Disclaimer: The actual PotC franchise has nothing whatsoever to do with me, savvy?
Something Rich and Strange
He didn't like the way the witch was looking at him.
It was something about her eyes: the way they glittered, black like the night sea under a new moon, a placid, opaque surface that hid treacherous unfathomed depths and brimmed beneath with unseen swimming sinuous hungry things. And something, too, about the knowing smile that curved her mouth when she caught him looking back, the way her red tongue passed over her full lips, over her stained teeth, as if she were a cat considering a bowl of cream.
The bowl of cream could not feel as discomfited by this as did he. The bowl of cream certainly could not flush deep and hot under her gaze with guilt for some crime he had neither committed nor conceived.
He did not like it at all. He didn't trust her, this Tia Dalma of mysterious pronouncements and heathen spells, not least because Jack Sparrow had, inexplicably and to a bad end.
Which only served to remind him of how much, too, he did not like the way Elizabeth had made a practice of not looking at him at all throughout their long journey to the end of worlds, the way she lifted her chin and turned her head away each time he tried to meet her eyes, pressing her lips together as if holding back some speech of defiance or dreadful breach of pride.
At least he knew what she was guilty of, although he could hardly believe it. The girl he could not remember not loving, his fair and shining lady, was no cold-blooded murderer. He did not know the woman who, hard-voiced and Arctic-eyed, had admitted to giving Jack to the Kraken's maw. He was not sure he wanted to. Jack had never been a friend, exactly, but he had been friendly enough with Elizabeth--more than friendly, he amended, not without some bitterness--and she had as good as killed him herself; was, as she declared to Will with the facility of long recitation, not sorry; because she had done it for them, for herself and Will, and would do it again if she had to, without hesitation.
He did not doubt her, but the chill in her voice had seeped into his bones and made him shudder.
Nonetheless, he did not like in the least the way Elizabeth was looking at Jack at this very moment, with a searing kind of desperation; nor did he like the way the miraculously living Captain was looking back at her, though he could not read that expression at all, except to realize uneasily that it bore nothing of the cold fury she had certainly earned from her would-be victim.
Elizabeth must have expected anger as well, for she seemed to steel herself for the justice of a blow; still, she darted forward to grasp at Jack's sleeve, speaking a few brief words too low for Will to overhear. Jack rounded on her to take her roughly by the upper arms, speaking quietly as well but at some length, and Will started towards them; but was halted by the pressure of a warm body against his back, a restraining hand firmly on his shoulder, and Tia Dalma's rich and oddly musical voice purring close at his ear,
"Stay, William Turner. They two birds of one feather, and 'tis not now the proper time nor place to stand between them."
"But she's my fiancée," he protested, trying to shrug her off; but she pressed closer still, and despite himself he felt her warmth seep through him, slow and sweet like honey.
"A woman such as she belong to no man, fair William," she said, and he felt, too, the light puff of her breath on his skin.
He jerked away from her, from the curious prickling sensation she had awakened at the back of his skull, the nape of his neck, that was not entirely foreboding. "What do you know about Elizabeth?"
"What don't I know? Her path, she does not lead the same as yours. And yours is not the hard and bitter fate of him that tries to keep a woman who do not want to be kept."
"I don't understand what you mean," he said, obstinately, but his stomach sank at the sight of Jack's mercurial golden grin as the pirate wrapped an insolent arm around Elizabeth's waist and ushered her towards the Black Pearl's Great Cabin: wild dark head and proud bright one bent together in the intimate absorption of private council.
"Do you not?" And now Dalma slipped around to peer up at him, head tilted, leaning in; he found himself taking an involuntary step back. There was no escape from that piercing gaze, so he met it warily; but he could not read her in turn. "Then maybe you do not want to know. Just as Elizabeth does not yet know her own heart, no more than do Jack Sparrow."
"I know her heart," he said. "And I know my own."
"Poor William," she said, and raised a hand to touch his cheek; a gesture that startled him and held him frozen. His mother used to caress him so, when he was very small. "As I do. A heart strong and true, it is, and noble. A heart born for greatness. For destiny. For the sea. Him could beat forever, that heart, that fine, sweet heart..."
Whether she had stretched upwards or he had leaned towards her, he couldn't say, but her lips nearly brushed his as she spoke; her damp breath was almost sweet, like a warm sea-wind, and her hand lingered on his cheek while her other toyed with the fastening of his sword belt, drawing him closer still.
"What spell is this," he said, finding with some effort the words and the breath to speak them.
"No spell," she murmured. "No magic but the oldest, and the pull of like to like."
"I am not like you," he said.
But she only smiled that wide smile of hers, and kissed him, just as he must have known she would, although he could not have known that he would allow it.
She tasted of salt and the bitter spice-tang of cacao; he closed his eyes, feeling at once the weight and weightlessness of water, a diver's descent from a translucent surface into the living dark below. Behind his eyelids he saw, with the over-brilliant immediacy of a dream, the vivid traceries of branching coral and the darting flash of small bright lives, inevitably shadowed by the lazy sharp silhouettes of those that hunted them. His ears were full of ocean-thunder, rhythmic as a heartbeat (hers or his own? he could not tell) and mingled with the strange sonorous haunt of distant whale-song; while through it all wound a wild desolate music he had heard before: in the grim holds of the Flying Dutchman, organ notes that had shuddered through the very boards of that fell ship until it seemed as if the souls of all her lost sailors added their voices to the dirge of Davy Jones.
