A/N - Oh, I love writing Gibbs, he is such fun. And finally, the plot thickens!

Gibbs, looking as sober-faced as ever, sat down opposite me, only the unsteady hand as he laid down his tankard belying his true state.

"Mr. Gibbs…" I began

"Joshamee, Joshamee – please."

"Have you seen Anamaria?" Gibbs shook his flushed face.

"No, not me young love, I be's keeping from her path." He replied with more emphatic head-shaking.

"Jack said the same." I mused, almost to myself. "Why are you all avoiding her?"

Gibbs took a deep draft from his tankard before replying, and I shifted in my seat to become more comfortable; knowing from experience Gibbs was about to begin a tale.

"Well, I'll tell ye true young Catherine, though I don't think ye'd like to hear it." He began. I shrugged off his concern. "Aye well, t'is well known, though not so much spoken, that our Quartermaster is in love with our Captain." I nearly fell from my stool with shock, Gibbs began to answer the questions in my eyes before I could even get them out of my mouth. "When Ana escaped from those frog slave drivers, she stowed away on a ship, see? Hid herself away in the hold she did, and prayed for a quiet passage to some distant land. But what she didn't reckon on was that ship being a pirate ship. Queen Anne's revenge it were called, after old Blackbeard's great ship that were sunk in the Ocracoke inlet. And t'was on that ship Jack had just joined as cabin boy.

"The captain was a powerful cruel man, from what I hear Jack tell, and he kept that crew tight as slaves in the orlop. There wasn't even space for poor little Jack to sling a hammock. So he took up the habit of sleeping down in the hold, ye see. Well, a long voyage, you're going to get to know if you're sharing quarters with someone.

"So Jack found Ana out, by and by. But he doesn't give her up for the captain, ye see. No, our Jack may be young, but he's got his eyes on the prize, so right he as. The two of them, they works out a plan; next time they dock Jack will be left to guard the ship while those other poor sods gets chance to stretch their legs and take in some of life's small pleasures. The captain never liked to leave anyone but Jack on board – thought he was too young to think about mutinying."

"Jack mutinied?"

"No, not he, never. What they did, Ana and him, they waits for the others all to leave, and waits more till they reckon they'll be good and drunk. Then they takes whatever swag and vittles they can, and makes off in the pink – that is, the ships longboat.

" The very next day they manage to take a larger vessel just out to sea, and they presses some of the crew to join them, and a few days the same again, then they uses their wits to take a merchant sloop with a few canon, see? They goes on like this and in no time at all they were terrorizing the Caribbean. Ana tells me they had vowed to be the best pirates the world has ever known, and so they were for a while, though they were only young. They say ye learn to swim if yer thrown in at the deep end, and Ana and Jack took to sailin' and piratin' like none other, they were a grand team, and no one ever got between them. But after a while…" He hesitated, but continued. "Well, like I say – it were a day like any other and the two of them were in Tortuga, putting their feet up, like. Anamaria, well – she were in a family way. Jack didn't know yet, but on the morning she set out to tell him, she found him in bed with some Tortuga wench."

"Oh poor Ana!" I cried, a rush of tenderness boiling up for my friend.

"Aye, t'were nearly the end of her. Off she went, without a second word to Jack, to find her a doctor who'd fix things for her. She never had the child, and Jack never knew she carried it, and t'were near seven years before they saw each other again. Jack has crossed a lot of water since then, but Ana – God help her – she still loves him, always will, I reckon." Gibbs spoke the last few words with an air of finality, and drank deep of his tankard, leaving me to mull over all this meant.

Jack; who drives me mad and whose kiss was still burnt into my brain. And Ana; my dearest friend, who loves him.