She could feel the rain water dripping down her back, cold at the start of the drip, but a warm little pool by the time it reached the small of her back, kept warm by the combination of the tartan wrapped around her and the body heat of the man to whom it belonged. She could feel her thighs chaffing with each trot of the horse. She had never ridden a horse before.

The ride was long, and for the most part silent, it gave the girl plenty of time to question how the hell she had ended up in this situation, cold, wet, afraid and surrounded by strangers. Her name was Elsie May Duncan, and from what she could tell, she appeared to have travelled through time without the aid of a Tardis.

It sounds utterly ridiculous, and if she were able to locate an insane asylums or looney bins, or whatever the god damned politically correct term was in this time then the girl would happily submit herself to it so as to have a psychiatric evaluation. She believed that something had happened that had caused her to crack. Admittedly, it hadn't been the best of days for Elsie even before she was hurtled back through time and shot at by red coats, but now we're skipping ahead. To truly understand our protagonist we need to go back to the beginning.

Elsie Duncan, second of her name, was born in London on October nineteenth 1995 and it was in London where she spent the early years of her life. Elsie's mother, Anne, was London born and raised, a high flying business woman in some kind of field that Elsie had been too young to understand and no one ever really explained to her in any depth. It was from her father where she got her name. Angus Duncan was from the Scottish Isle of Skye and that was where he spent the first nineteen years of his life, but in his desperation to escape the wilderness of rural Scotland he had run away to the big city to become a lawyer and never returned other than for short visits.

Elsie didn't remember much of her London Childhood, but from what she could remember it was a happy one. She had been taken on picnics in the park, and stories were told to her, while she was cosied with her parents around the old fireplace in the living room of the creaky old flat, in the winter. Elsie was eight years old when tragedy first stuck her previously unmarred childhood. It had been a normal day, she had had her breakfast and was packed off to school. It was before lunch time that she was sent for, her father had suffered from a heart attack while at work, the result of a heart condition gone undetected. He was taken away from her and she hadn't had a chance to say goodbye.

This period of time, after her father's dead, Elsie could recall vividly, as though watching it back in HD, the emotions and memories were painfully clear. She remembered her, previously, strong and capable mother falling apart. She could remember bills going unpaid and dinners going unmade. She remember being hungry and scared for the firsts time in her life, and she remembered not liking either sensation much at all. The cupboards were empty because her mother couldn't bring herself to go shopping. She didn't go to work. She didn't cook, or clean. She didn't do anything at all. She just sat there, in her husband's chair, staring out of the window to the London streets, unseeing.

The months of hunger and fear when her mother wouldn't respond to her questions or hug her when she cried felt endless to Elsie, but in truth it only went on for three or four months. The depression that Anne Duncan suffered from was all consuming and something that she had no idea how to begin to recover from. Elsie had been the one to find Anne's body. She had been the one to call the ambulance when she arrived home from school on a beautifully bright and sunny Tuesday afternoon to find her mother passed out in a pool of her own vomit on the living room floor.

It was something that haunted Elsie for decades to come. You see, her father hadn't had a choice when it came to leaving Elsie alone in this world, but her mother had. She could have tried harder to pull herself back, she could have loved Elsie more than she hated living in a world without her husband. But she didn't and she opted out, and that was something which took Elsie falling deeply and head over heels, into an all-consuming love herself, to even begin to understand or start to start forgiving.

Being an orphan hadn't been what Elsie expected. She wasn't like any of the heroines from the novels she had read. She didn't feel like Mary from The Secret Garden, or Sara from A Little Princess. She couldn't even relate to her favourite orphan, Harry Potter, or any of the orphaned Disney princesses. Instead Elsie just felt a sort of hollow emptiness.

