Prompt: Oaths and promises. Originally posted 25/1/08.
Once again, it all belongs to the mouse. Except for the chapter title, which on this occasion is the property of e. e. cummings and taken from Maggie and Milly and Molly and May:
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea.
In the place between life and death, Will dreamed. He dreamed of a ship and the angry sea, pacified by his wish; he dreamed of distant stars under other skies; he dreamed of cold fingers and the clinging entanglement of drowned women's hair. His every dream was lit with a green glow, and into them all came Elizabeth—vibrant and fierce and alive with the wind in her face, or slain and grey upon a wooden deck. And over all that happened in his visions, above every strange path he walked, he heard the echoes of two voices, mingling and unravelling.
"A touch of destiny," Tia Dalma murmured, sometimes low and soft, sometimes great and terrible. "I'd die for her!" his own voice reverberated, though he did not, then, recognise it.
"I'd die for her!"
"I'd die for her!"
I'd die for her.
Conscious and—for a certain value of the word—alive, the words remained with Will, as he leaned on the rotting rail of the Dutchman. He had spoken them thoughtlessly, but only because no thought was required...since he was twelve years old, he had been willing to sacrifice anything for her. That had never really changed, though at times he had wondered if he was a fool for his fidelity. Had he been given the choice again, he would have answered in the same way—but he had not been asked again. Someone had already heard those impetuous words, and though they had postponed judgement, in the end had returned to collect. The irony was not lost upon him; near two years to the day, it was, since the moment he spoke those words and made himself a pirate with the saying. Two years between the time he finished that near-perfect sword and the time it finished him; two years between the making of the promise and the redeeming of it.
I died for her.
A steep price indeed, but he had been prepared to pay even more dearly and receive nothing in return, when he mortgaged his life to the fates.
"Depends on the one day."