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STALEMATE, OR FAREWELL FOR FOOLS Author: Katla Disclaimer: It all belongs to the Mouse if you recognise it at all. Alice Carroll, however little she’s worth, belongs to me. You may borrow her as much as you like, but I’m certain you won’t be able to stand her after a while. She’s off her rocker, you see, and she’s hopelessly lovesick. Not to mention that she sings nonsense songs like a regular Ophelia. You’ve been warned! Summary: When you literally wash up on the shore of a beach near Port Royal and a young blacksmith’s apprentice finds you, this colony’s in for a surprise: a girl who refuses to conform! Shame on you! During a bittersweet and secret love affair with Mr. Turner, you discover that there is no hope for your conforming and you leave the city for the free life outside of society. But when you see Will being held captive on a naval ship, you inform the dutiful Commodore, only to discover that he’s wanted as a criminal. You make a special return to the city to offer your final apology and to end what you began so long ago… Author's Note: Surprise! I’m back again! You thought you were rid of me a long time ago, didn’t you? But no, you can take the girl out of Pirates, but you can’t take the Pirates out of the girl. This story was first inspired by a song called “Headlock” by Imogen Heap. It’s a lovely little song I would highly recommend to all of you, as Imogen is fantastically amazing (and British too, because I love the Brits!). But beyond that you have tons of other inspirations and influences: chess, W.H. Auden’s poems, the character Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and most noticeably Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Alice probably has the greatest effect on this, seeing as the You-character’s name is Alice Carroll and there are references to both books (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass) and the 1950s Disney movie. I would ask you to bear with me on these countless references. I used two quotes—one to open, one to close—and the song Alice sings at the end is taken directly from Hamlet. It is the last song Ophelia sings before she exits in her final scene, drowning very dramatically two scenes later. Since this story was originally planned as a one-shot and has not grown very much, I should let you know this is the first and only update. What a relief, isn’t it? I’m attempting United Kingdom English here, considering that the story takes place in a British colony anyway. If you’re from Europe and you catch a mistake, be sure to point it out! I’m silly (and American besides), so I might not have caught everything. So, I shall stop my babbling and let you read this little tragedy called Stalemate. Do enjoy, and remember—I want to hear what you thought! Reviews make my day. :) * * * * * O stand, stand at the window The truth of the matter was that you knew William Turner was a fool. Of course he didn’t mean to be that way, as most fools did not aspire to their position in that godforsaken society. Most fools did not mean to be mockeries of human beings to make other people feel that much holier and closer to a God with a face nobody had seen and words people had only heard from someone else. He walked through life with only the best of intentions and the purest of hearts. He was a good, obedient man of twenty years who came from the same city that you once called home. He had a lure you couldn’t deny even after the end on that cold and ruthless day in November, but you could not escape the fact of his foolishness. He was stuck in a rut and not crying for help, stuck in Port Royal like a face hidden in the shadows of a painting. He was following the same path daily without exhaustion or boredom despite the offer you had made long ago. You could not see what appeal that held for him—living by society’s measurements of right and wrong, falling apart in the morning and walking broken through the day like everyone else. After all, you had abandoned it long ago, much to the shame of your guardians, who made you nameless to them forevermore and lived as if you had never been born to this world of cobblestone and courtesy and civilization. You preferred to live where your dreams did—far away in the bulleted-blue sky, where you spent your days chasing medallion suns and making chains of exotic flowers worthy of a dark-skinned queen. You dined with the gods of long ago that everyone mistook for dead on sparsely lit beaches and took what sustenance the sea offered to you on a sandy plate. Your lullabies were the enthralling legends of the stars as the city slumped into exhaustion beneath all of their worries and works and whispered wonders. But never once in your wildest dreams—which were crammed full of backwards-reverse worlds through mirrors and dark, tribal drums beating like a dying heart and the stars falling down to cover everything in silver glass—did you expect to go back to the city. After you heard that his partner-in-crime to retrieving the Governor’s daughter—the elusive and slippery eel of a pirate called Captain Jack Sparrow—was to be hung, you suspected he might not have wanted to see your face nearby his candlelit window. You had betrayed him in so many ways that you had been unaware of, lost in the concern of a rumour that your blacksmith, who was so fond of being on the safe side, might have been in deep trouble indeed. You had been the one to abandon your isolated lifestyle to tell society’s favourite himself—a man of honour and duty named Commodore James Norrington—what had happened to his grand Interceptor, where you had unexpectedly seen William’s figure hanging desperately for life onto a yard of the ship. A man at the helm you didn’t recognize rocked the ship back and forth on the bluest sea you’d ever seen until the vessel was out of your sight and headed for somewhere you would never know. You had been alone and