Changed Destinies

"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."

-George Santayana

It was very quiet in the car as Danny drove down the road. Sam sat in the passenger seat ahead of him, while Danielle sat in the passenger seat behind him, having sent her marines back to the ship. Neither woman had said anything during the last five minutes after they 'd all left the park to return to FentonWorks. Finally, after a long moment, Sam let out a sigh. "How are we going to explain this to her? Hell, we took her DNA without consent and analyzed it behind her back to confirm it, which was illegal as hell and could land us all in prison for a very long time."

"As you recall, that was my decision," Danielle said, her voice hard with her own sense of shame and embarrassment. "I didn't want to tell her the truth because, well," she sighed. "I like her. I like her a lot. Sure, she's a tad vain, but she's tough, smarter than she looks, and a surprisingly well-developed sense of right and wrong, and I didn't want to risk our friendship for something that ultimately seemed irrelevant. Though in retrospect I don't know why I'd thinkthat, I'd like to know if some mad scientist got a hold of my eggs for a twisted genetics experiment."

"Yeah," Sam said from next to her. "We all really dropped the ball on this one."

"Oh, gee, you fucking think so," Danielle snapped snidely, earning her an irritated glare from Sam.

He shook his head. She probably gets her…mouth from her mother. Along with a good portion of her other personality traits.

Shaking those thoughts from his head he said aloud, "The bottom line is," Danny found himself saying a moment later after he snapped back to reality, "is that we both screwed the pooch on this one, and the only way we're going to make it right is to lay all our cards on the table, nothing added, nothing withheld. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Danielle and Sam responded. Danny leaned back into the driver's seat. Musing silently on the convoy of cars making it's way back to Amity Park from the house, he thought of the potential consequences of finally bringing all this out into the open for discussion. The best case scenario was that Paulina would reject his authority and withdraw from the alliance. The worst case scenario would be that Paulina rejected his authority, withdrew from the alliance, and began openly opposing them again. And with something of this magnitude driving it, he'd find it hard to blame her.

There's only one way to find out though, Danny thought as he made the final turn between the park and FentonWorks, and that is to tell her, and see what happens. Danny finally saw FentonWorks coming up on the right, pulled off the road and parallel parked, bringing the car to a stop as everyone else's cars followed suit.

"Hey," Sam said, putting her arm on his shoulder. "You want me in there with you?"

Danny sighed. A couple months ago he would have reluctantly said no, as there was still too much lingering animosity between Sam and Paulina from high school, and the last thing he would have needed was Paulina to use her past history with Sam as an excuse to ignore anything he and Danielle said, and she would have, no matter how irrational. However, three months of actually working together had largely replaced those feelings with something approaching friendship. Her mere presence was no longer going to derail any attempts to salvage this situation.

"By all means," Danny said, leaning forward to press his lips against Sam's. They broke the kiss a few moments later and all three of them stepped out of the car, then winced as they heard the shouting coming from the living room. "Well, that's already begun."

They rushed up to the living room door, only to find Paulina and Jazz shouting at each other, while the others, including Zelenkova, stood around watching them.

"Why didn't you tell me?!" Paulina shouted at her nominal superior.

"Hey!" Jazz bit back, all pretense of military discipline apparently forgotten in this. "That wasn't my call that was-,"

"Mine!" Danielle shouted, "It was my call! They wanted too, but on this…personal matter I was allowed to override them."

"Paulina," Danny said, reasserting control of the situation before it spiraled any further out of control. "Wait in the kitchen, we will be in there shortly."

Paulina glared at him before a long moment before pivoting around, walking into the kitchen and closing the door behind her.

"Zelenkova," he said, motioning at the much older Czech woman to follow her. "Sam, Danielle, and I would like to talk to you in private for a minute, follow us upstairs please." Zelenkova, saying nothing, simply nodded and followed them up the stairs and into the master bedroom.

The master bedroom had been made over almost completely ever since his parents had moved out and into the orbital station. They'd left their desk for them to use, as well as the TV, but other than that, all their personal items had largely been moved into orbit. Then both he and Sam had moved the bulk of the stuff from their bedrooms in. Their combined book collection was in the bookshelves on the wall for one thing, along with Sam's record collection near the windows.

As Sam locked the door behind them, Danny turned to face Zelenkova. "All right," he said harshly, "before we go any further, I need to know why you're coming forward with this now, of all days."

