Some Other Fool Across the Ocean Years Ago
Part 2: Bombshells of My Daily Fears
by
Pairing: James Norrington/Jack Sparrow
Rating: Mature
Disclaimer: Pirates of the Caribbean is owned by Disney, etc. No infringement intended.
Originally Posted: 12/11/10
Dedication: For Hannah
Summary: James Norrington transitions from working in IT to working for a pirate. It's not as bad as he'd feared, but he still feels like there's something he's missing—like a lifetime's worth of memories. But maybe not having that weight is a better choice?
Rating: Mature
Disclaimer: Pirates of the Caribbean is owned by Disney, etc. No infringement intended.
Originally Posted: 12/11/10
Dedication: For Hannah
Summary: James Norrington transitions from working in IT to working for a pirate. It's not as bad as he'd feared, but he still feels like there's something he's missing—like a lifetime's worth of memories. But maybe not having that weight is a better choice?
The first week aboard the Pearl was disorienting.
Jack's idea of introductions was to wait until James had climbed aboard and say, "Everyone, James, James, everyone. Carry on, then," and waltz away while James was still gaping.
In truth, until he'd stepped onto the Pearl, he hadn't believed this was all real. The state of disbelief which had enveloped him when Jack had walked into the cafe on Friday was only barely starting to lift. And now that he was actually standing on board a beautifully maintained 18th century pirate ship—the same one he'd been winding up on in his dreams for the past fifteen years—well, it wasn't that it was a more convincing reality, it just suddenly seemed a more pleasant one.
He rethought the 'more pleasant' description when he learned how much work actually went into keeping the ship running. The sails and ropes and things weren't just for show, and the crew were quick to show him just how little he knew about how they worked. For most of the week, it was learning names, faces, and hard physical labor, after which he fell exhausted into bed.
Jack's bed. He wasn't sure how that had been negotiated—he'd expected it, but it had also just sort of happened. Jack thought his haplessness was incredibly amusing.
Jack thought other things were less amusing.
"D'you have a condom here somewhere?" James asked that first night, when Jack had started stripping his shirt off.
Jack stared at him like he'd started speaking Martian. "What?"
"Oh, come on, you've got to have used them sometime."
Jack raised an eyebrow. "We never have before."
"Yes, but—" James rolled his eyes, exasperated that he even needed to explain this, "That was when we were having sex in a magical shared dream which I thought wasn't real."
"Not my problem," Jack said quickly.
James sighed. "I don't want to have sex—I don't want you to fuck me without protection, all right?"
Jack scowled for a second, then shrugged. "Your loss." He finished pulling his shirt over his head. "Is there anything I can do to you without a condom?"
"There are—" James made an exasperated noise. "Yes, Jack, there are plenty of things we can do without a condom."
"Oh, good," Jack said, crawling onto the bed. "Though you might be one of those touchy folk who won't let anyone go down on them without a rubber."
"I—" And James may have been about to go into a lecture on what kinds of infections could get carried via oral sex when Jack got his cock out and sucked the head into his mouth. And at that point it just seemed rude.
So that happened.
At the end of the first week Jack took him aside. "So the thing about the Fountain of Youth," he said, "is you can only visit it once."
James frowned. "So that's enough, then? To keep you set for life?"
Jack pulled his mouth into a particularly pitying expression. "It's the Fountain of Youth, mate, not the Fountain of Eternal Youth. One sip gives you five years or so."
"So how did you..."
"You can only visit it once," Jack said, fishing a piece of paper out of his back pocket, "but you can tell other people how to get there as much as you like. Here."
James took the paper and unfolded it. It was a wrinkled sheet of A4, printed with a set of instructions, and... "This is from a geocaching website," he said, eyeing the URL in the footer.
Jack nodded.
James squinted at him suspiciously. "You geocached the Fountain of Youth?"
"Can you think of a better use for these things?" Jack said, tapping the page. "Elizabeth loves 'em. Remind me to get you one of those tracker thingies before you set out."
'Elizabeth'—there went one of those casual references again.
The rest of the crew of the Pearl had come aboard well after what James though of as 'those adventures'. There were about twenty of them, five women, and they all treated him like a younger sibling who had just been let out of his room. Or, probably more accurately, like a pretty but useless thing Jack had picked up to warm his bed. It made the splinters and rope burns he was getting on his hands feel even more frustrating, but he didn't expect this to be easy.
In any case, though they gave him a hard time about his usefulness for physical labor, none of them expected him to be familiar with Jack's old stories—at least, no more familiar than they were from listening to him tell them. It was only Jack who occasionally forgot that he didn't actually know Elizabeth and William Turner. James supposed he'd meet them, someday. It couldn't be any more than exceptionally awkward.
They hit land shortly after that—well, they anchored the Pearl in deep water and took a couple rowboats up to the dock. The Pearl had a diesel generator on board specifically for running a couple refrigerators, but Jack hated having more things that ran on petrol than necessary. As James watched the shore come closer (of course he wasn't trusted to manage oars, not yet,) he squinted and finally asked, "So, erm, where are we again?"
Jack looked incredulous for a moment, then shrugged. "Florida, mate."
James took another look around, then suddenly felt as stupid as the crew thought he was. "Oh. Right."
Jack grinned. "Don't worry about currency. I've got it covered."
Now James felt stupider than the crew thought he was. "My passport is back..."
"Got it covered."
James waited on the dock with two of the crew, Annika and Cecil, while Jack talked with the authorities. Even without making out all the words he felt equal parts admiration and terror as Jack's charisma got them into the country. It was an amazing con; he'd seen something like it a couple times before, but only from professionals on Channel 4 showing off for the cameras.
"All right," Jack said, swaggering back into the sunlight. "Let's provision ourselves."
Cecil and Annika nodded and headed off together, poking each other and giggling. Jack grabbed James' elbow and led him up the road into town. "Um," James asked. "What are we..."
"Getting a car," Jack said.
