#Davy Jones AU

[daisychainsandbowties]

Is there anything more beautiful and tragic than Lilith’s self-destructive longing to be loved?

i wrote a little something for this. a little bit of davy jones au

/// lullabies in salt

Lilith sings to her, sometimes, when the ship becomes a ghost and all of her crew are just specks of watery light. They move through the rigging, each one turning into what they really are.

Or what they long to be – Lilith has never been certain of this as she stands alone among them all, watching as eels curl around ropes dangling unattended, as crabs wander the deck with their claws scraping softly on soft wood.

Jellyfish strung like floating lanterns up above as thought trying to replace the night sky.

Her crew, to whom she is not gentle, and yet here they are in their simplest form; their wishful thinking that endures to this depth and makes light for her where there should be none. She has watched their bodies change, like hers, over the years.

(there is no need to admit to herself that she has lost count of them)

They are always so astonishingly alive in the beginning, and of course Lilith is just a ghoul to them. She has to be. Pacing by day in her coat that always drips cold water, her swords lending weight to her hips where flesh and fat and all her girlish ends of her have faded away.

She’s seen how they look at her – eyes bloodshot, gleaming in the candles her crew carry with them onto the wreckage of ships. Lilith wonders each time if this makes for a better ending, as she paces in front of the survivors where they kneel in their shallow saltwater graves, variously bloodied and always on the edge of death.

Her crew, who have all made the same poor choices, whisper that it is. Better.

“Why?” she asks them, her voice moving like water over sand.

Her crew, who she thinks of as beautiful because what else to think or to feel about them? Their faces cracked open by barnacles and occupied by every crawling thing that lives inside the ocean. A girl of seventeen (dead) who did not endure the crossing from England; her eyes replaced by the broad caps of jellyfish, who looked up from her whalebone dice and said, “It’s better to have a choice, I think.”

Even now, she is shy, though the sea has reclaimed all of her girlishness. Her forearms are chitin and her teeth are coral, and even as Lilith stood by, waiting for her to summon her voice again, a tiny krill crawled out of her left ear and settled on the lobe like an earring.

The girl touched it, smiling, as though a pretty boy (or another pretty girl, Lilith supposes) had set it there with bare hands. “I wasn’t ready to be dead,” she told Lilith, quiet but fierce, “And I don’t regret this.”

“You will.”

As the ship falls, passing out of sight of sunlight, Lilith searches for the marshlight of that girl in the strung-shadows, in the ghosts. There are a few she suspects.

One, a dolphin turning loops around the mainmast. It is the pink kind that live out somewhere on the continent west of Europe – oh, Lilith can’t remember the names they put on maps. What she remembers, from the queer knowing of things that is her deathbed companion, is that this creature is a freshwater thing and does not belong here.

Its shape climbs and climbs, into the crow’s nest, and then the ship shudders. They are done descending.

The light vanishes.

Lilith steps away from the wheel, fingers unsticking reluctantly from the barnacle-choked wood. Maybe there is no wood left at all, she realises, taking in the twitching mass of creatures that have consumed every inch of what was once a clean and solid shape.

(what has she done to them?)

Her memory is cloth eaten by moths, and all of this is probably her fault, but she cannot remember why.

Sometimes, when she falls asleep (at last. Always at last) with the ship’s organ falling silent around her, she dreams of a rainswept shore. Scrawny palm trees and dried seaweed strewn along the sand.

Kneeling there like one of the flotsam she fetches out of the sea, face uptilted to taste the rain, to feel it run between her teeth. One last taste before her trembling hand raises something that makes her fist ache. She is shirtless in her dream, lurid in the shine off of drenched skin. Her scars all laid bare for that ruined island to see.

(did she burn them out of their little church on the hillside. did she paint the parish bell with blood and turn the neat little houses to cinders. did she-)

Perhaps the island was deserted when she came, rowing away from the Dutchman in the longboat with her crew watching in their silent way. Arms flung over the railings, hands fiddling with bits of wood or scraps of leather.

