JACK SPARROW AND THE GIRL WITH BLUE HANDS

by Apache

Content:
Het
Graphic Sexual Situations
Violence

Running out from Tortuga on a westerly, skulking in the shoals near Montserrat... here was where jolly King George liked to ship some of his less convenient nobility, and they had a fine habit of carrying the family plate, the family bullion, and the family jewels along o' them. Heavy cargo that, added to a king's disdain, but the captain and crew of this lively galleon were benevolent men, and stood all times ready to help the aristocracy shed its tragic burdens -- wealth, ornament, perhaps even that heaviest weight of all, blood that ran straight back to a Conqueror. Family lines that ran back almost to the Flood had a sharp way of ending in the waters of these islands, and the blade that trimmed them tended to flash from the hands of Jack Sparrow....

Jack Sparrow and the Girl with Blue Hands

There were few pleasures to equal a good plunder, Jack Sparrow reflected.  Here he was, boots solid on the comfortably rolling deck of an English merchantman, pistol casually but accurately leveled at its cowardly pinkish pig of a Captain.  The man's numerous plump chins were quivering with outrage and fear, both emotions a source of great satisfaction to the pirate.

As were the pleasant tang of scorched black powder hanging in the air from the bastinado it had taken to persuade this wallowing pelican of a ship to heave to, and a pleasant glitter of gold, silver, the odd jewel, and decent armaments piling up on the deck as his men ran their questing, sticky fingers through the ship faster than lightning.

And that was just personal possessions - down in the hold, the crew had found  her cargo was gold, silver, Caribbee pearls, indigo and cochineal - money to spend, ornaments to keep if they liked, and good materials for the auction blocks at Port Royal or Kingston... a good haul.   Lucky.  There's nothing men on the sea like better than luck.  A lucky ship, a lucky captain.

Luck was not exactly what Jack Sparrow was famed for, unless you counted ill luck. 

Ay, not more than a month since, another pirate had remarked sympathetically that he'd no manner of luck whatever, climbing out of a jail cell whose stone wall had been opened by cannon fire from the Black Pearl as she raked Jamaica's stone fortress with eight pound shot.  Jack's cell had been given a bit of window, but no exit; nor had he been offered his freedom by two of pirate crew who came calling to his dungeon, mistaking it for the armory.  They'd simply laughed and left him to hang or rot, whatever fortune might bring.  No manner of luck at all.

The thought brought a small smile curling to Jack's lips; that night he'd been a man without a purse, without a ship, without a sunny day to look forward to, a man scheduled for the short drop and the long strangle.  Today was different.

Today, all was warm and happy on a gently rolling sea.  That selfsame vessel, Black Pearl, sailing under his wonted black skull flag again, was cradling easily in two-foot seas only a few feet away, grappled securely alongside, the better to shift cargo by.

Nothing was on Jack's mind, really,  but he did feel a slight tickling sense of the passage of time - wouldn't want one of His Majesty's gunships rolling sail-up on the horizon before they could offload all the goodies, would we, now.

He opened his mouth to growl "with a will, ye swabs!" at his expert crew purely on principle, but before he could form the words, the sound of a screech and a cry of "God's pitiful wounds!" floated up to the deck from below and abaft.  It had come from the captain's stateroom's open windows, and it was a pirate's cry and a female screech, therefore requiring, Jack instantly concluded, his personal presence.  He gave Gibbs the high sign to take command of the gathered officers, passing him his pistol, and swung down into the companionway. 

Belowdecks, he found Neddy Tree in the captain's quarters, all agog and at a standstill, a cutlass in one hand and a blanket in the other.  Tree was a reliable hand in the rigging, but had little more wit than one of his namesakes, and clearly he was fully flummoxed by the sight before him.

Which was, in simple, a naked and now silent female, crouching, knees in front of her, holding herself in a tight bundle -- and chained to the wall by an ankle.  The blanket must have been her only covering, just as the bucket for a chamberpot would have been her only comfort.  There was not so much as a stool for her sit on.

The sight brought Sparrow up short; he stood and took a long moment to consider the scene, his wild eye roving over the cabin, down to the chain, along that to the ankle held by its great shackle, and then generally over the still figure that was wearing it.  His eyes narrowed in thought, enhancing the darkness around them, and he brought his hands up almost to his face in a curious, prayerful motion, sketching what might have been a tiny bow before he spoke.

