Through dusty tears, Mary watched Jack guide Will's hand to stab the heart immediately following Bootstrap's sudden burst of lucidity. She rubbed her face against Will's temple, her dark stardust tears wiping off onto him. Her body jolted at the struggling sounds between Bootstrap and Jones suddenly stop when the blade was all the way through. Everyone stared at Jones, his eyes rolling back into his deformed head.
"Nooooo," came a voice from the choppy waters, the rain even heavier now, rain mixed with tears.
"Calypso," Jones breathed before plummeting off the side and into the harsh sea. Their heads turned back to Will just as quickly as he let out a final wheeze.
"Will, Will, stay with us." Elizabeth smoothed a drenched piece of hair off his forehead. Mary could feel his head in her hands grow heavy.
"The Dutchman must have a captain," Bootstrap said, his black and white knife in hand. The rest of the crew followed him, two of them picking up the empty chest. Mary ran her hands over his arm, her wings spreading, willing to act before she was. She left a light, airy kiss just below his ear.
"I love you, Will," she whispered. Stepping back, her wings lifted her feet inches off the deck. Summoning up her remaining strength, she yelled to the others, "Take hold of me!"
Jack took Elizabeth by the arms and dragged her over to Mary, the two of them and James holding onto her. She looked one last time at Bootstrap tearing open Will's shirt, exposing the white, pure flesh to the biting rain. The weight of so many people made it a slow, strained flight, but the Pearl was near, scoured with more of the dead. She collapsed when they reached the familiar black deck. On her hands and knees, she crawled to the railing and scanned the Flying Dutchman, wondering, hoping, praying Will would surface. All lay still.
"Jack!" Gibbs ran to him. "The Endeavor's turned tail. No word on the pirate lords. What are we waitin' on? Where be Will?"
"I don't know," he breathed, watching the ship in front of them. At last, Will stood, a long red gash running down his chest, his shirt ripped all the way down to his bottom ribs. He had the helm with one arm, ordering the crew to their posts, the barnacles and sea anemones and urchins melting off their bodies, revealing human skin, human faces. A grin broke out on Jack's face.
"Orders, Captain?"
"Hard to port! Back to Shipwreck Cove. Get that man off my helm," he said, climbing up the steps to Barbossa.
"Ye be invitin' them to return, turnin' your rudder on 'em like that!" Barbossa argued.
"They do not have the Flying Dutchman anymore. We do. All of Beckett's plans hinged on having the Flying Dutchman, which, I'd like to point out again, we now have. Hence." Shooing Barbossa from the helm, he felt two arms slide up onto his chest and a chin on his shoulder. He exhaled. Exactly what he needed to feel after that. He expected her to speak, but instead he could still feel her body tremble.
"It's still a victory, darling."
"How's Calypso going to feel about what we've done?" she whimpered, her forehead falling onto him. Dearest Lizzie. He wished he knew. Guiding her to his front, he switched places with her and wrapped his arms around her, placing her hand on one of the helm's spokes. Kissing her shoulder, he pondered what to say.
"Elizabeth! Thank heavens you're all right." Jack let go of her just long enough for her to enjoy her father's embrace before pulling her back to him. It would come, all right, a swift release of the pent-up shock at what all just happened. He could not yet even revel in the fact he was freed from his debt. It would come with great force, which would then probably be followed with a great amount of rum, but for now, he knew only Lizzie's touch could steady his nerves. "I thought for a moment it would be the last time I saw you, some of those sea ruffians cornered me and, and…" His eyes shifted over towards Pintel and Ragetti. "But I just followed their lead, and when we ran out of ammunition, we used them as clubs."
"Highly resourceful," Jack remarked, noting the Flying Dutchman gaining on them. It was the first time he could really look at the ship without fear and take in its magnificence. Still nowhere near his Pearl, of course, but a fine ship. "Hold your head up, love, if ye wish to see Captain Turner."
Before either of them knew it, Will was next to them on the Pearl's deck.
"Oy! Ye can't be doing that all the time!"
"It takes too much energy to do it all the time," Will said. "Besides, it was worth scaring you."
"William, you could not scare me if you tried."
"I don't know, Jack," Elizabeth said. "It seemed we were all scared not too long ago." He recoiled before resuming his hold on her. It was just now that Jack spotted the chest tucked under Will's arm, a heartbeat sending out tiny vibrations.
