The dreams that night started about the same way they usually did, with restless thrashing and half-muffled moans coming from the upper hammock. The Skipper, by this point, could, and usually did, sleep right through it, but not tonight. This time, Gilligan, with a shriek that the handkerchief could not contain, twisted so violently that the hammock flipped. He hit the ground with a thud, too tangled in his blanket to break his own fall.

Dazed from the impact, still half dreambound, he tried to sit up, but the blanket was twisted into something between the Gordian knot and a straitjacket. His hands were pinned to his sides; he couldn't free himself, and the more he struggled, the tighter it got. He writhed for a moment longer, then, with a heartrending, primal groan, surrendered and lay still, waiting for a bullet that didn't come.

And that was what finally woke him the rest of the way. Eyes wide and desperate, he finally wriggled free of the blanket and sat up, his whole body heaving as he tried to catch his breath. He tugged the useless gag away from his mouth and let it fall, and buried his face in his hands. "Oh, my God," he murmured, between gasps. "My God." It was a prayer.

As his breathing slowed to something approximating normal, he turned towards the Skipper, who was watching him, helpless and pained. "Sorry about that, Skipper," he said quietly, and he tried to smile. "At least I didn't land on you this time, right?"

The Skipper tried to ignore the lump in his throat. "Never mind that; are you all right?"

"Sure. Yeah, I'm fine. It's not like this is the first time I've fallen out of a hammock, right?" He looked away. "I think I'll just sack out down here for the rest of the night, though. I don't think even I could manage to fall off the ground."

The inevitable knock at the door came, and Gilligan, shame in every line, got up to answer it. The other five, of course, were all out there. "I'm okay," he said, forestalling any questions.

They didn't ask any. They all knew the answers, anyway. Yes, that had been him screaming. Yes, he had had another nightmare. No, he did not want a cup of tea, or a snack, or the loan of Mr. Howell's teddy bear. Yes, he was quite sure he didn't want to talk about it. No, he was not okay. Yes, he was going to tell them that he was.

"I'm sorry, everyone," he said. "Just… you can all just go back to sleep, okay? I'm sorry I woke you."

He came back into the hut, and more-or-less collapsed into a chair. The Skipper lit a candle, and stuck it into the wax-crusted bottle they used as a lamp. The flickering light cast eerie shadows on their faces and against the walls, and it highlighted how drawn—almost skull-like— Gilligan's face had become.

"Gilligan…" the Skipper said after a moment. "Can you ever forgive me?"

"Of course I forgive you, Skipper. Just…"

"Yes?"

"What am I forgiving you for?"

"Oh, for Pete's sake... I'm your captain. I was supposed to be looking out for you, and I failed. I let that lunatic... I should never have let this happen. You're my crew. You're my friend. I should have done something. And I'm sorry, Gilligan, I'm so sorry."

"What have you got to be sorry about? There's nothing you could have done. Kinkaid had a gun and a goon; if you'd gotten in his way, he'd've just shot you, and then where would we be?"

"It couldn't be any worse than where we are now," he whispered, mostly to himself.

Gilligan heard him. "Are you nuts? The only good thing about the whole hunt is that he picked me, and not one of you guys. I can run a whole lot faster than you, and the others are just civilians." He shook his head, decisively. "Besides, the Howells aren't exactly spring chickens, and I don't even want to think about if he'd hurt the girls, and we'd all be sunk without you and the Professor to keep us safe. If it had to happen at all, I'm so glad it was me I can't even tell you."

The Skipper shook his head. "You can say that, but these dreams you keep having say different. Everything isn't all right, and we all know it."

"I told you I should go sleep in the cave. If I didn't keep waking everyone up things would be all right. Or a lot more all right than they are, anyway."

"That wouldn't solve anything! In the cave or in the hut, if you're going to keep having these awful dreams, it doesn't matter where you are."

"It would matter a lot to the others if they could get some sleep," he argued. "And I wouldn't have to keep saying sorry when I wake everyone up and get them all worried, and that would matter a lot, too."

"Trust me, everyone's already worried, awake or asleep."

"Aw, gee whiz—that's exactly what I was trying not to do," Gilligan said, defeated. "I'm trying so hard not to bother anyone, Skipper, honest I am, and I couldn't even do that right? I… oh, never mind. It's late, huh? I'm going back to sleep."

