When You're Gone
You want to know about me and old Bill? And you think you know what there is to know, too, dirty-minded girl that you are. Well, Bill had a taste for boys right enough, but that doesn't mean he had me, does it? I wasn't a boy anymore when I met him, and anyways by the time he worked up the nerve to speak, you might say that fate intervened. I gather young William takes after him that way.
"Jack, you can't be doing this," Bill said, pulling him aside to speak, as if any of the poor sods chained below could likely understand. As if it mattered who else heard. "You can't just have your own way this time."
"My way." Jack smiled without a bit of humor. "I can, mate, because I'm the captain."
"If you lose this cargo, Beckett will kill you."
"This cargo is people," Jack said. He caught Bill's wrist as Bill reached for his arm, and tried to stop him talking by the force of his grip around the man's wrist. There were things that once said wouldn't be able to be unsaid. His own fault now if they were. He didn't have enough friends to throw them away by offering that easy an opening.
Bill looked like he was choosing his words carefully. "It's not our problem," he said finally. That Jack could live with. A perfectly reasonable statement of self-interest. The sort of approach a man needed to take to go up in the world.
"It's not your problem, because I'm the captain," Jack said. "None of your concern." He clapped Bill on the shoulder, seeing the relief in the man's eyes. Easy to be a coward when you had a wife ashore. Not that he wasn't a coward himself. He thought it would have taken more courage to sail on, smelling the stink from the hold and dreaming every night of chains.
Be that as it might, Bill made no further move to stop Jack from putting their cargo ashore, with what little water they could spare and Jack's fervent hope that they wouldn't be picked up again in a day or two by someone ready to make a profit by selling them back to someone like Beckett. He said little to Jack as they sailed back to meet Beckett's ship, while Jack paced the decks and the cabin, too keyed up to sleep, changing his mind a hundred times about what the best way to talk Beckett around would be.
"Tell him some lie," Bill said low and urgent as they pulled alongside the Fortune and waited for Beckett to come aboard. "The men like you, they'll follow your lead."
"I didn't know you cared, mate," Jack said, not looking at him. There might be something more to it than a joke, but there wasn't time to wonder. He smiled at Beckett as the man came aboard, half-guessing what would follow, but he couldn't make himself hold still for the irons around his wrists, and he fought the men who caught at his arms until a punch to his stomach doubled him over and a knee to his chin made the world go black.
It was a year and more later that he met Bill again in a waterfront tavern; the brand on his wrist was healed to a red scar by then, and the marks less visible had ceased to trouble him except occasionally in his dreams. He was a captain by then, and felt himself less in need of friends than crewmen who weren't complete idiots.
"Any berth here for an honest pirate?" Bill asked with an uncertain smile, one hand resting on the edge of the table over-casually in a way that suggested he'd found the courage to ask in the bottom of a bottle.
"No such thing, mate," Jack said, but he shoved out the chair next to him. "Thought you was keeping your hands clean," he said, keeping his gaze on the milling tavern crowd.
"Working for Beckett is anything but clean," Bill said. "I heard too much about what he did to you. What he did to a lot of people."
Jack gave him a sideways glance. "Taking up for me now, are you?" He resisted the urge to add that it didn't do much good now.
"You could use someone taking up for you, couldn't you?"
Jack turned to look at Bill. Bill rested his hand on Jack's wrist, his face a little flushed with drink, his gaze a little too frank. His square fingers stood out against the angry red brand and the dark lines of the sparrow etched into Jack's skin.
It felt too much like a shackle closing around Jack's wrist, and he jerked his hand away. "Not at any price."
Bill looked hurt, or maybe just cross that he couldn't get his way. It was hard to tell the difference with Jack's skin crawling with the memory of other hands and them both the worse for drink. "Since when was it buying and selling with you? You've had enough lads --"
"Bugger off and bugger whoever you like," Jack said. "Or else stay and shut your bloody mouth." It would have been easy to say I don't care for that kind of thing so much these days , and would have been at least part of the truth. Easier than saying where were you a year ago , for sure.
"It ain't like that," Bill said. "It's only I haven't seen my wife in months."
Jack flipped him a coin, and Bill caught it neatly, drunk or no. "Go get yourself a girl, then," he said. "And get yourself aboard in the morning, sober or something reasonably like it."
"You're the captain," Bill said, with a half-bow that might have been mocking either of them. He turned aside before Jack could speak; he was fairly sure Bill didn't want to hear anything he might have said.
