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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: R. Some graphic description of decay and sex.
Pairing: Bootstrap Bill/Norrington.
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, etc.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Supernatural stuff. Am assuming that the loss of senses brought about by the curse wasn’t abrupt but was gradual. Also am not using Stellan Skarsgaard as my mental picture of Bootstrap. Written prior to the second movie.
Summary: Resurrection doesn’t happen all at once.
***
It took him a long time to remember about his son.
He drowned only the once, and that he figured had happened during the long fast sink when, thankfully, the shock had already robbed him of sense. By the time the cannon had settled on the sea-bed, he had revived and realized he didn’t need to breathe. He needed a surprisingly little amount of time to adjust to that.
More painful by far was the constant picking of the fish, like living in a perpetual cloud of stinging gnats. They looked to have no lips but he could feel something pecking at him. Many little somethings, soft and slimy and yielding till suddenly he noticed the stinging of the salt in the tiny sores and the pockmarks that healed before his eyes and the rasping hurt that followed each dive at him. He shook his head, kept his eyes tightly shut whenever he could. Eventually he worked free a hand and used it to wave at them. The cannon had fallen half-across him, pinning his legs in the soft muck, and so he could not reach the rest of the knots but at least he could keep the fish from his eyes.
When the tides rolled over him, they rocked the cannon and strained the ropes that bound him, and the ropes rubbed him raw. He healed, but the blood stayed in the water, spreading from scarlet ribbons to veils of near-black, and so the fishes stayed as well. They were relentless and so he had to learn to pace himself. He grew so used to the sight of thin strips of skin waving in the water like weed, of ragged holes in his flesh, that it took him many nights before he realized he was rotting beneath the light of the moon. In day he was as whole as the fishes let him be, but at night he was decaying. A fit thing, he thought, and then he wondered why he would think that. He’d forgotten that as well.
Once there was a shark. It found him and it took his hand. He screamed and fainted, and when he awoke the flesh had been stripped to show half the bones in his wrist by little bright fish. It did not hurt, he noticed, but still the sight of it was too much for him. He buried the stump in the mud and suffered the fish to peck at his head until he could pull out a whole hand.
His other hand came free sometime while he was underwater. On the day of the turtles, he thought, but he could not be sure because he had more than once let slip from his mind what was night and what was day. He remembered enough to struggle, but the cannon was still too heavy for him to shift.
After the turtles but before the whales, he forgot that he was a man and began to think that he was water and weed. He saw nothing, heard nothing, tasted nothing but seawater. The fish lipped at him as they did the delicate greenish blades that surrounded him. He had parts of him that could flow a little, stream in the currents, but they could not go far before they were stopped. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t feel.
He laid in the mud and stopped batting at the fish, and sometime after that he believed he was mud, for he looked more ragged and more filthy by the light of each moon and the only fragments left in his head were gold coins, treasure underground. And what was the underground but the mud?
And a long, long time after that, the storm came. He remembered little of it except that suddenly the weight that had been there so long it was no longer a weight had gone from his legs and it was a change and he did not want that so he reached for the weight. But he missed and caught a tide instead that boiled him and spun him and threw him on sand.
If his memory was true, it took him two days to remember what sand was when it was not in the water. Five to understand why he did not flow but instead had to go along with awkward joints crabbing about and head swimming. Six to know that the hairy screeching things were monkeys, and seven to remember why they terrified and angered him.
Seven to remember Barbossa. Seven and a half to remember Jack Sparrow and the Pearl and the gold coin and what he’d done with it and his own name, William Turner.
A year to remember his son’s name.
* * *
He was standing on the deck of a merchant ship. The decks were awash with blood and corpses, and he was on one knee because he had just sunk his sword to the hilt in the last attacker. Both his ship and the pirate vessel were burning, and too tangled together to be separated by one man. They were deserted, for the pirates had taken too long to understand why he wouldn’t die and he’d had a year to rediscover what anger was left for him to feel. To feel it slowly slip away.
The master, who’d been so understanding of his strange skin condition, was lying dead near three feet from him, face still frozen in the horror of seeing Bootstrap rise whole and hale from a musket-shot to the face. He had been kind to Bill, and so Bill would have liked to close his eyes for him, but the more he looked at the dead man’s expression the more he wanted to tear it off. So instead he yanked the sword out of the pirate and he headed for the only unbroken longboat, and as he was letting it down he distinctly remembered thinking, I hope Will doesn’t greet me like that. He remembered because it was hope.
It took him three days to row to the nearest island, though he needed neither sleep nor more rest than was needed to let each crop of blisters heal. And in those three days, he finally managed to piece together why he would think of a Will and who that was to him and then what he’d done to his own son.
He had been working his way as best he could across the Caribbean, looking for signs of Jack Sparrow, but now he made for Port Royal, there to find a ship that could take him to England.
* * *
They were barely clear of the harbor when Bill sought out the captain. “Turn back,” he said. “There’s a storm rising.”
The other man, a vigorous middle-aged sailor, looked him askance. “Mister, I’ve been sailing these routes for thirty years ever since I was a fifteen-year-old. There’s no storm coming. The sky is clear as clear could be.”
It took an effort for Bill to remember that his old captain—no, not Jack or Barbossa, but the merchant one newly died—had claimed brujah blood in him, and had listened to Bootstrap because he thought he saw the curse of the damned on him. And the damned, so the man had said, are the most desperate to live so it behooved people to listen to them.
