firesignwriter (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fsw) wrote,@ 2004-02-02 20:17:00 |
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F&F uni: zombie!Norri
One of several possible sequels to Fortune and Favor. This is affectionately known as zombie!Norri for reasons that should swiftly become obvious. I really like this one quite a bit, but I hit a bit of an impasse with it and have to think about a solution.
Length: somewhere around 4000 words.
It began with a bee sting.
Felt that way, at least. Commodore James Norrington strode commandingly across the street, his blood not yet cooled after just delivering a scathing reprimand to a few guardsmen in the Thirsty Crown who'd forgotten their place and purpose in this town, and then there came the bee. Or the sting. Right to his neck, sharp and intense. He slapped his hand to the place and wrenched the tiny thing from his flesh. Pulled it before his eyes.
It wasn't a bee.
It was, in fact, more of a dart. A strange, narrow little assembly that looked like nothing so much as a sewing needle stuck in a tiny lump of feathers and wood that might have been some misguided deity's efforts at creating a hummingbird.
He took a step. Tried to take another. Tried to turn his head, slant his eyes, find the source, the threat, the hive.
His blood cooled then, in a flood that radiated from the sting outward. Head unturned, step untaken, he instead only managed to fall.
And though his open eyes saw it and his open mouth pressed into it, he didn't even feel the ground that caught him.
Somebody screamed.
He should get up -- should find out why.
There were running feet, clad in boots with soles that made them sound quite determined. "Commodore!" was shouted. One of the men he'd just rebuked. Gibson, that was it. Then a wrench he didn't really feel except by the sight of the world spinning by as the man turned him, rolled him to his back, stared into his eyes as if looking for life.
Norrington tried to tell him he was fine, it was just this damned unnatural bee. But words...the very thought of voicing them took so much effort...
"Get help! Somebody, now!" A hand on his chest. The back of a hand placed over his mouth. "He's not breathing..."
That just didn't make sense. Dead people didn't breathe. Living people breathed all the time. Didn't even have to think about it.
Bemused, he tried to frown. That didn't work either.
Odd. Decidedly odd.
He'd really rather expected to die at sea.
***
The doctor declared him dead. Then, moments later, noticed the faintest of faint movements of his chest, rising and falling, and declared him alive, only...Elsewhere. Or dead and not yet aware of it. Hard to say for certain.
Really, Norrington thought, the doctor should've been able to be a bit more specific than that. He, for one, would greatly appreciate having some clue as to what limbo he might be in, or why, or if he still lived. And if not, why did he remain? Why was he trapped inside his body like a cage?
Why did someone have to close his eyes? Now he could only hear and guess.
Unbidden, the thought entered his mind: was this how it was for the pirates he'd hanged? Did they...linger? When he passed the grisly corpses displayed in warning to all their kith, did they know him? Hate him until the last of their flesh rotted away and their bones finally fell into the sea?
The doctor, rather useless, left. A priest replaced him. Norrington entertained brief, skeptical hope, but the prayers and invocations and strident demands for demons to flee ultimately did nothing. He supposed he'd been anointed with oils, holy water, religious symbols. Perhaps he lacked the requisite faith. Perhaps there was a God, an angry one, and this confinement was punishment of sorts.
Somewhere in the wandering time, he encountered fear. Sought to master it. Found that stoicism proved less reliable in the privacy of one's own soul, where a man couldn't stiffen his jaw, square his shoulders, straighten his spine or call on any of those physical reassurances that let him know he still had control of something.
Words reached him. Lieutenant Gillette. How long had he been there, talking in such a quiet, thick voice? Ah, Gillette. Loyal to a fault. Norrington didn't want to be his icon of perfection. Wouldn't be, if Gillette knew the reach of his commodore's weaknesses.
Pirates swinging, rotting, warning. Fewer than there should be. Certainly fewer than there could be, had he the strength of will and purpose credited to him.
He tried, very hard, to move a limb. A finger. A toe. Anything.
Nothing.
His body, the gaol. The irony made him want to laugh. But of course he couldn't.
And then came another voice.
***
"Hurry."
Lieutenant Groves. Ellis. Friend, such as he had them, and sometimes confidant.
"Can't rush this, mate. There's an order to things."
That -- was most definitely not the voice of an officer.
He fought to speak and failed.
"You really believe this will work?"
"Hm. 'Believe' is a strong word."
"Jack."
"If we don't try it, he dies. If we do try it, he might die. Given the options, have you anything to say?"
"... Wake him up, Jack."
Things clacked. Things rattled. But he'd ordered Sparrow's hair shorn. What...?
"You know, Commodore..." Softly spoken. For his ears alone. "To be quite honest with you, my life'd be a whole lot easier if you just decided to not come outta this. So don't feel like you have to rush back to the land of the living, eh?"
Anger coiled like a snake in his stomach.
In his stomach. He felt his stomach?
"Did he swallow it?"
"Aye." With a sigh.
"That means he'll recover?"
"Might."
"How...how do we know...?"
His blood -- boiled. Breath hitched in his throat. Crawled brokenly down into his lungs, shuddering, stuttering. He gasped it in voraciously.
"There it is," Sparrow said resignedly. "He lives."
"Jesus Christ," Ellis breathed.
"Flattered, but no."
Norrington opened his eyes. Closed them. Opened them, because he could. Another pair met his, dark and gleaming at once, lined in shadow. Lampblack. Kohl?
Hardly unrecognizable, Norrington thought, somewhat peevishly.
"According to the gent what educated me on these matters," Sparrow told him, expression rather bland, "I'm s'posed to inform you that now your soul belongs to me. But honestly, Commodore, I've no idea what I'd do with it. So what say you jes' keep it, eh?" A hand patted his chest, thump-thump. "Suits you better'n me anyway."
Groves came into view over Sparrow's shoulder. "He'll be all right?"
Sparrow shrugged that shoulder. "Hard to say. I'm told a lot of 'em die. Some a them 'at live never are quite right again."