"Well, sweetheart," Jack said.  "I've been clapped in irons in my time, but never in the captain's cabin.  Dammee if this isn't an odd place to put a brig."

"A woman, Captain," Tree said belatedly.

Jack gave an exaggerated nod of the head.  "I must agree with you there, Tree.  Rather an uncommon one, wouldn't ye say?"

"Er," said Tree, but Jack already knew conversation wasn't his long suit.   Nor the woman's, apparently, her lips pressed together, seemingly disinclined to offer her view.

Not woman, really, but girl.  And yet no girl any more, in so many ways.

She was young in way of years, Jack deemed, but old in all others, her body worn and used-looking, her eyes worldweary, her hair shot through with tiny glints of silver over a face with the smooth features of youth but none of its careless relaxation.  Those shining glints were the only breaks in hue from all of her, which was glossy black, eyes, hair and and skin deeply black as a night sea under cloudy skies.  Even her scars were black, both the old - from the Middle Passage, Jack guessed -- and the newer --  the only gifts the New World had ever given her, no doubt.

Except her hands.

As her own eyes came up to search the silence, she saw where Sparrow's eyes were fixed.  Slowly, compellingly, she brought them in front of her, turned them outward to him - blue hands, palms and fingers, huge and long hands, big enough for a six-footer and more, long fingers and big hard knuckles that might have been ungainly but were instead halfway unnatural, these hands of an exquisite deep blue, a fathomless blue, an indigo - these were the night sea quiet under a clear sky and a bright moon; these were like the hands of a water goddess.

A cargo of indigo indeed.  Jack's thought flickered to the plump captain with the apoplectic complexion, no doubt still quivering with indignation and calling the pirates 'scallywags' up on deck.

Loaded your truckage and picked up a little trinket for yourself, didn't you, mate?  For the hands told Jack where she'd gone after she'd been ripped from West Africa.  Her passage had taken her to Virginia, maybe, or the British Carolinas, somewhere on those little longshore islands that ran from Maryland to Georgia colony, and to the hot pots where the indigo plant became indigo dye.  He'd heard tell the plant turned the dyemaker's hands, but this was his first seeing of it and it affected him with far more than mere curiosity.  Blue hands... ocean hands...

With the hands lifted off her and loose from her knees, there was more of a night sea goddess about her to see, a tall body thin but yet made of small curves, not angles, one that looked like the night goddess he'd seen painted on walls in Araby, almost a snake of a girl, feet and hands large, hips and shoulders thin, a long neck rising to a broad jaw, expressionless black eyes, a wide nose, and below it, a wide mouth that might encompass -- oh, anything a man cared to offer it.

Jack's appearance could easily have seemed as compellingly strange to her.  His head had cocked far to one side as he considered the girl and her predicament, loosing his long bead chain to jingle slightly and glitter with the sunshine from the stern lights, big windows that swung inward to make the captain's quarters the freshest room in the ship. 

But his eyes were dark even against his deeply sea-tanned skin, and darker still for the half inch of kohl that outlined and adorned them.  His wildly braided and twisted hair, could he have known it, looked to the girl on the floor like the wigs attached to witchdoctor masks in the home village she no longer clearly remembered.  And his hands were like no man's hands, half-serpent, half-bird in their strange restless fluttering.

"Out, Tree."   There was a harsh edge in his voice that he hadn't meant to put there.

Tree nodded; it was what he expected, and what he would have done.

"The door, Tree," Sparrow added, and Tree nodded again; a man likes his privacy guarded if he can get it.  Taking a last gander at her as he passed through the door, Tree saw that the female knew, too; her body both tensed and sagged as she accepted her knowledge.

A long minute went by as the cabin rocked gently, the light reflected in off the sea through the open windows, bouncing in all directions off the dozens of panes as it came in.  Jack Sparrow stood, gently swaying as the shipped rolled, a hand at his chin idly pulling at the two thin braids of his beard.  His eyes looked all but unfocused, but he was seeing her, feeling her - he felt her presence like the air, somehow.  The sight of her enlarged on him, was also a kind of seeing of the sea, was not just a naked woman crouched on a warm bare floor, one ankle chained with heavy iron, the weight of which his own flesh knew well...

A thought struck Jack, and he went to the door and opened it fractionally.

"Your cutlass, Tree," he said, and a hand with a cutlass came through the opening, and then the hand but not the cutlass pulled back through.  Jack closed the door and turned back to the crouched woman, holding the cutlass loosely in his right hand.