"But..." his brain was already skipping, and this wasn't helping. "You can drive?"
"It's a long bloody walk," Jack said. "And I should know."
They wound up getting a cab to the rental place in Port Orange. Jack talked his way into the rental even faster than he'd gotten through the port authority, and after a short stop for supplies they were lazily drifting down Florida's highways, going indecently fast and listening to appalling music on the radio.
"Can we at least turn that off?" James asked as Taylor Swift whined her way through a plea about the girl on the bleachers.
Jack smirked and let his fingers rest lazily against the volume dial. "You have a better suggestion?"
"How about you tell me where we're going?" James asked.
"Happiest place on Earth, mate," Jack said.
You belong with meee-eee, Swift's voice keened, which was just enough time for James to digest what Jack had said. "You're fucking kidding me."
"Got your GPS thingamawhatsis?" Jack asked. "You're gonna need it."
The trip took them two hours, all told, and a good deal of it was traffic in Orlando. Jack didn't lose his smile once while they waited in what seemed to be a slightly-mobile parking lot to get in.
Finally, they drove along with another few hundred cars into the park, around loops and down roads, and finally into a huge expanse of parking lot. Jack threw the car into park and got out in the punishing sunshine.
"Ugh," he said. "Well, we're here."
James got out slowly and looked around. There was flat blacktop, a couple streetlamps, and a line of cars on the edge of the lot. "So—"
Jack had opened the car's boot and pulled out a huge empty water bottle—the economy size, big enough to stick on a water cooler, but thankfully with a handle and a cap. "You'll need this."
So now he was standing in a baking hot parking lot with an empty water bottle and a piece of paper from a geocaching website. "Um. All right. Is there someplace we're starting from?"
"You're starting, mate," Jack said, and pointed over James' left shoulder. "That lamppost, right there."
James looked behind him. The lamp was standard industrial lighting, with some kind of sign on it that presumably was to help people remember where they parked. "What, we come all this way and don't even get to go on any rides?"
"Tell you what," Jack said. He leaned against the side of the car, crossed his legs, and pulled a knife out of his pocket to fuss with. "You go there and fill the keg up, and you don't think the trip was worth it, I'll give you your money back and you can go talk to the singing mice. Sound good?"
"Sounds fine," James said, smirking. "All right, I'm going."
He unfolded the directions again as he walked to the lamppost. "Start on the north side," he read, "And walk counterclockwise around the pole three times—seriously?" he shouted back at Jack.
"Seriously," Jack confirmed.
"Which way's north?"
Jack looked disgusted, but he pointed. James rolled his eyes and started walking.
"Okay," he said when he'd done that. "Then turn west and—"
He looked up to yell at Jack, but the parking lot was empty.
James froze, somewhat belatedly remembering that he was in the middle of a magical quest given to him by an immortal pirate using a secret treasure map—well, okay, not a secret treasure map, but one that wasn't going to be found by anyone other than other nerds on the internet. So that was almost as good.
Okay, then. If north was the side he'd started on, west was—he turned and looked down at the directions again, suddenly terrified of getting lost. "Forward until you reach the trees. What—all right."
He looked up and started walking.
It felt like he came to the edge of the parking lot sooner than he should have, like every step he took was back in time toward an age when the earth was unpaved and roots grew where they would. The crisp pavement gave way to packed earth, and then to loose soil under his feet. When he reached the treeline and the overhanging branches shaded his eyes from the sun, he looked down at the page for the next direction. "Turn around," he read, "close your eyes, and take three steps backward."
He looked at the page for a moment, then looked up at the sky and said, "This is still ridiculous."
When the sky (or Jack) didn't bother replying, he turned around, closed his eyes, and very carefully backed up three paces. When he opened his eyes he wasn't even sure he was going to be still on earth. Maybe the damn path would have teleported him to Mars and he'd have to fight green aliens with four arms for the damn Fountain.
But there it was—and here he was.
It was a stone fountain—and it looked ancient in design, but like it had just been carved yesterday out of heavy gray flint. The spout was in the shape of an urn tilted on its side, a stream of glittering water pouring endlessly out of its mouth and into a wide, shallow basin.
He looked around. The parking lot he'd been standing in was completely gone. The clearing was a small dot of meadow surrounded by untouched forest. It looked as though no human had been there for years. If the fountain hadn't been there—but of course, the fountain was the centerpiece, the point which commanded attention. It was at once incongruous and completely right, and the splashing of water into the basin sounded like laughter.
James took a deep breath of startlingly fresh air, stepped forward, and thrust his hand into the spray.
***
He really didn't remember walking back to the car.
"Wonderful," Jack said, taking the full jug of water from him with both hands and loading it into the back seat. "Excellent work."
James waved back at the empty stretch of parking lot he'd just walked out of. "How..."
"Magic."
"Right."
They drove out of Orlando with the sun going down and the air turning slightly cooler. Jack had all the windows rolled down, and the breeze cleared James' head a little and made it possible to think. "So what happens if someone else follows those directions?"
Jack raised an eyebrow. "What d'you mean what happens?"
"I mean what if somebody finds it? The Fountain of Youth, the real Fountain of Youth?"
"You worry too much, mate," Jack said.
"But..."
"It's been there for a bloody long time," Jack said, "and it'll be there for longer yet. If someone else follows the directions I put on the internet for just that purpose they probably won't believe what they've found, but if they do, so what?" He shrugged. "Not like I've got a patent on the thing."
They got back to the coast, returned the car, and James got the job of carrying the jug of water back to the ship. Annika and Cecil slapped him on the back and grinned at him like lunatics when they all caught up with each other. "Nice work," Annika said. "We got the beer; there's gonna be a party tonight."
Annika's accent was from somewhere in Eastern Europe; she claimed to be Polish nobility, though the rest of the crew openly doubted the 'nobility' half. "Thanks," he said.
