"Sparrow is...?"

"Below, sir. Waiting in your day cabin, where we left him."

Norrington sincerely doubted Jack Sparrow would stay where anyone left him for long, and he was, of course, quite correct in his assumption. Jack was nowhere to be seen in the day cabin. There was no way to conceal anything in the deluge of sunlight dodging off the water and through the stern gallery, especially given the furnishings, for which 'spare' would be a generous description at any time. A single visual sweep would have found anything that may have been out of place. Norrington checked under the table, just in case. No Jack. He paced the cabin's length a few times out of habit, then headed to his sleeping quarters.

Norrington sighed and methodically tugged the knots and loops of his cravat. It was ungodly hot topside... and no better below decks, either. The sun still dumped through and sprawled in fiery boxes over the planks, but down here the air was heavy and stagnant as well, even despite the open gallery. Norrington found himself completely unwinding his cravat, then reaching up to unpin his wig, squinting an eye shut when a drop of sweat laced with wig powder raced past it.

Wig and hat came off in one practiced swoop, perched on the chest of drawers, and were about to be joined by the coat when something in the cabin coughed. James paused thoughtfully, collar and lapels hanging about his elbows, then continued to remove his coat and spread it over the back of the chair. He smoothed and straightened it until not even the slightest of anomalies remained in the deep blue broadcloth, and only then did he turn around, with no particular urgency to his step.

"Well, well, well," he said, with a languid liquidity in his voice and step that he only felt spiked through with fever. "Jack Sparrow, isn't it?" A slow smile curled around his lips and he leaned over the cot, placing a hand on the top of each wooden side. Jack lay in the box of a cot posed like a dead man, with his legs stiff, eyes shut, and hands folded one over the other just atop his navel. James leaned down into his ear. "And whatever happened to 'silent as the grave'?" Jack's eye betrayed him and cracked open, and he gave a minor shrug. James' smile only grew sleeker. "You would tell me, then, that you tried your best, and that what happened just now was involuntary." Jack gave a twitch that was meant to be a nod, and James pretended to think.

Just as he finished a quiet, "Well..." there was a soft sharp whisper, a streak of motion from beneath him, and a row of buttons flew off James' waistcoat, each shine of brass shooting off to take refuge in another corner of the cabin or crack or snarl in the planking. He jerked back, startled, and pressed his palms possessively down the white and gold-laced front, now falling open. An instant and a dark growl later, James' face was hairsbreadths above Jack's, their noses aligning, breath mingling hotly as Jack's mouth fell open in lust long-deferred and Norrington panted at him in anger and harsh desire. "Don't ever do that," he said, voice as quiet as treachery, and slowly pressed his hand up Jack's forearm, wrist, the back of his hand. With a slow, hard, oozing caress, he slipped his fingers in between Jack's... and wrenched the knife out of his grasp. Threw it to the side, where it clanked and skidded, and finally stopped with a tired thump against the bulwark.

Jack swallowed noticeably, and James' eyes followed the bob to a fault. A split second, enough for Jack to lose his breath, and James dove in, mouth falling on the tender silken ridges in voracious waves of lips, teeth, and tongue. Jack stretched his head back and gasped without opening his throat, impossibly deepening the hollow at the base while his mouth gaped uselessly and his eyes pressed shut. James chuckled against him in a thick, black way, and Jack's eyes rolled and he went limp except for a heaving chest. James took the opportunity, and the happy incidence of long fingers, to tangle both Jack's narrow wrists up in one hand and raise them above his head, pressing into the top edge of the cot. Jack squirmed and bit his lip, aching terribly for those beautiful long legs that seemed to him so far away, but made no sound.

