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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: R
Pairing: Will/Elizabeth, slight Elizabeth/Norrington and Elizabeth/Jack
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, and why you thought so.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Chalchiúhtlicue (“Jade,” “Green-stone” or “Water”) was the goddess of water, rivers and oceans. The macaw was the bird of Mictlantecuhtli, god of the underworld. AU from the first scene of the movie. Supernatural stuff.
Summary: Elizabeth comes to understand the meaning of consequences.
***
She had always wanted a story of her own. Her life was easy and rich and oh-so-patterned, a logical progression from petticoats to wedding dress to babies that stretched out before her like the road to Calvary.
It had not been particularly hard to have a copy made; a bit of wax snapped off the end of a candle, softened between her hands and then pressed to the coin when Will had let her look at it once. For a moment. He always was nervous about it, and even more so after—but Elizabeth knew nothing about that. What she knew was that caring nothing for the usual fripperies of girls had finally acted in her favor, for she had been able to save up the money necessary for the goldsmith and now she held the price to her adventure in her hand.
It seemed like simply another coin, albeit one with an excitingly macabre decoration on it. Though when she held it up to the candlelight, placing the coin against the backdrop of the night sky, the gold seemed to glow reddish around the edge. But that was all.
She would give it a night, Elizabeth told herself. Just one night, and in the morning when she went to see that Will was well, she would exchange the coins.
He worried her, and frightened her. Sometimes when they passed each other in the street, their eyes would meet and her heart would flutter in her throat, fanning a blush in the skin. She would see the way his sleeves bunched over the muscles of his arms and secretly a faintness would hatch within her. Will could be kind in ways that touched her deeper than anything else.
But sometimes he would look beyond her shoulder at something that she could never see and the hollowness in his eyes turned her cold as death inside. And sometimes he could be cutting as the beautiful swords he made with the words he threw in her face. Those times, she looked at commodore Norrington and she thought perhaps it would be better to take quiet polite boredom. But only for a little while.
Will was wrong. It could not be all bad, or else no one would ever venture beyond their doorstep. Or else he would never have left the forge.
But he had nearly drowned, and when Norrington had brought him in all dripping and wet and deathly pale, Elizabeth had come the closest to truly fainting in her entire life. So perhaps it was that awful for him—in that case, he would appreciate a night away from it.
Elizabeth hoped he was all right.
The coin twisted in her fingers and her eyes snapped back to it. She thought she heard…laughter. But it was difficult to tell because just then the cannon boomed across the waters.
* * *
When Estrella saw the pirates, she fainted and Elizabeth was secretly relieved. The other woman had babbled so much that Elizabeth could not think, and had kept dragging them upstairs where they would only be trapped. The swords in the coat of arms over the mantelpiece might have been too rusted to draw, but that might have been for the best, after all. The fireplace pokers were closer to the sticks Will and she had used to spar.
Poppet she wasn’t, and the two that had made it into the mansion seemed to consider their swords to be overly large knives. She sent them out a window and rushed out the servants’ passage into the streets, the coin bouncing on its chain about her neck and the blood pounding in her ears. Elizabeth hastily tucked the coin into her dress and hiked up her skirts as best she could with one hand; she wished that she’d managed to hide her cut-down men’s clothes from her father. It would have made things easier.
In town it was slices of chaos: a man’s screaming mouth, the shadows of droplets spraying across the sky, the flash of lace toppling backward beneath the weight of a broad scarred back and the small white hands flopping helplessly over the pirate’s shoulders. Between the slices it was pitch-dark, as if the images were being flayed from the night’s body.
It was not as it had been in the books. There, Elizabeth and her heroes had had no difficulty conjuring up a perfect shot at the enemy despite the “moonless nights” and the “thick fogs.” Here, she stood shaking in the street with the poker weighting her arm, looking in vain for the stances of her spar-games with Will and for—
--Will. She hefted the poker and ran for the blacksmith’s.
Once she had begun to move, it did not seem as frightening. The dress she wore now, while not as compressing as the corset from the morning, still bound her lungs and she cursed it. Cursed and gasped and when a long length of silver swung at her, she had parried and ducked past before she even realized it had been a challenge. Something snatched at her skirts and nearly pulled Elizabeth off her feet, but she yanked. Fabric ripped as she regained her stride, now longer for the extra freedom.
