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This is the day you will always remember as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow. It is the song of James Norrington's career, his adult life, his downfall. Through the years, those days have become numerous, but yes, he always remembers them.
Catching Captain Jack Sparrow is like holding candle wax with your bare hands; it slips through, and it burns you in the process. Scars you.
Even after so many sword fights, James still does not carry a single mark from the pirate. He feels branded all the same.
He is back in Tortuga – somehow, James always finds himself here. He leaves the Two Hornpipes be this time, though, and the rum. It has been months since Lord Cutler Beckett's ship disappeared, and the rumours of The Flying Dutchman have stagnated. Whatever happened out there, James will never know, but he cannot help but wonder if the slippery little weasel of a pirate somehow managed to survive it all.
Knowing Jack the way he does, James would not be terribly surprised.
The evening air is heavy with smoke and the smells of musk, rum, dirt, vomit, and over-cooked meat. The streets are forever brimming with singing, laughing, brawling, fornicating people. James truly does not know why he loves Tortuga, but he does.
Then again, James has never understood the ways of his own heart.
“Giselle!” someone hollers from nearby, and James straightens from his slouch against an empty barrel. He stands in the shadow of an Inn, and he doubts he will be noticed in this familiar chaos. Still, he presses himself up against the darkened wall all the same, pulling the brim of his feathered hat further down in front of his unshaven face. There are still people who remember him, here – some as Commodore Norrington, although that seems an eternity away, and others yet as the drunken fool who had tried to kill Jack Sparrow one night a year ago.
He recognises this voice.
“Giselle, darling!” and yes, oh yes, that is him. Captain Jack Sparrow stumbles out of Two Hornpipes, clad in his usual clothes and his beloved hat, unsteady but oddly graceful as he makes his way over to a cluster of thin-lipped, large-busted harlots. A blonde-wigged, gaunt woman turns to squint derisively at Jack, who grins at her.
James sighs. How could he have thought Jack could possibly have succumbed to something as common as death? Sparrow probably made a deal with the devil himself, to stay top-side for however long he wishes.
“Don't you Giselle me!” the blonde harlot snarls, and Jack tries to kiss her.
“But I've missed you so these months, my sweet-”
Giselle backhands the words straight out of the pirate's mouth, and James lets a few undignified guffaws escape him. He always did enjoy watching Sparrow lose his footing, if only for a moment.
The strumpets all leave, noses in the air. Jack stands there, half-slumped in his usual manner, as if he is wrestling with gravity itself over how crooked he can be and still remain upright. “Always happens,” James hears him mutter to himself, brows furrowed in drunken concentration, one hand on his swelling cheek. In the other hand, he holds one of his beloved bottles of the Devil's brew.
“Really bad eggs,” Jack sings, almost too soft for James to hear. The pirate stares at the harbour, towards the sea, as if he misses her even when she is so close. And there is a moment, one that is so easily missed in the cacophony of life surrounding them, that James could swear that Jack seems wistful.
No, that is not the word. Mournful is closer.
“Drink up, me hearties, yo ho,” Jack continues, as quiet as before, and nods as if he is conversing with himself. James would not be surprised. There are few things – except honesty, perhaps – that would surprise him when it comes to Jack Sparrow.
The pirate sighs deeply, shaking his head, making his braids jangle. James can hear the clinks of his pearls and beads as they move. His beloved hat droops, the leather stained from years of use and salt water, adding to the unusually melancholy mood.
“And I thought you might've become an honest man again, Commodore,” Jack says, still gazing at the sea.
James does not startle visibly, but a tingle too much like fear shoots through his spine nonetheless. Yet he never entertains the idea of denial. “I'm surprised you have not yet gone blind from the rum,” he says and steps forward, out of the stretched shadows.
Jack cradles his bottle protectively. “We 'ave an understanding,” he slurs to it, voice warm as if speaking to a lover.
James thinks that it would not be an inaccurate comparison; the drink, The Pearl, and himself are the three true loves of Captain Jack Sparrow. The ever-present smell of the salty sea wafts over him.
“I thought you might have gone down with Beckett's ship,” James says and walks closer, until they stand almost side by side. Like old war comrades.
“Sorry to bust your bubble, love,” Jack says without much infliction. The dance and song continues around them, but here, with their backs to the town life and only the dark, quiet harbour in front of them, James feels something disturbingly like peace.
“And yet, I think I may live,” James says drily.
Jack cracks a smile at that, as though he finds their quiet, non-violent banter amusing. James does not fully understand what he is doing – the last time they met, James tried very hard to kill this pirate. Yet here they are.
