A/N: A bit of grim (albeit true to canon) violence here, just fair warning. I've tried to tone it down and not have it be too gratuitous, but it is what it is. Here we go! I can't believe we're in the final leg. I'm so not ready for this story to be over, but I'll contain myself for now and save any emotions for nearer the end. I don't tend to know how many chapters are actually left of a story until I'm within ten or so of it, but once I know I'll let you know. Experience has told me so far that the actual content of the movies pass quicker than I tend to expect, so at a tentative guess I'll be very surprised if we exceed 100 chapters, but we'll see. It should definitely be finished by the end of the year!

The hangings soon began, and once they did it was with a regularity that wore down on Theo with each passing day. With the rate Beckett was flying through executions, not even sparing a glance towards those whom he sent to the gallows, it was a miracle there was a soul left in the Caribbean to go after next.

Like Beckett, Theo mostly avoided looking at them - although for vastly different reasons - but she couldn't block them from her sight entirely. If she was going to prove her knowledge to Beckett, she'd need to be able to tell him that they were about to start singing. Before they actually started singing. That was sort of the whole point. So she would give each group a cursory glance as they ascended the steps to the gallows, and when the group didn't contain anybody whose face rang a bell (namely the boy who would start all of the singing in the first place), she'd look away again. Maybe there'd be some who, were they in her shoes, would force themselves to watch each and every neck as it snapped, or each and every face as it turned scarlet for those who were not lucky enough to get a clean break as they dropped, out of some misplaced sense of honour - or in hopes of hardening themselves for what lay ahead. Those people would be idiots. By the end of the first day, the sight of figures swinging back and forth in her peripheral vision was already burned into her psyche.

Did it feel cowardly not watching any of it properly? Not facing it head on? Yes. Of course it did. And being wilfully blind towards it likely did make her a coward. But watching it would only serve to shake her up and unnerve her rather than desensitise, and that much she absolutely could not afford. Especially since Beckett's newest form of torture involved not seeing that she would be offered so much as a chair during their time at Fort Charles, which was lethal in combination with the heat and the dread that washed over her with each sickening drop of the doomed.

The sounds were just as bad as she imagined the sight would be anyway. The way the drums gave way to a terrible silence that was only broken by a few horrible cracks, and then the thudding of bodies being deposited into the piles. It would end with the rattle of chains as the next group stepped forward, and then the process would repeat. The whole sorry affair was narrated by the soldier who stood a ways down the steps, calling out Beckett's decree with a regularity that felt timed to the second, and an uncanny ability to make it sound the exact same every single time with no differentiation in tone, pacing, nor even a stutter. She already loathed his voice by the third iteration, and by the hundredth a few days in, she was longing for anything else to listen to that might break up the cacophony of death and bureaucracy she was mired in - bad karaoke, drunken football chants, the wails of banshees, a riveting round of 'huzzah!'s, anything. Until she was given it.

"Traitor!"

Her head shot up on instinct, the same way it would if somebody had shouted a 'hey you!', and a few of the soldiers shifted slightly as though expecting some sort of revolt. A frown was already working its way onto her face as she regarded the line destined for the gallows - Beckett was many things. In fact, she could easily spend her evenings with James listing exactly what all of those things were if not for the fact that she didn't want to spend the hours in which she was free of him so much as thinking about him, never mind speaking about him, too. Traitor, though? It just didn't make sense.

Eyes flitting down the line, she tried to work out the source of the shout, and she found it in the form of a pair of eyes staring back at her, filled with loathing. Oh. They hadn't been shouting at Beckett at all. It took Theo a moment to recognise her beneath the grime and the disarray - but once she did, her stomach dropped. What was her name, again? Flissa? Felicity? Fiona? Something like that. One of Ada's girls. Theo had never been friends with her, not really, not in the way she'd formed a camaraderie with Ada, but she knew her. They'd shared drinks together in a group setting, and knowing looks whenever a particularly annoying patron walked into the tavern. Now, though, there was nothing but hatred in her eyes.

