[POTC fic] - "The Promise of Nostos" - rated R
Title: "The Promise of Nostos”
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Spoilers: Post AWE
Pairing: Jack/Elizabeth, Will/Elizabeth, and some Norrington/Elizabeth if you squint.
Rating: R
Word Count: 1,969
Disclaimer: I don't own POTC or any of the people in it. They belong to Disney. Would that I was that rich....
Summary: Elizabeth turns 25 and has a rather drenched encounter high above the seashore.
Author's Note: I've fallen to a bit of the "one-brainness" sweeping our fabulous fandom, and have decided to try my hand at a little post-AWE angst-and-glee. I've taken a bit of liberty with Shakespeare's The Tempest, but all's well that ends well for fic, yes? Right now this is a stand-alone, but my muse's ears are perked. We'll see where she leads me. This work is updated to my fic list.
This work is dedicated to
djarum99 for all of her support, for her uplifting friendship, and for her birthday, as belated as this gift may be. Many squishes, smooshes, and lobster-nips to you, love.
And thanks are also in orderfor the gifted
djarum99 , for initial concrit and for general inspiration. I'm so sorry, love, that I was too impatient to send the completed work for beta.
Feedback is fabulous!
The Promise of Nostos
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
--The Tempest, 3. 2
The table is bare but for the remnants of her evening tea: the lone teacup and saucer, the crumbs of ship biscuits, the singular drizzle of honey and its errant spoon - and the last packet of tea leaves, torn wide, a gift from Captain Chevalle on his way back from the East Indies. The blue and white porcelain cup is chipped at the rim, a reminder of Singapore. Dipping her finger into the puddle of syrup, she smiles against its sweetness before clearing the table with solemn efficiency.
She climbs the stairs surreptitiously. The boards have begun to warp and dip in the center, groaning beneath even the gentlest footfall, and so she presses herself against the banister as she ascends.
Entering the hallway, she tiptoes towards James’ room, the moonlight bone-pale and piercing the room in dusty slats. The tangled shadows of leaves and branches form a familiar carpet of lace. Peering into the bedroom, she finds her son sprawled haphazardly across his bed, a miniature ship still clutched in his fist. Elizabeth tucks her son into his pocket of batting and down, kissing his eyelids asleep, and padding across the floorboards - planks she helped lay with her own bloodied knuckles - she retreats down the stairs, across the kitchen, and gentles open the door, slipping into the balmy evening. Twilight is a sultry thief, welcoming her with the sigh of sand stirring, grain against grain in song. Beyond the cliff’s ledge the ocean stretches towards the sky. Tallgrass curls seaward down the gentle slope from her garden. She approaches the brink, tempted.
She turns her face into the wet wind. The lapel of her coat ruffles, windswept, and she slips it down her shoulders carelessly, confident in her isolation here, at the edge of her world.
“Happy birthday, then, Elizabeth Swann.” She speaks plainly, the habit of talking to herself familiar as the wool of her coat. His coat, really. And like her threadbare companion, she refuses to discard both the reminder of piracy and the consoling fleece of her father’s name, referring to herself as Swann despite the weight of her hasty vows.
Boulders rumble in the twilight sky, dove grey and glancing against one another with a hollow, siltstone sound, the thunder a rockslide. The horizon dims to charcoal, but the water remains placid, smooth and blued as shale. A slim line of lightning illuminates the distant atolls, and she wonders if her twenty-fifth year will include a visit from Gentleman Joe or perhaps even Teague.
She has stopped searching for flashes of green, and she has certainly stopped straining for the billow of black sails. In any case, she knows better than to wish for dinghies and Dutchmen to wash across her shores. Instead, she charts the sweep of clouds and the misted moon, an ashen puff of color, a clenched fist tugging at the tide.
She extracts her longpipe, tobacco, and tinderbox from the generous pockets of Jack’s coat. Smoke rises in lavender tendrils. The scent is her father’s, bent over paperwork and cognac. It is Jack, procrastinating at her kitchen table, neither of them ready to say goodbye.
She stifles the memory, puffing thoughtfully. She will not think of her dead father and her like-as-not dead friend. Instead, she tries to remember Will - the Will she knew in Port Royal, attending her birthday parties in his shy way, slipping her an overripe orange through the back gate before the guests arrived.
