Disclaimer. All publicly recognizable characters, settings etc., are the property of their respective owners. The original characters, ideas and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended. I only do this for fun.

A/N: This is an older story that I had wrote last year and I just now am starting to post it. Since it is finished for the most part, it won't interfere with my posting and updating any of my other stories. –B

Chapter 1
(Natalie's POV)

My mother drove us to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue. I was wearing my favorite outfit – a tight gray dress that came down to the middle of my thighs with a thick black belt that wound it's self around me just under my breasts. My twin sister, Bella, was wearing a sleeveless, white eyelet lace. I was wearing it as a farewell gesture. My carry-on item was my jean jacket and Bella's was her parka.

In the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington State, a small town named Forks exists under a near-constant cover of clouds. It rains on this inconsequential town more than any other place in the United States of America. It was from this town and its gloomy, omnipresent shade that my mother escaped with Bella and I when we were only a few months old. It was in this town that we'd been compelled to spend a month every summer until we were fourteen. That was the year that Bella and I finally put our foot down; these past three summers, my dad, Charlie, vacationed with us in California for two weeks instead.

It was to Forks that we now exiled ourselves – an action that we took with great horror, especially Bella. She detested Forks. I wasn't much of a fan myself, but for a completely different reason. It was there that when I spent my last summer there that I had my heart broken by my first love, Paul Lahote.

When I was thirteen, we started dating the first week that I arrived at Charlie's for the summer. He was a few years older than me, but it never mattered. The month we spent together was wonderful and by the end we were so in love that it broke my heart to have to leave him until the following year. When I came back the next year, he had changed. He was no longer the sweet boy that I fell in love with, but he had an attitude where he seemed mad at the world. He began sleeping around with a different girl every other night and acted like I was the furthest thing from his mind and that the summer we spent together the year before meant nothing. He ripped my heart out that summer and it was then that Bella and I agreed that we didn't want to continue with this tradition and came up with a new one instead.

Phoenix…

I loved Phoenix. I loved the sun and the blistering heat. I loved the vigorous, sprawling city.

"Girls," my mom called out to us – the last of a thousand times – before we got on the plane. "You don't have to do this."

My mom looks more like Bella then me, except with short hair and laugh lines. I felt a spasm of panic as I stared at her wide, childlike eyes. How could we leave my loving, erratic, harebrained mother to fend for herself? Of course she had Phil now, so the bills would probably get paid, there would be food in the refrigerator, gas in her car, and someone to call when she got lost, but still…

"We want to go," Bella lied, breaking me out of my thoughts. She'd always been a bad liar, but she has been saying this lie so frequently lately that it almost sounded convincing now.

"Tell Charlie I said hi."

"I will." I said giving her a small smile.

"I'll see you both soon," she insisted. "Look after each other and remember that you can come home whenever you want – I'll come right back as soon as you need me."

But I could see the sacrifice in her eyes behind the promise.

"Don't worry about us," I urged. "It'll be great. I love you, Mom."

She hugged us both tightly for a minute each, and then we got on the plane, and she was gone.

It's a four-hour flight from Phoenix to Seattle, another hour in a small plane up to Port Angeles, and then an hour drive back down to Forks. Flying doesn't bother me; the hour in the car with Charlie, though, we were both a little worried about.

Charlie had really been fairly nice about the whole thing. He seemed genuinely pleased that Bella and I were coming to live with him for the first time with any degree of permanence. He'd already gotten us registered for high school and was going to help us get a car to share until we can each afford one on our own.

But it was sure to be awkward with Charlie. None of us was what anyone would call verbose, and I didn't know what there was to say regardless. I knew he was more than a little confused by our decision – like our mother before us, we hadn't made a secret of our distaste for Forks.

When we landed in Port Angeles, it was raining. I didn't see it as an omen – just unavoidable. I'd already said goodbyes to the sun.

Charlie was waiting for us with the cruiser. This I was expecting, too. Charlie is Police Chief Swan to the good people of Forks.

Our primary motivation behind buying a car, despite the scarcity of our funds, was that we refused to be driven around town in a car with red and blue lights on top. Nothing slows down traffic like a cop.

Charlie gave us each an awkward, one-armed hug when we exited the plane; or in Bella's case, stumbled. She was quite the klutz and it always puzzled me where she got her sense of balance from. She could find something to trip over on a flat surface.

"It's good to see you, girls." He said, smiling as he automatically helped me catch and steady Bella. "You both haven't changed much. How's Renee?"

