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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: R. Sex, violence.
Pairing: Will/Anamaria, implied Will/Jack and Will/Elizabeth
Feedback: Good lines, typos, etc.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Totally the Mouse’s. I’m just unwitting free promo.
Notes: How to forge nails. Also, there’s a great video-clip here, which demonstrates the slightly different Japanese style of hand-forging nails. Thanks to evil_jacquie.
Summary: Anamaria is wrecked twice over, rebuilds, and gets her own ship.
***
I.
She’s got no notion as to why he still stays. He’s a dab hand at sailing, with wrists quick as lightning and strong like steel, and his sword’s saved even her, but he’s got no heart in it. His eyes don’t flash when the sea is calm and flat, sluggish like land, and they don’t quiet down when the ocean decides to buck her back so all the tiny little ships bounce wildly about it.
Once upon a time Anamaria could’ve fathomed it—once when Will’s eyes lashed themselves to the high, fine tilt of Elizabeth’s head who in her turn drunk up the sea with her gaze, only to look about her for more. A man loves what he sees in the mirror, is the law Anamaria’s had beaten into her, and for the longest time Elizabeth’s heart was Will’s mirror. All he saw was her hair, her smile, her quick pretty ankle swerving about the deck. Her eyes, so what she saw he took within himself.
But that’s been a while in the past. Miss Swann’s a Mrs. now and the name paired with that ain’t Turner, and though everyone else cares to know why, Anamaria don’t. She’s got no reason to, long as Will keeps from foolishness like steering the Pearl onto the rocks for a glimpse of his lost love’s hair or throwing himself on a Spanish blade-point. He’s already done his sobbing damnedest to drink Jack under the table, but that was the once and the next day he gritted his teeth ‘gainst the aftermath and rolled out with the rest of the crew, so Anamaria’ll let him have that one.
She’s less inclined to let him slack for taking up with Jack for a second night, dead sober and steady-handed, and for a month after that, but Anamaria’s in no position to talk on that ‘less she’s in the mood for some pain-sharing, and she ain’t ever. Her pain’s her own, Will can damn well keep his, and Jack’s a lucky bastard for still having them both on his ship, and loyal to him. Or maybe he’s just that damn smart.
Either way, he still has his blacksmith-pirate. Will laughs with the crew, fights like the devil to keep Jack’s back clear, and when they put into port he’s the first man off, last man on. He don’t spend the time drinking and whoring, nor do he spend it staring after the well-dressed landsmen in their snug little homes. He goes sea to shore to sea with no change in him but no light, either.
Anamaria wonders what the hell he’s playing at, when she happens to think on it. He’s not one to occupy her mind often, and for that she reckons she likes him.
* * *
II.
She’s got her own barrel for washing, and a corner behind the shrouds in which to do it. She likes better to wait till they’ve docked and do it on a sandbar well away from the others, but it’s the sea-life and liking and having coincide about once in a blue moon, even if one’s captain is the slyest madman ever to put hand to a tiller.
It’s her courses and it’s the Caribbean, turning her own blood sticky and thick against her, matting the hair between her legs and gluing it to the rags she binds up against herself so every time she turns she wrenches out some. Now that the dark has fallen and she has time, she mops hard at it with a wet rag. No perfumed Castilian soap for her, so she’s got to make do with stale rainwater. But still, better that than this heavy foulness that coats her thighs, marks her out once a month.
The planks have turned slick beneath the soles of her feet. Slick and groaning in a slight swell, the Pearl lapping up what Anamaria’s got to give her, but it don’t make her any less contrary. A bunching of the sea beneath the hull tips the ship and Anamaria’s foot skids. But she’s weathered worse and her right hand goes out to catch a rope, her left slams the open barrel back onto its bottom before it spills. She’s got no hand for catching the rags.
They fall, scoot along the deck, and she leaves them there for later while she rights herself, binds dry rags up against that slow cramping trickle. She’s pulling herself straight using the rope when somebody dangles the reeking, stained rag near her face.
“Anamaria?” Will says.
First thing she does is snatch the rag so it slashes outward at his face to see him jump back a foot. Second thing is to grab at the tails of her shirt and yank them down, keep her sex covered even though it’s dark because she knows men and she knows there’s some shadows that are never only shadows to them. “Didn’t your mother teach you to keep from women in the dark, Turner? They’ll lay a curse on you if you don’t watch your damn eyes.”
“Sorry, sorry.” His steps mark both his hasty retreat and his slow return, bearing something light and flapping before him like a flag of truce. “Your…trousers fell on the deck.” He tosses it just as she reaches for it so there’s no nonsense like last time, only a smooth, respectful exchange. “I heard a clatter, thought maybe you’d fallen.”
Anamaria rolls her eyes at him. He should know better, what with his cat-feet and uncanny balance. There’s only two on the ship that maybe match him, and he’s still young.
