Caribbean Cartography 3

Barratry

by

Dee

Where the blazes was Sparrow?

Trees, sand, water, rocks, birds, seaweed, mud up to the knees, sunburnt for the first time in years, idle unwatched hours of emptiness. This was some sort of Caribbean purgatory.

I hadn't climbed a tree since I was eight and my mother admonished me for dropping chestnuts on my sister and my father told me that eight was far too old for such childish pursuits as tree-climbing. I was up a tree when the ship appeared on the horizon.

Time started again.

He looked at me across the little boat as the waves shoved at our bare toes. "Bloody hell," said Jack Sparrow, and I don't think I'd ever heard such honest, unaffected startlement in his voice. "You're a sight."

What was left of the Commodore? No wig, no shoes, no brocade. All lost to the sea. Dried mud on my trousers, bark stains on my shirt, sun in my eyes, dirty fingernails.

"Took your time," I said.

He grinned, gold-glinted. "Need a moment to gather your effects?"

"I'm honestly not that attached to the coconut."

He started to laugh.

As I inspected my chin for any patches I'd missed, a dull thud sounded at the door. "Come in?" I hazarded.

The door opened and Sparrow came in backwards, holding two steaming wooden bowls that drew my gaze as though magnetic forces were involved. He spun about, almost losing the lot, and kicked the door shut somewhere in the act of melodramatically regaining his balance.

"Well!" he said, eyeing me. "You've scrubbed up quite well. For a dead man."

My stomach twisted mid-gurgle. I'd hoped he might have at least waited until after I'd eaten. "Yes, well."

He grinned. "So how about I put down the stew and you put down the razor—no sudden moves, now—and you tell Uncle Jack all about it?"

I smiled ruefully as I dropped the blade into the bowl and joined him at the table.

The stew was, in all honesty, absolutely the best meal I'd ever eaten. Including the mysterious crunchy bits. Seeing my incapability, Jack talked. "The problem was, you see, that we were all the way down in Cartagena—"

"What were you doing there?" I honestly couldn't helped myself. I did at least swallow before I continued. "They don't trade with pirates there."

"Yes but I'm Captain Jack Sparrow."

I raised an eyebrow over my spoon.

"Shut up. Eat your stew. And we were trading in information, which even stupid snobbish Spaniards are happy to have dealings with. The point is—and who's telling this story anyway? You'll get your turn... where was I?"

"The point," I offered.

He frowned at me, then his face cleared. "Yes! The point. Which is that it wasn't until we were two days off Port Royal that we even got your message which kept me in a fine state of perplexity—you could have shown a little more precision in your wording, you know—until we all get home and find out that you were magnificently brilliant in Santa Catalina—congratulations on that, by the way, always knew you had it in you—but are, unfortunately, dead and lost to the sea."

Sometimes, talking with Jack Sparrow was like being washed up on a beach. As long as you kept your head above water you'd get to solid land eventually. Lost to the sea. I liked that. I hoped it was true.

My spoon scraped the bottom of the bowl. "I'm glad you came," I told him.

"Well." He shrugged. "Your note wasn't entirely incomprehensible."

I settled the spoon in the empty bowl. "I just couldn't—"

"I know," he interrupted, and when I looked up his eyes were as unfathomable as the sea we sailed. "I know. I just couldn't quite believe you'd do it."

For all I wondered what that said about the stupidity of my actions, I returned his smile.

I hadn't entirely believed I'd do it, either. Not even turning over in my hands my orders to return to England. Not even after I'd sent the message to Sparrow, when one might reasonably have expected I could feel the whole thing taken out of my hands, rendered fait accompli.

I was not unaware of the repercussions of my demise. On those I loved, on those I led. But my removal would happen in any case, and they were already becoming accustomed to it. Beginning to whittle down their futures to those possibilities that did not include my presence.

Even so, I wasn't sure. Until we took ship for Santa Catalina, running hard south with the wind in our port quarter, crisp and clear and Caribbean. The sun on the sea and salt spray in our sails; there do not exist the words to capture properly that moment of realisation.

Elizabeth and Will would find another to be their wedding's fairy godmother. Swann would know that such things happened, would drink a quiet toast to me on lazy summer evenings. Gillette and Groves would move along, climb the ranks. They'd even understand, I thought, perhaps. If they knew, though I could not tell them.

And as for Commodore Norrington... he would fall without disgrace, and remain in the Caribbean.

The only place in the world he wanted to be.

"Slugabed," Sparrow chided me, and I blinked in the bright sunlight, thinking that I hadn't heard that phrase since it fell from my nursemaid's lips.

I joined him on the quarterdeck, watching his crew swarm the rigging. Actually, there weren't enough of them to be a swarm. He was travelling with close to his skeleton crew, I suspected.

"What do you say?" Sparrow asked, licking a finger (an act of questionable wisdom, given the state of his hands) and holding it up to the air. "If we quarter hard to starboard and the wind holds, five days back to Port Royal, at the absolute worst."

I didn't round on him immediately, as he no doubt wanted me to, but it was a near thing. "I'd say you were mad, except this is you we're talking about, and I hate to sound redundant." I turned to look at him then, leaning on the railing beside me with the sun behind him; I had to squint. "There's nothing for me there any more, Jack. It wasn't a decision to be made lightly."

He watched me as canvas unfurled overhead, billowed and popped. "Then we'll continue on as we were, shall we?"

"Please," I said. "Do."

His grin bloomed, sudden and brilliant, and he turned to face forward, arms sweeping up like a diva addressing her audience. "North, lads!"

I began to see why Sparrow had done what he had to regain her.

I watched the crew sail her, and counted faces where I couldn't place names. I was right; she was sailing with minimum hands. Not that that necessarily meant anything, with Sparrow, but I wondered where they were headed, and to what purpose.

We, really, not they. I was, for want of a better phrase, in the same boat.

