Disclaimer: See Chapter One.

Sailor Moon: A New Star

Chapter II

Group Therapy, the shining start to each day in the hospital. Serena was so glad they let them eat breakfast first, or even she wouldn't have the stomach for it. The nurses gathered everyone together, all the droolers, all the hyperactive schizos, all the people who had to be strapped to their chairs, and put them all in one big circle reminiscent of one of those Happy Sunshine Campers campfires where they all sit around and smile and talk about how great the world is while singing Kumbaya and It's a Small World. Then they made them sit around and smile and … well, it sufficed to say the only thing missing was the campfire. Once that was all done, they were made to talk about what was wrong with them and what progress they were making in their treatments.

And it inevitably came to Serena's turn, no matter where she tried to seat herself to be as far away from the beginning as possible, even sitting between a girl whose mouth resembled Niagra Falls and a boy who kept grinning at her in a way that made her wish there was a Negaverse demon somewhere to keep her company, instead, as she did today. She watched Dr. Horace, the head psychiatrist in charge of the hospital, make his way around the circle with dread, like the progress was the hands on a timer ticking down to a bomb strapped around her throat.

Finally, from his seat, the doctor turned his unwanted attention to the blonde girl. "And Serena!" he greeted her as if they were dear friends, in that sickeningly sweet way people in his profession had of addressing those within their care. "How are you feeling today? I heard from a little bird that you had a little trouble last night. Would you care to talk about it?"

Yeah, sure. She'd love to talk about how she got "lost" on the way to the bathroom last night, which was obviously what he was referring to. She'd just jump at the opportunity to spill her innocent, delusional little heart out about the scary burning lady she saw chained to a bed. Yeah, she couldn't wait! The sarcasm in her own mind made her scowl, but the expression vanished suddenly as her gaze went right past Dr. Horace to the doorway to the group room behind him. "It's her ..." she breathed before she could stop herself, unable to put more force into the words than that.

In the doorway stood the "scary burning lady" from the night before. She looked disoriented, lost, like she didn't recognize where she was. She'd probably just followed the voices. Dr. Horace turned to follow Serena's gaze and his eyes widened, not expecting to see what was there. "Oh my ..." But then his eyes moved slightly.

Serena saw it in almost the same moment he had. Her wrists and ankles still bore the shackles from her bed, but the edges of the metal were twisted and torn, almost as if … "She ripped them off of the bed frame …?"

The psychiatrist looked as if he wanted to speak, to say something in denial of the deduction, but his mind seemed to patently refuse to even consider such a possibility.

Instead, it was the girl who broke the room's new-found silence. At first, only a rasp came from her throat, but she closed her mouth, swallowed and tried again. Her voice was still weak from lack of use, but she managed to get the words loud enough and with enough force to make herself heard and understood through three words.

"Where am I?"

At that, it was Dr. Horace who cleared his throat, and his mind put itself back on the rails. Of course she didn't tear the metal, herself. The answer was obvious. "Ah," he started, "Miss … ah, forgive me, I haven't had much cause to use your name frequently enough to recall it easily … something Native-American … something contrary …" He ran a few syllables over his tongue before producing the answer. "Ah! Peace-Fire, was it?"

The girl nodded. "It's just treated as one word, though."

Meanwhile, Serena was stewing over the new information. Native-American, huh? If she were a Westerner, that would explain her height and build. Lina was the only girl she personally knew who could compare. Come to think of it, in the light of day, she did have more of a tan than an oriental girl typically did. Still, the girl's accent was flawless. She spoke Japanese as if she had grown up in Tokyo.

"Well, you're in Shin Memorial Hospital," Dr. Horace was saying. "You've been with us while we monitored your sleep disorder for a year now."

"A year ..." the girl repeated, though it didn't sound like a question, just a filing of facts. Her gaze swept the room as if really taking it in for the first time. "Excuse me for saying, but this doesn't look like much of a hospital. It seems like more of a mental institution."

The doctor's smile didn't so much as flinch. "That's because it is. We're hospitals, too, after all." Then a slight change of subject. "Where's the nurse, dear?"

But she just looked blankly back at him. "What nurse?"

He chuckled slightly, what a silly question. "The one who cut your restraints. We had to weld them, you were thrashing so much. It looks like she had to take bolt cutters to them."

But she looked down at the wrist he motioned to as if seeing the things for the first time. "Oh," she noted passively. "I didn't even notice them." And then, in a scene Serena wished she could have recorded, not for what the girl did, but the way it made Dr. Horace pale and quiver ever so slightly, she reached down and plucked the steel cuffs from her wrists like they were nothing more than loops from paper chains and dropped them on the ground.