Title: "Not All Treasure"
Author: monimala
Fandom: PotC
Rating/Classification: SAC, Jack/Elizabeth/Will, angst.
Disclaimer: Aaaar!! Avast!! Disney!
Summary: Fourth in the "...And a Bottle of Rum" series. Set just a little farther in the future. There are harder things than being a lady. Like being a woman.
She sometimes wonders if her father misses her. If he wonders why she never came back from her post-wedding holiday...if he makes the connection between that and the Commodore being singularly unable to catch the Black Pearl. Even after two years of pursuit.
Billy laughs and laughs, delighted, as he plays in the surf with Will. Her son was born to the water. All ready, his skin has been burnished bronze by the sun. Swarthy like a pirate, he learned to swim before he could walk and he's the apple of the crew's eye. He has a ship full of family, of kin that would willingly die for him.
Which is a blessing.
Since she's not quite sure who his father is.
It is not something they speak of, of course.
That is one aspect of her breeding that has survived these past twenty-six months of moving from island to island, port to port. Jack Sparrow sometimes holds Billy up to the wheel...helping his little chubby fingers grasp it and turn... but he never cradles him for long. Fakes a swaying attack of insanity and doesn't quite meet her eyes as he hands the baby over. He is not cut out to be a husband, a father. Freedom is what he craves. And yet he spends the hours between sunset and sunrise in her bed. With Will. Their sun-dark hands moving in harmony.
Anamaria berated her for hours when she missed her monthly courses. Now...now she is well-prepared against the quickening of her belly. Island remedies, potions from witch doctors, will ensure that Billy is the only child on the Black Pearl for years to come.
That...and her strict ban on rum.
There will be no rum on the ship as long as she's on it. The crew grumbled for the first few months but are much relieved that they can still rely on whiskey and ale. But, sometimes, when they go to port... Jack brings a bottle right up to the gangplank, takes one, last, defiant, sip before dropping it on the docks and watching her flinch as the glass shatters.
For the first few months, when she spent most of her time hanging over the rail and praying to find her lost sea legs again, the only things that drove away the taste of sick were pineapples. Captain Jack announced he would bring her back some...but when he met them in Jamaica three days later, he was empty-handed. He disappeared into the cabin with Will and when they emerged, they were stumbling. Buggered into fatigue, into oblivion. She watched their limbs, carefully, in the moonlight, for any signs of the skeletons beneath.
He goes back often. She knows that. Not now that they are in the Indies, but before...before, the draw of the Aztec gold was his escape. Sitting for hours, on end, in front of the open chest. Touching no coin...but wanting to. So, desperately, wanting to.
Billy's eyes and hair are a shade of dark brown that tells nothing. His smile...his smile is the enigmatic one she sees in her own mirror. When he says "Mama", it is in a voice still too high and sweet to be anything but his own.
In her husband's mind, Billy is his. It is evident in the way he tickles the child on the sand...tells him stories at night of pirates whose bones show under the moon that he is still too young to understand. Will Turner has always ... always... been an idealist. He sees the best in her. He sees the best in their marriage. He sees the best in Captain Jack Sparrow. Especially in the candlelight, when the ship rocks against its anchor, and they have nowhere to go but deep inside one another.
She...she embraces the worst.
So, in her mind, Billy belongs to all of them.
And, one day, he'll laugh Jack Sparrow's husky, lunatic, laugh.
Then, he'll belong to the sea.
And he won't wonder if his mother misses him at all.
--end--
July 12, 2003.