Strange Fate

by the Lady of the Mists

Chapter One: A New Home

From the time that I was old enough to understand what it meant, I knew that my parents weren't my birth parents, knew that the family that I had been born into had given me away and my parents had taken me in. I also knew that my parents didn't want me, not really, anyway. My mom just couldn't have kids and Dad really needed somebody to take over his company—of course, he had planned on adopting a son, but he decided that he'd rather just marry me off to some rich guy and expand his empire, so to speak.

All I was to them was a commodity, someone that was born just so they could marry me off to the richest guy that they could find, I would have his nice, rich kids, and that was it. They didn't care about me; they didn't care about my happiness or what I wanted. All they really cared about was making sure that I didn't stray off the path.

Maybe that's why I was so eager to break free of the chains that they kept around me, why I kept tugging against them, eager to break free.

Not that it really mattered anymore, I thought as I stared out into the streets of Stars Hollow, Connecticut, about a hundred miles and a couple of states from my home of Redwood Falls, a town with a tragic history and an even more tragic present. All that mattered was that that part of my life was now over.

After my parents had been killed—murdered by a self-serving psychopath—and my life had turned upside down, the social workers tracked down my birth family and found my mother Lorelai Gilmore living with my twin sister in this strange little town. Needless to say, I was more than a little shocked to discover that not only did I have a twin, but she had kept Rory while our father gave me up.

Here's the deal: Lorelai Gilmore and Christopher Hayden get pregnant at the ripe age of sixteen, she gives birth to twins and decides that she doesn't want to marry Christopher, so they split up the twins. Lorelai got my sister Rory and Christopher got me, but his parents decided that they didn't want me to drag my father down any more than he already was and forced him to give me up for adoption. I was adopted by the Dawsons and seventeen years later, here I am, driving through this little town to live with the family that I'd never known.

It wasn't too hard to find the house; it was right where they had told me that it was going to be. And anyway, if I made two right turns, then I'd be right back in the centre of town, so it wasn't really hard to find anything in this town. It was a nice enough house, though nothing grand, not like I had grown up in. (Yes, I did grow up in one of those huge, stone mansions, but personally, I would have preferred to grow up in something like this.)

The house was the kind that I had been planning on moving into after I graduated from high school with—

A lump formed in my throat as my thoughts travelled in a different direction and it took all of my energy not to start sobbing right then and there as I took several deep breaths, trying to reign in my emotions. Now was not the time when I needed to lose it, especially now when my temper was on the edge of explosion, along with the rest of my emotions.

"Easy, Susan," I muttered to myself, shaking my head, trying to clear it. "It's all right. You can do this." And anyway, it wasn't like I was going to get this chance a second time. In a few years, I wouldn't have the chance to come here and get to know them. Might as well grab the opportunity while I could and I knew that if I didn't do this, then I would regret it for the rest of my life.

And unfortunately, that was going to be a really, really, really long time.

But how was I going to hide the truth from these people for very long? It was bound to become obvious that I wasn't a normal girl; they were bound to notice things when she was living in the same house with her and once they began to notice, then they would slowly piece together the truth and then all that would happen was it would end up in a bloodshed . . . just like before.

Banishing those thoughts from my mind, I stared at my reflection in the mirror determinedly. "It's gonna be okay, Susan," I told myself firmly. "You can't think like that, all right? Everything's going to turn out just fine. It's not going to be like it was before. If they start to figure out what's going on, then you'll just have to leave. Simple as that. Now get up and go knock on that door."

Reaching for the necklace that I wore around my necklace, reassuring myself that it was still there, I grabbed my purse and my duffle bag, sliding them across my shoulder as I opened the door and headed up the sidewalk—or lack thereof—climbing up the porch and tapped once on the door, my newly enhanced hearing catching everything that was going on inside.

A woman—Lorelai, I assumed—was talking on the phone, her shoes clattering against wooden floors with music playing in the background. I could also hear voices coming from the nearby houses and the sounds of cars on the highway, making their way through traffic.

The second that she heard my knock, though, the woman quickly ended her conversation and I heard her coming towards the door, opening it up to reveal a woman in her early thirties, stunningly beautiful. She had dark hair and the exact same eyes that I did: startling blue and just as vivid as the sky on a clear day. But instead of my short stature, she was tall with a flawless perfection and her lips pulled into a bright smile the moment that her eyes landed on me.

She smelled like coffee and peaches, I noted, the sharp scent catching my nostrils and I was glad that I wasn't on a rampage like anybody else would have been if they were in my situation. Because of the lifestyle that I had chosen, I was . . . well, tamer than I should have been.

