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imagineclaireandjamie · 5 years

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HRH?💏😍💔😥

Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.)Part XXIII: Rarer

Claire’s teenaged fingers had been nicotine yellow when the King – her uncle – told her that she needed to manage her reputation. A shamed and orphaned royal for whom money could no longer buy silence, Claire had been brought to London quietly after her boarding school declared no more. To prevent a scandal, a cover story had been constructed. She would never forget the disappointment in his voice when he explained, “Your future rides on it.” She had been different then – lashing out against loneliness and authority in the senseless, minor ways that seem significant only to a teenager.

And while her indiscretions had been charming when there was still time for an heir – a real heir, her Uncle Lamb’s progeny – they were not when she was lined up to succeed him to the throne. At that time, her youthful dalliances had made her The Accidental Queen and The Party Queen. Newsink had made it so, and a nation had laughed, picked her apart.

Now she was something different. Her new monicker, designated by a headline, had been brought to her attention just as Mrs. Fitz’s calming influence had taken hold, and she was quiet. As she finished straightening her jacket and pinning to its lapel the brooch her Uncle Lamb had given to her for her seventeenth birthday (“a hummingbird, a free spirit for my free spirit,” he explained), one of her staff entered her bedroom suite with the paper.

The Harlot Queen. Newsink again had made it so.

“Ye dinna need to read that… that… rag,” Mrs. Fitz said, giving the newspaper’s bearer the kind of look that quite possibly could kill in an alternate dimension. Despite Mrs. Fitz’s firm protestations, Claire took the paper. She looked utterly happy in the photograph that they had chosen, and she recognized it from Frank’s private cache of holiday snapshots. He was holding her hand tight, half of his body out of the frame. Her hair was loose and she was wearing sunglasses, ones that did not really fit her and were constantly slipping down her nose. She remembered arguing with him endlessly on that holiday – nothing was ever quite right, really. Her eyes scanned over the article, picking up bland bits here and there about her ring, a biographical sketch and dashing, quite young portrait of the uniformed suspect – Colonel James Fraser, discredited war hero from a small town, about whom little was known save that he was never quite right after the war according to acquaintances.

“Came back from the war completely mad, but you canna blame the lad. Word is that they tore him up in that war camp – tore him up good, disfigured him. It doesna surprise me that the poor chap turned on the hand that fed him.”

Claire’s stomach soured as her heart sank.

This was what she had wanted to prevent.

“Leave then,” Fraser had said to her, his eyes flashing when she told him that she was going to take them public before someone else did.

Disfigured him. Completely mad.

She wished that she had a way to contact him. To have the time to reach out, to explain that she was doing this to make it better, to redirect the spotlight. He didn’t understand what it meant to be in the spotlight like this, to have millions of pairs of eyes scrutinizing, judging. Absently, she prayed that the first edition of this particular printing had not made it around the jail before he was whisked away. Perhaps he hadn’t even had an opportunity to see it.

She kept skimming. Then, there in the center of it all, was a quote from Frank. It was a monologue transcribed as truth by a man with ambitions that were decidedly political, not as the ranting of a disgraced, disgruntled lover:

“It makes me worry about her health, really. She was erratic in the final days of our engagement before she gave that dreadful, meandering speech. She frequently slipped away to the stables, and I attributed it to the fact that she could not bear the weight of the crown that rested so easily atop the King’s head. However, now I fear that she was being manipulated by someone – or rather some scoundrel – on her staff. Groomed for him to accomplish some ends. Would I forgive her for what she has done for me? Of course. Do I have concerns about her judgment? I cannot answer that for a nation. However, I can pose an alternative question. Who among us would not have such concerns? This nation, this continent, has seen more than its fair share of what misplaced trust can bring.”

Claire did not taste bile or see red. Instead, she carefully folded the paper, set it on the side table, and stood. “Are we ready?” she called to Mrs. Fitz. When the woman nodded, Claire responded in kind with a tight little tilt of her head towards the newspaper. “Throw that in the fireplace. Find every copy. I do not want to see a single trace of the bloody thing when we are finished with this.”

Again, Mrs. Fitz nodded. By the time the instruction was firmly given, Claire was already gone. One room over, she had taken a seat on the couch where she had delivered the first of her Christmas addresses to the empire for which she was Queen. She inspected her fingertips. They were pink, scrubbed, filed, and polished a her-nail-color-but-better neutral.

Claire swallowed, fixed her eyes on the cameraman, and nodded.

7:58 a.m.

She felt as though her entire life was about to change, though she knew that it already had.

