Title: Between Wind and Tide
Author/Pseudonym: Ruby Isabella
Rating: R
Disclaimer: The following is fanfiction based on a property owned by Disney.
Summary: Norrington returns to Port Royal after long absence
Notes: Sequel to "A Windward Tide." Also, you might worry at times that this is not slash, but it is. Really. Cross my heart. Finally, it takes place some years after PotC.
10.
He found the chiseled stone at their feet difficult to argue with.
"How?" he asked, thinking that it must be a mistake, that he must be having one of his dreams. Or had Elizabeth been the dream?
"An accident."
"What happened?"
He watched Will pull his gaze from the stone to look out over Port Royal; the cemetery had, out of necessity, been built on the far side of the port from the sea and on the highest available elevation. The only things higher in sight were the heavy tops of scattered palm trees and Fort Charles.
The stones on the graves--most only two or so years old, courtesy of the outbreak--were windworn at the corners already. Pocks marked where rain had pelted them. Some, though not the one with Elizabeth's name on it, had sunk or shifted in the soft ground.
"She lost her father to cholera," Will said finally. "She lost a lot of people to it, in a very short period of time."
"Estrella."
"Right. Her friends. Shopkeepers, delivery men...in general just about everyone she'd dealt with for ten or more years. Seemed that way, at least."
"And then?"
"And then. And then to add to it, she was so afraid." Will turned his head back toward him. "Not afraid for herself, but for the baby. She had nightmares. She was--" He took a deep breath and looked away again. "I thought of getting something for her from Dr. March, but first I was afraid of bothering him with such a little thing in the middle of all he had to deal with. And then...well, he died." He shrugged as he continued to look out over Port Royal. A breeze stirred his hair where it had come loose from its tie.
"And the baby?" Norrington asked, his mind going back to the child's room until reason stepped in to tell him that if Will and these graves existed then the child's room he swore he'd slept in didn't.
Will's voice was so low that if rain had been falling it would have drowned it out. "It was never born."
Norrington swallowed through a tightening throat. "I'm sorry."
"Well." Will's hands brushed the sides of his trousers. "We could have tried again."
"What kept you?"
Will turned, his eyes like coffee about to spill over. "She slipped off a cliff in the rain."
Norrington took in a breath. He didn't know how to respond. Will crouched on the damp earth in front of her headstone. He plucked a weed, then laid his arm across his knee with the thin plant and its roots dangling from his fingers. His body, bent toward the grave, mimicked the weed.
"What was she doing on a cliff?"
Will crumpled the plant in his hand as he stood. "Yelling for me to not leave." He watched the weed drop to the ground, then apologized curtly. Before Norrington could say anything, he turned, hands shoved into his trouser pockets, waistcoat bottom flapping against his wrists, and headed back in the direction of town.
Norrington took a few steps to give chase, but the slick grass and muddy ground demanded more care from a one-legged man than two-legged one. Winded and with a throb in his armpit from twisting his crutch in an effort to keep his foot and the crutch from sliding out from under him, he stopped and watched Will stride down the hillside.
He glanced back at the graves--eighty of them or more. Their stones seemed to lean silently toward him.
~~~
Eventually, the way that Wire'una had pointed had led to the outskirts of a small settlement where, had he approached from another direction, his experience might have been different. As it was, he came upon the settlement from the north, and from the north the first dwelling in the settlement belonged to an old man and his grown son. Neither had a wife, as far as Norrington had been able to tell. The two of them shared a one-room shack that Norrington found himself making his way past when suddenly he was set upon.
The barrel of the old man's musket bruised his chest as he used it to shove Norrington against a tree.
The son snatched the crutch away and tossed it aside so that he could go on to snatch Norrington's water pouches and his bundle of belongings. All of these were tossed aside.
The men spoke Portuguese; Norrington did not. His gaze ran from one face to the other in an attempt to learn what they were discussing. He'd survived the Indians without at first understanding their language; to keep calm, he told himself that he could do the same with these men.
