PotC fic -- Outlaws and Inlaws
I'm afraid djarum99 and I are sharing one brain! Though it's not the same story at all, really! *waves*
Last week I posted Swan in Flight, a story with Elizabeth and Teague. Several people asked for more, so here's the next bit, Outlaws and Inlaws. Jack/Elizabeth, kind of, with a lot of Teague on the side.
Elizabeth’s sixth month begins with the stars of winter. She has told everyone now, with Teague loudly toasting, “The child of the Master of the Dutchman, the child of our Pirate King, sure to bring us the fortune of the seas!” If they do not have Calypso, perhaps that their King is wed to the Master of the Dutchman is worth something. It is. She can see it in their eyes. Fear of the Dutchman runs deep, and they do not know Will. Fear of the Locker runs deep, and Elizabeth does nothing to dispel it.
Even here, there is revelry at the turn of the year. It hardly matters if they celebrate Christmas or Eid, or some festival darker and older. Pirates will drink, and see in the dawn in a haze from the deck of some strange ship.
Mindful, ever mindful of cost and worth, Elizabeth has casks of rum breached, stands on one toasting everything that comes to mind, her loose shirt bloused over her belly, swollen but not ungainly yet. The babe jumps with the rhythm of drums from Africa, deep and resonant as the sea, Irish flutes and Spanish guitar. He likes it, she thinks. So does she.
Before dawn, she waits at the railing outside Teague’s quarters, far up over the harbor, watching the stars begin to pale.
A year ago, she thinks, they touched Mauritius the day after Christmas, ragged and out of supply, Twelfth Night in a French colony on the way to Singapore, Elizabeth and Barbossa and Will.
Two years ago, she was being measured for her wedding dress, angry at her father for making Will deliberately awkward at the Christmas ball, insisting he lead the figures when he knew Will couldn’t dance. As though it would matter to her if Will never danced, knowing a deadlier dance so well. But she misses her father still.
Three years ago, she wondered if Captain Norrington would propose, and how she should say no if he did.
Three years. The child is due at the spring equinox, just before her twenty-first birthday. Three years more and where should she be? Who should she be in nine years, when Will set foot on land again?
Elizabeth hears a step behind her, halting on the stairs, and turns, hoping that Teague will at least be company.
It’s Teague, yes, but with his arm about a plump redhead who is whispering in his ear, her bared breasts against his coat. He drops his face to hers, smiling. For a moment Elizabeth burns with shame and indignation. Why should she? Jack’s mother has been dead thirty years. Surely Teague has not lived as a monk all those years. Surely no one should expect it, fidelity to a spouse so long parted.
They do not see her in the shadow, wrapped up in one another. They pass like ghosts in a reek of rum and vetiver, faded velvet and salt. The redhead is not young, and though her skin is creamy, her face is showing the first lines of age. She’s Jack’s age, not a girl.
The door closes behind them, still cracked to the night air. She can hear them laughing softly, the rustle of cloth.
Elizabeth leaves. There are tears on her face that have nothing to do with shame. She thought Teague was like her. She thought he was faithful.
In the morning she is cool and distant. She sips her coffee quietly. Perhaps Teague thinks she is the worse for drink.
There are many documents to go over, threads from all over the world. Gentleman Joe wants an accord with the Haven of Madagascar, and someone else has a plan to steal cloves but has need of a safe market far from Grenada. The smugglers of St. Malo have challenged the Brethren again, running down a British supply ship in the Channel under the nose of Captain Chevalle and taking her into Le Havre bold as brass. And there is no word of the Black Pearl.
“It’s too soon for you,” Teague says, lifting his dark eyes over the rim of his coffee cup. “But a lifetime is a very long time.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Elizabeth says, and meets his eyes firmly. She’s learned that seems honest.
He shrugs and turns away.
The seventh month she is ungainly. Now she is ready for it to be done. It’s hard to keep her balance on tipped decks, and she must use both hands on the stair rails. The baby kicks in the middle of the night, keeping her awake between midnight and dawn. Elizabeth sleeps during the day, wakes sticky with sweat and disoriented late in the afternoon.
