Changeling
Disclaimer: Just something I thought off when wondering why Timmy's parent neglect him so much. Don't own, don't sue.
He is not her child. Not really. She thinks her husband knows it too, but chooses to ignore it. She can't. She doesn't think she ever will.
She watches him through the window, playing. They did a very good job, she thinks. He has her colouring. Same hair, almost. Same eyes, almost. Almost, but not quite. Just a little off. He was always a little off.
They were supposed to have a girl. She saw the ultra-sounds, remembered the tiny baby she held in her arms before giving in to exhaustion as the nurse took the bundle away. It was a different child they returned with. No one would listen. No one believed.
Just stress, they said. The baby was always male.
Sometimes she almost believes it. Then she dreams, and sees her little girl, sees hears the soft 'poof', the purple cloud, sees the swirl of pink and green…
Her husband gave him the hat meant for their daughter. Shirts too. The boy took to pink well, she thinks. She wonders if that might have something to do with his real mother.
She watches from the window and sees him fall. She reaches out, momentarily, but then there is a 'poof' and he is standing once again on firm ground. She pulls her hand back, unneeded. She loves him, distantly, resentfully. She knows she is supposed to care for him, like a mother would a son, but can only express it in fleeting, far apart spurts of affection. He isn't hers. He is the monster that replaced her real child, and every time her he calls her 'Mom' she dies a little inside. She hates him.
He looks around for the source of the magic, then shrugs the incident off. She wonders if he realises the three fish upstairs are still sleeping in their bowl.
He isn't hers.
He isn't even human.
She hates him for that, too.
She makes plans to leave him alone with the babysitter again, knowing her husband won't object, knowing that it hurt him as much as it hurts her to watch the wolf wearing a lamb's skin prance around their house.
She knows the babysitter will hurt him. She feels a sliver of vindictive pleasure, of success, of victory, that smothers the inklings of guilt.
She hopes, as she always does, that when they come back he will be gone.
That his real parents would remove him from their careless care, that their daughter would be sitting in his place.
She knows they won't. They came to him, after all.
She saw them, once. The man with green eyes who looked so much like her son they could have been duplicates, and the pink woman who spoke with the same care and confidence as the boy. She wonders if they knew who he was.
She doubts it.
She grabs her coat and her husband, ignoring the waving boy in the yard, the disappointment on his face when she does not wave back, the 'poof' of purple as his real family arrive to comfort him.
She watches as he fades in the rear-view mirror, as their blue eyes lock.
Almost the same shade of blue. Almost, but not really.
She looks away.
He was not her child.
Never hers.
Not really.