She went to where they could not witness her and stripped down. Laying her coat over a fallen tree and leaving her shirt as a smear of white on the sand, weighted by rain. She kept her pants (she has others) and knelt, placing every last letter into the box. A handful of flowers long turned dry and delicate as she shielded them from the rain, snapping the lid shut to protect them.

Turning instead to a smaller chest, all filigreed in the shape of sea creatures. Lilith didn’t make it herself. In the way of things, the ocean brought it to her in the ruins of a dying ship. It knows her mind and what she intends, and there is only a little mockery in the gifting of a chest.

(a locker)

 Sailors, among all types of men, are good at poetry because they see so little of it.

And so much.  

Lilith has seen so much and she remembers certain things with clarity like crystal – warped, but unashamed. Carrying light somewhere, if not where it needs to go, if not exactly all the way to the eye of the beholder.

She remembers kneeling, naked, and something in her hand (terrible) and tears tracking toward her mouth to make the freshwater taste of rain vanish. It was a knife, she thinks, that left hard welts in the flesh of her hand and made her bruise for days.

Her palm a cup of bluegrey turning green, turning yellow, turning on her as she walked unsteadily through the ship.

(and lilith is no fool)

She knows what she’s missing, and few besides her know that it is difficult to walk without a heartbeat – that there’s a rhythm to it. Stumbling like a drunk for days with the ship all run dry of rum.

“When do we make port?”

Her crew, as things crawled up on the deck.

They were afraid at first to become more like the sea, lashing out so she tipped more than one eviscerated body over the railing in that first week. Bodies weighted like anchors to their doom, since they could not sleep without serving her.

(she came back, later, and found them in their shallow graves alongside hidden reefs or close to islands they used to visit in passing, just to lay on the beaches and drink)

“Sorry captain.” Voices almost vanished into seawater and the soft rolling of waves across the ocean floor. “Glad you came back for me.”

(what else could she do? this is all her fault)

 It was cheating, but Lilith made deals and traded favours with other ships to get them supplies. “I’m a ghost, if anyone asks,” she’d tell their captains, who were always variously afraid of her. “Speak of this at all of your own volition and I will send her to find you.”

“Who?”

Only the daring ones asked, and sadly Lilith liked the daring ones. Their smiles and how their fingers lingered on her cold wet hands, fascinated instead of repulsed – give it time.

A hunger to them as they stepped a little closer – they met on her ship, and in their eyes it was because she preferred it this way, and not because her ship would not allow her to leave. “Who will you send?”

She’d smile, like a girl who did not need to keep secrets, “The sea.”

It was close enough to the truth. Lilith does not remember anything of how it came to this, but she sourced paint, canvas, charcoals and paper and anything her crew might need to remember for her. All of her kindest acts have been out of fear.

In their stumbling and then better and then beautiful attempts at painting, or sketching, Lilith has seen the bottom of the ocean as it changes over years. The crawl of objects along the ocean floor as the waves return. They are more loyal than the rest of the world together.

Sometimes she would be stupid and end up in her cabin with one of these odd little artists – her crew which is a collective and also individual. Individuals.

They were like anyone else to fuck – messy, and good, and quiet afterwards, tracing the mark of her own sword on some crewmember’s stomach.

Of course she is not so much of a fool as to say, “Who did this to you?” even in jest, but she wonders.

Who did this?

It doesn’t feel like her, but she remembers and it was and she left markings on her map at each place where she sent a panicked body over the railing.

All of them were right as they came at her with cutlass, saber, chunks of rotting wood.

“You did this to us.”

(and she did. she did)

It is not punishment enough, she knows, to have watched them change, one by one. Bodies she knew – fucked, cooked for, defended with her own – turned to bodies she only recognises because she never looked away. Afraid to blink, sometimes.

She gave them paper and paint so that they could remember, and there is a little booklet in the dry-store of her crew before, or halfway through. Her crew slowly undone as the Dutchman turns and turns around the ocean like a tiger in a cage.

And she is not brave enough to remember why she did it to them.

