She found him sitting alone, staring at the sea through one of the gun ports with his back to a cannon. He didn't notice her when she walked up beside him, and she wondered if he was simply ignoring her or if he was so lost in his own thoughts that he hadn't even realized she was there. It wasn't until she sat down opposite him, crossed her legs, and propped the rum bottle against her knee that he glanced at her, his eyes lingering for a moment, but the venom from earlier was gone.
It was still a wonder to her that he was the same man to whom she had once been engaged. He certainly didn't look like it. It was almost impossible to see any trace of his old self through the dirt and grime, the untrimmed beard, or the bedraggled strands of filthy hair that wouldn't quite stay in the ribbon at the nape of his neck. And though she knew he was barely over thirty, he seemed older somehow, careworn and cynical, the lines of his face deepened by troubles she could only imagine. He had lost everything he had ever loved, and in anger she had mocked him for it.
Her stomach twisted in regret as the vague sense of responsibility began to nag at the back of her mind. Now she knew that he hadn't been wrong to say that freeing Jack had been a mistake, and she wondered how to tell him so. But she was held back by the fear of the snide comments that she knew he would throw at her, so she stared down at her lap and absently picked at a nail.
When she finally took a breath and opened her mouth to say something, he beat her to it.
"I believe I owe you an apology," he said slowly, and she looked up and saw that he was watching her from the corner of his eye. For no reason she could think of, she felt the blood rush to her face.
"It was a bit rash," she admitted sheepishly. Neither one of them cared to clarify, because they both knew exactly what he was apologizing for.
There was an awkward silence.
"You were right, you know," she finally told him, her voice quiet and bitter, "About Jack."
"A fact that I take no pleasure in," he replied gently.
A wry smile tugged at the corners of her lips. "You certainly seemed to be enjoying yourself earlier."
"Don't mistake my hatred of Sparrow as an endorsement of his wickedness," he shot back, before his brows furrowed, "Just because I would like to see him hanged doesn't mean I actually wish to be present when he does something that could doom us all."
"What do you mean?" she asked, a slight frown crossing her.
His expression turned dark. "Turner's isn't the only soul he's willing to trade for his own."
"You think Jack would hand us over Davy Jones?" she said incredulously, because it sounded at first to be an incredibly ridiculous supposition to make. But then, if Jack had so easily sacrificed Will...
"I doubt that he would condemn you to such a fate."
She stared at him. "You can't be serious."
"And what could I possibly gain by lying?" he asked with a tired sigh, and she could see that he was just as weary of arguing as she was.
She chewed at her lip, looking down at the rough boards of the deck. Was she really so blind that she couldn't see what kind of a man Jack was? She had known that he was infamous, that he was a pirate, that he was capable of terrible acts... But she had never expected to be affected by any of those acts. Perhaps the naive governor's daughter wasn't entirely gone after all.
"He saved my life," she said hollowly after a long pause.
James blinked.
"I would have probably drowned if it hadn't been for him," she went on, thinking back to the day that she had fallen from the top of Fort Charles. Everything about it– the extraordinarily stiff ceremony, the extraordinarily stiff corset, and the extraordinarily stiff Commodore Norrington– all seemed to be utterly ludicrous in the face of this new, grim reality. "And in the caves on Isla de Muerta. Barbossa was going to shoot me but Jack killed him."
He snorted in derision. "Unfortunately along with a number of my men," he muttered, and she looked at him uncomprehendingly.
"How else do you think Barbossa and his crew knew that we were waiting for them?" he asked.
She stared, realizing that, in the midst of all that had happened with Will, the skeletal pirates, and the cursed treasure, she had never wondered why the Dauntless had come under attack.
"Sparrow told them where we were anchored. I can only assume that he was trying to rid himself of both us and them. Killing two birds with one stone, as it were." He flashed a sardonic smile. "It was sheer luck that his crew decided it was in their best interest to take the Pearl and leave before the Dauntless could reduce her to splinters."
A sick feeling began to grow in the pit of her stomach. She had returned to Port Royal aboard the Dauntless after the battle of the Isla de Muerta, and she remembered how many canvas-wrapped corpses had been dropped into the sea.
At the time she had been so enamored with pursuing Will that none of that had seemed to matter. It had been a tragedy, to be sure, but an impersonal one. It wasn't as though she had known any of the men who had died. Then, in the aftermath, she had been entirely occupied with the idea of marriage, followed by the idea of the wedding, until Lord Cutler Beckett had arrived and interrupted her idyll.
"I've been such a fool," she whispered miserably, and when she looked at him she was surprised to see her pain reflected in his eyes. It was an expression she might have expected from Will, or maybe her father, but not from him.
"As are we all," he replied with a sad smile, "At one time or another."
Of course he was speaking from experience, and somehow that made it worse.