"It's a tradition," Cecil explained as Jack helped him load the boats. "You make it back from the Fountain, it means you're in it for the long haul. Part of the crew, not just a passenger."
James raised his eyebrow. "I thought that was when I could tell a jib from a stu'nsil without using Wikipedia."
Cecil grinned. "Well, that too. We've got a lot of traditions."
"Oh, Jack," Annika said. "We've got a passenger. Do-won called and said she's already aboard."
Jack threw up his hands in brief exasperation. "Fine," he said, then pointed at James. "This is what happens when you delegate authority. No control over my own ship."
"Don't worry," Annika said, eyes sparkling. "She won't cause trouble."
The mood on the way back to the Pearl was distinctly celebratory in any case, and they hauled the boats, their supplies, and themselves aboard in the last dimming twilight, James managing the last with what he felt was an unfortunately awkward scramble.
When he got back to his feet, he looked up to see an unfamiliar woman, slender, brunette, and beautiful, staring at him in startled recognition.
He stared back, uncomprehending. After a moment, she tilted her head and asked, "James?"
"Yes?" he answered reflexively, then swallowed and said, "I don't..."
"Oh, right, this thing then," Jack said helpfully, popping up beside the woman. "Elizabeth, this is James Norrington in all his reincarnated glory without any memory of all those things which happened. Right? James, this is Elizabeth Turner."
Oh. Well, that explained a couple things. He cleared his throat after a second and extended his hand. "Hello," he said. "I, um..."
"Well, isn't this awkward," Elizabeth said, taking his hand and smiling not unkindly at him. "Trust Jack... well."
She was dressed in a neat blazer over jeans, practical trainers on her feet. Even so casual, she was one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen, and he felt a flutter as he realized just how easy it must have been to fall into a bizarre eighteenth-century love triangle after her.
"Talk later, work now," Jack said, waving at the supplies the rest of the crew were swarming over. James nodded at Elizabeth, and grateful for the reprieve, went to make himself useful stowing things. He could still make out Jack asking, "So where are you heading this time, and what are you buying passage with?"
James didn't hear Elizabeth's answer, and he tried to lose himself in work. But still he found his mind drifting. Elizabeth Turner, someone else with that bizarre shared history that he was apparently part of.
There was a special part of the hold just for storage of Fountain water; there were a few other jugs stored there, and they hauled out a half-filled one to bring up on deck. Cecil had set out some tables, and some of the food they'd bought on shore; by the time night fell the party was in full swing.
"All right," Jack announced, when everything was stowed and everyone had made it back on deck, "We have gathered here to celebrate another successful trip—" Here he drummed his hand on the jug on the table, though it wasn't the one James had brought back. "Drinks for everyone!"
The crew cheered and lined up with small plastic cups, not much more than a swallow. Jack poured out a shot for everyone, then one for himself; the crew toasted with an incoherent shout and then drank more or less together.
James had already drank a mouthful back at the Fountain itself, but even without the water he felt second-hand the rush of energy wash through the crew. Cheers rang out, and then everyone was clapping him on the back and trying to hand him alcohol.
He'd had several drinks, then, by the time he ran into Elizabeth again.
"I... hello again," he said coherently.
She toasted him with her own glass. "Congratulations," she said.
He smiled and drank, trying to fill the pause. Someone had filled his glass with rum, lime, and coke, which was too sweet and sticky. "Thanks. I still don't quite feel like I know what I'm doing, but..."
"Jack gave me a run-down of the situation, sort of," she said, which made him feel a bit less awkward. "So you two are... involved?"
He laughed. "Involved. That's one way of putting it."
She was smiling at him strangely. Finally she shrugged. "Well. Times do change."
"I suppose they must." He looked down into the black liquid he was carrying. "I wouldn't really know."
Elizabeth laughed, slightly, then put her hand on his arm. "This is awkward. I don't know if it would help to say that you are different. From the James Norrington I knew, I mean."
He smiled wryly. "I suppose I'll take that as a compliment."
"I don't know what Jack's told you," she replied.
He shook his head. "That... you and... he were engaged," he said, deciding on third-person pronouns at the last moment. It felt wrong to lay claim to this other man's life while he was talking with her, no matter how much Jack seemed to insist. "And that you were in love with someone else, and he was pretty broken up about it."
Elizabeth snorted into her drink. "That's... one way of putting it," she agreed.
He chuckled weakly and looked around the party for a moment. "Look... I'd really love to talk with you. I mean, I'd like to hear your side of things, since all I have to go on is Jack... but later?"
"Of course," she said, and raised her glass to him again. "I look forward to it."
He tapped her plastic cup with his own, then slipped into the party again until he found Jack. Captain Sparrow was holding court over a few of the crew, some argument about methods of navigation if he could make it out right. But he gave up the argument and followed James when James tugged on his sleeve.
"What's this, then?" Jack asked when they were out of hearing range.
"I actually went and bought some condoms at that store in Port Orange," James said. "So I was thinking that it might be nice to fuck or something."
Jack perked up at that, then frowned. "I don't actually like the bloody things," he said.
"Jack," James said. "When was the last time you used one?"
Jack closed his eyes in thought. "Mmmmmm... Nineteen... sixty. One. Nineteen sixty-one."
James rolled his eyes, grabbed Jack by the wrist, and dragged him back to his cabin. "Okay," he said. "It's been fifty years, and the technology has improved somewhat."
"But..." Jack protested.
James emptied his pockets onto the bed and started turning over the packages he'd bought. "Look. These ones are lubricated, these have ribbing for extra texture, these ones are made of polyurethane if you don't like latex, these out of polyisoprene if you don't like polyurethane either, and this one," he held up the novelty square of foil, "is glow-in-the-dark."
Jack's expression, which had been growing steadily more uneasy, suddenly brightened. "Ooh! I want that one."
James couldn't stop himself from smirking, but cleared his throat anyway and said, "I have to warn you, the way they package these one side is shielded from the light, so they don't get exposed properly."
