Jack was half pleased and half nervous. He was pleased that he no longer had to worry about Barbossa looking over his shoulder to second-guess his decisions, and nervous that it would soon be apparent he had in fact no plan at all.

But with Elizabeth back - and Barbossa gone - a whole new set of options came into focus. Most importantly, he now had the option of not playing it straight. Jack considered himself easygoing and forgiving by nature, but he was not yet over what had been done to him, his ship, and very nearly his friends as well. Davy Jones had promised him thirteen years as captain and as far as Jack was concerned, he had not delivered. He had ignored years' worth of attempts to contact him, refused Jack's perfectly reasonable offer of a soul to serve the Dutchman, and quite dishonorably preferred to send the Kraken after Jack's ship and crew rather than after Jack himself.

So Jack had just about had enough. Besides, he had a feeling that Jones's hatred for him was like his hatred for Jack the monkey - it made lies of the most solemn promises, transcended all reason and lasted beyond even death itself. Agreement or not – especially after that little incident with the, heh heh, unauthorized borrowing of the heart and its, ha ha whoops, subsequent accidental misplacement – he doubted Jones would ever be able to leave him alone. He squinted into the sunset and muttered, "It'll be him or me," because he liked the sound of it.

Besides, he was Captain Jack Sparrow for heaven's sake! It would be a decade and a half of tradition out the window for him to make a straight deal with no ulterior motives and stick with it.

He felt a slight twinge in his stomach when he considered that some of his friends might be killed before this was all over, but then he comforted himself by thinking that they probably wouldn't, and anyway, that a short life full of adventure is much better than a long life with no fun at all. He was sure it would all work out in the end. Sure enough, anyway.

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Barbossa stumbled out of his room. First-class brooder though he was, it was too difficult to concentrate on a pillow strewn with Elizabeth's scent and hair. He preferred his gloom to be a little more private.

"I can't be in there," he muttered to himself.

"And why not?" Davy Jones was on him in an instant. Barbossa jumped.

"Do you have to do that?" he snapped, then answered the question... in a manner of speaking. "Things. On my mind."

Bored as ever, Jones steered him into the organ room and prompted, "Such as?"

Barbossa snorted. "You have to ask?"

A tiny silence before Jones answered: "Ah." After a longer pause he suggested, "You know there's always the magic that I..."

Barbossa managed not to flinch. "Thanks, but it's not that serious." He dismissed the problem with a wave of his hand and explained, "Really. A wench would do me a world of good. I think I'll stop by Tortuga next chance I get, see if any of my old favorites are still there."

"That won't help," said Jones reflexively. If there was a way to rain on someone's parade – even a parade as small and joyless as that one – he had to take it.

"No, probably not." Barbossa opened his flask and discovered that it was nearly empty. "A hundred differenty types of damnation," he growled, shaking it for the last drop. "I think the world hates me."

Jones didn't drink often, because these days alcohol tasted like poison to him. But because there were those occasional nights he woke up and even the locket wasn't enough to get him to sleep, he always kept a bottle or two handy. He dug one out of his drawer and poured for both of them. Barbossa held up his crusty glass. "To old Bill Turner," he said listlessly, draining it in one gulp.

Jones noted the sloppy gesture he used to wipe rum from his beard. "That flask was full when you came here, wasn't it?"

Barbossa made a face. "This is the sixth or seventh time I've made that toast tonight."

"Ah."

"I could hear it, Davy, I could hear it in his very voice. I could have sworn-" he broke off. "But that's ridiculous. I think I'm going mad."

"What did you hear?" Jones was intrigued despite himself. He poured another round of rum and gestured for Barbossa to drink.

"We were standing there in the hold, just looking. I was thinking. And I know we were silent, I know it…. but still… I could swear I heard the boy sayin, This is all YOUR fault. In that…you know…that..." he gestured aimlessly while he fished for a word. "Accusey way he has," he finished at last. "And Davy? You know I keep thinking... he might be right."

It took Jones a minute to piece the mumblings together. It helped when Barbossa added out of the blue: "I meant for him to drown in a couple of months. How could I have known?"

"So the fearsome Captain Barbossa needs to make confession, does he?" Jones's eyes crinkled with amusement. "Humble apologies, but I have no priest here. Listen, you know you're not thinking properly," he added after a moment. He poured them another drink. "You were certainly within your rights to kill him. It took him a while to die, yes. But that's because the curse lasted. And that was Bill Turner's own fault."

"Well..." Barbossa considered that through the haze of two or three drinks too many. "Wait - how do you know about the curse? I never told you the details..."

"Your little siren has quite a mouth on her."

Barbossa's dark mood lifted a hair and he smiled. "Aye, that be the truth."

