PotC -- Six Nights Out From Tortuga
Jack/Elizabeth, R
This one's a bit different. geekturnedvamp wanted grimmer, and Jack's voice. selenak wanted a not-fluffy Elizabeth. This is what might happen, past the end of the world.
"It's easy to descend to the Underworld. It's returning that's the trick." -- the Sibyl of Cumae, Virgil's Aeneid
There is no fifth night out from Tortuga. Or it lasts a very long time. Depending on your perspective.
The sixth night they are celebrating their victory. Well, not victory precisely. Escape is a better word. Celebrating their escape, then. That’s something to celebrate.
Tomorrow there will be more things to escape from, he has no doubt. And then they can celebrate escaping from them. On and on in an endless cycle of pursuit and escape. And celebrating. It’s important not to forget the celebrating.
Jack takes another drink of rum, lets Gibbs pound him on the back. There is a lot of pounding going on. He supposes everyone wants to touch him and prove that he’s actually flesh, not a ghost. Or undead, either. A lot of them have been undead, and they have a suspicion of it. So he makes a great show of drinking a lot of rum and pissing over the side. Live men do this, not wraiths or whatever. And pounding. Everyone seems to need to pound him on the back until his teeth shake.
The Pearl rides at anchor in shallow water, much too shallow for any monster of the deep. And no monster of the deep is presumably looking for them right now. The Pearl is supposed to be on the bottom and he is supposed to be dead, and hopefully it hasn’t occurred to Davy Jones that neither is precisely true anymore. He is not precisely dead. He seems rather less than more dead, in fact.
Jack shakes out his hand, managing to dump rum on Gibbs’ head in the process. Fingers working, yes. All in order, there.
The party on the quarterdeck is beginning to thin. Everyone has assured themselves that the planks beneath their feet are real, and that he is real. Given that, only the most dedicated drinkers are still at it, and the people who want to pound him the most. It has not escaped him that Will is nowhere to be seen.
Elizabeth is all the way forward, sitting on the hatch cover up in the prow, looking out over the sea, her legs drawn up beneath her like a little boy. If there was some scene between her and Will, he’s missed it. There’s nothing to see now.
Still, he ambles forward, making elaborate detours around coils of rope and the iron-circled mainmast, the bottle still in one hand. He drops onto the hatch cover beside her. Whatever he meant to say dies in his throat.
She looks at him like she’s waiting for a blow.
Maybe he meant to give her one. Probably not, but somewhere statistically speaking it was on the chart. Not probable, but possible. Somewhere down there in the lower percentiles with kissing her passionately.
Instead he shrugs, lifting the rum bottle to his lips, his ragged sleeves falling back, and takes another long drink. It buys him ten or fifteen seconds.
She’s still looking at him that way, steeled for whatever it is. He hasn’t seen her alone since those last minutes on the Pearl.
“No hard feelings, darlin’” he says, “I’d have done the same to you.”
Maybe he would have and maybe he wouldn’t. It’s possible. But you never know if you will or you won’t until you come to the moment, not for sure.
“Jack….” Her eyes drop from his, and she looks out over the sea. “I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t believe it, and he doesn’t want to hear pretty lies from her, not just now with his head spinning with rum and everything rocking just a little too much. He lies back on the hatch cover, looking up at the Pearl’s sails glimmering gray in the moonlight. Whatever’s happened, he has her back, his lady, his light. The ship rocks slowly at anchor.
“No, you’re not,” he says, and it comes out almost a chuckle. “You’re sorry you had to. You’re not sorry you did.”
“I came all this way to find you, didn’t I?” she demands.
“Aye, you did,” he says. He digests this. It takes a while, what with the light in the rigging and the sails moving softly above. He can hear the slow creak of her boards, the rustle of canvas like the feathers of a great bird. “I’m wondering why.” He closes his eyes, resting in the Pearl’s embrace.
“Jack,” she says, and her voice is a little ragged. There’s just no need for this conversation. No need for any more right now.
“But I don’t need to know,” he says. The land breeze is very light. It barely registers against his face. “You do what you need to do.” He’s just too tired, and the rum has not taken him all the way to oblivion, just to that nasty lucid place between cheerful and horny and completely gone.
