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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: R
Pairing: Will/Elizabeth, Jack/Will, vague Will/Norrington
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, and why you thought so.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Quetzalcóatl was the benevolent, wise creator-god of the Aztecs, who was brother and nemesis to Tezcatlipoca. AU from the first scene of the movie. Supernatural stuff.
Summary: Jack knows better than most the cost of things.
***
If the girl had worried him, then the boy terrified Jack.
Long days of waiting and searching and listening for the slightest whispers in the haze and wind and spray had taught Jack something about fear. Long nights of bedding ashore, or in a poor rickety second to she who’d always be first, had taught him more about risk, and loneliness and things that were worse than death.
The sun was warm on Jack’s head and the sand-water sluicing around his ankles was the comfortable temperature of his body, and the ice in his gut only grew when he tore his eyes from her stern to the man standing beside him. They had not been formally introduced before Elizabeth had leaped the railing, but the man’s face needed no introduction to Jack.
What lay behind his eyes, however, was a different, colder story, and very much akin to the new grim cool calculation that had underlaid the glint in Elizabeth’s gaze. If she had been girlish leverage before, now she was something beyond Jack, like the mermaids that combed their hair so prettily before singing sailors onto the rocks. And if William Turner’s son had ever been young and foolish and pliant, he had been forged and tempered long before Jack’s coming.
“I was a friend of your father.” It was as good an opening as any, seeing that Jack was not quite sure whom he was addressing.
“You’ll want to tell me he was a pirate. Barbossa already told me that, and what happened to him. Jack…Sparrow.” Lingering over the last name Jack had taken for himself, rolling its syllables as a goldsmith would pebbles of ore before properly assaying them. Then the man turned, and what else was with him flickered away so it was only him who seized Jack by the shoulder and dragged him ashore. “Will Turner. I remember Elizabeth saying you escaped from here once—”
Jack shook him off and quickstepped backward, keeping a wide stretch of soft yellow sands between them. “She’d not be your sister, would she? Or if so, then not by Bootstrap.”
“No.” As firm as the answer was, it seemed that Will hesitated. But then he shook his head and turned his back on Jack, heading further inland. His shadow stretched shapeless and twisting behind him and beside the sharp black outline Jack threw on the beach. “No, she is not and her blood won’t end the curse. But I’m going to rescue her, and you’re going to help.”
For a moment, his voice doubled and Jack’s hackles rose at it, not only because he was wary but also because he was—angry. Will was presumptuous in a way he did not deserve to be.
The young are foolish and hasty and demanding, Jack reminded himself. Though his words rang hollow against the piercing cries of the gulls above.
* * *
Rum made sense of the world when it confused Jack, and confused the world when it made too much sense. Its fumes were a familiar welcome that obscured the tight, painful memories that also flooded out of the cache-hole. “See? Reckon they’ve not been round in some months. Your navy and your commodore’s done quite well in sweeping the Caribbee free of scum.”
“He is not my commodore.” Will bit off the ends of the words and left them bleeding raw and raging as he backed away from the hole. Then he turned and stared, not at the sun like most desperate men, but at the dark waving shadows of the palm fronds. His face clenched. “Don’t…mention him.”
“Why? Oh, are you fond of him?” It was cruel, but then, Jack had never been known for his forbearance of patronization. Bootstrap’s son he was beyond a doubt, but Will had neither the rank nor the reason for ordering Jack about.
And they were trapped on the same damned spit of sand and trees and nothing, and once again Jack had had his lady slip through his fingers. He took another draught of rum, hoping to burn away the memory of the last time; at least then he would be suffering only the once and not its recollected twin.
When he lowered the bottle, there was Will standing half a breath away, all black stare and no sound. Perhaps Bootstrap’s never-seen wife had been a witch, a wild girl bred on the mystical bloody rock coasts of Cornwall, for certainly Will had never gotten such deep eyes from his father. Almost before he remembered to breathe, Jack was easing back a pace. His hand drifted out to hold the rum bottle as a shield or as an offering of sorts.
