His long fingers, masculine and squared at their tips, were pressed against the bullseye window glass. The pane was cold and frosted, the heat from each fingertip leaving a clear and dripping oval, five small scenes to the outside. With a sudden movement he swept the window free of the frost and brought his face close to the glass. He looked through the distorted, green plate and watched the snowflakes drift and swirl down, down, down from the silver grey sky. The world outside this blacksmith shop had become a dull and shapeless whiteness, quiet and still but for the eddies of flakes that had not stopped falling for two days now.
He couldn't help but sigh and shake his head, "Oh, Scotland, how is it that I've come to find myself adrift on your white plains this long and lonely Wintertyme?" He let his head fall forward until his forehead touched the cold glass, and looking out from beneath his thick brown lashes he could almost trick himself into believing it was the porthole window of a certain ship he was looking up and through, into the green sea, the warm sun shining sideways into the churning water. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard.
He felt trapped. Inside this white world of cold snow and colder people, inside himself, his heart iced over, his mind frozen. Fittingly so, Turner, he chided himself. Fittingly so that you find yourself here.
The anvil and the hammer and the heated iron and still he was chilled. But then, blue waters as warm as a naked body, beaches as white as hidden flesh, a proffered bottle of rum and the open arms of the only woman he loved and still he had been frozen with…With what?
The cold from the window became a burning heat against his flesh, he brought both hands up and pressed their fire-calloused palms against the glass and smiled bitterly at the thought of what he surely must look like to passerby, if someone would even bother glancing over at the smithy, at a man with his face and hands pressed against the pane, looking out, a permanent and aching longing defining the fine features.
He turned back to his fever-hot work, rubbed his upper arms briskly, and pushed the leather apron down into place, slung low on his hips. He walked slowly back to the forge. A popular item here, he rued, ornate wrought iron fences used to keep the dead in their places, gravesites enclosed and gated and the work kept him busy. But even the hammering of the crosses could not warm the marrow of his bones.
"Ah, Elizabeth," he whispered to no one but himself.
She lay on her back in the rumpled silk and Egyptian cotton that dressed Jack Sparrow's bunk. Her body glistened with sweat and the dozens of kisses that Sparrow had bestowed upon her flesh since waking her early with a gift. She now held that gift aloft, in her two finely-boned and long-fingered hands, turning it upside down and right side up in a slowly timed rhythm, watching the snow fall inside the globe.
Jack had gone down to the galley for fresh coffee, ducking out almost before she'd had the bauble unwrapped. She grinned to herself, thinking of the Pirate Captain and his shyness around gift-giving. He seemingly loved to bestow her with trinkets and jewelry, finery and delectable sweets, but would turn his dark face away with every gift as though her reaction meant little. She knew differently though and her heart had been touched at this giving of vulnerability.
If someone, any one of the many some ones who could have or perhaps should have asked her before…before the choices, before the choked back tears and the incriminating wet eyes, before the slight turning away and then the turning back with a smirk, before the arrivals and departures, the fare-thee-wells and the godspeeds…had actually inquired of her what sort of man she thought Captain Jack Sparrow was, what would have been her answer? Then. And what would it be now.
She narrowed her elegant-lidded and slightly-slanted eyes at this thought and drew her lower lip in beneath her small white top teeth and chewed a bit in pondering that thought. But then her lover nudged open the cabin door with a shoulder and backed into the morning-lit room, two steaming mugs, one in each hand and a quickly glancing look to where she lay decadently, smiling at him.
He winked at her and she nodded him to set the hot coffee on the window ledge and he did this, leaning across her and she shut her eyes and inhaled deeply of the musky scent of him, of his underarms, of his clothing, of his java breath. He settled beside her on the bed, cupping his mug and sipping tentatively, seeming to study her in slitted kohl-lined eyes over the rim.
"You like it then, love?"
She was mid-turn of the globe and she nodded. "Very much, Jack. But where did you get such a thing? It's truly a treasure. The snows of my childhood captured inside this glass world." She went up on her knees and held it in front of him; he lowered the cup and peered into the small glass scene.
"It took a bit of getting, that pretty bauble did. Reminds you of your childhood, does it?" He was looking at her now.
"Yes, it does," she pushed a thick hank of her blonde locks over her ear.
"Not much snow in Port Royal to remind you of things left behind, was there?"
"No," she laughed low in her throat and he felt the tremble of it inside himself as though it were his own laughter. "Not much." She cocked her head at him, "None. At all. Ever. But you know that, Jack."
"You were a small lass then, when you left England and your mother's grave, weren't you?"
She nodded slowly now, her eyes intent on the globe, she tipped it another turn. "You know that I was, Jack," her voice low and he felt the tremor of it, this time down the length of his spine.
"You never looked back, did you, Lizzie?"
"I never looked back. No."
He lowered his lashes, looking through them at her, and he felt his longing for her and it ached all the way down into the marrow of his bones, as though his blood were freezing inside of him.
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Written as a Secret St. Nicholas gift for virgo79 in the yahoo group TheBlackPearlSails