It occurred to Norrington that he should be worried about that -- about all of this, really, with his lieutenant sneaking a pirate into the fort in the middle of the night -- but it took all the energy he could muster to drag the air in, send it out, and peer through his own eyes again.
Anyway, Groves looked worried enough for both of them. "You have to leave, Jack."
"Aye," Sparrow said, not moving. Looking at him.
"Now, Jack."
The pirate stood and caught up a handful of strung baubles, jingling and clanking, from the bed beside Norrington. Took a step back. Norrington found the strength to roll his head, following Sparrow's eyes as the man backed to the door, watching him in turn.
A glint of gold -- wry smile. Before slipping through the door, Sparrow sketched a mocking salute.
Groves filled his field of vision then, nothing wry about his smile, and the commodore realized something that stirred apathetic alarm:
They were square now, he and the pirate.
***
Fear and awe. Every face that turned his way, every murmur that followed his passage, held both of those unwelcome, uninvited tributes.
Distantly, he noted them. But then everything seemed distant. Hardly real at all. He'd nearly gotten himself run over by a carriage on the way here because he'd stopped to gaze at the light draft horses bearing down on him, wondering if they had substance.
Two days ago he'd been dead. One day and a night ago he'd awakened -- alive, changed. Not quite right. And they swore, everyone from the priests to the prostitutes, that he'd been battling sorcery, demons, Lucifer himself, and the victory had cost him dearly.
He had no particular feelings about their theories. Feelings, in fact, seemed more things of memory than of the moment. He felt in echoes. Shadows. Wavelets on the water. Those things which lingered after the source passed by and away.
Only after he opened the door to the smithy did he notice his hand on the latch. Only once he'd walked in, slowly, and said the blacksmith's name, did he see that the man was in fact there.
"Commodore Norrington?" Turner's voice held things he couldn't guess at, and didn't care to. The lad had hated him for some time now. But even he couldn't be indifferent to the stories circulating about these past days.
Beginning to sweat already in the heat of the forge, Norrington stared hazily through the unevenly lit interior. Turner gleamed, wet and dirty, his arms loaded with kindling.
"Where is he?" Norrington asked, his throat feeling stiff, lined with grit.
Turner's brow wrinkled. "Who?"
"I know he's here."
"Who's here, Commodore?"
He started walking, pacing the cluttered interior, scrutinizing everything that might be his quarry in disguise. Even the donkey. Especially the donkey. "He'll have to explain this," he told Turner as severely as he could. "It's unacceptable. I've a right to know."
Turner carefully set down the kindling. "I really don't understand what you're saying, sir. Who is it you're looking for?"
"That damned pirate."
"Jack?"
"Obviously."
Suddenly the boy was in front of him, blocking him, with eyes that seemed to burn. "You killed Jack, Commodore. Nearly half a year gone."
"Yes, yes," he agreed impatiently. "But not very well."
A moment crawled by, hot and suffocating, the smoldering in those eyes changing in some indefinable way. "It's true what they say," Turner said, softly. "You have gone mad."
Norrington scowled faintly. "I'm not looking to arrest the man, Turner. Just tell me where he is."
"He's at the bottom of the sea. Davy's Locker. You sent him there."
"But where is he now?"
"Commodore, we should..." He hesitated. Ran a restless, grimy hand into sweaty hair. "We should get you back to the fort, sir. I'm sure there are people looking for you."
Norrington turned away. "Tell him I demand an explanation. Tell him he owes me that much. I mean it, Turner, tell him."
The smith said nothing. Didn't follow him through the door.
Outside, Norrington started walking, and the murmurs followed in his wake.
***
He'd had to actually elude the guardsmen. Imagine! Commodore of the Jamaican fleet, dodging his own men! Madness.
But now there was aloneness and rocky sand and foam-and-ink waves crawling in to swirl around his feet. No moon in the sky. Some clouds, though, dimming the stars. The darkness swallowed him and gave him shelter, allowing his overtaxed mind to find a little ease.
He barely even flinched when Sparrow spoke from behind. "You'd do better to stay in the fort, Commodore."
Norrington turned. Resolved the vaguest hint of a human form from the night. His voice sounded dead and flat even to his own ears. "What did you do to me?"
"Brought you back."
"No." His head shook weary negation, though the other might not have seen. "It's...I'm...wrong." He shook his head again, futilely trying to clear it. "You said...my soul..."
"Returned to you."
"But is it whole? Did you...damage it?"
A moment's hesitation. "I might have."
Heaviness, such weight inside his chest. "Why?"
The shadow swayed closer, water lapping at his feet. "First time I tried that. Putting a soul back. He warned me it might not work perfectly."
Norrington stepped backwards, a hand going up unconsciously, the fog in his mind obscuring man and words and his very own thoughts until he wanted to scream from the lostness. "I spared your life. I could have, should have killed you, but I spared your life."
"Aye."
"And you...you..."
The figure stopped advancing. "You think--" Cut himself off, waiting until Norrington faltered to a standstill as well. "Commodore, no. No. Wasn't me what poisoned you."
"No?"
"No." Firmly.
He let out an uneven breath, looking out over a pitch ocean. Abruptly he sat, uncaring of the dampness that soaked his seat through and crawled up his thighs. Just sat because his heart didn't have a willingness to stand anymore.
Quiet steps, then the warmth of a body settling in near his flank, right down onto wet sand caressed by dying waves. Sparrow didn't say anything. They watched an ocean they couldn't properly see and thought their own thoughts, and Norrington wondered with dull curiosity if he'd actually managed to buy a measure of loyalty from this unpredictable creature. And if it meant anything if he had.
"Who?" he finally asked, wresting his mind to what mattered. "And why?"
"Who." Sparrow dug a hand into the muddy sand, the waters curling and twining about it. "Blighter goes by Finn. Finn the Sharkman, we call him. But fair bet none a that's 'is real name."
"You know him?"
"Not precisely. He did come lookin' t' kill me once, though, so you might say I've made his acquaintance."
Norrington rubbed his eyes, hoping somehow to massage his brain into full functionality again. "Clearly he failed."
