Mark stepped off the plane. The Hawaiian sun was still as bright as ever, but this time around he'd known enough not to bother wearing a jacket, and the sunshine felt like a kiss on the cheek, rather than a kick in the teeth. He turned back to the door of the plane to help the woman behind him disembark safely; she smiled at him with a sort of fond exasperation that said, quite clearly, that while his fussing was sweet, and she appreciated his concern, if he didn't knock it off, he was going to hear about it. Which was, admittedly, quite a lot of meaning to pack into a momentary flick of an eyebrow, but her ability to communicate volumes without saying a word was one of the things he loved about her. He ignored the warning and kept a careful hand on her arm as she stepped onto the tarmac, not so much for her sake—she could take care of herself, which was another of the things he loved about her, actually—but for the baby in her arms.

It had been several years; a lot had changed in that time. Good, bad, and indifferent; nothing stood still. Not even Barnacle Bill's ramshackle pub, which looked less welcoming than ever, at least to those outside the family-by-choice brotherhood of mariners that routinely gathered there. Mark himself had been allowed in only on sufferance, and for his brother's sake, not his own. They had looked at him, though, had seen an angry, grieving, guilt-stricken mess that most people would have been perfectly justified in ignoring, and they had delivered their own brand of rough-edged sympathy, binding up wounds he had scarcely let himself admit were there. They had done this for a stranger who shared nothing with them and little more than a last name with a man they had known and liked. It was a debt he didn't know how to begin to repay.

He looked around now, and realized with a pang that it wasn't the same. Oh, Bill still stood behind the bar, and still poured him a mug of soda with a sly smile, but several of the old salts he had met on that long-ago trip to Hawaii were now doing their drinking in Fiddler's Green, and, while Bill had, so far, stubbornly kept his establishment a tourist-free sailor's refuge, the increasing contrast between the grubby bar and the glossy buildings to either side made Mark suspect that Bill was fighting a losing battle. The old man was, in all likelihood, short-timing it, and the bar would probably not be there the next time they came to the islands, or, at least, would be gentrified past all recognition. Mark sighed. One more link gone. Good, bad, or indifferent, nothing stood still.

"Well, would you look at that," Horowitz said, standing to greet them. "How've you been, stranger?"

He was older, too. He walked with a stoop Mark did not remember him having on their first meeting, and his hair had gone from grey to white. The smile lines were cut more deeply into his flesh, and had been joined by others. His face was hollower than it had been, his eyes more deeply set in their sockets. But he still carried himself with the quiet dignity of a man with nothing to prove to anyone, and the welcome in his smile was no less warm than it had been when they had met at the Minnow's empty slip.

"I'm good, Horowitz. How've you been?"

"Same old, same old," he said, waving a hand dismissively. "The sea's still a beauty, the tourists are still a headache. Who's this lovely lady? Too pretty to be any relation to the likes of you."

He rolled his eyes in fond exasperation. "Take it easy, sailor. This is my wife, Angela. Angie, this is Horowitz. He was a friend of my brother's. Heaven only knows why."

Horowitz grinned, unoffended. "A pleasure to meet you, my dear. Welcome to Hawaii."

Angie smiled and adjusted her grip on her child, turning him to face the old man. "It's good to meet you at last," she told him. "Mark's told me a lot about you all. This is our son. Say hello, Brendan."

"Brendan, huh?" Horowitz looked at the child carefully, from the dark fuzz on his head to the pink toes with their infinitesimal nails. "Looks like a keeper," he said approvingly. "Bring him back in a year or two and I'll give him a spot on my crew."

Angie laughed. "Perhaps a little bit longer than that. First we'll have to see whether or not he takes after his namesake. I get seasick just looking at a boat."

"Ah, we can fix that fast enough," Horowitz dismissed her objection. "Namesake, you said?" He gave Mark an inquiring look. Several years back, after the people aboard the Minnow had officially been declared legally dead, their names had been added to the communal memorial stone the sailing community maintained near the marina. It had been Horowitz, embarrassed but forthright, who had drawn the short straw and telephoned Mark to ask as delicately as possible what his brother's first name had actually been. It was, needless to say, not Brendan.

"Saint Brendan the Navigator," Mark explained. It had been Angie's idea. He had wanted, of course, to name his son after the uncle he would never meet. And had not been able to bear the thought of doing so… because that would, by definition, have also meant naming him after the grandfather he was grateful the child would never have to know. She had thought about that for a while, had done a little research, then sat him down and told him the story of Brendan, patron saint of sailors, who had set out in a tiny boat in search of Eden. He had sailed westward from Ireland, and after a number of adventures, had found a magical island where the sun always shone and the trees were always full of fruit. He had had to look away for a moment, blinking rapidly, and she had kissed him, and it had been settled.

"Gotcha," Horowitz said, and turned his attention back to the baby, letting the little hand grasp his gnarled finger. "Hiya, Kid," he said softly. It was obvious that, no matter what the name represented, no matter what story it was intended to tell, Horowitz had no intention of ever using it. No more than he had used his namesake's.

Mark smiled, warmed by the continuity of it all. "Yeah. He's too little for Cokes quite yet; like you say, we'll have to give it a year or two. Actually, scratch that. He's always going to be too little to drink with you guys… I remember what you jokers are like, and I remember that hangover, too."