"You two appear awfully cozy." It was said with less malice than Jack expected, which only worked in everyone's favor.
"It is customary, William, to comfort one's wife when her former fiancés go gallivanting about as immortal captains."
"Wife." The corner of Will's lip twitched upward before it fell back down into a moment of contemplation. Elizabeth nodded. "In that case, I should like to kiss the bride." He planted a chaste kiss on Elizabeth's forehead and peered around the ship.
"The Endeavor retreated, but that can only mean Beckett will be back," Elizabeth said. "Once we're back at the Cove, we'll have to regroup and form an offensive strategy."
"There you are," Will said, finding Mary resting on the bowsprit of his ship, her wings folded. His bowsprit. His ship. He used to think them such meager possessions, rolling his eyes at Jack and Barbossa's preoccupations with the Black Pearl. Captain Will Turner. He could grow used to the title. "You still have your wings."
"I haven't been released from anything," Mary said.
"I'm sorry."
"Not your 'sorries' I'm lookin' for," she snorted, glancing down at the water. "Ever since she come spring me from jail, all it's been is her cryin' and carryin' on about being trapped in a human form. Now that she's back to how she's meant to be, 'spect she won't have no one to vent her sorrows to. Should've known she'd forget me rather than free me." She let out a sigh. "But ye now, that's somethin' else again, says I. Captain William Turner. That's a fine thing, that is. And a fine noble position, if ye don't mind me saying."
"One day ashore, ten years at sea," he said. He took a step, leaning forward and balancing his arms on the bowsprit. "Did you mean it?"
"Mean what?" she coughed, her eyes shifting, her form taking on a deep purple tint. Will gave her a smile. "I…now how did ye even manage to hear such a thing? Ye seemed too far gone…"
Instead of answering, he straddled the bowsprit and scooted his way to her until they were right across from each other. Cupping her cheeks, he smiled when they faded back to their normal, if somewhat transparent selves. The immortal captain of the Flying Dutchman, assigned to ferry those who die at sea to the other side and a winged guardian angel. You're really in trouble now, he thought, but decided the sound of it was so lovely he couldn't care for very long. Leaning forward, he closed his eyes and kissed her.
"I love you too, Mary, wings or no wings, human or not human, pirate or no pirate."
Elizabeth preferred to stand near the door, knowing full well her father's ear was pressed against the other side of it. So much had happened she had blushed upon seeing the other pirate lords return, their faces and fingers smudged with gunpowder, their surgeons and attendants still hovering over some of them, applying a few last stitches. Hearing the report a few of the East India Trading Company's ships now existed as flotsam, even more taken over and now part of various pirate fleets, she sighed.
"There is no need to take the offensive and go following one ship across the seas," Chevalle scoffed. "The East India Trading Company has suffered enough, and when word gets out most of its ships were destroyed, it will suffer even more."
"You don't understand," James said. Like her, he stood apart from the others at the table, his arms folded, pacing the length of the room. "Beckett still must be stopped. If the king, England's king," he clarified, shooting her a glance, "finds out about this, he'll only resupply Beckett with more ships. We've only proven him right that pirates are more powerful than the monarchy had ever imagined."
"I don't much care for how you act after such…stimulating interludes," Jack said, leaving Elizabeth to purse her lips together trying not to blush. All her life, she'd never pictured James engaging in such activities outside of a firm, legal marriage, and yet, here they were. "Nevertheless, our lecherous colleague is right."
"Yer just sayin' that, seein' as how you be wantin' your revenge on him," Barbossa said, sitting for once, allowing slender, creamy Asian fingers apply one more stitch to his eyebrow. Wincing, he swatted her away and took a sip from his goblet.
"I am not sure you have much of a right to be here, Captain Barbossa," Mistress Ching said from across the table to him. "We did not vote to release Calypso and yet that is precisely what happened."
"I was not the one who did the deed," he said, glaring over at James.
"No, but you made it possible."
"Calypso will never let us make such a voyage anyway," Villanueva spoke up, commanding everyone's attention. "We have killed and subverted her lover's position."
"What was the sea like before she was bound?" Elizabeth asked.
"The sea has always been unforgiving, my King," he said. "But never more than when Calypso commanded it. The number of shipwrecks alone, well, how do you think most of these ships that make up this very Cove came here?"
