A DAUGHTER'S LOVE

CHAPTER ONE - BACK TO TWIN PEAKS, BACK TO REALITY

Foreword: So, I basically decided a few years ago that it was time for me to write my own continuation of the Twin Peaks story and it starts roughly a year after the events of season 3. Only, at that time, I pretty quickly got stuck after only four chapters, but after receiving a surge of inspiration, I finally got it together to finish it and my plan is for it to end up being eighteen chapters in all, although I might end up extending it by a chapter or two. Over the past month or so, I've been updating the story over on Ao3 by posting one chapter per week and I plan on doing the same here. Already today, I'll be posting the first ten chapters (to get it up to speed with where it is on Ao3), so it's basically at least half of the story that you're getting right off the bat.

Is it anywhere near as good as what Mark Frost and David Lynch would have come up with? Probably not even close, but it's my version of a Twin Peaks story and hopefully, a few of my fellow fans of that sadly departed series will get as much joy out of reading it as I'm getting out of writing it.

I'm dedicating it to David Lynch and all of the others that we've lost along the way, who helped him with putting his spectacular vision of what a TV show can be on the screen.

Rebecca McCauley Briggs (formerly Burnett prior to her recent divorce) was feeling a kind of relief that she couldn't remember having felt since she was a kid, all of those years before this. She was now twenty-six years old and for the first time in years, she was in every sense of the word a free woman. Free from her highly drug-addicted husband Steven, who'd done such a fine job of pulling her down with him and whom, after she'd testified against him in court as the prime witness to his misdeeds, she'd now officially become divorced from. Best of all, thanks to a few months spent in court-ordered rehab, she'd also become free from her own drug addiction that had held her down since she'd first met Steven at the tender age of sixteen and in the following years, he'd kept her plenty supplied with whatever kind of escape from reality, she'd felt like getting. That she couldn't see then that she was basically following in her mother's tragic footsteps, annoyed the heck out of her to say the least, but there was nothing that could be done about it now where she was trying to live on the straight and narrow, while she also got her head back in order again. Not an easy feat, considering how extremely out of whack it had been when she'd truly hit rock bottom the year before this, prior to her parents talking some much-needed sense into her rebellious young self and no doubt saving herself from a long time behind bars as well.

Her own and her mom's stories were eerily similar too. Becky's mother Shelly had met her father Bobby when they were still just little kids, and they had in time become each other's first sweethearts. After he'd broken her heart in grade ten however, when she'd found out that he was secretly seeing Laura Palmer behind her back and had been for a while, they had a very public break-up at a school dance and was the end of them: part one.

Even if Becky had never claimed to be the wisest person on ways of the world, even she knew that a troubled teenage girl from a broken home, who had a lousy relationship with a mom that had never wanted to have her in the first place and had barely gotten to know her dad, before he'd skipped town on her (not to mention had just had her fragile, young heart crushed in the worst way possible by the first boy, she'd put any real trust in after her dad had abandoned her), would have been an easy victim for the absolute worst guy, her mom could have shacked up with: a trucker named Leo Johnson, who was five years her senior. From the moment that he began pretending that as the only one, he actually gave a damn about her, she was sold and with that had begun an over two year-long abusive nightmare for her. Not long after, he'd threatened her enough to make her marry him, move in with him and drop out of school and from then on, she'd essentially become his personal house slave and little more.

Substitute the names Bobby and Leo for Davey and Steven and you basically had Becky's own sob story neatly wrapped up as well, even if Steven luckily had never treated her anywhere nearly as horrible as Leo had treated her mom, whom he'd turned into a mixture of a punching bag and a non-paid maid, living in constant fear of what he might do to her (again). It wasn't even like he took care of her financially, she had to go to work as a waitress at the double R diner every day as well. Then again, that could very well be why she managed to stay sane through it all and to a part of Becky at the least, it comforted her know that her mom had a somewhat of a safe spot away from the near-daily horrors that monster must have put her through.

