Will vignette [standalone]
Will vignette-ish...thing. Started it waaay long ago in response to reading one too many "Will is a pirate at heart and mopes by the sea" fics. The fanon pendulum has since swung away from pirate!Will, but back then I kept thinking, y'know, he learned something big and ouchy during that adventure. And the ocean's not really been his friend. He has another reason to mope by the sea.

It's not exactly WIP (for this "WIP Amnesty Day" fabu mentioned), but I'm sick of looking at it, so. Here 'tis.

Disney's. No money. Don't sue.




Somebody calls from the deepest dark, and nobody hears but Will.

They misunderstand him, those who whisper of his pirate blood, the brine in his veins. They believe it an inborn and newly awakened love of the sea that sends him to the docks, the cliffs, the sandy shore -- anywhere to get up close, to smell and taste the saline sting of the air washed in over the water.

And Elizabeth, for all her caring, sees what she wants to see in his distraction. She sees her own longing, reflected -- her need to be away from the constraints she was born to. In quiet moments she promises him they'll find a way, both of them, to break free.

Will doesn't hunger for that same freedom. He doesn't need it the way he senses in her (and in Jack Sparrow, don't forget, Jack Sparrow whose dream is to chase the edge of the world until it ends or he does). Maybe if he were born a woman...yes, then he might better understand what Elizabeth really means when she tells him with desperation underlying her voice that she can't breathe here...

That's not what brings him to the ocean. Nor is it thoughts of Jack, as some of the more scandalous whispers suggest. He counts the pirate a rare friend -- has put his life on the line for him, and will do so again with neither hesitation nor doubt -- but it's more personal than thoughts of that peculiar rascal, what draws him here. Deeper. Older.

The beach now, bare feet digging into the exquisite grinding squishiness of wet sand just recently lapped by high tide. He breathes deeply, through his nose, and the first scents are brackish breeze and moldering vegetation and hints of all the life and death occurring out there past the waves. Past the waves and underneath them.

They sent Bill Turner to the bottom of the sea with a cannon dragging him down, plunging through dark, progressively colder waters, crushing the air from his chest in a final, bubbling scream.

He dreams it sometimes: plummeting into endless blackness, mind crying for air an undead body doesn't need. He dreams of his father's thoughts (despairing, hopeless, the deepest circle of hell sucking him down, enveloping him) and of the years crawling by (madness, slithering madness curling through his eyesockets, festering at the roots of his teeth, squeezing in and out of lungs that won't learn to not try to breathe) and sometimes he lurches up, bathed in chilling (seawater) sweat, crying out hoarsely with the horror of his father's last moments of mortality when the curse lifted and life flared again and the ocean, that thieving ocean, snuffed it out in an instant.

There is comfort, then, from Elizabeth. She curls around him, arms fiercely tight, chin on his shoulder and heart thumping through the soft heat of her breast against his back and he remembers that they call him Will, not Bill, and he's never seen his flesh melt away beneath silvering moonlight, and while at times he's been rash he's never been mad. Daftness in the heat of battle aside.

A shell-shard stabs his heel. He bends to examine it. Beading blood (of a pirate), just barely welling through the calloused sole, dotted with sand grains. Proof of life.

Wind shifts. Brings him the sick-sweet stench of putrefying flesh, reminding him: this is what he came for. This is what summoned him here. He forgets his heel, forgets his thoughts. Follows his nose.

Unrecognizable, the corpse, when he finds it. Something marine, much larger than a man. Bloated, sort of slimy, gray-black with decomposition. There are white and black birds flocking over it and tearing it apart, fighting each other with flapping wings and cawing shrieks.

In the unlikely event that Bill Turner's body found its way to some distant beach, carrion eaters would have pulled him to pieces.

Not that his disposal beneath the water could have been prettier.

Toes flexing and digging through sand, Will watches nature work. Aches for his father. Wonders.

When the tide spits dead things onshore and the distinctive odor of decay wafts through Port Royal, he always goes to check.

***