Chapter Text
It takes someone mad to fall in love with the sea. It claims to be nothing but water, yet bears little resemblance to traditional examples of the element. It is wild and dark, impossible to drink, it rages like a fire. It can dry a man's lips to cracking from proximity alone. It wants to kill every man that sets upon it, and yet some build entire lives on her. They cannot be anything but mad, to love something that cares so little for their lives. Thousands come and go upon her and she shows none of them favor, save a very few remarkable persons. Sometimes, they don't realize her affection. Even the affection of the sea is a dark, terrible, and dangerous thing.
James Norrington built his entire life on the sea, or had it built there for him. His sweat mingled with hers. His eyes looked like trapped seawater, held still at port. His blood, when spilt, has the salt-slick taste of the sea. He mingled so closely that there were times in his life he did not know where he ended and she began.
Jack Sparrow had been consumed by the sea an age ago, taken in whole and regurgitated more times than he could count. He could not say now what had been original to him and what was hers. His laugh sounded like waves, like gulls, like the snap of canvas in wind. His eyes were dark and deep and as unfathomable as her. He had seawater in his soul.
Both men sailed seas first prowled by other men like them. Men like Edward Teach, Bartholomew Roberts, Robert Maynard, William Kidd and Woodes Rogers. By men like James Flint and Long John Silver. If they were anything, they were a homage to the sea like those men before them, playing out the same battles as had happened a generation before. All of these men, of course, had passed into legend by the time Jack Teague became Captain Jack Sparrow. They became that long before James Norrington first set eyes on the blue, blue waters of the Caribbean.
Life ends quickly for men in the Bahamas, and things pass out of memory. This is especially true for men of the sea.
It was looking like a short life for James Norrington, for example. His hands clutched the bloody, aching hole in his chest, the sharp spike of wood still protruding obscenely. He stared at it in shock. Oh. It had happened so fast, he hadn't seen it. It barely hurt. This wasn't how he'd thought it would end.
He'd heard the call of Nassau in his boyhood, like all boys did. It was 1717 and Charlestown burned at the whim of one man, and it terrified him half a world away. It also excited him. He was 14, and he watched his father kiss his mother woodenly on the cheek as he steered James' oldest brother out of the house. He steered him toward the ocean. Toward the fighting. Toward Nassau. James cannot go yet, he's too young. He thinks that he's almost a man, really, old enough to be a midshipman. Old enough at least to run powder between cannon on the gun deck. Old enough his father should know he's learned to swim. He's not useless anymore.
He's too old for his mother to hold him, but she does. She clutches his shoulders tight and refuses to cry. She pulls him close to her skirts, but he's already taller than her. His father returns two years later, without Alexander, without comfort for her. She screams as he tears James from her protective talons and out into the cold grip of the sea. James feels guilty for his own excitement. He never stops feeling that guilt, even when she passes - alone, in England, her sons far away. James feels nothing but joy from jumping into the sea, into those arms that took his older (better) brother. He turned his face to the sea spray in hunger and never in fear. She wasted away in London. The guilt burned, but the sea pulled harder. He loved the sea like he loved no other thing.
His father taught him to love something else, as well. He had no romance in his soul for the groan of timbers or the hiss of waves. What he loved was nothing more or less than the hunt itself. They dogged pirate and corsair alike with relentless brutality. James learned to fight at his father's shoulder, and reached eighteen bathed in blood. He passed the equator on his nineteeth and the crew cheered as he sat for his first tattoo, his father looking on with a sneer. Too familiar with the men, always.
Flint was long dead when James first saw the shores of Jamaica. Calico Jack had just been hung. Blackbeard rested beneath the ocean he'd loved like no other mistress. His father hunted the survivors, from the coast of Argentina up beyond the smoking husk of Charlestown itself. They'd begun rebuilding, the process slow. James went with him. He was halfway to twenty when his father breathed his last on a slippery deck off the coast of Carolina. James went home to England. There was nothing there but an empty house he no longer remembered. His father's lack of debts was a small favor. Both of his parents had been stiff-necked skinflints to the core, and he managed to sell the house at a small profit. His pockets had jingled for the first time in his life. His first scars started to heal over. He took a posting as a lieutenant as quickly as he could, and hated every moment he waited in London to go back out to the sea.
