Disclaimer: I don't own it. Everything you recognise belongs to Disney.
No infringement
is intended and I'm certainly not making any money from this story.
Summary: How did he escape, last time? That was the question,
was it not... On the
island, just before Jack tells Elizabeth the truth.
Author's note: Dedicated to Jen, for all those comforting pats on the
back :-)
Truth Be Told
by Hereswith
How did he escape, last time? That was the question, was it not, and a pertinent
one, at
that, coming from the lips of that impertinent wench who was standing before
him, her person
in such fetching disarray. He could hear the hint of curiosity in her voice
and—aye—the hope
that soared on the eddies of her anger. He was Captain Jack Sparrow, and she
imagined he
would save them, by some clever plan, or mayhap by some conjurer's trick.
She wanted to
believe that he would.
But he was not the pirate she had read about, for the pirate she had read about
was not
entirely him. And though the stories and tales had somehow become part of him,
over the
years, memory and legend spliced together like rope, on most days he knew full
well what
was, and what had never been. Sea turtles and the rumrunner's ship. Human
hair from his
back and the tail of the whip lashed across it. The times he'd had no
hope of escaping and
the blood on his hands.
She looked at him, now, like no Governor's daughter ever had, and the
fire he saw in her
was not the kind he usually roused in a woman, but it burned him nonetheless.
He had, it
seemed, held a place of some significance in her thoughts, from which he was
falling, with
each heartbeat, each breath. And what she expected from him, he could not give.
He meant to evade her, it would be such a simple thing to make a jest of it,
but the garish
light gentled nothing, it blunted no edges, and the words would not come. The
bloody island,
and her eyes, had stripped them all from him, and left him with naught but the
truth.