Title: "Before the Storm"
Author: monimala
Fandom: PotC
Rating/Classification: PG-13, OMC/Anamaria, J/E implied, angst.
Disclaimer: Disney and people own the characters, savvy?
Summary: A future ficlet set in the "...And a Bottle of Rum" universe. Billy's regrets are many...and one.
The sea is calm. The Pearl rocks, gently, against the waves like the cradle that must have held him for the first months of his life. Like his mother's womb, too. Comfortably suspended in water.
Sometimes, he feels a vague twinge where his heart should be, thinking
that he and Ana should have made a child, should have raised a babe shipboard. He, himself, was brought up learning letters by candlelight and climbing the rigging at all hours of the day. But a wicked scar curves, jaggedly, across Ana's otherwise flat belly. He has nightmares, still, of her bleeding out, desperately trying to hold in her guts after the calculated strike of a Malay smuggler's blade.
"You makin' too much of it, Billy," she chides, whenever he awakens
drenched in sweat. She presses her lips to his shoulder and croons lullabies in some long forgotten language that her mother brought from the old country. She, too, was born on a ship. In the dark, crowded, hold...surrounded by the stink of death and bodies far older. In the haven of their bed, she seldom kisses his mouth. Instead, she marks every other expanse of skin with crosses and tells him he is her map to riches. To freedom.
They have gone back to La Isla de Muerta exactly once in ten years. All
the treasure was looted, the network of caves stripped bare, save for the chest. Eight-hundred-and-eighty-one.
He hopes the single remaining coin has been buried with his mother, at the base of that simple wooden marker on another forgotten island. He hopes the man who buried it still wanders the earth, cursed.
He feels a vague twinge where his heart should be...because he is no father, only a marginally good pirate, and less than half what his woman
deserves.
Typical.
He is, after all, a Sparrow.
His first love will always be himself.
His second...? The Black Pearl. Closely tied with the sea.
Ana is not like him. She never makes too much of anything.
Especially of the man he's become.
Perhaps that's why he's comfortably suspended in her.
She often tell him that he's dwelling. That he thinks too much of the pain and not enough of the joy. Her eyes are dark and wise and deep. He remembers that she used to sing the same lyrical ballads when he was barely walking...and it should be strange, now, to know her thighs and her hips and her spine better than he knows his own.
"I'm not Elizabeth," she whispers, sometimes, when he puts his lips to her breast. "You can't see me in her. You won't."
"I know," he lies, gently.
He is, after all, a Sparrow.
And the sea is calm.
--end--
July 26, 2004.