AN: CW for brief reference to suicide.

"Hey, this is Lauren. I can't come to the phone right now, or I'm ignoring you. Either way, leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Or I won't…because, you know, I'm ignoring you. You know what you did."

I grinned, shaking my head at my sister's idiotic voicemail greeting and waited for the beep.

"Hey, Lauren. I know it's late, and you're probably asleep right now - like I should be. Aren't you practically nocturnal these days? I heard your PlayStation at like 4am the other day. Anyway, I'm just leaving Lisa's house - everyone was asking about you. You know, it wouldn't kill you to get out of your room once in a while and actually come with me to one of these parties. It would be nice to have someone to take turns being the designated driver every now and then." I sighed, shaking my head at my impossible sister. "Anyway, I'll be home soon. If dad asks, I got home at one o'clock - you're my alibi, okay? Love you, Loz."

I hung up and sighed, heavily, replaying the fight I had had with my ex-boyfriend before leaving the dying party. He was such a dick. I couldn't believe I had ever thought I was in love with him. Lauren had always hated him, even before we had dated, but that hadn't exactly been a red flag - Lauren hated everyone, as far as I could tell, with very few exceptions. If my dating pool was limited to the people my sister actually liked, it would consist of me, our neighbour's dog, our friend Clive - who had a girlfriend, and the crazy guy who lived at the foot of the braes near our house.

I had asked her once why she liked that old man who muttered to himself and carried an empty grocery bag with him wherever he went, and she had appeared confused by the question.

"What do you mean, you went to his house for tea? Lauren! He's insane." I had tried to explain. "And possibly dangerous."

"He's just lonely. And he's the only interesting person within a ten-mile radius." She had said, with a shrug. "I want him to adopt me."

I frowned at the memory, but couldn't help the affectionate smile that spread across my face when I thought of her. She was the most popular girl I had ever known who had zero interest in embracing that popularity. She was rude to everyone in our school, but she was so naturally funny that people usually assumed she was joking. I knew her well enough to know that she usually wasn't.

When Lisa had called the day before to invite us to her party, I had accepted before passing the phone to Lauren.

"No." I heard her say, bluntly. She was silent for a few seconds while Lisa replied. "No." She had said again, in a bored voice. "No other plans."

Another few seconds of silence passed while Lisa pressed her for an explanation. She shrugged, raising her eyes to the ceiling.

"Because I just don't like you very much." She said, casually. She passed the phone back to me with a pleasant smile, and I heard Lisa's hysterical laughter on the other end.

"She's so funny, your sister." The other girl had gushed, when I spoke again. "So you'll both be here?"

"I'll try to twist her arm." I said, throwing Lauren a meaningful look. She mimed hanging herself and left the room without another word.

I hated the way that I always found myself trying to cover for her terrible manners. Almost as much as I envied how little she cared about what anyone thought of her. We were identical twins, but we couldn't have been more different. Our dad had once described her as "having the confidence of a ninety-year old man", and for some reason, that description always stuck with me.

I snapped out of my reverie when I realised that I had managed to take a wrong-turn. There weren't many roads around here that I didn't immediately recognise, and I glanced around looking for a familiar landmark. The old coal bing that was visible for miles around was on my left, and I groaned, realising where I had gone wrong. The clock on the dash flashed 4am, and I knew that my accidental detour would add at least another twenty minutes onto my journey. I had nursed a single cider when I arrived at the party hours before, but my eyelids were growing heavy with tiredness.

I was surrounded by green fields on both sides and there wasn't a single other car on the road at this time in the morning, so there was little to hold my attention. I blasted the aircon and turned the radio on, shaking myself to chase the sleep away.

My family and I lived in a tiny village in the countryside, which was surrounded by seven or eight other tiny villages within a few miles of one another, all connected by the area's dominant farming community. Lauren and I would be leaving for university at the end of the summer, and I could hardly wait.

It was a lovely place, really, but when you grow up here, you don't appreciate the quiet beauty of trees and rivers and green hills: you just look for a way to get out – to escape the quiet and the green for somewhere busy and breathing and grey. You get out, or you live and die your quiet life, just like your parents and your grandparents before you, and you definitely don't make a difference.

I wasn't sure that I wanted to make a difference, exactly. But it might be nice to have the option…and there had to be hotter guys in the city than there were here. I mean my God, if Gavin Grieve qualified as a heart-throb in this place, I would be as well resigning myself to spinsterhood now if I stayed. Maybe the crazy old guy who lived at the foot of the braes wasn't so bad, after all.

And then I was thinking about Gavin. He was the sports champion at the local high-school. He had average grades but that didn't matter, because everyone knew that he was going to work on the farm with his dad anyway. His career had been decided for him the day his mother had found out she was pregnant. And that was a good thing. That was a best case scenario. People around here respected that. Gavin Grieve was the closest thing we had to a local celebrity.

My sister used to say that he was the "biggest little shit in South Lanarkshire".

I felt my eyelids droop and I realised that the radio was blaring out sports highlights. Well, that wasn't going to keep me awake.

I moved to change the channel to something more interesting, but my hand wouldn't budge from the steering wheel. I frowned, trying again to release my grip on the wheel, but my hands stayed stuck fast, like they didn't belong to me, or like I was no longer in control of them. Confusion and panic rose up inside of me, and my heart pounded in my ears.

At the same time, the dial on my speedometer started to creep up, going from forty to fifty…to sixty…to seventy…I wasn't sure when I started screaming. I jerked my body around in my seat, wildly, trying desperately to unglue my hands from the wheel, or to slam down on the brakes, but my limbs were held fast by…something.

I screwed my eyes shut, wondering if I had fallen asleep after all. That was the only thing that made sense. This was obviously a nightmare. When I opened my eyes again, the fields on either side of me blurred as I raced by them and the only thing that was in focus was the tree on the hill in front of me. Gnarled and black, it stood out from its surroundings like it didn't belong there. My hands – not my hands anymore – turned the wheel ever so slightly so that I was heading straight for it. I closed my eyes, and I knew that this was the end.

"Lauren…LAUREN!" Without knowing why, I screamed her name, and the darkness swallowed it, and became me, and my hands finally let go of the wheel. Too late. Too late.

When you grow up here, you don't appreciate the quiet beauty of trees and rivers and green hills: you just look for a way to get out – to escape the quiet and the green for somewhere busy and breathing and grey. You get out, or you live and die your quiet life, just like your parents and your grandparents before you, and you definitely don't make a difference.

AN: I said in my description that these earlier chapters could do with a rewrite, because it's been more than a decade since I actually started this fic and yes, I do feel the icy breath of death upon my neck, thank you for asking. So this is my half-hearted attempt at making the first few chapters a bit more interesting/readable. Feel free to drop a review if you care to, but I'm doing this for me, more than anyone else, because I hated these chapters more than life itself.

If the rewrite is universally despised for reasons I won't pretend to understand, the original versions are preserved on my laptop to one day be hung in the Terrible Fanfiction museum.