Jack woke with a start to the ragged sails of the Black Pearl stark against an endless dome of white, a mild headache, the distressing and lingering scent of fish and a sense of profound wrong that took him a moment to place.

It was the silence. Life on the Pearl, or indeed any ship of Jack's experience, was usually a tumult of noise, the rough jabber of sailors, the creak of the masts and the snap of the sails, the constant wash of the surf. Stunned, Jack stared blankly at the dome of white for a long moment, then let out a little (but manly) scream and scrambled for the rail.

The Pearl was beached listlessly on her side, on an endless flat white desert. No wind, and even the air smelled sterile.

All things considering, Jack indulged himself in a slightly louder scream. The barnacles on the keel were dead; the white ground under the Pearl was cracked and barren. Everything was bone dry. Unconsciously, Jack wet his lips, then noticed that as stark as the light around him was, he couldn't feel any warmth at all, only a flat, slightly cool temperature.

If everything in this world was dry...

"The rum. The rum!" Jack whirled away from the rail and clattered down below decks, only to run bodily into something warm and solid that cursed as he flailed, off-balance, causing them to rattle down the creaking stair and land in an awkward jumble of limbs at the bottom of the steep steps.

Jack found himself staring up into the angry expression of a somewhat tousled, bruised ex-Commodore. Ripped shirt, scuffed baldric, maltreated blue navy coat, untended beard, sharp green eyes narrowed in irritation, just as he remembered (and all too clearly). That was the final straw: Jack's mind came unwillingly to a logical conclusion as to where he was, given his last memory was the stinking maw of a giant squid.

"I'm in the Locker."

Norrington somehow managed to frown even more severely, scowling as he untangled himself away from Jack and got to his feet, dusting off his coat. Jack remained in a flat sprawl on the deck, if somewhat melodramatically.

"What are you talking about, Sparrow?"

"Silence, figment of me imagination." Jack flapped a wrist limply and dismissively at Norrington. "Obviously, I'm in Davy Jones' Locker, courtesy o' the Kraken, an' now subject to the most terrible tortures, nightmares an' fears that me mind can come up wi'."

"I looked out of a porthole and only saw white desert," Norrington folded his arms. "If this is your worst nightmare you lack imagination."

"Grounded in a windless dry desert wi'out the sea in sight and wi' me only company being a traitorous homicidal ex-Commodore," Jack continued, determined not to let a figment of his imagination get the better of his melodramatic spiel. "An' I bet the rum is gone."

"It's not, actually, but it will soon be, if we are indeed stuck with each other's company," Norrington said irritably. "Honestly, Sparrow, I definitely should have let you rot on your ship. Close association with you only appears to lead to illogical supernatural outcomes."

Jack's mind ran over a speed bump of doubt. If Norrington was truly one of his nightmares then indeed he was a poor one—this version of Norrington, in any case, scruffy and cynical and out of place in the world, was not particularly frightening. "Last saw ye bein' left behind on a cannibal island, mate. And ye stole the heart."

"And then had an attack of conscience, which mind you I am now regretting, and proceeded to make my way back onto the ship. I had just managed to scale the anchor chain and through one of the distressingly large holes the Kraken had made in your ship when the Pearl was pulled under. I lost consciousness and woke up in this desert." Norrington's voice had the inexorable, patient weight of someone who had gone through the circumstances multiple times and was absolutely refusing to have a breakdown.

"Ah." Jack pulled thoughtfully at his beaded beard, tilting his head. "So in fact you are truly and incorporeally and incontroversially here and am not in fact part of an overactive and rum-deprived imagination or indeed part of my post-traumatic shock."

"I could only wish," Norrington said witheringly, "Though if the Locker does, as you say, express its victims' worst nightmares then being stranded alone with only you for company would be one of mine."

"So," Jack said slowly, as another thought occurred to him, "Ye now have the heart wi' you?"

"No," Norrington sighed, frustrated. "Somehow I had already misplaced it when I—"

"No, ye couldn't have," Jack mused aloud, "'Cos the heart can't exist in the Locker, so Tia has told me, so it would'a gone back to the last place its master had chosen."

"Good God, I should have left you to die."


--


As annoying as the ex-Commodore's presence could be, having someone to talk to stopped Jack from (further) insanity, not that Jack would admit this, of course. The pirate genuinely liked people. Having no one about in this desert but himself would likely have damaged his mind (further). As such, whenever talking to Norrington, Jack was careful to keep his chatter within the other man's limits—what he didn't want was for Norrington to get pissed at something he did and stalk off into the desert.