For a moment Theo was struck by the sensation of being a child again, like she'd just been caught doing something bad and was being given that look by her dad. The one that had her freezing and negating the need for any real telling off. This one was worse, though, because it was filled with real loathing. Like the woman wanted nothing more than to use the chains at her wrists to wring her neck. And she couldn't blame her, could she? Last time they'd seen each other, she'd been dressed like any other pirate in Tortuga, and now she stood masquerading as a good lady of Port Royal at the side of the man who Because she knew how it looked. She'd bloody well orchestrated it to look that way for Beckett's benefit. The downside was that he wouldn't be the only one to witness it.

It was always bound to happen. It was something she'd been steeling herself for when she next met the crew of the Pearl - along with Will and Elizabeth, for that matter. What was more troubling was that it brought a stark realisation. If she found people she recognised in these lines, it wouldn't necessarily be because she'd seen their faces on the big screen. Ada could be in the next batch. Maybe, she feared for a moment, she'd even been in one of the lines she'd mostly refused to look at. But Ada wouldn't have gone quietly if she'd seen her standing here.

Keenly aware of Beckett's gaze on her, no doubt revelling in this newest turn of events and watching keenly for a reaction, Theo returned the woman's gaze evenly for just as long as it took to not appear ashamed, and then she looked away slowly and fixed her eyes on the wall ahead of her.

"An old friend of yours, I take it?"

"She thought so. At the time."

Flissa-Felicity-Fiona spat on the ground as she was slowly urged by. It didn't come anywhere near her she was much too far away for that and it did earned her a firm blow with the butt of the nearest soldier's rifle when it landed too close to his boots. The woman didn't appear to care, for her statement had been made and the sentiment was painfully clear. Theo didn't respond. She didn't allow herself to respond. She refused to respond. Inhaling deeply to dispel the beginnings of a lump forming in her throat, she leaned against the wall at her back and pretended that she couldn't feel the eyes burning into the side of her face.

There was nothing she could do - not in response to the glaring, and certainly not to help. What choice did she have? Even if trying to help her wouldn't squander any minimal amount of trust Beckett had in her, there was really nothing she could do. Begging would never work, not with a man like him, and the only thing even more doomed to failure would be trying to stage some hare-brained rescue attempt. There was nothing she could do. That was just a fact. So why did it still feel like the wrong thing? Logic told her that all creating a scene would do was doom the things she could do to failure later down the line, but even with that in mind, even knowing it all to be true and that the best thing to do in the long run was nothing…nothing still felt horribly, horribly wrong.

The solidness of the wall against her back served to ground her a little, and she focused on breathing in and out evenly, but the woman from Tortuga was wearing a dress that, although now dirty and ragged, was a very distinctive shade of yellow, and unless Theo wanted to completely turn in the opposite direction (which she wouldn't allow herself to do, even if it wouldn't look ridiculous), she was painstakingly aware as she slowly moved through her peripheral vision, up the line and finally ascending the steps to the gallows.

Nausea welled within her the whole time, right up until the lever was pulled, and then guilt. Chest-gripping, soul-destroying guilt as those pretty yellow skirts swayed in and out of the corner of her eye. She'd been one of the girls to bring the bath to the room the night she'd been reunited with James. That memory, intrusive and unwelcome, almost had her breath hitching on the inhale, her hands tightening their grip against the bodice of her dress as she hugged her arms about her middle. Horror at not being able to do anything was replaced by horror at not having done anything, and she responded to it by continuing to do nothing. She stood still, and she stayed silent, and she refused to let her emotions show.

There was movement at the end of the line as a new batch of prisoners was affixed to the train of the condemned, and this time her reluctant scanning of the line bore fruit.

