Prologue
They were moving again; on their way to a different state, a different city… It was nothing new. In their 15 short years of being alive, they had never known the words "home", "stability" or "family". They were each others family. Fraternal twins, born into a world that they had seen from the moment of birth, through jaded eyes. She was the older one, the darker one, she was the one charged in keeping her baby brother safe.
They don't remember the first four years of life, they had to have been under someone's care but faces and names escape them. Their first orphanage was fair, too overcrowded, but light and airy. Their first foster family they did not remember very well, three months into living with them they were shipped out when the woman discovered she was pregnant with their blood child. The next few families and orphanages were a blur. At age 10, they were separated. She had gone to a nice family that only wanted a little girl, her brother had gone to a different state orphanage, and then to a nice family that only wanted a little boy. She ran away to find him, they ran for two years before ending up in an orphanage in California. A year later, they were removed from their foster family when her brother attacked their foster-father for hitting her. At 14, just a short year earlier, they were shipped to a family in Maine. They had been nice until they had been shipped back to another orphanage when the family had a child of their own. Now, at age 15, they were being shipped to Mystic Falls, Virginia, to be put in the care of the town's sheriff. Sheriff Elizabeth Forbes was the ex-wife of their Maine social worker's ex-boyfriend. They loved Stephen dearly; he had truly taken to caring for them. But when he had fallen ill, he had worked to put them into Sheriff Forbes' custody, and with his dying breath he had told them that Mystic Falls would be perfect, they would be family there.
She prayed that he was right. It would be nice to finally find a place to call home. She was tired, 15 years old, and she felt as if they had lived a lifetime. It is hard to go through life when you do not know more than your names and your birthdays. So many people ask questions, so many that she had taken to standing in every home room class and making a speech. "We will not be here long; do not waste your time."
Stephen had tried to do so much for them, and his own daughter had loved them dearly. But, she worked so many hours and traveled so much that she was deemed "unstable living conditions", or else they would be in Paris, France with her. And so they were on a plane headed to the care of Sheriff Forbes in Mystic Falls.
Elizabeth "Liz" Forbes smiled as she moved through the house, making last-minute adjustments before she had to go and pick up her two wards. When Stephen had called her last month about the two teenagers, she had been shocked, but she had agreed to take in and care for the twins. She agreed for many reasons, but the biggest one Stephen knew nothing of and never would.
The children bore a name that she had not heard in 15 long years. And there would never be anyone that would be able to convince her that it was just a coincidence, especially after Stephen had emailed their school pictures to her.
The girl was slightly taller than her brother, no more than an inch or two. She had long, dark brown, waist-length ringlets of curls and the second prettiest shade of blue eyes that she had ever seen. The boy had long, light blonde, shoulder-length curls, with the same shade of blue as his sister. They both had the same expressive lips, but the boy's smile caught her attention and reinforced the thought in her mind that their name was not a coincidence. For when he smiled, he had the cutest dimples.
Liz sighed as she turned and stared at the photo of her daughter from her high school graduation, and the man standing next to her with a smile so large that his dimples drew focus to them alone. "There is just no way this is a coincidence." Liz thought to herself as she walked into the kitchen to grab her keys and the flight information for the twins. Looking at their pictures again, she took a breath and prepared herself to meet the teenagers. "There's just no way."