And then there is her hand moving against his hair, tentative and slow, stroking snarled locks. It’s like the pounding. It’s being sure he’s real. He’s almost entirely sure that’s what it is. It loosens something inside him, and he lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, eyes still closed, relaxing into her hand as it traces along his hairline, curves around his face. He turns his head just a little, his nose against her wrist and his lips against her palm, the lightest of kisses. Her hands smell of rope and sweat and leather, just a touch of incense remaining. He could breathe that and sleep.
“Jack,” she says, sounding amused, “Are you planning to sleep on the hatch cover?”
“Yes,” he says.
“It might rain,” she says.
“It might,” he says without opening his eyes. “It might also snow. Or have a sandstorm. Or a plague of frogs. Those can be quite nasty.”
“When have you had a plague of frogs?” Elizabeth sounds perplexed. Perhaps this is not going at all as she planned. Whatever that was. It probably wasn’t talking about frogs.
“At Aden,” he says. “You wouldn’t expect frogs there, on account of the desert. But it was a plague of frogs. Little tiny ones. They tasted wonderful.”
“Jack, for God’s sake! Do you ever stop?” Her hand is twined in his hair.
“No, not really,” he says, and is surprised how tired his voice sounds. How naked.
He hears her move then, and she’s tugging at his arms. “Come on, Jack.”
“Come where?” he opens one eye.
“To your cabin. Where you are going to sleep.” She’s doing her best to haul him onto his feet, and it occurs to him he’d best cooperate unless he wants her to rupture something.
A few form protests are enough, coupled with some dramatic moans. She has him by the arm and is half dragging him into his own cabin. It occurs to him that this might be one of those opportune moments he’s mentioned, but probably not. Opportune in the sense of falling over. It’s a good opportunity for that.
His cabin is wrong. Even in the limited light through the stern windows he can see that. The bed covers are mussed and half on the floor just as he left them, a bottle of ink and half a stoppered bottle of rum on the table. They should have fallen off and shattered long before the kraken hauled the Pearl under. A chill runs down his spine, sobering like a bucket of cold water. Everything looks just as he left it forty hours ago. Or three months ago, depending on your perspective.
“Jack?” Elizabeth is standing by the bed, frowning.
He picks up the bottle from the table, swirls the rum around in the glass. A thousand shards of glass. He is sure he heard glass breaking. He is sure he heard the stern windows breaking in her death throes.
The bottle feels hard and real in his hand, and he lifts it, half in the light, the moonlight through the window striping across his sleeve, slanting through the unbroken panes of the windows.
He is sure he saw the bones in his arm, suddenly stark and white against ripped flesh, scars transformed into bloody strips torn by teeth, with a blinding pain so bright as to be painless. He shoves his sleeve back, looking not at unmarred flesh, but all the same scars, the same ones he’s carried for fourteen years. His wrist is dirty from the chains. There is a bruise on his hand from the sword fight on the island. Ordinary, warm flesh.
“Jack?” She’s starting to sound a little frightened now. Can’t have that. Her sounding like the thing he feels curling around inside.
He lifts the bottle up, letting the draggled lace drip down around his hands again. “What happens in the underworld, stays in the underworld,” he says. “It’s tidy like that, love.” The rum tastes exactly like it did forty hours ago, when he put that bottle down.
“I think you’ve had enough rum, Jack,” she says, walking toward him and taking it out of his hand. There probably isn’t enough rum in the entire world. But he has forgotten things before. This one will fade in time too.
He conjures up the below decks of the Frances Davenport, the slave ship raked by fire. They had used grape to take her, not ball, sweeping the decks not the waterline. The damage below wasn’t much, where two hundred fourteen people shackled nose to feet lay in their own waste waiting for the ship to go down. It was the worst thing he had ever seen. Now the memory is worn, frayed around the edge, some of the horror worn off from use, from being pulled out and held up like a miniature. Is this worse than this? No? Then fuck it all. Horror is the antidote for horror.
Elizabeth is standing close to him, the bottle in her hand. Her brows are knit, and she looks terribly, awfully concerned. She shouldn’t look that way. She should be smiling. She’s won.
There is something he ought to say. Something he ought to do. If he kissed her now she would not protest. He could kiss her and forget it in her breath, in the softness of her mouth.