The sun was out, trailing bright nails over the water so the waves glistened with fresh chips, but nevertheless Bill could look over the side and know that a storm was coming. He thought, faintly, that he was supposed to explain. “It doesn’t matter. It’s coming, and it’ll smash your ship and send it to the depths of hell if you don’t make for the harbor. The fish will graze on your eyes.”
He spoke the same as he had the first time, and his hands did not move, but the captain paled and stepped back as if he were a monster from those very depths. “Erwau’r pysg,” he muttered. “The fish’s pastures. You look like you’ve seen them.”
“Turn around,” Bill said, soft as ever.
“Are you putting a curse on us?” The captain reached for his sword.
Bill almost laughed. It was well that he didn’t, for he was not sure if his muscles remembered how to work themselves. Instead he looked at the captain, and the captain looked at him, and finally the captain turned around to croak out the order. Soon the other passengers had descended on him and were complaining, but he held fast. His face reddened at them and whitened when he glanced at Bootstrap, but he turned his ship around and he sailed them into the harbor just as the first clouds came scudding across the horizon.
It was a hurricane. The tops of trees ripped off and soared miles into the blue and fisher’s wives ran weeping through the streets. In a near-abandoned tavern upland from the docks, Bill watched the water creep halfway up the road. He felt no fear, and he told it so in a very low voice. He’d seen all it was.
What he felt was a seething inside of him where he thought of his son and wife, and of the blood payment Barbossa would exact from them. By now he would have learned the terms of the curse that Jack and Bootstrap had hidden from him, and he would have had time to hone his fury.
So had Bootstrap. Eight years, he thought. Eight years, and nearly all the memories of his wife had washed so far that he suspected they would never return, and all that was left of his son was a name and a condemnation that Bootstrap had wrought with his own hands. He carried a curse, yes, but it was for himself and for Barbossa.
He leaned against the door-less doorframe as the wind howled a child towards the lashing waters. At the last moment, a woman snatched her to safety.
And that, Bootstrap thought, was the worst cut. For he knew once upon a time that he would have felt horror and he would have run out there without another second wasted because his heart would not let him hang back, but now he could watch and feel little except a sick wonder at himself. His rage was all for memories and the hollows of absences; he no longer knew what it was to be a man, but only acted from what he recalled. He was revenging the dead, and he included himself among them.
“A drink?” The captain came up to him, face a white blister of fear and hands restless around the long neck of the rum-bottle he held. He shakily passed it to Bootstrap.
Bill drank, though it did him no good. He could feel the fluid pass over his tongue and through his body to soak into his already-wet trousers—that was all.
“You’ve got the weather-sense,” the other man said. He pursed his lips. When Bill handed him back the bottle, he looked both immensely grateful and deeply frightened. The rum put enough courage in him for him to chance further comment. “I should thank you, sir. And I am thankful. I will be to you if I can know for certain that you are not one of those devils who invaded this port scarce a week ago.”
“Devils?” Rumors all over the sea of Barbossa. It was difficult to pick them out from all the other fanciful bloody legends that thrived in these waters, but Bill followed each one as best he could.
The captain nodded. “Aye. I and my men kept them clear from the ship, but—” he lowered his voice and shivered “—they would not die. I ran one through, I swear to you on my ship’s rudder, but he walked again as if I’d never touched him. Their captain called them off, else the whole town would have been destroyed.”
“Do you know who the captain was, and what ship?” Outside the sky was eerie green glass, a lid trapping all below it in their misery. Something pained Bill, a deep stabbing just under his left ribs. He pressed his fist to it and was disappointed when it went away, for he’d not felt that since the first weeks underwater. The pecking of the fishes and how that had stung him almost seemed a memory to miss.
“I know not the captain, but it was the black ship that haunts these waters. The Black Pearl.” The rum had leaked into the other man’s words and made them waver, weave as the man was weaving. He slumped in a chair out of the way of the wet wind. “But our navy’s gone after them,” he said more strongly, more fearfully. “They’ll be punished.”
“Not near enough.” The wind reversed direction. It caught Bootstrap by the elbow and tugged hard, so hard he nearly was dragged out of the doorway. But he pulled himself free, and then he stepped back inside just as the pain flared up again.
He had learned he needed no air and so he breathed only when others were looking, so as not to attract attention. But now his lungs heaved of their own accord and he breathed. It burned and the moment he needed to remember what that was let the pain take him to his knees. His hand went out and hit the stone threshold, and then there was another pain. Black was taking over his vision, but he kept it long enough to realize that blood was welling up beneath his palm and it wasn’t stopping. He rasped in another breath.
And he smelled the world.
Bill fainted.
* * *
The house he woke in was small but sturdy, the materials of the best quality but stingily used. It was that of the captain whose ship was to take him to England.
“Lost a few spars so I moved everything back a week. But I would’ve lost the whole ship if you hadn’t spoken, so I thought I owed you.” The captain pushed a bowl of porridge across the table to Bill, and then stretched his hand after it. “Morris,” he gruffly said.
“Bill Turner.” The steam rising from the porridge nearly killed Bill. He let out his breath a little at a time so the intense warmth and smell of it would not overwhelm him. Shook Morris’ hand, then sat down. When he picked up his spoon, he had to pause for a moment while the memory of pewter tamed the feeling of it.
He looked at the porridge. Now that he had grown somewhat accustomed to the smell, he judged it to be mouthwatering, but nevertheless his stomach clenched and cramped painfully at the thought of eating it. After a moment, he understood that it was because he was something like afraid. It would have been silly if earlier the sensation of a razor running over his cheeks hadn’t brought him to his knees; his nerves were exploding with every rediscovered feeling.
