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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG-13.
Pairing: Jack/Norrington
Feedback: Good lines, typos, etc.
Disclaimer: These characters are not my original creations and I make no monetary profits off of or claims to them.
Notes: Boondock Saints/PotC: DMC crossover.
Summary: The new Norrington still needs therapy. Paul’s happy to help. For a fee, of course.
***
It wasn’t often that Paul actually got a repeat. Though in this case, he was thinking a schizophrenic break and a mild case of dissociative personality disorder might be responsible. Normally that was about the least appealing kind of case, since almost nobody ever got a second personality with better taste; people’s insanities had to work with what they were given and most people weren’t exactly the stuff of Parisian Fashion Week. The former Commodore Norrington, however, apparently was the exception to the rule. He was getting dirt stains all over Paul’s Italian leather chair and he smelled like barnacles had spawned all over him, but he still made nervous breakdowns look good.
“Hey, mate.” A beringed hand whose jewelry would’ve put any rapper to shame snapped in front of Paul’s face. Jack Sparrow, on the other hand, looked exactly the same. Of course, that included a certain shifty attractiveness that probably managed to sneak up on most people and riffle between their legs before they ever noticed, but ‘most people’ didn’t include Paul. “Don’t suppose we could start any time soon? I’ve got a resurrection to get on with.”
“Oh, you’re dead? What a shame. No wonder Turner looked so depressed and Elizabeth so frustrated,” Norrington drawled. Somewhere along the line, he’d gotten over the whole ramrod bit and was sprawling so the well-worn fabric of his trousers clearly outlined his manhood.
Paul raised one eyebrow as he settled back in his chair. “All right, all right. Let’s start with where that came from.”
Norrington’s eyebrows lifted; he was tracking Paul’s look, but didn’t seem to give a damn. Sparrow frowned and leaned out of his chair to physically follow Paul’s stare; apparently he thought ‘line of sight’ was a material concept. He waved his fingers along an imaginary line and turned and was starting to dive into Norrington’s lap when the other man sighed, dropped his head back onto the chair-top, and gave Sparrow a good shove to the face. Jack rocked back into his chair with a hard thump and a pout.
“I lost my ship, my rank, and just about everything else that identified me as who I was. Then I spent a year struggling to regain all that, and as you can imagine, it wasn’t an easy task, nor is it complete yet. Forgive me if I can’t seem to muster as much sympathy for the travails of others, given the circumstances,” Norrington muttered. He was still sprawling.
After some difficult gyroscopic negotiations with gravity, Jack managed to assume a position where his head was up and his feet were vaguely in the direction of down. He rolled his eyes—and his head—as he took out a silver flask and uncorked it. “He sailed through a hurricane. Got a good knock on the head, which I’m thinking was useful since I really was getting tired of telling him saintly ain’t fun, but then he went and got another, and he’s been grouchy ever since. Do like the stubble though, mate.”
“I wouldn’t have thought more abrasions would be pleasant, considering you work in a salt-water environment.” Paul crooked his finger into the handle of his desk drawer and pulled it open. He swapped notepad and pen for calipers, then resumed trying to make an eyeball estimate of Norrington. If the man was going to put it out there like that, Paul figured he might as well get started on updating Norrington’s medical information. “So basically, you’re back here for the same problem: no time for sex.”
Norrington made a rude gesture with his hand, then let his arm drop back to the chair with a thump. The motion made his head loll sideways and he absently glanced over Sparrow. Then his eyes came back to the flask from which Sparrow was noisily drinking. “No inclination, either. I can’t trust anyone not to toss me overboard afterward, and I don’t have the damn time to toss them overboard. I’ve still got to get myself a ship.”
“And there’s the little matter of me being dead,” Sparrow said in a hurt voice, glaring at Norrington. He noticed where Norrington’s attention lay and made a face, clutching the flask to him. “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t care, Jaime. That Beckett lout never gets more than half-mast, for one.”
For a moment, Norrington looked as if he were going to let that just roll on by. Then he frowned and turned to look fully at Jack. “How would you know that? And just what is the East India Company doing in the West Indies, Jack? Seems a bit of a stretch for a mere navigational accident, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe their compass is a bit…” Jack fluttered his fingers in a dismissive up-roll “…broken?”
As soon as Norrington went back to slouching and staring moodily at the ceiling, Jack covertly took out a compass from his own pocket and began to shake, rattle and roll it till Jerry Lee Lewis would’ve cried mercy. Not that it seemed to do the compass any good, to judge by the look on Jack’s face when he peered at it.
