PotC fic -- The Swan In Flight
erinya won the contest the other day for a ficlet with characters of her choosing. This grew considerably longer than a ficlet, but it's her choice -- Elizabeth and Teague. (That's Elizabeth&Teague, not Elizabeth/Teague.) This one's gen, folks, with lots of Jack backstory.
SPOILERS FOR AWE LIKE WOAH!
The first night after the battle, after Will leaves, she walks back around Shipwreck Island in a haze of exhaustion. The green flash took with it the last of her energy, and it all crowds in, battle and fire and blood on weathered boards, rain and Will dying in her arms, Will embracing her on the sand, cannon fire that has left her still half deafened, blood still beneath her fingernails. Is it Will’s? Or hers? Or someone else’s entirely?
When she finds a bed she collapses. For one moment she feels like she’s flying again, as though Jack is lifting her from the awash decks of the Dutchman, clutched against his chest. It’s all right then, she thinks, and thinks no more.
The second night she has slept all day, and so she sits awake. Shipwreck Cove is oddly quiet, compared to how it was before. There are so many dead, and the living sleep as though stricken. She looks out over the hulks and wrecks that make up the main core, over the graceful raiders ranged about like swans, their running lights bobbing at anchor. Above, the stars arch as if painted on a cathedral ceiling, bright as the stars of the underworld that are eternity.
Somewhere a dog barks once. A man swears. Somewhere, a baby cries fitfully before it’s hushed. There are children here. There are women too, most of them lovers or wenches or prostitutes, not captains like her and Captain Cheng. And where there are women there are children. She supposes this ought not surprise her. Will is the son of a pirate, and so it seems is Jack.
This is hers. She is their king.
It hardly matters that her election was an accident, or an odd contrivance of Jack’s. The Code is clear. Once elected, a king cannot be unmade, except by death. Like the captain of the Dutchman. He has his work, and she hers.
The third night she goes to find Captain Teague. His room is near the center of the core, far up, in what might have once been the main stern cabin of a galleon. It’s full of plunder, ornate chairs from some Spanish colony, Turkish rugs, a strange handleless tea set of translucent pale green porcelain. He looks up from his guitar, his face showing no surprise at all.
“Teach me the Code,” she says, and watches him break into a smile.
Some of it is surprisingly easy. She can read and write, of course, as most pirates can’t. Barbossa has taught her the basics of navigation, and she can read a chart.
Why the Dutch harbor pirates at Curacao, how Gentleman Joe affects the coffee trade, how Clive’s conquest of Kashmir caused the East India Company to rise to prominence, these are the things a king must know. Strangely enough, in long hours of tutelage at Teague’s side, she is reminded more and more sharply of her father.
She used to sit like this, Limoges tea cup in hand, bored to tears while her father talked about economics and trade, about how an adventurer named Pierre Poivre broke the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg, and how the lack of transported Jacobites is encouraging the slave trade in Barbados.
She knows these things already. And now she has a context to fit them in. They are not isolated pieces of information. They are the history of her people. They are the currents and tides, the weather and conditions, that affect pirates. All the seas of the world are theirs, and so too are all the problems of the world. It’s so vast she can hardly compass such a canvas, but compass it she does, visualizing the globe in her father’s office spinning round and round, his long fingers tracing the Empire over water and land. Here Ceylon. Here Quebec, recently taken from the French. Here Terra Australis.
Teague is surprised, she knows. She sees it in his eyes. He had accepted that she could fight, but he had not known that she could rule, that behind her pretty eyes were a brain. It gives her satisfaction to prove it. It pleases her to gain his admiration, to see the dawning respect.
I am my father’s daughter too, she thinks, not the son of a pirate, but the daughter of a royal governor. Tea and provisions, quarrels between captains, adjuration, logistics, politics. These are the things that are a king’s life. The things that make this world function.
And she is good at it.
The first time she misses her courses, Elizabeth is not surprised. She’s been irregular for more than a year now, since she stowed away on the Edinburgh Trader and took to the harsh life of the sea. She hardly gives it a thought.
The second time she wonders. But she does not think about it. She doesn’t want to, doesn’t need to. Her days are full, even if her nights are not. Ten years is a long time, and she will not spend her days in mourning. There is too much to do.
The third time she knows. It is ten weeks since she lay beside Will on the sand, seventy days and seventy nights. There are a hundred and ninety six more to go, more or less. How many can she hide it? And then what?
Perhaps she should speak to Captain Cheng. There were three tall young men who were introduced as her sons. Surely she knows how to do this. But Captain Cheng has sailed, and she is no longer at Shipwreck Cove. And so Elizabeth says nothing, just holds her secret to herself. In loose men’s shirts no one has noticed.
