Caribbean Secrets
Summary: Two girls, one gold medallion. I wish it hadn't happened, but can't be happier that it did. Welcome to the Caribbean, lasses.
Rating: PG-13, to play it safe for now.
Archiving: You'd want to?! Umm....sure. Just ask, I suppose.
Disclaimer: Pirates of the Caribbean is owned by Disney....they own everything....and I do not. I have no money. Bug them. Christine belongs to...me! Mwa ha! Well, no, she doesn't...I suppose she belongs to her mother and father, or something. I do, however, own me, and if you want to use me for a story (HA!) please ask me first. Sue me, because I am a poor student who will need to take out a loan to pay for school, much less lawsuits. Thank you.
I wish I could explain what happened.
I wish there was some concrete reason that I could point to, say "There! That's it!" I wish that there was some way of determining the how and the why, if for no other reason than to ensure that it wouldn't happen again.
I can't do that, though. I have no idea how it happened, and even my vague inklings at why don't really explain anything very well. All I can say is that something happened, something totally unexpected, something that boggled even my imagination, and my imagination is pretty darn hard to boggle. I don't know if the circumstances are reproduce-able - all I know is that they scare me.
It's really all my fault. I was home - albeit for less than 24 hours. Just long enough to gather up the last few things for school; unwind from two months working at the summer camp with screaming, yelling, and otherwise miserable children; say good-bye to friends, family and distant relations; then head back out again.
My best friend's sixteenth birthday had been the weekend before, and as I had been four hours away without a car at the time, I had obviously missed it. Now, as I was headed out to University the next afternoon, and I wouldn't see her again until Thanksgiving, I decided that I had to do something really special for Christine's birthday. So when I found out, to my shock, that she had not been to see The Pirates of the Caribbean yet, I knew immediately what I had to do.
That was how we found ourselves standing in front of our small-town one-screen theatre that Saturday night. Frankly, I was impressed that it was still playing in our one-horse hometown, until Christine pointed out that the Aztec didn't get any movie until at least a month after everyone else had seen it dozens of times and gotten disgustingly tired of it. Perhaps that was why there was no lineup to speak of, and why once we'd paid ($5.25 for Christine, $6.50 for me - darn those stupid adult prices, anyway) and split the cost on a large popcorn, two Vanilla Cokes, and a bag of peanut M&Ms, we were able to grab our favorite seats - dead centre.
"So, there's lots of Orli, right?" Christine asked, glancing at me in the dim theatre light.
Orlando Bloom was the reason I couldn't believe that Christine hadn't seen this movie yet. Let's just say, when I gave her a Legolas action figure last Christmas, her squeals of "Oh, he's so HOT!?" had the entire church turning in their seats to glare at us.
"CC," I assured her, "Between Orlando and Johnny, you will not have a single drool-less moment during this movie."
Her teeth flashed in the dimness, as she turned her trademark Christine grin on me. "Ooh, I like the sounds of that," she laughed.
"Ooh-!" I gasped, excited, as the lights dimmed even further, and the soft-rock playing over the speakers faded. "Here we go!"
The first advertisement (they are to be expected, I suppose) came up, and even halfway through it, I leaned over and hissed, "We're here to watch a movie about pirates, and they're trying to tell us to stop piracy?!"
Christine giggled, and leaned over. "Seems a little redundant, doesn't it?"
The car commercial (and the mental picture Christine stuck in my head with a particularily old inside joke) sent us into insane snickering that drew glares from the five other people in the theatre. I reminded myself (again) that I had to tell my mother that a movie adaptation was coming out for a book by one of her favorite authors with the announcement of The Runaway Jury, and when the adverts finally ended, both Christine and I were both getting a little edgy for it to start.
So when mist began to roll across the screen, I sat up a little straighter, grin fighting its way across my face. This was, as I had firmly maintained ever since the first time I saw it, the best movie ever (with the possible exceptions of The Matrix and the Lord of the Rings movies).
Now, I had given the other inhabitants of the room little attention, though now I realize that I probably should have. Looking back now, I seem to recall a couple making out in the back row; two teenaged girls not much older than 14, watching the screen, enthralled, having probably watched this at least five times; and, in the row behind us, some guy with a weird, big hat.
That guy was probably someone I should have paid attention to, but man, Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp were going to be up on the screen, and that demanded my full attention!
So when something rolled across the floor, sounding like a tinkling coin, it seemed, at first, to be nothing more than an irritation. But then it bounced off my flip-flop clad ankle, and I looked away from Elizabeth's vision of a floating umbrella to see a large, gold coin sitting beside my foot. I bent to pick it up, and when my fingers brushed the cool metal, I felt a strange, spreading coldness racing through my fingers and up my arm. Lifting it up, I felt the blood drain from my face for a moment, even as that chilled feeling spread across my torso, and into my right arm.
"What's that?" Christine hissed, tearing her eyes away from the rescue of young Will Turner.
Mute, I tipped the object into my best friend's open hand. "Ouch! It's really cold!" she whispered, turning it over. "What is it?"
Touching her arm, she looked up at me, then at the screen, where I pointed. Her eyes shone wide and incredulous, as she whispered, "Unreal."
Even as Elizabeth Swann removed a gold 'pirate's mark' from Will's neck, the identical object lay in my best friend's cupped hand.
Staring, unseeing at the screen, I hadn't even realized how cold I'd gotten. My teeth were chattering, and I found myself drawing my knees up to my chin, trying to draw some warmth into them, wishing away my goose-bumps. "Heather," Christine whispered, her voice sounding oddly small and far-away sounding. "I'm c-cold."
