A/N: Had folk express an interest in the idea of James and Theo visiting the future after the events of CTW. Cannot emphasise this enough – I don't consider this little storyline to be part of the CTW canon. It didn't actually happen in their "real" life together, it's an AU at most, and just a fun little "what if" otherwise. Having them actually be able to dip in and out of the future in the official story just feels too convenient, I don't like it lolol…Sorry Theodora.

This will be the first part of many - this first part has been a section of a monster draft that I've been chipping away at for months before I finally got the early scenes into a cohesive thing and ready to go.


"Y'alright?" Theo asked softly.

"Are you?" James arched one dark eyebrow at her.

"It's going to be a lot to take in," she said "A three century time difference is nothing to sniff at."

"As it was for you - and you did…oh, at least passably well."

Theo smirked in response to his teasing "High praise, Admiral. I'd say some parts were better than passable."

"You flatter me."

"Do I? Because I was talking about meeting Jack. Why? What did you think I was referring to?"

He narrowed his eyes at her in a manner that was too fond to have any real bite to it. Then he gave her a half-smile that was downright rakish, which served as her only warning for what he would say next.

"Were I not reluctant to greet your father in a state of dishevelment, my darling, I would show you - and exact my revenge in doing so."

"We've spoken about threatening me with a good time."

"Just as we've spoken of your artful knack for avoiding a topic of conversation and replacing it with a joke when you fear it may grow uncomfortable. Now who scorns sentimentality?"

"I scorn seriousness. There's a difference."

"In that case, you've chosen your husband poorly," he said, voice dry.

"Absolutely not," she disagreed.

His smile gained a level of softness then, but he still wasn't going to let her off the hook.

"I only ask because I'm wondering whether you're truly afraid of how I might respond to what I'm about to see, or because worrying about my response distracts you from your own. If I know, I'll know how to respond."

Well. He knew her to a mortifying, dizzying extent, didn't he? Like there was ever any doubt about that.

"I had more of a frame of reference than you. Coming here, I mean, on the historical count, as well as the matter of knowing the story. I'd be less nervous on your behalf if we were about to step into the fourteen hundreds."

"And you were fully prepared to meet the likes of Barbossa, Beckett, and Jones face to face on that account, were you?"

"...Touché."

"Truly, Theodora, I have no worries about this," he said "Only curiosity."

"Good, then," she nodded.

"And you?" he prompted, when she didn't offer her own feelings on the matter.

Sighing, Theo wrapped her arms about herself as she regarded the stones before them "It's…not natural. To be nervous about going home. What used to be home, anyway."

"I learned long ago that there is little about you that's natural," he said lowly.

If there was any doubt in her mind that he meant it as a compliment, it would have vanished when he pressed a soft kiss to the back of her hand.

"I don't pretend to be an expert in the realms of sentiment…" he continued quietly, letting her hand drop back to her side.

"You're not half as much of a novice as you'd have everybody believe when it comes to it, either," she snorted knowingly.

He smirked a little, but there was a softness to it "Returning to the home you once had after having built a new one - without anticipating doing so when you last left, no less - is bound to be daunting. Perhaps painful. Many in similar positions at least have the benefit of having chosen to leave in the first place. You were not given a farewell."

"I always sort of liked that fact," she admitted "Leaving wasn't difficult, because I didn't know it was happening. The last day I spent at home was like any other day, I wasn't busy being so sad that it was ruined."

But now the last day was no longer the last day - and the one that would come at the end of this trip would be so, so much harder. She left that part unsaid, but it didn't matter because he understood her all the same. As always.

He nodded in silence for a few moments as he searched for words. Probably grappling with the fact that he couldn't fix this in any way that would end with absolutely no pain at all - it was just about which option sucked less. And while she could never think, by any stretch of the imagination, that returning to the life they were building here sucked, she knew that coming back would be difficult, if only because of what she was leaving behind rather than what she was coming back to.

"I will be there," he finally settled on.

And that did help.

They turned their attention to the stones. A dozen fears flitted through her mind at once about the journey through the stones alone, never mind all the things that would come after. What if something went wrong? So many things could go wrong. She could come out of the other side alone. Or James could. They could end up in the wrong time entirely, too far in the future or too far back with no way of returning. Even if they got through, they could end up stuck and unable to come back home again. Or what if they did get to the future, but it was the future of this world rather than the one where the Pirates trilogy was fiction rather than history? Worse still, what if they emerged in a ridiculously bad place, as she had last time? Even if they survived, she hardly had her passport on her and James had none at all. Travelling home would be an impossibility, unless they found some mad and dangerous way to get themselves smuggled in.

