A/N: Yes, I know Elizabeth's been doing unusual amounts of crying, and she'll do more this chapter. I think it reasonable that the death of her loverboy did quite a number on her. But she'll get her equilibrium back, never fear.
"Sleep," Barbossa ordered, turning away from her with a bit of difficulty. "You are not in your right mind, and neither am I. Do you have any idea what this ship has been through while you've been off sashaying around grogland? Hmm? I am at the end of my patience and my good behavior and my everythin else. It's not wise to push me any further."
"Hmm?" Elizabeth sat up on the bare, lumpy mattress and asked (because she really couldn't remember) "What did I do wrong?"
He went to the bucket of seawater in the corner and splashed some over his face - the pirate version of a bath, which he took (unusually frequently for a pirate) every few days. "No, you see, the problem is what you're doing right. Do girls go to a school to learn how to torment people, or is it something you all make up on your own?" He was momentarily distracted from Elizabeth when the bathwater stung a wound he didn't even remember acquiring. It really had been a long few days. He cleaned up and got fully dressed, coat and hat and all, and only then looked back at her. "Oh would you stop!" He stormed over and roughly laced up her undershirt. "There, now go to sleep."
"But I'm not even -bluhgh- tired."
Barbossa didn't like that sound. He lunged for a bucket just in time, and held her hair out of it while she was sick again. When it looked like she was finally done, he kept the grip on her hair to jerk her head back and emphasize the warning: "If you filthy up what's left of my cabin I'll throw you overboard."
"I wanted to ask you about something..."
"We'll talk when you wake up. And if you still want to try and persuade me when you're sober, well...you have my word I'll listen." He left, laughing, and Elizabeth dozed off not quite able to grasp what was so funny.
When she woke up she drank the water someone had left out for her and just lay still waiting to feel better. It didn't happen...but she used the time to chew over the events of the last few days, so it wasn't a total loss.
Eventually she dragged herself to her feet and went on deck, where everyone, including the captain and Jack the monkey, was busy working. A wave had apparently taken a large bite out of the railing around the foredeck, and Barbossa himself was helping to fix it. Elizabeth tapped him on the shoulder. "I thought the captain was supposed to sit and do nothing while everyone else slaved in the hot sun."
He had planned to give her a real earful, but it was so nice to see her up and about that he only shrugged. "Desperate times."
"I see. What can I do?"
"See to the men who're injured," he answered immediately.
"I've no medical knowl-"
"It's more for morale than anythin else."
Elizabeth had planned to start pleading Will's case the moment she could, but decided that it might be better to take the time to rack up some goodwill first. She cleaned out bites and cuts, pulled shards of wood from infected and bleeding injuries, and soothed fevers with wet cloths. Everything took twice as long as it ought because the men were starved for a sympathetic (and attractive) listener to pour out their stories to.
Finally Barbossa broke up the line by snarling "Arrr, are ye a bunch of women! Get back to work!" He took Elizabeth aside, made sure nobody was listening, and got straight to the point. "I must say your mood has me a bit concerned, missie."
"My mood?"
"It's too good. You seem to think I've agreed to go after William for you, but-"
"Is the problem that we can't, or that you won't?" Elizabeth interrupted, all business. "Because if it's the latter, then I'm sure you and I can come to some kind of arrangement. If it's the former...I'll think of something."
His reply didn't quite answer her question. "I named this ship for a reason."
"But finding Will won't put us in any more danger than finding Jack! Or will it?"
Barbossa rolled his eyes. "Every second we spend in that place puts us in danger. Not to mention what Davy Jones will say when he sees-"
"Davy Jones? What's he got to do with this?" Elizabeth demanded.
"Most gates have got a gatekeeper, Elizabeth. Why do you think I owed Jones a debt in the first place?"
But of course, as she had known (and he himself had suspected) in the end Barbossa couldn't bring himself to say no. He worked the crew up into a screaming lather for her and got them all to agree - no, to insist - that any and all manner of risks should be undertaken to ensure young William's safe return.
"We all set out on this voyage together, to cheat death!" the captain declared grandly. "And we have all fought and risked and sacrificed to make it this far! How many of you have had a brush with eternity these past weeks - and made it through, with your courage and wit and a bit o'luck?" He waited for their roars. "Aye! And had luck deserted us, had the sea or its beasts claimed ye... do you not think we would have come after ye too?"
He could hear one of the dimmer pirates mutter to another, "Oh, that's nice, it really is. Makes you feel right homey, don't it? Like a family."
"I named this ship because I am bringing us back from the end of the world! All of us! And I will not allow one of us to be left behind. So I say we find Turner. What say you - who's with me?"