Captain Morris had paused himself. “It’s a common name, I know, but there’s a blacksmith in town. Young man, name of William Turner, and now that I think of it, he has a look of you. Any relation?”
His son should be in England, but if Bill lived now it was because the curse had been broken. And if the curse had been broken, then his son had to have been there. Will and Barbossa and Jack.
“Then again, he’s turned out a reckless one and you seem steady enough.” Morris dropped his spoon into his food and the small wet plop it made locked Bootstrap’s back teeth together. Oblivious, the other man went on. “He and the governor’s daughter, who’s as beautiful as the sun but who could have used a good whipping when she was younger, got themselves involved with those pirates somehow. They and the commodore came back right after the hurricane blew over with a pack of them, and with Jack Sparrow.”
Bill bent his spoon. The air boiled high into his nostrils and steamed there, scalding his insides so he wanted to open his mouth and pant like a dog. But he held himself in, remembering the cool of underwater, and eventually he could smooth out the spoon with his fingers. He dipped it into his bowl and tentatively touched the porridge to his tongue. “Was there…a man named Barbossa among them?”
“Don’t know, but the lot of them were hanged yesterday.” As Morris ate, the chewing sounds he made seemed to strike at Bill’s very marrow. When he’d been dead and drowned, everything had been muffled, and even after he had come ashore again, it had been quiet. “All except for that damned Jack Sparrow. And here’s the rich part—he was helped by the blacksmith and the governor’s daughter. Two young fools…wait till they’re old enough to know the cost of being generous to pirates.”
So Jack lived. And if that was true, then Barbossa almost certainly had to be dead.
Bootstrap hated Jack for that. Then he nibbled at another droplet of porridge clinging to his spoon, and thought of what he still owed his former friend, and told himself if anyone deserved it, Jack did. But nevertheless the roil of Bill’s anger inside of him went unappeased; the only parts of humanity he’d retained through the eight years of living death had been the desire to put his hands around Barbossa’s neck and squeeze, and to put his hands around his son and ask forgiveness.
He ate a whole spoonful at once and was sick for minutes afterward with the rich taste of it. Morris saw his face and reached for the salt-cellar. “Too bland?”
“No. No, thank you.” Bill closed his eyes. That helped, for now he had only four senses to leap at him and of those four, one of them was hearing the sea beyond the window. The sound of the waves soothed him, for he had grown used to them. And of all the senses, hearing was strongest underwater so having it intense again on land was not so much of a shock.
“I’ve got a proposition,” Morris abruptly said. He rose and took his dish to the door himself, though from there a servant had charge of it. Then he came back and leaned against the table by Bill’s elbow. “Mr. Turner, I’ve been looking for a new pilot for a while. Not so much for navigation—I can still do the math though I might squint at the numbers now—but to mind the deck and the weather and the seabed. In my family the bones stiffen early. I can’t stay out and read the sky and the water like I once did.”
If the curse was gone, then Bill did not need to go to England. And if he did not need to go to England, then he needed to go nowhere.
It was curious—beneath the pain, being alive in all senses was not so different from being dead but aware. He still could care only as a distant sort of feeling, an emotion cobbled together more out of what he knew should be there than what came without any bidding. He’d been too long out of practice.
But he said: “No. I thank you for the offer, but I think I’ll stay here for a spell. My business has changed.”
Morris’ mouth twisted and Bill could understand why, for it was a poor way to repay the man’s kindness. But eventually Morris shrugged and weatherbeaten compassion was begrudged space on his features. “It’s a waste, but it’s your choice. Ah, well, I’ve still a day or so before I’m ready to sail. Would you at least come to the harbor for me, and see if you can reckon where the sandbars have shifted since the hurricane?”
“Is the blacksmith’s shop along the way?” Bill asked. His appetite was dying even as he grew more able to eat without flinching.
“Close enough to make it a stop. Wondering if he is a relation after all?” When Bill didn’t answer, Morris laughed. He dusted off his hands and got his walking stick as Bill stood up. “Better if he isn’t, I reckon. He’s set to marry the governor’s daughter, and damn me if that won’t be a disaster. I suppose he thinks himself lucky now.”
Bill smiled. The corners of his mouth hurt and he didn’t let it last long enough for Morris to see. “Luck cannot be any worse,” he softly said.
* * *
When they arrived at the shop, the windows were shuttered tight and the door was locked. Though Morris gave the door three heavy blows with his stick, no one answered. Finally he stepped back and pointed the way towards the water. “Well, you know where it is now. You can come later when he’s not wooing his way to riches.”
“Aye,” Bill said, and ignored the man. The wood around the door smelled like long abuse of rum, like Jack’s cabin where he would whirl about some tomfool idea and then present it to Bill for brushing it, but the building was in good repair. The glass was bright. Inside he could see neat rows of tools and, he thought, swords.
It was the house of a man that loved his business. Bill tried and failed to remember the details of his own hammock, of even the kitchen that he had left so shortly before. The memories were all flowing away from him like so much wet sand through fingers and what grit remained did not turn him to sentiment.
The muscles in his throat constricted, and he touched his fingers to the door. Then he came away and went with Morris to the docks, where he knelt and put his hand in the water. Bootstrap looked at the shadows of the ripples and the shape of the waves, and he tonelessly told Morris what the man had wished to know.
“And you’re certain of all of it?” the other man asked. He looked Bill in the eyes and then he raised his hands. “No, I believe you. But the believing that I believe you is a bit hard, if you take my meaning.”