In the month after her mother's death not a word passed Elsie's mouth. She watched silently as the ambulance people wheeled her mother's body away, never to be seen again. During her month of silence Elsie's whole life was turned on its head. Her life in London was packed up, loose ends were tied and Elsie was taken from the urban of London to the quaint wilderness of Skye. Her Granny, for all that she was the woman for whom she was named, hadn't been someone that Elsie had known very well before being thrust upon her. Of course there had been the obligatory family visits, the two weeks they spent there every other summer, the last of which had been perhaps two summers before her father had died. That was, however, the only interaction other than phone calls and birthday cards that Elsie had ever had with the woman.

Elsie Duncan – the first of her name – became what Elsie wanted to be when she grew up. The woman had the patience of a saint. She didn't try to force Elsie into speaking before she was ready. She just filled the silence with chatter and warmth and freshly baked bread and scones, seasoned with her own herbs. Yes Granny had been exactly what Elsie had needed, warm patient and loving, and in not pushing her, the old woman gained Elsie's respect.

Granny had always been old. She was already in her early seventies when she brought Elsie home with her to Skye, her husband, had passed away years earlier when he was a fairly young man, a heart attack similar to the one that would claim his son. She had long since retired from her years of service as a nurse and a midwife, though she would still go when called, if there was a particularly difficult birth. Regardless of her age and the stigma that retirement was meant for relaxing, granny was very active and she liked to include little Elsie in her activities. Her early years were informative as she learned about all of the herbs in Granny's garden and what they could do, other than flavouring your bread. Granny had Elsie keeping herb and berry journals from the start, claiming that this was valuable information that one day she could need. As summers and winters came and went and Elsie grew from a little girl into a young woman she kept herself immersed in her grandmother's work. She may not ever need to know the properties of peppermint other than that it was great for digestion and helped her period pains, but regardless of that it was there in her journal.

Despite the fact that Elsie had spent so much of her life in Scotland, the lilt of her London accent never quite left her. Of course there were certain words and phrases that took on a Scottish colouring, but for the most part she kept a little piece of Englishness with her. Her Granny claimed that it was because it was an integral part of her identity, never to be forgotten. It was her mother's side of the family. After all, her Scottishness was stamped all over her with a name like Elsie Duncan.

Her childhood on Skye was peaceful. Despite the sadness of her early life, Elsie wouldn't have changed a thing about the years that she spent with Granny, learning about the wildflowers and berries. She helped to deliver her first lamb the spring after she had arrived, and was completely enthralled by it. Bringing new life into the world, it seemed like a miracle to little Elsie, honestly, it still seemed like a miracle to grown up Elsie which was why she decided to study to become a veterinarian when the time came for her to go away to University.

Elsie was still only seventeen years old when her acceptance to study Veterinary and Animal Care at Aberdeen University. Granny had been over the moon, she couldn't have been any more proud. Despite now being in her early 80s granny was still very mobile. While Elsie had her reservations about leaving her on her own, the old lady wouldn't hear anything of it. She sent Elsie off to the big bad Grey City to "follow her dreams and go down a road of self-discovery". Whatever that was supposed to mean.

Aberdeen was different to Skye. Very different. For one thing, people only spoke English, Elsie was used to half of the population around her slipping into Gaelic despite the fact that she could, for the most part, understand what was being said, Elsie had never picked up speaking Gaelic. She could read all of the signs, but that was because they were right there alongside the English words for her to learn. In Aberdeen the signs didn't have a Gaelic translation beside them, they were just in English. No one looked at her funnily because of her accent. People didn't assume that she was a tourist when they heard her speak, like they always had back home. There were so many different types of people, from all over Scotland, all over the UK, heck from all over the world.

Elsie loved university, she threw herself into it head first and embraced it as much as she could. She did the obligatory drunk fresher, thing. She met everyone and anyone, then a few weeks in knuckled down to work, because Uni Essays were harder than school ones and you had to format them correctly. It was in the library that she met Graeme McKinnon. He was in his final year of a History degree and was writing his dissertation, which meant he never left the place. Elise wasn't sure how they got talking, but they did. And talking in the library turned into coffee, which turned into dinner, which turned into drinks, and a few weeks later turned into a boyfriend.