England was cold, and stiff, and gray. It pressed. It chafed. It poured over him and smothered him, until he felt like he was made from plaster. If he moved the slightest inch, he would crack.
He spent some of his time and coin in a tavern frequented by other navymen and sailors. Men whose eyes looked like his - trapped. Wild. Fearful. None of them belonged in this city of stone, roaming the streets outside Whitehall without purpose. They drank, and fought, and gambled. They had to do something. Anything. Anything that quieted the beating of waves on the pier that was so close and so far away. James didn't - couldn't - felt too close to breaking too often. He wanted the sun back. The smell of coconuts and salt and sugarcane rum. Those were the only things that could soften him.
He read more often, instead. He bought endless books. He sat on a grassy patch next to a gnarled tree where he could watch ships pass on the Thames. Not the ocean by any means, but as close as he could come until he was called to get underway. The gray-green water matched his eyes, and it mocked him. It brought him pale reminders of a place where it sparkled, blue and free and treacherous.
"Are you really reading books on piracy while you're on leave?" A cheery voice asked him. It was a midshipman with wild and curly hair who had startled him, appearing behind him suddenly. He was tan, brown hair honeyed with sun, and he still smelled sharply of the sea. He looked like a joyful sprite that had sprung from a wave. His eyes glittered with mirth in the sun.
"Maybe." James said, his voice guarded, but that dissuaded the younger boy not at all. He collapsed on the ground beside James and stuck out his hand.
"Theodore Groves." He grinned. He had a handshake as enthusiastic as the rest of him.
"James Norrington." He'd heard the name Groves before. By the look on Theodore's face, he'd heard James' surname, too. They shared an unspoken agreement not to ask each other about it, which may have been the first foundation of their friendship.
Groves settled at his side like a friendly burr, and James' brittle outside couldn't shake him. Theo was loud, and bold, and impulsive - everything James wasn't. He said things he shouldn't, sometimes. He did things he shouldn't, either. An hour after he'd told James he'd sailed in on the ship James was to sail out on in a few weeks, he'd pressed James to a wall in a back alley and kissed him until he'd forgotten to be surprised. James hadn't even known he would like that. Theo seemed to never have doubted. By the end of the day, Theo was staying with James in his lodgings until they shipped out again. James half wondered if he was going mad. He smiled more in two days than he had in the past five years. He thought they must be terribly obvious, and waited for the noose to tighten around them both. Theo never seemed to fear.
Theo talked to him about the breeze in palm trees, about gunpowder and shot, about pretty women and rum and pirates. Endlessly about pirates. Theo loved stories about buccaneers. James loved listening, in turns baffled, annoyed, and entranced.
"I heard Captain Flint was a navy man once." Theo told him, tickling James' side with his toes as they sprawled on the floor of their room, lazy in the afternoon sun. "I hear he went mad with hatred for England, and wanted to destroy it all."
"He did an excellent job at that." James said dryly back, catching Theo's ankle. England wasn't that bad, he thought. Not all the time. Not from far away. "Plenty of them used to be navy." You learned that fast in the Bahamas.
"He was an officer." Theo's foot went still.
James grimaced. There was a way Theo talked about these men that made him nervous. Frightened him. He realized that it was admiration Theo felt, and that could be heard in his voice. "That makes it worse. Abandoning duty for greed and murder? He was no hero. No pirate is." James' voice was firm. All he saw in his reflection now was Alexander. He couldn't picture it older.
Theo pulled his leg back and they bickered until bed over the nature of good and evil. They were too young and too jaded for a fair discussion, and no compromise could be reached.