Maybe she should’ve ripped him another strip instead, for her silence seems to embolden him. They aren’t what one would call familiar and that suits her, but Will is always looking for something cosy, something he ain’t going to get here. “You don’t truly think of it as a curse, do you?”
“Don’t you?” she grunts. A corner of one rag gets twirled up into her sex, first tickling and then paining once enough blood’s soaked in to clog, and she’s got to unbind the whole lot to straighten it out. Soon as she does, she pulls on the trousers. Maybe Will’s got the back of his head to her, and maybe he’d like to be a gentlemen, but maybe hasn’t satisfied Anamaria for a long time.
“No. I…caught my mother once. Screamed my head off because I thought she was dying. Because of me—she could’ve been a high lady of the town if she’d not had me to see to.” The tone of the story is meant to be reminiscent, slightly laughing, but Will’s a bad liar. “She told me it was all right. It was something to respect, and I should never call a woman weak because they suffered it in silence.”
Anamaria tugs at the drawstring of her trousers, doing the knot one-handed. She thinks Will is gallant in ways that Elizabeth and her prettily-illustrated books wouldn’t ever fathom, because it involves no swords and picturesque swearing. She thinks Will is an idiot. “Your mother’s got that half-right,” she snaps, striding out from behind the shrouds. “All you can expect from a landswoman.”
She thinks that, if Will imagined she’d be admiring and agreeable, he’s taken too damn long to get to know her.
* * *
III.
Sometimes Jack’s luck spills over to cover nigh the whole world, and sometimes it can barely keep a fly float in a thimbleful of water. He’s fey, too many steps out of the line to make sense to men or gods or superstitions, so he don’t have to worry about it often. His luck is his luck.
Ordinary sailors aren’t so sanguine. When the gold runs dry, they take to searching the old grudges and the faded, misremembered battles of history for explanations instead of looking towards themselves, or even towards something like the winds that’ve shifted to take the big lumbering merchants from them. When the drink runs dry, they huddle in corners and compare their foolish mutterings against the powers of their thirsts and they neglect the myriad small favors of the past for the big imagined wrong. And when the wind dies in the sails, they forget they’re men and think they’re mean beasts, ready to tear what’s due to them from the guards that only exist in their damn fool minds.
“That dusky bitch, I seen her watching the sails…”
Like it ain’t her job, seeing as she steers when Jack’s below. Like she won’t drown sure as them if a gust rips the mainsail and sends them onto a reef.
“She wants her boat. I hear she’s been getting impatient with old Jack about that boat she’s owed.”
It’s been a sore in Anamaria’s heart for forever and a day, but she’s not so stupid she’ll think to bend Jack that way. Maybe she’s been louder than she has to be about it, but she wants it known because generally the kept secrets are the ones that fester. She ain’t someone’s sly silent witch-woman, always smiling from the side, and she ain’t about to act like it. She keeps her head high when she crosses the deck, feeling the weight of her cutlass at her hip and her dagger against her back, and she don’t change where her path goes, though it takes her near enough to see the red meanness webbing their eyes.
“…black whore of Hell. Should make her call up a wind, shouldn’t we? That’s her damned place.”
“Where?” asks a cool, airy voice. Will’s wandered up behind the men, blade loose in his hands because he’s mending the bindings on the hilt. Their eyes follow the dip and flash of the sword, but his stay on their flushed, sweated-out faces. “Didn’t know we were back to ranks, now. It sounds just like the Royal Navy. Jenkins. Did you want to go back? Because I’m sure Jack will be happy to…”
And Jenkins bows his head, scuffs his toe and mutters that he was heat-struck, didn’t know what he was saying. If Will asks him to apologize on-deck to her, then it’ll be Anamaria jumping ship at the next port.
Will don’t. He shoots her a look that reaches long and feels close, but he goes on his way, still wrapping up his sword.
And later Anamaria takes an earring off Jenkins in a dice-game below-decks, and when the other two have shouldered up to back his protest, she lays all three of them out with the knotted end of a rope and an iron bar. It’s small, tight space down there, black beyond the small hazy circle around the lantern hung up before them, and she knows that kind of world better than them.
She wears the earring the next morning when the wind rises and, groaning and wincing, Jenkins and his friends leap to her orders regarding the sails. She should be smiling, grinning wide and nasty like a ragged alley-cat, but she don’t.
* * *
IV.
Sail on the forward horizon: Spanish ship, gunning heavier and moving to intercept. Thunderheads on the backwards horizon, scudding fast into ominous mountains and not looking to miss chewing up a bit of wood and tar and human flesh. And them in the middle.
Will’s coming up from below where he’s yelled himself hoarse to get the gunners ready, Anamaria’s slipping down from above where she’s readied the men to turn the sails at a moment’s notice. It’s a bad time, and it’s as good a time as any in their lives.
