Remix Fic: Thieves and Beggars (Never Enough Remix)

[erinya]

Title: Thieves and Beggars (Never Enough Remix)
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Pairing: Jack Sparrow/Elizabeth Swann
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Disney's characters; djarum99's story; mine is merely a tribute to both.
Summary: When it comes to saving each other, once is never enough. Written for remixredux08. Original story is Thieves and Beggars, by djarum99.
Notes: Many thanks to geekmama for beta reading.



Thieves and Beggars (Never Enough Remix)

Will dies. She doesn't expect that.

She's not even looking at him when it happens, but Jack's face goes abruptly slack and still; she turns her head, following his gaze, and can't comprehend for a long second what she sees, Will impaled on the sword he forged. So sudden. An impossible thing.

Then Will cries out. Davy Jones laughs. She thinks, oh. And for a long moment she can't move.

It's not that she thought they might survive this. She just didn't consider the possibility that only one of them wouldn't.

She begs him to stay, to look at her; gathers him to her, as if holding him close enough will keep him there with her. He tries to speak, but only blood bubbles up between his lips, so bright against his white face, the rain washing it in pink rivulets onto the deck, onto her hands. On Will's other side, Jack is doing something inexplicable with the heart of Davy Jones. She should understand why that's important, but Will's eyes have fixed, he's gone, and she's trying her hardest not to understand anything at all.

Jack drags her away. She fights him, because the only thing she does understand is that it wasn't supposed to end like this. But he won't let go, and one second she's struggling and the next she's clinging to him, the only thing she has left. Her head drops to his shoulder; he rests his cheek against her hair, ever so briefly. And they fly.

The chaos of the vortex drops away beneath them; the waves swallow the Dutchman, the dead and the damned, and they hang silent, weightless, suspended between sea and sky.

It's almost like peace. Maybe it's like dying.

Then the ocean rises to swallow them, too; it's a different kind of death, but it'll do. Until Jack hauls her to the surface, a soft stream of curses falling on her ears, his arm tight around her, holding her head above water.

"Oh, no you don't," he mutters, and she takes a breath.

* * *

"So you married him, then."

Elizabeth starts and turns, tearing her eyes away from the sight of the Flying Dutchman sailing abreast the Pearl, of the familiar figure at that coraled helm. Below on the main deck, rum has made the celebration raucous. On the poop deck, she and Jack are alone.

"I did," she says, wondering who has told him and how. Probably Gibbs, hopefully without too much fanfare. Jack's eyes, opaque, tell her nothing. He betrays no sign of the dark madness that has privately frightened her since his return from the Locker; even his old manic energy seems subdued, leaving him apparently but improbably sober, and this unnerves her in its turn. She notices, inconsequentially, that his hat has gone missing. "You saved him. He was mine, and you saved him for me. I know what that must have cost you--"

Light catches suddenly on his rings, though he doesn't stir otherwise. "A pretty presumption."

She hears the edge, that he means it to cut; chooses to see the strike as an advantage to be pressed. Perhaps the finality that lies heavy in the air has made her reckless, but she needs this answer from him now, should there arise no more opportune moments between them. "You saved me, too. Again. Why, Jack? What are we, you and I?" Friends, enemies, co-conspirators--none of the words seem quite right, nor justify what he has given up for her.

"You and I? I and you? Us?" He laughs; she recoils, stung by the bitterness in that soft sound, by the echo of memory his words call forth. "A chimera, a fever-dream, a mere device of theatre. That play is over, Elizabeth. 'Twas a fool's tale if ever there was one."

She stares at him; his gaze burns into hers, and her heart makes a queer, startled leap. "Jack--" She reaches out to him, but he jerks away, hands raised as if to ward off a blow.

"Once was quite enough." In riposte, a palpable hit.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I always was, you know."

"Then we're both fools," he says, shifting his glance deliberately from her face to the near distance past her shoulder, where the Dutchman glides in preternatural silence. "Your groom awaits you, Mrs. Turner, and you have one day to take your pleasure. Can't think why you're wasting it with me."

He turns on his heel; in a few moments he's down on the quarterdeck, snapping orders at poor Gibbs. His hat has reappeared, firmly in place upon his head. It hides his face from her view. He is Captain Jack Sparrow again, who does not nor has ever cared for Elizabeth Swann.

As for the man she killed, who kissed her sweetly to seal his doom--another role played, a mask assumed, no truth at all? It seems he would have her believe as much. She almost wishes she could.

Cruelty is a matter of perspective.

Elizabeth dashes her hand across her eyes and goes to meet her husband, willing away the ache worn raw and deep beneath her breastbone. But when the flash at the vanishing point has taken the Dutchman back out of the world, she looks down at the chest in her hands, and thinks that once is not enough, after all.

