Author's note: To make the narrative flow correctly, I was forced to swap the order of a couple of scenes; to wit, the tag now precedes the conclusion of 'Gilligan vs Gilligan.' Izvenitye*!

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"And was there any shiny gold pocket knife?" The Skipper's voice was pitched to its sweetest and most patient tones; that usually meant that it was a good time to run for it. Gilligan's fingers tightened on his blanket until his knuckles went white. He'd have given a lot to be able to run for it right about then.

"No," he said readily. "There wasn't any pocket knife. And I didn't see anyone who looked like me. It was all a fig leaf of my imagination."

The Skipper sighed. "You mean a 'figment' of your imagination."

"Okay. A fig mint of my imagination. But I don't know why I'd imagine one of those. Peppermint, maybe, or-"

"Gilligan."

"Or spearmint, or—oh! Chocolate chip mint, maybe. But fig mint? That would taste terrible!"

"Gilligan!" The Skipper calmed himself down with a visible effort, and pitched his voice back to the 'humor the lunatic' sweetness. "One more time, okay?"

"Skipper, we've been doing this for hours," Gilligan begged. "Can I please go to sleep? I promise I won't be crazy tomorrow… oh, all right." He surrendered in the face of the Skipper's glare; he knew when he was beaten. "Okay. I never saw a guy who looked just like me, and there was no gold pocketknife and it didn't have a death ray and I wasn't kidnapped. It was all just my reflection in the water because I was guilty about the pie so I preventilated."

"Prevaricated," the Skipper corrected. "But I think you're finally cured. And tomorrow—"

Whatever he had had planned for tomorrow would have to wait; the Professor entered the hut, completely entranced with the possibilities of the damaged pocketknife in his hand. The shiny gold one. The one which, it seemed, might once have had up to two hundred functions, and possibly even a laser.

It was nice under the blanket, Gilligan decided, having retreated to its slightly sweaty shelter somewhere around that point. He wasn't coming out. Reality was flickering back and forth faster than he could sort it out—what he had seen was mixed with what he thought he had seen, what the Professor thought he had seen, and what the Skipper had decided he had seen, and he hadn't slept in two days because he had spent the previous night not being kidnapped and not frantically trying to free himself and they had been drilling him with these same questions for hours and hours and hours and all he really wanted to do was stay under the blanket where he was safe.

The Professor left the hut, knife in hand, in hopes that some of the components, including, emphatically, the radio transmitter in the folding spoon, might be salvageable. It would be unfair to say that he had forgotten about Gilligan and his psychological difficulties; he hadn't. But the Skipper had that well in hand, it appeared, and the possibilities inherent in the ruined microtechnology gleamed more brightly than the gold they resembled. He left without looking back.

A shiny gold pocketknife with two hundred functions. Just like the one they had spent most of the day convincing Gilligan that he hadn't seen. Even for their island, with its notoriously relaxed standards of plausibility, that was stretching coincidence past the breaking point. The Skipper looked at the lump in the hammock for a moment, with sudden, ugly doubts beginning to eat their way into his gut, then gently—real gentleness, not the 'run for the hills' kind—pulled the blanket away from his first mate's face.

With no gentleness whatsoever, Gilligan snatched at the blanket and tried to pull it back over his head. The Skipper held on tight, though, and Gilligan struggled with his iron grip with about as much success as he ever had. His sleeves rode up in the process, revealing the raw mess on his wrists. The Skipper's heart plummeted into his shoes, and he grabbed a skinny forearm to examine the cuts, scrapes, and rope burns more carefully. "Gilligan! What happened to you?"

Gilligan gulped. He knew this one. In one breath, he reeled off, "Nothing! Nothing happened to me! I wasn't kidnapped and there was no guy that looked like me and he didn't hit me over the head and tie me up because he wasn't there and I was just prevelocitating with my ego debasement because I stole the pie and the guilt made me see things and I'm sorry and I shouldn't have done it and I'll never do anything like that ever again. Now, please, can I be your buddy again and we can forget this ever happened, please?" His voice, which had been scaling ominously upwards, broke entirely on the last word, and he fell silent, breathless, wide blue eyes too hopeless to implore.

