PotC Fic: By Blood Undone

[erinya]

Fandom: PotC
Title: By Blood Undone
Rating: NC-17
Warning: You know, I think there's technically necrophilia and dub-con going on here? But not in any way you'd expect, probably.
Pairing: Jack/Elizabeth, some Will/Elizabeth
Summary: It's getting back from Death that's the hard part. None of this "up is down" nonsense; for something this important, it has to be...well, you'll see. An AU sequence for AWE, so it's not particularly spoilery.
Notes: Trying to clear out a backlog of unfinished stories here (and I can already hear the cries of "But what about [insert languishing project here]?" Yes, I'm aware that I'm a slacker; sadly, the ones everyone wants to read are never the ones that want to be written.) This particular story has been a long time developing and was originally inspired by angelaadm's manip of an un-ornamented Jack being attended by Lizzie in a bathtub. It lost the bathtub and gained a lot of supernatural weirdness along the way. The Locker I had in mind here was more informed by Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea mythos than by T&T, as I hadn't seen AWE yet or even read many spoilers when I began writing it, but it turns out I didn't hit so far from the mark on a couple of things, so huzzah for the communal mythic consciousness, or something?

Many thanks to geek_mama_2 for the beta and to woolymonkey and fabu for long-ago feedback at rough_magic; any remaining errors, eccentricities, and lapses of logic are mine own.



By Blood Undone

Beyond World's End, there was no night or day. No sun, no moon. Only a strange twilight, and waves that glowed with an eerie green phosphorescence, and the stars, which were not the stars of the world they had left behind, and which illuminated nothing.

There was no wind, but the ship called the Eurydice--Barbossa had named her, with a sly glance in Elizabeth's direction--glided forward anyway over the unearthly ocean, limp-sailed and silent. Tia Dalma stood at the bow, unmoving as a statue, but Elizabeth could faintly hear her voice rising in a keening chant, like a dirge; the air seemed to pulse around her. Elizabeth wondered, uneasily, what power pulled them onward and what its price might be.

Thus abstracted, she leaned thoughtlessly over the rail, gazing into the ghostlit water; and her heart nearly stopped. Faces stared back at her. Faces of the drowned, of the damned, their heads tipped up, their grey swollen hands reaching out to her, clutching at the hull of the Eurydice as she passed before slipping and falling away, their eyes white and sightless. Though they were voiceless too, she thought they spoke to her still, a dry murmur that she could not truly hear but which swelled and ebbed at the edges of her mind like a far-off tide, like Tia's droning song. Pleading, begging, calling to her for salvation, for release, for the taste of lives lost long ago...

She gasped, backed away, stumbled, and was caught by someone whose chuckle sent chills crawling the length of her spine. Barbossa. He gripped her shoulders, speaking softly in her ear.

"Did ye not hear the witch when she said we were not to look at the sea we sailed through, lass?"

"I forgot," Elizabeth said, her voice thick with horror, and then, more truthfully, "I was curious."

"And what did ye see, then?"

"Dead faces," she whispered. "Dead men, in the water, trying to climb out..."

"Aye, tryin' to claw their way back to the world of the living. So it must be always with the dead." His hands tightened on her shoulders. "Here there be monsters indeed, Miss Swann. Do ye yet regret your choice?"

"Never," she said, though she wasn't entirely sure what choice he meant, and wrenched herself out of his grasp. Barbossa's mocking laugh rang flat and hollow, the echoes dying quickly in air too still to properly carry the sound. Elizabeth was reminded suddenly of the atmosphere aboard the Black Pearl while the ship was yet cursed, stale and heavy with dust and rot, the choking miasma of a charnel house, of the grave. But the air here smelled of nothing at all...

Will was there, belatedly, glaring at Barbossa. "I told you to keep your hands off her."

"I did nothing wrong, boy. Ye can ask the lady yourself."

"I'm all right, Will," Elizabeth said wearily. He had hardly spoken to her this long voyage, but he still felt it necessary to defend her honor. As if she had any left anymore, and he knew that well enough. But Will could not help being Will. Her erstwhile knight. She put a hand on his arm, and he actually turned to look at her.

