"You can keep doing that all you want. That dog is never going to move."
"Excuse us if we ain't resigned ourselves to the gallows just yet."
Shaking his head, Jack stared at the straw-covered stone beneath him, grimacing at the stench of mold and piss mixed into an odoriferous union more unholy than Davy Jones and Tia Dalma. Tia Dalma—wretched creature, sending him out here. All Port Royal managed to do for him was throw him in this rank cell. The medallion, he reminded himself, narrowing his eyebrows in thought. Barbossa would surely come for it since it had hit the water. He shivered, remembering the face just above the little death's head carved into the gold. He had seen eyes like Miss Swann's before, but never on a woman's face. They were eyes that bore a cool resolve, leading down to a pistol pointing right at a challenger in a duel. Something about those kind of eyes belonging to her…unsettling was what it was.
Unknotting the string that held his Piece of Eight to his hair, he scratched a white notch into the stone floor, followed by an identical one next to it. To assume the boy wasn't Bill's was too much. The jaw, the cheeks-- everything was the same, right down to the insistence on nobility that seemed to make all Turner men slightly stupid.
So, he thought, forcing his mind's gears to turn in spite of the beginnings of a headache tapping on his forehead. Bill sent his share of the "treasure" home to the little one and now Miss Elizabeth Swann had it dangling from her pretty neck. The boy, just call him William for now, Jack thought, make it easy on yourself. The boy and Elizabeth, sorry, love, no time for formalities, knew each other. He marked a line between the two notches on the floor and added a circle over the second notch to indicate the medallion.
All right, he sighed, feeling an immense weight lifted off his back, still knowing he hadn't really solved anything. Did William know what the medallion was when he got it? Odds are, if he gave it to Elizabeth, he did not. Bill wouldn't have had time to write a letter explaining its importance, and even if he did, Jack never remembered Bill saying whether or not his family knew about when the legitimate Wench became the pirate-filled Pearl and explaining the Aztec gold would require explaining the nature of finding said Aztec gold. No. William has no idea what it is.
Which brings us to the exchange, Jack thought, burning a hole into the floor with his eyes. For it to switch hands, William either gave it to Elizabeth or she took it. A blacksmith apprentice and the only child of a governor, albeit Governor Swann, seemed so unlikely. Even less likely was the notion that William would give such a mysterious gift from his father that he never saw to a girl. Jack grinned. Perhaps Elizabeth had an eye for all things shiny and swiped it at an opportune time.
Knowing there was always the possibility of being wrong, he stretched out his hands to smear away the notches. Just when he took a breath and prepared his mind to deduce further, a sound thundered from the distance.
Everyone ran to their little windows, meeting the faint blue rays of the moonlight. Couldn't be true, he thought. Another boom deafened the jail.
"I know those guns," he said to himself and ran to his own window. There, silhouetted against the ebony water and a sapphire sky, the Black Pearl glided through the smoke of its own guns, making its way to the dock.
"It's the Pearl," he breathed, aching at the numerous holes scattered throughout her massive sails. Too far to see which traitor was at the helm, he gritted his teeth. Mum told him the story of Tantalus only once, a foolish bugger whose eternal punishment consisted of reaching out for food and water, eternally just beyond his grasp. Barbossa had come for the medallion.
"The Black Pearl? I've heard stories," a shaggy prisoner next to him said. "She's been preying on ships and settlements for near ten years and never leaves any survivors."
"No survivors? Then where do the stories come from, I wonder?" While seeing that mutinous bastard captain his ship stung more than anything, being surrounded by useless twits acted as the salt being poured into his wounds. Now, the shadows of the men emerged from the ship, shots and torch flames accompanying them.
Look-but-do-not-touch came to Jack's mind.
A deep boom seemed to fly right past him. When the smoke cleared, a hole just large enough for a grown man to squat his way through appeared in the next cell.
"My sympathies, friend. You've not manner of luck at all," he heard one of them say, the lot squeezing through their hole and on their way to freedom.
I'll kill her, Jack thought, his eyes darting to and fro. I'll kill Tia. Leave it to her to say I'd find the Pearl but would lose her again. Grabbing the bone the idiots dangled out in front of them earlier, he whistled and tapped the bone against the metal bars.
"Come on, doggy. Just you and me now. It's you and old Jack. Come on! Good boy! That's a good boy!" The mutt with the keys clenched in its mouth cocked its head and took reluctant steps towards Jack. "That's it! Come on, you filthy, slimy, mangy cur. No! No, no, no. I didn't mean it! I didn't…"
He stopped upon hearing the same crash that sent the dog trotting away from the cell. Down the small corridor, his eyes hardened at the familiar faces there. Koehler, cold-blood Koehler, and simple Twigg, looking exactly the same as they did that night Ragetti, probably the loser in a game of drawing lots, knocked on the captain's door and invited him to a mutiny.
"This ain't the armory," Twigg said.
"Well, well, well," Koehler said, his little tour of the building at an end. "Captain Jack Sparrow."
"Last time I saw you," Twigg spit, "you were all alone on a god-forsaken island, shrinking into the distance. His fortunes aren't much improved."
Twigg, I got more intercourse in my mind on that island than you will your whole life, he thought, but decided on more careful words.
