12 Foxfire


"It's bloody cold, Jack," James complains, bundled up under so many layers of warm clothing that he resembles a wooly hillock. His breath puffs tiny clouds before lips blue from the chill, huddling near the mainmast of the Black Pearl and sullenly watching ice form on the rails. "Why are we here?"

"'Tis late August, Jamie," Jack grins, perched on the slippery rail, back against the sea and its treacherous rafts of greenish ice. "It's almost time."

"I don't see what's so interesting in the Antarctic outside of us catching our deaths of cold," James mutters, his body and mind used to balmy Jamaica.

"Wait," Jack flutters his fingers in the direction of the cabin. The pirate, James notes, a little irritably, looked good in the winter wear they had picked up at Recife—a thick black woolen coat, a blue scarf, and ridiculously adorable red mittens. He wore that over his usual gear, and seemed impervious to the frightful cold, just as at home in the icy Southern edges of the world as the heat of the Caribbean.

"I notice the rest of the crew have gone below decks," James says reproachfully, as he skates and slides over the icy sheen to Jack, leaning his back to the rail and placing an arm around the other man's waist. If the pirate fell by accident into the sea, he would likely die of hypothermia, James tells himself—there's no other reason. Jack, however, takes it as an invitation to cuddle—arms wrap around James' neck, and he purrs into mussed brown hair, tickling a cold scalp with warm breath.

James is about to suggest that they go back to the Captain's cabin, to warm up, when there is a crackling, whistling sound, like a gigantic bird, or a serpent—he looks around, sharply, half-expecting a monster, only to be tapped on the nose by a mitten. Jack laughs, and jerks his chin upwards.

Above, what looks like a curtain of flame flickers across the sky of an unearthly green, tongues of writhing fire, stunningly beautiful, dancing over the darkening sky. James watches, entranced, awed by nature, until the display dies down to the occasional darting fork, and whispers, "Aurora borealis."

"Aye, that's a name for it," Jack grins, and presses a startlingly warm tongue to a chilled ear, making James shiver. "Meself, I prefer the Finnish. Foxfire, I calls it."

2 The largest fish

Shouts from the rail pull James out from where he had been discussing their planned course with Jack (or at least, he had been trying to extract the course from Jack, who had merely smirked at him). Jack emerges behind him, moments later, and frowns at Gibbs. "What's all this noise 'bout, eh?"

"Look, Cap'n, look!" Gibbs is pale as a sheet, and he's pointing down at the water, next to the anchored Pearl. James, with his longer legs, reaches a space in the rail in between gesticulating sea dogs, and inhales sharply in shock.

A massive fish, possibly more than thirty feet in length, visible as a lazily moving dark shadow beside the ship, mottled with white splotches larger than a man's head. "Good lord." A giant dorsal fin, and fluttering gills. "A... a shark?"

"Aye, a shark," Sparrow squeezes up next to James, grinning and unafraid, though some of the crew have stepped away, crossing themselves fearfully. "Biggest sharks in the world. I've seen this one a couple o' times, crossin' these parts. Hoped that we'd run up against it."

"That's why you insisted on anchoring here?" James blinked, as the revelation strikes him. He had thought that anchoring in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the day, had simply been yet another mad piratical fancy.

"O' course. Lots o' fish swim in patterns—don't see why this one should be otherwise," Jack shrugs, fluidly, and clambers up onto the rail. James isn't the only one who pulls him firmly back down.

"Sparrow!"

"They don't eat humans," Jack said, gesturing at the yawning mouth, which swept everything before it into the maw.

"If you get sucked into that, I don't see how it'll matter," James retorts. His eyes are drawn inexorably back to the monstrous creature, as it glides serenely on its way. "Incredible."


34 Living Tapestries

"Jack, this is really unnecessary," James says, as reasonably and as patiently as he can, for the fourth time, blindfolded. His ears pick out the sounds of the oars dipping through the waters, and his skin prickles at spray, the back of his neck seems to burn under the scorching heat of the sun. He can smell the sharp salt of the sea, and fish, and the rum-sweat-musk of Jack Sparrow.

"Patience, Jamie," Jack drawls, somewhere behind him. James mutters to himself, settling more comfortably in the cockboat. At least he isn't rowing.

The heat gets too much for him after a while, and he pulls off his tattered coat—no longer abused brocade, now a sensible dark brown wool that he had brought with him on the trip (having actually packed, this time round). After a moment, he utters a curse, and strips off the soaked shirt, as well. The breeze picks up, and the relief at the sudden cool is so intense he nearly gasps.

