A/N: Thanks once again to everyone who has read and reviewed this story! I have just finished final exams for the semester (whew), but in the next couple of weeks I'll be doing a lot of traveling, so updates may be a bit slower in the next month or so. I hope to get Chapter 5 done sometime in the next week, though, so hopefully I'll stay mostly on schedule. Now, without further ado...
James stood in front of the room's small window clad only in his breeches, taking a drink from last night's neglected bottle as he regarded the bright Caribbean morning. The sunlight was far less offensive to his sensibilities this morning than it had been the day before; but then again, he hadn't imbibed nearly as much rum yesterday, having found himself engaged in other, more pleasurable, pursuits.
He turned to spare a glance back at the bed, where Elizabeth still slumbered, her naked body half-hidden under the sheets. She'd stirred up a hornet's nest of confusion within him; memories he'd tried very hard to bury had risen to the fore of his mind, and he resented their intrusion – resented her intrusion. Not that last night, all things considered, hadn't been worth it. He smiled wolfishly at the memory of her gasping out his name as he took her, and could not help feel a thrill of victory – after the way she'd so publicly rejected him in favour of Will Turner, it was he who'd plucked her first, after all. Yes, he decided; that was worth enduring the unpleasant memories of his spectacular fall from grace.
She stirred restlessly, her body shifting beneath the covers, the sheets falling aside to reveal yet more of her to his lustful gaze, and he felt his cock twitch in response. She would likely regret falling into his bed so eagerly, but he hoped her regrets were not so severe that she would be averse to an encore performance before they went their inevitable separate ways. Once it might have been incongruous to see the governor's daughter, raised to be a proper lady, in such a state of dishabille, and he, raised to be a proper gentleman, standing before her leering with a bottle in his hand; but fate had taken them both far from their intended paths, and James had learned long ago that to question its vagaries was a fool's enterprise of the utmost futility.
She shifted again under the sheets, this time her movement accompanied by the low, drawn-out groan of the newly awakening, and he watched her lift her head from the pillow, her eyes blinking groggily. She turned over to the other side, where he had lain, and, finding it empty, twisted her head around in puzzlement until she found him across the room. He watched the play of emotions dance across her face, from confusion to recognition to a startled, full awareness.
"Good morning," he said casually, smiling down at her as he took a drink.
"Oh my God," she murmured, barely loud enough for him to hear. Her face suffused with a crimson flush as full realization of the previous night's activities crashed down on her with a shattering finality. "Oh my God. No. This didn't happen."
"Oh, but it did," he drawled, taking another pull from the bottle. "And it was quite lovely, by the way."
"No. No! I am betrothed – I am to marry Will! This cannot happen!" She sat upright in agitation, swinging her legs around to get out of the bed – and at once became fully aware of her nudity. She let out a mortified yelp and seized the covers around her, pulling them up to her chin.
"A bit too late for modesty, my dear," he chided, scratching lazily at his bare chest. "I saw it all last night. And then some."
"Ugh!" she exclaimed, regarding him with an incensed glare. "Since when did you become such a… such a… boorish lout?"
"I thought we'd covered that ground quite sufficiently yesterday evening," he replied without pause before swallowing another mouthful.
"Despicable man," she grated, glaring at him balefully and still clutching the bedsheets tightly around herself. Wrapping one hand around her chest to hold the sheets close, she gestured with the other towards the pile of discarded clothing in the corner of the room.
"Bring me my clothes, and leave the room while I dress. I will be on my way and you shan't see me again," she commanded.
He stared at her incredulously for a long moment before bursting into loud gales of laughter.
"Bring you your clothes?" he mocked. "You have the audacity to order me about in my own room? And here I'd thought that perhaps all these years of living the vagabond pirate life had cured you of your suffocating high-society manners. I am curious," he said, his amusement still running high, "whether you command your pirate comrades so imperiously and with such a spoilt air of refinement? Pray tell me how well that goes over on the Black Pearl or whatever accursed pirate barge you sail with these days."
