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.
11.
Slowly the details filled themselves in: he was waking up, apparently on a soft bed. His leg was still missing--this he knew because his good knee was drawn up so that the heel of his remaining foot touched the stump of his other thigh. His pillow, he surmised, had become jammed between the top of his head and the headboard because his cheek and the side of his mouth were pressed against a mattress while the top of his head was nestled against something soft.
His hair twisted against the pillow as he rolled toward the sound of curtains being pulled back. He opened his eyes.
And pushed up on an elbow, his other hand clutching his chest. He looked around himself, then back at her. Holding a vase in front of her, in two hands, she smiled at him from behind a wash of flowers.
"Elizabeth?" His voice cracked across the syllables.
"Dear? What's wrong?"
Norrington swallowed. His gaze darted across the room again. The guest room. "This dream I...." He looked at her. "It had to be a dream, hadn't it?"
"Since you were sleeping I'd say it must have been."
"I left here, didn't I? Last night?"
Sunlight streamed through the window. He blinked, his eyes unaccustomed to it. Then Elizabeth's silhouette blocked a large swath of the light as she set the vase on a table in front of the window. His eyes were relieved.
"About that...." Elizabeth said, adjusting the curtain.
"When did I get back?"
"Yes, well, about that, too."
"What about which?"
"About your leaving, I owe you an apology. I really have been alone too long--not just alone in the sense that I'm missing a husband, but truly alone. Save for Estrella, of course. Being alone plays tricks with your mind. You of all people...you must have experienced that while you were...well, on your own." She settled on the edge of the bed.
*Joao had unlocked the door to the brig. _Joao_ Joao had filled his thoughts--his soft way of speaking, his bashful smile. All these things imagined, of course, for what else did he have to do with his days and nights in the brig than imagine? Paulino grabbed him roughly, hoisting him to his foot, but Joao slipped easily under his other arm. Norrington, hanging between the two men, let his head fall toward Joao, let his temple brush temple Joao's thick, dark hair. He closed his eyes as they led him toward the ladder; he breathed him in. "That bag of shit not off my ship yet?" Captain Roque growled as Joao dragged and Paulino shoved Norrington above deck. When he was yanked upright once more, he saw Port Royal ahead of him. Joao once again slipped an arm behind his back, this time to lead him toward the gangway, and Norrington suddenly found himself not wanting to go. "Joao," he whispered, too softly for Joao to hear.*
"Elizabeth--"
"I don't know what I was thinking. There were better ways, weren't there, to let you know that I knew?"
He drew in a breath to respond, but she hurried on. "I should have kept it a secret. What good does it do, you knowing that I know?"
"No, you shouldn't have kept it a secret." He pulled himself up so that he was sitting with his back against the pillows. In the guest room. At Elizabeth's house. He fingered the linen sheet to make sure it was real.
"And as to how you got back here," she said, sliding a glance in his direction. "You were carried. You'd had a bit much to drink, I'd say." Her gaze moved back to the window. She smoothed her skirt. "Can't say I blame you."
She twisted to face him then, suddenly. "What about your dream? What was it? You looked as though you'd been kicked in the chest."
The dream came rushing back. Will, the doctor's office, the cemetery.
"My God, it was so real," he said, wishing for all the world that he could lie his head back on the pillows, close his eyes, and retreat to that other world. "I even had a dream inside the dream," he mused as he stared at the blankets across his lap. He looked up at Elizabeth who was leaning in, watching him, waiting.
"The dream inside the dream...I was leaving the Indian village."
"And the dream?"
He shook his head. Sunlight gained purchase on the rug; soon its beam would crawl up the side of the bed.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"Half past eleven."
"Tuesday?"
"That dream really does have you shaken up." She gave him a peck on the lips before rising. He touched his mouth with his fingertips. Dead women don't have warm lips. He looked up at her.
"You must be starving--unless you're hung over. Are you?"
