Summary: It's not an entirely new development, this "curiosity" between them.
Notes: Something of a sequel-in-spirit to hereswith's lovely On the Docks. Weird tense-switching more or less intentional. Written as a birthday gift for geekmama2.
(Also fulfills potcdogwatch drabble prompt 18, "letters of marque," although it's very much not a drabble at just over 700 words.)
Curiosity
She'd expected an entirely different reaction from him, some salacious remark, perhaps, off the double meaning present in her threat. (Handling swords—what wicked impulse had possessed her to phrase it like that, baiting him with innuendo he could hardly miss if he tried?) Instead, she'd watched his eyes drift shut, close enough to feel him inhale quick and sharp before he turned, and his eyes were dark, so dark as he said again, "Persuade me."
She could not hold his gaze for long, not when he looked at her that way, not while her heart startled and raced and the heat rushed to her cheeks. She'd spun away, forgetting for the moment the letters he'd plucked from her unresisting fingers.
He'd looked at her thus before, the bravado and manic legerdemain of Captain Jack Sparrow dropping away so that she glimpsed, with a shock like recognition, something of what his legend obscured. Scars and a living man. She thought suddenly of the day and night they'd passed together on that island, a flare of bonfire joy in that dark, fearful, frantic time; of sand and rum and a sky full of stars, of that damnable song. How they'd danced, how he'd slipped his arm around her as he spoke of freedom, two reputations in tatters and both of them past caring.
Alone with him, and drunk as he'd been, he hadn't once tried to force himself on her, to take what wasn't offered, though she'd woken rather more sober than she had been, later, to find she'd curled into him in sleep, unconsciously seeking his warmth as the wind blew a slight chill off the sea.
"I trust him, that's all," she told James Norrington, when he caught her smiling at this secret memory, and it wasn't a lie. But she was guilty nonetheless, for she could not trust herself.
The compass needle trembled; spun, and settled.
It told her true North was a pirate, standing—no, posing silhouetted against the wide sky, glass in hand, eyes on the horizon; she told herself it was only the letters in his pocket she wanted more than anything, just then.
For Will, of course. She wanted them for Will.
No. Elizabeth Swann always knew exactly what she wanted; and she knew that was a lie.
More than a year ago, she had lain restless and half-tipsy by Jack Sparrow's side as he slept, willing him to wake, too, and find her nestled against him, her body craving touch, aching to know and to be known. And now she ached again, and cursed him as she'd cursed him then, and turned her thoughts determinedly to her beloved, lost at sea. Widowed before her marriage; she felt a sudden sick pang of foreboding, for fool's words or no, they echoed now in her mind with the ring of prophecy.
But Will was not dead, and she was no ghost, but a woman, flesh and blood and troubled by it; and by alarmingly intuitive pirates who lounged negligently and far too close beside her on the quarterdeck steps, offering her rum and "marriage."
"Curiosity," he says, smug and stalking her like a cat, talking of longing; she wonders how he knows, and remembers another conversation by a ship's rail, looking out to sea.
Peas in a pod, and she stalks him in turn with meanings spoken and unspoken, until his canary smile fades and she's drawing him towards her, where she wants him. She's flushed with triumph, as intoxicated by this power she's discovered she holds over him as she's ever been by strong drink. It's only when he finally touches her--his hand brushing her cheek light as tenderness or trepidation, a strand of wind-roughened hair threaded through his fingers, his eyes fixed, black-dilated and intent, on her parted lips--that she realizes just what game they're playing, and how high she's raised the stakes. In a moment his mouth will be on hers, and all bets will be off.
But then his face changes as if she's slapped him, though as yet she's no more than considered it, and he doesn't kiss her at all.
She presses her lips together, pretending to believe she's won; but she suspects she's still lost, in the end, for she aches more than ever.