A/N: If you have already read this story, then this chapter has been edited, and the mistakes fixed by my lovely beta. If you are new, please enjoy, and REVIEW.

Chapter Six: Straightjacket

It had been a week. The constant mind games were starting to crack her.

Elizabeth was perched on the starboard side of the Black Pearl, with a needle between her teeth, her mind focused on repairing the rope that bound the anchor to the ship. An inventory of supplies had revealed the middle of it to be faulty, and with the aid of the needle and a bit of spare rope, she was sewing and rebraiding the repairs into said rope, in order to prevent a mishap should they need to lay anchor anytime soon. Although this was no menial task, she as concentrating far more brain power on this piece of rope than any sane human being ever would, just to take her mind off the ship's infuriating Captain.

The Captain was the source of the mind games and silent battles she was determined to end with herself as the victor. But Mr. Sparrow proved to be a thousand times more maddeningly relentless than she could have possibly imagined—in fact, ironically enough, it was safe to conjecture that she'd finally met her match. This ongoing silent war that he had deliberately started proved more vicious than either could have foreseen, as his way of attempting to get her to talk was to allow perfectly alienating things to come out of his mouth and expect her to let her guard down. And the impossible man really had not learned the appropriate moment to shut his mouth—which inevitably resulted in either a screaming match or a hard smack across the face. And still, she would sit in the dark afterwards and wonder why he was trying so hard to pull this out of her, and she would try to discern what emotion she kept seeing flare up in his eyes that would be gone the second he blinked. She couldn't figure him out. And it was all swirling around in her head and colliding with everything else and succeeding in slowly driving her mad.

The crew. There was the crew. As much as she preferred distancing herself from everyone and getting the point across that she was inaccessibly cold, she couldn't help taking pleasure in the company of the select few she'd know previously.. Mr. Gibbs, for one, she could hardly avoid, as he had such a fatherly quality to him, and she keenly remembered his gory stories about piracy from her childhood. He'd never treated her like she was made of glass, not even when she'd been a child of ten, and now, though she saw sadness and a curiosity in his wrinkled eyes when he looked at her, he proved a comfort to be around when Jack was being particularly annoying. That, and she highly respected him for always giving her a job to do—something he had at first neglected, whether she was a woman or because of her attitude, she didn't know—but had changed his game when she looked at him after a day or two and blankly told him that if he didn't give her something to do she was going to busy herself with the murder of Jack Sparrow. He seemed to sympathize with that feeling.

But there were some of the crew who were decidedly not so friendly. Not to say that anyone was abusive or any truly atrocious thing like that, but she could tell that her presence was a cause for caution and temptation, and she could sense a certain disgruntled way about some when they figured out just where their unplanned passenger did her sleeping. They joked about her in the holds, or at night when they didn't know she was watching the sea from the high deck, cloaked in shadow and listening to their talk. She was the captain's whore, his personal slut that he'd brought along on a whim. They leered at her sometimes in the hold; she'd heard them making bets as to who could get her in their hammock first. She couldn't really blame any of them for that, and her feelings were hardly affected by their slurs and jeers. She, in her decidedly immodest attire and the seductive manner that stuck with her from Tortuga, had to own to a bit of teasing. There were a few crew members who were better looking than others, some that were more mentally equipped and provided a better conversation. Then, there were the vulgar few who, though apparently witless, she had to tread carefully around because, even though she wasn't exactly a helpless damsel, they could quite easily over power her and she wasn't in the mood to add rape to the list of grievances in her mind. But, faced with the ever present choice of spending her time learning games and gambling with the assortment of men or pitting herself against Jack and coming dangerously close to losing control of everything, she gladly chose to slum with the crew.

But those whispers. Captains whore. Whispers, assumptions. They got to her. And not because she was offended at being called a whore or the like, she hardly objected to that. All she could do at a supposed insult like that was raise an eyebrow and give an inward, derisive snort, as it glanced off her skin with hardly a nick. The vulgar allusions to her liaison with Jack didn't faze her either, let them talk, let them share their crude stories of what so-and-so had supposedly heard or seen. It was more…complicated than that. No, it wasn't the insults or the vulgarity that bothered her, it was the insinuation and the nagging that they caused in the confines of her mind.

