Work Text:
“Dancing their couple’s choice, from the musical Cabaret, Claire Beauchamp and Jamie Fraser!”
It had all been leading up to this. All the hard work, all the repetitions, all that training – day after day, endless hours in the training room, listening to Jamie pick her up on her every movement, manipulating her body with a meticulousness that could be measured in millimetres, working her harder than she had ever worked before. All of it, all the tears, all the falls, every bruise and bump and scrape and twist. All the teas, all the talks, all the texts. All the compliments, all the encouragement, all the hugs, all that love and affection and enthusiasm.
All of it. For this moment. For the next 90 seconds of intense action and extreme precision.
Standing there in that iconic outfit, her hair slicked back, she knew that Jamie would shortly be walking up to kneel behind her, could see the other dancers poised and ready around her, and just waited. The applause died down and her nerves settled as the cheery music started.
‘This is it.’
You have to understand the way I am, mein Herr…
And with that, she was off.
The music picked up, the dancers picked up, she was picked up! And soon she was strutting her stuff Fosse-style across the floor.
There was no time to think about what she had been through over the last few months, no time to get stuck on what had been said, been done, where he had been, where he had gone, who he was with, then and now. No part of her mind that she could now allow to dwell on his callous dismissal of all those years of marriage, of the vows she had sworn that he had broken on what had turned out to be so many occasions, the humiliating, public reveal of his new relationship with a slip of a thing some twenty years younger than him, the underhanded personal attacks in interviews, articles, online, in which he insinuated that she was frigid, distant, a harpy, that he was hard done by and in the right, and that the blame lay all on her.
No room in her head for anything other than the moves she had been drilling all week. The feelings of support and trust that she knew Jamie was willing to her as he danced behind, before and under her.
She threw a look at the camera, fully in control, fantastically confident, and finally free. This was what Jamie had given her back: her strength, her confidence, her sense of self. It had taken weeks of work, but this dance was worlds away from where she had started in week one – an emotionally beaten-down woman, unsure of herself and vulnerable, faking a sense of calm she hadn’t felt in months.
In what felt both like an eternity and the blink of an eye, the song reached its climax and she threw herself backwards off the chair and into his arms, hanging there as the audience went wild.
Jamie straightened her back up onto the chair only to lift her off again and swing her round, roaring his approval.
“Yes! Yes, just like that,” he shouted, then drew her in close in a tight hug. “I’m so proud of you, Sassenach. That was all you!”
She could barely speak, panting from the effort, but she managed a quick ‘thank you’.
They walked forward to hear what the judges had to say, but it all rather passed her by. In that moment, it didn’t really matter what they had to say, though it all sounded tremendously positive. In that moment, her mind was still buzzing with what she had had to say. And she had said it.
‘Fuck you, Frank.’