He doesn't buy just any swords anymore.

There are none more perfectly balanced than Will Turner's. None of truer, stronger steel and more elegant craftsmanship. The other smiths of Port Royal and all the vicinity have tried to imitate the young man's technique, but their forges only produce poor forgeries of Turner's art.

The blacksmith's shop is a dizzying arsenal—Will fashions swords at a startling rate, and though he now has a fiance, he still creates instruments of death by the day.

He said once that he hoped Will would show the same care with Elizabeth that he did with his precious swords, and his careful questions as to her health and happiness always ease his mind. She has chosen the man she loved, and he loves her.

Will asks his own careful questions. He inquires as to the hunt for Jack Sparrow, perhaps knowing that it is the only thing that has given James Norrington any sense of purpose in the past year and perhaps out of personal interest. Perhaps even both.

The hunt progresses as it always has—hardly at all.

Norrington loves the sound of folded steel as it cuts through the air almost as much as he despises the feeling of it cutting into flesh. Law should be clean. Law shouldn't be marred with collateral damage. It shouldn't be impossible to tell the screams of one's men from the screams of one's enemies.

Shouldn't be impossible to tell whether he pursues from a sense of duty or from his own personal interest.

Have you ever really had a conversation with Jack?

When he talks with Will, however briefly, he has the sense that the boy loves his work with all the devotion he does not save for Elizabeth... and he feels a strange kinship with the boy. He would have loved her in the same way—with only part of his heart, and though that part was full of real love, the other part was older and surer and in love with his work.

And there is another strange parallel that surfaces in their every conversation: wherever their love lies, their minds are forever following the pirate across the waves.

On some rare occasions, I have been so perversely curious.

No other has forged Will more totally. Once, he was upstanding. Law-abiding. Brave, but never reckless. Now he does as he likes, with only his own moral code as law. James is thankful that the boy's morality has not been skewed as well.

Will is a sword that Jack Sparrow uses against him even from a distance.

He is a good man, Commodore Norrington.

And what of himself? What is he, that bridges the gap between pirate and blacksmith? He is nothing more than a lifeline, an assurance in that he is still taut with frustration.

If much-given to following metaphors to their logical conclusion, he might wonder if Will isn't using him to slowly pull Jack in.

Perhaps he is. But that does not offer him immunity from law.

They are never long conversations, and happen seldom. Just the space of time between entry, the sharpening of a sword or the purchasing of it, and departure. But both of them notice that the conversations are gradually less about Elizabeth.

Good day, Mr. Turner. Send my regards to her.

On the day that a customs official reveals that the white-sailed "Portuguese" vessel that had just left the harbor was the Black Pearl masquerading, Will is gone.

Elizabeth swears that she doesn't know where her husband is, but her mouth betrays the words it puts forth. She smiles too much for a woman abandoned. She knows that Will Turner is on the sea.

And at this point Norrington realizes how wrong he was.

Will was his lifeline.

And James is made to play the sword.

+ + + + +

James Norrington has spoken with Sparrow on occasion. The man, he has come to realize, is entirely unscrupulous. He trades the whereabouts of other pirates for his own freedom and would certainly trade more if that alone didn't suffice.

A good man?

A good fighter. One who knows when he can't win and forges on when he thinks he has the barest chance.

But a good man?

Not one who abides by any rules but his own.

Is he or is he not a good man?

Captain Sparrow still has a lot of slag to him... but just as he has forged Will, he can, perhaps, be forged in turn. Under the slag, there is true steel.

He will not follow this time.

...Perhaps it is personal interest, after all.

+ + + + +

He has never rested in the rafters. Never sat with his legs dangling over the emptiness and talked as naturally as if he were on the ground. It was different from rigging—when up the mast, one had a task and a purpose. When sitting over the forge, one could admit no purpose but perversity. And that is why he remains on the ground as he converses with the pair.

He does not miss the way the pi—privateer (for he has a pardon and a Letter of Marque now, at Will's insistence) ostentatiously does not notice how high he sits, standing for emphasis or lying on a beam as the mood strikes him. Nor does he miss the covert affection in all of those histrionics. Nor the disheveled look that he has never seen to Will before.

Will has forged Jack Sparrow, but in the process has been shaped himself.

And James can only think of Elizabeth. Once, Will had loved her with half of his heart—how much is hers now? The pair may yet marry, but Will's memories will always have a snag like an ill-formed blade's, because he is imperfect and no time will grind that imperfection to smoothness.

In his sorrow for Elizabeth, as with his heart, though, he cannot allocate all of it to her. He saves the smallest part (but the largest he will allow) for himself. After all, hasn't Will once again taken a heart before he could try his fitness for it?

Will, who would never give Elizabeth more than part of his heart though she gives him all of hers.

Jack, who colludes in corruption and in whom legality cannot mask immorality.

And James himself, who can't even discern the line between good and bad anymore.

James begins to think that he has never known a purely good man—that all who seemed good at their cores have some great imperfection that cannot be melted away.

A man can be forged, but his goodness is a forgery.