A/N: Edited.
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 relief flooding her veins as her plane landed at William R. Fairchild International Airport. Her left ear was 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 could recall her excitement as a child, making this exact same trip every summer to visit her grandparents in America. It felt like a great big adventure back then, all the planes and the connecting flights at massive international airports. America had seemed like a distant dream then. 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, an aunt, an uncle and a cousin. A full family.
Then her mother passed away. Her father never recovered. The heartbreak turned into full on raging depression and alcoholism, which then took hold of his life. It had been her paternal grandmother in France who had stepped in and intervened at last, an absolute force of a woman Jules adored with her whole soul. And so, her father saw fit to pack up his entire life and move with his daughter to France, where she was raised mostly by her eccentric grandmother. Every summer, the trio would make the trip to America so Jules would never forget where her mother had been from.
Jules had watched everyone she had ever loved die, in one sense or another. 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 remembered, 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 was drifting endlessly as a ghost upon the mortal plane. She was alive, yes, but she was no longer living. 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 without the interference of school or work.
By the time Jules turned sixteen, she had thought she had finally come out of the dark ages. 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 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 time to grieve. There were too many sudden complications to solve, too many loose strings to tie up. She had suddenly felt as if her entire world had been flooded and she didn't know how to swim. She was an orphan, an ocean away from her last living relatives. It was all up to her. She sorted out her father's affairs at his work, she dealt with the declaration of his death and her own legal status being changed. She had spent endless hours at banks and government offices instead of mourning, instead of grieving.
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 shown up to support her, but she had not spoken to them since the news, and she had left things quite awkward as she continued to avoid their attempts at helping her after the funeral.
She packed up the house, 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 kept herself busy right until the very end- which led her to this moment, walking out of the airport breathing a huge sigh of relief at the sight of the familiar 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, wrapping one arm around her shoulders as she leaned up on her tip toes to press a kiss to his cheek. "You get taller?"
"No, I shrunk." Jules deadpanned, 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 and simple. 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. Juliette's 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 suitcase and her duffel bag of clothes. Everything else had been shipped in advance. "What's the plan?"
"Hungry?" He asked, grunting as he shut the trunk and they parted ways to get into the cruiser. It was the first week of September in Washington, it wasn't the coldest weather Jules had been exposed to but it was nippy out, the air crisp 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 and 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 human, 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 wouldn'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 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 actually enjoyed the fishing trips his daughter always excused herself from, she liked 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 incorrectly to be from travel. She'd developed a lilt to her English now, probably from the three years she had not needed 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 it from her father's side of the family, along with most of her looks. She had been teased about her lips her entire childhood from what he remembered her grandmother telling him. Now she had grown into herself, her jawline strong, her cheeks hollow and her cheekbones high and proud. Her full lips no longer looked odd, her dainty nose 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. It hurt him to see that the only sign of his sister Beth at all was in her eyes, a swirling hazel that appeared more deep blue than green in the dim light of the cruiser.
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 annoyance he was not prepared for.
"I wish I was coming here under better circumstances." Jules cut 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 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 answered, earning a furrow of eyebrows in confusion. Charlie flushed. "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, that 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 share his bed. She had never known Charlie that had gone through 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 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' confident tone. 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 twinkling 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.
