PotC fic -- Four Days of Advent
Next in the "Outlaws and Inlaws" series -- in which there is a baby. The earlier stories are here: Swan in Flight, and Outlaws and Inlaws,
Jack/Elizabeth (with background Elizabeth/Will) This one's rated R for graphic girl-bits!
The first day past her time, Elizabeth is annoyed. Surely the baby should not be so inefficient as to wait one day past 280. Surely she has been pregnant long enough.
“The world don’t move like Beckett’s clockwork,” Jack observes smugly. She would kill him, but that would require movement, and he has brought her oranges. They’re juicy and sweet, just what she wanted, and it’s hard to reach a pitch of temper with their pulp dribbling down her chin as she sucks all the flavor out.
Jack lounges on her bed, his feet on the carved footboard. He looks better for three weeks of square meals, three weeks of solid sleep. The first week he slept twelve hours a day. Now he’s sleeping normally, or normally for Jack, rising at mid-morning and awake until after midnight.
“Too many years of taking the first watch of the night, me darlin’,” he says. “Keep ship’s time even when ashore.”
If one can call Shipwreck Cove ashore. She supposes there’s land down there somewhere, under the bottommost hulks. Something must be holding them up.
Jack sleeps in her room, shares her bed as chastely as any knight errant in an old tale, his face toward the door, his back against hers. There is a pistol on the dresser beside him, easy to hand, and a serviceable cutlass on the floor beside. It’s good enough, but she knows he misses the weight of his own sword, the one that Davy Jones broke, the one that Will put through the heart.
She wondered why, until she heard him and Teague in the hall one day, the end of a conversation in hurried low voices.
“…too dangerous, and too close to her time,” Teague said. “She’s a tempting target.”
Jack shrugged, but his voice was keen with exasperation. “I sleep beside her with steel and ball. Dunno what else I can do.”
Teague lifted his hand as though he meant to put it to Jack’s shoulder, but did not. “I know you’ll keep her safe, boy,” he said.
It should irritate her that they want to protect her, like a prize, and she means to tell Jack exactly what she thinks of that, but when they have gone to bed, locking the door with double locks and a bar, blowing out the candle in the dark, Elizabeth says nothing. There are plots. There are always plots. It’s part of ruling. She might even welcome them herself, but there is James to think of. If Jack wants to apply himself to protecting James, she cannot argue with that.
The second day past her time she is frightened. What if something has gone wrong? The baby seems to move less. How would she know if there were something wrong? At last she goes to see the midwife, a West Indian woman about thirty with three young children. She’s birthed more than forty babies since she took over from her mother, ten years ago. Her name is Susannah, and her man is a pirate.
“He’s just dropped is all,” Susannah says in tones that remind her of Tia Dalma’s, of Calypso’s. “See how it’s easier to breathe and there’s the pressure there? It means his head has dropped into the birth canal, so he’s got less room to move.” Her hands probe about Elizabeth’s privates a little painfully, pressing with her thumb. “You’ve started opening and thinning. Nothing wrong. Just a few days more.”
“When will the baby come?” she asks, holding herself still so she doesn’t squirm. It’s odd, having a woman look at her there. Having anyone look at her there. Will didn’t do much looking, their one short day.
Susannah shrugs. “Tonight. Tomorrow. Three or four days. Depends on how fast you thin out. When you’re all thinned out, you’ll start to open. That’s the pains that come on. You’ve already started, a bit, even though you don’t feel it yet. I could fit the tip of my littlest finger inside.” She holds up her finger for emphasis.
“How wide is it supposed to get?” Elizabeth asks.
Susannah spreads her hands wide. “That big.”
It seems big enough to fit a cannonball through.
Her eyes must show her dismay, because Susannah smiles reassuringly. “Have to fit the baby’s head, no?”
That night she lies beside Jack, her fingers clinched beneath the pillow. Her mother died in childbed when she was seven, delivered of a stillborn boy who never drew breath. She will not be afraid. She will not allow it. But she cannot make her breath quiet in the still air, cannot make her limbs not poise for flight.
Jack turns over, away from his gun, away from the door. His hands move on her back, slow and lazy, tracing the muscles in her back, warm at the base of her spine where the nagging ache is. “Did I tell ye about the time I went up the west coast of Mexico?” he asks.