The Skipper shuddered. He'd seen that look before, during the war. On captured prisoners. "Get up," he said, gruff with emotion. Gilligan obeyed, mechanically and unquestioningly, with only his slumped shoulders revealing anything of what he was feeling. The Skipper half-expected him to recite his rank and serial number. "Come here," he said, retrieving his shaving basin and dipping some water from the cask. "Let me clean that up a little. Your wrists are a mess."

Gilligan pushed his sleeves back and extended both hands, palms down. The other wrist didn't look any better than the first. "I guess that was from… um… I bet I did it in my sleep! Yeah, that's gotta be it. I was sleeping, and I guess I had some kind of nightmare, and… um…"

"And you tied your hands behind your back, and then fought your way out of the ropes. In your sleep," the Skipper said, dabbing a wet cloth to the worst of the scrapes. "Is that what happened?"

Gilligan looked like a deer in the headlights. "I don't know," he said, tentatively. They hadn't gone over this part of the story before, and he was no longer sure what the right answer might be. "Maybe?"

The Skipper, much to his relief—and surprise—didn't challenge that. He just nodded, and continued washing away the dried blood. After a long minute, Gilligan said, in something much closer to his normal tones, "Hey, you don't have to do that. It's not that bad. I'll just take a long swim in the morning."

"No, I don't mind," he replied. "Might as well take care of it tonight. Bet your head hurts, too?"

"Boy, I'll say," Gilligan said. "It feels like someone's pounding a drum in there, right where he clocked me with the—" He cut himself off with a gasp, and looked up to meet the Skipper's steady gaze, and the fear in his eyes made the Skipper's heart break all over again.

Gilligan was afraid. Of him. Dear God Almighty.

After all these years, he could read his crewman like a book. This was not his familiar 'oh, crud, I think I screwed up' expression; there was far more than a swipe from a hat or a chewing out at stake. There was fear, and then there was fear, and the Skipper knew the difference. "You really were kidnapped," the Skipper said slowly. "There really was some sort of… impostor here, with that crazy knife. He was the one who grabbed Ginger, and insulted Mr. Howell. And ate the pie. Not you. You were telling the truth all along, right?"

Gilligan was shaking his head, frantic. "No. No! It was all my disgraced ego and I was being a prevariolator and that pocketknife the Professor found isn't really a death ray and I didn't get tied up, and the Professor said it was all my reflection in the water and he's real smart, so that's got to be what happened. And I ate the pie."

The Skipper thought about that for a minute. "And Mary Ann? You were the one spying on her in the shower?"

Gilligan's eyes widened at that, horrified, but he nodded just as frantically as he'd been shaking his head. "Yes! Yes, I must have. Not my double. Because he wasn't there. So that was me, too."

"Oh, my God," the Skipper whispered. While he wouldn't have put it past the impostor to try any such thing, as it happened, he had never had the opportunity. "What have I done?" He got up, hurried to the door, turned back. "You just stay put," he ordered. "I'm going to get the Professor. I'll be right back."

Gilligan rested his elbows on the table (just like Mom had always told him wasn't polite,) and buried his face in his hands, completely spent. The Professor. He'd bring his medical book, and probably try to hypnotize him, and brew up something awful that he'd have to drink so that he could be sane again, or maybe it was like amnesia and everybody would want to whack him in the head some more, and, frankly, his head already hurt like the dickens, thank you very much, and there would be more questions. He wasn't sure he had the strength for another hour of this left in him, but then again, he was entirely sure that he wasn't going to be given a choice one way or the other. And at the rate he was going, the chances were that Mary Ann and Ginger were already sewing a straitjacket in his size. "I shouldn't have tried to escape," he murmured. "I should have just let him zap me with that death ray of his. Then that me could've been the me sitting here, instead of this me."

