“I am grateful for every day we have.”

Me: JUST YOU FUCKING WAIT, MY DUDE.

Roger and company venture into a hostile town on their conscription mission. Shots are fired. Why is Fergus a consulting officer? If you old cranks shoot Fergus, I will pull out your guts with my teeth

It’s your classic case of star crossed lovers at the heart of the gun brandishing

Roger is losing conscripts over his policy of whiskey before conflict. Jamie is none too pleased. Roger is obsessed with singing his little songs. Like, please try problem solving instead. As a historian, shouldn’t he have a number examples of how different types of conflict have been resolved stored away in the old memory bank. Just pathetic.his plan is just, stall until Jamie gets here.

More unwed mother trouble

Roger fails to impress Jamie. Brianna burns the mugshot

Jamie does a little dance. Better than Murtagh’s back in his boogie woogie bugle boy days.

Jamie is very keen to keep the little baby, which is very sweet. He wants to raise a baby! Claire says no in a very reasonable way. There is a childless couple here that really wants this baby, plus Fergus and Marsali are popping them out like rabbits so there are always going to be babies around.

The poor drab Juliet tries to shoot herself

||COUNTDOWN || SEASON 5 EPISODE 04  || THE COMPANY WE KEEP ||

#83daysofoutlander☆

Bearing in mind Jamie’s adjuration to “Go canny,” I sent her down the narrow stair alone. Alone, she would be merely assumed to be going to the privy—if anyone even noticed her departure. Both of us together might cause comment. Left by myself in the darkened loft, I drew my own cloak around me and went to the narrow window to wait for the few minutes necessary before I could leave, too. I heard the soft thump of the door closing below, but couldn’t see Alicia from this high angle. Judging from her response to my summons, she didn’t intend to stab Isaiah to the heart, but heaven knew what either of them did intend. The clouds were gone now, and the frozen landscape stretched before me, brilliant and ghostly under a setting moon. Across the road, the horses’ brushy shelter stood dark, dappled with clumps of snow. The air had changed, as Jamie had said, and warmed by the horses’ breath, chunks of melting snow slid free and plopped to the ground. In spite of my annoyance with the young lovers, and the undertones of comic absurdity attending the whole situation, I couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for them. They were so in earnest, so intent on nothing but each other. And Isaiah’s unknown wife? I hunched my shoulders, shivering slightly inside my cloak. I should disapprove—I did, in fact—but no one knew the true nature of a marriage, save those who made it. And I was too aware of living in a glass house, to think of throwing stones myself.

Almost absently, I stroked the smooth metal of my gold wedding ring.

Adultery. Fornication. Betrayal. Dishonor. The words dropped softly in my mind, like the clumps of falling snow, leaving small dark pits, shadows in moonlight. Excuses could be made, of course. I had not sought what had happened to me, had fought against it, had had no choice. Except that, in the end, one always has a choice. I had made mine, and everything had followed from it. Bree, Roger, Jemmy. Any children that might be born to them in the future. All of them were here, in one way or another, because of what I had chosen to do, that far-off day on Craigh na Dun.

You take too much upon yourself. Frank had said that to me, many times. Generally in tones of disapproval, meaning that I did things he would have preferred I did not. But now and then in kindness, meaning to relieve me of some burden. It was in kindness that the thought came to me now, whether it was truly spoken, or only called forth from my exhausted memory for what comfort the words might hold. Everyone makes choices, and no one knows what may be the end of any of them. If my own was to blame for many things, it was not to blame for everything. Nor was harm all that had come of it. ’Til death us do part. There were a great many people who had spoken those vows, only to abandon or betray them. And yet it came to me that neither death nor conscious choice dissolved some bonds. For better or for worse, I had loved two men, and some part of them both would be always with me.

The dreadful thing, I supposed, was that while I had often felt a deep and searing regret for what I had done, I had never felt guilt. With the choice so far behind me, now, perhaps, I did. I had apologized to Frank a thousand times, and never once had I asked him for forgiveness. It occurred to me suddenly that he had given it, nonetheless—to the best of his ability. The loft was dark, save for faint lines of light that seeped through the chinks of the floor, but it no longer seemed empty.

I stirred abruptly, pulled from my abstraction by sudden movement below. Silent as flying reindeer, two dark figures darted hand-in-hand across the field of snow, cloaks like clouds around them. They hesitated for a moment outside the horses’ shelter, then disappeared inside. I leaned on the sill, heedless of the snow crystals under my palms. I could hear the noise of the horses rousing; whickers and stamping came clearly to me across the clear air. The sounds in the house below had grown fainter; now a clear, loud “Meh-eh-eh!” came up through the floorboards, as Hiram sensed the horses’ uneasiness. There was renewed laughter from below, temporarily drowning the sounds across the road. Where was Jamie? I leaned out, the wind billowing the hood of my cloak, brushing a spray of ice across my cheek. There he was. A tall dark figure, walking across the snow toward the shelter, but going slowly, kicking up white clouds of dusty ice. What . . . but then I realized that he was following in the lovers’ tracks, stamping and floundering deliberately to obliterate a trail that must tell its story clearly to any of the trackers in the house below. A hole appeared suddenly in the brushy shelter, as a section of the branched wall fell away. Clouds of steam roiled out into the air, and then a horse emerged, carrying two riders, and set off to the west, urged from a walk to a trot and then a canter. The snow was not deep; no more than three or four inches. The horse’s hooves left a clear dark trail, leading down the road.