A/N: Prompt Buried treasure, originally posted 27/7/10. Yes, that would be today.
This one is AU to my own canon, but it arrived in my head and I liked it.
He can remember the first time he kissed her, can still hear the astonished, indignant sound that had escaped her, only to be muffled against his lips. When he closes his eyes he can again see her as she was: an ebony-haired silhouette against the crimson dawn, dark-diamond eyes flashing just before she kissed him in her turn. With a little effort he can feel her in his arms; the warm old-ivory skin smooth over ship-trained muscles, her hair tangled between his fingers like wind-tossed silk. The taste of her mouth, too, seems to linger in his own: oranges, cinnamon, salt.
He wonders how long the memories will hold her vitality, how long it will be before they dim like the light in her eyes.
They bury her at sea.
"It's what she would have wanted, Cap'n," Gibbs says gruffly, offering what awkward comfort he can. Jack nods, as though in acceptance, but it's a bitter lie and he knows it. What she would have wanted is to be alive and free and in command, wheel in her hands, breeze on her face, open water before her. Never once had she expressed a desire to be laid out upon a blood-washed deck, graceful limbs become ungainly in death. She should be vibrant and intensely present, face filled with that expression of fierce triumph he had come to know so well, not still and pale, cool body stitched into a sheet taken from Jack's bed and abandoned in the wine-dark sea.
The world must be somehow distorted, Jack thinks, if something so indefinably beautiful and irreplaceably precious can be gone forever in the instant it takes for the implacable sea to take back one of her own.
Not all treasure is silver and gold, and Jack will not again forget it.