Disclaimer: I do not own Captain Jack Sparrow, and I most emphatically do not own the magnificence that is Allison Krauss and Union Station.
A/N: My life is depressing right now, so this is what you get. A songfic. With angst. And a lot of it. And if you dare to tell me that Tess is Mary-Sueish, might I ask you take basic math class and learn to add?
The song is "Doesn't Have To Be This Way" by Allison Krauss and Union Station off the album "Lonely Runs Both Ways." Go. Buy. Listen.
"Who so regardeth dreams is like him that catcheth at a shadow, and followeth after the wind." - Ecclesiasticus 34:2
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Sometimes I wonder
Where you're coming from
The weather is unseasonably cool for high summer, cool for the Caribbean at any rate, and she is grateful for the clouds and the storm the herald as she bends over the roiling pot. Times like this always make her think of him, he of the dark eyes and beautiful face. He hasn't come in a long time, long enough for her to know it is long, and she does not keep track of the days anymore.
But on days like this, days where even the very air seems to be expectant, waiting, she is reminded of him and the way his dark eyes make her breath catch still, and how she is always here, expectant, waiting, just as he arrives from some far flung location she does not ask about and he does not speak of.
When you roll in like thunder
Just to turn around and run...
The sky breaks with a low growl and the soft patter of rain on her roof. A breeze kisses her face from the door she knows she closed. She turns and he's there in the doorway, his hair a little wilder, his clothes a little shabbier, but his eyes the same liquid black and his easy grace just as she remembers. Time stops.
"Hullo, Tess."
"Hello," she answers. "How long?"
"One."
It is ritual, this question and its variable answer, ritual like all the pieces of their separate lives they live together. She asks and he answers; one night, two, three, a week. Once he stayed three months while mysterious overhaulings were made on his ship, and by the end they were so heartily sick of each other's company it was a relief when he left. But this time it is one night, and the remainder of the day, and they will make of it what they can.
"Sit down," she says. "You must be hungry."
He sits, and a dream begins.
It's a good thing I don't need you to stay...
"I brought you something," he says around a mouthful of bread. This, too, is ritual. He produces a small wooden box and sets it on the table. She eyes it with trepidation. More often than not the gift is useful, practical, a bolt of cotton, a sheaf of paper, an iron skillet. Once he arrived with a small ball of grey tabby fluff in his pocket, saying the ship's cat had kittens, proclaiming the fluff would be an excellent killer of small rodents one day. It opened eyes the same ridiculous blue as the sea and mewed.
Tess named it Annelise and has no more trouble with mice in her stores or rabbits in her garden. Annelise jumps up into Jack's lap now, butting her head against his hand. She unabashedly adores him. Tess stares at Jack's stroking hand, mesmerized by the contrast of dark skin against light fur. Annelise is a beautiful cat, but a practical gift, and Tess is a practical person.
"Go on, love, open it."
Tess's eyes slide to Jack's face. Yes, most of his gifts are practical things, but sometimes, just sometimes…an ill-concealed grin tells her it is one of those times. She opens the box. A small fortune of large pearls luster up at her. She stares for a moment before saying with a small exasperated sigh, "Oh, Jack…"
"They look like you," he says. "Glow like you when the sun hits them. How can I deny them a bearer their beauty will not overshadow?"
Tess shakes her head, but says nothing, knowing if she refuses them he will contrive some means to leave them here anyway.
"Now," he says. "What can I do?"
You smell like moonlight and early morning rain
Pray 'til a fool might surrender to your pain
Or find a cure for your decay
The rain clears up and he spends the rest of the day doing the sorts of husbandly things that she does herself; fixing the roof, hauling trees and chopping them for firewood, resurrecting the chicken coop which blew over in the last great storm. Tess gathers up the clothes he sheds as he works, and washes them. When he protests, she tells him it is laundry day anyway, but it isn't a Tuesday and they both know she is lying. She yanks out all his darns, too, and if they are no more neat, at least they are the right colors of thread.
She feeds him twice more this day, she who eats less than her cat, but she gains a somewhat perverse pleasure from watching him devour her food like it is ambrosia. She supposes it is, compared to the food on his ship. It amuses him, the joy she gets from feeding him. He laughs and catches her about the waist, fingering her hair and telling her she hasn't changed a bit. She only smiles and gives him more food. He is right, she looks much the same as she did at eighteen, because at eighteen she already looked old enough to be ageless. The weariness in her hazel eyes and white at her temples, souvenirs from tragedies she would never speak of, could do nothing but deepen and broaden over the years. He changes, though, every time she sees him, and sometimes the unreadable blackness in his eyes frightens her because it speaks of a man she does not know nor wishes to.
You're at your best with an ache in your chest
And that worn out old song that you play
They go down to the village that night, he looking slightly tamer than usual after a visit to the millpond with a bar of soap and clean clothes and she slightly more exotic with her hair left loose and a single pearl bound about her throat on a ribbon. They are met at the tavern with glad cries of welcome. The people of this place know Jack and his crew are pirates, but stolen gold spends like any other gold, if not quicker. And no one in all the Seven Seas can play guitar like Jack.
