A/N: Credit for the development of Will and Theo's relationship in this chapter, along with my major gratitude, goes to 0-Elizabeth Dawn-0 for giving me the idea, because the vague plans I had before her review were a hell of a lot more boring. Thank you!

In terms of content from the movies, I'm doing my best not to just have this story be a rewrite of the script with the addition of Theo making a few sarcastic comments here and there, because I figure if you're reading this story, you've seen the trilogy a stupid number of times just like me (: — that being said, there are times when it's going to be unavoidable, but I'll strive to at least keep it entertaining when those times do crop up!

Was it utterly and entirely pathetic that she already missed James? It hadn't even been a full week yet - although living the events of the first movie gave her a newfound appreciation for how quickly all of the events from it happened - and yet miss him she did. In fact, she didn't really need a second opinion to know that it was pathetic. But maybe it was pathetic in an endearing, I'm-only-human sort of way. He'd been a big part of her journey here. It felt strange, to have something funny happen and not having him there to shoot her a deadpan look that said more than any words ever could. Or to have him look so thoroughly unimpressed by one of her jokes that his face alone would make her laugh even harder at herself, which would in turn prize an amused smile from his lips, as much as he often tried to hide it.

It was easy between the two of them - easy, but never boring. That was a rare thing, in her experience. With men she'd known in the past (ordinarily she'd say 'guys she'd known', but James was anything but a 'guy'), she'd often found that the ones it all came easy with were the ones who soon bored her. Not because they were too nice or anything, she wasn't a girl who needed drama to be happy, but because there were no butterflies. Now she was stuck trying to kill off the butterflies she did have.

It was because of the ship, she decided. The Interceptor was now as synonymous with James in her mind as The Black Pearl was with Jack in the eyes of the world - both here and back home. In fact, the place where she now rested her head at night was probably more his home than the house she'd been staying in up until now. The whole place reminded her of him. Of course, it probably didn't help that even standing on the docks as Jack inspected his new crew, she was literally wearing James' clothes. Not much about her circumstances conspired to allow her to forget him. Even the fierce, prickling itch of her still-healing face conjured back memories of sitting on the floor by the hearth.

Standing at the end of the dock, she watched as Gibbs assembled the crew he'd managed to put together on such short notice, ready for Jack's inspection. Her mind wasn't particularly occupied. It hopped here and there from problem to problem, but she never let it settle. Frankly, she couldn't be arsed torturing herself this morning. She'd overindulged a little when it came to the rum the night before, and the sun felt just a little antagonistic today.

"Is it true?"

Blinking, she turned to Will. She'd noticed his approach, but she hadn't expected him to speak to her.

"Is what true?"

Jesus, she'd kill for a pair of sunglasses. Worse, still, was that she knew she'd had a pair in her backpack when she'd been flung here. Memories of where that backpack had been left lying at the base of a tree still taunted her whenever she thought of anything useful it contained - which was usually daily.

"What you said to Jack back on The Interceptor."

Eyes fluttering shut, Theo sighed "You eavesdropped."

That put a bit of a spanner in the works. Maybe just a plastic one - the kind from a kiddies' toolbox set rather than a real, heavy steel one, but still. When she opened her eyes again, she saw no traces of shame on Will's face. Just skepticism in his frown, and a dash of curiosity in the eyes beneath it.

"You can't tell anybody. It wouldn't be good - not for me, not for anybody who finds out, none of it."

"Did Commodore Norrington know?"

Theo laughed at that "What do you think?"

"I think he wouldn't believe you even if you did tell him."

"It's a good thing I didn't, then. Nor will I - not ever. Jack was the only one I wanted to know."

"A questionable choice."

"I'm sure it appears that way," she replied, watching as the man in question strode down the shore towards the dock "But you have to admit, you've put all of your eggs in his basket, too."

Will ignored her point, instead making one of his own "Maybe you chose him because he's the only one mad enough to believe such a story."

Theo shrugged. And then, after a pause, she saw an opportunity to have some fun. Hell, she had to make the most of capitalising on the hours she'd poured into her favourite comfort movies. Motioning with a jerk of her chin for Will to follow her, she took a few steps closer to the new crew, just as Gibbs led Jack towards them. A few of the members shot a curious look or two in her direction, but otherwise they didn't bother much with her.

"Feast your eyes, Cap'n," she murmured to Will just before Gibbs said the very same to Jack.

Her words earned her a frown of confusion, but then his eyes quickly widened when Gibbs repeated them without having heard her say them first. She didn't know the script off by heart, of course - mostly the truly iconic lines (she internally mourned that she hadn't been around to hear Jack's 'but you have heard of me' to James back in Port Royal, but her mind had been a little occupied that day) along with whatever else happened to have stuck, but she what she did remember, she could use.

"All of 'em faithful hands before the mast," Gibbs continued to Jack.

"Every man worth his salt," Theo finished in a murmur to Will, exactly at the same time Gibbs did "And crazy to boot."