There was something wrong with that logic, somewhere, but he was too tired to try and figure it out, and his eyes were just closing when the other two returned. The Professor was, in fact, carrying his medical book, but all he did was sit down next to Gilligan and examine his wrists.

"I don't think you have anything to worry about," he said, soothingly. "The abrasions are completely superficial."

"Glad you think so. It doesn't seem all that super to me," he replied.

"Not super. Superficial. It means they're not serious."

"Oh. Yeah, I know they're not serious. I'll just take a long swim tomorrow and the salt water will fix me up in no time."

"That sounds like an admirably efficient plan of action. Seawater has been used as a crude antiseptic for centuries, and swimming is excellent cardiovascular exercise."

He nodded sleepily. "But that's good, right?"

"That's right," he said. "Gilligan, can I ask you a question about that pocketknife I found?"

"Okay, P'fessor. What is it?"

"You said that there was a laser capability. Do you have any idea which attachment might have housed that?"

"Well, he was pointing the corkscrew at me, so that's probably it," he answered without thinking. His half-shut eyes sprang open as he felt the trap closing around him, and one last surge of adrenaline sent his pulse racing. "But he wasn't there! He was just my reflection in the water. So that knife you found, the corkscrew's just a corkscrew. Not a death ray. Because he wasn't there. Right?"

The Professor just nodded. "Well. It's not important now, anyway. Why don't you get some sleep and we'll commence running experiments on it in the morning?"

Gilligan looked warily to the Skipper, who nodded. "Hit the sack. The Professor's right; it's been a long day."

Shooting them both nervous glances, obviously expecting the order to be countermanded at any moment, he got up from the table and back into his hammock, clutching the blanket like a lifeline. The other two left the hut.

"What's going on here, Professor?" The Skipper asked the question, but only for form's sake. He already knew the answer as well as the Professor did. But someone needed to say it aloud, and it wasn't going to be him.

"Given the indubitable existence of this pocketknife, I believe that some sort of spy, or agent—the instrument's original possessor—was, for whatever reason, here, impersonating Gilligan, for at least the last day or two. Our Gilligan, the real one, was obviously held prisoner for at least part of that time, resulting in the injuries to his wrists," the Professor said. That was the easy part. "The injuries to his psyche are directly attributable to both the stress of that incarceration and our subsequent refusal to entertain the possibility of either his veracity or his sanity."

The Skipper blinked. The Professor pretty much always sounded like he'd swallowed a dictionary, with a thesaurus for dessert, but this time he sounded like he was hiding behind all of those fifty-cent words. He didn't want to say it, either.

But he did. "Simply put, Skipper, between the trauma of the original event and our insistence on a version of events directly contradictory to his lived experiences, he has been forced into a state of extreme suggestibility. He'll agree to anything, confess to anything, say anything he thinks we want to hear. To be blunt, between the impostor and ourselves, we've tortured him into submission."

The Skipper closed his eyes for a moment. "Yeah. I know. I saw the same thing happen once. After Pearl Harbor," he said, and he didn't elaborate.

The Professor didn't ask for details. He didn't really want to know. "Psychological torture is no less effective than the physical variety. I know a little something about it, and sleep deprivation, from which I believe he is currently suffering, is a potent tactic. And prolonged questioning of the sort we've employed is another."

"But what can we do about it, Professor? You saw how he looked at me! I can't leave him like that!"

"For now? Let him sleep. In the meantime, I'll have a look through my books and see if I can find anything of use," the Professor said.

The Skipper's frustration—and no small amount of guilt—were not hard to read. The Professor put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Keeping his own frustration—and guilt—out of his voice as best he could, he said, "Skipper, you can't blame yourself. We were only trying to help him, and there was no reason to believe a fantastic story about an evil doppelganger."

He shook his head. "I should have believed him. Whatever knuckleheaded thing he does, he's always honest about it, and doesn't make up crazy excuses. I just let myself get so worked up over a lousy piece of pie that I… I… Some friend I am!"

