horny on the Spanish Main

Only the need for public displeasure made doting on James impossible, with his tooth wrapped in a handkerchief in her pocket and him visibly wincing and testing out the empty space in his gums.  Her good mood and his recent dental work very apparent to onlookers, the story was clear enough - enough being the operative word.  There was as yet some disagreement on whether or not James Norrington had had this inflicted on him as a punishment.  The overall atmosphere towards him was one of such cheerful, welcoming schadenfreude that Elizabeth even felt it permitted her to touch his face on front of the others.  The motions made towards moving out of the mall and returning to the Pearl were of a less reassuring nature.  There Elizabeth was disappointed, and found Teague and Barbossa in about as much of an unsteady mind as most of their collective crews.  Only the reminder that they had still had crew waiting behind for them got them reluctantly into gear.  

She did not know Teague so well as to form any opinion, but such sluggishness from Barbossa certainly did surprise her.  She had never felt herself in this mall, either, but that made leaving all the more imperative.  Yet if she did not have an active reason to prefer the Empress to this place - the promise of something like the honeymoon she had been denied - she wondered if she would be the same.  Even the night before, when her faith in her future with James had been at its weakest, she had not felt up to leaving; the prospect of living full time as the Pirate King was too daunting.

There were other bad signs.

Large numbers of crew had gone missing, including her boys Pintel and Ragetti.  This had been alarming until they were discovered in what was certainly a wing of the mall she and James had not mapped - she checked their maps.  Amidst the rich aroma of warm butter they found a little cordoned-off section labeled TICKETS - and the strangest and most lifelike noises there.  Even Elizabeth had wasted at least an hour staring up at a story more dazzling than any theater she’d ever been to, the images of people appearing flat against a hanging panel on the wall.  She cheered for a man named Blood in a riveting duel against a Frenchman, and only succeeded in pulling herself out of it when she thought of how much she would have liked James to see it.  

But she had gone to find James when she received a call, quite unexpectedly, from Will.

She almost did not answer it, but that was behavior she could not justify, and so with the deepest reluctance she picked it up.

“I know this isn’t who you want to hear from,” she picked out.  There was overpowering static.  It had never been unusual at sea, but she had made calls in the mall before without problem.

“Will?  I can barely hear you-”

There was something else garbled, and she futilely called his name a few more times, before managing to pick up, “Do you know the J. C. Penney beyond the- furniture display-”

“The one at the end of the mall?”

“It’s not- the end-”

That, most ominously, was the most she got out of him before the connection was lost.  More and more vexing.  The only positive was running into James on her way there.

“Well,” he said, with a nod back toward what could be generously interpreted as the rest of the mall. “I seem to be back in their good graces- or in them for the first time, rather.”

“Yes, yes,” she said hastily.  “I’ve just got a call from Will-”

“What is it now-“

“He said there’s a new store,” she said, wiping her hair off her forehead. “And that’s the second one today-“

“Considering the amount of fun this place seems to want to have with us, I’m not surprised,” he said darkly. As he spoke, he rolled up a small bit of cloth from his pocket and traded it for another wedged in his teeth, which was soaked through with blood. He threw this aside into a nearby rubbish bin.

“How’s that coming,” she said with a terse nod of her chin.

“Better,” he said. “It's going to do this for some time. You needn't worry, though Mr. Rivington of the Gloriana swore and announced that in his day a captain would have a man’s hair for that and never a tooth, so your reputation appears unassailed, if not bolstered.”

He smiled a little wryly at this, his spirits improved by the throbbing ache of a partially cracked tooth being replaced by the tolerable background pain of a patch of raw gum.

She gave him a wobbly smile.

They met with Will on their way to find him.  Elizabeth momentarily wanted to cut her own heart out, seeing the way his was crushed upon seeing them together.  She had to force it down.

“Another new stall?” she said, before pleasantries could make things worse. James, who had been about to speak, closed his mouth quickly and nodded his head.

“Yes. It’s - we’d be better off if I showed you.”  

Will had just about turned to take them when he looked back again, with a squint on his face.  

“Another new stall?” he repeated.

“Yes,” she said grimly.  “A quarter of us has been there half of the day.  It carries nothing, but plays pictures - moving pictures, with sound and everything - like watching a play with musical accompaniment-”

“What, really?”

“It isn’t as marvelous as it sounds,” she insisted - and when faced with both of them looking awed and skeptical at once, ostentatiously shut her mouth, and began again, more timidly.  “It is marvelous - but - isn’t that more of a concern?”

“I don’t know,” said Will.  She knew he was of a serious nature in general, but his solemnity still gave her greater concern than anything else.  “After you see this you can weigh which worries you most.”

The hall lights had started to grow dimmer as they approached.  They could not be fully certain there had not been a hallway here before, but they were positive nothing had been in it.  At first it seemed to be nothing - the tables by the windows were crowded with clothing, children’s toys, books, all ancient and weatherbeaten and broken and used.  It was nothing so nice as anything else.  Paper tags hung from everything with some scribbled price, some completely illegible.

A few more of their crewmates dug there, carrying things under their arms.  One of her crew had a fan and a rug of visibly Chinese make under his arm and scurried past her as she ran out - it was her navigator.  He looked up at her and then ducked his head and went off running.  To get his brother, perhaps.

“It’s just junk,” said Elizabeth, perplexed, lifting and setting down a journal so old it was practically falling to pieces, a dull red stone gleaming on its cover its only draw to the eye.  “What’s so much more alarming about this than moving pictures on the wall, I don’t know…”

She looked back up at Will, who looked half beyond her, white as death, and gestured to something with a quick, nervous gesture of the hand.

Elizabeth turned and looked, and gasped as though in pain.

“Will,” she said, without pulling her eyes away.  “Can you - please go find the other Captains.  Tell them I want the packing and leaving effort doubled - and if he has a moment, I want Barbossa down here.  Please.  As soon as possible…”

He didn’t answer, but she knew he nodded without having to look at him. She heard him leave, only barely - so stealthy and graceful it was second nature - and when he was gone it was as though the string that held her up was slashed.

Elizabeth grabbed the edge of an unremarkable chair in front of her and held it tight, knuckles white, to keep herself steady.

“Elizabeth?” James asked, putting his hand on hers.

Elizabeth shook her head, but took his arm so tightly it must have hurt him.  She felt nothing. It seemed as though her fingers had gone numb. Finally she tore her eyes from it and sought his face.

“It’s my wedding dress,” she said.

James frowned and looked where she had been and saw it- pale yellow and cream silks, trimmed with gold, hung limply on some kind of wire hook instead of a dress form. He swallowed.

“Is it, now,” he said, when he could speak again.

Elizabeth looked like she’d seen a ghost, and then, abruptly, laughed when the irony of that simile occurred to her. It must have been a strange nervous bark to him.

“I would swear it. Will recognized it, too.  I wonder-”

She looked around the shop as though scared to turn her head - rubbish though it might have been.  

“Do you think everything in here,” she started doubtfully.  “Blast, I wish I had thought to ask Ping before he left-”

“Whatever runs this place is in a panic,” said James. “It’s trying to trick you, that’s all. You see- ah, look, it’s as I thought. Do you see that locket, there?”

He gestured toward a little silver pendant hung carelessly off the edge of one shelf.

“If I didn’t know better, I would think that contained a portrait of you that went down with Dauntless. It’s a trick, do you see? If it were truly the same locket, you would be in there. Watch.”

James plucked it from the shelf and popped the latch with his thumbnail.

“You see? There’s nothing in-”

He stopped.

The locket opened on a tiny oil portrait of Elizabeth at age 19 or so, a little clumsily executed and inaccurately proportioned, but Elizabeth nonetheless.

Elizabeth’s mouth felt dry.

“See how the painter tried to make me prettier,” she said throatily, gesturing to her own chin ineffectively.

“He wasn’t successful. It’s a poor likeness. Your head looks enormous,” he said. He shut it just as quickly and strung it back up.

She attempted to smile at him, but couldn’t meet his eyes.  There was too much to take in, too much to see.

“It’s a trick,” he said again, though he sounded less convinced this time.

“It undoubtedly is a trick,” said Elizabeth, holding back tears.  “But do you see that chair across the room?  The one beneath the pile of quilts?  Do you recognize it?”

“Your father’s study,” he said softly.

She stepped closer to him.

“Do you feel cold?”

“A bit,” he said. “They can’t bring up a whole ship.”

She took his hand, needily.

“We should leave. Barricade the place off for the time being.”

“You’re right,” she said.  

“Get the others out,” he said, “by force, if we must.”

But when Elizabeth let go of his hand, she wandered further into the shop instead of leaving it.

“Elizabeth-”

How many of these things belonged to the men here, it was impossible to tell - none of them would have carried them on their person, any more than James would have kept that locket or she that dress. In fact she hadn’t kept that dress, not even to try and sell it in Tortuga, which might have been why it ended up here.  A little cloth doll, a little tin officer, a hat, a rabbit’s foot, a pincushion in a picnic basket - and every other space was cluttered with equally sentimental bric-a-brac.  

There was a bookshelf, she saw; she wondered if - she didn’t dare hope, but - yes, she saw it.  All at once, a chandelier hanging from the ceiling flickered to life - one by one the candles rapidly lighting themselves.  Elizabeth froze in fear with her fingers on the spine of one of Henry Morgan’s rough drafts - then, brazenly, she pulled the volume into her arms and opened it.  There it was - Henry Morgan working on the Pirate Code of Conduct - annotations from a fifteen year old girl in the margins.

“Elizabeth,” James repeated as he came up behind her. “We need to leave.”

She showed him the pages. His brows popped up in surprise, but he tried to push the book back toward the shelf.

“God only knows if you can take it back with you.”

She let him put that volume away as with a gasp she recognized another far more precious to her.  “James! It’s my diary!”

It was a swollen tome, stuffed with extra papers; a button and cord kept it closed, which Elizabeth now unlocked.  Ominously, one sheaf fluttered to the floor; Elizabeth picked it up.  The seal on the letter was broken; she opened it.

“Oh, my God-” James muttered.

It was his own handwriting.

Elizabeth was lost in reading it, her heart sinking and yet beating much faster as she did.  She recognized this letter; she had read it three times for two lines alluding to the capture of a vessel and the execution of a pirate crew off the coast of Virginia and some ten more trying to find something in it worth replying to to keep up the correspondence - at that point for her father’s sake as much as or more than for James’.  She remembered how she had felt about it and logged it away in her mind - her mind and certainly not her heart; she had been nineteen; she had thought him a dull homebody bored of all he had in his life that she envied him for, wishing to be doing dull things in Port Royal, unable to speak of anything but that most prosaic and dreaded of topics, the climate.

Again I iterate my fondest hopes for your health and happiness, & that of your father. You are often in my thoughts.  We have had beautiful sunsets these last few nights.  The moon has been full & the sky very cloudless; seeing the sun drop over the horizon I remember as one of your favourite views from Port Royal. You particularly enjoyd it at the docks, if you were permited to be out at such an hour.  The night we went to Lady Cartwright's ball & your father permited me to escort you to your home & you persuaded me to take the longer route, which did not disappoint us in delivring a very beautiful sunset at sea.  V. orange and pink, all the proper colors of a Caribbean flower, though I believe you wore a white flower in your hat that night.  Yes, it was jasmyne; I recall the fragrance.  Flowers are a privilige we lack at sea, so I must remember yours.

"Oh, God," Elizabeth said out loud.

I lack your flowers and you my oceans, though it seems an appropriate trade, doesn't it?  But we have the same sunset and the same full moon in the sky.  Please tell me what you were doing, if you remember it by the time you receive this; I should like very dearly to know if we saw the same sunset on the same night.  I like to hope we did.  Give some of my love to your father.  

Yours truly, always,

James Norrington.

"I am an idiot," she whispered, with deep feeling.

“Elizabeth?”

James barely looked at the letter; he vaguely recalled writing it, but Elizabeth dominated his attention at the moment and he tried to move it aside.

“Elizabeth, it's all right- it's a trick, remember? I'm right here.”

She put her arms around his neck and held him tightly. James wasn't sure, exactly, what was going on, but he had just made out a pile of toys he remembered owning as a very small child on one shelf that he was almost certain had not been there a few minutes ago.

“We need to get out of here,” he repeated. “It's all right- walk with me-”

“Just give me a moment,” she said, pulling back only enough to cup his dear face - gently on the one side, very gently - and kiss him.  He tasted of blood, but he satisfied her regret.

“Elizabeth?”

His smile was confused, and presently a little ghastly, but he returned the kiss, and joined it with another on her forehead.

“I love you,” she said in distress; “I love you…”

Just like he’d said in that letter, in every turn of phrase, without her knowing.  But instead of leaving with him, she turned the pages of her old diary unhappily.  There were mathematical equations; there was an unflattering sketch of her governess chaining her to a wall, like Andromeda, captioned to the effect of Elizabeth’s being thoroughly doomed (to continue her English history studies); a fond note from her father on her birthday that almost made her cry; a short, painstakingly printed letter from one William Turner that he would be making a delivery that day, which had been addressed to her father and to her - she had known it had only included her because had only been for her, and that succeeded; Elizabeth was wiping tears away when another letter revealed itself, an even crueler irony than James Norrington’s.

I love you very much, my darling and dearest Elizabeth - and it pains me to speak sternly to even those I do not love, but you have always urged me to be frank and honest, and you would love me less if I were not, which I could not abide; and so I see that I must be brave like you are, and attempt it.  If you want to change your situation, and you are so desperately unhappy in yours now, you must marry.  You have been raised to know this.  All of the games of our childhood are behind us now.  You have so much to look forward to!  I have never known the great happiness I am provided by my dear and loving Jonathan.  I only wish you could know an equal joy, and I believe you will.  Please don’t speak any longer of running away.  Your duty as a daughter begs you not to, for, even if you would not protect your father’s honor, surely you would protect his heart?  Indeed you must take heart and have courage, and live the life you wish to life - that is all very good and true! You can and must do this through marrying.  I wish I were there and could make you see your prospects as they truly are.

I do not share your conviction that Captain Norrington would ‘leave you on shore to rot’, as you put it, if you accepted him - and neither am I convinced Will Turner would make you so happy as you think.  I know that it is nothing to you that he is a blacksmith; I daresay learning a trade alongside your husband is a draw to you and not a repellent; but a blacksmith will be much more at shore than a naval officer; he will craft swords and not use them; and if you marry him you will spend the rest of your life in Port Royal much as you dread you will already, and those society balls you so detest, you say, without me - a fact which I can well believe since you did not love them beside me, either! - you will only evade them because you will no longer be admitted to them.  If there is a way to be bold while remaining proper, and ascertain whether or not Captain Norrington intends to take his wife to sea, surely you are the woman to discover it! And even if he has no such intention, which I doubt, if any woman could convince him, it would be you.

Elizabeth, I have spoken too much as a mother already, but as I close I find myself uneasy about your continued chest pain.  Please trouble yourself to see a physician.  I know that you are afraid of being labeled with one of those female ailments, and confined further to your house than you already feel you are, but it is not normal to experience such intensity in a complaint as you describe to me.  As you love me, promise me you will.  I would make you if I only could.  Heaven knows how greatly I value you - my best friend through all the worst years of my life, who saw a beauty in me before any man did, my sister and soul - so protect yourself.  

Always and forever, Amelia

Elizabeth struggled to press a quiet kiss to the closed letter; she was visibly distraught.

“Elizabeth?” James said again.

She pressed it silently into his hands. James frowned and opened it up again.

A moment into his scanning through it, his eyes softened. He folded it again and gave it back to her before folding her into his arms, against his chest.

It was a distraction - she wanted to go through those pages again, it hurt like an itch - but a relief.  She sank against him with a heavy sigh.

“Come with me,” he said. “We need to go back.”

“I don’t know if I can do that right now,” she said, desperately wiping at her eyes.  When the next thing they landed on was a handkerchief, she didn’t question it, though she saw the W. S. she’d embroidered in the corner afterward and snorted bitterly.  “I can’t - I can’t be seen like this-”

James looked around for something that could shield her face. Predictably, yet alarmingly, an impeccable black cocked hat, trimmed with cloth of gold and ostrich feathers, slipped from the top of a clothes rack and hit the floor at their feet.

“Oh, God,” he muttered, his eyes uneasily alighting on a small oval portrait of a young woman in rather plain dress who was decidedly not Elizabeth. James reached out to try to turn it to the post on which it was hung, but it was no use. The portrait turned around on its wire, and Mrs Maria Fenton- black-haired, dark-eyed, skin a light brown and dressed in mourning- gazed back at them.

Elizabeth’s wet eyes darted from the painting to James and back again.

“Is it-?”

“Yes,” he said. “Before she set sail with us.”

“I think she’s very pretty,” she said, not knowing what else to say.

“I'm sorry you had to see that,” he said as he tried to pull her away. “We should go-”

“Her portrait is better than mine,” Elizabeth said in a feeble stab at humor.  She was still reluctant to leave.  “I had Will send Barbossa here - I don’t want us to be gone when he comes-”

“It's trying to keep us here, that's what it wants- it's already hurt you, it's already transfixed you-”

“I’m just not ready,” she protested, holding his hands but digging in her heels.  “I’m not ready to face all of that-”

“All of what? Elizabeth-”

“All of the rest of my life!” she shouted, fear naked in her face.  “Look at it, it’s just been one mistake after the other -”

“I wrote that letter, and I'm here, right now, asking you to please come with me-”

“I will!  Just give me a minute - James - please - please don’t make me walk out of here like this-”

Her voice had gone from a shout to a hoarse whisper in only two phrases, and she clung to his hands with tears in her eyes. James tightened his hold on her hands.

“Elizabeth- none of this is real. None of it-”

“How can you look around at this and say that,” she said, a tiny note of hysteria creeping into her voice - that kind that says I’m not crazy, why won’t you take my side?

“The portrait- it would have rotted underwater by now-”

“Maybe they came here, maybe it all came here first-”

“Then where's the ship, Elizabeth, where are the men?” James said, his voice growing hoarse with anxiety. “How is it going to give me my bloody hat back and not Dauntless-”

Elizabeth shook her head, increasingly frantic and faint.  “I don’t - I don’t know, but- these things are real - even if - even if these aren’t the originals-”

“Then why- why these of all things? Why torture us with a life we cannot go back to and would not choose to if we could?”

“Maybe just a reminder- to be-”

Her voice was growing soft.

“To be grateful for -”

Elizabeth let go of James too quickly, stumbling back into the bookshelf and knocking something over.  It landed open, of course.  Elizabeth did not see it, though, pressing her hand over her heart, which was jumping.  It felt full of shooting pain, and she didn’t feel strong enough to stand.  In fact she had such an overpowering and irrational sense of distress and physical pain she started to cry.

“Elizabeth!”

James caught her and guided her down to the floor, where he knelt beside her.

“Elizabeth, what is it-”

“I’m so glad,” she managed to tell him. “So glad you’re still here to love me-”

James glared up, wild-eyed, at the nearest sailor, and barked at him to get some help, even as he pulled Elizabeth to his chest again.

“I am,” he said. “I've loved you for years-”

Her breathing came sharp; her hands were shaking, but she kept one pressed over her chest as though that could ease that pain.  She felt helpless and miserable, and mortified James had seen it - she felt she had just undone herself for good.  Having a woman’s ailment - kings do not have women’s ailments.

James, his own breathing heavy, pressed his hand over hers and leaned his head on hers.

“It's this place,” he said. “It's getting to us all.”

“I don’t think I can go,” Elizabeth moaned into his chest.  “I don’t think - I don’t think I have any future when I leave here, and everything that’s happened here has only hastened my downfall-”

“We can't stay here,” James said. “Beckett's still out there, alive, and we're all that can match him. He killed your father, Elizabeth- we can't stay here-”

She tried to peep up at him, but she only managed to see a portrait hanging on the far wall - obscured earlier by dangling scarves, no doubt, but Weatherby Swann just the same.  She tried to fold herself into the smallest piece of person possible and hide against James, but the tears returned all the same.

“Elizabeth,”James murmured, in a much softer voice now, “it wants you to give up. It wants you to feel helpless. You're braver than that, you're so much braver than this-”

“Give it a rest, boy,” another voice cut in. “Forgive me for my admittedly rather harsh assessin’ o’ the situation, but you may not be the best man t’be preachin’ a gospel of resilience.”

“Captain,” James said, with a short nod.

“Commodore,” said Barbossa.

Elizabeth’s head came up, streaked with tears and messy hair.  She tried to pull air into her lungs, but she only managed to protest Barbossa’s name in a gasp for breath, and her attempt to stand up was frustrated by a concerned lover.

Barbossa’s arms were crossed over his chest. Today, it appeared he had discovered a jacket made of the same stiff blue material as nearly everyone’s trousers, trimmed with fleece at the collar and wrists.

“So,” he said. “Who’s going to explain to me what in the name of Triton’s left bollock is going on in here?”