"Worry about your own fortunes, gentlemen. The deepest circle of hell is reserved for traitors and mutineers." He smirked, waiting for them to brainstorm between the two of them some crushing verbal blow. Instead, Koehler reached through the bars with clawed fingers. Dodging back, a force of habit when one was John Teague's son, Jack noticed the dark skin of Koehler's arm seem to peel back in the moonlight, leaving a white bone with tattered rags encasing it. Pink bumps of flesh still clung to the bone, a bracelet or two about to slip from the wrist that was hardly there.
"So there is a curse. That's interesting."
"You know nothing of hell." Koehler's eyes showed no emotion at the statement. Rage and frustration filled them up until there was no room for even a slight sparkle. Pulling his arm back through, he nodded to Twigg and gave a last sneer at Jack before they left.
"That's very interesting."
XXX
Jack awoke to a warm sun creeping up on his closed eyes. It all could have been a dream, seeing the Pearl, having estranged, undead crewmen threaten him despite their lack of skin. Standing and taking a hopeful look out the window, Jack shook his head. The Pearl hadn't stayed docked for long, but it had been there and left its mark on the townspeople. Faint blurs of people re-thatching their roofs and gathering shrapnel off the streets proved the Pearl had been there. Across the harbor, large schooners waded in the water, the wind acting more like a collective sigh of relief that they had not been harmed in the rioting.
"Please," he grunted, picking the bone back up and working the smaller end into the lock.
"You. Sparrow."
Jack scooted back and lay on the floor at the voice, pushing his hair to the side in case it brushed up against the questionable straw. "Aye," he said with a light air. He bit the inside of his cheeks when Bill's son approached the cell. The face may not have been a spitting image, but the manner, the way he carried himself, channeled Bill out of the Locker or wherever he was and placed him in front of this cell at this moment.
"You are familiar with that ship? The Black Pearl?"
"I've heard of it."
"Where does it make berth?"
"Where does it make berth? Have you not heard the stories?" he sighed. "Captain Barbossa and his crew of miscreants sail from the dreaded Isla de Muerta. It's an island that cannot be found except by those who already know what it is." And once upon a time, they left their good captain at a fledgling island and sailed straight into damnation. By now that island probably had some plant life on it, maybe an animal or two. But he cringed at remembering that entire ordeal.
"The ship is real enough. Therefore its anchorage must be a real place. Where is it?"
"Why ask me?" Jack kept his own speech short, making sure it sounded more slurred than it usually did. Ask me the right questions, boy.
"Because you're a pirate."
It took energy to not wince at the disdain with which the boy spoke the sentence. You've bitten off more than you can chew if you think you're going to outdo me. "And you want to turn pirate yourself, is that it?"
"Never!" The boy blurted. "They've taken Miss Swann."
Of course. They were about the same age. Laughing inside, Jack wished to see Barbossa's face when the awful truth would come to be known that Bill had a son and not a daughter. Ah well. If Elizabeth was smart, she would play along with the idea for as long as she could.
"Oh. So it is that you've found a girl. Well, if you're intending to brave all, hasten to her rescue, and so win fair lady's heart, you have to do it alone, mate. I see no profit in it for me." He watched the boy's face try to hide the rapidity of thought going on behind it. Turner men were slightly stupid, but they were sharper than anyone else in most circumstances. This boy would not disappoint.
"I can get you out of here."
"How's that?" Jack asked, sincerely interested. "The key's run off." He had assumed a bargain of some kind, not a full-fledged escape.
"I helped build these cells. These are pin-barrel hinges." He turned and placed a bench in front of the bars. "With the right leverage and the proper application of strength, the door will lift free." He stood on the bench but made no move for the door, waiting for Jack to respond.
"What's your name?"
"Will Turner."
Jack tightened his fists, concentrating on the strain so as not to grin. "That'd be short for William, I'd imagine. Good strong name. No doubt named for your father, eh?" He made a face at that. That sounded so forced.
"Yes." William was looking at him, a wrinkled brow trying to form a question. Bugger! He knew it had sounded forced. Change the subject. Change the subject.
"Well, Mr. Turner, I've changed me mind. If you spring me from this cell, I swear on pain of death, I shall take you to the Black Pearl and your bonny lass. Do we have an accord?" He stuck his hand out between the bars, his lace brushing past them. Don't you worry, Bill, he told himself. Nothing's going to happen to your boy. Not while I'm with him.
"Agreed." It was as if it were Bill's hand sliding through and taking his in a firm shake. Jack glanced down at their joined hands, feeling a rush of energy, feeling like he knew how that first sparrow he saw when he was a boy felt, free to roam the sky. Somehow, William Turner and Elizabeth Swann would be his destiny.
A/N: Okay, I'm sure some of you are disappointed I didn't include the scenes where Jack meets Elizabeth or Will. Well...1.) This isn't the end of the story, not by a long shot and 2.) At the time, the meetings themselves weren't all that significant to him. I promise some really exciting things are about to happen. Please leave reviews. I've enabled my story to accept anonymous reviews, so if you have been following along and were not able to post anything, now is your chance! Just remember, I did not invent Jack, Ragetti's eye, the little monkey's vest, Sao's fingernails, or the mysterious bruises on Tia Dalma's neck. Disney owns POTC...even the stuff that isn't so "Disney."