AN: For the Broken Compass forum prompt to 'write about a pairing that is not your favorite.' The idea for this has been slowly forming in my head for a while. It wanted to be a poem, but I mangled it into a prose format instead.
I almost feel like I'm cheating, because despite the fact that it's not my preferred pairing, it was incredibly easy to write. Although I very much think Will and Elizabeth belong together, writing Willabeth gives me a lot more trouble- it's so hard to write it realistically without ending up with fluff, and I have a pathological aversion to fluff.
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I never liked my name. Elizabeth Swann always sounded like someone else, a tall, elegant woman with perfect posture and unbitten fingernails, a stranger who dwells somewhere in the whalebone prison of my gowns and speaks with my voice, saying soft demure things that make me want to scream.
Still, I suppose it is a pretty name.
My father says it as if it were a word in a foreign language, a beautiful word, but one whose meaning escapes him. Sometimes, when he sees that I am not paying attention, his voice trails off at the end, like a poet who has forgotten the final verse. Loving me, despairing of me. Thinking of my mother, perhaps. I'm not sure.
James says my name as if it is the name of a painting or a book, something fine, valuable, and worthy of respect, but something inanimate. When he addresses me, I feel as if sooner or later, the book will close, and I will be crushed between the covers and left on a table to sit there, trapped in the glue of my bindings and the smooth paper of my skin. Were I his, I would be kept indoors, in fine parlors, behind glass, where the wind off the sea might not touch me. Kept pristine and preserved, and carefully opened now and then, in the odd free moment, that he might read another chapter.
When Will says my name, each syllable becomes another step up to the pedestal he would place me upon, another swirling embellishment on the silver frame he keeps my portrait in, and when I would leap down off that pedestal, I am caught in loving arms and then, far too soon, carried back up to the top and left there, impatiently waiting for something that I cannot put words to.
Jack calls me "Lizzie" or "love", refusing me the dignity of a full name, taking away the inconvenient bits of me that he cannot use and turning me into something smaller and less imposing. I can tell when he says it, flamboyant in his disrespect, that he likes the way it sounds. "Lizzie…" It is a word that he can slip off his tongue and catch between his teeth. When he calls me by it, his eyes imprison mine, challenging me to reassert myself, to demand my proper title and show him by doing so that he has unsettled me. He wants badly to unsettle me, to see me fray around the edges, to trim me down to something he might gain mastery over.
So eloquently concise, how in one short word, he is able to turn me into something commoner, more vulnerable, something that might fit more easily into his mouth, the better to savor before devouring.
I must continually remind myself that I want to be neither savored nor devoured, but sometimes I fear that I am lying.
