Bella McLeod

Healer

This is my first Twilight fic, and it is a femlash, featuring Bella and Rosalie as a couple. So, if you don't like, please head somewhere else.

As an introduction, you may want to read "Snape McLeod" since the Bella that trained Tobias there is the same one here, only a decade later. It's not a requirement for you to read it, especially since I will try and untangle things as the story progresses. I altered the timeline to fit my needs, so… she met Snape in 1997, they parted ways in 2000 and it is now 2011, when she moves to Forks with Charlie.

Bare in mind that I do not own Twilight, nor its characters, so if you recognize any of them, THEY'RE NOT MINE. I only own the idea of making Bella Swan part of Clan McLeod.

I also not own the Highlander series, characters and concepts.

Remember to leave your reviews…

Bella McLeod

Chapter 02

Healer

I didn't sleep well that night. The constant whooshing of the rain and wind across the roof wouldn't fade into the background. I pulled the faded old quilt over my head, and later added the pillow, too. But I couldn't fall asleep until after midnight, when the rain finally settled into a quieter drizzle, reminding me of my time with Tobias, and how fond he seemed to be of this type of weather.

Thick fog was all I could see out my window in the morning, and I could feel the sensation of being trapped, creeping up on me. You could never see the sky here; it was like a cage.

Breakfast with Charlie was a quiet event. He wished me good luck at school. I thanked him, knowing his hope was wasted. Charlie left first, off to the police station that was his wife and family. After he left, I sat at the old square oak table in one of the three unmatching chairs and examined his small kitchen, with its dark paneled walls, bright yellow cabinets, and white linoleum floor. Nothing was different from the pictures he sent me. Over the small fireplace in the adjoining handkerchief-sized family room was a row of pictures. First a wedding picture of Charlie and Renee at Las Vegas, which lead me to think 'God bless Photoshop', then one of them with a baby in the hospital, supposedly the three of us in the hospital after I was born, taken by a helpful nurse, followed by the procession of my school pictures, this ones provided by Duncan, and then I cursed Photoshop!. Those were embarrassing to look at, but a necessary evil for the charade. We had done the same with Tobias and myself the time we were in Spain. It made me uncomfortable now. I didn't want to be too early to school, but I couldn't stay in the house anymore.

I donned my coat, which had secured my best friend and life insurance within, and headed out into the rain. It was just drizzling still, not enough to soak me through immediately as I reached for the house key that as stipulated by Charlie, was always hidden under the eaves by the door, and locked up. I couldn't pause and admire my truck again as I wanted; I was in a hurry to get out of the misty wet that swirled around my head and clung to my hair under my hood.

Inside the truck, it was nice and dry. Either Billy or Charlie had obviously cleaned it up, but the tan upholstered seats still smelled faintly of tobacco, gasoline, and peppermint. I chuckled lightly, if we added weed to the mix, it would have exactly what I had wanted in my original youth. The engine started quickly, to my relief, but loudly, roaring to life and then idling at top volume. Well, a truck this old was bound to have a flaw. The antique radio worked, a plus that I hadn't expected.

Finding the school wasn't difficult, though I'd never been there before. The school was, like most other things, just off the highway. It was not obvious that it was a school; only the sign, which declared it to be the Forks High School, made me stop. It looked like a collection of matching houses, built with maroon-colored bricks. There were so many trees and shrubs I couldn't see its size at first. Where was the feel of the institution? I wondered. Where were the chain-link fences, the metal detectors? Well, now that I think about it, it's good there are no metal detectors, right? It would be hard to explain why one brings a sword into school..

I parked in front of the first building, which had a small sign over the door reading front office. No one else was parked there, so I wasn't sure if it was off limits, but I decided I would get directions inside instead of circling around in the rain like an idiot. I stepped unwillingly out of the toasty truck cab and walked down a little stone path lined with dark hedges. I took a deep breath before opening the door. Inside, it was brightly lit, and warmer than I'd hoped. The office was small; a little waiting area with padded folding chairs, orange-flecked commercial carpet, notices and awards cluttering the walls, a big clock ticking loudly. Plants grew everywhere in large plastic pots, as if there wasn't enough greenery outside. The room was cut in half by a long counter, cluttered with wire baskets full of papers and brightly colored flyers taped to its front. There were three desks behind the counter, one of which was manned by a large, red-haired woman wearing glasses. She was wearing a purple t-shirt, which immediately made me feel overdressed. The red-haired woman looked up.

"Can I help you?"

"I'm Isabella Swan," I informed her, and saw the immediate awareness light her eyes. I was expected, a topic of gossip no doubt. Daughter of the Chief's flighty ex-wife, come home at last.

