A/N: Welcome to the official start of the sequel! I can't promise I'll be updating regularly since my life is in sort of a transitory state, but I will be making a serious effort to post more often than I did last time around. I still love this story and these characters, and despite the massive disappointment that was AWE, I still love James. That being said, I will be following the events of AWE, just rather obliquely. Since James was not involved in much of the filmed story, this leaves me a lot of room to play with what went on before the film and in the gaps. After a certain point, this story will become technically AU. All of your questions about Grace will also be answered, and expect some interaction between Grace and some other (in)famous ladies of the sea that I am super excited to finally write!

The usual disclaimer applies: POTC and all its attendant denizens belong to Disney. Grace, her Glory, her crew, her family, and her story belong to me. I am not making any money off writing this story, nor do I intend to change the names and later market it as pornography for women in their 40s.

(I chose to spell 'Colours' the British way...it just looked wrong in American).

Flying False Colours

Prologue: Yo Ho, All Hands

Where it's wave over wave, sea over bow
I'm as happy a man as the sea will allow.
There's no other life for a sailor like me
Than to sail the salt sea, boys, to sail the sea.
There's no other life but to sail the salt sea.

There would be a storm that night. The air was heavy with it; the pennants hung listless from the masts and the usual bustle and rumble of town business was swallowed up in a hot and deadened hush. Another night, another storm.

In all her years at sea Grace could not remember such a run of foul weather as this. She watched from the window of her room as the harbor grew grey, churning and frothing against the moorings.

Angry water. But no wind.

No wind. All these tempests and yet there was no wind to stir them. Even lubbers like Isaac, just arrived unexpected from Boston that morning, couldn't fail to notice but it was not the impossible storms that had driven her to ground. There were strange tales on the seas these days, strange enough that she could no longer pretend they didn't tug at her superstitions.

The Black Pearl was lost, ran the whispers, lost and her captain taken to the Locker.

A fitting end.

It was no surprise to anyone that Jack Sparrow had at last met his fantastic demise, and in a fashion so prone to wild rumor. Some said he had dove into the maw of the Kraken to retrieve his hat, others that he had clung to the mast of his beloved Pearl and wept like a newborn babe. Others still claimed a she-devil from the deep had chained him to his ship like Andromeda to be devoured without a fight. All agreed it was Davy Jones who had taken him at last. But there were other tales, and it was those other tales that had driven the men of the Glory to beg her for harbor and for her to gladly comply.

Grace had not returned to Tortuga since that night-she felt a sudden tightness in her lungs and held her breath on the memories-but even on the sea she could read the signs. Not long after leaving Tortuga she had begun to see it: ships beached and abandoned on water islands, flotsam and jetsom bobbing more thickly in the waves with tell-tale sharks teeming below. It was a matter of course for the Glory to cross waves with a pirate or three, but as the weeks wore on Grace saw fewer and fewer black flags on the masts and more and more of the spidery triangle that was the East India Trading Company.

"Will it storm badly tonight?"

Grace turned from the window and mustered a weak smile for her cousin. "Yes," she said. "But the Glory is a strong girl and Richard a capable man. He'll see her through the night."

Isaac joined her at the window, his own eyes fixed on the harbor. Grace had seen very little of him since his surprise arrival that morning and that was as unnatural as the waves. The man standing beside her, eyes red-rimmed and his lips pressed thin, was a husk of the one she had seen just five months ago. He was going grey at the temples, she noticed.

He's far too young for that.

"Isaac, what are you doing here?" she asked. "I didn't think you the sort of man to run from fatherhood."

Isaac turned from the window. "No, no,he said, seating himself at the edge of her dressing chair and leaning over with his hands on his knees. "My God, Grace, I didn't want to leave her, not with the child so close."

Grace knelt in front of him, forgetting her disguise's decorum and wrenching her heavy skirts free of her legs. She took his hands and he gripped them back tight, a drowning man's grip.

"Why are you here, Isaac?" she asked again.

"I had no choice. I-", he began, but his voice choked and he coughed to get the words out. "Do you recall when last you were in port? I asked you an unusual question..."

"You asked me about Davy Jones," Grace said, unable to keep the hush from her voice or the chill from her blood. That was an ill name at any time, but an ill name she'd heard resounding in terrified whispers from here to the coast of Barbary over the past months. In the harbor below, the breaking of the strange waves grew louder.

Isaac's eyes were wide, sunken in dark half-moons. Had he slept at all? "Grace, dear cousin," he said and kissed her hands, still clutched tight in his. He whispered something against her fingers, a word she had not thought to hear again ever in her life.

No! Damn you, damn you, damn you!

She tore her hands away and jolted to her feet, stumbling a bit over her hem and heeled shoes. "Do not use that name again, Isaac. Not ever," she said. She took a slow breath; for the first time in years, she felt faint. Even in a whisper, the name was like knives and dust.

My name.

Out on the harbor, the ship bells were ringing.

"Grace, please!" Isaac said from behind her. "Either I'm going mad or..."

Grace spun back to face him, her heart suddenly in her throat. "What did you see?"

"A ship," Isaac said, his voice hoarse. "Huge, with...with teeth. It appeared...it seemed to appear from beneath the waves. But that's impossible. It's impossible, isn't it? It must be."

Grace closed her eyes, the roar of the waves below filling the blackness and Isaac's stunned ramblings drifted away into the sound of them. She could picture it clearly still. One hand on the wheel, still bloody. Scratching tears and sweat from her face with the other as she turned for one last look...and the spray and the masts that appeared just there between blue and blue. She'd told herself after it had been a trick of her tears in the fading light, but she had always known that she'd lied.

"You're not mad, Isaac," she said, and her voice sounded hollow, echoing in her own ears. "Though in the end you may find you would have preferred it."

Grace opened her eyes to look at her cousin, but instead of turning to Isaac she found herself drawn to the window. The flags still hung dead, but the waves were so loud! Louder than she'd ever heard. They crashed like a gale, and yet there was no gale. She was dimly aware of Isaac's hands gripping her arms, dimly aware that she was leaning out the window, pulled by some tide in her blood. And over the phantom crash of the waves with no wind, she heard it. Thin and wailing from over the boiling sea on the horizon's edge of hearing.

A song.

A/N: Next Chapter- Cutler Beckett throws a reception in honor of his new Admiral