Time Frame: The following story takes place before, during, and after the events of Curse of the Black Pearl, leading into Dead Man's Chest.

Note: As far as I've been able to determine, no official name for Bootstrap's wife has been released. Therefore, I have taken the liberty of given her one.

Chapter 1: Aboard the Flying Dutchman

Bill Turner was not surprised when he saw the ship sailing towards him along the bottom of the sea. A fish clung to his cheek, gnawing patiently at the flesh beneath his eye, and he had been dreaming. Philippa had just walked into the room. Must not have really needed anything, as she was gone almost as soon as he had raised his eyes in greeting. His fingers played across the edge of William's coverlet—Will, his own little Will, so healthy and new. Now in his arms. Now against Philippa's breast, and all three of them in the small, cramped dark grey house. Walking its two rooms—the bedroom, the kitchen, gazing out the window at the neighbours' brick wall.

Half-awake, he walked moss-sleek piers and pulled on the ropes of hundreds of ships. Back and forth, tighten the jib, raise the main mast, capture the wind. His hands skinned and callused and salty. In and out, like the tides that tugged at his hair and the drifting scraps of his coat. Everything grey and misted, silent and deep.

Jerked back into reality—ocean floor, hands tied, rusted heap of cannon to his right, barnacle crusted chain that led from the cannon to the straps of his boots—even as unreal things paraded behind his eyelids as if they had happened seconds ago.

A mutiny. His baby boy, picking him up, holding him close, forehead to warm forehead. The lingering touch of Philippa's fingers over his own. The island out at sea, receded now into a cloud-choked horizon, where his captain had been left to die with no boots and only one bullet.

Him left to die as well, not long after.

The hope that it might be today. The same hope, day after day.

The knowledge that he could not die. Could not summon death.

But he had.

Today, he had.

Stood before him now, like a nightmare from a child's book of faerie tales or the rum-soaked tales of sailors washed ashore, spared from wrecks and battle and the vast, gaping maw of a storm. A mass of translucent, writhing tentacles were both face and beard to a tall, time-worn man dressed in tatters like fine lace coral and reef beds. He blurred, shifted, faded in and out with the currents. And all the while he gazed down at Bill with keen, intelligent blue eyes.

Bill could not look away, even had he wanted to. Could not move for the tons of seawater that pinned him to the floor.

So he watched. Waited.

He was hauled aboard a rotting, filthy ship, gasping and heaving and nearly blind. Trawled from the depths, he was tossed on deck with no more fanfare than that of a fisherman shaking out his net. He dropped to the deck on all fours, coughed out water and water and more water. Shivered, gritted his teeth so they wouldn't shatter.

The hollow thud of a peg leg caught his ear. A thick, slurred voice, "William Turner, do ye fear death?"

He spat out the last of the salt water, wiped his mouth clean as best he could with a sodden sleeve. "It's not dying what's my problem," he rasped.

"So yer a man what can't die?"

In a flash, the ship's captain had dropped to one knee, eyes level with Bill's, his nearness a slap of aged, stagnant brine and things forgotten to fester in the dark. His tentacles shivered and contracted, then rose, slow, prodding. Took up Bill's chin and tilted his face, tentacle suckers popping and snapping as they felt their way. Searching. Reading.

Bill held his breath.

Could not drown.

But there were other ways to die.

The captain smiled, smacked his lips with an audible pop. "Do ye know who I am, Mr Turner? Do ye know whose ship has," and here the mirth in his voice reached his eyes, "saved ye?"

"Davy Jones," Bill said, labouring around the tentacle that pushed into his jaw. "The Flying Dutchman."

It couldn't be any other ship, any other captain. He had lain at the bottom of the sea, immortal and cursed and unable to die. If these things could happen in this world—to him, to the insignificance that was him—then the Flying Dutchman couldn't be anything but real.

Jones nodded. "Aye." Withdrew his tentacles, pulled Bill to his feet as he rose. He drew a pipe from his coat pocket, clamped it between his lips even as other tentacles filled it up, tamped it down, hunted out matches and struck them. A brief, warm flare of colour, then thick grey smoke snaked and weaved out of Jones's mouth.

"Yer a cursed man, Mr Turner."

Bill said nothing.

"And this cursed state, I wonder, would it be—" Jones puffed on his pipe, a deep, wet sound "—related to a certain captain?" Bill blinked, twitched. Something involuntary, eyes darting sideways even as his brain tried to both hunt down and hide the name that flashed through his mind. Jones exhaled one luxuriant arabesque of smoke. "Ahh," he said. Drew closer to Bill. "Where is the little Jackie bird?" Puffed and exhaled as he waited for Bill to meet his eyes.

