Chapter XXIII - True Love
 
 

    Jack felt his body jerk involuntarily. He looked down to see a darker consistency permeating his black clothes, the blood flowing freely like a river, thick and streaming, right where his heart was.
    He sucked in breath, aware that there seemed to be something that had clamped his throat shut. He lifted his eyes to Kidd's face and discovered his vision blurring and disconnecting itself, saw it go dark around the edges as he fell backwards into Will's arms, hearing the boy's pleas for an answer only as a faroff, muffled sound, as the blue went from his sight, and then the yellow, leaving him with a black and red monochrome that dimmed and flickered as at last he fell forward, limply, upon the deck, a thousand images shooting past through his dizzying brain all at once. A hundred pirates at each other's necks with swords and pistols and hands and teeth, and strangely, just for a moment, he saw in the midst of it all as clearly as the day he'd first laid eyes on her, the woman in the red dress...
    He landed on his side, head stretched out a painful angle that tilted his eyes off toward the port side, where he could barely see in the last of his eyesight the fading shadow of the Black Pearl. Instinctually he reached out his hand, stretching it out as if in the attempt to reach his ship, grasp it in his hand and keep it with him forever. Reaching as he did, he felt in only the dimmest, obscurest of ways, the old scar on his palm splitting open anew, before the cold overwhelmed him like a strong wave, and all that was left was black.
    And the sparrow, at long last, found its window.

    Tears streamed freely down Will's cheeks as he shook Jack's lifeless shoulder.
    "Jack! Jack! Get up! Please! Jack, don't go...!" he sobbed, the words coming out without his knowledge or consent, free-flowing like blood, bitter and rueful. "Jack, don't die!"
    He pulled the body near him, amazed at how heavy Jack had become, but it wasn't enough to startle him from tears. Will buried his face in his shoulder, staining his own waistcoat as he held himself against Jack's bloodied chest, smearing his hands and not caring, not caring because nothing meant anything anymore, nothing added up, nothing made sense at all...
    "Really, is that all it took?" he heard Kidd say mockingly somewhere above him. "Is that all it takes to kill the man, honestly? Was that all it was all along?"
    Try all he could, Will couldn't block out the Scotsman's voice. He bit down on his own tongue, choking back curses and open sobs, as Kidd continued:
    "Truly I was expecting a little more of a challenge. That's it, then? All words and pretense. What a joke. What a useless, pointless, joke of a life..."
    And then Will really couldn't hear Kidd's voice, for the blood rushing through his own head as he pulled the sword from Jack's hand, brushed the open scar upon Jack's palm, and pushed himself to his feet.
    There was no battle cry. There were no words or gestures or even an expression, past Will's pained, tear-soaked face and clenched teeth to bate his hyperventilating breath. He silently raised the rapier near eye level, and wordlessly charged.
    He swung, and Kidd's block nearly struck the sword from his hand, and as Will staggered unsteadily at the sudden halt, Kidd slashed twice to leave deep cuts across both shoulders. Will cried out in pain, his off hand going immediately to the opposite shoulder to clamp down on the wound, but he shook himself from the action and struck out again, wildly, without form or grace. He was blocked twice, and on the third strike Kidd knocked Will's sword aside to clatter noisily on the ground.
    Kidd swung again to Will's head, the force of the blow sending the boy reeling back onto the floor, blood streaming from a foot-long cut slashed diagonally across his face.
    "Have that to remember me by, boy," said Kidd, smiling in that hauntingly pleasant, grandfatherly way of his, as he disappeared into the crowd.
    One hand clamped down on the wound that was even now obscuring his vision and turning everything a hazy red, Will began to climb once again to his feet, searching the deck for his sword-- noting the floor wasn't as crowded with rushing feet as it had been-- that, in fact, the air around him had shifted far colder and the sounds of the pirates was of a different kind, more pained and distraught-- it had to be his imagination...
    "Will?" boomed a heavy-accented voice, cottony and indistinct to the boy's ears. The owner of the voice, dissatisfied with Will's lack of response, spoke again. "Will... Are yoo all right?"
    The young Will Turner, curled up into a fetal position on the ground, felt himself lifted up like little more than a lifeless doll in the great, broad arms of Fezzik the giant, who cradled him like a baby.
    "What happeened to yoo, Will?" Fezzik said gently, rubbing the blood from the boy's face with a sleeve. "Eet'z too dangerooz for yoo heer. Yoo need to be taken back to da..." His eyes had fallen to the crumpled form by his feet. "Oh no..."
    Fezzik shifted Will to one arm as politely as he could, then crouched down and hefted the body of Jack Sparrow into his other arm. Will watched those glassy, lifeless eyes, fixed on the last image burned into his mind at the time of his death, and Will wondered what it had been...
    He felt the sting of tears welling up again and shook his head fervently. "The dead..." he stammered, struggling out of Fezzik's grip and leaping down onto the deck, "...the dead... shouldn't be carried like that." He helped Fezzik reposition the body, held abreast with both of the giant's arms, the classic embrace that all the storybooks showed, the way that Michelangelo sculpted Mary holding the dead Son of God. Jack's black hair, shiny like oilslick, fell around him and swayed with Fezzik's footsteps; one of his arms, crossed over his bloodied chest, slipped from its position and swung limply as the two pirates made their way back to their home.
    Will was nearly knocked off his feet upon colliding with Inigo, rushing up to the two from between a small passageway between a wall and a stack of crates. He was clutching a dark wound on his side, although he didn't seem particularly bothered by it, as if this was something he was well-accustomed to.
    "I've been looking for you!" he wheezed at Fezzik, using the Six-Fingered Sword to keep him aloft. "Where is..." His eyes fell upon the body. "Oh God. I felt it in my veins when I heard the shot but I prayed it was... prayed it was only my imagination..."
    "What's going on? Why is everyone leaving?"
    "Everyone's dead," Inigo corrected. "Their side at least. After we... after we heard the shot, O'Malley and all the rest, they... Like nothing you'd ever seen!"
    "Kidd. Who's gotten Kidd?"
    "No one. Nobody. He's escaped." Inigo deflated, his eyes drawing themselves to Jack again. "There's no justice."

