"Belle!"

I called for her until her name was the only thing that made sense.

Many people turned to look at me, none of them were her. There were marks on my palm where the sharp corners of my Compass had dug in. I knew what it was telling me- in the two hours or so it hadn't changed its position. The streets of Tortuga rang with her name, but the only person who could answer it was gone. My Compass told me so.

It could be wrong. I've doubted it before.

I've never been right to doubt it, though.

Every time I've thought it was broken it was actually me who was broken.

"Belle!" People had stopped turning now and their looks had changed from interest and curiosity to annoyed glances that shot between one another, but never at me. They started to ignore me, as I did them. George's ship was long gone and only my Compass knew where it was.

Am I sure it's pointing to her?

What else could it be?

There would be nothing else that George had that I would want. I had seen his ship and it was nothing compared to the one I had been Captain of until about three hours ago. I was sure he was rich- certainly richer than I was- but his gold was probably nothing compared to the swag I probably could get my hands on if I put my mind to it. Treasure was all well and good, but I had always valued freedom far above it- that was the real draw of piracy for me. I was sure George had one of those big and grand houses that I had seen in Port Royal when I had visited it with Belle on that day where I had glimpsed that part of her life that I had never understood or been a part of. Houses had never, ever appealed to me. No, there was nothing about George that I envied. Nothing. There was no other reason that my Compass would have an interest in him or his ship.

It's Belle. It has to be. She's on his ship.

But why?

"Belle!" I threw her name at the horizon that George's ship had long disappeared over.

"Jack!" there was finally an answer, but it was Gibbs not her. I turned to see him standing, the only one facing me in the throng of people at the docks. It was only when I saw that his hair had darkened with rain that I felt how damp my clothes were. How long had that been going on? Gibbs was looking at me with a heaviness in his blue eyes. "What are you doing?"

"She's gone," I told him and it felt strange to say something that wasn't her name. Empty. Useless. Gibbs nodded but the heaviness in his eyes did not change.

"Where?" he asked after taking in the open Compass in my hand.

"George," was all I could say. Gibbs looked away from me, towards the horizon. There was a silence that neither of us really knew how to handle. I couldn't even work out how to breathe in it.

"Never liked him," was all Gibbs could offer me.

True.

I have always disliked him.

Why?

Perhaps there is something about him that I have always envied.

Yes. There is. But it's not something he owns.

He was a part of Belle's life long before me. He belonged to that part of her that was in the time before me- a big part of a life I would never know. A life of riches and rules. A setting that I had never, could never, see her in. I hadn't known her then and I had no way of knowing what she had been like then. We were worlds apart and I had never felt that distance when I was near her, but now that she was gone the wide vacuum between us made my head spin. George's ship, his money, his house and good reputation didn't bother me because they meant nothing to me, but maybe they meant something to her. I couldn't offer her any of that. I had none of it. It had never seemed to matter to her, but how would I know, really? I had never seen her around expensive things because I had nothing of the kind of expense to which she was accustomed to give to her.

Maybe love wasn't enough for her.

Maybe I wasn't enough.

Maybe just seeing the splendour on George's ship was enough to remind her of what she was missing and that her brief dabbles with piracy had been nothing but a short-lived dream of adventure and now it was time for her to get back to her Real Life. Settle down. Marry. Have children. Had the life she had always been told that she wanted. Or, worst of all, have the life that she had actually always wanted.

So what was I to her then?

Gibbs's hand squeezed my shoulder.

Maybe she had never loved me at all.

In this time before me- the time when she and Elizabeth and James and George had sat around drinking tea and discussing the Eunuch in his blacksmith's shop or whatever the hell it was that they did in Port Royal- had she ever loved him? Had she and George spent much of their teenage years together? James would have loved him, probably encouraged any kind of courting behaviour between the two of them. He would never have encouraged any affection for me. Would Belle also have encouraged it? While Elizabeth blushed over her hidden feelings for William would Belle have giggled over her similar feelings for George? I couldn't imagine it, but how would I know? I hadn't known her at all back then.