"I bought 'im off. Then I made sure to cancel his contract with the fella did the hiring."
Best not to guess what that meant. Not yet. "Someone hired him? To kill me?"
A snort, amused, not overly derisive. "If he'd just been hired to kill you, you'd be dead, and I'd not have a thing to say about it." That hand twisted and turned almost invisibly in the sand. "You're worth a lot more alive. That's why he tried the witch-doctor trick."
His stomach chilled. "Witch-doctor?"
"Aye. He kills you first, with poison or potion or whatnot; then if you're lucky he comes along, digs you up, pours the right elixir down your gullet and brings your sorry carcass back to life." Fingers splayed out, dimly visible, dripping sand and saltwater. "You're his slave after that, of course. African magic. Finn learned himself a bit."
"And you?"
"I learned meself a different bit, eh?"
"Then..." The fog closed in again. Norrington growled. Thumped a palm to his temple, roughly, wondering if he might beat speed of thought back into his head. "...you..."
"Hey, whoa, easy now!" Sparrow snatched his hand as he drew it back to strike again. "I'm fairly certain that won't help."
"I can't think."
"That's no call to go knockin' your head in." Sparrow forced his hand down all the way to the sand. A wave rushed in, flooding around and over, splashing up their wrists. "You meant to say I beat him to it with the elixir, I suspect. And you'd be right. That's why you're sittin' in the surf bashin' yourself in the head rather than trussed up in some boat right now, unable to hurt yourself at all. You're welcome." He pressed Norrington's hand more firmly into the shifting sand. "Now stop doing that."
Norrington's brain tripped forward. Caught itself. "How did you know he'd be here?"
With one last admonishing push to his earthbound hand, Jack released him. "Captain Jack Sparrow may be, for the present and the immediate future, as dead as dead gets -- barring Aztec treasure, of course. But ol' Jack still knows how to keep an ear to the ground. It's a trait you'd do well t' learn."
"Who hired him?"
"We're working on that."
"Who's 'we'?"
"Meself an' an associate. Or associates. One never can tell, really."
"Sparrow..."
"Shouldn't think you'd be wantin' t' throw that name around, Commodore," the pirate said absently. "It's your reputation that'd suffer, after all."
What care did he have for reputation now? But he compromised, if only to get answers. "Jack. Tell me."
Lights flickered in the distance on the path he'd followed down the cliff. They'd thought to look for him here after all. Sparrow stirred, gathering his feet to him with a muttered, "Finally."
Norrington caught his arm with wet fingers. "Why are you here? Is this...gratitude? Honor?"
Starlight peeked through and managed to pull a glint from those eyes. Another hesitation, one of those pauses, like a second thought before the first. "Much as it'd give me black ol' heart great joy to have you believe that, mate...it's really more a matter of a lost wager." He stood, dripping, and stepped around Norrington. "Now do us a favor and stay in the fort awhile. I'm bound to try an' preserve your hide, and it'll be a fair sight easier if you keep your head down, savvy?"
He didn't wait for an answer. The night absorbed Jack Sparrow like the ghost the world believed him to be, leaving whatever there was of James Norrington to be found by the torch-bearing searchers.
***
He stood on the ramparts, gazing down at gray-black rocks and white foam, at swaths of blue and patches of brownish green. From this very spot, two times over, he'd seen a person fall into those perilous waters. Seen a body miraculously miss dashing itself to a broken wreck on jagged stone. Seen himself lose someone.
This seemed the place to go if a man wanted to feel something -- loss, rage, terror, love, humiliation... They were there, those emotions, buried in him somewhere, but he couldn't find them. The only feeling he seemed to own was a great, draining weariness.
Rocks and whitewater. He remembered, distantly, being prepared to leap from these ramparts after Elizabeth, the day she fell. He remembered Gillette's hand and shouted warning stopping him, he remembered the heart-pounding run to the docks, and he remembered the questions that arose in his chest later, the questions of whether he might have won the lady's heart himself had he only ignored his lieutenant's sensible caution and jumped as his instinct demanded.
But deep down Norrington knew the ways of the world better than that. He wasn't blessed with the luck of fools and madmen. He was a king's man. A commodore, with rank and responsibility and ships and lives always dependent on his prudence.
Men such as he didn't miraculously miss the rocks.
"Sir." Lieutenant Groves coming up behind him, with an undisguised note of concern. "Are you...all right?"
His lips curled. Not into a smile. He didn't know what the expression was, but he knew it wasn't that. "Would you be?"
"To be quite honest with you, sir, I hope I never have enough knowledge to answer that question."
An intelligent man, Groves. Neither madman nor fool. Another who'd best not risk the rocks.
Norrington's mind worked sluggishly, stumbling over important details strewn carelessly about his thoughts. "The dart. Have we learned anything?"
"No, sir," Groves said, frustration evident. "Some heathen invention, no doubt."
"'No doubt,'" Norrington echoed. "There's always doubt."
"Sir?"
He shook his thick, slow, fuzzy head. "Spar--Jack...said the attacker's name is Finn."
"If Jack knows who this man is, I should think we'd be able to find him with little difficulty."
That lip-curled nonsmile. "Indeed. If Jack were on our side that would likely be the case."
"You think he's not?" His voice lowered. "After what you did for him, sir? And what he did for you?"
"He's a pirate, Lieutenant."
"You had enough regard for him to risk both of our careers in order to spare him." Groves almost sounded angry. It was a nice change for the man, too mellow too often.
Norrington turned, spine to the open drop, and met his lieutenant's dark eyes. Wondered how his own seemed now -- if his constant confusion showed in them, or if he looked somehow addled, like a man after head trauma. "Perhaps I'm a fool after all." He smiled suddenly, almost -- almost feeling a tickle of excitement in his throat. "Fool and now madman. That's what they're all saying, isn't it? Madman?"
Groves took a step forward. "Commodore, perhaps you should come away from there."
Norrington edged back until the stone lip pressed into his legs. "How would you feel if your soul were mangled by a pirate, Ellis?"
