PotC Fic: "This That Lingers Still" (Elizabeth, Jack, R)
Title: This That Lingers Still
Characters/Pairings: Elizabeth, Jack, Elizabeth/Jack; mention of Will, Norrington, Elizabeth/Will, and (if you squint) some implication of Elizabeth/Norrington, Jack/Will, Jack/Norrington, and/or Elizabeth/Will/Jack.
Rating: Light R for sex, alcohol, language, death, depression, and the end of the fucking world.
Length: 2,490 words
Spoilers: At World's End
Notes: Written for the apocalyptothon for doyle_sb4, prompt: "Jack and Elizabeth try to outrun the end of the world." Helpfully beta'd for me by kayliemalinza: love ya, babe.
Summary: There is nowhere that they have left to go to.
Elizabeth barely notices when the horizon changes.
The sun is coming up. It’s getting harder and harder to see, these days. The colors of the dawn are almost invisible, pale yellows and golden hues swallowed by the permanent sickly haze of the sky.
Jack stands on rotting wooden planks with a bottle ready in his hand. He hasn’t started drinking it yet. He might not for awhile. He doesn’t drink quite as much as he used to, actually. He keeps so much rum near him at all times out of habit more than anything.
Elizabeth suspects he likes to hold the bottle for the sake of holding it, likes the feel of glass and the sound of it sloshing in his hand. It’s something that still hasn’t changed after all this time.
A little piece of the familiar. It’s one of the few that’s left.
Jack takes a few steps and peers at the sky. “Looks to be another lovely morning,” he comments flatly.
The remark is meant to be cynical with no cynicism in it. No tone, no emotion, of any real kind. Just another careless observation, indifferent to its own irony.
“Another morning,” Elizabeth says in rebuttal.
Jack grunts. The rum bottle swishes in his hand.
Elizabeth idly picks at a barnacle clinging to the warped wood where she sits. Jack paces the deck, his familiar swaying gait lackluster and weary with time. He might count his steps. He might not.
Some days, Elizabeth lives to chide him. She lets not a moment of silence like this go by. She makes mocking, scathing remarks, pointing out his ineptitudes, the hopelessness of this world, of their situation.
“So, Captain,” she will sneer, “have you found us a heading yet? Have you thought of a place we should run to? A place you would like to go?”
How Jack will answer her will depend on his mood. He can be anything from careless to condescending to crude. But regardless of what he says or does, his response will always boil down to the same: he does not have an answer.
He hasn’t, not for a long time. Answers, like so many other things once found in this world, are a commodity of which there seems to be none left. At least, Elizabeth hasn’t seen one in awhile.
She can’t remember the last time she saw a seabird, either. Or a dolphin. Or a fish that wasn’t diseased somehow, fins pointing the wrong way and gills all green and foamy.
Or a sunset that wasn’t hidden by a layer of polluted air.
“You are of a particularly notable quiet temperament this morn, Miss Swann,” Jack says.
She narrows her eyes at him. “Don’t you mean, ‘Mrs. Turner’,” she corrects.
He smiles thinly at her. “It hasn’t been Mrs. Turner for a long time now, love. We both know that.”
He pulls the cork out of his bottle with his teeth, spits it out into the water over the side.
“Hasn’t been a Mr. Turner for a long while, either.”
Elizabeth smiles at him in a way that is more a baring of her teeth. “I know.”
Some days, she hates him more than anything. There is a fire in her heart stronger than she has felt anything for near as long as she can remember. She can’t stand to be around Jack, can’t bear to look at him, or hear him, or smell him.
She wants nothing more than to put distance between herself and Jack, to quit his presence and this rotting hulk of a wreck to which he clings. But she can’t. She knows there is no place else to go.
She wants nothing more than to hurt Jack, maim him, make him somehow suffer the way she does. She’s killed him once before, and in lighter times they laugh about it.
Some days she wants to kill him again. But she can’t. She knows he can’t die.
Not any more than she can.
It was Jack that brought her to the fountain and so it’s him she blames for it, on those days when she needs someone to blame. Some part of her knows if it’s anyone’s fault it’s only her own, for she may have been the horse Jack Sparrow led to the water, but he didn’t put her head under and make her swallow down. He didn’t make her drink. It was her choice and hers alone.
