Prologue

-

Jack lies face down in a black cell where they dropped him. Blood gushes from a wound on his cheek and his tongue tastes sickly sweet with the scent of it. He squeezes the broken shards of bone in his wrist with the arm that still moves. Pain keeps him from loosing all of his senses. Time has no meaning. The ticking of a clock. The path of the sun. He never sees the sun anymore.

They haven't fed him. If he falls asleep he's afraid he won't wake up.

Death is just the next footstep.

Eventually everything dies. Even stone.

Tiny grains of sand watching the water as it washes them away.

A month. Years. Jack doesn't know. In the cell there is no sanity.

He has a lot of time to think.

The bars of his cage cast blue shadows across the floor like imperfect stripes in marble. Ants scurry along the cracks in the stone floor. His eyes feel sluggish. It hurts to breathe. In and out.

Eventually everything dies.

His thoughts and memories are simple, confused.

He has a lot of time to think.

He mistakes her for meaningless women but her face still haunts him.

Death is just the next footstep.

Tomorrow or the next day they will decide that it is his time to die and someone will pump a bullet into his forehead and he'll smile. The pain will end and he won't have to remember her anymore.

He hears empty footsteps coming down the hall.

He is the only prisoner.

He sees the barrel of a gun.

-

Then, Sophia woke up screaming.

-

A/N: I'm baaaack. Finally got around to the damn sequel. How's this for a short start?

Wow. . . I wrote this after reading Fight Club. I see its darkness has influenced me.

I know that not everyone approved of the way I ended the story (some people were downright insulting, mostly in e-mails). I needed to do something different, something to surprise people and make them want to keep reading. If I had ended with Jack and Sophia together, what would be the point of continuing to read? The story would have been tired. I've read so many sequels that are so alike to the first story that I confuse the two, and then simply quit reading. There are countless POTC fics in which everyone lives happily ever after and everything ends up perfectly. It's old. It's redundant. It's overdone. The ending of TFOE is more realistic (for fan fiction), I think, and it leaves things open and left un-said.

I realize that the ending was abrupt. It always is, in those terrible tragedies. Think of Romeo and Juliet, although I would never compare my juvenile attempts at writing to Mr. Shakespeare's. The fate of Jack and Sophia may have even seemed hasty, but I can assure you that I had this planned from the beginning. Things were never going to simply "work out," unfortunately.

Anyway, I just wanted to explain to those of you who were disappointed. You also must remember that this is a sequel. We could very easily have a happy ending after all, finally.

I don't know how quickly the chapters will come at this point. I have a lot of work this year so it may be a bit slow.

You may want to pay attention to this. Some time I might post the epilogue (already written) to TFOE. It's good and I feel like sharing with more people than those who answered my trivia. Also, check out my new mini-fic, Italian Oil Painting. It's written in a very stylized fashion and is pretty interesting, if I do say so myself. Hmm. This is a long Author's Note. I think I'll shut up now.