Theo knew she had a history of risk-taking, but this was a lot. Had there been anything less on the other side waiting for her, she wouldn't risk going at all.

Of course, Queen Achtland had offered assurances…and Theo had sought those assurances over and over right up to the point where continuing to do so would risk offending her in some way, like it showed doubt in her honesty. While she did have doubts, it was more blind fear at how much they were risking rather than distrust towards Queen Achtland herself. Why would she exert power to bring them together just to tear them apart so pointlessly after everything? Theo just needed to hear that. Eighty-seven times. To feel marginally better. It was a wonder James hadn't lost his patience and throttled her yet, but she supposed there was a hell of a sunk cost fallacy at play there.

For his part, once he'd had his assurances, he'd set about focusing on what needed to be done so that their home might continue running in their absence. When Theo had asked if he wasn't worried about something going amiss in their journey, he'd only smiled a little and pointed out that nothing had managed to properly part them yet. The tone with which he said that almost dared anything to try.

"I suppose there's nothing left to do but go for it," she murmured, staring at the closest stone.

Their travel packs had been shouldered - leaving them behind seemed daft, not only because something might go wrong but because it would leave them exposed to the elements, if not random bypassers. If random bypassers were even a thing in Queen Achtland's land. Given how fiercely her father had tried and failed to find the stones, Theo suspected this was the sort of place that couldn't be found accidentally. All preparations that had to be made had been made long before they'd left home. Now they were just reaching a point, she suspected, where hesitating much longer would only dwindle her nerve rather than bolster it.

James extended a hand to her, long fingers threading with her own before they tucked their arms in together too - like they were trying to avoid being parted in a river, rather than through whatever strange web of realms and time separated them from her birthplace. They hadn't brought any rope for them to tie themselves together with, though, so it would have to do.

"On three?" she suggested.

"On three."

"One," they counted together slowly "Two…"

She knew that he was at least a bit more nervous than he'd shown when she felt how his grip tightened on her. But then their hands were touching the stone before them, and the world whirled away to nothing.


The first thing Theo did when she was next aware of, well, anything was to reach blindly for James. Whatever promises they had from Achtland, fear lingered in the back of her mind that perhaps she'd be returned to her old home and he would be left on the other side, separated forever. It turned out, though, that the fear didn't linger for long, because he'd broken her fall with his ribcage. While he often strove to be the perfect gentleman, she doubted quite a bit that it had been deliberate.

"Sorry," she winced, moving to stand just as soon as the world stopped spinning around her "Sorry."

He waved off her apologies with a wince of his own, blinking the vision back into his eyes as he sat up on his elbows, a few leaves stuck here and there to his hair and his coat.

"I can see now why you so ardently sought to prepare me," he remarked drily "I'm not sure I shall ever recover from the shock. Tell me, have you any smelling salts? I'm afraid I shall need them if we're to continue thusly."

The woods around them were pretty much entirely identical to the ones they'd just been in. A great sign all things considered.

"Smart arse," she returned the lopsided smile he offered her as she helped him to his feet.

He had a point, though - for the similarity was so extreme that she wasn't sure it had even worked at all. Further cementing the fact that this woodland was far from normal, her dad had never managed to find it himself, no matter how many instructions and recounts she gave him of how she'd done so. Because of that, he promised he would instead wait at the entrance to the walking trail. Oh, he believed her, for the fact that she was speaking to him in a dream while toting a supposedly fictional husband was quite a bit of evidence in itself, but he also swore up and down that he'd combed the entire woodland from front to back, back to front, everything, and never found anything of the like that she described - nor even her backpack.

It was the thought of her backpack that had her whirling around, eyes flitting between the roots of the trees all around. The thought was probably a hopeless one. Exposure would have long since ruined everything that the pack contained, but perhaps it would allow her to believe that they really had passed through to-

Her eyes pinpointed something amidst the roots of one of the trees to the right.

"No way," she breathed.

There sat her pack, untouched even by the moss growing on the tree it was nestled against, looking exactly as it had when she last saw it. Like there was any doubt that there was something unnatural about this place.

Kneeling by it, she pulled out the items she would have killed for back when she'd first arrived in the world she'd come to view as home. Her giant metal water bottle, her knife, her phone. It was out of battery, the screen not reacting when she pressed the 'home' button, but she was weirdly relieved for that. It would've tipped things over into being just a bit too weird.

