#thehealer

You don’t have to believe everything you think

we’ve been programmed,

wake up we miss you.”

Oliver Jackson Cohen : The Healer (2020)

Out of focus at first because an angel wanted to make her presence known. Hi Mom. 😭💘 Happy Birthday to the Prim to my Katniss! I love you sis.

To those odd fellows who are not shackled by all-consuming desires, their hearts never ripped apart to fester hopelessly from that gaping rotting wound, days passed by unremarkably in their small quiet lives. 

 Never were they beckoned to a strange old apothecary's cottage disguised from their untroubled eyes as nothing more than an abandoned building - fraught with weeds and rampant with decay. Only the weary-hearted in need of the impossible to heal their sorrows could see and beg a wish of the mistress who lived there. A healer with a supernatural gift only as great as her spirit's eternal light. 

 However, a wish for her skills always comes at a price. An exchange of something precious from the desperate soul. 

 Nothing more, nothing less.

 And today she had a visitor who paced and paced outside her gates of slate, his bleary eyes disturbed as a mourning sea.

 ———

 Past the facade that shrouded the apothecary from prying eyes, was a surrounding, endless garden thriving wild as a forest, where all that grew reached up, up to soak in the golden rays of the cloudless spring sun. Even the young apprentice, Elias Pound, kneeled with a spade digging through the verdant earth, found himself high in spirits despite his nose twitching as a hare's from the inquisitive dragonflies dancing on the wind.

 He kindly swatted away at their shimmery beating wings, back to his task of rooting for the treasures buried deep with the earthworms, when his hand came dangerously close to a patch of prickly violet plants that stirred in anticipation for his blunder to be their gain. Before he could move another inch closer the lad felt a touch, warning and familiar at his shoulder. 

 The mistress of light. 

 Simply clad in a thin white button-down rolled up her slender forearms and tucked into her well-loved trousers, stitched here and there from age. Further down she wore a pair of shoes that had never known a day without a stroll through the grass, while her hair was an entity unto itself, curling warm as a halo about her face.

 "Careful with those," Claire cautioned, with a gentle squeeze of his shoulder, and crouched down beside her apprentice to the dirt that was like her second skin but her heart was owned by the wild around them.

 "The juice from a split stalk will slowly eat away at your skin, baring the white of your bones."

 Withdrawing his hand to his dirtied lap, wide-eyed Elias curiously studied the dangerous plant that smelled of citrus, tangy and crisp. "Why grow such a wretched plant at all then?" 

 "Because too many folk in the early days of ale and mead knew its leaves held a cure for a bruising hangover and squandered it, leaving the earth barren of its name and very nearly its seed except for here in this patch of earth." 

 She fondly thumbed the fuzzy underside of one sharp-edged leaf that had saved her from many a dark and pleasurable bender.

 "They also keep the vermin and insects away but sadly not the untrained eye." Claire gave the lad a pointed, yet not unkind look of reprimand. "Keep to your studies, Elias, if you value your fingers."

 "I shall, mistress," the lad assured her with a nod, as his round freckled cheeks pinked under a mop of russet hair. The color deepened as he sputtered a chuckle when Claire thumped him, shoulder to shoulder, at the title he addressed her by. 

 As he forever would do no matter the years, decades. A century or two. 

 When his mistress kept herself perched beside him, taking inventory of his withy basket filled with heaps of medicinal herbs and pungent wild garlic (along with a bitty red ladybug roving lost atop them), Elias wondered aloud, 

 "Wasn't Mr. Fraser supposed to call on you today, mistress?" 

 Mr. Fraser was a friend of hers that had kindled months before and was never one to keep the lady of the house waiting.

 Before she could answer where Elias would hear the disquiet in her voice, note the concern in her eyes, a bell clear as birdsong echoed through the air, signaling the company in question had arrived. 

 Claire rose from the ground as if she'd been plucked by the breeze and quirked a brow at her apprentice, a faint smile at her mouth. "Do keep yourself in one piece, Elias. It'd be a shame to lose a fine hand such as yours." 

 He gave her a cheek grin, rubbing his nose with a sooted knuckle that painted him more speckled than he already was. "Don't bother a worry with me, mistress. And send my regards to your man for me."

 Claire ignored the last comment, if it was even heard, as she was already off towards the fading bell chime.

   _____

   Claire hurried down the hallway of her inheritance from long ago, the power enchanted within the apothecary walls having given her years beyond the promise of a creator high above. Where rooms were neatly cluttered with every curiosity that had ever caught her eye, itched at her hands, had the power to heal the human soul. 