Her room is below Teague’s but on the same side, with windows of tiny diamond shaped glass that look as though they might have belonged to Sir Francis Drake, except one window, broken and repaired with rippled panes in sea green. When the sun comes through, it casts a watery light in the room. Her sheets are heavy turquoise silk from China. She will take them off before the baby comes and give birth on rags.
Beneath the bed, Will’s heart beats in a trunk bound with iron. She has not opened it. She doesn’t need to, Elizabeth tells herself. She knows what’s in it.
She dreams she’s kissing Jack, locked in his arms by chains that surround them both, decks awash as the ship slowly sinks beneath the sea. Surely Will will come for them! Or maybe it’s Will who has left them like this, his faithless wife and his faithless friend. The sea roars in her ears. The waters creep up their bodies. Jack is smiling as though he doesn’t care at all.
She wakes, her heart pounding, her body throbbing in ways that seem obscene from someone who ought to be all mother. Her room is quiet. Nothing is wrong.
For a moment, more than anything, she wishes for James Norrington. He was, she thinks, her true friend no matter what else. But Norrington is dead, killed by Will’s father so that she and her crew might escape.
James. She puts her hand to her belly where the child kicks. Will would not begrudge the tribute, and William Turner seems like tempting the fates.
“My James,” she says, and feels the answering pulse, less like tiny wings and more like tiny whallops, like someone very small turning lazy underwater flips, pushing off one side and then another. “My James.”
The eighth month is more than enough. Her ankles swell and she must go barefoot instead of booted, otherwise she can’t get them off at night. She eats ten bites at a meal, feeling as though the child’s feet are surely in her throat. His head is down now, pressed against her bladder. Her face breaks out in protest, her hair hangs in an oily mass no matter how often she washes it. Her nipples darken brown as her eyes, her breasts straining the skin that covers them.
Never in her entire life has she felt so completely ugly, a sloven who rises mid-afternoon, wandering about barefooted in search of tea and bread, less a King than a lump, a huge greasy lump of waiting. Three more weeks. Twenty-one days, more or less.
She goes downstairs slowly to one of the smaller kitchens. In the afternoon it’s usually quiet there, and few crews are in port anyhow, just a galley under repair and a few clandestine traders. Someone will have a pot on the fire, and there will be bread. Maybe Teague will be around, if he’s not with the traders. She wants to know what deals are being made.
She hears Teague’s voice as she reaches the door, but doesn’t catch the words. Perhaps he’s brought one of the traders in for a bite.
Elizabeth pushes open the curtain and sees the last face she expected.
Jack is sitting across from Teague at one of the tables, a bowl and spoon in his hands, and he looks up at her as though an angel had descended through the ceiling in a shower of gold coins. “Elizabeth…” he says, a stupid expression on his face.
“Oh damn,” she says.
He looks terrible. His coat is faded by the sun, and he’s far too thin, the sharp bones of his face standing out, a month of filth on him. She can smell him from three yards away. She’s not sure how she got there. She had been in the doorway.
“I see you’ve been busy,” he says, with a cockeyed leer at her belly. He’s standing up, the bowl and spoon forgotten.
“You stink,” she says.
“You look ready to drop a calf,” Jack says.
“Your teeth are tobacco stained and look ready to fall out,” she says.
“Are those your breasts, or did you borrow someone else’s?” His eyes are laughing, and so close. Somehow they’re standing close enough to touch.
“Is that a very small oyster in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?”
“Oyster,” he says, and their arms are around each other, his forehead against her shoulder and hers against his, the bulk of her belly against his side.
For a long moment they just stand like that, her greasy hair against his filthy cheek. She feels his eyes close, the sweep of his lashes against her skin.
“Hello, Jack,” she says.
“Hullo, Lizzie.”
“That’s Captain Lizzie to you.”
“King Lizzie,” he says, and she feels him smile.
“You still stink,” she observes.
“Spent last night on the Dutchman, how not?” he asks.
Elizabeth pulls back, looking at him. “On the Dutchman? Jack, what happened? Did you see Will?”