The son swept a hand in his direction while he spoke to his father. Norrington touched his chest where the musket barrel had pressed.
He dared not ask them if they spoke English or the language of the tribe he had come from, or even broken French. When he'd last been current on current affairs, the Portuguese and the British were not on each other's dance cards. He had no guess as to where they stood with the French. And the fact that he was dressed like an Indian from the Amazon basin hadn't so far seemed to impress them. The longer he could put off claiming a nationality, the better.
The son tore open the blanket of belongings.
A handful of medals from the British Royal Navy jangled to the ground.
Norrington's breath stopped.
The old man jammed his musket against Norrington's chest once more as the son looked up with narrowed eyes.
The son stood, then, and walked up to Norrington, face to face. When he spoke, spittle splattered against Norrington's lips.
"I don't understand," Norrington whispered against the son's barrage of words. Speaking earned him a backhand across the face. He blinked, one eye threatening to tear from the sting.
The old man grabbed his arm, yanking it, and shouted "Vindo!" His son picked up the chant as he crouched to gather Norrington's clothes, medals, and water pouches.
"Vindo!"
Using the arm that wasn't being yanked, he held onto the tree behind him. His crutch lay some feet away; the old man was attempting to drag him in the opposite direction.
"Wait," Norrington said. "Crutch." He nodded his chin toward the fork stick lying against a row of wide grasses.
The son, red-faced and narrow-eyed and clutching all of Norrington's belongings except the crutch under one arm, strode up and slapped him again, this time with his open palm, then grabbed his hair and said, "Vindo!"
Norrington, letting go of the tree, teetered, hopped twice to keep his balance, and then spilled onto his hands and knee in the dirt.
The old man nudged his son and said something that made them both laugh as they stared down at him.
"Deixe-o rastejar," said the old man with a wave of his arm as he turned away.
The son spit more words out, including "rastejar," and kicked him.
By the time the old man and his son turned him into the authorities at Recife, he had learned enough Portuguese to know when they were telling him to come and when they were telling him to crawl.
~~~
"James."
His name pulled him from the depths of his thoughts. It took a few seconds for the past to wash away enough for him to register that Will was beside him and that he had made it to the bottom of the hill.
"I apologize for taking off," Will said.
"I understand."
They walked together in silence.
He'd sat in a jail in Recife for four months, until finally a privateer by the name of Captain Roque, a man who spoke a fair amount of broken English, had come to prod him through the bars with a stick and ask him questions, the answers to which he didn't appear to care about listening to.
Norrington had watched him swagger back down the hall; the thin stick he'd used for poking scraped the stone floor as he went.
After Roque turned at the end of the hall, Norrington heard laughter. Talking, too low to make out. Then more laughter. Hearty, back-slapping laughter.
He let go of the bar he'd been gripping at the front of his jail cell and let his back rest against the cool wall.
Footsteps. Norrington sat up straight, his heart beating his breastbone. The privateer approached again, and he had with him a soldier swinging a ring of keys.
"Where were you going?" he asked Will suddenly, bringing the both of them to a halt.
"When? Oh." His gaze climbed the hillside behind them. "Work."
"Work?"
"On a merchant vessel...."
"What happened to blacksmith?"
"Elizabeth and I thought there was more potential in running merchant ships. In fact, Elizabeth loved the idea and took up the books and business end almost immediately. This was before she'd become pregnant, before the cholera. We'd lie in bed and talk about owning a whole fleet of ships one day. She convinced Weatherby to finance the first one, a schooner of dubious water-worthiness, and our dream was launched." He pushed his hand through the air.
"And then?"
"And then she was five months pregnant. And then she lost the baby. I let jobs go to other companies so that I could be with her--we only had the one ship at that point. I tried appointing another man captain but nearly lost the one ship in that decision. But say I gave up it, sold the ship. Then what? Port Royal's not big enough for two master blacksmiths, and it wasn't long after Brown passed out under a moving donkey cart that a new man moved in, taking up the work that needed to be done around here. He did some work for me even."
