#and i just thought man. dahl would be interested in time travel too cause they could actually take control of helios

[krotiation]

I always assumed that the "catastrophic events" Zarpedon was talking about was referring to the Warrior and the havoc it would have wreaked on Pandora (and more since Jack definitely wouldn't have stopped at that) if it was let loose

But now I realized that no, she was referring to the course that the Seer talked about in the bl3 director's cut dlc. Zarpedon must have known about the course in some form and tried to destroy Elpis to keep Pandora closed, not Elpis' vault. The visions Jack saw before he got vault punched? That's just a snippet of what Zarpedon saw of the course and Jack actually was destined in some way, to play a part in this prophecy. The Eridians needed Jack to have this revelation so the vault hunters could discover the map in the Vault of the Warrior which would lead to the "prime instrument" reaching the Promethean vault, and so on. Or maybe Jack could have potentially been the prime instrument if he had witnessed the whole vision

Why would Dahl care about Pandora being destroyed by the Warrior when they abandoned it themselves? It couldn't have been because the eridium was a threat because then they could have just tried to destroy Pandora as well. Why only Elpis? Because "hundreds to save millions". If you break the key you can't open the lock meaning that if Elpis was destroyed Pandora wouldn't have to be and whatever chaos would come next would be kept at bay. Pandora was supposed to be opened in the vision Zarpedon saw but Lilith, being a siren, was an acausal and therefore not part of the prophecy. Zarpedon thought Dahl were the only ones who could stop the course from happening

[imagineclaireandjamie]

The Last All-Clear (Part 3)

Notes from Mod Bonnie

This story is a series of vignettes following the premise: “Imagine if Jamie travelled through the stones, but instead of finding Claire in Boston he found himself having arrived years too early, when the War was still happening and Claire had yet to meet him… What would he do?”

Formatting note: Bolding in Jamie’s letters = underlining

Previously:

(Part 1) September 17, 1942: A Rusty Nail

(Part 2) December 3, 1942: Comb and Glove

(Part 3) 

1943: Blood and Whisky  

April 29, 1943

“BLOODY—”

I was already falling, stumbling over a rut in the dark. My hands crashed into the side of the shed and I surrendered; let the wall take my weight, wished it would take still more from me. Moving, righting myself—those were foreign, even the prospect of allowing myself to sink to the ground. All I could do, I did: I leaned my forehead against that wall and fell apart. 

Proud of yourself, are you? 

Ruined your goddamn career, Beauchamp. 

It’s over. 

My tears were icy-cold upon my cheek. I’d run out of the surgery tent in nothing more than my smock, and I was shivering so hard my entire body was seizing. Though, truthfully, it mightn’t have been the cold, at all. 

HOW could you be so careless, Nurse Randall??

Don’t you realize what could have HAPPENED, Nurse Randall? 

One more such blunder and I SWEAR, I’ll make it so you’ll never work in the QAs or any civilian surgery again, Nurse—

“Nurse Randall?”

“JESUS H—” I whirled and gasped and choked on a half-uttered sob, but from that familiar ‘RON-dahl’, I knew who it was before I actually saw. 

Danton was slowly rising to his feet a few yards away to my left at the corner of the shed, as though he had been sitting there, enjoying the clear, crisp night. I saw him slip a small book—a diary?—into his jacket pocket before raising both hands in front of him, showing that he didn’t mean to alarm. There was alarm aplenty in his own manner, though, as he took in the sight of me: hair wild from where I’d torn off my cap, front and sleeves and gloved hands covered in blood. 

“Oh, bollocks,” I moaned, just then noticing the bloody handprints on the stretched-canvas wall of the shed. My clumsy swipes at the mess only made it worse, and for some reason that made me cry even harder. 

“Din—Do not trouble yourself, madame, please,” he said in that slow, oddly-accented English, indicating the blood-streaked wall. “I will take care of this myself.” 