Zelenkova had expected her to look at her with some haughty glare as she laid out some reason that fit some inscrutable purpose that ended up serving her ends. Instead what she did next surprised him.

Her eyes began to water up with tears as she crumpled onto the side of he and Sam's bed.

"Because," Zelenkova said, obviously fighting back tears. "'All spirits are enslaved that serve things evil.'"

I've heard that somewhere before, he thought, as his mind tried to remember where he'd heard it.

"It's from an epic poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley called Prometheus Unbound, in a line spoken by the Demogorgon." When Zelenkova looked up at her. "The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley was the only book in the room where I woke up." She smirked. "I guess you could say it was the first book I ever read, and it was one of the few things I took with me from that godforsaken mansion."

Zelenkova nodded. "It's my copy. Do you still have it?"

"Yes I do," Danielle said, "I mean I thought I lost it in New Mexico after Danny and I were dumped in the forest, but when we bought the house that we stumbled across I went back down there and found it in my old backpack. Someone over there must have developed something vaguely resembling a conscience and left it out there for me to find, but I was so disoriented and scared after having been knocked out I forgot about it. You can have it back if you want."

"We're getting off-topic here," Danny said quickly. "Why are you doing this? Why now?"

"Because," she said. "I'm tired of the lies, and I'm tired of running. Before I ran into Vladimir, I'll admit I was not the most ethically minded scientist. But I was determined to unlock the secrets of reproductive cloning, because I was utterly convinced that by doing so I would bring about exactly what's happening now. That the ability to grow organs for transplant would, free of the risk of rejection, was worth whatever minor ethical hurdles I had to go through. Then I was contacted by a scientist whose training had been that of an engineer of all people, had unlocked the secret of human cloning, but that he wanted me for a special project. When I told him that the base for that 'special project', you," she said, with a flick of her head towards Danielle, "was impossible, he retained me to oversee it anyway with my proposed modifications, due to my theoretical research into growth acceleration compounds. In exchange he promised to give me all the funding I'd ever need to complete my research. I was so…excited I took it without ever seriously considering why. I turned a blind eye to how he got his hand on Miss Ortega's eggs, or your sperm," she said, motioning towards him.

"How was I created?" Danielle asked before he could say anything. "I have an inkling what you might have been done, but I want to really know for sure."

Well, for starters I took eggs from Miss Ortega and Mister Fenton's sperm and fertilized them per standard in vitro fertilization. I then had them implanted and bought to term for nine months, using the intervening time to formulate and perfect the growth compounds."

"In an artificial womb?" Sam asked.

"No," Zelenkova said, shaking her head, "In my own womb. I didn't trust the artificial womb technologies, not knowing at the time they'd already been put to…extensive use," she said, disgust evident on her voice. She sighed. "I'm not quite sure how, but I somehow found the time to have two sons. I never thought I'd have another child again." She said looking up at her, a ghost of what sounded like fondness appeared on her face.

I think I begin to see why she's doing this, Danny thought to himself, as Zelenkova continued on.

"After you were born, and Vlad's doctors certified that you were healthy," He and I began to put our plan into effect. Putting you in general anesthesia we placed you in a tank of sterile fluid, placed a breather hood over you, and ran the IVs required to give you the required drugs to keep you asleep, ensured you got the nutrition and fluids required to support this process and keep you alive, as well as administer the growth compounds, and began."

"You were kept in continuous general anesthesia for as we worked to bring you to puberty in three months instead of twelve to fifteen years. At the proper time we began neural restructuring to ensure your developing brain had all the proper patterns, command of the English language, speech, the ability to read and write, as well as the innumerable other things you would need. Restructuring that took the form of a time-compressed interactive simulation where you experienced over a decade of life in months, but designed in such a way that the effects would be there, encoded into your brain, but that you would have no lasting memories prior to awakening. At the same time we began electronic stimulation of your muscles, linked to the program, to ensure that when you finally awoke you could actually use all your muscles, and your eyes. So many things could have gone wrong during that process, but by some miracle you came through completely unscathed."

"Upon verifying that you'd reached the target developmental stage, we disconnected you from the myriad electrodes and tubes and subjected you to extensive medical testing to ensure you were in perfect physical health, and you were. It was then that Vladimir summoned me and revealed who and what he truly was and the full extent of his plans for her. I was given a choice, continue on with the agreement we worked out, with all the rewards intact, or be disposed of then and there. It's obvious which one I chose."

