Hey guys, so this is a story about Jack and a young mermaid called Lena (short for Coralena). It is set thirteen years before the second POTC film, when Jack barters with Davy Jones and convinces him to raise the Pearl from the depths. It is a romance between Jack and a certain someone, but you might have to wait a little while before that comes in. It's rated T at the moment, but this rating might go up to M as the story progresses, just to be safe.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything except for parts of the plot and any original characters such as Lena. This is a story created for entertainment, not profit or personal gain. Please review, they seriously make my day! And please enjoy!

A sea turtle hovered near the edge of a platter of coral, gently propelling itself forward with its front flippers to feed. Its hooked beak curved over the top of the coral as it began its steady gnawing at the seemingly hard surface. Nearby, a shoal of tiny fish darted in a single, inconceivable formation through tall patches of sea grass. Brightly coloured parrotfish meandered here and there, slowly, but not without purpose, while tiny seahorses peeked out from their homes of kelp.

All at once, the peaceful atmosphere was shattered like glass. Sea creatures scattered in all directions. The seahorses hid inside the kelp forest again. The fish, like lightning, were there one moment, and gone the next. The sea turtle, though deceptively docile at first glance, made its getaway with just a few powerful strokes of its front flippers to escape the monstrous ship that crashed through the reef-like area, huge and terrifying, with sails of woven sea grass and wood so rotten that it looked as if it should be crumbling to pieces. The shelf of coral caught on the side of the ship, and after a few seconds of ear-piercing screeching, it tore away from the rock it had been holding on to with a sickening crack. And just like that, the underwater ship was gone, rising up towards the surface again, leaving terror and destruction in its wake.

The last sea creature, a small messenger dolphin that stayed to witness the incident, fled the area to alert Poseidon.

The rest of the animals never returned.

"Coralena!"

The young mermaid winced at the tone of her mother's voice and lowered her head.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!"

Wincing again, the girl lifted her gaze. Her grey eyes met ones of furious green.

"What have you done to your hair?!" her mother exclaimed. Reaching forward, she yanked on a golden-brown lock to make a better point.

Lena grit her teeth so as not to make a noise and pulled away. "Nothing," she muttered sullenly, looking away again. Her hand reached up of its own accord to run through her recently sun-streaked brown hair. Her mother did not miss the action.

"This is not nothing!" she stated, pointing an accusatory finger at her daughter.

"I just wanted to see-" Lena didn't even get through the first sentence her half-hearted attempt at defending herself before the older mermaid launched into a lecture.

"You are the daughter of Poseidon, the demi-God of the sea! In case you have forgotten, we wouldn't be living here if it weren't for Calypso's imprisonment! We are in the middle of a crisis involving the pirates that know these seas almost as well as we do, and yet you decide to put that sea-weed juice in your hair and go to the Surface, no doubt for at least a day! And where has your hair all gone? A mermaid does not cut her hair! You're eighteen years old, Coralena, you were going so well! It used to be halfway down your tail!" She swum closer and miserably inspected the girl's hair.

Lena sighed exasperatedly, and pulled away again in irritation. "It's not that short," she said, trying to sound reasonable rather than annoyed, and failing miserably.

"Don't speak to me in that tone, young lady," her mother cried, almost as if reading her thoughts.

The teenager lost her patience.

"It's not that short," she yelled. "It's still down to my bloody backside-"

"-Coralena!"

"-and it was getting in the way all the time! You won't let me put it up, and it always gets tangled when I try and get to the brig, and the hull,and even the Captain's Cabin! I couldn't go anywhere on the Pearl with hair that long, and now it's shorter, I might be able to! You can't just say that . . . that . . . I-I didn't . . . I, uh . . . well, you see mother . . ." Her voice trailed away into nothing, and all that was left is a painful silence and her mother's disapproving glare.

"The Pearl?" she hissed after a full minute.

Lena said nothing, and waited for the bomb to explode.

Boom.

"DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DANGEROUS THOSE SHIPWRECKS ARE? SOMETHING COULD FALL ON YOU AT ANY SECOND, AND YOU COULD BE KILLED! THERE IS NOTHING TO BE GAINED FROM EXPLORING SHIPWRECKS! THEY ARE MAN-MADE, ANDWE ARE CURRENTLY AT WAR WITH MEN! HOW DARE YOU-"

"At war?!" Lena burst out.

"DON'T INTERRUPT-"

Lena shook her head furiously. "This war that we're in the middle of hardly even qualifies as a war! How many merfolk have died in battle in the past decade? No, don't even bother, I'll answer for you - none. We are safe. Only the most elite of our race have been planning with father on how to get Calypso back, and even you don't know those plans. How can you say we're at war when you don't even know the details of what's going on? I'll do what I bloody want, and there's nothing you can say or do to stop-"

A hand connected hard with her cheek, and her head flew to the side, where she let it stay, a shocked expression on her face. Her mother had never slapped her before. Something's wrong. And for one, horrible moment, it was all she could think. Then the older mermaid spoke again, and the thought was gone. She's just being unfair, Lena grumbled to herself, swimming to her room as ordered.

