Exorcism

For a moment, Jack looked thoughtful as if considering his next move, but didn’t speak. Elizabeth eyed him nervously, praying silently for him to stop this and just take her back to the ship, but to her amazement, he reached for his torn shirt and pulled it to the side until a small tattoo became visible, just opposite the bullet scars she remembered having seen on the island.

“Jack, this is …,” she began, but was cut off by his words.

“Tell me, Elizabeth, what’s this?”

“It’s a tattoo – a rather ugly one, if I may say so,” she replied, hardly concealing her annoyance with his puzzling behaviour. “I really don’t know what -”

“Okay, it’s a tattoo,” he interrupted her quickly, bending his head in acknowledgement. “But what does it show?”

“Jack, I am tired of playing these games. If we just could return to the ship, I’d be eternally grateful and -"

“Tell me what you see and we’ll go back to the ship, I promise.”

And when he found her hesitating, he added, “I suppose you have to come a bit closer to see it properly.”

She knew he was daring her and though she was not in the mood for another one of his eccentricities, she couldn’t help but being a little curious, too. He turned his body so she could see the tattoo in the candlelight, sharp black carved into golden skin, and she unconsciously reached out to touch it. Chinese signs, she figured, a word, maybe, or a sentence … a name? She couldn’t tell, but she kept tracing the delicate lines with her fingertips and felt him shiver, but it wasn’t until he drew in a sharp breath that she woke from her trance and jumped away from him, embarrassed and shocked at herself. What had she been thinking?

“It is … it’s …,” she stumbled, turning her face away from him. “It’s Chinese.”

“Yes, it is,” he confirmed and she was grateful he went on as if nothing had happened. “And what does it say?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Well, I do, but I won’t tell you.”

At that, Elizabeth finally dared to look at him again and found he was smiling, not boastfully or menacingly, but in a way that actually made her trust him.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

He blinked and she knew that this was exactly the question he’d expected her to ask.

“It’s nothing more than a reminder of something that happened to me at some point in my rather eventful life,” he replied, choosing his words carefully. “Might have been a stay in an oriental prison, might have been a beautiful wench or the result of several Opium-flavoured nights in Singapore. It doesn’t matter to you, it only matters to me because it is part of my memory and something I have to deal with, not you.“

Elizabeth wanted to say something, wanted to ask why he’d shown her the tattoo if he wasn’t prepared to tell her what it meant, but he unperturbedly went on.

“However, if, one day, I should meet a person who incidentally gets to look at the tattoo and is able to read as well as to understand these words, I and said person might talk about it. The same is true for this one …”

He pulled his sleeve up and revealed a badly healed scar criss-crossing his left forearm, the same scar he’d shown her when he’d told her that there was no truth at all to his legend.

Well, she knew better now.

“I won’t tell you where I got it but if I am to meet someone with a similar one, we might sit together and talk about the pain.”

She looked at him wide-eyed, crushed under a flood of emotions that seemed to wash all over her and somehow, nothing seemed to make sense anymore. It might have been the realization that she had really met a man in those ruins, a man that looked like Jack Sparrow, sometimes talked like Jack Sparrow but wasn’t Jack Sparrow. And she didn’t understand.

“Do you understand now why I told you my story?” His voice was soft now, almost as if talking to a child. “We’re all covered with scars and tattoos, even though in most cases, they’re invisible - which doesn’t mean they’re not as deep and painful as the physical ones. Your scars are still fresh, but you refuse to have them treated because you feel you deserve the pain. And you think they will heal, once you manage to ignore them. But that’s not how it works. Feeling the scars is part of being alive. The moment you choose to live, you agree to a lot of fun - but also to a great deal of pain, and sometimes it might seem as if they don’t come in equal proportions.”

“They don’t,” she burst out. “And if that’s life, I don’t want it.”

“But you see, that’s the thing. You can negotiate with pretty much everyone, but not with life itself. Of course, you can always run and you can always hide, but sooner or later, life will get you. And it will always be what you make of it, the fun and the pain likewise.

We’re all human, at least most of us are, if you don’t count undead pirates and goddesses, but putting that aside, our species has some very unfortunate habits. We tend to kill each other, which, in most cases, results in someone dying. We fall in love at least once, and if it is only with the bottle, we hate, we hold grudges, we fight, we annoy each other – but we just can’t live without life. I tried and I assure you, it has nothing to do with freedom and it doesn’t make things easier. Because running from life only means running from yourself – I have to know, I died for it.”

