White and Black Pearls 1 - Seven Pearls

Chapter Fifteen

The bottle in Will’s hand was half empty, but he’d stopped drinking from it nearly an hour ago as he stared at his father, engrossed completely in the story. “Her leaving him… caused him to lose sight of his quest for treasure?” he murmured to himself. The two different facets of Jack’s life were so dissimilar; he didn’t understand how one would impact the other.

“No.” Bootstrap had stopped drinking too. “Think of it instead, in terms of one was to serve the other. Jack was searching for treasure that could make him immortal.”

“The Aztec gold,” Will uttered. “Immortality so that he could be with Celeste as they both wanted, yes... but if he’d kept that gold, he wouldn’t have been able to feel pleasure anyhow, or even the warmth of her touch.”

“Exactly,” his father agreed. “So the gold didn’t work. Never mind not being able to feel pleasure… his true form would have been revealed under the moonlight that she cast from her very body during the nights, like the Black Pearl’s crew had to suffer through. And then there was his quest for Davy Jones’ heart. At first it was really only about trying to buy more time for himself so that he could keep searching for a means to live forever. When he realized that he could serve two purposes at once and both cancel his contract with Jones and become immortal at the same time… it finally restored his ability to use his compass. He had his heading again.”

“I still don’t understand why he gave the heart to me to stab, rather than doing it himself,” Will added with a nod. “That was very unlike Jack.”

“Imperfect immortality again,” Bootstrap mused as he put his bottle down and pointed at his son’s scar. “All it takes is a stab at your heart and you’re dead. That’s still a very vulnerable kind of immortality, one that doesn’t last and that must be constantly guarded… plus it would land him in the same situation that Davy Jones had been in, only able to go on land once every ten years and who knows what else.”

Will’s expression became dry. It figured that Jack only passed the wealth along when it didn’t suit his own needs well enough. So much for the small amount of respect he’d gained for the man as a result of his resurrection at Jack’s hands. “Why didn’t the stars fall like this when Jack went to Davy Jones’ locker?” he inquired.

His father shook his head and looked at Will honestly. “I don’t profess to know a woman’s heart, let alone that of a goddess. She might have actually succeeded in detaching her heart from his affairs by that point, enough not to cry?”

“But the battle with the Pirate Lords,” Will protested once more, wanting to know about her involvement with that even more now. Had she been involved at all? He recalled clearly the hurricane winds and rain and lightning pelting down upon them during the battle, but nothing stood out as being particularly helpful to one party or the other… and if she really was over Jack, why would she have participated in that anyhow, and why then but not at Jack’s death?

Bootstrap held up a hand for silence. “I’m getting there. Back up. After the first time’s success, and the repair in some fashion of the relationship Davy and Celeste had, she went back to his ship every year at the same time, on the Blood Moon. And every year on the Blood Moon, Davy Jones would become… almost kind, in a way. She served to remind him that there was somebody in the world who still trusted and cared for him, and whose heart he did not strike a deep fear within. If you wanted to do something that would normally have you suffer great tortures at Davy Jones’ hand on that ship, you did it on a Blood Moon and you didn’t get in trouble because he was either too busy being with her or too subdued and at peace to bother.

“It almost seems to suit pattern that as soon as Jones found some small thing to look forward to each year, the rest of his life and wellbeing were put in jeopardy.

“She did not appear on the Flying Dutchman during the period in which his heart was missing but nobody had confirmation of where it was. We don’t know where she was exactly but some who told the story speculate that during this time, she went into mourning over the loss of Jack Sparrow.”

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