Fic: Metal and Words, 2/16
Title: Metal and Words, 2/16
Author: Aletheia Felinea
Beta: compassrose7577. Thank you so much!
Rating: PG-13 overall
Wordcount: about 2 100, this chapter
Characters: Jack Sparrow, Gibbs, OCs.
Genre: Gen fic supposed to be a crime story.
Time: Months before CotBP.
Summary: The sweet air of Tortuga can be dangerous sometimes, even for the certain Captain. And curiosity can kill a sparrow. Or... save?
Disclaimer: Not my hunting territory, The Big Black Mouse prowls here.
Previous parts: 1
Note: The fic was translated from Polish. Jeśli wolisz czytać w oryginale, zapraszam.
Jack Sparrow stepped over the tavern’s threshold, squinting in sunlight. It turned out the sun was already in its zenith. He set off down a dusty street, maneuvering amidst the crowd, sending glittering smiles towards giggling lasses, dodging trundling carts, and straining his ears.
Streets were still buzzing with the rumor that Rusty Hans was already the late Rusty Hans. The essence of it was nothing strange on an island where every day and night someone had an appointment with a fist or iron. The stranger was to hear it regarding a man who never brawled or tempted robbers. Even on Tortuga, however, no matter how exciting the news, the gut demands food, which wouldn’t come by itself. So the clatter of uncommon excitement slowly turned into the clatter of common life.
“Slack?! You call it slack, you scrub?!” Tom O’Malley bellowed thunderously, brandishing the indicted loaf. “Your mother never baked better! Twopence and nothing less! An’ be glad I’m not adding for the offence to a honest trader!”
“Sure, slack, and looks like you threw sand in place of salt!” the ‘scrub’ lodging the complaint yelled back, defiantly sticking his thin chest out. “Or you took ash for flour! Not a pence it’s worth! Broken one! You hear, folks?!”
Tom flushed purple, sputtered and turned in search of a solid club. Finding it in its usual place beside the door, he turned to discover the would-be client had vanished already, having resigned both the purchase and the complaint.
“What’s goin’ on with this good island?” The sigh came from somewhere behind, accompanied by a faint chiming. Startled, Tom whirled around.
“No respec’ at all for hard workin’, and they’re slaughterin’ each other in the port, and even gulls are more and more impudent.” Jack Sparrow, leant against the wall near the windowsill which served as the counter, rolled his eyes skyward and shook his head with a jangling, clucking indignantly like a pastor at a pulpit.
Tom relaxed a bit, but wielded the club in the supposed direction of the annoying seeker of sand, in an empty… that is, a full loaf, of course, excellent loaf!
“Well?! What they’re lacking?!” He brandished the loaf again, towards Jack this time. “What, not good enough?!”
“Perfect,” Jack assured hastily, moving beyond the club’s reach. Well, if one comes ashore after three months, he casted a glance at trays of grayish bread.
“Is it true, wha’ they’re talkin’ on Hans?” he asked, leaning a bit closer to the counter again. “Where to look for the gospel, if not at you, Tom,” he added quickly.
O’Malley flushed proudly. After all, that Sparrow is a decent chap, even if not the brightest.
“Aye,” he said dignifiedly. “There’s always the best bread and the best news from me. Mummeh,” he recalled suddenly.
Sparrow nodded eagerly and waited, showing with eyes like saucers that Tom ‘The Best Firm’ O’Malley has his undivided attention. Tom crossed his hairy paws on a prominent belly covered with a grubby apron, and took a breath.
“Aye, so it is, Rusty Hans is lying dead… was lying,” he corrected. “Fishers took him right away, to make short work with the burial and, well…” he broke off with some confusion, finding that he had no more to tell. “Mamiyah,” he finished. Having heard once that Italians were famous as extraordinary bakers, he decided that in business, in the face of lacking in quality (which, of course, he would never admit), success would come through a proper publicity. From then on, he had been trying to pass as an Italian, in spite of an Irish accent which could crush rocks. Cracks in this concept stemmed from the fact it hadn’t occurred to him to change his name. Even if he had, the only Italian he knew was Mamma mia!, which from his mouth sounded different every time.
