A/N- 8/17/10: Well, I've been pretty busy taking down, fixing, re-numbering, re-naming, and re-posting chapters today, so I'm a little tired and won't say much about this. Basically, I took the first 2 chapters and combined them to get the plot moving faster. Don't worry, I'll update with a real new chapter soon, thanks to my inspiration from BluJeanBaby526, whose own Star Wars story, Life as a Smuggler's Sister, is being brought back to life with a little help from my beta-ing talents. Go read it, it's a fun story (and I suggest you read it ASAP, because I may or may not make a sneaky reference to it in a later chapter and I want you guys to be ready when I quiz you on whether or not you picked up on it, ok?).

Chapter One: October, 2006

Stephanie

Fate is a funny thing. Sometimes, when Fate throws you a curveball, everything can seem to fall to pieces around you, your life shattered, meaning and reason lost among the scattered fragments. At least, that was how it was for me after my Father died. And as I began my slow and arduous quest to pick up the pieces of my broken life, I guess I sort of lost myself along the way.

But I wasn't the only one who was lost. This is, after all, not a story of a lonely, angsty teenage girl. This is, however, a story of a brother and a sister- twins, in fact- distanced by the pain that they shared. A story of a boy and a girl who were lost and confused and alone, who found their way back to each other and found their way back home. A story of loss, learning, adventure, hurt, humor, and family. You might call it the Story of Star Wars, but that would only be the truth from a certain point of view. To us it is simply a small part- the beginning- of the Story of Stephanie and Mark Legio. Our story.

Believe me, readers, this is not an easy story to tell, though it is one that I feel I will keep in my heart for the rest of my life. My brother and I never imagined telling this to anyone, though the months that have transpired between now and the events of last December have convinced me otherwise. At first, Mark thought that we could simply begin our amazing tale at that point, but would that really have done our story justice? No. This is the true beginning.

But to be honest, starting here makes telling the whole thing easier. Sometimes, when life seems to be just too much for me, I close my eyes and think back to that fateful Halloween night back in 2006, when we were 17 and all that was holding our shattered lives together were school, soccer, and Star Wars.

I mentioned before that this was, from a certain point of view, the story of Star Wars. I wasn't joking about that. This is no delusional fangirl fantasy run amuck. (I used to sometimes wish that it had been, though. Silly as I was, I thought that it would've made great fanfic material). For you to believe the story that is about to unfold, you must forget everything you know about that galaxy far, far, away. You must unlearn what you have learned...

There are those who like think that they can handle anything their destiny can dish out. I used to be one of those people, too. But when Fate mixes with magic- and yes, maybe some of the Force- that's when things really start to get crazy. And when that happened, Fate proved me wrong.

Dead wrong.

I looked in the mirror, glanced at the photo lying on the dresser, then back in the mirror, making sure I had perfected the hairstyle. Finally I sighed and smiled awkwardly at my reflection, patting the massive "cinnamon rolls" on either side of my head. How my uncle had persuaded my brother and I to do this may still have been a mystery to my mother, but it was beginning to make sense to me. I would just have to learn to accept that this was simply another one of those things that she couldn't fully understand. At least, not after... the accident.

For as long as I could remember, the Legio family had carried what Mark and I had dubbed "the Star Wars Curse". It wasn't necessarily a bad thing; it was just that there was something about us that was so sci-fi. Maybe it was the whole "twin thing" with me and my brother, which had inevitably led Mom and Dad to think it would be a cool idea to buy us cute little Luke and Leia costumes when we were babies, then take our pictures in them and use them as Halloween cards (my mother is the only person I know who actually sends Halloween cards).

Or maybe it was the fact that our cool Uncle Jim who lived with us- or rather, we lived with him, since he actually owned the house- collected lightsabers, had repeatedly collaborated with Mark, myself, and our friends on our fan film-making exploits, and was the owner of a deluxe (and very expensive) Darth Vader costume that he had proudly worn to many a convention in the past, as well as every Halloween I could possibly remember. Not that any (well, most) family members objected to his strong spirit of fandom; Mark and I had always been very close to him (occasionally more attached to him that our own parents, I'm ashamed to admit), and as kids had dubbed him "Uncle Vader". The nickname stuck.

...Nah, it was definitely the twin thing. If it wasn't, then why else would I be trying to convince myself that "This was all Uncle Vader's idea" as I adjusted the hood of my white dress while Mark let out a string of curses as he futilely searched for his prop lightsaber?

"Mark! Language!" Mom shouted from the bathroom.

"Ah, shit!" I had just stabbed myself in the eye with mascara; which wasn't surprising, considering how much noise my brother was making in his room.

"Steph, Language!"

"Sorry," I mumbled, "but I can't help it that Luke Skywalker over there is busy tearing his room apart, why can't you tell him to shut his door or something?"

