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Footsteps vanish in the tide as it sweeps across the sand. The evidence of his existence is held for only a moment and then gone. No matter how he treads the shore line, the sand is unforgiving, filling the gaps as if he was never there at all.
Jack was fifteen and he was filled with a gnawing need to be known.
It was the folly of youth. The burning desire that swore the candle was already near its end even when it had only begun to burn. Rational thought had no place in the body of a teen whose blood hummed with salt and sea water. He was as much a creature of the ocean as the mermaids he befriended as a child. Jack knew it. He could taste it as much as he could taste the sweetness of rum.
He was nearing the age where he could go to sea. Nearing that fine point where he could make a choice of who he wanted to be.
On the cusp of the legends he longed to be a part of.
But tonight… tonight it was not the sea herself that called him to the beach. Tonight, he watched the great white sails of a monstrous ship as she sat in the deep waters beyond the reef. A single light danced on the waves. A man rowed to shore with only a lantern to guide his way.
Jack’s heart thundered against his ribs.
The man who stepped into the surf was dressed in black and white. The monochrome uniform suited him well. His black hair, his black eyes, his skin that glowed in the moonlight – paler than his own, but just as warm…
“Sparrow.” A deep voice, distinct and threaded with an accent he’d come to love.
Love.
Love.
Dangerous word, that. Jack shoved it down. He buried it in his heart, locked it in a chest, and swallowed the key.
“Capitán.” His voice broke. He’d call it age, but he knew it was the nerves.
Familiar hands cradled his face. The bloodied hands of a monster, the rough hands of a butcher, the man responsible for a war against piracy… How Jack could hold affection for them, could feel so safe within them, he didn’t fully know. It started in a tavern. It started with too much rum. And now, he was here. Now, he was held like a treasure by a man who swore against all such vice…
What need for words did they have? Standing on the edge of possibility, of choice, of endless destinies, Armando Salazar kissed him with all the lure of a siren.
It was a surrender to kiss him back. Jack collapsed into the kiss, fingers fisting into that dreaded uniform. There would be bruises tomorrow. From hands, from lips, from the fall. A tumble into wet sand, with the lick of the sea against their legs.
Armando undressed him slowly. A loose shirt tugged over his head, the ties of pants a size too large for his lithe frame, the winding fabric in bright colors that whispered a truth they desperately ignored. The clothes fell to the side, forgotten objects to be found later when he had to cover the marks of tonight.
Not now, though.
First there were hands on his body. Large, rough, dangerous hands that trailed so tenderly across his ribs. They stopped to tease at brown nipples, plucking and rolling until they were stiff and sensitive. A warm tongue soothed the ache that settled in them, coaxing until the sparks caught the tinder in his veins.
Jack’s fingers weren’t idle. Quick as thieves, they sank into black hair to tug the strands from their tie. He wanted the man beneath the uniform. He wanted to explore the flesh of the monster. He wanted to map how human they both were in the lines of his muscles, in the trail of his sweat, in the taste of salt on his skin…
Armando allowed Jack to push him down, to settle astride his lap, to kiss his way down the cords of his neck.
There was no need for oil. Jack had readied himself for this night, for this chance, for the choice he would make at dawn. He didn’t want to waste time. He didn’t want to risk seconds they may never have again…
“Sparrow, mi corazon, mi vida…” Armando’s words were too much for Jack.
He kissed the man again to swallow back the sob threatening to break in his chest. Emotions ran too high. He sank down on Armando’s cock and willed himself to forget. The stretch, the burn, the hint of pain. It reminded him that this was real. It seared into his flesh that Armando was there and the choices remained fluid.
When his thighs quivered too much to continue, Armando rolled them over to violently thrust into him. Sounds were punched from his chest, refusing him space to hide. Armando refused him that quarter.
He clawed at the sand, wishing the marks would be scored there forever. Jack wished the same for the bruises on his hips and the red lines he clawed into Armando’s back.
Evidence that they were alive. Evidence that this moment was real.
Evidence that Armando loved him once…
The tears came despite his efforts, but they were disguised by the rush of pleasure. Let Armando remember him like that. Let him remember him in passion, in heat, in the bliss of completion.
It snuck up on them both. Bright as a star, brilliant and golden and perfect…
Jack lost count of the moments. Armando took him over and over. An insatiable lust, the desires of a beast that in some way knew the end was near. Jack was certain of that. Why else would Armando work so desperately to carve himself into Jack’s body?
He was fifteen and he was on the cusp of something… He could taste it on the wind even as he buried his face in Armando’s shoulder and begged for the man to never stop.
The pleasure blurred towards pain with orgasm after orgasm, but he didn’t care. Not until the abyss swallowed them both. The collapse, the wavering, the deep sleep…
His footsteps lingered in the morning. A path cut in dry sand, a few fallen fragments of their hurried night lost in his wake. Jack left his desires etched in the body of Armando Salazar. It seemed his heart would beat even if it was broken.
With the morning sun, Jack boarded the Wicked Wench and Armando would row alone back to the Silent Mary…
If fate was kind, she’d never cross their paths again.
***
Fate was never kind.
Armando cursed it. He resented it, demanded his payment in blood for the longing it settled in his bones. He became a shark. Not a butcher who shed blood but a shark who hunted for even a drop from the one who had stolen his heart and dared to slip away.
