Jack/Pearl
The sun was sinking low in the sky when they sailed away the first time. Jack stood on the beach, heedless of the tide rising around his ankles, his feet sinking into the sand, the last of the day's heat beating down on his unprotected head. And he watched as his ship shrank to a speck on the horizon and finally disappeared.
It was deep night the next time he saw her, moon high and full above the fort's battlements. Peering out the prison window, he could make out the sea from the sky by its sparkle, and he could only see the Pearl by virtue of the fact that she did not. With every dull thud from her gun deck, his chest grew tight and his throat dry, and he thought, Now.
The second time she left him, it was bright afternoon and the island shimmered in the sun, gold and green and blue, prettier than any jewel, prettier even than his companion. Jack cared not. The sand burned, the waves taunted, the girl shouted. He checked the shot in his pistol and sought the numbing veil of the rum buried in the hated earth.
When he stood at her helm for the first time in ten years, he let his clothes dry on his back. He didn't move for the next eighteen hours. Only when he was directing the ship off course by sagging against the wheel was Gibbs able to persuade him to collapse in a hammock. In his dreams she sang to him, a song like stretched canvas and creaking wood and the deep, lonely cry of whales.
He watched her go down from the deck of an English man-of-war. The captain ordered the other prisoners below, but he gripped Jack's hair and made him look. He wouldn't have turned his head even if he could. He owed her that much. As she burned and broke apart, he could hear her screaming defiance, until her last bones fell beneath the waves.
The commodore will be pleased, the captain growled into his ear. Jack didn't bother to contradict him. Within an hour of his arrival in Kingston, Norrington came to see him, his green eyes shadowed like a spot of dark, dangerous current. He asked if there was anything, anything Jack could tell him, anything that might be of use.
Yes, said Jack. I was faithful. But it didn't save her and it won't save me.
It hadn't, and after the briefest of trials, it didn't.
But Jack could see the ocean from the gallows, and so he smiled, because no one could take that from them. And now no one would get the chance to try.