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Stepping out of her room upstairs, Max looks to the sound of commotion below.
Her face lights to see Jack on the stairs arguing with Idelle. She calls his name with a smile, already readying to be swept up in a hug before he looks up to meet her eyes. A returning smile never reaches his lips. He moves past Idelle and comes up the stairs toward her. Max backs away.
He walks with more purpose than she’s ever seen him have, as though he's carrying something important. His arms are empty, however, and he’s alone.
Max’s hand fumbles with the door handle at her back. He reaches for her. Max is already turning though, hiding away in her room. His hands fall against the door the moment she shuts it.
“Max,” his voice wavers, and she hears him try again as she backs away towards her bed, “Max, she-” It'd taken time, but she'd grown to love Jack over the past few months, now she hated him with all her will and she wished him to stop, to let the words go unsaid. She couldn’t bear to hear them, “She’s gone, Max, she’s gone.”
Falling to her knees, the pain rushes through her as she lets herself fall against the floor. She held onto the blankets from the bed beside her, and shivered, the air rushing in from the window colder than she remembered. She couldn’t hear Jack anymore, not above the rushing of her own thoughts. He continued to babble and beg on the other side of the door, but Max was lost to him. Set out on her own boat, she felt herself dip away into the sea.
When she rouses herself it is to the blue glow of moonlight. It shines through her window and the world seems foggy with the dark of night. Dried tear tracts tighten her cheeks, as she scrubs at her face.
Jack is seated on the outside of her door. She can see his form through the crack of her curtains, and hear the quiet way he talks with someone outside. She doesn’t say anything. Turning back toward her window, unwilling to return to the light on the other side of her door.
Instead, she approaches her balcony, pulling aside the curtains to reveal the full effect of the night sky over Nassau. Except, Nassau is missing. Her balcony is missing. A flat black sheet of water laps at the lip of her window. She can’t hear the others now, eyes focused on the endless expanse before her. It stretches away, far beyond the sea. She cannot see the end of it. The only light that of the low hanging moon.
Grabbing her robe she returns to the window and gingerly sets her toe to the surface. It is cold and solid, like a wet stone. With a breath of a prayer, she steps out onto the water and when she does not fall through she continues out further. Her feet barely sink into the liquid. She feels its touch on her skin and she curls her robe closer.
She doesn’t know how long she walks. She doesn’t look back to check if her room is still there, safe and waiting. The longer she walks, the more her form feels the stiff and dull pain of an open wound. Her body is cold in the elements of the place, but her soul seems colder. A frozen echo still trying to sound out the beat of her heart, and find the strength to remember Anne’s touch, her voice, her face.
A table comes into view ahead of her. As she approaches, two chairs appear, matching the inky black of the table. As she closes in on the furniture it seems to become more ornate, dark seat backs twisting away into curls of wood and the tables grooves mix and mesh in designs too intricate to make out. When she only a few feet away a hulking form begins to take shape in the chair furthest from her. She shivers but steps forward again. She can see it is the build of a large man. She sees the bow of his head and the matted blue hair at his scalp. As she pulls the chair back to sit, he looks up and the matte of his eyes meet hers. They are not deep or endless as the rest of this place. They are simply flat. Their color shifts from random spots of blue and sea green pulsing to the surface like a flat expanse of dry sand being blown by the wind.
He grins.
She waits and he observes her, leaning back in his chair. His eyes track her up and down. She doesn’t know if she holds her breath. She tries to focus on nothing.
Eventually, he speaks, and it is not in a rasp, nor does it bombard like that of the angry men Max had always known. He is quiet, sarcastic almost, as though they are sharing drinks and discussing future investment.
“How did you know you would find me?” he asks. Max mirrors his seating, pulling at what she knows from past deals she's made. She feels silly. Small. She refuses to show it.
“My mother’s mother told her a story about herself as a girl. About the sudden death of her two smallest brothers and the bargain she made with a man below the Earth to have them returned to her.” the man’s grin grows at her words.
“And you believed this story?”
Max shrugs, “My mother did.”
The man laughed, his head falling back to reveal the length of his neck. He is blue like water and the moonlight touches him as his voice fills the air. Finally, he quiets.
Sitting up, his hands clasped. He brings his face closer to Max's.
