A/N: Sorry it's been so long :( We had homecoming at school, and then exam week, so please do forgive, dears. This is a bit short, I believe, but I AM trying to keep you satisfied.

Enjoy

Chapter Ten: Gone Forever

The Caribbean sky was clear, immaculate blue without a cloud in sight, and the sun was blistering, beating down on the entire crew with unrivaled force. Jack pulled his tricorn hat down a little more over his forehead, shielding his eyes more from the blinding light of the days' shining star. He tapped idle fingers against the spokes of the helm, surveying the crew through lidded eyes, occasionally shifting his weight. The sea was calm, hardly a wave was to be seen, and the just-afternoon-day was utterly lazy. No repairs, no inventory, no orders. It was a completely unproductive day in the kingdom of Jack Sparrow.

This gave the captain ample time to brood over the maddening mood-swings of his tempestuous carry-on.

He surveyed the crew with a professional's hawk-eye, not missing a thing and all the while targeting his main focus on her. She was oblivious to the people around her—Jack's men who at least tried to look bloody useful even though there was nothing to do. Elizabeth was perched on the edge of the ship, by the looks of it from this distance curling her hand around some rope trappings to keep her balance and prevent her from toppling into the pits of the dark sea. Her head was tilted up, towards the sun; she was sans hat and clad in a white smock with a crimson corset tied over it. Ridiculous, maddening, frustratingly enticing girl.

Fortunately, none of his men were paying attention to her at the moment. Unfortunately, he wasn't deaf, and he knew they were all acutely aware of her presence on the ship. For the precise reason that they were in the middle of the ocean, and Miss Swann happened to be the only female specimen aboard the ship. And the sailors were perfectly un-cursed and fleshly. Jack's fingers tightened around the spokes and he gritted his teeth together, both annoyed and incredibly touchy at the thoughts. He could not pick out the exact reason why she seemed to pull animosity out of him until he projected it towards everyone who came within a six inch radius of him when he was thinking of her, whether it was the other men thinking of her or her raising her tempting eyebrows across the deck at them. She had made it perfectly clear she wasn't above slumming with them to piss him off, and she was more than pissed off at him right now, he could only assume.

He didn't want her with the crew; he made that perfectly, crystal clear, and all he could do was watch to see if she heeded it. The nagging issue was why did he so fiercely forbid it? Of course, he vehemently maintained that she was on board as crew, and that she was to be treated as any other crew member, that she was neither his personal plaything nor was she to be theirs, and the rules that applied to them applied to her: no distractions, do your job. The problem here seemed to be that Elizabeth considered it her job to either cause harm to herself or tease the entire crew with the intent of enraging him.

It was, to no end, a brilliant ploy that had the irritating effect of actually working. It was ridiculous to Jack that the real reason he didn't want her near the crew was because he didn't want anyone else touching her, and definitely not under his watch. Especially given where he'd uncovered her in Tortuga. He could not shake the image of the woman she used to be, and though he had not ever thought her as fragile or pristine as she assumed he did, he never considered her as lowly as she was now in reality. It pricked him the wrong way to think of other men pressing their lips against her smooth skin and pulling tight on the curls in her honey-colored hair, and this—god forbid he call it jealousy—was completely unacceptable, as jealousy and its closest friend spite shrunk the mind to a one-subject mechanism.

A better suggestion as to why he didn't want people touching her was because he thought of her simply as Will's. Perhaps he just didn't see it any other way. Having been through his fair share of sloppily-pulled off affairs, angry husbands, untimely deaths, and general unpleasant life experiences, he wasn't opposed to a good happy ending strewn in to pepper life a bit. For her to be like this, and to have Will so completely besmirched by her wicked retelling of the past, struck bullet holes in a canvas of serenity causing Jack to, maybe, Jack could consider himself in denial and just leave it at that.

But that wasn't even it.

He thought of William, and he thought of her, and he almost visibly cringed. For no other reason than he, at the beginning, at the first, at the point where it all began with her epic fall into the water and the dramatic staging of a kidnapping, he had seen what they had all been blind to. That she was smart, clever beyond their imaginations, a leader, a taker, powerful and passionate. She, who had never been trained to fight, had picked up and made use of the objects in that cave on Isla de Muerta, beat back skeletal pirates that were fantastical to the point of disbelief, and all but saved them all. For where would they be if she hadn't been the one to shuttle back and forth, alerting them to change of plans. She thought he looked at her as a prissy, spoiled, sophisticated governor's daughter who got them all into a mess five years ago but there had not been a moment when he had seen that. He had always seen fire where William had seen water. He had always seen steel where William had seen putty. William had treated her in that time like the damsel who needed saving, where Jack could see she was just as aware and mindful of her surroundings and capable in her situation as the commodore himself—maybe more so herself, because she knew how to wield her feminine charms even then. She had been one of the few people he'd happened upon in a life so crazy and a world so chaotically insane who said I am a person.

This was why he cared. This was why he swept her away from Tortuga and this was why he nettled her and harassed her until he cracked her. And now there was the initial split, the first working of the wedge into the cold stone, and all that remained was the chiseling and the sanding until he could rip away dull steel and reveal the iridescence underneath. He didn't care if she wore stockings under a French-style dress or breeches tucked into over-sized boots, he didn't want her to tie a bonnet on and sit primly with a cup of tea. He wanted her. She was Miss Swann, the governor's daughter, she was Elizabeth the blacksmith's wife, but who she was really, behind that over-bred nonsense, was Lizzie. A girl who, he had noticed, had pulled a book off his bookshelf when she'd been held captive so many years ago—Machiavelli's The Prince—and bookmarked at some point in the middle, never finishing it. That had enthralled him. It had made him study her when she wasn't looking, and analyze the nail print she marked under lines in the book. It made him unreasonably keep the ribbon she'd slipped into the pages tied there where she'd left it, those years ago.

They had all been too oblivious to her. Jack had seen how her father and the commodore had treated her. With good cheer, my dear, but as a willful child who simply needed to be told what was wrong and what was right—when in reality, Elizabeth's eyes were always glinting with some other idea, some thought far off, a step ahead of everyone else.

And it was all gone now. Evaporated, diminished, her eyes were ice, her skin cold, her head full of nothing but the next biting comment and numbing her body with chemicals. She was hidden behind striking, intense make-up that glorified her gentle prettiness into the dark beauty of a temptress. She was barely human anymore; she wanted to be numb but she wanted to be alive, and the frightening self-destructiveness in her was hypnotizing and awful.

Jack swallowed hard, through a tight jaw; his hands were clenched tightly on the spokes that his knuckles were paper-white.

…you're some kind of whore…

He had almost taken it back. Almost; but had instead stormed out of the cabin, furious with her and his own idiocy, and taken out his burst of temperament on the first few crew members he'd seen. He only remembered the unabashed, silent look in her eyes when she heard him say it, her unmoving glare fixed on him before he banged the door shut behind him.

He regretted the scathing words now.

Jack lifted his head to find her, dragging his gaze slowly over the lolling crew to give his search a purpose beyond just Elizabeth. She was still in the same place, her arm stretched up on the roping. She turned and locked her eyes straight on his. It was too far away from him to extract the emotion, if any, that she projected there, but the connection was electric.

--"Gone Forever" Three Days Grace

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