Exchange fic--Part 2
**
He was alone staring out at the sea. She appeared behind him in silence and threw her hands over his mouth and nose. James arched his back, drew his sword. She cackled at him.
“You frightened me,” he said, breathing heavily.
“Ah yes, what could I have done? Killed you, eh?”
She laughed again, a wild sound. Something was different about her. Her eyes were burning and James picked up a scent of blood in the wind.
“What’s wrong?”
She wrapped her arms around his neck.
“I have something to show you.”
Very far off there was the low growl of thunder. Calypso disappeared but a trail of wet footprints led him down to his cabin. When he opened the door the cry burst forth from him.
“My God…”
It sat on the floor in the center of the room, a small hunched creature in rags shivering and rocking slightly. His skin was gray and shining as though he had been stricken for a long time with fever. His hair was plastered back to his skull and dripped water. He was crying.
James recognized Cutler Beckett more by the ache that tore through his soul than by the huddled creature before him. He looked around wildly for Calypso. Even the footprints had vanished. James went forward and knelt before the lost soul. Cutler was holding one forearm, fingernails digging into the flesh. James tentatively reached out and brushed against them but Beckett whimpered and pulled away from the touch. His eyes stared straight ahead, seeing nothing. The color seemed drained from them. No longer that frozen shining blue they were only colorless. The eyes so magnetic they could make James do anything were now only empty. Tears stung and blurred James’s gaze. Even now, even after his own death, he still felt far too much.
“My lord,” he whispered. “It’s me…It’s your Admiral.”
Suddenly he heard her voice booming all around him.
“Do not dare to call yourself his possession. He is no one’s lord now.”
James whirled around and shouted at the ceiling.
“Enjoying this are you? Are you proud of your handiwork?”
“His sins have made him this, not I. He must pay for the crimes he committed against others. Against both of us.”
Calypso appeared behind James’s shoulder in a shroud of mist.
“He doesn’t see us,” murmured James.
“He is damned. His body is here. His mind is somewhere else.”
“The Locker?”
“Men are so feeble in trying to give order to the world with names.”
“Why have you brought him here?”
“Because I have decided what I want you to do for me.”
She licked the side of his face and forced something into his hand, something thin and long. James paled.
“Remember this?”
He took the riding crop and held it in both his hands. She placed her command in his head without needing to speak.
Take him.
“Why are you doing this?” he sobbed. “Why?”
Another mist and she was in front of him, between him and the body.
“Because he took your life, James.”
“Mr. Turner stabbed me. The Captain has suffered more than I-”
“William Turner does not have a vengeful spirit.” Her voice was growing harder by the word. “This is not about killing. This is about bondage of the soul.”
James tried to swallow past a stone in his throat.
“You…you just said only his body is with us. He does not recognize me. It would not signify…”
Again she cut him off, this time her tone was soft and dulcet and wicked. It chilled him more than her anger.
“He will know you. His soul craves punishment; only through it can absolution be reached.”
A dark chuckle.
“He taught you that, do you remember? You learned so very well.”
He stared at her, at her dark implacable eyes, then down at the weapon in his hands.
“This has nothing to do with me,” he whispered. “You do not care what my life has been. You merely want your own vindication. He tried to possess you and you want vengeance. This is how you work, Jones, me, you make us love you and then exact a price.”
There was no resentment in this, no defeat either. How could he reproach her?
“There is always a price for love, James.”
She leaned close up to his ear.
“You loved that-” a languidly disgusted hand over his shoulder making him cringe “-once and look what he did to you. Is there not a price to exact for that? Redemption must be earned.”
James bowed his head and shut his eyes tightly. Suddenly his human body was heavy as stone. It closed in upon his soul. He understood the goddess’s bondage. His fist tightened around the crop as he remembered each welt and bleeding gash it had left upon his back, calves, thighs…He remembered it glistening in the lamplight as his master slicked it wetter than an eel with oil made from pepper and ginger so that it burned like a live coal inside James’s body. He would stoop on all fours and tremble so violently with pain and degradation that it wagged like the tail of the dog he had become. Beckett made him lay his precious, beautiful sword on the ground so he would be forced to see his own reflection, to see himself truthfully at last…
James was jolted out of himself by the sound of the leather against skin. Over and over and over. For the first time the screams were not his.