Her face startled him; even chained animals prefer to live, and he'd thought to find fear and soothe it with words.  But there was no fear, no misery even, just the silken shine of the large black eyes seeing him come near with a great blade in his hand.

Once he stood over her,  the blade hissed up in into the air - and froze, as Jack's afterthought had an afterthought of its own.  "A bird in the hand," he muttered, "a bird in the cage . . . is well worth . . . ."  He let the thought fall away as softly as the blade, which he set down quietly on the chart box, well out of reach.

Through all this, no reaction but one slow clenching and unclenching of the blue hands. Again he stood over her, extending his own hands.

 "Let's have them, then," Jack said.

No resistance, but no terror, either.  She simply lifted her hands and set them down on his.  They were bigger than his and he stared down on them: hard, big-knuckled with work, scored with tiny cuts and burns, and even close up, blue blue blue, darker in the wrinkles of the knuckles, paler over the bone, deepest of all over what must have been the pink of the palms... even in the nail beds, there was blue, a shallower blue --

Sparrow's whole body quickened - his nostrils flared for a quick sharp intake of breath, his lips broke apart, his thighs ran hot with a sudden flush of sensitivity that made him feel his loose, soft trousers as heavily as the shackle that bound her bony ankle.  Everyone called him mad, but he knew it was only in moments such as this that he was truly beyond help, moments as now when there was only a single thing in the universe, and that one thing must be had... a door to be opened, a treasure to win, the Black Pearl to be regained - and now there was only blue, both under his eyes and raging in his mind, raging through his body --

"Up," he said.  "Up, now."

Again he heard the harsh note in his voice, but the gesture offered with it was loose and languid, a gentle rising, his fingers curling slightly, and he gave her a smile, a glitter of the gold teeth behind the coarse black mustache and small, pursed mouth -- it was description as well as command.

The girl was rising, still unafraid.  To her this was no novelty, just a change -- as it almost was for Jack, just the newest variation on an eternally sweet theme, and he was reaching for the trouserflap buttons, beginning the old melody, and yet --

Blue hands.  He wanted blue hands on him.  On his body, not doublet or sash or trousers, but skin to skin, blue to weathered olive deeply tanned, blue on him.

He stepped back half a step.  Little short of his own height, the girl was thin and powerful in front of him, gleaming black in all the blue and yellow and brown of the captain's cabin and the light off the sea.  She watched, wearily, warily, and all too wisely, as he began to pull away his layers.

There was so much -- the wide leather belt and equally wide baldric with its sword and reserve pistol came first, then the jacket, shrugged off,  then the doublet, tugged by its flaps out the snug wrap of the sash, then a tug at the shirt as he slipped an elbow out of its sleeve and began to lever it up over his head -- it pulled and pulled, but now a loop of sash came with it and tightened, and his arm was bound over his head, his elbow stretching the doubled-over shirt to its limit and binding his hand so there was no way forward and no way back; the damn shirt was doubled over his face and tied over his shoulder, and one of his accursed bead swings and some hair had rolled into the tangle.

He paused.  He was a rational being and a pirate, a man of parts and resources, a rogue to fear and obey, and a man such as that could get his shirt off.  Somewhere on the other side of all this faded linen was a woman he would possess, and that was another reason to deal promptly.

He shifted the elbow, looking for wiggle room, looking for the way to slip the elbow down his side again, but there was no give in the shirt, and no way past the sash.  He brought his other hand up, trying to slide the sash up to the elbow, then, but that seemed only to pull the sash tighter, wound around the linen as it was.  He shoved with his elbow.  He shoved again, harder,  feeling the fabric stretch.  If it stretched out just a bit more, the sash might slide right along it... he pushed.  He pushed.

He pushed so hard he hopped and stamped his feet on the floor, once twice three times, halfway to frenzy, and finally, with a sound of seams popping, the damned thing came over his head, tearing what felt like half his hair away with it, but off.

As the pieces of fabric finally cleared his face, all his dozens of long rolls of black hair settled back on his shoulders and his beads swinging down with their familiar tinkling, he heard the girl:  she laughed.  Brought a blue hand up to mostly cover the flash of teeth in her lovely soft mouth, and laughed  at him.

He took a fast, heavy step forward, and now at last her face showed fear.  Most men would rather be killed by a woman than laughed at by her, and in these waters there was little forgiveness from any quarter for offending a man's pride.

