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Adrift

by Virgo79
July 23, 2006

Jack's sword lodges in something he can't really identify, even from this singular viewpoint, and it draws a bellow from the creature that rattles the marrow in his bones. There is a lurch, and a rush of heat, and then the pain begins in earnest.

Jack tells himself it gives him something to focus on other than the smell. His sword is wrenched from his grasp when the kraken opens its mouth for a better grip, but it doesn't matter anyway, because a tooth pierced the shoulder of his sword arm in that first bite, and the limb lies limp at his side. Jack can't feel those fingers anymore. They are the only part of his body he can't feel, and he wonders when the rest of his parts will follow suit. He thinks he'd like it to be soon now.

The leviathan rolls like a storm-swell beneath him, and something happens to his left foot that he doesn't trouble himself to look at. He thinks he screams when it happens, but he can't rightly tell over the noise the beastie is making.

Jack's head falls back, and he can see, beyond the rings of teeth, the clear blue of the sky above the Pearl's fluttering sails. There's something wrong about the way they move in the wind, and he realizes dimly that her masts are buckling, toppling towards the sea. He has the space of a few seconds to indulge his anguish over her fate, to regret that it should be as ugly as his own, and then the teeth come again, and this time one of them finds the artery in his thigh.

This pain is brilliant, lighting up his world, but only for a moment. When it recedes, it takes the rest of the pain with it, an ebbing tide that leaves him numb and drifting. He can feel his heartbeat in the place the offending tooth has just vacated, a drumming, tugging rhythm that loosens him from himself a little more with every pulse.

The stench of the monster's breath dissipates then, and the clean salt scent of the sea surrounds him. Inexplicably, he can hear the snapping of the Pearl's canvas in the wind clearly now. Before, his head had been filled with roaring. It's quiet now, but for the sound of the sails.

Is this really what he'd been running from? How strange. This isn't so bad. Not so bad at all, come right to it.

Jack has no awareness of his body emptying its lifeblood down the monster's gullet. All he can see of his darling ship is her sails, and so he doesn't know it when her keel shatters and she folds like a paper fan in the terrible tentacles of the leviathan. The same ebbing tide that pulled pain away from him took fear with it, and the only thought that has the power to trouble him as the blue of the sky brightens and consumes his vision is bugger, I hope the longboat got clear.

Jack has already drifted too far from himself to feel it when his back breaks between the kraken's teeth, and he is gone before the Pearl is dragged beneath the turquoise waves.

~.~

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