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PotC Fic: Worlds Enough, And Time
Title: Worlds Enough, And Time
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Pairing/characters: Jack/Elizabeth, Elizabeth/Will
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: "Death changes everything, even when it cannot touch you. Except your own lithe body, its laws and its longings, and this." Future fic, with sci fi elements. Originally conceived for hseas_challenge #5, "Brave New Worlds."
Dedicated to piratemistress, without whom this fic would never have made it off the concept board.
Worlds Enough, And Time
The thing that no one mentions about eternal life is how well you get acquainted with death.
It blooms around you as you go, fleeting and fascinating as that twentieth century sorcery they call time-lapse photography. Bright and then dull in the faces of the ones you loved and hated, in the eyes of the child you bore, just once and never again. You come to know the smell and taste of it intimately as you march up out of it over and over, untouched by battle, by disease, by the years. Your constant companion, familiar as a lover, faithful as the tides. But reach out to touch it, and it’s gone.
It will never come for you.
Ironic, that you drank from the Fountain of Life to get closer to Death, to the Ferryman. Thought you could snatch back a fraction of what you’d lost that way.
Time; you’d wanted more time. And you got time enough, all right: to learn the man you’d married, for whom you’d grieved and thrown the whole world over, for whom you’d fought fate and the Devil and the entire British Navy, and won, was no longer the man you loved. One day in ten years is just a drop in the ocean of forever, and with every decade he is less and less what you remember, more and more something you cannot know. A ghost, a god, a force upon the seas, but never yours.
Death changes everything, even when it cannot touch you. Except your own lithe body, its laws and its longings, and this.
He will never come for you. Not that way.
Once there was an Aztec curse, and the men who labored in its grasp felt nothing. Not the wind on their face, not the spray of the sea, not the warmth of another’s flesh. You walked among them; it was your first brush with death and magic, lust and cruelty, things you didn’t understand. You pitied them, their desperation, their damnation.
Now you understand them, though you are not quite like them.
You feel everything. Life surges in you as sharp and bitter and achingly sweet after five hundred years as it did at twenty-five, as the draught from the Fountain like wine and blood and water holy on your tongue.
A curse is but a blessing that cannot be borne.
You hardly know the difference anymore.
* * *
In a darkened resort bar, the still silhouette of a woman seated against a window, staring out. Her right hand is sunk deep into the pocket of her coat, pulling its tailored line askew. Beyond her, the black sea and the dull glow of the night sky, air and light pollution colluding to create false twilight. Only she and her unseen observer remember true night anymore, the thick-clustered stars, the breadth of the horizon before the world grew crowded and small.
The bar is empty but for her. The dapper figure currently pouring her another fifth of rum is a mechanical servant, his metal skin glinting in the glow from the sky. Metal and wire and an AI that doesn’t ask questions. Solitude is her prerogative; she owns it all, the rum, the robot, the bar, the resort, the island it’s built on. It’s not really all that big, the island, but it’s not the only one she owns, either.
It’s possible she owns the entire Caribbean by now, for what that’s worth. She may even have acquired some of it legitimately.
She stirs, dragging her left hand across her face, her right hand still pocketed, her shoulders hunched up towards her ears. The gesture makes the man in the doorway flinch; it roughens her name on his lips.
“Lizzie Swann.”
She gasps; her head jerks up. “You.”
They stare at each other. He holds his ground, although her voice is all full of things he can’t categorize and some of them might portend considerable pain in his near future. To the best of his knowledge, they’re not enemies this century, but he wracks his brain for anything he might have done to make her angry the last time they crossed paths.
Well, there was that little incident in Tokyo. But she hadn’t come collecting, and he assumed that meant they were square.
“You were expecting someone else?” He takes a cautious step towards her.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“Good, then. Would hate to preempt a tête-à-tête.”
“How did you get in here? I told security--”
A flash of teeth, white and gold. “You may be the richer criminal between us, but I’m still the better pirate, love.”
She straightens her shoulders; it seems to require some effort. “I didn’t ask you to come.”
“No, but you wanted me to.”
She only looks at him, her face blank. It’s a bad sign that she’s not arguing.
“You called,” he prompts her gently.
“I did not,” she snaps. Better.
“After all this time, m’dear, you’d think you’d give me more credit. I’d think so, anyway.”
“I called you from a private number,” she says, enunciating carefully. “Needless to say, you did not answer. I did not leave a message. Nor did I tell you where to find me. Why are you here?”
He says evenly, “It was your anniversary.”