His pace had quickened as spoken. His hands had tightened into fists. Norrington found himself being left back.
"Besides," Will said, glancing beside himself, then over his shoulder. He stopped and turned. "Besides, I didn't want to give it up. I _like_ the sea."
"She didn't agree."
"No. We never fought so hard, ever. Finally I just had to do it, accept a contract, get on the ship, go."
Norrington caught up. Will turned and began walking again, at a slower pace.
"And she stood on the cliff calling after you," Norrington said.
"I didn't learn of her death until I returned."
~~~
Silence walked with them as they entered town. Norrington, having no idea where they were headed, merely followed, and mere following allowed his mind to engage itself in recreating the terrible last months of Will and Elizabeth's marriage. He felt a pain through and through him at the image of Elizabeth running, yelling, slipping, being silenced forever, all while Will's schooner sailed silently away.
"So, how'd you get back to Port Royal?" Will asked, interrupting his thoughts.
He looked up. Will had stopped them the bottom of the front steps of a narrow house.
"This is mine," Will said in response to Norrington's creased brow.
"Ah."
"How'd you get back?" Will asked again, leading the way up the steps.
*"Hey, Joao, come, you try some," Captain Roque had said, speaking to Joao, but speaking English for Norrington's benefit. His blunt fingers dug into Norrington's neck. The ship heaved, causing the brig's door to swing open with a low moan. Norrington tried to look backward, beneath Roque's arm, but he couldn't see the open door. He closed his eyes and listened to someone--Paulino, maybe--push it back closed. Unlocked, it would fall open again the next time the ship hit a swell. Eventually, they would leave and lock it behind them. "Joao, come, be a man," Roque called. Norrington lifted his eyes until he could see Joao standing ten feet beyond the bars, a cask in one hand. He lifted the cask as though to show Roque, and said, "I just came for this." "Whatever, little pig fart." Roque's fingers clamped Norrington's neck and Norrington squeezed his eyes closed as he felt Roque's manhood forcing into him once more.*
"On a privateer," Norrington replied at the top of the steps. Will nodded.
~~~
"So, you did go after me, like she said?" Norrington asked as rum made his belly feel as though it was melting into the chair Will had pulled in front of the fire for him.
Beside him, Will drained his glass, then shrugged. "I'd lost Elizabeth. I had nothing keeping me here, and had I managed to arrange some business that would take me out the way your ships wrecked."
"So you did go. Jesus. Elizabeth said you had." His hands trembled. He laid the one not holding the glass of rum flat on his thigh, but still it shook. "But if Elizabeth.... If she's dead.... Jesus." He scrubbed his cheek with his shaky hand.
"I wanted to bring back your body," Will said quietly. "I thought that's all I'd find, if I found anything at all."
Norrington's throat tightened. _My body._
"We did find bodies."
Norrington's hand shook as he lifted the glass to his lips.
"Seventeen of them."
"Seventeen."
"All buried. All marked, though not a one with a name, but we dug them up and identified most of them. The two we couldn't put a name to, I at least could tell that neither was you."
"I couldn't figure out a way to mark their names permanently," Norrington said, his gaze intent on the fire, his voice sounding like someone else's, someone more calm. "Marks in the sand blew away. Pebbles scattered. I could tell you the names of those two, though, if you tell me which ones you did identify." He looked down into the empty bottom of his glass. "I know all their names."
"James?"
"I buried them."
"Alone?"
He nodded. His throat again felt like it was closing up, but then a dry sob broke through, saving him from suffocation. He covered his eyes with his hand. "They kept washing up. There were.... There were five already when I washed up myself, and I had hardly got the third in the ground when another showed up. And another and another.... Until they stopped. I waited. I walked the stretch of coastline for miles, every day, looking for more.... But that was it. The end. Seventeen. Eighteen, if you count me."
"Let's not count you in with dead, all right?" Will squeezed his shoulder.
Norrington resisted letting his body give in and lean toward Will's; if he were to allow it, he wouldn't be able to hold back the tears.
