Title: Severance
Author: Anactoria
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Tia Dalma (mention of Tia/Davy, but mostly gen.)
Warnings: Nope.
Summary: "Exile. So this is what it feels like."
Beta-ed by Atraphoenix. Thanks : )
She awakes without herself.
She is alone, sprawled awkwardly on the shore where they left her, her eyes stinging, her hair gritted with salt and sand, her limbs heavy. Moving takes an age and standing centuries. She shivers.
After a time – she does not know long, with no internal clock of tide and ebb and flow to tell it by – she becomes conscious of the incoming waves. It must be the sea that woke her, for she hears its rush and splash, sees its rise and fall – but on the outside only now. Just hours ago, she felt that rushing in her veins, she surged with the power of the ocean, she sang its song.
Now she sees waves crest like the backs of strange beasts. The shallows whisper round her ankles, but their language is alien to her and their cadences jar like discords.
Exile. So this is what it feels like.
The shore is strewn with the usual debris; sea wrack, shells, driftwood from an old wreck. She takes a large conch (smooth, perfect – she fashioned its curves herself) and raises it to her ear and hears… nothing. An empty echo chamber, a hollow mockery of the ocean's song where yesterday there was the beat of her own vast, untamed heart.
Once – long ago, now – her lover laid his head upon her breast and blinked in astonishment, saying he heard the sound of waves. At the time, she laughed with delight.
It was all different then. She has a human body now, and a human heart. Its beat quickens as if to mock her and it rattles in her chest, tiny and ineffectual as a bird's. This body, too, is useless – insubstantial as a ghost, lumpen and graceless as solid lead. Her flesh-and-blood feet sink into the sand and she is anchored here; kept apart from herself. Trapped. She may still have a little power, but it will not be enough. She who was many is now single. She who was so much, who stretched as far as the eye could see, is now small and weakened. She can no longer see the whole of the sky.
In future years, she will hear sailors talk of the horizon, or what it means to them – freedom, adventure, the Beyond. And she will grow to hate it, that thin band that circumscribes her world and makes her less than she should be. For she was that Beyond and is now tethered.
On that forsaken shore, the queen of the ocean sinks to her knees and claws with scabbed fingers at the sand, the hateful shore. And finds in herself another voice, a human voice, a voice with neither the song of waves nor the roar of storms in it. And screams.
And, scattered across the world, a few pirates shudder.