For the second time that day, Theo recognised somebody in the line - but this time, thank Christ, it wasn't from personal experience. The boy. The boy who'd start the singing. And god, but he was only a boy. Seeing it on the big screen had been a gut-punch moment, to the point where she still clearly remembered seeing it in the cinema all those years ago. It contrasted so sharply against the quirky humour of the movies up until that point, and emphasised how far they'd come from Jack and Will walking along the seabed with an overturned dinghy over their heads. Seeing it - seeing him - in person was unfathomably worse.

He was so small, cutting a tiny figure amongst the grown adults that he stood in line with, his head ducked down as he turned the coin in his hand over and over again. To avoid looking at the gallows? Nobody could fault him for that. Theo struggled to look at them, and she wasn't destined for them. She'd practically fainted in the five seconds she thought that she had been after she helped Jack escape, and she knew if she was in that line now, she'd be pissing her pants. So seeing a child in that situation? It filled her with a dread usually reserved for her nightmares of James' demise.

Walking on stiff legs towards the desk that Beckett had had dragged here for him to work at, she hesitated just long enough for him to pause, looking up at her with faintly raised eyebrows.

"Are you well, Mrs Norrington?" he asked boredly.

"They're going to sing," she said quietly.

All of his usual responses - snide, sarcastic, condescending, and just generally dickish - were things she was ready for. She didn't even really care, not in that moment. But she received none of them, and when she tore her eyes away from the boy long enough to look at Beckett again, she found his gaze fixed on her with a surprising absence of his usual, well, bullshit.

"When?" he asked simply.

A quick look to the gallows and a little bit of counting had her working out the answer.

"The next lot to be hanged will start it when they're on the scaffold - before the lever is pulled."

Beckett mimicked her glance, then replied "I imagine it would be rather difficult for them to do so after."

For once, this left Theo truly lost for words. She stared at him, floundering for any sort of coherent response, little other than stunned silence taking hold of her thoughts. A certain level of desensitisation towards the hangings she could understand - especially from somebody like Beckett. Daily she had to remind herself that she lived in a time where a person's crimes said something intrinsic about their character - about their nature, and that death was deserved by anybody who so much as walked beneath a pirate flag, or shared a lukewarm acquaintanceship with somebody who did. Unless, of course, that person had a decent bargaining chip. Hypocrisy and double standards aside, she could understand it. Hangings were just a thing that happened here. A day out. Like going to the cinema.

But this? How could anybody, even Beckett, cast a glance over a child sentenced to die that day and then make a joke? How could she stand by and resolve to witness such a thing without trying to step in and help?

Even if her loathing didn't show on her face, her astonishment certainly did and he waved her off when he seemed to realise his funny little joke wouldn't be getting so much as a snort of laughter from her. Theo accepted his dismissal readily, turning and approaching the steps that led down into the courtyard where the hangings were taking place. She didn't try to descend the steps, she'd only be shooed right back up them again by the soldiers flanking either side of the bottom step, so instead she hovered there awkwardly, arms clutched tightly about herself so that she wouldn't fidget nervously.

She couldn't do anything for Ada's girl. The patches of yellow fabric poking out from the pile of bodies being loaded into yet another wagon taunted her and set her stomach turning, but she couldn't have done anything. Not with how the woman had made it clear they'd known one another, and not with how she'd just been one of many women in the line. The boy, though. He was the first child she'd seen here. Whether none of the other ships caught so far had boasted cabin boys, or whether they simply hadn't been taken alive, she didn't know, but this was the first child. And he didn't know her. He glanced up towards her, her agitated pacing catching his eye, but his eyes drifted over her disinterestedly. Why wouldn't they? To his eye she'd be just another stuck up lady, sat here to watch the scum get what they deserved.

The song had to be sung. She couldn't do anything before that point, but what about afterwards? Would there be time?

The soldier whose job it was to read the decree began to do so yet again, starting anew.

"In order to affect a timely halt to deteriorating conditions, and to ensure the common good…"

Theo had to suppress a snort. Common good, her arse.

"...a state of emergency is declared for these territories by decree of Lord Cutler Beckett, duly appointed representative of His Majesty, the king."

