Change in the House of Flies

There are just so many people to thank for all the exquisite and heartening encouragement and so little room in which to do so. So, to all those who have been there from the beginning (and you most assuredly know who you are) and to those just beginning the reading journey, I extend the full extremity of my heart in thanks for all you have contributed in your kindest of words. The story will be finished in one more chapter, which has already been written, beta-ed and posted selectively (the entirety of this fic has been posted to my LiveJournal for several weeks already, http://www.livejournal.com/users/sy_fanfiction/18211.html). I will post the 7th chapter here in a week or so, as health, time and memory permit.

So thank you all, I could find no dearer companions in this world of creative expression.


::Change in the House of Flies::


*~Chapter Six~*


“He has left now,” Smith announces mildly, watching the pirate waltz down the pathway.

“Good for him,” is Will’s petulant response. The little man sighs with a touch of knowing sadness and turns to face his sometimes difficult companion.

“I feel I have failed in my vocation this time, failed the Hippocratic Oath I swore to uphold.” The young man’s eyebrows quirk up in inquiry. “You are still hemorrhaging from a deep lesion. Without treatment I fear it shall be fatal.”

“I—What are you speaking of?”

“Did you know, son, that a man can run away without moving his feet? Perhaps you ought to sit down with this pirate captain of yours and discuss what you are so eager to ignore. If he knew, perhaps you would both know peace then.”

“I refuse to tell that—that blackguard anything!”

“Well, that is your decision, but you should think upon it a bit more. If nothing else, he will stop pestering you.”

Will looks away from the gentle smile on the old man’s face.

“I’m not running away.”

“It must have been a rhetorical question then,” is all the little doctor says. “Clean up and start peeling the potatoes. I have an appetite for something Irish.”


*~*~*~*~*


The scene is set: a white marble wall about two feet in width and infinite in length remains firm beneath his boots; a grandfather clock with neither hands nor numbers tolls the passing of hours as seconds; to the right a strange, undulating darkness waits; to the left an adust desert of brick red sand; the smeared, gray-blue sky overhead cradles a dull orange sun; swinging deliciously long legs above the darkness, Will Turner sits.

“It is strange, really,” the lad says in such a tone as to imply that Jack has come during the tail end of the conversation. Jack valiantly fights back the urge to grab Will and drag him away from the shadowy tendrils lapping at the undersides of his restlessly moving feet. No doubt the smith will not appreciate such a protective act by the pirate; he’s always had a strange predilection for doing incredibly stupid things that cause Jack to want to tie him up with rope.

“Strange?”

“Well, one always has to know why, correct? So, then, why not? Strange.” A particularly thick tentacle briefly wraps about the lad’s foot, and the pirate feels his heart stall. Will swings his legs and the tendril dissipates in a trailing ribbon of black mist. The clock quickly strikes off midnight and then moves on to one.

“Why don’t you move yourself over this way, Will,” Jack suggests, finding himself unable to span the distance between with his own power. A force has welded the soles of his boots to the marble. The young man tilts his head to the side, tangled curls sliding aside, and gives Jack a small but earnest smile.

“I’m waiting for someone.”

Jack tries to puzzle this out. Who could the lad possibly be waiting for? Who would cross the darkness for him?

The clock moves past eight.

“He’s late, but you have to expect that from his type,” the lad continues with a rueful shake of his head. “Better late than never, I suppose.” Will issues a light laugh, as if some marvelous joke has just unfurled within the tight passages of his mind. A delicate trembling takes hold of his body as his laughter slips into silence, leaving the physical manifestation behind. For a moment Jack would like nothing better than to take hold of the lad’s shoulders and shake him into submission, force him to lay open every portal of his thoughts to Jack’s scrutiny.

If motion were allowed him, the pirate would wrestle the smith to the narrow band of marble and flay him with words; he would dig dirty fingers into scarred wounds and rip them open to bleed freshly. With sanguine drenched hands he would unravel every mystery and closely guarded secret. Then maybe he would be allowed to live in Will’s life and not just haunt his fading wake as the lad wanders forward.

