She's self destructive when Will leaves, because ten years is a long time and she's promised to stay still, to stay safe for it, and she's not used to that. Has, in fact, actively avoided it, for all her promises to her father.

The difference between her days since Barbossa and her days since Will are striking. Wrenching, really, there's just so much quiet, and without him, there's no peace in it, just a soulless soundlessness she wants to avoid.

She can't stay in Port Royal, not without her father and James to stand between her and the dogs of society. She doesn't even realize how much she's depended on them until they're gone, and she repents in leisure for all she hasn't appreciated. Angry eyes, blame from every corner, because they know so well what she's only just realizing; she's what kept her father silent against the East India jackals, she's what ravaged James's implacable pride, she's what kept this port from the pretty decoration of a fairy story wedding and an ordinary sort of fantasy. They'd watched her grow from precocious youth to willowy woman, considered her their princess of sorts. Meant her to be the Governor's daughter, the Commodore's wife, eventually the mother of stalwart sons and dauntless daughters to marry their own future generation.

Had she gone along with that plan, she thinks, things would have been very different indeed. A right misery, because she'd never have loved James more than his men and eventually, he would have seen that, known that, felt that, and how could it not have affected him? Adversely, at that.

Will might have married—would have, she knows, because he's simply too kind and good and decent for anything else, in the marriage markets of the lower classes, she imagines him quite the catch—and there would have been children, too, dark-haired and solemn eyed. She wonders if they might have gone to sea, Will's boys. If they might have been pirates, as it's in his blood.

In her mulishness, which only seems mulish now that she's time and space and wretched silence to think of it, she realizes her need for adventure has, if nothing else, cost Port Royal a sober, skilled smithy, for which she imagines even those unbothered by the loss of potentially advantageous marriages blame her. She wouldn't blame them, she thinks, as she recalls the state of that smithy without Will's talents to tend it.

So she can't stay in Port Royal, where she thinks every eye bears venom, and she won't return to England, which hasn't been home since her mother's loss. She is a woman of the Caribbean, then, if not quite a Lady of it, and in lieu of anywhere else to hang her cloak, she purchases herself a spit of cottage on the outskirts of port on an island where no one knows her. Pays gold, real gold and uncursed at that, and steadfastly answers no questions in any salient detail. She is Elizabeth, Mrs. Turner, her husband's gone to sea on prolonged service, and she has a child on the way. She can keep herself and her babe, needs no help nor friendship nor curiosity from her new neighbors. Needs, truth told, someone to come along and explain how she's meant to live peacefully without the very things that gave her peace in the first place, but none in her village fit that description, there's simply too much they don't know.

***

It takes Jack thirteen months after her move to track her down. He ambles up the path to her cottage, which feels so very landlocked and vulnerable to attack, and when she greets him, she has no words.

Jack, however, is rarely at a loss for them. He looks over William, who's little more than pink skin and wrinkles yet, and says, "Don't look much like Bootstrap." There's something territorially vicious in his tone. Her shoulders stiffen.

"Accusations of infidelity, Jack?" She hopes her posture conveys her indignation, as her tone is sadly lacking. It's not quite the greeting she's expected, not even from him.

He shrugs, lets unspoken threats slip off him with a roll of faded brocade coat. "Kissed me, didn't you?" he says, and they both reflect on the peril that followed.

"Then I killed you."

"Done a fair mite more with our whelp, though, haven't you?" Jack says, too knowing. She's missed the Pearl but she's somehow forgotten this, how easily Jack scrapes her ire.

"His name is William." William Weatherby Turner, and she knows second names aren't done for blacksmith's sons but she doesn't care, merely remembers looking down at her child in the hours after his birth, blind and helpless and reaching for her in it, and she couldn’t shake the thought of her father until she'd decided on the name despite convention. She's never been one for it, anyway.

"Obviously," Jack says, and she realizes that's true, what other name would her son have but her husband's? She wants to believe Jack understands that she wouldn't do that to Will, give him a false son, but Jack's never thought well of anyone but himself and she doesn't imagine that's changed in the preceding year.

Jack looks around her small home, which seems shabby and faded until she sees it through pirate eyes, at which point it becomes a veritable trove of goods awaiting nimble-fingered plunder. She likes to think she'd catch him at it—Tia did, she remembers—but it's been a long while since she's required this sort of sharpness, so she's not entirely convinced of it.