He could say that the underworld is very quiet, and hell is on earth. But that’s not the sort of thing that Captain Jack Sparrow says.
“Jack?” She puts one hand tentatively against his chest, against the worn leather of his baldric, the shirt beneath it. “You’re very drunk, and you should lie down.”
He lets her unfasten the baldric and take it off, unwind the stained sash from his waist. He throws the sash across the table, listens to it knocking the ink bottle off, clunking onto the floor. It’s different. It’s marked. Time has passed in this room.
“I’ll be right as rain tomorrow,” he says, knowing she will think he means that he’ll sleep it off. And he will. Tomorrow it will all be better.
He will lie down and she will go out and he will lie here in the cabin like it was day before yesterday or three months ago and he will remember what it felt like and…
…he leans forward and kisses her damned if he will think. But being damned was the problem in the first place if he remembers.
She’s startled and tries to suck in a breath but then her lips are very warm and her arms are going around him and he can feel her soft hair against his face where it’s escaped. She’s saying some incoherent little things, but all he can feel is what the weight of her hair feels like gathered in his hands, how her breasts feel against his chest through two layers of clothes, and how she smells like salt and like her, whatever that is that smells like Elizabeth.
“Sweet Bess,” he says, kissing at the corners of her mouth, her face upturned as though he were the sun, her arms tight around him.
She might be telling him to go straight back to hell or that she loves him eternally, he has no idea which and doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. He could drown in her.
“Not drown, swim,” she says, and he is not sure if she said it, or if he imagined it in the small noises she is making. Swim in her, like crystal waters. Not diving to oblivion, but swimming in the blue, raising her up from white sands. Or is she raising him up, like the Pearl from her resting place? Everything is blue behind his eyelids. There is nothing but Elizabeth.
And somehow he’s lying down beside her and her hands are under his shirt, running across his chest in long, hungry strokes, and his arm is beneath her head.
“I’m not sorry,” she says, and he has no idea which thing she means, giving him to the kraken or coming to look for him past the end of the world, or giving herself to him like this.
“I’m not either,” he says, and he’s not sorry for anything right now. Whatever new problems there are belong to another day. He’ll roll those dice when he sits down to the game.
Her eyelashes are darker than her hair, looking almost damp against her cheek, her head thrown back for some reason. Maybe it’s because he’s stroking her breasts and belly, her shirt up around her neck and her skin so soft under his hands. This is the moment of opportunity, but his body’s not answering. Too much rum. Or forty hours of subjective time. Or being dead, or something. He should be raw with desire and he isn’t.
It’s just not answering. Her hands are soft and her mouth is on his and he should not be so unmoved, so hungry for nothing but the sense of her, the scent of her, not the warm places in her body where he should want to be. He should be mad with desire, not just mad. And he’s going to break it. He’s had a virgin before, and she’s virgin if there ever was one. This isn’t how he’d go about it, drunk and half mad.
He will break this. He’s broken lots of things. The world is full of things that can be broken, and it doesn’t matter much because there are always more things. There are so many things that you can break and break and break them and there are more and if you didn’t someone else would. But he doesn’t want to break this thing. Not without even knowing what it was.
So he has to make it funny so it’s not cruel, so it’s not embarrassing. He leans back against the pillow, his hand stilling on her, waiting for her eyes to drift open. They do, and he smiles, a pirate leer. “Sweeting,” he says, “There’s one very important thing you have to learn about being a pirate.”
“What’s that, Jack?” She looks a little breathless, and her eyes are dark with desire. She will not thank him for stopping, not now.
“There are only two things when you’re a pirate,” he says, enunciating carefully, afraid of mangling the metaphor. “Things you can do and things you can’t do. And this is a thing I can’t do.”
Instead of being angry she laughs, her face against his arm. “Jack, you are a mess.”
“I know it, darlin’,” he says lightly, his arm tightening around her. “It’s been forty hours since I saw me bed.”
“Or three months.” Her face stills, and he thinks she sees too much, guesses too much. He’ll never know. She puts her head down against his arm, her face against his shoulder, drawing him to her, into an embrace that’s warm and not too close. His hand is still on her flank, skin smooth as cream and untouched by the sun. “Do you want me to go?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
She sighs, settling into him and drawing up the blanket. He’d thought it was on the floor. He’s losing track of where things are. That’s a bad sign. Usually he knows exactly where everything is at a glance. He needs to know that.
