The Weakness in Me
folder
Pirates of the Caribbean (All) › Slash - Male/Male › Jack/Will
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
8
Views:
6,057
Reviews:
17
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
Pirates of the Caribbean (All) › Slash - Male/Male › Jack/Will
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
8
Views:
6,057
Reviews:
17
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
I do not own the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
Trouble Enough
Chap. 4: Trouble Enough
There was no greater insult in the world than what Jack was enduring. He rolled his shoulders, trying to adjust the feeling of the irons that held his wrists together behind his back. The two soldiers that were holding him in place reacted by pushing closer to him, pinning him down with a greater weight between them. The rest of the crew was spared this particular shame. They were still wandering the city doing who knows what in the pubs and with the women who prowled the same streets they did. Jack had returned to the Pearl after his own adventure in a pub only to be clapped in irons and slowly crushed between the two sweating brutes who seemed to be wielded to those irons as surely as the chain. The matter was made worse by the fact that their commanding officer, Commodore Norrington, was slowly prowling around the Pearl’s decks. He was jabbing crates, shifting ropes, disappearing below only to reappear moments later, clucking to himself. When he finally came back to the captain, he had a smug sort of smile that made Jack sick.
“Well, she certainly is a fine vessel, in her own way,” Norrington held his hands behind his back and Jack wondered why such a man would choose to imitate the posture of one imprisoned. He knew that it was considered a good posture to have for a military man, and faintly wondered at it to distract himself from being insulted.
“Aye, she is, and what have I done to warrant this? Port Royal hasn’t incurred any insults from my crew this time ‘round, so pardon if my curiosity seems… out of place,” Jack growled, looking up at Norrington from beneath hooded eyes. There was something in the stoic way that the man held his body that was to be admired. There was intelligence behind that smug expression that was also admirable. It made Norrington a fine opponent for Jack. He wished that they would meet in a better way, on the open seas, where the fight would be fairer. Having him locked in irons on his own ship didn’t seem quite fair.
“You managed to evade me this long, Jack Sparrow. It was Mrs. Turner who notified me of your return to my fine city. She said that you were making a nuisance of yourself around her household and threatening her husband. I felt obliged to remove such a pest from her life.”
“Ah. I see,” so she had gone and snitched to the only thing that could really threaten Jack, “well, do you really believe that I would be threatening Will Turner?”
“The lady has more honesty to her name than you.”
“That may be true, but then again, it may be false. Perhaps there’s more to this than you know. You’d have to get into her head to know for sure, and in my experience it’s a hard thing to get into the head of any woman, much less such a fine one as her.”
“Silence, Sparrow, I have no time for your riddles. They give me a headache. Take him away, men. Bring his ship to the naval port to be impounded there. We can make something honorable of her yet, boys.”
Jack grit his teeth as he was dragged backwards, digging his heels into the deck. They couldn’t do this to him. They couldn’t do this to the Pearl. She was his, and they had no right. He looked over his shoulder when his feet touched the dock, eating up every detail of her. The way that the sails were bound, neat and beautiful. The patterns and nicks in the wood that made up her hull. The figurehead, holding the sparrow aloft… he rested all his hope on that figure resting in those delicately carved hands. It was a promise that he had made to himself long ago that he would always be free, and the Pearl was his freedom. As long as she existed, he’d be free again. He hung his head and allowed himself to be dragged off by the brutes.
*~*
The procession seemed all very odd to Elizabeth. She had never been in a prison before, so the very sight of the string of prisoners being marched down the stairs ahead of her was frightening. She recognized many of them, but kept her mouth shut. It was because of her that they were in this predicament. Norrington was just doing his job, really, arresting the fiends. Fiends. It was so hard to think of this bedraggled group as fiends. She had sailed with them. The only other woman descending the staircase turned her head and gave Elizabeth a look of pure malice. Elizabeth tried not to betray her feelings about the situation as she stared back at Anna-Maria. There was no doubt in her mind that Anna-Maria knew that Elizabeth was behind all of this.
