He was a liar.

His stories were lies, and his misdeeds had landed the both of them on this deserted island.

Elizabeth sat on the beach, her knees pulled up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her knees, staring out at the sea, despising Captain Jack Sparrow. She'd never hated anyone in her entire life, she didn't think.

"Keeping an eye out for ships? You'll be watching for a good long while," said a voice from behind Elizabeth. She drank deeply from her bottle of rum, feeling it in her head, and she mumbled,

"If I hope hard enough, perhaps someone will show up here and rescue me from you."

"That's not nice." Captain Sparrow - Jack - sank slowly down onto the sand beside her. He'd gone off to relieve himself after having half a bottle of rum, leaving Elizabeth alone for a while. He'd shown her his bullet wounds, his scars, but he was still a liar, she thought. She tried to remind herself of that as she drank again. Some of his stories were true, but the one that mattered - the one about this island - was false.

"Look," said Jack in a begrudging sort of voice, "When you and I are rescued by some passing merchant vessel, or some such similarly miraculous happening occurs, we shall see to it that young Mr Turner is summarily set free by his vicious captors. Eh?"

"He doesn't have time to wait for us," said Elizabeth. She shut her eyes and drank again. "By the time you and I get rescued, Will will be dead. Gone."

Jack sighed deeply. "And you love him as deep as all that, do you?"

Elizabeth gulped and shook her head a little. "He loves me."

"Not the same thing, is it, love?" Jack stared at her, and Elizabeth flicked her eyes to him. He was annoyingly handsome, she thought, with his perfectly-shaped, kohl-lined eyes, his cheekbones that could cut glass, his long thin nose… She didn't even mind the way he smelled of sweat and the ocean and spices sitting next to her. She didn't mind his dreadlocked, ornamented hair. She studied him and answered,

"No, it isn't the same thing. But I care for him, as a childhood friend who loves me, and so I need to rescue him."

"Well, love, that isn't exactly an option for you just now," noted Jack. He took a long draught of rum and murmured, "I assure you, this is not the way I meant for this to turn out for any of the three of us."

"I know." Elizabeth turned her face to the sea. "But I still resent you for it."

"Fair enough," Jack said. He drank again, and so did Elizabeth, starting to feel more than a little drunk as the sun started to set on the horizon. Jack said, "Time to light a fire before it gets dark."

"How are we meant to do that?" asked Elizabeth. "I certainly have no implements with which to -"

"Leave it to me, love." Jack staggered to his feet, and he left his bottle of rum on the sand as he made his way over to the tree line. He began to gather up fallen fronds and leaf sheaths. He took armloads at a time and began stacking them on a spot of open beach. Elizabeth huffed a breath and figured she ought to help. She stumbled as she walked, feeling a bit drunk, and she bent to gather fronds and sheaths like Jack was doing. She carried them to where he was building a fire, and she watched as he made a pile of extra fuel nearby.

Then she sat on the sand and watched in absolute wonder as Jack began to start the fire. He built a tinder nest using the soft insides of palm bark, piling it up into a fuzzy pouf. He used the rest of the bark to make a fire board, using the dagger at his hip to cut a v-shaped notch into it and a depression adjacent. He placed palm bark under the notch and used a spindle of bark wood inside the notch to spin. He spun and spun and spun until sweat began to drip from his forehead, and Elizabeth wondered if he would ever, ever, ever manage to get a spark. His rough hands rolled up and down the spindle, over and over, until, at last -

Fire!

Or, at least, a glowing ember. Jack expertly tapped the fire board to drop the ember onto the piece of bark, and then he transferred it onto the nest of soft tinder. He blew on it gently, and it burst into flame.

"Ha!" he exclaimed proudly, and he brought the flaming tinder carefully to the pile of dried palm detritus and stripped bark. The fire caught almost at once, and then it grew, with some more blowing from Jack. He smirked at Elizabeth.

"Easy peasy," he bragged, but Elizabeth's mouth had fallen open in wonder. Jack wordlessly walked over to where their bottles of rum sat abandoned in the sand, and when he came back, he handed Elizabeth hers. In the glow of the fire he'd built, he looked awfully handsome, Elizabeth couldn't help thinking. She gulped again and let him clank his bottle against hers.

