I think I'm just going to stop saying, "yeah, this part won't take me that long", because it's a curse.
Let me just say I'm VERY sorry this took so long. Real life has been a bit more tied up and chaotic the last few months than it normally is, and I ended up spending less time on this than I was previously. (However my best friend is now gloriously, happily married, I managed to not trip on my bridesmaid's dress on either the way down or back up the aisle, the bachelorette weekend in Pittsburgh was a blast, and my little sister has now had both her high school graduation and her graduation party.)
So. Thank you again to everyone who's reviewed, I still don't own the characters, and here we go again.
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His watch ended, Bill headed below decks and made immediately for his hammock, hoping to find it occupied, and the occupant sleeping. In the week since the salvage of the slaughtered Charybdis, the one survivor she'd yielded up had flirted only occasionally, and very briefly, with sleep. His hours had gotten away from him, was Jack's explanation when Bill had voiced his concern. Night and day got a bit tangled together while he'd been in hiding. Wasn't real sure of when he'd been awake and when he'd been asleep during that time, and now slumber was eluding him completely.
Bill thought it was more likely the other way around, that it was Jack fighting to outpace the fatigue dogging his steps, but he hadn't pressed that point. The lad had the tenacity of the bloody Nile, and Bill had a still-healing bite on his arm as a reminder of that.
So he hadn't pushed, and he hadn't preached, and when he'd found Jack sprawled in his hammock this evening, an open book on the floor where it had slipped from fingers that only exhaustion had managed to still, Bill had simply draped his coat over the younger man, brushed a tickling lock of hair out of Jack's face, and dimmed the lantern as he left to take up his post.
Returning now, Bill discovered he'd be bunking on the floor for the remainder of the night, and quite relieved he was about it, too. It meant he could scrap his fallback plan, which had involved laudanum, and a guilty conscience, no matter how badly the kid needed to rest.
Jack had curled more tightly in on himself as he slept, and Bill's coat had been partially pinned beneath his body as he shifted. As Bill removed his baldric, he saw that the movement had gotten Jack's arm tangled in the folds of heavy fabric, twisted stiffly into what was going to become a very uncomfortable position before long.
As unobtrusively as he could manage, Bill moved to ease Jack over onto his back long enough to loosen the wrap of the coat. The first hint of pressure on his shoulder drew a sharp breath from the sleeper, and distress flickered in the slack face like a candle flame set fluttering by a draft.
"There now, lad," Bill murmured, almost inaudibly, as he worked the coat free, and reached to take hold of Jack's arm and stretch it out before it ended up as asleep as its owner. "Nothin' worse than wakin' up to pins and needles."
He felt the tendons in Jack's wrist tense and coil a bare instant before slumber split open at the seams, and the younger man came up kicking and clawing, gasping in too much air too quickly, and making horrible, strangled, panicked noises that sounded like they were trying to be screams, if they could only escape the cage of his lungs. "Jesus, Jack, don't! It's all right, lad, it's all right!" Bill's grip tightened reflexively to keep the thrashing body from spilling itself out of the hammock to the hard planking below, and Jack fought the benign restraint madly, eyes wide but unawake. Gritting his teeth, Bill seized Jack from behind, pinning the younger man's arms across his chest, narrowly avoiding taking the back of Jack's skull to the nose as he ducked in close. "Jack, stop fighting me," he commanded, giving a single constricting squeeze, just shy of painful. "Wake up now."
One ragged, pealing cry was wrung out, and then the struggling ceased. Bill felt a different kind of tension stiffen Jack's body, and it bespoke of awareness, even if the lad's heart was still drumming wildly enough that Bill could feel it in his own chest. Bill relaxed his grip without releasing it, and brought one hand up to the dark head against his shoulder, smoothing the tangled hair. "Settle down, lad, it's just me."
Jack's hands clutched at the arm encircling him, muscles still rigid with ebbing terror, and Bill began to rock, swaying in time with the ship. "Everything's all right now, Jack. Just a bad dream of a bad time, and it's over now. It's all over."
Jack shuddered, and then sagged, empty as canvas in a calm as the nightmare seeped out of mind and body. Bill felt it go, but kept on with the rocking, anyway. He felt Jack's breath, warm through his sleeve, when the boy pressed his face into Bill's arm.
