Epilogue
knockknockknock.
Delphine Turner shifted uneasily on her feet, glancing
to either side of her down the street, although it could hardly be called
that. In the first place the area was mostly desert, so that which separated
the grounds of the house from the street was mostly how well-trodden the
ground was into an impenetrable rock-like apparatus. In the second place,
this was the outskirts of the township, and township was stretching the
point. It was, by and large, a penal colony. They were just very relaxed
about it way out here.
She knocked again.
knockknockknock.
She thought briefly of just turning right around
and running away. If she ran, and kept running, she could reach the port
of Perth by nightfall, and be out of harbor and out of sight by moonrise.
She didn't have to do this. This was just a choice. This was something
she could do in her spare time. It didn't have to be now...
Except it did. She knew it did. If she ran away
now, she'd never, ever come back, and that just wouldn't look right.
Before Will's and her departure from the Queen
Anne's Revenge, Inigo Montoya had taken her aside and explained things.
It had been a lot to take in all at once. Especially right then,
when Jack was just sitting there cold and stiff not twenty feet from them.
What a way to learn about... about...
The queasiness that had been welling up in her guts
for some time now took a sudden jolt for the worse as the memories flooded
in about that moment, what Inigo had said, what she had felt, how she had
taken one glance at the corpse laid out by the bow of the ship and then
buckled over the railing, involuntarily purging everything everything she
had eaten in the past day, or the past week, or the whole of her life,
by how it felt...
She staggered, clutching her stomach. She glanced
around for something she could hide under, found a handy bush...
When Anathema MacNamara opened the door of her thrown-together
home, it was to the sight of a West Indian woman in men's clothes bent
over a low bush vomiting up what, at quick estimation, was about the density
of a four-course meal. Which isn't really among the top things people like
to see upon opening their front doors.
"Er, excuse me?" Anathema said, after a while.
The dark-skinned woman, upon being addressed, coughed
and choked back the last of whatever it was she had been in the process
of regurgitating, quickly wiped her mouth and stood up-right.
"Quite all right, are we?"
"Fine, thanks," Delphine said quickly. She flexed
her hands out of nervous habit, and then, seeming to realize something,
scanned the ground around her feet until she found the dusty, half-dried
bouquet she had dropped previously. "Just a... bit of a spell there, no
worries."
"Oh. Well, er, were you calling for something?"
"Yes, uh, I'm here for a Mrs. Krawatte MacNamara..."
"I'm her daughter. Would you like to come in? Ah..."
Anathema froze, studying the other girl's features.
"What?"
"Oh, nothing. I'm sorry. It's just that you look
familiar."
The MacNamara's living room was dark and musty, and
filled with mismatched decorations and crowded furniture. Delphine coughed
as she sat down on a sofa opposite Mrs. MacNamara and her daughter, a cloud
of dust billowing up around her.
"Thank you fer seein' me so late in the day, madam,"
the Jackal said respectfully, bowing her head a little. Then, without thinking,
she scratched a spot under her blue bandana. "I 'spose yer wonderin' why
I'm here..."
So she explained. She told the women about a man
who, long ago, had met one of their distant ancestors, and the curse that
had erupted from that, and how, several hundred years later, it had fallen
to her, the man's direct descendant, to finally set things right.
At least that was the intention, but what really
ended up happening consisted of Delphine constantly stealing glances at
MacNamara's daughter, who blushed timidly at the attention, so that when
it came time to make her official apology, instead of addressing it to
the head of the MacNamara household of the small sticks and tumbleweed
town south of Perth, she addressed it to her daughter.
Which was all fair and good in the grand scheme
of it all since it meant things turned out just about the same, but it
did bother the mother some. After Delphine had finished, Mrs. MacNamara
excused herself to the kitchen to prepare some tea, leaving the two younger
girls alone in the dusty room.
Delphine stole a prolonged glance at the young Anathema,
and instead of giving it back, ran away with it and held it for ransom.
Anathema, for her part, blushed a deep scarlet.
The Jackal took a particular delight in watching the girl's eyes go back
and forth as she debated whether there were some alternative opportunities
that were worth trying her hand at.
