Disclaimer: In addition to not owning any of the PotC characters, scenes, lines, etc., I've decided that I don't even totally own Winn. She's something of a conglomeration of me and my friends.
Author Note: The wedding! We've actually reached the wedding! It probably won't be in written in much detail, seeing as how most of my readers are begging, pleading, imploring, and demanding more Winn/Jack action. We'll that's what my reviewers and demanding – I hope I have more people reading this than just those who review. Just to make me feel better you should review if you haven't yet. : )
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Last Chapter Ended This Way:
"Captains Morgan, Mmes. Morgan, guests – I'm afraid that I must take my leave. I'm already running late for a rather important meeting with some rather shady characters. If you will excuse me?" Alex's eyes were caught by a strange man in the back of the group. He pulled them away when the Morgan patriarch stepped forward to bid him goodnight.
"Of course, Captain Thomas. Thank you for returning my granddaughter to us."
"It was my pleasure." And with that, the man let himself out. Jack watched him go with unreadable eyes, wondering just what that man's connection was to Winn.
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"So let my get this straight – Captain Morgan has issued an ultimatum that if Winn does not choose a husband within the next three days, then she has to marry someone her grandfather chooses?" Will looked from his wife, to Jack, and back to his wife. With wide eyes and an incredulous voice he asked, "Does Jack know yet?"
"What do you think?" Elizabeth looked at her husband suspiciously. "Would it matter if he did know?" Will shifted his feet nervously. "What aren't you telling me, Will?"
"Well . . . you remembered how you asked me to check on Winn this morning?"
"Yes. You said that she appeared to be in perfect health . . . . You're not telling me that –"
"No! No, no, no. But I did find Jack in the room with her. And afterwards we had a talk. You know, the normal, 'If you hurt her, then you'll regret it because she'll come after you' thing." There had been a lot more to it than that, but he didn't think his wife needed to know that.
Elizabeth shook her head. "I remember when I used to wish for a more complicated life."
Jack stood across the hall from the room where Catherine Morgan was busily tending to her sister-in-law's wounds. He had noticed the two lovebirds down the hall whispering and throwing glances his way. If things have degenerated into that, I certainly don't want to know about it. Instead he was focusing his energy on solving the puzzle that had been thrust into his hands.
I suppose I don't have anyone but myself to blame, really. I knew from day one that Winnie was going to end up a particularly distracting puzzle. I didn't have to take the woman off her bloody ship. I didn't have to come after her when she left. I didn't have to stay in the room when she came up from the wedding early. And yet, for all the things I did that I didn't have to do, I'm no closer to solving this puzzle than I was when I first saw her.
He watched with steady eyes as Cat cleaned the blood off Winn's face and sponged some from the back of her head. If anything, I've managed to collect pieces. Not the least of which is a strange fascination for this unconventional woman. Winn didn't respond to Cat's gentle probing of her injury. She sat pale and quiet, murmuring responses to questions only when more than a head motion was needed. Look at her. She's foolhardy, has a wicked temper, is shrewish and naïve by turns. She's not exactly pretty, has no figure to speak of, has no idea when to back down from an argument, and generally insists upon having her own way.
Winn turned her head at the direction of her sister, and found herself staring into a pair of dark eyes. She held them, already in a trance-like state from her weariness. If Jack were an option . . . . She didn't know it, but her eyes started to fill with longing. Not for sex, but for understanding, for comfort, for companionship, for the memory of being held through the night.
Jack held Winn's eyes, and read what she desired in them. It wasn't a thing he was used to seeing in a woman. A desire for his money? Yes. Occasional desire for his person? Yes. A desire for more than that? He soaked in the gaze and felt the stirrings of a similar desire in him.
Winn saw that, and all of a sudden an all too visible veil dropped down behind her eyes. She turned her head away from him with a barely restrained violence. "Cat?" she croaked. "Please, just stop fussing and leave." Winn held up her hands in front of her, palms facing out, as if to ward off any more care. "I'm not one for your children who is suffering from a scraped knee. I'm tired. I just want to sleep. I'm sorry if I'm a crank right now, but I really need to be alone."
