All characters mentioned belong Disney. Elizabeth's son has been expanded upon by myself.
Elizabeth Reflects
I'm surprised I don't feel lonely. I used to think that made me a bad wife, but now the feeling of guilt has dulled. So I don't feel lonely and I don't feel guilty. In fact, I don't feel much of anything at all. There's only me, my son, and the sea.
We moved to the cliffs. To be nearer to him, I suppose, but no where is near enough to the dead. The dead and their Shepard. My son waited inside me like a good little boy until a quiet nine months passed. Then he slipped out of my body as softly as he slipped in, and was away like a fish. The midwife said boys like him are always conceived at sea. I said nothing, as I so often say nothing, because I didn't know for sure. I like to think it was that last day on the beach, but there had been other times, times filled with fear and sweat and salt. William and I didn't speak about those times, in the holds of ships, in unknown ports, before all was said and done and the sea claimed his heart once and for all.
Alexander and I stayed away from people and people stayed away from us. In the early years they whispered I was the wife of the new Davy Jones. Later it became wife of William Turner, the Ferrier of the dead, when they had learned his name. Over time, the whispers changed. I became the wife of a dead man, of a ghost, of a shadow, and then one day, I was the wife of the sea and nothing more was said. It seemed accurate enough to me. Both the sea and I had William's heart, and after a while it became muddled into a woman and a great body of water that had claimed yet another man. And I had married the sea.
Alexander and I lived off what my father had left for me, what anonymous pirates brought for me, and what William had hidden for me. We could scrape by on it all without my having to get a job. I trained Alex to be a swordsmen and a scholar. But I never took him out in the water. I had no fear of it, but Alex had no inclination to be a pirate or even an honest sailor. He knew his history and was proud, but he said he could not give his heart and life to something that could never love him back. I can't say I wasn't disappointed, or that I understood him. I knew the sea. It held my soul in its swift hands. But even so, my son stayed with his feet planted firmly on dry land while my soul drifted in the reeds.
I told my son stories of my old life. A young woman, hidden away from the evils of the world, is stolen away, brought to a ship of undead pirates, terrifying and unrelenting. A young man, who loved her from the first moment he saw her, allies himself with a scoundrel to save her. They are wrapped up in a deadly feud and an ancient curse, barely escaping back to the lives they once knew, only to be torn asunder by a man with a heart of ice. They return to their scoundrel in hopes that he will help them, but he only has eyes for desire and a magical compass. They follow him to Davy Jones' Locker, into a war, to the ends of the Earth, thinking that this sly, skunk of a man can redeem of them the sins he helped create. In his own twisted way he does, and flies away while the young man is tied to a ship he'll man until the world itself dies.
Yes, I resent Jack for what he did. But if he hadn't done it, William would have died.
I don't tell my son that part of the story, the part where the young woman has doubt.
The pirates still regard me as their King. Alexander always watches from a safe distance, hidden behind a chair or under a table as wet, ragged men visit me in the night. They tell me tales of captains Sparrow and Barbossa, hounding after the fabled Fountain of Youth, and of new captains rising from of the depths of the sea. A dark, remorseless man to the South is killing men by the boatful to build his bloody reputation. No one knows his goal in all this, but the pirates are avoiding his red vessel. Another new name to the West, a girl with a thirst for jewels and a crew willing to follow her to hell and back. My visitors tell me of William, flashes of the Flying Dutchman in the fading light of sunset. No one can tell me of more then a glance; all that have seen William face to face are going to his Locker.
I wait in my house by the cliffs, raising a boy to be like a father who is already fading from my memory, listening to the reports of the World from bedraggled seadogs. I am a witch and a heathen and a demon. I have no where to run. My heart belongs to the sea.