The moon waxes and wanes again, and she feels him move beneath her heart, strange and slight as a bird’s wings beating inside. Is this what it feels like, she wonders, to be an egg? She has watched birds hatch. Is this faint movement the way it feels the moment before the shell bursts open, and wet winged the duckling flops peeping to the floor?
Not a duckling. A cygnet.
Teague notices. Of course he notices first. He is the one who spends the most time with her, the loremaster at the king’s right hand. Her Aristotle, he jokes, and smiles when she gets it.
“My Spirit,” she says, and she sees from the laughter in his eyes that the comparison does not come amiss.
He asks her apropos of nothing, while she is wading through the correspondence of the pirate Henry Morgan, and he is tuning his guitar softly, one leg over the arm of his chair. “Turner’s?” he says quietly.
Elizabeth looks up, but his eyes are on the fretboard, not her. “Of course,” she says, and watches the lines of his body relax into something like disappointment, though his face shows nothing. They have not spoken of Jack. He sailed with Barbossa for Tortuga, and no one has heard anything since. What is there to say?
“That will make it easier,” Teague says. “It’s a brave pirate that would touch the get of the Master of the Dutchman. Unless he liked the idea of the Locker or a watery grave. Less likely it’d be used as a hostage against you.”
She had already thought of that, of course, kidnapped by pirates because she was the governor’s daughter. “I know,” she says.
“Best to brazen it out and tell everyone,” he says. “Secret’s only dangerous hidden.”
She nods. Henry Morgan’s handwriting was bold, but time has rendered it hard to read. A hundred years, more or less. A bit less. These letters are from 1678, when the Brethren Court bound Calypso.
“My Jackie,” he says, and for a moment she does not know who he means. “My Jackie,” Teague says again, as though his voice were rusty from disuse, “Was the sweetest child you could ever see. Affectionate, high-spirited, and trusting. He was nothing but sunshine.”
Elizabeth does not lift her eyes from the page, for fear he will not go on.
“A beautiful child,” Teague says, “Like his mother.” His fingers slide over the strings, a soft chord plaintive as a sea bird’s call. “Isabelle. She was the daughter of a French planter in Nouvelle Orleans, got on a slave woman out of Guinea.”
Elizabeth draws in her breath, but if Teague hears it he gives no notice. She wonders if he is warning her, or if he hardly cares that she’s there. The strings tremble adagio under his hands.
“Isabelle was her father’s pet, raised with every grace. He died when she was fifteen, and his wife sold her off to a Nouvelle Orleans brothel before he was cold in the ground. That was how I met her.” He lifts his eyes to Elizabeth, as if daring her to say what she might. “And fell madly, passionately, completely in love. When I’d spent every penny I had, I took her away with me, watched her swell like that while we ran for Cape Town with the wind behind us.”
Elizabeth blushes. She doesn’t know why. She had thought she was beyond anything pirates could say, now.
“Jack was born off Mauritius in the middle of a typhoon. A hard birth, and we never had another. But no need to. He was nothing but light.” Teague’s hands brush across the strings softly, as though he caressed a baby’s head, conjuring it out of music, like Orpheus.
“We had ten years, start to finish. She went with me everywhere, everywhere in the entire world there’s water. No man nor woman had a better ten years since the world began than did Isabelle and me.”
He stills the strings with one hand, and for a moment she thinks he will stop. She hears him swallow, but when he goes on his voice is even. “We got in a tangle with the Garda Costa off Cuba, right off Santiago. They were firing chain. One shot took Isabelle’s head clean off.” Teague’s hands stray on the fretboard in a phantom chord. “And Jack…Jack just kept trying to put it back on.”
Elizabeth freezes, her hands to her mouth.
“He weren’t never the same after that, and nor were I. I brought the ship in to Shipwreck Cove, and I never sailed it out again. Not once. Not in thirty years, till the battle then, when you said every ship. I’d lost my nerve, see?” Teague looks up at her, his mouth twisted. “Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sail without shaking, couldn’t do nothin’ without seeing Jack like her, headless in my dreams. Had to have him out of it. You’ll understand, when that one comes. Someplace safe. Someplace he’d never be a pirate.” The strings wail in a discordant note. “I had a sister, Gladys by name, who’d married a cartographer in Bristol, a solid, respectable man. I sent Jack off on the first ship to be prenticed to him. Boy’s got to have a trade. And I wanted him safe, see?”
