Chapter Text
“Jack, you need to choose me next time,” Anne hissed at him through clenched teeth. Jack’s eyes were fixed firmly on the bodies of the four men he had already sentenced to death against the British giant towering before them. He scoffed at Anne’s command.
“Absolutely not,” he hissed back, wincing as the fifth man he chose took a blow to the stomach and doubled over. With each blow, his panic only mounted. He was trying to run through he problem, find the loophole or the weak spot like he had done so many times before, but no matter what, he couldn’t see a way out. A way that didn’t end with the death of his entire crew, and most importantly, Anne, along with them. But five men were already too many, and each body that fell to the floor, disfigured and covered in blood, cast a weight on his soul he wasn’t sure he had the strength to shoulder.
“These men don’t stand a chance against--” Anne started, before Jack cut her off with a hard glare.
“Oh, and you do?” He whispered back, unable to wipe the fear off his face. Fear of losing his crew, what little reputation he’d built, any chance of securing Nassau, and on top of it all, he would lose Anne, too. Anne’s steely gaze didn’t waver, her icy blue eyes locked on his.
“Yes, I do,” Anne answered, not a shred of doubt present in her tone. Jack sighed, his eyes flitting back to the man now in a pulp on the ground, another body Jack was now responsible for.
And then the British officer was back, standing over him, asking him to choose. And he opened his mouth, intending to answer, ignoring Anne’s intimidating glare beside him, but his mind went blank. He couldn’t make his mouth say a single name, couldn’t hear them in his head. Instead, all he could hear was the story they would tell about him after all this. Captain Jack Rackham: bringer of death. The downfall of the Great Pirate Blackbeard. He saw himself shouldering that burden alone, haunted by the death of Anne, shunned by whatever remained of Nassau… and he froze. The inevitability of the vision was suddenly apparent to him, and with it, a fresh wave of potent dread, and he couldn’t even hear what the British officer was saying anymore. He snapped his eyes up to meet the officer’s and saw him ask the question again. Again, Jack could offer no response. He ran through his options a final time, as if a miraculous solution he hadn’t considered before would appear.
From where Jack was sitting, he couldn’t see a way Anne could possibly overpower the Goliath in front of them. She was strong and nimble, yes, but without her knives--those two knives that had been connected to her hands for so long, they may as well be them--he didn’t understand why she was so sure of victory. But he had underestimated her before, and unfortunately, his power of reason was too strong for him to ignore the mounting possibility that Anne may have figured a way out of this that he was unable to see. But, in order to execute that plan, Jack had to hand her over to a monster that would surely crush her.
Finally, he turned to Anne, giving her a final devastating look that could only mean one thing. She returned the look, although her expression was not scared or remorseful as Jack’s was. Hers was determined. Defiant. She turned to face the British officers now looming over as their commander ordered his men to get her up, taking Jack’s silence as choice enough.
An officer stepped forward, grabbing a fistful of Anne’s auburn curls, and although Jack had seen her endure worse (God, far worse), he already felt sick to his stomach. Anne wrapped her hands around the man’s and pulled herself up, fire in her eyes, before the man shoved her to the ground before the giant as if she were an offering for a hungry beast.
The moments that followed were quick, too quick for Jack to process. One moment, Anne was pulling herself to her feet, calmly scanning the room, sneering at the hungry officers before her, and the next, she was on her knees, blood already smeared across her face. Jack winced, eyes wide in horror, biting back cries of anguish as he watched her weakly crawl across the floor before the hammer came down on her again. Jack felt the air get sucked from his lungs as if he was the one who had just been flung across the room. His breathing was beginning to quicken, a cold sweat breaking out on his skin despite the searing heat trapped in the belly of the ship. It was all coming crashing down.
Anne was still crawling, small wheezes escaping from her mouth as she clawed her way across the floor. The sick feeling in Jack grew exponentially, and he swallowed hard, fighting against his mounting nausea. He felt as though his chest was going to burst, either from fear or guilt or rage, he wasn’t sure yet. The jeering of the British soldiers filled his ears, and his head shot frantically around the room, a disgusted expression on his face.
