Hey guys! Sorry this is so late, but it was a fairly difficult piece to accomplish, and I had some other stuff going on, but it's done now! There are a lot of different perspectives crammed into one scene, but I think it's clear who's speaking each time. If it's not and you're really having a problem with it, let me know in a PM and I will try to clear it up. Please do not forget to comment. This is the second to last chapter, I do believe. One more to go!

"No!"

Dying was a lot like waking from a nightmare. It was all frantic gasps and prayer and telling yourself it wasn't real, and your body threatening to pull you under and never let you go. An endless sleep.

It was a lot like swallowing the sun, a burn of poison that caught onto veins and spread like fire to the mast of a ship, the fabric curling and blackening with the last whispers of wind against it.

It was a lot like slamming hull first into the wrong side of a wave, washed over with water and weight. Like everything you stood on had been ripped out from underneath you and for a moment you're floating, falling, sinking, and the ground beneath you is the only way you know you're on earth at all.

It was like that.

Only ten times worse.

Ten times more horribly clear, and he could suddenly see everything, feel everything. The overload on his senses was a deluge of raw feeling, the way light hit the water and dust rose like smoke from the ruins of the Fountain, the way the sword felt against his skin, and the color of her eyes when he met them, a grey-blue shot with silver, the feel of her against his body, the empty air when she stumbled backwards from his push. The way she looked in the space he invaded, like she was ready to die.

Captain Jack Sparrow slipped through battle-thick air and the smell of death and blood and dying, and when he landed, it was almost a surprise. The pain was something else. It started quick with the red bloom on his shirt, catching quick on his veins. He imagined a flame engulfing paper, curling and blackening and becoming nothing.

He didn't want to be nothing.

How did anyone survive dying?

"Jack." Her voice was a croaked whisper, cracked and broken and fading. Like speaking would make all of it real. "Jack!"

Anna dropped to her knees beside him, her fingers fluttering over the blood and the pain spike, set his spine arching and his hands into fists. She jerked like she'd been burned, and her fingertips found his face, the sharpness of his cheekbones and the sweat suddenly coming to life on his brow.

She looked otherworldly. Her long hair fell around her in tangles, framed her face with loose curls that caught the sunlight and shown a warm brown-gold. And her eyes, there was a revolution of light happening behind them, sparks of falling stars and dying embers. Like the sun rested there, and she was alive in ways no one else was.

And that made him smile.

Her gaze burned into him, desperate and breaking and falling off the edge of everything and there was a piece inside her breaking and Jack was dying and now he could feel it. Because she looked like she could, like she'd taken all the pain onto herself with that frozen look of blinding fear.

"No, no, nonono! You bloody stupid man! This isn't the way this is meant to end!"

Her voice sounded like it was coming from far away, but was too close all at once, like she was whispering it in his ear, like she was pressing the worlds into the inside of his heart, leaving them tattooed there.

Her eyes were wild, blue and alive in a way they'd never really been before. Like she was crumbling from the inside out in a huge fire, the kind that roasted slowly and turned you into the sun. And it was for him, that brilliant star-white fire.

A fitting sight, if it should be his last.

He didn't have the strength to feel regret.

But he didn't need breath to feel the pain, it ripped through him in sweeping waves of twitching agony that left him writhing against the wet stone. It wasn't fire, it was a flood. It consumed him in rising tides and caught him on the riptide.

He was drowning in it, in the blood in his lungs.

"—promised," he whispered, spat out the words and tasted copper on his lips.

The edges of the world seemed to float inside of darkness, in and out, and he could see the stars, pattered across Anna's skin as she filled his vision, consumed it.

"Someone do something. Someone do something!"

It seemed like the whole world was mourning, things seemed suspended. Her hair fell around her face in ratty curls, and her hands fluttered over him restlessly, as if her touch could stitch him back together, suck the poison from his veins.

But there was movement, panicked and fast from the corners of his vision, like fairies were dancing for the end of the world. He saw people running, felt hands press down onto his ribs, and imagined rivers of red pouring into the swell of his lungs.