"I can assure you that my 'pirate comrades' would have more respect for my chastity and would not leer at me like the Tortuga filth you've become!" she retorted hotly, pulling the bedsheets tighter. He could not help but smirk at her romantic but assuredly false representation of virtuous pirates.
"Your chastity?" He laughed. "Darling, you lost all claim to that when you begged me to take your maidenhead in the throes of passion last night. It is hardly fair that you should blame me for obliging your wishes."
"I did not beg!" she cried furiously, her face flushing in anger and shame – for they both knew she was lying.
"No?" he said curiously, draining the dregs of his bottle and tossing it heedlessly into the corner. He took a step closer to the bed, admiring a fleeting glimpse of her pale legs as she shifted again, straightening up to meet his gaze. "I seem to recall differently. I seem to recall –"
"You plied me with rum! I was not myself!"
"Plied you with rum?" He narrowed his eyes at her, feeling the stirrings of the beast inside him awakening once more. "I think not. One sip from one bottle is not sufficient to inebriate even the most delicate of constitutions." He took another step forward, close enough to reach out and touch her – and he found himself sore tempted, to reach out and run his hands through her unruly waves of golden brown hair.
"I'm afraid you must face the truth, Elizabeth," he said. "You came to me willingly." He paused. "No – you came to me eagerly."
With a flash she was on her feet, still clinging tightly to the sheets she'd wrapped around herself.
"You are a complete and utter scoundrel," she snapped, eyes glinting ferociously.
"Mmm," he considered. "Yes, I suppose I am."
"And a drunken cur!"
"Most assuredly so," he agreed.
"You've probably whored your way through every brothel on Tortuga by now! You're no better than a – "
"Pirate?" he finished dangerously, sliding his hands around her waist, feeling the heat of her skin through the thin sheets beneath his palms. He leaned in close, so close, until his lips brushed up against her ear. "But I thought you liked pirates, Miss Swann. Found them… irresistible."
He felt her body tense against him, heard her hiss in a sharp intake of breath, felt her free hand slide between them, traversing the plane of his chest and tangling in the dusting of short hair there.
"Damn you, James," she whispered, her breath hot against his neck. He pulled back to regard her, and found once more in her eyes that intoxicating, fearless desire that had so seduced him the night before. "How is it you're able to do this to me?"
A half-smirk found its way to his face, tugging at the corner of his mouth, and he leaned in close again, grazing his lips against hers.
"I think we both know you're really quite partial to scoundrels, aren't you… Elizabeth?" he murmured against her mouth.
And then she was kissing him fiercely and with great violence, wrapping her arms around his neck and tangling her hands through his hair, the bedsheets dropping to the floor, forgotten in her sudden lust and hunger. It was not a tender kiss; teeth and tongues and lips crashed together and duelled for supremacy, a duel that ended abruptly when she took his lower lip in her teeth and bit down, breaking the skin and drawing blood.
With a feral snarl, he seized her hips in his hands and shoved her up against the wall beside the bed, lifting her thighs until she wrapped her legs around his waist and pinning her there with his body. He tangled one hand in her loose hair and pulled, eliciting a squeal from her as her head jerked up, revealing her creamy neck to his plundering mouth; with the other, he scrabbled at his trousers, unbuttoning them at last and shoving them indecorously down and out of the way. He entered her unceremoniously and without pretence, shuddering at the exquisite feel of being inside her again – God, but she felt so warm, so tight, so god-damned good, better than any Tortuga whore he'd ever had. Better than any woman he'd ever had, to tell the truth. To think she could've – should've – been his, not Turner's.
The thought of Turner sent him into a possessive frenzy, and he bucked against her with unrestrained vigour, unconcerned this time with any notions of gentleness or care. Her arms had twined tight around him, her body stiff and arching against him as she gasped out her pleasure with ragged, rasping pleas, begging him to take her harder, faster; begging him for more. He welcomed her vocal interjections; he knew that Turner had never seen her like this, so wild and abandoned, so lost in the throes of passion and lust that she forgot herself. When her release came, she screamed and dug her nails painfully into his shoulders, gasping out his name in a hoarse, low moan; when his followed shortly after, he thrust into her hard, nailing her to the wall, emptying himself inside her with a ragged groan. Unable to support both his weight and hers on trembling legs, he slid heavily to the floor, dragging her down with him, and there they lay curled in a tangle of limbs, panting, heaving, sweating, and sated.