"What do you mean?" Jack asked.
"I mean..." he shook the package. "Only one side gets lit, right? The other side's opaque, so no light can get in, so it doesn't charge up the glow... stuff on that side. Only the condom's rolled up, so it winds up..." he trailed off at Jack's incredulous expression. "Look, I didn't ask my roommates to have a 'lightsaber' fight in the middle of the sitting room, did I?"
Jack snickered at him, then schooled his expression to something approximating seriousness. "So what happens, then?"
"You get... stripes," James said.
Jack thought that over for a second, then snatched the foil packet from James' hand. "I want it," he said. "Put out the bloody lights and prepare to be boarded."
And in a few minutes, he exclaimed, "Whaddya know? It is stripey!"
***
That was, James considered, a very good start to the week.
The kitchen on the Pearl consisted of a large fridge and a few gas burners, which meant they were carrying rather more propane than James felt entirely comfortable having on a wooden ship. It was nominally Do-won and Annika's province, the two of them squabbling over stores and providing a varied but always satisfying dinner menu. But everyone generally made their own breakfasts, which meant that James stumbled out of Jack's cabin intent on attacking some eggs only to find Elizabeth at a table, sipping coffee.
She looked up as he came in, and he flushed, aware of what he looked like, in the T-shirt and sweatpants he'd thrown on—hell, what he smelled like, like he'd woken up in a body that was ten years younger and had taken to making up for a week of self-imposed chastity with enthusiastic abandon. How the hell did women manage to look put-together at seven in the morning? Even in just jeans and a sleeveless blue shirt she looked stunning.
"Good morning," she said, after the silence had already turned awkward.
"'Morning," he said. "Is there any coffee left?"
She nodded and gestured toward the coffeemaker with her cup. "There should be plenty."
"Thanks." Well, there was one set of social pleasantries done with. He poured himself a cup, added cream and sugar, and considered bolting back to Jack's cabin to frantically make himself look half-presentable.
"Please, sit down," she said, as though she could read his mind. He hesitated, but she waved at the seat across from her, and bound by courtesy, curiosity, and a ridiculous belief that she might actually find him attractive on some level, he sat.
"Well," she said after a moment, putting her coffee down and lacing her fingers together, "I'm glad to see you two getting on so well..."
James managed to not spit scalding coffee all over himself by a tiny fraction of a second and a great deal of self control. He waited a moment, took a sip, waited for his airway to clear, and said, "I suppose it's a little strange."
Elizabeth burst out laughing. James waited for a second, then reflected that was probably the best reaction he could hope for this early in the morning. He rubbed his eyes and drank more coffee.
He would probably have muttered something and tried to escape, but Jack stumbled in a moment later, squinting and grumbling noisily to himself. "I forbid you to be so cheerful before I'm properly awake," he said to Elizabeth, which just made her start laughing again.
Jack muttered something underneath his breath and went to pour himself coffee. James rested his chin on his hand and waited.
"So where are you going after you drop me off in Morocco?" Elizabeth asked when she had herself back under control. James raised his eyebrow at 'Morocco', but didn't interrupt.
"Atlantis," Jack said.
James blinked a few times, then turned and looked at Jack. Jack was stirring sugar into his coffee and didn't look up.
Elizabeth was frowning when he looked back at her. Suddenly her expression cleared and she said, "Jack..." in a warning tone of voice.
"You got a better idea?"
"Drink your coffee," she said. "James..."
"Mmm?" he said, startled to be suddenly involved in the conversation.
"You do know what he's talking about?" she said. "There's a machine on Atlantis that claims to bring back past memories." She paused. "Memories of past lives."
He blinked a few times, then said, "I have got to stop disbelieving you people."
Jack snorted. "I told you I'd been to Atlantis."
"You two were trying to kill each other," Elizabeth said. "Don't you remember? Well, not you," she said, nodding at James, who tried not to feel snubbed. "But Jack, honestly?"
"I remember," Jack said moodily. Then he picked up his coffee and lumbered back in the direction of his cabin.
"Um," James said after a moment.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I actually did know," he said. "About the trying to kill each other, I mean."
Elizabeth set her coffee cup down, then reached out and rested her hand on his arm. Her fingers were slightly cold against his wrist, and slender, the gentle pressure commanding his total attention. "Do you want this?"
"I..." he said, a bit startled at the question. "I dunno, I'm getting sick of being the ignorant one in these conversations."
She looked... pained. "Are you happy? I mean, here. You look happy."
"I think so," he said. At her frown, he sighed and explained, "I had a good job, and then it was about to turn into a really shitty job, and then I ran off with Jack. This is more fun than just about anything else I could be doing, and he's..."
Elizabeth was smirking at him. He shrugged and finished, "Well, he's Jack."
"You have something good," she said. "I just don't want you to lose it."
***
Morocco was... lovely, James supposed. He spent more time in Jack's bed than in the city.
Elizabeth left carrying no more luggage than a backpack. She stopped and gave him a hug before disembarking, and whispered, "Remember what I said."
"I won't forget," he said.
She smiled, and turned on her heel and headed down the gangplank into the city.
After Morocco, they headed back to the ocean. James was getting sunburned from all the time he spent in the rigging. The ocean was beautiful. The crew were starting to seem like family, which meant they teased him about Jack and tried to trick him into taking over the worst chores. He started reading through the ship's library, which was mostly Rex Stout novels and someone's Mills and Boone paperbacks. (He did not dare to blame the latter on Annika; she'd decided to try and teach him how to use a rapier and was much better than he was.)
He was midway through In The Best Families when Jack sat down on the bed next to him hard enough to jar him away from his place. "Here's the thing," Jack said. "I don't know if the thingamawhats will work. I just want to give you a fair chance of getting those memories back. Savvy?"
James looked up. Jack was watching him with what he was pretty sure was feigned unconcern. "Okay, but... what if I decide I don't want to?"
