Rabbits on the Blue Moon

At the age of five Lily Stanley found herself stranded in a foreign land after miraculously surviving a plane crash which killed her aunt and every other passenger aboard. Perhaps if she’d been any old five-year-old that would have been the end for her. Yet she was once a girl called Haruno Sakura, and the will of a shinobi is to endure.

Ten years later she finds herself on a plane back to her family, bound for Forks and her sophomore year in high school alongside her twin sister, Jessica Stanley. Yet sleeping dogs rarely let lie, and there are figures from her past who aren’t quite done with meddling in her life just yet.

Between trying to outrun her demons, navigating the world of high school alongside her sister, and the arrival of the enigmatic Cullen family, it’s safe to say turbulent times were both ahead and behind her.

Chapter One | Meet the Stanleys

There was an air of disquiet to the house, Jessica was finding, even as she finished the last of the tidying up in what had been a disused room in their home for far too long. The room which had been supposed to belong to her twin sister – someone who they had long believed dead, alongside her aunt in a fatal plane crash some ten years ago.

A phone call two months previous had shattered that belief like it was glass.

It had been a call from the military, saying they had found someone who claimed her name to be Lily Stanley out in Afghanistan, of all places. The same place where the wreckage of flight BA3417 had been discovered. The flight that her aunt and her twin sister had been on. The flight she would have been on, had she not come down with a severe fever a few days before she had been due to go on holiday with her aunt.

She shivered at the memory of how an illness had seemingly saved her life, part of her having always wondered if she had given her illness to her sister – if they both might have lived to see sixteen. That was a moot thought by that point, since her twin sister was alive and on her way back to them under the watchful eye of one Colonel Witchester. The man who had, alongside the rest of those under his command, encountered her elusive sister and brought her home.

“Jess!” her father called up the stairs. “The Colonel just called! They’re not far out. Is your sister’s room ready?”

Jessica glanced at the pale blue room, the bedspread a damask print of the same colour, and idly she hoped her sister didn’t hate the colour blue. “As ready as it can be!” she called, excitement squirming in the pit of her belly at the thought of meeting her sister. Someone she’d be able to hang out with. Someone who wouldn’t be like Angela and Lauren, people she remained somewhat distant to. She’d never been that great at getting to know other girls – not after the disastrous sleepover in junior high where all her friends had asked about the picture of her and her twin sister. Things had never been quite the same, a rumour going around school that she was the weird kid with a dead twin sister. Apparently popular girls weren’t allowed to have any sort of odd baggage, and the people who’d disliked her has long since taken advantage. She was a popular girl through and through. They were the girls who got dates with the hottest boys in school, after all, and that was what she wished for.

They had moved to Forks not long after that, and Jessica had sworn she wouldn’t make the same mistake again. She wanted a boyfriend – someone to love, like every teenaged girl wished for. “Do you think your sister will like the casserole I prepared?” her mother asked, looking both worried and nervous as she bustled about upstairs. “I don’t know what food they have out there…”

She touched her mother’s shoulder gently. “It’ll be fine, mom,” she declared, pasting her biggest smile on her face. “I’m sure she’ll love it – she’s a Stanley, after all!” Jessica said, hiding her own nervousness as best as possible. What had been a date she was looking forwards to for weeks was quickly turning into a festering pile of nerves. “We’ve got cake for afters too. Everyone loves cake!”

Even if it had lime green icing on it, which Jessica thought was a travesty, declaring the words welcome home, Lily. Celebrations called for cake, after all, and nothing was a celebration like welcoming a once-declared-dead family member back home.

It was a celebration Jessica had never really thought she would be participating in. In fact, she had never thought about having a celebration for that event, if only because the likelihood of it was astronomically ridiculous. At least it had been until that fateful call which had left her parents in tears and her in a shocked state of disbelief.

She was setting out the plates around the dining table when she heard the screech of brakes – of a car pulling up outside, and a quick glance out the window showing someone in camo trousers and a white t-shirt climbing out of the car. He looked military, which meant that could only be Col. Witchester, and that meant that her sister was here. She swallowed her nerves, grabbing a drink of water quickly before she yelled, “They’re here!”

There was a flurry of activity at the top of the stairs, her parents both bolting downstairs just in time for the doorbell to ring, a clear sound which had her heart pounding in her chest. This was it, she mused, reaching for the front door handle and jerking it open. “Hi!” she greeted, barely looking at the buff, blonde colonel in favour of staring at the girl standing next to him.

She looked small in the shadow of the older man, her hair a shade of pastel pink, matching blue eyes meeting her own for a little while before her sister glanced behind her – where their parents were standing. Jessica swallowed, staring at the skin-tight long-sleeved t-shirt her sister was wearing, and noting the defined, large biceps her sister had, and the slight tan there was to her skin. She hadn’t really seen a muscled woman before, what with how that wasn’t really a style which attracted many people, and being attractive was important.

Jessica thought she might change her mind on that front, maybe, because her sister was hot. She blinked, clearing the thought from her mind as she stepped to one side, allowing the pair inside. “Hi,” she greeted once more, catching her sister’s attention even as her parents began talking to Col. Witchester. “You probably don’t remember me,” she said, parroting what her parents had told her was likely the case. “I’m Jessica – your twin!”

Her sister blinked, a slow and distinctly feline motion. “Hello,” she replied. “I’m Lily… but you probably already knew that, didn’t you?”