"All I could smell was their blood." It wasn't shaky, or sobbed. Jack's voice was steady. But it was muffled against Bill's sleeve, against calico saturated with the scents of pipe smoke and sea air. "They were screamin' for ever and ever, Bill. And it was so quiet when they stopped…I thought m' ears would burst it was so quiet. I don't know how she didn't hear my heart in that quiet, Bill. I held my breath. Held it 'til I made meself tipsy and then I'd do it again. Over and over again. But I couldn't hush me bloody heart up. I don't understand how she didn't hear it."
Bill had been on the Charybdis for maybe half an hour, in that rotted-copper stench so thick it was swallowed more than it was breathed. He imagined, very briefly, spending five days smothering in it, and marveled at the fact Jack was sane enough to form complete sentences. "It's all over, lad," Bill hushed. "Lay it down and leave it."
"Bill?"
"Aye?"
"Awful sorry I bit you, mate."
"Aye, well. There were circumstances, weren't there?"
"Still."
"You're forgiven, Jack. Don't you fret any more over it." He reached for his coat, and tugged it once more around Jack's shoulders. "Don't you fret over any of it. Everything's all right now."
"'S all right, Bill."
Jack Sparrow sat, storm-drenched and dripping, on the stone floor, rocking to and fro, his hands stroking over Bill Turner's hair as the older man sobbed convulsively against the pirate captain's stomach, red-splashed arms wrapped around Jack's waist and ribs in a crushing embrace. "Shhh. 'S all right now." His hands quivered on Bill's back, and Jack wasn't sure if the tremor had been Bill's or his own.
"How?"
Jack looked up from the Turner collapsed across his legs to the one kneeling out of arm's reach. Will was hugging himself every bit as fiercely as his father was clutching at Jack --and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Jack was going to end up more bruised from these reunions than he had from the mutiny, the East India Company, and new year's eve in Singapore combined – and staring at Jack almost accusingly.
Jack hated that look. It was the one that made him wish he had a list handy, headed Bloody Catastrophic and Unfortunate Shit that is in No Way my Fault, just in case Will tried to peg him with anything like the Black Death or the caste system or the invention of the pan flute. He especially hated that look when he had no idea why he was getting it.
"How are we going to make any of this all right?" There was an edge to Will's voice that Jack strongly suspected the lad wasn't putting there deliberately, but was nonetheless abrading on nerves already frayed to their snapping point.
Jack blinked lingering rainwater out of his eyes, tracing figure eights over Bill's back with the fingers of one hand. "Not makin' it worse would be a good start, savvy?"
He really hadn't meant it unkindly, but Will's face fell, and Jack discovered it was, in fact, possible for him to feel even more the bastard. Felt like there was an entire octave of wretchedness he could sink to underneath the one he'd been singing at all day long. Wearily Jack let his head drop, his tangled, wet hair hiding his face as he curled at the waist, bending like a battered branch sagging to brush the ground. He rested his head against Bill's shoulder, catching as he did the scent of tobacco smoke clinging to the older man's hair and clothes, but clinging lightly, as if most of the traces of the indulgence had been stolen away by the wind. Here on the other side of a decade, this much of Bill Turner was unchanged, and the familiarity of it lanced so deep and sharp into Jack that if what it pierced could've bled real blood, he would've keeled over deader than driftwood from the loss. He inhaled deeply, remembering…and, for a few minutes, doing a bit of forgetting, as well.
…………………………………
Will watched from a distance that felt a great deal longer than the few feet it was, jaw set to stop his chin from quivering, as his father shed his misery onto Jack, the slight pirate's perpetual sway never faltering under Bill's dead weight. Even sprawled and diminished, Bill was a big man. Just as Will remembered him. Long and lean, but broad-shouldered; a swordsman's muscle lending bulk to a sailor's frame. He used to carry Will one-armed, flung over his shoulder, while Will had shrieked and giggled as he dangled from what had felt so high above the ground.
