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Disclaimer: POTC belongs to Disney
At the Interceptor's dock, Commodore Norrington stood near the very crane where that horrid Sparrow had threatened poor Elizabeth. He was trying to concentrate on the ship's cargo manifest to avoid thinking about the night before and what he had lost.
He knew he could have saved Elizabeth Swann. Why hadn't he thought of her, all alone at the Governor's mansion? That delicate, beautiful woman in the hands of those pirates . . . He suppressed a shudder and his fury. Jack Sparrow had begun all the trouble, that arrogant, swaggering–
He drew a deep breath and forced his eyes to focus on the page of the book he held. The sooner he could get the Interceptor into open water the sooner there would be hope for the woman he knew he loved.
"Commodore!" Groves, a young officer, stepped up beside Norrington. He gazed worriedly out to sea. Scowling, Norrington turned toward the water as a faint voice could be heard: "Sir! They've taken the Dauntless!"
Norrington slammed the manifest closed and shoved it into Grove's hands. He yanked out his spyglass from its pocket and pulled it open, lifting it to his eye.
He found Gillette standing in the front of a rowboat full of sailors and one soldier. The lieutenant was waving his arms wildly. "Commodore!" His voice came again across the water. "They've taken the ship!" He pointed, and Norrington turned his spyglass.
It blurred along the side of the Dauntless and into her neat rigging...neat no more. Beneath some half-freed sails two ropes waved and wobbled unnaturally, and Norrington followed them down to the deck.
"Sparrow and Turner have taken the Dauntless!"
Sparrow and Turner. Norrington's spyglass found Turner's tall frame. The boy had the two ropes and was waving them awkwardly about while Sparrow looked on.
"Rash, Turner," Norrington said, icy. "Too rash."
Sparrow was gesturing upward now, dramatically, and the youth began waving one rope as hard as he could. Above, the sail rippled and looked more tangled than ever. Norrington lowered the spyglass. He had underestimated the both of them. He wouldn't again.
"That is without a doubt the worst pirate I have ever seen." He pressed his lips tightly together, then turned to the Interceptor.
Out in the harbor, Will tried to get used to standing on a massive wood tub while watching the H.M.S. Interceptor. Men were swarming onto her dock and over gangplanks, many of them with red uniforms. There were tiny flashes…sun on bayonets, Will realized, with a lurch in his belly.
Then the swarming stopped. Multiple lines were pulled free and hurled to tiny men leaning over the sleek vessel's rail. Will's eyes followed multiple figures up multiple ratlines then–
On both her fore and aft masts, the Interceptor's topgallant-sails bloomed gracefully downward from her spars, white as Will's best shirt. Which he was still wearing, he realized vaguely, too dismayed to care.Then beneath, larger topsails fell free and grew bloated with the wind that was teasing Will's hair.
The Interceptor visibly rocked. A flower of white appeared at her prow as she began to slice the waves. And then, the largest square sails tumbled down, down, down, rippling, stiffening. Will stared. The Interceptor's wingspan made the actual wood ship below look like a modestly sized longboat. And she was coming for him.
Will sprinted up the steps to the quarterdeck where Jack stood at the helm, his pistol rested cockily on his shoulder.
"Here they come," was all Will could say.
The pirate turned and his dark, dark eyes caressed the falcon that hurled toward him, talons splayed and sharp, her every inch streamlined glory.
Captain Jack Sparrow grinned.
The Interceptor slid like a sea serpent past Gillette's tiny dory. "Bring her around!" he yowled to the rowing sailors, "bring her around!"
They followed the Interceptor, bobbing in her silky wake.
The commandeered H.M.S. Dauntless drifted near the cliffs, her one tangled sail flapping sadly. The Interceptor slid alongside, slowed. Not a sound came from either ship.
Norrington stood beside the boarding party, scanning the deck of the Dauntless. The criminals had made themselves scarce. But on a ship there was no 'scarce' that could bring success. Grimly Norrington smiled. "Grapples!"
