Fic: Costume Jewelry, Pirates of the Caribbean
Title: Costume Jewelry
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Word Count: 2377
When Tia Dalma was twelve, she got a letter from her elder sister, written on the back of a rice sack.
She did not show her mother or her brother, but she did show her her best friend's sister, who was pretending to be a man so she could get a respectable job on a white man's ship. She agreed to take her up to Port Royal, because Tia Dalma had seen her secret in fish entrails and she was desperate enough. It didn't harm her to think Tia Dalma would tattle (and she did, eventually, but it was an accident).
She was nervous, almost, because it was partly her fault her sister had left. She hadn't meant to tell on her and the son of the Ghana tribesman, but it slipped out and she hadn't really thought they would put her on the first boat out over it (and it had been the first secret she ever felt should be kept and she failed).
There was red paint on her sister's teeth, and Tia Dalma couldn't stop staring at it because she was smiling so wide. She said some things, asked some things and seemed to get the answers she wanted, because she soon produced a gift.
Tia Dalma wasn't sure what its function was, but her sister showed her, looping the bracelet over one finger and then her entire wrist. It flashed up at her in the dim candlelight of The Pacing Steed, a blue-green like the sea inlaid in gold and she thought it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given her. Even if the golden links pinched at her skin.
"Why?" her sister echoed the question she didn't know she had asked, and smiled at her, ruby-red lips peeling and long, black eyes glittering and she couldn't help thinking poison. "I want the world to know what kind of person my petite cadette sister is."
Behind her, the aleman laughed, low and husky, and Tia Dalma's twelve-year-old instincts kicked at her like a frightened jackrabbit, and she got up and left, barely remembering to thank her sister for the jewelry and kissing her firmly on the cheek. She came away with white powder on her lips and a sick feeling in her belly. The bracelet was too heavy on her hand.
While she was sitting on the docks, watching the dark waters churn like the hate in her sister's eyes, she was found by some spirit-white sailor who said he liked that pretty piece of shiny on her wrist and what was she doing out here, all by herself, didn't she had a pap who'd look out after her and why are ye looking so scared, little cannibal girl, I ain't gonna do nothing to ye ain't shoulda been done on that there ship ye came in on, ain't nobody gonna miss ye a couple ticks more...
Later, when her best friend's sister pulled her into her longboat and frowned at her wet petticoats and the bruise-red fingerprints on her shoulder like teardrops, Tia Dalma pursed her lips closed and resolutely turned her back on Port Royal and thought of nothing but her mammy and her brother and the blue-green of the sea and the green-green of home.
Her wrist was bare.
She painted her lips and her teeth black after that.
~*~
The chain is delicate, but the pendant is not. The silver is heavy and it almost looks pregnant, until it spins and she sees a woman's frightened face cradled between fierce pincers and she thinks she might understand.
She does not tell this desperate, painted noblewoman that she does not actually live on Isla Cruses. she is merely visiting a family she placed here before the Spanish built their colony, or their pirate port, or whatever they thought this series of thatch-roof huts was.
However, it is not usually a good idea to tell spirit-white, rich people that the people you have begged Neptune to free from slaver's ships are living peacefully and happily right under their sunburned noses. She does not tell the noblewoman that it is a likely good chance she will lose this trinket when she returns to her bayou in Jamaica, and she doesn't think much of her besides, caring so much for this symbol of her wealth that she'll seek out a witch woman to protect it.
"What is your name?" she asks instead, letting her voice drawl with boredom to hurry her up.
"Winifred," the noblewoman replies in a rush, even though she doesn't have to. The moment Tia Dalma closed her hand around the necklace and its dainty chain, the name was screamed at her so loud she could still hear it ringing against the crevices of her skull. Winifred's eyes -- blue-green like the sea, encased by golden lashes and golden, shining skin and hair like midnight brushed with stars -- flicker like a hummingbird, timid and desperate. "Please, lass, can you keep it safe for me? I beg you. My heart's in there, and I cannot trust myself with it."
Tia Dalma shrugged noncommittally. She would probably barter it later. It may be worth something. Perhaps she can ask her former best friend's sister's son if there were any markets in China for Spanish silver when she returns home.
