chapter one

arwen

( two can keep a secret if one of them is dead )

Disclaimer: Everything except Arwen, Lilith and Arwen's family belongs to the BBC.

It didn't come as much of a surprise when sixteen-year-old Arwen Love woke up with a burning desire to be alone. Recently, she had been feeling more and more trapped in her own mind, and the worst thing was that she didn't know how to escape. Her parents had booked her in for a weekly session with a psychiatrist and in all honesty, it had done her more bad than good. Arwen couldn't handle being made to tell a complete stranger her creepy thoughts, and she hated having to write them down when she didn't feel like talking.

For the past six years, every time Arwen had closed her eyes, she saw Natasha's lifeless body staring at her. She knew what she had done was a bet with the devil, but in a bid to appear more tough to Lilith, she had gone ahead and shook the beam. Natasha had fallen from it and broke her neck almost instantly. She had been pronounced dead about three weeks after the incident, because at first she had officially been a missing person. Every time Arwen saw the posters sellotaped to trees and lamposts, she wanted to be sick. She knew the whole thing was affecting Lilith too, because the once-confident young girl had become withdrawn from her peers, and spent most of her time holed up in her room.

It hadn't been much of a surprise when the police came into the school and told them that they had found Natasha's body, because both Arwen and Lilith knew it would only be a matter of time. They did feel relieved when the officer said that they were not treating the death as suspicious, that it just looked as though Natasha had been playing on a fallen roof beam and lost her footing. Arwen would never forget the look that passed between her and Lilith, as if someone up there was saying "You made a fateful mistake Arwen Jo Love, but it'll all be okay. Just DON'T DO IT AGAIN!".

But the feeling had soon worn off when Arwen had saw Natasha's parents crying on the news. Their only child; gone. Arwen knew it was all her fault and no one else's, but she couldn't help hating and blaming Lilith for pressuring her so much. Lilith had never been a particularly GOOD friend; she had been okay to talk to, okay to slag people off with and fairly okay for copying schoolwork from. But Lilith had also been mean and bossy, controlling Arwen and making all her decisions. If a skirt looked ugly on Lilith; it looked ugly on Arwen too. If Lilith was no good at something; Arwen had to (or at least pretend to) be no good at it too. Arwen had never been allowed to be her own person, and eventually she had become moulded into a clone of Lilith, her so-called best friend. That was the reason why she had shook the beam as Natasha walked along it, to prove to Lilith that she wasn't afraid.

But because of that, she had ruined a family. She had killed someone. Maybe, not intentionally, but an innocent girl was dead because of her, and there was no going back. Arwen had soon grown somewhat insane, and began resenting everyone around her. She had done everything in her power to make her parents' job ten times harder and she had made sure her little brother, Greg, had to take the worst of her moods. She acted up at school and spent the majority of her lessons winding her teachers up, but all of that was a front. The person she hated the most and wanted to have the worst time ever was Lilith.

Her hatred for her 'best friend' had came to a head one day, about nine months ago, when she had been staying over at Lilith's house. Lilith had been winding her up about something that Arwen couldn't remember and they had been arguing in the hallway. It was just the usual 'Arwen-and-Lilith' type argument, one screaming about how the other was a bitch and a rubbish friend, the other yelling that they tried their best to be perfect, but nothing ever seemed to be enough. Lilith had been standing at the edge of the stairs, and out of spite, Arwen pushed her.

It was just a small shove, not even enough to do a small child any harm, but Lilith stumbled a little and almost instantly fell down the stairs in a heap. Fortunately, she didn't die, but she did have some serious injuries. It wasn't long after that when Arwen got admitted into a psychiatric hospital, on anti-psychotic drugs and under strict guard. She was only allowed to go back to live with her family when the doctors were pretty much positive that she wouldn't pull another stunt like that again, although things were different when she got home.

Her parents treated her with caution, as if she were to suddenly lash out and cause them grievous bodily harm. Even her little brother was distant from her, he avoided her and eyed her up nervously, worried she would snap at any minute. Arwen's parents decided that a move away from everything; away from the memories, away from Lilith would probably be for the best.

So that was how she ended up here, in London, starting at a new school that day. Arwen hadn't been particularly pleased when her mum had announced they were moving, and she would be starting at a school named Waterloo Road, but she didn't say anything. Truth was, she was scared that she would meet another bossy, controlling friend and the memories of the Natasha thing would come flooding back. She knew that the world was filled with Liliths; mean, bossy girls that would do anything to make it to the top, including destroying other people.

But Arwen wasn't going to let her past creep back into her present. She was a whole new person, she wasn't the silly little girl that had once been in Lilith Parsons' shadow. She was different; stronger, more emotionally stable. She wasn't going to let an old friend and a terrible mistake get in the way of living her life to the full potential.

But she was soon about to learn, the past will always find you, no matter how far away you run from it.

Sorry for any spelling or grammar mistakes, I wrote this on Microsoft WordPad and then edited everything on the doc part of this site. Please leave a review telling me what you think, it was pretty rushed too. I hope that my OC isn't too much of a Mary-Sue, or badly done. Thanks for the reviews so far, it means a lot.