Two's Company: Part 1 of 3
The nineteenth-century adventures of two immortal pirate lords, one ex-commodore, and an undead monkey.
This grew out of a fic exchange request for what I think is a unique OT3.* It was too dark and long for the exchange, but I wrote it anyway.
Pairing: um... Sparringtossa? (This part mostly Sparrington. You can bail out when things get ugly.)
Rating: NC-17
Beta: viva_gloria
Disclaimer: not mine.
Warning: this is nineteenth-century France, the theme park ride. You may recognise names, dates, events, and mad Dutch painters, but trying to fit it all together is liable to cause head explosion. Bit like Pirates of the Caribbean, really.
*If you've seen this threesome done elsewhere, I'm not sure I want to read it, but I'd certainly like to hear about it.
Two’s Company: Part 1 of 3
"James Norrington, d'ye fear death? I'll take that as a no."
His sword was borne away, having apparently done no damage whatsoever to its target. Norrington was surprised how much this hurt. Ridiculous to waste his final moments pining for a piece of metal, however fine and cherished.
It occurred to him that a man who could waste his final moments worrying about the correct way to spend them was a man not yet ready to face his maker.
"Actually," he croaked, "I do fear death.”
Tentacles slid over one another as Jones turned his head.
"I wish I could say I fear it less than dishonour, but since I appear to have run headlong into the arms of both…"
"Ah!" Jones leaned down and smacked his lips bonelessly. "Hope! Ye seek a chance to set right wrongs done: a clean conscience, a shining reputation… An' what'll ye offer in return?"
"I believe the usual rate is one hundred years’ service."
"Aye." A tentacle skated over his chest, oozing slime that both chilled and healed. "I've need of an officer who knows his ropes. I accept your terms, Mr. Norrington. But dinna come whinin' if ye find yerself no better at the end of it."
~
One hundred years later, James Norrington saluted his crew for the last time, checked, yet again, that their new captain properly understood his duties, slung his small bundle of possessions over his shoulder and turned his back on the Flying Dutchman.
Lorient, on the southwest coast of Britanny, was hardly the port he’d have chosen for his return to dry land, not least because he was obviously English, and the French had had another of their revolutions and were, once again, at war with Britain. However, as captain of the Flying Dutchman, he'd kept track of all those he’d cared for in life (quite a small number when it came down to it). He’d watched where they went, and known when they died. They all died, of course, as did their children, and their children’s children, until all connection was forgotten. All but one.
Jack Sparrow, whether captain of the Black Pearl, bobbing around the ocean in a dinghy barely worthy of the name, or-more recently-lingering on land, was the sole still point in a changing world. The vile pirate had become Norrington’s last remaining connection with the land of the living. And, for reasons Norrington could not begin to fathom, Sparrow was currently residing in Paris.
~
Paris in the mid-nineteenth century was busier and bigger than any city Norrington could have imagined. Now he was a mere mortal again, he had no idea how to locate an implausibly long-lived pirate, no doubt under an assumed name-a different assumed name. However, it seemed like a good idea to head towards the highest concentrations of alcohol, loose women, and general depravity.
This approach yielded an astonishingly extensive and populous search area. Norrington settled to his task, drinking his way through the bars and getting to know the locals. He began to see what drew Sparrow to the place: a mere hundred years could never have made London so uninhibited. After a century at sea without living company, it really was quite cathartic. When his store of seabed gold ran low, he hired himself out as a bodyguard.
On the first anniversary of his arrival in Paris (Norrington kept track of dates), he decided to give up the search. He’d built a life for himself, found a way back into the world: surely that was all he’d been looking for when he set out to find Sparrow.
But the pull of meeting a man who shared the old Norrington’s past never quite faded. He and Sparrow had nothing else in common, naturally, but it would be good to speak with someone who remembered Elizabeth, Turner, Port Royal, the Interceptor… So, once in a while, Norrington would pull out a broadsheet almost as old as himself.
“I’m writing a play,” he'd explain, “about the sordid life and grisly execution of the notorious pirate, Sparrow, but I lack an actor. I don’t suppose you know anyone who resembles this woodcut?”
They usually did, of course, and it was never the one he was looking for. But one day, shadowing a serial adulterer with wealthy political enemies, he turned down a small street in the Marais and stumbled upon a shabby little print shop. The sign outside showed a printing press with death’s head, crossed cutlasses, a very familiar flying bird, and the words Les Éditions Pirate: propriétaire Philothée O'Neddy.
The adulterer’s enemies could wait a few days longer for their scandal; Norrington pushed the print shop door and stepped inside. The jangling bell provoked a farcical flurry of bangs and crashes from behind a curtain at the rear of the tiny shop. A small boy’s face appeared, splotched with ink.
“M’sieur?”
Norrington hadn’t planned for this scenario.
“Um,” he said. “Bonjour, mon petit. Um. Je… cherche…” He pulled the broadsheet from his coat, spread it on the counter. “I’m looking,” he continued, still in French, but with renewed confidence, “for someone who can make copies of this. To advertise a theatrical performance.”
The urchin examined the broadsheet; disappeared with it behind the curtain. Sounds of whispering; a long silence; Norrington pretended not to notice that someone was standing just behind the curtain, breathing conspicuously. Someone about Sparrow’s height, and wearing badly scuffed boots.
Eventually, a voice, gravelly and familiar even in French, told the boy to run over to Gustave’s and see how that manuscript was coming along, then buy himself a cup of wine and spend at least an hour drinking it. A familiar, be-ringed, and ink-stained hand cuffed the boy round the ear as he tumbled towards the door.
