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The Shore of Port Royal
BY: Spirit Melody*** The noon sun glittered suddenly on the ring
that decorated Elizabeth's slim finger, startling her from a long-lingering
reverie.
She had been thinking about his smile. He had a beautiful smile. She couldn't say how it might affect others, but it bore down into the very deepest recesses of her heart, leaving a brightly shimmering impression, and making her wish to reflect its scintillating brilliance in her own smile. And how she mourned for the loss of that smile! For she had not seen it in a long while. Will's smiles now were insincere, fleeting little things that flew away the second you turned away as if in sheer relief that they did not have to be part of a lie any longer. She was the only person who noticed anything, but of course, who else was there who should? Well, who indeed. For years she knew it had only been her who would have had the knowledge, only her who would have possessed any kind of insight into Will Turner's soul. It twisted her inside now that that was not so. Here she was, with all her dreams apparently realised, but with the crushing understanding that whenever Will looked her straight in the eye, all he saw was the reflection of the sea; and *him*. It was a strange turn of events; -that- she could appreciate if she was able to be objective. It had been her whose dreams were filled with pirates, and the excitable rhythm of the sea. Things that perhaps made themselves most often known in Will's nightmares. And then they had seen and felt and been surrounded by these elements of her dreams, and it was he who remained the most affected. He whose heart now beat with both a secret longing, and a fear, of the wide, treacherous expanses of the ocean; while she was content with having had her adventure and now yearned for love; love and a family. She looked at the Commodore occasionally and was dismayed to feel twinges of regret for what could have been so much simpler. The previous night Elizabeth had had a disturbing dream. She'd dreamed that by some different circumstance it had been Will, not her, trapped on that island with Jack; and events had been much the same: rum and drunkenness and intoxicated laughter. But it was all so diverged too, and she dreamed that Jack looked at Will the same way Will looked at him and then woke abruptly when Will had smiled his smile. In the Stygian quietness of night she had felt the tears damp on her face in the ghastly confusion of it all. She had taken to wandering the busy streets of Port Royal during the day, waiting patiently with a leaden heart to catch a glimpse of Will appearing from the dingy 'smith's workshop to carry out some errand or another, and to watch the agitated tension manifest on his face as he forced his feet not to follow the paths down to the harbour. Hope did blossom in her when his strength of will succeeded, but more often than not it failed, and she almost hated him then. Hated him, and hated Jack Sparrow. She berated herself that she did not notice it at the time. Didn't spot it when she still had some influence over the situation. As it was, she simply could not have known the effect that damnable pirate was having on Will, the way his patchwork of colourful morals and flexible principals flipped the black and white of Will's world upside down and opened his eyes to the real definitions of right and wrong. Elizabeth knew now that it was Jack Sparrow who commanded, perhaps, but probably not, obliviously, a unique hold over Will Turner's heart; one that didn't leave room for any other call of possession. And that was why her future needed re-writing. Because that was why her Will was not hers anymore; and why he stood so often, gazing out to sea, on the shore of Port Royal. |
