Work Text:
River was a mistake.
Isobel could admit that now, as she drove down the familiar roads that led to her childhood home, her son dozed in the backseat.
Not a mistake in the sense that Isobel didn't mean to get pregnant, no, she knew precisely what she was doing. River was wanted in that sense. She wanted—desperately wanted—to have Frank’s child, be his wife, and raise River and the other children of Les Arbres together. She spent weeks painting the mural in the nursery, envisioning her child growing up in that room with his brothers.
But then her father destroyed it all like a child stomping another child’s sand castle. He stomped his foot and that was that, Isobel was to return home, her father deemed it so. He forced Frank’s hand, made him an offer he couldn't refuse, simply so he could show Isobel there was no escaping David Cartwright’s reach.
David Cartwright, legendary MI5 agent, could reach out and pull his daughter to heel no matter how far she ran. He could convince the man she loved to throw her and their child aside as easily as tossing a discarded newspaper. He could leave her trapped with a child who suddenly no longer had a purpose.
So, yes, in Isobel’s most authentic moments she would admit River was a mistake, if only to herself.
She didn't know how to raise him alone, how to raise the son she created to one day help destroy her father and the only thing he truly cared about, Her Majesty’s Government. River and his brothers had a higher purpose, to be weapons of destruction and change, guided by Frank, but now he was nothing more than an unsharpened knife in her care.
“Mummy, where are we going? Are we almost there?”
He blinked at her in the rearview mirror, his enormous blue eyes almost startling in their size and curiosity. He was always looking at her like that: studying, appraising her the same way David did. It was unsettling.
“Somewhere fun, darling. Go back to sleep.”
Isobel took a deep breath when she pulled into the drive an hour later. She chanced one last look at her son and reminded herself this was the only way as she gently roused him from sleep, smoothing his hair and pressing a final kiss to his forehead.
David wanted to control her life, and if he wanted to pull her away from the man she loved, well he could reap what he sowed. If she gave River willingly then her father couldn’t take him from her. Attachments were meant to be purged. Better River learned that now than similarly to how she had; pregnant and deliriously in love, the man who she thought hung the moon shoving her out the door and back to her father like an unwanted stray cat.
If she didn’t have River then she could never lose River. David would have nothing left to weaponize against her.
Isobel didn’t look in the rear view as she drove away.
River was a mistake.
Leaving him was not.