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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Will/Elizabeth, Jack/Will, Will/Norrington, Elizabeth/Norrington
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, and why you thought so.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: Tláloc was the Aztec god of rain, consort to Chalchiúhtlicue, goddess of the ocean. He had equal status with the god of war Huitzilopochitli, the patron god of the Aztecs, and was somewhat kinder than the other gods. AU from the first scene of the movie. Supernatural stuff.
Summary: James slowly puts together the pieces of faith and love and friendship.
***
A ship is a small world and its captain its god. So said some wise man, once upon a time.
James would not go so far, though it was true at least that the captain was the sinkhole toward which every activity within the ship, however small, inevitably spiraled. Good strong captains were ready for whatever came falling their way, while weak ones were justifiably caught off-guard. So he had believed, once upon a time.
Tonight he sat in his cabin, bloody bandage tight around his writing arm and quill in hand. The ink was rapidly drying upon the tip, yet he still did not know how to describe what had happened. Keeping the log demanded accuracy, truth free of fancy and qualifiers, and yet the truth of this night was in the fantastic and the scarcely believable—or what would be the scarcely believable, were there not wounded men groaning through the walls and above, the tired steady wet thump of the mop washing the blood off the decks.
He put quill to paper and found that the scratches he made wrote nothing, for the ink had dried. James dipped his pen again and listed the wounded and the dead. Then he stared at the precise thin black words and wondered that they did not burn through the book.
His arm pained him, but his head and heart pained him more.
* * *
The pirate was below in the brig, awaiting a judgment which no longer seemed certain and well-defined in James’ mind. And in the dark narrow passages of the ship, there were whispers.
Will, voice raspy and hurting. “I love you.”
It was an odd sensation that accompanied James’ hearing. A dull, spreading ache, like a bruise welling beneath the skin.
“I never should have taken it.” Elizabeth, sounding far older and bitter than her years and nature should have allowed. “God, Will, I love you, but—”
“You should marry him. He wasn’t a part of this. The farther you go from anything—anyone involved—the harder it’ll be for it to touch you again.”
There was a gasp from Elizabeth that drifted into the softest sigh and James could see clearly in the dark how Will must have so lightly touched her cheek, drawn his rough fingertips carefully over her delicate skin.
“I don’t know what’s coming to me now, and I don’t know whether I can keep it from you,” Will went on. His voice strengthened with desperation. The planks creaked as the pair of them clutched each other nearer to James. “I still see.”
“I know. I know. I had to pay her, and I didn’t understand then what she meant but now I think I do.” Elizabeth had tears in her voice, but they were already drying as if she had said her farewells and was now sinking into the dull haze of widowhood. Her tone James had heard so many times coming from the wives of his dead men, the bitter distant acceptance of those who knew too well that they were overmatched by life.
He abruptly remembered the little girl who’d sung to the Caribbean fog, the high piping defiant voice.
Through the walls came a low long groan, and then a muffled shriek. They had been two hours under sail and still the surgeon plied his trade, and still James’ entry in the log remained no more than a bare list of casualties without rhyme or reason to it. Part of him thought that that was more fitting than any words he could produce, but he knew his duty. He hoped.
Beyond him were the harsh, rough sounds of a stolen embrace, and suddenly the burn in his chest worsened. He raised his hand to steady himself against the walls, but a swell of the sea sent it careening against some overhanging thing that clattered.
All sound ceased.
Then, very dimly, James thought he heard the rumble of thunder.
* * *
Elizabeth looked well, save for her wise-worn eyes. Those seemed to have sunk deeper into her face, and sometimes when she turned sideways to James, the flicker of light and shadow painted her brown and wrinkled…but still not unbeautiful. Her hands remained slender and graceful as they adjusted the lanterns, their white gleaming bluish instead of the expected warm red and yellow.
