Cartography
Elizabeth doesn't ask why Jack sold his soul. She's afraid to ask too much about why he did anything thirteen years before she met him, afraid to wake the sleeping anger under the surface of Jack's easy cynicism. She can feel it call to something hot and answering in her, and she's never felt safe with her own anger, even before she had proof of the worst she could do.
Instead she merely traces the lines of the scars on his body and toys with the knots and beads of his hair, as he lies back lazy and pleased with the attention. There's a map here she could follow back to someone he used to be, reading backwards to before each trophy and scar. It's hard to imagine him unmarked and laid bare, and she wonders how far back she'd have to go, if there was ever a time the world wasn't setting its mark on him, body and soul.
Will doesn't have her map to follow to understand Jack, but Elizabeth thinks he may be less afraid of knowing where it leads.
"Was it for a woman?" he asks, leaning on the rail beside Jack watching the Pearl's dark shadow run across the blue water. Elizabeth knows what Will would risk his soul for, what sometimes, sick of piracy and bloodshed, he looks like he's lost it for.
Jack smiles as if they're in the middle of some conversation she never heard them start. "For the sea," he says, leaning out over the rail so the wind can catch his hair. "This is worth selling your soul for." He looks up at the horizon, where the first stars are just standing out against the sky.
"It might be," Will says. His hair is tied back with a scrap of silk from Singapore, and she can see the white line of one of his scars where his shirt is astray and shows his shoulder. She wonders if she'll be with him in thirteen years, if there's any path as tangled as Jack's that they can both follow.
Will traces the lines of her body with his fingers in bed, as if he's learning the balance of her like a sword, the weight of her in his hands. She's no longer perfect, one long scar across her palm and another the length of her arm, her bones too sharp and her fingers too rough.
"Not so lovely anymore," she says, and turns her face away. Sometimes with Will she feels too vividly the distance between who she was and who she is, how far she's drifted into uncharted waters.
"I don't mind your scars," he says, and she hopes it's true. She's turned her back on the road that might have led her home. Instead she turns over under his hands and draws him down, her mouth against his, his body against hers. For a while, the maps don't matter, as long as they can meet here.
Jack doesn't ask why Will stayed on the Pearl . Elizabeth thinks there's no answer he wants to hear, whether it's for Elizabeth or for you or because where else would I go ? Every answer Will could give is too bitter or too sweet, and so he doesn't ask and Will wisely doesn't answer.
Instead he beckons him close to show him the beads tangled in his hair and tell him stories, a girl he knew in Madras once, an alligator he wrestled in the bayous of Nouvelle Orleans. Elizabeth watches as Will fingers the beads in Jack's hair, as Jack opens his shirt to show off his powder burns. Will's fingers brush Jack's skin, and it seems suddenly indecent, as if they're all naked instead of fully clothed on deck in the broad sunlight.
"Don't you want a look, Lizzie?" Jack asks, and though she smiles and shakes her head, she lingers as he poses for them both, showing off the marks on his skin and the glitter of gold in his hair.
"You can read me like a map," he says, as if he's sure that they will both arrive at the place where he wants for them to go.