Please read Crimson and Scarlet first, if you haven't.

No wonder that Jack's curse was so strong, and worked so very well. A curse was nothing, anyone would tell you, without some intimate token of the victim—hair or fingernail-paring or blood—to send it homing to its destination. When Jack Sparrow had stood on that islet, watching the Black Pearl sail away with Barbossa's hand already caressing the helm, he'd still have been feeling the ache and stretch of Barbossa. His skin would still have been red where Barbossa had marked it; his mouth would have been swollen from Barbossa's kisses, his skin sticky with Barbossa's seed.

Couldn't get much more intimate than that.

Barbossa had watched that mobile mouth, watched for Jack cursing him or the crew—his crew, now—or the Black Pearl herself. Jack had said nothing, nothing that he had heard: but maybe his curse did not need to be spoken.

It was Jack's curse, though: of that, Barbossa was certain. And Jack was haunting him, for sure. At night his sleep was wracked by the memory of those dark eyes, that alluring smile, the feel of his skin under Barbossa's hands. The feel of him.

No more than three days after the mutiny, when Jack Sparrow must still have been alive, he came to Barbossa in a dream, all silent and accusatory. Barbossa's marks were livid on his tanned skin. He did not smile. He reached out his hand, like an invitation, and Barbossa stretched eagerly towards him: but before he could touch Jack he was awake, shirt soaked not with seawater—like Jack's—but with his own sweat. Shaking.

And undeniably hard.

He brought himself off with hardly a touch; just the memory of Jack's mouth on his cock, Jack's eyes meeting his as Barbossa came hot and hard and—

"Land ho!" came the cry, somewhere above him on deck.

He almost forgot the dream that day, as they raised the uncharted island whose bearings Jack had given him, as Barbossa steered the Black Pearl through a graveyard of ships to the secret harbour of Isla de la Muerta. Jack had told him—told them all—of the treasure past imagining that was hidden here. Back in Tortuga, when the two of them had been recruiting the crew, he'd lured them with tales of treasure: Spanish doubloons and pieces of eight, French sols and English crowns, drachmas and marks and dollars and guilders; and chests of jewels besides, rare gems in antique settings, and strings of pearls like hazelnuts. "And black pearls too!" Jack had cried, and they had drunk to the Black Pearl, drunk on his words, drunk on his voice; drunk on the rum he'd bought for them all.

"Tell your tales to the birds of the air, Jack," Barbossa said aloud into the night. "Maybe they'll believe you."

He'd been as keen and greedy and excited as any of them. More, he'd been intrigued by the extravagant gleam of Jack Sparrow, by the lilt and sway of his words, as much as by the gold-traced wickedness of his smile and his hot, dark gaze.

Perhaps Jack had set his spell even then. A spell's just a curse dressed pretty, after all. Barbossa chuckled, remembering Jack in the crimson silk dress; stopped laughing when the ghost-feeling of silk against his fingers dragged at his heart.

Not something he'd felt since—

He remembered the half-light before dawn, too, the two of them sprawled on Jack's bed in the captain's cabin. (Barbossa stretched and shifted in the bed. His, now. The smell of Jack lingered, haunting him.) He had drifted in and out of sleep that night, waking at last to find Jack watching him. In the gloom, the crimson silk had looked as dark as his eyes.

"Will you not tell me, Jack?" Barbossa had coaxed. "Won't you tell me where that fantastical island lies?"

That dark, unreadable gaze. "You reckon this changes matters between us, then?" Jack had said, gesturing.

It changed everything, but Barbossa did not give Jack the satisfaction of telling him so. Instead, he'd teased and tormented the secrets from Jack gradually, with kisses and caresses, hands and mouth, exulting in the simple power of making Jack Sparrow moan.

Then he'd left Jack to sleep, there in the gentle light, and crept away to rouse the crew. As he had planned. As he'd been planning since Tortuga.

Did Jack curse him beneath his breath that morning, fingers fumbling as he got himself the rest of the way out of the stained crimson silk oh the sight of Jack naked; the memory is sharper than anything that's happened since and back into shirt, breeches, boots? He hadn't spoken, hadn't said a word to Barbossa as he stood there with the knife. Had hardly looked at him. But maybe he'd set the curse in a single flash of that smile, utterly without warmth for once.

Or maybe he'd spoken the curse later, as he watched the Black Pearl sink beneath the horizon.

It had been a deal like any other, a bargain, a gamble. Barbossa had gained the Black Pearl, and on the Isla de la Muerta he'd let gold pieces fall from his hands like shells on a beach. He'd laughed in simple pleasure at the glow and shine of it all. But he'd left Jack standing at the ocean's edge; he'd traded Jack, and the having of him, for the treasure. Sometimes he was sure he'd made a bad bargain, after all.

Perhaps Jack had cursed him alone at first, and only later come to the rest of the crew. Barbossa never asked about Jacoby's dreams, or whether Ragetti saw Jack's smile whenever a tossed coin landed heads. Enough to know that, like him, every man-jack of the Black Pearl's crew was hungry after eating; thirsty after drinking; aching with want all night, and never mind if it was a woman or a man who sold him their mouth and hands and body.