Jack shrugged. "Then you don't."
"Okay," he said.
Jack watched him for another second, then sighed and pushed himself to his feet. "I'm not saying you're not good enough as-is," he said. "I'm saying..." he waved his hands in a gentle motion like he was conducting the world's most post-modern symphony. "Context."
James licked his lower lip, then said, "So you want me to."
"It would give certain... things," Jack said, "more closure."
James groaned and covered his face with the novel. "Jack, sometimes we don't get closure," he said. "I mean, I may not have the experience you have, with being three hundred years old and running a magical pirate ship, but I have learned that life lesson."
"Did you also learn the lesson about not quitting your job and running off to join a magical pirate ship's crew?" Jack said, "Because that one doesn't seem to have stuck."
James left the book over his face until Jack shut the door behind him.
It wasn't that things weren't good between him and Jack. It was just some days he wondered what the hell Jack saw in him, if it wasn't some bizarre longing for his best enemy from way back when.
"I don't know, do you think I'm being paranoid?" he asked Do-won the next day after lunch, when he was lending a hand washing up and Do-won was taking advantage of the available extra labour to relax and clean his firearms.
Do-won looked up from the revolver he was oiling. He considered for a second, then said, "All I know is, the last time we visited Atlantis, none of the machines worked."
Several thoughts collided in James' head at once. "Didn't... then how does Jack expect me to..."
Do-won shrugged. "I don't know. Do you know what an Antikythera mechanism is?"
"Yeah, it was an Ancient Greek computer," James said. "Used for astronomy. Why?"
"Jack was cursing it after the last visit," Do-won said. He closed the revolver with a click and wiped his hands off on a rag. "That and 'Turing machines'."
James cleaned his own hands and tried to give that some thought. "So it might work, but nobody has any clue how to turn it on?"
"None of us did." Do-won gave him a smirk. "Why, do you have some ideas?"
"Maybe," James said. "Maybe."
He had some ideas—they included the idea that maybe Jack was just fucking with him.
"You could have told me that you need me to hack an ancient Atlantean computer," was his opening gambit when he tracked Jack down a few minutes later. Jack was at the great wheel of the ship, lazily cradling the wood with his eyes fixed on the horizon. He deigned to give James a glance at that comment, then turned back to his contemplation.
"Didn't want you to get performance anxiety," he finally answered. "I understand that can be a real problem with Atlantean computers."
"Honestly, I'd just have been happy hearing that you wanted me around for something."
Jack gave him a long, searching look. "We have got to do something about that complex of yours, mate," he said. "Lemme find someone to take over here and I'll try to fuck it out of you."
***
The entirety of the computing power onboard the Black Pearl consisted of one ghastly laptop which had been purchased at the end of the 1980s, and James' iPhone. James resigned himself to doing a lot of squinting.
He supposed it didn't bother him that the hack-the-Atlantean-computer thing was Jack's idea. Jack had brought him on, had trusted him even when he didn't turn out to be the person Jack thought he was—had stuck with him, had never once expressed doubt that he could make it.
Jack still told him stories about the good old days, though they didn't have the same tenor they used to—
"You remember, don't you," Jack used to murmur into his shoulder in the dream-state they shared, and James would say, "Yes, yes, I was the most fearsome pirate hunter in the Caribbean, and you were the best pirate I'd ever seen, and it seems I've caught you now, haven't I?"
Being around Jack was like perpetually having a gaping hole in his understanding of the universe. Jack was... Jack. Intoxicating, fantastic, like something from another world. He did everything with both a single-minded purpose and a lackadaisical unconcern.
Jack came up behind him when he was standing at the railing, staring off into the distance and massaging his sore wrists. "We're two days out," Jack said, leaning on the railing next to him. "Then it gets a bit interesting, since we have to swim."
James looked over at him and smirked. "I'm not even surprised."
Jack grinned, then shifted his weight and bumped James' hip with his own. "You're getting the hang of it."
James grinned back, then suddenly was hit by that feeling of relationship vertigo and had to look away, down, out at the horizon, anything.
He'd almost gotten his breath back when Jack gently rested his arm over his shoulders, almost casually enough to be meaningless. "I ever mention how lucky I was to find you?"
"I don't know," James said. "You know, I have this memory problem."
Jack laughed. "Serves me right. Well. I am, you know. And nothing's going to change that."
The problem was, James thought, when Jack said reassuring things like that he started to think he ought to be worried.
***
"Atlantis is under a mountain," Annika explained, holding a wetsuit up to James' shoulders. "Here, I think this one will fit. Give it a go."
"Hollow mountain?" James asked as he started pulling off his shirt. Body modesty was something else he'd gotten over in the last month. It wasn't so much that the crew were inveterate nudists or anything as that whenever someone did wander through a room naked nobody so much as batted an eye.
"Yeah, or hollowed out mountain," Annika said. "The whole thing is only reachable through an underwater passage. The air vents are too small to get in and it's too deep to dig, so we swim."
The neoprene suit was tricky to get on. He sat down on a crate and tugged the stiff fabric up his legs. "No chance of renting a submersible, then?"
Annika snickered at him. "You'll be fine. We'll haul a bunch of stuff over and set up camp inside. It's nice."
The crew laughed and joked as they got supplies together, but there was an air of tension underlying the whole thing. It wasn't just, he hoped, that the crew had some kind of bet riding on whether his and Jack's relationship would survive the mission. That would be paranoid.
Annika snorted when he asked her anyway. "Nobody's stupid enough to tell you they took odds on that. I'm just betting it'll take you at least two days to crack the codex."
"Thanks," he said, "I think."
"Do-won has a day and a half, so y'know," she grinned, "you can dawdle a bit."
They had dropped anchor in a cove overshadowed by the sheer face of the mountain. James was completely turned around by this point, geographically speaking, but the temperature was tropical and the plants gripping the rock were lush and green. The ship only had five sets of SCUBA gear, so it was him, Jack, Annika, Cecil, and Do-won who made the trip overboard and into the cool green water.