"Tomorrow I'll build you a shelter," he said quite proudly. "It'll be a month or more before someone comes by to rescue us. We'll have weather before then. So you'll be in want of a shelter, won't you? Hm."

"Jack." Elizabeth felt a quiver of fear go through her as she stared at the bottle in her hands. "We can't survive for a month on rum."

"And whyever not?" demanded Jack, but then he rolled his eyes and assured her, "Easy enough to spear some slow reef fish with a cutlass and roast 'em over the fire. Easy enough to shake down some coconuts for water and their meat. Rain brings water that we'll catch up for ourselves. We'll make it, love. You'll see. You won't go starving or dying of thirst, not on Captain Jack Sparrow's watch."

Elizabeth sighed and chewed her lip. She made up her mind right then and there to raid the stores of rum and light a signal fire in the morning. The entirety of the English Navy in the Caribbean was searching for her. Surely they'd see her signal. All she needed to do was get Jack Sparrow smashingly drunk so he wouldn't notice what she was doing.

And that didn't seem like such a difficult task.

It didn't work.

He'd screamed viciously at her for burning all the rum, and she'd spat back that everyone was looking for her, that her signal was sure to bring ships. But hours had passed with her massive fire raging, and nothing had appeared on the horizon. All that had happened was that she'd scorched several rather important coconut palms and had burned up all the rum on the island. By the time the fire fizzled down to a normal size, the sun was going down again, and Jack stormed back to Elizabeth and demanded,

"Where is your Navy, Miss Swann? Where is the good old Commodore, eh? You burned up - nay, exploded, blew up - all of my rum for no good reason, didn't you?"

"It was for a good reason," Elizabeth said tearfully. "I thought for certain someone would see that signal. That dark smoke was over a thousand feet high. How it is that no ship at all saw it, I can not fathom."

"Well, it seems that no ship at all saw it," Jack said, crossing his arms over his chest. He tipped his head. "When are you going to accept, Elizabeth, that we are trapped on this island with exceedingly limited resources and very little recourse?"

"I attempted recourse!" Elizabeth screamed. She gestured toward the fire, to the burning crates, and she cried, "I burned wood and alcohol to try and signal the dozen ships out looking for me right now. I am the Governor's daughter! Commodore Norrington wants nothing more than to find me! I tried, Jack Sparrow. I tried."

"Captain, if you please," he said tightly, and Elizabeth narrowed her eyes at him and shook her head. She threw up her hands and said,

"You have been thoroughly divested of your ship, Jack. You couldn't be less of a captain just now if you tried."

"What I am," he said, walking toward her and looking her right in the eyes, "is a man trapped on an island with no spare fresh water, no food, having to build fires and shelters from scratch… and what you are, Miss Swann, is a lady on an island in the same position. Do you know how to spear reef fish with your cutlass and build a shelter out of palm fronds?"

Elizabeth tipped her chin up. "I'm sure I could figure it out."

Jack raised his eyebrows. "With what cutlass, exactly? Admit it, Elizabeth; you need me right now. Your signal fire didn't work. Nobody in that Navy saw it; they're not coming for you, love. We have to wait this out until a ship passes by, at which point we'll have to find more signal fire material. In the meantime, if you want to live, may I suggest putting that pouting, pretty lip back where it goes and accepting that you and I have no choice but to be copacetic? Eh?"

Elizabeth quickly adjusted her angry mouth, suddenly very self-conscious. She huffed and told him,

"I am not going to like you, Jack Sparrow."

"Never said you had to," he replied, "but I'd really love not to shoot you, Miss Swann."

He gave her a weighty look, and she studied his eyes for a very long moment. She finally shrugged and shut her eyes.

"Why didn't they come?"

"Probably because they didn't see the smoke," Jack replied, as though it were obvious.

"But how is that possible?" Elizabeth demanded, and Jack sighed before he told her,

"I've learned a lot in my… admittedly bizarre life, Miss Swann, but one of the most important things I've learned is that anything - and I mean anything - is possible. Including an entire Navy missing your signal fire."