"Stop." His eyes implored. He looked ready to lunge for him, afraid to try. "Commodore -- James -- please come down."
Now? When he finally might have enough magic in his veins to survive the fall?
"Commodore!" This from farther down the wall, in Gillette's unmistakable voice of pride and importance. Norrington's senior lieutenant -- currently made even more important with temporary oversight of Port Royal's defenses -- bustled toward them with as much haste as military decorum allowed. If he noticed his superior officer's stroll along the knife's edge he gave no sign. "Sir, you have a visitor. It's William Turner."
Norrington stared at him, wordless, as this announcement tottered through his mind. Gillette stood at attention and tried not to show his discomfort and his awe. He was one of those most convinced his commander had personally vanquished the Lord of Lies during his half-day of death-that-wasn't. Merely breathing the same air with Norrington was apt to make him flush.
"Turner," Norrington said finally, eyes narrowing significantly. "In my office? Alone?"
"Yes, sir."
"Thank you, Gillette." He stepped down, pointedly ignoring the relief on Groves's face.
***
He should have been flattered. The lad had bothered to clean up, tie his hair neatly back, even put on a reasonably decent brown suit. And if he'd had it in him at the moment, he really might have been.
Turner had that look of preemptive defensiveness on his face, which meant he expected whatever he had to say to be unwelcome. Nothing new there. Norrington nodded to him and circled the desk. "To what do I owe the honor?" he asked, pro forma.
"I'm here to inquire after your health, sir."
He didn't need his brain in full working order to recognize that for a lie. "And if I tell you my health is remarkable for a dead man? Will you be on your way?"
Turner's throat bobbed. "Then, sir, I'd be inclined to ask after the health of another dead man."
With a quiet sigh of real exhaustion, Norrington seated himself. Sat back, eyeing the youth, and considered his words. Of course, as was now always the case, this took a while. Eventually Turner caught another chair from its place against the wall, pulling it before the desk and sitting uninvited. Waiting.
Patient, really. For such a young man.
Norrington finally found some words. "You'll have to be a bit more direct than that, Mr. Turner."
His jaw tightened. "You came to my shop looking for Jack Sparrow yesterday."
"I remember."
"To be honest, I wasn't sure you would. You seemed...confused."
"Mad," Norrington said, with the nonsmile. "That's what you said."
"I'm hoping to find I was wrong about that." He straightened uncomfortably. Tugged at his coat. "You understand how...difficult it was, hearing of your encounter with Jack five months ago. And that it was impossible for me to accept the story you gave the governor."
"You said I fabricated Sparrow's attack on the woman," Norrington said inflectionlessly. "You called me a murderer."
Remembered anger flashed in those deep brown eyes. "You know by now that I questioned the men serving on the Dauntless at the time. I can say with some certainty that I not only know the woman in question, I also know that Jack would never have done what you claimed. Particularly not to her."
With a stirring of his old irony, Norrington lifted an eyebrow and asked, "Too noble a man, your pirate friend?"
"Too intelligent a man, Commodore. One doesn't attack Anamaria without considerably more armament than you said he had."
Her name, absent to his ears for five months, stirred something deeper than irony. For a moment he was lost in that fragment of genuine feeling, the flavor of heat and urgency to it. For a moment...
"I knew the story wasn't true, sir. But now I wonder if...perhaps I assumed too quickly that I had all the answers."
Norrington blinked a few times, until his vision accepted a man's pale golden face rather than a woman's sun-ravaged brown. "It wouldn't be the first time you've come to an ill-informed conclusion, Mr. Turner."
The boy still had enough prickly, youthful pride to jut his jaw at that. His voice was moderated. "I believed you lied to exculpate yourself for murdering Jack."
"It's a strong word," Norrington interjected nonsensically. "'Believe.'"
"Elizabeth refused to believe that of you, sir. She argued in your favor. It has not been easy on our marriage."
Norrington said nothing, though this time not for lack of reply.
"What I'm wondering now, Commodore, is if my wife and I were not both right."
Norrington waited.
Turner's throat bobbed again. "You did lie, sir. Jack Sparrow never assaulted Anamaria."
Norrington waited.
"But you weren't covering a murder. Were you? You were covering an act of mercy." He leaned forward like a dog on the hunt. "You let him go."
Norrington...waited. But this time for himself.
Still patient, watching every flicker of his face, Turner waited with him.
Hardly imaginable, that Sparrow hadn't revealed himself to the blacksmith. Norrington had taken it as a given that the irrepressible rogue wouldn't be able to resist flaunting his livingness in some fashion, and given his history with the Turners (and their close proximity to the man who'd been fool enough to spare him), it'd only seemed logical. Only in this very moment did he realize that William Turner truly did not know.
Why? God knew Sparrow had a reason for damn near everything he did, every word he said. He manipulated people through their own natures, sharing information or withholding it to lead them where he wanted them to go -- in the process making it impossible to truly blame him when all he expected of anyone was that they do what's right by them.
What Sparrow didn't reveal had as much import as what he did. And at the moment, a very brain-weary James Norrington felt nowhere near up to second-guessing the man.
His eyes were steady. "You're mistaken, Mr. Turner."
"Am I?"
"Jack Sparrow is dead."
"Then why did you expect to find him at my smithy?"
"I wasn't thinking clearly."
"You're lying again, Commodore."
"You don't believe that, Mr. Turner. Not truly. That's misplaced hope you're feeling, nothing more."
Turner surged up from his chair and slammed his hands down on the desk, leaning on them heavily. He seemed nearly angry enough to challenge the commodore right there. "Then tell me you murdered him. Tell me you ran him through with the sword I forged for you, and you're certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that he's five months dead."
"He's five months dead."
"Because you murdered him."
"Because I killed him. With the sword you forged."
Turner studied his eyes. Let out a sharp breath and stepped back, tense. The death of hope was written on his face: a twisted, sad remnant like faith betrayed. "He was a good man."
"So you've said."
"And you feel no shame?"
The nonsmile. "I feel nothing."
