Author's Note: This is AU. This is very AU, for the sole and solitary reason that I do not want this to be how things happened. But in some less savory universe than the one I usually choose to inhabit... it might have. Additionally, I know nothing about the Navy that was not derived from equal parts Wikipedia and old movies, but even I know that it's nothing like as callous as depicted here; this story is not intended as an accurate depiction thereof, and no insult is intended. In short, the entire flashback sequence is arrant nonsense, but then, this is not a TV show that spent too much of its energy worrying about such trivialities as authenticity or plausibility; at least nobody turned into a radio!

OoOoOoO

It had taken three days, four buckets of glue, and most of the Skipper's patience, but the battered dirigible had been restored to something resembling working condition. Gilligan had been sent to the other side of the island in search of a very particular type of vine, which, the Professor had solemnly assured him, could be braided into cord strong enough to support their combined weight. He would know it, the Professor had continued, by the small blue flowers.

"If that vine makes such strong rope, why haven't we been using it before now?" asked Mary Ann.

"Because it doesn't exist," said the Professor, a wry smile on his lips. "Now. Come on, girls. We have a lot to do before he gives up and comes back."

"Oh, that was marvelously clever of you, Professor," Mrs. Howell said.

"You can take your time," the Skipper said. "He won't give up. Once you set him a task, he keeps at it until someone has to come clean up the wreckage."

They all laughed. A plan for rescue—one that looked set to succeed—had lifted their spirits. "Where did you find him, Skipper?" Ginger asked.

"Never mind that," Mr. Howell drawled. "The real question is, can we send him back?"

The Skipper wasn't laughing anymore. His expression was unreadable. "The Navy," he said quietly. "I found him in the Navy."

OoOoOoO

CPO Grumby looked at his newest Seaman Recruit and suppressed a frustrated snarl with some difficulty. If that kid was on the sunny side of seventeen, he'd eat his hat. Not that the Navy cared. The Navy wanted warm bodies to plug the holes in the ranks where the last batch of warm bodies had been, and if that meant looking the other way when some wide-eyed kid with a head full of war movies and vague notions of patriotism and glory lied about his age to join up, well, that was his choice, after all.

No one should know that better than him. He'd been that wide-eyed kid himself, back in the day, and he'd trained any number of them since.

"Seaman Recruit Gilligan reporting for duty, sir," said the kid, the slight quaver on the last words almost making it into a question. His uniform hung like a sack on his pipe-cleaner frame. The trousers were held up with the combination of an over-cinched belt and prayer, his dark hair had been cropped with even less than the usual lack of finesse, and his eyes looked like saucers. Grumby had seen less promising material in his time… but not much.

"Don't call me 'sir,'" Grumby barked. "I work for a living. I'm CPO Grumby; you'll call me 'Chief' like everyone else does. Clear?" He waited; this was his standard way of welcoming new men aboard, and the kid's reaction would give him a little insight into his newest sailor.

"Yessi—um. Aye aye, Chief," he said, gamely, with just the suggestion of a ghost of a hint of a smile in his eyes. His voice wasn't quavering anymore, and as he saluted, his hand was rock steady.

Good enough for Grumby; the kid might not be old enough to drive—and there was no real doubt in his mind that he wasn't—but there was something there for him to work with. He let the 'martinet' demeanor slip away, and smiled. "Then welcome to the USS Edmonton, Seaman Gilligan. C'mon. Grab your duffel. Enlisted men's bunks are this way."

OoOoOoO

Some weeks later, the kid and two of his bunkmates—Seaman Reilly and Seaman Weiss, to be exact—were scrubbing the deck, and their low-voiced conversation turned, as it usually did whenever two or more of the men found themselves together, to the subject of home. Grumby wasn't listening, exactly—he had his own work to do and the damned reports wouldn't take care of themselves—but he couldn't help hearing.

"Never realized how good I had it at home," Weiss griped. "At least back there I got to sleep in a real bed after working like a dog every hour God sent."

"Yeah, and Mom's cooking was a helluva lot better than Cookie's," Reilly shot back. "And Mom's cooking was lousy."

"They don't call it the mess for nothing," Weiss agreed. "Heh. What about you, Gill?"

