Hello everyone!

This is the last chapter. Ever. Unless there's another movie, in which case, who knows. But as of right now, there are no more chapters, no more installments. This has been over a year of absolutely wonderful support and I cannot thank everyone enough for sticking with me through this. For helping me accomplish this much. I had horrible writers block on this, because it was the end, and I wanted it to be perfect. I don't know about that, but. I'm happy with it. I would really appreciate closing reviews. Thank you again. It's been an amazing journey.

-Han

You could find them at the bottom of the ocean, those heartbeats. In those slow heavy-pressed seconds without sound, they were pushed by the weight into the warmth of their bodies and the swallowing depth of their minds. They were cold.

But more than that, they were empty.

The rest of the world crowded in around them, and they felt nothing but the wet touch and slide of enchanted water as it ran from an empty body near them. But the choke-hold fear of it, as it ran downwards passed them, threatened to crawl up against his waist and pull him down, into the canyons beneath the waves, where no light pierced that darkness.

They felt no sunshine against their skin. It was not the presence of dark, but the absence of the sun, and it tore at them. It made a rough home against their chests and beat in time with them, tried to drown out the sound of his heartbeats.

Her fingers trembled against his face, pressed gently into the hollows of his eyes, whispered over his lids and traced over his cheekbones, shaking. Trying to memorize him. But couldn't quiet feel him there.

She was alone.

He was lonely.

Caught on the edge of a poisonous sword and shuddering around the taste of bloodless air. A darkened horsemen breathed down the back of his neck, drew cold fingertips shaped like raindrops down his chin.

Everything hurt and nothing felt real. He was a ghost inside his own body, his own flesh had been caught on the waves and drifted out. He blinked, and the world filtered in slowly.

Dawn.

Or. Her.

Her eyes, blue and shining with the impossibility of the, apparently, possible.

Swept up in sea-salt tears and reddened around the whites, like sea foam had been stained with his rust colored fingers. She pressed her hands more firmly against the sides of his face, and the noise she made was somewhere inside of a crashing wave and the taste of lightning. A rough-dragged sob from the center of her.

Kind of like the earth beneath them was splitting open.

She closed her eyes, like she was troubled by the emptiness between them, like he wasn't there at all, like the silence had crawled inside her and made a home inside her trembling lips.

Pieces of the ocean leaked from his eyes.

Rain fell from hers.

And then.

They met in the middle, splashes on skin and choked, starved breaths. It was like they were pushed by the currents into each other, and the rising sun had taken them by the heartstrings and wound them together. She shuddered against him, and he surged up against the invisible weight to meet her, his hands trembling against her jaw.

She kissed him like he was air and she'd been held under the brim for too long. He kissed back like she was the sun and dawn was coming, rising over the darkness inside his eyes and eclipsing the fear.

Like she was a hundred thousand stars and he was pulling her apart, spark by spark to find the center of her, the flame.

And they were neither alone nor lonely.

Just alive.

You could almost hear the last drops of the Fountain whispering goodbye, in that silence.

But not quite.

Breathing drowned it out, pressed it back into smoke and mist and broken rock, and it was something like a symphony, if a sunrise could make music.

They dawned on the night, and the music rocked them across a boundless ocean, sun sparkling off the water.

Xx

Sometimes Anna wondered if her mother was watching her inside the castle. If she was among the faces she'd seen sitting in on endless courts and balls or in the side hallways, where the maids stored supplies and the butler kept his card deck. She used to pretend that if she tried hard enough to find her face in the passing women, she could figure it out on her own.

And her mother would swoop her up onto her hip and press her forehead against Anna's and tell her what a clever girl she was, and smile. And it would be like the sunrise, that smile, such a strong pull that everyone in the palace would be forced to replicate it.

Because they were together again, and everyone would have to feel that happiness.

That perfect pieces of a puzzle meeting.

Her mother hated high society, Anna decided, as she ghosted down ornate halls with dress trains trailing far behind her. She hated the crown and the rules but never wanted Anna to break them, so that she wouldn't get hurt.