As the jangling of the doorbell died away, Jack Sparrow strolled nonchalantly from behind the curtain and draped himself over a low wooden chair. His hair, long and wild as ever, was caught back in a single braid. He wore moleskin breeches and a linen smock, also-as ever-far too many rings and that ludicrous, jezebel eye-paint. He and his clothes had clearly spent a great deal of time working with ink.
“Former Commodore!” he drawled. “I heard you were dead. To my considerable regret, as it happens, but you have to admit rather more than a decent period of mourning has elapsed. Anyway, black’s such a depressing colour, don’t you think?”
Norrington failed to frame a coherent answer, but noted with sharp satisfaction the throbbing pulse over Sparrow's collarbone that belied his apparent composure.
"Philothée O'Neddy, I presume?"**
Sparrow had the grace to look mildly embarrassed.
"Had to call meself something. I write poems, I paint, I run a profitable small press - it was funny for a while, awright?" He waved a hand towards the other chair, indicating a change of subject. “Sit down, sit down! This really is the most delightful surprise.” His face crumpled in apparently genuine doubt. “Isn’t it?”
Now, this was a conversational angle Norringon had foreseen. “Not entirely a surprise, on my part,” he said smoothly, taking his seat. “But it’s pleasant to see a familiar face.”
“Not a surprise? In that case, what took you so long?”
Norrington had forgotten how the man could pout. Didn’t he know it made him look like a cross between a spaniel and a houri?
“I’ve been fairly busy. The Flying Dutchman doesn’t sail herself.”
“Ah!” said Sparrow. “You served under Davy-and Will. But Will came back.”
“Hard though this may be for you to grasp, Sparrow, I remain a man of my word. I promised one hundred years, and I served no less. Under any captain or none.”
“You?” Sparrow flapped a finger towards Norrington’s chest; twisted it around to trace a line down his own; grimaced. “Promotion. Just keeps on happening to you, doesn’t it?”
“I do my duty.” Even to himself it sounded hollow.
“Not entirely how I recall your time on my lovely Pearl: theft, desertion, betrayal…”
“The Pearl was a pirate ship.”
“So it was your duty to act like a pirate? Well, being one myself, I can hardly object. At the time, however, I’ll own I was somewhat moderately distraught: finding you’d run off to pursue career opportunities doing the East India Company’s dirty work and heartlessly left me to face Jones’ beastie heartless, as it were.”
How the wretch could twist things! Norrington had no cause to feel guilty. Any unfortunate involvement with Sparrow during his time on the Pearl had been entirely due to rum and mutual weakness. Trust, promises, alliances, dalliances, and the like were most definitely not involved.
“Yet here you are. Still keeping ahead of the beastie, and the hangman. I’m curious to know how.”
“Oh, that!” A shrug. “Fountain of Youth, mate. Florida. But you know all about that, eh?”
Norrington pinched the bridge of his nose and breathed deep, counting silently backwards from a hundred. Of all the people- Nelson, Newton, Mozart, Governor Swann, Elizabeth, Lieutenant Gillette-whose survival might have served humanity, the one sailing serenely through the centuries, with never a thought for the good of others, was Jack Sparrow. It was as though the man had seduced the Good Lord himself! Not an impossible scenario, come to think of it, if he favoured the Good Lord with the smouldering gaze currently targeting James Norrington, who, thankfully, was well fortified against such assaults.
“I’m not sure I could bear to live as you do for even one lifetime.”
“Nonsense!” said Jack firmly, pulling him to his feet and drawing him behind the curtain. “You just need to get to know me better.”
The press in the back room was surrounded, indeed partly hidden, by wobbly piles of paper. This appeared to be printed with poems.
“Charles Baudelaire,” explained Sparrow. “Wonderful poet, delightful man. Well worth a read. How’s your French these days?”
Norrington picked up a sheet. “Worse than I thought. Unless this poem actually is about a rotting corpse.” He looked more carefully. Good Lord! It truly was a description of putrid carrion. There was a line about the carcass opening like a flower in the heat... and the maggots flowing out of it like thick liquid…
“This isn’t poetry-it’s revolting!”
“Who said beauty had to be pretty?” Sparrow (himself by turns revolting, pretty, and beautiful) leaned over the page, much too close to Norrington. “Oh, Une Charogne. P’rhaps not the best choice for a beginner. Here, try this!”
He pushed Norrington towards another stack of pages, rummaged, and presented him with one titled L’Homme et la Mer. “Don’t say a word until you’ve read all of it.”
Norrington’s ingrained obedience kept him from voicing his first impression-that drivel about free men being at one with the ocean was all very well for poets and pirates, but actual sailing required a keen sense of duty and discipline if you didn't want to end up at one with the stomach of a shark.
Then he read the second verse: your heart / For a time forgets its noisy beat, becomes a part / Of a greater, more savage, and less tameable moan. It was true: out on the ocean, nothing inside him ever hurt quite the way it did on land.
“Not bad, in its own way,” he admitted. “May I keep a copy?”
“Consider it a coming ashore present.”
Sparrow beamed entirely too broadly and tucked the thing into Norrington’s breast pocket, inky fingers rubbing obscenely against his chest. To hide his discomfiture, Norrington picked up another sheet. “Lesbos?”
Sparrow leered. “So that’s what you like! One of the ones the reputable press aren’t allowed to publish. I do them unofficially, as it were. Although, I have to say this particular one’s entirely harmless, in spite of the promising title: I’d never shift ’em at all without the illustrations.” He pushed aside a pile to reveal a small crate of printed engravings, one of which he handed to Norrington.
Norrington had seen similar things passed round on board ship, but modern printing techniques allowed for a great deal more… detail. He swallowed; cleared his throat.
“Surely, these women… don’t try to tell me this is permitted, Sparrow.”