That night, the Spanish place of worship burns brilliant against the midnight brushed with stars. She can't bring herself to feel any particular grief about it.
A month or so later, she goes out into the graveyard and finds the cross, tall and upright, and traces her fingers over the beginning of the "W'. It takes her a moment to notice the corner of a sheaf of paper sticking out of the fresh-turned earth. The seal tells her it's from a pirate. The feel of it, pressing against her palm and against her heart, tells her it's a love letter.
She reads it, and tucks a dead woman's secret in neatly next to all the others she carries.
~*~
Davy Jones doesn't cry when she gives him the fat, ugly music box on its delicate chain. He doesn't cry or scream or throw it into the river. He just sort of blinks.
She wishes he would do something, because then she could focus on something other than the feel of this man's heart cracking all around her like a thousand stone walls coming down all at once.
~*~
The bonfire crackles and pops, and her tiny, toddling son shrieks in surprise and clings to her skirts and everyone gives a great shout of laughter.
Tia Dalma puts her hands under his armpits and scoops him up, and his sticky, starfish hands close around the lace border of her bodice and he twists his head to watch the fire, trying to be fearful and threatening by degrees.
"He's never seen a large fire like that before," she tells her former best friend later, when they're all sitting around with bellies full of cassava and seasonal fruit. The men are telling stories. The women are weaving and spreading paint on each other and trying to pretend this was ceremonial instead of just silly fun. "It's always too wet at home to get a good fire going."
She braids the corn husks together as well as she can with her son squirming restlessly in her lap, pushing at her elbows as if trying to get them to unlock, until she has a full, golden crown that she can dump on his head. He doesn't like it, and it catches in his curls when he tries to rip it out and she laughs while he fusses. She doesn't see her best friend complete a similar crown until she feels it being pushed down her skull.
She jumps, and the grown-up woman smiles at her sadly. "We don't want you to forget who your people are, Tia Dalma."
"I never could," she lies, because she already has. The fates saw to that, when her dead father sat down next to her for tea when she was ten and told her about her sister and the Ghana tribesman's boy. She tells secrets that should long be buried, and there is no market for them here.
Years later, she finds the crown, no longer quite so golden or so strong, pushed beneath a treasure chest she nicked from a sloop, and places it on top of her head, letting the frail maize leaves tickle across her temple. Her throat stops up.
Her grown-up son tells her it looks beautiful on her, and smiles a smile that makes his slender blue eyes flash and dance like a spray of seawater.
She has never told him how he is going to die.
~*~
Tia Dalma reacts quickly, snatching up a nearby letter opener and snapping him firmly across the wrist. He drops the drachma with an indignant "Oi!" like he was the one who had been wronged, and gives her what she assumes is an angry frown, though really it just makes him look little more than five years old.
"If you do not learn you keep your honey-coated fingers to yourself, Jack Sparrow, then you can forget about ever seeing your Wicked Wench again," she tells him severely.
He wrinkles his nose animatedly. "I really need to come up with a new name. The Wicked Wench was Beckett's idea." He rolls his tongue in and out of his mouth, like Beckett brought a foul taste to it.
She heaves an aggravated sigh. He was charming, in the way a thunderstorm was charming when one was caught without shelter. She really had no clue how to deal with him, and he never gave her any clues at all to what he was going to say or do next, and still, she gets the gut feeling that she was not going to be rid of him for years to come.
"There is a man who may be able to bring your ship back--" she begins, and he is swift to interrupt.
"If he can raise my ship from Davy Jones's locker, then he is no man."
"Owei, I could tell you that I speak of Davy Jones himself, but most people tend to react poorly when I do," she says wryly, watching Jack Sparrow's face crumple in the most telling expression she's ever seen on a human being in her entire life.
She doesn't tell him what Davy Jones's price is. She never has before. The fewer dead she hears in the back of her mind, the better.
But Jack Sparrow does wind up stealing a lot from her. Too much of her time (for one thing), not to mention her virtue (such as it is), a compass (which, technically, was a steal, even though he traded her a scrystone which turned out to be completely useless, but she didn't tell him that), and a ring. A ring that had belonged to King Edward of Spain, even; bulky and golden and embedded with the largest black pearl in existence.
