Summary: In the aftermath of World's End, Elizabeth takes stock of what's been won and lost, and someone she thought she'd never see again stops by for a few words about freedom, curses, and true love.
Note: Look, Ma! Canon! Still working on making it all okay in my head (and heart.) I kind of hate this title but couldn't come up with a better one.

Ocean Heart

The sun has vanished below the bright horizon, the afterimages of that green flash still pulsing in Elizabeth's vision, fading fast but burned into her memory. She's alone, now, and maybe that's the same as freedom—she has no home now, nowhere to go; she could go anywhere—but she can't bring herself to believe it.

Nightfall brings a chill off the sea; she shrugs on her warrior's coat over her simple black dress, slips her feet into her boots, wraps her arms around her knees and tries not to shiver. She wonders if either of the men who have left her here thought about what would happen to her, afterwards. Both of them sailing away to their horizons.

She wanted to be married to Will Turner, she tells herself. She got what she wanted. And yet she feels she's lost even more, everything and everyone else she's ever had or loved, given it all up for a heart in a box and a decade's promise. She sifts sand through her fingers, a makeshift hourglass. The stars emerge above her, twinkling and so very far away, but closer and more tangible than the man to whom she's sworn her life.

She lays her palm atop the chest, feels the steady beat within; snatches her hand away. She hasn't dared to look inside. If it's supposed to be some comfort to her, his heart to be taken in her hands if she wishes, she's ungrateful. She's ungrateful not to think that every ten years is better than never again or never at all. But if it was never again, or never at all, she could school herself to stop wanting it, to move on. Could learn not to feel this tearing pain in her own heart, could learn to live like she was whole.

Ten years, she thinks, is such a very long time.

She cries then, silently, lifting her face to the sky, tears streaming down her face unheeded, as though the sea inside her has risen in storm-surge, overflowed. She cries for her father, for James, even for Sao Feng, for all the men she met and fought beside, whose blood she has walked through into her bitter victories. For Jack, and the look in his eyes when he said everything but what he meant, and would not say goodbye. For Will, already changing while she lay with him to a man she does not know; and she thinks perhaps she never really did.

The touch of a gentle hand on her shoulder, in her wind-roughened hair, startles her. She twists around; in the shadows, she can just make out the familiar dark face with its inked designs, the strange lovely smile that she now knows carries pain and knowledge, both.

"Tia Dalma?" she breathes.

"That was never my name," says the apparition seated on the rock beside her; but she is not an apparition, for the hand brushing tears from Elizabeth's cheek is warm, human, a mother's hand, a sister's.

"But—I thought you were gone. You changed. Became the sea. Became--"

"I was released," says Calypso. "It is not the same as being lost. I am free now, to take whatever form that fits, to go where I will and love as I desire."

Bitterness rises in Elizabeth's throat like bile, choking her. "I can only imagine what that must be like for you," she says; and despite her sarcasm, she can imagine, can understand. Goddess and mortal, perhaps they are not so different, women both and wanting the same things.

"I know, child," Calypso says softly. "I know."

"Did you love him? Davy Jones?"

Calypso smiles, her eyes luminous and distant, starlight on a dark sea. "I never stopped loving him."

"But you didn't wait for him."

"It is not my nature. Not to be possessed, nor bidden, nor bound by any man. Mortal, immortal, it makes no difference, and my heart is like the ocean; it holds many. But he--he desired to be held as the only one, and proof of that I could not give him."

"And so he imprisoned you as he had been imprisoned?"

"Davy Jones," Calypso says, "wanted power, and it was power he was given, not imprisonment. I gave him eternal life. But he wanted more, always more. He wanted mine, and he took it from me when I refused to give it freely. It was that power, stolen and perverted, that left him cursed. Nothing more or less."

"Not all men are like that," Elizabeth says, thinking of the earnest plea in Will's voice and the devotion in his eyes when he offered her, literally, his very heart. How could she offer him any less in return? She leans her head on Calypso's knee, as she once leaned on her mother's knee when she was a very small child, and the goddess strokes her hair as her mother had, then.

"And you will say that what you have given, you have given by choice," Calypso says. "But you were a king and a warrior, my child, and now you are but a girl weeping on a lonely shore; and the choice you made was not your choice at all. Nor will it be your last."

Elizabeth sits up. "What do you mean by that?" she demands.

But Calypso is gone; a soft sea-wind ruffles Elizabeth's hair where the goddess's hand had lain a moment ago, a breath, a whisper, a kiss from another world.

"What do I do now?" Elizabeth cries. "Where do I go?"

She receives no answer from the fickle wind, nor from the star-flecked sea, and she knows then that she must make her own, this time: answers, and choices, and home. That she will leave the girl who wept on this beach behind forever, and become.

Ten years is, after all, a very long time; and her heart is like the ocean.