Square
By TwinEnigma
Blanket disclaimer: Anything you recognize, except for my OCs and the plot, I don't own. I do this for fun and absolutely no profit.
In a filthy back room of a seedy tavern in Tortuga, four individuals whose fates seemed inexorably intertwined stood in awkward silence. Three of them were men, each of them good and true in their own fashion, and each a romantic paragon of their respective walks of life, if a little worse for wear in one department or another. The fourth, standing with her back facing the barred and locked door, was a woman, despite the misleading nature of her masculine clothes. She was many things, lace and petticoats, swords and fire, rum and sea spray – all that she was mixing and swirling hot as the brews of the vodun mambo, Tia Dalma, until she had lost herself fully in the desperate, conflicting desires in her heart and became an entirely new concoction, something far more potent than rum. Separating her and the three men was a mere table, upon which lay a remarkably plain compass. Said compass held beneath its wooden lid the certain knowledge of whom her heart desired most and the certain misery of the others.
They expected a choice and, had she been the girl she was when she was first kidnapped by Barbossa's cursed crew, she might have easily made that choice. Had she been the woman that was the last person to step off the Pearl, she would not have known whom to choose. Of course, she had learned much about herself since those times, and could now make the decision her station and confusion had previously denied her.
"If I had any sense at all, I'd maroon the lot of you on some godforsaken spit of land and marry the ship," she quipped, eliciting a grin from the former commodore and a feigned look of alarm from the eccentric pirate. "But, very well, I'll take all three of you scoundrels."
A pregnant silence descended on the room.
James appeared to have been stunned so badly that he appeared to have been struck deaf and dumb by the statement.
"...All of us?" a wide-eyed and very much confused Will echoed, as if to reaffirm that he had indeed heard what he suspected to have heard.
Jack – Captain Jack, she amended mentally, bore a momentary look of surprise and then let loose a hearty laugh. It was hardly surprising to her that he would be the first to realize the reasoning behind her decision. After all, he was a pirate through and through, whereas Will and James still toed the line between respectability and notoriety, neither one yet ready to admit they were pirates at heart.
And now, confusion etched clearly on their countenances, James and Will looked to her for an explanation.
Elizabeth gave them a wry smile and said, "Pirate," as if it explained everything.
...Which, in a manner, for them, it did.
Author's Note: Something that just came to mind while watching "Dead Man's Chest". Elizabeth does a lot of emotional growing during the course of the two movies, which I'm glad for. I'm also markedly ticked that she - and, ironically, almost every canon female in any major fandom - get ripped on so badly by the fangirl masses. I happen to disapprove of that sentiment, hence... She gets all three in this because she's a pirate. So there. As always, reviews are welcome, flames are not.