…10…

She's anticipated this day for years. Now she dreads it.

Liam is bubbling with the excitement she'd expected to feel, chattering away about what how he'll impress the father he's never seen, who perhaps doesn't know of his existence (though Elizabeth hasn't told Liam that), laughing nervously once in a while, pestering her with questions about Will… For the most part she ignores the boy. It's too much of a strain on her nerves, this homecoming. She feels cold, then hot instead and goosebumps, which have nothing to do with the wind – chill, as usual – wuthering its heart out over the island, prickle her arms.

She's made an effort to look like the Elizabeth Swann of old, the girl he fell in love with when he was seventeen and she fifteen. Of course it's impossible to bring back the sweet, starry-eyed woman-child of eld… but she's tried her best. Hair pinned neatly, if not decorously, just the way she used to do it when she went to visit him in the smithy. A plain gown with a dark waistcoat. Lace ruffs, two petticoats like a decent woman, not the sea-faring trollop she fears she's got a reputation for being.

Liam looks beautiful, the pockmarks barely visible in the fading light, his nose a little red perhaps. Glossy dark curls tumble down his face, shaped so long like her own, down to his shoulders – he refuses to let his hair be cut and she permits it, just because he looks so pretty (though, to save his pride, she doesn't tell him that) and childish with long hair. He's insisted on wearing a pirate hat and plain, dark clothes – just like his father used to wear at his age. The son of a beautiful father. Beautiful not handsome – Will's dashing good looks had not been what had made her fall in love with him, it was his heart. He had been as beautiful inside as he had been outside.

She stares out, hope and dread alternating within. Grey clouds sweep over a dully bronze sky. It looks rather more like sunrise; the flame-red brilliance of sunset is not to be today. She wonders if that's an omen but then thinks no. Sunsets are for endings. Sunrises are for beginnings. Liam gives a shout, pointing frantically at the horizon but she has already seen. A ship with black sails that seems to melt out of the sunset. And she can just make it out… yes, now she can!

There's a man climbing down from the crow's nest, now hanging by one hand to the ropes, his lean body sharply defined against the background of sunset.

She looks down at Liam and sees her Paradise. She looks out at Will and sees her Heaven.