The desperation in Elizabeth felt like ice and fire at once, freezing in her veins and spurning her forward into the black, burning. Though her screams had slashed like knives at the dark silence that was filling the void, in the end there had been nothing for them to catch onto. Father was moving—no. No, it was the Pearl that moved, all at once swift and slow and so distressingly steady upon the fathomless inkwells of fatality. Why weren't they changing course, dropping anchor? Couldn't everyone, anyone else see? They were leaving him!
Her feet were on the taffrail, fingers round the halyards. She bent her knees.
And then fingers firm as a vice seized her arms, hauled her down to the deck.
"Elizabeth…"
'No!' She wrenched and writhed instinctively. How could this happen?! Why were they still moving?! 'Let me go!' She lunged one last time, but the grip on her was clad in iron, drawing her farther and farther from the rail and her father. As she clawed the night, the pain of her grief tore at her throat, "I won't leave you!"
But she already had.
The hands upon her arms remained sturdy, turning her sharply away from the agony before her eyes and anchoring her in place. She wanted to fight, to run, to jump, anything to fix this broken nightmare. But those goddamn hands—Will's hands—drew her in tightly, bracing her against his body's unyielding stability. She saw black and gold and red, heard the thunder of her heart clashing against his own. And for all the fire that had been in her oaths, the darkness won. The last of the lanterns had already slipped into the shadows. Elizabeth's father was gone. Now there was nothing left behind to burn but tears, and, oh, how they burned her skin and suffocated her with the unseen smoke of despair.
She couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't bear it all at once. As her knees buckled beneath her, her arms found their place about Will's neck. Though they'd grown so distant over their misplaced burdens and secrets, she clung to him desperately. And he held her fast, cradling her heartbreak and caressing her sorrow in his sympathies. For a moment, her cries caught themselves in a knot in her chest.
"Is there a way?"
Her ear was against his throat, and though his question was asked quietly, it sent a rumble and shock of hope through her bones. She began to tremble and she felt his fingers tighten across her back. If there was a way, she would jump for it without question. If Will was to follow her into the night, so be it.
But it was not to be at all.
"Him at peace," she heard the obeah woman say.
Then everything truly broke. As if she had dropped into churning waters, Elizabeth choked, gasped, clenched Will's shoulders like a lifeline, reeling and fighting for breath, for sanity. Her father's smile came to her, accompanied with an evoked trace of the scent of his wig powders and wafting in the memory of the moment he'd last kissed her cheek, on the morning of the wedding she never got to have. Why was this happening? The pouring of her tears, the wailing of her voice burned and burned, and she pressed her face as hard as she could against Will's neck, burying herself in the forgotten familiarity of his embrace, the only meager warmth and solace to be found in the vast expanses of starless, unfeeling night about her.
Then Will's hands loosed from around her.
"Come on," he whispered gently taking hold of shoulders, drawing her from him, and she allowed it though she loathed the cold invasion of emptiness between them, matching how she felt inside.
Will's hands were on her back, at her elbow, and she was vaguely aware of the crew's piteous faces turned upon her like the submerged corpses from before, as he guided her down the steps to ship's waist and towards her hatches. She heard Mister Gibbs call him, felt the rumble of his whispers in Will's ear, saw his fingers move towards Will's pocket. Then Will's hands guided her into the depths of the Pearl's orlop, and Elizabeth understood where he meant to go. Though she knew she was walking, somehow she felt as though her legs had been left behind, that she was drifting, floating through the ship's guts as though she were another ghost on the seas of the dead. Her fingers felt her way through the shadows of hammocks and past the shapes of the galley, cast in meager lantern light that reminded her of the torches in the depths of Fort Charles. And at times she thought saw the shape of the shadow of her father leading her forward, tall and determined.
'I've arranged passage for you back to England… I must stay.' 'No!'She couldn't breathe. The ship was swaying and Elizabeth's ears rang with the pressure of her sobs. She felt weak and dizzy, and the consistent brush of Will's fingertips on her back made it clear her stumbling was not in her head.
In a few steps, they arrived in the sick bay. While she was aware of Will shutting the door and setting down a lantern he had plucked along the way, Elizabeth sat heavily on the berth, doubling over her knees with the weight of her tears. She shuddered and rasped—now she felt she couldn't stop weeping even if she wanted to, and her cries filled the cabin so fully, she felt as though she were hearing them from another body entirely. Her head and heart were pounding with pain, and she was reeling hard.
Suddenly, the dark, blurry outline of Will's body appeared before her, kneeling. His hands were on her again, gentler now, running lightly up and down her arms.
"Shh," came his whisper. And he squeezed her shoulders once more, both light and firm with his imploring in the midst of her gasps, "Look at me, look at me."
Desperate for any sense of stability, she latched onto his voice and his commands, blinking fiercely as she tried to raise her head to him and make out the feelings etched into his face.
