The Raptors of Misdirection and Waxing Gibberish - Chapter 1
Title: The Raptors of Misdirection and Waxing Gibberish
Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Warning: Will eventually contain slash
Rating: PG for now, NC-17 later
Disclaimer: I have no claim on POTC or the lovely characters who populate it, even if it seems that James Norrington is making himself quite at home in my head, the snarky British bastard.
Dedication: This is all Norrington’s fault. I woke up one day with him in my head, metaphorically sitting across from me sipping tea and raising his eyebrows expectantly. Considering that I’ve written the man on a roleplay website that never took off, this was not wholly surprising, but then he asked, nay, demanded that I write him. So I did, and that would be how chapter one came about.
Note: This was meant to just be a drabble or a vignette or something, which would then satiate Norrie dearest and allow me to move on with my life...but then it kept going. And going. And going...and suddenly I had an epic on my hands. And it was, to my surprised chagrin, pretty good; a lot of it quite amusing, in fact, but it also would not leave me alone. At all. Quite irritatingly so.
Summary: It all starts with one day’s head start, and then suddenly the commodore is in Tortuga, in disguise, doing questionably legal things. It's all Jack Sparrow's fault, surely.
Chapter One
One day’s head start.
James Norrington used the time wisely. He managed his duties at the fort quickly and efficiently, and retired to his office under the auspices of writing up reports on both of Jack Sparrow’s escapes as well as reading over the reports from the entire Isla de Muerta incident in order to be quite sure that none of those who had written them would be pegged as madmen. In truth, Norrington had done the latter last night when sleep had completely eluded him, and had no plans to write the former until he had taken some time to think about all that had happened since that damned pirate had first swaggered into Port Royal.
Norrington was familiar with insomnia. Ever since he had first joined the navy, it had struck him for a few nights at a time, without any real pattern, every couple of months. It was usually the same every time: there would be at least one or two nights wherein his mind refused point-blank to cease moving at the speed of the escaping Black Pearl; it left him none the worse for wear the following mornings, but then the day after each episode ended, once he had finally succumbed to the realm of Morpheus, he would awaken feeling more sluggish and drained, but not actually hindered from his duties.
For now, he was still sharp and controlled, clear-headed and calculative; albeit more cloudy-hearted than he would dare show. Norrington shut the door to his office behind him quietly, considered locking it but rejected the idea out of hand knowing that he might be needed, and settled in to think, with only the smallest wince as the minor fleshwound at his waist protested, which James ignored with determination.
His hat and wig were set aside on his desk, and he poured himself a glass of fine brandy. It was sheer force of will that kept his fingers from shaking. He stared out of his office window at the sea, and found himself thinking about chess, because it was always one of the first analogies that came to mind for the complex games he played in his life: navy versus pirates, man versus man, high-ranking unwed bachelor versus persistent mothers seeking to marry off their daughters post-haste...
To the core, Norrington was a strategist and a hunter; these were the most prominent aspects of his nature, and while they did well in Naval uniform, they were not limited to it. Norrington knew this well enough. He knew, as anyone in his rank had to know, that the only rules that really mattered were what any given man could do, and what he could not do; in the case of the Navy, this usually referred to what any given man could get away with and not get caught, reprimanded, or accused of some kind of scandal. Norrington’s high rank limited his ability to get away with impropriety insofar as his social behavior, his obligations to the public, and his connections; however, as recompense perhaps, Norrington’s rank also meant that he had more influence over larger numbers of people, and few men here in the Caribbean could give him orders that he could not, in some way, either ignore or at the very least subvert if he wanted or needed to--and it was subverting orders with skill, whilst still seeing a great deal of military successes, that had made him a commodore at the unusually young age of thirty-one.
His rank also gave him prey to hunt, and the means to do it, both of which he enjoyed. He was also quite good at the sort of hunts that the navy sent him on; in fact, he had not yet met a pirate who could outthink him, and therefore once he had one locked in his sights, they were usually either as good as caught or as good as dead, depending upon how and if they fought back--at least, all of that had been true before James Norrington had come face to face with one particularly infamous pirate named Jack Sparrow.
Captain, the commodore silently corrected himself, remembering the sight of that elegant black ship so near to his fort, Captain Jack Sparrow.
Pirate captain the man may be, but Jack Sparrow was clearly smarter than the average buccaneer, and indeed smarter than the average military man. James was... intrigued, by this. His original perceptions had been clouded for a number of reasons, he knew. It was high time then, was it not, to perform a comprehensive re-evaluation of the facts, and only the facts, cold and pitiless as they may be.
As a welcome distraction from the pain in his chest that had not relented since Elizabeth had taken her place beside Will Turner, James Norrington kept his thoughts cooly objective as, with clinical detachment, he methodically recalled and examined every moment of his acquaintance with Captain Jack Sparrow: from the pirate’s rescue of the drowning Elizabeth Swann, to his well-planned little tumble off of the fort into the very same waters. Norrington recalled William Turner’s personal report, which had been delivered by the lad in person just before dawn: before the pirate’s appointment at the gallows. With new interest and less prejudice, the commodore finally deigned to read it.
As he read, Norrington slowly began to piece together the strategies and tactics used by Captain Jack Sparrow--no longer judging the man by the standards of morality, so much as his skill in playing The Game. On a purely personal level, Norrington found the manipulations of two young people in love, based on elaborately deceptive half-truths and guileful emotional appeals, to be underhanded, but he had to admit that Sparrow used them to great effect and with a great deal of skill. Such elaborate manipulation: it had an almost artistic flare.
The commodore appraised his opponent with new eyes.
First and foremost, it was abundantly clear, Captain Jack Sparrow was a master of misdirection. His entire demeanor and appearance were designed to distract from the skillful, ingenious madman hiding behind them.
With chagrin, Norrington recalled just how well the pirate had manipulated the navy with such tactics, himself included. The recollections tempered his determination to be sure that he, at least, would learn to see through the man’s tricks the next time.
James had almost never seen misdirection applied in quite the unique ways that Captain Sparrow applied it, but he understood their concepts, and now he knew what to look for.