“It’s a trap,” James began. “The place is-”

“Oh, come off it,” Barbossa groaned. “You should’ve learned by now that when I ask something among all assembled parties, I’m exceptin’ you.”

Elizabeth took a shallow breath and pushed herself unsteadily to her feet.  

“New shop-” she managed.  “I’m - my heart is - “

The mortification of being discovered in such a state beyond helplessness by Barbossa, the man whose respect she most desired and whose displeasure she most feared, was almost enough to send her into a real fit of hysterics, but she focused on the ridiculousness of his fleece collar to draw her sanity from.

“It’s - subsiding, but-”

“Man alive, girl,” he said, in what approximated shocked concern where Hector Barbossa was concerned, “you ain't old enough for that!”

“It’s happened before,” she grumbled.

James pushed himself up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. Barbossa gave him a suspicious look.

“How about you? Did you know about this?” Barbossa asked, jerking his head toward Elizabeth.

“A nervous symptom is not a symbol of decline,” James said in stiff offense.

“Nobody said nothin’ about decline, handsome,” Barbossa retorted, somehow making the last word sound like an absolutely devastating insult. “Now, what's a junk shop got to do with any o’ this?”

Elizabeth picked up the Morgan journal and weakly pushed it at him. Barbossa glanced at it, at first in dismissal and then in amused interest, not noticing the letters that slipped out and fell to the floor.

“Well, ain't this a sight. Teague’ll want a look at it. What do you reckon it's doin’ here?”

“Look in the margins,” Elizabeth pressed.

A surprisingly accurate drawing of a swashbuckling teenage girl who caricatured herself with a rather big chin, wide mouth, small eyes and enormous amount of uncombed hair fought pirate doodles in the corners.  She hadn’t dared to wish too hard, but the dress still showed a fair amount of flat bosom; that was the only detail she had gotten extremely wrong.  Her sketches of pistols were terribly like sausages, unsurprising for a girl who was largely encouraged to draw close acquaintances and flowers only.  

Fittingly, artistic license seafaring Elizabeth appeared to shoot at inksmudge-with-eyes assailants beside the coda on parlay.  She had taken to drawing pistol-fire with great gusto and rather enormous clouds of smoke.

Barbossa scowled in order to not look disturbed.

“In considerin’ the circumstances, I’ll overlook the vandalizin’ of an important document,” he said. “Are you suggestin’ this place conjured this up from your old belongings?”

“There’s James’ hat,” she said pointing.  “There’s Mrs. Maria Fenton.  And my father over there.  That - that there - is my wedding dress. Oh, look,” she said, in a perturbingly flat tone of disinterest.  “Do you recognize that one?”

She was certain it hadn’t been there earlier, but draped across a beat-up and ornate chair was another familiar dress - rather older, the color of a wine stain.

“Look around. Recognize anything else?”

Barbossa followed her gaze, not noticing that James Norrington had lowered himself to the ground to look at the fallen letters.

“Mary’s blessed tits,” Barbossa muttered, eyes widening. “This be a new one, all right.”

Elizabeth wearily touched the top of James’ head - absent-mindedly, and not for long.

“I’ve been reading my old letters,” she said, her heart-beat still not returned fully to normal.  “And all of a sudden I felt like to die.  It’s improving though.  Must be your excellent company,” she said drily.

James unfolded the letter. It was- already in disturbing defiance to the already faulty logic this place appeared to run on- one Elizabeth had sent to him.

My Dearest James:

Please promise that when you next make port in Port Royal you will leave with one sailor more than you arrived with. My father & governess & maid & each and every acquaintance agree that i look like a boy already, and i will listen to all of your orders, even the very dangerous & dirty ones, as long as you do not ever tell me to correct my posture or threaten to tie my back to a chair until I sit like a lady (which already sounds like one of your navy punishments, does it not? I may as well be there already). I wait your confirmation and only hope I am still alive to receive it for I am less & less certain every day that I shall live to see the next. Fondest -

Your Elizabeth

He remembered this one, and unfolded the accompanying letter with an increasing sense of expectant dread.

“Is that a recurrin’ affliction?” Barbossa asked.

“It was a long time ago,” said Elizabeth reluctantly, rubbing her chest as though it still ached (it did).  “I’m sorry you saw it.”

“Don’t go apologizin’ to me. It’s you you’ve got to be looking after.”

My dearest, most cherished Elizabeth,

Your misfortunes do pain me. For what do I sail the seas if the cruelest injustices are meted out not by pirates, but by governesses? And against no mere stranger, but my dearest, shortest friend. (Not for long, I gather - your father mentioned having to update your warderobe to accommodate a growth spurt.  Congratulations! Not for nothing are they training you to be a lady, you'll be one soon - and what a fright THAT prospect is. I am almost afraid to make port again.)  

However, I shall not take you with me when I leave again, for a number of reasons.

1. Your father would not allow it, and so if I did, that would put a quick end to my career.

2. They would not train you so if they were not certain you would benefit by i one day, so I assume you won't make a convincing lad much longer. Condolenses.

3. You would terrorise my crew and bully my captain, and

4. Your knots were always abyssmal.

Try to practice either the knots or the posture a little better before we meet again, my girl.

Best wishes,

James Norrington

As James lifted his head, he realized with a start that there was someone crouching under the loaded table Elizabeth and Barbossa stood talking in front of- probably a crew member embarrassed to be rifling through the shop when the king and her dog had arrived. Elizabeth and Barbossa both seemed distracted enough that James crept forward on all fours to dismiss the eavesdropper.

As he moved closer, so did the person under the table. James made a quick gesture for them to get out, but they continued forward, one hand coming forward into the light in a dark blue woollen sleeve, trimmed with gold braid at the cuffs.

James’s frown deepened. He looked up at the eavesdropper’s face and suddenly, too abruptly to make it without stumbling back, jumped to his feet again, heart pounding.

“James?” asked Elizabeth, the sudden motion - and the fact that it was James, who did not start readily - creating havoc for her heartrate all over again.   Not caring about the presence of Barbossa, she held him tightly.  “James, what is it?”

“I saw-”

He bent down to see if it- he?- was still down there, and saw only his own startled face looking back from a rust-spotted mirror propped up under the table.

He exhaled and shut his eyes. “Never mind. It was a mistake. I’ll tell you later.”

Barbossa looked at him suspiciously. “Been drinking again?” “No,” said James, without much feeling.

“I pulled his tooth out,” said Elizabeth.  “It came loose in the fight with Will yesterday.”

That was delivered with a mild kick to James’ posterior; his ego would feel it most.  Nonetheless, things were so unsettled at the moment that it was meant to lighten the mood.  

“What did you find down there, anyway?”

“Letters,” said James, who was glad to change the subject. “Between you and I.”

Barbossa rolled his eyes.

Elizabeth wilted. “What now?”

James held them out to her. “We were both much younger then.”

It wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be; they made her laugh.  She tried to show them to Captain Barbossa, as a cat tries to make a gift of a dead bird, and he gave them a token glance-over and a strained smile befitting any indulgent but less than enthused cat owner.

When she moved to put them back into the diary - she wasn’t certain why; she knew they were not real, yet she couldn’t help but treat them as though they were fragile keepsakes - she looked surprised to find a third letter in her hand, overlooked by both James and herself.  There was an ink sketch of the view of the beach from Elizabeth’s old bedroom that gave her a powerfully disorienting sense of homesickness and misery, and beneath it, a letter she had long since forgotten.

Everything you describe sounds so grand. I picture it vividly in my mind - the heated smell of gunpowder, the salt of the sea air, the deafening noise - and the swelling in your chest as your survey the end of it, victorious - and grieving too; it must be such a tumult of feeling!  No man is more deserving, father and I both agree, of a promotion; you must make captain soon.  No excuses! I speak to the Admiralty, you understand.  In my heart I know it cannot be long.  And father - and I, and all of Port Royal - are so proud of you.

I wish that I were on another journey, as like the passage from England was, over sea, with a fine young officer to teach me how to tie knots. I still remember the constellations you showed me.  It was a night I could not sleep; you had only time to point out two. I don't suppose you recall all that.  I must have been such a dreadful brat to you.  But as a mourning child your kindness was never forgotten.  Who could have imagined we would be such dear friends so many years later?  I think if you had told me then, though, I would have believed it.  

I wish I had those constellations back.  I have the dances, the small talk, the music, the flowers, the dinners, the hair styles - oh, my word, so many hairstyles - and the shoes, the corsages - but never the stars, it seems, hang above my head just to spite me though they will.  I envy your stars and your ocean.  At least tell me of them, and then it will be almost like they are mine too.  

The illustration of her view of the beach had signified a comparison between his view and hers - hers being pitiful next to his, she had thought then; the first page of the letter was missing.  Yet it seemed intimate now; the closest he would have ever come to a view of her bedchamber; she had even kept in the windowsill; the curtains, crosshatched, a suggestion of lace flowers.  

The rest of the letter was also missing; she was certain there had been a pencil of her father in there too, and a half-hearted attempt at her own likeness, which he had intimated in his letter he would like to see, in response to her saying she had been practising likenesses but had been her own best model.  It had been done by candle, late at night, after she could not sleep; she remembered being more in shadow than out of it, but it had aided the impression of accuracy enormously.

What an encouragement it must have seemed at the time; she had not considered it from that angle.  He had still been like a brother to her, though she had never liked him so much - and until recently she had never liked him so much since, either.

It sunk her spirits again.  She penitently handed it over to James.

James allowed his fingers to brush over hers as he took it.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I need to talk to you in private.”

“Just a moment. Captain Barbossa,” she said, turning only to discover he was no longer waiting impatiently for her to leave; he had something in his hand.  Weary with dread, she repeated, “Captain Barbossa?”

When he looked over his shoulder at her, Barbossa’s eyes were, shockingly, wet.

She said nothing, but the tactful alarm in her eyebrows spoke for her.

“It’s her dress,” he said. “It’s me little Polly’s dress…” Elizabeth’s sense of personal distress for him increased exponentially.  She was on the verge of apologizing for his daughter when she saw the proportions of it.  It was only somewhat a relief.

“She drowned near twenty years ago,” he said, choking back a sob. “She never did no one any harm-”

“Oh, another monkey,” James said in sudden, relieved understanding.

“More’n a monkey,” Barbossa snapped. “She was me own little girl. The only little girl I got to keep.”

Elizabeth and James exchanged a look at that, Elizabeth breaking it too quickly to be seen.

With a heavy sigh, he turned away from them, dropping the long-dead monkey’s frothy little court dress on the table and walking toward the door, pausing only to look at the decaying journal with its ruby-encrusted front and making a noise like a wounded animal as he flung it down and hurried out in an uncharacteristic transport of grief.

“This place really is getting to us,” James said, watching him go.  Unexpectedly - but producing a rather more normal state of surprise in Elizabeth - Will Turner leaned around the door, looking more spooked than normal.

“You can say that again,” he said, and, looking nervous at the prospect, walking back in.

Elizabeth hadn’t realized Will was still there, but she was very nearly relieved to see him, and had left James’ side to go to him before she realized what she’d done and stopped.

Will had never been excellent at concealing his feelings - all the more reason to be more shocked when it turned out he had been more than capable of doing it, she supposed bitterly.  But now he made no such attempt, looking around the room with his jaw set tight, hoping not to recognize anything - and failing, she believed clearly.

“What is it?” she asked softly.  Contextually, it might have seemed like a question about his mood; but he knew she meant what his eyes had fallen on, even though she couldn’t tell for certain that they had.

“A chair,” he said shortly.  “Stool, really.  It was in my mother’s kitchen.  I remember sitting in it the day she died, putting my head in my arms, my arms on the table - not moving.  A neighbor came and cooked something for me.  An old woman… I’ve forgotten her name.  I wish I hadn’t.  She was the kindest…”

Will broke off, flatly. He lifted a brooch from one among many, with a flat expression and a shrug.

“Well, she wore this on her fichu that day. I remember that part.”

Elizabeth had shyly joined him by now, though she stood on the other side of the table.

“I’m surprised your father’s medallion hasn’t turned up by now.”

“Ha. Maybe even this place can’t conjure up those.  Maybe their magic was greater…”

Elizabeth lifted a necklace, thin and delicate gold chain with one beautiful pearl, sighed, and lowered it again.  Will placed his hand over hers a moment, as though to keep it down - or to touch her, possibly.  As though he came to the same conclusion, he removed it with a stiff awkwardness.

“It’s getting better at finding our weak spots,” Will said, his voice low, but certain.

“Are you afraid of its overhearing you?” asked Elizabeth wryly.  “It’s all around us now. I don’t suppose the volume of your voice matters.”

“No, you’re probably right,” said Will, with a quiet laugh.  “Perhaps I don’t want to overhear myself.  I hate thinking about it. It’s trying to keep us here, I imagine.  Though I don’t know how this is going to help.  As likely as anything it will make us hate the place.”

“It doesn’t want us to like the place,” Elizabeth countered. “We just have to stay here. That’s what James thinks.”

“Turner,” said James, from a few feet away.

He had his hands clasped behind his back as he approached, all business.

“Am I to call you Norrington?” asked Will, voice so subdued he nearly did not sound as though he were baiting him.  Elizabeth put her hand on his arm at once, and some of Will’s tension dropped away with a small, self-conscious, visible twinge of shame.

James was visibly unamused, but he held out his hand regardless.

“I believe I owe you an apology.”

Elizabeth’s relief and surprise were their own punishment.  Will took his hand, less surprised than she was, but more visibly glad of it.

“Seems that I owe you the same,” he said.  “It was…. Self-destructive and foolish to demand the heart.  I should have petitioned you, Elizabeth,” he said, turning to her when the handshake was relinquished, with his voice growing unconsciously soft.

“I would have told you no,” said Elizabeth firmly, but warmly.  Will snorted a gentle laugh, but it was assenting.

“Then I would have chased you all over the mall,” he warned her - unable to conceal a smile.  

Her own was equally unconscious.

“You’d be a sorry man if you caught up to me,” she returned in kind.

“Perhaps it would be he who lost a tooth,” James cut in.

“You lost a tooth?” asked Will, instantly humbled.  “I am sorry - I didn’t realize I hit you that hard.”

James smiled just enough to show the wad of gauze where his tooth should have been and abruptly closed his mouth again before he added, a little more graciously, “It wasn’t you, exactly. It was the final straw for an older injury I sustained in Tortuga.”

“I’m still sorry, but rather less,” said Will, with a smile that was too sincere to be sly, though it approached it.  Elizabeth was watching his face without realizing it.

“It comes with choosing a side,” said James. He averted his eyes, and immediately regretted it, greeted as he was by Elizabeth’s wedding dress.

“I pulled it out myself,” Elizabeth was saying, her voice soft and low; Will leaning in unconsciously to better hear it.  “Pair of pliers, hardware store.”

“I tremble to think of it,” Will responded.  “That’s something I’ll miss when we leave.  I took a few things, but all of the things I’d really like to take would be too heavy when we swim back to shore in our - in the real world.”

“Yes, we’ve been having the same trouble.  The furniture’s good here, but…”

James, eyes averted, forced himself to tune them out. A floorboard creaked at the back of the store and he turned his head in its direction.

“ - not that I really need that many pairs of trousers -” A self-conscious, adorable laugh.

“You wear them well,” Will responded, respectful and fond.  “I hope you’re happy in them; you used to hate sparring in that old dress.”

“Yes! Oh, God’s name - is that -”

Elizabeth crossed to the other side of the table to pick something up by the handle, which she had only just now seen, sticking out from beneath an old blue coat.

“It is!” said Will, taking it before she did, lifting it up to admire it.  Not half so nice as the one her father had commissioned, but sturdy and fine - and blunt.  “I remember making this for you.”

She touched his arm again, this time her hand sinking into the crook of his elbow comfortably.  His eyes met hers and rested there.

“ - May I?”

“ - oh - of course -”

With Elizabeth preoccupied and the apparition under the table still weighing on his mind, James stepped slowly, cautiously toward the back of the store. There was a creaking and shuffling from behind a rack of old clothes, as though someone were walking around back there. The clothes themselves ruffled lightly.

James stopped partway there and leaned down to peer under the rows of clothes.

There was a pair of legs on the other side- small, in greyish stockings and heavy shoes. Rationally, it was one of Barbossa’s children- a girl, probably, dressed up in boys’ clothes.

James wasn’t sure.

He reached out toward the shelf, anticipating by now that the store would answer him with what he was thinking of- and sure enough, his hand closed over the wooden handle of a pistol. Single shot, naval issue.

James opened the chamber. It was loaded.

“Come on out,” he said. “You shouldn’t be in here. It’s- unhealthy.”

Towards the front of the store, neither of the Turners - former and present - had noticed he was gone.  

Will had found one of his other practice swords, and slowly lifted it for Elizabeth to block.

“Good- that’s very good.”

“Hard to mess up when you’re going so slow-” she countered, with a cautiously quicker lunge at him - he blocked it, of course.

“There’s hardly space enough to go faster -”

“If it were a real duel, we’d have to adapt to the space.”

“True enough.”

And soon Elizabeth was hitting a table and disrupting it, knocking several things off it with a heavy thud - from the table - and a giggle, from herself.

“Careful! Are you hurt?”

“Not at all.  Will?”

The clang of the practice swords made his heart float, as he thought it wouldn’t again.  This was familiar.  He knew this feeling.  He knew this sound. And he knew this woman - his Elizabeth again, not the Pirate King, not another man’s lover -

“Yes?”

“Do you think - perhaps I could commission - we used to discuss it -”

He almost got the sword away from her, but Elizabeth tossed a scarf into his eyes and got away from him while he pulled it away, laughing.

“- a sword for me, the guard shaped like a folded pair of swan’s wings - I think I’d like that.”

Clang.  Clang.  They’re kissing, Elizabeth used to say.

“I think I’d like that too -”

The figure behind the rack paced a few steps to the side, with a strange squelching sound. James leaned down again.

Whoever it was, they were soaking wet and dripping water. It squeezed from their shoes as they turned and paced back another few feet.

James’s pulse sped up. He closed the chamber on the gun again, took a deep breath, and parted the clothes on the rack.

The store echoed uncommonly, didn’t it?  It rang with the sounds of two swords striking each other again and again, and Elizabeth’s laughter, as sweet a sound as a bell.  Too small a space for echoes, and too small a space for sparring, too - they got tangled up together too quickly.  Will managed to knock her sword aside, his own sword playfully at her throat.  But she didn’t end it there, out of breath, caught between a smile and a thought - a dream, really - looking at him with an odd expression, like she’d had a revelation.  

Will lowered his sword.  “Elizabeth,” he said.

James Norrington came running, leaping over a table and clearing it of half its possessions - then skid along the floor deftly, without falling.

“We have to leave now-”

Will lifted the blunt training sword to attention at once, frowning in the direction he’d come from.

But James grabbed them both by the first surfaces he could grab, the pistol already abandoned, and started hurrying them toward the door.

“James, what is it?” asked Elizabeth, trying to keep up with him, but still rather disoriented.  “And- wait- James, I wanted to keep-”

They had already been hauled out of the storefront by the time she managed to get that out, and for the life of her, she could no longer remember what she wanted - only the sense of wanting it, and wanting to go back in for it.

“What’s the matter with you-”

James looked, wild-eyed, over his shoulder at the distant storefront, as a little white face and two little white hands pressed against the glass window, water dripping from where they made contact.

Elizabeth let out a short scream and clapped her hand over her mouth.

He pulled them both another few yards away.

“Whatever else happens,” James said, trying and failing to conceal the tremble in his voice, “no one is to go back there. We ignore it, we pretend it doesn’t exist-”

When he looked back over his shoulder, the figure was gone.

Will Turner took Elizabeth - grip strong, but not rough - by the arm and hurried her, with Norrington, down the hallway until they had reached the part of the mall that was brightly lit again, whereupon, as a group, they stopped, all pale and shaken - Elizabeth pulling out her phone with a trembling hand to glance at the time.  No wonder her legs felt as unsteady as they did; they had been hours in that store, and they hadn’t eaten.

“It was your cabin boy,” Will surmised, eyes meeting Norrington’s as Elizabeth scrolled her phone, the bright light of the screen making her look even more exhausted.  “Wasn’t it?  From the Dauntless.”

James looked at him, about to angrily retort something at him before he realized what he had actually said.

“...yes,” he said. “Georgie Bingham. He was- he was only ten years old.”

“I’m sorry,” said Will, the weight of it in his eyes.  They rested on Norrington’s only a moment longer, but it was enough.  He glanced over the mall; after the dim gas lanterns of the haunted storefront, the brightness of the rest of this place felt ghastly and artificial.  It looked like something that had had the blood sucked out of it.

“We have to get out of here, don’t we,” he muttered.

“Does the number 403 mean anything?” asked Elizabeth Swann suddenly.  She hadn’t been listening, but now she glanced up from her phone in annoyed confusion.