Hot air and cool alternately blew about her exposed ankles; a fire had broken out in the building beside the forge. The flames licked the underbellies of the stars and roared like a dragon. Stumbling to a stop, Elizabeth ran up against a nearly solid wall of heat that sparked a burning between her breasts. Her hand flew to press through the front of her dress and she felt drums beating.
No, she heard them. Down the road was the harbor, and on the docks stood a man with a feathered hat. Beside him a tall Ethiopian—skin that dark, he could be nothing else—pounded a long weirdly carved cylinder, and behind was Will hanging in the grasp of pirates.
“This was not the bargain!” he was shouting. Distance and dark did not keep Elizabeth from missing the bruises on his face.
She was already running for the dock, poker swinging wildly in her hand because she was growing tired and the hard ground wore through her thin slippers.
“Aye, the bargain. But I am keeping it—you can’t expect me to have predicted your generous offer before I had my men land ahead of me. We’ll be leaving soon enough, after they’ve slaked themselves enough to bend an ear.” The pirate captain’s voice was like a snake’s, of course, but no snake Elizabeth had ever imagined could sound so cold. It chilled her.
Beneath her hand, trapped between dress and skin, the coin twisted. It gnawed at her and she frantically yanked it out, only to feel someone seize her shoulders. She screamed.
Over her scream came the words of the captain. “Take him aboard!”
“Elizabeth?” But Will had already disappeared behind a wall of pirates, who came smarming from every dark corner.
“Will! Will!” Elizabeth kicked and fought, and it wasn’t until she had been dragged halfway to the fort that she realized her captors wore Navy blue and King’s red.
* * *
“But you have to go after him,” she cried, shaking off her shock.
Before her, Norrington’s face remained regretful but unyielding. And he did not straighten from his maps, but instead hunched farther over them. Between his fingers ruler and lead pencil drew and redrew lines, as if marking out the boundaries of a prison. “Elizabeth, the last of the pirates only left an hour ago. I have a terrified, ravaged town to—”
She would have no truck with boundaries. Her hand pulled the knob shut on the door before he had finished speaking and she stormed past the guards, the contemptuous lieutenants, the still faint Estrella.
It was Will. A part of her said reasonably enough that yes, the town was badly damaged, and yes, those were dark bruises on Estrella’s face and yes, the rusty stains on Elizabeth’s skirts did look like the wadding she drew out from between her legs monthly, but her mind was turned towards the desperation she had seen on Will’s face and she could not look away. Her apparent suitor had not even mentioned Will’s name. It was as if once Will’s feet had left the sands of Port Royal, he had ceased to exist.
You are young yet. Think.
Her breath caught and her step nearly stumbled. But with the next stride she was already recovering, reaching for the tenuous guide. Will, her heart said.
Think. Go after him. The words were suspended susurrations, speaking of age and old wisdom and power.
Later she would think back, and remember that they came from the sea air and not the coin, but then she did not think.
Elizabeth began to calm once she had reached the mansion. There she was able to greet her distraught father with a kiss on the cheek and quietly allow herself to be tucked into bed two hours before sunrise. When Estrella was finally persuaded to leave her be, Elizabeth was coolly reading her favorite pirate novel.
It was the first thing that went into her bag, which remained otherwise empty until she had left her letter on the bed and had slipped down the side of the house to make her stealthy way to the forge. Once there, she exchanged her skirts for breeches and bound her hair back with a thong. She picked among the swords and blades till she had found one long and one short blade that suited her. As she searched about the place, she passed near the forge and for a moment she was faint with heat. Her head grew dizzy and she thought she heard the drums of the pirates beating once more. But Elizabeth firmed her resolve and shook it off—she had no time for fancies. In the afternoon the pirate would be hung, and so she must to the jail.
* * *
“And where the advantage for myself, young miss?” asked the pirate, voice caressing as the fingers he drew slowly up and down the bars. He seemed to curve snakelike against his prison, as if he lingered there only of his own choice.
