In pain and dizzy from loss of blood, Elizabeth allowed herself to be half-carried back across to her ship. She didn't resist when she was laid down or when Will kissed her on the forehead. The most protest she was able to mount to all this ridiculous babying was a mumbled "If you say one word about me parading around in my chemise, Will Turner, I'll have your guts for garters."

"Yes, I've been meaning to ask about that," Will said absently as he peeled off what was left of her shirt (it wasn't much.) "What happened to your top?"

"I had to use bits of it as a – ooh, careful – bandage."

Will took a look at the blood-soaked wrapping. "Bits," he echoed, bemused. There was at least half a shirt there, tied haphazardly over a wound whose seriousness he could not even begin to guess at.

By the time he had noticed she was hurt, she had been scrambling across a plank over open water, unafraid and in control of herself. She was obviously not in immediate danger, so Will had forced himself to ignore his impulse to go fuss over her. It had not been easy.

And he knew that the quickest way to lose any gratitude she might be feeling would be to lose his head now. So he unwrapped her third-rate bandage calmly, murmuring only perfunctory apologies when his movements hurt her, and took a cool look at the wound.

"It doesn't look bad," he said at last. "That is, it wouldn't look bad on anyone else. But Elizabeth...it might scar."

"Oh, I hadn't thought of that." She smiled as best she could. "Do you like women with scars?"

"I love them," Will said fiercely. He slipped under her arm to catch her in a bone-crushing hug, burying his face in her hair, completely forgetting his resolve not to do just such a thing. "Elizabeth, my God, you could have been killed! What happened?"

"Ow. All right, all right, I'll tell you everything, but please, clean it out while I talk. Lord only knows what's going on over there, we shouldn't leave them alone – Norrington's probably got himself killed by now."

Will resisted his impulse to respond good riddance. Instead, he rinsed out the wound and began wrapping it in a relatively clean cloth while she told him the story.

When she was through, he found himself fighting a feeling of anger. "You'd trade your life for a pirate's? Elizabeth, captain or not, Barbossa is not worth your getting hurt for. He would not have done the same for you."

"I wasn't thinking," she admitted. "You're right. And it's not a mistake I'll make twice – the ungrateful thing didn't even say thank you! After all the time I've spent with him, every day, hanging on his every word, letting him tease me, not to mention slaving away for him like all the rest of the crew, and when a crisis happens and I perform spectacularly for him, what does he do? Nothing! That's perhaps all I needed to learn about being a pirate. Maybe it's not for me after all."

Knowing that she had learned her lesson went quite a ways towards appeasing Will's anger, but now he found another unpleasant feeling surfacing. He tried to be nonchalant. "So what did Barbossa say?"

Elizabeth, hearing the strain in his voice, craned her neck to give him a puzzled look. "Why would you ask that?"

"Oh, no reason." Will kept his eyes on what he was doing. "It's just..." he continued doggedly, "that if you're going to go running to him all the time for...for I don't know what, guidance I guess...even though he's the most insensitive person we know...then maybe I just wanted to know...well, what he's doing right, that's all."

"Do you mean to tell me that you're jealous of an old pirate with no teeth?" Elizabeth thought it adorable.

"He has teeth," Will corrected. "It's just that you don't usually see them, because they're mostly black."

Elizabeth giggled. "Yes, that's one aspect of the pirate life that I hope I will never catch on to. I mean, have they never heard of hygiene? Why are they all so disgusting? Even Jack. I'll never allow myself to look like a pirate. Never."

Will wrung out a dirty cloth, dipped it into a bucket of seawater after first picking out a piece of seaweed, and offered it to Elizabeth to sop up blood with. "Never," he echoed skeptically. "Well, good luck."

He got Elizabeth to drink some rum (it took less convincing than he would have liked). He got her to lay down, and petted her hair until she fell asleep. Then, certain that the captain was profiting by his absence to commit all sorts of atrocities on their prisoners, Will hurried back up on deck.

Ominously enough, the captain was nowhere to be found. People said he and Norrington were still in parlay, so Will sat down to wait for them.

When the negotiators finally resurfaced, Will popped to his feet. "Back to the ship now, Captain?"

"Almost." Barbossa raised his voice and addressed his crew. "Scour the ship stem to stern. Take everything we can eat – and everything you're not sure about. Anything needed to load or fire a cannon. I want everything you can use to shoot, stab, smash, chop, hang, or otherwise kill an enemy with. On the double, gents, we've got a long way to go."

Will was speechless. As the pirates started to raid the ship, he cornered Barbossa and demanded, "All the food? But what will they eat? I thought you'd agreed to let them go unharmed."

Barbossa gestured to the unhappy-looking prisoners. "They look to me like they still be unharmed. I didn't cut off their ears, did I?"

Norrington approached with as much dignity as he could muster. "Captain Barbossa, this is not what I had in mind," he said through clenched teeth. "By unharmed, I meant in a state which would allow us to return safely to port."

"Then maybe ye should have said so." Barbossa snapped his fingers and smiled when Jack the monkey dropped out of the rigging to land on his shoulder. "Now, will there be anythin else?"

"Yes, there will." Norrington stopped Barbossa's departure by planting a hand firmly on his chest. He heard the clicks of pistols cocking all around him and ignored them. "I am not satisfied that the terms of our arrangement have been carried out. You will rectify that at once."

"Will I?" Barbossa sized him up. "Make me an offer, boy."

"An offer?" Norrington echoed incredulously. "I already gave you all the information I had, as per our other bargain – the one I kept my half of."

"Then I suppose we're done talking here – unless you've got something else to offer?" When Norrington didn't have any ideas, Barbossa prompted, "There be an awful lot of people here to sail this tiny little ship, don't you think?"

Norrington gaped at him. "My crew? You're not seriously proposing to take my crew, are you?"

"I'm not proposin nuthin," Barbossa said primly. "It's you who's got nothing to feed his crew come suppertime. Ever been mutinied upon, boy? It ain't a pretty sight. Perhaps they'll serve themselves captain soup when they get hungry enough, what think you?"

Norrington didn't lose his composure. "Unlike youvile creaturesmy men do not eat human flesh and will not murder their captain in cold blood whatever his mistakes." He paused to think.

He thought for a long time. "I once lost an entire crew to a hurricane because of how much I hate pirates," he said at last. "Never again. I won't let these people face starvation. If there are volunteers among my men, so be it."

To Norrington's deepest embarrassment and disgust, five men offered willingly – even eagerly – to join the pirate crew. Barbossa took four and rejected the fifth, who was "A little too mad – even for my taste." He left Norrington enough of the bare essentials to get his ship back to port.

The And Back sailed on.

TBC...

Yo ho! Everybody secretly wants to be a pirate, yarr!

A brief word about my Barbossa: I know he's usually written a lot more bloodthirsty than the way I'm doing it. People frequently reprise his "People are easy to search when they're dead" line. But I notice that given a choice, he prefers to negotiate rather than fight. Always. Even after that "when they're dead" line, he takes everybody aboard and then blows up their ship. Most telling, I think, is that during the cave scene, he points his gun not at Jack, who's threatening him, nor at Will, who has the power to break the curse. He aims at Elizabeth. Why? The only possible outcome of that choice is a stalemate, which gives rise to – surprise, surprise – negotiations. I don't know why Barbossa has such a hardon for bargaining, but he does. If he was really so eager to shoot people, he would have shot Elizabeth anyway. He had plenty of time; he wasn't even mortal until he and Will exchanged that bit about whether or not Jack had wasted his shot.

Ok, end of rant. For now.