    The next day dawned. It came as a surprise to many, who were starting to believe the sun had died.
    Storm clouds were amassing in the east. They wouldn't reach the crew of the Black Pearl until tomorrow, but they grayed the dawn and sent weak and impotent rays of light out across the water, dispelling the last of the fog, and lighting the frozen features of Captain Jack Sparrow.
    They'd laid him out on a makeshift coffin, dressed in his old clothes, his hair washed of the foul-smelling chemicals that had kept his hair from fire last night. They'd even made an attempt to get the old tangles back.
    His trihorn hat rested on his stomach. It might have partly been in deference to tradition, but mostly it was to cover the gun wound. Even still, before rigor mortis had set in someone had repositioned his hands and fingers to seem as if they grasped it, holding it close to him. Indefinitely.
    Baron Munchausen watched him intently. It would have been better to say that he studied.
    "Can't he just--"
    "Not everyone can ressurrect themselves like you, baron," Inigo said quietly.
    "But--"
    "No."
    Westley took a deep breath. "Perhaps, if we took him to a miracle man..."
    "No, Westley," Inigo said, his voice beginning to fracture.
    "But I was--"
    "That was different."
    "...I know."
    Reluctantly, Munchausen stepped away from the body, and then headed back toward the crowd. He passed Granuaile, going the opposite way with something tight in her fist.
    She sought under his jacket near his neck and produced a long black necklace, at the end of which was attached a small silver ring. With a well-placed yank she ripped the necklace from his body, and stuffed it as a gnarled mass of string into her breeches. She undid her other fist, containing a blue gem necklace certainly unfit for most lower-class women, let alone any sort of man.
    "One necklace for another," she said, loud enough for the assembled to hear. She fastened the gift from Tikalus and Lunaseer around Jack's neck, and hid it beneath his shirt as she had.
    As she strode proudly away, she rubbed her eye for some invisible mote of dust that seemed to have been caught in it.
    "What do we do now?" Will asked. He fingered the stitches of his new scar, laid in last night by Trinity, under some duress. "Who takes the Pearl?"
    "She should go to Montoya," Hands said dutifully. "He was her captain just as well as Mister Sparrow."
    But Inigo shook his head. "It was never something intended as permanent. The ship should go to you, Will; you're the one Jack chose as his first mate."
    "Not me," Will said at once. "If anything she should go to Anamaria. She was quartermaster and first mate both for a long time before my arrival. Besides, I'm..."
    "I won't take her," Anamaria said resolutely. "She should be given to you, Lady O'Malley. Jack would prolly have left her to you anyway, if he'd been given the option."
    The eyes of the assembled, which had been moving back and forth like spectators at a tennis match, all came to rest upon the frail, aged but not until recently withered Irishwoman. She had an expression like granite.
    "You're all fools," she croaked. "We are meant to send our old friend out to burn into ash upon the sea and you discuss among whom to divide his belongings? Do you want to know what I think?" She straightened up impressively. "I think Jack should die with his true love. The only one to steal his heart and he permitted to keep. This ship," she said, flourishing a hand toward the deck. "This ship dies with him."