Silent as the grave. James kissed Jack's bitten lip in a plaudit for his success thus far and then continued over his chin, past his beard, down his neck, at the same time reaching to pull a mahogany-handled knife from where he knew it was nestled in Jack's boot. He lifted his head and eyed the blade, then Jack, grinning in an inexplicably giddy fashion when sparks of terror leapt into Jack's eyes, followed by heavy lust. "It would have been for your clothes, if anything." James traced the tip down Jack's thigh to his knee and back up again, and then lifted it to outline the open V of his perpetually unfastened shirt. "But then, this is your only set of clothes..." He tossed that knife away as well, and it hit the first one with a commiserative clatter. Still holding Jack's wrists high and tight in one hand, James surveyed the pirate neatly and intently. "Now, it is quite a matter of how to get these clothes off of you without ruining them—any more than they are." James dragged a palm and fingers down from the underside of Jack's chin to somewhere around his sash, at which point Jack's writhings were too much to manage and contain with one hand. James stepped out, reached out, and picked up his cravat. He doubled it, poked it through an angle made by the suspension chains, and with several more quick-minded twists and tugs bound Jack's wrists together, looped the linen through his mouth, and secured it all well to the chains. Jack's eyes glinted and he shivered, not in fear.

James bent down and kissed Jack while he blindly and blithely undid the belt, unwound the sash, and removed both from the arena. His lips pressed against the sweat-toned gag cloth, and he hummed through the material and into Jack's tongue. When that made Jack's hips rise, James quickly undid the breeches so he could take advantage of the moment to clear them of Jack's thighs. "Boots," he murmured grumpily inside Jack's mouth, and pried himself up to get to the foot of the cot where he could wedge them off and therein finish clearing the breeches. It took some tugging and angling, and some discreet kicking on Jack's part, but in a short enough time they had vanquished both boots, and those boots sat in two small, defeated, wistful leather piles on the cabin floor. James slipped faded blue breeches off incredibly dirty feet, and Jack flexed his toes and bent his knees appreciatively. Then his toes curled and his knees locked, as James put a ring around the inside bone of Jack's ankle with his lips. James heard a muffled moan, quiet and cut off, so he bit sharply as a reminder. The moan, however, returned even stronger than before, and James decided rather to roll his eyes up and shoot quick daggers at Jack, who looked inexpressibly contrite and sensuously desperate, with his wine-dark eyes and supernaturally long lashes, not to mention his cheeks flushed pink right through the cultivated, wizened bronze.

James began to lick and swirl his way up the inside of Jack's calf, changing direction whenever he thought Jack might be getting comfortable with a given pattern. James listened carefully; the pirate's breath hitched, held, and filled in with shudderingly difficult self-control, but did not gasp or sigh. Good. James sucked on the back of Jack's knee. Jack veritably convulsed, but clawed, clenched, and bit at everything he could to keep from keening aloud. Silent as the grave.

James dallied less on the way up Jack's thigh, knowing the pirate's stamina was wearing thin, but still wanting to drive him farther. He licked and nipped at the crisp, coarse hairs curling, and when Jack's hips shot up he ducked away without injury. He stripped himself of a waistcoat now ruined and a shirt he preferred clean, toed off his shoes, then padded back over to the cot with a quiet smile, eyes always on Jack's visible hunger, the need that came through every pore with a mystic burnished glow. James hooked his hands under and pulled Jack's knees up, pushing his feet a good twenty inches from the end of the cot. James took that space to kneel carefully, listening for any signs of strain from the canvas, the wood, or the suspensions. Not hearing any to worry him, he leaned forward and planted his tongue right on the curving base of Jack's prick.

He half expected to hear an impossible-to-retain shout, or yelp, or hiss, or something, but Jack was using full stubbornness and well proving his ability to remain silent. Silent as the grave. James held the hips down and drew his tongue up, hard and slow, and let it snap wetly off the tip to land on Jack's belly and continue the journey. He slithered along behind it, pressing all the skin that he could to all of Jack that he met, and was not surprised to feel Jack trembling with the effort of no noise at all by the time he had ducked under the linen shirt and made it half up past Jack's navel. He continued steady on, though, all the way up Jack's chest, through the thankfully loose neck of his shirt, up the center of his throat, right to his lips. Jack was twitching helplessly and grinding his teeth by that point, and James, part for care of his cravat, decided to allow the pirate a small reprieve. He fastened his mouth over Jack's and licked at the gag cloth, and Jack's defenses shattered into a groaning, keening, whining, sobbing, shouting moan of more than epic proportions: a sound that rattled all through James' body as he pressed hard and close and grinding against Jack, and that when it ended made him arch away for breath of his own, dimly hearing a shirt rip in the background. Jack's shirt. He looked, and it was rent all down, laying open and leaving Jack as good as nude except for the sleeve-shaped shrouds on his arms.

