Just in case anyone was feeling warm and/or fuzzy....
.... let me rectify the situation immeadiatly.
Must be Eddie's day, mind! (JAMES NORRINGTON LIVES!!!!!!) And thanks to her for betaing (though I promise I will never write the fic based on a dream I had where James becomes one of Doctor Who's team).
And... I don't set out to Lizzie-bash. Honest I don't.
Title: One Last Great Betrayal
Author: soubie
Characters: James Norrington, Will#2, Will#3, Elizabeth Turner (sort of), OMCs (sort of)
Disclaimer: Not mine, merely borrowed.
Warnings: Character death, implicit trauma. Not, as far as I know, technically AU, though probably not what one would hope for. Implied major angst. Like big style. But nothing actually on show. And probably formatting errors.
After their last interview, Norrington couldn’t think of a single thing to say to the boy that seemed appropriate; and as such he chose not to make the horrendous effort of fully waking when the boy came back again. However, when the child wriggled under the quilt beside him, then even in his current condition, there were limits.
“William, do you mind?”
“I’ll be careful. I’ve taken my boots off.”
How old would he be? Ten years? No, several months younger than ten. Still, surely, old enough to see the subtle inappropriateness of the situation?
He’s a Turner, Norrington reminded himself. Subtle inappropriateness was a hard concept to impress on Will the Elder. Half the reason he’s well-suited to his current- and presumably now permanent- calling is that a man who any ordinary society would have considered normal wouldn’t stand a chance of fitting in.
********
It wasn’t so much the interview with the then-Commodore Stanhope after Will had been pulled out of the sea- where the boy had sat with seal-eyes and answered in monosyllables throughout- that stuck in Norrington’s memory, though that had been interesting enough.
(“And you have put out to the West Indies for what purpose, may I ask?” Commodore Stanhope had said.
“My father… he- he was here. I came to find him. The last I heard of him he was here.”
“Do you know any more than that?”
“Nossir. We- I haven’t heard anything for a while. A couple of years back he- I don’t know, sir, I know he’s a sailor. A merchant sailor, sir.”
“That’s not a lot to go on, you know.”
“I know… but… I can work. I, I’d like to work- if- if I can find something I can do.”
“I’m sure the governor will be glad to here it, Turner.”
“Yes sir.”
“Wanting to be a sailor, are you?”
Please no, Norrington thought. The boys we’ve got are enough. Not this one as well, he’ll be dead before we’ve cast off.
“I- I wasn’t so much- I don’t mind, sir. I mean I would- it’s a very fine, ah- I should like being a sailor sir, with the learning about arms, sir. For killing pirates, sir.”
Norrington had glanced up at this point, but the boy still hadn’t been wearing any trace of a facial expression.
“That’s… a rather unchristian thought in a lad your age, Turner.”
“Sorry sir.”
“That’s not to say you’re entirely wrong.”
“Nossir. Terrible men, sir. I saw them- terrible things, sir. The men who attacked us- somebody should kill them, sir.”
“Are you intending to track them down and kill them, then?”
The boy had looked up and studied the ceiling.
“I suppose if I find any pirates, I should have to kill any of them just to make sure, sir.”
“Didn’t do so well with the first lot you came across, did you?” Norrington had regretted it as soon as he said it, and if he hadn’t the glance that Stanhope gave him would have chastised him enough anyway. One had to assume the child was still in shock; he had given them to understand that he had only been fully orphaned a matter of weeks ago.
That any criticism, let alone ridicule, had been aimed at him, however, didn’t seem to occur to the boy who sat in the chair before him. Instead, he nodded, his face serenely serious.
“I shall have to learn better what to do next time,” he said, folding his hands in his lap.)
It was more the day where James had been at a luncheon at the Palace a few months later, and the then-little Miss Swann had run in sobbing that Will Turner had said that he would kill her.
Swann had, in the heat of the moment, been more concerned with Elizabeth than with having words with the boy or his master, and as such the accused had found himself before a parlour full of His Majesty’s Naval officers, unfortunately including Captain Hewitt. Hewitt, it turned out, was one of those men who prided himself on liking children, in a thoroughly jolly fashion, all laughing and good-humoured mockery.
The trouble was, it seemed, that nobody ever seemed to have shown the young Turner how children were supposed to behave. True, he had been trembling to a satisfactory degree, with his chin stuck out to such a degree he appeared to be on the verge of using his nostrils as ocular assistance, but children were really not supposed to greet a cry of “So here is the rake who’s been terrorising the young females, then!” with a look that was neither amused nor ashamed, but utterly mystified. Avuncular teasing evidently did not fall within his understanding.