She sucks in a quick breath and turns away; but not before he sees her expression. In a moment he’s crossed the room to her side. She won’t look at him, returning her gaze to the inky spread of the sea.
After a moment, she says, “It’s dead, Jack. The ocean. It’s been dying for centuries and now it’s a corpse. The rest of the world can’t be far behind.”
“We’ll outlive it.” Close to her, he can smell the alcohol on her, wafting off her body in waves. He reaches out to place a tentative hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs him off.
“Don’t.”
“In a fine state, you are,” he says. “What’s got you there, I wonder?”
She shrugs again, maybe less a shrug than a twitch, a small spasmodic shudder. “Oh, Jack…don’t you ever get tired of it?”
“Of arguing with you in fine drinking establishments at all hours? Now and again, I fear I do. Particularly when you won’t give me a straight answer to a serious question.”
She just shakes her head, still staring out at the dark water, the livid sky. “It always comes to this, doesn’t it.”
“What’s that, love?”
“The end of things,” she says, a soft slur he has to lean forward to catch. “Death and reckoning.”
Once they’d brought that about; more than once. “And you and I standing witness,” he says soberly.
Funny thing, how he’s sober and she’s not. But she’s lifted him out of enough gutters over the long years. He reckons it’s his turn, and that it will be hers again, in time.
“You say that like it’s worth something.”
“Isn’t it?”
She makes a small sound, a “ha” of breath expelled. “It’s just,” she says, and then, all in a rush. “I can’t-- It’s not-- All this time, all these years, and I feel like I’ve done nothing but watch things slip through my fingers--!”
The words end on a sob she tries to swallow. When he wraps an arm around her, she doesn’t actively resist this time, but she’s tense against his side, rigid and vibrating like struck steel. It’s awkward to hold her like that, against her refusal to yield, but he’s still trying to get a handle on whatever it is that she is facing and he can’t let her slip away.
“I’m here, Lizzie-girl.” As he says it his hand slides over hers, still buried deep in her pocket, the wool of her coat between their skins, and he feels the unmistakable outline of what she’s hiding, clutched so tight her fingers’ tremor resonates in her whole body.
They both freeze, but only for a moment. She’s drunk and so he’s faster, his hand circling her wrist as she tries to wrench out of his grasp. She cries out; they struggle a minute together, her breath harsh and uneven as she curses him. Her head comes up; her eyes are glassy and wild. And then they break apart: she is on her feet, snarling, at bay, and he doesn’t dare look away from her for a second, although he’s powerfully aware of what he’s taken from her heavy in his hand, hard and hot from her palm, the grip a little slippery with her sweat and now his.
“Give it back.” Her voice is high and thin, breaking point.
“Not a chance of that, my dear.”
“Jack--”
He still doesn’t take his eyes off her, but his thumb finds the release. He snaps the clip out, rendering the pistol harmless: just an object, in pieces now, not her avatar of death. He sees the sound reflected in her face, in her stance. Defeat. And in turn it catches him, like a sucker punch in the gut, leaving him struggling for breath; he speaks more brusquely than he means to. “And what were you planning on doing with this, pray tell?”
“What do you think?” she whispers.
There’s a sharp, sour taste in the back of his throat. “You little fool. It wouldn’t work, you know.”
“No,” she says. “I know. Not like that. It’s been tried. But I thought…” She gives a little sigh. “I thought I might forget. Bullet through the brain, maybe there’d be a chance the Water couldn’t rebuild it just as it was, couldn’t rebuild me as I was…”
He won’t hear any more. “But why? Elizabeth, what in Hell happened to you?”
Her shoulders slump a fraction more, and he watches her search for a lie, waits out the truth.
“He didn’t come,” she says finally, and the little smile twisting her lips might well be the saddest thing he’s ever seen.
* * *
She lets him take her in his arms this time, clings to him like a drowning woman as she weeps for her beloved, lost so many years ago, once every ten years after that, and now again with a finality that she at last accepts.
He strokes her hair, still as long and honey-thick as it ever was. No silver there. It doesn’t match the age he sees when she lets him glimpse her tear-drowned eyes.
It’s not the only moment down the long years that they’ve come to this. He remembers every one, vividly as if it were yesterday. The first time, rain and tears and Will’s blood on her face. The second, watching the body of her son put in the ground, William the Second’s long rich life no balm at all to a mother’s ageless grief. And all the times between; she loves so fiercely, still, without reserve and without quarter for any, particularly herself. Always her way to rage against the dying of the light.
He’d read that poem, some two hundred years ago now, and wondered if its author had had occasion to know the immortal Lizzie Swann, who’s never gone gently into anything in half a millenium and takes it as a point of pride.