“And so you’ve come to make a bargain?” his teeth are large and stained black, they shine with his grin, “Whose soul do you wish me to sell today, Madam?”
“You know who I seek.”
"I do," he agrees but continues to wait.
"I would like to barter for the return of Anne Bonny's soul." she says through gritted teeth. His response is instant and theatric.
“Oh, no, no, no, are you sure you want that?” he asks, lifting a hand across the table to reveal a thread held in it, the length of it thin and translucent, “Anne has been with me a while now, her cord cut at last.” He winds the thread a few times around his palm. It sputters in its light, and Max grips her own hands in her lap to refrain from reaching out for it.
“She is who I have come for.”
“It is not so easy to re-tether someone,” he lifts his finger and plucks at something stuck between them. Max feels the tugs of his finger as he pulls against a taut gold thread between them, looking down she finds the origin within her breast. As he pinches it, the sound of her own heartbeat, previously faded, now rises in her ears,
“Especially when -”
Max looks back up from her own thread, refusing to be distracted, “I have come for Anne, do you accept my bargain?”
The silent room fills with the sound of another set of steps approaching them. The man’s eyes stay trained on Max and she doesn’t dare look away but listens as the third person approaches. A chair appears beside the man, a shadow looming behind it.
Her hat is gone, hair pulled back and the skin of her eye is bruised and swollen shut. She looks dead. Max can see it. Her eyes lack their color, her hair more green than red. But she is Anne, and Max cannot keep the tears from welling in her eyes, hands tightening in her lap, she returns her attention to the man before her. He observes her reaction in silence. She sits a bit taller, leaving her excitement over Anne to the side.
“As I said, a loose soul will be hard to return,” he sets his hand on the back of Anne’s chair, fingers tapping against the wood, “And how can you know it will work? How can you know she will forgive you? That she will stay?”
Max’s eyes wander back to Anne. Her lover is hunched in her chair, a disgruntled look on her face as she side-eyes Death beside her. Max’s heart warms.
“I do not imagine that she will.” Anne glances toward Max as she speaks, confused, “Anne does not belong to me but I want her back anyway.”
“You would have her back from me, simply to lose her again.”
“Many times over,” she matches the man’s eyes, something glowing in her, “And she is not lost to you yet.”
“She has been given to me, given to the sea.”
“The sea has returned stranger cargo to our shore.” Max spits.
The man is silent, his hand scratching at his chin. “It has.” there is the sound of dripping coming from beyond them, loud enough to fill the silence- only tampered with by Max’s breaths, the sound of her own heartbeat rushing in her ears. Someone else would try to name the sound, to let it sink within her. Someone else would wonder at their surroundings, try to explain what they see and cannot see.
Max knows better than to question Death. She waits. She quiets her heart, lets her goal flood her mind. She does not face the shade of Anne before her but recalls Anne asleep in her bed. Curling away from her. Small, like a child, still clutching dreams she can never seem to voice.
“What would be your barter,” the man finally asks, “If we assumed I could return her. What would you gift me in return?”
Max steels herself, the words coming to order. She has outwitted and out willed to this point. She shall win this too.
“My grandmother offered her life, and she returned from the roots of a tree holding two boys.”
“And you now offer yours.”
“No.” Max swallows, the taste of sealed wet earth still choking her, “I do not believe you want my life.”
“No?” the man is grinning again, something in her words a joke to him.
“No, you do not sit here bargaining for lives.” at his silence, she continues, “Not Death, for Death has all lives- as it is known to every lawless man that sets sail. We are claimed before we begin, so I believe an offering of my own is of little worth to you.”
“So, you’ve come with nothing to trade? You have no bargain? No sale?”
“I have come knowing that every man wants for something. Every soul I have ever met has longed their own, and I believe that if I ask you, you will tell me what I can give to you that will truly be worth something. I believe you already know what it is you wish me to trade.”
She doesn’t dare look away, and the man seems caught with her as well. The world is blackened, and Max cannot remember if the moon still rests above. Perhaps she has died. Perhaps this was for naught. Perhaps Anne is not truly seated there, instead, it is a form wrestled from the man’s mind. Perhaps, she has failed. But, she cannot look down to face it yet. “Indeed.” the man intones, a nod swaying the bulk of his head. He lifts the hand from the back of Anne’s chair and gives a halfhearted wave behind him. In less than a breath, Anne disappears, chair and all, yanked back behind him into the depths.
