Fanfic, PotC
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Pairing: Jack/Elizabeth
Post-AWE, but ignoring the extra scene at the end of the credits
The Long Way Home
Part 1
And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.
-from The Swan by Ranier Maria Rilke and translated by Robert Bly
~~*~~*~~
She thinks in waves a lot these days; memories and voices and thoughts ebb and then swell inside her skull, inside the quiet stage that has become her life. It is quiet, but not silent, never silent-just like the sea spreading out all around her. She wonders at how the rocking of the sea is so familiar and yet so new and different now that she is so alone. Before, there was always something urgent that needed doing, always someone to be retrieved from the terrible black fear of death and not-death, always someone she was fencing in the watery fields of language and sword. And now…now there is only the tide in her own head and the swelling, rocking sea all around her, and time: flat, unending amounts of time in which she is learning its movements and its smells and its moods in her own singular company.
The sails are snapping quietly against their tethers, whipped up by a brisk wind playing across the moody patchwork of grey that is the dark sea meeting the paler sky and each bleeding into each. She is reminded of a blanket in her father’s house, the house back in England that sat on a hill in the rolling land that drifted gently down to the sea cliffs. The blanket had come from the hand of some sailor’s wife with calluses on her fingers and salt in her mouth, made for the governor with kind lines around his eyes and an easy hand of the rents. The wool had been boiled in a kettle, so the dye was uneven and when it was woven into the blanket it mixed and waved across the thing as if it lived, with a color between grey and blue that had no proper name at all, only that it was the color of the sea when the sea chooses to be all of its mysteries at once.
The world around her now looks like this, and with a hot rush of blood to her skin she remembers her father as vividly as if he were standing close to her, close enough to touch and smell and hear. It is surprising to her, how the life of a governor’s daughter could bleed so easily into the life of a drifting pirate. But just like the sea and its companion the sky, that girl bleeds into this one who is still forming, and she thinks that all of them--herself, Will, Jack, James, Barbossa, all the crew--have bled into each other, and all they have done and said and meant to each other has woven them inexorably into something which binds.
~~*~~*~~
She had watched Will leave her in a ship that did not sail off beyond the horizon, but ducked under the sea’s surface, like death, which was after all her new husband’s life. But she was alive. And she was alone. After all the renting done in her soul’s fabric, after all the hurt and the uncertainty about whose side she would find herself melded to, she had ended up with no one. One marriage night and the bitter grit of sand in her mouth was all that came of the love she had wrestled with in the darkness.
She had looked for him, afterwards, in the way the sea rushed up to her shore, those weeks alone with the reality to which all her dreams had come to, trying to find the rhythm of his easy smile, his warm glances, his heart when it rested in his own chest. The other chest she had buried after her first long night alone, sweat and tears choking her breath and clogging her nose, but it was deep under the soft soil now, and she took little pleasure in a heart left with no hands to hold her own.
The cave walls had been stocked with fresh water and grains and bottles of other drink. She took them when she needed to, and she wandered farther along the shore to find fruit that she ate facing the waves, and slept afterwards with the juices still sticky on her hands. She had no one left to seek out beyond the shore, and no inclination to move beyond the surf and sand and the skies turning slowly around her. The day came when she no longer cared even about washing the sand from her tangling and knotting hair, and her skin began to grow ridges and layers like a woman only half human. When the sun was high in her sky she lay under it with hooded eyes and her lashes seemed to float around her like dandelion gone to seed. She wondered when she would dissolve just so and float away.
Weeks, maybe months drifted by and then a ship glided into her world of sand, wave, and sky. She watched it, lying as she normally did in the sand-cradle carved out by her body, watched it long through the afternoon and into the red-streaked hours of early evening and she never moved. Then one moment she blinked, and he stood over her, a shadow and a human hand looming dark and solid and real as a candle left burning in a window that shows its face to the sea.
He had pushed her roughly down the beach and into the water, throwing great handfuls of it on and over her before he finally took her arms and sluiced the hardened crust of her off like linen being scrubbed in a washbasin. She was like a bolt of linen--flimsy and quaking in her actions, so worn she seemed to shine slightly translucent in the dying sunlight. It was only when he took great caked handfuls of her hair in his hands and pulled her down to meet the sea that she stirred, and she struggled, briefly, before he touched his fingertips to her forehead and she stilled.
“Done your best to look the part of the Death’s bride, eh Lizzie?” he’d said, and after he’d gathered up some of her fresh water and the barrel of gold Will had left her, he walked back toward the shoreline to where the Pearl waited beyond. He looked back only once, at the point on the beach where seaweed washed up and clumped to dry like human hair, and he had said, carelessly and over one swaying shoulder, “Bring the rum.”
~~*~~*~~
Barbossa is gone, and there had been some talk of mutinies and marooning and stolen maps and wormy sons of slug excrement getting what they finally deserved, but all that is immaterial to her. She is on The Black Pearl, and Captain Jack Sparrow is aiming the very heart of his ship through waters that rise to meet her prow like a lover, and somehow the rightness of it has settled with weight into her bones and she is not, in fact, floating away. She is instead wrapped in a blue-gray blanket of wordless sounds. The whisperings and murmurings of the sea, which holds them all out to the sky above like a present, sings in her head waking and sleeping.