"Don't see it," he murmurs, still searching, and when she realizes what he means, her own heart lodges firmly in her throat and she cannot gulp it down for all she tries. "But I feel it," he says, head cocked, voice strange, as though he's speaking to things she can't see. Perhaps his Pearl. When he looks back at her, it's focused and sharp, still more threats left unvoiced. "Nine years yet, Lizzie. Will you make it?"

"I love him."

"Nine years is a long time, luv." He turns gentle, which she trusts less than she trusts his threats. "Too long, maybe."

"I have my home and my son." And her hope, though she won't gift that to Jack bloody Sparrow. "I have no need of anything else."

"You know what happens if you can't do it, aye?"

She does. Much as she's tried not to think about it, she does. "He loses his soul." Odd, of all the ways she's wanted to own Will Turner, heart and soul, she doesn't remember youthful dreams of this. "That won't happen. I won't have it."

"You wouldn't live to see it," Jack says, as overt a threat as ever she's had from him, and she wonders why Jack's put such a high price on her success. No, on Will's survival. Perhaps there's some truth to those rumors she's heard swirling on the tail of Jack Sparrow's legend in Tortuga, then?

"I will do this." She invests the words with as much of her former self, the Pirate Lizzie, as she can. "So you've no need for concern."

Her smile feels cold, even to her.

He studies her for a long while, just watches her beyond reason, and she fights not to squirm at such close survey. She's avoided this, contact with others, since her return to Port Royal after Will's departure, and she's glad for the reminder of her reasons. Then Jack leans back, grins gold and pleased. Says, "Aye, I know," like she's a crewman serving well, and while that bristles, too, he says, "But you might."

She frowns. "I might what?"

"You're a woman alone, Elizabeth. No husband, no brothers, no father, no kin to protect you."

"I don't need protection." Save Will's, but that's long years off.

Jack looks her over again, mutters something about whelps and wenches and bloody fate. He's got that acumen in his eyes again, which reminds her that Jack studies nothing so much as human nature, if only to find some way of twisting it to his purpose. She wonders what his purpose is with her. "You're by most accounts unmarried," he says, as though that's some clue, and when she deciphers that, she recoils. She's heard tales of what happens to unmarried women alone.

"I won't support my son on my back, if that's what you're asking."

"It's not."

"I can wait for Will. He'll find me, I know he will, and when he does, I intend to make this—" she waves a hand at the cottage in lieu of the wait. "—inconsequential."

Jack laughs. "Everything's got a consequence, luv. Thought you'd learned that by now."

"I don't need a protector, Jack. Not even you. I think it's time you left."

He settles in further, wriggles himself in the chair that's been Will's since she bought it, though it's never been used before now. Jack settles in like he's meant to be settling, which sets her teeth to grinding. "Want me or not, luv, you're stuck with me. I'm not having our Will come home to some soul-stealing tragedy for want of a little concern on my part, savvy?"

She glares black death at him. "I'm married. To the man I love, Jack, like you love your Pearl. I wouldn't betray him for all the tea in China, any more than you'd give up your ship voluntarily."

Jack's grin fades, leaves his expression all the more unsettling for it. "Some things are worth betrayal, luv. All a matter of priorities, innit?" She tries to protest but he cuts her off, silver tongue wagging in that awful combination of sense and ridiculousness that so marks Jack's thoughts. "Now, you love the whelp, aye?" She nods. "And you love your boy there, aye?" Another nod.

"Don't threaten my son, Sparrow, or so help me—"

"Shh, luv, I'm not threatenin' a thing. Hear me out." He lifts a finger, hand precise and poised, a gesture she thinks means "parlay".

"I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your request."

Jack flits a smile, wan and weak. "Barbossa," he says, like he's heard that before. Possibly he has. "Parlay, Elizabeth, if you need me t' say it aloud. A bargain, I suppose, one that might suit you well, as I've something you need."

"You have nothing I want."

"Want? No. Need? That's another story. See, by my figurin', you've got another year or so before those men down there—" he waves a hand at the path to the village. "—realize your husband, he ain't coming back any time soon. Maybe not at all. Which makes you something of a widow, savvy? And your little one here, he's proof you're hardly an innocent maid, aye? How long d'you think you can hold out, once they've taken it into their fool heads to come calling? What happens when, and it's when, luv, there's no if about it to my mind, you've a choice between keeping your boy safe and honorin' Will?"

"Perhaps you're unacquainted with my pistol, Jack, but I do have one."

"And when you're out of shot?"

"I'll buy more." She grinds the words out, pushes them between her teeth.

