drown the urge for permanence and certainty; crouch down and scrawl my name with yours in wet cement

[herotypical]

Who: lists_to_port & slaying
What: carpentry; catharsis; cutting a deal
When: october 17th; noon onwards
Where: house seven
Summary: buffy wants to build something for jilly's return. buffy also wants to borrow a boat.
Rating: clean enough to start but it's these two so don't be surprised if the rating climbs a couple hundred tags in.

Today looked just a little bit brighter. Not by much, granted. But enough to make a difference and enough to sweeten the sense of industry that was unfolding her backyard. The heat helped; the day was warmed than the ones before it and strangely warm for a late October afternoon. Buffy had quickly given in to summer's last hurrah and was hoarding her last chance to wear shorts before autumn established its firmer grip on the month and on the village. Misery and grief were very, very slowly opening up to allow silver linings and miniature blessings. And one such something was working just a few feet away from her. Not quite so silver, though, and she suspected his lip would curl if she referred to him as miniature anything. Buffy worked the plane across her chosen soon-to-be-planks of wood and she watched Jack Sparrow from the corner of her eye. Perhaps a tarnished, coated kind of silver that resisted polish like two too similar poles on a magnet. Blessing was a harder one to pin down. The word seemed as though it should be anathema to a rough-reptuationed pirate. But then again? In a number of ways, Buffy knew that Jack was less rough than she was.

The afternoon's project was a simple porch swing and it was a little bit of home improvement to impress Jilly with once she returned. And it was a way to keep busy while they waited for her while they waited out their grief. Keeping busy, she found, helped her focus. The work tricked her now and then into smiling when she hadn't intended to. Silly little mistakes would take place -- fumbling with a tool or trying very hard (without much success) to remember carpentry terms once taught to her by Xander Harris -- and somehow these mistakes weren't discouraging. They were comedic. They were okay. And Buffy knew that none of it would be possible had she been left at the house alone, this week.

So she worked diligently at Sparrow's side and took moments now and then to appreciate his work ethic before it inspired her to press forward with her own. And she soon had another plank smoothed and sanded. Buffy pushed it aside and sat back with her palms crushing into the grass that was just a little too long. It wasn't as though the place was crawling with lawn-mowers, after all.

"What colour, Jack?" She asked as she blew a fine stream of breath up and across her brow. Fluttering bangs and clearing her vision. "We should paint it. It should be painted. What colour?"

Comments

[all7seas]

"I want to see you through," he tried to explain, haltingly--wishing the were not in the library. The treehouse. He needed the treehouse for this. "Certain persons suggested I...I was giving you up. But I'd never, I'd never, I'd never. And perhaps we should...not discuss this just now?"

[herotypical]

"Who?" Her question was harshly whispered and not at all at a library-appropriate volume. She felt so at home in libraries that she often forgot that they had rules. "Who said that?"

MY TYPO. What is WRONG with me tonight?!

[all7seas]

"Annie...please. That's not important, love." He released one of her hands so he could stroke his fingers across her cheek. Trying to explain any of this with straight talk was beyond difficult for the pirate.

"Point is, this person made me think on you and on possibilities. Made me think about what I can live with and what I can't live without." He took a breath. Could he live without his Pearl? He'd died for her once, and nearly died for her before that, only escaping the burning and drowning by making a bargain with Jones. And what about Joyce? The little girl plagued him like an itch he couldn't reach, no matter how many times he told her to go away. But how could he put anything before her?

She doesn't exist, Jacky.

SHUT IT, DAD.

But above all, what about Buffy? He'd lived without her for two years, unknowingly. He'd returned to be hit with the loss of those two years and it had been terrifying, maddening. What if he lost her for the rest of forever? Even if they did come from the same world...

Jack pressed his palm against his side. What if he could hope for more than this? But there was always a price to be paid. Always.

i've infected you.

[herotypical]

Buffy lifted her released palm to his chin -- positioning her thumb plum between the two dangling beard tales and spreading her fingers across his neck. "N-no. I wanna know who's been putting these things in your head. Because..." And now her voice dropped into a semi-reverent hiss. "Because if -- no, not if -- when I get the power to? I'm gonna knock these walls down and here or there won't matter. This place...what it's done to us? We deserve the choice. Everyone does. But that choice shouldn't be..."

The optimist and the pragmatist duked it out over the Slayer's face. One moment she looked ready and radiant at the prospect of a utopian, connected mass of worlds. The next, she could hear her own hollow hope and feared disappointment.

"It shouldn't be dreaded."

[all7seas]

"Like I said, love." Jack cleared his throat. "Like I said: I can't tell you who, and I don't dread choosing. And I don't want you selling your life for that choice."

