PLAYLIST: 'Duduk of the North' from Gladiator.
Seriously, it's the best accompaniment yet. Do use it.

35

The ship's underway and the weather is fine
The skipper's down aft hanging out other lines
The crew are asleep and the sea is at rest
And I'm singing this song to the one I love best

Elizabeth jerked awake, clawing sheets. Her face was bathed in moisture, a sob halfway from her throat.
She had been sobbing for an age. She could tell from the rawness and the deep throes that still washed over her.

She rolled onto her side and took in a gasping, shuddering breath, feeling the pain expanding in her heart, feeding off the air.

'Duduk of the North'.

It came out again in an overwhelming, involuntary wail - her own voice was alien to her.

The dream had splintered her remaining courage, edged her grief with the power of unconscious fear, cut her right to the bones of her mind. She couldn't move, couldn't think. Only whimper and writhe.

Her entire torso prickled and seared with waves of infliction so strong they were physical. Her skin, her organs rebelled against the information that her mind couldn't block out.

He was going to die.

No, he wasn't.

He was maybe going to die.

If he died?

But he couldn't. He simply couldn't.

But what if he did?

She was getting louder. Her father would hear soon, and rush to see what the commotion was about.
Because he didn't, couldn't know, nobody could.

At least, not until the moment she stepped out to scream his name, to try and save him.
To succeed in saving him.

Or to fail.

Because as far as William was concerned, Jack was a dead man.
She squeezed and squeezed her eyelids together until they hurt, and shoved her face into a pillow so that she could cry freely.

"You won't even try to help him?"
She could feel the first of many tears rising already, finally breaking through her shocked defenses.

He looked at her as though she were unstable, as though she had just asked him to put a sword through his own heart.
"For a man who forced me into piracy, led me along with myths about my father - a man with no principles?"

"You know he has so much more than principles, Will."
"He has no decency."
"He loves me! Isn't that decent enough for you?"
"One fleeting passion is not enough to redeem a life of theft and deceit."
"You sound just like James. Listen to yourself - you're all cold at heart."
"Listen to you! You sound like a simpering scullery maid!"

She slapped him hard, then. He deserved it.

"I can't explain the things I feel for Jack. Not even to you. I'm not ordinary, I don't have ordinary thoughts. You've known all the time we've been friends."
"Are we friends?"
"We won't be, if you betray me like this."
"You consort with pirates and lecture me about betrayal?"

She paced in sheer desperate frustration.

"Your father was a pirate, don't you still believe in him?"
"I'm not sure."
"Will, please.Why are you being so righteous? It's not a case of black and white, and you know it - Mr. Gibbs is a pirate, your father was against Jack's mutiny - you wouldn't condemn them to death! You wouldn't!"

"It's not up to me. It's up to the law and he chose to break it. They all did."
"This isn't about the law, this is about your revenge, because he gave you hope."

"And what if it is?" he in his turn stormed about, "Did you think of my pain? My father - he was the thing that held me to the earth." his voice had dropped to a choke, "Even if I would never have found him, I would have dreamt of him, as a model for my life. Now he's a criminal and dead. Jack Sparrow is a manipulative, sly blackguard and he has you around his little finger -"

"You haven't a clue what he's done for me, his concern for me. You can't judge one side of a coin."
"I really am sorry, but it's better that he dies than abducts you and ruinsyou. You have too much life to live for that. I can't allow you to become another of his whores."

She tried to say, "It's not like that."
Instead the words bubbled and died away as they passed her lips, half-formed, and she finally crumbled. Her knees were buckling and her fortitude couldn't hold back the brutal fact that William was against her, like everybody else was against her.

He caught her as she sank slowly to the floor. Wrapped his arms around her. Kissed her head with such affection she wondered how he could have been shouting moments before.

"I love you more dearly than anyone, Miss Swann. You are the closest person to me - and even we aren't close. It hurts me to see this."
"I don't want your pity."
"I am sorry that he is a pirate. He would have made a decent man for you, if he weren't."
"He is the only man - because he is a pirate - you don't understand -" she wept, hitting her forehead against his shoulder in agony.