She turned her hands over, studied them. She had expected her palms to sweat, to go clammy, for her fingers to tremble. But she was dry, still. She laid them to rest on her thighs, crossed her legs at the ankle, watched the cameraman do some last-minute fussing with the lens on his equipment. When the lights clicked on, she didn’t even blink, just lifted her head.

7:59 a.m.

She brushed a curl back, not out of nerves, but for the mere fact that it had been tickling her cheek. It had been a firm refusal when she declined some sort of helmeted, serious chignon. If she was going to expose herself on television, she figured she might as well really go for it.

8:00 a.m.

“Yer majesty, on three,” the cameraman said, his voice smooth. The countdown was hardly over when she started.

“On this day, I am taking the opportunity to speak to all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live. I speak to you today from my home in Edinburgh before I depart for the Highlands, which I have come to hold so dear. My priorities as Queen are to secure for my people the inalienable rights of health, happiness, security, and freedom. They have always been so, and they will always remain as such. It is from this important business that some seek to distract this great nation.”

She paused, catching her breath for a beat.

Fraser.

That headline.

The article.

She prayed that he had made it, that he was far from all of this.

“I assure you that despite the cluckings of small men, I am well and truly in possession of all of my faculties. You see, some weeks ago, I made a decision. It was a the type of decision that was unheard of, not just for a queen, but for a woman. I decided that I would not put my happiness or myself last. In that vein, I ended my engagement to Frank Randall.”

She paused a second time, fought the urge to wet her lips, and leaned forward.

“I did so in the service of finding something rare. Based on the examples set for me by the King, my parents, and their parents, I knew that love was dear, but I had not experienced it. Never with Mr. Randall or any other man. But I have found that now. With a man – a solid one, someone captivatingly different, one who I was bound to through no particular effort or ingratiation on his part. When I met him, I felt a connection more profound, more fundamental than any I had ever felt.”

She was beyond the point of no return, and she knew it. Fraser had taught her to save herself, not to need saving. Now, she would save him.

“His name is Colonel James Fraser. He served this nation at a great personal sacrifice, he has served his Queen. He has no agenda other than to love me, and at a great personal cost. It has been at the cost of his privacy, his honor, and his dignity. And by loving me as he does, he has now been accused of doing something ugly, of being something ugly. Of being a thief who stole brazenly from the Crown. He stands accused of taking a ring that is dear to me and that is made of stones that were dear to my uncle and that have been in my family for as long as any historian can trace. He did not do it.”

Having long forgotten the script, she swallowed, spoke from the heart.

“While I was with him, I left the ring in a certain place where it was discovered not on Colonel Fraser, but someone related to him. Now, a horrible misunderstanding has caused an innocent man – Colonel Fraser – to be ripped away from his job and family, and to be put into an Edinburgh jail. While some seek to use the Crown for fame or glory, Colonel Fraser was prepared to forsake both, to sacrifice himself for me. Because he loves me. And because I love him – because what we have is rarer than the gold or gems he was wrongly accused of taking – I sit here now, speaking to you from the heart. As Queen and as a woman.”

She could feel the twist in her stomach, the throb in that heart that produced the words her mouth spoke into the public space where their relationship now lived.

“Colonel James Fraser is a good man, better than the small, insignificant man who has attempted to smear him and to smear me. Do not harbor small-minded conclusions about Colonel James Fraser or the man he is.”

Enough. It was enough.

What was rare was sacred, private. She was a Queen, but she was also Claire. She would never not be both.

And so she concluded, “Although I have found the great love of my life, I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service, and to the service of our nation. God help me to make good my vow, and God bless all of you who are willing to continue to share in it.”*

When the lights switched off, she rose. Her palms were still dry as she turned to Mrs. Fitz.

“Get him a message. I am going to our place. He will know.”

* the first sentence of the speech and this *’ed part were adapted from Queen Elizabeth’s 21st birthday speech, which you can read here, if you’re so inclined

#crookedfestivalalmondknight #;mod kate #HRH #Her Royal Highness AU #royal au #jamie x claire #Part XXIII

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whiskynottea · 5 years

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Next chapter of thermo?❤❤😥😥😥

Tonight (which means in a few hours)!!

Thank you for dropping by! ❤️

#don't ask me about the gif #the alternative was an alpaca eating leaves #but I guess it means that it's not the happiest chapter ever?#thank you for reading!#crookedfestivalalmondknight #thermodynamics #the first law of thermodynamics

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ladyviolethummingbird · 5 years

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Is Mint & Thistles coming back? It’s been 84 yyyyyyyeeeeaaaaaarrrsssss!

Thank you so much to all the lovely people asking about Mint & Thistles! My lofty plans to get a posting schedule happening have come to naught, annoyingly! 😡 This has been due to a combo of things - in part it’s struggling to write (I managed to outline a whole new fic in the time I should have been writing the next chapter of M&T) but also real life stuff. I got a new job at the start of the year and it’s a lot more demanding than my previous role (which allowed me to basically sit in the office and write fic for large chunks of the day!).