"You did so much for me, James," she told him, her voice deathly quiet, and she wondered if he could hear the tears threatening to drown her words. "And I was so dishonest to you..." She trailed off as she thought back to what had happened after he had rescued her from starving on an island with Jack Sparrow– how she had used his offer of marriage to her advantage, how he had pressed her for sincerity, how she had held onto the lie.
It wasn't the first time she had regretted her actions that day. Sometimes, in the darkness of still nights, when the sins of the past surfaced to haunt those still awake, she remembered how she had wronged and manipulated a good man. But those concerns were so easily pushed aside with Will and her father nearby, when James Norrington had existed happily in the Mediterranean in her mind. Now it was impossible to push them aside when he was sitting here staring her in the face and bringing with him an entire host of bad memories.
"You knew all along, didn't you? Even when I accepted your proposal, you knew..."
"That you intended to choose Turner," he finished bitterly, his voice wavering.
It almost physically hurt to hear it from him. The sick feeling spread, and for an instant she wondered if maybe she deserved everything that was happening. Maybe this was the universe's way of setting things right after she had helped to avert the execution of Jack Sparrow.
For another instant, she wished she had let him die, but then she knew she would have regretted that too.
Nothing was making any sense anymore.
"Then why did you even agree to search for him?" she asked, trying to understand why he had risked his ship and his crew for the life of one man if he had not been deferring to her as his wife-to-be, as she had always believed. She had heard him make the excuse that Will was a citizen of the Crown and therefore under his protection, but even her father had not been convinced of the decision. "If we had returned to Port Royal, you and I would have been married."
"And you would never have forgiven me," he replied, staring wistfully out the gun port, and again she knew he was right.
There was a long silence before he looked at her, and for a startling instant she could see the kind and gentlemanly commodore again. But she could also see pained sadness and longing.
"Love is a curious thing, Elizabeth," he said softly, and suddenly her heart forgot how to beat.
She didn't know why it surprised her. It was something she was supposed to have known all along after her father assumed the role of matchmaker: that James loved her, that he would propose, and that they would be wed. But never once had he claimed to love her. He had barely even showed it, at least not in ways that she had recognized. He had always been so calm and collected, so put-together in a manner she thought to be terribly dull, that it was difficult to tell if he felt anything at all. Of course he had been respectful, honorable, and caring, but she had never thought of him as a loving man. It was Will who had defined that standard for her, with his impetuous nature and sometimes imprudent display of emotion, and that was why she had chosen him.
But this James was not the old James. This James had shown passion, even if it had been in anger, and now she wondered if his old self had been the facade and she was only now really seeing him for the first time.
She didn't know what to say to him, except maybe, for once, the truth.
"You know I never meant to hurt you," she said quietly, though to her it seemed that for something so honest it still sounded terribly contrived and false. Perhaps he would still understand.
Something in his face told her that he did, and she felt the knot of worry that had been balled in her stomach begin to uncoil. She sighed, and they sat in silence, watching the waves roll by as the horizon bobbed in the distance.
"I don't want to be your enemy, James," she finally added, and they looked at each other. He seemed to struggle with something for a few moments before managing a small smile.
"I wouldn't want it either," he admitted, and for the first time since Will had left Port Royal, she felt almost happy. Maybe they could somehow regain a piece of what they'd had before. They had been friends, once. She had memories, pulled from so deeply out of the past that they remained untainted by the more recent events, of times he had visited her father's home, when they had been capable of having a legitimate conversation with one another. She could even remember the excruciatingly long voyage from England, years and years ago, how she had whiled away the hours learning the rules of chess from him, and how he had grown increasingly frustrated with her complete inability to comprehend tactics, but he had never quite given up. They had both been so much younger then, neither one of them carrying the troubles they carried now. Then life had intervened, she had grown closer to Will, and James had concerned himself only with the Navy. The rift between them had started then, and she hoped that the past year had not opened it beyond repair. Perhaps, if they tried, they could be friends again.
"It's a truce, then," she said, feeling almost amused, her spirits higher now than they had been all day.
He scooted towards her and leaned forward to take the nearly-empty bottle of rum that had been sitting, quite forgotten, beside her knee.
"Shall we drink to it?" he asked, wryly smirking and lifting the bottle in a mock toast before taking a swig. When he finished, he looked pleasantly surprised. "If anything must be said for Sparrow, it's that he has excellent taste in rum," he said resignedly as he offered the drink back to her.
She had just taken it when somewhere above them, on the main deck, the cry rang out that land was in sight.
Author's Note:
So, this chapter hated my guts. It did not want to be written in any form or fashion, hence the long wait for the update. Plus school was extremely annoying this week, and promises to become even more annoying in the future.
I also hope I am not butchering Elizabeth's point of view too horribly.