FIC: Sleeping with Ghosts (pt 2)
Title: Sleeping with Ghosts
Word Count: 6, 591
Characters: Rose, Mercer, Jack, Goldie, Gibbs--mentions of Cutler, James, Andrew, Pintell and Ragetti
Pairings: Rose/Mercer, Rose/Jack, Rose/James, Rose/Cutler, Cutler/Jack and Mercer/Cutler if you stand on your head.
Warnings: SERIOUS AU, SERIOUS GORE, torture, character death
***
“And so it came burstin’ from the depths at our broadside when we though’ for certain it had been swept away by the maelstrom.” Gibbs had taken over the tale from Jack now. “The spray was like the breachin’ of a great whale. The great hull rising from the water and shedding all its choking barnacles an’ weed an’ the souls of all those press ganged into service aboard that floatin’ Hell. You see tha’ is how it works…”
He leaned in closer to his daughter, who stared back at him with a little girl’s wide china blue eyes.
“The souls of the men who make this deal to cheat death eventually fade into the framework of The Dutchman itself. Part a’ the crew, part a’ the ship.”
“Won’t be so now,” Sparrow broke in. “Not now the heart’s been returned.”
Here is where Rose entered; and as she watched him tell his glory tale she managed to look happy as a lark while imagining the knife sinking into this stranger’s back.
“Come off it!” A man she recognized as the cooper, John Higgins, slammed his tankard down. “Y’expect us t’ believe you restored the Heart of Davy Jones from tha’ bastard Beckett? Ha!” He took a swig. “Man was black hearted maybe but just a man still.”
She froze. Her mind flew back many months to that horrible sight she had once seen in her Lord’s chamber. Often she still heard its pulsations in her nightmares-that thing that had led her terrified into James’s arms.
She was still piecing Cutler’s story together even now. He was greater than any of you, Rose thought bitterly.
Suddenly words were tumbling out of her.
“I saw it. He kept it in a lockbox in his desk.”
This pronouncement was met with silence. Jack’s eyes snapped toward her and regarded her carefully. She had not meant to say it, and now she looked into pair after pair of eyes of familiar people knowing they thought she was something to be pitied. A strange shadow fell over Goldie’s eyes. Her father had taught her to be a believer, so she did not share the pity of their neighbors. Even now she couldn’t get Rose to speak about all that time as Cutler Beckett’s mistress, but Rose had never been a liar. She surveyed her friend’s face and saw no sign of anything out of the ordinary.
“See! The beauty believes me and tha’s all tha’ counts.” Gibbs waved her over. “Come give this seadog a big ole squeeze.”
It was easier to smile with him around. Dutifully Rose went and put her arms around the old man. As first mate Gibbs would become captain of the mythical Black Pearl in Sparrow’s stead. This would benefit more than herself. The thought steeled her.
“Preserving your legend?” she asked. She didn’t know if she could listen. She was still haunted by the image Mercer had provided of her lord’s headless corpse being cradled by a Company flag floating in the water. She did not want to hear history as the victor’s composed it. Then again…If she heard Sparrow speak of it…would it make this easier to do? Would he gloat? Did he even have the slightest bit of remorse? She had known hatred for her lord once. Were they bound together in that? Was he merely the pet that had bit the master back? Rose stared at him and though his posture was relaxed and comfortable his eyes were far away. She could not read them.
“Oh no, no, no, Rose. No more war stories,” Gibbs said and there was a saddening behind those bright blue eyes that gripped her to the heart. She knew that look well. The look of running from one’s past and the things one has had to do. Rose glanced at Jack again. He was looking apologetically at Gibbs. An entire conversation took place between the three of them with nary a word. Then Mister Gibbs smiled with smiling abruptness and said:
“Rose, while I’ve been away the thing I have missed most in the world is your singing.”
This was a boldfaced lie, but Goldie leaned forward nodding and took her friend’s hand.
