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Ship in a Bottle	By : EvilE Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (All) > Het - Male/Female > Jack/Elizabeth Views: 4205 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter 3: Too Much Rum

Captain Jack Sparrow was drunk.

Not just his usual upkeep level of rum, which made the deck lay flat instead of gently leaping, and kept bad food down in his stomach. Not even his celebratory level, which smoothed the edges of the pointy things in his brain and memory, and brought an easy laugh to his lips while talking to Gibbs or one of the others. No, he had passed “celebratory” at least an hour and a bottle back, perhaps more. Because he ought to have felt happy - ought to feel wonderful and light as he had that morning, or back in Tia's hut when he'd first learned he could get back the Pearl and to hell with the rest of her mumblings and crab claws and gewgaws - but he couldn't seem to find that place again. Every time he thought of the Pearl and this morning and the wind on his face, suddenly, she was there.

And she hurt. Thoughts of her pricked him till he bled. She stung. She burned. She... ached. He grimaced at the reminder that she was here, on his ship with him. Again. Not good. At worst, he and Elizabeth were literally at each other's throats. He had lost track of how many times they'd planned, attempted and nearly succeeded - in her case, never mind the 'nearly' - in killing each other. At best, their interaction could be described as a tense camaraderie, the temporary aligning of two iron wills and two minds, both fast as lightning and equally perilous, toward some common goal.

He glanced ruefully at another nearly empty bottle of rum, and groaned, leaning over his navigation charts. He was charting a course to the spot the witch had specified, but every time he picked up an instrument, his mind wandered like an idiot child. A child who had to reach out and touch everything in sight at the market: the bright fruits, the insects crawling on the ground, the strangers. He had no more control over his thoughts than that, at this level of intoxication.

And so his train of thought reached for the appetizing fruit. A rush of heat flared in his midsection. The good things... the nice moments. Dancing around a crude fire, arm in arm. Her nearly naked in that thin under-dress. God, he'd wanted to take her, then... and again, after that teasing exchange about curiosity, when she'd presented her lips to him, they were right there, right there and all he had to do was lean in and she would have been his. Oh, she didn't know it at the time, but she would have, Will or no Will, black spot or not, compass be damned...

And then inevitably, his errant mind came upon the creepy crawly things. The unpleasant, the frightening ones. Her betrayal, that fateful kiss that had changed everything. Oh, he'd punished her for that already, nearly let her drown to death, and never let her know how frantic he was to bring her out of the water alive. Then he'd made love to her. Only once. In actuality. That was leaving aside the times he'd fantasized about finding her somewhere, about being stranded with her, alone, outside of society and wealth and the law, or rescuing her - some time when he wasn't actually responsible for her predicament - and miraculously finding himself alone with her, capable of staging the seduction of the century. Mentally he'd seduced her dozens of times, when the lanterns were extinguished, late at night, and he was alone and he allowed himself to indulge in fantasy just for a few minutes, the dark side of it to be erased by the light of the morning.

And part of his stupefied brain tried to convince the other part that the sex hadn't really been that intense, that powerful or mind-blowing, that he was somehow romanticizing it as he forgot things and made up other things, except for he remembered distinctly the gist of what she'd said directly afterward. In a word: Will. And he told himself that the new, yet familiar, ache in his gut was a result of way too much rum and not the sight of her, and him, together, after six months of peace.

Utter boredom. But completely peaceful, relaxing, stupefyingly simple ennui.

He'd never meant to let it get this far. The intoxication. He never had a problem putting things out of his mind that he did not wish to dwell on. It was how he lived. He forgot looks on faces of people that were actually scared of him. Forgot how close he'd come to the sudden drop and short stop, refused to think of the slimy, stinking inside of the Kraken. He put aside the thought of innocents harmed as a side effect of some good old-fashioned larceny, the theft of some precious family heirloom from dear old departed Grandfather, and sold it or traded it or did what needed to be done. Banished the image of a crewman with his throat cut, gasping for life as he bled out on the white sand. Jack made the hard choices. It was how he had to live. Tonight he had tried to find his way out of this ridiculous misery... and so he drank and drank some more, and then he was still miserable but had less control over how he thought and why he felt. He just felt. He slowly became aware of the firmness of the table pressing pieces of hair against his temple, as the world span crazily, tilted on its axis, and the darkness encroached, ready to claim him.

“The rum issssgone.... anshe's married,” he mumbled against Jamaica, below his lips on his chart.

* * *

Elizabeth stepped out on deck the following morning, feeling immensely freer in a pair of Will's trousers and a man's shirt. It was too large, and so she'd rolled up the sleeves and buttoned a tunic over them both. A black three-cornered hat protected her fair face from the sun. It was strange to know she was dressed like a man, and yet, no one on the ship ever seemed to mind, and the only one who ever commented on what she wore was... Jack. She spied him on the companionway talking to Gibbs, consulting a compass (a real one, as she'd discovered he did possess after all) and pointing in several directions before Gibbs turned and bellowed “Ten degrees to port!”