He started back from her then, blinking his eyes open like a man surfacing from sleep or other depths, strains of fey melody chasing themselves to echoes in his mind. "What are you?" he demanded, staring.
Her face was human enough, but her eyes glowed with a faint but unmistakable phosphorescence, like the gleaming wake a ship leaves in certain warm waters, in the dark. "I think you begin to guess already," she said.
He said, confusedly, "But Davy Jones is the sea. I heard him say so."
"So he may like to claim," she answered, smiling still, despite an unexpected undercurrent of sadness in her tone. "He is mistaken, as any man who ever thought he was a woman's master. But the sea rule him yet, and will yet splinter him."
She said it with a kind of distant pity that was nonetheless entirely devoid of mercy. Will thought of Jones's small, mean cuttlefish eyes, the voice that rang with the icy oblivion of black fathoms beyond life or hope, the grotesque limbs, clawed and tentacled--a creature who had been human once, rendered now by bitterness and despair and some unholy power into the sea's cruel mockery of a man's shape--and shivered. Then, startled by a lightning-strike of insight, he said in a rush, "You're her. You're the woman Davy Jones cut his heart out for, aren't you? And you're the one that made him what he is--"
Tia Dalma had turned away from him, looking out over the fading fire of the twilit ocean, and a west wind rose up and lifted her hair until it streamed around her face like tangled seaweed in a strong tide. She seemed taller then, and remote, though she still stood close to him; when she spoke, the lilting accents of her speech took on a more resonant timbre, as if her words were not spoken by her but through her, in some way Will could not define. "No," she said. "Davy Jones fell in love with a woman who did not exist. And him alone made him who and what he is. You have heard the story already."
"Not all of it," he said. "You've only told one version, haven't you? And all are true...But some are more true than others."
Her eyes glinted at him. "You are a clever man, William Turner," she said. "Perhaps too clever. And what would such a truth be worth to you?"
"They say the truth will make you free."
He was stalling, and they both knew it; but she looked at him meditatively for a long minute in the half-light, before she said in that same soft resonant voice, "As it may do indeed, for the one who tells it. But we are speaking of you. Are you willing to pay the price of hearing the answers to your clever questions?"
"That depends," he said. Miles from solid ground now, and gambling without knowing the rules or the stakes. But the winnings might be the difference between freedom and the Locker for Bill Turner, and Will had made an oath he meant to keep. "What price are you asking?"
A sly, slanted look. "The full price of knowledge is never known 'til all is told. But I will only ask of you what already belong to me."
"And you only speak in riddles," he cried, with sudden fury. "What do you mean? What do you want of me?"
Her fingers stroked his cheek again, and again she smiled her slow hunter's smile. "Three times the sea has swallowed you," she said, "and three times she give you back to the world; and you are three times mine."
"Speak plainly," he said, though the answer to the riddle surged hot through his veins and tightened in his groin.
"Then come," she said, "I will show you;" and she was like the tide.
He did think of Elizabeth then, as he had not since the witch's kiss had swept him from her shore; thought, too, of the way Elizabeth had molded herself into Jack Sparrow's side, how she had not spared the barest glance of shame over her shoulder for him; and he followed Tia Dalma down into the darkness below, and told himself it was mere witchcraft that compelled him.
In candlelight, her skin was smooth and dark and luminous, and her body younger and firmer than he would have guessed; not that he had speculated about such things, before the enchantment that ensnared him now. How old was she? She was unwrinkled, unfaded; but she had known Jack a long time ago, or so he'd thought. There'll be no knowing here, only there was and would be. He trembled as she pushed his shirt from his shoulders and ran her hands—soft palms, stained nails—over the muscles of his chest and abdomen, and said, "I can't--I've never--" But his voice hoarsened as she shrugged the bodice of her dress down so that her breasts spilled out full and dusky-round, and failed utterly when she took both his hands and led them to her; and he found, with some degree of surprise, that he could. Her wide aureoles were a half-shade darker again than her skin; when he brushed his thumb over one—too roughly, he had thought—she arched against his hand, the puckered brown nipple hardening beneath his curving fingers.
It was not the knowledge he had bargained for, but he was beyond haggling. She kissed him and bit at his lip with small sharp teeth until he gasped; laughed low in her throat. Her eyes gleamed eerily in the gloom of the tiny cabin when she turned her head: fey or feral, not quite human, like the queer grace of her movement. He heard his own heart loud in his ears, quickening with fear or lust or both, and she must have heard it too, for she laid her palm over it before setting parted lips to the same spot, her tongue shockingly hot and wet on his skin.
"Tia," he breathed, foundering, and then, "is that really your name?"
"I have," she said, "been called by many names. Your name for me will do."
And when, a little while later, he murmured, "Calypso," as she flowed over him, she smiled as before and was silent; but he laid his ear against her belly like a shell, and heard the ocean.