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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: R
Pairing: Will/Jack, Will/James, implied Jack/James.
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, etc.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: For the contrelamontre ‘doubles’ challenge. Done in 44 minutes.
Summary: Will doesn’t wish to think in halves.
***
Down and down and down, ragged the breathing goes. Whenever he comes, it’s always fast till the edge threatens to windburn off the top layer of Will’s skin, hard so that the next day Will has to bend over his forge like old age has already warped him and the fire has finally baked him that way. His brocade rasps Will raw as the closed expression that is all Will gets for his open door.
None of them could hold her. In the end, she was gold and glitter and all herself, with no room for any of them.
Maybe it could be called making do. Or maybe it could be called something else. When he comes, he pours dirty-silk words into Will’s ear as his rings mark Will’s hips with the only taste of gold and silver and jewels Will has these days. Even the stray coin has abandoned him now, the officers stepping light around Will’s little dank hole in the market, their noses high so they shan’t smell the lingering odor of pirate that always clings to him, no matter how long he stands on the sands and feels the water wash higher and higher.
Except the one. Norrington still comes round. At first it was to have the maker see to the made—good enough of a man that he won’t surrender Will’s work to any fumble-fingered fool with a whetstone—but then it was to check up on the blackened blacksmith. Perhaps to mock at the one who threw away all order and security on a gamble that nevertheless failed to pay out. Perhaps to offer a sympathy and an empathy Will would have spat on if he’d been able to. If he hadn’t needed that spare coin to shore up his stubborn residency.
She went, and she’s out there beyond Will. So he stays.
Jack slips in once in a while, always a glib smile and a tidbit of news of her rolling about his mouth, needing only that first stiff kiss to release it. He’s offered his hand more than once, and Will turns it down because even in his loss, Will wishes to be his own man. Not his father’s son, not her almost-husband, not Jack’s mate. Which begs oh-so-sweetly the question of why, time after time, Will rejects the offering of one hand and then twists to accept the other, head banging against the wall and fingers fisted in Jack’s hair. He’s cut his palm more than once on that long white bone and watched the blood drip down to clot in the dust, doing nothing.
They come and they go, and Will keeps his door open because though he lives in the dark, he still remembers to love that patch of blue sky in the frame.
He doesn’t make any attempt to hide the marks. The good commodore knows what he is doing, what he has chosen, and he takes Will all the harder for it. But his mouth lingers too long on the uneven bruises, the one darker because of the greater weight of a gold tooth, and he breathes too deeply when his face is pressed into Will’s neck where the musk of pirate lasts longest. In England, Will’s boyhood friends told him of great lords that kept hounds that could sniff out fox, rabbit, man; Norrington is the hound of the empire, so perhaps that is his reason.
Sometimes he approaches the subject oblique, fingers fidgeting faster with the recalcitrant buttons of his coat, nails catching in the froth of lace that he always carefully lays aside in the space with the least dust. He mentions the new birds’ feasts hanging at the entrance of the cay, the hangings he’s done, the laws he’s enforced. But Will’s eyes are more used to the dimness than Norrington’s and so he can pick out the difference between the hard jaw and the trembling eye.
He hasn’t made a sword in months. His fingers itch once in a while, and he takes up his tools, but he cannot think of a single man who deserves one.
The first time Jack left, Will woke to find the very best blade of his current stock missing. He did not begrudge that Jack, but as the time passed and the scent of rum soaked into his walls, clothes, skin and turned rancid, he started to watch the other man more closely. Jack is loud. Jack is daring and careless and lucky. Jack doesn’t care, and yet he always asks whereabouts the commodore. Sometimes he sits on the edge of Will’s bed and looks somber as he can and asks Will whether this respectability has killed him yet. But Jack doesn’t ever seem to tire of risking it.
Old Mr. Brown dies and is buried on a gray, stormy day, so Will ventures outward and pays his respects to that drunken, hypocritical, useless piece of humanity that has up-and-delivered his property into Will’s hands. Will didn’t ask for it.
Once they nearly crossed before Will: the back door was banging down on Jack’s tattered coattails when the starched, preening feathers of Norrington’s tricorne ducked in the front. The commodore’s eyes were darker and more desperate, his hands grasping at more of Will, and the darkness of the rafters glinted with sight. Will looked up and he saw.
As he sees now, standing in the rain beside Mr. Brown’s grave and looking beyond to see the Governor’s, father buried just in time to miss his daughter’s last renunciation. And beyond even that is the sea, with mist hanging low over it so Will seems to sight land where there should be none.
A place like that would suit him, he thinks. One in between like him, too piratical to settle and too orderly to live before the wind.
His fingers curl and stretch, and as he walks down the hill, he catches a glimpse of the sword he’ll make to rest in them flashing in the sky. It crashes white to earth and threatens to split the world asunder. And perhaps it will. Perhaps only he is close enough, safe enough to stand in the middle and hold both ends and cushion their grind. Perhaps he does have a role to play here, and perhaps it is a necessary one for preservation.
But there is a world beyond this world, where he can move and make his way without giving up to either side. Elizabeth’s found it, Will suddenly realizes, but it is not hers alone. It could be his. And like she was, he is now tired of being hurt both ways.
***