In a few short days James' heart lept as they eased out of dock and Theo's knee brushed his. He bid goodbye to grey, stooping England and could already smell the tang of ocean air in the breeze. Theo, James was amused to learn, still got seasick for the first half day of the journey. James gave it three more before he learned what Theo's skin tasted like when spunk and seawater mix on it, on his knees in the lower gundeck. It felt like nothing else he'd ever known.
Even Theo couldn't compete with ocean spray and sunlight beating down on his face. Theo never seemed to mind that his new friend favored nights spent reading near the rail, as opposed to nights tangled with him. He continued to stick to James like a burr. They spent time off duty discussing James' books and they path before them.
They were ferrying the new Governor to Port Royal, the one place James had not been before. It was rubble still when he'd last been by. It was still rebuilding now. Earthquakes were the cause, not raiders, and James wondered at the wisdom of continuing to fight the ground itself. The Governor himself was cheerful company; his daughter audacious. They would be arriving to a fully repaired Governor's mansion. The Navy barracks, James had been told, would take two more years to complete.
"Captain" hardly felt real on James' shoulders when he and Theo met their final piece, a few years later. Andrew Gillette looked pristine in almost the same midshipman's uniform Theo had worn years before. Theo looked trim and handsome in his lieutenant's uniform now, and James felt guilty at the disparity in their ranks. Gillette was young, sharp-faced and clear-eyed and had flaming red hair. He was sharp in every place Theo was round and strong. His pale face had a permanent sunburn and he looked like he was angry with the world about it.
The captain Gillette sailed under was - as Theo put it - a right bastard, too free with the lash by all accounts. It took hardly any time at all for James to finagle a few trades and a promotion, thankfully. In mere months he had a second lieutenant at his back, who came with an irrepressible and irreverent tongue, and a poorly stifled Irish lilt.
And then, like his father before him, James took them hunting.
From Nassau to North Carolina they sailed, chasing a dying breed and hurrying it along to its death. Norrington's name was known again in the Caribbean, and Groves and Gillette could not be separated from it.
James caught them together a few scant years after they settled into their pattern. Though 'caught' would perhaps not have been the best word for it. Theo seemed to have coaxed Andy into James' bed before James got home, and they were sprawled naked like an offering when he came through the door. He didn't bother to ask questions - he just crawled between them and collapsed, letting them take him like a current.
Everything James had needed was now here, on the sea. Them. The air. The salt. It bleached his clothing, his hair, it left grit in his eyelashes and he loved every damned moment. Their best hunts were a small ship; a sparse crew; the three of them worked until they shook and chased pirates and each other like schoolboys, until they fell. Some of James' favorite hunts had no prizes to show at all.
"I bet there's treasure out there." Theo whispered once in his ear, as they stared at the moon beyond the horizon.
"Mountains of gold under a fire-breathing dragon." Andy laughed against James' skin.
Theo laughed too, tackling Andy to the bed and struggling to pin him. He murmured to them both, "Let me tell you a tale about a spaniard named Vazquez..."
God, his breath was coming harder now. He was shaking and couldn't stop. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. He heard the heavy tread of Davy Jones' peg leg coming closer. Everything was still clear, but it wouldn't resolve into pictures. It didn't make sense. He wished Theo and Andy were here. He wished he knew where Andy was. At least he knew Theo lived. For now. They'd all be dead when Beckett was done, he knew that now. There would be no survivors.
When he'd first noticed Elizabeth - when - god - years ago -
When he'd first realized she'd gone from an impertinent gangly thing, always underfoot, to something wild and unknowable - he had wondered if Andy and Theo would feel betrayed. Betrayed might not have been the right word. Andy didn't speak to him for three days. Theo had looked at him with pity.
"Is it because she's a woman?" He had asked awkwardly one night.
Theo has looked at him sadly. "James, I love women. You love things that swallow you whole."