In saying that, I finally have enough of the next chapter to post a preview which I’ll put up in just a sec. Thank you again to everyone that is still interested and has enjoyed reading M&T, you really mean the world to me! Xx

#mint & thistles #fickeepingtheshipafloat #crookedfestivalalmondknight #outlander fanfic #ol fan fic #ol ff

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desperationandgin · 5 years

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When Will you drop your second summer smut? 🙈😍

Right now!

#crookedfestivalalmondknight

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wafflesetc · 5 years

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Hi how are you? ❤ Any I'll be here for you update coming soon? It's so so so good. Sending much love ❤

I am just fine!

As far as the update goes...I know I keep saying I am working on it & I am. Unfortunately, every word that comes out doesn’t feel right. I’ve wanted to torch almost everything/anything I have written lately... It’ll pass, I just am not going to force it either.

#Tat talks #crookedfestivalalmondknight

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imagineclaireandjamie · 5 years

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I NEED MORE HRH 😩 and Loss, obviously

Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.)Part XXI: A Woman’s Speech

Claire woke from a dream within a dream.

In the first, she was suspended in a dreamless trance against Fraser’s chest. It was warm. Too warm for Scotland. Perhaps there had been some noise (a crash or faraway disturbance) that roused them both at the same time. Silently, Claire traced a single gray hair in a sea of unruly auburn lightly breaking against the centerline shore of his chest. Cool air filtering through the window lifted curtains she had never seen before. Perhaps it was a honeymoon – a gauzy, bikini-clad getaway ensconced in the carefully-controlled bubble of one of the British Protectorates. The Maldives maybe? She had seen a postcard once (pressed into the pages of a scrapbook maintained by her sister, a memory of a beautiful holiday to trot out to make a younger royal grow emerald with jealousy), but she had never made it there before.

She curled closer to him, felt the burr of speech rumbling in his chest like an oncoming storm, realized she couldn’t hear him. Jerking up, she pressed a hand to the center of his chest, felt her facial features contort. His mouth was moving, curled into a lazy, slow smile. His hand was on her naked hip, urging her closer, but she had the sensation that she was being pulled backwards. It was as though she was being tugged by a lead threaded into her spine.

Then it was pitch black (like blindness itself, an endless blank slate of darkness upon darkness forever and ever).

In the second dream, Fraser was stripped bare to the waist and in a courtroom. Scars criss-crossed his back like the map of a chaotic, unplanned city center. Lined, bloody wrists were secured in fetters and chained behind his back. Scar tissue (his past) and fresh wounds (their future). Claire shouted for him (for her Fraser, for him to pay attention god dammit, that she would fix this), voice raw. He turned, calling to her and shaking his head. His mouth was frantic, needy. There was no trace of a smile. She tried to move, but she was bound to the spot (hip-deep in cement, locked in place). The courtroom lengthened, the lights dimmed. It was a corridor then, and he was getting further and further from her.

“Stop!” she attempted to scream, but no sound emerged. She scraped at the cement until her fingertips were bloodied; she touched her mouth. Only the narrowest indentation remained where her lips (appendages designed to kiss him, taste him, tell him the darkest parts of herself and hope she had for a future drenched in light with him) had been sealed together.

“Claire!” he bellowed, the single syllable bellowing from the deepest part of his belly.

Her fingers clawed at the indentation, her toes curling uselessly inside shoes entombed in cement.

He continued, “I’m doing this for you.”

She tried to call out, shook her head furiously, and refused to blink. She couldn’t bear the thought of tears falling as her lipless mouth screamed, “No. No. No.”

She woke, gasping and kicking through layers and layers of covers until her legs were free of the obstruction. The soles of her feet found solid ground.

Edinburgh. She was still in Edinburgh.

Her nightgown clung to the sweaty parts of her (lower back, breasts, armpits, lower stomach, thighs), made her feel like a thousand colonies of insects had taken residence under her flesh.

She launched herself from the mattress, tearing at her nightgown, ripping it off and over her head, leaving it in a puddle on the rug.

“Fraser,” she whispered, taking her robe from its resting place over the settee next to the window. “You bloody stubborn Scottish martyr.”

It had been nine hours since she had left him in that jail. Nine hours since he had declared himself a martyr, announced that he would take the fall without seeking her input. Nine hours from the moment she turned her back on him, left him alone with his mouth full of lies and his daft self-sacrificing nature.