"You just going to stand there for the whole damn voyage?"

I turned around, though there could be little doubt who the owner of that voice was. Sharp as Spanish steel. Female.

Anamaria was wrestling to reef a sheet that might have been tricky for two men. "Shall I give you a hand?" I asked.

Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say. She glared. She lifted a threatening finger. She took a deep breath.

It was after dinner in his cabin. I lingered at the table over a very nice brandy—the bottle I'd given him, in fact—as Sparrow pored over his map table, working with more minute concentration than I would have believed he was capable of to effect an adjustment. He might have been a statue of himself; his hand was unthinkably steady. He referred to scrawled notes, measured, made a mark. Only when the pen was returned to the bottle did he speak. "Who?"

"Your second mate."

That brought him out of his trance; he laughed. I had to wait quite a while until he recovered himself sufficiently to answer. "More or less, that's Anamaria. But she is rather worse than usual recently."

"Who on earth did something to rattle her chains?" I was genuinely curious. I certainly wouldn't want to cross the lady.

"Your Lieutenant," Jack supplied readily. "He threatened her with matrimony."

I didn't choke on my brandy. "Good grief."

Jack hummed, consideringly. "Strange lad. I think he's feeling an impending sense of his own mortality, y'know?" He picked up his own brandy glass, watching me over the rim.

"You think I did the wrong thing," I said, sounding more belligerent than I'd really intended.

He shook his head slightly, sending hair ornaments swinging. "I don't give two figs for your right and wrong. And in the end, what does it matter what I think? It's you as has to live with it."

I wasn't surprised; since we first met, there has not been a moment when Jack made my life easier. I looked away from him, to the rear windows of his cabin, but it was dark outside, brightly lit within, and all I saw was myself reflected back. I looked back at him, but he'd turned back to his maps, holding his glass in his left hand as the fingers of his other hand twitched for a pen. "Is she going to accept him?" I asked, as though we hadn't strayed from the original topic.

"You'll have to ask her that," Sparrow replied.

"Not particularly tempting."

He laughed again, even as he set down the glass, hands and attention returning to the measuring, the notes, the ink well.

I eased out of my chair, slowly circling the dining table. "Why are we going north?" I asked.

"A piece of business for Anamaria," he answered, readily but unhelpfully.

"About which I can ask her, I imagine?"

"Of course."

I came up behind him, my attention following his to the pastiche of maps on the flat surface. He had been making amendments to the stretch of coastline where he'd taken me aboard. He worked now between that map and another, using his fingers as callipers to measure distances between a mid-ocean point and... "Havana?" I said. "Are you entirely mad?"

Jack yelped—actually yelped, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been standing at his shoulder when he made the noise—and slithered his maps together, smearing ink over his palm. "Look what you did!" he accused, holding up the indigo stain indignantly.

I leaned around him and tugged at the corner of a map. He slapped the back of my wrist, marking me like a bruise, and I picked up the brandy glass instead. "You don't have the men to even think about raiding Havana."

"Just as well I'm not thinking about it, then," he retorted, and then narrowed his eyes at me. "Is that my glass?"

I had, point of fact, left my own on the dining table. I raised an eyebrow mid-sip, but passed the glass over with barely a smirk.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you? he accused.

I honestly had to admit I was. The Commodore never got to do things like this. The Commodore never grinned, free and faintly smug, and watched Sparrow glower.

"Suppose you're going to be a pest until I get too annoyed and tip you overboard," he grumbled, seeking solace in his remaining brandy.

"Actually," I said, "I was thinking I might join your crew."

Jack choking was the crowning glory of a very pleasant evening.

"It's the obvious option, isn't it?" I said.

"That's not necessarily a recommendation," he pointed out.

Especially not for him, I supposed. "I left Port Royal so I could sail the Caribbean. I'm damn well going to sail it."

The ghost of a smile visited his face. "Norrington—" he began.

But I interrupted him. "I know you know my Christian name." Elizabeth had used it at least once in his presence, and Jack Sparrow never missed a detail like that.

He tilted his head, allowing my point without precisely agreeing. "But some things," he said, as though it should be obvious, "are not there for the taking."

I wondered if he could be persuaded to put that in writing and perhaps sign it.

Then I realised the substance of what he'd said.

I don't know why it should surprise me that he wouldn't let us simply slip into this intimacy, that he should make me consciously invite it. That he should challenge me.

It didn't surprise me at all.

I faced him squarely, and said, "My parents called me James. I would be honoured if you would too."

The moment hung between us, and then split open on the glinting edge of his smile. "Honoured, eh?"

And it was that simple, to slip sideways into it. "Something like that," I allowed.

"Ever been called Jamie?" he asked, cheeky.

"Ever been called John?" I returned.

He winced. "It might be from the French," he protested.

"If you're a Frenchman, then I'm Welsh."

An insincere eyebrow lifted. "Got something against the Welsh?"

"Not half as much as I have against the French, and I still wouldn't wish you on them."

He tilted his head, still grinning, and had to squint a little into the sun. "How about Jim, then?"

"How about Mister Sparrow?"

Jack laughed and held out a hand that I shook without hesitation—his palm was as cool as the wind, roughened by calluses like barnacles. "Welcome to the crew, James."

But with—with—the wave-top to wave-top singing of the hull, the deck, the timbers, she doing hers as you did yours, she needing you as you needed her, your devotion matched. The perfect poised moments—hanging one knee and one hand from her rigging, balanced between the spray and the snap of the canvas. Between sea and sky.

This I had given my life for. I considered the trade well made.

"Yer alright," Anamaria said, from somewhere out of sight on the other side of the mast. "For... you know."

I smiled into the breeze. No one mentioned what I had been. Jack had "introduced" me to the crew as merely James, and no one had stepped forward to gainsay him. Would have I received such a welcome on any other free vessel in the Caribbean?