Her mother lived in the country, bundled up in a warm little house that always smelled like a bakery, and her hands were dotted with little scars from keeping it up by herself. There was no one else, and it would be so easy to slide inside that life, to catch her mother's skirts in tiny fists and giggle outside in the small garden and streak her skin with dirt just so her mother could wipe it off with a cool cloth.

Her voice would be like a candle, a gentle, flickering kind of thing. Soft and slow-burning, but it gave light to the room, it made it seem warmer, like a hot burning star had fallen to earth and was still shining.

The years came and went, seasons that packed dirty snow against the streets and made her sweat uncomfortably through her layers of corsets and heavy fabric. And no one ever came, no one ever looked at her with a slow, secret smile, and no one ever saved her.

There was no woman, no mother.

Anna stopped looking for herself in passing faces, stopped dreaming of her voice in the calm quiet of the evening, stopping thinking about it all together. Because there was no one beyond that veil of dreams, not even a shadow.

Until now.

Xx

Dry bones cracked and yellowed with phantom age lay in a crumpled heap. Jack could see them from where he lay, and traced their outline with the inside of his eyes, burned their image into his retinas.

He felt like there was wind inside his blood, could feel her years bundled up inside him, pushing against the sides of his lungs and pooling in his fingertips.

Like someone had set him aflame in a place where pain didn't exist, and he was burning for the sake of making light. He breathed, felt air rush in like the coming tide, and it tasted sweet. It fed the flame.

He felt like scars has been peeled from off his back and tossed into the water, like the fine lines carved by the sea around his eyes had been kissed away. He felt like, if he lay still enough, he would have the time to feel the earth spinning, to grow a part of it, to feel its heartbeat.

He thought if you should care to wait long enough, you could maybe feel time slip through your fingers, like a smooth, satin-twist of endless ebb and flow. And when you got there, you could reach out far enough to touch the very edge of the horizon, where the sky and stars meet, and feel the sunrise.

Jack could.

He'd never felt further from the Locker, from a desert hell at Dante's feet.

He was winged, against the wind and weightless.

With years and years to finally learn how to fly.

He wondered if children felt like this when their mother died, like the whole world had depended on them, and things were suddenly out of balance. His eyes stayed on the corpse but he felt he was looking at something greater, at the edge of the sky when pinks and purples swept up the shadows in the clouds and made the horizon look aflame.

"Thank you."

Xx

She didn't even get to say goodbye.

Didn't get to memorize her face, to find all the little pieces of herself there and secret them away in the very back of her mind, where their rush and crash life didn't touch. Where things stayed quiet and warm and loved.

Her hands felt heavy where Bonny's touch lingered on some plane in-between reality and memory. Like her skin itself remembered, and was trying to hold onto it.

There wasn't even a moment, one she could rock herself to sleep with later, something that gave her a closing door. Just the sound of her voice, rough and torn with years of sea-salt and barked orders, and the way her eyes looked content. Like she was floating somewhere far away from them.

Anna didn't even get to grip her shoulder, or press her face into the crook of her neck, where she'd imagined being rocked into dreams so long ago. Just her empty hands and the blood on her clothes. Just the cavern in her chest and the tears running down her face. Just the taste of an embittered woman's guilt, for getting swept away by the hatred, and forgetting the weight she once held in young and shaking arms.

Anna didn't get to say she forgave her.

Xx

Pirates can't love, Groves. They're barely even human.

He'd never heard such a lie.

Jack's hands were clinging, white-knuckled on Anna's shoulder her shirt bunched up in his palm, dirt and blood dragged across her skin. He trembled, and Groves could see the fear, the relief, the taste of ghosts inside his mouth and death breathing down his neck. He hid his eyes in the crook of Anna's neck, where Groves thought it must be some pale imitation to their slow-waking mornings adrift.

