AN: Okay, so I've been in a Roux inspired mood lately, so a lot of this is borrowed without permission from Chocolat. And I also have to mention – for the purposes of my story, the food fits – but as far as I know yakisoba didn't exist until after World War II. Sigh. Damn black market corrupting the Japanese and causing them to make gloriously good meals. I'm going to go with the theory that in Shipwreck Cove people were already experimenting with different spices from all over, and this is where yakisoba – Pan noodles – came from.
Disclaimer: Not mine.

Chapter Three: Inspiring the Cabbages

It hurts. She has been pushed back onto the bed, and Madame Chin's midwife has her legs spread and is yelling at her. And it hurts. Oh, it hurts.

There is blazing pain, and she thinks it will never stop. It's early. Too early. She still has weeks and weeks. It shouldn't be happening like this. Cairbre is gone, out to check on some disturbance in Haiti, and she is alone. Achingly alone. No husband, no friend. Only Elizabeth and Madame Shang.

And it hurts.

"You have to push, girl!" Shang is crying at her, pushing her legs apart again and making her muscles scream in agony.

"I am pushing!" she yells back. "I'm pushing, damn it!"

They've been at it for hours. Hours. Every once in a while Teague will peek his head worriedly 'round the door, and instead of screaming at Madame Shang she'll screech at him. He leaves quickly.

She doesn't dwell on it. Because, goddamn, it hurts like hell, and she thinks this is wrong. That it should not hurt this much. That there is something wrong. Very wrong.

She hears someone knock on the door, and Shang sends the other girl, the one about Elizabeth's age, to it. And she listens as Teague asks how things are going.

Complications, the girl is saying softly. Don't know if…

She glares murderously at Madame Shang. "What's going on?" she asks.

"You just have to push," Shang tells her. And Elizabeth hates her. With a passion.

"I've been pushing, you miserable hag!"

Another contraction washes over her, and she screams, white pain blinding her. She thinks she hears something crashing at the front of the room, by the door, but it hurts, and she isn't quite sure what is up and what is down, let alone if something is crashing in the room.

She blinks her eyes open when the rush of pain subsides a little, and finds her hand clutched in one she knows well. The rings are warm against her fingers, and the strap of leather is soft and worn. The look he is giving her is a worried one.

"Lizzie," he says, brushing damp hair from her face, bending to kiss her sweaty forehead. And she's too tired to be angry with him. Too tired to yell at him, tell him to leave. Instead, she just clutches Jack's hand as another wave of pain bears over her.

When she can think again, she notices that he isn't even wincing, and reaches for his other hand. He kisses both her hands, and then smiles at her.

"Mistress Swann –."

"I'm pushing, you nasty little –." She is interrupted by another surge of white-hot agony.

The casket is small. Tiny. She thinks it is strange that they are even made that small. She shakes her head when Teague shows it to her, and tells them she wants to cremate him.

There is no funeral. She refuses to have one, only she lets Jack hold her hand as Cairbre and Gregory lower her son onto the buoy. She doesn't cry. Hasn't done.

She sees her loyal subjects have all turned up for it, anyway. To see her stillborn set out to sea in a blazing glory. They stand on balconies high above, or on the empty deck of a marooned ship out in the water, their heads lowered, hats clutched to their chests.

The King's subjects, all mourning her loss where she can't. Won't. Doesn't.

Cairbre takes the torch he is handed slowly, and she can see tears glistening in his eyes as he lowers the torch to the raft. She watches him bend to untie the rope holding her son to the dock.

He drifts away quickly, as if something is calling him. The fire takes, blazing against the night sky, and she watches the raft drift out to sea, until the spark of light is gone, too far away to see.

She turns, away from the sight of the glittering stars of night, and Jack swings an arm around her waist, murmuring something that must be words of comfort in her ears. Shipwreck Cove is quiet, and all its occupants still have their heads bowed, are still waiting. Waiting.

