Flights of Fancy

By Illoria

Author's Note: Yahaha! It feels good to be back in a way. But what am I saying that for? I haven't added to this story in months & months. I would say I'm sorry, but I guess I couldn't write unless I wanted to. But I read every review anyway and thought about not keeping up the story but I decided I wanted to after the reviews convinced me.

Thank you to everyone who reviewed. Thanks for poking and prodding me and um... threatening me to write more on this story. It's the pirate fancy that makes fanfiction writers write, and I hadn't been much for pirate fancy for a little while, but you can't exactly have full summer in my way without having pirates, so. :)

I think this is the most "intense" (even though short... I felt it should end where it did. The CHAPTER, I mean, not the STORY) chapter so far. I looked out the window in the night-time after writing it and could imagine I was near the beach in Tortuga.

Here we go. :)

Chapter Five: The Winds Converge

Falter and submerged, falling into the water at the base of the pier, my! - it's deeper than it looked, sinking down, a dark plummet, stones and clogging her lungs the water pressing down and the seaweed wrapping about her ankles and she's faltering...

Elizabeth gasped for air as if she had just broken the surface of a foreign sea. But in reality, she was just standing there by the pier, with Edward looking concernedly at her. Her dress was dirty; her hair was matted to her head. Sweat dripped down her forehead in the hot sun that was just beginning to set over a surrealistic world; the waves that lapped at the empty docks.

"It – can't be true." Her voice came from the wavering plains above her, a light on the surreal surface; she can't speak because she's drowning.

Edward took his hat off and held it in both his hands in front of him. He bowed his head down but his dark eyes were lifted and studying Elizabeth's pallid face. The captain had not told Edward, or any of the other crew members of the Cordelia, why this guest had embarked with them on a trip to Tortuga. They had all wondered about the pretty lady, all wondered why she was alone.

The salty air wrapped about Elizabeth, the widow's shawl. If she stood at the end of the pier and looked out to sea, would the horizon be empty? She dared not look to see her dreams all gone. There was a silence. The air was sweltering, and the docks smelled like the sweat of sailors, tar and feathers, tar and feathers... Elizabeth felt a great unease fill her. She felt as if she were going to be sick, and the feeling reminded her to call the maid to help her with a cold cloth across her forehead. Why was she in Tortuga?

Her eyes alighted on Edward. Who was he? A faint swimming of images in the thickness pervading her mind. What was she doing here? - Chasing a fancy whose departure seared the membranes of her finest fears and brought hot tears to her eyes, scorching. The air was sweltering.

The second demanded a response. Elizabeth could just remain standing there forever with the searing and the breaking and the persistent image of tar and feathers. The image of a shipwreck hadn't come fully to her yet. She hadn't realized it yet, even. She was on the verge of it, though...

"I don't-"

Jack was dead. That immortal pirate with a cursed tongue and rum burning, the gold, the gold, the gold, he was gone? No... Was he her dream? Was he real? What was he? Where was she? What had she been doing? It was all a dream, a haze... like smoke from the flames of an island fire. Come rescue me! I'm waking up.

Waves crashing through a breakwall, the fires, cannons in the night, silence. The roar of the sea, the spray of the waves, she was cursed too, she could not feel it.

"Miss!"

Her body fell in a heap on the hot ground; she was suddenly aware of how tangled her hair was, how messy it was. Why hadn't she brushed it at least? It was tousled in salt.

She could cry the sea now if she could only... Why wasn't she crying?

It was all unreal. She couldn't grasp the realization. Was that because it was not true?

She sat up and held clods of dirt in her hands. "How do you know? How do you know that it is true?"

Edward was looking down at her like someone looks down at a sick person who doesn't know what they say in their sleep. Finally he started talking.

"We - us on the Cordelia, I mean - we had just got in at Port Royal, and another ship comes in, and we met the captain when they docked. He started tellin' our captain about, talkin' to him I mean, 'surely he knew of the Black Pearl?' O'course... an' this captain, he said, with great mirth... The Pearl was sunk, not far out, 'parrently just having left Port Royal - our cap'n said, lucky for us, and we..."

Elizabeth was looking at her dirty hands. All the dirty deeds of years and years of piracy were on her hands, at the bottom of the sea. Where was the dark muse who beckoned her sailors forth, braving the depths? She would not trust such a friend.

