A/N This replaces an earlier, incomplete version.
Jack was there when William was born. He'd arrived three days before – at least a fortnight too early by the midwife's predictions, but he'd shown up with the utmost conviction that the baby was going to be born soon.
Elizabeth knew he was right. The knowledge danced with fear in the pit of her stomach because it was too early and she didn't know if she could bear losing a child, especially without her husband.
Three days early, and on that first day she was glad to see him. The air had cooled off over autumn and the Pearls black sails had billowed ominously across the bay. Jack rode in on a longboat as his hip sailed for safer ground. This was not Port Royal, but there were still few ports that would give berth to that ship willingly.
Weatherby Swann could hear them from downstairs. His wife had had a difficult pregnancy. This was not her first, but the first that had come to term and he prayed with every corner of his soul that she had the strength to birth the child. Theirs had been a love affair from the start – not all marriages were, he knew – but he considered himself fortunate to have found someone who made him truly happy.
On the mantlepiece was a glass bottle with a small wooden ship. Hers. Weatherby had never paid it much attention before, but now, with all the waiting he found himself looking at the detail – the sails and rigging, the miniature lifeboats. The sound of his own breathing was like the squall of the ocean and he didn't hear the doctor the first time he cleared his throat.
It was Beth who has wanted children. Wanted them desperately and with every miscarriage she seemed to sink a little further away from him.
The doctor cleared his throat again. "I'm sorry."
She reached the beach shortly after he did. This side of the small island was shared only by Elizabeth and a few families, the populated side only by a dozen or so more. Port Phillip was half the size of Port Royal, barely registering on a map, and consisting of a small village and a scattering settlers making a living off a rocky and inhospitable island.
The island was her punishment. Her father's will specified that she had to be taken care of, and her cousin, who had inherited, had followed the will to the letter and not a typeset beyond. She was 'discouraged' from returning home and had settled comfortably in Port Phillip. The rumours followed her, of course, and there would always be some who didn't believe her properly wed to a man who wasn't there.
Merchant sailor, she told them. Pirate, they whispered. This was no navy outpost, and the nearest magistrate was one island over. Their village was 'protected' by a small militia of local men who wouldn't know a pirate if one pissed in their hats.
And now a pirate had finally come to Port Phillip.
A pirate. Beth knew that though her husband and the young Leiutenant were both good men, there was still a chance that the boy would be in danger. The coin was warm, too warm for the time spent in the water, but she put that down to her own guilt as she placed it in her pocket.
The boy coughed and opened his eyes. Beth darted back for a moment, but only a moment, before her maternal instinct took over and she was at the boy's side.
"Give me your coat," she ordered one of the sailors, with the authority of the Governor's wife, "and get me some fresh water."
The boy was shivering with cold and whatever terror he had only just survived. Weak, but Beth wasn't losing another child. This boy was a gift from god, a gift to make up for the children she could bot bear and the daughter who had come so very close.
"What's your name, child?"
"William Turner."
The pirate in question was thinner than she last saw him. His red headscarf and been exchanged for blue and he's collected a few more trinkets in his hair. Jack waved her off as she tried to help him pull the boat onto the beach.
"Babe'll be out soon. You best let me take care of this."
"Two weeks, at least," she'd said, and he'd looked at her, somewhat sadly, and she knew it was a lie.
The walk to her cottage was conducted in uncharacteristic silence.
The second day she was annoyed with him. She hadn't seen him since they parted ways nearly nine months ago and he was unusually scant on details of his time since then. Oh, he told her about loosing the Pearl (again) and his trip to the Americas. His quest to become immortal had failed spectacularly, although not as spectacularly as Barbossa's, which had ended in (what Jack hoped) one final death.
"It turned him into dust," Jack said, smirking over a cup of tea. She knew he'd spiked it with rum, although he swore blind that he's brought none of the stuff with him (in case she burned it) but the smell was unmistakable. "Then I grabbed the dust and scattered it everywhere. There's nothing left to come back, now, I made sure of that."
Jack's knuckles were white around the cup, and Elizabeth let him keep his rum.
"What are you not telling me, Jack?" Elizabeth felt the void where there should have been a story, felt the wrongness and saw it flitter across Jack's face like a shadow
"I made a mistake, Liz," he said, "Only I don't know what it is." He sat back in his chair and something like his old grin returned. "Also, I appear to me going mad. Apparently. Mad-der, according to Gibbs."
Elizabeth laughed at him then, and forgot all about shadows and stories for a while.
William Turner didn't find out about the coin until Barbosa's men slit his stepmother's throat.
On the third day she hated him, wanted him to leave and never come back. He fussed over her all morning. Jack's version of fussing was a bizarre combination of whining, unhelpful suggestions and even less helpful help, all the while muttering that the baby was coming soon and how he could feel it in his bones.
When Elizabeth finally got sick of him she went down to the village, not even bothering with an excuse.
The air was cold but the sun was up and bright. The villagers kept staring at her, more than usual. She wondered if they could feel what Jack could, the imminent and disastrous arrival of her child. Elizabeth wished for Will, closing her eyes and feeling the sun on her face, imagining him doing the same somewhere in the world or out of it.
