Work Text:
December, 1968
Inverness
“You look wonderful, Mrs. Randall.”
I jumped, startled, for I hadn’t heard Fiona come up the stairs, let alone appear at the doorway behind me.
“Th—Thank you, darling,” I managed to get out. I felt more than a little foolish: a grown woman, caught staring at herself in the full-length mirror for minutes on end, dressed up like it was her first day as a tour guide at Colonial bloody Williamsburg (one of my more loathed and inebriated family vacations, I shuddered to recall. ‘Explore the eighteenth century!’ I think NOT).
Still, there was only shy approval in the girl’s eyes. “We should be off, soon. Ye’ll want to be there at the stones plenty before dawn.” She bobbed her head and smiled, knowingly. “I’ll just go warm up the car, aye?
I thanked her, genuinely grateful both for the reminder and for graciously consenting to be my taxi service. A bit difficult to explain THIS getup to your average cabbie, I should think, let alone why they should be dropping you off in the middle of nowhere.
I turned once more to the reflection of the woman before me, her shapes and planes ghostly against the canvas of the dim room. She breathed, her shoulders aching to release in a great whoosh of relief, but staying where they there, tight and high and stiff.
Objectively, practically, I had everything prepared and in hand. I had thought ahead, had planned for as many disasters and contingencies as I had pockets to account for them. All except for one. The one. There was no tool or protocol, no preventative that could ease the weathering of that circumstance; the horror of the scenario where I did find him, but he no longer—
“Jesus H—OUCH!”
I swatted at my neck, where a clump of baby hairs (from standing on end, I shouldn’t wonder) had suddenly snagged in the chain of my necklace. I stepped closer to the mirror to try to better see the offending hairs as I delicately tugged and pulled. The last thing I wanted to do was damage the chain.
I got it unsnarled in the end, but I didn’t immediately step away. My fingertips slid slowly down the chain toward the stone, my eyes fixed, soaking in that warm, honey-brown sparkle, the facets smooth and perfect. Brianna’s gift.
Oh, Bree.... Little love...
“We’ve been *through* this, Mama,” she would have said, were she here. She’d have crossed her arms and cocked her head with that fierce, blue glare. “You’re GOING. And he’s going to lose his goddamn mind with happiness when he sees you, if he’s got any brains or eyes to his name whatsoever.” She would smile, then, a bright, brave grin that would almost even convince me. “So, no more of this mopey-dopey-drag-your-feet stuff, okay? Chin up and sally forth!”
My Bree. My joy. Hell, I would have braved Williamsburg a dozen times over to see that beaming grin, the face of a history-lover living out a dream, no matter how painful it was for me to be there. I would have braved anything for her, including loneliness and self-sacrifice. My sunshine. My little girl, grown now into a brave, strong woman.
It was her strength that had gotten me on that plane to Scotland; her courage, rather than my own, that had me standing on my own two feet now, teetering on this precipice.
“Thank you,” I murmured aloud to her. I could hear the tears in my voice, and I forced a laugh as I ran my thumb over smooth plane of the exquisite pear topaz. “You might have saved yourself a bit of money, though, darling. This gorgeous thing is going to be burnt up into ash, in a few hours.”
There had been absolutely no trace of Brian Fraser’s cabochon ruby, that April morning twenty years ago. I’d put the empty ring setting in a suitcase, the emptiness of the setting so mournful and heartbreaking, I couldn’t even bear to look at it. Is that what this gift of Bree’s would be soon, I wondered? An empty shell, the inherent absence within an inditement of all I had turned my back upon? All I had given up?
“Mama,” my daughter’s stern voice said again, unyielding. “You’re not giving me up, remember? *I’m* giving you back to him. It’s my choice. If you refused to go, I would jump through those stones myself until you chased after me, so, see? There’s no possible way you’re not going!” I laughed, for she was completely serious. A remembered hand squeezed mine over the gemstone. “This is what I choose, Mama. Go. I want this. For you.”
A vanished stone; a vanished daughter. Soon.
But neither would truly be gone, I knew. I would have the gold setting as a reminder of the love and sacrifice of my little heart, my Bree; and I would have her with me, too. Her voice in my ear, my heart—that deepest knowing of her spirit, so deep as to be intrinsic to me as blood and bone—would never fade away.
And thus, Jamie might know her, too.
Would know her, too.