Years later, he brought her clove-pricked oranges - fragrant and celebratory - on the eve of the dinner celebrating their engagement. She remembers how the treacherous, tempting flicker of candlelit goblets reminded her of the silver-gold of sunlight of the sea. And she recalls a certain shallow loneliness even then, in the glittering shoals of ballrooms and the sandbar duplicity of polite teas.
Now, her isolation has festered into a deep wound, the absence of friends and family like brine in her blood. The pain is whetstone sharp - a keel slicing through water, or the blade of his spine, tan and taut beneath her fingers. Reluctantly, she conjures them one by one from the embers in her pipe, from the sighs of smoke hovering languidly in a halo at the crown of her head.
The phantom sensation of Will’s lips against her knee lingers even now, the shiver from thigh to hip as his hands drifted up her leg is nearly palpable. Her throat still aches, her tongue bitter with the salt-sting of their goodbye.
She draws another pensive lungful, the tobacco turning bitter in its full burn, the current of her thoughts shifting. There is James to mourn: the disheveled Mr. Norrington coated in pig-slop, and the resolute Commodore pacing at the wall of the fort, stealing her breath. And her friend, James - poor, misdirected James - his hands trembling as he kissed her. His lashes had grazed her, had whispered unspeakable syllables against her skin. Regret flutters like molted feathers, whisked beyond her grasp.
Another pull at the stem of her pipe and her mind turns towards Jack. Smoke and mirrors, he materializes in her periphery, a wisp of grey in the ducts of her eyes. She shakes her head to dislodge the image of him there, an elbow’s width away, head cocked. A collection of shadows. He is: Jack, wandered ashore, confusion wrinkling his brow. Jack, elbows bloody, her babe in his arms. Jack, barefoot in the grass, her son supine on his chest, giggling and grasping at the ropes of his hair. He is her only surviving friend, his eyes anxious and avoiding her face during their final goodbye, his head bowed as he begs forgiveness. Her chin was steady, but her heart turned to pulp as he spun on his heels, little James wailing in his basinet.
He is the final betrayal - the click of a closed door - his breath scalding her collarbone, her skirts balled in his fists.
And he cannot be revisited. She shakes her head as if to clear her vision.
Cicadas shuffle in their brittle way, crooning for companionship in the distant trees. The sea shifts restlessly against the shore below, and long fingers of water grip the shoreline in a frantic, angry sort of coupling. She taps the ivory hull of her pipe to empty the smoldering mess of ash and singed leaves.
Her cheeks moisten as the rain begins to fall, and she lifts her face to the wet mouth of it, enjoying the flavor of the arriving tempest.
“So this is twenty five years?” she mutters, raindrops on her tongue.
“Not what you expected, then?”
She stiffens, her throat suddenly swollen shut. Blinking, she inhales a shallow breath, rainwater in her lashes and her ribs aching. His hand is at the small of her back - a light touch, the palm of a ghost. Her heart beats and beats and beats before she can manage an answer.
“I don’t really know what I expected anymore, Jack. I think maybe I dreamt of a version of this life - until life itself managed to offer me a taste of something better. I don’t imagine I thought I would be a king absconded into motherhood.”
“A common occurrence, that. What's past is prologue, hmm, Lizzie?”
“Mmm, a tale to cure deafness, no doubt?” She smiles at the swell of waves breaking below.
“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows and stranger wisdom, Elizabeth - and you’ve managed to misquote Shakespeare again, I see.”
“And I do begin to have bloody thoughts, Captain.” Grinning ear-to-ear, she closes her heavy-lidded eyes.
“Not too bloody, I hope.” He’s closer now, his right hand snaking around the curve of her hip, resting against her belly. His shoulder presses hers, the length of his body molten-hot against her back, the trinkets in his hair tickling her shoulder blades. She shivers involuntarily as he begins tracing the planes and angles of her left shoulder with the pads of his fingers, delicate lines drawn from the tip of her collarbone to the round joint of her arm to the peak of her shoulder’s blade.
Elizabeth leans into him, her temples throbbing suddenly. The rain slides its wicked fingers beneath the rim of her dress, and she is vaguely aware that she is pressed against him with little barrier to brace herself against- only her thin nightdress, transparent with rain, his coat having slipped down her arms to the ground.