“If you want,” Rose shrugged and smiled a little. Gibbs offered her a hand and she climbed up on the table. At the sight of the red hair other men at other tables began to turn and nudge each other. There was scattered clapping. A single voice called out:
“She is risen!”
A smile played across her lips. In the sound of her own voice she could take refuge. She could steel herself, make her heart. She could do this thing she had decided on. It gave her voice urgency, added a new timbre to it and acted as a new spark to set her listeners on fire. They were glad to see her home.
The sea's evaporated
Though it comes as no surprise
These clouds we're seeing
They're explosions in the sky
It seems it's written
But we can't read between the line
Hush…
The word swept over the crowd like wind over the sea. It slowed their very heartbeats to a crawl.
It's okay
Dry your eyes…
It wasn’t. And her glass tears would never run their course.
Soul mate dry your eyes
Cause soul mates never die
Soul mates never die
Jack leaned forward in his seat, pressing his hand to his lips. I’ve got you now, she thought.
This one world vision
Turns us in to compromise
What good's religion
When it's each other we despise
Her mind was taken over by pictures of the past-of the scaffold for six and those piles of corpses, of canonfire and raging seas and smoke and the familiar black flag. She saw him standing above it all and herself gazing up from a great distance away. She saw herself beaten, kissed, fucked and slapped across the face; saw him bathing her body after starvation had made her sick all over herself.
Damn the government
Damn their killing
Damn their lies
Some scattered voices cheered. The two very ugly pirates stood up and hooted and even Mister Gibbs nodded slightly. Only Sparrow remained stock still. His eyes were so wide and black that they seemed too large to fit the drawn face. She wanted those eyes to tell her why.
Hush
It's okay
Dry your eyes
Dry your eyes
She began to see Cutler as she liked best to remember him. The hunger even he could not conceal just before he grabbed her in his arms. The glow that descended on those cold eyes after she had sated him. She felt hot tears begin to roll as she remembered the last time they saw each other. He had laughed with her. He had kissed her face with tenderness neither of them had ever known before. His frantic whisper echoed in her head:
“I love you. I love you!”
Cutler had meant it. He had meant it because he had never said it to anyone.
Except, from what David had told her, to Jack Sparrow.
Soul mate dry your eyes
Cause soul mates never die
Soul mates never die
Never die
Soul mates never die
Never die...
Hastily she wiped her eyes. The patrons cheered, but she did not hear them. The scratch of a chair near her was very loud in her ears and suddenly Sparrow was on his feet, offering a hand to her as she came down from the table.
The captain had taken the bait.
She hesitated, almost drew back in revulsion. Her hand hovered in the air for an endless instant before she willed it into his. She felt the air electrify. When her feet hit the floor she almost tripped into him and steadied herself by placing her hand on his chest. Looking up into his black eyes she saw something like fear.
“You…you seem somewhat familiar.” A forced smile twitched its way onto his lips. “ ‘Ave I ‘ad you before?”
Her voice became husky with unshed tears. Fortunately it sounded like desire. She looked up at him with large, glittering eyes.
“I would’ve remembered the famous Captain Sparrow.”
His arm wound around her tiny waist like Eden’s serpent.
Cutler, I’m so sorry.
***
She didn’t have to do this. She could have found a way to alert David now that she had him in the room with her. But somehow she found herself divesting the pirate of his shirt. Jack stared almost in awe at the way the candlelight cast gold rays into her fiery hair, which she unpinned for his pleasure; letting it fall in waves across her emaciated shoulders. She let her faded, threadbare dress fall in a puddle on the floor but left her stay and stockings in place. She couldn’t afford new clothes anymore.
“You are very thin.”
Jack’s voice was a thirsty, raspy whisper. She did not reply. Her eyes were burning. She crawled onto the bed and he drew his arms around her to pull her close. She examined, with a kind of dethatched fascination, a set of blackened holes under his collarbone. Bullets. She wished to touch them, then thought of her own wounds and did not.