"There's still some rum," said Elizabeth. "I couldn't carry it all. There are two crates left that I didn't get onto the fire. When I told you it was gone, I was just trying to rile you up. They were too big for me to lug out of the hole in the ground."

"Oh. Good. Two crates should last a week," Jack joked, and Elizabeth finally smirked at him. Jack walked away, and she was curious about what he was doing, until she saw his shadowy outline scouring the ground near some palm trees. He picked two objects up off the ground - coconuts. Elizabeth's mouth suddenly watered, and when Jack brought the coconut back, she realised just how thirsty she was.

"How do we open these?" she asked, accepting the coconut and staring at it. Jack pulled out his sword, and Elizabeth gasped a little. But then Jack turned his sword over and used the blunt side near the hilt to whack at the middle of the coconut. Suddenly it split open in his hand, and he hurried to drink the coconut water before it spilled out. He tucked his coconut under his arm and took Elizabeth's, and he told her,

"Be ready to drink."

He whacked it open just over her head, and Elizabeth gasped as he cracked it apart so she could drink the coconut water. She gulped it down and then swiped at her mouth with the inside of her wrist.

"My God in Heaven; that is delicious," she marveled.

"The meat has lots of water in it; it keeps you damp," Jack told her. He put his sword away and pulled out his dagger. He opened the coconuts one and a time and carved the meat away from the shells in strips. The two of them stood there in silence for a long while eating, until finally Elizabeth told him,

"For a man who was only marooned for three days, you're awfully good at Desert Islanding."

"You're assuming that my last stay on this particular island was my only sojourn to a tropical wasteland," Jack said cryptically. Elizabeth frowned and chewed one of her last bites of coconut meat.

"Will you tell me more of your stories?" she asked. "Like how you got those gunshot wounds?"

Jack shook his head a little. "My stories aren't fit for lovely ears like yours," he said, but Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

"Lovely ears," she repeated. "I'm not a child, Jack. You can tell me anything."

He scoffed. "No, love; there's quite a lot I can not tell you, though I certainly admire your bravado. Now. I had intended on building you a shelter today, but you managed to make me cross enough that I circled the island five times kicking sand up in rage while your ridiculously ineffective signal fire burned, so that didn't happen. No shelter. Sorry. Anyway, you'll be sleeping out on the sand again tonight as a consequence."

Elizabeth shrugged. "I don't mind."

Jack stared at her in the glow of the fire, shook his head, and smiled crookedly until gold glimmered through.

"And here I thought you were actually flirting with me last night," he said. "Stupid old me, eh?"

Elizabeth felt her cheeks go warm, and she swallowed past the knot in her throat. She had flirted with him, rather wantonly, but it had only been to trick him into drinking until he passed out so she could light the signal fire. She sniffed now and told him,

"I may not like you very much, Captain Jack Sparrow, and I may be quite furious with you about what's happening to Will right now, but you're right about one thing. I need you. I tried my damndest to get us off this island, and I failed. So I am stuck here with you, and without your help, I will die. So, yes, I need you, and therefore I must be more amiable to you than I have thus far been."

"Is that just a very eloquent way of you saying you're sorry?" Jack narrowed his black-lined eyes, and Elizabeth rolled hers. She stared at the ground around the fire and mumbled,

"Now to find a good spot for sleeping. Goodnight, Captain Sparrow."

He backed away from her, that smirk of his growing until firelight glinted off his golden tooth. He nodded.

"Goodnight, Miss Swann."

Author's Note: Woo hoo! Sparrabeth! I haven't written for PotC since about 2004 or 2005 (showing my age here) so I'm really glad to be back in this fandom and trying out this pairing for the first time. I realize there are a lot of stories that center around their time on the island, but I'd like to put my own spin on it, and I promise things will definitely get a little wonky.

To those reading, thank you so very kindly for joining me. If you get a quick moment to leave a review, I'd be exceptionally grateful, especially given the small size of this fandom at the moment. Thanks to all!