"Hi," she said brightly, grinning broadly at me and I only managed a weak, uneasy smile back, but she seemed to take my uneasiness as shyness rather than anxiety. "You must me Susan, I'm Lorelai." Her blue eyes were overexcited at seeing the daughter that she hadn't seen since I was one day old again. "Come on in."

"Thanks," I said, silently thanking the Powers that Be. Without an invitation from anybody in the house, then I never could have set foot inside of the threshold and that would be extremely difficult to explain.

Of course, Lorelai should be more careful about who she invited into the house, but she had the ignorance that most humans did, the same ignorance that I had only a few months ago, before everything had happened and my whole world changed. Hardly anyone knew the truth about what happened after the sun went down and I hoped very much that she never learned the truth about what happened after dark.

With the barrier now gone, I stepped into the house, very grateful that I'd had the foresight to eat before I came here, because this was the first time since I'd been changed that I had been around humans and the smell was intoxicating. If I hadn't been on a strict diet since I'd been changed, then I might not have been able to resist it. As it was, if I didn't have such a strong sense of control, I wouldn't have been able to. After all, I was still only a newborn, less than two months old.

Because I wasn't an average, ordinary girl, not anymore. Once upon a time, that was true. Once upon a time, all I had to worry about was what college I was getting into and studying for my math test. But it wasn't like that anymore. I had changed.

Now . . . I was a vampire.

"Well, Rory isn't home yet, she's still at school," Lorelai offered when an awkward silence fell down upon us after she closed the door. "But you'll meet her later; she's looking forward to meeting her sister. She should be home around five; she goes to this big fancy school up at Hartford, so it takes her a little while to get home." She talked really fast, I noticed with amazement, as though she couldn't get the words out fast enough.

"That's okay," I said, not sure how to respond to this. I didn't know how to talk or what to say in this situation. It was just too weird; this woman had given birth to me, but I didn't know her. And it didn't help that I had been completely changed. If I was any other vampire, I'd want to suck this woman's blood dry.

"Here, why don't I take this for you?" Lorelai said, grabbing the duffle bag before I had a chance to protest. She grunted as she realised just how heavy it was. "Jeez, this thing weighs a ton; what did you put in here, books?" she asked with a grin. "Uh . . . well, why don't we put this up in your room and then I can give you the grand tour?" she asked as she lugged the duffle bag up the stairs and I reluctantly followed her. "So . . . how was the traffic getting here? I know it can get a little hectic this time of day."

"No, it actually wasn't too bad," I said as I followed her up the stairs, slowing down my speed so that I didn't pass her up and get there before she did.

"Well, that's good," she said, smiling as she ascended the last step and dragged my bag down the hall, to the last door on the right. "So . . . is this all that you brought with you?"

I shook my head. "No, there's a couple more bags down in my car," I answered as she pushed open the door and I caught my first sight of my new room. "Wow . . ."

It wasn't much to look at; basically, it was like my closet back home and there was hardly anywhere to put my easel, but there was actually a pretty decent view, I admitted as I stepped inside and looked out the window. And the lighting was pretty good. It would have been pretty bad if I'd had awful lighting, but it wasn't like I was doing much drawing anymore. Not since . . . him.

Lorelai interrupted my thoughts. "I know that it's not what you're probably used to, but you can change anything you want, of course, and if you want to put up curtains or something, we could go shopping tomorrow. I'm pretty handy as a seamstress." She seemed a bit proud of this fact.

"No, it's fine," I said, looking around the small room, not at all minding the smallness of the room. My room back home had always seemed . . . well, daunting and too big for one girl. "It's pretty."

She smiled brightly at that. "Good. Well, why don't I give you the grand tour and then we can get the rest of your stuff out of the car?" she asked before cocking her head, studying my necklace curiously. "That's pretty," she observed, inclining her head towards it. "Where'd you get that?"

My hand moved towards the necklace, gripping the stone instinctively before I let go. "It was a present," I said lamely.

Lorelai left it at that, not pursing the subject as I dropped my purse on my bed and my duffle was left by the door as I followed this woman—my mother—out the door and she showed me around.

It was a quaint, tiny little house, but I didn't particularly mind as I looked around. The kitchen looked as though it hadn't ever been used and they had more movies than a video store. Their sense of decoration ranged from monkey lamps to Hello, Kitty bed sheets and everything in between with no real sense of style and where nothing seemed to match perfectly. Even the pillows on the couch were mismatched, which both fascinated and astounded me.