Some time later – he couldn't possibly have said if it was minutes or hours – she reached over to him and ran her fingers delicately across his chest, tracing a pattern along an old long-forgotten scar that traversed his right pectoral from his shoulder to his breastbone.
"I'd never imagined you had this many scars," she said quietly, trailing her finger down to touch another, longer one that ran a jagged course along his left side and down his ribs.
"A sailor's life is not an easy one," he replied simply, revelling in the tingling sensation her roaming fingers left in their wake. "No man who takes to the sea remains untouched by it for long. Cutlass blades, musket balls, ropes, the lash – all leave their mark."
She continued her idle exploration of him, fingers caressing an old bullet wound in his shoulder; then down his arm, marked by a glancing blow from a pirate's blade long ago; to his hands, where a smattering of thin white scars across his knuckles told tales of brawls lost and won. She held his hand in hers, rubbing a thumb across the old wounds, and when she looked at him, her gaze was almost tender.
"It's funny," she said quietly. "You were always so impeccably put-together in your uniform. I never knew you were hiding all these scars under all those layers of splendour and adornment."
A spasm of acute anger lanced through him at her words – somehow, he found it so much more unbearable when she tried to be kind and compassionate than when she was furious and raging and heaping upon him scorn and contempt. "There is much you never knew about me, Miss Swann," he said, not bothering to hide the bitterness in his voice. "Much you never bothered to show the slightest interest in learning."
She withdrew her hand at once, her expression instantly guarded and sullen again. "For God's sake, James," she said angrily. "You don't have to be so hostile. I am not your enemy."
"Aren't you?" He considered her, reclining naked against the wall of his room, her hair a wild mess about her face and shoulders, her pale skin flushed still from the exertions of their lovemaking. "You are the siren responsible for my downfall. I'd say you more than qualify."
He found himself relieved, in an odd way, when her face filled once more with the wrath that he found so much easier to stomach than her kindness.
"Is that it, then? It's all my fault that you're a rum-soaked shipwreck who washed ashore on the godforsaken island of Tortuga? You bear no responsibility for your fate at all?"
"Of course I do. I bear all the responsibility, every last miserable ounce," he retorted. "I know perfectly well that I'm to blame for allowing you to influence my duties to even the minutest of degrees. I will not allow myself to be so swayed again."
"Is that what you think I'm doing?" she challenged, her eyes blazing. "Swaying you? To what purpose? What nefarious harms do you imagine I wish to inflict on you, James?"
"I don't know and I don't intend to find out. You've done enough."
"I have apologized to you!" She was shouting now, and it dawned on him that he had never seen her this agitated – not even when she had begged him to rescue her lover on that ill-fated quest to Isla de Muerta. "I do not know how else to make amends! I told you I never intended to hurt you, and I meant it! I did not ruin your life out of spite or malice, whatever you may choose to believe. You were my friend, James, my dear friend! I cared for you!"
Her confessionary outburst threw him wildly off-balance, knocking askance the spear of his white-hot ire, now aimed not at her but at the world beyond. He rose swiftly to his feet, needing to remove himself from her immediate presence, and stalked back to the window where he'd stood this morning, drinking his rum and regarding her in her slumbering repose. He was tugging up his breeches and buttoning them closed when he heard her rise to her feet and advance behind him, her bare feet scarcely audible against the rough wood floor. Her cool, soft hands were a torment to the exposed skin of his back, and he stiffened in response to her touch.
"My God, how did you get these?" she murmured, sliding her hands gently across his shoulders and down his back, and he knew without asking what she referred to; her voice was again full of damnable compassion, and it made him ill. The story behind those scars was not a pleasant one, one he ordinarily would never share with a woman, but he found suddenly that he wanted – no, needed – her to know. If she wanted to be so damned curious, so bloody full of sympathy, then let her know the whole ugly truth behind her romantic ideals of a life at sea.
