A/N: Again, thanks to all the lovely reviews, and a special nod to royalpinkdogs for offering to be my beta, lets give her a round of applause. This chapter was initially going to be longer, but it wasn't flowing well after a certain point and I decided not to force it. Enjoy!

Chapter Five: Fix You

In a split second he realized she had no idea where she was. Her coppery eyes focused on him and she took a deep, shuddering breath, regulating her quick breaths back to normal. She touched her wrist unconsciously, running her own finger over the rigid scar there, and he saw her jaw tighten as she swallowed hard; she blinked swiftly but he had a keen enough eye to catch the glaze of tears she was jerking back.

"Elizabeth," he started gently, momentarily regretting the harsh words they'd been throwing about lately. He stepped forward and reached out to touch her knuckles where her hand was clutched around her wrist.

She moved her wrist away and a pulled her legs up to her chest, pressing her knees together. She put her head down, resting her temple against her kneecaps, and wrapped her arms around herself. Her shoulders were shaking imperceptibly, but he couldn't tell if she was crying her or not.

God, he just wanted to know what was wrong. Devil knows he knew what it was like to be afraid to close your eyes at night for fear of being plagued by nightmares. But he couldn't figure this out; he was at a loss as to what was still eating at her. She couldn't escape from her demons even in her wakeful state. He reached out with a rough, ringed hand and pulled her hair back from its shielding curtain and tucked it behind her ear. She flinched sharply at the motion but he caught her injured hand before she could move and pulled it to him; she lifted her head. Her eyes weren't red; there were no tear streaks on her rouged cheeks, but her kohl-lined eyes were smudged just a little. He chose the wiser option here and tactfully ignored that. When he found her eyes again, they were cool again, but her mouth wasn't set in its hard, unforgiving line. Her hair was a little disheveled, as the sleeping had mussed it, but it fell no less beautifully around her shoulders. She was looking at him blankly, with expressionless features, as if bracing herself against his remarks and chalking up her own. Her jerking around and squeezing her wrist so tightly had re-opened the cut, and blood was smearing across her wrist again, wet and slick. He held it up dismally.

"Convince you you're alive, love?" he asked grimly, setting her wrist gently on the pillow again. He turned around and pulled a leather pouch off a shelf, searching out a vial of clean alcohol and something he'd bought off a medicine woman in Aruba that seemed to close up wounds unusually fast. She was watching him with eyes that bordered on distrusting when he turned around, prompting him to hold up the items in front of him as if he'd been caught red-handed stealing. She didn't move, and he set the things on the bed, uncorking the stopped from the vial and carelessly ripping a piece of cloth from the bed sheet to saturate with the alcohol. He glanced up at her swiftly before he pressed it to the cut; she flinched again, and he couldn't help the words that came out of his mouth:

"Does that hurt enough?" Maybe it was cruel, it was definitely uncalled for, but he couldn't deny that she needed it. He'd never seen such reckless intent on self-destruction. Moments after he called her out on her stupid outcry she picks up the nearest sharp object and gouges herself with it? He had half a mind to cuff her to him and drag her around the ship kicking and screaming to prevent her from killing herself. She frustrated him to no end, with her chilling refusal to wake up to reality and her through-and-through apparent hate of all humanity and aversion to any contact from people. She was showing herself more and more to be a lost cause, and much as he was one to drop a hopeless cause without a second glance, she was one chance he wasn't going to give up on if it meant beating her senseless to get this out of her. Whatever it was, it was killing her.

He didn't look up at her reaction while he used his finger to spread the ointment over the cut. He touched some to the recent cigarette burn as well, noticing her curl her fingers against the burn out of the corner of his eye. The other scars he didn't bother with; they were old, they would be permanent. When he corked the vial and the ointment, he returned her arm to her and looked up with scrutinizing eyes. She wasn't looking at him, but down at her wrist; he couldn't see her eyes to try and pull any information from them.

"What did you do it with?" he asked sharply, needing to break the silence and determined to get it away from her all the same. She looked up slowly, and he anticipated the sharp retort.

"Why do you care?" She asked in a low voice, not quite as menacing as she had been before. He was tempted to slap some sense into her. She could anger her so much with this uncanny stubbornness but she invoked such pity in him—wouldn't she hate him for that, if she knew?

"Is it so hard to believe that I don't want you dead?" he asked tensely, the statement ringing warning bells in his head as being way too revealing of his not-so-roguish side. She was looking at him almost scathingly, her eyes were slanted; he could see her mulling it over in his head. Suddenly she straightened her head up and looked at him evenly.

"Do you mean that?" she asked, surprising him with the simplicity of the question. Is that what she wanted? Assurance? Knowledge that there was someone who actually cared about her mortality? As emotionally unacsessible as he was, Jack could give her that easily. There were plenty of people he didn't want dead. What he couldn't tell her was just how much seeing her pale and cold would affect him. He nodded, without taking his eyes off of hers.

Elizabeth reached up slowly and took the gold earrings from her ears, and removed two pins from the bodice of her dress. She dropped them into his outstretched hand and gave him a look that seemed to say, are you happy? He squeezed his hand shut, ignoring the stabbing of the unclosed pin against the soft pads of his fingertips. She took note of the paleness in his face. She wanted to scream at herself for telling him. For letting him gain that much ground over her as to take her only means of release. What was he doing? Jack glanced down at his hand, resolving to throw the offending items over the side of the Pearl the instant he was away. He started to turn away, to set them on the table, when her voice stopped him.