That grin again, glittering with gold and wickedness. “Don’t think there’s a law against girls havin’ a spot of fun. Printing the pictures, well, that’s almost legal, you might say. If the authorities could trace these to me, I'd be shut down. On the other hand, if the respectable presses dared to touch this stuff, I wouldn't have a business to be shut down. So you might say I'm providing a disreputable service at some risk to myself; and I have some very reputable customers who make sure I don't suffer unduly for the risks I run. The blonde is Claudine from the bar round the corner, by the way. I could introduce you.” He paused. “Since you like that kind of thing.”
Norrington sighed. “I’m neither as prudish nor as desperate as you appear to believe, Sparrow. I’m perfectly capable of arranging my own diversions and I see no need to discuss my preferences with you. Nor do I wish to know about your sordid business arrangements.”
The Sparrow pout reappeared, but it was blessedly fleeting. “If that’s how you want it, I’ll not trespass on your privacy.” (A likely tale!) “Although I seem to remember you weren’t always so inscrutable, and I’ve always made it perfectly plain who I root for.” Houri eyes gave him a look at once reproachful and inviting. “Cold-hearted spurning aside, do I have your word you’re not currently representing the tedious arm of the law?”
“Absolutely.”
“In that case, come and see what really keeps me in business.” Sparrow dragged away a rug, the towers of paper on it teetering dangerously, and revealed a trapdoor. In the cellar below stood a smaller press and several very neat stacks of crisp new banknotes.
“Raised intaglio printing,” he announced, incomprehensibly. “Wonderful technique, but a bugger to get right. Even I need a moment to distinguish these from the genuine article, though I say it as shouldn’t.”
“It’s good to see you’re using your talents and longevity for the greater good.”
“Now you are being a prude. Life’s for living. In the long run, that’s harder than it sounds.”
“My heart bleeds for you.”
“Sew it up, then. I ain’t after your sympathy. Your company, now, that’d be more’n welcome.”
Odd to hear the damnable pirate express feelings so close to Norrington’s own. “I could stand a little company myself,” he admitted. “Especially company that remembers the old days.”
“Maudlin reminiscences, is it? I know just the place!”
Sparrow pulled his smock over his head, exposing bronzed skin and an array of scars and tattoos, mostly ones Norrington remembered from a century ago; he dragged his gaze away and made a show of examining the banknotes. They really were most convincing.
“Here you go,” said Sparrow, as close to decent as he was capable of in an open-neck shirt and embroidered waistcoat, tucking a hundred franc note into Norrington’s waistband. “Don’t spend it at the bar, though. I’m a regular.”
They were in the street before Norrington thought to ask which bar they were headed for.
“The Tour Abolie. Just a little place, but quite charming. You know it?”
“Only by reputation, as a den of vice and unnatural practices.”
“Must be why I feel so at home there,” commented Sparrow with a grin for which Norrington didn't care at all. “Don’t worry: as long as you pay for a drink, any additional practices are entirely optional.”
~
The den of unnatural practices turned out to be small, dark, smoky, but mostly empty in the early afternoon. They sat at a table in a corner. It was private and cozy in a disreputable sort of way. In all probability, Elizabeth would have felt perfectly at ease here, but it didn't seem like the proper place to talk about her.
Sparrow ordered rum for himself and tried to persuade Norrington to try absinthe, visibly disappointed to learn he was already familiar with the foul green stuff and preferred brandy.
“I love the nineteenth century!” Sparrow declared, a little too passionately to be entirely convincing. “Modernity! Nothing’s sacred any more. Everywhere you look, people are busy tearing down old powers and beliefs, inventing new devices, new techniques, new ways to live. Of course, it’s noisy and crowded and grimy, but there’s a thrill in it. Beauty too: the new poets are right about that.”
Norrington nodded, because he could see Sparrow’s point, really he could, but he’d come here to talk about the past. “Isn’t there anything you miss?”
Sparrow stared into his drink, swirled it around. After a long while, reluctantly, he muttered. “Ships. I miss the old ships.”
“Ah!” agreed Norrington. “The creak of rigging and timber; piling on canvas with the wind just so; holding the weather gauge; tacking good and tight with the spray springing off the rail…”
“Boards dancing underfoot on an ocean swell; sitting in the crosstrees with naught for miles but gulls and horizons…” Sparrow sighed and blinked. “Course, you could starve to death in the horse latitudes for want of a breeze, or be trapped in port for weeks if it blew the wrong way. These days, they just fire up the smokestack, and putter along nice and steady.”
“Progress.”
“Aye.”
Norrington wondered what had become of the Pearl, but sensed it was best not to ask. If she’d met a noble end at sea, he’d know about it. If she were still afloat, would Sparrow be here?
"Pianos, now," said Sparrow, suddenly perking up. "There's real progress for you. And republicanism, hashish, chocolate, abolition... Have you tried hashish?"
Norrington shook his head.
"Must see if I can find you a spoonful somewhere."
~
One thing led to another (although Norrington steadfastly refused to consume hashish), including frequent visits to Sparrow's lodgings out in Montmartre, and nights spent together either in Sparrow's-Jack's-disorderly bed, or in even more disorderly houses. Of course, all the girls adored Jack and were eager to meet his new friend.
Norrington found he was quite relieved to be one of many attachments; it made it easier, somehow, to consider their liaison merely a casual, coincidental comfort, which, of course, it was.
