Renaissance

The sun was making sweat pour in rivulets down her back, the wicked, blistering Caribbean weather sticking at the top of her trousers, when she was roughly grabbed by the wrist and pulled into the captain's cabin. No time to protest, only enough to open her throat in an attempt to yell before his mouth was bruising hers, the strength of rum and spices and sun and tongue and god...

"I'm sick of waiting for you," he said, and pushed more power into her. And his hands were everywhere, work roughened and bedecked in silvers that felt like ice on her feverish skin. There was cold and there was hot and there was him, smoldering hotter and higher and smokier than the signal on the island, and oh yes, his hand on her stomach was a signal, and the chord on her trousers slipping was a signal, and his hand cupping her, and her mouth on his stomach and lower was so much more than a signal is was a flare.

Her own wetness soaked her as quickly as the snakes of guilt spread like plumage around her thighs, as quickly as his fingers found her and thrust again, and again, his hooded eyes staring her down as if daring her to do anything but open her legs wider. She complied, tugged herself to his waist and gasped at the skin contact, and in her mind's eye his skin went from olive to pale and his eyes from dangerous to earnest, and her heart went from pure to poison.

His name was not the one on her lips when he ground himself into her, impaling every inch of her breath against the wall. She felt the wood scraping again her spine, the pain of the burn as sharp as the pain of each thrust, ebbing, cutting, and she kept moaning when his mouth found hers, and he swallowed every plea and groan of Will from her throat. He swallowed every sound she made and she in turn swallowed his when he came gasping and she screaming into the open throats of the other, the open mouths whose voices had stilled and forgotten language.

When she remembered, she slid numbly to the floor, unaware of her nudity or his. She stared at a map he had on his table, a pencil, sheets of notes. She was so numb but so hot, feeling his skin molding to hers as strongly as she felt nothing but the urge to stare vacantly at the wall and have fairytale dreams of a caged fiance. Who was his captor now, the Flying Dutchman or her, she no longer knew.

Jack panted as he pressed his forehead to hers. He was already dressed.

"I gave you what you wanted."

He took his coat and was gone.

Later. Click. That painful noise, sharp and black, piercing as the untimely loss of virginity. Satisfying. The right thing to do, as kissing him was, as shoving a blade of his own desire back into him. His eyes were hotter than they ever had been as they bore into her, and she found herself longing for the chill rains of England. Anything to escape this burning, the fire that she thought she left behind on the island.

Pirate. Said with such pride that rang in her ears, an echo as she looked at the man she was to marry with frigid eyes. Jack had pulled all her warmth from her, selfishly claimed it as his own.

"Where's Jack?" poured from Will's lips. She met him with frost. Always cold, always laced into a bodice of propriety. Not anymore, but he wouldn't know that.

The ice lingered as she watched Jack be swallowed as surely as she had swallowed his moans not a week before. Not sorry not sorry not sorry..

Later, she sat at her bunk idly twirling a stolen iron rod. She dipped it into the fire and left it to swig another hearty mouthful of rum down her throat, as eagerly as if she were drinking him down. She poured over maps, and let her eyes wander defiantly over books, not reading the words but only the dust that travelled like dancers in the air.

Angrily, she rose to her feet and snatched the rod from the fire, the P lighting her face in a golden glow, an afterglow. She was his pirate now, as she was her own, and Will's; but it was a P that belonged on her skin, not a wedding band. Not that brilliant piece of chilled silver that looked like the stars but wasn't bright enough to light the way for a ship at night.

When she pushed the brand into her right arm, she didn't cry out. Only sucked in air as he did when he gasped and came inside her, only breathed in the flame through her skin and into her heart. Let no one say Elizabeth Swann was not a pirate. Let no one say she would not sail into hell for the man that marked her heart as she marred her skin, no one allow her into dresses and corsets and proper society again. Jack Sparrow would see her scar and he would smile, wider than he did when she chained him to the mast, wider than in the bed of rum and fire on the island.

She poured rum on the burn and finished the last of the bottle, staring at the sight of her sun tanned skin through the tarnished glass. Not sorry not sorry not...

"Barbossa," she called as she exited her cabin. "I'm ready to set sail."

...sorry.