Even if Leo had thankfully been murdered (and from everything she'd heard about him, more than deservedly so!), just the frightening stories that she'd been told about him from her parents or one of the other adults, who knew them at that time, was enough to send entire waves of shivers running down her spine. To think that her wonderful mom, the closest thing she'd met to a real-life angel in every way, had been in such a horribly abusive relationship and had almost lost her life thanks to that thankfully deceased psychopath, only made her all the happier that after Leo had his "accident" (as if anyone actually believed that's what it had been and not yet another one, he'd made mortal enemies of trying to murder him and finally succeeding at it!), her parents had rekindled their fractured relationship and with no one around to get between them that time around, had also ended up tying the knot on a romantic weekend trip to Nevada, almost a year to the day after she'd buried her first husband.

Around seven months later, Becky herself had made her entry into this world and for the first several years of her life, they'd been a mostly happy little family and, on the surface, at least, things were going swimmingly. Her dad had decided to become a cop, while her mom was more than contempt working at the same place, she'd worked since she was a young teenager, the double R diner. Then again, why wouldn't she, when she had her best friend Norma as a boss and probably wouldn't be able to land a better job in a small town like Twin Peaks, anyway?

Unfortunately, in time her parents had begun growing apart and she could still remember vividly from when she was eleven years old, the day where they'd told her that "daddy was moving into a place of his own" and that "she shouldn't worry over it, because it wouldn't change anything for her". Looking back on it now, it was definitely a negative turning point in her life and although, they'd tried to keep things as much on the normal for her as they could, there was still no denying that there was a fresh-faced innocence within her that had been lost during that first year afterwards and would never be coming back again.

That neither of them, all of these years later had managed to find someone to settle down with, was honestly just kind of sad to her and it made her wonder if it wasn't because they were still too hung up on one another to move on. Certainly, if you looked at the romantic history of either of them over the years since their divorce had been made final, it read more like a who's who of matches, they were never going to last with in the long run and not the kind of people, either of them should be looking into dating. Heck, her mom's last boyfriend "Red" had almost been a reversion to her old days with Leo in how much of an obvious bad guy, he was and if he hadn't been taken down along with Steven, who knows what would have happened to her dear mom by now?

With both of those men spending the next many years in prison however, this was their chance at a fresh start in many ways. Becky couldn't help being a little pleased to know that it was almost sure to go better than most of their latest attempts had.

As she sat there on the passenger seat of her mom's car and glared out of the window while they were driving back from Seattle and Steven's court sentencing, she started wondering to herself, who the perfect match for either of her parents could be, if such a thing existed. They both had a couple of exes in town, but she couldn't really see either her mom or dad getting together with any of them a second time.

"Do you think they went too hard on Steven? Thirty-five years is a long time!" Shelly half-asked, half thought out loud, breaking the awkward silence between them that had been more or less been in full effect, practically since they'd left the Twin Peaks city limits five hours earlier or so.

"I can't say, mom. It isn't like I'm an expert on the law or anything like that. I'm just glad that I won't have to see him again" she replied truthfully, getting a small smile from her mom in return.

"That makes two of us, Honey! What is it with the women in our family that we always go for the worst guys, we could possibly choose for ourselves? First it was your grandmother, then me and now you. It has to be something genetic, I'm sure of it!" her mom dark-humoredly joked and they shared a dry laugh over it.

"Can we honestly say that dad has had more luck in love than we have? First there was you and that didn't end all too well, did it?"

"I'm sure that all of those who saw our very public break-up at that tenth-grade dance got a good laugh out of it, so that's something!"

"Still, it isn't exactly how you want your first relationship to end, is it?"

"I guess not, Sweetheart".

"Does it ever make you angry when you think back on how he cheated on you with Laura Palmer?"