“Knew a preacher once, said we were all God’s children and so white shouldn’t treat black any different. And he bought slaves just to free them, and then he turned round to beat his wife for barrenness,” Anamaria says to Will, harsh and sharp and fast like the wavelets cracking over the railing. She turns because her shirt is soaked through and she knows it’s sticking to her back, to the ridges there and he knows what those are from. “Did you go to sleep feeling lighter of sin?”
He knows damn well what she’s talking about, too. Will’s jaw tightens and it’s in his eyes a moment to tell her not now, take it up with him when they’re not about to claw for their goddamned lives. But the moment goes. He comes besides her, pushing his sleeves up; his shirt’s a prize from a poxed Spanish noble three times as round in the belly so it flops about him. He bathes with the men, Anamaria bathes alone, and they keep to their respective spheres so she wouldn’t ever have seen the scar if he wasn’t showing it to her.
It’s a ragged, rolling thing, a twisted strip of reddened flesh over his inner forearm that’s been scraped up into rough crests and left to heal that way. And over it Will’s eyes have gone flat, hard, cold like Anamaria hasn’t seen since the last time some idiot asked Jack how he’d liked the nine years of no Pearl.
“My master was a drunkard, couldn’t fill the orders himself. Dropped them all in my lap soon as he could, which was before he’d taught me everything. I used to fall asleep by the forge—once I did it working at the anvil. Doctor said if it’d flowed the other way, I would’ve crippled my hand.” Will shrugs a shoulder at her, drops his hand to loosen his sword in his scabbard. Now the two ships are close enough for the cannon-splashes to wet their faces.
Anamaria looks towards the wheel—Jack’s there, eyes on the Spaniards. He’s about to give the signal for dropping anchor to wheel them around. “Ain’t the same.”
“Forgive me if I feel lucky about that,” Will snaps, finally goaded too far.
He’s better that way, shorn of all his delicacy. He’s angry and honest and he don’t puzzle her so much as to his motives. Right now, bouncing from one heel to another, he wants to take his sword and run it through as many bodies as he can and he’d like to start with her, says the way he’s turned away, but he can’t because she’s on his side. It’s got nothing to do with the breasts on her chest or the color of her skin.
“You are lucky, you damned idiot. Don’t feel sorry about it,” Anamaria says. Half her words are blown away by a cannonball that chips the foremast, and the rest are swallowed up in Jack’s wild yell.
Next thing she knows, she’s screaming for the anchor and the sails, and Will’s already striding down the deck, getting ready to repel boarders. For a second everything is clear to her.
* * *
V.
Enough water’s gone down Anamaria’s throat to fill a small harbor when they finally wreck. They’d tried to stand off the Spanish ship, cripple it long enough to run, but they’d still been engaged when the storm had hit. Anamaria had been over on the Spanish decks, and she’d had company, but as the Spanish ship cracks wide open on the shores, she has to reckon them all dead.
She keeps her hands twisted in the ropes no matter how the winds and water buffet her, grits her teeth against the shuddering of the hull. Her hands are numb; she’s forcing them to hold on by sight and sheer will. There was blood dripping from her leg before, and she thought it was hers then, but now she don’t dare take a look. It’s cold. It’s dark.
Anamaria cries now, hurling her sobs into the screaming storm.
She hates, too, but even that isn’t enough to keep her warm.
* * *
VI.
She comes to on the white, white sand that is the Caribbean’s way of tipping a cruel wink at the people struggling to live in it. Her head aches and when she touches the side of her face, it explodes. There is blood crusted on her skin, and more on her trousers.
“You’re up.” A wreck of a man staggers up to Anamaria, swiping hair out of the way so she can see Will’s bruised face. His shirt’s wrapped tight around his chest, spotted with blood dry enough that he must have woke with the dawn, at least. He keeps one hand close to him.
“Who else?” Anamaria tells her beaten skull to get on with it, it ain’t broke so it can take her getting to her hands and knees. She holds back her hair so it won’t blow over the swollen side of her face and takes a good look around.
Maybe an island, maybe part of a coast, but at any rate, it don’t show any signs of habitation and that’s rare in a region where every manjack’s looking to start their own private kingdom. It’s got a nasty reef that smashed the ship to pieces, but not one big enough to keep most of the lot from sliding all the way to the beach. She sees chunks of hull, halved masts, limp bodies and the varicolored spill of the cargo.
Will could sit down if he wants, but he stays squatting. Someone’s drained all the blood from beneath his tan so he looks like a husk about to fold over, if Anamaria don’t look at his eyes. Those are excited, somehow, in spite of all that’s against them. “They’re all dead—we’re the only ones from the Pearl. The rest are Spanish, so the others must’ve jumped back in time.”
“Or fallen out,” Anamaria has to add. She edges her feet apart in the sand, half-burying her toes, and puts her hand down. Standing up is hard, pains her leg so she feels a scab break and fresh blood drip down her skin, but she manages it. She feels better afterward.