“I believe before all of this started, you were planning to present me with a proposal. I accept it, and I’m certain that my father will approve.” No trace of indecision lingered in her voice, but her finger slipped on the knob of the second lantern. It threw its light wide and high, changing the dark brown of her eyes into an eerie deep black-blue surrounded by glowing white, like the sea at night.
“That’s…rather impetuous of you. I never finished making it, so you couldn’t possibly know the substance of it.” But beautiful as she was, James would have had her as she had been before. At least then he could have been sure that he spoke to a real woman, and not some phantom of the moonlight. He had had enough of…of that. Though to his red-cheeked shame, he still could not bring himself to put concrete words to it.
She shrugged and rested her hands on the table, standing across from him. “I thought you would have learned to expect that from me.”
“Impetuosity, yes. But not…not…Elizabeth, I would be honored if you became my wife, but I would be dishonored and damned if I took you from some…prior claim on your attentions,” James said. The heat of the light on his face made the sweat rise and gather beneath his wig. An itch began to crawl along his hairline and over the back of his neck.
Elizabeth glanced down at her hands and smiled, almost rueful. “You’re a good man, Commodore Norrington, but you haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Then tell me. Tell me what I don’t—what were those pirates before they began to die, and what was your connection to Jack Sparrow. Tell me what you and Will and that pirate were doing while my men were dying.” The temper rose in James’ voice and cracked out his words. Immediately afterward he was sorry for it, but he saw that while the sting had laid deep into Elizabeth, it had not cut her down.
Instead she lifted her head and came round the table, and the press of her clenched fist against the corner turned her knuckles chill white as her eyes were angry black. A hectic flush had risen in her cheeks. “I was a silly fool, and Will a gallant one, and now we’re both paying for it. You saw those pirates—we laid them to rest, and it cost him his peace of mind and it cost me my girlhood.”
Then she fell silent, only her eyes moving to search his face. They lingered on the sick fear rising in James.
After a moment, Elizabeth turned her back to him and faced the ocean beyond the window. “No, don’t blame Will or Jack Sparrow for that. They had nothing—men had nothing to do with it. If you want frankness, then I will be frank with you. I would not come to the altar a maiden. I may not be able—I may not be able to bear you children. I don’t know. Her price might not include that.”
“She?” James echoed, trying to make sense of it.
Outside the wind rose and it flung in a fresh sharp smell of rotten salt, a reminder of the vast waters that lay beyond the frail wood of the ship. It was raining, James thought. He could hear the soft pattering, nearly a whisper.
“But I would be a good wife to you, I think.” Elizabeth leaned forward to place her hands on the sill of the window. When she bowed her head, her hair streamed in rivers of gold and brass and carnelian down her back, as if she had been transformed into some pagan idol. But her voice was indisputably human. “It would be a favor you’d do me, James.”
“And what of Will? What bargain are you making? I’ve already said that he won’t be charged—he was clearly a prisoner—” James stopped, for Elizabeth was laughing. Softly, beneath her breath, and not at all in happiness.
She eventually ceased, and once again began to stare at the water. “I’m done with bargaining. I only ask you, James. Please.”
In the end, he left her. He shied from the line of her back and the tresses of her hair, and he told her he would come to see her again when she was in better spirits. Somehow, though she still had not turned, he thought she had smiled at that, and shed a few tears. He could almost taste the tang on his tongue.
* * *
Will looked terrible and terrifying, pale and gaunt like a worm-eaten ivory idol tossed up on the shore. He leaned against the bars of the cell across from Jack’s and spat fury. “You let him send his men out to the ship. Jack, we didn’t even warn them—”
“And rightly not, for they would’ve called you worse than sick.” The pirate was little more than a swaying shadow that occasionally brushed over Will, but nevertheless there was a familiarity that soured in James’ mouth.
He bent down to check on the guard posted at the end of the brig, felt a slight snore whuff his hand, and was both surprised and angered that someone on the ship could still find sleep so easily. But then James bent nearer and heard to the unnaturally slow breath of the guard.