When he'd spoken, when he'd thanked a corpse for so much more than just saving him, his voice had cracked, and the assembled flinched almost as one being. Men of all nationalities and flags bowed in mourning and respect and Groves could swear he saw wet faces among them.

He wasn't surprised, still had a hand pressed up against his mouth, as if to catch an odd noise that would rip apart this moment.

Groves couldn't tell you what it was like, when they stared at each other, suspended and quiet, like they were expecting Jack to be gone, irretrievable and lost. Barbossa had backed away, his aging, twisted face, smoothed over, like some ancient god had whispered something kind in his ear and the world was right again, with those essential to the story living to see another sunrise against the ocean.

The minutes had stretched, while they relearned each other's faces and waiting for death to fall against them like a huge, white wave of suffocating inevitability. Groves wondered if he'd existed in that moment. If any of them had.

Just because he'd never seen two people more alive in his entire life, never seen two people more desperate and afraid and blindingly in love.

Everything else must pale in comparison to their reality. He was a husk, a ghost.

And then.

When the spell broke and they surged to meet each other, Groves could hear music. A crescendo that gave him shivers, that crawled up the back of his spine and made him uncomfortable in the raw beauty of it. That made him remember the little things, the way sun looked on the water, and the flavor of a Port Royal day in the winter, when the air was cold but the sun warmed his skin. He thought about stars and sunsets and floating villages in Singapore and fireworks and floating lanterns and the graceful, impossible way Jack and Anna moved when they fought, like they were dancing alive with fire and magic.

It was like watching angels find humanity, falling together because this was worth it.

And he smiled, had led an applause they couldn't hear, whose only purpose was to make the rest of them remember that they were alive at all. The sound of it had crashed against the sides of their stoned-in well of misty heaven, and it was like waves crashing down on them.

The silence came back so quickly, and Groves felt hushed by a mother into quiet. Jack was matted down with blood, dirt cut through with salt-streaked tears none of them would speak of later. His eyes were shiny, catching the light in places water wanted to leak out, but the brown was endlessly deep, searching until it found a woman who was so much more. He looked from another world. Angular and fiercely beautiful, the pieces of him, tan skin and wired muscle and sharp cheekbones and trembling lower lip made up something otherworldly.

And Anna.

Like a shattered angel, like the precipice of beauty and pain. Like she had sinned for love and someone had ripped huge black wings at the base of her and left her flightless and shivering. Like she was bleeding grief and ecstasy and bitterness and love.

Like she'd just been granted emotion, and didn't know what to feel.

Her skin looked to be made of porcelain, a soft white like Grecian statues or clouds on a summer morning, only streaked with mud and drying blood and old bruises and scars that webbed across her arms like the fingers of demons. Like she was fighting hellfire and heaven all at once and Jack was the only thing keeping her alive.

He was air and she was drowning.

And they were an accidental audience. They were not made to see this. These creatures borne from sea spray and star light and blood.

God help them, they couldn't look away.

Xx

Her hand reached, bloodied and trembling, thin, elegant fingers with broken nails and thick calluses skating across wet, rough stone out towards the corpse. A child reaching for the hem of her mother's dress. Her heartbeat fluttered, and she felt it crashing in her throat, eating away the words.

If she tried to speak, something would break inside her. She was sure.

The movement was stilted, like she couldn't quite remember how to, like a stutter around a word that didn't taste right.

Jack's hand enveloped hers, his rings pressing against hers in a soft clink and pulled her the rest of the way, gliding over stone with the lightest of touches, gave her what she needed. Together, her fingertips, his, theirs traced the hollows of eyes that had been blue.

Her gaze looked fractured, shattered, like the ocean had been broken into a thousand pieces. She pressed her lips close together, sucked them in until the dusky pink was hidden, and turned away, her whole face twisting, rebelling against the need to scream. To let go.

It was like she was adrift, floating in the dark corners of her own mind and she was dreaming, she just wanted to wake up. She wanted to see the end of the storybook foldout of her own mind and find herself curled beneath the sheets on the Pearl.