"Mom's fine. It's good to see you, too, Dad." We weren't allowed to call him Charlie to his face.

We only had a few bags. Most of our Arizona clothes were too permeable for Washington. Mom helped us pool our resources to supplement our winter wardrobe, but it was still scanty. It all fit easily into the trunk of the cruiser.

"I found a good car for you girls, really cheap," he announced when we were strapped in with me in the back and Bella in the front.

"What kind of car?" I was suspicious of the way he said 'good car for you' as opposed to just 'good car'.

"Well, it's a truck actually, a Chevy."

"Where did you find it?" Bella asked.

"Do you remember Billy black down at La Push?" La Push is the tiny Indian reservation on the coast where Paul and his friends lived, as well as many of Charlie's friends.

"No." Bella answered.

"Yeah, he used to go fishing with us during the summer, right?" I asked.

"Yup," Charlie nodded. "He's in a wheelchair now, so he can't drive anymore, and he offered to sell me his truck cheap."

"What year is it?" Bella asked and I could see from his change of expression that this was the question he was hoping that we wouldn't ask.

"Well, Billy's done a lot of work on the engine – it's only a few years old, really."

I hoped he didn't think so little of us as to believe we would give up that easily. "When did he buy it?" I prompted.

"He bought it in 1984, I think."

"Did he buy it new?" Bella pressed.

"Well, no. I think it was new in the early sixties – or late fifties at the earliest." He admitted sheepishly.

"Ch- Dad, I don't really know anything about cars. That's more of Nat's thing, but she doesn't have any of her tools here, so we wouldn't be able to fix it if anything went wrong, and we couldn't afford a mechanic…"

"Really, Bella, the thing runs great. They don't build them like that anymore. Also, I'm sure if Natalie needed to borrow Billy's tools and use his garage to work on it for whatever reason that she would be more than welcome to."

"How cheap is cheap?" She asked.

"Well, honey, I kind of already bought it for you girls. As a homecoming gift." Charlie peaked sideways at Bella and up at the review mirror with a hopeful expression.

Wow. Free.

"You didn't need to do that, Dad." I said. "We were going to pay for a car ourselves."

"I don't mind. I want you both to be happy here." He was looked ahead at the road when he said this. Charlie wasn't comfortable with expressing his emotions out loud. Bella inherited that from him. So she was looking straight ahead as she responded.

"That's really nice, Dad. Thanks. I really appreciate it."

"Yeah, Dad. Thank you very much." I added with a small smile that didn't reach my eyes. No need to add that our being happy in Forks is an impossibility. He didn't need to suffer along with us. And I never looked a free truck in the mouth – or engine.

"Well, now, you're both welcome," he mumbled, embarrassed by our thanks.

We all exchanged a few more comments on the weather, which was wet, and that was pretty much it for conversation. We stared out the windows in silence.

It was beautiful, of course; I couldn't deny that. Everything was green: the trees, their trunks covered with moss, their branches hanging with a canopy of it, the ground covered with ferns. Even the air filtered down greenly through the leaves.

It was too green – an alien planet.

Eventually we made it to Charlie's. He still lived in the small, three bedroom house that he'd bought with Renee in the early days of their marriage. Those were the only kinds of days their marriage had – the early ones. There, parked on the street in front of the house that never changed, was our new – well, new to us- truck. It was a faded red color, with big, rounded fenders and a bulbous cab. To my intense surprise, I loved it! I looked at Bella and could see by the expression on her face and the look in her eyes that she loved it too. I didn't know if it would run, but I could see myself and Bella in it.

Plus, it was one of those solid iron affairs that never gets damaged – the kind you see at the scene of an accident, paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed.

"Wow, Dad, I love it!" I exclaimed.

"So do I," Bella agreed. "It's great."

Now my horrific day tomorrow would be just that much less dreadful. I wouldn't be faced with the choice of either walking two miles in the rain to school or accepting a ride in the Chief's cruiser.

"I'm glad you girls like it," Charlie said gruffly, embarrassed again.

It took only one trip to get all of our stuff upstairs to our separate rooms. I got the west bedroom that faced over the front yard and Bella got the one next to me that faced over the back yard. The room was familiar; it had belonged to Bella and I since we were born. The wooden floor, the light blue walls, the peaked ceiling, the white laced curtains around the window – these were all a part of our childhood. The only changes were switching the crib for a bed and adding a large L shaped desk as I grew. There is also a large vanity that had once belonged to my grandma swan and an armoire. The desk now held my lap top that I had saved up to by last year, along with a small printer/scanner/fax machine.