Despite his reputation for honesty, bluntness, and toleration of little else from those under his command, Commodore James Norrington, too, was familiar with a surprisingly wide variety of applications for the use of misdirection and manipulation as tactics in the game of life. His skilled use of misdirection had, in fact, not only contributed toward building his reputation and exploits, but had also saved his career, and the careers of a number of good sailors under his wing who suffered momentary lapses in discretion, from destruction several times.
Upon finishing William’s report, skimming over the idealistic pleading at its conclusion, the commodore set it aside and leaned back in his chair. His fingers moved restlessly, seeking some small task to keep them busy and help their owner think.
James Norrington recalled a street magician he had been fascinated by as a child in London. He had seen the man only in passing, but when he had asked his uncle about the magic tricks, his uncle had displayed an unusual hobby: coin tricks, which James had been young and eager enough to learn, wasting hours and hours perfecting the motions.
James pulled a coin from his pocket, holding it between index and middle finger and examining it in a speculative manner. There were two primary skills to master, when it came to coin tricks: misdirection and a bit of dexterity; the commodore had not forgotten the lessons to be learned from them.
The commodore glanced again at William Turner’s report, and specifically at its recounting of Jack Sparrow’s recent coin tricks, which had temporarily cursed Sparrow along with the rest of the skeleton crew. The pirate had probably once been a pickpocket in his youth, James speculated, as well as quite possibly a con artist or a street magician; he had all of the right dramatic airs.
The coin from the commodore’s pocket, not very shiny but silver nonetheless, danced idly back and forth across the backs of James’ knuckles, unknowingly in parallel of the same gesture that Jack Sparrow had used to taunt Captain Barbossa back on that cursed island. The movements were not quite fluid and effortless, but then, it had been years since Norrington had any spare time for coin tricks, or reason to think about them; with practice, the rustiness would be sanded away.
Contemplating his relative lack of free time, James looked around his office; he thought about the games of propriety and ambition that he played in the navy, and how all of the endless paperwork, however efficiently he handled it, got in the way of his hunting. So, in fact, did his rank, it now seemed.
He had never expected to be this dissatisfied with the profits of his own ambitions. Of course, his ambitions had provided different kinds of hunting, but that was not enough for him. Hunting by means of papers and politics and propriety--it was as nothing compared to sea and wind and ships, or flesh and blood and steel.
And while the paperwork helped to keep up appearances (especially because the particular skill James possessed for wording his replies and reports with the proper amounts of vagueness and white lies had been the only thing keeping his reputation as spotless as it was--which even James was more than willing to admit was undeserved, albeit highly appreciated) the commodore found himself suddenly caring very little about all of it. In fact, if he had less self-control, he might have given in to impulse and set the papers on fire.
Today had been a lesson to him, and his three teachers all had still-healing cuts on their palms from events on the Isla de Muerta. The lesson was a simple one; propriety (and with it its tools: paperwork, reputation, politics) does not and cannot satisfy.
But for James himself--and this realization the commodore reached all on his own, independent of his teachers--the hunting did, and sailing did; these activities struck soul-deep chords in him, filling him with life. Propriety came easily to him, as easily as sailing, but there was no soul to it, only further lines to deftly avoid crossing.
He had felt more in his element these last few days--chasing down pirates, searching for Elizabeth Swann, and fighting a small army of undead skeleton pirates--than he had felt in the two months leading up to his promotion, wherein he had been too often landlocked and office-bound, playing those games of propriety and ambition for all that he was worth, seeking... what?
James was no longer sure that he knew. But he did know, now, that those games paled in comparison to the ones that he played when hunting pirates, or even simply when sailing his own ship. And he was tired of the kind of hunting that made him feel... contained, tamed, and as though he were getting too old and too stuffy to still leap into a fray with sword and pistol. He wanted to feel his blood pumping again, reminding him that he was alive.
Memento vivre. Had he come so close to forgetting? His face in the mirror had grown pale these past months from lack of sun exposure. Looking at himself in the mirror that morning before donning his uniform, James had looked at his reflection and thought himself colorless as a corpse except for his eyes. His flesh was white as bleached bone, almost as white as his wig, which added at least ten years to his apparent age when he wore it. That in and of itself should have given him pause long ago. The Isla de Muerta had served as quite a reminder: memento mori...memento vivre...
Absently, pausing in his playing with the coin, he rubbed at his wrist, at scars that his uniform always kept hidden.
Remember that you are going to die...remember that you have to live...
It was high time he had started living up to that promise he had made to himself, all those years ago: remember to live.
Few things on this earth were more satisfying to James Norrington than chasing down and capturing prey, especially when his hunting ground was the sea and his prey was clever enough to challenge him now and then.
With all of these papers in his way, the commodore had to spend a lot of time waiting for reports of pirates to come in, before he could seek them out. He had to track them based on these reports, which often meant that the trails he followed were days or weeks old. Such methods were quite unwieldy, like using vinegar to attract flies. And also, he had little or no choice in what prey he hunted, or what herd he guarded from the wolves. Norrington’s gaze drifted again to his window, and his eyes narrowed.
No sane and decent man of keen intellect could be in the Royal Navy for as long as Norrington and not feel some resentment for particular varieties of merchant vessel. James had become adept, over the years that he had spent as a captain, at finding more important things for his ship (or ships, once he became commodore) to do than protect slave ships, or slave merchants. He did this for the sake of his own sanity. And it was not as though the slave market lacked funds to provide for its own security privately.
Still massaging his wrist only half-consciously, James recalled an event from three months ago, when he had begun to quietly attempt courting Elizabeth--perhaps too quietly, in retrospect. She had been telling him a story about some incident from five or six year ago, and she had remembered something. It had finally occurred to her to ask why he had stopped visiting her father for nearly two full years, sometime around that same period of her life. She had asked her father at the time, but he had been grim and close-lipped.
The answer had been simple enough, albeit ugly: James Norrington had been captured and sold into bonds by the Spanish for nearly a year.
He had told Elizabeth as much, and then explained that his physical recovery, once he had made it back to English soil, had taken a number of months. He did not mention that in the months following, he had hunted down a great deal of Spaniards, and he did not show her the scars on his wrists that were kept so well-hidden by the clean white cuffs of his uniform. While Elizabeth usually tended to push even the most reluctant people into telling their adventure stories, she had not pressed James to reveal this one; perhaps his mask had slipped, if only for a moment. She had only rested a hand gently over his, not saying anything, quiet and thoughtful, not removing it until she heard her father’s returning footsteps.
