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Calypso tells him once that the dead are dead not because they’ve died, but because they are at peace. That if you die and you aren’t at peace, you aren’t really dead then, are you?
Then, it stands to reason, if you aren’t at peace, you can come back. You just need someone who cares enough to go fetch you. To cast you a line.
The trouble is— the trouble they don’t warn him of, not Calypso, not Teague, not Davy, not the elusive one who made Jack this way in the first place— is that when you’ve been alive for this long, do you even care to come back?
Barbossa gives Jack a pistol with a single bullet and deserts him on an island, despite knowing perfectly well that neither will kill him.
The worst thing about a mutiny is how long it takes. Jack sits in the brig of his own damn ship for three days before his traitorous crew finds an island Barbossa deems suitable for Jack’s personal hell, tucked away in a corner of the ocean no one in their right mind would ever visit.
The night before they desert him, Barbossa comes calling, crouching down to meet Jack’s glare through the steel bars of his cell. There’s no trace of remorse in those watery blue eyes, their color not unlike the sky but certainly unlike the sea. There’s no love lost in them, no regret, whereas the water Jack was raised on is all love, all regret.
Jack’s not a sentimental man by nature, but he tends to inspire sentimentality. And not just in people— because he knows he’ll get his crew back one day, one by one if needs must— but in things, too: his own hat found its way back to him across an ocean, after all. But he wonders if Hector Barbossa is the first man to have loved Jack Sparrow and then let him go. Peeled from his skin like a sunburn. Plucked from his mouth like a rotting tooth.
Barbossa, the only man Jack has ever willingly given his secret to— not that he meant to make it a secret, mind, it’s just you don’t go spouting off words like immortality if you want people to follow you— at least not until you’ve got them on board, leagues away from shore, and even then, well. Jack’s in a brig, isn’t he? He certainly didn’t lock himself in here.
But Barbossa he told. He wanted Barbossa to know. Barbossa, years ago, not yet undead himself, still just Hector and so much younger as he stood elbow to elbow with Jack on a ship neither of them captained. The stars above them, the sugar-glass sea beneath prone to shatter if one of them were to merely spit. Jack’s secret a whisper on the winds between them.
Maybe Jack told him because he knew out of everyone, Barbossa would believe him. Barbossa wouldn’t mock him or declare him insane and shove him overboard— not yet. Because Barbossa had that look in his eye, the one Jack used to have, before the years and the salt water and the sand eroded it, chipped away at it like waves at a bluff until it was just a poor, warped reflection of the light within those he traveled with, those he plundered, those he drove his sword into the bellies of.
He wanted to keep looking at Barbossa, if only to steal some of that precious, precarious fire back. To remember the warmth of it. Of living.
The Barbossa crouched in front of his cell now still has that look in his eye, that gleam like the dazzle of a gold coin, but there’s a manic edge to it now. Not passion, not thrill, but fear. If the brig didn’t already reek, Jack’s sure he could even smell it, seeping through the fabric of Jack’s stolen captain’s coat stretched too snug around Barbossa’s shoulders.
“Don’t worry, Jack,” Barbossa croons through the bars. “It’s not the end of the world.” He smiles, yellow teeth bright in the dim light. “Yet.”
“I can’t give it to you,” Jack swears. “Even if I wanted to, I don’t know how anymore.” If he knew how to keep something, someone, by his side as he sails into the gaping maw of eternity, don’t you think he would have done it by now?
“Then I won’t be needing you while I go looking, hm?”
And then Barbossa leaves, and the next time Jack sees him he’ll be back on the Pearl, years and years and years later, still not dead.
Because Barbossa, like Davy, like all good pirates, is a creature of envy, wanting that which does not belong to him. Where Davy wanted love— endless, undying love— Barbossa just wants the endless. The undying.
Jack’s never really been afraid, and he’s never been very envious, either, which is why he, all truth be told, isn’t a very good pirate.
He doesn’t know what it makes him, really.
