Disclaimer: No, I don't own this. If I did, I definitely wouldn't be in school anymore.
AN: I'm not dead. I know, it's hard to tell sometimes. School is taking up an unprecedented amount of my time. Consequently, my ability to contact just about anyone has diminished to...well, nonexistance. My ability to write at all has been reduced to a laptop that has no capacity for communication to other computers (that includes the internet) so in order to get this story from there to here, I literally had to set the laptop down and retype the entire thing, word by word.
There are about four more chapters on this particular laptop which must be copied this way. Hectic? You bet. I only do it out of love, so please forgive long lapses and sadly short chapters. Anyway, enough of my whining and on to the story:
She'd learned to sleep with her door locked. It was a vain gesture, of course, since he randomly picked the lock anyway. That much became a weekly occurrence, at least: he sneaked out of his room, broke into hers, and then sat on the floor beside her bed, watching her sleep. He didn't touch her, didn't smooth her hair, didn't even speak to her. Sometimes he'd stay awake the entire night, just watching her, and duck out of sight in the drunken moment when she woke, but usually he fell asleep right there.
The first time she woke to find him snoring on the floor, she nearly screamed. It was, after all, improper for a grown man and woman to sleep in the same room however chaste the intention might have been. Shock at indecency melted away as her faculties reemerged that morning. She was left to wonder as he snored (he hadn't snored in some time; at least not when he had been recovering) what had compelled him to steal into her room in the first place. After all, her blankets and clothes and belongings remained unmoved, and he had even remained a (relatively) gentlemanly distance from her bed. For a few moments she could only sit and stare, clutching at her blanket in a vain attempt to shield her bedclothes from immodesty, but at last her good sense took full control of the situation, and she seized her clothes and fled to the bathroom to dress.
He didn't wake until after she returned, now appropriately clothed, and even then the process was slow. First his nose wrinkled, then he began to shift, just slightly. Then his hands and feet twitched, as though searching for restraints. Finding none, he rolled onto his side while his hair flopped comically onto his face. One eye opened, then the other, with a deliberate slowness, with all the caution of one accustomed to hangovers. Slowly the daze left his eyes, and they began to meander through his surroundings: up the legs of this table, across its surface, to the corner of the bed, to the pillow. Then they struck the woman who was sitting patiently on top of the bed.
Now he was quite fully awake.
"G'morning, love," he groaned. She raised one sculpted eyebrow.
"Jack," she began, her tone somewhere between curious and scolding. "What are you doing in my room?" He glanced at the floor on which he lay, and back up at her.
"Sleeping," he said simply. She shook her head to dismiss the answer.
"Yes, but why here?" she insisted. He opened his mouth as though to explain, but a look of sudden enlightenment washed over his face, and his would-be confession was replaced by a satisfied smirk.
"I don't think I'm going to tell you," he said.
"Don't do that again, Jack," she berated him. He nodded. And, in the civil, honest way for which pirates are still honored, he returned the next night. Still he remained chaste and ambiguous, still she chastised his wrongdoings, still he continued as though he had never been caught.
She locked the door, but that endeavor for privacy was easily fouled, as were several other attempts at security. Eventually she simply accepted her fate as an addition to her life with Captain Jack Sparrow: improper, unencouraged, unnecessary, but not quite regrettable.
She stopped telling him to stop when she realized why.
The dead of night had oozed into the shadows of her room, bled between the cracks of her floorboards, trailed against her skin through every hole in her bedclothes. It encased her, stifled her, strangled her, until she nearly wished herself dead if only it would make it go away. She tore at the inky veil, tried to claw it from her face so she could breathe again, before it stole into her throat and crushed her heart in her breast and—
"Elizabeth!" she heard a low voice cry, splitting the air and driving the night terrors back into the shadows. "Elizabeth!" There was no advice in the plea, no instruction, but she returned obediently to the waking world that had summoned her.
"Will?" she asked, momentary relief reddening her face. "Will, I—" His hands jerked, sending a slight spasm through her arms. It was only then that she realized that he was holding her wrists in a fierce grip. "Will? What is it?"
"Just a bad dream, love," he said wearily with Jack's voice. There was a moment's confusion, an instant when she resisted all the vices of mortality, before that final realization took root.
"Oh…" she managed to croak. He pulled her into his arms before the tears had a chance to fall. He rocked her back and forth and said things that she wouldn't remember while she soaked the front of his nightshirt with her noiseless sobs. At some time she must have fallen asleep in his arms, but when she woke she was safe under the covers, and he was sprawled protectively on his patch of the floor.
Just as things should be.