The cheers were deafening, and nobody asked inconvenient questions like "And what about all the others who died, what will we do for them?". Elizabeth thought that for all their fearsome reputation, pirates seemed a lot more like sheep than anything else.
As soon as they were alone again, Elizabeth threw her arms around the captain and cried into his shoulder. He considered lying to her and telling her everything would be fine, but in the end settled for patting her back in a reassuring sort of way. It was less of a lie, and had the same effect of stopping that infernal crying.
When Elizabeth finally opened her eyes, she found herself face to face with a patch of dried blood on the captain's collar. "Why did you make me do this?" she asked abruptly, touching the cut. It seemed like a lifetime ago. "I never got a chance to ask."
He hesitated. "Do you really want a lesson now?"
"Anything to distract me. Captain?... It really will be all right...?"
There would be no point to giving her an honest answer. "Everything will be fine, Elizabeth," he assured her with a perfect imitation of sincerity. "We'll find him." He sat down on the bed and motioned for her to sit next to him. "Now, pay attention. Do you know why I had you cut me?"
"No. That's why I asked."
"Because blood's a very useful instructional tool. Cock a gun and you could be bluffing, but once you make a man bleed he knows in his bones that you're serious in what you say. It makes people realize how vulnerable they actually are."
"Not to mention it hurts," she added, closing her hand around the scar on her palm.
"Aye, that too. The man who cuts someone without battin an eye is the man at the helm of the situation, that's for certain." He nudged her. "But that be a secret, you realize," he whispered. "Not to be shared with the crew nor anybody else. If they know that somethin's behind it besides a real animal urge for blood, you lose the edge."
"I see." Elizabeth thought about it for a moment, then stood up and stretched her arms over her head. "So do you think I should carry a blade? All I've got is my sword, and there's really no finesse with that."
Barbossa was amused. "For now, I say definitely yes. For your future as a wife and mother and high-class society woman... I suppose I don't see why not then, too."
He took it as a positive sign that the "wife and mother" comment didn't start her crying again.
Despite Barbossa's troubling remark about gatekeepers, they sailed through the great stone Gates without any further hindrance. Coming out the other side, Elizabeth half-expected a barrage of lights and faeries and all sorts of marvelous things...and was thus half-disappointed.
The seas beyond World's End, these mythical lands of the dead, turned out to be nothing more than vast foggy stretches of dark swamplooking water. There weren't even any people. Every now and then an island or a wave rose up to break the monotony, but that was it.
Or so she thought until Barbossa snapped: "Stop lookin at them," to one of the more curious sailors.
The man stopped leaning over the railing. Elizabeth came up to him and whispered, "Looking at what?"
"Them." He pointed down and Elizabeth noticed for the first time that the water was clogged with bodies, dead-looking people who floated every which way so thick that it was a wonder the ship made any headway at all.
She gasped and put a hand over her mouth, then couldn't resist taking a closer look. The reason she hadn't noticed them was most of the bodies looked dark and bluish, as though they had marinated too long in some kind of corrosive ink. A few looked more colorful, almost alive even. She could have sworn she saw one move, but decided it must just have been her imagination or the waves.
The fog rolled a little thicker, making the bodies little more than blurs beneath her. Suddenly the vast boring seas around her became the biggest, most insurmountable problem Elizabeth had ever seen.
"How do we find him?" she whispered, to herself at first. She whirled around and called, "Captain? How are we going to find Will?"
Barbossa was upon her in an instant, covering her mouth and staring terrified into the sea. After a moment, when nothing happened, he relaxed. "I don't know what wakes them up," he whispered. "But if they were to awaken and notice us..."
"They'll mob us," she whispered back. "Like drowning men pulling each other under... God... that's awful..."
The eerie silence settled back over the ship. Elizabeth asked again, more quietly: "How are we going to find him?"
"I took this off him before I threw him over." Barbossa took out something that Elizabeth just barely recognized.
"Is that the knife his father gave him?"
"Aye. It has meaning to him and it's been doused in blood twenty times over. I can't think of a better object to work Tia Dalma's magic on. I've already done it, and unless that woman's made her first mistake in twenty years…." He threw the knife overboard and it bobbed for a moment, then began moving purposefully off the port side.
Barbossa ordered the crew with gestures to change course and follow it. Elizabeth leaned so far over that she thought she might fall. Will, at any moment they would see him. Will...
