It was right at the crack of dawn as Teague had been up early preparing to set out for holiday errands.
He went upstairs to wake up the cousins when he heard humming from his son's room. Teague put his ear to the door and listened.
"I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day in the morning
Oh they sailed into Shipwreck Cove
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day
They sailed into Shipwreck Cove
On Christmas Day in the morning!"
Just then, Teague opened and barged through the door, interrupting Jack's hymn.
Jack yelped in surprise. "Hey! Why doesn't anybody in this blasted shack of a place ever knock?!"
Jack was sitting up on his bed with his back propped up against some pillows and a small book and pencil on his lap. Scattered about the floor were papers with scribbles written all over.
Teague bent over and gathered some of the papers. He then skimmed through some of the pages, and what was written on them looked like lyrics for some classic Christmas carols, except Jack had taken full liberty of rewriting them: "My Dong Is So Very Big" (in the tune of "Ding Dong Merrily On High"), "Good Fucking Wenches and Whores" (in tune of "Good King Wenceslas"), and many more.
Teague glared at Jack in disappoint and disgrace. "Do you not have any shame, boy?" he asked with scorn.
"Not any left after last night," Jack mumbled, pushing his book off his lap and sinking into his bed.
Teague tossed the papers on top of Jack and walked toward the door. He turned back to Jack. "Come on now. Borya offered to give us a lift on one of the Koldunyas so we don't have to take mine or Grandmama's ship."
"Ugh, it's too early! Why do I have to go!" Jack complained, snuggling under his covers even further.
"Jackie, we need your help in getting some supplies for our Christmas feast, and we need help cutting down the tree," Teague said. Jack thought about it.
Though Teague was known to be laid back, mysterious, and quiet, he had quite the temper, especially to those who disrespected the Pirate Code. Jack had seen this for himself, and plenty of times have been on the receiving end of his eruptive temper.
During Christmas, Teague had before used an old fake tree he had made long ago, and the tree finally fell apart last year. Teague's temper would flare up every year when it came time for decorating the tree, becoming grumbly, irritated, and angry, and it was quite funny and entertaining to see. Jack smiled a bit at the thought. He quickly hid it and pretended to be indecisive.
"Um...I don't know. I'm so tired and it's so early... Ugh, all right! Okay, I'll go," Jack said, pushing the covers off himself.
"Good. I was going to force you to come if you said no," Teague said. "I'll go tell Valerie to get ready, too."
Jack's inner giddiness quickly faded. "VALERIE?! Why does she have to go?!"
"The more hands, the merrier. Get up and ready, mate," and without hesitation, Teague walked out of the room and shut the door.
After sailing to one of the port islands some ways away for fresher food, and Valerie nearly pushing Jack off the ship again and locking him in the cargo deck, the Koldunya landed by one of the wild islands nearby Shipwreck Island to pick out a potential Christmas tree. Jack, Valerie, and Teague waded to shore while Bora waited for them at his ship.
"You know that there are no evergreen in the Caribbean, right?" Jack asked as they trudged through scrubs and brushes.
"Of course," Teague huffed in reply. "Not every Christmas tree has to be an evergreen. We just have to find one that will work."
Throughout the hour the three searched, they had no luck in finding a tree that would support candles, ornaments, and any other decorations.
Jack started to notice Teague's temper beginning to flare up, and that was then he knew what he was looking forward to was about to begin. Teague mumbled and cursed under his breath as Jack tried to hold in his laughter.
Eventually, they found a shortish palm bush that would possibly fit into the Great Chamber, and could support the decorations. Teague examined the stump of the tree and began to search his effects. Noticing Teague's growing frustration, Jack prepared for his father's realization that he had forgotten something.
"Here we go..." Jack muttered, smiling and rubbing his hands together.
"Bugger...Goddammit!" Teague swore loudly. "I forgot the bloody godforsaken axe!"
"Ye mean the one on the Koldunya?" Valerie questioned, raising an eyebrow and smirking a little.
"Dammit! Why didn't you tell us before we left the ship?!" Teague demanded.
"Nobody asked me," Valerie answered with a shrug.
Teague grumbled and cursed under his breath. He noticed Jack chuckling at the side.
"You."
Jack looked surprised. "Wait—what? Me?" Jack said, putting a hand on his chest and looking around.
"Go fetch me the axe from Borya's ship, ye misbegotten welp," Teague barked.
Jack opened his mouth to protest, but Teague shot him a deathly glare. He sighed and put his hands up in defeat. "Ugh, fine. I will."
Jack sulkily trudged all the way back to the beach, where he waded back out to the Koldunya to retrieve the axe and ran back to Teague and Valerie as he retraced his steps.
