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Disinclined to Acquiese

by Virgo 79
August 23, 2006

"What d'ye mean, you aren't coming?"

Jack looked up at him and managed to achieve blistering contemptuousness while covered in blood and sand. "Sorry, mate, did I go too fast?" He tapped his hand against his own chest. "I'm." He shook his head slowly and emphatically. "Not." Two fingers pantomimed a pair of walking legs across the air in front of him. "Going." He jabbed a finger in Barbossa's direction. "With you." Jack flashed Barbossa a brilliant smile, and the graceful hand pointing at him rearranged itself into a different gesture.

Barbossa placed a boot heel between the eyes of his own temper and shoved it back down. He did not grab that graceful hand and squeeze until the bones gave way, but imagining the sound they would make if he did went a little way towards placating him. Not to mention that the Turner whelp was bound to show up any minute, and Barbossa had no intention of giving the brat a reason to scratch the itch for a little justifiable evisceration that he'd been nursing since they'd been on the other side of the Atlantic.

"Not that I'm personally opposed to leavin' ye here to rot, Jack, but that ain't an option, I'm afraid. Yer comin'." He took a step closer, looming over the seated man. "Understand, Jack, I made a bargain. I get to keep on treadin' the mortal coil, on the condition you are returned to it. Y'see, lad," Barbossa explained through half-bared teeth, "if you don't go, I don't get to stay. Your friend Tia Dalma was quite explicit on her terms."

"Oh, my deepest sympathies," Jack said scathingly. "Maybe if you ask her very nicely, she'll make sure you're dead before she buries you." He proceeded to tug off one of his boots and upend it, shaking out sand. He gave the heel a sharp rap, then glanced up at Barbossa again. "You can go now."

Barbossa refrained from speaking for the few moments it took him to assure himself he wasn't going to spontaneously bleed from both ears in pure fury. That grave-robbing, snake-charming, devil-eyed bitch was laughing herself sick over this, he was sure of it.

"Jack, pick your skinny arse up off that beach and come with me now, or I swear on everything holy and unholy I'll beat you `til you don't know right from left and drag you out of here by your neck."

Jack pulled his boot back on and brushed the sand off his hands. "Sod off."

Barbossa heard his own teeth grinding. All right, he'd tried asking nicely. And this sort of reaction was exactly why he'd never bothered doing things that way the first time he'd been alive.

Fighting dirty was much more efficient.

"You want to wait for the whelp and his wench to get here and convince you?" He shrugged one sharp shoulder indifferently. "As you like it, lad. They're quite beside themselves to see you, anyway, so the sooner the better, I suppose."

The defiant set of Jack's jaw didn't change, but through the frosty dismissal in his eyes swirled an eddy of something hotter, and Barbossa knew he'd found the angle at which to best twist his blade.

"We'll just wait `til they get here, and then you can tell them yourself why you won't be joining us. Best thing for them, really. Four months of mourning is more than bloody enough, don't you think, Jack? Time for them to get on with their lives." He shook his head and heaved a sigh. "They've been dismal company, I tell you. Just dismal. I'm half surprised the ship even sailed, carryin' such a weight as all that misery." He leaned in close to Jack, and watched hungrily for the pain he knew was curling its way up towards the open air. "You just set them straight when they come, Jack. I'm sure they'll thank you for it."

Jack's eyes flickered closed for the briefest of moments, then burned black and fathomless into Barbossa's venom-laced gaze. "I wonder what they'll do to you in hell, Hector," he said in a soft storm warning of a voice, "after you get sent back."

He meant it. Whatever lunacy was passing itself off as logic in Jack Sparrow's mind, the pigheaded little bastard meant to stay here. Barbossa could've screamed. He was about thirty seconds from the worst violence this place would allow him against someone already dead, and there was a twitch forming in the place between his shoulder blades where Will Turner would bury his sword if he didn't follow the steps of this dance precisely as they'd been laid out for him.

His foothold was precarious, his power was borrowed, and he, as those two hateful children had taken every opportunity to remind him, was expendable.

"Why?" he hissed, control slipping. "Do y'truly hate me so much you'd throw away your one chance to escape this place just to make me suffer?"

Jack barked with laughter at that; a sharp, jagged sound, like shattering glass. "Don't flatter yourself by thinking this has anything to do with you," he spit. "You're a bad smell in a strong wind, Barbossa; fast, foul, and forgotten." Jack stepped around him lithely, face sneering up into the taller man's every step of the way. "I'm not doing this to spite you. I'm doing it to spare them."

"Spare them what, exactly?" Barbossa growled. "'Cause it sure as hell ain't suffering. Not that I give a damn, personally, but I always thought avoidable cruelty wasn't your game."

Jack turned away, turning towards the dry, barren wind that never seemed to still in this forsaken place. It whipped his dark hair up, made him squint eyes that threatened to tear at its mercilessness.

"There's suffering," he said after a moment, "and there's suffering. And yes, I'll inflict one if it means preventing the other." Jack wrapped his arms around himself, fighting off a chill that had nothing to do with the air around them. "How long do you really suppose it would take Davy Jones to take up the hunt again, once I was back and breathing? If I go back, he'll find me. Sooner or later…" Jack closed his eyes. "He'll find me. And somewhere along the way, he'll find them, as well." He shook his head, hair snapping along his cheeks and in his eyes, then threw Barbossa a glance harsh as the sand in the wind. "So thanks ever so much for the rescue offer, mate, but I'm staying here. There was a reason I stopped running in the first place, savvy?"

Jack's feet had scarcely pointed themselves in the direction he planned to walk away in when a gnarled hand seized his shirtfront and yanked him forward. Barbossa's forehead cracked hard against Jack's, snapping his neck back. Barbossa's hold on Jack's shirt kept him from collapsing any farther than his knees as he went limp, and the grey-haired man took a moment to flinch and rub at his smarting brow with the hand that didn't have an unconscious pirate dangling from it.

"Try forgettin' me when you wake up from that one, you little bastard," he muttered, then leaned over and hauled Jack up over his shoulder. "And who said anything about an offer?"

~.~

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