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H34v3nlie Måll: Elizabeth, James, Will, and Barbossa

Will Turner has found something worrying: a new shop that seems at first to be filled with rubbish, but is actually full of relics from the past of anyone who steps foot inside it. With large portions of their crews absorbed in the mall cinema that appeared overnight and frustrating their evacuation plans, Elizabeth, James, Will and Captain Barbossa investigate - raising the ghosts of their former lives from the figurative dead. And perhaps literally, too....

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.

Wet footprints glistened on the linoleum stretch behind them, growing drier as the light grew brighter, fading into nothing.

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