“No”, Elizabeth interrupted him fiercely. “You died because I killed you!” A storm was raging inside of her, and her heart felt heavy as stone. After he had told her his story, after she had seen proof that every word he’d said was true, she felt relieved and worse than ever at the same time. For how was she to live now with the guilt of having killed him? He might not exactly be what she would have termed a good man, but after all that had happened, she could hardly claim that she was any better than him. And she didn’t want him to shoulder her burden, didn’t want him to take her guilt away … it was her memory, her scar, and she felt she had to suffer from it.

“No worries, I grant you, it was your doing that sent me to the locker. But you should ask yourself if it had been necessary for you to kill me if I hadn’t been running. What if I had faced the consequences of what I’d done? As you said, Davy Jones’ beastie was after me, not the ship, not you … .”

She looked at the tanned skin of his chest, a small line of unscarred territory revealed by his torn shirt, and for a moment, she wished she’d never seen the hidden part. Squeezing her eyes shut, she lifted her head and looked into his face, serious and with a strange kind of wisdom in his eyes she would never have expected him to possess.

“What if I had been honest with you and Will? What if I had not so desperately sought to run from my own mistakes … and from what I should have known I could not fight?”

She stared at him in disbelief, mouth slightly parted, holding her breath.

He could not … would not … would he?

“Would you have killed me anyway, Lizzie?”

She was not sure if he actually expected her to answer his question, but it didn’t matter anyway, for she found she could neither talk nor move.

“You would not. Because you’re better than you think you are. You did what was necessary and when you said you were not sorry, you meant it. I admire you for it, and I’m grateful - I really am. Well, I might not have liked the beastie’s teeth all that much, and the stay in the locker was rather … tiring, but apart from that … I’ve been worse.”

“But … but you’ve been angry with me. You had every right to be. I thought you never forgave me … you said you … you didn’t want my … my …”

“I know exactly what I said. I said I didn’t want your empty apologies. And I still don’t want them. Never wanted them, never needed them. And yes, I’ve been angry with you. Actually, I still am. Look at you. What have you done since you killed me? Have you faced your decision? No! You’ve been running ever since … from the guilt, from me, from yourself. And now you’re wallowing in self-pity, chastening yourself and spending your nights pondering on how hard life has been on you, leaving you with no one but a dirty, rum-soaked pirate. Suddenly you want nothing more than to be Miss Swann again, the governor’s daughter who wears the finest gowns sent over from Paris and bores herself to death at tea-parties held by young ladies who spend their time talking nonsense. Maybe this kind of life wasn’t so bad, after all … now that your little trip into piracy went wrong. Terribly wrong, if I may say so. This is not what you wanted, am I right? You wanted to play the pirate, wanted your taste of freedom, but you didn’t want to pay the price. And then life came and took what it was rightfully entitled to. Poor Lizzie …”

“I do not want your pity!”, she spat, shocked by the brutality of his words. How could he talk to her like that? How could he hurt her in such a way and yet look at her almost tenderly, with an understanding that went beyond everything she had ever found with either Will or her father?

“So you think all I am doing here is honouring you with my pity?” He lifted his eyebrows and stepped away from her. “Do you remember why I brought you here in the first place?”

She stared at him and suddenly realized that she had completely forgotten about the story he had made up to trick her into following him to Port Royal.

“I promised you would meet someone who’d take you to England and I fully intend to stick to my words. I am here and I promise I’ll get you out, even if this means that I’ll have to impersonate a cleric of the Church of England to get into Kingston – I did it once and I swear I’ll do it again! And if there’s no other way, I’ll sail you to London myself, up the river Thames, and drop you at your relative’s front-door.
But before I do that, I want you to know that it’s ridiculous to believe England will change anything about your current state of mind. You might be able to run away, but not for long … as I said, you’ll always bear the marks, visible or not.”

Elizabeth wanted to yell at him, tell him how wrong he was, but her anger had been spent what seemed like hours ago, and what remained was a painful feeling of emptiness. She found she didn’t even have the strength to convince herself that she shouldn’t be listening to him, that he was only trying to irritate her, for it was only too obvious every single one of his words had actually hit the mark.

But even if there was some truth to what he’d said, she felt she needed to defend herself, felt that he was thoroughly right and horribly wrong at the same time, that he understood everything and yet nothing at all.

