A/N: Surprise Liz! This is a pre-birthday present for XxIcexX, or her real nickname Liz, because I got the idea while watching the end of AWE and couldn't resist posting it for her. I love you darling – and I love all the rest of you who are reading this message right now! If you go on to read the one-shot (which is random and written at four in the morning) please remember to review. Enjoy!
"Love dictates, but a kiss writes the secrets of the heart"
-- Anonymous
One kiss, he muses.
He'd had her for only one kiss – although that kiss was surprisingly long and quite passionate.
For those few moments out of time, she did something he never thought she'd do. He'd completely misjudged her, and for that, she blew him away when she finally showed off her true colors:
He thought that she abhorred him, that she would never want to spend her time with someone like him when there was a whelp to be taken. Yet, for that one kiss, the whelp no longer mattered; for that one kiss, she was his, and he let himself be hers hers.
She could deny it all she liked, but he knew she enjoyed it. He knew she wanted it, despite the insidious deed she did afterwards. He knew that something he'd said or something he'd done had finally won her over to his side, and her curiosity had taken over from there.
It was almost frightening how alike they could be – completely selfish when it suited them, but passionate in every action they performed, including that nightmare-and-fantasy of a kiss.
He remembers her now, as he floats away on his little dingy towards an endless ocean of cerulean possibility.
He remembers her hair – damp, wet, stringy, and attractively golden-brown when he'd flown her to the Pearl on his parachute.
He remembers her eyes – brown, serious, ardent, while being utterly deceptive. He could see himself in them; they promised him that the Elizabeth Swann he'd first saved from death and a marriage proposal was gone for good, and the crazy-to-boot Pirate King he'd elected would be there to take her place.
He remembers the various ways with which she'd looked at him – angry when he fretted about the burned rum, pain-staking when she'd tied him to the mast of his own ship, unwillingly curious when they'd discussed that very subject, surprised when he elected her King.
He also remembers the way she'd looked at the whelp when they all thought he was going to die. How she desperately cupped his face in the wet hands that had killed many over the past hours, looked fleetingly but pleadingly at him through the hellish storm to do something, anything, to save him. How her eyes – so hard and similar to his moments ago – had, in the face of danger, softened all the way back down to the naïve, innocent teenager who nearly died a corset-induced death. How there was profound, childhood-nursed love in them for him that he would never see for himself.
He even remembers the way she smelled the last day – like seaweed and water, but with something that was uniquely her own mixed in. Something sweet, like strawberries, or rum with three pounds of sugar in it.
But, the biggest thing he remembers about her as he lies back to stare at the endless sky above him, is their one kiss.
The one kiss that changed their lives, the one kiss that became both their hell and their heaven – that brought out the best and the worst in them, that defined who they would become in the next weeks before they saw each other again.
It didn't matter that he would probably never see her again, that he would never feel her hair, admire her eyes, or smell her; he still had her kiss, the memory of the frantic, lust-filled motions her lips made against his, and that was all he wanted.
As he'd told her: "Once was quite enough."
He smiles as he picks up his bottle of rum from beside him and pops the top off of it. Muttering to himself as he's come into the habit of doing, he quietly begins to sing, "We're rascals, scoundrels, villains, and knaves, drink up me 'hearties, yo ho. We're devils and black sheep, really bad eggs, drink up me 'hearties, yo ho. Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me."
He raises his bottle in a toast, and says in his usual drunken drawl to the clouds floating above him – "To you, your majesty."
And with that, he drinks heartily – each drop passing down his parched throat somehow inexplicably tasting a little bit like her, and that one damned kiss.