Another one shot, everybody, completely unattached I might add. This is EW implied, but not shipper. I was in a bad mood about people not knowing what a bosun is and I decided to kill will. But then it turned out much happier than I expected, so I've posted it! Yay! 500 words on the dot my friends!

Dancing into Demise

Standing atop the wall of the great fort at Port Royale, a pale white woman watched the ocean. The water was licking the rocks below her, covering them in a slick black layer of grime from the carious plants growing in the warm Caribbean bay. She had learned to loathe the sharp things, jutting out of the water and disrupting the peacefulness of it all.

"Washed up on the rocks, he did."

Elizabeth's Swann world spun slightly as she remembered the words of the marine standing in front of her. It had hardly been the proper way to address a married lady, but he told her straight forward, as she would have it no other way.

"Been up on a yard, tendin' to th' spanker. The storm tore them up something fierce."

The young woman's tiny little hands twisted her gloves constantly as she remembered the words, which had been recited to her three years ago today. The gloves suffered the same treatment then, as well.

She hadn't been able to make any kind of noise, let alone cry out in horror as she had seen her mother do. The same type of red coat had come to her home in England when she was just a small girl, telling the lady of the house of her brother's death in the army. It had been the eventual unraveling of Mrs. Swann. She'd die two years later of the fever, but her will had been crushed the day the marine rapped on her door.

Her will had been crushed.

Elizabeth's hands finally stilled and settled on the top of her skirts. Her Will had been crushed.

Washed up on the rocks, they told her. Fallen from the spanker in a storm, and washed up on the rocks.

She knew it was a lie, she believed it had to be a lie. Her Will had been crushed; she felt loneliness pierce right through her soul the day he left her, even before the news had come. But her soul also told her that the rocks hadn't taken him. His spirit belonged to the sea now; he had given it to her and Elizabeth both on the day he saved a pirate from the hangman's grasp. Somewhere in that great, smooth liquid body of waters, Will Turner had found his father, found his eternity.

Elizabeth smiled in the pink hue of the setting sun.

Feeling herself get lost in the feeling of her husband all around her, she slowly started to sway back and forth in time to a song playing in her head. Elizabeth's eyes closed and turned her back to the sun with her arms spread out completely, and fell backwards. The feeling of falling such a great distance escaped her, and her body still relished in the feeling of Will's arms around her.

And she danced.

"Washed up on the rocks, she did." Sailors would gossip for the next several years. "Barely reco'nize'ble, but wit' a smile true as day."