Elizabeth thinks there is a pleading note in his voice, as though somehow telling her would win him Jack’s forgiveness. She sees the mistake and the cause both, son losing father and mother and all the familiar world at one blow, for Bristol snow and an unfamiliar master, cold floors and gray skies instead of the wide open seas. “I see,” she says.
“I had to keep him safe,” Teague says, his head dropping almost against the fretboard. “Course he didn’t stay. He ran six months before the end of his bond. Didn’t know what happened to him for years after that.” He looks up from the strings. “Do ye know why he voted for you?”
Elizabeth shakes her head. The answer to that is too complicated, though she thinks she does.
“He don’t care about power, my Jackie. Never did. Only one of the Pirate Lords who doesn’t. He didn’t want to be king. Don’t know what he does want.”
Nothing she can explain without hurting, she thinks. Nothing but his lost Eden, the world of the pirate ship and the freedom of the seas the way it appears when you’re nine years old, when sorrow and pain have never touched you, and you are a child of light. Nothing you can find in rum or whores or all the shores under heaven.
“I don’t know,” she says to Teague, and crosses the room to him, dropping a kiss on his bent head the way she used to kiss her father goodnight in his study, with him preoccupied by some paper or another. “But Jack will be all right.”
“He’ll never be all right,” Teague says. “Jack is mad.”
“He’s not so bad,” Elizabeth says. “And you know he always comes out on top somehow.”
Teague looks up at her, the corners of his mouth creasing into a smile. “So you do love him, then?”
“I have no idea,” she says, sitting down on the footstool. It wasn’t what she meant to say, but it’s probably true. “But this is probably not the opportune moment to find out.”
“What with Jack gone God knows where and you pregnant with someone else’s child.”
“With my husband’s child,” Elizabeth says, “Who would never have been conceived if Jack hadn’t given up his chance at immortality for Will.”
“For Will? Or for you?” Teague asks.
“For me,” she says, and drops her face behind the curtain of her hair. “I know that.”
“Well,” Teague says. “That’s something. And Jack would make a terrible immortal.”
Elizabeth nods. She can’t imagine Jack with that gravity sitting on him, that new weight that made Will familiar and strange at once, as though his ordinary body cloaked a power he was just beginning to feel. She leans back, and feels Teague behind her, sane and ordinary for all his strangeness. His hand brushes over her hair lightly, just as her father used to do, and tears start in her eyes.
She is not alone. Whatever burdens she must carry, at least she is not alone.
Feedback is greatly appreciated!
SPOILERS FOR AWE LIKE WOAH!
The first night after the battle, after Will leaves, she walks back around Shipwreck Island in a haze of exhaustion. The green flash took with it the last of her energy, and it all crowds in, battle and fire and blood on weathered boards, rain and Will dying in her arms, Will embracing her on the sand, cannon fire that has left her still half deafened, blood still beneath her fingernails. Is it Will’s? Or hers? Or someone else’s entirely?
When she finds a bed she collapses. For one moment she feels like she’s flying again, as though Jack is lifting her from the awash decks of the Dutchman, clutched against his chest. It’s all right then, she thinks, and thinks no more.
The second night she has slept all day, and so she sits awake. Shipwreck Cove is oddly quiet, compared to how it was before. There are so many dead, and the living sleep as though stricken. She looks out over the hulks and wrecks that make up the main core, over the graceful raiders ranged about like swans, their running lights bobbing at anchor. Above, the stars arch as if painted on a cathedral ceiling, bright as the stars of the underworld that are eternity.
Somewhere a dog barks once. A man swears. Somewhere, a baby cries fitfully before it’s hushed. There are children here. There are women too, most of them lovers or wenches or prostitutes, not captains like her and Captain Cheng. And where there are women there are children. She supposes this ought not surprise her. Will is the son of a pirate, and so it seems is Jack.
This is hers. She is their king.
It hardly matters that her election was an accident, or an odd contrivance of Jack’s. The Code is clear. Once elected, a king cannot be unmade, except by death. Like the captain of the Dutchman. He has his work, and she hers.
The third night she goes to find Captain Teague. His room is near the center of the core, far up, in what might have once been the main stern cabin of a galleon. It’s full of plunder, ornate chairs from some Spanish colony, Turkish rugs, a strange handleless tea set of translucent pale green porcelain. He looks up from his guitar, his face showing no surprise at all.
“Teach me the Code,” she says, and watches him break into a smile.
Some of it is surprisingly easy. She can read and write, of course, as most pirates can’t. Barbossa has taught her the basics of navigation, and she can read a chart.
