and now, for something completely different...
Fic! Pirates. AWE spoilers.
Title: Waiting
Fandom: Pirates of the Carribbean.
Characters: Will, with guest stars Calypso and Bootstrap.
Rating: G; Angst, mentions of Will / Elizabeth.
Disclaimer: Not mine, obviously. But too damned pretty to leave in the limbo of movie afterlife. Written entirely on the spur of the moment, with no beta and no excuses.
Summary: She opens the chest as he walks towards her, stabs the thing inside. "I waited," she hisses at him, and then he wakes up, gasping for breath.
It's different, sailing these other seas. Under his feet, the deck moves in only the tiniest motions, ghosts of waves under the keel, ghost of movement, and he misses it. Somehow, after years of fire and metal and dry land under his boots, he misses the salt-drenched unpredictability of the real sea.
It's not all he misses, of course.
He feels the deaths that occur under the ocean's purview, feels the way the Dutchman lists accordingly, his hand barely needing to touch the wheel to send the sails flapping and his crew to trim them to new winds. Of it's own volition, the scarred old ship picks up pace, skimming the water like a shied stone. It's his ship, and it's not; his thoughts are part of it - or are the Dutchman's part of his? He's it's captain, probably more than it is his ship.
And when he's turned, when the lost ones come aboard, the strange calm of death doesn't quite remove every emotion from them; they set foot on his deck and look at him, look at the creaking, barnacle-crusted timbers, the tattered, weed-ridden sails, and they look at him as though they don't quite understand.
Neither does he.
-
Will can never quite see the shore where he leaves his passengers; the rickety-seeming dock where they disembark is all that's visible through the curtain of mist. It's not like the beach, Jack's beach, at all. It's not like anything.
He would have found out what lay beyond, he supposes, had he not been the instrument of Davy Jones' destruction. Or was that release? He became the captain, and that made him immortal, did it not? If it hadn't been for Elizabeth, her pleas in his fading conciousness, he isn't sure that he'd have chosen this as an alternative.
Many passengers flow past him, their unhurried movement into their afterlife making him abruptly aware of time. For most of these souls, time ran out when their ship hit bad weather, the sea-anchor catching a deep current and dragging them inorexably to their deaths on a hungry reef. Now, the sand-grains trickling through the hourglass mean little to them.
Their erstwhile host wishes it were so simple for him.
-
"What breaks the curse?" He asked his father one sunset, letting the light shine on his boot-knife, flashing redly in his eyes.
Bootstrap stares at the horizon. "You already know that."
Will flicks the knife handle firmly into his palm, carves another slim notch in the timber of the mizzenmast. He doesn't really need to tally the days thus, but it seemed appropriate. And under the water-grey, scarred and crusted finish, the timber is sound and silver as the rain. "Is it really that simple?"
"Yes," Bill says.
Will drops the knife into it's sheath, the hilt cool against the inside of his ankle, and then his fingers drift up, brush across the scar that creases his chest.
"And no," his father adds.
He nods. That's what he thought.
-
She appears on the bowsprit, like a figurehead, her face turned to the spray; Will nods a sailor - Carstairs, a man who will not pass on without his wife - to the tiller and joins her. She's been searching, ever since her release.
"You think she's waitin'?" Calypso asks. Her patois is fading, a human trait that's merely a dying custom for her immortal voice.
"Yes," Will says; he doesn't doubt it. Sometimes, sometimes, he hopes for her sake that she isn't, but if she wasn't, she wouldn't be Elizabeth. Like a blade, he'd always thought of her; finely crafted. Beautiful. Steel-sharp and deadly; brittle, in the wrong hands. She'd stay true, though it might be better for her if she did not.
"It's harder than you know," the goddess reminds him. "To see that sun come up, day on day on day, wake up with your arms empty and heart... full."
"I have arms too," he says, after a moment. "I sleep. And my heart..."
"Aye, a different tale, Captain Turner, true."
"I don't have it," he agrees. "But I do still feel it."
She whirls, then, her wild hair scattering droplets across his cheek. "Maybe you do. Maybe you just feel how it aches, that hole in your chest?"
She's bitter, like saltwater; it's in her nature. She's variable, stormy and comes and goes like the tide.
Will doesn't know why he reduces everything to its elements, even this deity. Even this ship. Even himself. "You will find him," he assures her, and lets his eyes drift out over the still sea.
She nods, touches his cheek, vanishes; he reaches up to wipe away the salt.
