(no subject)
Jason would have been a good teacher.
He has a strange patience, showing her how to load ammunition into a gun, his hands warm and steady, or foreign phrases, broken down phonetically. He takes a pin and teaches her how to pick a lock (which she can only successfully do once after,) and how to distinguish between guns by the sound of their shot (so she can count the bullets in the chamber.) She learns to notice everything- the number of people in a room, the location of cameras, exits and objects that can be used as weapons. He shows her some basic defense moves, which, she declares, is a waste of time, because he doesn't let her out of his sight anyway. And it's true, for three months he keeps his eye on her as though she might slip away, following her on errands and scrutinizing every customer that enters. She likes the possessive gleam in his eye in spite of herself, the grip of his hand on her elbow.
Three months after the look in his eye changes from a fear she might fade away to the fear of the enemy when his hand on her elbow is the only thing that keeps her from a bullet. Blown, he hisses, voice thick with rage, and Greece is left via a route so confusing she could not recreate it if she tried.
She knows she loves him, island-hopping to the mainland, her hair covered with a scarf as he shows her how to spot for camera lenses by their reflection, and not because he's dangerous and more than a little handsome. Her importance is magnified by his lack of memory, and he loves her as whole-heartedly as one who remembers nothing can. She wonders sometimes if there's a wife or girlfriend somewhere, waiting for a phone call or a shadow in the doorway. She never mentions it, even when he dreams of a home.
(It's not much, he says, his body covered in a cold sweat, it's a house, just a house. His voice wavers, and she touches his back, his neck, and he says, there are only shadows, and they're saying something I can't hear. He felt guilty at first, knowing he had woken her up with his dreams their third night together, just as the giddiness surrounding their reunion was starting to wear off, but now he'll speak without much coaxing, and eventually he'll write it down.)
From Greece they go to Poland. He's too nervous to stay anywhere for long, so they crisscross Eastern Europe before hiding a month in Prague. He dreams of running, of being chased, and her legs are covered in bruises. She occasionally realizes that they're really strangers whose lives happen to be tangled up together, but never then, when he needs her so desperately that his breathing won't slow until she has her arms around him.
He seems proud that she's clever, able to parrot back false identities and hometowns, charmingly mangled greetings and questions in a dozen languages. When he teaches her defensive moves, she knows he's doing it more for himself than for her. He cannot shake the idea that someday he'll snap.
(It may have something to do with the night in Krakow when she startled him out of a nightmare. His fingers were around her throat hard enough to bruise in under a second, and off before her eyes finished widening in fear. Afterward, not even out of breath, she realized it was too quick for her to even get scared, but he leaps away as though burnt. He apologizes quickly, repeatedly and his hands shook. He didn't once ask for forgiveness, just apologized, even as she breathed for him. I'm okay, she says, look, I'm fine. From that night on, he is more regular in her requests that she leave for her own sake.)
She can't put her finger on when, exactly, it changed so completely from being scared of him to being scared without him, but by Gdansk it's total. She wonders how things might have ended up differently- if she had told him to leave in Greece, or left him after Paris, or taken the car and left him. If she had gone to the Embassy in Zurich an hour earlier or later.
She waits, of course, for the day that something will happen. That he will misjudge and get shot, or she'll come home to find him dead, that their car will get driven off the road, or the day the day that his guilt will get the best of him and he won't come home. Or, maybe, just for the day that she'll get tired of losing things in a move, and she'll say goodbye, just like he's been waiting for. In some versions of this, she doesn't say goodbye, and instead walks off.
(And on other days, she imagines that an all-clear will sound, and he will relax, his shoulders loosening and his face softer, and they will live happily after all. This is a dangerous dream.)
Five things that might have happened had Norrington lived
(1)
"What did your mother call you as a little boy?" she says as leans on his chest, happy.
"Oh, no," he says lightly, and his fingers gentle on her back. Her skin is more golden than he had anticipated. "I won't tell you that, you'll only tease."
"Come now," she says with a pout, "I'll tell you that my mother called me Eliza when I was little."
"Yes, but that's not embarrassing."
"Darling," she says, and she draws out the second syllable to make it infinitely more intimate, "darling, tell me. I won't tease." She moves up to kiss him lightly, and then pecks him twice more. "Please, darling."
He already knows that he will give in, for it is his way and he is already anticipating her delighted laugh. "It was- you said you wouldn't tease, don't get that look."
She looks at him, eyes wide and innocent. "Oh, no. I won't tease."
Sighing, he exhales: "Jamie-boy. There."
He hadn't thought it possible, but her eyes widened further. "Oh, it's better than I thought."
"No teasing."
"Oh, but Jamie-boy!" She kisses him again. "It's so precious. Oh, were you very small then?"
"Very small," he replies gruffly, but his heart's not in it. "She died before I was seven."
She settles her head on his pillow, clasping their hands over the coverlet. "Mama died when I was six too, and Father never called me Eliza. I can't imagine what it would even sound like, coming from someone else, isn't that funny?"
He squeezes her hand before kissing her, and he says, deep and reverently, "Eliza."
(2)
Her cheeks are red with sunburn the morning after he follows her across the rope, skin flaking and lips chapped. She seems both absurd and completely at ease in her new role as captain, and he can't help but see her at twelve on the trip from England, pale and delicate as she held to the rail, her governess ill below decks. She winces when she sucks on the lime, nose wrinkled and eyes watering, her lips sore.
He seems a bit dazed to her, staring mostly at the ocean and occasionally at her, his wig lost in the sea. "James," she says quietly, over the wind, and when he looks over, she finds she has nothing to say. She is not angry at him, or grateful, and instead she sees him as her final tie to civility and a life beyond the sea.
(She had never realized that by committing to a life of piracy, she lost the freedom to return to a life on land, and she is against losses of freedom of any kind.)
"I forgive you," she says without ceremony, dropping the remains of the lime overboard, surprising herself.