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There was a bunny in the forest but it certainly wasn't the kind that Ainsley was looking for. In one of her rare moments of solitude these days, Coralie Williams was stretched out on a mossy slab of rock in her bathing suit top and favorite pair of board shorts. They were a shade of pink somewhere between her hair and her ruby eyes, little white bunny heads dancing up the sides where the seams met.

Hearing the young cries for a fluffy little bunny Coralie couldn't help but laugh and wave at the approaching girl. "Sorry, I think I made them run away. I do not look like I should be here." Everything about her was bright and eye-bleedingly pink. Thankfully children, especially little girls, seemed immune to eye-bleeding pink.

"I am called Bunny though. Where I come from." Tsukino Usagi. Sometimes she wondered why she hadn't been Chiba Usagi but when you were the King and Queen of Crystal Tokyo, you probably didn't need to worry about things like legal marriage and name changes. She was Princess Small Lady Serenity of Crystal Tokyo. Only the senshi knew her real name anyway.

Watching those tiny hands creep up before being consciously pulled back down, then drifting up again, Allie couldn't help but smile. It reminded her of a time when she was younger, though she was perhaps half the age of the girl in front of her when it happened. Ever since Small Lady had hair long enough, they had been put into her odd buns every morning. But not by one of her caretakers or even one of her mother's senshi, no.

Neo-Queen Serenity was a busy woman who didn't have the time to be a mother, spending her time on things that were important to the whole world. Yet every morning for half an hour she took the time to brush out her daughters bright pink hair. 100 strokes (or so she'd thought) and then they were pinned up in the same manner of her mothers...with a unique twist. One morning, she'd been old enough to touch them and wonder about their importance.

Mama had just laughed, called her Little Rabbit, and floated ethereally from the room. Now she knew it was just what the Serenity line did of course, but then it had been something different.

"Thank you. It is okay, you can touch." Allie even dipped her head a bit so that one of the buns leaned solidly against one of Ainsley's reaching hands. "I am Coralie. When I was home they called me Bunny because of my hair. Chibiusa, little rabbit." One of her own hands lifted a four and a half foot long ponytail and laughed a bit.

"It was short then. It is very long now, huh?"

Fingers reached up and detached the buns with the ease of many years of practice. Over five feet of hair now spilled down over Coralie's shoulders and Ainsley's hands, a wide grin of pride and almost showmanship in the girl's ruby eyes. "You can play if you want. I can give you hair like mine?" Fingers reached out and without even hesitating, snagged an end of the child's silken brown hair.

"It is as long as mine was. It will be very cute if you want it." Her voice was eager to share even just a small part of what she enjoyed with this obviously eager girl. There were never many children around when she was young enough and it would have been taboo to offer the hairstyle to anyone anyway.

Here? Here it was just a strange hairstyle and if she gave it to every kid in Camp Larkspur, it wouldn't mean a damn thing. It was both depressing and lifted a weight that Allie hadn't even known she had on her.

"You can do what you like! Oh! A minute!" Almost like she had totally forgotten and now was in the grasp of realization, Coralie crawled off of her perch, dragging all that hair behind her much like the Rapunzel character she was always teased of emulating. Hands reached around in the bushes at the base of the rocks before pulling out a small backpack and a comb. "Here! To brush." Thinking it would probably amuse Ainsley somewhat, Allie simply stuck the comb in her hair and let it hang there for the smaller girl to grab.

"You can sit next to me and play with my hair, while I do your hair. Is that okay?" Fingers lightly sifted through the paler child's hair and were thoughtful. "Your hair is very clean. It will be very easy to give you odango." The bunny type were the easiest as she had done them every morning since coming here from her own time. The circular odango and heart odango that her mother and Cosmos favored might look better on her.

"Do you want round odango, bunny odango, or heart odango?"

"I think that is a good choice. When I was little, everyone called me Little Rabbit like my hair." Parting Ainsley's pale hair down the center she chatted casually, fingers combing through it so easily that a bit of envy rose through the teen. She couldn't remember the last time her fingers had gone through the six feet of her cotton-candy hair without tangling or snarling somewhere. Dragging them further had always made things worse. Maybe it was time for a change? Something a little less 30th Century Princess and more modern.

Maybe.

One of the rabbit-eared shapes was making itself present on the top of Ainsley's head before she was nudged lightly to turn around for inspection. It was different to do it for someone than do it for yourself. Muscle memory was what took over after so many years of doing her hair day in and day out.

The tail of hair that had been a gigantic pouf on the younger Chibiusa was instead more like a sleek tail on Ainsley. Coralie was sad at the fact that she had no curling iron to give it a bit of twirl. It would have been almost sickeningly adorable and she thought that was just perfect.

"So bunnies are you favorite? Not bears or...unicorns?"

Allie couldn't help at all the laughter that sounded in the sun-dappled clearing at Ainsley's last question. "I love unicorns. When I was young I used to...play a lot." It was the easiest way to explain what had happened with her and Helios, like it was some sort of made-up game that had been played out on lazy afternoons with her invisible friends. They were all gone now, or out of her reach in some way or another. Thinking of Reanna made the teen unbearably sad so she pushed it aside, starting to loop the second odango as she continued.

"There was a prince with white hair and a gold horn. He was the prince of dreams, you see, so every night he would get on his Pegasus..that is a unicorn with wings," she felt this was worth explaining, "and deliver dreams to all the good people. One day he found a maiden who had the most pure dream he had ever seen, so he came back every night to watch her dream because it was so pretty. He did not realize for a long, long time that the maiden saw him in her dream every night and wished to be his princess." Fingers combed through the tail of hair with a dreamy sigh.

"So she spoke to him and told him she wanted to see his dream and make it come true too. He was so surprised that he told her she was his dream but not yet. His maiden had to grow up before he could come take her to be the princess of dreams because she was still very very little." But he had never come. Things had fallen apart so disastrously and now her prince lived inside of a young woman who, understandably, did not want her heart and her life ruled by the soul that inhabited her body.

Securing the last odango she tapped Ainsley on the shoulder, handing her a mirror that had been inside her backpack. "Here, look!"