[herotypical]

"Selling it isn't the plan." Ending up lifeless would mean failure. Buffy didn't intend to fail.

She dragged his head down to hers -- brow to brow -- and kept on whispering: "C'mon, Jack. Me and you have a date with something less...sad. Preferably something more fun. Think of it like a post-date date."

[all7seas]

"Then perhaps we have a date with the Codex?" It could be fun...sort of. Mostly it was macabre. But macabre things could sometimes be fun.

[herotypical]

"...Lead the way, Captain. If you've got the piracy textbook par excellance? Then you might as well gimme a lesson."

[all7seas]

He kissed the tip of her nose.

"Who says I'm giving you this lesson, eh? There's an entire page dedicated to that in the Codex: always exact payment for services rendered. Dirty deeds are NEVER done dirt cheap, savvy?"

[herotypical]

"Where is the fool who introduced you to AC/DC and can I personally go kick them in the gut?"

Payment. Oh, Buffy didn't plan to pay for any lessons. That much was evident as she patted Jack affectionately on the chest and headed deeper into the library.

[all7seas]

Jack rubbed his lower lip as he watched for a moment as she disappeared among the stacks. Beautiful, lovely, one woman in a million women. There wasn't much he wouldn't do for her. But leave the Pearl? That twisted his gut like a knife made of pure ice, especially now that he had her. He HAD her, and a sackful of ships besides! Everything about that choice felt all unknitted and wrong. But Buffy. Losing her again...

The good thing was that no decisions had to be made right now. A slightly less good thing was that the decision would probably, inevitably, not be his to make. That was something he had tried to make Norrington understand and something that Buffy was determined to change. For Jack, it was something he was willing to accept as long as he could live in and suck every joyful thing out of the present.

Instead of following her, Jack found his way to a disused table in one of the far corners of the building. It was covered with books that hadn't been shelved yet, including those too large or unwieldy or fragile to shelve. Beneath it was the most impressive of the incunabula: an enormous black hidebound volume that had a distinctly salty smell about it, and a fine crystalline crust that broke away beneath any fingers that touched the cover--almost as though it had been dipped in ocean brine.

Sparrow didn't handle it with kid gloves. Though it typically took two men to carry it, he hefted the Pirata Codex on his own and managed to wrestle it to a clear reading table nearby. With a muffled booming sound it settled into place on the tabletop, sending up a small cloud of dust above and a trickle of sand below.

[herotypical]

Buffy trailed her fingertips along the spines of books. Tall books, short books, stout books. Pretty little delicate tomes with pretty little inscriptions. And heavier ones much more like what Giles used to keep in stacks and piles all around the high school library. She took them all in along with the filtered-through-glass rays of light that spoke of the warmth still outside. She took them all in without absorbing title or author; she was only seeing shapes.

Did Dawn need her or did she need Dawn? Because she knew that right now Dawn didn't even know she was missing. Would that still be the case if she hopped worlds? Buffy's throat tightened. She had already abandoned the girl twice -- she couldn't do that to her again. Not when she remembered the reproach in those eyes. Buffy sighed loudly into the dust motes floating in the air.

And then she heard the thud of the Codex on a far-off table. "Jack?" She asked just to impose her voice on the silence and threaded through the stacks and chairs and tables until she refound the pirate and laid her eyes upon that massive, massive book.

"...Jesus," she breathed. A touch more impressed-sounding than her more customary jeez. Buffy stopped by Jack's side and wasn't shy about reaching out and touching the book's cover.

[all7seas]

"All of it in Teague's keeping," he informed her, stepping back so she could have a look at it. Bound with an iron hasp, girded with more iron, and with the title gilded on the cover, it looked more like a large treasure chest than a book. As a child, Jack had feared it. Touching it meant a whipping.

As a teenager, he'd hated it as the thing that occupied nearly all of Teague's attentions. There had been so very little left over for Jack, and none of it approving.

As a pirate, he had come to respect the Code as far as it served him, but no further; it was yet another tool of abandonment. He'd put more of his trust in men than in the Pirate's Code, no matter how often he told his crew to "keep to it" if there was trouble.

Honor among thieves, of course, was lacking, and so the great book became a placeholder for both moral and common sense among the most blackhearted of crews. And it MADE sense. It regulated greed, avarice, and the laws of murder. Its "guidelines" threaded cannily in and out of official laws and regulations, making the waters safe for piracy and ensuring more winnable outcomes for men brave and desperate enough to set out in small, quick ships and pit themselves against the more heavily-armed merchantmen.

In Teague's eyes, the Codex codified the ideals that made a pirate's life worth living. It was a sacred word, to him, and he would willingly kill for it.

Sparrow slipped a lockpick out from within one of his dreadlocks.

"You like it?"