The pirates were shut in a cell, the door clanging behind them with a sound that resonated through Elizabeth’s bones. The resonation settled itself in her hips, leaving a dull ache there that Elizabeth was familiar with. It was her hips that bore the strain and pressure of her emotional trial, sending that dull ache down her legs and into her feet. She wished that she could push it along faster and ground herself so that she didn’t feel so peculiar walking past the cell full of baleful eyes. So that she didn’t feel so peculiar as she stood in front of the cell that harbored Jack Sparrow.
“Jack…”
“Well, if it isn’t Mrs. Turner. My turn to be surprised,” Jack responded from beneath his hat. His back was to her, leaning against the bars, his hat hanging from his brow in a way that allowed it to cover a major proportion of his face. It made his voice muffled and in an odd way, resigned.
“When I was talking to James, I was very upset. I asked him to scare you off of Port Royal. Not to arrest you.”
”Well, there’s your mistake. Never mention me to James Norrington. The man loves seeing me behind bars, and I have a feeling he likes the look of rope ‘round my neck. If you didn’t want me arrested, lass,” Jack turned his head, revealing one eye behind the hat, “you never would have uttered my name to him.”
“I was distraught and you know I have full reason to have been. I knew that I could use James to scare you away from Port Royal and out of my life.”
”It’s interesting to me, how even after you married young Mr. Turner, you still beckon to Norrington when you’re in trouble.”
Elizabeth grit her teeth and crouched, reaching through the bars and knocking the hat off of his face. It was irritating her that she couldn’t look him directly in the eye. She didn’t want to play games. She wanted to have an earnest conversation that didn’t deal with riddles and accusations. She grabbed the pirate’s shirt collar and pulled him closer to the bars.
“Listen to me, Jack Sparrow, I will not stand to have my name slandered, nor my reputation by anyone even if it is only in such a small and sun battered mind as yours. No, I do not always go to Norrington when I’m in trouble. Normally, I take care of it myself, as you know I am capable of doing. If that doesn’t work, I defer to Will. However, in this instance I cannot send Will to your ship to try and scare you off because he might never come home again!” her words rang with the same tone as the slamming jail cell. They were out there; everyone had heard her because he voice had risen in pitch and volume with her anger. Jack was staring at her in a slack jawed way that she didn’t have patience for. She let go of his collar and tried to shake away the silence by speaking, “I… I don’t want to lose him, Jack.”
“I know, Elizabeth. I was trying to leave the port. I was waiting for the crew to get back, and then I was going to set sail and leave the two of you alone,” Jack’s voice was soft in comparison to how hers had sounded moments before. He leaned over and picked up his hat, fretting the edges of it with nervous fingers. With his other hand he reached out for hers, clasping it. His skin felt warm and leathery against Elizabeth’s. Like William’s in some ways, because of the roughness of work that showed in the textures around the fingers, but different in the vague memory of the ocean that they carried with them. Sitting this close to the pirate’s cell, holding his hand, she could smell how completely saturated he was by the ocean. Salt, sweaty cotton, damp wood, rum, a hint of some unknown spice and even the vague scent of wish washed over her as Jack leaned forward.
She remembered these exact same smells, mixed with the heady scent of fire, from when they had been stranded on that damnable beach together. She had fooled him into thinking that she was getting just as drunk as he was, by dumping out her rum as she ran around the fire, singing at the top of her lungs. The old pirate had absolutely adored the song that she taught him in his drunken stupor, finally falling to the ground with a loud’and really bad eggs!’. He’d come on to her, reeking of rum and all the scents that he carried with him. Luckily he passed out shortly after so she didn’t have to endure his advances any longer. Even with how repulsed she had been by this man on the beach, she could see how Will had fallen for him. He was easy to get along with in general (when one ignored what a scoundrel he could be) and had a certain way about him that was sensual. She couldn’t quite identify what exactly it was. Was it the way he spoke? The way he moved his body, or his hands, as if he was continually caressing a body that no one else could see in the air? She shook her head to clear it of such thoughts. Jack had been speaking.
