Rhetta Peake had buried her little boy.

He'd been the joy of her household, the treasure of her soul. He'd been born only a few short months before the war had been declared, the one the history books now called The Second World War. She'd rocked him to sleep in the cellar that her husband used as a workshop, to the lullaby of the planes flying overhead. She didn't know how many times, but she could picture it even now, Johnathan's books on the shelves and tools on the workbench, little gears in divided wooden boxes everywhere, and the battered three-legged stool she'd sat on. She'd nursed him more than she should have, maybe, but it kept him quiet, when the planes were overhead. It had to be quiet, when the planes were overhead.

Maybe if they had been down there that first night of the Blitz, things would have been different. But he'd been sleeping in his cradle for once, and she'd been so tired. She'd woken when she heard the planes, the thunder of the bombs. She'd had enough time to get him out of the cradle, to shield him with her body. That had been all there had been time for, though, before the world had come crashing down. After that, she didn't remember much. He'd been crying, but she hadn't been able to help.

Johnathan had come home. Johnathan had come to help. She'd smiled at him, trusting. All his help had been for her, though, and Rhetta had wanted to scream at him, the baby, the baby, help the baby! He'd told her to quiet, and smoothed her hair, and given her the handkerchief of ether, and then there had been no memory for a while.

Of course he'd taken care of the baby. When she woke, Johnathan was beside her with William in his arms, quiet as could be. Everything had been exactly as it should be. Only Rhetta had changed. The gears turned within her, little flutters like the quickening of a child in the womb, and she'd not been sure what to think of it, but Johnathan had helped her sit up, and handed her the baby, and that had been that. Things were different then. Not this modern era of equality and social justice. Rhetta had never expected anything of her life other than a husband and household and children, and never thought to ask for it. While her little boy lived, her path was determined.

She'd raised him with all the strength she could - it was not an easy time to raise a child. Together, they'd hidden in the cellar when the planes flew overhead. They'd lived through war, and watching a generation leave home, never to return. She'd lost two brothers, to the war, and only Johnathan's work in his lab for the government had kept him from being called upon as a soldier as well. They'd lived through rationing, and had an easier time of it than most since Rhetta didn't need to eat and could slip her portions to her husband and son. She saved what she could for the neighbors as well, when she could. The nation had to work together, after all.

The war had ended, in time. William had been a schoolboy then, as good of one as he could be under the circumstances. With paper rationed, schoolbooks were often hard to come by. The teachers did what they could, but it was not the schooling Rhetta would have desired. Johnathan taught William bits of things, when he was at home. He was a bright boy, she thought, but all mothers thought that of their sons. Somehow, he'd grown into a man. She didn't know where the years had gone. He'd been a baby, then a boy, and then suddenly a man.

And all too soon, he had been an old man. She'd come back into his life when he had needed her, and cared for him when he could no longer care for himself. She'd cared for him, even when he no longer knew who she was. It hadn't mattered in the slightest. He was her son. That was what a mother did, whether or not her son knew who she was. She'd loved him, and she'd cared for him, and in the end, she had buried him.

The years changed. The world changed with them, one war giving way to another, clockwork giving way to computers, children growing up, growing older, living and dying with the world around them.

Rhetta Peake had not changed, not since that night when the bombs had fallen on London and her husband had preserved her with clockwork and mechanics and little bits of tinkering that the world had yet had no names for. She remained, as she had - and perhaps that meant that she did not live... but it did not mean that she did not love.