"Marooned," Bill said at length.

"HAH!"

Jones turned away in triumph. A crowd had gathered, a fact that Bill had—until then—only been vaguely aware of. Jones's crew were every bit as deformed as their captain. Huddled together, even making way for their captain as he strode across the deck, they resembled nothing so much as the seabed Bill had been lifted from—a teeming collection of half-formed men and fish, crabs, molluscs, sea urchins and mussels, anemones, starfish, suckers and flapping gills. They grunted and grinned as Jones paced, puffing on his pipe, tentacles rising, curling, and falling as he digested Bill's words. As he paced—the clump of his peg slowing, growing heavier—his mood of cruel delight began to fade. He turned on Bill.

"Marooned, ye say?" Cocked his head so that his tentacles slapped together in a flick of salt spray. "Soon to die?" When Bill said nothing, he turned away, lips pressed firmly together. "On land," he spat. He glared at Bill. "Ye are a cursed man, Mr Turner, not least for knowin' that coward Sparrow. Ye know what I offer. Can ye do it?"

"I'll do anything."

Jones drew back. As he considered Bill, eyes down to slits, his anger began to soften into a rueful craftiness. He glanced down at the sea as it lapped against the sides of his ship, chuckled. "Anything?" he said. "Anything to be free of the sea's embrace, of the weight of it, the crush of it?"

"Anything."

"Lucky for you, Mr Turner, all I ask is time and servitude. One hundred years aboard the Dutchman." He cocked his head, gave him a mocking smile. "We both know the tale."

The crew snickered. Looking from them to Jones, Bill felt something heavy drag at his heart. His insides were numb. He was not entirely a fool. He suspected a bargain struck with Jones was no bargain at all, and nothing that would benefit anyone but Jones. Even now, his mind foggy from captivity, he remembered Jack Sparrow and his odd tales. Tales about albatrosses providing rope for an escape, sea turtles that could push along a dingy caught in becalmed water, Persian princesses turned into mechanical peacocks, ghosts rattling bones and Davy Jones, pulling the Black Pearl from the depths to present to Jack as a gift.

"Made me her captain, ole Davy did," Jack would say. Half the crew thought him barmy. The other half paid him no mind so long as there was treasure and rum and a port where both could be utterly spent.

And now Jack was without the Pearl, its crew cursed.

Such was the payoff for his bargain with Jones.

"We're waiting, Mr Turner," Jones said. "Surely ye don't expect us to wait ten more years for ye to make a simple decision?"

"Ten years...?" Bill muttered, thrown. "What—?"

"Not known fer yer mental faculties, then. 'Course, ye were cursed to the bottom of the sea. Hardly a position from which t'gather information." Jones stowed his pipe. "Ten years, Mr Turner. Ye've been layin' at the bottom of the sea for nigh on to ten years."

Bill staggered, caught the rail to steady himself. Laughter rang in his ears.

All that time... all that time...

And yet. The curse. Jones read him somehow, felt it. He was still cursed. Ten years on, and the blood debt on that accursed Aztec gold had still not been paid. And here was Davy Jones come to free him from the punishment to which Barbossa had doomed him. And Barbossa still cursed. A smile twitched across Bill's lips.

"I'll do it," he said. Looked straight at Jones. "One hundred years. Bound to your ship. Aye. I'll do it."

"And what do I get, hm?"

Bill frowned. "What...?"

"Certainly not know fer yer mental faculties," Jones snapped. "What are ye known fer, Mr Turner?"

"Loyalty," he said.

"Aye?" Laughter again, derisive and malicious, as the crew held on to Jones's every word, watched Bill cringe yet try to retain his dignity. Jones circled Bill, arms clasped behind his back. "Loyalty," he said, rolling the word in his mouth, the taste and weight of it. "And how did that work fer ye, last two captains?" Leaned in close, tentacles coming to rest on Bill's shoulder. "Loyalty put you at the bottom of the sea, Mr Turner. Left to die."

"And now part of this crew, sir. L-loyal."

Jones stepped back. He held Bill's gaze. Whatever he saw there, it was enough. For now, at least. He nodded. "Do not forget that, Mr Turner. Because I will not."

Bill stood on the Dutchman's deck, eyes closed, mind still, breathing in the sea.

The way Bill saw it, a body could get used to anything. Not just pain or physical reality, but everything processed through one's senses. Weight and quality of air, for one. The close claustrophobia of oxygen pulled in and spat out by thousands throughout the Port of London. The needles and pins of the sun out at sea, sat in a doldrum, sunlight like a heavy, heady second skin, pulsing across his pores.