Laughter bubbled from her lips, and there was only a slight edge of hysteria to it. “Yeah, silly,” she said, grabbing her sister by the hand. Lily flinched, and Jessica paused at that. “Uh, I can show you around the house, if you’d like. We’ve got your room all set up, and everything… and we’ll need to go shopping before school, since I don’t think you’ve got too many clothes,” she said, eyeing the duffel bag her sister was holding. “I hope you like the colour blue.”

Lily blinked, seemingly allowing herself to be pulled forwards. “I don’t mind it…”

“Well, we can always redecorate, if you’d like. There’s a hardware store just around the corner, or there’s Port Angeles…” Jessica smiled, leading her sister up the stairs and to the room they’d all too recently decorated for her. “I’m just across the hall, you know,” she said, tapping at her door as she showed her sister the blue room.

::

There was an underlying tension in the air.

Lily could almost smell it, familiar as she was with suspense and drama. Though perhaps this wasn’t exactly the kind of drama she was used to, strange and different as it was. There was a humidity to the air, telling of the precipitation which would probably be falling in a short while. It wasn’t the blistering heat and the desert sands she had long since grown accustomed to. It wasn’t the sparse vegetation and sandy mounds she had once stalked.

The trees around there were dark and tall, looming and foreboding, their leaves a deeper green than she was used to. Even the smell was different, and that in itself was unsettling. Nothing was even remotely similar to the dry, sun-baked military base she had briefly lived in after she had been brought overseas.

“Brace, brace, brace!”

She shook her head, shaking the vague, near unfamiliar memory she knew to be the time when the plane went down. It was a vague recollection, the same as her memories of before she had landed out in the middle east and experienced what she had.

“What’s it like in… Forks?” she asked, sitting on the blue bedspread, brushing her hand against the soft material which was a far cry away from the hard ground she had usually slept on – a thin foam roll mat, if she was lucky, but that wasn’t really a mattress. “I’m… not familiar with the area,” she said in lieu of a proper answer.

“Well, it’s overcast pretty much all the time, so don’t expect much sun,” Jessica said matter-of-factly. “Most people consider camping and fishing to be things our town does well – or at least that’s why we seem to get a few visitors,” she declared. “I don’t know what your last school was like, but Forks High is pretty small, but there’s a decent amount of hotties considering the small population. You have a beau that you left behind?”

Lily almost wanted to laugh at the thought. Her name had once been Haruno Sakura, and she had been obsessed with pretty boys and appearances. A life as a shinobi had proven that there was more to life and romance than simply a pretty face. She was hardly going to make the same mistake again, despite her fondness for pretty boys. “No,” she said, lips curved into a wry grin. “I didn’t really leave anything behind.” Aside from a trail of dead bodies, and the so-called wreckage of the lab she had been trapped in for too many years. “How about you?” she asked, gently steering the conversation away from the minefield her sister was unknowingly attempting to step into. “You got anyone you’ve got your eye on?”

“Well there is this guy called Mike Newton – his family run the nearest camping store,” Jessica answered. “But he’s already dating someone… which kinda sucks.”

Lily shrugged. “I’m sure there’re others, you know, plenty more fish in the sea,” she said, remembering how she had once fought over a boy with her once best friend, and the chasm it had created in their relationship until they’d managed to build a bridge over it. She didn’t want that to happen to anyone else, especially her sister. There were more important things in life than boys. Like staying alive in a war-torn country where everyone she met seemed to be out for her blood – a little too literally in some cases. She shuddered at the memory.

“I’m friends with the girl whose dating him, and I’m pretty sure she’s just stringing him along for a little while.” Her sister shrugged. “So sometimes I wonder…”

“Nothing wrong with wondering,” she answered, a smile curling at her lips once more as she tucked the traumatic memories of her past into a small, tiny box of stuff to be dealt with later. Repressing your trauma doesn’t work, Sakura, she almost thought she heard Naruto say in the back of her head. A fond memory, and something she would never be able to witness again. “But maybe they're serious, and it’s kinda a dick move to break up your friend and their boyfriend, isn’t it?”

Jessica didn’t look convinced. “Maybe,” she said offhandedly.

“Girls!” their mother called up the stairs. “Dinner’s ready!”

“We should head down, shouldn’t we?” Lily asked, gesturing for her sister to lead the way. “I don’t know where the dining room is,” she said, and Jessica startled and started leading her downstairs. “What even is for dinner?” she asked, taking a sniff of the air and smelling food.

“It’s chicken casserole,” her sister answered. “It’s one of mom’s specialities, and it always tastes great. You okay with that?” She turned, blue eyes finding the matching ones she had in that life.

“Well, I don’t really know what casserole is,” Lily said, sniffing the air once more. “But whatever this is smells great,” she declared, smiling at her sister once more as they went to dinner with her parents, and the man who’d made it possible for her to return home.

PREMISE: Haruno Sakura is reborn as Lily Stanley, Jessica Stanley's twin sister, and after miraculously surviving a plane crash which killed her aunt and every other passenger and the following ten years stranded in a hostile environment, she finds herself returned in time for her sophomore year in Forks High School, just in time for the enigmatic Cullen Family's arrival to town. Not everything in her past is done with her though. Canon Divergent. I steal lore from other vampire novels. Pairings: (probably) Sakura/Original Male Character, Bella/Edward