Oceans made in its dry chambers.

"No, I—I have to—move. Get out of the way!" Anna shouted, shoving up roughly and knocking crewmembers and Spaniards and Englishmen down with the ferocity of the movement. Like she was an earthquake.

She was running, and Jack could see her disappear behind the crushed fountain, hear her coughing through the smoke and dust. He was fading, too fast to hold on. He turned his head, and felt his body seize in agony, like he was a rag doll with all the stitches split.

Blackbeard was dead, glassy-eyed and final.

"Oh god, Oh god, Oh god," Bonny whispered, over and over. She looked far away, lost in a world where her Jack met the noose and she prayed and there was no answer. But Jack couldn't read that darkness in her eyes. Could only see it went deep, crawled into the center of her chest and made a home there long ago, festered. That his death, and that's what this was, brought it all to the surface.

"Jack, Jackie," Barbossa said, like he used to when they were years younger and stood on the same bow with the same purpose. When they were something like friends. His eyes were sad, and he seemed so much older, the lines on his face grooved deep and etched permanent. Like they'd been there forever.

Like they would grow deeper still, with time.

And suddenly, with a kind of lost-haze that seems to befall the dying, Jack imagined the sea crawling into those canyons and marking them with saltwater in time. He wondered if the earth was as riddled with them beneath the waves as it was on land, and how the water filled them all up. Like he was being filled up by the blood.

It hurt to breathe.

He coughed and red fell in patterns onto the stone near his mouth. He convulsed, and the pain shot livewires down his body, lightning and dark magic. Tia Dalma was somewhere, laughing. Davy Jones stood with a debt in his hands.

Anna waved goodbye from the shore as it was swept up in fire, passion.

He couldn't really tell what was before his eyes, and the pain made his head lurch uncomfortably, like he was still falling to the ground, only in all different directions.

Maybe he could go backwards, and fly like sparrows did.

Xx

No.

Not this.

Not again.

She could feel him slipping through her fingers, bloodstained and marked by traces of him. Anna was afraid. So desperately afraid. It was like the world had cracked open and she was falling in.

Xx

The mermaid rose from nothingness, her fingers wrapped delicately around the Chalices like they were soft and fragile, some treasure she had found in sunken ships deep below the brim. Syrena could taste the scrambling mad panic in the air, the way men bent over a broken body like he was necessary to the fabric of reality. Like if he was gone, they would cease to exist.

But she only believed it in the girl, sloshing through knee deep water and coughing through the smoke, her eyes running, smudging the last kisses of kohl around her eyes and staining her cheeks. She couldn't seem to breathe, was sobbing, was breaking.

It was like she was the one dying, instead of the Captain, who lay twitching and silent.

It was like the sun had gone out. Like the moon had fallen to the surface of the world.

So she held out the Chalices when she got close, and spoke so the woman would recognize her as real, and not some shadowy figment of her own fevered mind.

"Take care of him," she said, because she could feel the weight of her Phillip on her cold heart, and most people don't get as many chances as they all had. Most people don't get so many tries. "Don't waste this."

Her hands were empty, and the woman, choking on a 'Thank you' or an 'I promise' was already running towards the last leaking goodbye of the Fountain of Youth, stumbling and falling and getting up all over again.

Syrena slipped beneath the water again, and answered the bone-deep call in her chest. She needed Phillip like she needed air. Because the woman's eyes had struck something in her, so dead and shattered. The world had lost all meaning to her.

Syrena wanted to cherish every moment with her meaning, her light, her sun and moon and stars and horizon. She wanted to keep it close.

She didn't ever want to wear that look.

She prayed the woman was able to throw it off of her soon and toss it into the waves, never to be seen again.

Xx

The water spilled onto her hands, cold and clear. She was trembling, the Chalices shaking. She imagined she was breathing for Jack, was helping him take in air, and made herself suck in the mist and fog and dust like it was precious. It felt like it coated the inside of her body a damp, heavy grey.