James looked sick.

“Oh, God-”

She continued to scroll her phone.

“Some number I don’t know has been texting me that for nearly three hours.”

“We have to get out of here-”

Elizabeth looked at him; he looked nauseated.  She met Will’s eyes.  In spite of her hunger and overall physical exhaustion - she felt as though Will had done much worse than merely spar with her, which was uncomfortably hard to explain - it still seemed as though her mind was clearing.  She took James by the hand gently, then looked at Will.

“Tell Teague we’re leaving.  I’ll get Barbossa.”

He nodded.  They had no time to waste.

For the second morning in a row, Elizabeth woke with a kiss.

Yesterday, however, all had been well; yesterday night had been a different story.  Stormy, one might have said.  In spite of how they had made up, she had still gone to sleep unconvinced of their future together.

“What’s that for,” Elizabeth murmured, careful not to breathe on him.  The lights were on; morning it was again.  Elizabeth checked her phone and gently swore.  It was later than she wanted to be up.

“It's something I never grow tired of. Let me indulge myself,” James said, his voice rougher and even lower than usual from sleep.

Elizabeth couldn’t say she minded.  And let him not tire of it, she hoped.  And if he proved false today, at least she would have memories.

“I would have thought last night’s activities put you in a sullen mood,” she teased.

“Mm. Well. I hope you consider me properly chastened…”

“You did serve me rather well.”

“And frequently, as I recall.”

Elizabeth found herself laughing self-consciously.  There was a throaty quality to her voice at this hour.  She was not fully awake - not awake enough for this, although she had first mentioned it.

“Well, you seem recovered enough,” said Elizabeth, forcing herself to sit.

“Your kisses are a very capable curative,” said James, who had resolutely stayed on his back.

Seeing James did not plan to get up, Elizabeth moved to lie on him, tucking her head on his chest and sinking against him.

“Bad breath and all?”

“No one is otherwise first thing in the morning,” he laughed.

“I should think that would damage my healing powers somewhat.”  Her throat felt dry.

“I'm not going to quibble with you about morning breath,” he said gently, as he tilted his head to look down at her. “Suffice it to say it does not.”

“You’re soft in the mornings,” she noted mildly.

“Hm?”

“Sweet, I should say.”

“I'm feeling somewhat improved,” he said with a small shrug. “My mouth is still a pain, but that's only a matter of time.”

“Remember, I want it if you lose it-”

“I know,” James groaned, though not particularly vehemently. “I can't for the life of me understand why, but I think you know how I enjoy spoiling you.”

She touched her throat absent-mindedly. “I want to wear it-”

“I cannot help but feel I should not be as touched as I am.”

Elizabeth breezed her fingertips along his chest, up and down. James closed his eyes, with a surprised smile.

“Good morning, love.”

“Do you feel touched?” she quizzed him.

“Elizabeth-”

He began to laugh, covering his mouth with one hand. Satisfied, Elizabeth settled down again, face all but buried.

James slid his fingers into her hair and ruffled lightly, without judgment.

“Would that we did not have to get up. I would be content to spend all day in here.”

“We should be leaving today,” she reminded him.  “We should have gotten up early for that. Set an example.”

“I know,” he said. “More’s the pity.”

“I thought you wanted to leave.”

“This place? Absolutely,” he said with a scoff. “This bed, on the other hand-”

“We’ve got a bed on the Pearl,” she reminded him. “And on the Empress…”

“I know,” he repeated. “But I’m afraid I’m rather absorbed by the moment…”

He smiled tiredly down at her as he lifted her hair and let it spill through his fingers, split ends be damned.

“The bed on the Empress,” Elizabeth whispered confidentially. “Really it’s rather spectacular. For horrible reasons, one can assume. But, regardless.  I last lay in it a heartsick and frustrated virgin, and next I will lie in it with you.”

“Closer than a bride,” he said, with a carefully contained smile to spare her the sight of the inside of his mouth- though, realizing how she might take that reluctance, he added, “and twice as eager.”

She remembered how eager a bride she was, and for someone else, but it was thankfully early enough that her facial expressions lagged behind her feelings, and this time she pinched any grimaces away before they could bloom on her face.

“A large bed is a terrible place to be lonely,” she said vaguely, rubbing grit out of her eyes.  “My face feels swollen.”

“It is,” he agreed, in a quiet voice, as his hand descended to the back of her neck through her hair and rubbed a little more pensively. “I look forward to ending that for you.”

She thought about apologizing, telling him she knew it wasn’t the ship he’d hoped for them to end up on.  But there was a bigger hurt there than her, she knew, and she didn’t know how to heal it.  It seemed unfair that she couldn’t alone, but that was the way things were.

“I’ll miss the Pearl, though, I admit.  And we’ll all miss out, trying to see which of her captains wins…”

“I've no such attachment to it,” he said bluntly. “I prefer to think of a less furtive future with you.”

“I’ll miss her crew,” she retorted, and sighed.  “I hope my boys will keep up their lessons. I haven’t had much time with them.”

Pintel and Ragetti, the only surviving members of the Pearl’s original crew, had been learning how to read from her.  They had a slate and a piece of chalk, limited good humors and Barbossa’s permission as their only tools of learning, but they were surprisingly eager to do it.  With growing guilt at the privilege of an education she had taken entirely for granted, Elizabeth did not want to abandon them, but knew they would not be allowed to depart with her if she’d even wanted them to.

“Your boys,” James repeated in amusement.

“You know, they’re the ones who took me on board the Pearl,” she said lightly, “the first time.”

“I suppose that must engender a certain affection,” James said dryly.

“I honestly can’t believe Jack let them join his crew,” she said, in real incredulity.  “No one’s told me yet how that happened.  Just hopped on with you in Tortuga and there they were and no one’s said a word of it since.”

“The operative words in that sentence being with me. I don't think he was after much in the way of quality.”

“Yes, but they mutinied against him-”

“And I nearly hanged him- twice, I might add, and now he's going about saying that actually serves to better qualify me as his friend. I don't think Sparrow gives these things ordinary consideration.”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth in some exasperation, “but that’s not a betrayal; you were on opposite sides of the law.”

“The heart,” James said flatly.

“You tried to stab Will, and I forgave you,” said Elizabeth still more bluntly.  “It seems that he did too, til you absconded with me.”

“I know,” he said. “I think if we're honest with ourselves, the only one among us who hasn't done anything of the sort to a substantial number of the rest of us is Giselle, which only serves to highlight how lucky we are to have her.”

“That’s because Giselle doesn’t come from class or pirates,” said Elizabeth drily. “Her cunning comes from pirate-adjacent at best, and all of her sense of class, style or elegance is her own, she has never had any haughty ladies to impress.  She’s a self-made woman.  We should all aspire so high.”

“I might have to bring her aboard with me,” he cautioned. “She's rather attached, and I will confess that it's mutual. It's rather like having a sister.”

“If she’ll come.  It’s not a fun prospect; more than half the crew has little or no English.”

“And if she'll forgive me for taking the matter of my hair into my own hands,” he said, too lofty even by James Norrington standards to be serious.

“If her man will join us, I expect that will be what decides her.”

“He can teach your crew how to code.”

“They’ll be much obliged if he does,” said Elizabeth, finally feeling awake enough to start, very lazily, picking apart her hair with plans to braid it.

“Here- let me help you with that,” he said as he pushed himself back up to sitting. He gave her a kiss on the temple in passing, along with a small, yet warm, smile.

“You don’t have to do it in the mornings - only at night,” she protested in embarrassment.

“I don't mind it,” he said. “Besides that, I feel I was rather unnecessarily cold toward you last night.”

“I think you may have behaved according to the dictates of circumstance,” she responded with delicacy.

“It was unkind, nonetheless. I’m sorry for that.”

“I don’t recollect you.  That may be for the best.”

James pressed his hand above her heart- and by extension, and rather daringly for him- over her breast.

“I feel as though I have neglected not only your authority, but our relationship as well, in my dwelling on my current station. I would like to amend that, if you will permit it.”

Elizabeth could only meet his eyes for a moment.

“Then you may begin with my hair, if it suits you,” she said, believing that would address both his points, and should satisfy him.

James kissed her on the forehead.

“I expect my spirits to improve significantly aboard the Empress, though you will have to help me learn their language.”

“I have some small skill at that,” she said, with a little smile.  She had been kissed three times in as many minutes; it lifted the spirits as it was meant to.

James’s own hair was disheveled from sleep to such a vengeful extent that it might as well have been rebelling against years of fastidious grooming, aggressive shearing, and being too limp, dirty and unkempt the last time it had grown out to do much of anything. He raked it back from his face with his hand before he went to brush hers; it was much more noticeably uneven now than it had been last night, but the carelessness with which he responded to it was new in itself.

“My only regret is that I did not look deeply enough into whether or not I wanted to keep anything from this place. I’m rather fond of the bedspread, I’ll admit.”

“Take the bedspread if you want it,” said Elizabeth, amused.

“Well, you know,” he said. “Sentiment and all that. It's practically a wedding bed.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, understanding, and leaning in to nuzzle him, since she had still not seen to her breath.

“And the quondams, of course. What we shall do when those run out again, I’ve no idea-“

“I suppose we’ll have to make them last until we’re ready to settle down,” Elizabeth whispered, then snorted with laughter.

James finished brushing her hair and began rebraiding it.

“I had a thought last night, regarding the Gloriana.”

“Oh?” she asked, soothed by the gentle tugging on her hair.

“I think I have a condition for putting her in fleet. I think she ought to be rechristened.”

“What do you want to name it?” she asked dubiously, belatedly fearing it was going to be something sentimental to stab James in the heart every time he said it - something to evoke the Dauntless, perhaps.

“What would you think of calling her the Weatherby Swann?” he asked, leaning over to look her in the eye.

“I don’t think he would like it,” she said, looking bleary.

“Ah,” James said quickly. “I- all right, then. No matter.”

“I don’t think I’d like the idea of calling a ship my father’s name, it would feel unwieldy on the tongue all the time- and if you think these people aren’t fond of you, I can’t see them being especially fond of the last governor of Port Royal, can you?”

James’s apologetic expression darkened into a glower as he leaned back behind her.

“I want Beckett’s armada to think of him as they perish.”

“That’s all very well and good, but I’d still have to talk about a ship using my father’s name.  I don’t like it.”

“Very well. I won’t push it any further.”

He finished the braid.

“Besides,” she reflected, lost in her pragmatism. “I expect the name doesn’t mean much to most of the armada.  I doubt most of them even know Beckett- well. What would they know about it?”

“I could have saved him, if I had known,” James said softly.

“Perhaps,” she allowed.  “But you don’t know for certain.  Perhaps he would have killed you both, and I’d have seen you both in a little boat in the afterlife, helpless to prevent your passage.  Believe me, James, when I say I would not have taken your death very well.  And then what would have become of me, James?”

She leaned her back to his chest familiarly and shut her eyes.

“Trade myself to Sao Feng and die in the boarding by the Dutchman.  You know perfectly well that’s true.”

“I did not mean to darken the day so early,” he said, taking her hands in his and leaning his chin on her head.

Elizabeth tilted her head back a little with affection.

“I’d brighten it, but my breath is too foul.”

“Mine can’t be any better,” he said, smiling down at her. “You’re forgiven.”

Elizabeth bounded out of the bed.

“I’m going to remedy that,” she said, beginning to dress first. Her braid swung around with amusing speed as she hopped into a pair of trousers and pulled on a shirt.  “Come on.  We’ll be wanted.”

“All right, give me a moment-” James quickly sorted through some of the strange-looking clothes this place had given him and dressed.

“Might I still trouble you to help me with my hair later, as you offered?” he asked as he fiddled with the buttons of his shirt. “I understand if there’s no time, but…” His voice trailed off, as it often did, but he looked up at her again, aching with sincerity.

“God help me, I think I look forward to the attention. It’s odd how that works. I thought my contentment with being your dog was enough.”

“Let’s eat something first,” Elizabeth agreed with a smile.  “I think perhaps one thing might lead to more, and I won’t be frustrated by foul breath.”

James laughed, startled.

“Are you already planning that far ahead? I would never have considered that an amorous activity to begin with.”

“I meant kissing, James, but you may get your hopes up.”

Shirt on, she scooped her braid out of the back of it and stepped into a pair of boots.

“Even so,” he said, as he belatedly unfasted the first few buttons of his shirt for her sake. “And may this damned tooth come out if it’s going to before we try-”

Her unwelcome fingers pushed on his cheek to see if she could find where it was. James flinched and instinctively pulled away.

“Ow,” he said pointedly.

She did not mind this, instead moving her fingers to his throat absent-mindedly before turning away and beginning the process of packing things up.  She couldn’t bring anything back with her she couldn’t carry underwater, and that was the hard part - wanting to bring clothes and knowing they’d be weighed down.  She ended up pulling out a lot of things with reluctance.  Ah, but the trousers she’d keep, and possibly a second pair of the boots she’d found - she’d have to go back out into the mall for those -

“We should probably go eat, then direct the packing effort.  We might not make it out today; I don’t think everyone is on board with it yet.  Well, that should give us some time for me to trim your hair, at least -”

“That’s a low priority, at that,” he conceded. “To be plain with you, I only gathered it back and cut it off, and that was that. I didn’t anticipate your involvement, welcome though it is.”

“Maybe I want to do it.”

He paused halfway through sleeve-rolling.

“That’s… generous,” he said, with a confused little frown.

“You could have asked me to do it from the start, you know,” she said, her frown matching his.  “I don’t see why you didn’t, when you think you’d like me to.  We make time for other things.”

“It would have seemed a very petty thing for which to pull the king aside.” He smiled a little bitterly. “Particularly with the reputation I’ve built among these people- and I did not even know if you would be willing or able.”

“Lord, you could have still asked. And you didn’t have to ask in front of them, you could have just texted me.”

“Cut it as you like then, later today,” he said, a little bitterly. “I don’t think I shall be able to eat much until I get this thing out of my mouth.”

“Come and drink something then. A juice if you don’t want coffee.”

“Better yet, I find a way of dealing with this and then pack through my headache with the comfort of knowing there's an end in sight,” he said grimly, though he lightened his tone enough to make it clear that he was teasing her when he added, “unless you’d like to do that as well.”

“Hardware store, then?”

James looked faintly alarmed. “Are you serious?”

She smirked. He blinked, a little stunned.

“Are you?” he repeated.

“If you are.”

“So long as you don't expect any dignity from me, I'll allow it,” he conceded.

“I was teasing you.”

“Oh, thank God-”

“But I’ll be serious in a moment if you’re asking me.”

“My only concern is the thought of the crews finding out and assuming this was an intentional punishment.”

“James,” said Elizabeth shortly, sitting heavily on the bed now she was dressed, and looking, she hoped, like a proper pirate in spite of things - “if you want me to do it then I will. If you don’t, I will not.  Is that clear enough to you?”

He had to weigh these options before he could answer. James rubbed his jaw and cursed under his breath.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll let you. At least you’ll keep going long after I would have forced myself to stop.”

She didn’t relish it, but she gave him a thin smile regardless.

“As your mistress I think I should be expected to do a little dirty work for you every now and again.”

“I just want it done with. Bad enough to have to walk off the personal impression yesterday's little episode left behind. I won't top it off by being seen stumbling about in pain.”

He sighed and looked back at her.

“And I worry that if I don't, I’ll drink to stop feeling it. I don't want to cause you any more trouble, and I feel I ought to grow more accustomed to managing pain through force of will than irrigating myself. I'm sure the others would agree.”

He smiled very briefly, and then went back to dressing himself.

“I think it might do me some good to be seen as appropriately chastened, but able enough to manage a bit of pain. I'm sure they'll find the whole affair amusing enough to placate them, anyway.”

Elizabeth interrupted him in his dressing to - gently, on account of the tooth - take him by the chin, lean up, and chastely kiss him.

“As you wish,” she murmured.  “Now I’ve got to run.  Catch up with me at the canteen?”

The way to Macy's was far more full of onlookers than James had either expected or desired. The teens from the Pearl mostly guiltily avoided looking at him, but the non-Chinese enlistees to the Empress and even some of the Gloriana’s crew hooted and shouted vulgar suggestions of how a good dog could earn his mistress’s forgiveness, made fists and jerked their hips forward in rhythm. A few of the Chinese sailors, who had only been informed by Tai Huang that both James and Turner were up a creek with the King, but hadn't learned the details yet due to both the language barrier and Tai Huang’s disinterest in discussing the King’s love life (or even thinking about it if he could avoid it), caught the meaning of the gesture and laughed as well. One man caught his eye and howled like a dog, with a strangely languid jerk of his shaven head and his hand trailing back from brow to ear that James belatedly realized was a mockery of his own attempts to keep his hair out of his eyes while Elizabeth raked them over the coals.

Turner had to have been talking to these people. Turner would have been seen as the ideal person with whom to share every mocking thought the crews had had about a man they saw as their King's frivolous, rum-sodden, good-looking but utterly brainless professional failure of a kept man. Turner, he knew, probably took this in in silence, with the occasional pained grin of validated dislike, but it was as though James’s rival had granted the power to read minds and suddenly made it impossible to ignore a single demeaning thought that ever made itself visible crossing their faces.

He had stopped in front of them without realizing it, and quickly looked away as he hurried along.

Macy's itself was blessedly empty- Elizabeth had probably ordered everyone else to keep out.  Their bed in Macy’s, on the other hand, being empty, was more of a curse or an ill omen.  He stood there a moment, wondering helplessly if she had changed her mind, when he heard her clearing her throat behind him and turned.

Elizabeth had taken to wearing the garb of a honeymoon for him, on the nights she wore anything at all, but at the moment she was still nearly entirely dressed - she wore slippers and the first layer of her clothing, but it was not an inviting outfit.

It also did much to suggest she had not had a very excellent evening.  It was late now, and she had visibly not approached the matter of sleeping.  She stood and watched him warily with shadows under her eyes, hands on her hips confrontationally.

“Captain,” she intoned.

“Elizabeth,” he said, in such a low voice it came out breathy.

“Run the gauntlet, I expect,” she said, gruff but charitable.

“I’ve run a gauntlet before,” he said. “This was more like being tarred and feathered.”

“You see how this poses me a problem,” she said, approaching the bed, but giving him a wide berth as she did.

“If you need to punish me before them, do it,” he said. “Trust me, they won’t assume I enjoy it when they’re actually looking at it.”

It was the wrong thing to say.

“Oh, I see. Flog you for your benefit, so they will stop telling stories of how the King’s dog likes it rough-”

“I didn’t mean flogging alone. I could make a list of naval punishments, though I don’t relish the thought.”

“If it had been any other two men in a fight over some valuable, that caused mild property damage and involved toy weapons,” said Elizabeth in growing agitation, “it would be nothing and require no punishment - nothing but stern words and the mockery of the crew! But it was you. It was you and Will.  The only men on this expedition who can compromise my reputation, both of you were involved, and contextually it looks like you were fighting over me.”

And she spoke over any interruption about the heart of Davy Jones with a fierce, “And now if I do nothing, it looks like I want to encourage it!”

“You did strike me,” James said stiffly. “That could be turned into a warning.”

“I have been trying to think of a way to spin this so that nothing further must be done,” said Elizabeth, holding onto a bed post and leaning against the footboard to look at him.  “I have considered things.”

“...and?” James asked uneasily.

“I will have the two of you working together as we head out,” she said, tossing her hair and holding herself steady as possible, though she looked as brittle as she felt.  “Not in positions of command.  I expect you both feel as stupid as you should feel about what you’ve done and will manage without another squabble breaking out, and in the meantime everyone else can - and likely will - remind you of how well you’re regarded at the moment, without my having to do the  reminding.”

“How do we know he's going to stay with us? He’s not particularly nautically inclined-”

“I’m aware,” she said shortly.  “He’s here for now, and will be treated like the rest of you.”

“No passengers. I see.”

James swallowed and nodded.

“Thank you, then.”

“I’m not done.”

“Ah,” said James.

“I think some reference to our bedroom is in order.”

He frowned. “I don't follow.”

“I mean I think I have to let on that I fuck you.”

“As though they didn't figure that out before we did-”

“We haven’t exactly encouraged the rumor,” she pressed on in irritation, crossing her arms.

“I already know how they think of me.”

“If I want this to continue I have to establish that it does not unman me to do so,” she insisted.  “Do you understand what I am telling you at all?”

“I know exactly what you're saying,” James sighed. “Fine. It's only making the truth explicit anyway.”

“I would like your permission to do so!”

“Then you may have it. You didn't force me to ask for your cock as a Christmas gift-”

“I know I didn’t,” she replied indignantly, eyes stinging.

“Tell them whatever you need to, then,” James muttered. “You have my permission. I’m glad, at least, to not find myself banished from your bed altogether.”