Author/Pseudonym: Ruby Isabella
Rating: R
Disclaimer: The following is fanfiction based on a property owned by Disney.
Summary: Norrington returns to Port Royal after long absence
Notes: Sequel to "A Windward Tide." Also, you might worry at times that this is not slash, but it is. Really. Cross my heart. Finally, it takes place some years after PotC.
10.
He found the chiseled stone at their feet difficult to argue with.
"How?" he asked, thinking that it must be a mistake, that he must be having one of his dreams. Or had Elizabeth been the dream?
"An accident."
"What happened?"
He watched Will pull his gaze from the stone to look out over Port Royal; the cemetery had, out of necessity, been built on the far side of the port from the sea and on the highest available elevation. The only things higher in sight were the heavy tops of scattered palm trees and Fort Charles.
The stones on the graves--most only two or so years old, courtesy of the outbreak--were windworn at the corners already. Pocks marked where rain had pelted them. Some, though not the one with Elizabeth's name on it, had sunk or shifted in the soft ground.
"She lost her father to cholera," Will said finally. "She lost a lot of people to it, in a very short period of time."
"Estrella."
"Right. Her friends. Shopkeepers, delivery men...in general just about everyone she'd dealt with for ten or more years. Seemed that way, at least."
"And then?"
"And then. And then to add to it, she was so afraid." Will turned his head back toward him. "Not afraid for herself, but for the baby. She had nightmares. She was--" He took a deep breath and looked away again. "I thought of getting something for her from Dr. March, but first I was afraid of bothering him with such a little thing in the middle of all he had to deal with. And then...well, he died." He shrugged as he continued to look out over Port Royal. A breeze stirred his hair where it had come loose from its tie.
"And the baby?" Norrington asked, his mind going back to the child's room until reason stepped in to tell him that if Will and these graves existed then the child's room he swore he'd slept in didn't.
Will's voice was so low that if rain had been falling it would have drowned it out. "It was never born."
Norrington swallowed through a tightening throat. "I'm sorry."
"Well." Will's hands brushed the sides of his trousers. "We could have tried again."
"What kept you?"
Will turned, his eyes like coffee about to spill over. "She slipped off a cliff in the rain."
Norrington took in a breath. He didn't know how to respond. Will crouched on the damp earth in front of her headstone. He plucked a weed, then laid his arm across his knee with the thin plant and its roots dangling from his fingers. His body, bent toward the grave, mimicked the weed.
"What was she doing on a cliff?"
Will crumpled the plant in his hand as he stood. "Yelling for me to not leave." He watched the weed drop to the ground, then apologized curtly. Before Norrington could say anything, he turned, hands shoved into his trouser pockets, waistcoat bottom flapping against his wrists, and headed back in the direction of town.
Norrington took a few steps to give chase, but the slick grass and muddy ground demanded more care from a one-legged man than two-legged one. Winded and with a throb in his armpit from twisting his crutch in an effort to keep his foot and the crutch from sliding out from under him, he stopped and watched Will stride down the hillside.
He glanced back at the graves--eighty of them or more. Their stones seemed to lean silently toward him.
~~~
Eventually, the way that Wire'una had pointed had led to the outskirts of a small settlement where, had he approached from another direction, his experience might have been different. As it was, he came upon the settlement from the north, and from the north the first dwelling in the settlement belonged to an old man and his grown son. Neither had a wife, as far as Norrington had been able to tell. The two of them shared a one-room shack that Norrington found himself making his way past when suddenly he was set upon.
The barrel of the old man's musket bruised his chest as he used it to shove Norrington against a tree.
The son snatched the crutch away and tossed it aside so that he could go on to snatch Norrington's water pouches and his bundle of belongings. All of these were tossed aside.
The men spoke Portuguese; Norrington did not. His gaze ran from one face to the other in an attempt to learn what they were discussing. He'd survived the Indians without at first understanding their language; to keep calm, he told himself that he could do the same with these men.