Norrington had no urge to be avuncular to the half-witted child, and less urge still to watch Hewitt spend another twenty minutes attempting it. A few direct questions were helpfully revealing.
“Miss Swann said to me,” Turner replied. “That she was going to grow up and go to sea and be a pirate. And I told her that she shouldn’t do that.”
“Very reasonable, I’m sure. But can you tell me how this seems to have turned into a mortal threat?”
“Sir?”
“That’s not what she told us you said.”
“Well, Captain, sir, I said to her, that it’s a very silly idea, and if she really wanted to then maybe she could be a privateer. Only she shouldn’t be a pirate.”
Something about that curiously even, sincere tone tweaked a chord in James’ memory.
“Because then you would have to kill her?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that’s what you told her, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
There was nothing in the boy’s expression to indicate it, so it was only at this point that Norrington realised that he’d been unthinkingly shaking his head.
**************
At the time, James had been twenty-one, and had assumed the boy’s intelligence to be limited. And he’d thought no more of it.
Now he was forty-two- or at least, it had been forty-two years since he was born- and he’d had more time than he could ever have asked for to consider Will bloody Turner, which was plenty enough to realise that ‘skewed’ was probably more accurate. Not that that altered the fact that what he was fairly certain to be the son of Will bloody Turner had just curled up in the corner of a narrow and uncomfortable palette-bed beside him; and it didn’t provide him with how the hell he was going to explain this away when somebody noticed. And the child seemed to have been blessed with an unwarranted number of knees and elbows.
On the other hand, the effort of kicking the boy onto the floor he suspected would rip open the stitches on his belly all over again.
“Turner, this is my bed.”
“You’re not using all of it. It’s not like you can move about very much like that.”
“That is hardly the point.”
“I’m not dirty. And anyway, if you let me sleep here I can look after you. That warden’s trying to watch everyone at once. I can fetch and carry for you, and things. I just want to lie down somewhere.”
“Look, if I agree to this the warden might turn us both out. And then where would I be?”
William looked at the bandages across Norrington’s belly critically.
“I think you’d probably die quite soon.”
“Yes, thank you, William. And what good would come of that? I wouldn’t be of any use to you then, would I?”
“Well, you’re not being of any use to me now.”
“Hah! You’re your mother’s son alright.”
James heard a sharp intake of breath from the unseen weight beside him. “Sorry,” he said, “I wasn’t thinking. Really. One forgets what one’s saying, half the time.”
“Please,” the boy said, lying mercifully still. “I’ve nowhere else to go.”
“That implies that sharing a palette in the back-room of a church with an invalid who knew some of your relatives counts as ‘somewhere to go’.” He sighed. “Lie atop of the quilt, then.”
“Does that mean I can stay here with you?”
“Maybe. If I can keep you. Until… until somebody has a better idea. My coat’s on that chair. See if it’s dried out. If it has you can use it as a blanket. And please lie still.”
“Yes sir.”
***************
When the pain of the freshly re-opened wound woke James again, the warm weight was still on the bed beside him, smelling of wet, salty wool. By agonising twisting he could just about see the child’s face- fast asleep, and in the half-light of dawn he looked greenish, rather as his parents had both last appeared to Norrington, beneath the sea; the captain of the Dutchman looking perhaps a little more grey and green than could be caused by the water alone, as, through the struggling crew of the stricken sloop, his wife swam, with a terrible mermaid’s smile, towards them.
I don’t believe that woman, had been James’ last thought before he had found himself struggling with her, and, in due course, being thrust up to the surface, where the condition in which he had fallen beneath it was reminded to him with full force.
But if he hadn’t believed her then- how long was it since he had?- he had never believed her so little as when he had heard a small boy, appearing at the church where the survivors who had washed up near the village downstream had been carried, asking if anyone had seen his mother.
It had taken James a moment to realise that he should not be glad. If a passenger on the Dutchman could not find a loved one, it was generally a comfort to them, as it was they who the worst had happened to. Here, though…
It hadn’t been hard to guess how to catch the boy’s ear: when a stranger in a land where it’s been made a point of that you weren’t widely known, to have ‘William Weatherby Turner?’ called across a room would have been quite a significant stimulus.
