It had only been a couple of days since MJ and Willow had last seen the little island girl; she wasn't at the lair when they returned the day after their first sighting, and attempts to track her had proved useless. It seemed that she would be found when she wanted to be found. Thankfully, it hadn't taken MJ long to shake off her funk from their first meeting. 'Probably just ate something venomous,' MJ had mused to Willow with a cheeky smile.

Which was just as well, because the little girl had shown up again, and was currently clinging to Willow's back and going full Hitchcock's Psycho on her with her little DIY dagger.

"Get off!" yelled Willow, trying to throw the girl off as she repeated blocked the arm stabbing down at her. The knife was getting dangerously close to Willow's vitals with every swing, but the girl's unpredictable but untrained stabs against Willow's expert and practiced combat skills meant Willow hadn't been seriously injured... yet.

MJ grabbed at the girl, wrapped her arms around her torso in a big hug-like move and did her best to yank her off Willow. She kept a close eye on the hand that was wielding the knife and the girl squirmed and jerked in unnatural ways. The girl, skinny and brimming with unchecked rage at the person restraining her, wriggled from MJs grasp. She got in one good bony elbow into MJ's face as she scrambled onto the floor and jumped back, facing the women with her knife out and a snarl on her face, her other hand hiding behind her back. Both her good eye and her milky, cataracts-touched eye glinted with a savage ferocity.

MJ slowly put her hands up. "Listen, kid, we aren't going to hurt you," MJ said, in as soothing a voice as she could muster. "It's okay. I'm sorry we snooped in your home." In response the girl hissed, and swiped her knife in warning.

"Fuck this." Willow's hand went to the hook on her pants where the gun she got from the life raft was. "Where the fuck is—The bitch took my gun!"

MJ was fairly certain that the girl couldn't speak English, but the anger on Willow's face must have been a universal language because the girl's face morphed into a too-wide smile as she brought her bandaged hand out from behind her back. The gun, a small black pistol perfect for a spy, was twirling precariously around her finger.

"Willow, it's alright, she doesn't know how—"

Ignoring her, Willow braced herself to pounce at the feral preteen, when the preteen in question launched the dagger with pinpoint accuracy directly towards the centre of MJs chest.

Using her lightning reflexes (which had saved MJs life more times than she could count), Willow recognised immediately what the girl was doing and moved to shove MJ out the way. MJ yelped and twisted as she was flung to the ground, having barely registered the object flying at her as she toppled awkwardly on the ground with a thud. Fortunately, she had not been impaled in the chest. Unfortunately, she did feel a strange tingling in her shoulder. She snuck a peek at her left shoulder.

'Yep,' she thought to herself, looking at the rocky dagger sticking out of her flesh, 'that's gonna hurt in a bit.'

The sound of small footfalls and a scratchy, disjointedly, yet melodic cackle filled the air, but it was soon overtaken by Willow's cursing. MJ looked up to Willow, who was just kneeling down to inspect MJs wound with a frustrated look on her face.

"Fuck, are you okay?"

"At least we got her knife."

The pain kicked in soon after, a searing heat burning up her shoulder as Willow helped her hobble back to the cave. It wasn't bleeding yet; they both had the good sense to leave the dagger lodged in MJ's shoulder for now. They were only a few minutes away from the cave when the girl jumped them, so it didn't take long for them to be safely sheltered in their torch-lit home. MJ sat herself up against a smooth section of cave wall while Willow collected their medical supplies. In a move that confirmed that MJ's claim about a 'psychic link' with Sharkbait was at least somewhat true, Sharkbait glided into the cave and dropped yet another bottle of Questionable Island Spirits next to her.

MJ sucked in air through her teeth sharply to avoid yelling in pain as she unscrewed the bottle and took a big gulp of the red-brown liquid within. Mmmm. Rum.

"I need you to sit still while I take this out," Willow said, inspecting MJ's injury very closely.

"Go for it," MJ grimaced, taking another swig of rum. She swished the drink around in her mouth, focusing on its burnt caramel flavour and overwhelming burn to distract her from the shooting pain of the knife being dislodged from its place. Willow quickly threw it down and replaced it with some gauze, but not before a good stream of warm blood had run down her arm. MJ instinctively applied pressure to the gauze using the hand attached to her non-stabbed shoulder as she swallowed the rum.

Willow exhaled sharply. "Do you know how lucky you are that her rinky dink razor is small? If the wound was any deeper, it would have severed your axillary artery. The bleeding from that would be a lot harder to stop." MJ rolled her eyes as Willow packed more material over the blood-soaked gauze. "Did you hear her laugh while she was running away? I would recognise it anywhere. That motherfucker has been watching us since we got here and I can tell because she's heard your unhinged chuckle enough to learn it. She has your laugh." Willow's eyes widened. "And my gun."

MJ laughed with as little chest movement as possible. "Relax. What's the worst she could do? If she's been here for so long, she probably doesn't know what a gun even is. She hasn't seen you use it yet, so how would she know how to use it?"

