Chapter Text
I heard her, somewhere far away — feral and tear-choked, her cries reverberating in the stone beneath my feet.
Where are you?!
I wasn’t sure myself, for one landscape bled eternally into another. I moved without pain and without effort, stepping sometimes with intention, other times compelled by forces far greater than myself. With my last stride away from Craigh Na Dun, I plunged, unbreathing, into the cerulean blue of the Caribbean Sea, and swam down until I reached the door to Lallybroch. The giggling taunts of children chased one another down a distant corridor, and I smiled, turning left to the Great Hall at Leoch. My uncles were there, hale and strong; they nodded at me in acknowledgment just as Mrs. Fitz bustled in from the kitchen, pink-cheeked and tutting all the while.
“Hurry along, lad, ‘fore she wakes the whole castle!”
Round the corner and down the stairwell, I pushed open the door to Davie Beaton’s surgery and stepped into Claire’s instead — the custom maple shelves laden with tinctures, the sage green paint she’d chosen herself when we built the Big House.
I halted, looked about, frowned. The room was empty, sheets still made on the bed.
Her guttural wailing had gone quiet.
Where are you?! I called back to her.
Out the side door and through the breezeway, down to the river where she loved to forage for her wee herbs. The midday sun glittered on the water, and I faltered, trying to find her there in the light.
For a single, sinking moment, I thought perhaps she’d chosen differently. Perhaps I had finally asked too much of her; perhaps she’d heard my call at the stones and turned away.
No sooner had the thought occurred to me than I heard buzzing, so faint beneath the babble of the burn that I almost missed it. Glancing down, I saw a soft round bumblebee bobbing midair, homing in to the bullet hole in my chest as though it were the center of a—
With welling tears and a breath of relief, I wheeled around and ran, knowing exactly where I’d find her.
The meadowgrass whipped at my hands as I sprinted across the field and into the cedar glade, leapt three alternating steps up the boughs and into the air, splitting the sky with the precision of an arrow whistling toward its target. There on the hill was the New House, the bairns out playing in the yard. Mandy looked up and waved as I neared, shading her eyes with the opposite hand.
“Granny’s over there,” she offered cheerily, though I needed no direction; Claire was precisely where I’d asked her to be.
I lowered myself into the hollyhock with painstaking care, afraid to disturb her — she was so still, curled on her side in a cradle of white petals. Easing onto my back beside her, I closed my eyes and rested for a time, content simply to let the thawing ache of sunlight warm me through.
No… no, not sunlight, I realized with delayed, mounting wonder. Her light, brilliant and blazing, the same impossible blue of her eyes. Still as she was, my wife was neither idle nor asleep — I felt her hand move toward me by inches, seeking, until it cupped the curve of my jaw.
“Took you bloody long enough,” she chided, her voice shredded beyond recognition. “Where did you go?”
“Be still, a nighean,” I murmured, and cracked my lashes to look at her. “I only went to call ye home.”
Drop after quivering drop, I watched a pair of tears slip from her eyes. “Funny,” she sniffled, the last of her grief yielding to peace. “I came to do the same thing.”
Even before she’d spoken the words, I could feel her working on me, though neither of us moved a muscle — could feel her light flow through the touch at my neck, branching out into my veins and arteries in illuminating cracks like forks of lightning. Claire had described to me, once, how she had been able to feel the germs in her body combust as Master Raymond moved his hands over her failing body, and from that I had gathered that she must have been in terrible pain.
But I understood now, in a way that no words would have aided me.
The light didn’t hurt at all, it was… exultant… like a hair-raising sweep of gooseflesh tingling through every nerve of my body. It was the burn of pleasure when I was inside her, almost unbearable, wide-eyed and clawing out of my body as we neared completion; it was the triumphant, heart-bursting sensation when every soldier cried out, sword raised, as the tide of battle turned to victory.
I tried to find my wife’s eyes to share it with her, but Claire was glazed, her focus deep and distant. She was as still now as she’d been when I found her, but I realized with a slow-creeping chill that something about her was shifting, withering. Whether she was aware of it or not, the color was leeching from her hair, her face, her lips as she poured whatever life she had left into me.
I’d learned a bit from my tutor, as a lad, about Stephen Gray and his studies on electrical conduction. I’d learned a great deal more from our brilliant engineer of a daughter about the things that would one day be called circuits, conductors and currents.
I didn’t pretend to comprehend it all, but I understood enough.
Clasping Claire’s face in both hands, I sealed our mouths in a kiss, willing the light back into her with a blinding surge just as she returned it to me, ferocious with love, incendiary. Above us, the stars tremored and blazed, all of the heavens whistling with their cosmic shriek, loud enough to crack stone — loud enough to rend time itself.
We awoke on the mountain, gasping.
I watched Jamie in profile, the strawberry-gold lashes blinking rapidly in the light, the steady tic of a pulse in his carotid artery. With every lungful of air his color improved, the terrible mottled purple easing back to pink as if he’d only lingered too long in an icy creek. Mesmerized, I drew my limp hand down the slope of his (moving… moving) chest to touch his fingers in disbelief.
They twitched instinctively, curving into mine.
Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.
Jamie exhaled a wheeze of a laugh, tears springing to his eyes. I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud.
Maybe I hadn’t.
Feeling very much like a puddle of melted wax, I watched, bleary and unblinking, as he shifted his head on that godforsaken stone to look at me. If I had anything left, any single drop not raged at the stars or soaked into his vest, I would have wept at the sight.
He seemed to be of a similar mind. For a long while he simply stared at me, his gaze tracing the lines of my face with unspeakable tenderness. It might have been minutes or hours before he shifted himself gingerly up onto his left side, facing me.
“S’pose this means,” he rasped, almost inaudible, “that ye dinna accept my apology.”
A convulsion shook my lungs, soundless, as he reached out to stroke my cheek with the side of one calloused thumb.
“No,” I ground out, chin quivering. His eyes ached with guilt as he framed my face in his hands, drew me in slowly until our foreheads touched. When he closed the last breath between us, his mouth tasted of blood, just as it had all the times I’d pressed beseeching kisses to his unresponsive, cold lips. Without warning, panic surged through my already frayed and sparking nervous system, and I gripped to him with an involuntary mewling noise, panting through the nose pressed to his. At once, I felt his broad palm smooth over my shoulder and down my back, trying in vain to soothe me.
I wouldn’t be fucking soothed.
He’d made me watch him die. Right here on this bloodstained rock, pressing my palms to the spurting wound that had blown straight through his right ventricle, cradling his head as the life went out of his eyes.
“You left me.” I smeared the accusation into his mouth, hard, our teeth clashing.
“Never,” he swore.
“You left—” I tried again, but then my throat swelled tight, and Jamie tucked me under his chin, and we wept, both of us, bone dry and juddering until we were too exhausted even for that. I fitted the bridge of my nose to his neck so that I could feel his pulse against the throbbing pain in my skull; I wasn’t sure if I slept or simply laid there in a half-conscious daze until Roger finally came back for us.
At any other point, perhaps I would have found the humor in the string of terror-strained expletives that followed. As it was, I hadn’t the energy to do any more than breathe as Jamie raised his chin off the top of my head.
“Roger Mac,” he said, still terribly hoarse, but loud enough to be understood, at least. “I’ll promise ne’er to breathe a word of that to yer congregation, if you’ll be so kind as to help my wife and I back to our tent.”