She's finished with farewells.

* * *

The Black Pearl wings fast and far, fleeing her following seas and all that's been left behind, beneath the rise and dip of the horizon.

Not fast and far enough.

"Accursed woman!" Jack upends the rum bottle, only to find that the rum is once again, as always, gone. "Can't even leave a man alone when he's alone. Better forgotten. Can't forget her....Need more rum."

He slams the bottle down and stumbles out of the cabin, dogged by a strange sense of déjà vu. Outside, the sun has begun to set in a painful glory of red and orange and burnished gold. Jack pauses, his blurred vision troubled by an anomaly, a shadow marring the division of sea and sky.

The sea isn't the only thing that's following.

"Oh, bugger," he says, softly. Then, "Mr. Gibbs!"

"Yes, Captain?"

Jack grips Gibbs' arm, as much for balance as for emphasis. "What is that?"

"What? Where?"

Jack waves a hand, and lists briefly to starboard. "That! There! It should not be there, Mr. Gibbs. It should be anywhere but there." A thought strikes him. "It is there, isn't it?"

"Aye, sir. I see it now." Gibbs squints, shielding his eyes. Not a hallucination, then. Jack tries to decide whether he feels relieved or dismayed. "Looks like a ship to me."

"Well, of course it's a ship," Jack snaps. "The question is, what ship is it?"

Gibbs produces a spyglass, peers through it for a few long moments. He looks grave. "Why, it's-" And then he stops, wordlessly offering Jack the glass.

Jack raises it to his eye; on the deck of the Empress, a slender figure lowers its own spyglass, and lifts an arm in silent greeting.

"Bloody Elizabeth."

"What do you suppose she wants, Captain?"

Jack shakes his head, glass dropping to his side; but his eyes remain fixed on the square-rigged silhouette gracing his horizon.

At his belt, he feels his compass stir, and start to spin.

* * *

They take their first prize together at dawn, the Pearl striking hard and fast while the Empress circles wide to head the victim off, then closes for the kill. In the aftermath, they meet on the conquered deck, breathing hard. Jack has blood on his hands, cooling from slippery crimson to sticky rust, and he sees her fierce grin fade.

"I expect you'd like to share the spoils," he says.

"I'll share if you will," she answers.

"And if I don't?"

She lifts one shoulder in a shrug. "Then I'll take what I can."

Jack eyes her. "I think I saw a case of Madeira in the hold," he says finally.

They trade swigs in a dead man's cabin, neutral ground, as they divide their plunder. "You drive a hard bargain, Captain Turner," he says, when they're done haggling.

She tips back the bottle. "Harder than you expected, Captain Sparrow?"

The wine's taste lingers in his throat, thick and bittersweet. "No," he says. "Never that."

She looks at him for a long minute, measuring, until he turns from her eyes. He hears the clunk of an empty bottle set on the floorboards. "How many, Jack?"

"Does it matter?"

"It used to."

She has stepped closer; he moves away, towards the door.

"Let the dead reckon the dead," he says. "We've finished our accounting."

"Jack-"

"Leave off," as he wheels in the doorway to face her. "You have no high ground from which to moralize at me, Elizabeth! I know what you are, better than anyone else alive, I'll wager. Pot and kettle, aye? And you of all people should know what a pirate really is."

Her gaze never wavers from his face. "I know what you are, too," she says. "And you were never a murderer, Jack."

"Enough," he says, and makes his escape; but her voice floats after him.

"No," soft but clear. "Never that."

* * *

Three months, and she haunts him still: a constant presence in his peripheral vision, sometimes at his side and sometimes far off, diminished, only the Empress's topsails on the rise. They circle one another like rival tigers when the sight of prey does not unite them in the hunt; Jack wonders if this dance will prove as deadly as their games with hapless sloops and doomed, clumsy galleons.

He finds he doesn't care in the black moods that take him often, remnants of Locker-madness and despair that he keeps hidden from the crew and, above all, from the lovely architect of his damnation. He privately curses the weakness that folded her husband's limp fingers around the hilt of a broken sword and killed his own chance at immortality. Now, the fate he almost cheated draws him back, like iron to its dark pole; he dreams he looks down and sees its ugly stain flowering in his palm. In defiance, he becomes reckless and ruthless, challenging death to take him if it can. The sharp joy of battle clears his mind of shadows and voices, while it lasts.

Until the day he loses.

He makes too bold a feint, and his enemy's sword knocks his own away, arcing towards his bared throat; in that long moment, to his astonishment, he feels only relief. It's over. No more waiting. He hopes Elizabeth is there to see it, the frustration of her cheap redemption. Perhaps she'll even weep for him, water from stone.

Then she is there, bending to retrieve his sword, and the other man lies dying at their feet.