Lilith has no interest in drawing things, or putting smears of colour down to try, try, try and represent what happened to her. Lilith is a liar, and that should make her an artist too, but she takes what she has and puts it onto piano keys.

Happy, in the end, to remember little beyond her own naked chest. Nothing but a beach, a knife, a bloody shape in her hand.

(still beating)

It has been like this forever. Lilith with lichen growing out of her hairline and glassy teeth growing under the veins in her wrists. As a child she read about Moray eels and their teeth, and as usual her dreams have come back to infect her.

She is sick with longing, disfigured by it, and sometimes she wakes up with her arms bloody and soaking her bedsheets. Prongs of a glasslike substance sticking out of her wrists – and it is terrifying, but Lilith cannot die.

(and ‘cannot’ is a terrible thing, even when it is about death)

Tonight the ocean is calm and nothing has died, so Lilith moved through her crew. Oh, they are quiet sometimes especially when the stars come out. Night so clear you can feel it reaching for you.

Their voices all around her and their hands reaching out, sliding off her slick skin. Lilith, their fresh-drowned corpse, with new shapes sprouting now from her jawline. Following it all the way home into her mouth.

She loves their hands. She loves them.

The new ones as yet unbroken by the slow crawl of time, with their human faces. Almost, now, she finds their eyes unnerving – all simple shades of brown or blue or black or hazel or grey. There is so much weather in these living-dead things. So much of land.

As the sun fell she moved through them, listening, composing something in her head that sounded already as though it would be a sad song. She is good with only two emotions in music.

Anger, and this strange melancholy that falls over her crew when there are no bodies to collect. No limbs floating in the water and no blood in the seafoam.

No sharks.

“Let’s go down”

                                                      “Lilith”

                       “Captain”

    “Let’s go down”

Lilith has seen more of the ocean than anyone alive. Her body is spyglass, map, compass, and complicated in all the ways that saltwater is. There are no clean deaths out here.

Only drownings.

She took them down, waves rushing up the length of the ship to swallow their bodies one by one and how they floated for a while as the crushing took hold. Their bodies ignored it, and Lilith felt only the familiar ache in her wrists.

Here, at least, she cannot drip water onto the deck beneath her like a poor excuse for a heartbeat. Her crew were, at first, themselves.

She hates to find them beautiful, but there’s a helplessness to it; to Lilith and her long acquaintance with the sea.

I miss you.

The thought stepped out like a ghost to frighten her, and Lilith flinched against the wheel, but she did not let it go. Beach, knife, rainwater, and a bead of sharp pain somewhere on her chest.

Sand, blood, and the water catching up to catch her, and drinking it down.

“Are you thirsty, Lil?” (a voice she does not know)

Her crew are beautiful. They are the ocean and they are her and they float so perfectly as the ship descends, dragging their shapes out of sight. Light-swallowed and turning into light as they unravel.

(she will not describe them)

Only their ghosts, strung up into blurry wavelengths as the depths settle like an absent heartbeat around her. Quiet as her grave.

Lilith waits.

Her ship is lost now, barnacles loose in the water around her as they try to flee. (where? there is nowhere to go)

Catching one, she turns it over, watching as featherlike cirri tease from its tip, combing the water even now for food. It is not afraid of her, or it would have retreated into its shell, and Lilith lets its tiny appendages tease over her fingertips. There is plenty to eat on her skin.

She sets it on her forearm, feeling it secrete onto her skin, burrowing down among fine hairs and into flesh. There is a momentary bloom of blood in the water and then Lilith turns her attention out toward the ocean, to where a shape lurks now on the edge of seeing.

“Hello darling,” Lilith whispers, and a kraken’s arm punctures out of absolute darkness, easing toward her like a tongue parting lips, parting water. Easy as a knife parting flesh, carving out space for a ghost.

It moves through her crew, who scatter like wavelengths of light (that is all they are for now) from its path. The barnacle, newly apart of Lilith, quivers against her bones.