    The breeze carried the smoke westward across the sky, thick and white as clouds. The water below it boiled as the flames upon the Black Pearl devoured her wooden flesh, turned her veins of rope into ash and her beautiful black sails of hair into dust. The windows broke, the fire flared, the smell of death consumed everywhere the wind blew. The smoke trailed upward and upward, disappearing finally into a thin streak reaching up towards the Moon.
    And the occupants of the battle-worn Queen Anne's Revenge looked on, unmoving. Incapable of movement, as the last planks turned to cinders cast up into the wind, the sun setting behind them by the bow.
    "I'm going back to Madagascar," Hands murmured. "To see if... To see if there's anything I can do there. I'll find something. I'll drop you off in Bombay, of course," he added to Westley. He addressed the rest of the remnants of the crew. "As for the rest of you... India or Africa, that's as far as I'll go. Or this ship will go. Once I reach Madagascar, I'm setting the torch to her as well."
    "Why?"
    "Blackbeard told me something once, about the nature of the Q.A.R. He said that that she was a special ship, of special design, at the hands of skilled artisans in a country no mortal man has found. And that she had a sister, only one. These are the only two black-wood ships to fall into the hands of mortals, as a gift from the heathen gods... It sounds like a myth, and it probably is, but... you know what? Myths grow on you. So if one sister must die, the other must follow suit. Besides..." Hands murmured, bowing his head, "it's over for us."
    There was a dark murmur throughout the assembled. Yes, it was over.
    "'Scuse me," said a brash, vaguely feminine voice. The group turned their heads to the rough-cut form of Delphine Turner, standing next to her younger brother on the level just below them. "What about us? How are we to get back home?"
    The group exchanged mournful glances.
    "You'll come with us, won't you, Annie?" the Jackal said hopefully, turning her gaze to Anne Bonney, who was holding her wounded companion from falling off her feet.
    Bonney took one look at Mary Read, then back at Delphine. She shook her head.
    Delphine scanned the crowd. "Anyone?
    "Anyone at all?"

