(no subject)
Title: looms and anvils [the pretty boys and pirates remix]
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Characters/Pairings: Will/Elizabeth
Rating/Warnings: PG, spoilers. Also, suicide, but the context makes it a lot less uncomfortable than it would otherwise be.
Written for: Remix Madness 2011, remixing Five Things That Never Happened to Elizabeth Swann by soda_and_capes.
Wordcount: 3000 [not the plan]
Author's Notes: This is, technically, only a remix of one fifth of the fic in question. I apologize for this fact. If memory serves me, I did come up with the idea for the resolution to this (in terms of Elizabeth) after seeing At World's End; nonetheless, this might not have taken the same form if fahye's turn your sail (never say we die) had not been my headcanon for some time now. I probably don't need to cite it at this point, but the title derived from one borrowed from the lyrics of "Hey Lady" by Thriving Ivory.
Sometimes Will wonders if things were supposed to be this way.
Certainly it’s not the kind of thing you find in stories. Will collected a lot of stories when he was younger, gathered hodgepodge here and there: a treasured cache from his father first, pirates and princes and monsters and whales, and the rest scooped up piecemeal by sitting just behind the children waiting with mothers, or listening to the old men at the backs of bars. Will spent a lot of time in bars back when he was little enough for people to cluck in concern rather than contempt when he came out of them, when he didn’t understand the bits of the stories that made the men laugh and he could spit out the nasty-tasting sip of beer without getting worse than a roughly fond ruffle of his hair.
Now he can spend his time in bars without anyone clucking at him at all, for he’s the town blacksmith and known to be all right with it, and he’s the one spinning out the stories to the grubby children wrinkling their noses at the taste of beer. He’s careful to leave out the frightening bits; no need to give them nightmares. He’s fairly sure that they’ll wake up alone.
Most of the stories didn’t give Will nightmares, when he was young. One or two of his father’s, before everything; one or two about shipwrecks, after that. Never Davy Jones, and once or twice when he’s slumped at the kitchen table, head in his sweat-soaked hands and a pint of any liquid he can find in front of him to soothe his raw throat, he laughs at the irony: yes, when he’s a grown man this childhood story gives him nightmares.
It is on those nights when he misses Elizabeth the most, which is a bit like talking about oceans where the sea is saltiest. It isn’t that it is unbearable, because he is far from the unhappiest man in this little town and truth be told he can think of far worse ways for his life to have turned out, but it is constant. He wants to hold her, smile at her, brush her hair out of her eyes; wants to get completely drunk with her and stumble laughing home together and nurse each other through the hangovers the next morning; wants to be able to run his hands over the soft gentle skin of her stomach and the quickly-puckered scar where that sword slid into her (his fault, his fault) and reassure himself that she’s still breathing and still loves him.
He writes to her, carries the letters to the ocean and throws them to the waves with a whisper - you owe her this, Calypso, please give her this - and after the first time it almost breaks him because he thinks she’ll never see it, but six months later another ship comes in and there’s a message for him. It’s creased and battered and stinks of sweat and dust and all the dozen men who have carried it, but it’s from Elizabeth, and so clear that he can almost hear her. He still remembers what her voice sounds like, he discovers, and it’s a relief to him.
The letters become constant; Calypso never seems to become frustrated with him, and Elizabeth can order her men and her women - they do not meld with the ship any longer, she writes, and I hear some of the crew say they’ll take this over Paradise - to carry her answers into the ports. One way or another, they always make it to him safely.
It's hard at first, but it comes easier with time, and soon enough - comparatively - he can tell her all the things that normally he would whisper into her hair or spell out on her breasts with his fingertips. She made him feel alive like nothing else, managed to combine the wonder of setting out free across the ocean with the comfortable solid known stability of home, is beautiful to him mostly for how strong, how clever, how brave she is. I will never stop being grateful that you love me, he writes to her, but even if you hadn’t, it would still have been the greatest honor of my life to have sailed with you. And later, quietly, in a letter written by wasteful candlelight because he doesn’t want to go anywhere near his sweat-soaked sheets and he is still shaking, he writes, whether in battle or on unsafe ships or anywhere in the world, I have never felt as safe anywhere as I have felt with you.
Safe isn’t quite the word, not always, but it is the closest one to that mixture of feeling protected and invulnerable and so determined to keep them both alive that he couldn’t imagine anything they could not defeat together.
He discovers after the first ten years - to the day, almost to the hour - that he can’t feel that way anymore, not because he doesn’t love her, not because anything has faded except her clothes and a few strands of her hair, but because they have lost a war together. Can’t fight time.