He was only slightly taken aback to find that Jack shared his lodgings with a Dutch painter, who never seemed to be there. The small daybed in the painter's otherwise lavishly cluttered room looked more suited to occasional naps than to serious use, which did rather suggest that the painter, if he existed at all, spent most of his nights in Jack's more than voluminous four-poster. Possibly, he didn't exist, or no longer called; the objects in his room gathered dust undisturbed except when Jack borrowed a fancy waistcoat, bottle, or goblet. There was a rail of coats, a shelf of hats, some kind of perch, and an assortment of unfinished-looking paintings-garish landscapes and gloomy still lifes, a basket of putrescent apples. Pride of place over the mantle went to an outstandingly cack-handed rendition of a bowl of fruit-apples again-signed by someone called P. Cezanne, clearly the sort of wastrel Norrington wouldn't trust with a brush and a bucket of whitewash.
Sparrow, himself-Jack, rather-was undeniably delightful company, the rough, man-to-man encounters of Norrington's brief spell aboard the Pearl having given way to a surprisingly feminine softness, by turns flirtatious, tender, brazen, or languorous.
Norrington found himself wondering how many centuries a man would need to discover all the faces of Jack Sparrow, and whether any of them was real-or all of them.
He grew accustomed to hearing footsteps on the stairs. They always turned back on reaching the landing: Jack employed a wonderfully efficient code. The rush mat pushed up against the door meant he was out. Flat on the floor with the doorknocker free meant he was at home, decks cleared for action. A cravat muffling the knocker signalled the success of a previous boarding party and the advisability of a tactical withdrawal. (Norrington strongly suspected it sometimes meant simply that Jack preferred peace and quiet and his own company, though this was strenuously denied.) It was a straightforward system that saved a great deal of embarrassment: Norrington heartily approved.
On this particular night, however, his ears were squashed between Jack's thighs and he'd either missed or ignored the tread on the stairs that failed to retreat, and even the key in the lock. Only the creak of the opening door caught his attention.
Where the hell were his pistols, or the boot with the stiletto in it? But fight and flight were equally impossible: Jack was crying out and convulsing, hands and thighs clamping Norrington's head tight as his hips thrust clear of the cushion, pumping and pulsing halfway down Norrington's throat.
With a final, fierce scream, Jack spent his last and slumped back in the green padded armchair. His head released at last, Norrington scrambled to his feet, wiped Jack's seed from his chin, and twisted to face the intruder with what dignity he could muster.
"Did ye miss me, Jaack?" asked a voice from a fair way north of France and west of Holland. The hair, eyes, and skin were wild, reddened by rough weather; the hat was huge; the whole assemblage smelled of salt and tar: if this man was a Dutch painter, Norrington was a dairymaid.
"Why would I do that?" queried Jack. "You've hardly been gone a decade."
If the wretch was even slightly embarrassed to be caught like this-flushed, breathless, legs splayed, breeches gaping-he gave no sign. In fact, he didn't even bother to pull his shirttails over his stickily subsiding prick.
Suppressing the urge to reach out and preserve Jack's non-existent modesty, Norrington bent to pull on his own boots, sliding the stiletto into his sleeve as he did so.
"Ah, well, I be baack now! So ye can be tellin' Johnny Newcome here to stow his shiny knife afore it gets tarnished, an' take hisself home to maman."
Jack turned to Norrington. "Jamie," he said, "I don't believe you've met Captain Hector Barbossa."
He turned back to the visitor, with a look of quite implausible innocence.
"Hector, allow me to present Com… no, Admiral James Norrington, late of the Royal Navy, more lately of the Flying Dutchman. Currently residing in Paris."
Barbossa opened his mouth. Shut it again, quite forgetting to sneer. Norrington could practically see cogs turning behind the man's pale eyes. He hoped his own confusion was less apparent.
"I believe I almost had the pleasure of your acquaintance on the Isla da Muerta," he said, carefully casual. "Unfortunately, you were…" (For the love of Christ, the man was dead! He'd had to reprimand some marines who'd been kicking the corpse.) "…indisposed."
Norrington was most definitely not going to ask the obvious question (Fountain of Youth, mate) but it took all his self-control not to ask how-or when-the cursed pirate had reached the damned Fountain in the first place.
"A temporary setback, as ye see." Barbossa was recovering fast. Again.
Something small and furry bounced through the open door and onto Barbossa's shoulder.
A monkey. The monkey, surely, for it was dressed in britches, shirt and waistcoat, and chittering in Barbossa's ear just as Elizabeth had described. Norrington glanced at it, raised one eyebrow. He felt he was beginning to get the hang of this.
"Fountain of Youth?"
"Nay! Aztec gold!" Barbossa widened his eyes as if to say that thereby hung a tale worth telling if Norrington would but demean himself asking for it.
"Ah!" said Norrington briskly, "The curse of Cortez. Not quite the target the Heathen Gods had in mind."
"Too bloody right it's a curse," muttered Jack darkly from the armchair.
Norrington kept his face straight. Barbossa was glaring daggers at him, and anyway, he was damned if he’d collude in any more of Sparrow’s antics until the man pulled himself together and buttoned those bloody breeches.
The monkey, apparently oblivious, seized a peach from the bowl on the table and carried it off to the perch in what Norrington still thought of as the painter's room. Meanwhile, Barbossa strode slowly to the chair, stooped, and very deliberately nudged aside Jack's softened cock to trail his fingertips through the glossy puddle congealing around it.
Incredibly, Jack allowed this without so much as a twitch. Kohl-rimmed eyes locked to watery ones. Slowly, Barbossa brought his fingers to his mouth and licked them clean. He looked at Norrington.
"Well, stay or go, lad, but whiche'er it be, shut the door."
This would seem a sensible precaution. Norrington picked up his coat, fully intending an icily dignified departure; he shut and latched the door, not forgetting to replace the cravat around the knocker. Rather to his own surprise, he found himself still on the inside when this was done.
~~
Notes
**Philothée O'Neddy is a made-up name, but it’s a genuine, nineteenth-century French made-up name. If you don’t believe me, google it.