"Skipper, getting upset isn't going to help anything. Look. Get some sleep yourself. We'll sort everything out in the morning. Gilligan will be fine. He's extremely resilient, and we've been through worse than this." The Professor was perfectly well aware that his fellow castaways had a tendency to take his pronouncements literally and at face value; if he told them that something would be so, they didn't often argue or disbelieve. He wished that he had their faith in his infallibility.

OoOoOoO

The next morning, as the sun peeked shyly over the horizon, the Skipper awoke to the less-than-reassuring sight of an empty hammock dangling above him. His heart in his throat, he left the hut, telling himself that there was no reason to panic; the younger man had probably just slipped out for that swim he'd been talking about. Or use the head. Or something. Nothing to worry about. He wished that he were either a better liar or more gullible.

The fresh water trough had been topped up. And there was a bowl full of mangoes on the table that had not been there the night before. He stood there, twisting his cap in his hands, trying to decide where to look first, when Gilligan himself emerged from the jungle with a large bunch of bananas.

"Good morning, Gilligan," he said.

"Good morning, Skipper," he replied. He did not look appreciably less nervous than he had the night before. "Um… want a banana?"

"Sure," the Skipper said, taking the bunch and breaking one off. "Thanks. How're the wrists?"

Gilligan looked at his hands as though he expected them to do something. "Oh, just fine," he said, edging away. "I'm just gonna go… um… collect some more firewood," he babbled. "Yeah, that's it—firewood. Mary Ann can't make any breakfast if there isn't enough firewood, and everyone will be awful sore if there isn't any breakfast. So, um, I'll see you later—"

He turned to escape, but the Skipper had a handful of shirt by that time, and effortlessly reeled him back to the table. Gilligan slumped again, no fight left in him, and sat down, stared at the tabletop.

"So," the Skipper said after a while. "I… well, I think I owe you an apology."

"Huh? What for?"

"For not believing you about the whole crazy business with the pie and your double and all the rest of it. I know you better than that; you don't lie, and especially not when it's important. I'm sorry, little buddy."

He looked up at that, desperate hope in his eyes. And completely ignored the first two sentences in favor of what the Skipper would have assumed was the least relevant part of the apology. "So… I am your little buddy again? For real? Not 'former' anymore?"

"What? Of course you are! I never meant that 'former' bilge, anyway," the Skipper said. He had forgotten having said that, and, frankly, he hadn't really needed another reason to hate himself.

Gilligan let out a breath he hadn't noticed he was holding. "Oh, boy, am I glad to hear that," he said.

The Skipper sighed. "I really did a number on you, didn't I? I'm sorry. I should have believed you from the get-go. I just got so mad when you—no, not you. Him, whoever he was. Well, he was talking like he blamed me for the shipwreck, and I just got so upset I couldn't think straight."

Gilligan's mouth fell open. "And you thought that was me? You thought that I'd ever in a million years think the wreck was your fault?" Now he sounded hurt. "Wow, some rotten friend I must be."

The Skipper shook his head. "That's just it, little buddy—you're not. You're probably the one person on the planet who's never thought I was to blame. Everyone else has… and that includes me," he admitted. "I didn't realize how much I depended on that until that… impostor, or whatever, pulled it out from under me."

"Oh," Gilligan said quietly. "I get it. So if I really had gone nuts, then anything I said about the wreck being your fault was just more crazy talk."

"I guess so," the Skipper said. Psychology wasn't exactly his strong suit. "All I know is that I should have believed you in the first place, and none of this would have happened. I'll know better for next time."