He took in the sunlight, the flowers, the strands of Elizabeth's hair that had pulled loose from her hairdo.
"You know what I said in the dream?"
She picked up a shirt--his--that lay over a chair and shook it out. "Which one?"
"Pardon me?"
"The dream or the dream inside the dream? Which one?"
"The dream."
"What'd you say?"
"I said, 'Lately, I don't know whether I'm dreaming or not until I land flat on my face."
"What an odd thing to say."
"I had just fallen."
She had the shirt folded neatly over her forearm. She patted it, then said, "Dreams. They're strange things. I'll have Estrella fix you something to eat, all right? Do you want to get up or should I have her bring it here?"
~~~
"It's a lovely day, isn't it?" she asked, sweeping the parlor curtains open wide. Sunlight lit bits of dust in the air, turning them golden.
"Yes. I was thinking of taking a walk."
"A walk?"
He swung the crutch forward, then his body behind it, aiming toward the window. Breakfast had shored him up; he was more than ready now to have the sun on his face. "Would you care to come?"
"Where to?"
"Well, I thought.... The cemetery."
"Oh, I...." She looked toward the window, almost longingly. Then, turning back, she smiled widely. "Why not? It'll be good to get out, won't it? Are you sure you're up to it?"
"I'll be fine."
He closed his eyes and let the sun warm his eyelids through the window's glass as she hurried upstairs to ready herself.
Will's palm on his forehead, warm like the sun, came to mind, causing his eyelids to flutter open. He realized his dream was in truth a nightmare-- how long would bits of it keep coming back to tease him?
He turned his head at the bustle of skirts. Elizabeth had a small purse hanging by a chain from her arm, and she was tucking a few coins in it. "Are you ready?" she asked.
"I am."
"I thought we'd stop and buy flowers for father's grave on the way."
"Sounds like a good idea."
She lowered her hands and smiled sadly at him. "Father so would have loved to see you back. He thought of you as a son, I believe."
"Almost had me as one," he said as he took her arm.
"_Will_ have you as one before long." She patted his hand and then let him open the door for them.
~~~
"Where are you going?" she asked, lifting her nose from the bouquet of flowers she'd sent him into the shop to purchase.
"I, uh...." He gestured down a twisting road that led to--in his dream, at least--a quiet, narrow house squashed between two imposing ones. "I don't know. I thought I'd take the scenic route?"
What would it prove if he went down that road and found said narrow house? Only that he'd seen it before, perhaps years ago when he'd spent a fair amount of time in Port Royal. Surely he'd been up every street, seen every building. Dreams were nothing more than scavengers of the past.
"Honestly, I haven't been out to stretch my legs in a dog's age," Elizabeth said, a slight look of pain crossing her features as she lifted a foot to massage an ankle through her boot. "I'm not sure I'd make it back home if we added an extra mile to the trip."
"Right. Don't know what I was thinking anyway. I said the cemetery, that's where we'll go."
He had dreamed the rows of gravestones; had dreamed, in fact, the cemetery itself since in his recollection he'd never been there. Visiting the actual cemetery would prove his dream to be just that.
It wasn't as though he would have seen Will if he went to find the narrow house. His cheeks grew warm at the realization that that had been exactly what he'd been hoping to do.
"Are you sure you don't want me to carry that?" he asked, nodding at the flowers.
"Then how will you take my arm?"
They walked on, Elizabeth under the shade of her parasol and Norrington with his fingers lightly holding her elbow.
This was how it would be from now on.
"What do you think I should do?" he asked.
"About?"
"About something to do. Work."
"Why, whatever you want. Or nothing at all, though I doubt it would suit you. It's not as though we'll starve, though."
They turned onto a narrower road that led away from the buildings of town, and upward.
"I do have to say I'm glad you've quit the navy," she said.
"Oh?"
Her pace slowed and she turned her face to watch him. "Have you been thinking of going back to sea?"
"I...."
