A/N: Thank you to meowbooks and Starling Rising for their reviews! You both have reviewed so steadily, I can't say thank you enough. You're sweet and wonderful and I will continue to be grateful for the time you spend on my work. It means more than I can say!

Thank you so much to jedipati for her wonderful betaing work!!

Disclaimer: POTC belongs to Disney

Jack glared, grabbing his tankard as if it made him feel safe. "I've asked y'not t'call me that."

The tall man easily snatched up a chair lying on the floor, planted it, and sat down between Will and Jack. For a moment, Will stared at the fine burgundy silk of the man's waistcoat. Gold buttons gleamed on the large cuffs and plackets of his coat, which was so deep a red as to be black. Then the man folded his hands on the table. His fingers were white and slender, unadorned. Will caught a faint whiff of flowery perfume.

He smiled eagerly at Jack. "I could not resist. It has been so very long since we last talked."

Jack was looking queasy. "Ah yes. A very long time."

"You see, this night marks that two 'undred and third night that's come to me without payment from you. What, you're still drinking this cambouis?" He took Jack's tankard and sniffed, then slammed it back down. " 'ow many times must I tell you, Jacky, rum will rot ton cerveau?"

Jack leaned back, seeming to compose himself. "T'be heartlessly honest, Renard, me brain is so rotted already, said sludge can only help."

"Déplorable! But I do not want to keep you long, mon ami. Despite the rot, I am sure you remember November 14th, 1688? Wicklow…the Killruddery House…need I go further?"

Jack lowered his eyes and pursed his mouth. Then he looked up. "Sounds Irish?"

The man's expression flattened with annoyance that was not to be taken lightly, especially since two huge bruisers had just appeared at his shoulders. They wore floor-length black coats with frightening bulges beneath. One looked at Will and one looked at Jack.

Jack frowned awkwardly and Will shrank back in his seat.

Renard smiled. Beneath his thin mustache, his smile was really quite charming; the gaudy girl in the corner had completely forgotten Will, and she received a wink of one of Renard's black eyes for her admiration. "You're sure you don't recall, cher Jacky?"

Looking thoroughly cowed, Jack mumbled, "One hundred pounds worth of wine, lost in the Channel."

"Oui," Renard said pleasantly. "My vin. Which I what?"

"…Had hidden on the boat y'loaned me…" Jack sighed, "…for escaping certain individuals what didn't have me best interests in mind."

"Yes, that I loaned you. Out of the goodness of my heart." Icicles hung from Renard's sharp enunciation. "That was a blow I did not recover from, for my business was young et vulnerable. I don't think you'll like the interest your debt has accrued, Jacky."

Jack's eye twitched. "You seem t'have done well for yerself anyhow."

"Indeed I have, my friend!" The icicles melted in a tropical cheeriness. "My new business is not as clean as the wine trade, yet, I believe I was never destined to be un entrepreneur irréprochable…" Renard suddenly turned on Will. "Are you with Jacky here?"

Will nodded, wishing he wasn't. He felt even worse when Renard's narrow face was transformed by a wolfish grin.

"How do you intend to pay me, Jack?"

"Well. I've never been one to…"

"Yes?"

"…deal unhonestly wi't me mates, or even been disposed to disappointin' people, but…"

"You are holding back!" Renard exclaimed, as if to a timid musician. "Torture us all no more and let free!"

"Well," Jack dug at the table with one nail, "I…"

Renard leaned closer.

"I can't pay you." The phrase was barely audible.

Will realized he was gripping a leg of the table in iron hands.

Renard crowed. "You're making such progress, Jacky! Fortunately, I foresaw this, and have a way charitable out for you. You want to hear it?"

"I would," Jack said quietly.

"Well, then I must tell you about my new business. There's some people in Spain who…well, resent the English. They're fond of turning English prisonniers into workers…"

"Slavery," Jack spat.

Renard winced and shook his head, and the shrugged. "Well, yes, more or less. Mais you drove me to this, Jacky! They usually pay the deliverers quite well, in this case, moi. But you see, I work with everyone."

Jack raised a scathing eyebrow.