Her words darken his face, bring a little life back into it, but he don’t appreciate it any. Just ignores her and slings an arm beneath her arms without asking, dragging her along. “Here, I want to show you something.”
“Off.” She shakes free and limps her own damn way. Makes her head swim by the time they get there, but at least she don’t have to watch for his winces and stumbles.
The Spaniards were carrying heavy. There’s food spilling on the sand and a couple unbroken casks that lift a weight from Anamaria’s chest. Cannonballs and chains sprawl darkly in the white sand, black coal tumbles from one end of the ship, and bunched up in the other, where Will is carefully picking through the wreckage, is a tiny sloop, like a baby ripped from a mother’s womb. It’s battered and cracked up, but as Anamaria fumbles her way around it, she sees something of what’s got Will so interested. It could sail, if it were fixed.
“I think they were lowering it when they saw us, and they winched it back up on the side instead of taking it apart and stowing it. There’s even tools for smelting over here and here…with the coal I could rig up a forge. The tricky part would be the mast—” Will babbles, voice threading in and out of Anamaria’s hearing as he hops around and ducks between bits of unsteady wreckage. Once a chunk of wood falls and misses his head by a much smaller space than it misses his attention.
“And you think this’ll work?” The ache in Anamaria’s head is starting to hurt bad now, pressing out against her skull that suddenly feels so thin. The merest touch, a wind-blown strand of hair, is agony like she hasn’t felt in years.
Will falls silent. Then he pulls himself back into the open and stares at her, eyes narrowed by more than the glare of the sun. “Jack’ll have been blown too far to get to us any time soon. I had a walk around this place—it’s an island.”
“You walked around the whole island.” Anamaria could paint a house with the derisive disbelief that thickens her voice. She eases back against a ship rib and clutches at her own, trying to see past the bright spots in her vision.
“It’s a very small island,” Will curtly answers. He don’t say what they can both deduce from that: too small to support them for long, too small to attract regular attention from anyone.
He turns to pick up something, then stops and squints at her in a way that don’t pretend to be about the sun at all. His hand’s a fist rubbing on his hip.
The sand’s soft, if nothing else, and Anamaria’s head is hurting her. She lets her back slide down the spar till her legs are cradled in the sand. “You think we can fix that thing and sail off to meet Jack in the middle of the big, big blue sea. Where the hell were we blown to, do you know?”
“No.” And it’s like Will is grinding nails out from between his teeth. “No, I don’t. No, I don’t think we can fix it. I think we damned well have to, unless you’ve got some magic conjure tucked between your breasts that’ll save us.”
Anamaria was seeing white. Now she sees red. And then white again, when she throws a handful of the damn sand at Will’s face. She misses but she don’t feel bad about it, and she’s on her feet and yelling anyway so she’s got no time to. “Conjure? Conjure! Who the hell do you think you are? What do you think I am, some goddamn hoodoo bitch from Louisiana? Do you know any? Do you?”
“Ana—” Will starts, already looking contrite.
She don’t want that. She wants him mad and screaming back, wants a reason to howl till her goddamned lungs burst, wants her veins to boil over and kill her dead so she don’t have to face this.
She wants to sit down and cry some more.
“You think you know! You think you can be good to me, think I need it! Think you can make up whatever you did wrong with Elizabeth! You stupid thoughtless son of a bitch—I’m no slave! I’m no witch! I’m Anamaria!” she shouts at him.
Her words flay off that sincerity and leave Will raw so she can see just how angry he is. And Anamaria’s seen lots of anger, but she knows it fast and hot and violent, like most men, and cold and long-lived and vicious, like Barbossa and sometimes Jack. What Will is, what the slow hot rise in his eyes and the aborted step he makes towards her means, Anamaria’s frightened to realize she don’t quite recognize.
Will grabs a plank, as if to stop himself, only it breaks off in his hand. He slashes down with it, then spins to throw it over the ship with a snarling yell. Just as quick he’s back around and staring at Anamaria while his words slap out like fists. “And I want to get off this damned island! I am getting off of it and I’ll leave you if you want! Then you can be Anamaria all by yourself and not worry about what my goddamn intentions are! You’re not those other names, but you’re a damned bitch and I don’t have to put up with you!”
With the last word out he whirls to slam his hand against the hull, the one he’d been nursing. There’s a wet snap and a shrill scream from Will, who instantly drops to the sand, doubled over.
Anamaria stays put, staring.
Eventually Will drags himself up. His face is pale and bloody spit is trickling from the corner of his mouth, but he’s using both hands to hold himself off the ground. “Dislocated. Was, anyway,” he mutters. “Thank God. Can’t swing a hammer with a broken wrist.”