And what about that horrible gap? The time in between me leaving her in Port Royal with him after the happenings on the Isla De La Meurta and her and the Eunuch finding me as Chief of the Cannibals. Had facing death by undead pirate made them realise their love for one another?

I turned my back on the sea and let Gibbs steer me away from the docks.

Had I just been a brief distraction for her while her heart was with someone else? She had been so insistent on seeing him. Determined. Perhaps they had fought before she left Port Royal to find me and save herself and Will and Elizabeth from Beckett's noose. And today she had gone to make up with him, or worse still- used me to make him jealous until their anger had melted in an argument that ended in a heated twist of lips and tongue and teeth that weren't mine.

I think I am going to be sick.

"Cap'n…" Gibbs had stopped walking. Or maybe I had stopped first. I looked up at him. "Drink?"

"Yes," I nodded. I could feel her name running through my veins and churning in my stomach, squeezing its way up my throat and windpipe simultaneously. I needed to kill it, drown it in rum, push it right down inside me until it was buried so deep within me that I would never be able to find it again.


Am I dead yet?

I heard the sound of my own vomit hitting the pavement.

No. Sadly not.

I lay back, seeing nothing but feeling everything. There had only been a few times in my life where the phrase "blind drunk" had applied to me, and this was one of them. I couldn't see the world, but I could feel it spinning and twisting underneath me. It was like the Earth had turned in to the sea and I was ship being tossed around by it. I felt sea-sick. Land-sick. More than that, I felt life-sick. I had been physically sick so many times and yet I felt continuously queasy. It was a queasiness that had hit me from the moment she had left me that no amount of self-prescribed, rum-induced vomiting would cure. My very soul was queasy and sick. I could feel it writhing in my body, cutting up all of my organs with its sharp edges until they all bled on to one another. And my blood was thick with rum. The thing about rum is, it's flammable too and it ignited an inferno that scorched the ragged and torn edges of my cut and bleeding insides.

And it never stopped.

It was a fire, a pain that never went out. It had been days since she had left, how many I couldn't say, they had all melted in to one another and become one long drunken mess. Perhaps it had even been a few weeks. A never-ending and immeasurable amount of time consumed by pain. It dulled occasionally to a deep but distant throb in the pit of my stomach, but it was always there. Like an infected wound, it was raw and easily bruised. The smallest nudge or bump- the slight smell of her that sometimes past me on a breeze from something that held her scent, a girl with her hair in a crowd, or the colour of her eyes in the world around me, the weight of her name in my mind– and it flared up all over again. Drinking dulled it, for a while. It didn't make it better but it made it quieter, it softened the world for a few hours and made me feel lighter. I think what happened was that there was so much drink that it took up the space of the pain for a while, but then there was this terrible backlog of pain just waiting for me.

Then all I was left with was moments like this- with the drink wearing off and my world crashing down on me again and again as everything I'd ever eaten landed on whatever surrounded me. If only it were possible to vomit up sadness. I bet I'd be really good at that.

Why? Why? Why?

Why did you go with him?

Why wasn't I good enough?

Why pretend to love me if your heart was with him all along?

I knew it. I always knew she'd pick George over me.

The stars swam in to view along with the sobering fact that I could now see them and was therefore not as drunk as I had been. For a moment I found peace in the stars and their colossal silence. I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I made those words echo from star to star and wondered at how far they stretched. Were the same ones that comforted me looking down on her too? And if they were… what would they see? Could they show it to me too? Did I want to see it?

No, probably not.

But the thought had entered my mind and, although I closed my eyes in an attempt to keep it out, it was already lodged there like a parasite, waiting to feed on me until there was nothing left. She would be with George, I was sure of it. Right now, somewhere out there she was with him. By now they would probably already be married. He would already know how soft her kiss was. How it could change your entire mood in just one moment. My own lips were trembling at the memory. That nasty, parasitic thought showed me her lips on lips that weren't mine. Her gentle fingers in his ginger hair. His face nuzzled in to that lovely curve where her neck met her shoulder and lips on her warm pulse released a sigh from her that had always made me shiver with anticipation. His hands running across her body in a way that mine never had. Skin on skin. I would never hold her like that. I would never hold her in the way that he can now.