“He’s got all of forever, love,” he said to her, smiling that conniving wicked smile he used only when he told the truth. “And with just a sip, you can too.”
She thought herself selfless, at the time. Willing to give up her life as a mortal woman to share eternity with the man she loved.
Time has made her realize how foolish that was. And how selfish.
She thought she could have an eternal love, a love that would last forever. Such a thing that no one was meant to have. Not even gods and certainly not women and men: a love that would never die.
Will wasn’t supposed to die. Never mind that he already had. He was supposed to be the captain of the Flying Dutchman and sail the seas forever. But it turned out even legends had to die.
The Flying Dutchman had been gone for ages, and Will along with it. And she still lived on, alone.
Alone, except for Jack.
He turns and squints at her, darkly silhouetted against the too bright gleam of the sky.
“You forget yourself, Lizzie.” He sounds almost merry, but when he calls her that she knows he’s nothing but gravely serious. He sashays towards her and grins. “I much prefer you when you’re feisty.” His hand waves in a sweeping gesture. “After all, are you not Captain Elizabeth Turner nee Swann, one of the eight Pirate Lords, the eternal and still-reigning Pirate King?”
She smiles humorlessly back at him, tilts her head. The brethren are long gone, he knows. So too the Court, any real power she had as King. There have not been pirates for ages. Their time was over long before anything else.
The pirates were gone, when she still thought there was hope for other things.
“And are you not the immortal Captain Jack Sparrow,” she asks in almost the exact same tone as his, “the last true pirate, and ruler of the ocean?”
“Ruler of the ocean…hmmph!” Jack grimaces. “There is no bloody ocean. No proper sea at all anymore.”
He goes to the rail, peering over. The waves are oily and black. They churn in unhealthy, unnatural patterns.
“Just a great big garbage slick, that’s what that is.”
She doesn’t disagree with that. She doesn’t see how she can.
Jack looks distantly at the waves. He rocks against the motion of the boat, the rum sloshing loudly in his grasp.
“I miss William,” he mutters, bleak.
Elizabeth’s heart wells, even after all this time. How dare he say such things aloud. As if there was any reason yet to voice it; as if there could be any doubt, that they both loved him.
She wonders if he actually expects her to say it: “I miss him too.”
She says instead: “I miss James.”
She is challenging him now, a little, and he can’t possibly be fooled by it. But Jack only nods his head.
“Aye, Norrington. He had his fine moments, that he did. A worthy adversary, a worthy sailor. And a worthy man.”
He drinks from his bottle, nursing it with darkness in his eyes. “I miss him, too.”
James, she sometimes muses, was the lucky one: dead before any of this began. Never having to live knowing the sting of immortality; not even for a little while as Will did. James Norrington lived and died what he was born to be: a mortal, ordinary man.
If there was anyone that deserved that reward, it was him.
“I do not miss them enough,” Elizabeth says, firm; “either of them…that I would wish either of them back here, to join us in this Hell.” She tilts her chin and a few loose strands of her hair, long bleached by the sun, attempt to fly away in the breeze.
The wind is not what it used to be. It either blows too much, in a constant gale, or never very much at all. The second is becoming all the more frequent.
Too often, the tides linger. The ocean seems dead.
“You always were such a convincing liar, love,” Jack says to her now. He struts back in her direction, long easy strides, the frayed edges of his coat and various pieces of magpie-like trappings hanging about his person swinging with each step. “But you rarely ever did fool me.” He points at her. “And you’re certainly not fooling me now.
“If you could have dear William back in here in a heartbeat, you would.” His teeth glint sickly in the over-bright sun and he spreads his arms. “Even if it was against his choice.”
“Will would never choose to be separated from me willingly, regardless of the cost,” Elizabeth retorts. “Don’t even pretend not to know that.”
Jack’s grin never falters, but his eyes narrow. “Aye, that is true. Fair William would brave any amount of terrors from one edge of the world to the other for you. Fight through any army, fend off any demons, face any torture…”
He crouches down to her level, his hands folded as if at prayer, even with the rum still clenched in his grasp.
