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1.
The storm takes his ship and his men, while the court-martial takes everything else. He sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night in a small, wooden room, the taste of the salt sea still in his mouth. He waits for the unsteady back and forth of the waves, the creak and moan of his ship, but all he's met with is the reality of dry land, of this dingy boarding room – the salt air is his own sweat, and the floor beneath him is solid, unmoving.
He soon discovers that a bottle of rum remedies the latter, but the only way to take care of the former is to throw yourself into the ocean, one dark night, and not wake up.
2.
He's rescued by a fishing boat, or so they claim. The first thing the men do is take his hat and wig, which he would never have let happen had it not been for the lungful of seawater. The captain of the ship wrings the wig out and plops it on his fat little head, looking like a fool in king's clothing. He tells the captain exactly that when he finally catches his breath.
"That may be so," laughs the captain, "but you're the king who's lost his clothes to a fool."
They have him scrub the deck for three days straight. When they finally spot land, he runs past the captain, grabbing his wig and hat along the way, and dives overboard. He swims the last mile, and it's not until he drags himself onto shore that he realizes he's reached Tortuga.
3.
Tortuga hums under his skin; its streets are rivers of rum. He drinks himself into stupors and gets into fights over absolutely nothing. When he sees Captain Jack Sparrow, one night out of a long string of nights, he thinks that it's a drunken hallucination. It's not until he sees other people noticing and touching him – mostly whores and their painted, garish lips – that he realizes Sparrow is really here.
Naturally he starts a fight. He chases Sparrow, again, like always – except this time, instead of pushing blindly through a hurricane, he's fighting his way through a sea of men. One of them smashes a bottle over his head and he goes down, hard.
(Later he'll find out that it wasn't a man at all. He'll accuse Elizabeth of trying to kill him, she'll claim she was saving his life, and he'll answer that it's funny how alike those two things look. She won't know what to say to that. He'll leave her standing on the deck of the Black Pearl, the sun behind her blinding and absolute.)
4.
They're searching for the heart of Davy Jones, he finds out from Gibbs; Gibbs, who loves to tell stories only slightly more than he loves to drink, slightly less than he loves the open sea.
"Davy Jones," he starts in that lowered voice of his, half full of awe, half full of fear, "could no longer stand the agony of spurned love that he removed his own heart, never to feel again."
He doesn't believe the story for a moment, but it's a nice thought anyway.
What he concerns himself with more are the Letters of Marque that Elizabeth is waving around. He watches them closely; the papers go from her waistband to Sparrow's. She's even dressing like him now. Long hair under a pointed hat. A shirt and vest. Breeches, of all things.
Sparrow leans in to say something. She smiles. They're standing too close, their lips almost touching. He has to look away.
5.
He sleeps below deck with all the other men and is surprised at how familiar this is, how similar to his first few years in the Navy. Hammocks stacked on top of each other, unwashed men, grunts and whispers coming from unknown corners of the room. As long as you don't open your eyes, there's the illusion of privacy.
He dreams that night, of his own empty chest, hollow, cavernous. It fills with seawater and various creatures take up inhabitance within it, between his rib bones, on top of his diaphragm, inside his throat. And where his heart used to be, a starfish, which glows bright for a moment but then burns out.
His heart. Out of the corner of his eye he can see someone standing in the dark, curling their thin fingers around the bloody organ. They have long, dark hair and even darker eyes, lined in black paint.
This is a ritual of some sort. He's being sacrificed, organ by organ, to call up an ancient sea monster with a million arms, a million eyes, a million devoured hearts. The ocean below him rumbles. The animals in his chest swim away in terror. He watches his disembodied heart beat faster and faster as the person holding it steps closer to him. The darkness never leaves their face. He can only see their eyes, their blood-red lips, which touch against his just barely.
He closes his eyes. He doesn't want to see who it is.
6.
It seems all lines lead to this one island. They find the chest. Will Turner appears from nowhere to claim it and his bride. Swords are drawn, and he fights Turner and Sparrow for the key to the heart, while Elizabeth chases after them, scolding them like they're just roughhousing children. Even after all this time she doesn't believe that they're capable of killing each other. She's too apt to see the good in everyone, which was why she saved him on Tortuga, which is why she keeps taking Sparrow's side, time and time again.
Then the monsters come. Amidst the horror and the confusion, he's left alone by the longboat with Sparrow's silly jar of dirt. Only he realizes that it's not silly, or a jar of dirt; it's the heart of the ocean, unguarded and unlocked. He takes it out, the organ black and bloodless but still beating, and to his surprise, still intact. He doesn't know what he was expecting. He'd been told it was a broken heart, but holding it in his own hand, he can't see it. There are no hairline cracks, no fissures. It looks like any other heart, the heart of a man who defeated death, defeated love.
He tucks it into his vest, feels it beat in time with his own.
7.
"Don't wait for me," he says to Elizabeth before sending her away, and means it.