 |
|
|
|
|
Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Slight Will/Jack/Elizabeth.
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, etc.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: The changing meaning of death.
***
I.
Mrs. Turner haggles for hours over the smallest difference in price and then asks no questions when the man in the shop overcharges her for paper and a bottle of ink. She shaves off her fingertips sharpening quills so they will write clear and smooth, so the words will be readable no matter if the letter suffers stains and mildew. She sends Will to learn his letters, he sometimes believes, not so he can be a clerk safe in a warehouse but so he can laboriously scribe letter after letter to wing over the uncertain, cruel sea.
Once they get a letter back. They’ve gotten other letters, but this one makes his iron-backed mother bend, drop tears onto the fine scrolling ink that usually she is so careful to preserve. Keep clear, keep clean, keep order, she’s told him so often. So he rescues the paper, smoothes it from her crumpled fingers, and reads the blurred words: pirates.
The first death is black ink on his fingers, and the sharp edge of paper bleeding red from where it’s bitten into his thumb onto the gold of the coin.
* * *
II.
London can be cold and damp, stealing into the bones and turning them soft if one does not watch for it. Soon Will’s mother doesn’t and soon the city sends little creeping fevers to nibble away her flesh. She takes to wearing shawls, and then she takes to bed, a dim shadow with hardly enough weight to press down the blankets. And Will walks harder and longer to earn the few coins that must feed them.
He comes home every night to show her the gleaming circles in his palm, hoping they’ll spark life back into her. But she sinks faster and faster, too far for his walking to match, and the doctor refuses to come any more. Will spends a night sitting beside the fire, looking at how the flickering light seems to caress the one piece of his father he has left.
The doctor’s eyes light when he sees the yellow gold, but then he touches it and then he shudders, telling Will to get that heathen nonsense out of his Godfearing home. He says it’s no use, and all the way back, Will builds story on story of how the man’s wrong. But when he opens the door his mother is so very still, her fingers lying on the corner of her shawl like twigs snagged in someone’s hair.
The second death is a cold room, and the lingering sweet smell of his mother in the air, and the weight of gold in his hand.
* * *
III.
His mother was a handsome woman before she grew ill and she had men seeking her favors, but she spurned them all for being sailors and for being fools. One still came despite that, saying he went for the talk and not for the looking, and so down at the docks before his worn brown beard is where Will finds himself.
The captain is a fair man, and a generous one. He lets Will stay in his cabin for so-called polishing duties until Will’s seasickness passes, and then he begins to teach Will to read the skies for fortune and favor. He is doing that when the black sail rises into sight, and the fog drops clammy veils around the ship.
The third death is many, but the one Will remembers most is how black, not red, the captain’s mouth was when open and screaming, and how the fire flashed like a coin held in the sun.
* * *
IV.
Fighting the pirates was a storm, a rolling wave that picked Will up and swept him along uncaring of whether he could breathe or stand. And when he pulled himself free of it, when it all dripped away to leave him in a damp cave surrounded by so much gold it burned his eyes, he was cold.
There was blood—real blood staining Barbossa’s shirt and trickling away from him when he slumped into his treasure, and it was dull against the pieces of eight. Will watched for a moment longer, a great heaviness settling within him, and at first didn’t remember that the heaviness, and not the flash, was what death was.
The fourth, then, was the sliver of dead white peeking from beneath Barbossa’s eyelids, for the man had no one that thought well enough of him to shut them, and Will flinching into the brighter, livelier gold scorch of Jack’s smile and Elizabeth’s hair.
* * *
V.
Jack was not hung, and neither was Will, and so Will only felt the beginning of fear and not the end of it. He looked in the eye of the bayonets and he did little more than glimpse the darkness of the cave before Elizabeth reversed all the blades with her two words.
And after, when Will had thrown off his mother’s warning and his father’s ghost—that of the merchant sailor and that of the pirate—it was still all brilliance and confusion, flowing too fast for him to feel it sink in. Until one night in an alley, where it was dark and where the other man was a silver point and harsh breath, was death leaping at Will’s face and then falling to fill his hands with splashes of blood.
He sank to one knee after the body, bent over with the sudden freeze of exhaustion that came after the heat of effort. His nose smelled the sick sweetness of the clotting blood, and his eyes could see, dimly, the glitter of gold in the sheen covering the dead man’s eyes.
The fifth death, then, was the real one because it was a meaningless surprise in a backalley, a life blinking away before Will—at his hand—and nothing to tell him what it was worth except the continuance of his own panting.
Somehow he was not surprised that he could go back to center himself in warmth and sleep, and somehow he was not surprised that in the morning, he could still smell the traces of blood on his hands.
The fifth death was not golden, but blooding.
***