The pair of nurse sharks guarding the double doors sensed her bad mood and took their job to a more respectful distance down the hallway, still able to protect the room but at the same time, giving her some privacy.

Lena's always gotten on well with the nurses.

Slamming the doors behind her, she swum straight to the bed of soft coral in the corner of the room and flung herself onto it with a groan of exasperation. About a minute passed before she became extremely bored with sulking and got up to move over to the full length mirror, her mouth twisting in distaste at what she saw.

Grey eyes, a slender nose, skin that was much browner than most merfolk, a result of all the time she'd spent near the Surface. Wavy brown - and gold, she reminded herself quickly - hair that fell to her hips, high cheekbones, small hands, breasts that were slightly larger than the average mermaid's, covered with a loose-fitting, sleeveless top that she made from one of the worn out, ebony sails of the Pearl, cut off a couple of inches underneath her breasts, so that her belly was still showing like most Mer. Her tail was one that fanned out into an angelfish-like fin at the end, silvery-green in colour. Perhaps, to humans, she would seem beautiful, flawless even. But in the world of Mer, where pale skin was a symbol of perfection, curvy figures were looked down upon, eyes were supposed to be green or blue, tails should be coloured in shades of pink, blue, purple, crimson and gold, and most people's hair was either light blonde, red or dark, dark brown, she knew she would never be regarded as beautiful. The King's ugly duckling, she thought bitterly to herself, remembering a human story she heard on one of her earlier explorations to the Surface.

Muttering irritably to herself, and mindlessly realising that she must sound mad, Lena whirled away from the mirror and retrieved her shoulder bag from the corner that she dumped it in that morning. It was one that she'd made of tightly woven sea-grass with a long shoulder strap, leaving the bag to trail next to her right hip when she swam. A string of black and silver pearls was sewn around the top edge of the bag. Looking at it, Lena realised that the bag was a bit like herself - different, odd, but beautiful if one saw it in the right way. Reaching inside it, she took out a short dagger with a bejewelled hilt and a thin, leather belt with a sheath attached that she found on a drowned female. She wrapped the belt around the top of her tail and sheathed the dagger, giving the room a quick scan and telepathically telling the sharks outside that they'd better not give her away before swimming out of the hole in the palace wall that she made behind her bed.

The wreck of the old ship, the Black Pearl, had been a refuge of hers ever since she found it, when she was just ten years old. Despite it being clearly naught but a shadow of it's former self, Lena had been mesmerised at the very name from the moment she saw it. As she swam towards it, some of the anger that she harboured towards her mother dissipated, leaving her feeling hollow and empty, half-heartedly trying to convince herself that the Queen deserved all the trouble she got. However, a teenage girl can only delude herself for so long, and by the time the shipwreck was in sight, Lena had begrudgingly admitted to herself that her mother was just a tired mermaid who was getting too old for the job, with her people's best interests at heart. These interests just unfortunately happened to be very different to her interests.

Pushing these troubling thoughts to the back of her mind for the moment, Lena gave a ferocious thrust of her tail, speeding forwards as fast as she could until she finally reached the Pearl. Grinning openly, she made her usual way through a large cannon-ball hole in the starboard side of the ship which opened into the place that she knew would have been the sailor's sleeping quarters. Some of the hammocks were still hanging limply from nails sticking out of the wood, so real that she could almost hear the loud snores, the tossing and the turning, the occasional soft padding of footsteps as a man rolled out of bed and up to the deck to try and escape his secret nightmares. Oh, she may have been a mermaid. But she had heard the stories. She had swum alongside ships in the dead of night, had seen a lone sailor throw himself overboard, crying out words of love for his long-lost family. Terrible things, ones that mer people should never see, especially after the capture of Calypso . . . but she'd seen them anyway.

Swimming on, fighting back the surprisingly strong wave of sadness that washed over her at the sight of the sleeping quarters, she excitedly weaved her way through a complex cluster of fallen planks of wood, crusted with barnacles, slimy with algae. She'd never been able to get through here before, because of her annoyingly long hair, but since she'd cut it, the path was fairly easy, and she carefully pushed through the planks until she got to the other side. This was one of the few parts of the ship that she had never explored before, and as she made her way through a hole in the floor, down to the last level that housed the brig, she couldn't stop the little shiver of anticipation at the thought of the new treasures she might find. Of course, she reminded herself, humans kept their prisoners in the brig, so there probably wouldn't be anything shiny. But in Lena's books, the definition of interesting didn't contain the word shiny, and that's all that mattered to her.

Please review!

CJS xxx