“I do.” It was green here, the water; the color was like stained glass. Where Bill had been, it had been more blue and sometimes the water had been cloudy whenever the deep currents stirred. He had grown to know it well, and the echoes he saw in the bay of Port Royal made his chest ache. That, he found familiar. Not the breeze and the light on his face, though he had been a year in it now.
Morris awkwardly touched him on the shoulder. “My thanks to you.”
Bill nodded, and while Morris’ footsteps retreated he stayed and crouched and stared at the water. He wondered if Barbossa had died ashore or on the water. Somehow, he suspected a halfway point, as it’d always been with that one. He let the water run through his fingers and the salt residue dry on the back of his hand, and he hoped the body had ended up rotting on the earth’s domain. The sea was too good for him.
* * *
He did see his son. Walking back from the water, not thinking about his path, and then he looked up and there was the memory of his wife that he had lost, and there were the memories of him as he’d been before the mutiny and the ocean that had seeped away.
Will was a grown man, and he’d done it without Bootstrap’s help.
He wore good clothes, and his back was still strong and unbent by life, and the hands he used to unlock the door and push it were broad capable ones. A soft whistling came from his lips and was only stopped by the shutting of the door, so he was happy, too.
The sky was darkening and there were few people left on the streets. Even so, it was several minutes before Bill could bring himself to cross the road and stand on his son’s doorstep. He lifted his hand and lowered it twice before he finally turned and walked to look through the window.
Inside Will was preparing for bed; he exchanged his fine clothes for more workmanlike ones, but those were still of prosperous make and cut. The bob of his head said he was still whistling to himself, and on his finger gleamed a simple ring of gold. When he lifted his hand to straighten one of the many fine swords hanging on the wall, Bootstrap caught a glimpse of a fresh scar over the palm. So did Will. The good cheer died from his face as he looked at his hand and the shadows crept low over his face, but soon he turned his wrist so his eyes alighted on the ring. Then he smiled, softly and giddily, and mouthed a name.
The reason Bill had fainted when the curse had broken, Bill suddenly understood, was because his heart had started again. To no purpose—his life and his blood itself had managed to accomplish nothing, and that honor had gone to his blood, his namesake.
Let him keep it, and cherish it well, then. Bill retraced his steps to the dockside.
For a long, long time, he stared at the water that was not the same color but that was very like. Then a breeze sprang up and he flinched, for it carried a heavy scent of gunpowder. The smell came from the fort, and when Bill looked towards it he saw a single bright blue figure standing on the ramparts. A dying ray glinted off a telescope lens.
Some coin still jiggled in Bootstrap’s pocket. Enough for a few nights’ berth in an inn, he judged, and he turned his feet that way.
* * *
Before he had gone, Morris had whispered in the ears of a few drinking companions and they in their turn had talked, and so it was not long before the first came wandering to Bill. He went to the water with them and assayed the weather. In return they dropped a leather pouch in his hand; he counted the coins through the leather because he disliked the sight of gold now. As he was turning away, his eye landed on a nearby ship, roved the way the tide ran around her.
“You’ve got a rotten plank in the stern, two feet below the waterline,” he said, more to cover up the man’s nervous shuffling than to be helpful.
After that, he had no lack of visitors. They came often but never stayed longer than was necessary. He suspected that they disliked the way he did not often blink.
The name he gave them was Bill at first. Later he sometimes said Bootstrap. They didn’t ask for any more.
He stayed away from his son, and let him be William Turner, and wished him all the luck with it.
* * *
One day, a rare day of clearest blue, Bill walked out to the cemetery where they buried whatever was left of the hanged. There were no markers but crosses, but the ground was damp. He took off his shoes so the muck could ooze over his toes and walked about till he had a guess.
“You bastards,” he said without any heat.
“Excuse me?” A Naval officer stood at the edge, a confection of blue broadcloth and Belgian lace and gold touches strangling quite a young man. He had a hard face, but it was not of cruelty’s mold; he looked as if he had spent his life disciplining the emotion from his features with only half-success.
Bill turned around all the way and the shock on the officer’s face cracked off the plastered reserve, dropped his jaw and made him step back.
People kept their distance from him, but rarely this dramatically. So Bill stood and waited.
The officer caught himself, pursing his lips to cover up his surprise. He raised a hand to his hat and adjusted it so its broad brim did not cast so much shadow over his eyes. “Are you the one the townspeople all think is a sea-witch?”
“Probably.” And some of them had remarked on a slight likeness between him and the town blacksmith, but that had been before Bill had been breathing long enough to go gaunt in the cheeks. He had grown used to the smells, the sounds, but his appetite had never truly recovered. “What do you want?”
“I’m Commodore Norrington,” the man said stiffly, as if to rebuke Bill for implying that such a lofty being would have mundane feelings. But then he shook himself, essayed an uneasy step forward. “I have a possible business offer for you. My office is just up the hill.”
Bill looked down a last time at the graves of his former mates. The resentment was still there, but only as an old used-up cinder. They were dead, which was what he had wanted, and even before he’d had caring washed out of him he hadn’t been naturally vengeful.
He scraped the mud of them off his feet while Norrington watched and occasionally coughed, and then he went up with the other man to the garrison.
As he was shutting the door, Norrington looked hard at Bill. “You’re Will’s father, aren’t you.”
The glass of the windows in Norrington’s office were highly polished and reflected the whole room including Bootstrap’s face. It looked little enough like Will now.
“I’ve seen him in worse conditions, and there’s a look about the eyes…identical.” Footsteps passed behind Bill. Then there was the tinkling of crystal, and the splashing of liquid.
