Sam and Cait story - from how they met until... well, it's still unfinished so you still have time to jump in 😉, but basically this is a story of how stars aligned and how two people fell in love, both on and off camera.
chapters: 42/? - ‼‼‼‼
Last chapter update on 01/07/2023 - CHAPTER 42- NEW UPDATE 🎉‼‼‼‼‼‼‼
- click on the title for the full story and chapter summary or if you've missed the last chapter click directly on the chapter
COME TO ME
Jamie and Claire story - in short, they meet and form an instant friendship, blossoms love that will be torn apart when Claire's past pulls her back as tragedy hits her family and Jamie has to deal with his own past. Will she come back to Jamie?
Find out as we move further with this story, but if you haven't read it yet, this is the best time to jump in as love blossoms in Lallybroch.
chapters: 18/?
Last chapter update on 01/10/2023 - Chapter 18 - A promise made 🆙✨🎉🎊
- click on the title for the full story and chapter summary or if you've missed the last chapter click directly on the chapter
Chapter 30 is now live: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31022585/chapters/87841183
Single Da Jamie Fraser and single mother Claire Beauchamp, are thrown together by the fate of the universe - meeting for the first time in the Headmaster’s office...
Will they be able to stay away from one another?
Or, alternatively - Your child punched mine in the face and now we’ve both been called to the Headmaster’s office. I wanted to be angry at ye, but ye’re bairns actually quite sweet and ye’re fit as fuck.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
An audible sigh escaped me as the light reflected his copper and auburn curls. And when he casually ran his hand through his hair, then rubbed his neck, twisting his head side to side, I almost began to drool.
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Hi, Lovelies.
Welcome to my latest fic:
I Think He Knows.
Inspired by the amazing Taylor Swift song by the same title, it's part of The Love Story collection.
There will be 8 chapters, and I will try and release them weekly.
I hope you enjoy it, I love it.
Bel❤️
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/LoveStory
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Here’s a dumb thing I’ve been sitting on for far too long. But it’s ~spooky season~ and maybe I will actually finish it if I post it. Maybe. Maybe!
Plot: The (so-far-untitled) story of how Jamie and Claire met—Conjuring edition. I promise it’s not scary :)
You can also read it on Ao3.
~*~
November, 1971
Claire Beauchamp is barely eight years old when she starts to see the dead.
She is wandering around a Scottish cemetery, having abandoned her uncle’s pensive mourning in favor of something more productive. She is tired of grieving in the rain—is in fact tired of this country altogether, though she is as devoted to their purpose here as she is to cats, plants, and God. For somewhere in this wet and dreary place are her parents—the possibility of their discovery the very reason she and Lamb have moved here from England.
At this age, Claire is precocious, restless. She is a girl whose insatiable curiosity often carries her places she doesn’t belong. Claire has heard too much (an ominous knock at the door) and seen too much (a battered car, upholstered seats stained with river water), but there is still a part of her that burns with optimism; thinks miracles can happen.
She begins leaping from one grave to another, legs aching as she launches from stone to stone. Shiny with the day’s rain, the markers—a mismatched assortment of headstones, monuments, and granite slates—form no discernable pattern as they stretch in all directions. She clings to the base of an obelisk memorial, catching her breath.
The sight of Lamb off in the distance, stooped with the weight of his responsibility, sends her lunging toward a faraway tree line. She needs more distance between herself and the hallmarks of her uncle’s grief: his rumpled flap cap and moon-ringed eyes; the ever-deepening crease between his brows, which splits his face in half just as tragedy has cracked Claire’s life into two distinct parts. Before. After.
The rhythm of Claire’s soles smacking the rock, of her own breathing as she prepares for another leap, soon frees her mind to think of happier things. These daydreams are not of princes and princesses, or of fire-breathing dragons, but of real-life resurrections. She has spent countless hours between the library stacks, seeking scientific evidence that such things do, sometimes, happen.
She thinks of a particularly stirring case she found last Wednesday: Jessie Flowers, age 36, from northern Indiana. Here was a man, in good health and a father of two, who came back to life hours after he was pronounced dead from a drowning in Lake Michigan. The photo-copied medical reports, eyewitness accounts, and images of a fully recovered Jessie now fuel Claire’s leaps and, eventually, her imagination:
She pictures going back to the old house on Chestnut Street and finding it filled with the familiar music of her parents’ existence. Her mother’s sewing needles click-clack while a sitcom laugh track plays in the background. There’s the swish-swosh of cloth against leather—her father cleaning his work shoes, a nightly ritual—and the hiss of his lit cigarette. Her mother tsks when she notices a sloppy stitch; her father laughs at the TV, having finally caught a joke delivered minutes earlier.