“I don’t want to return to England,” she began, her voice unsteady and almost pleading. “But what else can I do? You … you’ve always been on your own, I mean, you do have your crew and soon enough, you’ll get your ship back, and there are the girls in Tortuga, and the girls in Singapore … .”

Oh, she’d never have thought it would hurt so much.

“ … you’ll never be alone, you’re used to being chased, after all, you’ve been a pirate for quite some time now. But what about me? Tell me, where am I supposed to go if I stay? Look around you … that’s what’s left of my life. My father, Will – they’re all gone. I’m all alone, so what do you suggest I’d do? Go to Tortuga and get myself a crew?”

Her last sentence was pure sarcasm, and she almost regretted she’d said it, for he looked indeed … well, hurt? He opened his mouth as if to say something, but then, a shadow ghosted over his face and he turned away, the air around him thick with disappointment.

“I see,” he said while he picked up the candelabra. “We should probably return to the ship. It’s gotten late and I have no intention whatsoever to spend the night in a ruin as ruinous as this one, though I have to say that the junk my dear friend Barbossa presented us with is hardly any better. Besides, I would not even dare to hope your father has a decent supply of rum in his wine cellar …”

With that, he swayed out of the room, and for a few seconds, Elizabeth was alone in the dark parlour, left with the dawning awareness that Jack had put his mask back on. He was talking with the familiar slur in his voice, a mere caricature of the soft timbre she now knew it actually possessed, and when she watched him swaggering over the remains of the door, she feared he might fall and set the house on fire.

Part of her despised him for being such a coward, demanding her to face the consequences of her own actions but unable to do the same for himself, still, deep down, she knew that this was exactly the reason he had been so hard on her. She had already started wearing her own mask, and if his was the mask of comedy, hers was its tragic counterpart, both designed to mirror an aspect of life itself and yet hardly more than a device to hide from it.

But it was too late. For both of them. Jack had taken down his mask and she had rejected him, had rejected him like she’d done the day he’d returned to the Pearl when he’d offered her a similar kind of understanding and forgiveness. It was everything she wanted, everything she needed, but she couldn’t take it, much less offer the same to him.

She wondered how he could’ve thought her still capable of it; didn’t he see that it had been her incapability to trust and be trusted that had driven Will to his sinister fate? Everyone who turned to her, everyone who expected something of her was bound to be disappointed in the end. She’d failed as a daughter and as a wife – well, as a fiancée, but the difference was slight - , and whatever Jack expected her to be, she was sure she couldn’t keep up with that, either.

She was fighting back the tears, feeling worse than ever, when she left the parlour and rushed after Jack who had almost reached the passage to the entrance hall. Catching up with him, she wordlessly took the candelabra from him and watched him climb over the debris, before repeating the same action the other way round.

Elizabeth expected him to march straight out of the mansion and back to the ship, but he didn’t seem inclined to do so right away. He strolled across the entrance hall, apparently without purpose, but when he reached the base of the staircase that led up to the first floor, he stopped and looked upstairs, eyeing the steps curiously. They were still intact, even though the railing was missing, but he couldn’t possibly plan on going up there.

Or could he?

She saw him ascending the first step and kicking the second one with his boot as if to ensure it wouldn’t crumble away as soon as he set foot on it. When it actually managed to withstand his assaults, he stepped back down and turned to her.

“Forgot something,” he mumbled, pointing up the staircase. “It’ll only take a minute, be right back.”

And with that, he thrust the candelabra into her hand, took one of the candles and set out to climb the stairs, but Elizabeth managed to grab his sleeve and hold him back.

“Jack, you’re not serious, are you?”

“Why, yes, I think I am.”

“This house is a ruin. I know you tend to ignore the voice of reason, but this is sheer suicide!”

There must have been a considerable amount of panic in her voice, for he seemed on the verge of saying something to reassure her before changing his mind and commenting on the issue in a way that was more appropriate for the roguish pirate he was pretending to be.

“That’s why you’ll be a good girl now and stay here. We don’t want you to break your pretty neck, do we?”

She wanted to go after him, but stayed behind when she saw he’d reached the stairhead without causing major damage to either himself or the building. Resigned, she slumped down until she was sitting on the floor and leaning against the curtail step. Putting her candle down, she buried her face in her hands and closed her eyes, trying to block out the voice in her head that was yelling at her, telling her how stupid she’d just been.

For whatever he’d offered her, she knew it would have been an act of exorcism.