Work Text:
“No survivors? Then where do the stories come from, I wonder.”
Sometimes, when Jack closes his eyes against the beating sun, he thinks he can see her.
Well, he thinks it’s a her. Or he likes to think it’s a her, because the only other woman he ever considered a mother figure is now a shrunken head strung up like a bead on a necklace— so he’d like to have another, somewhere, perhaps thinking about him the way he thinks about her. Perhaps she is watching over him, even, like the sun, the moon, the thousands of stars that Jack knows by name because they raised him, the only constants in the buried years and rewritten maps of his existence.
He doesn’t know how to describe her. He knows only that she feels like the softest sand against scorched skin, and she looks like when you look up at the sun from deep beneath the ocean waves. He thinks that is how a mother is supposed to look: like something to swim to.
“And so despair leads to betrayal. And you and I are no strangers to betrayal, are we, Jack?”
Jack doesn’t sleep much, which is fine, because he has always liked the ocean best at night. When his crew is asleep and the deck is empty save for him, and the surface of the water beneath his ship is still as glass and just as fragile, and the the wind is up in the clouds and too high to tug at his hair, his skin, whisper in his ears to remind him of everything calling his name, everything he is running from, every force in the universe that is out of his control. For just a moment, he can pretend it is only him and the sea, the way he thinks it should have been, or was supposed to be.
He woke alone. Whenever it was that he woke, that first time, into this new life of never dying— he woke alone. There was no one around to give him any answers, to tell him what he was meant to do with all this overflowing time.
He doesn’t resent the one who made him this way, though, and he doesn’t resent her for leaving. He doesn’t resent any of them for leaving, because that’s what they all have to do, eventually. Jack has his course; they have theirs. Even in her story perhaps he was only a drop of water in her wake, a grain of sand brushed from her skin; a consequence of destiny.
When he first met Calypso, he wondered if she wasn’t her, old and wild as she was, but Calypso seemed to know less about Jack’s origins than he did, and she certainly never thought about her own. To Calypso, there was only the next heart to seize in her hands, to pry open and look inside. Jack followed her lead because he had no other.
But then, what is a pirate without a treasure to chase, and what is a treasure but something that belongs to someone else?
“A woman. He fell in love.”
“No, no, I heard it was the sea he fell in love with.”
“Same story, different versions. And all are true.”
Sometimes Jack collects a crew. Sometimes Jack collects stories.
Calypso, Barbossa, Gibbs, Bootstrap, vagrants, the whores at Tortuga, countless nameless others before them, in lifetimes long cast away: Jack has passed many hours listening to their tales, their myths, their songs. Sometimes he recognizes them— the stories, never their tellers— as ones he himself played a hand in, once, only now the details have changed, eroded and reshaped by water and time and hands unknown. Sometimes he doesn’t; he prefers those. Sometimes it is too muddling, to be told about yourself, as if you were a stranger.
Bootstrap had the best stories— even better than Gibbs, who only has his superstitions— for Bootstrap’s were true. Good men are hard to find; honest ones might as well be ghost stories. Though, as Jack will come to learn, even the ghost stories have their pound of flesh to pay.
Jack heard of Will Turner long before he ever met him, much like people hear of Jack. He just never expected to meet him.
“People are what they love, Jack,” Beckett tells him, and Jack thinks of all the pirates he has made of good men and good women.
Jack thinks of what he loves. He thinks of what he wants, and how those two are not the same.
He stands on the deck of the Pearl and watches the compass point to Elizabeth, to Will, to the horizon, again, again, again.
Sometimes Jack thinks Calypso gave him the compass just to taunt him. To remind him of all he covets but does not possess. He thinks she hates him because it never once pointed to her. That’d make sense: sometimes he hates himself because the arrow has never pointed in, towards his own heart— though perhaps that is because it is not there.
Jack Sparrow— there should be a Captain in there somewhere, shouldn’t there?— will never know satisfaction. He will never know peace. That is his curse.
Or, as Calypso would have called it, his nature. For even when it looks calm, the ocean is never still. Deep beneath, there is always a roiling riptide of a current, like the blood beneath the blue of his veins.
Would they love him if he was anything but what he is?
They love him, they survive him, they leave him. And then come the stories. And then comes Jack. Round and round it goes, like the tides, like a coin, like a ship through the doorway of life and death. Like a compass.
The compass does not point to whatever you want; it points to what you want most. Which, sometimes, not even you know. It’s part of the game, Jack reasons. Because that is one thing he knows as certain: whoever made him this way— a woman, a god, destiny, the old sea itself— loves a game.
They love him, they survive him, they leave him— and it is up to them to decide if they are victors. What was lost and what was gained. What it is they wanted. To some it is business— Beckett, Davy— to which there are rules, races, finish lines.
To others, the rules are more like guidelines.
Jack opens his eyes to the sun, again, again, again.