WAKI 25

Aw... feels teh love Thanks for all the love, you guys. Getting all the "We're not mad at you!" reviews really helped. Made life not so craptastic. Anyways... Sorry it's taken so long to update. Life has been busy as all get up and go. I shall try to post a new chapter at least once a week. Possibly sooner, if I get reviews reminding me. To give you an idea of the timeline... I have written chapter 41. And there is slash. But not very much. The conclusion is coming, though. Never you fear. Mwahahahahaha. Anyways... This chapter is sorta boring, in my opinion. It's just sort of a stop-gap, explaining why it doesn't bother Jack that he can suddenly no longer rationalize his past actions. Sort of. It's complicated, and I am lazy. Just read it, k? Love goes to anyone who reviews.

It all suddenly made sense.

He knew he had gone mad. It had started when he was just a little child, talking to someone who wasn't there in order to escape the horrors of his everyday existence. This person, this guardian, had saved him from slavery, delivered him from the clutches of a pedophile pirate captain. Whenever something stressful had happened, there he'd be. Watching over him. Saving him.

And then he'd been left all alone on a deserted island and his whole mind had gone to hell. He returned, got arrested, busted out of jail, went on a crazy adventure to get back at the back-stabbing bastard who'd stolen his ship. All the while running the full spectrum of madness. Undead pirates. A skeletal monkey. His ship drifting in and out of moonlight, sailing across a windless sea. A handsome young blacksmith, smiling at him through the same eyes of his imaginary friend.

Fallacies in his mind, of course. He had regained his sanity, and could no longer be fooled by the fairy tales. The pirates, the blacksmith, everything. None of it had been real. He'd lead the Navy to his first mate, and the two had killed each other, and he'd made off with his boat. Simple as that. There wasn't anything left to explain.

Except… Here he was. The blacksmith was standing next to him, watching him with chocolate eyes. And he knew this boy had to be real, because Anamaria and the rest of the crew saw him, and he highly doubted he was making all of them up. He wasn't that creative.

So the boy was real. It made sense, really. Will sprung him out of jail, and off they rushed to go save Elizabeth, who had undoubtedly been kidnapped by the foul beasts previously inhabiting his lovely ship. It was a win-win sort of situation. Will would have ignored his madness in order to get his princess back. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do, given the lad's rather desperate set of circumstances.

What didn't make sense was the whole 'falling in love with a lunatic and dumping the beautiful, rich royal girl' part. It was going to take him a while to make heads or tails of that little bit of logic.

And as for Jack dismissing him as another figment of his imagination, well, who wouldn't? He bore far too great a similarity to his childhood protector for his malfunctioning brain to tell the two apart. He had probably cut him out along with all the memories of his imaginary friend when snapping back to sanity.

That was good. A nice, rational explanation.

An explanation which, for all of its wonderful simplicity, helped him not at all with the current situation.

"Look…" He said with a sigh. "I'm sorry about the whole 'not remembering you' thing, but it's not really that surprising, is it? I mean, I was mad at the time, and it was awfully easy just to-"

He froze. Glanced around.

Nothing. The boy was gone. Just disappeared, as if he had never been there in the first place. An empty room, warm sunlight filtering in through salt-crusted glass. He was all alone.