It was funny, too, how futuristic it now looked to her eye. Back when she'd last held it, she'd regarded it as pretty old, keeping it until it was pretty much unusable out of pure principle - the case bearing the Guns n' Roses logo chipped at the edges and a few hairline scratches only just visible if she looked closely at the screen. Now it looked like something out of Star Wars, sleek and oddly flimsy in her hand.

"When you bemoaned the poor quality of the mirrors in our time, this wasn't what I pictured your being used to," James admitted, peering at it over her shoulder.

"It's not a mirror," she shook her head "Remember when I told you about phones?"

He frowned down at it with renewed interest, taking it without hesitation when she held it his way.

"This thing can contact people all over the world, create portraits, play music, puzzle out complex mathematics, provide any information, and produce light?"

There was something oddly wholesome about how the torch feature seemed to be the pinnacle of the phone's abilities in his mind.

"Just about, yeah," she straightened up, the backpack's strap in hand.

"Surely you jest," he turned it over, eyeing it with equal parts distrust and scepticism "How? Show me."

"It can't right now - it needs to be charged," she said.

"Charged?"

"Like…how a gun is useless if not loaded," she said "This needs to be loaded up with power to run on before it can be used."

"They're not all-powerful, then."

It was difficult to tell whether he viewed that as a relief, or a disappointment - he handed it back to her pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

"No. In fact, their power purposely grows weaker over time so we have to buy new ones. Then the manufacturers make more money."

James scoffed, shaking his head ruefully "I suppose it's just good business."

The noise of disgust Theo gave in response to that was utterly whole-hearted. But then she forced her mind to much happier matters.

"Come on. Let's go find my dad."

Who'd have thought she'd ever be able to say that?


There was only one figure waiting for them at the entrance of the trail. Throughout the whole walk (and the couple of wrong turns they'd taken trying to find their way out) she'd been pretty tense, waiting to have to launch herself into some explanation about LARPing if they happened across somebody - or, worse, why she bore a striking resemblance to the local girl who had gone missing a few years back. But the gods, or one in particular, must've smiled on them for they had no company other than the sun and the summer breeze.

Well. Until they spotted her dad. He sat on the old weather-beaten wooden rail next to the sign that pointed the way for the trail, his coat draped across the beam beside him, his face obscured by the cap on his head, his feet tapping impatiently. The involuntary squeak that snuck out of the back of her throat alerted him to her presence before their footsteps could.

James was already gently prying the backpack from her fingers before her dad had even fully risen to his feet, but she was barely aware of it - nor of the travel pack thumping furiously against her back as she broke into a sprint. She hardly slowed down at all when she reached him, barrelling into him with a force that might've had her feeling guilty were it not for the rib-crushing strength with which he wrapped his arms around her.

The strange little realm in which Achtland allowed them to visit - seldomly - always felt real at the time. Certainly more real than even the most vivid dream. If James couldn't corroborate her tales of the visits there, how real they felt would be her only piece of certainty that it wasn't just wishful thinking on her brain's behalf. But even that was no match for this. It was daft, too, because even when her arms began to ache from clinging so hard, and even though she knew they had weeks together, it took a long time before she could bring herself to let go and trust that it wouldn't all just vanish when she did.

She wasn't alone in that, though. Even once she forced her grip to loosen, his did not for several moments after. And she wasn't the only one with tears in her eyes when she stepped back.

"Christ, when did we become criers?" she sniffed, shaking her head and picking up his cap from where it had fallen.

"Around the same time you started gallivantin' through centuries, I think," he shook his head and plopped the cap down atop her head when she handed it to him "This was for you. Bit of disguise while we get ready to break the news. I was going to bring Groucho Marx glasses, too, but it seemed a bit much."

All Theo could do was laugh, bowing her head and adjusting the cap. She'd missed him so much.

James hung back during the exchange, smiling just the slightest bit awkwardly when her dad finally pulled back and greeted him with a hand-shake and a 'macho' hug.

"It's good to see you again," her dad said.

"I'm pleased we were able to come, sir - that it was possible," James nodded, his slight nerves only visible to Theo because of how well she knew him.

They showed themselves primarily in how his already stellar posture suddenly ramped itself up to eleven, his shoulders squared in a way that must've been painful, his back ramrod straight.

"What d'ye think of the place, then?" her dad stepped back, patting him on the arm and then regarding the rural landscape around them "And we'll be having no more of that sir nonsense. Theo'll never allow it."

"It's a fair country, we travelled to Ireland some time ago after…well, as a honeymoon."

"They haven't been invented yet back home," Theo chimed in, moving to stand by James' side and tucking a hand into the crook of his arm out of instinct "Had to do some explaining on that account."