The room that Bella now used was our grandpa swan's old room that he slept in when he was living with Charlie before he died. It was a little bit smaller than mine and had been painted purple recently for Bella's benefit instead of the old green color that it used to be. She had a small dresser, a bed, a rocking chair from when we were babies, and a desk that now held a secondhand computer, with the phone line for the modem stapled along the floor to the nearest phone jack. This was a stipulation from our mother, so that Bella didn't have to borrow my lap top every time she emailed mom.

There was only one small bathroom at the top of the stairs, which we would have to share with Charlie. I was trying not to dwell too much on that fact.

One of the best things about Charlie is that he doesn't hover. He left us alone to unpack and get settled, a feat that would have been altogether impossible for my mother. It was nice to be alone, not to have to smile and look pleased; a relief to stare dejectedly out the window at the sheeting rain and let just a few tears escape. I wasn't in the mood to go on a real crying jag. I would save that for bedtime, when Bella would crawl in to my bed and talk about the day and the coming morning.

Forks High School had a frightening total of only three hundred and fifty-seven - now fifty-nine – students; there were more than seven hundred people in our junior class alone back home. All of the kids here had grown up together – their grandparents had been toddlers together.

We would be the new girls from the big city, a curiosity, an outsider.

Maybe if we looked more like girls from Phoenix should, we could work this to our advantage. But physically, we'd never fit in with how the rest of the girls looked. I should be tan, sporty, blond – a volleyball player, or a cheerleader, perhaps – all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun. I had gotten my fair share of boys asking me out on a date, which I never accepted, but was more than Bella had ever had. She never understood why I would say no, and I would always end up explaining that I was waiting for someone I really liked to ask me out one day rather than just saying yes in order to obtain popularity points at school.

We were both ivory-skinned with slender bodies, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete. Bella and I were fraternal twins. We were both the same height and build, but my hair was fell down just under my ribs and a darker brown than hers and I had Renee's blue eyes, while Bella had Charlie's brown ones. Our tastes in clothing differed also, though neither of us was fashion crazy like a lot of the girls we went to school with. I dressed in what I was comfortable in, designer or not, I didn't care, but I thought I had good taste anyway. Bella was more of a T-shirt and jeans kind of girl.

When I finished putting my clothes away in my closet and armoire, I took my bag of bathroom necessities and went to the communal bathroom to clean myself up after the day of travel. I looked up at my face in the mirror as I brushed through my long, tangled, damp hair. I never had a problem with acne like most girls my age did, and it was one thing that I really liked about myself, along with my large blue eyes.

I didn't relate to well to people my age, aside from Bella, and that was because she was a lot like me in that aspect. Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was just a glitch in my brain. But the cause didn't matter. All that mattered was the effect. And tomorrow would be just the beginning.

I didn't sleep well that night. The constant whooshing of the rain and wind across the roof wouldn't fade into the background. I pulled the faded old quilt over my head, and later added the pillow, too. But I couldn't fall asleep no matter how hard I tried.

Around midnight, I heard the creaking of my bedroom door and peaked my head over the covers to see Bella quietly closing the door before turning around to face me. I lifted up the covers and scooted over towards the other side of the bed and she scampered on to the bed and under the covers with me. Finally, the rain finally settled into a quieter drizzle and I was able to fall asleep.

A/N: So, what did you think? I'm curious to see what everyone will think about this story.

If you have any questions or comments, post them in my reviews and I will answer them in my next Author's Note!

Check out my other stories!

'Attempting to Covet'
'Dhampir' COMPLETED!
'Far Fetched Realities'
'Mirror Image'
'Other Worldly Beauty'
'Dhampir: Broken Moonlight' (SEQUEL) NEW!
'Perplexing Revelations'
'Unimaginable Outcomes' NEW!
'Pretexting'
'The Heart's Desire'
'Intricate Beauty' NEW!
'The Major'
'Twilight ReVAMPed'

If you enjoyed this story so far, check out some of my other stories on my FanFiction page! Also, I am still accepting Twilight stories that involve Jasper/any female leads or Bella/selected male leads
if anyone is looking for a Beta Reader. I will make exceptions on the characters depending on the plot.
I am also now accepting Phantom of the Opera FanFictions that include Erik! I will also
be accepting Titanic FanFictions featuring Jack, The Ghost Whisperer that feature Melinda and
Law and Order SVU that feature Elliot. PM me for details!
- Bella'Xo
Xo BellaItalia oX