"You don't look all right," he said, frowning. "You're very pale."

"It's this damned light," she retorted. "You look like death, too--" And she faltered, fell silent. Barbossa shot her a sardonic look as he turned away.

"What is it?" Will prodded.

"I looked into the water," she answered finally, and when he made as if to move towards the rail, she gripped his arm harder. "No, Will. Don't. You don't need to see them."

"Who?"

"The dead. Just the dead...The sea is full of them."

His Adam's apple jerked as he swallowed. "Elizabeth," he said urgently. "I don't like this."

"I know," she said. "The stars are wrong. I know."

Will glanced upward briefly; had he not noticed? After a pause, he said, "Maybe we should--"

"No," she snapped. "There's no turning back. Not now. We've come too far. I...we have to finish this."

"What if we can't find him? What if we can't bring him back?"

"We will," she said. "We have to." And when he opened his mouth again as if to argue, she dropped his arm and walked away, almost breaking into a run before she reached the hatchway.

What if they couldn't get Jack back?

No. The thought could not be borne. It was impossible.

She tried to push away the image of Jack's face rising out of the waves, staring up at her, unseeing.

No, she told herself, as if her denial would assure her his return by force of will alone.

Elizabeth had not yet allowed herself to think about what would happen after that. If there were choices to be made or remade, then, they could not be fathomed now. All she knew now was that the world they had left behind was not much better or brighter to her than this one, without Jack in it. The stars there had seemed to mock her cruelly as they moved in their familiar courses. It seemed more appropriate that they should stand still, here, for all that she had called them wrong.

* * *

Later, she lay on her hard, cramped bunk, counting off the bells as they were rung. Without them the hours would have slid together into the endlessness of the other-world; time was a foreign substance in this place, something the travelers had brought with them, as precious as their stores of water and hardtack and lantern oil. Elizabeth had hoarded away a spare hourglass among her things; now she upended it and set it on the bunk beside her, turning her head to watch the thin silvery strand of falling sand just visible in the gloom of the cabin, a protective hand curving around its base to steady it. The Eurydice only shuddered slightly in her too-smooth course; but if the glass should shatter, she thought, if that slender thread should break, time would stop, and they would never return to the living world.

She wished there was something she could do, wished she could push the sand faster into the belly of the glass; but she could only wait, for without a wind there were no sails to trim, and in accordance with Tia's warnings Barbossa would set no watch in the crow's nest.

So she rested, but could not sleep, listening to the whispers of the dead, the soft scrape of their fingernails on the other side of the hull beside her ear. She could not help but feel a bitter kinship with them; their restlessness and desperation was not so different from her own. She laid her palm flat on the rough wood that separated this tiny pocket of time and breathing souls from the changeless sea of the lost, and prayed as fiercely as she ever had for those within and those without, and for herself, and most of all for Jack.

Jack.

Will, she knew, had a piece of her heart, but Jack might very well have taken her soul down with him into the depths, damned her with that smile of his and a single word. Pirate.

Perhaps that was why she felt so empty, now.

Perhaps that was why she had to find him, so she could take whatever he had stolen of her back from him. Perhaps that was why she would defy the sea and Death and the laws of whatever gods there were to carry him back across the threshold of the fate to which she'd left him.

Perhaps that was all of it.

* * *

After a time which would have numbered three days, had there been days at all to count--twenty-one watches, one hundred and forty-four turnings of the glass, three hundred and twenty-four bells--the Eurydice ran suddenly aground with a great shuddering jolt. The shock woke Elizabeth from an uneasy slumber, throwing her out of her bunk and onto the floorboards of her tiny cabin, where she found herself clutching the hourglass to her chest; by a miracle, it was unbroken. She pounded up the steps topside, and practically leaped aloft.

Sand. Sand enough to fill an eternity of hourglasses, stretching as far as she could see to an indistinct horizon, glowing faintly like the water they had sailed through. And far off in the expanse, its only mark, a dark rounded hillock which, as she squinted, resolved itself into the shape of a beached ship's hull.

The Black Pearl.

"There," she cried. "Oh, there...!" But her voice broke before she could give the bearing, and she had to cling tightly to the rigging of the Eurydice and blink and blink again until the blindness that had descended upon her had passed.