English translation of L’Homme et la Mer
Part 2
Part 3
This grew out of a fic exchange request for what I think is a unique OT3.* It was too dark and long for the exchange, but I wrote it anyway.
Pairing: um... Sparringtossa? (This part mostly Sparrington. You can bail out when things get ugly.)
Rating: NC-17
Beta: viva_gloria
Disclaimer: not mine.
Warning: this is nineteenth-century France, the theme park ride. You may recognise names, dates, events, and mad Dutch painters, but trying to fit it all together is liable to cause head explosion. Bit like Pirates of the Caribbean, really.
*If you've seen this threesome done elsewhere, I'm not sure I want to read it, but I'd certainly like to hear about it.
Two’s Company: Part 1 of 3
"James Norrington, d'ye fear death? I'll take that as a no."
His sword was borne away, having apparently done no damage whatsoever to its target. Norrington was surprised how much this hurt. Ridiculous to waste his final moments pining for a piece of metal, however fine and cherished.
It occurred to him that a man who could waste his final moments worrying about the correct way to spend them was a man not yet ready to face his maker.
"Actually," he croaked, "I do fear death.”
Tentacles slid over one another as Jones turned his head.
"I wish I could say I fear it less than dishonour, but since I appear to have run headlong into the arms of both…"
"Ah!" Jones leaned down and smacked his lips bonelessly. "Hope! Ye seek a chance to set right wrongs done: a clean conscience, a shining reputation… An' what'll ye offer in return?"
"I believe the usual rate is one hundred years’ service."
"Aye." A tentacle skated over his chest, oozing slime that both chilled and healed. "I've need of an officer who knows his ropes. I accept your terms, Mr. Norrington. But dinna come whinin' if ye find yerself no better at the end of it."
~
One hundred years later, James Norrington saluted his crew for the last time, checked, yet again, that their new captain properly understood his duties, slung his small bundle of possessions over his shoulder and turned his back on the Flying Dutchman.
Lorient, on the southwest coast of Britanny, was hardly the port he’d have chosen for his return to dry land, not least because he was obviously English, and the French had had another of their revolutions and were, once again, at war with Britain. However, as captain of the Flying Dutchman, he'd kept track of all those he’d cared for in life (quite a small number when it came down to it). He’d watched where they went, and known when they died. They all died, of course, as did their children, and their children’s children, until all connection was forgotten. All but one.
Jack Sparrow, whether captain of the Black Pearl, bobbing around the ocean in a dinghy barely worthy of the name, or-more recently-lingering on land, was the sole still point in a changing world. The vile pirate had become Norrington’s last remaining connection with the land of the living. And, for reasons Norrington could not begin to fathom, Sparrow was currently residing in Paris.
~
Paris in the mid-nineteenth century was busier and bigger than any city Norrington could have imagined. Now he was a mere mortal again, he had no idea how to locate an implausibly long-lived pirate, no doubt under an assumed name-a different assumed name. However, it seemed like a good idea to head towards the highest concentrations of alcohol, loose women, and general depravity.
This approach yielded an astonishingly extensive and populous search area. Norrington settled to his task, drinking his way through the bars and getting to know the locals. He began to see what drew Sparrow to the place: a mere hundred years could never have made London so uninhibited. After a century at sea without living company, it really was quite cathartic. When his store of seabed gold ran low, he hired himself out as a bodyguard.
On the first anniversary of his arrival in Paris (Norrington kept track of dates), he decided to give up the search. He’d built a life for himself, found a way back into the world: surely that was all he’d been looking for when he set out to find Sparrow.
But the pull of meeting a man who shared the old Norrington’s past never quite faded. He and Sparrow had nothing else in common, naturally, but it would be good to speak with someone who remembered Elizabeth, Turner, Port Royal, the Interceptor… So, once in a while, Norrington would pull out a broadsheet almost as old as himself.
“I’m writing a play,” he'd explain, “about the sordid life and grisly execution of the notorious pirate, Sparrow, but I lack an actor. I don’t suppose you know anyone who resembles this woodcut?”
They usually did, of course, and it was never the one he was looking for. But one day, shadowing a serial adulterer with wealthy political enemies, he turned down a small street in the Marais and stumbled upon a shabby little print shop. The sign outside showed a printing press with death’s head, crossed cutlasses, a very familiar flying bird, and the words Les Éditions Pirate: propriétaire Philothée O'Neddy.
The adulterer’s enemies could wait a few days longer for their scandal; Norrington pushed the print shop door and stepped inside. The jangling bell provoked a farcical flurry of bangs and crashes from behind a curtain at the rear of the tiny shop. A small boy’s face appeared, splotched with ink.
“M’sieur?”
Norrington hadn’t planned for this scenario.
“Um,” he said. “Bonjour, mon petit. Um. Je… cherche…” He pulled the broadsheet from his coat, spread it on the counter. “I’m looking,” he continued, still in French, but with renewed confidence, “for someone who can make copies of this. To advertise a theatrical performance.”
The urchin examined the broadsheet; disappeared with it behind the curtain. Sounds of whispering; a long silence; Norrington pretended not to notice that someone was standing just behind the curtain, breathing conspicuously. Someone about Sparrow’s height, and wearing badly scuffed boots.
Eventually, a voice, gravelly and familiar even in French, told the boy to run over to Gustave’s and see how that manuscript was coming along, then buy himself a cup of wine and spend at least an hour drinking it. A familiar, be-ringed, and ink-stained hand cuffed the boy round the ear as he tumbled towards the door.
As the jangling of the doorbell died away, Jack Sparrow strolled nonchalantly from behind the curtain and draped himself over a low wooden chair. His hair, long and wild as ever, was caught back in a single braid. He wore moleskin breeches and a linen smock, also-as ever-far too many rings and that ludicrous, jezebel eye-paint. He and his clothes had clearly spent a great deal of time working with ink.
