Wassup, welcome to my shitty writing! Updating all the chapters because FFN deleted my line breaks, so I'm adding a couple author's notes too while I'm at it. JSYK, this story is in non-chronological order, and it's crossposted to my AO3, polyxena_chatoyant. Enjoy!
Sometimes she can't get over how it happened. She thinks about it on bad nights and good mornings - basically, all the time. The way she died was heartbreaking, literally. Standing on a road in the rain, run over by someone she thought she'd loved. The betrayal still stings, a lifetime away.
The golden sunlight raked through the window in a visible beam, setting dust in the air alight. Florence turned on her side in bed to see it better, basking in the sound of birdsong through the open window. She could hear her dad cooking dinner downstairs, the pots and pans clashing, and the distant sound of Mike watching TV with their mom. Pleasantly warm and completely unhindered by responsibility, Florence sighed contentedly.
How many times had she wished she could do over her life? Go back to childhood, before things got complicated by money and life expectations. The days where ice cream was her number one influencer, not the pretty girls she couldn't help staring at on instagram. This was her most desperate wish come true.
She closed her eyes.
Sometimes you shouldn't get what you wished for.
KNOCK KNOCK.
She opened her eyes. Her bedroom door swung up maybe a second following the knocks, her brother having no manners. He stood in the doorway with his schoolbag in hand, a frown on his face.
"Mom's being mean," he griped, stomping into her room with no welcome, plopping down onto the carpet in the sunbeam. "She said we can't watch TV until after we've done our homework."
"So what you're saying," she rolled onto her back and clasped her hands on her stomach with a chesire cat smile, "is that I get to watch TV and you can't."
Mike glared darkly at her, unzipping his backpack in one smooth motion and dumping his books and papers onto her clean carpet. She smiled crookedly at him, batting her eyelashes.
"Please help me with my math homework," he said monotonically, as though his life were ending just by asking.
"Hmmmm…" Florence reached up and tapped her chin. "No."
"Oh come on!" Mike half shouted, throwing his hands up. "I don't understand long division! You're good at everything, why can't you help me? I thought twins were supposed to stick together!"
"Maybe if you paid attention in class you'd understand the homework," she taunted, pushing herself up and out of the bed to join him on the floor. Her ponytail was messed up from laying down, so she took the scrunchie out of her hair and tied it back at the base of her skull. "Which one are you having trouble with?"
Mike seemed to immediately forget his anger, pointing a pencil at one of the problems. "This one."
"Gotcha. With this one…"
Sitting in the sunlight with her twin, their hair shining gold like the sunlight, she was content.
"What do you mean we're moving?" Mike shouted at the dinner table, his plate of chicken and peas forgotten.
"Exactly what we said," Karen, their mom, said gently. She set her utensils down and folded her hands on the table. "Your father and I are starting a business, but there are too many outdoors outfitters in Sacramento. We have to go where the money is."
"But all my friends are here!" Mike argued, waving his hands emphatically. "I have baseball practice next week! What am I gonna tell the coach?"
"He'll understand." Their mom replied. "I'm sure Forks will have a baseball team for you to join."
"Forks? What kind of name is that?" Mike stuck his tongue out and made a face. "What's their neighboring town called, Spoon? Spork?"
Florence took a large bite of her chicken. It was seasonless, how sad.
"Florence," her dad, Matthew, started. "You've been quiet so far."
Florence looked at her dad, who stared back at her silently. Her parents liked to think she took after him, with how quiet she tended to be, how sure of herself. Mike looked over his shoulder at her, and Karen looked expectant.
Florence didn't really care, to be frank. She didn't have friends to worry about leaving behind, she hadn't gotten involved in after-school activities, and while she was attached to Sacramento in the way she would always be attached to somewhere she'd grown up in, it wouldn't be the end of the world to leave. In her last life, she had dreamed of moving around constantly, seeing place after place. That dream had never left her; moving was a way of life she longed for.
"When do we leave?" she asked.
Matthew smiled and lifted a spoonful of peas to his mouth as Karen answered.
"We'll start packing this week. I've informed the landlord already, so we've got to be out by the end of the month."
Mike howled in anguish, slumping so far in his seat he threatened to slide out completely. Florence nodded and continued to eat her meal.
Packing was always fun. She could declutter her belongings and start fresh in a new town. Maybe the kids would feel less like kids there and more like equals - unlikely, but she could hope. Sometimes she couldn't even stand to be around Mike, with how immature he was. Not that it was his fault for being a kid.
After dinner, she went to her room and started to take out the clothes in her drawers and closets. She separated them into piles; keeping, donating, and trash. There was plenty in the donate pile and few in the keeping or trash when Mike slinked into her room with a prominent pout.
"I can't believe this," he sighed dramatically and dropped backwards onto her bed. "Why do we have to leave?"
"Because kids don't get a choice," she muttered without thinking about it.
Mike grunted unhappily in agreement, though she was already rethinking her words. Kids should get a choice, but ultimately it was the parents' say that mattered. Some, however, took that to an unreasonable extreme. Karen and Matthew had never shown themselves to be anything other than considerate of she and Mike's wishes, so this might not be any different. Still, she wasn't going to argue it.
"Think of it like an adventure," she advised, shrugging at her twin. "You don't always get to choose where you go, but you can choose what to do about it. You can make newer, better friends; you can be better at baseball there; you can be whoever you want to be."
"Even if I want to be Derek?" he asked.
"Who's Derek?"
"I don't know," Mike shrugged, "someone I could be."
"Then yes, you could be Derek."
"Cool."
Forks, WA, wasn't even sunny during the summer. It was rain, rain, and - you guessed it - more rain. Florence had never been to a place that had so little sun and so much clouds. It was like wearing sunglasses 24/7. While it did wonders for her sensitive eyes, it did horrors for her mood. She hated the wet and the cold. Had she been told of what Forks was actually like when her parents had announced the move, her reaction would have mirrored her brother's.
Her new room, where she spent most of her time since she hated being rained on, was on the second floor at the back of the house, overlooking the water-logged garden and treeline beyond their fence. From her bedroom windows, of which there were three, she could see well into the neighbors' yards and a few feet into the forests surrounding the small town. She'd set up a desk beneath them, carefully organized and to her aesthetics.
The rest of the room was comparably messy, mostly boxes surrounding an unmade bed, the walls a blank white. At least the hardwood was nice, she decided, running her bare feet over it. And she and Mike's rooms were across the hall from each other, not side-to-side. She was finally free of hearing him shouting over his video games.
Well, she thought to herself. Might as well start unpacking. I'm gonna be here a while.