The arm stops, extended, a few inches from Lilith where she stands just shy of the ship’s wheel. It is cold at this depth, but Lilith cannot feel that any more than she can feel sunlight on her skin or the taste of food in her mouth.

She reaches out with her left hand so as not to scare the barnacle (who knows its place in the grand scheme even if Lilith does not) and lets the very tip of that unfathomable arm reach forward, curling all around her.

Her kraken hums and Lilith feels the reverberation of it mostly in her chest where there is plenty of room. She steps forward and the arms curls and curls – and Lilith is always dripping water but this creature is wet and she can feel it for once.

Lilith closes her eyes, feels her feet lift away from the deck and she is free, finally, of all that wood and tar, of a million nails and a thousand tiny chips in once-beautiful wood. She feels her barnacle rush toward the inside of her elbow where it burrows into the vein, opening her wide.

A blood trail follows them through the water as the kraken brings her close, away until the ship is just a mirage. Its mouth opens to show her rows of pretty teeth. Lilith has one on a leather cord around her neck, gifted accidentally by a shipwreck she visited one.

“Liar. A shipwreck you made.” (says a voice she does not know)

Its breath is only warmth here as the kraken lazes at this depth, letting faint currents shift her from side to side. They are still far from the bottom of the ocean, but this dark is preternatural anyway. This place hardly even exists.

Lilith, who has been granted space to move in the safety of the kraken’s grip, runs her hand over the suckers on its arm. It tastes her blood.

“Have you been well, dear one?” She asks this through the murk so her voice does not really travel, but the kraken hears her. She feels it twirling her lightly in place, humming more serenely as they dance farther from the ship, together.

Lilith kisses its wet flesh and looks toward her creature, her kraken, her ocean. “It is all I have, to hear that.”

It sends a small shockwave through the water in response – enough to make the barnacle shiver where it sits sipping at Lilith’s blood.

“Do you want me to sing for you?” Lilith spreads her palm over what passes for a kraken’s hand, sliding her fingers fully around the thinnest part, the very tip of its arm.

There’s a plea in its voiceless rhythm as the kraken twists in the water. There is so much of it that Lilith cannot follow every arm to its ending. Her creature is vast and it swallows the ocean around them. Everything, instead, is her.

(they are the same thing)

(ocean and kraken. ocean and girl)

Lilith sings.

[cupcakeshakesnake]

Some kind of important day

[skymagpie]

My new way of coping is just drawing some weird Modern AU(ish) domestic Calypso and Davy Jones (it's working)

[reine-du-sourire]

Catler Cutler Beckett gets in on the booping action! No one is immune.

Literally, no one.

Not even...

...sadly, Cutler booped one boop too many.

~Drawn as always by @thundersongfury~

[jollmaster]

AU: Seviathan is one of Leviathan's descendants and he could have been Charlie's husband; Charlie was afraid to give birth to water goats and said no, now they are mentally divorced, Seviathan is married to (one of many) Marquess Vepar's daughter and isn't exactly close friends with Charlie, but they don't fight

[teejay-kaye]

is this not basically how Scylla’s acquisition went down in the Dutchman Baby AU-

(listen I know technically when they got her they weren’t fish people yet but I refuse to draw normal humans if there is any alternative and it was funnier this way anyway)

[lastmidtownshowmp3]

Girls the sequel

[music00lbumm]

Yes…. They meet every 10 years

I introduce the tentacle trio Au

[glamnessaaumisc]

Pirates Ramblings

The Pirates of the Caribbean universe would be so much funnier if the British won in At World's End because then Davy Jones would just work for the British forever and the list of shit to do with Davy Jones in the Royal Navy is near-endless. Like he'd totally be involved in a bunch of major naval battles because the Flying Dutchman is invincible. He'd definitely fight in the Napoleonic Wars, the World Wars, the Opium Wars, among others. But Davy Jones would also get quite bored during peacetime so the navy would probably assign him to hunt pirates in the Indian Ocean or something.

