#FMM Chapter 72
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Flood my Mornings: Found
I know, right??? Thank you for bearing with me while I’ve taken a wee ten month sabbatical! And thank you, too, for dropping in every now and again to remind me of how much you love this story. It means the world! - With love, Mod Bonnie
This story takes place in an AU where Jamie travels through the stones two years after Culloden and finds Claire and his child in 1950 Boston.
FMM Master List
Previously: Hectic
Found
Early December, 1952
.
“Hey, Mummy?”
“Yes, pumpkin?”
“Um! Why come—”
“How....”
“—How come my hairs is all gray in all tha’ pictures?”
One grammar victory at a time.
“Cameras only can show things in black and white. Ours, anyway.”
Taking pictures was always great fun; poring over them once they’d come back from the developer, a joy, particularly coupled with Jamie’s still-sharp wonder in their implicit magic. Actually following through with organizing them into albums, though? A bloody-hateful chore I’d managed to put off for nearly a year, this time. The red album already held Ian’s first six months or so, but most of his subsequent life had accumulated in lazy shoeboxes and (better late than never) now lay scattered around Bree and me in a shiny arc on the living room floor.
“Wouldn’t them—those pictures be better if it was all the right ones?” She popped up from hands and knees to shove a fistful of ginger curls toward me. “The good colors?”
“Absolutely! Maybe someday.”
She nodded once, satisfied. “You should go tell them to.”
“Tell who?”
Shrug. “Camera people.”
“I’ll write Mr. Kodak right away.”
“Good. Which picture’re we doin’ next?”
“Hmmm....” It came out more like a ‘heeeeeee’, since I was grinning with complete, albeit exhausted joy at my unstoppable eldest.
“How ‘bout THIS one?” She came up with a snapshot from the Fernacre Halloween party this year: Jamie beaming as he held Ian securely atop Kugel, one of the newer horses.
“Oh,” I moaned, heart squeezing as I held the photo next to the page showing Ian at four months, fuzzy-headed and drooling happily with his hands clapped together. “Bree, when did my tiny baby become a grown-up boy?”
“He izzzz a baby, Mummy.”
“Well, yes, but....”
But oh lord, to see his infant photos again, compared with the walking, sometimes-talking little man across the house! Where had all the baby fat gone? When had the generic softness of his features been replaced with cheekbones and Jamie’s dimpled chin?! Jesus H. Christ, it made me want to curl up and sob for days and then get down to business making another one. (Except, no, absolutely not).
“He IS a real baby,” Brianna was saying, with a sass that spilled over into guilty-glee: “He still poopies in his pants!”
“Touché, lovey,” I giggled along with her, rifling through our pile to make sure I hadn’t missed any from Ian’s birthday. “OH! This is pure Ian, right here, don’t you think??”
This was from just last week, from the packet Jamie had picked up on his way home yesterday. No special occasion: just our sweet, sweet boy standing in the doorway to the back garden, beaming with a magnetic smile even as he shyly resisted any coaxing to come out, blanket over his shoulder and pressed comfortingly against his cheek.
Somehow, he alone had managed to miss the gene for curly hair. His was still thick, though, brown and unruly as mine, with a tendency to poke up in little cowlicks every time you turned your back (and good bloody luck to anyone that tried to come at him with a comb and triggered a caterwauling to wake the dead). His eyes—dark honey—were slanted, seeming even more so as he grinned at the camera. So like Bree and yet so much his own.
Resemblance wasn’t the only difference between my little ones, for Ian was less tempestuous than Brianna, to say the very least. Whereas she had seemed to exit the very womb inclined to speak (or howl) her mind with a fierce, vocal confidence in herself, Ian Fraser was a more subtle charmer. He got what he wanted by lavishing snuggles and carefully-placed puppy-dog eyes on his target, speaking his few words when necessary, but usually content to wheedle in his own way, or else let Bree do the talking for him.
His own unique spirit, I marveled, running my thumbs against the glossed edges. Bree was, in a word, intense; her brother..... what? More shy by contrast, absolutely, but I’d always hated the milquetoast connotations of that word. He wasn’t at all skittish or morose; when in his element, he could be as boisterous as she, and if he sometimes preferred to play by himself in a group of friends, it always seemed to be by choice, not exclusion. In fact, I’d observed that he even spoke more when on his own, when he was absorbed in organizing a Gathering of the cuddly toys, or making tiny stick-villages in the garden, narrating his playtime in a mixture of English, Gaelic, and (the vast majority) Toddler. It was only when someone was watching that he would flash them a sheepish grin and start keeping his thoughts to himself.