You don't like that story? It's not a pretty tale, and it stars Cutler Beckett in a larger role than he probably deserves. Well, then, it happened long before. Both of us drunk and neither of us with enough in our pockets to stand the price of a room and a woman unless we shared, but that's what mates are for, right?
Jack was well content laid back under warm flesh and soft skirts, and then he got to watch Bill swiving her, his hard muscles moving as he rocked against her, the bed swaying with their rhythm. After the girl pocketed their coin and left, they sprawled warm in the bed and Jack played with Bill's hair, trying to braid it at the nape of his neck where it was almost long enough.
"If we had more money, this would be a better bed," Bill said, sounding in some confusion. There had been a lot of rum.
"You're never satisfied, are you?" Jack said against his ear.
Bill laughed and closed his eyes. "Never in life," he said.
In the morning, Jack thought it might be a bit awkward for Bill waking up naked with his best mate in a bed that reeked of sex, but he just groaned and hid his eyes from the light.
"Best be going before she comes back looking for more money," Jack said.
"I'm getting too old to climb out windows," Bill said. "And all this sort of thing."
"Feel free to enter the priesthood directly upon our return to the ship," Jack said. "But let us return to the ship."
"I ain't Catholic," Bill pointed out as Jack steered him out the door of the room and down the back stairs.
"Trifles," Jack said, waving a hand. At the bottom of the stairs he caught Bill by the shirt and kissed him, lingering in the kiss until Bill relaxed against him like he'd been a girl.
"What the hell was that for, Jack?"
"Well, if you're going off to be a priest, I won't get another opportunity, will I?"
"I'm not going to be a damned priest, Jack," Bill said.
"I think the point is to be less damned than virtuous."
"I think your point is that I oughtn't try," Bill said. "I don't expect I'll be giving up swiving whores any time soon, if that's your worry. Or pirating, for that matter."
"Of course pirating is a young man's game," Jack said. "If you're feeling a bit tired--"
"What do you care if I stay around or not?"
"I don't," Jack said. "Of course." He gave Bill a bit of a shove toward the door.
That night when he went off watch he left the cabin door unbarred, just to see. After a bit Bill came in carrying a bottle. He barred the door behind him.
"Well, then, William," Jack said.
"What's the point of being a pirate if you can't try all the vices?" Bill said, and came to sit down on the bed. Jack slid easily down to his knees in front of him.
"No point at all," he said.
Jack felt it a very satisfactory arrangement at sea, where there were no women to be had, and for that matter in port, at times when their finances were strained. It cost nothing to strain warmly together, their hands roving and their mouths hungry for each other. And whores didn't rest against a man in bed after, talking of places they'd been or things they were going to do someday, touching with unhurried hands.
Bill showed no inclination to become a priest. Jack was well content, although he admitted that if they had more money, they'd have better beds when they were ashore, and prettier wenches to share them, when that was their pleasure. It seemed harmless enough to take a cruise up the coast to England, after Bill filled his head with the desire to see the same old foggy streets and hear the King's English badly spoken as it was meant to be badly spoken.
He found the whole thing depressing, still, and spent as little time ashore as he could. Bill hung about boring pubs where Jack gathered he knew people, and Jack let him be until one evening he turned up at the docks with a woman who was as little like a whore as a rowing boat was like a pirate ship. She was scrubbed and shy, with great brown eyes and a neat brown frock that made her look about fourteen.
"This is my Mary," Bill said, and there were a few minutes awkward conversation before he left, presumably to return her to a hovering father or some other relation. When he returned, Jack was lounging on a crate looking out at the dark water.
"Going to marry the wench, then?" he said.
"She's a respectable girl," Bill said. "And, yes, I am."
"Some like that sort of thing," Jack said. "Well, get on with it, and we'll come round and bring the drink. You want time to bed her properly before we sail, don't you?"
"I'm not coming," Bill said.
Jack smiled with deliberate unconcern. "Going in for the priesthood after all?"
"No," Bill said. "Just trying to be a good man. I reckon it's about time I started."
"You won't stay," Jack said. "The sea gets in a man's blood. It's in yours, mate."
"To hell with the sea," Bill said. "To hell with all this, Jack. It's a dirty way to live, and if the sea's a woman it's you who's playing the whore for whatever gold she throws you."
"It's not whoring if it's love," Jack said. "I thought you knew the difference."
