Fic: The Ferryman's Wife
Title: The Ferryman’s Wife
Author: Versifico
Disclaimer: Don’t own nothin’.
Rating: I’m going to go with PG-13. No sexuality, no cursing, but there are some disturbing images and death. You’ve been warned.
Summary: Elizabeth experiences loss, in more ways than one. One-shot, post AWE (spoilers), AU. Gen-ish and mostly Elizabeth centered. Some J/E for good measure.
A/N: Please excuse my dark and twisty-ness here.
For those of you who may be wondering- yes, I am planning to continue Time and Eternity. Soon, I hope. For now I am just glad my muse decided to wake up from its coma. Many thanks to erinya for the fabulous impromptu beta and concrit job *Squishes*. All errors are mine.
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.”
- William Shakespeare
Twenty-eight weeks the nameless child has grown within her; twenty-eight weeks and sleep eludes her as her lover does. She finds herself dozing off at odd times during the long days, perhaps with her fingers buried in the fragrant patch of dirt behind her house, perhaps while bending low over a row of perfect small stitches in fading light. Yet the waking is always the same, abrupt and painful, a shock of light and reality, the wavering image of Will's face poised at her outstretched knee. There is longing too, buzzing about her ears like a living thing, a loneliness like sitting at the bottom of the ocean, waiting to drown.
***
When sleep does come, the clever trickster, she dreams of her child. A girl, age indeterminable, with golden hair spilling about her shoulders and impossibly small elfin features. Always the girl is running from her, turning to her mother and laughing; there is no sound, but the set of her face speaks of joy. In the dream Elizabeth wants to run after her, but her feet seem fixed to the ground.
She calls out to her daughter whose name is a mystery; the shape of it forms and then dies on her lips, an unanswered prayer. Her hands are heavy at her sides.
The girl continues to run, careless as a sprite, carried on the wind. She runs toward the water, the coastline that seems foreboding and dangerous in the glittering afternoon sunlight, and she's running faster and faster until her feet are in the sand. She leaves no footprints behind.
Elizabeth watches, helpless, as her daughter splashes into the brilliant surf, smiling with delight at the cool water. She turns to her mother again, her face alight, beckoning her wordlessly. Come on, mama, her hands say, wild flailing gestures.
But she cannot move, cannot speak, cannot think, and she stands, rooted, as her child disappears into the water, melting away before her eyes, until only the cruel horizon remains.
***
She wakes to pain that claws at her back with unyielding iron fingers. Sharp and tearing pain that forces her up awkwardly, her hands clutching white-knuckled at the rough headboard. The swell of her abdomen is yet small but rock-hard now, and the feel of it startles her as she places her hand over to settle the babe. She reaches for the water at her bedside, sips carefully, but when another pain wracks her she fumbles the cup and drops it. Watches as it shatters on the floor, feels something shatter within her. It is too soon now, much too soon for the babe to come but she knows without doubt that she will come tonight. Her daughter that she's dreamt of, her tiny unborn child, and the midwife is more than an hours' walk away.
The pains come in waves that crash too closely together, a tide too strong to swim against, and there is no shelter for her to seek. She is alone, wretchedly and blessedly alone, and there is no one to judge her for a weakling when she cries out, keening long and low in her throat. The night swallows the sound and she feels that she's in the dream again, watching her beloved disappear. She closes her eyes and there's the flash of green, where the dim of the room meets the blackness behind her lids. Her hands clutch at the bedclothes ineffectually, twisting and dampening them beneath work-roughened palms.
And then the pain is everywhere, at her back and clutching at her belly and writhing low in the cradle of her hips. She cannot breathe; the sounds that come forth from her are unheeded, gurgling in her throat. Too much pressure builds within her, as if she might explode, and then she does in a white-hot burst of light and agony. The room tilts and then falls away, and there is nothing but the warmth between her legs and air that's gone heavy with the smell of copper.
She swims in blackness for what could be hours, unsteady moments that are measured by the pounding in her ears, the throbbing of her insides. There is movement, fluttering and unsure, on the sheet between her knees. The room spins about her as she struggles to push herself up. Murky light streams through the window, and she realizes that dawn is fast approaching. Blinking, struggling to focus, her breath catches at the blood she finds. On her legs, the bedclothes, her gown...and in the middle of it, a tiny squirming mass. Her baby, impossibly small, her fragile chest rising and falling in shuddering breaths.
Elizabeth's hands tremble as she picks her up close to her body, restricted by the lifeline that yet binds them together. The world's entire held in the slope of her palm. She traces the perfect face, the curling eyelashes, the near-translucent eyelids. The downy head, the newborn's fuzz matted with blood and fluid. The miniature alabaster fingers that close around her mother's thumb, grasping blindly at the pulse of life. One last breath escapes her, nearly a sigh, and then she breathes no more. She never opens her eyes.
There is nothing left within Elizabeth, no words that can contain her grief. She sobs silently, choking and gasping, and she wants nothing more than to lie down and die alongside her child. But she will not die, cannot, she knows; she will live on, and it is the cruelest truth she's yet to endure. Her tears fall unheeded onto the babe's still form, washing away the life blood, bathing her in water as warm and salty as the Caribbean.
***
Two days later her strength is beginning to return but she feels still like a newborn colt, unsteady upon her legs, braced for the inevitable fall. She's wrapped her daughter in emerald silk, treasured fabric long-buried in a trunk she salvaged from her father's ravaged estate. The minute body feels weightless in her arms, light as air. Elizabeth wonders if she only dreamt the horrific birth, if instead she holds Will's still-beating heart swathed in her hands.
But her bundle does not move; if it is a heart that she holds it is as broken as her own, as frozen and still as the northernmost seas.