On the other hand, if they can lose that battle, if they can fight the King of the Sea and gain and lose a criminal throne (no immortal kings, especially not of pirates) without ever losing each other, then he believes that they never will.
She has aged: no lines on her, of course, and he knows how old she is, but she looks an astonishingly youthful thirty rather than eternally timeless. It’s the new calluses on her hands, the slight shift in the way she stands. The past decade has taken a great deal of work from both of them, and he loves her so much that he cannot stand it.
Of course it takes about a heartbeat for everyone to hear about Will the Blacksmith kissing a woman on the dock, and even less for them all to guess that she’s the wife they all thought left him and lied to him. He introduces her to everyone, and they make each other laugh with all the raised eyebrows and baffled stares, and most of the villagers walk away looking hesitantly happy. Will’s face feels unfamiliar, he is smiling so much, and he knows that he has love written on him as clearly as the metalworking scars. He and Elizabeth don’t let go of each others’ hands until they reach his house - for the moment, his home - and then it is only so they can touch every last piece of each other, clutching and laughing and crying. She calls him Will, and doting husband - lingering on the word - and handsome and incredible, and he calls her Captain Turner and Mrs. Turner and his wife, but mostly Elizabeth. He almost calls her love, but that’s Jack’s joke and he wants to make her laugh all on his own. (Only for today. In the letters they tell each other Jack stories, and crew stories, and villager stories, and everything else that they can imagine, but when they have so little time truly together that he doesn’t want to share any of it at all.)
“Are you happy?” he asks her afterwards, stroking the rough tanned skin of her back, the texture fascinating against his hands.
She frowns. “I miss you, of course,” she says, kissing his shoulder. “Always. But yes, I’m happy.”
“I’m glad,” he says softly, kissing her again, and he is eternally grateful that she understands he means it.
They knew already, always did, that one day would not nearly be enough. It also isn’t nearly long enough for a ship to stay in port without raising half a thousand questions, and fortunately a ship in harbor is not dry land at all. It’s amazing how much privacy can be found on a ship with nooks and crannies, at least when all the crew manage to be conspicuously ashore. They understand their captain, Will sees. He is familiar with the kind of smile that says you make one of our own happy and that is enough for us to like you, and its appearance as constant as her hand in his.
He notices a number of people back in town sending that smile across the water, on those one or two days when he has to slip back into town for a few hours, or when Elizabeth takes a bit of a risk and comes in to help load the boat, staying steady at the stern to make sure all the food is properly packed. (“We don’t eat,” she explains to Will, “but we can give it to the shipwreck survivors and the castaways, and maybe have a tiny bite for taste once in a while.”) One day a few of the town’s wives row out to offer “Missus Captain” a little help airing out the ship, and another day the children from the bar want to see both the ship and Elizabeth, and there are days when it feels like all of Will’s life that is worth having is crowded onto the deck.
It doesn’t last forever, of course, not when sailors are still dying. He and Elizabeth kiss good-bye with his back pressed against the rail, and if they’re both crying a little, well, their carefully blank audience pretends that they don’t notice.
“I love you,” he whispers to her before he lets go, and he watches from the hillside as the patched-up sails disappear into the crack between the sea and the sunset.
The next ten years are different. Some of them pity him now; because he can’t be with Elizabeth or because he has a wife who is a captain, he cannot say. Most of the town women, though, make him an honorary sister; there’s a kind of camaraderie among the wives of sailors, and now the quiet simple understanding is directed at him too. He thinks it makes it easier, but everything that’s harder makes it very hard to say.
The girl who spat beer in his lap and told him scornfully that there were no such things as mermaids is married in a sun-soaked church, and she comes to him with some entirely unnecessary smithing the day after her husband’s ship leaves shore.
The only thing that Will cannot eventually write about to Elizabeth is that he wonders what their children would look like. An undead wife is hardly the same as a barren one, but he still doesn’t want to hurt her. And besides, it’s no way to raise a dark-haired son with his mother’s laugh and fighting stance or a merry-eyed daughter with steady hands and an appreciation for craft, a chubby clinging baby or a scrappy twelve-year-old determined to try everything.
He tells all kinds of stories at the bar and in the street now, softening the frightening bits but leaving them in because there is only so much that you can do to protect children from nightmares.
At nine and a half years Elizabeth writes him that she wants to stay on the ship until the last day. I want to leave with the best part freshest in my memory, she says, and then, hurried and sloppy as if she wrote it without planning, I love you.