* * *

Will gripped her hand, but Elizabeth barely felt it. Her whole being was straining toward that distant hulk that was the Pearl, equally stirred by hope and fear.

Barbossa, too, was strangely animated, his eyes glittering as he stalked the lanterned deck. "Pintel, Ragetti, Cotton, and Gibbs," he barked. "You're with me, men. Let's have a look at her, aye?"

Gibbs stopped and placed a hand on her shoulder as he joined the landing party. "Don't you worry, now, Miss Elizabeth," he said. "We'll find him for you, right enough."

"No, you won't," she rejoined. "I'm coming with you."

Gibbs' face clouded. "Might be better if you stay here, lass. There's no knowing what else we'll find in this accursed place." He made the sign of the cross as he spoke.

"I don't care," she said, then louder, for the Captain's benefit, "I won't be left behind." She noticed that Tia Dalma had left the bow and was watching her keenly, head tilted slightly; when Elizabeth's eyes met hers, the woman's lips curved in a knowing smile. Elizabeth looked away.

Barbossa interrupted Gibbs' further protest. "Very well, missy, if ye must ye must."

"I'm coming, too," declared Will, squeezing Elizabeth's hand. She shook him off impatiently, striding forward to join the others. When he followed her, she saw the wounded expression that flashed across his face, and regret clenched at her heart. Oh, Will, she thought. Don't you see it yet? I will always hurt you...

"And the whelp too," Barbossa said, casting his eyes upwards. "Quickly now, the great gaping lot of ye! I've waited long enough to get my ship back."

So that was the source of his excitement: the Black Pearl. He meant to have her, of course, and Elizabeth couldn't allow that. Jack might forgive her for sending him to his death, but he'd never forgive her for letting his Pearl fall into the hands of his most despised enemy.

She smiled sweetly at Barbossa as she passed him, and he grinned fiercely back at her, as if he had read her thoughts.

He thought he could best her as he had before. He was wrong.

She was not that naïve little girl now, trusting in codes and legends to protect her. She was like him now. A murderer. A betrayer. A pirate.

Things were simpler now that he was mortal.

* * *

The shallow water they splashed through to the pale shore was mercifully free of the dead and their stretching hands, though Elizabeth's skin shrank from its touch, knowing what other skin it had washed over on its way to this beach. The pale sand was fine, featureless: no shells, no remnants of life here, only grains ground into near-dust. If there were a wind, the sand would have swirled up and choked them. As it was, their footprints filled in quickly, smoothed the record of their steps as if they had never been.

Elizabeth shivered, and squinted ahead through the uncanny dimness towards their goal. Shouldn't Jack be there? Shouldn't he be waiting for them, emerging around the hulk of the Pearl to swagger towards them, grinning and smug, crowing, why the long faces, mates? You'd think somebody'd died. What--me? You're not making any sense, love. I'm Captain Jack Sparrow…now where's the rum?

But the Black Pearl lay still and silent as a wreck, and if anyone inhabited her, man or ghost, they gave no sign.

And then, as they drew closer, Elizabeth saw: beside the large shadowy bulk of the ship lay a smaller shadow, a huddled shape, like a bit of flotsam, broken and discarded. A rock, surely, or a piece of driftwood, that seemed to take on the contours of a man's motionless body, tossed carelessly onto the sand…

She heard herself cry out, a strangled shriek that fell away behind her as she broke into a run, headlong and heedless. She thought she heard Will call her name, but he seemed very far away as well, a thousand miles or ages past and growing ever farther as she ran.

At last she flung herself to her knees beside the unmoving form, gasping, breathless.

He lay curled on one side like a child, naked, his slim-muscled back exposed to her, facing the scuppered Pearl. For a moment she thought, it's not him, it can't be him, for no trinkets or coins glinted amid the sand-matted tangle of dark hair at his neck, and without his costume and accoutrements he seemed slighter than she remembered.

"Jack," she choked out, trying to gather his limp weight up in her arms. "Don't do this. Damn you, Jack, wake up..." His head fell back to loll in the crook of her elbow; his closed eyes were not rimmed with kohl, and that frightened her above all else, that his face was as naked as the rest of him, as vulnerable. And he was so still, too still for a man whose lively mind and dancing fingers and clever tongue had once never seemed to cease their movement.

