Chapter 25!
Warning: There is a NON-CON scene in this chapter, so proceed with caution. You have been warned.
"He's crumbling," Sin stated plainly, her silver hair hanging freely past her shoulders.
The human psyche was a complex thing. It could transform itself suddenly, with one ripple, one twist, one mistake. The human conscious thinks that it understands itself, thinks that it knows what reactions it will have, and what actions it will perform. But all it takes is that one shadow in the timeline, that one stain that blindsides it and turns everything that a person thought they knew into a terrifying joke. Their new reality becomes a poison that taints the very core of their thoughts.
And the subconscious sits and laughs like a merry fool at the tragedy of it all, reveling in the final release of all of its secrets. The deepest recesses of the mind see and know all, but refuse to depart with the knowledge, not because it doesn't want to, but because it doesn't care.
He was sure that had poor Elizabeth known just how much she was going to propel Jack towards a shade of what he once was, she might not have sent him to his death. Had she known how angry he would be with her, she would not have made claims that she wasn't sorry. And had she known exactly how much Jack Sparrow loved her, there was no doubt in Lucifer's mind that she would have flung herself into the Kraken's maw before she shackled Jack to the mast of his ship.
But she wasn't privy to any of that knowledge because her mind only let her see the surface of it all. Her mind only told her that Jack was too risky to bet on, romantically or morally, with the stakes she had behind her. Her mind told her that he harbored nothing for her besides marginal lust. And her mind convinced her that everything she feared Jack Sparrow to be was true.
Her mind was so very wrong.
And that moment, that one convoluted moment of misinformation and misdirection, had changed both of their lives.
"I am aware," he replied, his voice echoing off of the cold stone walls.
"And you are giving up?"
He had decided to retreat to the background, to observe, to re-evaluate his position, but now he saw a new window of opportunity.
The piece of Elizabeth's soul that she had traded would have allowed her to soldier through the guilt and mental exhaustion, but now the Locker had it, and she had no defense mechanism.
She may be putting on a brave face for Jack, but beneath the surface, a hundred fears had manifested themselves as pinpointed weapons, parasites that attached themselves to her thoughts, warping them inside of her mind until they were no longer recognizable.
"No."
Sin stared at the demon, the air feeling cold and void around her.
"What are you going to do?"
His head turned to look at her slowly, his face holding a grin that did not move his mouth at all. It was the kind of expression that chilled her very countenance.
"It isn't a question of what I am going to do, it is a question of what I am going to continue doing."
Jack was beyond his reach. He had accepted that nothing was going to shake the connection he had to Elizabeth. The man was just too damn stubborn. But because of Elizabeth's fragile state of mind, he saw a glimmer of possibility.
"You really are willing to go to any lengths to claim your prize, aren't you?"
He gazed into Sin's pale face.
"I claimed you, didn't I?"
Her hands, which were previously clenched at her side, loosened in immediate defeat.
"Leave at least some sanity left in her, will you?"
"I don't make promises."
She gave him one last withering stare and swept out of the room.
Elizabeth already feared Jack as a product of her paranoia and scrambled mind.
Now she needed to see him as an enemy. She needed to be convinced that Jack was dangerous, and she needed to convince Jack that she no longer cared for him. She needed to become cold inside, to everyone and everything.
She needed to hate Jack with every fiber of her being, so that he would, in turn, feel betrayed by her yet again, and this time, Lucifer was convinced that he would not turn a blind eye so easily.
The status quo had to shift.
His throat was scratchy when he woke from the haze that might have been called sleep. It hadn't been more than an hour, he concluded, when he peered out of the window. He rubbed his eyes as the fog cleared from his brain, and that's when he heard it.
A small faint whimpering was piercing the air, coming from the form next to him.
He lightly touched her shoulder and got no response. She was still asleep, which meant that she was dreaming.
Using extreme caution to avoid waking her, he gently turned her onto her back and then froze at the sight of her face.
Her skin was deathly pale, and a harsh trail of tears was shimmering on her cheeks. She was twitching her head back and forth, and her brows were pinched together. He realized that she was in pain, and then something crystallized into sharp relief. He hated seeing her in pain, and he suddenly acutely hated every time that he had caused her pain.
The surface of the bed shifted when her wrists pushed into it, as though something was pushing on them. He noticed with a jolt that her hips were jerking, trying to get away from something. The whimpers were getting louder as her head thrashed from side to side more violently.
Terror struck him when she opened her mouth and screamed, a hoarse sound that very nearly made him make a fruitless attempt to wake her up. But he refrained, barely. His own hands were starting to shake from watching her, this, whatever this was.
Lucifer. Lucifer was torturing her, and all he could do was sit there and watch if he wanted to help her at all.
The helplessness he felt left him hollow, bereft of the anger that he once felt towards her.