Why the Dutch harbor pirates at Curacao, how Gentleman Joe affects the coffee trade, how Clive’s conquest of Kashmir caused the East India Company to rise to prominence, these are the things a king must know. Strangely enough, in long hours of tutelage at Teague’s side, she is reminded more and more sharply of her father.
She used to sit like this, Limoges tea cup in hand, bored to tears while her father talked about economics and trade, about how an adventurer named Pierre Poivre broke the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg, and how the lack of transported Jacobites is encouraging the slave trade in Barbados.
She knows these things already. And now she has a context to fit them in. They are not isolated pieces of information. They are the history of her people. They are the currents and tides, the weather and conditions, that affect pirates. All the seas of the world are theirs, and so too are all the problems of the world. It’s so vast she can hardly compass such a canvas, but compass it she does, visualizing the globe in her father’s office spinning round and round, his long fingers tracing the Empire over water and land. Here Ceylon. Here Quebec, recently taken from the French. Here Terra Australis.
Teague is surprised, she knows. She sees it in his eyes. He had accepted that she could fight, but he had not known that she could rule, that behind her pretty eyes were a brain. It gives her satisfaction to prove it. It pleases her to gain his admiration, to see the dawning respect.
I am my father’s daughter too, she thinks, not the son of a pirate, but the daughter of a royal governor. Tea and provisions, quarrels between captains, adjuration, logistics, politics. These are the things that are a king’s life. The things that make this world function.
And she is good at it.
The first time she misses her courses, Elizabeth is not surprised. She’s been irregular for more than a year now, since she stowed away on the Edinburgh Trader and took to the harsh life of the sea. She hardly gives it a thought.
The second time she wonders. But she does not think about it. She doesn’t want to, doesn’t need to. Her days are full, even if her nights are not. Ten years is a long time, and she will not spend her days in mourning. There is too much to do.
The third time she knows. It is ten weeks since she lay beside Will on the sand, seventy days and seventy nights. There are a hundred and ninety six more to go, more or less. How many can she hide it? And then what?
Perhaps she should speak to Captain Cheng. There were three tall young men who were introduced as her sons. Surely she knows how to do this. But Captain Cheng has sailed, and she is no longer at Shipwreck Cove. And so Elizabeth says nothing, just holds her secret to herself. In loose men’s shirts no one has noticed.
The moon waxes and wanes again, and she feels him move beneath her heart, strange and slight as a bird’s wings beating inside. Is this what it feels like, she wonders, to be an egg? She has watched birds hatch. Is this faint movement the way it feels the moment before the shell bursts open, and wet winged the duckling flops peeping to the floor?
Not a duckling. A cygnet.
Teague notices. Of course he notices first. He is the one who spends the most time with her, the loremaster at the king’s right hand. Her Aristotle, he jokes, and smiles when she gets it.
“My Spirit,” she says, and she sees from the laughter in his eyes that the comparison does not come amiss.
He asks her apropos of nothing, while she is wading through the correspondence of the pirate Henry Morgan, and he is tuning his guitar softly, one leg over the arm of his chair. “Turner’s?” he says quietly.
Elizabeth looks up, but his eyes are on the fretboard, not her. “Of course,” she says, and watches the lines of his body relax into something like disappointment, though his face shows nothing. They have not spoken of Jack. He sailed with Barbossa for Tortuga, and no one has heard anything since. What is there to say?
“That will make it easier,” Teague says. “It’s a brave pirate that would touch the get of the Master of the Dutchman. Unless he liked the idea of the Locker or a watery grave. Less likely it’d be used as a hostage against you.”
She had already thought of that, of course, kidnapped by pirates because she was the governor’s daughter. “I know,” she says.
“Best to brazen it out and tell everyone,” he says. “Secret’s only dangerous hidden.”
She nods. Henry Morgan’s handwriting was bold, but time has rendered it hard to read. A hundred years, more or less. A bit less. These letters are from 1678, when the Brethren Court bound Calypso.
“My Jackie,” he says, and for a moment she does not know who he means. “My Jackie,” Teague says again, as though his voice were rusty from disuse, “Was the sweetest child you could ever see. Affectionate, high-spirited, and trusting. He was nothing but sunshine.”
Elizabeth does not lift her eyes from the page, for fear he will not go on.
“A beautiful child,” Teague says, “Like his mother.” His fingers slide over the strings, a soft chord plaintive as a sea bird’s call. “Isabelle. She was the daughter of a French planter in Nouvelle Orleans, got on a slave woman out of Guinea.”
Elizabeth draws in her breath, but if Teague hears it he gives no notice. She wonders if he is warning her, or if he hardly cares that she’s there. The strings tremble adagio under his hands.