James had never dived before, not seriously. For a few minutes he was completely distracted by the riot of color under the waves; brilliant stalagmites of coral, darting schools of fish, rich greens and browns of seaweed further down the sea floor. Then Jack tugged on his arm and directed him forward, toward the wall of rock ahead.
... Which wasn't a wall, he realized suddenly, but a hole in the world like a deep well, leading into darkness so thick that their torches' light seemed to fade out in thin streaks before illuminating anything. It made him flinch, that boundary, instinctively pulling back toward warmer water. It was only Jack's steadying hand on his arm that kept him from bolting skyward and telling anyone who asked they could keep Atlantis, keep their treasure, fuck it all he was going back to London.
After a second's racing panic he looked again, and though it was just as dark inside the tunnel the searing wrongness seemed to have gone. He shook his head, slowly. It was just a tunnel. What the hell did he have to be afraid of, besides some bizarre Freudian—
Okay, now he wasn't going to get THAT thought out of his head. It was certainly better than mind-numbing terror, he thought as he swam after the others, but it wasn't comforting.
They swam for something like fifteen minutes through darkness before coming to the other end of the tunnel. They headed upward toward a dimly-lit surface and James breathed a shallow sigh of relief.
Jack ditched his mouthpiece as soon as they surfaced. "You all right?"
James nodded. Jack shrugged and headed for the edge of the water—which was artificial, James suddenly caught on, like the wall of a swimming pool. He looked up past the water and there was the city.
Part of him had somehow assumed that living in a world which contained Star Wars, the new Doctor Who series, and Star Trek would have inured him to any mystical city they came across. That part of him hid in the corner of his mind in shame as he took in the view. Sepulchral arching buildings springing up from around the water, huge vaulted terraces that went up and up and up into the high dark places inside the mountain.
Yeah, screw Star Trek, it was far more Fellowship of the Rings anyway, the pop-culture part of his brain recovered enough to say. He shook his head and paddled to the edge of the water.
"So is there any light?" he asked when they'd shucked their breathing apparatus and pulled the cases of camping supplies out of the water.
"There is one great ugly computer," Jack said, waving, "over there which controls most of the power. One assumes. Mostly we have been spending our time tinkering with the smaller Atlantean whatsits and trying to work out the principle of the thing."
James stared at him. "So we're playing Myst, is that it?"
Jack's look of incomprehension was actually somewhat heartening. "Playing what now?"
"Never mind," James said. "I think I know what I'm doing."
The air was warm and slightly humid. There seemed to be no ceiling on the city, just towering edifices shrouded in shadows, and criss-crossing walkways stretching between them like spiderwebs. Jack led them along a wide stone boulevard past floor-level doorways in various states of repair. Some had massive stone doors lying open, or broken from their hinges, some had no doors at all, just open wounds in the facade. James couldn't tell from the outside what was different about the building Jack picked, but inside a foyer like the front of an office building was where Jack told them to make camp.
It looked eerily like EastWest's offices, actually, James thought as he helped Annika string LEDs over the walls until they could see. Square, a desk behind which someone could sit to watch the door, and really awkwardly placed corridors leading off into the rest of the building. And stupidly high ceilings, though he guessed with the tropical climate the Atlanteans didn't have to worry about their heating bill.
"Here," Jack said, waving vaguely at one of the hallways, "I wanna show you the whatchamajiggit. C'mon."
James dug his iPhone out of his bag and slipped it into a pocket. "Okay."
"That's it?" he asked a minute later.
"That's the power transmitter," Jack said.
It was a singularly uninspiring piece of hardware the size of a table. It looked like someone had grafted a steering wheel to a sewing machine.
"You're sure?" he asked, just in case.
Jack shrugged. "Pretty sure, yeah. See, you flip these widgets—" he reached out and pushed down a couple of brass levers, "—and turn this wheel—" he turned the steering wheel, which made clicking noises as it rotated.
For an instant, the lights in the room flared to life, making James blink away the brightness. Then they shut off again and the wheel spun back to its original position.
"Dammit, Jack!" Annika yelled from the other room.
Jack waved at the device again. "See?"
"Yeah," James said, "You blew the circuit breaker."
Jack stared at him. James sighed. "Let me take a look."
It wasn't actually that hard a puzzle, but it felt really good to exercise the logic circuits of his mind again. The levers changed the output levels, the wheel aimed some kind of focusing device, and after about ten minutes of back-and-forth when James turned the wheel the requisite seventy-five degrees the lights stayed on.
After a moment, Annika stuck her head in the door. "What did you do?"
James waved at the transmitter. "I fixed the lights."
"Damn right you did. Why didn't it work before?"
James shrugged. "I dunno, I guess it wasn't obvious. Also, one of the levers was stuck, and I had some WD-40."
"Hunh," she said. "Well, good thing we have you along."
It was startling, how much that offhanded compliment cheered him up. He spent the rest of the time setting up camp trying to keep from humming.
***
Having the transmitter working, it turned out, was only part of the problem. The door to the chamber with the memory device in it looked much like the rest of the doors in Atlantis, except someone had stuck an incredibly complicated mechanical lock on it.
"These are logic gates," James said after poking at the clockwork for maybe half an hour. "See? This is an XOR gate, and this one here—"
"I have no idea what you're sayin'," Jack said. "We're gonna go pick up some trinkets to sell on the outside. You happy here?"
Jame shrugged. "Yeah, I'm good, I know how to get back to camp. Do we have any paper?"
He wound up stuffing a bag with a notepad and some of the trail mix they'd brought along, filling his water bottle, and sitting down outside the door to draw diagrams. Once he had that in order he could start running basic simulations on his phone, and after that it was a matter of fiddling with the latches, adding the results to his sim, and trying it over again. He started falling into a similar rhythm to writing code; checking and re-checking, running a sim, checking for bugs. It was remarkable how quickly he picked it up again.