I could only nod my thanks as I turned my back to him, as I tried to calm my breathing. I shucked off the gloves and threw them on the ground, tried to focus on how to look less like the utter lunatic and fool that I was. Just what I needed, I thought as I hunched my shoulders and buried my face in my hands: an audience for my descent into madness. Although.... company did have its advantages. 

“Aviez...” I rasped out as I turned back to him, my gulps for air spasming like those of a small child as I struggled for the ridiculously-simple French conjugation. “No, wait—Avez-tu, no, SHIT, VOUS un—une—”

“Speak English, madame,” he offered gently. “It is alright.”  

English, then. “Do you have a bloody cigarette?”

Every man in camp had cigarettes, but this man had the absolute gall to look disapproving. “You should not smoke, madame.”

I practically bared my teeth at him as I snarled, “Well, governments shouldn’t drop bombs on people and blow them apart, either, but here we fucking well are.”

Whether it was the words themselves or the violence behind them, he did not push it further. He fished in his pocket, and I was already reaching before I realized it wasn’t, in fact, a cigarette case he held.

Hunched shoulders shrugged once as he offered me the battered flask. “Better than nothing, non?”

Better than just about anything, in fact.  Accepting it gratefully (and deciding any grace or decorum had left my company for good, tonight), I sank onto the ground, leaning against the wall as I unscrewed the lid and took a tentative sniff. Oh, blessed Jesus: whisky. 

“Please, ‘ave it all, if you wish,” he said, seeing my oh-so-slight hesitation over seeming greedy. “You are needing it, I think.”

“Bloody right.” I downed half of it in a single, long gulp. Heaven. 

My eyes were closed and I was just getting my breath back when I heard him shift and say: “I bid you a good night, madame. You can return the flask another—” 

“No, don’t!” I blurted.

He didn’t actually look at me. “Do not...?”

My voice was a pitiful whisper. “....Would you please—stay? I—” For, as much as I was mortified to have been seen at my worst in these minutes since my flight from the surgery, the prospect of being alone with my thoughts was .... “Would you? Please?”

He was cast deep enough in shadow that I couldn’t see it myself, but I was certain his expression had gone drawn and tight; I’d seen him react thusly countless times, usually precipitating a hasty departure. At last, though, he relented, and to my surprise, actually sat on the ground beside me, just more than an arm’s length away. When I glanced over, his forearms were resting comfortably on bent knees. The hat and long hair and beard obscured him, as always, but his manner was peaceful as he looked up at the sky, one bare hand absently rubbing the the gloved one, the stiff one.

“What happened to it?” I blurted, misjudging where I was mid-sip, and ending up dribbling all over my front. If he noticed, he didn’t let on, just gave a puzzled grunt. “Your hand,” I clarified in my still-sniffly voice, taking another sip to hide my embarrassment (bloody hell, you ARE a paragon tonight, Beauchamp).  “How did it get injured?” 

I felt him stiffen awkwardly, but he answered simply enough.  “It was crushed, several years ago.”

“That’s...terrible.” Crushed. Jesus H. Christ. “An accident?” A wheel, maybe, or piece of farm equipment.

“No.” A pause before he said softly, with something I could only place as shame: “An act of cruelty.”

“I’m—My God, Danton....I’m so very sorry.” To think of the kind of person—monster who could have hurt him so, purposely hurt him in such a horrific manner. I wouldn’t dream of pressing him for details of the event itself, but damn me, my medical interest was piqued and I couldn’t resist asking, “Does it still give you pain?”

“Ay—Yes. Sometimes.”

“Will you let me look at it?” I was dying to see what manner of surgical repair had been done to allow him such dextrous use. I reached out, inviting.

“No,” he said, almost snapped, recoiling. “No, madame. There is nothing you could do, in any case.”

You. Something sliced in the bottom of my gut. My lips were wooden as I gulped from the flask again and turned back to face forward, “Of course. Nothing I could do.”

