Chapter Text
In the place beyond the edges of all maps, a fallen man opened his eyes to the vast white sky, and sighed.
Without moving from his position, spread-eagled in the bone-coloured sand, he lifted both hands. They were human hands, weathered and sturdy. He sighed again, not out of any particular feeling. It was just a sound for the sake of making a sound to penetrate the deep, deep quiet all around him.
There was a hollowness to Davy Jones as he sat up, shrugging his shoulders to dispel the fine mist of sand that clung to his coat. He was dry for the first time in hundreds of years, rid at last of the seaweed and fish-stink that had clung to his body with the curse, but something was missing inside him. He squinted. Then he remembered, and looked down at the bent blade protruding from his chest.
Once he would have curled his blubbery lips and sneered, full of venom for the ones who had taken everything for him. Sparrow… Turner… but their names were already fading to obscurity inside his mind, and Jones found he didn’t particularly care.
He seized the hilt and tore the blade out of him with a grunt, letting it drop into the sand. Then he stood and looked around at the space that had loomed at the back of his skull for so long it seemed like a memory.
Sand stretched out forever. No shoreline, no horizon. No sun, no clouds, no waves. Just… white. And he didn’t get to choose whether that soothed or unnerved him, because he had no heart.
Instead he narrowed his eyes. There was a dark spot on one of the sweeping mounds of sand far away. He itched, despite the hollowness, to go to it. It would be better to move than to stay still, even if he got nowhere either way.
He began to walk.
His boots filled with sand as he went. “Ach,” Jones spat, relishing the impact his sound made on the silence. But there was no echo; it was gone as soon as it had left his tongue.
Soon– or maybe it had been a thousand years; there was no way to know– he was near enough to the dark spot that he could discern that it was waving its arms. The revelation that it was another person did not have the effect on him that it should have. He shook each foot vigorously, dislodging small floods of sand, and pressed on.
“Over here!” shouted the faraway person. “Can you hear me?”
Jones stopped walking. He knew that voice. Or did he? Yes, he definitely did. It was a voice that made him want to grind his teeth, but how could that be? At surface level, there were no particularly unpleasant qualities to it… and yet, and yet he was certain he hated its owner. Yes, the memory had dislodged at last, worming its way out from the tangle of others dimming fast. When he spoke, his voice was acrid. “Cutler Beckett.”
Beckett stopped waving his arms. “Who are you?”
Jones was near enough now to see the look of confusion on his face. His fine clothing was badly singed, he’d lost his wig, and there was a long shard of wood lodged deep enough in his chest to stick out of his back as well, but he appeared not to have noticed any of these things.
He spat into the sand. “Dinnae ye recognize me, ye blithering idiot?”
“How dare you speak to me in such a manner?” Beckett said irritably. “Either tell me your name or don’t, but I think you’ll agree it’s in both our interests to work together to leave this place.”
Jones tipped his head back, stared wide-eyed into the white sky, and hacked out a series of laughs without feeling anything at all. “Leave? Leave? No one leaves here. I made sure o’ that.”
Beckett took two steps back. “I beg your pardon?”
“Do ye need me to spell it out fer ye? We’re in the Locker,” Jones hissed. “And since ye seem to be having trouble recognizing me, I’m yer old business partner. And I dinnae ken whether I’m glad to see ye ended up where ye deserve, or to curse Calypso that yer stuck here with me!”
A faltering smile appeared on Beckett’s face, making him look slightly deranged. A trickle of dark blood ran down his cheek. “You’re mad, Jones,” he said, as if asserting it would make it so. “You have to be dead to end up in the Locker, and neither of us are.”
Jones ground his teeth. “Really? Look down.”
Beckett’s face drained of the little color it had left when he saw the piece of wood sticking out of him. Another harsh laugh escaped Jones’s throat, scraping on the way out. “Yer as heartless as I am now.”
His eyes were huge. “This can’t be true. I don’t remember any of this. I’m not…” He glared. “You’re lying!”
“If only I ken how it happened meself,” Jones cackled. It was the oddest feeling, doubling over laughing without finding anything even the slightest bit funny. “But ye must’ve died after I did. Pity… I’m sure ye went out with a bang!”
A faint, yet painless, tugging sensation at his shoulder made him straighten up, the sound dying in his throat. A sharp smile curled his lips when he saw the bullet hole. “I didnae ken ye carried arms.”
Beckett’s hand was shaking. It was making the thin trail of smoke emanating from the barrel of his pistol waver in mid-air. “Listen to me,” he demanded.
Jones spread his arms mockingly. “As yer Lordship commands.”