“That’s the stupidest goddamn way I’ve ever seen a man put his bones back in,” Anamaria says. She reaches up to touch her head again, feel around the swellings, but it hurts so damn much that she can’t. She can’t stand up like this, can’t do anything, can’t feel anything but the pain.
Will looks wearily at her. “How’s your head?”
“Need a knife.” She waits while he finds one, but instead of tossing it over, he walks back to kneel in front of her. Her hands lift to hold him off, but he sits there and watches her till she drops them.
“Anamaria.” Will almost sounds like he’s laughing, except that can’t be it because his eyes are as bruised as her head is. Still, he looks straight at her without flinching from the hurt. “I’m a man, with lighter skin than you, and I’m about to hurt you a good deal. You’re dark-skinned, a woman, infuriating, and one of the best sailors I’ve ever sailed with.” The corner of his mouth ticks up. “I want to have it all straight first.”
She hits him on the knee because that’s what she can reach. He grabs her jaw, turns it before she can stop him, and is scoring the swellings with the knife just as the first ragged howl breaks from her chest. For once her body doesn’t listen to her pride but instead does the sensible thing, and she passes out.
* * *
VII.
Anamaria wakes up without a mouthful of sand because Will’s wadded up cloth beneath her head. He’s still kneeling by her, wringing out a rag that smells of blood and pus and sweat. “I squeezed out most of it. Cut as little as I could, but you’re still going to—”
“—think the mainsail will do you for a bellow?” The side of her face is sticky and she swipes at it without thinking. It hurts, but not so much that she can’t scramble to her feet and take another look at the sloop. The Spanish bastards had unstepped its mast, at least, so only the tip had gotten snapped off. They’ll have to rig a shorter sail than usual, but they won’t have to cut a new mast from scratch.
“Ana—”
She pulls the rags of her shirt around herself and ties them up out of the way. Her leg is stiff, almost too stiff to bend, so she gives the ground a couple kicks to loosen it up. Will’s looking a bit achy as well, but not so much so that he can’t get himself out of the way in time. “Hope you enjoyed that. You ain’t ever getting that close again, ‘less you want to get cut somewhere lower.”
He pauses. Then he gets to his feet, wincing and rubbing at his back, and wanders round the wreckage. Maybe it’s the light, but for a second it looked like maybe he was foolish enough to grin. “Right,” he mutters.
* * *
VIII.
High tide’s both a blessing and a cursing. It crests only a few feet from the sloop so they won’t have to break themselves to pieces getting it down to the water later on, and it starts washing away wreckage before they’ve entirely figured out what needs saving and what don’t. In the end, Anamaria and Will are slopping about in the knee-high water, grabbing anything they can reach and tossing it higher up on the beach.
By the time night falls, Anamaria’s got no shame about falling down in the shade of one piece of hull too big and high up to be dislodged and going to sleep. She figures Will should be following in a little while.
She wakes up when the moon’s still riding high, muscles locked up and clothes and hair stiff with dried salt. It takes her too damn long to work herself into a condition to go strolling, and all the while she can hear Will messing around with the salvaged wreckage.
He’s cobbled together most of a forge, but he hasn’t slept. His eyes keep closing on him and he stumbles into this piece of wood, that half-buried stone, but he keeps at it. “It’ll just be nails and a couple bigger pieces. Nothing I can’t do with what I’ve got, thank God.”
“You ain’t got a master now,” Anamaria replies, sitting herself down in front of him. She’s got some idea about making him stop, but what she gets is him damn near toppling over her shoulder when he runs into it. Instead of helping him up, she pushes him to the side and scoots round to fix him with her eye. “And we ain’t getting off tomorrow even if you get all the nails and what-have-you done tonight. Take a rest, Will. You’re keeping me up with your racket.”
“I will. Only I’ve got to—” He’s already twisting, restless and shaky like a sick dog. His hands are still scrabbling at the sand even after she presses her own over them.
Anamaria stares him down. “No, you ain’t. Don’t make me hit you.”
He stares right back, all hard jaw and glittering eyes, and she’s just getting ready to snap a fist against his temple when he suddenly sighs and all the fight drains out of him. After that, he’s nothing but a tired ghost in the moonlight.
It’s still hot as hell, so they’re not feeling the lack of a fire. She takes Will not building one anyway to mean that there’s no animals here big enough to worry about.
“I’m sorry about what I called you earlier,” he eventually says, drawing himself into a sitting position. He puts his chin on his knees like a little boy, only the arms he wraps around them are hard-muscled and scarred to show all the years.
“Sorry about throwing that fit,” Anamaria replies. Maybe it’s the moonlight getting to all the seawater she swallowed, pulling it about so bits of her she hasn’t seen in a long time bob up to the surface. Or maybe it’s just that she’s tired and sore, and deep down she still wants to cry a little. “You’re right, you know. Bitch I am, but that’s deliberate.”
He nods, squeezing at his knees. He don’t look surprised, which for some reason don’t surprise her, either.