But Jack Sparrow was not of that ilk.

"No, sweetheart, don't be afraid," he said softly, moving in closer.  He reached out gently to take the blue hand away from her mouth.   She looked at his arm - thin but sailor-strong, burned to brown in the sun, the branded P long faded white, and above the blue tattoo of a bird wild over the open seas and above that the King of the Ocean with his trident and chariot drawn by raging white horses, manes foaming like storm seas...

"You savvy?" he said, voice still very soft.  "No harm in a laugh, and much good.  If there's still a laugh in you after this," he gestured to the chain, "then let's have it."

He didn't really fancy she spoke English, but he kept talking as he moved in on her, just as he might do if there were a wild mermaid somehow before him.  His voice became ever quieter as he got closer and closer, and his black-rimmed eyes turned dense and shadowy.  He licked his lips and said almost in a whisper, "give us a kiss, then...."

God, what lips.  Soft, wide, plump as a hen, the crazy thought came to his mind.  You could lean your whole weight on these lips, they were so deep.  He sent his tongue between them, tasting, pushing and sliding along their wonderful texture, their wonderful sharp-cut, outward turning edges, the beauty of an African mouth.

And he was still holding the hand he'd drawn away from hiding her smile.  Now he put it on his naked chest, square over his left nipple, and held his own hand over it, rubbing it up and down, blue as the sea, the great single ocean of the world.  The only place he really loved, bluewater with all land down beyond the horizon, nothing but clouds to fool a man's eyes for mountains, and his own ship sailing free over it wherever his will or even his whim took him.  Blue on his flesh, blue touching....  His little man's nipple hardened to a pip, and he kept rubbing her hand there as he launched his tongue deeper in her mouth, tasting vague salt and vague run, ocean tastes, sliding his tongue over her big teeth, his hand sliding the blue hand over his chest, hairless and smooth as a boy's but for the odd cut and scar here and there....

There was no resistance in her, but no give, either; she was nearly a living statue, with the extraordinary expressionless black eyes to complete the illusion.

Was there anything in the world she loved or hated anymore, any bit of secret self she had carried intact through the story that was written on her flesh? Jack thought he'd never seen a waking woman be so still, and kissed her face, gentle kisses enjoying the wonderful finely-made edges and corners of her mouth.

He brought his free hand up to follow the lines of her face, her jaw, her cheek, the smooth forehead over the wide eyebrows, the delicately fleshy lobe of one ear... there was an old piercing there; perhaps as a girl on the other side of the world, she'd had an ornament, some present from a mother or father.  Yet even as he touched that, hoping to touch some memory of feeling, there was nothing, no sign of reaction.

Yet she had laughed....

He pulled half an inch back from her face.  "Don't want to play, love?" he asked.  He gave it a moment, and answered for her, "well, you're a slave, not a whore, eh?"   Gave a quick grin, quick flash of those gold teeth he was so proud of, and saw nothing but the grin reflected against the blackness of her eyes.   It bounced back at it hard as a slap, harder than a slap for all that it was just nothing.

"Ay then, my pretty one," he growled, and now the harsh note was just what he meant, "shall we do our bit of business?"

He took his hand off hers and wrapped both his arms around her body, pressing her hard against him, against his cock, still hard and upright with the promise of good things.  His tongue forced itself back,  deep into her mouth, his thin lips all but swallowed in pillowy ones, his thin sharp nose pushed sideways again the softly curving plain of hers.

And in the same moment, his hand went down; he released himself and reached over to push her legs to a straddle, push against the wall, his own legs in a wide stance, both for balance and to give him a good brace to hold from if she showed any fight; it sometimes came in the very last moments like this, another thing about women Sparrow loved and lacked the slightest understanding of-  does the mouse, then, never know when the cat well and truly has it?   But there was no fight, and he pushed her against the wall, ready and open for him, his cheek laid against hers now with a little jingle from the dangle, his fingers finding the tight little curls of a black woman's private hair, moving past, feeling for her particular gate to paradise --

Something a little different down there, but not different enough to make a difference; he found her hole and reached to bring his cock to it; he smelled her hair, salty and oily, and touched his face to it, soft and nappy, curled in a million little corkscrews; the tip of his cock slid over the little stub, to the beginning of the littler lips, still that slightly odd sensation, still not enough difference, not the little bubbles of the pox, though little would it have stopped him if it were; down or up between the small lips, a little farther, fingertips helping cocktip, his body slammed against hers with her hand caught between them, blue hand on his tit, and her small soft tit against the other, nipple not even hard, after all, this was her whole existence, naked woman chained to a man's wall --

He got even harder just thinking of it, if that was possible, and in that instant his tip slid past the guiding fingers into the great dark sanctuary of her cunt.