"I should have thought you'd have a higher opinion of us," I said, feeling brave with the thickness of a mast between myself and the lady. "All things considered."

She sniffed, and I grinned and kicked my heels.

And then almost toppled off as she swung around the mast on a leechline, suddenly stern in my face. "It's all your fault!"

So much for my immunity. "I couldn't possibly have known he was going to prop—"

"Not that," she snapped, jaw clenched and frightening. "You brought him on board in the first place."

I'd what? I couldn't help it; I started to laugh. Thank Heavens she needed both hands and feet to keep her hold on her position. The only thing she could throw my way was a glare. "And if you'd snapped him up any quicker he would have been gone before I turned around. You can't blame me for that one."

Her glare subsided into a glower, gaining a hint of petulance. She looked down at her feet, braced against the stays on the mast, and we stayed like that for a moment. It seemed I'd got away with it.

It was pushing my luck, but I was curious. For myself, for Groves, for a desire to see him happy in this world I'd left him in. "Are you going to accept him?" I asked.

She squinted into the setting sun, the wind whipping loose strands of her hair about her face. When she spoke, her voice was almost carried away entirely by that wind. "He said we would sail a merchant ship. We could sail it together..."

Silence dragged past on the Caribbean wind, and I was helpless to fill it, caught up in the quiet, lost tone of her voice, the thread that drew it all straight back to Groves, the unthinkable, outrageous man. Anamaria blinked and look at me as if surprised to find me there, and I found something to say. "Does this have anything to do with why we're going north?"

She might have answered me, but before it could happen, a shout came from the deck. "Oi, you aloft. Lay alow!"

When I looked back, she was halfway down the mast. I followed.

He did, at least, manage to swallow the 'sir' that had been threatening at the end of that sentence. I smiled ruefully. "Gibbs—" but at the twitch of his shoulders, I changed my mind about what I was going to say. "I don't know about you, but I need a drink. Join me?"

Thankfully, eventually, he did. If we were going to be sharing a space as small as a ship (even the Pearl) for any length of time, there were obviously issues we were going to have to deal with.

The grog we procured was eye-wateringly raw rum. Which worked to our advantage, since Gibbs actually relaxed watching me choke on my first mouthful.

"That's horrific," I coughed.

He smiled, somewhere amidst nostalgic and beatific, and took another swig. "Aye. Rough and ready."

He looked so satisfied that I couldn't help but laugh, and he laughed with me. When I held out my mug, he knocked his against it, and I braced myself for a second swig.

Gibbs considered the contents of his own mug as I recovered. With something approaching an apologetic wince, he said, "It's just a mite strange, I'm sure you'll agree, havin' you aboard."

"It's a little strange to be here," I admitted. "But anything's possible on the sea. Isn't that why we took to it?"

He ducked his head, and now we came to it.

"You're a good man, Gibbs." He looked up at me, hope peeking out. I smiled, a sardonic edge that we both knew he deserved. "More or less," and he grinned. "I'm not going to denounce you from the crow's nest, so you can stop tiptoeing around me."

He poured for himself again, and offered the jug unnecessarily to me. "I—" he hazarded, and I waited as he worked around to a full admission. "I always wanted to stay on the right side of the law." He looked embarrassed—as well he might, a man who'd been pirate for this many years.

"But the Navy isn't precisely the perfect place for a true man of the sea," I provided, and smiled at his expression. "Not among the sailors. I'll acknowledge that as readily as any, and more so than most."

"That why you left?" he asked his rum, darting a glance up as I grimaced (yes, so much for my immunity). "Begging your pardon, sir, but you're a good man yourself, and it's... well, it's strange, that's all."

In this light, the rum glinted like hidden treasure at the bottom of the mug. The inverse of the endless Caribbean sunlight on deck was the gloaming absence below. "Maybe," I said, and took a breath. "Maybe we all come to a point where the sea won't be compromised."

When I looked up, he was nodding. I felt as though I passed a hurdle, and lifted my mug.

The rum still burnt like the fires of hell, and Gibbs still laughed.

I'd almost been asleep when he materialised. I was not fresh at all off a night aloft and almost comfortable in the close darkness of the crew quarters. In no way did I have my wits about me sufficient to deal with Sparrow, and yet there he was. Anyone would think this was his ship, the way he kept showing up.

I blinked and scrubbed a hand over my face, pressing my shoulder into the canvas of the hammock to counteract the slight rock Jack's grip had set off. "I wasn't aware our bridges were in a state of disrepair." He'd been my first thought of accomplice in my own disappearance. He'd picked me up off that lost beach. We were doing well, weren't we?

"I could make something up, if you like," he offered, swinging forward against the axis of his grip on the hammock and tilting his head confidingly. "Misunderstandings, arguments. Incidents." His other hand caught the edge of the hammock as it swung against him, holding me steady. "Shouldn't be too tricky, pair of fellows like us."

And I remembered, as I'm sure he had intended, the last incident. My breath caught against something in the back of my throat and my vision blacked with memory and vertigo. I blinked it away, off balance in the hammock, but when I could see him as more than a shadow among shadows, he still stood as he had.

"Jack..." I said, but I had nothing to follow it, and his name sat between us, like a tangible thing in the dark.

He smirked, eyes and teeth matching glints in the gloom. "Get some sleep, James. Still a ways to go before we're there."

"Where?" I called after him, but he'd already disappeared.

"You think too much for a sailor," Anamaria declared, accompanying the curt sentence with a not unfriendly elbow in the ribs as she climbed past me in the rigging.

She was right, but it didn't stop me. Port Royal, I was almost certain, had passed away far to the east and south. It occurred to me that we might be heading for Tortuga, which would be an interesting experience without a doubt. There was not much else beyond in that direction, but the absence of any reasonable target could never be considered a deciding factor when dealing with Sparrow.

