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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG.
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Pairing: Barely Jack/Will, even less Jack/Bootstrap
Feedback: Would be v. appreciated.
Disclaimer: If they were mine, I'd be one v. happy mouse. But they're not.
Summary: For the 'deadline' challenge. Literal and figurative, 'cause my head's weird like that. Done in thirty-three minutes.
***
There's a line between the dead and the living.
It shimmers and dances, it caracoles to the music of the dark spheres. But it's never seen face-to-face, never touched even in the crossing of it.
Jack catches it slantwise, fuzzy silver gleaming from the length of Will's swords in the light. He's glimpsed it in the turn of Elizabeth's neck, just under that faint white line she'll forever bear. When the Commodore and his men were bringing Jack back to Port Royal in chains, toy soldiers turned to real steel, Jack often saw it slipping from eye to eye of his jailers. But never glancing it directly, not when they dropped their gaze before his, not when they taunted him by day and serenaded him by night with their screaming nightmares.
Sometimes he hears its tune whistling in the sails of his ship. Sometimes he feels its beat thundering in the air about him and knocking up against the soles of his feet as he sways with the Pearl's lurching. And a very great once in a while, he'll feel it winding about his feet, curling along with the water, or the sand, or the breeze blowing over the scaffold.
He's tried following it. Of late, he's forced himself to the trailing of it, provoked by the shivering at the edges of his sight that no amount of rum can clear-or blur. His heart has taken to beating quicktime, day after day tapping that little quicker. He wakes night after night in the cradling of the Pearl, always just before it dances free and fair before him, bowing out from the shadows.
Jack pushes his crew hard. They notice, but they remember too and they, them and their captain, all share the same deep, unknowing but certain instinct that whispers to them in the salt, in the spray, in the calling of the seagulls. And they follow, though none know why. None, perhaps, except for Anamaria, Jack thinks, palms flat against the wooden wheel that has seasoned itself to his-and only his-grip. Sometimes when he looks past the fire barring her eyes, he sights a faint streak that speaks of blood and pounding drums and high frenzied chants.
She, unlike the others, doesn't stare questioningly when he turns the ship with his eyes nearly-closed, doesn't come to the cabin privately like Gibbs to ask after the bearings. Jack hasn't touched his compass in weeks. He hasn't needed to. But now, the frisson jarring his sight drives him faster, faster, as fast as the Pearl can soar and it's still not fast enough. The glimpses aren't coming quick enough, close enough for him to steer by heart and so he must grope his way. He begins to sleep less and less, and that helps: the in-between gives him the most landmarks. Jack takes the wheel at sunrise and sunset, and when he cannot see any more in the sun's blinding white, he hands the ship to Anamaria and paces in his cabin, arranging and rearranging his many maps to no avail.
One day, Jack looks down in the dark green water and lying itself out before him is his course, like a prime meridian sprung from the cartographer's pen to full living silver.
The Pearl flew before; now she shoots arrow-like, bullet-like, less hesitant than a falcon stooping to kill. Following the path, beside it, not on it. Jack has not become foolish in his obsession. He does not cross when they reach port, does not cross when they weigh anchor, does not cross even when the wood turns to sand and then dirt-crusted cobblestone beneath his feet. Merely lopes alongside, racing the night, and when it curls back on itself in a tight loop, only then does Jack cease movement.
He looks up then into dark eyes. Eyes that sank under a cannon-weight; eyes that flashed jewel-like in the dark of a smithy and then in the dark of a cave. And it is only then that Jack sees the line in himself, reflection staring back at him, reflection off the ground between them.
Jack steps over the line.
***