The consternation was clear in his voice as he hastily amended, “Nothing—anyone could—”

“It’s true though,” I said falteringly, the fatigue and the turmoil and the spirits making me half-delirious as I croaked out, “I’m absolutely useless.”

“That is not true, madame.”

Sweet man. Sweet and wrong. I looked up at the moon, wishing I could get off this wretched planet and escape everything, never to look back. I squeezed my eyes tight-shut. 

“I nearly killed someone just now.” 

The words were tumbling out of me. “I was supposed to be holding the clamps in the chest cavity while the surgeons worked and I must have held too tightly or slipped or something—I’d nicked the artery and before I knew it, he—he was bleeding out— so quickly—so goddamned fast—and by the time we realized— By the time they stabilized him—The surgeons— everyone—screaming at me and—”

I swallowed a scream and drained the last of the whisky, every last drop of oblivion it promised. 

“A soldier leaves his home,” I grated out, though every word trembled, “to fight for king and country, gets himself half-destroyed by artillery for the cause, for his family and friends, and it’s a stupid, stupid excuse for a nurse that nearly kills him because she THOUGHT she could—could do this.” 

“....Could do what, madame?” 

I thudded my head back against the canvas wall once, my voice ragged with shame. “It’s good, I suppose, that I’m learning this now, the hard way.” He started to say something, but I was already voicing the wretched truth:  “They wouldn’t even have me if there weren’t a war on.” A sob of despair slipped out. “I’m just not capable of the things surgeons are.”

“Yes, you are,” he laughed at once. Yes, laughed—chuckled, actually. I was stunned into silence, still more when he added, more soberly, but with that same unhesitating conviction, “You are capable, Nurse Randall.” 

“With all due respect, Danton...” My throat ached from the effort of maintaining some shred of control over myself. “...how would you know?”

I was ashamed as soon as I said it, but if my pointed inflection rankled him, he didn’t let on. “I know.” 

Sensing rightly that such an answer was not going to cut it, he leaned forward, clasping his hands together around his knees. “I am often in the wards near to you, do you know?”

He was, nearly every day, at some point or another, to lift patients or bodies or bring or take away as he was needed. He was such a solid, reliable presence, to me and the other—well, no. To me. 

“I speak very little,” he continued, “but I keep my eyes open. I ‘ave been watching you—Non, pardonnez-moi,” he amended at once, “that is not what I—I only mean....I ‘ave noticed you. You see?”

I hadn’t been offended by the choice of words, just mute with shock that he was speaking at all, and even now, I could only manage, “...oh?”

“Oui,” he said softly. “You are....most kind to me, of course, and yet you ‘ave a spirit that is—ruthless.... and that is no small thing.” With every word, he spoke faster and more surely. “You can take orders when you must, but you so easily, admirably assume authority and ‘elp direct others when there is need. Not everyone can do this, you know.”

Jesus.

He wasn’t finished. “You ‘ave a sense, an uncanny sense, for the urgency of a matter, and ‘ow you must conduct yourself to best remedy it. I do not see you daunted by blood or dirt or uncomfortable interactions as the others are. You...take charge. You carry on, and ‘elp, and fix, no matter the need.” From the corner of my eye, though we were both facing forward, I saw him nod. “You are uncommonly strong, madame.”

His words were like—like tingling in my fingers and toes; a reminder of life and liveliness in a stagnant dark. I was stunned by it, by the evident honesty behind his words. He’d truly noticed all—?

He’d have died, Nurse Randall.

YOUR name would have been down as cause of—

“Blustering through awkward encounters is hardly strength,” I gritted out, my body coursing with every despairing thought and memory as I latched onto the easiest of his statements.  “Pigheadness at best. It’s acting; that’s all it fucking is. Stubbornly acting like I know what the bloody hell I’m doing when I DON’T.”  