[herotypical]

Her index finger traced from iron to leather and back to iron once again. Law books and codes and manuals rubbed her the wrong way although she doubted Jack would believe it if she made such a confession. But Buffy preferred more fluidity in the control she by-times exerted and at others times followed.

She tapped the middle of the X -- once, twice, three times. "I don't think that like is the word I'd use." The Slayer slid into a chair nearby and drew her hand back from the volume.

"How about...curious." A word already tabled by Jack himself, earlier in the day.

[all7seas]

"That's the best word for it, really. Curious." It took the pirate two seconds to snick open that giant lock and slide the pick back into place in his hair.

"What sorts of things are you interested in knowing?"

[herotypical]

"...That easy to break into, huh?"

She sat back and tried to smother the strange sensation of ceremony with dry laughter. "Ever play the game where you just open a book up to a random page? Admittedly not a very exciting game but...hey, during hardcore research sessions? We had to make our own fun. And there's only so much fun you can have with books filled with ugly, ugly demons."

[all7seas]

He glanced up at her, momentarily thrown. The Codex was not at all easy to break into. Jack had a thief's touch, and locks responded to him--not to mention the fact that he had broken into this particular book many times before.

"Hmmm? Ah. Right. A random page. All of them are random, really; I could never make sense of the order and organization of this thing. Makes sense to Teague, though, I guess. Right."

He swung open the ponderous cover, and the scent of a heavy fog overhanging a quiet harbor escaped from beneath it, as though it had been trapped there only moments before. The pages within were stained and scrawled over and annotated. There were bits pasted in and bits cut out and bits rearranged. Several pages seemed stuck together with something that looked suspiciously like blood, and another was so fragile that it seemed as though it would turn to dust in the pirate's fingers. Finally, though, he settled on a page somewhere near the middle that seemed to concern itself completely with the subject of albatrosses.

"Hmmm. Albatross."

[herotypical]

She had been tempted to ask whether it was easy to break into or if he was just that good -- but that would have been too exploitable a choice.

"Albatross? Are albatrosses at all particularly piratical?"

[all7seas]

"Not so very much, but they are lucky. Here, look--" He ran a finger down the page beside an illustration of the large bird.

"Seafarers don't kill them, albatrosses. They're a sign of hope; can ride out any storm, cross oceans, the whole lot of it. And here---"

He tapped the page, further down.

"There was a pirate ship by the name of the Albatross what was very lucky indeed. The most luckiest, really. Captained by one Gabriel Jesserun. He was famous, you know, for his escapes. Before my time, was Captain Jesserun. Dad knew him, though, in his younger days. But he's not nearly so lucky as Captain Angus McDonald."

Jack turned the page; there, spanning the next two pages, was an illustration featuring a rather wild-looking Scotsman parasailing behind the largest albatross that had ever roamed the skies.

[herotypical]

Superstitions, then. Buffy leaned forward and paid due attention to the book. The illustrations. And she began to realize that sitting down was a little bit of a mistake with a book so big laid so flat on the table. So -- after a pause -- she climbed up so that she was kneeling on the chair instead. Buffy braced herself against the edge of the table with her palms.

She smiled an entertained smile at the two page spread. "That's crazy. I figured there'd be -- y'know -- more things like thou shalt not not-steal lollipops from babies. I wasn't expecting stories. Or pictures."

[all7seas]

He cleared his throat at crazy, pretending that Codex dust had gotten into it. "The Codex is nearly always unexpected, and always changing--especially if Teague doesn't keep a sharp enough eye on it. Aaaand there's no ruling in there on babies one way or another...not that I've seen, at any rate. But Angus?"

He leaned against the table, close beside her.

"Angus was rather mad but possibly the only pirate to travel from Tenerife to Barbados by albatross."

[herotypical]

"Will this be more impressive when you tell me where Tenerife is?"

She leaned her shoulder against his. Comfortably close as she studied Mad Old Angus McDonald.

[all7seas]

"Canary Islands. By Portugal. He went clear across the Atlantic, sweetness. As the tales go, his string broke after only thirty days out. He had to rig up his trousers in the pinch, but, the albatross being a highly forgiving bird, this wasn't a problem."

[herotypical]

"You're better than TV, Jack Sparrow."

Did she believe it? Perhaps. Partially -- with the understanding that some magic must have been involved. Either way, she now boldly reached across Jack and turned the page herself.

[all7seas]

"I should hope so! So many advantages over the television box, me."

He frowned at the page she had opened to. Overlaying it was a single sheet of parchment that had been stuck between the pages. It contained a list of punishments for those who dared to hang the Code or in any way debase it. It was all, very clearly, in Teague's handwriting, and as crimes against the Code became more dire, so did the punishments. Jack plucked it free.

"...Very serious about the Code, is Teague."