She could feel her own blood pumping.

A life for a life.

That was the way these things worked, that was the way those kind of promises worked.

I'll protect you became I will die for you so quickly.

It all happened so fast, less than a moment where she saw the blade and tightened for the strike and then it wasn't there. There was only Jack, crying out around the steel and sliding, floating to the floor.

Too fast.

His heartbeats were fading too fast.

Xx

The Spaniard crouched close to the dying man, pressed his white gloves against the pound and kept them there, tried to trap the blood in, tried to keep the man breathing. The one he loved, the princess, had run to the corpse of the Fountain, trembling from the inside with grief. But he was sure she would save him.

Juan de Prado could not find it in himself to deny Sparrow that.

"Done it before," Jack said, reading a natural, animal kind of worry in the commander's face. Juan was startled by the perception there, the intelligence that clung to the inside of his irises, like he'd seen more of the world than he had, like he'd been to the end of the world of back and had more years than he.

"Qué?"

"Brought 'im back to life," Barbossa answered from the other side of him, clutching Jack's shoulders with gnarled, aged hands to keep him upright, as if he could drain the poison from his veins. "Girl don't believe in lost causes."

"No," Juan said, a sureness gripping him tightly through the fast-breath panic that had seized him when the Sparrow fell. He never liked to be this close to dying. "She believes he is worth the impossibility. You can read it behind her eyes, but, es el amor." His accent made the words sound like music.

Jack twitch beneath his consistent pressure and Juan thought about God, thought about the way a man lay dying for the woman he loved. How she would give anything to fix it. How a just God wouldn't let that shocked-white paleness stick to her skin, the shattered empty linger in her eyes.

A just God would let him live.

Xx

The tear slid into the left Chalice like a singular raindrop from a near-broken sky. Like everything else would shatter in just a moment, and the deluge would come. It would wash away this knife-point sadness, cleanse her of the shaky fear and the—

ohgodohgodohgod

inability to think.

Xx

Barbossa hated this, hated the poison sword at his side and the white foam at the corners of Jack's lips, hated the sun and the stars and the sky and the ocean for giving him this vengeance. He hated God for not existing.

Jack wasn't one of those people that was allowed to die. Not after the things he'd done. Not after working for Becket as Captain of the Wicked Wench for a handful of sunsets and moments before realizing his cargo was human, skin dark and eyes frozen over, and setting them loose on Tia Dalma's island. Not after watching his ship, his only love, sink to the depths and willing it to rise again with black wood and black sails like the black pearl she was.

Born again, from the sea.

Not after wearing a brand and giving a fashion of his own.

Not after chasing sunsets and buried treasure and talking about touching the horizon with him, a man grown old too young with greed in his bones. Jack was not the hero, just as Barbossa was not the villain, but they were both essential to the story.

They were the thread that kept it together.

The push and pull of respect and hate had kept them afloat and it was more than frightening to think that Barbossa didn't really know what to do, without Jack.

Sparrow's hands clenched and unclenched, seeking. Anna was running back to them.

Their time was slipping into nothingness.

Xx

She couldn't move fast enough and the wind seemed to bite against her face and closer, she had to get closer.

The Chalices weighed so heavy in her hands.

Xx

He hadn't thought about it. It had been a reaction, to step in her way, to push her back.

It had been akin to breathing. In and out until you die.

Jack didn't regret it. Didn't regret dying.

Xx

It was like watching Calico suffer the noose. Like watching Mary die in childbirth, like selling herself to a prince for a price, like giving up the consequence for revenge.

Anne Bonny couldn't breathe, could only stand just behind the Spaniard, numb and dying in her own way.

A life for a life, that was the way the Fountain worked.

Lives seemed to cost so much more, these days.

Xx

Groves could taste the pain, bled between the two of them. Could see the fragile way Jack breathed like he was fluttering inside of a great wind, and the whiteness of his skin. Could feel the shudder-chill of death down the back of his neck. And he could feel Anna's heart crack down the center and splinter off, could feel pieces of it collide into the other parts of her body, until she was collapsing from the inside out.