“I’ve done what I needed to, and you’ve done what you’ve needed to, and Elizabeth did what she needed to. So we’ve all excused ourselves by calling on expedience and can hardly point fingers, Will.” First one hand and then the other threaded its way through the bars, as if Sparrow were lounging against them. His effortless, unruffled certainty grated on James. “But I suppose I’d understand if you’re changing your mind. Wouldn’t be well for the fiancé of the governor’s daughter to have any blots in his past.”
“I’m not marrying her.” Eyes closed, Will let his head fall back against the bars. His hands clasped each other before him, squeezing and twisting and finally locking on his wrists.
Jack’s many baubles jingled as he straightened. “No?”
It was a long time before Will answered, and when he did, he used the same exhausted, too-knowing tone as Elizabeth. “So many men have died down here…only a month ago, there was one dead of infection and broken spirit in your cell. I can see him snarling over your shoulder.”
James stiffened and felt himself turn cold, first at tips of fingers and nose and then rapidly spreading inward. Because that was true, and because they had dumped the pirate’s body at sea and because even if Will had learned of it from the gossip, there was no way he could have known which cell.
When Jack answered, the flippancy had been stripped from his tone to leave bare a harder, hotter core. “Just as well I can’t see him, then. Who were you seeing instead of me on the beach, William Turner?”
“It doesn’t matter now, does it? They aren’t here now. I am.” Suddenly Will pushed off the bars and across the passage to grab the bars above Jack’s hands. “And I love Elizabeth but when I touch her I feel her ghosts and I know she can see mine in my eyes. I’ll not marry her to that. We’d haunt each other to an early death.”
“Are you making me a proposal, then?” The slim brown hand flipped over, slow, and splayed its fingers to almost graze Will’s cheek. Jack shifted and Will shifted back, but only a little.
James found he was praying hard for Will to reply.
But when Will did not, Jack did. His fingertips traced over Will’s hair while the other man stared at something dully horrible in Jack’s cell. “Then I’ll make one. I liked what I saw of you, Will. And I’ll wager that I can help you show me more of that.”
His hand darted forward, quick as a snake-strike, and twisted in Will’s hair. One moment Will was against the bars, and the next he had ripped himself away. His face seemed chalked onto the damp darkness, and he lifted a hand to his mouth to wipe away drops of something. “You don’t know who you’re asking.”
“Oh, but I think I do. Even if you don’t, yet. Been a while since you’ve been alone, hasn’t it?” Strangely enough, Jack sounded as if he meant it kindly, but his words only made Will stumble the quicker away.
If he was to do any thinking and map a way through his confusion, James should have withdrawn without leaving notice of his presence. But instead he stayed, and he lifted his hands so when Will fell heavy against him, he could catch the other man.
* * *
In the light of dawn Will looked no better. He slumped in the chair and stared up at James with near-mocking drained eyes and lips still flecked with the blood he had coughed up while James had dragged him back to the captain’s cabin.
“And that is what you expect me to believe,” James said, one hand bracing himself against the rock of the ship and the other pressed hard to his forehead. The clarity of the sunlight now streaming in both shocked and hurt him; the greyness of a cloudy day would have been easier to bear. “A curse and unkillable pirates…”
“Formerly unkillable. And no, I don’t expect you to believe anything.” Will lifted his palm and stared at it, as if reading the lines.
“Especially that you and Elizabeth would cleave from each other now, after she’s risked life and virtue to save you. After such adventures, I hardly—”
The grip around James’ wrist was iron, and shaking, and the look in Will’s eyes flashed mad and red as the sun over a battlefield. But then it faded to show fear and worry, and those were directed, oddly enough, at James.
“I missed your lessons,” Will said. He drew James closer, then released him and leaned back. Now his face was more akin to the old men of the town, who sat on their porches and sadly watched the world that had moved beyond them. “She would do better at your side than mine.”