Once Teague had finally chopped the tree down, while still grumbling and cursing, the three had carried the tree back to Borya's ship and they set sail back to Shipwreck Cove.
The next day, Jack was tasked to help out decorate the Christmas tree. With the promise of extra pocket money and hopefully some entertainment from Teague, he was pretty on board with it.
He came down to the Great Chamber. Valerie and "Quick Draw" McFlemming's children, the four little cousins, hung around by the tree sitting at the back by where the stairs were. Three of the kids had ganged up on one kid and were wrapping tinsel around him as they were kicking him to the ground. Valerie was putting candles up in the tree and Teague sat in a chair going through a small crate of decorations, grumbling and cursing as he struggled to untangle more tinsel and and garland. Jack could barely stifle a giggle at the sight.
"Well, looks like no one needs ol' Jack Sparrow here anymore. Guess I'll go back to bed," Jack said. He turned to go back upstairs and Teague sat up.
"Oh no you don't, boy," Teague said. "I can't find any of the bloody ornaments with the tinsel and candles, so I need you to go down to the cellar to look for them."
Teague put his thumb and forefinger to his lips and whistled. Just then, a dust-colored mongrel appeared in the room with the ring of jingling keys readily in its mouth. The ring contained the keys to all the dungeons, cellars, and of course, the Pirata Codex. The dog trotted over to his master wagging its tail as Teague removed the keys from its mouth.
"Go fetch me the ornaments quickly," Teague ordered. "And don't get into anything else." he added.
Jack rolled his eyes and took the ring of keys from Teague, and headed straight to the cellar with the prison dog following right at his heels.
Jack unlocked the door with one of the keys and went down, letting the door shut behind him. Dimly lit candles led him through the dark cold cellar. All the holiday decorations were in the back, but before it was all the rum. Much of the rum in there was the best in the Caribbean, and many pirates would kill to have this kind of rum.
Jack decided to stop and browse through the rum. He was told to come back quickly, but Teague was probably distracted, grumbling and cursing at something else.
Jack picked up one of the bottles from the shelf and examined it. He pulled off the cork, took a whiff, and smiled. The good stuff! He pushed the cork back in and went to stick the bottle in his waistcoat when...
WOOF!
"Shh! Shut it you mutt!" Jack hissed through gritted teeth.
The dog still continued to bark. WOOF! WOOF!
"Shh!" Jack shushed again. "Look, I'll give you extra rum in your dinner tonight if you keep your trap shut. Savvy?"
The dog went quiet and tilted his head as his ears perked up. That mutt sure did have a taste for rum.
Jack stuffed the bottle into his waistcoat and proceeded to the back of the cellar. He went through each of the crates and found a wooden box that looked like it had ornaments in it.
Jack carried the box back up the stairs and to the Great Chamber where Teague was waiting for him. He handed the keys back to Teague who stuck the ring back into the dog's mouth.
"Here, I think the ornaments are in there," Jack said.
Teague looked through the box, shifting things inside. Then, he had a confused and frustrated look on his face. Jack could tell something was wrong.
"Jackie, is there any more ornaments down below?" Teague asked. "I thought we had more than this!"
Jack shrugged, making no effort to hide his smirk at the increasingly irritated Teague. "Dunno. I looked through all the crates and boxes."
Teague looked through the box once more. He began cursing under his breath again.
"Goddammit!" he yelled. All the cousins jumped and stared at Teague. Jack snorted. "All the ornaments in here are all bloody broken! We can't use any of them!" He forcefully pushed the box aside and began pacing back and forth.
Jack knelt down and took a gander inside the box. Yup, all the ornaments inside were broken.
"We could just buy new ones," Jack suggested. "We have a few days til Christmas, so how about we sail out tomorrow to another town and find more decorations, eh?"
"I mean, we all could just make them," Valerie added. Jack shrugged in agreement.
Teague cursed some more and glanced towards Jack.
"We're not waiting until tomorrow and we're not making any," Teague said. "The whelp is coming with me into town and we're buying ornaments here."
Christmas ornaments in Shipwreck Cove? Jack and everyone else knew there was no making sense into Teague. He huffed as he sat up, and he and Teague walked out of the large shack made of ship hulks.
The two had looked through multiple shops around the city and had no luck in any of them. After each of the stops they went into, Teague became more and more grumbly and irritable, and Jack enjoyed the slow build up of anger.
They tried again in one last shop. Jack and Teague walked in, with the little bell above ringing as the top of the door hit it. The place was a bit of a hole in the wall, but it seemed to have precious decorations nonetheless. They browsed through the shelves, each of them with nice little pieces like mini statues, vases, antiques, but no ornaments or anything related to Christmas. Jack braced himself for another blowup from Teague.