The boarding tools soared across the ships, thudding to the dreadnought's deck, scraping over her planks, and then catching on her rail. The ships bobbed closer together. Gangplanks went across and then shouting Marines streamed over. They were careful not to jostle Norrington, who landed on the deck with a crisp thud. He marched aft. "Search every cabin, every hull, down to the bilges!"
"As I thought. Our dear Norry only had time t'bring a bare-bones crew and a few Marines–an' he brought almost everybody over here."
Having made this smug observation, Jack gingerly straightened from his awkward position. He climbed from the face of the Dauntless's prow onto the forecastle deck. Will, white-knuckled, climbed from his place beside the bowsprit and, bent in half, followed Jack to the lines the pirate had told him to loose earlier.
The rope was thick as a child's arm and rougher than raw wood. Will grasped it. Feet up onto the rail…he looked down and the space between the ships went down and down and down–Jack was already swinging away. It was like purposefully stepping off a balcony, but Will pushed off and after he thumped to the Interceptor's forecastle deck he wondered that he had feared dropping down into the water: there had been absolutely no chance of him letting that rope go.
He clambered to his feet and pulled his hatchet from his belt as he sneaked down to the quarterdeck. He hurried down the rail closest to the Dauntless, whacking each grapple line free and gouging the polished wood as he did. He felt the Interceptor shift beneath him when he cut the last line. They began to move, ever so slowly. He took shelter behind the aft mast and looked for Jack.
His eyes widened. Up by the poop deck rail, Jack was covering the mouth of an unlucky sentry. Will looked nervously around for others and saw none.
"Can you swim?" Jack asked. The man, hat at his feet, struggled. Jack tightened his grip.
"Can. You. Swim?"
The sentry slumped. Jack removed his hand. "Of course, sir," the sentry said indignantly. "Like a fish. I grew up summers living in Dover, with my uncle–"
"Good." In one smooth effort Jack heaved him over the side. There came a wail and a splash.
Faster and faster, the Dauntless was sliding back. The gangplanks fell down between the ships, clattering over the gunports. Those on the Dauntless turned.
"Sailors!" Norrington bellowed. "Back to the Interceptor now!" The men rushed to comply, but Norrington's heart was sinking. He had deeply underestimated them. What a perfect failure as a new commodore, too. Sick with disgust at himself, he watched one sailor make a noble swing, miss by feet, and somersault into the water.
Helplessly, Norrington's eyes found Sparrow. The pirate, standing at the Interceptor's helm, had twisted about to admire his handiwork. He flamboyantly swept his hat from his head.
"Thank you, Commodore, for getting us ready to make way!" he hollered. "We'd had a hard time of it by ourselves."
Marines lined against the Dauntless' rail opened fire, and both Turner and Sparrow ducked down. Seething, Norrington whirled and marched toward the quarterdeck deck. "Set topsails and clear up this mess," he ordered Groves.
"With the wind a quarter astern, we won't catch them!"
Norrington turned to glare at Groves. "I don't need to catch them, just get them in range of the long nines."
Groves followed his superior, shouting over his shoulder, "Hands, come about! Run out the guns!"
As cannon bay doors snapped open and cannons grumbled into position, Norrington leaned on the poop deck's forward railing and he gazed after the shrinking Interceptor, waiting for the Dauntless to surge forward in pursuit. Oddly, he felt they were coming about instead. He dismissed the thought. Absurd.
Groves joined him. "We're to fire on our own ship, sir?"
"I'd rather see her at the bottom of the ocean," Norrington growled, "than in the hands of a pirate."
"Commodore!"
Both British officers turned toward the speaker, a burly sailor who squinted at them from behind the helm. "He's disabled the rudder chain, sir." The man pulled at the helm, but it refused to budge.
Norrington had never felt his heart plummet so fast. The Dauntless, sails turgid with wind, was indeed coming about, headed back toward land.
And in the Dauntless' path lay one very small, full dory.
Gillette turned to see the bow of the Dauntless looming directly above him, the ship's great hull only yards away and closing. He threw up his hands in terror and shrieked, "Abandon ship!"
Yelling, they all leaped from the doomed dory and into the water, flailing clear as the hull of the Dauntless snapped it into shards and pulled it under.