“Oh, indeed, you seem very pleased to be here-” said Elizabeth, turning around and walking away from the bed display entirely.

“I didn’t want to try my luck,” James protested. “I had already managed things badly enough today that I didn’t think it wise to come at you melting in relief and taking you into my arms-“

She stomped back again.

“Well? Are you glad or aren’t you?” she demanded.

“I’m ecstatic,” he said, his voice fervent yet his face motionless.

Elizabeth blinked back angry tears and kissed him. James’s shoulders released with relief as he kissed her back, pulling her into his arms.  Elizabeth continued to kiss him as though her guiding passion at the moment were rage, but she clung to him like she thought he would let her go.

“I thought I had lost you,” he whispered.

“It would serve you - right, God damn you-”

“I know. I know, love-”

Elizabeth pulled him back to the bed with her, needing to feel him, to be held.  Every time the stress of this became too much she wanted him to hold her, and when he was the cause of that stress, she was too angry and lonely to think.

“Wait- I brought you something,” said James. “Fortunately, it survived the fountain, and dried just as well. It's far overdue.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out something thin and dark and bound at one end. He pressed it into her palm and curled her fingers over it.

Elizabeth looked down at it in surprise, then let out a miserable noise and buried her face against his chest.  After a moment, she lifted her hand and kissed the lock of his hair in her palm.

James kissed her forehead.

“When we're back,” he murmured, “I want to have yours sewn into my coat, over my heart.”

“Do you now,” she sighed, shutting her eyes.  It seemed to be in exhaustion, hardly pleasure.

“I hope to never be so apart from you to need the reminder, but yes. I do.”

“Rather silly, don’t you think? It’s just hair. It’ll be all split ends-”

“I don’t mind it,” he laughed. “You wear it well. You’ve seen what becomes of mine when left it its devices.”

“Oh, please, regale me with another complaint about your hair,” said Elizabeth.

He laughed. “I’m sorry. If it’s any reassurance, I’m quite pleased with it now.”

“Yeah, you said you cut it,” she said, reaching up to touch it with a pained smile.  She had moved to lay down in his lap now and look up at him; the anger seemed to have left her, at least, but it had left in its place a terrible exhaustion that made her seem delicate and weary, like a battered old love note kept in a pocket as a charm.  The light did not help.  It was eerie and dim after nightfall, making everyone look sickly.

“I wanted you to win me a toy with the claw machine,” she said wistfully.

“I would be thrilled to win you a toy from the claw machine,” he said, leaning back to hold her better.

“We’ve got to leave tomorrow.  Lord, James, I don’t know if we can really do this.”

“We’ll have to put Sparrow in a cage to pull it off,” he scoffed. “That’s the difficult part.”

“No, James. When we leave.  This king business.  I’m afraid I can’t make good on any of my promises to you - again.”

James frowned up at the tiled ceiling.

“Which parts?”

“Our wonderful, terrible reputations.  I think I am going to be remembered as a silly girl forever - Sao Feng’s concubine and Barbossa’s too if I am very unlucky - how can I rehabilitate yours if mine is going to fall apart?  I can’t keep a hold on anything; it’s like grasping at a reflection on the water.”

“Perhaps mine is not to be rehabilitated, if it is to save yours,” he said, in a low, pensive voice. “If I am to be unmanned to ensure you are not, that’s probably just the way things ought to be.”

“I don’t think that a weak and feeble pirate king - barely a pirate at all, an upstart from the governor’s mansion - is going to be much of anything to anyone just because she knows how to wield a dildo-”

She laughed, but underneath it was a terrible breath of bitterness and resignation.

“Then we'll find a target for you to conquer,” said James, “and you will conquer it. You've commanded a fleet before.”

“I just don’t think I can do this. I don’t know that I can maintain it.”

“I have faith in you, Elizabeth.”

He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it.

“Far more, I might add, than I have in my own reputation.”

She extended her fingers to brush along his cheek.

“Mmm, you trimmed.”

“I hope you don't mind,” he said, tilting affectionately into her touch. “I may have turned pirate but I'm not about to grow some kind of sea-dog beard.”

“No, I quite like this.”

“Thank you. Someone among the men around here ought to give a damn.”

She rolled her eyes and turned her head to the side, looking out over the dim Macy’s and its displays, which took on monstrous characteristics after the lights went out.

“Thank-you, Captain Norrington, for your expert sartorial opinion, shall you inspect their nails, while you are at it-”

“That's for the armorer, with how many here use them as weapons.”

Elizabeth covered her mouth to try and stifle a giggle.  Being as tired as she was, she failed.

“I never did have much opportunity to think of these things for myself, you know,” he said wistfully. “I'm beginning to enjoy it.”

She reached up to stroke his cheek again.  He had found a marvelous balance between bearded and well-groomed; she wanted him to know she had noticed.

James smiled down warmly at her.

“How's your head?”

“My head? I’m not the idiot that got into a brawl today.”

“You've been crying,” he reminded her.

“I have not,” she said, stiffening.

“I thought you had. I'm sorry-”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Captain,” said Elizabeth, sitting up icily.

“On the contrary. It's a relief to know you have not. I mistook your few tears earlier for something else.”

She was pulling her hair to the side and finger-combing it with something too glacial to be sullenness.  “Hmm?” she interrogated, sounding bored.

“Never mind. I'm glad you're well. I thought I had done yet more unrealized damage‍.”

“Well,” Elizabeth said flatly.  “Yes, after a manner I am just fine.”

She did not sound it, nor did she have any intention to.

“After a manner,” James repeated, unconvinced.

“Well, what do you expect?” she said with a renewed stoniness, a wall seeming to come down between them in her eyes.  “After what you two put me through today - I am going to be lucky if they keep their whispers and their taunting where I cannot hear it - ”

“That’s my fault,” he sighed, “not his. Turner’s… well, the world has a very strange sense of humor.”

“I am not laughing.”

“He’s not a pirate,” James blurted, “and…” James swept his hand up toward his face in a bitter little jerking motion.

“The irony is rather thick, that’s all.”

“May the irony protect me, then, from reprobation,” she said too sweetly, with a fluid, facetious hand gesture to imitate a bow.  “I believe I’m going to go to sleep now-”

“All you need say for him is that he’s out of your jurisdiction,” he said, a little tersely. “That leaves the fault with me. He’s… he’s not coping well, Elizabeth.”

“Oh,” she said, and froze.

It was all she could think to say.  It was not a surprise, if he and James were going to brawl about it, but to hear it from James himself filled her with foreboding - like the hull of a ship fills with brackish water.  

“In Cuba,” said James, “when I thought you had gone back to him, Barbossa came and spoke to me.”

Elizabeth looked over and up at him, hands curled beneath her face half as though in supplication.  She could think of no words, not now, but the enormity of her eyes asked the question for her.

“To offer his condolences, allegedly.” He scoffed at this. “To reason that perhaps it wasn't meant to be.”

He sat and leaned forward instead, elbows to knees.

“Of course, he had another idea of how I could still serve you.”

James tipped his head toward her duffle bag.

Elizabeth’s mouth opened.

“He didn’t,” she said in anger and indignation, despair swelling in her chest like a hard intake of air, knowing full well that he had - that he had made the same suggestion to her, well before Will had shown up.

“I told him I would do no such thing unless it was by your command,” he said. “Now the situation has reversed and Turner has already made the same choice on his own. If Barbossa gets through to him- well.”

Real fear flickered across her features.

“God help me,” she said faintly.  “I couldn’t live with it.”

“That was the cause of our…clash this afternoon,” James said solemnly.

“I have to - “ Elizabeth started to leave in visible agitation, but instead of getting out of the bed, when her feet hit the floor, she turned her head abruptly and looked at James, feeling sick.  “God - what can I do?  How do I convince him?”

“We have to find a way to bargain with Jones, first of all- if such a thing even exists. Elizabeth-”

She turned her back to him, anxiously wrenching her hair over her shoulder and tugging on it in a poor imitation of taking care of it.

“You were the only one I cared about knowing I possessed the heart,” James said softly. “The only one. I swear it. It wasn't about power, it was- the way you whispered of it in bed with me-”

It took her a moment to understand what he meant by this - it was an abrupt change of pace from what her mind had been racing about.  

“You didn’t say that to him, did you?” she demanded, voice clipped.

“Of course not,” said James.

“I don’t even remember that,” she went on coolly.

“You were having a bit of a moment,” he admitted. “I don’t take it as a particular compliment outside of that… specific context, shall we say-”

“ - ah,” she said, coloring slightly.  She had not recalled it, but she could now imagine it, which was almost worse.

“You asked me how it felt to be the most powerful man on the ocean, possessing both Jones’s heart and your own. Well, I’m not,” he said, leaning back on the heel of one hand now. “That’s you, for one. But I… I did feel you loved me rather better for it, at times. That’s all. He felt it was a matter of ensuring the others tolerate me, and I daresay that’s you as well.”

“James,” she sighed, voice ragged.  All the same, a note of reluctant, aching fondness had entered her tones.  “What am I going to do with you, you’re hopeless.”

“I’m afraid it would be insubordinate for me to make any suggestions,” he said dryly, “lest they be taken as facetiousness.”

“Shall I grant you permission,” asked Elizabeth, stretching warily out on the bed, leaning on her stomach and elbows, hair falling tangled down her back.  

“You could always claim it was your idea to take the Gloriana from me. You gave it to two women to further put me in my place.”

Elizabeth groaned, leaning her face into her hands a moment in contemplation.  “You realize, I suppose, that that implies it is demeaning to lose to women.”

“Not inherently,” said James, “but most of them have guessed what we do in bed together. They would probably view it as an extension of… well, that.”

“We’ve only done that once,” she said with a snort, rubbing the side of her nose with her thumb.

“They don’t know that. Without a ship, you might even go so far as to start calling me commodore again-”

“Are you saying you want to be a commodore again?  Am I to demean you or to promote you,” she asked wearily.

“When it no longer carries any meaning, I think it becomes an insult in itself. I don’t know. Thinking about being addressed by that rank feels like putting a finger into an open wound.”

Feels like it, but isn’t.  

“Suppose it’s worth considering,” Elizabeth murmured with her eyes shut.  She leaned in to rest her face in her hands a moment.

“Or perhaps merely ‘King’s dog’,” he said, musingly.

“You’re already my dog,” she said a little testily. Her voice was muffled against her hand.  Am I to demean you or promote you?

She concentrated on the small, unsettling background noises of the storefront, and hastily refocused on James’ breathing.

It all came back to the simple, amusing little truth that she did not want to punish him, but to be lax as an authority figure where her mistress was concerned would not do very well.  She and James had wanted to be at sea and cementing their reputations by now, but they were on the Jack Odyssey and God only knew when they would be able to leave - it was imperative she maintain a grip on that authority here and now.  

“James,” Elizabeth said, opening her eyes and lifting her chin, rubbing her face in exhaustion.  “I need a public spectacle.  I need you humbled - if not humiliated.”

James had already been still, but his back stiffened, like a wary animal’s.

“What kind of public spectacle,” he asked, without much inflection.

Elizabeth moved to her hip, and then pushed herself wearily to a sitting position, reaching out to touch the back of his wrist.

“I don’t know - something that does not hurt you, I prefer.  But I cannot be seen going soft on you again. You know that Captain Barbossa intimated I should either torture or kill you if you had another misstep - and he likes me personally.  But I do not kid myself that the man who originally marooned me would defend my lovesickness over a pair of squabblings boys for very long.  Of course, there is another option,” she said uncomfortably.  “If I were to treat the matter as I would with anyone else, striking you earlier would have been enough.”

“I would rather be flogged than made to look additionally hapless and foolish in front of these people,” James said, a little more heatedly- but under the temper there was a note of pleading. He did not look at her.

“We could - we could part entirely,” she said numbly.  “I would not have to harm a hair on your head.”

“Elizabeth-”

“I know it isn’t ideal,” she said, a struggle to keep composure.  “I am not even angry anymore - how could I be angry at you and Will for behaving like reckless, silly boys?  But you are not just anyone, you are-”

“Beckett’s former admiral,” James muttered, “and your bedwarmer, useful for very little but the flesh, and a drunk-”

“My sweetheart,” she corrected him, gently, closing her hand over the back of his.

Just as he was the Admiral’s son. Of course. One always did have to bear more for such privileges, didn’t one?

“Very well,” said James, still without moving. His eyes were open, but he was not quite seeing anything, in a way that had nothing to do with the dim light of the storefront.

“Perhaps,” said Elizabeth, struggling to keep her voice steady, “you could - perhaps you should leave on the Gloriana, as - as planned originally-”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” he said. “You may have your spectacle. I understand.”

Elizabeth shook her head, and tears fell down her cheeks on account of the swift motion.

“I can’t flog you.  You must understand.  I think they expect a flogging - Barbossa offered me the use of his cat - and I think it will affect me if I don’t deliver.  God help me, I can’t do that.”

“I can bear a flogging,” he said, lifting his voice a little more emphatically.

“But don’t you see I can’t?” she asked, her voice breaking.  She gasped just once, then pulled him in sharply to hide her sobs against his shoulder.

James’s whole body jerked in surprise and he sat up, pulling her with him as he put his arms around her.

“It’s- never mind, darling, I’m sorry- please forgive me. Do- do whatever you must, all right? I’ll bear it-”

He stared over her shoulder, expressionless, but rubbed gently between her shoulders anyway.

Hideous, it seemed to her, for him to be bringing her comfort in a time like this.

“I told you,” Elizabeth sniffed; “after you arrived on the Pearl drunk as a dog Barbossa intimated that it might be better to kill you if you made a mistake again.  I’ve been up for hours thinking about what to do with you to curb their resentment, to satiate their lust to see you punished.  It would be easier if you weren’t my James Norrington, my father’s first choice for my husband and my oldest friend.  The faster I am to pardon you, the faster my position decays. You have no idea - perhaps you and you alone have some idea - how little I have to go back to if I should lose this. This - the one thing, the only thing I’ve ever had, that affords me the respect and independence, the protection, that formerly I could only have because - because you or Will would still have me in spite of my ruin - and soon I will have lost you both -”

James pulled himself back to look at her properly- eyes focused and purposeful again, brows knit.

“I won’t let it come to that,” he said, chafing her hands between his now, as though she had fallen overboard.

Elizabeth smiled weakly, but sincerely, even though her eyes were reddened and wet.

“I think you must be Commodore Norrington again,” she said apologetically.  “Even from me, darling.”

“Whatever you need-”

“Oh, James,” she said, and the smile faltered. “You. I need you -”

She pulled him into her arms, leaning her head on his shoulder again faintly.

Even if she had to - even if she had to hurt him, to keep him - it would be worth it. And perhaps he would forgive her in time, if he wanted badly enough to be kept.

“I- thank you, Elizabeth,” he said, relieved that he no longer had to keep eye contact with her.

Elizabeth lingered in his arms, contemplating the weight and the smell of him, and how much she shrank from the thought of making him suffer, yet how much she would if she lost him.

It was a tense minute that she stayed there before she pulled back and looked at him again, astonished by an idea that seemed, to her, to be a very harmless alternative.

“Commodore Norrington,” she was putting together rapidly.  “A promotion ceremony -”

“A what-”

“Pirates- you know how they thrive on theatricals.  Putting on mock trials when they’re bored and such like.  I’ll promote you to Commodore - make a show of it.  It will hurt your pride - only your pride.  And it will satisfy them - I’m certain it will satisfy them. James-”

She had tears falling from her eyes again, and an elated smile.

“I can keep you - and keep you safe-”

James stared at her.

“Safe?” he repeated. “My God- if they wanted to kill me, they already would have-”

“From the whip- or whatever else anyone can suggest to me if I don’t act to their satisfaction. God knows-”

“I’ve been whipped before- I know what to expect, it’s fine- Elizabeth, please don’t fret about this-”

“It will be one ceremony - they’ll forget it as soon as it’s happened, it will all be, as they say, water under the bridge,” she said, putting her hand in his hair and gently combing it out.

“Will they? Elizabeth- I’ve let some of those men bugger me for drinking money-”

“Those men would enjoy your suffering whatever form it took - at least this way you will have all the outside appearance of it and nothing more. Oh, James,” she said, ruffling his hair.  “I think it would work.”

“...the outside appearance of it, yes,” James mumbled, lowering his eyes. “Of course.”

She kissed him on the cheek. James limply patted her leg. She pulled back from him and glanced down at it, with a titter of uncomfortable laughter.

“Do you know,” she asked softly.  “Did I - or anyone - tell you what Barbossa did to Will’s father?”

“I don’t pry into the personal histories of pirates unless it is to gain an advantage,” he answered, so arrogantly and automatically that it was as though she had been swept a few years into the past.

Elizabeth pulled back and looked at him in shock and no small measure of disgust. James turned his head, his eyes averted and his jaw set. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and straightened his back, which he hoped would mask how much he was trembling..

“Maybe the advantage in this case would be the benefit of some human decency,” she said shortly.

“I'm sorry,” James sighed. “I'm- never mind. I'm sorry. You never told me anything about the elder Turner’s involvement with Barbossa.”

“It seems it would not interest you if I had,” said Elizabeth, rummaging through her stash of things by the bedside.  She had dragged another table over there to rest it on, but she could not find what it was she was after.  Everything seemed to her suddenly so useless - even the box of quondams, open and spilling on its side; the three quarters full bottle of whiskey they had appreciated with some now empty soda cans the other night; a card full of strange, cheaply-made earrings she had thought looked pretty and planned to wear (she wanted nothing so poor for James when she pierced his ear - that seemed an unlikely thing now, didn’t it). Such an overabundance of frivolity and waste and jetsam when one good thing, one normal thing that might be found at a bedside was absent.  She slammed her palm down on the table in frustration.

“James, get me a hairbrush.”

“Whatever it was, I can assume it was intended to be lethal, seeing where he ended up,” James said flatly. “All that aside, where have you put it?”

“I said get me one,” said Elizabeth in irritation, pushing what seemed to her to be a particularly disgusting hank of her own hair behind her ear.  She met his eyes and finished coolly, “dog.”

“From where? Pardon me, but I’m in no mood for this dog business now that you don’t have your public to appease-

“Do you think I am appeased?  James,” she said irritably. “Get me a damn brush.”

“Have you already got one, or do you want me to fetch one from elsewhere in here too-“

“If I had one, I wouldn’t need you to fetch it, would I?”

“Good God- fine, fine. Give me a moment.”

He stormed away from the bed and wove his way out of the maze of display rooms. As he passed through something that was probably a sitting room, he knocked over a standing lamp that fell on and shattered a glass tabletop; James bit off a loud curse before turning a corner and disappearing into the darkness of the rest of the store.

Elizabeth regretted sending him, but no so much she could call him back.  She sit on the edge of the bed and willed her hands stay on her knees, far away from her hair.  She thought she might tear it out if she didn’t.

He returned around ten minutes later and dropped the brush on the bed beside her.

“Here you are. I’m going to sleep, if Your Majesty should deign to permit it.”

He picked up the whiskey bottle from the bedside table and took a few swallows to take the edge off, before pointedly setting it back down and turning to her with an exaggerated bow.

She met his eyes with guilt and reluctance.

“Brush it.”

It was still phrased as an order, but she bit her lip and rephrased it.  She’d grown brittle in the moments without him.  

“I mean I want you to brush it.”

James’s lips parted, and he blinked a little too rapidly to try to recover himself.

“Is that- a punishment or a reward? Because I’ve had my fill of the one for today, thank you, and I’m not sure now is the best time for the other-“

“It is primarily for my benefit,” said Elizabeth, her mouth feeling dry.  Her eyes sought some forgiveness and understanding in his.  “I’m afraid if I do it myself, I’ll pull my hair out.”

James didn’t move for what felt like an age, but he sighed and sat beside her nonetheless.

“Fine,” he said again. “It’s fine.”

He slowly drew her hair back over her shoulders and studied it, feeling as though he were truly seeing the knots and split ends and general damage, everything that she had always complained of as having come with that lovely sunlit blonde shade she had gradually acquired, for the first time.

James cleared his throat and began brushing- small strokes, from the bottom.

“This is not how I used to think this would happen,” he admitted, more than a little bitterly.

“Oh?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even, and drawing her legs up under her slowly enough not to disturb him.

“That is to say, when I allowed myself to think of it at all.”

All of a sudden she knew of what he meant.  She was thankful to be so turned away from him as she was.  

“I’ve never thought of it at all,” she said, truthfully.  She had thought a long time on what it might be to be married to Will, but she had never imagined him brushing her hair.  A husband might do such a thing, she supposed.  It hurt to be reminded how faithfully James had thought of her.  She felt the nails of both hands driving into her palms.

“When we leave this place, I’m teaching you how to take care of this. I haven't the patience to look after mine in that way any longer, but I have all the time in the world for you.”

“Have you?” she asked softly.

“Obviously.”