“—thought you’d leave him. After all, you’re a society tart and he’s not much of a blacksmith. Wonderful with swords, but terrible at horseshoes. I was going to try and save him the pain of you leavin’, but now I’ve seen that you don’t have that intention, and he’s still rather taken with you, the fool,” Jack rambled, “just as much as he always was. I can see that he does want the same thing I do, pardon… but I don’t suppose you care for propriety as much as he does. Anyways, I can see he wants what I do but not in the same way. If that makes sense.”
“What is it that you want from him?”
Jack frowned and didn’t respond, probably trying to think of some flourished way to say it so as not to offend her delicate ears. She rolled her eyes.
“Jack, don’t be so daft. I saw the two of you through my window. I can guess that fornication is part of the plan as a whole. But I also don’t think that someone such as yourself who no doubt has his way with too many people to really be accounted for would pine so for one missed chance. Aside from sex, what is it that you really want from William?”
“What you have.”
They stared at each other in silence before Elizabeth gathered her skirts around her and stood again. She would have to think about this, and exactly what it meant. Of course she would try and get the scallywag and his crew out before they were set to hang… but she had a lot of thinking to do. Keeping Jack in that cell was the safest thing at the moment. That way he couldn’t come staggering up to the house to interfere with her thoughts. She bid him farewell and made her way back up the stairs into the open air of Port Royal. Her next stop would be the blacksmith’s shop to see William. Before she could really think on such matters she would have to have a real discussion with him. Even if it meant cornering him with one of his swords, she would get him to talk about it with her. She needed to know everything that had happened between the two. She was no fool. She knew it wasn’t the kiss he told her about, nor was it what she had seen. There was more to this than she could see.
As she walked, she turned to gaze out at the port. The Pearl was making its slow way towards the naval docks, captained by unfamiliar hands. The figurehead of the ship had seemed so terrifying to her when Barbossa’s crew had taken her in for parley negotiations now seemed sad. A woman held a bird aloft, her gaze cast towards heaven, her body bound to the front of the tall ship. Elizabeth leaned against a wall, watching the ship pass the merchant docks. She felt for the woman bound to that ship, feeling her own bindings tightening around her chest as her breath hitched with tears. Casting her gaze upwards she spotted a sparrow perched on the sign for the smithy.
-----------------------------
Thank you to all of those who
have given me reviews. I
appreciate them. :) I hope
that I was able to answer
some questions in this chp.
There was no greater insult in the world than what Jack was enduring. He rolled his shoulders, trying to adjust the feeling of the irons that held his wrists together behind his back. The two soldiers that were holding him in place reacted by pushing closer to him, pinning him down with a greater weight between them. The rest of the crew was spared this particular shame. They were still wandering the city doing who knows what in the pubs and with the women who prowled the same streets they did. Jack had returned to the Pearl after his own adventure in a pub only to be clapped in irons and slowly crushed between the two sweating brutes who seemed to be wielded to those irons as surely as the chain. The matter was made worse by the fact that their commanding officer, Commodore Norrington, was slowly prowling around the Pearl’s decks. He was jabbing crates, shifting ropes, disappearing below only to reappear moments later, clucking to himself. When he finally came back to the captain, he had a smug sort of smile that made Jack sick.
“Well, she certainly is a fine vessel, in her own way,” Norrington held his hands behind his back and Jack wondered why such a man would choose to imitate the posture of one imprisoned. He knew that it was considered a good posture to have for a military man, and faintly wondered at it to distract himself from being insulted.
“Aye, she is, and what have I done to warrant this? Port Royal hasn’t incurred any insults from my crew this time ‘round, so pardon if my curiosity seems… out of place,” Jack growled, looking up at Norrington from beneath hooded eyes. There was something in the stoic way that the man held his body that was to be admired. There was intelligence behind that smug expression that was also admirable. It made Norrington a fine opponent for Jack. He wished that they would meet in a better way, on the open seas, where the fight would be fairer. Having him locked in irons on his own ship didn’t seem quite fair.
“You managed to evade me this long, Jack Sparrow. It was Mrs. Turner who notified me of your return to my fine city. She said that you were making a nuisance of yourself around her household and threatening her husband. I felt obliged to remove such a pest from her life.”
