the strangest moving patterns
Mar. 13th, 2004 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zarahemlaHere we gooooo... the Norrington ficathon assignment. It's for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
circe_tigana, who wanted Jack/James/Elizabeth but with no sex (thank goodness). I apologize most mightily to you, Circe, if this isn't what you wanted, but oh, if you only knew how many times I rewrote it, you would forgive me.
(thanks also tosilveraspen for the read-through)
title: the strangest moving patterns
author: zara hemla (shutupmulder@yahoo.com)
site: http://if.lightquencher.net/
rating: pg-13
fandom: pirates of the caribbean
summary: one year later, a meeting.
one-half: love is hell
This is what she might have done: forgotten the white dress and the veil, the sharp trap that is marriage. Flung open the window to the Caribbean breeze. Spread out her arms and lain on the blond island sand, bottle of rum in hand, and never set those trees on fire.
one: calm down, calm down, calm down
Elizabeth is a quixote. She likes to tilt at windmills, sail into the face of the storm. She smiles at strangers to see what they'll do. Will looks down at his toes when he walks, unless he sees someone he has sold a sword to, and then he gives them a forced smile and shoves his hand into his pockets and scuffs his toes.
At her father's parties, he hangs at the edge of the crowd and will not dance unless forced. Half of it is his hyperawareness of his social station, but the other half is just that inward nature. She realises, now they have been married almost a year, that the only reason he gets customers is because of his prodigious talent.
In his workshop, Will is knowledgeable and his hands move quickly to find the right tool or to stroke the donkey's nose lovingly. In bed, he is rather knowledgeable too, and he strokes her rather more deliberately. He can set her hotter than any forge when it is just the two of them. But in public, he never even holds her hand. He calls her "Mrs. Turner" in the most Elizabethan manner possible. And he's always starched stiff.
Almost a whole year later, she is not sure whether Private Will can make up for Public Will. She has hopes that she can change him. She isn't sure. She doesn't know what to do. It is two weeks before their anniversary. She has an appointment to keep and she doesn't know how to tell him that she doesn't want him there.
Jack had said she could bring him. "Go on and bring your sweetheart," he'd said in his note. "More's more fun." But she doesn't want to. It is perhaps the last thing she will do that reminds her of the old days. And she doesn't miss them. Much.
She settles for a note, two pages long with hearts hand-inked around the border. At four in the morning, when he goes to the forge, she dresses simply, takes her portmaneau, and walks down to the dock, whistling and swinging her bag. The Port-Au-Prince is waiting in the harbor and they've agreed to drop her off at the island and come back for her in a day. It cost a substantial amount of gold, but she has gold. What she needs, what she has none of, is excitement.
On the gangplank, she turns and stares back at the forge, hoping the note will suffice. He has never been really angry at her before.
Oh well, she thinks. If he must feel something, let it be anger. Perhaps it will change him. Or me.
one and a half: this place is inconvenient
This is what he might have done: in that bar in Tortuga, when the Commodore broke down the door, he could have smiled instead of brawling. Sat him down and medicated the pain in his eyes with kisses. Licked the salt from his teeth.
two: would you lay here for awhile
The palm trees are growing back, Jack thinks as he lies on his back in the soft sand. He's been many places but, outside of the deck of the Pearl, this one is the most beautiful. He feels sorry for all those poor buggers trapped back in England or America, trying to tie a half-hitch while their hands are freezing off. Why bother, when even the hardest Caribbean rain eases off to beautiful sunlight?
Aye, there was malaria, and his second mate's wife had died last month from yellow fever. And sometimes a coconut could drop on your head. But all in all... not a bad way to go.
Some people might disagree, but Jack's been dead -- or at least undead -- and while there's something to be said for being able to walk underwater, there's more to be said for feeling the sand under you and apples you can bite around. Barbossa could've backed up that statement, if he hadn't been et by the fishes. Better to be alive and mortal than cursed.
Jack chuckles to himself, remembering Barbossa and those damned apples. He's half foxed already, two thirds of the way into a squatty brown bottle of homemade rum, but not foxed enough that the arrival of the Port-Au-Prince escapes him. He squints and yes, there she is, being rowed to shore by two bemused midshipmen.
