Disclaimer: I don't own it. Everything you recognise belongs to Disney. No infringement
is intended and I'm certainly not making any money from this story.
Summary: Very short. Elizabeth is watching Jack sleep.
Author's note: When I first posted this, I hadn't planned for it to be more than one vignette,
but it evolved into a series and, on top of that, I wrote them out of order... So, just to clarify,
the correct order for the Jack and Elizabeth vignettes are: "Collision", "Vigil", "Accord",
"Clarity" and "Flight". "Faith" is a separate vignette and can be read on its own.
Vigil
by Hereswith
The wind, in her hair. The sound of the surf, of wave upon wave, crashing against the shore.
She watched him sleep.
He had, at last, succumbed to the liquor and he lay on his back, oblivious to the world, snoring
so loud it could, surely, have roused both the living and the dead, as well as the cursed and
the damned.
But he was at rest, if not quiet. The constant shifting and swaying had ceased. The sea didn't
claim the whole of him, now. So she did. Took what she could, while none could see, or
condemn, not even the Captain himself. Especially not the Captain himself.
The moon was up, its face unveiled. It cast a gentler glow, here, than it had on the Pearl.
He looked young, in the silvered light, incongruously so, and very nearly innocent. No truth
in either, still, it made her wonder about the boy he must have been. The fledgling sparrow,
dreaming perhaps, like she had, of an endless horizon.
She felt an odd kinship with that dark-eyed lad, at so many years remove, that she didn't,
quite, feel with the man. But then, with the man, nothing could ever be that simple, no emotion
that unalloyed.
Those fingers, she knew, would have left marks. On the fabric of her shift. On her skin.
On her heart.
And she might not have been drunk enough to allow it, but she was drunk enough to wish
she had.