Her eyes looked only inquisitive, nothing more. He glanced up the hillside. From where they stood he couldn't yet see the gravestones at the top. Over his shoulder lay only the town, the majority of its buildings shoved so close together that sometimes it was difficult to tell where one ended and another began.
"I haven't given thought to what I'll do."
"Apart from marrying me."
"Yes, apart from that."
A few moments later, they crested the hill.
Eighty or more gravestones, canted and worn, greeted him with silence. Even the sound of the sea and its gulls seemed to disappear.
"James? Are you all right?"
His eyes scanned the rows. Where had hers been? Where?
"Father's over here." She picked her way through the grasses. When she reached a gravestone three rows in, she stopped and looked back. "James?"
"Coming." His eyes darted from row to row as he pivoted his way over to her. Where had she been?
"There's a lot of them, aren't there?" Her voice was quiet.
"Yes." His voice was similarly so.
"It was horrible. You can't imagine." Her gaze skimmed toward his leg. "Perhaps you can."
Weatherby's stone stood at their feet.
"I need to go," he whispered suddenly, a lump tightening his throat.
"Of course, yes."
He was already turning away, already making his way down the long row of stones. From here they didn't seem the same as the ones in his dream, not the way they had when he'd first laid eyes on them. Names swept by as he swung his body forward. Ashworth, Dickson, Pickering, Plumb, Torrens, Howard....
"James!"
He glanced back to see her holding her skirt off the ground as she picked her way toward him. The flowers they'd bought lay spilled in front of Weatherby's stone.
"James, wait up."
His heart raced. He was surrounded by the dead.
~~~
"Have another," she said, lifting the decanter from the tray on the side table.
"No, it's all right. I'll be fine," he said, hunched in a chair in her parlor.
"Have another blanket, then."
He tugged the one she'd already laid around his shoulders closer. "I'm fine. I'll be fine."
"You scared me." She bent to peer into his face. Her fingers pushed a stray lock of hair out of his eyes. "You're scaring me still. You're pale."
Her cool hand pressed his forehead.
"I shouldn't have taken you there," she said, backing away to perch on the edge of the sofa.
A tremor shook his shoulders. "I took you, remember."
"Well I shouldn't have let you." She rose, as though restless. "Can I get you anything?"
He glanced at his empty glass. The brandy warmed his throat and belly but also exacerbated the feeling that either his body or the room was reeling. "Tea?"
"And a cloth for your brow. You're perspiring despite all that shivering."
He lifted his eyes to her face where he saw that she, too, wore a light glow of sweat, likely from the fire she'd had Estrella build when they'd arrived at the house.
Shadows licked the firelit walls.
Gripped by a sudden thirst, he leaned forward, fingers outstretched toward the decanter.
The wind rattled the window panes. He looked up, worried that the force of it would break them free.
The decanter slipped through his fingers, tumbled to the floor.
"James!" Elizabeth called, hurrying into the room. Shoving the tea cup onto the table, she crouched by his knee. "What is it?" She turned her head to see what held his attention.
"James, what is it?" Glass crunched under her as she shifted to take his hand and squeeze it. "James?"
He licked his lips. Whatever had been in the window was gone.
"What?" she glanced toward the window again, then turned her furrowed brow back to him.
He swallowed. He reached for his crutch, just to hold it, just to have it near.
"James?"
"I'm sorry," he whispered. A tremor passed through him. The window showed only darkness. A moment ago...perhaps it had shown a piece of cloth, blowing by in the wind. "I'm seeing ghosts," he said, pulling his eyes from the window.
The front of her dress was stained with tea, and its stays seemed about to split open against her heaving chest.
He turned his gaze toward the fireplace. Windblown debris or not, in his inner eye he could still see him--Will--peering into the room, his hair whipping his cheek, his dark eyes incomprehensible.
Elizabeth's hand touched his brow again. "We need to get you to bed." Broken glass crunched as she rose.
