Outlander 03 - Voyager

He didn’t say anything, but exhaled rather strongly through his nose. I could hear him moving about the room, putting the case of syringes away and hanging up my skirt. The site of the injection felt like a knot under my skin.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Well, ye should,” he said evenly. “It is easier to kill someone to save your own life than it is to hurt someone to save theirs. Ye’re a deal braver than I am, and I dinna mind your saying so.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him.

“The hell you don’t.”

He stared down at me, blue eyes narrowed. The corner of his mouth turned up.

“The hell I don’t,” he agreed.

I laughed, but it hurt my arm.

“I’m not, and you aren’t, and I didn’t mean it that way, anyway,” I said, and closed my eyes again.

“Mmphm.”

I could hear the thump of feet on the deck above, and Mr. Warren’s voice, raised in organized impatience. We had passed Great Abaco and Eleuthera in the night, and were now headed south toward Jamaica, with the wind behind us.

“I wouldn’t risk being shot and hacked at, and arrested and hanged, if there were any choice about it,” I said.

“Neither would I,” he said dryly.

“But you—” I began, and then stopped. I looked at him curiously. “You really think that,” I said slowly. “That you don’t have a choice about it. Don’t you?”

He was turned slightly away from me, eyes fixed on the port. The sun shone on the bridge of his long, straight nose and he rubbed a finger slowly up and down it. The broad shoulders rose slightly, and fell.

“I’m a man, Sassenach,” he said, very softly. “If I thought there was a choice…then I maybe couldna do it. Ye dinna need to be so brave about things if ye ken ye canna help it, aye?” He looked at me then, with a faint smile. “Like a woman in childbirth, aye? Ye must do it, and it makes no difference if you’re afraid—ye’ll do it. It’s only when ye ken ye can say no that it takes courage.”

I lay quiet for a bit, watching him. He had closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair, auburn lashes long and absurdly childish against his cheeks. They contrasted strangely with the smudges beneath his eyes and the deeper lines at the corners. He was tired; he’d barely slept since the sighting of the pirate vessel.

“I haven’t told you about Graham Menzies, have I?” I said at last. The blue eyes opened at once.

“No. Who was he?”

“A patient. At the hospital in Boston.”

Graham had been in his late sixties when I knew him; a Scottish immigrant who hadn’t lost his burr, despite nearly forty years in Boston. He was a fisherman, or had been; when I knew him he owned several lobster boats, and let others do the fishing for him.

He was a lot like the Scottish soldiers I had known at Prestonpans and Falkirk; stoic and humorous at once, willing to joke about anything that was too painful to suffer in silence.

“You’ll be careful, now, lassie,” was the last thing he said to me as I watched the anesthetist set up the intravenous drip that would maintain him while I amputated his cancerous left leg. “Be sure ye’re takin’ off the right one, now.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, patting the weathered hand that lay on the sheet. “I’ll get the right one.”

“Ye will?” His eyes widened in simulated horror. “I thought ’twas the left one was bad!” He was still chuckling asthmatically as the gas mask came down over his face.

The amputation had gone well, and Graham had recovered and gone home, but I was not really surprised to see him back again, six months later. The lab report on the original tumor had been dubious, and the doubts were now substantiated; metastasis to the lymph nodes in the groin.

I removed the cancerous nodes. Radiation treatment was applied. Cobalt. I removed the spleen, to which the disease had spread, knowing that the surgery was entirely in vain, but not willing to give up.

“It’s a lot easier not to give up, when it isn’t you that’s sick,” I said, staring up at the timbers overhead.

“Did he give up, then?” Jamie asked.

“I don’t think I’d call it that, exactly.”

“I have been thinking,” Graham announced. The sound of his voice echoed tinnily through the earpieces of my stethoscope.

“Have you?” I said. “Well, don’t do it out loud ’til I’ve finished here, that’s a good lad.”

He gave a brief snort of laughter, but lay quietly as I auscultated his chest, moving the disc of the stethoscope swiftly from ribs to sternum.

“All right,” I said at last, slipping the tubes out of my ears and letting them fall over my shoulders. “What have you been thinking about?”

“Killing myself.”

His eyes met mine straight on, with just a hint of challenge. I glanced behind me, to be sure that the nurse had left, then pulled up the blue plastic visitor’s chair and sat down next to him.