"I can't stop doing it." She said.

He dropped the injury-inflicting things into his coat pocket and turned around, unable to stop the eyebrow he raised in question. Couldn't stop? Like it was an addiction? He didn't know whether to surrender her to madness or give her another really strong drink.

"What did you say?" he asked quietly, glaring at her. She didn't look away from him, but she seemed smaller in his eyes. She still looked at him with ferocity in her features, and he couldn't see any vulnerability or emotion that gave away why she'd told him something so…revealing. A second longer of looking at her told him she wasn't going to repeat herself. He groaned inwardly and sat down on the bed facing her, pulling one leg up and resting it at a triangular angle from his body.

"Elizabeth," he stopped briefly, trying to extract the patronizing tone from his voice. "It is mind-boggling to me that you would intentionally inflict pain upon your person so as to," he couldn't help it. His tone was anything but neutral. "watch yourself bleed."

Elizabeth's shoulders were stiff and her back was rigid against the headboard. She wasn't comfortable with him that close to her, and he could sense it. He couldn't fathom why either, as earlier she hadn't seemed to be uncomfortable around anyone; she'd been busy seducing them. Then, he had obviously caught her in a bad moment, and even though he could tell she wanted him to leave and he knew she was going to start throwing obscenities around soon, he wasn't really planning on leaving. It was night. The ocean was calm. He didn't have anywhere to be.

"I told you," she started, through gritted teeth. Her knuckles were white; she was gripping the sheets on both sides of her legs. "It helps."

Jack rolled his eyes to the ceiling and put his hand over his face in exasperation.

"It helps with what? What can you possible fix by—by cutting yourself? I think ye 'ave lost yer bloody mind, Lizzie, because damn it all if I can't figure out what's wrong with ye—"

"There's nothing wrong with me!" he barely gave her warning voice time to interrupt.

"There's about a thousand things wrong here, miss, and I don't think it's anything a good bashing of yer head against a wall would fix." He had raised his voice after her interruption, the words rough and cutting, and he wasn't really aware if they had stunned her or angered her or both.

"I'm not mad. I haven't lost my mind." She said quietly, glaring at him with silent anger. That accusation was getting to her, and she showed it. Cruel as it may seem, he was going to have to break down her defenses, and it seemed he'd found a way to do that. Find the weak spots and fray the edges.

"Then you have a colossal misconception of the definition of sanity." Jack stopped the venom for a moment to look over her, and continued with a softened determinedness. "You're a smart lass, Elizabeth. Don't pretend you don't have any clue what yer doing to yerself. I don't have a bloody clue what happened to mess you up so bad but I never thought I'd see the day when you'd pull such an asinine stunt—"

She'd almost leapt forward suddenly, on all fours, and her face was inches from his, her eyes blazing and the muscles in her face and around her lips taut.

"You have no right." She growled lividly, her eyes dark. He didn't move back from her, just looked back at her with a mild gaze, waiting for the expected mood-swing. "You don't understand. You don't know anything."

"Would it kill you to let me in on that sacred little enigma?" he asked, sarcasm dripping from his words like honey.

"Fuck you!" she snarled, reaching behind his head and grabbing his hair, holding his eyes on her. If he'd really wanted to pull away, she could have had broken bones in an instant, but he stayed put for the time being. "Did you bring me with you to play games? To amuse yourself? Do you find me entertaining? Oh, I can be entertaining, Jack, if that's what you want, I'm good at that. But if you brought me here on some whim, following that save-the-damsel complex all you men seem to possess; if you brought me here to find out what could have possibly cause pristine little Miss Swann to have a complete change of character, then I hate you for that. You sit there, in all your self-righteousness, as if I'm in need of guidance, as if you saved me—and I, Captain Sparrow, do not rescuing from the likes of you." And she jerked his head forward and met his lips with hers.

He could taste the desperation in her kiss. She wanted the conversation over, she wanted him to stop, and the devilish woman knew exactly how to distract him. She was digging her nails into the back of his head, and shifted her weight onto his lap. He grasped her small waist in his hands and moved her back, moving one hand up to hold her head the way she was holding his. Her eyes were blazing brightly, whether with anger or suppressed tears he didn't know, but she tried to shake him off and put her other hand on his neck.

"Is this how you're going to fix it?" he asked sharply.

"Stop acting like you disapprove." She gave back bitterly. "Stop acting like I need to be fixed." She pressed her nail against the tender flash beneath his ear. "And stop pretending you care." He grabbed her hand away from his ear and held it tightly, willing the blood to stay in his head. She pushed him back and straddled his hips. She leaned forward, her hair fell over to one side, all the curls spilling down and covering his shoulder. "You know it's all easier this way." She said in a low voice, coaxingly. "If you just shut-up." The last words came out as an annoyed hiss, and she bent down to attack his mouth again. He placed his hands on her knees and moved them up her thighs under her dress; she pressed her mouth harder against his, her tongue running along his bottom lip.

If this was what she needed, if this was what would stop her from slicing open her skin and watching her blood drip out of her, he could provide this for the time being.

I again, remind you to please Review

--I'll hopefully have Chapter 6 up in the next week or so, but Cross Country practice has started so updates may be a longer wait.

-- 'Fix You' by Coldplay