Commodore Norrington bowed his head, eyes closed. And just yesterday morning I was being promoted.
"That's got to be the best pirate I've ever seen," Groves said with grudging admiration.
"So it would seem." The words fell like daggers from Norrington's lips as he glowered at the green shore, his green eyes the hardest marble.
Leaving Port Royal and the humiliated British far behind, the Interceptor flew east, lit up joyfully in the sunlight.
Jack scurried about the Interceptor, trying to stay on top of everything with minimal assistance from Will, who had not yet recovered from being fired upon by upstanding military personnel. He would recover soon, Jack knew, and then he would be stunned all over again by the crime he had committed. At least he'd found his sea legs without hurling over the side; the lad probably had his father to thank for that.
Jack moved to tend a rope near Will, who was sitting on the barrel where Jack had put him. Will's sword rested on a second barrel and he was sharpening it with a small whetstone. Scrinng...scrinng...scrinng...
"When I was a lad," Will said suddenly, "living in England, my mother raised me by herself. After she died, I came out here," scrinng,he glanced at Jack, "looking for my father."
"Is that so," Jack replied tersely. He did not like this reminiscing; he frankly had no ears for reminisces that weren't his own.
Will set the whetstone down. "My father," he reminded Jack, standing and tucking his sword in his belt, "Will Turner?"
Jack was walking away. Jaw tightening, Will followed him up to the quarterdeck. "At the jail it was only after you learnt my name you agreed to help. Since that's what I wanted, I didn't press the matter." He watched Jack crouch to adjust another rope.
"I'm not a simpleton, Jack. You knew my father."
Brow furrowed, Jack focused on his rope.
When Will did not leave, Jack tilted his head back into the breeze with a sigh. He stood and faced Will eye-to-eye. "I knew him. Probably one of the few who knew him as William Turner. Everyone else called him Bootstrap or Bootstrap Bill." He walked away.
"Bootstrap?"
Jack pulled free the rope loop he had used to secure the helm's position. "Good man," said he, his back to Will. "Good pirate. And clever–I never met anyone with as clever a mind and hands as him. When you were puzzling out that cell door, it was like seeing his twin." Jack twisted and looked to Will's face. "I swear, you look just like him."
"It's not true! He was a merchant sailor, a good, respectable man who obeyed the law."
Jack twisted again, sharply. "He was a bloody pirate! A scalawag." When Jack turned away, Will pulled his sword free.
"My father was not a pirate!"
"Put it away, son," Jack spoke wearily to the horizon. "It's not worth you getting beat again."
Will's voice was venomous. "You didn't beat me, you ignored the rules of engagement. In a fair fight, I'd kill you."
Jack finally turned. "That's not much incentive for me to fight fair then, is it?" He wrenched the helm hard to the right and ducked.
The Interceptor's mighty boom careened over Jack's head and slammed into Will's chest. The youth barely had the time to drop his sword and frantically grab the boom before it carried him right over the rail and out over the water. There it stopped.
Jack straightened, picked up Will's fallen sword, and went to the rail. "Now as long as you're hanging there, pay attention."
Kicking, Will clutched the ropes that followed the underside of the boom. He unwillingly grimaced at Jack.
"The only rules that matter are these:" began Jack with the delicate eloquence of a philosopher, "what a man can do, an'what a man can't do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man, or y'can't. Pirate is in your blood boy, so you'll have to square with that someday." He paused and gazed into Will's strained, shocked face.
"Now me, for example. I can let you drown. But I can't bring this ship into Tortuga all by my onesy, savvy? So." He turned and heaved the helm to its original position. Creaking, the boom swung back over the deck and Will, lifting his feet, landed safely on the deck with a thud. He squinted, lifted his head, then stared at the blade Jack held near his face.
"Can you sail under the command of a pirate?" Jack tossed the sword up, deftly caught it by the blade, and then extended the handle to Will. "Or can y'not?"
Slowly, Will took his sword, then his cautiously excited eyes met Jack's. "Tortuga?"
Jack's gold teeth gleamed. "Tortuga."
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