I ran all my calculations again when the cry of "Land ho!" came from the lookout. It took another hour or two before the coastline was visible from the deck as more than a low line of grit along the horizon. By the time we were close enought to pick out the darker, greasier smudge of a city, I knew where we were.

Sparrow stepped up beside me, where I was leaning against the forward rail. "Santiago," I stated. Wealthy enough to draw all sorts, not yet established enough to have begun being choosy about who it welcomed within its walls.

"Not Havana," Sparrow pointed out, with admirably little smugness.

"Not your final destination," I countered.

"Cheerful spot to stop over, though," he continued, not missing a beat. "Nice fruit, good grog, lovely girls. Ever been there? Fabulous town. I could even consider leaving Tortuga for her, but you know how I hate to appear fickle."

Well, at least I was relatively unlikely to be recognised here. "Why is it," I wondered aloud, "that whenever you're involved I end up surrounded by Spaniards?"

"Because bouquets of flowers are very boring." Jack clapped me on the shoulder. "Look lively. We can spend tonight on solid ground if we try."

Jack gave the watch to two of the crew who'd let a minor disagreement get out of hand the night before. (The injuries weren't even sufficient to impede their ability to discharge their duties.) It was, I couldn't help thinking, almost precisely what I would have done. Excepting only the part where he shook a stern finger in their faces, telling them that if they continued behaving like scallywags he'd hang them out to dry on the yardarms.

Then the rest of us hit the town.

Though he couldn't have been said to be precisely leading the party, Sparrow seemed to know exactly where he wanted to go, and our rowdy group (entirely inconspicuous on the early evening streets of Santiago) drifted up one street and down another until we reached what I could only assume was the right place. The sign didn't have a written name, but suggested strongly through pictures that the place was called the Bell and Anchor. There was little to distinguish it from a dozen other places we'd passed, but Sparrow made a bee-line for the door.

I don't think there's such a thing as unjustified suspicion when it comes to that man.

The crew tumbled into the tavern like a spilt drink, trickling into all the gaps and soaking into the atmosphere. In minutes it was as though we'd been there for hours.

It would have been easy to lose Sparrow in the chaos if I hadn't been watching for him. He slipped through the crowd like a rat through rushes, graceful and greased, and washed up at a corner table occupied by a hard-eyed Spaniard who didn't seem at all surprised to see him.

There's a grim satisfaction in having assumptions confirmed.

I lost him in the swell of the first round arriving with a consonant-free roar of approval and unwinding that I joined in, raising my tankard to the group. When I looked back to the corner table, Anamaria had joined them, and I was entirely unsurprised.

There was little to be gained from continued watching; I was too far away to hear anything, and there was little remarkable to see. I turned back to the main body of the crew, who'd ambushed a passing serving maid and were engaged en masse in cajoling her into singing. When they finally prevailed, she proved to have a very clear voice (and a deft manner in turning down the multitude of other "offers" that were thrust upon her). Another serving girl (not a sister, I thought, and my eyes slid to the corner again) had a talent for dancing, and a much more mercantile attitude to other matters.

By the time I was languishing in the bottom third of my second tankard, the party was beginning to fragment and spread, getting rowdier in all directions. I saw Anamaria first, suddenly appearing in a knot of the crowd to be tucked under a burly arm and claim a tankard as her own, draining it in one long pull. I didn't look back to the corner, but finished my own beer as I waited, until Sparrow dropped into the seat beside me.

I didn't give him time to settle. "Profitable meeting?" I asked, keeping him in the corner of my eye.

From that angle I couldn't quite tell if he was smiling, but I thought so. "Yes, it was," he said.

I pushed my empty tankard across the table. "Where to now, then?"

He shifted in his chair, but I still wasn't looking. "Now," he said, "I thought would be the perfect time for that quiet drink you owe me."

When I did look, he was twisted in his chair to face me, grinning, elbow slung across the back of the chair and hand dangling. "That wasn't what I meant."

"I know." His fingers danced over my elbow, up my arm, twisting into a knuckled grip in the fabric at my shoulder. "Come on."

They followed those orders with alacrity, hieing off down the wharf before he could change his mind again, no doubt. I crossed to the starboard rail, looking out over the harbour, letting the Pearl rise and fall below me as though she were breathing along with me. When he stepped up beside me, Jack was brandishing a bottle. "Did you have that in your pocket?" I asked.

"I certainly didn't have it under my hat," he retorted, failing to get a grip on the cork. Eventually he pulled it out with his teeth, spitting it grandiosely over the side to join the rest of the detritus on the water.

"Charming."

"I try."

I followed him up onto the forecastle, where a lantern at least provided better light. Jack leaned over the forward railing, patting a familiar hand against the carved locks of the figurehead. Ritual of some sort apparently completed, he turned his back upon her, lounging back against the railing. I sat on the edge of the forward hatch.

"Want a drink?" he offered.

"Not particularly," I said, but took the bottle anyway. It was, as feared, the same breed of ferocious rum I'd sampled with Gibbs. Perhaps not quite as ferocious. Perhaps I was getting used to it. "What I'd like is answers."

Jack tilted his head, giving the concept its due consideration. I didn't hold out much hope. Sure enough, he answered, "Too easy," and smiled in a manner entirely not conducive to reassurance. "Let's do it this way instead: one question, one answer. What say you?"

I was sceptical, to say the least. "And would that answer be the truth?"

"Of course!" he cried, convincingly affronted.

I sipped again at the rum, weighing words and phrases in my head. I knew him. My question would need to be answerable with nothing but the truth I wanted. "What will be the end point of the Black Pearl's next voyage?"

"Havana." The answer was startling in its promptness, its stark simplicity, the ease with which Jack gave it up.

I blinked. "Are you entirely mad?"