shivering in sorrow on the dock after you had reported to the Commodore their directions, knowing that you had essentially sold Will to his death, even without the proverbial twenty pieces of silver. Hopeful word came from the city some days later that William had been pardoned due to the Governor’s kindness, though the pirate’s sentence was not lifted. His hanging had been considered the event of the year—and none other than the blacksmith had allowed the pirate to escape to freedom. Over the next days, you left little afterthoughts of trinkets the untrained eye did not see to tell him you were sorry for what you had done—lovely seashells that caught the Caribbean sunlight if you held them just so; a morning glory that was left on the windowsill to open as the sunrise burnt the sky purple and red and yellow; a bright yellow fruit that looked peculiarly like a star, mutated and changed until it became more extraordinary and beautiful. The gifts had ended up in a wooden box that smelled of fire and metal and darkness that was buried haphazardly, a loose corner sticking up as if reaching for the sky. You had accidentally tripped over when you were taking your long walk across multiple beaches on the past Sabbath day. For the rest of the humid Sunday you hadn’t moved from the beach in hopes that he would return again. Only losing your hope very late into the night, you had hardly remembered to close up the grave the box had been in with fresh sand. Defeated, you had walked through the foamy salt water to the cave you called home without even a breeze to listen to your sighing. But you knew that your latest gift would wind up somewhere besides the grave where he buried the memory of you. It would be hand-delivered and you would wait in the shadows, forever if you had to, until he was trapped and forced to be with you. You knew, as you always had, that William Turner was a fool, but he was quite the proper one. And being polite, he would never deny a lady’s company, no matter how much he wanted to forget that she existed. You entered the city that night without any tangible direction in mind—save for perhaps the guidance of the stars—discovering that the city had been reborn in sturdier brick and taller walls. The only thing that had remained the same was the empty gallows, looking like a greedy shadow as it waited for convicted criminals to destroy. You blazed a trail with determined steps down the damp and unlit backstreets, plunging into total darkness at times after you abandoned the main streets of lost and mourned dreams. As you went on, picking up your skirts to sidestep puddles from the pale and light rain earlier that day, lanterns became scarcer and scarcer until you lost all sense of propriety and patience. Rashly you broke a window in a rowdy, dirty tavern to take a candle nobody would miss in the brightly lit room that shone like the Star of the East to people far and near. You faded away into the shadows as the men and their whores found themselves without their minds again, singing drunken lullabies. * * * * You discovered the smithy sometime later near the edge of town, when the moon was an undeniable pearl shining in the sky and the candle-wax was only a whisper away from your hand. You let the candle fall to the cobblestones below, the flame sputtering and dying with a painful hiss in a shallow puddle beside you. The smoke slithered its way into the sky to defy gravity in hopes of discovering whether or not there was a heaven. You placed the hyacinth on the half-open smithy door that had been left ajar, the families of candle flames shining like black lamp oil in the puddles. In the creaking silence of the heavy Caribbean night the wind whispered tidings from the sea, both good and bad. You closed your eyes reluctantly, stretching your ears out to hear all thieves sneaking in darkened rooms and frightened children returning from dares to enter the sea at night-time. But you didn’t expect to hear the steps on the cobblestones that were too deniable and yet too easy to understand. “You’ve returned to see me, haven’t you, Mr. Turner?” you asked to the man whose presence you felt all too strongly, the sounds of the steps going to his smithy’s side entrance dying away into nothing. Your eyes opened to see the world spinning in delirious shadows outlining his dark figure against the bright sky. “But I’ve forgotten—you’re not the orphan blacksmith’s apprentice anymore. The name is too common. It doesn’t suit you.” The next words were not as caustic as you had hoped them to be, as you had practiced to the empty noonday sky to the clouds that had run away. Choking back tears that you were too proud to shed, you stumbled over the next words. “You’re practically God Himself now, aren’t you? You’re William the hero, William the white knight, William the conqueror.” “I’ve been back,” he said slowly and cautiously, as if he was in a dreamland that could not possibly be real, “but you’re the one who’s been away, Miss Carroll.” The formality in the sentence stung harder than you anticipated, and as you walked over to him you locked his eyes in a stare that bared all and hid nothing. I want you to call me Alice again, like you did long ago, you said in your mind, because suddenly your lips could not and would not move when they were needed. He stood awkwardly on the brink of the street like a cat certain that it would be spooked away. How many times must I tell you, my love? I want to be your Alice again. You fixed your face to say nothing and exerted an apathetic air as if pretending you had not been waiting nearly all night for his shadow to stray into yours. “Now, don’t you start accusing me of things I haven’t done,” you scolded unnecessarily, ready to say anything to break the silence. Weakly you concluded in a hoarse whisper: “It isn’t polite.” “What do you want, Miss Carroll?” he said wearily, with a voice that belonged to a man at least twice his