Jack is elated. The spokes of the Pearl's wheel are smooth in his one palm, and in the other he holds a bottle of rum. Lovely rum, fine rum, free rum. They've found a whole supply of it on another of these otherwise dreadful little islands. Cheerfully, he pulls the cork out with his teeth and guzzles a giant swallow.

He reels. He wrenches at the wheel and pulls them off course before righting himself. He spits across the whole quarterdeck, making choking noises. And, not to forget, he swears. Loudly and fervently. "Bleedin' hell! What sort of swill's that?"

Amidst the obscenities, he bellows for the course to be set for Cuba, to restock. Because they have casks and casks and casks of rum, but it's all the same swill that tastes of bilge water.

He continues to curse, does so all day, because with the current calm, it'll take them days until they can get a new supply.

He's still cursing when he makes his way down in the brig, and, unsurprisingly, it makes his captive grin widely, the green eyes sparkling.

"'tis bad enough yer throwing all the folks with the good drink out of business and keeping the prices high, but laughing 'bout this vile stuff is dreadful! If I'd known that, I certainly wouldn't've shared me good, perfectly fine grog supplies with ye!"

That bloody Navy bastard seems no less amused, on the contrary, the aristocratic countenance, faintly bruised from a bit of suppressed struggling, is hiding a chuckle.

"On the contrary, Sparrow. I find it most hilarious that it was you who found the soiled rum. I had already thought it lost to the deep."

Jack's eyes widen, and he grabs Norrington's collar through the bars and hauls him up against them. "Ye know of this... this... this..." He is shaking the Commodore wildly, at loss for words. He is too upset to even correct the omission of his title.

And Norrington grins again, even wider. "Rum thinned with bilge water? Yes. It was my idea." And the damned bastard says it as though he's proud of it!

"Your idea? Yer the devil! Who'd do such a dreadful thing? And ye call me a criminal!"

Norrington seems not daunted in the least by Jack's hands still on his collar and dreadfully close to his throat, clenching and unclenching. "It is efficient, Sparrow. It is one matter to find a hidden stash of a smuggler. Another entirely to sacrifice the means to wait until he can be caught, getting it away. You have little idea how helpful a sailor can be in pinpointing a smuggler if he feels he has been cheated with badly watered rum."

Jack gasps for air like a fish. "You... you... you... bloody pirate!" Norrington only laughs.

Jack has to admit he looks quite fetching like that, amused and without that bloody wig. Not to mention that, unlike other people, Jack acts drunk when he's in fact sober, and he thinks shocking the good Commodore is the least he can do in payback.

So he doesn't punch or kick—which he suspects would make Norrington even more smug, but instead shoves the second arm through the bars and hauls the Navyman close for a kiss.

It seems quite reasonable that this would discomfit Norrington far more than a beating.

However, just as poisoning the rum—and really, putting bilges water into it counts as poisoning—is dreadfully unreasonable, Norrington apparently seems to like being unpredictable, because he parts his lips and moans into the kiss, his hand yanking Jack's head close, the other groping lower.

Norrington isn't bad, but Jack's been a pickpocket before he could walk, and he catches the hand trying to take the keys from his belt.

Not that Norrington couldn't have them, Jack thinks with a sparkle in his own eyes, worrying the cut in his lips from the probably unplanned bite.

He's definitely planning on getting that cell open now, after all.