She walks into the surf, relishes the heavy drag of the waves on her skirt. Further in until she's waist-deep. The crests are slight today, and lap against her chest gently; the ocean sings to her, its tones mournful. Today the sun hides behind the clouds and the sea dances with shadow. She releases her precious bundle, watches it recede with the tide only to float back and out again.
Come back to me, Will, she whispers, and the greedy wind steals her words away.
She cannot bury her daughter in this land to which she is so tethered. She gives her to the only freedom that she's ever known, to the sea's loose and loving embrace, to the bright and lurid sky. To Will, her father, to Calypso, the sea goddess, her now-mother.
She can only trust that they will take care of her child while she cannot, will guide her where her mother cannot trespass.
***
Two years pass, a stretch of time that dampens her grief but does not heal its source.
She still stands at the shore with her feet bare in the waves, but she watches the horizon no more. More than seven years until his return, but she cannot deny the months that she spent hoping, however irrationally, for his premature appearance. For the feeling of an intimate touch, that long-forgotten comfort. She cannot pardon his absence, cannot forgive herself for the life that she chose in haste and passion. But it matters not- there will be no flash, no sign of his sails, and she lives now only for the benediction of water on skin, that tenuous connection. Her heart is in this ocean now, swept away in the undertow, liquid and changing and lost to her.
Or so she tells herself.
Two years pass, and one day there is another set of sails. She’s forgotten what it’s like to feel breathless with anticipation. To want. To live past each breath. The sails are black, and her prow is beautiful in the smoldering dusk. There are tears in Elizabeth’s eyes.
***
He finds her in the tavern with her hands about a drought of rum and her hair a tangle ‘round her shoulders.
“This is no place for a proper lady such as yerself, Miss Swann. I suggest you let me take you home straightaway.”
He waggles his eyebrows licentiously, although the effect is quite lost on her. Her eyes are still downcast, and it has not escaped his attention that she has failed to correct his blunder. Purposeful as it may be.
“Why so long in the face, love?” he asks good-naturedly, helping himself to the seat across from her table.
But he is not prepared for her eyes, older than they’ve any right to be. She holds the world in those eyes, a world of life and death and all of the messiness betwixt.
“Oh,” he says, feeling quite stupid.
“Oh, Jack,” she murmurs, her low words reaching him in the din of the room, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you at a loss for words.”
“Never had cause to be, I s’pose.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Ah, but the more fitting question might be what are you doing here. This is Tortuga , sweeting, and one of your ol’ Jacks oldest haunts.”
“Where else do I fit now but here?” she asks, in answer.
“On a ship, perhaps. Pirate King and all. Only makes sense.”
She smiles at his half-sentences and his half-truths, for nothing makes sense anymore and she thinks that he knows it as well.
“How are you, Jack?”
“Well enough. I have a full purse and a full hold and I’m good and well rid of Barbossa. I’ve got my Pearl and no beastie chasing about after either of us. Not likely to be eaten anytime soon, and that’s fortune enough for me.”
She quirks an eyebrow at him in the dim; she cannot help but smile, and the sensation is foreign and near-painful to muscles so unaccustomed.
“Sorry, Bess. Can’t help myself, it seems.”
Indeed, she thinks. It seems that neither can she.
***
She takes him home with her, inevitably, and he duly admires the work she’s done to carve a home out of her modest surroundings. She watches him take in her view of the coastline, has to turn her face away because she knows that the picture he sees is a world apart from her own.
She serves him old tea and stale scones, although it’s much too late for such feeble pleasantries. They’ve both missed dinner, it seems, too busy talking around the numerous subjects that could make for awkward conversation topics. He tells her stories of his voyages, of chasing a dream of cool magic water and immortality, a dream so tenuous it dissolved before his very eyes. Death disguised it was, and almost took Jack for death’s fool.
“What now?” she asks him, and he drums his still-ringed fingers on her table.
“Who knows? India, perhaps, or Singapore. The Caribbean’s grown a mite small for my taste.”
“So far, Jack?”
“Aye. Sometimes the situation calls for such a long journey. Helps to straighten things about up here, as it were,” he responds thoughtfully, tapping his forehead.
His eyes catch hers and she knows that he sees what she tries so vainly to hide, knows that he must see the loss and the desperation written plainly in the lines of her face.
“What’s happened to you, Lizzie-girl?” he asks, his voice more tender than she’s ever heard.
“I lost…” My child, she thinks. My love, my joy, myself. “Everything,” she says. She does not have to say it all. She will not, not to Jack, who knows her with a glance.
“Well, it’s settled then. You’ll come with me.”
And perhaps she should protest, for there are vows that she has made. Words that anchor her to the land, as solid and sure as any iron bolt on a dead man’s chest.
“I’ll go,” she answers, and the bolt slides free.
“What of the chest?” he asks, his words a grimace.
“I buried it long ago,” and she thinks of Will’s heart beating so quietly in her dirt, of her daughter’s heart which beat for such a short time. Of her own heart, which is unfurling again, finally, as fragile as a promise.
***
From the deck of the Pearl her home is nearly invisible, sheltered by trees and shadow. There is no pain in letting it go, or any of the things within. It’s almost surprising, how little of a life she has built these past years. A life of waiting is no life at all, she’s discovered, and she is ready to begin anew.
Jack comes to stand behind her, quiet in thought as she. The sails slacken, then catch in a sudden breeze. She has missed the details of the ship; the sound of those sails in the wind, snapping cheerfully; the smell of brine and rum. She has missed Jack as well, more than she could have realized.
“What about your daughter?” he asks, in cautious tones- the tale is still newly shared, her pain still raw in his mind.
“She’s with me now,” she murmurs, and smiles. The salty spray on her face feels like forgiveness, and she is free.