And he is everywhere. He is behind the Pearl’s full-moon wheel, he is weaving across the deck to have a word with the crew, he is up in the crow’s nest with his compass and a jug of her rum. He is prancing and gesturing everywhere across the stage of her head, and he is not her husband. He has not talked directly to her since the night he brought her on board, and somewhere within the quiet cocoon she has pulled around herself, she misses the verbal sparring and innuendo. She misses the small, fluttered jerk of her belly when he stood at her side on land or ship, when he strode up from behind her and filled up the fearful space between her and all she was unfamiliar with.
At night when she is alone in the tiny cabin room below deck she dreams liquid things, images rolling in droplets away from each other, landscapes slowly turning into blankets of stars or sheets of ice. Sometimes she sees a ship broken right down the middle like an oyster shell, and she’s screaming down through the great gaping crack of it, waking up with the thing she shouted still on her lips. Jack.
Once she’d snatched a thing back from a dark edge, only it didn’t matter that she had beaten the dark, because now she could see the edges everywhere. Will had thought that the killing explained the kiss, and she had let him think it, had let herself think it in his arms. She wonders if he sees it differently now that he sails the ocean floor with a crew of the dead. She wonders, as he sails upside down and breathes water into his lungs and does not drown if he sees, as she now sees, how the apparent line of the things we do and do not do loop back around each other and explain themselves out of sequence. Of all the mysteries strung together around her neck like the dark and heavy tokens of some sacrilegious rosary, it is this one she worries over and over with her thumb as she rises and falls in time to the sea. It is that the kiss is no explanation at all for the killing, only an ill-fed candle shining out toward the dark heart of why a woman would send a man to the night-cradle of his soul and bring him back again to the hot light.
Some times she thinks, as the moon catches him swaying on the deck or rocking in time to the movements of the waves and the singing of the crew that Jack, that the dark, slippery man behind Jack Sparrow -whole, alive, fired in the kiln that takes no prisoners and spit back out-is the great masterpiece of her own naïve hand. As if Jack had started a long, slow splintering long before she ever met him, and she had glued him back together bit by bit and thrown him to the fire to fix him together, shining and dangerous and scorching as the sun, forever. But she is too surprised by what lies in her own soul to be sure; too capable of love so close to ruthlessness it cuts. She had sent Jack to Davy Jones’ locker and Will to captain The Flying Dutchman, and the stars flung out against the dark sheet of night give no heading.
Part 2
Part 3
Pairing: Jack/Elizabeth
Post-AWE, but ignoring the extra scene at the end of the credits
The Long Way Home
Part 1
And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.
-from The Swan by Ranier Maria Rilke and translated by Robert Bly
~~*~~*~~
She thinks in waves a lot these days; memories and voices and thoughts ebb and then swell inside her skull, inside the quiet stage that has become her life. It is quiet, but not silent, never silent-just like the sea spreading out all around her. She wonders at how the rocking of the sea is so familiar and yet so new and different now that she is so alone. Before, there was always something urgent that needed doing, always someone to be retrieved from the terrible black fear of death and not-death, always someone she was fencing in the watery fields of language and sword. And now…now there is only the tide in her own head and the swelling, rocking sea all around her, and time: flat, unending amounts of time in which she is learning its movements and its smells and its moods in her own singular company.
The sails are snapping quietly against their tethers, whipped up by a brisk wind playing across the moody patchwork of grey that is the dark sea meeting the paler sky and each bleeding into each. She is reminded of a blanket in her father’s house, the house back in England that sat on a hill in the rolling land that drifted gently down to the sea cliffs. The blanket had come from the hand of some sailor’s wife with calluses on her fingers and salt in her mouth, made for the governor with kind lines around his eyes and an easy hand of the rents. The wool had been boiled in a kettle, so the dye was uneven and when it was woven into the blanket it mixed and waved across the thing as if it lived, with a color between grey and blue that had no proper name at all, only that it was the color of the sea when the sea chooses to be all of its mysteries at once.
The world around her now looks like this, and with a hot rush of blood to her skin she remembers her father as vividly as if he were standing close to her, close enough to touch and smell and hear. It is surprising to her, how the life of a governor’s daughter could bleed so easily into the life of a drifting pirate. But just like the sea and its companion the sky, that girl bleeds into this one who is still forming, and she thinks that all of them--herself, Will, Jack, James, Barbossa, all the crew--have bled into each other, and all they have done and said and meant to each other has woven them inexorably into something which binds.
~~*~~*~~
She had watched Will leave her in a ship that did not sail off beyond the horizon, but ducked under the sea’s surface, like death, which was after all her new husband’s life. But she was alive. And she was alone. After all the renting done in her soul’s fabric, after all the hurt and the uncertainty about whose side she would find herself melded to, she had ended up with no one. One marriage night and the bitter grit of sand in her mouth was all that came of the love she had wrestled with in the darkness.
