Fic: Ashes in the Interlude
Author: Versifico
Summary: Picks up where AWE leaves off. Spoilers abound.
Pairing: W/E this part, J/E the next
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Don’t own anything. Don’t especially want to, at this point.
A/N: Part one of two. I chose to divide this because this part alone is over 2,000 words- gigantic for me. Next part will be out tomorrow. Many, many thanks to djarum99 for the kind beta read!
A/N Continued: This is my desperate attempt to make sense of, and make right, what we were given in AWE. The first part covers the first 20 years following the movie; the next will cover another 20. Please, bear with me…I am going somewhere (slightly) happy with this. Lots of angst for now, though. Feedback please :)
Ashes in the Interlude
“Time is the fire in which we burn” ~ Delmore Schwartz
Elizabeth
The first time she felt her unborn child move within her womb she was standing with her feet in the warm surf and the afternoon sun glinting upon her loosed hair. Amazed at the unfamiliar sensation, she placed her hand over her still-flat abdomen. Her world narrowed to that tiny point of contact, to that new and powerful connection.
"You will love her as I do," was the promise she murmured to her babe. Her gaze was fixed to the horizon, the sight so familiar that it seemed imprinted onto the backs of her eyelids when she closed them against the shimmering glare. The sun was setting, the tide rising; she watched for the brilliant flash of green as she had every night since discovering the secret she carried. Willing him to pass by, if only for a moment, and to share this secret with her that seemed much too heavy to bear alone.
Yet the pull of the water was growing too strong, too seductive, and as her babe turned another slow roll in her belly, she knew it was time to pull her anchor from those hopeless waters. Will was not coming back, and she dug her heels into the sand as the reality of responsibility set in.
After several long minutes, the sun finally dipped below the horizon, another uneventful setting. The world had gone dark and she turned her back to the sea, the lover that had wronged her.
Some things, she had found, were best loved from afar.
Will
The first day aboard the Dutchman, he pledged to remember every face, every name of the poor souls he was duty-bound to ferry between the worlds.
But months trickled by, time that passed differently aboard the strange ship. Some nights he jerked awake, clawing at the angry scar upon his chest, from a dream in which 100 years had passed unbeknownst to him. In the dream Elizabeth died an old woman, standing alone at the shoreline, watching for a ship that never appeared. On those nights Bootstrap would find him brooding at the helm, would reassure him that his ship would not betray him so. The Dutchman knew better than any when the day approached, and would guide herself to the proper port.
Despite his promise, he found himself losing track of his charges. The flow of souls never slowed; most of them taken before they were ready, victimized by the perilous seas. It grew too difficult to look with compassion into those faces drawn with pain and regret. Will knew that most of them would have chosen immortality, Jack’s gift to him, without truly understanding the price. The cost was heavy, bearing heavier upon him with each passing day, like lead in his boots that held him fast to the planks of the deck.
He’d come to understand Jones a little better, forever bound to the ship, filled with bitterness toward any man who sailed freely, any man who loved.
Elizabeth
When her son stumbled upon the chest, she shouted at him for the first time in his short life; the desperate cry had been painful, clawing its way from her belly and splitting the air.
"No! Don’t touch that, Isaac!”
He drew his hand back quickly, confused and afraid, looking to his mother with wide eyes. He was only a child of five then, filled with wonder at the world and the new things that he was perpetually finding within it. She was shaken at the lost look in his eyes, knowing as she did the gravity of this truth that she had chosen to hide from him.
"What is it mum?"
"It’s not a toy," she’d answered, her voice gentled and quaking. "It’s one of my things and you’re not to touch it, do you understand?"
He nodded carefully, his eyes curious, and she took him by the hand to lead him from the room. She closed the door behind her and focused on the sound of her son’s voice so that she couldn’t hear the horrible beating of Will’s heart speaking to her, berating her for her lies.
The story of his father was no child’s fairytale, and she wasn’t ready to wipe away the innocence in his eyes. Not quite yet.
Will
Upon his first return to land he met his son, by then ten years old. The shock of that discovery- the life that he'd created, the child he'd never known of- was enough to lift the haze of unreality that had blanketed him for so long. He felt suddenly vulnerable, so very mortal. He looked to Elizabeth, needing her guidance, but she only smiled softly at him and nudged the boy closer to his father. Will reached for him by instinct and the boy backed away, clutching at his mother's hand nervously. He felt an ache in his chest, where his heart should have been, and crouched down to face his son.
"I'm your father..." he began, and the realization that he did not even know his child's name nearly rent him in two.
“Isaac,” she supplied, quietly, and the name seemed a benediction that he did not deserve.
“Isaac,” he repeated, calling out to him. The boy's eyes fell to his exposed chest, to the scar that had never healed nor lightened, and his frightened eyes darted quickly away.
"Have you not told him about me, Elizabeth?"
"I've told him enough," she answered, and by then he’d learned the sound of a lie on her lips. He stood, searching her face, seeing her for the first time since he came ashore. At first glance she appeared not to have aged, but upon closer inspection he saw the pull of time at the soft corners of her eyes; marking parenthesis around her lovely mouth.