He grinned and swung forward, holding himself upright with one hand on the railing. "One question, remember. My turn." He plucked the bottle from my hand, sweeping his head back and losing his hat in taking a long swallow of the filthy stuff. He bared his teeth against it, and nudged his hat further into the prow with his toe. "Why did you kiss me?"

The question was like a jab to the stomach, all my breath rushing out. I saw Jack there, I saw him before me, I saw him again kneeling on the carpet before me, before the fire. Firelight, lamplight, his face, his eyes, the way he'd tasted and felt and sounded... My lungs burned; I drew breath into my body again. He was looking at me; he hadn't been that close before, he'd stepped forward from the railing. "You were... there," I said. So incredibly, indescribably there in a moment where anything else was impossible—how could I say that?

The curve of his mouth was amusement not quite equal to a smile. "I was there? You mean to tell me that anyone—"

"One question," I reminded him, clinging to the rules Jack had made. I held out my hand for the bottle.

He relinquished it with good grace and a long, heavy look from beneath half-lowered lashes. "In that case, it's your turn," he reminded me.

My turn. I could ask him anything. I could ask him why Havana, how Havana, and he'd answer, he'd tell me everything. "Why did you kiss me back?"

His eyes glinted like the sea under moonlight. He was closer but still distant until he spoke, so quietly but I had no trouble hearing him. And he said, "Some things aren't there for the taking. But if they're given, how can a man deny them?" I didn't remember closing my eyes, but they were closed when he whispered in my ear, breath against the lobe and whiskers against my cheek, "James."

I turned, I reached, and he was there, right there, sliding into my arms, breath pushing against mine. I couldn't taste the rum on his tongue for the rum on my own (the bottle knocking against wood as I set it aside in favour of non-liquid intoxication) but he was still the flavour of the sea, of wild boundless freedom. He washed over me, lapped against my shores, and I drew him closer and closer still, taking him with me when he tilted me backwards with a hand tangled in my hair and a branding grip just above my elbow. We sprawled over the hatch cover, him kissing me kissing him because he was there, more there than anyone else had been, could be, and I told him, muttered against his jaw, "Not anyone. Not anyone else."

We rolled like the sea, like the ship beneath us, and eventually came the ebb as we eased apart, gasping. He began to shift back and, "Jack," I muttered, trying to keep my grip.

"I don't," he started, and I exulted to realise he was breathless. "I don't want to push..."

He half sat up, but I got my fingers around his shoulder and pulled him back down, pressed his shoulder blade into the wood with the heel of my hand, held him there. "When don't you want to push?" I growled in his ear, and moved my other hand down, palm pressed where I knew he was hard. Knew because I was, hard and wanting.

His head knocked back against the hatch with a hollow thud. "James," he gasped, laid out below me like some lost treasure of the Caribbean.

If such things are given, how can a man deny them indeed?

Havana, the answer that only raised more questions. But before I played any more games at Jack's instigation, I judged it wisest to garner a little more information of my own. And that meant braving Anamaria.

I chose the ground a little more carefully this time. As picturesque as the view was from the topmast yards, I wasn't particularly fond of being at the mercy of both gravity and the lady at the same time. So I waited until I could slip away and catch her taking a moment out of the sun in the lee of the forecastle. I brought her an apple, from the new store Jack had taken on board in Santiago, as combination bribe and excuse.

Anamaria eyed both me and it with suspicion, the one more warranted than the other. "What do you want?" she demanded, snatching the fruit from my hand.

I should have known she'd appreciate the direct approach anyway. I took a seat on a barrel beside her and said, "Why are we going to Havana?"

She snorted and took a bite of the apple, large and ferocious. "You ask too many questions for a sailor," she declared, mouth full.

I nodded; she was quite right. "Some habits are harder to be rid of than others." That did not mean I was going to be deterred.

With a sigh, she wiped apple juice off her chin with the back of her hand. "I had a brother..."

Her escape had been successful, but he'd weighed on her conscience. Five years later, she'd gone back, half fearing he'd be dead or worse. When she found him alive, she took him away. Speaking of it brought a beautiful joy to her eyes.

But then it had all gone horribly wrong. She was used to looking after herself, and herself alone, and he wasn't used to not being looked after. He was a still a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and handsome to the point of being pretty. There are so many predators in Caribbean waters.

I didn't press her and she didn't volunteer anything about the specifics. She merely said that she had never seen him again. Had assumed him lost, occasionally hoped him dead. There had been no way, no chance, of finding him. Years passed.

Then, suddenly, the faint end of a trail had appeared. It had been Groves, actually, providing the first clue, recalling that a certain merchant in Guadeloupe had called himself by a certain name when he traded in commodities less salubrious than sugar and cloth. Even given that first person to question, the trail should have been dead, but it had instead pointed her on, to a naval clerk in Cartagena. And thence to a hard-eyed Spaniard in Santiago, who had given her the final piece.

A year ago, he had told her, her brother had been sold as a catamite to the Governor of Havana.

"I prefer lurking," I replied. I was surprised at the ease with which I could watch him, how dispassionately I could follow the movement of that body, the tilt of the hips as he shimmied his coat down his arms...

Maybe not quite that dispassionately.

He joined me at the windows, fingers loosening the lacing down from his throat. I caught his hand, caught myself on the verge of swearing I would not let him distract me. Caught myself because one should avoid being foresworn if it's possible. But still, an attempt should be made.

"You said we weren't going to Havana," I said in opening.

"No," he answered slowly, wrist quiescent in my grip. "I said we were going to Havana."

"Not last night," I said. He smirked, and good God, I was not blushing. "My second night aboard."

Jack's eyes swivelled as he demonstrably dredged his memory. "Ah. What I said—" I thought I'd be safe atop the cabinets; I hadn't reckoned with the monkey-like skills of Sparrow. In a moment, he had a knee beside my leg, heaved himself up. One knee, and he teetered. I had a steadying hand on his hip before I even though of it and he beamed, shifted under my fingers as he swung his other knee across my outstretched legs, settling back on his heels and my knees. "What I said, was that I wasn't thinking of raiding Havana. Very different prospect."