“He’ll come. He has to. Do you know why?” Jack shakes his head, but the lad seems to see him, though his eyes are now closed as he leans forward and laughs with his body. “No, it’s a secret. I can’t tell you. Not yet.”

The clock sounds twelve again.

The darkness eagerly reaches for the oblivious lad and Jack finds his voice stolen by a deep seated pain welling up wetly within his body. Distantly everything has coalesced into horrible clarity; he knows and yet he cannot put to words or thoughts just what he knows.

Will’s velvet brown eyes open and he turns his face to Jack, as if the pirate is the sun and he a flower seeking the light. An immeasurably dense force rises up inside the smith’s lean body and spills haunted sadness into every line of his young face.

“He will come.”

A strange noise of metal gears grinding draws the pirate’s attention to the odd clock. Silence presses into Jack’s eardrums with relentless force.

From the corner of his eye, the pirate notices movement. He returns his gaze to Will in time to witness him pitch forward. In an instant he is gone, and Jack thinks that maybe he was never there.

*~*~*~*
*~*~*~*

A passage of time:


The chirurgeon does not seem to regard Jack’s penchant from entering without forewarning—or usual means of entrance—as anything of concern. He merely greets the pirate warmly and promptly offers him a drink. However, never once has he offered the rogue a place to stay, thus allowing Jack’s ill-gotten gold a respite from the rapacity of the local inn. Truth be told, Smith might as well do so seeing that the pirate spends a good portion of each day loitering about and generally being a nuisance, especially to Will.

“The boy needs a place to rest without extraneous stress and foreign stimuli,” the little man told him not so long ago, even though Jack never brought the subject up. Every once in a while the pirate has to wonder if the strange little man has some sort of second sight, as he has the tendency to address unspoken questions before their originator even fully realizes he has them. Damned annoying at times.

Young Will has remained quite evasive and, a good portion of the time, downright surly whenever Jack attempts to probe his thoughts. However, being ever the resourceful manipulator, the pirate has finally discovered the trick regaining Will’s lost confidence in him: stories, the more ridiculous the better. Jack regales the young man with his adventures to all seven seas—or so he likes to claim in strident tones—since they last parted. Will rarely speaks, and only then to admonish the pirate for over-embellishment, but he listens with a look of indulgent amusement and barely restrained incredulity. The most important thing to Jack, though, is that, in those all too brief moments, his Will resurfaces as a ghost resurrected across the smith’s countenance.

And then Will completed the first commission.

Upon letting himself into the little doctor’s abode he found a hastily scrawled note to him resting atop a bundle of maroon velvet on a small table near the front door.

“I would think you to look a mite more cheerful, considering you have just received one of your orders,” the balding chirurgeon comments blithely, upon finding the pirate contemplating a set of throwing knives at the little man’s dining room table. Smith picks up one of the freshly polished blades. “These weapons are too fine to scowl over.”

The man speaks truly, Jack admits. Each blade is a study of subtle killing elegance. Instead of proclaiming menace with dazzling ostentation, the blades whisper death in the light glinting in cold lines along the edges. They have become their purpose.

The last few grains of sand are falling, tumbling down from the top chamber of the hourglass, and there is no power within Jack to flip the world over and start again. Soon the final item of his order will be filled and his excuse for lingering will no longer be valid. If he leaves, he will never find his way back. That is not to say that this town is some magical place only to be found once every hundred years; but simply that all his effort towards creeping inside Will’s core will disintegrate, never to be rebuilt.

“Perhaps you are put off by the forge’s original purpose?” the little man suggests, graciously allowing Jack to slither his way out of the true answer. Smith’s ability to read others continues to disconcert the normally unflappable pirate.

“Original purpose?” Jack obligingly inquires.

“I assume you have noted the detailed drawings in the sitting room, yes?”—vaguely nonplussed nod—“I sketched those from actual bodies; I’ve always had a passion for realism. Many of the anatomy books I have come across do not do the human body justice, and tend to skirt veracity at every conceivable opportunity.”