"Considering that we're talking about a girl, who was savagely murdered at the age of seventeen, I'm just glad that it wasn't me in her shoes! Jesus, that poor girl! You don't know the half of it and I'm not sure, you'd ever want to! Believe me when I tell you that any residual jealousy that my younger and far more selfish self might have had towards her, all disappeared in an instant the moment that I was told about them having found her dead" her mom told her from the heart, before needing a moment to recompose herself. "I don't know if you've ever discussed it with your dad, but it hit him hundreds of times worse than it did to anyone in Twin Peaks, except for maybe Laura's parents and her best friend Donna. They'd been about as close, as a pair of teenage lovers could be for a long time by then and I can tell you that he blamed himself thousands of times afterwards, for not having been there to protect her when she needed him to".

"Until he got back together with you, right?"

"I'd like to think that it helped him with moving on with his life after losing her in such a brutal way, at least. Anyway, that's all part of a very dark past now that I don't feel like revisiting any more than I have to. But yes, you're right. Your dad hasn't had much more luck in love than either of us have when it comes down to it".

"He never dated any other girls back in high school, with the exception of you and Laura?" Becky asked and it made her mother bat an eye at her question.

"Where's this curiosity coming from?"

"I'm just making conversation" Becky replied casually, so that her mom wouldn't pick up on what she was actually in the midst's of.

"The only one I remember seeing him flirting with a few times was Audrey Horne. Then again, Audrey pretty much flirted with all of the boys, just so she could get off on the power, she held over them!"

"You don't mean "Crazy Audrey", do you? What kind of power could she possibly have held over them?" Becky had to ask, since the few times that she'd seen Audrey when she'd been home on a short visit from the nut house that she'd lived in for the past many years, she hadn't exactly looked like someone, who would have had the guys flocking towards her back in school. Quite the opposite, in fact.

"Trust me, back then there were a lot of girls, who envied her for how amazing that she always looked. Even I did too, a few times. There wasn't a single boy in that entire school, with the exception of perhaps James, that she couldn't have wrapped around her little pinky finger in a matter of seconds if she wanted to. I can easily see why it would hard for you to see now, but back in high school, she was the untouchable princess there".

"She must have had lots of boyfriends, then?"

"Not really. Any guy who did win her heart had to work hard at winning it first. The only guy that I ever saw her having a legitimate crush on was an adult FBI agent and from what I heard, it was only because he'd saved her life a time or two!"

"To each girl her own, I suppose! Speaking of James, why did you never go out with him? I mean, he's as nice as they come and you're always saying how he's always been cool! Did you think that too back in school or ..."

"I'm starting to think that this conversation has gone on long enough!"

"Come on, I'm curious! There must have been some part of you that liked him, even back then".

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"That going back as far as I can remember, the two of have been sending one another these "secret smiles", like you know something that the rest of us don't! And don't think that I haven't noticed how you sneak little looks at him, whenever we see him around town!"

"And how's that, my little junior psychiatrist?"

"You look at him with this sad "Why didn't I ever take a crack at that?" kind of look. Fess up, mom! Did you have a teenage crush on him, and it's just never entirely went away?" Becky asked, while trying to look her mom in the eyes. Not that it was working, since Shelly was clearly trying to avoid her gaze and had her eyes firmly fixed on the open road ahead of them.

"He was my first crush, okay? Way back in grade six, before I'd ever begun flirting with your dad or any boy, for that matter. I had a feeling that he liked me back, but with how painfully shy that we both were at that time of our lives, nothing ever came of it. I've never told him this and I don't want you to tell him either! Is that understood?" her mother finally answered her daughter, who nodded in reply.

"You didn't answer the second part of my question, mom. Do you still like him?"

"That's between me, myself and I and no one else! Not even my own daughter".