No, it’s not that he doesn’t understand why she might want to erase her memories with the mercy of a bullet. But his stomach still churns when he thinks of it; like teetering on a dizzy precipice. Nothing to grasp at but air.
It figures that she of all people could keep coming up with new ways to break his heart.
They are kindred in so many ways, but in this one respect, he’s not like her. For centuries now, he’s only loved one thing.
Small comfort that while it’s always someone else she loves and mourns, it’s him she holds onto, in the end.
* * *
"Did you ever consider that he might have forgotten the date?"
“Will wouldn’t forget.” She glares at him. “He never did before. Not in five hundred years.”
“C’mon, Lizzie. All those years are bound to blend together eventually. Particularly on a ship like the Dutchman. No calendars where it makes berth, love; you know that as well as me. And Will wouldn’t be the first man to neglect an appointment with a lady.”
“Just because you might in his place, doesn’t mean Will--”
“Just saying. It may not mean what you think it means. Maybe something more pressing came up. Like a naval disaster, or three.”
“No.” She refuses to allow him to provide the sick comfort of imaginary catastrophe elsewhere. “He’s gone. I can feel it, Jack.”
He considers her gravely for a moment; then, “There is one way to know for certain.”
“No, there isn’t.” She’d rather not explain, but off Jack’s look she finds herself saying, “The chest, the key…I gave his heart back to him long ago.” His expression of surprise doesn’t fade, but it transmutes subtly, and she mutters, half-angry, “What? It was never safe with me. Too many bloody pirates knew our story, and I didn’t want to have to choose…Not again.”
Not after her sweet baby son had been born. Not after….She looks down quickly, away from Jack’s gaze. Those dark eyes always could see straight through her.
His hand appears in her field of vision. His nails are not as tarry as they once were, and his rings and ornaments have been replaced many times over the years, but that is all. She thinks she would recognize him anywhere, just from his hands: his long, graceful fingers, his warm sun-roughened skin, his calloused palms. She knows them in restless flight, in rare stillness, in the dark upon her skin.
Five hundred years of chance meetings and offhand partings, betrayals and bargains and the knowledge that somewhere out there, Jack Sparrow goes on being Jack Sparrow. She raises her eyes to his, but her throat closes around whatever she was going to say.
He says, “Come with me. I have something to show you.”
* * *
“What is that?”
He looks aggrieved. “It’s a ship, of course. My ship. Pretty little thing, isn’t she?”
It’s unlike any ship she’s ever seen, for air or water: smooth-carapaced and round-contoured, with a silvery sheen even in the dingy orange light of the sky. But she can’t deny that somehow it still carries the impression of a creature poised to leap into flight, the barest suggestion of wings.
“It’s a lightspace runner,” she says, as recognition finally strikes. Sometimes her awareness of contemporary technology lags behind her perceptions. Airplanes startled her for decades, once upon a time. “Where on Earth did you get it?”
“Not on Earth,” he says, with one of his lightning grins.
“Jack…one of these would cost me half my assets. How did you--?”
He shoots her a sidelong glance. “How do you think?”
“You stole it?”
“Right out from under the noses of the United Nations Intergalactic Navy.”
“I’m not even going to ask.”
“Pity. It’s a good story.”
“Is she armed?”
“Of course she is.” Another wicked smile. “In case of pirates, you know.”
“Of course.” She steps towards to the gleaming craft. It’s not large for an interstellar transport, built to carry only a small crew and minor cargo, but it dwarfs her. A different scale at work here. She reaches up to run a hand along its underbelly; its metal skin hums against hers with latent energy, warm as a human body.
“She’s pleased to meet you,” Jack says, close to her ear; she jumps a little. “Aren’t you, darling?”
It takes Elizabeth a moment to realize that he’s talking to the ship, and that the vibration against her palm has shifted its frequency slightly in response. She snatches back her hand, turning to look at Jack in consternation.
“Says she’s been looking forward to it,” he adds, with a smile. “From one fine lady to another.”
“She says…?”
“You’ll like her, I’ll wager. A sweet, fiery soul.”
“AI,” Elizabeth breathes, with belated understanding.
“For centuries sailors swore our vessels had wills of their own. Now they can tell us themselves.” He strokes the curving hull. “Turns out human creatures aren’t the only ones to crave freedom.”
Trust Jack to find a ship with which he could literally have a relationship. “Does she have a name?”
"I call her the Siren."
"A fanciful name for such a modern vessel."
"She didn't have a name--a real name--before. But when the Navy locked me in her brig, she sang to me. Beguiled me, you might say."