The latter briefly stirred him, but when he realized it was Madeira he resumed staring out the window. Wine and ale and rum now stayed in his stomach, but they still offered him no panacea.
“And he and Elizabeth have told me…I doubt it’s the entire story, but it included enough of the curse to explain matters. And it mentioned you.” Norrington offered him a glass, which Bill took out of courtesy. “He thinks you’re long dead.”
“He’d be more right than wrong.” Bill saw a strange fear ice over Norrington’s eyes. The other man’s hand wandered towards his sword. But it was not until Bill realized Norrington was watching his chest for breathing that he understood. “No, the curse is lifted. Not to much good in my case.” He stared at the wine, swirled it so the tiny sediments in the bottom moved like sand. “So you know my son?”
Relief showed on Norrington as a hunching of shoulders and a quick drop of his hand to his side. He turned away, put his hands on his desk and smoothed a map over it. “I suppose. I pulled him from the water eight years ago and about a month ago he stole my fiancée.”
In the glass, his back was an awkward strained curve. When Bill ran a nail along the line of the reflection, it rippled like water breaking against a half-submerged post.
Norrington was wincing. “I apologize for that. Elizabeth made her choice freely and even I have to admit that.”
“What’s your offer?” Bill asked. Elizabeth. He told himself to remember that name.
“Don’t you want to know—” Norrington said, surprised.
“What’s your offer?” The window was slightly open. It was easy to tip the wine through the crack, and then to wipe off the lone thin streak that had spilled off the sill. He rubbed the wine between thumb and forefinger till it turned sticky, and still they stood in uncomfortable silence. “Is Will well?”
When Norrington replied, his voice was free of bitterness. He resented the situation, not the people, or so it seemed. “Yes. But—”
“I’ve done enough for him already, and somehow he’s survived despite me. I’ll do no more.” Bill turned around and handed the glass back to Norrington, then waited.
For several minutes Norrington did nothing but spin the glass between his fingers. Then he looked sharp and quick at Bill, and then he pushed Bill’s glass and his aside to point at the map. “I’m in charge of ferreting out the pirates of this sea and bringing them to justice. Unfortunately, I have only a few ships and they’re all too large to indiscriminately chance the shallows and narrow channels the pirates favor. Also, I freely confess to a lack of knowledge of the coasts they haunt most often. I need someone to steer.”
“And you believe in sea-witches?” Jack, Bill remembered. He’d heard the man had gotten away, and occasionally his visitors mentioned his name. So Bill’s former captain was back plying his old trade.
“No, but I saw enough to believe in the curse. I know what it worked was true enough.” Norrington slowly straightened himself but his gaze stayed fixed on the map. He spoke rapidly and briskly. “You’ll be paid well.”
Bootstrap looked at the sea again. “I don’t need it.” He heard Norrington clear his throat and interrupted. “All right. But I won’t chase Jack Sparrow.”
“You’re still loyal to him?” Norrington asked in disbelief. “From what I’ve been told—”
From what he’d been told, from what anyone could tell him, he would have heard the merest skin of the story. “I regret him. Yes or no?”
Norrington waited for so long that Bootstrap began to think about walking out. But finally the other man nodded.
* * *
Most of the sand down there was of the soft sucking kind. If the ship ran aground and the seabed got a grip on her hull, it’d be nigh impossible to rock her free. Bootstrap leaned over the rail and watched the angles change with the shifts in the sand, the long grasping shadows of fish shoals huddling about the ship.
“Good evening,” said the commodore. He stood uncomfortably beside Bootstrap. “I would have thought you would be tired by now. We’re anchored for the night; the bottom doesn’t change that fast…does it?”
“Only if a storm rises. There isn’t one coming.” Bootstrap wished they weren’t so far from shore. It was easier when he could get his eyes level to the water and let it drip through his fingers.
Norrington stayed.
“I don’t sleep much,” Bootstrap added. Neither did the commodore, it seemed. This was the third time they’d encountered each other wandering the decks at night. “Old habit.”
“From being a pirate?” Plenty of bitterness in Norrington’s last word.
The wind rose briefly and carried to Bill the powerful fetid smell of the thick jungles ashore. He silently blew out his nose and stepped back from the railing. Down in the lower levels, it would be damp and he would be able to better feel the rocking of the waves. “From being dead.”
He could feel Norrington’s stare bend and recoil. “Will…said they bound you to a cannon.”
“They did.” As Bootstrap passed the other man, Norrington stepped from the shadows to the pale light that even now Bootstrap tended to avoid. The curse was gone, but nevertheless Norrington’s face looked haggard as a skeleton.
Bill barely noticed. The smell was worsening; there was too much life in the jungle and it was suffocating. He headed below where the stench at least was of rot, something to which he was more accustomed.
* * *
There was still gunpowder stains and some dried blood from the skirmish earlier. The pirates had fled down inland streams into which even Bootstrap couldn’t steer the Dauntless, but nonetheless Norrington had seemed well pleased with their first foray. Bootstrap had directed them close enough for the pirates’ on-shore fortifications to come into cannon range and a terrific explosion had proved they had destroyed a large arsenal.
Chasing pirates had stirred no conflicted feelings in Bootstrap’s breast, though he had recognized a few of the fleeing, and at least one of the dead that lay on the shore. All people seemed beyond him now, and so they were all the same.
“There’s a few that won’t be bothering honest folk again,” Norrington said. He came striding up the sand, his walk as full of false complacency as his voice. In daylight his face was pinked with health, but his eyes still seemed to recede from the sun. “Where are they going?”
