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Author: Guede Mazaka
Rating: PG-13. Period racial slurs.
Pairing: Grégoire de Fronsac/James Norrington, Norrington/Sparrow, others later.
Feedback: Good lines, bad ones, etc.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: PotC/Brotherhood of the Wolf crossover; post-movie for both. Am following the general history of 1766 in New Orléans, when the city was turned over to the Spanish amid protests by its mostly French citizenry, but am not sticking strictly to the timeline, so slight AU in respect to that. Supernatural aspects.
Summary: The last thing anyone needs when dealing with the supernatural is a fever.
***
The man on the bed stirred, then tried to turn over so he could sit up. He failed with a wince and fell heavily onto the mattress, which prompted another grimace of pain.
Grégoire quietly slid Norrington’s sword back in its sheath and set it on a nearby table. “I wouldn’t if I were you. Two dislocated ribs are not something you should take lightly.”
Nevertheless, Norrington insisted on rolling himself into a sitting position. Having succeeded, he spent several moments blinking dazedly at the far wall and breathing in a slow, extremely controlled fashion. He obviously wasn’t a man to be easily dissuaded.
The look he shot Grégoire once he’d come back to himself showed he had some interesting substance beneath all that lace and gold braid. “Thank you for your concern and help, but I have responsibilities elsewhere.”
His voice was as sharp as his blade. And his determination to stand up on his own rivaled that of any farmyard ass, though it was certainly more admirable. If futile—halfway out of bed, Norrington suddenly grabbed at his chest and lost his balance. He flailed for the bedpost, but his hand missed and it was clear he was about to have a painful encounter with the floor.
With a sigh, Grégoire stepped forward and seized the other man’s wrist. He yanked up, ignoring the harsh groan that provoked from Norrington, and then quickly stooped to slip his arms beneath Norrington’s. The other man still hadn’t regained his balance and flopped limply against Grégoire’s chest, breathing hot and heavy so he saturated Grégoire’s cravat with more of the mugginess that was already tormenting the city. After a moment, Norrington put up his hands to clutch at the backs of Grégoire’s shoulders, but once his fingers had dug in, they ceased to have any strength in them. He hung from his fingertips like the last autumn leaf stubbornly dangling from a branch while Grégoire strained to lift the man back onto his feet.
Norrington took a deep breath and shoved his head against Grégoire’s neck in an attempt to brace himself. After a few stumbling tries, he managed to lock his knees and stay upright once Grégoire had set him that way. But when Grégoire started to pull away, Norrington tilted and slumped, grip going iron on Grégoire’s shoulders. Where his face was pressed against Grégoire’s skin, the heat flushed from Norrington to Grégoire.
It was pointless to move, so Grégoire simply stopped trying. He stood in place and let the other man lean against him. “With all due respect, sir—I think your responsibilities elsewhere might have to wait.”
“I am not—I cannot be—” Something very like a sob broke against Grégoire’s collarbone, fraying the edges of Norrington’s near-hysterical voice. But before Grégoire could even begin to think of a proper response, Norrington had clamped down on himself. He calmly turned so the side of his head was pressing into Grégoire’s cheek and lifted his hand. It was shaking so hard the fingertips were a chalk blur. “I have it, don’t I?”
“It would seem so.” Grégoire did his best to modulate his voice into pleasant tones, though he didn’t shy from the truth. It was no longer a likable or a justifiable habit to him. Additionally, he had a hunch that it wouldn’t be welcome to Norrington either.
Norrington tried to stand up one last time, and more through sheer will than anything else, he made it. He slowly slid his arms off of Grégoire and tentatively began to lower them to his sides, but when he began to sway backwards, he hastily jerked them up again. Eventually he tottered to the wall and collapsed against it, swiping at his moist brow. His skin was white as the moon framed in the window behind him, but slicked with sweat so it gleamed like he were made of metal. He couldn’t seem to control the rhythm of his breathing, and his pupils would slowly drift into disorientation before he forced them to focus again.
