Fic: Haunting in Thirteen Parts

Title: Haunting in Thirteen Parts
Author: kayliemalinza
Rating: PG-13
Word count:1481
Setting: Directly after DMC
Genre: serious; drama


Haunting in Thirteen Parts


Norrington hanged a murderer who cried to God the night before his death.

But not in fear.

He was relieved, the man had said, because the person he killed kept watching him. He pointed to the corner and related every detail: the carved-out chest, the half-blue lips, the dark and vengeful eyes. In death, the man exclaimed, the ghost would leave him. God had promised it.

James saw nothing there but stone and broken mortar. He locked the cell and left.

* * *

His world was a tiny boat and shimmered strips of sea and sky. James held his jacket-front away from him, disgusted with the ceaseless pulsing of his second heart. When a ship at last discovered him, James imagined there were eyes in the shadow of its prow.

* * *

James unlocked the door to his house and saw Sparrow in the darkness near the stairs. His chest and thigh were pierced clean through; his skin was raw and blackened.

Ghosts, James was glad to note, did not drip blood on carpets.

"I do not regret it," he said.

Sparrow inclined a subtle nod; perhaps he smirked. He continued to stare.

* * *

James woke up from his first clean sleep in months and Sparrow was still there, staring. James watched his watcher as he sat up in bed. The only ghostly movement was a shifting sliver of white around black irises.

"It must be terribly dull," said James, "to watch someone sleeping." Sparrow's shoulders floated slowly up, as if that was the most insouciant shrug his altered state could muster. James slid from the bed. He stood in front of Jack. "Despite the admonition of God and law, I am grateful for the fatal consequences of my actions." He allowed a soft ironic smile. "You may lack the decency to remain completely dead, Sparrow, but you are blessedly still and quiet."

He studied the pirate with a thoughtful smirk, amazed by hair and skin that murked and rippled like an antique looking-glass. The gastric damage pulsed and faded in the corner of his eyes. Waving a hand through Jack's combative face gave no resistance nor proof of presence; James felt no goose bumps nor romantic chill. He laughed and went to his shaving. Jack tried to strike out with arm or leg, but he achieved nothing but a shadowed twitch.

* * *

Sparrow did not drift the streets with James, preferring instead to own the bedroom corner, the shadows of his newly-given sloop. James closed his chamber door upon the ghost, and opened his cabin door unto it. Jack turned his head more quickly than the day before, an almost-ape of living movement. His eyes were still unnatural and darkly lit.

"You were a pirate and a criminal," said James. "You committed crimes enough to hang a hundred times. That your execution took place in the ocean rather than at the gallows makes it no less just."

Jack shrugged, and tilted his head to watch James chart a course.

* * *

Sparrow claimed the only darkened spot in Beckett's office. James stood before the desk and averred his gaze, as Beckett tended to suspicion.

"Are my orders clear to you, Captain?" said Beckett.

James glanced at Jack, who raised a dreamy hand to Mercer's sleeve and passed it through, back and forth. Flesh and cloth and ghost. "Yes, sir," said James. "I shall do what I must." He had done it, he meant.

Jack smiled, and slid an arm through Mercer's chest.

* * *

From his hammock, James could not see Jack's stare.

"Given a second chance," he said, "I could devise a more dramatic treachery." He smiled and raised a hand, picking at the grubby under-nails. "I could steal the heart at sword point, and spill a pint of your blood upon the white Caribbean sand." He pulled himself up to peer into the shadows. Jack shook his head and James let out a sigh. "What if I then sold it for thirty pieces of silver?" Jack revealed a golden tooth and James lay down, knowing that was the best he'd do that night. He simply hadn't the taste for theatrics that Jack did.

* * *

The sloop's crew were dunces all, and all in Beckett's pocket. James' pocket held a bottle of rum, and he wooed it in his cabin.

"You're lucky," he said to his ghost. "You can't be made a chattel to anyone now."

Jack glared and pressed against the empty air composing his corner. He touched his lips, his belly and groin.

"You had more than your share of earthly pleasures when alive," said James, slurring slightly. "And I've no doubt this haunting is entirely your idea. You can disappear from my corner any time you wish."

Jack did exactly that.

James wondered if he was so drunk that he was no longer imagining things. Imagining ghosts.

"That didn't mean I wanted you to," he mumbled, and capped the rum.

* * *

Jack cavorted in every corner of Tortuga. Norrington walked the streets and saw Jack in the shadowed creases of alleyways, beneath the awning of a pawner's stall. He mouthed along to bawdy songs behind the tavern bar, switching corners if he felt James wasn't paying enough attention. This was unfair; Jack haunted the rum he could not drink and the women he could not woo more attentively than he haunted James.

James thought Jack had not followed him to the alley with the whore, but his eyes flew open at her cunny tricks and Jack was there. His eyeballs flashed and gleamed; he moved his hips in mimicry of James' coital endeavors. James rolled his eyes and persevered, and when he shrugged away the culminating shivers, Jack applauded.

* * *

Jack decided a round crow's nest could have a corner. He was a thinning fog in the sunlight; sometimes James forgot and stretched his legs into the ghostly chest. Jack wagged a finger and shifted down until his holes appeared to swallow James' feet.

"That's disgusting," said James, and waved a boot through Jack's wide grin.

But sometimes Jack didn't notice. He was staring at the ocean.

* * *

James laid down his dispatches. "What is it like?" he asked. Jack came into sharper focus; he tended to fade when he was bored. He tilted his head quizzically. "Never mind," said James. "It's a senseless question."

Jack shook his head, but there was no way for him to answer just the same.

"Is there something more than this?" asked James. "Some place beyond where you are?"

Jack studied the bulkhead. He minutely flexed his thumb. If he were careful, it looked like his nail was really catching in the wooden grooves.

"Why haven't you moved on?" James asked quietly. Jack flashed him a grin, and James waved a wry salute. "Take what you can," he said. "Give nothing back."

* * *

The morning they pulled into port, Jack was blurring at the edges. James didn't think much of it, didn't see Jack knit his brows at the sloppy mist where his fingers had been. Jack disappeared sometime during unloading, but James was concerned with the cargo in the hold, as well as the cargo hidden in his cabin, which did not appear on any ship's manifest. He had no time to dwell on eccentric ghosts.

James did wonder at Sparrow's absence from Beckett's office. Jack liked to mock the lord in ghostly pantomime; he would have been sympathetic about James' new orders. He didn't tease the shadows as James walked home.

James checked his body for wounds, skipped his dinner to see if he would hunger. He was sure he hadn't died.

Wouldn't he have noticed something like that? Wouldn't Jack have let him know?

* * *

In a month, James had sailed to Cayman, to Nassau, to Trinidad and back again. He'd stood on the deck of the Flying Dutchman and censured Davy Jones on behalf of Cutler Beckett. He'd trolled the pubs and whores of Tortuga. He'd sailed home to Port Royal and received new orders. He'd given up on Jack.

His four-man crew were exceptionally slow in re-stocking. They kept glancing at the battered galleon that had sailed into port that morning. Word was it carried a load of cryptic gold and a boastful captain with a feather in his hat. The crew included a serious slim man who kept a hand on the hilt of his sword, whose matelot was an even slimmer boy with curling honey hair. The matelot led the man towards the Governour's mansion as if they would be welcomed.

James did not look at the galleon. He had no time for rumours. He told the crew to be ready to sail in five minutes and went into his cabin, where the shadows were streaked with near-dusk light, but they were dark enough. The corner was again a sentry post with steady eyes.

"You're back!" cried James.

"That I am," said Jack, and stepped out of the corner.


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