“And what do you see, Jack, in the dark abyss of time?”
“This rough magic. Brave new worlds.” The wet seal of his mouth against the nape of her neck scalds her.
“An unfamiliar sentiment coming from you.”
“Vagaries of the past, Elizabeth. Now, I would give a thousand furlongs of sea for this acre of ground beside you.” Tilting her head back, her next craning to rest on his shoulder, she swallows the pelting rain, panting against him as the hand splayed across her belly begins to venture north, gliding up the long bone of her sternum to anchor between the uncharted swells of her breasts.
“For tonight, then?” He does not answer, his lips skimming the length of her throat - jaw to base - his fingers resuming their northerly path, pausing to dance over her clavicle.
She longs to turn and swim in the inky pools of his irises, yearns to lose herself in their loamy warmth, in their mud-bright shine. Yet she dares not turn for fear of breaking the enchantment.
“What is it you want, Jack?”
“To die a dry death.”
“And he that dies pays all debts?”
“If there is debt to be settled,” his fingers reach the ridge of her bottom lip, tracing the curve from corner to corner, “then ‘tis not my place to do the dying.”
She moans, his fingers slipping into her mouth, and she is turning, then - craning sidelong into his kiss. There is no air, and the world narrows to a pinprick.
But the heat of his lips - of his tongue against hers - does not come. She stiffens, eyes squeezed shut, and waits.
She lingers, frozen at the threshold of a kiss, for what seems like hours. Neither the warm sinew of his body against hers nor the hot loop of his arm around her waist can penetrate the sensation of wind and rain. She is sopping, is swaddled in the wet blanket of the strengthening gale.
And so she waits and waits, unable pry open her eyes, unable to blink and shuffle on.
She waits for her son to grow and uproot.
She waits for the emerald glow of sunset.
She waits to feel the beat of a human heart.
Somewhere, distantly, James cries, a mewling whip of wind in her ears. Opening her eyes, she finds herself alone, and bending to pluck his coat from the ground, she heads home.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
--The Tempest, 4. 1
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Spoilers: Post AWE
Pairing: Jack/Elizabeth, Will/Elizabeth, and some Norrington/Elizabeth if you squint.
Rating: R
Word Count: 1,969
Disclaimer: I don't own POTC or any of the people in it. They belong to Disney. Would that I was that rich....
Summary: Elizabeth turns 25 and has a rather drenched encounter high above the seashore.
Author's Note: I've fallen to a bit of the "one-brainness" sweeping our fabulous fandom, and have decided to try my hand at a little post-AWE angst-and-glee. I've taken a bit of liberty with Shakespeare's The Tempest, but all's well that ends well for fic, yes? Right now this is a stand-alone, but my muse's ears are perked. We'll see where she leads me. This work is updated to my fic list.
This work is dedicated to
djarum99 for all of her support, for her uplifting friendship, and for her birthday, as belated as this gift may be. Many squishes, smooshes, and lobster-nips to you, love.
And thanks are also in orderfor the gifted
djarum99 , for initial concrit and for general inspiration. I'm so sorry, love, that I was too impatient to send the completed work for beta.
Feedback is fabulous!
The Promise of Nostos
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
--The Tempest, 3. 2
The table is bare but for the remnants of her evening tea: the lone teacup and saucer, the crumbs of ship biscuits, the singular drizzle of honey and its errant spoon - and the last packet of tea leaves, torn wide, a gift from Captain Chevalle on his way back from the East Indies. The blue and white porcelain cup is chipped at the rim, a reminder of Singapore. Dipping her finger into the puddle of syrup, she smiles against its sweetness before clearing the table with solemn efficiency.
She climbs the stairs surreptitiously. The boards have begun to warp and dip in the center, groaning beneath even the gentlest footfall, and so she presses herself against the banister as she ascends.
