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To The Sea

by Hereswith
July 21, 2006

She had not planned it like this, not pictured it thus, even when she had been on her knees, in the midst of the pouring rain. She should have been married, a wife, not a-sailing in men’s attire, her palms blistered, the horizon on every side of her and the Black Pearl beneath her feet.

Out here, on the shimmering, shivering blue, all things are both simpler and more complicated at once. She had not realised how much she had missed the sea, until she went aboard the ship that brought her to Tortuga, but she roams the Pearl with long strides and a lighter step, and she isn't certain that she can ever go back.

She has not spoken of it to Jack, but he isn’t witless, never was, though at times he acts like he is; his gaze is on her, more often than not, and she had thought she would mind, but she doesn’t. She has missed him, too. Absurd, yes, improbable, certainly, but there it is. He watches her, as she lends her aid on deck, as she’s up the rigging, and he hasn’t seen her behave in such a fashion before, he’s seen the young lady, the Governor’s daughter, but it doesn’t seem to surprise him. He calls her Lizzie, with a glint of gold, and it fits, the name sinks into her and takes root.

She looks at him, as well, that addled-brained, begrimed pirate, she seeks him out like he seeks her out, it’s the circling they do, before the strike, and when their eyes meet, something passes between them that was begun months ago, years ago, even, when she was but a girl, reading stories by flickering candles. A little girl, drawing the outline of a ship in the mist formed by her breath on a frosted window, in faraway England.

She has always wondered, but it’s a madness, now. She wants it. This. Freedom and him, as if they were one. So badly it burns her like rum, on the inside and out, and—God—the images come to her, in flashes like lightning: his back to the bulkhead, his mouth on hers and his hands up her legs, touching her in places where her skin still is much paler than his. It would not be gentle, it would be wicked and wrong, but she would have him, she would take him, Captain Jack Sparrow, and she aches for it in the dimmed light, when he’s more legend than man; she craves it in the glare of the sun, when he’s Jack, only Jack, and she should know better.

She does know better, but he makes her smile and she forgets herself, or remembers, she cannot tell which, anymore.

~.~

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