Work Text:
If Elizabeth had managed to get her warning to Commodore Norrington in time, he would have scoffed at her. Magical undead pirates? It was ridiculous. Magic wasn't--magic was something he positively, categorically refused to believe in. Magic was impossible.
(There was a wise woman who had lived down by the docks in a lean-to, and when she was twelve, Jane had gone and bravely bit her lip as the wise woman applied a painful, tiny tattoo on the back of her left shoulder. The next year, Jane had run off, and lied about his age and his name, and as far as he was concerned that was all the history James Norrington needed.)
And even if there were such a thing as magic, magic didn't work as well as it ought to. Magic didn't give you an immediate solution like Tiresias' serpents. It gave you a chance, but you had to make it the rest of the way on your own.
He'd trusted one other person with his secret--another lieutenant, in the quiet darkness of their shared boarding-house room, years before he was posted to the Caribbean. He hadn't been looking forward to telling Elizabeth, but he wanted her more than he'd wanted anyone else in the world, and the price of that--coming clean, telling her, trusting her--was worth bearing. He hoped.
It became a moot point in any case. As did his career, and every other focus of his life.
The reason he hated pirates--besides that they were murderers, thieves, villains, predators, rapists, terrors, and occasionally immortal skeletons--the real reason he hated Jack Sparrow, who made it look so easy, who made it look so heroic--
He hated them because if he hadn't been able to join the Navy, that's where he would have gone, because he'd have had no other choice. After all, everyone had heard of Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
Elizabeth had said "Come with me," and he would still follow her anywhere. Even if her crew would only trust him in a cell. Even if it meant sitting by for a battle between the navy and the largest pirate fleet ever assembled. Even if it meant being there when she married Will Turner.
It meant he was serving on her crew when she took his hand and said, "James, I want you to know... Will and I talked about what this would mean. Being apart for ten years."
It meant he got a second chance at that awkward conversation.
The first time they went to bed together, Elizabeth was gentle, slightly awed; she touched him as though afraid he would break. The second time her fingers were sure, her body eager against his.
It wasn't the most perfect happy ending; he's not sure how much it resembles what he would have chosen otherwise. But even without the navy, he can be the man he wants to be--with the woman he still loves, and with the sea.