Salt in the Wounding Flame
They look straight through me, these eyes
Seeking more wisdom than I have to give away
Realize, realize
what you are...
What you've become,
Just as I have
Are you and I so unalike?
-What You Areby Dave Matthews Band-
"You'll leave er' with Teague…let im' dash er' dreams of traveling amuck with philosophy an' verse…"
Jack tapped his chin with the sharp end of his charting compass, his boots kicked up onto the edge of his desk as he faced into the direction of his bed, watching where Eva's form moved slightly up and down in short breaths of sleep. He continued mumbling silently to himself as he plotted out his own confusing situation.
"…empty er' pockets o' whatever she's brought board'…then send her tumblin' into the Cove. She'll hold er' own…and Lizzie's there t' watch after er'…"
A smile crept across his face for a moment as he saw in his mind's eye, the charming missus to his dear, cursed friend William, and what sort of things she could possibly teach little Eva of. He pictured the two of them locked away for hours in the Cove, alone, doing things that perhaps men should never know of. With a sigh of curiosity to himself he turned around to lean over his desk again, to focus on the task at hand. But from across the other side of the room, lying with wide and alert eyes in an old wooden chair, was a tiny mutt. It was Eva's, and had come with the territory of his deciding to lock her away for the week. He grumbled a little and revealed his angry teeth in the low candlelight, imitating that of a meaner, bigger beast than he. Dill howled at the wounding face and covered his nose with a paw, while Jack laughed and relaxed back in his chair.
"Dogs an' women in me cabin. I'm done for."
A ruffle of sound came from the bed and he turned his eyes sideways to watch the movement under the sheets. While he couldn't see her face, a tiny foot poked out from the end of the blankets, with toes wiggling in the orange light of the early morning room.
Under his breath, as he caught Eva sitting up in the bed, he softly hummed, "Mornin', sweet woe."
Her head was heavy with the swaying of the ship through the last four days and nights, and she held her cheeks with a flush lull as she looked across from the bed to see Jack's eyes hung low, but his body facing her in his creaking chair. She tried to let her eyes grow accustom to the change in light, and stretched under the blankets, not completely rested but as well as she feared she could be.
Through the week, she had kept to herself in the cabin, read books, studied charts aimlessly, drank herself into a stupor or two same as her Captain, and eventually passed out in one of the many corners of the room. Only this morning, for the first time, did she find herself actually in his bed. She hadn't wanted to sleep here, for fear he would either hurt her for stealing his bed, or that he would take advantage of her during the night. But in all truth, she had remembered falling asleep near the window again, and so knew this had been his personal doing. He put her here and she didn't know what to think of it.
She coughed a little out of tire and then spoke quietly. "Did you not sleep because of me, Captain Sparrow?"
He glanced up finally, catching her smoky blue eyes in the dark light. He noted then how they so often changed from light, to dark, deep or shallow, at the drop of a single word or time of day.
"I don't sleep, lass." He replied darkly, shifting in his chair. "Ne'er really have."
Eva fell even more silent at this and wondered just why that was. Of course she wasn't going to ask him though, she didn't know him half well enough to go into that sort of territory, and she had a feeling that if she even so much as tried to, he would shun her on the topic anyway himself. Instead she slid to the edge of the bed, still in one of her father's tunics and set of pants, and then eased her bare feet onto the floor.
Jack watched every single movement she made, trying to remember as many of them as he could for his quick moments of privacy over the next few days. And when her toes hit the floor a few feet away from him, he decided he would try to remain civil, in a way she hadn't seen of him. He was so busy trying to be tough and commanding and the scariest man on the sea that he had forgotten to be the man who had helped her out of the dirt in the street as guards had tried to trample her.
"Hungry?" He asked, making a gesture to a nearby table covered in fresh fruits and breads and meats.
Eva looked at it but then turned her gaze off a little from him.
"Ye should eat despite wanting t' make a stand against me, love."
She turned her face shortly back to him, accepting his words as nothing but truth. He was right, she needed to eat instead of just defying his every small attempt. Eva nodded slightly and then pushed away from the bed to walk to the table. She dug through a basket of fruit, picking at a few bruised apples, popping a couple of sour grapes into her mouth with a wince that Jack silently laughed at, and then settled with one of the bananas resting on top.
His brow perked at her choice. It was his favorite, and he watched as she leaned on the table feet away, peeling back at the soft fruit. He eyed her lips suspiciously, sensing just how sweet and saccharine they were by the way they shone in the mix of candles and sunlight. Lips like sugar…he thought, biting down on his bottom one to keep from moaning or doing something completely irrational. He held a glare fast to her mouth as he watched it glide toward the curved tip of the banana, her lips pressing down the supple rod as she gorged it slowly, savoring it.