 There were shelves enclosed with folding glass doors, twice the height of a man extending from floor to mahogany beamed ceilings. They held bottles of bitter thick liquids that could coat a mouth a frothy bluish-green, others sweet as fruit just tumbled from a vine, fallen from a tree. 

 Cabinets held charms big as a man's fists, smaller than thimbles, to ward against dark spirits that lurked in the shadows, stalking the unknowing until their touch was upon them, claiming flesh and mind. Mirrors too were scattered among the bric-a-brac of another room that gleamed reflections of other realms, and time, but draped with sheets to shield any unfortunate from falling through, leaving nothing but a wisping breath of who they once were behind.

 And one room left undisturbed held tear-stained belongings that had been sacrificed to purge a spirit of its relentless suffering. 

 As would be done today.

 Claire slowed her stride to gather breath to lungs, combing from her cheeks a tickling of errant curls. She had cut her hair a bit too short, above her proud shoulders, during an impulsive battle of struggle and defeat where she broke several brushes to a shamble of splinters. 

 Her Mr. Fraser - Jamie, had to coax her from her room and at first sight fondly tugged her dark locks, promising they were lovely still. 

 "As a tangled bushel of curly dock weeds," he had said, provokingly with a snort. Claire had flicked his nose in glaring retaliation (even as she was mildly impressed he recalled any of her chatter on the botanical), then readied her elbow for a jabbing as his wide mouth pursed for another compliment that sputtered into rib-shaking laughter.

 However, that joyful tease in his lilting voice had been smothered to a haunted rasp when days after he called upon her at the solemn hour of dawn's first light.

 "I beg for yer hand to heal me, Claire. To bleed my misery, gift me peace."

 Unspoken was the why and reason when questioned from her tightened throat. The call falling dead when uttered that she would do all that was possible for him.

 Claire vowed to do just that as she turned a final corner to the front of her shop that doubled as her home, finding Jamie faced away from her, edged over the long oak countertop. He was rigid as stone from shoulder to toe, except for his fingers tapping a raving beat against the hardwood until he heard his name whispered, breaking his anxious trance to glance her way.

 His eyes, rimmed with bruising shadows, were a fleeting rush of mingled relief and fear, with a flicker of intensity undefinable. Then gone behind a mask of stillness cracking at the seams as he averted his gaze to the empty space between them. 

 Claire felt the whole of her seize to see Jamie sickened with such an affliction and a chest gnawing guilt that she, a healer, hadn't seen the signs of distress before now. And that he didn't trust her with his woe before it came to this. 

 At her approach, she raised a palm to touch him - whether it be his hand soothed between hers or to clutch her dearest friend with all she had until his ill seeped to herself - only to let it falter to her chest as the very motion caused Jamie to clench his jaw and flinch. 

 Another crack breaching his mask. 

 He bowed his head in apology, waves lusterless as rust and Claire's own features gentled in response, wanting to appear unfazed.

 "You're late." She tried to sound casual enough. "Not having second thoughts are you?"

 "No," was Jamie's curt and raspy reply. "If ye please, I would like to be rid of this -" He tapped a long forefinger to his temple. "Now and forever."

 Claire inclined her head, resisting the urge to thread her arm with his. A habit from their first stumbled upon meeting, a ritual now rebuked. 

 "Of course, come with me."

 She led Jamie to a room that was nearly wall to wall windows, obscured by plants hanging from the walls and wooden rafters that filled the room with the fragrance of herbs and jasmine flowers. Claire held the arched door open for Jamie to pass through but he paused at the doorway and questioned,

 "Is the lad wi' ye today?"

 Claire assured him they would have no interruptions as Elias was in the garden. "Probably singeing his poor fingers as we speak and rueing the day he ever crossed my path."

 She hoped to spark a chuckle, no matter how small, to lessen his gloom, but Jamie merely strode past her (mouth pressed into a numbing white line, ducking low to avoid a smack from the doorframe), sitting at the small round table in the middle of the room. In the past the two had tea there, possibly spiked with a heavy hand of brandy, whisky more often than not, telling each other's fortunes of fantastic demise and toothless hunchbacked lovers from grubby leaf bottoms and the crumbled bits of chocolate biscuits.

 All that dressed it now were brown bits of flower petals.

 Taking her seat across Jamie (his attention absorbed in the wood grain of the old table), and needing to dispel the disturbance clinging to him, Claire began her speech recited thousands of times before to those like himself.

 And once spoken to her by the old master of the apothecary, her own Maitre Raymond, when she sat in his very seat.

 "Your thoughts are yours alone. The memories, good and bad, are protected from my sight. But I can feel them, all that plagues you. You only need to free your mind to be healed." 

 The words sinking in, Jamie flicked his dour gaze uneasily to hers.

