Disclaimer: My name is Lauren. This is in no way the same as Stephenie Meyer. My point? I don't own Twilight.

Chapter Two – My Sister

BPOV

Knock, knock.

I turn to bury my face into my pillow as I hear someone at the door. Next to me, I feel something move. Confused, I open my eyes and look to my side. Rosalie? What is she- I cut off my own thought as I remember the events of the previous night.

The nightmare-slash-flashback. Rosalie waking me up. Rosalie lying with me. Rosalie hugging me.

Rosalie stirs as Heidi calls out after knocking again. I call out quietly to Heidi that I'm awake before turning to wake Rosalie. Perhaps her reactions to me this morning will give me insight into whether she plans on using this against me. Or at least attempting to. Everyone knows that I have nightmares.

"Rosalie, it's time to wake up." I say, gently shaking her shoulder.

She grumbles incoherently before rolling over. Unfortunately, she rolls onto the floor with a muted thump. Stifling my laughter I lean over the edge of the bed to check on her. She hasn't said anything but appears bewildered at landing on the floor.

"Are you okay, Rosalie?" I ask. Amazingly, I manage to stop my voice from shaking with my suppressed laughter.

"I think I broke my butt." She states seriously.

I get off the bed and stand in front of her. Biting my lip in an effort to contain the laughs that are threatening to burst forth I extend my hand towards Rosalie to help her up. She accepts my hand and stands.

Running a hand through her messy bed-hair she looks around the room briefly then turns to face me.

"So...why am I awake at seven-thirty on a Saturday?" She asks.

"You haven't been in a group home before have you?" At the shake of her head I offer a small smile before I explain. "Well, because there are so many of us there has to be routine," she nods understandingly, "so, on weekend's breakfast is served between seven-thirty and nine. Lunch is twelve 'til one-thirty, and dinner is five-thirty until seven. Most of the others have shower schedules for mornings and nights, but a few, like us, are lucky and have our own bathrooms."

I look to see how Rosalie has taken this. Her face isn't giving much away. Though, I'm unsure as to whether this is due to a lack of sleep or if it's how she always is.

She looks at me, nods and then asks if she can have first shower. At my okay she grabs a bag which I assume is full of hygiene and bathroom related things.

"Rosalie, there's a cabinet in there where you can leave some of your things. Just shove some of my stuff on to two of the shelves. I'll tidy it later and you can have the other two shelves." I tell her.

"Okay. Thank you." She gives me a small, tired smile and goes into the bathroom.

Since I had a shower the night before I decide to just get dressed and wait until I can brush my teeth. While I wait I pull my hair up into a simple pony tail. I would do something more elaborate, but I fail at simply trying to braid my hair.

Rosalie walks out in a towel and blushes slightly when she notices I'm still in the room.

"I forgot to grab my clothes" she offers as explanation.

"It's fine. You can get dressed out here and I'll brush my teeth. The bedroom door locks and I won't come out 'til you give me the all clear."

She nods at this and I proceed to brush my teeth. While brushing I think about how Rosalie has been acting towards me this morning.

She's warmer towards me, but we're not close by any means. I don't think she'll try to use anything against me. And she actually seems like she may end up being a really cool person.

After finishing in the bathroom and getting the all clear from Rosalie I lead her down to the dining room for breakfast. Weekends are always good because there's bacon, eggs, pancakes, and heaps of other food that they don't make us through the week because it takes too long before school.

Rosalie and I sit together and begin to eat breakfast in silence. It's not long before some of the other kids realise that there's someone new though.

"Hey, I'm Steven. So, you're new here, right?" Steven asks Rosalie.

I watch Rosalie, curious to how she'll react to the older boy. She slowly looks up from her breakfast and faces Steven. Her expression is one of pure boredom as she looks him up and down then returns to her food, ignoring him completely.

I try to keep my own expression neutral but as I see the pure shock on Steven's face I feel my lips twitch and I smile slightly to myself.

"Fine. No need to be such a bitch." He says to Rosalie. She continues ignoring him as he stands making his chair scrape and walks off.

Several minutes pass in silence after Steven left before some girl...whose name I cannot remember but she has really curly, black hair and hazel eyes, comes over and tries talking to Rosalie.

"Hello. My name is Melanie. You're new, aren't you? What's your name?" Curly hair, or Melanie, says.

Rosalie repeats the same thing she did to Steven, to Melanie. Looks her up and down in pure boredom and turns to her food. However, Melanie is not one to be swayed.

"Mk, not a talker. That's fine. I love to talk." Melanie begins, "By the way, why are you sitting with Bella? No one sits with her. She's a freak." Melanie says to Rosalie. Part of me wonders if she realises that I can hear her, another part wonders if she did it on purpose to try and get me in trouble.

I roll my eyes to myself and ignore her, not that I was acknowledging her before.

"Actually, Bella is my friend and if you know what's good for you then you won't say anything against her again." Rosalie says firmly.

My head snaps in her direction with an expression of immense shock. I mean, I knew we weren't enemies before but friends?

Melanie's expression looks as though it should match my own with the amount of shock.

"But, like, she's crazy! She screams in her sleep for Christ's sake!" Melanie exclaims.

Rosalie shrugs, "I know."

Melanie, still looking shocked though confusion is also evident now, gets up and leaves. I'm still looking at Rosalie and she slowly turns from facing the now vacant seat to me.

