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Many things you were, Davy Jones, but never cruel.
Her words had affected him more deeply than he’d thought anything could. His breath had caught in his throat, his eyes had widened without his permission, and he’d felt something burn somewhere deep inside his supposedly black soul. So that was what she thought.
She thought he was cruel, and delighted in cruelty. She thought he hated, and delighted in hate. She thought he destroyed, and delighted in destruction.
She was wrong. So wrong.
Oh, yes, he hated and destroyed and was cruel. But delight in those things?
He’d never been purposefully cruel, or hated, or destroyed, until the day she’d betrayed him.
He’d eagerly scanned the shore as they approached, fully expecting to see her there in her human form. He hadn’t seen a figure standing on the cliff above the cove where they’d made port, but he’d attributed it to the cold. Looking back on it now, he knew should have known better. Calypso, goddess of the sea, staying in because of the cold? Rubbish. But he’d been young and passionate and oh so foolish, and he’d thought that she’d be there for him. But when he’d burst open the door of the house they’d spent so many happy hours in, she was gone.
Gone.
He’d searched everywhere, entered every shop, interrogated every person he saw, until just before sundown when he knew he couldn’t stay any longer. The ground was beginning to burn him as he stepped aboard the Dutchman. And he had realized that she had purposely hidden herself. She had not meant to be there.
And it had hurt.
It scared him, hurting. He’d never felt pain like this before. It churned and twisted and burned inside of him. He writhed on his bunk at night when no one could see, writhed and wept and begged Calypso to come and save him.
She never did.
Eventually he’d figured it out. The pains in his chest were the throbs of his broken heart.
So he’d steeled himself and cut out the offending organ. He ripped it out of his own chest and threw it in a different one, feeling dejectedly triumphant at having beaten Calypso. She couldn’t make him hide away! She had no power over him now! He was free!
But he wasn’t. If anything, he writhed and wept even more violently.
And it enraged him.
So he had turned to cruelty, to hate, to destruction, as a desperate attempt to hide the pain, to mask it with something else, anything else, so that no one would know. Not Calypso, not his crew, not anyone. He lived alone with his pain, never letting anyone know how much it still hurt. He rejected the task she’d given him and sailed the seas, destroying ships and taking lives at his leisure. He built walls around the heart that he couldn’t get rid of and became a stranger to pain, to heartbreak. He who had once cried bitter tears over a woman now was a heartless wretch.
Sometimes he longed to give in to the pain, to let himself cry, to find Calypso and beg her forgiveness. And then he’d be furious with himself for even thinking of such a thing.
He’d never give in.
He was Davy Jones.