One of a series of five that will eventually be linked up and posted to Pirategasm.


Pulling the trigger was one of the hardest things Elizabeth had ever done, and not simply because the thirst was making the pistol hard to lift.

She had to close her eyes to do it, had to block out the sight of the sleeping face turned up towards her so trustingly. Well, probably he wasn’t really being trusting, but that’s how it appeared, and she couldn’t look at his face and kill him. It was going to haunt her anyway, even if she didn’t watch. She took comfort in knowing that at least it wouldn’t haunt her long.

‘It’s the right thing to do,’ she told herself, as she set the barrel of the weapon against his temple. ‘You can’t let him use this on you. You have to shoot first.’ It wasn’t a very convincing argument, true or not.

The sound when the gun fired was louder than she thought it would be, and it jerked in her hand like a living thing. Her eyes opened in surprise then, and she looked down to see blood splashed over her hands and soaking into her shift. It probably was warm, but the sun made everything so hot that it was hard to tell.

The hole was smaller than she expected, such a small hole to kill a man. Save for the blood, he might still have been asleep.

But of course, he wasn’t asleep. He was dead. But she hadn’t had a choice, had she? Dead men couldn’t suffer thirst anymore, or stare silently out to sea with eyes that got a little more empty every day.

Dead. Killed. No going back. Now Elizabeth was all alone with the sun and the heat and the hallucinations.

She was so thirsty, thirsty enough to regret that spent bullet. It had been three days since she’d had any water, or was that four? Four days. Barbossa would have killed Will by now. Jack had said so, when she’d asked him. Well, he’d said that it would take three days for the Black Pearl to reach the Isla del Muerte, which was essentially the same thing.

That was after he finished cursing the empty, abandoned cellar that had sealed their doom, and before he stopped talking altogether. Talking hurt when your throat was too dry to swallow.

But that didn’t matter, because there was no one to talk to anymore, and in another day or so the thirst would stop, and she would be with Will.

Unless she was going to Hell now. Could you go to Hell for an act of mercy?


And that has been thirty minutes of research paper avoidance. Thank you, come again.
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