“Go to sleep, Jack,” she whispers against his neck. Maybe she understands or maybe there’s hell to pay in the morning or maybe she thinks she understands but doesn’t. The odds are about even all three ways. He can’t calculate the risks from here.
He takes a deep breath of the scent of her hair, salt and sweat and warm. She is here and this is real, not some sort of fever dream or hallucination. Already it’s vaguer, that place between. People aren’t supposed to remember. That will fade away, boring and gray. The kraken stands just this side of the door, and he will remember that. But not so well after a while. There will come a time when he doesn’t think about it any more than all the other things he doesn’t think about that he can’t remember to name what they are that he’s not thinking about.
He will go to sleep and in the morning he will wake up on his own precious Pearl with sweet Bess sleepy and half naked in his arms, and the sun coming up over the water. There will be people after them and there is still the whole damn business of Norrington and Davy Jones’ heart and whatever Will is on about and he wants to go over every square foot of the Pearl himself.
But maybe he will wait until he’s gone over every square inch of Elizabeth. He will kiss the sleep from her eyes and see if she meant it. He will see what it would be like to take her at dawn, gentle and slow as swells far out to sea on a calm day, and when she bites her lip against the pain he will wait for her and whisper small things and let her have the dignity of designing her own ruination. And she will love him just a little, for a little while, and at least he knows she will remember because you never forget the first and maybe she will be fond someday when she recalls this.
And the oceans are deep, and the Pearl is rocking them to sleep, and he can hear all her sounds like seabirds do far out to sea, when they hear the surf on distant islands and know which way to go by sounds men can’t hear. The wind will pick up tomorrow, fair for home. He doesn’t know how he knows but it’s one of those things from a million details of clouds and wind and the way the moon had a faint aurora of moisture around it, and he can tell you what the weather will be, calm at dawn and fair by afternoon.
Time to love and time to go, both.
Captain Jack Sparrow is a happy man.
Feedback is greatly appreciated!
This one's a bit different. geekturnedvamp wanted grimmer, and Jack's voice. selenak wanted a not-fluffy Elizabeth. This is what might happen, past the end of the world.
"It's easy to descend to the Underworld. It's returning that's the trick." -- the Sibyl of Cumae, Virgil's Aeneid
There is no fifth night out from Tortuga. Or it lasts a very long time. Depending on your perspective.
The sixth night they are celebrating their victory. Well, not victory precisely. Escape is a better word. Celebrating their escape, then. That’s something to celebrate.
Tomorrow there will be more things to escape from, he has no doubt. And then they can celebrate escaping from them. On and on in an endless cycle of pursuit and escape. And celebrating. It’s important not to forget the celebrating.
Jack takes another drink of rum, lets Gibbs pound him on the back. There is a lot of pounding going on. He supposes everyone wants to touch him and prove that he’s actually flesh, not a ghost. Or undead, either. A lot of them have been undead, and they have a suspicion of it. So he makes a great show of drinking a lot of rum and pissing over the side. Live men do this, not wraiths or whatever. And pounding. Everyone seems to need to pound him on the back until his teeth shake.
The Pearl rides at anchor in shallow water, much too shallow for any monster of the deep. And no monster of the deep is presumably looking for them right now. The Pearl is supposed to be on the bottom and he is supposed to be dead, and hopefully it hasn’t occurred to Davy Jones that neither is precisely true anymore. He is not precisely dead. He seems rather less than more dead, in fact.
Jack shakes out his hand, managing to dump rum on Gibbs’ head in the process. Fingers working, yes. All in order, there.
The party on the quarterdeck is beginning to thin. Everyone has assured themselves that the planks beneath their feet are real, and that he is real. Given that, only the most dedicated drinkers are still at it, and the people who want to pound him the most. It has not escaped him that Will is nowhere to be seen.
Elizabeth is all the way forward, sitting on the hatch cover up in the prow, looking out over the sea, her legs drawn up beneath her like a little boy. If there was some scene between her and Will, he’s missed it. There’s nothing to see now.