They beach a quarter of a mile away and she hops out of the boat with a small bag. She is wearing a white shirt and brown breeches and the sailors look wildly scandalized. One of the middies stands up and points back toward the ship, saying something obviously useless, because Elizabeth shakes her head wildly and flounces away from them into the trees. The two of them look at each other, shrug, and begin rowing back to the ship. Jack grins. Trust her to put them in their places.
It takes her awhile to find him because he doesn't move or call out. In fact, he tips his hat down over his eyes and stares out over the ocean, listening to her call and call for him. When she finally stumbles over him, she is very annoyed and uses her Princess tone to ask him where the hell he's been hiding all this time.
He grins at her from under the hat and says, "Right here, love." Which makes her blow her hair out of her eyes, stomp her feet, and then burst out laughing.
"I came all this way!" she says.
To which he replies, "Want some rum?"
"I believe I shall," she smiles, and she sits down on the beach next to him.
"How's being married?" he asks her halfway through the rest of the bottle. She is curled up around her suitcase, watching the sun go down.
"It's like having a fur coat," she says. Squints at him. "A really nice one."
"Love, you lost me a long time ago." He watches the long line of her neck as she tips her head, gold hair falling away.
"'S, you know, smooth on one side, and, well, really rough on the other. You know?" She looks so earnest that he feels he has to say something.
"O'course, darlin'."
And then her eyes go past him and widen, catching the sun's last orange rays. "What's HE doing here?" She sounds aggrieved and Jack turns his lazy gaze to the small dinghy approaching, rowed by two of His Majesty's finest bluecoats.
"Oh, I invited him."
"You WHAT?"
Jack laughs out loud then, throwing his head back and really crowing at the sky. She watches with her eyebrows pulled down over the bridge of her nose and a little frown on her face. When he finishes laughing and stands up to wave Norrington over, she asks prissily, "What was that for?"
He smiles again, showing all his teeth and looking down into that mobile, mercurial face. "This isn't your island, love."
two and a half: taking bullets for the team
This is what he might have done: held her to her promise. Forced her into love or something near it. Or, failing that, he might have held Sparrow's wrist longer, feeling the military drumbeats of a pirate's pulse, then examined that tattoo and then all the rest: become the cartographer of Sparrow's life.
three. we'll burn this town
When James wakes, he is breathing in muslin, and with a shock he realises that he's burrowed his head nearly into Sparrow's armpit. It's disconcerting -- not because he hasn't slept near another man before, he's a sodding sailor, but because with the choice of all those miles of beach *and* Mrs. Bloody Turner lying fetchingly on his other side, he'd unconsciously rolled into the clutches of a pirate captain.
Sparrow's hand is lying loosely on his head as if giving benediction, and James likes the weight of it enough that he just lays there, blinking, for a few minutes.
The forces of their personalities had been enough to make Elizabeth unwind a bit in the darkness, with a fire going and some food from Sparrow's capacious larder. The man had brought salted ham and bread and pineapple, and James had felt guilty for not thinking of food but had eaten it willingly enough, watching Jack fold up his meat into tiny squares and Elizabeth lick her fingers.
She had told a long rambling story about a time in England, when she was a girl, that she found a cave in a cliff and explored it. Apparently there hadn't been much of anything in there, but she made it sound like an adventure. James can hardly recall England now, he has been away so long. With a pang he had remembered the cool rain of it and the grey clouds, the long fields stretching out before the crowded cities.
He had asked quietly, when she was done, whether they ever felt like exiles from their homeland. Elizabeth had looked surprised and said that the Caribbean was so much nicer than England. "After all," she'd said, and rather thoughtfully too, "women have more freedom here than there."
James's eyes had met Sparrow's over her head and they probably had shared the same thought -- rich women have freedom everywhere. But Jack had broken the eye contact and laughed.
"I'll warrant that no fine lady from England would be consorting with a thief like me on an island like this."
"And I'd be arresting you," James remembers saying, half-laughing and watching Elizabeth watch him with a puzzled look on her face. Hadn't she ever seen him laugh before? If not, it was high time.
"I laugh. I laugh a lot," he mutters under his breath, forgetting where he is, and then he feels Sparrow's fingers flexing in his hair.
"Regular jester you are, Commodore. You'd joke at a hanging."
In spite of the alcoholic evening, James's head is clear enough to appreciate Sparrow's wry tone. "I'd joke at yours."
"You'd like a rope around my neck, wouldn't you?" One of the fingers loops a strand of hair and tugs.
