A/N So, I've been asked what I'll do if all or most of this is contradicted by the as-yet-unseen third movie. Well, if that throws too much of his out...well, Jack's supposed to be telling the story in this fic. So he lied. It is Jack we're thinking of here, after all.

Chapter 6—"A Deal's A Deal..."

Nothing terribly noteworthy happened until we arrived in England. As I said before, we were scheduled to arrive in August, but due to circumstances beyond our control and totally within what can be expected for a voyage of this type, we didn't put in on English soil—meaning soil in England, as opposed to belonging to it like a colony—until January. And let me tell you, it was something. January...you know...winter. In the northern hemisphere. That meant one thing.

Snow! I'd never seen anything like it before, and neither had Billy, for that matter. I wouldn't see it again until I was back there as an adult. If you've never seen it before, snow's a hell of a thing to encounter. And if you return to the Caribbean and meet up with someone whose never seen it, or even heard of it in some cases, and try to explain it to them...you sound like a loony. Rather like sand, snow is, except lighter, sort of like cotton, except whiter than sand or cotton, and very, very cold.

Heh, cold. That reminds me. Billy and I were both sniffing and coughing pretty much the whole time between the time we crossed the equator heading north and the time we crossed it back heading south again. We were unaccustomed to the climate, to say the least. Born in sweltering heat, lived in sweltering heat. When we arrived in England, it was in the middle of a snowstorm and I tell you not one man on board knew what to make of it, with the exception of my uncle, who'd lived there for a large part of his life. One or two of the dullest knives in that particular drawer thought they'd died and were experiencing the torments of Hades, which I suppose would mean they thought Hell actually froze over. Ris told them they were being gits, to put on coats and to get back to work

We started becoming suspicious when escorts met us at the entrance of the bay. We were just plain surprised when it turned out they were there to welcome the Black Pearl and her captain and crew. It was evident they they genuinely needed Ris' help. He went into town alone. Secrecy is a virtue learned only by experience, unfortunately. He'd had his turn already. Mine was yet to come.

While Ris was in the city, Billy and I sat on the steps of the forecastle wrapped in coats and shivering.

"What do you suppose he's doing?"

"I dunno, Billy."

"Do you think we could find out."

"Not now, I'd say. He's probably somewhere well-guarded talking to someone important."

"So what do we do if he won't tell us what's going on? I want to know!"

"Can you read, Billy?"

"Well enough, I suppose."

"Good."

"What's in your head, Jack?"

"We'll sneak a peek in the log book in his cabin later."

"He won't let us look in that, no matter how convincingly you ask."

"Who said anything about asking. Just get him out of his cabin long enough for a quick look. We'll need a distraction, and a reader." I said, and looked at him, "You just volunteered to be the reader."

"I did?"

"Yeah."

"Ris should be gone another hour, then?"

"About that."

"Excellent. Let's go play in the snow."

"What? What about the plan...the cold! The cold! We can't play in that, we'll freeze!"

"Oh, we'll be fine. Let's go see if Mother England is all she's chalked up to be."

Billy sighed, his breath hanging like fog in front of his mouth for a moment. He consented and within a few minutes, we were roaming the country sides of allegedly-Great Britain and freezing ourselves to the—huh, what?

Oh, no. Nothing in particular against the country. Nothing at all, produces some very catchy songs, and a lot of cows and sheep too. But it's like this, see...I was born in the Caribbean. So were most people of my generation who live here now. Most of us were born here by people who moved here from England. These people—our parents' generation, the ones who moved, I mean—understandably miss their native land, to which they were as a rule very loyal. And after they've set up lives in the Caribbean colonies and had kids, they're still nostalgic and patriotic for where they were born, and so they try to instill a love of their own homeland in their children. So what you end up with is colonies full of immigrants' children and eventually adult descendants who are raised to be fervently loyal to a place they've never seen and know only through idealized tales a growing number of years old. But he key is...the generation born there have never seen it. They were raised to play lip service to the old country England, but their heart isn't really there. It's not green hills and wide rolling countryside and farms and castles and Old World traditions and royalty and thriving cradles of civilization that come to our minds when we think of home. Comes to our parents' minds, not ours. To us, home is blue oceans, white sands and hot sun and rain that can fall like bullets. It's small, up-and-coming towns and new frontiers and hot, dense jungles. To the islands of the Caribbean do our loyalties lie. Not to the Old World.