age. “Call me Alice?” you asked, responding far too quickly, your voice breaking in a raw desperation. Cursing beneath your breath, as all ladies do at one point or another, you remembered the flower resting against your breast. Burrowing a hand underneath your fading sky-blue dress, you retrieved the blossom, twirling it slightly in your fingers as it captured the pearly moonlight. “I wanted to give you this,” you said in quite a straightforward tone. Will’s face furrowed with concentration, as if he was debating whether or not you had poisoned the flower to the touch. As if anyone would be such a fool as to try that, you thought cynically while he reluctantly grasped the stem, twirling it as you had done. “It’s a hyacinth…lovely, isn’t it? It means ‘I’m sorry,’” you offered meekly, not sure what sort of silence he was brooding in now. It went against everything proper as you reached over to touch Will oh-so-lightly on the shoulder. He was warmer than you had remembered as you stood there in silence, the hyacinth still spinning as if attached to a carousel. Every movement you made was closer towards him, your breath circling like smoke into his seashell ear as you whispered: “I came to say that it wasn’t my fault.” “You told the Commodore where we were headed!” Will snapped suddenly, grasping you roughly by the shoulders as you quivered in helpless fear. His look was hot with anger and you could swear that you saw fire smouldering in his eyes. “Jack and I had everything under control! I was too fortunate to escape, and if it weren’t for me Jack might have hung—!” “I heard what you were doing, and I was frightened for you!” you said in a high and mourning tone, your voice on the verge of breaking. Tears shone sharply in your eyes as you broke away from his grip, your hands brushing against your eyelashes to wipe them away. “You were foolishly following the Black Pearl, the most notorious pirate ship in the entire Spanish Main! And then I heard you were after Captain Blackheart!” “Blackheart?” Will murmured, tasting the legendary name on his tongue. Oh, Alice Carroll, you are a fool! you thought angrily, curling your hands into fists with your fingernails tight against your skin. The gossips—crones who had nothing better to do than to talk of matters that didn’t concern them—had whispered about the unfortunate yet intriguing circumstance of your parents’ deaths. They had been swallowed up by the sea after a vicious attack by a pirate ship with ratty black sails and a train of fog that followed wherever it went. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” you murmured lightly, hardly wishing to discuss perhaps the only memory that you could not lie to yourself about. All of the other unpleasant nightmares had been lacquered over so easily, yet you could never escape being a victim nobody sympathized with. “You have your princess and your happily-ever-after ending now, like a hero in the Brothers Grimm. I was a fool to think that you would still want me.” “Please…Alice.” Hope fluttered in your heart at the sound of your name, but Will’s face was hard and solemn and you feared that he would one day wake up to frown lines about his thin lips. “I can’t want you anymore. You have to stop believing in impossible things, in impossible loves. This is…this is goodbye.” After floundering in uneasy silence, you smiled weakly and said, “Of course—it’s for the best. I’ll wish only the finest for you.” The humid air weighed heavy on your back as you turned your back on him, determined to live your life knowing no love but the love of the sun and the moon. You tread slightly on already broken flower petals on the street, recognising a petal or two as columbine and rue. “And will he not come again? And will he not come again?” you sang in a wavering caricature of a song, not being born with an ear for arias and waltzes, violins and pianos. “She’s mad,” Will whispered in a horrid mix of fear and amazement, though perhaps he did not say anything. The wind was a wicked devil of a prankster, upsetting everything wherever he went. Will’s shadow was still skittering behind you, as if it would run off and leave him for dead the way you were leaving him now. “No, no, he is dead. Go to thy death-bed, he will never come again,” you continued solemnly, your skirts trailing in the muddy water despite your careful grace. The full moon shone bright and beautiful upon the streets, upon Will, a man of fire and you, a lady of the water. The ethereal night-time silence filled the sky to its bursting point, as if the world was baiting its breath and hoping for something beyond their imagination to occur. “He is gone, he is gone, and we cast away moan—oh, God have mercy on his soul!” you screamed to the night sky, your tears flowing forth like a fountain that had been cleaved in two. Your heart felt as if it might burst to bathe your insides in oxygen-rich blood. For a long moment you could not dare to move, your skin suddenly very cold despite the heat that pushed down on you. “Oh, God have mercy on our souls,” you repeated in a voice made small by the great wideness of the world. You began to walk again with a heavy heart on this lonely road, the only one that you could ever hope to know. Before your silhouette disappeared into the night, Will was suddenly aware that he would likely never see you again. The trinkets from the doorway would disappear and become nothing more than a memory to, perhaps, be regretted. He was losing you permanently to the bright world inside your head where impossibilities were all too common. He almost called out to ask where you were going. But by the time he said anything you were as good as dead to him, lost in a wonderland he would never be able to understand. * * * * We shall boast anyway: —W.H. Auden, “Law Like Love” THE END A/N: And there is woe. I know, I’m addicted to the sadness. Thank you for reading, m’dears! Ta-ta! Ever your loving friend, |