#escayna

@timeisonthetable asked: Hi there! Imagine the conversation Jamie and Claire have with William telling him about where she came from. Does William believe it? Or does he refuse ? :))

anonymous asked: Any plans to continue “Tell Me About Your Family ”? There’s a chance I’m alone in this but I like William. Jamie’s revelations about wee Mandy being a tiny Claire are adorable.

@escayna asked: Imagine William visiting the Ridge post-MOBY and getting to be an uncle to Jem and Mandy.

Reuniting at Fraser’s Ridge AU

They’d waited to tell him until after the supper plates were cleared and the Fraser/MacKenzie/Murray clan began tucking in to their lovely – if simple – dessert of baked apples. Mandy quickly hoisted herself up on the bench, standing on her tiptoes to reach the pot of honey at the middle of the table, carefully sliding it across the smooth planks with Ian’s assistance. Rachel helped the girl spoon honey onto her apple before turning to her left and serving Roger. Jamie reached under the table to squeeze Claire’s knee – drawing her attention and silent agreement that now was the moment to move forward.

“William, a bhailach?”

The lad looked up, startled, from the opposite end of the table – chewing thoughtfully. “Pardon?”

Jamie sighed – belatedly remembering that the lad had no Gaidhlig. Something that he and Brianna would quickly remedy.

“There’s something we all wish to tell ye. It’s best for ye to hear it in the company of yer family – so ye can ask all of us questions, if need be.”

William carefully lay down his spoon and sat up just a bit straighter – readying himself. He raised his chin – meeting Jamie’s blue gaze – the tilt of his face and the way he rested his palms flat on the table mirroring his father. The resemblance was so striking that Claire blinked in shock – and was momentarily transported back nearly forty years, to that fateful night at Leoch where Jamie had defied his uncles at the final MacKenzie Gathering with the exact same look on his face.

“Ye’ll know that Claire and Brianna and Roger Mac and the bairns are different, aye?”

William’s gaze narrowed. “Yes.”

Jamie threaded the fingers of his right hand through Claire’s, squeezing tight. “And ye’ll also know that I take counsel from them in which side I’ve taken in this war, and in the decisions I make in running the farms.”

William nodded, dark brows furrowed, clearly struggling to follow Jamie’s logic.

Jamie licked his lips. “So. I trust them implicitly. It’s my duty – and Ian’s – and Roger’s – to protect all of them from harm. Because they know things. They know what will happen to the Colonies. They know that the English will not prevail in this war. They know that the Indians will be run off their lands. They know that there will be great growth in this country, and that thousands and thousands of ships will come across the ocean, full of people wanting to settle here.”

Clearly bored with this sudden turn in the conversation, Mandy helped herself to Rachel’s half-eaten apple – delighting in how neither her mother nor her father stopped her.

William darted his eyes to look at Ian – and Roger – and Brianna – and Jem. “But how? How do they know such things? And I know they’re your - our - family, but why do you trust them?”

“Because they’re from the future,” Jamie said baldly.

William blinked. “Excuse me?” He turned to face his sister – politely diverting his eyes from Rachel, who had hoisted a fussy Oggy from his basket to feed him his own supper – face full of questions.

“Mama, Roger, and I – we were born and grew up in the twentieth century,” Brianna said softly, laying a soothing, gentle hand atop a fist William hadn’t even realized he’d formed.

He frowned, mind racing. “I – I – that’s impossible.”

“It’s not.” Roger’s voice was quiet, but strong. “We’ve all done it, more than once. Travelled through time, I mean. Even Mandy.”

Finally happy that the grown-ups had decided to bring her into the conversation, Mandy nodded at her uncle. “Aye. We went thwoo the magic wocks in Scotland!”

“Magic - ??” he gaped.

“Stone circles – surely you’ve seen them in your travels? They mark…passages, of sorts. Places where those who are able to can travel.” Brianna gently rubbed the back of William’s hand – only slightly larger than her own. “I know it sounds impossible, I didn’t believe it either, at first. But it’s real.”

“Aye, it’s real all right,” Jem added, eyes trained on his empty plate, one finger idly tracing back and forth over a chip in the fire-hardened clay.

“But – but why? Surely things are – are different where you come from. Why live here, in the middle of a war, when surely things are safer in that other time?” William raised his elbows to the table and cradled his head in his hands, scrubbing his fingers back and forth through his thick, dark hair.