The Wicked Wench was fast, but his hunt lured her in. Her captain could not ignore his fellow pirates being hunted to extinction. Perhaps Jack also could not bear the carnage wrought for his choice. Armando supposed it didn’t really matter. He hunted the Sparrow… and now he had him cornered in the smoke that settled thick in the air.
Jack’s voice, still cracking on adulthood, still wavering on the cusp of something greater than himself, cut the air like cannon fire.
Taunting, mocking, cruel words that should bruise his already battered heart… But Armando swore he could hear sorrow in that cherished voice. He raised his glass, he watched that boy pirate who haunted his dreams, and he gave the order to follow.
But Jack was not a bird he could cage.
In a single moment, as their ships passed each other and their choices turned to ash, Armando saw what he had always wanted from Jack… Love. Painted in eyes that watched his death, held in the body of a boy caught between childhood and adulthood, scarred across a heart that would forever beat in broken halves…
Armando doomed his men, he doomed himself, and yet he could not help smiling even as his ship was engulphed in flames.
Fate was cruel. She bound them there, as if to punish him for ruining the gift she gave him. His ghost haunted the jagged pass, frozen in that dark place. The only solace was a ship that sometimes sat in the deep waters, black sails billowing, and a single lantern held in the hands of a boy who became a man but never quite moved on.
And when that ship stopped coming, Armando was forced to accept that the Sparrow had died somewhere far from his arms…
***
Jack hated the compass sometimes. She also pointed him to the thing he wanted most, even when she knew he couldn’t have it. Their adventures were plenty and yet she still pointed him to that lonely spot in the sea where his heart died.
How could he have ever confessed that his only consideration for becoming the new ferryman was to free the one person he longed for more than anything? And how could he face that same man when he’d given up his chance to save a friend…
Staring at Armando on that beach, seeing what his lover had become, Jack mourned all the different choices that might have been made.
“Do you remember me?” Armando asked, cruel and angry and cold…
A sob broke in his chest. Let the others think what they would. That he was afraid, that he was a coward, that he was a lost cause… “How could I forget?”
“Sparrow.”
“…Capitán.”
An echo thirty years in the making. A whisper of a past, a memory, a long list of what could have been… There they stood again. The boy and the butcher. The pirate and the hunter. But maybe it was different now. Maybe they were both monsters. Maybe this is where Death had always been luring him.
Everything that anyone ever knew about Jack Sparrow – the one constant amongst the lessons – is that there was no one better at fleeing.
But the legends were wrong. Jack faced plenty of things head on… Hector, the Kraken, Beckett. The only thing he’d ever truly run from was this ghost. Armando Salazar. The person who held the other half of his heart. He almost wanted to laugh at the irony. Davy Jones saw himself in Will Turner but if he looked a little deeper, he would have found the exact same wounds on Jack. The scars of a love that was too big for either of them to contain.
It reverberated across time until it brought them back to this same space.
His friends shouted behind them. Armando’s men watched in silent acceptance.
A choice.
A choice.
A choice.
Jack stumbled forward and was caught in arms suddenly warm with life.
The spell that held them for three decades shattered with a single touch. To be recognized was to be loved. Jack was a bird with tired wings and Armando wasn’t a cage to escape but a nest to rest within…
“It wouldn’t have worked out, back then.” Jack whispered when it was over. When the hunt ended, when the truths were spilled. Hector’s daughter, the broken curse of William Turner, the love of Carina and Henry and Will and Elizabeth and… And them.
“It wouldn’t have.” Armando agreed when the strange amalgamation of the Pearl and the Mary went quiet with sleep. “I realized it too late, when I was too bitter…”
“I knew it before I stepped onto the beach. I could have…” Could have run then, could have spared them that final night.
“Fate cursed us. We would have been on this path no matter our choices. You were what you would always be, Sparrow.” Assurance tasted like brandy and tobacco when Armando kissed him.
“Pirates aren’t what they once were.” Jack whispered.
And he was never cut out for that life anyway. He was an adventurer, a thrill seeker, a mystery solver… He wanted to touch magic. He wanted to peer beyond the veil. He wanted to see all there was and keep those secrets inside him. Beckett could never understand that. Hector loathed what he saw as foolish idealism.
“Nothing but you exists for me.” Armando admitted. The world moved on without him, what meaning was there to being alive again if not to sail beside his wild little bird. “Where you choose to wander, so we will come with you.”
A second chance.
Jack wasn’t fifteen anymore. He was forty-something and his bones were beginning to ache. But maybe there were a few more journeys left in him. He smiled, wrapped his arms around Armando’s shoulders, and drew his lover close. “There’s several oceans to show you, capitán.”
When kissed Armando this time, he drew the man down onto the bed. Their clothes were shed, the skin of pasts they no longer had to hide. Bare and real, Armando traced the marks of Jack’s life. Each year brought them closer together without either of them knowing. Scars, tattoos, decades. Now they were bound together, inseparable, undefeatable.
Armando’s hands mapped his body, tracing the years as he drowned Jack in pleasure. He had decades to make up for. Jack carded his fingers through Armando’s hair, pulling the strands free of their bonds.
They made love. Honest and real, unafraid. And Jack cried this time with all the relief and all the pain he’d swallowed over the years. That chest he buried his feelings in long ago broke open. He didn’t care anymore if the world knew him. Someone who knew he lived held him tight. They left bruises on each other’s skin, marks of affection, and when Jack fell asleep, he didn’t worry about vanishing…
Because he was already exactly where he was meant to be.
At sea.
At home.
At peace.
In love.