Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Spoilers: Assuming you've seen the first two movies, only for At World's End.
Notes: A bit of response to the end clip (after I was told to go see the movie again so I could see it). Feedback is loved and appreciated.
The Irish washwomen hum a jig as they work, their feet longing to move and dance, their hands longing to put down their tedious work. Scalded, work weary hands dash in and out of hot water, drawing yet another piece of clothing over the washing board; scalded hands dip in again; scalded hands no longer feel.
They stay away from his mother while they worked.
There is a sort of strangeness around her that he's never felt in the brightness of the day, when he can see her reddened hands, her lank hair escaping her bun, her tired but tall posture. But her eyes are bright, and perhaps it is this that wards the other women away.
She had always been the town enigma that no one cared to solve, gossiping the truth away and more satisfying truths into existence; mysterious in the day to everyone except him, her son, who sees only his mother, worn out and tired but still pretty in her own right. The boys in his first year of school had been hardly as kind.
Will, not knowing what a bastard or a whore was, thought he still didn't like it.
His mother was livid when she saw the scrapes and bruises, knowing somehow of the scuffle before he'd told her. But as for whom her anger was directed at, he didn't dare ask, for in this case, he thought he didn't want to know. Somehow more powerful for her anger, more lively for her power, and more beautiful for her life, she tended the wounds he had earned for his pride in silence. She hugged him close, and he let her.
The old washwomen (and the school boys, never mind how many fights he got into) were nearly more forthcoming than his own mother, who hugged him close as all mothers do, and fed him swashbuckling tales at night before he slept. She never talked of his father, and he was a little afraid of what doing so himself might provoke.
Their little cottage was seemingly on the outskirts of nowhere, with the beauty of the rolling hills to the rolling sea, the terrible contrast of the expanse of rocks to the cliff that hid it. It was sharp and definitive; and for reasons not definitive, he and his mother loved it best there. The secret route to the ocean that only they knew; the wonderful seclusion from anyone who would mock them. The sea drowned them in its roar, in its power, in its washes of forgiveness and forgetfulness.
It gave something back, he thought, to him and his mother, when they came.
"Yo ho, yo ho," he'd sing, and his mother's eye would soften and hesitate before she danced with him, laughing wildly, their feet dragging in the sand.
He thought she would have seemed mad, had he not been playing along with her. It was only at night that the wildness was caught in her eye, that she became a bit frightening, despite her loving gestures and sad looks of the day.
Once, a lightning storm had hit, for him to run to her bed, for her to wake instantly, disoriented, her hand clasping his arm like a vise, a wild look in her face. Her other hand searched for something that was not there.
"Mum, mother," he cried, imploring her desperately.
Her look softened, her eyes still sharp and piercing, but her lips turned up in a smile and drew him into her embrace. It was tight, and discomforting, the rain threatening to drown them, the lightning threatening to strike them. He could not have escaped from it had he wanted to.
oOo
"Hoist the colors high..."
His mother was humming.
The h's came on breaths soft and heavy, an exotic pan flute in the oppressive heat in the room; the c coming on the articulation of defiance. Heavy, empty, and clear, it drifted.
"Heave, ho..."
Drawn to it through he knew not what power, he rose from his bed and wandered through the small house as easily as the fog off the ocean rolled outside. The moon shone down, its light trapped in the fog, its shadows cast in an odd transparency on the ground below.
"Theives and beggars... Never say we die."
He hid behind a doorframe, allowing only his eyes to peek out from behind to watch the scene in front of him. There stood his mother in the doorway leading outside, her eyes cast over the darkness of the unfathomable ocean, her hair drifting strangely in the light, still wind. Half in shadow, half in light, her lips hardly moved, her low voice not any less clear for it, the tune drifting lazily, sharply, to where he stood. Entranced, he could not look away.
Her gaze suddenly turned on him, seemingly unseeing, her eyes blinded by the bright moonlight outside, clouded by the fog. He shivered, but did not move, unwilling to make a sudden move and startle her from her thoughts. Her hair, her eyes, her pale skin. She looked near to a goddess might, eerie and commanding, though in that moment, harsher, rougher.
Never say we die, his mother's words echoed and rang in the silence of the stifled air, heavily and unwillingly, a defiance born in the song that was somehow lost in the singing. He stared at his mother's too-bright eyes, and knew.
It was then that he understood, and he wished he hadn't. The stories, the tender maiden turned pirate, the blacksmith turned sailor. The effortless way such blatant, overstated truths flowed off her tongue at nights.
She blinked, and questioned aloud whether he was there; her voice grew in playfulness from its cold seriousness, though not quickly enough, and having no choice, he stepped out into the open.
She frowned. "What is it?"
He looked at her, not knowing what to say. "The song. The one you were just singing."
Troubled, she looked down at him, and crouched to meet his eyes and tenderly smooth back his hair. Close, she smelled of the tang and salt and freedom of the sea, caught in her for-once flowing hair. "That, you must never sing outside this house. Or ever, better yet."
He remembered long since spoken echoes of her serious, nearly reverent voice, and nodded.
"What else is it," she asked, her hair, curly and wet, curtaining off all else but her face and his. She stared into his eyes, and hers soon bore realization.
"The stories," she said, softly.
He could only bring himself to nod.
"You believe them?"
He nodded again. Her lips quirked, playfully, perhaps a bit precariously.
"Do you wish to know of your father?"
He was struck by a sudden fear that he didn't want to know; he nodded once more, because it was the only thing he could do.
His mother grinned as if all she had been waiting for was for him to ask, all playfulness and love but for the glint in her eye, sharp, or sad. It was often that he couldn't tell them apart. At this moment, it no longer mattered, for though he was much too big, she gave a playful grunt as she picked him up and clutched him to her side and hugged him close.
The long-forgotten feel of the smoothness of her neck against his cheek was as comforting as he barely remembered, his face buried in it, his arms clinging around her neck as tightly as her arms wound about his waist. He could not have escaped had he wanted to.