Still, he ambles forward, making elaborate detours around coils of rope and the iron-circled mainmast, the bottle still in one hand. He drops onto the hatch cover beside her. Whatever he meant to say dies in his throat.
She looks at him like she’s waiting for a blow.
Maybe he meant to give her one. Probably not, but somewhere statistically speaking it was on the chart. Not probable, but possible. Somewhere down there in the lower percentiles with kissing her passionately.
Instead he shrugs, lifting the rum bottle to his lips, his ragged sleeves falling back, and takes another long drink. It buys him ten or fifteen seconds.
She’s still looking at him that way, steeled for whatever it is. He hasn’t seen her alone since those last minutes on the Pearl.
“No hard feelings, darlin’” he says, “I’d have done the same to you.”
Maybe he would have and maybe he wouldn’t. It’s possible. But you never know if you will or you won’t until you come to the moment, not for sure.
“Jack….” Her eyes drop from his, and she looks out over the sea. “I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t believe it, and he doesn’t want to hear pretty lies from her, not just now with his head spinning with rum and everything rocking just a little too much. He lies back on the hatch cover, looking up at the Pearl’s sails glimmering gray in the moonlight. Whatever’s happened, he has her back, his lady, his light. The ship rocks slowly at anchor.
“No, you’re not,” he says, and it comes out almost a chuckle. “You’re sorry you had to. You’re not sorry you did.”
“I came all this way to find you, didn’t I?” she demands.
“Aye, you did,” he says. He digests this. It takes a while, what with the light in the rigging and the sails moving softly above. He can hear the slow creak of her boards, the rustle of canvas like the feathers of a great bird. “I’m wondering why.” He closes his eyes, resting in the Pearl’s embrace.
“Jack,” she says, and her voice is a little ragged. There’s just no need for this conversation. No need for any more right now.
“But I don’t need to know,” he says. The land breeze is very light. It barely registers against his face. “You do what you need to do.” He’s just too tired, and the rum has not taken him all the way to oblivion, just to that nasty lucid place between cheerful and horny and completely gone.
And then there is her hand moving against his hair, tentative and slow, stroking snarled locks. It’s like the pounding. It’s being sure he’s real. He’s almost entirely sure that’s what it is. It loosens something inside him, and he lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, eyes still closed, relaxing into her hand as it traces along his hairline, curves around his face. He turns his head just a little, his nose against her wrist and his lips against her palm, the lightest of kisses. Her hands smell of rope and sweat and leather, just a touch of incense remaining. He could breathe that and sleep.
“Jack,” she says, sounding amused, “Are you planning to sleep on the hatch cover?”
“Yes,” he says.
“It might rain,” she says.
“It might,” he says without opening his eyes. “It might also snow. Or have a sandstorm. Or a plague of frogs. Those can be quite nasty.”
“When have you had a plague of frogs?” Elizabeth sounds perplexed. Perhaps this is not going at all as she planned. Whatever that was. It probably wasn’t talking about frogs.
“At Aden,” he says. “You wouldn’t expect frogs there, on account of the desert. But it was a plague of frogs. Little tiny ones. They tasted wonderful.”
“Jack, for God’s sake! Do you ever stop?” Her hand is twined in his hair.
“No, not really,” he says, and is surprised how tired his voice sounds. How naked.
He hears her move then, and she’s tugging at his arms. “Come on, Jack.”
“Come where?” he opens one eye.
“To your cabin. Where you are going to sleep.” She’s doing her best to haul him onto his feet, and it occurs to him he’d best cooperate unless he wants her to rupture something.
A few form protests are enough, coupled with some dramatic moans. She has him by the arm and is half dragging him into his own cabin. It occurs to him that this might be one of those opportune moments he’s mentioned, but probably not. Opportune in the sense of falling over. It’s a good opportunity for that.
His cabin is wrong. Even in the limited light through the stern windows he can see that. The bed covers are mussed and half on the floor just as he left them, a bottle of ink and half a stoppered bottle of rum on the table. They should have fallen off and shattered long before the kraken hauled the Pearl under. A chill runs down his spine, sobering like a bucket of cold water. Everything looks just as he left it forty hours ago. Or three months ago, depending on your perspective.
