Oh I'm just a girl, living in captivity

Your rule of thumb makes me worrisome

Oh I'm just a girl, what's my destiny?

What I've succumbed to is making me numb

Jules could feel the relief flood her veins as her plane landed at William R. Fairchild International Airport. Her left ear had blocked entirely from the air pressure ten minutes into her first flight from Charles de Gaulle to Schiphol. That had been thirteen or so hours ago. This was it, this was the end of having to deal with everything on her own. All she had to do was get through customs and immigration, find her luggage, and find the policeman that was set to be waiting for her somewhere outside.

Jules remembered her excitement as a child, making this exact same trip every summer to visit her grandparents in America. It had seemed a great big adventure back then, all the planes and the connecting flights at massive international airports. America had seemed a distant dream then, a rare delight. She had been born there, in the little town of Forks Washington, a place her mother had called her home her entire life. For the first two years of Juliette Rowe's life, she was raised an American child in a small American household with two adoring parents, grandparents, and an aunt, an uncle and a cousin. A full family.

Then her mother passed away. Her father never recovered, the heartbreak turning into full on raging depression and alcoholism. It had been her paternal grandmother in France who had stepped in and intervened at last. And so her father saw fit to pack up his entire life and move his daughter to France, where she was raised with the help of her eccentric grandmother. Every summer, the trio would make the trip to America so Jules would never forget where her mother was from.

Jules had watched everyone she had ever loved die, in a sense. Despite the distance she had remained close to her maternal grandparents, especially her Grandpa Geoffrey. Her grandmother Helen had been deep in the throes of Alzheimers for as long as she had been alive, but her Grandfather had been present and had adored her more than anyone, despite his limited mobility as the years wore on. It had been Grandma Helen to go first after the passing of her mother, and then Grandpa Geoff when she was six.

On the flipside, Mamie Éloise had been her entire world. Jules finally understood her father's constant battle with depression when she lost her grandmother when she was thirteen. She felt as if the sun would never shine again on her life, as if she understood what it felt to drift endlessly as a ghost upon the mortal plane. She was alive, yes, but she no longer lived. The melancholia became a part of her, and her Uncle Charlie understood when she and her father decided to stop spending their summers in America. They both had issues with grief, issues they needed to face together during the times when they could truly focus on it without the interference of school or work.

By the time Jules turned sixteen, she had thought the two of them had finally come out of the dark ages together. That she finally felt whole again. She had good friends, she had a social life. She had dreams and goals and ambitions. She had begun to feel what it was to feel wonder again. She spent her days in the sun in the parks of Paris, surrounded by her comrades in arms, flinging from one adventure to the next in the bustling crowds of the city. To her, the past year had been nothing short of the greatest of her life.

And then her father died.

This time, Jules did not have the time to grieve. There were too many sudden complications to juggle, too many loose strings to tie up. She had suddenly felt as if her entire world had been flooded as she struggled to swim to the surface amongst the ever-mounting paperwork and chaos that fell in the wake of her sudden new status as an orphan. She had done it all by herself. She had sorted out her father's affairs at his work, she had dealt with the death paperwork and all the rest. She had seen to the funeral arrangements all on her own- a small affair, her father only ever left the house for work, he did not have friends and he did not speak often to his colleagues, but it was nice of them to attend. Her friends had attended, but she had not spoken to them since the news, and she had left it quite awkward as she continued to avoid their attempts at helping her after the funeral.

She packed up the house by herself, made the arrangements with her Uncle Charlie, sold her childhood home and shipped off what she deemed too important to leave behind. With the same level of meticulous precision, she had kept herself busy right until the very end, which had led her to this moment, walking out of the airport breathing a huge sigh of relief at the sight of the same fuzzy half-grimace half-smile of her brand new guardian.

Fuzzy- because Charlie Swan had the most singularly atrocious moustache Jules had ever seen in her entire short life.

"Hi kiddo." Charlie pushed off of the trunk of his police cruiser after she approached, wrapping one arm around her shoulders as she leaned up a little on her tip toes to press a kiss to his cheek. "You get taller?"

"No I shrunk." Jules deadpanned flatly, earning a dry snort from her mother's older brother. He didn't look much different to the last time she had seen him, four summers prior. The moustache was new, and there were a few extra lines on his already too busy forehead. His hair was cut the same way it always had been, dark and short. His skin was still as pale as wax. He was wearing his uniform, promoted now to the Chief of Police. It was nice to see that not much had changed. Jules' eyes, however, could not tear away from the furry beast atop his lip. "Why the pornstache?"

And with this Charlie pulled away entirely with a roll of his eyes. "Yeah, you're holding up pretty good."

"Thirteen hours of flying Uncle Charlie, I think I'm just running on delirium and fumes here." Jules sighed, the two working together as Charlie popped open the trunk of his cruiser, sliding in her singular suitcase and her duffel bag of clothes. Everything else had been shipped in advance. "What's the plan?"

