By Illoria
Disclaimer: They are owned by the mouse, and I… I am not the mouse!
A/N: 'Ello everyone. :) I shall introduce this story by saying thank you for reading this because that means you're about to read the story. :P heh. Well anyway… I am not really sure how long I intend this fic to be, but it'll be a pretty good sized one, I think. Ummm, anything else, anything else…? I don't think so. :) Well, proceed!
Chapter One: Princes and PiratesElizabeth remembered being a small girl, no older than seven, and wishing she were a part of the fairytales her governess would read to her at night. She fancied that she would be captured by a villain, a horrible villain; that she would fight and fight but to no avail until finally, a prince would come and rescue her, defeating the villain and telling her how brave she had been for enduring her capture. Then of course, she and the prince would confess their love for each other as they rode away on a white horse.
When she got a little older, that fantasy wasn't enough anymore. The scenario stayed the same for the most part, but it was added to. She wondered where she and her true love would ride away to after her rescue. To come up with an answer to this pressing question, she changed the galloping white horse to billowing white sails on her hero's ship.
As young Elizabeth grew, she would hear more and more of her father talking about the colonies in the Caribbean. Mostly she was bored by the news her father discussed at the dinner table, but sometimes he would say things that piqued her interest. He would talk disdainfully about the pirate threat in the Caribbean, about lawless men sailing into the British colonies, plundering until there was nothing left of some towns. Her eyes would go wide with fascination and she would ask her father to tell her more stories of pirates, but he would scoff and ask Elizabeth why on earth would she want to know about a thing like that.
By the time Elizabeth was ten, she had found out that her father was not willing to tell her any pirate stories and the governess knew none to tell. So, in the absence of pirate stories, Elizabeth made up her own. About rogue captains and miscreant crews and their adventures all over the Seven Seas. It would be a grand and fanciful adventure, she was certain, to be a pirate. It would be like that tingling feeling she got the time she stole a shilling left unattended at a market stall, that pride and relief that came with getting away with something, but multiplied an innumerable amount of times.
The thing that made her more excited than she was sure anything else could at the time was when her father would receive letters from the colonies in the Caribbean. After he was done with them, she would sneak into his room and read them as eagerly as she had listened to fantasy stories as a smaller girl. The news of pirates had by now replaced all those stories, and the ships of her imagination had by now hoisted the Jolly Roger up high.
The letters were few and far between, but they were worth the wait in Elizabeth's opinion. In long script the governors of the colonies told of the pirate threats, describing the latest raids and other illegal deeds committed by the pirates. She got to knowing these pirates by name, eventually, and when her father let her go out by herself to buy something at the market she stopped by the docks and asked any sailor she saw about her favorite pirates. Mostly they regarded her as a silly child, but they told her their stories anyway and she listened eagerly, committing the stories to memory and telling them over and over to herself.
Eventually she even learned a pirate's sea chantey, which she sung to herself at night when her father was asleep, which she hummed to herself while walking down the streets to church. An exciting thing about this was that her father was completely oblivious to the fact that what she was humming was a pirate song. Again, that tremor of getting away with something.
Then, when Elizabeth was twelve, one of her fantasies finally came true. Her father was to be the governor of Port Royal, Jamaica. She thought she could've exploded from the excitement – they were moving to a place where pirates were a regular occurrence! They were moving to the Caribbean – she would finally get to go to the place she had visited so often in the stories she made up.
On the crossing, she kept a sharp eye out for any suspicious passing ships. She sang "A Pirate's Life for Me" while standing at the bow, hoping that somehow the song would make a pirate ship gravitate toward her ship, the pirate ship of her fancies with its adventurous crew and daring captain. The wistful half of her waited in anticipation for the ship to come, while the other half of her stood disappointed, wondering if maybe such a pirate ship didn't exist after all. But she wouldn't allow these disappointed notions to creep into her head, and she stuck to her own stories.
Which is why when she saw the boy in the water, her heart was pounding. When they took him aboard and told her to watch him, the anxiety was bubbling up inside of her and she felt like the anticipation of his awakening might be too much for her to take. When she found the medallion around his neck an enormous exclamation went off inside of her and she felt like jumping for joy at the story that was unfolding in her head to explain the boy's piratical origins.
Eight years had passed since the crossing from England. Even more years had passed since Elizabeth had first defined all of her fancies, from the white horse to the white sails to the Jolly Roger. She had grown up, but the fantasies had not disappeared because of it. Inside she still had those stories, every last one of them. They were the fancies of a silly girl. They were the solemn wishes of a girl who wanted more than what she saw.
The fantasies she created were an escape from the world around her. An escape from evening gowns and bonnets, corset strings and carriages, dinner parties where everyone sat too straight and talked too formally to be genuine. She kept Will's pirate medallion in her drawer as a wistful sort of prodding that her fantasies were more than just fantasies after all.
Oh, and she now had the proof she had always wanted, ever since she was a little girl. She now had proof that fantasies were more than just fantasies, that every last fancy she had created had come true in the sense she had wanted them to. She had told Barbossa that she didn't believe in ghost stories. But a little part of her had been nudging her at that moment, reminding her of how thrilled she really was at the prospect of a ghost story. She had told Barbossa that she didn't believe, and she didn't. But she had been hoping that something would happen to make her believe.
It had.
