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The first thing you need to be a pirate, Elizabeth learns, is not a hat, or a sword, or a treasure, but luck. Half the profession, it seems, is just being in the right place at just the right time. Be it the deck of a ship, rollicking on the waves in the smoke and the fog as a half-drowned boy floats by on a shard of wood. Be it the top of a terrace in the scorching sun, the water waiting with open arms to catch you below, and call your next life to meet you. Be it the wrong end of a gun with just the right coin in your pocket. It’s all luck.
For a long time, Elizabeth didn’t think she had any luck. Or that which she did have did not belong to her, smuggled away in a bedside drawer, inspected only in the candlelight, alone in her rooms. No, bad luck was her birthright. She was a motherless, headstrong, yearning, lonely only daughter of a politician. It couldn’t be luck, to be watched so closely, preened and plucked and peered at like a parrot in a gilded cage. What good were her wings, in a cage like that?
But she could sing, like any good parrot. Only she chose all the wrong songs, songs that made her father and her governesses squint down their noses at her in dismay. But the words promised her a different world, of wide blue skies and wide blue seas, and she couldn’t stop tasting them on her tongue, salty and perfect, or stop them slipping past her lips into the winds, to whatever ears might be listening. No matter if it was bad luck, or good.
Yo-ho, yo-ho.
It’s bad luck to have a woman on board. It might be worse luck to have a woman as Pirate King. What does Elizabeth know of war?
But she does know of being a prisoner. And what she might do to never be one again.
Sao Feng, like all pirates, has foul breath. It makes Elizabeth’s eyes water even as she spits through her teeth. “Pretty speech for a captor. But words whispered through prison bars lose their charm.”
He thinks her a wrathful goddess. Not yet, a voice whispers at her ear, but to whom it belongs, she doesn’t know.
“Then I shall take your fury,” Sao Feng declares, and Elizabeth almost laughs. As if her fury could ever be taken from her.
The second thing any good pirate has, to tuck in their waistband and keep the powder dry, is a secret.
Jack Sparrow already has luck in spades, if luck means hair-brained schemes and a penchant for swinging around on ropes seemingly attached to thin air. But secrets? Well. Elizabeth fears for the pirate who ever unravels whatever it is Jack’s hiding.
She once thought maybe Gibbs had an inkling, or Barbossa, or perhaps even Will had learned it, in his time alone with Jack as they chased the Pearl, but eventually she realized Jack is much like the very sea they sail upon: so much more beneath than you ever glimpse on the surface, the surface that tries to dazzle you in the sunlight to make you scowl and look away, trick you not to look deeper.
It is a revelation, she supposes, the day she discovers Jack cannot die. Cannot age. Has not aged. That Jack isn’t human, not like her and Will. Or, like Will used to be. By some twist of destiny, or plain bad luck, Elizabeth keeps falling in love with men who then become more myth than man. Though perhaps Jack was always more myth to begin with, and she’d only imagined the man. Either way, they all fall through her blood-dripping fingers, to clatter against the treasure below. You can’t hold a myth. A myth can’t hold you.
(Calypso knows as much, and watches Elizabeth with a pity that Elizabeth cannot bear.)
And yet there is Jack. Who feels real enough, to Elizabeth. He feels like the wind, pulling your sails the way they ought to go. He feels like the sand in your bodice you can never entirely shake out, and the longer it’s there, the nearer you let it to your heart, the more it wears you down. He’s coarse and scalding and made of a million broken pieces, but he makes you soft.
She understands, eventually: Jack was raised by the Code, its gospel like a cruel bedtime story. Any man that falls behind is left behind. But Jack never could leave anyone behind, and eventually, no one else could leave him behind, either. Elizabeth tells herself she is an exception.
Elizabeth tells herself a lot of things.
Killing Jack is a quick decision. She doesn’t let herself think twice— after all, he can’t die. That’s his secret. This isn’t really the end, just the right place and the right time. Right?
She kisses him, and tells him as much, without as many words. “I’m not sorry.”
Jack smiles, silver and knowing. There is salt on her lips.
Elizabeth accuses Jack of being a good man, and in turn, he brands her a pirate.
With the keys to the cage, and the devil to pay…
The third thing you need to be a good pirate is the thing you don’t need at all.
Which goes against the doctrine of a pirate, really, at first glance. But the less you have of this particular thing, the better you fare. And it is this one thing that Jack Sparrow has too much of, and can never rid himself of, and that is why he, without a doubt, is the worst pirate you will ever hear of.
The thing you do not need is remorse.
Envy, anger, hatred, love so fierce it makes you sick with it: Jack and Elizabeth have enough of these to waterlog and sink any vessel on the seven seas. But remorse? Guilt? And, worse, forgiveness? Mercy? Elizabeth doesn’t have a speck. The world has never shown Elizabeth mercy— mercy abandoned her when she sat kneeling in the rain in a wedding dress. Mercy mocked her when she watched her father drift off into a waveless oblivion. Why should she show the world a single drop of mercy in return?
“Against the cold, and the sorrow,” Calypso says, as she offers a mug, after Elizabeth has just killed a man in cold blood. She takes it, but she does not drink. She knows she is undeserving of the warmth it has to offer. She has found herself at odds yet again. She cannot show mercy, and yet there’s Jack, who was— is, she pleads, to whoever is listening — deserving of nothing less.
She looks at Will, who has looked at nothing and no one else since she climbed down into the longboat, a lifetime before. Yet another good man, and terrible pirate, deserving of mercy. And he gets Elizabeth instead, for her sins.
Careful, she wants to warn him. Not all shipwrecks are wood and canvas.
Elizabeth learns many things from the scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells around her, but how to lie is something she mastered by herself years ago, long before a coin pressed the indentation of a skull into her palm. As a girl, and a noble one at that, lying was her one weapon, her one defense.
So she lies about her name, her blood, her intentions. It is the language of pirates, and she is fluent before they even reach her shores.
And yet Jack, for all his deceit, is an honest man. He meets her every lie with a truth, and it splinters at her like a dry deck beneath bare feet. It makes her blood boil. It tears at her already broken heart, threatening to stitch it back together with the shreds of a jolly roger. She loves him, she despises him. She has faith in him, she has no faith in herself.
“It would never have worked out between us,” she tells him, and it is the only time she tells the truth and wishes it was a lie.
She cannot be kept, and Jack… Jack just keeps searching for something that can hold him. He just hasn’t found it yet.
Heave ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die…
A ship is freedom. Jack tells her that, stinking of rum and fire. And that’s the moment Elizabeth’s soul is sold, once and for all, to the tides.
She doesn’t want to never die. That’s not her play, in this game. She doesn’t want to rule the seas. She couldn’t care less about fortune. When she holds Jack’s compass, it spins and spins until it doesn’t anymore, and she has to find her heading elsewhere.
That’s how she’s different from Will, James, Jack— she’s never wanted anyone’s heart but her own.
“Time and tide, love.”
Time and tide, and love. Three things you can never stop nor change, no matter how you may wish to. No matter if you are staring down a kraken’s throat, or facing an armada, or holding a beating heart in your hand and asking it to marry you, and then to leave you. You cannot rewind time, you cannot change the tides, and you cannot stop love. Even if it is the most painful thing in the world.
The only thing you can do, for all three, is sail through them.
But the wind’s on her side. That’s all she needs.
“Vile and dissolute creatures, pirates,” Norrington condemns.
“Devils and black sheep, and really bad eggs,” Jack sings.
“Free men,” Elizabeth roars, and the wind hears, and roars back.