She shakes her head. His hands feel good, kneading and leisurely.
“Most beautiful place in the world,” Jack says. “And mind I’ve seen a lot of beautiful places. One night in particular comes to mind. All the stars in the world coming out just at evening, and the water lapping quiet against the shore. Way up on the green green mountains, there’s an Aztec temple or the like, and ye can see the fires of torches from away, red under the moon. And behind is the mountains. One big volcano with a plume of smoke over it, smoldering like embers, reflected in the cloud. And to the other side, the lights of the Spanish colony. There’s a market right down to the water, with tables and all set out for a fiesta. The music of guitars coming over the water….”
She sleeps before he finishes, and dreams not of death but of moonlight and the sound of the sea.
The third day past her time she is restless. She rises early and leaves Jack sleeping, goes down to the kitchen to make tea. It’s appalling how filthy the kitchen is in pure morning light. There are dirty plates still on the tables, and a brindled cat is washing one of them with his tongue. He gives her a look as proudful and insouciant as Jack.
“Get down,” she says, picking him up about the middle and dumping him on the floor. “Go hunt rats or something.”
He meows indignantly and stalks off, his tail in the air, pausing across the room on the hearth to wash his manhood with resentful looks in her direction. Or should she say his cathood? Her search for a euphemism seems to have hit a Jack-like fork in diction.
By the time Teague comes stumbling in at nearly noon Elizabeth has cleaned half the kitchen. The pewter dishes are in a pot to boil, and the china ones are clean and gleaming on the high shelves. The empty rum bottles are piled in a box by the door. She’s scrubbing the long trestle tables with lye soap, her hair caught up in a bandana behind her.
Teague looks around as though he’s never seen the kitchen before, his eyebrows rising.
Before he can say anything she forestalls him. “And just how do you expect a baby to be born into this den of filth? No wonder we have rats! People just throw their leftovers on the floor, like as not. And who do they think will clean up after? Pirates! There are going to be some changes around here, let me tell you! We need a duty roster for kitchen cleaning, for one thing!”
Teague looks at her, and the corners of his mouth crinkling.
“Don’t you dare laugh at me! I may be big as an elephant, but I’m still the king around here! I don’t understand how pirates who can holystone the deck every day without a word of complaint can’t mop the floor in a year!” Elizabeth throws the soap at him.
Teague catches it with one hand. “I’d say the baby’s due any minute now,” he says. “Gettin’ a bit broody?”
“Don’t you dare patronize me!” Elizabeth shouts. She sounds a bit unreasonable, even to herself. “I thought you were different! I thought you respected me!”
Teague bends down as the dishrag goes sailing over his head. It smacks Jack in the face just inside the doorway.
“Lord love a duck, Lizzie!” he exclaims.
“I hate pirates!” she yells. Somehow Jack’s startled bewilderment with a dishrag on his head is the most annoying thing she’s ever seen. “Foul, drunken, messy, licentious, smelly, despicable…”
Whatever else she would have said is forestalled by the sudden rush of water down her legs, a lurch within that leaves her staring stupidly at her loose trousers, wondering how she managed to wet herself.
Jack’s jaw drops beneath the dishrag, his mouth hanging comically open.
“Better get Susannah,” Teague says evenly, putting the soap on the table and coming round to her. “Captain Turner’s about to deliver.”
“Right!” Jack says, bounding about and colliding with the wall. “I’ll just get Susannah then.”
“Here?” Elizabeth says.
“I doubt it,” Teague says. “Unless you’ve a hankering for the nice clean kitchen. How about back upstairs in your own room? Might be more comfortable.”
“I have to mop the floor first,” Elizabeth says, looking with horror at the spreading puddle around her feet.
“Jack can take care of that when he’s finished his humorous pratfalls,” Teague says, glaring at Jack, who has picked himself up and tripped over a bench on his way out the door. “Ye’d think he’d learned to walk by the time he’s forty years old.”
“Just you reconsider that insinuation,” Jack shouts over his shoulder as he takes off to find Susannah. Another clunk and clang heralds his conjunction with something down the hall.
Teague rolls his eyes. “Never seen a young father not go to pieces with the first,” he says, “But it’s dead tiresome.”
Elizabeth looks at him sideways, gathering herself for the long stairs back up to her rooms. “Teague.”