"There are the plantation owners. There are the shop owners. And there are the noble families who need laborers; the men for their fields, the women…well." Renard turned to Will with a glitter in his eye. "That's where this comely specimen comes in."

Will almost jumped out of his chair, but the bruiser who had been watching him took one step over and clamped a hand on his shoulder.

Jack stared at the hand on Will's shoulder. "What d'you mean?"

"Well, it's a discreet sort of business, but some Spanish ladies pay very dearly to have attirants young men tending their jardins." Renard leered at Will, who was quivering with panic and outrage.

"Now, Jacky, I was thinking I'd take you to Spain and see if any of them took to your obscenely ugly dreadlocks and slurred speech. But you're so old. Believe me, I didn't have much hope. But this one…" Renard took Will's chin and forced it up, his eyes following Will's taut jaw line. "He'll fetch a far higher price than you. He's got the visage, la forme…and he's fiery." Renard released Will and surveyed his glare. "Spanish ladies are very spirited, boy. You'd find your match in your maîtresse, and she'd be so pleased to find her match in you."

"You're mad," Will snarled.

Renard just smiled smugly and looked to Jack.

Instead of looking revolted, as Will wished, the pirate instead looked calculating, his eyes veiled. "All Spanish ladies're like this?"

"Only a select few, my friend. It's an intimate market. Alors, you let me take this merveille, and all grievances between us are forgotten."

Jack knit his brow. "Take him now, you mean?"

"Zut! Do not tell me you have a problem?" Renard looked crushed. "I do not know if I could live without the gain I'm sure he'd bring me, Jacky."

"I see." Jack's lids were low.

"Jack." Will's throat rasped, his voice was so dry. "Jack?"

Without a glance at Will, Jack extended a hand to Renard.

"You can have ' im. He's a blacksmith, beware."

Renard clasped Jack's hand. Floored, Will stared at those hands, then struck at the elbow of his bruiser. He couldn't get the right angle, though, and in an instant the second bruiser was on his other side, a huge hand about his throat. He couldn't move; couldn't even speak the hatred burning his tongue.

"I wish you," Renard said sunnily to Jack, "how do you say…a following wind?"

Grimacing, Jack grimaced buried his face in his tankard. The bruisers hauled Will to his feet and when Will struggled, Renard snapped, "Trait le taire."

Pain blossomed at the back of Will's head and black curtains closed over the world.

She was human no longer. She wasn't even alive. Every shred of warmth, reason, courage, every drop of blood, every life-sustaining organ, was stripped from her bones, leaving a terrible void. She was reduced to a pair of eyes and a throat-ripping shriek, a pair of iced lungs and a paralyzed form, a mindless outlet of horror.

For the fiddler's eyeballs, white and bare in their sockets, glared, while his blackened teeth stonily grinned. Gray strips of flesh stretched over his skull; stringy hair framed his ghoul's face. He was a medallion come to life, and his gaze was so hungry Elizabeth's knees gave, sending her between the spokes of a huge capstan turned by bent monsters. They didn't stop and she was shoved around, a dove lost among vultures.

Abruptly her heels caught on the lip of an open hatch and she tumbled backward into the dark, arms windmilling. She landed on her back only feet below the hatch's lip. She sat up, gasping, and realized that she was in the center of a taut tarp held by bony hands. Below, she caught the evil gleam of bare eyeballs above gaping skull noses, then the tarp snapped, and she went flying.

Up, up she went, twenty feet into the cold, thick air. Then she smacked the tarp again, tried to get off, but the white hands were yanking and, rough laughter in her ears, she careened upward again. The horrid, fluttering sails reached for her and she could only scream, waiting to fall.

Then an arm wrapped brutally about her waist and she was flying through the rigging, held against something hard. She glanced at her captor; she screamed again.

A wet growl came from the monster's mouth as he swung them over to the poop deck, where he landed. Elizabeth found herself released and landed hard, hearing him crackle down behind her. She fled around the helm and he followed, stopping when she stopped, glaring across the helm with foul intent in his eyes. Elizabeth feinted left; he matched her, then back the other way. Demented green eyes wild, he threw himself across the helm at her; she flinched, then rallied and wrenched the helm into a spin. Each passing knob knocked her enemy's chin, up, up, until his head was thrown back, his neck broken.

