Disclaimer: Nothing in this story except for Charlotte belongs to me. I have altered certain aspects of the story to fit my plot. For example, Renée left with Bella when both she and Charlotte were five years old.

I wrote this story for two reasons. The first one is, I have read many Volturi Kings/OC stories and loved them. The only thing that's always disappointed me is how easily the OC agrees to be their mate. I also think that even with their mates, the Kings would still be assholes until they actually learned how to have a genuine relationship with their partner. The second reason is that Charlie is my favorite character, and I've always hated how easily he's left behind.

Charlie fans unite!

Philia: love without romantic attraction, occurring between friends and family members

Storge: love built upon deep emotional connection, occurring between parents and children

Pragma: deep love built over many years, occurring between romantic partners

It was an unfortunate series of events that led me to be with who I truly consider to be the best man in the world. If anything had gone even slightly differently I could be living an entirely different life. If my bio-dad had decided to stay with my bio-mom after knocking her up in high school, I might never have been put up for adoption. If my bio-mom had decided to get a day-job and her shit together instead of sliding needles in her arms and blowing our grocery money on bad weed, the neighbours might have never found her passed out halfway through the door of our shitty apartment while I played with pill bottles like they were Tonka Trucks. If my bio-mom hadn't decided to name me Molly after her biggest fix, a decision which was equal parts horrifying and amusing, the nice lady at child services wouldn't have renamed me Charlotte after she read me Charlotte's Web and it was the only thing that could get me to stop crying. And if I hadn't been renamed Charlotte, Renée would have never picked me out of all the other children because "Oh look, Charlie and Charlotte, how adorable!"

Renée was an entirely different character. I couldn't say I hated her for what she did. I don't think I could even say she was a bad person. Immature, sure. Flighty, definitely. But hardly evil. She loved experimenting and trying new things, crazy recipes that were barely edible. She loved playing around with paint colors, painting our cabinets bright yellow and our walls pale blue. It was when she started playing with people's lives when it became a problem. I was an unfortunate, or rather fortunate, casualty of this little quirk of hers. Her marriage with Charlie was hanging by a thread when she decided to adopt me, as if I was some magical bandaid that would fix years worth of relationship problems. They already had a little girl, which had probably kept them together longer than it should have, so I don't know why they thought I would be different. And I know she didn't really consider me her daughter either. I was more some sort of funny little pet to her, which was why she was so disappointed when I decided to attach myself to the only one who didn't want me.

I couldn't really help how I acted those first few months with the Swan family. One unfortunate result of my past was my inability to emotionally connect with women. I was petrified of Renée, and even found it hard to talk to the quiet, demure little Isabella. The one thing my sister had going for her was her mild manners. My bio-mom had a habit of prattling on to me like I was some therapy doll, and it left me terribly anxious of anyone who enjoyed hearing themselves speak. My bio-mom was a complainer. She complained about how my bio-dad was her high school's best football player, and how he couldn't have helped take care of me because he would have missed out on an Ivy League scholarship. She complained about how her Catholic parents forbade her from getting an abortion, but abandoned her anyway as soon as I was born. She even complained about how her dealer was cutting her coke too far, and how her Molly tasted flat on her tongue.

I had little love for Renée, but she was certainly nothing like my bio-mom. When she nattered on it was mostly about wallpaper and house plants instead of her latest fix, but the similarities were just too much for me to handle. And so I ended up clinging to Charlie instead. Which in hindsight, was probably the best decision I ever made.

Charlie Swan was the first man I ever really interacted with. If my bio-mom had spent her free time screwing guys instead of screwing her life over with cheap drugs, I would have probably been far more terrified of him than Renée. But as it was, he fascinated me. I liked his big, brown puppy-dog eyes. I liked his funny mustache and the wrinkles on his forehead. I loved the way he rarely spoke, and how when he did, it was sweet and slow like honey. I took to using him as my own personal jungle-gym as a way to express my appreciation. I would cling to his legs when he walked and climb on his lap when he sat down. It would have been hard to say who was more disconcerted, him or Renée. He tolerated me, because he was sweet like that, but it was overwhelmingly clear even as a child what he thought about the whole situation. He had never wanted to adopt me. Charlie only had eyes for his real daughter. I was more like the daughter of a close friend he had to take care of for a favor.