The lack of (further) insanity also helped him think, and after some time of introspection atop his beloved ship's masks he came to the happy conclusion that his sojourn in the Locker would likely be a short one. After all, he had one of the pieces of eight, and Tia would certainly not be comfortable with that being in the Locker. When the sea goddess wanted something done it tended to happen (if sometimes with catastrophic side effects, but Jack would have been fairly happy with any results at all, let alone quibbling over methods).

He explained this to Norrington at one point when the man queried, somewhat irritably, why Jack seemed to be absolutely reconciled with the idea of being stranded forever in a supernatural dungeon.

Naturally, the poor, Christian, repressive officer-type Navy ex-Commodore expressed disbelief at his conviction. "A sea goddess."

"The sea goddess, mate." Jack corrected. "'Sides, she likes me."

"All right," Norrington said slowly. "Taking for the sake of argument assumptions that the sea goddess exists and 'likes you', both of which equally strain my imagination, why hasn't she already come here to rescue you? After all, she is a goddess."

Telling Norrington the pirate legend of how the pirate lords had bound the goddess to human form took a while, partly because Jack was unable to control his tendency to go off on tangents about the characters of the old lords and some of the new ones.

Norrington's expression turned more and more skeptical. "So you are saying that you are one of the nine pirate lords?"

"I have one o' the pieces o' eight, don't I?"

"Show me."

"An' why would I be showin' a thief something that precious?"

Amazingly, Norrington conceded the point, and Jack took the twist to his lips as self-reproach. Good, t'was about time, too. "Who are the others?"

"An' why would I be tellin' someone who's Navy, eh?"

"I'm no longer a Commodore, Sparrow."

"Navy be what you are, t'aint something someone like yerself can just cast off," Jack said slowly, and watched the other man's face freeze slightly. Past experiences aside, he was a fairly good judge of character.


--


All things considered, Jack was fairly relieved when the crabs appeared, but not for immediately apparent reasons. What had occurred randomly as yet another thing to pass time was turning awkward, and what was worse, the Pearl felt as though she approved. She'd been fairly silent up until the moment James had rolled over and pressed those soft kisses along his neck, and then Jack could feel her hum contentedly under his fingers, pressed flat against the deck.

Where were you? He thought, distracted enough to allow the kisses to move down to his collarbone. Normally he would have rolled away immediately—he'd made it clear to James that this was a no-strings-attached matter, after all.

The Pearl replied rather tartly that she had been hiding her passengers from Davy Jones, thank you very much, who would have sent creatures to murder Jack and/or James had he known they were both in the Locker. She was also glad that Jack had found a mate, even if he was an ungrateful scallywag.

It took a moment for Jack to remember that the Pearl's colloquial English was somewhat antiquated and odd, and that 'mate' did not quite mean what pirates thought it did. He sat up sharply, yelping, "I have not!"

James looked puzzled. "Have not what?"

At that point, the ship seemed to lift, and move, and both men hurried to the side to see an impossible moving surf of white rock crabs. "Tia," Jack murmured, and smirked at James. He hoped his relief wasn't obvious.

"I concede all attempts to follow your world's logic." Thankfully, no mention was made of the yelp, and Jack busied himself by climbing up the rigging to the top of the mainmast. It wasn't personal, there was no attachment, but Jack couldn't yet bring himself to tell James. He convinced himself that it was self-preservation.


--


On the beach, Jack was somewhat unsurprised to see his crew. Individually his crew was fairly incompetent, but together they seemed to have a collective sense of (probably accidental) purpose that remarkably enough, got the impossible done. He was surprised to see Elizabeth without the Turner whelp, and was about to say something to that effect when he realized everyone was staring openmouthed at James.

Somewhat annoyed to be out of the center of everyone's attention, he frowned at Barbossa. "Aye? Ain't ye dead?"

"So're ye, Jack," Barbossa drawled, recovering quickly. "And the Commodore."

Jack ignored the cue for him to say something about James, and tried to disregard Barbossa's sly smirk. His treacherous first mate had an overdeveloped intuition. "And where's the whelp?"

Elizabeth looked uncomfortable, and her weariness seemed to go beyond what was physical. "He's betrayed us all, Jack. Somehow he found the heart and took it to Beckett."

"The Brethren are convening. The call's been sent out," Barbossa added. "We need yer piece o' eight."

"I die for a moment an' all the world goes t'hell."


--


James watched the brawling pirate lords with a sense of bemusement. Cleaned up a little, and dressed in a normal sailor's coat and clothes, none of the lords had recognized him as James Norrington, ex-Navy Commodore. After all, save for Barbossa, none of the other pirate lords knew who James was in the first place—his jurisdiction was the Caribbean, after all.

