A/N: If I owned Norrington, I'd be happy. If I owned POTC, I'd be rich. I don't own either, so I'm not happy OR rich. So that is my lot in life.
Please don't be TOO harsh. I know this story is crap. That means you don't have to tell me over and over that it is and shatter my ego.
Oh. This is (almost definitely) a one-shot. So I'm not planning to continue. Yep.
Fragmentary
50…51…52…53…53…?
The steps he was taking didn't matter. It was all the same every day, anyway. 53, 54 steps to the tavern, an additional 5 to the nearest vacant table. 59 steps and counting. 59 steps, three seconds, four seconds, five seconds…
He was richer in steps than in anything else. Money? Spent on a bottle of rum. Medals, bartered off for money to spend on the bottle of rum. Commission? Snatched away like freedom from prisoners. Name? Worthless. A worthless name for a now worthless person. So what did it matter?
But steps? In steps, he was a millionaire. He could buy her in steps. He could buy her things in steps! In steps, happiness was just a purchase away. He could buy his life back in steps, and hell, he hadn't even been counting that long! Just since he was dropped off in this godforsaken town, kicked off the ship for someone "more able" and "more competent". And from them, he started counting the steps. Every day's ever worsening stagger from his room, to the tavern, and if he was lucky, back to his room, wielded an untold profit of steps. But steps couldn't buy the rum. For the rum, he needed money. And he had run out of medals to sell. It seemed money, and her, were the two things that he was lacking in life. But why bother worrying about her? She had made it quite clear that he was not her style—painfully clear. He was lacking her, yes, but he didn't need her—yes?
Was it any coincidence that the ship he had sailed in on was the Deception? No, there was no such thing as coincidence.
He gripped the bottle that another signature, progressively growing sloppier, bought him. At this point, he could have, and would have, sold his soul to the bottle and the devil, and not have cared. The sips to the bottom were 49. Sometimes 39.
59 steps, 49 sips, and one worthless ex-commodore.
1…2…3…
When 47 had hit, though the Deception made port again. Slipping out of his hands, the bottle met with the floor and shattered outward. Three notable pieces for his three missing drinks, three missing pirates, one worthless name, one bottle of rum that controlled his life.
48…49…Fragmentary.