A beat of silence, in which I wanted nothing more than to curl up and vanish. When he spoke again, his voice was so unutterably gentle, understanding. “You are tired, mo—madame, and—”  

“That doesn’t—”

 “You ‘ad one mistake,” he pressed, “one unfortunate night. It does not take away all that you ‘ave done; all that you are, in yourself.”

Before I could speak, he was crouching beside me, and—Good Lord— taking my hand in both of his. For once, it was me that couldn’t look him in the eye. I stared at our joined hands as he spoke, watching them ripple through gathering tears. 

“There is not anything ‘ere you cannot manage, madame, if the need is great upon you,” he said. “I know this in the deepest part of who I am. It may sound—ridiculous, an overstepping to say such things, but it is the very truth, as I know it. Forget the men who yell and shame you, and let yourself remember who you are. You are yourself, always.....you are capable. You will make mistakes, yes, as all do, but in the urgency of battle and of war and upheaval, that is where you are the most strong. You prove this day after day. One mistake does not undo it. Tonight does not undo it.”

In the last two minutes, Danton had uttered what had to be triple, quadruple, even, the amount of words of our entire acquaintance; and the way he’d spoken them—fluid and strong and true, his accent even seeming less pronounced as he spoke, encouraged me with a message as piercing and discerning as though he’d known me all my life—

I surrendered to his words, broke from them, wept like a child without holding back; let the warmth of his hands on mine, his presence, his unfathomable belief in me, begin to drive my shame and fear and doubt off into the night. 

C. E. B. Randall

Camp Nightwing, France

29 April

Always darkest before the dawn. Can’t even express how much Danton’s words tonight meant to me. Have been feeling for some time now like I’m the worst sort of fraud, for believing I could be more, that I might pursue more, one day. I always had the sense that even Frank is only indulging me with this whole medical business, rather than genuinely believing I had something to offer. How should a man that’s practically a stranger to me be the one to set that fire of purpose back in my hands and my heart again? I don’t know why him, but I’m grateful. I WILL work harder, better. I will SHOW them what I have to offer. 

-CEBR

7 4 3  

I shouldna have taken your hand last night. Jesus, God, what madness came over me? Only I saw ye like that, lass, love, so young and fragile, covered in blood, weeping your whole heart out there in the night, and—Those things ye said of yourself:  they were the vilest slander. It broke my heart that ye should believe them, even for a moment, and I had to speak against that darkness in your heart. Ye needed to hear what you are, within you—what you can be, what you will be. No...what you are, beneath the fear. 

And the look in your eyes Claire, when ye handed back the flask and I bade ye farewell—the utter fire in them? To see that same flame still alight today—the way ye squeezed my hand again and thanked me over and over—began asking me anew about my own life, my experiences—and pressed still more when I demurred, until had to wrench myself away to tend to some feigned task? 

No, I shouldna have taken your hand. I can still feel your touch on my skin. 

C. E. B. Randall

Camp Nightwing, France

20 August

My hands are SHAKING with happiness. A special commendation by the chief surgeon for my performance these last several months, and on top of it all, a PROMOTION! I am positively bursting with pride and excitement. Absolutely cannot wait to tell Danton! Going to run out and find him before final bell. 

And Frank, of course. Must write to Frank. 

First thing in the morning. 

8 5 7  

I cannot stop myself. I cannot. I still keep my distance to some extent, still willna let ye see my face clearly, still willna tell ye of who Monsieur Danton might have been before joining the camp, but still....I treasure every single one of your smiles, Claire. I treasure every time you come to tell me of your day, grinning like a wee fool as ye detail for me whatever manner of infection or pestilence ye vanquished since last we spoke. I do little save smile and nod, you’ll know, but ye always see the genuine feeling in even those small nothings. I treasure that, too. I treasure every moment of you. 

I know I shall have to stop this, shall have to pull back to keep this connection from growing into something dangerous for us both, but not yet. May I be damned for my weakness, but I cannot, yet.