the Dalaverse

To even explain it, there are
(I think everyone knows this much, but just to be sure)

OMGWTFBARBOSSA?!

But seriously, I was starting to think I'd never write Elizabeth's POV again, and once I'd finished this I realized it was inevitable.

Shades of...uncomfortable pairing. Back to main entry so I can cut directly to fic... PG, by the way.



Reunion


She does not like the way Tia Dalma's posset warms her. The cold felt right, felt like justice as it stung. She wonders if it is cold where Jack is, or if he feels nothing at all.

"An' we find ourselves met a second time, Miss -- is it Mrs. Turner now?"

Barbossa's ragged outline comes into the corner of her vision and she turns her gaze to the swamp. "It is still Miss Swann," she replies through gritted teeth. She will not call him captain if she can avoid it.

"Ah," says Barbossa with what in another man might be called good humour. "Still a maiden, then, though ye wear th' threads 'f a pirate."

Her chin drops as the ice strikes her chest again, searing away all her borrowed warmth.

I'm not sorry.

Pirate.

She a fool to speak so soon, and his last words a stab at honest truth...

"I must admit, ye wear them well," the man continues, refusing to go away like a sensible person when she has come out here to be alone. Will must not realize that both she and Barbossa are absent; then again, perhaps he does, and does not care. She would be the last to blame him.

Barbossa is still oozing, damn him. "Near as good's a boy, ye be so scrawny -- aye, but we know there's a woman's flesh unner there somewhere, don't we?"

It is his words flashing into a sensory memory of Jack's eyes holding hers, the taste of him still on her lips, the way he savored that word on his own -- she snaps and whirls and raises her arm.

But Barbossa catches it as easily as Jack did when she called him wretch, only he is much nearer than Jack was then -- as near as he was at the end --

"Oh no, Miss Swann," he says with a cluck of his tongue, menace in deadly earnest lurking behind the amusement in his watery blue eyes. "Ye don't want t' be strikin' yer captain before we've e'en left shore."

Breath stalls in her lungs as she mentally curses herself. She made mistakes in calculation the first time they met, but it's doubly mad now, when she knows how dangerous he can be. And now there is no curse to make him forget that she lies at his feet, no quick-witted Jack to distract him from the knife he holds to Will's throat.

"Why are you here?" she hisses, putting on a show of defiance though her wrist aches where he grips it. She need not be afraid, not when Tia Dalma's people fill the swamp, when there half a dozen men behind the door at her back and it would serve him no purpose to harm her in these circumstances. Still, he strikes so fast, she isn't sure she would have time to scream.

Turning her hand over to study her palm, Barbossa replies evenly, "I've reasons of me own." His gazes slides up her arm, lingering on the pulse jumping beneath her jaw. She shifts her weight to her back leg, readying herself for a kick to his kneecap, but the door clicks before she lifts her foot. By the time it opens fully, she is once more standing on the porch gazing out, while Barbossa smoothes the fur of the monkey that has leapt to his shoulder.

Will looks from one to the other and his hand immediately goes to his hip. Barbossa ignores him thoroughly. Elizabeth shakes her head once; he opens his mouth to say something, then closes it, pressing his lips tight. He turns to go back inside, leaving the door open.

"Hector," Tia Dalma's dark, knowing voice calls. "You an' pretty Lizzie come hear de tings we have to discuss."

Barbossa favors her with a grin as he brushes by to answer. Elizabeth stays still to let them all know she can stand it, and then she follows.