Stunned, aching, and breathless, Will found himself thinking he'd just plummeted from that height; the hands that had always held him fast bloodied and fisted in Jack's red coat. He should've moved, should've helped, should've at least spoken and he knew it, but couldn't gather his legs beneath him. He was trying very hard not to look at Twigg's body, stiffening on the other side of the cell door, the dark pool underneath still spreading, but slower now, as everything inside thickened and cooled.
The man who'd put that body there was the same man who'd sat beneath the ancient oak tree behind their house, squinting up into the leaf-dappled sunlight and grinning encouragingly as Will climbed. The same who'd scolded Will when he got himself painfully scratched trying to play with Nellie-Belle's kittens before they were old enough.
Will didn't know if he could reconcile one with the other, or if he even wanted to. He sat apart as Jack steered Bill through his despair, jealous that he hadn't been the first one his father had reached for, and ashamed that he hadn't been the first to reach for his father. That righteous, cool part of his mind that he'd always lived so comfortably in echoed with the word "murderer", but the syllables grew more foreign with every repetition, and Will couldn't make the word mean what it was supposed to.
More frightening was that "father" was sliding away from him, too. Will thought that by the time he found the courage to move forward, it would never sound the same to him again.
It was that threat, that desperation, that propelled him forward. He crawled the short distance, without bothering to regain his feet, stretching a hand out towards Bill as he came close.
"William." The gruff, raw voice was the last thing he was expecting, and Will nearly left his skin behind jerking back.
Dark eyes, bloodshot with weeping, were open and taking him in. Bill pushed himself up from Jack's lap, the younger pirate straightening to give the elder space to rise.
Will held himself perfectly still, watching warily as indistinguishable emotions swirled over each other on Bill's face. The scrutiny tingled like the onset of sunburn in its intensity, continuing unbroken for so long Will had to resist the urge to flinch away from it.
After a time, Bill reached out and ran a light touch over the curve of Will's ear, then caught a lock of Will's hair between thumb and fingers. With every movement he looked as though he had no idea what he expected the parts he touched to feel like. Bill drew the section of hair away from Will's face, watching with something akin to amazement as it slipped off his fingers and back down to the younger man's shoulder. Then he reached out to catch it on his fingertips again.
"You plannin' to sit there all night watchin' it grow, Bill?" Both Turners gave the smallest of starts at the impatient tone, and looked to Jack, who had thus far been watching the interaction between father and son unobtrusively. Crossing his arms over his chest and letting out his breath in a sharp, huffing sigh, Jack cast his glance from one to the other. "God in bloody heaven, won't one of you say something?" he exclaimed.
"He's gone buggerin' crazy!" Pintel shouted from where he'd been huddled against the far wall of his cell. He pointed one grubby finger at the mess the late Twigg was making on the floor. "Look what he's done to Twigg! He was gonna do us all!"
"Shut up!" Jack and Will snapped in unison, vehemently, and the stocky pirate retreated, wide-eyed. They turned their attention back to Bill, and Will gathered his wits enough to speak. "We probably ought to go--"
The rest of the sentence was abandoned in favor of a grunt as Will was caught up and embraced so fiercely his teeth clicked together. For a moment his arms flopped at Bill's sides, but he decided as he regained a bit of his breath that returning the embrace couldn't possibly feel as awkward and unnatural as hanging unresponsive in the clutches of such unrestrained affection. Will wrapped his arms around his father's back, refraining from putting too much pressure into the contact, and praying that any second now this would feel like home again, and this horrid hateful stiffness in his body would just fucking go and leave him alone and let him forget for a few fucking minutes that the father he'd just gotten back had stabbed a giant fucking hole through someone.
A strong hand clasped the back of his head, and Bill's lips were pressing against Will's temple. "He didn't get you," Bill breathed into Will's hair. "He didn't get you. Oh, Jesus, thank you." Clutching Will to him with one hand, Bill grasped the side of Jack's face with the other. "Thank you, God. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."
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Will was heavy in his arms. Heavier than the baby he'd cradled once or the little boy he'd been the last time Bill had held him. Heavier than Jack, whose mass never had been able to account for his strength. Both of them heavier, somehow, than eight hundred and eighty-two pieces of sneering, tainted gold, or the weight of all the water in the Caribbean bearing down upon him. He enveloped Will in a hold of iron and steel and fierce warmth, and held Jack as light and loose as he would the man's namesake; a still palm beneath capricious wings.