Annika cleared her throat next to him and he looked up, startled. "Have you been here all night?" she asked.
"Sorry?" he said, then looked at his phone. It was—many more hours later than he expected. "Oh, sorry, I lost track of time."
She looked at the door, then back down at his scattered piles of handwritten notes, then at the empty bags of trail mix. "Seriously, have you had any sleep in the last twenty hours?"
"Ahhhh..." he said, then, "No."
"You look scruffy," Jack told him when he stumbled back to camp.
James squinted at him. "'Scruffy'? Really?"
"And you're swaying," Jack said, swatting at him. "Get some sleep."
"Sleep, sleep, everyone thinks I need sleep," James muttered, crawling into his sleeping bag. "I could finish this in a few hours if you just brought more coffee."
"You're not fooling anyone, mate," Jack said.
"I'm an 'elite' 'hacker'," James said, pronouncing the air quotes as clearly as he could. "I don't sleep, I hard reset."
He had a feeling Jack was laughing at him, but by that time everything was warm and gray.
When he blinked his eyes open again Do-won had a tiny barbecue grill set up and something smelled heavenly. "Breakfast?" he asked.
Do-won raised his eyebrows. "More like dinner," he said. "It's four in the afternoon. You were out all day."
James rubbed at his eyes. "Mmmnf," he said coherently.
"There is coffee."
"Coffee. Yes. Need that."
His eyes remembered how to focus about halfway through his first cup, and after freshening up in the Atlantean washroom and forgetting which way the taps turned about four times in a row he felt keen enough to argue with a computer again. And hungry.
"So," Do-won asked as he handed James a bowl of breakfast-dinner-food, "what is the problem with the door?"
James hummed noncommittally around the first bite of food. "Well," he said when he'd finished swallowing, "I don't read Atlantean, but the pictographs seem to imply that the lock is hooked into the thing inside. So I don't want to break it."
"Makes sense." Do-won practiced his most innocent expression. "So how long do you think it'll take to open?"
James chewed another mouthful and smirked. "You just want to win that bet with Annika, don't you?"
"Please," Do-won said. "It's not just Annika who's in on it."
"So if you've got a day and a half," James asked, stirring the remaining rice and meat in his bowl, "Is that just working time, or does that count sleeping as well?"
He shrugged. "We never decided. If necessary I'll arm-wrestle her for it. I think I can win that."
James' notes from the night before, when he got back to the door, took him about an hour to decipher. He was almost ready to start work again when Jack cleared his throat from the hallway outside.
He looked up. Jack nodded at his pile of paper. "So that's 'hacking', is it?"
James shrugged. "Like most things, it works better if you have a plan."
"Excellent." Jack walked over and clapped him on the shoulder. "Y'know, it occurs to me I may have not appreciated the scope of this challenge, and if so I apologize."
James frowned at him, then said, "Is this about me not sleeping?"
"Something like that. I was worried."
James laughed. "That's... sweet, but honestly, you don't know too many computer people, do you?"
"Um." Jack frowned at him. "Well, you."
"Trust me, Jack," James said. "It's not anything to be worried about."
Jack watched him shuffle his notes for a moment, then shrugged. "All right then. I'll check in later?"
"Thanks," James said abstractly. Jack left and he went back to working.
The door was a challenge, but it was a programming challenge—it was far more than just a lock. He felt like he was learning how to pick locks in another language.
Jack checked on him again, a few hours later, then announced he was getting some sleep and all reasonable folk should do the same. James laughed and said he'd come by in a few hours more.
So it was close to exactly a day and a half since he started working when the door opened.
The handle of the door was warm under his hand and turned with a solid, reassuring 'click.' And then the door swung gently open on silent hinges, revealing a strip of darkness beyond.
Oh, shit, he thought, and jerked his hand away. The door stayed open.
He stared at it for a very long time before he reached out and pulled it open the rest of the way. The light from the foyer dimly outlined shapes inside—a table, and something on the table like a helmet.
James took a few deep breaths, heart racing, then shut the door and turned the handle back. He stood with his hand on the warm bronze for a moment, then a sudden feeling of panic shot through him and he flinched back, shaking.
"Shit," he said aloud, then coughed against a scratchy feeling in his throat. He looked away from the door long enough to find his water, then went back to staring at the armature of the door lock, gleaming and silent.
"Okay," he said, mostly to reassure himself that his voice still worked. "Um."
He stared at the door a moment longer, then turned and headed back to camp.
Jack wasn't there, and neither was Cecil. "Where..." he asked.
Annika looked up from the card game she was playing with Do-won and shrugged. "Cecil found a bunch of battery-like things, and Jack headed out with him to check them out. They might be gone a while. What happened with you?"
He hesistated, then said, "I got the door open."
"Ha," Do-won said, and Annika rolled her eyes. "Told you."
"I mean..." James said, and looked off toward the street. "I think I know how it works. I think I could go in there and..."
He trailed off. Annika and Do-won stared at him, and then Do-won nodded and said, "Sit down."
He sat.
Do-won put down his cards and looked James up and down. Then he asked, "What's frightening you about this?"
James jerked as though he'd been shocked. "What? No, nothing. That's not—"
"Ha," Annika said.
James sighed. "I just... don't know about this."
Do-won nodded. Annika fanned her cards out and pushed them together in a stack again.
"I mean," he clarified, "I feel like I hardly know who I am now. I don't think that'll get better with someone else's memories in my head."
"Might give you some perspective," Do-won said.
James took a deep breath. "Yeah, maybe."
"So don't do it, if you don't want to," Annika said. "Jack'll pout, but who cares?"
"I care," he said.
She scoffed. "Okay, fine, you have to share a bed with him. But the rest of us don't have to care."
James pinched the bridge of his nose to stave off either a headache or the impulse to hit something. "I just feel like... I don't want Jack to be the one to talk me into this. I have to know for myself."