"She's a filthy person, Captain, I don't see why you brought her or why she's still alive." Jones poured again.

"I wouldn't call her filthy," Barbossa said, doing his best to exercise a little control over his rummy tongue. "The furthest I would go is vixen, and even that isn't certain. She's young and silly, true… but very good to that William of hers. And annoyinly faithful," he added as an afterthought.

"Oh? And what about the one before William?" He poured.

Barbossa shrugged. "Bah. That was what you marry for, not what's in here." He meant to pat himself on the chest, but wound up whacking himself in the shoulder instead. He threw Jones a glare, but his tone was all grudging admiration as he observed, "And now ye have me babbling like an idiot." He sighed. "You win, Davy Jones. What do you want to know?"

Jones almost asked about what Jack Sparrow was really planning, but he thought better of it for several reasons: first, because Barbossa was crazy like a fox and might well be feigning this entire spell of drunken honesty, second, because it was unlikely that Jack Sparrow would have shared his plans with anyone after all the times he'd been stabbed in the back, and third, because it was unlikely that Jack Sparrow had any plans to speak of anyway.

So finally he just said, "No questions, Barbossa, just a piece of advice. Forget about Bootstrap Bill - you did right to dump him over, and everything that happened since has been his own choice."

"That's how you sleep at night?" Barbossa demanded with a harsh laugh. "It's their own choice? When they're growing out of the walls, stuck trapped half between livin and dead, nothing left for them and no hope and worst of all no way to end it… no way to end it, Davy, that's what Hell is, you must know that by now… And you don't care because it's their own choice?"

Jones honestly didn't seem disturbed. "They're welcome to take death when I offer it them," he reminded easily. He leaned forward, glowing with some malicious private amusement. "If they're afraid, if they decide from their gut instead of their head, that's hardly my fault, is it?"

"You're only givin them what they think they want," Barbossa agreed, heavy with sarcasm. "You're practically doing them a favor."

Jones banged his fist down on his keyboard suddenly, making the room shake with the organ's discordant roar. "You," he warned quietly, "Have been spending a little too much time around young Will Turner, it seems. You had better watch that accusey manner of yours, Barbossa. Or we'll have problems."

"Thank ye kindly, but I already have enough problems," Barbossa answered, as though refusing the offer of an additional life insurance policy. He rose, squinted until the world straightened itself out, and declared, "I'm goin to bed. And I'm takin that bottle with me."

"You're welcome to it," Jones said. He leaned his head back and guzzled what rum remained, then handed over the empty bottle. "There you go."

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"There had to have been something." Will said into his arms. He was seated at the table, collapsed over it. The bottle of rum was within easy reach... but still untouched.

"Yes, there was - and you did it. You freed your father from his worst nightmare in the only way that was left. Will. Look at me." Elizabeth waited until he took his head off the table and made eye contact. "You did the right thing."

"Elizabeth...that was my father. I killed my father."

"Now, you know it isn't like that," she argued again. "Your father wasn't alive in the first place - he was trapped. You set him free."

"There had to have been another way."

"You took the only way there was."

"But Elizabeth, he's my father, I actually killed my own father..."

With breaks for eating and sleeping, and brief bouts of attention to unrelated material, this conversation had been going on for four whole days. Repetitive, yes, but if there was even the slightest hope of making Will feel better Elizabeth was willing to try.

She waited until he had tired himself out of talking, held him while he cried again, and then assured him that yes she had spent hour upon hour in conversation with Bootstrap and yes she had asked him all the questions Will had been dying to and yes she was sure her memories were clear on everything they had discussed.

She could see that it helped a little, but not much. She told him about the long rambling letter Bootstrap had dictated to her, but would not show him until he was calmer, because she was afraid he would cry all over it and ruin it.

Elizabeth was very proud of her man, for although he was clearly conflicted over what he had done, he had not started to drink or developed a temper or begun hating himself or any other of a hundred worst-case scenarios she had dreamed up when she first noticed that Bootstrap's feet stuck to the deck whenever he stood still for too long.

Will was hurting now, but she knew he would be all right. So, much as she hated to leave him, as soon as he fell asleep that night she rushed out of their cabin and went to talk strategy with Jack.

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TBC.

Sorry for the chapter being short and comparatively non-exciting. It gets better – we're about to reconnect with our dear friend Norrington.

How do you like it so far?

Oh, and a mild spoiler for the future: I think Davy Jones will soon realize that Elizabeth has tricked him. I think his sympathy for Norrington will vanish and he will be quite pissed off. I've decided he's probably not such a bad guy around other men, but I do think he's still terrified of women and that's why he was desperate to show Elizabeth who's in charge.