“Are you planning to help Sparrow escape and to flee with him?” James reached for Will, glimpsed something in Will’s palm and seized it. He turned it over to see a wicked scar grinning up at him. “What is this…some pirate’s mark he’s put on you?”
Then Will was on his feet and pushing back James, mouth set in a grim line. “No. This has little to do with Jack Sparrow, except that possibly he’s the only one who isn’t a fool. Take care of Elizabeth, commodore.”
“James.” The correction came awkwardly and thickly off of James’ tongue. He still held Will by the scarred palm and as he drew them sharply together, he thought he felt the burnt skull twist, bite at his thumb.
Will was sweet and bitter, struggling then yielding then matching. He had still been a boy when James had ended their contact, feeling the pressure of responsibility and rank and also resisting the urge to see Will as something else, but now it was impossible to deny that Will had grown into a man. And that James had wanted, did want this press of Will’s body against his own and the uneven tender-hard play of their lips against each other. He grew dizzy, tasting lightning. And for the briefest moments, he thought he touched the very edge of a different world.
But then Will broke them apart. His eyes glittered wet, and his lips were twisted into a grotesque half-smile. “James. Believe me when I tell you that you want no part of this—that I haven’t told you half the truth.”
He raised his marked hand towards the mirror on the wall and it dulled, blackened. At first James thought it was tarnish at an impossible speed, but then he saw the wavering and he realized it was smoke. Some face danced behind it, so gruesome and furious that James took a step back before he realized.
There was no fire for the mirror to be reflecting. And Will had gone.
When James looked back at the mirror, he saw that it was clear silvered glass once more.
* * *
What arrangements Will and Elizabeth had made, James never knew and never bothered to find out. He had reeled from the glimpse of truth and had sought refuge in the old order, the comforting routine of putting to port and repairing and restocking.
After the funerals of his men who had been killed, he had nightmares. And on the night before Jack Sparrow’s hanging, James made no attempt to seek sleep but instead paced back and forth all night, trying to decide to whom to speak. At last he decided to try resting, but a chance glance out the window showed him a red dawn.
In the morning, Elizabeth and her father met him halfway to the gallows. She offered him her arm and he took it, both warmed by the whiteness of her smile and alarmed at how wan it was.
“As you can see, I am better.” She lifted her chin into the bright sunlight and gazed upon the men on the gallows as if they were the whitecaps of the sea. Her hand was an ephemeral thing, barely palpable on James’ arm, and her voice was both melodious and hollow, like the echo of the ocean in a conch-shell.
Below the hangman had neared the midpoint of his recitation of Jack Sparrow’s crimes. The pirate himself looked calm, uncaring, as if he knew something that no one else did. It was entirely possible he did, for alone of the players in the moonlit nightmare, he seemed unscathed.
“I thought you had some fondness for Sparrow. According to W—Mr. Turner, he provided some aid to you.” James was aware that his envy of the man was spinning his voice tight and tense, and he castigated himself for it.
But Elizabeth seemed untouched by the harsh twang and deep cut of his words. “We all earn our due and Jack is no exception. Nor do I believe he would wish to be.”
The recital ended, the hangman was stepping towards Jack with the noose hanging between his hands. And in the crowd there was a commotion headed by Will, his dress somber and spare but for the sharp silver sword strapped to his side. He nodded to the Governor, who was stiff in his surprise, and then he turned to Elizabeth. His eyes flicked from her to James and then back to her, and she straightened beside James like a diver preparing to launch.
“Whatever wrongs I may have done you, please forgive me for them. For I do and will always love you,” Will said, eyes fixed on Elizabeth. He bowed. “From the moment we met.”
Then he was gone, slipped into the crowd quicker and more quietly than smoke spiraling into nothing. By the wall something red and yellow flickered—a jaunty-garbed parrot, but for some reason James felt a chill upon glimpsing it.
