A/N: Okay, I feel bad for not posting what I wrote for my best friend Liz (XxIcexX) and I owe her anyway. So I wrote these for her, despite my not liking song-drabbles (I know, everyone's writing them – now including me, because of Liz) and not liking the posting of my Sparrabeth shit.
Written to the wonderful album Eyes Open, by Snow Patrol. Post-AWE, loosely connected, VERY melodramatic and angsty, so be warned.
Characters not mine, blah, blah, you know all this.
But now that you're here, reading these, I'd love if you could review. So do that, when it comes to an end. Love you, Liz. Love you, readers. And onwards!
You're All I Have
He's it.
She had a nagging suspicion this would happen. Ever since she met him, really. But now the difference is that she's sure – she doesn't have a shadow of doubt in her mind when she says he's it. He's everything. He's all she has.
He's dark. He's dangerous and flawed and sinister and sincere in a funny way. He doesn't abide by rules (in fact, he mocks them), he doesn't care for anything moral or decent or remotely hygienic, and he is completely selfish. He's theatrical and melodramatic, and when she gets under his skin, teasing him and being theatrical and melodramatic right back, she can't help but feel right, in place, somewhere promising, somewhere she belongs.
Sometimes he teases her. Sometimes he kisses her with such passion she can't handle it, and she gasps for breath, her senses as sharpened as if a thin film has come off. And every time she looks, it's him there, him next to her, him in, on, and all over her.
He is a contradiction that will never be solved, he is dishonest and passionate and beautiful for all that he is, and he never makes clear his intentions, but hers are clear enough to her.
She's afraid of him sometimes, but most of the time, she isn't. She can't be; because she knows he is all she wants, all she's ever going to want, and she will brave the darkness for the light she knows is in him somewhere.
He's it. She's known it all along.
Hands Open
He hurts her. He argues with her. He knows what he does to her, when he shouts those things she sometimes deserves at her from across the room, and her cheeks go pink with indignation and an odd sort of betrayal.
He knows exactly what's going on when she huffs away to sulk in her room, petulant and hurting, her composure scratched by his scrambling fingers. He doesn't like seeing her like that, and yet, when the next fight rolls around, he can't help it.
He can't stop it, because there's a reason for what he's doing: He wants to know how much they care for each other.
He's testing her – testing her limits, her reactions, the way she tries to pretend nothing was ever wrong to start with. He digs deep, he always does, and he wants to hear her mean every word that comes out of her mouth; he has no time for games.
He wants her to sink into him, the truth and everything beautifully ugly about it enveloping them, making love and making truth and making everything right in the world.
He just wants to open her.
Chasing Cars
"Will you?"
These are his hesitant words, when he enters her room tonight. He asks her this every night when the crew is asleep and they alone remain awake, the ship gliding across the fathomlessly black waters by the half-asleep First Mate he appointed. It's a habit – and one she loves.
So she smiles, and she says, "Yes, I will."
He flashes a ghost of a grin, and they go off together, to the back deck which is the best for star-gazing, and he finds them their usual blankets, stuffed away behind the barrels. He lays them out and they lay together, and they lie back, staring at the endless sky, an artist's canvas eternally above them, and look at the stars.
She feels warm here, like the world and the wind and the wispy, sultry clouds don't exist. Just them, the stars, the sea; life moving along so slow, just for them. His skin is hot on hers, his hands sweaty as he holds hers and guides her index finger along the sky, pointing out constellations, whispering his seductive stories in her ear.
It doesn't feel right, the two of them sharing these quiet, intimate evenings together, when the rest of the world is in turmoil. It feels surreal, as if they are stealing time as well as their kisses and words and emotions, but at the same time, it is a vital part of her night.
So tonight they kiss, like they do every other night, and more kisses follow as they always do, melting into one another, their lips having an amorous conversation with skittering tongues and ragged breaths; their alliance re-established as the sky meets sea, edges blurring, inseparable until the intrusion of the morning light.
Shut Your Eyes
He has so many stories for her, always a new and exciting tall tale when they spend their odd moments together on deck, and her favorite has always been about a meadow he came across once on his many adventures.