That had been when Norrington had begun to truly fall for her. He had acutely misjudged the situation, it now seemed, in thinking that she had begun to feel similarly.
A different, less solemn memory stirred, a too-familiar surprisingly-sincere voice in the back of James’ mind: I was rooting for you, mate.
The commodore mulled that over for a moment, but shook off that train of thought and returned his gaze to the paperwork that surrounded him, before his thoughts could become as leaden and cloudy as his heart still felt. As further distraction, the dull silver coin once more danced back and forth across James’ knuckles; the motions were already regaining their sureness.
He found himself thinking about hunting pirates in a different way than he had before. It seemed a slightly morbid desire, but he wanted to avoid the tedious reports, the cold trails, the time spent away from the sea. He wanted to get his hands dirty again, as he had when he was younger and less restricted by rank and reputation; he wanted to get closer to his prey and understand them all the better for it.
And it would get him out of this office and closer to the smell and taste of sea-spray. The thought brought a slightly predatory smirk to his lips, even as he imagined the shock that would result if the well-to-do in Port Royal could but see what he had in mind; because the idea of such an honorable personage as a British Royal Navy Commodore dropping all decorum and propriety for the sake of a good hunt might be seen as something akin to scandal; it was certainly outside the bounds of normalcy and popular sensibility.
On the other hand, Elizabeth Swann, one of a scant few people James had ever met with the wit and intelligence to keep up with him and come close to reading him, as well as the only woman to ever do so, cared not a whit for propriety or appearances, it seemed. Perhaps there was wisdom in that.
James was now bound and determined to find out.
His thoughts shifted again to tactics.
Where else could he get information about where the pirates that he wanted to hunt were coming and going from? Where might he learn what prey would be the best choice to hunt: the most ruthless captains, the greediest and most ambitious cutthroats...
But not, Norrington admitted at least to himself, Captain Jack Sparrow. He did not have a fast enough ship to catch the Pearl, he did not have the resources necessary to thwart her captain’s cleverness, and--reluctant though he was to admit it--there were more deserving throats awaiting the noose.
Sparrow, after all, had rid the waters for good of the undead pirates Norrington had faced aboard the Dauntless, and the pirate’s quick action had saved the lives of a good number of Naval men. Now that the pirate had officially ‘escaped’ Port Royal, Norrington could afford to let him to slip free. If Sparrow had been able to board the Black Pearl instead of the Dauntless after the cursed undead had been thwarted, then Norrington would have let him go without a second glance far earlier, and also with no plans to chase him, but the Pearl had run off early, and with the infamous Jack Sparrow squarely in the palm of his hand, the commodore had been unwilling to commit political suicide by letting him go--especially when to do so would either lose him his engagement to Elizabeth, or drag her down with him in his disgrace. That had been another misjudgment, it seemed.
Yet, things had, by all appearances, worked out swimmingly for all concerned...
Aside from the sharp pain in James’ chest that had not faded.
He refused to focus on the pain. It was deeply ingrained in his nature to never surrender to pain, to never let it sway him or weaken him or interfere with his clarity of thought; with physical pain, this was easier, because it often, in small doses, could sharpen his awareness and even potentially clear his head quite well; however, to combat pain that was not physical in origin, it was necessary to focus on something else, especially something that could take up all of his concentration. Hunting for pirates--that would serve well enough. Especially with the lessons to be learned from his recent experiences with Captain Jack Sparrow.
Norrington’s gaze once more wandered his office, lingering wherever he saw stacks of paper and scrolls. With an idle flick, the coin dancing across the backs of his knuckles flipped into the air, was caught, and began moving across the knuckles of his opposite hand.
When Sparrow had escaped from behind bars, he had done so using nothing more than the right man: the one who knew what needed to be done to facilitate escape and had powerfully compelling reasons to want Sparrow free.
What Norrington needed was someone similar, or a number of them, and a reason for them to talk to him. Not gold or bribes, because that would attract unwanted attention.
Slowly, Norrington smiled as all of his little ideas connected into one clever plan, like a latticework of quiet lightning. Then he let the coin dancing across his knuckles fall between his fingers, caught it between his thumb and forefinger, and flicked it high into the air, where it spun lazily up and then slowly fell back down, where Norrington caught it in the palm of his other hand, snatching it from the air in an almost feline manner.
What type of men needed, for their careers, to know about the movements of pirate ships, the quality of their captains, and the sort of behavior on their ships?
Pirate crewmen. Many of them were nomadic, moving from ship to ship doing general labor in exchange for some small percentage of a ship’s plunder. They might even be taken on by merchant vessels of questionably legal nature, and more than one such ship had been hunted down by a pirate ship with men aboard who knew where the merchants kept all of the most valuable cargo, because they had been hired to load it onto the ship.
Of course, these men often had no love for the British Royal Navy, and they would be disinclined to discuss their former and potential employers in front of a commodore with Norrington’s reputation. Around the coin, his hand momentarily clenched into a white-knuckled fist, then slowly relaxed, but did not open.
The solution was simple enough: James would merely have to leave the commodore behind when he met with these men, and take on the appearance and airs of a different walk of life. It had been some time since he had attempted such subterfuge, but it was not actually foreign to him. What kind of man could he become, that the men he needed would speak freely in front of him?
It required a new strategy of sorts, one that went against a great number of rules, ranging from the merely improper to the sort of thing that would get Norrington imprisoned and possibly hanged if he were caught, but it was, in a way, just the sort of change of pace that the commodore felt as though he needed at the moment: exercising his independence from the navy whilst still doing his job, reminding himself that he was still James Norrington first and the Commodore second. He opened his palm and glanced down at the coin resting in the center of it. He was surprised to note that he was smiling again, if only just a little, and with a distinctly vicious edge to it.