A breeze strikes up and slithers around Anamaria the way the waves clutched at her during the wreck, and she shivers, suddenly wrapping her arms around herself. But rubbing at her arms don’t warm her, and the sinking of the moon makes it worse because then what she can see gets smaller and smaller. She was used to it before, but right now’s a weird, frightening time in between what she was and what she’s going to go back to being.
“Your face—” Will suddenly says.
She grabs his hands before he can finish, and when she pulls him up she can see the same strange uncertainty in his eyes. It makes her throw him back, snatch him forward almost in the same second and then she’s clutching him, her mouth clutching his mouth and her hands his back and his hands her breast and hip, and they’re diving into each other on the sand. Writhing, rubbing, pressing, kissing and holding and fucking till sleep finally touches them so there’s no more knowing.
* * *
IX.
Anamaria stops to mop the sweat and draining pus from her face. When she checks the rag she lets out a long breath to see that it’s much more sweat than pus now.
“Well, it works,” Will says, blowing on the new scorches on his hands. He looks proudly at the small pile of nails they’ve made, same as most men would watch their firstborn sons. He don’t look at Anamaria, and when he tosses her a fresh rag he’s over-careful about looking her in the face. “I think we’ll have enough to start hammering tomorrow.”
“Good.” She’s over-careful about watching when he strips off his shirt, Anamaria’s irritated to see. Not like she hasn’t seen it before, but generally not this close.
It’s a distraction, anyway. She don’t have to think on how her legs started trembling soon as she got up and kept on through the first half of the day, how her arms feel like rubber bands from pumping the bellows they worked up. How damn frustrated she is with having to put it back together every twenty or so pumps because it’s held together with hemp and a couple nails pried from the bigger ship and hope, which she ain’t good at making. How they’ve only got a few unbroken water casks and even if it’s only them, it’s going to be tough soon because there’s no drinkable water on this damned island and what they’ve got is going fast. How she don’t want to die, how she’s been running from that for years and years instead of standing to face it like everyone thinks she do all the time. She screams so loud and so often because it covers that up nice.
How she thinks Will’s caught on to that.
He tosses her half of a biscuit and chews on the other half, holding out for as long as possible before he has to dip them out some water. His eyelashes are crusted together so they look frosted, and his fingers shrink from hers on the crab-shell they’re using as a ladle.
Will suddenly chuckles as he drops down besides the coal-pile. He’s amused enough to not be wary about meeting her look. “You’re going to get your ship, finally. And you could argue that Jack gave you it, since he did get us here. God, I told him the Spanish were going to be patrolling this route, but he thought we could nip through quick enough…”
“…sometimes I think he’d gotten addled by his damn ship. She’s damn fast, all right, but how she sails goes only a little on the ship and a lot on winds and wave.” Anamaria licks up the last drops from the shell without feeling any guilt about how she looks. She pretends she wasn’t avoiding her reflection in the water. “Just like an old idiot with his nursery-school wife.”
“You don’t like men much,” Will observes.
She rolls her eyes at him, but sits down by him anyway. “Don’t have many reasons to. Only one that didn’t ever hurt me in the body stole my boat.” She hears him shifting around, opening his mouth, and speaks before he does. “You like all that banging with the hammers and tongs, even after what your master did?”
“It got better. After I grew up a bit, it was easier having him out of the way. He’s not the worst master I’ve ever seen or heard about—he only hit me once, when I was trying to get him inside, and that was because he was so drunk he thought I was somebody else.” Will rubs at his stubble, faint frown creasing his brows. He likes being neat, tidy, organized. Gibbs still wonders why Will ended up with them instead of with Navy. “He never got upset when I started doing better than him—well, he never realized.”
“So why didn’t you stay with the blacksmithing? He was that far gone, he couldn’t have lasted much longer.” The glow of the coals has faded past yellow, Anamaria suddenly notices. She swears to herself, because that means they’ll have to spend another hour building it back up.
When Will figures out what she’s swearing at, he gives a shrug and resettles himself in the sand. “It’s fine. It’ll get too hot to do this in the afternoon, so I was going to try and make that bellows stronger. Maybe try and cut some planks to fit the holes in the boat.”
He didn’t answer her question, and Anamaria’s about to say so when Will gives her a look that tells her no, he didn’t. She’d like to swear at him for that, but it’s already hot and she’s not so stupid she’s going to waste her energy.
“Elizabeth never liked it—she had an accident once where her sleeve caught fire at the forge, and afterward she always wanted to meet me somewhere else. The piers. She liked sailing, and pirates.” The twist of Will’s mouth is both wry and bitter and wistful. He looks up and down to the glittering water that’s so damn beautiful it should be slapped for it, gleaming at them when they couldn’t even ride it. “I got used to it, and then I ended up liking it. Which is what I’m doing here.”