She had looked for him, afterwards, in the way the sea rushed up to her shore, those weeks alone with the reality to which all her dreams had come to, trying to find the rhythm of his easy smile, his warm glances, his heart when it rested in his own chest. The other chest she had buried after her first long night alone, sweat and tears choking her breath and clogging her nose, but it was deep under the soft soil now, and she took little pleasure in a heart left with no hands to hold her own.
The cave walls had been stocked with fresh water and grains and bottles of other drink. She took them when she needed to, and she wandered farther along the shore to find fruit that she ate facing the waves, and slept afterwards with the juices still sticky on her hands. She had no one left to seek out beyond the shore, and no inclination to move beyond the surf and sand and the skies turning slowly around her. The day came when she no longer cared even about washing the sand from her tangling and knotting hair, and her skin began to grow ridges and layers like a woman only half human. When the sun was high in her sky she lay under it with hooded eyes and her lashes seemed to float around her like dandelion gone to seed. She wondered when she would dissolve just so and float away.
Weeks, maybe months drifted by and then a ship glided into her world of sand, wave, and sky. She watched it, lying as she normally did in the sand-cradle carved out by her body, watched it long through the afternoon and into the red-streaked hours of early evening and she never moved. Then one moment she blinked, and he stood over her, a shadow and a human hand looming dark and solid and real as a candle left burning in a window that shows its face to the sea.
He had pushed her roughly down the beach and into the water, throwing great handfuls of it on and over her before he finally took her arms and sluiced the hardened crust of her off like linen being scrubbed in a washbasin. She was like a bolt of linen--flimsy and quaking in her actions, so worn she seemed to shine slightly translucent in the dying sunlight. It was only when he took great caked handfuls of her hair in his hands and pulled her down to meet the sea that she stirred, and she struggled, briefly, before he touched his fingertips to her forehead and she stilled.
“Done your best to look the part of the Death’s bride, eh Lizzie?” he’d said, and after he’d gathered up some of her fresh water and the barrel of gold Will had left her, he walked back toward the shoreline to where the Pearl waited beyond. He looked back only once, at the point on the beach where seaweed washed up and clumped to dry like human hair, and he had said, carelessly and over one swaying shoulder, “Bring the rum.”
~~*~~*~~
Barbossa is gone, and there had been some talk of mutinies and marooning and stolen maps and wormy sons of slug excrement getting what they finally deserved, but all that is immaterial to her. She is on The Black Pearl, and Captain Jack Sparrow is aiming the very heart of his ship through waters that rise to meet her prow like a lover, and somehow the rightness of it has settled with weight into her bones and she is not, in fact, floating away. She is instead wrapped in a blue-gray blanket of wordless sounds. The whisperings and murmurings of the sea, which holds them all out to the sky above like a present, sings in her head waking and sleeping.
And he is everywhere. He is behind the Pearl’s full-moon wheel, he is weaving across the deck to have a word with the crew, he is up in the crow’s nest with his compass and a jug of her rum. He is prancing and gesturing everywhere across the stage of her head, and he is not her husband. He has not talked directly to her since the night he brought her on board, and somewhere within the quiet cocoon she has pulled around herself, she misses the verbal sparring and innuendo. She misses the small, fluttered jerk of her belly when he stood at her side on land or ship, when he strode up from behind her and filled up the fearful space between her and all she was unfamiliar with.
At night when she is alone in the tiny cabin room below deck she dreams liquid things, images rolling in droplets away from each other, landscapes slowly turning into blankets of stars or sheets of ice. Sometimes she sees a ship broken right down the middle like an oyster shell, and she’s screaming down through the great gaping crack of it, waking up with the thing she shouted still on her lips. Jack.
Once she’d snatched a thing back from a dark edge, only it didn’t matter that she had beaten the dark, because now she could see the edges everywhere. Will had thought that the killing explained the kiss, and she had let him think it, had let herself think it in his arms. She wonders if he sees it differently now that he sails the ocean floor with a crew of the dead. She wonders, as he sails upside down and breathes water into his lungs and does not drown if he sees, as she now sees, how the apparent line of the things we do and do not do loop back around each other and explain themselves out of sequence. Of all the mysteries strung together around her neck like the dark and heavy tokens of some sacrilegious rosary, it is this one she worries over and over with her thumb as she rises and falls in time to the sea. It is that the kiss is no explanation at all for the killing, only an ill-fed candle shining out toward the dark heart of why a woman would send a man to the night-cradle of his soul and bring him back again to the hot light.
Some times she thinks, as the moon catches him swaying on the deck or rocking in time to the movements of the waves and the singing of the crew that Jack, that the dark, slippery man behind Jack Sparrow -whole, alive, fired in the kiln that takes no prisoners and spit back out-is the great masterpiece of her own naïve hand. As if Jack had started a long, slow splintering long before she ever met him, and she had glued him back together bit by bit and thrown him to the fire to fix him together, shining and dangerous and scorching as the sun, forever. But she is too surprised by what lies in her own soul to be sure; too capable of love so close to ruthlessness it cuts. She had sent Jack to Davy Jones’ locker and Will to captain The Flying Dutchman, and the stars flung out against the dark sheet of night give no heading.
Part 2
Part 3