"You'll heal. And you'll be grateful. There's no place for you out there, you would have spent the rest of your life hating me for helping him."

She couldn't stand to touch him as the words fell from his mouth. She flung herself away, stumbling to the door, before she punched him.

It couldn't end like this.

Reaching the street she whipped around and lowered her chin to glare him square in the eye.
Some part of him had to understand. His father's part. Some tiny glint of humanity.

"Pirate is just a false name for a free man." she clenched her fists and forced herself not to sob, "Jack uses his head, not a sword, not until he has to. He saved you when he didn't need to, and he's saved me from myself - I was so stubborn but he didn't give up on me."

William was frozen under her stare, as though she held all the power of the sea and skies in that moment. She felt as though she did. There was nothing but this.

"Will, he doesn't believe in fighting or killing. He believes in freedom, from this madness. And that's all you really have in this world. A little freedom to recompense the rest."

She took a breath, and the spell was broken. He glanced away, and shook his head.
And then she ran.

Her door resounded with three purposeful knocks.
"Elizabeth." her father's voice was layered with several suggestions, the serene surface barely winning over, "It's time."

The bobbing heads of bloodthirsty citizens gathered around the gallows, like a standing audience at the Globe back in England. Waiting for their entertainment.
The harsh hissing multitude of perfectly synchronised snare drums only enhanced the brutal order of it all. She felt cold despite the midday sun.

How, how could these people mutually stand aside to witness the murder of a man who was above them all? A man who had kicked himself free of the earth, who had seemed untouchable, a demi-god until now.

His jewelled brown hands were bound, the cloth binding his cut still in place. The hands that could touch without lifting a finger, the gems from all corners of the globe, that told stories of such adventures.

Her father and James stood silent and inhuman as the red-clad guards that surrounded the small square, that stood arranged on the battlements, guns at their sides, ready.

Perhaps ready to shoot her.

A cool injection of reassuring perspective washed through her shattered body, gravitated her, stilled the shaking in her hands and let her breathe.

Because she knew she had nothing to fear any more.
Either Jack would escape, or she would die with him.

The voice of otherworldly cruelty rang out, with a finality that steeled her heart against everybody in the world except for Captain Jack Sparrow.

Her eyes darted automatically to the only real face, the darkly handsome, ruthlessly roguish face with eyes like burning coals and a small smirk like the conspiracy of lovers.

The executioner slid the noose around his neck.

His pitch black gaze was levelled at her unabashedly. She didn't know why she was still standing there. It was as though he held her in place with the sheer force of his dark, glinting seraph's halos.

The hangman was striding towards the lever that would end them both.
She flinched, and sprang.

"STOP!" her own voice terrified her - she sounded like the swift wrath of a goddess, like the crashing waves of an explosive storm, "YOU WILL NOT HURT HIM!"

For a fractured moment, the whole universe obeyed her. She was charging into the crowd of common criminals with all the authority of an empress.

Her authority overcame them all, because she knew, and they didn't. Law couldn't withstand the supreme rights of their freedom. Humans could not control who lived and died, when the horizon and the ocean breeze was calling them home.

"This man is free!" she claimed again, ignoring all but the executioner, unleashing all the force of her passion upon him as Medusa unleashed all the force of her monstrosity. "This man belongs to none of you, and you will not hurt him!"

"Elizabeth."

It was not Jack's voice. It was the Commodore's.
She froze, and suddenly the polite world had sunk its claws back into that small gathering of people.

He had named her, and she was once again Lizzie - no goddess. No liberator. She was no speaker for the innate and superior forces of the blank spaces on maps. He powers were stripped from her as soon as she had realised them.

The hangman was moving again. Jack was doomed.
"No!" she lunged forwards, too late now, simply floundering.

Until somebody shoved her hard and she stumbled sideways, crying out through the tight lump in her throat. The figure swept past her, moving more quickly than she had ever seen anyone move, barrelling citizens over as though they were made of straw.

She couldn't breathe.