It had been six hours since she had made clear her intentions to her staff. Three hours since she gathered three of her most trusted advisors and explained what she would do to head him off at the pass, to put an end to this (the media spectacle threatened by her ring, the hushed speculations about how it got there and why). She knew that her plan would start something else entirely (a cannibalistic feeding frenzy for information, which she would publicly respond to with a regal dismissiveness appropriate to her position), but she did not know what else to do.

And perhaps, most importantly, she had ceased to care.

She swallowed hard and went to the window. Crossing her arms across her waist, she squinted down at the stables (they were dark, lifeless, her stock transported to Balmoral ahead of her). Quietly, she shook her head and let her fingertips sink into her hips, an attempt to replicate Fraser’s touch. Her efforts failed miserably.

Then she said it aloud – the thought that had dwelled unspoken in her mind since she’d left him, since he’d vowed to take the fall for them both. “I hate you right now.”

She heard footsteps outside her door and turned, watched shadow interrupt the creamy sliver of dim light beneath the door.

“Come in,” she called, turning her attention back towards the stables before the corridor’s lurker could enter.

Mrs. Fitz.

Claire could tell. She knew the cadence of the woman’s step (the soft shuffle, the clank of a tea service on a tray), the gentle way she closed the door and flipped the lock into place.

Swallowing back the bitter taste of a fitful sleep in her mouth, she summoned the question that had roused her, replaced a dream within a dream. “Is Fraser still in the jail?”

“Aye, ma’am,” Mrs. Fitz confirmed quietly.

Without meaning to move from her vantage point at the window, Claire felt herself being pulled as if by gravity itself towards the table where Mrs. Fitz was pouring two cups of what smelled like perfectly-steeped Earl Grey.

How properly English, Claire mused. Fix it with tea.

Claire would have given anything for a taste of the cabin (jewels that were not hers to give, a title that only felt precious when she thought of giving it away). To have the gritty, smoky flavor of Fraser’s too-strong coffee in lieu of her usual morning tea (the concentration in his brow as he poured hers, dropped a single sugar cube into its depths, stirred it into a sparkling whirl before handing it to her with the smallest of smiles, a hand on a bare hip). To taste tinned peaches (to pluck the wiggling, gelatinous, too-sweet preserved stone fruit from the tines of a fork held by Jamie; to squeal as the juice dribbled onto a sheet wrapped around her breast; to let her noises magnify as she feigned a fight against his efforts to take the sheet from her.) To bite into a crumbly icebox biscuit (his fingers dusting the flakes of icing from her lower lip, kissing them from his finger, promising to teach her how to drive his motorcycle) or stovetop-charred sausages (his laugh as he promised her with sparkling, fibbing eyes that he actually preferred them cooked to charred, unrecognizable logs). To lick yogurt from the side of her thumb beneath the sheets (the warmth of their joining evaporating with the leisurely lack of urgency that seemed to define all things on a cool Scottish summer morning, and their tongues meeting to mingle clover honey and berries).

She blinked hard, turned, and offered what she could of a smile.

“How much longer?”

“The broadcast will be at 8 o’clock. Fraser will be escorted from the jail to his sister’s home three hours earlier… they are probably waking him right now.”

Claire nodded, her mind suddenly fixated on the sound of his name from her lips.

Fraser.

It was just a last name to Mrs. Fitz. To her it was something more, intimate syllables that tumbled from her mouth to represent someone to her that had defined love and sacrifice and lust and passion and hate (just a little). She focused her attention outside, feeling her cheeks redden at the thought of him believing he was doing her a favor by declaring himself a common thief.

She dried her palms on her robe, inhaled, let loose a cosmic question to which she did not have an answer. “Do you think that he will hate me for this?”

The cadence of Mrs. Fitz’s familiar plunk-shuffle-plunk step neared, and Claire closed her eyes as the woman’s hand closed around her shoulder. “I ken the man loves ye. I ken that solely from the look in his eyes when I slipped him a wee note, the way his shoulders squared when ye had to postpone a visit or two. The way a lad becomes a man, he looks when he’s longing for someone, not out of lust, ye ken. It’s no’ his cock–”

“Mrs. Fitz,” Claire gasped, tears burning along her lower lash line as she chuckled.

“Ye ken just fine that ye’re no’ some innocent doe-eyed girl. Ye’re a woman, and he loves ye. You’re ban-druidh. Ye conjure things for him, ye ken? He’s given himself over to ye, to yer spell, ma’am, just the way of ye enchants him. So no, he’s no’ thinkin’ wi’ the parts that make him a man, but from spiritual need.”

A dribble of tears tickled Claire’s chin and throat. She uselessly attempted to mop at them with the back of her hand.

“And what he needs now is for you to be strong. Stronger than he is.”