“I…” Jack swallowed hard. Against her skin he felt his hands trembling. Odd for a legend. “I ‘aven’t done this in quite a spell.” He laughed. It was a strangled sound that reminded Rose of her own laughter. “What if I told you I’ve come back from the dead, love? What would you say to that? Because I ‘ave. God’s honest truth. T’Hell an’ back again, sweet love. You’re holdin’ on t’a ghost. I used t’be dead.”
“I’m dead now,” Rose muttered. “I believe you.”
She was about to kill him, so it was safe to divulge this. Rose’s mind was an utter blank as she latched her lips onto his nipple.
Then it was like time sped up. Then they were holding each other in a python embrace and he was kissing her with both hands gripping her face in a way that would have hurt if she wasn’t so numb. She worried for a frantic moment that he might suck her soul into him through these sweet lips. She wrenched her face away from his. Sparrow moaned as she shifted her hips onto him. He was trying to make love to her and she would not allow it.
I won’t kiss him again, Cutler. James I promise. It’s just business.
The grinding motion of her own hips restored some semblance of permanence. But as her mind separated from the actions of her body the thing she had been so determined to do began to materialize. In a few minutes she would call Mercer in and she was going to help him kill this man. Cutler and David were so in love with death. Would she damn her soul or would she come alive? She remembered the day Cutler wrapped her body in the company flag and whispered his great love affair to her. The boy with the beautiful, dirty face, his song cut off as the noose tightened around his little neck…the two marines hoisting one girl’s limp body onto a cart already groaning under the weight of corpses…The animals stuffed and mounted in that room in his house. The fox that had reminded him so much of her. He had wrapped her in that flag and in the end Jack had wrapped him in it.
Death had been her bedmate for a long time.
Her strained mind saw her mother’s body, thin and plague ravaged; her father in all his strength crushed under a piece of wood. She thought of every girl in the trade who she’d heard killed off by a drunken cullie or taken by the pox after God decided they’d had too many years. Death came regardless. What did it matter whether she murdered him or if he was taken by scurvy or some naval officer with better luck than James took him down?
James. Tears sprang to the eyes she had clenched shut tight. James who had always been too good for the touch of her dirty hands; too honorable for the lot he drew. She blamed him for so long, now all she heard was his tortured voice as he called out in the dark, sound asleep and still hounded.
“Sparrow…Sparrow did it, Drew, you know he did. I’ll get him; I’ll get him…for both of us…promise…Sorry…so sorry…”
Andrew, James and Cutler. It seemed to Rose that she had become three different women to be able to love them. The only thing they had in common was Jack Sparrow. She could be whole again in killing him. They could stand equal in her heart.
She was not doing anything wrong.
She heard the pirate coming as if she were underwater. He tossed his head back and closed those darkened eyes. His fingers came up to anchor themselves in her hair and he yanked her face down to meet his. When he forced her into a kiss she bit his lip hard so the orgasm was a cry, a growl and a laugh all in one. Rose made her muscles ripple and she faked a sigh.
“Wild thing you are,” Sparrow said with drowsy approval. He shut his eyes to rest. His head lolled. She wished she had the strength to snap his neck. He shifted her from his thighs and as she moved to the side of the bed he rolled on his side, back facing her. Her heartbeat quickened loudly, but she forced herself to think. Her nerves were strung so tight she had to swallow a cry when he began speaking again.
“Question,” he murmured. “Wha’ you said down there…abou’ seein’ the ‘art. Abou’ where ‘ee kept it…Y’know who I mean don’t you?”
Rose’s own heart seized in her chest. Her teeth set.
“Yeah.”
“So you believed our tall tale?”
There was a barely discernible chuckle in the whisper. She couldn’t speak past the lump in her throat. She had to do it now.
“Y’ave a pretty voice,” he whispered. “Talk t’me for a while. B’fore we go back downstairs.”
“What do you want me to say?” She eyed the clay basin on the bedside table.
“Anythin’,” his voice was fading.
Her mouth smiled, her mind wondered why and her fingers curled around the rim. Rose crept up and pressed her lip against his ear.
