'Daddy?'
'I'm here, love.'
Meg reaches up her arms, wraps them around her father's neck, and she's nothing but a whimper as he picks her up. John clutches her to him, and she hides her face against his neck. She's so small, he thinks of porcelain, of Venetian glass.
'He's coming.' She whispers, voice thick.
'We'll go. The ship is fixed. We can go.'
He nods to the Rolfe family, shielding his daughter from their eyes, and half kicks open the door. The world outside is black, but he can find his way. He's navigated through midnight seas with cloudy skies, and he can find their home.
She's warm in his arms. She's always been warm – when he dragged her from the ocean, when he picked her up (her and her bleeding carcasses of arms), when he held her the first time and looked into her pitch dark irises.
'John?' he turns around. There she is. Standing in the doorway, haloed in the light.
As she has stood hundred times. A thousand. In his dreams she's stood before him, held out her hand – but then there are tall trees, and soft soil, and the wind. Now there is a doorway, and her hair is tied away, and she has lost her freedom, her sense of sense. The girl who hurled around river bends is dead.
'Goodbye, Pocahontas.' John Smith says, and walks away.
And the woman in the doorway breaks away from the house, runs to him, watches him leave her.
The words she sings are soft, broken, a mess of tears.
You can own the earth and still, all you'll own is earth until...
The song lingers in the air. The tune his daughter plays on her violin, the song he repeated in his head, through all that blood, through all that murdering and brutality and the faces he still sees before he goes to sleep. But she cannot finish the song. Her face is cut with tears.
You can paint with all the colours of the wind. The last time he sung those words was to his sleeping daughter. His daughter in his arms. So he must take her home.
A wind stirs through the pine trees. It wraps itself around them, as he walks away.