You may be thinking, "If Britain has an invincible ship and an immortal crew on it's side, surely they'd win the American Revolution, right?" Wrong. America would still win because if the British asked Jones and his crew to sacrifice their once-in-a-decade chance to be on land just to fight Washington, they'd probably just say "Screw you!" and hang out at a bar in Massachusetts instead.

Come the late 19th century, the Dutchman would need some retrofitting to remain effective so they'd turn it into like a destroyer or something, but it would be tough to renovate it due to the fact that they have to coax Bootstrap and that other guy out of the walls, as well as Jones' demand that they don't dismantle his organ.

Davy Jones would probably end the Russo-Japanese War early because the Second Russian Pacific Squadron would fire on the Dutchman thinking it's a Japanese torpedo boat and Jones would overreact accordingly.

Davy Jones would probably get notified when the Royal Navy updates their uniforms and be sent a new uniform but he wouldn't wear it until it's sufficiently barnacle'd.

In the 1930's Davy Jones would probably come across Amelia Earhart stranded on an island or something. He'd heard about this woman in the newspapers and the radios, so he'd sail close to the island and yell through a megaphone "MISSES EARHART I'M A BIG FAN-AH DO YOU FEAR DEATH?" Bonus points if she agrees to join him and her Dutchmansona (for lack of a better term) involves coconut crabs in some way.

At some point the Spanish would get a similar idea and fish Salazar out of wherever the fuck they left him (I don't remember shit from that movie) and he and Davy Jones would have beef over who's the better supernatural sea captain.

Fast forward to the modern day, Davy Jones would still be active, probably hunting Somali pirates or something. He'd definitely get cancelled on social media for one thing or another.

There's probably a whole lot of other goofy ahh scenarios that would happen but these are the only ones I can think of at present.

[neek00draws]

Finally finished this sketchbook!! Time to move onto the next!!

[daisychainsandbowties]

6 and avatrice for the angst prompt please and thank you

davy jones au. cw: blood, gore, extreme gay pining

///

The hilt of the sword tangles briefly on Beatrice’s knuckles as it drops from her fingers. They are slippery, hanging limp with wetness leaking down over metacarpals, dampening her palms and sliding through her fingers until they reach the tips.

drip, drip, drip

In a chorus around her, everywhere. From the torn mast overhead to the ropes swinging limply, casting horrible twisting shadows on the deck of the ship, backlit by the breaking storm.

The clatter of blade onto wood is a damper sound than it ought to be; the whole world is salt-drenched and rank with the hanging, mist-thick scent of iron.

Blood. She should say it, will have to say it eventually if only to acknowledge the shape slumped in the middle of the deck. A beautiful tangle of limbs, splayed open with the shirtsleeve on her right arm torn away to reveal a blotch of black ink running all over her skin.

But it’s not ink.

Even from clear across the deck Beatrice can see how the marks on Ava’s arm shine, like they are real things freshly dredged up from the ocean floor and not pictures stabbed into her skin. They tangle from her wrist up past her forearm and they resemble tentacles – splotched with suckers, twisting and writhing and almost bumpy beneath the surface of Ava’s skin.

Her chest rises shallowly, stutters on the exhale. The ship lists, and in the corner of her eye Beatrice can spot a familiar shape on the horizon; the others, coming at last to find them, Shannon no doubt standing behind the wheel with her hair plastered against her scalp with saltwater, rainwater.

They’re too late.

Beatrice takes a half-step forward, almost slipping on the – she has to say it, has to – blood that has spread in a weird, wind-wicked halo around Ava. She, too, is red-daubed, strands of hair stuck to her face by clots, chunks, unmentionable things, but Beatrice knows the words for them.

She’s not Camila, but anatomy is a thing held in books as well as in the surgeon’s quarters and so Beatrice knows all the bones of the body and how the word heartstring comes from Latin meaning tendinous chords, but she always misreads it as tenuous chords. Maybe both translations are true.

This, for example, feels tenuous and has to do with her heart.