Mark got up and stood in the doorway of his room, looking pissed. "Well, I'm hardly Luke Skywalker without my lightsaber, now am I?" he retorted, "I bet you hid it on purpose..."

"What the hell are you blaming me for?" I shouted, slamming my makeup drawer shut with more force than I had intended to. An outside observer, like Mom, might have remarked that there had been tension between us since I had chewed him out over something at breakfast, but I knew that our resentment towards each other went a few months further back. Ever since a few days after the funeral, each word he said to me- which were increasingly fewer and fewer- I perceived to be a new way to antagonize me, each biting remark inviting aggression on my part. He always seemed to be waiting for me to attack.

Why, God, WHY is he doing this to me now? Was all I could think as I stood there glaring at him.

"Oh, like you don't know; you steal my stuff all the time, or at least you used to! Seemed to find it pretty damn amusing..."

"Um, language?" Mom cut in.

" Oh, come on!" I said, ignoring her, "If we're getting dressed up as Luke and Leia for tonight, then please do explain to me why I would find that funny now?"

"Because that's exactly the kind of thing you do, Steph! Well, even if you didn't steal it, I guess that it's for the best if I go as somebody completely different anyway, seeing as how Luke is still like your little Lover boy and all..."

I could feel my face burning ; my cheeks felt hot enough to melt my thick coating of makeup off. Call me a crazed fangirl, a hopeless Luke-Lover, but it was no secret that I had had a crush on Luke Skywalker since I was old enough to like boys, a fact that my brother had always resented and jumped at the chance to tease me about. But in the heat of the argument, this retort seemed to be not only totally irrelevant, but way out of line. I took it as a slap to the face.

"Really Mark, really? Do have to go and make such a HUGE DEAL out of one little thing!"

" Oh, so I'M the one making a big deal? Well, at least I don't spend two hours bitching and whining about your damn hair, bunhead..."

" Watch your damn language!" Mom shouted. Great, I thought, now Mom's pissed off. But when she stepped out of the bathroom, green witch makeup only half done, her eyes were red; she looked really upset. "God, don't you two ever stop fighting? For Christ's sake, you're seventeen now, this 'sibling rivalry' crap you always give me has got to end! This is the last thing I need... if your father..."

Mark and I looked down, ashamed, and stunned, too, that she'd mentioned Dad. She looked just as stunned as we were; nobody had talked about... it in over a month. I had to say something.

"Mom, I..."

"Just finish getting ready. I have a headache," she hurried past me towards her bedroom, but not in time to keep me from seeing her makeup streaked with tears. I almost wanted to cry myself, but at the same time I fumed on the inside at Mark, blaming him for what happened. All I did was tell him to be quiet, and he had to go and be a total jackass about it. I just couldn't bring myself to yell at him about it though, not anymore. Just a few words had slipped out by accident, but it had been enough to bring our fight to an abrupt end.

Slam! The sound of my mother's door brought me out of my grim reverie, and I looked up to see my uncle rounding the corner and coming towards us. He had his full costume on, and carried his Vader helmet under one arm. He smiled when he saw us, running his free hand through his black hair.

"Aww, don't you two just look so authentic!" he said. I sighed, and his smile fell as he noticed our somber expressions. "Is everything ok? Where's your mother?"

"We, we, got in an argument and kind of upset her," mumbled my brother from his doorway, "She yelled at us and said something like "if your father was here,' and then she started crying and ran to her room. I'm sorry."

'I'm sorry'? After what had just happened and all the bastard could come up with was 'I'm sorry'? But deep inside, I knew that even that was more than I could muster, so ashamed was I at my own actions and hurt by his rude remarks. I looked down again in shame, not wanting to see the disappointment in Uncle Vader's face, and the old grief at the mention of his own brother that I knew would be there, too. He sighed and cleared his throat.

"Well, I'll go talk to your mother. The party starts in half an hour, so whenever you're ready, I'll meet you guys in the car. Your Aunt Suzy'll kill me if we get there late again this year," he joked weakly, then left us and went to knock softly on Mom's door.

"I never even found my lightsaber," I heard Mark grumble. My anger boiled to the surface. Shoving past him, I marched into his room, looked around, and picked up his saber hilt from where it had been lying on his dresser the whole time. Without a word, I whacked him hard on the arm with it, dropped it in his hands, and walked away, not even looking back as he gasped in pain.

Mark

The car ride to Aunt Susan's Halloween party was a silent one. From where I was in the backseat, Uncle Vader's expression as he drove was unreadable, but I could tell that his jaw was clenched, his focus on the road unwavering. Mom was so quiet that she could've been asleep. Beside me, but with as much space between us as possible, my sister sat with her chin resting on the Vader helmet on her lap. I stared out the window, ignoring her pointedly. So what if I was acting childish? She was no better. The tension it the air was almost palpable.