"Goddammit! And this is the last shop in town..." Teague grumbled under his breath after they've given up.
"Teague, no one celebrates Christmas here in Shipwreck Cove. So what did you think? That they would have Christmas stuff even though no one celebrates it?" Jack said amusingly, trying to keep his voice low in the quiet shop. "All that we have here is a bunch of bloody pirates, cutthroats, scallywags, and whores. Why do we even celebrate it anyway? Remember what you always say to me when you drag me to those boring meetings? 'We're pirates goddammit!'" He said the last part in a mocking tone.
The pirate captain huffed and glared at Jack. He leaned over, his face being inches away from Jack's. Uncomfortable with his personal bubble being violated, Jack took a couple steps back away from Teague.
"Remember what I told you when you asked this before, boy?" Teague growled.
"Yes, we celebrate it for the drinking and getting blasted. However, I see no point in me participating in the festivities when I'm not even allowed to drink," Jack answered, crossing his arms and sticking his chin up defiantly.
Teague opened his mouth to respond when the shopkeeper interrupted them. "Is there anything I can help you two with?"
Teague turned to the shopkeeper and changed his tone. "Ah, yes, mate. We were looking for Christmas ornaments and hoping by the chance would you have some?"
The shopkeeper looked confused for a moment. "Hm, I'll go take a look," The shopkeeper went behind the counter and searched around. After a couple minutes, the shopkeeper pulled up a wooden box onto the counter. "I'm not sure if this is anything you were looking for, sir, but this will hopefully be close enough."
Teague and Jack looked inside the box. The contents inside sort of resembled ornaments, but not anything for Christmas. They seemed to be more fitting to a pirate theme: little skulls, swords, pistols, little glass balls decorated with rope, mini chests, treasures and jewels, etc.
Jack looked at Teague with a raised eyebrow. "I don't think these have anything to do wi—"
"We'll take 'em!" Teague interrupted, slamming a pouch of coins down on the counter.
The father and son stormed into the Great Chamber with a box of decorations. Valerie and the little cousins were stringing tinsel and garland on the tree.
"All right you scoundrels! Take everything off the bloody tree except for the candles right now!" Teague demanded.
"Oh, come on!" Valerie complained. "We just finished putting the tinsel and garland on!"
"That's unneeded. We just got new ornaments for the tree and all of that won't fit," Teague said.
Jack placed the box of new ornaments down by the tree. "I'm afraid he has a different plan in mind," he said quietly.
"Quick Draw" McFlemming entered the chamber from upstairs. "Ey! Did ye all ever finish decorating that tree yet?" she asked with a slight gruff.
"Nope," everyone chanted.
"We're just barely getting started," Jack said. He turned to Teague with a glare. "because of this one." Teague huffed and glared back.
"Bloody dammit! Ye better be done by sundown or I'll be letting Grandmama know!" McFlemming threatened. She turned and went back upstairs.
Everyone else turned to the porthole window. Outside, they could see it was getting close to sunset. They only had about an hour to decorate the tree.
Teague turned to all the cousins. "I need you all to start putting up the ornaments after you take all that glittery stuff off the tree," Teague ordered. He then sat in on his chair in the corner and began strumming his guitar, leaving kids to decorate the tree themselves.
The cousins took all the tinsel and garland off the tree and hung the new ornaments. The new ornaments looked very fitting for the setting they were in, but not really for the holidays. They worked nonetheless.
Jack pulled out a red fabric cut in a circle pattern. "All right then, now that the ornaments are up, we should put the tree skirt down and—"
"NO!" Teague burst out of his chair and snatched the tree skirt from Jack's hands.
"What now?!" Jack cried.
"This tree skirt is Christmas themed!"
"And?"
"The ornaments are pirate themed!"
"So?"
"We cannot have a Christmas tree skirt with pirate ornaments!" Teague explained.
"And so what are we supposed to use for a tree skirt?" Jack scoffed. "We can't just have the bottom of the tree be bare! If you're going to want a tree skirt to fit with the ornaments, wouldn't you just use a bloody flag or something?"
Though Jack didn't ask with a serious intention, an idea still sparked in Teague's head. Teague whistled for the prison dog, and the mutt happily trotted with him to the cellar.
The children waited a few moments before Teague came back in the room holding neatly folded fabric. He knelt down under the tree and laid the fabric around the stump of the tree. It was a black flag, and it had a skull in the middle with two crossed daggers just below.
"This was one of Grandmama's retired flags from her younger days," Teague said.
"You can change flags?" Jack asked curiously.
"Well, it's not necessary," Teague answered, "but sometimes they could use a design change."
Jack had thought about what his flag would be when he procures his own ship someday. Maybe something like a bird as a connection to his name...