"Beware, pirate."
Sparrow lets go, levers himself up onto his elbows, and shakes his head. "I think it's a palm tree that's going to have to beware." As he stands up, Norrington rolls over and sees Elizabeth sitting up, watching him speculatively.
"You aren't wearing your wig," she says.
"I left it with my good uniform." Norrington hears Jack go crashing through the tall dry grass with more force than finesse. Elizabeth -- Mrs. Turner -- has not stopped watching him.
It has been a year since she stood on the beach at Port Royal with her white dress streaming in the wind. James can't pretend that he hadn't spent months of nights sitting in his barracks, wondering why he wasn't good enough. And further, what made her such a catch that he had to be good enough for it.
He wants to ask her if she's happy, and he hates himself for it, but all the same. He loved her once. He loves some things about her still: her burnt caramel eyes; that pointed, determined chin; the way she needs no compliments but still seems to earn them.
"Did you tell him you were coming here?" he asks finally. She opens her mouth to tell a half-truth, he is sure, and closes it again, and shrugs.
"I left a note."
"Why didn't you bring him with you?"
She smiles at him then, a large Elizabeth-of-yore smile. "Why didn't you bring your wig?"
Maybe the heartache will always be there in one form or another. But James feels satisfied this morning, as if something has shaken loose in him and been blown out to sea while he slept. This regret, this shallow scrape, he can keep. He is mended.
Out of the blinding white sunrise, he hears Jack crashing back toward him, singing an old soldier's song at the top of his lungs, and James smiles at the woman he loved once, climbs to his feet, and joins in.
three and a half: and it's over / when it's over
There is a point when "maybe" ceases to gratify, when the past is put away in a drawer like an old coin, to be brought out when needed. On a day when the sea stretches its horizon further, two men and a woman take ship, but do not separate: they sail to the future. They will meet again.
--end--
Notes: All section titles from Ryan Adams's "Love Is Hell" parts 1&2
title: "F**k the Universe"
.5: "Love Is Hell"
1: "This House Is Not For Sale"
1.5: "Political Scientist"
2: "Please Do Not Let Me Go"
2.5 "City Rain, City Streets"
3: "World War 24"
3.5 "Avalanche"
circe_tigana, who wanted Jack/James/Elizabeth but with no sex (thank goodness). I apologize most mightily to you, Circe, if this isn't what you wanted, but oh, if you only knew how many times I rewrote it, you would forgive me.(thanks also to
silveraspen for the read-through)title: the strangest moving patterns
author: zara hemla (shutupmulder@yahoo.com)
site: http://if.lightquencher.net/
rating: pg-13
fandom: pirates of the caribbean
summary: one year later, a meeting.
one-half: love is hell
This is what she might have done: forgotten the white dress and the veil, the sharp trap that is marriage. Flung open the window to the Caribbean breeze. Spread out her arms and lain on the blond island sand, bottle of rum in hand, and never set those trees on fire.
one: calm down, calm down, calm down
Elizabeth is a quixote. She likes to tilt at windmills, sail into the face of the storm. She smiles at strangers to see what they'll do. Will looks down at his toes when he walks, unless he sees someone he has sold a sword to, and then he gives them a forced smile and shoves his hand into his pockets and scuffs his toes.
At her father's parties, he hangs at the edge of the crowd and will not dance unless forced. Half of it is his hyperawareness of his social station, but the other half is just that inward nature. She realises, now they have been married almost a year, that the only reason he gets customers is because of his prodigious talent.
In his workshop, Will is knowledgeable and his hands move quickly to find the right tool or to stroke the donkey's nose lovingly. In bed, he is rather knowledgeable too, and he strokes her rather more deliberately. He can set her hotter than any forge when it is just the two of them. But in public, he never even holds her hand. He calls her "Mrs. Turner" in the most Elizabethan manner possible. And he's always starched stiff.
Almost a whole year later, she is not sure whether Private Will can make up for Public Will. She has hopes that she can change him. She isn't sure. She doesn't know what to do. It is two weeks before their anniversary. She has an appointment to keep and she doesn't know how to tell him that she doesn't want him there.
Jack had said she could bring him. "Go on and bring your sweetheart," he'd said in his note. "More's more fun." But she doesn't want to. It is perhaps the last thing she will do that reminds her of the old days. And she doesn't miss them. Much.