“So this is the legend of the great Captain Jack Sparrow.” Will leaned towards Jack while tilting his head and shoulders first this way and then that way, a serpentine mockery of Jack’s own habits that somehow seethed with threat.
“I’m thinking you never believed in that anyhow,” Jack said, dredging up from somewhere a steady tone and a steel back. The breeze whipped up and billowed in his shirt and sash so it spread wings from his body. “You’re not much like Miss Elizabeth.”
This time Jack could see what made Will’s lips press white together. To his surprise, it was not anger so much as fear. “Don’t mention her either. I don’t want to be reminded.”
An odd thing to say, as Will did not seem to have given up on his self-proclaimed mission. On the contrary, he started to pace around the edge of the pit, lips silently moving. Occasionally he shook his head—gently at first and then with increasing violence.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s how we pirates are. All flash and hopefully, that’ll take care of everything ‘fore we have to resort to substance.” Jack sat himself down on the sand with his bottle and prepared to imbibe till the world went away.
The glass nearly burnt his fingers as his bottle was snatched away. Once again Will had evaded detection to stand before Jack. Will’s eyes were glittering like veins of precious metal in the darkness of a cave, and for the briefest moment Jack smelled fetid spicy smoke, like that which rose off a pagan sacrificial pyre.
“You always disappointed,” Will hissed. Then he put the bottle to his lips and in one gulp drained enough to impress even Jack.
Jack, who knew what it was to be light in years and in astuteness, but who nevertheless felt the exasperation of a younger man rise in him. “Have we met before?” he asked, voice sharp as he rose.
And Will fell, a dazed crumple of limbs and unfocused eyes and tousled hair. He looked up at Jack through long fluttering lashes and was suddenly as young as his face. “No.” The word cracked into a harsh low chuckle as Will’s head tipped back, exposing the paler flesh of his throat. “No, we haven’t. Would—would you like your rum back, Jack?”
Their fingers overlapped on the bottle-neck and a warning sang high and thready in Jack’s ear. But he thought he knew this warning, which felt so familiar and so distant all at once, and he reckoned it without weight. They were on the island, and only they—what need he worry about except himself and Will, and their comforts?
* * *
There was fire, later, to go with the scent of smoke. And a lithe body in the sand beneath Jack, muscles from a life of honest work gleaming with the sweat and spit of a ne’er-do-well pirate. Will came to him unsure, wary, but once their arms had gone round each other, Will had been nothing but eagerness. It had even frightened Jack a little, how easy it was to press up between Will’s thighs, nails digging into hips that were just now discovering this rhythm and mouth tasting spilled rum in Will’s warm mouth. And for fleeting moments, whenever the firelight flickered dark, Will would change in Jack’s grip, change around the tight hold his body had on Jack’s prick. Things would grow hazier and hotter, but so that Jack was chilled and cut to the bone with panic. But then Will’s face would rise into the red and orange and he would bend that throat towards Jack and Jack would forget. Jack always forgot. Regretted later, but never while.
“You remember the story?” Will whispered later, when they were lying twined about each other. As if they were old, old lovers—or perchance old enemies; the one knew the other just as well—meeting again. “No, of course you don’t. The great king, wise and good, who was tricked by his jealous brother into drink and debauchery. In his depravity, he took his beautiful sister to bed. And when he woke and looked in the mirror and saw himself, the shock nearly killed him.”
“Are you saying stay away from your supposed sister? Seems a bit pointless, as Elizabeth isn’t here.” Jack’s mouth was stuffed with raw cotton and his head swam in the uncertain light. There were great walls of gilt and jewels and the finest stonework around him, and then there were only the palms and the sand and the night. He shook himself, reached for that which always helped him see.
Will handed him the bottle. “The king abandoned his throne and went to sea, but he always vowed to return and revenge himself.”
“Understandable.” As always, the rum seared away the dross of the world and lifted Jack that much closer to the feeling of flight. Not quite—never quite like how it was standing at the helm of the Black Pearl, but it sufficed for a little while. “Nasty family. Treason’s always the worst coming from those you know best.”