They didn't speak much on the last part of their drive, and it gave Becky a chance to think some things over. Even if her mom hadn't said so in so many words, she hadn't denied that she still had feelings for James, and if Becky was to choose a top candidate for a new step-dad among the otherwise rather sorry-looking pool of available bachelors around her mom's age in their small town, James would probably be at the top of her own list potential step-dads as well. More than anything though, she just wanted both of her parents to find happiness through love again and if she had to willingly take on the role of being the catalyst for that happening, it was a role that she'd more than gladly take on!

After having spent most of the day with her mom, Becky had already made plans to join her dad for dinner at his small house, located just a few houses down the street from the house that he grew up in. They rarely spoke about her grandparents on her dad's side and with good reason too. Her (highly decorated) Air Force Colonel grandfather would often disappear for days at a time without leaving any trace of himself behind, and what had actually happened on the day that he disappeared for posterity, still stood as one of the biggest unexplained mysteries in a town that had more than its share of them. There were even those, who said that he'd been abducted by aliens several times and that the reason why he hadn't returned was because they'd decided to keep him, although the sceptic in her had trouble believing this theory, just for how unlikely it sounded to her ears. In the following years after his final disappearance, her grandmother had become much more withdrawn and by the time she'd left this earth in the early 2000's, the only ones who could say that they still knew her was her closest family members and a couple of old friends, who'd refused to give up on her. That said, Becky still had lots of great memories from visiting her back in her childhood. Whenever she brought them up to her dad, it wasn't hard to tell that he still had a deep-rooted love for the both of them, in spite of the differences they may have had during his adolescent years, where it wasn't a secret that he was living up being the town's number one bad boy to the fullest and enjoying every second of it.

"Do you miss Steven at all?" he asked her while they were preparing the evening's dinner of oven-roasted potatoes and pork chops. As far as the culinary talent between the two of them went, that was about as far as it could be stretched!

"A little" she answered him truthfully. "I know that I shouldn't, because we were always terrible for one another going back as far as I can remember".

"It's okay if you are, Becky. He was a huge part of your life, so it's only natural for you to feel this way. I can tell you from personal experience that it won't go away anytime soon, I'm afraid" he answered her with the sort of warm dad-like kind of smile, which often made her wonder how someone like him once could have been a wild child, to where it even rivaled her own wildest days of her teen years and her early twenties.

"Was what I went through with him, kind of like what you went through with Laura? I mean, we both tried to save someone from themselves, and we ended up losing both ourselves and them in the end, anyway".

"That's very insightful of you! Did a few of those classes that you took in college before they kicked you out, actually stick?" he asked back and they shared a small smile over it.

"Maybe. I've actually been thinking about becoming a part of our health service in some way, I'm just not sure how to go about it yet. Don't tell mom, but I don't want to be stuck working at the diner for the rest of my working life, like we both know that she will be!"

"There's no need to apologize! It's nice for a dad to hear that his daughter is coming up with constructive plans for her future and isn't planning on spending them being high out of her mind. For you, that's a big step up!"

"If you could get over your bad boy days as easily, as you did, I'm sure that I can get over my bad girl days as well! Was mom ever a bad girl, back in the old days?"

"If by the old days, you mean back in the late eighties and early nineties, I'd say that she could be on the rare occasions when she wanted to and we'll leave it at that. I wouldn't want you to get any wrong ideas in your head here, if you know what I'm saying?" he rhetorically asked before putting their dinner into the oven, where it in a little over half an hour would turn from being just a bunch of produce thrown together, into becoming a pretty tasty dinner for the both of them.

"You didn't answer my question about Laura. But look, I completely understand if it's still too hard for you to talk about an ex-girlfriend, who was murdered while you were still together with her".

"It's okay. We've never talked much about her, have we?" he solemnly answered her while trying to keep a brave face on. Even if it wasn't hard to tell that just bringing up the memories of how distraught he must have been after his high school sweetheart was found naked, murdered and wrapped in a sheet of plastic by the side of the lake, weren't memories that he would want to think back on.