Was Will supposed to have a line here? She felt like he did. But he was standing beside her, and not beside Jack, so it went unsaid. Nobody seemed disturbed by the absence of his input, though, and it offered Theodora some food for thought. So she could change things. Small, meaningless things so far - but it was something. No supernatural force had appeared to drag Will towards Jack and force the words that should've been said out of his mouth.

Their dear old Captain continued to inspect The Interceptor's newest - and most indisputably unwashed - crew with narrowed eyes, before he stopped at Mr Cotton.

"You, sailor!"

"Cotton, sir," Gibbs supplied.

"Mr Cotton - do you have the courage and fortitude to follow orders and stay true in the face of danger and almost certain death?" Jack rattled off at an impressive speed.

"You didn't know Jack was going to say that?" Will asked drily.

Joke as he might, it was plain to see that her proof was making him uncomfortable as he shifted from one foot to the other. Theo was almost certain that it never occurred to him that she might've actually been telling the truth. For that she could hardly blame him. If somebody rocked up on her doorstep back home with such a tale, she'd have written them off as an absolute space cadet and slammed the door in their faces.

"I'm not sure even he could repeat it perfectly if he tried," she snorted "Nobody can manage Jack's lines but Jack."

"Lines?" Will echoed "Like we're on a stage?"

Oh, he had no idea how uncomfortably close he was with that one. Theo simply shrugged in response.

"Mr Cotton! Answer, man," Jack glared.

"He's a mute, sir," Theo resumed her fucking with Will, almost perfectly in time with Gibbs once again "Poor devil had his tongue cut out, so he trained the parrot to talk for him. Nobody's sure how."

"No one's yet figured how," Will corrected her after Gibbs spoke the line differently to how she'd worded it.

Theo gave him an exasperated look, eyebrows raising slightly. He'd had to forgive her minor mistakes, her memory wasn't exactly photographic. Or was it phonographic, when it concerned sound? Either way, the point remained - the essence of her 'prediction' was correct.

"Now Cotton will stick out his tongue - or, er, lack thereof, and Jack will return the favour," she ignored his jab, just as the exact exchange happened "Believe me now?"

The look on his face told her that he did…even if he did not wish to. For somebody who had been so eager to have her prove herself to him, he didn't exactly look happy now that she had.

"Go," she nudged him with her elbow "You're to interject in a moment."

He had to offer Anamaria The Interceptor in recompense for her services, and that was one gap Theo wasn't willing to take it upon herself to fill if needed. She was content to stay on Jack's good side, especially considering it was shaky ground as it was. As if sensing that something wasn't quite right, Jack frowned and then turned towards the two of them.

"Weren't you the one who was so bloody adamant about inspecting the crew for yourself? And now you're…what? Flirting with the seer? What would Miss Swann say?"

At Jack's words, more than a few heads amongst the crew turned and they stared at her with suspicion and curiosity mixed. Very nice, Jack. Very subtle. She pursed her lips and looked away as Will left her side to approach their Captain.

"Well, you've proved they're mad," he said grimly.

When she returned her gaze to the crew, a few still stared at her, so she returned their stares evenly until they faltered and looked away - perhaps worrying about what she might see in their own futures. Well. It was one way to make a first impression.

With The Interceptor now properly crewed, there wasn't actually a great deal for Theo to do. She still did what she could - usually whatever menial tasks were left, leaving the 'real' work to the people who actually knew what they were doing when it came to handling a ship - not content to simply lie back and sunbathe while the others did the real work. In part it was so that she made a decent first impression, for if all went well she'd soon be sailing with these very people for quite some time, and it also put her in a position to learn by watching. The fact that it made dealing with her thought more meditative than troubling just helped. It had always been her way - exhausting herself physically when she was plagued mentally. It had yet to fail her, but if anything was going to really put it to the test, it was living here.

As fun as fucking with Will had been - she still caught him giving her troubled looks when she looked his way - it did highlight yet another problem that she now faced. Her memory wasn't perfect, and the longer she lived here, the worse it would get as far as her knowledge of the trilogy was concerned. She could hardly whip out a flat screen and refresh her knowledge. Out of them all, she'd seen the first the most amount of times - it was easy to stick on and watch by itself because it was self contained. The order got a bit muddled from there, for she'd probably seen the third the most amount of times after that, which put the second movie in last place. Mostly because she could never quite bear to watch Jack die. That…would make life pretty fucking terrible in the future. His death was too big, too important to change. It couldn't be prevented while keeping everything else more or less the same, like Governor Swann's or…or like James'.