One of Cutler’s precepts had been, wait between lashes; don’t let the old sting dull into the new. If James followed this it was out of the final shreds of hesitance. With each crack Cutler, or whatever was left of Cutler, cried out but he lay still and splayed upon the wooden floor. He did not try to get away, he did not even curl defensively in upon himself. He simply looked up at James with those unseeing eyes, now filled with tears, and allowed the blows to fall.
“Please,” he murmured. “I’m sorry…Please…”
Please, my lord, please…!
It was a small, soft childlike voice that James had never heard him use in life but he recognized it from all the times it had been wrenched from his own lips and James became incensed by it. Lord Beckett adored hearing him beg, loved having him so utterly undone that he hardly know what he begged for: for it to stop, or to desperately be given more. He understood it now, as he began to grow hard. The blows rained down faster. The screams echoed louder. Calypso stood in silence and watched and smiled.
James had thought that death would mean freedom and for a long time it had but he now gave in to the flood of memories that assaulted him. Calypso had spoken of redemption in exchange for this brutality, a concept which he understood and believed and had lived through. Would Cutler be redeemed through all the rage and all the love his former supplicant felt for him? Would the sea goddess release him if he saw himself bathed in blood and repented?
If redemption was won through retribution James had had a good teacher.
“They are all dead, lost because of you, James.”
“I know.” Choking sobs.
Crack.
“Your pride, your ambition. It ended the life of every single one of those men. Are you sorry?”
Crack. Crack. A trickle of blood.
“Yes…Yes!”
James would weep. He would see their faces through the haze of pain. Then there would be a soft, lovely kiss on the back of his neck.
“Can you prove that to me?”
He tried. He proved it with pliability, with mouth and hands and a body warm and willing. In exchange there was the pleasure that was hurt’s twin. There was desire so strong James thought it would burn him up. There was his master’s guiding hand on these voyages through the body, the way he whispered…
“…It’s going to be all right. Trust me.”
James heard the voice inside his own mouth. Cutler looked up with wide eyes that used to be his. James pulled down the ragged breeches, spread his lover wide…
When he joined with Cutler the moan he heard was like a gift. The two of them sank down to the floor and James found the slow rhythm that he remembered, like the rocking of the sea itself. Behind them, seemingly from a great distance, Calypso recognized it too and moaned but neither heard her.
Cutler was sighing. James could never remember him ever uttering a sound. He tried to gain purchase on the floor with the palms of his hands and pushed his body back on to James, all the time whimpering:
“Please…Please…”
James slid one arm under his lover’s body to cradle him, then he shifted slightly and thrust hard with a grunt. Cutler screamed. James repeated the motion again and again. Cutler found another set of words buried deep inside his shattered mind.
“Oh my god…Oh my God…Oh my god!”
At the deification Calypso grew jealous. James felt the change and it recalled her to him. He would have to finish quickly. He was crying again. He bent down next to Cutler’s ear, praying she could not hear him and knowing she could.
“I will not try to break you as you did me. I love you…and I want to save you. I’m sorry…”
With a last thrust they both cried out and sank into each other. If they had been alive their heartbeats would have slowed. James became very aware of the blood on his chest leaking from Cutler’s wounds. He ran his hand across dark curls he had never seen, half a gesture of apology.
Suddenly the body beneath him stirred and to his surprise began to turn. When the head turned and the eyes met his, James caught his breath as a sudden spark rekindled in them, and Cutler’s voice slowly asked:
“James?”
He gasped, or sobbed he couldn’t quite tell, and nodded hurriedly. Cutler smiled at him. He had never seen that smile, but it was more real to him than anything he had seen.
“Oh James, I’ve missed you.”
And then as suddenly as they had lightened, the eyes went dark again. The body beneath him grew cold and the soul receded somewhere far away. James was seized with sorrow but also with revulsion and scrambled off the terrible thing. It disappeared faster than a movement of his eye. He sat on the floor for something that was very long, despite its not being time and then turned to look at Calypso. She crawled forward on her knees to him, summoned water to her palms with a whispered syllable and began to wash him. That was the only evidence of what had occurred and she was drowning it.
“Is the goddess pleased?” James asked her, and found that he still wanted her to be. He was a servant in his very soul, and knew it now.
“Yes,” she answered softly.
She moved into him then, laying her head upon his chest.
“I misjudged the strength of your love, James Norrington,” she said. “I misjudged its power…as I always do. Love frightens me so.”
“Do you think love is a disease too?” he whispered into her hair.
She did not answer him. Human speech was becoming very tiring.
**