-
Sunrise and sunset, past the world's end, were the times that seemed most like the living world; bittersweet pleasures for Will. Morning and evening, he would stand on his quarter-deck, feeling the timbers of the ship beneath him creaking with remembered winds, and watch the colours flood the sky, growing and receding like tides in heaven. He marked time - a personal record - in the scarred timber with the point of his knife.
It took a while for him to realise that while the days went on, time itself had ceased, for him at least, not at the moment of his captaincy, but at the moment of his death. Physical pain did not linger in the memory, but the agony of his anger and grief - that was different; he remembered that clearly. Remembered the look on Elizabeth's face even as his heart had stuttered, transfixed on a sword's point.
He understood, then. The immortality of the Dutchman's Captain was not invulnerability. After all, what danger would a man face, ferrying souls to the afterlife? The dead were not violent, their change still too new for them to lash out. Perhaps that would come later, when they crossed that pier into the mist that lay beyond? It didn't matter. And the Dutchman did not founder in storms, neither on the wild living sea or the strange, quiescent dead one. The Captain of the Dutchman was simply removed from time. That's why it was a curse, he supposed: to stay young, constantly hovering on the edge of a life he could not touch.
For Davy Jones, loving a goddess, it would have been the perfect solution. He would live forever, in thrall to his ship and his task, with his goddess waiting for him - if she had waited. Yet need she have waited? She was the sea, and she could walk the deck of the Dutchman even when Jones could not set foot on the land. If he'd but waited, another ten years -
But he hadn't waited; instead he'd carved out his own heart and taught the Pirate lords how to conquer his faithless Goddess. He'd condemned himself to an eternity without her in order to punish her for one day's betrayal of him.
Would Will Turner be so unforgiving? Or would he be the opposite, returning decade after decade, waiting in unfailing hope for love to free him? He did not doubt; conjecture merely filled the empty hours.
Another sunset stains the sky in flame colours, and as he carves his tally in the mizzenmast, the Dutchman gives a familiar lurch. Sighing, he sets his hand to the wheel and feels the ship leap forwards in the water. There's work to do.
-
He wonders, often, how it all came about; how the circumstances link to the causes and necessities and tie together to produce his peculiar predicament. Was the Captain of the Dutchman meant to have his heart carved out? There was only one prior example, and heartlessness hadn't been part of the original requirement. Jones had chosen that for himself.
Will wonders how much of his father's action - putting his son's heart in the chest - was a result of the lingering lassitude on the ship; the unchanging plight of those bound forever to a cursed vessel left both ship and crew locked in their warped roles. But it was already proven that the Dutchman's captains could die, so perhaps the procedure had also saved Will's life?
He didn't know. Immortality - seeing his skin reform unmarred after lifting a man's soul from a burning shipwreck, seeing his face, unchanged and unweathered, each day in the mirror - gave him no answers. He dreamed, sometimes, of reclaiming his heart, of pressing the point of his knife down along that ragged scar, of pressing the eerie organ back into the confines of his ribs. He thinks, sometimes, that it would work, that he would feel it flutter again, as though surprised, before it settled again into it's work. He knows, somehow, that it would change nothing.
What he doesn't know is what would come next.
With Elizabeth's face constantly in his thoughts, he wonders. The day will come, and he will step foot on sand and find her waiting. There is no doubt in his mind of that. He'll set foot on sand and be free, and then his heart - cleft like a pinned butterfly in an eccentric's collection - might stop. Immortality is the gift of the Dutchman's captain, but a sword in the heart is death to a mortal man.
But that might happen anyway, might it not, if his heart remains locked in that strongbox? What normal man can live without a heart in his chest? What would that do to Elizabeth, to be waiting for him and see him drop, lifeless, the minute his foot touches that shore?
It is too cruel to contemplate.
He remembers his father's words, in answer to his question: is it that simple? Yes. And no.
He doesn't doubt Elizabeth - not any more; not since she wed him, since she spoke her heart to him, since he felt her bare skin against his, smooth against the sand. But he begins, bitterly, to doubt himself.
-
He marks his sunsets with reluctance, takes his turn at the tiller with something like loathing for the weathered, roughened wood beneath his hands. Jones, he remembers, had the power to change his service; but Turner, it seems, may change nothing at all. The souls pass off his deck, the power of their existence going with them to shores unknown.
He wonders how many it would take, to change things back? A few? a thousand? How many souls would he have to betray to the keeping of the ship before he would see the scarred timbers smooth over and the tattered sails reknit? Would they? Would the rust drop off the anchors, leaving their metal smooth and shining? Would the intricate carvings on the fittings shed their barnacles like snakes shedding scales, to be fresh and lovely underneath, and the cannons their coats of verdigris and slime? The men had, by the virtue of their own souls passed back into their keeping. What price his battered ship?