 "I have yer word I willna remember all that ails me, Sassenach?" The name he gave her that filled along forgotten hollowness beneath her breasts.

 "I promise. Even if I must rip its possession of you." 

 So with a heavy exhale, Jamie pulled from inside his coat's breast pocket a small cherrywood snake. He rubbed his thumbs against the ridges carved down its coiled spine with a reverence that one would give to a holy cross and deep from his throat said something haltingly in gaelic (Claire thought it must be a goodbye) then laid the snake carefully between them.

 "To honor the mistress of the house."

 Claire wished she could refuse him but she was bound to the rules of give and take carved in the wood of the house. All she could do was give it the same reverence as Jamie, her fingers gingerly stroking it from head to tail. Memories flooded her senses, ones spent frolicking in glades, hiding in barns beneath the hay, shivering to the bone in unforseen rain.

 But brightest of all was of a departed brother's love carved on the flat underbelly of the snake, a name her fingers softly traced. 

 Sawny

 Swallowing thickly, Claire gently placed it aside and held her palms up. Jamie noted with an aching affection streaks of green, scented strongly of mint, marked a few of her fingertips. 

 "I'll need to touch you now. It's the only way for me to do what must be done. " 

 Color finally flushing his pallid skin, Jamie breathed almost shyly, "Ye may. It wouldna be proper if I were to go wi'out smelling like yer wee herbs."

 They shared a smile, however small, as Jamie's gone in a flash.

 Without thought, needing to be near him, Claire pushed her chair closer to his (not missing the sharp inhale that left his mouth) and tentatively cradled his face where she couldn't help but stroke against the scarred lines of restlessness. Beneath his greyed eyes under long lashes, down to the stubbled thin cheeks stretched tightly over sharp curving bone, and then the corner of his wide mouth that twitched, parting softly in a haggard sigh. Or was it a sob?

 Jamie was quick to brace her wrists.

 "There's nothing to fear, Jamie," Claire soothed, her breath of honey, tang of whisky, kissing at his lips. "Trust in me to care for you." 

 He managed to muster a half smile, crooked and true, but his gaze of her was mournful. Regretful even. "I always do, Sassenach. Always." 

 But he kept his grip on her that whitened his knuckles and she refused to let him see the worry creeping up every notch of her vertebrae as she pressed her thumbs to his temples. "Now, focus on the source of the pain."

 Jamie's eyes fluttered closed and Claire delved into his mind with a touch that glowed just as the flowers of devotion, a radiant forget-me-not blue.

 She was enveloped with the pieces of him that blared like the mighty sun - That bull-headed stubbornness. The bone deep loyalty of a knight. His insufferable sense of humor, vexing her even as she bubbled over with laughter. And Jamie's pure hearted goodness, so forgiving and impossibly kind. 

 Oh, how she admired him so. 

 But underneath that beautiful aura, Claire felt an agonizing blood red pain slashing apart his flesh, crying out in despair that misted her eyes as her hand fell to his breast, clasping the source of it all.

 A burning heart so divine in love. 

 "Oh, Jamie."

 His eyes flew open in gut clenching panic. "You said ye couldna see."

 "I can't. I only feel what consumes you and I do as if it were my own heartbeat throbbing, shattering." Her pulse was indeed rising with his dizzying passion, hunger and such unspeakable love blazing like wildfire. 

 "How can this person not reciprocate?" Her voice cracked.

 Jamie lowered his chin and covered both his broad palms over hers making the fragile bones quiver from the mounting pressure as he pressed them against his hammering heart, slowly killing him.

 "She kens nothing of how I feel, nor could she ever bless me with what I yearn to have. She haunts my every dream to where I fear to sleep. I canna breathe when I see her, am near her - even if I only think of her my heart's blood leaves me as if to perish."

 Mouth twisting in pain he whimpered, "Now please free my soul of her. "

 Claire dug her nails through his shirt, swallowing the salty sting of tears.

 "You will feel a coldness towards this woman. No love or warmth will she ever be to you. You'll remember her but she will hold the same place as a stranger in your heart. Can you handle that?"

 "That's what I want. What I need." Tears freely trickled down his wasted face and Claire knew that no words would sway him. Pressing her forehead to his, she sought once more to grasp that wild perfect flame he wanted her to smother.

 "Speak her name aloud."

 Jamie pressed his trembling thumbs to the jumping pulse at her wrists, breathing once, then other and once more again, he sobbed.

 "Sorcha."

 "A pretty name who will be no more to you."

_____

I rewrote another thing. And I honestly could rewrite this forever and ever and ever.

I don’t know if I made it better or worse.