"Hey, you think this is bad? Sister Mary Proculus liked her floors so clean they squeaked. 'Your souls may be filthy with sin, boys,'" he mimicked, pitching his voice up an octave and sprouting a thick Brooklyn accent, "'But we can at least make certain that these floors are not!'" He mimed swatting Weiss with a ruler, then grinned, dropping character. "And there were so many fast days I couldn't even tell you what the food was like. Why d'ya think I'm so skinny?"

Reilly nodded in wry recognition. "Catholic school?"

"Catholic orphanage," Gilligan corrected. "Basket on the church steps, a name they picked out of the telephone book, the whole nine yards."

Weiss whistled, then spat on a particularly stubborn spot on the floor and scrubbed harder. "Okay, you win. That's an officially crummy story."

"Aw, knock it off; it's not that bad," Gilligan protested, edging up a bit to scrub a new patch of deck. "They took good care of us. And it was like having twenty brothers all at once. But I do like boats a lot better than land. I like it out here on the ocean."

Grumby was not surprised by that. There had been a storm the day before; the ship had spent much of the day shimmying like a cross between a roller coaster and a hula girl, and there had been a lot of green faces. No shortage of sailors feeding the fishes—one reason the deck had needed scrubbing—and not just the raw recruits, either. Seaman Gilligan hadn't seemed to notice the disturbance, except to tactfully duck around shipmates who were in the process of, well, call it 'needing a moment to themselves.' Some men really were born for the sea.

"Only boat I was ever on before I joined up was the Staten Island Ferry," Reilly commented, pausing to resoap his scrub brush, and the conversation wandered elsewhere.

OoOoOoO

You couldn't help liking the kid, Grumby thought. He was unfailingly friendly, with a hail-fellow-well-met demeanor and the absolute willingness to give you the shirt off his back if you hinted that you wanted it. He was eager to learn anything that his superiors would teach him, threw himself wholeheartedly into scut work as if he liked it, swam like a fish and held his breath like a seal, and he obeyed orders with an unquestioning alacrity that would have brought a proud tear to the eye of the harshest drill sergeant. In short, there was every sign that once he grew into himself a bit more, the Navy was going to end up with a sailor of which it could be proud.

The accident should never have happened.

The Navy was careful with its artillery. The scaffolding holding depth charges in their place didn't just break like that; it just didn't.

Until it did.

Directly above the Chief.

In later years, Grumby was devoutly grateful that he couldn't really remember the incident. He knew what he'd been told, of course; the rolling depth charge, the flying tackle that knocked him out of the way before he'd even really known that there was anything for him to be in the way of, and Seaman Gilligan shielding him as best he could with his own undersized body from the ensuing explosion. It couldn't have been the full force of the depth charge, of course; neither of them would have survived that, even if by some miracle it didn't scuttle the whole ship. The Skipper never actually found out what truly happened, except to be told that, all things considered, it could have been worse. And yet. And yet… it was bad enough.

He could thank the resulting concussion for his inability to remember most of the incident, and he did, fervently and often. It was better that way. It was bad enough that he had to live with the memory of the young recruit who would become his best friend, lying sprawled where the blast had thrown him. Lying still, so terrifyingly still… except for the pool of blood, which was spreading with the enthusiastic speed he'd seen so often at Guadalcanal, and other places... Someone was shouting for a medic, and it took him a moment to realize that it was himself, and where the hell were they? If they didn't know by now that explosions meant that they had a goddamned job to do, they were in the wrong goddamned line of work, that was for damn certain, and he had more than half a mind to tell them so himself, right after putting them on report for the remainder of their lazy-ass lives, and then someone was telling him to relax, that everything was going to be all right, and a needle stabbed his arm as the world slid into a comfortable darkness.

After far too long in sickbay having various bits of himself sutured, bandaged, splinted, and otherwise tended, not entirely sure how many days he had lost and well past caring, Grumby was finally allowed to leave his bed. He went straight to the critical ward and to the bed where Gilligan was lying, with an IV drip in one arm and a leg in traction. His face was whiter than the bandages wrapped around his head and torso, and his shorn hair—starting to grow back; how long had they been in sickbay?— was startlingly dark in contrast. He didn't look old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes at the best of times; unconscious, he barely looked old enough to join a game of stickball.