This was not the way it was supposed to happen. This was wrong, all wrong.

"No," she whispered. "No..."

Her tears spilled over, wetting his skin, like the rain this barren place had never seen; but he did not stir, even then.

* * *

Will and Gibbs pulled her away from him, though she fought and cursed them like a wild thing until Will caught her in a restraining embrace. "Breathe, Elizabeth," he said sharply. His face was set, but his arms steadied her while she calmed, and she turned her head against his shoulder to watch Gibbs lay his coat over Jack's body and bend over him, expression intent, doing something inexplicable with a hand-mirror. He uttered a sharp imprecation, then; pocketing the mirror, he caught up Jack's arm and laid two fingers against the inside of the slender wrist.

"What?" Elizabeth exclaimed, pushing Will's arms away from her. "What is it?"

"Come here, lass," Gibbs said, and she did, kneeling beside him, biting her lip. He took her hand, laying her two fingers over the sinews of Jack's wrist as he had laid his own a moment ago. The skin there was cool, and softer than she had expected for all the grime. "D'ye feel that?"

She shook her head mutely, and then started as she felt the tiniest of flutters, followed a moment later by another. Blood, sluggish in a blue vein. She raised her eyes to Gibbs, hardly daring to speak.

"Is that..."

"Aye," Gibbs said. "A heartbeat, lass. That's hope, that is. Don't you give up, yet."

* * *

They carried Jack into the Great Cabin of the grounded Black Pearl, Elizabeth trailing in their wake, hating the way their procession seemed like a funeral march. But when they had laid him on the bed, still covered with Gibbs' coat, she stood with her head bowed as if in mourning, listening to them file out, ignoring their whispers and stares. She was long past propriety these days, and they were all pirates here.

The double doors clicked shut softly. She lifted a hand, brushed a dark elf-lock from Jack's forehead, frowning at the way the lantern light shadowed his cheeks, at the grayish cast dulling his sun-darkened skin. And yet...

She had always thought Jack Sparrow handsome, devilishly so, and charming, certainly, though she'd been loathe to admit so even to herself. But now, studying the contours of his face, the long dark lashes and full lips, the hollow of his throat beneath his Adam's apple, she thought suddenly that he was beautiful. A curiously sharp pang twisted in her chest, and she fumbled for his wrist again; for one panicky second she felt nothing at all, before the faint leap of a pulse under her fingers left her light-headed with relief.

"You love him, don't you." It wasn't a question.

She started, turned to find Will watching her from just inside the cabin doors, pain and accusation plain in his eyes, in his voice.

"Will, I-" She realized she was still holding Jack's wrist, dropped it as if it had burned her.

"No," he cut her off. "No more lies. I'm not blind, Elizabeth, nor a simpleton. I've seen-" He paused, then went on quietly, "I saw you kiss him."

The revelation struck her like a broadside; she couldn't breathe or speak for one long dizzy moment, denials and explanations crowding thick in her throat like tears or nausea. "You thought I betrayed you," she said, finally, with as much calm as she could muster. "You were half-right, then. I betrayed him. To his death, Will. I killed Jack Sparrow; or I might as well have."

Will stared at her, confusion, disbelief, and horrified comprehension chasing rapidly across his features. "So I saw...what, then? Some sort of trick?" At her nod, he laughed shortly, incredulously. "And you think that makes it better, somehow?"

"No," she said. "But you wanted the truth. And I love you; I always have. You know that."

"I thought I did," he said. "I thought I knew a lot of things about you. But I'm beginning to think I never knew you at all."

And he pushed his way out, the doors banging closed behind him; Elizabeth started to call him back, but her voice failed her, and she sank into a chair, burying her head in her hands.

She was beginning to think that he might be right.