"Of course, I heard stories about her wild and crazy life in school or around town, like I think that everybody in my generation and the one which came before us, did. It wouldn't surprise me at all, if those stories are still in some form circulating at Twin Peaks High today. I just don't know how much of it was trustworthy information, considering that I heard by far the most of it from those, who were my own age at the time, and they had probably heard it from someone, who'd been told the story for the tenth time over, at least!"

"Maybe we should try talking about Laura for once. After all, if she hadn't been taken from all of us when she was, it isn't unlikely that you wouldn't have been born, so I guess that I can't blame you for being on the curious side".

"You're almost making it sound like I was brought into this world to take her place. Who knows? Perhaps that is the case and it's all a part of someone's big masterplan!" she lightly joked, easing the tension in her father a little and helping him to loosen up again.

"With this being Twin Peaks that we're talking about, we probably shouldn't rule anything out entirely! With all of the mighty strange things, I've seen or been told about over my many years living here, I don't think it would even make my top ten! So ... what do you want to know?" he calmly asked her, before taking a couple of cans of beer out of his fridge and handing one to her.

Before they sat down at his kitchen table, he took a big swig of his and as they did, he took a deep breath for courage to come clean about a time of his life that he'd always tried his best to hide for from her.

"Did you love her?" was Becky's first question, since it seemed to her like a good jumping off point.

"I did. I can honestly tell you that there wasn't a thing in the world, I wouldn't have done for that girl if she wanted me to. That was perhaps our biggest problem as well. She knew this all too well and she wasn't shy, when it came to taking advantage of it".

"It doesn't sound like she was a nice person, the way you're talking about her".

"You have to understand how troubled; she truly was. I'll be the first to admit that I was far too young and too naïve as well, to even begin to understand how deep it ran within her. Now, where I can look back at it with the benefit of hindsight and not the least, all of the baggage that all of my years on the force has offered me, I can see that I was more or less doing the opposite of what I should have done. If it had been me today, I would have tried to get her the psychiatric help, she so desperately needed, but I was too blinded by my intense love for her to see anything apart from perfection whenever we were together. By the time that we reached those last weeks of her life though, my sixth sense tells me that she knew, she wouldn't go on living much longer" her father confessed to her, and it made the hairs on her arms stand up, to hear it being said that way. Sure, she'd been a troubled teen herself with everything that entailed, but to have been seventeen years old and know that your life is coming to an end soon? She couldn't help thinking to herself, that it's no wonder that Laura was messed up beyond belief, if that's the sort of knowledge she was running around with in her head!

"What makes you think that?" she enquired, after a few seconds of letting what her father had just told her, sink in.

"She'd begun distancing herself from everyone around her, even me and her best friend Donna and we were the two, who were closest with her. I don't know if you've ever heard this part of the story, but she was seeing James Hurley too, without me knowing about it. I'm sure that he loved her as much as I did, but sometimes all of the love in the world isn't enough to save someone from their unfortunate destiny" he continued quietly, before taking another swig of his beer and having to wipe away a pair of small tears from the corners of his eyes.

"Didn't part of you hate her for cheating on you?"

"Oh, I did my share of hating her after she'd died. I hated her for how she'd lied and deceived me more times than I could count and how, when I looked back on it, I'd just been a pawn that she'd used until what little I could offer her wasn't enough anymore. I hated him too right after I'd found out, but even in my incredibly messed up head at the time, I'm sure that I knew perfectly well that he was just another one victim of her charms, like I was. She wasn't easy to say no to, especially to a pair of overgrown kids like him and I, who were both far too innocent and bright-eyed to ever have a chance of keeping up with someone like she was. Either way, we made peace over it a few years later, so that part is all moot now. When I look back on those days though, don't think that there aren't a million things that I would have done entirely differently, if I could do them over today. That's what's both the blessing and the curse of having all of these years of hindsight".