Entering the hallway, she tiptoes towards James’ room, the moonlight bone-pale and piercing the room in dusty slats. The tangled shadows of leaves and branches form a familiar carpet of lace. Peering into the bedroom, she finds her son sprawled haphazardly across his bed, a miniature ship still clutched in his fist. Elizabeth tucks her son into his pocket of batting and down, kissing his eyelids asleep, and padding across the floorboards - planks she helped lay with her own bloodied knuckles - she retreats down the stairs, across the kitchen, and gentles open the door, slipping into the balmy evening. Twilight is a sultry thief, welcoming her with the sigh of sand stirring, grain against grain in song. Beyond the cliff’s ledge the ocean stretches towards the sky. Tallgrass curls seaward down the gentle slope from her garden. She approaches the brink, tempted.
She turns her face into the wet wind. The lapel of her coat ruffles, windswept, and she slips it down her shoulders carelessly, confident in her isolation here, at the edge of her world.
“Happy birthday, then, Elizabeth Swann.” She speaks plainly, the habit of talking to herself familiar as the wool of her coat. His coat, really. And like her threadbare companion, she refuses to discard both the reminder of piracy and the consoling fleece of her father’s name, referring to herself as Swann despite the weight of her hasty vows.
Boulders rumble in the twilight sky, dove grey and glancing against one another with a hollow, siltstone sound, the thunder a rockslide. The horizon dims to charcoal, but the water remains placid, smooth and blued as shale. A slim line of lightning illuminates the distant atolls, and she wonders if her twenty-fifth year will include a visit from Gentleman Joe or perhaps even Teague.
She has stopped searching for flashes of green, and she has certainly stopped straining for the billow of black sails. In any case, she knows better than to wish for dinghies and Dutchmen to wash across her shores. Instead, she charts the sweep of clouds and the misted moon, an ashen puff of color, a clenched fist tugging at the tide.
She extracts her longpipe, tobacco, and tinderbox from the generous pockets of Jack’s coat. Smoke rises in lavender tendrils. The scent is her father’s, bent over paperwork and cognac. It is Jack, procrastinating at her kitchen table, neither of them ready to say goodbye.
She stifles the memory, puffing thoughtfully. She will not think of her dead father and her like-as-not dead friend. Instead, she tries to remember Will - the Will she knew in Port Royal, attending her birthday parties in his shy way, slipping her an overripe orange through the back gate before the guests arrived.
Years later, he brought her clove-pricked oranges - fragrant and celebratory - on the eve of the dinner celebrating their engagement. She remembers how the treacherous, tempting flicker of candlelit goblets reminded her of the silver-gold of sunlight of the sea. And she recalls a certain shallow loneliness even then, in the glittering shoals of ballrooms and the sandbar duplicity of polite teas.
Now, her isolation has festered into a deep wound, the absence of friends and family like brine in her blood. The pain is whetstone sharp - a keel slicing through water, or the blade of his spine, tan and taut beneath her fingers. Reluctantly, she conjures them one by one from the embers in her pipe, from the sighs of smoke hovering languidly in a halo at the crown of her head.
The phantom sensation of Will’s lips against her knee lingers even now, the shiver from thigh to hip as his hands drifted up her leg is nearly palpable. Her throat still aches, her tongue bitter with the salt-sting of their goodbye.
She draws another pensive lungful, the tobacco turning bitter in its full burn, the current of her thoughts shifting. There is James to mourn: the disheveled Mr. Norrington coated in pig-slop, and the resolute Commodore pacing at the wall of the fort, stealing her breath. And her friend, James - poor, misdirected James - his hands trembling as he kissed her. His lashes had grazed her, had whispered unspeakable syllables against her skin. Regret flutters like molted feathers, whisked beyond her grasp.
Another pull at the stem of her pipe and her mind turns towards Jack. Smoke and mirrors, he materializes in her periphery, a wisp of grey in the ducts of her eyes. She shakes her head to dislodge the image of him there, an elbow’s width away, head cocked. A collection of shadows. He is: Jack, wandered ashore, confusion wrinkling his brow. Jack, elbows bloody, her babe in his arms. Jack, barefoot in the grass, her son supine on his chest, giggling and grasping at the ropes of his hair. He is her only surviving friend, his eyes anxious and avoiding her face during their final goodbye, his head bowed as he begs forgiveness. Her chin was steady, but her heart turned to pulp as he spun on his heels, little James wailing in his basinet.