"Gilligan—"

"G'night, Skipper," he said firmly, and stuffed the handkerchief back in his mouth before realizing that he hadn't yet blown out the candle. Fanning his hand over it made the flame flicker a bit, but it stayed resolutely lit. Trying to pinch it out only led to a still-lit candle and slightly singed fingertips, and when he instinctively tried to put them into his mouth to soothe the burn, the fabric of course, got in the way.

The Skipper just watched the antics, because he had the feeling that he was supposed to be so distracted by the dog and pony show that he would drop the conversation. He wasn't fooled, if indeed it was intended to fool him at all, but Gilligan was right about one thing at least. It was late. Morning would be a better time for this. "Okay, little buddy. You win. Get some sleep," he said, and blew the candle out himself.

Wrapping the blanket loosely around his shoulders, Gilligan curled up on the ground. They both went back to sleep, or, at least, pretended to go back to sleep until pretense, at some point, became reality. He wasn't there when the Skipper woke in the morning. Not all that unusual, these days. Gilligan had an irritating but undeniable knack for disappearing into the far reaches of the island, more or less instantaneously. The Skipper assumed that it had served him well during the hunt, but it was rapidly becoming a liability.

The Professor didn't know what to do. Fine. He would see this through without the Professor's help. One way or the other, he was going to fix this, before Kinkaid managed to take Gilligan down from beyond the gates of Hell.

OoOoOoO

Gilligan, it transpired, was in the clearing, the one where Kinkaid had met his end. He found himself going there a lot, these days. He'd dug a grave there, and rolled Kinkaid's broken body into it, and had tried to say something respectful, because he knew he should. But not before he had checked all the hunter's pockets, just on the off chance that the radio tubes had survived. They hadn't.

Grass was beginning to grow over Kinkaid's grave, but the outline was still clearly visible, for now. Sooner or later, no one would ever be able to tell by looking that he'd ever been there at all, except for the large stone he had manhandled into place over the approximate location of what was left of Kinkaid's skull. Not to be respectful, and certainly not to memorialize. No, it was intended as a means of weighting him down. Dogging the hatch that was keeping him in.

Visiting the clearing, checking on the grave, had become a habit, a ritual. Not to say an obsession. It reassured him to see it, though. Kinkaid was still down there. He was buried deep, far below, where he could not hurt anyone. He had not escaped. He was still safely trapped in the endless earth, where he would feed the plants and the worms, doing at least one good thing in his twisted life.

Kinkaid was buried. He, Gilligan, had buried him.

He would make certain that he never got out.

He had to make certain that he never got out.

He could not be allowed to hurt anyone. Not ever again.

That was where the Skipper found him.

Gilligan's skinny arms were wrapped around his knobby knees, his head down, in a perfect picture of mute misery. He wasn't crying. He wasn't shaking. He was just sitting there, riding out the waves of unbearable pain, waiting dumbly for release or death.

The Skipper sat down beside him. "Talk to me, Gilligan. This has gone on long enough. Talk to me."

"What do you want me to say?"

"What do you need to say? Tell me what that bastard did to you. Whatever it is, it's eating you from the inside out."

"He didn't do anything to me. I… I did it to myself."

The Skipper kept his voice steady. "What did you do, little buddy?"

"I killed him," Gilligan said. "I killed him, don't you understand? I rigged up a deadfall trap, and I shot him with his own weapon after he'd been flattened! I killed him! I'm a murderer!"

"You had to. There just wasn't any other choice. It wasn't murder; it was war, and there's a big difference. It was his life or yours."

"No, it was his life or yours! He… He told me he couldn't afford to let any of you get back to civilization. He wasn't gonna get you rescued, even if I did let him get me. And I couldn't let him get me. He was gonna kill everyone! He'd even decided already what order he was going to hunt you in," he said, the words coming fast and faster. This had been bottled up for far too long to stop there. "He told me. He told me, and he laughed about it. First the Professor, then Mary Ann. He said Ginger he'd, um… keep for a while, first. He was just going to kill Mr. and Mrs. Howell straight off, but you were gonna be a hostage to keep Ginger in line 'til he was done with her. If it was just me he wanted, I wouldn't've been so scared!"

The Skipper fought back a wave of violent nausea. "Well. You had even less choice, then. You saved us all; there's nothing for you to feel guilty about."

But Gilligan was shaking his head like a pendulum, eyes squeezed shut. "No. There is. It's not only that I killed him. That's not the bad part."

"What is it, then?"