Not that it usually wasn't at least awkward; none of us ever really wanted to go to these parties, anyway, because Aunt Suzy's family was the most obnoxious family on the face of the Earth- we only ever tolerated them because of Mom's insistence that we go and because Aunt Suzy was a great cook. Usually, though, Dad was the one driving, not Uncle Vader, and my arm wasn't severely bruised enough to cause me to wonder if I had internal bleeding.

But that had been before the accident. Back then, going to these parties had almost been fun. Back then, Steph, my twin sister, hadn't been as much of a bitch (but she was still a bitch, though, just not at much; she was happier then). But everything was different now; even the car ride to the party was quieter. We didn't even have the same car, for obvious reasons, but it wasn't until now that I realized how much I missed the strange noises our old car used to make...

The day it happened all seems like a blur in my mind now; I think I tried to block it from my memory forever, but the moment when you find out that your father is dead... well, that's not something easily forgotten.

What I do remember is finally starting to eat dinner at almost 7:00 on that unnaturally cold February night, later than usual, even considering how busy our lives were. We had spent more than an hour waiting for Dad to get home from work, when Mom finally decided to start without him, having "remembered" that he had said he would be late for some reason. But we hadn't even started eating yet when the knock on the door came...

I think time must have slowed down in the moment it took my mother to get up and walk down the hall to the front door. Slowed down just enough to give me time to realize that something was horribly wrong even before her strangled cry had be uttered.

Black ice, we were told at the hospital. Dangerous enough to have sandwiched Dad's car between a tree and an 18-wheeler. Enough to cause the numerous fractures in his spine and skull. The doctor said that he had felt nothing, but inside, I screamed, How do you know that? Were you in the car with him? No! How do you know how it felt for him to die? How? HOW?

"Mary! Hi! Good to see ya, sis!" Aunt Susan promptly attacked my mother with a bone-crushing hug as soon as she answered to door. Insufferable cow. I hoped the semi-darkness was enough to hide my scowl. Oh, sure, she'd been sad enough at the funeral, but my mother's sister could never stand to be anything but obnoxiously cheerful for more than five seconds of her perfect life.

She had a hard time getting through said door, considering the height of her massive crown or the width of her hideously sequined Pepto-Bismol colored dress. She must have been Glinda the Good Witch from "The Wizard of Oz", which I knew for a fact since she wore this costume every other Halloween (the other costume being a vampire). A horrible realization struck me: if my Mom was dressed as a witch and had green makeup, and her sister was wearing that thing, then had this been part of some kind of plan? I sure as hell hoped not; if anyone else inside was dressed as the Tin Man, I would just get in the car and drive home as fast as I could. Seriously.

Thankfully, Aunt Suzy had no idea what I was thinking.

"Aww, just look how grown up you two are getting!" she exclaimed as she always did every time she saw Stephanie and me.

"Hi Aunt Suzy," we said in unenthusiastic unison.

"Hmm, looks like the whole Skywalker clan is here tonight, eh Jim?"

Uncle Vader grunted in response; he never liked her much, a fact which our Aunt seemed completely oblivious too. "Yeah, I guess," said our uncle. Aunt Suzy giggled nasally.

Inside, my sister and I were promptly abandoned by our mother and uncle (I guess they had gone to see Grandpa Henry), and were confronted with a Halloween horror: our cousins Katie, Ashley, and Eric.

"Hi, Katie," said Steph. The spoiled eight-year-old rolled her eyes. Of all the bratty little cousins in the world, our Aunt Susan and Uncle Ken's kid was the brattiest and the littlest. Her weird pink costume looked like pajamas, but the shiny boots, head bandana, and plastic sword told me that she was either a ninja, a lazy Power Ranger, or had very little imagination.

"What are you supposed to be?" she asked. Steph looked shocked, and I laughed.

"I'm Princess Leia, from 'Star Wars', " she answered, "Jerkface over here is Luke Skywalker." I guess she was still pissed at me; my bruised arm ached, and I reached over and flicked her on the back of the neck. I would've done more, but Eric and Ashley started giggling a little too loudly, and Steph fixed me with a death glare. I didn't want any unnecessary attention from parents.

"Hmph," said Katie, "I hate Star Wars. My Dad says that your Uncle Jimmy of all people should get his head out of the clouds and stop trying to turn you guys into younger versions of him. My Dad thinks that Physics professors shouldn't be running around Star Wars conventions with a bunch of crazies like he does, and he thinks that by filling your heads with garbage with stuff like that, all he's doing is pretending to be your dad and trying to raise you. He told me your parents always spoiled you, letting your uncle fill your head with garbage and playing with lightsabers with you like a little kid. That's why he my Dad doesn't like your Uncle Jim very much, and that's why he never liked your dad, either."

