Title: Unable to Die

Disclaimer: Bill and Davy, sadly, aren't mine, nor is anything Pirates of the Caribbean.

Summary: An exploration of what might have gone through the mind of William Turner, Sr. ("Bootstrap Bill") when he was tied to a cannon and sent to the bottom of the sea. Or, why serving on Davy Jones's crew and growing a starfish on your face beats the crap out of spending eternity on the ocean floor.

Author's Notes: I thought I was over my Pirates of the Caribbean obsession until I read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which totally wasn't written until well after the Pirates of the Caribbean movies take place, but still managed to remind me of PotC every three verses. It's a very good, very famous poem, and if you aren't prone to writing Pirates fanfiction every time you hear about undead crewmen and soul-staked dice games, you should definitely read it.

"The many men, so beautiful!

And they all dead did lie:

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I."

--from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He felt nothing. Not the cold of the ocean, not the wetness that saturated the lungs of the drowning, nor the panic of the surface sealing over his head.

Yet he was aware, horribly aware, of the relentless, crushing mass of the sea above him. He was aware of the fortunate dead things lying silent and serene on the rocks and sand around him. He was aware of the creatures darting about him, how none took a compassionate nibble at his bonds. He was aware of the people he had left behind, those beloved and betrayed. Most horribly, he was aware of his fate: banished to the bottom of the sea never to rise, never to return, never to drown, never to die.

He would not see his wife or son again. He had lost his chance to come home for good, to renounce piracy and embark down a more honorable avenue of adventure, an occupation of which they could be proud. A toxic mixture of grief and guilt roiled in him. She would die waiting for him to come home, Penelope slumped over her weaving—her own shroud. They could not grow old together, now. His son, his boy would grow into a young man and he would miss it. Without him, his family would live and love and die.

He was a doomed immortal, condemned to a watery eternity served alone.

Alone but for the pale, scaly forms slipping obdurately past.

He prayed to awake at home, for his bindings to rot away, to die and end the maddening motionlessness. Sometimes he thrashed desperately, futilely, longing at least to feel his flesh grate against the rope, or to dash his head against the cold black body of the cannon to stop thinking, to stop yearning, to stop living. Sometimes he hung in a sorrowful stupor, a dreamless semi-consciousness from which he would start, thinking blissfully that he had at last died, but a return to thought meant a return to the truth; he was not dead and not alive, simply cursed. He was trapped in a place deeper than hell, where his wishes were lost in the ill-fated fathoms…

Until a devil came to him.

"Here are strange circumstances indeed," the sea devil remarked, champing at the stem of his pipe with sinister interest. "I make my bargains with the dying, yet here I find one undead. Surely you do not fear death?"

"I often long for it," he replied in quiet, desperate pain.

The pipe received a pensive gnaw. "What can I offer you, then, but your freedom?"

What, he thought miserably, freedom to roam the surface, undead and unfeeling? Freedom to sail without knowing the salt-spiced wind on his tongue? Freedom to see the sun again without feeling its warmth, and the freedom to dread the moonlight? Freedom to return to his family a cursed man?

Yet that word, family, dredged up homesickness and hope, treasures he thought he had lost. He still longed to see his family again. Every curse could somehow be broken…he could, perhaps, find a way to return to them whole. And if he could not…it would still be worth looking again on their faces. He would be free of the perpetual, crushing solitude in the dark and desolate deep.

And so he asked, "What are the terms?" and the devil grinned.