Disclaimer: This isn't really a chapter, just Wanda's point of view. Don't own, don't sue. And no, random reviewer, I do not have a religion. What an odd question...
Fairies aren't allowed to have children. It's in Da Rules, made up because of Cosmo's uncontrollable magic all those years ago. Just because it isn't allowed, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It's inevitable, really. Have two creatures of opposite gender around each other for a millennia, and something is bound to happen. It does happen. A lot.
Jorgen turns a blind eye for the most part. After all, he has had more than a few accidents of his own. Accidents happen; especially in the Fairy world.
They called them changelings.
Wanda hold's Poof close to her as she remembers this, her son, the first baby in a thousand years that she has been allowed to keep.
It was easier when humans lived in villages rather than cities.
Easy, to turn the baby human, to sneak through a window and switch their offspring with a human child. The parents almost never knew, and the human babe would be given to an orphanage or kind-hearted peasant.
Sometimes the villagers caught on as the child grew, as unexpected things began to happen around it. Sometimes the child was killed.
It was hard; to leave the baby behind, but it was the rules.
Wanda had never seen Cosmo cry until it happened to them, watched him scream, and watched him tear their bedroom apart in the agony of losing something so precious.
The spell usually wore off by adolescents and the fairy child would come into their magic; return to the Fairy World, never knowing its true parentage, believing the changes to be a gift, for often a changelings life was miserable.
Wanda never looked at the baby they left in the hospital, but she knows her husband did. While he was making the changes to it, giving it their last goodbyes, she floated in the white halls, trying not to cry.
A changeling rarely lives long enough to become a fully fledged fairy.
It wasn't fair.
A changeling will never stay in the human world.
But the baby wasn't meant to be theirs.
Wanda looked away as Cosmo walked out, bundle in arms, and floated towards a brown-haired woman whose daughter was stillborn.
Her arms ached with the desires to hold her child. She reached out, but then stopped and withdrew her hand.
She watched as Cosmo waved his wand, making them forget.
She watched as the new mother held her son.
Hers, not Wanda's.
He was never hers.
Not really.