My blood began to boil as she spoke. How could even a little bratty kid like her say something so terrible? It wasn't what she said about Uncle Ken that bothered me- he had always been a bigoted, ultra-conservative workaholic, but I had never known him to be this crazy- it was the last thing that she said about him that made me so angry. Steph and I looked at each other in shock and hurt. At that moment, a shared desire to make Katie and her Dad pay for what they had said united us again. I was about to open my mouth and chew out our cousin when little Eric tugged on my sleeve.

"Ugh. What, Eric?"

The four-year-old beamed up at me with big, pleading eyes. "Pway hide-and-seek wit us!" he demanded, clapping his hands together.

Stephanie sighed, no doubt remembering last year when the rotten little kids had begged us to go hide, then had trapped her in a closet, only to be chewed out in front of everyone later by my Mom for making too much noise. "Maybe later. Isn't it almost time for you three to go trick-or-treating?"

Eric stamped his foot. "No! No! Wanna pway now!"

"Now! Now!" his sister Ashley chimed in.

Steph looked at me, eyebrows raised. I sighed. Fine, if one of us was going to end up locked up somewhere this time, it better not be that closet.

"Oh, alright," she told them. Katie walked away in a huff, but Eric and Ashley cheered and promptly latched onto our costumes and dragged us up the stairs.

"Stephie can count!" Eric exclaimed.

"Yeah, let's start in the attic!" His sister pushed past us and hurried to open the attic door.

The attic? Great, I could just picture it now: an old, musty, tiny room with the kind of door that locked on both sides. Perfect for aggravating older cousins. As we went inside, though, I couldn't help but smirk; at least I didn't have to stay here and count. Stephanie look simply infuriated.

Two things I didn't count on, though: 1) those little brats were faster than I expected; and 2) my sister wasn't about to let them have their way. Just as I was about to run from the room after my cousins, Steph sprung from her "counting place" and locked the door on Eric and Ashley. She was too late, though. Before either of them could start whining, there was a click as a lock on the other side of the doorknob engaged, and the malicious giggling of two little kids running down the steps.

"Hey! Come back here you little...!" I shouted, but gave up quickly.

"Well, you could at least turn the light on," Steph said drily. Stumbling in the dark, I reached up and turned on the flickering light bulb above. To my surprise, the light revealed a room full of boxes and overflowing trunks.

"I wonder what that is," said Steph as she opened the nearest trunk. She gasped, then laughed, "Hey, check this shit out!" I looked over to see her holding a Princess Leia dress to herself, old and off-white with age, but otherwise identical to the one she was already wearing. Ignoring the smell of mothballs, I looked in the trunk to find and amazing, albeit wrinkled, array of "Star Wars" costumes.

"Dude, this stuff has to be at least twenty years old!" I found a Luke costume and compared it to my own in the mirror standing in the middle of the floor.

"Yeah, whoever thought Aunt Suzy and Uncle Ken were closet Star Wars fans."

There was another trunk next to the one we had opened, tightly shut and obviously very old. There was something strange about it... it looked almost familiar in a way, and something, I don't know what, compelled me to open it. I hesitated.

"I wonder what's in that one..." my sister's voice trailed off mysteriously, and I saw her go over to open the trunk. The lid wouldn't budge. "It's stuck." She tired harder to pry it open.

"I don't know if we should open it, Steph..."

Suddenly, her fingers seemed to slip and the lid burst open. Startled, she stumbled and fell backwards on top of me. Annoyed, I shoved her off of me and she shoved me back, but before either of us could do any more, things started to happen.

The light bulb flickered, dimmed. The musty air suddenly seemed strange, hot and arid, and breezy, too. The curtains of the lone window billowed a bit, then harder.

"Hey, could you close the window?" I asked my sister. She looked at me strangely, a strange excitement in her green eyes.

"But Mark, the window isn't open..."

We got up off the floor, which was hard to do in the now gale-force wind, and found ourselves brushing dust from our clothes... only dust wasn't this gritty... but it couldn't possibly be sand...

The light went out. Half-blind, I could barely see my sister as she tripped backwards over something on the floor, about to crash into the mirror! I rushed forward, not because I thought I could catch her, but because some powerful force, stronger than gravity, was pulling me towards the mirror, too.

"Steph!" I cried, but it was too late. In the split-second it took for my sister to fall, I realized that the mirror had ceased to be solid, and she was literally falling into it, me along with her. Desperately I tried to grab her wrist, or anything else that might stop us from falling, but she fell from my grasp with a terrified shriek, flying away into a vast expanse of white fog.

Screaming, I fell for what seemed like an eternity, until I seemed to hit a wall of blinding white, hot air, caught up in swirling winds and flying dust that stung my face. At last I think I landed, my head hitting something that must of been hard and painful, but before I could feel any pain, everything started to go black.

The last thing I remember before passing out completely was the feeling of dry sand between my fingers...