The pillow went over her face.
After so many years living in her house, by her rules, and with the sounds she knew, there was no reason to suspect anything. Shoes clicking on wood were not new. Even the tones of doubt or disbelief when she said something was nothing but a momentary frustration. Like flies to her overall plans because she was the Mistress of this house. Her word was law.
But as the air left her lungs, her hands flailing to try and dislodge the pillow restricting her surprised and struggling lungs, her sight failed her.
Not as it had years ago, bleeding out slowly from vague confusion on the edges of her vision until all was blackness. Her ears compensated. Even her taste, when she let her mouth open to scent the air, combined to fill the gaps her lack of sight made in the world around her. This, with the taste of the fibers running over her tongue and blocking her nostrils, was a different kind of blindness.
In this she could not cry out. None heard her. Her voice did not penetrate the thick fibers she ordered based on a memory of color and only her fingers running over the intricate pattern. All of the senses that compensated when her sight failed proved useless. Now she was blind, deaf, and dumb. Mute in the face of her own demise.
As her brain starved of oxygen, as her mind flailed desperately to hold onto life, she ran over her memories. Flits and flashes that kept her occupied so her body could not fully comprehend her awaiting demise. She saw the deaths of her husbands, one after another with the different memories leaving their marks as they reopened and closed in seconds.
Her daughter's deaths, one leaving her blood over her hands, almost sapped the will to live. There, at the edge of her faded vision, was the chance to join those who predeceased her. To live with them again. To be where happiness offered its golden hands.
But then, right at the edge of surrender, there he was. Not Duncan, blessed man he was for understanding and for standing as the symbol of her power. No, he was not the one wo stalled her. Leaving him would leave no trace on her heart. No more than living the beauties of River Run that only lived on in her mind.
No, he stood there. Murtagh. With hair she had to imagine white since all she remembered was the deep brown. The beard felt the same, the contours of his face wrinkled but she remembered the smile. Like the callouses on his hand or the new scars on his body. It was him and he was hers and… And when he came to her that night…
When she regained consciousness, when life returned to her as air filled her lungs and the desperate plea of her name beckoned her back, Jocasta wondered if time paused on the fringes of death. If time refused to hold no meaning there. Life, being fleeting, would mean that death is permanent. Time has no meaning for those who need never rise again, or take meals, or watch the changes of the seasons. Perhaps, she thought as she endured the questions and inspections of Ulysses and Duncan, in that moment of her death she experienced a place where time no longer existed.
A place where she still held Murtagh.
A place where she did not sing at the cairn Jamie built for him.
A place where she left with him, left the safety of Duncan and her home, and journeyed to the edge of existence.
A place where she could be happy again.
She remembered that night. Remembered telling Murtagh about her daughter, Morna, and crying. She did not sob. That was not her way. Not the way of the Mackenzies. But she did. She cried into the hold of the man who loved her and she loved in the twilight of her life. Perhaps the only man she ever loved.
That night, as Duncan tucked into bed beside her, worrying over her like an old fool despite her telling him off, Jocasta's sightless eyes continued to stare toward the ceiling. The steadiness of his breathing put her almost in a trance and her memories, resorting themselves after her ordeal, picked that night. Put her back in her own past.
To the night when she made her biggest mistake.
Dreams mixed with memories. She imagined him as he was, making him older as she knew he was but could not quite see. So perhaps the wrinkles were not quite deep enough or stretched far enough from his eyes. Or his hair was not as white as the wool she imagined but certainly not the brown that crept between her thoughts. And his clothes not as Scottish as they once were but what did she know about the fashions of the New World? Or the fashion of a man living in the woods with his Regulators.
All that mattered was that he stood before her again. Her eyes could see this version of him, the specter she created in her mind to match him in her memory, as he held to the knob on the door. As he went to leave her for what she did not know then but felt deep in her heart now was the last time.
She did not stop him then. Consumed by grief and fear and the promises of security offered by a man who was good but not great. She let him go with those words, his words, being the last they shared between them.
This time it would be different.
She would stop him, taking him by surprise with her hand on his arm or flat against the door to stop it opening. Her hand would go back to the broach on his lapel, the one she remembered with her fingers but detailed in her mind. The one she wore and Duncan never asked why. The symbol that bound them together.
Perhaps it would shock him. Perhaps it would encourage him. Perhaps it would only feed the desperation inside her to turn back the clocks until she could bring him back to her and not leave him in a cairn at Frasier's Ridge.
She would pick up the pin, in the second of surprise her halt of Murtagh could bring, and put it to her heart. That would be all the words they would need. It would be the only trigger they would need to come together.
It would be like their meeting after the wedding. The simplicity of the hut almost made her feel a child. Back when little girls snuck kisses from boys in the barn or the sheds.
Except they both had experience. Ages and times and people and memories that brought them together despite their old bones wearing away in skin that wrinkled and folded. Even without her sight, all of Jocasta's other senses combined to make the times they snuck away together to make better memories.
But with her sight, in the pocket of time she created in her mind, Jocasta could create a memory all her own. A memory of a time that never happened because she was frightened and selfish. Memory that could possibly make up for the time they lost.
She would lock the door. Duncan, as a gentleman, would never try to visit her the night before their wedding and none of her slaves would dare open a locked door. All would leave them to the little world they would create there. A world that existed entirely in her mind.
Undressing would be easier with her eyes. For all the things that changed when she was blind, getting in and out of clothes was one that could do with some simplicity. And they would have it. The sensations would change, given there would be no surprise as to where cloth would fall or how it would stroke her skin. But she would shiver all the same. The callouses on his fingers and the run of him over her would encourage that.
The bed would be different. Like the night they first shared her bed but not quite the same. That bed would now be Duncan and hers. The bed she imagined… It would theirs. A bed just for Murtagh and her.
A bed that kept the comfort of hers, the overstuffed and pillowing sensation she enjoyed. But it would be in the privacy of the little shed he made for them in the woods. The shed she only knew by touch and smell and scent. It would be the smells she brought to the bed that night. The atmosphere of the little place they made for themselves.
She wanted to remember the sensation of his skin on hers. Whether he was above her or she above him, her hands would trace those scars. She imagined what they felt like and how they might look. Part of her wished they would all be faded and white, no red of new injuries still healing and mending themselves. Signs of traumas and troubles long past instead of those fresh and yet to come.
In the dark of the night, she wanted to hold him close as he came and then slept beside her. Jocasta stroked her fingers along the replica of his brooch at her neck as she thought of his fingers bringing her to climax. Of the way he gently caressed her face or kissed her. The kindest and lightest of touches from a man many might consider was naught but a wild beast or a rough rider.
There, as she faded toward sleep, she thought about the chances she might have had if she went with Murtagh that night. Perhaps, if she promised to wait for him, he might have been more careful. Maybe Jamie might have been faster at saving him had he known that Murtagh would marry her. Or perhaps he might have lived through it all for her despite what history bore out to be.
The brush of tears reminded her there was nothing to be done. She already sang her mourning song at his cairn. He already lay dead and buried in the earth.
And she did not stop him leaving that night.