He needed to know how, but not yet. It would be important eventually, but right now it mattered less than the way Will fit within the curve of his arm, or the texture of Jack's beard beneath his thumb, grown full over the jaw where there had been only barely-shadowed skin when last Bill had laid eyes on him. Bill's world, for the moment, had contracted to what space he could reach with both arms, and everything beyond that fell off the edges, slipped from sight and thought like foam in the waves.
It wasn't relief. Relief had been the moment in the blue, damp hour before dawn when Bill had gathered Will, shivering and soaked from a fever finally broken, into his arms, kissing the five-year-old's matted hair as he stripped him free of his nightshirt. It had been the breathless but imaginative string of curses Jack had offered up when Bill had carried his young captain, flogged halfway into the hereafter, across the deck of the Pearl to his cabin, laying down a wake of red droplets behind them. What his heart pounded with now was beyond relief. It was resurrection.
Bill Turner clung to his boys, and lived again.
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Elizabeth had cursed the mud, her gown, and her shoes practically from her first step out of the house, and the macaw mask had, from the sound of things, hit a cat when she flung it away. When her right slipper was sucked half off her foot in the bog the side of the road had become, she kicked loose of it gratefully, said a quick prayer for the absence of broken glass in her path, and ran like hell.
The apprehension that had been sitting coiled within her ever since Will had disappeared with Jack, leaving her with only the most cursory of explanations, had burst forth when she'd seen the two soldiers approach James at the party. Too far to hear what was said between them, she had understood enough when Norrington had become suddenly grave and hurried, slipping through the crowd to the governor's side. A minimum of words was exchanged between them, and Elizabeth's throat began to close at the small frown that blossomed on her father's face.
Even before James had made it to the front door, Elizabeth had been backing up as discretely as possible, searching out an exit of her own, trying to lose herself in the very crowd she'd been wishing all night would simply evaporate.
Her father's troubled gaze had found her in seconds, and she'd moved faster, unable to look away as she saw him come to some sort of clarity. There was no time for misdirection, no time to try to make her flight look like anything other than what it was.
She had turned and run before her name was even fully formed on Wetherby Swann's lips, driven by the need to reach Will and Jack before James Norrington did.
But now, though the rain had slowed to a spent drizzle, it seemed the streets of Port Royal themselves conspired to hold her back. Bricks and cobblestones she knew like the back of her hand caught her feet, the dark and wet turning the memorized walk into a labyrinth of snares and stumbles.
She swore out loud when rounding a corner too fast put her down on one knee and one hand, but found consolation in the fact that the puddle she'd landed in twinkled with the reflected lights of the fort.
Struggling to her feet, Elizabeth yanked up her soaked, clinging skirts and raced forward.
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In Will's rarely indulged and wistful imaginings of what it would be like to introduce his father to the woman he loved, there hadn't been a dead body in the room. His father had never made Elizabeth's acquaintance collapsed on the floor and covered in drying gore, and Elizabeth had never entered the daydream tattered and muddy, with a skinned knee bleeding down her shin.
Will's reality of late required a great deal of adapting on his part.
It was Elizabeth's hasty and somewhat squelchy descent down the stairs that tore – tore, or freed, and what the hell kind of question is that, anyway? – him from Bill's arms. "Elizabeth!" he exclaimed softly, startled. Taking in her appearance, he rose to his feet, alarm brewing. "What are you doing here?"
"James…" she began, faltering when Bill's presence registered, but quickly remembering herself. "James Norrington is on his way here, Will. You have to go. If he finds Jack, or…" she trailed off once again, and her silence was as much a question as a warning.
"My father," Will said softly.
"Oh," Elizabeth breathed. She made her way to them, attempting to wring a bit of moisture from her hair.
Bill stood at her approach. Some things were ingrained deeply enough that even a seven-year swim couldn't wash them away, and proper treatment of a lady was one of them, no matter if said lady was lacking a shoe and wearing as much mud as she was clothing.
