A/N: Before we start, I just want to say please know I intend to write a part III in this series…letting you know just so you all don't kill me. ;)

Chapter 6: Promises to Break, Vows to Keep

For approximately ten minutes after arriving at the Isle las Cruces luck smiled upon them.

Jack, Elizabeth, and Norrington made their way to the beach, followed the compass, and dug up the eerie chest of Davy Jones.

Then everythingwent to Hell.

Jones' crew and the whelp arrived with impeccable timing, and Norrington decided to try for the heart too. At the end of the melee that involved swords, pistols, and a giant dislodged watermill rolling down the beach, someone ended up with the heart.

Not Jack.

Of which he discovered after taunting Jones, and breaking his hallowed Jar of Dirt upon the decks of the Pearl.

He knew it was a sign of doom. He knew it even before the Kraken started plucking crew members from the decks like they were fruit on a tree.

Now, the powder was gone, and all the hope gone with it.

Elizabeth stood steadfast at his side through it all, sword in hand. He knew she was scared, but he admired the way she lifted that sharp chin to the world, daring their adversaries to do their worst.

But there was a lesson she had yet to learn in her callow youth, brave lass that she was.

Sometimes, you lose everything.

Jack had made her a pledge the night before, but life was not a series of straight lines. It was a maddening path of tributaries and side-roads. Sometimes, a man had to weigh the promises he'd made, and decide which ones were worth keeping.

Jack knew he wasn't a good man. He'd broken more promises than he had fingers and toes. More promises than he had hairs on his head. But there was one he intended to keep. One he would not compromise, even if she hated him for it in the end.

As Gibbs oversaw the loading of the remaining crew into the longboat, Jack decided he would honor the vow he'd made upon this very deck, not but a year ago, with Elizabeth at his side. On that happy day, which seemed like a lifetime ago now, he'd sworn to always protect her.

Whether she liked it or not.

Elizabeth looked up to him, her eyes too wide, as the ship groaned beneath them. The Kraken would return, they knew. It was just a matter of when. He read the question in her eyes without needing a word. Would he retreat to the longboats, or stay with the ship? Either way, she would remain with him.

That too, he knew without a word.

Brave girl. Too brave for her own good.

When Jack held out his arms to her she filled them immediately, giving in to the need for a comforting embrace. "We tried, Jack," she whispered, and a rueful smile curled his lips. He kissed her hair and said nothing, savoring this moment of her in his arms.

Would he remember it, he wondered, in the Locker? Would he be allowed the memory of her soft skin? Of the way her rum-colored eyes shone in the sunlight? Her kisses and the cadence of her unbridled laughter?

When she tilted back her head in silent request Jack's lips met hers, gentle, then hungry.

One last taste, just one last…

He did not know how long they kissed upon the deck of the Pearl. How many times had they exchanged locks of lips upon this revered ship, and other lovers' favors? It was hardly fathomable that this could be the last, but he sought to savor this sweet embrace to the very end. He felt Elizabeth go pliable in his arms, rendered soft as clay by his mouth and his hands in her hair. That hunger to touch between them had not faded, as he'd feared it might in close quarters over time.

Perhaps their love could have lasted, could it only have been given the chance?

He would never know.

Jack pressed Elizabeth against the main mast, and she moaned for the weight of his body pressed against hers. She gave no protest when he took control of her hands, placing them behind her back.

She trusted him.

It was a thing at which Jack Sparrow never ceased to marvel.

She trusted him to the very moment she heard a click and felt the press of manacles about her wrists.

"Jack?"

He knew she would never get into the long boat without him, and so he devised to make her by whatever means necessary.

"I never deserved you, Lizzy," he whispered, pressing a kiss to her forehead, bracing himself for the onslaught.

Her brow creased in a frown. "Jack? No, what—"

Before she could react he unhooked her manacles from the mast, dragging her towards the gunwale. The whelp waited to receive her, Jack's agent in this deception.

"JACK?!"

A second later, she understood.

"NO!" she bellowed, attempting to twist free. "No you don't, Jack Sparrow!"

Jack ignored her. "Go to Tia Dalma," he instructed. "She might…there could be a way."

Elizabeth ignored him. "I will not leave you!"

"Ye can't go where I'm going, darlin'."

Jack was headed for the Locker. Jones would see to that. But he feared Elizabeth would simply die. That he couldn't abide.

