Ohmygod I can't believe I've been gone so long. Okay, I'm so sorry, but school and other stuff and you know the excuses. Here's a chapter, please PLEASE review, I need your words to know if you like what I am giving you. I cannot stress that enough, I like to hear your praise to enforce what I'm doing and what choices I'm making within the story. Shorter than usual, but this was what I had time for. Should upload again soon. Thanks guys.
-Han
Angelica's fingers clutched at a compass that didn't point north, broken and shifting subtly as her thoughts swam in murky water, trailed on the edge of a name and the brush of callused fingers against her neck years before. Imprints in memory she never truly left behind.
Her steps were fluid, a slow dance on uneven ground she attributed to natural grace, a soft light inside her own chest that ran to the tips of her fingers and the heel of her boots. The jungle wrapped close around her, heavy like a thick cloak and humidity stained the air, made it harder to breathe in and around.
The crew trailed behind her with the omnipresent fear that Blackbeard inspired in them, fervent glances between them and soft murmurs of concern for a pair of pirates lost amidst the fingers of the wilderness in the dark of a night stripped away by a rising sun. Two halves of a whole, consumed by the shadows.
Her fingers tightened around the compass, threatening to crack it down the center of its constantly wobbling needle, to bite back the scathing words that festered in her heart and burned through her veins. All for a woman who stood in the space beside Jack like she belonged there, like the ghost of promise hadn't stood for Angelica for more than ten years, like it hadn't been tattooed by her presence.
It had.
Angelica knew it like she knew the sun would set, like she knew the Fountain would be before her before it slipped below the horizon and painted the sky in an inferno of reds and oranges.
She knew Jack thought about her, dark eyes and the perfect fall of thick dark hair, her body, splayed beneath his in the sea-stained sheets that had come to smell of her perfume. She wondered if he still tasted it when he crawled beneath them. She thought so.
Hoped that when he wrapped his arms around a lanky woman with blue eyes his senses reached out for the Spanish woman he left behind. Who parted ways with a man she'd been tied to with a fog embracing her mind and a crack in her heart. She hoped he pressed kisses into Annabelle's skin and tasted her.
She altered her course slightly, her boots sliding on wet mud and her fingers loosening slightly around the compass, watching the needle spin violently in the aftermath of her thoughts and settling again in the same direction. She wondered why it moved, what caused its erratic movements and the way it seemed to have the answers to the deepest questions, ones she didn't know how to ask, how to frame thoughts inside words. How to even ask such a small, fragile object.
The glimmer of steel, a flash of moonlight off of metal and the pressure of pressure of a sharp edge against her throat. Icy water poured into her veins and stopped her movements, eyes wide in something so close to the fear she tried to suppress, the panic that she had long wiped from her eyes in order to earn her father's respect. To get him to look at her without the dead indifference colored in his eyes.
Her eyes flicked to the swords-bearer, the elegant line she would always recognize and the smirk wiped clean from an elfish face, sharp angles and inhuman perfection. His eyes were a sparked flame, inferno of looming adventure and the need for the heart-pounding climax burning swiftly in his veins. Anna stood behind him with her eyes cat-like in their brilliance, reflecting in the sunlight and the expression an animal intensity. She leaned into him nearly unconsciously, the sword at her hip held in a white-knuckle grip and her spine stiff.
"How is it that we can never meet without you pointing something at me?" She asked with forced brightness, a smirk in the direction of the woman in the space she didn't belong in. The position she didn't fit with abstract edges to her piece. Angelica slotted into place.
"Be content it wasn't dear Anna," Jack answered quietly, his voice a myriad of frustration and exhaustion, the urgent tones of a battle hulking on the horizon in the undertones. He wore his excitement like the elegance only few people realized with the kind of clarity she did, where Angelica could see the way it seeped into his skin and consumed all of him, every facet of his existence walked in grace and blood-boiling intensity. "She would not have afforded you the mercy I have."
"I perish the thought," Angelica answered dryly as twin glares narrowed on her, Jack's body coiling taught like a predator a snarl curling his cupid's bow lips in a twisted expression of hatred.
She stumbled back, mouth falling open in something she couldn't name, something that wormed its way into her heart and whispered of love's enslavement and the brand a pirate left on her heart, the sting when rejection fell like a crashing wave.
