Blues Skies, Prompt #5: Holding Back the Tide (PotC)
The tides will carry away the castle, as they carried away the boy’s father, but he toils at it with the determination of a child who has no thought for the future.
“He’s pretty enough.”
She turns her head, smirking at the man sprawled in the sand beside her, his chest bare to the sun.
He nods at the boy. “Takes after his mother. Fortunate lad.”
She digs her toes in the white sand, watching their visitor peer with squinted eyes at her boy. “I think he looks like Will when he was a boy.”
He scrunches up his nose. “Give the boy more credit than that, love. Look at that expansive castle: that’s a spirited young lad.”
There’s no point acknowledging his jabs at Will. She doesn’t think he even believes them, saying them more out of habit than anything else. Or perhaps he’s as off balance as she is, after being thrown together once more after so long. After thinking too much on the prospect of his ever making land here again.
She runs her hand over the collecting perspiration in the curve of her neck, brushing her hair off her shoulder, but his hand stops her. She watches a little warily as he wraps a lock of her sun-bleached hair around his work roughed fingers.
“As spirited as his mum,” he muses. “No, the gods smiled on him. You would make an excellent lad, Lizzie.”
“I made an excellent lad,” she corrects him.
“Aye, but this is the fair form I prefer,” he says with a grin that catches the sunlight as he traces the slope of her neck with his knuckles.
She’s uncertain, unnerved, her nerves are tightly wound, but the feeling isn’t wholly unwelcome. It never was and after long years it is even less so.
She glances back towards her boy, who is working on a wide moat. The waves are already closer than they were moments ago, ceaseless and irrepressible.
He is the same. Jack is here, but the future laps at their feet, waiting to pull him away.
If she is as spirited as he thinks her to be, she best seize her opportune moment. She best tell him what she never managed to before and hope she can hold back the tide.