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Fallon did not answer the door. Mrs. Novette-Naim did. Her face was flushed, mouth forced into a tight smile. It seemed clear that she was upset about something, angry too. "You must be Liliana," she said, opening the door wider. "It's so nice to meet one of Fallon's friends." That was what her lips said, but there was no emotion behind it.

It was clear that Lily had walked in on a tense situation.

Behind her mother, Fallon sat propped up on her pillows. She smiled too, but less tensely. "Hey, Lily," she said. "It's so nice of you to come by and see me." Mrs. Novette-Naim didn't look at her daughter. She hung in the doorway like a ghost, drifting this way and that way, undecided.

Finally, she appeared to make a decision. "I'm going to the cafeteria for some coffee," she said, grabbing her purse from a chair. "You girls have fun." And she was gone, disappearing down the hall, leaving only the sharp click-click-click of her heels slapping against the hard floors.

When she was gone, Fallon relaxed. "Sorry, my mother and I have been... disagreeing." That was an understatement. Mrs. Novette-Naim was trying to force Fallon to go back to France, and her daughter was staunchly refusing. All of their discussions on the matter ended with one or both of them in tears. Fallon feared the rising feeling that this was tearing their relationship apart. If her mother went back to France without her, that gap would only widen.

But it was for the best. Fallon truly believed that. And now poor Lily was waltzing into a bad situation with all the best intentions.

There was something bubblegummy and optimistic about Lily, a naive quality that Fallon liked in romantic interests. She was too tired to contemplate it now, too worn out from fighting with her mother. Normally, she liked to keep her problems to herself, but still in the aftershock of the latest argument, Fallon let it slip.

"She wants to take me back to France with her, take me out of Crystal, make me leave for good." Fallon laid a hand on her forehead. God, she was getting a headache. "I don't know why she needs to interrogate me while I'm in a hospital bed. I don't want to go." She sighed, and dropped her hand back to the bed.

Fallon fiddled idly with her hospital bracelet. "I'm fine. That is what I keep telling her." She forced a smile. "And thank you for coming. It is very nice of you." Was she really fine? Physically, she would be. The boy managed to bruise one of her ribs. The trashcans cut her up. The ankle was just badly twisted. She might be in a soft cast or brace for a couple days, but nothing serious. Emotionally? Well... going to France wouldn't help that anyway so it hardly mattered.

Lily was simple, uncomplicated. Fallon could pick the emotions off her face before she was even certain of her own. It was comforting to see genuine sadness on Liliana's face at the possibility of her leaving, nicer still to hear that she would visit.

Wait, no. No. No visiting because Fallon would not leave.

She sighed, pressing her head back into the starched white pillow. "It's complicated," she said, dismissing the problem with a hand wave. She thought better of it. Why be rude to the new friend who took the trouble to come by? So Fallon put on a strong face. "I got attacked." The memory was there, even if it felt like a dream sometimes.

Fallon could remember the burning in her legs as she ran, her mind screaming at her for not being more in shape, better, faster, stronger. The frantic leap into the trashcans was a last attempt to survive. And then, one of those... people. The ones the sailors called dangerous. Did she trust Sailor Virgo and Sailor Cancer? Certainly more than she trusted the boy dressed in bows hiding out in the theater district and killing people in alleys. People like the boy that Wolframite killed before her drive into the trashcans -- but not her.

The look of death frozen in Wolframite's victim's eyes hung in her vision. Stared at her. She closed her eyes to try to forget, and when she opened them, Fallon saw only the deep blue of Lily's glancing back at her. "I was seeing Hamlet for this extra credit paper I have to write. And it was late... I couldn't help that. I was catching a cab. Or, trying to." If she had gone to another corner, maybe she wouldn't be here at all. "This... monster," Virgo called it a youma, but the word still sounded foreign on Fallon's tongue, "jumped at me. I fell. No one was around. I ran away, and I took a bad turn toward an alley that ran behind a warehouse. I... fell. A lot. I thought I would die." She remembered that clearly.

Fallon lifted a hand and pushed her hair out of her face. She couldn't even imagine what she looked like now. To calm her nerves, she let her OCD take charge, her hands slowly folding a napkin beside her table into a fan made of evenly-spaced pleats. "A boy showed up, and... I don't know. He was one of them, one of the terrorists. I thought he'd kill me, but he didn't." There was more to the story, but Fallon didn't want to say it. She had no idea how to process the fact that Wolframite killed a youma to save her, then showed her a dead body of someone he'd killed, then cried, then knocked her out, and then... called the hospital? How else had she gotten here?