He twitches, however, when lips press against his spine, then his shoulder blades—oars are pulled back over the boat, and ringed fingers wrap around his midriff. "Jack."

"I s'pose we're far enough," Sparrow says, a little roughly, "And God, you're beautiful."

James blushes, still unused to hearing any sort of compliment or endearment—his fingers reach up to the scarf around his eyes, and hesitate. Jack chuckles against sweat-slick skin, nodding against his shoulder.

James sees the faint hint of a pristine beach, in the distance, and the Black Pearl, safely anchored at sea, in his peripheral vision. Around him, under him, however, is a reef that seems to stretch out forever to either side, the water crystal-clear, allowing him to pick out brightly colored coral and shifting anemones, beautiful shoals of silvery fish, even the occasional scuttling crab, sidling from one layered coral to another. "How... how long does this stretch?"

"Miles an' miles," Sparrow says, warm breath against the nape of his neck. The puffs move up to his ear, and Jack whispers an absolutely indecent suggestion into the shell.


48 Remnants

As day creeps towards night in the cloudless desert, James begins to shiver in the unexpected cold, and he's glad that he gave in to Jack's insistence that he wear more of the robe-like clothes just before they ride out from the sandstone Barbary pirate city. The horses snort, bored, secured to a hooked remains of a well.

Jack is watching the sky, thoughtfully, then the shadows on the ground. They've been here for at least an hour, maybe more, alone in the ruins of a city, or what's left of it—the few craggy outlines of structures that could have stood here a century, maybe more, ago are smaller, in area, in total, than the fort in Port Royal. He's getting bored, but he knows that if there's something here Sparrow wants to show him, it'll likely be as damnably amazing as the last forty-seven ways to fall in love with Jack's freedom.

Sparrow perches on a crumbling wall, then, and fishes something out from his slung pack—the oddly etched gray candle that he had bought for a ludicrous price from the city this morning, from a wizened looking gnome of a man with bad teeth. He motions James over, and murmurs, "Ye might want t'sit down, Jamie."

James obediently moves to sit next to Jack on the wall, but Jack slips down, and instead flops cross-legged on the sand, crooking his fingers until James sinks down beside him. The sand is still warm from the scorching desert sun, the heat ebbing away into the night.

Jack fumbles with matches and a rusty candleholder. Finally, the candle is lit, and safely stuck on blackening metal—and the sun sinks down, over the horizon.

Shadows dance out over the ground from the candle, and abruptly, as if he'd just woken up from a dream of ruin, the city restores itself in an instant. The buildings and their gorgeous Eastern facades give lie to the fact that just moments ago, they were crumbling brick swallowed by sand; he can hear music, distant, foreign and beautiful, played by instruments he can't identify, outside of the deep boom of a drum. Laughter and conversation in a forgotten language, then abruptly, people appear, dressed brightly in elegant flowing robes edged with exotic feathers and beads. Bronzed skin and dark eyes and hair, women veiled in fabrics so fragile that it looked like it could be torn by a breeze.

James realizes that Jack is holding on very tightly to his wrist—he arches an eyebrow at the pirate, who grins, a little apologetically. "Not sure what'll happen if I let go, but we only have one candle. 'Ere, I'll show ye somethin'."

"Something else?" James says, a little shakily, awed by the magic—the people passing by don't seem to notice them, and he flinches, as one child runs right through their legs, with nothing more than a faint chill.

"Oh aye. We're a wee bit early, so it should'nt be too crowded." So saying, Jack drags him down the sandstone streets, past hawkers selling intriguing gewgaws or skewers of meat, past elaborate bleached stone fountains sculpted into fantastical animals, to a white square. Elderly man with shaved heads in dusty brown robes meditate in a circle around a small boy, his scalp shaved except for a single crest of hair, painted orange, an odd symbol tattooed onto his forehead. He looks up at them sharply when they approach, and smiles—his eyes are impossibly old.

"Here for the dance, walkers?" he asks, and James gets the feeling that he isn't actually speaking English—the meanings, instead, are what gets translated straight into his mind.

"No," Jack shakes his head. "Just for a look-see. Showin' a friend around."

The boy looks consideringly at James, for a long moment, then back at Jack. "Welcome, then, walkers. May your soul know peace, may your heart know joy." The blessing, oddly, sounds a tremor through his frame—James is shocked to realize that his eyes sting with tears.

Jack smiles, and tilts his head—he nods a farewell, and tugs James away, looking at the candle in his hands every few minutes, and at the shadows on the ground.

Later, after consulting (the apparent) shadows on the ground, Jack blows out the candle, and the city vanishes back to cold sand and the remnants of crumbling brick. The gray wax scatters into dust.