“Yes?” He smiles, a tricorn smile like Jack’s.
“It’s not Jack’s baby,” she says quietly. “I told you that.”
“Might as well be, isn’t it?” Teague says. “Wouldn’t be no different if it were.”
“It would be,” she says.
“Not to him.” Teague’s eyes are kind and grave. “How should he love ye more?”
The fourth day is the day James William Turner is born, just after midnight, on a day that the rest of the world calls March 26, 1763. He is born in the hull of a galleon, high in Shipwreck Cove, by the light of a ship’s lantern and iron candelabra looted from Vera Cruz fifty years before. A West Indian midwife breathes the breath of life into his tiny lips, while a vaguely nauseous pirate holds his bloody little body in his hands.
“Let me see him,” Elizabeth says, straining to reach forward for him on the birthing stool.
Jack hands him to her as though he were a priceless relic, while James William, better known as Flipper, screams his indignation aloud to the world.
The cord that binds them still pulses as she holds him against her sweaty chest, his dark hair matted with the blood of birth, his eyes squinched shut against the unbearable bright light of the world. “He’s beautiful,” she whispers.
“I never ever want to be in another birthin’ room so long as I ever live,” Jack says fervently, his arm around her.
“And you’ve no place here,” Susannah replies with a dark look. “Save as Captain Turner wouldn’t let you leave. It’s not men’s work. This is life and death.”
“Well,” Jack says, “if that’s all. I know a bit about death, but this is the other side, so to speak.”
Susannah ties a red string about the cord and lifts the knife, and Elizabeth is sharply reminded of that other knife in Bootstrap’s hand, the one that severed her forever from Will, black and white. Her hands clench on James.
But this knife is not for the child, but for the line that ties them together. With its stroke they part, two separate people for the first time.
“Hello, Flipper,” Jack says, bending low so that in his shadow the baby’s eyes open, wide and crossed. “Hello, sweet boy.”
“His name’s not Flipper,” Elizabeth says. Her body is still pulsing with one more deep contraction, but she hardly notices. “His name is James.” Jack’s arm is around her, behind the arm of the birthing chair, his shirt painted with her handprints. The baby’s eyes are sea gray, like storm clouds, though perhaps they will darken to brown. “He’s a pirate, and a good man.”
Jack/Elizabeth (with background Elizabeth/Will) This one's rated R for graphic girl-bits!
The first day past her time, Elizabeth is annoyed. Surely the baby should not be so inefficient as to wait one day past 280. Surely she has been pregnant long enough.
“The world don’t move like Beckett’s clockwork,” Jack observes smugly. She would kill him, but that would require movement, and he has brought her oranges. They’re juicy and sweet, just what she wanted, and it’s hard to reach a pitch of temper with their pulp dribbling down her chin as she sucks all the flavor out.
Jack lounges on her bed, his feet on the carved footboard. He looks better for three weeks of square meals, three weeks of solid sleep. The first week he slept twelve hours a day. Now he’s sleeping normally, or normally for Jack, rising at mid-morning and awake until after midnight.
“Too many years of taking the first watch of the night, me darlin’,” he says. “Keep ship’s time even when ashore.”
If one can call Shipwreck Cove ashore. She supposes there’s land down there somewhere, under the bottommost hulks. Something must be holding them up.
Jack sleeps in her room, shares her bed as chastely as any knight errant in an old tale, his face toward the door, his back against hers. There is a pistol on the dresser beside him, easy to hand, and a serviceable cutlass on the floor beside. It’s good enough, but she knows he misses the weight of his own sword, the one that Davy Jones broke, the one that Will put through the heart.
She wondered why, until she heard him and Teague in the hall one day, the end of a conversation in hurried low voices.
“…too dangerous, and too close to her time,” Teague said. “She’s a tempting target.”
Jack shrugged, but his voice was keen with exasperation. “I sleep beside her with steel and ball. Dunno what else I can do.”
Teague lifted his hand as though he meant to put it to Jack’s shoulder, but did not. “I know you’ll keep her safe, boy,” he said.
It should irritate her that they want to protect her, like a prize, and she means to tell Jack exactly what she thinks of that, but when they have gone to bed, locking the door with double locks and a bar, blowing out the candle in the dark, Elizabeth says nothing. There are plots. There are always plots. It’s part of ruling. She might even welcome them herself, but there is James to think of. If Jack wants to apply himself to protecting James, she cannot argue with that.