He grasped his own hair-streaked skull and yanked it back up into position; Elizabeth trembled at the popping of bones that filled the air. With another malevolent growl, his eyes fixed on her once more and she fled down the stairs and around...under...behind them. There she crouched, hunted, staring out at the hellish deck.

Bones crackled behind her and she turned with a cry. It was the monkey; black eyes glaring bare from its small skull, screeching, holding the medallion in a bone claw.

Her voice was spent. She ran for the doors she had fled only minutes before.

She ran straight into the waiting Barbossa who caught her and roughly forced her to face the decks of the Black Pearl. "Look!" he exclaimed. "The moonlight shows us for what we really are. We are not among the living and so we cannot die. But neither are we dead."

The crew was assembling itself before their captain and his captive, a sickening vision from the darkest corner of human imagination. Elizabeth quivered against Barbossa, breathing hard.

He grasped her shoulder and savagely turned her toward him. "For too long I've been parched 'a thirst and unable to quench it. Too long I've been starvin' t' death and haven't died."

Elizabeth stiffly retreated, her horrified eyes fixed on his terrible, pleading face. He followed.

"I feel nothin'…not the wind on my face, nor the spray of the sea, nor the warmth...of a woman's flesh…" He reached for her, hands infinitely starved. She lurched back into the moonlight, watching his following hand, which rotted in the moonlight.

"You'd best start believin' in ghost stories, Miss Turner," Captain Barbossa said coldly, then stepped fully into the moonlight. Exposed ligaments creaking, he stared into her glazed eyes. "You're in one."

He lifted a bottle of wine. He tugged the cork free with his teeth, spat it to the deck. Then he threw his head back and poured the wine into his open jaws; the red stuff trickled down and coated his white ribs like blood.

Choking, Elizabeth sprinted past him into her prison. He hurled the bottle against one of the doors; it shattered. He shoved the doors closed then looked to his silent crew and laughed. When they all laughed with him, he stopped. "What're you lookin' at?" he bellowed. "Back t'work!"

As the muttering pirates obeyed, Elizabeth pulled her knees to her chin and huddled deeply in her small corner. Beyond tears, she started at every shifting of the shadows, at every creak and groan.

She knew she would never, ever be safe again.

When Will's eyes opened, he was in darkness. Stinking darkness.

His first thought was of Jack, and he saw red. When the first wave of rage had passed, Will managed to look around.

He was on the floor of a tiny room and he couldn't spot the door. He had the sense of being deep inside something…and when the floor shifted gently beneath him, he knew he was in the bowels of a ship. There was creaking all around, but beyond that all was completely silent. His hands and feet were tied, and a gag cruelly tore at the corners of his mouth. He tried to wriggle forward, and discovered that his wrists were bound to something on the wall.

They'd certainly taken Jack's warning to heart.

And for all Will knew, he had been out for hours and was already on his way across the Atlantic toward bondage.

At his wit's end, Will went perfectly still. Only now he realized that the day Jack had come to Port Royal, a noose of betrayal and danger had been put around his throat. The trapdoor had dropped out from under Will when Elizabeth had been kidnapped and he had felt the noose beginning to bite his breath away ever since. Now the noose was going in for the kill and all Will could do was wait to die.

His despair was so profound, he didn't feel alarm when the door opened. He hardly squinted when a hand carefully set a lantern near his head; too fixed were his eyes on utter hopelessness.

When someone prodded his shoulder, though, he had the presence of mind to growl and turn.

Almond-shaped eyes in a devious face met his. The Oriental grinned briefly then stood to close the door. Will lifted his head to watch, and recognized the man's tunic. It was the slumping, tired Oriental he'd seen stumble into The Faithful Bride. Relief poured through him, I must still be in Tortuga!

How had this man gotten in? But of course. Why would they need to guard me? I'm a complete nobody and the only people who know I'm here are the people who want me here. Except…Will stared as the Oriental came back.