Elizabeth stayed in profile to James, but he could see a thin, wet-blue film spread over her eyes. Behind them both her father was exclaiming and muttering his way through the implications of Will’s words, and before them—
--silver flashed at the gallows and Elizabeth gasped. Delicate as a flower, she wilted. But when James caught her and strove to stand her back on her feet, her grip holding him down was stronger than iron.
“Is this your choice?” he hissed, just before laying her down and ripping himself away to chase Will and Sparrow. He thought he had guessed it.
* * *
James’ heart was in his throat and so he could not speak the order to hold fire. Elizabeth signaled it for him, sliding before the bayonets with her arms outstretched.
“Elizabeth!” her father exclaimed.
“Father, I’m sorry.” But she did not waver as she took first one step back and then another and another, shielding Will and Jack. Because James still could not speak, the soldiers advanced as she retreated until they were standing on the edge of the cliffs.
Over her shoulder the pirate’s black eyes gleamed with mayhem and madness and, startlingly enough, a trace of melancholy. He tipped his fingers at James. “I was rooting for you, commodore. Better the law than the divine, so they say.”
And then he was gone, fluttering sash all that James saw as Jack flung himself over the walls.
“Elizabeth?” Governor Swann repeated, a plea in his voice.
Her chin jerked down, but only for a moment because then Will was embracing her from behind, hands on her waist and face hidden in the fairness of her neck. He whispered something, sighed perhaps, and then withdrew to meet James’ eyes. And his gaze said a few last words to James as well, though James had not the wisdom to decipher their meaning.
A second later Will was gone as well, and Elizabeth was lowering her arms to stand unprotected and unregretful before them. “This is my choice,” she said, steadily and softly.
Then she took a step forward, and held out her hand to James.
Why he took it, he was never quite certain. It was because he did love her somehow, though he could not fathom the shadows that shaded so much of her now and he was blinded by the parts of her that were not in shadow. And because she needed him, and perhaps because he thought something of Will lingered on the curve of her throat. And perhaps…because the rattling of the drum still echoed in his ears, only muffled so it resembled the sound of the rain that was so like human speech.
* * *
They married. On their wedding night, in the sanctity of their bed chamber, he carefully gathered her to him and felt real fear shiver her body. Her hands moved uncertainly over his body and the dark blanks in her knowledge made her eyes like gaping wounds. But when he parted her legs and slipped within her folds, he found that she had not lied about that.
Much later in the night, he woke to find the bed empty and Elizabeth standing with one hand on the windowpane. It had been sunny for the vows, but now a light drizzle stirred the darkness.
Near dawn, he heard her wake and turn to look at him, standing at the half-open window so the light drops struck his face. Neither of them called to the other.
* * *
Once a month, Elizabeth rose far earlier than was her wont. She took up a basket of the bandages she had used to soak away her monthly courses and she washed them out in the sea.
James was not supposed to know of such things, but nevertheless he had learned. He overheard the whispers.
He did not realize for a long time that not all of them came from people. Matters of state preoccupied him, kept him long aboard his ships where there was little time to spend on speculation. Elizabeth proved her word and was an excellent wife to him, running household and society with a firm hand and a light laugh and a calm face. She was genuinely warm with him, he came to believe, and he in turn held her in higher regard than almost anything else. But if James found himself less reluctant than expected to attend to his duties away from Port Royal, he could not pretend it was not true. She was an excellent wife, but she was not, in the end, a great love.
If there was fault to be found in that, it lay on both sides. Perhaps three sides, or even four.
Occasionally information would blow in from far outposts, bits of news would stray across James’ desk, rumors would make his hands wander when he strove to mark positions on his maps. Sparrow had been sighted in this port, a strange occurrence had stirred that town. The odd sailor bearing too fine a sword for his appearance would pass through Port Royal. It would rain and, reading late in the library, James would look up and almost think he had heard a cry of welcome.
