Pirates of the Carribean
Heat Sickness
E.L. Weil

Pairing: No pairing. Just Jack. Mmmm. Jack...

~~~

At first, he had felt nothing. Just a calm void of nothingness – his limbs were weighed down and sluggish, but that was okay, because it felt like he was floating in water. Cold, calm water; it rocked him gently, and he swayed in its lingering embrace. He thought he recognized the sensation. When he was a boy, just when his childish illusions had been shattered by reality, he had once stepped into the silent waters of a lagoon and thought to himself: This is what peace is like. That had been one of his earliest memories, of standing hip deep in the crystalline waters and hoping that his mother’s ‘rest in peace’ was something similar.

He learned soon afterward that life was rarely so tranquil, and few had the time to appreciate it. And when that tranquility was torn away...

Refusing to continue down that line of thought was what brought sensation back to him. His limbs were not weighed down with water, but rather blankets; they seemed unbearably harsh against his suddenly sensitive skin, and when he shifted to relieve the pain he immediately regretted it. Pain shot through stiff muscles, activating a chain of aches that revealed themselves to his sleep-fogged mind, quickly building a headache from too much information.

“He’s waking up.”

He who? he wanted to ask, but all he heard was a low groan. Was that him? The muscles in his tongue and throat didn’t want to work in his suddenly dry mouth. A disjointed jumble of questions tumbled through his mind, begging to be answered but unable to be asked.

“Well. I didn’t ‘spect ‘im t’live.”

A different voice. A different person.

“He may well not. Who knows how long he was on that island before we showed up?”

Three days, his mind whispered amongst the screaming questions, and for a moment he was assaulted with a deep, terrible, unquenchable thirst – it suddenly turned his already dry mouth into a desert. Like he had seen once, a thousand years ago it seemed, on the other side of the world. He remembered looking at the undulating dunes of sand and thinking: How like the sea this is. Stretching out as far as the eye could see, with that same unreachable horizon, burning the eyes with its glare, tantalizing in its own mysterious way. And, like the sea, so dry to human consumption.

“Thank god it wasn’t too long a time. ‘e mighta drunk the whole cache in justa few more days.”

“Lot of good the rum did him. It only dehydrated him worse. See? He’s still not sweating. That’s a bad sign.”

Something pressed against his forehead, and instinctively he tried to shrink away from it. His headache intervened, however, jolting pain down his spine and briefly brightening the blackness behind his eyelids. He wasn’t able to make any noise of pain until the pressure in his skull lowered to a more bearable level.

The touch to his forehead vanished, and he realized then that it had been someone’s hand.

“’e’s yer responsibility, then. We shoulda left ‘is bones ta bleach back on that spit – good incentive ta keep anyone from comin’ ashore an’ findin’ our cache.”

“Let me tend to my job, Captain, and you tend to your own. There’s no need to step on any toes.”

Captain. The word dropped like a lead weight through his mind, sending ripples through his memories and causing unrelated thoughts and sensations to surge to the shores of his consciousness. Hot, hot sun; rough weave of hemp around his waist and arms, the smooth mast to his back; anger and humiliation, too interwoven with one another to separate; suffocation, sinking, arms tied behind him as he struggled to keep his head above the water; stars swirling in the night sky, twirling, spinning, sitting still in an ocean of stars...

It was too much to process. With a great effort he opened his eyes, willing away the image of dancing blue eyes.

“He’s awake?”

Two figures hovered over him, but he could only make them out as dark blurs against an even darker background. Nothing came into focus, and his eyes burnt with the effort of keeping them open.

“What’s yer name, sailor?”

He parted his lips, the memory of a cocky rejoinder moving his tongue, but no words came. A name – his­ name, that’s what had been asked, but no names came to his mind.

No. One name sprung to his mind, tasting bitter and hollow on his tongue as he spoke it.

“Barbossa...”

And then he closed his eyes, no longer able to keep them open. It was not sleep that claimed him then, but a waking nightmare – and unaware of the activities of the ship that rescued him, Jack Sparrow dreamt of a desert in his throat and of dancing, mocking blue eyes.

~end

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