Her wrists were trapped, a vice grip tightening and tightening, and there was a weight on top of her, hot and suffocating.
She couldn't breathe. Wheezing noises were being wrenched from her chest, and her brain swam from the lack of oxygen. Colors blurred and rushed together, and noises amplified and vanished before she could tell what they were.
Then she heard it. It cut through the dizzying precipice that she was nearing the edge of. That voice. Deep and baritone, it throbbed through her ears as it whispered something to her, into her neck, scorching her skin.
"I want to watch the light leave your eyes."
Those terrible words washed over her, connecting to something deep in her mind, but she couldn't find...couldn't understand why they were so familiar-
The tear of fabric singed the air, causing her eyes to widen. A streak of white flew through the haze, and with alarming clarity, for just one moment, she realized she was half-exposed to the shadow's gaze. Fighting to cover herself, she expunged the remaining strength she had. It would not relinquish its hold on her arms.
It shifted, leaving the skin of her neck cold, and halted right above the valley of her breasts, inflaming the skin there. She gazed down at it, watching in mute terror as it whispered another string of words to her.
"I want to watch as your limp body hangs, and your blood covers the deck."
Heat mixed with the glacial piercing chill that gripped her very being. Pain throbbed incessantly in her head as she searched valiantly for-
"Familiar, isn't it? This fear you are feeling…"
She couldn't speak. It felt like someone had poured sand into her throat. Then suddenly, it released her arms, and for one glorious second, she thought she was free.
The burn of cloth dragging down her skin made the thought perish and whispered no's chanted their way through her cracked lips. But it was no use.
Tears welled in her eyes as the shame crept into her. It could see everything now. Her too thin waist, her shaking legs, the gooseflesh that covered her entire body.
Red eyes stared up at her as its fingers sunk into her hips, its grip too strong for her to struggle.
The muscles of her stomach quivered when the mouth lowered again, speaking again, as though its goal was to make her turn herself inside out with the indiscernible thoughts chewing their way through her brain.
"It's sad that you went through all of that trouble for forgiveness that you will never have."
God, she knew that voice, rich and velvet-like, rumbling with its intensity, but her memory had abandoned her, and every search she did through the buzzing inside her head left her more and more helpless in the insanity.
She wrenched her head away from it, squeezing her eyes shut, causing excess tears to leak onto her cheeks. Lights danced behind her eyelids, strange wisps of white dotting her vision. A repugnant layer of sweat had settled onto her skin, the dirtiness she felt peaking in that moment.
Her terror was newly forged when the grip shifted from her hips to her thighs, and a shriek was torn from her throat when strength that she had never experienced wrenched them open. The contrast of the feather light touch of lips to the piercing pain of fingers digging into her flesh made her sob anew with the manic energy of it all, ripping through her from top to bottom like a whip strike.
She didn't know who she was anymore, didn't know the meaning of anything, didn't know...
"You killed me. You played-" it paused to kiss her thigh, making her feel violently and suddenly sick-"a ridiculous cheap trick on me."
Nausea poisoned her stomach, and the throbbing behind her eyes climbed to such an intensity that she had the sudden urge to claw them out to stop the pain.
The shadow figure's next words were punctuated with more kisses.
"You shackled me to the mast of my own ship."
Red eyes gazed up at her again, and then, through the tears that coated her vision, the figure started to change, started to form into something so familiar…
Dark brown eyes, lined with something...something...she couldn't remember what it was called…
Long dark hair…
She knew someone with hair like that...who...why...why couldn't she think…
She searched, looked as hard as she could, but everything was so out of focus, so blurry…
The figure's lips moved, the curve of them visible even through it all.
All feeling seemed to float away, her body growing numb to everything. Everything but that voice, as it spoke more words that she strained to hear.
"What kind of fantasy world are you living where I feel anything besides hatred for you?"
Her eyes squeezed shut involuntarily, and then several things happened very quickly. Nothing was touching her for a brief moment, and she dimly heard the rustle of more fabric, and then everything was brought into sharp focus again when it climbed, slithered its way up her body, its mouth settling on her throat again.
The muscles in her body felt like jelly, and she did nothing when the figure gripped her hips again. Then, strength returned to her when it lifted her hips, and she became wild, struggling, thrashing with every ounce of vitality she had left.
She lost.
"You will get the punishment you deserve," it whispered against the corner of her lips, holding her body tightly. Something was scratching at her face, and something small and cold was tapping against the skin of her neck just below her chin.
Her body went taut and then contorted forcefully at the tearing pain that shot through her.
A low rumble emanated from the figure.
Laughing…
God, it hurt.
She sobbed, sobbed until she didn't think she was going to have any tears left, and then the figure lifted its head to stare at her.
The bottom of her entire world dropped out from under her.
Her vision cleared magnificently in that moment, and she desperately fiercely wished it hadn't.
