Part One

Exodus

I.

Down the Rabbit Hole. Throught the Looking Glass. Into the Wild.

Any Way You Put It, I'm Fucked.

I tried to ignore the plane rolling down the distant tarmac. I tried not to pay attention to the low growl of the engines, or the ominous trembling underfoot. I tried to pretend I was not here, was not about to do this. I tried... and I failed miserably. Jesus Christ, I could already feel the nausea building.

I, Katherine Edith Swan, loathe flying, more then any other heinous, vile, repulsive thing on this planet. And I was about to be faced with five torturous hours of it. Wonderful.

I ran through the statistics once again in my head. You're more likely to get struck by lightening then go down in a fiery wreck spiraling madly out of control. You're more likely to get in a crash on the way to the airport then in the air. Air travel is the safest means of travel there is...

But all I could see was our plane colliding with another one at take off, our plane getting trapped in a thunderstorm over Washington, our plane plummeting down through the clouds from thirty-thousand feet into the harsh landscape below...

I tried to take one of those deep, steadying breaths they tell you about in anger management classes. It wasn't doing anything.

Instead of letting my thoughts linger on what I was sure would lead to my imminent demise, I stared pointedly at my mother's face, focusing - or, at least, trying to - intently on the words she was speaking.

"Are you sure you're okay with this girls?"

Renee's eyes were brimming with anxiety and uncertainty. Not to mention tears. I rolled my eyes. This was only, what, the umpteenth time she was trying to talk us out of our decision.

"You know you don't have to do this." She reminded us, again. "This isn't about Phil, is it? You know he's crazy about you girls, don't you? I don't want you to think he's trying to drive you away, or that I'm choosing him over you..." She bit her lip, looking back and forth between my sister and me.

That was just like Renee. Always overanalyzing everything.

Renee, my fearless, headstrong, free-spirited mother, had recently remarried. Within a few weeks of meeting Phil, she had sworn she was madly in love with him (not surprising for Renee - she has always had a bit of a flair for the extreme). What was surprising was that these feelings hadn't faded at the same breakneck speed at which they'd appeared. A year later, she was just as crazy about him as she had been when they'd met, and he was equally as devoted to her. They were married within the month. Which was fine. Phil was a very decent guy. He wasn't loud, obnoxious, or an alcoholic. He bathed regularly and cooked with above-average skill (an unexpected plus). And, as our mother had pointed out, he really did seem to like Bella and I, he didn't just tolerate us for the sake of our mother.

And he made Renee happy. That was the most important thing. So everything was fine. All systems go. There was nothing standing in the way of the four of is melding into a nice, Norman Rockwell style nuclear family. Which, of course, meant there had to be a catch. That catch was baseball. Baseball. A month ago, I would have never thought something so unoffending as America's favorite pastime could cause me so much misery. The problem was, Phil played baseball for a living. No, scratch that, the problem was he didn't play it well. Which meant he was unsigned. Which meant he went bouncing around from team to team, from state to state. From home to home. You can see how this particular lifestyle might be rather unappealing to two teenage girls. So, rather then cause our mother unnecessary pain by forcing her to stay in Phoenix with us, we were exiling ourselves to our father Charlie's dismal home of Forks, Washington so that she could travel with Phil instead.

"No." Bella said firmly from the front seat - this whole arrangement had been her idea. "Phil's great, really. But you two deserve some time to be newlyweds. You didn't even get a honeymoon. And I think Kit and I would both prefer to stay in one spot until we graduate... even if that spot is Forks." She said it like it was a dirty word.

I sighed. Poor Bella. I already knew that this was going to be a lot worse for her then it was for me. For one thing, I had never been too terribly close to Renee. I mean, I loved her, of course, she was my mother, but the two of us had never shared the same kind of bond that she and Bella did. And leaving Arizona would be no big deal for me - in actuality, I was looking forward to it. But Bella loved it here. She loved the bright, blinding sunshine, and dry southern air. She loved the city we lived in, and the gruff desert landscape surrounding it. Bella was custom made for Arizona, despite her obstinately pale skin. She was very strongly tied to it, almost as strongly as she was to our mother. It was going to be really painful for her to leave it behind.

It would not, however, be so for me. I had lived in Scottsdale nearly all of my life, had been raised here, gone to school here, made friends here. But for a reason I could never quite put my finger on, I'd always felt out of place in its harsh environment. I couldn't stand the staggering heat, the relentless sunshine, the saturated blue of the ever-cloudless sky that seemed to stretch to unnatural lengths over the flat, lonely landscape. Oddly enough, it was the climate in Washington that I seemed to agree with. Washington, the place I had left far behind before I was even born. There was something inexplicably appealing about the soft grey light that sifted through the constantly overcast sky, the persistent chill that permeated the skin even in summer, the unending string of wild storms, and the equally wild landscape. Brooding, thoughtful, mysterious, maybe even enchanted, but in the Grimm's Fairytales kind of way that always had you a little on-edge. It made Phoenix seem weak and superficial in comparison.

