✧. ┊ Labour of Love, an Outlander fanfic written by Liz aka @pseudonym-lux
╰─▸ just a little sneak peek into aoife's life with her boys before her honorary mom ( claire, obviously ) comes along!
FOR HER WHOLE LIFE, AOIFE MACBETH had to watch the people around her take things for granted that she had never gotten. After losing her mother before she could even remember her, Aoife would always crave a relationship like everyone else seemed to have with their mothers and never be able to find it, even in her own godmother. She watched her peers continue on through medical school when she was forced to drop out when the pressure and the expectations became too much for her. She was forced to return home where her father was waiting for her with open arms, happy to tell her that she shouldn't let life get her down, things hadn't always worked out for him, either, but it had led him to finding the love of his life and having a beautiful daughter.
THE ONE THING AOIFE HAD THAT SHE wouldn't trade for the world was her father and their relationship. They had always been close, ever since Aoife's mother died and it was just the two of them. Patrick Macbeth was always happy to tell his daughter the story of how her parents fell in love and Aoife would treasure this and any story that she was told of her mother. "She was the love of my life," Patrick would say. "I was the luckiest man in the world that she chose me. Never settle for less than the one that stirs your very soul." People would chastise Patrick for giving his daughter what were probably unrealistic expectations of love, but no matter what anyone said, Aoife always had hope and confidence that she would find her soulmate and their love would rival that of her parents'.
PATRICK MACBETH WAS KNOWN AS A POPULAR historian, with a weekly magazine he ran with the help of only a few people, including Aoife. She mostly helped manage things— taking photos for the topics they were covering or of the people they interviewed, any technical details like designing the cover, things like that which tended to be beyond her father's skill. The photography was one of Aoife's favourite parts and she joyed in driving all over her country, taking pictures of the things her father wanted to talk about. And for one particular issue, her father wanted to talk about a mysterious site: Craig Na Dun. The article would be accompanied by an interview with the family of the author of a book titled A Practical Guide for Time-Travelers which talked about the mystical standing stones.
LATER, AOIFE WOULD SAY THAT SHE WAS SURE her father never would have sent her there, never would have even decided to talk about Craigh Na Dun, if he had known what would happen. For after arriving at the site, the father and daughter who only had each other would be separated by nearly three hundred years of the history they loved so dearly.
IN MERE MOMENTS, AOIFE IS THROWN BACK in time by the standing stones at Craigh Na Dun. She is suddenly standing in a world so foreign to her that she might as well have been on a different planet. Her only solace is seeing the familiar face of Claire Randall, a woman she knows went missing after the Second World War, supposedly kidnapped by fairies. Aoife suddenly has a crystal clear explanation of what had happened to Claire all that time ago and that now the same thing had happened to her. Three hundred years in the past and with no idea how she's going to survive and get back to the people she loves.
edited by dunbonnets | jan. 2023