The blue '88 Oldsmobile cut through the thick fog of the Washington morning, its fog lights the only bright spot in the driver's vision. Not that it wasn't a pretty drive; the road was sheltered on either side by huge trees covered in moss, and ferns clustered on the ground. If the fog would clear and the sun would shine, this would be a perfect Sunday morning drive. But the Olympic Peninsula was one of the most sunless places in the world. There would be very few sunny days for the two people in the car, which is why the driver suspected the passenger had chosen to move to Forks- to get away from the cheer and brightness that would remind them both of how soon darkness would fall on them.

The driver shook her head as she looked out the windshield into the fog. "You sure know how to pick 'em," she said lightly, tucking a few stray blades of hair behind her ear. "People back home would think we're vampires, moving here."

Her hair was dyed blond, with highlights of green and purple liberally strewn throughout. It had been cut into short, choppy layers, the longest layer falling a bit below her chin. Her green eyes were shielded behind square-cut glasses. She was dressed in a maroon Ramones shirt with a black vest over it, dark, ripped jeans, and red chucks. Her nails were painted black. She was very skinny, but the daintiness suited her.

She threw another glance over at her passenger, trying to conceal the worry in her eyes. "How're you doing?"
The passenger gave her a wry smile. "I'm fine, Henderson. Just like I was the last time you asked… twenty minutes ago."

Henderson Lee nodded, but continued to keep a close eye on the passenger as they drove to Forks. The passenger leaned back in her seat, closing her eyes and focusing her attention on the music blaring through the speakers- Situations by Escape The Fate, one of Henderson's favorite bands.

Her thick dark brown hair fell in perfect curls to the bottom of her ribcage. She was pale, like Henderson, and thin, but much more fragile. Beneath her kohl-rimmed eyes, which behind the lids were a startling shade of light blue-purple, were purple bags that no amount of sleep could cure. She huddled into her black Green Day hoodie and her baggy boys' jeans, curling her chuck-covered feet beneath her. Her nails, like Henderson's, were painted black.

"You sure?" Henderson asked her twin. "We can stop if you need it, Rox-"
Roxanne Lee laughed at her sister. "You worry worse than Mom ever did, you know that? I'm fine, Hendo. Just keep driving," she said in a voice that should have belonged to an angel, the voice that was her greatest beauty.

Henderson laughed feebly, but her grip on the steering wheel tightened as her lungs constricted and a sudden, overwhelming urge for a cigarette gripped her. She had good reason to worry about her sister.

In all seriousness, the lack of sunlight had nothing to do with why the sisters had left the fun and sun of Berkeley, California. There was one reason and one reason only why the 19-year-old twins had come to Forks, and that was Dr. Carlisle Cullen. He was reputed to be one of the most knowledgeable and competent doctors in the western United States, one who could be making five times his salary if he lived in Seattle or Olympia or one of the bigger cities. But because his wife loved small towns, they had settled in Forks. It was to Dr. Cullen's hospital that the Lees were going. If anyone could help them, it would be he.

They pulled in to the hospital and walked in. Henderson gave the receptionist their name and appointment time, and ten minutes later the girls were ushered into a private room. Roxanne hopped up onto the examining table, while Henderson plopped down on the swiveling stool, and immediately started scooting around and making race car noises.

Roxanne laughed. "You realize you've done that every single time we've gone to a doctor since we were four?"
"Of course I do," Henderson grinned. "It's the only fun part of a doctor's visit. 'Specially now that they don't give us candy and stickers anymore."

Roxanne laughed her silver bells laugh again, but before anything else could be said, the door opened and the doctor walked in.

One would have to be dead in order to not appreciate the attractiveness of Carlisle Cullen, and the Lee sisters weren't quite dead yet. He looked like a runway model, not a doctor; it seemed impossible that he was 32 years old. His blond hair was neatly swept back, and his hazel eyes stood out in his pale face. Every last feature of his body was perfect; the only hint of human frailty was in the bruise-like shadows beneath his eyes.

"Good morning, girls," he said pleasantly, his musical voice floating through the air. "I'm Dr. Cullen, and you must be Henderson," he glanced at Henderson, who'd stopped rolling herself around for the moment, "and Roxanne," he finished, walking towards the examining table.

The girls smiled and murmured hellos, shooting each other covert glances. Many people had said that the twins had an almost eerie connection, as if they could read each others' minds. It was a common enough trait among twins, but the link between the Lee sisters seemed to be nearly telepathic. Right now, they were thinking the exact same thing- this was the best-looking doctor either of them had ever seen. And they had seen a lot of doctors.