Sparrow miraculously managed to gape even wider at O’Malley’s shocking tale.
“Any moment we all, honest and peace lovin’, will get butchered in beds…!” he moaned. “An’ some even in own ones,” he added in sepulchral voice. Then he pushed off the wall and hurriedly walked down the street, calling back to the baker: “I’m goin’ to lock doors, if I find any. I’ll follow the example of such a clever guy like you, Tom.” He ducked around the corner, not waiting for O’Malley to count his loaves.
Once past the third corner, Jack slowed. He had heard from the baker no more than expected. Tom O’Malley, admittedly, used to believe anything he was told, but he also was unable to invent, which rendered him a certain source of news, indeed. Not overly surprising anyway, this time. The surrounding of the old pier was an old-timer fisherman’s place, who cared scrupulously for its tidiness, although not it alone. A corpse wasn’t a rare find on the town’s street, and merchants, traders and innkeepers didn’t want upon their threshold anything which might repel the clientele. There was a small cemetery on a hill behind town, but since a tombstone costs, and no one shovels for free, the biggest and the most popular cemetery of Tortuga was its surrounding waters, fishermen the cheapest morticians. Sometimes, if a dead man had a family, they would wait until someone could find Padre Mateo, drag him out of a tavern, and tell him which a cap to don, for the Padre, being a man of enterprise, used to be also Pastor Matt or Rabbi Matityahu, when the need called. It was said he once managed to be Imam Mattà. But since Rusty Hans had never been rich in family or money, why wait?
Cautiously munching a loaf and spitting an occasional pebble, Jack wandered narrow streets and alleys. He methodically looked into stables, pigsties and cowsheds, especially the ones adjacent to taverns, hence, the majority. Goats, donkeys, and piglets replied with curious or impassive gazes, hens fled with alarmed clucking…
Ah-ha! In a wooden shed, entitled to the name ‘pigsty’ through its permanent inhabitant, being a well, for Tortuga standards, fatten up hog, was the source of the most versatile, if not the most valid information, on the island. It was fast sleeping, with its head rested comfortably on the said hog, which didn’t protest, sleeping as well. Jack looked around for a bucket and a trough.
SPLASH
“Wheeee…!!! Phoo! Ugh… What?”
“Welcome to a wonderful new day, Mr. Gibbs.” Jack beamed, substituting for the sun, which failed to reach the shed’s interior at that hour.
Joshamee Gibbs blinked and wiped the water from his eyes.
“Are you off your head, Jack?! Don’ you know tha’s bad luck to wake a man when he’s-!”
“Worse bad luck is to counter a dead man’s will,” the Captain cut in. “You told me that Rusty Hans was looking for me?”
“Hans…?” Gibbs gaped at Jack as if he had wakened him to inquire as to his opinion on the house of Habsburg’s marital politics. “Aye, he was…”
“Then he’s not anymore. Would be difficult from the bay’s floor and wif his throat cut.”
“Throa…” Gibbs was struck speechless. He crossed himself hastily and regained his voice, though not necessarily his presence of mind. “Mother of… Hans?!”
“Hans,” Jack said patiently. “Rusty. Cut. This night. You claimed you’d been talkin’ wif him?”
The question seemed to take Gibbs’ speech once more, petrified for good, by all appearances. Jack rolled his eyes and looked around for the abandoned bucket. At this sight, Gibbs’ self-preservation instincts kicked in. He blinked again, wiped the last of the water from his face, and sat heavily on an upended trough, while Jack patiently waited. The hog, unimpressed by the shower, grunted in his sleep and kept blissful dreaming of hoggy dreams. Gibbs rubbed his tousled whiskers and patted at his clothes.
“Dead?” he asked again, rather hopelessly.
