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It had been over a month since Fallon left the hospital after the Barren Pines incident. She was one of the first discharged. Most of her injuries were superficial wounds, and despite the psychiatrists insisting that she wasn’t reacting “appropriately” to what had happened to her, they had no choice but to discharge the healthy teenager. Her parents stayed as long as they could, but after awhile, Fallon just wanted to be alone. She loved her parents, she really did, but after she left the hospital, they began to fight again. Why fight? If they didn’t love each other anymore, they just needed to get divorced. It wouldn’t change how much Fallon loved either of them, but it would make being around them far more bearable. Though she never told them, the reason she decided to leave France to go to school back in Destiny City was because of their constant bickering. Fallon had a lot of control over herself, but it was hard for her to be in an environment of chaos and negative energy. Positivity made Fallon feel happy and balanced. Her parents were only bringing her down and making her life much harder than it needed to be.

So she escaped to Destiny City – and fell headfirst into Barren Pines.

Her parents couldn’t remember the school, but Fallon did. She had memories of her first months – of Andeon and Imogen and even Leonette, who was no longer in the waking world. Thinking of Leonette made her heart sag in her chest. Fallon felt like Leonette was one of the only people who saw her for who she truly was and cared about her in spite of it. The teal-haired girl never got angry at Fallon, always made exceptions for her weird quirks, always smiled even when Fallon was frowning. And now she was dead. Though Fallon had done her best to block Leonette from her memory, it was nearly impossible, and she would find her slipping back in during moments of quiet relaxation. They hadn’t been dating technically, but Leonette was certainly the closest thing Fallon had ever had to a real relationship.

Thinking of Leonette was too painful, and so Fallon forced herself to think of someone else. A very unexpected face came to her mind – Laney Sutton. And it was that face that had Fallon clipping on a “Visitor” badge and click-clacking her way down the narrow hallway of Destiny Memorial once again. A few nurses paused to look at her – did they remember her? Fallon couldn’t be certain. Her purse bumped against her hip as she walked, her other arm holding a dark green bag from the bottom. Laney had survived Barren Pines, but she survived that prison only to be moved to a different one, the internal prison of a coma. Fallon had heard the news when Imogen gave her the list of survivors with a tiny asterisk by Laney’s name. Why had it taken her so long to visit? Laney might not have been a close friend – hell, she could be pretty annoying – but she was someone that Fallon knew, someone who had gone through the same things that she had.

Except Laney never woke up from the nightmare.

Turning down the next hallway, Fallon found the number written in cool steel gray outside each door, the tiny placards reading the names of those within. She paused only for a moment to read “Landscape Sutton” and then entered through the starkly white entranceway. A nurse was inside, switching one bag of clear liquid for another on her IV stand. Fallon smiled politely and waited for the woman to leave. The nurse shut the door behind her, leaving Fallon alone with Laney.

For a long time, Fallon didn’t move. The steady beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor stole the silence from the room, echoed only by Laney's deep and steady breathing. It was almost pleasant, actually, to Fallon's ears. Everything was constant, nothing varied. She loved the heart monitor liked she loved metronomes. It made her wonder why leaving the hospital had seemed so desirable to her before. Within its walls, there was control, there was consistency, there was peace. Her eyes fell to Laney, and she felt instantly guilty. Control, consistency, peace -- but no awakened body to appreciate it.

Crossing to Laney's bedside, Fallon glanced to her nightstand, moving a few things aside. She set the dark green bag on the floor and her purse in a chair. Bending down, she pulled a potted plant from the green bag -- a fern -- and set in on the nightstand. "I think you like plants," she said, feeling stupid for saying the words aloud. Could Laney hear her? Fallon often heard that coma patients claimed they could hear voices and sometimes even remember what was said to them. If that was true, then Fallon decided it was worth her humiliation to give Laney a moment of company. "You had an ugly plant at Barren Pines... I think. I mean, I remember it... sort of. Just like I remember everything sort of." Flashes of memory would come to Fallon from time to time, but she could never be certain what was real and what was a creation of her nightmares. Everything at Barren Pines was crystal clear for the first few months and then... blurriness. Like looking through frosted glass at her own memories. She could remember inviting Serenade over to her room on a date, but she could not remember how the night ended. She could remember auditioning to cater the school play, but she couldn't remember the actual performance. Were these all a result of the drugs that the organ ring doctors had given her?