In the heavy silence that had flowed in after Will's hasty departure, she heard Tia Dalma's voice rising again from the main deck: a new chant, eerie, commanding, insistent. Abruptly, the ship gave a great lurch, nearly throwing Elizabeth from her seat; she ran to the stern windows in time to see the sand around the Black Pearl's keel turn to water. The Eurydice lay behind them, beached on newly solid sand, washports streaming. They had traded one ship's life for the other, it seemed. All the crew had joined them on the Pearl; she could hear Barbossa shouting orders, though there was not much for the men to do while there was no wind to stir the sails and no waves.

Elizabeth knew she'd seen horribly strong tentacles rip through the window she sat at now, leaving the Great Cabin in a shambles, had seen the Pearl shattered first by the Flying Dutchman's cannon and then by the rage of the Kraken. But like Jack, the ship seemed strangely intact, and the livelier of the two of them as she slid forward through the still water.

Elizabeth shivered, turning away from the window, and went to summon the sailor called Ragetti to the cabin; precious though it was in this place, she knew he would not argue with her demand for a basin of water. He brought it quickly enough, but would have lingered to goggle at the man they had raised from the dead, until she dismissed him; more brusquely than she intended, for he jumped and backed his way out, cringing and apologizing as if he were afraid of her.

And well he might be, she thought wryly. She wondered for a moment if he knew somehow what she had done, if Will had told them all; but no, it wasn't like Will to tell someone else's secrets. Perhaps she only looked as desperate as she felt.

Moving slowly, as if in a dream, she pulled her chair to Jack's bedside and wet a cloth torn from one of his old shirts she had found in a sea-chest, wrung it out, setting herself to the task of washing the sand and salt and dried sea-slime from his body; wishing she could wash her own soul thus clean of a multitude of sins. The damp rag revealed scars she knew and scars she did not, skin paler than expected, slender lines of muscle, and over it all intricate patterns of blue ink, a map half-faded of a life she could not quite read.

Biting her lip, she turned back the coat that still lay over his hips, laved him there as well, trying to see him with the eyes of a nurse, not those of a woman. But she had never seen a naked man before; she could not help the way her curious gaze was drawn along the fine trail of dark hair leading down from his navel, and was this penance, or another sin? She half-expected him to stir under her ministrations, but he lay as still as ever, even when she let one fingertip-just one-graze the length of him, ghosting over unexpectedly smooth skin. She leapt back anyway, guilty heat flooding her cheeks, turned her face away determinedly as she sponged down his thighs, his calves, his fine-boned feet. The water in the basin swirled, clouded now like her own thoughts.

She had to call Gibbs in to help turn Jack over, and again to move him under the sheets of the bed, glaring a challenge at the old sailor to say one word about bad luck or seemliness, anything at all to question her presence in the Captain's cabin.

Grim-faced, his usual cheerful manner subdued, he must have sensed this, for he said no more than what was necessary; but he dropped a hand on her shoulder before he left, squeezed once, stared into her face for a long moment. She didn't know what that look meant, but she took it as support, or perhaps gratitude.

If he only knew, he owed her none. All these debts were hers.

She sank down on the chair beside Jack and found his slack hand, willing warmth from her fingers to his; prayed that she might know what coin was due from her.

* * *

"Surely we should be out of this by now," Elizabeth fretted. The glass still turned, meaningless, and the bells still rang the hour; but still they sailed ever onwards through the unrelenting twilight, through that sea of dead, and Jack would not wake up.

"The veils will not lift for us," Tia Dalma said. "It is forbidden to carry a dead man back into the bright world."

"But Jack's not dead, surely! He's breathing-his heart is beating."

"His body lives. But his spirit walk in darkness, in the place of shadows. Neither completely living, nor yet completely dead."

"You brought Barbossa back," Elizabeth said. "Can't you do the same for Jack?"

"Not I, child," said Tia Dalma.

"But there must be something!"

"Indeed there is." The witch smiled, a wide, unnerving smile. "She who condemned him must bring him back."

"You mean me," Elizabeth said dully. "But how--?"

"There must be a sacrifice. Blood for blood. The old magic, the oldest."

"I don't understand."

Dalma merely looked at her, eyes gleaming in the half-light. "Do you not?"

"No," Elizabeth snapped, not wanting to, and fled back to the Great Cabin to resume her vigil by Jack's side, where she found his condition unchanged; except that while she had tarried on deck, he had begun to shiver, deep, bone-shaking, teeth-rattling tremors. She pressed a hand to his forehead, expecting his skin to burn with fever; but instead it was cold and clammy. Like a corpse...