"Of course," she said. She dug through a precariously stacked pile of documents on her desk till she found the ones she was looking for. "I have your schedule right here, and a map of the school." She brought several sheets to the counter to show me. She went through my classes for me, highlighting the best route to each on the map, and gave me a slip to have each teacher sign, which I was to bring back at the end of the day.

She smiled at me and hoped, like Charlie, that I would like it here in Forks. I smiled back as convincingly as I could.

When I went back out to my truck, other students were starting to arrive. I drove around the school, following the line of traffic. I was glad to see that most of the cars were older like mine, nothing flashy. While living with Clara, whenever that happened, we'd lived in one of the few high-income neighborhoods around. It was a common thing to see a new Mercedes or Porsche in the parking lots at schools and malls. The nicest car here was a shiny Volvo, and it stood out.

I looked at the map in the truck, trying to memorize it now; hopefully I wouldn't have to walk around with it stuck in front of my nose all day. I stuffed everything in my bag, slung the strap over my shoulder, and sucked in a huge breath. I can do this, I mean, they're just a bunch of teenage kids, nothing to worry about. I told to myself. I finally exhaled and stepped out of the truck. I kept my face pulled back into my hood as I walked to the sidewalk, crowded with teenagers. My plain black coat didn't stand out, I noticed with relief. Once I got around the cafeteria, building three was easy to spot. A large black "3" was painted on a white square on the east corner. I felt my breathing gradually creeping toward hyperventilation as I approached the door. I never liked school. I had only enjoyed Tobias lessons because they were so different than regular education. I tried even my breath as I followed two unisex raincoats through the door.

The classroom was small. The people in front of me stopped just inside the door to hang up their coats on a long row of hooks. I copied them, careful not to let my sword see, and putting my coat underneath the mass of coats. I took the slip up to the teacher, a tall, balding man whose desk had a nameplate identifying him as Mr. Mason. He gawked at me when he saw my name, but he sent me to an empty desk at the back without introducing me to the class. It was harder for my new classmates to stare at me in the back, but somehow, they managed. I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairly basic: Bronte, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I'd already read everything. That was comforting… and boring. I wondered if Duncan still had them, if he would send me a folder of my old essays, or if he would think that was cheating. I went through different arguments with him in my head while the teacher droned on.

When the bell rang, a nasal buzzing sound, a gangly boy with skin problems and hair black as an oil slick leaned across the aisle to talk to me.

"You're Isabella Swan, aren't you?" He looked like the overly helpful, chess club type.

"Bella," I corrected. Everyone within a three-seat radius turned to look at me.

"Where's your next class?" he asked. I had to check in my bag.

"Um, Government, with Jefferson, in building six." There was nowhere to look without meeting curious eyes.

"I'm headed toward building four, I could show you the way…" Definitely over-helpful. "I'm Eric," he added. I smiled tentatively.

"Thanks." We got our coats and jackets and headed out into the rain, which had picked up by then. I could have sworn several people behind us were walking close enough to eavesdrop. I hoped I wasn't getting too paranoid.

"So, this is a lot different than Phoenix, huh?" he asked.

"Very."

"It doesn't rain much there, does it?"

"Three or four times a year." I answered nonchalantly

"Wow, what must that be like?" he wondered.

"Sunny," I told him.

"You don't look very tan."

"My mother is part albino." I lied. He studied my face apprehensively, and I sighed. It looked like clouds and a sense of humor didn't mix. A few months of this and I'd forget how to use sarcasm, damn. We walked back around the cafeteria, to the south buildings by the gym. Eric walked me right to the door, though it was clearly marked.

"Well, good luck," he said as I touched the handle. "Maybe we'll have some other classes together." He sounded hopeful. I smiled at him vaguely and went inside.

The rest of the morning passed in about the same fashion. My Trigonometry teacher, Mr. Varner, who I would have hate anyway just because of the subject he taught, was the only one who made me stand in front of the class and introduce myself. After two classes, I started to recognize several of the faces in each class. There was always someone braver than the others who would introduce themselves and ask me questions about how I was liking Forks. I tried to be diplomatic, but mostly I just lied a lot, I had to. At least I never needed the map. One girl sat next to me in both Trig and Spanish, and she walked with me to the cafeteria for lunch. She was tiny, several inches shorter than my five feet four inches, but her wildly curly dark hair made up a lot of the difference between our heights, kinda cute actually, could see myself hooking up once or twice with her. Damn this eternal hormonal body I got stuck with. I couldn't remember her name though, so I smiled and nodded as she prattled about teachers and classes. I didn't try to keep up. We sat at the end of a full table with several of her friends, who she introduced to me. I forgot all their names as soon as she spoke them.