“Maybe the brother was lonely. It gets that way, in the dark.” Now Will’s voice was hollow, thin and yet resonant, like the murmuring of an underground stream. His hand pressed hard on Jack’s back and he made a sound that was almost a sob. Then he relaxed, sounding more like himself, though that was also bleak and despairing. “I don’t know what kind of pirate you are, but Elizabeth was screaming for you, too. And I don’t hate you that much, to wish on you—go to sleep, Jack. Maybe he’ll ignore you if you stay quiet.”
Jack slept, cheek nestling glass and Will’s whisper coiling uncomfortably in his ear. He dreamt of a bed of knotted snakes, and the rare green flash that lit the horizon just before sundown.
* * *
It wasn’t a faint curl of smell, or even a gradual building of stench, but a sudden overwhelming torrent that ripped Jack from slumber to his feet before he had fully awakened. When his eyes finally condescended to view the world, he saw darkness still.
A moment later, his sight and his mind made out the truth. The sun was not yet over the horizon, but the blackness was more from the billowing smoke than from the night. And in the middle of it stood Will, tossing on what Jack instinctively knew was the last of the rum.
Jack scrambled up to him, toes nearly in the bonfire of the only panacea available to them, and stared in horror. “What are you doing? You’ve burnt everything—the food, the shade, the rum—”
“All that I needed was the rum. The trees are still there.” Will dusted off his hands, and it was such a mundane gesture compared to his prior actions that it more than anything else stopped Jack.
“But why the rum? For a signal? It won’t burn long enough, Will, and besides, who would be looking for you?” All that lovely…Jack seized the other man by the arm, near true fury. “You’re worse than any pirate I’ve ever met, though I’m sure you think yourself better.”
Will’s arm was like ice, so cold that Jack feared his hand had frozen to it. But he jerked it away without any harm, and in doing so half-spun Will about so the doubled gaze could make his blood crawl slow and shivering.
“I used to think pirates were the worst—they’d killed my father, and they attacked the ship that brought me from England. But I’ve seen worse than them. You’ve less ghosts about you than many, my merciful brother.” As Will spoke, his voice had dropped lower and lower, till it was more akin to listening to a wardrum beating for blood than to a human being. “You should be grateful for this. I won’t set your sins before you this time.”
“Brother?” Jack said, careful and slow. He heard a better answer echo around him, in the registers that the rum usually dulled to deafness, but he ignored it. Over the years he had learned the price of asking for aid.
He remembered that Elizabeth had seemed so much thinner and brighter, perched on the rail with the pistol to her head, as if a little bit of her had been eaten away. And he looked at Will and he saw the same, only much further along.
As he stared, the other man’s eyes cleared and for a moment, Will gazed at Jack as if about to plead. But then Will sighed and turned to the bonfire, shoulders hunched and fists pressed to his legs. “The Navy will be out looking for—for her. She’s the Governor’s daughter, and Commodore Norrington would like to marry her. They won’t miss the signal.”
The fire suddenly leapt, burning nothing and burning high on it so the smoke drove deep into the sky like a sooty arrow launched by a defiant warrior. And Will’s stare was shaved even thinner.
“What are you paying him?” Jack asked, finally feeling the traces of the night—the better parts of it—on himself. He remembered this time how the rum had tasted clear and sweet in Will’s mouth instead of cloying or stale or sour.
“He’d like her. And him.” Will’s hands signified the commodore in a few strokes and twists. “He wants to walk again, only with someone that isn’t limited by the curse. But he’ll have to settle for me, and I want him to sleep.”
The sun had finally risen, a liquid violent red blot on the parchment-colored sky. It was like the seal on a royal order, or like the end of a world.
He could break it, Jack thought. If he only asked. But then the bill would be presented to him.
* * *
“You swear that he can lead us to Elizabeth.” The commodore was an even fancier concoction of blue and white and gilt than the last time Jack had seen him, but behind all of that he had a pair of serious, concerned brown eyes. They were fixed on Will in a way that made Jack want to laugh and sigh all at once.