"I only have one more question. Do you think that you could have saved Laura?" she asked her dad, who had to take his share of moments to think about it, before answering her.

"I can't tell you for sure, but I can tell you that I sure as hell would have tried a whole lot harder than I did back then!" he answered her with a wry smile and for the rest of the evening, Laura Palmer's name was never brought up again.

On her short drive back to her room at her mom's house, she couldn't stop thinking about Laura and how horrible it must have been to be as young as she was and knowing that you won't make it to the end of your teens, before someone takes your life away from you. It also made her feel even worse for how she'd treated her parents and everyone else who loved her, during those months and years where her love for Steven mixed with an almost greater love of getting high, had led her to stooping far lower than she ever could have imagined doing, while growing up in the comfort of her family home. And at the end of the day, in spite of being someone, who still lives with their mom at her age not exactly being on her list of things that she wanted to have happen to her, by the time she was twenty-five, it still by far beat the uncertainly of essentially putting your life in the hands of someone, who has as little or less control over their own life as you have over yours.

Becky had gone to bed pretty much right after she'd come home, knowing that there was plenty of meals-on-wheels dishes for the area's recluses and senior citizens to be both prepared and delivered the day after and that if she didn't get a good night's sleep, then the workday would surely end up crawling along at a snail's pace. It was for that reason a little annoying to her, when she woke up in the middle of the night because she had to pee. After she'd relieved herself, she came back into her room and when she saw what awaited her in there, she almost jumped so high in the air out of fright that she would have bumped her head badly on her mom's ceiling!

There, in the middle of a room that he had no business being in, stood a thin and enormously tall man (at least seven feet and then some!), who looked like he would have been the natural choice for the monster, if you were shooting a Frankenstein movie, and stared at her as she came in.

"Who are you and how did you get in here?" she asked him, before grabbing her alarm clock to use as a weapon, in case that tried something. Not exactly the best choice for a weapon, granted, but it was the closest to it at her disposal!

"A friend" the gigantic man very slowly and calmly said, and something in the way he said it made her believe that he was telling the truth. Seeing how much bigger than her that he was, plus that her only weapon was an alarm clock, also gave her little other choice than to trust him, so she put it back in its place.

"Okay, so you're a friend! I'm Becky. What's your name?" she nervously asked him and instantly felt a little foolish for sounding so much like a six-year-old, who's trying to make friends on their first day in school.

"We don't have names in the sense that you know it, where we come from. It's different from here. Very different" the giant said as he took a look around at the posters of pop stars on her walls, most of which had hung there since her she'd lived there growing up. "Sometimes, this world confuses me" he continued, as his eyes momentarily fixed on a picture of Mötley Crüe, back in their 80's heyday.

"That makes two of us!" she joked, although it didn't get a smile out of him. It made her wonder if he was able to change facial expressions, because he hadn't so far at all in the minute or so that she'd known this strange man. "So, what made you decide to pay me a visit here in the middle of the night, friend?"

"BOB is dead. It means that she can be saved" the giant continued, only making her feel even more puzzled than she already did.

"Who is BOB and who is it that can be saved?"

"BOB was a killer. He killed Laura. You were born, so you could save her" he calmly stated as if he was someone reading out bingo numbers at his local YMCA.

"Ehm ... I need some further explanation here! You're telling me that I was born, so that I could save a girl from getting murdered, who died over twenty-five years ago? Is there a mental hospital somewhere that you've escaped from, because it sounds utterly insane!"

"Your first love was a boy named Davey, but he deceived you with another girl. When you were a child, you had a dog named Patches that you loved as much as life itself. On your ninth birthday, you were hoping that a girl named Clarissa would come, but she never did, and it ruined the day for you. How would I know these things if I was, as it's said on this plane of existence, crazy?" he asked her without ever changing the tone of his voice in the slightest. Something that was becoming eerier to her, the more that she listened to it.

"How do you know those things? I never even told my parents how disappointed I was, when that little bitch Clarissa blew off my B-Day party!"

