I'd fancy you return the way you said (but I grew old and forgot your name)

[captjacksparrow]

Everything has died. No -- scratch that word. Not died. Nothing to do with dead. Nothing and no one is dying if Jack has anything to say about it, and he will if they just could pick up a bloody breeze.

Sometime around late afternoon, the wind gave out. The sea rolled to a slow crawl of gentle waves and the Pearl, for all her might, guttered and

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[captjacksparrow]

Reading between the lines -- a trick Jack is very, very good at, despite the fact people seem to insist on the contrary -- it seems that James is here for no purpose other than a lack of purpose. It's a dangerous thing to tell a Captain you have nothing to do aboard his ship. Any sailor worth anything knows to find an occupying activity lest someone give him a less pleasing task.

Like scrubbing the decks. With a wig.

Jack doesn't much want to doll out that particular punishment at this moment. He's only done so the once (twice? few times?) when James was at his best for being unmanageable. James is still unmanageable now, but in a way Jack thinks he can navigate. Or at least is willing to make the attempt. There's little else to do and Jack's just not the sort to turn away company on the merits of whom it involves.

He likes to think it's part of his generous and curious nature. There are plenty of other places and other people for James to waste his time on, after all. Can't fault a man for turning to old habits in times of distress.

Jack chuckles into the bottle at James' words. "Thought you'd be used to standing still," he says, and takes a drink to splice the teasing into something softer than outright cruelty. "Legendary man of one great, wide port that you are."

[commodore_jln]

Those words only get a disdainful glance from James. Jack knows perfectly well how he feels about standing still. He's always been at his most comfortable when he's in motion; going somewhere, doing something, or if that isn't possible, to at least have a clearly discernible goal. Jack knows that better than... well, probably anybody. Which is a faintly disturbing thing, really, when he thinks about it.

'Commodore James Norrington was a legendary man,' he says, his voice coloured with drunken bitterness, and something maybe a little wistful. 'Me?' He snorts indelicately. 'I'm no-one.'

And it's true. With no movement to define him, no purpose or point or drive... James Norrington is nobody. Nobody at all.

[captjacksparrow]

That bitterness is a newly acquired trait. Or new to Jack, at least, because he reckons from how easily James slips into it that it has become old hat for him. That in itself borders on the disturbing. At best, that behaviour sits firmly in the capital of uncomfortable. The rum bottle seems a safer place to look than at the miserable figure James cuts, so Jack directs his eyes yonder, considering his words and whether another drink will clear his throat or not.

Little more rum never hurt anything, he concludes, and then pour a good quarter of the bottle down his throat. "No one's nobody," he tells to rum quietly, tone dropped low and serious and a little hesitant. His voice circle around the glass and echo back out to him.

Jack didn't mean nothing by his earlier words. No, wait. Not exactly true. He did mean, but only in a way to poke rather than injure. James chose Port Royal over seeing the world with Jack and limited himself in that way. It's an old game, that teasing, and one Jack assumed would be neutral ground between them. He hadn't expected for James to take him to heart, because anyone who knows Jack at all knows he's not worth listening to more than half the time.

Time changes things. Evidentally. Jack's still learning about that prank of fate. Still, though. There's self-deprecation and there's self-abuse and then there's just self-pity. James is swimming near the deep end and close to drowning. Jack can't just sit here and let him go under.

"Only way you get to be nobody is to keel over one day, not breathing." He lifts his eyebrows to look at James behind the protection of the rum. "And even then, some of those men manage to make quite a name for themselves. Not dead yet, mate. You're just serving dead time."

And that's really all Jack wants to say on the matter, because he's said the word "dead" about eight times too many in that last sentence and it's beginning to call up that bristly hair feeling on the back of his neck again.

Dead wind, he thinks fearfully, and the way the Pearl creaks against the lapping of waves doesn't go far in the way to reassure him.