A crewman she didn't recognize, a graying man with a florid, smiling face, rotated the helm wheel in response. Gibbs strode away from the captain and began to loop one of the lines around his arm. She felt herself drawn over to Jack, as though an invisible thread were tugging at her limbs.

“Captain Sparrow, where are we headed, exactly?” She walked over to him and stood a conversational distance apart, leaning her elbow on the rail of the deck.

He turned his head slightly, so that he could see her out of the corner of his eye, and glanced at her before answering. “Back to 'captain,' are we? Had the impression you didn't like getting orders.”

“You don't seem to like answering my questions,” she observed, her voice sharpened with impatience.

“Not when I can help it.” He sighed, and touched a hand to his temple. “Your complaining hurts. Not now, all right, love? I've got a headache.” He turned his eyes back to the sea.

She continued to stare at him, without moving an inch.

He refused to look at her. “You're still there. Why aren't you leaving?”

“I want to know where we're going.”

“Your knowing's not going to get us there any faster.” He then lifted his other palm to his forehead, and rubbed gently. “Really, Lizzy, if you don't stop making my head throb with your chatter - “

“Oh, wonderful. Your first threat of the voyage. I can't wait - do tell me what dire fate awaits me for asking a simple question.”

He rotated his jaw in a circle, slowly, seeming to gather patience. “I can think of any number of appropriate punishments for causing a disproportionate amount of pain inside my skull.”

“Really? Like what?”

He turned to look at her, and the shadow of a smile flickered over his lips. “Come now, you do possess some amount of imagination. I'm sure you can think of how I might enact my... retribution.”

Elizabeth felt her palms begin to perspire, and she flattened them against her breeches. The tone of his voice was low and smoldering, and despite the cooling sea breeze, her face began to feel hot. She struggled to find her voice within a throat that seemed to be dry as splintered wood.

“If you mean to toss me overboard, I dare say that punishment hardly suits the crime.”

“No.” Jack leaned closer to her, now, still wincing slightly with pain, but seeming to be turning something over in his mind, languidly. Before speaking again, he bit the side of his lower lip for a moment with his front teeth, and Elizabeth was surprised to find her vision narrowed, entirely, on that spot. “I was thinking, something slower. A little more... painful. Something to make you... squirm.” On the last word his voice dropped even lower, in volume and pitch, and Elizabeth drew in a fortifying breath, as visions of infinite possibilities flashed through her admittedly imaginative brain. He was watching her react, she knew, watching her lips part as she fought to breathe and her cheeks flushed and she was frozen in place, knowing his mouth was only inches from hers, and getting closer by the second as he leaned toward her.

A passing thought to the ten other people on deck, no more. A passing thought to Will - oh God, if Will sees, if he sees, I'm finished... he'll never believe me if he sees me kissing Jack right in broad daylight, oh God, please let him not see us... Her breath came in quick, shallow pants, and she could do nothing but wait in agony for the brush of Jack's lips on hers.

She waited a moment, awash in fear and desire. A long, anxious moment. And when nothing changed, she opened her eyes.

Jack was looking down at her, a strange hunger blazing in his black eyes, but he held himself away, allowing the few inches to continue to separate them, his faintly rum-tinged breath lightly brushing the tip of her nose. She saw the corners of his mouth turn up slightly, and she realized in an instant that he meant to tease her, meant to find out if she wanted him to kiss her, and now he knew that she most assuredly did.

Shame brought a new flaming rush to her cheeks, and she took a step back, desperately needing some air, some space, between them. She struggled to grasp the thread of their conversation... what had they been talking about? Her searching glance fell on Gibbs, whose eyes met hers, and widened briefly before he turned back to the line he was tending. He had seen, she knew. Would her humiliation know no bounds... and then, just like that, she was mad. She tried to assimilate everything she'd learned in the last two minutes, and form something coherent.

“Not fair to blame me for your poor head aching,” she almost purred, the sarcasm dripping from every syllable. “Someone's been drinking too much rum.”

His brows narrowed, and she saw in the brief flash of irritation that she'd been right. “No such thing as too much rum.”

“Is that so? Shall I add 'too much rum' to the list of 'no such things' from which I've already crossed off a certain black-sailed ship, ghost stories, magic spells, charmed compasses, the Flying Dutchman, great ship-and-crew-eating sea monsters and giant snakes? It might get lonely on the no-such-thing list all by itself. Let's see what else we could add. Jack Sparrow's ability to answer questions honestly. Jack's sense. Jack's sanity. Jack's - ”

“Enough,” he said quietly, his hands gripping the tops of her shoulders. He flexed his fingers in warning, and Elizabeth was not fooled into being comforted by the soft volume of his voice, nor the gentle touch of his hands. Both were controlled, but potentially deadly. “Now it's Jack, is it? Not proper for you to call me that in public, anymore.”

