scourgeofpiracy | (no subject)

(no subject)

He has a room, above the bar, but he's out of it as much as he is in at present. Either working on the Pearl or, as now, just walking the lakeside and trying to pretend it's a real shoreline, and it's salt water he smells, not fresh.

Sometimes it even almost works.

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"Aye. Be it kind or cruel, we all do what we must, though."

It's simple, really.

It always, she thinks, a bit ruefully, has been simple.

That doesn't make it easy.

"And sometimes you can't tell which."

"You can very rarely tell with any certainty", he agrees quietly. "And sometimes it's harder still."

"But that's life, isn't it? Or maybe something more," she muses. "I'm not sure it's so different should you die. Not in this place, anyway."

"This place removes all kinds of certainties", he says wryly. "Before death and after."

"It makes you wonder if there really were any to start with."

"Perhaps there weren't. It's an uncomfortable thought, that."

"Really? I don't know," she muses.

"There's probably one or two, really. But it leaves a great deal of room for hope, if little is set in stone."

"For hope, perhaps. But for other things besides."

"What else do you need?"

"I meant there are other things than hope that may fill the space, if nothing is set in stone."

"True," she admits.

"Too easily true, really."

"But then, I suppose... it's for each of us to face as we can."

"I like to think that hope's more prevalent, though."

"It's certainly hard to kill beyond redemption."

"Why do you say that?"

"Call it personal experience", he answers after a moment. "Even when you think it's gone... it has a way of bouncing back, in the right circumstances."

"Aye. I do agree," Lucy says with a faint smile. "I was more curious than anything else."

"Perfectly natural", he assures her. "But the answer is... a very long story."

And not one he wants to tell to this woman who seems friendly to both himself and Jack, but knew Jack first.

"I should not object to hearing it for that reason alone, but the choice is, of course, yours," she says agreeably and skips another stone.

"I think I'd like to hear more of your story, if it comes to that", he says equally agreeably. "And perhaps then mine."

"Aye? What would you like to know, then?"

"Your time and place, for one", he suggests. "England, I can hear - unless you're not from Earth at all - but I don't recall your year."

"I was born there, aye. In the year 1930," she clarifies. "It was 1949 when Id died. Though I spent half my life in a land that's not part of Earth, England was the land of birth and death."

The affect to her accent was virtually non-existent; her speech patterns are another story.

Norrington looks at her curiously.

"And there's another part of the story just begging to be told."

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