That first time with a Tortuga whore he'd thought that the whole thing was Jack, the memory of Jack, the fear (the fear?) that nothing would ever feel like Jack again. He imagined Jack standing there in the shadows (two weeks, by now; he'd be dead and rotting, shrivelling like something washed up above the tide line), standing and smiling at him. "Thought you'd be untrue, eh? Thought I'd give you up?"

He'd been desperate to come, to spend himself in the whore's soft willing too-red mouth; but not even the clear precise memory of Jack's lips on him had been enough to get him there. He'd twisted his hand cruelly in her neat black braids, thrust himself down her throat until there were tears in her dark, painted eyes. It was no use. He was still under Jack Sparrow's spell. His curse.

* * *

Jack Sparrow had cursed them all, it turned out, though Barbossa did not understand that until the Black Pearl had left Tortuga again, and was sailing by night for the Windward Passage. He would never forget that night, either: the oaths and cries as men saw each other, saw themselves, stripped to rotting flesh and gleaming bone.

They spoke of nothing else for days. It had taken each of them differently, back in Tortuga. Bootstrap had got into a fight with the tavern-keeper he'd accused of watering the rum. Twigg had spent all night trying to find a whore who could get him off. Ragetti had thought he was host to another bloody tapeworm. It was a sickness, said the Bosun; black magic, according to Lee; the Devil marking his own, said Drake.

Dealing with Drake—or trying to deal with him, the old-fashioned way, with a marlinspike to the skull—they found out about the other bit of the curse. They couldn't be killed. None of them. Not by marlinspike or pistol or cutlass: not by hands tightening on a messmate's throat until his face was black and his eyes wept blood.

"We're already dead!" the Bosun cried, stumbling back, staring at the ridges his fingers had left in Kruger's neck.

There was nothing Barbossa could do about the panic in the Bosun's voice. Looking at what they'd done to Drake made his stomach turn: and Drake still wouldn't shut up about Judgment Day and the resurrection...

By day, the men were calm enough. They went about the business of the ship, and if they were more quiet than usual then it was a blessing. They ate and drank, and if there was never enough rum or bread or stew, that wasn't so different from hard times before, midway across the Atlantic from Africa to Hispaniola.

After a week or so they'd started to play jokes on one another. Barbossa watched his crew as, with macabre glee, they hacked at one another's indestructible bodies. They tossed Lee's bright-eyed skull from hand to bony hand, and all he said when he was whole again was, "Dizzy." They found out what hurt, and what didn't, and did it all regardless. There was a gruesome skittle-game they played most nights, after moonrise; the clattering noise on the deck above his cabin reminded Barbossa of the ivory dice tied into Jack Sparrow's dark hair.

He alone was sure of who had cursed them, and why. He alone was haunted, day and night, in the captain's cabin and at the helm of the Black Pearl, until he was more set on Jack, more consumed with Jack, than any silver or gold.

He went back to the island, to break Jack's bones and so break the curse. Not until they'd searched every square foot and found nothing did he discover how desperately he'd longed to find Jack here: to find Jack somehow, impossibly, alive after all this time.

"I'm Captain Jack Sparrow!" Jack would've crowed, and his gesture would seem lazy save for the pistol pointed at Barbossa's heart. Barbossa—who knew quite well what Jack would do to his mutinous First Mate—could imagine his smile perfectly, all sharp-edged and nasty and bright. He longed for that smile more than apples.

* * *

It was Bootstrap Bill who reminded him that Jack Sparrow had told them of a curse. A curse on the damned gold, of all things. "They say the treasure's cursed," Jack Sparrow had said, back in that Tortuga tavern where he'd sat recruiting. "They say that any who steals it is cursed to Death-In-Life." Pause for effect, all glitter and timing like a travelling player. "They say? They? Ghost stories! But dead men tell no tales, say I!"

And every one of them had laughed with him.

"We've been talkin'," Bootstrap Bill said one morning a few months after the mutiny, standing before Barbossa in the captain's cabin of the Black Pearl. "Me and some of the lads. And we reckon it's that gold. That curse Cap—that curse he told us of."

"Ghost stories?" Barbossa sneered, though in truth he was not much bothered by Bootstrap's words, or by his presence in the cabin, or even by mention of... of...

"You don't feel the curse?" Bill's voice set his memories adrift again.

"Aye," said Barbossa heavily. "I feel the curse."

Bootstrap Bill had been watching him since he'd taken the Black Pearl. If Jack Sparrow'd had a mate, a true friend, amongst the men, then it had been Bootstrap. He'd hung back—craven, Barbossa wanted to say, but he knew it wasn't so—when the crew roared for Jack's blood. Close enough, though, to call the men back like over-eager dogs when their horseplay got too rough. Close enough to have recognised the marks that Jack already bore.

Whatever else those two had been to one another, they'd been friends. So Barbossa trod carefully around Bootstrap Bill, and their eyes met again and again, like lovers', as they watched each other.

"Reckon we deserve it," said Bootstrap now. "For what we did."

Barbossa's eyes narrowed.

"For what?" he asked, deceptively gentle.