"We're friends?" I question, because hell, I'm confused.

Again, Rosalie shrugs, "Yeah."

She turns back to her food and I do the same. When we're done Rosalie asks if I want to sit outside with her. I agree figuring that I can probably ask some questions about this 'friend' thing. I'm not confused about the friend thing in general, just about how it applies to Rosalie and me.

We walk for a bit before sitting under a massive Jacaranda tree. We face each other with our legs crossed. No one is near us and we're at the back of the property.

We look at each other for a few minutes, both of us seeming to try to find the words to start.

"Did you mean it or were you saying it to annoy Melanie?" I ask.

Rosalie immediately knows what I mean and looks me directly in the eye as she answers me.

"I meant it. I think you and I will be great friends. I'm not entirely sure why, especially since I don't tend to get along well with other girls but...I don't know. I can't think of how to word it, I just know." She tells me, I can see the sincerity in her eyes.

I smile and say "I don't get on with girls, well anyone, very well either. But you don't annoy me like other people do."

"That's exactly it! People annoy me so easily!" She exclaims.

I laugh. "It's why Heidi was so weird yesterday when we didn't fight, you know. The last roommate I had lasted four days and she irritated me within five minutes!"

Rosalie laughs as well. We both sit in silence for a while then.

"Rose." Rosalie says. At my confused look she explains, "You keep calling me 'Rosalie' but I prefer my friends to call me 'Rose'." She smiles.

I nod and then ask "Rose, what's your full name?"

"Rosalie Lillian Hale. I'm also ten, if that was your next question." We both laugh easily at that.

"Well, I'm Isabella Marie Hunter (A/N: Remember, she was James and Victoria's daughter.)" I begin, sneering my surname, "and I'm nine."

"Don't like your last name?" Rosalie asks.

I glare at a spot on the ground and answer, "No. It ties me to my biological parents too much. I can't even change it until I'm either eighteen or adopted...or married."

She nods even though she looks concerned with my remark about my parents.

"Why don't you like your parents? I'd give anything to have mine back." She says wistfully.

I sigh and study her face for a minute. I decide to trust her. I'm not sure why, but I feel like she won't make fun of me or anything like that.

"Well, first, you have to promise not to tell anyone. No one here knows what I'm going to tell you, the workers only know what's on my file as it is. I'm going to tell you everything, if you promise." I say firmly.

"Of course. I wouldn't tell anyone."

I nod and look to the ground, twirling some grass between my fingers.

"My parents, James and Victoria, they never wanted me. Honestly, I'm surprised I survived them." She gasps but I ignore her reaction and continue my story.

"I'm not sure when it started, I don't remember it being any different for the whole time I was with them, but they beat me. Every day. Sometimes, I'd do something wrong. I might've made a noise. I mightn't have done something I should've. Anything. Sometimes, I did nothing wrong. I still have some scars from my life then.

"Then, one day, Victoria had taken me grocery shopping with her. Purely for show, I remember that. 'Girl, you had better behave and don't you dare say a word to anybody' she had told me as we left the house. When we got back, James wasn't happy. Apparently Victoria hadn't told him we were going out. He was very...controlling. He beat Victoria and she passed out.

"He'd forgotten I was there until I made a noise by accident. I thought he was going to kill me. He muttered some things and then went into the kitchen. He came back out, told me it was all my fault and then killed Victoria. I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. Really, I did. But I couldn't. I was frozen.

"He looked at me again. I remember thinking 'this is it' over and over again. But instead, he told me 'Remember this Isabella. Remember. You are what killed Victoria. And now, you are what has killed me' and stabbed himself. It wasn't until after that that I started screaming.

"That was when I was five. I've been in care since. Now, at night, I have dreams, well, nightmares, of my time with them. It's why I woke up screaming. I remembered their deaths. I'm not sad about it, but it terrifies me." I tell her.

She's quiet so I look up to see her face. There are tears running down her face.

"Rose?" I say, waving my hand in front of her face. This causes her eyes to snap to mine and she lunges at me.

She hugs me and says "I'm so sorry that, that happened to you."

I hug her back. "It doesn't matter now. It's in the past and I try not to let it affect my everyday life."

We stay hugging for a few more minutes before Rose pulls herself away and says that she wants to tell me how she ended up here.

"My story, isn't as..." she pauses to search for the right word, "difficult as yours." She says.

"Rose, it doesn't matter whether you think that I'll think it's difficult. Different people deal with things differently. Things affect people differently."

"I know." She says with a small smile. I smile back.

"So, your story?"

"My mum died during child birth. It was sad. My dad always told me what a wonderful person she was. I have a picture of her, she was beautiful. Then, about two weeks ago, my dad died in a car accident. He was on his way to pick me up from a friend's house when a truck ran a red light and slammed into his side of the car. He died on impact." She says.

Tears have started falling again, this time from both of us. I pull her into a hug as she continues through her tears.

"I stayed with a friend until the funeral. That was the day before yesterday and now...I'm here. My parents were both only children, with no close friends who could care for me. My grandparents had all died by the time I was seven. I have no one."

It's in those four words that I know, it's no longer true. For either of us.

"That's not true, Rose. Not for you. And, not for me. Not anymore. You have me. I'll never let anyone hurt you or be mean to you. We'll be there for each other. Always." I say, hugging her tight.

She squeezes me just as hard as I'm squeezing her and says one word that changes both our lives.

"Sisters."