"And you resisted mightily, I'm sure."
A shrug. "I'm no Odysseus. Any more than you, my dear, are any man's Penelope." He offers his arm. “Want to see the rest of her?”
“In a minute,” she says thoughtfully. “Jack?”
“Aye?"
"If you've been busy stealing starships, getting thrown in their brigs, and escaping in cleverly ridiculous ways these last few years, how did you happen to know that I called?"
"Fortunate happenstance," he says lightly.
“No, really.”
“All right," he says. “I came looking for you. Thought you might be inclined to travel a bit, after your one day had passed.”
She stares at him. “You couldn't have known...”
“An old spacer told me a story the other day,” he says. “About the apparition of an ancient flying ship that appears when disaster strikes, out in the black, to gather up the souls of the dying and carry them home. Wherever in the universe that might be.”
“You made that up.”
“I might have,” he says. “But it might be true.”
“Oh, Jack.”
“Come with me,” he says. “This world is old and worn out, but there are a thousand more out there that we could make our own.” The arc of his flung-out hand describes the width of the cosmos. “The universe, Elizabeth. Nothing but horizon.”
“‘Wherever we want to go, we’ll go?’”
“Just so,” Jack says, and takes her arm; the courtly gesture squeezes at her heart. She lets him lead her towards the ramp that has extended noiselessly and without apparent prompting from the Siren’s hull.
“She really is a pretty ship, I’ll grant you.”
“Hush.” Jack taps his ear significantly. “She can hear you. And her opinion of herself is quite high enough already.”
“It sounds like the two of you have a great deal in common.” At the top of the gangplank-or whatever one would call such a structure on a starship-a hatch blooms open like a dilating eye. Elizabeth jumps back, nearly losing her balance, and Jack laughs, steadying her.
“She says, ‘welcome.’”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth says in the vague direction of the open airlock, and then, to Jack, “Will she talk to me?”
“If you want her to,” he says, as they step inside. “I expect she’ll become more loquacious once you get to know her, like most creatures of the female persuasion. Talk your ear off, she will.”
Elizabeth is startled yet again when a clear, girlish voice chimes in from nowhere in particular. “If I have interpreted your statement correctly,” it says, with what sounds very much like triumph, “it is closely analogous to that of a pot describing a kettle as black.”
Elizabeth laughs out loud in delight; Jack rolls his eyes. “She is also entirely too sharp for anyone’s good. Bloody AI.”
“Bloody pirate,” the Siren says, in dulcet tones. The hatch shuts with an audible snap that makes Jack wince.
“I think,” Elizabeth says, grinning, “that we are going to get along famously.”
“I fear you’re right.” Jack shudders theatrically, but Elizabeth sees something relax in his stance as he turns to her. “Is that a yes, then?”
“It’s not a no. But I need time…” To think, is what she is about to say. But that isn’t it. She’s already decided. It’s the emotions spurring that decision that desperately need sorting.
“Ah,” he says. “Well. That, my dear, we both have in abundance.”
* * *
The lights are low in the Siren's helm cabin when Elizabeth slips through the half-irised door. Jack, sprawled loose-jointed in the captain's chair, glances up at her entrance. There's a question in his eyes for her, but warmth too.
His face and body are the same, exactly as youthful as he was the day he drank from the Fountain, and yet she realizes that the years have changed even him. He would never have looked at her so with such open hope in those first decades. First centuries. She wonders when that shift of opacity occurred. She hadn’t noticed it until now.
She goes to him and silently puts her arms around him; he leans his cheek against her hip. After a moment, he pulls her into his lap, and the old familiar heat tugs at her, low in her belly. But there will always be time enough for that. For now, they both seem satisfied with sitting together before the wide viewscreen, looking out at the stars. Billions of them, thick and bright as dew on the grass of spring mornings she still remembers from her girlhood. Nothing but horizon.
"I've missed this," she murmurs. The skies of Earth have been starless for so long.
"So have I, love," he says, and turns his head so that his lips brush her neck, his breath stirring her hair. "So have I."
Around them, the ship sings softly to herself, a soft, melodious hum. There's a countdown running on the display beneath the viewscreen, seconds left before the Siren swings herself out of Earth's orbit into space. Antigravity drive, Jack had said solemnly as if that made sense. Elizabeth secretly thinks that magic is magic, regardless of what one calls it. She steels herself as the countdown races to zero.
It's not what she expects. Just the slightest of jerks, and the stars in the viewscreen wheel dizzily. Jack’s arm tightens around her. Elizabeth takes a breath.