This is the day you will always remember as the day that you almost...
“Whatever happened to Beckett?” James asks the slowly rolling waves.
“Sea wanted him back,” Jack says and drinks from his bottle. He does not offer it to James, which the latter is grateful for.
James looks over at the pirate. “And Davy Jones?”
But Jack does not answer that.
James walks down to the soft and sandy beach, further away from the sounds of life and laughter he is not a part of. He does not notice – although some part of him knew, perhaps – that Jack has followed until James sits down in the sand.
“This reminds me of an evening I spent with our lovely Miss Swann,” Jack says. He does not so much sit down as he falls over, but of course his bottle remains unharmed and not a drop of his precious rum spills.
“I'm sure I do not wish to know,” James says primly, and Jack laughs; a throaty, low, oddly raw thing.
“ 'Course, that would be Miss Turner, now.” He smiles into another mouthful of liquid, and this time, he offers the bottle to James – who takes it. “She killed me, you know.”
James only arches an eyebrow at the pirate before he drinks – Jack's stories are nearly as legendary as the man himself. “I'm sure.”
“I swear on my watery grave, Commodore,” Jack says with a disarming smile and a hand on his dirty-white linen shirt. “Have I ever lied to you?”
James does not dignify that with an answer; only laughs. It is an unfamiliar sensation, the bubbling intensity of it; nearly as heady as the rum itself.
Jack frowns and stares at James. “It's like you don't trust me, Commodore.”
For the first time, James notices that the silver coin in one of Jack's braids is gone. Only a blue-coloured bead is left, stark against the deep red of Jack's head kerchief. James almost asks where the silver has gone. “I see,” he says instead, stretching where he sits, handing the bottle back and wiping his sandy hands on his coarse, dirty trousers. He can play Sparrow's game, he is sure: it is hardly the first time they have sparred. “How, may I ask, did she kill you?”
“Tied me to the mast of the Pearl, using her... wickedly womanly charm,” Jack says with a thin smile and makes a drizzling motion with his free hand. “Let me get dragged down by the Kraken. Never thought she had it in her.” He sounds almost proud. He then peers into his bottle, presumably to see how much James drunk, and makes a thoughtful noise.
“I shall remember to thank her, then,” James says.
“You just do that,” Jack says and waves more with his hand, swaying from side to side as he does. “Anyway, doesn't matter. I got better.”
James snorts. “How, may I ask?”
And then Jack is suddenly there, too close the way he does when he wants – needs – to impress someone, and James has seen him do this before, but it does not make it any less surprising. “By magic, Commodore.” His breath is sour and warm on James's face.
James rolls his eyes and pushes at Jack's chest, right where his shirt is open. Sun-warmed, sand-grainy skin is suddenly there, beneath his fingertips, and James marvels – in a distant, frightened sort of way – at the feel of Jack's heartbeat.
He had his doubts, whether this man was human after all.
“Commodore?” Jack says, his voice teasing, but he is not moving away like James had meant him to. The white and silver beads in his beard glint each time he exhales, terribly distracting.
And James opens his mouth, tells Jack to move away, to find some strumpet and not jumble James's thoughts in such a way, tells the pirate that they are not eunuchs – but that is not what he says. What he says is, in fact, quite different.
“James. It's James. I have not been a Commodore for quite some time now, Jack.”
And Jack looks startled at that, at the use of their names, as if some unspoken rule in their game of banter has been broken. James wonders idly if he is not breaking every other rule there is too, sitting here on the beach with his hand still resting against Jack's smooth collarbone. The touch is light and it burns him.
“My place is right here,” Will Turner once told James, after stealing Elizabeth from him. “Between you and Jack.” There is no one between them now, naught but a few scarce finger-breadths of heated air. His lips are dry and he resists the sudden urge to wet them, resists too the urge to slide his grimy fingers further under the soft material of Jack's shirt.
Jack's fingers close around James's wrist, slowly. James glances down to see the familiar leather wrist cuff, the shiny P that mostly, to him, signifies their very first meeting – the very first time James's thumb had brushed over the swollen scar. Further up, half hidden beneath Jack's shirt, is the paled tattoo of the swallow.
“You're not very used to rum, are you?” Jack asks, but the vein of humour in his voice is thin and the rest of it is – something else. “James.” His moustache twitches. James is close enough that he could count the individual hairs, were he so inclined.
This is the day you will always remember as the day...
“Yes,” James says, looking up at those startlingly brown eyes that always seem to have dark rings of exhaustion beneath them. “Let us blame it on the rum.”
And then he leans in.