Despite the title, this is meant as a cheer-up fic for joyful_molly who continues to entertain us even though she's not well. Whether it succeeds in being cheering, I don't know :)

Title: Drowned Baby
Rating: G
Pairing: none, really.
Disclaimer: Disney's characters, mucked about with entirely for enjoyment, not for profit.

Summary: Mr Midshipman Norrington, and Mr Midshipman Gillette meet for the first time and form an alliance (of sorts).



The painters were being cast off as Midshipman Norrington came over the side, and he was at first distracted by the need to avoid Lt.Golby's disapproving eye; to get down to the cockpit, stow his new Latin grammar and hopefully purchased second-hand Lieutenant's frock where no one would see it, and emerge as if he had been on board all day. It was only when this plan was accomplished, and he had pushed past Jones and Howell with nothing but a superior look for their self-important 16 year old giggling, that he had time to straighten his coat and stroll nonchalantly out on deck.

There, amid a rumpus of escaped goats, he was transfixed by Captain Perry's livid blue gaze. He straightened to attention as instinctively as if a cord ran down his spine, which the man's eyes had tugged. The Captain's wrath stirred a deep sympathy in him, for the Inconstant was making a laughing stock of herself, as usual, and the shame of belonging to such a lubberly ship was acute.

"Mr. Norrington," bellowed the Captain, with the carrying voice that made him feel as though the whole ship was watching him. It probably was. "Much though it would improve the ship if all you squeakers were strung up by the heels, he is neither useful nor decorative. Get him down at once!"

"Sir! Yes sir!" barked James in reply, doing his best to look keen and competent, shiny with zeal and capable of Captaining a Ship of the Line, while inwardly frantically wondering what on earth the man was talking about.

Fortunately he hadn't far to look. Apart from pell-mell bleating goats, now joined with chickens as the rampaging animals had knocked over the hen coop, the deck was lopsided where a queue of topmen waited below the starboard main shrouds, sniggering at an obstruction tangled in the ratlines. James took one look at the new midshipman - twelve years old and left hanging upside-down in the rigging for God knew how long - paled with fury and shouted "Lundy, Bob Square, get that man down at once! The rest of you, this is not a theatre! Up the port side if you please, and get to work!"

Taking the dirk out of his belt, he put it between his teeth and swung himself up the insides of the shroud, to where he could cut the twisted bonds which held the boy's wrists to the rope. The child must have struggled for some time, for the cord had worked through the linen of his shirt, into his flesh, and blood had wicked up the material half way to his elbow. His ankles were worse. A furtive flash of white in the corner of his eye made James look down just in time to see Strouse and St.John-Goodchilde disappear back into the cockpit, their eyes alight with satisfaction.

God's teeth! He'd known his fellow midshipmen were a set of the worst swabs in Christendom before this, but this... this went well beyond what he could tolerate.

Lundy got the boy's ankles undone, and between them, they eased him down on deck, where he lay looking very much like a plucked tomato; his face so swollen with blood that the gag had to be eased out of soft furrows in his cheeks. James touched them gingerly, surprised that a dew of blood did not work its way out through the boy's pores to stain his fingers.

"Let's get you upright then." He got a shoulder under the boy's arm and lifted, stood for a moment bent over in an acute angle - the child being so much shorter than himself. "Thank you, Bob, Lundy. I'll handle it from here. Back to work now."

He could feel a heartbeat in the chest that was pressed against his own, and in the wrist, slippery in his encircling fingers, but it was still a relief when the boy gave a sudden great gasp, a strangled whine of pain, and buckled, pulling James down with him, so they both went sprawling over the lower gun-deck, to the amusement of the off-duty tars.

Finally ensconsed in the damp chill of the empty cockpit, the boy wrapped his arms about himself, shivered violently and looked at James with bloodshot dark eyes that seemed to ask him some world-devouring question, to which he did not know the answer. It made him feel embarrassed, so he kept his head bent over the task of binding up the thin white wrists with one of his outgrown shirts. "All four of them, I'll wager, wasn't it?"

"I couldn't say, Sir."

"I am the senior Midshipman in this berth, Mister...?"

"Gillette, sir. Andrew Gillette."

"I am the senior Midshipmen in this berth, Mr. Gillette, and while hazing is good for the character, this goes too far. They were all in on it, weren't they? Tell me."

The boy's face was now passing through a healthy pink, though showing no signs of slowing down its race towards pallor. It remained slightly swollen-looking, so that his eyes - still full of that disconcerting mystery - looked sunken and slanted as a Mongol’s. "I hope you don't think me an informer, Sir."

