Song of the Sea

by Thyme In Her Eyes

Author's Note: To start off, I own no creative rights to the characters blah blah blah. Anyway, I love twisted and doomed couples, so I just had to write a short something on Davy Jones and Calypso after seeing 'At World's End'. This is a piece set during (my version of) the beginning of their relationship. I hope you enjoy it, and all feedback is appreciated!

-- SONG OF THE SEA --

Hear me sing: "Swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you."
"Here I am. Here I am, waiting to hold you."

-- This Mortal Coil (Song to the Siren).

x-x-x

Ever since his infant cries sounded deep and restless in the night and reached the rough shore by whose heaving side his father's house was perched, he and she were one. She heard him, and sang deep within the foundations of his soul before he had even met her. Her dark melody undulated and soared in his every impulse and every dream, before he knew her name, or knew that she even had a name he could call her by.

All he knew her as was the sea. His kindred heart. She, who had claimed his awe and respect from his earliest memories. She, whose stories filled his child's nights. She, whose prices for all favours were mightily steep and whose bounty came with severe conditions. She, who had whispered and beckoned to every secret corner of his soul since boyhood. She was the unknowable, the untameable, the untouchable. The alluring. The source of all the familiar legends of sirens and mermaids and their habits of luring sailors to their doom with their fatal songs, and the chord these deadly melodies struck in the hearts of lonely men.

She was known as the big blue to some, though even at her most vast and daunting, she never seemed bloated to his eyes, and the shimmering curves of her rising and falling wave-crests were compelling as any woman. She was the cruel sea to others, the heartless ocean, but he knew why she was as wicked as she was generous to sailors, fishermen, merchants and pirates alike, and could never resent or fear her for it even when she denied him good fortune in times of need. No shard of her nature could frighten him, or cause him to recoil from her. In a shrinking world, she was the only aspect of it which still could not be contained, controlled or lessened, and he loved her for it. The dash of waves against the land's rocks was the music of freedom – a harmony full of promise and danger.

He was a man in that time, one who commanded respect and confidence without blind worship or snivelling fear; a great sailor and captain. Above all else, he lived to challenge the sea – his only passion and only equal. Courage and cunning were his ship and crew, and being wily herself, she rewarded him well for those attributes. His destiny was to dare sail across her thrashing waves, to hurl himself against the untameable beauty and unrestrained power of the blue, to grapple and dance savagely with her, to live the thrill and risk of crossing her furthest reaches and braving her fiercest storms. As he traversed her, letting his longing to be rid of the land and to drift upon her mercies once more guide him, she became his teacher, rival, confidant, mistress and guardian.

The roar of maelstrom and squall sang in his blood, and the sea claimed his very bones without needing to drown him. His soul was already lost to her depths, and his defiance sang back to her and encouraged her waves to rise and rise. When caught in a sea-storm at its most frenzied, he would lean over and close to the sea as far as sanity allowed and, laughing and revelling in the violent communion between them, would allow his fingertips to skim the surface of the waves in a teasing caress.

She was no woman, but she was his woman. She was all he desired. With every voyage, he met her every test and dared her to drown him, to try and contain and tame his own renegade spirit. If it was possible for her to achieve this, then something stayed her punishing hand. Something caused her to spare him, to watch him a while longer, to become fascinated by him, to desire him and hear his interpretations of the songs of her moods, her kindnesses, and her injustices. He was not young any longer, but he was potent. He made her beautiful and he marooned her whenever fate forced him to leave her waves and tempests for the land. He alone could rise to meet her most perilous challenges, he alone could requite her anguished and aggressive possessiveness, he alone could weather her most incomprehensible cruelties, he alone could fully appreciate her sweet and frivolous moods, and he alone could truly understand and love the inconstancy and unpredictability of her nature, and delight in it, even as thrashing waves stung and scorned him.

He did not know it yet, but he alone had won her immortal rebel heart.

One night she defeated him. Her waves were too powerful, her winds too brutal. His ship, too vulnerable. He fought back, defied her will to the end even as he accepted his fate, feeling that his destiny was always to be a drowned man resting forever in her sea bed. In spite of it all, in spite of his longing for final union with the one who had always possessed him, he would not go down easy, not like some fool sailor without his proper bearings. His courage and skill kept his ship intact and afloat and his crew safe far longer than any other captain could have, but the sea's anger was stronger. She tore his ship to pieces, scattered his terrified men, and her waves threw their brave captain down, sapped his strength and forced water into his mouth until he could struggle no more. She swallowed him down and he fell into the cold mystery beneath the raging surface, her song a madness howling in his ears.

He had driven her to such wildness, to such frustration, because she had no arms to hold him. She had no limbs with which to grasp him or hands to touch him, fingers to explore him or eyes to bewitch him. She could not seize him as a prize or as a lover. An ever-thirsting ocean, she could not take her fill of him. Though she could reflect him, she could keep no part of him unless she deigned to destroy his crusading spirit and unquenchable soul and accept him as drowned corpse. She could feel want and greed as his gliding fingers leapt and touched upon her waves, but she could never warm him. She could only break around him, shattered by the touch of him. And as much as he could never hope to capture or tame her, in turn she would never be able to restrain him or impress her ardent lovers' marks upon him. Cold and wild, she possessed all his love, but her kiss could not heat his skin or blood. Ferocious and pitiful, she could only dissolve and leave salt traces when she most needed to seek him, cling to him, storm within him, and soar beside him.

Unable to shed tears for want of him, she could only dance endlessly, aggressively. She churned his ship, kept him with her, and looking for release, tried to destroy him, to wreck lumber and flesh like hopeless passions and yearnings. Her dances became frenzies. Death rhythmically undulated for him and countless unlucky sailors.

