Drabble: 'Give Him An Inch'

[dwgm]

Here's my entry for the drabble theme of the week, angsty and unbetaed, but exactly a hundred words...



~ Give Him An Inch ~


The blade'd been broken, but it'd been deadly sharp and only an inch away.

Yet the moment was too sweet. He'd had to gloat. "Heady tonic, holding life and death in the palm of one's hand."

"You're a cruel man, Jack Sparrow!"

Lord, that was rich, coming from Jones. "Cruel is a matter of perspective," Jack had replied, with gentle malice.

"Oh, is it now?"

The scene played behind Jack's eyes, over and over, on the way to Tortuga. Almost as bad as the Locker.

One inch to immortality, and happily ever after.

Might as well have been a mile.

~.~

Comments

[geekmama.livejournal.com]

One could argue that the whole thing was Beckett's fault, for burning the Pearl and branding Jack a pirate. Certainly Beckett seems more a "devil" than Jones, entirely unsympathetic and amoral. But it really boils down to Jack's choices. He chose to work for Beckett, chose to free the shipment of slaves, chose to make a deal with Jones to regain the Pearl. He chose to go after the Aztec gold, and presumably chose Barbossa to be his first mate. His errors in accurately judging Beckett's and Barbossa's characters might be chalked up to youth and naiveté, but he had to have known his Faustian bargain with Jones was a terrible risk, to himself and to others, for as a ship's captain he would be responsible for the welfare of his crew. As it turned out, his choices affected every major character in the movies, and his choice to flee Jones and the Kraken cost the lives of a great many "redshirts" before he finally accepted that there was no way to avoid paying his debt. I personally think he came back to the Pearl to go down with his ship, and that Elizabeth's actions were unnecessary. His anger with her after he's rescued comes from hurt pride rather than a sense of injustice.

Of course, that's just how I saw the films. Your mileage may vary.

Will subconsciously brought this on himself, too.

It seems so. Others have commented elsewhere about the illogic of Will becoming so obsessed with saving his father that he'd sacrifice his relationship with Elizabeth and his own freedom to do so. It doesn't make sense -- and yet, people do things like that. It's crazy, but its realistic, too, I think.

[tiamary.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you about Jack's behavior in DMC. I watched the scene where he returns to the Pearl many times before realizing that his eyes target one of the bodies and he doesn't look away until Elizabeth calls his name. He was "finally", though too late, facing the consequences of his actions.

The responsibility issue is a dilemma I grapple with often. Many say responsibility rests exclusively with the perpetrator. They might say Jack didn't send out the Kraken, Jones did. Jones didn't bring Will to the Flying Dutchman, Jack did. So they each bear sole responsibility for those respective acts.

However, I also believe, as you do, people's bad choices and character flaws lead to tragedies as surely as do evil intentions. So I distinguish between responsibility and blame: to me, the only one to "blame" for the Kraken attacks is Jones, but Jack shares a chunk of the "responsibility."

I like Jack better than Will but Will is a foil to Jack when he says "I've doomed us all" when the Kraken attacks the merchant ship. Will takes responsibility, although he's far less culpable than Jack, if he's even culpable at all.