Yes, Washington I could certainly deal with. Forks, however... Forks is one of those impossibly tiny towns that rarely sees anything more shocking than a fender bender. The arrival of Bella and I would be the biggest thing to happen there since... well, since our mother ran off with us sixteen years ago. Renee and Charlie had both grown up there, just like their parents had before them, and their grandparents before them. They got caught up in one of those highschool first-love whirlwind romances, and my big-family-small-town minded father had convinced my mother to marry him and "settle down." But by the time Bella was born, Renee could already feel the claustrophobic walls of Forks closing in on her. It was the day she found out she was pregnant with me, she said, that she had had her epiphany: she was trapped. Like her mother and her grandmother and however many generations before her, she was being caged in on all sides by the inescapable iron bars of small-town life, and unless she acted fast, she would soon become one of them. She'd left that very night.

Thus, Bella and I had been raised in the suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona, and while Scottsdale was most definitely the epitome of the word suburb, I had always had Phoenix to escape to when I needed something of a little more substance (which was often). But Forks... Forks made Scottsdale look like excitement central. Nothing ever happened there. It was literally a void of all things mentally stimulating. Two months of that place a year had nearly been enough to kill me. I didn't know what was going to happen now that we were making the move permanent.

"Oh." My mother said, her musical voice shattering my thoughts. "We better go. I don't want to risk you girls missing your flight.." She trailed off, as if that was exactly what she was hoping for.

I marched across the sweltering parking lot as quickly as possible, practically diving through the automatic doors into the air-conditioned oasis of the airport lobby. That could basically sum up my existence in Arizona: constantly scrambling from one air-conditioned location to the other.

The walk to the gate seemed to be going far too fast, despite the combined efforts of Bella, my mother, and I to drag it out, lingering as long as possible at every gaudy gift-shop window. And wasn't security supposed to take much longer then this? Where were the full-body searches and bomb sniffing dogs? But in what seemed like no time at all, we were sitting on hard plastic chairs amongst the other Seattle-bound travelers in a pained silence.

Renee, as always, was the first to break it.

"Kit, sweetheart, let me take a picture of the two of you."

I shuddered, but unzipped the bag on my lap and reached in for my camera anyway.

Photography is something of a hobby of mine. Well, no, not hobby really, hobby is too blase a word, but passion just seems too cheesy for everyday conversation. I'd always been fascinated by the camera. I guess I just liked the idea that you could freeze something in time and keep it forever. One of my first memories was of fooling around with Renee's old camera as a toddler, just pushing the little button at random. I was about six when she stared giving me disposables to play with, and I got my first real camera (a good old fashioned Polaroid) at eleven. I'd been thrilled, snapping shots of everybody and thing I came in contact with. I used up a small fortune in film.

It was the Polaroid I placed into Renee's eager hands, too lazy to dig the new professional camera I'd gotten for my sixteenth birthday out it's snug case at the bottom of my carry-on. She held it up to her face, and I dutifully wrapped my arm around my sister, leaning into her returning embrace. Renee snapped the photo, and almost instantly the Polaroid spit it out.

"Oh, this is a good one." She grinned, beckoning us forward. I cringed. As much as I loved taking pictures, I generally despised being on the other side of the lens. But I had to admit, as I leaned over Renee's shoulder to see the photo, she was right. It wasn't bad. I smiled as I examined the image of my sister and I. We had our arms around each other, and Bella was leaning her head to the right so it was resting on top of mine. Neither of us were smiling, we both looked completely miserable. But that wouldn't bother Renee. Renee liked pictures that captured the moment, not ones that falsely presented everything as peachy keen.

The goodbyes were kept short (or, at least, as short as possible when dealing with Renee). I took one final shot of her from down the long tube that connected the plane to the gate, and then carefully stowed my camera away. There was no need to document my torture. As soon as I sat down, I slid the plastic shutter down on my tiny window with more force then was necessary, and spent the remaining four hours with a pair of headphones firmly in place over my ears, the volume on my hand-me-down ipod turned up as high as possible without causing permanent damage to my hearing. I tried not to think of what I was doing, but I couldn't help squeezing Bella's wrists tightly every time the plane wobbled a little. My fingernails left little pink marks in her skin, but she didn't seem to mind.

My sigh of relief as the thickly forested ground began to rise up to meet us was a little too audible. I never thought I'd be so happy to see Washington. The ride to Forks from the airport was a little awkward, but uneventful. Charlie tried to make small talk, Bella and I tried to sound interested instead of dejected, and everybody failed miserably. The mood darkened considerably when Charlie sheepishly admitted that he had bought Bella a car - a car that was made sometime in the 1950's. Nobody spoke much after that.

"I got you something, too, Kit." Charlie said after a long while, as if he had just remembered.

"Really? What is it?" I tried to sound excited but was inwardly cringing. I wasn't really one for antiques.

"It's a surprise." He said, sounding proud of himself. "You'll have to wait till we get home."

I saw Bella's shoulders stiffen a little in the front seat, and knew she was thinking the same thing I was. Home was in Arizona, with our mother.