“Dead,” said Jack, who was beginning to regret that he had put the bucket aside.
Gibbs sighed, and then realised what he was searching for. He looked in his breast-pocket, surprised to find the flask still was there. He uncorked it. Surprise of surprises, something still sloshed.
“Aye, I was talkin’ to him.” He sighed again. “Not further than yesternight, so I was.” The sloshing in the flask faded in between sighs and sentences.
“An’ he’d asked for me, you mentioned, right?” Jack was trying to not look at the flask. “Wait, yesternight? Yesternight too?”
“An’ how not! He was scourin’ all Tortuga fer you and every time when he ran across me, he asked if I’d seen you, an’ to tell you, when I meet you. That he’s seekin’, that is. And I tell him that I’ve just passed you by, there, on the street. An’ he stares at me, eyes like plates, turns back an’ almost loses his legs… so hard he ran after you. I haven’ seen him in such a panic yet…”
The Captain nodded. True, Gibbs had told what he had been told to tell. Just enough to keep Jack beware. He frowned suddenly. “In a panic? Why? And where it was?”
“An’ how I’m to know why? At Faithful Bride. That is, I know why afterwards, when he said that he lost it, at the Bride too.
“What?! Gibbs, talk in turn and decently at last, not as if you’re confessin’ in front of a court martial!”
“Just talkin’! All the time I’ve been talkin’ you! Two days ago, he ran across me and asked after you. So I told you that when I met you. Next day, I see you near the Bride, go inside, Hans comes in right after me and asks after you again. An’ he babbles something, all tremblin’, that he has to find you. To read him, and to read him, repeat’ still. Then clearly he hadn’t found you after that, when he’d jumped out of the Bride, cause he dragged himself again, at the evening. He sits down, clinging to a mug and whines that all’s failed, that he lost it somewhere. So I push another mug to him, seein’ the fellow’s in a burnin’ need of consolation, the third mug for me, cause it’s always better to console together… and can’t remember what was from then,” Gibbs finished, a bit hesitantly.
Jack ceased to wonder how Hans had found himself in the fisher’s port. One should rather wonder that, as a result of the ‘consolation’, he only had set out for a wander along the beaches, for he as well could have commit something more mad, like visit other taverns, and try to carry away Sally McDonnell’s candlestick, table and all. Besides that, everything became more and more vague, instead of clearer.
Jack gritted his teeth and his hands, one on the cutlass’ pommel and the other on his belt buckle, unsure as to whether grab Gibbs and shake him properly or just snatch the flask. Jack felt an increasingly urgent need of its contents.
“What. To. Read.” he growled. “And. What. Did. He. Lose.”
Gibbs glanced anxiously at Jack’s left hand on the cutlass.
“I dunno what, he didn’ tell that. Oh,” he recalled, “he told that he remits your debt, if only you read it to him. An’ he jumped out on the street, before I managed to ask more. An’ when I saw him at the evenin’ again, I forced my way to him, with that first mug, for to, well…” Gibbs break off, disconcerted suddenly. “Well, one can always see,” he restarted boldly, “if I’d be of use, I can read many a thing too, an’ maybe a some bottle would be there for it, but nothin’ doing, turned out, then we only got down to tippling… together…”
Gibbs stopped at noticing the Captain stood as motionless as a statue on a duke’s tombstone, staring without a sound. The gaze disturbingly brought a snake to Gibbs’ mind, or even worse, one of his former captains, stalking towards someone dozing on a watch. He cautiously turned to look behind him, but found nothing more than a wooden wall, and then turned back.
“Jack…?” he asked tentatively.
The Captain whirled around, his coat skirts flaring and silver jangling. Gibbs, almost whipped in his nose by the sash’s torn end, jerked involuntary.
“Jack, where are you goin’…!” he called.
“Drink.” The firm reply came from around the corner which the pirate had already turned.
