The Ao3 Summary: Seventeen years of marriage.
The Actual Summary: A series of vignettes, focusing on Will and Elizabeth making their supernatural long-distance relationship work, + life/death circumstances.
It would feature:
-Elizabeth murdering a man, tying his corpse to her rowboat, and then placidly waiting for Will to show up
-while heavily pregnant
-Elizabeth dropping actual messages in bottles into the sea, but weighting the bottles down with something heavy, so they sink instead of bob.
-Will can’t send the bottles back, but shell-shocked survivors of wrecks at sea often seek Elizabeth out after being rescued, drawing thick letters wrapped in oilskin out of their coats and pressing them, terrified, into her hands
-In this way Will and Elizabeth conduct a passionate, piecemeal argument about whether Henry should be allowed to go to school in England, as he begs to, or whether he should stay away from that godforsaken country where Will has no jurisdiction, and therefore cannot save his life at sea/check up on him/see him, and anyway isn’t Elizabeth building Libertalia, hasn’t the British Navy set a sizable price on her head? Why would she want him to live in that awful place anyway, and Elizabeth would fiercely argue that her aunt Mary is a perfectly trustworthy person, it’s not like she’d be sending Henry to strangers, and also she is trying to build Libertalia and it requires an awful lot of goddamn bloodshed and it’s really no place for a twelve year old, so why not let him do what he wants and get an education???? etc.
-Henry learns the tie-a-bag-of-rocks-to-your-feet-and-hope-for-the-best trick from Elizabeth
-Jack and Elizabeth stay on friendly terms while Henry is a baby. Jack and Will stay on friendly terms while Henry is a baby. Only then Jack gets into a scrape and tries to use his relationship with Will as leverage, and it doesn’t work because Will has a sacred duty, and Jack makes an aborted attempt to steal Will’s heart which Elizabeth never forgives, and Will ends up bailing him out of the scrape and thereby somewhat neglecting his duty anyway, which is part of why he’s all barnacley at the beginning of the movie, and Elizabeth never forgives that, either.
-Mostly though I want Jack to kiss Elizabeth, and for it to mean something, because the Turners are definitely in a casual friends-with-benefits-but-maybe-there’s-something-else-there relationship with Jack Sparrow, and then for Jack to steal the key to the dead man’s chest from where it hangs around her heart, and for Elizabeth to shoot him for it, when she finds out. There’s a pink knotted mess of scar tissue on Jack’s left shoulder, just above his heart, courtesy of Lizzy.
-probably other stuff involving Norrington, who is first mate on the Dutchman and who starts off pining for Elizabeth and then gradually starts pining for Will, too
-probably Henry falls overboard as a toddler, and between one swell and the next he’s picked up by a bright-eyed woman with a wicked smile, a woman who comes from seemingly nowhere, and she laughs at him and presses a kiss to his forehead before handing him up from the waves to his mother, who looks dead panicked, like he’s never seen her before
-this is the plot of five fics, not one
-it’s because this is just the AU I’ve been building in my head since 2007
-and there’s enough basic material here for six seasons and a movie