Author's Note: Feedback is appreciated!

Nathaniel and Charlotte irritably sat in the sweltering study, working their way through the copious documents that James had left them. He rubbed his eyes wearily, in frustration and wished he could take off his ridiculous wig. When he had been found, they had to cut his wig out which had fused with real hair from all the blood. As a result that idiot "doctor" on the ship ride back to Port Royale had determined to shave Nathaniel's head rather than do something useful, such as stem the blood loss.

Now he was bald, with a particularly uncomfortable wig and a headache. He had garnered precious little time that day to himself, but necessity demanded that he pay a visit to Mrs. Norrington and help straighten affairs.

"-don't you think?" He startled in mild horror as he realized that Charlotte had been talking, apparently for quite a while. She gave him one of her classic frosty glances, but it softened before the full effect was delivered.

"Nathaniel?" Oh dear Lord, not this again.

He just raised an eyebrow and went back to his stack.

"Why are you doing this to yourself?"

Slowly, he leveled his gaze with that of hers and tilted his head in question.

Charlotte was unmoved and she looked at him with a mixture of pity and remorse. He unconsciously bristled at that act; he required nor deserved neither of the two.

"I talked to some of the men, at the Fort the other day when I was looking for you." she started slowly, playing with the corner of the letter before her. "Nathaniel, I'm worried for you. You hardly slept any in the last few days, and quite frankly it does nothing to improve your looks. The men say that all you do is work from sun up to sun down. And furthermore, I've seen what they try to pass off as food there and I think today's Gazette had more substance than that."

At some point in the conversation Nathaniel leaned heavily on the desk, rubbing his temple vainly in an attempt to stop her. Or at least to stop hearing her incessant nagging.

"Charlotte, please. I'll be fine, it's just that there's an awful lot of work to be done and not enough men. We leave tomorrow to look for those pirates, although in retrospect it seems a somewhat flawed plan as we have no idea who exactly we are looking for. Furthermore we have complications here, people don't feel safe. You saw that burning, the mob. They're afraid."

"And you aren't?" she asked mildly.

He smiled at the question and ducked his head. "Afraid isn't the word I would use for it. I know what I have to do and there's something oddly comforting in that fact. Something definite, fixed in an ever changing world."

Nathaniel noticed he had started talking faster as the sentence wore on- a curious phenomenon that only seemed to happen around Charlotte. His ears starting burning as well, and he was sure that they were as red as an apple.

Charlotte leaned back in her chair and breezily swept a hand through some errant strands of hair. "You puzzle me, Lieutenant. Or shall I call you Captain?"

He tactfully ignored the last statement, and felt a sense of pride at even a minor control of the tongue. "Are you still trying to determine my character?"

"Vainly it would seem." She said, sighing dramatically. "There are too many layers for me to unravel."

He snorted and chuckled. "And what of yourself, Mrs. Norrington? You have proven yourself a veritable puzzle."

Her levity of just moments before faded, only to be replaced by an underlying sorrow that threatened to break through the surface of her clear blue eyes. "I was a horrible wife, wasn't I?"

Nathaniel shifted uncomfortably in his seat, a duel between his tongue and his mind. She took the discomfort, the elongated pause as an affirmation and lowered her head.

"I suppose that I've always been in search of a fight, of something to provoke me to defend some notion of honor for myself and my family. I've always fought up until this point but I never knew why. I never really had a reason to until now, until James. He was always fighting too, but he always had a reason, a belief of his that compelled his actions. I had none of that."

She looked away for a moment, to a great map pinned to the wall and something in that seemed to comfort her, give her some sort of hope. It was as if she were looking at something beyond the map, and she asked in a near whisper, "Who is James Norrington? Is he a real man, one of flesh and bones, like us, or is he just a figment of our imagination? A reflection of what we would like to see in ourselves?"

"Does it matter?" There. He had said it so easily, and yet it had such a decided effect.

Her blue eyes sharpened, and reflected something like hurt. "So you believe he's dead too then? But what about the eyes, Nathaniel. You swore that they were brown."

"I would like to believe."

She shook her head. "But you don't. Of all people, I thought that you would be the one to believe me, to encourage me. You're always stuck in the past, reminiscing about people, wars, events that no longer exist, yet you would willfully ignore what is in front of you."

Hard won, but so easily lost was the way of his temper and his ears began turning red again, but not from any discomfort such as previously. "And you Madam would rather believe in some fantasy, some sort of way that could absolve you of your own sins, of your own failures that you cannot move on."

"Really, Lieutenant?" she asked, with a triumphant tilt of her head, " I find it rather interesting that it is you who addresses me with the subject of moving on when you are so firmly lodged in the last decade that one would think that we were still fighting the French at Quebec."
"You cannot change the present, Mrs. Norrington, for it is a product of our past. An action, a choice we made has a decided effect that sets into motion a chain of events. For example, when I pull the trigger on a pistol it sets into motion a series of events, where the firing pin hits the flash pan. Even if I were to regret pulling the trigger, it could not stop that action. It is fixed, determined."

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