"So is that what I'm hearing, that none of you believe such a venture is worth it?" Elizabeth's arms dropped to her sides. Unfathomable. "You're pirates! You take the offensive all the time raiding ships, and when the biggest threat to you has a moment of weakness, you don't do anything about it?"
"With Calypso freed, I fail to see why we need a King in the first place," Jocard said.
"Se Sumbhajee concurs," his attendant said after bending down to have the pirate lord whisper in his ear. "Se Sumbhajee says if you kill Beckett, he will follow you as his King."
"What?"
"What?" Jack repeated.
"An excellent idea," Chevalle said. "Captain Swann, if you wish to remain Pirate King, you will prove yourself worthy."
"She's already proven herself worthy!" James shouted, looming over Chevalle. "What do you call Davy Jones' destruction? A fluke? This is how you treat your King? It's a wonder how the first King survived long enough to bound Calypso!"
"She must prove her mettle," Mistress Ching said. Elizabeth's bottom lip fell an inch. Of all of them, she'd expected another woman to be more supportive.
"You're not making any sense at all," Jack said. "To send a King, especially a Pirate King, on such a perilous, nay, suicidal mission would be considered, in other kingdoms, an act of treason. Since we have forsworn our loyalties to our previous homelands and places of citizenship, we do not adhere to a King as the highest form of authority, but rather the law, or in our case, the Code. Where the law is subject to some other authority and has none of its own, the collapse of the state, in my view, is not far off; but if law is the master of the government and the government is its slave, then the situation is full of promise and men enjoy all the blessings that the gods shower on a state…or, so everyone can understand…" He looked over at Barbossa. "If the King makes the rules and we elected the King, the rules said King makes are the rules we abide by…savvy?"
"Then go with her," Jocard challenged.
Elizabeth brought her fist up to her mouth to keep from laughing. Only Jack, only her husband, could come to her defense only to wind up in the same predicament. Still, if it was just the two of them, she feared their odds.
"If I'm to do this," she said, clearing her throat. You're King. You're King, she told herself. "I should like a few more assistants. Captain Norrington, Captain Barbossa?" Her eyes flashed at Barbossa, daring him to tell her no. Her heart gave a sudden skip at the thought of punishing either of them if they refused her, but she would be left with no choice. Fortunately, they both nodded, Barbossa's the more tentative. "Good. Everyone else, out."
She waited until each one had left before drooping down into the chair at the head of the table, the curve of her wrists pressing against the arms. Killing Beckett before Calypso killed them…easy, she snorted.
"What are you going to do?" James asked, taking a seat.
"If I knew that, don't you think I would have told you?" She rolled her eyes, wishing to be able to snap at him that it didn't matter what she was going to because he so enjoyed taking matters…and goddesses, into his own hands, but now was not the time.
"I might be able to be of some assistance," she heard. Glancing up, she watched Teague come down one of the spiral staircases off to the side.
"Oy! Since when is circling all goings-on like a vulture one of your pastimes?" Jack blurted.
"Since ye can't seem to do anything without me lately," he quipped with a gravelly voice, low but authoritative, slow but sharp. She had to know what having such a man for a father was like, but there were more pressing matters now. If they ever had a quiet moment again, she would ask. She ignored Barbossa's incredulous frown that bobbled from her to Jack and then to her again. Teague hoisted the Code back up onto the table and flipped through the pages, taking the top right corner of each one and turning the page with it with more care than Elizabeth had ever seen anyone handle a book. Tome, she corrected herself, wondering if she could even lift the Code. "Here."
Everyone leaned into the table, their heads over the massive text. In the center of the page, surrounded by fine Latin script, was an illustration of a red vial, its container small and square.
"Ye keep Calypso mortal for but a period of time," Teague said, his heavy, sunken eyes burning right into her own. "Ye do that, and it'll buy ye your time to find Beckett."
"This makes an immortal mortal?"
"It's what bounded her in her bones the first time, but then it was lost, thought to be no more. The only other way to free Calypso was for one of the lords to set her free themselves, and that's been done. Find this, and the sea'll be more willing to accommodate ye."
A/N: Didn't anticipate Jack would be referencing Plato's philosophies or that the chapter would contain anything that could be considered Political Science 101, but there it is. Plato is also where the chapter title comes from.