A/N: I had always assumed, after watching the third movie, that the curse worked like this: every ten years Will would come spend a day with Elizabeth, and then he would leave and Elizabeth would have to wait another ten years to see him again. Because, I mean, the whole plot point was that the DUTCHMAN needed a captain. And then I hear all this stuff about, "No, since Elizabeth stayed true to him for a decade, the curse was broken and he could return to her forever" - which still leaves the plot hole of "uhm, who's manning the Dutchman"? Anyways, I thought I'd go with the first idea, that Will could only see her one day out of ten years, bearing in mind the fact that Elizabeth doesn't do too well with sitting around waiting for stuff to happen. I also went with the idea that the captain's attitude influenced the ship - when Davy Jones became irritable and hateful, the ship fell into disrepair; with Will behind the wheel the ship was brand new again. This is just something I spat out, so it probably isn't very good, but I just wanted to put it out there.
She wasn't there.
Will paced the length of the beach, halfway between fury and sorrow, keeping an eye on his ship waiting patient beyond the rocks.
It was a few days after Elizabeth's forty-fourth birthday, and Will had created a shell necklace especially for the occasion.
Sunrise turned to noon and Will left, disgusted.
"Do you fear death?" Captain Turner asked the row of shivering, bedraggled, sniveling men crowded on the deck of his ship. Fifteen men. Fifteen said yes. Why, Captain Turner thought bitterly, couldn't the miserable cowards just accept that their ship had been gutted and their captain had deserted? Why couldn't they let him ferry them to the other side to face their sins instead of standing stupidly around on deck, fingering lengths of sailing rope and marveling in their good fortune?
Will gripped the wheel in irritation and the wood whispered warningly of men encased in barnacles and sea slime, and a captain that fell sick of love, and he curbed his temper.
Seven years until his third day, and Will found himself face to face with Ragetti, thinner and rattier and more faded then before. He had the courtesy to flinch when he saw Bootstrap and made a clumsy half-bow when he saw Will. The rosary wrapped around his fingers rattled. Will, whose feelings towards the one-eyed pirate were still mixed, used him as a chance to catch up with everyone and Ragetti was talkative enough once he got over his shock - Sparrow and Barbossa were still hunting for the Fountain of Youth; they had had a good wind coming up from Jamaica, which was where Ragetti had met his fate. Cotton, surprisingly, was still alive and well, and had retired to a good life in Nassau. Pintel's hip was bothering him but he could still parry with the best of them ("It's really not a s'prise," Ragetti explained gaily, "tha' he outlived me"). Marty had lost a finger in that battle with a merchant ship, and King Swann...
Ragetti stopped, looking guilty, and Will felt something heavy grow in his throat. King Swann, Will realized. Ragetti looked terrified, as if expecting to be run through for his slip-up. But Will merely drew himself up and asked, "Master Ragetti, do you fear death?"
"Naw," Ragetti looked fondly down at his rosary (whittled by large, inexperienced hands, with nicks and cursing and swears against both his nephew and the God who was represented by it). "Not anymore, leastways."
Will almost felt disappointed.
Two years later and it was Jack Sparrow leaning languidly against the railing of the Flying Dutchman, eager to tell stories of Captain Barbossa and Pirate King Swann and Captain Turner the Third gallivanting across Florida, ever closer to the Fountain of Youth. Jack's beard was streaked with grey and the skin around his eyes was sun-crinkled, but to Will the familiarity was welcoming, and he prolonged his question with nights together in his Captain's quarters, prying stories from Sparrow's lips in return for rum.
"No son," Jack answered when Will finally asked. "Cap'n Jack's lived too long already."
Will tried to persuade him to stay, something he hadn't done in the twenty-some years he'd been Captain of this cursed bucket, but the old pirate held fast. He dropped off the side of the Dutchman in the long boat with a saucy wink and disappeared into the fog of the Other Side. The boat came back empty and the Flying Dutchman sailed on. Will despaired.
