As soon as Penelope's eyes closed, she was knocked out for the night. To her delight, she had no dreams and when she woke the next morning, she felt fully rested. Her sight was a little blurry but once she blinked a few times, she took a double take at her surroundings.

She was no longer in her room but in a darker, more lavish bedroom. Weak sunlight filtered through the big window on her right as she sat up in the bed.

"What... in the world?" She whispered weakly to herself. For a moment, she thought this might be another vivid dream and that she'd get pulled out of it soon.

"It's just a dream... it's just a dream..." She consoled herself with those words and sat up, waiting for the dream to morph into something else, or better yet, for her to wake up. Luckily, there was a clock on the nightstand next to her she could watch, but as the minutes ticked by, the dream wasn't changing like it usually did.

Her eyes wandered to the lavish decor of the bedroom while she waited to be whisked off to some other mind-boggling experience. Whoever lived here was from old money for sure. Dark wood furniture, a canopy bed, gothic windows... Next to the clock on the nightstand was a framed photo. She picked it up out of curiosity and her eyes shot wide open at the image before her.

It was Penelope. And Gomez and Morticia stood at either side of her.

She burst out laughing at that. As if the idea of her being in the same image as Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston in their Addams Family days was the most absurd thing she had ever conceived of. Her laughter slowly died out and her eyes focused back on the picture. It began to unsettle her a bit, but not because it was scary. It was the growing familiarity with the picture that spooked her.

Slowly, Penelope's mind filled with the memory of that day. She remembered going down to a dark beach on a stormy day with her... parents? Yeah... her parents. Morticia and Gomez were her parents. They had decided to go out on a nice family outing and despite (or rather because of) the fact that they were soaked through from the rain and there was lightning flashing in the background, the three looked very happy.

She frowned. "No..."

Her parents were back in her hometown, working their jobs, and living their relatively calm lives. But... Gomez and Morticia felt like her parents too. She began to recall more memories she didn't even know she had. The bedtime stories, seeing them in the audience at her performances, the fencing lessons, the poison-making lessons, the holidays, etc. These all felt so foreign, yet so familiar.

"No." She repeated in a firmer tone, her hands shaking a little as she held the framed picture.

Part of her wanted to fight back against these memories. Her real parents were hardworking people. They weren't rich, but they had a comfortable home in a small city. And while they couldn't give her music, dancing, or fencing lessons, she lived well and made the most of her life so far. But even as she fought back, these new memories and their growing sense of familiarity were winning. And though it did not feel like one was trying to replace the other, that left her mind to grapple with two sets of realities. Two families. Two lives.

Just then, a set of footsteps could be heard in the hallway and it sounded like they were headed towards her room. Penelope's eyes laser-focused on the door as her heart rate picked up and her breaths came out in small gasps.

"No, no, no..." she thought to herself in a growing panic. In her previous "dreams," she never interacted with living things. They simply weren't there. Now there were footsteps?! This was where the two parts of her battled between a sense of normalcy and fear. Part of her was freaking out while the other was calm, knowing it was most likely her aunt. It was a strange feeling for her to be both panicked and nonchalant at the same time.

Her heartbeat had just calmed down when a knock was heard on her door.

"Come in." She called out in a slightly strangled voice, a small sign of her internal battle.

Penelope's aunt, Anastasia Addams- her father's younger sister, poked her head into the room, a warm smile forming on her face as soon as she saw her niece. "Morning, Pen. Breakfast is ready. Lurch made your favorite."

She simply stared at her for a few seconds, her eyes taking in the warm smile of her favorite aunt and a stranger. The one that felt like her big sister and a complete unknown. Her aunt was a beloved surgeon at the local hospital, she was practically a prodigy for accomplishing so much at her age.

"I- I'll be down soon," Penelope replied after a few seconds of hesitation. With that, her aunt left her to her baffling thoughts. Right, her parents, Gomez and Morticia, were out of town for a few days on business, she thought to herself. Gomez had his usual business dealings, but Morticia had begun her own fashion house which was comparable to other luxury brands like Thierry Mugler or Versace. She even named it after herself.