Claire nodded, her chin tilting up as she snuffled back a second round of tears.

“Strong enough to show him that he doesna need to take a fall for ye, that ye’re the bloody Queen. That ye’ll do this for that rare love that ye kent ye needed, that led ye into his arms in the first place. Now, wipe yer face and find yer smartest dress, and give the speech of yer life, ma’am.”

Claire intended to do just that.

#crookedfestivalalmondknight #;mod kate #HRH #Her Royal Highness AU #jamie x claire #Part XXI

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imagineclaireandjamie · 5 years

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Any HRH coming soon? Absolutely in love with this fic and these two. Your writing is out of this world and I can't wait for where this story is going, it's SO SO SO SO GOOD.

This is my submission for the One Quote, One Shot challenge by @notevenjokingfic and @balfeheughlywed. The quote assigned to me (@missclairebelle) was: “Leave, then,” he said, jerking his head toward the door. “If that’s what ye think of me, go! I’ll not hinder ye.” Happy reading!

Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.)Part XX: Cuffed

It was Sunday night.

The weekend was behind Jamie and Claire (along with all of the possibilities those short hours held).

For another five nights, the cabin was behind them.

When he’d left her (fingers tangling in her hair and holding her face within inches of his, the fronts of their bodies melted together until all that separated their hearts was skin and clothes and bone), he’d whispered, “We should talk about what comes next.”

Alone as the hollow bong bong bong of the grandfather clock just outside her bathroom announced the arrival of ten o’clock, Claire sank into the bath (feeling utterly boneless) and closed her eyes.

She ached everywhere.

Between her legs where Jamie’s hips had lived throughout the preceding forty-eight hours.

Deep in her belly where a new emptiness had taken up residence.

Along the centerline of her shoulder blades where she had winched herself up from the sleeping bag on their impromptu camping trip as he closed a hand over her breast, his mouth a molten, sucking thing at her throat.

At the base of her skull where his parting words echoed (residing like an unwelcome companion to her every thought).

What comes next…

These parts of her. She knew they would continue to burn, to feel like they had been pulled taut long after dawn came and she again was the Queen, not Just Claire.

She didn’t just know that these incidental aches would remind her of their time (those precious, disconnected hours where they had blissfully lived without answering to another), she hoped that they would.

A reminder. A brand. A place for Fraser to dwell under her skin, close to the bone, twined together with the nerves and veins and vessels that made her human.

Relishing the promise of weightlessness in her bath, she lazily watched as she willed her arms to go limp and bob up from beneath the placid lavender-scented surface.

“I love you, Jamie Fraser,” she said, taking in a mouthful of milky-white bathwater. It was the first time she’d said it aloud in the bounds of her own room, in the palace where she lived for a portion of the summer. The emptiness in her belly filled (just for a moment), her heart skipped (just for one-half of one beat). She let her mouth rise up from beneath the water, drew breath, and whispered it again. “I love you, Jamie Fraser.”

Smiling to herself, she perched her feet on the edge of the tub and sank until her entire head was underwater.

She had never known it was possible to smile while screaming.

The next morning, the palace was alight with a flurry of activity as her staff prepared to depart for Balmoral.

It was the traditional second leg of the Crown’s summer in Scotland.

She was ready.

For the change in her environment (salted air and open places).

For the change in pace (the unending liveliness of Edinburgh left behind, stables where it would not be unusual for her to wander off for a ride throughout the day and disappear onto the grounds, more casual clothes, fewer official duties).

For the opportunity to put to good use the corridor between her staff’s living quarters and her own (nights in dressing gowns, trying and failing to hold back laughter as she pawed her way down dimly-lit hallways with Fraser, grabbing greedily for his waistband).

It was just as she finished gathering the things she wanted from her desk on Monday morning that Mrs. Fitz furiously blew into the study with a newspaper clutched in her hand.

“Yer Majesty,” she breathed, her voice reedy from exertion. Claire looked up from the handful of correspondence (from said Colonel) that she was banding together with a floral-printed silk scarf, nodded. Mrs. Fitz winced as the door swung shut, slamming behind her. “Colonel Fraser isna here… he’s been– weel… he’s been…”

Nonplussed, Claire asked, “Where is he?”

“Jail, ma’am.”

If given a hundred opportunities to guess where Colonel Fraser was, she was certain she would never have guessed the answer. With a spinning head and dropping stomach, Claire’s mouth tried for words, her soft palate becoming that of an infant (an obstruction in the process of trying out new sounds).

“For… what?” she managed, tripping over her words and resting her trembling hands on the edge of her desk as she rose.

Mrs. Fitz held up the newspaper, adding, “Ye need to ken somethin’ else.”

