It's a Jackathon thought train! Enjoy.

Playlist'All of Them!' from King Arthur.

22.

The brig again.
Jack had assumed his typical position, sitting on a box with his head leaned easily against the wooden boards behind him, and his hat tilted down over his eyes.
There was a sharp kernel of bitterness and discomfort twisting around in his belly.

He had figured it out even as they were leading him through Norrington's doorway, into the captain's chart room. The Commadore's private quarters were just visible through another door to the right. His stomach had turned over when he'd thought about that bed, and who may soon be in it.

She'd meant it when she'd said she wasn't turning pirate.
The strongheaded wench.
He should have seen this coming, with the talks and the tears and the holding back.
But marriage? So soon?
To him?

Elizabeth! Are you accepting the Commodore's proposal?

So that was it. Already engaged when she'd met him. Half-engaged. Thinking upon it.
What a saucy little lass. What a scallywag!

And there he'd been, looking like an absolute wet jellyfish, bending over backwards on that island with a please an' thank you Miss. He'd given her a nickname.
You didn't give people nicknames unless they meant something to you.

This isn't about what bloody social circles you move in!
No. It was all about what social circles the Commodore was flitting through, apparently.

He really did despise a dishonest woman. Especially now.
The one woman who had done him over before he could abandon her first.

'All of Them!'

The question of whether he really would have abandoned her, had she been loyal to him, drifted slowly through his mind, and he realised that he wasn't certain on the subject.
Though he doubted that he would have.
She was too interesting.

And God forbid, she was lovable.

He knew that he had only been chasing after her memory for days and days after they'd first met.
He knew they had only really known one another since he had swung over from the Pearl to find her in the heat of battle. Since they had stepped off that plank of wood together.

He knew she was a stranger, even though she had read about him. Even though she seemed to know him through and through already.

But she intrigued him.
More than that, she had the potential to blow him over and shackle him in the chains of love.
He knew that more than he knew anything else. It blazed within him.

He was aching to be conquered and he had never felt that before. Not even for Angelica.
He had run from her because she wasn't the one for him.

When he had imagined the rest of his life with that pirate girl he had shuddered. Imagine the disagreements. The children!
And the eventual going of separate ways... It was doomed before it had begun.

Everything about Lizzie smacked of endurance, from the determination ever present on her face to the youth and purity of her honey-coloured skin, tanned from the beach, and the innocence of her lips, and the sword-sharp gleam in her dark eyes.

Innocence. She played that game well.
She was anything but.

He had considered already that she had his best interests at heart. She planned to help him to get the Pearl back. She had read so many pirate tales as a child that she had the pirate mentality scrawled all over the inside of her head.

It was why she seemed to know him so well. Her mind worked exactly like his own, when it was given the space to function that way.

And he was glad. He was glad that he was getting the Pearl back, so that he could use it to sail as far away from her sweet adoring gaze as quickly as possible.
Her doe-eyed expression, as he had told her about his life. About his dream of her. It still stood there, like a relic of her lost potential behind his eyelids.

He would never regain that Elizabeth, that he thought he had unleashed forever.
Lizzie.
She was all but dead and gone again. In the brig, like he was.

He fought against the selfish and adamant part of his mind that insisted he must find a way to set her free again.
He had had his chance, when she had given up right there in front of him, given herself up to Norrington.

He could have pulled a sword from the hilt of any of those men, and battled for her freedom or died trying.
But if he was realistic he had known the girl a day and a night in full. And she had turned against him. And it was to be expected.

He was a pirate who had seduced her on their first night together, like a common whore.
He had shown that she was nothing to him but another catch. Another set of spread legs.

Their flame had been fierce, but very small.
It hadn't had the time to weld them together yet.
If she had stood beside him, defended her true wishes, defied her father and taken up arms with Jack then he may have considered braving his biggest fear, the fear of battle and death.

But it was never going to be that way.
She wasn't in love with him, and therefore she would choose the respectable Commodore.
He wasn't in love with her, and therefore he would not be saving her from a trap of her own making.

There was another but that he had been vaguely contemplating, and not quite trusting.
It was this:
Curiosity, and the pull of temptation.

He had used her as a hostage upon their first meeting. Drawn a pistol and pointed it at her gorgeous little head.
But hours later she had turned up in his jail cell, confessing that she wanted to see how he was doing.

She had been in danger at the Isle de Muerta, and his concern was so great that he had allowed himself to be caught off guard in the heat of battle with the whelp.
She had been in peril aboard the Interceptor and he had gone straight to her.
She had said his name, then. His real name.

She had cried when she'd told him she couldn't be like him. Couldn't be one of them.
She had given into him, allowed him to expose her in the most explicit ways, trusted him with the sight of her body. In that moment, none of the outside world had mattered. Not even to her.

In return, he had let her burn the rum.

And now this. Even as she had uttered the words to Norrington he had said her name his name for her utterly involuntarily. And she had responded. He had seen the guilt and torment on that bonny visage, and caught just a glimpse of what she might have been going through.

They were magnetised.
Even now he could feel the bond between them, their tangible future, despite any distance.
It drew a straight line from him to her, through walls and floors. Connected them by soul and body. Especially body.

He could feel her thinking about him, because it wasn't possible that she was thinking anything else. Just as it wasn't possible that he could think upon anything else but her.

She wasn't dead quite yet, his Lizzie.
She remembered him, and Lord knew how slippery and slanted the slope down to sin and betrayal was... when there was fatal attraction involved.

His nobler half told him strictly that it was wrong to presume that he had a right to test her, to bring her down to his low level. He shouldn't be meddling with her emotions. He should let her go, let her live her own life because that was the right thing for her.

He tried to convince himself that all this rubbish he was spouting was truth.
The right thing for her?

Why, in all honest truth the right thing for her was him.

In moral truth, however... the Commodore was exactly what she needed to steer her onto the righteous path again. Back into society. Back into God's fold, back into prospects, back into good behaviour and great luxury.

Jack snorted.
He wouldn't even get a chance to try and persuade her his way, anyhow.
She was currently involved in fine dining with her fiancée and father, probably laughing at Jack for all his foolish concern and loyalty. Probably having a grand old time of it in the lap of luxury, and finery, and more appropriate clothing.

He abruptly heard footsteps on the stairs from the hatch above, movement behind the wooden door to his right. The handle turned slowly. His heart raced.

"Jack?"

Her voice was as soft as a real caress, and twice as warm.
All thought of nobility sank away from him, into the depths of his lust, as deep as the ocean itself.

She had come. Their attraction was well and truly fatal.
So hard to fight.