Title: The Ocean Hath No Blast
Disclaimer: Alas! Pirates of the Caribbean still isn't mine.
Summary: One way a heartless legend might have lost his love.
Author's Notes: That's right---another PotC angst!fic with a Rime of the Ancient Mariner excerpt! That poem makes my muse all eloquently emo and almost annoyingly alliterative (see?). I just went with it for this story; I figured a guy who cuts out his heart and plays the organ won't mind some overdramatic prose. --So, yes, this is a story about Davy Jones, but I didn't want to shove his name in the title or the summary because I didn't want anyone focusing on the fact that it's a DAVYJONESFIC!!! instead of a tragic tale of loss. Also, some of those tentacle-fancying DJ fangirls creep me out.
As far as the Tia/Davy theory goes, I tried to leave it ambiguous. Tia Dalma could well be the source of Davy's torment, or his agony could be on account of another bonnie lass.
I apologize if the end seems abrupt, but I like it that way. I thought the poor fellow had suffered enough, and I'm pretty sure the detailed-cutting-out-of-the-heart scene has been done.
First Voice
'BUT tell me, tell me! speak again, '
They soft response renewing--
'What makes that ship drive on so fast?
What is the ocean doing?'
Second Voice
'Still as a slave before his lord,
The ocean hath no blast;
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast—
If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim.
See, brother, see! how graciously
She looketh down on him.'
From the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Ocean Hath No Blast
He paced between the pews with a sailor's swagger, yet his steps fell agitated and his mouth twisted with apprehension. His right hand clenched and unclenched, as though used to cradling something in his palm, while his left swung stiffly at his side. Each time he passed the center aisle, he paused and allowed his eyes to make the walk toward the door. Light rolled lazily from the long windows, dashing up against the colored panes and spraying the small sanctuary with tempestuous hues.
Passing through the sunlit showers, he donned the tinting of the glass—pink with one stride, green with the next, blue with another. On his right hand, his fingers continued their gentle rhythm of bending and unbending, furling and unfurling. He halted in a shadow between a window and the wall, casting himself into a pale and ghastly shade of grime. His eyes tensed in worry, binding his brows together with vexation. A small groan of pain or frustration broke away from him, and he pressed his restless fist to his chest.
He exhaled loudly, releasing air but not his tension, and turned to the structure of wood and brass seeming to grow from the floor. Rising like a great tree or a castle of stalagmites, the instrument presented both distraction and catharsis. He sat and offered up his fingers to the keys.
He plunged into a melody he knew better than any other—the tune to which his heart danced. Passionately attending each note, he sank into the deep of the song, his shoulders rocking in time to the swell of the line. Ebb and flow, crescendo and decrescendo, hope and doubt.
A heavy wooden groan from the door interrupted him; he looked up at once. A man leaned panting against the open door, still wearing his hat. Disappointment made limp the fingers on the keys but curiosity bid their owner rise.
"She'll not come," the man in the hat told him quickly. "She's boarded a ship sailing out today."
The organ was abandoned with a cry and curse, the messenger left winded in the doorway.
He found a small, swift ship tied in the harbor and took it. He would be a pirate, then, pursuing her.
She had run before, he reasoned, to toy with him, to test him. She had grown predictable in her mutability, like a storm on the sea. She and her accursed, blessed stubbornness for which he both loathed and loved her.
The water coyly tossed his vessel as she tossed her hair, gently and infuriatingly hindering him. He could see her ship, not yet so far, not yet gone. Obdurately, the sails of his craft ignored him as he implored them to grant him speed; the wind was against him.
When he squinted desperately, he thought he could see her, standing on the deck of her ship, gazing impassively back at him.
But the wind never changed, the sails never swelled, and his small boat fell behind. Now he could only imagine her standing there, her head high atop shoulders swept gracefully back, her hands determined fists at her sides.
You'll not tame me, she told him across the water as salty as tears.
Still he trailed her, fighting the wind until even hope could not supply a vision of her ship on the horizon. When she had sailed from sight, he sank against the thin mast, aching too greatly to scream or to weep or to move. His ribs were too small a cage for his torment. He would overflow with pain.
He loved her. He loved her, he loved her, and she was gone.
The pain did not subside.
He longed, he languished. He pined, he prayed. He drank, hoping for that inebriated numbness, but drink merely amplified his grief. He examined other beauties and found every one a pale, stagnant pool of insipidity. None were as fair and free as she. None matched her wit and wildness.
He had fallen in love, and there was no crawling back out of the amorous abyss.
One of his shipmates, the man who had forgotten to doff his hat, tried to convince him to return to work. The captain would replace him, he said.
"Let him," came the distant reply.
"What, are you your own captain now? Those of us yet answering to him are courting the dice tonight. Will you come?"
He went, because he neither wished to go nor to stay. The tavern was loud and yellow. Pipe smoke crowned bleary, intoxicated heads while lantern light gilded their faces, golden caricatures of ephemeral pleasure. Bitter amber liquids swirled as the men swilled them, reminding him of her eyes like whirlpools drawing him in. Voices brashly rasped and shouted, sweat and dirt seeped into the floorboards. A twisted gaiety wove through the thick air.
The sailors cursed and crowed over their game, the worn cups clattering loud discord to the rattling of the dice. Their brazen laughter offended him; their joviality was an insult to his suffering. How could they engage in such merriment when the world had dealt him such loss? A low, fierce hatred of them roiled in him. He wanted to silence every joyful voice with a blow, a slash, a bullet, though he knew this rage was but armored envy.
He sat and glared, nursing his detestation to distract him from his anguish. A couple entwined in a corner suddenly laughed together, that lovers' laugh that does not require a joke or a reason. His hate receded, leaving the empty shore of his unhappiness. He cursed his pathetic, crippling woe. His ambition and adventurousness and pride had all left with her on that blasted ship, marooning him with sorrow but no pistol to end it. He brooded because she had left him only with his love.
None noticed him leave the tavern; the barmaid puzzled over the coins left on a table she'd thought empty all evening. Too drunk to remember anything earlier than their first game of dice, his shipmates carried on without noticing one less among them.
His commandeered craft floated in a hidden inlet, one of many he'd discovered in past years of ardent exploration, and to its gently rocking deck he retreated. He sat staring at the stars, but those ancient guides of sailors offered no aid. He turned and gazed back at the buildings clumped with empty yellow windows on the land. There was no reason to remain here. He sliced silently through the mooring and drifted out to sea.
His pain was a perpetual throbbing with every pulse of his afflicted heart, unbearable and unrelenting, unable and unwilling to allow him to die.
So he carved out the offending organ. He made a deal with the Devil and the sea. He buried her letters, his longing, and his love and became a creature callous and cold. He commanded the damned and beckoned dread beasts, he mocked and murdered until he and his crew were more ocean than human, lost in the water as salty as tears, in the waves that tossed like her hair, and in the whirlpools deep as her eyes.
He kept the locket. Some shard of hope residing outside the chest cleaved to the song and believed the locket's mate was likewise held to. He played the song even when he lost his fingers and thought of her even when he knew the chest was leagues and leagues away. It tugged at him like the moon at the tides, and he knew that he, the sea, was yet in pain.