Cat got up, and shook out her skirts around her. She understood the woman before her was upset, but that didn't change the fact that she was dead wrong. "No, Winn. You don't need to be alone," she said crisply and precisely, making sure that every syllable of every word was understood. "But I am not the company you need. You know whom you want to be with, so just stop fighting and resisting like a little girl who needs to have a tooth pulled, and grow up and admit it. You're not going to be happy until you do."
Winn stared at her in astonishment. Cat, noticing that she had nothing to say, left the room, closing the door firmly behind her.
Winn sat on her bed, unable to do more than gaze at the door blankly. Sleep, that's what I need. I just need to get some rest. Blowing out the candle, Winn got into bed, sinking into mattress and pillows bonelessly. Closing her eyes, she saw Jack in her mid, his eyes still boring into hers. I can't. I'm too close to loving the man as it is. It's bad enough I must marry. To marry a man I could come to love would be awful. Did I learn nothing from mother?
To Winn's relief, sleep soon claimed her and stopped any conscious thought. However, her dreams were nearly as bad.
Winn was being pulling in three different directions. One force was pulling her forward, another back, and one was holding her in place. She could hear voices, but couldn't see where they were coming from.
Focusing her attention on the force dragging her back, she found that her grandfather was one of the voices. He was ranting and raving about marriage, about how a woman needed someone to care for her. How a woman is incomplete without a man. She tried to stop listening to him, but his voice held her in much the same way that the dream did.
When she could take it no longer, another voice came to the fore, a familiar and missed voice. It was her mother. Winn shook her head in denial of what she was hearing. Her mother telling her father how much she loved him. Sobbing when news of his death reached them. Screaming for him in the delirium of fever. Whispering his name on her last breath. Winn felt sobs racking her own body, but couldn't hear them over the agony inducing words. She would go crazy if she had to listen any longer. She'd –
A new voice broke through the fog around her, a new force pulled at her numbed body. It was a voice that had quickly come familiar to her – one she had heard raised in amusement, lowered in anger, roughened by passion, and whispered in tender caring. "Winnie. Luv, I'm here. Stop your strugglin', lass. Shh. Shh. Look at me, Winnie. You know that's what you want. You know I'm what you want."
"No. I don't. I don't need you. I can't need you."
"Come to me, Winnie."
"I can't move, even if I wanted to."
"Yes you can. You already have." The fog around her parted slowly, wisps of it congealing around the sources of the other two voices, muffling their words. Winn found herself looking at Jack, and beyond him, herself.
Winn sat bolt upright in bed. She was shaking, trembling uncontrollably, tears running down her face. She started rocking back and forth, trying to comfort herself, trying to remain silent.
A pair of arms encircled her. She jumped, a small cry escaping her lips. "No, go away," she begged. Jack's scent enveloped her, invading her last defenses. "Not now, not like this. I don't want you to see me like this."
"Why don't you want me to see that you're human, Winnie?" he whispered. "What's so horrible about your past that you can't allow yourself to be human?" Winn ripped herself from his grasp in a sudden burst of adrenaline.
Throwing herself out of bed, Winn hesitated between flight and fight for no more than a second before deciding to fight. She had to, for the sake of her sanity, her way of life, and most importantly, for her heart.
"You want to know what's wrong with me?" While her voice remained below a whisper, it was filled with everything she was feeling: fear, pain, loneliness, rage, confusion. It all combined into an anguished tone that lent incredible strength and conviction to her words. "You want to know why I don't allow myself to be human? It's because I'm not. I haven't been for years. I'm half a person who wanders around wondering what she did that was so horrible that her own mother would rather die than stay with her."
Winn tossed her head in contempt. "I've heard my brothers, their wives, my friends, all of them talking about how I'm afraid to love. That's not true. What the truth is, is that I am not worthy of being loved. Just like my mother."