And how many to safeguard himself? Would his own be enough?
He tries to number the souls that he knows returned at some point, their bodies unbroken: Jack, of course. Barbossa. But neither had to deal with the problem of a vital organ misplaced. And they'd not been able to be alive again merely by choice. He didn't even know how Tia Dalma had resurrected the latter, nor whether she could do so again.
Bootstrap comes to relieve him; they do not keep precise hours, but tradition still holds. "You have the deck, Mister Turner," he says automatically, and then realises he had not even heard his father approach. Bootstrap's hair is silvering, and his eyes are unearthly. His feet don't echo on the deck.
His father hadn't ever died, and couldn't - not on this ship - grow physically older, but he wasn't young. He'd been in his forties when Barbossa's cannons and an Aztec curse had forced him into servitude on the Dutchman's deck. And Will sees, suddenly, that Bill's been walking the edge of life and death for long enough now to feel the currents of both waters.
How close to death did one have to be before there was no going back?
-
"He dead," she weeps, bitterly. Spray patters on his deck, and the Dutchman rolls in unaccustomed swells.
"Yes."
"I've seen a million men die. I know their souls pass out the world. I set this ship to help them do it. But - but -"
"Immortality doesn't help us comprehend what death is," he tells her, and his own pain rises. Somewhere, in the other world, his heart in it's wooden confines is pounding in panic. "How can you know something you can never experience?"
Calypso turns her gaze on him, dark eyes stormy with grief. "I cannot put it right," she tells him. "I cannot bring him back, if he is already gone on."
So that is the dividing line he thinks, and he has to swallow the incredulous hope. He serves at Calypso's behest; she grieves, now; a woman's personal loss, not the universal empathy of a deity. He cannot be sure she will grant him a happiness she herself cannot achieve.
Instead he touches her arm, warm, mortal-seeming skin, voices the thought that recent fears and dreads had brought him, the one that echoed with every single voice that bade him farewell as he set them ashore, past world's end. "Perhaps it is better where he is?"
She ponders that. "What is it like?" she asks him, then. "What is it like, dying?"
He can't really answer from his own experience, but he's seen ten thousand faces as they turn and see their destination. He knows what they're feeling.
Will feels the ship shudder, straining against Calypso's grief like a hound on a leash; as he turns the ship, he tells the goddess that it's like the tide. One can't fight it. One doesn't try. And in the going, there's peace.
It's the waiting that wracks all of them.
-
He wakes from each slumber thinking of Elizabeth, but his dreams are full of fear. He sees haunting, bitter things, sees Elizabeth on the sand, the chest in her hands when he steps upon the shore, a free man. A moment later, she's crying when she hears the pulsing within shudder into silence.
Yet other nightmares show her standing there, her body older with every tide. She opens the chest as he walks towards her, stabs the thing inside. "I waited," she hisses at him, and then he wakes up, gasping for breath.
The realisation is terrifying: Elizabeth is bound as surely as he is, and she's only a goddess to him. Eternity isn't standing still for her, so his survival has cost ten years of her life, not his. If his heart was handy, he thinks he'd stab it himself to free her.
But not even that could change anything.
-
Bill's face has a look of anticipation; he watches Will carve the day's notch in the mizzenmast with a hunger that unsettles his son. "Not long now, Captain," he says, pointedly.
Will has not counted the days in a long time, but he knows it for the truth. It feels as though the vacancy in his chest is yearning towards something, the aching emptiness pulsing more rapidly in anticipation and fear; the remainder of his sentence is calculated to a minute in his soul.
What he can't calculate is the reason that Bill should count those days so avidly.
"What will you do?" he asks.
Bill turns his face eastward, where the sun will come up in a blaze of living colour, and laughs. "That's a bloody stupid question, son," he remarks.
Will's mouth twists. "Is it?"
The elder Turner pivots, stares at him. "You remember what life is, don't you, William?"
Elizabeth.
"Yes," the captain of the Dutchman admits.
I remember.
"Then you remember how to live it, don't you?"
It's a statement, not a question, but uncertainty stalks afterwards, all the same. He remembers being alive, but he hasn't felt alive in nine years, three hundred and fifty-six days.
He doesn't say so. He suspects that to a man who's been mostly dead a decade and and a half, and more, how life feels doesn't really matter as long as it's life.