The second day past her time she is frightened. What if something has gone wrong? The baby seems to move less. How would she know if there were something wrong? At last she goes to see the midwife, a West Indian woman about thirty with three young children. She’s birthed more than forty babies since she took over from her mother, ten years ago. Her name is Susannah, and her man is a pirate.
“He’s just dropped is all,” Susannah says in tones that remind her of Tia Dalma’s, of Calypso’s. “See how it’s easier to breathe and there’s the pressure there? It means his head has dropped into the birth canal, so he’s got less room to move.” Her hands probe about Elizabeth’s privates a little painfully, pressing with her thumb. “You’ve started opening and thinning. Nothing wrong. Just a few days more.”
“When will the baby come?” she asks, holding herself still so she doesn’t squirm. It’s odd, having a woman look at her there. Having anyone look at her there. Will didn’t do much looking, their one short day.
Susannah shrugs. “Tonight. Tomorrow. Three or four days. Depends on how fast you thin out. When you’re all thinned out, you’ll start to open. That’s the pains that come on. You’ve already started, a bit, even though you don’t feel it yet. I could fit the tip of my littlest finger inside.” She holds up her finger for emphasis.
“How wide is it supposed to get?” Elizabeth asks.
Susannah spreads her hands wide. “That big.”
It seems big enough to fit a cannonball through.
Her eyes must show her dismay, because Susannah smiles reassuringly. “Have to fit the baby’s head, no?”
That night she lies beside Jack, her fingers clinched beneath the pillow. Her mother died in childbed when she was seven, delivered of a stillborn boy who never drew breath. She will not be afraid. She will not allow it. But she cannot make her breath quiet in the still air, cannot make her limbs not poise for flight.
Jack turns over, away from his gun, away from the door. His hands move on her back, slow and lazy, tracing the muscles in her back, warm at the base of her spine where the nagging ache is. “Did I tell ye about the time I went up the west coast of Mexico?” he asks.
She shakes her head. His hands feel good, kneading and leisurely.
“Most beautiful place in the world,” Jack says. “And mind I’ve seen a lot of beautiful places. One night in particular comes to mind. All the stars in the world coming out just at evening, and the water lapping quiet against the shore. Way up on the green green mountains, there’s an Aztec temple or the like, and ye can see the fires of torches from away, red under the moon. And behind is the mountains. One big volcano with a plume of smoke over it, smoldering like embers, reflected in the cloud. And to the other side, the lights of the Spanish colony. There’s a market right down to the water, with tables and all set out for a fiesta. The music of guitars coming over the water….”
She sleeps before he finishes, and dreams not of death but of moonlight and the sound of the sea.
The third day past her time she is restless. She rises early and leaves Jack sleeping, goes down to the kitchen to make tea. It’s appalling how filthy the kitchen is in pure morning light. There are dirty plates still on the tables, and a brindled cat is washing one of them with his tongue. He gives her a look as proudful and insouciant as Jack.
“Get down,” she says, picking him up about the middle and dumping him on the floor. “Go hunt rats or something.”
He meows indignantly and stalks off, his tail in the air, pausing across the room on the hearth to wash his manhood with resentful looks in her direction. Or should she say his cathood? Her search for a euphemism seems to have hit a Jack-like fork in diction.
By the time Teague comes stumbling in at nearly noon Elizabeth has cleaned half the kitchen. The pewter dishes are in a pot to boil, and the china ones are clean and gleaming on the high shelves. The empty rum bottles are piled in a box by the door. She’s scrubbing the long trestle tables with lye soap, her hair caught up in a bandana behind her.
Teague looks around as though he’s never seen the kitchen before, his eyebrows rising.
Before he can say anything she forestalls him. “And just how do you expect a baby to be born into this den of filth? No wonder we have rats! People just throw their leftovers on the floor, like as not. And who do they think will clean up after? Pirates! There are going to be some changes around here, let me tell you! We need a duty roster for kitchen cleaning, for one thing!”
Teague looks at her, and the corners of his mouth crinkling.
“Don’t you dare laugh at me! I may be big as an elephant, but I’m still the king around here! I don’t understand how pirates who can holystone the deck every day without a word of complaint can’t mop the floor in a year!” Elizabeth throws the soap at him.