"Semantics," I snapped. Or tried to snap, but he'd leaned forward, one hand bracing on my hip, the other tugging at the neck of my shirt, and somehow my voice wasn't as forceful as I'd intended.

"That's an awfully big word for a sailor," Jack purred—purred!—as he leaned in towards the part of my neck and shoulder he'd just bared, nudging my head back to knock against the window frame. Not all the stars I saw were from the impact.

It occurred to me that I could keep retreating, fighting a rearguard action, until he overran my defenses (and the idea was not without a certain distracting merit). Or...

I dropped both hands to his hips and drew him closer, until there was no further he could go and his mouth fell away from my neck on a gasp. I let it all meld, the satisfaction, the aggravation, the feel of him against me. "You still don't have the men to raid Havana," I reminded him, lip scratching his jaw.

"Still not planning on it," he replied, voice wound tight, but my smugness shattered as his hips rolled, my hands tightening on them. I tilted my head up and met his mouth coming down; the kiss was deep and instantly shocking, like diving into still water. I had to close my eyes as the sun refracted off the panes of glass.

Jack's hands scrabbled at my shirt, heaving it off over my head, and I had his off him a moment later. I slid one hand up the bare skin of his back, hooking two fingers into the waistband of his trousers. "What," I managed, between his lips on mine, shifting my weight, "were you planning then?"

"Something—" he began, and I used his distraction, pushed him forward, pushed him off me to come up onto my knees and push him back against the wood as he laughed. "Something sneaky." He smirked, fingers nimble at the fastenings of my breeches even as I worked on his. "More than one way to skin a cat, mate."

Then we were naked together, stretched out atop the cabinets in the last golden glory of the setting sun streaming through the windows. Naked and his hands so distracting, so maddening, that I caught them and held them away, above his head, stretching him beneath me as I pressed him down, and again, as he undulated beneath me, never still, never passive, not Jack Sparrow. He gasped, he kissed me, he bit at my neck as I asked him, breathless, unheeding, "What will you do? What will you do?"

He never answered, twining his leg around mine, just gasped back, "What will you do?" and then the world was rushing past me in the hoarse sibilance of my name on his lips.

We lay together as the light died through purple and into the fleeting blue dusk of the tropics. I asked no more questions. Nor did he.

"Same way," Jack said, hopping his fingers back across the wall on the map. "Into the jungle, no one the wiser, mind the snakes."

She shook her head again. "No. I made this mistake before. Jorge is not one of us. He doesn't have the same skills and instincts."

I agreed with her. But just because no one had objected to my presence at this planning session didn't mean I felt I had any right to speak. I sat in my corner and kept my mouth shut.

"Well, you can't just walk in," Gibbs said. He wasn't overly concerned with the matter; it seemed fairly obvious that he would have command of the ship while Anamaria and Jack executed whatever unlikely and perilous scheme came out of this candlelit assembly. Since it wasn't directly responsible for his safety, that scheme was not receiving the dubious benefit of his undivided attention.

Jack pulled a face somewhere between a wince and a wrinkling of his nose. "No, probably not. Too bloody well known, and after the last time we won't get away with the old wimple trick again."

"What about this half-built fort?" Anamaria asked, pointing to her corner of the map.

When Jack went around the table to look, I stepped forward to the edge he'd been lording over. I wasn't really listening to his answer—"Map's three months old if it's a day, that'll be completed by now. Look, here, I'm telling you, that's the key."—as I examined it. Once again, a more detailed chart than any I'd ever had cause to peruse before, Havana being entirely outside even the possible realm of English interference. It was a fine town, a beautiful harbour, with aggravatingly well-planned defenses, at least so far as the map detailed them. I had little reason to suspect reality would err in our favour.

It was only when I saw my own fingers on the parchment that I realised I was measuring, calculating. Every inch of the harbour covered twice, the easy land approaches as well. No way to fight out of that harbour, not the Pearl by herself. Little chance of slipping in and out with hostile intent either. Which meant...

"Damn," Jack said, and when I looked up, he was watching the spread of my fingers over the lines of the map. "We are going to have to walk in."

"Sail in, at least," I confirmed, taking my hands away from Havana as I stood up straight, leaning against the edge of the table.

He shook his head. "I told you, I can't—"

"But he can," Anamaria interrupted. She watched me, the gaze of a hunting bird intent upon her prize. "Can't you, James?"

I supposed we were going to find out.

"I shan't ask," I told Jack over the bundle of cloth.

He grinned. "Don't."

The most surprising part was the change Jack wrought upon himself. He changed his clothes, discarding the sash and trading his coat for one at least as boring as anything I ever found in the bottom of my sea-chest. He tidied his hair somehow, working deft-fingered miracles. He trimmed his beard. He scrubbed face and hands, turning the water black.

I caught his eye in the mirror over the shaving basin. He didn't say that he hadn't done this for me; he didn't need to, I knew.

He knew that I wouldn't have asked it of him. Nor would Anamaria. But it had been necessary, and he had done it.

"You could walk past Will Turner like this and he'd think you just another respectable man," I said, and he smirked, slightly marring the effect. "You could certainly walk into Havana. You don't need me along."

His gaze reflected was just as steady as direct. "There are numerous impressive stories of my exploits, but even in the ones I don't believe, I've never managed to dupe the entirety of the men under my command, all of my friends and dear ones, and an actual State into believing something so blatantly untrue as, say, that I was dead."

He turned to face me. I said, "There's an hour until sunset. We should start moving."

The harbourmaster was eager to finish for the day, uninterested in complications. "Ship name?" he called up, the final question.

"The Hidden Pearl."

"Poetic," he commented.