Limping across the deck, Beatrice moves toward the shape of a girl who is much more than she appears. It is easy to picture her as she was before everything… happened. How she stood on the deck with one hand raised, suddenly fierce as fire when the captain pressed the tip of his blade teasingly into Beatrice’s throat. They wanted her to summon up a lightning storm to set the Cat’s Cradle alight on the horizon where it pursued them.

The men laughed as Ava squirmed free of their hands, tripped over her own boots on the deck and then winning back to her feet, snarling at them to “Let her go!”

“Or what?” the captain had laughed, pressing forward lightly but hard enough to slip the very tip of his blade into Beatrice’s throat. Not deep at all, but enough to send a ribbon of blood sprinting toward her collarbones.

She remembers Ava holding up her hand, then. Menacing. Her face could never be expressionless – there was too much to her for that, but a certain blankness stole her eyes and made them black as the deepest water. Storm clouds split overhead, leaking light down through the sailcloth and the ropes and the bodies swarming overhead in the rigging.

“Let her go,” Ava repeated. Slow, like she had any leverage.

Beatrice did not fear for her life – not these days, with the bite of her tattoos gnawing deeper at the bones in her wrists and her arms with every passing year. Magic has a cost, every weaving sending the ink deeper into her, parting tendon and ligament. Stealing into her calcium, her marrow. Soon, she’d hardly be able to step onto dry land without her debt tearing her to pieces.

But it had been her choice to be leashed to the ocean, but that didn’t mean Beatrice wanted to let go of soft, dry sand. Of solid ground and grass and the feeling of a horse underneath her. The breathlessness of standing atop a cliff with the waves crashing far below.

Most mages died before the price came to that, and were grateful for it. Beatrice was not unlike them. She was ready to pay when the debt came due.

And yet it scared her, this once – the idea of leaving Ava alone with the men who had been sent after her, who had captured her in a net like an animal and hauled them both through the portside streets. Beatrice could see bruises on Ava’s face, her neck. She knew that there would be more underneath her clothes, patched over her stomach and her back where they’d beaten her almost unconscious while their mage trapped Beatrice in a cage of light.

A knife at Ava’s throat had stopped the glow in her mage tattoos and she’d let them strike her to the ground, staring blearily at Ava who lolled against a stranger’s chest with a blade at her throat shaving off the fine hairs that grew over the line of cartilage Beatrice had traced with her eyes again and again and again. She’d always wondered what those fine hairs would feel like against her tongue, her lips.

Maybe it was a flaw they shared. Beatrice trapped between her own power and the knife at Ava’s throat and Ava, driven to some unseen edge by the tip of a blade pressed against Beatrice’s neck.

She’d wanted to cry out, to tell Ava that she wasn’t worth dying over. That she was already half-dead and had been since the day she said her vows and felt whispers of unearthly light flow from the harbour waters and into the fresh-inked skin on her arms.

But then Ava had taken on that deadened aspect, had reached up and ripped away the sleeve over her right arm.

Beatrice had assumed scars, when Ava did everything in her power to keep her arms covered up even when Camila snapped at her about hygiene and set her to cleaning knives instead of helping with wounds.

She was only a little wrong. Instead of scars, she’d watched Ava unearth an arm fully sheathed in strange, grey-black tattoos. They gleamed, and the captain tore his blade from Beatrice’s throat and shouted something.

Too late. Ava stood, grimacing at her bared skin. Beatrice’s hand had risen to the cut on her throat, half-intending to dart forward and try to steal the captain’s blade, but before she could move there was a ripping sound.

Unmistakable. Beatrice had listened to skin tear a thousand times and she knew the song of it, the burst of blood and sinew as bone came to protrude out of pulpy flesh.

This time, however, the sound came from Ava and it was not the sound of something cutting into her. She stood alone on the deck, men arrayed uneasily around her. Wetness rippled along her arm as the not-ink inside her skin undulated and then, with a disturbing lack of fanfare, something long and wet and real burst out of Ava’s skin.