-
There's no real process for the selection of a new captain. For several reasons, stabbing Captain Turner's absent heart won't do as an inauguration. A few of the men - lingering souls - who man the rigging and tend the Dutchman's idle cannons speculate and nominate among themselves, but Will mentally questions their suggestions. Technically, all of them except his father are dead; can a dead man fill the role?
Others among his crew tread warily around the whole issue; in their opinion, no woman would wait so long. Their speculation is all on what will happen after the ship hoves to on an empty coast.
He dismisses their foretellings, too; that's not what he fears at all. And his dreams have taught him that there are worse horrors than his part in this otherworldly tale.
Captain Turner rationalises: if he's freed and dies on the shore, or if he lives, the selection of the replacement won't be his problem. And if he isn't free, it's moot. He has other potential plans - there are things he could do to force matters, possibly - but he can't do anything until the day arrives.
It's a pity such logic doesn't seem to matter to his dreams, especially the one where Elizabeth is waiting for him, sick and worn and bitter as the oceans, the one where she spills his heart out of the safety of the casket and grinds it under her boot.
-
Sleep hasn't been a refuge, not for a long time.
But between one sunset and the next sunrise, something changes. A different dream: sand again between his toes, rough against his knees, but the softness of her body under his own. Her fingers twined through his. The smell of rosemary lingering in her hair, the taste of salt on her lips. The way her laughter danced in the firelight, her smile glinting like a drawn sword.
The first time in ten years, his body feels like it's living. Not waiting.
-
His last sunrise seems interminable; when it's over, and the sun is fully up against the backdrop of the endless waiting sea, he turns to find Calypso leaning on the rail beside him. Her hair sparkles with dew: stars on a dark ocean.
"You're going, soon," she tells him, and her eyes measure him, calm and immeasurably deep.
He nods. He knows, can feel the tug in his chest at war with the tug of the Dutchman's duty; nothing is certain, but nothing means more than holding faith with Elizabeth. As surely as she promised to wait for him, he promised to return. No matter what. But his duty isn't quite done, not yet. "What becomes of my ship?"
She smiles, teeth like pearls against the darkness of her skin. "Your task will be done," she chides him, gently. "It won't be your worry."
"It will if captain has to kill me to take the job."
Calypso laughs, a chuckle like the splashing of waves, like a dolphin's joyous chattering. "Don't worry, William Turner. I won't."
His chest loosens, the thing filling it now excitement untainted with fear. "I wasn't sure."
The goddess trails a finger down his cheek, her eyes merry. "Did you think it would be easy for her, the waiting? That she would never hurt, never doubt?"
"No!" Will is horrified at the idea, the thought that he might dismiss Elizabeth's pain so glibly.
"And are you waiting, any less than she is? Do you love her any less than she loves you?"
He should feel like a fool, but there's a bubble of happiness building in his chest, buoying him up. So he changes the subject. "Why do you want to do this?" he asks, gesturing at the ship. It seems wrong that she should be bound this way, limited to this calm ocean. It seems wrong to think she will be bound in this form again.
Calypso rests a fond hand on his, on the tiller. "You said it yourself. How can I know something I cannot experience - any other way?"
He nods then, understanding.
"Besides," she goes on, and her eyes go distant, seeing something else, "the wind and the waves are not invincible. I'm not invincible, either. Things change. Men are changing, and while they will never truly conquer me, they will never truly fear me again. And I do not wish to stay and be always taken for granted."
Will looks down at the mainmast, where three new passengers, their faces blank with wonder, look back at him. "That's one thing that never happens here."
Calypso's hand on his helps him turn the rudder, turn the Dutchman, one last time for that uncharted shore. "Never," she agrees, and there's jubilation in the sound.
-
Sunset, and his eyes fill with green light, like the sun seen from underwater. And his fingers wind through the rigging to anchor him to the ship. He's mortal, again, and it wouldn't do to let his eagerness pull him overboard to drown. Soon, oh, soon. Elizabeth.
Bootstrap supervises the readying of the boat; there's even two sets of oars, because both Turners are going ashore.
"Don't worry," he quips to his son, over his shoulder, as the crew's shoulders flex, ready to lower the dinghy to the water, "I'll make myself scarce a week or two."
Will laughs, and then stops, catches his breath, because he can see a shape on the promontory, stationary in the rippling waves of green grass. And a flash of colour, the sunlight gilding her honey hair. The ship flies forward, bringing the figure ever closer.
Two figures.
He never dreamed of this.
He doesn't bid farewell to the Dutchman, nor Calypso: he'll see them again. And he barely hears the cheer offered up by the crew. His heart is pounding too loudly in his ears.
And in his chest.
-fin-
Yes, I'm sort of writing again. This may not be pilots, but pirates really are very pretty, too.
