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Giselle had not intended to come back to the hospital so soon, but her hair had been down when she woke up.

Her hair had been down. Before, it had been up, and she wanted her hairtie back. Giselle was not usually one for sentiment, but she kept things that helped her stay in control, things that helped her remember, and Barren Pines was already feeling unreal enough as it was. She had no idea what the nurses had done with the dirty rubber band, probably thrown it out. But there was a chance it might still be there, and as long as there was a chance, Giselle was going to take it.

As she attempted to go into the ward, however, she was stopped by nurses. If one was close by in the hallway, the conversation could be overheard thusly:

"I beg your pardon?" followed by murmurs from the nurse.

"Well, I don't think I need a guest pass, I was just in here yesterday." More murmurs.

"Oh, for God's sake." A more emphatic murmur.

"I'm visiting my fellow victims, I'm sure that's acceptable." Questioning murmur.

"Yes, I'm related to," A pause, as Giselle picked one of the many names she had glanced at on the list before she had left the other day at random, "Azzo. There is an Azzo in this ward, and he is my third cousin, and I love him very dearly."

Thus, she was ushered to Azzo Wolf Crowley's bedside as he became her convenient alibi. This was becoming quite a task just for a hair tie.

"The organ trafficking ring." Giselle said absently, as she looked around the ward and tried to ascertain which way the bed she had been occupying was. The difficulty with hospitals was that every bit of them looked pretty much the same- white, white, white, as far as the eye could see. "We were both recovered from it." Giselle was not about to ramble on about Barren Pines. Her identity as Libra was compromised when the talk turned to Barren Pines, and organ trafficking was a convenient phrase for what had happened to them.

"You're my third cousin, incidentally. Welcome to the Petrova family." There was no room in Giselle's tone for argument, then she added "You wouldn't have happened to notice where I was staying, would you?" She certainly hadn't seen him, the beds around her were empty when she left. But she hadn't exactly been looking.

Giselle was being herself, which meant she was offering statements about things that were obvious to her and then expecting everyone she was talking to to be able to keep up.

"Don't tilt your head like that, it looks ridiculous." she added, adding insult to confusion.

Giselle watched what Azzo did with his face and raised one of her thin blonde eyebrows.

She rolled her eyes at his despair at being unable to remember her. "Well I'm sure you'll remember, cousin." said the blue-eyed blonde to the golden-eyed sable haired boy. She labelled him as slow, which wasn't fair considering he was in a hospital bed and confused when she was fine, just tired and ornery. But, for heaven's sake, it wasn't even as if they looked related. Her hands twitched as the urge to set the historical record straight nagged at her, but if she did and he called the nurse, it would be a poor move on her behalf.

In fact, the information that he didn't remember much justified her not mentioning Barren Pines, and also meant that her identity was safe. "I'm not hungry. Thank you for offering." However, she was looking at him more interestedly, as if she was hungry for something else. It was unnerving, the slanted eyes of the cat staring at the canary.

"What do you remember, Azzo?" she asked curiously.

"Well, you don't remember me," Giselle pointed out, a touch unhelpfully, considering she was acting like she was expecting him to remember a blatant lie.

She startled at his comment about her hair, something unexpected and something Giselle was not used to dealing with. She wasn't good at physical compliments, and thus she blushed and looked away so he wouldn't see. "There's nothing wrong with redheads. The house of Tudor had some famous redheads, including Queen Elizabeth I. She was quite capable, and I'm sure your nurse is as well." However, an image of the redheaded Captain using that boy to attack Virgo flashed in her mind as he whispered to her. Could Azzo have had a run in with her as well? It seemed that though he appeared to have forgotten everything, some feelings had been left behind. It was a shame that he had come out of the situation with such an illogical fear, but Giselle got the feeling he was hardly logical to begin with.

"And you can remember nothing more?" she asked. It was good to know. The zodiacs must have been able to remember more about the situation than the other survivors, unless Azzo was a zodiac, but she doubted it. She could remember the faces of a few of them, and she didn't remember his amongst them.

She was speaking rather loudly now, partially because she was pacing the ward, looking down at the floor and under beds.

A thin, green rubber band. Considering everything here was mostly white, it should at least stand out.

Giselle's head peeked up from where she had been kneeling to look underneath a bed.

"A thin green rubber band." she informed him, then went back to her search. It would have seemed like a joke if not for the tone of her voice and the look on her face, but there they were, and there she was, staring at the floor like she could intimidate it into producing the offending item. "I don't suppose you've seen it."