Fourteen hours later Elizabeth's excitement had died down but she still had not abandoned her post. She signaled to the crew whenever the knife changed direction a bit, and watched the dead bodies, and that was all. Everyone else had had enough of the scenery and was drinking or playing cards, so she was of course the first one to see when the knife came to rest against a facedown corpse...and wormed its way into the corpse's pocket and stayed there.
Elizabeth raised the alarm and would have leaped straight overboard into the bodies if the pirates hadn't held her back. Barbossa had someone lowered over the side of the ship to tie a line to Turner - with strict instructions that he was to touch no one else and especially not touch the water itself.
It took a while, but the plan was executed perfectly. Will was brought up on deck and, after surprisingly brief theatrics on Elizabeth's part, he opened his eyes.
She held her breath while he looked around. Blinked. Sat up. And then spoke.
"We're at World's End, I'm dead, and you've come to rescue me?"
Elizabeth tackled him in a hug so fierce it prompted Cotton's parrot to complain, "Wraak, save it for the cabin, wraak."
They cried into each other's hair and whispered plenty of touching things to each other. When they finally felt satisfactorily reunited, she helped him to his feet and they looked around at the crew, who were still gathered in a speechless circle around the amazing sight of a dead man kissing his fiancée.
Then Will's eyes fell on Barbossa.
"You," he said breathlessly. "You betrayed me. I knew you would! I can't believe I ever came within ten miles of trusting you!"
Barbossa sighed and looked heavenwards. "Must we really discuss this? What do you think I should have done?"
"I think I had to be killed, but I should have been asked first," Will hissed at him. "You know I would give my life for Elizabeth – did you really think I would have endangered the ship she's on? You know me better than that." Barbossa didn't look abashed or ashamed or even sorry, and Will lost his temper. "Instead you lied to me. You pretended you were on my side. You tricked me and murdered me like the disgusting pirate you are, and I can't imagine why I expected better from you. Your methods are repulsive and you've got no moral character whatsoever – you just turned around and killed a shipmate in cold blood! You warned me once about impugning your honor...but that's ridiculous, isn't it? You've got no honor at all!"
Barbossa waited until the boy was quite finished, then made his answer short and to the point. "Remember how I told you that next time you turned on me I'd scar Elizabeth where it would never heal?" He pointed to her, and they all saw that her tears of joy had turned to quite another kind of crying. "I think you've just saved me the trouble."
He turned and walked off, leaving Will to stare in confusion at his hysterical fiancée. "Elizabeth? What's wrong? What did I-" all of a sudden it hit him. The reason they were even here in the first place. Jack. Whom Elizabeth had tricked and murdered in exactly the way he had just been talking about. He went up to her to try to hold her but she shoved him away. "Elizabeth please I didn't mean-"
"Don't, Will," Elizabeth managed. "You're right, but...don't." She rushed off in a haze of tears and climbed the stairs, hoping that the breeze might help clear her head.
She thought everyone would have the decency to leave her alone, until a voice from right next to her said: "You don't have to worry about Jack, he's more like you and me. You won't get any of that from him."
Elizabeth wiped her eyes and looked over at the captain. "Did it ever occur to you that we might deserve it?" she whimpered.
"No," he answered decisively. "You're doing wonderfully and you just ignore that boy if he ever tells you different." Barbossa chuckled. "He's probably just annoyed at me that I shot him. He'll get over it."
"He's right."
Elizabeth and Barbossa both gasped and whirled around. "Didn't no one ever teach you it's not polite to sneak up on people?" the captain snapped, a little embarrassed at having jumped a foot in the air.
"Oh, is that what they tell you in pirate charm school?" Will asked off-handedly. He was much more concerned about Elizabeth. "Elizabeth, listen to me, please. You have to understand I would never say anything to hurt you. I understand why you did what you did with Jack, I really do. I'm just still pretty angry about being murdered, that's all. I said things I didn't mean. I'm really sorry I caught you in the crossfire."
She sniffled, already starting to feel better simply because Will was alive to apologize in the first place. Barbossa suggested, "This might be one of those times where thinkin before speakin would've been helpful."
"Yes and thanks for helping make this easier for me," Will fumed.
Barbossa smirked at him and Elizabeth's smile came back.
It was only unfortunate that Jack's rescue would not proceed nearly so smoothly.
TBC.
So, what do you think of this MONSTER chapter? I had to cover a lot of ground to keep us on schedule for Jack, but I've done it! Jack's on deck, people! (I mean "on deck" as in "up next" the way baseball players use it. Not as in "Jack's on the deck of the ship," because he's not yet. But he will be.)
I had Barbossa talk for a bit about how he escaped on his own, but I took it out because the chapter was just too long. Maybe if there's time Elizabeth will ask him later.