It suited him fine, so she let him keep it.
She stole it back anyway, thirteen years later, and gave him a jar of dirt in trade.
Well, it made her laugh.
~*~
She is not invited to Elizabeth Swann's wedding, but she barters a ride from her dead best friend's sister's grandson to Port Royal anyway.
"I came to give you a gift," Tia Dalma says, without saying hello or asking any polite questions, and lifts the girl's veil.
The chain is thick and strong, and it will leave chafe marks on her collar bone, but the flower is cut from African diamond and Elizabeth bleeds when she presses her finger against it too hard. But her slender, blue-green eyes smile and she says nothing as Tia Dalma traces over the "P" burned into the spirit-white skin above her wrist, and then she goes and marries James Norrington.
After the ceremony, Tia Dalma finds herself in conversation with some poor bird named Giselle, whose eyes are too bright, long, and dark and whose lips are too red, and if she were to kiss her cheek her mouth would come away white with powder.
"Tell me a secret," Giselle says.
So she does.
She tells them all.
That night, she dreams of the dead, as she always does. This time is different. They are no longer nameless, screaming faces, but people, coming to her with hands outstretched.
Her father presses a crown made of golden maize onto her head and her best friend wipes away the bruise-red fingerprints on her shoulder like five separate teardrops.
Her son embraces her hard and the war paint on his face looks too bright and childish and he doesn't protest when she wipes it away with a cluck of her tongue.
She thinks she should say something about the thundering silence inside Davy Jones's chest, but his scaly lips smile a smile that make his slender blue eyes flash and dance like a spray of seawater and at his side, Winifred hums a music box's hymn and it sounds better than any heartbeat.
Cutlar Beckett gives her the black-pearl ring without meeting her eyes (Barbossa calls him on it and Beckett hisses something about hell) and Will Turner's dagger is motionless in its sheath, and she can count as many resemblances between him and the father who stands with him, tall and strong, as she can the gouges in her table.
And Jack Sparrow looks generally unforgiving and refuses to give her compass back, but he says, "You're coming with us now, savvy?"
So she does.
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Word Count: 2377
When Tia Dalma was twelve, she got a letter from her elder sister, written on the back of a rice sack.
She did not show her mother or her brother, but she did show her her best friend's sister, who was pretending to be a man so she could get a respectable job on a white man's ship. She agreed to take her up to Port Royal, because Tia Dalma had seen her secret in fish entrails and she was desperate enough. It didn't harm her to think Tia Dalma would tattle (and she did, eventually, but it was an accident).
She was nervous, almost, because it was partly her fault her sister had left. She hadn't meant to tell on her and the son of the Ghana tribesman, but it slipped out and she hadn't really thought they would put her on the first boat out over it (and it had been the first secret she ever felt should be kept and she failed).
There was red paint on her sister's teeth, and Tia Dalma couldn't stop staring at it because she was smiling so wide. She said some things, asked some things and seemed to get the answers she wanted, because she soon produced a gift.
Tia Dalma wasn't sure what its function was, but her sister showed her, looping the bracelet over one finger and then her entire wrist. It flashed up at her in the dim candlelight of The Pacing Steed, a blue-green like the sea inlaid in gold and she thought it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given her. Even if the golden links pinched at her skin.
"Why?" her sister echoed the question she didn't know she had asked, and smiled at her, ruby-red lips peeling and long, black eyes glittering and she couldn't help thinking poison. "I want the world to know what kind of person my petite cadette sister is."
Behind her, the aleman laughed, low and husky, and Tia Dalma's twelve-year-old instincts kicked at her like a frightened jackrabbit, and she got up and left, barely remembering to thank her sister for the jewelry and kissing her firmly on the cheek. She came away with white powder on her lips and a sick feeling in her belly. The bracelet was too heavy on her hand.
While she was sitting on the docks, watching the dark waters churn like the hate in her sister's eyes, she was found by some spirit-white sailor who said he liked that pretty piece of shiny on her wrist and what was she doing out here, all by herself, didn't she had a pap who'd look out after her and why are ye looking so scared, little cannibal girl, I ain't gonna do nothing to ye ain't shoulda been done on that there ship ye came in on, ain't nobody gonna miss ye a couple ticks more...