A body could get used to sunlight again.

There was a weight to it, a colour, a taste. The leather and keratin of his own skin warming, the heavy, biting and filthy sweat of his crewmembers, and more—a something hard to pin down. Sunlight tasted of vast, immeasurable distance, of movement. He was not William Turner in sunlight—he was just one man, adrift upon a sea that swayed ever on and on and on.

Sunlight was violent and red, bursting orange, yellow and white when he closed his eyes. Kept his eyes closed, felt it—light and distance yet to travel—took a deep gulp of it again. Filled his lungs with it. Not dark, not the tonnage of cold vast deep water upon him, numbing and tasting of growth that signalled decay. Rot. Pungent. Living yet festering, squelching underfoot.

Not even the Dutchman could cancel the urgent red of open skies behind his lids. It was—

"Look, mate. Mate? Look, I'm all fer standin' about an' all, but if ye don'move, someone's as goin'ter get beat. Likely you."

He stammered out an apology, even as he moved aside. Couldn't afford to let this keep happening. Had to work. Keep busy. Move the ship forward.

Forward and forward and forward.

Closed his eyes, one last breath of sunlight, before an overwhelming sense of water and darkness propelled him forward.

On its best day, the Dutchman appeared to be made of nothing but water, a slithering, cold blanket that sank into the marrow of one's bones. It heaved and swelled and pushed them all forward in a scuttling, rushing mass to carry out the orders of the foreman, the bosun, and—on the dread occasions when he would emerge—Jones himself. And then it was movement and countermovement. Knots undone and all the hands to pull on the ropes, lines tied down and rigging secured and the thud of twenty feet or more on deck and all the salt in his mouth and water, water, water.

"Is no wonder we turn to fish, hein?" yelled a crewmember from across the yard arm, voice nearly lost in the crash of the waves. "Soon you sprout gills, you see!"

"How long does it take?" Bill hollered back. The man—face half-buried by a conch—laughed. Never a good sign.

"Some poor bastards keep count," said a crewman with lobster feelers. They twitched and clacked as he patched replacement shrouds. "Below deck. On th'bulkhead. Inside th'brig. Powder monkey still countin', th'poor bastard."

The powder monkey was a young man. New, from the looks of him—only a few coral bits like flared gills behind his ears, his forearms covered in patches of sea grass and algae. Nervous type. Jumpy. Bill felt calm and all but a master of the Dutchman on the rare occasions when their paths crossed. Saw him again a few times, rushed and irritable as he ran from cannon to cannon, igniting the fuses. Caught sight of him after a new ship had been sunk—new crewmembers had been put through the paces, bodies had been tossed into the sea, throats slit and skulls crushed, to meet the deaths they did not dare fear—muttering to himself as he scratched out one more day on the brig wall.

"Useless fool!" spat the bosun. Backhanded the boy back to his place below the quarter deck.

Bill stepped into the brig. There, on the wall, some fresh, some half-buried under barnacles and moss, were different collections of marks, scratches and words. Most he could read, others were in languages he had never seen, alphabets like little boxes or flowing lines and dots, curving and dipping. He ran his fingers across the wall, brushed off moss and fungi to read 2 yeers lord, jost 2 yeers. Wondered if the unfortunate man had made it back to land.

A guttural laugh at his shoulder broke his pitying reverie. "Now dere be a waste a'time." The speaker was tall, dreadlocked, teeth like tar. Most of his dreadlocks were now seaweed that clung to his cheeks and neck. "Don' bother none with dat, dis one. Is 'ere we come, is 'ere we die. None kin change dat true. Ya join' de Dutchman, ya pledge tah Davy Jones, ya kin be certain ya remain part of him crew." He fixed Bill with a steady, calculated stare—the shaman around the bonfire, conjuring the bogeyman and rattling his bones at the novices. "Part of da ship." He jerked his head to the left, seaweed dreadlocks joining in a wet, jilted clap. "Ya be him."

Him was an old, gnarled gentleman sitting on a barrel against the lower deck wall. He gripped a lantern in his left hand, propped against his ankle as he dozed, head bowed, a crest of fine coral growth radiating from either side of his head, almost like a halo. Bill approached him slowly, the dreadlocked crewman close behind him. The old man napped on, peacefully, seemingly unaware of anyone or anything around him.

"What does he do?" Bill said.

"Him? Nottin'. Him sit and hold dat light an' be none wot really needs it."

Barnacles and coral grew out of every part of the old man's body, so that, when viewed sideways, he seemed to not be there at all. A living figurehead. When he looked down, Bill could see that his feet had merged with the wood of the deck floor, so that his toes and ankles had warped and bulged into roots chocked with sweating, bright orange shelf fungi.

