Chapter 35: Hereafter

30st of June 1952, Inverness

Jack listened to the noises of the waking town outside his window and those of the hospital, bustling around to get ready for the rounds the doctors made every morning. There weren't many of those noises that were familiar to him at first, but now that he had spent over a week fairly alert after the two major abdominal surgeries he was told they had to perform on him to save his life and most of his bowels, his interest in the outside world slowly returned in the form of looking out the window of his first floor room in the hospital, or asking questions directed at the various nurses and specialists who tended to him every day, changed his dressings, administered his medicine and helped him with everyday hygiene as they called it, to some crazy extreme he couldn't have imagined, no matter how much Claire had described the future to him on cold evenings in their Sussex bedroom, cosied up to each other for warmth. Despite himself, his knowledge deepened through the use of a contraption called radio that spurted facts of life of the twentieth century on the hour, every hour, in between bursts of music that was even harder to get used to, though he doubted he would ever be interested in such strange cacophony of sounds, not without Claire being there, full of life as she was, making everything and everyone better she had touched.

It was even less of a life worth continuing in a historical time that wasn't his, than it has been without Claire in his own century. Why did these people care anyway? Why was he offered help? He had told them he had no way to pay for it and yet he was given commendable nourishment and promise to find him relatives, notwithstanding that they had assumed he had suffered amnesia, not knowing anyone in this world. It intrigued him, this future, where benevolence prevailed, though it wasn't enough to impact upon him more than asking to be rolled over to the window in the wheelchair he was given as he was too weak to stand on his own.

It was this way, staring out at the bustle of the late afternoon rush hour that Claire had found him, stumbling in and breathless in her haste to get to the scene and find out for herself who the mysterious time traveller was, barely alive when he was recovered from the stone circle. One glance at the profile of the man, dark in contrast to the light illuminating the room from the window, and she flew to him, a flood of emotions threatening to burst out from under her skin, looking for purchase in the embrace she gave him, brash and resolute and not caring just yet about the reaction it might elicit, "Jack! Jack? Is that really you?"

"Cc...Claire?" He finally managed when she took to regard him at arm's length, holding onto his shoulders. A stone statue still, now complete with an agape mouth, Jack felt as if the world would have stopped still along with his heart and threatened to crush him at the same time if what he was seeing wasn't actually the truth.

"Jack! Jack, how did you get here?" Came the obvious question.

"How did you?" He shook his head, finding it hard to breathe.

"Alright, alright," Claire pulled back a little, but didn't dare to let go of his hand while she pulled the small table by the window closer to sit on and take a position where they could look into each other's eyes in close proximity as they tried to figure out the logistics of this turn of events. "You first. Where did you come from?" She asked somewhat hesitantly. Because what if this Jack came from another time and wasn't her Jack at all but the monster she had encountered at Wentworth.

"Stone circle in Jamaica," he answered quickly, now eager to get to the end of the conversation. If this miracle was really happening, he wanted her in his arms, sooner rather than later.

Claire nodded eagerly too. His response had crushed her worst theories. "How did you get there? You were dying. Jamie buried you," she reiterated the facts as she knew them.

"He didn't. He gave me to Geillis Duncan as human sacrifice for her crossing over. She didn't expect me to hear it, the humming of the stones, close to deafening. She lay me down right next to a stone. I touched it and thought of you. It brought me here and I didn't know why, not till now!"

"But now it's clear it is because this is where I am!" Claire's words were harder to discern through her smiling and her tears.

"How are you here?" Jack's forehead creased again with the question.

Claire sobered somewhat and she contained herself, "Sissy."

"Sissy?" Jack echoed, panicky at her tone. Of course the state of the affairs could not be as rosy as it first appeared.

Claire shook her head, "do not worry, she is safe. But you know how I told you that your brother's heart condition was hereditary and that one of William's children also had it? Sissy too, I became aware of it shortly after arriving to Jamie's aunt's plantation where she caught a fever. She did come very close to dying there and then I knew that I had to bring her back here where she could be treated. I thought she'd be much safer here, in the case of any complications at any case, but thankfully it turns out the disease running in your family was due to a heart defect that could be corrected with surgery in her case. Adhering to the right life style, there's no reason why she couldn't live as long as any of us. It's good I came, Jack," she emphasized, as if trying to convince herself a bit.

"You're not planning on going back?" Jack tested, especially as her last sentence didn't sound too sure.

"No. Every time I stepped into the whirlpool, I felt like losing a piece of me, you must've felt it too. I can't go back, I wouldn't leave the children anyway."

"Children?"

A smile instantly spread on Claire's face, "I wasn't even sure Sissy could make it back here, it was a serious risk, but I had to take it given how poorly she was. She could have been ripped away from me in the vortex, or dropped at the stones as I passed. But not only did she make it back, but we had a passenger too. Unbeknownst to me, Brianna stole away from her father she never really got used to calling on that name and jumped at my feet at the last moment, when I was already touching the stone. All three of us arrived safe and sound and I have no intentions of putting them through that again, risk being separated. It was bad enough thinking I had to leave Brianna behind and now you're here! She will be so happy, getting her pops back! We can be a family again," she pulled his hand to her chest, "now that I found you. Sorry it has taken me so long to get here, but I never knew about you, not till Reverend Wakefield called saying a man looking like Frank has been found at Craigh na Dun. Frank died while I was away, from a heart attack. No doubt this disease is still getting passed on, many generations down, but you don't have it, I'm sure, it would've shown by now, with whatnot you've been through. His life was in England and I have all his papers so there's no reason why you couldn't assume his identity if we settled somewhere down in America. What do you think?" Claire squeezed his hand eagerly.

"I think that I don't deserve this," he muttered confused, eyes unseeing as if in a dream.

"You sure don't deserve heaven either, so it must be true and real, believe it," she kissed him on the cheek.

He turned his face slowly to look at the apparition, take in her features, convince himself that she was really there and offering all he could ever dream of. He didn't even care about having to get used to a different historical time. "I love you Claire." Perhaps it wasn't the right thing to say, but he was overwhelmed by all that happened. All he wanted to do was bury his head in her bosom and let his tears flow like a baby's.

She sat back seriously, without letting go off him still, a part of her also worried that he would dissipate in the fabric of time if she did so. A bit more reserved than how she talked when he was on his deathbed and she didn't know for sure he could hear her, but she found it in herself to openly admit: "we have been through too much for me to keep pretending that I didn't come to love you over the years as well. We would be seen as man and wife in both centuries, let us live like that too," Claire settled for her heart's wish.

The End.