With no regard for correctitude at all, Turner twisted sharply on a heel and left.
***
One of several possible sequels to Fortune and Favor. This is affectionately known as zombie!Norri for reasons that should swiftly become obvious. I really like this one quite a bit, but I hit a bit of an impasse with it and have to think about a solution.
Length: somewhere around 4000 words.
It began with a bee sting.
Felt that way, at least. Commodore James Norrington strode commandingly across the street, his blood not yet cooled after just delivering a scathing reprimand to a few guardsmen in the Thirsty Crown who'd forgotten their place and purpose in this town, and then there came the bee. Or the sting. Right to his neck, sharp and intense. He slapped his hand to the place and wrenched the tiny thing from his flesh. Pulled it before his eyes.
It wasn't a bee.
It was, in fact, more of a dart. A strange, narrow little assembly that looked like nothing so much as a sewing needle stuck in a tiny lump of feathers and wood that might have been some misguided deity's efforts at creating a hummingbird.
He took a step. Tried to take another. Tried to turn his head, slant his eyes, find the source, the threat, the hive.
His blood cooled then, in a flood that radiated from the sting outward. Head unturned, step untaken, he instead only managed to fall.
And though his open eyes saw it and his open mouth pressed into it, he didn't even feel the ground that caught him.
Somebody screamed.
He should get up -- should find out why.
There were running feet, clad in boots with soles that made them sound quite determined. "Commodore!" was shouted. One of the men he'd just rebuked. Gibson, that was it. Then a wrench he didn't really feel except by the sight of the world spinning by as the man turned him, rolled him to his back, stared into his eyes as if looking for life.
Norrington tried to tell him he was fine, it was just this damned unnatural bee. But words...the very thought of voicing them took so much effort...
"Get help! Somebody, now!" A hand on his chest. The back of a hand placed over his mouth. "He's not breathing..."
That just didn't make sense. Dead people didn't breathe. Living people breathed all the time. Didn't even have to think about it.
Bemused, he tried to frown. That didn't work either.
Odd. Decidedly odd.
He'd really rather expected to die at sea.
***
The doctor declared him dead. Then, moments later, noticed the faintest of faint movements of his chest, rising and falling, and declared him alive, only...Elsewhere. Or dead and not yet aware of it. Hard to say for certain.
Really, Norrington thought, the doctor should've been able to be a bit more specific than that. He, for one, would greatly appreciate having some clue as to what limbo he might be in, or why, or if he still lived. And if not, why did he remain? Why was he trapped inside his body like a cage?
Why did someone have to close his eyes? Now he could only hear and guess.
Unbidden, the thought entered his mind: was this how it was for the pirates he'd hanged? Did they...linger? When he passed the grisly corpses displayed in warning to all their kith, did they know him? Hate him until the last of their flesh rotted away and their bones finally fell into the sea?
The doctor, rather useless, left. A priest replaced him. Norrington entertained brief, skeptical hope, but the prayers and invocations and strident demands for demons to flee ultimately did nothing. He supposed he'd been anointed with oils, holy water, religious symbols. Perhaps he lacked the requisite faith. Perhaps there was a God, an angry one, and this confinement was punishment of sorts.
Somewhere in the wandering time, he encountered fear. Sought to master it. Found that stoicism proved less reliable in the privacy of one's own soul, where a man couldn't stiffen his jaw, square his shoulders, straighten his spine or call on any of those physical reassurances that let him know he still had control of something.
Words reached him. Lieutenant Gillette. How long had he been there, talking in such a quiet, thick voice? Ah, Gillette. Loyal to a fault. Norrington didn't want to be his icon of perfection. Wouldn't be, if Gillette knew the reach of his commodore's weaknesses.
Pirates swinging, rotting, warning. Fewer than there should be. Certainly fewer than there could be, had he the strength of will and purpose credited to him.
He tried, very hard, to move a limb. A finger. A toe. Anything.
Nothing.
His body, the gaol. The irony made him want to laugh. But of course he couldn't.
And then came another voice.
***
"Hurry."
Lieutenant Groves. Ellis. Friend, such as he had them, and sometimes confidant.
"Can't rush this, mate. There's an order to things."
That -- was most definitely not the voice of an officer.
He fought to speak and failed.
"You really believe this will work?"
"Hm. 'Believe' is a strong word."
"Jack."
"If we don't try it, he dies. If we do try it, he might die. Given the options, have you anything to say?"
"... Wake him up, Jack."
Things clacked. Things rattled. But he'd ordered Sparrow's hair shorn. What...?
"You know, Commodore..." Softly spoken. For his ears alone. "To be quite honest with you, my life'd be a whole lot easier if you just decided to not come outta this. So don't feel like you have to rush back to the land of the living, eh?"
Anger coiled like a snake in his stomach.
In his stomach. He felt his stomach?
"Did he swallow it?"
"Aye." With a sigh.
"That means he'll recover?"
"Might."
"How...how do we know...?"
His blood -- boiled. Breath hitched in his throat. Crawled brokenly down into his lungs, shuddering, stuttering. He gasped it in voraciously.
"There it is," Sparrow said resignedly. "He lives."
"Jesus Christ," Ellis breathed.
"Flattered, but no."
Norrington opened his eyes. Closed them. Opened them, because he could. Another pair met his, dark and gleaming at once, lined in shadow. Lampblack. Kohl?
Hardly unrecognizable, Norrington thought, somewhat peevishly.
"According to the gent what educated me on these matters," Sparrow told him, expression rather bland, "I'm s'posed to inform you that now your soul belongs to me. But honestly, Commodore, I've no idea what I'd do with it. So what say you jes' keep it, eh?" A hand patted his chest, thump-thump. "Suits you better'n me anyway."
Groves came into view over Sparrow's shoulder. "He'll be all right?"
Sparrow shrugged that shoulder. "Hard to say. I'm told a lot of 'em die. Some a them 'at live never are quite right again."
It occurred to Norrington that he should be worried about that -- about all of this, really, with his lieutenant sneaking a pirate into the fort in the middle of the night -- but it took all the energy he could muster to drag the air in, send it out, and peer through his own eyes again.