But perhaps smiling was apt. After all, he suddenly had no real worries about sabotaging his career. There was a letter on his desk informing him of his eldest brother’s recent death. It had arrived whilst he was out at sea looking for Elizabeth. James and his eldest brother had never been close, mostly because they had been of such opposite dispositions--one a spoiled dandy, and the other a sardonic man of the Navy; also, the dandy having attempted fratricide against the younger navy-man in the distant past had put a bit of a dark cloud over their relationship. James’ only other sibling, aside from an elder sister long since gone, was his other older brother: a fellow Navy man, who had died in battle two years ago in a tangle with pirates near Singapore; James had mourned that brother more sincerely. Both brothers had died without heirs...
With a small independent fortune to fall back on, and no fiancee` to get caught in the crossfire, Norrington felt... oddly elated. As usual, in the middle of chaos and throughout the recovery afterwards, his head felt clearer than at any other times in his life.
And this time, he wanted to hold onto that coldness and detachment, that clarity of vision, if only to ward off the fog and dull ache still lingering in his chest.
A lot of things can change a man: sudden shifts in fortune, humiliation at the hands of one unusually crafty pirate, near-death experiences, recognizing that a devil-may-care criminal was also a good man, the loss of the love of a good woman to a half-pirate blacksmith rival...
James smirked faintly, recalling rumors he had heard, shortly after he had released Elizabeth from their engagement: already, there were bets being made on whether the commodore planned to run off and become a pirate. And those were the kindest, mildest rumors.
Not quite that drastic a change, James assured himself.
But still a drastic change, indeed, James found himself thinking, two weeks later, when he caught sight of his own reflection in a large mud puddle of rainwater and rum, which took up half of a Tortugan alleyway that he was attempting to walk through. He had let himself grow three days’ beard on the way to Tortuga, and had spent his first night mostly hiding as he got together what he needed for a reasonable disguise. He wore a long, dark and battered frock coat of an indeterminable color, a ragged white shirt, an olive-green sash about his waist with his pistol sticking out of it, his sword on a belt at his hip, a pair of black breeches, and some very nice black leather boots. His wig was nowhere to be seen and his dark hair was loose about his face under a battered-looking tricorne hat that had, long ago, belonged to a Lieutenant James Norrington, but all military qualities had been roughly removed, so that it now looked like a proudly battered souvenir, stolen from some unknowable Naval officer.
One particularly inspired touch belied some wry humor over his source of inspiration: James’ eyes were smudged lightly enough with kohl that he looked haggard rather than decorated, and as though he might have gotten into a brawl a few days ago.
In short, he looked nothing even remotely like a man of the British Royal Navy. He had even found a few silver rings worth wearing in the pocket of his commandeered frock coat, and had made use of his one pierced ear, which had been one of his earliest lessons against getting too drunk with his lieutenants Gillette and Groves--one that James had learned back when he had been captain instead of commodore.
After examining his own reflection thoughtfully for a few moments longer, James made his way to yet another tavern: his third this week. He dodged one man, who was being enthusiastically tossed out the door, and wove his way easily through the ever-present brawl in the middle of the main room, until he reached the bar. Putting down his coin, he ordered rum. Once served he again wove his way through the brawl, heading for the tables near the back.
He had been pleased and amused that his educated guess--that the men he wanted to eavesdrop on would be the sort of men who reminded him of one Ex-naval Joshamee Gibbs--had been proved accurate thusfar. He spotted a table around which sat several old sea-salts, and joined their card game silently.
One thing that James appreciated about pirates was the careless way that they accepted men into their ranks. The most respected man at the table gave him a good look up-and-down to be sure that he was not a total scoundrel, and then nodded at him; thusly, James was given the opportunity to play, and--more importantly, so far as James was concerned--to listen to them speak in the process.
“Where you from?” one man asked.
Norrington raised an eyebrow, glancing up from his cards and answered in a heavy French-accented drawl, which he had learned to mimic perfectly after seeing Gillette drunk regularly enough following the Isla de Muerta. James’ answer amounted to something along the lines of: a sordid affair with an asshole merchant and his wife. His words were just slurred enough to make him sound as though he were lightly buzzed, but not quite tipsy.
A few of the men laughed: one raucously, and two of them with bitter sympathy.
They played cards, and talked. Some compared living conditions aboard various ships they had worked recently and where those ships were probably headed. Then others talked about where they heard about certain ships docking, and the latest rumors about the various captains.
Once or twice, the name Jack Sparrow was mentioned: sighted here, and sure to return to Tortuga again in a few months’ time. With the Black Pearl in his hands again, the men spoke of Sparrow with mixed wariness and approval: he treated his crew well, he was successful at finding treasure and plunder, and no one aboard his ship got flogged, but the man attracted the most bizarre circumstances.
James smirked very faintly into his rum as he sipped it, and one of the men at the table asked him if he knew Jack Sparrow. Meeting the other man’s gaze, James found that he recognized the mixed look of amusement and irritation therein; it matched his own. It seemed perfectly logical, then, that the other man knew Sparrow, too. Smirking again, James explained in his feigned French drawl that Captain Sparrow was a good pirate, but one deserving of a good strike about the head with a heavy blunt object.
“Was he part of your affair-gone-wrong, mate?” one sailor asked, tauntingly.
James was surprised into a bark of honest laughter that sounded strangely harsh. “Non, no, de affair, it ruin on its own.” He raised his eyebrows a bit and looked back down at his cards. His bitterness and amusement were sufficient to cover the bit of dishonesty. “As dey tend to do, oui?” And it was, perhaps, for the best, he did not add, except to himself.
A few of the men nodded solemnly. One or two others smirked.
After a few more rounds of cards, and two more tankards of rum, James retired, having lost just a little more coin on the game than he had made. He walked back to the room he had rented from a nearby inn. He kept none of his valuables there, and when he did sleep there, it was with his sword at his side and his loaded pistol (aimed away from him, toward the door) in one hand. Before going to bed, he took a pen, ink-bottle, and a mostly-empty leather-bound journal from the inner pocket of his coat, found a blank page, and wrote all that he had learned from the tavern that night. Once the ink had dried, he re-pocketed the papers, folded the coat for use as a pillow (he did not trust the pillows here) and rested.
He had four more days in Tortuga, as a raptor unseen amidst the pigeons, before he returned to the respectable world, shaved his beard, dressed in uniform, and made use of what all he had learned.