Will waited at the end of the walk, which more or
less meant, in this dirt and sand environment, that he stayed at the edge
of the bleached wood fence. He paced back and forth a bit, not with impatience
but just for the sake of something to do with his feet.
Recent years upon the sea had sent the young Turner
boy through a growth spurt. He was taller than Jack now --he was getting
accustomed to calling his sister that finally; it made it easier for when
their exploits made the papers-- and had filled out from a scrawny little
body to bearing broad shoulders and muscular forearms. Exposure to the
sun had darkened his hair to a deep brown, like his father's, which he
kept long and tied in a ponytail at his sister's behest.
It wasn't a bad life, overall. Will seldom ever
had his moments of doubt anymore, where he wondered what his family was
doing back in Port Royal. He knew there was little chance of ever finding
out about them, although he knew that they heard plenty of news about them.
She knew how to kick off a great campaign, Jack...
Even back then, in a rowboat South of Hong-Kong, stealing ("commandeer,
Will; nautical term" as his sister had insisted) that British man-o'war,
was a stroke of genius. Their names had made the papers the very next week.
Or his sister's name had, at least.
"Jack Sparrow Sails Again," the headlines had read.
A rumor they'd picked up in Georgia stated that
Captain Kidd's superiors hadn't been too pleased about that. They had been
so not pleased that apparently, his head remained up on the pike outside
the royal palace for weeks.
Will reasoned that that was some kind of
justice, anyway.
The young man hardly glanced up when inside the
house, something of glass shattered. He nearly jumped out of his skin when
the MacNamara's door burst open, and out sprinted his sister the famous
Jack Sparrow, clutching her trihorn hat to her head as she ran.
"We're going," she said hurriedly, looping his arm
in hers and dragging him along at a half-dash. Behind them, blue and red
lightning sparks crackled in the air furiously.
"What did you do?!" Will shrieked.
"I dunno, but I sure hope it ain't any worse than
what Jack got hit with!"
Life went on. Life has a habit of doing that.
True to his word, Captain Israel Hands burned the Queen Anne's Revenge to the ground upon his return to Madagascar... Or that was what was reported, anyway. In all fairness, the Q.A.R. did disappear from this world, but that was because it became the doors and roofs and walls of the rebuilt Libertalia.
Baron Munchausen went on to save a city from a siege by the Turks and inspired a little girl in the flawed, inconsistent imaginary tracts of thought common to those suffering from the disease of senility. Eventually he died for good, but it might just have been because people got tired of trying to kill him.
Westley returned to uptown Bombay to his beautiful wife and had many, many children, one of which he named Hamlet.
Inigo officially retired the title of Dread Pirate
Roberts and returned to Spain. He proceeded to set up a fencing school,
where he always taught students with his left hand. It never paid to shatter
all
their confidence, after all.
He never did end up getting married, and soon the
ghost of his father grew to accept why and gave up on the whole issue.
Fezzik stuck with his old friend, and his charming
rhymes were perceived by the students of the school to be the enigmatic
wisdom of the great fencing sages.
Anne Bonney and Mary Read did end up getting married,
although no one ever managed to find out who performed the ceremony.
...
Except for the Jackal. She sent them a box of chocolates
which, given the time period, was actually a rather impressive gift.
Granuaile died of grand old age in a warm bed surrounded
by grieving relatives, purely on the principle that at least one of a cast
of characters has to meet their demise in this way. At one point, minutes
before her quite timely end, she sent all of her kin from the room (something
of a feat because the Irish notion of kin can extend extraneously far),
and a moment later a tall, blue haired creature with a vaguely familiar
face appeared in the doorway, holding a blue gem necklace.
"I believe this was yours?" Tikalus said.
You already know what happened to Captain Kidd.
As for the rest, they went about their lives-- at least those who had a talent for it. Many died of stupid things like disease and bar fights, because that was simply the kind of world they lived in. Others lived very rich lives and harkened back fondly to their trip with Jack Sparrow against the current of time to the center of the world. Or whatever they preferred to call it.
And as for Jack Sparrow...
Well...
The notion of piracy has been known to change
with time...
"0wnz0r3d!" Jack cackled, raising his fist into the
air. "Your data cluster is m1n3!"
THE END
...mostly