"For what we did to Jack," said Bootstrap, looking his new captain in the eye.

"You—" Barbossa's words stuck in his throat.

"What're you going to do to me, Captain?" said Bill, and he grinned, as broad as by moonlight. "Can't kill me, can you?"

"No," said Barbossa, drawing it out. "No, I can't kill ye." He scowled. "Get out."

He waited until Bootstrap had gone aloft before he sent for the Bosun.

"I can't kill ye," he told Bootstrap, once they had him pinned against the taffrail. "But I can make ye wish I had."

The crew had gathered on the afterdeck, eager as dogs for some excitement. Barbossa looked around, gathering them in with a gesture.

"There be a traitor in our midst, lads!"

General outcry. The noise they made was like an animal roaring. Bootstrap had been popular, but his friendship with Jack—and the fact that he'd stood back from the mutiny itself—had tainted him. Now they wanted him gone.

"Told you," said Bootstrap Bill, voice still steady despite the punishing grip of his captors. The bruises, where he'd resisted Twigg and the Bosun, were starting to show. "We deserve that curse, we do, for what we did to Jack Sparrow. Captain Jack Sparrow. 'Tis bad luck to mutiny against the Captain. Against the Code, it is."

A few of the men were muttering, too low for Barbossa to hear.

"Against the Code, he says," said Barbossa, playing the crowd. "But 'tis only guidelines. And sure, we didn't need a vote, did we now?"

The men cheered.

"Bind him," he ordered Twigg and the Bosun.

Bootstrap got one hand free while they were getting the rope around his legs, and he pointed at Barbossa. "It'll be your turn one day," he said, low and furious, like a curse. "You—"

Twigg's arm went across his throat, cutting off his words, and he struggled less as the last of the ropes went around him.

"Now, did we ever try a test of the drowning?" Barbossa asked the crew. "No? Happen he needs something to keep him down, wouldn't you say?"

"Aye!" they chorused, entirely with him now.

"Make him fast to that," said Barbossa, and he pointed at one of the stern-chasers.

"I made sure of it," Bill managed, while his captors wrestled him half over the gun.

"Made sure of what?" Barbossa demanded.

"We're cursed, and we'll stay cursed," Bootstrap said. "Like we deserve. Like—"

"Down to the depths with him!" cried Barbossa, enraged. He gestured the men forward; and he took notice of the men who hung back and did not join the rest of the crew in hefting the great gun and its half-conscious attachment over the rail and into the ocean.

Watching air stream up like silver from the place where Bootstrap had sunk, Barbossa felt as though he were making some sort of sacrifice. But to whom? Jack Sparrow, or the heathen gods he'd spoken of?

"Ghost stories," he muttered, turning away from the rail.

"But, Captain, what if he was telling the truth? What if he... did something?"

That was Lee, and he didn't look particularly sorry to see the back of Bootstrap.

"Well," said Barbossa, chuckling, "we know where to find him, don't we?"

* * *

The men were unlettered, but they could calculate prize-shares and courses as easily as they'd tot up the price of a round at any Tortuga tavern. Every man of the crew could tell you, any day, how many of the coins were still to be found. The first six hundred or so were easy: walk into any tavern, brothel, or stewshop in Tortuga and buy or extort or bully the coins ("with this skull-head, see? Cursed gold, 'tis... Aye, but return it to me, and the curse'll come with it. And see, I've another coin to take its place.")

Sometimes it was easy to find the gold: it seemed to call to them, to shine in a way that had nothing to do with light or visibility or reflection. The Black Pearl engaged another pirate ship, the Rose, and found five Aztec coins amongst the loot that her captain tried to barter for his life.

"Your life is worth nothing," said Barbossa, secreting the cursed gold inside his coat. "And you won't be needin' this where you're going."

They sacked Port Royal and won back another hundred and ninety-one pieces of Aztec gold, with a few dozen coins of humbler origin, just to make the trip worthwhile. And here and there, from island to island, the gold came back to the Black Pearl, back to the chest in Barbossa's cabin, to be counted over and over. He no longer took any pleasure in the feel of gold coins in his hands. Counting the gold became a meaningless chore.

He'd let the crew believe that Bootstrap had told the truth, that it was the gold that was cursed. It made sense, then, to think of putting it back—putting it all back, and being free and alive and mortal again. But Barbossa knew better. Not all the gold in that stone chest, not all the gold in the world, would break Jack Sparrow's curse.

Only Jack could break it. And Jack was surely, mercifully dead.

* * *

Jack came to him whenever he slept, undiminished by death, more solid in the moonlight than Barbossa himself.

Sometimes Barbossa would dream of crimson silk, of Jack moving above and beneath him, of Jack's wicked smile full of delight and complicity. Sometimes the dreams would be darker and he would wake sweating, terrified of seeing the glint of that smile in the dark corners of the captain's cabin: Jack's cabin.

Terror or joy, it was all brighter and livelier than anything in the waking world.

Sometimes he dreamt of the simple glorious truth. Jack Sparrow, alive and well; alive and kicking, and not in any hangman's noose, either.

But waking, he always forgot that he'd dreamt true.

-end-

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Read the sequel, Ten Years Gone.