Anyway, Groves looked worried enough for both of them. "You have to leave, Jack."
"Aye," Sparrow said, not moving. Looking at him.
"Now, Jack."
The pirate stood and caught up a handful of strung baubles, jingling and clanking, from the bed beside Norrington. Took a step back. Norrington found the strength to roll his head, following Sparrow's eyes as the man backed to the door, watching him in turn.
A glint of gold -- wry smile. Before slipping through the door, Sparrow sketched a mocking salute.
Groves filled his field of vision then, nothing wry about his smile, and the commodore realized something that stirred apathetic alarm:
They were square now, he and the pirate.
***
Fear and awe. Every face that turned his way, every murmur that followed his passage, held both of those unwelcome, uninvited tributes.
Distantly, he noted them. But then everything seemed distant. Hardly real at all. He'd nearly gotten himself run over by a carriage on the way here because he'd stopped to gaze at the light draft horses bearing down on him, wondering if they had substance.
Two days ago he'd been dead. One day and a night ago he'd awakened -- alive, changed. Not quite right. And they swore, everyone from the priests to the prostitutes, that he'd been battling sorcery, demons, Lucifer himself, and the victory had cost him dearly.
He had no particular feelings about their theories. Feelings, in fact, seemed more things of memory than of the moment. He felt in echoes. Shadows. Wavelets on the water. Those things which lingered after the source passed by and away.
Only after he opened the door to the smithy did he notice his hand on the latch. Only once he'd walked in, slowly, and said the blacksmith's name, did he see that the man was in fact there.
"Commodore Norrington?" Turner's voice held things he couldn't guess at, and didn't care to. The lad had hated him for some time now. But even he couldn't be indifferent to the stories circulating about these past days.
Beginning to sweat already in the heat of the forge, Norrington stared hazily through the unevenly lit interior. Turner gleamed, wet and dirty, his arms loaded with kindling.
"Where is he?" Norrington asked, his throat feeling stiff, lined with grit.
Turner's brow wrinkled. "Who?"
"I know he's here."
"Who's here, Commodore?"
He started walking, pacing the cluttered interior, scrutinizing everything that might be his quarry in disguise. Even the donkey. Especially the donkey. "He'll have to explain this," he told Turner as severely as he could. "It's unacceptable. I've a right to know."
Turner carefully set down the kindling. "I really don't understand what you're saying, sir. Who is it you're looking for?"
"That damned pirate."
"Jack?"
"Obviously."
Suddenly the boy was in front of him, blocking him, with eyes that seemed to burn. "You killed Jack, Commodore. Nearly half a year gone."
"Yes, yes," he agreed impatiently. "But not very well."
A moment crawled by, hot and suffocating, the smoldering in those eyes changing in some indefinable way. "It's true what they say," Turner said, softly. "You have gone mad."
Norrington scowled faintly. "I'm not looking to arrest the man, Turner. Just tell me where he is."
"He's at the bottom of the sea. Davy's Locker. You sent him there."
"But where is he now?"
"Commodore, we should..." He hesitated. Ran a restless, grimy hand into sweaty hair. "We should get you back to the fort, sir. I'm sure there are people looking for you."
Norrington turned away. "Tell him I demand an explanation. Tell him he owes me that much. I mean it, Turner, tell him."
The smith said nothing. Didn't follow him through the door.
Outside, Norrington started walking, and the murmurs followed in his wake.
***
He'd had to actually elude the guardsmen. Imagine! Commodore of the Jamaican fleet, dodging his own men! Madness.
But now there was aloneness and rocky sand and foam-and-ink waves crawling in to swirl around his feet. No moon in the sky. Some clouds, though, dimming the stars. The darkness swallowed him and gave him shelter, allowing his overtaxed mind to find a little ease.
He barely even flinched when Sparrow spoke from behind. "You'd do better to stay in the fort, Commodore."
Norrington turned. Resolved the vaguest hint of a human form from the night. His voice sounded dead and flat even to his own ears. "What did you do to me?"
"Brought you back."
"No." His head shook weary negation, though the other might not have seen. "It's...I'm...wrong." He shook his head again, futilely trying to clear it. "You said...my soul..."
"Returned to you."
"But is it whole? Did you...damage it?"
A moment's hesitation. "I might have."
Heaviness, such weight inside his chest. "Why?"
The shadow swayed closer, water lapping at his feet. "First time I tried that. Putting a soul back. He warned me it might not work perfectly."
Norrington stepped backwards, a hand going up unconsciously, the fog in his mind obscuring man and words and his very own thoughts until he wanted to scream from the lostness. "I spared your life. I could have, should have killed you, but I spared your life."
"Aye."
"And you...you..."
The figure stopped advancing. "You think--" Cut himself off, waiting until Norrington faltered to a standstill as well. "Commodore, no. No. Wasn't me what poisoned you."
"No?"
"No." Firmly.
He let out an uneven breath, looking out over a pitch ocean. Abruptly he sat, uncaring of the dampness that soaked his seat through and crawled up his thighs. Just sat because his heart didn't have a willingness to stand anymore.
Quiet steps, then the warmth of a body settling in near his flank, right down onto wet sand caressed by dying waves. Sparrow didn't say anything. They watched an ocean they couldn't properly see and thought their own thoughts, and Norrington wondered with dull curiosity if he'd actually managed to buy a measure of loyalty from this unpredictable creature. And if it meant anything if he had.
"Who?" he finally asked, wresting his mind to what mattered. "And why?"
"Who." Sparrow dug a hand into the muddy sand, the waters curling and twining about it. "Blighter goes by Finn. Finn the Sharkman, we call him. But fair bet none a that's 'is real name."
"You know him?"
"Not precisely. He did come lookin' t' kill me once, though, so you might say I've made his acquaintance."
Norrington rubbed his eyes, hoping somehow to massage his brain into full functionality again. "Clearly he failed."
"I bought 'im off. Then I made sure to cancel his contract with the fella did the hiring."
