A/N: Ahahaha! Update #3 this week! 'm on a roll! Except I haven't quite finished the next one yet. Thank you to all my loyal reviewers! Oh, and ChilliPowder. Actually the only Gavin/Courtenay I was going to end up with was platonic, though I have of course been hinting at it I think it would be... I dunno... wrong for them to actually end up together. Courtenay/Count... I was going somewhere with both pairings, but it wasn't there. For either. I'm tying it all up in the epilogue. For now, enjoy the mischief and mayhem in this chapter!

-for you!

The next day dawned bright and cloudless, and the early morning saw all of us standing, facing the Count, in the boiler room. Felicity and I were dressed for exercise, in shorts and singlets and Angus was minus the singlet, but nobody else seemed to have made an effort; Carl was even still smoking. Gavin sat in his usual leather and sunglasses, lounging in an armchair directly behind me.

"If I fart, you're screwed," I told him. He chuckled again, but he seemed to have made it his duty to stay as close to me as possible now he knew how much and why I hated him, and I had to admit it was working; his antics that I once found sickening now made me struggle to hide a smile.

"Right," the Count began to get everyone's attention. "Today we begin our new exercise regime. We have let ourselves go…" he looked in the mirror next to him and patted his stomach ruefully. "Especially me. But if we do this stuff every day, then in a month we'll all look like…" he bent down, swore as his expansive belly got in the way, and picked up a poster. "Steve McQeen! Now how fucking sexy is that?"

"That's so sexy," Simon agreed. I, personally, didn't particularly want to look like Steve McQueen, but I understood the appeal.

"Right. Oh, God…" the Count cursed again as he put the poster down. He paused for a second and looked at me uncertainly. I giggled and made press-up motions. "Press ups!" he said, and we all bent to the ground. More swearing came from the Count's direction.

"Okay," he said. "Now when I say go, we'll… well, we'll start." Down in the press-up position, I suddenly felt a weight on my back as Gavin placed his Cuban heels in the small of my back like I was some sort of coffee table. "Go," the Count said finally.

I was a reasonably fit person, but with Gavin pushing down as hard as he could on my back until I was lifting at least twice my own weight, even I was struggling. "Fuck off, Gavin!" I said exasperatedly. "Get our fucking feet off me!"

He just laughed as we struggled through the Count's excruciatingly slow count of 'One…' I tried a bucking motion with my back, but that just caused his heels to crash into my back harder. 'Two…' I bent and lifted again.

"That's perfect." I collapsed. "That's it for today, guys." Gavin got up and waltzed nonchalantly from the room. The others started picking themselves up. "Well done! I'll see you all same time tomorrow. I know this is going to be tough, but it's gunna be worth it." I chuckled. "Seeing some improvement already, Dave," he congratulated, hugging the huge DJ. Carl loped over to me, looking exhausted.

"Two press-ups, Carl. Really?" He grimaced.

"Hey, you look as bad as I am."

"I had Gavin-fucking-Kavanagh's feet on me until I was practically lifting him, too!" I retaliated, looking the way he'd gone. "One day, I will murder him."

"Yeah," Carl said easily, "or marry him."

Night fell too slowly, dark shreds of clouds strangling the sun's descent until we were all sitting in agony waiting for it. Finally the Count, dressed all in black with a balaclava stretched interestingly over his head, descended the stairs.

"Do we have our weapons?" he asked. We held up the things we'd gathered; knives, glue, scissors, record labels, and a pre-recorded cassette tape.

Simon held up a permanent-looking marker doubtfully. "Are you sure this pen comes off, Kevin?"

"Definitely." Simon shrugged and smeared it over his face. I laughed and turned it down.

"Right. Let's go." We all jumped up and rushed down the stairs, bubbling excitedly to each other.

"Shit!" Dave whispered suddenly. "Quentin! Quentin's coming!"

We swore and hurriedly backtracked, squeezing ourselves through the nearest door. As I tried to close it, it got stuck on Dave's stomach; I swore again and shoved as hard as I could. "Come on, Dave, suck it in, man!" the door clicked shut just in time; I heard Dad's heeled shoes tap past, holding my breath, though more out of lack of space than fear of discovery. "Okay," I breathed finally. "Coast's clear. Let's go."

We all squeezed back out of the room and continued up the stairs. I fell back to wait for Carl. As he left the room, he turned back. "Sorry, Felicity," he said.

I turned to look inside the tiny room; Felicity sat on the loo, her hair rumpled. "No, no," she said meekly. "I enjoyed the company."

We boarded the longboat and I grabbed an oar. I thought we'd be rowing for ages, but it had been barely ten minutes before the Count broke the relative silence. "Oh my God," he whispered, "there she is." He pointed a torch in the direction we were rowing. I glanced there to see a severely smaller boat than ours. It looked almost pathetic, sitting there all by itself.

"This," said Gavin in his usual husky whisper, "is going to be so much fun!" he said it with a little shiver on the 's' of 'so', so that it sounded like he'd just done something involuntary in his trousers.

"Orgasmic, isn't it, Gavin," I said sarcastically, but I felt it too. It was exciting to finally assume the name of 'pirate' we'd been given for so long. I could hardly sit still.

They had a 'sentry' strutting around the boat; Dave threw a net over him and Gavin gave him a solid wallop over the head with an oar.

Then we found the recording studio. The Count switched the lights on, pulled his balaclava down over his head and looked around. A cruel smile twitched over his face.