Romanticism never did pay, but neither did it cut as deep as the unsmoothed world could. Jack fingered his manacles and leaned against the rail, waiting for this transitory scene to wrap itself up. The rum was slowly teasing its delirium and dreams from him, so he could see too far ahead and so he knew he had nothing to worry over yet.
He whistled a little. Not any song of the homeland, or ditties of those who had no homes, but a birdcall. In the waters of the ocean he saw answering patches of greens streak over the white foam, and he heard the slightest laugh in the burbling of the waves breaking against the ship. But he knew better than to rely on her affection; when the ocean was with him he rejoiced and when it was not he was careful not to presume he could take offense at that. She would be owned by no one.
And she was occupying herself with Elizabeth. He wondered if Will knew about that. Most likely not, given the gaunt worry that hung about him. The girl was safe till Barbossa reached the cave, where the ocean’s realm receded and left others to hold sway. He wondered if Anamaria had seen it in them both, and if so why she hadn’t mentioned it—she could have hissed something before Barbossa had had Jack’s crew taken below. Of course, she always had been more reverent than Jack, and daring to interfere was the height of irreverence.
If he was to have a chance, he really should call. And if he were going to call, he should do so now, while they were in relatively neutral waters.
Instead Jack rested his arms on the rail and grinned at the froth. In the haunted recesses of Will’s and Elizabeth’s eyes, he had seen something he’d liked, something that had resonated with him. They were playing long odds with no true allies, and they were betting everything against the opportunity of a clear slate, a cancellation of all debts. It’d be going against the pattern to go into debt himself merely to set his pieces on the board.
And besides, he was too old to believe in mortgaging the present against the future’s returns. Even if he forgot once in a while.
“Jack? I need you to lead them to the cave. It could get you a pardon,” Will said, coming up beside him. Now the man looked only desperate and tired, and hopeful in the manner of those who the sultan declared who would be only beheaded instead of being tortured to death. His hand lay on the rail, stretching towards Jack’s own, and Jack could feel the hardening of the commodore towards him.
Jack turned from the sea, and smiled, and reached for his compass. “Surely, surely.” He waited till the relief spread across Will’s face before leaning in to say a little more. “You shouldn’t have burned the rum.”
Suspicion smoked over Will’s eyes, but before either could puzzle it out, Jack allowed himself to be led to the helm with clear mind and sight that was all his own.
* * *
Halfway there, Jack had an interesting conversation with Norrington. The other man came up from below, casting a glance towards Will who refused to leave the bow, and arranged himself stiffly next to Jack. He stared at the thick mists that had enveloped them, pretending very well that they did not chill him like they did everyone else but Will.
“I do not know what has transpired between you and Miss Swann and Mr. Turner, but rest assured, you will be held accountable for it.” Norrington was the epitome of civilized law and order, and as such he was sadly out of his depth. But nevertheless it was a gallant stance.
“Never doubted it, commodore.” Jack hung his arms over the wheel while he checked his bearings, whispering silently to she of the ocean to not play any tricks now. He felt a vague disappointment emanating from the dampness in the air, but it seemed her attentions were elsewhere. “By the way, maybe you’d like to let me go in first. Wouldn’t want to risk your neck if there was a chance at negotiating.”
In the front of the ship, Will was a tense unmoving figure who stared ceaselessly at the impenetrable mists. He would be hearing things now, if not seeing them as well.
When this was over, and if it was over well, Jack reminded himself to ask which ghosts Will had seen about him. It was generally unwise to let things stay restless.
“You seem very sure about Barbossa’s receptiveness. I would remind you that the sole reason we go is to rescue Miss Swann, and not to facilitate any secondary plans of yours.” After reclasping his hands behind him, Norrington also gazed forward. Occasionally his eyes would fall on Will and then an uncomprehending, anxious look would spread over his face.
It would not be tactful to laugh, however much Jack wished to. Hopefully the commodore wouldn’t, for with three already moving chips over the board, it was becoming rather crowded. “Of course not. Maybe you should get some food into Will—I don’t believe Barbossa would have had the decency to feed him often.”