They seemed impressed by her bravery in speaking to me. The boy from English, Eric, waved at me from across the room. He approached us and tried to flirt with me, causing one of the girls on the table to glare at me.

"Eric" I started, deciding that it was better to take this out in the open, let everyone know about the new girl from the beginning, instead of just bits and pieces. "Let's just make something clear here… Between tulips and roses, I definitely pick roses" I said in a serious tone, hoping that the code Clara had once told me to use to keep boys away and girls interested in me, still worked.

Eric and some of the boys looked lost, the girl glaring at me stopped her glaring and looked curious now, and the other one, Angela I later remembered, seemed to be smirking.

"Ok, if I buy you flowers, I won't give you the tulips" Eric said smirking

Boy, kids this days sure can be oblivious… then again maybe the code had evolved and changed, I thought miserably, slightly cursing my choice of words in the end. "Please, don't buy me flowers… To put it simple I'm…" It was there, sitting in the lunchroom, trying to make seven curious strangers understand that I was into girls, that I first saw them. They were sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, as far away from where I sat as possible in the long room. There were five of them. They weren't talking, and they weren't eating, though they each had a tray of untouched food in front of them. They weren't gawking at me, unlike most of the other students, so it was safe to stare at them without fear of meeting an excessively interested pair of eyes. But it was none of these things that caught, and held, my attention. They didn't look anything alike. Of the three boys, one was big, muscled like a serious weight lifter, with dark, curly hair. Another was taller, leaner, but still muscular, and honey blond. The last was lanky, less bulky, with untidy, bronze-colored hair. He was more boyish than the others, who looked like they could be in college, or even teachers here rather than students. The girls were opposites. The short girl was pixie like, thin in the extreme, with small features. Her hair was a deep black, cropped short and pointing in every direction. The tall one was statuesque. She had a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the same room. Her hair was golden, gently waving to the middle of her back. She took my breath way.

Every one of them was chalky pale, the palest of all the students living in this sunless town. They all had very dark eyes despite the range in hair tones. They also had dark shadows under those eyes, as if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose. Though their noses, all their features, were straight, perfect, angular. But all this is not why I couldn't look away. I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel. Being objective, it was hard to decide who was the most beautiful, though I had already decided that the perfect blond girl, was the most perfect of them. They were all looking away, away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell. As I watched, the small girl rose with her tray; unopened soda, unbitten apple, and walked away with a quick, graceful lope that belonged on a runway. I watched, amazed at her lithe dancer's step, till she dumped her tray and glided through the back door, faster than I would have thought possible.

My eyes darted back to the others in my table, who were staring at me, "Who are they?" I asked the girl from my Spanish class. As she looked up to see who I meant, suddenly he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps. He looked at my neighbor for just a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered to mine. He looked away quickly, in that brief flash of a glance, his face held nothing of interest, it was as if she had called his name, and he'd looked up in involuntary response, already having decided not to answer.

My neighbor giggled in embarrassment, looking at the table like I did. "That's Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale. The one who left was Alice Cullen; they all live together with Dr. Cullen and his wife." She said this under her breath. I glanced sideways at the blonde goddess, who was looking at her tray now, picking a bagel to pieces with long, pale fingers. The other three still looked away. Strange, unpopular names, I thought. The kinds of names grandparents had. But maybe that was in vogue here, small town names? I finally remembered that my neighbor was called Jessica, a perfectly common name too.

"They are… very nice-looking." I struggled with the conspicuous understatement.

"Yes!" Jessica agreed with another giggle.

"I like roses indeed" I finally muttered, setting my eyes on her.

"They're all together though, Emmett and Alice, and Jasper and Edward, I mean. And they live together." Her voice held all the shock and condemnation of the small town, I thought critically. But, if I was being honest, I had to admit that even on the old continent, it would cause gossip. But on the bright side, for a small town they had seemed to have accepted a homosexual relationship, the problem here was that they were siblings.

"Which ones are the Cullens?" I asked. "They don't look related…" Now staring at Rosalie

"Oh, they're not. Dr. Cullen is really young, in his twenties or early thirties. They're all adopted. The Hales are brother and sister, twins; the blondes, and they're foster children."

"They look a little old for foster children."

"They are now, Jasper and Rosalie are both eighteen, but they've been with Mrs. Cullen since they were eight. She's their aunt or something like that."

"That's really kind of nice for them to take care of all those kids like that, when they're so young and everything."

