Date: August 6, 2003.
Length: 500 words.
Challenge: Choose one of four words (rum, ruin, rascal, or rain) and make it the theme of the story. I chose ruin.
Warning: Please be warned that this ficlet mentions character death.

Port Royal smells of death, Will thinks as he walks through the mostly empty streets, hands clenched at his sides, his stomach rolling. It smells of death, of blood and burned flesh, of charred wood that’s been doused by seawater too late.

It’s a smell that Will knows he will never grow used to, no matter that it’s the only thing he’s smelled for three days, since he came to in the middle of an alleyway the morning after the pirate ship that wasn’t the Black Pearl sailed towards their harbor.

On the back of his head, he has a lump the size of a potato and it throbs with every step that he takes, but the pain is real and he needs reality. He feels as if he’s lost in a dream that he can’t wake up from, no matter how hard he pinches himself. Fingernails dig into his right palm as he resists the urge try pinching again.

His right palm, his right hand, the hand that had still been clutching his sword when he’d awoken the next morning, whole lot of good it had done him.

Whole lot of good it had done Elizabeth.

Elizabeth.

And he chokes, covering his mouth with his left hand, yet trying to breathe in deeply at the same time, to calm his stomach so he won’t expel the small amount of food that he’s been able to keep down. He doesn’t succeed, removing his hand just in time. The air tastes of smoke and ash and saltwater tainted by blood.

He wipes his mouth across his shirtsleeve, the once white cloth now stained gray and blood brown. He swallows convulsively, tasting bile, but even that is an improvement, he thinks, over tasting death.

Will raises his eyes as he starts walking again, looks up the hill, and sees the skeleton of what had once been the Governor’s mansion. He can see the spiral staircase through the nonexistent walls, and if he closes his eyes—which he does, of course—he can see Elizabeth walking down them, trailing her hand along the banister, smiling.

The image morphs and he sees her as she was four nights before, cringing in time with the guns, flinching as he told her to go up to the mansion, that she would be safe there. He sees himself reflected in her too-wide eyes.

If he keeps his eyes closed even longer, he sees men who aren’t him carrying her body out of the mansion, the line of a knife sliced into her throat.

He opens his eyes then, so he won’t see anymore, and notices that he’s stopped again. Force of habit. Memory, because he’s standing in front of his own house, the one he’d shared with Elizabeth for far too short a time. He sees still-whole walls and unbroken windows, a door that’s still hanging by both hinges, one of only three houses that survived the attack intact.

He smells death even more strongly than before.