Fanfic, PotC
The Long Way Home, Part 2
It feels as though his ship is haunted by a figment of his own shadowed dreams. Lizzie is a wraith, pale and silent and somehow everywhere he looks, every place his thoughts wander. Hard to say, precisely, why he pulled her out of her crusted sand and onto his ship. Hard to say why he dreamed of The Flying Dutchman and its captain, why he sometimes woke with notes stuck in his throat he had once heard Tia Dalma hum. Or for that matter, why, when he ended up dreaming between the skin of pleasure and nightmare and he was racing along a beach after the unknown receptacle of all his soul’s lost matter, he always saw the face of James Norrington flickering beside him.
Sometimes, he had found, it was best not to question too closely the people and things that stay with you in the dark. As long as they were sticking to one of him -as long as there was just one of him-- he figured they were welcome to it.
But now here is Elizabeth Swann, stepped concretely out of her place in a dark corner of his head and places lower, and he would have to deal with her soon, because it was becoming impossible to ignore her. The trouble was that he had no idea how he wanted to deal with her; when Elizabeth was near, he found that he swung wild as a broken compass around a range of emotions larger than any sea he had crossed, and some of those emotions he’d felt while standing behind a sword pointed at someone else’s throat. Hell, some of them he’d felt on the receiving end of a sword pointed at his own throat. And some of them he had no name for at all. So it was that the first words he spoke to her after that evening when he’d found her on the beach, ridged and thin and looking like a sea creature about to blow away, were to ask her what port she’d like him to take her to.
~~*~~*~~
She looks…young…in the weak light coming from a thin fingernail of new moon, very young and little-girl lost. Her hair is working its way out of a messy braid in snarls of soft fuzz around her temples, and he remembers the feel of it in slick ribbons across his palms under the seawater. The long, rough shirt she has belted over a borrowed or stolen pair of breeches does nothing but emphasize the angles of her frame, the sharp clavicle peaked and shadowed in the dim light, the small breasts nearly unnoticeable in the folds of fabric. She could be a boy standing here in front of him, but for a certain grace in the exact length of her neck and an indefinable tenderness to the bottom curve of her jaw.
“Port?” she repeats vaguely, and he is tempted to ask if Cotton’s parrot has the night off. But he doesn’t. He just looks impassively at the pale face and pretends he has not noticed all the things he noticed in the space of a handful of heartbeats.
“But of course, my fearsome Pirate King.” A fluid wave of arm, a stage gesture out to the black curtain of sea. “Where shall I let you off my ship?”
She stares out past the rails. The moment stretches on, until she says, quiet and dry and looking not at him but beyond to the now invisible line of sea meeting sky, “I hadn’t thought…I don’t know.”
Normally Jack loves to fill anyone in on everything they don’t know, but somehow the woman in front of him has never fulfilled his usual desires.
“Port Royal?”
She stares at him. Silent. Filled with dark waters he cannot chart.
“No, perhaps not. Maybe England? I can’t take you directly to port there, obviously, for various and sundry reasons all having to do with either totally above-board or otherwise nefarious dealings with bloodthirsty pirates and the financial doings of seemingly respectable businessmen of said country, but I can get you close and onto another boat going there.”
“I have nothing in England anymore.”
Jack’s fingers drum along the seams of his vest, restlessly. There is a point in the pursuit of a treasure, when a man gazing at his charts and maps and notations from various sources sees the trembling and active fault line of the venture. When he feels in the liquid parts of his bones all that he risks, all that he might lose in the quest for something that might not exist at all. There is the same sort of moment when a pirate who has been at sea more of his life than he ever spent on land looks at one who desires to do the same; all that they are prepared to fling aside swims upward to remind him of what he lost or what he has yet to find. An adjustment of the equation towards a balance that never arrives.
Her eyes are so impossibly large in the flickering light, in her thinned-out face and the angle she holds her head at in order to look him, and he wants to do something to get rid of the spaces he can see in there, he has had enough of empty chests and open spaces that hold only echoes. He will put other things in there; he will give something and take something else away; he will put anger there or maybe he will put relief in the spaces or fear or maybe, maybe he will start with lust and work his way through all of them. He has a feeling she would do exactly the same, has already begun to do so in another lifetime, in a different scene of a play they both seem to return to in different costumes. And that is why he reaches out and draws a finger along the line of her clavicle as it is painted in this moment by the moon and the night in silent accord, and why he allows the ghost of her sudden sigh to pelt his cheek as he leans toward her before he asks, “What is it you want, Bess?”
And he can see that she doesn’t know herself, that the treasure on her map is still just two lines joined together, still a box with unlabeled contents, but he is filled up with both sides of this equation they’re both part of, pushing and pulling against each other. So he pushes forward and tangles his hand in her braid that is coming undone and he pulls with one hand and with the other pushes her against the railing. Her face is tilted to match his and he imagines her parted lips as if they held rows and rows of teeth like the kraken. He imagines her face in the teeth of the kraken and he imagines a kiss not weighted with anything other than desire.
He can’t untangle the strange tenderness from the sudden anger as his hand leaves her snarled hair and goes instead to her waist, under her shirt and up and he whispers down to her as his fingers pinch skin that could still belong to the governor’s daughter, that the wind and sea have left alone until now.
“Is this it?” The muscles along the smooth line he’s tracing up her belly all quiver and jump like tiny riptides under his fingers. “Is this what you want?” He is rough as he takes her breast in his palm and presses against the small landmark of her nipple, against the cage over her beating heart.
Her head has fallen, her forehead rests against his chest. “I am no lovesick boy, Lizzie,” he warns, and they are both unsure whether he means it as threat or escape clause. His hand that has snaked up to just under her chin is salty wet now. Sea or Lizzie, one or the other, funny how they often seem like the same thing in his mind these days.
“I’m not Will,” he finally says, breaking the moment like he would break fine china. Her head snaps up; he can see that he has put anger there and guilt and hurt and yes, still lust.
“What do you want, Captain Sparrow?” she hisses, and he is unprepared for her parry and she escapes him, back to her cabin chrysalis in the rocking sea.
~~
~
Part 1