AN: umm heya guys! This just came over me one night and wouldn't let go, so please tell me if it's crap(well, you could sugarcoat it a bit :D) and I will stop torturing everyone with it! Anyways, here's a sort of 'first chapter' where Ray Ray's just realizing things don't always turn out like they do in movies, and the next couple of ones will be her sorta analysing her 'sisters', so first up will be Sarah (cause Rachel's a big gay dork and she always puts Sarah first duuh), then Alison, Cosima and so on...

Umm, I guess that's it! Let me know what you think of it or if I should continue! :)


There's a coldness that comes with it.

Not like an inner coldness, one of the soul, not like how psychiatrists describe feeling hollow. But rather a shivering of the bones, limbs trembling in the hot sun. Was this how having a family felt like? Was this really what Rachel had dreamed of for so long?

In the dreams she dared not share with anyone ( foolish dreams that, no matter how hard she tried to put a stop to, always managed to slip past her eyelids every night ), family felt like coming home. Like all her life had been a giant trip ( the Dyad, Leekie, the glass walls she'd grown up surrounded by ) and finding a family of her own would feel just like coming home, tired but happy, sun-freckled skin on soft, familiar sheets.

This was... different, to say the least.

There was no warmth pooled in the depth of her heart, but rather... a strange coldness.


Father.


The arms of a strange man around her, weighing her down. This man, this Ethan Duncan. Was this her father? An old man rambling on and on about the most trivial of things? Was this the brilliant Doctor Duncan?

No, it couldn't be.

This couldn't be it.

Not after years of wanting and wishing, not after endless nights spent crying and praying and 'pleaseplease bring me back my parents doctor leekie doesn't tuck me in like mummy did and he doesn't read to me like daddy please i just want them back why did you take them from me i don't want those stupid tapes i want them'. There had to be more than this. More to family.

The images might have slipped away, lazy autumn days spent in the park forgotten in favor of white walls and harsh, fluorescent light, but the feelings had always remained. Fleeting bursts of 'i used to belong' and 'i was loved' always tormenting her. A little taste of what would never come. Like poisonous little arrows they shot away at her chest, ripping her insides open, veins raw and throbbing.

And she'd done it. She'd found her family. A father.

So where was her reward? Family meant belonging, and belonging meant being loved, and love was warmth, and hot tingles everywhere. So where had she miscalculated?

The equation was fairly simple: father = family = home = love = happy. This wasn't right.

Yes, she'd always struggled to keep her lines straight and her loops perfectly neat, and she could never remember which lakes went where or how tall all of the mountains were, but math had never been a problem for her. She'd taken to it quite quickly, the endless rows of numbers soothing her. Math followed an order. Unlike those pesky 'Creative Essays', there were definite steps you had to take in solving an equation, you couldn't just make up numbers and signs, there was no room for childish additions, no space to ramble. No mistakes.

So really, this didn't make sense at all. Rachel Duncan did not make mistakes. She could not have wasted years of her life wishing on fairy-tales, pixie dust leading her straight down the bloody rabbit hole.

Then why was she not happy? Why was she not home? If Sarah Manning had managed to make a family, a home for herself with her so called sisters, why couldn't she?