When he steps onto the ship, she leans against him with weariness soaked into her hair as heavily as the salt; he buries his face in her throat and catches a thick heavy reek of sweat and ocean and blood, and he never wants to let her go. The work has been hard recently; it’s been in her letters, and it’s even clearer now as his hands rest against her neck. It hurts to see her like this, temporary and tired, but the pain is the greatest relief that he has ever felt.
“It isn’t normally like this,” she promises him from her bunk, propped up on one elbow. “We’ve been cleaning up after battles.”
She looks different again: physically far too young for forty now, especially forty and at sea, and the youth rests strangely on the way she stands and moves. Her eyes look like soldiers’ eyes would if you could strain the haunting out and leave only that echoed deep-seated age. She is this ship’s matriarch as well as its captain, now.
It’s better than seeing her forever young while his eyes crease up and his hands turn weathered, it means he doesn’t feel guilty when she winds her hands in the gray streaks of his hair (twenty-year-old her deserved so much better than a man who’d aged beyond her) , but it reminds him of the endless onslaught of time.
He asks all the men of the crew how long they’ve sailed with her (some from before Elizabeth, many who’ve been the full twenty years, many he’s never met before, and none of them rotted or melded at all) and he raises the question on the last day: “Do you think the Flying Dutchman has any use for a swordsmith?”
She twists to look up at him, head pillowed against his chest. Considering, but concerned too. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he says, and it comes more easily than anything but “I love you,” and that one “I do.”
In the end, they wait three more years, and he tells everyone in town that Elizabeth is settled in another port and that he is sailing out to meet her. He sells almost everything he has to buy passage and so that he can leave a pile of coins in apology when he steals the strange ship's boat, and he rows out through the waves and closes his eyes.
He’s afraid, of course; the fear is clenched at the back of his throat, and his heart is hammering in tandem with Elizabeth’s, clutched to him in its waterproof chest. But it’s a clear, calm night, with a full moon painting a speckled path across the waves, and he can just see the shape of a sail against the brightness on the horizon.
And after all, it really is less like dying than it is like taking up a new career. Or maybe it’s more like becoming immortal. He isn’t sure.
He closes his eyes and slips over the edge, and after a brief flash of cold there’s a rope bobbing at his hands. Apart from being thoroughly soaked and not especially cold, he doesn’t feel especially different until his feet hit the deck, and that is when he realizes that it has always felt a little wrong to be alive and on the Dutchman. Now, with the water drying around his feet but only sea-spray damp on him anymore, it feels like home.
“Welcome aboard, Will,” Elizabeth calls from the wheel, and the man next to her taps her on the shoulder and takes the spokes without a word. Will himself is busy enough with smiling at her that he can’t quite remember to move.
She is too sensible to run to him, of course, but she knows her ship well enough to move very fast indeed, and it feels familiar to him still. And she is just a foot away from him, where he could reach out and touch her and pull her to him, and he doesn’t want to do anything but stand here and look at her because now he can afford it now. They have all the time in the world, and she is beautiful.
For a moment all the crew falls silent, and there is nothing but the slap of the waves and the thump of the ropes and the steady thump-thump-thump of Elizabeth’s heart.
Will clears his throat. “I think this is yours,” he says, holding it out to her, and she laughs and shakes her head, wrapping her fingers around his wrists.
“No,” she says, sliding her hands up his arms until they’re resting on his shoulders, “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t?” he repeats, smiling like a fool. She shakes her head, and he shifts his grip on the heart in its box so that he can reach out with one hand and brush the backs of his fingers along her cheek, stroke down to wrap his hand gently against the back of her neck.
“None of us are going to think less of you if you kiss him, Captain,” someone mock-whispers from the rigging, and Elizabeth is still laughing - along with the rest of the crew - as he leans in to kiss her. At first it’s gentle, soft, and then she winds her hands into his hair and pulls him down to her, gasping into his lips as he nearly stumbles off-balance and has to cling to her to hold himself up, and then because he simply can’t stop holding her and can’t stop kissing her, and it feels like when he married her.
Right down to the roaring noise around them, even, although now it’s whoops and whistles and good-natured applause.
“Your crew seems to approve of me, Captain!” he half-shouts as she breaks the kiss, both still wound up in each others’ arms, and the good-natured laughter sets off again.
“They do indeed,” she says, smiling and strong and close, and he can’t do anything else but lean in to kiss her again. Some romantic joker strikes up a violin, and Will keeps kissing his wife, his captain, his lover, the Grim Reaper, and he doesn’t really care at all about plans or dreams or stories. He and Elizabeth are free and together, and that means that everything that matters is exactly as it should be.