"He saved my life," he said aloud.

"He certainly did," confirmed a strange voice. The doctor had entered the room without his noticing. He stooped, picked up the chart from the foot of the bed and glanced at it. "It's amazing that either of you made it out of there in one piece. Don't get me wrong; I'm good at my job, but I'm modest enough to admit when I see a miracle on my operating table."

Miracles interested Grumby not an iota. "Is he going to be all right?"

The doctor looked away for a moment, then cleared his throat. "I don't know. How's that for honesty? He has a lot of cuts and breaks, just like you, and he lost a lot of blood. That part of it we could fix. The real problem was the head wound."

Grumby nodded slowly. "What happened there?"

"We think he was hit by a piece of shrapnel. Fractured his skull like a jigsaw puzzle, and a piece of the broken bone was pressing on his brain. We don't know how much damage he sustained, and we're not going to know for a while yet. It could be nothing. Or it could have affected his mind, his memory, his ability to speak or move… we don't know yet. I'm sorry, Grumby. We just don't know."

There didn't seem to be much to say to that, so he said nothing for a long moment. Finally, he asked, "When might you know?"

The doctor shook his head. "I can't say. We're keeping him sedated for the moment, at least until he stabilizes a bit more. We can't let him thrash about without risking more damage than there already is, but that does mean that we can't gauge his mental state yet. It's going to be a while. Weeks, at best, and months is more likely. They'll probably be sending him home before we really know the full extent of it. Medical discharge, for certain."

"He doesn't have a home to get sent to. He's an orphan," Grumby said. "It's all in his file."

"Damn," said the doctor, with genuine regret. "Then it'll be the nearest VA hospital, I guess. We don't have the facilities to tend to him here, or the personnel, for that matter. Wherever we make port."

Grumby's face tightened. He understood. The Navy had no further use for the boy; he would be sent somewhere out of sight and out of mind, to live or die as God willed it. There would always be more wide-eyed kids to take his place.

"I'm getting out, too," he told the doctor. "In Honolulu. Do me a favor. Stall, would you? Keep him here until we get to Hawaii. I'll look after him."

The doctor gave him an appraising look. "You're taking on a lot of responsibility, you know."

"He's part of my crew," Grumby said. "He's already my responsibility."

OoOoOoO

"The docs say that it could have been a lot worse, but, well… you all know how he is. And it would never have happened if he hadn't gone and saved my hide. If it wasn't for that, he'd probably have been an officer by now." He shook his head. "So, yeah, when I bought the Minnow and started doing chartered tours, I hired him on as crew. I owed him at least that much."

A streak of bright red in the greens and browns of the tropical foliage should have been easy to spot. There really was no good reason that none of them noticed it; Gilligan was grateful for the small mercy. He'd heard enough, and more than enough, so he slipped silently back into the jungle, and was even more grateful that for once he didn't trip on anything along the way.

OoOoOoO

The blimp didn't work, of course. The exact nature of the disaster—which involved, but was not limited to, a rather spectacular plume of fire which put paid to any hope of salvage—didn't really even matter; suffice it to say that it didn't work, hopes were shattered, recriminations were exchanged, the Skipper's cap got a bit of a workout, and everyone went off to lick their metaphorical wounds. Gilligan didn't turn up at lunch—which consisted of a bunch of bananas, still on the stalk, because even Mary Ann was in no mood to put any more effort into the meal than that— and when he didn't join them, nobody was particularly surprised, and, to be blunt, no one was particularly sorry.

When he didn't turn up at dinner, either, though, they started to get a bit anxious.

OoOoOoO

"Oh, hey there, Chief!" Gilligan, after several months of medical attention, was back to something as akin to his old self as the doctors thought was likely. Once the broken bones had set, he'd regained full mobility fairly rapidly, even if coordination was no longer his strong suit. Which it most emphatically was not. His memory wasn't much to write home about, either. His short-term memory was essentially shot, and his long-term memory had holes in it that you could have sailed a battleship through. They'd spent the previous Sunday fishing, and Gilligan had chattered happily about boyhood adventures with a pair of friends bearing the unlikely names of Skinny Mulligan and Fatso Flanagan. The stories would have been more amusing if Grumby hadn't known that they were drawn from a radio comedy program; according to the medicos, Gilligan didn't always seem to realize where the boundaries of reality and fantasy lay, and he'd crafted a set of memories for himself that were equal parts wishful thinking and outright plagiarism.