“James,” she said, clearing her throat; “if you would rather have the Gloriana than a tyrant king, I will not grudge you…”

“We would be lucky to see one another more than a few times a month, if that,” he said sternly.

“I am not confident that you will love me so much if you see me more than that number,” said Elizabeth numbly.  “I am not so confident you do not love me less already.”

“What happened to ‘I need you’-“

“Poetry, I suppose.  But I told you before I could live without you if I had to.  I would rather not, but I…”

Elizabeth swallowed.  She thought to herself about how much she did not want to hurt him as he had been by all the rest of the world, and then how much all the rest of the world might punish her if she let him set the pace in matters of his punishment.

She thought of Captain Barbossa’s ambiguous respect for her and his transparent contempt for James Norrington, and wondered what could transpire between her and the latter to make the former turn on her.  Anything, really.

And Barbossa was the nice one out of the lineup of pirate lords whose fealty she nebulously had.

But here James was, hers and hurting all the same.

What other options did she have, then, but to set him free?

“...It would be better, I think, to leave you a captain for the time being,” she said carefully, as though it were only a political matter.  “I do not think the matter will be long in anyone’s mind after we have parted - it will not be long, then, if you - if you so choose to later join me on the Empress -”

James stopped brushing and slammed his hands down on his thighs in irritation, startling her.

“For God’s sake, Elizabeth, if you don’t want me, at least grant me the courtesy of saying so-“

“Do you want to be promoted?” Elizabeth demanded, turning to face him.

“What kind of game are you playing with me?” James retorted, his voice rough with distress. “Elizabeth- I can’t live like this. I’m exhausted by trying to live up, or down, or whichever the day demands, to the expectation of how I am to best serve you-“

“Then don’t,” she said plainly, blinking a few too many times.   “It is clear what you want from me and what I can give you are two different things.”

“Do you not want me on the Empress?”

“I can’t be your wife, James,” Elizabeth said by way of an answer, the tears burning in her eyes; but she did not shy away from holding them steady on his.

“Of course not. God, imagine that lot out there calling you Mrs. Norrington. Mrs. Dog-”

“You would be taking my name,” she said as though a reprimand.

James stared at her, flabbergasted.

“You’ve thought about this?”

Elizabeth colored.  Her distress at this coming up now when they were not certain to be together very long was immense.

“If you - would have permitted it only-”

James Swann. He wanted to feel the name in his mouth, but if he said it out loud he knew he would betray himself.

“From what you seem to want,” he said, very carefully, “I don't think it matters.”

Elizabeth let out a bitter laugh, drying her eyes on her shirt.

“I don’t think I can reasonably be accused of having misled you about my intentions,” she said with a faint edge to her voice.  “I have always planned on remaining the Pirate King.  And yet you still hope I will change my mind.”

“I have never said that,” James retorted.

“And yet you continually balk at it,” said Elizabeth.  “And now I am accused of playing a game with you, because you don’t like to be my dog, as though I can make allowance for something else-”

“Why has being your dog meant my humiliation from the beginning, rather than simply my subordination?”

“Perhaps if you were not so determined to make an ass of yourself-”

“Because I wasn't about to let Turner destroy himself-”

“Then why did you not come to me?  I found the two of you brawling in a fountain-” Elizabeth cried in a rush of strong feeling.

“Elizabeth,” James sighed, “do you even love me, or am I just here?”

“I do love you,” said Elizabeth with an acute sense of despair.  “I can’t flog you. I can’t promote you.  You think I do not love you because I do not let you walk all over me?  I cannot love you less than myself and you cannot ask me to-”

“I have never asked to walk over you- I don't wish to even put you in my shadow-”

“What do you wish, then?”

James studied her a moment longer, smiling sadly.

“I want to be with you,” he said.

He took her hands in his.

“May I continue brushing your hair?”

“You needn’t, I can care for myself,” she said, feeling at last the chagrin she was due on reflection of how poorly she had treated him.

“It's all right,” he said. “Beside that, you’ll probably destroy it in the temper you're in.”

“I think all my temper is gone,” she said after a moment.  “Do you really not know that I love you?  After all of this, that you are here with me because I had the option?”

“In your grief, then. It's rather fragile, darling. And I- I’m not always certain of the…”

He lowered his eyes for a moment and looked back at her with a sad smile.

“The depth of it, perhaps.”

He still held her hands in his own, and she brought them up to kiss them and ease the pain he brought her.

“Do you, as a sailor, deny the depths of the sea, even where you cannot see them with looks alone?”

“Don't compare yourself to the sea, when I have lost so much to it.”

“Very well,” she said shortly, pressing his hands, and gently pushing them away.  “Brush my hair or don’t, it’s nothing to me.”

“All this time,” he said, “I have told myself that you chose me. You chose me.”

He looked at his rejected hands, and then away from her altogether.

“But I am forced to wonder for what purpose.”

“Yes, what indeed,” she said listlessly, getting out of bed to undress, clumsily and not for show, before getting back in again, sliding beneath the covers.  It was cooler inside the Macy’s with the lights gone out than she was fully accustomed to growing up in the Caribbean.  

He looked back over his shoulder at her.

“Come here.”

Elizabeth rolled over with a groan to rest her head again in his lap, gingerly.

“Sit up. I’m going to brush your hair, all right?”

“If you want to,” she said, indifferent with exhaustion, but sitting up just the same.  “I have given it up as ever looking well again.”

“Give it time,” he said, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, as he began again.

“And effort on your part,” she added, in softer, reconciliatory tones.

“If you want it,” James said cautiously. “I don't want you to feel I am unduly prioritizing something as frivolous as your hair.”

“It is of little consequence,” she agreed readily, but she was equally quick to admit, “but I can’t help feeling a connection between the degradation of my hair and the degradation of my moral character.  It used to be - if I may be allowed to say so - it used to be very nice.”

She laughed nervously.

“I tried not to think of it,” said James, with a weak laugh of his own.

“Because it fares the worst at present by comparison?”

“No- I meant to say, in Port Royal.”

“Ah,” said Elizabeth, nervously tilting her head back by a fraction as he worked on the very ends.  “Thank you at least for your ‘trying’; that says to me that sometimes you must have failed, and I appreciate it.”

“Often,” he said softly.

“I’m sorry it’s not what it would have been,” said Elizabeth quietly, “on our…”

She was not able to finish. James paused, mid-stroke.

“It was never truly about your hair,” he said, in the same quiet voice.

“I hope not, at this point; I would have lost your affection by now, then,” she tried to joke.

“To quote the wisdom of a very close friend, whose opinion I hold in the highest of regard,” James said as he began to brush again, “if it bothers you so terribly, you should cut it.”

He was gentle in a way that belied his words, though he hadn't spoken with much of an attempt to convince, either. It may not have been about her hair but it certainly didn't hurt.

“It did not until very recently,” she confessed.  “But now I feel as though I have neglected more than my hair.”

James swept her hair forward, over her shoulder, exposing the nape of her neck and then pressing a soft, solemn kiss to it, just below her hairline.

“Just as you are the only one to pay any attention to my hair,” she said, shutting her eyes, “I believe you are the only one between us to possess any moral strivings, today excepting.”

“The very fact of your concern shows you are better than you think,” he murmured, close to her shoulder.

“Will you - will you keep brushing it, please,” she asked faintly, as much to feel the nurturing comfort of that attention as to prevent her heartsickness at the attentions he was currently providing instead.

“Oh- yes, of course,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ll damage it-”

But he continued, nonetheless.

“Better to rip the knots out now than later-”

“I would prefer to be gentle and avoid ripping anything out,” he said, with a note of finality.

That very same gentleness that she had long misconstrued as dullness made her smile to herself now.  She knew, even as her mood had softened, that she held him at arm’s length, but she could not draw him any closer.  

“I can do it, if you prefer,” she reminded him.

“And rip out the knots?” James said dryly.

“If need be.”

“Allow me to spare you that fate. I happen to be fond of this hair.”

“A fact with which I am well acquainted,” she managed, “to my pleasure, although not my understanding.”

“It's not your hair itself so much as the circumstances under which I might have once had this kind of access to it.”

She took that remark with a vivid picture soon entering her head and draining her of some of the happiness she had just regained, until she, seemingly very abruptly, turned her head - pulling her hair from his grasp, even unto his involuntarily pulling a strand still in the hairbrush enough to hurt - and said, “Do you know what circumstances first came to my mind?  A marooning.”

“Would you have really wanted me to kiss you then-”

“No,” she said shortly; “you know my thoughts were all for Will then, and how much I feared Barbossa opening his throat.  But my hair was certainly quite down for Jack Sparrow, wasn’t it?”

She took note of her own bitterness and checked herself.

“I only marvel that that is where my head went first, that’s all.  Of course it’s a very - a lovely picture to imagine a virtuous bride letting her hair down for the first time on her wedding night-”

“There were two competing wedding nights in my mind,” James murmured. “The one in which we did everything I had hoped for, and the one in which I could not bear to.”

“James,” she said softly, with a sincere look of pain making her flinch, even as she reached up to touch his roughened cheek - the one that did not have a mark from Will’s ineffectual blade upon it.  “You know now there shall probably never be a wedding night.  Let’s not think on what might have been any longer.  Besides the specific regret, it forces me to consider other things I have lost out on - my maidenhood and my virtue, my standing, my family- I have your company, I hope for a little while more, and I have your love.  I have your love, don’t I?” she asked with real doubt and real hope.

James looked rather hurt.

“You know you do.”

Elizabeth worried her lower lip a while.

“Perhaps I can…. call you ‘commodore,’” she said doubtfully, “and have that pass for humiliation enough-”

“Really? I- oh, thank you. Thank you-”

He kissed her hands with sincerity he would later recall as embarrassing, but in the moment his relief was enough that his head swam a little.

“And keep you with me on the Empress without much judgment from the rest of them - those not on our crew, anyway.  On the Empress they won’t care.  They don’t know you or your father so well in Singapore that they have that peculiar lust to see you ground down, and you are just some man to tem.”

“And I will let the ladies have use of the Gloriana as a sign of trust,” he agreed, beginning to smile in earnest now

Elizabeth was more hesitant.

“I think I shall still have to avoid you publicly a while,” she said.  “But God knows if Barbossa will be convinced without a further show.  Oh, I can’t wait to be back on the Empress-”

“Barbossa is probably too eager to practice on Turner now that he's the weak link in our chain to notice,” James retorted.

“You don’t know much of Captain Barbossa,” said Elizabeth, a little frostily.  “You should fear him more, even if we are, as I hope, out of the range of exciting his displeasure.”

James gave her a questioning look.

“I’m serious,” she pressed him.

“I’m sure you are. Elizabeth, if you feel you need protection from him- just in case, God forbid-”

“I am the one who is meant to be protecting you,” she said heatedly. “But how can I if you strip me of all dignity and respect-”

“What happened out there?” he asked, his frown deepening. “Before he marooned you. I ultimately assumed it could not have been so terrible; you're wretchedly fond of the man-”

His surprising her with the question caught her very miserably off guard; the large solemnity of her eyes and the way that they avoided him after fixing on him for one intense, brief moment of shock was generally unlike her.

“He didn't-”

“Didn’t what?”

“...use indelicate force against you-”

Elizabeth moved to refute him, but pressed her lips together instead with a look of great exertion and turned away from him again, as though he were to continue to brush her hair.

It was only when she could no longer see him that she could make herself speak.

“I don’t know that he wouldn’t have, and that is the most honest answer I can give.  There was a certain implication of interest on his side at the start; he had me change my dress, although I can at least allow that I was abducted from Port Royal in only my nightgown and robe.  After he sank the Interceptor, he-”

This required her to chew on the inside of her cheek a long moment before she could bring herself to recount it; she had not spoken of it out loud before.

“ - it was stated,” she said delicately, “by Captain Barbossa, that I had evaded their hospitality once, and ought to return the favor, whereupon he tossed me to the crew and they -”

She could not finish saying it; even saying as much as she had gave her great pain.  She was afraid she was giving James leave to conjecture too much on what might have happened, but she could not finish.

“- Will appeared then; he had not gone down with the wreck as we had supposed; since it was his blood they needed to lift their curse, he threatened to shoot himself if his terms were not met.  His terms were that the crew be unharmed and I go free.  Barbossa agreed to them, but only in those exact words.  So I walked the plank and swam to that island, with Jack after me, and the crew, uninjured, went to the brig.”

She paused, and turned back to him with a reddened face and eyes, and then she gave him an exhausted smile.

“At least he had me strip out of the dress before I went in,” she said with a touch of laughter and a heavier touch of bitterness.  “As much as I cannot say I liked to give the men a show, wearing it I am sure I would have drowned.”

“And this man- and members of his crew,” James said slowly. “This man has been among us the entire time- taking in stray children, dispensing advice-”

“Is that all so peculiar to you?  You have forgotten your oppressively dull speech on pirates,” she said with a snort.

James put his hands on her shoulders.

“Say the word and he’s as good as dead.”

Elizabeth’s eyes rolled half through her head.

“No.”

“Elizabeth, I’ve slain dozens just like him-”

“And like me too, I expect.”

“Regardless-

“Whatever he has been to me in the past, now he is my ally,” she said firmly. “Though not yours, I admit.  If you would help me with him, please, please conduct yourself better-”

“I know-”

“After they became aware they were cursed,” Elizabeth said, abruptly, “Will’s father sent him a piece of the treasure, that they might remain so - he said they deserved it for marooning Jack.  Barbossa strapped him to a cannon and dropped him into the ocean.  An eternity of torment, that was to be.  You see how he has only traded one ill fate for another.  I don’t pretend I don’t believe better of him now than I once did; I think he is a changed man after the curse.  But that is what he is capable of.  Don’t be so foolish as you are about him.  He would be a very dangerous man to cross, James, and I do not think his threats about you are idle.”

James took a moment to consider that.

“Noted,” he said finally, very softly.

Elizabeth found herself needing him very badly.

“James,” she said.

“Yes, Elizabeth?”  

“Hold me-”

James gathered her into his arms and lay down. She fit snugly against his shoulder like this; she was not a small woman, but she felt it at moments like these, and James was overwhelmed by an aching need to protect her, even if she would probably just as quickly reassert that she could do it herself.

“I cannot say I’ve forgotten why we quarreled,” she sighed, “but I certainly don’t care anymore.  I am surprised you and Will did not come to blows earlier, to tell the truth; and I am equally certain that forcing the two of you into close quarters will serve as punishment enough, for when you don’t repeat the mistake it will be clear a lesson was learnt.  There.  I am done being King for the night, I think, which means you no longer have to be dog, if you wish it.”

“Thank God,” he said, with a tired-sounding laugh. “I am content enough to be your man.”

Her answering smile was real and vivid, and she leaned up to kiss him with all the passion she had saved for him while waiting by the claw machine.

“You never let me finish with your hair,” James laughed.

“Mm, did you want to?  I find I mind less, now that I am secure in your affection, how it looks-”

“Next thing we know, you’ll be filling it with nonsense like Sparrow’s-”

“I don’t want it in mats,” she responded indignantly.  “It would be one thing if i had hair like Tia Dalma’s - Jack’s is just dirty.  Barring mats I can’t see anything staying in my hair.  And, good God, I won’t have it said I think Jack is a style icon-”

“Then perhaps,” he teased, “you ought to let me finish.”

Elizabeth tossed her hair as she sat up, smirking at him like it was a challenge, telling him he could go ahead. James grinned back and went for the brush.

As he pushed her hair back over her shoulders in preparation for her to turn around, James stopped for a moment and gathered it in his hands, lifting it from her face.

“Do my eyes deceive me, or is this the foolhardy young lad who struck me with a rum bottle during a brawl in Tortuga?”

“This is she.”

“She? Ah, that explains why he's so pretty.”

She put her hands on his chest and moved them up to cup his face.  There was so much she wanted to ask him in the way of sentimentality and affection, but, while touching his lips with her thumb, what she in fact said was, “I’ve thought of more duties for you.”

“I thought I was done being your dog tonight,” said James, though thankfully in a decidedly non-accusatory tone.

“Can’t be helped,” she said with little remorse.  “I think I must have you do my hair from here on out.  I’d forgotten what a convenience it is - and never known it could be such a pleasure.”

James emitted a sudden bark of startled laughter.

“I’m not certain I’ll be good for more than a plait-”

“I can dress it myself. But you’re to brush it.”

His smile softened. “I would be thrilled to.”

She kissed him.

“Turn around, then- don’t keep me waiting!”

She rolled her eyes again good-naturedly, but she did so; the last he saw of her face before she turned her head again was the soft radiance of a smile meant only for him.

“You know,” he said as he began brushing, “I think if Theo were to ever find out about this, he would positively refuse to let me live it down.”

“Somehow imagine that is true of a lot of what we do in bed.”

“He gave me such trouble for the time I spent on my uniform, to say nothing of my hair-”

She remembered Lieutenant Groves from Port Royal; she had always gotten on with him very well.  An amiable man, likely given to mischief.  It was not that strange, if he was friends with James, that James should like her too.

“I like to give you trouble for those things, too.”

“Elizabeth.”

“I rather think you like to be given trouble yourself.”

“I was the Admiral’s son,” he said. “I had obligations to uphold.”

“Now you’re my lover. I like to think you still have some.”

“Is this the earring again?”

“It can be the earring.  I had given that up.  I only meant that you reflect on me now. I’m answerable for your deeds and appearance.”

She came close to renewing her complaints over his behavior of that afternoon, but enough had been said about it to exhaust her on the subject, and she did not want the office of authority any longer tonight.

“You can have the earring,” he grumbled good-naturedly. “Though I may have to challenge your notion of wearing anything dangling; that's all but asking to be grabbed and pulled on in close combat.”

He had found a snarl, and was pinching above it with one hand as he brushed from the bottom with the other, to keep it from pulling on Elizabeth’s scalp. James resolved in that moment that he would never allow her hair to return this state again.

Elizabeth winced, grateful again he could not see her face.

“Will has a hoop,” she said bluntly.  “I would rather not invite the comparison-”

“And it still dangles,” James countered, “so I think we're in agreement.”

“Have what you will,” said Elizabeth. “Let it not be said I put fancy jeweled collars on my dog like some vain Frenchwoman.”

“Oh my God-”

“The Pirate King must have a little taste.  I’ve got so many other Pirate Lords to offset,” she deadpanned.

“And I am, I suppose, a necessary accessory.”

“A bodyguard,” she said evenly.

“Ah,” he said. “Oh, that's far more palatable.”

“The kind of bodyguard that does one’s hair.  But also the kind of bodyguard that does one.  So, you know.  A lover.”

“We won't mention the matter of your hair, I should think.”

“No, indeed, that I like too much to let others know it.  Others would make something vulgar of it and I think it is very lovely,” said Elizabeth, mortifying herself with shyness.

He reached forward and let a stray lock of it fall over his finger, and kissed it.

“Is that the strand you want for your coat?” asked Elizabeth, unable to resist taking a moment too open and unguarded and teasing him for it, though the way she looked over her shoulder was devastatingly sincere.

“Any strand will do. I shall try harder not to lose this one.”

“Well, you can’t have that one,” she argued, “now that you have kissed it it is too dear to me-”

James gathered the whole sunny mass of her hair in his hands and brought it to his lips.

“Oh, dear. Now I suppose I shan’t have anything,” he laughed. “It’s all right. Better on your head.”

Elizabeth burst into unladylike squeals of laughter, leaning back on him the easier to nudge him with her elbow.  “I nearly dare to say - there is technically speaking other hair you could have - but you’ve kissed that all over, haven’t you -”

“Elizabeth-”

Now it was she that kissed him all over, turning around in his arms to take him into hers, kissing him on the chest, the throat, the face, and the lips, finally, sliding into his lap with a patient insistence that he suffer her there to touch his chin with her fingertips and kiss him again and again, not hastily or in a rush of passion but the good sense to go slowly and enjoy him.

“Mm- I haven't finished-”

“You keep tempting me away from letting you,” she said with an unfelt indignation, guiding him to lay back and let her lean over him.

“It's not my fault you’ve no sense of control,” James said, faux-accusatory, as he lay down.

“Very wrong, commodore, it is only that I best love to control others, and best love among others, controlling you, so with that in mind, put your hands back in my hair-”

“And to think I worried that you thought I loved you only for that,” James said, a little wistfully.

“It does a king good to know someone is noticing and appreciating her remaining feminine attributes,” Elizabeth snorted.  

“The rest are less concealed than you think,” James retorted.

Elizabeth rubbed one of her legs on his.  “At the moment.”

“You cut a rather delicate figure.”

“I suppose compared to you,” she said, her hand creeping up his body. “You’re as broad as a ship yourself.”

“Thank you,” he said dryly, though unoffended.

“I don’t think it registers much til you are nearly on top of me,” she said reconciliatorially.

“The Admiral has a low opinion of staying. I suppose for that I am grateful to him.”

“And so am I,” she said, with an admiring lookover.  She met his eyes and smiled.