“Ah. I see,” so she had gone and snitched to the only thing that could really threaten Jack, “well, do you really believe that I would be threatening Will Turner?”
“The lady has more honesty to her name than you.”
“That may be true, but then again, it may be false. Perhaps there’s more to this than you know. You’d have to get into her head to know for sure, and in my experience it’s a hard thing to get into the head of any woman, much less such a fine one as her.”
“Silence, Sparrow, I have no time for your riddles. They give me a headache. Take him away, men. Bring his ship to the naval port to be impounded there. We can make something honorable of her yet, boys.”
Jack grit his teeth as he was dragged backwards, digging his heels into the deck. They couldn’t do this to him. They couldn’t do this to the Pearl. She was his, and they had no right. He looked over his shoulder when his feet touched the dock, eating up every detail of her. The way that the sails were bound, neat and beautiful. The patterns and nicks in the wood that made up her hull. The figurehead, holding the sparrow aloft… he rested all his hope on that figure resting in those delicately carved hands. It was a promise that he had made to himself long ago that he would always be free, and the Pearl was his freedom. As long as she existed, he’d be free again. He hung his head and allowed himself to be dragged off by the brutes.
The procession seemed all very odd to Elizabeth. She had never been in a prison before, so the very sight of the string of prisoners being marched down the stairs ahead of her was frightening. She recognized many of them, but kept her mouth shut. It was because of her that they were in this predicament. Norrington was just doing his job, really, arresting the fiends. Fiends. It was so hard to think of this bedraggled group as fiends. She had sailed with them. The only other woman descending the staircase turned her head and gave Elizabeth a look of pure malice. Elizabeth tried not to betray her feelings about the situation as she stared back at Anna-Maria. There was no doubt in her mind that Anna-Maria knew that Elizabeth was behind all of this.
The pirates were shut in a cell, the door clanging behind them with a sound that resonated through Elizabeth’s bones. The resonation settled itself in her hips, leaving a dull ache there that Elizabeth was familiar with. It was her hips that bore the strain and pressure of her emotional trial, sending that dull ache down her legs and into her feet. She wished that she could push it along faster and ground herself so that she didn’t feel so peculiar walking past the cell full of baleful eyes. So that she didn’t feel so peculiar as she stood in front of the cell that harbored Jack Sparrow.
“Jack…”
“Well, if it isn’t Mrs. Turner. My turn to be surprised,” Jack responded from beneath his hat. His back was to her, leaning against the bars, his hat hanging from his brow in a way that allowed it to cover a major proportion of his face. It made his voice muffled and in an odd way, resigned.
“When I was talking to James, I was very upset. I asked him to scare you off of Port Royal. Not to arrest you.”
”Well, there’s your mistake. Never mention me to James Norrington. The man loves seeing me behind bars, and I have a feeling he likes the look of rope ‘round my neck. If you didn’t want me arrested, lass,” Jack turned his head, revealing one eye behind the hat, “you never would have uttered my name to him.”
“I was distraught and you know I have full reason to have been. I knew that I could use James to scare you away from Port Royal and out of my life.”
”It’s interesting to me, how even after you married young Mr. Turner, you still beckon to Norrington when you’re in trouble.”
Elizabeth grit her teeth and crouched, reaching through the bars and knocking the hat off of his face. It was irritating her that she couldn’t look him directly in the eye. She didn’t want to play games. She wanted to have an earnest conversation that didn’t deal with riddles and accusations. She grabbed the pirate’s shirt collar and pulled him closer to the bars.
“Listen to me, Jack Sparrow, I will not stand to have my name slandered, nor my reputation by anyone even if it is only in such a small and sun battered mind as yours. No, I do not always go to Norrington when I’m in trouble. Normally, I take care of it myself, as you know I am capable of doing. If that doesn’t work, I defer to Will. However, in this instance I cannot send Will to your ship to try and scare you off because he might never come home again!” her words rang with the same tone as the slamming jail cell. They were out there; everyone had heard her because he voice had risen in pitch and volume with her anger. Jack was staring at her in a slack jawed way that she didn’t have patience for. She let go of his collar and tried to shake away the silence by speaking, “I… I don’t want to lose him, Jack.”