"Breathe with me. Come on," Will called, taking and releasing a deep, long breath, once, twice…
Elizabeth struggled to follow his lead, but eventually found her breathing growing more steady to a degree. A sob heaved from her belly involuntarily, unexpectedly gagging her, and she began to cough instead.
Will fumbled about his pockets, withdrawing and clumsily unstopping Gibbs' flask before presenting it before Elizabeth's face. "Here."
She didn't need to be asked twice, accepting the gift immediately and taking a hearty swig. It burned the entire way down, then at last she breathed and breathed and breathed.
After nearly an hour, Elizabeth lay curled on her side in the sick berth, the violence of her sorrow largely quelled for the moment after having seemingly cried all that she possibly could for the present time. The ship rocked and lowed mournfully in her stead. She knew if she allowed her mind to wander down the paths that called her, pain would wrack her again, so she allowed herself to become mesmerized by the flickering flame in the lantern, dancing behind smoggy glass and casting golden beams in a rim across Will's hair, sitting with his back to the berth and a head bowed in absolute silence. She felt heavy, filled and weighted with the aching sludge of grief and the subtle haze of the rum.
'Come quickly!' 'What's happening?'She shut her eyes tightly against the intrusion of her memory. But it could not be held at bay, and the quiet words left her lips almost involuntarily: "It's my fault."
She felt Will turn, awake after all. For a moment he was silent, as he had wont to be these dark and dangerous months.
"No," he eventually responded in a low thrum. "It isn't."
"It's my fault, it is my fault," she hissed. She felt the rise of another sob building in her chest, the beginnings of a conjuring of her father's specter beginning to return once more, and she clenched her fist around Gibbs' flask as if she could hold it all down with her spindly hands.
She felt the brush of Will's fingers lightly touch her arm before moving to draw the hair from her face. She opened her eyes and stared at the shadows obscuring the corners of the cabin, seeking distractions in dusk. But her final moments in Port Royal kept returning to her, as if calling from those shadows. She stared deeper into them, and fell unwittingly back into her memory.
"He'd booked my passage," she explained slowly, "had me taken from the fort to the harbor. Everything was prepared. But I was furious, because he wasn't listening to me about how I'd promised—how I wanted to wait for..."
She stopped herself before she could say it, but the word hung heavily in the air about them anyway: 'you.' Her stomach suddenly twisted, sick from the realizations dawning inside of her about the choice that she had made all those months ago. She finally sought Will's overshadowed eyes, and tears began to prick hers anew. When she spoke, her throat tightened around the words, as if trying to keep her from saying any more.
"I didn't want to leave you. So I left him."
The shadows were deep, the lantern casting Will's profile in a black silhouette, but in the dimness she could see his brow crease for a moment. In her mind, she could see her father's brow creasing under the past's torchlight, then turning to face the gloaming of Port Royal's harbor and the endless black of the night she had just witnessed engulfing him only moments before.
"I left him, searching for you... then searching for Jack. All this time, I didn't once look back unless it was to think about you and I and our..."
Time swept her mind in a tidal wave of emotions. The tenderness and yearning she had felt for her almost-husband as they reached for each other through iron bars. His assurances and promises and keenly felt absence over days then weeks then months. The rush of the night's chill around her as she fled far from her father, his carriage and all her dreams for the future. The unsettling glitter of Jack's grin and the sharp sting of James' scrutiny, mingling under confusion and hurt as that damned compass whirled and twisted between targets she could not see. The acrid smell and bite of salt, of tar, of gunpowder, of blood, of betrayal. The lonesome, shame-laden yawning of the abyss that had opened before her feet, pushing her from everything she thought her life could have been, what it was supposed to be.
"If I hadn't run the way I had, if I had stayed—"
"Don't," Will's voice cut through her verbiage, quiet but sharp and sure. "You'll never know how it would've been, Elizabeth. You'll make yourself sick dwelling on it."
The sob she held back slipped out. "But I do know that none of this would have happened."
Will said nothing. It was true, after all. Wasn't it? If she hadn't left Port Royal when she had, how she had, maybe she could have escaped with her father? Maybe she could have persuaded him to take her place on his escape vessel and fly to England? Maybe she could have sent word to London of Beckett's ploys with her father's signet. And then… and then…
"Some things would have still happened," Will whispered, at last. "You couldn't have stopped Beckett's plan to begin with-he would have come all the same. I wouldn't have changed a single thing I had done leading up to the kraken-I couldn't. And if you had taken a different path while I still got tangled up with Jack and Jones, it's likely every last man on this ship back then would have ended up dead… including me." He turned his head back away from her, facing the tiny space in front him. A bit of the lantern's light managed to creep around him and glint off the small hoop pierced in his left earlobe, carrying a grim, barely audible musing to her ears: "The price for love runs especially steep in these waters."