Young Will might have been lying when he said that his mother had rowed out to see if she could help the stricken men, or he might have been as yet mercifully ignorant. Of course, Norrington had been lying when he claimed to have got his streaming wound- through which his diaphragm and occasionally a small loop of intestine undulated obscenely- in a struggle in the water with an unwisely armed shipmate, before being tossed up on the shore of Cornwall (or if not, somewhere that looked like Cornwall) after the sloop on which he travelled had fallen pray to wreckers.
But if he wanted to explain to Young Will exactly what their connection was, he had a horrible feeling that it would require him to tell the child exactly what his mother had done- the selfish, ridiculous, hysterical- and, presumably, inexcusably dead woman who had put her arms round his shoulders and said: “James, you’ve a life to live, without me in it, ever again. This I promise you, it’s the least I can do.” Damn her, damn her, for this. Damn her eyes.
What did she think she was doing, anyway? He was over forty now- perhaps not a great age in the life he had once seen stretching out ahead of him- but if the hole in his belly failed to close to the air as persistently as it had to the waters, he would have to think of himself as effectively twice that. And even if it did close, what then? The most optimistic future would be if the Navy could consider him a retired officer, though he suspected the pension would be severely mitigated. And a slender chance of any wife and children now. He’d missed his chance of being normal.
Young Will twitched in his sleep, and whimpered.
It was when James absent-mindedly smoothed the boy’s hair to comfort him that it struck him, with such physical shock his vision drifted out of focus.
She wouldn’t- would she?
But even if she’d thought of it, she couldn’t have- could she?
He supposed it couldn’t have been a long-made plan. He’d had an idea what the long-made plan was. He wasn’t sure who he had first heard it from- events aboard the Dutchman tended to run together, generally underwater as they were- but somehow it had come to him, and had explained a lot. If the captain of the Dutchman found a woman on land who proved herself faithful, then he could return to her, at the end of his ten-year captivity. That was part of the bargain, not one widely discussed but… he’d heard it, somewhere.
Turner had never discussed it, which was probably wise. Norrington didn’t even know if he knew. Perhaps he would find out when it came into force, and wouldn’t that be a happy occasion.
Nobody discussed it, and thus nobody discussed what the rest of the Flying Dutchman were to do afterwards.
When, after his long-awaited leave, Turner had re-appeared upon the deck, tacium as usual,
Norrington had wondered whether he should tell him he wasn’t expected to be there any more.
Then he’d wondered whether, perhaps, he was.
Aboard the Dutchman, Will Turner hadn’t really done facial expressions. He hadn’t registered much surprise, for that matter, when Norrington had appeared, having been rejected at more or less every heaven, hell, paradise or next life he had ever heard of and several he hadn’t, on account of none of the keepers recognising being stabbed by a dead man as a proper cause of death. Puzzled, yes, but that was about the limit of it.
“I think it’s to do with not having a heart- not here, anyway,” Will had leaned on the desk, his chin on laced fingers, above the scroll that bore: “James Leighton Norrington: Suspecti Paradoxium” in florid script. “It is useful. I can look after the dead without feeling terribly sorry for them. I mean, I can think sorry for them. But that’s quite bearable.”
“I thought you seemed- alright, you don’t seem cheerful. You seem- serene.”
“Oh yes. Lamenting isn’t going to get me anywhere.”
“You always were an optimist, Turner.”
“I hope so, yes. Though I go to my cabin if I ever feel too positive about things. It wouldn’t do to be in too good spirits in front of the dead.”
That said, the few days after he had returned from leave, he had been- particularly blank. Seeing as he had no choice but to skulk aboard ship until someone accepted him as dead, Norrington had decided not to ask him if he was thinking upset about something. There wasn’t much that Turner, or the other Turner, could do to him that was worse than had been done already, but Norrington didn’t have Turner’s talent for optimism, or serenity.
Though the serenity had finally cracked, when Elizabeth had loomed out of the green shadows.
What did she think she was doing? What in all the hells that James had encountered- that had still turned him away, either for being too alive or for not knowing about them- did she do that for? Turner must have met the boy. She must have realised that James had no life to go back to. How deranged must she have been if she had thought both or either of them would-
“The boy, my good man, who is he?”
Norrington blinked, and tried to focus on the warden standing over him.
He made a decision.
“My ward,” he replied. “He has nobody else to go to. He wished to watch over me.”
The warden nodded, evidently satisfied, and moved on.