“I know, Elizabeth. I was trying to leave the port. I was waiting for the crew to get back, and then I was going to set sail and leave the two of you alone,” Jack’s voice was soft in comparison to how hers had sounded moments before. He leaned over and picked up his hat, fretting the edges of it with nervous fingers. With his other hand he reached out for hers, clasping it. His skin felt warm and leathery against Elizabeth’s. Like William’s in some ways, because of the roughness of work that showed in the textures around the fingers, but different in the vague memory of the ocean that they carried with them. Sitting this close to the pirate’s cell, holding his hand, she could smell how completely saturated he was by the ocean. Salt, sweaty cotton, damp wood, rum, a hint of some unknown spice and even the vague scent of wish washed over her as Jack leaned forward.
She remembered these exact same smells, mixed with the heady scent of fire, from when they had been stranded on that damnable beach together. She had fooled him into thinking that she was getting just as drunk as he was, by dumping out her rum as she ran around the fire, singing at the top of her lungs. The old pirate had absolutely adored the song that she taught him in his drunken stupor, finally falling to the ground with a loud’and really bad eggs!’. He’d come on to her, reeking of rum and all the scents that he carried with him. Luckily he passed out shortly after so she didn’t have to endure his advances any longer. Even with how repulsed she had been by this man on the beach, she could see how Will had fallen for him. He was easy to get along with in general (when one ignored what a scoundrel he could be) and had a certain way about him that was sensual. She couldn’t quite identify what exactly it was. Was it the way he spoke? The way he moved his body, or his hands, as if he was continually caressing a body that no one else could see in the air? She shook her head to clear it of such thoughts. Jack had been speaking.
“—thought you’d leave him. After all, you’re a society tart and he’s not much of a blacksmith. Wonderful with swords, but terrible at horseshoes. I was going to try and save him the pain of you leavin’, but now I’ve seen that you don’t have that intention, and he’s still rather taken with you, the fool,” Jack rambled, “just as much as he always was. I can see that he does want the same thing I do, pardon… but I don’t suppose you care for propriety as much as he does. Anyways, I can see he wants what I do but not in the same way. If that makes sense.”
“What is it that you want from him?”
Jack frowned and didn’t respond, probably trying to think of some flourished way to say it so as not to offend her delicate ears. She rolled her eyes.
“Jack, don’t be so daft. I saw the two of you through my window. I can guess that fornication is part of the plan as a whole. But I also don’t think that someone such as yourself who no doubt has his way with too many people to really be accounted for would pine so for one missed chance. Aside from sex, what is it that you really want from William?”
“What you have.”
They stared at each other in silence before Elizabeth gathered her skirts around her and stood again. She would have to think about this, and exactly what it meant. Of course she would try and get the scallywag and his crew out before they were set to hang… but she had a lot of thinking to do. Keeping Jack in that cell was the safest thing at the moment. That way he couldn’t come staggering up to the house to interfere with her thoughts. She bid him farewell and made her way back up the stairs into the open air of Port Royal. Her next stop would be the blacksmith’s shop to see William. Before she could really think on such matters she would have to have a real discussion with him. Even if it meant cornering him with one of his swords, she would get him to talk about it with her. She needed to know everything that had happened between the two. She was no fool. She knew it wasn’t the kiss he told her about, nor was it what she had seen. There was more to this than she could see.
As she walked, she turned to gaze out at the port. The Pearl was making its slow way towards the naval docks, captained by unfamiliar hands. The figurehead of the ship had seemed so terrifying to her when Barbossa’s crew had taken her in for parley negotiations now seemed sad. A woman held a bird aloft, her gaze cast towards heaven, her body bound to the front of the tall ship. Elizabeth leaned against a wall, watching the ship pass the merchant docks. She felt for the woman bound to that ship, feeling her own bindings tightening around her chest as her breath hitched with tears. Casting her gaze upwards she spotted a sparrow perched on the sign for the smithy.
-----------------------------
Thank you to all of those who
have given me reviews. I
appreciate them. :) I hope
that I was able to answer
some questions in this chp.