"Hello, Gilligan," Grumby said. "I've got some big news for you."

"Oh, boy!" Gilligan's eyes glittered, excited. "What is it?"

"The paperwork has gone through. You're being decorated," he said proudly.

Gilligan looked confused. "What for?"

"For your bravery," Grumby said, taken aback. Did he not remember even that much? "You saved my life, little buddy. That depth charge would have flattened me like a pancake if you hadn't pushed me out of the way!"

"Gee whiz," Gilligan said, still looking confused. "They shouldn't be giving me medals just for that."

"No?"

"No! I just did what you would have done, that's all," he said matter-of-factly. "I mean, if it had been me on that deck, you'd have done the same exact thing." And that was that. So far as he was concerned, Grumby would have saved him. And, equally surprising, the sky was blue and water was wet.

Grumby, a bit ashamed, wasn't nearly as sure of that as Gilligan seemed to be. "Well, it wasn't me who did it; it was you, and if the Navy thinks you're a hero, it's sure not my place to second-guess them."

Gilligan looked at his shoes, smiling shyly; he didn't seem to know how to respond to the praise. Grumby took pity on him and changed the subject. "That isn't all, either. I've bought a boat—an old forty footer—and once I get her fixed up a little more, I'm going to start in the charter business. Go out at eleven or so, show the tourists around the islands for a couple of hours, drop 'em back off at the marina by two, and be at Barnacle Bill's by happy hour. What do you think?"

"Sounds like a great idea, Chief. If you're half as good at giving tours as you were back on the Edmonton, you'll have people lining up to sail with you on the.. on the… um. What did you say she was called?"

"I didn't. She's called the Minnow."

"Gee, that's a nice name," Gilligan said.

"The thing is, I can't sail her and tend to the passengers all by myself. I'll need a crew," Grumby said, and paused significantly.

Gilligan frowned, thinking hard. "Well, there are a lot of sailors around Honolulu who'd probably be good at that; you just need to find someone who can—"

"Gilligan! I'm talking about you! How'd you like to be my first mate?"

His eyes widened. "First mate? Me? Really?"

"Well, first mate, second mate, bo'sun, deckhand, and cabin boy," Grumby admitted. "It's not that big a boat. But yes; if you'd like the job, I want you as my first mate."

"I won't let you down, Chief," Gilligan said, then frowned. "No, wait—you're not 'Chief' anymore, are you?"

Grumby started. "No, I guess not. Er… try 'Skipper.' How's that?"

"Aye aye, Skipper," Gilligan said, pride and excitement chasing each other across his expressive features , and he saluted. If the ear-to-ear grin wasn't exactly Navy standard, it certainly left no doubt that he wanted the position. The newly dubbed Skipper returned the salute, grinning back. It really was something, he thought fondly. Hand the kid a medal for bravery, and he brushes it off like a second helping of asparagus. Offer him a crummy job on a beat-up old tub, and he lights up like a signal flare.

OoOoOoO

The others had suggested splitting up to cover more ground, but the Skipper just shook his head, and had gone off alone to look for his missing crewman. It took the Skipper a long time to find Gilligan, but persistence paid off in the end. Gilligan was sitting on a stretch of beach that none of them visited all that much; the fishing was poor, the coral sharp, and the waves unpredictable. The last place any of them would go. Which meant that next time, as Gilligan would have said, he ought to look there first and save himself some time. He almost smiled at the thought.

Gilligan didn't look up as the Skipper approached. He was intent on the bow drill in his hands, or pretending to be, and didn't stop sawing away at a bamboo slat, which he was holding in place with his foot. Several similar slats were in a neat pile next to him.

"What in the name of the seven seas are you doing? We were all worried about you!"

"Ginger was saying she wanted Venetian blinds for the girls' hut, so she could let in the morning sun, so I'm making them for her." The bamboo cracked, split in two pieces. He scowled at it, threw the broken slat into the water, and started on a new one. "I don't know why the morning sun is any different than the afternoon sun, but if she thinks there's a difference then I'm not about to argue. Anyway, I cut a whole bunch of these and now I'm drilling holes to run the cords through."

