Title: "The Edge of the Map"
Author: monimala
Fandom: POTC: DMC
Rating/Classification: PG, Jack gen (J/E-ish), filler scene, 400 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to the House of Mouse.
Summary: He'd warned her. Too bad he didn't warn himself. A filler scene for Dead Man's Chest.
He watches them fluttering about the deck. They chatter like magpies as they secure the rigging and billow out the sails so that they can catch the wind before the first flush of dawn. Even Mr. Cotton, who says not a word, seems to be bloody incessantly loud and Jack has half a mind to shoot the bird to be done with it.
Not nearly as satisfying as shooting the monkey, of course. But he'll take what he can.
Aye, he'll take what he can and leave what he can't.
Like Miss Maiden Not-So Fair tucked in the captain's bed.
He'd warned her. He's got no dress in his cabin. And she, being of an obnoxiously curious nature, had to come have a look-see for herself. She touched all of his things, hands all over the maps spread round his desk, dipping quill in ink and writing "here there be dragons" on the bottom of one and likely "Mrs. Elizabeth Turner" in loops and hearts on another.
"Oh, Jack," she'd sighed, twisting her hat in her hands--'twas fairly disgusting that she looked so fetching in a boy's get-up, wasn't it?--"Oh, Jack, why does this keep happening to us? To Will and I?"
"I don't think, darling, that twice is rightly a 'kept happening,'" he'd told her, hiding a lone tankard of rum behind a particularly hideous bust of some old dead Greek thinky fellow before dancing back across the boards. "If you and your eunuch get yourselves good and buggered a third time, then you've got a problem. Best to check for curses, savvy?"
"Sometimes…I think I am cursed already. I think I was born cursed." And she'd turned those eyes on him. It was bloody unfair that wenches had eyes on top of all their curvy parts and warm places. Eyes were a man's doom. Tears even worse. Chains dragging you straight to the Locker.
As if he's not sailing there fast enough already.
And now she's all cozy by her onesies in his linens. Worn. Sobbed out. And still tragically, metaphorically and literally virtuous.
He grinds his teeth, tastes gold dust as he stalks out atop the deck. He'd almost had her. Bosoms heaving against his arm and the like. But it's forever "almost" with Elizabeth. Almost, nearly, and approximate.
He'll take what he can. Leave what he can't.
And love only the constant sea.
--end--
August 3, 2006.