She doesn't ave' a clue wot' she's doing…he sighed in thought as he felt his every muscle squeeze tight inside of him, his pants urging with the flow of unconscious blood, hardening his entire form in the chair. Jack's eyes were brooding and dark as he caught his breath to miss not a single moment of what was taking place before him. Eva could feel his gaze after a few seconds though and looked over with the banana between her lips, to see him staring her down desperately, his knuckles fierce with what looked like pain on the arms of his chair.
She gently mumbled over the tip of the fruit in her mouth, "Wha'?"
And although she saw it as an innocent question of concern for his odd state, Jack could feel his pants pushing against the thickness they couldn't contain any longer, his lips parched with the need to touch the wetness of hers, his eyes burning with hers so focused on him.
And yet it wasn't until she took a sharp bite of the fruit, her teeth hitting one another with a full mouth of sugary ecstasy, that Jack quickly stomped his boots back down to the wood floor, kicked his chair away into the back of the room, and flew past her in a rush to get to the door. His head was a swell of eager and pleading need, and he knew that to stay in that sweltering room with her another moment longer, would lead to nothing but danger.
He would give in. He knew it.
So instead he jumped out of the cabin and slammed the door behind him as Eva watched him disappear through the glass. She chewed on the fruit in her mouth while her brow twisted up and down. When she swallowed it all completely, she was still looking at the glass doors leading to wherever he had evaporated to, and then she quietly laughed to herself before looking over at Dill.
"Please, tell me you think he's as peculiar as I do?"
When he was safe from the cabin's lust filled air, Jack stammered across the deck and hurried down to the galley without a single word to the fresh waking crew, not even to Gibbs who hollered after him from the wheel a half dozen times. He took the steps two by two and rushed through the men's quarters until he came to the second stairwell leading to the cargo hold. He locked the door behind him, then took those steps very gently one at a time. His body was tense, his pants nearly too tight to walk, and he eased himself down on the bottom step to release the demons that had filled him up.
He sat stroking himself loose again as he thought about Eva and that damned banana and everything else he'd seen for four days longer than he would have preferred. He thought of how she looked like a sensual little pixie as she woke up in his bed, with her ruffled crop of black hair and tantalizing eyes of indigo flash. He thought for a long time even following the desperate spill of himself, about how he would probably never stop thinking about her, even once she was in the safe, teaching hands of his father. Eva would somehow always be there, he just knew it.
When he returned to the deck, Gibbs was waiting with a curious eye and a list of questions concerning his Captain's health. The old man worried too much, but it was better to have questions about whether he had taken ill, than inquiries about a certain hostage in his room. So he endured the long conversation with his friend as he stood with him at the wheel most of the day. Every skipping mile of waves they passed through, he felt the weight on his head growing lighter and felt better than he had before.
And so when the sun eventually began to fall down on the horizon, he took his routine leave of the upper deck and slowly walked back to his cabin. He thought he would try to find Eva and finally get down to the bottom of why she was even here, maybe make an offer for her to sit and have dinner with him, or even just share a bottle of rum while he questioned every last bit of her turbulent and gypsy like existence.
This plan though was halted when he turned the knob on his cabin door to reveal that it was unlocked, and that he must have been the one to forget to lock it in his rush from her that morning. He darted inside, suddenly nervous, and walked around in the empty space of his cabin, not seeing a soul. There were a few candles still burning low, but no noise of any kind to speak of, until he heard a quick and hushed whimper from behind a nearby curtain.
Jack stepped towards the hidden alcove of the room at the same time that the red silk curtains shuffled around frantically, and Eva fell through them, barely catching her balance with a torn chemise, an arm gushing with blood and a petrified wince. He immediately felt himself rise to nothing but anger, honest anger and rage this time, as he forced his way past her. She fell hard against the wall she was gasping by, her head hitting the rough wood as tears flowed down from her eyes and her legs shook. There were no words spoken between her or Jack before he stormed through the curtain.
She breathed deep and hard as her tears fell wilder, and as the sound of thrashing fists and grunts of fighting men covered her senses. She heard someone fall to the wood floor in agony, a slash of a blade or two, and it made her too fall down against the wall until she hit the floor in a tired heap.
"I should kill ye fer the fish t' enjoy!"