She had been kidnapped by pirates, but not only that. That was only scraping the surface. What had happened had exceeded all of her fantasies, had dove down further and beyond her wildest stories. Curses were real, cursed gold existed, cursed pirates existed.
But they weren't the only pirates that existed. Captain Jack Sparrow existed. He had always been one of her favorite pirates, simply because his stories were the best, the most extravagant, the most adventurous. She had put him up on a pedestal, and to actually meet him was like a daze.
It was sort of like one of her earliest memories. Her father had bought her a doll, a beautiful doll, but she had never been able to see it up close because he put the doll high up on a shelf. She would stand down below and stare up at it, marveling at the shining hair and smooth porcelain face with perfect features, marveling at how real the little pretend person looked.
Who would've thought that Elizabeth would fall into the ocean and wake up to find that she had been rescued by none other than Jack Sparrow himself? She had thought for a moment that she was still unconscious and slipping back into a girlhood pirate fantasy. But after that, things moved too fast to be a fantasy, and she knew that she was definitely not dreaming when he had his irons around her neck and his pistol at her head. That had certainly never been a part of her stories.
Alone on an island with Jack Sparrow and rum. That was another thing she would've never predicted. But there was the one thing, the ultimate thing to shatter her fantasies. There was no daring escape from the island for Jack Sparrow, there was no adventurous endeavor. There was just… a lot of rum.
It was like when she was seven and her father took that beautiful doll from the shelf and put her in Elizabeth's arms, and Elizabeth had noticed that the doll wasn't so perfect and unattainable, that the doll was just a regular doll, nothing special there. The porcelain even had a small chip in it.
It was the same feeling of
desperate disappointment. Seven-year-old Elizabeth had examined the doll over
and over again to try and find that magical quality the doll had lost upon
coming down from the shelf. Grown-up Elizabeth had examined Jack Sparrow over
and over in her mind to try and find that magical quality the stories about him
had always carried for her. It was how she felt so stupid for having put him up
on her pedestal, how she felt so stupid for never having realized that he was
real.
And now, now that it was all over? Now that she had been rescued by her hero and the villain had been defeated? Now that she and her rescuer had fallen in love? What would come next? Well, they would gallop away together on a white horse, down to the docks to sail away together on a ship with billowing white sails.
But something was nagging at her. An anxiety was forming in the pit of her stomach and creeping through the rest of her. Something was wrong, something was missing. But what was it? She had been kidnapped by the villain. She had fought but to no avail. She had been rescued. Was it that Will was not a prince, but a blacksmith? No. She didn't particularly care about the prince part anymore. The only part remaining was that she and rescuer had fallen in love. That had happened, too.
…Or had it?
As this thought crept into her mind, she got angry with herself. Of course that part had happened! I love Will, she told herself, a little more firmly than she should've needed to. And that firmness was what made her search as he kissed her, search for that something she had always thought would be in a kiss, that something that had always been in her fantasies. She couldn't find it, and that scared her.
That night she laid awake, back in her room at her father's mansion, and somehow the whole adventure seemed but another fantasy. But she made it so that it was still real, replaying the details over and over to make it stay real, vowing never to let it drop back into a fantasy. Because she felt like it was something she could hold onto.
Then it washed over her, slowly like the peaceful waves that rocked the ships she had imagined sailing on all her life. Slowly, slowly, until she was covered in it. Will was the hero that had rescued her from Barbossa, but was Barbossa really her villain? …A memory of her own voice rose up inside of her: "Do you really intend to kill my rescuer?"
Yes, Will had rescued her from Barbossa. But he wouldn't have been able to if Jack hadn't rescued her from drowning. A memory of sputtering into consciousness as she felt her corset being ripped off. Gratitude more than anyone could ever understand.
A memory of spinning around a fire, singing the song she had longed to sing at the top of her lungs but had never been able to all her life. The voice joining hers, that of a pirate, and a pirate captain no less. That moment had been perfect in a way, a perfect fantasy that was enough to piece back together those that had been shattered earlier that same day. A pirate song and a toast to freedom.
Elizabeth lay awake in her father's mansion. She could still feel the night breeze on that island and the rum burning down her throat. She could still feel Jack Sparrow's arm around her.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
This wasn't happening. She loved Will. Then why did she fancy Jack more
of the rescuer she had always dreamed about?
Will had saved her from Barbossa. But Barbossa wasn't really her villain. He was technically the villain, but he wasn't what she had always feared.
Jack had saved her from her corset. A corset was something that every high-society lady wore beneath their billowing dresses, and it even stood as a sort of status symbol. She couldn't breathe in that corset, and Jack had ripped it off of her. She couldn't breathe in that high society, and Jack could rip her out of it.
She knew now what her villain was. Not a person, but a life. Her villain was, and had been since she was a child, the life she was born into, among nobles, among upstanding gentlemen and fine ladies. She wanted to get away. Oh, desperately she wanted to get away.
She had always thought that her escape was the dashing hero on the white horse and the ship with the billowing white sails. But no, no, that wasn't what she really wanted.
She inhaled sharply as she realized.
She wanted black sails.
Black sails and a bottle of rum. She felt guilty as it washed over her that all she really wanted was Jack Sparrow. Oh, it was all mixed up, it was all jumbled, it was all wrong...
But yet… ever since she had been a little girl with fancies of pirates dancing through her head… there had always been that tingling feeling of getting away with something that was wrong.