Max stands, fists hitting against the table as she bares teeth at the man, “You!”
“When your mother told you that story, all those years ago,” Death interrupts her, only pausing to gesture down at her chair. Max remains unmove. He continues without incident, leaning forward to match her, “Did you believe her?”
“Enough!” Max shouts, “Do we have a deal or not?”
“We do.”
“Then what is it you want from me?” she feels herself unwinding, the endless sea seeming to be more of an abyss and Anne lost within it, “Where have you put her?”
“Patience, she’s there, returning. Trust me,” he nods again to her chair. Max sits with a huff, her skirts puffing around her as she wraps the ends of her robe tighter around her.
“I will return her to you in trade for your answer.”
“What answer?”
“Did you believe her then? Do you believe now?”
“Everyone believes in Death.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“What then?” Max’s hands rise with her question, “Did I believe my mother’s story? No!” Max remembers her mother, rocking her close at night, remembers hearing the heartbeat beneath her chest, and the words spilling from her, “I had seen men die, and never come back. I had seen my own mother left motherless,” she sniffs, “I didn’t believe it because when she left me, she never returned, and the only thing that laid beneath my feet when I said goodbye was dirt and bone.”
“But you believe in her?” there is understanding in his words, and for a moment Max questions him as Death. For what made him not man, beyond his dark tomb, “You believe in Anne.” she can hear her steps again, this time with the sloshing sound of running.
“I-” she can see her, see her coming toward them, “I believe-” Anne reaches them, running straight to Max and wrapping her in her arms.
Anne holds her tight, eyes shut against the rest of the dark, and her words still swallowed deep. Max hugs her back, careful, eyes still on the man. He makes no move to stop her, and Anne lets her go to turn and face him, her stance defensive and shielding Max. Max stares at her, still unsure. The weight of the woman still off-balance, but so true to her memories.
“Do you believe in her?” he nods to Anne again, who remains still at his words, “Do you believe she will love you? That she will forgive you?” he’s standing, ignoring Anne’s knife and harsh glare, to again meet Max’s stare. He smiles. “Do you believe she is worth it?”
Max’s hand grips the back of Anne’s shirt, and Anne steps back toward her touch. Anne stands beside her and looks at her, and Max sees her as she was. Her face alive again and spirit still soaring.
“She might love me, she might forgive me.” Max breathes, her words warm in the cold air. She turns back to Death, her hand reaching to find Anne’s. Anne grips it tight, “I do not believe it matters.”
Death watches them both as they turn to leave, Max leading the way. Their forms shrink, illuminated only by the moonlight, with their hands still entangled and their gaze never swaying from their journey forward.
They reach the beach on the far side of the island. Max’s knees buckle, and she sinks into the low tide. Sound rushes to her, and laps at her like the sea. The sun has risen, the heat of it hanging in front of her in the sky. She had assumed it was still moonlight, but its touch is warm and she shuts her eyes to its glare.
A curse goes quietly under her breath, and she finds herself surprised to feel a pressure at her cheek. Opening her eyes, she is met with Anne’s face before hers. Alive, and real.
Anne helps her up, her hands cold and wet, but slowly warming in her grasp, “Thank you, I-” Anne fumbles, her features twisted in upset and awe, “I don’t know how you-”
“I’m so sorry, Anne.” the tears she’d been holding flood her again, the shock of her loss still sharp in her heart. The tears fall and Anne is lost for words or reaction, “I do not know what-” her words devolve into hiccups, her face falling down to land against the fabric covering Anne’s chest, “You were gone.”
“You brought me back.” Anne whispers. And Max breathes in deep. The salty scent of Anne alive filling her as she straightens again. Her hands crawl up to Anne’s face, holding her, as she kisses her.
***
Later, they are found. A worried Jack and Idelle lead the search for Max after she’d disappeared from her room. When Max returns to her room that night the window shows only Nassau and the sea. They don't speak of the day before; of Jack’s words or how Max had managed it.
Jack asks Anne, many days later, what had happened. For many years after he will continue to wonder, to ask her. Each time, Anne will look to Max, wherever she stands.
She will never answer.
They set sail again. They will again and again. And Max will continue to rule the town of Nassau. Anne will always return to her. And many years later, when they near their end, they will face it together.