“So as part of your mid-life crisis, you’ve renounced sex? Gotta say, that one doesn’t come up very often.” Paul gave up on the calipers and decided he’d just run the security camera footage by that Neo geek later. If Greenly knew what was good for him, he should’ve had one camera focused on Norrington for the whole time, anyway.
“I’m not having a mid-life crisis,” Norrington snapped. “The crisis was foisted on me, and I’m taking steps to rectify it.”
Jack was now holding the compass box upside-down and whispering the most incredible threats to it if it didn’t stop pointing at every single person who went by because he did have priorities and it’d better respect them. Or at least the size of his cabin.
“Okay. Anyway, let’s talk about this mid-life crisis. You said that your idea of self was completely turned upside-down and you didn’t like it, so you’re currently working to get back to where you were before, right?” Paul asked.
Norrington cautiously nodded.
“But…you don’t want to fuck Jack anymore. Which is interesting, given that I have in my notes that screwing Jack seemed to be what your life previously revolved around.” At least, Paul vaguely recalled that the last session had mostly been about that topic. Anyway, it was a close enough guess, given that Jack had been the one booking this session.
Jack was hissing to his compass to not even think about pausing at the crazy head-doctor. If it had enough respect for him to avoid the likes of Davy Jones…
“It was not!” After a second, Norrington dropped the indignant look and flopped back in the chair. This new him certainly was more entertaining when it came to self-truths. “Oh, fine, it was. In one manner or the other. But let’s say I want to go back to who I was before I even met Jack. When I wasn’t screwing Jack. You’re not even holding a notepad this time. Are you saying you remember all of this?”
“Look, when you don’t look like Mr. Dock Trash of the Year and you’ve got a nice corner office with a big desk again, then you can question my memory recall. Anyway, all right, let’s take that assumption and follow it through to its conclusion, shall we?” Paul brought out his nice professional smile and sat up so he could fold his hands on the desk. He held the pose just till he saw Norrington’s jaw muscle start to tic. “You’re currently in a period of not fucking Jack and you’re unhappy. You’d like to get back to when you were happy, but the nearest time when you were happy was when you were fucking Jack. But you don’t want to fuck Jack now, so you want to go back even farther to the last time you weren’t fucking Jack. Now, the question we have to answer in order to complete this parallel is were you happy when you weren’t fucking Jack? Because then we’d know what kind of relation your unhappiness has to your refusal to fuck Jack.”
Norrington blinked. Squinted and frowned. Opened and closed his mouth a few times. He clearly didn’t function well in the mental department when he was hung-over.
“Exactly,” Jack suddenly said, sitting straight up and looking very attentive. He looked quizzically back as Paul and Norrington stared at him, then glanced down and saw his compass, as if he’d noticed it for the very first time. He made an ‘oops!’ grin and stuffed his hands behind his back. “You don’t want to have a repeat of your past bad experience, do you?”
“Which bloody past experience are you talking about?” Norrington snarled, eyes shooting back and forth between Jack and Paul. He sounded angry all right, but he also sounded like he was a man realizing he’d just been reversed by some clever rearranging of his own words and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Paul leaned forward. He pulled out his best soothing tone. “Why don’t you tell us? Remember, we’re here to help you.”
It was a good thing he’d had Greenly confiscate all swords, pistols, and daggers before the session had started. As it was, Norrington made a credible attempt to decapitate Paul with the chair before Jack knocked him over.
While the other two men fought, Paul crawled around under his desk, trying to read the damn labels next to the buttons on its underside. He really needed to get a light installed down here, given that he didn’t always have time to grab a flashlight…oh, there. He gave the ‘rum’ button a good stab, making sure his legs were tucked fully beneath the desk. No point in getting his damn suit ruined if he wasn’t getting laid.
Norrington stopped shouting and cursing after a few minutes. He started singing only a couple more minutes after that; Sparrow could’ve mentioned the man had low tolerance. That would’ve sped things up a lot.
The rum shower stopped a few seconds later, so Paul carefully levered himself out of the leg-space and stood up to peer over his desk. Jack did have a nice ass. And damn, Norrington was exactly as big as he looked.
“Fine view up there?” Jack gasped, rolling under Norrington.
Paul indulged himself in an appreciative grin. “Not bad. But remember, this session was to convince him abstinence is part of the problem, not part of the solution. You want help getting him to resurrect you—” Paul had to lean over more and raise his voice “—that’s another two sessions!”
Jack’s reply was mostly muffled in Norrington’s chest, but it went something along the lines of that not being a problem now. Yeah, whatever. That was what everyone always thought, but it was amazing how lazy post-coital bliss could make people about little details like that.
Well, no skin off Paul’s nose. He was just gonna sit back, and watch, and wait for these two to show up on his appointment book again.
***