4 September 2006
Pirates of the Caribbean/V is for Vendetta fusion

Thanks to mimsere for the title and quotation.





Content thyself to be obscurely good.
When vice prevails and impious men bear sway,
The post of honor is a private station.
                                    - Joseph Addison


He was in Barbados when the Houses of Parliament were destroyed, and perhaps the distance as well as the shock helped to adjust his perspective.  He left nearly two thirds of his crew, those he wasn't sure of, in Barbados as a relatively reliable and peaceful garrison.  On the way back, he selected a few others to replace them.  They travelled quickly, on skeleton shifts, and they made harbour far, far north of Portsmouth.

Nothing in England looked the same, and he was oddly relieved by it.  Years of slow erosion of his country and he'd said nothing.  Sailed the world instead, relying on the legitimacy of the Royal Navy so that he could ignore the less legitimate forces in the city streets.

For three days, he went home.  The flat in Bath he'd inherited from his father was still full of a lawyer's books, many of them now strictly illegal but still protected by the barrister's bookshelves and the layer of dust obscuring their titles.  Few eyes in here.  He was home perhaps twenty days out of every five hundred.  Between visits, he no longer even kept the most basic staff.  Sheets on his furniture and none on his bed.  His mail came to him aboard ship.

He has no idea how the box on his desk could have reached him.

The mask in it is a relic of his childhood, newly revived and politicized.  For years, he has had Guy Fawkes moments whenever they loaded powder aboard ship.

He picks it up.




He meets Evey only months later, when he is forced ashore in the North for repairs and comes down to London to see the city.  There are only reports of his piracy, not of the damage he's wrought on the navy to which he gave his life when he was barely thirteen, but the people know.  There are more masks than there used to be, more civic damage.

He meets her in the old Underground, when he's found his way down.  This stripped-down woman all bones and sharp character.  Sits down with her and talks for almost two days about his plans.  He took their fight to the strongest force in the nation, the Royal Navy, and while he hasn't destroyed it, his work interrupts the cash flow that feeds the state.  It makes her work easier.

When he dreams now, aboard ship, he doesn't picture Elizabeth.  Mostly, he sees smoke.  Sometimes he sees Evey, who has never once asked him to do this thing for her.



jane
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