Best not to guess what that meant. Not yet. "Someone hired him? To kill me?"
A snort, amused, not overly derisive. "If he'd just been hired to kill you, you'd be dead, and I'd not have a thing to say about it." That hand twisted and turned almost invisibly in the sand. "You're worth a lot more alive. That's why he tried the witch-doctor trick."
His stomach chilled. "Witch-doctor?"
"Aye. He kills you first, with poison or potion or whatnot; then if you're lucky he comes along, digs you up, pours the right elixir down your gullet and brings your sorry carcass back to life." Fingers splayed out, dimly visible, dripping sand and saltwater. "You're his slave after that, of course. African magic. Finn learned himself a bit."
"And you?"
"I learned meself a different bit, eh?"
"Then..." The fog closed in again. Norrington growled. Thumped a palm to his temple, roughly, wondering if he might beat speed of thought back into his head. "...you..."
"Hey, whoa, easy now!" Sparrow snatched his hand as he drew it back to strike again. "I'm fairly certain that won't help."
"I can't think."
"That's no call to go knockin' your head in." Sparrow forced his hand down all the way to the sand. A wave rushed in, flooding around and over, splashing up their wrists. "You meant to say I beat him to it with the elixir, I suspect. And you'd be right. That's why you're sittin' in the surf bashin' yourself in the head rather than trussed up in some boat right now, unable to hurt yourself at all. You're welcome." He pressed Norrington's hand more firmly into the shifting sand. "Now stop doing that."
Norrington's brain tripped forward. Caught itself. "How did you know he'd be here?"
With one last admonishing push to his earthbound hand, Jack released him. "Captain Jack Sparrow may be, for the present and the immediate future, as dead as dead gets -- barring Aztec treasure, of course. But ol' Jack still knows how to keep an ear to the ground. It's a trait you'd do well t' learn."
"Who hired him?"
"We're working on that."
"Who's 'we'?"
"Meself an' an associate. Or associates. One never can tell, really."
"Sparrow..."
"Shouldn't think you'd be wantin' t' throw that name around, Commodore," the pirate said absently. "It's your reputation that'd suffer, after all."
What care did he have for reputation now? But he compromised, if only to get answers. "Jack. Tell me."
Lights flickered in the distance on the path he'd followed down the cliff. They'd thought to look for him here after all. Sparrow stirred, gathering his feet to him with a muttered, "Finally."
Norrington caught his arm with wet fingers. "Why are you here? Is this...gratitude? Honor?"
Starlight peeked through and managed to pull a glint from those eyes. Another hesitation, one of those pauses, like a second thought before the first. "Much as it'd give me black ol' heart great joy to have you believe that, mate...it's really more a matter of a lost wager." He stood, dripping, and stepped around Norrington. "Now do us a favor and stay in the fort awhile. I'm bound to try an' preserve your hide, and it'll be a fair sight easier if you keep your head down, savvy?"
He didn't wait for an answer. The night absorbed Jack Sparrow like the ghost the world believed him to be, leaving whatever there was of James Norrington to be found by the torch-bearing searchers.
***
He stood on the ramparts, gazing down at gray-black rocks and white foam, at swaths of blue and patches of brownish green. From this very spot, two times over, he'd seen a person fall into those perilous waters. Seen a body miraculously miss dashing itself to a broken wreck on jagged stone. Seen himself lose someone.
This seemed the place to go if a man wanted to feel something -- loss, rage, terror, love, humiliation... They were there, those emotions, buried in him somewhere, but he couldn't find them. The only feeling he seemed to own was a great, draining weariness.
Rocks and whitewater. He remembered, distantly, being prepared to leap from these ramparts after Elizabeth, the day she fell. He remembered Gillette's hand and shouted warning stopping him, he remembered the heart-pounding run to the docks, and he remembered the questions that arose in his chest later, the questions of whether he might have won the lady's heart himself had he only ignored his lieutenant's sensible caution and jumped as his instinct demanded.
But deep down Norrington knew the ways of the world better than that. He wasn't blessed with the luck of fools and madmen. He was a king's man. A commodore, with rank and responsibility and ships and lives always dependent on his prudence.
Men such as he didn't miraculously miss the rocks.
"Sir." Lieutenant Groves coming up behind him, with an undisguised note of concern. "Are you...all right?"
His lips curled. Not into a smile. He didn't know what the expression was, but he knew it wasn't that. "Would you be?"
"To be quite honest with you, sir, I hope I never have enough knowledge to answer that question."
An intelligent man, Groves. Neither madman nor fool. Another who'd best not risk the rocks.
Norrington's mind worked sluggishly, stumbling over important details strewn carelessly about his thoughts. "The dart. Have we learned anything?"
"No, sir," Groves said, frustration evident. "Some heathen invention, no doubt."
"'No doubt,'" Norrington echoed. "There's always doubt."
"Sir?"
He shook his thick, slow, fuzzy head. "Spar--Jack...said the attacker's name is Finn."
"If Jack knows who this man is, I should think we'd be able to find him with little difficulty."
That lip-curled nonsmile. "Indeed. If Jack were on our side that would likely be the case."
"You think he's not?" His voice lowered. "After what you did for him, sir? And what he did for you?"
"He's a pirate, Lieutenant."
"You had enough regard for him to risk both of our careers in order to spare him." Groves almost sounded angry. It was a nice change for the man, too mellow too often.
Norrington turned, spine to the open drop, and met his lieutenant's dark eyes. Wondered how his own seemed now -- if his constant confusion showed in them, or if he looked somehow addled, like a man after head trauma. "Perhaps I'm a fool after all." He smiled suddenly, almost -- almost feeling a tickle of excitement in his throat. "Fool and now madman. That's what they're all saying, isn't it? Madman?"
Groves took a step forward. "Commodore, perhaps you should come away from there."
Norrington edged back until the stone lip pressed into his legs. "How would you feel if your soul were mangled by a pirate, Ellis?"
"Stop." His eyes implored. He looked ready to lunge for him, afraid to try. "Commodore -- James -- please come down."
