Hey, it's a new story! Rachel thinks about her son.
Un-beta'ed, so quibble away.
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Children of the Revolution
Rachel doesn't want to admit it, but she hates her youngest child when he's born. Well, not the idea of him, of her family. She hates what he represents. She hates what she did for Danny, how she compromised her principles and Ben's work.
The doctors call it postpartum depression. She's not allowed in the natal unit without Ben and a nurse (or an orderly, some days) with her. Rachel has to visit a psychiatrist every day.
How does she tell them that she killed her child, and this…this changeling everyone's named Danny, that everyone says is her son, is the thing that replaced him? She can't tell them. Ben wouldn't understand. Charlie loves her little brother. Miles keeps sneaking his best friend into the ward so he can show off his favorite nephew, the future Marine.
Rachel wishes they could see that that isn't her son in the crib. Her Danny died at the university, when she was accepted into that study. Randall, the man from the Department of Defense, he's this changeling's parent. He's the one who made him.
The doctors tell her husband that she just needs some time to adjust after a difficult pregnancy, and the study she was allowed into, and the caesarian. Rachel thinks they're idiots. She can't look at the baby everyone tells her is her son without feeling a strong sense of unease and loathing.
If the loathing is directed at herself, or Randall, or Danny, she doesn't know. The woman wishes she could have found another way to save her baby. Then she wouldn't have had to give him up to Randall, a sacrificial goat in exchange for funding for Ben's program. How can he even look at her when she killed their son?
Rachel visits a psychiatrist every day for six months before she figures out how to lie and smile and pretend everything is fine. Danny, her little changeling, is starting to grow on her. She can't help but see Randall looking at her, even when he's not there, every time Danny smiles. Still, he's such a happy baby.
Ben mothers her and the changeling incessantly. Danny is his precious child, the one who needs the most care and looking-after. He still has plenty of love and affection for Charlie and Rachel, but Danny is his first priority. Rachel wonders if he knows what she did, knows that the boy he calls "son" isn't his. Knows that Randall, their benefactor from the Department of Defense, made the child. Danny isn't hers. He's the replacement Randall gave her, in exchange for her son and Ben's technology.
Rachel knows she sold the world. She gave it up on a silver platter and danced on the ruins with the changeling brat.
Fifteen years hasn't done much to change her experiences. It's given time a grimy filter, smudged away some of the worst. She's come to accept that Danny, her little changeling, is hers. She is, after all, a mother of monsters.
She arranged the Blackout. She helped the Militia. She made them all for the price of a government contract and a child that isn't hers.
The psychiatrists would have a field day with her. There would have been so many papers she would have been the topic of, if the world hadn't collapsed. The idea that she's still suffering from post-partum depression, after nearly eighteen years, is insane. Her changeling is drawing the gazes of Major Neville and General Monroe. They're both monsters, so if either one carries Danny off, it's only fit that they do so.
Rachel knows she's the mother of monsters.
She wishes she knew what her son had been like, if she hadn't exchanged her Danny for the changeling. Danny isn't her son. But he looks like her baby should have, if he'd lived.
She knows Danny is hers.
Rachel gives birth to monsters.
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Currently at 28,500! :D (I'm in a lecture. Don't judge me.)