She knew it was the Captain, which meant he couldn't be the one on the floor, and this helped her to breathe a little easier. He was the one fighting for her, and because of that, she couldn't help but to silently pray for him as she felt her head weigh heavy from all the blood loss in her forearm. Her head lolled a bit as she kept listening to the sound of boots and growls of pain and then the soft swoosh of the curtain overhead again as she saw a man's leg step move her.
Jack knelt down and eased her good arm around his neck, through a few of his dreads, as he eased her up to her feet and slowly walked her to the bed. He had little concern for the white sheets beneath her and only worried about the color as it faded away, leaving her cheeks as white as the linens themselves. He rushed around her quickly, from the bed to the nearby table for a bottle of rum, to a cabinet for towels, and then back to her as he pulled a chair up.
"Bloody ell', e' did a number on yer arm." He sighed angrily and draped a long cloth over his already somewhat bloodied pants leg, and then rested her arm down onto it as well.
Eva watched everything going on, but was only half aware of it. She could see Jack's eyes shift from her arm to hers, and felt the softness of them for the first time in a week aboard the ship. He was a different man altogether, one she didn't realize even existed, and it made her head and knees weaker as she sat before him.
"Ere'", he stated flatly as he held up the bottle of rum toward her lips. "Take a deep sip."
Eva moved her mouth over the rounded edge of the bottle as Jack tipped it carefully for her, and she downed a good sized gulp before he brought it away and began pouring some over the gash in her arm. She screamed out loudly at this, now fully awake and conscious again. Her heart pounded suddenly with the burn of what felt like a thousand needles piercing the cut at once, as she threw her head back with a bite of her tongue, her good hand digging into the sheets at her side.
Jack eyed her with torn emotion, certain by his judgment of her so far that she was strong enough to handle it, and was thoroughly impressed as she did. The blood came away from her wound with every swipe of the rum induced cloth he made, until it began spilling through thin from the alcohol and he took to adding pressure, examining her eyes as they rolled into her head with a whimper.
"Ave' to stop the bleeding."
Eva sighed with a guttural grown and returned quietly, "I know that."
His eyes shot up at her tight lipped spat. "No need t' thank the man who's rescued ye twice."
She heard both the defeat and annoyance in his voice, but wasn't interested in falling to his gentility. After all, he was the one who had left her in this room, unlocked and open to any man who saw fit to test the knob. And one certainly had.
"I acknowledge that you're tending to my wound, but I won't show gratitude for your own mistake."
Her eyes were angry as she looked down at him and it made him press harder onto her cut, deepening the amount of alcohol entering it until she cried out again.
"I wouldn't ave' forgotten th' damned lock if ye hadn't set 'bout me room like a siren this morning."
Eva's mouth gaped at his words and she bit her lip with the pressure of his hand. He was helping her, yes, but making the pain of getting to the fix twice as bad on purpose. She refused to stand down, it wasn't in her nature, whether he knew this yet or not.
"Your weaknesses are your own. You needn't take them out on my arm!"
She tore her arm from him and pushed her weight back further onto the bed, trying to get away. But he was stronger, and he grasped her bare ankle, tugging her back until she nearly fell into his lap, and then growled up into her face.
"Sit still an' shut it. Then it won't urt'."
Eva too barked back with a scowl. "No."
"Ah I ave' a masochist in me bed, eh?" He returned, pressing down one last time with the cloth before dropping it into a bowl on the floor and grabbing the bottle of rum again. "Welcome t' my world, lass."
She squeezed her eyes shut as his warm breath blew over the open wound, making her entire body tingle against her will. He had a way of doing something to her, and had, even though he made her just as angry as easily. Eva sat still as asked, but ignored his face completely. She didn't answer his question and instead openly shared her horrific thoughts on her attacker.
"I tried to stop him, but he just grew more livid with me. It would have hurt so terribly, I know it…with how he touched me."
Jack turned his eyes to the curtain, where no one and nothing was moving or sounding out. He was certain that his crew man McAllister was well on his way to bleeding to death, and rightfully so.
"He said he was going to punish me the way you should have already."
He said nothing to this, and instead returned to Eva's arm with a needle and thread in hand, feeling her try to pull away anxiously. But he held her arm softly, with reassuring eyes.
"Please, don't." She tugged more, "It will heal itself. I'm alright."
"Yer right," he returned mockingly and pulled back forcefully until her arm was back on his lap, "T'will mend with infection an' then yer own death. Now ere'…" he lifted the rum to her mouth again as she took it from him. "…drink yerself numb. Works fer me."
Before he looked down to focus on stitching her arm, he could have sworn he saw a faint smile leave her lips.