Teague and the little cousins marveled at the tree as Jack looked through some of the decoration boxes in case they were missing anything.
"This family is absolutely mad to have a pirate tree for Christmas," Jack mumbled under his breath as he sifted through the decorations.
"Well we are pirates," Valerie added in. Jack rolled his eyes at her interruption. "Remember what Teague always tells ye?"
"Yeah, 'we're pirates goddammit,'" Jack snickered. He reached to the bottom of the box and pulled out a crudely knitted angel that was meant to go on top of the tree. He sat up and brought the doll to Teague. "Hey, you're missing this."
Teague looked down at the doll in surprise, then frowned and shook his head. "No. This won't work."
Jack's arm dropped and he looked up at Teague with a disapproving glare. "Oh, well of course it won't work! Nothing ever works for you!" Jack told off. "There's no tree without a topper. And if you're thinking about dragging me all around Shipwreck City again searching for a new 'piratey' tree topper, then count me out! I want no part of it!" He huffed and turned away, crossing his arms. Jack expected Teague to argue back, but the pirate had something else in mind.
"Actually," Teague said thoughtfully, "we may not need to do that."
"Huh?" Jack perked up a little and turned toward Teague.
"We could probably use something we already have," Teague hinted.
After a minute of thinking, Teague reached to his belt and untied something off of it. He pulled it off his belt, reached up the tree, and began to tie it to the top.
Jack's eyes widened when he realized what it was. The thing appeared to be a small dark head with a white coarse hair. The mouth was stitched shut with two sticks.
"Oi! You can't put Mum on top of the tree!" Jack cried out.
"Why not?" Teague asked.
"It's disrespectful!" Jack fumed.
"No, it is not," Teague insisted. He finished tying the head and backed away to view the now fully decorated pirate-Christmas tree. "Doesn't she look beautiful up there?"
"I have to admit, it is a little creepy, Teague," Valerie commented. The four little cousins all huddled behind her in fear.
Jack's mouth hung open in shock. He didn't know what to do, think, or say. He looked down at the knitted angel in his hand and squeezed it.
He stared back to Teague with hatred and tears in his eyes and whispered, "I hate you." He threw the doll on the ground and stormed upstairs, pushing past McFlemming and Uncle Jack who were going down.
Jack slammed the door to his bedchamber as he quickly marched to his desk. He grabbed to the edge of the desk and hung his head as he sobbed. He couldn't believe anyone, especially his own father—or who he thought was his father—would do this to his mum. It wasn't entirely harmful, but it was still out of disrespect, and though he didn't know her, he knew his mum would not have liked to be used as decoration. She probably would not have like to have been turned into a shrunken head in the first place.
He was too young to remember his mother; what she looked like, what she sounded like, what happened to her, the last Christmas he had spent with her. Although he was able to hide the pain easily since he didn't have to remember the trauma of loosing her, unlike many other traumas he did remember, it made it hurt even more when it did.
He continued to cry as he took the bottle of rum he had stolen from his waistcoat and pulled the cork off. He stared down as he held the bottle with a shaking hand. He put the bottle to his lips and chugged as much of it as he could before nearly puking it back up. He threw himself on his bed where he continued to sob into his pillow.
After what felt like a while, Jack's cries slowly ceased as the alcohol took over. However, he was still sad. A sad drunk. Being sad drunk was the worst. Someone began to knock on his door.
"What?" Jack murmured in a low, miserable sounding voice, as he turned his head a little from his wet pillow.
"Ey, Jacky-boy," Uncle Jack called from behind the door.
Before his uncle could say anything else, Jack responded with harsh coldness in his voice, "Don't come in here."
"All right, I won't," said Uncle Jack. "But I want to talk with ye."
Jack stayed silent.
"I knew yer mum," Uncle Jack began, still talking from behind the door. "She was real nice, but boy was she a tough one, she was. She was the only one who had a sense of order around the family, and was a great crewmember aboard Teague's ship."
Tears once again silently cascaded down Jack's face as he listened to his uncle talk about his mum.
Uncle Jack continued. "Aye, the situation we have at hand isn't good, but there's honestly no makin' sense to Teague. But if it makes ye feel better, just think of yer mum as that angel on top of the tree lookin' down on you right now. And she's lookin' down on you seeing how proud she is of you and where ye are right now. Aye?"
Jack still stayed silent, but Uncle Jack knew he listened to every word he said.
"Do ye want to come back down with us, Jackie?" Uncle Jack asked.
Jack hoarsely replied "No."
"All right, hope ye feel better, boy."
Jack heard steps fade away from his door and he was left to his own again. His vision was blurred from both tears and drunkenness. He buried his face into his pillow again and softly wept throughout the night.