“Get up, little miss,” they taunted and laughed, pointing as Anne--his beautiful and glorious Anne--scraped her nails against the wooden planks, her face nearly covered in sticky crimson blood. Why wouldn’t she get up, Jack wondered to himself, following her path to the shards of broken glass scattering the far corner, then jumping back to Anne’s face.
Jack had tried to master many things in his messy quest to make a name for himself. He had tried to master Charles Vane, tried to master the street and its commerce. He tried to master a crew, tried to master a cache of Spanish gold, tried to master being King of Nassau. But try as he might, he had only ever mastered one thing in his life. And that was Anne. He had the ability to read her thoughts as though they were his own, to decipher her grunts and sneers and looks as if they were a secret code meant only for him.
As he read Anne’s face now, he knew, irrefutably, what she planned to do. Like he noted before, without her knives, Anne’s strength decreased considerably. Now, he realized, she planned to even the odds.
“Anne, get up.” The command was ripped from his throat, a hidden plea for Anne to alter her course, to let him find an alternative way out of this, although they both knew there was none. But the plan was already in motion, and Jack knew he was powerless to stop it now.
He watched, paralyzed by the inevitability of what was to follow, as Anne cried out, wrapping her hand around two shards of glass and squeezing, before planting one firmly in the giant’s gut. He cried out in pain and dropped to a knee as he doubled over in front of her. But Anne didn’t relent, of course, she didn’t relent. Before a single soldier could move, she brought the shards down again, and the keys were suddenly in the possession of his crew.
There was an instant of paralyzing shock as both crews processed the events that had just unfolded. As they worked to reorient themselves in their new roles, now that the odds had so quickly and so monumentally shifted. Then chaos erupted as his crew frantically freed themselves, and the British scrambled to prevent what had already been unleashed.
But Jack’s eyes were fixed firmly on Anne’s limp body, sprawled out on the floor of the ship, shards of scattered glass discarded by her mangled hands. His body moved toward her without his mind telling it to move, surprised to find himself still bound to the floor.
“Somebody, unlock me.” He meant to yell it, but it came out as barely a whisper.
“For fuck’s sake, unlock your captain!” He yelled this time, and a moment later, his hands were finally free. The giant was up again, sprawled over Anne with his hands around her throat. She was barely fighting, her hands twitching uselessly at her side, her feet kicking weakly as the air was squeezed from her lungs. Her expression was one Jack almost never saw on her fine features: fear .
Fuck the guilt, fuck the loss, fuck all the shit has was going to have to wade through and set right and live with after this was said and done. There was no place for guilt or sadness or self-pity now. Now was the time for fury.
Jack only saw red as he forced himself through the sea of soldiers, driving his sword through as many as he could manage, cutting them down with a rage he had felt on only a few rare occasions, until he finally caught sight of Anne again.
It was instinct that guided him through those next moments; pure animalistic instinct. He wrapped his hands around the handle of the giant’s hammer and, without hesitation, without a single shred of doubt anywhere in his sure movements, he brought the hammer down on the giant’s skull again, and again, and again until what was left bore no resemblance to a human face.
Only once justice had been enacted did he allow himself to face Anne, kneeling over her body, his mouth agape in horror as he took in the swollen, bruised, bloody mass that looked nothing like her. He gently brought his hands behind her head and pulled her broken body closer to his, suddenly desperate to feel the realness of her beneath his fingers. Her eyes were practically swollen shut, and all that came out of her were weak wheezes as she struggled to pull in air.
The terror he felt then, staring down at that broken thing that couldn’t possibly be Anne, was unlike any fear he had felt before. It bore so deeply into his bones, penetrated every atom of his being, he was sure it would kill him right there on the spot. It would stop his heart. In the life he had spent with Anne, he had never once seen her like this. She had never lost this greatly.
But she hadn’t lost , he had to remind himself. She had freed them all. And Jack decided then, soldiers and pirates fighting and falling and dying around him, that he would make Anne’s sacrifice worth something more than his life and the lives of his men. He would make them all pay, and then, he would make sure Anne would never feel fear again.