“It’s…just good business.”
Word Count: 6, 591
Characters: Rose, Mercer, Jack, Goldie, Gibbs--mentions of Cutler, James, Andrew, Pintell and Ragetti
Pairings: Rose/Mercer, Rose/Jack, Rose/James, Rose/Cutler, Cutler/Jack and Mercer/Cutler if you stand on your head.
Warnings: SERIOUS AU, SERIOUS GORE, torture, character death
***
“And so it came burstin’ from the depths at our broadside when we though’ for certain it had been swept away by the maelstrom.” Gibbs had taken over the tale from Jack now. “The spray was like the breachin’ of a great whale. The great hull rising from the water and shedding all its choking barnacles an’ weed an’ the souls of all those press ganged into service aboard that floatin’ Hell. You see tha’ is how it works…”
He leaned in closer to his daughter, who stared back at him with a little girl’s wide china blue eyes.
“The souls of the men who make this deal to cheat death eventually fade into the framework of The Dutchman itself. Part a’ the crew, part a’ the ship.”
“Won’t be so now,” Sparrow broke in. “Not now the heart’s been returned.”
Here is where Rose entered; and as she watched him tell his glory tale she managed to look happy as a lark while imagining the knife sinking into this stranger’s back.
“Come off it!” A man she recognized as the cooper, John Higgins, slammed his tankard down. “Y’expect us t’ believe you restored the Heart of Davy Jones from tha’ bastard Beckett? Ha!” He took a swig. “Man was black hearted maybe but just a man still.”
She froze. Her mind flew back many months to that horrible sight she had once seen in her Lord’s chamber. Often she still heard its pulsations in her nightmares-that thing that had led her terrified into James’s arms.
She was still piecing Cutler’s story together even now. He was greater than any of you, Rose thought bitterly.
Suddenly words were tumbling out of her.
“I saw it. He kept it in a lockbox in his desk.”
This pronouncement was met with silence. Jack’s eyes snapped toward her and regarded her carefully. She had not meant to say it, and now she looked into pair after pair of eyes of familiar people knowing they thought she was something to be pitied. A strange shadow fell over Goldie’s eyes. Her father had taught her to be a believer, so she did not share the pity of their neighbors. Even now she couldn’t get Rose to speak about all that time as Cutler Beckett’s mistress, but Rose had never been a liar. She surveyed her friend’s face and saw no sign of anything out of the ordinary.
“See! The beauty believes me and tha’s all tha’ counts.” Gibbs waved her over. “Come give this seadog a big ole squeeze.”
It was easier to smile with him around. Dutifully Rose went and put her arms around the old man. As first mate Gibbs would become captain of the mythical Black Pearl in Sparrow’s stead. This would benefit more than herself. The thought steeled her.
“Preserving your legend?” she asked. She didn’t know if she could listen. She was still haunted by the image Mercer had provided of her lord’s headless corpse being cradled by a Company flag floating in the water. She did not want to hear history as the victor’s composed it. Then again…If she heard Sparrow speak of it…would it make this easier to do? Would he gloat? Did he even have the slightest bit of remorse? She had known hatred for her lord once. Were they bound together in that? Was he merely the pet that had bit the master back? Rose stared at him and though his posture was relaxed and comfortable his eyes were far away. She could not read them.
“Oh no, no, no, Rose. No more war stories,” Gibbs said and there was a saddening behind those bright blue eyes that gripped her to the heart. She knew that look well. The look of running from one’s past and the things one has had to do. Rose glanced at Jack again. He was looking apologetically at Gibbs. An entire conversation took place between the three of them with nary a word. Then Mister Gibbs smiled with smiling abruptness and said:
“Rose, while I’ve been away the thing I have missed most in the world is your singing.”
This was a boldfaced lie, but Goldie leaned forward nodding and took her friend’s hand.
“If you want,” Rose shrugged and smiled a little. Gibbs offered her a hand and she climbed up on the table. At the sight of the red hair other men at other tables began to turn and nudge each other. There was scattered clapping. A single voice called out:
“She is risen!”
