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Summary: You can't properly bandage your own hand. Neither can Jack Sparrow.

He clasped Sparrow’s hand, and turned it over; they'd been swept apart as soon as they boarded the Dauntless, Jack’s gold and jewels replaced by irons, and he never had a chance to properly bind the wound. It had opened itself wider with the rough handling, broad and deep where Elizabeth’s had been shallow and his had been but long. They are men and a woman marked by the experience, and it might have held them together were it not for the shackles weighing down the wrists he clasped. Were it not for the lacings suffocating Elizabeth anew somewhere lost in the decks above him.

Were it not for the men guarding the door, stairs, and decks both above and below.

He notes, absently, that Jack’s fingers are a small bit shorter than Elizabeth’s. This doesn’t seem quite right, but he supposes that Jack presents them to greater effect. He brushes aside the old wrappings and reached toward the waiting closely clean rags he’d gathered and grasped the canteen he’d brought. Jack caught his eyes before he could pour it.

Smiled, arched his head back, and opened his mouth.

So he leaned over and held the brim to Jack’s lips, as he tried to judge how much drink to allow him, watching Jack’s eyes and the smooth brown ripple of his throat. He found himself leaning forward, more, and jerking himself back only caused Jack’s mouth to leave with a soft wet sound. And spilled the rum.

He quickly pours the rest of it over the open cut, shifting whatever comment Jack had readied into a drawn out hiss. Dabbing the cut softly, it’s soon clean enough to be rewrapped. He tries to keep the bindings flat and mostly succeeds as he bent his head over their hands, breath held lightly, and vaguely wishes that someone other than the ship’s medic wrapped his own. Not that the medic wasn’t quick and efficient but. He ignores the thought as he smoothes down the last layer with both hands and gently binds it tight. He releases a breath of air and tries not to think of it as a benediction. He lifts his head up.

He clasps Jack’s hand fleetingly, then leans back. Jack sweeps the hand to his knee. He airily pronounces into the space between them,

“Don’t worry. I’m Captain Jack Sparrow, remember?”

Will swallows and nods and can see in Jack’s eyes that he feels, too, the swarming tremble of uniformed boots through the bones of the ship and knows that Norrington’s noose can just as easily hang from a crow’s nest as from a proper gallows.

He gets up to go to the door.

Sparrow’s already returned to carelessly lounging, eyes-closed, on the cot. Will clenches his hand and it disturbes him that, of the three of them, Jack’s might be the only one to scar, if it ever gets a chance to.

He carefully doesn’t consider why his hand stretches and splits his own wound in response.

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