Title: The Light

Pairing/Characters: Barbossa

Summary: What happens after you die?

Over the ages there had always been on unknown that was constant in man's existence. It had survived the rise and fall of great empires, ever present during wars and peacetime, and always speculated upon by every living man, woman and child.

What happens after you die?

This one question was persistently plaguing the mind of one man who was gripped by blackness and the icy cold fingers of Death as it wrapped around his bleeding heart. What was going to happen to him now; a mutinous, traitorous, thieving, murdering, lying pirate?

At first, there was only the darkness and no awareness. Nothing. There was no Chiron waiting with his ferryboat to take him across Acheron's dark waters. Not even the mythical Davy Jones and his cursed ship, the Flying Dutchman. None of the myths and legends he grew up with hearing as a child and later as an adult waited for his soul. No Devil and his Hell or God and Heaven. Nothing.

Then he saw it.

A tiny pinprick of light in the distance that was growing brighter as time so slowly agonizingly passed that he felt he would go mad from the wait. He wasn't sure how much time had passed since his death. All he knew was the darkness and now this curiosity. It was familiar to him, he had heard from those who had been on Death's bed, that there was a tunnel of light when you died.

Could this be what happens after death?

He suddenly found himself drawn to it and as it grew closer or brighter, he could not tell, he found he felt warmer than ever before. He wanted to reach out to it, to grasp it and let it take him to his awaited fate. It was better, had to better than this limbo he was stuck in.

He said something. He wasn't sure what though. All he knew now was the bright light filling his vision. Then, as quickly as it had come, its brightness was faded and nearly gone by something, a shadow crossing in front of it. "No, Hecta Barbossa, him not be carried away by Chiron to Hades' Gate this day."

With bright light blurred by the shadow, his vision began to clear and he saw what he had been reaching out for, past the smiling, ink toothed and tattooed visage of Tia Dalma.

An oil lantern.