It is almost dawn, and I wake. I'm in his arms, his warm, strong, beautiful arms. It's just a dream, I tell myself. It's just a dream.

Then I look up into his face, and I think maybe it's not. The panic that was rising in my chest subsides, and is replaced by doubt and need. I need to know that it's real, that he's finally here, that I'm allowed after a decade of longing to have him for myself.

He doesn't wake up with the first kisses. The exhaustion of ten years finally caught up with him, and he looks almost dead, a ghost from the previous fearless pirate I knew. I shake him and kiss him and bite him and gnaw at him, because it's a body, he's just a body, and I know that he's abandoned me again.

I only realize I'm screaming when I suddenly feel his breath on my ear. I can't distinguish sounds, or words – because he isn't there, surely, have I gone mad? – but no, he is, he is there, repeating my name, over and over and over again.

Elizabeth.

"I'm here, love. Hey, hey, shush. I'm right here."

"I thought you were gone, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry Will, I forgot, I…"

"Don't apologize. Don't you dare. You look at me. Look. Open your eyes Elizabeth"

He shakes my body as if I'm a rag doll, but I don't manage to open my eyes. Funny really, it seemed like such an easy, effortless deed the day before, but now they won't open. My eyelids are glued to the skin below, and I can't force them apart. I can't. "I can't!" I shout.

He'll disappear if I do.

But he doesn't. Because somehow, he manages to hold my face still, and they open, and all the cares in the world are gone, because he's gazing into me and I'm gazing into him and the rest of the world and noise seems to fade away. His eyes are like gems, almost too shiny to look at but impossible to look away. And they read me, and know all my secrets, and swallow me whole, and tell me that everything is going to be okay.

There is no need for words. We are just there, sitting still, holding each other. And then I remember. I remember that he came back to me yesterday, that he is here for now. That we have Jack, a beautiful little boy, all ours, that we made and that managed to survive through all the pain of having Will gone. And that now he can be happy. I can be happy. Our family can be truly and wonderfully happy again.

Because he's not going away in the next sunset. He's going to stay. The words have been said, and the goddess has been kind and the curse has been lifted.

I start to cry.

Will startles, thinking I am still locked inside my nightmare, but he lifts my chin and he sees that they are tears of joy. I am smiling, really smiling, and my facial muscles sting horribly due to the disuse. And I kiss him, softly nibbling and biting his chipped lips, caressing his beard, memorizing every inch of his face with my fingers, even if there's no need for memorizing anymore. Will starts to laugh, and I laugh at him, and with him, and because of him. He lifts me up and throws me in the air and pins me down to the bed and then he does it again and again. He kisses my body delicately, he hugs me and touches me and makes me feel whole again. I feel him everywhere, whispering my name and grazing my skin with his lips and combing my hair with his fingers. I sing words of love into his ear, and he answers with his own. I want to stop this moment, capture it and put in somewhere far away, and live in it for eternity. We're a bundle of limbs and clothes and longing. We're stuck in our little bubble of bliss, untouchable.

Eventually we have to leave that moment behind because, no matter how wonderful it is, we have a child to take care of. We have sweet Jack. Will and his son have their moments as well, moments that makes me so unbelievably happy and proud. Will tells us of his great adventures as the successor of Davy Jones, and then tells me in private about the not so great ones. We tell him of our adventures as well, of the ones Jackie and I remember, like our hikes, and the first time I took him on a boat, and the taste of strawberry cakes in the summer with his mother, and of the ones Jack doesn't remember at all, like his first steps and the first word he uttered. Will starts sailing again at one point, but this time only as a merchant, for few days at a time. I work at the house and do my duties as the commercial and foreign affairs official of the city, thanks to my inability to stay put for very long and to my unexpected talent in politics, but staying out of the business of the governor and other stressed men who run the city and who don't seem to like a woman telling them what to do very much.

I still have nightmares like the one from the day Will came back to us. They become fewer as the years go by, but they never fully leave me, just like the fear that Calypso might change her mind and that I might give up my husband again. But this time, Will is there to comfort me, and somehow that eases my worries and makes life infinitely easier.

Jack grows up quickly. After a lot of insistence from him, Will teaches him how to handle a sword. Eventually, we also tell him the darker tales of our piracy years, leaving a few bits out that we want to keep for ourselves. In a blink of an eye, he's already a teenager, so similar to his father in many ways, but less keen to look for trouble like him, for our relief.

I never share with him though how much I miss my father, and Will tries to cover up the sorrow and guilt he feels of losing ten years with him and with me by trying to make up for lost time. We all deal with our demons, the biggest of all the longing for adventure, for sweat and blood and danger and sea, for the years that have already gone by. We know it grows every minute, and that at some point we won't be able to tame the beast anymore. I am the pirate king, he the former captain of the Flying Dutchman. We both know that when the time comes, that other strange and exciting universe will welcome us with open arms. But it is not time to embark on such a trip yet.

Will and I build our family, our careers and our home, but we still find a way to go back to that little bubble of ours, the one in which time seems to stop. And while we bring our little boy up and wait for the day we'll go out in search of those waters again, we escape to our little world. A world where nothing else exists and there is only him and I, meeting for the first time, fighting at each other's side, alone in an island and dreading the sunrise. There is only him and I between sword training and tangled sheets and hour long conversations and laughs and tears and love. Each day we learn something new about each other, discover that we were right when we were kids, that we were meant to be. And he whispers my name and tickles me with his beard and buries himself in the hollow of my neck. We are one again, today and yesterday and tomorrow. Forever.