“Former Commodore!” he drawled. “I heard you were dead. To my considerable regret, as it happens, but you have to admit rather more than a decent period of mourning has elapsed. Anyway, black’s such a depressing colour, don’t you think?”
Norrington failed to frame a coherent answer, but noted with sharp satisfaction the throbbing pulse over Sparrow's collarbone that belied his apparent composure.
"Philothée O'Neddy, I presume?"**
Sparrow had the grace to look mildly embarrassed.
"Had to call meself something. I write poems, I paint, I run a profitable small press - it was funny for a while, awright?" He waved a hand towards the other chair, indicating a change of subject. “Sit down, sit down! This really is the most delightful surprise.” His face crumpled in apparently genuine doubt. “Isn’t it?”
Now, this was a conversational angle Norringon had foreseen. “Not entirely a surprise, on my part,” he said smoothly, taking his seat. “But it’s pleasant to see a familiar face.”
“Not a surprise? In that case, what took you so long?”
Norrington had forgotten how the man could pout. Didn’t he know it made him look like a cross between a spaniel and a houri?
“I’ve been fairly busy. The Flying Dutchman doesn’t sail herself.”
“Ah!” said Sparrow. “You served under Davy-and Will. But Will came back.”
“Hard though this may be for you to grasp, Sparrow, I remain a man of my word. I promised one hundred years, and I served no less. Under any captain or none.”
“You?” Sparrow flapped a finger towards Norrington’s chest; twisted it around to trace a line down his own; grimaced. “Promotion. Just keeps on happening to you, doesn’t it?”
“I do my duty.” Even to himself it sounded hollow.
“Not entirely how I recall your time on my lovely Pearl: theft, desertion, betrayal…”
“The Pearl was a pirate ship.”
“So it was your duty to act like a pirate? Well, being one myself, I can hardly object. At the time, however, I’ll own I was somewhat moderately distraught: finding you’d run off to pursue career opportunities doing the East India Company’s dirty work and heartlessly left me to face Jones’ beastie heartless, as it were.”
How the wretch could twist things! Norrington had no cause to feel guilty. Any unfortunate involvement with Sparrow during his time on the Pearl had been entirely due to rum and mutual weakness. Trust, promises, alliances, dalliances, and the like were most definitely not involved.
“Yet here you are. Still keeping ahead of the beastie, and the hangman. I’m curious to know how.”
“Oh, that!” A shrug. “Fountain of Youth, mate. Florida. But you know all about that, eh?”
Norrington pinched the bridge of his nose and breathed deep, counting silently backwards from a hundred. Of all the people- Nelson, Newton, Mozart, Governor Swann, Elizabeth, Lieutenant Gillette-whose survival might have served humanity, the one sailing serenely through the centuries, with never a thought for the good of others, was Jack Sparrow. It was as though the man had seduced the Good Lord himself! Not an impossible scenario, come to think of it, if he favoured the Good Lord with the smouldering gaze currently targeting James Norrington, who, thankfully, was well fortified against such assaults.
“I’m not sure I could bear to live as you do for even one lifetime.”
“Nonsense!” said Jack firmly, pulling him to his feet and drawing him behind the curtain. “You just need to get to know me better.”
The press in the back room was surrounded, indeed partly hidden, by wobbly piles of paper. This appeared to be printed with poems.
“Charles Baudelaire,” explained Sparrow. “Wonderful poet, delightful man. Well worth a read. How’s your French these days?”
Norrington picked up a sheet. “Worse than I thought. Unless this poem actually is about a rotting corpse.” He looked more carefully. Good Lord! It truly was a description of putrid carrion. There was a line about the carcass opening like a flower in the heat... and the maggots flowing out of it like thick liquid…
“This isn’t poetry-it’s revolting!”
“Who said beauty had to be pretty?” Sparrow (himself by turns revolting, pretty, and beautiful) leaned over the page, much too close to Norrington. “Oh, Une Charogne. P’rhaps not the best choice for a beginner. Here, try this!”
He pushed Norrington towards another stack of pages, rummaged, and presented him with one titled L’Homme et la Mer. “Don’t say a word until you’ve read all of it.”
Norrington’s ingrained obedience kept him from voicing his first impression-that drivel about free men being at one with the ocean was all very well for poets and pirates, but actual sailing required a keen sense of duty and discipline if you didn't want to end up at one with the stomach of a shark.
Then he read the second verse: your heart / For a time forgets its noisy beat, becomes a part / Of a greater, more savage, and less tameable moan. It was true: out on the ocean, nothing inside him ever hurt quite the way it did on land.
“Not bad, in its own way,” he admitted. “May I keep a copy?”
“Consider it a coming ashore present.”
Sparrow beamed entirely too broadly and tucked the thing into Norrington’s breast pocket, inky fingers rubbing obscenely against his chest. To hide his discomfiture, Norrington picked up another sheet. “Lesbos?”
Sparrow leered. “So that’s what you like! One of the ones the reputable press aren’t allowed to publish. I do them unofficially, as it were. Although, I have to say this particular one’s entirely harmless, in spite of the promising title: I’d never shift ’em at all without the illustrations.” He pushed aside a pile to reveal a small crate of printed engravings, one of which he handed to Norrington.
Norrington had seen similar things passed round on board ship, but modern printing techniques allowed for a great deal more… detail. He swallowed; cleared his throat.
“Surely, these women… don’t try to tell me this is permitted, Sparrow.”