“I did.” He shrugs off her arm. “And thank you for inquiring after my health. I am in fact not dead, perhaps the only man under sixty in all your acquaintance to be not dead, though formerly counts in some quarters. The Whelp is as well as might be expected, though not as expectant as you, I gather. He doesn’t know?”
“How should he? I’ve not seen him.”
“Ah!” Jack settles back against the edge of the table, seemingly oblivious to Teague. “Well, I have. Most emphatically. I was adrift in a dinghy, ye see, with a prodigious supply of rum, having had a bit of a run in while trying to recover the Pearl from your darling Hector, who seems to have absconded with it again. Myself and said dinghy were in the Florida Straits at nightfall, where upon I was happened upon by the Dutchman, and plied with their unenviable forms of hospitality and cheer.”
Jack takes a long swig from a tankard on the table. “I told Dear William that it would be a great improvement were they to take up bowls or some innocent pastime, rather allow the constant frustration to hold sway.” He glances at her meaningfully. “For want of anything better to do, I was compelled to play Will’s organ.”
Elizabeth bursts out laughing. “You’re terrible, Jack!”
He grins, gold and stained teeth. “He sends you his love, undying as ever. I am to carry to you his most steadfast assurances of affection, and his sentiments of missing you daily and hourly, which I do bring with all dispatch, a veritable Cyrano. With all unhelpful dispatch, in fact, as I woke this morning in said dinghy just off Shipwreck Island, a good three hundred miles from the Florida Straits, something I am not particularly appreciative of. It will take me quite some time to get back, and a dinghy is not perhaps a vessel best suited to the voyage.”
Elizabeth’s eyes meet Teague’s for a moment over Jack’s shoulder. “Don’t you think you might stay a little while? You look as though you could do with a square meal or two.”
“No denying that,” Jack says, with a wolfish look in the direction of the bowl of chowder. “Even a madman must eat, and the food of the dead may look tasty, but I know better than to eat from Will’s bowl of pomegranates. Your pomegranates, on the other hand….” He drops his eyes slyly to her breasts.
“Are for the baby,” she says, smiling. “Jack, you’re wicked even when you’re falling over.”
“I hate to disappoint,” he says. “Especially in quarters where I have so often disappointed, being lacking in both piratical bravado and political acumen. Not to mention raw ambition, a certain quality necessary in pirate lords.”
Behind him, Elizabeth sees Teague stiffen, but he holds his tongue. Whatever is between them, Teague will not rise to the bait.
“Eat some chowder, Jack,” she says. “I’ll get a bowl and join you, and you can tell me all about Will.”
For a moment she thinks he will not, but Jack shrugs elaborately and sinks back onto the bench. “I must obey my king, must I not, having elected so electorally her Excellency.”
“That’s Majesty to you,” Elizabeth says with a smile, and tries to maneuver her bulk onto the opposite bench.
“As your Officiousness demands,” he says, drinking in her smile. She cannot stop smiling either.
That night he sleeps in her bed.
They are not lovers, but a man must sleep, as he says, and by the time the baby has stopped his nocturnal flailings it’s very late, and Jack is nearly asleep in the chair.
“Blow out the lamp,” she says, and he curls up beside her in breeches and shirt, nestling against her back, one arm curved tentatively around the bulk of her belly. He feels warm and real, solid and animal. There is something to be said for that.
The circles under his eyes are too dark, and owe nothing to charcoal, the bones in his hands sharp and angular. He’s nothing but skin and muscle, the ropy body of a man who hasn’t eaten properly in months, who hasn’t slept full nights at a time. And how should he, alone in an open boat?
“Stay a while,” she whispers, as though she needs him. He would not stay for himself, out of pride or Teague or something, but perhaps he will stay if he thinks she needs him. She could pretend to need him just a little.
“Might as well,” he whispers, and she feels him grin against her, as though there were some joke. “Curious whether little Flipper is a boy or a girl.”
“He’s a boy, and his name’s not Flipper. It’s James.”
“Flipper Turner,” Jack says, waving his fingers about. “Little webby feet. Chip off the old barnacle.”
“He doesn’t have webbed feet. And Flipper Turner is horrible.”
“Id’n it though?”
“Good night, Jack,” she whispers.