"We've been keeping an eye on you since you were born, Rebecca. This is your mission and no one else can take it on, except for you. Come with me and I'll take you to Cooper. He can explain it better than I can".

"Cooper, as in the FBI agent, who disappeared years ago?" she had to ask, since he was the only one named Cooper that she'd ever heard of and somewhat of a local legend in town, thanks to the several months that he'd spend up there finding out who killed Laura.

"He needs your help. Will you come with me?"

"You know, I'd really love to! But my workday begins in less than three hours and ..."

"Where we're going, time works differently. When you return, you'll come back to this exact same point in time where we are now" he explained, taking away the last excuse she had apart from "this sounds far too incredible to be true and I'm still half-way inclined to believe that you're some kind of insane serial killer!".

"Where are we going? Do we need a car to get there?"

"Close your eyes" the giant told her and in spite of being highly suspicious, she still did. Moments later, it was like she could feel a small breeze blowing against her naked arm, although that had to be something that she imagined, right?

"You can open them again" the giant calmly spoke and as she did, she now had to come to the conclusion that this was some sort of very vivid dream, she was having!

"Okay, this has now officially blown the lid off the crazy scale! How did you teleport us from my room to the middle of the god-damned forest?" she exasperatedly asked him since there was no way, this could possibly be true! The chill of the night air told her that it was though, and it was quickly making her wish that she'd put more clothes on before they'd left. If nothing else a pair of shoes, so that she wouldn't be standing there on the cold dirt in her bare feet!

"I could only achieve this because you're still asleep. If you had been awake, then you wouldn't be able to see me. Look" he told her, mere moments before a magical passageway (for lack of a better word) appeared in front them, with red curtains marking its entranceway.

"I seriously hope this is a dream or I'm officially completely out of my mind!" she whispered to herself before following the giant through this entryway, which seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, in a spot where she was a hundred percent sure and then some that it hadn't been when they'd first arrived there.

After stepping through the curtain, she followed the giant through one empty room after another that all looked the precise same. Empty rooms with red curtains and all of them with an eerie feeling to them, as if something that was pure evil had once stayed there and some of their "evil energy" was still lingering around. They passed through half a dozen of these rooms at least, until they came to one where a fifty-something man in a neatly pressed suit was waiting for her with a blonde-haired woman, who looked to be in her mid-to-late 40's. As they turned their heads to look at her, she immediately recognized the woman, even if she'd aged significantly from the picture they still had hanging of her at the high school, where she'd spent a good part of four years of her life.

"Aren't you supposed to be dead?" she had to ask, just to be sure that this was actually Laura Palmer, whom she was standing only a few feet away from and alive and in person! It only made Laura laugh however and it even got a small smile out of the man, whom she was guessing had to be FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, who'd disappeared back in 1990, never to be seen or heard from again. As far as she knew, anyway.

"I am and I'm not. One version of me that existed in your world died, but another version of me was created shortly before she was killed. Dale came from the future and saved me".

"Only, I didn't" Agent Cooper continued on for her. "I thought that I could, but all I did was create an alternate reality. A purgatory, if you will, that none of us will be able to escape from without your help. YOU are the key to it all, Rebecca and no one in the entire world can do this with the exception of you".

"So, you keep telling me! What no one's told me is exactly what you want me to do. It would be really nice to know before I agree to anything!"

"Correct the passage of time" the giant said monotonously, making his small contribution to this already extremely strange conversation.

"You don't think that's asking a little much?" she asked while still trying to comprehend what he meant by it.

"It's asking a lot, but it won't only be to save my life. If I'm not murdered, then my cousin Maddie won't be murdered by the same man either. That wouldn't have happened either if she hadn't come to Twin Peaks after my death. You'll be saving two lives and if that's not enough, you'll be making the lives of a lot of people better by doing this. That includes your parents" Laura explained.

