Summary: Anyone who's been paying attention to the cast listings of the PotC sequels would realise that Bootstrap Bill is very much alive… (and sprouting barnacles, apparently.) I've decided to take this one step further…
Yep, he's alive, and he's brought an ancient cursed treasure to the attentions of a certain pirate captain we all know and love, (he also brought a drag queen with questionable sexual preferences, but let's not get into that now, shall we?) with only an encrypted scroll as clue to its whereabouts…

Disclaimer: Hey, if I owned Pirates of the Caribbean, I'll be lying on a beach filming my story instead of sitting here typing it up for your own leisurely perusing…

The Scroll Of Kesmehet

Prologue: Poor, Bullied Bootstrap

A very funny thing had happened to William Turner, once upon a time: he'd fallen in love. Completely, utterly, hopelessly, desperately so. Which, coincidentally, led to another thing he did that he'd always deemed unusual: letting a woman talk him into walking down the aisle, even though he'd been completely against the whole idea of such a cruel concept such as the likes of monogamy to begin with, and, without a doubt, still was. But, alas Bill Turner, poor bastard that he was, remained completely infatuated with the woman, and no amount of alcohol, opium, or hell, even very mild doses of laudanum could take that away from him, and he'd finally consented to throwing his liberty and all of its entitlements away to make her happy, because that was what love did to people. (And besides, Juliet had as good as said—what was the exact quote? Ah, yes—that until the day she'd been made an honest woman by the man that she'd loved, she was keeping her legs firmly crossed, thank you very much for the offer, but she wasn't a whore.)

Two years later, he'd somehow winded up with a bouncing baby boy on his knee (whom he'd named after himself simply because of lack of originality on both his and his spouse's account) after nine months of slavery and abuse (verbal and otherwise) from the woman that he'd thought he'd loved.

Now that's what you call irony.

Faced with the sudden responsibility of a family, his darling Juliet had all but thrown him out of their small little London home with the ominous threat of no access granted until he'd returned with a higher-paying form of employment than gambling and fraud whilst she pursued the unreliable career of whoredom. (And that, my friends, is just plain bad luck and timing.)

It looked like poor, abused, terrorised Bill was going to have pursue the career of a sailor, and this he did, slaving away on a merchant ship that was constantly travelling to Africa and the Americas, with nary a glimpse of his fair wife and bonny son. He continued this tiresome profession for nine years or so, until one fine lucky day, as he wondered upon one of London's docks, he'd come across a young gentleman, inspecting a fine, light vessel tinted a deep ebony, who'd called himself Jack Sparrow, and had managed to somehow commission his own ship at the startling age of twenty-three. He was a little naïve, and he was a tad more than faintly idealistic, but Bill did not care; he'd spoken of going on the account, or piracy. Bill had travelled to Africa quite a few times in his occupation, and he had begun to form bonds with a corsair ship by the strangely English name of the Silver Chimera, but this here was an opportunity to travel to the exotic Indies, and William Turner was more than ready for another angle at which he could employ his finely-crafted seamanship. Sparrow had also spoken of a cursed treasure of an Isla de Muerta, Aztec gold crafted by the very hands of the gods themselves, apparently, although this could very possibly have been a faint embellishment, and William, unable to believe his sudden good luck, was more than happy to follow this daft kid's plans.

Of course, it didn't last; within two months of arriving in the West Indies, Jack Sparrow had been left marooned upon an island to die, whereas Bill had somehow ended up with a cannon—yes, a cannon—laced to his boots and thrown overboard to drown.

Now that's what he called 'a bad day'.

Of course, those bastards of Barbossa's had forgotten to disarm him completely—he'd still possessed a dagger in his boot, and his ropes were very easy to twist out of, so all in all, it could, he supposed, have been worse. He was able to escape from his bonds in fifteen seconds, after carefully removing his weapon from his footwear, and after that it was simply a matter of cutting through the straps of his shoes to let the cannon sink to the bottom whilst he swam for the surface.

Being a cursed immortal really wasn't that bad. A privilege was most certainly the ability to stay underwater without a limit, whilst another was his lack of fatigue whilst he journeyed to the port of Kingston, Jamaica.

The conclusion of this short little tale is simply this: poor Bootstrap Bill was without his prized boots. However, he still possessed his seamanship…

…And his piratical friends of Africa…

So naturally, he bartered passage to the Barbary Coast, and after several weeks of endless searching, came across the Silver Chimera once again. Using his influence over the European captain, Bill was given permission to join the crew, and it was to this fate that our hero resigned himself, content to remain cursed till the end of eternity if Jack Sparrow's life was the price that had been paid…

If only he knew that, eleven years later, he would embark on a little quest that would coincidentally lead him to an encounter with his young companion once again…

AN: Thoughts and comments will all be welcomed… Tips/criticisms especially so…