Work Text:
Sunlight filtered in as he clawed against the remnants of murky unconsciousness, and with it the long-forgotten sound of liquid sloshing around in a bottle.
“Will, love,” Jack coaxed, trying to press a half-empty bottle of rum into his hand. “Drink something.”
Because rum fixes everything, Will mused with a bitter taste in his mouth, but he bit his tongue because he didn’t want to see the pity and trepidation on Jack’s face deepen. Jack was only trying to help, in his own way, and Will didn’t think he could bear to send him away either, for his own selfish reasons of not wanting to be alone.
And gazing up at him discreetly, Will noted how lost Jack looked, like he was trying to fix Will but knowing that none of it was doing any good. And why should it? How could Will go back to who he was after everything that had happened?
He scratched at his face and neck fervently, amazed at not finding wretched tokens of the sea burrowed there. He hadn’t believed Elizabeth when she had ecstatically told him that the curse of the Dutchmen was broken, that his crew had been released from their servitude to him and he released from the sea. And he hadn’t believed Jack’s devotion when he had welcomed him aboard the Pearl with Will barely standing, hardly a man anymore. He hadn’t trusted that the Jack who practically carried him over the threshold with a fierce determination in his gaze and set him up in his cabin could exist.
Will never thought he’d see Jack Sparrow again, let alone Elizabeth and Jack both on the same ship, barricaded up in the same room, not bickering or finding ways to kill each other or making some sort of deal or…
But then again Will was tired and he slept more than anything else, rising up out of consciousness occasionally to see just Jack or just Elizabeth or the both of them, someone always there, holding a cool cloth to his brow or feeding him some god awful broth or just talking, plotting a course for somewhere.
Will was never a part of it, couldn’t be, couldn’t pull himself together enough to listen much, let alone string their spoken, shared words together into actual coherent sentences. He might have laid there waiting to die without the thinking about the dying part, given he thought of nothing. He drifted on a burning sea, sometimes roiling unceasingly and sometimes languid and as quiet as the dead. He drifted and waited for something or someone to snap him out of it. Will didn’t want to think about Jack or Elizabeth, about what he was doing to them and what had happened to bring him to here.
He didn’t want to think about anything at all, it hurt too much.
And his body hurt plenty.
His fever raged whether it was day or night, not that he could distinguish one from the other. His limbs ached and trembled, overused though not allowing him peace even when they needed rest. And through some long hours he felt as if his body were repairing itself from within, that he was becoming human once more slowly and painfully enough that it just might kill him.
Some nights it was Elizabeth’s soft, beautiful voice that mercifully lulled him to sleep away from the encroaching fear and insurmountable mental and physical agony, a voice that had belonged to his dreams since he was a small boy. And yet other times it was Jack’s ludicrous, drunken ramblings and even pervasively loud snores that convinced him that he was where he should be.
Not alone. Not at the bottom of the ocean.
Not somewhere where Jack and Elizabeth couldn’t reach him with their insistent hands and voices slowly filtered down as if through some tunnel until they were nearly unrecognizable.
In some moments of lucidity, Will wanted to go back to the Dutchman, to the ship and the crew that had become his reluctant, cursed home. Sometimes he wanted to beg for it, probably did beg for it because it was all he knew. He didn’t know Jack or Elizabeth or anyone else on the Pearl anymore.
He wasn’t that Will Turner anymore.
But in one moment, drowning of thirst and hunger, limbs seizing, soul reaching out to something or someone before the verge of blacking out became reality, Elizabeth reminding him to breathe and Jack’s panicked voice saying words he couldn’t make out, Will wanted nothing more than to go back to them, even into a world he had to familiarize himself with again. Elizabeth and Jack wouldn’t let him go, not without a fight, and what kind of man was he if he let down the people he loved?
So the next time he woke he was much more lucid, forced himself to concentrate, to stare at Jack when he spoke and smile at Elizabeth when she rewarded him with one of her own, however small, fearful or concerned they were. He ate what little he could that they offered him and listened to them bicker now that they were less worried about him, though still had to find something to do and primarily someone to take out their frustrations on.
And here Will was now, days later, staring into the bottle without really seeing it, wondering whether to just go back under again.
Jack retreated, just a step, and Will was torn between telling him to leave and pulling him closer. Neither of them would do him any good, in the end.
Elizabeth was next, never far away, bringing in a platter piled high with enough food for the three of them. Will’s stomach roiled and he turned his head away. He hadn’t needed to eat, couldn’t remember how food tasted, didn’t really want to remember. Since his return there had been a few bites here and there, without really tasting anything, but they were pushing him now. It couldn’t be like this forever. He had to feed his body what it now needed, had to take care of himself because he was human again and he couldn’t go back . Will knew he was withering away like this, not eating, not drinking, not even really sleeping much anymore, but he couldn’t bring himself to care, didn’t want to be human and feel sick and empty and broken like this.
He also made himself painfully aware that Jack and Elizabeth had never given up hope of bringing him back, of making him human again so the three of them could be on the open seas in Jack’s beloved Pearl, content as pirates for the rest of their days. Before all that came to pass, he knew that they would take care of him without him even needing to ask for it, so why worry about taking care of himself? Why try?