The situation made no sense to her, and she didn't want to get Liliana caught up in it too -- or to make the girl think she was crazy.

Fallon smirked, but it was dark, full of pain. "He said the same thing. He told me I was stupid for being out at night." Her hands were shaking, but she stilled them, pouring all of her focus into folding the little fan. She told Liliana the same thing that she told the terrorist that night in the alley. "What am I supposed to do? Lock my life away and swallow the key? It wasn't... late. And I wasn't alone at first. It was 10:30, and I was catching a cab... and then I was just. Alone." Fallon closed her eyes. She didn't want to get emotional over the issue, and she knew she wouldn't. Fallon had done all of her crying when her mother first got there. Now, she was just trying to process things.

"The really scary part," she said, setting the fan in her lap and pulling her hospital blanket up higher, "is that I have met him before. In broad daylight. He ambushed me on a running trail and chased me. And then again, in the theatre district. I remember his outfit very clearly." Fallon opened her eyes. She was back in control, no weepiness, no weakness.

Her hands reached back for the fan, and she resumed her folding. "If I had called you, you would have gotten attacked too." Fallon smiled weakly.

Lily was trying to be comforting, and Fallon appreciated that. Her mind, unfortunately, seemed to only go to dark places. "He was shorter than me," she said, trying to call the image of the boy who terrorized her back to her mind. She distinctly remembered looking down to him. "His hair was... dark? His face... God, I can't even remember it. I... I don't remember his face." In her head, he was a pair of glowing eyes on a smooth surface.

The outfit, on the other hand, Fallon could describe in detail. She had a knack for it even when she wasn't being attacked. "The outfit was black, maybe just very dark gray. He wore a suit jacket with five buttons and a wide folded over lapel, and the tails of his shirt stuck out from under it. He had on thigh boots and gray slacks that tucked into them. I remember the bows: sage green. One on each bell sleeve. And one on the thigh of each boot. And then one at his neck with a pendant in the center." Describing Wolframite's uniform almost made her feel better. It was a way for Fallon to compartmentalize the situation. She could describe his clothing, even if she couldn't get out of the hospital.

"I never got his name, but he had a jump rope." Fallon scoffed a little. "A jump rope."

It was hard for Fallon to process what had happened, even now. The two sailors that she had met were nothing but nice to her. They saved her; they didn't chase her or punch her in the stomach. Wolframite didn't seem totally evil. He didn't directly say that he had killed the boy in the alley, and he hadn't killed Fallon. If anything, he seemed... conflicted. This only made things more difficult for Fallon to digest.

The spotlight was beamed directly on Fallon, and she wanted it to go away. "How have you been, Lily?" She smiled, weakly, and hoped that the redhead beside her hospital bed could help her forget everything, even if just for a moment.

Nightmares? Fallon could relate. Her beloved glass marbles just didn't look the same to her anymore. Each time she picked one up, she could only think of Leonette forcing them into her mouth. It wasn't something she wanted to share.

But good grades? Fallon couldn't exactly relate to that. She was doing well in a few subjects, but her D in history was threatening to hold her back. It was hard enough recovering from the organ ring debacle. Over the summer, Fallon would be taking a full course load at Crystal just to make up for lost time. She really didn't want to have to retake her history class too.

Too many negative thoughts in an already negative place. The hospital was really such a drag.

"I'd like that," she responded, smiling. "You know, you should meet my friend Melinda. She goes to Crystal with me, and writes the loveliest music. I have a feeling you two would hit it off."

The pillow crinkled beneath her head. Damn starchy hospital sheets. Fallon would never get used to them. "You'd like Melinda," she said, again. Melinda and Lily were very similar, actually. Maybe that was why Fallon liked them both so much? When she met Melinda, granted, she had been a different person. More confident, less afraid. She sometimes wondered if Melinda saw the changes too.

Fallon didn't know much about music, but she liked karaoke and metronomes. She liked steady beats. She liked pleasantness. "'Once Upon A December'... is that from Anastasia?" It was one of the movies that made its way from France over to Destiny City when Fallon moved. With all her proclamations of maturity, she still held a soft spot for the cartoons on her childhood.