“To wherever the Navy is not.” Bootstrap saw the ire begin to rise in the other man’s face and felt the slightest prickle of annoyance. He prodded it, but the sensation disappeared as softly as it’d appeared. “I am not a witch of anything, commodore. I can tell you only what I see.”
Norrington took the rebuke mildly enough, though down the beach one of his lieutenants grew red-faced. None but Norrington had recognized Bootstrap for what he had been, so doubtless they thought him one of the Caribbean’s many nameless mad strays, picked up for a time and then to be dropped when he was no longer useful. If they hung him beyond the waterline, Bootstrap wondered, would the jerk of the noose be like the jerk of the cannon’s weight?
“Did you know any of them?” Norrington asked. His men were emerging from the burnt shells of shacks that pocked the shore, but instead he chose to watch the sea.
“I used to.” A squall was blowing together, lacing the sky with green and gray ribbons. It reminded Bootstrap of a dress, though he couldn’t remember whose. Perhaps his wife’s, perhaps one from the last cargo Jack and Barbossa had taken as captain and mate.
Whatever was eating Norrington, he’d do better to let it wash out and fleck away in the foam. They hurt less that way.
“Did you like being…one of them?” Another lieutenant was barely three yards from them, but Norrington still watched the white-caps. His question was low and rough-coated, like the barnacles that shipped little feathery creatures within their chalky hulls.
This time, Bootstrap looked at him. “You don’t like when you’re dead. You don’t feel anything.”
“Sometimes I wonder whether you’ve truly returned.” Norrington told it to the waves, not Bootstrap, and then he turned and ordered them back to the ship. He raised his eyes to it as if it were both haven and haunt.
Bootstrap was surprised to realize he knew the feeling. He was still looking at sky and sea.
* * *
The water in the depths of the ship covered Bootstrap’s boots to the ankles. He held onto the rail and slowly sloshed his boot through it, listening to how the sound echoed in the bowels of the ship. It was not at all like the bone-low rumble of the ocean, but his ears tolerated it better than the sleep-heavy breathing in the higher decks.
He wondered whether his son had married Elizabeth yet, and if they would have children. Better a blacksmith for a father than a sailor, who was always at least half the ocean’s and often more.
“Have we sprung a leak?” Dim light clawed down the steps in a pincer around Bootstrap. Then it leaped and hooked at the ceiling; Norrington cursed softly as his boots slipped on the green-slimed wood.
“No.” After a moment, Bootstrap grudgingly moved aside for the other man. The echo of their voices was faster, sharper, more cutting.
Norrington’s eyes were no eyes at all in the jagged shadows and sulfur light, but black pits. They trained on Bootstrap like gun muzzles, or like the skulls of hanged pirates who invited their brethren in life to join them after. He held the lantern high, though there was a hook for it, and for a long time he watched Bootstrap watch the intimate, fragile communion of ship and sea.
At last Bootstrap found a question of his own lurking within him. “What are you trying to find?”
“I have no idea.” The light dipped, rose again as Norrington’s arm finally tired; he hung up the lantern and put his hands on the rail. “Do you know why the men won’t eat with you, and why they keep their distance?”
Bootstrap didn’t answer. He knew well enough that he’d be told it if he waited.
“I didn’t tell them, and I don’t know who else could have, but they know you were, at least partly, one of the pirates that wouldn’t die. My men fought Barbossa’s crew—there’s not a man of them that hasn’t woke screaming to the memories at least once.”
“Is that why you don’t sleep at night?” Bootstrap asked. He put out a hand and idly caught some of the damp dripping from the planks overhead. When he put his fingers to his nose, he was assaulted by the smells of tar, pine, salt—sweat. Men.
Norrington drew in a sharp breath. “You know what you are? A walking reminder of mortality. And not the poets’ favorite metaphor—a human life may be as a flash of light compared to history, but who lives history, truly?” His voice was rich with contempt and bitterness, long brewed and strong. “We all hope to be young forever, but after that we hope it’s quick. And you and your old crew—you were rotting examples of what we fear mortality’s true condition is. A long, lingering suppuration, oozing more pus daily. That’s the real nightmare.”
“That’s why you stare?” It took a moment for Bootstrap to recognize what the warm rolling feeling inside of him was—amusement. He turned and began to make his way past the other man. “You fear and so you look anyway to master it? Sir, nothing about what I am now’s natural, and same with them.”
“I know that,” Norrington hissed. And he seized Bootstrap’s hand and drew him back, ghostly green points flaring in the hollows that were his eyes. His flesh was hot and dry, dry like a fever had burned all the water from him.
Wood groaned, throbbed the air around them. A breeze blew up and rocked the ship faster so the water in the bilges splashed higher and higher against their boots, sucking at the leather as it receded.
“I know it’s not natural.” Norrington tightened his grip on Bootstrap. Digging into his lower lip was an edge of teeth, which Bootstrap guessed were very like the edge on which Norrington swayed. His eyes widened so the whites finally showed, and so he looked a man instead of the dead. “Why haven’t you seen your son?”
“Why should I?” Bootstrap countered. With a sudden twist he had taken Norrington’s wrist and inverted their grip, pulling them closer. Water sloshed high enough to dot his knees with dampness. “I’m dead.”
“You lie about as well as he does,” Norrington laughed. The sound curled like a barb, like the water around their feet, like the fingers he hooked around the back of Bootstrap’s neck. Norrington sank his teeth deep into Bootstrap’s lip, and then Bootstrap remembered the other ebb and flow, the other kind of storm. The other kind of drowning.
