Disclaimer: Don't own PotC, don't sue me please.
A/N: Finally, the might-have-been long awaited sequel-like one-shot to For the Weary. Was incredibly hard to write, started and scrapped four to six times, before I finally wrote this—a hodgepodge many different bunnies. Now I'll shut up. Elizabeth PoV, Post DMC, Will/Elizabeth (with the smallest implications made to a certain event at the end of FtW). Read, enjoy, let me know what you think.
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"The beginning of atonement is the sense of its necessity."- Lord Byron
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Will's shirt needs mending.
It is a decision she comes to suddenly. And lying awake on a thin mat, listening as the sounds of the bayou blend in with that of Will's breathing, she decides she'll be the one to do it.
Jones' whip tore the fabric with the same cruel accuracy as it did Will's flesh, leaving precise tears that even Elizabeth's untrained fingers cannot make worse.
Tia Dalma laughs when Elizabeth asks for the needle and thread. There are serious plans underfoot, a dangerous plan on the nearing horizon. Mending is unnecessary in there current company, Tia Dalma remarks with a sharp grin. "Not like there be much left ya can actually fix." The other woman's smile is pointed, her eyes burning. She makes Elizabeth uneasy, makes her think the woman is privy to more than Elizabeth has ever been willing to share.
"I'll fix what I can." Elizabeth replies smoothly—coldly—and she accepts the requested supplies with equal civility.
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The truth is it was a lost cause from the beginning.
The blood does not wash out any better than the damage caused by days and days of seawater. It pains her, in small and frivolous ways that she cannot help but think foolish. He was going to marry her in this shirt. He had worked long hard hours for weeks in order to earn the wages for the material (he had refused charity in all the arenas he reasonably could refuse it).
Despite it all, Elizabeth does not stop. She washes the fabric thrice, scrubbing until the tips of her fingers begin to peel.
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She cannot ignore duties or plans entirely.
Her secret task must be put aside for long whiles at a time—Will does not question the disappearance of his shirt, content instead with the rough material provided by Tia Dalma's people—and she is often tired when she returns to it. The task proves more difficult then she once imagined. She finds that the material has frayed from the washings and that the clean edges she had depended on have begun to come undone.
In addition to this, her stitches are not perfect. The seams are awkward and uneven, her stitches crooked and sluggish, sometimes so terrible she cannot bear the sight of them, requiring an entire row to be removed. Their imperfection, however, lies not only on the shoulders of fatigue. Elizabeth Swann is out of practice. While her governess had seen to it that she learn all the fine skills required of a lady of the house, there were few occasions when Elizabeth's hand could be forced to needlepoint as a mean of passing time.
In this situation, Elizabeth has only her own neglect to blame.
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Will doesn't ask where she disappears to in her free time.
He doesn't ask much of her nowadays and his neglect drops ice into her stomach. Her mind still races now and again with memories and guilt and shame and she wishes she could tell him. She wishes she had the nerve or the courage (courage he so often praised back at Port Royal).
She doesn't though.
In this Elizabeth Swann is decidedly a coward (pirate still rings in her ears, and the word has never been more of a dead weight in her chest then now).
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She kisses him.
It is a desperate act of a worried woman and a weary man, mouths hurried, hands frantic. He tastes of smoke and steel and earth (back at Port Royal he tasted more of black tea than copper and she misses the tastes). His hand is rough and tight where it closes around the nape of her neck, possessive and unsure, thrilling and frightening her all at once.
Her blood pounds in her veins, crashing in her ears, drowning out the continuous song of the bayou around them, her hands are fixed at his shoulders, grabbing fistfuls of coarse material.
Her body burns and her heart aches and her mind races—rum and saltwater and gun powder, that was what Jack Sparrow was made of— and she wants it to be easy. She wants all of this to be easy as a compass arrow pointing in the right direction .She wants loving Will to be easy (as easy as fooling Jack proved to be in that one singular moment when all she could think was 'I am going to save us').
Will pulls away with a sharp breath, as though he were trying to reclaim anything she might have taken during that kiss. His feet take him back an air's breadth, though his hand, warm and abrasive, remains perfectly still.
Her throat constricts and she fears for a moment that everything is ruined in some perfect way that can't be fixed. He looks at her, eyes dark and searching, like a man who has cast his gaze onto the sea in search of its depths, and her skin prickles with pins and needles under his hand.
"Will—"she starts, but the word remain lodged at the base of her throat, resting heavily against her heart. She tries to swallow, to breathe, but Will removes his hand and walks away.
She doesn't try to call him back.
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Some nights she is overridden with a certainty that Will knows her crime.
What had begun as a nagging fear in the Pearl's last long boat has grown reckless, a dark terror that seizes her until everything of her is chilled. Her mind spasms at times with paranoia, convinced that if she is not discovered soon, her treachery will be found out at the world's end (because Jack might have been a good man of the worst sort, if he was ever a good man at all, but she could hardly expect him to keep her secret if they ever found him).
There is no way in the entire world that she can keep this secret. It proves too big, this truth she hides. It is a truth that demands sacrifice, a truth that will not settle for guilt or shame or fear, a truth that riddles her mind with holes until she can no longer bear the thought of it. It must show on her outsides, she thinks, and if any in the world would notice an invisible mark upon her forearm, it would be Will.
And when she is drowning in the certainty of all this, she seeks her atonement in thread.
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It is ridiculous.
After all the trials and tribulations of recent events, it proves ridiculous that her undoing comes in the form of a needle.
Her stitches are awkward dashes in the fabric, and pressed tightly between her fingers the fractured remains of her borrowed needle. She's not entirely sure when the weight in her chest becomes a half-uttered wail or when the wail dissolves into sobs that produce tears she cannot control.
She is wreaked, there in a sun drenched corner of her shelter, face buried in the ruined fabric of Will's shirt, the fragmented remains of the needle digging into her palm.
She is only half aware of the sound of hurried footsteps that beat up the dirt path towards her hut, only vaguely hears the door crash open and hurried breathing. She startled then, by the sight of them all, standing just before the threshold, swords drawn, terribly impressive and out of place in this absurd situation. "Ain't no one here." Ragetti says in his slow manner, looking around the room with his one bright eye while the yellow wooden one stays fixed on her.
Her tears begin with renewed force and her breathing is ragged and wet where it hitches in her chest. The men avert their eyes from the sight of her, a group of grim and bedraggled faces cast down or to the side, feet shuffling back slowly until he stands alone just inside the door. There is a moment of quiet hesitation, where her breathing is too loud, where the light that bounces of his sword is blinding, and all at once it's over.
All at once something in his face crumples as easily as the fabric in her fists and his sword falls to the floor with a resonating hum that lingers in the air even as he kneels by her side. His hands are sure as they wrap around her arms, pull her towards him until he is holding her securely against his solid frame.
"I was trying to fix it," she says, when he asks her what happened, feeling ridiculous and raw, foolish and broken, "But I can't now." She shows him the remains of her needle, stained with crimson now that it has punctured her palm.
Her apologies come next, a row of them, one after another, though she is sure Will doesn't understand the meaning behind half of them. She is sorry and he does not stop her, just strokes her hair and kisses her brow and waits for it to pass.
"I'm tried," she says against his neck, hands leaving her ruined mending and weaving into his hair, "I tried but I couldn't."
Will's hands run down her back and she thinks that's all the courage she has.
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End
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