It was a beautiful meadow, he told her; lush, green, with a waterfall. He spent a lot of time there, exploring it and wishing he could stay for the rest of all time, and he describes each part of it with such blazing, passionate detail that she can't deny she believes him.
Sometimes, when they collapse in the rum cellar, drunk on rum and on each other, she tells him she wants to go there someday. The world hurts, she tells him every time, and she wants to be somewhere with him. Somewhere that's there, somewhere he hasn't taken a wench before.
She wants his meadow, and when his eyes glitter with uninhibited ecstasy, he tells her he will take her there when they happen upon it.
Their secret place, it'll be; and one day she will make him take her there, as a promise kept, as if she had never been absent for a single moment.
It's Beginning to Get to Me
It bothers her, sometimes, when they lie in his bed together, fused together and forgetting where one of them starts and the other ends; it bothers her how much he's changed, since she's come to him on the Pearl.
Gone are those distant days where all of him is out of her reach. He is always here physically here now, but the side of him that makes him human, the emotional side, is still as distant as it used to be.
They fight. That's natural. But they fight with the core of their selves now, regurgitating their hearts out of their mouths and flinging them at each other, weapons of dire destruction, and then she goes to his bed at night anyway, and they do what they do, but she can't stop the frayed ends of her emotions spilling over to the awkward morning-after, her lips a bruised red and full of him.
She doesn't understand him. Everything is thrilling, making and breaking and rebuilding, and so wrong, and yet she can't find it in her to do anything about it besides go along for the ride, trying to ignore the should-be's and the what-if's from her mind – she's gasping for air, she gives him whatever she can and he keeps all of it, greedy like the pirate he is, and she doesn't know what's going on when she's with him.
He gives her something, and then he takes it away, and then she gives him something else, which she sort of takes away but doesn't.
It's getting to her, this muddled exchange of allegiances, full of sharp beauty and sorrow and pain and levity, but what can she do? She is stuck here, in this circle, in this cycle, and the only thing she can do is come back for more of him, more of them, because he's all she really has left.
You Could Be Happy
Will's sweet words…Will's sweet face…Will's sweet demeanor…everything about him is a tinkling music box in the world of her mind, and it plays an eternal loop through her head, plays until she goes mad with the memories.
It still hurts her, on those nights when she's with Jack and he holds her like she wishes Will did. Will can't hold her anymore. She knows he had no choice but to accept what had happened, and that Jack had had no choice but to do what was done, but she can't help but feel she should have done something. Anything.
But she hadn't. She couldn't.
She can smell him sometimes, on her clothes, in her hair, in the air when she thinks of him. So when she feels like that, she lets those memories wash over her like a gentle wave of the ocean, and she closes her eyes, breathing in the air he breathes somewhere in the world, under the sky that covers him too, and she hopes he's happy.
That's all. He doesn't owe her any more than that.
Make This Go On Forever
He's standing there on the main deck, and he's watching her rage. She's been raging for a long time, raging away like the worst hurricane to exist, and he can only watch – she doesn't give him time to interject.
She's distraught. She's shouting things about not knowing what his problem was, what he was playing at, wondering if he loved her or if he was using her for some unspeakably horrible agenda, and she looks so intensely real, her eyes alight and glistening, her motions large and desperate, her voice half-strangled.
She breaks it all down for him, and she stays far away from his comfort, but he watches her, watches her shout that he's made his last mistake and she can't ignore it and they should spend their time apart and she's tired of their dense confusion and she doesn't even know why she's still here.
When she's finished ranting, and she retreats to the side of the ship, face in her hands, crumpled and defenseless, he finally approaches her. His hands give her the lightest touch and she recoils as though burned, and she looks at him with those eyes of her and he can't take this anymore, can't bear another second.
So he reminds her that the last word of her last broken sentence was love, love for him, love for them, love for what they had and what they are going to have, and he tells her that she doesn't need to look further.
She's here, and that's all, she shouldn't go, she shouldn't consider it. Just stay. And he doesn't explain, but he does kiss her, his words dead on his lips now melting into hers, and she knows, knows, she can't go.
She wants this to be forever, him and her, together, on this ship, and she won't go. She just can't. She never has.
Set the Fire to the Third Bar
She'd come here because she missed him. She missed him deeply, profoundly, more than she could ever say, and that was why she chased him down and persuaded him to let her on his ship.