If any outsiders came to visit during those few months we all lived together in one house, it would have become very clear very quickly who the odd one out was. I didn't even look like my new family. Renée, Charlie, and Isabella both had pale skin, dark wavy hair, and beautiful brown eyes framed with thick lashes. My mother had given me her tan skin, almond-colored eyes, and tight curls, and I had received dirty-blonde hair and freckles from what must have been my father. Next to Isabella I looked practically emaciated. My mother's care had ended up destroying my body. I was found heavily malnourished, and with traces of various drugs in my system. I arrived at child services going through withdrawal so bad it nearly killed me, and ended up permanently stunting my growth. I would always be small for my age, with limbs as brittle and thin as sticks.

I don't know what influenced Renée's decision to leave me behind. It could have very well been my sickly appearance. Perhaps it was the mandatory therapy sessions I needed in order to acclimate to my new life and ensure I was battling through the last vestiges of addiction that clung to me like cobwebs. Probably it was my clear favoritism of Charlie and my inability to emotionally connect to her and Isabella. Either way, when Renée fled to greener pastures with her real daughter in tow, she left me behind. Perhaps I was some sort of demented consolation prize. I don't think Charlie was very consoled. The last threads of his marriage had snapped, his daughter had been snatched away before his very eyes, and he was left stuck with some girl he didn't even want in the first place.

It must have been tragic. In fact, I'm sure it was. But every time I look back on that day I am filled with the greatest joy. That day was the first step towards me calling the best man in the world my father.

Before Isabella came to our rainy, little town of Forks, I was living a remarkably happy and remarkably mundane life. So much so, it almost felt weird to call the beginning of it traumatic. I was only five when I was put into child services, and though my memories of that time were stronger than the average person's due to my trauma, I managed to escape with only a mild dislike of idle chatter and a stronger inclination to men. Of course, I had my friends to thank for that. If it hadn't been for them I would have still been a hopeless daddy's girl, petrified of women and gossip and with a body too weak to keep up during PE.

My first few weeks of first grade followed those lines pretty closely. My teacher was, thankfully, male, so I was following along with the lessons, but I was too frightened to talk to anyone else in my class until one fateful show-and-tell when a boy named Eric Yorkie brought in Charlotte's Web. It was my favorite book of all time, the first one I had ever had read to me, and the reason I was named Charlotte instead of Sarah or Katie or something along those lines. My therapist had been pretty insistent on my finding a first friend, and Eric seemed to fit the bill. He was male, and quiet for a six-year old, which ticked off all my boxes. He was also one of the smartest kids in the class, and unbearably kind. He traded his apple slices for my carrot sticks without a second thought.

He only had one flaw, and that was a girl named Angela Webber. Angela and Eric had been best friends since Preschool, and you never saw one without the other. They sat next to each other during reading-circle. They traded pudding cups. They even had matching friendship bracelets. Angela was like Isabella and Eric: quiet, kind, and smart. But just like Isabella, she was a girl, and it was just too much for me to handle. Luckily for me, after I lent him my umbrella one day after school, Eric had decided to sort of adopt me as his friend. For a couple of weeks he never left me alone, and by extension, neither did Angela. Exposure therapy wore down my walls until one day I found myself sitting with her behind the bleachers, wondering if Mike Newton really had cooties or if Lauren was just being dramatic.

Mike Newton was another unexpected asset to my recovery. He was possibly the loudest, chattiest, and most obnoxious kid in the first grade. The most popular too: his blond hair and blue eyes made him an instant hit with the girls and he could play tag better than almost anyone. He ran in an entirely different social circle than Eric, Angela, and I, so when he approached us after a spelling-test where we all earned a hundred and he spelled 'house' with a 'w,' we were understandably concerned.

