The Growing Darkness

Lucinda's entire being seemed to be in shock—her brain was proving absolutely useless. The only thought that came through to her was that Sparrow was alive, he was with her, and he was currently leading her into an alley by the wrist. She finally latched on to that last fact, and a frown puckered her brow. "What are you doing?"

"We need to talk, love," he replied, his voice so much lower now than it had once been.

"Unhand me this instant," she commanded in her haughtiest voice.

He simply smiled at her.

She fought down a smile herself. This was rather like old times, and it seemed as though eighteen years hadn't changed either of them very much. "I'm warning you, Sparrow—I shall scream my head off if you don't!"

Sparrow's smile turned a touch wicked. "You ought to be thankful that I'm not carrying you over me shoulder."

She gasped, mockingly scandalized. "You wouldn't dare!"

"Wouldn't I?" He turned around fully for only a moment, but the look he gave her was so masculine and teasing that she couldn't reply for nearly a minute.

Absently, as she thought of something to say, Lucinda noted that Sparrow walked with a swaying, rolling gate that she had not seen in even the most sea-legged men. Truth be told, she was rather reminded of his father, for he had been the only pirate she'd ever come face to face with, and Sparrow resembled him greatly.

His grip tightened on her for a moment, as they entered an empty corridor between buildings. Then he spun on his heel, facing her, and finally dropped her wrist. "There, you've been unhanded."

She lunged at him, clinging to his broad form in the tightest hug she could manage. "I can't believe it's really you!" she laughed quietly. For the briefest of seconds it occurred to her that this was not in the least bit proper, but then that had always been half the fun of being with Sparrow—she didn't have to be proper.

Jack's mind went from age thirty to age twelve as he brought his arms tightly about her. Lucy fit him perfectly, her head resting just under his chin—but all he could suddenly think of was that kiss he'd never had the nerve to take.

"I should have known the moment I saw Henry this morning," he said in an effort to distract himself. "It's too much to expect that there would be more than one Miss Maplethorpe on this island."

"You saw Henry this morning?" she asked, her breath tickling his throat. A brief pause followed her question, then a little groan as comprehension finally dawned. "That rotten old man! That's why he was so panicked earlier—and of course he didn't bother to tell me that you'd come back!"

He smiled at her outrage, even as he tried to ignore the fact that he could almost feel her lips against him. This was new territory for Jack, wanting something and yet denying himself, but he didn't want to frighten Lucy so soon after they had found one another. "Chased me straight out of the house, he did," he replied in a slightly pinched tone.

"That man never changes," Lucy laughed—a sound that was so warm and rich that Jack was left defenseless.

"To hell with it," he muttered, gently tipping her head up. He had a moment to revel in the beauty of her sweetly rounded face, to admire the shine of her green-hazel eyes and the dark curls of her long hair, and then he was kissing her.

Lucy didn't understand it at first. Not the kiss; that she understood perfectly well, for she had been kissed before—although they had always been silly kisses from Lordlings, desperate kisses from stable boys, or perfunctory kisses from her husband, which were not like this kiss at all. No, what she didn't understand was that it was Sparrow kissing her. She'd always endeavored to remember him as he'd been: tall, gangly, mischievous, and twelve—yet here was this man, pressing his lips to her own! In the grand scheme of things, she wasn't sure what to think about that, but she couldn't deny that it was pleasant.

Upon that revelation, it occurred to her that she should probably respond in some fashion.

Lucy leaned up into the kiss, unprepared for Sparrow's reaction. He made a desperate noise low in this throat, like the keen of a wounded animal, and suddenly his hands were moving restlessly. One arm tightened about her waist and the other skipped playfully along her back, teasing the length of her spine until his hand came to tangle in the curls at the back of her head. He pulled her closer, if at all possible, angling her for fuller contact. His lips pressed over hers, no longer a gentle meeting of flesh, but a hungry, restless surge of desire.

She shivered, her body suffused with something she'd never quite comprehended in the past. Desire had been an abstract concept, something she'd heard of but never experienced, for she'd been too young to appreciate the only man she'd ever really wanted. She experienced that delight now, the strange, bittersweet combination of feeling him all around her and yet wanting more, knowing it would never be quite enough.