“But here’s the real question. Can you, Mrs. Elizabeth Turner nee Swann, look me in the eye and tell me, honestly, that you don’t think he’s probably better off right where he is?”
Elizabeth does look him in the eye, but she doesn’t say it. She doesn’t say anything at all.
Jack’s hands part as he smiles, peaceably.
“Ah,” he says, “I thought not.”
Elizabeth seizes the bottle from his grasp and he lets her have it without fuss. She takes a swig, trying not to choke on it. They certainly don’t make rum like they used to.
The mouth of the bottle is warm where it touches her lips. Warmth from Jack’s lips, transferred to hers. She wipes off her mouth with the back of her hand, and she looks at him. His gaze lingers on her face.
Some days, she loves him, with all the passion and fire that still lingers in her being. With all the strength and emotion that could be left to dwell in her heart she loves Jack, more than anything in this world.
On these days, she can even believe that he loves her, more than his ship, more than rum, more than his precious freedom. She can lie to herself or pretend or simply let herself not see. She needs to be loved, on these days. She needs to not be lonely. She needs Jack.
She needs her body beneath his, his hands all over her, his skin touching her skin. She needs him to kiss her everywhere. She needs to be fucked so hard there are bruises on her skin come morning.
She doesn’t just need it; she wants it, this is true. She enjoys it. They both do.
She wants him. But she needs him more.
She loves Jack, truly loves him, when they both come. When for one moment, they are both reminded that they are, after everything, alive.
Those moments become rarer and rarer these days. Not because she feels any less fond of Jack, truth be told. It’s just that she feels alive enough to need less and less.
Jack does too. She can tell. With him, everything is half pantomime.
Jack moves to sit beside her now, and Elizabeth hands him back his bottle without looking. Her fingers brush against his as it’s passed.
Jack half-smiles at her, fondly, and smoothes a loose strand of hair from her eyes.
She doesn’t need to look at him, she knows, for him to be able to tell she is as close as she ever comes now to crying.
It was a long time before she came to Jack. Her son had died. Her grandchildren had died. Eventually whatever was left of the Turner legacy was gone, too far scattered to the winds and faded to be worth the bother of tracing.
She went to stay with Will, then. For what seemed forever and a day they wandered the world together. But it was not for forever: eventually Will was gone. Eventually every soul and every place and every even vague connection she once had to the world she knew was gone.
All she had left was Jack.
The sailed the world on the Pearl at first, roaming from country to country, seeing whatever there was to be seen. But time kept passing, and the world…kept going the same way it had already been.
Eventually Jack stopped caring to come ashore, whenever they dropped anchor or made port. Eventually, Elizabeth did as well. The world was in a state where it was, to their eyes, no longer fit to be seen.
Now they stay to the water. Some might say they are hiding from the inevitable, though Jack persists to call it running.
Elizabeth is not sure why. They have nowhere to run to. Every year, every decade, every century grows just a bit worse and worse. And there is no escape from what follows ever-close behind them.
The end of the world. Not a great big gasp, a disaster or a war. Not some calamity, some catastrophic annihilation of biblical proportions, no. A slow but unending flicker, a gradual fade: a disease that eats away, in pieces, at its host. That is how it all will go.
The world is dying slowly and they, two immortal souls left floating on the tides of a poisoned sea beneath the light of a polluted sun, can do nothing but watch it happen.
“They said it was coming to this,” Jack says to her, reading her mind. “Long ago, if you remember. They warned that this was, more or less, exactly what it would be like…global warming, toxic waste, irradiation.”
“Yes, I know,” says Elizabeth, tiredly. “But nobody did a thing.”
“Those in power did what they always will do, love.” Jack smirks, smug and derisive as he shakes his head: “Choose not to listen.”
No apocalypse, just a slow pitiful decay. And the two of them stuck but passing the time, until the end finally comes for all.
There was a time once, when Jack actually thought they could escape it; that they would be safe, if they only stayed out far enough in the water. That it would never reach all the way out here.
She always knew better.
