AN: Hi everyone! This is my second Black Sails fic, and this is basically based on a dream I had before season three started and I didn't exactly plan on writing this, but it just didn't leave me alone. I'm not sure how long this fic will be, and I most likely will not update even nearly as fast as I did with Seas and Sands, but I'll do my best to keep updates regular. So, here's the first chapter, I hope you'll like this.
It was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when she realized it. She had not been paying any mind to such things since all the Abigail Ashe related occurrences had taken place. She had been so preoccupied with her plans, her betrayal, his betrayal... So much had happened between them. So much rage she had harbored inside her since the moment she walked into the fortress to find what he had left her to be found. Now that rage had been wiped away for the first time in weeks. It had been replaced with an emotional range so much more vast. Truth be told she could not even pinpoint what those feelings raging inside of her were. All she knew was that there was a life growing inside of her. In that moment, in chains in the middle of an ocean, on the way to her execution, all she could hear was her own voice that kept echoing inside her head. I am carrying Charles Vane's child.
A few more weeks passed and Eleanor touched English soil for the first time in her life. It was a brief encounter as she was rushed right out of the ship to her cell, all ready and waiting for her. What she had seen of England did not impress her. I'd rather not die in this dreadful place, she thought as she felt the dampness seep through her skin all the way to her bones. That dampness was the worst thing she had ever experienced and she had been kidnapped and shipped to another continent to be hanged. That was saying something. Those thought vanished quickly, however. Nothing so trivial could truly occupy her mind when she remembered the living thing inside of her. Eleanor had never thought she would ponder motherhood, but in that dark cell, that seemed to be all she was thinking of.
Eleanor Guthrie had declared from a very young age that she would never be a wife and a mother. Everyone had laughed at her then, pinching her cheek and telling her she would soon think different and start picking out suitors and the names for her children. When twenty year had passed from those early childhood moments, no one questioned her life as an unmarried woman. No one dared. Or perhaps no one cared. No one in Nassau cared what she did, as long as she sold their goods and they got their money. Eleanor had hardly even thought of children. Especially during the time Max was her lover, the though had not even crossed her mind. And it had not crossed her mind when she bedded Charles. Well, she had gone through the usual methods of preventing a child, but she had not really thought of the matter. Clearly something had slipped their minds. On the night she had had to look him in the eye as she turned the key in that lock.
That night haunted her all the way from Nassau to England and it did not leave her even when she was cast alone into the cell festered with rats and other vermin. The whole night kept repeating in her head, over and over again. It was after all the night of the conception, the night when that small living being inside of her had started its life. She had known what she was doing about Abigail, about her betrayal long before she stepped into that fort. Of course she had, she was Eleanor Guthrie and she always had a plan, there was no doubt about that. The betrayal had weighed heavily on her mind, it truly had. She was not the heartless monster the men and women of Nassau liked to make her into. She did have feelings, she just didn't show them. And him... He was where all her feelings seemed to reside. Even so, she would never put those feelings before her ambitions, never. But that did not mean she did not feel the weight of those ambitions heavy on her shoulders when she walked to him, up the hill, up the stairs, to his room, to his bed. Still that night sent shivers all over her body. It had been her goodbye. As he kissed her lips and stroke her core, that's what kept repeating in her head, goodbye. A small apology also crossed her mind when he was sound asleep next to her, after. She didn't dare to stroke his face in fear of him waking up and being discovered. But she had wanted to, oh how she had wanted to stroke those long strands of brown hair away from his face, like she always did. Like she had been doing since she was sixteen years old. She refrained from touching him, just whispered a silent goodbye to the only man she had ever loved and disappeared to the dungeons. At that point it had been her betrayal, only hers. She had done anything but pushed the literal dagger to his back. Those feelings vanished as soon as she found her father, dead by his hand. Oh how she hated him.