"With what money, luv? There's only two sorts of women what can pay their own way without obvious industry on these islands: the sort what entertains on her back for bread, and the sort what's run from money. The first leaves herself open to, well, I assume you know, you've never been so naïve as all that, have you?"

"The second?" But she's afraid to ask, because she thinks she knows, and when he says, "Blackmail, for a start," she winces.

There's more silence, though she thinks this through longer than she might once have done, because he's right, he's bloody right, and she has no answers. "What do you propose, then?"

"Marry me."

She wants to kill him. "I'm already married."

"We can pretend, can't we?" he offers, and she's expected that pleading charm of his, so she's surprised to see soulful sorrow in his eyes.

"I won't touch you. Ever."

That brings a smirk. "Wouldn't have it any other way, luv."

***

Life with Jack is hardly ideal, but it serves its purpose. He plays up to the villagers, the long-lost Will "Call me Jack, luvs, s'a name I've picked up at sea" Turner, and true to his word, he keeps a respectful distance from anything matrimonial, which suits her just fine. He won't explain it, not even when she plies him with rum, though he spends the night staring hollowly out to sea and she's desperate to know what he's thinking.

He can't stay ashore, not for too long at one stretch, but he comes by more often than she's expecting, stops in with gold and plunder and saucy tales for the tavern, then staggers back up to the cottage for his waiting "wife" like that's the life he wants. The first time he does it, she spends the night with a blade at her side, a knife more suited to cooking than killing, and when he stumbles by her on his way to the privy, she braces for the inevitable attack.

It doesn't come, though he stops to laugh quietly.

"Y'can drop your blade, Liz'bef," he slurs, as amused as she's seen him in years. "I'm here to keep you safely untouched for your Will, I'm hardly about to wreck that meself, aye?"

She blinks at him, the awareness of him despite the drink. "Have you a whore in the village, then?"

He laughs louder, though he's careful not to wake William. Strange, the care Jack's taken. "No need, luv. Have all the whore I'd want in m'head, savvy?" He taps a finger at his temple like that answers questions.

No, Elizabeth doesn't savvy, but he's gone before she can ask.

***

"Is it just me you don't want, Jack?"

He's home, such as it is, for the first time in six months, and she's counting the days between his visits like she's counting the years to Will's because Jack was right, once he leaves, the sailors in port believe her welcoming in ways which require judicious use of blades on occasion. Now that the villagers know her "husband", however, they guard her in ways she hasn't expected, and she still thanks the butcher for his well-timed arrival that night William had scampered off in town. She hates to think a mauling by a drunkard on leave would count against Will's heart, but she can't be sure.

Jack swigs back more rum than she feels necessary, then says, "You and all them what's like you," before doing his best to drown in bootleg.

She tries again. "What are you getting out of this?"

"Nothing what needs telling."

"You forget, captain, how well I know you. The Jack Sparrow I know lives to the Code."

He preens a bit at his title, which she's used for just that reason. "Take what y' can, give nothin' back," he parrots, a quiet, schoolboy's repetition.

"Must I point out that you appear to be giving back in this situation?" And she's no clue what he's taken, either, so she's concerned all the more.

"Egregious misconception, that."

"Jack."

"Elizabeth." He smirks at her again. Oh, she wants to smack that smirk, for all she's grateful for whatever magic he's worked on her behalf in the village.

"Why do this? You don't have to." She's restless on land herself and she's never been known for her wanderings, not like Jack has, so she can only imagine it's worse for him.

"Have you ever wondered why I wanted that heart so much, Elizabeth? I mean, the whelp wanted to free his father, and you wanted it because he did, and Ja—Norrington—wanted it so he could maybe get a bit of himself back, and you were all only too glad t' follow me along to find it. But did you wonder what I wanted it for?"

"To spare yourself the Kraken. Jack, I knew this. What does the bloody heart have to do with anything? Is... something... after you again?"

If he's brought trouble to her life, which remains quiet if not entirely peaceful, she'll run him through herself.

"S'more what I'm after this time," he says. "The gettin's not so good as the havin' in this case, maybe, and it's nowhere my Pearl'll take me, save here, but that's neither here nor there, so we'll stick t' the heart. Which, had you been paying attention, might've been a mite clearer, savvy?"

It's vintage Jack, this mess of words and meanings, and she's tired because she's had a long day of chasing William through the market. Far too tired for one of Jack's meandering riddles, which makes her feel old.

"If you mean not to answer, do me the courtesy of saying so," she says, and she can hear the beginnings of snipish wife in herself.