That grin again, glittering with gold and wickedness. “Don’t think there’s a law against girls havin’ a spot of fun. Printing the pictures, well, that’s almost legal, you might say. If the authorities could trace these to me, I'd be shut down. On the other hand, if the respectable presses dared to touch this stuff, I wouldn't have a business to be shut down. So you might say I'm providing a disreputable service at some risk to myself; and I have some very reputable customers who make sure I don't suffer unduly for the risks I run. The blonde is Claudine from the bar round the corner, by the way. I could introduce you.” He paused. “Since you like that kind of thing.”
Norrington sighed. “I’m neither as prudish nor as desperate as you appear to believe, Sparrow. I’m perfectly capable of arranging my own diversions and I see no need to discuss my preferences with you. Nor do I wish to know about your sordid business arrangements.”
The Sparrow pout reappeared, but it was blessedly fleeting. “If that’s how you want it, I’ll not trespass on your privacy.” (A likely tale!) “Although I seem to remember you weren’t always so inscrutable, and I’ve always made it perfectly plain who I root for.” Houri eyes gave him a look at once reproachful and inviting. “Cold-hearted spurning aside, do I have your word you’re not currently representing the tedious arm of the law?”
“Absolutely.”
“In that case, come and see what really keeps me in business.” Sparrow dragged away a rug, the towers of paper on it teetering dangerously, and revealed a trapdoor. In the cellar below stood a smaller press and several very neat stacks of crisp new banknotes.
“Raised intaglio printing,” he announced, incomprehensibly. “Wonderful technique, but a bugger to get right. Even I need a moment to distinguish these from the genuine article, though I say it as shouldn’t.”
“It’s good to see you’re using your talents and longevity for the greater good.”
“Now you are being a prude. Life’s for living. In the long run, that’s harder than it sounds.”
“My heart bleeds for you.”
“Sew it up, then. I ain’t after your sympathy. Your company, now, that’d be more’n welcome.”
Odd to hear the damnable pirate express feelings so close to Norrington’s own. “I could stand a little company myself,” he admitted. “Especially company that remembers the old days.”
“Maudlin reminiscences, is it? I know just the place!”
Sparrow pulled his smock over his head, exposing bronzed skin and an array of scars and tattoos, mostly ones Norrington remembered from a century ago; he dragged his gaze away and made a show of examining the banknotes. They really were most convincing.
“Here you go,” said Sparrow, as close to decent as he was capable of in an open-neck shirt and embroidered waistcoat, tucking a hundred franc note into Norrington’s waistband. “Don’t spend it at the bar, though. I’m a regular.”
They were in the street before Norrington thought to ask which bar they were headed for.
“The Tour Abolie. Just a little place, but quite charming. You know it?”
“Only by reputation, as a den of vice and unnatural practices.”
“Must be why I feel so at home there,” commented Sparrow with a grin for which Norrington didn't care at all. “Don’t worry: as long as you pay for a drink, any additional practices are entirely optional.”
~
The den of unnatural practices turned out to be small, dark, smoky, but mostly empty in the early afternoon. They sat at a table in a corner. It was private and cozy in a disreputable sort of way. In all probability, Elizabeth would have felt perfectly at ease here, but it didn't seem like the proper place to talk about her.
Sparrow ordered rum for himself and tried to persuade Norrington to try absinthe, visibly disappointed to learn he was already familiar with the foul green stuff and preferred brandy.
“I love the nineteenth century!” Sparrow declared, a little too passionately to be entirely convincing. “Modernity! Nothing’s sacred any more. Everywhere you look, people are busy tearing down old powers and beliefs, inventing new devices, new techniques, new ways to live. Of course, it’s noisy and crowded and grimy, but there’s a thrill in it. Beauty too: the new poets are right about that.”
Norrington nodded, because he could see Sparrow’s point, really he could, but he’d come here to talk about the past. “Isn’t there anything you miss?”
Sparrow stared into his drink, swirled it around. After a long while, reluctantly, he muttered. “Ships. I miss the old ships.”
“Ah!” agreed Norrington. “The creak of rigging and timber; piling on canvas with the wind just so; holding the weather gauge; tacking good and tight with the spray springing off the rail…”
“Boards dancing underfoot on an ocean swell; sitting in the crosstrees with naught for miles but gulls and horizons…” Sparrow sighed and blinked. “Course, you could starve to death in the horse latitudes for want of a breeze, or be trapped in port for weeks if it blew the wrong way. These days, they just fire up the smokestack, and putter along nice and steady.”
“Progress.”
“Aye.”
Norrington wondered what had become of the Pearl, but sensed it was best not to ask. If she’d met a noble end at sea, he’d know about it. If she were still afloat, would Sparrow be here?
"Pianos, now," said Sparrow, suddenly perking up. "There's real progress for you. And republicanism, hashish, chocolate, abolition... Have you tried hashish?"
Norrington shook his head.
"Must see if I can find you a spoonful somewhere."
~
One thing led to another (although Norrington steadfastly refused to consume hashish), including frequent visits to Sparrow's lodgings out in Montmartre, and nights spent together either in Sparrow's-Jack's-disorderly bed, or in even more disorderly houses. Of course, all the girls adored Jack and were eager to meet his new friend.
Norrington found he was quite relieved to be one of many attachments; it made it easier, somehow, to consider their liaison merely a casual, coincidental comfort, which, of course, it was.
He was only slightly taken aback to find that Jack shared his lodgings with a Dutch painter, who never seemed to be there. The small daybed in the painter's otherwise lavishly cluttered room looked more suited to occasional naps than to serious use, which did rather suggest that the painter, if he existed at all, spent most of his nights in Jack's more than voluminous four-poster. Possibly, he didn't exist, or no longer called; the objects in his room gathered dust undisturbed except when Jack borrowed a fancy waistcoat, bottle, or goblet. There was a rail of coats, a shelf of hats, some kind of perch, and an assortment of unfinished-looking paintings-garish landscapes and gloomy still lifes, a basket of putrescent apples. Pride of place over the mantle went to an outstandingly cack-handed rendition of a bowl of fruit-apples again-signed by someone called P. Cezanne, clearly the sort of wastrel Norrington wouldn't trust with a brush and a bucket of whitewash.