Now this Elizabeth recognized: chapter seven, page eleven. She smiled back and dangled the keys before her, well aware of the provocation of her dress. The first ray of morning stole in the window, glanced off the key to something else and nearly blinded her—the coin. No matter how tightly Elizabeth belted Will’s shirt, she could not pull the front entirely closed and so it had let the coin dangle free. “Your freedom, in exchange for your aid. We’ll make a pact, and if you should break it my father will be after you with all the might of the Royal Navy.”
The gold mesmerized the pirate. Something black and reminiscent of the other pirate captain flicked through his eyes, and the idle twisting of his fingers briefly grew purposeful, as if to snap. “Where did you find that, Miss…?”
What possessed her, Elizabeth never afterward quite wanted to admit. But then with the coin sliding between her fingers like water, the smell of salt stinging her nose, it seemed altogether natural. “Turner. Elizabeth Turner. It was my brother who Barbossa took—William.”
“William Turner.” Now the pirate was all attention. “He had a sister…well, it seems Bootstrap stuffed more’n one card up his sleeve…”
The bars of the window striped a reddening sky. Elizabeth held out her hand. “Do we have an accord?”
A mysterious half-smile, exactly described in chapter two, page thirty-three, graced Jack Sparrow’s face as he carefully clasped her fingers. “I do believe we do.”
* * *
They stole out of Port Royal’s harbor as the sun’s orb had just risen fully above the horizon. It seemed as if Jack expected her to be impressed with his cleverness, but she had read better. Far more distracting to Elizabeth was the sea: her near-drowning had been the closest she had been allowed to the ocean in years, and now she was wading in it. Breathing nothing but its—so it seemed, for the ripples that softly washed around her were like the delicate lift of a chest beneath blue silk—exhale, feeling it drench through her clothes and her skin.
It was whispering to her, she giddily thought. It told her that Will was unharmed, it told her that the ship they were busily stealing was fast and elegant and had fed many others to the sea’s maws. It told her that the soldiers and sailors would fall for the distraction on the one ship and allow them to steal the other if she did this, and when she did, there she and Jack were on the deck, watching the docks of Port Royal recede behind them.
From the fortress dashed a moving dot of blue and white. Norrington, Elizabeth realized, and then she noticed her hand clutching the coin to her chest so hard that when she took her hand away, the palm was marked deep red with coin’s engraving.
“Looking a bit less cheerful,” Jack murmured, sidling up too familiar and too quiet. “Thinking on your brother?”
And the slap of the waves hissed a warning. Elizabeth stepped out of the circle Jack had attempted to draw round her with his body and the railing, and she raised her chin. This was her mission, not his, and she would have to ensure that he remembered it was so. “Where are they taking him?”
“I believe a course for Tortuga would be best.” He slipped back to the wheel, hands restless on the wood as if he found it faintly distasteful.
Listen to what is not said, splashed the water, and Elizabeth thought she did.
“Is Will in Tortuga?” she demanded.
And Jack gave her a look that was not in Elizabeth’s books of adventures on her high skies, but that was in her detested volumes on decorous behavior. It told her how little she knew and it curled her nails into her palms. “No, but we’ll not be getting to Isle de Muerte without a crew. We’ll be lucky to reach Tortuga with only our four hands. You asked for my help, Liza. Here it is.”
“Do not presume to give me pet names, Captain Sparrow.” But she could not argue with his logic, however maddening his presentation of it was. Her frustration she pressed down till it sank from her mouth and seemed to evaporate through her skin. It flavored the dampness of the air.
Jack’s chuckle echoed double, or so Elizabeth thought, with the second amused shading originating in her breast. But when her fingers brushed the coin, she felt nothing but cool smooth metal.
“You’d do well to hide that,” he said, nodding towards Will’s token. His hand molded the air into a path towards her shoulder, half-bared because of the looseness of the shirt.
“You would do well to wander less,” she replied, and in her voice was another echo. It made Jack look sharply at her, and from then on he refrained from being condescending, though he was still not respectful. Not to her.
You are young yet.
Perhaps, but Elizabeth was putting into motion that which her elders would or could not. It should earn her some recognition. It should save Will.
Her fingers twisted together around the ropes she pulled, let out, knotted in accordance to Jack’s orders, and she asked again and again if it was true that Will was unharmed. Again and again, the answer was yes, but always with a lingering trace that told her hurry, hurry.
