Tori: *sigh* The little lovebirds… How soon until we have little braided morons running about?

Heero: Two is ENOUGH!

Tori: Aw… Is Uncle Yuy in a mood again?

Heero: CAN THIS WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE WEDDING!?

Tori: *laughs* Baking little muffins, Iruka? MUAHAHAHAHA!

~*~*~*~

            Jab! Jab-jab! … … … JABJABJABJABJA-

            Heero's eyes flew open and he grabbed the stick poking him in the chest. The boy holding it screamed and jumped back.

            Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, he sat up and squinted against the sunlight. A sheet of dry, crusted sand fell from his torso and his still-damp hair stung his eyes with drops of salty water. "Where am I…?" he managed and looked around. Relena lay a few feet from him among scattered debris of the boat, her left arm draped over her face. She seemed unhurt but unconscious. The others were nowhere in sight.

            Beyond her, and all around them both, stood a mess of boys. They couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve and some looked as young as five or six, but they all had a savage, untamed look about them.

            "Kon'ichiwa… Nihongo ga hanasemasuka?" he asked, nearly gagging on his dry tongue. The boys backed up a step, wondering out loud to each other what the washed-up teenager had said.

            He hadn't been positive of the nationality obscured by clay and berry face paint, but now he realized, from their whispered comments to one another, that they certainly weren't from Japan.

            "Do you speak English?" he tried. The group of boys went silent. After a moment, one stepped forward.

            He was a lean, tanned boy with a mop of stringy carrot-colored hair that fell in a tangled mess to his shoulders. "My… name… is… Jack," he explained in the loud, slow, careful speech of someone trying to get their point across to a deaf person. He pointed at his chest and said again, "Jack." It didn't take much for Heero to swallow his sense of humor that urged him to reply in Japanese.

            "I can understand you fine… My name is Heero Yuy."

~*~*~*~

            "It's a girl…" a scrawny blonde boy whispered to the group following him as they picked their way across the debris-strewn beach. He stopped over Duet and frowned, deep in thought. She was curled up, her hands grasped behind her bent knees, lying unconscious among splinters of wood. Blood trickled down her cheek from a small gash under her right eye, but she appeared otherwise unhurt.

            "Is it alive?"

            "I think so…" The boy approached, holding his sharpened stick in front of him. When he was near enough to touch her with it, he reconsidered, and switched to the blunt end.

            "Don't wake it up!"

            "It's just a girl!"

            "Ralph, don't!" the pudgy boy to his left moaned, tugging on the remains of Ralph's ragged sleeve. Ralph yanked his arm away and moved closer in stubborn defiance.

            He poked at her shoulder. Her hands unclasped. Another jab and her hands slipped apart and she was half on her back, still comatose.

            "I think it's dead…"

            "Keep poking her!"

            "Leave it alone."

            Curious, but a bit more sure of himself, Ralph knelt down next to the figure and brushed the clumps of bangs out of her face. Her skin was cold to the touch but her breath was there, shallow as it may have been. Just at the edge of puberty as he was, he did the first thing that came to him.

            He poked her in the chest.

            Her eyes opened halfway and Ralph jumped back, not expecting that kind up reaction.

            "…Quatre?" Duet murmured. Granted, the blurry little blonde-haired boy she saw may have resembled Quatre at some point in the Arab's life, but he simply backed up further, crawling belly-up.

            "Quatre?" she tried again.

            Ralph cried out and jabbed at her with his stick. That, with the add effects of dehydration, heat, and overexposure, was all it took and she was out again, collapsed in the same position.

            "Hey!" A tall, lanky boy came crashing through the underbrush at the top of the beach and tearing across the sand at them. "Hey! Just what do you think you're-" Unfortunately, the boy was in roughly the same shape Duet and, upon reaching the congregation, he misjudged the distance and tripped over her, collapsing next to her.

            Ralph, Piggy, and the other boys just blinked.

            "Were…grown ups always like this and we just didn't notice…?"

            "I hope not…"

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Tori: Duo, the guild main page is screaming at me… O___O