No no no no…
Jack.
It was Jack.
Then everything went dark.
She woke in a pool of sweat, her limbs trembling.
"Lizzie."
Her eyes shot to the figure that had just spoken, and then a terrible fear slammed into her chest. Her breathing became irregular, giant wheezing gasps turning into short breaths. The world around her started to spin, and she turned as quickly as a lightning strike and flew off of the bed, hitting the hardwood of the cabin floor painfully.
She had to get away, had to get away from him.
"Stay...stay away from me," she croaked, holding her hand out in front of her.
He rose from the bed and walked slowly towards her, causing her to shuffle back on her knees. His hand reached out to her.
"It's me."
The blonde hair that was now dirty with sweat shook as her head jerked from side to side.
"No..no no no...you hurt me, you-"
He knelt down to where she was huddled and raised her face up to meet his.
"Lizzie, it's Jack."
She gripped his wrist with an almost painful tightness as she flung his hand away.
"NO!"
The force of her scream made him recoil.
"You hurt me. You caused me pain, you have caused me pain ever since...how could I ever believe that you might still care for me…"
There was no denial of the first accusation from Jack, but he would be damned before he let her think he didn't care for her, and that scared him.
"I'll admit, I was, still am, angry with you, but the things I said...I didn't mean them, Lizzie."
She looked up at him with bloodshot eyes, her skin raw from the spilled tears.
"Then why would you do that to me? How could you force me...you said...in the-in the jungle that you would care, and then you…"
A new kind of fear was starting to creep into him as her voice failed her.
He prepared himself for her to lash out again, and knelt, taking her face in his hands.
"What happened?" he whispered.
"I remembered, all of the terrible things you said to me, I remembered, you spoke them again, and then you…"
Her words failed her again as she sobbed noiselessly.
Suddenly she shoved him back with all of the strength she had, and stumbled for the door of the cabin, wrenching it open with her shoulders heaving, only to come face to face with Will.
He stared down at the trembling form that was now clinging to his shirt, and then looked at Jack, who was kneeling on the floor, defeated.
"She was having another nightmare, and then she woke up, and...she's terrified of me…" he muttered, answering Will's unspoken question.
Elizabeth turned around slowly, and in the new angle, he could see how drained, how exhausted she looked.
"I was such a fool. The way you have been treating me, pushing me away and then pulling me back in, the things you said to me. You told me that you wanted to-"
She quieted yet still gazed wildly at him when Jack rose from the floor, dark eyes stark and hollow.
"So that's what it is then. That's what his plan was."
His voice was no more than a whisper.
"Who's plan?" asked Will.
The pirate captain shook his head, more to himself than anyone else.
"Take her and go. Get her out of here. Away from me."
"Jack, what-"
His eyes flashed dangerously.
"Take her, and get out of my cabin."
The empty bottle of tequila shattered against the wall behind his desk, sending fragments of glass around the room, and Jack wished in that moment that it was he who shattered instead.
The fabric of his old reality felt like a million worlds away. It was a strange thing, that you don't realize how much you care about something until it was gone. And the gravity of what had just happened was only beginning to sink in. His mind was fighting to eject all of it, to erase the last half hour from existence.
But it wasn't going away. The ugly hate in her eyes, the fear that practically bled off of her skin, it was all directed at him, and there wasn't an ounce of his body that could process anything.
He should have seen this coming. He really should have.
Looking back, it was painfully obvious what Lucifer's plan was, but he hadn't even considered that he was going to try and turn her against him because somewhere in his subconscious, he had been convinced that that wasn't possible.
He had told her that he had no intention to physically harm her, so he knew that his new fear of him didn't originate within her, and he knew that she was strong enough to overcome any lesser persuasion from Lucifer.
What had he done to her in the dream?
He scoured his memory of both, looking for commonalities. Nothing significant stood out to him in either of them, but he remembered that she had brought up the conversation that they had in the jungle after she had woken up. She said that he told her he would care…and he had betrayed his word in the nightmare.
What was she referring to?
Then, he remembered one detail that had stood out to him.
Her hips had kept moving as though...as though…as though she was trying to escape something.
What-
The truth dawned on him before he was prepared for it, making him pitch forward to stumble to the ground on all fours. The contents of his stomach found their way onto the cabin floor, his chest heaving with the raw panic that clenched at it.
He had never had more of a confirmation that he still cared for her deeply than the absolute sickening feeling he experienced when he even thought about forcefully taking her. His heart seemed to eat itself every the terrible image paraded through his mind.
And now, for all intents and purposes, he had done it. She had seen him, she had seen his face above her, his body, his…
He slammed his fist into the wooden floor and then rolled over onto his back in exhaustion.
At some point, the world fell away, and just for a split second in the teetering precipice between consciousness and sleep, he wished it would stay gone.