When Claire walks through the imagined front door, they rush towards her without a second’s thought. They are relieved to finally tell her there’s been a terrible misunderstanding—that they did not die in the crash that tossed their car into a deep ravine. That they have been injured, starved—so hopelessly lost in the corners of the Scottish wilderness, unable to share news of their survival with anyone.
Mama’s hands are all over her as she recalls how they swam out of the wreckage and made it safely to the riverbank. Can you imagine, darling? Your father and I, rubbing sticks together for fire? Claire must try to understand—Please don’t be angry with us, darling!—but they couldn’t wait for the police arrive, so desperate were they to return home to her. What else were we supposed to do? Twiddle our thumbs for the thirteen days it took them to find the car?
Papa grunts his approval at Mama’s defense of their logic. He bemoans the lack of trail markers, the ineptitude of Search and Rescue. He has already written a strongly worded letter that questions the ethics of declaring one dead before one’s body is found.
For a moment, Claire is at peace—cheered by her mother’s imaginary darlings and her father’s conviction—as she jumps her way through the maze of graves.
But when her legs buckle and she loses her footing, the fantasy comes tumbling down with her. Henry and Julia Beauchamp have been gone for eleven months—and there is nothing of them here. Their graves sit empty in this field of stones while their bodies lie at the bottom of some distant river, two secrets that Lamb claims (hopes) his hired team of human eyes, spotlight beams, and industrial claws will soon uncover. He has lost all faith in the police. The police lost all faith months ago.
The truth of this pricks at the back of Claire’s eyes and weighs her down. She so badly wants to be the brave girl everyone has commended her for being, but she cannot keep her sorrow from pouring out in great, heaving sobs. Hunched on the ground, cradling her twisted ankle, she thinks of how unfair the world is—and how she is surely the loneliest person in it.
Suddenly, there is a disturbance in the wind, and Claire knows in the very marrow of her bones: Someone is here. There is no shadow or sound to announce this new presence, but Claire is as sure of it as she is of her own bruising knees and, now, of the increasing impossibility of her parents’ discovery.
Through a veil of tears, she looks up to find two wrinkled feet standing on a grave just a few feet away. They are shoeless and purple and they smell of something foul. Claire drags her gaze upwards to find a pair of matching ankles and legs, then a bloodied waist, until she is staring directly into a woman’s eyes. Bulging from their sockets and clouded by death, these eyes reach into Claire’s soul and set down roots, as immovable as the gnarled hand now closing around her wrist.
Then Claire is falling.
She is soaring through a dark and nameless space where there is only a deafening buzz. The noise swallows her screams just as the darkness obscures her sight. The descent is endless, as if it cannot be measured by distance or by time, but only by the intensity of Claire’s fear—which grows and grows the more she falls. She is certain she will be torn in two by the sheer force of her own terror.
And then, just as suddenly, she crashes against something solid. The buzzing quiets, the darkness abates, and Claire opens her eyes to a blinding brightness. A uniformed man hovers over her with a flashlight, brows knitted together and fingers sleeved in red. His words are muffled and reach Claire slowly, like they are floating through a viscous film.
“Stay with me, lass. Stay wi’ me,” he says before shouting over his shoulder. When he wipes the sweat from his forehead, he leaves a streak of blood behind. “For fuck’s sake, can I get more help over here?!”
Claire feels a sudden pressure, then a searing pain. Another man is pressing into a stomach that she realizes is not her own, a vain attempt at staunching the blood that does not belong to her either. Her hand—now reaching feebly for a dark-haired girl—is the same hand that dragged her here, but no longer gnarled. The eyes through which Claire sees the girl’s stricken face are not yet clouded by death.
“Wh-where’s yer brother?” Claire croaks, and she is shocked to find a woman’s voice inside her mouth. Shocked further still by the knowledge of the girl’s name and of the gun shot that has ripped this alien body apart. “Jenny?”
“I dinna ken!” the girl sobs, beside herself. Jenny tries to break through the wall of paramedics but is forced back into a room of toppled furniture. A fireplace crackles cozily behind her, wildly at odds with the surrounding chaos but reminiscent of Henry Beauchamp’s lit Rothmans. But no—that memory is from a different place, from a different time. Claire is a wholly different person from the girl she was in the house on Chestnut Street, or just minutes ago in the cemetery.
“He ran, Ma! He just ran!”
Claire is now keenly aware of the front door, which stands open to the quiet night and the swathe of white beyond. The snow-covered land stretches beyond eyesight, marked here and there with trees, valleys, and rocky inclines—plenty of places where a frightened boy might conceal himself and be forgotten. She thinks of several neglected barns that she, Claire, has never actually seen—a collection of half-fallen structures that look like kneeling parishioners, bent in prayer for the repairs that Claire knows there is no money for.