He is the final betrayal - the click of a closed door - his breath scalding her collarbone, her skirts balled in his fists.
And he cannot be revisited. She shakes her head as if to clear her vision.
Cicadas shuffle in their brittle way, crooning for companionship in the distant trees. The sea shifts restlessly against the shore below, and long fingers of water grip the shoreline in a frantic, angry sort of coupling. She taps the ivory hull of her pipe to empty the smoldering mess of ash and singed leaves.
Her cheeks moisten as the rain begins to fall, and she lifts her face to the wet mouth of it, enjoying the flavor of the arriving tempest.
“So this is twenty five years?” she mutters, raindrops on her tongue.
“Not what you expected, then?”
She stiffens, her throat suddenly swollen shut. Blinking, she inhales a shallow breath, rainwater in her lashes and her ribs aching. His hand is at the small of her back - a light touch, the palm of a ghost. Her heart beats and beats and beats before she can manage an answer.
“I don’t really know what I expected anymore, Jack. I think maybe I dreamt of a version of this life - until life itself managed to offer me a taste of something better. I don’t imagine I thought I would be a king absconded into motherhood.”
“A common occurrence, that. What's past is prologue, hmm, Lizzie?”
“Mmm, a tale to cure deafness, no doubt?” She smiles at the swell of waves breaking below.
“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows and stranger wisdom, Elizabeth - and you’ve managed to misquote Shakespeare again, I see.”
“And I do begin to have bloody thoughts, Captain.” Grinning ear-to-ear, she closes her heavy-lidded eyes.
“Not too bloody, I hope.” He’s closer now, his right hand snaking around the curve of her hip, resting against her belly. His shoulder presses hers, the length of his body molten-hot against her back, the trinkets in his hair tickling her shoulder blades. She shivers involuntarily as he begins tracing the planes and angles of her left shoulder with the pads of his fingers, delicate lines drawn from the tip of her collarbone to the round joint of her arm to the peak of her shoulder’s blade.
Elizabeth leans into him, her temples throbbing suddenly. The rain slides its wicked fingers beneath the rim of her dress, and she is vaguely aware that she is pressed against him with little barrier to brace herself against- only her thin nightdress, transparent with rain, his coat having slipped down her arms to the ground.
“And what do you see, Jack, in the dark abyss of time?”
“This rough magic. Brave new worlds.” The wet seal of his mouth against the nape of her neck scalds her.
“An unfamiliar sentiment coming from you.”
“Vagaries of the past, Elizabeth. Now, I would give a thousand furlongs of sea for this acre of ground beside you.” Tilting her head back, her next craning to rest on his shoulder, she swallows the pelting rain, panting against him as the hand splayed across her belly begins to venture north, gliding up the long bone of her sternum to anchor between the uncharted swells of her breasts.
“For tonight, then?” He does not answer, his lips skimming the length of her throat - jaw to base - his fingers resuming their northerly path, pausing to dance over her clavicle.
She longs to turn and swim in the inky pools of his irises, yearns to lose herself in their loamy warmth, in their mud-bright shine. Yet she dares not turn for fear of breaking the enchantment.
“What is it you want, Jack?”
“To die a dry death.”
“And he that dies pays all debts?”
“If there is debt to be settled,” his fingers reach the ridge of her bottom lip, tracing the curve from corner to corner, “then ‘tis not my place to do the dying.”
She moans, his fingers slipping into her mouth, and she is turning, then - craning sidelong into his kiss. There is no air, and the world narrows to a pinprick.
But the heat of his lips - of his tongue against hers - does not come. She stiffens, eyes squeezed shut, and waits.
She lingers, frozen at the threshold of a kiss, for what seems like hours. Neither the warm sinew of his body against hers nor the hot loop of his arm around her waist can penetrate the sensation of wind and rain. She is sopping, is swaddled in the wet blanket of the strengthening gale.
And so she waits and waits, unable pry open her eyes, unable to blink and shuffle on.
She waits for her son to grow and uproot.
She waits for the emerald glow of sunset.
She waits to feel the beat of a human heart.
Somewhere, distantly, James cries, a mewling whip of wind in her ears. Opening her eyes, she finds herself alone, and bending to pluck his coat from the ground, she heads home.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
--The Tempest, 4. 1