Captain, she says, again and again, with the practiced cocksure grin and just the faintest of threats, flickering around the edges of her voice. It is nearly second-nature at this point. It’s Captain.
Her father named her ‘Jacqueline’ after a whore on Santo Domingo he’d particularly enjoyed. Her mother had given her ‘Sparrow’ because there was so little else to give. (A certain softness to the mouth, the texture of her hair, and the laugh that had snared the heart of Captain Edward Teague–this was all her maternal inheritance.) She had chosen ‘Jack’ for herself, because of the way it fit in her mouth, the hard bite of it, how easy it was to shout during a storm. How sweetly it sounded, fitted between ‘Captain’ and ‘Sparrow’.
Drowning in a justaucorps a size too large and a battered coat that she cuffed several times to keep it off her hands, she can pass as a young man. The trinkets help, beads in her hair and a length of cloth tied about her waist, bandolier and head wrap and kohl around her eyes–she is too much to look at, and so no one looks.
She sells her soul to Davy Jones for the ship of her dreaming, and gives all else to Calypso for the skill to sail her. Clever girl, Calypso croons, helping Jack out of her shirt. My witty Jack. (She tastes like the sea, and Jack quite washes the worship of it from her mouth. There’s not enough rum in the world to drown the ocean.)
She hadn’t ever trusted Barbossa. Not really. But he was crooked and cunning and she had liked the idea of him, that she was equal to the grizzled first mate, whose mind she could hear ticking over like some terrible and perverse mechanism.
Her fatal flaw, she explained to the rum runners who saved her from that godforsaken island, was that she was never enough. Nothing was ever enough.
Captain, she says, again and again, with the cocksure grin that is wearing thin at the edges. It’s Captain.
Elizabeth Swan is dangerous. Jack knows this the moment she slices through the strange, drowning girl’s corset, the moment the girl chokes, and Jack can’t look away from the warm rise and fall of her breast, like the sea. Elizabeth Swan is a cursed gold piece given flesh and eyes dark as a starless night, and that voice, that canny little voice in the back of Jack’s head is whispering don’t touch don’t touch don’t touch–
(She might have had tried her hand at Will–he’s very pretty, and the closest thing to a good man she’s met for some time; he looks her as though still deciding if she is brilliant or mad, which is gratifying. But first and foremost, he is the thing Elizabeth Swann wants, and Jack respects a prior claim.)
There was that thing with sending him to Davy Jones as payment of Jack’s debt–which she feels very bad about! She does. Very guilty. Especially when she catches Lizzie looking at her slantwise and heated, when the compass keeps pointing in Jack’s direction and Jack has to pretend she doesn’t notice, doesn’t imagine–
One day, Elizabeth Swann says to her, her mouth near enough to present an immediate and terrible temptation. You won’t be able to resist.
(Jack’s not entirely sure why she still is.)
Elizabeth Swann is dangerous. Elizabeth Swan is a cursed gold piece given flesh and Jack knows this the moment her mouth opens under Jack’s, the moment she presses herself flush against her. That voice, that canny little voice in the back of Jack’s head is screaming don’t touch don’t touch don’t touch–
……………Jack has never been particularly good at listening to that voice.