She feels hollow. Her stomach is mostly flat, springing back almost as if there'd never been a living soul in there, and the only thing she has to remember him by is the name she gives him.

James. James Swann. James Turner. She isn't sure which.

She thinks, ironically, that William will see his son long before he should.

But she does not cry.

She is craving…something. It rolls around in her head, refusing to give her peace, and it makes her stomach twinge with uncomfortable want. She needs…salt. And spice. She needs something with a flavor that overwhelms her, something tangy, and spicy, and sweet all at the same time. She needs…

"Noodles."

Elizabeth glances up at Jack as he slides an ornately painted bowl in her direction. He's even remembered to put the chopsticks in. She stares at it for a moment, letting the smell of the sauce waft upwards, and then shoots Jack another look. "This is another feed Elizabeth venture, isn't it?"

He grins lopsidedly at her, just like his father had two days ago when he slid some kind of tempura in front of her. Apparently, they had decided she had a hankering for Japanese. "You have to eat, love."

She looks up at him, squinting a bit. "You're different," she tells him. "You've been different."

He shrugs away from her gaze, turns his face away from her. She can't pinpoint what it is exactly, but something…in his air, in his walk…something has changed since she last saw him, ten months ago.

She watches him swing another chair up beside her, and glances at him through her hair as he puts a bowl of noodles in front of himself, reaches for his chopsticks and starts to eat.

"Where did you get yakisoba, Jack Sparrow?"

He grins at her. "Love, have you not seen Shipwreck Cove? It's just busting at the seams with all manner of exotic foods. I'm telling you, one day, every city's going to be like this one, fit to bursting with every kind of food imaginable. They'll even have people who take the food to you."

"You didn't answer my question," she replies, playing with her chopsticks, pressing at the noodles.

Jack sighs. "If I tell you where I got it, you won't eat it, and that'll defeat the purpose entirely. So how's about you just take a bite and enjoy it. It's your favorite."

Elizabeth picks at the food for a moment longer, and then takes a bite, savoring in the way it burns, just a bit, as it slides across her tongue. It's everything she's been looking for, for months and months. This is so much better than crumpets and tea, she thinks. She swallows, finds Jack watching her, and shakes her head.

"It's fantastic," she tells him, her finger's swirling the thin bamboo, grasping more without her really noticing, and she brings the bite up to her lips. "Not my favorite."

He seems to take this as a challenge, by the way his eyes light, and takes another ravenous bite of his own. He doesn't seem to notice Teague in the doorway, but Elizabeth can see him, out of the corner of her eye.

She is sure he smiles, just before he turns to leave.

It is just after sunset, her favorite time of day, when everything is an ethereal rosy hue, and as she sits with her face to the wind, and lets a leg dangle over the edge of the high cliff, she thinks about her life. About how she'd always been a bit too energetic, a little too forceful in her endeavors and personality.

About her strange obsession with all things piratical, and how, at first, she'd fallen in love with Will because…well, because he was a pirate. Even at twelve, she'd known that.

There are a lot of things in her life that she knew before everyone else did.

She thinks about when Jack Sparrow first came into her life, his face (poorly sketched and quite a bit more haggard than even she had ever seen him) plastered across some wanted poster for who knows what. Two days later she'd listened at her father's study door as James and a few other navy men had chatted about Sparrow's threat to Port Royal. She could still remember James' voice, riveting in its fervor. "He's not a threat to us. Nassau is small-time work – they've no order, no systems of law – they might as well have been a pirate port. Were, at one time not too long ago, if you remember correctly. The only reason Sparrow made it without being killed was that everyone else was too drunk to see him coming."

He'd never been fond of Jack Sparrow.