She’d screamed, knees buckling onto the deck, as something massive erupted from her outstretched arm, swallowing it in a mess of reaching tentacles. They crashed across the deck almost too fast for the eye to follow, but Beatrice let a twinge of magic into her body and sharpened her sight. Did it on instinct and regretted it as she watched the tentacle shapes spear through men.

They twisted into bellies and plunged into open mouths, ripping wherever they went. Bulging out as men screamed and trembled and tried to run. Blood showered over the deck and the tentacles writhed up into the rigging, tearing through sailcloth. Ropes snapped and men fell like missiles onto the deck. They broke.

In the middle of it, Ava was almost invisible but Beatrice spotted her as she felt the tentacles move gracefully past her. Cold where they brushed her arms as they plucked men high and ruptured them and sent bits thumping back onto the deck.

Beatrice tried to shut her eyes but she couldn’t. Foolishly, she even took a half-step towards Ava as another scream reached her. She would know Ava’s voice anywhere even in the worst sound it could make.

Her feet didn’t manage to carry her far.

She fell onto the deck as something hit her across the shoulders – something wet – and found her hand slapping down inches from a sword-hilt. She grabbed it, dry-heaved as iron flooded into her mouth. The stench of blood so thick it felt like she was submerged in a soup of it.

When she won back to her feet, blinking sweat and saltwater out of her eyes, scrubbing at them with her forearm, Beatrice found the deck empty. Quiet. Still.

Dead.

There was only Ava, slumped on the deck with her arm miraculously intact.

All of this flickers through her mind roughshod as she walks unsteadily toward Ava. Drawn across the deck, ignoring everything but ava, ava, ava. Her knees give out just as she reaches Ava’s side, depositing her down.

With a shaking hand, Beatrice pushes the hair away from Ava’s face and finds muscle shifting under her fingers as Ava grimaces.

Wakes.

“Are you alright?” Beatrice rasps, surprised that she can speak at all with Ava staring at her like that. Like she’s a miracle, or a nightmare.

“Bea?” Her voice breaks around the edges. The rain is already turning the blood fainter and fainter on her skin, from dark red to light, to pinkish. Her eyes roam over Beatrice’s face and – gods, she must look a wreck.

But she doesn’t take her hand away, touches the corner of Ava’s jaw very gently. “Yes, it’s me.”

Coming back to herself, eyes widening, Ava pulls away and Beatrice feels scalded by the absence of her. She draws her tattooed arm against her chest as though there is any point in trying to hide it.

“Don’t touch me!” Her voice is high, faltering, terrified. “It might come back, it might…” She breaks off, crabbing back across the deck. Fruitlessly – her heels slip on the deck, carrying her nowhere but a scant few inches away.

Ava.

She looks pretty even now, with the wet writhing shape of her arm clasped to her chest. Blood in the hollow of her chin, coated thick on her neck. Rainwater sending trickle-trails down over her brow.

There are tears in her eyes as she shakes her head, looking around at the devastation. “Fuck, fuck. I didn’t mean to- it wasn’t my choice. I don’t know what this- how it works or why or, or…”

She trails off, just staring.

Beatrice stares back. She feels beside herself, like she’s riding an adjacent path to shock, to horror. All she can feel is relief. Strange, strained, but so palpable it makes her chest ache.

She doesn’t reach for Ava because she’s seen her flinch from the most casual contact, not knowing how to take it. Beatrice picked her up off the street back when Ava couldn’t read, or write, or add up past twenty or do multiplication or fight with a sword.

All of these things Beatrice has taught her. Snappishly, waspishly, patiently over months of sailing and fighting and trying not to die.

“It’s okay,” she says instead of touching – which she wants, desperately, to do. Sitting back, cross-legged on the blood-soaked deck, Beatrice tries make her face behave. Judging by Ava’s expression, she fails.

“Why are you not freaking out?” She asks, low. The only sound is dripping and the waves rolling under the ship. They’ve tacked oddly into the wind with the sails torn away.

The Cat’s Cradle must be getting close. Did they see what happened?