"Ain't nothing but honest, then, just for you." He preens there, too, like that's a compliment she's inadvertently paid. She can't follow the thought, but she nods encouragingly all the same, half-sorry she's asked despite her curiosity. If anyone can break her of it, it's Jack. "The honestly dishonest truth. Thought I'd be the next Davy Jones, aye? Immortal Captain Jack Sparrow, pirate for the ages. Just sailing for all eternity. I'd have me crew, I'd have me ship, no more mutinies—don't suppose I have t' tell you how temptin' that bit was, do I? Run me own Kraken and all, aye?"

And she sees that stretching out, can imagine him plotting madly—Jack Sparrow knows no other way of being, she suspects, but madness suits him—so she nods a little to show him she's following along. "Why run from the Kraken when you can run it?"

He doesn't say anything else, just stares out at that bit of horizon that enchants him.

"I can't let you have Will's heart," she says finally.

"Don't want it."

"No immortal Captain Jack? No running the Kraken?"

The bangles in his hair clink as he shakes his head. "No need to run from anything, luv. A decade spent minding his wife and his whelp? I don't owe anyone more than that."

***

She dreams of Will more when she's alone, when she can spend the hours before bed in silence with her thoughts and her memories. She dreams of him when Jack's there, too, but it's different then, more nightmares of undead villains and ridiculous quests than the gentle romance she recalls when Jack's not there, stirring up memories she'd sometimes rather forget.

That moment on the Pearl when she'd realized the Kraken, for instance. She could live without that one, though she suspects it will haunt her long past telling Jack she's sorry for it now. Her time alone as Calypso, wherein she'd sidestepped the prospect of forced whoring by sheer fortunate attack and somehow found herself one of the Pirate Lords. Swords and blood and war and vengeance, that's what Jack makes her recall, and she's glad he's not around lately because she prefers to recall her Will her way.

He's careful when he touches her, almost reverent, and she thinks they've left it too long. So long, and she blames Will's foolish morality for it, as she's been more than willing since well before her first brush with Pearl piracy. He smiles at her, gaze fixed on hers, and runs cautious fingertips over bare skin until she shivers.

"I don't want to go," Will says into her hair, and she closes her eyes, for which she'll curse herself later. Next time she sees him, she promises herself she won't blink. Nothing to affect the way she drinks in the sight of him.

"I don't want you to leave."

"But I must." So determined, her Will, so very earnest. She'll never find a truer man than this.

"Not yet," she murmurs, and draws him down for a kiss. She stores the memory of them, his mouth on hers, the texture and weight and pressure of this contact. Pushes herself into him to soak up his warmth. The sun, she knows, more than the man, but it feels real and she knows no different.

It stings the first time he's inside her. She's not expecting that but he seems to be, because he kisses her again, promises it won't happen again, promises to go slowly, and he does, and it's perfect. She doesn't know how he wants her to move at first, so she lays back and lets him lead until she thinks she can guess, and by then, nature's taken over and she moves despite herself. He braces himself on the sand beneath her and rolls in deep. She hisses. His mouth grazes hers, so she grazes back, and he pushes harder, faster, moves so her flesh rubs against his with sensitivity she's only just beginning to understand.

She feels like she's made for him because everywhere he touches feels scorched and complete. How's she meant to give this up for a decade, she wants to know, and what the hell was wrong with Tia that she wouldn't wait for the man who made her feel like this? Or maybe he didn't. Maybe no one else has ever felt as good as Will makes her feel. It's something to consider; they've never been utterly normal, either of them, and perhaps this is one more irregularity.

She roughly understands the concept of orgasm until she has one, at which point she thinks, "Bloody hell, I'm going with him, surely if I can be pirate bloody king, I can crew a ship of the damned. Again." Well, all right, she thinks this when she can think again, when it's not all blurred pleasure and Will burning into her.

Still, she's plotting a way to keep this before he's withdrawn, and when she remembers that day, she remembers this most fondly. Perhaps she seems passive these days but she wasn't always.

She wants to ask—surely if his father loves him, the man will run his daughter-in-law through to keep his son's mate aboard eternally—but before she can, Will says, "I wonder if we've made a baby yet," and she realizes it won't be as easy as all that, just letting her father-in-law kill her on that floating prison.

She takes Will's flushed face in her hands to stare into his eyes, more familiar to her than her own. "Do you think we might have?"

Oh, she'll miss this smile, foolish and boyish and utterly Will. "Maybe. Would you mind?"

She shakes her head. Much as she'd die for him, she can't kill his child, not even if she's not sure there is a child to kill. With their luck, she is and she'll spend eternity with a baby she can't birth.