* * *
“The wickedest city on earth,” Jack said, and Elizabeth was only half-listening because the sights were overwhelming.
She breathed and she smelt the sins of the centuries, rank and rich and vivid in a way that the delicate perfumes of her old life could not compare. And then she opened her eyes and the shadows played over the background of men of all shades of skin, of women dressed picturesquely provocative, and it was like an engraving come to life.
They found the man Jack was looking for, and together Jack and he huddled together in a corner, plotting and planning and scheming. Several times they cast wary, ominous glances at Elizabeth, and in particular Jack seemed to hold her at arm’s length, but that mattered little to Elizabeth. She could revel in the secrets that the slop of the rum in their mugs told her, in the salt-smell that peaked above the miasma of alcohol and stale vomit and muddy ground.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
Jack’s finger drew slowly through the spilled rum on the table. Overlaid with his whispers of leverage was the drip-drop of another voice, feminine and low. ‘I am the water, the rain and the sea. I am the life of the deserts and the death of the floodplains, I am the mistress of all that slumbers beneath the waves. I am Chalchiúhtlicue, and you are the youngling who would see us waken.’
Elizabeth was not certain what was meant by wanting to see them awaken, for she did not even know who they were. But she did know that finally she was stepping into Will’s world, into a realm where the everyday niceties could be ripped off and those chains thrown to the wind. Where she could see as he did, side by side with him, and have no things such as class or stale gratitude stand in the way.
‘Are you the one who speaks to—’
Gurgling laughter that suddenly cooled the air behind Elizabeth’s back. ‘No. He who speaks to your Will is he who you should fear more.’
Drowning. Her nails clenched in the post against which she leaned and she stared out at the crowded bar from which the warm veils of quaintness had been slashed away. There were eyes—hundreds of them, it seemed, and now they were ice-coals in their dead bleared stares, bulging from the faces of the drowned. But they were hungry and grasping, stripping past her boy’s clothes to her living flesh that was not so distant from what their own had once been.
She reached before she could think and then there was air swirling forth from behind her: air heavy with salt and with moisture, air with all the power of the ocean behind it. It forced back the eyes of the dead behind their living masks, and for a moment she delighted in her newfound position.
‘I offer my help for reasons other than yours, girl, but nevertheless I do not do so lightly. This will cost.’
Once again, the space behind Elizabeth turned cold and empty. When a hand fell on her shoulder, she nearly startled into Jack’s arms.
He held her off, though his fingers drifted only slowly from her shoulder. “Come, Liza. We’ve done enough talk. Now to find ourselves a crew.”
“Elizabeth,” she insisted. “You are far too familiar, Mr. Sparrow.”
His eyebrow rose, and behind him grizzled old Mr. Gibbs eyed Elizabeth as if she had grown into something vaguely horrendous. But Jack pushed him back and stepped careful about her, as if acquiescing to her wishes. “I’d say you’re more familiar by far,” Jack murmured. “More familiar than I’d prefer to be.”
He left her no chance to query him on the meaning in his words, but instead rushed them about the town on their hunt. Soon Elizabeth noticed that Jack had let her wander ahead, and that her feet seemed to slip along the alleys to the orders of a voice not his or hers. It was for Will, she told herself. For Will, and so they must hurry by any means necessary.
* * *
On the docks of Port Royal, the sunlight and the comedy of Jack’s past sins coming to roost briefly brought back the air of romanticism, but soon after they had put to sea a storm had blown that to ribbons. Elizabeth clung to her line as another wave rattled her and chilled her bones so they vibrated with shivers long after the water had sluiced off the planks. Her ears were filled with the thin high screams of the lost at sea, which crested with every swell of water, and it made her head swim worse than anything else. Was this the price? she wondered.
“Jack!” Gibbs was calling. “She can’t—”
“She will. Another moment.” The slur was gone from Jack’s voice and the consonants of his words were as hard as his black gaze on Elizabeth. It expected something.
Fingers tangled around Elizabeth’s wrist, so slippery that at first she thought it was seaweed. But no, Anamaria’s face hove into view and her hiss threaded through the deafening sounds of the dead. “Call her.”
“But this is—”
“This is him. But ain’t his…” crashing water momentarily separated them “…call her. Y’got her, I can see. Call her.”