The man knelt down. "You understond me?"

Will nodded impatiently, ready to kill the man for trying to start a conversation without bothering to remove his torturous bindings.

"You al wit Jack Sparrow? You…was?"

Will nodded angrily.

The Oriental smiled at Will's scowl. "Feng no like 'im either. Wir you put this," the man held up a vial with a death head carved in the top, "in his dlink?"

"You mean kill him," Will tried to say. It came out like a moan. I'll consider it…

The Oriental tsked. "I untie you, if you aglee."

Will looked at the grinning death head.

"And if you tly escape without doing as agleed, I kiw you," the Oriental added.

Will nodded. The Oriental produced a dirk and cut the ropes at his ankles, then carefully, his gag. Will licked his lips and winced as the Oriental leaned over him and cut his wrists free. Then Will sat up, feeling a hundred years old, as the Oriental squatted and watched, dirk in one hand.

In that moment of silence, Will tucked loose strands of hair behind his ears and looked at the Oriental, fascinated for an instant by how the lantern light enhanced his face. The Oriental extended the vial slowly. Will took it.

"Come," the Oriental said, shoving his dirk into his belt and picking up the lantern by its ring.

Out the door they went, Will limping as blood entered his feet again. They were in a narrow passageway lit by lanterns hung on the ceiling. Down the passageway–thump–Will bumbled and hit the wall–up a ladder. The Oriental made Will go first. A bit further down a more lit passageway and up another ladder. As Will's body grew adjusted to the idea of moving, he could think. They must've had him on the orlop deck. One level down and he would've been stashed in the hold with all the crates.

Will climbed the last steps to the upper deck, the need to see that he was still in Tortuga swelling in his chest. He heard a yelp behind him and whirled around.

"Jack?"

"Who else?" the pirate said. He had a knife to the Oriental's throat. "I came t'spring you out, as you did me, back in Port Royal, yet it seems this one beat me t'you."

"You, rescue me? I thought you were happy to see me off to some obscene life in Spain."

"That's the problem with only ever doing black…smithy-things and practicing with all yer little swords, mate." His hat shadowed Jack's eyes, but his grin was blazing as ever. "You never thought it might be possible and plausible that I was workin' t'save both our hides."

"You were planning to come and get me." Will crossed his arms.

" 'A course! Now if you'll excuse me, I need to deal wit' little Bok Choy here."

"Wait!"

Jack's head snapped up at the fierceness of Will's tone, and his hand involuntarily quivered.

"Maybe I don't want you to kill him, Jacky. Maybe I like him better than I like you."

Jack's chin went down. Even in the shadow, his eyes were piercing as they fixed on Will. "What'd he want in return f'your freedom, fanatic?"

Will's jaw tightened. "Something I would't've done earlier…but that I wouldn't regret now."

"Is that so." The words were treacherously soft. "Well let's talk about that, you an' I." In one smooth motion Jack sliced the Oriental's throat and dropped him with an awful thud.

Will gaped. Jack wiped his blade clean on his breeches then slid the knife into his boot. Then he walked slowly to Will, who gritted his teeth and stood firm.

Faces inches away.

"What did he give you?" Jack asked.

Barely breathing, Will opened his hand. Jack plucked the vial from it, opened it, and sniffed.

"How original," he said breezily, tossing it over his shoulder. "I'd've smelled it before I drank it boy, n'then you'd be in hot water, aye you would. Now. Please, don't alarm yerself over that–" he pointed at the hatchway "–scene. When you live in this world, y'make enemies. Killin' is the only thing that'll stop his kind, an' I learned the hard way. Believe me, if there was another way I'd do it."

It was all quickly spoken in a low, soft voice that made Will want to stay very still. He nodded numbly.

"You've had 'nough excitement for one night, I think," Jack said. "We're going to tie little Bok Choy in whatever cranny they had you in, an' then we'll find a quiet place to wait till Gibbs comes through. Then we're outta here. Savvy?"

Exhaling, Will nodded.

Jack gave the softest sigh of relief and hurried to finish the deed. Will slowly followed.

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