The room seemed to occupy his attention, for he never looked in the same direction twice. Occasionally a flash of the intelligent, perceptive man he must have been broke through the feverish air. “Where am I?”
“We were closer to my lodgings, so I carried you to them. I sent word to your ship that you’ll be here till morning at least; they sent back that they couldn’t spare men to come, but that they were very grateful.” Grégoire could see what a struggle it was for Norrington to keep his composure, so he turned away and busied himself with pouring some water. There was no point in giving the man the additional burden of an audience. “You’re free to use my bed; there are already two sick men down the hall, so no fear of the landlord tossing you out.”
“And you’ve of course had this before.” When Grégoire handed the cup to him, Norrington briefly focused on Grégoire. Then he went back to scrutinizing his surroundings, stare even more intense because his trembling hands meant he had to hold the cup with both hands. His pride could have been well-described by his shirt—spotted in a few places, ragged at the hem and hanging low enough from his shoulder for the bandages around his chest to be seen—but he made no effort to abandon it. “I do appreciate the offer, but my place is on my ship. After the help you’ve already rendered me, it would be unfair of me to take over your rooms.”
On his fourth swallow, his hand jerked uncontrollably and he spilled the cup. Cursing and red-faced—somehow he was blushing strong enough to cover up his fever-flush—he instinctively tightened his grip. A mistake, since he overcompensated for his shaking fingers. The cup squeezed out of his hold, and he damn well almost fell over trying to snatch it back. The man skidded down the wall in a graceless jumble of elbows and feet and harsh loud breath.
Stubborn English, Grégoire thought as he stooped to catch the cup. He wiped off the rim and picked up the pitcher to refill it, only to catch a queer look in Norrington’s eyes. “I wouldn’t be using the bed anyway. It really would be no trouble. And if you want to be well enough to captain your ship, you’d do better to listen to the man that’s lived through this.”
Norrington accepted the cup. He paused when Grégoire remained squatting and holding the poor bit of pottery, but after a moment his commonsense managed to convince him to let Grégoire help hold it. “Why wouldn’t you be using the bed?”
Then he clamped down on his lip and looked away; Grégoire added ‘prudish’ to the ‘stubborn.’ God alone knew how that people had managed to accomplish so much, considering how nastily they cut the few imaginative adventurers their land threw out. “I’m going out to see if I can find anything about our wolfish acquaintance. Listen, Norrington—the fever is a worse beast than anything else out there because you can’t reason with it. All you can do is rest, drink water, and try to vomit out the window instead of in bed. If your ship has it, then you can’t do anything for them except wait.”
“Then I can wait for them on my own damned deck. I won’t let them feel abandoned,” Norrington retorted. His jaw clicked shut on the last word as if he hadn’t quite meant to let that out, but his eyes didn’t move from Grégoire. Although they did roll a little…and the man was rapidly falling into the fever’s grip. He had commendable determination, but his sense was deteriorating.
Grégoire sat back on his heels and tipped up the cup so Norrington was forced to drink the rest. When the other man was done, Grégoire stood up and dropped off the cup on the table, then reached for his pistols and his coat. “You aren’t a prisoner, so you can do as you please. But I’d remind you that the loup-garou nearly had you, and it won’t be daylight for another five, six hours.”
“Loo-gaa—roo?” Norrington’s pronunciation was execrable. He tugged at his shirt, occasionally stopping to wrap an arm around himself and chew on his lip till the color came back into his cheeks. When he considered himself decent, he carefully used the bedpost to lever himself to his feet.
“The…what do you call it? The werewolf.” And now Grégoire could see Norrington hiding a smile at his pronunciation at that word, so perhaps he should stop underestimating the Englishman. On the other hand, perhaps he should strap the man to the bed to avoid such pitiful sights as Norrington trying to don his tightly-tailored coat with the cracked ribs visibly paining him.
After another moment of watching, Grégoire gave up and took Norrington by the arm. He pulled up one sleeve, then let go of the man so he could straighten the collar. In that position, he could see every flicker that passed over the other man’s face.