Then the old world drops away beneath them, and they fly free.
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Pairing/characters: Jack/Elizabeth, Elizabeth/Will
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: "Death changes everything, even when it cannot touch you. Except your own lithe body, its laws and its longings, and this." Future fic, with sci fi elements. Originally conceived for hseas_challenge #5, "Brave New Worlds."
Dedicated to piratemistress, without whom this fic would never have made it off the concept board.
Worlds Enough, And Time
The thing that no one mentions about eternal life is how well you get acquainted with death.
It blooms around you as you go, fleeting and fascinating as that twentieth century sorcery they call time-lapse photography. Bright and then dull in the faces of the ones you loved and hated, in the eyes of the child you bore, just once and never again. You come to know the smell and taste of it intimately as you march up out of it over and over, untouched by battle, by disease, by the years. Your constant companion, familiar as a lover, faithful as the tides. But reach out to touch it, and it’s gone.
It will never come for you.
Ironic, that you drank from the Fountain of Life to get closer to Death, to the Ferryman. Thought you could snatch back a fraction of what you’d lost that way.
Time; you’d wanted more time. And you got time enough, all right: to learn the man you’d married, for whom you’d grieved and thrown the whole world over, for whom you’d fought fate and the Devil and the entire British Navy, and won, was no longer the man you loved. One day in ten years is just a drop in the ocean of forever, and with every decade he is less and less what you remember, more and more something you cannot know. A ghost, a god, a force upon the seas, but never yours.
Death changes everything, even when it cannot touch you. Except your own lithe body, its laws and its longings, and this.
He will never come for you. Not that way.
Once there was an Aztec curse, and the men who labored in its grasp felt nothing. Not the wind on their face, not the spray of the sea, not the warmth of another’s flesh. You walked among them; it was your first brush with death and magic, lust and cruelty, things you didn’t understand. You pitied them, their desperation, their damnation.
Now you understand them, though you are not quite like them.
You feel everything. Life surges in you as sharp and bitter and achingly sweet after five hundred years as it did at twenty-five, as the draught from the Fountain like wine and blood and water holy on your tongue.
A curse is but a blessing that cannot be borne.
You hardly know the difference anymore.
* * *
In a darkened resort bar, the still silhouette of a woman seated against a window, staring out. Her right hand is sunk deep into the pocket of her coat, pulling its tailored line askew. Beyond her, the black sea and the dull glow of the night sky, air and light pollution colluding to create false twilight. Only she and her unseen observer remember true night anymore, the thick-clustered stars, the breadth of the horizon before the world grew crowded and small.
The bar is empty but for her. The dapper figure currently pouring her another fifth of rum is a mechanical servant, his metal skin glinting in the glow from the sky. Metal and wire and an AI that doesn’t ask questions. Solitude is her prerogative; she owns it all, the rum, the robot, the bar, the resort, the island it’s built on. It’s not really all that big, the island, but it’s not the only one she owns, either.
It’s possible she owns the entire Caribbean by now, for what that’s worth. She may even have acquired some of it legitimately.
She stirs, dragging her left hand across her face, her right hand still pocketed, her shoulders hunched up towards her ears. The gesture makes the man in the doorway flinch; it roughens her name on his lips.
“Lizzie Swann.”
She gasps; her head jerks up. “You.”
They stare at each other. He holds his ground, although her voice is all full of things he can’t categorize and some of them might portend considerable pain in his near future. To the best of his knowledge, they’re not enemies this century, but he wracks his brain for anything he might have done to make her angry the last time they crossed paths.
Well, there was that little incident in Tokyo. But she hadn’t come collecting, and he assumed that meant they were square.
“You were expecting someone else?” He takes a cautious step towards her.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“Good, then. Would hate to preempt a tête-à-tête.”
“How did you get in here? I told security--”
A flash of teeth, white and gold. “You may be the richer criminal between us, but I’m still the better pirate, love.”
She straightens her shoulders; it seems to require some effort. “I didn’t ask you to come.”
“No, but you wanted me to.”
She only looks at him, her face blank. It’s a bad sign that she’s not arguing.
“You called,” he prompts her gently.
“I did not,” she snaps. Better.
“After all this time, m’dear, you’d think you’d give me more credit. I’d think so, anyway.”
“I called you from a private number,” she says, enunciating carefully. “Needless to say, you did not answer. I did not leave a message. Nor did I tell you where to find me. Why are you here?”
He says evenly, “It was your anniversary.”
She sucks in a quick breath and turns away; but not before he sees her expression. In a moment he’s crossed the room to her side. She won’t look at him, returning her gaze to the inky spread of the sea.
