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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: G
Pairing: Will/Elizabeth, Will/Jack. Could also be read as gen.
Feedback: Effective images/lines, accuracy errors, etc. please.
Disclaimer: Belongs to the Mouse.
Note: Title comes from alchemical concept. The Elixir of Life (or Elixir of Immortality, depending on the source) gave immortality to its drinker. It was the liquefied form of the Philosopher's Stone, which could transmute lead to gold, and was believed to be made up of all the primary elements: fire, water, air and earth (Western tradition; Eastern alchemy also has an Elixir of Immortality, but is based on five primary elements-fire, water, earth, metal and wood).
Summary: The making of a man. For the contremontre 'water' challenge; done in 51 minutes.
***
Will could have been many things. His mother had made sure he could read and do maths and write a fair hand before she bowed under her grief-three qualities that are a rarity in almost any part of the British Empire. Moreover, he is smart and capable, and he usually knows when to hold his tongue. He is, he thinks, as good a man as any.
Once, when they were still young enough to go romping together, he and Elizabeth traced their hands in carved bark. Or rather, she brought the chalk, and he the knife. He passes that tree every so often, and when he looks now at his small hacked outline, he sees the square palms of a maker, and long fingers that could have shaped their malleable immaturity to any kind of tool from hatchet to rope to pen.
But when the time came-because time always comes and never goes, even in the endlessly swept-clean bleached sugar of the Caribbean lands-he chose blacksmith. Because while Will could have taken many paths, he is many things. And even under the sun-drowsed tricolor of the Port Royal fort's flag, what a man is decides his fate, not what a man does.
He comes from a mother whom the neighborhood had nicknamed Iron Corset for her stern facing of the fickle winds that blew through every sailor's beloved ashore. She had kept her head high when walking those dank city streets, one hand firmly clasped round her slim purse and the other settled with equal steadfastness on young Will's shoulder. But he remembers her earthy side as well: the quiet humor more entertaining than any common ribald's, the ragged heel-prints her worn shoes left behind in the dirt day after day after day. She was his first love, and sometimes, it seems like she is still his best love.
He comes from a father seldom home and never grounded, for all his famed dependability. William Turner the First, after all, had been the ocean's son first and Merry Olde England's a distant last. If that. Perhaps cousin would have been a better description, for while he had circled home to heath and family more often than the usual albatross, Bill Turner never could resist the curl and tickle of salt breeze under his chin, the lapping of waves against his ears. But he had been still a better father than most, and a good man, as sworn by all including his wife. And he is dead. Better to leave the shades wherever they slip, Will believes, than to risk turning a lantern onto them.
Because Will comes, too, from other than father and mother. He came from a flaming mist, bearing memories of reds and yellows and bright blistering orange that licked up wood and man alike. He recalls all too well the difference between forge-fire and cannon-fire, and the absurd smallness of a pistol flare against a raised blade.
And he comes from water, cool and treacherous and familiar in an alien way. It surges and ebbs even now in his veins, close though he stands to desiccating furnace heat. It drips out through his fingers into his solid tools, turning his swing into crescent silver and his swords into scarlet liquor, flowing as he wills it against the rich brown-black of the anvil. It hisses sweetly at the air, blowing sharp-scented blasts past his face as he pounds it down into sure hardness.
But no matter how hard he tries, Will cannot draw out the brew fast enough to empty his seething cauldron of a stomach. He bubbles at the glimmer of languid horizon in Elizabeth's eyes. He simmers as the wide ocean waves froth back at him.
And when he looks deep into the dark, dark pit of the jail he helped pull from liquefied fire, inside Will comes together in one turbulent fusing.
***