Prison of the Mind

Animam Nequeo

The night was dark as the hours crawled past them, the sun hidden beneath the line of trees. The fire of the cabin had long turned into spotty patches of burning ember, casting a dim glow around the rest of the swamp. She would stare at them too long and then see them clouding her vision as she gazed elsewhere.

Some moments, she wished she had never met Jack. She wondered if her life might have been better if she had kept her wits when James proposed to her. The need for Jack to intervene would not have come to pass. He would have never dove into the water to drag her water-logged form to the surface, and he would have never lit a fire within her when he tore her corset off with his rough hands. To this day, she swore that he was not looking at just the medallion around her neck when he had gazed down at her with his chocolate colored eyes.

He had seen something in her, just as she had seen something in him. She knew that there were far more layers to him than what was shown on the surface. Burning anger and rage, sadness and grief, confusion and frustration, and in the deepest recesses of his soul, a layer of tenderness. All of that beneath a mask of whimsical aloofness. To others, he may have seemed like a cowardly fool, caring only about what was best for him. But to her own eyes, she saw an intelligence unlike no other; it was complex and sharp as a blade. There was a darkness in him, swirling and writhing through his veins, and yet she knew that for only a small few, his retribution would be swift were harm ever to come to them.

But what did her eyes tell him when he gazed into them? Did she look like a girl with her head too high in the clouds? Did she look like a pathetic fantasizer?

Dreams of living a life filled with adventure and danger, mirth and mischief, had long since flitted through her mind. She remembered running along the beach just after they had arrived in Port Royal, imagining that she had seen once again the black sails of the great ship she glimpsed on the voyage over. Had someone told her that she would condemn a man she loved to death on the main deck of that ship some years later, she might have fainted from laughing.

Or did she simply look like someone whom he could seduce into his bed before moving onto the common strumpets?

God, how she feared that. Longing for his touch every day and night, especially now that she would almost certainly never experience it. Then, when she finally felt his rough fingers trailing across her skin, dancing across places that set her ablaze, accelerating into a union that would rob her of her sanity, he would tell her that he had gotten all he wanted from her, that he had never had a hope of loving her, and that she was a fool for harboring the hope. She felt it was akin to finally eating the finest honey only to be told that it was poisoned. She realized that she was obsessed with discovering what he felt for her, whether it was love, hate, or anything in-between.

But she would have to put that obsession aside for now. They might have escaped the locker with relative ease, but she knew that the darkness and shadow that she found there now resided in both of them, and would continue to possess them. It was the most painful thing she would ever experience, but there was no denying the great rift between her and Jack. He was too far away from being relieved of his rage towards her, and she was too tired to try and wage war with him with forgiveness being the end goal.

She needed to leave. There was nothing for her here right now. She could slip away in all of the commotion once Beckett arrived. Jack would be occupied with taking the ships and wouldn't notice her. Not that he would care if he did, he was going to force her to leave once they arrived at Tortuga anyways.

Gibbs stood up a few feet away and came to sit next to her. "One would think that you were trying to calculate how long it took for the fire to go out by how hard you are staring at it", he quipped. She offered a small smile.