Jamie's accent does not come over as strongly in the books as it does on screen. I'm going to attempt to change that with trying to convey how people sound around here (the West of Scotland, round where Sam Heughan comes from).
Chapter 3: Agency
It appeared that all Claire's efforts to rehydrate the captain of His Majesty's Eighth Dragoons were largely ineffective. Julian's words echoing in her mind of it hardly being any point to trying to help him, she mopped up the latest of his vomit. Judging by how much the effort of expelling his stomach contents seemed to have exhausted and pained him, she finally decided to give up on the fruitless exercise for the time being and try to make him a bit more comfortable instead, as she would do for any soul on death's doorstep.
Having had all his clothes soiled with various body fluids and no clean ones to put him into, Jack was essentially naked under the blanket and passed a mental state to care about such matters. So it was fairly easy to clean him up of the blood and mucus he's passed down below. Claire held no conscious intention to inspect the damage Jamie inflicted in France, but avoid it she could not either. The injury extended to both the testicles and the penis, but it wasn't as extensive as Jamie assumed it was. Randall still had a phallus, bar mangled, that could've probably been repaired with surgery in her time in the future, but of course it was too late for that, or too early, depending on how you were looking at it. One testicle was clearly missing and whether the other was still inside there somewhere she could've only been able to tell by examination by tactual exploration and that was something she was certainly not going to do only to satisfy some part of her brain that was curious about how successful Jamie had been in his endeavour to harm him where it really mattered in terms of their previous history.
Claire averted her eyes after a mere glance and covered him up, taking to clean his chest of the vomit. His belly she did not touch, he grabbed at it himself, unable to shake the effect of the cramps even half unconscious and she could not help remembering Jack's own words when he mentioned the disease to her, his men dying in their own filth, grasping at their convulsing bellies. Assuming the cool water will at least lessen his fever somewhat, she dabbed at his neck and jaw with a cloth instead. There was not much she could do for him now, whether she re-examined his abdomen and the scale of the infection or not. She had seen too many soldiers dying in this manner already not to feel heavyhearted at the sight.
Him snapping up to grasp her wrist caught her by surprise and the strength of it too. For a moment, he was hurting her there, though she was quite sure it wasn't meant as his intention, not this time. The nurse looked into feverish, bleary eyes, his breath coming in agitated gasps. "Please..." He gulped, looking like the movement hurt him more than it hurt her, reminding her of how she quietened another dying Randall, looking eerily similar, only mere weeks ago.
"I have sent for laudanum," she pacified, "it should be here any moment now. It will ease your pain, I promise," she assured him, benevolent in the face of such suffering.
Jack shook his head. "Forgive me.." He steadied his gaze, intent on her answer.
It got her to reel back a little, pull her hand out his grasp and sober. Circumstances have softened her previously, but he had to remind herself of who and what he really was. Her answer was frigid and distant as a consequence, "I can and I could be amenable to forgive you for what you have done to me, but I have no right to forgive you for what you have done to my husband."
Her response seemed to calm him nevertheless. Jack nodded and settled back, closing his sunken eyes, "that I know I can never ask for, not even from him." His voice quietened with every word as he spoke.
Him. Jamie's name he never uttered, agreement and his word was kept, still. As if watching from the outside, a state brought on by the painful memories of how she became aware of what happened in that prison cell, Claire's medicine woman self noted all the same that at the end of that little burst of energy he became paler, greyer and more tranquil, his palm settling on his stomach, but not groping into it.
"Sassenach?" A quiet, hesitant voice said behind her. Jamie frowned at her questioningly as she turned, then promptly pulled her round and behind the corner, out of Jack's line of vision, that is if he would've opened his eyes and was conscious at all. "That is no how I wanted him ta go," the Scotsman grumbled, shaking his head disapprovingly, complaintive.
"You shouldn't be here," Claire immediately worried for his welfare, "I don't want you to catch this disease."
"Yet fondling his privates out of all people ye do want damn it!" Jamie rolled his eyes, speaking a little too loudly.
Claire stiffened and half checked around. A couple of people turned their heads in their direction, but were most likely too buried in their own misery to care. "You well know what that was for. Not to mention you're inside an English military post, with your red hair peeking out from under your cap and speaking with an obvious Scottish tang!" She raised a finger at him and pushed him closer to the wall on instinct.
"Aye, an' I shall no be shushed in me ewn country!" He complained, but mellowed immediately, taking it down a notch. "For all they'd be all sick or dying at any rate, are they no?"
"Likely," his wife admitted to the probability, "and there's no need for you to join them. Why are you here?" The brunette demanded.
"Ye've sent fe that laudanum?" Jamie spoke emphasizing every word, expressing half his anger over the whole situation and half his frustration with her not remembering the message she had sent herself. "God only kens why we're helping the enemy." He had to at least protest, even knowing it will do him no good against Claire's stubbornness.
"I've sent a message to Murtagh, not you," Claire continued to argue.