Why had he brought her on his ship? What had possessed him to whisk her away in the secret of night from a tavern in Tortuga and set himself up as her proverbial savior? She could not, no matter how hard much she dissected his every word and studied his face and his movements, figure out what had sparked his unusual whim. In his attempts to draw her out of herself, to get her to tell him what had—in his words—caused her to scatter her marbles to the four corners of the earth, she could sense real concern in him, and under his biting words and immature whining fits, she sometimes started to believe that he wanted to help her. She almost saw in him a sort of desperate want to smooth out her jagged edges and an actual softness. But these words, these behind-the-hand whispers, they were a parasite in her mind that angered her when they made her think of other motives he might have had. She wasn't any fool; she knew very well that had the opportunity presented itself years ago he would have hardly hesitated in seducing her. This parasite planted the thoughts in her head that it was quite possible that Jack had simply seen a new opportunity and actually had sought to make her his private whore. And that particular thought, when she dwelt on it, made her so irate that woe be the individual who interrupted her reflections on the matter. It wasn't that she found being the mistress of a man degrading, nor was she hurt by any shred of indifference in Jack; she was far beyond having scruples and she didn't care if Jack was a scheming bastard or not—what did bother her was the possibility that she was his good little whore. In essence, she was, but that was of her own choice to get him to shut up when he started his self-righteous rescuer crusade. No, if it was her doing, she had no qualms about her sinful cavorting with the pirate, but if officially considered as belonging to him, she'd be damned if she was doing it for free.

Elizabeth removed the needle from between her lips and jammed it into the middle of the rope with brute force, taking her inner anger out on the innocent object since the offending captain was not around to bear the brunt of it. Her eyes moved to her wrist as she quickly laced the needle in and out of the rope, examining the fading cigarette burn and cut above it. Both were almost invisible now, the burn a shrinking brown circle and the cut a thin red line only visible if one squinted. Whatever he had put on the injuries had almost hidden them to scrutinizing eyes, and she found herself wishing his odd assortment of ointments and such could somehow hide the others that criss-crossed up her arm. Those today were covered by a simpler dress with loose sleeves that fluttered a little above her elbow and came to rest high on her thighs when she sat down. The dress had annoyed Jack when she defiantly put it on in the morning. He had accused her of spiting him and toying with the entire crew. To which she scathingly replied that she didn't fancy sweating under a ton of heavy clothing and stormed out of the cabin.

With a tired sigh, Elizabeth laid the rope and needle aside and leaned back on the edge of the ship, supporting herself with one arm stretched out behind her and staring out over the vast ocean. She wasn't afraid of falling, even with the slow rocking of the ship she had good balance and was so perched that she could easily hop on deck if it should decide to tilt the wrong direction. The cool breeze stirred her hair around her face and she tucked it behind her ear with her other hand, feeling suddenly exhausted from all the stress.

He didn't know how much his persistence was wearing her resolve to the ground. She was finding it harder and harder to hold her own in their sparring matches. Her sarcastic comments and derisive barbs where automatic, she didn't have to think to keep up in that department, but she did have to fight to keep her eyes dry and her face covered with an ironic smirk of some sort, or risk revealing a bit of the turmoil to him. And god knows she didn't want to dredge it all up again. Not when finally, finally, she'd confined the heartbreak to her nightmares. Vulnerability was not an option, tears were not a luxury, and he, Jack and his endless pestering and probing eyes, he was burrowing into the cracks and threatening to undo everything she'd worked so diligently to beat down.

Her eyes glazed over as she picked over her ruminations, and the shouts and noises from the ship around her melted together. Memories surfaced and images swam before her eyes and she swallowed hard, clenching her teeth. She didn't want to relive them now. She dug her nails into the side of the ship. She could hear his voice in her head, hear him saying her name in all his different tones. She wanted to tear at her ears until his grating voice couldn't penetrate her anymore.

'Do you ever regret marrying me?'

'Why do you look at me like that?'

'You never come home anymore! You stay in that forge half the night!'

'I can never give you what you deserve.'

'I love you! That's all that matters!

'Stop!'

'Why are you doing this to us? You're tearing us apart.'

'You're spoiled, you always have been.'

'Will!'

Words, anguish, fighting. Precious illusions.

She just wanted it to stop. Suddenly, she just wanted to close her eyes and get rid of it all. She wanted to scream. Strangely enough, for the first time in a little less than five painful years, she wanted to cry. Jack.

This was what he was doing to her.