Rated PG for graphic death and implied sexual content.
'At rest', they called it; 'eternal sleep'. If those complacent matrons had looked down on Jack Sparrow's contorted features as he was doing, Will thought savagely, they might be less inclined to espouse that comfortable lie.
Even in snatched moments of slumber, on that short-handed voyage to Tortuga, Jack had never lain so slack and shrunken. Maddeningly, he'd never lain still at all, twitching and murmuring under his breath, with changes of vivid expression flashing across the mobile face like the sleeping whimpers of a hound dream-hunting beside the fire. Will could cheerfully have choked him for it, at the time. Now... now, staring down at the body on the makeshift plank, he'd have given anything to wipe those marks of strangulation away.
They said the dead looked surprised. That, too, was false. There was no surprise on that congested face; only the snarl of a snared creature at bay, flinging its last defiance against the unheeding constriction of the noose. He'd known what was coming. Gone down like all the rest with teeth bared in that last, useless struggle, for all his resolve.
Much good the elaborate apparatus of death had done for him. They might as well have swung him off the ladder in the old style, Will told himself bitterly now, his own throat thickening at the sight of the evidence before him. Jack Sparrow hadn't died easily, and he hadn't died quickly. It was a good thing - a very good thing - that Elizabeth was not here.
Not that they'd have let her in, anyway. Will glanced around the bare little guardroom with its pair of sentries - one, by the door, who'd admitted him at the sight of the Governor's written order, and the other standing stolidly at the foot of the body like some blank-faced mourner, eyes trained with regulation rigidity somewhere west of Will's right ear - and felt a laugh struggling to escape. As if they thought... as if they really thought that even now, the notorious Captain Jack Sparrow was going to give them the slip, was going to take up his plank and walk, in his last and greatest feat of legerdemain, to thumb his nose at them from the freedom of the wind outside.
For a moment the image was so vivid that Will was almost surprised to see the body still there. Still lifeless, drained of all its wicked merriment. If it could have been done, Jack would have done it. Danced on thin air and made fools of them all.
Will's eyes had unaccountably blurred. He lifted his head, his stare blind and fixed as that of the redcoat a few feet away, and schooled himself to think of something else. Of Elizabeth instead.
He hadn't seen her - to speak to - since that night on Isla de Muerta, though he could guess well enough to whom he surely owed the special pleading that had set him free on arrival in Port Royal. She was keeping her word to Norrington, no doubt. Norrington - who'd done... this.
Will felt the first hot drops fall; ignored them. He had nothing to be ashamed of. He had nothing to be ashamed of... if it hadn't been for him, Will Turner, the pirate would have been swinging by the neck long before this. Every day of life Jack had enjoyed - despite the tears, he couldn't help smiling at the thought; enjoyed had certainly been the word - every day of life, since the morning they'd struck their bargain, had been his, Will Turner's, gift. And if that brute Barbossa had offered to return Elizabeth Swann unharmed in exchange for the life of an old enemy and condemned felon, Will knew well enough that back then he himself would have thought it a trade cheaply won.
Only... in the course of those days lived with such zest, Jack had become more than just an incongruous face. More than the one man who happened to hold the only hope of tracking down those other pirates. More than the captain who'd been his - pirate; Will faced that truth now without a flicker - father's friend.
He'd become a living, aggravating, amusing, unpredictable individual in his own right, to Will and Elizabeth both. Annoying, yes. Unreliable, yes. A drunken, rascally, utterly charming reprobate - but not just a name, a face, a list of crimes. A man. Despite everything, a good man. A friend... Will bit his lip, feeling the coolness of salt drying on his cheeks as the lantern overhead swung in the draught... a friend worthy of weeping for.
He found himself thinking, again, of Elizabeth, who hadn't come. Would never have been permitted to come, for all that it seemed her father had thought it proper to submit her to the spectacle of the hanging itself. The talk of the town was that she had fainted; been carried off in her fiancé's strong arms. The old biddies in the marketplace had oohed and ahhed over the romance of it all, conflating Jack with Barbossa as her kidnapper and laying stress on the way she had melted into Norrington's grasp.
The memory of the gossip brought Will's teeth grinding together again as it had when he had first heard it. Taken to her bed at the memory of her ordeal - oh, really? More likely by far, he told himself brutally, to have taken to her room as a refuge from her coming marriage to the man who'd orchestrated the whole unnecessary scene. Shut herself away from the knowledge that she'd pledged to marry Norrington.
Norrington, who'd known the truth about Jack, who'd have been utterly helpless at the mercy of the cursed pirates without Jack... and had cold-bloodedly set out to hang him just like the rest of them. Had repaid Will's life, Elizabeth's life, the lives of every man Jack's action had saved, with - Will looked down again, at the distorted, discoloured face, at the livid marks on the neck some kindly hand had half-knotted a scarf to hide - with the ugliest death in his power to give.
