Belong

"Ana? Ana! Wake up, sweetie! Can you hear me? Can she hear me, doctor? Ana?"

There's a loud and constant beeping behind my head. I've never heard anything like it before. I don't open my eyes because I'm not totally sure where I am and who's talking. I'm no longer on Ravina's back but lying on my own. The material I'm lying on is soft yet itchy and doesn't feel like plants or grass or dirt. It is also freezing cold but I can't feel the wind.

"Give her time, Mary. She'll wake up when she's good and ready. This isn't the first time she's been in the hospital, you know that."

"Yes, yes, but this time is different! I told you! She just passed out at home after screaming she was too hot. When I left her to let in the paramedics and then came back, she had shifted from her crumpled state and looked like Sleeping Beauty. She never lies like that."

"Maybe she's watched too many movies recently. I don't know what to tell you, Mary. This is weird but she's going to be okay. Call me when she wakes up."

I hear footsteps and then a click. It's quiet again except for the beeping.

"I'm so sorry, baby," the woman's voice soothes. "I didn't mean for the house to get so hot. It's just that this winter has been so harsh. I didn't want us to freeze. I don't know why you were looking in the stove in the first place. You know fire scares you."

Fire. My eyes fly open. Fae are terrified of the Other's fire. Fae fire is infused with magic and never gets too hot. Mother warned me long ago about the dangerous effects of the Other's fire and about how they used it to torture innocent Fae by melting and disfiguring their bodies in raging infernos. If there's some here then I need to leave immediately.

I frantically look around for dreaded flames but see nothing. I'm in a strange kind of room. Everything is white, whiter than the clouds I would chase as a child. I sit up and feel several vines attached to my body. When I reach down to pull the vines out, however, I realize they don't feel like any vines I've encountered before. I can see the liquids inside them moving from pouches on weird silver trees into my body. I begin to panic and pull at the vines until soft white hands envelop my own.

I forget my fear and stare at them for a moment. The nails are rosy-pink but the ends are bitten down to the nub. A sprinkle of brown dots decorate the back of the hands. They're so soft.

I slowly trace up the arms and find bright green eyes looking back into my own.

When I was a child, I would look into a glassy smooth pond at my own reflection. My friends knew they were beautiful, as all Fae do, and so were never preoccupied with their own faces. But I never felt as sure of myself as they did. I would stare into my own green eyes until the rest of my plain features blurred and I could imagine that I was as beautiful as Mother.

These eyes match mine but seem older.

"Ana?"

Her voice... it sounds so different from Mother's and yet, it resonates deep in my chest. I feel like a missing piece of myself has finally been found. She doesn't look like Mother, but she feels like safety and it's impossible to resist leaning into her arms or holding back my tears.

"Oh, Ana, it's okay, baby, it's okay, don't cry. We're going home. We're going home."

I initially assume that "home" is where I've lived my entire life. But this lady, who keeps calling herself "Mom" when addressing me and "Mrs. Darling" to the Others in white and green clothing, seems to have other plans.

A stubby little woman with frizzy red hair comes in and takes all the vines out of my arm. She calls them IV's and asks if it they hurt anywhere and gently pulls them out. My skin is blue and purple. She yells something and, a few minutes later, a girl comes in with something wrapped in fabric. The stubby woman takes the fabric, thanks the girl, and places the fabric on my bruises.

It's so cold! It must be magic.

The stubby woman and the girl leave the room. It's just me and Mom/Mrs. Darling now.

"Here, sweetie, I brought you some clothes from home. Why don't we get you changed so you're a little more comfortable?" She looks at me expectantly for a moment. When I don't move, she reaches into a bright blue bag on the floor and pulls out more material. She places the items on the bed and I wonder if they'll be cold too.

She holds open something black near the floor and gestures for me to step in. It feels like half of the suit I used to wear at home with Mother. The material is soft and molds to my body in a comfortable way. "Leggings" I think Mom called them.

Next is the top part of what I now understand to be the suit that the Others must wear. It's creamy white and even softer than the leggings.

"You've always loved this sweater. Grandma made it for you two Christmases ago," says Mom. She gets a faraway look in her eyes for a moment and then shakes her head, catches my eye and smiles.

I can't help but smile back.

"Okay, kiddo, ready to go home?"

I don't know what "home" means exactly but I trust this woman with eyes like mine. She's obviously an Other but hasn't done anything to hurt me and neither has anyone else so far.

I glance around at the room again and then back at Mom.

"Yes. Let's go home."

Author's note:

The story I used to inspire this part of the story is called "The Changeling" from Scandinavia. It speaks of a woman suspecting that her child was a changeling because it was refusing food and not behaving well. She finally gets so fed up with it that she heats her stove as hot as it can go. When her maid asks her why she's heating the oven so hot, she answers "to burn my child to death." She repeats this response three times and, after the third, puts the baby on the peel and begins to shove it in the oven. But, just before the baby falls into the fire, a troll woman comes out of nowhere carrying the real baby and takes away her own. The troll woman says to the human woman, "There's your child for you. I have treated it better than you treated mine," and it was true: the human baby was fat and healthy.

Instead of having the human mother (Ana's true mother) be cruel, I changed the story to make it like it was a simple mistake of making the house too hot. In the world I've created, the Fae cannot get too hot or they'll die. Because of this, they stay away from extreme fires and heat. This was the coldest winter so far so Mary (biological mother) heated up the house as much as she could. When the Changeling child that she thought was her daughter got too close to the fire, she screamed and passed out which caused distress in the Fae world. The elders misinterpreted the distress and thought that the humans were hurting their own so they decided to switch the children back.

Obviously, the children are not babies so that aspect of my story is different too, but Ana and her Fae counterpart look identical so there's not really any problem with switching them. The only difference is that Mary, as the biological mother to Ana, now feels connected to her daughter in a way she didn't before and Ana feels the connection too though neither fully understand it yet.

I hope you enjoyed! Make sure to come back for the final installment of Ana's story!

Image Source: Shutterstock

Story Source: The Changeling