"Named by my sister," I said, with suitable deprecation. There was a snort of amusement somewhere behind me. "My maiden sister," I added, tossing down the wharfage fee.

A sharp noise of protest, a louder laugh, and the harbourmaster looked puzzled, but shrugged and turned back down the wharf, home towards his dinner.

So easy even I was dissatisfied. Of course, we still had to make it out again. Sparrow joined me at the railing. "I make it about six."

"Close enough," I allowed.

"Excellent." He beamed, pleased with the world. "Time enough for a drink, then."

We had two, in fact, in a crowded and raucous establishment where no one looked at us twice, Anamaria glaring ever harder than usual, Jack unaffected by the circumstances, and myself somewhere between the two.

The message they had sent with the Spaniard in Santiago told Jorge to meet his sister at midnight—the traditional time for kidnappings and secret trysts and other dastardly deeds—tonight in a particular grove in the governor's garden, Jack's knowledge of which I once again chose not to question.

This was where I got out of my depth. I could construct a plan that would tick out with metronomic precision, but I had no recourse when it came to the vagaries that could occur by moonlight. That was why we needed Jack.

The wall around the Governor's mansion provided no real challenge, though it did prompt another hissed argument between Anamaria and Jack as to whether Jorge would be able to manage it with the same ease as we had. Jack pointed out that I had had no trouble. I pointed out that I'd hit him once before and I could do it again if he liked.

There was, one had to admit, more than a little of the ridiculous about the whole evening.

We skulked in a shadowed copse, waiting in a not particularly patient fashion. Time limped past. The moon must have been close to full; the gardens were limned with light.

"You're sure that fellow delivered your message?" I asked, finally.

"If he didn't," Anamaria growled from deep shadows, dark and menacing, "then when I find him I'll hang him from the yardarm by his—"

"Someone's coming," Jack interrupted, and I was quite relieved not to hear the end of Anamaria's sentence.

He was still barely more than a boy, a slight shadow slipping into the moonlit grotto. Instantly recognisable even if Anamaria hadn't leapt forward with a cry, dashed into the clearing to wrap him in a desperate embrace. Jorge had her features, her build, though in him the sharpness was tempered. The hawk was a dove. The ferocity was fragility.

He was, indeed, very attractive. He was also, I noticed as they stood, arms so tight around each other it seemed unlikely they would let go any time soon, very well dressed. He looked like someone who had been carefully looked after.

With a rustle and a scrape and a shifting of shadows, Jack sat down, making himself comfortable against the trunk of a tree. His voice emanated from around the level of my knee. "Might as well get comfortable," he said.

"You think it will be worth it?" I asked. The evidence, I had to admit, certainly did seem to suggest the siblings might be a while.

"Family reunions," he said, offhand and careless. "Can't rush 'em, mate."

My sister was still in England. I hadn't seen her in more than ten years, our communication reduced to letters at six month intervals, her drawing room society as exotic to me as my surroundings must seem to her. She'd been only fifteen when I left England. She'd married very well, and apparently happily.

I doubted she would have greeted me like this upon my return to England—the siblings had taken a step apart, but Anamaria still held his arms, as though he'd be snatched away again if she let him go entirely. But did that mean that Catherine felt any less for me as a sister?

How would she feel when news of my death reached her?

"Oh, sit down, will you?" Jack chivvied.

They were speaking animatedly now. I sat, leaning against my own tree, opposite him in the dark. A wind sifted through the branches above us, trickling moonlight down on our heads.

"We really must stop meeting like this," Jack quipped, half-hearted.

"What, stealing things in the middle of the night?"

"You'd better watch out," he cautioned. "It might become a habit."

I tilted my head back against the bark. "First a ship, now a governor's personal slave. Are we moving up in the world or down?"

More than a little of the ridiculous; I warned you.

Something in Jack's direction surreptitiously jangled. I could barely make out his outline in the dark—he could be his usual outrageous self, not the new-minted respectable he'd fashioned for this venture. "Why are you here, Jack?" I asked.

"That's a question a man often asks of himself, especially a sailor, though admittedly usually on an empty sea. I think it's the trees; all those leaves just get in the way of the philosophy."

"Shut up," I suggested. "Why are you here tonight, like this? We probably could have managed without you, though we would have been desolate—"

"Naturally."

"—and you could have kept your own peculiar sort of dignity intact."

Jack shifted in the dark. "Maybe I just like playing dress-up."

I snorted.

"Or maybe," he continued blithely, "even I need reminding on occasion that Jack Sparrow is more than just the sum of his parts. Or maybe, just maybe, there's a debt between Anamaria and myself, and I suspect that this may be the last chance I have to repay it."

"Dangerous," I commented. "If I believe that third option I might have to start believing all that nonsense about you actually being a good man."

"Can't have that," Jack agreed. "I'd do something reprehensible immediately, but I fear you'd scream and bring the guards down on us."

The gesture was useless in the dark, but I couldn't help raising an eyebrow. "Scream?"

"Like a chambermaid who's had her bottom pinched."

"Only if that was what you were intending to do."

"It crossed my mind."

I gave up, and started laughing. He slithered and scraped against his tree, kicking my ankle in the process. "Sorry," he muttered absently. "What are they doing?"

I tilted my head around the tree trunk to look. "What about the sanctity of family reunions?"

"Time and place. They'll have forever once we get him out of here."

Anamaria had finally released her brother, using both hands now to gesture. Jorge, in his turn, seemed to be... imploring? "He's not coming," I realised.

"What?" Jack scrambled forward, hand on my knee, coming up at my shoulder as if it was somehow visibly obvious, not something I'd intuited. His profile showed faint and silver in the corner of my eye.

"He's not coming," I repeated. "Look at him. He's clean, he's well fed, he's well dressed."

"Nice fancy coat," Jack allowed. "But why would he want to stay here? He's... well."