"I'm afraid we'll have to start at the beginning," Dr. Cullen said apologetically as he looked through Roxanne's extensive medical file. "This file is in complete disarray; I can hardly make sense of it. When were you diagnosed, Roxanne?"
"Two years ago," she replied evenly, swinging her legs gently and looking down at her lap. "Just before my seventeenth birthday. When I was diagnosed, Dr. Fields said the tumor must have been there at least a year."
"And he said it was a traveling but invasive tumor, correct?" Dr. Cullen asked as he flicked through another dozen pages of convoluted doctors' notes.
"Yes," she said, gripping the edge of the examining table. "He said that the tumor would eventually travel from my right frontal lobe down the corpus callosum, severing neural connections as it went, and would someday lodge in the cerebellum, and that would kill me."
"What kinds of treatments have been tried?" Dr. Cullen asked.

Roxanne rattled off a long list of medications and treatments, none of which had worked, all of which had ended up making her sicker. Dr. Cullen frowned at some of them, disturbed that some of the riskier, experimental treatments had been tested on this fragile girl.

"Finally, Dr. Gregory told us that the tumor wasn't treatable. Dunno how he came to that conclusion," Roxanne ended, a smile gracing her lips as the sarcasm coated her words.
Dr. Cullen gave a short laugh. "With your permission, we'll order up a round of CT scans, an MRI, and an EEG reading, to see how large the tumor is, and if it's spreading. After I've read those, we'll see if there's anything else we can try."

After the appointment had been made for the tests, the girls got back in Henderson's beloved car, and made the short drive to their new home. They were staying in a small house that had been put up for rent, which they paid for from their meager inheritance from their recently deceased mother.

When they got home, Roxanne went to her room, claiming a headache. Meanwhile, Henderson slipped outside for a smoke. It was bad for her health, she knew that, but it calmed her anxiety, which was what she needed right now. As she chain-smoked her way through half a pack of Newports, she let her thoughts run free. And as usual, most of her thoughts were about her sister.

Roxanne hadn't always been so frail. True, she had always been the one more prone to illness, but for the first sixteen years of their life she had been mostly healthy, and active. In high school, she'd been on the volleyball team, and had been first soprano in the school choir. She'd had a boyfriend, a ring of friends and throngs of admirers. She had been the popular one of the two of them, though to her credit she had never been an elitist snob. She had had plans to someday be the curator of a museum, or the director of a fine arts center.

Her recurring problem had been her anxiety, her panic attacks. She had suffered from them since their father walked out on the family, when the girls were eleven. The attacks had gotten so bad that their mother had taken her to the first of a long line of doctors. Dr. Fields had prescribed a medication to be taken every day.

It had worked for a couple of years. But then Roxanne had started to complain of terrible, debilitating headaches. The doctors hadn't been able to find a cause for the headaches, but when Roxanne's personality began to change, and her behavior grew more erratic, they figured out what had happened. The anxiety meds had caused a tumor to grow in her right frontal lobe. The growing tumor had severed neural connections in her brain, had changed the lobe's structure and changed the way Roxanne reacted to the world. The damage was likely permanent.

From the moment the tumor had been diagnosed, their mother had frantically tried to find a cure. She had fed Roxanne every herbal supplement or new fad cure she could find, her panic growing as nothing worked. Two years later, the doctors had all but given up on Roxanne, and had guessed that she had less than five years left.

Five years. Meaning that by the time Henderson turned 25, her twin sister would be lying in her grave. It was a thought that Henderson couldn't bear to contemplate. From the moment of conception, Roxanne had been her closest friend, the only person in the world who had never abandoned her. Even when they had formed their own very distinct personalities, and had formed their own social circles, Roxanne had never left her. The rest of their school saw them as Roxanne the jock and Henderson the punk, but they'd always been side by side.

What in the world would Henderson do if Roxanne died?

Their mother hadn't been able to cope with the stress of her daughter's illness. She had become an alcoholic, and as she drank more, Henderson and Roxanne had been forced to fend for themselves. Their mother had finally succumbed to an anyeurism, leaving them alone in the world with little money and even less hope.

Henderson winced as the smoke caused her to start coughing. She muffled the sound with her hoodie sleeve, but her eyes grew wide as specks of a hot liquid flew out of her mouth. She stared at the spots of blood on her sleeve, then sighed heavily, spitting a few times to get the metallic taste out of her mouth. Silently, she walked into the house and pulled out a prescription bottle, dry swallowing two large pills.

