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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG-13. Mention of character death.
Pairing: Jack/James
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, etc.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: For commodorified, as it's her birthday. Slight twist on the 'five things that never were' challenge.
Summary: Five-way reflection.
***
One morning the sunlight is white crystalline beams across a peaceful, content, wealthy town where no dark shadows dare to hide. The sky is transparently blue, the clouds are light and fluffy as fresh breakfast rolls, and the ships in the harbor heel gently to the breeze. Only the little rippling waves along their sides seem a little out-of-place, for they follow no rhythm except their own senseless one, and their breaking sends up a white froth that seems as if it should sting.
High up in the center of town, in a grand but discreet house, the guardian of this town, who keeps its serenity close and sheltered like a precious pearl, wakes as he always does. He rises as he always does, lowers first his right foot and then his left to the floor as he always does, and then he goes about his morning toilette as he always does. It is simple but thorough and cleansing, and at the end, he briefly glances in the mirror to see that not a speck is out of place. As he always does.
It is his wedding day.
Everything is perfect. And irrationally, he finds himself wishing for a slight crack somewhere, anywhere, everywhere.
* * *
That is where one strand ends. You might even say it breaks.
You might say it is a trick of the light. Put a stick in the water and look down at it, and it will seem snapped, but take it out and it is still whole.
* * *
In England the light is pale and weak, shy instead of bold, while belligerent gray thunderheads bully their way between the many steeples and towers. Great lords and sore-ridden beggars roll through the streets with the same implacable momentum, both classes only giving the slightest precedence to gold hilts and stiff brocade and crisp-cornered hats. Here the ranking are a pound a penny, and the whole world seems to pour down into this one proud, stinking, raucous city.
James holds up his chin and uses his scabbard to part the way before him as his ship, wallowing unhappily at her moorings, would if she were free and swooping through the free waters of the Caribbean. Like the city, the river all the way out to sea is crowded with denizens of all kinds, and all of them consider themselves the best merely for within the sphere of London. Of the many that he passes on the way to the Admiralty, he doubts that one in a hundred would know beyond which horizon Jamaica is, let alone have any kind of appreciation for that distant frontier outpost.
He is home, and he is happy. It has been a long exile from proper civilization. And yet, when the good commodore finally enters the halls of his beloved Navy, his mind stubbornly misses the inherent significance of history and power, and instead fixates on the dark cramped spaces encroaching upon him.
They nod without looking up at his orders, his rank so recently and proudly acquired, and he is set kicking his heels with a dozen others. Across from him is a heavy baroque-bordered oval of silver, and when James looks into it, he notes as a matter of course that his appearance at least is impeccable. Never mind the slow unraveling within him.
He is home, he tells himself.
* * *
Some strands are thicker than others. Some are frayed at the ends.
* * *
It is his duty and he would never be able to look at himself again if he shirked it. So he stands for the duration of the proceedings, ignoring all the manner of looks, and then he pivots smartly to accompany the little group to the longboat. Considering the notoriousness of the limp bundle beside him, his presence is essential to dispelling any lingering expectations of misguided hope. No matter who they are or what their deeds, all men come to the same end: dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
In the pirate's life, however, it is rot to fishes.
Hanging up the corpse is always an awkward matter, and especially now since the hanging was twice-delayed by futile pleas till the tide came in. The boat rocks, and the sailors bite down on their curses as they try to maneuver it near enough to the gallows' pilings.
Perhaps it would have been more sensible to wait the hours till this was soft sucking sand instead of water, but Norrington believes it better to hurry. If he waited, he only risked his most potent warning being stolen away, as it had itself so many times before. So he takes a hand in it, braces his foot on the piling and tosses the rope over the crossbar.
But when they haul on the end, nothing but a black-faced scoundrel goes up, his commonplace patchwork finery flapping ridiculously in the wind. Norrington hands the rope over to his men because he feels ill. Cheated again.
He leans over the side of the boat while they secure the corpse, and in the momentary smooth dips of the waves, he sees the true face grinning up at him. Sparrow always escapes-even now. And James cannot bear to look.
* * *
Pluck up another strand from the dirt and follow its crusted trail, as Theseus followed his yarn through the bloody labyrinth of Minos. Perhaps it will lead to daylight, and perhaps it will not.
* * *
The glass is so thickly covered with black marks, some finger-shaped and some not, and razor-edged fractures that James can barely make out the general shape of his face. If he contorts head and shoulders, he is briefly able to glimpse a flash of dull green he recognizes as his eyes, a glimpse of rough stubble, but more than that, he cannot see. Yet he stays there a long time, because the mirror is an objective speaker and it is the only one he knows now.
His boots have the tops folded unevenly down to hide the raggedness of their tops and his trousers are a size too large because they were made to fit a different, now dead, man. The pistols stuck into the waistband make them sag even more, and the gay strip of sash wound about his waist does nothing to correct that. The shirt he wears is too stained and remended for him to know what its original color was, and the coat draped over his shoulders is velvet crusted over in patches, a suffocating close wrap in the steamy heat.
Long brown arms go about him, tightening his choke, and long clever fingers try to tease between his pathetic scraps as if to pull his broken puppetry back together. Then Jack kisses the side of James' face, licking softly at the gold ring piercing James' ear, and the heat and the rum and the meaning are nearly enough for forgetting.
But James never in his life has settled for forgetting. "Jack, I'm not myself."
"Can see that plain enough," comes the breathless wheedle. "Nothing wrong with-"
"I am not myself," James hisses, jerking away. He hunches over the remains of an indulgent, excessively rich breakfast that now sits turgid and poisoning in his gut. "And I can no longer find myself."
The tarnished, greasy silver plate between his hands shows him nothing but what another man has made of him.
* * *
The children play a game of cat's cradle with mere string. From one form they move to another and another, until finally they invert to the beginning.
It's a good metaphor.
* * *
The day afterward, James tarries a few moments in bed as he tries to understand what has happened. In the heat of the moment, with two pairs of young, foolish, brave, loving--but that was not for him-eyes on him and one pair that should known better than to laugh, he had acted and it had all seemed to flow in one irresistible, right direction. But out of the stream, he lies and stares at the ceiling and wonders what on earth was it going to mean?
Habit and duty call, and he rises soon enough. But when he looks in the mirror just prior to leaving for the day, as is his wont, he pauses once more. Is he the same man as the day before yesterday?
Is that the same ocean beyond his window?
Jack Sparrow is out there, James thinks, and they would meet again. He would see to that, if the other man did not. But…it is now a question as to what would happen after that. Because uncertain as James is, gazing out on this world that is new and still the same, he genuinely does not know.
***