James licked his lips, hungry, and slithered down through what Jack's legs had involuntarily wound him into. Once free, he returned the sun-deep feet back to where they had been, the knees bent as they had been. His tongue wet-burning where it had been. He spread his hands around Jack's diamond-sharp hips and held hard, this time, and his tongue slid down.

Jack's eyes got unspeakably wide and a harsh tremor took him from head to foot, then he shut his eyes and put his head back, and curled his toes into the cot's canvas bottom. James licked a few times, teasing—'Cruel bastard,' Jack would have hissed, were he on speaking terms—then grinned wide and plunged his tongue in deep. Jack's hips bucked hard against his hold and nearly broke his grip, but barely not. James did it again, and held Jack's hips as close to immobilized as possible, for both their sakes. Winding, curling, lashing, diving, taking horrendous glee in the barely-not-pained look that he knew took possession of Jack's face at that moment. Waiting, and holding, and moving, and waiting, and he knew it was coming, and—he'd not fault Jack for the shorn, bitten sob when he came.

He smiled against the soft side of Jack's knee and petted his calf until the shaking was done. Then his smile was wolfish again, and a small answering gleam returned to him from Jack's cloth-striped mouth. Jack pulled his feet a tiny bit closer, slid his knees a little bit farther, and caught James' eye as the commodore undid his own breeches and leaned up to swipe a handful of the mess from Jack's belly. The pirate's stare was somber, simple, and eloquent. Silent as the grave, he said.

Indeed. And James made no sound as he took himself in hand to slick and ready; he said no words as he took Jack's ankles and lifted them to his shoulders; he was silent as he took his place and pressed so slowly in. He gritted his teeth and needed desperately to growl, to let the intensity of sensation overflow from his throat, to give it vent before he started on fire. But silent as the grave. If Jack could do it, James could. He dragged back out, and fired back in. Jack's back arched as though it might break, but he made no sound. His neck was tenser that the rigging that snapped in a squall, and it quivered, but he was silent. James was silent. He began a slow rhythm, leaning back just enough to get the right shiver running through Jack, and concentrated on biting his lip and breathing through his nose.

The mistake was in catching Jack's eye. There was a swift glint, and before James could warn himself, Jack had twisted this, and squeezed that, and flexed those, and it was all James could do not to break. Silent as the grave, he thought to himself, Silent as the gravesilent as the grave silentasthe grave silentas thegraveSILENT! Jack tightened and wound and bucked and drove, and James wasn't doing anything anymore but trying not to shout every obscene word he knew, some he didn't, and some that weren't words at all. Damn Jack. Damn him. James ground his teeth hard and tried not to think about the lights shooting off behind his eyes, or the whitefire flames spiralling through him from where Jack stoked them like the Devil Himself. James brought his arm up to his mouth and bit into it to keep the scream from happening when Jack brought him farther than he could go.

He jerked his hips twice and climaxed, and had hardly the energy to wrap a hand around Jack and bring him off before crumpling in a leggy tangle around him, the two of them sticking together with sweat and sex and nearly tumbling out of a cot that was barely fit for one. They both lifted their heads and whimpered quietly.

It was a few good minutes before Jack's legs started to get numb enough that he nudged Norrington to get up and out, and about a minute after that before James actually was up and out, at which point he moved to untie the cravat whose damages he would assess later. Jack's lips were red and raw, but James bent down and kissed a sloppy apology, something along the lines of 'That hurt more for my cravat than it did for you,' and Jack smiled lazily and ridiculously at him when he pulled away.

So, James might marry Elizabeth Swann. But he would never manage to forget Jack Sparrow.


...


My Two Cents: I really think this is the first classic-style (at least, that's what I was going for) Sparrington in the history of EVER to insist upon being written to the Matrix soundtrack. Whatever; it worked. Also, that scene. FRAUGHT, I tell you! If I have to, I'll write a subtext translation. Because people must know the... FRAUGHT-NESS. (You just can't argue with a word like 'fraught' -- I love Tigger)

Wow. That all was... insane. Please forgive me.