James decided just to trust that Andy would come around again, and one day Theo would stop looking at him like that.
Not that anything in James' life had ever prepared him for approaching someone else emotionally. Theo had done all the work before. He didn't know how to be the aggressor. He wasn't sure he liked it. He didn't know how to tell her he saw the beach in her eyes, the breakers beating on the shore, rocks hidden below. He wondered if he could drown in them and finally feel at home. If he would have a place to go back to that the rest of the world could accept.
James was completely and utterly used to being chased, though. Elizabeth had no interest in doing so, and made that more than clear. He did his best - which was pisspoor - and had to admit even as he sailed trying his damnedest to rescue her, the Turner boy had whatever she wanted. He always had. James...lacked. Oh, at times Elizabeth still led him, and he let her. But she led him inexorably toward Will Turner, where her true passion lay. He could say one thing of that entire cursed journey, though, and that was that it had led him back to pirates. Of course. They were as part of this sea as the dolphins and the sea turtles. But this one -
This one -
He said, "So you have heard of me," and something in James lights on fire. Their eyes meet and James feels a raging sort of joy. Of course he's heard of Jack Sparrow. The name's commonplace. He can feel Andrew's indignant rage on one side, Theodore's thrill on the other. He can't look away from Sparrow. He can't stop finding reasons to reach out - Sparrow looks like a naiad. A selkie, maybe, something so much more of the sea than James that he wants to never let go. He wants to know how. He wants to be that. Jack is wild braids, dark eyes, golden teeth, and the last man to sack Nassau. Jack Sparrow never had to fire a shot.
Sparrow breathed the sea the same as James did. He smelled like the worst of the Caribbean made flesh - rum, salt, tar, blood, sweat, dirt. God above, James could have lived with the damned monstrous living dead pirates tearing his life to pieces, if only it wasn't for the way he kept looking away from Elizabeth to stare at Sparrow. In Sparrow's eyes he saw a raging hurricane to drown out Elizabeth's summer storm. He could die there. Jack Sparrow was a ship killer, and James could never resist them.
When he tried to hang Jack it was with the wind howling in his ears and the surf crashing in his veins. It was almost too loud for him to keep moving. Something inside of him screamed as Sparrow walked up to the gibbet. It roared as the trap door went - and it wasn't lust, it wasn't a passing fancy, it was the ocean - the Caribbean sea herself rioting against it.
The next time he remembered breathing was after Sparrow had broken away in a mad dash for freedom. Of course Turner helped. Of course Elizabeth stood with him. But he didn't feel real again until Sparrow swayed close to him and their breath mingled. Their eyes met and the sea was quiet. All James could hear was Sparrow.
"I was rooting for you, mate."
Norrington blinked and he was gone. He felt a pull like the tide in Sparrow's direction and he thought oh no, this is what going mad feels like. He still gave the pirate three days before he gave chase. There were the rest of the pirates to hang, after all.
The Dauntless could never hope to catch the Black Pearl, of course. Andrew and Theodore watched him with wary eyes. They didn't know what to make of his new hopeless obsession. Theo worried. Andy scowled.
The stopped him belowdecks one day, hands fisted in his coat. "Stop, James. Why are you still letting it consume you? Letting him consume you?"
James looked at Theo, lost for words, and Theo knew.
"God, James, if you'd get over your need to be swallowed whole."
James couldn't argue with it but neither could he stop. It wasn't Jack's face that woke him in the night in a cold sweat, though. Oh, he thought of Jack - dark thoughts, shameful ones, tied up in the smell of sea salt and tar and the flash of gold teeth - but those eased him to sleep. It was different grins that woke him, skeletal pirates moving jerkily through his mind. Their tendons hung useless and grotesque from their arms, scraps of meat still on their bones. They laughed and came for him and when they came too close, some weren't pirates at all. They were his brother, his father, the men he lost at the Isle de Muerta. Coming for him.
