Would Have Worked Out.

A/N: An AU Sparrabeth oneshot set after Curse of the Black Pearl, inspired by the line "It would never have worked out between us, darling". This is very much an experiment with writing style, and its also my first ever proper fanfiction, so please, please, PLEASE review and tell me what you think.

Would Have Worked Out.

Beneath Sails of night, outspoken in their hue against an outrageously innocent sky and its blatant white occupant, a pirate reclined listlessly, on a wooden platform held aloft by the mainmast of her vessel. She had positioned herself underneath the buckling material deliberately so that the rays emanated by the said orb only invaded her makeshift sanctuary at few, irregular intervals. In a stupor of languorous thought induced by heat and humidity that even the light air of the open sea could not quite disperse, her lax form and occupation, giving off a sense of Bohemian freedom, was an affront to the caged governor's daughter she had forever left behind. In her reverie, the bustles and shouts of nautical life on the deck below went unnoticed, muffled like the pealing of a bell in fog. The pirate knew what duty she had left in the world beckoned there for her attendance, yet the weather, and the lazy heaviness of limbs simply demanded inaction.

A playful breeze flickered past, blowing a couple of stray strands of hair, escaped from her now lopsided tricorn into her eyes. So the pirate, squinting, brought a hand to her face to tame the dark gold locks behind her ear. Even this simple gesture caused her to mentally debate, before deciding on the affirmative, as to whether relieving the annoyance was worth the small amount of effort that was required for the tasks performance.

Yes, the heat was oppressive, though not suffocating, as it had been on that fateful day she had fallen from the battlements at Port Royal. The day that had set into motion the chain of events that had brought the pirate to where she was now. In the space of those twenty four hours, her life had been the little dinghy-boat she had once observed at the docks as a child. A restless little vessel, suspended in a continuous game of tug-of-war between the tide which seemed to unfairly goad the worn, hard rope that was its opponent, fastening the boat in place. The pirate, as a girl of twelve, would occasionally when she had nothing better to do, saunter along the docks and see the little thing bobbing on top of the water, far-dwarfed by its massive peers and wonder that that rope didn't give way after so may months of use. One morning, she had walked along and mused at only a frayed end of rope, its captive escaped out to sea.

Now, thirteen years later, that morning seemed an eternity away. And it was. For, the pirate had often thought, how could a person change so much in such a short space of time? She hated to think what the prissy little girl she had once been might have, under the influence of her elders of course, said about her current scruffy and unladylike attire. If there were any surviving remnants of girlish rectitude still affecting the carefree figure as she lay sprawled out atop her platform then they were yet to be encroached upon. Admittedly, it wasn't exactly her ship in terms of legal ownership or even captaincy, yet the hold of memories she had both created and witnessed here surely entitled some kind of ownership, in her mind at least. Besides, she was a plundering, pillaging, rifling pirate, and that meant she could take what she wanted, nevermind that her exploits at this point were somewhat lacking.

So it was with great pride in her newfound recklessness that the pirate fancied herself a free spirit, in all senses of the term and idly lazed away an entire day in squalid contentment, the only offender to her temporary Eden being the aforementioned weather which had caused her to come up here in the first place. She squirmed slightly in her position as a ray of sunlight shone through a gap in the sails momentarily and then retreated.

She wondered what might have become of that pompously affable man who had proposed to her on those battlements a year previously. She hoped that fate had been relatively kind to him. As did the pirate still query about the young blacksmith who had been her childhood friend, who had been like a brother to her. A brother who had tried to act as her protector, her shield when the pirate had first been thrust into the chaotic business in which she now took delight. The friend, who had wanted to be more than such. Both her father's opinion and her own eventual, questionable choice of occupation had been very harsh on the poor boy- for she could not help but think of him as such- from whom, she mused, she had, as a young girl, pirated her first item.

The pirate shifted slightly as she recalled the brittle, misty morning when a half-drowned boy had been pulled from the water of the Caribbean, whom she had stood over and lifted from his frail chest a cold hard circle of gold. She then smiled as she remembered a similar situation in which the roles had been reversed, and where the part of the thief was recast. It was the first time, but by no means the last, that the mischievous eyes, the goading smile of her rescuer hovered above her, surveying, half-mocking the object of their scrutiny- well, perhaps their first encounter wasn't quite like that- the thief- the pirate, looking more perplexed at the medallion than at her, and she had regarded him, after their short acquaintance, as quite despicable- yet that was certainly how she liked to paint the memory, more akin in tenor to more recent...encounters. Her grin widened as she recalled several incidences when she and her rescuer had not been imposed upon by an irate, newly appointed commodore-

"Fond memories?" Inquired a voice. The pirate started, unexpectedly snapped back into reality by the joyously familiar sound. She hoisted herself up on her elbows so she was sitting with her back against the mast that was in the centre of the platform and then regarded the amused face of the captain of the ship with curiosity. He had in fact known that she had been up here for quite some time and, taking his baffled beholder's lack of an answer to his question as an affirmative, the captain, the rescuer, the thief- the despicable pirate with the golden smile- swaggered over and fell down next to his "bonny lass" as he might have called her, wrapping an arm around her and drawing her close to him. She, still dazed from inaction, turned slightly and asked after why he had come up here, and was not attending to his duties on deck. He, very much bemused, produced a bottle of rum, which she took. He then chuckled and brought a hand up, his fingers cool against her warm cheek, lightly tilting her face towards him, drawing closer. Far out on the Caribbean Sea, a pirate and her captain could be seen beneath black sails. They kissed, deeply; the sky was now a fauvist painting.

A terrifying white sun rises in the sky casting a pallid gleam upon closed curtains and a young woman sits in a dark room on the morning of her wedding day to a man she hardly knows. Her back is upright, not touching the wood of her stiff-backed chair; she faces a desk, writing. The refined scrawl is uneven in places, the ink blotted. It is cold in the room but that's not why her hands are trembling. Her attention is solely focused on the page in front of her. For minutes at a time the only sounds are the scratching of the pen and her own breathing. The writing is her escape, her solace from the thoughts that had plagued her just a while earlier when she had woken in the heavy silence of an ungodly hour. The rivers of black dripping from her pen are not filled with the simple pleasantness that an innocent governors daughter, or soon to be Commodore's wife should be pleased to compose. Instead, she warms the icy sheets before her with a sketch of her life as it could have been. In the cold of her reality she creates a blisteringly hot sun and a passionate kiss which she will only ever imagine. The pen races across the page and her grip tightens. With the grasping determination of a person in desperate denial she writes to prove an impossible point to herself: It would have worked out.

9:54 pm, 21st May 2008

CeceliaSparrow