When she had started having breathing problems half a year ago, she had written it off as her asthma being aggravated by too many cigarettes. She had gone in to the doctor secretly to get a more powerful inhaler. During the routine tests, the doctor had discovered what was really causing the wheezing.

Lung cancer.

Aggravated by her smoking, the cancer had spread quickly. There was little the doctor could do for her, other than agree not to tell her mother and sister. He had given her a deadline- five years, tops.

Henderson smiled bitterly. She knew how fast the cancer was spreading, could feel how much harder it was to pretend that there was nothing wrong. She would be lucky if she made it to 25, and Roxanne beat her for first dibs on coffins. It was far more likely that they would die within months, if not weeks, of each other, and then what?

Carlisle Cullen sighed heavily as he walked through the front door of his home. A tenth of a second of listening told him that Jasper and Alice were up in their room discussing her latest vision, Edward was in the living room playing Bach concertos, Emmett was outside playing catch football with himself, and Esme was in her study. He took the stairs two at a time and walked into his office, tossing the heavy file under his arm onto his desk.

He spent the better part of two hours meticulously wading through the medical file, trying to bring some cohesion to it. As he worked, he made copious notes, preparing his own, much more organized file. He didn't need the notes, of course, but he wanted to make the Lees confident that he was doing all he could.

What he read saddened him. By all accounts, Roxanne Lee was being cut down in her prime, and the incompetence of doctors who were more interested in Mrs. Lee's money than Roxanne's recovery had shortened her time. Their contradictory treatments had chopped precious years off of her life. He had ordered the new tests as a formality, but from what he could see, he would have to agree with the doctors who had come before him; there was little that the medical field could do to save her.

If only there was something he could do…

Carlisle sighed again. A mere century ago, Roxanne would have been the perfect candidate for him to change, a perfect addition to his family- a sister for Alice and Jasper, a possible mate for Edward or Emmett, another daughter for Esme and him. His greatest compassion had always been for those who were doomed.

But he couldn't bite her now, not with the treaty with the Quileute tribe in firm place. The shape shifters would begin a war if he created another vampire. So all he could do was sit back and watch another patient die because he couldn't offer to save her.

"Carlisle?" asked the soft voice of his wife.

He looked up as Esme glided through the door. His beautiful, perfect Esme… he shuddered at the thought that he could have lost his chance with her, had he not visited the morgue the night she was brought in.

"What's wrong?" she asked, immediately picking up on her husband's disturbed state.
Carlisle sighed, pushing back his chair so Esme could sit in his lap. "My newest patient."
"The girl with the brain tumor," she remembered.
"Yes," he nodded. "It's worse than I thought. As the tumor speads, she will be in pain most of the time. And it will travel quickly. She's lucky if she has another year left."
"How sad," Esme murmured, her tender heart distressed at the thought.

Carlisle nodded, looking over Roxanne's new file bleakly. At this point, all he would be able to do would be to keep her comfortable.

"Roxanne Isabella Lee," Esme read softly. "It's a lovely name."
"She's a lovely girl," Carlisle replied. "I worry for her twin, Henderson. They appeared especially close. I don't like to think of what will happen when Roxanne…"

He didn't finish the sentence, but then again he didn't have to. Carlisle sighed, his mind moving on quickly. He would do everything he could for Roxanne, but what could he do for Henderson to prepare her for the separation that was coming?

Roxanne sat quietly as Dr. Cullen delivered the news.

One year, if that.

It was nothing more or less than she had expected; other doctors had told her much the same thing. She should be feeling depressed, or desperate, she supposed. But all she felt at the moment was resignation, and a mind-numbing apathy. She drew the numb sensation around herself gratefully, more than happy to put off the despair for a few more hours.

"I will do anything in my power to keep you functioning comfortably for as long as I can," he was saying. "There is a medication that I can prescribe for the headaches, and I'm going to take you off of several of the pills you are currently taking, and prescribe just one in their place. Other than that… I'm sorry."

She looked up; he looked like he actually meant his apology, unlike many of the other doctors, who had delivered it by rote, but didn't actually care how she did, as long as she kept paying for their ludicrous treatments. Pulling on her game face, she found a smile for the doctor and thanked him, then motioned to her sister and left.

She glanced at Henderson when her sister started coughing. "Are you all right?" she asked, concern lacing her voice.
Henderson waved her hand dismissively. "Fine, fine. Just my asthma- I don't know if you've noticed, Rox, but it's damp here."

