Chancing Fate - Jack Sparrow x OC

Part 2 - Chapter 1

The night felt darker than it should have beneath a sky buried in heavy clouds, distant thunder rolling somewhere beyond the Turkish prison while the Black Pearl sat hidden offshore. Most of the crew had already gone below, leaving only a handful of figures scattered across the deck as the ship rocked steadily beneath them and the first signs of the incoming storm gathered along the horizon.

With little else to do while their captain remained ashore, Lena rested against the railing and stared vacantly across the black water. An ever-present worry had settled low in her stomach days ago with little relief, making sleep shallow enough that every time she started drifting off, her thoughts circled back toward Jack before she ever fully settled.

He'd left the crew with only the vaguest idea of his intentions, determined to find something inside the prison without bothering to explain what, and days had passed since then without a word.

Sometimes it was difficult to believe a full year had passed since Lena first ran off and, as Jack liked to put it, turned pirate. She truly had now. The crew trusted her, and somewhere along the way the Pearl had become less a ship she happened to live aboard and more the strange family she considered her own. Time had given her the knowledge to pull her weight, enough practice to hold her own in a swordfight, and more rope burns than she cared to count. Anamaria had been responsible for much of that adjustment whenever Jack couldn't be bothered to teach her properly, eventually becoming one of the few people aboard Lena relied on without hesitation.

That didn't mean she never missed Port Royal. She still missed Elizabeth, especially the quiet moments they used to steal away from expectations neither of them particularly wanted, but that was part of what she'd traded when she chose the Pearl. Jack had been right about one thing from the beginning: this was freedom, and Lena couldn't imagine willingly giving it up now.

Not everything aboard had settled nearly so easily. Her relationship with Jack remained tumultuous at the best of times, especially after months spent trying to force something born aboard a pirate ship into expectations shaped by Port Royal. Jack was difficult to read, naturally flirtatious, and infuriatingly unwilling to fit himself into anything neat enough for Lena to understand. It had taken months and more than one blunt conversation with Anamaria before she finally accepted that whatever existed between them was unlikely to resemble anything she'd once imagined wanting.

Somewhere between arguments, near-disasters, long nights aboard the Pearl, and the quiet familiarity woven so deeply into their daily lives that most of it happened without thought anymore, the lines had blurred beyond sorting cleanly back out. Reaching for Jack had become instinct before thought, to the point that half the time Lena noticed herself moving toward him only after she'd already done it.

Even that had changed lately.

Unsure what else to do, Lena had spoken to Gibbs, but even he couldn't explain what had Jack acting stranger than usual. Whatever the reason, it had brought them to this prison, and after several days without a word or sign from him, the waiting had become nearly unbearable.

Then someone called from the opposite side of the ship.

They'd spotted him.

Lena pushed away from the rail immediately and hurried toward the voice, peering over the side just in time to find Jack sitting in the water below, apparently using a coffin as a boat. Relief hit fast enough that for a second she almost laughed, and within moments the crew had ropes lowered and hands ready to haul him aboard.

Gibbs leaned down to offer him a hand as Jack reached the railing, only to receive a skeleton leg instead.

"Not quite according to plan," Gibbs commented as he looked over his captain.