“You aren’t surprised that such things exist?” Grégoire asked, keeping his tone casual.
Norrington’s pupils grew wide and dark and blurry, then snapped into pinpoints. He arched an eyebrow and produced a dry, dark smile that was decidedly not in keeping with his earlier attitude. “I wasn’t sick enough to be hallucinating when I saw that.”
“If you had any sense, you’d wish it were a hallucination.” Grégoire stepped back and studied the other man. If he himself had any sense, he’d just let Norrington do as he pleased, and be done with the matter. He’d already done more for the man than he had for some of his own countrymen. “What do you know?”
For once, Norrington’s pride fractured enough for him to betray how out of his depth he was. He had to lean against the wall again, and the fingers of his right hand twisted restlessly around a strip of lace that had torn loose from his cuff. “I know that there are things beyond reason and natural belief in the world. And I know that dead Spanish soldiers in the streets are not good news for French- or Englishmen. Not with Governer Ulloa in the Cabildo.”
Then he tried to raise his hand to Grégoire’s shoulder and promptly lost his balance. His curses this time sounded almost like pleas.
“You’d be doing your duty if you stayed put and got well, and didn’t trouble yourself with this business,” Grégoire grunted, catching the other man. He ducked under Norrington’s arm and wrapped his own around Norrington’s waist, trying not to put too much strain on the man’s ribs. The muffled gasps in his ear proved he wasn’t doing very well. “What kind of captain leaves his ship for some nonsense about a folktale?”
“What kind of naturalist believes in folktales?” Norrington countered. He briefly laid his head on Grégoire’s shoulder, then withdrew. Unsteady, apt to fall any moment, but he was on his own feet and walking under his own power to the door. “Where were you planning to go?”
The man either was a martinet or a hero to his crew, Grégoire decided. He shrugged and ambled after the other man, then overtook Norrington to pin him against the wall. Before the other man could do more than make a few feeble bats, he’d gotten his palms inside Norrington’s coat and flat against the man’s chest. The irregularity was a ridge against his hands, and with a short, sharp shove, he smoothed it out.
Norrington went even whiter than before, proving that that shade did indeed exist. Grégoire ignored how it turned his stomach and rolled up the other man’s shirt while Norrington was too busy clawing at the wall to protest. He made a few adjustments to the bandages and out of habit muttered a prayer that they’d hold. Then he politely pulled down Norrington’s shirt and tucked it back into the other man’s trousers. “If you don’t do anything stupid, that should keep you breathing. Still want to come?”
The paleness of Norrington’s face made his eyes far too bright, but they weren’t bright enough to disguise the resolve behind them. He belatedly pulled his coat tight around him, but he stayed close on Grégoire’s heels. “Where are we going?”
* * *
If the city were burning like Rome—or London some hundred years ago, for that matter—the whores’ alleys would still be the last to go. As empty as the rest of the city was, the prostitution district was still very much alive and thronging with people.
A closer glance showed that it was false life: there was a shrill edge to the laughter and a shadow haunting everyone’s eyes. No…almost everyone’s. Occasionally James would meet a gaze that might be old and tired, or angry, or drunken nearly to stupor, but always it was knowing in a black-humored way that shouldn’t feel so familiar to him. Fronsac had eyes like that, when he wasn’t trying to charm the women. No matter what happened, the French always seemed to be able to make time for that.
“You don’t know any French?”
James startled to attention. Then he had to concentrate on the now-difficult task of putting one foot down before he lifted the other. He felt a hand momentarily touch his elbow, shifting his balance, and almost re-lost his equilibrium by shrugging it off. His chest burned and he struggled to keep it out of his voice. “I know French--enough to deal with diplomats. What guttural nonsense they speak here, I have no idea.”