"That's so not canon," she thought to herself. The Morticia she was used to didn't have a career, but even this thought was contradicted by the new memories of her mother's fashion shows and how she continued to wear the color black but in different styles throughout her career. Somehow, her use of only one color in her wardrobe never tired the public because she always found a new way to wear it.

Penelope groaned out loud and buried her face in her shaking hands. She didn't know how she was going to continue with two lives embedded in her mind. Was she even able to leave this particular life and go back to her old life?

"Oh god." She sat back up and her eyes were wide with fear. Was she able to leave? How the hell is she getting back to her other life? Her face twisted into a strange expression, almost like she wanted to cry because she might not see her family and her friends ever again. And not only that but what of her education? Has it all just gone down the drain? The faces of her loved ones flashed through her mind along with the despair of possibly putting her degree in jeopardy. Yet the other part of her felt completely at peace in this new place- and it was this part that was stopping her from crying at the moment.

A strangled cry just barely escaped her lips and she was left heaving slightly. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes while she calmed herself.

"Ok... ok... ok... ok... you're ok...," she said to herself, though she didn't fully believe it. After about ten minutes of being ok and not being ok and then another few minutes of being between acceptance and denial, she slowly got up from her bed and went to change, figuring that she might get answers as to how to get back to her normal life if she played along. 

・・・

When she opened the closet doors, her eyes widened when she saw just how big the closet was and how full it had been with beautiful clothes. "Damn..." 

Penelope picked a black, high-neck dress with ruffle sleeves and styled it to her liking. She couldn't help but explore the room that was supposedly hers. She remembered when her parents first offered to have her bedroom remodeled and she chose to stay in the Victorian Gothic style of the house, but instead of the darker beige color that the interior walls were, she chose an ivory color which contrasted beautifully with the dark wood of her furniture. There was even an intricately designed fireplace in her room, but her favorite feature was the big Gothic window.

She opened one of the paneled parts of the window and let the cool air wash over her face. The whole estate was on top of a tall hill and seemed to be surrounded by the dark, lush forest of the... the place they were... living in...

A look of shock forms on her face as she makes another realization. The dark green forest, the constantly cloudy sky, and then... then she remembered the name of the hospital where her aunt works. 

Forks Community Hospital.

・・・

Her grip on the window sill tightened, her knuckles turning white.

No. No. No.

No.

She did her best to deny it, but then another thought came to annoy her.

"It's January of 2004..." she whispered. Then she shook her head dismissively.

Nope. Just because this place happened to be Forks and set in the early 2000s, it didn't mean that this was all set during Twilight. The Addams Family was thrown in here for god's sake!

However, she remembered the kinds of dreams she had back in her normal life. The Gothic estate- check, the forest- check, Forks High- she was a student there (ew, high school), so check, and then... the Cullen's mansion... Was that going to be a possibility?

Out of mere curiosity, she peered out her open window again to see if perhaps she might be able to spot the infamous mansion. She could only see the forest, but that only made her more desperate to know if she lived near them. After closing her window, she made her way to the opposite side of the estate. Walking onto the large balcony that looked out at the family cemetery, she could just barely make out a white structure among the trees, but it was miles and miles away. Was that it?

She frowned. That couldn't be it, right? It could always belong to someone else.

Suddenly, a thought entered her mind, but it wasn't hers.

"I wonder where she is. It's been over 20 minutes since I told her breakfast was ready."

The thought belonged to her aunt and that was when she realized that she was a mind-reader. It had been an ability that developed over the past few years simply because she was an Addams. It started with impressions of what people felt or thought at the moment before slowly developing into their full-on thoughts and inner monologue. Her mother and grandmother had taught her how to control her abilities so that she could tune them out completely if she wished to. Normally she did, but the onslaught of realizations after realizations this morning left her more unfocused than usual.

"They just keep coming, don't they?" she said morosely to herself before making her way down to the kitchen.

・・・