"I wanted him to be dead!" The words exploded out of him. His eyes were open and aghast, horrified with himself. "And it couldn't just have been that he was bad. There have been bad people here before, and I never wanted them to be dead. Not my double, or that crazy dictator, or the Japanese sailor, or those gangsters, or even the headhunters; I always just wanted them to go away. But not him. I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to be dead. Don't you get it?" His voice broke. "I'm just like him. I'm just as bad as Kinkaid."

The Skipper didn't say anything for a moment. "Can I tell you the truth, little buddy? I wanted to kill him, too. I wasn't even the one he was chasing, and I wanted to kill him. And back during the war… I can't tell you how many times I looked at an enemy and wanted them dead. I was glad whenever we sank one of them, and if I could have dragged them back out of the deeps to kill them a second time, I would have. It doesn't mean that either of us are anything like Kinkaid. It just means we're human."

Gilligan was still shaking his head, still unconvinced. The self-loathing had not left his voice. "But where does it end, Skipper? This time, sure, maybe I was doing the right thing. He was gonna kill you all. I thought if I didn't kill him, even if he did go away, he'd probably just find some other people and hunt them, and then it would be my fault for not stopping him when I had the chance, so I'd be a murderer if I killed him and a bigger murderer if I didn't."

The Skipper blinked a few times, trying to follow the logic. "Well… I don't think that's quite how it works, but okay. It still means that you didn't do anything wrong; it just means that you didn't have any other way out of the bind you were in. That we were all in."

"Yeah, but killing Kinkaid… it wasn't even hard. And it should have been. I never killed anyone before. I know I should have felt bad, and I didn't. I just walked up to him, and I took his rifle, and I blew his brains out. It was hardly worse than clubbing a fish for dinner. I still don't feel bad, and I'm still glad he's dead. What if it isn't hard next time, either? What if I start wanting people to be dead all the time?"

"There's no easy answer to that one, little buddy. Or if there is, I never found it." The Skipper stared off into the distance, where Guadalcanal had never quite faded. "Men like us, Navy men, with our military training being what it is… part of it means being ready to kill to protect our own. I'm not ashamed of that. And if anyone as terrible as Kinkaid ever landed here again, then, no—I wouldn't hesitate to kill him, either. If that means I won't see heaven, then so be it; better that than seeing innocents like the girls sent there before their time. Do you blame me for that?"

"N-no. No, of course not!"

"Right. Kinkaid was a stone-cold killer. Not military. Not even a hunter, really— just a killer. He wouldn't have stopped with you; he wouldn't have stopped with the rest of us. He'd have kept on hunting, kept on killing, until somebody got him. He was a mad dog. No one who kills for fun could be anything but, and putting him down was the only thing to do."

"If a mad dog bites you, you go mad, too," Gilligan pointed out. "I didn't know I was like him, but I must be. I… I dream about it all the time. Running, being hunted through the jungle, except it's not Kinkaid doing it. It's me. Sometimes I'm hunting the Professor, or the girls, or the Howells. Sometimes it's the guys from home, or my mom and dad, or our pals back in Honolulu… and sometimes… sometimes it's you," he admitted in a hoarse, shamed whisper. He hung his head again; he couldn't bear to see the look of disgust he was certain would be twisting the Skipper's face. He took a ragged breath, and continued.

"And it's like I'm Kinkaid, but I'm me at the same time. And I have the rifle, and you're running, running…" He hugged his knees even more tightly. "And even in the dream, I know I don't want to, I mean, the me part of me doesn't want to, but the other part of me, I'm laughing as I track you down. And always, always, I take the rifle and I line up the sights, and… I'm afraid, Skipper! I'm afraid all the time that… that… that one day it won't be a dream…"

"Oh, Gilligan," the Skipper said softly. So that was what was haunting the poor devil. "That's not going to happen. That's not ever going to happen, okay? I'm your captain, and it's my duty to see to my crew. And believe you me, before you ever came even close to going that bad, I'd put you down myself."

Gilligan looked up, startled. After a long moment, very softly, he asked, "Do you promise?"

"You have my word on it," he said, then chuckled. Voice heavy with affection, he continued, "You knucklehead. I must know you better than you know yourself. You think you could ever be like that snake? You think I'd let that happen to you? Not a chance, little buddy, not a chance. I'd knock you back to your senses long before you could even start to go that wrong. If you can't trust yourself, then trust me, okay? I'm here."