Title: Waiting
Fandom: Pirates of the Carribbean.
Characters: Will, with guest stars Calypso and Bootstrap.
Rating: G; Angst, mentions of Will / Elizabeth.
Disclaimer: Not mine, obviously. But too damned pretty to leave in the limbo of movie afterlife. Written entirely on the spur of the moment, with no beta and no excuses.
Summary: She opens the chest as he walks towards her, stabs the thing inside. "I waited," she hisses at him, and then he wakes up, gasping for breath.
It's different, sailing these other seas. Under his feet, the deck moves in only the tiniest motions, ghosts of waves under the keel, ghost of movement, and he misses it. Somehow, after years of fire and metal and dry land under his boots, he misses the salt-drenched unpredictability of the real sea.
It's not all he misses, of course.
He feels the deaths that occur under the ocean's purview, feels the way the Dutchman lists accordingly, his hand barely needing to touch the wheel to send the sails flapping and his crew to trim them to new winds. Of it's own volition, the scarred old ship picks up pace, skimming the water like a shied stone. It's his ship, and it's not; his thoughts are part of it - or are the Dutchman's part of his? He's it's captain, probably more than it is his ship.
And when he's turned, when the lost ones come aboard, the strange calm of death doesn't quite remove every emotion from them; they set foot on his deck and look at him, look at the creaking, barnacle-crusted timbers, the tattered, weed-ridden sails, and they look at him as though they don't quite understand.
Neither does he.
-
Will can never quite see the shore where he leaves his passengers; the rickety-seeming dock where they disembark is all that's visible through the curtain of mist. It's not like the beach, Jack's beach, at all. It's not like anything.
He would have found out what lay beyond, he supposes, had he not been the instrument of Davy Jones' destruction. Or was that release? He became the captain, and that made him immortal, did it not? If it hadn't been for Elizabeth, her pleas in his fading conciousness, he isn't sure that he'd have chosen this as an alternative.
Many passengers flow past him, their unhurried movement into their afterlife making him abruptly aware of time. For most of these souls, time ran out when their ship hit bad weather, the sea-anchor catching a deep current and dragging them inorexably to their deaths on a hungry reef. Now, the sand-grains trickling through the hourglass mean little to them.
Their erstwhile host wishes it were so simple for him.
-
"What breaks the curse?" He asked his father one sunset, letting the light shine on his boot-knife, flashing redly in his eyes.
Bootstrap stares at the horizon. "You already know that."
Will flicks the knife handle firmly into his palm, carves another slim notch in the timber of the mizzenmast. He doesn't really need to tally the days thus, but it seemed appropriate. And under the water-grey, scarred and crusted finish, the timber is sound and silver as the rain. "Is it really that simple?"
"Yes," Bill says.
Will drops the knife into it's sheath, the hilt cool against the inside of his ankle, and then his fingers drift up, brush across the scar that creases his chest.
"And no," his father adds.
He nods. That's what he thought.
-
She appears on the bowsprit, like a figurehead, her face turned to the spray; Will nods a sailor - Carstairs, a man who will not pass on without his wife - to the tiller and joins her. She's been searching, ever since her release.
"You think she's waitin'?" Calypso asks. Her patois is fading, a human trait that's merely a dying custom for her immortal voice.
"Yes," Will says; he doesn't doubt it. Sometimes, sometimes, he hopes for her sake that she isn't, but if she wasn't, she wouldn't be Elizabeth. Like a blade, he'd always thought of her; finely crafted. Beautiful. Steel-sharp and deadly; brittle, in the wrong hands. She'd stay true, though it might be better for her if she did not.
"It's harder than you know," the goddess reminds him. "To see that sun come up, day on day on day, wake up with your arms empty and heart... full."
"I have arms too," he says, after a moment. "I sleep. And my heart..."
"Aye, a different tale, Captain Turner, true."
"I don't have it," he agrees. "But I do still feel it."
She whirls, then, her wild hair scattering droplets across his cheek. "Maybe you do. Maybe you just feel how it aches, that hole in your chest?"
She's bitter, like saltwater; it's in her nature. She's variable, stormy and comes and goes like the tide.
Will doesn't know why he reduces everything to its elements, even this deity. Even this ship. Even himself. "You will find him," he assures her, and lets his eyes drift out over the still sea.
She nods, touches his cheek, vanishes; he reaches up to wipe away the salt.