A smile played across her lips. In the sound of her own voice she could take refuge. She could steel herself, make her heart. She could do this thing she had decided on. It gave her voice urgency, added a new timbre to it and acted as a new spark to set her listeners on fire. They were glad to see her home.
The sea's evaporated
Though it comes as no surprise
These clouds we're seeing
They're explosions in the sky
It seems it's written
But we can't read between the line
Hush…
The word swept over the crowd like wind over the sea. It slowed their very heartbeats to a crawl.
It's okay
Dry your eyes…
It wasn’t. And her glass tears would never run their course.
Soul mate dry your eyes
Cause soul mates never die
Soul mates never die
Jack leaned forward in his seat, pressing his hand to his lips. I’ve got you now, she thought.
This one world vision
Turns us in to compromise
What good's religion
When it's each other we despise
Her mind was taken over by pictures of the past-of the scaffold for six and those piles of corpses, of canonfire and raging seas and smoke and the familiar black flag. She saw him standing above it all and herself gazing up from a great distance away. She saw herself beaten, kissed, fucked and slapped across the face; saw him bathing her body after starvation had made her sick all over herself.
Damn the government
Damn their killing
Damn their lies
Some scattered voices cheered. The two very ugly pirates stood up and hooted and even Mister Gibbs nodded slightly. Only Sparrow remained stock still. His eyes were so wide and black that they seemed too large to fit the drawn face. She wanted those eyes to tell her why.
Hush
It's okay
Dry your eyes
Dry your eyes
She began to see Cutler as she liked best to remember him. The hunger even he could not conceal just before he grabbed her in his arms. The glow that descended on those cold eyes after she had sated him. She felt hot tears begin to roll as she remembered the last time they saw each other. He had laughed with her. He had kissed her face with tenderness neither of them had ever known before. His frantic whisper echoed in her head:
“I love you. I love you!”
Cutler had meant it. He had meant it because he had never said it to anyone.
Except, from what David had told her, to Jack Sparrow.
Soul mate dry your eyes
Cause soul mates never die
Soul mates never die
Never die
Soul mates never die
Never die...
Hastily she wiped her eyes. The patrons cheered, but she did not hear them. The scratch of a chair near her was very loud in her ears and suddenly Sparrow was on his feet, offering a hand to her as she came down from the table.
The captain had taken the bait.
She hesitated, almost drew back in revulsion. Her hand hovered in the air for an endless instant before she willed it into his. She felt the air electrify. When her feet hit the floor she almost tripped into him and steadied herself by placing her hand on his chest. Looking up into his black eyes she saw something like fear.
“You…you seem somewhat familiar.” A forced smile twitched its way onto his lips. “ ‘Ave I ‘ad you before?”
Her voice became husky with unshed tears. Fortunately it sounded like desire. She looked up at him with large, glittering eyes.
“I would’ve remembered the famous Captain Sparrow.”
His arm wound around her tiny waist like Eden’s serpent.
Cutler, I’m so sorry.
***
She didn’t have to do this. She could have found a way to alert David now that she had him in the room with her. But somehow she found herself divesting the pirate of his shirt. Jack stared almost in awe at the way the candlelight cast gold rays into her fiery hair, which she unpinned for his pleasure; letting it fall in waves across her emaciated shoulders. She let her faded, threadbare dress fall in a puddle on the floor but left her stay and stockings in place. She couldn’t afford new clothes anymore.
“You are very thin.”
Jack’s voice was a thirsty, raspy whisper. She did not reply. Her eyes were burning. She crawled onto the bed and he drew his arms around her to pull her close. She examined, with a kind of dethatched fascination, a set of blackened holes under his collarbone. Bullets. She wished to touch them, then thought of her own wounds and did not.