He didn't love her.
Maybe never had, and the soft words he'd spoken to her in the cover of a darkness tangible had been lies, delusions of her fevered mind. She'd let herself fall too far, had nothing to catch her.
Anna's face was carefully blank as she watch realization crush a woman who loved Jack in every way she knew how, crass and broken beneath years of mistrust and being left behind, an ugly thing as it stood beneath the surface of Angelica's words and gazes, pitiless and hardened through the years. To her love was the feeling of skin on skin and the slow release of breath after heights unimaginable had been conquered.
Anna found it in the careful way Jack slept beside her, rarely folding her inside of his arms, running his fingers through her hair and dotting kisses on her temples. Found it hidden amidst an average day, an order that sounded like a request on deck, and the way his eyes flicked to hers so often, as if to assure himself that she was real at all. Found it in calluses and sword fights and sea spray and the way he would whisper 'go back to sleep, love' when she woke from nightmares of fire and the scars on her arms and leg. The way he kissed them softly, drew his fingers across webbed and thick skin as if they were sacred.
She thought that was different from Angelica. More real. Alive in its shared heartbeats and movements.
"The Chalices, Sparrow," Blackbeard barked, breaking Jack from whatever feral thought had gripped him, whatever it was that compelled him to defend her, to stand between them with his sword unwavering and his eyes black, pieces of coal burning deep in the depths.
"Aye," he answered, clipped and dangerous in the flinty shadows in his eyes.
"Oi," Anna called, tilting backwards to shout the word to the green twisted background, her voice undignified with something raw hovering beneath the surface. She wished she could slip her fingers into Jack's squeeze his hand and thank him for the squared set of his shoulders and the tight jaw meant to stand up for her with the unspoken fury of a man unused to the action but devoted to it all the same.
Gibbs stepped out into their crude clearing with a rope digging into the palms of his hands and his back straining with the familiarity of hauling sails as he half-dragged a hog behind him, two silver Chalices strapped to its coarse back, glinting amidst the fat pink skin.
"I see you brought a friend," Angelica snorted, trying to cover her moment of shattering realization, water thrown on her face and a fire dying in her heart, a torch thrown to lapping waves.
"We did," Jack answered, the flash of a smile coloring his face. Bitter and cold.
"And the one-legged man, is he near?" Blackbeard demanded, cutting through the tension with the gentle flow of his words, the hiss and bite hovering just beneath them.
"Why yes," Anna answered brightly. "He hovers with a woman just beyond our immediate concern, but we digress."
"Before we go handing the Chalices over, we may have one or two conditions," Jack picked up seamlessly, as if he'd learned the direction from a script, poured over it for nights on end as he had with battered copies of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, plays Angelica had glimpsed tucked beneath piles of treasure in the Captain's Cabin.
"Name them," Blackbeard ordered, as if he commanded them with the same authority he did a crew.
"Firstly, I'll be having the compass back," he paused, and waved his hands dismissively.
"No, no, no, that's secondly. Firstly, on your word...you will bring no harm to Anna, or I promise, on pain of death, that I will end you, drawn out and screaming in a ways the one-legged man wouldn't even dream of." The words were a hiss on the thick air, the slight curve of Jack's body as he leaned in, the grip on his sword now held at his side, white and firm.
Anna blinked, her eyes suddenly vulnerable and innocent, caught off-guard by the intensity that layered Jack's voice, as if she hadn't never considered the possibility that the depth of her feelings were returned. Her eyes opened to the balance of a scale, she smiled something soft, the texture of angel wings and morning mist, and didn't care who saw.
"I'll make no vows to the likes of you, Sparrow," Blackbeard sneered.
"Then let me make one of my own," Anna said, with a ferociousness her words rarely held, a black, pitiless look swimming in her eyes. "If I find Jack on the wrong side of your sword, or anything you command, if it passes through him like the many whispers of the other world have, I will drag you to the very gates of the Hell you so fear, I will wring you out over the fires until you scream for a salvation you will never see, never touch. And I will laugh as you bleed."
Silence met her words, a moment hung heavy and the crew wrung their hands and tried not to whisper, tried not to breathe.