"She could figure it out! The little mogwai is crafty."

"Like the kid from The Jungle Book?"

"What? No, it's like a demon—"

"Oh, I remember, from the Gremlin movie. I gotcha."

"What? No, it's not... You know what, nevermind. It's not important."

MJ smiled to herself as Willow folded a triangular bandage from the first aid kit. Taunting Willow was a great distraction from the throbbing pain. She leant forward off the cave wall so Willow could quickly strap the padding in place with a roller bandage. With her good hand now free from the wound, she grabbed the bottle and took another mouthful. Then, she held the cool glass up to her bruised cheek where she had copped an elbow in the fight.

"Put your arm up. I need to sling it so you don't move the wound too much." With a pained wince, MJ moved her injured arm so it was her body with her finger resting at the opposite shoulder. Willow continued talking as she tied the sling, "What's important is that the little bitch has my gun and has decided to start attacking us with murderous fucking intent. She killed Sam, which actually makes me like her more, but if she thinks we're next, she's got another thing coming. We need to deal with her now."

MJ leant back against the rock once Willow was done with a curious smile. "Deal with her? You mean, like, befriend her and steal the gun back, right?"

Willow gave MJ her stern look MJ recognised as her 'serious government operative stare'. "We need to neutralise the threat, by whatever means necessary."

"Hang on, Willow, are you being serious? Do you actually want to kill her?"

Willow replied in a frighteningly serene manner. "If we need to."

MJ shook her head.

"No. Absolutely not. We are not killing that kid."

Willow sat back, an almost insulted look on her face. "Do you have another knife lodged in your head as well? She's thrown a knife at you twice and tried to make a pin cushion out of me. We know she's perfectly willing to murder us, and she doesn't want is to live on this island with her. I don't see any other solution."

"So, what, you jump immediately to child murder?"

"Yes, if it's the only way to protect us and our home."

"...I can't believe that's what you're suggesting."

Willow got stood up and stomped away a few steps, crossing her arms over her chest. "And what, exactly, do you think we should do?"

"I don't know, but we can't just kill her. I know I've done a lot of iffy things in my life, but I draw the line at murdering a preteen."

"So now you've got a conscience?" Willow turned back and gestured her arms wildly. "What about all those people on the cruise ship, huh? Kids were going to be stranded on lifeboats in the ocean, you didn't care then."

"That's different. You want to, and I cannot stress this enough, actively murder this poor girl."

"Poor girl!?" Willow started pacing from cave wall to cave wall. "She's trying to kill us, MJ! Just look at your shoulder! She is a smart, fast, and deadly opponent with an in depth knowledge of this island. She probably knows of at least 20 different ways to murder us without us even knowing she was there. We need to kill her before she kills us."

"She is not an opponent, she's a kid. And of course she's attacking the first adults she's seen, think about how rough she's had it. Growing up on this island all alone, having to deal with all sorts of crazy horrors like krakens in the beach and killer centipedes and who knows what else." MJ looked away from the pacing Willow and at the dirt ground next to her. "Everything's fine until one day her mum's suddenly gone and she has to fend for herself, no one looking out for her. I mean, sure, she survived, she might be fine now. In fact, I bet she's stronger for it. But she probably hates anything that even resembles the mother figure that let her down. Her mum abandoned her to this! Of course she hates her mum, only an absolutely shit mother would do something like that."

When MJ looked back up to Willow, she was standing still and eyeing MJ with curiosity. "That's a weird take-away from this situation. Is there anything you want to tell me about your mother, MJ?"

"What? No, my mum was a sweetheart."

Willow pursed her lips. "...Are you sure?"

"Yeah, she was great. Wait, are you talking about my actual mum or my biological mum? 'Cause I never met her, I was adopted."

"Ah, that makes sense." Willow nodded slowly, then resumed her pacing. "Regardless of how hard the poor baby's upbringing was and how justified her hatred of adults is, she's not going to stop attacking us until she's dead. She. Is. Trying. To. Kill. Us. And she will if we give her the chance."

MJ rolled her eyes. "Oh, please, she's a kid. She can't hurt us that bad."

"Your shoulder, MJ! You won't be able to use your arm for who knows how long. You could still die of blood loss, or infection, or even a slow-acting poison if she coated the knife in toxic berries. And she was aiming for your heart!"

"But I'm fine! This is just a flesh wound, I've been hurt worse falling out of bed."

Willow made motions like she was about to pull out her own hair. "Why are you like this," she seethed to herself.

"Look, I refuse to believe that killing her is the only thing we can do in this situation. We could... I don't know, find some way to show her we don't mean her any harm. She's a scared kid trying to survive the best way she knows how. You don't deal with those kids by killing them. You help them, you show them that they don't have to be scared. You look out for them because no one else is going to."

"You want us to 'look out' for her? She doesn't need anyone to 'look out' for her, she's clearly capable of caring for herself."

"No kid that young can really look after themselves."

"I could!"

"No you couldn't. Maybe you knew how to survive, but you had parents to look after you."

