Disclaimer: I do not own Pirates of the Caribbean.
Pairings: Jack&Elizabeth Gen, past Elizabeth/OMC, and Elizabeth/Will
A/N: Concrit is very much appreciated, especially in terms of characterisation; I don't believe I managed to capture Jack convincingly. There is also an AU warning for this fic; it's set after the first and possibly second movies, but the events of the third didn't really happen. I haven't written anything in ages, so this is my 'Yes! I can't believe I managed to finish something!' fic. It was also meant to be part of something longer, but I like it just the way it is. So please, read and, hopefully, enjoy!
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Of Friends in an Age Gone By
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He sees Elizabeth for the last time when she is wrinkled and old with the decades she's lived. Her hair, cropped short and as slate grey as the sea in the dead of winter, sticking up in thinning tufts and rebellious, is belied with weary eyes. Her spirit, always fierce and independent, is so plainly tired; for a mortal, nine decades are a long time to live.
Jack can't help but wonder; if he had not drank of the Fountain that tainted the greedy with immortality, if he had not felt the richest of water upon his lips; would he too have aged so visibly, so cruelly? He shudders to think of it.
She sits him at a tiny table and brings out two cups of fine china; expensive once, but now faded and chipped, the handle of one snapped clean off. She sits them down with a clink, and he wonders if he can in good conscience refuse fine English tea this far into Asian territory. But she smiles a little, reaches under the table and draws out a nearly full bottle of rum.
"I wouldn't want to bore you, Jack," and even her voice is heavy and hoarse with time. "Not this late in the game." The purse to her lips, part disapproval but mostly amusement remains the same, unchanged from the prime of her life.
He hasn't seen her for nearly sixty years. Not since Will had found his grave at the bottom of the ocean too young and she'd retired to land.
She tips some of the rich amber liquid into both cups as he watches; the dichotomy of coarse rum in fine china for a moment startling. He pretends he doesn't notice how her hands tremble.
She sits back into her own chair as he leans forward, picking up the cup gently. His rings clink as he makes a show of treating the battered china delicately.
Over the cup he smirks at her and asks, "So, Miss Swann – pardon me, Ms Turner – what does a woman do with her life? Especially such a lovely lass of your stature and -" he leers, raking his eyes along her painfully old frame "-widowhood?"
She takes the question with good grace, lifting a brow wryly as she smiles a little, revealing yellowed teeth and a tolerant humour she'd only just begun to develop when he'd known her.
"A woman of, as you say, stature and widowhood gets remarried, Captain Sparrow. I've been going by Mrs Burenwood for nigh on fifty years now." She sips her rum, smiling.
Jack pauses then, surprised.
"Oh?" he asks recovering himself, and leers again. "The bed get cold when young Will joined Davy Jones? 'Tis understandable, I suppose, I've a been told that a woman has certain – needs."
Her smile doesn't falter, her eyes still serene and heavy.
"Yes, and marriage is convenient in fulfilling those needs; children, a home, financial security. I was lucky when Rodger took my hand."
Jack gulps his rum, nearly draining the petite cup dry. He hasn't ever expected Elizabeth to be content with the life of a lady, has somehow never envisioned her belly swollen with parasitic life. If he had, then the children he would have dreamed would have had Will's chocolate curls and her fiery eyes. They would have run wild on whatever ship the couple had called their own – because he had thought, once, long ago, that the pair had felt the same call to the sea that he does.
Jack has heard the legends of Sirens; every man who sails the seas has. He remembers being a lad without a ship to his name or a reputation to upkeep, when he had loved the ocean with a fierce desperation that drove him from his mother, from his home. When the ocean was the entirety of what he had known, or cared to know. Back then he had fancifully wondered if the legends had not gotten the tales wrong; that it was not beautiful women that called men to their deaths, but the ocean itself.