“I…” Jack swallowed hard. Against her skin he felt his hands trembling. Odd for a legend. “I ‘aven’t done this in quite a spell.” He laughed. It was a strangled sound that reminded Rose of her own laughter. “What if I told you I’ve come back from the dead, love? What would you say to that? Because I ‘ave. God’s honest truth. T’Hell an’ back again, sweet love. You’re holdin’ on t’a ghost. I used t’be dead.”
“I’m dead now,” Rose muttered. “I believe you.”
She was about to kill him, so it was safe to divulge this. Rose’s mind was an utter blank as she latched her lips onto his nipple.
Then it was like time sped up. Then they were holding each other in a python embrace and he was kissing her with both hands gripping her face in a way that would have hurt if she wasn’t so numb. She worried for a frantic moment that he might suck her soul into him through these sweet lips. She wrenched her face away from his. Sparrow moaned as she shifted her hips onto him. He was trying to make love to her and she would not allow it.
I won’t kiss him again, Cutler. James I promise. It’s just business.
The grinding motion of her own hips restored some semblance of permanence. But as her mind separated from the actions of her body the thing she had been so determined to do began to materialize. In a few minutes she would call Mercer in and she was going to help him kill this man. Cutler and David were so in love with death. Would she damn her soul or would she come alive? She remembered the day Cutler wrapped her body in the company flag and whispered his great love affair to her. The boy with the beautiful, dirty face, his song cut off as the noose tightened around his little neck…the two marines hoisting one girl’s limp body onto a cart already groaning under the weight of corpses…The animals stuffed and mounted in that room in his house. The fox that had reminded him so much of her. He had wrapped her in that flag and in the end Jack had wrapped him in it.
Death had been her bedmate for a long time.
Her strained mind saw her mother’s body, thin and plague ravaged; her father in all his strength crushed under a piece of wood. She thought of every girl in the trade who she’d heard killed off by a drunken cullie or taken by the pox after God decided they’d had too many years. Death came regardless. What did it matter whether she murdered him or if he was taken by scurvy or some naval officer with better luck than James took him down?
James. Tears sprang to the eyes she had clenched shut tight. James who had always been too good for the touch of her dirty hands; too honorable for the lot he drew. She blamed him for so long, now all she heard was his tortured voice as he called out in the dark, sound asleep and still hounded.
“Sparrow…Sparrow did it, Drew, you know he did. I’ll get him; I’ll get him…for both of us…promise…Sorry…so sorry…”
Andrew, James and Cutler. It seemed to Rose that she had become three different women to be able to love them. The only thing they had in common was Jack Sparrow. She could be whole again in killing him. They could stand equal in her heart.
She was not doing anything wrong.
She heard the pirate coming as if she were underwater. He tossed his head back and closed those darkened eyes. His fingers came up to anchor themselves in her hair and he yanked her face down to meet his. When he forced her into a kiss she bit his lip hard so the orgasm was a cry, a growl and a laugh all in one. Rose made her muscles ripple and she faked a sigh.
“Wild thing you are,” Sparrow said with drowsy approval. He shut his eyes to rest. His head lolled. She wished she had the strength to snap his neck. He shifted her from his thighs and as she moved to the side of the bed he rolled on his side, back facing her. Her heartbeat quickened loudly, but she forced herself to think. Her nerves were strung so tight she had to swallow a cry when he began speaking again.
“Question,” he murmured. “Wha’ you said down there…abou’ seein’ the ‘art. Abou’ where ‘ee kept it…Y’know who I mean don’t you?”
Rose’s own heart seized in her chest. Her teeth set.
“Yeah.”
“So you believed our tall tale?”
There was a barely discernible chuckle in the whisper. She couldn’t speak past the lump in her throat. She had to do it now.
“Y’ave a pretty voice,” he whispered. “Talk t’me for a while. B’fore we go back downstairs.”
“What do you want me to say?” She eyed the clay basin on the bedside table.
“Anythin’,” his voice was fading.
Her mouth smiled, her mind wondered why and her fingers curled around the rim. Rose crept up and pressed her lip against his ear.
“It’s…just good business.”