The storm’s punishing blows mounted higher and higher, shaking the ship till Elizabeth began to lose sense of up and down, left and right. She desperately held to her rope, though it scraped through her palms and occasionally splashed warmer, redder, more coppery drops on her face, and she tried to answer. But this was not in the books, and she did not know what was meant by call her. In the tavern she had already been speaking to Chalchiúhtlicue when she had asked, but now there was no sign of the voice and all Elizabeth could do was choke down sobs and flail—
--she touched a laugh.
The waves fell to half their height, and then to smooth dark calm. Weak and limp and confused, Elizabeth clung to her rope and tried to ignore the way the crew’s half-relieved, half-terrified stares arced to her.
“Wish you whatever good you’ll get of this,” was how Anamaria left her. The other woman picked her feet through the mess of the deck, stride sure and knowing and all herself.
That is two, girl. Delicate chuckles fell on Elizabeth’s face with flecks of foam, and she began to understand why Will might hate it so.
* * *
In the cave the water glittered gold and the ceiling seethed black and the air echoed with the ancient cries of tortured victims. Elizabeth crouched low in the boat, not to see better the treasure, but to drag her hands through the water in an attempt to lose herself in that song. Will, she chanted to herself.
‘Near,’ whispered the soft ripples slicing by the sides of the boat.
“…they’ll be all about the chest, I believe. We’d best land here and then make out the lay of things before we go further.” Jack spoke in a whisper and watched her hands, watched her as close as he would a hissing snake. He was afraid of her, she thought.
Or perhaps that was the words of the drops pattering from the toothy stone ceiling.
It did not matter at the moment. What did was peering over the rocks into the glittering, jeweled bowels of the cave and seeing Will, neck held above a chest of coins with blade to it. It was the exact scene of her second-favorite novel and it wasn’t, for the engravings and the words had never spoken of the deep chill that seized all of Elizabeth’s limbs, the fear that parched her throat and paralyzed her fingers against the stone. The knife was real—it caught the glints of the gold and reflected them coldly up at her—and it would yield blood and suddenly she knew that there was no play-acting here. There was only Will, and she and Jack up above, and all the world rested on their actions.
Jack had turned away from her, some old revenge calling him more strongly. “A moment…”
Elizabeth silently ducked beneath his hand, which was reaching out to stay her, and scooped a heavy statuette from the sands. He fell with only the barest whisper of a sound and, a little regretful, she pillowed his head gently to the ground. But then there came the uproar from around the chest and she had to go. Will needed her.
* * *
Temple already blackening from Barbossa’s blow, Will lifted his head and saw her—for the barest moment. Then his eyes flicked to the coin hanging between her breasts and his mouth began to twist in anger.
She covered it with her hand and pulled him fast into the water where it was silent, fearful that the pirates arguing above would notice them again. And yes, because the sea was saying, hurry hurry, and because its voice was so thin and frail here, where someone else’s voice strove to echo through Elizabeth’s head.
Later, when they had climbed dripping wet to the deck, Elizabeth answered Anamaria: “He fell behind.”
And Will’s head lifted and he fixed her with deep hollow eyes that were not entirely his own. “He?”
Cotton passed by, and as he did his parrot turned on his shoulder to meet Will’s uncanny, too-many gaze. The smile on Will’s face was not entirely his own. “Ah. You mean they.”
Elizabeth pulled him below before he could frighten the crew, leaving the captaincy to Anamaria who watched them with eyes like Jack’s.
* * *
The flash of the coin in his eyes finally seemed to snap Will out of his daze, but what replaced it was not relief or happiness, but fury. He snatched for the coin and ripped it from her so hard that the thong burned a thin red trail across her palm. “You had no right, Elizabeth. Moreover, you’ve done—you’ve ruined everything.”
“I saved your life. They would have killed you, Will,” she hotly replied. When he reached for her again, she slapped him.
Black rose high in his eyes and frightened, she stepped back a pace only to feel something rush up behind her. There was nothing she could see or smell or truly touch, but it was still there and he saw it. Will saw it, and Will broke through whatever—whoever—he carried with him.
They stared at each other, like two children who had been playing ghosts only to have the lights go out without their touching them.