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.
11.
Slowly the details filled themselves in: he was waking up, apparently on a soft bed. His leg was still missing--this he knew because his good knee was drawn up so that the heel of his remaining foot touched the stump of his other thigh. His pillow, he surmised, had become jammed between the top of his head and the headboard because his cheek and the side of his mouth were pressed against a mattress while the top of his head was nestled against something soft.
His hair twisted against the pillow as he rolled toward the sound of curtains being pulled back. He opened his eyes.
And pushed up on an elbow, his other hand clutching his chest. He looked around himself, then back at her. Holding a vase in front of her, in two hands, she smiled at him from behind a wash of flowers.
"Elizabeth?" His voice cracked across the syllables.
"Dear? What's wrong?"
Norrington swallowed. His gaze darted across the room again. The guest room. "This dream I...." He looked at her. "It had to be a dream, hadn't it?"
"Since you were sleeping I'd say it must have been."
"I left here, didn't I? Last night?"
Sunlight streamed through the window. He blinked, his eyes unaccustomed to it. Then Elizabeth's silhouette blocked a large swath of the light as she set the vase on a table in front of the window. His eyes were relieved.
"About that...." Elizabeth said, adjusting the curtain.
"When did I get back?"
"Yes, well, about that, too."
"What about which?"
"About your leaving, I owe you an apology. I really have been alone too long--not just alone in the sense that I'm missing a husband, but truly alone. Save for Estrella, of course. Being alone plays tricks with your mind. You of all people...you must have experienced that while you were...well, on your own." She settled on the edge of the bed.
*Joao had unlocked the door to the brig. _Joao_ Joao had filled his thoughts--his soft way of speaking, his bashful smile. All these things imagined, of course, for what else did he have to do with his days and nights in the brig than imagine? Paulino grabbed him roughly, hoisting him to his foot, but Joao slipped easily under his other arm. Norrington, hanging between the two men, let his head fall toward Joao, let his temple brush temple Joao's thick, dark hair. He closed his eyes as they led him toward the ladder; he breathed him in. "That bag of shit not off my ship yet?" Captain Roque growled as Joao dragged and Paulino shoved Norrington above deck. When he was yanked upright once more, he saw Port Royal ahead of him. Joao once again slipped an arm behind his back, this time to lead him toward the gangway, and Norrington suddenly found himself not wanting to go. "Joao," he whispered, too softly for Joao to hear.*
"Elizabeth--"
"I don't know what I was thinking. There were better ways, weren't there, to let you know that I knew?"
He drew in a breath to respond, but she hurried on. "I should have kept it a secret. What good does it do, you knowing that I know?"
"No, you shouldn't have kept it a secret." He pulled himself up so that he was sitting with his back against the pillows. In the guest room. At Elizabeth's house. He fingered the linen sheet to make sure it was real.
"And as to how you got back here," she said, sliding a glance in his direction. "You were carried. You'd had a bit much to drink, I'd say." Her gaze moved back to the window. She smoothed her skirt. "Can't say I blame you."
She twisted to face him then, suddenly. "What about your dream? What was it? You looked as though you'd been kicked in the chest."
The dream came rushing back. Will, the doctor's office, the cemetery.
"My God, it was so real," he said, wishing for all the world that he could lie his head back on the pillows, close his eyes, and retreat to that other world. "I even had a dream inside the dream," he mused as he stared at the blankets across his lap. He looked up at Elizabeth who was leaning in, watching him, waiting.
"The dream inside the dream...I was leaving the Indian village."
"And the dream?"
He shook his head. Sunlight gained purchase on the rug; soon its beam would crawl up the side of the bed.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"Half past eleven."
"Tuesday?"
"That dream really does have you shaken up." She gave him a peck on the lips before rising. He touched his mouth with his fingertips. Dead women don't have warm lips. He looked up at her.
"You must be starving--unless you're hung over. Are you?"