"It was then that I agreed to oversee Phase Two of your creation," she said. "You were taken to a chamber specially designed to replicate Vlad's original accident under controlled conditions. There you were exposed to the energies that he was exposed to, and then you were tested again to ensure that the integration of the ENA strands into your genetic code was within parameters." A trace of shame appeared on her face again, "And at the time I thought we had succeeded." Shaking her head, she said "It was then you were taken to an empty room and allowed to wake up."

"And two hours after I woke up," Danielle said, a trace of bitterness on her voice to go with the glistening of tears in her eyes, "I was told then that I was Danielle Masters and that my mother had died in an accident and that he was my father. I suppose I should call you mother, then."

Zelenkova sighed. "I wanted to tell you all this at the time, but there was that threat from Vlad hanging over me. At the time I thought that if he attempted to tell you, he'd have simply taken all my research, killed us both, and then repeated the experiment all over again. At any rate, he actually was getting ready to fulfill his end of the bargain, he was creating a new identity for me, and preparing for me a place at Berkeley. But then I heard some of Vlad's other scientists discussing rumors of another project a cloning project that was having…less than expected results. After some digging I found out that he had a lab under his mansion and snuck inside." She winced in pain. "And discovered the abomination you witnessed, and the truth. That you, Danielle, had both been a weapon and a means to an end, and that I, and the project that created you, had been a means to an end. In his obsession with having you as his son, Mister Fenton, he had commissioned your daughter's creation as little more than a feasibility study for the effectiveness of my theories regarding growth acceleration, and to get his hands on my cloning research. But Vlad didn't-," and she shook her head.

"Anyway," she said after a moment, "between that and what I realized he was doing with Danielle, I'd finally had enough. I was all set to blow the whistle on that… murder factory under his mansion, but that was a moot point soon afterwards, for in kidnapping you, he'd set in motion the rescue mission that heavily damaged the mansion and wrecked the cloning facilities. And Danielle himself turned on Vlad. At the time I thought it was no longer necessary."

Silence fell on the bedroom. Danny looked over at Danielle, who stood at the spot as though rooted. Danny, still processing what Zelenkova said himself, was silent, as was Sam. The next move now was in Danielle's court.

After what seemed an interminably long time, Danielle finally said, still fighting back tears, "Why didn't you come forward earlier?"

Zelenkova sighed, her lips trembling. "I…was scared. I barely managed to get out of the mansion while it was still in one peace, and then I was terrified of spending the next decade or two as a guest of your prison system. So, instead of coming forward with what I knew, I ran. I ran and hid, I got a fake ID by using the birth certificate of a dead nine-year-old girl, and have been…hiding out ever since."

"But why-," Danielle began.

"Because I was tired of running," Zelenkova cut her off by saying. "Because especially since the Miracle the fact that I could have helped stop his final mad plot by coming out against him has caused me a lot of sleepless nights, and…because I was proud of you. I am proud of you, the closest thing I have to a daughter. I kept track of your efforts those fans your alter-ego had in the blogosphere. Instead of letting the demands of survival twist you into becoming bitter and hateful you worked to help those in need, to contend with those who would prey on society, and I couldn't have been prouder. So, one day, I decided to follow your example, and finally face what I did. I contacted one of the few friends I had in the legitimate American scientific community, who got me your phone numbers. After figuring out how to actually use a cellphone, I texted you all, and here we are. I wanted to confess what my role in your creation and tell Miss Ortega the truth."

She reached into her backpack pulling out half-a-dozen manila folders holding them out to Danielle, who accepted them gingerly. "These contain the names and what information I could find on the other scientists who worked directly on Vlad's illegal and unethical projects, including complete details on my involvement in the project that created you. I trust you will want to turn most of it over to your government. And for you, personally, you may keep my copy of Shelley's poems, as well as this," and she handed over her entire backpack to her. "In there you will find four books, my entire journals both personal and my log of my scientific data from the time I worked with Vlad. You will find a complete technical, day-by-day account of your creation from the day you were conceived to the day you were allowed to wake up as well as my personal journals from that time period. I imagine I won't need them where I'll be going after today."

Before anyone else could say anything she then stood up from the bed. "Now I believe we've spent enough time up here, it's time we talked to Ortega."

------

Paulina Ortega leaned back against her chair, watching the oak door as she sipped from her glass of water. Her feelings were a roil as she sat there, she was still processing the revelation that Danielle of all people was not only related to her, but was her daughter.