“I see…” In all truths, Jack is a bit disturbed by the strange course their conversation has taken. Baldly he has no difficulty with cleaving a man’s limbs from his body in the heat of glorious confrontation, or even the systematic disembowelment of the recipient of his vengeance, but what he does, he does to his enemies, to those who would happily return the favor. This little man who favors surgery to all other forms of medicine has a disposition towards the impersonal dissection of his fellow man—all for cold, unfeeling science! It almost seems to speak of necromancy and things better left unknown to mortal men.

Any seafaring gent has a healthy respect for the dead and all the travails they can be tempted to heap upon the living. Best to let them rest, when the case allows, Jack believes. The preternatural is not something he cares to navigate past on a daily basis.

“Well, I have to get the corpses from somewhere, as you can imagine. As it happens to stand, quite a few individuals seem to deal false hands with fate and end up dead in the less reputable parts of the docks. Furthermore, this is a relatively small island and the graveyard has limited space. The company these gentlemen kept did not look kindly towards having to take the corpses on board and then sailing out to deep water to dump them.”

“Fascinating.”

The man gives him a halcyon smile, quick eyes twinkling. “The only recourse, naturally, was to burn the bodies. Hence, the forge—or rather—the crematorium, as was its original purpose. For its use the town council allowed me to further scientific knowledge. Of course, there was some commotion concerning consecration and such, so I had a visiting priest say words over the oven.

“The blades Black makes are blessed some might dare say!”

Jack simply stares at the mirthful and macabre chirurgeon.

“I think I would be more worried about the angry spirits of the men. Being burned up is no proper burial, mate.”

“Oh, the ashes are put to rest in consecrated ground. If you go by the cemetery by chance, please note the lovely flower beds. Quite the pride of the town.”

“Will do.” Of course Jack has no intention of doing such a thing; he sees enough death as it is on the water without actively seeking it out on the unfamiliar land. All in all, he is fairly at a loss for a path of action. Haunted or blessed, the blades speak only of time’s unchanging motion. Time, always back to that. Time. Time. Time.

“I think Black has returned. Would you check around back? I need to speak to him about a matter.” Carefully the little man replaces the knife in its place upon the roll of velvet.

“I think you may be mistaking me for an errand boy.”

“My eyesight is good for all that I am no longer in my prime.” Smith arches a brow and smiles. “You seem a bit…distracted. I do not require his presence with any urgency, but perhaps you would like to speak with him about something, yes?”

And here offered is an opportunity to not only escape the chirurgeon, but to, also, if one is to take the man’s prediction as truth, once again ply his mind towards a further understanding of this new Will.

“Who am I to forgo a chance in the lad’s illustrious company?” Jack announces grandly. Gingerly he rolls the fine blades up in the length of cloth and picks up his battered tricorn.

“A thought first, sir.”

Jack pauses obligingly, though with a lingering taste of exasperation.

“I believe I have read somewhere that confrontation is normative and that a wise man knows when to push past a placed line. Perhaps that is a lesson to take to heart?” Another enigmatic smile, and some force beyond forces urges Jack to leave this room and hold fast to the little man’s oddly resonant words.

*~*~*~*

And find Will, Jack does, as per the chirurgeon’s prognostication. Out behind the oven-like forge, shirt off and gleaming under diamond trails of just-splashed water, the lad watches the cloudless, burning blue sky overhead and idly fingers the drying cloth in his hands. There is such beauty in the silhouette of the lad’s lean frame that Jack spends a moment suffused with the pure emotion of simply being in the presence of such a one. Crystal droplets hang from the wet tips of his hair before succumbing to the pull of the earth. Down they fall to be swallowed by the parched ground and to be absorbed into the rough weave of the lad’s pants. A few tumble back into the trough of water from which they were purloined by the sweating youth.

Avariciously Jack’s eyes trace the golden course of Will’s skin over muscle and bone. He pauses at the decadent display of dusky nipples and the shadowed outline of the boy’s collarbone, all glittering with watery jewels. He swallows convulsively, hips jerking with the sudden influx of heavy blood into his cock, and continues the upward path across the tenderly arched throat. Would that he could bend the distance between, take hold of the rules governing the planet and rewrite them, and glut himself upon the spiced feast before him.

