Disclaimer: Disclaimed!

I'll date this early in Will's captaincy, say, two to six months. This conversation didn't fit into the larger Captain Turner piece I wrote, so here it is as a one-shot.


"I'm missing her."

He stared over the rail at that thick dark deep below, like the black of a god's eye, specked with pale forms wafting restlessly. There had been a storm.

"Come to the fo'c'sle, William. Have a tot of grog, and you can get the thoughts out."

Captain and father stood at the bow, the wet wind creeping softly at their backs as it pressed the ancient ship across the Undersea. Will was surprised to see him, just as Bootstrap was surprised to find himself at his side. Neither knew how much of their habitual distance was anger, and how much the privacy that came naturally to the Williams Turner.

Young William shook his head. "No," he murmured.

Bootstrap made to retreat, but his Captain looked at him, humbly, meekly, sadly. He stayed and leaned at the rail. He understood leaving a wife.

"I don't miss her, exactly," William said, and grimaced at his own words, clenching a fist. Bootstrap raised his eyebrows. "You know who she was?"

He knew her name, her face, her valor. "No, William."

"She was the governor's daughter," his son explained, wistful or bitter—his face was turned to sea. "I was the smith's apprentice. We met as children, and I hardly saw her before I proposed. Then when the Pearl…" He glanced back, directly, and Bootstrap saw his face twist in pain, heard his voice dying. "When I thought she…before…"

Bootstrap waited as his son gathered his thoughts, dug his nails into the wood, turned to stare up at the spars.

"All I had to do was worship her," he whispered, his eyes vacant as his thoughts roamed long into the past. "And she would always be there, Elizabeth, with a smile like the day she saved me." He rubbed his hand on the rail. "I would think about her face, in the smithy…I lived that way, it was enough. But after all that happened after, what she…what she told me…" He laughed, a helpless huff. "I don't know what she's doing."

"Come now, William," said Bootstrap with a nervous smile. "I met the lass. She's a good egg if ever there was one, all you said and more…"

"Not like that. It's… Before…" He winced, and Bootstrap lost all hope of patching the gaps between the before's and after's. "I thought I knew her once, when she was the governor's daughter. She was my angel, that was all I knew, all I needed. But now, there's so much I never imagined—she's become—she was all along—" He caught his breath and laughed once. "And ten years is so long; she will do so much in the world."

He shut his eyes, somehow seeming to fold into himself without moving, to freeze, harden, retreat. "And I am missing everything."


Good lord, I just published a relationship one-shot. I must have had a stroke.

Please tell me if you thought anything. All reviews will be answered in rhyming verse. Even flames. I love flames. I swear I will craft little poems for you---not love poems, though, because that would be creepy.