Maybe it wasn't much, but it was more than enough for two—correction, three—women living alone in a small town like this. And anyway, I was more than tired of living in the upper classes where all that mattered was how much money a particular family had and whose daughter was going to marry whose son and make the perfect offspring and all that. I had spent seventeen years in it and was more than glad to get away from it.

Which, now that I thought about it, was exactly what Lorelai had one after she had gotten pregnant with my sister and me. When we were a year old, she had split with Rory, taken off down the highway and gotten the first job that would take her. Maybe I was more like my birth mother than I thought.

After showing me around the house, Lorelai helped me lug my suitcases up to my room. I probably could have done it by myself—in fact, I know that I could have, with my new vampiric strength—but it was probably better to just let her give me a hand and not draw attention to myself. That was the last thing that I wanted to do.

After all, the last thing that this town needed was for a bloodbath to ensure like had happened in Redwood Falls. They were still recovering from everything that had happened, but like what had happened over a hundred years ago, the true story would be downplayed and nobody other than the ones who witnessed it firsthand would know the truth, myself included.

Either she was a little bit nervous herself about having her long lost daughter in the house or she wanted to give me some time to myself so I could make myself feel more at home, but Lorelai left me alone for a little while, heading downstairs to watch some television. The second that she closed the door behind me, I sighed, running my hands through my brown tresses before I moved over to my new bed, sitting down on it.

I shouldn't have come here, I thought miserably as I looked around me in desolation. No matter where I went, I knew that chaos and destruction would follow it and take away the people that I cared about most in this world. It had happened back home and no doubt, my presence here would unleash horrors the likes of which they'd never seen.

But I was a vampire now, an immortal being doomed to walk the endless eons on this earth alone. And I was unable to age anymore, which meant that in only a few years, I was going to have to leave here anyway. This was literally my only chance to know them.

And I knew that if I didn't take this chance, then I was going to end up regretting it. Maybe it wouldn't happen for a couple of centuries, maybe not even for a millennia, but eventually, I would regret not taking the chance to get to know my birth mother . . . and my sister. So I had better take it while I still had the chance.

There are just some things in life that you don't get the chance to do over, such as this. If I never came here, then I would never get to know them and I wouldn't get that choice again.

Maybe a bloodbath would ensue just because I came here. Or maybe I would buy myself a few years of happiness and nothing would happen. It wasn't like any of the other vampires that had created that massacre in Redwood Falls knew that I was alive . . .

Or I guess the technical term would be living dead. But none of them knew that I was one of them knew. They all thought that I was dead. Of them, only the vampire that killed him knew that I was a vampire now and if he came here, I was bound to shove a stake into his chest.

If I ever saw him again, I would kill him.

Getting to my feet, I walked over to where my suitcases lay and opened up a particular one, moving aside the clothes and books that had been placed ever so neatly there, setting them aside until I found a picture frame wrapped up in one of my shirts so that it wouldn't get smashed.

It was nothing special, just a simple silver frame—actually, quite out of the ordinary for anything that I owned. But it was the picture itself that I was more interested in.

Laying inside of the frame was a simple photo of a young man, seventeen years old, wearing a cocky grin as he glanced sideways at the camera, towards me as I had taken it. He was tall and handsome, reaching six feet easily with blondish-brown hair that swept his face in a chaotic mess that was an art form all on its own, but it was his eyes that I had fallen for the first time that I saw him. They were grey, but they weren't a simple, ordinary grey; they were soulful and expressive, reflecting his emotions and portraying them as though they were an open book. If he was angry, they were dark and stormy and if he was happy, they were soft and laughing.

My heart ached as I stared down at him, tears filling into my eyes as he smiled up at me, unaware of the pain that I was going through just by looking at his picture. Reaching out, I brushed my finger against the photograph, memories going through my mind as I remembered the feel of his hair, the way that he would hold me in his strong arms, the feel of his lips on mine whenever he kissed me . . .

It took everything that I had not to start bawling at that moment as I stood up and walked over to the window seat, crawling into it and holding the picture frame in my lap as I stared down at it.

I wouldn't deny that I was grateful to get away from Redwood Falls. I wouldn't say that I was relieved to be out of the tight, prude world that my parents had lived in. I wouldn't say that it was a relief to be able to live my own life and not to be told what to do every minute of every day.

But I would give it all up just to have him back. I would give anything just to have him with me.

"I miss you so much, Tyler," I whispered to my dead boyfriend, my soul mate, my one true love.