God, please. Don't let me really be this far from shore.

Jack caught the back her neck, and he was alive, and it was like she was being torn at the seams. Being ripped apart by the forces that made her up and she was going to be scattered on the wind. There was too much to feel, and no way to balance the joy and the heartbreak and the hope and the hurt. God, that hurt.

There was a lack of color the world, but the greys were lit with lightning.

His eyes met hers, searching so endlessly.

There were midnights when they rolled to each other with fingers skating across the rough cotton sheets for a heartbeat, for warmth that absorbed everything, just so that they could be lost in the knowledge that they weren't sleeping alone. Sometimes they were hard to find, on nights when the mind made Anna sit high in the crow's nest to let the cold make her face numb. Or a calm night made Jack itch to star up at the stars, so he'd lay in the center of the deck and look up to try to find the things she did, when she was in his place with Cotton, back when a black spot stained his skin and they were strangers again.

And now she was far and away and strange. Alien. There was a pain in her eyes Jack couldn't define, a kind of shamed loss that would settle on her soul for years. That he couldn't wipe clean with a smirk and the promise of another adventure.

She'd been so close.

And hadn't even gotten that moment.

Hadn't even gotten that one, perfect moment where mother and daughter understood each other and all they'd been through. Time hadn't slowed, there were no tears for a sacrifice for a mother to see. There was only Jack, dying in her arms and the vicious, desperate prayer that it would work.

That wouldn't go away.

He pressed without pressing, made her look at him, young and breathing and like a flash of lightning had been elongated by gods into hours.

The light forever, the light by which the color would return.

"Love," he called, and it was a thousand other times, when the epithet had fallen as a shout from his lips or when he whispered it in the dark. It was everything, and she blinked, as if lost. "Look at me."

And she did.

"You are not alone," he whispered, and it seemed to fall to her slowly. There was a fog over her eyes.

"There are some things," she paused, blinking away drops of the ocean, caught behind her eyes and begging to trace clear lines down her cheeks. "That you can't heal."

The scars on her skin seemed to speak in arcane, demonic tongues. They whispered from hells made of burning ships and danger he couldn't save her from. But he stepped between her and that blade, he was content to let his heartbeats fade and he wouldn't let her be lost. Not when he'd finally kept his promise, not when all the words he'd let be assumed between them were finally rising to his lips.

"'Love seeketh not itself to please,/ Nor for itself hath any care,/But for another gives its ease,/And builds a heaven in hell's despair.''" Jack whispered, his fingers catching tears in the swirls of his fingerprints. "Got to try, Annie."

She was too bright, too beautiful with her eyes shining with unshed tears and dappled light. Almost. More like the night sky, the scatter-print of a hundred thousand stars and galaxies and northern lights. She was all of that, and it's reflection on the calm ocean.

She avoided his eyes, like she could read his thoughts and found they settled too heavy on her soul. Like she was waking from a dream and found reality hard to swallow.

He held her until the shaking stopped.

Xx

Time was meaningless, it bled around them; it rose and fell with a tide they imagined to exist in their souls. When he let her up, standing without pain and breathing mist and smoke and the last kisses of magic on the water, the spaces around them seemed huge, like they were opposing magnets to the others, men who slipped back into that other world, beyond the veil. There and back again. Angelica was long gone, and Jack hoped he'd never see her again, never make Anna feel so worthless.

Juan de Pedro tipped his hat, his face a mask of content, like the pieces had fallen into place and he had made peace with his Lord. He was carried beyond the barrier, and Jack realized they were being given this, with their company shrinking so fast back into the Florida heat. This was their gift.

This one moment inside a moment, without an audience.

"Jack."

He looked at her, really looked at her. Could see the way her shoulders tilted back and her hand rested on her sword, the way her red-rimmed eyes seemed to find a home in him. Like he was all that mattered, without having to say it.

He wished they gave voice to their thoughts, wished they gave them wings and let them fly to the horizon and tell the stars their secret dreams and wishes.