This cousin who looked nothing like him, seemed to have little interest in him, and almost immediately began looking in his ward for an innocuous rubber band was somewhat suspicious. Giselle, seeming to realize this, went back over to Azzo's bedside to pay him some token attention. "If you move, you're going to do yourself an injury. I heard you making all that fuss when I came in, I really don't see what better things you have to do than lay down and rest."

No matter how harmless Azzo seemed, Giselle supposed that there was a point where even he would put two and two together. Giselle hoped to avoid that point, however, after she gave her advice to him, she turned on her heel again and began to pace the room once more. Whatever that rubber band meant, it was clearly weighing on her mind more than he was.

At his words, Giselle pulled open a drawer. She hadn't thought of it, but it had been a long day.

A long week.

A long year, in fact.

Giselle's inner voice (which sounded suspiciously like Nestor Petrova) said that a long day was no excuse for poor mental performance, but more alarming was the other mental voice that was now in her head, the one that kept urging her to keep balance. The one that was making her look at Azzo and feel sorry for him, the one that should not have been there, was never there before.

You have at least twelve people to be close to. Who does he have? Was it a voice that had always been in her, dormant? Was it the fault of her new senshi powers? She didn't know where it had come from, but it had surfaced like rot in the water after she had removed herself from Barren Pines.

She supposed he must have hallucinated Alease, the onionheaded girl that Giselle had only been briefly introduced to had not been on the list of survivors that she had seen. "I'm sorry," she said briefly, shutting the cabinet. "I'm sure you have friends. It's been a year though, what kind of friend would go to the hospital on the off chance that one of the kids that showed up was within their acquaintance?" Not even Tate had come to the hospital, and it was the only thing Giselle had to hold against her, to be mad about. Tate had a year's absence to berate Giselle for. Giselle only had a car ride's worth to be upset about, or at least to be openly upset about. She wasn't about to tell Tate about what really happened at Barren Pines.

Giselle bit her lip. Telling him her first name meant revealing her whole identity, and whether she felt sorry for him or not, that was a bit too much information if she wanted to make sure she got out with the rubber band.

Rubber band. She looked around the room that she had been crawling around the floor in just moments ago and frowned. There was, she knew, no way that she would find that rubber band. They must have cleaned up her area as soon as she left, and of course a beaten up bit of elastic would be tossed out right away. Anyone with any common sense knew that, and Giselle was usually possessed with more common sense than most people. So why had she even come to the hospital?

She didn't know, and that was frightening to her. Maybe just trying to control things, she had been having trouble with control recently, or rather her lack thereof. Everyone was deciding things for her, Tate leaving, her sudden transformation to Libra, waking up in a hospital ward. The rubber band had briefly provided her with some control when she was, for lack of a better term, undead. (Or outwardly undead, techinically she supposed she had been undead during her whole stay at Barren Pines.) Trying to find it had been her way of trying to regain control.

But there was a different hairtie in her hair and she was clean and well. She no longer needed the rubber band, it was just sentiment that had driven her to look for it. And spending time searching for relics of a different battle was futile. If she wanted to regain control, she should be doing useful things, packing for school or patching things up with Tate, not this nonsense.

She looked back at Azzo. "Giselle. My name is Giselle."

And, to set the historical record straight, she added "I'm not your cousin. I'm..."

"I'm a friend who came to visit." she decided. If she had wasted her trip, she might as well make Azzo feel better. He wasn't in control either, and if Giselle didn't totally respect him, she could at least empathize with him.

"I've been there," Giselle said offhandedly. "I was just released a few days ago, they undid my bun." She said it like it was some sort of personal offense. "When my family picked me up it was quite a relief." Family and Tatiana Konstantin were the only visitors she would expect or even appreciate. Giselle's circle of friends was so small as to be microscopic, and with Barren Pines destroyed, she had even lost some people that she was willing to view as friendly acquaintances.

"Are you okay?"

Giselle paused. So far today, she had pretended to be a strange boy's cousin, crawled on her hands and knees looking for a rubber band, and completely ruined her cover in one sentimental moment of weakness. She certainly didn't seem to be okay, or at least not the Giselle Petrova definition of okay. She had memories she didn't know how to deal with, Libra's memories, a situation she had to adapt to, and she and Tate were fighting. The strain was beginning to show.

"I don't know." Her insides squirmed, Giselle hated not knowing things. "I need to go." Moving towards the door, she bit her lip and said, "I hope you recover promptly," before she left.

She departed rubber bandless, but she had picked up things to think about instead.