But as we pulled off the road and into Charlie's gravel driveway, thinks took a turn for the better. Bella's "new" car, far from the ancient, rusted deathtrap I had been picturing in my mind, was actually, well... it was cool. It was a truck. A huge, rusty-red monster of a thing, the kind with a big bulbous cab and huge metal fenders that never need replacing. Perfect for Bella. It looked like something straight out of an old movie. And it meant that Bella and I would not have to walk in the rain to school every morning. Or worse, endure a ride in the cruiser...

We spent a good fifteen minutes admiring the truck. Charlie, thrilled that he had gotten something right, chattered on and on about how well everything ran, from the almost-new engine to the antique stereo. He had bought the car from somebody named Billy Black, and kept saying how well his son (I think his name was Jacob) had taken care of it. The names conjured up some vague memories from my childhood - long, torturous afternoons spent trapped on an ageing fishing boat with Charlie, Bella, and a three (or maybe it was two...) children who's names I'd already forgotten. Charlie insisted that Bella and I'd both been evry good friends with the nameless children (although, I suppose one of them must've been the Jacob character) when we were younger, but neither of us could remember much about them. I returned my attention to the truck.

By the time Charlie had gotten to the new lining in the bed, I began to wonder idly what my surprise was. Surely it couldn't be better than a car? As Bella climbed into the cab, feeling the leather seats and testing the space, I turned my eyes onto the house. It wasn't very big. Two stories. Blue, with white shutters that looked like they could do with a fresh coat of paint. The front lawn was small, but neatly kept. I smiled. It hadn't changed at all.

Or had it? There was something different about the place, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. It seemed... bigger then I remembered. But that wasn't possible. Houses don't just grow on a whim. Maybe it was just because that last time I was here, I had been considerably shorter. But that didn't make sense, that would mean the house should feel smaller, not larger...

Bella and I lugged the few suitcases and boxes we had out of Charlie's cruiser and into the house. We hadn't needed to bring much. We didn't need any furniture, as the room we shared upstairs had been well stocked with a bunk-bed, two dressers, and a desk, compliments of Charlie. We had brought to Forks clothing, books, movies, and music; the four staples of life. It would probably only take one trip to get it all upstairs, two at the most. Charlie seemed giddy as he followed us up, a suitcase in each hand, and I guessed that whatever my present was, it would be waiting for me up here. We reached the top landing, and again I was struck with the feeling that it was much bigger then I'd remembered it, only this time it was stronger. I turned to Charlie, and watched as a wide grin spread across his face.

"Come with me girls." He said, and edged passed us and down the hall. He strode past the room that Bella and I shared and stopped at a door that I didn't remember being there. I froze, comprehension dawning, and Charlie's grin spread wider as he threw open the door. I stepped inside, and gasped.

"Dad..." I breathed.

"Wow." Bella said.

"You like it?" Was Charlie's almost breathless reply.

Oh yeas. I certainly did.

It was a room. A bedroom. It had two large windows, each with a pair of simple white curtains that were heavy enough to keep out the light in the mornings, a daybed, complete with crisp white sheets and a heavy comforter, one of the dressers that had previously resided in what was now Bella's room, and a desk almost identical to the one he had bought for us a few years ago. There was nothing remotely remarkable about it. Well, except for the fact that Charlie had built it just for me.

Charlie had added a room onto the house, just for me.

I wheeled around to beam at him, nearly sending the large box in my arms to the floor.

"So... you still like purple then?" He asked sheepishly. He was referring to the walls, which had been painted a rich aubergine purple, my favorite color. I laughed.

"Dad!" I squealed, half reproachfully, half elated. "Oh course I like it! I love it! But you shouldn't have done it! Christ, this must've cost a fortune... a whole room! All to myself!"

"Actually, it barely cost me a thing." Charlie replied, his smile wider now then ever.

"What!?" Bella and I gasped in unison.

"How?" Bella sputtered.

"A friend of mine, a doctor at the local hospital, helped me with it. Well, he and his three boys. He offered to help build it and pay for all the materials. I did him a favor a while back, and he said he owed me one."

I whistled. "That must've been some favor."

"He was having a problem with some documents. Strictly legal stuff, but it could've ended up costing him a fortune in fees. I made it go away." Charlie swelled with pride. He was the chief of police here in Forks.

"So you asked him to build you a room? And pay for it?" Bella's tone sounded reproachful.

"No!" Charlie said in surprise. "I just asked him if he knew any good contractors. I remembered him mentioning that he had built his house himself. I didn't realize that he meant he had actually built it, I thought he had hired someone to do it from plans he had made. But he insisted on helping me himself. And he bought all the stuff before I could stop him." He added defensively. "I was surprised by how quickly they got it done, it only took them two weeks and I barely had to do anything. But apparently, Carlisle's father did work like this before he retired, that's where they all learned it from."

"Carlisle..." The old-fashioned name sounded strange in my mouth.

"Carlisle Cullen." Charlie said. "His kids go to the highschool, too. There's five of them, I think. You two should introduce yourselves."

"Yeah." I said. "I think we will."

A/N This chapter's mostly exposition, introducing you to Kit and whatnot. Sorry if it's at all boring, but it had to be done. I promise promise promise the next chapter shall hold some intrigue. Definitely some Cullen action.