But if she's living for his baby, she wants to make sure there is one, so despite his intention to get her dressed and have a meal of some sort while there's food available, she keeps him in her and on her until he has to leave.

Tells him she'll miss his touch too much to let go, but she knows the truth and no one else needs to.

She wakes alone in her bed, Will-less as always, and she can't stop herself from laying a hand on her belly like William's still in there to be saved any more than she can stop herself from laying her ear on that chest to hear Will's heart beat. 

***

"It's important to you that Will survives, soul intact."

Jack spares her an inscrutable look. "Aye."

"Why?"

"He has something I want."

"The Dutchman?" She can't imagine Jack wanting anything but a ship, not after five years ashore—more or less—watching over her and William.

"Not quite."

"What, then?"

"Leave it alone, Elizabeth. Some things aren't for telling."

"Damn it, Jack, you've been nothing but kind to us, William and I, and I—" She falters, realizes what's left of that thought is her own perception that Jack Sparrow's not kind to anyone. She is insatiably curious.

He squints at her like she's the sun reflecting off the horizon. "It's probably the first truly unselfish thing I've done, walking away from that heart." She doesn't remind him that he didn't walk away until the heart was dead, that he'd held Will's hand and made this thing happen. Funny, that she hasn't blamed him for this horrid stretch of waiting until now, and as she tries to work herself up for it, the slump of Jack's body convinces her otherwise. "I'd hate to see it fail for lack of follow-through, savvy?"

Right. He's a good man, and she's forgotten it, or at the very least, forgotten that she knows it. "So this is your moment, then?" She half-smiles and hopes he remembers.

"Ten years of them, aye."

She considers this. "How does it feel, being a good man?"

"Less pleasant than it will."

She doesn't expect more explanation than that, so she's not surprised when it's not forthcoming.

***

Two years before Will's return, she catches Jack teaching William the ways and means of piracy. When she reminds her son that such things are illegal, immoral, and not for young boys, she's actually reminding Jack, who fails to feign even the slightest remorse for anything but getting caught. Which is just like him, really.

William talks about taking to the sea once Jack leaves, and Elizabeth spends more time than she means to trying to distract him. Her boy is strong and steady in his way, very much like his father, but there's that spark of mischief in him she can only attribute to Jack, and in the dark of night, she sometimes wonders if he'll hang for it.

Really, she thinks, it's a miracle Jack hasn't. Yet.

Jack's gone months on end, doesn't return until well past Christmas, which means she spends most of the morning calling William away from the window where he waits for sight of his substitute father.

William comes but remains resentful, as though she's what stands between him and the world. She thinks that's truer than he knows.

When Jack does return, he's loaded down with galleons and saucy tales also not meant for the ears of small boys. Elizabeth shares his rum and listens to him talk, lets him bleed the lies out while William sleeps that night because she knows Jack well enough by now to know he won't rest easy until he's burned through the last of his misanthropic enthusiasm.

She knows they're lies because they sound like sea turtles strapped with back hair, and she waits until he's drowsy to pick for the rumrunner truth. His smile doesn't reach his eyes, no matter how much rum he swills.

***

"One last trip, luv," he says one morning, over coffee dark as his eyes and bitter as his tone. "I'll stay a while, maybe another few weeks, but I can't afford to be caught out there when he's here."

She realizes with a start that "he" means Will, that Jack's keeping track, too. That this last trip is planned in some regard with a view to Elizabeth's own calendar. She rather likes that.

"You know the timing, then?" Dawn to dusk, less than twenty-four hours, and she doesn't mean to let anyone steal but a minute of them.

The look he gives her suggests Jack Sparrow knows more about this day of hers than even she does.

She leaves him to his coffee. He leaves her to her waiting.

***

She's done it before, spoken to William of his father, but as that visit approaches, she sits him down for a more involved conversation. He's older now, nearly nine, and his teacher says he's bright as a whip, which she thinks will make this task easier on her.

She tells him stories again, the brave and gallant blacksmith's apprentice joining a pirate crew to rescue her from the hands of evil men; the nobility with which he stands between a condemned man and the law; the quiet boy they'd pulled from the wreckage that first time she'd seen him.

She doesn't tell him about that last day with Will, not in any discernable detail, as William's still but a boy and most of what she recalls is unfit for young ears.

William has surprisingly few questions about his father, and when she asks why, he tells her, "Jack, of course," like that was patently obvious.

Which, she supposes, it is.