Fallon scoffed. Was she believing that now too? No, Barren Pines was real... wasn't it? Lately, Fallon wasn't sure. Her eyes strayed back to Laney, fingers fidgeting with the little fern. "It's a fern," she said, placing one hand on the railing of the bed. "I don't know if you like ferns. I don't know what kind of name you would give this one either..." Fallon didn't like to name inanimate objects, but she hoped Laney might dream up one in her coma. Could people in comas dream? Fallon had no idea.

Seconds ticked by as Fallon stood over Laney's bed, trying to decide what to say to a person in a coma. After a moment, she shifted her weight and said, "I'm sorry this happened to you, Laney. I really am. You survived, yes, but... also you didn't. You're caught in some limbo between the rest of us." Each word made Fallon feel foolish. "I wonder what you're seeing in there..." Maybe nothing. Maybe just darkness. The thought chilled Fallon.

As much as she wanted to leave, Fallon also wanted to stay. She wanted to stand there until Laney woke up. She wanted someone to tell her that everything was going to be okay, that all of this happened for a reason that was too big to understand. In all of her heart, Fallon wanted desperately to believe that the friends she had lost had not died in vain. That she had not been stolen from her family and hidden away for no reason. But there seemed to be more answers than questions. The people who had perpetrated the Barren Pines organ theft were never found. So where were they? Off hocking body parts of her classmates, of Leonette? Again, Fallon felt a chill creep through her body.

Leaning forward, Fallon closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like to never open them again. It was morbid, as if she thought closing her eyes for a moment would give her an idea of what it would be like to be in a coma like Laney, or to die like Leonette. She opened her eyes. "I am buying a horse," she said at last. It was easier to talk about herself when the other person had no way of responding. "I joined Crystal Academy's equestrian team. I have no idea what to expect, but on Monday, I will be joining their practices." The babbling account of her current life situation made Fallon feel at ease and so she kept going. She talked about Crystal Academy, and the other survivors, and her run-in with Sailor Virgo. She told Laney about the meal she was planning to cook at her next dinner party. She even told Laney she could come if she woke up in time, which in retrospect made her feel lousy. She rambled until she was sharing details about her parents' marriage that she had never said to anyone else.

By the time she finished, the sun was setting, and a nurse came by to tell Fallon that visiting hours were over and it was time to say goodbye. Fallon nodded, embarrassed that the nurse might have caught some of her rambling. Whatever her intentions had been, the visit to Laney had been therapeutic for Fallon. She said whatever she wanted because Laney couldn't respond. Laney couldn't judge her or share her secrets. And talking out loud made her feel good. Would it help Laney? Fallon had no idea. But she spent her afternoon trying to restore normalcy to her life, even if it involved talking to a girl in a coma.

Before she left, Fallon watered the little fern and promised Laney she'd make sure the nurse looked after it. Fallon could not promise to stop by every day, she knew she would never stick to it. Instead, she brushed a bit of hair from Laney's face, an oddly intimate gesture, and said, "I'll come back." And she would. Maybe not the next day or week, but at some point, Fallon would find her footsteps leading her back to this hospital room, if only to be reminded of what fate she could have had, how terrible the Barren Pines incident really could have been for her.

But Fallon was not Laney. When Fallon left, she returned to friends and family and school. Laney just stayed in the bed, alone, comforted only by the beep-beep-beep of her heart monitor, the little fern by her bedside bending toward the light.

It had been a few years since Fallon was last forced to sit in a doctor's office to talk about her feelings.

It started when she was seven years old after multiple reports from her elementary school about "unruly behavior" and "insubordination." At first, there were parent-teacher conferences. Lots of them. But her parents did not want to medicate their child, something the school tried to push time after time. When the conferences didn't help and the medication was denied again, Fallon was moved to EH Self-Contained. (EH? A nice PC way of disguising "emotionally handicapped.") Most of the kids in Fallon's class had severe learning disabilities too, but she didn't. She wasn't the best student in the world, but she made As and Bs and still got a special cake from her mother for turning in quality report cards. Sitting in a padded room with the rest of the underage sociopaths was painful for Fallon. The focus was never on learning; it always degraded into someone throwing a tantrum and the rest of the class being sent to the other side of the room for quiet study.

The Novette-Naims did not like the stories that their nine-year-old child had to share about those programs. So they took her out and sent her to private school. At this time, Fallon's father had not yet patented the technology that would fill their bank account over night, and the schooling was a great financial strain. Fallon seemed to do well -- at first. But then her old habits reemerged. She would be in the principal's office daily for throwing someone's lunch box across the room, stealing her neighbor's pencils, tugging on other girls' pigtails. Once again, Fallon was facing a self-contained learning environment, or expulsion. Her parents kept the administrators at bay by promising to enroll her in counseling outside of school, and they did. But it was another bill to add to their daughter's already pricey list of needs.