Now? When he finally might have enough magic in his veins to survive the fall?
"Commodore!" This from farther down the wall, in Gillette's unmistakable voice of pride and importance. Norrington's senior lieutenant -- currently made even more important with temporary oversight of Port Royal's defenses -- bustled toward them with as much haste as military decorum allowed. If he noticed his superior officer's stroll along the knife's edge he gave no sign. "Sir, you have a visitor. It's William Turner."
Norrington stared at him, wordless, as this announcement tottered through his mind. Gillette stood at attention and tried not to show his discomfort and his awe. He was one of those most convinced his commander had personally vanquished the Lord of Lies during his half-day of death-that-wasn't. Merely breathing the same air with Norrington was apt to make him flush.
"Turner," Norrington said finally, eyes narrowing significantly. "In my office? Alone?"
"Yes, sir."
"Thank you, Gillette." He stepped down, pointedly ignoring the relief on Groves's face.
***
He should have been flattered. The lad had bothered to clean up, tie his hair neatly back, even put on a reasonably decent brown suit. And if he'd had it in him at the moment, he really might have been.
Turner had that look of preemptive defensiveness on his face, which meant he expected whatever he had to say to be unwelcome. Nothing new there. Norrington nodded to him and circled the desk. "To what do I owe the honor?" he asked, pro forma.
"I'm here to inquire after your health, sir."
He didn't need his brain in full working order to recognize that for a lie. "And if I tell you my health is remarkable for a dead man? Will you be on your way?"
Turner's throat bobbed. "Then, sir, I'd be inclined to ask after the health of another dead man."
With a quiet sigh of real exhaustion, Norrington seated himself. Sat back, eyeing the youth, and considered his words. Of course, as was now always the case, this took a while. Eventually Turner caught another chair from its place against the wall, pulling it before the desk and sitting uninvited. Waiting.
Patient, really. For such a young man.
Norrington finally found some words. "You'll have to be a bit more direct than that, Mr. Turner."
His jaw tightened. "You came to my shop looking for Jack Sparrow yesterday."
"I remember."
"To be honest, I wasn't sure you would. You seemed...confused."
"Mad," Norrington said, with the nonsmile. "That's what you said."
"I'm hoping to find I was wrong about that." He straightened uncomfortably. Tugged at his coat. "You understand how...difficult it was, hearing of your encounter with Jack five months ago. And that it was impossible for me to accept the story you gave the governor."
"You said I fabricated Sparrow's attack on the woman," Norrington said inflectionlessly. "You called me a murderer."
Remembered anger flashed in those deep brown eyes. "You know by now that I questioned the men serving on the Dauntless at the time. I can say with some certainty that I not only know the woman in question, I also know that Jack would never have done what you claimed. Particularly not to her."
With a stirring of his old irony, Norrington lifted an eyebrow and asked, "Too noble a man, your pirate friend?"
"Too intelligent a man, Commodore. One doesn't attack Anamaria without considerably more armament than you said he had."
Her name, absent to his ears for five months, stirred something deeper than irony. For a moment he was lost in that fragment of genuine feeling, the flavor of heat and urgency to it. For a moment...
"I knew the story wasn't true, sir. But now I wonder if...perhaps I assumed too quickly that I had all the answers."
Norrington blinked a few times, until his vision accepted a man's pale golden face rather than a woman's sun-ravaged brown. "It wouldn't be the first time you've come to an ill-informed conclusion, Mr. Turner."
The boy still had enough prickly, youthful pride to jut his jaw at that. His voice was moderated. "I believed you lied to exculpate yourself for murdering Jack."
"It's a strong word," Norrington interjected nonsensically. "'Believe.'"
"Elizabeth refused to believe that of you, sir. She argued in your favor. It has not been easy on our marriage."
Norrington said nothing, though this time not for lack of reply.
"What I'm wondering now, Commodore, is if my wife and I were not both right."
Norrington waited.
Turner's throat bobbed again. "You did lie, sir. Jack Sparrow never assaulted Anamaria."
Norrington waited.
"But you weren't covering a murder. Were you? You were covering an act of mercy." He leaned forward like a dog on the hunt. "You let him go."
Norrington...waited. But this time for himself.
Still patient, watching every flicker of his face, Turner waited with him.
Hardly imaginable, that Sparrow hadn't revealed himself to the blacksmith. Norrington had taken it as a given that the irrepressible rogue wouldn't be able to resist flaunting his livingness in some fashion, and given his history with the Turners (and their close proximity to the man who'd been fool enough to spare him), it'd only seemed logical. Only in this very moment did he realize that William Turner truly did not know.
Why? God knew Sparrow had a reason for damn near everything he did, every word he said. He manipulated people through their own natures, sharing information or withholding it to lead them where he wanted them to go -- in the process making it impossible to truly blame him when all he expected of anyone was that they do what's right by them.
What Sparrow didn't reveal had as much import as what he did. And at the moment, a very brain-weary James Norrington felt nowhere near up to second-guessing the man.
His eyes were steady. "You're mistaken, Mr. Turner."
"Am I?"
"Jack Sparrow is dead."
"Then why did you expect to find him at my smithy?"
"I wasn't thinking clearly."
"You're lying again, Commodore."
"You don't believe that, Mr. Turner. Not truly. That's misplaced hope you're feeling, nothing more."
Turner surged up from his chair and slammed his hands down on the desk, leaning on them heavily. He seemed nearly angry enough to challenge the commodore right there. "Then tell me you murdered him. Tell me you ran him through with the sword I forged for you, and you're certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that he's five months dead."
"He's five months dead."
"Because you murdered him."
"Because I killed him. With the sword you forged."
Turner studied his eyes. Let out a sharp breath and stepped back, tense. The death of hope was written on his face: a twisted, sad remnant like faith betrayed. "He was a good man."
"So you've said."
"And you feel no shame?"
The nonsmile. "I feel nothing."
With no regard for correctitude at all, Turner twisted sharply on a heel and left.
***
