A Dream Strewn Over a Thousand Stars (POTC: DMTNT) [12]
Summary: When a yearly stop near the Devil’s Triangle reveals something unleashed, pirate captain Maria Salazar will face the dark heritage left in her father’s wake - and try to save his soul from the darkness consuming him.
Read from the Beginning: Tumblr | FF.Net
Read the rest and other works here.
A/N: And we start the week with an alternate perspective! This was a surprisingly tricky bit to write, given how I’ve characterize the narrator in fic and such, but I think it came out well! Pirates pals shoutouts to @dying-suffering-french-stalkers and @and-will-nice-hat, as well as a little crumb to fellow Salazar ficcer @delectorable-blog1 - this might be up your alley ;)
Gone. The pirates were gone. That devil Barbossa had used him, this was why one could never trust a pirate - and now Barbossa and Sparrow were on the run, chasing a legend as if that would protect them from him! They would not be hard to follow, not with the Silent Mary.
It was the second ship that, under the hate and hunger and rage, made Armando Salazar uneasy. The few scraps of the man he had been did not want to find the Falcon again. Find her alongside Sparrow and Barbossa when his rage would be at its peak, when his power would not be denied.
Her name crawled over his skin like a chill, clenching whatever was left of his long-dead heart. Salazar ground his teeth and snarled, the black liquid that had replaced his living blood gushing between his teeth and over his chin. He felt the divide inside him, the hatred fueled by the unnatural demon that the Mary had awoken against the specks of the man he had been in life. Specks that had slowly knit together with those little boats, as each one bobbed into the Triangle and so quietly reached him.
Salazar ignored the pricks of starlight beginning to light the sky as he left the Mary’s course to Lesaro - he would have control when they found Sparrow - and limped in silent agony to the door of his cabin. A door he could no longer cross in safety, but one he had to see. Just inside the frame he could count the boards, one from nearly each little boat that had been lifted to the Mary’s deck, and when he squinted he could see the symbols carved on them.
The constant ones he had ripped apart because of the feelings they woke in him, though the Mary somehow preserved one board to add to his cabin. Salazar watched the boards and felt the heat of life - a life well-lived, a life worth the living - in the air above them. Invisible flames he, being dead, could not pass. The very first he had saved, casting it back into the water when they were free. That one…that one was different. There had been innocence in it, something…pure.
Where is it now, he thought with a scowl at the boards. Where is that innocence? It was destroyed, by pirates, as they ruin everything.
Unless, if Salazar dwelled on it, she had not been consumed by the infection of piracy. The warmth of her fire on the main deck as she spoke with the crew, her foolhardy exploration of the mainmast, the kindness she had given to Barbossa’s pirates - that was from her mother, Salazar knew, something that hadn’t been lost when a filthy pirate took his child aboard ship. Something that had endured her own piracy.
She is one of them. She will die after the Sparrow, like all the others. They cannot hide now, cannot run.
But she was his child. Salazar could feel it in his bones, had seen the boat in her hand when the Mary had first come upon the small brig. There had been no one following him or Rebeca that night, that night. The color of her eyes was Rebeca’s but their shape was his, his smile tucked across Rebeca’s mouth.
His child. Had he become such a monster that he would consider killing his child? Yes, perhaps he would have killed her had she not displayed the boat, but had she been the one survivor…
End her. Save her. By my hand. From me.
Rage at his indecision granted Salazar a swell of power, and he howled before slashing his sword across the doorframe. The blade did no damage to the wood, nearly bouncing back in his face, and the attack did nothing to soothe him. Only blood and ending Jack Sparrow could do that. For that chance alone he would kill any pirate he had to.
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