Fic: And Sailors Mad For Nightingales
Title: And Sailors Mad For Nightingales
Author:
djarum99
Rating: R
Pairing: J/E, references to W/E
Disclaimer: Disney owns these pirates, and I make no profit
A/N: The second tale in the Once series; a (very belated) response to the Halloween prompt at
hseas_challenge and to the blackpearlsails prompt “the dead.” The title is from a poem by the American poet Haniel Long, Dead Men Tell No Tales, included at the end of this story.
If I start writing that Christmas fic now, I just might manage to post it before Easter...
~~~
Once, they read of Troy burning, circling the edges of a quarrel and the thick Sargasso Sea. Elizabeth has forgotten their bone of contention, remembers Jack’s fingers chasing Greeks across the page, the dull snap of parched canvas, her irritation drowning in his lazy golden tide. Jack is always and ever a thief, her anger his consummate prize. Fair trade, by piratical standards - by her own, though she’ll never tell him.
After, she had retrieved Virgil’s epic from beneath his sprawled thigh, thumbed idly through pietas and furor, a tale three thousand years in the mist.
I sing of arms and of a man...
“Do you suppose the tale is true, Jack? So long ago...”
“Depends on your point of view. A hundred generations, eighty times my span of years - eighty of me. Not really so far away, is it, looking down the barrel of one man’s spyglass. Or down the length of one’s cock and progeny, so to speak.”
“The first metaphor will suffice. And I can’t begin to imagine eighty of you - the world would spin free of the sun.”
“The world spins free because of men like me, despite the god’s best efforts and those of wanton pirate kings.”
She remembers thinking that it might be true, and that someday she will tell him.
“Spin me again, Lizzie - there’s something markedly sinful in a woman naked beneath parchment and poetry...”
Jack had conjured some ancient engraving, the bronze image of a man long gone, body awash in his own inked legend and a patina of stillwater light. Shivering in the breathless heat, she had reached for him, found the bird's wing pulse at his throat.
She remembers joy in the glide of skin on skin, in the northern wind that rose with his undoing, with the keening sound of her own.
“Seems the gods do love a sinner, Bess. We live to sail another day...”
He’d slept then, as canvas fell and the Pearl awakened.
“We live...”
We live with our ghosts...
Elizabeth has learned to grant them quarter, her dead and the men Jack mourns. He seldom tells her, but she can see them in his eyes when the full moon casts its silver, when the Pearl chafes at anchor, when the tides surrender driftwood from ships entombed in the sea.
The Cove offers haven to a myriad of phantoms, every man and woman within its creaking walls playing willing host to their own. It’s Bootstrap, she thinks, who visits Jack most often.
“We were young together, Bess, young enough to believe the devil was blind to our existence. Young enough to seek him out.”
“You were friends, before the mutiny...”
“Before he looked the devil in the eye and made a pirate’s choice. Never was much of a pirate, our Bootstrap - never did tell me how many months he lay waiting on Jones for mercy. Reckon he regretted that choice a long and salty time.”
Jack had laughed then, but there’d been little mirth in it, his eyes glittering dark and distant.
“Cheated the devil in the end, old Bill, and I reckon he’s still my friend.”
Just as his son is still her husband, in some dreaming life beyond her reach. A life she can barely remember imagining, now, in this improbable city, in these wild times. It’s been eight years. In two, she’ll join him at the water’s edge, and Elizabeth wonders if the man she’ll meet can still be William Turner. She wonders who he will see on that beach, ten years beyond their sunset - one day, to weave into each decade. She hopes that love can prove mirror enough, that the Dutchman’s captain remembers a blacksmith, a boy rescued from the waves.
The others come and go, familiar in dawn’s half-light or within the lonely evening mist.
Her father, hovering between pride and bewildered chagrin as she crafts brigand’s plans with Teague. Weatherby Swann had nurtured an English rose, but he would see his own stamp here. He would recognize this libertine commonwealth, and the duties of its throneless king.
James Norrington, clad in a commodore’s blue, his purpose and spirit restored. He lingers in the wheeling song of gulls, and in the water's midnight calm. She tells him that he is forgiven, a companion lost to honor’s blindness and fortune’s pitiless sword. She tells him that she remembers, that his epitaph is not written in the ledger of one desperate act.
Jack Sparrow, alive, a man twice risen, from death and from Beckett’s brand; she finds him whenever the winds allow it, whenever they share a bed. Daylight seldom finds them easy, but there is certainty in their star-mapped union, fierce and bright as morning's sun. Between the worlds, beneath his cunning, fate’s thread holds sure and true - she knows that she will always find him.
Jack communes with Teague’s lost love, within the dust mote shelter of a forgotten Shipwreck hull. Elizabeth had listened by the light of a guilty moon, heard him speak of his father, the Pearl, of the child that slept inside her. Jack Sparrow is a man of the moment, and holds a cryptic kind of pride; if he chose to seek his mother’s council again, he had ventured there alone.
London’s rain, Calypso’s oceans, the eternal whispering tides - sometimes the water shows mercy, and sometimes the dead come back. Sometimes death’s shores yield battered treasures, transformations, rich and strange. The dead come back, in a daughter’s smile, a son’s steady hand, in the storyteller’s magicks and legends forged in time-banked fires.
Once, a pirate saved her from drowning, and the water claimed all that she knew.
Haniel Long. 1888–1956
Dead Men Tell No Tales
They say that dead men tell no tales!
Except of barges with red sails
And sailors mad for nightingales;
Except of jongleurs stretched at ease
Except of dying moons that break
The hearts of lads who lie awake;
Except of fortresses in shade,
And heroes crumbled and betrayed.
But dead men tell no tales, they say!
Except old tales that burn away
The stifling tapestries of day:
Old tales of life, of love and hate,
Of time and space, and will, and fate.