It explains why we're so alike, she thought to herself, as she thought of the young woman whom had become her friend over the past three months. Aside from sharing similar…physical traits, they also shared a similar aggressive disposition, and similar tastes in men and entertainment, which had led to them spending an increasing amount of time together out of work.

Why the fuck didn't she tell me?! She raged to herself even as the door opened finally. Stepping into the kitchen, first were Danielle and Sam who sat down on either side of her. Smooth, Paulina thought to herself, seeing their intent immediately. If I lose it at whatever Zelenkova's about to say, they'll be able too wrestle me to the ground before I can kill her.

It was then that Danny and Zelenkova walked into the room. Her fingers clenched against the grain of the wood of her table, both at the sight of Zelenkova and the fact that Danny cleaned up really good in his uniform and-

Stop it! Paulina snapped to herself, self-irritation rankling her. You have more important things to worry about than indulging your one-sided affections.

Danny sighed. "Zelenkova has something she feels she needs to discuss with all of us." Danny sighed. "Zelenkova, please repeat for Paulina what you told me."

Zelenkova nodded. "Look, Miss Ortega, I understand why you would feel less than disposed to listen to me right now, but the truth is…"

The kitchen fell silent once more as Zelenkova finished recounting the creation of Danielle once more. Paulina sighed and leaned back in her chair, looking over at Danielle, at the bitterness and pain in her face. I can't imagine what it's like, she thought to herself, sick to her stomach at what Zelenkova had described, to be used as a weapon. Not simply to be used as a weapon, to be used as a template as to grow dozens of disposable people. But how did that bastard get his hands on my eggs for this? Unless- And all at once the answer hit her. Oh, my God, she thought, as she felt her gorge rise again.

"There's still one question you haven't answered," Danielle said suddenly, a quizzical look on her face. "How did Vlad get her hands on Paulina's eggs for this?"

"Because I only have one ovary," Paulina said, her face a stony mask even as she prayed silently in relief that she had been able to open her mouth without first vomiting her anger and disgust over everyone else at the table. "I had an oophorectomy three years ago."

Zelenkova nodded. "And this was no random purchase off the black market organ circuit, from what I can tell when word reached him that you were going in for an oophorectomy he paid off the people who were supposed to be saving the ovary for testing to instead have it saved and delivered to him in Colorado."

"But why me?" Paulina asked, only to be interrupted by Sam's fist hitting the table.

"That disgusting smarmy sonofabitch," Sam said blackly. When Paulina, and everyone, else turned to look at her, she said, her face a picture of extreme hatred and disgust. "It's because Danny had a crush on you, once upon a time. In his effort to mold him into his son, he was banking that not only would he not move on from his crush on you, but like his inability to get over Maddie, he'd start doing anything to have any sort of 'claim' on you no matter how sick."

"That makes sense," Danny said, fairly green in the face himself. "In a sick, twisted, disgusting sort of way. Think about it, I'm moping over you, and along comes Vlad dangling both Danielle and the possibility of another child with you in front of me, and those feelings so throwing off my moral center that I'd agree to it, giving him his hold on me at last."

Which is stupid, she thought to herself. Given that his feelings for me had long since faded by that point, to be replaced eventually by Valerie, then Sam.

She sighed and leaned back in her chair.

Zelenkova nodded to Danny, a nod that to Paulina's eye was a signal to set off some prearranged plan.

Danny nodded in return. "Sam," Danny said, "take Zelenkova down to our legal department in Indianapolis. Have them assign her a lawyer, our best one, and have that lawyer negotiate her surrender to Federal authorities."

"Right," Sam said, accepting her task, which was befitting one for an XO, and standing up from the table.

"If I may, I'd like to go with her," Danielle said, suddenly, giving the older woman a curious look.

Danny nodded, giving a weary sigh as the three women left the room, silently. It was a gesture of trust, and just how much the relationship had changed between her and Sam, that she gave her erstwhile rival a sympathetic look rather than a cool warning glare against Paulina moving in on her man, whom she trusted implicitly anyway, before closing the kitchen door behind her and leaving them alone.

Paulina sighed, leaning back against her. "I'm not going to try to move in on you, if that's what you're thinking."

Danny nodded forlornly. "I know."

The two of them sat there, saying nothing, doing nothing, as each processed what was going on. The basics remained, Danny and Sam still loved each other deeply, and Paulina was just as loyal and committed as ever, everything else was up in the air.