She settles for a note, two pages long with hearts hand-inked around the border. At four in the morning, when he goes to the forge, she dresses simply, takes her portmaneau, and walks down to the dock, whistling and swinging her bag. The Port-Au-Prince is waiting in the harbor and they've agreed to drop her off at the island and come back for her in a day. It cost a substantial amount of gold, but she has gold. What she needs, what she has none of, is excitement.
On the gangplank, she turns and stares back at the forge, hoping the note will suffice. He has never been really angry at her before.
Oh well, she thinks. If he must feel something, let it be anger. Perhaps it will change him. Or me.
one and a half: this place is inconvenient
This is what he might have done: in that bar in Tortuga, when the Commodore broke down the door, he could have smiled instead of brawling. Sat him down and medicated the pain in his eyes with kisses. Licked the salt from his teeth.
two: would you lay here for awhile
The palm trees are growing back, Jack thinks as he lies on his back in the soft sand. He's been many places but, outside of the deck of the Pearl, this one is the most beautiful. He feels sorry for all those poor buggers trapped back in England or America, trying to tie a half-hitch while their hands are freezing off. Why bother, when even the hardest Caribbean rain eases off to beautiful sunlight?
Aye, there was malaria, and his second mate's wife had died last month from yellow fever. And sometimes a coconut could drop on your head. But all in all... not a bad way to go.
Some people might disagree, but Jack's been dead -- or at least undead -- and while there's something to be said for being able to walk underwater, there's more to be said for feeling the sand under you and apples you can bite around. Barbossa could've backed up that statement, if he hadn't been et by the fishes. Better to be alive and mortal than cursed.
Jack chuckles to himself, remembering Barbossa and those damned apples. He's half foxed already, two thirds of the way into a squatty brown bottle of homemade rum, but not foxed enough that the arrival of the Port-Au-Prince escapes him. He squints and yes, there she is, being rowed to shore by two bemused midshipmen.
They beach a quarter of a mile away and she hops out of the boat with a small bag. She is wearing a white shirt and brown breeches and the sailors look wildly scandalized. One of the middies stands up and points back toward the ship, saying something obviously useless, because Elizabeth shakes her head wildly and flounces away from them into the trees. The two of them look at each other, shrug, and begin rowing back to the ship. Jack grins. Trust her to put them in their places.
It takes her awhile to find him because he doesn't move or call out. In fact, he tips his hat down over his eyes and stares out over the ocean, listening to her call and call for him. When she finally stumbles over him, she is very annoyed and uses her Princess tone to ask him where the hell he's been hiding all this time.
He grins at her from under the hat and says, "Right here, love." Which makes her blow her hair out of her eyes, stomp her feet, and then burst out laughing.
"I came all this way!" she says.
To which he replies, "Want some rum?"
"I believe I shall," she smiles, and she sits down on the beach next to him.
"How's being married?" he asks her halfway through the rest of the bottle. She is curled up around her suitcase, watching the sun go down.
"It's like having a fur coat," she says. Squints at him. "A really nice one."
"Love, you lost me a long time ago." He watches the long line of her neck as she tips her head, gold hair falling away.
"'S, you know, smooth on one side, and, well, really rough on the other. You know?" She looks so earnest that he feels he has to say something.
"O'course, darlin'."
And then her eyes go past him and widen, catching the sun's last orange rays. "What's HE doing here?" She sounds aggrieved and Jack turns his lazy gaze to the small dinghy approaching, rowed by two of His Majesty's finest bluecoats.
"Oh, I invited him."
"You WHAT?"
Jack laughs out loud then, throwing his head back and really crowing at the sky. She watches with her eyebrows pulled down over the bridge of her nose and a little frown on her face. When he finishes laughing and stands up to wave Norrington over, she asks prissily, "What was that for?"
He smiles again, showing all his teeth and looking down into that mobile, mercurial face. "This isn't your island, love."
two and a half: taking bullets for the team
This is what he might have done: held her to her promise. Forced her into love or something near it. Or, failing that, he might have held Sparrow's wrist longer, feeling the military drumbeats of a pirate's pulse, then examined that tattoo and then all the rest: become the cartographer of Sparrow's life.
three. we'll burn this town
When James wakes, he is breathing in muslin, and with a shock he realises that he's burrowed his head nearly into Sparrow's armpit. It's disconcerting -- not because he hasn't slept near another man before, he's a sodding sailor, but because with the choice of all those miles of beach *and* Mrs. Bloody Turner lying fetchingly on his other side, he'd unconsciously rolled into the clutches of a pirate captain.