When they hung the last of the pirates in Port Royal, he didn't hang their bodies in the bay. It wasn't out of mercy, or decency. The sight was just too familiar as they decomposed.
He still chased Sparrow. He let other prizes pass. Better ones, more important ones. He neglected duties. Theo and Andy continued arguing with him, their fights becoming more and more frequent as they tried to shift his focus off of Sparrow. It wouldn't work. Something in the deep, terrifying depths of James' soul had roared out to meet something in Jack and he couldn't stifle it back down if he tried.
He remembered the best day of that chase, before it all went to hell. They'd caught the Pearl unaware in the early morning fog. For a split second, they had been so close to her that James could hear Sparrow laugh. He wondered if, over the sound of creaking timber and snapping canvas, Sparrow could hear him laughing, too. Then, they had sprang apart and James gave chase, as he always did. Sparrow outran them, as he always did. The wind had been brisk, the sun high, and they'd kept her in their sights the better part of a day.
That was only a few weeks before he'd lost everything. The sea loved Jack Sparrow, James thought, almost as much as it loved tricking him. He'd been certain after that day off the coast of Tripoli that the sea hated him. He never could resist a ship-killer. He'd sailed straight in, though it had sprung from nowhere and the clouds rolled black, and the Dauntless never made it out again. How he'd survived, he'd never figured out. Theo had thankfully been at the fort. Andrew had been at his right hand. James could never forget that. Andrew had been touching him, their fingers had brushed, and then the sea had let loose all her fury and James had let go.
That was the thing, wasn't it? That thing between he and Jack had always been best as a game. They matched move for move. When James sailed with him, it had felt like an extension of that - but he couldn't get Andrew's face out of his mind. Or Theo's face. He had needed to go back. He needed to right what he'd made wrong when he'd thrown good sense to the wind and taken the game too seriously.
He wondered, in what had followed, what would have happened if he had behaved differently. If he'd changed tack at the sign of the storm and put it and the Pearl to their rudder. Would Andy be with them? Would he have been able to stop Beckett? Would he still be here, gasping on the cold and clammy deck of the Dutchman with his fingers growing cold and his shirt sticking to his belly, wet with blood?
Blood as salty as the ocean, someone had said once. An old woman in a tavern, maybe, telling fortunes for coin. Or an angry ship's doctor. Even odds. Too salty. Too sharp and thin and cruel. One day he'd crumble like Lot's wife. Is this what that felt like? He knew he was dying. He was suddenly struck by the thought that he didn't know what happened after that. He'd long ago given up belief in heaven. There was no golden place where his family waited for him. He, like his father and brother before him, was a sailor. At the end of the day, all sailors were devils. James had done far too many things he wasn't proud of, that he couldn't deny. Most of all for Beckett. He wondered if the other men like him had felt remorse as they died. Hume, Rodgers, his father. Did they regret the wars they'd waged on men trying to find freedom, food, and an end to the yolk of cruelty?
Probably not.
James' vision was getting dim and blurry. The deck of the Dutchman seemed to tilt and list more than was normal and he squinted. He could just barely make out a boot and a peg leg coming to stand over him, with Davy's ominous step-thunk, step-thunk. That sound was one more thing that haunted James' dreams, like undead pirates and Andy's face. Well. At least all that would soon stop. Everything would soon stop.
"Not afraid." James wheezed through clenched teeth.
The man he saw when he peered up was not Davy Jones. For one, he had a significant lack of tentacles. He was handsome, some years older than James, and had a crutch tucked under one arm. His long, graying hair curled around his shoulders and a neat beard framed a mischievously grinning mouth. He was completely bereft of additional sea life. That was...probably a good sign. James squinted up at him, belly heaving as he still tried to breathe around the wood in his chest. "Good. No time for fear now."
The stranger gripped the spike in his chest and James hissed. "He's coming. Off you go." He pulled sharply, the wood wrenching free with a terrible sucking sound, and he shoved James off the Dutchman and into the sea.