We very quickly realized we had nothing to fear. Mike thought that us passing our spelling-test was "the coolest thing, even cooler than when I beat Tyler in that race yesterday" and that if we helped him with the next one he would "give you my mystery airheads for weeks, please Mom and Dad were so mad at me!" We did end up helping him (he only had the resolve to spare us one mystery airhead, but we forgave him for his slight) and after he ended up passing he stuck to us like gum. But Mike ended up helping me more than getting me accustomed to chatterboxes. He was an avid reader of comic books, Black Widow being a favorite of his, and for some reason he thought I compared the closest to the heroine. He managed to convince both himself and me that I would be the perfect addition to his capture-the-flag team. My body was far weaker than any other kid in my class, but no matter how many times I stumbled Mike was always there to pick me back up. When he saw how well I could throw the flag he even invited me to join his boys-only football skirmishes. After smoothing over the inevitable controversy by promising "she's not REALLY a girl, just kinda looks like one," and after the other boys saw my aim, I was accepted with open arms. My body caught up from there. I was still small for my age, and would always be, but my twig arms and legs started to swell with muscle until I could almost beat Tyler Crowley in a race.

Jessica Stanley was the last, and besides Eric, the most important addition to my circle of friends. As both a female and a chatterbox it was a double-whammy for my fragile psyche, but both Angela and Mike's companionship allowed me to interact with her. Not only was she a girl, she was Mike's definition of a girl, the kind that liked frills, and unicorns, and the color pink. But after she defended me against someone who called my hair frizzy by rattling off a list of celebrities with curls, she became even closer to me than Angela.

Our little group of five somehow survived the trials of both elementary and middle school with only a few bumps along the way. There was a brief period of time when Tyler convinced Eric and Mike that hanging out with girls was for sissies, and another when Angela, Jessica and I somehow managed to all get a crush on Mike at the same time, but other than that we were practically golden. It was Jessica who told me my homework-doodles were "ohmygod SO good" and Eric who got me a whole set of playdough for my birthday. It was Mike who kept including me in his little recess football games even through middle school, and Angela who would study with me until my grades were almost as good as hers. Even Tyler would defend me from people who would pick on the adopted girl with no mother. I loved my friends dearly.

But not as much as I loved Charlie.

It was all too easy to see the man never got over Renée's disappearance. I didn't love the woman, but I understood where he was coming from. She was flighty, but beautiful in her flightiness. Like a bird you can't cage but can admire from afar. Our little two-bedroom house changed very little over the years. The cabinets stayed yellow, the walls stayed blue. Isabella's room never changed, and Charlie ended up converting the attic into a bedroom for me instead of moving me in. He missed his biological daughter just as much as my ex-wife.

I didn't care. He could miss them all he liked. All I wanted was for him to love me just as much as the people who had left him.

It took a while. I'd even like to say I helped him get over his loss. He refrained from drowning his sorrows in alcohol because he knew it was a trigger for me, and he didn't have the time to grieve for his lost love because he was too busy putting me through therapy, doctor's visits, elementary school. When I first called him Dad, about a few months in, he looked surprised but didn't stop me.

Early on, when I was still too shy to make friends at school, he would invite his friend Billy Black over so I could play with his son.

I liked Billy. I liked his smile, and his fish fry, and how he would scoot me around on his wheelchair. I learned to braid using his hair, which was long and dark and straighter than mine could ever be. He babysat me whenever my dad was busy with his job as Chief of Police. He would bring his son, Jacob, and we would have sleepovers and argue about what story Billy would tell us that night. Jacob liked the story of the fierce knight who rode a large wolf instead of a horse. I liked the story of the princess in the tower who would sing to wolves and rule her kingdom through them.