Elizabeth sighs. The sun is hurting her eyes. So she closes them.
Characters/Pairings: Elizabeth, Jack, Elizabeth/Jack; mention of Will, Norrington, Elizabeth/Will, and (if you squint) some implication of Elizabeth/Norrington, Jack/Will, Jack/Norrington, and/or Elizabeth/Will/Jack.
Rating: Light R for sex, alcohol, language, death, depression, and the end of the fucking world.
Length: 2,490 words
Spoilers: At World's End
Notes: Written for the apocalyptothon for doyle_sb4, prompt: "Jack and Elizabeth try to outrun the end of the world." Helpfully beta'd for me by kayliemalinza: love ya, babe.
Summary: There is nowhere that they have left to go to.
Elizabeth barely notices when the horizon changes.
The sun is coming up. It’s getting harder and harder to see, these days. The colors of the dawn are almost invisible, pale yellows and golden hues swallowed by the permanent sickly haze of the sky.
Jack stands on rotting wooden planks with a bottle ready in his hand. He hasn’t started drinking it yet. He might not for awhile. He doesn’t drink quite as much as he used to, actually. He keeps so much rum near him at all times out of habit more than anything.
Elizabeth suspects he likes to hold the bottle for the sake of holding it, likes the feel of glass and the sound of it sloshing in his hand. It’s something that still hasn’t changed after all this time.
A little piece of the familiar. It’s one of the few that’s left.
Jack takes a few steps and peers at the sky. “Looks to be another lovely morning,” he comments flatly.
The remark is meant to be cynical with no cynicism in it. No tone, no emotion, of any real kind. Just another careless observation, indifferent to its own irony.
“Another morning,” Elizabeth says in rebuttal.
Jack grunts. The rum bottle swishes in his hand.
Elizabeth idly picks at a barnacle clinging to the warped wood where she sits. Jack paces the deck, his familiar swaying gait lackluster and weary with time. He might count his steps. He might not.
Some days, Elizabeth lives to chide him. She lets not a moment of silence like this go by. She makes mocking, scathing remarks, pointing out his ineptitudes, the hopelessness of this world, of their situation.
“So, Captain,” she will sneer, “have you found us a heading yet? Have you thought of a place we should run to? A place you would like to go?”
How Jack will answer her will depend on his mood. He can be anything from careless to condescending to crude. But regardless of what he says or does, his response will always boil down to the same: he does not have an answer.
He hasn’t, not for a long time. Answers, like so many other things once found in this world, are a commodity of which there seems to be none left. At least, Elizabeth hasn’t seen one in awhile.
She can’t remember the last time she saw a seabird, either. Or a dolphin. Or a fish that wasn’t diseased somehow, fins pointing the wrong way and gills all green and foamy.
Or a sunset that wasn’t hidden by a layer of polluted air.
“You are of a particularly notable quiet temperament this morn, Miss Swann,” Jack says.
She narrows her eyes at him. “Don’t you mean, ‘Mrs. Turner’,” she corrects.
He smiles thinly at her. “It hasn’t been Mrs. Turner for a long time now, love. We both know that.”
He pulls the cork out of his bottle with his teeth, spits it out into the water over the side.
“Hasn’t been a Mr. Turner for a long while, either.”
Elizabeth smiles at him in a way that is more a baring of her teeth. “I know.”
Some days, she hates him more than anything. There is a fire in her heart stronger than she has felt anything for near as long as she can remember. She can’t stand to be around Jack, can’t bear to look at him, or hear him, or smell him.
She wants nothing more than to put distance between herself and Jack, to quit his presence and this rotting hulk of a wreck to which he clings. But she can’t. She knows there is no place else to go.
She wants nothing more than to hurt Jack, maim him, make him somehow suffer the way she does. She’s killed him once before, and in lighter times they laugh about it.
Some days she wants to kill him again. But she can’t. She knows he can’t die.
Not any more than she can.
It was Jack that brought her to the fountain and so it’s him she blames for it, on those days when she needs someone to blame. Some part of her knows if it’s anyone’s fault it’s only her own, for she may have been the horse Jack Sparrow led to the water, but he didn’t put her head under and make her swallow down. He didn’t make her drink. It was her choice and hers alone.