Later, when her best friend's sister pulled her into her longboat and frowned at her wet petticoats and the bruise-red fingerprints on her shoulder like teardrops, Tia Dalma pursed her lips closed and resolutely turned her back on Port Royal and thought of nothing but her mammy and her brother and the blue-green of the sea and the green-green of home.
Her wrist was bare.
She painted her lips and her teeth black after that.
~*~
The chain is delicate, but the pendant is not. The silver is heavy and it almost looks pregnant, until it spins and she sees a woman's frightened face cradled between fierce pincers and she thinks she might understand.
She does not tell this desperate, painted noblewoman that she does not actually live on Isla Cruses. she is merely visiting a family she placed here before the Spanish built their colony, or their pirate port, or whatever they thought this series of thatch-roof huts was.
However, it is not usually a good idea to tell spirit-white, rich people that the people you have begged Neptune to free from slaver's ships are living peacefully and happily right under their sunburned noses. She does not tell the noblewoman that it is a likely good chance she will lose this trinket when she returns to her bayou in Jamaica, and she doesn't think much of her besides, caring so much for this symbol of her wealth that she'll seek out a witch woman to protect it.
"What is your name?" she asks instead, letting her voice drawl with boredom to hurry her up.
"Winifred," the noblewoman replies in a rush, even though she doesn't have to. The moment Tia Dalma closed her hand around the necklace and its dainty chain, the name was screamed at her so loud she could still hear it ringing against the crevices of her skull. Winifred's eyes -- blue-green like the sea, encased by golden lashes and golden, shining skin and hair like midnight brushed with stars -- flicker like a hummingbird, timid and desperate. "Please, lass, can you keep it safe for me? I beg you. My heart's in there, and I cannot trust myself with it."
Tia Dalma shrugged noncommittally. She would probably barter it later. It may be worth something. Perhaps she can ask her former best friend's sister's son if there were any markets in China for Spanish silver when she returns home.
That night, the Spanish place of worship burns brilliant against the midnight brushed with stars. She can't bring herself to feel any particular grief about it.
A month or so later, she goes out into the graveyard and finds the cross, tall and upright, and traces her fingers over the beginning of the "W'. It takes her a moment to notice the corner of a sheaf of paper sticking out of the fresh-turned earth. The seal tells her it's from a pirate. The feel of it, pressing against her palm and against her heart, tells her it's a love letter.
She reads it, and tucks a dead woman's secret in neatly next to all the others she carries.
~*~
Davy Jones doesn't cry when she gives him the fat, ugly music box on its delicate chain. He doesn't cry or scream or throw it into the river. He just sort of blinks.
She wishes he would do something, because then she could focus on something other than the feel of this man's heart cracking all around her like a thousand stone walls coming down all at once.
~*~
The bonfire crackles and pops, and her tiny, toddling son shrieks in surprise and clings to her skirts and everyone gives a great shout of laughter.
Tia Dalma puts her hands under his armpits and scoops him up, and his sticky, starfish hands close around the lace border of her bodice and he twists his head to watch the fire, trying to be fearful and threatening by degrees.
"He's never seen a large fire like that before," she tells her former best friend later, when they're all sitting around with bellies full of cassava and seasonal fruit. The men are telling stories. The women are weaving and spreading paint on each other and trying to pretend this was ceremonial instead of just silly fun. "It's always too wet at home to get a good fire going."
She braids the corn husks together as well as she can with her son squirming restlessly in her lap, pushing at her elbows as if trying to get them to unlock, until she has a full, golden crown that she can dump on his head. He doesn't like it, and it catches in his curls when he tries to rip it out and she laughs while he fusses. She doesn't see her best friend complete a similar crown until she feels it being pushed down her skull.
She jumps, and the grown-up woman smiles at her sadly. "We don't want you to forget who your people are, Tia Dalma."
"I never could," she lies, because she already has. The fates saw to that, when her dead father sat down next to her for tea when she was ten and told her about her sister and the Ghana tribesman's boy. She tells secrets that should long be buried, and there is no market for them here.
