the Dalaverse

Doing the first lines meme, which has popped up numerous times on the flist. If you've posted it, point me in the proper direction, because this is a fun idea.

Also, I'm posting the last lines too, just because...I don't know, because I can. Ignore them.



First lines:

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

The crew Gibbs finds for Jack Sparrow is a ragtag bunch and they know it.

The Bride was crowded and Jack was becoming bored with it.

"I'm beginning to think it's never gonna happen," said Jack Sparrow in a despairing voice.

It was as they were having dinner on her first night aboard the Pearl that Elizabeth told Jack he needed to "find someone."

Jack watches the Spaniard from the back of the tavern for a good hour, waiting for the mugs to pile up on his table.

"Ouch!"

“I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am, Will –”

Jack kicked the door off its hinges without even checking the lock.

He rubs the salve into Will’s striped back.

The best nights are the ones where James doesn’t sleep alone.

The first time James takes Jack in his mouth, which is almost immediately after Jack does the same for him with very profitable results, he discovers something more interesting than the taste and the texture.

She goes straight from the dock to the tavern where they agreed to meet, dressed in men’s clothing with a dirty hat pulled down low over her face.

The first time Bill Turner met Jack Sparrow, he laughed in his face.

Will had planned to spend the evening before his wedding dining at the governor’s house, making conversation with the man who would soon be his father-in-law while Elizabeth slipped her feet out of her shoes to run her toes and down his leg, making him squirm and blush (which, as she’d smugly explained once when he begged her to stop, was mostly the point).

“Take him below.”

One of the things Commodore Gabriel Norrington hated most in the world was being lied to.

Governor Swann dotes on his daughter, but the one thing he will not buy her is a sword.

Will had fallen asleep in front of the dying fire when he was awakened by the banging of the door.

They’ve all heard tales of female pirates, but this is the first one James has come across.

Groves is on watch when he hears the shouting coming from Norrington’s cabin.

They find Norrington clinging to a piece of wood amid the burning wreckage of the Dauntless, barely hanging on.

He takes one step.

“James, this is really very sad.”

Norrington was buried beneath the blankets on his bed, curled on his side and dozing comfortably, when his body was suddenly bared to the chill night air.

He has to admire Elizabeth’s nerve.

“This is the last time I let you choose an inn, Sparrow.”

Will lay in the captain’s bed with the captain’s arms around him, heavily sated by extensive lovemaking and rum.

After he sees about the damage done to the ship – minimal, for which he is grateful – he finds Will in his tiny cabin.

“Jack.”

When Will arrives on the Black Pearl, he looks more like a boy than he did when Jack saw him last.

It took Jack awhile to relax among the company of the native tribe, but the marvelous stuff they’d given him to drink was a considerable help.

For a moment Jack feared he was back in the cave at Isla de Muerte, surrounded by glittering swag and close, dank walls.

It was the seventeenth of December when Jack found out that Will hated Christmas.

Jack knows from bitter experience that it is in a captain’s own best interest to look after his crew.

“I don’t see Elizabeth,” Will complains, squinting into the dark alley.

Although the days when the veil is thin occur at the same time every year, Bill spent ten years being not exactly dead, so he didn't exactly have a free rein.

Elizabeth has had quite a few drinks when she stumbles out of the tavern and into the streets of Port Royal, but having Jack as a basis against which she measures drunkenness, she figures that she’s not too badly off.

“Jack Sparrow, you greasy godforsaken pillaging thieving – codfish!”

She is awakened by both of them dreaming, on either side of her.

He didn’t know exactly why he felt compelled to visit Turner at the smithy.

“I still can’t see the appeal of the story Matthew was telling when we left.”

She comes to him by the light of the full moon, one night late in October.

“It seems as if I’ll be spending a great deal of time on my own, then!”

In the two years since the incident with the cursed pirates and the Black Pearl, James Norrington had often dreamed of Jack Sparrow putting him in a compromising position.

“I just don’t understand why I’m the only one who gets this sort of treatment."

Even after weeks, James still had trouble determining the differences between Will’s mouth and Jack’s.

James woke up not because Jack left, but because Will had rolled over onto his arm and it had fallen asleep.

James had never understood daydreaming.

He very nearly slept through his own reunion.

Time began to pass in a way James wasn’t used to.

It was far from the first time he’d awakened to find Jack staring at him, head tilted to one side like a bird and a slightly puzzled look on his face.

“You’re sure there were no others about?”

The first time Scarlett meets Jack Sparrow, he doesn’t quite make it onto her client roster.

Scarlett’s a night owl, even now, and she’s up earlier than most folk in Tortuga to start the day’s cooking.

Elizabeth disappears the moment it is prudent.

“Back again, sir?”

It was patently unfair that the commodore had such a comfortable bed, Will thought as he jerked himself awake once again.

“Why is it,” James wants to know as they slam up against the door of the cabin, “that we can subsist for days – nay, weeks and months when I’m at sea – without seeing one another, but every time we set foot onboard this ship we can’t go a quarter of an hour before we’re back in here once again?”

It is a curious thing to lose one’s heart twice in a single day.

Elizabeth was as genuinely curious about the outcome as she was interested in winning.

"You think you're gonna get away with that?"

Peter’s not big on football, or sports in general really – that whole science nerd thing was more than just a label, and he doesn’t have a lot of time to catch up now that he is marginally less of an outcast.

There are two suits laid out before me, one black, one blue.

Timing, if you asked Hermione Granger, was nearly everything.



Last lines:


She closes her eyes when he kisses her, opens them again when he sinks his hands into her hair and her fingers close on the taut muscles of his arm, just in time to see her blue star leap from the heavens.

"You get used t' it."