"I could not have lived if—even if Bonny was. I couldn't have," she said softly, like the words were hard to find. Like they were hiding in ghost towns and seedy back alleys in London. Don't leave me melted into the shadows behind a bar and I can't lose you gathered dust next to the untouched piano and I love you was too drunk to speak itself, and make it real to more than just the bartender.

"I love you," he said, because Jack Sparrow wasn't afraid of anything. Because sometimes he was caught by how much she could consume a moment, how she could dominate his thoughts with just a smile or a tear or shaking fingertips. And she needed to know he could still be caught by her, that he was always caught by her, on the edge of something huge and indefinable.

Anna closed her eyes against this world, her hands fisted in Jack's shirt like he was the only thing keeping her on the ground. "Keep talking. Keep talking." Be alive.

And it was like after the Locker closed behind him and he drank in her smile and the sound of her voice and clung to all things life with a vicious need. She needed this, and he could give it to her. Could give her the words he'd kept in the pit of himself for an anchor in this endless storm.

Her.

The dawn and all the new storms she brings with the light of day.

He brushed his fingers over her collar bone, slipping against a thin red cut, a bruise blooming across her shoulder, and her body was a story. Myth and Legend wrapped up inside her skin. She was Perseus and Achilles and King Arthur and Robin Hood and the Pirate Princess.

"Beautiful. Like the ocean on a calm night. I could drown there. I want to.

"I want to teach you all the ways you can take stars from the sky and all the ways you can fall off the edge of the earth. I want to show you how much you've changed me without touching, without leaving any scars. I want to tear you apart at the very fabric and learn you inside and out. I want to prove that I'm alive to myself, and I want you to be there to catch me when I go too fast and the wind makes me numb to the sun in my eyes. I want to make you doubt sadness exists anymore, I want to build you like you were a monument to angels and then I want to keep your for myself. I want to journey, I want to love you like it's the greatest adventure I've ever taken. I want to be breathless at midnight and drown inside the way you say my name. I want to feel human in ways I never have before, I want to make gods jealous of what I have. I want to heal all your wounds and wear your scars like tattoos. I want you to live a hundred thousand years on magic that burns with divinity you're worth and I want to live one less, so I don't have to live without you."

Anna felt alive.

But.

More than that, and there was more than that, she felt worth something. She felt cherished, warm and belonging. She'd been wandering without ever leaving home, without ever being lost.

His skin was warm, and his voice broke with his last words, and his tears were hot.

Was this the first time she'd seen him cry?

She felt unfolded, small and aware of him in ways she hadn't been before. He moved through realities and time and space and made it to the middle of her, the middle of everything. The Fountain dripped poetry behind them, and Anna breathed him in.

Jack held onto her like she was the one who nearly died.

Like she was the one almost lost.

"A thousand years is an awfully long time," she whispered against his neck.

He could feel her smiling against his skin, and thought it would be okay. They were not so lost inside this fear, this sadness, this grief. They were fractures of people, but they fit together, in all the broken places. They could do this.

"One thing you're not is boring, love," he said, brushing his hands down the curve of her spine. He could fall into her, if he wasn't careful.

He was never a careful man.

Xx

You could breathe in the sunshine.

So they did.

They ran along the beach like children, stumbling over themselves in sea surf and kicking up the salty spray to watch it scatter like diamonds in the light. They shoved off their fears and Anna kept her mother's name bundled up tightly against her chest, and whispered it to herself when they slowed to a walk. And run again.

Groves wandered behind with his uniform in tatters, his coat lost to the waves long ago, a smile splitting his face into something like breathable life. Freedom. He could taste it, could feel it surging through his veins.

It was like waking up.

He watched Anna and Jack trip over themselves, dance like morons singing at the top of their lungs drink up be hearties yo ho! and whispered along under his breath with Gibbs as they left their tracks in the sand. He shouldered the glass ship armada to ease the older man's joints, and wondered if this bright feeling in his veins would ever dissipate. If there was ever a time he would feel more or less alive. If the best pirates he'd ever known would be alright, if they were losing themselves in the moment because they hadn't thought they'd get another chance. If he should join their dancing, if he should chase the horizon, if he should fly.