Claire took the folded paper from Mrs. Fitz and scanned its contents quickly.

It was a moment that Claire would come to think of as her death.

The article was lengthy, accompanied by photographs.

An official state photograph of Claire with Frank at the announcement of their engagement (her smile tight to her own eyes, back ramrod straight beneath his hand).

A snapshot taken of Claire by Frank in Norway (one she remembered him taking by virtue of the fact that she was seeing the photograph in print). She was cocooned in a chunky woolen knit and denim and sitting on a mountain of pillows reading in front of a fireplace.

A portrait of sorts of her ring, onyx and diamonds (one that sat in the palace museum open to the public in London along with various bits of ceremonial regalia in the service of the Crown over the years).

A grainy image of the ring next to the insignia of the local police force and two rulers (the word “RECOVERED!” beneath it screaming up from the page at once like both a howl of pain and nails on a chalkboard).

“What is this?” Claire asked, knowing as she clutched her ring finger and realized for the first time that the ring was gone.

“Ma’am, I… they… have him.”

Like a leaf in the earliest gasps of autumn, the news clipping drifted down down down until it came to rest on the desk.

“The police. He was arrested when he arrived home… from dropping ye off last night.”

The questions, exclamations, profanity scuttling around in her head fought with her lungs for airtime. The only thing that came out, though, was a choking gasp, like food gone down the wrong pipe or grief that became too much for a body to shelter. It sounded like his name.

Suddenly, she realized that screaming “I love you” underwater was not at all like the feeling of drowning inside yourself while standing on dry land.

Jamie.

In decidedly less accommodating quarters across the city, James Fraser was contemplating the fact that he had spent many nights in a German war prison.

This, with its butter-yellow slivers of sunshine, watery, lukewarm tea, and scratchy blankets, was nothing.

Bowing his head, he sighed.

After saying goodbye to Claire (his heart, his reason), he had not even made it to the door of his flat before his hands were wrenched behind his back and secured in handcuffs. His wrists stinging from the overly-aggressive slap of metal, he asked what it was that the officers (three of the local police force’s finest and three uniformed palace guards) believed he had done.

A ring had been stolen from the Queen’s private collection.

His mind whirled, the denial spilling easily (truthfully) from his lips as his head bowed (a ring? the Queen’s private collection? when? was it found?). One officer shoved Jamie’s head low and folded him into the backseat of an unmarked, nondescript black car. The insult hurled at him by one of the officers of the Queen’s guard (“ye piece of shite, ye’ve no loyalty”) coincided with his decision that under no circumstances would he ask to speak with Claire.

Oh Christ, Claire. Certainly, she would know that this was a lie, right? A misunderstanding?

The night was long, and he did not manage to sleep more than a wink or two. His bladder ached shortly before dawn, and he took a piss in the small silver portable urinal on the corner desk. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he shook his head. His weekend of stubble had seemingly devolved into a fully disreputable-looking shading along his jaw.

“At least ye look the part if ye’re in the clink,” he mumbled to himself, finishing and setting the urinal back on the desk. “And now ye smell like piss.”

In the amber haze of lost time, a day coiled around and around outside of the jail until the sun was high in the morning sky. Inside the jail, as he sipped the watery tea and ate a bowl of gritty porridge, he composed a letter to Claire (in his mind only, for he was in want of a pen and a scrap of paper). He spoke to the walls, counting the painted bricks, and found in the truth what he hoped he would be able to say to her (he didn’t take her ring, had no clue what ring had been stolen, he would give anything to see her, to explain).

Based on the angle of sun cutting through the small window, he presumed it was around midday. It was then that the metal-on-metal scraping clunk in the pass-through got him to his feet. Though he had been in jail for less than half a day, Jamie knew what role had been preordained for him. He turned, took three awkward steps backward to the pass-through, slipped his hands through the small opening, and winced as the cuffs slapped closed over his already-bruised wrists.

Two minutes and a long walk down a damp hallway later, the guard deposited Jamie in a sparse room with a desk (an uneven, wobbling thing with one too-short leg), a morning edition of the day’s newspaper (disassembled into various sections and reshuffled together in an uneven, ragged manner), an abused collection of paperback books (though missing their covers and title pages, Jamie could tell that they were the type of classical literature he could quote from memory), a telephone (he could not think of a single person who he wanted to speak with who he knew how to contact; the only person he wanted and needed to speak to was beyond unreachable), and a mismatched set of hand weights on a rubber mat.

“Ye’ve got an hour, Fraser.”

Jamie offered a lame smile and held his breath until the barred door to the room closed.

Seated, he paged aimlessly through a few books, his attention catching only long enough for the titles to register and immediately fall out of his brain.

