Author's Note: I thought I had only written this a couple months ago and planned to go back and rework it--but then I checked the creation date and, whilst reading November 2006, fell off my chair in shame. So, since I'm clearly not getting any time to fine tune this thing, I'll post it now and risk the criticism. Please let me know what you think! Again, NO AWE SPOILERS. All hypthetical. I know nothing.
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Wreckage
By Dream Descends
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The graveyard was unoccupied. In crooked rows, man-sized mounds of maroon rock were piled low to the ground, each marked at its head with a poorly constructed wooden cross.
Elizabeth instinctively curled her fingers against the fabric of her trousers. She remembered the splinters well.
The haphazard cemetary was situated atop the single plateau in a group of equally haphazard islands; little green buttons in the vast blue coat of the South Pacific. The hill was not a large one; it was only a dozen or so feet above the rest of the land, and its leveled top provided barely enough space for the score of men buried beneath it. On one side it broke off suddenly, giving way to a craggy bluff that disappeared into the turquoise water. The rest of it was surrounded by a thick tangle of tropical foliage, a forest flushed with pink and yellow blossoms in the spring, and dripping a heavy green in what one who was raised in England could not call winter. Framing the verdure was a neat ribbon of bleached sand and the blue stretch of the shoals.
Elizabeth observed all this with a fond, if distracted eye. She made a few brief notes in the blank handbook she held, a leatherbound book stained with salt and age. The page she had opened to was the crude sketch of a map—a map titled 'Otaheite'. It was what the natives called the main island, at the moment only a fuzzy peak of trees across the bay. It had been Elizabeth's home for nearly half a decade.
Four years…she glanced at the sun—thirteen hours…Since she had washed ashore with the wreckage of a ship and its mission. The memories were still vague; only an image of her palms dimpling the sand as she crawled in with the waves, a set of white teeth in a warm brown face, the distant calls in some unrecognizable tongue and a chalice of water thrust in front of her.
It had been this island, and from her location on the plateau she could see the exact spot her jolly boat hit the reef, and the place she had sat for days afterward, staring into the west as the west stared, empty, back at her. In unconscious immitation, she looked there now.
They had sailed from India, the canvas, hull, and helm being that of the Dutchman. With her cursed commander dead, the ship was unexceptional, but it had suited Will nicely. He took to captaincy quickly, and without any youthful illusions. His boyishness had been quite expelled in the years preceding—he might, Elizabeth thought, have made a formidable seaman if he had been given the chance.
Her gaze moved from the horizon to the unimpressive rock grave in the farthest corner of the plateau, nearest to the bluff. It was unmarked, like the rest of them, but she always knew which one was his.
It had been her idea to continue the search. Even the most loyal and fierce of Jack's former crew had thought to give up after Jones had been killed, Cutler Beckett's fleet had been crippled beyond repair…after they had seen half of Singapore's seaports razed to the ground…after an old woman in India had told them she hadn't seen her son for years…The search, after that, had no driving force save Elizabeth's terrible guilt.
They had survived storms before—the fact that they didn't with this one was the only thing different about it. When it was evident their luck had run out, that there was no chance left they might still outlast nature's rage, Will did what Elizabeth had come to understand he would always do. His features blurred in the torrential fall of rain and seawater, his voice unheard against the drumming of feet and waves on the splitting deck, had shoved her into their last unscathed jolly boat before setting out to look for more survivors. She had screamed against the wind for him, but, like Jack, he did not come back.
Less than half of the men were eventually found, whether pushed in with the tide or caught in the natives' palm fibre fishing nets. For a week she canoed to and from her tiny islet, each time with an old friend, a new corpse that she would drag up the hill, her fingernails digging into the drowned, bloated flesh. She would then roll them into the graves she hadn't dug very deep. Her hands would spread against the wet tatters of their clothing and the unkempt head of hair—and then they would fall, hitting the soil bottom with a sickening damp thud.
When it had been Will, she had cried on the mound of dirt left to cover him, so that her face was covered with slimy brown trails of grief. His cheek had been as cold and soft as snow when she pressed hers against it, holding fast to him once more, trembling with fear and heartache like a lost child. When he finally disappeared beneath the work of her makeshift shovel, she buried that child with him.
The sun was almost set, and there was one more grave she wanted to visit. Elizabeth tucked her notebook into her belt and clambored into the canoe tethered at the bottom of the bluff. It bobbed precariously from side to side until she sat down and began to row. Above her, the sky changed from scarlett to coral to plum, each colour reflected by the sea in a muddled dance as both were ablaze with light in the first moments of dusk.
This grave was further inland than the others were on their private piece of land. It was near the central marae, a stone temple shaped like a giant finger protruding out of the ground. Of the many other marae on the island, this one was the largest, and situated at the base of the long chain of steeply sloping mountains that made up the core of the island. It was a place of worship for the natives' pagan gods; onesElizabeth had become familiar with as her own.
After beaching her canoe, she made her way through the seaside village, crowded with huts of mud brick and palm fronds. Many of the inhabitants were now well known to her, and she to them. She smiled at a familiar face.
The marae had no walls, only stone columns supporting the roof, and standing in the centre of these columns one could look directly down on the village and the sea spreading beyond. It was a beautiful view, but one Elizabeth had seen many times before, and she only had eyes for the silhouette of a cross a few yards away, black and featureless against the sunset.
This grave was just as old as the others, but without any companions it seemed out of place. Much like the owner, she decided, kneeling down beside it and resting her fidgeting hands in her lap.
In literal truth, the grave had no owner. There was no body in a hole beneath it, simply stone and dirt. But Elizabeth had felt comforted, having somewhere to remember Jack.
A family of four, all with thick dark hair and skin the colour of tanned leather, passed by. She nodded and bade them, "Bonsoir."
She supposed it was irony, or fate, or perhaps Jack's bizarre sense of humour that had landed her on an undiscovered island where, somehow, a good quarter of the people spoke fluent French. She had thought for a short time that the guilt had driven her mad when the first words she heard were, "Parlez-vous au français?" Her reply had been unnecessarily rude, but after a while she listened to their story of the strange man with skin such as hers, who had come many years before with trésors dorés and taught them all how to speak his odd language. He had lived with them for some time, and even become close friends with their king.
"Mais oui," Elizabeth had only managed to say. She had not desired to hear any more of the man with golden treasure and a gift for persuasion. Why in hell Jack had decided to teach them French, she didn't know. It had probably amused him a great deal.
It was almost entirely dark. Elizabeth stared down at the grave in complete stillness, holding the only position that in four years had managed to bring her some semblance of peace. There sitting beside Jack, with no sound but her breath and the far off rush of the sea, she could open her eyes wide enough to see farther and surer to world's end, where she left some part of her that to today kept her incomplete, a place from which she was forever barred. With an uncontrollable dizziness she would find that she was as lost as the rest of the Dutchman's crew, with no one left alive to know or care if she existed, and each time it hollowed her to such a state of weakness that she had to clutch Jack's cross, if only to keep breathing.
She held it now, new splinters piercing the palms of her hands, her eyelids squeezed shut in a desperate attempt to regain something long gone missing. Compelled, her body pretended to feel the warmth and force he once provided, though without him it was a mere ghost, the feebleness of which made her gasp all the more for his vanished company. He, Will, Jack…he was gone, and thus was she, vanished like the sun setting and its colours reflecting on the ocean's face, dimming into invisibility like a beaten ship, sinking beneath black waves as some forgotten gulf of existence is lost, always, to the sea.
FIN
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