Roxanne nodded, but the creases in her brow remained. Henderson wasn't the best for taking care of herself; it had always been Roxanne's job to make sure Henderson was at least somewhat healthy. What would happen when she could no longer take care of her twin?

The drive home was silent. Each girl was mulling over what Dr. Cullen had said, was trying to deal with the grim news he'd been forced to deliver, was wondering what could be done now that it was certain that Roxanne was going to die soon.

When they got home, they sank down around their kitchen table. For a moment more, there was only silence, and then Roxanne spoke, trying desperately to hold herself together as long as she was before her twin.

"I don't want to obsess over it," she said. "I told you I scried last month to find out how long, and I knew it would only be a year. So I have a year. I don't want to cause a huge fuss about it. We'll do what we can with the time, and then I just want to go quietly."
"How can you be so calm?!" Henderson burst out, fighting back the tears. "Roxie, you're DYING! You have a year, and then you'll be GONE! All the things you wanted to do… get married, have kids, be a curator… you can't do that now! How can you just sit there and accept it?!"
Roxanne sat silently through Henderson's rant, then spoke quietly. "I've been dealing with dying for two years now, Hendo. I've spent two years trying to deal with it without crying too hard, or having a panic attack, because that'll just aggravate the damn tumor and give me a headache. I've had a lot of time to think, and… and I'm ready."
"I can't let you go," Henderson said in a tiny voice.
The tears welled in Roxanne's eyes then. "You're not letting me go. I'll still be right there. I'm gonna haunt the fuck outta you."

The sisters stood as if on a silent signal and threw their arms around each other, holding each other tight. Henderson broke away first, going to her room and shutting the door. When she was gone, Roxanne pinched the bridge of her nose, wincing as she felt the headache starting. She left Henderson a quick note saying she was going on a walk, then took off for the forest.

She kept to the path, but all too soon the trail disappeared, and then there were just the trees. She was alone now, and as soon as she realized that, she dropped her brave face.

Roxanne stopped dead in her tracks, staring at the carcass a few yards before her. It was a grizzly bear, and it lay on its side, utterly still. She walked up to it in a daze, and sank down beside it, leaning back against its bulk. She supposed it was morbid, cozying up to a corpse, but it didn't stink, and its fur was soft. Besides, she should get used to stillness; someday she would be as cold as the bear.

The tears started falling then, fast and furious. She couldn't contain them, and though she knew it would cause her a massive headache later, for once she let herself sob, and scream.

She was nineteen years old, and she would be lucky if she saw her next birthday. It wasn't fair! She wasn't supposed to be dying yet! There was so much she had wanted to do, to see… and now she would never have the chance.

Eventually, the sobs stopped, the tears slowed, and she was able to try to think. Roxanne was a pagan, and she believed that life was just a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. She would go on to live again; maybe she would even be reincarnated with Henderson as her sister again.

But that didn't change the fact that she wanted to live this life a little longer. Blessed Goddess, she hadn't even been in love yet. She hadn't traveled out of the country. She hadn't gone to college; the tumor had made sure of that. She hadn't had a pet, or a place of her own. And now she never would.

Closing her eyes, she laid her head against the bear's, and began to cry again.

He watched her silently from the tree where he was hidden. He had just been about to leave when he smelled her coming. He should have run off, but instead he had leapt up into the tree, and he had watched her.

She should have been terrified that she'd stumbled onto a bear corpse, completely drained of blood. Instead, she had sunk beside it, curled up into its side, and had started crying. He'd wished at that moment that he had his brother's gift of reading minds; he would've given almost anything to know what was causing her such agony.

She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in his life- and he was 93 years old, so that was saying something. He found himself wanting to bury his fingers in her hair, to see if her body, which was shrouded in clothes at least two sizes too big for her, was as perfect as her face. He wanted to make her smile, maybe even laugh.

Despite her beauty, he could see how frail she was. He gathered that she had to be sick- cancer, maybe? He could smell the scent of his father's hospital on her, could even catch a whiff of his father. If she'd been with his father, she must be his new case. Roxanne Lee, the brain tumor patient. He bit his lip as he watched her. From her tears, apparently there was nothing his father could do.

He didn't like the thought. She was so young, so beautiful… why should she have to die? He found himself desperately wanting to help her. Even if there was nothing that medicine could do, surely he and his father could offer her the one path that would save her.

"Roxanne," he whispered, the name- like honey on his tongue- wrapping around his brain and insinuating itself into every corner of his being.

Confused by his sudden attachment to her, and his fierce desire to protect her, but knowing that he had no other choice, he nodded once and jumped through the trees, swinging like Tarzan on his way home.