Then Will turns and Jack’s eyes are allowed to sup the sweet sight of the lad’s back.

A shock rocks down his spine and shatters the decadent visual feast. Deep red lines, crosshatched and prominent, cover the lad’s back in a latticework of faded agony. Jack knows intimately the procedure that produces such a checkered-shirt[1] and all the accompanying pain. He needs not ask to ascertain where and when Will earned those cruel etchings.

They are another physical reminder of Jack’s monumental failure. How long must guilt claw up through his viscera? Perhaps until the dark angel comes to collect his shriveled soul, he thinks.

And then, as if he truly has circumvented the necessity of movement to cross distances, he finds himself touching one grimy finger to a raised ridge of hard flesh. Every muscle beneath the marked flesh of the lad’s back snaps taut, knotting deeply and tightly in evident distress. With the unconscious grace of a masterful swordsman, Will whirls about and takes hold of Jack’s wrist in a bruising grip.

“Have I not requested enough that you not touch me?” Every word falls in a hammer blow upon Jack, but he has been inured to all the vitriol the lad spews. It is simply unfocused rage and self-hatred, destructive and all encompassing. Jack is merely the most easily accessible target.

Push him, a low voice urges Jack. Break him open.

“I’m a bit tired of this all,” Jack remarks casually. “I’ve been understanding, almost saint-like really, and you remain quite obstinate, quite exasperating. I’m havin’ a thought here…” He points at Will with his index fingers and winks. “Why don’t you stop being a woman about this and show some bollocks?”

Will’s face blanches sheet-white and then flushes with such celerity and depth of hue that Jack is truly amazed by the spectacle. He is less amazed by the fist that the enraged lad launches. Having anticipated this move in advance, Jack easily evades the first fury-driven swing and then flows past the second. A spike of exhilaration pierces his heart and an insouciant smirk gilds his lips.

This is a beautiful, brutal dance he has so longed to instigate with this impossibly aggravating and gorgeous creature. Finally, the tension of five years liquefies and fires his blood red-hot. The unnerving docility mantling the lad dissipates under the fire of this ecstatic conflagration. Following the time honored steps of fisticuffs, Jack and Will move together to the orchestra of violence. Then, with a perfectly timed sweep of his foot, the pattern shatters into jagged, seeping shards, and they’re tussling on the ground; the harsh symphony of their breathing marks them more as animals than men. Every bead of exertion that wends its way down his face and neck is a burning ingot. The sun is relentless, but so is Jack.

With deliberate efficiency Jack soon has Will face down in the loose dust, arm braced at a painful angle behind his back. The proper leverage and application of strength will subdue even a giant, or a lad bent on the apocalypse of self. And here Jack is, straddling the boy’s thighs, fingers white upon the captured arm, the other hand digging into the dirt by the lad’s head—hardly a David reborn. No, he is a daemon, cock aching and mind delirious with battle-fever, crouching menacingly over this prone angel. He is most eager to tear off the scarred wings.

“Will-lad, the game is up and you are well and truly caught. Now, I think we’ll be doing this my way from this moment on. I can snap your joint as easy as you please, but I would rather spare you the pain and convalescence. Why don’t you be a good boy and tell me everything?”

“And perchance you would understand? You can never comprehend—” Jack jerks the trapped appendage in warning, and lad issues a stunted cry. “This is my life, my choice. I do not need to defend it to anyone.”

“But you want to, don’t you? You’re crawling to unfold everything to someone, but not unless you’re… forced. Do I have the right of it?” If Will could see, he most assuredly would not find Jack’s brittle smirk reassuring. “Well, I’m here to force you, love, until you spill every horrible little secret. Confession is good for the soul.”

The young man’s sigh is a tremulous, flighty creature that barely reaches Jack’s willing ears. The rigidity of Will’s lean frame eases with the faint susurration and he turns his head to the side. Jack’s trenchant and tenacious argument proves the stronger when faced off against Will’s unwanted silence.

“The second… my back, I brought upon myself by my own actions…”

*~*~*~*
*~*~*~*

“Two dead and eight injured. You’ve spirit, boy, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to teach you a hard lesson now. Can’t have repeat incidents, can we?” A rancorous smile split the captain’s scarred face. “Two lashes from every man capable of wielding the scourge.”