"Fair point," Annika said.
He looked up, found they were both staring at him sympathetically. He sighed. "Just... I'm going to go take another look, all right?" They nodded. "Don't tell Jack."
"All right," Do-won said, picking his cards up again.
"Good luck," Annika said.
He nodded thanks. By the time he stood up they were pretending to ignore him and focus on their game again.
The door opened smoothly again, and the lights came on when he stepped inside.
It was a small room, large enough to hold the table, the helmet, and a chair. That was all. The walls were bare of ornamentation save the recessed downlights standard in every Atlantean room, and the whole thing felt like a well-lit coffin.
The helmet, now that he could see it, wasn't solid—several strips of flimsy-looking gold material were curved into a hemisphere that was clearly meant to sit on top of someone's head. There were contact points inside which would sit on his skull, and wires running from the temples to the top of the table. The table was covered in pictographs he'd be able to read when he sat in the chair with the helmet on.
He realized that he'd gone from thinking of the process as something abstract to something he was going to be doing. He took a deep breath and stepped forward.
There was really nowhere else to go but to sit at the table, so he sat.
The table didn't have that much instrumentation on it. There were two readouts which were displaying Atlantean numbers—he'd gotten fairly good at reading those, over the last couple of days, but he didn't know what the two numbers on the dials meant. There was a slider to one side. And there was a big lever that more than anything else here meant "start".
Gingerly, he picked the helmet up. It felt surprisingly sturdy under his fingers. He cradled it in his hands, letting the metal warm from his palms, then raised it up and slipped it on.
He didn't feel anything—no prickling, no humming. But three dots of light appeared next to the slider. He reached out and dragged the cool metal knob down to line up with the first one.
The leftmost number readout clattered to life, spinning backwards until, from what he could make out, it was reading just under three hundred less than the other one—
Three hundred years, he suddenly realized, three hundred years since the Commodore James Norrington that Jack knew died, the damn thing really did know what it was doing and he yanked the helmet off his head and the lights went off again.
He put the helmet back on the table and buried his face in his hands. It was real. It was all real. He was sitting here with a way to get back—to get the memories of the long-ago person he'd been trying to replace.
It was reasonable to be terrified, he told himself. It was reasonable to want to leave, close up the doors behind him, and make sure that nobody else could open them up again. He didn't need someone else's memories; he didn't want someone else's perspective and life story gumming up his head. He was James Norrington, dammit, and if he wasn't good enough—
But that wasn't it, was it? It wasn't about who he was. It was about that bizarre hole in his experience that he kept tripping over. It was about that thing Jack wanted but couldn't get.
Oh, Christ, Jack Sparrow, he thought, reaching out and running his hand over the helmet. You're going to ruin me.
He wasn't doing this for Jack, he told himself as he picked the helmet up again. He was doing this because he wanted to. Because he wanted to know. Because he was sick of feeling like he'd blacked out for half his own life.
Love you, you idiot, you madman, Jack...
He was going, he told himself as the board lit up again, to be fine.
He closed his eyes, took another breath, and pulled the lever down.
It was Admiral Norrington, not that he'd expect Sparrow to have remembered tha—he'd been fucking STABBED!
He gasped and clapped a hand over his stomach, instinct and phantom pain combined into reflex, but of course that had happened long ago—a lifetime ago—and nobody here was going to stab him.
Here being Atlantis, here being on the—he was going to be sick.
Carefully he took off the helmet and set it gently back on the table. He was—he was rapidly reassessing his entire catalogue of interactions with Sparrow, starting from their first meeting (the dock, Port Royal, not a dream, he could still smell the ocean) to Sparrow showing up in his dreams using magic to—oh, God, he'd actually done that. He was going to be sick.
Sparrow had—God, he didn't understand how that worked, but he'd taken advantage of James' naivete, he'd shown up when he was seventeen and taken advantage of him, he'd lied about their past and he'd ingratiated himself and James had trusted him with... with...
Dear God, what had he done?
Footsteps outside and he was on his feet covering the door before he knew he was moving, and he'd just managed to calm himself down with the reminder that there were literally four other people in the whole city, and none of them meant him harm, when Sparrow burst into the room.
For a moment they stared at each other.
He looks just the same, he thought, and then, you only saw him a few hours ago, of course he looks exactly the same.
"So," Sparrow said levelly. "It worked, then."
"You lied to me," he said.
Sparrow blinked, then looked offended. "About what?"
"About..." he took a breath. "About us. About everything. You—"
"That wasn't lying, mate," Sparrow said. "That's how I remember things happening, that's how they happened."
James was taken aback momentarily. "You took advantage of me."
Sparrow shrugged, but there didn't seem to be much enthusiasm in it. "Pirate."
"Is that all you've got to say for yourself?"
Sparrow looked startled. "I thought you'd be happy. Happier. Something. I mean, here you are, all en-memoried again, and..." he trailed off for a moment, frowned in thought, then finished, "And I would have thought that getting over some of your natural reticence would only have helped your disposition."
James couldn't help laughing, though it tasted unusually bitter. "That was hardly getting over my reticence—and Sparrow, there are plenty of people who are not immediately overcome by the force of your personality the first time they meet you."
Sparrow stared at him for a long moment, then said, "It's Captain."
That was the wall between them, then. James looked away first.
"Do you want me to leave?" he finally asked.
"Do you want to go?" Jack replied.
James leaned back until he could rest his head on the wall. It was cool, solid stone. "I don't have anywhere else to go."
"Hm," Sparrow said. "Well, that's not an answer, but good enough anyway."
"Jack." He lifted his head to see Sparrow staring at him in surprise. "Why did you think this was a good idea?"
Sparrow thought that over for a moment, then shrugged. "Dunno, mate," he said. "I was hoping you could tell me."
It wasn't an answer, James thought as he stirred himself to follow Sparrow out the door, but good enough anyway.
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