Gibbs nodded. “Ah.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The next part
Your thoughts welcomed, as always. :)
Author: Aletheia Felinea
Beta: compassrose7577. Thank you so much!
Rating: PG-13 overall
Wordcount: about 2 100, this chapter
Characters: Jack Sparrow, Gibbs, OCs.
Genre: Gen fic supposed to be a crime story.
Time: Months before CotBP.
Summary: The sweet air of Tortuga can be dangerous sometimes, even for the certain Captain. And curiosity can kill a sparrow. Or... save?
Disclaimer: Not my hunting territory, The Big Black Mouse prowls here.
Previous parts: 1
Note: The fic was translated from Polish. Jeśli wolisz czytać w oryginale, zapraszam.
Jack Sparrow stepped over the tavern’s threshold, squinting in sunlight. It turned out the sun was already in its zenith. He set off down a dusty street, maneuvering amidst the crowd, sending glittering smiles towards giggling lasses, dodging trundling carts, and straining his ears.
Streets were still buzzing with the rumor that Rusty Hans was already the late Rusty Hans. The essence of it was nothing strange on an island where every day and night someone had an appointment with a fist or iron. The stranger was to hear it regarding a man who never brawled or tempted robbers. Even on Tortuga, however, no matter how exciting the news, the gut demands food, which wouldn’t come by itself. So the clatter of uncommon excitement slowly turned into the clatter of common life.
“Slack?! You call it slack, you scrub?!” Tom O’Malley bellowed thunderously, brandishing the indicted loaf. “Your mother never baked better! Twopence and nothing less! An’ be glad I’m not adding for the offence to a honest trader!”
“Sure, slack, and looks like you threw sand in place of salt!” the ‘scrub’ lodging the complaint yelled back, defiantly sticking his thin chest out. “Or you took ash for flour! Not a pence it’s worth! Broken one! You hear, folks?!”
Tom flushed purple, sputtered and turned in search of a solid club. Finding it in its usual place beside the door, he turned to discover the would-be client had vanished already, having resigned both the purchase and the complaint.
“What’s goin’ on with this good island?” The sigh came from somewhere behind, accompanied by a faint chiming. Startled, Tom whirled around.
“No respec’ at all for hard workin’, and they’re slaughterin’ each other in the port, and even gulls are more and more impudent.” Jack Sparrow, leant against the wall near the windowsill which served as the counter, rolled his eyes skyward and shook his head with a jangling, clucking indignantly like a pastor at a pulpit.
Tom relaxed a bit, but wielded the club in the supposed direction of the annoying seeker of sand, in an empty… that is, a full loaf, of course, excellent loaf!
“Well?! What they’re lacking?!” He brandished the loaf again, towards Jack this time. “What, not good enough?!”
“Perfect,” Jack assured hastily, moving beyond the club’s reach. Well, if one comes ashore after three months, he casted a glance at trays of grayish bread.
“Is it true, wha’ they’re talkin’ on Hans?” he asked, leaning a bit closer to the counter again. “Where to look for the gospel, if not at you, Tom,” he added quickly.
O’Malley flushed proudly. After all, that Sparrow is a decent chap, even if not the brightest.
“Aye,” he said dignifiedly. “There’s always the best bread and the best news from me. Mummeh,” he recalled suddenly.
Sparrow nodded eagerly and waited, showing with eyes like saucers that Tom ‘The Best Firm’ O’Malley has his undivided attention. Tom crossed his hairy paws on a prominent belly covered with a grubby apron, and took a breath.
“Aye, so it is, Rusty Hans is lying dead… was lying,” he corrected. “Fishers took him right away, to make short work with the burial and, well…” he broke off with some confusion, finding that he had no more to tell. “Mamiyah,” he finished. Having heard once that Italians were famous as extraordinary bakers, he decided that in business, in the face of lacking in quality (which, of course, he would never admit), success would come through a proper publicity. From then on, he had been trying to pass as an Italian, in spite of an Irish accent which could crush rocks. Cracks in this concept stemmed from the fact it hadn’t occurred to him to change his name. Even if he had, the only Italian he knew was Mamma mia!, which from his mouth sounded different every time.