"I guess so," Jessica admitted reluctantly, and I got the impression that she didn't like the doctor and his wife for some reason. With the glances she was throwing at their adopted children, I would presume the reason was jealousy.

"I think that Mrs. Cullen can't have any kids, though," she added, as if that lessened their kindness. Throughout all this conversation, my eyes flickered again and again to the table where the strange family sat. They continued to look at the walls and not eat.

"Have they always lived in Forks?" I asked.

"No," she said in a voice that implied it should be obvious, even to a new arrival like me. "They just moved down two years ago from somewhere in Alaska." I felt a surge of pity, and relief. Pity because, as beautiful as they were, they were outsiders, clearly not accepted. Relief that I wasn't the only newcomer here, and certainly not the most interesting by any normal standard. As I examined them, the youngest, one of the Cullens, looked up and met my gaze, this time with evident curiosity in his expression. As I looked swiftly away, it seemed to me that his glance held some kind of unmet expectation.

"Which one is the boy with the reddish brown hair?" I asked. I peeked at him from the corner of my eye, and he was still staring at me, but not gawking like the other students had today, he had a slightly frustrated expression.

"That's Edward. He's gorgeous, of course, but don't waste your time. He is gay. Apparently none of the girls here were good-looking enough for him. So he settled with his brother" She sniffed, a clear case of sour grapes. I wondered when he'd turned her down. I bit my lip to hide my smile. Then I glanced at him again. His face was turned away, but I thought his cheek appeared lifted, as if he were smiling, too. I looked to the blonde goddess again. Boy, I wouldn't mind staring all day long.

My cell phone started to ring, I looked into the ID and saw that it was Duncan. I stood up and excused myself, heading outside.

"Hello Duncan, missed me already?" I asked as sweetly as possible.

"We've spent years apart, so no, not yet" He said chuckling

"Damn, and here I was thinking you'd want me to come back now" I smiled into the phone, turning my gaze indoors again, to happily stare at Rosalie. "Damn, Roses indeed"

"What you said Bella?" Asked Duncan.

"Nothing, just confirming my preferences"

"Bella, please don't" He warned me.

"Hey, it's not my fault that this kid was hitting on me and this gorgeous girl came in. I just let them know that I don't like tulips, but roses" I said innocently.

"Fine. Just try not break hearts there." He said

"I'll try" I said smiling to the blonde who looked up and our gazes met. She had this beautiful golden eyes.

"Anyway, Bella, I just called to let you know that Tobias is looking for you" This snapped me from my staring.

"Is he alright?" I asked frowning.

"Yeah, he just said he had an encounter with Clara"

"Oh boy, is she?"

"Clara's on the run now, she did not issue a challenge, apparently just wanted to mess with him. So if she contacts you. Stay out. Tobias is not happy about the outcome of their encounter"

"Boy, why can't they just be civil to each other?" I regretted.

"Well, your so called best friend is nothing but trouble and Tobias, well, you both were each other's Firsts, so you are close. That bond is hard to break."

"Ok. So, I'll stay out of their quarrel" I said defeated. I looked back indoors looking for the goddess and she seemed to be frowning now. I realized then that I would try and make everything in my power to stop her from being upset, and the first step to accomplish that was to introduce myself in order to know what was troubling her. "Listen Duncan, I have to go. Classes and all that"

"Since when are you eager to go to class?" He mocked me

"Oh, I'm not, but it's first day and I don't want the teachers to call Charlie yet" I smirked

"Fine, have a nice day. Renee says hi"

"Bye Duncan" I hung up and headed back inside. However, as I was going through the glass doors, The Cullens left the table together. They all were noticeably graceful, even the big, brawny one. It was unsettling to watch. The one named Edward didn't look at me again. And Rosalie just glared before leaving.

I headed back then with Jessica. I sat at the table with her and her friends longer than I would have if I'd been sitting alone. One of my new acquaintances, who considerately reminded me that her name was Angela, had Biology II with me the next hour. We walked to class together in silence. She was shy. When we entered the classroom, Angela went to sit at a black-topped lab table exactly like the ones I got used to in Spain. She already had a neighbor. In fact, all the tables were filled but one. Next to the center aisle, I recognized Rosalie Hale, sitting next to that single open seat.

Revised A/N (March 2021): Just a heads up. I did keep a lot from the original story during the first few chapters in order to get flowing into what Twilight is and what I want my Bella to be in that fandom.

Original A/N: Well, as you may or may not know, I am currently unemployed, so my mind decided to busy itself. I just had to decide where to start first while I find a new job.

Hope you liked it so far.

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Oh, and if you have a twitter account and are interested, follow me at OriginalHealer