“Good night, Lizzie,” he says, his arm tight around her. For now it is enough.
Last week I posted Swan in Flight, a story with Elizabeth and Teague. Several people asked for more, so here's the next bit, Outlaws and Inlaws. Jack/Elizabeth, kind of, with a lot of Teague on the side.
Elizabeth’s sixth month begins with the stars of winter. She has told everyone now, with Teague loudly toasting, “The child of the Master of the Dutchman, the child of our Pirate King, sure to bring us the fortune of the seas!” If they do not have Calypso, perhaps that their King is wed to the Master of the Dutchman is worth something. It is. She can see it in their eyes. Fear of the Dutchman runs deep, and they do not know Will. Fear of the Locker runs deep, and Elizabeth does nothing to dispel it.
Even here, there is revelry at the turn of the year. It hardly matters if they celebrate Christmas or Eid, or some festival darker and older. Pirates will drink, and see in the dawn in a haze from the deck of some strange ship.
Mindful, ever mindful of cost and worth, Elizabeth has casks of rum breached, stands on one toasting everything that comes to mind, her loose shirt bloused over her belly, swollen but not ungainly yet. The babe jumps with the rhythm of drums from Africa, deep and resonant as the sea, Irish flutes and Spanish guitar. He likes it, she thinks. So does she.
Before dawn, she waits at the railing outside Teague’s quarters, far up over the harbor, watching the stars begin to pale.
A year ago, she thinks, they touched Mauritius the day after Christmas, ragged and out of supply, Twelfth Night in a French colony on the way to Singapore, Elizabeth and Barbossa and Will.
Two years ago, she was being measured for her wedding dress, angry at her father for making Will deliberately awkward at the Christmas ball, insisting he lead the figures when he knew Will couldn’t dance. As though it would matter to her if Will never danced, knowing a deadlier dance so well. But she misses her father still.
Three years ago, she wondered if Captain Norrington would propose, and how she should say no if he did.
Three years. The child is due at the spring equinox, just before her twenty-first birthday. Three years more and where should she be? Who should she be in nine years, when Will set foot on land again?
Elizabeth hears a step behind her, halting on the stairs, and turns, hoping that Teague will at least be company.
It’s Teague, yes, but with his arm about a plump redhead who is whispering in his ear, her bared breasts against his coat. He drops his face to hers, smiling. For a moment Elizabeth burns with shame and indignation. Why should she? Jack’s mother has been dead thirty years. Surely Teague has not lived as a monk all those years. Surely no one should expect it, fidelity to a spouse so long parted.
They do not see her in the shadow, wrapped up in one another. They pass like ghosts in a reek of rum and vetiver, faded velvet and salt. The redhead is not young, and though her skin is creamy, her face is showing the first lines of age. She’s Jack’s age, not a girl.
The door closes behind them, still cracked to the night air. She can hear them laughing softly, the rustle of cloth.
Elizabeth leaves. There are tears on her face that have nothing to do with shame. She thought Teague was like her. She thought he was faithful.
In the morning she is cool and distant. She sips her coffee quietly. Perhaps Teague thinks she is the worse for drink.
There are many documents to go over, threads from all over the world. Gentleman Joe wants an accord with the Haven of Madagascar, and someone else has a plan to steal cloves but has need of a safe market far from Grenada. The smugglers of St. Malo have challenged the Brethren again, running down a British supply ship in the Channel under the nose of Captain Chevalle and taking her into Le Havre bold as brass. And there is no word of the Black Pearl.
“It’s too soon for you,” Teague says, lifting his dark eyes over the rim of his coffee cup. “But a lifetime is a very long time.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Elizabeth says, and meets his eyes firmly. She’s learned that seems honest.
He shrugs and turns away.
The seventh month she is ungainly. Now she is ready for it to be done. It’s hard to keep her balance on tipped decks, and she must use both hands on the stair rails. The baby kicks in the middle of the night, keeping her awake between midnight and dawn. Elizabeth sleeps during the day, wakes sticky with sweat and disoriented late in the afternoon.