"I think you're an idiot. They aren't going to stop unless something's done about it, and for that I need your word against them. Do you want this to go on, for the whole voyage? Or do you want me to deal with it now?"

Mr. Andrew Gillette picked sullenly at the fraying edges of his bandages, just as though James was not exerting his full 'I'm the senior officer here and I know what to do' authority, though as the silence stretched on more and more dreadfully, a certain pinkness came back to his ears. Finally he muttered something, and James – impressed by how long it had taken - couldn't help but smile as he said "what was that?"

The brilliant grin he received in return kindled that wary admiration into liking. James fought hard not to show it, but the instinctive feeling of having found an ally in a mess full of enemies was a welcome one, even if it was only a child.

"I said 'leave that to me, Sir'." But this second smile put him in mind of a cruising shark.

~

Three weeks later it was all over. James found Gillette standing at the rail, waiting for the boat to be lowered, to take them into Gibraltar. Howell and Strouse were standing a good oars’ length away, their backs to him; they moved further when James appeared.

A bright Mediterranean sun shone upon everyone, their best Sunday clothes gay and bright. The wind which snapped the ensigns above them, vivid against the blue sky, smelled of lemon and fish, and greenstuff – delicious to a palate accustomed to hardtack. And the freshly painted ship was smartly anchored, her sails neatly furled, looking for once not like a Toby jug in a service of Sevres porcelain.

James, also in his best, with money in his pocket and his hopes set on finding some lovely Spanish senoritas on shore, paused at the sight of Gillette, with a qualm. He really was an extraordinary looking boy, with his fat white face like a suet pudding, and that crinkly, vivid, inhuman shade of burning copper hair, not at all disguised by being viciously tied back. Not the company a handsome young almost-lieutenant needed in his amorous adventures about town. But who else was there to introduce the boy to the delights of shore leave? This was his first landfall in a foreign country; it would hardly be friendly to leave him to go about alone.

“St.John-Goodchilde not up yet?” he leaned his elbow on the rail beside the boy. “He could have been killed!”

“So could I,” said Gillette, a strange look in his eye as he watched the fishing boats and orange groves, the olive clad mountain and the whores and peddlers in skiffs and rafts being turned away from the sides by patrolling marines. “Besides, what makes you think it was anything of my doing? He was obviously trying to steal slush and fell in the copper by accident.”

“And fastened himself in from the top?”

James felt he probably should have been appalled. He felt he should be too old not to be repelled – under the circumstances - by the sudden re-appearance of Gillette’s happy, friendly, open looking smile. But what he did feel was glee; a boyish delight in a perfect piece of poetic justice.

“I expect he got the rats to do that for him, Sir; what with them having such a kinship together.”

“And he trapped himself in the cook-pot because he…”

“Enjoyed the warmth, I suppose. It was very cold last night.”

“Lucky cook heard him yelling, though, before he was boiled with the soup,” James pointed out, with a resurgence of adult guilt.

“The whole ship heard him squealing like a pig,” said Gillette, with a satisfaction that suggested this was part of the plan. “He was never in any real danger – it wasn’t as though he was gagged or anything.”

Turning to lean with his back against the rail, James studied that smug look, and thought about Strouse, who was reduced to wailing for help from what he took to be a bull in the hold – which later turned out to be the Captain’s milk-cow, mysteriously untied, fitted with horns and understandably enraged. Jones had proudly taken his copybook to the Master, to have his workings checked, and found he had written pages of defamatory verse of which he had no memory, and which saw him roundly caned, twice.

Howell, James thought, was probably the most unfortunate, for nothing had happened to Howell yet, and the suspense was playing on his nerves. He dropped things, and stuttered, turned white at random intervals, and hadn’t eaten for the last two days. There were signs he might even be working his way towards an apology.

“On the whole,” he said, thoughtfully, glancing sideways at the boy, whose drowned-baby looks were transformed into something almost pleasant by the wonder with which he watched the alien shore, “I’m glad you are on my side.”

“Always.” The formidable boy gave a smile of ‘butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth’ cuteness. James perked up at once. After all, there were many young women who would be disarmed by the presence of a charming child. He would seem responsible, mature, sympathetic, and his own beauty would be set off by the comparison.

Besides, the better part of him answered, remembering what it was for everything to be new and wondrously strange. The prospect of showing all his favourite things to an admiring audience appealed. This could even be fun.



Edited to add Notes:
Mr.Norrington is 17 and Mr.Gillette is 12.
'Drowned Baby' or 'boiled baby' is the name of a kind of pudding, one of Jack Aubrey's favourites :)

Squee! Menegroth has done a fantastic illustration for this, which you can find here