Years later, she finds the crown, no longer quite so golden or so strong, pushed beneath a treasure chest she nicked from a sloop, and places it on top of her head, letting the frail maize leaves tickle across her temple. Her throat stops up.
Her grown-up son tells her it looks beautiful on her, and smiles a smile that makes his slender blue eyes flash and dance like a spray of seawater.
She has never told him how he is going to die.
~*~
Tia Dalma reacts quickly, snatching up a nearby letter opener and snapping him firmly across the wrist. He drops the drachma with an indignant "Oi!" like he was the one who had been wronged, and gives her what she assumes is an angry frown, though really it just makes him look little more than five years old.
"If you do not learn you keep your honey-coated fingers to yourself, Jack Sparrow, then you can forget about ever seeing your Wicked Wench again," she tells him severely.
He wrinkles his nose animatedly. "I really need to come up with a new name. The Wicked Wench was Beckett's idea." He rolls his tongue in and out of his mouth, like Beckett brought a foul taste to it.
She heaves an aggravated sigh. He was charming, in the way a thunderstorm was charming when one was caught without shelter. She really had no clue how to deal with him, and he never gave her any clues at all to what he was going to say or do next, and still, she gets the gut feeling that she was not going to be rid of him for years to come.
"There is a man who may be able to bring your ship back--" she begins, and he is swift to interrupt.
"If he can raise my ship from Davy Jones's locker, then he is no man."
"Owei, I could tell you that I speak of Davy Jones himself, but most people tend to react poorly when I do," she says wryly, watching Jack Sparrow's face crumple in the most telling expression she's ever seen on a human being in her entire life.
She doesn't tell him what Davy Jones's price is. She never has before. The fewer dead she hears in the back of her mind, the better.
But Jack Sparrow does wind up stealing a lot from her. Too much of her time (for one thing), not to mention her virtue (such as it is), a compass (which, technically, was a steal, even though he traded her a scrystone which turned out to be completely useless, but she didn't tell him that), and a ring. A ring that had belonged to King Edward of Spain, even; bulky and golden and embedded with the largest black pearl in existence.
It suited him fine, so she let him keep it.
She stole it back anyway, thirteen years later, and gave him a jar of dirt in trade.
Well, it made her laugh.
~*~
She is not invited to Elizabeth Swann's wedding, but she barters a ride from her dead best friend's sister's grandson to Port Royal anyway.
"I came to give you a gift," Tia Dalma says, without saying hello or asking any polite questions, and lifts the girl's veil.
The chain is thick and strong, and it will leave chafe marks on her collar bone, but the flower is cut from African diamond and Elizabeth bleeds when she presses her finger against it too hard. But her slender, blue-green eyes smile and she says nothing as Tia Dalma traces over the "P" burned into the spirit-white skin above her wrist, and then she goes and marries James Norrington.
After the ceremony, Tia Dalma finds herself in conversation with some poor bird named Giselle, whose eyes are too bright, long, and dark and whose lips are too red, and if she were to kiss her cheek her mouth would come away white with powder.
"Tell me a secret," Giselle says.
So she does.
She tells them all.
That night, she dreams of the dead, as she always does. This time is different. They are no longer nameless, screaming faces, but people, coming to her with hands outstretched.
Her father presses a crown made of golden maize onto her head and her best friend wipes away the bruise-red fingerprints on her shoulder like five separate teardrops.
Her son embraces her hard and the war paint on his face looks too bright and childish and he doesn't protest when she wipes it away with a cluck of her tongue.
She thinks she should say something about the thundering silence inside Davy Jones's chest, but his scaly lips smile a smile that make his slender blue eyes flash and dance like a spray of seawater and at his side, Winifred hums a music box's hymn and it sounds better than any heartbeat.
Cutlar Beckett gives her the black-pearl ring without meeting her eyes (Barbossa calls him on it and Beckett hisses something about hell) and Will Turner's dagger is motionless in its sheath, and she can count as many resemblances between him and the father who stands with him, tall and strong, as she can the gouges in her table.
And Jack Sparrow looks generally unforgiving and refuses to give her compass back, but he says, "You're coming with us now, savvy?"
So she does.