This chapter made me really sad to write. This was when I still thought it was all going to end horribly. -.-' Poor Anamaria.
The crew knew something was happening.
It was impossible to miss. The sea practically screamed it, as shot full of anger and torment and wrath as any of them had ever seen it. The sky boiled overhead, sending bright forks of lightning arcing through the air. It didn't rain, although they had a feeling that it would, later on, when everything was said and done. For now, though, the water remained bound tight in the black clouds, and the fury of the storm around them just built and built.
Anamaria wasn't really surprised when the ship came surging up out of the water. She had seen Davy Jones in the bar after all, way back in the very beginning. It seemed like so long ago, now, but at the same time, it wasn't nearly long enough.
It could never have been long enough.
The crew readied themselves for battle. Most of them didn't really know what was going on, only that the ship was in dire need of defending. Those who had been told the truth over the last year, or those who had guessed, prepared for a different sort of defence. They would protect their captain, and the happiness he had found, with their lives if it came down to it. He deserved that much, after all he had done for them.
Anamaria calmly loaded her pistols, packing the gunpowder down tight. Gibbs stood next to her, filling his ever-present flask from an actual glass bottle of rum.
"This bottle o' rum," He caught her looking and held up the bottle, grinning from ear to scruffy ear, "cost me two an' a half months o' hording ta buy. I've held on ta the damn thing for twenny three years. Bout time I drank it, don't ya think?"
"Heh. What is it with men and rum?" Anamaria shook her head, packing down the last of the wadding and slipping the loaded weapon into her hip holster. "Give me a taste, eh?"
"Aye aye."
The bottle changed hands, and she took a sip of the red-gold liquid.
Damn, that was good stuff.
"Ye know…" Gibbs leant forward against the railing, watching the Dutchman cut through the roiling waters towards them, closer by the second. "This is exactly how I figured I'd go out."
"Really now, Mr. Gibbs?" Anamaria laughed, then stopped almost immediately. This wasn't laughing weather. "What about that little tavern you were always talkin' about buyin'? Dyin' drunk in your sleep?"
"Ah, feck and fantasy, s'all." He gave a dismissive wave, scoffing at the very idea. "I'm a sailor at heart, and the think 'bout sailors is they always die at sea. Either that, or they weren't never really sailors, if ye catch my meaning."
"Aye, I think I do."
The Dutchman pulled up along the port side, the monstrous creatures of Jones's crew hauling up thick, seaweed tangled mooring lines and heaving them over onto the Pearl's deck. The crew hacked away at them, sent them tumbling back into the sea, but they couldn't get all of them. Some of them caught, and stuck, and the two ships were slowly and inevitably drawn together, alone in the vast, angry ocean.
"I always loved him a little."
The grizzled old man shot her a look, scoffed, took a drink from his bottle of twenty three year old rum.
"We all loved 'im, girl. That's the sort o' man he was."
"You know what I mean. I could have been happy with him, Gibbs."
"… Aye. But could he have bin happy with ye?"
They didn't talk again after that. There was never enough time, not until it was all over and done with, and by then it was too late. There was nothing left to say.
That they were already talking about Captain Jack Sparrow in past tense never occurred to either of them.