Bill smirked, a bit sadly, and glanced at the stools where Entwhistle was not, where the Skipper was not. Where Gilligan was not. "Papa Bear's on to us, fellows. Better behave yourselves!"

"Hey. None of that. We got you home, didn't we? Even took your shoes off nice and neat before tucking you into beddy-bye. Ingrate!"

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

With the exception of a short pilgrimage to leave a lei at the mariners' carved marker, the rest of their trip followed the more standard Hawaiian vacation patterns—they swam and sunbathed on the beach, they took in beautiful scenery, they ate the sort of exotic tropical dishes they never saw in Pennsylvania, and in short, set aside their routines, their workaday irritations and tedium. They were together, they were a family, and they let the gentle happiness of that unity seep into them like the sunshine.

And then, at Angie's quiet insistence, on their last day, they had gone to the marina and taken a short sail around the islands. With Horowitz at the helm. It was no longer true that you could throw a rock and hit three different boats doing island tours; these days, Mark thought, you'd hit at least five. But there had been no question whose boat they would choose; he would not have hurt the old man's feelings by even considering another captain. Angie, as she had readily admitted, was a less-than-stellar sailor, and she spent a good portion of the trip with an unruly stomach and a tense look on her face, but she concealed both as best she could. This, she suspected, was something Mark still needed, whether he knew it or not, and a bit of mild nausea was a small price to pay for her to give it to him.

Mark, somewhat to his own surprise, enjoyed the cruise. The wind in his face was fresh and crisp, and the green silhouettes of the islands were unexpectedly beautiful, framed as they were between the two shades of blue of the sea and the sky. It was like… every trip he took around the islands was Christmas morning. All brand new and exciting, every single time. Horowitz had said that, trying to pin down in words his brother's passion for these waters. Contrasting it with the jaded, wonder-stale attitudes of many of the other charterers, who sailed these routes often enough that they stopped seeing their beauty. Stopped seeing the miraculous.

Steering them expertly back into his slip, Horowitz smiled politely as the other passengers disembarked, and winked mischievously at Angie when the last of them was safely gone. "Oy vey," he complained. "Either those tourists get dumber every year or I'm just getting less patient in my old age, I don't know which. Don't answer that, smart aleck," he said quickly.

Mark hadn't intended to. He hadn't heard the original comment, in fact. He was still standing at the rail, looking out to sea with his son in his arms, and he thought he finally understood. It's just in us, and there's no fighting it. He was living the only way he wanted to live. The words still haunted him all these years later, as did the memory of a scrawny teenage boy standing his ground as the man who should have been his protector cut him to pieces with his tongue. He glanced down at the sleeping child. It's going to be different for us, he promised silently. We are that second chance.

Horowitz fumbled in a pocket, pulled out a small box. He handed it to Angie. "Here," he said brusquely. "Me and the other fellows, we all figured he'd be needing this. Just in case he does take after his namesake."

Angie opened the box. Inside, on a thread-fine chain, was a tiny silver four-leafed clover. She looked up at the old man, quizzically. "For good luck?"

He shrugged, uncomfortable with sentimentality. "Ask your husband. He'll remember. Just… we figured that some things ought to get passed down."

She nodded, her eyes suspiciously shiny, and smiled. "We'll bring him out here when he's old enough for those sailing lessons," she promised.

He nodded. "I'll be here. And hey. Don't figure I have to tell you to take good care of the kid, but you guys take care of yourselves, too, you hear?"

"We will," Mark promised. "You do the same, all right?" The airfare to Hawaii was not cheap, and he would not be returning to the islands for at least a couple of years. This was, he suspected, the last time he'd see the old salt, and he was fairly sure that Horowitz knew it, too.

Horowitz nodded. "Aloha," he said simply. "Means hello and goodbye, both at once. So there's never anything sad about saying it, and no goodbye can be forever. Aloha, Kid."

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

Author's note: Fiddler's Green is a sailor's paradise, of which descriptions vary, but the name goes back at least to the nineteenth century. Stories of Saint Brendan's voyage to an island that either was or approximated Eden go back to the sixth century, and scholars like to debate the proportions of truth to myth, but there's at least one school of thought that says that his journey was real, and that he made it all the way from Ireland to America. There is also at least one brave soul who recreated that journey, using authentically recreated sixth century sailing technology, which, from the sounds of it, would also have necessitated an authentic sixth century miracle or two. It seemed an appropriate moniker for the little one, especially as the show's creators went to some trouble to ensure that we never learned Gilligan's real name. Everyone involved with the character seemed to have a different idea of what it was, and naming the child after his uncle in a symbolic rather than a literal manner seemed the best way to show respect to all concerned.

This chapter started out as a post-Rescue film encounter, because it struck me that Gilligan never seems to have so much as considered going back to Pennsylvania, even for a visit, and I wondered how Mark would have reacted to that. And then Brendan appeared, and before I quite knew what had hit me, we got so deeply sappy that there's still maple syrup in my keyboard. I'm genuinely not sure how that happened… but arguing with Angie got me precisely nowhere, so there you go.