Will opened his mouth, but Jack got there first. "Yes fine: Elizabeth, Bill. Bill, Elizabeth. We can elaborate elsewhere. With illustrations and a bloody Greek chorus, even, but not now." He caught Bill's arm with the intention of hauling him towards the nearest door, and was jerked back abruptly when the taller man failed to move. "By 'we' I did mean all of us, and by 'elsewhere' I meant far far the hell away from this spot we've not vacated yet."
Will, who agreed wholeheartedly with this sentiment, waited for it to move Bill from where he stood, but Bill's attention was, for the moment, only for Elizabeth, and the arm she'd slipped anxiously and unconsciously through Will's. "William?" he said, his tone strange and soft.
All too aware of the seconds they were losing, and of the incredulous look Jack was giving them, Will swallowed down the tangle of nerves in his throat and covered Elizabeth's hand with his own. "Father, this is my fiancée, Elizabeth Swann."
For a moment, Bill looked as though his legs were going to fail him again, but this time, his eyes were alight. His hand flew to his mouth, and a shaky laugh escaped him. "My God."
Elizabeth smiled uncertainly. "Mr. Turner," she greeted, taking the blink of an eye to drop an impeccable curtsy. "I think perhaps we ought to postpone our more thorough introductions until we aren't being chased by the Navy."
Jack rolled his eyes. "As smart as she is pretty, mates. Now shall we?"
Finally, Bill turned and looked at him – really looked, clear-eyed and comprehending-- and Jack was treated to the same damnably knowing smile he'd received time after time when he'd been Will's age, and even younger. "I take it there's going to be a spot of trouble if you're caught here, little sir?"
Jack's knee-jerk response of "I hate it when you call me that" was nearly past his lips when he realized, to his astonishment, it was no longer true. Or at least, it was less true than it had been ten years ago. "I wouldn't exactly bet on a parade, no. And not to be indelicate, mate, but your reception's not likely to be any warmer. Much as they hate pirates in this town, they get a bit testy about just who's allowed to kill them and when."
Will's face darkened, and Elizabeth cast a sideways look towards the cells she'd been tenaciously not seeing. "He's right…Father," Will stumbled a little over the word, praying no one noticed. "We need to get you away from here."
Whether it was that faltering in Will's voice, the fact that somewhere during this night he'd gone from "Papa" to "Father", or his son's urgency to smuggle him away from the scene of a murder that might easily have been the first instead of the only, Bill felt his insides clench, and he shook his head.
"No, William," he said with quiet finality. "There'll be no running from this."
Will stared, dumbly, and felt Elizabeth's fingers grip his arm tighter. "I don't understand."
"Yes you do."
"No," Will insisted. This was stupid, this was wasting time, and he didn't understand. Didn't understand why they weren't leaving, or why Bill looked so bloody calm.
"Don't do this, Bill," Jack said suddenly, and there was something in his voice that Will had never heard there. "Don't do this. Please."
"Jack, you'd better go now." Bill had become the reasonable one all of a sudden, but it was oddly no more comforting than his raving had been earlier.
"Bill, this isn't going to change anything. This isn't going to make things right."
"I know, lad. Believe me, I know."
Will was shaking his head. Too much talking. There was too much talking and not enough getting done. They needed to act, needed to go. "Father…" He looked expectantly at Jack, waiting for the pirate captain to take things in hand, to lead, and make Bill listen, but Jack had gone still.
"Damn you, William," Jack said quietly.
Will had no time to dwell on why that got a dry chuckle out of his father before the clattering of many footsteps came at the top of the stairs, and Norrington's voice rang crisp and cold.
"No one move, unless you want to be shot here and now." This edict was followed by a pause, which was followed in turn by a startled, "Elizabeth?"
The addressed turned slowly to look up at him, and she offered a weak smile. "Couldn't stand the party any longer either, James?"
Astonishment, exasperation, and amusement wrestled each other, and Norrington's gun was lowered, ever so slightly. Noting Will's presence at her side in the next moment, the commodore sighed softly. "One day, I trust I will cease to be surprised by anything the two of you do."
Upon spying Jack, however, all amusement was abandoned. "But not today, it seems." The gun, redirected slightly, came up once more. "Captain Sparrow. I'm fascinated to know what brings you back to Port Royal."
TBC