Beatrice looks at ava, shrugs. “You know me, I’m-”

“Unflappable.” Ava almost smiles – she’d given Beatrice that description of herself offhandedly when Beatrice had failed to react after stepping into the surgery just as Camila started sawing through a man’s leg.

“I didn’t really mean it as a compliment,” Ava adds, rubbing self-consciously at her face and only succeeding in smearing a palmprint of blood across it.

“I’ll take what I can get,” Beatrice deadpans, then makes her expression serious. “I won’t tell the others what happened. They… wouldn’t understand.”

Nor do you, fool.

Ava looks uncertain, “What about you? Do you know what this is?”

“No, but later you’ll tell me everything you know about it. We can figure things out from there.” She makes her voice more certain than she really feels. Power like that is mythical, the sort of thing they keep in books Beatrice doesn’t bother to collect, scowls at self-importantly when she sees them in portside bookshops.

Ava’s lower lip wobbles. She looks very small, hunched on the deck, hair plastered against her scalp. Her shirtsleeve hangs in tatters around her mid-bicep and the tattoo crawls all the way up there. Beatrice finds herself wondering how far it goes, if it crawls across Ava’s chest.

But the others are getting close. She can make out the shape of Shannon’s ship clearly now, racing across the waves toward them. Beatrice stands, careful not to slip, and casts around for an intact piece of fabric only to find her stomach turning again at the devastation around them.

Ava stands, too, but keeps her gaze studiously on her boots.

She looks up at the sound of tearing fabric, “Uh, what are you doing?”

Beatrice rips the hem of her shirt away, leaving a silly-looking bare patch of navel. It is mostly clean, still – shielded by her jacket. She wraps it around her hand, leaving a long piece to dangle, “We should cover up your arm before the others arrive. I’ll tell them that this-”

She looks around at the gore scattered everywhere, “I’ll tell them I did this.”

“Bea…”

“It’s alright,” she says. Not snapping, but firm, stepping forward with her hand extended, “Now, give me your arm. Quickly.”

Ava does, and Beatrice finds herself astonished by how ordinary her skin feels. Not slimy where the tentacle-shapes rest, just warm. She wraps the hem of her shirt around and around, tugging Ava closer so that she can twist it around her elbow and up along her bicep.

“Here,” Beatrice says once she’s finished, shrugging her jacket off her shoulders. When she looks up – no, surely Ava wasn’t staring at the slant of her navel revealed by her torn shirt. Why would she?

Ava looks startled, “No, Bea. I can’t take your jacket. It’s… part of your outfit.”

That almost makes her laugh, “My what?”

“You have, like, an ensemble thing going on. Dark with silver accents.”

“Do I?”

“Oh, don’t act so innocent. I’ve seen you picking through your shirts. No one does that kind of colour co-ordination by mistake.”

It’s good – strange, but good – to be arguing once again about stupid things.

“Anyway,” Ava continues, looking everywhere but at Beatrice. “I can’t take it from you.”

Beatrice forces the jacket into Ava’s hands. “I insist.”

Dark eyes examine her – aghast, almost. Beatrice turns to look at the horizon, pretending to ignore the sight of Ava slipping into her jacket. It is much too big for her, but Ava sighs as she touches the buttons on the front, no longer shivering.

The rain is cold. Beatrice hadn’t noticed.

[cupcakeshakesnake]

Ok I caved. Old couple goes to Costco

[kyuoki]

Human Davy Jones with his daughter, Scylla, from @teejay-kaye fanfiction "Nighean A' Chuain". It was so angsty and so beautiful, it completely destroyed me in all ways possible and now I need more content with dad Jones ahdsadksjgf. 😭🥺

If you have not read the fic yet, go and check it out especially if you like Davy Jones angst/wholesome content.

[reine-du-sourire]

Elizabeth goes around presenting lil Henry to everyone. Will looks on lovingly from his cup(Idk how the curse works here). Jones asks Calypso how they managed to reproduce, she responds that such things are private.(she doesn’t know either but doesn’t really care)

Drawn once again by @thundersongfury! Behold:

[toastydumpster]

The Kraken and his Lighthouse Keeper