The trick in these situations was not to fire your wad right away -- it was so sweet and your balls were so aching and hard and that great moment of entrance worked powerfully on a man but -- but in the end, it was a professional challenge, really, Jack Sparrow had always thought, and because he was a great and famous pirate in every way, it was a challenge he'd met and conquered.

There was no creamy explosion, no, but he groaned, because this was more -- blue hands, blue awash all through his mind and spirit - he pressed against her and started; once, hard, his bootheels lifting with the effort, banging her against the wall and his grunting and his heels slamming down loud; so deep in her, feeling the shape of it, the little curve, the little bumps standing out, she wasn't wet but he'd make her so, another hard thrust, hot sword into her vitals, so much to touch, to feel with her all but dry...  He brought one hand up to cup her little breast, and now smelled both his juice and the little of hers on it, sticking the fingers in his mouth --

"We make a nice sauce, sweetheart," he told her, and her eyes widened as they hadn't when he entered her -- did she know English after all, then? -- "won't you have a taste?"  He offered the fingers, slid them onto her lower lip and then, without resistance, into her mouth, oh lovely wet mouth -- she licked once at the fingers and wrinkled her nose-  well, there's something she hasn't done, then -- he smiled at her, sliding his wet hand back down on the small breast, cupping and caressing its curve, leaned his head next to hers, smelling her neck now, her hair -- and now he had full command, now he could go slow.

A rhythm of thumping known everywhere on earth started then, the wall giving and returning, her back swaying toward and from, his hips coming upward on hers, and the easy back and forth, it was a kind of travel, a voyage into deeper, a journey into quickening and slowing, and out of time itself, and she grew wet from him and there were sucking noises as he went in and out -- she was passive, but he was used to that, too; he was used to everything a woman could do with her cunt, so he thought -- and it could never be bad, this endless passage toward the only real infinity, the mystery inside a woman, the magic there.  Her cheek was none too soft; it had been a hard outdoor life for her as for him, but it was a woman's cheek and he loved to slide his face along them, loved to curl his long thin fingers around their breasts, like the little one with its finally hard black nipple under his hand now, loved the wrinkles in a woman's nipple -- and there was, too, this blue hand trapped between them, blue over his heart, sweating as he was sweating, the need getting stronger and stronger, turning to agony, harder, further, harder -- the slams against the wall came faster and faster and he groaned and huffed with the power of it within him, this need to be - There, wherever There was --  paradise --

He came hard, like a beast overcome with its mating. And in it, she moved for the first time, as he slammed in almost without pulling back between times, running her into the wall, crushing her against it, he felt her raise her free arm --  and with pirate speed, grabbed the upper arm without looking or thinking and slammed it too against the wall. But she wasn't striking; the blue hand that landed on his back, wet now with sweat from his straining, was wide open, and it was a wide palm and splayed fingers that landed on his back and slipped a little down to his waist, a slide of blue said something his mind, triggering a last flurry of helpless bucks.  But finally the ecstasy subsided, and the delicious last echoes of coming, spirals of pain and satisfaction, dwindled in his body.

"Ahhhhhhhh."  A sigh, groan, some fundamental completion.  For a long moment, he stayed where he was, slumped against her body and between her legs, breathing heavily in her neck, inside the blanket of his thick hair, his nose tucked in below her ear, smelling musk, sweat, a little drift of wind from open cabin windows.

And felt himself slide out of her, fall out almost, his eager volunteer reduced to a hammocky loafer, yet still sensitive, still feeling the gliding, feeling her hole close over him down the length of the tip, and it slumped there between her lips -- and again there was that strange scratchy feel, the difference....

Jack tipped his head back from hers, his hair and beads falling back over his shoulder with a soft jingle from one bead.  He rested his head on the bone of her shoulder, just briefly, just for a breath of sweet sea air with the small trace of woman in it, eyes closed, hands still on her to warn him if she tried something -- but even with a cutlass in the room, what could a chained woman do?  He felt the lift of her breathing, so different from his, calm and even, not the least ragged, not even as agitated as it might get if she needed a rotten tooth pulled.