* * *
Wood slipping beneath his hands, slicking it with slime as he scrabbled for a hold. His palms hurt first, then burned and then went raw with agony. And even now a pinch of pepper was enough to turn Bootstrap’s stomach, and so he gasped for water, for something that would blunt the intensity but what he got was spit and man. Flesh—tongue forcing his mouth open to it so his throat burned as well, so his insides were set afire and then there was no hope of quenching it. Nails dragged down his back through his clothes and his hand twisted loose of the rail, flung wildly about till it caught on Norrington.
But that was no guide—that was only another new agony. The bone of Norrington’s shoulder was sharp even through the thick cloth of his coat, was a searing line that curved as Bootstrap’s back did beneath the pressure of Norrington’s hands and mouth. He ripped his nails down Norrington’s front, got his hand beneath the coat and ground the heel of it against Norrington’s ribs. Maybe he was trying to break free the thundering beat he could hear there. Maybe he was trying to drive Norrington closer, to press into oblivion the demand that was suddenly rising in his flesh and that was feeling an answering demand in Norrington’s body.
It was too dark to see, and all Bootstrap could hear was the sound of Norrington’s raspy, angry breathing. Where the water had gone, he had no idea.
Eight years, and the thought of that was a rage in Bootstrap’s blood, a bite readying itself in his mouth, a furious grab in his fingers. Eight damned years for nothing at all, and now he had to live with it and he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to.
But he wanted it, and damn Norrington for that. Damn him while his tongue stroked the pulse back to life in Bootstrap’s neck, damn him while his hand wrapped both their pricks, and damn him damn him damn him most of all when Bootstrap jerked and bucked and didn’t breathe but thirsted for air.
* * *
In the morning the sea was the color and flatness of a cutlass blade, and the sky crouched like a dog over the scraps of men that dragged themselves beneath it. It was something of a shock for Bootstrap to find that he could still read it, and perhaps even better than before. The water seethed at the lines of the ship, and he heard its grumblings as clearly as he heard Norrington’s tread behind him.
“Did you have my son?” he asked.
Norrington stopped. “What manner of question is that?”
“It’s a question.” Bootstrap ran his tongue over his teeth till the blood came, but he still tasted the other man’s leavings from last night in his mouth. It nauseated him.
It made him clutch at the railing and try to will his stomach to stop hungering. Food would do him no good.
“No,” Norrington stiffly said. “Never. I would never—”
“Never is something you say when you’re sure you’re going to stay in the grave,” Bootstrap spat out. He passed the back of his hand over his mouth, then pressed his palm to his forehead. He had a headache. The memory of the last headache he’d had was long gone, so he could not tell whether it was worse than he remembered.
The other man turned and walked steadily towards the helm. But Bootstrap could still feel Norrington’s stare on him.
He stared at the foamless waves for a long time, but not long enough to keep him from glancing back.
* * *
“I’ve never even looked that way at your son,” Norrington hissed, hands ripping at Bootstrap’s shirt. He tried to rise, to lift his fingers to Bootstrap’s face, but Bootstrap shook him off.
“Shut up.” His hasty dip into the lamp hadn’t given Bootstrap enough oil but he didn’t care. He stabbed his fingers into himself and thought about how much worse other things had hurt, and when Norrington’s hands crept round he yanked out his fingers to shove them back.
But Norrington wouldn’t give up, and finally Bootstrap had to let the man run his hands over sides, beneath shirt and up chest as if they were something soft like lovers. Press his mouth to Bootstrap’s throat and shoulders and jaw, hard but not hard enough for it to be as impersonal as a flood. Each one burned individually instead, ate at Bootstrap so his prick twitched and rose in Norrington’s hand. “I know it’s easier if you pretend there’s no feeling—”
“Shut up.” Bootstrap clawed away Norrington’s hands. Before the other man could touch him again, he pinned Norrington down with one hand and took Norrington’s prick in the other and pushed himself down on it. Even the pain was a burn, and not a swamping wave.
“God,” Norrington said. And “Stop” and “Slower” and “I wanted—” but the last thing Bootstrap wanted to listen to was him.
He had to anyway. In the end he lost his strength and had to cleave to the other man, and then all he could hear was the frantic fluttering of Norrington’s heart. Little thing of air and water both, so damned frail and so likely to fail. But it didn’t.
* * *
“I never, ever looked at Will like that,” Norrington whispered later. He sounded wondering, sardonic. Regretful, maybe, because Will was still good and shining and would have been easier.
And Norrington said, his hand curling softly over Bootstrap’s back: “We could hang for this.”
“What does hanging mean to me? It’s only dying again.” He could feel hurt now, Bootstrap discovered. The stiffening beside him, and the long low silence that enshrouded them. But he hardly cared.
* * *
On deck, and the rain was coming harder and harder. It drove deep against Bootstrap’s face, pummeling him till he could feel the blood rising. His feet slipped, slid over the wet deck but he hung onto a rope and he let the erratic rhythms of the water tell him where to move.
“The sails will rip!” Norrington shouted. The wind drowned him and he floated to the surface a sodden, shaking thing that flapped and twisted awkwardly beside Bootstrap. His fingers slipped on his rope.
“A little longer!” Bootstrap told him. Watching the waves, and not Norrington’s hand. Watching them and feeling their lashing rage, their anger at a sky that wouldn’t leave, that always arched above as if to remind that for all their power, there was still a realm yet left unconquered. That there was a hope.