***

"You mean to take his place," she says when she finds Jack packing his possessions on the eve of Will. Jack spares her that look she's so accustomed to, the one that reads her yet remains itself unreadable. She's forgotten she's Pirate royalty as she's settled into the domesticity of childrearing, but with Will so close, she can almost taste her old adventures, her old courage a tincture on her tongue. "Can you do that? I won't let you kill him for a ship and immortality, Jack, no matter how well behaved you've been. You must know that."
"Still so suspicious, luv. You should really let that go. It's not right, a boy growing up with a suspicious mum. Liable to make him paranoid. Devious, maybe. Won't nothing bring out the pirate in him like rules what say he can't be a scallywag from time to time."

"We're not talking about William, Jack, we're talking about you."

"No, we're talking about Will." He lays down the journal in his hands. Sighs a bit like he requires courage or patience or both for this conversation. "With you, Elizabeth, it's always about Will, whether it is or not. Which is as it should be, I suppose, but rather exhausting, all the same, as we're not all obsessively smitten with the whelp. Now, I don't mean to kill him any more than I have, which, you'll note, involves significant wanting and no actual killing."

"For a pirate who's sacked a port without firing a shot, you have a remarkable tendency to get those around you slaughtered," she says.

"No, luv, that's you."

She's still thinking about what he's said long after the sting of her palm has faded. He might have been right, but she can't regret that slap.

***

Will's ecstatic and William's nervous and Elizabeth's a wreck. It feels like a dozen emotions are pulling her, like all her years of patience are exploding in this one moment when all she wants is a reasonable chance to welcome him home as she's meant to. There's no sign of Jack, but that's likely just as well.

Will kisses her. Stares long and deep like he needs to memorize what he sees, like he's matching the worn look of her now against the woman she was, and she does the same. Whatever else has happened while he's played ferryman, he's seen precious little sun.

The day passes too swiftly, and by the time William's settled into himself enough to show his father the boy he's becoming, Elizabeth's afraid of the hours left. She wants to feel Will inside her again, wants him close and stripped and there like she's remembered so often, but there's no time, she thinks. Without Jack, there's no one to guide William away long enough.

Will doesn't watch the time, barely looks at the sky, and it obsesses Elizabeth to the brink of madness, how little time she has left. Now that she knows how long a decade feels, she's scared she can't do it again. Without Jack, she's not sure she would have made it this time.

The sky darkens. She wraps her arms around her husband, who will always be her only love, and considers asking Bootstrap to kill her and William both, to take them both to sea with their man. Will squeezes back. Sweet, trusting Will, who hasn't been so hardened by his years of service that he suspects the perfidy in her heart, the desperation overtaking her.

Then he says, "It's all right, Elizabeth, I'm not going anywhere tonight," and she freezes.

"What do you mean?"

His laugh is low and husky. Intimate. She craves more. "Missed the green flash, did you?" Will asks, teases, actually. "The Dutchman's gone. God willing, she won't be back for either of us."

She scrambles away, has to check that chest—Will's heart, she'll kill Jack Sparrow if he's touched it—and when she throws it open, she finds it gone.

Her rage is bloody and sweeping. Before she's done more than reach for the pistol on her night table, Will's in the doorway of her room, hands lifted in surrender.

"Don't shoot," he says, as though this is a joke.

"I'll kill him." She doesn't recognize her own voice, it's that far beyond seething.

Then Will tugs at his shirt. Shows her a healed scar over his heart. Smiles tentatively, a plea for understanding and acceptance she can't deny, and when he releases the fabric to hold his hands out, she's off the bed and wrapped in him before she understands what's happened.

She's not sure how it happened, but she's not letting go.

***

Will can't regret Jack's bargain, even though William spends ages asking after the man once he's gone. They find a new cottage on a new island, somewhere the villagers don't think him the interloping Will Turner, and Will throws himself wholeheartedly into the task of giving William a sibling or three, because he can't get enough of Elizabeth any more than she can get enough of him.

He doesn't talk about his time on the Dutchman and Elizabeth doesn't talk about her time hovering over his still-beating heart, but he suspects they both think about it more than they should. He remembers lifting that dagger, offering to do the carving so Jack's not swarmed by crew. Remembers Jack laughing, waving him off, reminding him that for all Will had had Elizabeth to guard his heart, they're not all so lucky.

Remembers Jack saying he'd hold on t' his heart himself 'til he'd found someone worth handing it to, savvy? And if anyone can, Will thinks it's Jack.

________________
Read the sequel, Jack in Progress.