Chapter Text
There was a girl in the Swan house.
Nothing they hadn’t seen before, of course, this human beehive of the permanently rain-dampened, but small town gossip scattered like radio through Forks and eventually everyone stalled in their motions - paused and gauging like sharks, while the police cruiser crawled South Forks Ave.
Tasting for new blood.
People liked Chief Swan for the most part, some grumbled that he was a little too lenient on the local teens, but nothing too egregious. A good, upstanding man who knew and cared for the inhabitants of their home, but spent most nights mulling around the station. A uniform as his second skin, a cruiser that had the shape of his hands grooved into the steering wheel at a lazy 9 and 3. But his progeny was a stranger, a foreign object from a foreign land and the immune system was not ever sure of any visitor.
They wondered idly if she would choke and run like her mother did.
“She’s a nice girl though, Chief?”
A few stragglers were dawdling around the propped-open church doors in the dampened heat of a dying summer morning, and the lady who worked at the dentist office reception had sunk her french manicure into his sleeve as he passed by.
“Who do you mean, Lisa?”
Her lipsticked mouth turned down and the chief raised his hackles.
“Well, your daughter, Chief. Not that we doubt your disposition affected her greatly, just that we understand Renee wasn’t necessarily an easy woman. . .” She was basically tenderizing her purse, her eyes cutting around Charlie, tongue restless in her mouth. This wasn’t the first inquiry, but he was growing irate with the intimate speculations, the passive-aggressive dredging up of his lost opportunity at a nuclear family.
“Now Lisa,” Charlie rubbed a rough palm down his face and rocked back on his heels, thumbs hooked into his belt loops. Casual, bored. “I’ll let you know surely when that’s your business.”
He made it to the tackle shop with fifteen minutes to spare on his lunch, and nobody in town asked about Isabella until the day she arrived.
Charlie went to bed most nights rosy-cheeked and well-fed.
Well, to be frank, most nights he didn’t make it off the couch and fell asleep with a thumb-dented beer can cradled at his side, but Bella made sure the former was also true. They’d fallen into an easy, symbiotic routine that ended with a comfortable silence and fresh baked brownies cooling on the counter. Both of them felt uniquely privileged in their circumstances, and somewhat settled, despite the initial stunt of awkwardness.
Charlie felt a little desperate to make her feel welcome, but not to the point of neuroticism. Never that far, he wouldn’t ever fabricate a situation where he was unstable, out of control. Undependable.
And the kid was a blessing. They exchanged a similar ratio of words watching Jaws on one of her first nights home, she encouraged him to go fishing on the weekends after he off-handedly mentioned something about it being a ‘good season for it’ at breakfast one morning. She even gave the baseboards a scrub.
He let himself breathe after a while, and it became normal. Routine. He’d show her that he could be a good parent, a loving father, a kind authority (not that she needed it, Charlie caught her looking at mortgage rates online one evening). Whatever she needed, he’d give.
Shit, Charlie would let her paint the whole house desert orange if it helped her feel at home.