“Because this is where our family is,” Claire finally said. “Because when I fell through the stones the first time, nearly forty years ago, I met Jamie. I married him. I wanted to build a life with him. And that was more important to me than anything else.”

William looked up at her – the short ends of his hair sticking straight up – and watched his father gather her close against him and kiss her temple.

“But I don’t understand – you married him here? And yet Brianna and Roger were raised - then?”

“They were separated for nearly twenty years, cousin.” Ian hoisted a drowsy Oggy from Rachel’s lap up to his shoulder, gently patting the baby’s back. “She came back only when Cousin Brianna was old enough to live on her own.”

“Twenty years?” William gaped. Claire watched as he made some mental calculations. “That means - that means when you were at Helwater, that was when you were separated from Mother Claire. When you and my mother -”

His manners prevented him from going further - but the way that Jamie pressed his lips together tightly was all the answer that William needed.

Then for a long moment, William looked at each person – each member of his family – very carefully. From Jamie – whispering something into Mother Claire’s ear – to Mother Claire, her face nearly ashen – to Ian and Rachel, patiently watching him – to Brianna, sharing a small smile of encouragement – to Roger, gently rubbing Mandy’s sticky hands with a linen napkin – to young Jem, trying desperately to show he was an equal in this conversation among the adults.

“Does my stepfather know?”

“I know he suspects something - but I’m fairly certain it’s not that.” Claire pushed away her empty plate, one hand still linked with Jamie’s atop the table.

“Now do ye understand why I must protect my wife and daughter so, William?” Jamie asked softly. “Why they and the bairns are so precious to me? Why I trust them, and Roger Mac, as much as I do?”

William could only shake his head in amazement. “I still don’t understand it a bit – not yet. But I trust you. All of you. You have good hearts – you’ve no reason to deceive. I trust that you’re telling me the truth.”

“I am. We are. And I must ask ye to no’ tell anyone else.”

He sat up straight with indignation. “I’d never – ”

“He knows,” Roger said gently. “But he still has to ask, aye?”

“Yes, of course,” William breathed. “But still – I – stones? And time travel? I don’t quite understand it all.”

The room fell silent as William took his time to process everything. Mandy, suddenly bored with the quiet, folded her tiny arms on the tabletop, rested her head in the crook of one elbow, and fell promptly asleep.

“Do you – do you think that I could travel?” William asked after a long while. “That would be so – so *fantastic* to see the future!”

“It was two hundred years ago,” she remembered.  It was always two hundred years in the old stories.

“It was a dark night when the party went riding between the two towns.  They should have known better, for the mist was in and the footing was perilous, and the horses could feel that something was not right in the air.

“The woman wanted to go, however, and as they were taking her to her wedding, the men with her felt that they could not deny her.

“They couldn’t call themselves surprised, however, when her horse fell on the pitted and dangerous track.  The horse was well enough, but they could not find the woman anywhere.

“The woman had been stolen by the king of the faeries to be a bride for his son, taken nearly from her new husband’s bed.  The woman resisted and resisted, for the faerie world was strange to her.  

“The prince of the faeries was a kind man.  He apologized to her for his father’s chicanery and tried his best to make the human woman happy, for he loved her very much and wanted her for his bride.

“On the night before their wedding, he offered her a bride’s gift: he would take her back to the human world and the man who was to be her husband, and he would protect her from his father’s attempts to get her back.  She was free if she wanted to be.

“The woman considered her options- the man she had known and loved, and the life that she had always intended to live, or the faerie world, and this man who had been so kind and good to her.  She realized that she had fallen in love with the Prince of the Faeries, and she chose him and they were married the following day.

“After a time, the time came for the faeries to pay the teind- the tithe to Hell.  The faerie prince’s wife was pregnant with their first child and the wicked king of the faeries  knew that if she and the babe were given to Hell, the kingdom would be free of the tithe for a hundred years, the soul of an innocent babe being worth a hundred sinful souls.

“The prince knew what his father had in mind and he smuggled his wife and their child unborn out of faerie and put a spell on her that none of the Auld Ones would ever be able to touch her again, even though he knew it meant he would never see her again.”

“Why do you never tell stories with happy endings, Mama?”

“It does have a happy ending, my darling.  There are so many different kinds of love, and they gave up one for another.  Love of each other for the love of a child.”

“But children grow up and move away, and then the faerie prince’s wife will be alone without anyone.”