Sparrow, himself-Jack, rather-was undeniably delightful company, the rough, man-to-man encounters of Norrington's brief spell aboard the Pearl having given way to a surprisingly feminine softness, by turns flirtatious, tender, brazen, or languorous.
Norrington found himself wondering how many centuries a man would need to discover all the faces of Jack Sparrow, and whether any of them was real-or all of them.
He grew accustomed to hearing footsteps on the stairs. They always turned back on reaching the landing: Jack employed a wonderfully efficient code. The rush mat pushed up against the door meant he was out. Flat on the floor with the doorknocker free meant he was at home, decks cleared for action. A cravat muffling the knocker signalled the success of a previous boarding party and the advisability of a tactical withdrawal. (Norrington strongly suspected it sometimes meant simply that Jack preferred peace and quiet and his own company, though this was strenuously denied.) It was a straightforward system that saved a great deal of embarrassment: Norrington heartily approved.
On this particular night, however, his ears were squashed between Jack's thighs and he'd either missed or ignored the tread on the stairs that failed to retreat, and even the key in the lock. Only the creak of the opening door caught his attention.
Where the hell were his pistols, or the boot with the stiletto in it? But fight and flight were equally impossible: Jack was crying out and convulsing, hands and thighs clamping Norrington's head tight as his hips thrust clear of the cushion, pumping and pulsing halfway down Norrington's throat.
With a final, fierce scream, Jack spent his last and slumped back in the green padded armchair. His head released at last, Norrington scrambled to his feet, wiped Jack's seed from his chin, and twisted to face the intruder with what dignity he could muster.
"Did ye miss me, Jaack?" asked a voice from a fair way north of France and west of Holland. The hair, eyes, and skin were wild, reddened by rough weather; the hat was huge; the whole assemblage smelled of salt and tar: if this man was a Dutch painter, Norrington was a dairymaid.
"Why would I do that?" queried Jack. "You've hardly been gone a decade."
If the wretch was even slightly embarrassed to be caught like this-flushed, breathless, legs splayed, breeches gaping-he gave no sign. In fact, he didn't even bother to pull his shirttails over his stickily subsiding prick.
Suppressing the urge to reach out and preserve Jack's non-existent modesty, Norrington bent to pull on his own boots, sliding the stiletto into his sleeve as he did so.
"Ah, well, I be baack now! So ye can be tellin' Johnny Newcome here to stow his shiny knife afore it gets tarnished, an' take hisself home to maman."
Jack turned to Norrington. "Jamie," he said, "I don't believe you've met Captain Hector Barbossa."
He turned back to the visitor, with a look of quite implausible innocence.
"Hector, allow me to present Com… no, Admiral James Norrington, late of the Royal Navy, more lately of the Flying Dutchman. Currently residing in Paris."
Barbossa opened his mouth. Shut it again, quite forgetting to sneer. Norrington could practically see cogs turning behind the man's pale eyes. He hoped his own confusion was less apparent.
"I believe I almost had the pleasure of your acquaintance on the Isla da Muerta," he said, carefully casual. "Unfortunately, you were…" (For the love of Christ, the man was dead! He'd had to reprimand some marines who'd been kicking the corpse.) "…indisposed."
Norrington was most definitely not going to ask the obvious question (Fountain of Youth, mate) but it took all his self-control not to ask how-or when-the cursed pirate had reached the damned Fountain in the first place.
"A temporary setback, as ye see." Barbossa was recovering fast. Again.
Something small and furry bounced through the open door and onto Barbossa's shoulder.
A monkey. The monkey, surely, for it was dressed in britches, shirt and waistcoat, and chittering in Barbossa's ear just as Elizabeth had described. Norrington glanced at it, raised one eyebrow. He felt he was beginning to get the hang of this.
"Fountain of Youth?"
"Nay! Aztec gold!" Barbossa widened his eyes as if to say that thereby hung a tale worth telling if Norrington would but demean himself asking for it.
"Ah!" said Norrington briskly, "The curse of Cortez. Not quite the target the Heathen Gods had in mind."
"Too bloody right it's a curse," muttered Jack darkly from the armchair.
Norrington kept his face straight. Barbossa was glaring daggers at him, and anyway, he was damned if he’d collude in any more of Sparrow’s antics until the man pulled himself together and buttoned those bloody breeches.
The monkey, apparently oblivious, seized a peach from the bowl on the table and carried it off to the perch in what Norrington still thought of as the painter's room. Meanwhile, Barbossa strode slowly to the chair, stooped, and very deliberately nudged aside Jack's softened cock to trail his fingertips through the glossy puddle congealing around it.
Incredibly, Jack allowed this without so much as a twitch. Kohl-rimmed eyes locked to watery ones. Slowly, Barbossa brought his fingers to his mouth and licked them clean. He looked at Norrington.
"Well, stay or go, lad, but whiche'er it be, shut the door."
This would seem a sensible precaution. Norrington picked up his coat, fully intending an icily dignified departure; he shut and latched the door, not forgetting to replace the cravat around the knocker. Rather to his own surprise, he found himself still on the inside when this was done.
~~
Notes
**Philothée O'Neddy is a made-up name, but it’s a genuine, nineteenth-century French made-up name. If you don’t believe me, google it.
English translation of L’Homme et la Mer
Part 2
Part 3