She had no heart to give. Only to be taken.

Her core and secrets would never be uncovered. Her heart was unreachable. It was great, terrible and alone. It could not be looked for or found. She was so vast, so deep, so dark. No man even knew where to begin to look for the heart of the sea and none would come close to finding it. But when he began sinking from the surface, her man, her wild sailor, began falling straight to the heart of her.

He fell towards her, closer and closer, but unconscious and dying. The indomitable spirit and the unquivering will would drown too. The music in his captive heart would die with him and the body she wanted to touch as a woman would be eaten by her creatures. She refused to have him like this. She could not let him reach her as a drowned man. She could not let him drown. She would not let him go.

Her waves ferried him up to the surface, carried him through rough and unforgiving waters and, after a hard night's journey, cast him safely ashore. Carefully and tenderly, she washed him softly up on an island's solitary beach. Tiny traces of her still soaked his tattered clothes and clung to his skin and a more substantial essence of herself lapped around his legs in the form of the early morning tide. Satisfied, she let him drift and sleep his way to refreshment and renewed strength, as after a long night of human love.

He slept, half-alive and half-dead; torn, bedraggled, and exhausted. He breathed like a drowning man even in sleep. Lapping in gentle waves at his feet, allowing him to rest on warm sand and calming her fury as the night died and day broke, she waited for him. He was alone, unconsciously heaving in great lungfuls of air, soothed by the distant sweet sounds of sad, gentle, remorseful waves whispering against the shore and the occasional interruption from the harsher noises of a few stray planks of wood – surviving debris from his ruined ship drifting aimlessly on idyllic calm waves.

He was alone, until the waves tapped the shore, brushing and breaking against his feet one final time, and retreated, and with the next tide a woman approached him instead, with all the sea's music, wisdom and tempestuousness gleaming in her dark eyes. Surrounded by the familiar and comforting scents of sea-salts, she knelt beside him, the bunching of her skirts carrying the gentlest shush and crash of a small foam crest against absorbent sand. She placed a hand on his forehead, chanted in a low tone, and breathed air into his wracked body, then rested his head on her lap as gently and lovingly as any mother.

Then, with rare softness, the kind of sincere tenderness reserved only for him, she sang to him, accompanying the sea with swellings of music as old as her name.

Her song carried secret promises of how they would soon pitch and heave together on their own secret sea of delight. She carried whispers of eternity, scorching passion, heavy burdens and wild dreams. It would not be easy, she promised, offering pain with words of pleasure. Love and passion brought suffering – that was the risk, the adventure. They would plunge like a boat on the cruellest sea. They would row together desperately until they reached the shore, vowing to sink or swim together. She sang with passion and vibrancy, not tiring as a true woman should, singing to her sleeping, wronged man until he awoke; eyes blinking, seeing nothing but her face framed by the sun.

Before he could see the face of his destiny, the one who had saved his life and would make it a thing of wonder only to destroy it, he heard her song. Before any other sense was at his command once more – before he saw her glinting eyes and the teeth of her smile, before he felt the cool softness of her hand soothing and tidying his hair and distractedly caressing his face, before he smelt the welcoming familiarity and tantalising newness of her skin, and before he tasted the cool breeze, the crushed fruit she offered and the thrill of her lips as she had given him breath to live – before all of that, what pierced through the cold of the heartless deep was her song. It was the first thing that surfaced in his awareness.

He was reasonably well-educated, and had travelled widely and heard the tongues of many different people, but could understand no word of the floating, delicate tune she repeated. Nor did it resemble any language he had encountered, but instead seemed comprised of something older – not primal, but inhuman, above human… Something unknowable and untameable and touchable. But hopelessly, hopelessly alluring.

Then, language ceased to matter, and all that existed was the melody. The soul of the sea was in her strange song. Still unaware of anything but his rescuer's voice, he surrendered his senses and listened; half-believing that he had drowned in the shipwreck and had at last become one with his beloved sea. He listened, enraptured, as if listening to life and to all he had just escaped. It soothed him and spoke intimately to him, as did the peaceful music of a calm sea with the barest hints of an approaching storm.

Someone had given form to what had always existed inside him, someone had given melody to the connection between the sea and himself. It was the sea singing to him, he had no doubt, telling him all kinds of truths he was not yet ready for but could not hope to stay away from. It was the heart of the ocean, that song. It drowned and crushed him in perfection, and then turned into fire.

The simplicity, the haunting beauty would haunt him all his life. It would visit him as a ghost in his loneliest hours when he was at his most corrupt, and give him maelstroms of anguish. It contained all his joys and all his agonies. He did not know it yet, but he would try to both forget his tormenter and saviour and keep her close through that song, and would carry it with him through many dark years, until he and the dark melody bled into each other.

Then, the power of his eyes returned to him and he saw a smiling face, glimmering with wickedness and wisdom. The face he had always loved, even before he knew her. The face he had been looking for throughout all his seafaring years. The face he had so long searched for and had found at last. The face that anyone standing over his dying body would see reflected in his gaze in that last moment before oblivion.

Not unwise himself, he sensed immense power, but was unafraid. This seemed to please her, as she smiled a beguiling smile and smoothed his brow, promising patience and endless time in her gaze, before singing her sad song of the sea and love once more.

Davy Jones kept his eyes fixed on his goddess Calypso, unwilling to drift away from her and back into unconscious recovery once more. Instead, he willed himself to remain awake and aware of her presence; cherishing her sea-song and knowing even then that the mysterious and compelling music, which she privileged him by allowing him to hear, would become the theme of his soul.

-- FIN --