Back in town only three weeks after his last visit, Jack merely smiled when Elizabeth exclaimed over the anomoly, and kissed infant Billy on the cheek, and went to call on the commodore.

Jack turns back to his ramshackle little ship-that-is-not-the-Pearl and boards, whistling a jaunty Spanish reel under his breath.

"Now what was that about kissing and making it all better?"

“You know – holy God, Will – one of these days, we really are going to have to make it to your room.”

Jack clenched his hands in the blue wool overcoat, so familiar, and yet he knew he’d never mistake it for the one that belonged to James, the one that carried his scent, the one now lost to whatever madly daring captain had finally sunk the Dauntless, leaving behind a sobbing lieutenant and a pirate lost with no more north to guide him home.

He is asleep almost immediately, while Jack strokes his hair and waits for the horrors to wake him, grateful that Will is going to let him be there to suffer them as well.

Tangled in each other’s arms, they welcome this particular morning with guttering cries and whispers of mineyoursmine.

James is asleep before he finishes the sentence.

Elizabeth snuggles in her arms and waves the two men toward the empty chair, cowrie shell dangling from her wrist.

Shoulders propped against the brick wall, he let himself slide to the ground, and he laughed freely for the first time since he’d left Jack’s company.

“I’m ignoring you, Jack,” said Will pleasantly, pulling the quilt over himself and finally falling asleep, dreaming of Elizabeth’s white throat and the scent of her hair and how she would taste first thing in the morning, and late at night, and whenever else he might wish to know.

The journey, and who would be alongside for the whole of it.

They would take that luck and make the most of it, for as long as they could, come wind and water and biting, scratching kittens.

Then, too, will her father learn that his fears were neither groundless nor, oddly enough, at all consequential.

As it should be, Jack thought, for himself and for Bill’s son at his side.

But that does not keep him from dreaming of her face and crying out in horror when he finally sleeps.

But he’ll still wait for the sounds of strife coming from that larger cabin, and he’ll still go to Sparrow in the dark, where kissing the gunner's daughter will still be the closest to kissing a woman he’s been in fifteen years.

Against the skin of his neck, Jack can feel him smile.

“Very much so,” James repeats, before he lets his heavy eyelids drop and sleep comes to take him farther than he’ll ever want to go from the man in his arms.

Cotton nodded in agreement.

He wasn’t about to wait a whole day – but Jack didn’t need to know that until Norrington’s hands were free once more.

James snorts in good-humored disbelief and tucks the quilt more securely around them both.

Fortunately for his dignity – and he did have some left, even if Jack was completely lacking – the brawl was loud enough to drown out other more intimate sounds, and it lasted long into the night.

"Good night, Jack."

Will glides into focus above him, smiling shyly in the moonlight.

And he was certain that he'd found, by luck or fate or some combination of the two, just the person to share them with.

They comfort each other with grapes, not apples, and that makes all the difference in Jack’s mind.

So Will, as was his nature, took matters to heart and to hand, and set about proving to his captain that pirating was not the only venture in which he hadn’t lost his touch.

As long as the two of them managed to not set the ship on fire first.

Even so, he’ll be worn out from lovemaking and far too content to wonder very long.

“Goddamn noise-makers,” Jack grumbles just before he abruptly falls asleep and starts up an abominable snore.

"Want t’ hear one?”

She can manage it, she thinks, and she will.

“Three t’ two, eh?”

Elizabeth has learned how to sail from Jack, and from Will; as she slides onto the one and the other tightens his arm around her, she tells them both how much she loves them for it.

He can give James that at least, if that is all he'll accept.

It seems the pallet won't be doomed to suffer a meaningless existence after all, because Elizabeth’s hand somehow becomes trapped between Jack’s thigh and the juncture of Will’s legs and he’s making soft little moans as he watches Jack thumb Elizabeth’s nipples through her shirt while she lets out something resembling a screech, and he knows they’re never going to make it to the bed.

And he finally comes undone, with no clear idea of when he started to fray.

Will and James looked at each other and commiserated without a word spoken between them.

He burrowed against Jack’s side instead and kissed Will’s palm, wondering what the morning would bring and finding himself unable to care very much, because he had this night to keep for his own.

The last thing he heard was Jack's surprised chuckle before they both drifted off.

"Nothing a’tall.”

He had reasons to believe they wouldn’t, but they were as grains of sand next to the reasons he believed they would.

Never let it be said that James Norrington could not learn from example.

Knowing how difficult that was going to be, and entirely failing to care.

There was a whisper about a ghost that he caught just before he fell asleep, protected by the beams of the ship, the cold embrace of the sea, and the arms of the men beholden to both.

For a second it was joined by a man’s softly wicked laugh, and then it was just the wind and the creak of rail and rigging.

He tilted his head, pondering, then said, “How about the crow’s nest?”

She smiles at him, knowing that spotting the trick is sometimes half the point.

“Je ne suis pas triste ici, oiseau écarlate.”

“Home is where you are.”

If the sea did not complain of her changing tides, then James Norrington had no business doing so.

Will licked the jam smeared across James’s palm and felt very pleased with himself for the ‘closed’ sign he’d left on the smithy door the night before.

“...Damn.”

In all the world, this is the one thing he will never doubt.

Elizabeth smiled sleepily and dreamed of flight.

Then they're kissing for real and Buffy is touching Faith intimately for the third time, and the fourth time, and the fifth and sixth and seventh and eventually, she loses count.

Still, he smiles down at his lap when the people around him jump to their feet once again.

On my way to work, I toss the blue suit in a Dumpster.

I just like things where they belong.

...that's a lot of fic. If I had been told a year ago that I was going to devote this many words to Disney's movie about pirates, I would've fallen over laughing.

HOME TOMORROW OMG.