"Of all the pointless… Gilligan, the only holes around here are the ones in your—" the Skipper began, and cut himself awkwardly off. He paused, trying to regather his scattered thoughts.

"Well? Get on with it," Gilligan said flatly, not looking up from his work. "Hit me with your hat or something. Tell me what a dumbbell I am. How I ruined everything. Again. Tell me how I'm a walking disaster. Yell at me. Go on." The drill peeked through the bamboo, and Gilligan flipped it around to begin drilling a matching hole on the other end.

"That's not why I… no one's angry with you," the Skipper said quietly. "It doesn't matter, anyway. The Professor rechecked his calculations, and he says the blimp would never have made it all the way back to Hawaii, anyway. We'd have ended up in Davy Jones' locker if we'd tried."

"Oh. Guess it's a good thing we didn't get the chance to fly off on it, then," Gilligan said, with no expression whatsoever. He didn't take his eyes off of his drill, rapidly eating into the bamboo. "Anyway, I figured it out for next time."

"Figured out what?"

"The next time the Professor invents something, or something washes up in the lagoon, or whatever. I figured it all out. You're going to lock me up."

The Skipper's eyes nearly popped out of his head. "What?!"

"Yeah. You're going to lock me up in a cave, or tie me to a tree or something." There was still no expression on his face, or in his voice. The drill spun steadily. "You're going to lock me up, and you're going to keep me locked up until either it works or it's someone else's fault for a change."

The Skipper didn't say anything for a while. He remembered the horror, the despair, of learning that the authorities back in civilization blamed him for the shipwreck, and he remembered that the only response that he could come up with was to braid a noose from vines. It hadn't ever occurred to him to wonder how it had to feel to be blamed for failure after failure after devastating failure. Even, painful honesty compelled him to admit, the failures that weren't actually his fault.

Gilligan finished the slat he'd been working on and blew away the sawdust, then picked up a new one and started again. "So. That's my part of the plan. It's up to you and the Professor to come up with the other half. When you're rescued you can send somebody back for me. If you want. You don't have to."

The Skipper shook his head. "Nope, little buddy," he said. "Not a chance. We're not locking you up, or tying you up, or anything like that. And we're definitely not leaving you behind. That's just crazy."

"Okay," Gilligan said, indifferent. The drill spun. "So I'm crazy, too."

The Skipper winced. He wasn't much good at this sort of thing. "No! That's not what I meant. You're not crazy…"

"Make up your mind, will you?" Finally, Gilligan looked up from his handiwork and met the Skipper's eyes. He didn't look angry. He didn't even look hurt. Just… resigned. "I break things. I screw things up. I wreck everything. I'm the reason we got stuck here in the first place, and I'm the reason we're still stuck now, and I know that you know that everyone knows it, and we both know that I know that you know that I know that everyone knows that you'd all be better off without me." He stopped short, and his eyes crossed slightly as he counted that last sentence back on his fingers.

"Nobody thinks that," the Skipper tried. "We need you, little buddy. All of us."

"Sure you do," Gilligan agreed. "Who else would take care of the latrines, right?" They all did their best, pouring charcoal, ashes and clean sand into the pits to deodorize them as much as was humanly possible, but they did need regular… maintenance… to remain tolerable. It was not a chore to be relished. It was not a chore anyone else ever undertook.

"Gilligan… it's not about the latrines! Don't you realize how much you mean to all of us?"

"I mean trouble," the sailor said flatly. "I mean disaster. You guys always like me better when you think I'm dead. Sometimes I think the only time you like me at all is when you think I'm dead."

"Well, that's just plain not true—"

"Oh, no? Fine. Whatever you say. Sure seems like it, though."

The Skipper looked away, and the silence stretched, painfully heavy with things unsaid. "All right, little buddy," he said, finally. "All right. Next time we're working on some harebrained rescue plan that will probably blow up in our faces, we'll leave you out of it. I think we can forgo sticking you in the brig, though; you'll just stay by the lagoon or in the hut until we're ready to go. Okay?"