Fronsac apparently found James’ irritation amusing. The man turned and made a flourishing bow to a preening blonde, then dipped a hand to her hip. As he swung her around to leave her smile behind him, he leaned in to whisper something. She obligingly giggled, but her eyes were like cool mirrors. She flicked her handkerchief in farewell at them, vaguely in the direction of a decrepit cesspit of a tavern. Shortly thereafter, Fronsac began to guide them that way.
“Some of them are English. You probably should watch your tongue. And maybe we should have traded your uniform for one of my spare coats,” Fronsac warned, though he certainly didn’t sound very serious about it. In fact, he didn’t seem very serious about much of anything, including the women he was so casually touching—a hip there, the edge of a breast there.
“I’ve been here for over three weeks. Everyone knows who I am.” The next words wanted to stick in James’ throat, but he forced them out with his tongue. It was thick and unwieldy and dry no matter how much he swallowed; he wished he could risk a draught of his hipflask, but he was afraid he might tip over if he reached for it. “Everyone knows exactly how much of a threat the British ship is.”
The hands that made her fly all crippled with illness, her sleek form chained in the bay of this pus-leaking sore of a city to rot. And Fronsac could look as surprised as he pleased at James’ vehemence, as care-light as he seemed to be.
Then there were the steps, and so pathetic was James that those two sagging strips of wood were nearly the end of him. He sucked in air past the pain and dragged his body up them, hurrying to get to the top before he pitched forward.
At the last moment, a hand seized his elbow and pulled so he was forced to fall against Fronsac. It guided him into the tavern and, after a few snarls and sharp words that only dimly impinged on his consciousness, got him seated on the first few steps of a narrow, steep ladder leading to some kind of merriment upstairs. Then the hand withdrew, but James grabbed it before it’d entirely left and hung on till his sight had returned.
Fronsac was looking down on him with a mixture of irritation and sympathy. Not pity, James was thankful to see. “I told you to stay in bed. You can barely stand.”
“Is there something to drink?” James croaked. He made an attempt to clear his throat. “Please…”
The other man’s hand jerked up, then down. Shaking his head, Fronsac started for the crowded barroom. “It’ll be piss, but stay there for a moment…”
If Fronsac had slapped him, James honestly couldn’t have defended himself, either physically or verbally. He wasn’t in any shape to be out. He should have accepted the man’s offer, or at the most, made Fronsac take him back to the ship to collapse.
The reason he hadn’t was because he was quite sure he would’ve gone mad. He had been doing nothing for weeks except trudging back and forth between his ship, which was full of his men staring listlessly into space while they burned from inside-out, and the governor’s seat, where he did everything short of licking the damned dago’s boots to no avail. And now there was a new danger roaming the streets of New Orléans, quite capable of inflaming the governor to harmful actions. Fronsac seemed to be an honorable and able man, but he could have been the King himself and James still wouldn’t have felt any better about leaving the resolution of a possible threat to his ship up to the other man.
He didn’t feel well in any case. His skin was on fire and his hands and feet felt as if they were encased in ice. James slowly leaned back against the ladder. He attempted to keep his head up for a little while longer, but it was too heavy and he finally threw that piece of his dignity to the winds. When he could see without the world wavering, he could catch it.
The ladder-step made a poor pillow, but it supported James’ head and it braced his neck, so he ignored the roughness of the wood. Above him, he could hear voices: first they were a blurring chatter, but gradually two of them separated into distinct timbres.
“…nothing but dagoes dying. Bit odd to me.”
“Very welcome to me. Those high-and-mighty bastards come and they stomp their little heels and they expect New Orléans to come running. Well, what’s a treaty to me? It was made in France, not here.”
“As I’m not one for war, I suppose I’d best take my leave, then.”
“We could use you. You and your ship. When we drive the Spaniards from the river, you’d be richly rewarded.”
Pause so freezing that James wished he could dip his face in it. Then: “We’re old acquaintances, so I’ll forgive you that. But I am no man’s hire, and neither is my ship.”
