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Once upon a time, a fairy attempted to steal a babe from its mother and leave a changeling behind. The mother, fresh from the birth of her new child, woke up to the towering form above her with two children in its arms.
The mother demanded her child back.
“Do you know which is yours?” the fairy asked.
The mother did not. She looked at them both, and even the strange mark on one of their heads could not divine the truth to her. The birth was a hard one, and she had barely looked at the child before sleep had taken her.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll keep both of them,” she said, and meant it truly.
The fairy laughed, long and low. Such an answer seemed to please it for its own curious reasons. With little else to say, it placed both babes in her arms, brushing their foreheads with its too-long fingers. The action soothed them both, softening their pink, scrunched faces.
“I wonder,” it said, “how long it will take you to regret those words.”
It bent, its inhuman face tilting down towards her, towards the children in her arms, and murmured something to them in a language unknown. The mother shuddered at the sound of it.
And so the fairy went into the night. When the husband and nurses and doctors and all came back into the room, none questioned the new child. Perhaps they all believed the others to have witnessed the second child’s birth.
Both children are given the last name Pines.
Here is the question this tale leaves: who is the mortal, and who is the changeling?
Is the fey child the girl, the one in whose given name lay the name of Queen Mab? Is it the girl who grows into something that is altogether too much—she who is wild-eyed and wild-natured, she who finds that her energy and emotion swell beyond her body, shaking it, making it leap and dance and twirl and jitter?
Does the emotion spill past her body because it is no mortal body at all, but a clever construction? Does her love of soft wools and the clack of wooden needles and the tangle of thread give hint to her maker’s materials, a cloth doll made a girl by magic? Does like find like, in this instance?
When something that believes itself a god calls her Shooting Star, is it because she is an otherworldly creature, something unbound to humanity, something made to burn bright and burn quick?
Or—
Is the fey child the boy, the one who wears an impossible mark upon his forehead that speaks of a connection to the stars, a connection to a world beyond? Is it the boy who longs to know everything, a hunger deep within, who longs for the presence of the strange and inhuman?
Does he look with keen eyes to all that is not ordinary because he is not ordinary? Does he take to the fragile pulp of book pages because he himself was born from the trees and has never truly forgotten, a bundle of sticks bound by twine and magic to make a clever facsimile of a boy? When he thumbs the pages, is it like greeting an old friend?
When something that believes itself a god calls him Pine Tree, is it the symbol he wears, or does he wear the symbol because of what he is? Is it because he is made to be felled and left rotting?
The question is this: does it matter?
Perhaps it did once. Perhaps in the beginning, their mother would have found the fake if she so desired, if she threw them in the fires and beat them and pressed iron to their skin. Cruelty would have been a kindness to her uncertainty.
But then the children are placed together, bundled together, and their small, soft hands find each other and cling. Babes do not understand that there is a distinction between the natural and the supernatural—at such an age, all is new and strange and impossible, and so all is as possible as everything else.
They cling, and understand that they are together, and that it is the simple nature of the world that they will stay together.
Of course, in one of those children’s heads, there lies the intrinsic knowledge that one is beyond mortal qualms of aging and death. The knowledge that their twin is not. And that won’t do.
It can take a long, long while for magic to seep into a mortal body. But Mabel and Mason Pines are nothing but babes when it starts. There is time.
No twin will be left behind.