Lucy slid her arms around his neck, pulling him down closer to her as she made a quite keening sound of her own. He seemed surprised by her move, but not displeased, so she continued, reveling in the feel of him all the while. Moment by moment, she pressed her lips harder against him, until she was all but nipping at his lower lip. When he opened his mouth to her, his tongue sweeping out to meet her own, she felt paralyzed by the pleasure of it. A strange heat curled lazily through her veins, making her body feel heavy and lethargic, yet at the same time it filled her with an agitated sort of energy—she was content and yet, at the same time, it seemed as though she couldn't move enough to satisfy the sudden desire Sparrow was stoking within her.

They both parted on a groan, only separating so far as was absolutely necessary. His hand still tangled in her hair, his lips just ghosting over her own, Sparrow let out a quiet laugh—a happy, satisfied sound that simply made her want to kiss him again.

He smiled. "That wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I said we needed to talk."

"Why not? I thought we were communicating quite nicely." She laughed at the thought that their roles had been reversed—that he was talking as a sensible woman, and she was talking as a brash man.

The hand at her neck moved, coming to trail across her cheek and down her jaw. Sparrow's hands were not soft—callused, as they were by years of toiling at sea—but they were gentle nonetheless. His fingers slid down her neck, across her throat, and up to the opposite cheek where he trailed his thumb under her eye. "Eighteen years," he murmured quietly. "I can't believe it's been that long."

Neither could she—they fell in together so well that it was almost as if they had never been separated at all. Her thoughts, which were busy reminiscing, were interrupted when Sparrow ran his fingers over the arches of her brows and down the length of her nose. "What are you doing?" she asked bemusedly.

"Memorizing you," he smiled in that carefree way she had missed so much. "You've changed a lot, you know."

Lucy relaxed her grip, letting her arms trail ever so slightly over his shoulders and down his back. "So have you," she replied, marveling at the muscle she could feel tensing along his back.

"Well," he nearly sing-songed, "feel free to do some memorization of your own then." His fingers finally left her face, tracing instead along the length of her shoulders and then her collarbone. In fact, it wasn't until he reached the top of her bodice that the situation finally dawned upon her.

She slapped at his hand, tangling his fingers with her own. "I will not feel you up in an alley, Sparrow," she replied pointedly, ignoring that she had been doing just that mere moments ago.

He simply raised a brow. "You'd prefer to do it in the street?"

Lucy hit his shoulder playfully. "You've turned into quite the wicked man!"

"I thought you'd be a proper lady by the time I came back," he mused, "but you're even more brutish now than you were at six."

"I could say the same about you," she snorted. "Honestly, 'the street'?" She shook her head. "Unless your plan is to get the two of us leg-shackled by the local priest, then I wouldn't recommend it."

Sparrow seemed momentarily panicked by the idea of marriage, likely having gone to great lengths to avoid such a fate before, but he quickly shook the thoughts away, changing the subject slightly. "Nearly twenty-four and still unwed, Lucy?" His free hand came up to brush her cheek. "You're much too pretty to be a spinster."

"I'm not," she replied, trying to ignore the fact that he probably would have kissed her even if she had been married; that thought did funny things to her heart. "Haven't you heard? It's not Miss Maplethorpe anymore—it's Widow Maplethorpe."

He frowned, something dark settling in his eyes. "Your name…?"

"He was a distant cousin; my parents arranged it," she shrugged. By now, the details of her marriage were dreadfully boring to her, but if Sparrow wanted to know, she would tell him. "Alasdair was a kind man, and I shall miss him, but all the same he was quite sickly and it's probably better that he passed as he did."

"What happened?" Sparrow asked, not unkindly, but the darkness in his eyes grew.

"He loved horses," Lucy smiled faintly, remember her late husband's foolish enthusiasm, "but he was not a particularly good rider."

"Broke his neck, did he?" The question was gruff and just the slightest bit out of place, but it was hard to say why.

She nodded, her smile turning a touch sad. "The surgeon told me that he died instantly, that he didn't have time to feel any pain. This probably sounds horrible, but I think that was a better death than slowly expiring from whatever sickness took hold of him."

"I shouldn't have asked." Sparrow shook his head and stroked her cheek comfortingly, but it seemed as though there was a touch of bitterness lurking around his lips. "You probably hate talking about it."