Jack watched her with something so close to admiration, Angelica's heart stopped, tripped on the edge of absolute destruction and resignation for the two who would battle their way to the ends of the earth and jump for the other. Something she would never do, never ask of him.
"Where were we? Ah yes, the second condition," Jack wondered aloud, grinning with a spark that consumed. "I will be having the compass back." Angelica shared a doubtful glance with her father, where the compass was a key to a new world of possibilities. "Please. I do deserve it."
"Do you have any idea how difficult it was to catch that filthy pig?" Anna interjected, jerking her chin back towards the hog and Gibbs.
"Not the big one, the four-legged one," Jack clarified. The compass sailed through the air with a curving arch that reminded Jack of the path of the sun, reaching a peak and falling again. "Thank you. And thirdly, Mr. Beard, there are times - not very often - when I do reflect on my heinous misdeeds. Chief among them, and note how poorly I treated Mr. Gibbs, my loyal First Mate."
"Well, now that you mention it," Gibbs started, a good-natured smile coloring his weathered face. Anna smothered a smile behind her hand, pushed it down the insistence of self-preservation. To keep them from seeing her vulnerable.
"Left him to rot in jail," Jack interrupted, a secret look shared between them that Anna understood in surfaces but not depths, a world of interaction that she respected enough to not voice her questions. Jack hadn't told her much of the strange world he inhabited before he washed ashore in Port Royal and she knew enough not to push. "I did. Didn't care. Still don't." Anna snorted, disbelieving and certain of a bond between the two men that resembled something like father-son but with the turmoil of the sea beneath them. "But, point being, you must let him go free."
"Is that it?" Blackbeard asked, sounding bored, uninterested with the two pirates before him and their vows, promises, and declarations to higher powers. The possibility of death loomed to close for him to take note of the power behind their words, the fury.
"I think so," Jack murmured, his hand rubbing idly at his jaw as if in thought.
"Quick or the pig runs," Anna warned.
"And good luck getting those Chalices," Jack finished brightly.
"Done," Blackbeard spat, the tenor of his words binding in and of themselves, as if he had the ability to forge pacts of unbreakable magic.
"Release the swine," Jack said in answer, watching as Gibbs nimbly plucked both Chalices from the animal's back and set it free, watching it buck wildly, strangely, and take off into the embrace of the wild.
"Perhaps you folks won't mind if I walk with you-" Gibbs started, cut off by Blackbeard's fluent stride as he rounded on the First Mate and snatched the silver cups from dirty fingers and continued on without a word.
The crew followed, hollow eyes of men string death in the face and clinging to the fragile hope that Anna and Jack could be their liberators. Could save them from the grip of endlessness.
Jack tossed Gibbs the compass with nonchalant elegance Anna attributed to him at his most serious, when emotion was layered beneath a devil-may-care smile and a quick tongue.
"That'll lead you to freedom, mate."
Xx
Anna walked side by side with Jack, fingers brushing along the outstretched leaves, tracing the veins in them and watching the way sunlight made them brighter, even more alive. Phillip trailed behind them, his eyes averted and consumed with impenetrable sadness, a loneliness that demanded continuance, refused comfort.
Scrum had given them both a brief summary of events in their absence, and her heart panged in empathy too deep to fully realize, too close to the center of all her fears to touch again. So she slowed long enough to fall into step with him, smiled when Jack let her go with only an understanding gaze that toed the line of confused. He didn't know how her heart had splintered when he was consumed by a Leviathan, hadn't seen her stand on the edge of Tia's house and thought about slipping beneath the murky water. Hadn't seen her break.
"We'll save her. When this is over, we'll save her," Anna whispered, once Phillip was close enough to hear, and hoped her words reached him fully, broke through the pain like Will had when she needed it.
"How can you know? What if she is already lost?" he asked, voice bordering on hysteria and she never understood love at first sight, but she could respect the endlessly consumed look in his aqua eyes.
"We will still bring her back. I've done it before," she answered quietly, her eyes tracing patterns on Jack's back. "I've been over the edge and back, because I loved a man I couldn't save."
"You risked all of that for Sparrow?" he asked, confused and nearly awed by the conviction in her voice.
"Of course I did," she said, as if it were obvious, as if there was no other answer. "He was taken from me before I'd even begun to realize how much he meant, how much space he took up in the world I'd created for myself. When he was gone, there was no other choice. Either I brought him back or I joined him."