Dr. Price was a nice old lady with graying hair, wrinkled hands, and a box full of toys. She'd play with Fallon for hours and ask her easy questions like, "How do you feel about this toy, Fallon? Does it make you happy? What about this one? What makes you unhappy about it?" She taught Fallon how to count backwards from ten and how to breathe deeply when her heart began to pound. She even tried to get Fallon to talk about her dreams of the stains that she couldn't get out. For a time, this, too, seemed to help.

Then Fallon cut off the pigtail of Susan Lohr during arts and crafts in the sixth grade.

To this day, Fallon cannot remember why she did it. She was expelled that afternoon, and Susan's parents showed up, threatening to sue. The Novette-Naims pleaded with the family, and in the end, the Lohrs agreed to not press charges. It was a tense time in the household. And then Fallon's father applied for and received the patent for a new bit of technology his firm had been working on for years. Suddenly, Fallon's bills were nothing. The bigger problem was getting her into a school -- any school. After much discussion and heated arguments over the dinner table, the Novette-Naims decided that Fallon needed a fresh start. Her father's sister was ill back in France anyway, and in a matter of weeks, the decision was made to move the entire family across the ocean. Destiny City held bad memories. Surely France would be better. This was what they thought.

Fallon started in a new school, but her French was not as good as her classmates', no matter how much her father had spoken it to her as a child. She could understand them, but her own words were thought of as having a hideous Western accent. The other children pushed her around and teased her. Stress did not sit well with Fallon, never had. Again, she lashed out, getting into a fight with five other children at recess, and again, she was held accountable by the school system. They made it very clear: Fallon needed to be medicated or she needed to get out.

The thought of medicating their eleven-year-old daughter was painful for the Novette-Naims. They wanted to believe that Fallon could simply overcome it. In the end, they gave up. Fallon was started on a regiment of anti-anxiety medications, including a few to treat the side effects of the other medications. Fallon's organization and diligence made taking the pills simple. Her OCD helped her withstand some of the more negative side effects too -- the weight gain, dry mouth, the jittery feelings, nausea, lightheadedness, and difficulty sleeping. She remained on the medication for a year and a half.

Then one day, her mother forgot to refill her prescription. The withdrawal symptoms were nearly immediate. Suddenly, Fallon felt every compulsion come rushing back in full force. She couldn't go to school and spent the day throwing up while her mother frantically called the therapist to beg for a few pills until the pharmacy opened the next day. When she finally got the pills, Fallon stared at them for a long time. And then she flushed them down the toilet.

If this was what it would feel like every time she missed the pills, then Fallon wanted nothing to do with them. She could manage her OCD just fine, right? After all, she was older, and her new therapist had been teaching her more and more activities to help diffuse her OCD-induced anxiety. For a while, she didn't tell her mother or doctor what she had done. She wanted to prove to them that she could handle it. When they found out three months later that she was off her medication, doing well in school, and handling all her compulsions in a controlled and effective manner, they came to the consensus that Fallon should try staying off the pills for a while.

And so she did.

It was hard, but Fallon managed. She took up crocheting. She took up gardening. She took up cleaning. She took up organizing marbles. Fallon's life was a series of coping mechanisms that she had designed herself to maintain control over what she considered to be minor distractions. Or, at least she told herself they were minor. Things continued to be fine for a couple of years, but then her parents began to argue. And argue. And argue. The added stress in the house made Fallon more stressed, and she could feel herself slipping more and more. That was when she decided to return to Destiny City for school. Living in her parents house was only threatening her control. She reasoned that separating herself from the situation until they worked it out would be the best possible answer.

Plus, this Barren Pines sounded like a great place. Who wouldn't want to go there?

In the wake of the trauma of Barren Pines/Organ Theft, Fallon found herself once again being forced into therapy. Given her previous record of misconduct, Crystal Academy made it a stipulation of her enrollment, and her parents refused to return to France until after her new therapist told them it was okay. She had no other option and so she returned to the office of Dr. Price with indignation set in her brow and anxiety pounding in her heart.

But this wasn't her Dr. Price, the kind old lady with the toys. This was her son who had followed in his mother's footsteps -- Dr. Nathaniel Price. Fallon didn't know what to expect, but she knew that, unfortunately, there was nothing she could do to stop it now.