No, see, Ian’s quieter nature bespoke something beneath it, something that always struck me as remarkably developed and complex for a child of his age. Cunning, I’d call it, or some deep, satisfied knowing—slyness, in the best way! His twinkling eyes often seemed to so, so sweetly say, ‘You can’t make me do what you want, Mummy, but I sure do enjoy watching you try!’ A strain of the MacKenzies, I thought, not for the first time.
“Hey-Mummy?” My little Fraser had her brows scrunched up as though contemplating murder, poring over the blue album from the shelf under the coffee table. “I dinna remember this pictures.”
“Those are of you as a baby,” I grinned, “so you were too small to remember.”
“Well....then...Da! He must—!” She nodded, full of budding conviction. “He remembers a whole, whole-lot, then, cause he’s really big!”
"Ah—” My lips hurt as little fizzles escaped from between them. “You’re not wrong, smudge.”
“Uh-huh, I know.”
She had flipped open to the middle of the album, to a series of snowy shots taken when she was...what...sixteen months old? We had gone sledding for the first time, and Ms. Byrd had captured the fleeting joy of it so perfectly. Little Bree’s jack-o-lantern teeth bared in glee above her muffler, the point of her elf-bonnet tickling my chin. My own hat had flown off into the wind, curls a blurry cloud above us.
She turned the pages to the left, going back in time. Cackles erupted at the images from her first birthday, elbows and eyebrows deep in chocolate cake, then she straightened gravely at the evidence of some of her exuberant early steps. “Was I walkin’ as good as Ian?” she dared me.
“Very well! Though he did start sooner.”
“Hey-Mummy?”
I inhaled through a secret, tired smile. Eighteen hundred times a day. At least. “Yes, Bree?”
“Hey-Mummy, where’s Da?”
“Putting Ian to bed.” I glanced at my watch. “Which means you, sweet pea, need to get your pajamas on, and—”
“NO, where is he in heee-rrrrre?” She lifted the album, glaring. “Where I was the baby?”
My jaw was open as though I’d started to say something. If only I knew what it might have been. Maybe then I’d know what came next.
“See-look,” she insisted, turning the thick pages of the other album and pointing emphatically.
Jamie, showing Ian around the house on the first day he’d come home with us .
Ian, in my arms in the hospital bed with Jamie at my shoulder, smiling down at us with Bree on his lap.
She thunked the album down, half on top of the other, contrasting the very first family photos I possessed: just the two of us, meeting one another in the morning light of that lonely, heavenly hospital room. “Where’s the Da-ones for me, Mummy?”
“Da…he...”
Damn it.
“....He wasn’t there when you were a baby.”
Brianna blinked twice, and her eyes went fierce as she cocked her head. “Wasn’t?”
“No. He wasn’t.”
“Why wasn’t he?”
“He was away at—at the war when you were born.”
Seeing the questions stacking up behind her eyes, I tried to explain, though my blood was thudding in my ears. “You know how Miss Della’s beau Peter is a soldier? And how he has to be away in Korea? That's like where Daddy was, too. He…” My voice cracked a little. “He was away, and didn’t get to meet you until you were Ian’s age.”
“Da was-not away!” Bree insisted, though her eyes were wide, unaccustomed doubt creeping in.
“He was, though, darling,” I whispered. “You don’t remember because you were still very little when he came back.”
I turned the pages slowly, past those scattered glimpses of our early days, when we were the Randalls, then the Beauchamps. “Da was—” Goddamn it, what was the bloody story? “—captured, and we were told he died.”
I thought she hadn’t heard me. I cleared my throat and started to repeat myself, more audibly this time, but I glanced down and my heart clenched so hard the tears broke through. For, my little warrior’s face had completely fallen to despair. “....Daddy died?”
“No! No, no, no, sweetheart, he didn’t, but he was….lost....for a long time.”
She sucked in a breath, almost a gasp, all trace of fierceness gone as she searched my face. “Was he scared?”
I could only nod, the tears stinging, squeezing the walls of my throat. “But, one day, he did come back. He found us and he got to meet you. His wee lassie. See?”
Jamie, on our second wedding day, so very thin in his suit, but glowing as he held little Bree in his arms, looking down at her with unrestrained, awestruck tenderness.
“You made him — make him — so happy, lovey,” I whispered, pulling her close onto my lap and against my heart as I turned the page.
The two of them, stretched out on this very couch, both their mouths open as they slept, her cheek smushed cozily against his chest.
I pressed my own cheek against her head. “He’d loved you the whole time he was lost. Getting to finally meet you was....” I flipped over to Ian’s first photos, pointing to Jamie. “Just like how happy he was here, when he met baby Ian for the first time.”
“Mummy....I dinna—” Her voice was choked, tears streaming as she whispered: “I dinna w-want Da to be lost when I w-was Ian.”
