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There was no point in staying indoors on a sunny day, particularly not a sunny October day. Summer was petering out into autumn, and the new season came wrapped in khaki jackets and the warm, rustic colors of a fire blazing out its last life. Eager to soak up the last warm days and sunshine before the seasons pivoted onward toward winter, Laney Sutton had thrown a cotton scarf around her neck, tugged on a windbreaker and gone out to explore the city.

Having grown up in Destiny City, most of it was familiar to her by now. Every so often she'd come across a new store here or there that had opened in the year she'd been comatose -- and those were always tense moments of struggling with herself, trying to push down the feeling that the universe had betrayed her in some way, stolen away a year she could never get back. But mostly, what she found were black and empty shops behind stoic panes of glass; and those were the hallmarks of proprietors who had closed up shop and moved on to some other city. That, or worse. Destiny City was a blighted town, something strange and mysterious and altogether wrong that the world had turned a blind eye to -- and it was slowly emptying out. She'd observed that much.

But it was so much easier to forget that on a day like today, on a day when the sun scored its way through big cumulus clouds and the leaves hadn't deserted their trees just yet. During the daytime, people still went out on the streets, and all the living people out and about helped to disguise that Destiny City was becoming a ghost town.

It was good to hang onto a day like today. Laney whistled to herself, something cheery -- What Do the Simple Folk Do from Camelot would suit quite nicely -- and did a little Wizard of Oz shuffle-step as she made her way down the sidewalk toward the dog park. It took her a moment to realize that her whistling had inadvertently drawn the attention of several dogs, ears perked curiously: but when she looked down she saw a plump, happy corgi snuffling at her ankles, drawn out to the taut end of its leash. "Puppy!" she exclaimed happily, and immediately bent down to lavish the small dog with large-dog-sized affection.

It had taken Laney the better part of a year to get used to all the gaps: not just the voids that lingered in her life from what she had missed in her coma, but the spaces between memories of her time at Barren Pines. There was nothing left but flimsy recollections and thin filaments of remembrace surrounding the weeks she'd spent there: a face, a piece of paper, a heartbroken sob. Most of her friendship with Tara was moth-eaten and gone -- she relied on her friend to fill in the blanks for her, most of the time, with only two facts deep down in her soul that she had been dead sure of: this is Tara, and she is my best friend in the world. She was fairly certain that Tara didn't tell Laney everything she remembered. That was alright; Laney didn't tell Tara everything she forgot. They didn't want to disappoint each other.

Just now, there were wide, rolling, empty gaps in Laney's mind between this girl's violet-framed face and any other information about her. She knew Laney's name, which was something Laney still hadn't quite managed to avoid finding disconcerting, and she looked to be Laney's age. The snowy-haired girl made a show of scratching the corgi's ears to stall for time while she re-composed herself, wiping the unsettled look from her face in hopes it wouldn't have been spotted.

"I'm sorry," she said, looking up with a much more open smile, "we know each other?"

Seeing someone else in a panic always made Laney feel silly about panicking. She panicked often, and the majority of the time, it really wasn't for any particularly good reason, so seeing other people get worked up for actual legitimate reasons (and when it was other people, not Laney, the reasons always did feel much more legitimate) made her feel self-conscious that she was capable of flying off the handle so quickly.

Still, this had the advantage of calming her down and refocusing her attention on the other person and their discomfort instead of her own. "Oh, gosh," she said, straightening herself up and grabbing both of Yvette's hands between one of her own. "You don't need to be nervous, everything's okay! No, it's okay, I just get a little confused ever since -- well, since the hospital."

'Coma' was a word she had trouble saying. Its two syllables sat with her, hunkered down like gargoyles in the back of her throat, hands curled around their knees and waiting for her to slip up. She couldn't seem to get over her fear of it, however superstitiously: Laney simply had this feeling that if she said the word, it would come true -- like Bloody Mary or Beetlejuice.

"Things are kind of -- " she waved her hand loosely in the air like a piece of paper caught on the wind, at a loss for a word to describe it -- "for me sometimes. But don't feel badly about it! It gets easier every day." (No, it didn't. Most days, she felt stuck in a holding pattern. Most days, she felt stagnant and half-visible. But she was trying to shoulder her way through that now.) "How do you know Tara?" she asked, feeling better about the situation just knowing that Tara had given Yvette Weaver her stamp of approval.

"Well," Laney answered Yvette, lifting her hands in the air once and then dropping them away from her, "Any friend of Tara's is a friend of mine!" To Laney, this was a universal truth -- because, if Tara liked someone, then Laney was absolutely determined to like them too, no matter what. The only ruinous possibility to the contrary was if Tara should happen to have a friend who didn't like Laney -- but that concept was distressing, and so she mentally avoided it, preferring to pretend it would never come up. "It's nice to meet you," she said, punctuated with a theatrical wink and a laugh. "Finally, right?"

She bent down and attempted to scoop up Dogby in her arms, a wriggling, excited ball of corgi. "Who's a good girl? Who's a good, good baaaby?" Laney asked, nuzzling the dog's snout with her own nose. "You are, yes-you-are! Yes, you are! Who's the best puppy?" She had it on good authority that dogs loved rhetorical questions.

"Your dog's adorable," she told Yvette, delighted. "How old is she? What's her name?" And, without pausing to wait for an answer, she added, "And your outfit's so cute -- I love it!" Trickily for Yvette, the questions Laney had fired off at her in rapid succession probably weren't quite as rhetorical.

