Next in the Outlaws and Inlaws series, Dream Tides. In which Will Turner has a strange conversation with Calypso, and much is revealed. Gen, with background Will/Elizabeth, Will/Jack, Jack/Elizabeth, Jack/Calypso. SPOILERS FOR AWE LIKE WOAH!
The other stories in the series are here:
Swan in Flight,
Outlaws and Inlaws,
Four Days of Advent and
Cradle Tales.
Will Turner had not dreamed since he lost his heart. At first he had thought it was exhaustion. After all, the days leading up to his death had been more than a little busy, and had gone round and round the clock again without stopping. But as the days turned into weeks and he did not dream, Will began to think it was something else he had lost. He slept. He was not, as Barbossa had been, undead in any sense that seemed obvious. He drank, he ate, he attended to various bodily functions. And he slept.
Stretched out on a positively monstrous bed in the captain’s cabin, Will did not find it hard to fall into dreamless oblivion. Weeks stretched into months, and dreams did not come, only rest. Perhaps, now that he was more and less than mortal, he had no need for them, anymore than he had need of his heart, beating far away in a chest at Shipwreck Cove.
It was three days short of a year when he dreamed again, three days short of a year since he had taken the helm of the Dutchman, four months since he had found Jack Sparrow drifting in the Florida Straits and dropped him off at Shipwreck Island. So he was surprised to dream.
In his dream, he stood at the rail of the Dutchman while she traveled under the sea, blue light cascading down from above, the water sursurrating along her hull. Schools of multicolored fish whorled in intricate patterns, and below the white sand bottom was almost obscured by bright coral.
Calypso stood at the rail beside him, her dark hands clasped, her elbows on the rail as she leaned out over her realm with an expression of sheer delight. She looked at him sideways, smiling, her voice still Tia Dalma’s. “You do not like it, Master of the Dutchman?”
“It’s pretty,” Will said. He did not ask how they could talk underwater. One can do anything in dreams.
“All de wonders of de deeps, and he say it pretty,” she laughed. “What den you call beautiful?”
“Elizabeth’s eyes,” he replied without thinking.
Calypso snorted. “Always with you it is Elizabeth this and that. Do you not look at any other woman?” She turned half toward him, dropping one shoulder flirtatiously. “You not like this body? I can be anything you want. Anything you dream of.” She shifted, like a school of fish changing course, dark hair lengthening into red hair like a river of bronze, skin to the color of bone, eyes green as the sea. White breasts rose from a bodice of fitted emerald, and her voice was light and breathless as a flute. “I can be anything you like, Will Turner. I can give you anything.”
“Except my freedom,” he said. “Even you can’t do that.”
Calypso shrugged. “Not easily or simply.” Her eyes were clear and solemn now. “You have a duty, Ferryman. I can’t undo it. Were it not for Jack Sparrow placing the sword in your hand and stabbing the heart, you would be dead a year now, one of these souls you carry to the other side. It isn’t easy to give back life.”
“And yet you’ve done it for Jack and Barbossa,” Will said.
Calypso sighed. “And you know what trouble that was.” She put her hands together again, looking out over the blue depths, shading to cerulean in the distance. “I enchanted this ship for Davy Jones, that he might serve the dead for ten years. There is nothing that will release you in less than ten years, except for someone stabbing your heart.”
“In which case I’ll be dead and they’ll get the Dutchman. No, thank you. I think that puts us back where we started,” Will said wryly.
“Then you’d better be careful, letting Jack Sparrow so near your heart,” she said, watching him.
Will met her eyes evenly. “If you’re suggesting that Jack is in Elizabeth’s bed, you’re not going to get tantrums out of me the way you did out of Jones. I expect he is. And he has no interest in stabbing my heart.”
“I thought Jack wanted to be Captain of the Dutchman.”
“That was before he knew what it really entailed,” Will said. “He wouldn’t like it. You know that.”
Calypso sighed, her body sliding back into Tia Dalma’s familiar form. “I know it. I known that a long, long time. Since he were mine.” She lifted one hand to cup her cheek. “He was a mon, sure as all. But he were afraid of me just a little. Jack Sparrow, he know the uncanny, but he not like it much for all that. You not afraid, Will Turner.”
Will shrugged. “What do I have to lose?”
“Elizabeth.” Will turned at the sound in her voice. “Sooner or later, de Pirate King travel on the sea.”
“You will not do that,” Will said evenly, though his eyes sparked with anger.
“Will I not?”
“No,” Will said. “Because then you will have a slave, not a priest.”
Calypso laughed, and she stepped forward, her hand against his chest. “You have learned too much, Master of the Dutchman. No, I will not harm one hair of your Elizabeth’s head, nor of any that belong to you. Too long the dead have waited unheeded, and souls lost at sea wandered without their guide. I need a priest, not a slave, not another lover who hates me. But I would that you loved me a little, Will Turner.”
“I don’t think I can,” Will said, leaning forward on the rail. “And not because of Elizabeth. But she’s the one who always loved the sea. I never even wanted to be a sailor.” He didn’t look at her, only surveyed the depths, the half hidden shape of a wreck obscured by coral. “I never loved it.”
Beside him, Calypso stilled. Her voice was as soft as waves. “Why is that, I wonder?”