“That’s a stupid reason,” Anamaria tells him. She waits for his head to turn so she can glare him in the face. “It is. You got used to it—you don’t get used to sailing. You should love it if you’re going to try.”
Will’s eyes start to harden, and his eyebrow goes up to flag his colors. “So what should I do? You think I can go back to being a blacksmith now? It’d be like—” he flushes, goes white “—like trying to pretend I didn’t want you last night. Like acting like I don’t still—only you’d—”
She leans over and kisses him. It’s slow and deliberate, and it’s all on the outside because inside Anamaria is anything but.
He remembers to roll them into the shade of the wreck though Anamaria is cupping his erection through his threadbare trousers, and her mouth is feeding desperately on his throat. His hands never went beneath her clothing last night, except to guide his prick, but today, in the full light of the sun, he runs his thumbs beneath her shredded shirt and he moves his fingers over her cunt, playing through her hair till his callused fingertips can roll over the pearl of her sex.
Afterward, she curls against his side and breathes so her air filters through his hair, which is rank with sweat, salt and the fetid trace of blood. She lies quietly, but her heart thumps like a frantic fleeing beast against the hand he gently lets rest on her chest.
* * *
X.
Will knows what he talks about when he’s judging making, shaping, building. They finish the nails when he says they will, both of them falling like dropped dolls on the ground, and they drag themselves over the boat, mending and patching, till he says they stop. In between they eat and sleep. They fuck whenever one of them stops being frightened enough of the consequences to remember that they’re already living in a net of them.
Sometimes they talk, when Anamaria’s muscles are too worn-out and soft to be tense, when Will gives his determination to be the gentleman a rest and is himself. She tells him about the overseer and the short horsewhip while he traces the scars on her back, and though he starts out fighting to hide his horror, by the end he touches and looks at them like they were any other part of her body. He hides his head between her breasts and murmurs the story of how he and Elizabeth fell out, and how sometimes he gets up in the middle of the night and walks around with his engagement ring on, but only when Jack is asleep and it’s far too dark for anyone else to see it. He makes love to her with his mouth when he realizes that for once, she’s not going to turn that back on him.
One night, when the sloop is, impossibly, nearly finished, she leaves him by it and walks along the beach till she finds a tide-pool, calm and clear and glassy-surfaced like the finest ladies’ mirror.
There’s two large cuts, one coming down from her temple and another up from her jaw, and nearly hidden by her hairline there’s a third. They’re thin and healing well, and Anamaria can see that if they escape infection till the very end, she’ll still have a face that’ll cause her trouble. The cuts are still tender, but she spends nigh an hour touching them the way Will touched the ones on her back.
He’s awake when she gets back. He pretends not to be, but only till she digs toes into his hip and demands he rolls over.
“I’m sorry,” Will says.
She kicks him harder. He snorts, and then he’s laughing as he suddenly rises to grab her about the waist, as he drags her down. She leaves bruises on him for that, but later when he’s truly asleep, she kisses them while damning herself for a fool.
* * *
XI.
They proof the boat with caulking picked from between the ship’s plank, tar scraped off it and melted down in Will’s forge. Step the mast, rig the sail, stow provisions and what gear then can, and over the course of one exhausting afternoon, push it into the water.
They’ve got a makeshift sea-anchor to slow it when they need to, but nothing for holding it in place so they have to clamber in then, set sail without any more ceremony than Will looking pensively back at his abandoned forge. Then he shakes his head and turns around to give Anamaria a hand with the sail.
After that it’s all work, no rest or comfort. They have only the vaguest idea of where they are, and the stars plus the needle Will salvaged from a broken ship’s compass and strung from a few braided strands of Anamaria’s hair for navigating. Their food and water started low and gets lower, though Anamaria grew up outwitting the fish and Will’s luck can sometimes be as absurd as Jack’s, bringing them a few light showers that miraculously don’t swamp them while providing more water. Only one of them can sleep at a time, and twelve-hour shifts mean that they’ve nothing but tired glances as one goes to bed and the other heaves themselves up.
Anamaria misses Will’s hands, his mouth and eyes and slow drawing of breath just before he slips into sleep. But she’s relieved, too, because as the ropes slide through her fingers and the wind and water busy her mind, she recollects more and more of what she knows, of who she is and why she does what she does. He don’t fit with that, he makes the rest uncomfortable and jumpy, and anyway, he’s going to stay with Jack while she’s always been planning to follow her own way.
He seems to feel the same, because after the first few nights he no longer reaches for her but lies curled around himself in the bottom of the sloop. A few times Will starts to raise his voice above the low, terse whisper they use when they have to work the boat together, but he always catches himself before she even has to do or say anything.
So damn considerate, Anamaria growls to herself, and she’ll be damned if she could say how that irritates her.
* * *
XII.