Laney was somewhat reassured when Yvette didn't rebuff her completely, and delighted that the other girl had kept up with her conversation so well. She was used to people listening to her ramble till their eyes started to glaze over, then ignoring much of what she'd said and responding to only the tail end of it. At some point, she probably should've altered her speech patterns to something more fluidly conversational, but this never seemed to occur to her in the moment she was talking: the words all just tumbled out. She had a very hard time being concise.

"She's just so cute!" Laney burbled out effusively, having difficulty containing her affection for the stout little dog. "I can't say how jealous I am. Dog-sitting always seemed like such a great gig, and especially with a total sweetie-pie like this, you know?" She scrunched up her nose and let Dogby lick her face for a while, giggling. "Adorable," she declared, dragging out the syllables so it became adooooooooraaaaabuuuuuuuuuull. "I just want to take you home and feed you forever so you're the littlest, cutest, fattest thing. Yes yes yes I do, yes I do. But my parents wouldn't be having with any of that!"

She smiled back up at Yvette again, at the mention of her handiwork. "No way, did you really? That's so cool, wow, it must've taken you hours! You know, I've always wanted to sew, but I don't know, my mom always said I'd stab myself in the face just trying to sew a button back onto a shirt. I guess she's probably right! Ah well, it's amazing that you can do it. Do you go to school for it?"

Laney understood all too well what it was like to have parents that said 'no.' Her parents seemed to have been saying no to her ever since she was born screaming into the world, and she still heard the word like a constant background noise at home on a daily basis. "I know how that is," she answered Yvette's statement about her parents. "My parents hate pets. They think they're so ridiculous, you know, pets. Feeding an animal and keeping it around for no reason. Every time I ask my mother just says, 'Laney! We have white carpeting in this house! Absolutely no dogs, no cats, and no anything else that doesn't put on slippers when it comes in the house." She paused, thoughtful, and looked away, rubbing Dogby's ears between her thumbs and forefingers. "I did have a goldfish once -- I won it at a carnival, you know, one of those ring-toss contests. I didn't even win, actually -- I guess they just felt bad for me, and the goldfish are really cheap and all. And I kept it in a bowl at home, in the kitchen. ...but I guess at some point it must've -- it must not have made it. I guess." She hadn't asked her parents straight out. It was too likely she'd dislike the answer.

Laney sat and folded her feet under her, right in the middle of the sidewalk. She picked up Dogby into her lap so she could better give her affection while still talking. Dogs were needy, affectionate creatures, which always struck a chord within Laney. Like could recognize like.

Yvette's predicament about schooling tugged at her heart. "Oh, wow, I hope you get to go back. Financial stuff is so difficult, and it'd be really rough if you had to work while you were at school. I hear that's almost impossible in art schools! I really hope you make it, though. If you ask me," she smiled up at Yvette again, "You've got real talent. Honest truth." Laney didn't have a talent. She envied it.

Yvette's question made Laney look away, pretending to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. Her decision had been a hard one to make, but a harder one to defend. She didn't like disappointing people's expectations, and disappointing her family's expectations was always the hardest of all. "I've been taking some time off for the time being," she said flatly, which was the best lie she could manage to tell while still forcing a smile to her face. It was the same lie she told her psychologist (that her parents were making her see). Most of what she told her psych was a lie anyway -- she didn't like disappointing a psychologist's expectations better than she did anyone else's, so she just set up pre-arranged successes for herself in advance. Say you're unhappy. Come up with a plan to become 'happier.' Report happiness progress to therapist. Therapist reports clean bill of health. Mark 'therapy' in the Win column. It wasn't that Laney didn't believe in therapy -- it was just that she didn't quite believe in it for herself. She had trouble being honest with psychologists, and that probably defeated the purpose.

In actuality, she had no plans to go back to school. She felt smothered and lost in the life her family mutely expected her to follow, and though she hadn't found anything else to really fit the bill, she was determined not to go back to where she'd been. People only retraced their steps when they were lost, and she wasn't lost: she was exploring.

Still, this never went over well with people, at least not that Laney had seen. She hadn't really talked to anyone about her own plans, so she was mostly safe from their censure, but she saw the way some people reacted to the simple words 'taking some time off,' and she saw the way other dropouts were treated by people who were convinced of the singularity of their own right way to do things. She didn't think she could actually bear for people to look at her that way. She wasn't self-confident enough to stay the course if they did. All Laney knew was that she couldn't go back.

"I needed some time to readjust to things after I woke up," she bullshat. "I had physical therapy for a while, and I'm still trying to, you know, get my head in order. So it's been great, my parents have been really understanding. I'm lucky."

"So am I!" Laney answered, "Ha!" If her laugh was slightly forced, slightly over-enthusiastic, she hoped Yvette wouldn't question it.

The important thing here was Yvette, and that she'd just met someone new. Someone who seemed to like her reasonably enough. She made a note to herself to ask Tara about Yvette later, to try and get a better idea of whether the pretty, dark-haired girl was always this shy, or just uncomfortable with Laney's exaggerated personality. For now, though, she'd assume they were new friends.

"If I hadn't woken up, I wouldn't have gotten the chance to meet you. And I'm really glad I did." Dogby nudged around for her attention, and Laney bent her face down to the corgi's level. "And you, puppyface! And you!"

Laney had a suspicion she was making Yvette uncomfortable -- but even so, she wasn't entirely sure how to behave differently than usual. Instead she charged ahead as she usually did, trying hard to force sunshine to beam out of her pores. People definitely liked a happy person better than an unhappy one, at least. That much was just -- well, it was fact, wasn't it? Happiness was better than unhappiness.

"Do you want to hang out sometime?"