PotC – Black

Title: Black
Author: Atra Materia
Fandom/Characters: Pirates of the Caribbean – Jack
Rating/Warnings: Gen
Summary: Jack dwells on the past, the future, and how, when, or if he’s going to get there.
Disclaimer: All content relating directly to Pirates of the Caribbean, including but not limited to its characters, events, and places, is the property of its original creators.

He wondered, sometimes, why he bothered.

Maybe it was vengeance; maybe he thought himself judge, jury, and executioner. Right and wrong were true and real, and there were just some things you didn’t do to a man. He’d been done one of them.

Maybe it was validation. He’d been left for a dead man; maybe he needed to prove to himself that he really was alive.

Maybe it was stubbornness. Maybe he just didn’t know when to give up and call his losses. When it was a lost cause.

Maybe. Maybe. He could ponder and hypothesize and proselytize for hours, but when it came right down to it, there was no maybe about it. It was love.

It wasn’t a normal man’s love, but then, Jack Sparrow had never been a normal man, and the love of normal women, well – it had never done it for him.

No, she was the only one for him, the only one who understood him; who understood why he couldn’t settle down, why he couldn’t make an honest man of himself; why he wouldn’t be coming home at night, every night, day in and day out, the same door, the same table, the same arms, the same bed. Who understood what it would do to him to put down roots; how those roots would twist and blacken and wither away. How his heart would twist and blacken and wither away, and he’d be no better than Barbossa, the man who’d taken his heart and his love and his one and only. His freedom. His Black Pearl.

She was out there somewhere, waiting for him to come and take her back. He’d be her black knight, and she, his black steed. Love lost, she might have been – at least right then – but he could never call her a loss, and he’d be damned if he’d give up on her.

And so he bothered, and kept bothering; he chased and he dogged and he nagged. He had a woman in every port and a warrant in most of the same, and he left them all behind; left them wanting and begging and chasing. Maybe they thought they knew how he felt; maybe they did, and maybe they were just deluding themselves. As for Jack, he didn’t care. Maybe he should have had a little sympathy for them, knowing how it felt; but hell, had anyone had any sympathy for him? No, he didn’t have sympathy; he had a head start and a borrowed ship and a wind that was speeding him on his way back to her. He was coming up fast on the Black Pearl and the black bastard that was riding her. Raping her. He’d ride Barbossa’s arse to the ends of the earth if he had to, but he’d never stop.

Sometimes, though, there were blacker nights, moonless nights, when he’d give up – just for then – on trying to pick his way safely through the storm-churned waves, and drop anchor for a while. He could never sleep well on those nights, never dream; just sit in the captain’s quarters and stare at his fingers; black with the ink of the thousand maps he’d already read, and reaching for the thousand more he had yet to unroll. His stained hand would hesitate halfway there, and he’d touch his face instead.

His fingers would come away bare, and he’d tell himself that ink was fickle; that it went all too willingly to the flesh around his eyes, and that it was better there, because who could tell the difference, anyway? And then he’d blow out the candle and stare into the darkness, and pretend the wetness on his skin was still spilled ink, and wonder why he bothered.

Author’s Notes: Written for the Pirates 500 ‘Ink’ challenge @ LJ. It’s actually about a hundred and thirty words too long, but, eh.