Jack stood up, realizing that over a decade's worth of poison and hurt was spilling out of Winn's heart and mouth. He knew that it was pointless to argue with her at the moment, that anything he had to say would fall on deaf ears. The poison had to come out one way or another. It was best to play along. "Why do you say that, Winn?"
"Why do I say that? I told you about my life, Captain, at your insistence. I told you how my father loved my mother, but that he was always leaving. The truth was that he loved the sea more than he did his family. The only conclusion I can make from that is that there was something lacking in her, in us." Winn laughed bitterly, on the edge of hysteria.
"Then yes, there's my mother. A woman who died because she gave part of her soul to a man who was careless with it. I looked in her eyes the day that the crewman delivered the news. I saw her soul die, her heart stop, her will melt. It was like watching a beautiful statue of ice suddenly collapse into a puddle of muddy water. And still, she cried out for him on her deathbed. Not the daughter who stayed by her side and tended her, but for the man who abandoned her." Winn wrapped her arms around herself, still trembling uncontrollably.
"And who can forget my brothers? You know what they did after I informed them of Mother's death? They sent letters back asking if I wanted them to come out. As if they didn't care that I was alone, left in a household without family. Of course I wanted to come out, but they never said that they wanted me to. That's when I knew there had to be something wrong with me. That I had done something to drive others away.
"So I resolved to be perfect. To never do anything that would cause anyone to want to leave me. And should I find myself alone, I decided that I would do everything in my power to be able to survive on my own. I decided not to love, because I was my mother's child and I would end up like her in the end. Married to a man who loved something else more than me, giving him a piece of me that would be treated with all the respect afforded a rag rug."
Winn let out a single sob before composing herself enough to continue. "Now do you understand, Captain Sparrow? Do you see why I fight to keep myself apart? Do you see that no matter how I wish things were different, that they can't be because I can't change?" She hung her head, the constant shivers turning into convulsions of pain, her body going limp with what she believed was the honest truth and the knowledge that she was about to be left by the one man who had ever even tempted her to fall in love.
Jack had discovered just what he was feeling as Winn spoke. Bloody inconvenience, indeed. He started walking towards her, silent and unnoticed. Winn was breathing in the jerky way of one who is trying not to cry. Reaching her, he lifted her head, framing her face in his hands.
He didn't speak at first. What was there to say? He couldn't argue with what Winn had said, it was too firmly rooted in her for that. There was nothing he could do or say to ease the pain, only time and Winn herself could do that. But perhaps he could give her hope, and make her see that while she could do and say everything she could think of to drive him away, he didn't plan on going anywhere. Or on letting her go anywhere for that matter.
Smoothing his thumbs over her cheekbones, Jack said quietly, "Come to bed, love." He held her eyes, hoping that she had heard the difference in a name he constantly called her.
Winn stood looking up at him for no more than an instant before the tears in her eyes spilled over. She slumped into him, burying her head in his neck as sobs started wracking her body. She clung to him as a fiercely as ivy to a trellis, allowing him to scoop her up and take her over to the bed.
Jack stayed in Winn's room that night, simply holding her as she let go of a pain that she had been carrying for years. He stayed awake thinking long after she had fallen into an exhausted sleep, drained mentally, physically, and spiritually. She had drifted off still holding on to him as she allowed herself to fear being alone for the first time in many, many years. And allowed someone else hold that fear off.
Holding her in his arms and looking down into her sleep smoothed face, Jack realized one important thing that night, and one minor thing. First he realized that he never wanted to let her go, and secondly, that his life had just gotten a lot more complicated.
Staring into the dark, he wondered, If that's true, then why the devil am I smiling?
Tuesday:
Winn found it difficult to wake up the next morning. Several times during the night, she had started to awake, but had felt so completely safe that she had gone back to sleep. Now, just a mere half hour past dawn, a knocking at her door woke her.
"Mmm . . . ." Moaning, Winn stretched in a most feline fashion, her body pressing against that of the bed's other occupant. She could feel each and every muscle in her body stretching like an old rubber than had lost its elasticity. It felt good in the same way that pulling a tooth or removing scab did.
