Exchange fic--Part 1
Title: The Dreamer's Disease
Author: ophelivia
Recipient: fairielore
Word Count: 3, 515
Pairings: Calypso/James, James/Beckett
Warnings: Dub-con, whipping, slight blood
Rating: Hard R
Notes: After 4 years in this fandom I have FINALLY wrote actual Beckington. This is a great, great day. Thank you as always to sunsetdawn20 this time for buying me The Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson which was a huge inspiration while writing this fic and to my beloved Beth for helping come up with the idea.
The Dreamer’s Disease
All his life, people had held power over James Norrington. It seemed it extended even into death.
**
Sometimes he believed he was in Hell. When he looked to the helm with the rotted wind in his hair and saw William Turner charting their course, when the message of his son reached the ship he had to remind himself that he chose this eternity. That though Turner, who would now be a boy forever, pleaded with him in secret to say yes to the offer he still might have declined. He had to remind himself it was fear that kept him glued to the fabled vessel where he’d spent his last days and met his demise. He knew the sea better than his own soul. He did not know what is waiting on the other side.
But there were days also when this between-world was the only paradise. The day after making his choice he clapped his arms around Andrew Gillette, around those shoulders that had always been his strength. The peace of death had healed all wounds between them and for the first time in an eon James felt he was forgiven. He loved being with his friend in the white warm sunlight of the neverending horizon. He loved the preternatural storms that turned the skies silver and violet, and the waters a color for which there was no name. He loved the joyful reunions of newly departed souls with those they’d lost and missed, and he never forgot the thrill of forsaking up and down and the searing beauty of chartreuse light. He loved the certainty, as he always had.
Paradiso, Purgutorio, Inferno. Amid these states James would fluctuate until his weary soul was finally ready to make the journey for himself. In flux did he spend his days.
But at night James Norrington kept a secret to shatter time and place and world. At night he submitted to a power men had chased since the very dawn of time.
Oh, the nights…
**
He walked into his cabin and found the floor in water to his ankles. James frowned, looking around for holes in the walls. Nothing. He stood on his bed, checking the ceiling.
“Strange…” he mumbled.
As if in response, he heard laughter. Not laughter only, laughter concealed within the first rolling of thunder. James fell onto the bed. Never in his afterlife had such a thing occurred before. He felt stirred deep within, maybe even scared.
“Who’s there?”
Now the laughter joined in his ears with the rush of surf, and before him the water swirled and danced upwards. It trickled down just as quickly and in its center stood a long limbed, dark skinned woman, blazing eyed and mother naked. He heard his own gasp.
“Don’t be frightened, James Norrington.”
He knew who she was, without knowing how. And James trembled with such force that he crashed off the bed. His forehead touched the floor (dry now) in obeisance. Calypso laughed again, more human less storm.
“Get up,” she said, her rich cacao voice between kindness and disdain. “You have spent your life upon your knees, no need to spend death there too.”
At this frank analysis of his life’s misery, James’s eyes overflowed with tears. As they tracked down his face, her eyes softened. She clicked her tongue against her teeth, reached out, brushed them away.
“Oh there, there. There, there.”
That voice, that wonderful voice, now it soothed him as leaves dancing on the wind. James looked up.
“What do you wish of me…”
He swallowed.
“…Goddess?”
Calypso grinned at him.
“Rise,” she repeated.
James still shook, but managed to obey. Desperately he tried not to look at the glowing mahogany flesh, the round, buxom hips, the breasts as full as pomegranates. He stared at his boots. At this pathetic mortal form he clung so tightly to.
But was she not doing the same he realized? Why else should she ever return to the form in which she’d been for so long?
She walked toward him. With every step her bare feet took the floor rippled. James did not know where to leave his gaze. Calypso wrapped her arms around Norrington’s body, loving the way his every muscle heaved beneath her touch like the waves themselves. Green imploring eyes deep and glistening as the depths of all she loved.
“I have come to give you back your heart.”
She devoured his mouth in hers. The surf came to a crescendo inside his skull. He felt the pull of the tide, but there was no water. Then suddenly there was nothing. James opened his eyes. He was alone.
**
This was her realm. Her presence was everything and everywhere, and she tortured him. He saw her face instead of his own whenever he looked over the ship’s rail. He heard her voice on the breeze, singing in a language he could not understand. In the muffled white sun he saw the shimmer of her eyes. She was driving him quite insane in a place where there was supposed to only be peace.
He soon lost the ability to measure time in long periods. There was only the sun rising and setting, rising and setting. He did not see the world again and so could not watch it change and in the sameness he forgot things. He could not remember what year it had been when he had died or how old he had been. He had no way to tell when that year fell away, or a month, or more than a week. He tried keeping track of the days in his head but they slipped away like smoke and eventually he gave up. Andrew said it wasn’t important. Life itself would not fade, merely the way it was measured.
No matter what, the time between her appearances was far too long.
She had the ability to make herself visible only to him. Often she would stand a few feet away while he was at his tasks and stare at him, a hint of a smile on her mouth, the souls of the dead walking straight through her, the crew not even lifting their eyes. It made him shiver, and with a wave of her hand she whipped up a breeze to dance across his shoulders and make it worse. When she laughed no one heard.
**
“Why are you here with me?”
“I do what I want, James Norrington.”
“But why stay in this body? You are free now.”
“I have all eternity. This small portion I choose to spend with you.”
“Like you chose Jones? Like Odysseus before him?”
She shrugged.
“I do admit men are my weakness…for a thousand years I have worshipped passion. If I were mortal I suppose it would be called a disease.”
“It’s no crime to dream of being loved.”
“Dreams. Most certainly a human disease.”
She stroked the side of his face and he felt a cool breeze. Her smile glowed in the pitch black of the cabin like jagged pieces of moon.
“It did not seem to do you any good, did it?”
She often tormented him in this way and something about her voice, about the vibrations of wind and power that he felt coursing through her, shot him to the heart and brought tears to his eyes. She licked one away as it drifted back onto his temple.
“You have my protection James Norrington, you always have.”
She slid one hand between his thighs, began stroking him into alertness. James gasped. His heartbeat did not race now because of what he was, his blood did not rush or roar in his ears. But it was still more feeling than he was becoming accustomed to. He cried out, arching his back. Calypso placed a willowy finger to his pale lips, then mounted his thighs. James was hard. When he fit inside her body it was like warm summer rain. She rode him, slowly at first but soon the tempest would not be denied and she battered against him until he throbbed. Her hands spread on his chest like the cracks in the wood of a shipwreck. He grabbed onto both wrists, praying she could anchor him, but in his soul he knew there was no reason for any anchors now. The goddess opened her black lips and screamed and James’s gasping breaths were drowned in the sound of surf crashing and gulls crying. He held on to her and for the first time in a long time she was not bound. He knew that once sated she would disappear so he kissed her mouth and asked:
“What is the price of your protection?”
She smiled at him. Her matted locks blocked the intentions in her eyes.
“I have not decided yet.”
She placed her palm upon his face. Instead of skin he felt water cool the flush in his cheek.
When she was gone James got up from the bed and punched the wall. He was surprised to find his fingers could still bleed.
**
He knew she would forget him one day, or tire of him. He wondered if perhaps the reason memory hazed and time distorted in the floating souls the longer they remained was simply another thing she implemented on them. Maybe because she could not keep memory or time or love she did not want them to either.
Or perhaps it was simply how things were. Maybe she had no control of it at all. Maybe the gods were accountable to other things. Maybe they had less power than humans believed.