“Perhaps.  But some things are worth the cost.  Sleep now, my darling girl.”

~?~?~?~?~

Briana sat beside her aunt Jenny on the porch of the new big house.

“She never told a story with a happy ending.  Not my entire life.  They always had to live apart for love of their child, and they always pined.”

Claire and Jamie were standing at the mouth of the trail, talking to one another.  Claire’s face was tipped up to Jamie’s and the glow of her smile could be seen from across the distance.

“Faerie tales should have happy endings, shouldn’t they, Aunt Jenny?”

Ian glanced back as the door to the… house closed behind them.  He was glad to be away from the place- it had made him uncomfortable from the first moment he’d stepped in- but it did hold…

“Claire,” he said, turning to look at Jamie now.  That word was statement, question, exclamation, and censure in a single syllable.

“Aye, Claire,” Jamie said, quietly, answering them all.

Ian glanced at his brother-in-law.  He hadn’t heard that name cross his lips in twenty years.  Even when she’d been among them, Jamie had rarely called her by her name, preferring to call her “Sassenach” in affectionate teasing.  To hear her given name on his tongue seemed to cement the strangeness of the situation.

Jenny had told him that Jamie had spoken of Claire to her only twice in the time since she’d died.

No, he corrected his own thoughts, not died.  Gone.

He felt suddenly furious with his sister-in-law for having left them.  For having left Jamie.  How could she not know how much they would need her?  How much he would.

Jamie, seeming to catch his friend’s thought, answered it.  “No, it isna what you’re thinking.  She did not leave me, I sent her away.”

“Sent-” Ian began, stunned.  That didn’t track with anything he knew of Jamie or Claire- they had been mad for each other from the moment they had met, so far as Ian could tell.  For Jamie to have sent her away would have been…

Jamie sighed and stopped.  He glanced around, then pulled Ian into one of the small alcoves between buildings that pockmarked the city of Edinburgh.  Jamie faced his best friend, his blue eyes looking directly into Ian’s hazel, and for the first time, he spoke of Culloden.

“I knew I was dead, Ian,” he said, and his voice rang with that bleak emptiness that it had held for so long after Tcharlach’s cause had been lost.  “Every man standing on Drumossie moor that day knew that the Prince’s cause was lost, and every man knew we would die in droves, but I knew more than that.  If I did not die on the moor- if I tried to run or even if I were to somehow survive the battle,” and here his eyes lit with a wry amusement, for this he had done, “still I knew that I would be dead.  If not there, then at Tower Hill in London, upon the scaffold.”

Yes, Ian knew that.  Had known it, even then, though he had not gone with Jamie to war.  Not that time.

“I chose to die at swordpoint, standing for Scotland.  But I couldna do it with Claire by my side.  And she would have been too,” Jamie shook his head, and looked away from his friend to hide the tears that had sprung to his eyes.  “She said that she would put on breeks and go to the field with me.  Die beside me. The brave wee fool.”  He shook his head at that.  “But I couldna do it.  I did not have the strength to do what must be done if it meant her death.  So I sent her away.”

“But did you never look for her?” Ian asked, appalled.  They had all believed her dead for twenty years and Jamie had…

“After Culloden?  How?” Jamie sounded angry now.  “In case you’ve forgotten, I lived in a cave.”

“I could have looked for her,” Ian objected.  “Or Jenny.  Or Jared.  Or your uncle Alexander.  Anyone could have done it.”

“And if she’d been alive and we’d found her, what then?  What had she to return to?  A fugitive husband?  Starvation?  The chance of being arrested as a traitor along with me?  No.  If she were by some miracle alive, she was safe.”

“But what about-”

“I did look for her once,” Jamie interrupted.  “When… after I left Lallybroch.”

During his years as a prisoner and a slave, Ian knew he meant.

“I thought… maybe.  But she wasna there, and I knew for certain then that she was dead.  Or thought I did.”

He must have done.  So many things would have been different in the last few years had he harboured even the smallest doubt that Claire still lived, Ian was sure.

“But now she’s back,” Ian said.

It was as though a fugitive sunbeam fell on his brother’s face then.  He smiled, and his eyes lit with life again.  “Aye.  Now she’s back.”

Ian did hate to see that look go, but there was still one thing to ask.  “And Laoghaire?  Does she know?”

Jamie’s mouth compressed, and Ian knew that she did not.