-
Sunrise and sunset, past the world's end, were the times that seemed most like the living world; bittersweet pleasures for Will. Morning and evening, he would stand on his quarter-deck, feeling the timbers of the ship beneath him creaking with remembered winds, and watch the colours flood the sky, growing and receding like tides in heaven. He marked time - a personal record - in the scarred timber with the point of his knife.
It took a while for him to realise that while the days went on, time itself had ceased, for him at least, not at the moment of his captaincy, but at the moment of his death. Physical pain did not linger in the memory, but the agony of his anger and grief - that was different; he remembered that clearly. Remembered the look on Elizabeth's face even as his heart had stuttered, transfixed on a sword's point.
He understood, then. The immortality of the Dutchman's Captain was not invulnerability. After all, what danger would a man face, ferrying souls to the afterlife? The dead were not violent, their change still too new for them to lash out. Perhaps that would come later, when they crossed that pier into the mist that lay beyond? It didn't matter. And the Dutchman did not founder in storms, neither on the wild living sea or the strange, quiescent dead one. The Captain of the Dutchman was simply removed from time. That's why it was a curse, he supposed: to stay young, constantly hovering on the edge of a life he could not touch.
For Davy Jones, loving a goddess, it would have been the perfect solution. He would live forever, in thrall to his ship and his task, with his goddess waiting for him - if she had waited. Yet need she have waited? She was the sea, and she could walk the deck of the Dutchman even when Jones could not set foot on the land. If he'd but waited, another ten years -
But he hadn't waited; instead he'd carved out his own heart and taught the Pirate lords how to conquer his faithless Goddess. He'd condemned himself to an eternity without her in order to punish her for one day's betrayal of him.
Would Will Turner be so unforgiving? Or would he be the opposite, returning decade after decade, waiting in unfailing hope for love to free him? He did not doubt; conjecture merely filled the empty hours.
Another sunset stains the sky in flame colours, and as he carves his tally in the mizzenmast, the Dutchman gives a familiar lurch. Sighing, he sets his hand to the wheel and feels the ship leap forwards in the water. There's work to do.
-
He wonders, often, how it all came about; how the circumstances link to the causes and necessities and tie together to produce his peculiar predicament. Was the Captain of the Dutchman meant to have his heart carved out? There was only one prior example, and heartlessness hadn't been part of the original requirement. Jones had chosen that for himself.
Will wonders how much of his father's action - putting his son's heart in the chest - was a result of the lingering lassitude on the ship; the unchanging plight of those bound forever to a cursed vessel left both ship and crew locked in their warped roles. But it was already proven that the Dutchman's captains could die, so perhaps the procedure had also saved Will's life?
He didn't know. Immortality - seeing his skin reform unmarred after lifting a man's soul from a burning shipwreck, seeing his face, unchanged and unweathered, each day in the mirror - gave him no answers. He dreamed, sometimes, of reclaiming his heart, of pressing the point of his knife down along that ragged scar, of pressing the eerie organ back into the confines of his ribs. He thinks, sometimes, that it would work, that he would feel it flutter again, as though surprised, before it settled again into it's work. He knows, somehow, that it would change nothing.
What he doesn't know is what would come next.
With Elizabeth's face constantly in his thoughts, he wonders. The day will come, and he will step foot on sand and find her waiting. There is no doubt in his mind of that. He'll set foot on sand and be free, and then his heart - cleft like a pinned butterfly in an eccentric's collection - might stop. Immortality is the gift of the Dutchman's captain, but a sword in the heart is death to a mortal man.
But that might happen anyway, might it not, if his heart remains locked in that strongbox? What normal man can live without a heart in his chest? What would that do to Elizabeth, to be waiting for him and see him drop, lifeless, the minute his foot touches that shore?
It is too cruel to contemplate.
He remembers his father's words, in answer to his question: is it that simple? Yes. And no.
He doesn't doubt Elizabeth - not any more; not since she wed him, since she spoke her heart to him, since he felt her bare skin against his, smooth against the sand. But he begins, bitterly, to doubt himself.
-
He marks his sunsets with reluctance, takes his turn at the tiller with something like loathing for the weathered, roughened wood beneath his hands. Jones, he remembers, had the power to change his service; but Turner, it seems, may change nothing at all. The souls pass off his deck, the power of their existence going with them to shores unknown.
He wonders how many it would take, to change things back? A few? a thousand? How many souls would he have to betray to the keeping of the ship before he would see the scarred timbers smooth over and the tattered sails reknit? Would they? Would the rust drop off the anchors, leaving their metal smooth and shining? Would the intricate carvings on the fittings shed their barnacles like snakes shedding scales, to be fresh and lovely underneath, and the cannons their coats of verdigris and slime? The men had, by the virtue of their own souls passed back into their keeping. What price his battered ship?