The air was stale and heavy-smothering, even-and suddenly the ship's subtle movements made her feel sicker instead of soothed. She felt trapped, not by the ship's wooden barriers or the waters of death carrying her, not by Will's stoic vigil, but by the absolute incapacity with which she faced the changes surging over her life like a violent storm. She'd thought she could fight back, that she could wrest control and seize her own destiny. She'd done it before, after all, with Barbossa and Jack and the Dauntless. She had been so sure she would do it again. But now she was left in the shattering midst of a tortuously prolonged disaster, finally realizing just how small and helpless she truly was against the tides that pushed her destiny.
And for what purpose were these prices? She wasn't even asking for all that much, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps it could be one thing if she were truly avaricious, if she had wanted to spit in the face of actual gods and not the blood-soaked idols of greedy, evil men. But there had been no mountains of gold, no titles, no fleets, no magics that turned her head one way or the other. Freedom and love... that was all she had wanted, all she had sought. I should have been simple.
'This is the only way, don't you see...? I'm not sorry...' 'Pirate.'Elizabeth bit her lip, hard. How could she ever be free in such a world, where its costs were so high? And why did the price for love have to be so very steep? How many people would have to pay for such priceless things, in the end? This was cruelty, injustice. Her father didn't deserve to pay for her crimes-if they could even be called that! All she had done was what she had to do, to make it out of these hellish circumstances with Will, alive. He never asked for any of this.
'No! Will's gone to find Jack... He's a better man than you give him credit for-' 'Even if Will succeeds... Do not ask me to endure the sight of my daughter walking to the gallows-do not!'She squeezed her eyes shut, forced herself to breathe. And she once again felt the distinctive touch of Will's fingers against her arm, calming and inquisitive. She couldn't resist how his heart called to hers, and found her mouth opening.
"I can't stop thinking about how the last things I said to him were part of another quarrel," she confessed the last of her guilt in anguish. "We never got to… He was just trying to save me."
"From what?" Will's voice was soft on its surface, but underneath she detected the sharp edge of a challenge to her thoughts. When she didn't answer his question, he pushed harder and the edge came to the surface, "Save you from what, Elizabeth?"
It hurt to think about and hurt to speak. So many things since those days were built on regrets and pains she'd tried to ignore and forget.
Will pushed on, quiet but persistent, "He wasn't trying to save you from nothing—you didn't run without any reason at all. And I won't stand to see you try to continue to convince yourself that your decisions were pure selfishness because your choices were hard. I know you, even after all that's happened: if you'd had any reason to believe your father was in danger, you would have found a way to him. You didn't know."
'And what, Will?' She wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with his reassurance. She didn't want or need to feel better about herself-she wanted her father back, to reassure her that there was a refuge, a future she could return to when all of this was done, to reveal that this could all just end up left behind as another bad dream to wake up from with the sunrise. Nothing Will could say would ever restore him to her or bring back the remnants of the past they'd fought for. It was all gone. And she needed to make sense of it. Why couldn't he let her?
As if responding to her thoughts, his hand squeezed her arm in a final motion of attempted comfort, and he spoke to her one last time: "It's Beckett's fault. Only Beckett's fault."
Will then took his hand away from her, moving to stand on his own two feet. The ship rose and fell as if breathing, listening, waiting.
Elizabeth opened her eyes. It was true, after all. Wasn't it? In the end, it didn't matter what she had or hadn't done, what noose she'd help cut, what prison she had fled, what gun she'd held to his head... She hadn't pulled the trigger on him, but Cutler Beckett had. Over and over and over again. Beckett had come to Port Royal to use her and Will and her father as pawns in his game with Jack, no other reason. Beckett was the one who had chosen to disrupt her marriage, to threaten her and Will's lives, to hunt them across the seas and lands of the earth like dogs gone feral and rabid. How could she have assumed anything else but that he would take her father prisoner in the wake of her flight? And was it not Beckett's fleet leading the machine that was staining the seas in gunpowder and blood? He had taken her marriage, taken her freedom. Now that Will had said it aloud, there could be no other explanation, no doubt in Elizabeth's mind: Beckett had to have been the one responsible for taking her father's life in what was no doubt a cold-blooded murder.
It was all Beckett.
Slowly, steadily a rage in her heart began to flare, burning hotter than any darkness her grief or sorrow could ever begin to overcome. Elizabeth turned her eyes to Will's silhouette, standing like a black void against the flames that burned at his back. The darkness opened in her stomach and twisted and turned. She bared her teeth.
"I'm going to kill him," she vowed in a hiss.
Will didn't say a word in return, and the shadows shrouded his expression. All Elizabeth could see was the bowing of his head as he stepped away from her and back into the bowels of the ship.
But he left the door propped open.