I watched Jorge's face as he tried to convince his sister. "I suspect this will come as a surprise to you, Jack," I said, "but sometimes we have to make compromises to achieve what we want. Sometimes there are costs that come attached. And sometimes they're worth it." After a moment, I added, "Besides, there are worse things."

He leaned against my shoulder. "Are you blushing?"

"No."

We watched brother and sister for a minute. Jorge was, I noticed, unrelenting. Just as implacable as Anamaria. "But he's not free," Jack said, quiet and simple and sincere.

"It's not always that simple."

His frown was audible. "What do you mean?"

I shook my head. "Nothing. Maybe freedom isn't what he wants."

The siblings embraced again. Anamaria's shoulders were shaking, and she stood alone in the grotto for long minutes after her brother had left. When we met her at the edge of the trees, her eyes were clear and her chin was up.

"Take me back to Port Royal," Anamaria had said. So we were.

I had always known there would be a return to Port Royal, that I would have to go back. Jack was more or less sailing from there these days, would be returning for Will and Elizabeth if for no other reason. As long as I remained on board the Black Pearl, I had known that I would have to face the town.

I hadn't been sure, when considering all this as merely part of a plan I was setting in motion, how long I would be keeping company with Jack. Joining his crew had not been premeditated. Ending up in his bed certainly hadn't been.

Literally in his bed. Because it was, as Jack so helpfully pointed out, a much more comfortable sleeping arrangement than my hammock, and well-rested sailors worked better. I didn't argue too vehemently. There didn't seem to be much to be gained from the effort. Any claim that I did not want to share a bed with him would be known as a lie by both of us. I was no blushing maiden to have been seduced into this; I was a full partner in the business with the damned smirking pirate. Whose smirk I knew I had the power to wipe away into a gasp and a grin of a darker, richer hue...

I couldn't even be squeamish on grounds of my reputation. I was, after all, not myself. And moreover, not a single member of the crew batted an eyelid at the arrangement. I was forced to wonder how many other times Jack had done this, with how many people, who.

Every time I had a reasonable excuse to absent myself—like tonight, taking the dog watch—he would catch my elbow, already half asleep, and say, "Come back, after."

"You'll be asleep," I pointed out.

"Wake me up."

He was asleep when I came back in the smallest hour of the night, sprawled every which way over the bed, the cover draped haphazardly over one hip and down his leg. He was surprisingly tranquil to sleep beside, languid in slumber in a way wakefulness never seemed to allow.

As we had walked back through Havana that night, Anamaria had told us one thing only of her meeting with her brother: a question he had asked. "What will we do?"

"And I told him, anything we want. We'll go anywhere we please. The whole Caribbean will be ours. The whole world."

"What did he say?" Jack asked.

"He said that was not enough."

I was not the only one who knew what he meant. I though Anamaria also understood. I hoped she and Groves would be happy. It seemed as though we were all starting new lives.

When I looked at the bed again, Jack was awake, watching me steadily. "Nowhere to jump ship between here and Port Royal. Missed your chance, mate."

"I'm not going to run away."

He smirked, stretching like a cat. "Imagine that's what you told everyone back before Santa Catalina, too."

Except him. "The subject never come up."

"I don't suppose that it did."

When I joined him in bed, he wrapped those heedless limbs around me and whispered in my ear like the sea.

We hustled about the deck, performing all the tiny tasks of docking and making fast. As the flow of necessary jobs slowed to a trickle, Anamaria lingered longer at the port side railing, until finally Jack surprised her at it.

"Go on," he said. "Might as well get off."

The embrace she caught him in was at least as fierce as that she had given her brother. It knocked the wind out of Sparrow, and the hat off his head, but he didn't seem to mind either. There were words spoken between them then, but they were quiet and not for me to hear.

I joined him at the railing as she strode off down the wharf. There was, I noted when I looked for it, a figure coming down the last distance of the way from the fort that might have been Groves. I smiled to see it.

"James," Jack said, and I looked at him. He looked back, so stern, so serious, that I turned to face him entirely.

"What is it?" I asked.

He took a deep breath. "I think it's time for you to leave."

Like falling, like being knocked overboard, that long weightless instant before the ocean closes over your head.

"No." He took two steps, was right before me, gripping my shoulders, before I realised. "Not like that," he said, blazing. "Were it up to me, James, I would keep you here, but I can't, any more than Anamaria can keep her brother."

"No." My turn. I shook my head. "It was not a decision to be made lightly." I'd said that before; it seemed years ago.

"But you'll regret it," he said, implacable. "If you don't already, you will." His hand slid up my neck, under my ear, framing my still-shaking head. "You will, Norrington. You will regret leaving them, and you will regret lying to them, and you will regret abandoning your post."

I had my eyes closed. When had that happened?

"And you'll never blame anyone but yourself, you'll hate yourself for it, and James, James, I can't let that happen."

I took a deep, shuddering breath, and opened my eyes. He was so close. "But England," I gasped.

"It's only an ocean away," Jack said. "And you know, as well as I do, that you have to. It's the cost." He rested his forehead against mine. "The Caribbean's a part of you. I know it is. You can't lose that just because you leave. It will always be here. So go. Make us proud. Marry a good woman. Name your first son Jack."

I managed a smile. "Well then." He straightened, hands falling away from me, and I added, slightly startled, I must admit, "Now?"

His head quirked, but his smirk wasn't as bright as it had been. "Need a moment to gather your effects?"

"Yes," I said.

And then I kissed him, there on the deck in the bright Caribbean sunshine, in front of the world and God. I caught him to me and kissed him as though by will alone I could force him into my memory, his taste, his feel, the grip of his fingers on the tendons in my neck as he kissed me back just as desperately.

Then I turned and walked down the gangway. The sun was so bright, baked out of the sky, dazzling off the water, turning my vision white like a tunnel along the wharf leading to the land and my future.

I stepped into that tunnel.

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