He seats her at a table and his hand rests on her shoulder for a moment before he joins the musicians on their dais. She loves watching him, watching the quick fingers coax such sweet, sad, wild melodies from the old guitar. It is nights like this she feels like any other member of their strange society on this island, a woman with a man and a house and a cat. Her solitude is more by choice than by ostracization; the whole of this village it made of outcasts and exiles and those who carry too much pain to live elsewhere and it is here they find acceptance and healing and perhaps even peace. But she finds she can only handle the barrage of other people's thoughts so often and Jack, and even more mysterious figure than she, helps to deflect them.
Only Jesus and you long to teach us
Should no one be left to betray
His land-wife, they call her. It is not an insult, just a fact, and there are plenty of women in the same position here. She supposes she deserves the title as much as any other woman he visits or has the keeping of. Not that he has the keeping of her, but after nearly twenty years of their strange come-and-go relationship, she cannot thinks of a better term for want she is to him. She has watched him grow from a clever boy with an open face full of naught but mischief to the man with the liquid ink gaze and the devil's own grin. Every time he comes back, he is a little harder, a little more wary. The mischief is still there, but it lies side by side with madness now. He always reminded her of Puck, but now he is a Puck who has seen too many Unseelie things to keep it from his eyes. She thinks one day he will come back and she won't know him at all, and she hopes he stops coming back before it comes to that. He is growing older, although it does not show in his face, and there are silver hairs mixed amongst his matted braids, if one knows where to look. And Tess does.
I don't know the answer but I know who to blame
You can choose the dancer and you can choose the flame
I think you'll find they're one in the same
It doesn't have to be this way
He abandons his guitar for a song or two to drag her onto the floor for a dance, but mostly he watches her dancing with others, laughing at the antics of her partners, her hair trailing out behind her, red and grey and white like the ashes of a fire caught on the wind. The years have agreed with her, he thinks. No longer does her life sit so strangely on young shoulders, pressing down like iron bars. The iron has moved within, somehow, and she stands straight and strong. She is much like iron herself, Tess. Perhaps that is why life never could have worked between them, because iron rusts under the waves.
He watches her and gradually his song changes into something else, something slower, rawer, more dangerous. The musicians quiet their instruments and soon all that is left are the liquid strains of his guitar and a particular look in his dark eyes.
The song ends and the dancing begins again, but neither Jack or Tess are there to see it.
You're at your best with an ache in your chest
And that worn out old song that you play
Only Jesus and you long to teach us
Should no one be left to betray
They walk back up the hill to her cottage without touching, but somehow anticipation and the heavy night air heighten all their sense and when they finally do touch, Tess expects there to be small explosions where his fingers meet her skin. He tastes as he always does, of salt and rum and the bread she baked that morning, and she finds she is grateful that this at least remains the same. They stand in her bedroom, kissing, breathing, fingers skimming over skin and hair and cotton, every movement unhurried and amplified as if they were underwater. Finally, she guides his fingers to her lacings and they undress each other slowly in the darkness. This is her favorite part, the familiarity of rediscovering his body, of the feel of his callused hands and hard muscles, of greeting old acquaintances in his many scars and tattoos and encountering unfamiliar ones, sometimes still raw and painful so he hisses as her fingers brush them. His fingers brush her now, her scars and calluses and muscle. He whispers to her, as their clothes fall piece by piece to the floor, whispers that he loves her body, that it's beautiful. It is a good body, softening slightly from age, but still strong since when he is not here she does all the chopping and hauling and building herself. She looks down at herself, at his hands on her, such a stark contrast to her skin, so white where the sun never sees, and sees beauty in his sailor's fingers and the way they seem to worship what they touch.
He leaves the pearl around her throat as they make love and believes there is no difference in their loveliness save for when Tess comes beneath him and then no pearl could ever match her.
I don't know the answer but I know who to blame
Pray 'til a fool might surrender to your pain
It's a good thing I don't need you to stay
She watches him sleep afterwards, knowing he will leave in the morning. It hurts, this knowledge, but she is used to pain by now and does not let it truly reach her. She only watches him, the slow rise and fall of his chest, memorizing every curve, every shadow, knowing full well this could be the last time she ever sees him in this life. But she does not need him, or so she tells herself, which is good, for someday he will not come back to her island, and she will have a life without the occasional dreaming glimpse of another.
He sighs and turns over in his sleep and she sighs with him, a wistful sound. If she ever gave her heart away, it would be to this man, but her mother taught her long ago to never give something for nothing and Tess knows she would get nothing, nothing but an empty space and constant ache, because his heart belongs to his ship and the sea and the high keening cry of the gulls.
Sometimes I wonder
Where you're coming from
When you roll in like thunder
Just to turn around and run
She wakes and he is gone, although she can feel a slight pressure on her brow, like the ghost of a kiss. She dresses and walks outside to watch his ship leave, Annelise close at her heels. She stands for a long time, watching the wind in the sails and the spray of the sea and the sun rise in a golden blaze.
It's a good thing I don't need you to stay
Slowly, Tess becomes aware that Annelise is mewing very loudly for her breakfast, and the chickens need to be fed and the bread needs to be baked and that time is waiting for her so it can begin again. She spares one last glance at the horizon as the ship slips over it, before turning to her house and her cat and her life. It is better this way, she knows, better to come and go than stay, for in staying he would die, and in staying she would hate him, but she wishes sometimes, just sometimes…
It doesn't have to be this way