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Fandom: Pirates of the Caribbean
Warning: Will eventually contain slash
Rating: PG for now, NC-17 later
Disclaimer: I have no claim on POTC or the lovely characters who populate it, even if it seems that James Norrington is making himself quite at home in my head, the snarky British bastard.
Dedication: This is all Norrington’s fault. I woke up one day with him in my head, metaphorically sitting across from me sipping tea and raising his eyebrows expectantly. Considering that I’ve written the man on a roleplay website that never took off, this was not wholly surprising, but then he asked, nay, demanded that I write him. So I did, and that would be how chapter one came about.
Note: This was meant to just be a drabble or a vignette or something, which would then satiate Norrie dearest and allow me to move on with my life...but then it kept going. And going. And going...and suddenly I had an epic on my hands. And it was, to my surprised chagrin, pretty good; a lot of it quite amusing, in fact, but it also would not leave me alone. At all. Quite irritatingly so.
Summary: It all starts with one day’s head start, and then suddenly the commodore is in Tortuga, in disguise, doing questionably legal things. It's all Jack Sparrow's fault, surely.
Chapter One
One day’s head start.
James Norrington used the time wisely. He managed his duties at the fort quickly and efficiently, and retired to his office under the auspices of writing up reports on both of Jack Sparrow’s escapes as well as reading over the reports from the entire Isla de Muerta incident in order to be quite sure that none of those who had written them would be pegged as madmen. In truth, Norrington had done the latter last night when sleep had completely eluded him, and had no plans to write the former until he had taken some time to think about all that had happened since that damned pirate had first swaggered into Port Royal.
Norrington was familiar with insomnia. Ever since he had first joined the navy, it had struck him for a few nights at a time, without any real pattern, every couple of months. It was usually the same every time: there would be at least one or two nights wherein his mind refused point-blank to cease moving at the speed of the escaping Black Pearl; it left him none the worse for wear the following mornings, but then the day after each episode ended, once he had finally succumbed to the realm of Morpheus, he would awaken feeling more sluggish and drained, but not actually hindered from his duties.
For now, he was still sharp and controlled, clear-headed and calculative; albeit more cloudy-hearted than he would dare show. Norrington shut the door to his office behind him quietly, considered locking it but rejected the idea out of hand knowing that he might be needed, and settled in to think, with only the smallest wince as the minor fleshwound at his waist protested, which James ignored with determination.
His hat and wig were set aside on his desk, and he poured himself a glass of fine brandy. It was sheer force of will that kept his fingers from shaking. He stared out of his office window at the sea, and found himself thinking about chess, because it was always one of the first analogies that came to mind for the complex games he played in his life: navy versus pirates, man versus man, high-ranking unwed bachelor versus persistent mothers seeking to marry off their daughters post-haste...
To the core, Norrington was a strategist and a hunter; these were the most prominent aspects of his nature, and while they did well in Naval uniform, they were not limited to it. Norrington knew this well enough. He knew, as anyone in his rank had to know, that the only rules that really mattered were what any given man could do, and what he could not do; in the case of the Navy, this usually referred to what any given man could get away with and not get caught, reprimanded, or accused of some kind of scandal. Norrington’s high rank limited his ability to get away with impropriety insofar as his social behavior, his obligations to the public, and his connections; however, as recompense perhaps, Norrington’s rank also meant that he had more influence over larger numbers of people, and few men here in the Caribbean could give him orders that he could not, in some way, either ignore or at the very least subvert if he wanted or needed to--and it was subverting orders with skill, whilst still seeing a great deal of military successes, that had made him a commodore at the unusually young age of thirty-one.
His rank also gave him prey to hunt, and the means to do it, both of which he enjoyed. He was also quite good at the sort of hunts that the navy sent him on; in fact, he had not yet met a pirate who could outthink him, and therefore once he had one locked in his sights, they were usually either as good as caught or as good as dead, depending upon how and if they fought back--at least, all of that had been true before James Norrington had come face to face with one particularly infamous pirate named Jack Sparrow.
Captain, the commodore silently corrected himself, remembering the sight of that elegant black ship so near to his fort, Captain Jack Sparrow.
Pirate captain the man may be, but Jack Sparrow was clearly smarter than the average buccaneer, and indeed smarter than the average military man. James was... intrigued, by this. His original perceptions had been clouded for a number of reasons, he knew. It was high time then, was it not, to perform a comprehensive re-evaluation of the facts, and only the facts, cold and pitiless as they may be.
As a welcome distraction from the pain in his chest that had not relented since Elizabeth had taken her place beside Will Turner, James Norrington kept his thoughts cooly objective as, with clinical detachment, he methodically recalled and examined every moment of his acquaintance with Captain Jack Sparrow: from the pirate’s rescue of the drowning Elizabeth Swann, to his well-planned little tumble off of the fort into the very same waters. Norrington recalled William Turner’s personal report, which had been delivered by the lad in person just before dawn: before the pirate’s appointment at the gallows. With new interest and less prejudice, the commodore finally deigned to read it.
As he read, Norrington slowly began to piece together the strategies and tactics used by Captain Jack Sparrow--no longer judging the man by the standards of morality, so much as his skill in playing The Game. On a purely personal level, Norrington found the manipulations of two young people in love, based on elaborately deceptive half-truths and guileful emotional appeals, to be underhanded, but he had to admit that Sparrow used them to great effect and with a great deal of skill. Such elaborate manipulation: it had an almost artistic flare.
The commodore appraised his opponent with new eyes.
First and foremost, it was abundantly clear, Captain Jack Sparrow was a master of misdirection. His entire demeanor and appearance were designed to distract from the skillful, ingenious madman hiding behind them.
With chagrin, Norrington recalled just how well the pirate had manipulated the navy with such tactics, himself included. The recollections tempered his determination to be sure that he, at least, would learn to see through the man’s tricks the next time.
James had almost never seen misdirection applied in quite the unique ways that Captain Sparrow applied it, but he understood their concepts, and now he knew what to look for.