"So our salvation lies in all of these people agreeing collectively to do something?"

"Doesn't look likely aye?" Jack sounded almost cheerful. The pirate had been more and more nervous of late after Beckett had briefly captured him. Admittedly, Jack had managed to free himself, if rather flamboyantly and in a rather unlikely manner, but afterwards he had seemed uncharacteristically secretive. James hadn't pressed him, thinking it was a mere side effect of capture by Beckett (the man was notorious for his cruelty, after all), but had now begun to question that decision. Could it be that—

Barbossa was toying rather dangerously with his pistol, his expression dark. "Aye, just like us sea rats, elimination on the horizon an' we'll be a-fightin' over who gets t'bunk where in Shipwreck Cove next. Small wonder we are close t'extinction."

"We should fight," Elizabeth said passionately. James refused to believe fully still that Elizabeth Swann was now a pirate captain, let alone a pirate lord.

"You will never defeat the armada," he pointed out dryly. "Not even with all the ships I have seen in the harbor. The Endeavor is a ship of the line. None of the ships come close even to matching her."

James paused, when it abruptly occurred to him that the room was suspiciously silent. All the pirates were watching him warily. After a long, breathless moment, the painted Oriental matron untangled herself from the process of beating on the African lord with her beaded slipper, and inquired, "Then what do you suggest?"

"Find a way to get rid of the heart," James shrugged. "Without the heart there will be no threat. Then all of you are free to disperse to your haunts as you like. Facing the armada would only mean true extinction."

Jack was staring at him keenly. The pirate opened his mouth, then seemed to shrug, and smirked instead, looking away. Before James could question him, he had sauntered forward.  "Ladies an' gents, I totally agree."


--


James sat on the sand and watched the man walk into the sea. Once his toes touched the shoreline, the waves instantly scudded away from his boots, leaving an inch around him; further, to his knees, the water parted, swirling about him. When the man returned to the sands, James was already shaking his head, his smile wry. "I would not have believed it."

"And ye so young that ye cannae ha' seen all o' the world?" There was faint humor now, but it was cynical. Davy Jones curled his fingers absently in his rich gray beard, and the glance he took over his shoulder towards the sea was pure, raw longing.

"The sea is a woman. She'll forgive. Eventually." James added, allowing for a larger degree of feminine unreasonableness where an immortal supernatural element existed.

"T'would be seen." Jones did not look convinced. "But as unexpected as this is, I suppose I ha' to thank ye, Navy."

"Privateer," James corrected, with an easy smile. "Or Captain."

"Hah," Jones snorted. It had been half a year, and Jones still wasn't used to the change in status, let alone the change in the matter of suddenly being alive and human again. "Yer crazy enough t'be sailin' wi' a man that the sea hates, cap'n, I'll give ye that. But I'll not trust meself t'cap'n a ship when she's like this, an' bein' yer first mate ain't so unpleasant."

"Thanks," James said dryly. Having Davy Jones as a First Mate had its advantages. The sea's aversion to him didn't extend to poor weather (Tia... Calypso... had rather liked James, after all—or at least, she found him amusing. He could settle for that), and his crew were considerably more willing to listen when Jones spoke. He wondered if that was why Jack had grudgingly taken Barbossa back as First Mate, despite the problems.

"Besides," Jones said, with a lazy grin, "I've yet t'repay ye fer convincing me t'stab me own heart, as unexpected as the results are, cap'n."

"Don't mention it." It had been James who had wondered what would happen were Jones to put the dagger through his own heart. The cursed captain had been weary of his lot and his monstrous visage, but it had taken a lot of diplomacy, first to persuade Jones to do what he had done, and secondly to get Sparrow to return the heart.

"So. When do we go back t'the Caribbees t'chase Sparrow?"

James choked on his breath, sputtered, then glared up at Jones, who was now smirking, shaded from the Havana sun in an increasingly battered broad-brimmed hat. "We've targets to chase about New Orleans."

"Aye, cap'n, aye. I'm sayin' after," Jones' smirk widened.

"I'll like to do some trading, and perhaps see the world a little more."

"An' after?"

"Good Lord, man, you're bloody inexorable."

"Sometimes ye should forgive, if ye think the sea can." Jones drawled, and swaggered off over the sand back towards the Sea hawk. James secretly envied the swagger. His Naval upbringing absolutely disallowed him from developing one.

New Orleans. Nova Scotia. Then, perhaps, back to the Caribbean. He folded his arms under his head, lay down in the warm sand, closed his eyes, to red crescents from the glare of the sun. Jack was right all along. True freedom was worth everything.

-fin-