Disclaimer: POTC doesn't belong to me. Neither does Disney.
Jack paced the barren sand, wincing as it burned his bare feet. He shuddered as a crab that was as tall as his wasit and twice as long skittered by, then disappeared, burrowing itself rapidly in the sand directly ahead of him. So far they had left him well enough alone, and for that, at least, he was thankful. Refraining from stepping on them, however, might be difficult. Shading his eyes from the sun with his hand, he glanced around the island. Around him, the ocean churned, looking more like a giant boiling pot than an endless stretch of freedom. Felt more like a boiling pot, too, he reflected, sticking a toe in the water and wincing at its heat.
He wondered if he were dead, or if the kraken had just decided he didn't taste good and had spit him up on the shore of some unpeopled island. Stupid beast probably didn't like the taste of rum. Or maybe the pirate had ended up jamming a sword into some important place, and had killed it before it killed him. Of course, if that had been the case, he would probably still be in little shreds inside its belly, which he was obviously not.
The sun burned here, hotter than any other place he had been before, but he didn't think it was the afterlife. All the stories he had ever heard had detailed the afterlife as being either infinitely better or infinitely worse than this. Yes, the island story seemed the most probable. But that still didn't explain why he wasn't in tiny litte shreds, or at least full of kraken-teeth holes. Maybe this was some weird cosmic holding cell of Davy Jones, where one was neither living nor dead. Something what like Barbossa and his miscreants had experienced, perhaps.
He had hoped, before he died - or whatever had happened to him - that she would be here, waiting for him. Rebecca Abrams. Her name had been the last in his mind as he felt consciousness slipping away, and had been the one that had awakened him on these distant shores.
He had never loved Elizabeth, had never loved anybody but her, not really. He had been infatuated with other women - he was a pirate - but, like all pirates, he esteemed the sea above all, and Rebecca had been an embodiment of the sea. He had pursued her heart, and she had received his affections with an annoying but enticing combination of her good breeding and wild tempermant. Often, he was given the uneasy impression that inwardly, she laughed at him. She belonged to no one - no one on earth, that was. Her only ruler was the one who had created her, and who would, eventually, bring her to an end. As long as Jack refused to submit himself to her only master, she refused to submit herself to Sparrow, and they had hung in that limbo until her death. She had loved him, he knew - she had told him as much, just before she had died - but she had been one of those annoyingly sensible women who realized that there were things that were more important than the love of a pirate.
Davy Jones had finally taken her, in the end, not into slavery, but into death. She had never surrendered, had laughed in his face when he claimed to be the sea and had offered her 'immortality' on his ship. She knew; he might control the sea, but he had none of its spirit. That had belonged to her. She wasn't, now, in some purgatory imposed by the sea-devil. She was with Him who had created her, who had given her her untamable spirit and had snatched her out of an eternity worse even that that imposed by Davy Jones.
He could still see her dark curls falling in waves down her back, her aristocratically porcelain skin, her reckless laugh, her untamable sea-green eyes. But she was beyond his reach, now. The only thing he had was the realization that, in his pursuit of freedom, he had lost it forever.