She tried to make herself dead weight, but Jack hauled her off her feet with an arm about her waist. In physical strength and size, she could not fight him, and she knew it.

Damnable man!

"Jack…please don't. I want to stay with you. I have to stay with you!"

" 'Fraid ye haven't a choice in the matter, love. You're getting in that boat."

"No!" she snarled with frustration, kicking her feet. She nearly managed to twist away, but in another moment Will was there too, hefting her over his shoulder. Jack and the whelp shared a moment of charged eye-contact in which so much was left unsaid. Anger, that Jack had stolen her, and tricked him, and endangered them all. Surprise, that the pirate would relinquish her once more in this selfless act.

Then Elizabeth attempted to kick Will, and the moment was broken.

Jack was surprised to feel his lips curl into a smile, albeit a small one, in a silent bid of good luck.

Jack produced the keys to the shackles, handing them to Gibbs. "Ye might wait to use these until she's calmed down a bit, eh?"

Gibbs grimaced, clearly intimidated by the thought of releasing the harpy from her irons.

Elizabeth continued to scream and struggle, but somehow Will climbed down into the long boat without losing his balance or dropping her.

Jack watched them row out, Elizabeth's shrieks of protest echoing across the water.

Only after they had made it a ways from the ship did Elizabeth look up to see Jack standing at the gunwale, watching them go. She reached for him with her shackled hands, having already looped her arms beneath her feet in a feat of flexibility that would have spurred Jack's imagination in a different scenario. Jack saluted her with a wave of be-ringed fingers, grateful she could not see the tears stinging his eyes at that distance.

"See you on the other side, love." He blew her a kiss, and heard her moan his name in reply.

Unable to watch any longer, he turned away. An eerie calm had come over the ship, and he had a feeling something very nasty waited behind him…

Elizabeth had never known such despair, as she watched the tentacles of the Kraken embrace the spars of the Black Pearl, pulling the great ship asunder.

Jack…

Her voice had gone with her screams, and now all that remained was a raspy suggestion of sound. Her body shook, her cheeks soaked with tears that poured forth as a waterfall of sorrow. She rocked back and forth, her fists clenched upon her knees.

Jack.

Still, she could not stop chanting his name with her broken voice, as she watched her Captain go down with his ship.

Jack.

Who could dare argue with her now, that he was a good man? No one present. She felt far too wretched to gloat, that place in her chest where once a heart had been turned barren and black as the ship being pulled down to the depths.

Jack.

The crew of the Pearl drifted in their lifeboat, no longer pulling for shore, all aboard watching the place where the Pearl had been with silent mourning. They bobbed in the waves for what might have been minutes or hours, cloaked in an oppressive silence. The world without Captain Jack Sparrow seemed a bleak place indeed.

At some point the men began to row again.

Elizabeth huddled in on herself, lost in her misery, unaware of the time as the sun slowly sank in the sky.

Amidst the clamor in her mind, the sorrow and regrets, the anger that he would leave her behind, the should haves and what ifs and all the things she wished she could have said to Jack, his voice cut through the mental din. Go to Tia Dalma. There might be a way. Elizabeth suddenly recalled Jack's words, and there was a single glimmer of hope in this darkest of days.

Could there possibly be a way to bring him back?

She suddenly straightened in her seat, a new resolve glinting in her gaze. Everyone in the boat seemed to notice it, unconsciously leaning away a little, as though afraid she would exact her revenge on them all for ripping her from her beloved husband's side. But calmly she extended her shackled wrists to their respected First Mate.

"Mr. Gibbs, if you would be so kind? I believe we have an unyielding need to go upriver." She hardly recognized her own voice, and yet somehow it came steady from her throat so razed by grief.

Gibbs took a moment to regard her with caution, but in the end he responded to her steadfast tone by withdrawing the keys from his breast pocket.

She would have Jack back, she resolved. There was no sea she would not sail, no stone she would leave unturned, no beastie she would not face, no law she would not defy, no throat she would not cut, to have Jack back in this world.

Back in her arms.

Hold on, Jack, she entreated him, praying that somehow, maybe, he could hear. I'm coming for you.

To be continued in Part III: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea…

A/N: Aaaand I might go cry over Jack a bit more now…Thank you everyone for reading, favouriting, following, and of course, your lovely comments! They put such a skip in this writer's step! For more Sparrabeth fun come find me on Tumblr as apirateslifeforme123 !