Her room is below Teague’s but on the same side, with windows of tiny diamond shaped glass that look as though they might have belonged to Sir Francis Drake, except one window, broken and repaired with rippled panes in sea green. When the sun comes through, it casts a watery light in the room. Her sheets are heavy turquoise silk from China. She will take them off before the baby comes and give birth on rags.
Beneath the bed, Will’s heart beats in a trunk bound with iron. She has not opened it. She doesn’t need to, Elizabeth tells herself. She knows what’s in it.
She dreams she’s kissing Jack, locked in his arms by chains that surround them both, decks awash as the ship slowly sinks beneath the sea. Surely Will will come for them! Or maybe it’s Will who has left them like this, his faithless wife and his faithless friend. The sea roars in her ears. The waters creep up their bodies. Jack is smiling as though he doesn’t care at all.
She wakes, her heart pounding, her body throbbing in ways that seem obscene from someone who ought to be all mother. Her room is quiet. Nothing is wrong.
For a moment, more than anything, she wishes for James Norrington. He was, she thinks, her true friend no matter what else. But Norrington is dead, killed by Will’s father so that she and her crew might escape.
James. She puts her hand to her belly where the child kicks. Will would not begrudge the tribute, and William Turner seems like tempting the fates.
“My James,” she says, and feels the answering pulse, less like tiny wings and more like tiny whallops, like someone very small turning lazy underwater flips, pushing off one side and then another. “My James.”
The eighth month is more than enough. Her ankles swell and she must go barefoot instead of booted, otherwise she can’t get them off at night. She eats ten bites at a meal, feeling as though the child’s feet are surely in her throat. His head is down now, pressed against her bladder. Her face breaks out in protest, her hair hangs in an oily mass no matter how often she washes it. Her nipples darken brown as her eyes, her breasts straining the skin that covers them.
Never in her entire life has she felt so completely ugly, a sloven who rises mid-afternoon, wandering about barefooted in search of tea and bread, less a King than a lump, a huge greasy lump of waiting. Three more weeks. Twenty-one days, more or less.
She goes downstairs slowly to one of the smaller kitchens. In the afternoon it’s usually quiet there, and few crews are in port anyhow, just a galley under repair and a few clandestine traders. Someone will have a pot on the fire, and there will be bread. Maybe Teague will be around, if he’s not with the traders. She wants to know what deals are being made.
She hears Teague’s voice as she reaches the door, but doesn’t catch the words. Perhaps he’s brought one of the traders in for a bite.
Elizabeth pushes open the curtain and sees the last face she expected.
Jack is sitting across from Teague at one of the tables, a bowl and spoon in his hands, and he looks up at her as though an angel had descended through the ceiling in a shower of gold coins. “Elizabeth…” he says, a stupid expression on his face.
“Oh damn,” she says.
He looks terrible. His coat is faded by the sun, and he’s far too thin, the sharp bones of his face standing out, a month of filth on him. She can smell him from three yards away. She’s not sure how she got there. She had been in the doorway.
“I see you’ve been busy,” he says, with a cockeyed leer at her belly. He’s standing up, the bowl and spoon forgotten.
“You stink,” she says.
“You look ready to drop a calf,” Jack says.
“Your teeth are tobacco stained and look ready to fall out,” she says.
“Are those your breasts, or did you borrow someone else’s?” His eyes are laughing, and so close. Somehow they’re standing close enough to touch.
“Is that a very small oyster in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?”
“Oyster,” he says, and their arms are around each other, his forehead against her shoulder and hers against his, the bulk of her belly against his side.
For a long moment they just stand like that, her greasy hair against his filthy cheek. She feels his eyes close, the sweep of his lashes against her skin.
“Hello, Jack,” she says.
“Hullo, Lizzie.”
“That’s Captain Lizzie to you.”
“King Lizzie,” he says, and she feels him smile.
“You still stink,” she observes.
“Spent last night on the Dutchman, how not?” he asks.
Elizabeth pulls back, looking at him. “On the Dutchman? Jack, what happened? Did you see Will?”
“I did.” He shrugs off her arm. “And thank you for inquiring after my health. I am in fact not dead, perhaps the only man under sixty in all your acquaintance to be not dead, though formerly counts in some quarters. The Whelp is as well as might be expected, though not as expectant as you, I gather. He doesn’t know?”
