A/N: Because of the nature of the AU, there are certain parts that overlap with the original story, such as Theo's reaction to waking up in a world she previously considered fictional. I'm doing what I can to gloss over those parts without skipping them entirely - I hope they don't appear rushed, I just know that a good chunk of you will have read the main fic, so I don't see the point in boring you with things you've already read.

When Theo next awoke, groped blindly about her and sighed in contentment when her fingers were met with bed covers, and she registered the pillow beneath her head. As far as dreams went, the one she'd had last night wasn't the most eventful, but there was just something about it that made it the strangest. Vivid and hazy all in one - like she shouldn't be able to remember it upon waking. Inhaling deeply, she turned her head to the side and buried her face in the pillow. And that was when she paused.

It felt…strange. And it smelled different, too - a heavier floral scent than her own fabric softener, or even the grassy smell that clung to her camping gear regardless of how deeply she cleaned it. Still too hazy to do much more than huff her annoyance at the mystery, she inhaled deeply and stretched out like a cat. It was at that point where a few different things all happened at once, every single one of them dragging her by her hair into a jolting wakefulness. The strange, foreign covers stuck to her skin as she stretched - aggravating the burns that had no business being there - her hands met with a wooden headboard that she did not own, and a voice spoke a few feet to the side. An English voice, one that she'd previously only heard in movies.

"Miss Byrne? Are you awake? Theodo…Theodora?" her name was said hesitantly, like she wasn't sure she was getting it right "Can you hear me?"

Theo's eyes flew open, but unlike last time, she didn't start. She couldn't. It was like being trapped beneath the weight of sleep paralysis, such was how weak she felt. All she could do was stir feebly, and stare - primarily at Elizabeth fucking Swann, who had rushed to sit on the edge of the bed, beautiful, concerned, and very much real.

"You mustn't panic," Elizabeth met her gaze intently, resting a hand atop hers "Do you know where you are?"

In a four poster bed of which the curtains and the bedding had more bright blue fauna and flora on it than any wilderness she'd ever camped out in. Beyond that, she couldn't say. A shake of her head had the woman continuing.

"You are in Port Royal. My name is Elizabeth Swann, my father is governor here - you're in our home. I've been watching over you for some time…along with the maids, and the physician, of course."

She barely heard the words over the thrumming of her own blood in her ears. It was difficult to listen to much of anything upon waking up in a reality that didn't bloody well exist.

"Thank you," Theo rasped.

Speaking now hurt almost as much as it had last time, and Elizabeth took pity on her then, leaning towards the bedside table to take up a teacup before encouraging her to sit up, and holding it to her lips. It contained not tea, thankfully, nor water, but milk - incredibly sweet milk. Theo, however, was more concerned with how Elizabeth went about all of this like an utterly seasoned nursemaid, and not a woman who had been raised in luxury.

"Milk and honey," Elizabeth explained, unprompted "We've been drip-feeding you with it for days to try and keep your strength up. It appears we were only somewhat successful."

"Days?"

"Three of them. The physician assured us that it was good - that the rest meant you were healing. Truth be told, it was probably better that you weren't conscious while the worst of the burns were tended to. We were rather more successful in managing those."

Her words explained why the sheets had stuck to her - a glance at her arms found that the loose, flowing sleeves of the ornate white nightgown she'd been dressed in had been rolled up, and some sort of sticky salve had been applied to her still very pink skin.

"Thank you," she said slowly - for lack of much else to say, although the physical mechanics of talking were easier now, leaving her only to deal with the mental ones "I'm sorry if I've been a pain."

The furrow in Elizabeth's brow was more confused than anything else, so she rephrased it - this time doing her best to channel the voice she used to use for essays back in her high school days.

"I'm sorry if I've been an imposition," she clarified.

"Not at all. You hardly chose to end up where you did, did you?"

Her dark eyes lingered on her as she returned the teacup to the bedside table, hinting at the fact that the question was not an entirely rhetorical one.

"Can't say that I did," Theo answered honestly "I'm sorry - can you help me sit up? Talking like this is…it's a bit awkward."

"Only if you agree to stop apologising," she replied drily.

It took a few moments, but soon she was sitting up and feeling just a little bit less awkward for it. Although part of her was sure her heart was pounding so hard in her chest that Elizabeth could definitely hear it.

"How was it that you came to be washed up on that beach?" Elizabeth questioned "You must forgive me for prying so readily, but it's a question that has hardly left my mind since I first found you, and you've not been in much of a state to answer it until now. A shipwreck?"

Theo nodded "My memory is foggy. But it must've been."

How else did one end up washed up on a beach? She wasn't a sodding whale, it didn't just happen.

"Where were you sailing?"

That was a tricky one to answer. Port Royal had long since been claimed by the sea back home, but Theo knew it was in Jamaica. If she gave an answer of an island that was too near - Cuba, or Haiti - it might be no big deal for them to ship her off there. No matter how fucked she currently was (that was pending a real, cohesive assessment, but she'd wager she sat somewhere between 'utterly' and 'well and truly' on the fucked spectrum), she at least knew the people here. In some way or another. Elizabeth looked so very young, sitting here beside her. Wide-eyed and cheerful. If she really was here, in this sodding fictional land, and not being held hostage by some psychotic Keira Knightley lookalike, she knew the events that would soon happen, too. The same could not be said for Haiti or Cuba.

"America- er, the…new world."

Elizabeth's eyebrows rose somewhat "That's hundreds of leagues north."

"Our ship was forced off-course by pirates, and then dragged further off-course by a terrible storm. I suspect the tide did the rest of the work in dragging me here."