"Ah, so he could die as much as ye care." Jamie seemed to be in an awfully argumentative mood, but that wasn't unusual and maybe with a good cause this time.
"You know that isn't true. I simply trust him to behave more sensibly and cautiously around here," she countered, "now give me the vial and go," she demanded.
"It is no going so, Sassenach. Something fe something. I give ye the phial an' ye promise ye come home. Ye've no been ta the palace in days. Have ye slept at all fe one!" He has long gotten used to and learnt not to contest her healing streak, but his concern for her won out.
"I've slept a few hours last night," she conciliated.
"Where!" Jamie threw up a hand, indicating their surroundings, "in this clart! Even I can tell it is hummin, woman!" Maybe the English troops were generally better equipped in general, but that certainly wasn't the case here.
"Over at the Governor's House," Claire pacified once more, only realising in her indeed fatigued state that she had made a mistake. The building was for officers after all.
"You've slept in his bed," the Scot concluded, taking his hand off her in revolt.
"Better than here." It was her best argument and a very weak one at it, "the vial," she put her hand out, "I will administer it to as many as I can and then I will come home."
"Heaven help ye so, Claire Fraser, cause if no, then ye can deal with a very fiery husband!"
"I might not mind fiery." She stepped forward as if making to attend to her assumed duties, pausing close up in his personal space as she did so, "your intent to consent to disguise breeches are quite remarkable, but I'd bet you'd like the usual space for your privates more," she teased, banking on her alluring power on him to mellow his attitude.
"Claire!" The Scot blew the air out his nose, breeches becoming tighter indeed as she spoke. Maddening how she had that manner with him that never allowed him to hang on to his anger for long. In his own defence against a growing need to simply grab her and haul her out of there on his shoulders despite her will, he handed the laudanum over from his coat pocket.
"I will be there before it's dark," she promised, putting a hand on his front that finally made him visibly sway a little as two wills fought inside him till he gave in and nodded, knowing he could not win the battle, but it looked favourable for his side for the war. At least as much as marital discord went.
The nurse checked the amount of the medicine the bottle held, calculating in her head how many drops she should give to Randall and how many others was it sufficient for. It's not like it was easy to come by, nothing was anymore in the general atmosphere of hostility that took over the country occupied by two major military forces at the same time. Most apothecaries have run out, but she might be able to get it straight from a seller at the port and she will have to as well before coming back here. Spending a day on that should keep Jamie happy too, with her away from the castle. Slowly, she turned back and her attention on Randall, curled up around his belly, breathing shallowly and with gaps through and as dictated by the pain. Hoping the medicine will not go to waste by his stomach expelling it again, she tilted his head a little in a way that allowed her to drip laudanum into his mouth.
The bitter taste rose him a little out his semi-aware state and he swallowed on instinct before bleary eyes searched unconsciously for the cause of the intrusion. "The cramps will ease," she promised, "just rest."
Jack continued to blink at her, intermittently holding on to the eye contact as he tried to gather some strength to speak, "last rites?" He acknowledged her having stopped to try to rehydrate him.
"Do you want a reverend?" Claire asked somewhat surprised. Jack had made allusion to disapproving the deeply religious before and besides, if god was truly just, should a man like him ever get into heaven? However, if that was what he wanted, she would send for a minister.
The Englishman shook his head, validating her assumptions of his spirituality, "if I am dying, then I am allowed to say his name." The corners of his mouth turned up a little and his eyes bore into hers as he reverentially uttered, "Jamie." He was looking into her soul for a similar resonance that man's name set off inside both of them, passion, admiration, idolization, want. Claire wouldn't add love to his part, though she knew from Jamie that Jack claimed to have the sentiment. A sick, twisted version that will thankfully die with him and they'll never have to worry about it again, or the link between them that seemed to never be severed for good, no matter where they were.
The thought sobered her. There were others she could maybe save instead of giving her attention to the undeserving, may it be destinies entwined and unshakable similarities to Frank or not. "Good bye Jack." She rose, feeling like the burden she had been carrying on her shoulders has been lifted.
His gaze was reluctant to let her go of her. "Jamie," he repeated, quieter and more lethargic than before. His blinking eyes struggled to keep open. "Jamie..."
"Damn you and your idiotic mind on how to treat a love one," she spat, aggravated by his audacity of him wishing for or imagining her husband by his deathbed. "Here, you sleep." On a whim, she poured a few more drops of laudanum into his mouth and placed a cup with water, spiced with yet more of the precious medicine measured into it for his later use if necessary. The nurse would rather have him comatose, than dying with that name on his lips. She waited a few moments till she could take satisfaction in how he stilled, then sighed. Possibly overdosing him didn't give her as much of a satisfaction as it should've. Or maybe it was that she was still laden with the impossibility of treating the others without twentieth century medical innovations. Try though, she might, she was Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser, combat nurse, healer, witch, spy, informant and lover extraordinaire after all. At that last bit, she found the determination she needed to tend to the other suffering soldiers.
Tbc