She knew Jack was listening, only a step ahead of them, he had to be. And she was almost relieved, grateful she could finally rid herself of the weight of what she might have done, had Will not been there to pull her back from an edge she would have willingly jumped from.
"And you would risk the same for me?" Phillip asked, wrapped up in astonishment that defied everything he'd ever known about people. She seemed to always be an exception.
"I haven't saved you to live a life doomed to loveless agony," she answered simply, smiling. "I like to think I'm a better person than that."
Xx
A drop defied gravity, pressed up on the edge of a leaf and tried to launch itself into a light blue sky and a sun that called to it, clear water that wanted to rejoin the sky.
Jack caught it like a thimble on his fingertip, topped it on a smudge of dirt and the beginnings of his fingerprints, and he let it slide down his finger with the slow rotation of his hand to bend it to his will. It ran across the gleaming face of his favorite ring and on to the next finger, playing with it with the bright interest of the child he never fully left behind, saw glimpses of in the slow moments.
He smiled, felt Anna's gaze settle on his face as he let the drop escape him and float up, wished he could pass it on to the tip of her small nose, draw it down against its will to the curve of her lips and then kiss it away.
But not beneath the suddenly furious gaze of Angelica, finally come to realize how little affection he held for her, the smoke left from a candle long gone out.
"Knew it was here somewhere," he said brightly, staring past Anna's tender gaze, a blue he could fall into, to an intricate carving above a deep cave that yawned in darkness like the mouth of Hell. The same symbol from the Spanish map he'd glanced over when they'd snatched the Chalices. He smiled, curve of his lips inviting in a way he knew drove Anna's heart to beat faster. He liked having an effect on her, same as the chills the sea during a storm gave her.
"I never doubted you."
The cave itself was dripping with the collected water of the humid air around it, solidified and singing as fat beads fell from the ceiling and into puddles below, their own music filling the cavern, accented by the heeled steps of the men and the metallic clang of swords against hips or in hands.
The soft glow of torches sent golden light into far-flung corners and shadows danced like the girls in Tortuga, sensual and sweet. A bird flew in from the sunlight and sang softly, bringing a soft look to Anna's face, the reminder of the bird who stood beside her with strong shoulders and bright eyes.
Stalactites and stalagmites jutted from ground and ceiling, spires threatened their very existence as a band of pirates infringing on a delicate balance with their brutish glee. A piece broken from the bottom, one falling from the top, impacting a fleshy shoulder, roll of eyes into a skull and the dead weight of a nameless man as he fell lifeless to the ground.
Everyone stopped, staring back at where the body had once stood, the empty space speaking more than he ever had.
"We must not stop," the Quartermaster murmured, turning his marred and tattooed face away from the dead-eyed stare of the fallen man and looking forward.
They moved on, each step echoing in the half-darkness, the brush of Jack's arm against hers as they kept in stride with the other.
The torch waved uncountable minutes later, swiping across an expanse of blank wall, finding no crack or crevice to exploit, no hidden passage. Only the end.
"Ah! Dead end," Jack declared brightly, already turning to face the rest of the party.
"Dead end?" Blackbeard snapped, a threat flavoring his words.
"Dead end," Anna repeated, grinning.
"Jack. I'm starting to think you don't know where you're going," Angelica remarked, bitterness lining her tone like salt in the ocean lined the water, thick and so hard to separate.
"It is not the destination so much as the journey, they say. Chalices, if you please," he said dismissively, hand out and gaze averted from the Spanish woman and the anger that rolled in her chest.
Blackbeard passed them with visible reluctance, his firm grip lingering even as Jack's fingers wrapped around it. He passed one to Anna, and her eyes swept the lip of the goblet turning it quickly in her hands before catching on a word in a language unspoken. Jack caught the movement of her gaze, found his own transcription and grinned, knew it would have taken him a moment longer under the eyes of the crew to see it himself.
They toasted, eyes trained on the other and the echo of its high-pitched ring rebounding off the walls of the cave, consuming the pirates surrounding them with chills and the sound of pounding heartbeats. Anticipation. Anna spoke as the noise died down and faded to the distance, Jack not a moment after.
"Aqua."
"De Vida."
And the walls around them began to stir.
