Will Turner won’t say—he will never say—that he knew it was coming, but when the girl shows up on his doorstep only a few minutes after dawn, he can’t say that he’s surprised.

"Monsieur," the girl says, her bottom lip trembling, her eyes damp with tears. "Oh, Monsieur."

She’s one of the Swann’s maids, Claire, a new one, and he thinks that that is the reason she’s the one sent to fetch him. It’s not a job he would wish on anyone, especially not on what should have been the happiest day of his life. The day that he’s been aching for since he was old enough to recognize what his feelings for Elizabeth were.

He’s supposed to be surprised, though. He’s supposed to be—he will be—devastated, so he widens his eyes appropriately, and says, "What’s the matter? Is everything alright?" Stupid question, yes—because would she really be standing there, on his doorstep, on his wedding day if everything was alright?—but he has to say something. And there’s always the possibility that he’s wrong about the reason that she’s there. He could be wrong. He prays that he’s wrong.

But he’s not.

"Mademoiselle," Claire says, and the word appears to be too much for her. The tears spill down her cheeks, running over the dams of her lower eyelids. She begins to sob, but he can still understand the next words that she says. He wishes that he couldn’t.

"Mademoiselle," Claire continues. "She is gone."

He’s been expecting something to that effect since he opened the door and saw the maid standing there, but to actually hear it, to have his expectations confirmed is something completely different. He feels his knees start to buckle, and he grabs onto the doorframe to steady himself. It doesn’t help much.

He feels dizzy.

He feels sick.

He still doesn’t feel surprised, though, and he really wishes that he would. It’s so much easier to feel betrayed when you’re surprised.

It’s so much easier to believe, even subconsciously, that you weren’t expecting it when you’re surprised.

"Did she—?" he starts, not sure exactly what he wants to say. Did she run away? Did she leave on her own volition, because she couldn’t face the thought of marrying him? Was it his fault, because he wasn’t the pirate that she’d thought that he was? That she thought that he should be?

"She left, during the night," the maid says, gasping for air around the words, and that’s all the answer that he needs. He doesn’t want to hear more, but she has more to say. "No one heard her. But mademoiselle, she left you a note. Monsieur Swann asked that I bring you up to the manor, so that he may give it to you himself. He grieves mightily, Monsieur Swann does. To lose his daughter twice in one year, the poor man…"

Will wants to say that he lost Elizabeth twice in one year, too, but the words won’t come. And this time is different.

This time he won’t go after her.

He wonders if Governor Swann knows that, too. If that’s the reason that he didn’t come to see Will himself.

"Will you come?" the maid asks. She’s wringing her hands, and Will suddenly feels irrationally angry. It’s not her fiancée that left in the middle of the night, just so she wouldn’t have to marry that day. It’s only her mistress, a woman who she’s barely had an opportunity to work for, to learn how special she is, and her grief is nothing compared to his.

But then the anger fades, evaporates, and he doesn’t say anything, just nods, and his head feels as if it’s moving too slowly, muffled. He feels as if he’s moving in a daze, through fog as thick as his mother’s pea soup, but he lets go of the doorframe and steps outside, pulling the door shut behind him. He doesn’t lock it, because nothing matters right at that moment, nothing except getting up to the manor, seeing what sort of explanation Elizabeth has left him for her departure. If she gives him some reason other than the obvious.

He’s saved every note that she’s ever given him, parchment covered with that beautiful flowing script of hers. Her letters are the reason that he learned to read, because he wanted to recognize his name by her hand.

He wanted to know everything that she had to say.

Now he’s not sure that he wants to know.

The upper streets of Port Royale are empty at this time of the morning, something for which Will is sure that when reality starts being real again, he’ll be eternally grateful. Most of the town was invited to the wedding, after all, and if they were to see him out and about, in the company of one of the Swann servants…

He doesn’t want to answer questions for which he has no answers, for which he doesn’t want to have answers.

He doesn’t want people to wish him luck and happiness in his life with her.

He doesn’t want to see people’s shocked, pitying looks, especially while he’s still in shock himself, which he realizes that he is, because the only thoughts that are going through his head, layered with a slowly building anger, a delayed hurt, are that she’s gone, that he wasn’t enough, that he wasn’t the man that she’d thought he was.

He doesn’t want to listen to the hushed words that will echo around him on the street. Talk of her, of him, lurid tales of forbidden romance between Elizabeth and Captain Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, other pirates that she met on their journey that she’s run off to join… The talk will be there, the tales will build.

He will have to face them at some point.

But only when things start feeling real again, because no matter his lack of surprise, he is walking through a world that is only half there.

It would have been so much easier if pirates had carried her off again.

And not just easier on his ego, either—although he wouldn’t be feeling so broken and bruised right then, he was sure of that—but because being carried off by pirates on the eve of her wedding, well, that was just bad luck.

He’d know what to do then, though. He knows how to deal with pirates. He knows where to go to track them down. He knows how to get what he wants from them.

He got her back the first time, after all.

