And Beyond
A One-Shot by Rose with Thorns
DMC SPOILERS!
The sea called to her, curling around her and tugging at her hair. Come back to me, it called.
She ignored it.
The full moon cast shadows over her coverlet, her floor, her. It fell just short of Elizabeth Swann, in her bed at the Governor's mansion, who sat staring fixatedly at the compass. It was solid, it was dark. It smelled of Jack.
"It points you in the direction of what you want most in the world".
It had, and then she'd left him chained to Pearl, with his taste and the taste of rum on her lips, and guilt eating at her stomach.
She caressed it, revered it. She whispered to it: "Show me."
It spun, twittering about, and then…
It pointed straight forward.
"The sea, I know!" she cried furiously, tears coming unbidden. She threw it furiously. "The bloody sea!"
"Easy with that, love."
The leather of his sun-tanned skin stood out in the moonlight, eyes glittering with their usual keenness. It was not a shadow shaped into a wish. He was there. Straight ahead at the end of her bed.
Elizabeth choked on his name, surprised that it was so hard to shape a one-syllable word and verbalize it. But it was more than that. It was everything. Everything and anything she needed in life.
He was so warm, so strong and smelled so good. He was so close.
"I couldn't-I needed-"
"I know, love," he whispered into her hair, lips so painfully curse that her lips burned.
"And I've hated myself for it ever sin-"
Their kiss before was nothing like this. 'I need you' it said. 'This is for Forever' it said. In a lithe move, he covered her, his mouth tracing the lines of her neck. She fought to recapture his mouth as it made its way to her ear. She clung to him. This was her anchor, her port in the storm. Her everything clichéd and trite and overly used to describe that basic human need.
"It's not broken, Lizzie," Jack rasped, gruff and desperate, as if trying to call, undiscovered by another over some great distance. "The compass is not broken. Find me, love."
Breaking the surface of the dream, Elizabeth gasped for air and sat up. She looked over the edge of the hammock. The others, those not on shift, snored quietly around her in the dark. The compass was next to her side.
She put no credit in dreams-nor Barbarossa, who was the reason for the daggar she slept with and her hammock's close proximity to Gibbs'.
"Find me, love."
Instinctively, she opened the compass. 'In the world' he'd said. Elizabeth watched as it hopped around hopelessly. And then it stopped, pointing resolutely in one direction.
To the end of the world and beyond, she'd promised, and that was much more of a promise than 'Till Death Do Us Part'.