He just hadn’t expected Jack to be as pushy and persistent as he’d been since he’d gotten Will onto the Black Pearl and specifically into his cabin. And Elizabeth returning to the Pearl and seemingly reconciling with Jack, when Will knew she’d vowed never to return to that life, let’s just say that Will was both terrified at the idea of Jack and Elizabeth together and also unsure just where he fit in.
Suddenly uncomfortable, Will recoiled further from Jack and wrapped an arm around his cramping stomach. He intentionally avoided Elizabeth’s eyes. He didn’t want either of them to read him, to see his insecurity and pity him for it, to try to fix him.
Elizabeth paid no mind to his wanting to be left alone, flopping down beside him on the bed. Jack took a chair in the corner, the closest to the door, eyes wary and worried. It was Will who had made Jack into this, into this man who fretted and fussed and pushed just a little bit more each time.
Suddenly, Will was even more ashamed of himself and of what he was doing to them, but he still couldn’t stop.
“Enough, Will,” Elizabeth cut through his shame quickly and coldly. “Eat and drink and rest and you’ll be fine. It’ll be another rough few days but you’ll get through them. If anyone can, you can.” Will glanced up at Jack for a moment for confirmation, but Elizabeth’s trail of soft kisses starting at the base of his neck and ending near his elbow broke his attention. “Eat, Will,” her voice was softer now, as it always was in Will’s dreams. “Come back to us.”
Will ate and slept and dreamt. He dreamed that he could possibly be worthy enough for the both of them.
Will woke suddenly, eyes burning, stomach piteously growling and the aches and pains of his body more pronounced.
He made out familiar dreadlocks in the near dark, settled on his side only to meet two piercing black eyes next. “Jack?”
“Shh.” Jack motioned to someone behind Will and Will turned slightly, smiled upon seeing Elizabeth fast asleep, pressed up tightly to his back. He faced Jack again, who lit a candle and gazed at Will with an expression he couldn’t fathom. “I’ve always loved Elizabeth, mate, what man wouldn’t?” Will seethed inside at that, heart a throbbing mess, throat closing up despite the urge to be sick. Jack pushed on but Will knew he wasn’t oblivious to his anger, to the acrid taste of betrayal. “I couldn’t see to taking her as a wife, per se, but any man would want her as a prize.” Will opened his mouth to rebuke that, Elizabeth was her own woman and was no prize, or at least that wasn’t all she was, but the second Jack’s fingers brushed against his cheek, gentle and blessedly cool and lingering, the words melted into his tongue and he lost all thought for a moment. “You see, William, this doesn’t have to be a choice. I don’t have to make a choice. Elizabeth quite refuses to make a choice. You don’t have to make a choice, savvy?”
A beat, a long, daunting beat and after an age Will exhaled, sinking further back into Elizabeth, hand shaking and clumsily grasping Jack’s as it passed across his cheek again.
“The heart can love more than one,” Will breathed. He exhaled again, feeling his muddled thoughts start to come together. His body was still nowhere near healed, but maybe his mind was recovering its sanity bit and bit. Just maybe he could slough off the jealousy and uncertainty and rage.
Jack smiled at him, sharp and sure in the dark, and pressed a bottle to Will’s cracked lips for the tenth time in the last day, at least. “Drink. For the love of all that is…” The rum met his throat like fire but it more than prepared him for Jack, whose soft mouth chased that raging fire away and replaced it with an eternal light and a firm promise, that Will would never have to be alone again, that he had a home here on the Pearl, finally with Elizabeth and yes, he’d take Jack too without arguments or second guessing.
“You see, Will,” Elizabeth whispered behind him, hands massaging his shoulders. “I could never stop loving you.” She sat up then, stealing the rum and taking a long swig before lounging back against the pillows. Her voice turned harder, preening and more self-absorbed. “I just had to wait for the both of you to get your heads out of your asses so you could realize that. A woman doesn’t have to choose. She can have any and every man she wants.”
“Spoken like a true woman,” Jack praised, toasting her with an imaginary bottle.
Will promptly turned over onto his back, tiredly but contentedly watching the two of them fight over the rum, Jack’s arguments almost justifiable but Elizabeth’s inane ones always the ones he’d choose. After all, if he had to side with one over the other it would have to be Elizabeth every time: unpredictable and a force to be reckoned with.
And he could see now that Jack loved her, that he wanted to share the Pearl with her, but only because he had come to know Jack so well and never forgot.
Had come to love Jack so much and was only now just remembering.
It would be a heavy, treacherous sea that they would travel and a brutally slow and uncertain road of recovery for Will, but at least it was one sea and one road that they would travel together.
“Why is all the rum gone!?” Jack shouted in outrage the following morning.
Will snorted, properly positioned himself to use Jack’s chest as a pillow, and caught Elizabeth’s guarded smile as she pushed a grape between Will’s parched lips.
For the three of them, there would always be copious amounts of rum, an endless ocean and dangerous but glorious pirating.
The three of them against the world.
FIN