“He’s got all of forever, love,” he said to her, smiling that conniving wicked smile he used only when he told the truth. “And with just a sip, you can too.”
She thought herself selfless, at the time. Willing to give up her life as a mortal woman to share eternity with the man she loved.
Time has made her realize how foolish that was. And how selfish.
She thought she could have an eternal love, a love that would last forever. Such a thing that no one was meant to have. Not even gods and certainly not women and men: a love that would never die.
Will wasn’t supposed to die. Never mind that he already had. He was supposed to be the captain of the Flying Dutchman and sail the seas forever. But it turned out even legends had to die.
The Flying Dutchman had been gone for ages, and Will along with it. And she still lived on, alone.
Alone, except for Jack.
He turns and squints at her, darkly silhouetted against the too bright gleam of the sky.
“You forget yourself, Lizzie.” He sounds almost merry, but when he calls her that she knows he’s nothing but gravely serious. He sashays towards her and grins. “I much prefer you when you’re feisty.” His hand waves in a sweeping gesture. “After all, are you not Captain Elizabeth Turner nee Swann, one of the eight Pirate Lords, the eternal and still-reigning Pirate King?”
She smiles humorlessly back at him, tilts her head. The brethren are long gone, he knows. So too the Court, any real power she had as King. There have not been pirates for ages. Their time was over long before anything else.
The pirates were gone, when she still thought there was hope for other things.
“And are you not the immortal Captain Jack Sparrow,” she asks in almost the exact same tone as his, “the last true pirate, and ruler of the ocean?”
“Ruler of the ocean…hmmph!” Jack grimaces. “There is no bloody ocean. No proper sea at all anymore.”
He goes to the rail, peering over. The waves are oily and black. They churn in unhealthy, unnatural patterns.
“Just a great big garbage slick, that’s what that is.”
She doesn’t disagree with that. She doesn’t see how she can.
Jack looks distantly at the waves. He rocks against the motion of the boat, the rum sloshing loudly in his grasp.
“I miss William,” he mutters, bleak.
Elizabeth’s heart wells, even after all this time. How dare he say such things aloud. As if there was any reason yet to voice it; as if there could be any doubt, that they both loved him.
She wonders if he actually expects her to say it: “I miss him too.”
She says instead: “I miss James.”
She is challenging him now, a little, and he can’t possibly be fooled by it. But Jack only nods his head.
“Aye, Norrington. He had his fine moments, that he did. A worthy adversary, a worthy sailor. And a worthy man.”
He drinks from his bottle, nursing it with darkness in his eyes. “I miss him, too.”
James, she sometimes muses, was the lucky one: dead before any of this began. Never having to live knowing the sting of immortality; not even for a little while as Will did. James Norrington lived and died what he was born to be: a mortal, ordinary man.
If there was anyone that deserved that reward, it was him.
“I do not miss them enough,” Elizabeth says, firm; “either of them…that I would wish either of them back here, to join us in this Hell.” She tilts her chin and a few loose strands of her hair, long bleached by the sun, attempt to fly away in the breeze.
The wind is not what it used to be. It either blows too much, in a constant gale, or never very much at all. The second is becoming all the more frequent.
Too often, the tides linger. The ocean seems dead.
“You always were such a convincing liar, love,” Jack says to her now. He struts back in her direction, long easy strides, the frayed edges of his coat and various pieces of magpie-like trappings hanging about his person swinging with each step. “But you rarely ever did fool me.” He points at her. “And you’re certainly not fooling me now.
“If you could have dear William back in here in a heartbeat, you would.” His teeth glint sickly in the over-bright sun and he spreads his arms. “Even if it was against his choice.”
“Will would never choose to be separated from me willingly, regardless of the cost,” Elizabeth retorts. “Don’t even pretend not to know that.”
Jack’s grin never falters, but his eyes narrow. “Aye, that is true. Fair William would brave any amount of terrors from one edge of the world to the other for you. Fight through any army, fend off any demons, face any torture…”
He crouches down to her level, his hands folded as if at prayer, even with the rum still clenched in his grasp.