He did a few bicep curls with the heavier of the two weights, and then turned to the newspaper.

He read a story about a man in London who was sentenced to death after eight bodies were found in his Notting Hill home. He read about a series of science fiction novels being made into a multi-part television program. And then he found what was ostensibly the first page of the newspaper.

His eye was drawn to the headline first (RECOVERED!).

And then the photograph – the ring with its onyx and diamonds.

Claire’s ring.

The photograph did what the mere mention of the ring had not. It brought the mental image of it sitting on that bathroom counter to mind. His heart sank. He had not seen it on her hand since, had not felt the cool metal of it resting heavily on his chest as she slept or watched her wrench it back onto her delicate finger before returning from the camping trip.

He rose and dialed the number without thinking.

And when his sister answered on the third ring, he fought the instinct to weep.

“Jen,” he breathed, all the air evacuating his lungs.

“Mallaichte bas!” Jenny hissed. “I’ve been callin’ ye nonstop. Maggie found a ring at the cabin, and the police called. I tried to–”

“I’m in jail,” he interrupted. “They think I stole it.”

Against the silence of the line, he swallowed, used her Christian name, bowed his head against the wall.

A denial would mean that the ring was there because she had been there. Save the truth (a sordid, torrid tale), there was no good reason for the Queen to have been there (in that damp ramshackle cabin with the tilted porch adjacent to a town that barely warranted a dot on a map of Scotland). And he could not do that to her – to expose her to the shaming of a country (her country).

“Aye,” Jenny confirmed, a whisper. “They think that ye stole it, that ye stashed it at the cabin.”

“Do ye think I stole it?”

His eyes closed as he waited for his sister’s response. For some reason it mattered to him (deeply) that his sister not think him a thief, that he had someone who could hear the truth, not judge him.

“I ken ye are no’ a thief, brathair, which means she was… there… in the cabin. And there’s precisely one reason that I can think of her being there wi’ ye, for the sheets to be mussed in only one bedroom as they were.”

Jamie sank a thumbnail into a sliver of missing mortar between the bricks, watched the surface crumble beneath the slightest pressure.

“I didna steal it, Jen, and she’s in a bad situation if it was there, she canna be runnin’ around wi’ me –”

“What will ye do?” she broke in, knowing in her gut that her brother (the noble, self-sacrificing one who refused to let his niece go without new shoes for the fall or his nephew go without a book to read by the lake) already had a plan. He had called to see if he could fill in a blank, to figure out what had gone sideways and how. And now he had a plan.

“I’m going to tell them that I took it at the state dinner where it…”

A breath. Another. The feeling of a heart cracking, of the nebulous promise of forever evaporating.

“It’s where it started, ye ken. A dinner. I found her, and I…

“Oh, Jamie,” Jenny sighed, her voice taking on the tone he knew his sister reserved for barn kittens and her own bairns. “Ye love her, don’t ye–”

“The ring. I’ll say I took it. That she didna ken.”

And that was that.

He was going to confess.

Hours later, Jamie had penned a lengthy statement about his theft. Idly, he wondered if it could be considered treason when it was property of the Crown. Had he confessed to something more than snagging something shiny? He folded the pages, tucked them into an envelope, and sent them away with the guard to transmit to the court. In the morning, he would see a solicitor and a magistrate. He would try to make this as easy as possible for her (for his Sassenach Queen, his Claire, his everything). His confession would mean there was no statement from her necessary. All that was required would be an official notice from whoever wrote such things that her staff had trusted the wrong man, and that there was no remaining threat to the property of the Crown.

The Crown Equerry would be but a fading memory, an empty position to be filled by some other mildly-competent horse lover.

He was settling onto his back, his legs crossed at the ankles and his hands behind his head, when the hollow crack of a baton sounded down the hall. “They tell me that ye’ve got a visitor, Fraser,” the jail guard said gruffly, plainly disgruntled that his evening of lounging with feet up on a desk had been disrupted. “Some sort of special case, but they dinna tell me anythin’, just that ye’re to come up. Come suit up.”

For the second time that day, his hands were cuffed, and he made his way down the long hall. He was transferred to the custody of two members of the Royal Guard. His heart began a Titanic-like descent to the bottom of the icy ocean of his stomach.

Claire.

It was a pipe dream, he thought, but when he entered the room she was in the corner. Her back was to him and her head tipped back, loosely pinned curls falling to the back of her sweater.

“Uncuff him,” she demanded before turning on her heel, eyes like kindling ready to spark. As one of the guards began to stumble for words, she snapped, “Immediately. I did not stutter.”

“I dinna have the keys, Yer Majesty, I-”

“Find them.” The guards turned to one another. “And you will leave to do so.”