Perhaps the sea sends out its own call, one so captivating that it binds the men listening to it so completely that denying it is impossible. If so, Jack has always felt that call, and can't imagine a time he won't. Watching the young Will and Elizabeth on their adventures, he had thought that maybe they had felt it too; that maybe the ocean had claimed them as well.
But here Elizabeth sits, old and worn with none of the marks of a life at sea.
Jack finishes the rest of his rum before it occurs to him – the thing that has been niggling at the back of his mind like a decayed hand scratching the exposed matter of his brains.
"Rodger, you said, and I do believe you said Burenwood, so I would think that, because you ascribed those two names to your late husband, I would ask – Rodger Burenwood? You were in fact legally and eternally married before God to the late Rodger Burenwood of the Fidei, and that therefore would then make you, in fact, Mrs Rodger Burenwood?" Jack asks, intent upon Elizabeth, who sits and waits for him to finish his reasoning, smiling in an increasingly bemused manner.
"Yes, Jack, Rodger Burenwood. He captained the Fidei until he was killed. You knew him?" She leans forward, interested, her bones thin and creaky.
"Mayhap; I have heard of him, and it is entirely possible, nay, perhaps even plausible, mayhap certainable that I may have, in fact, met Captain Burenwood. Once or twice, on the seas or perhaps in a tavern. Strange folk you meet in a tavern, especially to be found in the depths of Tortuga and bottles of rum."
Burenwood had captained the late Fidei, pirate ship and evader of the navy for nearly twenty years before the Captain had been killed in an altercation with another pirating vessel. Jack had met the man exactly once; he remembers the greying beard and pierced brow, the eyes widened in shock as he had twisted his sword through the man's gut.
The Black Pearl had been carrying cargo Burenwood had been interested in, and Jack hadn't been in the mood to prove his ship's swiftness by fleeing.
"Yes, I suppose a tavern is a meeting place for all walks of life," Elizabeth draws her eyes over Jack's form meaningfully. "You never know what ship scum you'll run into."
"Now, darling, 'tis not kind to speak ill of the dead so..."
Jack drums his fingers against the dull white paint of his cup, listening to his rings clink. Elizabeth has small pearls in her ears; real, he thinks, hanging low in her sagging ear lobes. Not the only things sagging, he thinks mournfully, remembering a time when her bosom had been a delight to stare at.
Perhaps sensing his thoughts, or just following his gaze, Elizabeth clears her throat; had she been younger it might have been a delicate, well-bred cough, as opposed to the hoarse and vicious sound of a cat expelling a hairball.
Jack politely sips at his rum, only to find the contents gone. The bottom of the tiny cup is completely empty, as ascertained when he tips it upside down over his tongue.
"Jack," Elizabeth says, "I admit to find myself curious as to your own life. I must observe, you are looking particularly well for your age – I could almost be jealous."
Jack smirks, considering the bottle of rum resting innocently between them. "Sea-salt, darling, does wonders for the skin. A healthy regime of exercise, fine foods and rum – 'tis almost enough to make a man believe he hasn't aged a day." He grasps the bottle eagerly, and discards the beaten cup. The liquid burns sweetly on the way down.
"Oh, and I suppose that exercise would be found in the form of running from all forms of authority figures, creatures of the supernatural and barbarians from uncivilised lands?"
"Amongst other things; I've a' been told sea-battles with cutlass and pistol do wonders for a man's – thighs." He leers, watching Elizabeth's eyes dance behind her drooping lids.
"And the foods; I presume they were, oh, acquired from a variety of ships transporting cargo?"
"Beats ordinary sea-fare any day. Alas, profits must also be made, not eaten upon the acquisition of said fine foods, so often enough sea-fare is the menu. 'Tis a sad day when a man must suffer poor food just to eke out a living, a sad day indeed." Jack puts upon a comically anguished face, his beads clicking together as he ducks his head.
"Yes, I would imagine so. It is almost enough to make a woman glad her life was not lived upon the sea."
Elizabeth looks down at her own untouched cup of rum, her eyes, for a moment, losing their calm.