He began to rattle through all of the rights that had been 'suspended' - a fancy word for taken away, really - and Theo did her best to tune it out as the next group slowly ascended the gallows on stiff, weary legs.

The boy approached the noose in the middle and looked up at it where it dangled a good foot or two above his head. There was some discussion then between the hangman and the soldiers nearest to the gallows, but the boy paid none of it any mind. None of the condemned did. Instead, he turned the coin over in his hands, frowning down at it…and he began to sing.

"The king and his men stole the queen from her bed, and bound her in her bones," had the courtyard not been so eerily quiet, it would've been impossible to hear him, but his voice gained strength as he finally looked up and sang the next line, still paying no mind to the hangman as he walked behind him "The seas be ours, and by the powers, where we will, we'll roam."

Returning with a barrel, the executioner slammed it down atop the trap door and hoisted the boy onto it without ceremony.

"Yo ho, all hands hoist the colours high," a man at the end of the line joined in, and that was all it took.

"Heave-ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die," it started off tentative, but the more voices joined in, the stronger they became, until the voices and the rattling of the chains threatened to shake the very foundations of the fort "Yo ho, haul together, hoist the colours high…"

Seeing events from the movies play out in real life always felt different. She'd learned that as soon as the movies began to unfold before her eyes. Whether they felt more brutal and less glorious in the absence of any great swelling background music, or seemingly mundane moments felt genuinely unextraordinary because there were no cues given to the people living through them that an audience might receive to clue them in on the fact that this was not just another day. Theo had seen it both ways - battles at sea had felt anything but thrilling and epic when she'd been in the thick of them, and days where something big was about to happen felt all the more jarring for how entirely normal they'd felt beforehand. Life didn't come with moody shots of the horizon and foreboding string music over the top.

This was one of the few occasions, maybe even the only occasion, where the gravity - the far-reaching, rumbling consequences - of what was occurring all around them was not altered for better or worse by witnessing it in person. It was clear that it was obvious to all those gathered here, pirate, soldier, and civilian alike, that something big was happening here. Goosebumps had taken hold of her entire body and tears threatened to blur her vision. She couldn't have torn her eyes away from the spectacle if she'd tried as Groves rushed past her, up the steps and towards Beckett.

"Lord Beckett! They've…started to sing, sir."

"So they have," Beckett answered mildly.

The distinctly unreadable tone he'd taken on, along with how she could feel his calculating gaze burning into the back of her head, told Theo that she'd proven herself to him. Her knowledge, at least, if not her usefulness. She could neither bemoan nor celebrate that fact as the singing reached new heights as the song reached its peak.

"Heave-ho, thieves and beggars, never shall we die!"

The executioner was striding to the lever, the drumroll speeding up, and Theo couldn't stop herself.

"Stop!" she cried out "Stop! Wait!"

Her first cry had been drowned out by the rattling of the chains and the roll of the drums, but her next two, high pitched and ragged, had come just at the right time and the executioner faltered, looking to her…along with everybody else in the courtyard. The gazes ranged from distrustful to just plain confused - on the parts of the soldiers and the prisoners both - but she disregarded them, turning to Beckett.

"The boy, Lord Beckett - we can, we can use him. In the house. We've…we've need for a boy. Please."

Beckett regarded her, unimpressed, for a moment before he scoffed.

"If you've need for a servant, Mrs Norrington, I suggest you resist the urge to select them from amongst criminals."

He waved his hand, signalling the hangman, and he pulled the lever. The barrel clattered through the trapdoor, down onto the stone floor below where it cracked on impact. This time, idiotic or not, Theo turned, and she forced herself to watch, grasping onto the rough stone of the walls when her knees threatened to give out, all the while mentally berating herself - for failing, for trying at all, for looking, and for being so bloody weak as to be affected by this so badly. She should have been tougher by now. She'd need to be tougher, if she was going to be of any use for what was to come - because things were well and truly beginning now. There was no room for weakness now, and even less for failure. The boy's eyes had met hers just before he'd dropped.

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