Title: Something Else

Author: Berne

Rating: PG

Characters: Jack/Elizabeth

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Gore Verbinski, Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, various studios including but not limited to First Mate Productions Inc., Jerry Bruckheimer Films, and Walt Disney Pictures. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

AN: Love to Ociwen for betaing.

Something Else

Elizabeth was marooned on a desert island with the pirate, Jack Sparrow. Six years ago, three years ago, even a handful of months ago, and she would have thought this a scene from one of her daydreamings. Looking upon them both, she would have felt a thrill of excitement, a childish desire for something else, something beyond the tedious tea parties and balls of Port Royal. Looking upon them, she would have thought the flickering bonfire romantic, she would have thought that her adored fantasy of being kidnapped (rescued) by pirates had finally materialised into reality.

But this was real. Sand scratching between her toes. Fire that scorched a path down her throat, dried her tongue. Uncomfortable dizziness that nudged at the edges of her vision. A drunken pirate who looked nothing more than a glittering, shifting, irritatingly distracting half-drowned rat.

It was rum and frustration that made her voice clipped. "Why did you get it done?"

She fixed her eyes on the crackling fire and, when the silence grew too long to be comfortable, she glanced sideways, only to find Sparrow looking unaccountably amused.

Elizabeth glared and took another swig of rum. "Well?"

Sparrow tilted his head, dark eyes considering, and then pushed his shirtsleeve up past his elbow. There, she could see weather-roughened, tar-stained skin, the pale shine of scar tissue, blue-ink sea, setting sun and the swooping sparrow.

Elizabeth caught hold of his arm (warm and heavy and real), turning it this way and that, but…really…

"It's just a tattoo." Sparrow let out an indignant snort and started to pull his arm away; Elizabeth tightened her grip. "Why on earth would you risk your life for a tattoo?"

For a man (pirate!) who had consumed as much rum as he had, Sparrow caught her meaning considerably quickly.

"'S who I am," he murmured, swaying towards her. He glanced down and Elizabeth followed, seeing how pale her fingers were, splayed against his skin. She stayed very still, feeling his breath skitter across her knuckles, feeling the solid press of his arm against hers.

"But you're a pirate; you're a wanted man. It's as good as a death warrant, isn't it?"

"Aye, I'm a pirate, Elizabeth--"

"Miss Swann!"

"Elizabeth," he breathed, and laughed when she scowled and thrust his arm away. "I'm a pirate, Miss Elizabeth," he continued (and somewhere in that she heard a compromise), "I'm a pirate and you'd do well to remember that."

"As if I could forget," she sniffed, glaring at him. "You were going to exchange Will's life for a ship."

"So you've said." He shot a sharp smile at her. It looked more like a wince. "Abundantly."

"Hardly! Will told me that you knew his father. What would he say if he saw how you've--"

Elizabeth left off on a squeak as Sparrow stood up abruptly, forcing her to shuffle backwards a few ungainly paces. She had to crane her neck back to look up at him and even then she couldn't see his face, silhouetted as it was against the wavering gold of the fire.

"Careful, Miss Swann." His voice was low, fierce, and she squinted up at him in surprise. "I'd tread very carefully, if I were you. You know nothing of which you speak."

Elizabeth took offence at that, somewhere in the back of her mind, but she couldn't voice it, not now, not with Jack Sparrow towering over her like some incensed Aztec god. So she said nothing, simply stood (if a little unsteadily) and took hold of his arm again, studying it.

"A sparrow… Well, that's obvious." She could feel his stare boring into her temple. "The sea… A setting sun?"

Elizabeth took a deep breath (thick and smoke-lined) and looked up at him. Sparrow was grinning again, teeth glinting white and silver and gold. "'S not setting, love. 'S rising."

"Oh." And, somehow, that made all the difference. "I'm surprised you haven't the Black Pearl on there as well."

Sparrow's grin folded into a frown and he dipped down to grab up his bottle in an enviably graceful manoeuvre that somehow spilled not a drop. "Got it done ten years ago, Miss Elizabeth. There isn't much more to it than that, savvy?"

But of course there was more to it, there was much more: mutinies, maroonings, madness… But Sparrow's tone brooked no argument and his grimace was not quite hidden behind the bottle of rum.

"Besides, the Pearl's always had her own berth." He leaned in close, emanating heat and rum and salt-sweat, then he shrugged his shirt off his shoulder, just a little, letting her glimpse black strokes that made up a hull, sails, stormy waters, directly over his heart, before tugging the threadbare material to cover it again. He winked at her and she snapped her mouth shut. "Years before the mutiny, that was."

Elizabeth blinked and (a first since being marooned) smiled. The fire was pleasantly warm against her skin and the rum decorated everything with soft edges, as though she were caught in one of the feathered etches from her picture books. Except no self-respecting artist would sketch Jack Sparrow (not that he would ever hold still long enough). He was loud and rude and a black-hearted scoundrel who had used Will abominably. He was too exotic: bright-coloured beads and woven-silk scarves and ornaments that both reflected and held the light. He was everything that an upstanding English gentleman was not.

Elizabeth was not on one of her (imagined) romantic adventures on the high seas and he was certainly not the Jack Sparrow of her fairytales. And yet perhaps that was part of the charm. Part of the (reluctant) attraction.

He had that…something else about him. His voice and his walk lilted (swaying and rolling like the tides); his hair told of places and people, a hundred frozen moments in time; his eyes held years untold by the tales circulating the world's taverns.

Elizabeth half-closed her eyes and gulped down the dregs of her bottle, making the world tilt-spin as she sought around her for another. One appeared in front of her nose, uncorked, and she took it, smiling. Sparrow had extracted his arm without her notice and was rolling down his sleeves, covering scars and skin and tattoos.

"A pirate's life for me," she mumbled, swallowing.

Sparrow's head shot up so fast he had to grab onto Elizabeth's shoulder for support. "What was that, Elizabeth?"

She let it go. Just this once. "I did try to teach it to you earlier, you know." Eyes blinked, less than an inch from hers, until his swaying lurch stumbled both of them closer to the fire. Sparrow gave her a brilliantly contagious sidelong grin.

"Try again."