“But here’s the real question. Can you, Mrs. Elizabeth Turner nee Swann, look me in the eye and tell me, honestly, that you don’t think he’s probably better off right where he is?”
Elizabeth does look him in the eye, but she doesn’t say it. She doesn’t say anything at all.
Jack’s hands part as he smiles, peaceably.
“Ah,” he says, “I thought not.”
Elizabeth seizes the bottle from his grasp and he lets her have it without fuss. She takes a swig, trying not to choke on it. They certainly don’t make rum like they used to.
The mouth of the bottle is warm where it touches her lips. Warmth from Jack’s lips, transferred to hers. She wipes off her mouth with the back of her hand, and she looks at him. His gaze lingers on her face.
Some days, she loves him, with all the passion and fire that still lingers in her being. With all the strength and emotion that could be left to dwell in her heart she loves Jack, more than anything in this world.
On these days, she can even believe that he loves her, more than his ship, more than rum, more than his precious freedom. She can lie to herself or pretend or simply let herself not see. She needs to be loved, on these days. She needs to not be lonely. She needs Jack.
She needs her body beneath his, his hands all over her, his skin touching her skin. She needs him to kiss her everywhere. She needs to be fucked so hard there are bruises on her skin come morning.
She doesn’t just need it; she wants it, this is true. She enjoys it. They both do.
She wants him. But she needs him more.
She loves Jack, truly loves him, when they both come. When for one moment, they are both reminded that they are, after everything, alive.
Those moments become rarer and rarer these days. Not because she feels any less fond of Jack, truth be told. It’s just that she feels alive enough to need less and less.
Jack does too. She can tell. With him, everything is half pantomime.
Jack moves to sit beside her now, and Elizabeth hands him back his bottle without looking. Her fingers brush against his as it’s passed.
Jack half-smiles at her, fondly, and smoothes a loose strand of hair from her eyes.
She doesn’t need to look at him, she knows, for him to be able to tell she is as close as she ever comes now to crying.
It was a long time before she came to Jack. Her son had died. Her grandchildren had died. Eventually whatever was left of the Turner legacy was gone, too far scattered to the winds and faded to be worth the bother of tracing.
She went to stay with Will, then. For what seemed forever and a day they wandered the world together. But it was not for forever: eventually Will was gone. Eventually every soul and every place and every even vague connection she once had to the world she knew was gone.
All she had left was Jack.
The sailed the world on the Pearl at first, roaming from country to country, seeing whatever there was to be seen. But time kept passing, and the world…kept going the same way it had already been.
Eventually Jack stopped caring to come ashore, whenever they dropped anchor or made port. Eventually, Elizabeth did as well. The world was in a state where it was, to their eyes, no longer fit to be seen.
Now they stay to the water. Some might say they are hiding from the inevitable, though Jack persists to call it running.
Elizabeth is not sure why. They have nowhere to run to. Every year, every decade, every century grows just a bit worse and worse. And there is no escape from what follows ever-close behind them.
The end of the world. Not a great big gasp, a disaster or a war. Not some calamity, some catastrophic annihilation of biblical proportions, no. A slow but unending flicker, a gradual fade: a disease that eats away, in pieces, at its host. That is how it all will go.
The world is dying slowly and they, two immortal souls left floating on the tides of a poisoned sea beneath the light of a polluted sun, can do nothing but watch it happen.
“They said it was coming to this,” Jack says to her, reading her mind. “Long ago, if you remember. They warned that this was, more or less, exactly what it would be like…global warming, toxic waste, irradiation.”
“Yes, I know,” says Elizabeth, tiredly. “But nobody did a thing.”
“Those in power did what they always will do, love.” Jack smirks, smug and derisive as he shakes his head: “Choose not to listen.”
No apocalypse, just a slow pitiful decay. And the two of them stuck but passing the time, until the end finally comes for all.
There was a time once, when Jack actually thought they could escape it; that they would be safe, if they only stayed out far enough in the water. That it would never reach all the way out here.
She always knew better.
Elizabeth sighs. The sun is hurting her eyes. So she closes them.