Never Feel Unwanted

Fanfiction: Pirates of the Caribbean: DMC

Rating: K+ for mild swearing

Disclaimer: Don't own them, aren't making any money. All credit to the big-eared mouse.

A/N: Written for the Broken Compass Forum's drabble prompt 'fortuitous'. All reviews welcomed and appreciated.

Rum's the stuff for two lives wrecked by Jack Sparrow and thrown away in Tortuga, the town where one should never feel unwanted.

~^///^~

Tortuga. For all that it's a wild town of drinking, wenching and brawls, which I'll not deny, it has its' fair share of darkness and despair. I s'pose it's not too bad if you're just off a ship with coin and a place to return to, but I wouldn't care to live there. Too bad that's where I was born.

The nights were getting colder and if I intended to survive another year, which I did, I would need some footgear and a coat. The figure sprawled between the alley wall and back of the pub looked like he might have both, so I picked my way forward cautiously. As I got closer, however, the man stirred with a faint groan, sat up a little straighter against the wall and squinted at me.

"You look an awful lot like someone," he observed, a blurred mix of drunkenness and hangover in his voice. I sighed, used to this by now. There is nothing of my mother in my features.

"Yeah. The name's Daniel. Daniel Sparrow."

"Your father..."

"Yeah. For all the good it does me." I went and sat beside the man, wanting, in lieu of his boots, a bit of company for awhile. The idea of Tortuga as the one place in the world where one will never feel unwanted only applies when said one has money. Without coin for drink and pleasurable company, or even food and clothes for that matter, it becomes a damn sight more miserable. I didn't know this man or his story, but he looked about as half-dead as I felt, so I figured we'd get on. Besides, he had drink and I had not. In any event, he didn't seem to mind my proximity, but bore it with an indifferent shrug.

"James Norrington. Your father is the reason I'm here." He gestured sloppily at the dank, trashy alley we were sitting in.

"Yeah, me too," I replied wryly and that wrung a tired, grudging smile from him.

"That's fortuitous," he said lightly, swigging at the Rum bottle he held. I shrugged, not knowing the meaning of the word. "I used to be a Commodore," he told me, passing me the bottle.

"An' I used to be nothin', an' at sixteen, I'm still nothin'."

"And what were you expecting to be?"

I took a long drink of Rum before answering and passing it back. "Dead," I said slightly wistfully.

The man, Norryton or whatever, frowned. "That's amendable," he pointed out.

"But not very helpful."

"No, I guess not." He was quite a wreck, but then, who was I to talk? The word 'wreck' took on a whole new meaning on Tortuga. Yet, I could see him having been a Commodore once. There was something lingering in his speech, a certain way he looked around at his dismal surroundings. "Why're you here?"

"I was born?" I suggested, liberating the Rum from his grasp again.

"No! Here!" He jabbed a finger at the packed dirt of the alley beneath us, losing his temper slightly.

"Oh. You have boots." He frowned, apparently trying to string this together into a reason for my being here.

"I do." He squinted at said objects of apparel, as if only just recalling this fact. Then he seemed to understand and scowled at me. "And you can't have them."

"No," I agreed, tussling slightly as he tried to take the Rum bottle back, "I don't s'pose I can." He won the mild scuffle as he was both stronger and outweighed me, so I just sat there while he drank, hoping for a chance to steal the bottle back again.

"He abandoned you, then?" he asked after awhile. I shrugged.

"I wasn't ever his to abandon. Oh, he's around, he's always around. He just doesn't feel particularly obligated. He's never denied I'm his, but he never gave more than a companionable damn, neither. I'm not much of a Sparrow, it seems. Lacking in all important areas of. I'm just skinny, mean and I drink too much." I finally shut up, not even sure why I was ranting about this to the man whose life my father had apparently screwed. Maybe I didn't want to be thought of as the same. Maybe I did. Either way, I was greeted with a thoughtful silence.

"We're in Tortuga," Norrington finally commented, "Who doesn't drink too much?" I wasn't sure if that was meant to be a credit in my favor or what, but I took the opportunity to steal the Rum again. It definitely would have been better had it not sat open in an alley all night and been full of a lot of drunken backwash, but it was already beginning to serve its' purpose and I was never one to complain.

We watched a very drunk man chase a half-dressed woman down the alley in front of us in silence. When the man had staggered and lurched his way out of sight, my companion remarked, "I never thought I would ever wear the label 'Tortuga Drunk' or be classed with men like that, but really, we're no different, you and I."

I considered this. "Not really, no." The slightly wistful tone in his voice was replaced with bitterness.

"You never had to fall, though."

"No, you're right: I was born scum an' scum I am." He looked as if he were unsure of whether or not to laugh at that. Come to think on it, neither was I. He contented himself with a sour smile and a head-tipped-back gulp of Rum, downed hurriedly to drown the pain before it could surface and draw breath. I followed suit.

We drank. It was quite late by the time we finally ran out of Rum. Whatever God there is that keeps drunk men drunk and hungover men sane had provided enough bits of coin between us to buy another measure. We quarreled over who was to buy it and whether the other would run off with it by himself and finally we both staggered out of the alley to chip in our meager gold.

So we drank more, squabbling a bit over the bottle, while the night deepened around us and the chaos built it's mad revelries in the streets, talking about bits of our old stories, memories of our old pain, until even that was done and most of the Rum was gone and we were drifting somewhere where the pain could not find us. Everything was alright now. I tipped back the bottle, drowning in the golden-sugar burn.

Odd, how beautiful a town Tortuga is.

Strange how wonderful it can be to feel numb.

Who could want anything more than Tortuga, the town where no man will ever feel unwanted?