"Oh yes, sorry, that's the solution here. We shouldn't kill her, we should bring her in and raise her as our own. We can be her two island mums!"

MJ put the rum bottle down with a little more force than necessary. "I did not say that." Her tone was defensive. "If I know anything about myself, it's that I would be an absolutely shit mother."

Now, MJ knew that Willow was a very perceptive person. She had to be, she was a trained spy. So when MJ watched Willow pause, brows furrowed and cogs turning, she knew instantly that she had screwed up. She'd slipped. She was so good at keeping up the facade, she'd grown complacent. Her heart skipped a beat then raced to catch up. Willow was connecting the dots in the way only a true paranoid conspiracy theorist could and as her eyes grew wide and her mouth fell agape MJ couldn't stop her stomach from turning to lead inside her just like it had a couple of days ago. Willow gave her a questioning glance, but MJ looked away at the ground next to her, refusing to meet her stare.

"MJ, are you a mother?"

No, of course not, she wanted to say. I don't have a family waiting for me back in Australia. I grew up on a small tropical island on the back of a turtle named Kevin. She taught me how to navigate by the stars and create the most intricate maps of the seas. I can talk to animals. Of course I'm not a mother.

MJ sighed.

She picked up the bottle and drank a bit more rum.

And then a little bit more.

And she gestured for Willow to join her on the ground. She did, kneeling next to MJ along the wall. MJ offered her the bottle, which Willow took. She didn't drink from it, instead placing it just out of MJ's reach.

Darn. There goes MJ's backup plan of drinking until she was too plastered to talk. She sighed again.

"So, I was a bit of a... Rowdy teenager, shall we say, and, boy, he was not," she started, still looking at the blood-stained dirt and not at Willow. "My husband, I mean. Goody two-shoes who wrote poetry for fun, if you can believe it. But man, we were in love. We had that kind of all-consuming teenage romance that people write songs about. Before I was twenty, we were married and I was pregnant. Still not entirely sure which came first. Anyway, he wanted to settle down in the suburbs and start our family right, and it sounded like a good idea at the time so we went for it.

"Then she came along. I'll tell you, I thought what Jack and I had was love, until I was holding my own bub in my arms for the first time. Now that was something else. But... Well, here's the problem." MJ started fiddling with the material on her jeans as she spoke. "I loved being her mother, I really did, but I hated being a mother. It's so bloody boring. Nap times and mum's groups and grocery shopping, just on and on and on. The same thing, week in, week out. You know all that stuff you hear about parenthood being an adventure? It's true, but they're not talking about the interesting kind of adventure. I wanted the kind of thing you saw in the movies. I wanted to travel the world and find lost civilisations and overthrow a monarchy. I wanted to sail the seven seas as a pirate and map uncharted waters while evading the best navies in the world.

"I loved my daughter with everything I had," MJ said through the lump in her throat. "But I could see so clearly the direction my life was going and it was killing me. So, when she was a little over 12 months, I took the easy way out. During the night, I packed a bag and left. No note, no goodbyes, no warning. I just left, and I didn't look back."

MJ found herself pulled out of the moment by her watery eyes and sniffly nose. Don't you fucking dare, she thought to herself, I'm not going to ugly cry in front of Willow.

She snuck a peak at Willow to gage her reaction. She was looking forward, nodding slowly with a contemplative look on her face.

This was a mistake. She should have stuck to her instincts: Bottle everything up and pretend the bottle is full of champagne. It had worked well for her so far.

When Willow hadn't said anything for seconds, MJ felt compelled to fill the silence.

"And, you know, it's silly, because of course it's all for the best," she rushed to get out trying to force a casual tone of voice. "I obviously wasn't a very good mum, or I wouldn't be here, would I? And to your point, I should definitely not try to raise the island girl." She laughed, a little manically. "The poor thing's had it hard enough, can you imagine the damage I would do to her? She's probably more grown up than I am. Besides, I don't have a very good track record with families, and I doubt I'd ever actually be ready for one of those."

"What are we, then?"

MJ flinched at the intrusion of Willow's voice into her self-deprecating tangent. "Huh?"

"We want to live on this island together for the rest of our lives. Doesn't that kind of qualify us as a family?"

MJ looked to Willow, who wore a raised eyebrow and a friendly smile. MJ bit back her relieved smile as she joking rolled her eyes in response; a few tears escaped down her cheek. "We're not family, we're best friends."

"At this point, there's no difference," Willow stated very matter-of-factly.

MJ sighed, like a weight had finally been lifted from her impaled shoulder. "So... You don't think I'm a horrible person?"

"We've all done shitty things to the people we care about. That doesn't make us shitty people, any more than doing nice things make us nice people. As long as you're doing your best with the information you have at the time." She put a delicate hand on MJ's good shoulder. "I'm pretty sure any court system in the world would be willing to declare you legally insane, but no, I don't think you're a horrible person. You turned out fine."

"Eh, I don't know about that. Maybe check back in when I'm 80, we'll see then," MJ chuckled.