Marooned, 3
In Which Jack is Lost
by
Gloria Mundi
See Chapter 1 for full headers
Originally Posted: 1/3/05
For a while after the sea spat him back onto the shore, he'd drifted in and out of delirium. Someone had looked after him, or perhaps he had managed—always safer—to look after himself. The round, cold welts on his leg were cleaned every day: salt water made them sting, but gradually the angry red tendrils beneath his skin faded. One day he'd thought them a peculiar way of writing, an unknown hand using his blood as ink: the next, he'd decided that they were the boneless arms of a baby sea-horror, a creature that would grow up just like the one that'd marked him.
The nights were worse. He woke once when the sky was utterly black—no stars, no moon—knowing that if he could find north, then Norrington would find him. In the dream, that seemed a fine thing. He could see the Commodore striding down the lines of latitude to claim him. There were no irons in his hand this time. But Jack had lost his compass and the storm had spun him around so often that he could no longer be sure of north.
"A compass that doesn't point north," Norrington had said: but, Jack decided, it had not been contempt in his voice after all. It had been disappointment. He wanted Jack to find him again, and oh, Jack longed to be found.
When he awoke in a cold sweat from that dream, the compass was clutched tight in his hand, pointing its futile arrow to the Isla de Muerta. Jack swallowed, hard. "Norrington," he said to the embers. "North. Norrington." The alliteration pleased him—and the sound of his own voice was better than the wave-backed silence—but he was too tired to repeat it more than a couple of times. The sun had not yet risen, and he was cold. He turned onto his other side, facing away from the sea, and tried to dream of Elizabeth and rum.
There was Elizabeth again, back on that little island where Barbossa'd left the two of them. Just the sort of occasion about which Jack'd enjoyed many a pleasurable daydream: marooned, with a young lady—dressed only in her underwear—for company and audience! Jack had always felt that he'd excel himself in such a situation. But it seemed, this time around, that in Elizabeth Swann he'd met his match.
"You're all mine, Jack Sparrow," she said, and she was pinning him down, straddling him, in a way that should've been tremendously exciting. "All mine." And her cold, cold hand insinuated its way beneath his shirt, and came to rest above his heart.
"I'm my own man, Miss Swann," Jack tried to say, though the words didn't come out quite as he'd intended. That'd be the rum she'd plied him with, cunning creature. "All my own. But you're welcome to share." Still flat on his back, he spread his arms wide, inviting her to take advantage of him.
Oh, how he hated it when memories got in the way! For though he knew very well how the dream should have gone, he was powerless to make it so; instead, he felt his dream-self succumb to all that rum and, stretched out beside the fire, begin to snore drunkenly. Jack, trapped impotent in his own dream, could not move or speak or see, but he could feel the presence of the perfidious Miss Swann, watching him with her narrowed cat-eyes, waiting until she was sure he'd be no impediment to her plan.
Could feel, too, the moment when she leaned over Jack, close and warm, and dropped a single chaste kiss upon his forehead; a kiss as hot and sweet as her touch, earlier, had been cold and dead.
The next morning he woke late, clear-headed. It had rained in the night and the fire had gone out, but the sun was warm on his scarred skin, and he remembered all that had befallen him.
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Chapter 4