Author's note: None of this is mine, anyway, but I would like to clarify that this is one idea of a Jack/Elizabeth story. This one-shot is set indeterminately after the second movie, where I assume Jack has returned from the dead. No spoilers. I hope you enjoy!
Y así llegaste tú
Devolviéndome la fé
Sin poemas y sin flores
Con defectos con errores
Pero en pie
Y siento
Algo en ti algo entre los dos
Que me hace insistir
Cuando miro en tus pupilas
Sé que Dios no dejó de existir…
Shakira in "En Tus Pupilas"
Bursts of sand rushing past the windows, and skin bathed in cool milk. The drops drying, she would towel her face, the cloth fitted to her hand like a fingerless glove; tap, tap, tap. Twisted hair, writhing into a finish, twined on her head, and the pout of lips. Hands on her shoulders, not her own. Some unspeakable agony---
But the illusion must stop, there must be an end to the woman with the face in the mirror, and the writhing of sea waves, of hair, and the spine, jerked into guilty motion. A scene boiled with repetition, overstrung and rotten in her head. Not real, yet possible; not yet, but perhaps real very soon.
Perhaps. Will would not like this, but he did not like anything Elizabeth did these days. He was good, she knew it as she knew the dried webs of sliced red in his back, but sometimes the resentment was too easy to come, and hatred bubbled over when unmerited. She knew because he had shown her, look, look, look what I did, I suffered, I suffered for you. And so did I, she wanted to say, I still suffer for you, despite the hate. It was too easy to hate him, too easy to leave, and feel like the unshackled for leaving from a fate of a house and his children. In a room, of sparse wood and velvet, in new company, perhaps better, she had left him seas away.
Jack stood before her now, complete and with eyes unglossed from death. Hair dreadlocked into coils, eyelids darkened by kohl, and teeth flashing, he had seemed to have changed very little, though Elizabeth sometimes suspected otherwise. She herself was at her most virginal, white dress and no shoes, flowing hair and natural face. And panic and resolution mixing and trembling in her heart, in her mind, playing with desire and shame to skitter across her back.
He put his hands on her hips, stroking the white fabric. As some part of her collapsed, Elizabeth thought that she might too; a desire so painful, so real and heady, that her blood-drugged state heightened and her mouth prickled and soured. She did not want to be panting like a dog, in front of him, heaving like a night-woman, but embarrassment was leaving, his hands were touching her hands, his lips puckered against the top of her breasts as she cradled his head with her touch.
"So, would you kill me again?" he whispered.
"No," she answered honestly. "Not until I do this."