Sudden weight on the ladder made it creak and warp, almost bucking off James. He gritted his teeth against the flaring of his rib-ache, then eased off the rung. Though his intent had been to stand, his legs failed him and he had to catch himself on the side of the ladder so he’d only land on his knees and not completely collapse.
“Someone there? Very, very sorry for disturbing your rest, sirrah, but I’d be needing to get down and—well, this is…interesting.”
James didn’t want to raise his head. Especially with a boot-tip nudging his hand, which was gripping the ladder so hard he thought he could feel his bones merging with the wood. “Sparrow.”
“Commodore! Fancy meeting you here. I’d love to have a good gab with you, find out where you’ve been—thought we lost you ‘round Santo Domingo—but she’s calling and you never want to make a lady wait.” Yes, the slurring babble sounded about right. And the peculiar swishing tinkling noises, and the irregular light stride hastily bouncing off the ladder and away from James, as if he posed any sort of threat. It must have been far darker in the tavern than James had thought—Santo Domingo.
He raked at the steps, careless of how much that jolted his chest, and heaved himself upright. “Sparrow! Jack Sparrow! Get—”
“Who?” Fronsac was standing beside James, helping to hold him up. “Who—Mon Dieu! Arrêt—stop, Norrington! Norrington! James!”
Something slopped onto the floor as James clawed up the other man to stare wildly over Fronsac’s shoulder. The world swung towards him and he gasped, flinched away from it. Then he gave himself a sharp shake—the sudden burst of pain in his ribs made the world settle down.
They were burning candles and torches in the tavern as if such things grew on trees, so there was plenty of light. And Jack Sparrow was not a hard man to spot, even when people crowded a room from wall to wall.
James didn’t see him.
“Are you done?” Fronsac demanded. He sounded snappish, and he muttered in French too fast for James to understand. Its tone, however, was akin enough to his comment to the storekeeper earlier for James to guess the meaning.
“Yes…yes, I’m—I’m sorry. I thought I saw—” And there James stopped, not wanting to explain the reason why he’d been so furious and…then so disappointed. It probably had something to do with familiarity, and Sparrow’s ability to appear anywhere he damned well pleased, but James couldn’t pin down his thoughts long enough to fit them together. “I’m sorry,” he dully repeated, still staring at the room beyond.
* * *
If the Englishman was already entering delirium, then Grégoire might as well knock him on the head, drop him off at his ship, and track down the wolves himself. That was what he should have done in the first place.
Instead, he was propping Norrington up against the wall in a dark corner and slowly trickling watered-down rum into his mouth. It wasn’t quite piss—the barmaid apparently appreciated a man who flirted without clumsily grabbing—but it still wasn’t going to do much. “What happened?”
Norrington swallowed his current mouthful and failed to answer. He was thinking, or trying to think, very hard about something and he was working equally hard on not letting it show. When he wasn’t sick, he probably was very good at that.
“I heard some men talking about Spanish dying—only Spaniards. And then I thought…I saw someone I knew,” he finally said.
Grégoire debated prying the un-abbreviated story out of the man, but then Norrington tugged at the glass in his hand. He suppressed a sigh and poured a little more into the man’s mouth; Norrington’s eyelashes fluttered as he sipped it. “You weren’t imagining that much. That one soldier we saw was the third in as many days; the Governor thought it was only a few drunken malcontents, but now he’s threatening to crack down on the whole city.”
“That explains why he was so curt this afternoon,” Norrington muttered. Then he looked sharply at Grégoire, silently asking for something. “Did…did anyone pass by you when you walked in?”
“No,” Grégoire replied. He watched how his answer wilted the other man.
One of the barmaids came flouncing past and as she went, she smiled at them. “Là, m’sieurs, j’aime ça mais les hommes…tu veux une chambre?”
Laughing, Grégoire kissed her proffered cheek and sent her off with a genial decline of the rest of her offer. Then he turned back to Norrington, who’d recovered remarkably fast. Flinty eyes, raised chin.
“I understood that well enough,” he coldly said.