“I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

Elizabeth erupted in laughter.

“Yes, I am sure he is so glad you ran off with the Pirate King-”

“He probably feels gratified to have twenty-five years of suspicion confirmed,” said James, with a startled, hollowish laugh of his own.

“But what a smart match I am.  The former governor’s daughter, and now I am royalty.  Elected royalty, but all the same- did the rest of your family strive so high-”

“Young Laurence is a viscount now,” he said, “so I have done my part to emulate him.”

He began finger-combing her hair.

Elizabeth leaned into it until her nose touched the palm of his hand and she could nuzzle, gently.

“Of course, Young Laurence isn't nearly so young anymore- he’s nearly of an age with your father- but relative to the Admiral-”

“James,” she asked softly.

“Yes?”

“Do you miss your family? I forget too often that you still have yours.”

His fingers slowed as he tried to think of an answer to that.

“I never knew my brothers as well as I would like,” he said, after a pensive silence. “They were both already grown when I was born. Laurence has a son two years my elder-”

“Good God, really?”

“He was twenty-five years old at the time. It's hardly unusual.”

“It’s only difficult for me to imagine.  I’ve been simultaneously the heir and the infant of my household all my life.”

“I think William- that is to say, my brother, William- I think he was more the infant than I was,” he said, with a rather sad laugh. “Heaven knows he was always my mother's favorite. She had Laurence too early, and myself too late, and suffered for us both. William came very easily and agreeably by comparison.”

“You can be my infant,” she said agreeably, ruffling his hair in a manner that did not pass as maternal.  “It can’t help but make me sad, the way you speak of your family.”

“Please don't fret on my account,” he said, though he leaned a little into the ruffling. “It's not as though I did not benefit from any of it-”

“Let me baby you,” she argued with a tone of warning.

“Elizabeth-“

“Why should I not?  You owe it to me to have my way in everything-”

Elizabeth’s concept of babying was the tenderest of touches and a good number of kisses along the jawline, while leaning back to stroke his hair and look at him every so often.

“I find it odd, at times, to realize I don't hate him,” he said, with a thoughtful frown.

Sensing some of her kisses would be unwelcome, Elizabeth turned her head to kiss his fingers instead.

“I nearly did, for some time in my youth. I thought- never mind.”

“You can tell me.”

He huffed, as though steeling himself.

“When I was very small, I can recall my mother shouting at the Admiral that her carrying me was something he had done to her. I don't suppose I need explain how I later came to believe I had been conceived.”

He pressed his lips together as he looked up at the plain tiled ceiling, rather than Elizabeth’s face.

“She departed for her health shortly after my third birthday. She said she was hardly fit for English society any longer. She could hardly face any of her old rivals, obviously, not with a mouth full of false teeth and her hair full of switches. The difficulties of a late pregnancy, you understand. Of course, once I finally brought the matter to her when I was able to visit her again in Naples as a young man, she quite kindly assured me that he had done nothing of the sort.”

He laughed a little.

“She asked me not to blame myself. I was only the byproduct, after all. She and the Admiral both thought she was past childbearing age, and- well-”

He gestured at himself. “Surprise.”

Elizabeth pressed a quick kiss to his cheek.  

“It's no matter now,” he said. “I’ve had years to grow accustomed to it.”

“You seem to be so fragile to me,” she reflected in a soft voice.  “How precarious your situation, within your family, within the Navy, and now, in all society - even among pirates you are seldom wanted. It’s as though if one thing falls out of place you will disappear.  The world is too cruel to protect such people as you; it seems it falls to me to do it.  Doesn’t seem right, does it?  I am in hardly any less precarious a placement.”

“Oh, I was quite in demand until the hurricane,” he said, rather wistfully. “I had your father's patronage, the Admiral’s name, four limbs, the usual assortment of facial features- good ones, if you will permit me to say it myself- and thirty-two teeth. Jamaica Station didn't care that my career path was less than glorious to the Admiralty. I was the proverbial large fish in a small pond, and God help me, I was proud of it all.”

Elizabeth felt some discomfort, seeing how much she had longed to leave the place, and how, when the time to do so had finally come, it had been under such misfortunes as to ensure she could never think of it without some regret.  Now she pondered her life in Port Royal, and unable to avoid it, what their life there might have been, or hers with Will - thinking about her losses, tallying them up, and subtracting them from his.

“Estrella - my maid - she deemed it a ‘smart match,’” she said, with an embarrassed titter of laughter.  “If only I had been the kind of woman to esteem a smart match.  Amelia pressed me hard to consider you before you even asked me.  She said - but nevermind.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t know that it would do you any good to hear it.  In any case, I am sure she would have used the same language as Estrella, if things had taken a different course, and I had written her a letter on your proposal before Barbossa escorted me to the Isla de Muertos.”

“Smart enough, I suppose. Had your father not been your father I suspect he would have looked higher.”

“For me?”  Elizabeth burst into laughter.  “He knew what I was. I can promise you he had no expectation of that. How often he used to say to me, ‘Much as I would happily keep you to care for me into my old age…’”

All good humor fled at the memory.  She felt a dizzying rush of pain at the cruel realization, and pressed her cheek hard against James’ shoulder, willing herself not to feel it.

“...let’s just say,” she composed herself, “I have never been eligible.”

“You always were to me,” he said softly.

Elizabeth smiled tightly.

“That was the content of Amelia’s letters, after she married, and I was increasingly desperate to convince her I could barely live without her - she had found no shortage of tenderness with her husband and felt, I suppose, that her life had just begun; mine seemed to have ended - and she did not have the patience for me anymore.  She said, if i wanted to change my situation, I had to marry.  She asserted that I knew it, and had always known it, and that she did not understand why I still clung to the fantasies of my childhood, instead of looking forward to - well, to conjugal joy, I am certain.  She spoke very well of you, you might be pleased to hear.  She thought that our formerly very close friendship in my immaturity, and your significance to my father, and your clear regard for me, would make a good basis for marriage, and was less convinced than I was that I would spend the whole of my life ‘rotting on shore’ if I married a naval officer; she thought if nothing else my powers of persuasion and your desire to please me would get me aboard with you as soon as I wanted it.  She also had some firm words to say about Will - and I hadn’t intimated that I’d wanted to marry Will!  Amelia knew before I did.  She said she did not think I would be happy marrying a blacksmith when I could have married a captain and lived at sea.  I wish I could write her now; I think it would be a very pretty irony between formerly close friends, for me to say that I became the captain and still ended up with James Norrington.  She would not begrudge me some teasing on that point, not when she was right about so much else.”

“You loved her,” said James, with fresh realization. She had said as much before, but the intensity of her words deepened her earlier comments- it had not, it seemed, been the simple flutterings he had taken them for.

Elizabeth shrugged, noncommittal with discomfort.  “As a cousin, I thought at the time.  I don’t know.  I suppose.”

“I'm sorry. I can imagine it must have been… difficult.”

“Yes,” she said distantly.  “At the time, very.”  She cleared her throat.  “Of course I was sending all of these letters that seemed immature and playful - I am certain I said I wished we had run away together before some baron could come take her away to London, and that I was crying every day, and struggling to get out of bed, and hated everyone and everything in Port Royal without her, and she didn’t take me at all as serious.  And she confided in me as he started to win her heart away, and I grew more and more miserable that she could be happy and even excited to be happier, without me in her life; I thought I was of greater consequence. She did invite me to stay on with them, and father thought I might like it, but I didn’t want to meet the man.  I kept thinking of all our schemes as girls - running away, doing whatever thing had caught our fancy - it was mostly my schemes; Amelia didn’t want to sell poultices and herb bundles in a hut, or become a highwaywoman, or - I don’t know; dress as a boy and go to Oxford with me; but it was diverting to speak of.  More than that; it was half hopeful.  For a while, after Amelia left - I actually gave it some thought, trying to get into university - they let women into university, in other places - but no one took me seriously enough to let me run the risk of trying.”

She had not thought about this in years; she had gotten fixed on Will a little more and thought of her future as little as she could, and then… But before all of that had happened, there had been this first brush with the terrors of adulthood, the inexorable passage of time that had forced her to recollect the world was not for women in any way, shape, or form.

“At the time I used to have - I would get these pains in my chest, very severely,” she said, putting her hand over her heart, “and my heartbeat would all of a sudden race, and I would be overcome by a feeling of misery or fear; it would come on strong and sudden, and be hard to shake.  I’d wake up to them and not want to get out of bed.  I would just lie there, quietly crying.  Father thought I was growing lazy because I had no friend to look forward to, and I didn’t tell him otherwise; she was the only one who knew about them, and when she was gone, they got worse.  Amelia would write me and tell me i had to find a physician or else I really might die.  And she didn’t begrudge me your affection - she never had any real hope of having you, she said; her father wouldn’t have allowed the match even if you had thought of her particularly well; and she wouldn’t like to live at sea, she had already admitted.  And she was one of the first ones to suggest to me you might be considering me; she and my father.  I thought it was normal paternal affection making the best of things when father said it, but from Amelia I was really shocked.  At first I thought it was just a little sadness, feeling that you had overlooked her for me because you knew me better, and tried to reassure her of course I thought you must like her, how could you not?  She was already giving up on it, though; she knew her father wouldn’t allow it and Amelia was more dutiful than I was.”

Elizabeth started fingercombing her own awful hair.

“It’s difficult to say really.  We did kiss; but girls do that, I believe, regardless of the degree of affection between them; they don’t all need to be Ana and Angie to play pretend with each other.  And I was as encouraging of her infatuation with you as she was indulgent of mine with Will, so it isn’t as though I could not conceive of myself as being already in love, and not with Amelia.”

James gently paused her hand with his own, afraid that she would subconsciously make good on her threat of ripping her own hair.

“To say that you couldn't live without her, though- for your heart itself to ache without her- that would suggest… a rather un-casual degree of affection.”

“I am sure I wrote some very good stuff,” said Elizabeth with a dark glimmer of laughter, dropping her hand down to rub his chest idly since he had halted its progress in her hair.  “It was very foolish for me to expect otherwise, but I felt very rough when she took it all as a funny overstatement of my misery and urged me to go dining with Felicity Whatsherface and whoever else was left in Port Royal we’d somewhat spoken to.  It was so hard at the time - her moving on to such happiness with other people, writing to me less and less, and giving me some maternal advice on matrimony when she did.  I suppose everyone goes through a similar experience - the early loss or diminishment of a close friend.”

James pushed himself up again and began braiding her hair back so she couldn't menace it any further.

“I wouldn’t know,” he admitted. “I suppose that comes of living as a sort of band for decades at a time.”

“You lost one early friend,” she said in a quiet voice.  

“That was my fault.”

“A loss all the same.”

He wasn't sure how to answer that. James finished the braid and secured it with a band from their bedside table in silence.

“There,” he said. “We shall have to get you a bundle of string or something you can worry with your hands instead of your hair. I'm not certain how much more that can take.”

“It’s only hair,” said Elizabeth, a little sullen and remorseful to lose further pleasure from his brushing it tonight.  The conversation about Amelia had brought up a lot of memories she would have rather kept buried.  Worst of all, it had been so long since she had seen her that Elizabeth no longer fully remembered what she looked like.

“It's hair you intend to keep, is it not?” he retorted.

“Right now, James, I have to admit, it seems a particularly fruitless vanity.  I suddenly remember too well what my hair once was, and will never be again.”

“Now who's regaling whom with complaints about their hair? If you care so little for it, at least let me sew the whole plait over my heart in my coat, rather than force me to watch you destroy it and make yourself unhappier.”

He followed this with a kiss to her braid, though, in hope that, as with the smaller strand, this might have made her love it a little more.

“It’s different,” she argued, then relented. “Well - maybe it’s not different.  It was my only feminine accomplishment for much of my life.  I didn’t like the harp enough to give it much study, and I didn’t like singing - nothing appropriate for company, anyway.  When I was younger - but you already know.  It was just the only thing about me that could brook no criticism and look at it now.”

James smoothed one of the little loose locks remaining from her by now long-ago half-disguise to flee from Beckett behind her ear. It seemed, he thought, terribly unfair of this place to forcibly alter his hair on arrival and not hers.

“The new growth here is not too far gone,” he pointed out, his hand lingering by her cheek. “The rest will eventually follow. And really, a lifetime of powder and curling tongs is rarely any kinder…”

His voice trailed off as he studied her for a moment longer, feeling a little monstrous for what he was thinking.

“If you can’t bear to wait for that, the only thing to really be done for it would be to cut it. I don't know how you would feel- I feel unpleasantly destructive even saying such a thing. I'm not eager for it; I love the feeling of it falling over me when we-”

Elizabeth smiled.

James stopped himself there, took another breath and continued, “But I don't love you for it. I would be here to help you to keep it from ever growing to cause you such unhappiness again. I hope you will not hold this against me for saying so. I only hate to see you so wretchedly unhappy, no matter how much I love that you have given me the privilege of brushing it.”

She smoothed his own hair affectionately.

“I’m sorry for overrepresenting my dissatisfaction with it.  I don’t miss having it done; don’t miss wearing it in public, under a bonnet; don’t miss sipping tea in salons and waiting for a rival to spy it - no; I was never, in the fashionable sense, the equal to any other woman in Port Royal enough to have a rival - but I suppose, long after I have stopped caring for any of those things, I still miss the-”

She stopped herself.  She had not thought of it so clearly until forced just now by James and his hopeless sincerity, but now that she knew herself, she could not be proud.

“ - the advantages of it,” she admitted.  “I suppose that’s all it was.  I did not love the restrictions, but somehow - I suppose it is not really surprising when it comes down to it - I do miss the privilege of being a gentlewoman.”

“I’m certainly in no place to blame you for that.”

“It makes me feel guilty,” she went on quietly.  “When I see the other girls and I think about it.  Would there have been a fleet out looking for Anamaria, to see a smoke signal on a deserted island and save her?  What leverage would Giselle have had, if she had tried to persuade a commodore to rescue a blacksmith’s apprentice?  If Angelica fainted at Jack Sparrow’s hanging - not that I think she would have wanted to miss a moment of it,” she added wryly. “You know what I am saying.  I got a taste of my loss when I fled Port Royal on the Trader and had to live as a boy for a while.  The world is a different place when you’ve got to get by on your merits, not your father’s name and your pretty face.”

“I wouldn't know,” James said darkly. “That's probably the rest of why I can't bring myself to hate him.”

She patted his arm.

“What a relief that James Norrington had the grace to stumble into ruin at the same rate I did.  It is most proper of you.  Imagine if I were no longer appropriate for you.”  

“Oh, please. You're the King. You became something, whereas I…”

He smiled grimly. It didn't last.

Elizabeth’s smile was extinguished abruptly.

“Sorry,” he said absently. “That was unkind of me.”

“I’m the Pirate King because Sao Feng tried to force me,” she mumbled.  “It is no merit.”

“I meant only that… never mind. I'm sorry.”

She took his hand.

“I know what you meant.”

“I always admired how little you seemed to care for what was expected of you,” he admitted. “It was a quality I often hoped that I might have learned from you. It shames me to know how many of your worries I did not see.”

“You weren’t often in Port Royal,” she pointed out.  “And even when you were, I hardly opened myself up to you.”

Nor to Will, she thought with chagrin.  Nor to anybody.

“I didn't ask, either,” he reminded her, squeezing her hand gently.

“Nor would you have, you were too busy stammering,” she teased him.

“And now look at you,” he said. “I worry that to love me at all will compromise you.”

“I worry for that, too,” she said - she had already acknowledged that.  “But in the end I would rather have you than this title.  I bought it at a steep price, but that does not make it sweeter.”

He kissed her- chastely, softly- in gratitude.

“I suppose that if so many women can survive concubinage, it's only fair that I endure it,” he said, with a light touch of self-deprecating laughter.

She entwined their fingers.

“Perhaps I can entice you to finish my hair now,” she said with a resigned smile. “As little like it used to be as it is.”

“I would be happy to. Turn around, then-”

“I believe I said that to you recently,” she said with a smirk, though she did so.

“It's probably a boon to us both that you're not a man,” James said dryly as he began unraveling her braid.

“How’s that?”

“‘Any port’s as good as another in a storm’, or so they say.”

“Isn’t that a positive thing, then?”

“I don't know. Do you recall that term Barbossa suggested for a male mistress some time ago? I took the liberty of looking it up, and I think we allowed an insult to slide by us both unchallenged.”

“Which one?”

“Cicisbeo,” said James, though he didn't manage to pronounce it particularly accurately.

“I don’t speak continent, what is it?”

“In theory, a woman's lover. In practice,” he grumbled, “usually a paid invert.”

Elizabeth brightened at that.  “Maybe that’s what he thinks you are,” she said, sounding entirely too pleased with the notion.  “Now that would be a piece of luck-”

“How-”

“He might not believe that I am thinking with my parts,” said Elizabeth primly.

“Or that you are, and I'm joylessly taking advantage of them-“

“Oh, that’s much less pleasant.  Can’t he think you enjoy it a little? Perhaps turned around?”

“Oh, I’m certain he thinks I’m enjoying that,” he said, a little grimly. “Which is not to say I am not, but- look, I feel you must understand what I’m saying. I fear they think I am taking you for a fool.”

“Would you like the Gloriana.”

“I don’t want to be apart from you often enough to act as her captain.”

“Then we suffer the risk. But honestly, I do not think I am in your company in public often enough to lend to that impression.”

“Thank heavens you didn't cut your hair. I can only imagine what they would think. Probably that I had coerced you into playing at being a boy for my sake-”

“I somewhat doubt it.”

“One can only hope,” he said grimly. “My God, to be out of this place and fighting for you- I’m growing restless.”

Elizabeth wanted that too - she did.  But the reality of fighting and who they would be fighting against felt more than she could handle - right now she was no king, only Elizabeth, orphaned and on the run, feeling as frail and damaged as the split ends of her hair.  She stared hollowly into the distance and repeated numbly, “Restless, yes.”

It all seemed a hopeless dream tonight, destined to end in tragedy and humiliation.  The end of a noose for her, a firing squad for James.  She wondered which of them Beckett would force to watch the other’s execution.  James, watching hers, she thought, and he’d get in a good jab about how James ought to have impregnated her, to offer her a stay of execution; or was he incapable? She gently shook her head.

“I don’t know how much longer I shall be the Pirate King, especially if your presentiments are accurate,” she murmured.  “We’ll still have the Empress, and the heart of Davy Jones.”

There was that still - but it was not Jones she feared.  It never fully had been, even after witnessing the dreadful eldritch power of the Kraken.

“Do you really think you are supposed to have that much influence over me?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I know that none of these men save a handful of mine and the children hold me in much regard, and that’s quite aside from my history.”

He set the brush down and kissed the mass of her hair once more for good measure.

“Or perhaps it is, but not the part of it with Beckett. They find my downfall endlessly entertaining.”

Elizabeth turned and wrapped an arm around the back of his neck, pulling herself closer to him, touching his lips with the fingers of her other hand.

“Do shut up.”

“I worry only for how it reflects on you,” he pointed out. “I know I’ve no dignity to these people. What do you suppose they think of your stooping to me?”

“To be honest, I think they think I’m using you, if they think of it at all.  That’s what powerful men do with women, they use them up.  I think I come off more the man in this situation - isn’t that what you mean by no dignity?”

“I meant more specifically the spectacle of having seen me losing teeth and drinking myself sick in the gutters of Tortuga,” he said, “to say nothing of my efforts to ensure I remained drunk. Had I not fallen from so great a height, they would not rejoice so in my descent.”

She slid a little higher up on his lap, closer.

“But they can see I want you.  And surely they can also see why.  Regardless of your collapse, I don’t think I am seen as stooping at all.”

“Kiss me gently, then,” he said, half-deadly serious and half self-deprecation. “I suspect another tooth was doomed in the brawl with Turner.”

Elizabeth kissed him very gently, and slowly guided him to his back against the pillow, while she remained astride him.

“If you lose a tooth,” she could not help but say eventually, “can I have it?”

He stared at her.

“What? Why?”

“You wanted my hair, I would like your tooth - if it falls out.  Don’t try to pull it out or something.”

“I may have to, if it continues paining me as it is. Yes, you may have it,” he said, sounding resigned. “You don't need to sacrifice your hair for my sake, though-”

“I can part with a lock,” she snorted, leaning down to kiss him again.

“Let us hope that I needn’t part with more than one tooth in return,” he said, more than a little bitterly. “Hair grows back.”

Despite the gloominess of his voice, he chose to emphasize this by letting her brittle hair gently spill through his fingers. He twisted a lock of it around one of them, and lifted it to show her. The damage only began in earnest a decent distance down the strand, a little past her jaw, where her hair was long enough to toss about in the wind and grow salty. Before that point, it was less blonde, but it was also encouragingly smooth and a light burnished brown.