"Hungry?" He asks, grunting as he shut the trunk and they parted ways to get into the cruiser. It was mid-September in Washington, it wasn't the coldest weather Jules had been exposed to but it was nippy out, the air cool from what appeared to be recent rainfall judging by the puddles on the tarmac. "We can go to the diner for some dinner, or we can order pizza."

"Pizza's fine, all I want is a hot shower to wash away the plane germs and then the chance to be absorbed by your couch."

Charlie chuckled at his niece, pulling his seatbelt on. He'd been worried about too much for no reason it seemed. He thought he wouldn't know the first thing about handling a teenage girl, let alone a French teenage girl. He had expected a depressed shell of a girl, the guilt eating him away as he struggled to sleep at night wishing he could afford to fly to France just to take care of her himself so she didn't have to endure all she had to alone. He didn't fully recognize the young woman in his cruiser- his niece had always been more soft-spoken, more well-mannered and more tomboyish in nature. She spent her summers in Forks drawing with his daughter up in her bedroom, catching butterflies in the yard and making mudpies with Jacob Black. She had enjoyed the fishing trips his daughter always excused herself from, enjoyed racing up and down First Beach trying to find treasures amongst the rock pools. She'd spend her sunsets teaching Bella how to roast marshmallows on a campfire.

The young woman next to him now was a stranger. Her voice had dropped, deeper and lower than he had expected, a rasp to it he assumed to be from travel. She'd developed a lilt to her English now, probably from the three years she had not had to use it. His niece had once had one defining feature, the largest lips he had ever seen on a kid most often than not stretched out into the biggest, goofiest dimpled grin. She had inherited them from her father's side of the family, along with most of her looks, and she had been teased about them her entire childhood from what he remembered her grandmother telling him. Now she had grown into them, her jawline strong, her cheeks hollow and her cheekbones high and proud. Her full lips no longer looked odd, her dainty nose above them perfectly straight. Her hair was the same golden brown as her father's, skin milky and clear. She was taller than Charlie had expected, easily five foot ten with the potential to still grow if her father's height had been anything to go by. She was skinnier now, the cute baby fat from before long gone.

Charlie grimaced at the realization he had to worry about a lot more than he'd thought of with his pretty French niece. The boys in town were going to be an unexpected hurdle.

"I wish I was coming here under better circumstances." Jules cuts into the comfortable silence as Charlie drove towards Forks. She turned to him as he glanced her way, smiling briefly but brightly. "But I'm glad I'm here. I missed you."

Charlie felt a funny warmth in his heart, smiling awkwardly back before dropping it, nodding and turning back to the road. "You too kiddo."

"You don't have to treat me like I'm gonna spontaneously combust, Uncle Charlie." Jules rolled her eyes with a smile, and the man shifted sheepishly in response. "Dad's dead. It sucks, I'm dealing with it. But I'm not falling into a depression again, I'm not wasting any more of my life on feeling like shit. I've seen what that does to people. I'm not doing that. I can't."

"You don't gotta." Charlie shrugged, bristling at the way she so casually spoke about the crippling depression that had taken over her father's entire life. "Deal with it how you wanna deal with it. Doesn't make you a bad person."

Her shoulders dropped with relief. "Okay, cool. Next order of business then- where am I sleeping?"

"Downstairs bedroom." He answers, earning a furrow of eyebrows in confusion. Charlie blushed. "I uh…I converted the dining room after the last summer you spent here. Figured you were getting too big to keep sharing a room, and I didn't want you all the way down at the motel with your Dad."

While he drank himself to oblivion.

"I'm sorry I never got to see it." Jules' tone softens. She knows there was more to Charlie's words, she knows he had built another bedroom so her grandmother and her would have a space of their own instead of taking over the Swan household every summer and feeling guilty about it. Charlie spent each of those summers crashing on the couch so that her grandmother and her could take over his room. She had never known Charlie had gone through all the effort of making an extra bedroom before her world came crashing down. It made her feel all the more guilty for cutting off her summer visits, but she knew it had felt necessary then.

"S'okay. Glad I did it now." Charlie shrugged again. "Still only one bathroom though."

"Eh, it's fine." Jules waved off, folding one leg under the other as she shifted in her seat, looking out the window. "Don't really have a lot of stuff anyway."

At this, Charlie smiled. She's still my niece.

"Okay, next on the cohabitation rules list. If you're up before me, you're making coffee. I'm making breakfast, lunch and dinner. Fair deal?" Jules raised an eyebrow.

"I'll do the dishes when I can." Charlie flushed at Jules' pointed decision. He didn't know his niece could cook, but they both knew he couldn't. "Uh…laundry…"

"Got it covered." Jules bats off. "I like being busy, let me be busy. Please."

"Hey, you ain't gonna hear me complaining kid." Charlie chuckled. "Uh, the guys come around on Fridays. Game night. Living room's next to your door so it could get a little loud."

Juliette's lips twitched upward into a smile. "Maybe you can finally teach me how American football works."

Suddenly Charlie didn't think living with a teenage girl was going to be so bad.