The son swept a hand in his direction while he spoke to his father. Norrington touched his chest where the musket barrel had pressed.
He dared not ask them if they spoke English or the language of the tribe he had come from, or even broken French. When he'd last been current on current affairs, the Portuguese and the British were not on each other's dance cards. He had no guess as to where they stood with the French. And the fact that he was dressed like an Indian from the Amazon basin hadn't so far seemed to impress them. The longer he could put off claiming a nationality, the better.
The son tore open the blanket of belongings.
A handful of medals from the British Royal Navy jangled to the ground.
Norrington's breath stopped.
The old man jammed his musket against Norrington's chest once more as the son looked up with narrowed eyes.
The son stood, then, and walked up to Norrington, face to face. When he spoke, spittle splattered against Norrington's lips.
"I don't understand," Norrington whispered against the son's barrage of words. Speaking earned him a backhand across the face. He blinked, one eye threatening to tear from the sting.
The old man grabbed his arm, yanking it, and shouted "Vindo!" His son picked up the chant as he crouched to gather Norrington's clothes, medals, and water pouches.
"Vindo!"
Using the arm that wasn't being yanked, he held onto the tree behind him. His crutch lay some feet away; the old man was attempting to drag him in the opposite direction.
"Wait," Norrington said. "Crutch." He nodded his chin toward the fork stick lying against a row of wide grasses.
The son, red-faced and narrow-eyed and clutching all of Norrington's belongings except the crutch under one arm, strode up and slapped him again, this time with his open palm, then grabbed his hair and said, "Vindo!"
Norrington, letting go of the tree, teetered, hopped twice to keep his balance, and then spilled onto his hands and knee in the dirt.
The old man nudged his son and said something that made them both laugh as they stared down at him.
"Deixe-o rastejar," said the old man with a wave of his arm as he turned away.
The son spit more words out, including "rastejar," and kicked him.
By the time the old man and his son turned him into the authorities at Recife, he had learned enough Portuguese to know when they were telling him to come and when they were telling him to crawl.
~~~
"James."
His name pulled him from the depths of his thoughts. It took a few seconds for the past to wash away enough for him to register that Will was beside him and that he had made it to the bottom of the hill.
"I apologize for taking off," Will said.
"I understand."
They walked together in silence.
He'd sat in a jail in Recife for four months, until finally a privateer by the name of Captain Roque, a man who spoke a fair amount of broken English, had come to prod him through the bars with a stick and ask him questions, the answers to which he didn't appear to care about listening to.
Norrington had watched him swagger back down the hall; the thin stick he'd used for poking scraped the stone floor as he went.
After Roque turned at the end of the hall, Norrington heard laughter. Talking, too low to make out. Then more laughter. Hearty, back-slapping laughter.
He let go of the bar he'd been gripping at the front of his jail cell and let his back rest against the cool wall.
Footsteps. Norrington sat up straight, his heart beating his breastbone. The privateer approached again, and he had with him a soldier swinging a ring of keys.
"Where were you going?" he asked Will suddenly, bringing the both of them to a halt.
"When? Oh." His gaze climbed the hillside behind them. "Work."
"Work?"
"On a merchant vessel...."
"What happened to blacksmith?"
"Elizabeth and I thought there was more potential in running merchant ships. In fact, Elizabeth loved the idea and took up the books and business end almost immediately. This was before she'd become pregnant, before the cholera. We'd lie in bed and talk about owning a whole fleet of ships one day. She convinced Weatherby to finance the first one, a schooner of dubious water-worthiness, and our dream was launched." He pushed his hand through the air.
"And then?"
"And then she was five months pregnant. And then she lost the baby. I let jobs go to other companies so that I could be with her--we only had the one ship at that point. I tried appointing another man captain but nearly lost the one ship in that decision. But say I gave up it, sold the ship. Then what? Port Royal's not big enough for two master blacksmiths, and it wasn't long after Brown passed out under a moving donkey cart that a new man moved in, taking up the work that needed to be done around here. He did some work for me even."