He grabs her by the arm, hauling her up. She vibrates taut against his body, steel and wire. "What are you doing?"

"I should ask you the same thing," she retorts. "But what does it look like? I'm saving you, you bloody stupid pirate."

The battle rages on around them, but he searches her face, finds it set and determined. "Still trying to pay your debt of conscience, are you? Seeking my forgiveness?"

She shakes her head. "I can't buy your forgiveness. Not even with your life."

"Then why?"

"Because it's what we do," she says. "It's what we've always done, Jack. From the moment we met. We've never stopped, and I don't intend to now."

"In that case," Jack says, "I'd like me sword back, if you please." He spins her away from him. "One more, Lizzie-watch yourself!"

Faced with their combined fury, their last opponent drops his weapon and begs for mercy. They give quarter; and it's victory, after all.

* * *

By nightfall, the crews of both ships have exhausted themselves with merriment; their prize this time has proved exceptionally rich. Jack has just shed his hat and jacket in the candlelit gloom of his cabin when he hears soft footsteps outside, sees the door-latch turn.

"Captain Turner," he says. "I thought that might be you."

"Captain Turner isn't here," Elizabeth says, and shuts the door. She has let her hair down for the first time since the day they faced Beckett's East India Company; it glimmers in the dim light, a spill of gold against the ivory column of her neck. "It's Captain Swann. The name I've earned."

"Captain Swann, then," he says. "To what do I owe the pleasure? And may I offer you a drink of this very fine Puerto Rican rum?"

"This isn't about what you can offer me," she says. "Or what you owe me." Her voice wobbles slightly, but she goes on. "It's about what I can offer you."

Once, he would have answered that with a salacious invitation. Instead, he stills himself carefully, keeping his tone light. "Now what might that be, I wonder?"

She fumbles with the fastenings of her coat; when she finally succeeds, she drops it to the floor. Beneath the coat, she wears only a thin white undershirt and breeches. He sees the pulse leap in her throat, where the collar of the shirt lies open. "The only thing I have to give," she says.

"Elizabeth-" He rounds the table towards her.

"Your life wasn't enough," she says, in a rush, "and it never belonged to me, anyway. So I offer you mine. Save one day in ten years. Yours, Jack, if you'll have me."

He's standing before her now, so close that when he glances down he can see the rosy jut of her nipples through her shirt. He tears his gaze away, back to her face, and has to clear his throat. "And if I won't?"

Her chin lifts, though it trembles. "Then I'll go away right now, and you'll never see me again. I promise you."

"Then who would save me?" he says, and kisses her for the second time. It's nothing like the first; and the third is nothing like the second, nor the fourth, and still not nearly enough. She pulls him against her, hard, her hands slipping up under the hem of his shirt and skimming over bare skin, and her touch almost undoes him then and there. Her back hits the door, and his own hands shake as he drags her breeches down over her hips.

"Elizabeth," he says, desperate, and she says, "Yes," arching as he takes her, the affirmation becoming a wordless noise of pain, and he knows that she can't possibly be ready for him. But when he would stop, she holds his face between her palms, urging him on until he forgets himself utterly, burying his face in her shoulder and spending himself inside her like an untutored boy.

When he lifts his head, she looks back at him with wide-dilated eyes, glittering and wild.

"I'm sorry, love," he says hoarsely, but she shakes her head, grinding her cunny against his thigh, slick-wet with both their juices.

"I'm not," she says: fierce, emphatic. "Not for this. Jack, please."

He slides his fingers into the source of her heat, curving them towards him, and she gasps and shudders and screams a little, already on the brink. Her head drops back, and he sets his lips and then his teeth to her white throat, feels the waves of her climax rocking her within and without.

"This isn't penance, Jack," she says, later, in his bed.

"You owe me none," and now that he's said it, it could even be true. "What is it, then?"

She props herself up on one elbow; her fingers trace arcane patterns on his skin, new tattoos to overlay the old. "I couldn't bear to lose you, too," she says. "And you know what I am."

"What of your marriage vows?"

She bows her head, hair falling in a curtain across her face. "Will died," she says, after a moment. "I'm a widow. We talked about it, he and I. That day...after."

"You talked about me, did you?"

"No. About me, and what my life would be." She looks up suddenly, her eyes bright with tears; but then she smiles. "He wanted me to go free. That's why I loved him, always."

"And you want this."

"Yes," she says, flowing over him, and he yields to her mouth's sweet descent. "Yes, Jack. To everything. To all the questions we won't ever ask. Yes."

His hands close on her waist, staying her above him. "It never will be easy between us, Lizzie."

"No," she says. "Never that." Her smile turns wicked. "But I'll do my best not to kill you again."

"There are worse fates," he murmurs; and embraces his.