After a moment, she says, “It’s dead, Jack. The ocean. It’s been dying for centuries and now it’s a corpse. The rest of the world can’t be far behind.”
“We’ll outlive it.” Close to her, he can smell the alcohol on her, wafting off her body in waves. He reaches out to place a tentative hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs him off.
“Don’t.”
“In a fine state, you are,” he says. “What’s got you there, I wonder?”
She shrugs again, maybe less a shrug than a twitch, a small spasmodic shudder. “Oh, Jack…don’t you ever get tired of it?”
“Of arguing with you in fine drinking establishments at all hours? Now and again, I fear I do. Particularly when you won’t give me a straight answer to a serious question.”
She just shakes her head, still staring out at the dark water, the livid sky. “It always comes to this, doesn’t it.”
“What’s that, love?”
“The end of things,” she says, a soft slur he has to lean forward to catch. “Death and reckoning.”
Once they’d brought that about; more than once. “And you and I standing witness,” he says soberly.
Funny thing, how he’s sober and she’s not. But she’s lifted him out of enough gutters over the long years. He reckons it’s his turn, and that it will be hers again, in time.
“You say that like it’s worth something.”
“Isn’t it?”
She makes a small sound, a “ha” of breath expelled. “It’s just,” she says, and then, all in a rush. “I can’t-- It’s not-- All this time, all these years, and I feel like I’ve done nothing but watch things slip through my fingers--!”
The words end on a sob she tries to swallow. When he wraps an arm around her, she doesn’t actively resist this time, but she’s tense against his side, rigid and vibrating like struck steel. It’s awkward to hold her like that, against her refusal to yield, but he’s still trying to get a handle on whatever it is that she is facing and he can’t let her slip away.
“I’m here, Lizzie-girl.” As he says it his hand slides over hers, still buried deep in her pocket, the wool of her coat between their skins, and he feels the unmistakable outline of what she’s hiding, clutched so tight her fingers’ tremor resonates in her whole body.
They both freeze, but only for a moment. She’s drunk and so he’s faster, his hand circling her wrist as she tries to wrench out of his grasp. She cries out; they struggle a minute together, her breath harsh and uneven as she curses him. Her head comes up; her eyes are glassy and wild. And then they break apart: she is on her feet, snarling, at bay, and he doesn’t dare look away from her for a second, although he’s powerfully aware of what he’s taken from her heavy in his hand, hard and hot from her palm, the grip a little slippery with her sweat and now his.
“Give it back.” Her voice is high and thin, breaking point.
“Not a chance of that, my dear.”
“Jack--”
He still doesn’t take his eyes off her, but his thumb finds the release. He snaps the clip out, rendering the pistol harmless: just an object, in pieces now, not her avatar of death. He sees the sound reflected in her face, in her stance. Defeat. And in turn it catches him, like a sucker punch in the gut, leaving him struggling for breath; he speaks more brusquely than he means to. “And what were you planning on doing with this, pray tell?”
“What do you think?” she whispers.
There’s a sharp, sour taste in the back of his throat. “You little fool. It wouldn’t work, you know.”
“No,” she says. “I know. Not like that. It’s been tried. But I thought…” She gives a little sigh. “I thought I might forget. Bullet through the brain, maybe there’d be a chance the Water couldn’t rebuild it just as it was, couldn’t rebuild me as I was…”
He won’t hear any more. “But why? Elizabeth, what in Hell happened to you?”
Her shoulders slump a fraction more, and he watches her search for a lie, waits out the truth.
“He didn’t come,” she says finally, and the little smile twisting her lips might well be the saddest thing he’s ever seen.
* * *
She lets him take her in his arms this time, clings to him like a drowning woman as she weeps for her beloved, lost so many years ago, once every ten years after that, and now again with a finality that she at last accepts.
He strokes her hair, still as long and honey-thick as it ever was. No silver there. It doesn’t match the age he sees when she lets him glimpse her tear-drowned eyes.
It’s not the only moment down the long years that they’ve come to this. He remembers every one, vividly as if it were yesterday. The first time, rain and tears and Will’s blood on her face. The second, watching the body of her son put in the ground, William the Second’s long rich life no balm at all to a mother’s ageless grief. And all the times between; she loves so fiercely, still, without reserve and without quarter for any, particularly herself. Always her way to rage against the dying of the light.
He’d read that poem, some two hundred years ago now, and wondered if its author had had occasion to know the immortal Lizzie Swann, who’s never gone gently into anything in half a millenium and takes it as a point of pride.