Create your own visitor map!
Author:
djarum99Rating: R
Pairing: J/E, references to W/E
Disclaimer: Disney owns these pirates, and I make no profit
A/N: The second tale in the Once series; a (very belated) response to the Halloween prompt at
hseas_challenge and to the blackpearlsails prompt “the dead.” The title is from a poem by the American poet Haniel Long, Dead Men Tell No Tales, included at the end of this story. If I start writing that Christmas fic now, I just might manage to post it before Easter...
Once, they read of Troy burning, circling the edges of a quarrel and the thick Sargasso Sea. Elizabeth has forgotten their bone of contention, remembers Jack’s fingers chasing Greeks across the page, the dull snap of parched canvas, her irritation drowning in his lazy golden tide. Jack is always and ever a thief, her anger his consummate prize. Fair trade, by piratical standards - by her own, though she’ll never tell him.
After, she had retrieved Virgil’s epic from beneath his sprawled thigh, thumbed idly through pietas and furor, a tale three thousand years in the mist.
I sing of arms and of a man...
“Do you suppose the tale is true, Jack? So long ago...”
“Depends on your point of view. A hundred generations, eighty times my span of years - eighty of me. Not really so far away, is it, looking down the barrel of one man’s spyglass. Or down the length of one’s cock and progeny, so to speak.”
“The first metaphor will suffice. And I can’t begin to imagine eighty of you - the world would spin free of the sun.”
“The world spins free because of men like me, despite the god’s best efforts and those of wanton pirate kings.”
She remembers thinking that it might be true, and that someday she will tell him.
“Spin me again, Lizzie - there’s something markedly sinful in a woman naked beneath parchment and poetry...”
Jack had conjured some ancient engraving, the bronze image of a man long gone, body awash in his own inked legend and a patina of stillwater light. Shivering in the breathless heat, she had reached for him, found the bird's wing pulse at his throat.
She remembers joy in the glide of skin on skin, in the northern wind that rose with his undoing, with the keening sound of her own.
“Seems the gods do love a sinner, Bess. We live to sail another day...”
He’d slept then, as canvas fell and the Pearl awakened.
“We live...”
We live with our ghosts...
Elizabeth has learned to grant them quarter, her dead and the men Jack mourns. He seldom tells her, but she can see them in his eyes when the full moon casts its silver, when the Pearl chafes at anchor, when the tides surrender driftwood from ships entombed in the sea.
The Cove offers haven to a myriad of phantoms, every man and woman within its creaking walls playing willing host to their own. It’s Bootstrap, she thinks, who visits Jack most often.
“We were young together, Bess, young enough to believe the devil was blind to our existence. Young enough to seek him out.”
“You were friends, before the mutiny...”
“Before he looked the devil in the eye and made a pirate’s choice. Never was much of a pirate, our Bootstrap - never did tell me how many months he lay waiting on Jones for mercy. Reckon he regretted that choice a long and salty time.”
Jack had laughed then, but there’d been little mirth in it, his eyes glittering dark and distant.
“Cheated the devil in the end, old Bill, and I reckon he’s still my friend.”
Just as his son is still her husband, in some dreaming life beyond her reach. A life she can barely remember imagining, now, in this improbable city, in these wild times. It’s been eight years. In two, she’ll join him at the water’s edge, and Elizabeth wonders if the man she’ll meet can still be William Turner. She wonders who he will see on that beach, ten years beyond their sunset - one day, to weave into each decade. She hopes that love can prove mirror enough, that the Dutchman’s captain remembers a blacksmith, a boy rescued from the waves.
The others come and go, familiar in dawn’s half-light or within the lonely evening mist.
Her father, hovering between pride and bewildered chagrin as she crafts brigand’s plans with Teague. Weatherby Swann had nurtured an English rose, but he would see his own stamp here. He would recognize this libertine commonwealth, and the duties of its throneless king.
James Norrington, clad in a commodore’s blue, his purpose and spirit restored. He lingers in the wheeling song of gulls, and in the water's midnight calm. She tells him that he is forgiven, a companion lost to honor’s blindness and fortune’s pitiless sword. She tells him that she remembers, that his epitaph is not written in the ledger of one desperate act.
Jack Sparrow, alive, a man twice risen, from death and from Beckett’s brand; she finds him whenever the winds allow it, whenever they share a bed. Daylight seldom finds them easy, but there is certainty in their star-mapped union, fierce and bright as morning's sun. Between the worlds, beneath his cunning, fate’s thread holds sure and true - she knows that she will always find him.
Jack communes with Teague’s lost love, within the dust mote shelter of a forgotten Shipwreck hull. Elizabeth had listened by the light of a guilty moon, heard him speak of his father, the Pearl, of the child that slept inside her. Jack Sparrow is a man of the moment, and holds a cryptic kind of pride; if he chose to seek his mother’s council again, he had ventured there alone.
London’s rain, Calypso’s oceans, the eternal whispering tides - sometimes the water shows mercy, and sometimes the dead come back. Sometimes death’s shores yield battered treasures, transformations, rich and strange. The dead come back, in a daughter’s smile, a son’s steady hand, in the storyteller’s magicks and legends forged in time-banked fires.
Once, a pirate saved her from drowning, and the water claimed all that she knew.
Haniel Long. 1888–1956
Dead Men Tell No Tales
They say that dead men tell no tales!
Except of barges with red sails
And sailors mad for nightingales;
Except of jongleurs stretched at ease
Except of dying moons that break
The hearts of lads who lie awake;
Except of fortresses in shade,
And heroes crumbled and betrayed.
But dead men tell no tales, they say!
Except old tales that burn away
The stifling tapestries of day:
Old tales of life, of love and hate,
Of time and space, and will, and fate.
Create your own visitor map!
