#Travels with wee Loke.

[inanis-coronam]

@haevatein​ asked:  😈 Jump out of the shadows to scare/startle my muse /loke nO

Nonverbal RP Starters

The deity’s efforts to frighten him fall flat, the initial wariness toward the other long faded in the wake of greater priorities. Resulting in his indifference in most of his comrade’s activities. Even when he is involuntarily involved. 

Though he oft wonders if the youngling, despite their godliness, retains the behaviours of mortal children. Behaviours which might explain the abrupt attempt to scare him.  

Unfortunately, he has no desire to indulge in games. So he turns his attention back to the path ahead. Waving his hand forward in a gesture to ‘keep moving’. 

[imagineclaireandjamie]

Flood my Mornings: The Bairn

This story takes place in an AU in which Jamie travels through the stones two years after Culloden and finds Claire and his child in 1950 Boston.

See all past installments via Bonnie’s Master List

Previous installment: A King on a Throne

In the wee hours of December 3, 1951

He couldn’t move. Everything, all their lives, depended on it, and the guilt and terror—

The walls of the wardrobe— 

— Redcoats, just outside—

—And the knowledge: he had brought them down upon the house. Everyone would die because of him. The bairn would die. 

He had the tiny thing clutched tight in his arms, willing all his strength into keeping it safe, into hushing its heartbreaking cries. This new joy was in danger, and if his life were meant for no other deed than this, he must not let the child come to harm. 

And yet there was nothing he could do. 

The powerlessness, the dread of it had him weeping into the soft, downy hair, silently, shaking, covering the child and waiting for the bayonet of an English sol—

“Jamie?”

He jumped. It was English, the voice, sharp. He curled deeper over the bairn. 

“Jamie?” 

Why could he not fight? Why would he only cower and weep? 

A hand on his knee; another atop his hand that cradled the wailing child’s head.

“You’re awake. You’re safe.”

He wasn’t. 

He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t let them take—

“You’re in Boston…1951….You’re home.”

He felt the woman settle on the floor beside him, facing him, her cool hand touching his face, her arms going around them.

“I won’t let anything happen, love.”

He might have been asleep, there in the tub, except that I could see his knuckles, whiter than the porcelain.

God, he had looked so small, on the closet floor. The way he’d been holding Ian to his bare chest, curled in upon himself, turned away so that the claws of whatever beast or foe would tear him before the baby.

I’d stayed there on the ground with him, stiff and terrified but holding him fiercely while he’d wept, not daring to move my hands until he’d stirred again. The look in his eye when he had, after Ian had fallen asleep—it had terrified me still more, as though he didn’t know quite who I was. 

He’d briefly let his fingers trail across my shoulder after he’d risen and put Ian back in the cradle, but he didn’t speak, not even as he walked away.  

The echo of his dream had gripped my heart as I sat helplessly on the carpet, heart racing long past the time I’d heard the bath being drawn. What had he been dreaming of, I’d wondered. Something had frightened him, and badly, yet he’d said not a single word. Would he tell me, if I asked? Ought I to? Or was it better to let the ghost of it vanish into the night?

I still wasn’t certain, but he spared me having to choose.  When he opened his eyes from the bathtub, he immediately held out a hand to me, inviting me into the darkness still pressing in around his mind. 

The tub was large, but so was he, and I was obliged to settle more on top of him than beside. He didn’t seem to mind; he only turned on the tap with his foot until we were both covered securely in the water’s warmth, and held me. Held onto me. My hand slid slowly down between his legs, gently holding him there. I didn’t intend it to arouse or distract him. Perhaps I only wanted to reach the most intimate part of him I could, to have him know he was safe. His own hand came up to my nape, the big thumb behind my ear, warm, trembling. 

“Even despite the fact,” he whispered much later, his forehead against mine, “that it meant missing Brianna’s birth; that I ought never to have seen you again in life—I will never regret sending ye away when I did.” 

The breath knocked out of me as the shape of his dream began to take form in my mind.

His voice broke. “We wouldna have survived the Clearances, had ye stayed.”

I reached up and touched his face. I wanted to declare it maudlin nonsense—that of course we would have made do and had our life together, no matter the circumstances; but he was right. Given the direness of that November morning three years ago (and that in a modern hospital), either I or Bree would surely have died had she been born in the eighteenth century; and even if not, I knew the horrors and tragedies that would have marred our life as a family. Having Bree grow up with her father in hiding would have broken all of our hearts, day after day. Jamie would have taken risks to be near us as often as possible, putting him and me and Jenny’s family all the more at risk from Redcoat incursions. Our joy would have been so strangled, in that place and time, so tempered by war and hunger and constant fear; by hopelessness. 

“Do you pray, Claire?”

The question, asked plainly, with no sense of being rhetorical, took me aback enough that I couldn’t respond. When my choked throat cleared and I could have spoken, I was no closer to an answer. 

I did find myself uttering prayers now and again, usually by habit, or else in times of great desperation, but I couldn’t say with complete truth, most days, that I believed in an answering power. I believed deeply in the comfort and strength of hope in itself, yes, but true belief came far less easily to me than to Jamie. I very often envied him that faith, the surety it could give. I couldn’t answer, not if it would take away his hope tonight. 

Jamie, though, didn’t need my answer, not to that question, anyway. 

“Will ye hold Jenny and her bairns wi�� me in your heart, tonight?”

I laid my head over his heart, holding him as he let his brokenhearted wishes whisper out into the night, my own wrapped tight around them as we both spoke peace and safety toward Lallybroch. 

Aberdeenshire, 1935

“But Mammmm,” the little girl whined, louder than she knew she ought, “Why do I have to stay? Can I no’ just go in the other room and listen to Children’s Hour??”

“Your grandfather doesna have a wireless, Cait,” Mam hissed, looking for a moment over her shoulder to smile a fake smile at Grandda. “And for Christ’s sake, keep your voice d—” 

“We’ve been here for HOURS alrea—” 

“HUSH, NOW.” She loked about furiously before pulling a few old books from the shelf by the sofa. “Sit quiet and practice reading your letters.” 

“I ken how to read, Mam,” Cait scoffed, now annoyed on top of being bored to death. “I’m eight bloody years old, for f—” 

“We’ll be leaving in twenty minutes,” Mam snapped in that whisper that wanted to be a screech, “but if I hear one more peep out of you, young lady—least of all with such filthy language— we’ll stay another hour. Understood?”

Cait made a face at the back of her mother’s head and thumped her back hard against the sofa cushions in protest. Canna peep, but she didna say anything about THUDDING, now, did she?

Still, after a minute of secret sighing, the boredom crept in—Hell, did Grandda have to drone on and on all the time?— and she reluctantly opened the cover of the top book on her lap.

It was a Bible, which ordinarily Cait wouldn’t have bothered with, having quite enough of that at church, thank you very much, but someone had written in it by hand, and that she liked. She made a point of doing so herself, in fact.  She lived for Sundays, if only for seeing which old lady would suddenly gasp in the middle of the sermon and slam her pew Bible closed, turning all red and twitchy-eyed. 

The ones in this Bible weren’t rude words or jokes, though, just names and dates for people that were born or died in Grandda’s family a long, long time ago.

Her eyes went almost at once to that one particular line, and it gave her such a delicious, spooky thrill to see her own name—except for the middle one; hers was Jane—coming out of the past: 

Caitlin Maisri Murray

Born: December 3, 1749

Died: December 3—

Cait (maybe she would let people start calling her Caitlin again, she thought) had to peer hard at the page to read the year. It was smudged pretty badly, but she was almost sure of it, at least the first two numbers:

—1816.