And how many to safeguard himself? Would his own be enough?
He tries to number the souls that he knows returned at some point, their bodies unbroken: Jack, of course. Barbossa. But neither had to deal with the problem of a vital organ misplaced. And they'd not been able to be alive again merely by choice. He didn't even know how Tia Dalma had resurrected the latter, nor whether she could do so again.
Bootstrap comes to relieve him; they do not keep precise hours, but tradition still holds. "You have the deck, Mister Turner," he says automatically, and then realises he had not even heard his father approach. Bootstrap's hair is silvering, and his eyes are unearthly. His feet don't echo on the deck.
His father hadn't ever died, and couldn't - not on this ship - grow physically older, but he wasn't young. He'd been in his forties when Barbossa's cannons and an Aztec curse had forced him into servitude on the Dutchman's deck. And Will sees, suddenly, that Bill's been walking the edge of life and death for long enough now to feel the currents of both waters.
How close to death did one have to be before there was no going back?
-
"He dead," she weeps, bitterly. Spray patters on his deck, and the Dutchman rolls in unaccustomed swells.
"Yes."
"I've seen a million men die. I know their souls pass out the world. I set this ship to help them do it. But - but -"
"Immortality doesn't help us comprehend what death is," he tells her, and his own pain rises. Somewhere, in the other world, his heart in it's wooden confines is pounding in panic. "How can you know something you can never experience?"
Calypso turns her gaze on him, dark eyes stormy with grief. "I cannot put it right," she tells him. "I cannot bring him back, if he is already gone on."
So that is the dividing line he thinks, and he has to swallow the incredulous hope. He serves at Calypso's behest; she grieves, now; a woman's personal loss, not the universal empathy of a deity. He cannot be sure she will grant him a happiness she herself cannot achieve.
Instead he touches her arm, warm, mortal-seeming skin, voices the thought that recent fears and dreads had brought him, the one that echoed with every single voice that bade him farewell as he set them ashore, past world's end. "Perhaps it is better where he is?"
She ponders that. "What is it like?" she asks him, then. "What is it like, dying?"
He can't really answer from his own experience, but he's seen ten thousand faces as they turn and see their destination. He knows what they're feeling.
Will feels the ship shudder, straining against Calypso's grief like a hound on a leash; as he turns the ship, he tells the goddess that it's like the tide. One can't fight it. One doesn't try. And in the going, there's peace.
It's the waiting that wracks all of them.
-
He wakes from each slumber thinking of Elizabeth, but his dreams are full of fear. He sees haunting, bitter things, sees Elizabeth on the sand, the chest in her hands when he steps upon the shore, a free man. A moment later, she's crying when she hears the pulsing within shudder into silence.
Yet other nightmares show her standing there, her body older with every tide. She opens the chest as he walks towards her, stabs the thing inside. "I waited," she hisses at him, and then he wakes up, gasping for breath.
The realisation is terrifying: Elizabeth is bound as surely as he is, and she's only a goddess to him. Eternity isn't standing still for her, so his survival has cost ten years of her life, not his. If his heart was handy, he thinks he'd stab it himself to free her.
But not even that could change anything.
-
Bill's face has a look of anticipation; he watches Will carve the day's notch in the mizzenmast with a hunger that unsettles his son. "Not long now, Captain," he says, pointedly.
Will has not counted the days in a long time, but he knows it for the truth. It feels as though the vacancy in his chest is yearning towards something, the aching emptiness pulsing more rapidly in anticipation and fear; the remainder of his sentence is calculated to a minute in his soul.
What he can't calculate is the reason that Bill should count those days so avidly.
"What will you do?" he asks.
Bill turns his face eastward, where the sun will come up in a blaze of living colour, and laughs. "That's a bloody stupid question, son," he remarks.
Will's mouth twists. "Is it?"
The elder Turner pivots, stares at him. "You remember what life is, don't you, William?"
Elizabeth.
"Yes," the captain of the Dutchman admits.
I remember.
"Then you remember how to live it, don't you?"
It's a statement, not a question, but uncertainty stalks afterwards, all the same. He remembers being alive, but he hasn't felt alive in nine years, three hundred and fifty-six days.
He doesn't say so. He suspects that to a man who's been mostly dead a decade and and a half, and more, how life feels doesn't really matter as long as it's life.
-
There's no real process for the selection of a new captain. For several reasons, stabbing Captain Turner's absent heart won't do as an inauguration. A few of the men - lingering souls - who man the rigging and tend the Dutchman's idle cannons speculate and nominate among themselves, but Will mentally questions their suggestions. Technically, all of them except his father are dead; can a dead man fill the role?
