Gold and Longing
Why Jack Didn't Die
Pixie
Notes: I would first like to properly assign blame. This ficbit is entirely the fault of honilee, on LiveJournal. The third is the fault of my science teacher for being so damn boring while she's reviewing for the benchmark, and the fourth is the fault of my muses tinkering with my curiosity. So I am in no way, shape, or form responsible for this insanity.
Jack had always aged more slowly than your average man, and much more slowly than your average rum-soaked malnourished pirate captain. He suspected that there was something in his ancestry that his father wasn't telling him, because Teague (and wasn't that a poor pirate name? Jack had changed his as soon as he stole his first ship) had been Keeper of the Code for longer than anyone else could remember. Maybe it was simply something about being birthed and raised in the cove, spending years there, because in the damp caves time seemed to slow to a crawl, and the air had clung to Jack all his life.
So it was no surprise to him that he outlived that whelp of Bootstrap's and his girl with nary a change. It was, however, a shock when some years later he pulled into port and found that the eyes staring back at him were a little older, the flesh covering his face a little looser and more deeply furrowed, the black of his dreadlocks invaded by a few strands of silver. And suddenly, the immortal Captain Jack Sparrow whose name was whispered everywhere still even though piracy was dying, had to face the fact that he, also, was dying – would one day eventually die, never to rise again and enjoy life.
But Jack had never been one to give up easily, and he didn't want to face his own mortality. To him, death was an enemy to be conquered, one who kept coming back for more even though it had been beaten several times. The Kraken, the Locker, the Isla de Muerta – all of these Jack had survived.
Thinking about his old victories gave him an idea, though, and one day he stole a ship – a small one, mind you, as he had never quite found the time to master crewing a ship all by his onesies, what with being chased by His Majesty's Royal Navy and all – and sailed to the island that no one could find unless they knew where it was. There, he found many glittering jewels and heaps of golden coins and trinkets that made his mouth water (Jack wondered why he had never brought himself back here before, and then thought Norrington, with the surprise of one who stumbles across a thought in his mind that had been hiding for several months) but most importantly he found a chest. When he opened it, it was full of slightly irregular coins marked with a crude skull stamp and stained with blood.
He remembered the feeling from his own brief experience as a walking skeleton, years and years and years ago. He finds, as he thought, that it does not nearly compare to the isolation and fear and loneliness and absolute certainty that this was the end, he would never be rescued of the Locker. He can live like this for a long while.