“Serves you right for brawling; I hope Will loses one too,” she said, not particularly kindly, in this case her good mood from the realization of the fact that they had brought some punishment on themselves and she had even less cause to play the disapproving authority figure with him. “It’s a pity you like the blond so much,” she observed.  “That seems to be the matter.”

“It's all quite sun-streaked,” James admitted. “I did not realize until today that it was quite so fragile.”

“What’s the word for that? Is that a - is it metaphor?”

“It could certainly count as one,” he conceded. “I suppose I was comparing it to my own. Even at its worst- which you have seen- it never turned quite so pale.”

“Yours is darker than mine,” she shrugged off.

“I do like the blonde,” he admitted, “but I don't think I shall mourn it as I thought when it grows out, after seeing your unhappiness.”

“James, I am fine.”

“Elizabeth, if I spoke as you did about myself in any regard, you would try to threaten me into a better opinion.”

“I am your mistress,” she argued; “I may speak in ways you may not, is that not so?”

James gave her a profoundly unconvinced look from under his eyebrows.

“You were speaking of tearing your hair out. You'll have to pardon me for taking that as a kind of self-aggression.”

“I was not! I said I thought I’d tear it if I tried to brush it.  I was in an ungentle mood.”

“Sometimes,” said James, “I feel as though in your haste to remind me of how much you need me, you forget that I need you as well.”

“Is this about my mood?” asked Elizabeth obliviously.  “I admit it is not great, but it’s improved-”

“I apologise for my mistake,” James said, a little louder, and in a very even, cautious voice that did not entirely mask his frustration, “but I had reason to believe you would hurt yourself. I hope that, at the very least, you will permit me my concern.”

“Oh!” said Elizabeth, looking troubled.  “Did it - did it seem so serious?”

“It was a degree of agitation I had not previously seen from you,” James said, as diplomatically as possible.

“I agitate infrequently,” she agreed, and lay down gently on top of him.

“At the rate you were going, I half-feared you would cut it off in a fit of pique-”

He stopped himself, blinked, and then immediately added, with a warning gesture, “Don't you say a word. I wasn't furious at the moment, it was a perfectly considered choice-”

“I never doubted it,” she laughed. “You look all the better for it - your judgment is impeccable.”

She kissed his newly-trimmed beard.

“Mm- you might as well enjoy it before I'm down a tooth,” he said, a little grimly. “Growing prettier by the hour around here, we are-”

“Is it visible when you smile? The tooth you’re going to - lose I mean-” she asked between kisses.

“I believe so, yes. The obvious solution is not to smile-“

“Oh, don’t you dare-”

“I’m trying to convince myself that it could be far worse, but I can’t say I’m enjoying the prospect,” he grumbled. “I had rather hoped that any marks this left on me would come from you.”

Elizabeth nipped him on the ear.

“Like that-?”

“It’s a start-“

“Mm, what more can I do for you?”

“I’ll let you have the damned earring,” he relented. “Dangling, if it should please you.”

“Do you know what I love,” Elizabeth murmured into his ear, continuing to tease his hair and press kisses along his throat.  “I love that I do not have to talk about things at all for you to you lie here and think of them anyway and then you acquiesce just because it is weighing on your soul that you did not already.”

“That's- I don't do that,” he scoffed, a little too automatically.

“Oh, don’t you?”

Elizabeth’s hand crept up his thigh.

“No, I don't think I- I don't-”

“I think you do,” said Elizabeth, toying with his waistband.  “I think it sincerely pains you to withhold anything from me.”

“I had a thought earlier-” he blurted.

“Let’s have it.”

“When you meant to promote me- I nearly suggested that- you should mark me as your own, as so many of them have been marked as pirates because of me-”

“With what-”

“I don't know- a knife, probably-”

“That sounds messy,” she said dubiously.

“I would rather that than a mandatory public humiliation,” he countered.

“Which was already discarded as an idea, yeah,” said Elizabeth, stubborn and somewhat injured that he would throw that back in her face.

“I know- oh, no, darling, I didn't forget-”

“Well, now that a mandatory public humiliation is off the table, you needn’t stress yourself pressing for a mutilation in its place. James, this is really unsatisfactory pillow talk.”

“It's not terribly different from having a sweetheart's name tattooed, is it not?”

“Then do that instead?”

“There are too many Elizabeths in the world,” he retorted, “and frankly I have seen too many tattoos sloughed off, which I will not describe. And darling-”

“Swann,” she insisted.  “I think it should be Swann.”

James smiled- mouth resolutely closed, but nonetheless.

“A sort of crest-”

“I wanted to get a tattoo, of a swan flying,” she admitted wistfully.  “Through gates, perhaps.  I don’t imagine it will look like anything but arrogance to most people -”

“...we’ll share it, then,” he said, immediately understanding. “For him.”

She smiled. “I would like that, if - you would.” She hesitated.  “If you think it’s wise - sloughing, really?”

“...yes,” he said. “But I’m certain if the needle were heated each pass, it might not end so badly.”

“Well,” she said doubtfully. “When we are successful and have the money to have it done properly - then I say we will.”

“I would consider that a great honor,” he said as he tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear.

She rolled her eyes, but it was a poor concealment of her smile.

“It is a pity you can't do it yourself,” James admitted.

Elizabeth laughed, but it did not fail to cover her surprise.  “James,” she said incredulously.

“I trust you more than most. Certainly more than I trust that lot out there-”

“My drawing was never that good,” she said, mollified.  “Anyway, we’ll go to someone proper when we do it, what do you take me for?  If you’re going to get tattooed you ought to get someone good.”

“I know,” he said. “Though I do enjoy the thought of looking at something and knowing it was your hand that placed it.”

“I’ll pierce your ear tomorrow,” she said decisively.  “I know there is some instrument for it at the Claire’s.”

Despite everything, this still took him by such surprise that his mouth went slack.

“I- all right. As you wish.”

“James,” she said, now exasperated.

“I didn't say no-”

“It’s your ear, if you don’t want it then it won’t be done-”

“It is difficult, at times, to adjust to how quickly all of this has happened,” he admitted. “I don't wish it otherwise, but there are moments when I struggle to recognize my own reflection. That's all.”

“Yes, I suppose the loss of that wig is aggrieving,” she snorted, before recalling that James had been in that uniform since he was a child. To her credit, she looked remorseful before he had to say anything.  “I’m sorry. I forget sometimes you have actually lost something.”

“Truth be told, I’m not yet quite used to having to think about any of this. I feel as though I’m fumbling through it, blindfolded and leaning on your arm.”

“Well, truth be told, I don’t feel any differently,” she challenged him.

“...I meant rather specifically physically,” he said awkwardly. “I live in hope of that solving everything from the outside in.”

“I wish,” she said bitterly, and then hesitated, before plunging forward with more apology in her voice than any other sentiment, “I wish after all of the years you spent waiting for me, you were happier to have me.”

“Having you is the part of this I am most pleased by,” James insisted.

“It seems to be no compensation,” said Elizabeth with a dissatisfied, crooked smile.

“I always imagined that I would be to some degree providing for you,” James admitted. “It seems an injustice that I am not able to.”

Elizabeth met his eyes, about to make out his insecurity and his tender regard for her even in the soft, dimmed lighting provided by the glow of a bedside lamp - it seemed foolish to think of it as their bedside lamp, when they would be here for so short a while.  She felt again the breach between them - she would not have even thought of this as a factor to influence his feelings about their relationship - and the uncomfortable stab of guilt she felt knowing this was something positive to her, but a hardship for him.  She wondered if their relationship would survive it, or end as hers and Will’s had.  James wanted her love to be as pure and reckless as it had been when she had given it to Will Turner, but she knew she could never love like that again.  

“I did not want you to provide for me,” she said softly.  “What you wanted with me before… those things were the reasons I did not love you.”

She spoke like she knew it would hurt, and she was sorry.

“I would still feel… better, perhaps, with the knowledge of being able to reciprocate your protection-”

“You protect me,” she whispered, pressing his hand over her heart.

“Not as well as I would like,” he said, with a sad smile.

“As well as I require, then.”

“Mm. I hope I can do better by you sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t want the prestige or the income of a commodore in the Royal Navy,” said Elizabeth gently, bringing his hand to her lips now.  “James Norrington. I just want you.”

James closed his eyes with a flinch, but they stayed shut even as his brows unknit themselves and his face relaxed. He slowly unfurled his kissed fingers and turned them to touch her cheek, rounding under her chin. He took a deep breath and exhaled just as slowly, and then opened his eyes again.

He smiled, only briefly forgetting to keep his mouth closed to hide his swollen gums and loose tooth, and kissed her.

Elizabeth straddled him for better leverage, but did not escalate things, beyond holding him snugly to her, sliding her fingers back and forth through his hair.  At this length, to glide her fingers through it took a luxuriously long while, and it still curled, too.

“I really like this,” she broke the kiss to whisper to him, with a little laugh as though at her absurdity.

“Oh,” he said, a little breathlessly. “Oh, good. Thank you.”

“I’ve liked it growing out,” of course she had, “and I liked it long, too, when we first arrived here, but I think this-”

She had to pause and catch herself, following her hand as she tucked hair behind his ear and glided down his jawline. She was not wholly unaware of what she did; she distracted herself deliberately and let him see it.  It was indeed merely a reflection of what he did sometimes with her; she knew how that made her feel, and wanted him to know she felt the same.

“- you’ve certainly found a length that suits you… Though it is not wholly even in the back; I can trim that, if you like.”

“Is it? I made something of an effort to avoid dwelling on that. I’ll let you.”

“I doubt anyone but me will ever notice, so if you don’t care, I won’t endeavor to.”

“Oh, you cannot tempt me with the idea of a little reciprocal doting and then take it away-”

“To be very frank, it is now a rather late hour, and there are better things I’d like to dote on…”

“Of course. I’m in no rush…”

She resumed the kiss.

“Mm- be gentle, love-” he admonished her, with a bright laugh.

“Your poor teeth,” she responded with a laugh of her own, and teased him with her tongue.

“If you push it out while we’re kissing, I shall have to leave the country-”

“I don’t know what country we’re in. I declare it my country, and you are not allowed to leave it,” she murmured, pushing him onto his back again.

“Be gentle, then,” he repeated, though in a softer murmur now, as he reached up to tuck her hair back.

“Does my love satisfy you?” Elizabeth whispered to him through a veil of kisses.  “The way that I love.  Is it going to be enough?”

“Mm- more than that. You overwhelm me sometimes, sweetheart-”

“I mean we sort of want different things. I just want to know if you think it’s going to be enough in spite of that...”

Her fingers traced over his cheek with longing.  To be with someone and still not know if they were there was a new kind of agony for her.

James gazed guilelessly up from the pillow at her.

“You have always been enough, Elizabeth.”

She smiled at him, but there was still pain in it.  

After sending Elizabeth a message covering for his absence, James finished preparing for their hopeful departure the next day at his leisure. He felt no obligation to hurry for Turner’s sake, and the matter at hand took concentration.

(And borrowed supplies, of course, but concentration was the important part.)

It was nearly another hour before he appeared in the food court, his beard newly trimmed close again and his hair partially tied back from his face but now falling, surprisingly carelessly, a little over the back edge of the collar of the most recent shirt this place had given him, and no further. He still wore the heart beneath his shirt- its neckband disappeared beyond the opened collar- and paused warily at the edge of the space.

It was, like the rest of the place, empty- empty save a surly-looking Will Turner, who was waiting with a plate of curly fries. James watched him for a moment.

“Anon hate?” he asked, after a long silence. “I would have thought you above that, Turner.”

“Is it hateful to ask a man an honest question about an action he has certainly committed?” said Will, barely correcting his posture, and punctuating his retort by inserting several fries into his mouth at once, drenched in nacho cheese.  “Very well, then. I am not above it.”

James crossed the seating area and pulled up a chair, unnecessarily aggressively. He lowered himself into it without breaking eye contact and slowly slide down, affecting the most casual posture he could manage.

(It wasn't.)

“This is growing tiresome,” he said. “You know as well as I that it was not very long ago that our positions were reversed.”

“When Elizabeth was engaged to be married to another man,” said Will cagily, “and I was alone with her, and what Jack termed opportunity arose, I reminded her of it.  So tell me, Commodore. Is that what you did,” said Will, washing down his fries with a vicious swig of Dr. Pepper.  “Is that what you did when our positions were reversed?”

“Several times, as a matter of fact,” James said coolly. He crossed his hands across his middle.

“So that’s it, then? You wish me to believe Elizabeth knowingly chose you over me, but would not tell me so herself?  If that were her choice, she would have owned to it.”

“I do my best not to pry, Mr. Turner.”

He stretched one leg ahead of him and adjusted his position in the chair.

“Though, for what little it may mean to you, it is only because of her ongoing affection for you that I haven’t surrendered the heart.”

“Believe it or not, it is Jones’ heart and not hers that concerns me today,” said Will, folding his hands.  “What exactly do you plan to do with it, if not relinquish it to me as I ask?”

“I’m still deciding,” James said, as he defensively moved his own hands over the heart itself. “I don’t trust you to not do anything stupid.”

“I recognize you may not know what it is to care, where this topic is concerned,” said William Turner smoothly, “but my father is enslaved to the Dutchman, and in order to save him, I require the heart of its captain.”

“Then we bargain,” said James. “I told you that I would, and I would have were it not for…” He waved one hand around their surroundings. “This. Believe me, were it not for this nonsense the matter would be handled already.”

“I want your reassurance it will be and shortly.”

“Of course- and, with luck, we may be able to broker a partnership with Jones.”

He sat up a little more properly again.

“I know a little too well what it’s like to exist at the behest of Beckett’s… finger-wagging,” he said, with a lukewarm little impression of the gesture in question. “I’m certain the poor creature must feel similarly.”

“You forget something,” said Will, sitting up more straight and fishing out a fry.

“And that is?”

“Jones likes sympathy as much as he likes subjugation, that I am sure of,” he said, and ate it.

“That’s not what the mixtapes would indicate,” James muttered.

“Oh? You think that Davy Jones, a man who cut out his own heart and buried it on an island, is just waiting for someone to appeal to his sense of indignation.  To bond with him.”

“You’d be amazed, clearly,” said James. “But never mind that. Unfortunately, the matter remains of what would have to be done to prevent the East India Trading Company from coming back into possession of his heart. The ideal, of course, would be to trade your father for the heart and leave its disposal to Jones, but that raises the concern of how well he would be able to hide it again.”

“You think trusting Jones not to hold a grudge against you - who gave his heart to Beckett in the first place - to say nothing of I or Elizabeth or Jack - is at all wise?”

He let his scorn and amusement bleed into his voice.

“Is this an attempt at tricking me into giving it to you?” James asked, brow furrowing. “I won’t let you destroy yourself in a fit of pique when we have other options to exhaust first-”

“Wouldn’t you have done it?” asked Will, his voice deceptively light.  “Stabbed the heart, with nothing else to live for?”

“She would never forgive you,” James said softly.

“Never forgive me?  She’s already forgotten me.”

James looked away, sucking the inside of his cheek.

“This doesn’t leave this room. Understand?”

“This is a courtyard,” said Will.

“She has asked me to refrain from any open affection in your presence, lest it cause you any fresh pain,” James sighed. “She still cares for you, in her way. You are one of her oldest friends, just as I am. She has not forgotten that.”

Will took that in silently, a muscle working in his cheek, then looked carefully down.  The plate of grease and cheese had lost its appetizing qualities.  “And yet she does not speak to me. Does not look at me.  Can’t you - can’t you see -”

He glanced up at Norrington, but could not hold the man’s gaze; he forced himself to do so.

“- Can’t you tell I’m already dead to her?”

“She does not speak to you because she fears hurting you further,” James said. “That night in Cuba- she was in tears at the prospect of you seeing her in my arms. Do you not understand what I am telling you? She loves you still-”

“And I love her,” said Will, voice rising spectacularly quickly - he stood fast enough that if these tables had not been rooted to the ground, it would have overturned.  The chair skidded several paces behind him.  “Did you think I did not?  The man who captains the Flying Dutchman is a man who cut his heart out so that he would not feel the pain anymore after the woman he loved chose to leave him.  Perhaps it should remain so.  But better a captain who doesn’t want to drag you and Jack Sparrow and the Pirate King to his locker to rot, don’t you think?”

James stood up too- far slower, and more deliberately, taking a defensive step backward.

“Fine,” he said. “If you want it, that’s your affair. It is no harm to me if you want to destroy your life in the same state of mind that turned that post’s prior occupant into a monster. But if that’s where your heart truly lies, then you will have to fight me for this one, for I will not be mistaken for idly surrendering it in a fit of callousness-”

“Ah,” said Will knowingly, with a cold smile.  “Of course.”

He circled him, though he had not brought a sword.

“She may or may not forgive me, but she’d never forgive you.”

“I’m not a fool,” James retorted, turning to follow him without breaking his gaze. “My God- you really are angling for Jones’s position, aren’t you? Already you’ve developed an exquisite sense of seeking others’ unhappiness because you have been disappointed in your own.”

Will frowned in genuine distaste and unconcealed hurt.

“If I have uncovered unhappiness on your part, it was not sought.  But I should have guessed far earlier, you had no altruistic motive in denying me the heart.  You only want to protect your interests.  Same as ever.”

“And her heart,” James blurted, flabbergasted. “Turner, listen to yourself- forget me for the moment. You cannot imagine the hurt that would cause her- the fear of what you could become-”

“Why, do you think I would be untrue to my charge?  Respectfully, Mr. Norrington, I think we could call that projection.”

James gave the briefest, faintest flash of a strained and insincere smile.

“I can see, then, that there’s no changing your mind, is there?”

“You will find,” he said evenly, intently, “that having set my heart on something, it does not waver.”

“Very well,” James said calmly. “Good luck getting it.” And with that, he turned around and bolted toward the escalator.

Will swore and ran after him.

James ran up the escalator and hooked around the corner to grasp the railing, looking down at Will.

“Careful there, Turner, you don’t want to do anything rash-”

As Will was, by now, about a quarter of the way up the escalator, James took off again, into the nearest store to the walkway crossing over the food court, and looked around.

Most of the store was full of brightly-colored boxes announcing they contained games of one kind or another, with a clear glass case below the register full of tiny pewter figurines. He whipped his head around, trying to see if any of the strange ticking metal curiosities on the shelves amidst the games could be used as defensive weapons.

Then, he saw it. Behind the counter, mounted on the wall, was a series of swords.

He could hear Turner running behind him and decided, very quickly, that now was not a good time to waste trying to assess how difficult it would be to swing something two-handed. He clambered over the counter- it cracked under his sudden weight but did not shatter- and pulled down a sufficiently impressive-looking specimen helpfully labeled GLAMDRING(™) in a strange, curving calligraphic script.

It was lighter than it looked- so much lighter that he crashed back into the solid, non-glass part of the counter and disturbed the glass case enough that it shattered just to his left. James swore and went running back out onto the concourse, holding the sword out defensively.

“Think carefully on what you’re trying to do, Turner.”

Will skidded on the floor, having worked up too much momentum to immediately stop himself.  The soles of his shoes squealed on the tiles, and his dark eyes worked quickly to figure out where Norrington had gotten that from.

Of course Norrington attempted to block him as he tried to inch into the storefront, but Will was not stupid enough to be too obvious, and soon he backed off, moving towards the balcony instead, hands up in supplication.

“You mean as you did, when you first took the heart?” he said bitingly.

“We both saw how well that ended, didn’t we?” James retorted. “I would think that presented a model to indeed be avoided.”

“Must be why you took it a second time,” he said with mock deference.

“Of course. That time, I handled it properly,”

The sword was too wide, too flat, but it had to do as far as pointing it at Turner in a warning way went.

“Which is why we’re here again,” said Will, unable to hide his anger or even to bother trying, “you standing between me and my father, and insisting you never had any designs on my fiancée.  It’s a sad day when only Jack is telling the truth-” he said with a grunt of exertion and disgust, feinting in one direction and then diving into the store as soon as Norrington fell for it.

There were swords lining the walls, hung up like decorations, their names hanging beneath them.

A long and straight sword, some canine type of animal on his pommel, with runic lettering describing it as OATHKEEPER, stood out to him on its background of velvet, and he leapt for it.  It took so little effort to wrench it from its hangings that Will miscalculated and fell backwards.

Had it been a real sword, it would have cut his chest terribly when it landed on top of him.  A large volume from a toppling bookshelf hurt quite a lot more.  Will stared at the sword as he pushed himself to a sitting position.  Having handled swords for half his life now, it felt physically wrong to touch this one, and the unreality of this hit harder than, so far, anything else on this metaphysical journey had.

“What the hell is-”

He found himself having to scramble to his feet amidst a pile of books as Norrington came rushing back at him.