Sparrow's hand is lying loosely on his head as if giving benediction, and James likes the weight of it enough that he just lays there, blinking, for a few minutes.
The forces of their personalities had been enough to make Elizabeth unwind a bit in the darkness, with a fire going and some food from Sparrow's capacious larder. The man had brought salted ham and bread and pineapple, and James had felt guilty for not thinking of food but had eaten it willingly enough, watching Jack fold up his meat into tiny squares and Elizabeth lick her fingers.
She had told a long rambling story about a time in England, when she was a girl, that she found a cave in a cliff and explored it. Apparently there hadn't been much of anything in there, but she made it sound like an adventure. James can hardly recall England now, he has been away so long. With a pang he had remembered the cool rain of it and the grey clouds, the long fields stretching out before the crowded cities.
He had asked quietly, when she was done, whether they ever felt like exiles from their homeland. Elizabeth had looked surprised and said that the Caribbean was so much nicer than England. "After all," she'd said, and rather thoughtfully too, "women have more freedom here than there."
James's eyes had met Sparrow's over her head and they probably had shared the same thought -- rich women have freedom everywhere. But Jack had broken the eye contact and laughed.
"I'll warrant that no fine lady from England would be consorting with a thief like me on an island like this."
"And I'd be arresting you," James remembers saying, half-laughing and watching Elizabeth watch him with a puzzled look on her face. Hadn't she ever seen him laugh before? If not, it was high time.
"I laugh. I laugh a lot," he mutters under his breath, forgetting where he is, and then he feels Sparrow's fingers flexing in his hair.
"Regular jester you are, Commodore. You'd joke at a hanging."
In spite of the alcoholic evening, James's head is clear enough to appreciate Sparrow's wry tone. "I'd joke at yours."
"You'd like a rope around my neck, wouldn't you?" One of the fingers loops a strand of hair and tugs.
"Beware, pirate."
Sparrow lets go, levers himself up onto his elbows, and shakes his head. "I think it's a palm tree that's going to have to beware." As he stands up, Norrington rolls over and sees Elizabeth sitting up, watching him speculatively.
"You aren't wearing your wig," she says.
"I left it with my good uniform." Norrington hears Jack go crashing through the tall dry grass with more force than finesse. Elizabeth -- Mrs. Turner -- has not stopped watching him.
It has been a year since she stood on the beach at Port Royal with her white dress streaming in the wind. James can't pretend that he hadn't spent months of nights sitting in his barracks, wondering why he wasn't good enough. And further, what made her such a catch that he had to be good enough for it.
He wants to ask her if she's happy, and he hates himself for it, but all the same. He loved her once. He loves some things about her still: her burnt caramel eyes; that pointed, determined chin; the way she needs no compliments but still seems to earn them.
"Did you tell him you were coming here?" he asks finally. She opens her mouth to tell a half-truth, he is sure, and closes it again, and shrugs.
"I left a note."
"Why didn't you bring him with you?"
She smiles at him then, a large Elizabeth-of-yore smile. "Why didn't you bring your wig?"
Maybe the heartache will always be there in one form or another. But James feels satisfied this morning, as if something has shaken loose in him and been blown out to sea while he slept. This regret, this shallow scrape, he can keep. He is mended.
Out of the blinding white sunrise, he hears Jack crashing back toward him, singing an old soldier's song at the top of his lungs, and James smiles at the woman he loved once, climbs to his feet, and joins in.
three and a half: and it's over / when it's over
There is a point when "maybe" ceases to gratify, when the past is put away in a drawer like an old coin, to be brought out when needed. On a day when the sea stretches its horizon further, two men and a woman take ship, but do not separate: they sail to the future. They will meet again.
--end--
Notes: All section titles from Ryan Adams's "Love Is Hell" parts 1&2
title: "F**k the Universe"
.5: "Love Is Hell"
1: "This House Is Not For Sale"
1.5: "Political Scientist"
2: "Please Do Not Let Me Go"
2.5 "City Rain, City Streets"
3: "World War 24"
3.5 "Avalanche"