    "Bloody pirates," Will hissed, as he rowed.
    "Still for a moment," Delphine said, a board with a map spread across it on her lap. At the request Will ceased at the oars of the row boat, while his sister took a couple calculations on the map, measuring distance with a compass, and then turned around in her seat to examine star coordinates with a small brass astrolabe.
    It was dark, all but for the lantern of their boat and the far-off embers that were all that remained of a famous pirate ship. No land could be seen in any direction, and the lights of the Queen Anne's Revenge were long since gone over the western horizon.
    "I figure," the Jackal said at length, looking over her map markings, "that if we make it down to Singapore, we can get a lift aboard a merchant vessel bound for West Australia, and from there all we have to do is bum a ride on a milit'ry ship bound for the Americas."
    "Del..."
    "It might take a bit not to be clapped in irons the second we hit Aussie shore, but..."
    "Del."
    The Jackal looked up, bewildered.
    "You don't want to go back to Port Royal, do you?" Will said with resignation.
    "Not really. But you ought to."
    "I don't want to go back there."
    "Mum and Dad--"
    "Probably think we're dead," said William, nodding. "I know. So why not keep things that way? We'd only be a disgrace to 'em if we came back like this. You should know."
    "I know," the Jackal said quietly, absently rubbing at one of her curved scars. "But if we don't go home, where do we go?"
    Will didn't answer. He started to, mouth parted with the effort of saying something, but his eyes locked on something that diverted his attention.
    "Hello!" boomed a voice across the water. The siblings searched the darkness until their eyes came upon the lights of a ship, just barely coming out from the fog. "I say, hello! Anyone out there?" They were British voices. British officers. A British ship, probably out from Hong-Kong.
    Cautiously, Will and Delphine stood up in their boat. They squinted out across the water to where the lantern lights illuminated a man-o'-war, along the port side of which, facing the Turner siblings, were about twenty or thirty British marines.
    Delphine studied it appraisingly.
    "We can take it."
    Will looked around, shocked. "What?"
    "I said, we can take it. I mean, it's nothin'. Two pirates could make lunch outta a crew like that."
    "But Delph--"
    "Shht."
    "Fine. Jack--"
    "Shht."
    Will hesitated. Realization dawned. "Jack?"
    Delphine nodded, grinning the sort of grin only she could achieve. She reached to her belt and drew one cutlass, then the other, eyes alive like fire.
    "C'mon, Will. I'm feeling lucky."
    And as her muscles flared beneath her skin, her hair drifted about her in its own self-posessed wind, and as the sea swirled around her, and only her, yelling out a battle cry as no human had ever uttered or ever will, what the young girl channelled then was not the name of Jack Sparrow.
    Nor his heart.
    Nor his spirit.
    But his soul.
 

THE END
-----

finished at exactly: 18:23, 21 October, 2003.
 

And now, the credits.
 

"Alone for a while
I've been searching through the dark
For traces of the love you've left
Inside my lonely heart
To weave by picking up the pieces that remain
Melodies of life
Love's lost refrain..."

"Our paths, they did cross
Now I cannot say just why
We met, we laughed, we held on fast
And then we said goodbye..."

"And who'll hear the echoes of stories never told?
Let them ring outloud 'til they unfold..."

"In my dearest memories
I see you reaching out to me
Though you're gone
I still believe that you can call out my name..."

"A voice from the past
Joining yours and mine
Adding up the layers of harmony
And so it goes on and on
Melodies of life
To the sky beyond the flying birds
Forever and beyond..."

"So far and away
See the bird as it flies by
Lighting through the shadows
Of the clouds upon the sky
I've laid my memories and dreams upon those wings
Let them go and see what tomorrow brings..."

"In your dearest memories
Do you remember loving me?
Was it fate
That brought us close and now leaves me behind?"

"A voice from the past
Joining yours and mine
Adding up the layers of harmony
And so it goes on and on
Melodies of life
To the sky beyond the flying birds
Forever and on..."

"If I should leave this lonely world behind
Your voice will still remember our melody
Now I know we'll carry on..."

"Melodies of life
Come circle round and grow deep in our hearts
As long as we remember..."
 
 
 

Epilogue

Chapter XXII