Shaking her head as she furiously scrubbed at the deck, she drew her mind away from those particular thoughts. They would keep 'til later. The problem was, these movies were intricate. The only place that would've been trickier to end up in would've probably been fucking Middle Earth - although then she'd have been stuck making eyes at Sean Bean, because apparently her taste in men was limited to "noble and dead". While she was fairly certain she'd never forget the basics, she was pretty much positive she'd forget the details. Maybe not all of them, but at least one or two. But these movies were machinations, on top of plots, on top of schemes. That's what they were - everybody's plans tangling up together, encapsulated in sword-fights and Johnny Depp wearing eyeliner. One forgotten detail could be the difference between a gambit working, and it crashing and burning. For all that those who knew of her knowledge might've thought it made her time here easier, it was also a hell of a burden.

There just really wasn't much she could do about this particular problem. Writing it all down while it was somewhat fresh in her mind was quite possibly the most idiotic thing humanly possible, and it was the only solution she could really think of other than repeating the events over and over in her brain until she was sick of thinking about them at all. And so she found her new evening routine. When Jack's boots stepped into her view - sometime while she was furiously trying to remember whether the man in question went to Tia Dalma or Tortuga first in the second movie - she could've cried with relief at having something else to think about.

"Miss Byrne, a word?"

Nodding, she dropped the brush into the bucket and follow him to his quarters.

"I've been thinking your matter over quite a bit," he said without preamble once the door was shut behind him "And I wonder why you haven't just considered going back to Ireland and trying to pop back through the stones that you believe sent you here in the first place."

"Don't you think telling me this is risky? What if I left you at the first opportunity to try just that?"

"Frankly, love, if it wasn't a possibility you'd already thought of yourself then I'm not sure what use I'd have for that brain of yours," he replied bluntly.

A fair point if there ever was one.

"There's a whole list of reasons why it would be a bad idea," she sighed "I don't know if I could find them. I don't know if it would work. I don't know if it would send me elsewhere, somewhere even more bloody unsurvivable than here, rather than home. It seems too great a risk."

The likes of Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones didn't exist back home, so who was to say that the stones that sent her here existed in this world?

"But throwing your lot in with me seems the safe bet?" He raised an eyebrow, and then frowned "I'm not sure I envy your position."

Theo laughed and shook her head "Take it from me, you shouldn't."

She paused then, not sure if she should continue and say the rest of what was on her mind. Jack noticed it, though, and that left her with little choice but to do so. If he thought she wasn't telling him something, he'd make it his duty to annoy it out of her, so it only seemed logical to save herself the bother.

"It might be nothing," she said slowly, following him to the desk before sitting down after he did "There was…this series of novels, back in my world. A woman goes back in time a couple hundred years, has some adventures. It was entertaining enough, but now I can't help but wonder if it had actually happened to the author, or at least somebody she knew. That she didn't make it up, she just wrote about what had happened and framed it as fiction. Maybe changed bits here and there, I don't know. It wasn't the same, not exactly - in the books, there are rules to travelling. You have to have a precious gemstone on you to get through safely, stuff like that. None of that ever happened to me. And in the books, she came out the other side in the same location, just in a different time - I came out thousands of miles away, and…"

And in a world filled with fictional characters, rather than true history.

"And?" Jack prompted.

His eyes were alight with interest now, any eccentricity dropped in favour of prying more information from her.

"And…in the books," she sidestepped what she was originally going to say "The main character had a theory. Only some people can travel through the stones - others could pass them or touch them and have nothing happen at all. She says…she says she thinks you have to have somebody on the other side, drawing you to them."

Jack's face fell and he faltered, mouth opening as if to argue.

"Not you," she snorted, shaking her head "Don't worry. Although am I to take that reaction to mean you're just leading me on with all of your flirting?"

Jack smirked "Not at all - so long as it's only a good time you're after."

"I'll keep that in mind should we hit a rainy day," she deadpanned "But it does make me think, maybe my being here isn't so accidental. Maybe the stones dropped me exactly where I need to be, and it's up to me to…to do what it is I need to do. Once I work out what it is. I have a feeling if I tried to go home before that, it wouldn't work."

God, what if tried it and ended up in some bizarre Groundhog Day type situation, sent right back to the start of her time here over and over until she got it right? She'd drop dead of a heart attack from the sheer stress of it.

"And what was it that called to the woman in these fascinating books of yours?"

"A man," she rolled her eyes.

"Don't tell me you've set your hat at dear William, for I'm afraid he's already taken."

"He's safe, too," she snorted "In the books…"

She trailed off, and then she almost laughed. Because her next realisation made her wonder if the universe really wasn't intentionally fucking with her. In the books she spoke of, the protagonist was catapulted back in time before promptly finding herself head over heels in love with a man…by the name of James.

"In the books?" Jack prompted.

"In the books she does get to go home. Eventually. So I have no reason to believe it's impossible for me," she said, standing quickly "Now if that's all, Captain, I really should finish scrubbing the deck before it's time to eat."

He didn't protest, and for that she was glad. Mainly because if she didn't get back to scrubbing, she was absolutely going to punch something - something solid, and potentially knuckle-breaking.

A/N: The next chapter should contain Barbossa! Very exciting. Or, if you're the writer, very intimidating. He's just so damn cool.