Pintel came next with information about the Fountain of Youth, four years before Will's day. Older and with whiter hair, the stout pirate still kept the burliness that Will had found intimidating all those years ago. After inquiring after his nephew, Pintel went straight to business. "Yeh, yer wife and 'er whelp found the damned Fountain. No thanks to Barbossa. Had us goin' around in circles all year. If t'weren't for yer son an' his map-readin' they'd still be out there."
Will spared a few seconds to feel proud, and then asked, "Didn't you drink from the Fountain?"
"Nah. Didn' seem right, as it were. Rags always said, 'There's a time fer all men t'meet their end'." Pintel scoffed. "He went off with tha' religion bit sumtimes. Th' blighter couldn't even read the damned Bible."
Pintel too, answered no, and Will began to think that everyone was saying that just to avoid spending a hundred years with him.
At night, Will went to Captain's quarters and drank until he slept, something that was unnecessary and a waste of time. He drank and dreamt, and the barnacles crept up his fingers.
Over the years, Will became more and more desperate. He sent men to shore regularly near the coast of Florida, to Tortuga and Jamaica and Nassau, searching for information about the Pirate King, who remained elusive and vague even to the locals. The men were sworn to the ship and so could not refuse their captain, but the ones that had been there with Davy Jones could sense the circle coming back around. Bootstrap Bill watched his son pace the length of the Dutchman with worried, drooping eyes.
One day, they picked up a dead man in a rowboat, a gash across his throat. He had large brown eyes and full lips and Will's heart, somewhere in Jamaica, ached. "What's your name, son?" he asked, as the man climbed aboard the Flying Dutchman, wiping dried crusted blood from the front of his shirt.
"William Turner, sir." he answered calmly. Several of Will's men shrank from the man, as if he was a bad omen. Bootstrap stared incredulously at his grandson.
"William Turner...do you fear death?" Will prepared himself for the 'no', prepared himself to ferry his son to the Other Side without him knowing his father.
"Yes, sir." William III stared resolutely at the captain of the Flying Dutchman.
"Very well," Will nodded. "Welcome aboard the Flying Dutchman, William Turner. If you'd meet me in my quarters after dinner, I have a few things to discuss."
Liam, his son, knew exactly where his mother was. "She's in Kingston, preparing my funeral." Will noted that his son spoke evenly, without sadness or regret.
On the day which he was allowed to set foot on land Will walked up onto the shores of Kingston to the home that Elizabeth had bought for her son in the hopes he would settled down and not become a pirate like his late father and herself (pirate is in your blood, Jack would always say to him, and Will was oddly pleased that it had not skipped a generation). When he looked in the dusty window Elizabeth was curled up in a chair by the fire, looking every bit as beautiful and just a little bit more aged than the last time he'd seen her. Her shoulders shuddered with quiet sobs. In the bed by the corner lay a dark haired man, the weak firelight not reaching his face. Will felt many things in the few seconds he stared into her window; fear, anger, sorrow, inscrutable hate for the man in the bed and yes, even his former fiancee. The thumping noise from the chest under the table magnified and Elizabeth turned her tear-stained face up to meet Will's eyes. They were frozen like that for a while, and Will idly wondered if she felt afraid, afraid that he had become like Davy Jones and that she would feel the cold slither of tentacles and death around her throat. When she finally lifted herself softly out of the chair and opened the window up, Will opened his mouth to say something, anything; "How could you leave me?", "I've been so lonely", "Our son is beautiful"...instead all he said was, "It seems my heart is no longer yours."
"Yes." King Swann said hoarsely, not looking over her shoulder at the man who looked like Will, curled up in her bed. "I'll be needing it back." Will said evenly. "I'm sorry it wasn't enough for you."