"On the contrary," her smile bloomed, full and sweet, even as she felt off kilter with this man before her. "I'll miss him, as I said, but I'm done mourning for Alasdair. He was a good friend and I prefer to remember him at his finest."

The bitterness faded somewhat, but the darkness remained. "Friend?" he asked carefully.

"It's no secret that our marriage was one of convenience," Lucy shrugged once more. "Alasdair might have been my husband in the eyes of my parents, my neighbors, and God—but not in mine, and he respected that because he didn't really see me as his wife."

Was it a sin to despise a dead man? Jack had never met this Alasdair Maplethorpe, but he hated him on principle. The only nice thing to be said was that the Lordling had not been man enough to warm his wife to their union—that, and he'd had the good sense to leave Lucy as a young widow.

He had always feared, in a visceral sort of way, that Lucy would be attached to someone by the time he returned. Some of his worst nightmares involved reuniting with the Little Lady while she was surrounded by a mob of her own children. Jack could admit that he didn't like the thought of her committed to a husband or a home—finding out that she was a widow, that she'd been married, was almost just as bad.

But it was also an opportunity, and Jack had never passed one of those up yet. His Lucy was free in a very essential way and, if their kiss had been any indication, she wasn't completely adverse to the idea of getting more intimate with him—all he had to do was quietly, irreversibly insert himself into her life, and he'd have his girl back.

Irreversibly? He groaned at his own thoughts. Ever since Lucy had mentioned marriage, he couldn't get the idea out of his head. He kept forgetting one very important factor in all of this: he was a pirate. He knew himself too well to pretend that he could make a good husband; he was too in love with adventure, with the freedom granted by a ship on the sea, and he was much too used to simply getting up and leaving whenever the urge struck him. At best estimate, he could spend approximately half a year ashore before he went absolutely insane. And sweet, gentle Lucy wasn't the sort one took aboard a pirate ship and expected to flourish. A marriage between them would be one of distance and desperation—the marriage his parent's had shared.

"You must tell me all about your adventures on the sea, Sparrow," Lucy demanded, interrupting his thoughts.

He quirked a brow, grateful to be saved from the depths of his own mind for once. "We're old friends, Lucy," he told her, stepping away so that only their hands remained entangled, "you can call me Jack."

"You never actually told me your name, if you'll remember," she replied plainly, leading the both of them out of the alley and onto the street, "but if it's Jack you want, then that is what I shall call you."

Captain Teague leaned against the railing of his ship, the Misty Lady, and stared out at the vastness of the ocean around him. There had once been a time when such sights had filled him with the undeniable thrill of adventure, but no longer. It seemed that the longer he sailed and the more he saw, the less he was impressed by it all. Yet he still felt the itch for exploration—he'd seen it all, done it all, but it wasn't enough. He'd sailed for years, the ghost of a man who hadn't found the will to die. There had to be more out there, something that could give him back that spark of life; he just hadn't been able to find it yet.

Perhaps that was why he clung so desperately to Jackie. The boy was full of life, always finding trouble where it should not exist. His son was a lodestone: attractive to all sorts of danger and all manner of adventures.

Teague sighed and shook his head. When had he—one of the most feared pirates throughout the whole of the Caribbean—been reduced to living vicariously through his son? Even now, on his way to correct whatever mistake Jack was about to embark upon, Teague felt nothing but the lust for years long since past. Somewhere along the way, he had stopped looking forward, his eyes forever fixed on what had come before.

He'd known, when he was teaching his son the ins and outs of piracy, that he had been grooming a replacement—another Teague to take his place in the next generation of pirates—but was his time really up so soon already? Despite his absent passion, Captain Teague didn't feel like letting go of the helm just yet.

And so the Misty Lady sailed for Nevis.

A/N: The chapter title made this all seem like it was going to be way more melodramatic than it really was, didn't it?

I will admit upfront that not a lot is known about Captain Teague since he had maybe two scenes—I'm making most of it up as I go along, but I did take the name of his ship off his wikipedia page. I'm not sure if that's actually true or not, but let's just roll with it, shall we?

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Disclaimer: I own none of this, and I'm not making any money off of it either.