Others among his crew tread warily around the whole issue; in their opinion, no woman would wait so long. Their speculation is all on what will happen after the ship hoves to on an empty coast.
He dismisses their foretellings, too; that's not what he fears at all. And his dreams have taught him that there are worse horrors than his part in this otherworldly tale.
Captain Turner rationalises: if he's freed and dies on the shore, or if he lives, the selection of the replacement won't be his problem. And if he isn't free, it's moot. He has other potential plans - there are things he could do to force matters, possibly - but he can't do anything until the day arrives.
It's a pity such logic doesn't seem to matter to his dreams, especially the one where Elizabeth is waiting for him, sick and worn and bitter as the oceans, the one where she spills his heart out of the safety of the casket and grinds it under her boot.
-
Sleep hasn't been a refuge, not for a long time.
But between one sunset and the next sunrise, something changes. A different dream: sand again between his toes, rough against his knees, but the softness of her body under his own. Her fingers twined through his. The smell of rosemary lingering in her hair, the taste of salt on her lips. The way her laughter danced in the firelight, her smile glinting like a drawn sword.
The first time in ten years, his body feels like it's living. Not waiting.
-
His last sunrise seems interminable; when it's over, and the sun is fully up against the backdrop of the endless waiting sea, he turns to find Calypso leaning on the rail beside him. Her hair sparkles with dew: stars on a dark ocean.
"You're going, soon," she tells him, and her eyes measure him, calm and immeasurably deep.
He nods. He knows, can feel the tug in his chest at war with the tug of the Dutchman's duty; nothing is certain, but nothing means more than holding faith with Elizabeth. As surely as she promised to wait for him, he promised to return. No matter what. But his duty isn't quite done, not yet. "What becomes of my ship?"
She smiles, teeth like pearls against the darkness of her skin. "Your task will be done," she chides him, gently. "It won't be your worry."
"It will if captain has to kill me to take the job."
Calypso laughs, a chuckle like the splashing of waves, like a dolphin's joyous chattering. "Don't worry, William Turner. I won't."
His chest loosens, the thing filling it now excitement untainted with fear. "I wasn't sure."
The goddess trails a finger down his cheek, her eyes merry. "Did you think it would be easy for her, the waiting? That she would never hurt, never doubt?"
"No!" Will is horrified at the idea, the thought that he might dismiss Elizabeth's pain so glibly.
"And are you waiting, any less than she is? Do you love her any less than she loves you?"
He should feel like a fool, but there's a bubble of happiness building in his chest, buoying him up. So he changes the subject. "Why do you want to do this?" he asks, gesturing at the ship. It seems wrong that she should be bound this way, limited to this calm ocean. It seems wrong to think she will be bound in this form again.
Calypso rests a fond hand on his, on the tiller. "You said it yourself. How can I know something I cannot experience - any other way?"
He nods then, understanding.
"Besides," she goes on, and her eyes go distant, seeing something else, "the wind and the waves are not invincible. I'm not invincible, either. Things change. Men are changing, and while they will never truly conquer me, they will never truly fear me again. And I do not wish to stay and be always taken for granted."
Will looks down at the mainmast, where three new passengers, their faces blank with wonder, look back at him. "That's one thing that never happens here."
Calypso's hand on his helps him turn the rudder, turn the Dutchman, one last time for that uncharted shore. "Never," she agrees, and there's jubilation in the sound.
-
Sunset, and his eyes fill with green light, like the sun seen from underwater. And his fingers wind through the rigging to anchor him to the ship. He's mortal, again, and it wouldn't do to let his eagerness pull him overboard to drown. Soon, oh, soon. Elizabeth.
Bootstrap supervises the readying of the boat; there's even two sets of oars, because both Turners are going ashore.
"Don't worry," he quips to his son, over his shoulder, as the crew's shoulders flex, ready to lower the dinghy to the water, "I'll make myself scarce a week or two."
Will laughs, and then stops, catches his breath, because he can see a shape on the promontory, stationary in the rippling waves of green grass. And a flash of colour, the sunlight gilding her honey hair. The ship flies forward, bringing the figure ever closer.
Two figures.
He never dreamed of this.
He doesn't bid farewell to the Dutchman, nor Calypso: he'll see them again. And he barely hears the cheer offered up by the crew. His heart is pounding too loudly in his ears.
And in his chest.
-fin-
Yes, I'm sort of writing again. This may not be pilots, but pirates really are very pretty, too.