At World's Beginning

Drowning

Now

The first thing Ona noticed as she muddled her way to consciousness was that something was... missing.

The back of her head hurt something awful, and she reached up and cradled the sore spot with her palm. She opened her eyes and saw she was lying with her back against the floor, her head tilted to the side. The floor felt rough against her cheek; it was not the well-maintained wood of the Mariner's deck. It looked half-rotted and spotted with grime and tiny barnacles. Drawing her eyebrows forward, she carefully raised her head. She was in a decrepit cell, much larger than the one on their ship, and empty save for herself and...

James Norrington sat with his back to a wooden column. He was facing away from her, towards the cell door, and his eyes were unfocused, as if lost in thought. Seeing him evoked some memory trying to rise to the surface, but it did nothing to aid in her confusion.

How had they gotten here? Where was here? Where was Franklin? Where—

It hit her like a spear through the chest. Or perhaps, a sword through the heart. The scene replayed itself before her eyes: Jones, turning to Franklin, speaking to him in that low, mocking tone, and then piercing his heart straight through.

His eyes. She couldn't stop seeing his eyes. They were so... resigned. Calm. Not happy, but accepting of his fate. Those eyes that now saw nothing, but had once seen her, known her, and had looked at her with such warmth that she felt possibly worthy of it.

Gone. All gone. Snuffed out in one swift, cruel moment.

The sound that escaped her was nothing she had ever made before. She had heard a similar sound, once, from a mother whale as her calf floated at the end of a harpoon, dying. That was what it sounded like. A high keening so miserable it could not be described with spoken language.

The sound did nothing to bring relief to the hole that had opened in her chest, gaping and ravenous as it attempted to consume her. She curled her limbs around her as tightly as she could, burying her head in her arms, seeking to end the torment in any way possible, but it did nothing except condense her agony into a smaller space.

There was a voice. Words spoken. Meaningless noise. She did not care. She gripped her hair in her hands, trying to hold onto something so she would not fall into that black pit that now occupied the place where her heart had once been.

It was going to kill her, she knew it. Or perhaps, it wouldn't. That would be much worse, she thought.

No more of the voice. That was good. The voice caused her to want to open her eyes. To remember. She didn't want to do any of those things. She would remain here, unmoving and dead, until she actually did become dead and unmoving.

She felt something touch her. A light pressure on her hair. Warm, alive. Soft, but it might as well have been a hot iron branded into her skin, burning her alive. She scuttled backwards, her back hitting something cold and unyielding to stop her retreat.

The bars of her prison. She didn't look at what (who?) had touched her; she simply curled into a tighter ball and hoped it would not touch her again.

An eternity passed, or maybe it was a few moments, but the silence gave way to something else. The voice again. It was speaking some words that held meaning to her once, but she cared not to hear them now. The keening noise had stopped, at least. She was as silent as a dead thing, her sounds stolen from her—consumed by the empty hole within.

But still, the voice continued. At first, it was merely discord, but patterns emerged and the texture of the sound began to take shape in her mind. It was a pleasant baritone, comforting to hear, and it called to her, coaxing her out of her inner torment and misery. She tried to fight it, tried to resist, but the voice reached down somewhere deep inside and disarmed her defensive numbness.