The waters wavered, and they stood elsewhere, sudden as one does in dreams; Portsmouth harbor, and a cold day under scudding gray clouds, the wind tossing whitecaps on the water. By the rail a boy was waiting, his brown hair pulled back in a tail, his coat too tight around his shoulders. He leaned over the rail watching, and beside him a small woman wrapped in a faded shawl shaded her eyes, looking out to sea. They did not see Will or Calypso, of course.
“It took my father from me,” Will said.
The boy who was Will tugged at his mother’s skirts, urging her to come away, back to the warm taverns and shops of Portsmouth. Above, a seagull turned on the wind, crying. His mother didn’t move, only stayed watching out over the harbor, the steady progress of a ship of the line making her way out to sea, the tenders flitting along on the waves like white birds.
“She was faithful,” Will said. “She loved nobody but Bill. She had nothing but him, you see. She lived for his homecomings. When he’d arrive it would be a holiday forever, as long as he was there. A week. Maybe two. A week of beef for dinner and going about to taverns, watching them dance, her head hardly up to his shoulder. A week of holding my eyes tight shut, trying not to listen to them down below from the loft at night. A week of sweets and games.” He glanced sideways at Calypso. “And then six months of nothing. A year, sometimes. Bean soup and sewing and never enough wood for the fire. A year of taking in laundry for cheeky Navy midshipmen. When we were sick, it was the Parish that tended us, not my father. When she died, it was the Parish that buried her. And then I was on my own.” He shrugged. “But she was faithful.”
Calypso put her hand against his chest, and shook her head a little.
“Can you see why I don’t want that for Elizabeth? The last thing I want is for her to sit there waiting for me, wasting her youth and her spirit. You taunt me about Jack. If Jack is in her bed, well and good. If he makes her happy and bears her company, then I’ll shake his hand for it.”
“And be a father to the boy,” Calypso said, her eyes grave.
“What boy?”
“You do not know you have a son?” Calypso asked.
“What?” Will swung around, almost taking her by the shoulders. “How?”
“In de usual way, I presume,” Calypso said, laughing. “You know how it’s done, no?”
“A baby?”
“Dey start that way, yes.”
“When?”
“Nine months after you saw her last.” Calypso sounded amused. “Boy be almost three months old. She name him James William.”
“Oh my God.” Will bent his head. “I had no idea. I haven’t…. I haven’t seen Elizabeth. She hasn’t been at sea, and I wondered why. I sent Jack…. A baby….”
“Shipwreck Cove have docks,” Calypso observed. “Docks have ships that sit on de sea.”
“But I can’t set foot on land,” Will said.
Calypso rolled her eyes. “You learn nothin’ from Jack Sparrow about bendin’ the rules? You not set foot on land. Nothin’ against her setting foot on de sea. And as long as there be water under the ship’s keel, you on de sea.”
Will blinked. “It’s that simple? I can go on a ship tied up at Shipwreck Cove?”
“Davy Jones do it. No reason you can’t.” She had that obstinate look that Tia Dalma had worn, as though he were being very thick. “You want to see your son, you go do it.”
“My son.”
“Dat what I said.”
Will glanced over at the dream child, still standing looking at the harbor. “I promised myself a long time ago that I’d be a better father than Bill. That I’d never let my child want for things, or wonder where I was. I never meant to leave Elizabeth alone with a child. I would never have. I shouldn’t have married her. It was nothing but selfishness.”
“You knew you were going to die?” Calypso cast a jaundiced eye over him. “I don’ think so. You thought you live forever, like all young men. Besides, the plan was Jack stab the heart, no?”
“It was.” Will glanced down at her beautiful dark hands. “But somehow I knew it would never work.”
“A touch of destiny.”
“It would have been kinder to her if I had died. She would mourn me, and eventually go on. You know Elizabeth. If she didn’t have promises binding her, she’d find someone else to love. If she didn’t have me sitting like a dog in a manger, holding on to something I can’t have anyway.” Will closed his eyes. “And now I’ve left my son the same life I promised I never would.”
“Elizabeth is the Pirate King,” Calypso said. “She a woman, not some weak dreary creature. She take what she want. Maybe that be some man, and she not be true to you.”
“As long as she loves me, she’s true to me,” Will said, opening his eyes. “You don’t understand that I’m not like Jones. I never wanted to own Elizabeth. I never would have stopped her from anything. To bind a woman in her bones to keep her….”
“You would not do that, no,” she said, and her face was quiet. “That is why you are the Ferryman. Because your heart is strong.” Her hand shifted on his silent chest, over the empty cavity. “Go see your son,” she said. “We talk of this another time. Maybe you come to love de sea, maybe not. Or maybe we find something else to do for you, Master of the Dutchman. I have many names, and some have to do with love.”
“Sedna, Yemaya, Aphrodite Cythera, Mazu….”
She smiled. “You have learned some things, Will Turner.”
“I do try,” he said.
“You do,” she said, and dissolved like sea water in his hands, the dream breaking around her.
Will sat up in his quiet bed. Outside, the water played along the Dutchman’s hull, endlessly whispering the ghosts of the currents.
He strode on deck. “All hands, make ready to change course!”