“How should he? I’ve not seen him.”
“Ah!” Jack settles back against the edge of the table, seemingly oblivious to Teague. “Well, I have. Most emphatically. I was adrift in a dinghy, ye see, with a prodigious supply of rum, having had a bit of a run in while trying to recover the Pearl from your darling Hector, who seems to have absconded with it again. Myself and said dinghy were in the Florida Straits at nightfall, where upon I was happened upon by the Dutchman, and plied with their unenviable forms of hospitality and cheer.”
Jack takes a long swig from a tankard on the table. “I told Dear William that it would be a great improvement were they to take up bowls or some innocent pastime, rather allow the constant frustration to hold sway.” He glances at her meaningfully. “For want of anything better to do, I was compelled to play Will’s organ.”
Elizabeth bursts out laughing. “You’re terrible, Jack!”
He grins, gold and stained teeth. “He sends you his love, undying as ever. I am to carry to you his most steadfast assurances of affection, and his sentiments of missing you daily and hourly, which I do bring with all dispatch, a veritable Cyrano. With all unhelpful dispatch, in fact, as I woke this morning in said dinghy just off Shipwreck Island, a good three hundred miles from the Florida Straits, something I am not particularly appreciative of. It will take me quite some time to get back, and a dinghy is not perhaps a vessel best suited to the voyage.”
Elizabeth’s eyes meet Teague’s for a moment over Jack’s shoulder. “Don’t you think you might stay a little while? You look as though you could do with a square meal or two.”
“No denying that,” Jack says, with a wolfish look in the direction of the bowl of chowder. “Even a madman must eat, and the food of the dead may look tasty, but I know better than to eat from Will’s bowl of pomegranates. Your pomegranates, on the other hand….” He drops his eyes slyly to her breasts.
“Are for the baby,” she says, smiling. “Jack, you’re wicked even when you’re falling over.”
“I hate to disappoint,” he says. “Especially in quarters where I have so often disappointed, being lacking in both piratical bravado and political acumen. Not to mention raw ambition, a certain quality necessary in pirate lords.”
Behind him, Elizabeth sees Teague stiffen, but he holds his tongue. Whatever is between them, Teague will not rise to the bait.
“Eat some chowder, Jack,” she says. “I’ll get a bowl and join you, and you can tell me all about Will.”
For a moment she thinks he will not, but Jack shrugs elaborately and sinks back onto the bench. “I must obey my king, must I not, having elected so electorally her Excellency.”
“That’s Majesty to you,” Elizabeth says with a smile, and tries to maneuver her bulk onto the opposite bench.
“As your Officiousness demands,” he says, drinking in her smile. She cannot stop smiling either.
That night he sleeps in her bed.
They are not lovers, but a man must sleep, as he says, and by the time the baby has stopped his nocturnal flailings it’s very late, and Jack is nearly asleep in the chair.
“Blow out the lamp,” she says, and he curls up beside her in breeches and shirt, nestling against her back, one arm curved tentatively around the bulk of her belly. He feels warm and real, solid and animal. There is something to be said for that.
The circles under his eyes are too dark, and owe nothing to charcoal, the bones in his hands sharp and angular. He’s nothing but skin and muscle, the ropy body of a man who hasn’t eaten properly in months, who hasn’t slept full nights at a time. And how should he, alone in an open boat?
“Stay a while,” she whispers, as though she needs him. He would not stay for himself, out of pride or Teague or something, but perhaps he will stay if he thinks she needs him. She could pretend to need him just a little.
“Might as well,” he whispers, and she feels him grin against her, as though there were some joke. “Curious whether little Flipper is a boy or a girl.”
“He’s a boy, and his name’s not Flipper. It’s James.”
“Flipper Turner,” Jack says, waving his fingers about. “Little webby feet. Chip off the old barnacle.”
“He doesn’t have webbed feet. And Flipper Turner is horrible.”
“Id’n it though?”
“Good night, Jack,” she whispers.
“Good night, Lizzie,” he says, his arm tight around her. For now it is enough.