It spoke to how much of a toll her ordeal - the real one, the one that she couldn't even begin to make up the details of - had taken on her that she was out of breath just by sitting and talking. Elizabeth continued to watch her, her hands clasped amongst her skirts as she tried to steady her breathing again. The sympathy was back on her face, but it was joined by something else. Suspicion? Not the malevolent kind - not yet, anyway. But the sort a parent might have on their face as their kid insists that they have no idea how the cookies in the jar vanished.

"That's unfortunate," she said finally, lowering her gaze.

"Imagine how it looks from where I'm sitting," Theo replied drily.

That earned her a small smile. Which was probably how she was caught off-guard when Elizabeth reached into the folds of her skirts and produced a black leather wallet. One that was a hell of an anachronism in these parts.

"No," she said "It's unfortunate because you're not telling me the truth."

Theo knew then that if her burns would allow her to pale, her face would be the same shade as the nightgown she wore. Even if her pallor didn't show her fear, she knew her eyes did, for Elizabeth rested a hand atop her shin over the overs.

"If what I can glean from this is true, I suspect I cannot blame you for being dishonest with me now," she said quietly, eyes locked intently on hers "But I must know, or else I cannot help."

Well. Shit.

Three Days Earlier

With her father apprised of the situation, and a footman sent to Fort Charles in order to inform the men of Elizabeth's discovery, she was left with the maids to take care of their new guest. The woman - Theodora Byrne, if she'd heard correctly - was determined not to make it easy for them. While still mostly on her feet (so long as she had something to cling to), Elizabeth suspected she was not quite present. If she didn't know the truth of the matter, she'd have thought she was drunk. Where she previously talked in rasping slurs, now she didn't appear able to piece together a single sentence at all, her eyes fluttering even as they manoeuvred her up the stairs, each step an arduous process.

When they finally got her to the blue bedroom, sweat beaded on Elizabeth's brow - but it positively poured off of their new charge. They finally got her sitting down atop the bed, but every time they made to start undressing her, she would bat their hands away and insist on doing it herself, in private. It was an insistence that Elizabeth would have ordinarily understood, but under these circumstances, and with her utter inability to even undo the ties of the apron they'd knotted around her waist in an attempt to preserve her honour, it was very tiresome.

They'd relented, though, and Elizabeth stepped out of the room with Estrella, both listening with thinned, concerned lips to the sound of her stumbling about the room. Finally, after the clatter of china suggested she'd bumped into the dressing table in the corner, Elizabeth lost much of her patience and turned to her maid.

"Go downstairs and have the cook make some honeyed milk. Perhaps a broth, too, if Miss Byrne is able to take some. Water, also, we shall need water. After that, go to my own rooms and fetch a hairbrush, and a dressing gown. Oh, and a selection of books. I suspect she'll be bed bound for some time."

If she were being entirely honest, she knew they'd have need for less than half of what she'd just ordered. It was listed primarily to keep the maid out of the way, so that perhaps their charge would allow Elizabeth to help if it were only she who tried. Estrella nodded and all but fled, and Elizabeth waited until she turned the corner of the corridor to duck back into the room - only after giving a knock that was not answered.

Theodora Byrne was sprawled atop the floral bed-covers, the apron at her waist a jumble of knots, still fully dressed - including even her strange boots. Elizabeth sighed. At least if she was unconscious, she would not refuse help. She only hoped she would not be too cross when she awoke to find herself changed. The nightgown they'd already set aside for her was a puddle on the floor - it looked like she'd tried to pull it on over what she already wore, failed, and then gave up entirely.

That failure was likely a good thing, too, for the strange fabric of her underthings had grown stiff and unforgiving as wood thanks to the saltwater that had lapped at her while she lay unconscious. The clothing took Elizabeth a little time to figure out, but figure it out she did, unbuttoning and pulling down the strange denim smalls before casting them aside (noting the pocketbook that had been wedged into one of the four pockets the garment boasted, and setting it aside for later)…only to find she wore yet more smallclothes beneath her smallclothes. An Irish custom? A matter of religion, perhaps? Were she Catholic, as many Irish supposedly were, it was likely she'd have some strange habits.

The upper portion of her body was much easier to deal with, and the extent of her burns was made glaringly obvious once Elizabeth was able to compare it to the pale skin that had been shielded by her clothing. Sympathy welled in her heart at the sight of it - for she didn't envy the healing process she was likely to spend the next few weeks going through, and these were only the hurts they could see. At least, she resolved, they may help her with that. She wasn't in the habit of dressing and undressing others like a maid, so she was fully invested now.

Theodora hardly stirred as Elizabeth cast aside the remaining clothing and then gathered up the fabric of the nightgown into her hands. This part would be most awkward of all. Leaning forward, she encouraged the other women to sit up so she could pull the garment over her head…and then a burst of green across her back caught her gaze. Then orange, and streaks of…black? Elizabeth felt like she had stopped breathing entirely.

Rolling the barely-conscious woman over with not as much care as she probably should have, she stared in disbelief at the tattoo that sprawled across an entire quarter of her back. It was unlike any tattoo she'd ever seen - not on the rougher of the sailors who came into port for trade, and not even like the ones dotted across the pirates that were hanged at Fort Charles. Certainly not ever on any woman. These were not crude little cartoons, this was…well, it was almost art. Like someone had used watercolour paints on her very skin.

The woman huffed as if stirring, and Elizabeth rushed to make quick work of dressing her and hauling her into the bed - by which point she'd almost soaked her own dress in sweat, her hair quite deflated and awry. The pocketbook remained where she'd set it aside on the bedside table. Without hesitation, she took it up, confused at how something so small might hold anything of monetary value, but not allowing that dilemma to slow her down. She needed answers, and it seemed to be the only thing in any state to offer any.

A/N: Tumblr - esta-elavaris

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