Call you whatever I like, whenever I like, almost sprang to her lips, but then she followed his gaze as it swept the deck, and she was surprised to see a number of the crew watching them, the deck having grown strangely silent. When they saw Jack glance over, they returned to their various tasks, but conversation was still absent.

“Yes, love, we've got company,” Jack whispered to her, his eyes coming back to rest on her face. “Let's be careful what we say in front of others, shall we? Might just send your little idyllic domestic life right down to the depths.” He paused for that to sink in, and she glared up at him, rebellious anger sparking from her eyes. “Then again, you do tend to throw propriety to the winds.” He let an assessing gaze drop from her face to her shirt and tunic-clad torso and breeches. “Funny, I rather thought you wouldn't be on my ship long before you felt compelled to strip off your woman's weeds.”

Elizabeth felt her back teeth grinding against one another. His warm hands still rested on her shoulders, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of shrugging them off. “I prefer the comfort of a shirt and trousers out of practicality.”

“Mmm. Naturally.” Another glance down, then back up to her face. “I know those gray breeches. Will's?”

“Of course.”

“Gray's not your color. I like you in black.”

“That's too bad.”

“Not at all, I've got some black breeches.” He used her shoulders for balance as he leaned forward, his mouth brushing her ear beneath her hat. “The question is, what will it take to get you into them?”

At the suggestive image she closed her eyes, trying to banish the vision of unbuttoning Jack's breeches, reaching in to touch him... steely hard and fiery hot he would be, in her hands...no, no, don't imagine it, that's what he wants. She opened her eyes again, parting her lips for a deep breath. “I've no interest in your filthy clothing.”

“Doesn't get as filthy if I'm not wearing it, now does it?” He leaned back and grinned, a slow, lazy grin, and she knew that he knew she couldn't help picturing him naked except for that silly red bandanna, even for the shortest moment, before she forced the image out of her mind, and one of her hands gripped the wood of the deck rail for support.

“You're disgusting,” she spat out, wrinkling her nose and stepping back. “Leave it to you to turn the simple question of our destination into something dirty and unseemly.”

“Me?” His brown fingers splayed across his chest in mock innocence. He raised his chin into the air. “I haven't said anything unladylike. If that's where your naughty mind takes you, Lizzy, hardly seems fair to blame me.”

She sighed and closed her eyes again. If she walked away, after all this, without having learned where they were headed, she might as well fall on the deck and kiss Jack's boots. Was there no way to steer the conversation in her favor? Then, she thought of one final tactic: catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

She gave another little sigh and stepped closer again, aware Jack hadn't moved, that he was still watching her, waiting for her response. “Jack,” she said in a low, pleading whisper. “Won't you tell me where you're taking us?”

“What?” He sounded temporarily stunned by her nearness. Which was good.

“Where're we going, Jack, hmm?” Her voice was smooth, almost a purr. “Won't you tell me where, please? That's all I want to know. I just want to know where... we're... going...” She breathed almost against his lips, gratified to see his lips had parted and his eyes narrowed, and she could smell his masculine scent, rum and salt and that other spicy smell that was uniquely Jack.

“Where we're going?” he repeated, his eyes fluttering closed and a hand coming up to caress the side of her face. “I'll tell you where we're going.” His voice was a low growl.

“Where, Jack?”

“To my cabin,” he whispered slowly, the air brushing her lips as it left his. “To my cabin as soon as humanly possible.”

Elizabeth blinked her eyes open, and as his throatily deep words registered, she felt a rush of heat to her abdomen so strong it nearly bowled her over right as she stood there. It licked at her middle and sent small shivers of anticipation through her limbs, even her fingers and toes, which flexed in response. I should be furious that he's playing me for a fool... furious that he means to keep me uninformed and under his control... furious that he obviously means to have me in his bed again, means to make me his mistress and an adulterer... and where's my fury, why won't it come out and save me from making an utter fool of myself?

“'Scuse me, Cap'n?”

Elizabeth and Jack turned, mouths still slightly open, toward the crewman who had spoken. Jack removed his hands from her shoulders and faced the man, drawing himself up to his full height. “Something I can do for you?”

“We're almost there, Mr. Gibbs said to tell you. He said we're almost to the place the witch told you to part the mists.”

“Excellent,” Jack told him, and then turned back to glance at Elizabeth. “See? No need to fuss over where we're going. We're already there.” He looked at her still, a long, heated look. And then he sauntered off toward the helm, leaving Elizabeth to heave a great sigh of frustration.
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Ship in a Bottle