"Wyvern," the crewman said. "Is de reward o'years of service tah Davy Jones. Dem wot count down days an' years is worse dan 'opeless."

"How long has Wyvern been on that wall?" Bill said.

No answer came. The crewman had vanished.

Bill stared, cast his gaze into every corner of the room. Nothing. No sound or shadow or smell. Only Bill and Wyvern, the dim glow of the old man's lantern illuminating nothing.

A cry came from above, "MAN OVERBOARD!"

A thunder of feet, a jostled, violent commotion as every member of the crew clambered up or jumped down onto the deck. They rushed to the rails, some hanging off the shrouds or the sails. Bill found a place along the rail, pressed tight against it as other crewmembers pushed in closer. Lobster pincers bit into his lower back, his hair a tangled mess in his eyes as he squinted across thin sheets of rain.

"Who wus it?" someone yelled.

A man like a shelf of anemones pointed at the roiling sea. "Powder monkey!"

The boy surfaced and sank beneath the waves as he swam, his arms pale oars with no rhythm, only the blind desire to move—to get away.

"Swim lil'sea rat! Swim! Ye won't git far!"

Laughter rang out. Bill could only watch. The boy's arms broke the surface, sank again. His long, blond hair was plastered to his skull, the coral gills behind his ears broken. A shot rang out. Someone straddling the yard arm, aiming his musket at the struggling form. A second shot rang out. The boy disappeared to cheers and whistles. Only to reappear moments later, still swimming, blond head bobbing like a toy in the cresting waves.

"Someone git th'cannon!"

"Aye! Somebody get dah can—!"

"ENOUGH!"

The commotion died down to a rowdy simmer of mutters. A scuffle formed at the left end of the rails as crewmen pushed back and shoved others aside to give Jones a clear space. The foreman placed a spyglass in Jones's outstretched palm—almost human, Bill could see, but for one long, pale tentacle.

"He swims fast," Jones said. He snapped the spyglass shut. "Let him swim." He turned his face half-way, addressing the bosun, who had fought his way just behind Jones's right side. "A shame to let him swim alone, though."

A jolt passed through the crew at those words. It rattled and squelched and spat brine and it was contagious. It was excitement. Bill could feel it well from everyone around him. All eyes were on Jones and the bosun.

"Ya 'eard 'im!" the bosun called out. He shoved men away, unhooked the whip at his side. It whistled and cracked in the air. "Ring the call!"

A dark, guttural cheer erupted. Bill was knocked against the rail, blood in his mouth from where his lower jaw banged against wood. Heavy, pockmarked hands pushed him forward, until he found himself before the bosun. "One of the new guys, Jimmy Legs," said the crewman keeping a tight grip on Bill's shoulder.

Jimmy Legs spat. His piranha's jaw shifted and slid, needle teeth rasping and screeching across Bill's ears. The bosun thrust the butt end of his whip into Bill's stomach, scratched behind what remained of his ear as Bill doubled over, was hauled back upright by two crewmen. "Wot's yer name, ye gutless maggot?"

"Bill," he croaked. Coughed to clear his throat. "William Turner. Called Bootstrap."

The bosun backhanded him, grasped his ear to jerk his head straight. "Don't care wot ye was called." Shoved him back so that he nearly knocked the crewmen behind him down. "Turner," Jimmy Legs said. "That's all ye are 'ere. Now git 'im out of my sight! Set him at the wheel!"

"Sound the call!" the foreman shouted. "Captain's orders!"

Every voice took up the call. "Sound the call! Sound the call!" Bill found himself at a turning wheel, driven forward by the sting of the whip at his shoulders. Fabric ripped. The wheel turned. The crew chanted, low and rattling, like tremors rising from the deeps. "Sound the call. Sound the call." Flesh ripped. Blood splattered against the wheel. Bill cried out. Flesh ripped deeper. "Sound the call! Sound the call!" He slipped on rain-slicked moss and slime, on the red of his own blood, righted himself quickly, the whip catching him even as he gripped the wheel spoke harder, continued to push.

Jones stood above it all, gazing out to sea.

The powder monkey was a sporadic burst of skeletal limbs and wet hair. Rose and fell. Rose and fell. The crew's chant followed the swelling and crashing of the waves.

"Sound the call! Sound the call!"

Jones lifted his right arm.

Jimmy Legs let out a roar. "RING THE DEATH KNELL, BOYS!"

Jones dropped his arm. He watched as the boy surfaced once more.

"Summon the Kraken," he said.