God, if a woman loved you back... if a woman would fuck you back for that....  He gave himself another moment of dreaming of that, for he'd had it, and knew to value what he'd lost, but that was long ago, far away, and dead.  And this was good, tasty, good enough especially when it came with the open sea...  No use lingering....

He stepped back from her, caught the trouser flap by its two outer buttons and rolled his exhausted recruit back to its usual resting place, doing up the middle button and giving the fabric a shake to complete his decency.  Head lolling slightly, as hips did also, he regarded his not-so-fair lady admiringly, giving her a flashing up and down from under the black eyelids and a slow-growing grin.

The girl had crossed her arms over her waist and pulled her legs closer together, but still there was no sign of reaction in her face.  A little pinkish trickle ran down along one thigh, seemingly unnoticed.

"Well, back to business, then, eh?"  He reached out for the cutlass, took a quick step toward her, raised it, and as before, had a second thought and set the weapon aside.

"Actually, give us a look at that other," he muttered, going to the chained girl and squatting before her.  He reached his hands forward to push her legs apart again, but lost his balance and fell backward, splayed on the floor.

 "Apologies," he said, abashed as if he'd done something unmannerly, "a little inconvenience there."  He gave her a polite bob of his head that set his beard-braids swinging and his bead to jingling, then climbed up to his knees and leaned his body down in front of her, reached his hands out and parted her legs.  As before, the girl offered no resistance to his manipulation of her limbs; she stood steadily, compliant with his handling.

Jack bent his head, trying to catch a glance at what had struck him odd.   He bent over in a curve, craning his neck back up, then put one hand down and with the other, picked up the girl's right leg and slung it over his shoulder, still straining to see.   The girl took a short hop as her balance was disrupted, but otherwise her posture didn't change; her arms wrapped around her waist, the big blue hands all but out of sight under them.  And it was other things Jack was concerned with now.

Not enough light.  He picked up the leg again, and put her right foot on his shoulder, trying to get an angle.  Sea light bounced through the windows onto the blond wood floor and danced all over the cabin, even into this corner.  Still not right.  He reached up with both hands now, setting them on her hips,  twisting her around about a quarter turn, which she managed, hopping, her right foot still on his shoulder where he put it.

"Dark down there, damn dark," he muttered.  "A mirror would help things here."  Not having a mirror about his person, he looked by touch, putting the fingers of his right hand up into the girl's cunt and feeling for what he remembered.  And found it, all along the lips, all along the inside. "Right, then, there we are, mate."  He splayed his fingers to push back the flap of smooth black skin with small knots of hair, and found a chamber of horrors.

Women from Africa were often cut, but it was just the one cut.  It took away their feeling zone, and it was some Mohammedan practice from below the deserts, because they didn't do it to their women in Araby.  But this was no religious practice.  Razor cuts everywhere, and burns everywhere, and torn holes, and all fresh within a month or two.  Pinholes, and then because the bastard hadn't gotten enough blood or screams or whatever his black soul needed from those, nailholes.  He must have fucked her bleeding dozens of times, widening the new, reopening the old, closing them with fire....

"Not the pox," he muttered to himself, remembering his thought. "Not the pox."  He let his head droop for a moment, then looked back.

This was his woman, at least right now she was, and someone besides him had hurt her.   He ran a hand down his face, holding at his chin, thinking, except no thought would come.  Looked up again at the horror of red raw flesh.  The burns would have been a mercy, really, frying the ability to feel out of her flesh.  The Pearl hadn't picked up a ship's surgeon yet, but no matter, there was no doctoring a mess like this.

What happened next he could never explain, even if he had been the kind of man who looked backward.  He put his face, his mouth, right up to the destroyed flesh, his fingers still gently holding it open to the light, and did what a mother might do, kissed it to make it better.  Soft as a snowflake.  Kissed again,  in a slightly different place, and brought the tip of his tongue to clean the blood and come away.  Licked it a little more, for luck.  And a little more, for more luck, and because it tasted good.  Again and again, soft as an oyster on the tongue, and for sauce this juice that was him and her and her damage, over all the hurt places, his tongue, far better than his eyes, could find them and wash them and fluff them a little with a kiss.  He would pull his lips closed against the skin, then push them open again, and lick to smooth, lick to soothe.