No, it’s not that he doesn’t understand why she might want to erase her memories with the mercy of a bullet. But his stomach still churns when he thinks of it; like teetering on a dizzy precipice. Nothing to grasp at but air.
It figures that she of all people could keep coming up with new ways to break his heart.
They are kindred in so many ways, but in this one respect, he’s not like her. For centuries now, he’s only loved one thing.
Small comfort that while it’s always someone else she loves and mourns, it’s him she holds onto, in the end.
* * *
"Did you ever consider that he might have forgotten the date?"
“Will wouldn’t forget.” She glares at him. “He never did before. Not in five hundred years.”
“C’mon, Lizzie. All those years are bound to blend together eventually. Particularly on a ship like the Dutchman. No calendars where it makes berth, love; you know that as well as me. And Will wouldn’t be the first man to neglect an appointment with a lady.”
“Just because you might in his place, doesn’t mean Will--”
“Just saying. It may not mean what you think it means. Maybe something more pressing came up. Like a naval disaster, or three.”
“No.” She refuses to allow him to provide the sick comfort of imaginary catastrophe elsewhere. “He’s gone. I can feel it, Jack.”
He considers her gravely for a moment; then, “There is one way to know for certain.”
“No, there isn’t.” She’d rather not explain, but off Jack’s look she finds herself saying, “The chest, the key…I gave his heart back to him long ago.” His expression of surprise doesn’t fade, but it transmutes subtly, and she mutters, half-angry, “What? It was never safe with me. Too many bloody pirates knew our story, and I didn’t want to have to choose…Not again.”
Not after her sweet baby son had been born. Not after….She looks down quickly, away from Jack’s gaze. Those dark eyes always could see straight through her.
His hand appears in her field of vision. His nails are not as tarry as they once were, and his rings and ornaments have been replaced many times over the years, but that is all. She thinks she would recognize him anywhere, just from his hands: his long, graceful fingers, his warm sun-roughened skin, his calloused palms. She knows them in restless flight, in rare stillness, in the dark upon her skin.
Five hundred years of chance meetings and offhand partings, betrayals and bargains and the knowledge that somewhere out there, Jack Sparrow goes on being Jack Sparrow. She raises her eyes to his, but her throat closes around whatever she was going to say.
He says, “Come with me. I have something to show you.”
* * *
“What is that?”
He looks aggrieved. “It’s a ship, of course. My ship. Pretty little thing, isn’t she?”
It’s unlike any ship she’s ever seen, for air or water: smooth-carapaced and round-contoured, with a silvery sheen even in the dingy orange light of the sky. But she can’t deny that somehow it still carries the impression of a creature poised to leap into flight, the barest suggestion of wings.
“It’s a lightspace runner,” she says, as recognition finally strikes. Sometimes her awareness of contemporary technology lags behind her perceptions. Airplanes startled her for decades, once upon a time. “Where on Earth did you get it?”
“Not on Earth,” he says, with one of his lightning grins.
“Jack…one of these would cost me half my assets. How did you--?”
He shoots her a sidelong glance. “How do you think?”
“You stole it?”
“Right out from under the noses of the United Nations Intergalactic Navy.”
“I’m not even going to ask.”
“Pity. It’s a good story.”
“Is she armed?”
“Of course she is.” Another wicked smile. “In case of pirates, you know.”
“Of course.” She steps towards to the gleaming craft. It’s not large for an interstellar transport, built to carry only a small crew and minor cargo, but it dwarfs her. A different scale at work here. She reaches up to run a hand along its underbelly; its metal skin hums against hers with latent energy, warm as a human body.
“She’s pleased to meet you,” Jack says, close to her ear; she jumps a little. “Aren’t you, darling?”
It takes Elizabeth a moment to realize that he’s talking to the ship, and that the vibration against her palm has shifted its frequency slightly in response. She snatches back her hand, turning to look at Jack in consternation.
“Says she’s been looking forward to it,” he adds, with a smile. “From one fine lady to another.”
“She says…?”
“You’ll like her, I’ll wager. A sweet, fiery soul.”
“AI,” Elizabeth breathes, with belated understanding.
“For centuries sailors swore our vessels had wills of their own. Now they can tell us themselves.” He strokes the curving hull. “Turns out human creatures aren’t the only ones to crave freedom.”
Trust Jack to find a ship with which he could literally have a relationship. “Does she have a name?”
"I call her the Siren."
"A fanciful name for such a modern vessel."
"She didn't have a name--a real name--before. But when the Navy locked me in her brig, she sang to me. Beguiled me, you might say."