Beckett ignored the jab. “ If you are telling the truth as you claim, then you should know of a way out of this… predicament. Some magical loophole, as it were. It is your Locker, after all.”
His eyes darted around fast. There was a sharpness to them that Jones had seen before. A craving to see everything there was to see, analyze and break it down inch by inch, and then grind it through his own mind until it spat out an output that he could control. But there was a hollowness too.
“Aye, it was.” Jones balled his hands into fists. It was strange not hearing them click like claws. “Not anymore.”
“Well, then, whose is it?”
He wracked his head for the name of the man who’d stabbed his heart and then hacked out his own, but it was gone. The empty space where it should have been bothered him more than the memory would have. “It disnae matter anymore,” he growled. “There’s no way out.”
Beckett’s face did not change as his eyes came to rest on the pistol in front of him. Slowly, he brought it around to the side of his head and pressed the muzzle to his temple. He closed his eyes and let the trigger go.
Jones braced himself for the sound, but there was none. The bullet tore neatly through his head, whizzed out the other side, and vanished somewhere in the white sand. There was not a drop of blood in the channel carved out by its path.
Beckett opened his eyes. “Damn.”
Jones shook his head. “Killing yerself again isnae going to work. And I wouldnae blast any more holes in yerself. This body is the only one ye’ll have for a long time.”
If he was still himself, he might have felt a surge of vindication watching his old adversary sit down hard in the sand and begin to shake as he noticed the dark blood coating his palms for the first time. It would have felt like justice, after all those months in his captivity, seeing him reduced to the Locker’s slave. But there was no feeling in any of this.
Hard, heavy silence hung overhead till Jones felt on the brink of losing what remained of his mind. Then Beckett’s head snapped up. “I think I understand. We’re here as punishment for our crimes, correct? So the way out is to repent.”
He struggled to his feet and thrust out a hand. Stiffly, as if reading from a prepared speech, he announced, “Jones, I am terribly sorry for what I’ve done. Let’s leave the past behind us and be friends now.”
Jones seized his hand, squeezed hard enough to shatter a bone or two, and laughed in his face.
Beckett scowled. “Well, that’s not a very remorseful–”
“Ye think ye can crawl yer way out of here by saying sorry?” He laughed with all his teeth, nearly choking on it, flecks of spittle flying into his beard. “This isnae yer bloody Christian purgatory.”
Beckett ripped his hand away. One of his fingers was bent at the wrong angle. He tried fruitlessly to twist it back into its socket. “I was trying to help us both.”
“Nay, ye were trying to help yerself. I appreciate the effort, though,” Jones chortled.
“So is there a way out or isn’t there?” Beckett looked furious, but his eyes were empty. “I’ll be damned if I’ll listen to you spout these riddles for eternity. Either speak plainly, or… or…”
“Or leave?”
Jones enjoyed watching the sheen of horror slip over his face. “No,” Beckett said quickly.
“Verra well. I’ll speak plainly, then. There’s no way out.”
Beckett was silent for a long time. “I could have sworn there was a loophole,” he muttered. “I heard a story once… why can’t I remember his name?”
Jones shook his head hard, as to dispel water from both his ears. “Yer memories are siphoning away. Soon yer mind will be a blank slate.”
“That’s not true. I still remember…” Beckett started, again, to shake. “No, I don’t. I don’t… what is wrong with me?”
“Calm down.” Jones rolled his eyes up at the endless white. “It isnae as if ye can stop it, can ye?”
“I don’t want to go mad.” He tried, futilely, to scrub some of the drying blood off of his hands, but it wasn’t budging. “I don’t want to go mad. I can’t… I don’t…”
“Speak fer yerself,” Jones growled.
Personally, he was starting to welcome the hazy fade. There were many things inside his own mind that he would rather relinquish to the sea. The sea… he would never see the sea again. The realization pierced him so hard it stole his breath. He fell to his knees in the sand, drawing rattling air through punctured lungs. The sea. The sea…
Beckett was still shaking, trying with increasing desperation to clean his hands. Nothing was working, because there was no water. “Stop it,” he was saying, apparently to himself. “ Stop it… stop it…” but the compulsion had overtaken him, and he was scrubbing his own hands raw with sand, making fresh blood well up over top of the dried crust.
Jones’ vertical axis tilted, and he found himself back where he’d begun, flat on his back in the sand. He could no longer hear Beckett. Maybe he wasn’t there at all, and he had imagined everything. It was becoming increasingly difficult to care. His name, too, was already fading to oblivion. The white sky drew him slowly in, and he fell upward into the unmarred, the unconscious, and the impossibly keen urge to let his eyes slip closed.