Edward's eyes narrowed. This lady, this woman had seemed to be elegant, high-class. The captain did not like to question; they were not the Navy, they had no responsibility. If a lady wants to run away and offers the right of passage to them, why should they turn her down? They didn't turn down passengers generally; plenty of people needing to get somewhere... or to get away. Had they thought of this with her? He could not remember, like many things. Notions passed by so quickly.

Merchant sailors were not as honorable as they seemed.

Of course Edward could not ask this fine lady why she had paid for passage to Tortuga. He was below her, she was above him. If the captain had not told him, then he had no right to know. Duty was the matter of things, after all. Perhaps she also had a duty? - to her madness.

Then he would have to find some decorum quickly and pull his charge together.

"Miss," said Edward, "what can I do for you? Ask the captain for your passage back..."

"No!"

If Edward said anything else, Elizabeth did not hear him. She wasn't quite sure where she was or how she had gotten here. Of course she had come from Port Royal to Tortuga on the merchant ship Cordelia. But the question was, what ambiguous path was that of her fancy which she had ridden henceforth? The path or course of reason or madness was lost to her now. All paths seemed to lead to the secrets swallowed up by the sea. Curses on islands that she had not believed. Had it all been just a dream? Surely she would wake up soon.

But she couldn't. She was so changed that she could not wake up and be all right. If this was a dream, then she was so changed by it that she could not wake up. It had so pervaded into her that it had shattered the things that she had held to be true, revealed some tangled-in-sea-weed things that she had thought to be lost, reversed the very poles of her balance, and set her stumbling on the shores awash in rum. In her loss of reason, indeed did she feel as though everything was exaggerated. Her dress was soaked in rum. Her throat was burning from the screams. But it was only tinges of sea- spray and the damp, humid air. It was only that she was parched from too much saltwater that she could not drink.

She felt very detached from herself and from all that had ever grounded her before. She had cut the threads of rationality when she ran away like a little girl clutching a knapsack and her favorite blanket, that of fancy, and then her fancies had become the thinnest and most wispy thread to hold her to the siren-singing figurehead plunging through the sea, thrust forward on a pirate ship, a pirate ship -

- Splintered by cannon-fire.

The sickness rose up again. She would've fallen had she not already been on the ground. Shifty sailors gave her coarse looks. Was she but a whore who had not done a fine enough job to earn enough money to stand firmly on her two feet? A whore to mad dreams, no doubt of that!

Here she had come from fanning herself on the battlements thinking of Will Turner and Norrington both and now she was clutching clods of dirt in her hands on the ground with her dirty hair blowing about her face, becoming even more tangled in the gusts from the sea. Now she could cry.

Instead she screamed. She screamed and hit the ground with her fists until the gravelly sea-shore soil was hurting her and hurting her. Why, it should! How fast does a ship sink? How dirty is the rope to hold a captain to his helm? How much does the salty sea wash dirty deeds from the hands of a sinking pirate? How much rum would be lost at the bottom of the sea - good rum, worthy rum, that could burn her throat enough to intoxicate her out of this flailing misery! How many bottles that could be broken or burned!

A vile drink that turns even the most respectable gentlemen into complete scoundrels.

If rum does such a thing to respectable gentlemen, then what does it do to ladies?

Was she intoxicated the night she ran away? What was she thinking about on that island? It was about trickery to get Will rescued. Will. She had thought she loved Will, then. How easy it was now to say she had thought, when at the time she had really loved him! What a funny thing, love. Just as deceptive as a curse.

A bloody curse!

She wasn't herself. Who was herself? She didn't know any more. Why was she reacting like this? Nothing could be explained anymore, now that she had broken reason like an empty bottle over her own head and plunged herself into a spell of unconsciousness, in which reality and unreality blurred so easily together that she knew nothing.

What is there to know?

Elizabeth stood up and smoothed her skirt over.

"It's not true," she said, tilting her chin upward, letting her hair fall away from her face. A sea breeze came over Tortuga as the sun sank away.

Edward didn't know what to say or do. He felt like he himself was barely there anymore.

Elizabeth looked out to sea. What now? The pirate of her fancy was gone, or he was not. But was he gone anyway to her? Even something else had just shattered. How many layers of fragile glass was she made of before the core? She shivered with the notion that all she was, was so many layers of glass, down to her fragile, fragile core. Just a child grasping for a fancy, a grappling hook, a gang-plank. Passages to the ship that had already left.

Shatter, shatter. The pirate of her fancy was only herself.