"Enough for whom?" he asked, and she looked away. Ten years and a million unsaid words lie between them, and for the first time he did not know if they could find a way to overcome the distance.
***
Elizabeth showed him to their home and poured him tea. He sat at her table, feeling coarse and misplaced in the tidy, sun-washed space. The cracked china cup seemed too fragile in hands grown unaccustomed to such dainty trappings.
His boy, with the resiliency so common to young children, warmed to his father quickly. He was an unexpected joy, too full of life and mystery to be contained in one miserly day. The skin of his face was soft and warm but his hands were rough and dirt-stained, attesting to the shabby genteel life he and his mother had lead. He sat close beside Will while interrogating him about his adventures, the words and questions tumbling together in his excitement. He attended to each story with rapt attention, his upturned face open and smiling. There was much that Isaac did not understand about his father, but he understood the limitations of their time together. When finally his eyes were drifting closed, far past his regular bedtime, Elizabeth ushered him up and away towards his room. Will pulled his son into a tight embrace, struggling to store every detail of the moment away.
“I’ll be back, son. I swear it,” he told him; I love you son, he meant.
“I know, father,” his son answered; I love you too, Will heard.
***
Finally alone, the silence between them was awkward and fraught with tension.
"How have you been?" he asked her, needing to hear her voice, wanting to know about her life.
"Waiting," she answered, ten years summed up in the simple word.
At a loss for words, he asked to see the chest and she took him to it, dutifully. She wore the key 'round her neck, on a simple leather cord hidden beneath the bodice of her dress.
He didn’t look upon it for long. Instead he looked to Elizabeth, whose eyes were carefully averted away from the sight. There were no tears on her face, but her shoulders slumped; her features were heavy with sadness.
"Elizabeth," he said in a low voice, not daring to touch her. Ten years he'd lived for that day, carried by her promise to wait for him. Looking at her then, he could only wonder how he could ever have damned them both.
"This isn’t right."
She didn't respond and he looked down at the chest, to the lid that was covered with a thick layer of dust. A set of fingerprints dotted the edge, a child's fingerprints. His son's.
"You shouldn’t be here. I won’t let you pass another ten years waiting for me."
She smiled at him; it was a smile that he did not recognize, one that did not reach her eyes.
"What would you have me do instead, Will? I made a promise to you ten years ago, and I intend to hold fast to that promise."
"I thought I couldn’t trust you," he murmured.
"That changed," she answered, "when I bore our child."
Not just that, he’d thought then; she’d changed, and he knew that there was no one to blame but himself that he barely recognized her anymore.
***
Later that night he'd stood at her side just outside the door to her room, both of them looking inside and feeling quite young and uncomfortable. He felt her quaking beside him; it seemed so long ago that they’d lain together on that beach.
Then he'd looked to his son's room; the door was slightly ajar, and he could see his impossibly small form curled up on the thin bed. The urge to go to him had been overwhelming, more so than the need to be made human again by Elizabeth's touch, and he looked at her with longing in his eyes.
"You want to go to him," she whispered, in her knowing way, and he could only nod.
Touching his hand, she turned to go inside her room.
"Hold him close, Will. He needs his father."
He kissed her then, fleetingly, and turned to go into his son's room. The sound of Elizabeth's door shutting carried such finality; the moment felt weighted with choice and consequences that he could not yet understand. But none of it mattered, because when he lay down beside his son his small body was warm and alive and he curled into his father with an aching familiarity. Will held him close, as his mother had asked, and stroked his hair.
He closed his eyes, and slept soundly for the first time in ten years.
Elizabeth
Her son was sixteen, old enough to be considered a man, when she finally divulged the full details of his father’s curse to him. His reaction was mostly expected- anger at her, for keeping the secret for so long, anger at his father because he could not fully understand the events of that fateful day.
He was sixteen when she also shed light on her own past, of her short-lived days spent pirating and enjoying absolute freedom. Her son, amazed and proud of his Pirate King mother, had asked her why she had chosen Will over the life she obviously loved, understanding as she did his obligation.
“I’d lost enough already. I always feared being left alone in this world, Isaac. Even if I only saw your father once every ten years, at least I would know that he was out there somewhere, living his life for me.”
His eyes had been steady, his expression too mature for his years, when he’d responded to her.
“If he’d have wanted to live his life for you, mum, he would have let you go.”
***
She spent the better part of twenty years teaching their son and watching him grow into a man. She taught him to write and to read, to sow and harvest, to sail and swordfight. She raised him on Shakespeare and pirate tales, taught him to dance and sang him sea shanties as lullabies. He grew into a respectful boy, so very like his father and yet harder around the edges. She recognized his passion for the sea; she knew it had been born into his blood. He walked with his feet always in the waves as his mother stood carefully in the dunes. She knew that her days were numbered, that soon the call would be too strong to resist. She suspected that it was his father’s visit that stilled his actions. Despite the time and seas and anger that separated them, he was still just a boy wishing for his father’s approval, looking for a chance to say goodbye.
Nearly ten years after Will’s first return, she and her son were waiting, although they waited for very different reasons. Her son waited for his father to come, and she waited for her son to leave her.