“Time cannot be recovered once lost,” Calypso tells him once, and he finds himself repeating it over the years and in the locker, to himself and to, well, himselves. They say if you repeat a word enough times, eventually it loses its meaning. He’s hoping the opposite is true, that up really is down: that if he says it enough, eventually he’ll find the truth in it.
That maybe that loss is the promise, not the threat. That maybe there is such a thing as too much time. And maybe one day he’ll run out.
The tides lick at the bloated corpse of the kraken, and Jack stares into the eye of the thing that once hunted him. Once caught him.
"Still thinking of running, Jack?” Barbossa, not dead yet again, asks from behind him. “Think you can outrun the world?”
There’s a reason everyone wants the Pearl. She’s the lithe, dark shadow cutting through the fiercest of waves. She’s the fastest ship on the seven seas and the ones unmapped beyond, the only ship who can stay a league ahead of the Dutchman no matter the beating of the winds through her torn sails.
Everyone wants her because it doesn’t matter who they are, or how long they’ve lived: they’re all running from death.
“You know, the problem with being the last of anything, is by and by there'll be none left at all," Barbossa says, and Jack hears the question, unspoken: Why should you alone get to live forever?
But Jack doesn’t really want to be the last, as glamorous as the title sounds. Because he’s wondered, of course he has, what end there is to this cursed gift of his. If he’ll outlast them all, outlast his crew, outlast the land and the sea itself until all its creatures big and small are beached and rotting on the shores and the whole planet is a graveyard. Until it’s just him.
Is eternity something you must always stare down alone? “Sometimes things come back, mate. We’re living proof, you and me.” Come with me.
But Barbossa has never been one for sharing. The irony of it is, Jack’s the one who taught him the word mutiny in the first place, back on that ship that wasn’t theirs until it was.
"Aye, but that's a gamble of long odds, ain't it? There's never a guarantee of coming back, but passing on, that's dead certain." It isn’t enough, Jack. It’ll never be enough.
So Jack keeps making it up as he goes along.
Even Beckett loved him once, enough for him to brand Jack’s betrayal into his skin, to match the one on Beckett’s heart.
The thing they don’t tell you about eternity is not how lonely it is, because everyone knows that, but how easy it is to forget the things that made you lonely in the first place, and that’s an odd thing. Every morning Jack wakes up to the sun hot on his skin like a lover, but when he opens his eyes, there’s no one there, and he can’t remember whose face was in his dreams. There have been many faces. There have been many hands hot on his skin. There was only ever one whose hands were cold. Maybe one day he’ll forget those hands, too.
“Just close your eyes and pretend it’s all a bad dream. That’s how I get by.”
Hector steps closer, his breath at Jack’s cheek, sour from months at sea, and Jack closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to face the kraken’s wide dead eye, nor the desperate man he once dared to hope to share a treasure with. “The world used to be a bigger place.”
Jack shakes his head. “The world’s still the same. There’s just… less in it.”
Sand through an hourglass. Sand through fingers that once held a heart.
Years ago, on an island of death:
“Ten years you carry that pistol, and now you waste your shot,” Barbossa spits, and time slows as Will calls out.
“He didn’t waste it.”
Years ago, on an island of death: Jack catches Hector before he hits the ground. Cradles him as best he can, tries to apologize, though he knows he doesn’t know the words. The ocean never taught him forgiveness.
His own hands are ice on Barbossa’s skin. As icy as the depths of the ocean, cutting like glass beneath the Pearl on a star-filled night. Jack wishes he could give Barbossa one last shred of warmth. Wishes desperately. But destiny, like her sister Time, is deaf. She only watches.
“I feel,” Barbossa whispers, eyes widening in revelation, “cold.”
Years ago, on an island of death, and not-death: The truth is heavy in Jack’s hands. He presses his forehead to Hector’s, and closes his eyes.
“For what we want most,” Calypso tells him once, “a cost must be paid, in the end.”
Jack cuts a hole in a map, hoists his colors, and sets sail.