Memory showed him an apple, floating quietly in the water. A coarse, clever face seamed with violence, smoothing to strangely innocent surprise. Barbossa, lying in state among the tumbled treasures of his trade in the darkness of the isle that had seen his greatest triumph and his fall, with the merciful mark of his old enemy's single shot blackened at his breast.
Barbossa had been the lucky one, Will thought now, the sudden understanding of it threatening to choke him. Barbossa, who'd meant nothing but evil by them all, had taken the death cheated by Captain Jack Sparrow; but Jack had been abandoned to take his foe's place in leading the hemp fandango, at the head of his faithless men.
Better the blade or the bullet than the rope. And Norrington - if he'd been a little less hide-bound, a little more humanly decent - could have arranged for that, at least.
Instead, they'd gone through the whole farrago of trial, condemnation, execution, so that the wheels of blind Justice could be seen to be grinding on without fear or favour. Jack had shrugged the sentence off, across the courtroom, with a quizzical look and a glint of gold from a sidelong grin: no more than we expected, eh Will mate? It had been the last time their eyes had met.
Will hadn't gone to the hanging. Kept telling himself there was nothing he could have done, that Jack would not have wanted him there to witness the long jerking struggle, humiliation before the eager crowd, the last useless fight - hands tied - against the tightening hold of the rope. Jack had said as much, the last time they'd spoken. Practically told him - though not in as many words - not to come.
Of course, that had been just after Will had hit him, blindly and less than scientifically, for what he'd said about Will's prospects on Elizabeth's forthcoming wedding night. To Norrington. Will's hand went up instinctively and ruefully to the half-healed cut below his lip.
There hadn't been much to do, locked up together in the dimness below-decks on the 'Dauntless', but talk. For a man facing almost certain death who had, correctly, predicted that his companion was unlikely to share his fate on arrival, Jack could be surprisingly sympathetic. He could also be quite spectacularly (and - Will suspected with the clarity of hindsight - deliberately) infuriating.
Goaded beyond endurance, Will had unleashed a wild punch in Jack's general direction. It had barely connected, as Jack swayed with the blow; then, after a momentary pause, as if weighing up his target in the gloom, landed an efficient and flooring blow to Will's jaw with a fistful of rings that bore all the weight of a knuckleduster. Even at that moment, he remembered, Will had been amazed, as ever, by the complete lack of malice with which Jack always seemed to hit people, with that odd, almost apologetic grace of his.
Only Will had fallen backwards over the stool and gone down harder - and certainly more noisily - than he thought Jack had intended. The next moment there had been the clumping of boots, and lantern-light in his fuddled eyes as he'd lain blinking upward, and angry voices dragging them apart.
Jack had shrugged and let them take him as Will tried to regain his senses enough to protest, his darkened eyes catching and holding the younger man's clouded hazel. "See, there's some fights a man can win, and some he's bound to lose - savvy?"
Will had struggled up on one elbow, dabbing at the trickle of blood where a signet had caught his chin. "Jack, I-"
Bars clanged between them.
"Now, a losing fight's no pleasure to watch, nor to be seen watching." Jack had pitched his voice a little higher to carry as the footsteps receded, but it held the same maddening reasonable lilt as ever. If there had been strain in it, Will hadn't heard - then.
"So when it comes, young Will, you remember the art of telling one from t'other and stay where you're welcome and warm." A flash of gold teeth over his shoulder in the dark. "Oh, and pass on that kiss to Big Peg like I said - you hear?"
His head still full of Elizabeth, he'd taken it for granted with a wince as further - unsolicited - all-too-practical advice.
But as it turned out (as Jack, he thought, had known), that had been barely a day before Port Royal... and unexpected freedom for Will. Freedom to go back to the cold ashes of his life at the smithy. To witness the bustle of preparation for Norrington's - for Elizabeth's - wedding. To watch Captain Jack Sparrow hang.
For the time had come indeed, but not for Will; for Jack. There would be a cold bed, and a parting - not from love, but from life itself. And - remembering everything Jack had said, of his own future, of Will's, of the gallows and the end, half-serious or mocking entirely - Will had thought he'd understood at last, with a sudden icy certainty, what that final exchange had been meant to convey.
He'd been so, so sure. Already half-sickened by the eager anticipation of the crowd, had convinced himself Jack wouldn't have wanted his presence. Now, when it was too late to make the choice, he'd never know. If, somehow, he'd been wrong. If he could have made a difference, glimpsed some banner of hope to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat... or merely been there, at the last. For whatever comfort that could give.