First he insisted on coming along, then he collapsed so that Grégoire had to nurse him on rum, and now this. Men had killed for lesser reasons. Grégoire resisted the urge to roll his eyes, but did let some of his acerbity filter into his reply. “Well, what do you expect? You can’t seem to stop grabbing for me, you don’t make passes at the women…stop being so insulted and see the advantage. This way, they won’t be pestering us for our money while we talk to the madam upstairs.”
“You…you brought me to a brothel and now you—you’re letting them assume—” Norrington didn’t have the strength to sputter, but he was doing so anyway.
“No, I’m trying to find out more from the people that know the most around here. I suppose you thought oh, Frenchman, always has to be up a woman’s skirts.” Grégoire looked at the last few drops of rum, then wiped off the cup rim and downed it himself. He handed off the glass to yet another barmaid and took James by the arm, pulling him towards the ladder. “If you want to correct their impression, you’ll have to do it yourself. I’m going as far as I will.”
The other man shook off Grégoire’s hand and got onto the ladder himself, though he didn’t have any more strength than that. But when Grégoire reached to steady Norrington, he was soundly rebuffed. “You don’t seem like the kind of man that would dislike that reputation. Unless you—”
“I had a wife, Englishman,” Grégoire snapped, patience at an end. He pushed forward and shoved the other man upwards, whether he wanted to go or not. “She died a year ago, and I’ve lost my taste for women since. And it should be more telling that you’d be quicker to assume sodomy than to believe I might have a gentleman’s manners like yourself.”
He shoved again. It was a short ladder, so that second push sent Norrington awkwardly onto the second floor. Grégoire heard a loud thump and a few pained curses, and then nothing.
Norrington’s ribs, he belatedly remembered. He put his hands on the edge of the second floor and leaped the last two rungs, landing lightly on his feet.
Upstairs was a small open space where they were, surrounded by low narrow crooked hallways with many doors set into them. It was by far not the best brothel Grégoire had ever seen, even accounting for the frontier state of New Orléans, but then, he’d not come for the women or the décor.
At his feet was Norrington, who was painfully drawing himself upright. The man stopped halfway to one knee, hand stealing towards his side.
Grégoire scoffed at himself for never learning, but leaned down anyway to take Norrington about the waist. He helped the other man up and then surreptitiously re-adjusted Norrington’s bandages under the guise of straightening his clothes. All around them, sullen thin girls and narrow-eyed fat ones slunk between broken-down pieces of fine furniture. He called out to one and asked for Madame; after receipt of a coin, she loped down one hallway.
“I apologize. Again.” Norrington clearly wanted to stare at his feet, but nevertheless he made himself meet Grégoire’s eyes. He couldn’t focus on Grégoire for more than five seconds at a time.
“You’re sick,” Grégoire muttered, turning toward a small window. It was set unusually high in the wall and he speculated that perhaps it had been created by a brawl and then set with glass instead of patched. That would probably be cheaper. The glass certainly wasn’t of the best quality—if he wanted to see anything at all, he had to peer through an area the size of a fist that had a gigantic crack running through it.
Behind him, Norrington was shuffling his feet to stay upright and rambling on about how an illness shouldn’t excuse rude behavior. It was disturbing to hear, not so much for the lack of commonsense, but for how Grégoire could tell when the other man dipped deeper into fever: Norrington ceased censoring himself and came out with something beautifully, starkly genuine. Then he would will himself out of it and the tight-laced, circumspect Navy officer would return.
Grégoire was trapped in a social powderkeg and he had a raving Englishman for company. With a very, very small groan, he pressed his forehead against the cool glass and almost closed his eyes.
Then he snapped them open and nearly sent a fist through the window so he could see. Because that face in the road—
--he wasn’t ill. He knew that. And Sylvia had made sure that Jean-François de Morangias was dead.
“Fronsac?” Norrington asked, touching him on the shoulder.
“M’sieur?” another voice queried, but this one was rich and low with decades of living off the foibles of man and woman. Madame had arrived.
***