Gilligan looked skeptical, but he nodded; it wasn't worth fighting. "Aye aye, sir. And you don't have to make up phony orders, or send me looking for vines that don't exist. Just tell me to go away."

"All right," the Skipper repeated. "That's fair."

"And tell the others they don't have to pretend either, okay? I mean, 'they all know how I am', right?" He all but spat the last words, with a bitterness the Skipper had never heard from him.

"Oh. You, ah, heard that?" It was hard to push words past the lump of shame and guilt that had lodged itself in his throat, but the Skipper did his best.

"I'd forgotten the machete, so I came back for it." His hands tightened on a bamboo slat until it shattered. "I can't help it that I'm stupid, you know. Don't you think I would if I could?"

Just for a moment, the Skipper could see the bright, eager kid who had lied his way onto his ship looking out of Gilligan's eyes. He'd wondered, sometimes, over the years, if his first mate truly realized the extent of what he'd lost to that depth charge. If the boy he had met on the deck of the Edmonton was still in there, somewhere behind the clumsiness, the memory lapses, the non-sequiturs and rambling inanities. The immeasurable pain, the trapped-animal agony he saw for that brief moment answered that question forever. "I'm sorry," he began.

"Yeah, I know you're sorry. You're always sorry. You only ever hired me because you were sorry for me. That was the part I didn't know."

The Skipper turned away, spent a moment contemplating the sea. The waves were rough today. "It's true," he said, finally. "You saved my life, and got yourself hurt doing it, and I felt like it was my duty to get you back on your feet. I figured that, once you got a year or so of experience under your belt, you'd be in a better position to strike out on your own. That is why I brought you onboard the Minnow. But, little buddy…" he paused, no longer certain that he had the right to use the nickname. "That's not why I kept you onboard. You've become the best friend a guy could have, and I wouldn't trade you for anything."

"Yeah, right. Until the next time I do something dumb."

"Even then," he insisted. "Look, I know I have a short fuse, and I yell at you a lot more than I should. And it's true—you drop things. You break things. You forget things. And if it's humanly possible to step on my foot, you manage it. But I need you, disasters and all."

Gilligan didn't respond.

"At first, it really was just about seeing to it that you were okay. You needed a job, I gave you one, and that was it. And then you were just part of the Minnow, and I plain forgot that it was ever supposed to be temporary. And then…" he shook his head. "And then the tours didn't feel right if you weren't onboard. Going to Barnacle Bill's afterwards wasn't much fun if you weren't there to talk to. And here on the island… I'd've gone nuts without you to keep me on an even keel. You're a better friend than I deserve, little buddy, and I need you to believe that I know it. Okay?"

Gilligan just looked at him for a long time, his face unreadable. Weighing. Considering.

"So… still shipmates?" the Skipper asked, extending a hand.

Gilligan took it, and they shook. "Still shipmates," he agreed.

"Okay, then," the Skipper said, as jovially as he could manage under the circumstances. "Come on back to camp. I think Mary Ann made a coconut pie. That always cheers us all up."

Gilligan found a smile. "No thanks, Skipper—I'm not all that hungry. I think I'll just finish making these blinds for Ginger. You can have my piece. You need it more than I do, anyway. You've been looking a little peaked lately. I'd hate to see you waste away."

The Skipper, another time, would have growled at the sly dig. Under the circumstances, he smirked a little, took off his cap, and tapped Gilligan with it. Not hard. Not angrily. Teasing. Fond. Almost the way a father would tousle his son's hair, or a man would punch his brother's arm. Everything was going to be all right; life would go back to normal, all rancor would be forgotten. There would be pie, and they would all listen to the radio and plan what they would do next, and there would be laughter. Everything would be all right. He was sure of it.

"Thanks a lot. Listen up; you'll finish the blinds, and then you'll come back to camp and share that pie with the rest of us. That's an order!" Hoisting himself to his feet, the Skipper grinned at his first mate.

"Aye aye, sir," Gilligan said, grinning back, and saluted. The sunny grin didn't fade as the Skipper vanished along the path through the jungle, or as he retrieved the bow drill and bent again to his work. "Sure thing, Skipper. Still shipmates," he murmured, working steadily, smile firmly in place. If it didn't reach his eyes, there was no one to see. "After all, who else would ever want me?"