"Is that yer husband then?"
A voice and a poke startled her out of her reverie. Tom Shaller, who sold vegetables and terrible chese and had more than once insinuated that she hadn't been properly married, stood beside her with his hand on his hips.
"The man in yer cottage, then, is he the 'usband returned? He laughed, drawing the attention of some passers by who, pretending to mind their own business, were eager for her to answer.
She straightened herself up and looked him in the eye, as she had from the very first day.
"No."
The passers-by stopped pretending. Some muttered and walked off, feeling justified in calling her a whore behind her back. Others murmured and stood by, waiting for more.
"His name is Jack, and he is a friend of my husband's And mine."
"Looks like a pirate to me," said one of the kids still young enough to say what he thought as long as he was more than an arms reach from his father. The corners of Elizabeth's lips twitched, as she thought, perhaps, that there was hope for the island yet.
"He is my friend. And my guest."
"He saved my life!" Will looked from the face of his friend, to that of his stepfather, "Surely that must be worth something?"
He could see his stepfather wavering. Governor Swann sighed. Will could see that the relief of his return had been a small comfort in the man's grief. Beth has been loved by both of them. "William is right. Surely, Commodore, it is possible o make some exception for the circumstances."
Will turned to his friend. "James, please."
"I can't."
Two days later his friend hesitated long enough for Will and Jack to escape off the east tower. The Commodore gave them a days head start, not knowing that this would lead him down a stranger path than he could ever have imagined.
They would believe what they want. People usually did. The sunlight soured, Elizabeth returned to her cottage to find Jack staring at Will's heart.
Hers froze a second before her body sprang into action. She pushed him out of the way, grasping for the sword she kept by the door. Jack retreated, holding his empty hands in front of him in entreaty.
She advanced slowly, flicking her eyes down to the still beating heart as she kicked closed the lid with her foot.
"How dare you!" Her body trembled with anger. "Immortality any way you can get it, then?"
"Elizabeth, wait." He moved his hands towards her. Se swiped at them, barely missing, and he jerked his hands out of range. "I was just looking, savvy? I wasn't going to hurt it, I was just trying to understand."
"Understand what?" She said. Then stopped and dropped the sword. The color drained from her face.
"I would have done it, you know"
The ship in the distance disappeared in a flash of green. Jack tried to remember that, for all he found the former Commodore an uptight little snot, the man had been Will's friend and had, in the end, saved his dear William from an eternity as Capitan of the Flying Dutchman.
The last of the dying light caught Will's face as he turned to the sea. At that moment Jack understood Davy Jones better than he ever wanted. Understood how a man could love someone so much that he's tear his own heart out. Norrington's heart was in the iron chest, not his, and every heavy thud inside his chest reminded him of how close he had been to stabbing Jones's heart himself just to stop the pain of one William Turner.
Will turned around. "I'm glad you didn't"
"Oh no." Elizabeth had said it, clutching her hands to her stomach as pain rippled through her body. Jack echoed it as he rushed to her side. He sat her down on the bed as she gave him directions to the midwife. Jack hesitated a moment, before rushing out of the cottage.
Alone, Elizabeth hated him more than ever. Then the pain came again.
It was a long birth. Joanne, the midwife, tried her best to reassure Elizabeth but it was pain to see that the woman feared for both mother and babe. She had tried to usher Jack from the room, but the pirate stubbornly stayed. Elizabeth was too weak for the birthing stool, barely able to lift her head near the end.
Riddles and maps, maps and riddles. There was a time when Jack's compass pointed unerringly at Will but that time had passed. No, Jack didn't love him any less. Jack loved Will like he loved the sea. The compass had stopped pointing to Will because, like the Pearl, like the sea itself, Will belonged to Jack down to his very bones. The years had passed with them sinking ever deeper into each other, moving together like the tide.
But now Jack looked on as Will began sinking alone. Aye, the compass struck true for Jack but span for Will as the thing he wanted most couldn't be found.
They has talked about it, about finding a woman to give Will what he wanted most in the world; a family, but Will had shot the idea down.
"It wouldn't be us. I know, I'm being unfair."
As fun as Jack found trying, two men would never produce a child.
And then, one day, the compass stopped spinning.
Joanna put Jack to work talking Elizabeth through, and Jack climbed into the bed behind her, lifting her up with his body, propping her between his knees and whispering songs of the sea. With the strength she had left she clawed at him an screamed as William, too early, tried to find his way into the world.
There is always a price. The early death of a good woman to save a child. Jack's soul, split in two and his mind with it. And worst of all. William Turner before the mast. They would never have agreed to terms like this if they'd known.
Jack was holding Elizabeth when William Junior was born, birthed between both their thighs. They both lie there, breathing as one as the babe was placed at he breast.
The miniature ship sailed peacefully on a glass ocean, safe on Weatherby Swan's mantelpiece.
The doctor cleared his throat again.
"I'm sorry"