Why?

Why?

I opened my eyes and the stars blurred in front of me. It must be raining. I think there's rain in my eyes.

Hopefully I'll drown.

The urge to roll over on to my side and sleep was almost over powering, but the only thing that was stronger than it was the thought that maybe if I lay there facing the rain with my mouth and nostrils towards the sky I would eventually fill with water and drown. Perhaps just quicker to jump in the sea.

I definitely can't stand up.

Not now.

I'm not even sure I've got legs anymore. I think they might actually have turned to rum.

Good.

"Cap'n!" Gibbs's voice came to me through my foggy thoughts. I pushed my arms towards the sound in an effort to make him go away and leave me alone. It didn't work. I think I got the direction wrong.

"Gibbs," I said and the words slid around my mouth, slipping out of them in a way that wasn't quite correct but was close enough. "Ithinkmylegsarerum."

His figure bent over me and blocked out my view of the stars. "What?" he asked.

"My legs," I made an effort to enunciate everything properly. "Arerum I think."

"You think your legs are what?"

I propped myself up on my elbows to look at him properly. My God, you're a fool, man. "I think my legs," I said clearly. "Arerum."

"Arerum?" Gibbs repeated. I nodded. Oh good he understands.

"Yes."

There was a slight pause. The word Arerum rolled around between us. "What?" Gibbs asked again.

"Are rum," I said, taking a breath between the two words so that there was no confusion.

"Oh." Gibbs replied. "Are rum. Your legs are rum?"

"Yes." I agreed. "They are. Sorry. They are gone. Gone. Rum."

I closed my eyes,

Belle's gone too.

Everything is gone.

"No," my eyelids didn't manage to shut out Gibbs's voice as he spoke again. "They're not gone."

What's not gone? Belle?

No, she's definitely gone.

"What?" I asked.

"Your legs," he relied. "They're here."

I opened my eyes and looked down. There were my legs, still in my trousers but there was only one boot on one of my feet.

"Oh." I wiggled my toes. "So they are. Here they are. Gibbs I've found them."

"Good," Gibbs said with a huge amount of patience. "Time to use them."

I bent them to see if they still worked. They did. My bootless foot found the pavement and then so did my boot-ful one. I felt Gibbs's hands under my arms and he helped lift me to a standing position. It was a surprisingly difficult position to maintain. I slung my arm around Gibbs's shoulder. "Where are we going?" I asked him, concentrating on how difficult putting one foot in front of the other had seemed to become.

"Not far," Gibbs grunted.

Good.

I almost fell asleep again, but jolted awake when I realised that I was still walking. Seems unsafe. We kept walking- out of the rain, into some people up some stairs and through a big heavy door. "Gibbs," I said and he flinched at how accidentally loud I was. I dropped my voice to a whisper. "I can't keep doing this." Gibbs let go of me and I tumbled in to something soft. I didn't want to move again ever so I didn't.

"No," Gibbs agreed with me. "No you can't. You need to distract yourself, get your mind on other things. How about getting the Pearl back?"

I settled down completely into the soft thing I was lying on and realised that I was in a bed in a room of a tavern that I had been renting out for the last few days. Nice of Gibbs to bring me back here. "Yeah," I agreed with him as he made to leave. "Yeah that's what I'll do, but I'll have to get someone else to use my Compass. Maybe Barbossa, he's always wanted the Pearl too. Maybe he could find it."

Something doesn't make sense about that idea, but I'm too tired to work out what.

Gibbs said nothing and turned towards the door, making his way back to his own room. The light went out and I saw his dark shape against the light hallway. My eyelids were heavy. "Gibbs," I murmured, not sure if he was really here or if I was already dreaming.

"Yes Cap'n?" I head him reply.

"Why did she leave me?"

He didn't have an answer and the darkness he left behind when he closed my door didn't have one either. Maybe I would find one somewhere in a dream.