Billy Black liked wolves. He said they were a symbol of the Quileute tribe. Billy and Jacob both lived in La Push, an indian reservation just outside of Forks.

I would say that Jacob was like my best friend, but that wasn't entirely true. That position belonged to Eric and Jessica. He was instead more like an annoying but loveable cousin. We would play-fight, and real-fight, and Jacob would brag how his hair was longer than mine and I would draw Quileute tribe tattoos on both our bodies with washie markers. And if Jacob was like my cousin then Billy was like my uncle. In those early years I eavesdropped on him more than once talking to my father about me and his loss of Renée and Isabella. He was a major part of the reason my dad stopped looking at me as the girl he was living with and started looking at me as his daughter.

It started off slow, as all good things do. Billy had somehow managed to convince Charlie to let me tag along on their fishing trips. I think Charlie would have invited me if he thought I would like it, but I was a fidgety sort of person and fishing was certainly too boring for Jacob to handle. Everyone except for Billy was surprised when I got up at 6:00 AM on the dot and sat patiently on the boat all day. I was bad at sitting still but something about being around Charlie gave me the strength to shut up and sit down. He had bought a little kid's fishing kit just for me and explained with uncertain eyes how to cast a line and reel it in. I didn't manage to catch anything, but I was over the moon at the attention.

I surprised Charlie again when I wanted to see how to clean and gut the fish he brought home. It wasn't so much that I wanted to see some fish get split open, but that fishing trip was the closest I had ever felt to the man and I wanted more of it. After watching a woman stab her arms with needles every day, blood and gore hardly startled me. So Charlie propped me up on the counter and showed me how to cut open the fresh bass he and Billy had caught and fry it up for dinner.

I think that day really kicked our father-daughter relationship in action. We had something in common. I liked fishing. He liked fishing. He slowly started introducing more and more of his interests to me. Sports television. Greasy diner food. Bad crime shows. He would even show me how to disassemble and clean his gun (without letting me touch it, of course). I don't think he realized that before him, I didn't really have any interests. I was soaking up the activities he was throwing out because he liked them, and I wanted nothing more than for him to like me.

Soon, we were going fishing every Sunday, and going out to the diner together even more than that. He taught me how to throw a football and hit a baseball, and bought me a Seahawks jersey to match his. Every birthday he would take me out to a shooting range where we would knock clay pigeons out of the sky. When I punched a boy so hard I broke my knuckles after he made fun of Eric, he scolded the life out of me and then started to teach me self-defense. Every day after dinner we would sit in front of the television and I would ask him how many lives he had saved that day, as if he was a superhero instead of just the Chief of Police.

One day in fifth grade, I had cut my finger so deep on a swiss army knife he gave me for my birthday I had to get stitches. When I had approached him, the end of my shirt wrapped around my finger and my face screwed up from trying not to cry, he had been on the phone.

He took one look at my face, sighed, and told the person on the other end, "Hold on, my daughter needs me." I had started bawling right away, but it wasn't because of the cut.

I loved Forks. I loved the way there was so much green it hurt your eyes. I loved the way it never stopped raining. I loved the fact that everyone knew everyone, that by third grade somehow everyone knew I was the child of a junky mother and the woman who adopted me didn't want me. People didn't move into Forks, they grew up there, and their parents grew up there, and their grandparents grew up there. Every kid in Forks hoarded gossip magazines and watched drama television and dreamed of a life bigger and better than the one they were living in.

I didn't agree. I loved Forks, and I loved my friends, and more than anything in the world, I loved my father.

And nothing was going to take me away from him.

I've never been a huge Twilight fan, but quarantine has led me down a rabbit-hole of fanfiction binging. I started working on this on the side of another story I've been developing, and decided to post this chapter for the hell of it. This is sort of a background chapter to fill both you guys and myself in on what this character's life is and how the story is going to go. I may go back and change it later. I don't really have a plan for this story, but if you guys like it I'll definitely make it a bigger priority.

See you soon!

Jonkers