He just doesn’t know how to deal with a girl who thinks—who is sure—that she wants a pirate, rough and tumble and sea-scarred as they are. He doesn’t know how to deal with a girl who had suddenly come to the realization that he’s truly not the pirate she’d thought he was, and that, right there, was the problem: she’d always thought that he was one. Always. From the first moment that she’d laid eyes on him.

Elizabeth had told him once, twice, over and over that she’d always been in love with him, but somewhere, deep inside, Will knew that she’d only been in love with the idea of him.

He, on the other hand, had always been in love with her. He had been ever since the moment that he’d opened his eyes and found himself on the deck of a ship when he should have been dead, a young girl—an angel, he’d thought—leaning down over him, her eyes searching his own to make sure that he was okay.

From that moment on, he’d been entranced.

It had been a brotherly love at first, a protective love that had gone both ways. She’d never looked at him as just an orphan, as just the apprentice to the local blacksmith, and he’d never seen her as just the governor’s daughter, a lady, or the commodity that some men had seen her as.

She’d been… his. Except not literally, because he’d never thought that he’d be able to have her, not truly. No, to him, she’d just been the most important thing in the world, something to admire from afar.

Then she’d told him that she thought he was the most important thing in the world, too. She’d said it even after she’d found out that no, he hadn’t been a pirate his entire life, that he really was just a lowly blacksmith. He’d wanted so badly to believe her that he’d let himself, but as the sky grows brighter, as she travels farther and farther away from him, he wishes that he never had.

Because shock was being replaced by hurt, by anger, and by god, he’s never wanted to feel either of those emotions for her.

He wishes that the shock could stay, so that he could pretend that he was surprised, so that he could contemplate when he should have known that things were going to go wrong between them.

He thinks that maybe he should have known when he told her that the Aztec coin had been his father’s, that he hadn’t, in fact, been a twelve-year-old pirate. She hadn’t been able to look him in the eye, after all. She’d turned and left the room.

He thinks that maybe he should have known the day that he confessed his love for her, dressed in his cape and his big hat with the bigger feather, because her father had called him a blacksmith, and Elizabeth had said, "No, he’s a pirate," and she’d kissed him, the way that he’d always dreamed of kissing her.

He knows that he should have figured it out in the time since, because Elizabeth had taken to mentioning leaving Port Royale, heading off onto the open sea, finding Captain Jack and living the pirate’s life with him. He already had a woman on his crew, after all. One more surely wouldn’t hurt, she’d said.

But Will had always said no, because yes, he had a cape and a big hat with a bigger feather, but at most he was playing at being a pirate. He’s willing to protect what’s his—Elizabeth, Port Royale—and he’s willing to protect those that he thinks have been wronged—Jack—but he has no head for killing. He doesn’t want to search for gold, or become one of those drunken sailors getting into brawls in filthy taverns.

He doesn’t want to be a terror of the seas.

It didn’t matter what Elizabeth had said. It certainly didn’t matter what Captain Jack Sparrow had said, about him having an eye for treasure and not being able to rest until it was his.

Jack had been wrong. He’d just had an eye for Elizabeth. He hadn’t wanted to rest until she was back in his life. That was all.

But she can’t be his.

As he climbs the steps up to the front door of the manor, he thinks that she belongs to the ocean. She wants a life filled with adventures and strong wills and people who appreciate her for her, who can give her the freedom that she wants and needs, and Will knows that.

He’s just a man, just a blacksmith. He lives by rules, although he breaks them occasionally. He just wants to make his swords, because he’s good at that, the best in the Caribbean. He just wants a home, with a wife who loves him for who he is, in a place where he can do what he loves to do. That’s all.

And then his musings, his thoughts, his contemplating his lack of surprise is at an end, because Governor Swann meets him at the door, his face drawn and pinched looking. He doesn’t say anything, just hands Will a letter, folded parchment sealed with wax, and Will suddenly realizes that his hands are shaking, the paper trembling too much for him to even grab onto it with his other hand.

He hopes futilely for an explanation that’s not the one he’s sure it is. He hopes that maybe she just got cold feet, that she’ll be back in a day or so. He hopes that maybe she just didn’t want the big wedding her father had insisted upon, that there are instructions to meet up with her on the other side of the cliffs, that they’ll find a priest and get married on their own.

Hopes aren’t real, though, and he feels Governor Swann’s eyes boring into him, trying to see what’s inside of the paper, undoubtedly trying to see whether she would have given her supposed beloved more reason for her disappearance than he’d gotten.

He can’t look at her father as he reads the letter, though, so he turns and stares out at the water, at the ever-bluer sky, at the boats bobbing on the water, looking so peaceful and innocent. Then, taking a deep breath, he manages to steady his hand enough so that he can carefully pop the wax of the seal, trying to keep it in one piece, because for all he knows it’ll be the last he hears from her. Her script is just as beautiful as he remembers it, loopy and feminine, but there are blotches of smeared ink, though, as if she might have been crying when she’d written it.

He thinks that he should feel flattered that she’d cry over him, but flattery doesn’t change the words on the page.

I’m sorry, Will, she writes. I’m sorry, but I had to.

He’s sorry, too.

He stares out at the ocean and his tears start to fall, but still, he's not surprised.