Bootstrap spat on the deck, and violently shook the wet hair from his eyes. He noosed his rope around his wrist and felt the bite, the blood welling in bruises beneath his skin and he wanted to shout if more of that was all there was. If it was to be another eight, only a waste on land instead of in the water. If there’d ever be an end, if he wanted an end, if if if. If things would stop and go away so he could think.
The wind wailed.
No, that was the men—a lieutenant, catching Bootstrap and whirling him about to scream in his face. But Bootstrap was looking beyond him, over his shoulder to the nothing on the deck where a moment ago Norrington had been standing.
The strangle around his wrist loosed and an invisible one choked him as his feet skidded across the deck. He let them and hit the rail almost but not quite hard enough to topple over it, and for once he didn’t want to wait but he had to. He listened and then he pointed.
He was shouting. Though he only realized it later, when they’d heaved Norrington back on deck and Bootstrap opened his mouth to curse everything and found his throat too raw to speak.
* * *
White skin, white as foam but clammier and much more still. So white the stubble of Norrington’s brown hair looked black against it.
His two lieutenants dropped him on the table, in such a rush were they, but he didn’t notice. As rough as they were, his eyes stayed closed and his head lolled and his slack limbs did not jerk with the pain.
“Get his shirt open,” said the one lieutenant, nearly weeping.
The other already had it done, and was babbling brokenly about expelling water and perhaps a bellows only they didn’t have one small enough on board, did they, and oh, dear God this couldn’t happen. He barely noticed Bootstrap shoving him aside.
The first one did, and he protested but of course Bootstrap wasn’t listening to that. While the man was protesting, Bootstrap turned Norrington on his side and laid one hand between the man’s shoulderblades that still cut his palm though they were ice-cold. The other he pressed to Norrington’s chest where the beating should be, and then he knelt so his forehead touched the table and he finally called back instead of waiting. Instead of dying over and over again.
His knees went. His head banged the edge of the table as it went down and cold water flooded over him, invaded his nose so he thought—he feared—he was terrified he was drowning again. But his hand caught. And fingers curled around his wrist, and he held.
Bootstrap heard a dull thud as his knees hit the floor. His vision went black, came back to the light and woke to see sea-green eyes unshuttering to stare at him when he lifted his head.
“Sea-witch,” Norrington rasped. He didn’t smile; he was too exhausted and it wasn’t a joking matter. The table around him had been wet before, but was now so soaked with the water he’d coughed up that miniature waterfalls ran off the edge, drenched Bootstrap as well.
And Bootstrap didn’t answer, but instead rested his forehead against the edge of the table and grasped Norrington’s hand. He breathed, and waited for them to dry.
* * *
Will lifted his head and stopped. Stared.
When he did come to the fence, he walked hesitantly as if the ground would fall from beneath him any moment. “Father?”
“If you wish it,” Bootstrap said. Every second he was rediscovering a new aspect of nervousness and he very much could have done without remembering that.
His son broke into a broad smile and threw open the gate. “Of course I do. Come and meet my fiancée—”
“Elizabeth.” The memory hadn’t slipped.
* * *
A shadow fell over Bootstrap, but he didn’t look up or rise from his crouch at the end of the pier. He dribbled water through his fingers, watched how the drops rejoined the currents. “Strong winds tomorrow.”
“Good news for me, not so good for the Navy, I expect.” Jack delicately flapped his coat out of the way as he squatted beside Bootstrap. His voice lost its casual lilt. “Bill, I thought you were dead.”
“Bill is. Call me Bootstrap—it’s less confusing.” Bootstrap flicked the last of the water from his hand and took a deep breath, then looked at his former friend. And much to his surprise, he saw an old friend instead. “I’m sorry I didn’t step in sooner.”
The black smeared around Jack’s lashes had nothing on the black of his eyes, for they could glitter or dull or snap as they pleased. But now they rolled, looked forgiving as Jack slapped Bootstrap on the shoulder. “You did by me well enough in the end. Ah…you lived, I got my Pearl back, your boy’s set to marry and Barbossa’s dead.” Extra gleaming gold in that smile. “The ending’s all that counts, and to me that sounds like a fine one.”
“Is it over?” Bootstrap said. His tone was light enough with a phantom of their old camaraderie. But it was only a phantom, and Jack could see it.
“Maybe not. And you know Will’s never going to be Bill to me, or to anyone. Entirely different bird, him.” Jack dramatically widened his eyes and jerked back, holding up his hands. “Ah, now, not that I’d ever be thinking of taking him on. I know what you said back then…one pirate in the family’s good enough.”
Then he folded his hands as if in prayer, but the lips he pressed to their edges were quirked in curiosity, and the eyes staring around them were filled with ungodly cleverness. He tilted his head, waiting.
Bootstrap arched an eyebrow.
“On the other hand, appears a space has opened up.” Jack laughed, as he always did when matters turned serious, and began to rise. But he stopped halfway, rested his hand on Bootstrap’s shoulder the way he had before when he’d been asking—truly asking—and wanted a true answer. “Drowning and the Navy—you sure the one’s better than the other?”
“Don’t ask till you’ve gone through both,” Bootstrap said. He stayed a moment longer beneath Jack’s hand, then shrugged it off. Though he turned and caught it almost immediately, they both felt the change in the water.
This time, Jack’s smile was darker. “Who says I haven’t?” He squeezed Bootstrap’s hand, then let go. “Aye, but not your way, of course. We had a good run, mate, but if you’ve made up your mind…”
“This suits me well enough,” Bootstrap said, watching the fort wall. There was a speck of blue on it, blue as the ocean, and as Jack walked away it started to come down.
Bootstrap waited for him.
***