Sometimes he grew frustrated and angry wondering why he had not also been offered a choice. But then he would take his seat across from Elizabeth at the breakfast table, and he would see the way blue-purple veins strained beneath her always-blanched skin, and James would know that he would have taken the sure, the tried-and-true way. The way of least hurt.
Sometimes he wished he could help.
* * *
One night he was ashore and alone, Elizabeth having gone to visit with her ailing father in the mansion up the hill. Outside it was black and storming, and inside James stood in the library, hand on the window-latch. He would be a fool to lift it, but there seemed to be voices in the drumming rain and they wanted entry.
There was a face. James exclaimed, threw himself backward against a chair, and on the other side of the glass Will pressed his hand to the pane. He opened it somehow and pushed into the room, so wet that his hair and clothes made him like a great seal rising from the ocean, like the vague memories of selkies James had from the Irish maid in the household of his childhood.
“You’ve been calling,” Will said. He reached behind himself and closed the windows, then stood dripping on the carpet. Life sparked his eyes and crowded out most of the gauntness that had afflicted him the last time James had seen him, but enough remained to carve his face into a portrait out of an illuminated text.
“Have I?” The pressure of James’ fingers on Will’s wet sleeve turned the dripping into thready rivulets. “Who else does?”
Instead of answering him, Will leaned close and rested his lips against the corner of James’ mouth. He paused, then moved them a fraction. When Will paused again, James took Will’s head in his hands and turned them so their mouths fully met.
The fire went out, James remembered. It went out in a flare and a billow of smoke so large that some of it drifted into the room to be taken up by him in great gasping breaths, and the air cooled. Will was cool as well, his legs slippery and chilly, his neck like wet ice against James’ mouth. But he warmed under James’ hands, lips, tongue, and when he was wrapped about James he was flush-faced and burning, and all James saw in Will’s eyes was himself.
When they had coupled and were lying sated on the rug, James pulled at Will’s hand until he had turned it over to see the scar, still as sharp as the day the coin had apparently burnt it. He traced the edge with a finger and the shadows of the room darted out claws.
Will shivered, curled away from James and tried to withdraw his hand. But James held it, and finally the other man ceased trying.
“You see Elizabeth,” James said.
“When I can.” For a long moment Will’s eyes picked signs from James’ face, judged and weighed them. “Sometimes the sea calls her to it and I have to stay away because it won’t abide me then. Sometimes nothing calls her and then I have to stay away because I might bring something that would steal her from herself.”
It made a sense that James only half-recognized. If he closed his eyes and listened to the rain a little longer, he would root out all the meaning, but he did not. There were many nights when the falling water whispered, and so far only one where Will had appeared. “You travel with Jack Sparrow.”
“I do. The night is usually quiet around him. I can sleep.” Will stretched out his hand and touched dampness on James’ face. Sweat or rain, James couldn’t remember and couldn’t tell. “You weren’t part of it, but you’ve something after all…still, if I stayed more than a night you would have more, and worse, than in your most terrible nightmare.”
“It isn’t a night yet,” James whispered. He ran his hand up Will’s arm and down Will’s back to pull the other man to him, hoping Will would come.
And he did. But in the morning, he was gone.
* * *
Elizabeth looked at James once and knew, and he looked at her once and he felt the brief flash of jealousy that slipped from him to her and back. But then she put her hand in his and turned them to face the ocean.
“If I had written our lives, it would have gone differently,” she said. “Perhaps it would have been worse.”
“Perhaps it would have been better. But never mind it—we are writing them now.” James lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it. “Tell me, Elizabeth. I won’t stay out with my eyes closed any longer.”
She drew a long, shivering breath that seemed to echo in the shuddering white of the foam across the sea. Her fingers tightened on his own, and slowly, she began to tell the story from its beginning in fog and fire and furious blood, not leaving out anything.
He believed all of it.
***