But that's rather enough philosophy for now, innit? My point was that Billy and I were eager to see if old England was everything people said it was. But, given our own conceptions of what home was like, we didn't feel particularly at home or close to our roots when we were wandering knee-deep in snow. About forty five minutes of wandering (and piling snow and throwing it around) I tuned to Billy.

"Right. Now you turn back and look for Ris. That should give plenty of time for him to get back and make his log notes. Be real scared and upset and all and tell him exactly what's true."

"That I..."

"No, that I 'm still out here somewhere, you can say I'm lost if you like, and he needs to come find me. While he's looking for me, you sneak into his cabin and read his journal."

"You're sure you'll be alright out here alone?"

"I know I will. Hurry up!"

Billy disappeared into the blustering January white.

I wandered off a little ways further, out of curiosity, and out of lack of a place to sit. I was rather disappointed with what I'd seen, really. Even if it was all nice and mossy and green, say in springtime or something, I don't think it would have impressed me much, but probably because England is made up to us to look like a place full of faeries and castles and cockney chimney sweeps. I had thus far been disappointed. A while off, I found a stump to sit on. I was starting to feel sleepy. If you have any familiarity with cold at all, you'll know if I was tired the last thing I should do is sit still, because cold makes you tired, and eventually makes you dead, and I had least nearly an hour until Ris came to get me.

It was considerably more than an hour, as it turned out. My breath was turning to crusts of ice on my hair, and I couldn't feel my nose or toes or fingers. The snow blowing ever which way had no apparent intention of stopping. I was on the verge of shouting out 'Finally!' when Ris arrived out of the curtain of snow with a small pack.

"Lad, I knew ya were crazy, but this is insane! My fault, I guess. Should have explained about snow before I let you loose in it. You it loose on you, apparently. Here, follow me back."

Ris opened the pack and the first thing he took out was a thick woolen blanket, the rich dark green of seaweed. The second was a small, metallic container. He wrapped me in the green blanket, and rubbed my shoulders vigorously, trying to get my circulation going.

"Stand up now, get your blood moving. Here..." he said, handing me the metal cylinder, "Take a mouthful of that. Warm you up."

I did it. I vaguely recall assuming it was coffee or tea or something of that type, from the description of it as something that warmed one up. I took a mouthful as instruct and coughed, partially in surprise, and partially at he burn in my throat. Rum.

I believe I've made mention of Ris Sparrow's problem-solving skills before.

At any rate, he led me back to the town, and from there, back to the ship. Orders were given, and in the orange glow of the winter evening, we left, with no one seeming to know or ask where the bearing were taking us.

No one but Billy. I asked him that night, when we were in our hammocks in the hold.

"For what I went through out there, you'd better have read the log."

"I read the log."

"And?"

"They offered him a huge amount of money. I dunno how much...can't count that high. That was a lot of zeros after that one, though. We're meant to go trolling around—"

"Trolling?"

"Hunting. Pirate term for hunting other ships. You know how fishermen take the big dragnets, seines, and pull them though the water hoping for luck to get fish with it?"

I nodded.

"Right. Well, Jack, when a pirate ship goes sailing about hoping to catch another ship to prey on, it's rather like the fishermen with the seines, and since fishing with a dragnet is called trolling, there it is. Anyways, so our job is to go trolling around for vital shipments going to France. They're apparently outfitting their ships to attack the English port we were just in, so we have to stop the ships of supplies and munitions from reaching France."

"Privateer work?"

"Pretty much."

"But Ris is doing so well as a pirate."

"Aye, apparently they know that, so they're offering big money for his loyalty."

"That doesn't make sense...he's doing so well as a pirate, as a completely free man. Why come all the way here just to take work."

"I dunno. But the captain is a smart man. Cunning as sin, and twice as deceptive. And I can't imagine him tying himself down with a job like this unless here was something else up his sleeve."

Was Billy ever right. Ris was a lot like me, or more likely visa versa. He was smart, always had a plan, and did he ever have one that time.

Not just up his sleeve, but up both sleeves, under his hat, in his coat pocket and maybe down his...well, no reason to get into that is there? No pun intended of course.

Point is, Ris had a plan. A hell of a plan.