"I was a midshipman on my first voyage," he said, willing himself not to respond to her feather-light touch. "I was ordered to the mizzenmast watch – it's typically where the new sailors are put, because the work isn't as demanding and there isn't as much to bollocks up. The watch lieutenant was a vicious old bugger named Wexham, and he was notorious for doling out brutal punishments for the most minor of infractions. And God save the man who actually made a serious error on Wexham's watch. Which, of course, is what I did."
He heard her swallow with foreboding, her hands stroking him firmer and with determined purpose. "What happened?" she whispered.
"I failed to adequately secure the rigging. I'd thought I'd tied it properly, but I didn't know my ropes well enough yet, and during a storm, it came loose, whipping across the sails in a right fury. It almost knocked a man overboard, and it took a dozen seamen to tie it down in the midst of the gale. Wexham was furious and demanded to know who'd secured the rigging, and of course, I admitted to my transgression. I knew the punishment would be harsh, but I couldn't abide another man bearing the consequences of my failure." Always the good and honest sailor he'd been, dutiful and loyal and willing to take his lumps. And look, he thought sourly, where it had gotten him.
"Wexham had me strapped to the mast and sentenced me to fifty lashes. I tried to bear it as manfully as I could, but at some point, I lost consciousness from the pain. I remember counting to twenty-six, and then I awoke in the ship's hold with the surgeon pouring a bottle of cheap gin on the raw wounds to prevent infection. Christ's blood, that was the worst agony I've ever known." He heard Elizabeth mew in sympathy, and felt her hands still against him.
"I was told later that the captain stopped Wexham from meting out the entire sentence after I'd gone under. Not that Captain Key's motives were entirely benevolent, mind you – my father was an admiral, you see, and it just wouldn't do if I died on my first posting because of a punishment taken too far," he said mordantly. He turned around then, allowing her hands to slide around him. Her eyes were bright with tears, but her distress, he realized with a curious twinge, did not bring him the satisfaction he'd imagined it would.
"How old were you?" she asked, the revulsion in her voice readily apparent.
"Thirteen."
"My God!" She stared at him in horror. "You were just a child!"
"No," he said ruefully. "There are no children in His Majesty's Navy. Boys become men very quickly, or they don't become men at all."
"That's horrible," she whimpered, and pressed herself against him, resting her head in the crook of his shoulder. He instantly became extremely and painfully aware that she was still naked.
"It is the unvarnished truth, Elizabeth. Life at sea is not the romantic whirlwind of freedom and adventure you seem to imagine. It is terrible food and filthy unwashed men, floggings and drownings and taking a pirate's cutlass to the belly. It is not for the weak or faint of heart."
"Is that what you think I am, James? Weak and faint of heart?" She lifted her head and regarded him with a spark of that inner fire that had so bewitched him all those years ago. "I've been sailing with Wi – with the pirates for years now. I know that it isn't all glamour and romance."
He might have bothered to offer a rejoinder to her claim, but her slip hadn't gone unnoticed. Her near mention of Will Turner's name jerked him violently out of… whatever this reverie had been, and firmly back into the reality of their lives. And the reality was that she had used and abandoned him three years ago with nary a second thought, and was now betrothed to another man. The spell was broken at once, and he slipped out of her arms brusquely, striding purposefully towards the clothes that lay heaped in the corner of his room.
"Here." He tossed her shirt and trousers onto the bed. "But don't expect me to leave the room while you dress, not after you've been parading around in the nude for nigh the past hour."
She regarded him with utter confusion, clearly unaware of what had caused his abrupt change in demeanour. "James – "
"No. Let's not pretend any more, shall we, Elizabeth? You are not going to stay here with me, and I would not have you if you did. You have misplaced Mr. Turner, or don't you recall? I presume you still intend to find him."
Her eyes flashed at his casual mention of Turner; anger at his presumption, most likely, but also something else – guilt? But whatever it was, it was fleeting, and soon she had affixed in place once more the stony mask she wore when she held him aloof and at arm's length. He found a considerable measure of relief that their relationship, such as it was, had returned to familiar ground.