She snatched her hand away, staring down at him, reassuring herself by the shallow, barely perceptible rise and fall of his bare chest. Not dead, and not yet living... As they were lost between the Locker and the mortal world.

She had to make him warm, she thought. But she had already stacked all the blankets she could find over him, and still his chills did not abate. She hovered, irresolute; flew to the door and peered out, hoping to call Tia Dalma to his side, but she must have gone below. In the dim, uncanny light, she saw that Gibbs stood at the wheel, steering them nowhere. There was no one to help her.

What else had the witch said, about a sacrifice? Blood for blood. The old magic.

And suddenly she knew what she must do.

She shut the doors and fastened them, for she could not risk Will bursting in upon them. If he did not understand what she had done already, he could never understand this. He could not understand that she only did what was necessary.

She took a deep breath, and went again to look down at the man in the bed, surprised as before at how slight he seemed without his costume, without his swagger. His brow was slightly furrowed, his eyes squeezed tight as if against pain or the cold that shook him. Hesitant despite her new resolve, she sat beside him, lifting a hand again to stroke his icy cheek.

"Jack," she said softly. But he didn't answer, nor did he seem to feel her touch, and another shudder wracked him.

She did not wait any longer, but lifted the blankets and slipped into the bed beside him, covering his naked body with her own; she molded herself to him, close as she could, feeling his convulsive shivers vibrate through her. He had no warmth of his own, so she would have to give him hers, if she had any after so long in this sunless place. She laid her hands on either side of his face, stilling his chattering jaw.

"Come on," she whispered. "Come back, Jack Sparrow." Hot tears sprang unexpectedly to her eyes, splashing down over his face, onto his parted lips. "Come back to me," and she covered his mouth with hers, tasting her tears, tasting the sea, breathing into him. Everything she had felt and tried not to feel in the last few months without him rushed through her, and she let it all pour into that kiss. Grief, guilt, regret. Memory. Longing. Desire...

She realized, then, that he had stilled under her, the tremors fading. Stilled, except he was kissing her back, his mouth open to hers and drinking her down, as if he were a man marooned on a desert island and she were clear water. Or rum, which seemed more apt, because she was burning...

She jerked her head back, and stared down into eyes dark and glittering and hard as onyx. He was hard elsewhere, too, she realized through a confused mingling of shock and relief and the heat of her own body's response, and behind it her own knowledge, barely articulated, of what she planned to do. What she planned to make him do.

"Elizabeth," he said, his voice hoarse as if with long disuse. "Is this a dream, then?"

For a moment, she could not speak. There were such a great many things that she had thought of saying to him once she got him back, but she found that none of them would do now. "Yes," she said, soothingly, fingertips stroking over his temples, which seemed to warm beneath her touch. "Yes, a dream, Jack." If he believed this wasn't real, he wouldn't question her. If it were a dream, she wouldn't have to answer for this. They could both do as they wanted, as she knew they had both wanted since before he had died. And it was necessary now. She was doing what she had to, just as she had before.

"T'other dreams weren't like this at all," he said. "Unless you're about to turn into something nasty. Or kill me again. Although I'm dead already, so I'll have you know it won't do you much good."

Her laugh snagged and stuttered. "I wasn't planning on it," she said, and then, unable to help herself, "Oh, Jack," and pressed her lips to his shoulder, to the hollow of his throat, like she might if she were his dream, or if he was hers. She'd had such dreams enough to know, these last terrible months.

She found that he was watching her, wary or perhaps merely bemused. "Enlighten me, dream-Lizzie," he said. "Why am I naked, pray? Not that I'm objecting, just...curious."

"I don't know," she said, and propped herself on her elbows above him. "This is your dream, remember?"

He frowned at her. "If it were my dream, seems to me you'd be the one who was naked."

She said, breathless, disbelieving her own forward daring, "Would you like me to be?"