She traced the route she'd take, from where she was to the place where he'd ended up being, and her fingers between the two spots seems so small, as though she could look up and he'd be right there, right where she could find him.
He was so close to her in memory, his voice velvety and his eyes penetrating and his being open, fluttering, for her, only for her, always for her. She traveled for him with those images in her head, braving it all, ready to make new memories to replace her old ones, ready to devour him and return to where they should've been, his flushed skin under her fingers and his lips on hers.
His arms warmed her when she slept in cold place after cold place. And when she found him and those arms were real, lifting her up and keeping her close in his own dysfunctional way, she knew that was it.
That he was worth everything she'd done.
Headlights on Dark Roads
She'd been boring. She knew she had been. She lived by the rules and played it safe and never took risky gambles for fear her father would disapprove.
But her father did the same, and now he's not here. She strayed from his path and broke his heart, but she's still here. Doesn't that tell her something? Doesn't that show her how extraordinary she needs to be in order to make it alive in this convoluted, fractured world?
She knows she can see now. She sees life for what it is, everyday on the Pearl, and she doesn't want fear. She doesn't want to get tongue-tied and she doesn't want to keep secrets. She's done being ordinary.
She's a pirate now. Happily a pirate, her sweat on her back and her blood in her mouth and her heart on her sleeve; and she's living for the first time in twenty years.
She's reached out, and she's caught something worth keeping.
She's here. She's broken free, and she's leading her own life, rather than meekly following instructions.
Fire in her veins. Clarity for her eyes. Might deep in her bones.
This is who she is. And she is glad to have found this woman, and have this man who helped unearth them both.
Open Your Eyes
All he had ever wanted was to open her eyes.
Those days on the Pearl, the things that they experienced together, everything he'd said and done and felt, the ache she brought to his structure of steel. After meeting her, and glimpsing the fire buried, low and untold, in her various layers of dressed secrets and lies and want and fear; after he'd discovered her, he didn't want to waste a minute without her there.
Her society didn't understand her. Her fiancé didn't understand her. He didn't even understand her, but he understands some of her, the turbulent spirit that she is.
He knows how much she desperately wants to break free. He knows how she fights and hurts and falls and does her best to live, under her circumstances. He knows she dreams of more, she dreams of his life and what he could give her, but he also knows she doesn't believe in him or what he wants to give her.
He doesn't want to court her, heavens no. But he does want to explore her, get to know every inch of her creamy skin, bring her to the light of what can be done in a world that's fast changing and fast paced.
He can teach her. She can be his protégée, and he'll give her what he has, because she is one of few who can use the knowledge, who can make something out of it, who can lead a revolution. She already has, after all, and his faith in her was not betrayed.
Oh, how desperately he wants her to know this, but things keep getting lost, miscommunication in the way, and she doesn't understand how very extraordinary she is, what a gem she can be.
Nothing has been the same since she entered his life, and now he just wants to open her eyes…so she can confront the depths of herself, and see into his.
The Finish Line
They're an unlikely pair. They've known it from the beginning, and he suspects it was part of the reason he wanted her to begin with.
He sits with her now, on land for the night with their great Pearl looming over their heads. The grassy bank where they are is scratchy, and bugs whine in their ears, but the sky – clearer than they've been for a while – lingers above them, a strange magic not quite there but visible nonetheless, the night winds caressing their faces.
They're touching, but they're not kissing, for once. Water laps playfully on their feet. Images play across their mind's eyes, but each can feel the other's picture through their subtle movements, nearly inaudible sighs.
It's as though the scene is disconnected, disattached, and that in a moment, he'll wake to find it's all a dream, because life isn't like this, not at all.
But for now, he has all he wants – her, the sky, the sea, the ship that will take him to every corner of this place, take him where he needs to go. So he takes a deep breath, his eyes closed, her warm weight by his side, and he lets this dream-reality gently put them both to sleep for the night.
A/N: Urgh…my family environment hates me and distracts me to NO FREAKING END, as does my traitor-side that cheated on a few of these…but there you have it, some song-drabbles I tried so hard to put together for you.
Liked some? Hated others? Let me know – the review button's right down there.