A lie, for Barbossa’s tastes in torment lay elsewhere, but after a long sharp stare, Norrington did leave to go up to Will. Just as well, since Will would do better to save his strength till they were in the cave, and since Jack needed a little more time to think.
Something red and yellow fluttered high amid the sails, but it was gone when Jack looked upward. Then he did smile, for he hardly needed the reminder of the death lurking nearer and nearer.
But nevertheless, he still refrained from asking.
* * *
Will was not so foolish as to try and babble of walking dead to Norrington or the others, but he did his best to insist that he and Jack should go in first. However, he was overruled and then locked within Norrington’s own cabin under the pronouncement of ‘sick.’ He did look so, with the wide maddened gaze and the sallow tint to his skin, but he was still fighting when Jack and Norrington at last set off. It distracted Norrington and the man kept glancing over his shoulder, though he strove hard not to be obvious about it.
“Really, commodore. Worst that could happen would be they’d kill me—you don’t think I could do anything with only myself?” Jack rubbed at his wrists till the memory of iron had disappeared in the warmth of the friction. “And it could prevent so many injuries and maybe even deaths…”
“All right, fine. But you have only ten minutes. After that, we go in whether you’ve come out or not,” Norrington finally said.
So Jack slipped over the side and he went back into the maws of the cave where the wisps of fog rising off the water all had the faces of the dead. He landed and made his way into the center in time to see Barbossa force Elizabeth’s stiff neck over the chest and touch the blade to it.
The wet fabric of Jack’s clothes abruptly tightened about him. A low gushing rumble reverberated around the stone hollows, but not nearly loud enough to signal real power. “I…wouldn’t, mate.”
“Oh, I would.” Barbossa drew back the knife so the cut would be wide and deep. Elizabeth, Jack saw, didn’t flinch or blink.
Will, Jack thought.
And then the walls rippled, ever-so-slightly. Though he had always been dull to such things, even Barbossa seemed to sense something. He lowered his hand and allowed Elizabeth to lift her head; her gaze was unsurprisingly fixed elsewhere than the treasure or the pirates threatening her. “Why not?” Barbossa asked, petulant as a child.
After everything else, it was almost a relief to feel the old, human grudge stoke high in Jack’s chest, to swallow down an anger in his mouth that was all his own. But he showed none of that, and instead smiled, smiled, smiled his way to Barbossa’s side. Smiled as Barbossa choked on the thick flattery and sent his men out—though into the water was a sight that would stalk Jack’s darker dreams for nights to come—smiled as he delicately picked his way over the loose coins.
Smiles were unfairly discounted, in Jack’s opinion. All anyone looked or listened for was the rage and the scream.
“Such pretty little things. Nice metalwork.” He scooped up a handful of the Aztec coins and then flicked them back, all but the one.
The weight was slow to settle on him, and ringing in his head was the demand for the call, for the plea, but Jack pushed that card from himself. He would have his own revenge, and no one else’s mixed into it.
He confused them. Just enough for the smoke and the feathers to tangle in each other, and turn their eyes from the cave.
Standing to the side and under guard, Elizabeth at last shivered awake, a person instead of an inhabited statue. She slowly turned her head to look slantwise at Jack, and there was a wet veil over her eyes, like a carved-marble saint in the rain. If it was from thanks, she was offering it too soon.
“I underestimated you, Jack. You are a hard man to predict,” Barbossa said, swaggering about with not the slightest comprehension as to what it was really about. He had never had, and for a moment that made Jack feel pity for him.
Five some years of loyal service before gold had turned it all to ashes. It was worth a moment.
Jack had seen Elizabeth with a sword strapped to her side walking about like she knew how to use it, and so he hoped that that was a truth and not another illusion. He pattered on, rising to Barbossa’s jibe, and as he did he snatched the sword from one of the few pirates left.
She twisted and caught it, and she did indeed know how to use it. That seen to, Jack helped himself to a sword and set at Barbossa with the pent-up fury of nine long lonely years in the dark.