"Almost, Elizabeth?" Jack asks, because for a moment she appeared very... Far away, distant, in a way he had never known himself to be. His eternal life stretches on before him, endless.
"Yes," she smiles, yellow teeth and eyes bright, "almost. You know," she leans forward conspiratorially, "Rodger and I spent our honeymoon on the ocean, in the Fidei. We were chasing a merchant ship, hull full of exotic spices and coloured silks from India. We caught them after a week of sailing, just days before they were to make port in London. And, can you guess what they had, baskets full of them? Oranges. And these had to have been the brightest, biggest such fruit you've ever seen Jack. Rodger gave me one, and oh, the sweetness!" She clasps her age-spotted hands together on her lap, eyes looking somewhere over Jack's shoulder. "I had never tasted an orange like it, nor have I since."
Jack drinks from his bottle, holding words behind his teeth where they can do no harm. He wants to ask her why, then. He wants to ask her how she kept away, when the sea had already claimed her.
"Will – my first born – tasted sea air for his first breath. I don't think it ever left him; he sails now, has since he was a boy. Not pirating, and sometimes I thank God for it; your life, Jack, has stolen two husbands from me. Sometimes, and I'm not proud of it, but sometimes I wish Will and I had never met you."
All Jack can see in her face is age where perhaps there should be sadness. Or mayhap it's the other way round; sadness twisting her face so completely it is wizened into an old woman's, a stranger's; ancient.
Her voice is a quiet rasp as she continues.
"But most days I remember to watch the waves lick the sands and thank God that Will and I had five good years together, spent upon the ocean and chasing the freedom you taught us to want. I thank Him that Rodger was enough to bring light back into my life again, to return a part of me to the sea. Fifteen years is a long enough time to learn to love someone, Jack, long enough to miss them when they're gone."
The room rings with a heavy stillness, Jack not sure if it is his to break. Elizabeth sits, for an endless moment, still and silent, gone. Then, with a sigh and trembling hands, she raises her cup to her lips and drinks. It is empty when she puts it back down, and Jack feels the tension release; like the winds that vanish in the centre of a storm.
"Well," Jack drawls, uncomfortable and wondering why he had come at all. He had been looking for Elizabeth; pirate, fighter, Will Turner's wife; perhaps out of some misguided sense of reminiscence. He isn't sure if he found her.
He takes the bottle with him as he stands, intent on a quick escape.
"T'were lovely to see you again darling, it has really been far too long. But, you know, pirate; things to steal, places to pillage, whores to visit – it really is quite a busy life, so."
He doesn't move a step before she stops him.
"Jack." She hasn't moved from her seat, her hands still clasped around the china cup without a handle. Her hair, thin and grey, still sticks up in tufts and the lines of her skin, papery thin and heavy on a frame too small, sag in shadowed folds. Her eyes no longer snap with anger or excitement or joy. Instead, she sits, quiet and old, holding him there with just her voice.
"Before Rodger died," and Jack's stomach tightens, "he was chasing the ship with black sails." Her eyes bore into his, deep and fathomless, her face tight, silent, locked up like precious gold hides inside.
"I never told him about my adventures on the Black Pearl, or with her Captain; I wasn't sure he would believe me." She laughs a little as her eyes slide away from his, a brittle sound that holds only the memory of her youth. "No, that isn't right; I was being selfish. He went out to sea for months on end, having adventures and living with the rocking of a ship underneath him constantly; while I remained, land-bound, raising children like that's all I was; a womb, a breast, a heart for his progeny. I loved him, Jack, don't you dare misunderstand me, but sometimes I felt that it was the worst of cruelties; for him to teach me to love the sea again, and then bar me from it."
She is quiet for a moment, and Jack considers the benefits of turning and just walking out, of refusing to listen to this; but he stays. He thinks it might have something to do with the fragile bloom of guilt that he is failing to brush away.