Despite his reputation for honesty, bluntness, and toleration of little else from those under his command, Commodore James Norrington, too, was familiar with a surprisingly wide variety of applications for the use of misdirection and manipulation as tactics in the game of life. His skilled use of misdirection had, in fact, not only contributed toward building his reputation and exploits, but had also saved his career, and the careers of a number of good sailors under his wing who suffered momentary lapses in discretion, from destruction several times.
Upon finishing William’s report, skimming over the idealistic pleading at its conclusion, the commodore set it aside and leaned back in his chair. His fingers moved restlessly, seeking some small task to keep them busy and help their owner think.
James Norrington recalled a street magician he had been fascinated by as a child in London. He had seen the man only in passing, but when he had asked his uncle about the magic tricks, his uncle had displayed an unusual hobby: coin tricks, which James had been young and eager enough to learn, wasting hours and hours perfecting the motions.
James pulled a coin from his pocket, holding it between index and middle finger and examining it in a speculative manner. There were two primary skills to master, when it came to coin tricks: misdirection and a bit of dexterity; the commodore had not forgotten the lessons to be learned from them.
The commodore glanced again at William Turner’s report, and specifically at its recounting of Jack Sparrow’s recent coin tricks, which had temporarily cursed Sparrow along with the rest of the skeleton crew. The pirate had probably once been a pickpocket in his youth, James speculated, as well as quite possibly a con artist or a street magician; he had all of the right dramatic airs.
The coin from the commodore’s pocket, not very shiny but silver nonetheless, danced idly back and forth across the backs of James’ knuckles, unknowingly in parallel of the same gesture that Jack Sparrow had used to taunt Captain Barbossa back on that cursed island. The movements were not quite fluid and effortless, but then, it had been years since Norrington had any spare time for coin tricks, or reason to think about them; with practice, the rustiness would be sanded away.
Contemplating his relative lack of free time, James looked around his office; he thought about the games of propriety and ambition that he played in the navy, and how all of the endless paperwork, however efficiently he handled it, got in the way of his hunting. So, in fact, did his rank, it now seemed.
He had never expected to be this dissatisfied with the profits of his own ambitions. Of course, his ambitions had provided different kinds of hunting, but that was not enough for him. Hunting by means of papers and politics and propriety--it was as nothing compared to sea and wind and ships, or flesh and blood and steel.
And while the paperwork helped to keep up appearances (especially because the particular skill James possessed for wording his replies and reports with the proper amounts of vagueness and white lies had been the only thing keeping his reputation as spotless as it was--which even James was more than willing to admit was undeserved, albeit highly appreciated) the commodore found himself suddenly caring very little about all of it. In fact, if he had less self-control, he might have given in to impulse and set the papers on fire.
Today had been a lesson to him, and his three teachers all had still-healing cuts on their palms from events on the Isla de Muerta. The lesson was a simple one; propriety (and with it its tools: paperwork, reputation, politics) does not and cannot satisfy.
But for James himself--and this realization the commodore reached all on his own, independent of his teachers--the hunting did, and sailing did; these activities struck soul-deep chords in him, filling him with life. Propriety came easily to him, as easily as sailing, but there was no soul to it, only further lines to deftly avoid crossing.
He had felt more in his element these last few days--chasing down pirates, searching for Elizabeth Swann, and fighting a small army of undead skeleton pirates--than he had felt in the two months leading up to his promotion, wherein he had been too often landlocked and office-bound, playing those games of propriety and ambition for all that he was worth, seeking... what?
James was no longer sure that he knew. But he did know, now, that those games paled in comparison to the ones that he played when hunting pirates, or even simply when sailing his own ship. And he was tired of the kind of hunting that made him feel... contained, tamed, and as though he were getting too old and too stuffy to still leap into a fray with sword and pistol. He wanted to feel his blood pumping again, reminding him that he was alive.
Memento vivre. Had he come so close to forgetting? His face in the mirror had grown pale these past months from lack of sun exposure. Looking at himself in the mirror that morning before donning his uniform, James had looked at his reflection and thought himself colorless as a corpse except for his eyes. His flesh was white as bleached bone, almost as white as his wig, which added at least ten years to his apparent age when he wore it. That in and of itself should have given him pause long ago. The Isla de Muerta had served as quite a reminder: memento mori...memento vivre...
Absently, pausing in his playing with the coin, he rubbed at his wrist, at scars that his uniform always kept hidden.
Remember that you are going to die...remember that you have to live...
It was high time he had started living up to that promise he had made to himself, all those years ago: remember to live.
Few things on this earth were more satisfying to James Norrington than chasing down and capturing prey, especially when his hunting ground was the sea and his prey was clever enough to challenge him now and then.
With all of these papers in his way, the commodore had to spend a lot of time waiting for reports of pirates to come in, before he could seek them out. He had to track them based on these reports, which often meant that the trails he followed were days or weeks old. Such methods were quite unwieldy, like using vinegar to attract flies. And also, he had little or no choice in what prey he hunted, or what herd he guarded from the wolves. Norrington’s gaze drifted again to his window, and his eyes narrowed.
No sane and decent man of keen intellect could be in the Royal Navy for as long as Norrington and not feel some resentment for particular varieties of merchant vessel. James had become adept, over the years that he had spent as a captain, at finding more important things for his ship (or ships, once he became commodore) to do than protect slave ships, or slave merchants. He did this for the sake of his own sanity. And it was not as though the slave market lacked funds to provide for its own security privately.
Still massaging his wrist only half-consciously, James recalled an event from three months ago, when he had begun to quietly attempt courting Elizabeth--perhaps too quietly, in retrospect. She had been telling him a story about some incident from five or six year ago, and she had remembered something. It had finally occurred to her to ask why he had stopped visiting her father for nearly two full years, sometime around that same period of her life. She had asked her father at the time, but he had been grim and close-lipped.
The answer had been simple enough, albeit ugly: James Norrington had been captured and sold into bonds by the Spanish for nearly a year.
He had told Elizabeth as much, and then explained that his physical recovery, once he had made it back to English soil, had taken a number of months. He did not mention that in the months following, he had hunted down a great deal of Spaniards, and he did not show her the scars on his wrists that were kept so well-hidden by the clean white cuffs of his uniform. While Elizabeth usually tended to push even the most reluctant people into telling their adventure stories, she had not pressed James to reveal this one; perhaps his mask had slipped, if only for a moment. She had only rested a hand gently over his, not saying anything, quiet and thoughtful, not removing it until she heard her father’s returning footsteps.