Unexpectedly, Gilligan laughed a bit at that. There was no humor in it. "No, you won't, Skipper. That's just it, see?" He smiled, and somehow it was the saddest the Skipper had ever seen him look. "Remember when I saw the headhunter, and you thought I was losing it? Or when I saw the gorilla, or the jungle boy, or the ghost? Nobody ever listens to anything I say; you guys always think I'm lying, or I'm crazy, or just too dumb to know what I'm talking about. I could come tell you guys that water is wet and nobody would believe me. That's not gonna change, and you know it as well as I do." He shrugged. "I've got stuff to do. I'll see you later."

He stood up, flicked his fingers to his temple in a cursory salute, and left, ambling towards the lagoon, mostly because it was a familiar destination he didn't have to think about. He didn't start running until he saw the boat, and the man in it. The one who had gotten away from him the night before.

The man was tugging at the ripcord of an outboard motor in no sweet mood, and being confronted by the personification of his failure wasn't much of an incentive for improvement. But a nasty smile spread across his face, and he drew his knife. At least he'd have this much satisfaction.

The two men, mirror images, stood at the water's edge and considered one other.

"Do you have anything to say before I kill you?" asked Agent 222.

Gilligan shrugged. "Yeah. Your boat just sailed."

Agent 222 looked over his shoulder. Sure enough, his boat was drifting away from shore, and with a muffled curse, he leapt in the water and swam after it. I am a dead man, he thought gloomily, hoisting himself onboard. I failed my mission, and the Commandant will make sure I never leave Siberia. When I go back to Russia, I'm dead.

He cut the motor as a thought struck him. If I go back to Russia, I'm dead. It wasn't much of a choice, really. Go back to Russia, which meant either a one-way trip to a prison camp or a formal introduction to a firing squad. Or stay here on this island, which meant a lifetime of pretending to be the world's prize idiot and being ordered around by the runners-up in that unenviable contest. Ah, bozhe moi,* what a mess. Well, at least this island is warm.

He turned the boat around, steered it back to shore, where Gilligan was still standing, watching him. "Well, then," he said smoothly. "You wanted to show your comrades that there are two of us, da*? Let us show them." He smiled, and inclined his head and extended a graceful arm in a 'lead on, MacDuff' sort of gesture.

Gilligan rubbed the still-sore back of his head warily, but he nodded, and turned to lead the way. "See, nobody's going to believe me when I tell them you're here until they can see for themselves that there are two of us. So if you just—" Thunk.

"Durak,*" 222 muttered, looking at the man now measuring his length on the sand with some disdain. Dropping his rock, he knelt beside Gilligan's still form, turned him over, unfolded the knife blade from his laser beam / transmitter/ tape recorder/ et cetera, and held it to his face. It misted over; he was still breathing. Was that a good thing?

222 debated on whether or not to kill the man, but decided against it. A disgraced spy was one thing, and one that would be made to disappear in short order, at that. A spy who had been caught and executed by the Americanskis was a Martyred Hero; his story would be bruited about and his death avenged. That was the last thing he wanted to see happen. He wanted his superiors to forget about him, forget that this island existed; to put the supposed 222 up against the wall and move on to more pressing matters before they examined anything too closely. As soon as he awoke, of course, the poor fool would begin insisting that he was not 222, or, for that matter, even Russian at all, but with any luck that would be either blamed on the blow to the head or explained away as the desperate ploy of a doomed failure.

He refolded the knife, and shoved it into Gilligan's pocket; from now on the Commandant could eavesdrop to his heart's content, and it would be no concern of his. Taking hold of his double's ankles, he dragged the sailor to the boat and dumped him in. He restarted the motor, engaged the autopilot, and shoved the boat into the current.

Slowly, the boat left the lagoon. "Das vedanye,* comrade," he said. "Enjoy the snow."

Well, that's that, he thought. Goodbye, 222. Goodbye, Russia. Now… time to be Gilligan. He relaxed, let his face settle into an expression of sunny innocence, and ambled back along the path to camp.

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* Izvenitye – I'm sorry

* Bozhe moi – Oh, dear

* Da – Yes

* Durak – Fool

* Das vedanye – Goodbye

All translations and transliterations are courtesy of Google, and thus are probably wrong.