Title: "A Darker Destiny Besides"
Author: monimala
Fandom: POTC: DMC
Rating/Classification: SAC, Norrington/Anamaria, futurefic, AU, angst.
Disclaimer: Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of corporate mice!
Summary: Set after Dead Man's Chest. 500 words. He asks, she answers.
Anamaria's tongue holds the islands…and the faintest hint of something else. One night, when he is soaked to the gills and too foolish to curb his impulses, he asks her where she came from. And how she found the sea.
She answers plainly. "I was born on the hold of a ship, packed wall to wall wit' people…only they weren't people, they weren't folks, to those above deck. They were t'ings." Her eyes are distant, cursed, and he is shamed into burying his face in her breast as she clicks her tongue, soothingly, and strokes his sweat-dampened hair. "It's no sin, James. I got no regrets. I learned me lesson. I ran 'way from a field full of cane when I was just a girl with a bloody back…and I swore I would never, ever, be lettin' a white man own me again."
"Yet you served under Sparrow," he points out, raising his eyes to hers, unable to tame the curiosity once more. For he remembers her, only vaguely, as a member of that crew. A shadow, a feminine shape that held no importance for him at the time.
She snorts, shoving at him so that she can have her own space on the thin pallet that passes for their bed tonight. "Didn't say he commanded me, did I? And he's not one of you. He's got the dark blood in him, and a darker destiny besides."
"So I keep hearing." He scowls, breathing out, and turns his back to her, pillowing his head on his arm. "It seems like all men have destinies but me."
She does not ask him how *he* found the sea, how he found himself here with her…frittering nights away with tankards of ale and land legs that do not quite hold him steady. That is a tale that has already been spread across the Caribbean, with scorn and bile and laughter at his expense.
"Don't pout, Commodore," she teases, softly…indeed at his expense. She traces circles between his shoulder blades…where there are no whip marks, where the skin is clean and still pale though he spends more time toiling bare in the sun than clothed now. "It ain't seemly for a man to pout."
It isn't seemly for a man to do a great many things. To betray his crown. To lose his honor. To barter his wig for an hour between a whore's dirty thighs. To puke in the gutter like a mewling whelp. To trade a sea monster's heart for a pardon and thirty pieces of silver.
He does not tell her these things. He simply catches her hand and pulls her atop him. Lets her command him. As she always does. "Love me, James," she murmurs, though it has little to do with love. It is animal, instinct, pure and simple. It is heat and flesh and the most basic of needs. "Love me an' forget what troubles you."
Anamaria's tongue holds the islands…and the faintest hint of something else.
Mercy.
--end--
July 16, 2006.