“Jack?” Elizabeth is standing by the bed, frowning.
He picks up the bottle from the table, swirls the rum around in the glass. A thousand shards of glass. He is sure he heard glass breaking. He is sure he heard the stern windows breaking in her death throes.
The bottle feels hard and real in his hand, and he lifts it, half in the light, the moonlight through the window striping across his sleeve, slanting through the unbroken panes of the windows.
He is sure he saw the bones in his arm, suddenly stark and white against ripped flesh, scars transformed into bloody strips torn by teeth, with a blinding pain so bright as to be painless. He shoves his sleeve back, looking not at unmarred flesh, but all the same scars, the same ones he’s carried for fourteen years. His wrist is dirty from the chains. There is a bruise on his hand from the sword fight on the island. Ordinary, warm flesh.
“Jack?” She’s starting to sound a little frightened now. Can’t have that. Her sounding like the thing he feels curling around inside.
He lifts the bottle up, letting the draggled lace drip down around his hands again. “What happens in the underworld, stays in the underworld,” he says. “It’s tidy like that, love.” The rum tastes exactly like it did forty hours ago, when he put that bottle down.
“I think you’ve had enough rum, Jack,” she says, walking toward him and taking it out of his hand. There probably isn’t enough rum in the entire world. But he has forgotten things before. This one will fade in time too.
He conjures up the below decks of the Frances Davenport, the slave ship raked by fire. They had used grape to take her, not ball, sweeping the decks not the waterline. The damage below wasn’t much, where two hundred fourteen people shackled nose to feet lay in their own waste waiting for the ship to go down. It was the worst thing he had ever seen. Now the memory is worn, frayed around the edge, some of the horror worn off from use, from being pulled out and held up like a miniature. Is this worse than this? No? Then fuck it all. Horror is the antidote for horror.
Elizabeth is standing close to him, the bottle in her hand. Her brows are knit, and she looks terribly, awfully concerned. She shouldn’t look that way. She should be smiling. She’s won.
There is something he ought to say. Something he ought to do. If he kissed her now she would not protest. He could kiss her and forget it in her breath, in the softness of her mouth.
He could say that the underworld is very quiet, and hell is on earth. But that’s not the sort of thing that Captain Jack Sparrow says.
“Jack?” She puts one hand tentatively against his chest, against the worn leather of his baldric, the shirt beneath it. “You’re very drunk, and you should lie down.”
He lets her unfasten the baldric and take it off, unwind the stained sash from his waist. He throws the sash across the table, listens to it knocking the ink bottle off, clunking onto the floor. It’s different. It’s marked. Time has passed in this room.
“I’ll be right as rain tomorrow,” he says, knowing she will think he means that he’ll sleep it off. And he will. Tomorrow it will all be better.
He will lie down and she will go out and he will lie here in the cabin like it was day before yesterday or three months ago and he will remember what it felt like and…
…he leans forward and kisses her damned if he will think. But being damned was the problem in the first place if he remembers.
She’s startled and tries to suck in a breath but then her lips are very warm and her arms are going around him and he can feel her soft hair against his face where it’s escaped. She’s saying some incoherent little things, but all he can feel is what the weight of her hair feels like gathered in his hands, how her breasts feel against his chest through two layers of clothes, and how she smells like salt and like her, whatever that is that smells like Elizabeth.
“Sweet Bess,” he says, kissing at the corners of her mouth, her face upturned as though he were the sun, her arms tight around him.
She might be telling him to go straight back to hell or that she loves him eternally, he has no idea which and doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. He could drown in her.
“Not drown, swim,” she says, and he is not sure if she said it, or if he imagined it in the small noises she is making. Swim in her, like crystal waters. Not diving to oblivion, but swimming in the blue, raising her up from white sands. Or is she raising him up, like the Pearl from her resting place? Everything is blue behind his eyelids. There is nothing but Elizabeth.
And somehow he’s lying down beside her and her hands are under his shirt, running across his chest in long, hungry strokes, and his arm is beneath her head.
“I’m not sorry,” she says, and he has no idea which thing she means, giving him to the kraken or coming to look for him past the end of the world, or giving herself to him like this.
