The Deepest Circle

Plot: Jack has been betrayed yet again by another treacherous shipmate, and he starts to believe that his old friends are beginning to turn on him, too. How can they prove to him otherwise before he goes mad with hate?

Chapter Rating: R. I REPEAT, this chapter is rated R for brief strong language and a racy sex scene.

Author's Notes: Here's where you get some of the dirt on Luciana, and Jack starts to fall. This chapter is quick, but crucial.

x x x x x

Somewhere along the lines, it became clear to Jack that he was slipping. The minute he'd felt life twitch out of Peony's young body, something within him had snapped--but not on its own. Jack had pushed it, somehow. Now it was only a matter of time. A drool cup in the future seemed inevitable, and Jack laughed at the thought of seeing his broken soul encased in his wretched body, bobbing back and forth in a rocking chair with a thin wet sliver spilling out of the corner of his mouth.

He did become frightened, though, when the laugh that escaped his throat hardly sounded like it was his own.

What puzzled him was that he wasn't experiencing symptoms of what he'd heard one goes through in the process of insanity. There were no voices. No hallucinations. But there was paranoia. He'd experienced that...

'Don't touch me!'

But Will hadn't been touching him earlier. Something was, though...something cold was holding onto him, something cold and ticklish, irritating, like an icy feather gliding up and down his arm.

Were physical sensations a part of madness? Not that he'd heard of. Had he really been so worked up that his nervous system was beginning to imagine-- no, create--these odd sensations?

Maybe there was a voice. Maybe there were hallucinations. Maybe Will visiting him earlier was just a false vision. Hell, maybe this whole room was. Maybe he was still there, still on the deck, the sun setting in his skin with a dead girl in his arms. Her hot blood on his face, a ringing in his ears...

Maybe all these things were really happening, he just wasn't realizing it. But deep down, he sort of hoped for it. He would rather have a voice taunting him and driving him insane rather then his own brain beginning to malfunction and slowly decay and dissolve into a state of madness all by itself. All alone. Cap'n Jack, all alone with his rotten brain.

It was night outside now, he noticed. Or maybe it wasn't.

"Stop it, Jack old boy," he murmured to himself aloud. "These are the kinds of things that will drive you off the starboard side. Contradicting all that seems to be. It's not right. Accept what's in front of you..."

Accept that you aided in the murder of your best friend's child.

His thoughts receded back to Luciana. Luciana Doria, that's what her name was. Jack found thinking about her only pressed on his wounds further, but he continued. Why not blaze up the road of hysteria as fast as possible, rather than wait for it to blanket you slowly? The quicker the better, he mused.

She'd put something in his drink the night they'd met at a bar in Tortuga. Something that made his insides melt and his skin turn overwhelmingly hot. In fact for a good thirty minutes he thought he'd come down with a fatal fever and would be dead within the hour. He wasn't, of course, but in a thick, silver haze, he could remember Luciana pulling him to the top of the stairs in a bar, and begin to fuck him in the long hallway that led to a bunch of inn rooms. He went along with it. It had been a while since he'd gotten laid, and even if he wanted to stop her, the drug had coaxed his senses to a blank, trancelike state. He felt numb and sickeningly complacent as she pushed him to the floor in the middle of the hall and began to ride him shamelessly. Jolts of pleasure shot up his body, but they were somewhat subdued, on account of the toxins swirling about in his brain.

He remembered some man shouting at them to quit it and go on about their business in one of the rooms, so Luciana got off of Jack and opened the door to a messy little chamber and dragged him inside, and continued her "lovemaking," though you could scarcely call it that.

Then she started her kisses. They latched her mouth onto his, and her tongue felt warm with the faint trace of liquor in his mouth. He began kissing her back. Her lips detached and she began kissing him softly down the rest of his body, which she was now undressing, until she finally got to the area between his legs. She stopped then.

"Oh, Jack," she moaned. She started to laugh manically, after she mounted him again. "Kiss me, Jack, kiss me..."

He obeyed, helplessly. The sex was good. At least then it seemed good...but in his state, he could've shot his own mother and laughed at the sight of her bleeding corpse. He shouldn't be doing this, he realized. This wasn't right. He didn't even know this girl.

The drug was wearing off.

"Get off of me," Jack muttered, giving her a slight push. She rolled over and bumped her head gently against the nightstand next to the bed and giggled.

"What's the matter, Captain?" she asked, getting back on top of him. "Lost the urge to uncover some buried treasure?"

Then Jack's old self kicked in. What the hell was he doing? Of course he wanted her to keep going. She was a pretty girl, and this was sex she was talking about. Nothing too unpleasant at all. "Hmm, no. I don't think so, love."

She giggled again, leaned in and kissed him for a long time. After a bit more riding, she sighed and leaned in onto Jack's body, resting her head on his shoulder, his member still alive and kicking inside of her. "I'm tired," she breathed. "Carry me to bed."

"You've got to get off of me first."

"Says who?"

Jack grinned and pressed his fingers gently beneath her buttocks, picked her up. She pressed against him hard as he pulled her to a standing position and he gasped aloud. The pleasure was enormous. He pulled himself onto the mattress, Luciana along, and they romped for another half hour or so. Then she fell asleep.

Jack left her sleeping at around ten the next morning, feeling rather refreshed, expecting not to see her again. But he did.

Luciana had run into him the next night at another bar. He hadn't realized it was her, however, until the drug wore off a second time in a bedroom, discovering her lying naked next to him in bed. She had given him twice the amount she had than the night before. Jack didn't know he was being drugged. He presumed it was the alcohol, or just his lousy memory. It wasn't until he'd spotted her with his own eyes slip a clear liquid into his bottle of rum on the fifth night that he'd noticed. He slapped her.

It was that night when Luciana told him that if he didn't go along with her little games, someday she would ruin everything for him. "I'll make you wish you'd never been born, you fucking cunt!" she hollered at him, throwing whatever she could in his direction. She was a plain nutcase. Jack knew one when he saw one. Though soon, Jack feared the phrase he'd use instead would be "takes one to know one."

What if Jack's own insanity--if he was indeed going crazy, that is--turned him into that someday? A handsome lunatic who went around tropical bars, slipping hypnotic drugs into pretty girls' drinks and screwing them till dawn? He supposed that Luciana's main objective was to increase the dose each night for Jack until he'd been drugged so senseless that it killed him. And then she'd move to the next man. It was the only conclusion he could draw up.

Unless there was some underlying objective; some reason invisible to Jack's eye as to why she'd seduced him in such a blunt, crude manner, and then want to plunge him down into darkness. Revenge, maybe. But Jack hadn't ever seen this girl in his life, and couldn't possibly know what she would have against him.

A few days later, she showed up in Jack's cabin as the Black Pearl was about to pull away from Tortuga with a pistol pressed to his head. She said she wanted to kidnap the daughter of "the Turner family" and extort the money. Then they'd have their child returned once she received the gold, and Luciana would disappear from the Pearl and leave Jack alone. The terms were somewhat reasonable, and he agreed. Jack took oaths seriously, expecting them to be fulfilled.

Apparently, Luciana was not a girl of her word. She wanted to make Jack fall. Hard.

And he did. What Jack didn't realize, sitting awake in his hospital bed at two o'clock in the morning, was that the pain was just beginning.