His eyes were closed and he was almost startled when the tip of his nose touched her hole; he hadn't realized he was deep against her.  And more, that she was weighing on him, that her legs and hips had lost their rigidity, that she had slid a little down the wall, onto the caressing, the cleansing.  So he rubbed her with his nose a little, and rocked his head forward, finding the little nubbin that was often gone from Africans, a little rock of scar tissue now, but he kissed and cleaned and smoothed it too, licked deep around its outlines and sucked at it a little, and now she slid all at once onto his face, and past as they both fell to the floor.

Jack Sparrow had landed clear away from her on his back in a fighter's reflex.  He pulled himself to one elbow and looked at her, his face lathered with blood and come, moustache and beard flecked with it, and his eyes inside their black outlines blurry and dark.

So no one had ever done this to her, either.  She had probably still been fresh when Captain Pig abovedecks bought her, and he seemed a man of a single, simple taste.  Jack, schooled in many mysteries by the girls of Tortuga, knew this gave many women pleasure, but that had not been his thought- there had been no thought when he began.

The girl's mouth was open a little as she looked at him, lower lip hanging loose.  Her eyes were blurry too; she had cried a few tears.  Pain, pleasure?  But now she was just staring dully.  Did it hurt?  And what it would that be?

Jack rubbed his hand on his face again, then pulled it away, blinking into the present, realizing what he'd covered it with.

"Let's see ambergris try cases with this perfume, eh?" he said, but the joke was hollow.  She wasn't going to laugh anyway, not speaking English or, apparently, anything.  He noticed one last tear following the streak down her face.

"You know, love, I know just how you feel," he said sympathetically.  "What you want is a bit of rum to set you right."  His eyebrows rose a little and his eyes rolled in thought.  "Set anything right, really."

He stood up and went to the chest where he'd left his clothes and Tree's cutlass.  He looked at them, then started with the vest and put them all on again, except the torn shirt, which he used to rub his face fairly clean and then stuffed into his sash.

"Now then," he said, and picked up the cutlass a third time.

Once again he strode toward her and raised it, but this time he brought the blade flashing down -- even as he noticed that this time she reacted, shrinking away from it -- and this time he slammed it through the chain that held her to the wall.   The manacle could come off later, but Jack Sparrow hated a chain on a human being.   A chain on someone else could be a chain on him tomorrow, and probably would.   In fact, Jack hated a chain on anything but an anchor, but when you're about to take a woman by force is not the opportune moment for loosing her bonds, so he'd put the cutlass by until now.

The girl's eyes were at their widest.  She stared first at the broken link, then at Jack, who was still holding the cutlass.

"Come along, then, sweetheart," he said to her, reaching out his other hand.  She brought her left  hand up to meet his, her huge blue hand.

Jack took it and froze, again seeing something in its sheer size, the deepness of the blue.  He turned it over, looking at its bluest color of all, the wide, accepting palm, cupped like the hollow of displacement waiting for a hull to fill it.

It was called the wine-dark sea in stories he'd heard, which made little sense to him since bluewater was blue, but here was the color itself, the impenetrable color that was blue and was not.

And it was part of this woman, or girl, or whatever life had left to her to be.

He led her to the bank of windows that were open to the sea.  "Look out there, darlin', see it?  Fierce blue, to the farthest horizon."  He pointed out the window, tapped her hand and pointed out the window again.  "See how they're the same?"  He looked into uncomprehending eyes.  "Look -- no chains on the sea,  no cages, no borders - no one can bind the ocean, love.  That's why--"

There was a sound outside, and Jack turned his head to catch it.

"What be keepin' him?" 

It was a pirate, and he heard Tree answer, "Blast ye, what d'ye think?"  But then Tree dropped his voice to what he considered a discreet level and added, "It's been mortal quiet in there, mate.  There was some work done, aye, but since that..." silence, and Jack knew some expressive face was being made. 

"I appear to be both delaying and disappointing my crew," he remarked, looking aghast.  "Well, one's soonest mended, anyway."  He jumped up and down, hammering his bootheels on the floor with increasing speed, shaking the walls and bringing dust up between the planking.

He heard the pirates outside snort.  "Waited to have a second go, he did."

"Us'll be captains someday," said the other, and they laughed. 

Jack stopped jumping, and made a quizzical face towards the door.  "I very much doubt that that will be the case," he murmured, with a thoughtful tilt of the head.

