A/N: I just thought of this during a crazy 'what if' game with myself... Here goes nothing! And this is coming from the girl who said she'd never write a Will/Elizabeth, too...
The Pirates movies take place in the 1730s, FYI.
"There is nothing in the world so wonderful as to love and be loved; there is nothing so devastating as love lost." -an old Proverb
He remembered her eyes best. Golden brown, with flickers of light that shone when he kissed her and held her and pretended he could be with her forever.
He missed eyes the most, he pondered, as he stood on the deck of his own personal hell, The Flying Dutchman. The dead he ferried over to the other side rarely had eyes with any kind of light in them at all, but even if they had, their light could never have shone as brightly as hers.
It had been over one hundred years since he had seen those eyes. One hundred years of sailing all over the world, into every place except her arms.
One hundred long, terrible years.
His crew had come to accept that he rarely made it a habit to speak to the dead they retrieved at sea. Even though they came alive as they came on his ship, ready to be taken to the other side, he could rarely bring himself to speak to someone that wasn't her.
But this woman was different.
It wasn't that she looked like Elizabeth, no, not at all... It was merely the fact that she was the opposite of her that drew his curiosity. Her skin fair to Elizabeth's tan, her hair dark and tightly curled to Elizabeth's golden (How many times would he compare her to treasure?) waves, her build short and slight to Elizabeth's tall and thin.
He wondered how someone who looked nothing like her at all could still cause his throat to constrict tightly as he managed a "How do you do" and helped her aboard the Dutchman, as he had helped thousands and thousands of people who died at sea over the years.
"I assume I have died, yes?" she snapped impatiently, clearly unimpressed by the afterlife.
"You assume correctly, Miss...?"
She smiled ironically. "If I truly have ended life with the living, you and I might as well be on first name terms. Are you the one they tell the stories about? Are you William Turner?"
He nodded, wishing for the hand still in his to be someone else's, someone else's hand he could never hold again. "I am," he said heavily. "Call me Will. I'm afraid I still lack your name, however."
"It's Elizabeth," she said, making him jump in surprise. "But no one ever calls- called me that, you see... They called me Beth."
He nodded in relief, thanking God that her family and friends hadn't called her Liz, or Lizzie, or any of a wide variety of names he could not utter without feeling a renewed sense of loss. He could not bear much more of this burden...
"Well, Beth, welcome aboard The Flying Dutchman."
Four days.
He had seen her four days in forty years before she died. He had known he was going to outlive her, known as soon as his heart was put into the chest. He had thought that any extra time at all with her would be worth it, even if those times were few and far between.
They had been more than worth it, of course. It just made it hurt all the more now that she was gone.
He hated the small, traitorous part of himself, the part that had always wished she would die at sea so that he could be the one to ferry her over to the next world. He hated himself because he knew personally that this would be one of the worst ways to go, her lungs filling up with too much water and her cheeks turning blue...
And yet.
He would have taken a detour around the world for her before taking her to the other side. Or maybe he never would have taken her, and she could have stayed on the ship with him, a little bit of Heaven in the midst of his Hell. He didn't know if that was allowed, exactly, as no one had ever stopped to explain the rules of his occupation to him.
But they would have made it work, and they could have been together.
Beth was pacing the deck, glaring at any of the strange sea creatures that crewed the ship whenever they managed to come too close.
She normally hated people who paced, but this pacing was preferable to coming to terms with her death. She was eighteen in this glorious year of 1890, and, just like that, she was dead. Beth furrowed her eyebrows in that way her mother had always hated and said made her far less attractive than she really was.
How had she died?
She couldn't remember.
Muttering a curse she had learned from her older brother, she wracked her mind, trying to think, trying to organize her scattered recollections. She was momentarily distracted, however, by William Turner.
Something drew her to him. It wasn't his looks, though he certainly had those. It was the way he moved, as if he were supporting a person who wasn't there.
Beth understood loss, but she had never seen such an acute example as this grief-stricken man before her.
She watched as he issued commands and the waterlogged creatures immediately followed them, changing the direction of the ship. She watched as the wind swept back his hair. She watched as this caused him to touch his lips, feeling a ghost of a person who no longer existed.
To be terribly blunt, Beth was not happy with her short life. She had always vowed to help people later, when she was married and a mother, but fate had had other ideas. But who said she couldn't help someone after she was dead?
Lizzie, he would say now, look at this sunset. Look at the way that cloud over there looks like a twisted tree, like the one we first held hands under when we were twelve.
Look at the way it resembles two hearts, one broken and locked away.
He was startled out of his illusion when a hand gently tapped his arm. "Will Turner," announced Beth, "I would like to join your crew."
Well, lemme know if you like it so far... I'll try to update soon if I get a positive response.