"So I never told him about my adventures on the Black Pearl; I wanted to hold them tight from him, to keep something of myself, separate from 'Mother' or 'Wife'. To remind myself that once, once I had sailed the ocean as any pirate, no better or worse from the men I lived beside." She looks at Jack again, eyes tired, so very tired.
"So you can imagine my surprise, when he comes home after nearly a year at sea, and he tells me of the mystical ship with black sails that he's chasing. That he's going to catch just to walk her deck, to stand at her prow, to best the mythical Captain. Jack. Sparrow." She draws out his name, mocking bitterness heavy on her tongue.
Jack's jaw tightens as he thinks of the men who have held onto the spokes of his Pearl's wheel, who have dared to steer her as if they had any right to be her Captain.
Elizabeth looks at him and he remembers shocked eyes beneath a pierced brow, hot blood dripping onto the back of his hand.
"Rodger was dead two months after that, and I had to tell his children that Davy Jones had him now, and wouldn't be giving him back. And I knew, Jack, I knew that he'd found the ship with black sails, and that you'd killed him."
Jack wonders if now would be a good time to put his glib tongue to use, to assure her that if he had known – well. If he had known he would never have visited her, because her husband would still be dead. He has had to watch the Black Pearl sail away from him too many times in a life stretching longer than any other's; any threat to her is dealt with swiftly. He learnt his lesson on mercy long ago.
His mouth remains still though, not even a lie, a protest, crawling up his throat. Some part of him wants to know what Elizabeth will do now.
She stands laboriously; fragile hands pushing her upward, her dress, for a moment, pulling sharply at thin shoulders. She circles the table and approaches him, tiny and bowed, but her eyes are still fierce. For a moment he expects her to slap him, and maybe if she were younger she would.
He doesn't move when she raises her hand and rests cold fingertips to his cheek, brushing against stubble.
"I hated you for a long time. Maybe I still hate you; I don't know anymore. But," and her voice breaks, "but, I think he would have been happy, to catch the ship he spent so long chasing. I think he would have died sooner or later, no matter had he found the Pearl or not, and I would still have been alone." Her eyes, framed in deep lines, weary, are steady as her mouth twists. "I think I'm glad that you were the one to kill him."
Her hand slips away from his face and she stands there, waiting, but for what he doesn't know. He wonders what she sees when she looks at him, whether he is the same person she knew so many decades ago.
Long moments pass, still and silent, and though he has them to spare, he is conscious that she does not; that each wrinkle, each breath, is a steady countdown to her death.
In the end, he says simply, "Men die, Elizabeth, 'tis what people do."
And if he has quickened death for more than a few, then he refuses to regret. His life will be too long to repent for every misdeed, and he refuses to spend his life in penance.
Her lips twitch, and she murmurs, "Save for the infamous Captain Jack Sparrow, of course."
He smiles in response, and replies, "A' course. A man's immortality belongs only to the truly great; to those who will live on in deed beyond even his own immortal life. Mortality is only useful when one is, in fact, mortal."
"I'll try to remember that," she says, and laughs, bright for a moment like youth was only yesterday.
Jack leans in to kiss her cheek because the thought of kissing her lips sends a shiver down his spine, and not in the good way. But he pauses half way there, and thinks of another kiss they shared.
"No," he says, backing up and turning away. "Lessons learnt and all that rot; a woman 'tis only as good as what a man walks away with, after all the fun is said and done." He takes a swig of the rum, disappointed to find it halfway empty already.
"Jack!" Elizabeth exclaims, voice still hoarse, scandalised and laughing.
He turns back at the door, looking at her, considering. Finally he bows, gallant and exaggerated, mocking. But he finds that he means it when he says, "Miss Swann, t'has been a pleasure."
He leaves then, but he hears her laughing, old and brittle with the faint remnants of life.
"No, Jack, it's been an adventure!"
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Fin
A/N: Please leave some feedback, especially characterisation wise. Of course, just a short comment is very much appreciated too. ;)