"Didn't last long, did  'ee?"

"You bloody tell 'im that," grunted the other one.

Jack smiled.  Turning away from the door, he picked up the blanket Tree had pulled off the girl and draped it over her shoulders; she immediately pulled it close around herself.  Taking one blanketed arm,  he steered her to the door and opened it. "What're ye doing lingering here, you scurvy dogs!" he roared, and they ran up the companionway.

Arriving on deck, he roared a little more, "Tree, you negligent goat, forgot yer cutlass, did ye not!"  The abashed pirate came forward for his weapon, and Jack held his hand out toward Gibbs.

"I'll have me popper back."   Once possessed of the pistol, he turned to the merchantman's captain, whose eyes were shifting quickly back and forth between Sparrow and the slave girl.

"Captain... Captain...." Jack's face expressed concern.  His pistol described spirals in the air as his hand waved in confusion.

"Outerbridge, you villain," said the merchant captain.

"Outerbridge, that's it!" The pistol sketched a small bow.  "Your pardon, sir.  If you would?"  Jack beckoned gently, and Gibbs let him come forward.

"Your first mate a good seaman, then, Captain Outerbridge?" he asked.  The merchant captain stared.

"WELL, IS HE?" Jack roared, abruptly right in the man's face.

"He is, yes," the Englishman allowed, after a moment to recover his power of speech.  Jack nodded, and his little beards bobbed as he walked back to his previous place.

"I'm a merciful fellow," Jack announced to him, his tone once again reasonable.

Even as his own crew was turning to see if Captain Sparrow had really told such a remarkable lie, Jack leveled his pistol and pulled the trigger, dropping the man dead to the deck.  Jack stood over him, then kicked the corpse, hard.

"That's mercy, you filthy dog," he said.

With no other word, he turned, and reached again for the arm of the girl with the blanket drawn tightly around her.  She stared wildly at him, but he did nothing more but touch her lightly to steer her to the gangway.   Without a word, he led her across to the Black Pearl, his crew gaping and muttering after him.

AnaMaria, who always had an idea about everything, came forward and snapped at him.  "No slaves aboard ship, it's your own rule, curse you."

Jack reared his head back, enormously affronted that AnaMaria should think he'd break his own ship's articles.  He pursed his mouth and looked down his long nose at her.

"This is no slave," he said.  His remark was punctuated by a small clank from the ankle iron.

AnaMaria pursed her mouth even tighter than his.

Jack's head came down and he used his command voice.

"We are carrying her to Tortuga.  Find  her some clothes, find her a bed, find her a meal, she'll use the stateroom."  It was the biggest room on the ship, and the Black Pearl's single most elegant feature.  He paused for a moment, surveying his lewdly grinning crew.  "And know this, all of ye!"  He drew his words out.  "She... is... a... prudent... woman."

Which made it death to touch her, or even offer to, even for the Captain himself.  Which made her a virgin or a virtuous wife, never to be offended.  The grins vanished in an instant.

"Mad Jack," muttered a pirate, his voice tinged with awe.

"Smell fish, do ye?" muttered another, but not for the captain to hear.

"Take her, AnaMaria," said Jack, and his first mate moved to obey.

"And find her some rum," Jack shouted as afterthought, waving his arm after them.

"MAKE READY TO CAST OFF," he shouted to the crew, though likely they'd been ready this half-hour.  The few men still aboard the merchantman at last came across, their pistols leveled at its officers, and they moved to the swivel-guns to make sure of the other ship's continued good behavior as the grapnels were drawn back, the gangway was taken in and the Pearl prepared to get underway.   The rest of the crew scattered to the braces and rigging, and Jack Sparrow turned to take his wheel.

Tortuga... she'd have to be a whore, of course, but a whore was the freest of women, and anything was better than being a slave.  Or could she turn pirate?  AnaMaria had, but AnaMaria was Caribbean born, knew these waters as well as a fish, knew sails and rigging as well as a fisherman, and could gut either a fish or a man in seconds with any blade you chose.

The girl had turned and come back before AnaMaria could lead her below.  Jack looked down at her from the wheel, where he was already standing with one hand, ready to point his ship into the horizon.

He looked down at her.  She was looking at the sea, and her hand, and finally up to him.

"Perhaps I mend that shirt for you," she said.

~ Return to "Pirates of the Caribbean" ~

~ Return to Apache's Archive ~