Abruptly relaxing again, Winn felt the bump on the back of her head start throbbing again. Not to mention that I'm feeling a bit wobbly. As soon as she thought that, she realized that she wasn't imagining the fact that her pillow was moving up and down underneath her head. And that there was an amazing amount of room in the bed. Her train of thought was derailed when once again there was a quiet knock on the door.
Opening her eyes, she found that what she had taken for her pillow was in reality the chest of the man that she had tried to drive away the night before. That certainly wasn't very effective. No matter how much Winn tried to regret last night, her outburst and subsequent tears, she couldn't. She felt more at ease than she had in years. That in itself was enough to unsettle her.
Carefully disentangling herself from a sleeping Jack, removing the comforting presence of his arm around her waist, Winn got up. The room spun around her for a moment. It had been a little over eighteen hours since she had last eaten, and after the exertions of yesterday, she was feeling weak on her feet. She waited for the room to stop moving before she tried to move, lest she trip over her own feet. While she stood there, she realized that the knocking at the door hadn't yet ceased.
Who is so persistent this early in the morning? The knocking was starting to get on her nerves. Moving to where her robe had been laid over the arm of an overstuffed chair, Winn donned it over all her underclothes. Rubbing at her eyes which were feeling dry and creaky, as eyes often do after a good cry, Winn went to the door to yell at whoever was making a pest of themselves before dawn had even been firmly established.
To great surprise she found Marty on the threshold. He had been pecking at the door with his bill. "You ridiculous bird. Not only am I not the person who normally feeds you, but I have absolutely no inclination to do so now. Why aren't you asleep, anyway? It's barely light out yet." Ignoring these questions, the bird pushed his way into the room.
He inspected every corner of the room, as if he suspected her of hiding something good to eat. For several seconds he considered Pige, as if he were so desperate as to eat the pup. "Trust me. I doubt you would enjoy the experience." Winn had shut her door and was now leaning against it, her arms folded over her chest. Marty looked at her quizzically. Shaking her head, she asked herself, "And why am I talking to a bird as if I expect it to care about what I'm saying?"
Because it's better than thinking about what you're going to do when Jack wakes up, that's why. Winn rubbed her forehead – there were too many people behind it for her peace of mind. "At least they're still making sense."
Looking at the man in her bed, Winn decided that she had two options. Escape the room and him and risk running into her grandfather or other members of her family, or she could stay here and wait for Jack to wake up. Neither alternative seemed particularly attractive, but she'd much rather avoid unnecessary familial contact for as long as was possible. So I guess I'll be staying here for awhile.
Winn looked around her room for something to occupy her time until Jack woke up. Her gaze settled on a stack of books that were awaiting her attention. No, I don't want to focus that much. I'm not sure I can focus that much at the moment. Next she saw her sketchbook. While that was very tempting, that was the problem. It was a little too tempting to pick it up and sketching page after page of Jack asleep. Something that lets my mind wander, that doesn't take much attention, that offers no temptation. . . .
Winn remembered her recorder. That could work. Where did I leave it? She quickly scanned the room. There it was, sitting on the vanity, where she often set down the miscellaneous items that managed to gather in her room throughout the day - most of it belonging to her young relatives. It was lying in three pieces, so apparently she had remembered to clean and oil it recently, although she didn't really remember doing so. I must have done that yesterday when I was hiding.
She moved across the room, and quickly assembled her instrument. Crossing to the window, she threw it open and settled herself on the windowpane. Letting one leg hang out the window and bending the other at the knee, she watched the sun rise to the accompaniment of the music she was playing. Marty came to stand by her, starting to preen his feathers in her company.
Quickly losing herself in the melody of her chosen piece, she let her thoughts drift, let her head empty. She had learned long ago how to put herself in a trance-like state to avoid thinking, and she did that now, her fingers moving over the holes in the length of wood she held to her lips. She didn't even think of what she was playing.