"That's actually one thing, I was worrying over. If I save you, won't that mean that I'm never born?"

"Although, I know that it isn't worth much to you right now, you have my word and personal guarantee as an FBI agent that nothing like that will happen, Rebecca. Leo Johnson might not have died exactly like he did, but he still wouldn't have lived on for much longer than he wound up doing and your parents still would have ended up together, no matter what. At the point in time when you will arrive in the Twin Peaks of 1989, they'd already begun secretly dating one another again".

"They've never told me any of this!" Becky blurted out, probably as a small internal defense mechanism to help her deal with the absolute insanity of this situation, she'd all of a sudden been faced with.

"It's time to make a decision, Becky. I'm begging of you. Save me and my cousin Maddie from BOB!" Laura implored her, making it all the harder to say no.

"Won't he just come after me instead?"

"When BOB died, so did his spirit. Without it, he can't influence the events on any plane of existence anymore. You'll be perfectly safe from him, I promise. He wasn't the only danger in Laura's life though, and while I can't tell you who will try to kill her in his stead, it's likely to be someone she associated with regularly" Cooper explained on, easing her fears a little in the process. Only a very little, though!

"Get to know the me of that time and it won't take you long to come up with a list of suspects. You'll be returning a month to the day before my death, so it should give you plenty of time" Laura said, giving her a hint at least of where to start off from.

"Use Sheriff Truman to help you if you can convince him to. Even if he's a man who only believes in what he sees, he's also compassionate and could be a vital ally to you. We don't have much more in the way of time here. We need your decision now!" Cooped asked of her, as if she hadn't already made her mind up minutes ago over what she would do.

"In that case, I guess I'm going back to 1989! I sure wasn't expecting this when I went to sleep a few hours ago! Oh, one more thing and I can't believe that it's already making sense to me to ask this kind of question, but will I be awake or asleep as I'm living through this?"

"When you wake up, it will be in the old Twin Peaks hospital as a girl, who was found unconscious by the side of the road, just outside of town. How you go about your mission after this, is all up to you" Cooper explained with a smile on his face, now that she'd agreed to this ... whatever it was, that she'd just agreed to!

"Thank you and good luck, Becky. Succeed and I'll owe you, my life. Remember that" Laura, as her last message to her, told her, before her and Agent Cooper faded away into nothing again.

"Do I need to close my eyes now?" Becky asked the giant, who hadn't had any sort of reaction at all to any of what had been said the entire time and had stood in the same stoic manner throughout it all, staring off into nothingness.

"You learn quickly. A skill that should serve you well. Close your eyes".

So, Becky did and when she opened them again, she found herself lying on a hospital bed in a hospital room that she knew, she'd been in years before. It had been when she was still a small child, where her dad had been run over by a hit and run driver and had been forced spend a couple of weeks recovering in the hospital afterwards. It had been the worst event of her young life up to that point and she could still remember like it was yesterday, how seeing her dear old dad banged up and connected to machines in order for his body to keep on functioning, had been nothing short of an earth-shattering experience to a true daddy's girl like herself. Glancing around at it now, it looked almost exactly the same as it had back then, with the only exception being that she was much bigger now and she was the only one in there.

This didn't last long though, until a nurse with one of the worst 80's perms that she could remember ever having seen, came in to check on her.

"Oh, good! You're up. Maybe now you can tell us who you are and where you're from" the nurse cheerily said to her, in a way that made little hiding of how curious that she was to find out.

"My name is Becky. What date is it?" she asked, getting a befuddled look on the nurse's face in return.

"Hon, it's January 24th, 1989! I should get Doctor Hayward for you right away. It sounds an awful lot like you could have head trauma".

The nurse quickly left her, and it gave her a few moments to let it sink in that hat she was now back in 1989 and before long, would in all likelihood meet her parents, even before they were close to being the same age as she was now!

END OF CHAPTER ONE