"And you resisted mightily, I'm sure."
A shrug. "I'm no Odysseus. Any more than you, my dear, are any man's Penelope." He offers his arm. “Want to see the rest of her?”
“In a minute,” she says thoughtfully. “Jack?”
“Aye?"
"If you've been busy stealing starships, getting thrown in their brigs, and escaping in cleverly ridiculous ways these last few years, how did you happen to know that I called?"
"Fortunate happenstance," he says lightly.
“No, really.”
“All right," he says. “I came looking for you. Thought you might be inclined to travel a bit, after your one day had passed.”
She stares at him. “You couldn't have known...”
“An old spacer told me a story the other day,” he says. “About the apparition of an ancient flying ship that appears when disaster strikes, out in the black, to gather up the souls of the dying and carry them home. Wherever in the universe that might be.”
“You made that up.”
“I might have,” he says. “But it might be true.”
“Oh, Jack.”
“Come with me,” he says. “This world is old and worn out, but there are a thousand more out there that we could make our own.” The arc of his flung-out hand describes the width of the cosmos. “The universe, Elizabeth. Nothing but horizon.”
“‘Wherever we want to go, we’ll go?’”
“Just so,” Jack says, and takes her arm; the courtly gesture squeezes at her heart. She lets him lead her towards the ramp that has extended noiselessly and without apparent prompting from the Siren’s hull.
“She really is a pretty ship, I’ll grant you.”
“Hush.” Jack taps his ear significantly. “She can hear you. And her opinion of herself is quite high enough already.”
“It sounds like the two of you have a great deal in common.” At the top of the gangplank-or whatever one would call such a structure on a starship-a hatch blooms open like a dilating eye. Elizabeth jumps back, nearly losing her balance, and Jack laughs, steadying her.
“She says, ‘welcome.’”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth says in the vague direction of the open airlock, and then, to Jack, “Will she talk to me?”
“If you want her to,” he says, as they step inside. “I expect she’ll become more loquacious once you get to know her, like most creatures of the female persuasion. Talk your ear off, she will.”
Elizabeth is startled yet again when a clear, girlish voice chimes in from nowhere in particular. “If I have interpreted your statement correctly,” it says, with what sounds very much like triumph, “it is closely analogous to that of a pot describing a kettle as black.”
Elizabeth laughs out loud in delight; Jack rolls his eyes. “She is also entirely too sharp for anyone’s good. Bloody AI.”
“Bloody pirate,” the Siren says, in dulcet tones. The hatch shuts with an audible snap that makes Jack wince.
“I think,” Elizabeth says, grinning, “that we are going to get along famously.”
“I fear you’re right.” Jack shudders theatrically, but Elizabeth sees something relax in his stance as he turns to her. “Is that a yes, then?”
“It’s not a no. But I need time…” To think, is what she is about to say. But that isn’t it. She’s already decided. It’s the emotions spurring that decision that desperately need sorting.
“Ah,” he says. “Well. That, my dear, we both have in abundance.”
* * *
The lights are low in the Siren's helm cabin when Elizabeth slips through the half-irised door. Jack, sprawled loose-jointed in the captain's chair, glances up at her entrance. There's a question in his eyes for her, but warmth too.
His face and body are the same, exactly as youthful as he was the day he drank from the Fountain, and yet she realizes that the years have changed even him. He would never have looked at her so with such open hope in those first decades. First centuries. She wonders when that shift of opacity occurred. She hadn’t noticed it until now.
She goes to him and silently puts her arms around him; he leans his cheek against her hip. After a moment, he pulls her into his lap, and the old familiar heat tugs at her, low in her belly. But there will always be time enough for that. For now, they both seem satisfied with sitting together before the wide viewscreen, looking out at the stars. Billions of them, thick and bright as dew on the grass of spring mornings she still remembers from her girlhood. Nothing but horizon.
"I've missed this," she murmurs. The skies of Earth have been starless for so long.
"So have I, love," he says, and turns his head so that his lips brush her neck, his breath stirring her hair. "So have I."
Around them, the ship sings softly to herself, a soft, melodious hum. There's a countdown running on the display beneath the viewscreen, seconds left before the Siren swings herself out of Earth's orbit into space. Antigravity drive, Jack had said solemnly as if that made sense. Elizabeth secretly thinks that magic is magic, regardless of what one calls it. She steels herself as the countdown races to zero.
It's not what she expects. Just the slightest of jerks, and the stars in the viewscreen wheel dizzily. Jack’s arm tightens around her. Elizabeth takes a breath.
Then the old world drops away beneath them, and they fly free.