“Isabelle was her father’s pet, raised with every grace. He died when she was fifteen, and his wife sold her off to a Nouvelle Orleans brothel before he was cold in the ground. That was how I met her.” He lifts his eyes to Elizabeth, as if daring her to say what she might. “And fell madly, passionately, completely in love. When I’d spent every penny I had, I took her away with me, watched her swell like that while we ran for Cape Town with the wind behind us.”
Elizabeth blushes. She doesn’t know why. She had thought she was beyond anything pirates could say, now.
“Jack was born off Mauritius in the middle of a typhoon. A hard birth, and we never had another. But no need to. He was nothing but light.” Teague’s hands brush across the strings softly, as though he caressed a baby’s head, conjuring it out of music, like Orpheus.
“We had ten years, start to finish. She went with me everywhere, everywhere in the entire world there’s water. No man nor woman had a better ten years since the world began than did Isabelle and me.”
He stills the strings with one hand, and for a moment she thinks he will stop. She hears him swallow, but when he goes on his voice is even. “We got in a tangle with the Garda Costa off Cuba, right off Santiago. They were firing chain. One shot took Isabelle’s head clean off.” Teague’s hands stray on the fretboard in a phantom chord. “And Jack…Jack just kept trying to put it back on.”
Elizabeth freezes, her hands to her mouth.
“He weren’t never the same after that, and nor were I. I brought the ship in to Shipwreck Cove, and I never sailed it out again. Not once. Not in thirty years, till the battle then, when you said every ship. I’d lost my nerve, see?” Teague looks up at her, his mouth twisted. “Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sail without shaking, couldn’t do nothin’ without seeing Jack like her, headless in my dreams. Had to have him out of it. You’ll understand, when that one comes. Someplace safe. Someplace he’d never be a pirate.” The strings wail in a discordant note. “I had a sister, Gladys by name, who’d married a cartographer in Bristol, a solid, respectable man. I sent Jack off on the first ship to be prenticed to him. Boy’s got to have a trade. And I wanted him safe, see?”
Elizabeth thinks there is a pleading note in his voice, as though somehow telling her would win him Jack’s forgiveness. She sees the mistake and the cause both, son losing father and mother and all the familiar world at one blow, for Bristol snow and an unfamiliar master, cold floors and gray skies instead of the wide open seas. “I see,” she says.
“I had to keep him safe,” Teague says, his head dropping almost against the fretboard. “Course he didn’t stay. He ran six months before the end of his bond. Didn’t know what happened to him for years after that.” He looks up from the strings. “Do ye know why he voted for you?”
Elizabeth shakes her head. The answer to that is too complicated, though she thinks she does.
“He don’t care about power, my Jackie. Never did. Only one of the Pirate Lords who doesn’t. He didn’t want to be king. Don’t know what he does want.”
Nothing she can explain without hurting, she thinks. Nothing but his lost Eden, the world of the pirate ship and the freedom of the seas the way it appears when you’re nine years old, when sorrow and pain have never touched you, and you are a child of light. Nothing you can find in rum or whores or all the shores under heaven.
“I don’t know,” she says to Teague, and crosses the room to him, dropping a kiss on his bent head the way she used to kiss her father goodnight in his study, with him preoccupied by some paper or another. “But Jack will be all right.”
“He’ll never be all right,” Teague says. “Jack is mad.”
“He’s not so bad,” Elizabeth says. “And you know he always comes out on top somehow.”
Teague looks up at her, the corners of his mouth creasing into a smile. “So you do love him, then?”
“I have no idea,” she says, sitting down on the footstool. It wasn’t what she meant to say, but it’s probably true. “But this is probably not the opportune moment to find out.”
“What with Jack gone God knows where and you pregnant with someone else’s child.”
“With my husband’s child,” Elizabeth says, “Who would never have been conceived if Jack hadn’t given up his chance at immortality for Will.”
“For Will? Or for you?” Teague asks.
“For me,” she says, and drops her face behind the curtain of her hair. “I know that.”
“Well,” Teague says. “That’s something. And Jack would make a terrible immortal.”
Elizabeth nods. She can’t imagine Jack with that gravity sitting on him, that new weight that made Will familiar and strange at once, as though his ordinary body cloaked a power he was just beginning to feel. She leans back, and feels Teague behind her, sane and ordinary for all his strangeness. His hand brushes over her hair lightly, just as her father used to do, and tears start in her eyes.
She is not alone. Whatever burdens she must carry, at least she is not alone.
Feedback is greatly appreciated!