The Butterfly Effect

Definition (from physics): Small variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system.

AN1: I think that more than a few people have taken a swing at this particular AU, however I don't think that it's been done to death yet, so I'm taking a run at it. There will be blocks of SM's original text salted throughout the fic, decreasing over time as my story veers further and further from canon, but even then, I still may pop something of SM's in now and then just for fun, as a sign post or stepping stone. So if a sentence, the odd paragraph, or even several paragraphs looks sort of familiar don't be too surprised.

Fic Starts Here….

Bella's POV

My battle, such as it was, was over. My bags were packed and in the car, and what I couldn't carry with me or fit in a suitcase had already been shipped to my father's house in Forks, Washington. All there was left to do was to say my goodbyes. I walked out to the living room to find my stepfather waiting for me with a stoic look on his face. He wasn't happy about this, but he could accept the inevitable as well as I could.

"You ready Bella?" Phil asked

I nodded, but as I looked around the room I noticed something missing.

"Where is she?"

Phil half smiled. "Saying goodbye to the back yard," he replied.

Turning around I cut through the kitchen to the back door. Stepping outside I found the object of my search, with a disconsolate look of her face, swinging back and forth on her elderly looking swing set.

"Come on Kat. We have to go and see mommy."

"I don't want to," she piped up in a high voice.

"Why not?" I responded

"Because then we have to go away."

I sighed. "Yes, we'll have to go away, but that's a good thing. We're going to see Charlie. You want to see Charlie don't you?" Maybe baiting her with Charlie wasn't the best idea, but it was worth a shot. She had really only seen him a handful of times in her short life, but she loved him wholeheartedly.

She pouted. "Yeah," she responded grudgingly.

"Okay then, let's hop to it, kiddo. We don't want to miss our flight."

Taking her hand I led her back inside, past Phil, who followed us out the front door to his car and the beginning of our exile from the sunny skies of Phoenix.

Katrina Alexis Swan. Age five. She started out as something of an unwelcome surprise that resulted from what mom called 'a birth control anomaly'. Her sperm donor, Randolph 'of the phony last name' Smith, was one of Renee's sometime boyfriends, and we hadn't seen hide nor hair of him since the day my mother had proven to be pregnant. Child support you ask? Don't make me laugh. Charlie had been more help providing for Kat than Randy had ever dreamed of being, even though he wasn't the father of record. He still had a standing warrant out for Randy's arrest, should he ever be stupid enough to enter Washington State.

Renee hadn't changed her name after the divorce, because Swan is simpler and easier to write than her maiden name of Higgenbotham. So Kat bore Charlie's name, and none of us thought it the least bit odd. Through some genetic quirk, she and I resembled each other so strongly that my relatively few passing friends often tagged her as "mini-me". Seeing us together you'd swear that she was as much Charlie's daughter as I was. Taken together with her last name, it led Charlie to think that way as well, which leads us to the Rubicon that we were both about to cross.

Phil and mom were honeymooning down in Mexico when some drunken idiot piloted his ninety foot yacht over the catamaran that they were day-sailing on. Phil had come out all right, but mom not so much. She'd been in the hospital down there for eight weeks and up here for another six. Now she was in a rehab facility trying to recover and learn to walk again. The best prognosis that the doctors could give us was none too good. They said that it could take a year….or longer. And that was to give her even limited mobility. The cherry on top of all of that was that there was still the possibility of further corrective surgery looming on the horizon which would reset the recovery calendar to zero again.

My step-father is a good guy, second only to Charlie in my mind. After a long losing streak, mom found him thanks to Kat. My little sister has a rare talent that mom and I call her 'jerk-radar'; the ability to instinctively sort the good ones from the bad ones on sight. And then have nothing to do with the bad ones. Man after man passed through the door of our home only to be sent packing when they didn't pass the Kat litmus test. If they tried to engage her she'd run away. If they tried to touch her, she'd cry. Phil had won a second date only after Kat, laying eyes on him for the first time, crawled into his lap and promptly fell asleep.

Being a good guy, he wasn't about to abandon his crippled wife to the tender mercies of the medical profession. The previously mentioned drunken idiot's liability insurance had paid off handsomely, in the low eight figures, and without a quiver; resulting in more than enough money to see mom through, and then some. Though I didn't want to touch any of it, because it felt like blood money, I had no qualms about using it to take care of Kat. And it hadn't hurt my college fund any either.

So, things being the way that they were, I'd buckled down for the long haul. I'm a caregiver by nature. Before Phil came along, Renee and I had been more like sisters than mother and daughter - me being the older more responsible one. I'd been her unofficial Lamaze coach for god's sake. And so I figured the next few years would consist of helping Phil look after Renee, while I was looking after Kat. Everything else would take a back seat.

That is until Phil and my sneaky parents had a conference call behind my back. Several things had resulted from that call. The first was that Phil scrapped his much loved but mediocre minor league baseball career. A couple of phone calls to old friends let him slide into an opening on the coaching staff for the Arizona Diamondbacks. It wasn't big money, but it made him a decent living while letting him stay put in Phoenix. The second was that Kat and I were moving. All three of them knew that if I were in Phoenix I spread myself thin to look after everyone. And in their opinion, that was no way for a girl approaching the end of her teens to live. My opinion wasn't asked. And truthfully, I agreed with them, but I'd always put my own needs at the bottom of a very long list. So, they decided that Phil needed to concentrate on Renee, and I needed to focus on school, being a teenager, and Kat. I just didn't have to be happy about it.

So, to make that happen, Kat and I were being packed off to Charlie until such time as mom could rejoin the land of the living - or until I finished high school, whichever came first. And Charlie could take some of the load off of me by helping out with Kat. That was the plan anyway. You know what they say about the best laid plans. Right?

TBC