The sword didn’t seem to damage more than the other man’s pride when he struck him in the face with it - it did not even welt.  Nor did it hurt particularly much to receive the jab in the ribs he got in return. Each seemed more indignant at the injury to their pride to be hit by such a mock weapon than they would have been to receive mortal injury.  It did not matter; neither was content to abandon his jealously guarded pride and throw the useless piece of junk away, and so they staggered to their feet - and, with the perfect footwork of the professional and their toy swords making very pathetic noises as they scraped together, they dueled.

Norrington accidentally trod on one of the books and staggered backward, nearly falling as it skidded under his feet. He swung at Will and tried to disguise his stumble in a step back through the door and out onto the concourse again.

“And what do you plan to do when you’ve taken it, then? Bring Jones’s men down upon us? You wouldn’t even be able to stay here and say goodbye.”

There was a little rolling cart of sorts out on the concourse, loaded with thin shirts bearing pictures of strange wide-eyed women covered in an improbable amount of tattoos and a grimacing yellow rectangle with a face, baring gold teeth over the words HOOD LIFE. James struck a load of the shirts out of the way with his sword and pulled himself onto the cart, which began to roll away with the momentum he brought with him.

Will had noticed what he was doing too quickly to be outrun in that way, jumping onto it from the other side, attempting to strike him, and having to stop and hold on a moment longer.  In the meantime he said through gritted teeth.

“Can you not conceive of a man lacking your failings?” he spat.  “As if I would stoop to your level. I would ferry - “ here he nearly slipped - “the souls of those who have died at sea to a peace in the afterlife I have since discovered I cannot know myself-”

“I was speaking of when you stab it, Turner, try to keep up-”

“So was I!” he said angrily, finally getting a good enough grip with one arm to slash at him with the other.  The sword did not even cut his sleeve, but he felt it had a satisfying thud.

“Not stooping to my level, you say?” James asked, with an irritated glance at his arm before dealing Will a smack in kind. “As I recall, you were climbing into bed with Beckett at the same moment I was climbing out of it-”

“To save my father! Not my - “ He dodged a second strike. “-bloody career!”

“And to do that, you’d thrown Elizabeth to the wolves-”

“She wasn’t part of it! She was never part of it!” shouted Will, furious that Norrington would insinuate otherwise.  “And a very good job you did protecting her - if it were up to you - a military man, a sailor - Barbossa would have already cut her throat!”

He managed to get high up enough to aim a kick at Norrington.  The kick partially dislodged both of them, forcing each of them to scramble for better footing.

“How fortunate, then,” Norrington sneered, in an abortive cover for having had to grab quickly and gracelessly onto the cart again, “that you and Jack bloody Sparrow arrived in time so that he could try to bargain us all- and that after the pair of you managed to get her marooned-”

“Captain Barbossa’s lack of honor is not my fault-”

“If you care so much, why are you dead-set on breaking her heart and costing her another friend?”

“Or perhaps you are afraid that even ferrying lost souls ten years at a time, I might be of better use to her than you are!  What a better friend I could be to the Pirate King as the captain of a ghost ship than some washed up commodore with a haircut and a drinking problem-”

“I’m not giving you the heart and that’s final-”

The cart crashed into the railing and Norrington, his one-armed grip jostled loose, fell back over the edge.

“Give me the heart!” shouted Will, climbing over the upturned cart and jumping after him without a glance.

Norrington stood up unsteadily on the hard mock-canopy of the carousel, panting a little, and flung the sword out ahead of him.

“You’re mad. You’ve so thoroughly convinced yourself that this is the only way that it scarcely bothers you to think of what it might do to her.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be the one being missed for a change-”

He was cut off abruptly when he tripped and nearly fell backward. The whole carousel, improbably, was beginning to turn.

“She has plans for it-” James snapped, dodging forward against the direction of the turn.

“I had plans first!”

He wanted to lunge again, but it took him a moment to gain his footing.

“Stop pretending you have a real reason! You just like having it because you know it’s the only reason anybody tolerates you!”

“And what if it is? It’s a solid- foundation- on which to build respect-”

“Respect, ha! The man who - led his entire crew to die in a hurricane - chasing Jack Sparrow - reduced to rescuing Jack Sparrow for the sake of a woman - who calls him her dog, when he might have once been her husband. And you were Beckett’s dog first - helped him hang innkeepers, wives, children- You are only here because that woman we both love loves you - and I envy you that much - but without her you’re nothing, and you know it-”

Norrington stopped, shocked into silence, still pulled in a circle by the motion of the carousel, and glared.

“Be that as it may-”

Will took this opportunity to lunge, and so the game was afoot.

They could do little damage with these swords, but then, they could possibly injure themselves falling off this thing, and so they strove not to do that.

“You pretend to be better than me - some things don’t change, do they? - but at least I’m not trying to kill you - I suppose you think I forgot about that?  I suppose you forgot about that too - never was very much on your mind-”

Will raised his sword to deliver what would, with a real sword, be a killing blow, lost his footing, and fell backwards.

James stared, and then, genuinely alarmed, scrambled toward the edge on his hands and knees, holding the sword as well as he could under the circumstances.

“Turner?” He moved closer to the edge, trying to avoid looking too much at the surrounding area for fear of getting dizzy, and cautiously, clinging, leaned his head and shoulders upside down over the canopy to get a better look.

Will Turner, holding onto the edge of the carousel, with his legs wrapped tightly around a pole for support, yanked him down by the shoulder. Norrington had to swing himself under to avoid dropping straight to the surrounding floor, falling painfully to the upper platform of the carousel and having to grab his sword before it slid out of reach.

The whole structure was a little unsteady- he had to pull himself up with the aid of a pole, avoiding the rising and falling hooves of fiberglass horses. Despite his intentions, his hair had come loose again, and he had to toss it out of his eyes.

“End this,” he said. “At least talk to her about it. Don’t spring this on her.”

“Give me the heart and I will!” he shouted from the ceiling, dropping down to the floor and landing unevenly, hard on one foot and injuring his ankle.  Will staggered into the sea of turning horses the faster to lose him and to walk it off with a loud curse.

“I’m not giving you the- for God’s sake, Turner, give it up and get some ice on that-”

“Go to hell!”

His voice sank eerily into the upbeat, chirpy music.

“You’re the one who’s in a hurry for that,” James called after him, warily making his way toward the little staircase down to the lower platform with his sword at the ready.

On the first level, devil know how he got there, Turner jumped him.

No sword, he just tackled him to the ground and struck him immediately in the face.

“God damn it-”

James shoved at him and rolled himself off of the edge of the carousel.

“I’m not giving you the bloody heart, so you might as well stop now-”

The pervasive theme music and bloody single-mindedness of the duelists had disguised the growing, jostling crowd of oddly dressed pirates who had discovered that the Pirate King’s brawling boyfriends was a better event than drunk lacrosse in the main corridor could ever be.  The mall being what it was, many of them even had drinks.  Will Turner did not see any of them as he got limping but determined to his feet and charged after his opponent, grabbing him and running til they had both tripped over each other and fallen down once again, attempting headlocks, out of breath name-calling and all manner of noogies.

Certainly nobody saw Tai Huang send one of his men on a certain errand to fetch a certain happy lass waiting with a soft drink at the claw machine.

They had made it to the fountain before Elizabeth hauled them out and hit both of them on top of the head.

“Stop it! Stop it!”  

Her voice was ragged and raw with shouting.  She had in fact been shouting for several minutes without their looking up, a fact which stung all on its own.  

It took Will a horribly long moment to realize who he was looking at, and his eyes widened visibly; he stayed silence, shook and ashamed.

“Anybody mind telling me what in the blue fuck they’re doing?”

It was a joke to everyone else - there were titters and jeers from the pirates, in incongruous snatches of Cantonese and sailor’s English - but the King’s face was all emotional bruises, flushed with fury, nakedly hurt.

“Someone,” James began- he was still a little out of breath- “was set on piercing the heart of Davy Jones and taking his place.” He tossed Turner a quick sidelong glare.

“Things- escalated from there. I’m terribly sorry-”

“Sorry!” blurted Will, angry.  “At least I’m honest. I’m not sorry at all -”

“Oh, what now? Honest about what-”

“Why you won’t just give it to me-”

“Both of you!” Elizabeth interrupted, her voice becoming very high when she she shouted.  It did not sound little, but there was a fragility to it it did not always, otherwise, possess - though in no small part could this be attributed to the nature of the fight she had just broken up.  One of these men she had avoided speaking to out of the agony of the tenderness of her remaining feelings; the other had woken her up that morning with a kiss, like a prince in a fairytale.  “You have a disagreement and you settle it like a pair of roosters in a henhouse?”

Will immediately pointed to James, wildly protesting innocence with the look in his eyes, the way his mouth dropped open - James Norrington, who had provoked him, who had run up the escalator and grabbed a prop sword first -

“What was I meant to do?” James blurted, utterly appalled. “Elizabeth- he asked me to meet him in the food court- I’d no idea he still had some kind of death wish-”

Those last two words came out in an offended snarl, accompanied by another stinkeye in his direction.

Will by contrast had stopped trying to defend himself, looking with wide, meek eyes at Elizabeth, who narrowed hers at him, and then turned her gaze to James.  The crowd had not dispersed, but it had grown much quieter now - eager to see what happened, she had no doubt.  She wanted to administer this away from the rest of them, but couldn’t think of a way to engineer that.  And she suspected that they needed the crowd, at the moment.  It was so difficult to be the king here, with them of all men.  She might need all the reminder she could get on that account.

“That’s ‘Your Majesty’ to you, Captain Norrington,” said Elizabeth sharply, coldly.

James recoiled and lowered his eyes.

“If he's a captain,” someone called from the crowd, “where's his ship, then?”

This was met with scattered laughter, and someone who was probably the speaker getting high-fived. James looked up at Elizabeth again, eyes wide and pleading.

“I believe the last time you made a mockery of my command the question of flogging came up,” she said, voice just loud enough to carry.  Her face was frozen as she met his eyes unflinchingly, but a foolish tear ran down her face.  In the noise of the hooting and the derisive laughter that prompted, she managed to say, “for God’s sake” and go unheard by any but Will Turner and James Norrington.

Will fixed his eyes on the ground and kept them there.

“If that is what Your Majesty requires for my… atonement, for what has happened here,” James said slowly, “then I will of course yield to your authority.”

“That's ‘cause he probably likes it,” someone else shouted, prompting Captain Barbossa to grasp the would-be wit’s shoulder with one gnarled hand and give him a warning look.

“Oh, is it going to be necessary?” asked Elizabeth, her voice rising.  “Tell me. Norrington. Turner, is that what it’s going to take to contain this-”

“It’s just a - we had an argument, it got out of hand,” said Will, almost a mumble, his ears red.  He did not know how serious she was, but he had heard some rumors about the last incident, and realized he might have gotten his rival into some serious hot water.  

“What’s that? Sorry; can’t hear you.”

But when Will started to repeat himself, better-phrased, Elizabeth turned and addressed the crowd, with moderate theatrics - in truth unable to look at them a moment longer.  

“Out of hand, you say?  I would imagine so.  And what is the problem? The heart of Davy Jones?  You couldn’t bring that matter to me directly? You couldn’t petition me to deal with it?”  She couldn’t refrain from turning back to them, though, a bitter, personally hurt edge coming into her voice.  “Do you enjoy showing off?  Tell me, would it have ruined your day to not make an ass of yourself?”

“He only wants the heart because it makes him feel more powerful,” said Will earnestly.

“I don't give a damn for it for my own sake, not now,” James said heatedly, “only that she seems to enjoy-”

James stopped short, realizing immediately what he had done.

“I- Your Majesty, I’m-”

Will glanced sideways at him, anxiously.  Elizabeth’s eyes widened, her mouth opened wordlessly, and she stared; and an unpleasant hush fell over the broad, open space, and she wished to God she could have been allowed the privacy of telling off her boys - who had almost certainly been fighting over her as much as for the heart of Davy Jones, she was almost certain - without a bevy of amused onlookers.

“Give it to me,” she said in a sharp whisper, holding her hand out.  “Give it to me now.”

“Yes- oh, yes. Just a moment-”

He pulled it from beneath his shirt and passed it to her, as quickly as he could.

“My deepest apologies, Your Majesty-”

Elizabeth slipped that into her duffel bag, her hand trembling; and when she straightened, she backhanded him.

“Not nearly deep enough, I don’t think,” she snapped, and she turned on Turner now.  “And you, do you want to stab it?”

“No,” he said, looking beyond her, not seeing.

“Oh? Do you want to be the captain of the Flying Dutchman?  Want to sail the seas for eternity, come ashore every ten years, to a woman that’s waiting for you?” she said, much more cuttingly than she wanted to, and watching him lower his eyes back to the floor.   

“I thought you might want to- that is, it might be - useful - to have one of your own men controlling that ship, and not-”

Will struggled to get the words out properly, and did not speak loudly enough that the vast majority of those sucking on soda straws could overhear him, but he was clear enough to Elizabeth.

“You thought wrong,” she responded, that loudly enough for all to hear.  “You both thought very wrong.  You both acted very wrong.  I hope you’re good and proud of yourselves,” she said, eyeing them - dripping, scuffed and a little bloodied from minor scratches, one raised mark on James’ face and one cheek flushed unpleasantly.  “Because I’m not.”

And she lowered her voice now, just for them.

“Tell me this wasn’t about me.”

“He had no intention of trying to win you back,” said James, “or to part us. I promise you that.”

“Because I’d given up on it-”

“Oh, shut up,” said Elizabeth, exasperated, and wincing inwardly.  “Why would he need to try when you’re going to do this garbage all over again anyway?”

Someone hollered behind her, and Elizabeth turned around again.

“Disperse!” she shouted. “The lot of you!”  A specific instruction in Chinese now, Tai Huang smacking someone in the head and obeying her; and she ran her eyes furiously over the rest of them and added in plain English, “Now, damn you!”

She couldn’t wait for them to leave entirely; as some of the men who knew her specifically filed out, she locked eyes with Barbossa - unreadable, as ever - and averted hers, jumpy and drained.  She turned back to the pair of them, and, angry and helpless, she shoved one of them and then the other.  They were both tall and blocky enough in build that it was not a very physical gesture, but it was nonetheless a potent one.

“You told me I did not have to be the king with you,” she said exaggeratedly to Norrington - the reference to the tenderness of their personal life hurting the one of them with her frankness and the other with her mockery.  “And this is the second big, public spectacle you’ve made of yourself requiring just that.  Don’t speak! Do you think I want to flog you - either of you?”

“I don’t care if you have to flog me,” said Will, with a touch of bitterness in his voice, thinking back to other and probably more painful floggings - but not thinking of Elizabeth having to make the choice, and not looking at her enough to see the disbelief and pain cross her face.

“Maybe I do!” she shouted.  “You selfish load of… Did he really try to stab the heart?” she turned and asked James Norrington helplessly.

“He wanted to. I wouldn’t let him.”

James averted his eyes again.

“I know you care for him still.”

“Oh, don’t start that again-” said Will fiercely, and looked to her when she opened her mouth to speak in outrage again.  “I asked you if you loved him. In Tortuga and again in-”

“You left Tortuga!” she shouted - once more.

“Oh, pardon me! Pardon me if your not wanting to stay married hurt my feelings-”

“I didn’t want you to leave!” she shouted, her voice gone ragged again; and now that this was out in the open, and they were at least in theory alone, with tears in her eyes.  “But you shouldn’t have expected I would wait for you-”

“No, indeed, of course not!” said Will Turner, with a laugh of despair.  “Why would I- maintain any hope that the woman that married me would wait for me - instead of leaping directly into the arms of the man she gave up to be with me-”

“There was nothing to give up then,” James said, in a low voice.

“She would have married you!” shouted Will, straining his voice.

“To save you! To make him rescue you!” rejoined Elizabeth in tears.

“Well, neither of us can fairly call ourselves husband now,” James said. “As you reminded me, Turner, I might have been once, but I was happy enough to be called dog.”

She looked between them, devastated.

“This was about me?  Good- God’s wounds-”

“It was about the heart, and the desire to see yours… unbroken,” James said, in nearly a whisper. “But even that only came up as a question of what might be more of use to you- a would-be ghost captain, or…”

He sighed.

“A washed-up commodore with a haircut and a drinking problem,” James repeated gloomily.

“Hey,” Will said gently, with a shadow of a smile, all the more pained for its sincerity. “I’ve rescued you before, haven’t I?  At least - at least I can say that much for myself.  Wherever it ended up.  However it ended.”

“Or will be ending,” James said, looking at Elizabeth with a pained yet resigned expression.

“James,” she said, almost soundlessly.

“I have only ever wanted what is best for you,” he said, without moving to touch her.

Elizabeth’s lips twisted. It was an involuntary response.  Dimly, she was aware of the carousel music still playing somewhere behind her, of the burble of the fountain, the depths of which they were still dripping onto the marbled tile.

“What’s best for me,” she repeated, unable to hold back something of a sneer. Her eyes moved from his to Will’s and back again, confirming that assessment from them both.  “I see. What’s best for me - that’s, oh, that’s very good.  Yes, I suppose I can see that being the happy wife to a - to a blacksmith or a commodore might be what’s best for someone,” she said, diplomatically, feeling anger coil in her stomach when they both wilted.  “Someone who has betrayed the woman he loves for Cutler Beckett, maybe a little less so - did you both forget that?  My God, I don’t want to picture how silly and stupid your wrestling match must have been when that’s in your past - both of them!

“I suppose I owe it to you both - let me practice my curtsy! - saving my life from the terrible Captain Barbossa, you both had a hand in that one.  Though, I had to save your life from him too, Will - had to trade in my freedom for you - I got myself off that island, too, James, don’t take all the credit for that; you had a ship; I had Jack Sparrow and his rum and his keen interest in me at the time and I had to make do with that.  Have you ever had to make do with just that?  Really? Either of you?

“I went from Captain Barbossa and a shipful of pirates pawing at me to a prison in Port Royal to Sao Feng’s little boudoir to the brig of the Flying Dutchman - you want to take all of the credit in getting me loose of all of that?  Did you forget about Sao Feng, Will?  He wanted me on board his ship.  Because of your stupid little deal.  And if the Dutchman hadn’t attacked us - he tried things, Will - did you ever think of that?  And if James - and if Captain Norrington hadn’t been on the Dutchman then Davy Jones would have killed me then and there.  And if he hadn’t sprung me from the brig I suppose I would be there still, with your father.  Was it worth it? He’s still on the bloody ship, Will!  Was it worth it?

“Well, if I hadn’t been tarnished by Sao Feng I wouldn’t have become a pirate lord, and if I hadn’t been tarnished by Barbossa I wouldn’t have learned what it took to be a pirate lord, and so on, - so forth, but that doesn’t mean it’s been a picnic all the way there, and yes, you fucking rescued me, both of you, multiple times, and yes, fucking Jack’s vote crowned me, I know, I know, I know!  But I lived to be saved! You don’t even know - don’t even think about what I’ve had to do so that I could live to see help come in the first place!  And someone else voted me king - someone with every cause to hate me.  But I still earned it!  That dress Barbossa made me wear - I put that on, and I paid.  I pretended to be the goddess Sao Feng wanted me to be and I paid for it.  Pretended to flirt with Jack.  Agreed to marry you.  I murdered Jack Sparrow to save my own life.  I’ve paid a million times over now to be king.  Do you think I would give that up for you? For either one of you?  I wouldn’t do that.

“I earned the Pirate King.  I deserve her.  God help me, for better or for worse, you had better stay out of my way or I will pay with you too, because I have come too far and I have paid too much to let a stupid boy rip this out of my hands, I swear to God!”

“Your Majesty-” James blurted as she turned away from them both.

“In private you may call me Elizabeth, Captain-”

Will Turner flinched, for his own reasons.

“... Elizabeth, then,” James said, rising but without lifting his eyes to look at her.

She lifted her eyebrow.  

“Yes?” she demanded.

“You're- you’re completely correct,” he said. “I won't ask for your forgiveness for this.”

He looked at her for only a moment, then turned his face away from her again.

“I would- if I am indeed so much a liability,” he said softly, “you would be justified in taking your leave of me.”

Will looked up at him in shock and shame.  As much as he had raged about this and as long as it had hurt him, he had still not wanted this to happen.

Elizabeth’s mouth opened and her lip trembled for a moment.  She seemed to be searching a time for something to say, and searching his eyes for the passion of regret, but nothing came to her to prevent this; and she closed her mouth in a shaky and then a venomous smile, nodded her head, and turned on her heel, and did so.

Elizabeth Swann took the heart of Davy Jones as a good-luck charm, to win herself a stuffed animal at the claw machine if need be.  God willing, a man who had become a monster with a claw for a hand might make an appropriate talisman for such a venture.  She hoped so, because the heart of a man who had ripped his out for hurting him too much was otherwise a very ill omen.

“There,” said James Norrington flatly. “Now I’ve nothing left to live for, but you don’t see me trying to stab the heart of Davy Jones, do you?”