Chancing Fate - Jack Sparrow x OC

Part 3 - Chapter 6

A/N: Updated

Journal - August 1?, 1729

I am beginning to suspect the map is useless. It got us into the Locker well enough, which I suppose deserves some acknowledgment, but since then it has offered remarkably little guidance on how we're actually meant to leave again. Perhaps there's another map we're supposed to find first. If there is, I sincerely hope it comes with instructions because we are all very clearly missing something.

At the moment, starvation still seems the more likely answer.

The supplies continue disappearing much faster than the horizon, which insists on looking exactly the same no matter how many hours we spend sailing toward it. If this keeps up, we'll probably stop worrying about the map altogether. There is always comfort in having one's problems simplified.

Lizzy and I finally had the conversation we'd both been avoiding yesterday, and I still don't quite know what to do with any of it.

For months I thought I understood exactly what happened that day. Now I know I didn't, except somehow the truth hasn't replaced everything I spent those months believing. It simply sits beside it, and every time I think I've managed to settle one version of that day in my mind, the other quietly works its way back in again. I have a feeling that won't untangle itself overnight.

Even after sleeping on it, what I can't seem to stop thinking about isn't anything Lizzy said.

It's something I said.

I hadn't meant to say those words aloud, and perhaps that's why I still can't seem to stop hearing them. Not because I wish I could take them back, because I don't think I can, but because I don't think I'd ever really stopped to ask myself where they came from until they were already out in the open.

It had only been a year.

Somehow that feels impossible now. I keep trying to understand how one year could leave such an enormous hole behind, and every answer I come up with somehow leads me back to Jack. Not because he demanded every part of my life, but because somewhere along the way he simply became part of all of it. One day blurred into the next until another voyage, another ridiculous plan, another argument, another quiet evening in the cabin had all become perfectly ordinary, and I never stopped to notice just how much of my ordinary life quietly included him.

Perhaps that's why those months felt so impossible. I wasn't only grieving Jack. I was grieving the life we'd built without either of us ever really meaning to build it, and I think that's what finally frightens me about those words. Not that I said them, but that hearing them aloud forced me to realize how completely I'd lost myself when everything we'd quietly made together disappeared all at once.

Perhaps I haven't been able to stop thinking about them because they forced me to admit something else I hadn't really noticed while I was living through those months. Somewhere along the way I taught myself not to look anymore, or at least I tried to. There never seemed much point in searching for someone I already knew wasn't there, and after enough mornings I honestly thought I'd broken myself of the habit.

The trouble was that every now and then I'd catch myself doing it anyway. I'd come up on deck, my eyes would drift toward the helm before I'd even realized what they were doing, and by then I'd already prepared myself for exactly what I expected to find. It wasn't even the Pearl most of the time, which somehow never seemed to matter. Whatever ship we happened to be aboard, whatever port we'd reached, some stubborn little part of me still looked first and then quietly accepted the same disappointment all over again.