On the screen, Elizabeth, spotting the blackest ship to sail the seven seas gasped and closed her eyes. I let out a gasp of pain, squeezing my eyes shut, feeling as though I'd just plunged into a frozen lake. My muscles suddenly seemed stiff, frozen, and quite unresponsive. Like the cold and all-too-welcoming fingers of death, I felt myself being enveloped, being drug down, slipping away from reality. I flailed my arms wildly - and to my surprise, they met resistance. Resistance from.....water?!
My eyes snapped open as I took great, gasping breaths. It was dark - and I was immersed in water. I kicked out desperately, and my foot made contact with the, admittedly shifting, but still sturdy, sand. Desperately getting my footing, I looked around wildly. Gone were the teenyboppers, the weird guys, the making out couple. Gone was the massive screen, the Christmas-light-lit walkways, the exit signs, the comfy seats. Gone were the walls, the ceiling, the entire theatre.
In their place: miles of endless dark water to my left; sand, trees and, in the distance, the lights of a town, to my right. An endless expanse of dark, velvet sky, stars, and an almost-full moon stretched above me. And a short distance away, kneeling on the beach and coughing up seawater, Christine.
Heart beating wildly, I forced myself through the water to the shore - and Christine - all the while desperately hoping that I was - what? Dreaming? Imagining things? Hallucinating?
The relentless waves pushed me forward, then tantalizingly pulled me back, until at long last, a final white-cap pushed me onto the sand. I let myself collapse there, feeling the sand work its way into my hair, cling to my skin, grittily soak its way into my clothes. Christine was only feet away now, on her hands and knees, head down as her chest rose and fell in deep, rapid breaths. The night was soft, dark and silent save for the lapping of the waves that still washed over my legs, and the chirping of insects in the trees. I closed my eyes, and let the night and water - which felt considerably warmer than it had a first - ebb the stiffness from my body.
"Heather," Christine said weekly.
I didn't move. If I didn' move, if I didn't open my eyes, if I didn't acknowledge that any of this was real, then maybe it wouldn't be. Maybe it'd all be some disturbing dream.
"Heather," she persisted. "Dang it, Heather! Please wake up!"
The desperation and knifing panic in her voice was what finally prompted me to open my eyes and slowly turn my head to look at her.
Christine had lifted her face, her arms tensed and clutching at fistfuls of sand. "Heather," her eyes pleaded. "Where are we?"
I swallowed, and pushed myself off the sand. My white tank-top had become more grey from the pale sand that had worked into it, but as I sat there, legs still half-out of the water, I couldn't care, and I couldn't answer her question. Instead, panic, that creature that had never in my living memory truly attacked me, was clawing its way up my throat. I wanted to scream - but as I did not know where we were, or who a scream might bring running, I choked it down. I wanted to cry - but I was the older one, the stable one, the rock. I had to be the foundation, the support, and so I didn't cry, either. "I -" I started, cleared my throat, then began again. "I don't know."
Christine let out a shaky breath, her fists clenching the sand so hard, her knuckles were turning white. "Heather...what is this?"
I looked back up, to see Christine holding her hand out, the gold medallion glinting in her grip.
Reaching forward, I took it from her shaking hands, noticing that this time, no coldness spread across me. My fingers rubbed the sand of it's glinting surface, the eyes of the grinning skull gleaming at me. My hands, too, were shaking, I realized, as I stared at it. "It has to be a fake." It had to be. There was no way I held Elizabeth's copy in my hand, and yet all the other copies were safely locked in their trunk, so-
Realizing what I was thinking, I shook myself. Hello?! What was I thinking?! Of course it was a fake! Pirates of the Caribbean is a movie! Not reality! I tried to laugh at my foolishness, but the simple fact was that we were on a strange beach somewhere, and by the strong scent of fish and salt, beside the ocean, with no idea of how we'd gotten there.
"But - it's a fake what?" Christine asked, her eyes nervous.
Christine didn't know what the medallion meant. She didn't know what it meant. I looked past her to the distant, faint lights of the town, and something in my gut, I don't know what, just something, told me that something had gone terribly wrong. We were not supposed to be here, and it had something to do with this accursed medallion. And if I had anything to say about it, Christine was not going to know what the medallion meant. I would spare her that.
"It's - it's just a pirate's mark," I spilled the lie out easily. "That's all."
"Oh."
There was silence for a moment, then Christine repeated her first question. "Where are we?"
I shook my head. "I don't know. Maybe if we head over to that town, we can find out."
Christine turned to look over her shoulder at the lights. "Okay," she said simply, and we helped each other up. She kicked off her sandals to walk barefoot, but my flip-flops had long been lost in the waves. I rolled the edge of my jeans up - not that they'd get any less wet or muddy, but it gave me a sense of some normalcy - and we set off at a slow walk.
As we neared the end of the small peninsula we were on, around which the town appeared to be, a spit of rock far out in the water became more and more visible, until finally we rounded the rocks and trees that formed the corner, and there stood an achingly familiar town on the right, and the full, revealed spit of tall rocks far ahead and to the right. And near the end of these rocks, in a natural archway, hung the drying bodies of three hanging skeletons.
Christine let out a shriek, pointing wordlessly, wide-eyed at the bodies, and I felt the panic crawling its menacing way back up.
"What kind of place is this?!" Christine turned away from the sight of the distant bodies, her face pale.
My teeth had begun chattering again.
"Port Royal."
Well....what you think? Am I insane enough? Is it a spiffy enough b-day pressie for my bestest best pal, Christine?
Read. Review. You know the drill. : D