Her music woke Jack slowly, his awareness pierced by the sweetness of the notes pouring from the foot and a half long instrument. He sat up in bed, not bothering to announce that he had awoken, and watched Winn as she sat in the window. The morning sun cast a pure light upon her skin, the light breeze catching her hair and tugging it this way and that like a lover playing with the hair of his beloved. He listened as hymn after hymn poured forth from the both the instrument and the woman playing it. She switched from song to song effortlessly, sometimes at the end of one, sometimes halfway through. Marty had finished his grooming, and was now picking at the skirt of her robe, behaving like the harmless nuisance that he was.
Looking around in much the same way that Winn had earlier, Jack found the sketchbook. Quietly getting up, he picked it up from the trunk on which it was resting. He quickly flipped through it to a blank page. Settling back down on the bed, he started to draw Winn as she sat in the window, her gaze unfocused and pointed out to sea as if she longed to be elsewhere.
Slowly Winn stopped playing, her notes simply fading even as they were played. She lowered the recorder from her lips, setting it in her lap. Her head fell back against the casing, and she let out a low sigh of dissatisfaction. At what she couldn't define. Her Grandfather. Her situation. Perhaps at life in general.
Seeing this, Jack got up and moved over towards her – not that he knew what he was planning to do. This whole situation was as new to him as it was for her. He simply stood at her side, waiting for some cue as to what to do. He didn't have to wait long, for Winn leaned into him, her head coming to rest right below his heart.
Without opening her eyes, she said with a faint trace of humor in her voice, "'As to hanging, it is no great hardship. For were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so unfit the sea that men of courage must starve'."
Jack smirked at this, a bit of normality emerging into a strange and difficult situation. "I don't think things have gotten as bad as that yet, love."
"So say you." Winn listened to Jack's heart, listened to its beating. Bringing her recorder to her lips, she played a few bars of yet another hymn before stopping. "Things are looking pretty bad from where I'm sitting."
"Hmm. Why do you say that?" He waited for several minutes for Winn to answer, but she remained silent, once again playing music to avoid thinking.
If he hasn't heard what Grandfather had commanded, she thought, then I don't want to get into it. I don't want to get into it even if he has heard.
When Jack noticed that she wasn't going to answer, he asked another question, one that seemed to be a bit more harmless. "What do you keep playing?"
"Hymns. Whenever I'm depressed they just kinda come to my fingers."
"Where'd you learn them?" Jack found it hard to believe that this woman with such a strong pirate heritage had spent much time in church.
"Mother taught them to me when I was young, and then when I came out here, Grandmother taught me a new appreciation for them. She loved singing them as she gardened, and I learned how to play along with her. Now they're just calming to play. I guess they remind me of them both, in a bittersweet kind of way." Resigning herself to facing the day and dealing with the troubles of yesterday, Winn opened her eyes. Glancing at the book Jack still had in his hand, she switched the topic. "Why is it that even though that book is mine, you're drawing in more than I am of late?"
"Because you're not taking advantage of the glorious view afforded you in the same way that I am?" Winn snorted. The man certainly knew how to use his ego to his advantage.
"Whatever do you mean?" she asked innocently. "I've drawn this bay many times. And truly, I can't think of another view worthy of capturing at the moment."
"Shrew," Jack muttered.
"Pirate," Winn shot back
Marty, noticing that no one was giving him his due attention as a beloved household pet, squawked and grabbed hold of one of the many stands of beads in Jack's hair. Jack yelled when the bird started tugging on it, which woke Pige who started dancing and yapping in excitement. Winn's nieces and nephews, who were waiting outside the room for some sign of life that would mean it would be okay for them to enter, came racing in to throw themselves on the bed. Promptly starting a pillow fight, they woke their parents with their squeals and shrieks. The awakened parents came to the room to drag their children back to their rooms and to demand silence until at least seven o'clock.
Winn just sat in the window watching with a kind of fascinated horror as the scene unfolded before her, her hands covering her mouth. Jack finally pulled free of the determined and slighted bird, glaring at it and thinking evil thoughts of roast poultry.