Teague catches it with one hand. “I’d say the baby’s due any minute now,” he says. “Gettin’ a bit broody?”
“Don’t you dare patronize me!” Elizabeth shouts. She sounds a bit unreasonable, even to herself. “I thought you were different! I thought you respected me!”
Teague bends down as the dishrag goes sailing over his head. It smacks Jack in the face just inside the doorway.
“Lord love a duck, Lizzie!” he exclaims.
“I hate pirates!” she yells. Somehow Jack’s startled bewilderment with a dishrag on his head is the most annoying thing she’s ever seen. “Foul, drunken, messy, licentious, smelly, despicable…”
Whatever else she would have said is forestalled by the sudden rush of water down her legs, a lurch within that leaves her staring stupidly at her loose trousers, wondering how she managed to wet herself.
Jack’s jaw drops beneath the dishrag, his mouth hanging comically open.
“Better get Susannah,” Teague says evenly, putting the soap on the table and coming round to her. “Captain Turner’s about to deliver.”
“Right!” Jack says, bounding about and colliding with the wall. “I’ll just get Susannah then.”
“Here?” Elizabeth says.
“I doubt it,” Teague says. “Unless you’ve a hankering for the nice clean kitchen. How about back upstairs in your own room? Might be more comfortable.”
“I have to mop the floor first,” Elizabeth says, looking with horror at the spreading puddle around her feet.
“Jack can take care of that when he’s finished his humorous pratfalls,” Teague says, glaring at Jack, who has picked himself up and tripped over a bench on his way out the door. “Ye’d think he’d learned to walk by the time he’s forty years old.”
“Just you reconsider that insinuation,” Jack shouts over his shoulder as he takes off to find Susannah. Another clunk and clang heralds his conjunction with something down the hall.
Teague rolls his eyes. “Never seen a young father not go to pieces with the first,” he says, “But it’s dead tiresome.”
Elizabeth looks at him sideways, gathering herself for the long stairs back up to her rooms. “Teague.”
“Yes?” He smiles, a tricorn smile like Jack’s.
“It’s not Jack’s baby,” she says quietly. “I told you that.”
“Might as well be, isn’t it?” Teague says. “Wouldn’t be no different if it were.”
“It would be,” she says.
“Not to him.” Teague’s eyes are kind and grave. “How should he love ye more?”
The fourth day is the day James William Turner is born, just after midnight, on a day that the rest of the world calls March 26, 1763. He is born in the hull of a galleon, high in Shipwreck Cove, by the light of a ship’s lantern and iron candelabra looted from Vera Cruz fifty years before. A West Indian midwife breathes the breath of life into his tiny lips, while a vaguely nauseous pirate holds his bloody little body in his hands.
“Let me see him,” Elizabeth says, straining to reach forward for him on the birthing stool.
Jack hands him to her as though he were a priceless relic, while James William, better known as Flipper, screams his indignation aloud to the world.
The cord that binds them still pulses as she holds him against her sweaty chest, his dark hair matted with the blood of birth, his eyes squinched shut against the unbearable bright light of the world. “He’s beautiful,” she whispers.
“I never ever want to be in another birthin’ room so long as I ever live,” Jack says fervently, his arm around her.
“And you’ve no place here,” Susannah replies with a dark look. “Save as Captain Turner wouldn’t let you leave. It’s not men’s work. This is life and death.”
“Well,” Jack says, “if that’s all. I know a bit about death, but this is the other side, so to speak.”
Susannah ties a red string about the cord and lifts the knife, and Elizabeth is sharply reminded of that other knife in Bootstrap’s hand, the one that severed her forever from Will, black and white. Her hands clench on James.
But this knife is not for the child, but for the line that ties them together. With its stroke they part, two separate people for the first time.
“Hello, Flipper,” Jack says, bending low so that in his shadow the baby’s eyes open, wide and crossed. “Hello, sweet boy.”
“His name’s not Flipper,” Elizabeth says. Her body is still pulsing with one more deep contraction, but she hardly notices. “His name is James.” Jack’s arm is around her, behind the arm of the birthing chair, his shirt painted with her handprints. The baby’s eyes are sea gray, like storm clouds, though perhaps they will darken to brown. “He’s a pirate, and a good man.”