“Ohh, love, sweetheart, I—”
The door from the kitchen opened. “Alright, Bree, your turn for—”
“DA!”
By long instinct, he dropped to a crouch to let her run, sobbing, into his arms. “Christ, what's this, then, cub?” He rubbed her back, coaxing brightly to ease her worries, his expert skill. “Heyyy, lass, there, now.....Dinna be troubled so, wee love—tell me what’s amiss.”
She couldn’t say anything coherent at first, but at last, she choked it out. “I dinna want—y-you to b-be—lost again!”
“I’m no’ lost, Brianna,” he nearly laughed. “I’m here, see? Safe and—”
“Mu—Mummy said you were dead and l-lost when I was littlest and–I don't—dinna—w-want—you—to—ever— ”
“Och, no, lass,” he moaned at once as he pulled her tight against his chest and rose to his feet, his eyes meeting mine with an understanding that ached in us both as he saw the tracks of my own tears. “Never. Not ever.”
He swayed with her for a very long time as she sobbed into his shoulder. His eyes were closed and I could barely hear what he murmured into her hair:
“That was the saddest time of my whole life, mo chridhe....” In Gaelic: ‘I'll never be parted from ye again...nor your mother... nor Ian…...I swear it.’
“She’s truly growing up, then,” Jamie whispered, softly rubbing Brianna’s back where she lay curled up asleep on the sofa behind us. “That she can feel things so in her heart…..” He turned from her to lean fully against the bottom cushions, resting his arms on his knees. “It makes me want to weep, Sassenach. All the sadness that awaits them in the world....That I could keep all of it at bay.”
“Will we ever tell them differently?”
His head swiveled around, surprised. “Tell them what, mo ghraidh?”
“The truth.” The word was a ball of ice in my stomach. “About....everything. The stones... How we met. Who you really are.”
“I confess....I had assumed we never would tell them.”
“When it was only me and Bree, I had thought...well, it was a vague thought, only....but I assumed someday she would know. Now, though....it doesn’t seem as simple, somehow.”
“Aye.” His chest rose and fell heavily as he ran a hand backward through his hair. “In truth, ‘tis indeed a weight on my heart to think that they might never know all the dear memories—only the wee fragments, disguised as they must be.”
About Lallybroch. Jenny and Ian. All their little cousins. Murtagh. Brian and Ellen. Names the children knew, but only a surface-version; a bedtime story about people in a faraway land who were now lost; no more real than any other; far less so, with no photographs or brightly-colored illustrations to prove those people had existed.
Still more....might they never know what their father did for them at Culloden? Of the sacrifice and pain we both chose on that day?
“But we must bear it, no?” he was saying sadly, even as a half-hope grew in his eyes.
“How can they ever truly know us, Jamie,” I said, “understand us without knowing where we’ve been? What we’ve been through?” I thought of my own parents, shrouded in so much mystery, so much not known; unknowable, now.
“Perhaps...when they’re older? When they might be trusted to keep such a big secret, we might tell them. Though....” he considered. “They might both be fully grown before t’would be the right time for such a—"
“And yet, that’s the other side of the coin.” I hated this; scolded myself for being the devil’s advocate of cloying gloom. “It’s like adopted children that aren’t told until adulthood. If we wait so long, won’t they resent us for keeping such a monumental thing from them? The truth of who they are and how they came to exist?” My eyes must have looked as hopeless as Bree’s. “What do you think we should we do?”
A pause, then his mouth twitched in a weak attempt at a smile. “I wish I kent the certain path, Claire. I do.” Any light in his eyes ebbed. “In truth, we rob them — and ourselves, forbye — of something dear no matter the choice, aye?”
It might have lingered, the worry. It might have been a cloud over us throughout the fallen night. Instead, our eyes met and we softened in unison. He leaned his forehead against mine, pulling me closer to kiss my cheek. Many years stood between us and that day, should it ever even come.
I was about to rest my head on his shoulder, but a photo caught my eye, right there by my ankle.
It was barely in focus, fully half the image a diagonal, black nothingness, a childish finger covering the lens. Still, it had been captured at precisely the right moment, before Jamie or I had had time to react.
Both of us were in pajamas in front of the stove, my hair an absolute wreck (though, when was it not?), the cup of tea in my hand in serious danger of slopping over the side, since Jamie had me by the waist and was working to pull me close. His head was bent to my neck, his grin sweet and roguish, though his eyes were hidden. Mine were closed and my head was thrown back, as though no other damn thing in the world mattered but the moment’s silly joy.
I cradled it between us and spoke the simplest version of the ache within me.
“I’m so happy you’re not lost anymore.”
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