* * *
Will exploded into the cave and saved Jack the trouble of saving Elizabeth. The other man was a right wonder with a sword, and he had shaken off both his eerie languor and his half-crazed desperation to move like a man, like one defending his own purpose in life. It looked like it was him wielding the sword, and not him plus more.
Barbossa drove Jack into another patch of moonlight and Jack went numb and bony again. But this time he could feel sickly-sweet burn seeping into the marrow of his bones, and he knew there was not much time. He hadn’t called the one but had taken advantage of the other, and he’d known it wouldn’t be too long before someone realized being suitable for one probably meant the same for the other.
Below, Will stumbled and cursed, just catching himself on the chest. Instead of twisting about and defending himself, he clung to the edge and stared glazed up at Jack, and only Elizabeth’s intervention kept his skull in one piece. He was feeling the strain, and true to his word, he was trying to pull it all upon himself.
Time to rush down and see an end to it while they were still themselves. Jack leaped a few piles of treasure, backhanding Barbossa into an angry following rush, and with the last turn he slivered his palm on his sword. Warm sticky blood welled up and wiped thick on the coin, which he then threw to Will.
Will caught it and stared at it, as if he’d never seen it before. He started to drop it in the chest, but froze as a roar, inaudible but very palpable, slammed through the cave.
Damn, Jack thought. But then Barbossa came at him and he had no choice but to draw the pistol on him. The weight was gone and now all Jack felt was black triumphant amusement slowly circling in for the final bloodletting.
“Will!” Elizabeth rushed across the ground.
“No,” Barbossa said, snapping out his own pistol at her. He turned a yellow grin on her, and though her stare back was hard and defiant, it lacked that cold blue cast it had had before.
One last time, Jack was given an offer. And one last time, he passed. He did not smile as he faced his fate—only his fate, made of his own choices—and pulled the trigger.
The smoke was blue and pungent, curling slowly sideways instead of upwards, as if nothing involved with Barbossa could travel straightly. He matched Jack’s smile. “A wasted shot—”
“No,” Will said, and they were both gasping and both bloody-mouthed.
But the blood dripping from Will’s lips was the bright red of an apple skin, and the blood trickling from one corner of Barbossa’s mouth was the black of pus. Slowly Barbossa began to totter, eyes never leaving Jack.
“Ah,” Barbossa whispered. “I turned you cold as I.”
Then he fell, a ragged unremarkable lump amid the brilliant glitter and gleam of his treasure. When Jack put his pistol back in his belt, he found that his hand was shaking. But it was his hand, and it had been his will moving it. What Barbossa had said was a lie, and Jack was sure of it.
He savoured the feeling. It was even closer to flying than a rum-spell could be.
* * *
Later, when they were rowing away, Will hesitantly glanced at Jack. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
“They did what was best by them. It’s what anyone would do.” Though the near-grasp of the Pearl was like a ragged hole in Jack’s chest. But he suspected that neither he nor the others were done yet. “So you’ve stopped confusing who I am?”
Elizabeth paused, letting her oar trail in the water. A tiny bit of spray leapt up to touch her cheek and she leaned into it, eyes fluttering half-closed. Then she opened them wide and stared at Will, who looked back speechless explanations and pleas for forgiveness. No, it was not over. Perhaps certain gods and curses had been laid to rest, but the marks they had left on the world lingered on.
“You’re not letting him be hung,” she finally said. It was not till her hand reluctantly lifted from the oar and wrapped around his wrist that Will replied.
He shook his head. “We need to talk once we’re aboard.”
Jack sat back, though he did raise a hand to point at Will. He grinned at how that raised Elizabeth’s hackles, for he had not been within a foot of touching the other man. “You might try wiping your face first. Commodore Norrington doesn’t seem like the kind who is fond of blood.”
“No,” Will said, voice thick. Once again Elizabeth stared at him, though she did not relinquish her grip on Will’s wrist.
No, it was not over. But when it was, and if it was in his favor, Jack told himself, he would search out a quetzal feather or bone and braid it into his hair. He needed to remember this.
***