She hated him with such passion that was only reserved for him. He was truly the only one who had ever evoked such feelings from her. When she had loved him, it burned like the sun, so brilliant and shining, and when she hated him... everything around her was on fire, burning her alive. For such a long time she had tried to deny the effect he had always had on her. But those feelings she had for him were like the ocean, vast, deep and able to drown her any moment it wished. The hate, it burned her, and she could think of nothing else. Oh the fantasies, of him with a noose around his neck and swinging from the gallows. Her beating the life out of him. Keeping his head under water until his lungs filled with it and the life disappeared from his eyes. Any and every violent scenario that entered her head played out in her dreams. Charles Vane suffering, as she had suffered when he took her father away from her. The only man whose approval she had ever longed for had been taken away from her, just as she had gotten a little taste of what it felt when her only parent was proud of her. But in the middle of the Atlantic, those thoughts had been pushed aside. The life inside of her... it changed something.
Eleanor had never in her life wanted to be a mother that was for sure. She had no wish for a child to hinder her ambitions, to subject herself to childbirth, to the role of a mother. She really did not have the slightest clue what being a parent was all about. She hadn't had the best role models while growing up. But while she had been sleeping on the damned hammock in the ship on her way to her death, she had felt a slight flutter in her abdomen. By then she had realized that it was not sea sickness that made her heave during the mornings. It had been quite the revelation, truly, as she had realized that on top of the sickness, she had not had her monthly visitor in at least in the last three months. Her heart had dropped to her stomach. She had been in a shock for a day or few. As the thought settled in her head she was again able to sleep. And in that hammock, near the coast of England, she had felt that small flutter. The mark of life. Before that she had been able to regard it as nothing more than a parasite living in her womb, something she did not want and something that she'd gladly be rid of. But that flutter, it changed everything. Absolutely everything.
And now that she was in her cell, waiting for her sentence, she felt the flutter again and for the first time in years, she cried. It was the ugliest of cries, the years of holding everything in now finally coming out in ugly sobs and frantic breaths that made it feel like she wasn't breathing at all. She cried dearly, for the life that was living inside her had suddenly gained such meaning to her, that she dared not even think of the future that had been dictated for her. All the early thoughts of ridding herself of the child had disappeared long ago, but only in that moment did she truly feel the weight of what it meant to have this child growing inside her. She was hit with such a fierce need to keep it safe that she forgot all about the rats nibbling her dinner and the fleas biting her flesh.
That was when she thought of her father. The man whose approval she had been seeking all her life, at times pretending not to care what he thought of her, but always still caring, caring too much. After all, he had been her father, her only living parent and she had wanted nothing as much as he had wanted his love. Now she had been cast into this role, to his role and she couldn't help but to despise him. She put her hand on her stomach, only feeling a slight bump, still not noticeable to anyone who did not know the natural state of her body. There, inside her, in her womb, her child was growing. And already she loved it so fiercely that she could do nothing else but to hate her father. She had never even set eyes on her child, it was still so small that it surely would not have even looked like a child, and yet she loved it more that she loved herself. The mere thought of doing to it what her father had done to her angered her beyond measure. In that moment she vowed to her unborn child, that she would never make it feel less than, that she would never not love it based on its biology, never not cast it aside for her selfish reasons. She vowed to always love it. That love for her unborn child seemed to emerge out of nowhere. It surprised Eleanor. She was not motherly, anyone could see that. She did not love freely. And when she did love, she never put them ahead of her own ambitions. But now with this child inside of her, something shifted. Suddenly the image of her dead father did not enrage her, it did not make her feel much of anything. She was not yet a parent, but thinking of her father now only made her think how could you, how could you abandon your own child, how would you not love her? The rage was gone, truly. Charles' betrayal did not burn her anymore.
Charles...his face suddenly flooded her mind. She had barely cast a thought toward him since her realization, and before it she had been prepared to never see him again. Now... something would bind them together, forever. Life had taken such a sudden turn away from everything she had always wanted. And for the first time, she was willing to see this turn through. She had to get back to Nassau. Now there were two lives on the line, and her child could not live without her. I have to get back. That was the last thought in her mind as she succumbed to a fitful sleep in her cell, and it would be the first one she would have when she woke up. And when Eleanor Guthrie got something in her head, she would stop at nothing to see it through.
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