“My son is out there,” Claire rasps in her foreign voice, but no one seems to hear her. Black spots creep into her vision and stretch, forming ribbons that wrap themselves around her limbs. She is weightless, almost buoyant, as they pull her along an invisible current, back towards the darkness of the nameless space.
“My son,” she tries again, weak but frantic. Every word on her tongue is like an etching in stone, decided long before it’s even spoken. “H-he’s all alone out there.”
“Yer husband is on his way, mum,” says one of the men above her. They seem farther away, trapped behind glass. “Dinna worry about him now. Ellen, I want you to focus on me. Stay wi’ me.”
“N-no,” she whispers, her lips so chapped they feel coated in salt. She tries to steady the flutter of her lids, the involuntary skyward roll of her eyeballs. “It’s my s-son. Please, you have to find my—my—” but the rest of her words are lost in a rush of liquid metal. Blood fills her throat and pools in her mouth, and Claire is drowning inside, alongside, this woman.
Then she is falling again.
This time, the journey is different. She slams against the ground, and back into herself, in only a matter of seconds. The rain has become a steady pour, and—there!—just in the distance stands her Uncle Lamb, wrestling with a half-broken umbrella. But the vice-like grip around her wrist, and the eyes that ripped through her soul, have disappeared. The woman who brought her through the darkness, whose body she just inhabited, is nowhere to be found.
Now, there is only the faintest whisper, carried on the wind from the land of the dead.
Claire had been staring uselessly at her closet for what felt like an age. She knew what she needed to do: the thing she had been trying her best to avoid, for the intrusive questions it was sure to unleash. But the simple fact was that with Jamie due to arrive in just 24 minutes, she was in desperate need of help.
Picking up her mobile with a resigned sigh, she typed out a quick message.
You home? I need some fashion advice.
Two minutes later, Claire heard her front door open and close, followed by the click of fashionably high-heeled footsteps coming down the hall to her bedroom – where she stood surrounded by every article of clothing she owned, strewn across every flat surface available.
“Did a hurricane pass through Paris wi’out my noticin’?” Gillian asked from the doorway, eyes twinkling with amusement.
“Yes, that’s obviously what’s happened,” Claire replied, with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “Come on, Gill. I’m short on time and you’re the fashion guru. Help a girl out.”
Gillian sidled across the room and – relocating one of the piles to make space – made herself comfortable on Claire’s bed, legs crossed and eyes narrowed.
“Alright, my snippy wee friend. Tell me what it is that you’ll be doing, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Claire ran her hands through her hair in frustration. “That’s the main problem. I don’t know!”
This bit of information was greeted with a quick twitch of perfectly sculpted eyebrows and an injunction to “Explain. Now.”
“All he said was that he’d pick me up at 7. Which is in….” Claire glanced nervously at the clock. “19 minutes.”
Gill’s face lit up in a mischievous grin. “Oh, so we’re no’ talking about a work function, then? Does this ‘he’ have a name? And why do you no’ just text him and ask what the plan is?”
Claire proceeded to give Gillian a quick rundown of the situation, knowing she’d receive zero helpful advice until she’d spilled the dirt. Yes, he had a name. No, she didn’t have his number. Yes, he’d exited her apartment somewhat...precipitously...the previous evening. No, she didn’t want to talk about it.
“And what might this mystery man look like, eh? Please, Claire, tell me he’s handsome and not another drab history professor.”
“First of all, let’s not bring up Frank right now. Or ever again, actually,” Claire huffed, glancing once more at the clock. “And secondly, you’ll see him for yourself in 15 minutes, and I’d rather not still be naked when he gets here!”
“Och, I dinna think he’d mind so much, but as you wish.”
Just wrote my first Outlander story inspired by a rewatch! Thought I’d share it on here and see what everyone thinks! I’ve linked the story on AO3 (where i’ve originally posted it) below!
A03
****************************
Chapter One:
Jamie had remembered the various times Claire had mentioned about advances in her time. They would lay together, his hands brushing through the whips of her curls that didn’t fall easily behind her ears and listening to all of her wonderful stories... imaginative ideas and revelations of what amazing things were to come.
He didn’t scare easy, nor was he thrilled by the thought of his world disappearing as quickly as it would, but he knew it was for the best. Time had a way of changing and carrying on no matter what anyone wanted. Despite his own fears he couldn’t help but notice the glimmer of hope that appeared whenever she spoke of the future.