That had been when Norrington had begun to truly fall for her. He had acutely misjudged the situation, it now seemed, in thinking that she had begun to feel similarly.
A different, less solemn memory stirred, a too-familiar surprisingly-sincere voice in the back of James’ mind: I was rooting for you, mate.
The commodore mulled that over for a moment, but shook off that train of thought and returned his gaze to the paperwork that surrounded him, before his thoughts could become as leaden and cloudy as his heart still felt. As further distraction, the dull silver coin once more danced back and forth across James’ knuckles; the motions were already regaining their sureness.
He found himself thinking about hunting pirates in a different way than he had before. It seemed a slightly morbid desire, but he wanted to avoid the tedious reports, the cold trails, the time spent away from the sea. He wanted to get his hands dirty again, as he had when he was younger and less restricted by rank and reputation; he wanted to get closer to his prey and understand them all the better for it.
And it would get him out of this office and closer to the smell and taste of sea-spray. The thought brought a slightly predatory smirk to his lips, even as he imagined the shock that would result if the well-to-do in Port Royal could but see what he had in mind; because the idea of such an honorable personage as a British Royal Navy Commodore dropping all decorum and propriety for the sake of a good hunt might be seen as something akin to scandal; it was certainly outside the bounds of normalcy and popular sensibility.
On the other hand, Elizabeth Swann, one of a scant few people James had ever met with the wit and intelligence to keep up with him and come close to reading him, as well as the only woman to ever do so, cared not a whit for propriety or appearances, it seemed. Perhaps there was wisdom in that.
James was now bound and determined to find out.
His thoughts shifted again to tactics.
Where else could he get information about where the pirates that he wanted to hunt were coming and going from? Where might he learn what prey would be the best choice to hunt: the most ruthless captains, the greediest and most ambitious cutthroats...
But not, Norrington admitted at least to himself, Captain Jack Sparrow. He did not have a fast enough ship to catch the Pearl, he did not have the resources necessary to thwart her captain’s cleverness, and--reluctant though he was to admit it--there were more deserving throats awaiting the noose.
Sparrow, after all, had rid the waters for good of the undead pirates Norrington had faced aboard the Dauntless, and the pirate’s quick action had saved the lives of a good number of Naval men. Now that the pirate had officially ‘escaped’ Port Royal, Norrington could afford to let him to slip free. If Sparrow had been able to board the Black Pearl instead of the Dauntless after the cursed undead had been thwarted, then Norrington would have let him go without a second glance far earlier, and also with no plans to chase him, but the Pearl had run off early, and with the infamous Jack Sparrow squarely in the palm of his hand, the commodore had been unwilling to commit political suicide by letting him go--especially when to do so would either lose him his engagement to Elizabeth, or drag her down with him in his disgrace. That had been another misjudgment, it seemed.
Yet, things had, by all appearances, worked out swimmingly for all concerned...
Aside from the sharp pain in James’ chest that had not faded.
He refused to focus on the pain. It was deeply ingrained in his nature to never surrender to pain, to never let it sway him or weaken him or interfere with his clarity of thought; with physical pain, this was easier, because it often, in small doses, could sharpen his awareness and even potentially clear his head quite well; however, to combat pain that was not physical in origin, it was necessary to focus on something else, especially something that could take up all of his concentration. Hunting for pirates--that would serve well enough. Especially with the lessons to be learned from his recent experiences with Captain Jack Sparrow.
Norrington’s gaze once more wandered his office, lingering wherever he saw stacks of paper and scrolls. With an idle flick, the coin dancing across the backs of his knuckles flipped into the air, was caught, and began moving across the knuckles of his opposite hand.
When Sparrow had escaped from behind bars, he had done so using nothing more than the right man: the one who knew what needed to be done to facilitate escape and had powerfully compelling reasons to want Sparrow free.
What Norrington needed was someone similar, or a number of them, and a reason for them to talk to him. Not gold or bribes, because that would attract unwanted attention.
Slowly, Norrington smiled as all of his little ideas connected into one clever plan, like a latticework of quiet lightning. Then he let the coin dancing across his knuckles fall between his fingers, caught it between his thumb and forefinger, and flicked it high into the air, where it spun lazily up and then slowly fell back down, where Norrington caught it in the palm of his other hand, snatching it from the air in an almost feline manner.
What type of men needed, for their careers, to know about the movements of pirate ships, the quality of their captains, and the sort of behavior on their ships?
Pirate crewmen. Many of them were nomadic, moving from ship to ship doing general labor in exchange for some small percentage of a ship’s plunder. They might even be taken on by merchant vessels of questionably legal nature, and more than one such ship had been hunted down by a pirate ship with men aboard who knew where the merchants kept all of the most valuable cargo, because they had been hired to load it onto the ship.
Of course, these men often had no love for the British Royal Navy, and they would be disinclined to discuss their former and potential employers in front of a commodore with Norrington’s reputation. Around the coin, his hand momentarily clenched into a white-knuckled fist, then slowly relaxed, but did not open.
The solution was simple enough: James would merely have to leave the commodore behind when he met with these men, and take on the appearance and airs of a different walk of life. It had been some time since he had attempted such subterfuge, but it was not actually foreign to him. What kind of man could he become, that the men he needed would speak freely in front of him?
It required a new strategy of sorts, one that went against a great number of rules, ranging from the merely improper to the sort of thing that would get Norrington imprisoned and possibly hanged if he were caught, but it was, in a way, just the sort of change of pace that the commodore felt as though he needed at the moment: exercising his independence from the navy whilst still doing his job, reminding himself that he was still James Norrington first and the Commodore second. He opened his palm and glanced down at the coin resting in the center of it. He was surprised to note that he was smiling again, if only just a little, and with a distinctly vicious edge to it.