"It's not love if it's just the easiest thing to hand," Bill said. Jack thought later that was the moment that hurt the most, even more than seeing Bill's face at the rail as the Pearl sailed away and left him in the surf with a pistol in his hand.
And now just because I've said it hurt, you think that's not how it happened, don't you? I'm not always lying, love. Sometimes, I admit. Often, even. Frequently. But it might be true. He might have broken my heart when he found his Mary. Pretty wench, although to hear him tell, she had a temper and no mistake. Which suggests I knew him when they were married, doesn't it? Long hours he spent telling me things I ought not have heard. You won't tell young William, will you, love?
"It ought to be good," Bill said, stretched out across Jack's bed, a bottle in his hand. Jack made a sympathetic sort of noise and refrained from further comment. "But she hates it when I go away, and then she's always at me about one thing or another when I'm home. I can't win."
"Take her to bed and make her forget about whatever it is," Jack said. "That works for me."
"She never does," Bill said. "And besides ..." He broke off and took a long, angry drink from the bottle instead of whatever he'd been going to say.
"Can't you get it up for her?"
"We're married ," Bill said, as if that ought to settle the question.
"She's still a wench. I've never seen you with a wench when there was another alternative to be had." He forbore from pointing out that Bill was, at the moment, in the bed of an available alternative, rather than back home in England.
"You're one to talk about vice."
"I'm not urging you to repent your sins, mate. Just saying that you might have given sticking to women more a try before embarking on marriage."
"I go out to the docks," Bill said. "I never mean to, but I do. And she wants to know where I've been. She wants to know if I'm off doing something that'll shame her. And it would. It would ruin her."
"Mate ..." Jack wasn't sure what to say. He expected he'd probably have better luck giving up buggery than that, but then again he'd never properly tried.
"So here I am," Bill said. "I make a good pirate better than a good man, don't I?"
"A good man and a good pirate," Jack said, and bent to kiss him on the forehead. Bill caught at his braids and pulled him down, kissing him hungrily on the mouth, his hands sliding around the back of Jack's neck. After a minute he began unfastening Jack's breeches, and Jack lay back and gave himself into warm strong hands. In this, at least, Bill knew what he wanted.
He went on his knees, after, trusting Bill to have him like he didn't trust many men, not after a number of nasty incidents he rarely thought of any more. It felt good, the pressure and the weight and the driving rhythm, and afterwards they sprawled sweaty and sated on the bed, their hands tangled together. Jack started into a long story about the first time he'd crossed the Line, and Bill didn't seem to mind that he lost the thread of it in the middle and ended up talking about penguins.
"What was I saying?" he asked finally.
Bill shrugged. "Something about penguins laying gold eggs."
"They might."
"Not likely." Bill rolled over to stare at the deck above moodily. "We could use some gold eggs around now. The men are getting restless. They need paying out."
"Leave it to me," Jack said. "I know how to find the treasure, I swear, and then it's riches for every man. You can set your wife up well enough she'll never notice you're not there."
"Jack ..." Bill's voice sounded oddly weary.
"Trust me, mate," Jack said. "Would I lie to you?"
"Every time," Bill said, but he said no more about it, not until they had Jack in the brig, bruised and furious, trying every bar that he knew wouldn't bend and every board in the deck that he knew wasn't loose, looking for a means of escape. Barbossa left him there and went abovedecks, and the rest of the men hurried after. Jack supposed there weren't many of them brave enough to face him now.
Bill hung behind, and Jack searched his face for some reason, some buried anger or resentment that would explain how he'd ended up on the other side of the bars.
"I tried to tell you," Bill said. "They don't trust you."
"Barbossa's no better," Jack said.
"No, he's worse," Bill said. "But pirating's no place for good men."
"Thanks so much, mate."
"He'll take the irons off when he puts you ashore," Bill said. "He'll keep to the code."
"And so will you, won't you? Him as falls behind gets left behind."
"I told you I was a better pirate than I was a man."
"Or a friend, mate."
"Or a friend," Bill said, turning away. "You knew that."
"Of course I did," Jack said, like it were true.
There's your stories, love. One or another's bound to be true, and does it really matter so much which one? How much can it matter to you, resting on my shoulder with your own hands playing in my hair? It doesn't matter at all, or it makes all the difference in the world. How much would it matter to young William? How much does it matter to old Bill, where he is now? How much to you, my pretty Bess, sure as you are that you're the best I've ever had?
All the difference in the world, love, or no difference at all. How much will it matter what story I tell about you when you're gone?