"Let the evilness begin."

I cackled. Angus looked at me and nodded; he threw me a pot of glue and we headed towards the shelves of records. I pulled a handful from the shelf; Angus did the same beside me. I pulled from my pocket a handful of labels; Herman's Hermits, the latest songs from artists like the Beatles, the Move, the Monkees. Songs they were likely to play tomorrow. We gently peeled off the original stickers and glued on the new ones instead. Then, still cackling, I stacked them beside the record player in a neat playlist.

I looked around. Dave extracted with difficulty the cassette from his pocket. I grabbed the advertisement tapes and glued them in their original positions. Dave tossed his one neatly beside them.

Another look around showed all the DJs heavily involved in their mischief; Gavin was picking his nose beside me and wiping it on the microphone, the Count, Angus and Carl were sitting down with a pile of records and gouging deep scratches in them, Kevin was switching jingle tapes around in their stands with a look of intense concentration on his face.

I noticed Simon standing in the middle of the room as though unsure what havoc to wreak next; I pulled a funnel out of my jacket pocket. "Hey, Simon," I whispered. "Here."

He gazed at it blankly. "What do I do with it?

I shot him an evil grin and pointed at the teakettle. He returned it and headed off in that direction. Suddenly Gavin was behind me. "You know what this boat needs?" he whispered sensually in my ear.

"More of you? That'd be torture."

He ignored me. "A dead fish lying around somewhere."

I thought about this. "I think I saw some dead fish topside. I think this boat doubles as a trawler sometimes." We shared our first grin and dashed out of the door and up the stairs.

Gavin tripped and fell up the stairs; I laughed and kept running, leaving him behind. He laughed and ran faster until he overtook me, slapping my arse as he went.

I stopped. "Gavin," I said seriously. He turned around, his grin fading. "Not with the arse-touching, please." He kept walking backwards, twitching open a door as he went until we were on the main deck with the stars twinkling merrily above us.

"Sorry," he said, and he actually sounded it. "I just think your arse is so sexy."

I raised an eyebrow in disgust. "Give it up, Gavin," I said easily. "Even if I wanted to, I promised Dad I wouldn't sleep with you."

He grinned again. "He doesn't have to know."

"If I wanted to," I repeated pointedly. "I don't. I hate the way you act like it's a foregone conclusion. It's such a turn-off, to say the least."

He sighed. "Sorry," he said again. He looked around briskly. "So – fish?"

"Over here, I think," I said, glad that his unnervingly sincere apologies were over. I showed him the huge crates I'd seen covered in black tarpaulin; he took hold of the first one and pulled.

Fish. Brilliant. They were fat and glistening and already giving off that pungent fishy smell. I giggled. Gavin chuckled. I looked at him and he looked at me and the glee from the raid was still reflected in his eyes. He may be an arse, I thought suddenly, but he was a well-meaning arse. And we believed in the same things, and went about getting them in largely the same way. I didn't have to love him, but suddenly the idea that I'd have to live with him wasn't so bad.

In the middle of our sappy little moment of non-verbal reconciliation, the door to the foredeck opened.

"What are you two doing out here?" I jumped a mile in the air, thinking that someone from Radio Sunshine had caught us, before my still-sleepy brain processed the voice and realised it was Carl's.

I calmed down. "We were finding fish." It sounded really lame out loud, I realised. I proceeded to explain the method behind the madness to him.

"Oh," he said. He looked at Gavin, now holding the fish in his hand. "Right. Well, shall we head back down, then?"

Gavin made to follow him, but I hesitated and, on a whim, pulled back the cover on the second crate. "Oh, score," I said triumphantly. "Gavin? Hang on a sec."

The second crate was full of what looked like miniature eels, long, thin and slimy. Gavin saw them and gave another low chuckle. He dropped the fish he was holding and picked up one of them. Carl and I pulled the tarpaulin back on; I grabbed another eel just in case before we went back to the studio.

Downstairs, the pile of scratched records had swollen incredibly and the stacks still on the shelves were dwindling. Gavin brought the eel up to his face and kissed it before slipping it between the desk and the record player where they couldn't find it. I shook my head at him.

"Amateur." I placed mine carefully on a shelf under the desk beside a pair of headphones, where some unsuspecting DJ would reach without looking and meet its slimy body.

He laughed. I sat down on the floor between Simon and Angus, picked up a record and a knife and started scratching.

The first rays of dawn were all that saved us from discovery. With Radio Sunshine's entire record collection maimed, we headed up the stairs again. "Right," said the Count, "are we all here?"

We looked around for each other. "We're missing Mark," Simon noticed.

"Oh, Jesus. Dawn's coming, we've got to get back."

We waited for a few seconds, then Midnight Mark, the sexiest man on the planet, stumbled up a completely different set of steps than the ones we'd been watching for him. "Where the hell have you been?" I asked him.

"With a girl," he replied calmly. The others whooped. I was left to contemplate how he managed it.

Back on the longboat, we all cheered and high-fived each other triumphantly. "Great work, guys," the Count congratulated. "I'd like to see them messing with our listening numbers after that."

A/N: Ok. So next chapter may be a while, and after that sappy Court/Gavin moment I'm having more and more trouble convincing even myself that they're not meant to be together, especially since there's another one next chapter. I might throw in a kiss somewhere. Review if you are pro/anti kiss. (I'm watching All About Steve, hence the pro/anti business). Anyway. Review.

-for you.