Then his shoulders slumped and they took the rest of his body with them; he sat down and put his head in his hands. When she sat down, one hand fell to the table. It was entangled round with the strung coin, which Elizabeth nervously pushed out of the way with a nail before she dared touch his fingers. Her hurt palm touched the oozing cut on his, and beneath the thin coat of blood, the old scar of the skull-gold.
“I tried going to church. I got the priest to bless my hand under the pretext that I was nervous about working on the Navy’s ships. God doesn’t bar them,” Will finally said. What Elizabeth could see of his eyes was dullness. “They are gods—Tezcatlipoca is—and he at least wishes to walk again. He’s bound to the coins. If I want him gone, then I have to end the curse. Or he will kill everyone through Barbossa.”
“She wants him to sleep.” Elizabeth met Will’s surprise as honestly as she could. Her fingers roved over his hand till she could squeeze his wrist, and she bowed her head over their joined hands. “I didn’t think it would be—I wanted to help you. I did this for you.”
His eyes abruptly sparked to angry life, and he tried to withdraw his hand. “For me and for your adventure. I told you, Elizabeth. I told you what it was like and you never believed me. If you hadn’t taken the coin, I could have ended it all a few hours ago, but now we have to go back.”
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t know—”
The air shuddered and she threw herself at Will. A moment later, the ship rocked from some explosion.
They were pressed thigh to thigh, belly to belly and arm to arm. Their breath was one and so was their fear, but when Elizabeth looked into Will’s eyes, she knew they were not seeing the same. And it was cowardly, but now she did not ever want to know what he saw. What the crashing of the water alongside the ship said was awful enough.
“Turners! Elizabeth! Will!”
Something small and hard and round burned between them, bright as the sudden comprehension in Will’s eyes. “What did you tell them?” he demanded.
“What I had to! What I needed to so that they’d help and you would live! Will, I don’t want—what I want more than an adventure is for you to live.”
His fingers squeezed her so hard she thought bones would break, and he rocked so close that their lips brushed. But then he was on his feet and dragging them towards the ladder. Behind, on the floor, something glinted. The coin.
Elizabeth tore herself free and dove for it just as the ship lurched.
* * *
Once again, there was Will’s desperate face before her and his shouts ringing her ears while the water, no longer a comfort, mercilessly clasped her within itself. But his fingers were wrenched from hers and she had to take that last gasp before, squeezing her eyes shut in terror, letting herself sink.
She fell further and further, until she had passed the point at which she should have struck part of the ship. Elizabeth opened her eyes to endless serene green.
‘It will cost you, girl. I do not want to walk and I will have to, if he is to be put to sleep.’ Bubbles rose all around her and popped, each releasing a few murmurs.
‘Will! Where is—’ She struck at the nothingness and found hard walls. ‘Take me to him. Whatever the price.’
And the waters billowed about her, rushing tight to coil her and slipping insolently between her legs. They were laughing again, and they continued to laugh as they raked her month’s course from her a week early. The pain was unbearable, was excruciating and she was going to die, she was going to fail Will, she was—
‘I still have the taste for blood, occasionally. Feed me, girl. That will be my price.’
Then she was thrown upward.
* * *
It was a nightmare, Elizabeth thought. Pistol to her temple, Will before her and again in the clutches of pirates, and Barbossa’s yellowed chipped grin mocking her every word. But she faced it and she did not think of the pirate novel, now sinking into Chalchiúhtlicue’s clutching bosom. No, she thought instead that this was not what she wanted and this would not be what she ran to in the future, but that this was what had to be done.
She thought she sounded grimmer, and older, and she thought it would have been amusing if she had still been young.
“Do we have an accord?” she asked of Barbossa, and she could see that Will was shaking his head, fighting the gag, but if Barbossa took Will again, Will would not have only his hand cut. So the waves said, and so she knew because it was not romantic to hear but only bloody and terrifying.
Will needed time. He and Jack had to come to the cave in their own way, if all was to be locked away and not, instead, thrown wider open like Pandora and her box.
“I believe we do,” Barbossa answered. And Elizabeth discovered that she had been left a little innocence, for she trusted in his word for that one moment before he called for the plank.
The gods were cruel.
***