His hands came up, closing briefly on her hips, skimming the bottom of her breasts through her shirt, and she swallowed, her mouth abruptly dry, feeling the length of him pressing against her thigh and the answering pulse between her legs. "If this is mere temptation, love," he said, "it's as cruel a torment as any I've had in this place. But then, you always were a cruel lass, weren't you?"

And this was it. She could stop this, now. Should stop this. But if she did, they might never get back to the world.

She sat up, straddling him, her heart pounding; her hands shook as she unfastened her shirt, but she held his gaze for a long moment before she pulled it up over her head and tossed it to the floor. His eyes raked over her; she could almost feel their path on her skin, like fire.

"Has to be a dream," he muttered. "The real Lizzie would never be so accommodating."

"I'm not always cruel," she said.

"Aye, you're very sweet when it suits you," he said. "How well I know it." But he was touching her, his palms cupping her breasts, one thumb circling a tautening nipple, and she arched into his hands. God, if only she could have convinced Will...

"Jack," she said, and her voice sounded unfamiliar to her own ears, thready with the need flaring where their bodies met, need that made her grind down upon him, wanting to feel an equal need for her in him.

And something like need did flash in his eyes, something raw and almost frightening; before she could react he had rolled her off of him and himself atop her, pressing his knee firmly between her thighs until they opened to him. His face hovered just above hers, his dark tangled hair spilling around them, and suddenly he wrapped his hands around her throat, his thumbs pressing painfully into her windpipe. She gasped for breath, struggling, but his weight pinned her and he was not nearly as weak from his strange illness as she had expected; a jolt of real fear cut through the haze of desire that had softened her body against his a moment ago. If he believed this was no more than a dream, what would he not do to her?

"Elizabeth Swann," he said. "My lovely little murderess. I can't rightly decide what I would enjoy more. Killing you would be only fair, I think," and his fingers tightened until his features swam before her, panic choking her as surely as he was. You fool, you little fool, to trust him as you have. Again... "We'd be square then, perhaps."

I took your life. Will you take mine...?

Is this the debt I owe? My life for his? She forced herself to stop fighting him, trying to focus on his eyes. I said I would do anything...

"On second thought..." He released her suddenly, and she sucked air into her lungs desperately as he gently caressed the skin his thumbs had compressed a second ago. "I'm not well-known for playing fair."

"You--" she rasped, pushing at him, but he kissed her, hard and bruising, swallowing her invective and her protests.

"Yes," he murmured against her lips, his hands trailing over her angles and slight curves, skilled and possessive. "Definitely the preferable alternative. You at my mercy, all wide eyes and heaving bosom. And a very pretty picture you make, too...God, how I've wanted this," he added roughly. "Too long and too bloody much for comfort, love."

The blunt admission startled her, unmitigated as it was by mockery or wordplay; as did the way he turned his head to bury it in her neck and shoulder, inhaling. How long, she wanted to ask, how much? "So you don't want your revenge, after all?" she asked instead, trying to keep her voice calm, steady, controlled; but only half-succeeding.

His hands had trailed down to fumble with the drawstring on her breeches, yanking at them impatiently until she lifted her hips off the mattress to help him strip her, a brief but vigorous struggle that ended with the offending garment being lobbed halfway across the cabin. She nearly laughed; but then Jack slipped one hand between her legs, parting the damp curls there, and she could not think beyond the sensation of his calloused fingers on her, her whole world contracting to this single point of aching pleasure. She had touched herself before, but it was not at all like this. She bucked against his palm and opened her eyes to see him looking down at her, those dark eyes again; she wasn't entirely sure, with whatever corner of herself was capable of surety just now, that she liked his smile.

"On the contrary," he said. "I mean to exact a very thorough revenge upon you, my dear Miss Swann. In fact, I intend to make you beg, before I'm done with you." He hadn't stopped stroking her, lazily, circling the sensitive nub at her center. "Although that won't be terribly difficult, as wet and ready as you are for me already, aren't you, darling?" He dragged his fingers downward to the source of that wetness, and a whimper rose in her throat. Then she remembered she was dream-Lizzie, and could moan as much as she liked; and she did, on shallow ragged breaths, as he teased her with an agonizingly slow and gentle touch, moving her hips to urge him to give her more.