Sparrow miraculously managed to gape even wider at O’Malley’s shocking tale.
“Any moment we all, honest and peace lovin’, will get butchered in beds…!” he moaned. “An’ some even in own ones,” he added in sepulchral voice. Then he pushed off the wall and hurriedly walked down the street, calling back to the baker: “I’m goin’ to lock doors, if I find any. I’ll follow the example of such a clever guy like you, Tom.” He ducked around the corner, not waiting for O’Malley to count his loaves.
Once past the third corner, Jack slowed. He had heard from the baker no more than expected. Tom O’Malley, admittedly, used to believe anything he was told, but he also was unable to invent, which rendered him a certain source of news, indeed. Not overly surprising anyway, this time. The surrounding of the old pier was an old-timer fisherman’s place, who cared scrupulously for its tidiness, although not it alone. A corpse wasn’t a rare find on the town’s street, and merchants, traders and innkeepers didn’t want upon their threshold anything which might repel the clientele. There was a small cemetery on a hill behind town, but since a tombstone costs, and no one shovels for free, the biggest and the most popular cemetery of Tortuga was its surrounding waters, fishermen the cheapest morticians. Sometimes, if a dead man had a family, they would wait until someone could find Padre Mateo, drag him out of a tavern, and tell him which a cap to don, for the Padre, being a man of enterprise, used to be also Pastor Matt or Rabbi Matityahu, when the need called. It was said he once managed to be Imam Mattà. But since Rusty Hans had never been rich in family or money, why wait?
Cautiously munching a loaf and spitting an occasional pebble, Jack wandered narrow streets and alleys. He methodically looked into stables, pigsties and cowsheds, especially the ones adjacent to taverns, hence, the majority. Goats, donkeys, and piglets replied with curious or impassive gazes, hens fled with alarmed clucking…
Ah-ha! In a wooden shed, entitled to the name ‘pigsty’ through its permanent inhabitant, being a well, for Tortuga standards, fatten up hog, was the source of the most versatile, if not the most valid information, on the island. It was fast sleeping, with its head rested comfortably on the said hog, which didn’t protest, sleeping as well. Jack looked around for a bucket and a trough.
SPLASH
“Wheeee…!!! Phoo! Ugh… What?”
“Welcome to a wonderful new day, Mr. Gibbs.” Jack beamed, substituting for the sun, which failed to reach the shed’s interior at that hour.
Joshamee Gibbs blinked and wiped the water from his eyes.
“Are you off your head, Jack?! Don’ you know tha’s bad luck to wake a man when he’s-!”
“Worse bad luck is to counter a dead man’s will,” the Captain cut in. “You told me that Rusty Hans was looking for me?”
“Hans…?” Gibbs gaped at Jack as if he had wakened him to inquire as to his opinion on the house of Habsburg’s marital politics. “Aye, he was…”
“Then he’s not anymore. Would be difficult from the bay’s floor and wif his throat cut.”
“Throa…” Gibbs was struck speechless. He crossed himself hastily and regained his voice, though not necessarily his presence of mind. “Mother of… Hans?!”
“Hans,” Jack said patiently. “Rusty. Cut. This night. You claimed you’d been talkin’ wif him?”
The question seemed to take Gibbs’ speech once more, petrified for good, by all appearances. Jack rolled his eyes and looked around for the abandoned bucket. At this sight, Gibbs’ self-preservation instincts kicked in. He blinked again, wiped the last of the water from his face, and sat heavily on an upended trough, while Jack patiently waited. The hog, unimpressed by the shower, grunted in his sleep and kept blissful dreaming of hoggy dreams. Gibbs rubbed his tousled whiskers and patted at his clothes.
“Dead?” he asked again, rather hopelessly.