"Very well," she said primly, and began to pull on the awkwardly overlarge men's clothing. "Forgive me for hoping that we could come to some sort of understanding."
"What is there to understand, Elizabeth? You have chosen your life. I have – well, I suppose it would be a lie to assert that I have chosen mine, but it remains my life all the same, and it does not, and can never, include you."
"You certainly were eager for it to include me last night and this morning," she shot back, finally clad again in her shirt and breeches as she tied her hair back into a tight queue.
He couldn't resist a smirk at her smart rejoinder; it was true enough, at any rate. "I only wanted a taste of what might have been mine, my dear. It meant nothing."
She recoiled as if slapped, and opened her mouth to retort furiously, but some force of which he was unaware stayed her, and instead she adopted a curious expression, one he could not read.
"If you insist," she said cryptically, fetching her hat and placing it atop her head. He was utterly puzzled; he'd chosen his words to be deliberately cruel, hoping to at last chase this irksome wench from his room so he could begin forgetting about her posthaste (preferably with a bottle of rum). She'd seemed to take the bait, but withdrawn at the last moment. What a confounding woman Elizabeth Swann could be.
"I do insist," he replied, and cursed silently as he realized that his voice sounded far more irritated than he'd intended. "But nevertheless, I do hope you enjoyed your deflowering. Please pass my regards to Mr. Turner."
She merely shook her head, but her eyes finally registered the disgust he'd hoped to invoke. "You are a complete pig, James Norrington. I still believe you are a good man at heart, but Tortuga has not been kind to you."
"Tortuga is kind to no one, Miss Swann."
She said nothing in reply to that and made to leave, and he thanked all the powers and principalities of the heavens – his skin was crawling, and he badly needed a drink. But before she opened the door, she turned to him once more, and he barely suppressed a groan of anguished impatience.
"Yes?" he snapped.
"Captain Brodie," she said, and whatever irritation he'd been feeling collapsed away, replaced by complete and utter bafflement.
"What? Who is that?"
"He's the captain of the merchant vessel I sailed in on, the Sagitta. I believe he's looking to hire on some permanent crew in Tortuga. I heard him speaking about it with the first mate. He mentioned, before I disembarked, that he'd be staying at the Boar's Head if I needed anything, so perhaps you might find him there. I can't imagine he'd turn down someone with as many years of experience on the sea as you."
Whatever he had been expecting her to say, that had not been it, and it showed on his face.
"What… why are you telling me this?" he frowned in bewilderment.
"Because I was wrong," she said. "I told you I didn't know how to make amends for the wrongs I've done you, but that isn't true. I'll talk to Captain Brodie, tell him that you're an experienced seaman." She paused, and her countenance took on a softer cast. "I just hate to see you rotting away in this awful place."
He felt his anger, the savage beast, roar back to life, but – somehow – with less intensity than before.
"I told you I will never accept your pity," he snarled. "Nor will I accept your charity."
"Then accept neither," she retorted. "I've told you where to find Captain Brodie. Speak to him or don't. If you truly wish to drink yourself to death on Tortuga, no one will stop you. But just… think about it. Captain Brodie's ship is a way off this island, a way out." And then she was regarding him with something, some emotion he was certain he couldn't place.
"I don't care if you want to hate me forever, James. But please, just… think about it." And with that, she opened the door and slipped out and was gone without another word.
He did not know how much longer he stood there, looking at the door she'd closed behind her. He absentmindedly tugged his lower lip into his mouth, tasting the coppery tang of his blood and running his tongue along the swollen skin where she had pierced him with her teeth. He shook himself out of his reverie and began to pull on the rest of his clothes. When he was dressed, he heaved a great sigh and ran a shaking, unsteady hand along his unshaven jaw. Perhaps… perhaps she was right. Perhaps it was time to find a way off of this accursed island and get back to the sea. Where he belonged.
But not before he had a drink – his hands were beginning to tremble, and that always meant it had been too long. Shaking his head like a dog to clear away the perplexing emotions that besieged him, he waited until he was certain enough time had passed for her to have left the Mermaid's Tail, then opened the door and went downstairs to acquire a bottle of Crusty's best rum.