She thinks about when Will asked her to marry him. He didn't have a ring, and he'd looked desperately embarrassed at not being able to afford one – she hadn't cared. Not a stitch, because she loved him, and God she wanted to be married to him. Had been waiting for weeks, because he'd always stopped her with a soft touch, just at the door, and he'd glanced down at the floor and muttered "Elizabeth," in that way that told her he was still getting used to calling her that, and then he'd never finished what he had to say. She'd left their practice sessions with disappointment seeping in her gut, boiling until that last day she'd nearly slashed at him while he wasn't looking and said "Just ask me, you ponce!" Thankfully, she hadn't, and even more thankfully, when he'd stopped them to rest, he'd glanced at her and blurted something like "Wallumarrame?"

She thinks about when she knew she was pregnant. And how elated she'd been, because even without Will for ten years, at least, this way, she had three months and nine years with someone who'd remind her of him.

She thinks about when she almost kissed Cairbre, two weeks after they had to sink an English merchant ship because they'd fought back, instead of just damn capitulating. How she'd doled out money between her crew of miscreants, and handed Cairbre his complete twenty-five percent, and how she'd looked at him. She could feel something rolling in her belly, but didn't dare touch it, because she knew Cairbre would know, somehow. And she'd felt his hand on her arm, and looked up at him, and those eyes were dark and full of something. And she'd heard Jack's whisper in her ear, persuade me, and she'd wanted to kiss him. Wanted Cairbre to get rid of the image of Jack Sparrow that was forever creeping into her head. And she'd leaned forward, and his hand had been curling around her back, just under her armpit.

And then he'd been gone, out the cabin door in a rush.

She thinks about how, two weeks ago, Jack had started sleeping next to her, barely touching her as they fell asleep, but waking her in the night from some terror she'd been having, or he'd been having, and holding her close, his nose in her hair and his lips pressed against her neck.

She thinks about what it would have been like, if, nine years from now, she could have stood with her son as Will slugged out of his rowboat, and she could have introduced her husband to James Weatherby Turner.

And, four weeks late, she feels the tears prick in her eyes. Feels that aching in her chest well, and knows that damn it, she is gong to cry.

She suppresses it, taking two very deep breaths.

Then she starts to hyperventilate.

She feels it, rising in her chest, pushing, pushing it's way out, and she presses her hand to her stomach, like she's trying to stop an ache there. She hears footsteps and swings her head around, most of her body swinging with it.

"Lizzie?"

His voice is soft, but the wind carries it to her, and she feels her shoulders shake. Feels the beast within her swell, and she tries to speak, but all that comes out is a sob. She closes her mouth in surprise.

Elizabeth watches him kneel in front of her, and tries to shake the beast free – but it shoves up, causing her eyes to dot with tears and her lips to quiver.

Jack sets a hand on her knee and it is soft and warm and she lunges for him, hands fisting into the back of his shirt as she presses her face into his chest.

And she cries. Cries like she hasn't in years, mourning, mourning for something more than her lost child. It is a lifetime of loss that comes pouring out of her like a fountain. It is her mother, her father, James and Will – it is Jack, and Nolan, and friends she never had, and people she disappointed, and people who disappointed her, and she cries, and her shoulders shake, and it feels like pure agony. But something replaces it. As each tear is shed, something else fills her, and she thinks, through the pain, that she needs this. Needs to release the years of hurt, and needs Jack's hand at her back, rubbing circles, whispering soft words she can't quite make out into her hair.

She cries until she is drained – of tears, and energy, and everything else in between, but she doesn't pull away. Instead she keeps her arm hooked under his, and lets her fingers play with a stray curl at the nape of his neck that's never quite grown. And she breathes.

Breathes without restrictions. She hasn't breathed like this in…she's never breathed like this. There were always restrictions. They just got worse and worse until she'd been – quite literally – unable to breathe. And Jack had pulled her back, brought her back to life breathing. But still constrained.

It's gone. The weight that had always been pressing against her is gone, gone who knows where, but gone, and she can smell sweat, and rum, and the sea, and Jack.

Finally, she tilts her head up at him, and he smoothes a damp strand of hair from her forehead, tucks it behind her ear.

"Better?" he asks.

Elizabeth nods. Yes. Better is exactly what she is.