“Dead,” said Jack, who was beginning to regret that he had put the bucket aside.
Gibbs sighed, and then realised what he was searching for. He looked in his breast-pocket, surprised to find the flask still was there. He uncorked it. Surprise of surprises, something still sloshed.
“Aye, I was talkin’ to him.” He sighed again. “Not further than yesternight, so I was.” The sloshing in the flask faded in between sighs and sentences.
“An’ he’d asked for me, you mentioned, right?” Jack was trying to not look at the flask. “Wait, yesternight? Yesternight too?”
“An’ how not! He was scourin’ all Tortuga fer you and every time when he ran across me, he asked if I’d seen you, an’ to tell you, when I meet you. That he’s seekin’, that is. And I tell him that I’ve just passed you by, there, on the street. An’ he stares at me, eyes like plates, turns back an’ almost loses his legs… so hard he ran after you. I haven’ seen him in such a panic yet…”
The Captain nodded. True, Gibbs had told what he had been told to tell. Just enough to keep Jack beware. He frowned suddenly. “In a panic? Why? And where it was?”
“An’ how I’m to know why? At Faithful Bride. That is, I know why afterwards, when he said that he lost it, at the Bride too.
“What?! Gibbs, talk in turn and decently at last, not as if you’re confessin’ in front of a court martial!”
“Just talkin’! All the time I’ve been talkin’ you! Two days ago, he ran across me and asked after you. So I told you that when I met you. Next day, I see you near the Bride, go inside, Hans comes in right after me and asks after you again. An’ he babbles something, all tremblin’, that he has to find you. To read him, and to read him, repeat’ still. Then clearly he hadn’t found you after that, when he’d jumped out of the Bride, cause he dragged himself again, at the evening. He sits down, clinging to a mug and whines that all’s failed, that he lost it somewhere. So I push another mug to him, seein’ the fellow’s in a burnin’ need of consolation, the third mug for me, cause it’s always better to console together… and can’t remember what was from then,” Gibbs finished, a bit hesitantly.
Jack ceased to wonder how Hans had found himself in the fisher’s port. One should rather wonder that, as a result of the ‘consolation’, he only had set out for a wander along the beaches, for he as well could have commit something more mad, like visit other taverns, and try to carry away Sally McDonnell’s candlestick, table and all. Besides that, everything became more and more vague, instead of clearer.
Jack gritted his teeth and his hands, one on the cutlass’ pommel and the other on his belt buckle, unsure as to whether grab Gibbs and shake him properly or just snatch the flask. Jack felt an increasingly urgent need of its contents.
“What. To. Read.” he growled. “And. What. Did. He. Lose.”
Gibbs glanced anxiously at Jack’s left hand on the cutlass.
“I dunno what, he didn’ tell that. Oh,” he recalled, “he told that he remits your debt, if only you read it to him. An’ he jumped out on the street, before I managed to ask more. An’ when I saw him at the evenin’ again, I forced my way to him, with that first mug, for to, well…” Gibbs break off, disconcerted suddenly. “Well, one can always see,” he restarted boldly, “if I’d be of use, I can read many a thing too, an’ maybe a some bottle would be there for it, but nothin’ doing, turned out, then we only got down to tippling… together…”
Gibbs stopped at noticing the Captain stood as motionless as a statue on a duke’s tombstone, staring without a sound. The gaze disturbingly brought a snake to Gibbs’ mind, or even worse, one of his former captains, stalking towards someone dozing on a watch. He cautiously turned to look behind him, but found nothing more than a wooden wall, and then turned back.
“Jack…?” he asked tentatively.
The Captain whirled around, his coat skirts flaring and silver jangling. Gibbs, almost whipped in his nose by the sash’s torn end, jerked involuntary.
“Jack, where are you goin’…!” he called.
“Drink.” The firm reply came from around the corner which the pirate had already turned.
Gibbs nodded. “Ah.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The next part
Your thoughts welcomed, as always. :)