It’s not Jack they strike out for and it’s not Jack they find, but a bustling port too concerned with disguising its own affairs to notice a pair of strangers slipping into it. There’s enough traffic for them to hear news that’s relatively fresh: Jack weathered the storm and has been going off on what everyone deems a mad goose chase after Atahualpa’s treasure cache, haunting deserted, barren regions. Will grins into his beer, rubs at his freshly-shaven cheeks, and comments that maybe Jack’s branched out in his loyalties, to go through all the trouble.
“Late for that if he wanted to win into my good graces,” Anamaria mutters. She picks at her food, ignores her own mug, and has to be told twice when Will wants to start discussing about how to get word of them to Jack.
She hasn’t felt this much reluctance in a long, long time. It makes her temper rise.
“Are you even listening to me?” Will finally snaps.
And she whips it right back at him. “No, I ain’t. No point in discussing when your mind’s made up and you know it. There’s no ‘getting used to’ around me.”
He stares at her, mouth partly open, and when Anamaria lifts her chin, she turns her head too so he can’t look at that side of her face.
“I got a buyer for the sloop,” she tells him. Softer, quieter, but not kinder. She don’t know how to be, she forgot what she knew, she can’t do it. She wouldn’t want to if she could do it.
She’s such a good liar.
“You’ll get half the money—he’s so desperate that it’ll be enough to get you to somewhere Jack can pick you up.” She should be done there, but he’s watching her and damn him, she has to explain. She don’t explain herself to anyone, and yet she’s doing it to him. It’s in trade for the sweet way his hands smoothed over her back, she reasons. “I’m tired of waiting on Jack. I want my own ship, my own crew.”
Her own life. What she’s always wanted, what she’s always fought for. Her life and not what’s squeezed from between others, what’s left after she’s cut off some and steeled over some and hidden the rest.
For a moment, she thinks Will’s about to hit her.
He don’t, not then and not later when they’re in the alley and she’s passing him the bag, and suddenly his hand is pulling her up, his mouth is coming down hard as nails, hot as fire, and merciless as her. She guesses it’s because he already hurt her. She’s a bad guesser.
* * *
XIII.
Anamaria spills out the gold in the first step that’ll lead her to her ship, and out clinks something else. Gold too, but hollowed out like her gut feels when she sees it.
Will’s gotten better than she thought at pirates’ tricks, and maybe she never was as good as she thought she was.
* * *
XIV.
“Damn you, Anamaria,” is how Jack meets her, when their paths cross again somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He’s resplendent in rum-stained ruffles and new red velvet coat, Pearl looking like a black swan on the water, and his eyes are thunderous even as his smile is appreciative.
It’s not for her looks, even if she’s done damn well since, with her ship bellied down with plunder and her fine brocade coat. No, Jack’s madder than hell, and the reason why is stepping out from behind him with a sack dangling from his hand, and Gibbs dragging his chest behind him. Will looks well, even smiling when Anamaria feels like her body’s frozen and exploded all at once.
He takes a step forward, and Anamaria’s tongue comes to life first. “You get down on your knees and say a damn fool thing, and Jack’s first mate or no I’ll toss you over the side.”
So Will stands, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Captain—Captains—I’d like to change my berth. I’ve heard you just lost your first mate, and I think my qualifications should speak for themselves.” He tilts his head, not smiling now. His fingers tap against his hip. “Is that a damn fool thing?”
She’s going to cry. She’s watched her flesh rot beneath iron chains, and she’s killed men in dark dirty holes that a rat wouldn’t live in, and she’s going to cry, goddamn him. “That’s exactly what it’d be, Will. Your qualifications—”
All this time, Anamaria thought death would be the worst to stand before, but now she knows she’s wrong. And now she knows she’s not a fool or a coward, but she’s her scared shaking self when she steps forward and gives him a slap that rocks him back a pace.
Then she yanks up her sleeve and has her palm slashed before anyone can react. “You’ll take all, without reservation, through any troubles that will come. Or you’ll take the goddamn sharks.”
Will cuts his own palm without hesitation, and he’s already clasped Anamaria’s hand, their blood squelching in a way that makes Jack snort to himself, when some idiot has to say it.
“Ain’t that for man and man?” they call.
“And who’s to say that? You reckon yourself the Pope now?” Jack casually answers, turning about. He looks genial enough, but there’s no one else crying out, and it’s not because they’re missing tongues. Then he turns back, his sigh in eyes and hands, and he regards Anamaria with more respect than bitterness. “Best first mate ever, and you sneaked him for your matelot right out from under my nose. I’d applaud you if I weren’t suffering so.”
Anamaria laughs, not at him but with him, for there is a smile slipping around Jack’s face.
“I love the company,” Will murmurs. He raises an eyebrow at her questioning look. “Why I’m still at sea. Can’t find people like this on land. You’re out here.”
And she cries, quietly so only he can hear, and he stands so no one else can see.
***