They often laughed, as Jamie would defend the idea of horses being the perfectly reliable transport method, many a horse had gotten him through the years he reminded her. Claire immediately brought up cars in her defense explaining the speed and the mechanics the best she could. It wasn’t til now she even really thought about them as being a magnificent change of the future. Though she wouldn’t have gotten to explore the Scottish highlands without one. There’s no way she would have gone back to look at those flowers at Craigh na Dun if it hadn’t been for speedy transport option available to her.
“That’s how I got to the stones... in a car” she explained. One of the many times they’d spoken of their first encounter. Her head was neatly resting in the crook of his neck, his embrace welcoming her like it always did so perfectly.
“A car?” He frowned causing his accent to exaggerate and prolong the “rrr” sound reminding her of a pirate.
She nodded. “It’s like an…umm…” she tried to think of the right description. So many things in her time existed, yet she understood for Jamie these may seem hard to comprehend yet alone explains rationally. “A horse but it’s a kind of machine that is quicker than a horse…” she stumbled on her own words, seeing his face show even more confusion than before, so she began to describe what material they can be made out of, the speeds they go, the colours, everything she could imagine in her mind to help paint a realistic image for him.
“Why not just use a horse, if it’s practically a horse?” James Fraser said as boldly as he dared.
Claire smiled, pushing her hand softly into his chest; the smile appearing on his face confirmed he was winding her up, as usual. She softened her hand and rubbed up and down his stomach, pulling her body closer to his.
“Horses aren’t really used that much as time goes on… thanks to the industrial revolution” she resisted adding in the last part but she’d promised after being framed and tried as a witch she’d always be honest and this was part of it. If she knew something she wanted him to know, to understand to grasp a better sense of the reality she was already immersed in.
“I see” was all he replied. Claire knew not to press the matter anymore. He must have understood enough as he nodded, unsurely, but he still nodded.
So when he saw one approaching with great speed he had an idea straight away he might know what it was. Well, at least he assumed. It was a similar shape and structure to what Claire had described, the best she could as lass and with little interest for the machines. It stopped almost suddenly, the tyres skidding on the gravel road and without a word a man appeared from inside, hovering shakingly besides the door.
“I almost hit you!” the middle aged man declared, screaming his words into the road. It was a mix of shock and fear. There was no other cars around nor would their be for a while. These parts of the highlands were often secluded, with only haunted souls remaining. So bumping into a man and what appeared to be another person wasn’t what he had expected on his afternoon drive.
“Aye” Jamie replied. His strong accent appearing through more with each sound he made. He turned and picked up his fragile wife in his arms, her body lifeless and cold. He had used his arms to tightly secure her as much as he could against his chest, to shield her from the harsh cold air.
The man stepped back, slightly unprepared for what had been brought before him. He hadn’t been on the front and wasn’t use to the slight of body unlike many of his friends and neighbours. He looked at the man in front of him judging whether or not he was the reason this lady was in his arms or the one who saved her.
“I... I need ye help…” James Fraser begged. His voice breaking at the realisation his wife was in this position, that his own causes had been the catalyst for why his wife was in his arms not stood proudly besides him showing him her land… her time. God he needed her here right now, she’d be able calm his fears instantly.
The man gulped and nodded. Through his own judgment he knew the sad eyes like the scot in front of him. The pain was leaking out like waves of gas. He quickly returned to his automobile and opening the doors to the back of the machine. “Put her in here. We’ll take her to the hospital. It’s not too far” he declared, wasting no time and getting quickly into the front of the device and turning the rounded shape object he was holding on to so tightly his knuckles were turning white.
“Hospital” Jamie spoke quietly to himself, looking down at his Sassenach. He brushed the stray hairs from her face, holding his hand over cheek to cup her delicate chin. She had spoken of them regularly on the battlefield, explaining it was what she had been trying to set up and create to tend to the wounded. A hospital he thought to himself. If only she was awake to him talk so confidently of words he had not yet seen or experienced but had learnt through her wisdom and grace. Aye, she’d indeed probably be proud of him.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapter 20 snippet (for more click on the link 😉):
“What?” he asked, walking over to the kitchen island. “If you’re going to be this sheepish, Balfe, we’ll have a problem on set. Have you seen the number of scenes where my bare arse takes the lead?”
He sat down on the stool and made a face like it’s the most normal thing in the world that his bare arse and balls are splattered all over the leather seat. It wasn’t, but he was trying to make a point. If he was being honest, it was quite uncomfortable.
“Mental note, disinfect the stool.” Caitriona murmured.
“Oi!” he cried out.
“I’m not being sheepish, Heughan. Like I said, I have walked around naked on set before.” She replied cockily.
“Prove it. Get naked.” Sam replied quickly and she burst out laughing.
“I believe one naked chef is all Britain can handle at the moment. Now go on, get yer fine Scottish arse under the shower.” She said theatrically, her Irish accent in full mode.
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