“Ma’am, are ye sure–”

Claire squared her shoulders, crossed her arms over her stomach. “If you do not leave this instant I will have both of your jobs.”

As though connected to one another by a string, both guards nodded and left them. It was only a moment before one was back with the key to free Jamie from the handcuffs.

Claire nodded, raising her chin towards the door until the guard stepped through the threshold.

“And the door. Shut it. Do not enter again unless expressly authorized to enter after knocking by me.”

When the door clicked shut, Claire’s face melted and she took two steps, firmly planting herself against his chest and winding her arms around him. “Oh Christ, Jamie. Are you okay?”

He fought the urge to embrace her, to draw her close and inhale the soft elderflower and bergamot scent that lingered like springtime in the gentle indentation where her shoulder met her neck. He remained limp in her arm, one hand traveling to the back of his neck. He swallowed, made an anemic attempt to pull back from her ferocious embrace. “Ye’re no’ wearin’ the ring that I stole–”

“Do not dare joke right now, Fraser,” she snapped, holding him tighter, kissing him on the jaw. “We are going to come clean. I am going to get you out of here. I have my staff working with the police on it.”

Pulling back, she smoothed a hand over his jaw, tested the stubble just above his chin with her thumb.

“You have no clue how hard it is for even the Queen to get someone out of a Scottish jail. Your kind are brutally stubborn, Fraser.”

He fought the urge to smirk, to agree with her, to joke back that it was what she loved most about him. Humming, he let his nose nudge a curl from her temple, to allow his hands to rest at the small of her back just where her flesh started to swell up into the familiar curve of her arse. “Claire, we canna ‘come clean,’ to use yer words.”

He watched the delicate line of her throat as she swallowed, the gentle lift and fall of her collarbones under the exhalation before she finally said, “What?”

“I canna do that to ye. To make loving me a scandal.”

“Jamie…”

Her voice was tremulous, tears transparent in their threat to rim her lower eyes, to fall down those round cheeks.

Jamie said nothing.

The first tear fell, then the next, and a third, and then her chin trembled as she pursed her lips.

He had expected tears, expected her to cry. He was no fool. He knew that the love she felt for him was infinite in an unbounded, inarticulate way, that the threat of losing that love would devastate her. But he also knew that the love she felt for her country was ancient, a blood right that existed for her long before either of them had existed as an abstract longing in their parents’ eyes, before their parents and their parents’ parents had been conceived or born. He had fought for Queen and country, put his life on the line for it.

“Fraser… stop.”

With the flat of his thumb, he collected tears and wiped them away, fighting the urge to kiss her where the wet tracks made the powder on her cheeks disintegrate.

For her part, Claire felt the whimper building in her guts, fighting to come out so that the world could know that this was her second death of the day, that she was losing everything. Instead, she squared her shoulders, shook her head. “You cannot possibly be ashamed of me, and you cannot possibly think you’re doing me a favor.”

“We are no’ ready to be public–”

“–we would never be ready to be public, Fraser.”

“I’m no’ the type that ye can marry, and I–”

“You are wrong. You are precisely the type that I can marry. I love you.”

“I couldna do this to ye, to subject ye to rumors. That ye carried on an affair, that ye came to that cabin to fuck me. Your reputation would be ruined, and–”

She started to laugh, her body wracking against him as she started to cough. “You don’t love me. Is that it?”

“Don’t be daft,” he muttered, shaking his head as he used a word he had adopted from her vocabulary. “It’s got nothing to do wi’ how much I love ye, Claire.”

“And yet you do not want a life with me, a life for us to make our own?”

“It’s to protect ye, Claire. Ye canna be the leader that we need if the noise of me drowns ye out–”

“You will not even try then? To make a life with me, to try to exist in the world I have to live in. You do not want to fight for us?”

“Ye ken that’s no’ it. I canna make it any clearer for ye, Claire. I canna let ye walk away from yer entire life for me.”

“Oh, you have made it abundantly clear, Fraser.” She straightened the edge of her cardigan, shook her head. She opened her clutch and dabbed carefully at the tears on her cheeks. “You are a coward.”

He pulled back from her, shook his head as he bit down on his lower lip. “Leave, then,” he said, jerking his head toward the door. “If that’s what ye think of me, go! I’ll not hinder ye.”

It was the parting glance that she gave him that finished him off – a once over with defeated eyes, glowing amber and storming with anger, disappointment, heartbreak.

“Goodbye, Fraser,” she whispered as she took her clutch under her arm.

“Claire, I…”

His voice faded.

She was already gone.

#crookedfestivalalmondknight #one quote one shot #HRH #Her Royal Highness AU #jamie x claire #Part XX #;mod kate

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