“I’m not either,” he says, and he’s not sorry for anything right now. Whatever new problems there are belong to another day. He’ll roll those dice when he sits down to the game.
Her eyelashes are darker than her hair, looking almost damp against her cheek, her head thrown back for some reason. Maybe it’s because he’s stroking her breasts and belly, her shirt up around her neck and her skin so soft under his hands. This is the moment of opportunity, but his body’s not answering. Too much rum. Or forty hours of subjective time. Or being dead, or something. He should be raw with desire and he isn’t.
It’s just not answering. Her hands are soft and her mouth is on his and he should not be so unmoved, so hungry for nothing but the sense of her, the scent of her, not the warm places in her body where he should want to be. He should be mad with desire, not just mad. And he’s going to break it. He’s had a virgin before, and she’s virgin if there ever was one. This isn’t how he’d go about it, drunk and half mad.
He will break this. He’s broken lots of things. The world is full of things that can be broken, and it doesn’t matter much because there are always more things. There are so many things that you can break and break and break them and there are more and if you didn’t someone else would. But he doesn’t want to break this thing. Not without even knowing what it was.
So he has to make it funny so it’s not cruel, so it’s not embarrassing. He leans back against the pillow, his hand stilling on her, waiting for her eyes to drift open. They do, and he smiles, a pirate leer. “Sweeting,” he says, “There’s one very important thing you have to learn about being a pirate.”
“What’s that, Jack?” She looks a little breathless, and her eyes are dark with desire. She will not thank him for stopping, not now.
“There are only two things when you’re a pirate,” he says, enunciating carefully, afraid of mangling the metaphor. “Things you can do and things you can’t do. And this is a thing I can’t do.”
Instead of being angry she laughs, her face against his arm. “Jack, you are a mess.”
“I know it, darlin’,” he says lightly, his arm tightening around her. “It’s been forty hours since I saw me bed.”
“Or three months.” Her face stills, and he thinks she sees too much, guesses too much. He’ll never know. She puts her head down against his arm, her face against his shoulder, drawing him to her, into an embrace that’s warm and not too close. His hand is still on her flank, skin smooth as cream and untouched by the sun. “Do you want me to go?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
She sighs, settling into him and drawing up the blanket. He’d thought it was on the floor. He’s losing track of where things are. That’s a bad sign. Usually he knows exactly where everything is at a glance. He needs to know that.
“Go to sleep, Jack,” she whispers against his neck. Maybe she understands or maybe there’s hell to pay in the morning or maybe she thinks she understands but doesn’t. The odds are about even all three ways. He can’t calculate the risks from here.
He takes a deep breath of the scent of her hair, salt and sweat and warm. She is here and this is real, not some sort of fever dream or hallucination. Already it’s vaguer, that place between. People aren’t supposed to remember. That will fade away, boring and gray. The kraken stands just this side of the door, and he will remember that. But not so well after a while. There will come a time when he doesn’t think about it any more than all the other things he doesn’t think about that he can’t remember to name what they are that he’s not thinking about.
He will go to sleep and in the morning he will wake up on his own precious Pearl with sweet Bess sleepy and half naked in his arms, and the sun coming up over the water. There will be people after them and there is still the whole damn business of Norrington and Davy Jones’ heart and whatever Will is on about and he wants to go over every square foot of the Pearl himself.
But maybe he will wait until he’s gone over every square inch of Elizabeth. He will kiss the sleep from her eyes and see if she meant it. He will see what it would be like to take her at dawn, gentle and slow as swells far out to sea on a calm day, and when she bites her lip against the pain he will wait for her and whisper small things and let her have the dignity of designing her own ruination. And she will love him just a little, for a little while, and at least he knows she will remember because you never forget the first and maybe she will be fond someday when she recalls this.
And the oceans are deep, and the Pearl is rocking them to sleep, and he can hear all her sounds like seabirds do far out to sea, when they hear the surf on distant islands and know which way to go by sounds men can’t hear. The wind will pick up tomorrow, fair for home. He doesn’t know how he knows but it’s one of those things from a million details of clouds and wind and the way the moon had a faint aurora of moisture around it, and he can tell you what the weather will be, calm at dawn and fair by afternoon.
Time to love and time to go, both.
Captain Jack Sparrow is a happy man.
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