Poetry
by Eiluned
(eil.at.phoenixfyre (AT) gmail(DOT)com)
Archive: Sure, just let me know where.
Disclaimer: They belong to Disney, and I'm not making a single doubloon.
Summary: The moment he fell in love with her, and the moment she fell in love with him. Will/Elizabeth.
Notes: Will Turner ficathon fic for voleuse, hopelessly late, for I am the Queen of Forgetfulness. The poems quoted are "The Dream," "The Good-Morrow," and "Batter my heart, three-personed God" by John Donne. (will I go to hell for using a religious sonnet during a love scene?) Creative liberties have been taken with ages, names of ships and books of poetry.
When Will was a child in England, he rescued a book of poetry from the gutter before a rainstorm. His mother told him that it was useless; a boy of eleven had no use for poetry, especially when there was work to be done, and he could hardly read anyway. Being the defiant lad he was, though, Will kept the book hidden away, and he begged the local vicar to teach him to read. Once he had mastered the art of putting letters together, he read the entire book from cover to cover. By the next year, he had memorized all of the poems, and his mother had died. When he boarded the ship bound for Jamaica, he carried a sack full of dried meat and hard bread, a change of clothing, and the book of poetry.
He mourned when the book sank into the depths of the Caribbean. When he awoke in the belly of a British naval ship and got his first, good look at the pretty, blonde-haired girl, poetry sprang to his lips unbidden. "As lightning or a taper's light, Thine eyes, and not thy noise, waked me," he whispered, and she gave him a puzzled look.
"Are you all right, Will Turner?" she asked, wiping his face with a damp cloth.
"Yet I thought thee (For thou lov'st truth) an angel at first sight," he finished, and she giggled.
He thought he was in love, and he was enchanted by it.
As he grew older, though, he came to realize that he hadn't fallen in love at that moment. He truly fell in love with her the day she sneaked into the smithy with an apron full of apples and sat with him in his tiny room in the loft, when he was sixteen. He was no less enchanted then as he was when he was twelve, but there seemed to be a deeper meaning to it, something more tangible than a boy's fancy. Something that made him ache deep in his chest when he looked at her, sitting comfortably in her light blue dress, not caring if she got dirty.
"I remember you saying something strange when you awoke on the Artemis," Elizabeth said, gazing thoughtfully at the red fruit in her hand. "But I cannot remember exactly what you said."
Will blushed. "It... it was a poem. Well, part of a poem."
"A poem, really? I didn't know you read poetry."
He leaned back so that he was lying flat on the crosstimber. "It was something by John Donne. I found a book of his poems when I was a child. I lost the book, but I memorized them all."
Elizabeth was smiling. "You've memorized them? Oh, do quote some for me. I love poetry," she said.
Will sighed and wondered how to tell her of his love. "And now good morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere," he said softly, and she pressed a hand to her breast.
"Go on, please," she said.
"Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown: Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one."
"That's beautiful, Will," she said, and he thought she was beautiful.
He didn't think that she loved him, at least not in the way he loved her, until she stood beside him, between Norrington and his guns and Jack. She took his hand, and he knew. He kissed her, and he thought his heart would burst.
Later that evening, when they had sneaked off again to his room in the smithy, he held her in his arms and asked when she had fallen in love with him.
Elizabeth smiled softly and stroked her fingers over the bare skin of his chest. "I truly do not know," she whispered. "I think... I think that I had been for years, and I was blind to it until today."
He kissed her deeply, pulling her body against his. "Take me to You, imprison me," he murmured, gasping when her lips touched his neck, "for I, Except You' enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me."
End