But perhaps smiling was apt. After all, he suddenly had no real worries about sabotaging his career. There was a letter on his desk informing him of his eldest brother’s recent death. It had arrived whilst he was out at sea looking for Elizabeth. James and his eldest brother had never been close, mostly because they had been of such opposite dispositions--one a spoiled dandy, and the other a sardonic man of the Navy; also, the dandy having attempted fratricide against the younger navy-man in the distant past had put a bit of a dark cloud over their relationship. James’ only other sibling, aside from an elder sister long since gone, was his other older brother: a fellow Navy man, who had died in battle two years ago in a tangle with pirates near Singapore; James had mourned that brother more sincerely. Both brothers had died without heirs...
With a small independent fortune to fall back on, and no fiancee` to get caught in the crossfire, Norrington felt... oddly elated. As usual, in the middle of chaos and throughout the recovery afterwards, his head felt clearer than at any other times in his life.
And this time, he wanted to hold onto that coldness and detachment, that clarity of vision, if only to ward off the fog and dull ache still lingering in his chest.
A lot of things can change a man: sudden shifts in fortune, humiliation at the hands of one unusually crafty pirate, near-death experiences, recognizing that a devil-may-care criminal was also a good man, the loss of the love of a good woman to a half-pirate blacksmith rival...
James smirked faintly, recalling rumors he had heard, shortly after he had released Elizabeth from their engagement: already, there were bets being made on whether the commodore planned to run off and become a pirate. And those were the kindest, mildest rumors.
Not quite that drastic a change, James assured himself.
But still a drastic change, indeed, James found himself thinking, two weeks later, when he caught sight of his own reflection in a large mud puddle of rainwater and rum, which took up half of a Tortugan alleyway that he was attempting to walk through. He had let himself grow three days’ beard on the way to Tortuga, and had spent his first night mostly hiding as he got together what he needed for a reasonable disguise. He wore a long, dark and battered frock coat of an indeterminable color, a ragged white shirt, an olive-green sash about his waist with his pistol sticking out of it, his sword on a belt at his hip, a pair of black breeches, and some very nice black leather boots. His wig was nowhere to be seen and his dark hair was loose about his face under a battered-looking tricorne hat that had, long ago, belonged to a Lieutenant James Norrington, but all military qualities had been roughly removed, so that it now looked like a proudly battered souvenir, stolen from some unknowable Naval officer.
One particularly inspired touch belied some wry humor over his source of inspiration: James’ eyes were smudged lightly enough with kohl that he looked haggard rather than decorated, and as though he might have gotten into a brawl a few days ago.
In short, he looked nothing even remotely like a man of the British Royal Navy. He had even found a few silver rings worth wearing in the pocket of his commandeered frock coat, and had made use of his one pierced ear, which had been one of his earliest lessons against getting too drunk with his lieutenants Gillette and Groves--one that James had learned back when he had been captain instead of commodore.
After examining his own reflection thoughtfully for a few moments longer, James made his way to yet another tavern: his third this week. He dodged one man, who was being enthusiastically tossed out the door, and wove his way easily through the ever-present brawl in the middle of the main room, until he reached the bar. Putting down his coin, he ordered rum. Once served he again wove his way through the brawl, heading for the tables near the back.
He had been pleased and amused that his educated guess--that the men he wanted to eavesdrop on would be the sort of men who reminded him of one Ex-naval Joshamee Gibbs--had been proved accurate thusfar. He spotted a table around which sat several old sea-salts, and joined their card game silently.
One thing that James appreciated about pirates was the careless way that they accepted men into their ranks. The most respected man at the table gave him a good look up-and-down to be sure that he was not a total scoundrel, and then nodded at him; thusly, James was given the opportunity to play, and--more importantly, so far as James was concerned--to listen to them speak in the process.
“Where you from?” one man asked.
Norrington raised an eyebrow, glancing up from his cards and answered in a heavy French-accented drawl, which he had learned to mimic perfectly after seeing Gillette drunk regularly enough following the Isla de Muerta. James’ answer amounted to something along the lines of: a sordid affair with an asshole merchant and his wife. His words were just slurred enough to make him sound as though he were lightly buzzed, but not quite tipsy.
A few of the men laughed: one raucously, and two of them with bitter sympathy.
They played cards, and talked. Some compared living conditions aboard various ships they had worked recently and where those ships were probably headed. Then others talked about where they heard about certain ships docking, and the latest rumors about the various captains.
Once or twice, the name Jack Sparrow was mentioned: sighted here, and sure to return to Tortuga again in a few months’ time. With the Black Pearl in his hands again, the men spoke of Sparrow with mixed wariness and approval: he treated his crew well, he was successful at finding treasure and plunder, and no one aboard his ship got flogged, but the man attracted the most bizarre circumstances.
James smirked very faintly into his rum as he sipped it, and one of the men at the table asked him if he knew Jack Sparrow. Meeting the other man’s gaze, James found that he recognized the mixed look of amusement and irritation therein; it matched his own. It seemed perfectly logical, then, that the other man knew Sparrow, too. Smirking again, James explained in his feigned French drawl that Captain Sparrow was a good pirate, but one deserving of a good strike about the head with a heavy blunt object.
“Was he part of your affair-gone-wrong, mate?” one sailor asked, tauntingly.
James was surprised into a bark of honest laughter that sounded strangely harsh. “Non, no, de affair, it ruin on its own.” He raised his eyebrows a bit and looked back down at his cards. His bitterness and amusement were sufficient to cover the bit of dishonesty. “As dey tend to do, oui?” And it was, perhaps, for the best, he did not add, except to himself.
A few of the men nodded solemnly. One or two others smirked.
After a few more rounds of cards, and two more tankards of rum, James retired, having lost just a little more coin on the game than he had made. He walked back to the room he had rented from a nearby inn. He kept none of his valuables there, and when he did sleep there, it was with his sword at his side and his loaded pistol (aimed away from him, toward the door) in one hand. Before going to bed, he took a pen, ink-bottle, and a mostly-empty leather-bound journal from the inner pocket of his coat, found a blank page, and wrote all that he had learned from the tavern that night. Once the ink had dried, he re-pocketed the papers, folded the coat for use as a pillow (he did not trust the pillows here) and rested.
He had four more days in Tortuga, as a raptor unseen amidst the pigeons, before he returned to the respectable world, shaved his beard, dressed in uniform, and made use of what all he had learned.
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