He took in the sunlight, the flowers, the strands of Elizabeth's hair that had pulled loose from her hairdo.
"You know what I said in the dream?"
She picked up a shirt--his--that lay over a chair and shook it out. "Which one?"
"Pardon me?"
"The dream or the dream inside the dream? Which one?"
"The dream."
"What'd you say?"
"I said, 'Lately, I don't know whether I'm dreaming or not until I land flat on my face."
"What an odd thing to say."
"I had just fallen."
She had the shirt folded neatly over her forearm. She patted it, then said, "Dreams. They're strange things. I'll have Estrella fix you something to eat, all right? Do you want to get up or should I have her bring it here?"
~~~
"It's a lovely day, isn't it?" she asked, sweeping the parlor curtains open wide. Sunlight lit bits of dust in the air, turning them golden.
"Yes. I was thinking of taking a walk."
"A walk?"
He swung the crutch forward, then his body behind it, aiming toward the window. Breakfast had shored him up; he was more than ready now to have the sun on his face. "Would you care to come?"
"Where to?"
"Well, I thought.... The cemetery."
"Oh, I...." She looked toward the window, almost longingly. Then, turning back, she smiled widely. "Why not? It'll be good to get out, won't it? Are you sure you're up to it?"
"I'll be fine."
He closed his eyes and let the sun warm his eyelids through the window's glass as she hurried upstairs to ready herself.
Will's palm on his forehead, warm like the sun, came to mind, causing his eyelids to flutter open. He realized his dream was in truth a nightmare-- how long would bits of it keep coming back to tease him?
He turned his head at the bustle of skirts. Elizabeth had a small purse hanging by a chain from her arm, and she was tucking a few coins in it. "Are you ready?" she asked.
"I am."
"I thought we'd stop and buy flowers for father's grave on the way."
"Sounds like a good idea."
She lowered her hands and smiled sadly at him. "Father so would have loved to see you back. He thought of you as a son, I believe."
"Almost had me as one," he said as he took her arm.
"_Will_ have you as one before long." She patted his hand and then let him open the door for them.
~~~
"Where are you going?" she asked, lifting her nose from the bouquet of flowers she'd sent him into the shop to purchase.
"I, uh...." He gestured down a twisting road that led to--in his dream, at least--a quiet, narrow house squashed between two imposing ones. "I don't know. I thought I'd take the scenic route?"
What would it prove if he went down that road and found said narrow house? Only that he'd seen it before, perhaps years ago when he'd spent a fair amount of time in Port Royal. Surely he'd been up every street, seen every building. Dreams were nothing more than scavengers of the past.
"Honestly, I haven't been out to stretch my legs in a dog's age," Elizabeth said, a slight look of pain crossing her features as she lifted a foot to massage an ankle through her boot. "I'm not sure I'd make it back home if we added an extra mile to the trip."
"Right. Don't know what I was thinking anyway. I said the cemetery, that's where we'll go."
He had dreamed the rows of gravestones; had dreamed, in fact, the cemetery itself since in his recollection he'd never been there. Visiting the actual cemetery would prove his dream to be just that.
It wasn't as though he would have seen Will if he went to find the narrow house. His cheeks grew warm at the realization that that had been exactly what he'd been hoping to do.
"Are you sure you don't want me to carry that?" he asked, nodding at the flowers.
"Then how will you take my arm?"
They walked on, Elizabeth under the shade of her parasol and Norrington with his fingers lightly holding her elbow.
This was how it would be from now on.
"What do you think I should do?" he asked.
"About?"
"About something to do. Work."
"Why, whatever you want. Or nothing at all, though I doubt it would suit you. It's not as though we'll starve, though."
They turned onto a narrower road that led away from the buildings of town, and upward.
"I do have to say I'm glad you've quit the navy," she said.
"Oh?"
Her pace slowed and she turned her face to watch him. "Have you been thinking of going back to sea?"
"I...."
