If Dani thought her parents had hovered when she'd broken her arm, it was nothing compared to breaking her neck and being in a coma. In truth, she had little to no memory of the night, or what even happened; it had all been so fast that her memory had a weird gap in it, a kind of infuriating, absolute blank spot that she couldn't fill no matter how hard she tried. When she'd finally managed to regain consciousness long enough to talk, her mother was crying, saying that she'd been in and out for days -- that had annoyed her. Days lost, days, and she was sure Parker was worried.

Then she'd found out that she'd actually been in a coma for weeks, that people had thought she died, and she was pissed. A newspaper article had run, one that claimed Parker -- no, Taranis, she had to remember that no one else knew that Parker was Taranis -- that he had killed her, and people had just eaten it up even though she was obviously alive and in the hospital, just in a coma. Sure, there were a lot of other people in comas, but the least reporters could do was get their damn facts straight. Her parents had written in, they said, and there was a little blurb in the corrections margin of the paper, but barely anyone ever even read that, and it didn't mention her by name. Just that there had been a misprint, and the teenage girl that was brutally beaten by the senshi was in a coma, not dead.

She was livid. She was furious. It was easier than being scared, than thinking about what might have happened, so she held onto the anger, gathered it close and seethed. She did get a little scared when she couldn't contact Parker, when her parents told her they hadn't heard from him since the article had run, but she was confident she would find him again. He was fine, somewhere, she just had to locate him. Maybe he didn't even know she was alive, either, because of that damn article -- maybe he actually thought she was really dead or something, who knew where he would be?

She worried about him, and that was a little strange, because her priority had always been herself, first. Parker was her boyfriend, though, someone that she shared almost every aspect of her life with -- certainly the only person who knew of her life as Magellan, who held her hand on patrol and cracked jokes about the ridiculous amount of lace and frills she had on her fuku. Parker was different from everyone else, and the notion that he thought she was no longer part of the world, part of his world, really bothered her. A lot.

She called his phone several times, thought about going to his apartment, but decided against it. If he wasn't picking up, he probably wasn't there, anyway. She hadn't been able to get ahold of Tate yet, but that was her next plan -- after she went to Hillworth to see if they had any forwarding address for him, or something. Anything. Maybe she'd ask his old roommate? But Parker and Jaime hadn't been close.

Her first obstacle was getting out of her parents' sight, anyway. She had a curfew, a really strict one now, and someone actually looked in the first night to make sure she was in bed, several times. This was really going to cramp her style -- she tried to remind them that she was now sixteen years old, but they wouldn't hear it.

That was just one more thing on the long laundry list of stuff she was pissed about. She had been in a coma for her damn birthday.

The morning after she was released, she got on the internet and logged into her facebook, was horrified to see the wall postings from people she knew and people she barely recognized, talking about what kind of person she'd been. Some of them missed her, some of them took the opportunity to send her private messages full of venom and hatred -- and oh, she'd find those girls and kick their asses -- but mostly, she was very, very creeped out. She wanted to slam her hands against the keyboard, shout at the computer that she HADN'T DIED, but when she tried to type, her hands were shaking too badly. She was mortified to realize that she was crying, heavy, fat teardrops onto the keys, and she had to take a moment to just breathe, hands pressed tight against her face.

She was only sixteen, and she'd really almost died. She'd been in a coma. For weeks. Her boyfriend thought she was dead. Her best friend thought she was dead. Her parents wouldn't let her out of their sight for longer than an hour at a time, and she had a huge gap in her memory where she was in a coma that she might have never woken up from.

When she was done crying (and she hated crying, it made her face all blotchy and gave her a headache and it was such a girl thing to do) she tucked her hair behind her ears, calmly typed a message onto her facebook status post.

I'm not dead. I was just in a coma. Call me if you have my number, and to those people who sent me nasty messages? WE ARE TALKING.

She nodded, slowly, and turned off her laptop, hands fisted on her knees. Step one: let everyone know you're alive.

Step two: find your damn boyfriend.