Eva was grateful to see he knew what he was talking about, for by the time she'd finished off half the bottle and handed it back, she couldn't even feel it as he poured more onto the wound, or as he traced over it with the pad of his thumb. She was numb to all of it, and glad evermore as she began watching him move the needle through her skin and back out with the thread attached. He was intent and focused on her arm, as if it were the most delicate thing in the world, and she watched him carefully while his eyes were turned down, trying to comprehend all of him she could.
He'd been so mean to her all this time, and even more, he was awkward that morning as he ran from her with no explanation or real point. The first time she had shared a moment with him, eyes locked as she was brought to the height of climax in the middle of the evening alley in St. Pierre, was embarrassing to her. He hadn't moved for so long, and just stood looking at her, almost contently. And then, when he rescued her from being torn to pieces by the admiral's lead of horses, she had been so full of guilt for leaving without a word. But she didn't have a choice, she couldn't let him know her then, not like that.
Perhaps though, if she had known that the mysterious man who had stumbled upon her twice in town would end up being her captor and captain aboard the ship she choose to hide on, she might have done something differently beforehand.
Eva watched his eloquent fingers as they laced the thread through her arm over and over, and became so caught up in the sparkle of the trinkets in his thick hair, and the rings that stroked her skin without feeling, that she suddenly opened her mouth with the only thing she could think to ask.
"I take it you are an expert at that from personal experience?"
Jack's eyes started to turn upward, but he stopped himself with a simple grin and went back to sewing.
Eva was still interested though, "How many wounds have you taken like this, Captain Sparrow?"
He almost refused to continue answering her when she called him that, he was getting tired of the decorum between them. Anyone else, Lizzie even, he expected and desired to refer to him as Captain. But with Eva, for some reason, it didn't suit. He wanted to hear her call by him informally, like a lover would.
"Jack." He stated, finally looking up as he paused for a moment with the needle. "Try, Jack?"
She was shocked he had made the move for her to call him by his first name and not by his title. Eva thought all Captains wanted to be reminded constantly of their high standing. But she nodded graciously and began again.
"Very well, Jack…what kind of wounds have you endured to become so good at that?"
"All kinds ye can think of."
"Bullet wounds, surely." She replied and watched as he leaned back in the chair and moved his free hand to draw down one side of his tunic, revealing the bullet bruises above his heart. Eva leaned in for a closer look but he cut her off by returning to her arm.
"What about blade wounds, how many?"
"Lost count."
"Where are they?"
"All over." He replied with a roll of his eyes downward, not expecting what was about to come from her mouth.
Eva tilted her face down to watch his work more closely and whispered, "May I see some?"
Yes, that was unexpected even for him and for his situation. He chuckled darkly a little and ignored the interest to finish off the last few laces of her stitching. Eva watched, but didn't speak again for a long moment or two. Not until she caught a glimpse of the raised burn wound on his mid right forearm, the one in the marking of a P. She knew what it meant, but still reached out in curiosity and traced it quickly with her finger before Jack moved his arm away.
"That one is important, isn't it?"
A shuddering burn flowed over his arm when she touched him so softly there. He sighed and said quietly, as an afterthought, "Necessary, twould' be the more proper word."
Eva smiled at him though his eyes weren't facing her. "Do all pirates have to get that eventually?"
"No." He replied fast, shaking his head a little before finding her gaze. "Only th' foolish ones."
She didn't want to believe that and so held his eyes for a minute longer before he turned to cut the thread at the end of her wound, and she whispered quietly over his head, with as much sincerity as she could muster, "Or the brave ones perhaps."
It warmed over him to hear that, and especially with the way she had of saying it. He wasn't much of a sentimental man, or linguist of sentimental phrases, but those words and the honesty of which she spoke them to him, were enough to do him in for a quite long time. He hid this well though and gently moved her finished arm onto her own lap, and then cleaned up the bowl, cloths and chair quietly throughout the room.
Eva's eyes followed his steps, knowing what she wanted to say to him but not sure when it would be right. So she waited and watched him move between the room and the alcove in which she'd been attacked, cleaning the mess she couldn't and didn't want to see. He made no attempt to pull the man out and she knew why this was too, her spine shivering at the thought of it.
It wasn't until he turned toward the cabin doors, ready to get assistance with removing the hopeless brute from his room, that Eva knew what and how to say what she needed.
"Thank you, Jack…" she said quietly, but loud enough to make him pause in his path to the door. He turned back to see her standing at the edge of the bed. "…for stitching my arm so kindly." She trailed over the rigid thread marks with her finger and held his eyes in hers from yards away in the room.
And before he turned out, she saw his light, lazy smirk as he replied, "Yer welcome…Eva."