Her eyes looked only inquisitive, nothing more. He glanced up the hillside. From where they stood he couldn't yet see the gravestones at the top. Over his shoulder lay only the town, the majority of its buildings shoved so close together that sometimes it was difficult to tell where one ended and another began.
"I haven't given thought to what I'll do."
"Apart from marrying me."
"Yes, apart from that."
A few moments later, they crested the hill.
Eighty or more gravestones, canted and worn, greeted him with silence. Even the sound of the sea and its gulls seemed to disappear.
"James? Are you all right?"
His eyes scanned the rows. Where had hers been? Where?
"Father's over here." She picked her way through the grasses. When she reached a gravestone three rows in, she stopped and looked back. "James?"
"Coming." His eyes darted from row to row as he pivoted his way over to her. Where had she been?
"There's a lot of them, aren't there?" Her voice was quiet.
"Yes." His voice was similarly so.
"It was horrible. You can't imagine." Her gaze skimmed toward his leg. "Perhaps you can."
Weatherby's stone stood at their feet.
"I need to go," he whispered suddenly, a lump tightening his throat.
"Of course, yes."
He was already turning away, already making his way down the long row of stones. From here they didn't seem the same as the ones in his dream, not the way they had when he'd first laid eyes on them. Names swept by as he swung his body forward. Ashworth, Dickson, Pickering, Plumb, Torrens, Howard....
"James!"
He glanced back to see her holding her skirt off the ground as she picked her way toward him. The flowers they'd bought lay spilled in front of Weatherby's stone.
"James, wait up."
His heart raced. He was surrounded by the dead.
~~~
"Have another," she said, lifting the decanter from the tray on the side table.
"No, it's all right. I'll be fine," he said, hunched in a chair in her parlor.
"Have another blanket, then."
He tugged the one she'd already laid around his shoulders closer. "I'm fine. I'll be fine."
"You scared me." She bent to peer into his face. Her fingers pushed a stray lock of hair out of his eyes. "You're scaring me still. You're pale."
Her cool hand pressed his forehead.
"I shouldn't have taken you there," she said, backing away to perch on the edge of the sofa.
A tremor shook his shoulders. "I took you, remember."
"Well I shouldn't have let you." She rose, as though restless. "Can I get you anything?"
He glanced at his empty glass. The brandy warmed his throat and belly but also exacerbated the feeling that either his body or the room was reeling. "Tea?"
"And a cloth for your brow. You're perspiring despite all that shivering."
He lifted his eyes to her face where he saw that she, too, wore a light glow of sweat, likely from the fire she'd had Estrella build when they'd arrived at the house.
Shadows licked the firelit walls.
Gripped by a sudden thirst, he leaned forward, fingers outstretched toward the decanter.
The wind rattled the window panes. He looked up, worried that the force of it would break them free.
The decanter slipped through his fingers, tumbled to the floor.
"James!" Elizabeth called, hurrying into the room. Shoving the tea cup onto the table, she crouched by his knee. "What is it?" She turned her head to see what held his attention.
"James, what is it?" Glass crunched under her as she shifted to take his hand and squeeze it. "James?"
He licked his lips. Whatever had been in the window was gone.
"What?" she glanced toward the window again, then turned her furrowed brow back to him.
He swallowed. He reached for his crutch, just to hold it, just to have it near.
"James?"
"I'm sorry," he whispered. A tremor passed through him. The window showed only darkness. A moment ago...perhaps it had shown a piece of cloth, blowing by in the wind. "I'm seeing ghosts," he said, pulling his eyes from the window.
The front of her dress was stained with tea, and its stays seemed about to split open against her heaving chest.
He turned his gaze toward the fireplace. Windblown debris or not, in his inner eye he could still see him--Will--peering into the room, his hair whipping his cheek, his dark eyes incomprehensible.
Elizabeth's hand touched his brow again. "We need to get you to bed." Broken glass crunched as she rose.
