Disclaimer: eyes the Mouse sternly Here's hoping Disney will do well by them come July.
Summary: In the aftermath of CotBP, Elizabeth and Will discuss what might have been, and worse, what might not have been at all. For the "Wish" challenge at Black Pearl Sails, 500 words. I've done a variation on this theme before, in Sticks and Stones, so hopefully I'm not repeating myself too badly. K, Will/Liz.
No Regrets
Elizabeth--already a minor celebrity in the town and surrounding countryside as the Governor's lovely and eligible daughter--was ruined, of course, in the eyes of Port Royal's privileged society folk and working people alike; a cautionary tale and an object of pity, at best, but more often the object of vulgar curiosity or ridicule, and Will could not decide which was worse. The way they spoke of her! As if she had chosen to be kidnapped by pirates and marooned on that island with Jack; as if she was lucky to be engaged at all, even to a blacksmith. Will, who knew painfully well just how lucky he was to have won her, would have made and kept many a dawn appointment on his beloved's behalf, had his beloved not begged him, almost tearfully, to do no such thing.
"It only makes it worse," she said. "We must not mind them--it is to be expected--Will, I won't have it. What if you should lose, and leave me to bury you for the sake of nothing but foolishness and gossip?"
"I wouldn't lose," he answered, with a grin, and dropped a kiss on her hand.
But she was not mollified. "Promise me, Will. No dueling. Not on my account. Please..."
He could not oppose her, not when she grasped his work-roughened hands between her smooth white ones, when she gazed up at him and said his name that way. "All right," he said, and did not remind her that the foolishness at stake was his honor as well as her own. "Don't you care what they say?"
"No, indeed," she retorted, with a toss of her glossy head. "They can say whatever they like." But she bit her lip, and he remembered how she had flushed earlier that day when a bevy of officer's wives had cut her in the street, and how he had sometimes, on visits to the Governor's manse, found her eyes red-rimmed and her smile upon seeing him over-brilliant.
"I imagine you must wish now that you'd never stolen that medallion off me," Will said softly.
"The wages of sin," said Elizabeth, with a laugh and a sigh, but then she shook her head. "No, dear Will. I have often thought of it, but never wished it. For if I hadn't taken that 'bit of shine' from your neck, if I hadn't been spirited away by cursed pirates and called myself Liz Turner, I would be promised to James Norrington today."
Will flushed in his turn. "I would have spoken. I would have--"
"Would you have?" She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, and he fell silent. "It's all right, Will. I know. But what I do not know is how I might have answered." And when he stared at her, she said, quietly and fiercely, "I regret nothing of what has passed. But I would have, if none of it had come to pass at all..."