His pace had quickened as spoken. His hands had tightened into fists. Norrington found himself being left back.
"Besides," Will said, glancing beside himself, then over his shoulder. He stopped and turned. "Besides, I didn't want to give it up. I _like_ the sea."
"She didn't agree."
"No. We never fought so hard, ever. Finally I just had to do it, accept a contract, get on the ship, go."
Norrington caught up. Will turned and began walking again, at a slower pace.
"And she stood on the cliff calling after you," Norrington said.
"I didn't learn of her death until I returned."
~~~
Silence walked with them as they entered town. Norrington, having no idea where they were headed, merely followed, and mere following allowed his mind to engage itself in recreating the terrible last months of Will and Elizabeth's marriage. He felt a pain through and through him at the image of Elizabeth running, yelling, slipping, being silenced forever, all while Will's schooner sailed silently away.
"So, how'd you get back to Port Royal?" Will asked, interrupting his thoughts.
He looked up. Will had stopped them the bottom of the front steps of a narrow house.
"This is mine," Will said in response to Norrington's creased brow.
"Ah."
"How'd you get back?" Will asked again, leading the way up the steps.
*"Hey, Joao, come, you try some," Captain Roque had said, speaking to Joao, but speaking English for Norrington's benefit. His blunt fingers dug into Norrington's neck. The ship heaved, causing the brig's door to swing open with a low moan. Norrington tried to look backward, beneath Roque's arm, but he couldn't see the open door. He closed his eyes and listened to someone--Paulino, maybe--push it back closed. Unlocked, it would fall open again the next time the ship hit a swell. Eventually, they would leave and lock it behind them. "Joao, come, be a man," Roque called. Norrington lifted his eyes until he could see Joao standing ten feet beyond the bars, a cask in one hand. He lifted the cask as though to show Roque, and said, "I just came for this." "Whatever, little pig fart." Roque's fingers clamped Norrington's neck and Norrington squeezed his eyes closed as he felt Roque's manhood forcing into him once more.*
"On a privateer," Norrington replied at the top of the steps. Will nodded.
~~~
"So, you did go after me, like she said?" Norrington asked as rum made his belly feel as though it was melting into the chair Will had pulled in front of the fire for him.
Beside him, Will drained his glass, then shrugged. "I'd lost Elizabeth. I had nothing keeping me here, and had I managed to arrange some business that would take me out the way your ships wrecked."
"So you did go. Jesus. Elizabeth said you had." His hands trembled. He laid the one not holding the glass of rum flat on his thigh, but still it shook. "But if Elizabeth.... If she's dead.... Jesus." He scrubbed his cheek with his shaky hand.
"I wanted to bring back your body," Will said quietly. "I thought that's all I'd find, if I found anything at all."
Norrington's throat tightened. _My body._
"We did find bodies."
Norrington's hand shook as he lifted the glass to his lips.
"Seventeen of them."
"Seventeen."
"All buried. All marked, though not a one with a name, but we dug them up and identified most of them. The two we couldn't put a name to, I at least could tell that neither was you."
"I couldn't figure out a way to mark their names permanently," Norrington said, his gaze intent on the fire, his voice sounding like someone else's, someone more calm. "Marks in the sand blew away. Pebbles scattered. I could tell you the names of those two, though, if you tell me which ones you did identify." He looked down into the empty bottom of his glass. "I know all their names."
"James?"
"I buried them."
"Alone?"
He nodded. His throat again felt like it was closing up, but then a dry sob broke through, saving him from suffocation. He covered his eyes with his hand. "They kept washing up. There were.... There were five already when I washed up myself, and I had hardly got the third in the ground when another showed up. And another and another.... Until they stopped. I waited. I walked the stretch of coastline for miles, every day, looking for more.... But that was it. The end. Seventeen. Eighteen, if you count me."
"Let's not count you in with dead, all right?" Will squeezed his shoulder.
Norrington resisted letting his body give in and lean toward Will's; if he were to allow it, he wouldn't be able to hold back the tears.