In answer, he only fastened his mouth to her breast, suckling her, scraping his teeth across the tender nipple and biting the soft flesh beside it until she let out a little breathless scream of mingled pain and pleasure, then laving the spot with his tongue.

"I want--" she said brokenly, fingers tangled in his hair. "Oh, God, I want--"

His head came up. "What do you want, Elizabeth?" His fingers curled around her, and she shook, craving a release she only half-understood. "Tell me, love, and by my oath you shall have it--"

"A pirate's oath?" she gasped, and his grin flashed like lightning.

"S'worth more than you think. Speak, my beauty...my nightmare, my Doom...what shall it be, then?"

"You," she whispered. "I want you." He did not move, hardly seemed to breathe, and she sought his eyes, writhing under him as he held his fingers still. "Please..." And, fear and anticipation knotting in her belly, hot lust and cold calculation, "Come to me. Want you in me...please, Jack..." begging as best she knew how, and it was real enough, because she felt raw with wanting him, and perhaps she needed him to bring her back, too, from some place where she was not quite alive and not quite warm. "Take what you can," she said, and surged up against him.

Jack's eyes had gone flat and liquid, pupils drowning his dark irises in black, and he made an inarticulate noise in his throat, dipping his mouth to hers and kissing her hungrily. His tongue slid over hers, probing between her lips, as he spread her thighs with his hands and pressed into her below as well, slow but inexorable, invading her until he met the resistance there, her maidenhead. She heard herself keen softly as his gaze locked with hers, feeling the promise of pain but still wanting it, too.

And then he drove himself fully into her, hard, and her sight went white, went red; she swallowed a scream, clinging to him, tasting blood from where she had bitten her lip. He held her, murmuring her name, thrusting not gently but slow and deep, pressing her down into the mattress. It hurt still, a stretching, burning pain, but it lessened somewhat as he moved, as he kissed her. She bared her teeth and urged him on, her nails overlaying the old tattoos on his back with designs of their own; shut her eyes against the intensity of his regard, and moaned when she felt his teeth close on her shoulder, knowing he had marked her, wanting him to, wanting the way it made them both real. His pace increased, his breath a ragged counterpoint to hers, and she wrapped herself around him, her voice rising in little wordless cries until he shuddered and gasped, spilling into her.

Breathless now, his full weight heavy on her, he whispered words into her hair she'd never thought to hear from him, calling her beautiful, calling her his; he stroked sweat-damp curls from her face, kissing her more gently than the first time. Elizabeth opened her eyes, glancing across the cabin over his dark head, and saw the windows bright with sunshine. The ship swayed and rolled, cresting a wave; the faint jubilant shouts of the crew reached her ears, and she drew a deep breath.

"Welcome back, Jack," she said softly; he went still, lifting his gaze to hers.

"Lizzie," he said; he was still inside her, and she felt and heard a tremor of tension, saw realization and shock flare in his eyes. "This is no dream," he said, low.

"No," she said. "This is real. You're alive, now..."

She twined her arms around him, but he drew away suddenly, leaving her chilled and aching, her own body still throbbing with unsatisfied desire. He stared down at her, disbelief warring with an anger that surprised her, his chest rising and falling unevenly. "Sodding hell, Elizabeth. What have you done? What have I--?"

"Virgin blood," she said. "The price to bring you back."

"You lied to me."

"Time and tide," she said, though the triumph in her smile faded under his gaze. "I had to, Jack. It was the only way."

"I should have known." He raked one ringless hand through his hair distractedly, barely seeming to notice his lack of ornaments, though the incongruity and the vulnerability it leant the gesture made her heart contract. "I should have bloody well known, shouldn't I? Tell me something, love. Do you ever do anything without an ulterior motive? Anything at all?"

She thought of the things he'd whispered a moment ago, shamed now for tricking him into self-revelation when he had already been stripped bare of all defenses, and reached out a hand to him, running one finger along the brand at his wrist, the sparrow etched above it. Death had taken everything else that had defined him; she was somehow glad that it had left him something of what he'd been, of Captain Jack Sparrow.

"This," she said, and pressed his palm to her lips; then she lifted her mouth to his as sunlight flooded over them, and gave him what she could.