They were still the greatest pirates he'd ever known.

Jack was dying with dignity, holding onto pain-pressed tears with fiercely gritted teeth, gold caps bared to the foggy air. He looked feral, wrapped up inside the agony and the need not to show it.

When Anna collapsed so delicately next to him again and set the Chalices on the ground beside his hands, Groves could feel the desperation. Could hear the silent, please still be breathing.

She kissed him, quick and needy and so endlessly real.

James Norrington used to say pirates couldn't feel love.

Groves knew he was a liar. Because Jack kissed her back like she was the only air he could ever need, like she was healing, was divinity and prayer and sadness and joy and need and want and asleep and awake and the sun and the moon and the sea.

And that was love.

Xx

"Hold on, Birdie. It's alright," Anna whispered, her hands shaking as they reached again for the blessed Chalices. She pressed the left into Jack's shaking, dying hands. She imagined she could tell the tear apart from the rest of the water, it was that special.

She gripped the right in held on to the stem and hoped the water was cool enough to quench the tight, restricted feeling of her throat.

She was crying.

"It's alright, Shh. It's okay."

"No," he said, his eyes a dangerous tint, all darkness and endless conviction. Death would take him years before he let her die in his place.

Her tears fell against his upturned face.

"Please, please. Let me save you!"

Open-mouthed and floundering, the warm bodies surrounding them could only watch. Groves raised his right hand, his face a smooth mask.

"I'll do it," he said firmly. The horizons were closing in on him now, pinning him up against a final edge and he was going to fall and it was okay. Because he still believed in miracles and in God and in faith. And that kind of love was a miracle. Anna's blue eyes were despairing.

She wanted to say okay.

She wanted to let him.

More than anything.

"You can't." She shook her head, her hair falling down into her eyes and hiding them from his view. He was grateful. Those eyes weighed too heavy on his soul, made his skin feel ill-fitted to his bones. "I can't let you."

"Just…let me go," Jack whispered.

His voice was reluctant and afraid. So soft she almost couldn't hear it. He didn't want to die.

But he loved her more.

"Can't do that either," she whispered back, like it was some great, terrible secret. "Love you too much."

That was the sixth time she'd said 'I love you.' Jack had been counting.

"Love, please. Don't make….live…so long without." He couldn't finish. The words were too slow on his tongue.

Anna let out a broken sob, hunched over his body in the imitation of a prayer.

Men removed their hats.

Juan de Padro, who would become the governor of Cuba in short years, crossed himself slowly. Tried to convince himself his eyes were not watering.

Groves prayed.

Barbossa looked so lost.

The air around them was still, until by some unseen consensus, the crowd parted. Bonny put a hand against Anna's trembling back, the weight of it settling deep between them, and pried the Chalice from her clutching hands.

Anna jerked upright, her eyes a furious kind of betrayed, empty and lost and broken, wandering the pathways of her heart while it crumbled down around her.

"Please," Bonny implored, and Anna so much in her face. It was almost like looking in a strange, distorted mirror. Almost like pieces of her own face were secreted away beneath the years on Anne Bonny's. The shade of blue of her eyes and the curve of her jaw and the twist of her lips. Her face held more than resignation. It held peace, and love and the slightest bit of fear. But mostly happiness. Like she was coming home. "Let a mother do her duty."

Anna couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. And so Bonny drank.

Barbossa tipped Jack's Chalice into his slack mouth with gentle hands.

When the water took her, it was with a gentle, sweet touch. It crawled up her legs and wrapped her into an embrace her waist like a lover might, like a lover had, so many summers ago.

Xx

Bonny could feel Calico, could taste him on her tongue. Could feel the weight of her baby girl in her arms.

It was almost like diving beneath the surface of the ocean, quick and consuming. There was a peace and the sudden, complete assurance that you are neither alone nor lonely. And all at once, you were—

Gone.

Xx

Jack opened his eyes.

It was kind of like a sunrise.