His life was new, and he was ready to greet it.

Xx

Anna could feel a rush in her veins, a burning feral spark. Lightning had become her. The grief would take her later, would rise up in her like some horrible tide, and she would let it.

But for now.

Now there was only the pull, the horizon begging for her to meet it, the next adventure, the promise of more. Of steel and bullets and danger and Jack would make it, Jack would be okay.

"More than one way to live forever," he said, his eyes a knowing kind of warm. Like he was reading her from the inside out, like she belonged inside his head and his heart. "You can be sure Captain Jack Sparrow won't have his name on all of 'em."

"Let it never be said my birdie never found something," she agreed, watching the boundless blue sky stretch endlessly in line with the ocean.

"The world belongs to us, love."

There had never been more truth in that. Not when she felt she was being put back together, not when she was broken and desperate and so relieved. They'd made it one more day, and the world was theirs. The ocean belonged to them. There was nothing they couldn't face.

She breathed, and salty air rushed familiar and cool into her lungs. The horizon seemed to hold secrets, and she still wanted to know. She still wanted to pick apart the fabric of the world and lose herself in it. She wanted it for what it was, bloody and vicious and breathtaking.

"There she is lad!" Gibbs shouted for their new company, Groves, who watched the horizon like it was his only love, who stared in awe as the Black Pearl rounded the corner like it had so many years ago.

Like it had on the battlements at Port Royal, when a pirate had kissed her and jumped from the top, when she'd refused to let him die, when she realized she couldn't leave him behind in memory.

"Nothing much has changed since the last time she rounded the corner when we needed her," she said softly, her smile that secret thing Jack always kept in his breast pocket, up against his beating heart. He let the silence ask his question for him. "You will go, and the adventure is promised, the danger, the fear, the burning need to reach the very edge of the horizon and all the terrifying things it holds.

"And the only thing I want, even after all this time, is to follow."

Jack spun her in knee deep water, a hundred thousand droplets scattering in the breeze, and kissed her. Let himself go into her, with the sunshine and the Pearl as their background. Because she was everything, then. There was nothing but her and the feeling of the ocean around them, the call in their blood.

He'd never loved her more than now, bloody and tired and dirty and so breathtakingly real. She followed. She followed him.

Jack kissed her because it was the same as breathing; because she followed him and he looked behind to be sure she was there. Because his life wouldn't have the same rush, the same burst and flash of lightning and fire, without her in it. And she should be told that more often.

And maybe this was kind of like coming home, maybe this was what being welcomed into a new world felt like. Maybe this was wind picking him up and sending him flying to the edges of reality. Maybe this was the ocean crawling up inside of him, and finding a way to breathe around it. Maybe this was a kiss against a sunset that never lost its passion.

Home.

In a kiss, in her arms, in the water they could just slip beneath, in the ship with midnight sails coming to take them to another heart-pounding adventure. Endless and new, they had years to figure themselves out, to learn each other, to make their time endless in the real sense, and he promised himself he would.

She broke away first, as if she'd read his thoughts.

Jack Sparrow didn't think she'd ever looked more beautiful, her eyes dazed from the taste of him and bright with the promise of tomorrow's sunrise. And drink up me hearties yo ho pressed against his lungs and he breathed his freedom, he breathed all the things beyond it.

"What if we should grow tired of this world?"

He grinned, a secret, dangerous thing riddled with promise and mischief and bar fights and swords and love and lust and kisses at midnight and she loved him more than air, more than anything. She would follow him anywhere, would learn to fly if it meant they could face the next war side by side. He shrugged, facing the horizon and the Pearl, and answered like it was as simple as breathing.

And it was, because they were pirates, and they were free, they were more than that. So much more than that.

"Then we'll find another one."

This is Han, signing off.