"It was more than enough." Elizabeth whispered to him, her large eyes full of agony. "I just didn't realize it until it was too late." Seconds later he was holding the chest that contained his beating heart in his hands. Elizabeth looked over at him, a question in her eyes, and Will informed her stiffly, "Liam has decided to stay with me on the Dutchman. He sends his love." Elizabeth smiled, a tight, reluctant smile that did not fit her fading, sun-wrinkled face, and Will realized with a heavy heart (in a heavy chest, ha ha) that even star-crossed lovers could not break this curse. That in the end he could not go gallivanting off for a decade and expect Elizabeth to be there, as youthful and as enthusiastic as she was when he had left her decades ago.
"Goodbye, Elizabeth." he told her, and as the sun rose at the start of a new day he left the house, left Kingston, left behind the animosity that had been brewing for four decades, and the Flying Dutchman left the island behind.
"That's the tricky business with all of this, it is." Bootstrap would tell him compassionately after all was said and done, having a drink that had no effect on them while looking at Will's chest sitting there on the captain's desk. Will would nod and agree (but not really, because he had believed it wouldn't be tricky business...just him and Elizabeth and Liam and a day every decade), and the matter of his heart would go unresolved for another day. Liam suggested throwing it overboard; a crew member named Marley suggested trying to put it back in his body. Will would sit for hours in the dark of his quarters, listening to the pseudo-reassuring "thump thump" in the blackness.
The thing was, as easy as it was for Will to think he was nothing like Davy Jones, the closer he became to becoming him. After a particularly nasty bout of depression, he came around after a week to discover barnacles had adorned the ship's railing and one of the masts had started to rot. Bootstrap gave him a look and tried to convey lessons to him that had no meaning to him right now. Liam took to scraping the barnacles off and said nothing.
Calypso visited him once, knowing exactly when he needed her the most, radiant and beautiful and looking nothing like he'd seen her before, when she was musty and painted and draped with cloth. She perched on the stern and made the wind fill the sails and smiled at him when he bowed. When he finally asked about his heart she said, "Give it to someone you love."
"I did." Will answered. "And she gave it back."
"In love, sometimes you have to let go of the ones you love." Calypso told him, speaking in the faraway voice people use when they are giving advice that applies to them as well. "But just because she's given you your heart back and you think nothin' can ever be right again, you need to take a chance and see if the next time will be different."
"And what if it's not different?" Will wanted to know. "Then you keep tryin'." Calypso responded easily. "It hurts, and it will hurt, but your kind has always kept tryin' when it comes to love. That's what I miss - " Calypso stopped, stared at the sea. The sails emptied, and she was gone.
The tides changed. People continued dying. Will's crew continued working. "Fix that line, Mr. Turner!" Will roared good-naturedly, just so he got the opportunity to see his father and son run in the same direction and take wild leaps after the offending piece of rope, just as he had done so many years ago.
Barbossa was the only one who hadn't passed across his deck, and Will wondered why after all these years he had been the only one to drink from the Fountain. Elizabeth had passed quietly, kissing her son on the forehead and climbing on to the next boat off the Dutchman. Will's ties to the world he had once lived in had been completely cut, save for a few shadowy acquaintances who had, for now, escaped a death by sea. Will did not use his day on land the next time it came, and his heart had been given to his son, who kept it with the shell necklace his father made him.
Sixty years this day, Will thought proudly, and Davy Jones was a memory for this shining, peaceful ship. Every so often there would be doubt; paranoia; fear; self-loathing, and the ship would rock and sway and memories would peel off the old wood like specters, of Jones and his hate and his fate. And Will would take a moment, close his eyes and imagine himself back in Port Royal, making swords and picking up after Mr. Brown when he became too sloshed to stand. Those were days that, albeit nostalgic and peaceful, seemed so long ago, when Elizabeth was nothing more than a painful wish and pirates were nothing more than a tale in a story. Then the calls of the men would interrupt him and the sun would shine through the sails and dapple his lap with shadows and Will, breaking the cycle set before him, would smile and place a calloused hand on the wheel, sailing off into the wide, blue forever.