The way his hand came up to press over her knuckles was likely just as subconscious.

"I'm glad you like it - but I was talking about the other thing," her dad cracked a small smile.

Evidently he was impressed that James hadn't fallen to his knees and lost his mind over the sight of a nearby streetlamp. But hey, maybe he'd struggle after dark once it was turned on.

"I…expected the change to be far more of a drastic one," he admitted, eyes flickering towards the smooth, black nearby road "I see a few oddities, but nothing that is so unrecognisable from what I have known."

As if sent to challenge his claim, Theo shifted her weight from one foot to the other as she heard an engine in the distance - the engine of a car. Christ, had they always been so loud? It was mad to think she'd once been so used to it that she'd barely notice them at all, even in the middle of big cities. She ignored the temptation to look at it, putting her head down instead, not wanting to be seen or noticed until she blended in a bit more, until they'd put their ridiculous story out there. But James was moving far more quickly than she was, straightening the arm she'd curled her fingers around, planting a hand at her hip and pushing her behind him, the other hand trailing towards the dirk at his hip.

Before she could even begin explaining, she caught her dad's eye - and saw the approval shining there.

"You can't be drawing that," he said quickly, looking to James "Not unless you want your first impression of this time to come from a gaol. It'll do you no good against a car, anyway."

"A…?" he echoed.

"A car," she repeated - in an English accent that wasn't even the slightest bit mocking "I've told you about them. The metal carriages - self-propelled."

"They move with such haste," he commented, staring in the direction it had vanished into, now long-gone.

"That one was actually going too slow," her dad said "We'll have to work up to getting you onto the motorway, I think. Come on, I'll show you mine. We could walk home, but we can't risk being seen just yet. Not before we're ready to put the word out…and not before we've got you both into some, er, explainable clothes."

James was magnanimous enough to not look offended by that.

Her and her dad were still due their moment, she knew that - and she knew he knew it, too. Years of separation and mourning couldn't be undone by one hug. But if James bemoaned her knack for burying her emotions and hiding them beneath jokes, her dad was worse for it because that was where she'd learned it. The true extent of their feelings over all that had happened wouldn't come out in public, nor when he was still taking measure of his new son-in-law…and probably not until they had a few strong drinks in them.

The car might as well have been a spaceship when they approached it, parked on its own on a small dead end dirt road that acted as an impromptu car park for the few who hiked around down here. The silver colour did little to dampen the futuristic look of the thing, and she hovered patiently beside it as James made his inspection.

"How does one get inside of the thing?" he asked slowly.

"Ah, the famous James Norrington chat-up line," she sighed with mock wistfulness.

She'd used that particular, very stupid, joke often enough for him to understand her meaning, and it earned her a supremely unimpressed look…once he'd shot an alarmed glance in the direction of her dad to make sure he hadn't heard.

"I see you've learned that the best way of combating her is with silence," her dad disproved the impression that he hadn't heard.

"Theodora takes silence as a challenge, when offered by the right person."

"In which case I taught her well."

Theo decided she was mostly okay with being ganged up on by the two of them if it meant that they were bonding successfully.

"These things are handles, see," she pulled at the fairly thin, silver handle that protruded from the door "The doors are pretty heavy, so be careful. Here - you should take the front. Get the full experience. I'll sit in the back, it's easier for me to avoid being seen that way."

Her first instinct was to suggest they both sit in the back, but he wouldn't thank her if she spent this whole trip infantilising him and trying to hold his hand through every little thing. Plus, if he sat up front he was less likely to get car sick. That last bit was something she kept to herself, though, not wanting to jinx anything. It was a short drive, he'd lived on the seas, it would be fine.

James proved himself to be a fairly natural car door opener, the only hiccup being his surprise at how heavy the doors really were - and a brief interlude in which he peered at the mechanism that made the handle work in the first place. Theo waited until he ducked down to sit inside (visibly unimpressed with the awkward motions it required, and the insufficient leg room his height left him with) to climb into the back. The seatbelt took another moment, but she spent it marvelling at how subconscious all of it would have been to her back in the day, done without even noticing.

As her dad took up the very cheerful task of explaining the point of the seatbelt (and then reassuring James that crashes were hardly a given), Theo slumped down in the back seat, peeking out at her old home from beneath her cap.

She was glad to be visiting…but she had a feeling there would be no readying them for all that would unfold amongst their loved ones once they trotted out their story of her miraculous survival.


A/N: Tumblr - esta-elavaris