This command was met by raucous approval and the sinking of Will’s heart. He should not have let opportunity and anger govern the impetus of his actions. He should not have made a grab for the sword.

But the governor had not sent payment, and the ocean seemed more a companion than the wretched creatures masquerading in the flesh of men.

“Oh, and, boy, for every eighth of a degree off course you jerk that wheel, I’ll give you an extra stripe myself.”

Will squeezed his eyes shut and gripped the wheel with fear-weakened fingers.

Please, God, please…

*~*~*~*
*~*~*~*

“How many?” Jack whispers, eyes focused on a scene he can envision with painful clarity from Will’s carefully issued narration. So many lines, the lad’s back must have been a flayed, bloody mess at the end. Unconsciously his grip upon the smith’s arm tightens and his fingers press purple marks deeply into the tender flesh beneath. So many things to atone for, to avenge, and it is far too late to perform any action save this forced admission.

“Forty or fifty, not that it matters anymore. It was not all at once. They had a remarkably adept surgeon aboard, though. He seemed quite… knowledgeable in keeping people alive no matter the injury.” The laugh that accompanies these words is a brittle, spiked ball of distanced despair. A chill floods Jack’s veins and no spark of unnatural lust can tender a blaze. Will is a man too young to have lost hope, and a lack of hope is the first foot in the grave.

“Will you release me now?”

“I will know the third.”

“And what? What will you do once all is made known? Do you love torture so that you must continually add misery’s dross to the crucible?”

“Will…” Jack gazes past the matted and ornamented curtain of his hair to where the lad’s free hand lies just within the slanted shadow of the small forge. Calloused fingers curl and relax with the agitation tightening the lean form beneath him. The missing finger seems all the more prominent.

“I’m tired, Jack. So very tired.”

“Tell me. Explain it.”

“If this will bring peace… Let me up and I will do as you ask,” Will sighs, defeat lingering bitterly between each word.

Cautiously the pirate relinquishes his hold upon his captive and stands. The young smith remains prone for a moment longer and then levers himself up with strong arms. Jack wishes that he could appreciate the view of sleek muscles moving beneath the mutilated, dirt-smeared skin, but the moment is a limned horror upon his mind. Aesthetic appreciation has been ostracized from this moment.

Will stands with his back to Jack for the space of several heart beats as if to fully impress upon the pirate the shadowed consequences of his persistent curiosity. Then the youth turns, eyes fever-bright, face expressionless, and invades the pirate’s space.

“Shall I show you? Yes, that might prove far more efficacious.” The lad holds out his scarred hand expectantly. Wary of traps and tricks, Jack takes the offered appendage. The smith laces their fingers together and leans forward as if to bestow a kiss or whisper some dark confidence.

“I hope your insatiable curiosity finds this a worthy answer to all.”

The young man’s eyes never waver as he guides their joined hands past the loose waistband of his pants. Jack’s heart falters and then explodes into rapid beats. In a single, dizzying rush the blood surges from brain to cock and a hysterical voice begins to exalt the situation in garbled English. His fingertips thrill with the sensation of soft flesh and sparse hairs, and—oh God!—the living heat.

Farther down and…

The moment knowledge pierces his mind, a shard of warped satisfaction glints in Will’s eyes.

Beneath his fingers he discovers strange ridges of hard flesh and wiry hairs. Nothing else…

“You seemed to have proved yourself something of a prophet, Jack,” the young man hisses as he presses the pirate’s hand with greater force against what can only be a mass of healed scars. “Is this everything you thought it would be? Are you satisfied?”

Nausea, viscous and bitter, fills Jack’s mouth. He wrenches his hand away and stumbles back. A manic laugh bubbles from Will’s lips and finds a mate within the pirate’s conscious.

“This is my justification for solitude. How do you suggest I convalesce from this, Jack?”

And the third brutality is…

&*&*&*&*&*&

[1] A checkered-shirt is a term used to bring levity to the reality of the harsh whippings aboard ships. It is so named for the pattern of lesions inflicted.