Elsie hadn't been looking for a relationship! That was what she had told Granny when she came home for Christmas, full of big city anecdotes and Aberdeen Butteries. She spent her winter break cosied up by the fire with cups of tea, clean sheets and clothes and basking in that feeling of being Home. Looking back on it, Elsie wished that she had basked in it just a little more than she had, because come Hogmanay she was back off to University and her boyfriend, so full of excitement for the future that she barely looked back at Granny.

It was March when she got the call. She had been in a lecture at the time and had to excuse herself the second time her phone started buzzing in the space of a few minutes. Her world came crumbling down around her, painfully, terrifyingly. Elsie could hear the keening cry that was echoing around the corridor, but she didn't recognise that it was coming from her.

Granny was dead.

Her Granny. Her namesake. The woman who had raised her and taught her about the world was dead. The person on the phone had told her that it was peacefully and in her sleep, if that made her feel any better. In the moment it hadn't. Because Elsie was just eighteen years old, not even finished her first year at Uni and that was it. She was completely alone in the world.

She didn't have anyone.

Graeme was an absolute Godsend in those next few weeks. He went with her to Skye, he wouldn't hear anything about how he should be working on his dissertation or his final essays, or anything. He was just there for her. The funeral was beautiful, it was everything that granny would have wanted. People spoke, told tales of her life, and the wonderful things that she had done for them. Elsie gave a eulogy that made people laugh and cry in all the right bits.

Elsie left the clearing out of things until the summer. She couldn't stay in Skye, not right then. Not when it felt all wrong because it was home, but it was home without the person who made it home. And that wasn't much of a home at all.

Summer came and went and Elsie had to get on with her life. She moved out of her student flat and, at his suggestion, in with Graeme. He had graduated with First Class Honours over the summer and was staying on at Uni to do his PhD and expanding his dissertation thesis about 1700s Scotland, right before the changing of the ways. It was interesting, and Elsie found herself learning an awful lot about her boyfriend's studies over dinner and their evening cups of tea.

The relationship was easy. They spent time together, they spent time apart, they were both busy with their studies and part time jobs that had to be taken on to keep themselves afloat. Years came and went and before she knew it Elsie was twenty one years old and starting her final year of uni. She was also filled with a niggling feeling that something was wrong. Something that she couldn't put her finger on, so she kept her head buried deep in the sand.

It had all came to a head when they were visiting his family in Inverness for his sister's wedding. A wedding on Halloween would have been utterly ridiculous for anyone else, but it just fitted Allison down to a tee. She had always enjoyed the supernatural. Graeme had told Elsie plenty of stories about their childhood and the things that had gotten up to around All Hallows Eve. It should have been such a happy occasion.

It was the morning of the wedding and Graeme had had a face like thunder. It had been that way since they had woken up. Elsie had been busy getting ready. She was pleating her hair, pinning it in the right way so that it sat perfectly and wouldn't budge despite the outdoor wedding. She had her make up done, her full length lilac gown zipped and her pashmina was wrapped around her shoulders before she turned to Graeme.

"Right, out with it. Your face's been tripping you from the moment you got up, what's wrong?" She demanded of him, bluntly, her hand on her hip. She thought that, maybe, if she acted like this was something they could brush off, then it would be something that they could brush off.

The look on his face said otherwise. He hesitated before speaking. "Elsie, maybe now isn't the best time for this."

Her face fell a little, but she tried not to let the realisation slip into her consciousness. Surely it couldn't be what she was thinking. "Don't be daft, there's not time like the present and you can't spend Ali's wedding with a long face, so why don't you just say it?" There was a steely edge to her voice at that last statement. She didn't really want him to say the words but in her foolish confrontation she could see what was going to happen, where this was going.

His face crumpled. "Elsie things haven't been right for a while." She could feel her head spinning as he started what was clearly a well thought out break up speech. They had gotten together so young, she had only been seventeen, he only twenty one. Elsie had just turned twenty one now and honestly she didn't think that it seemed all that young. Still she couldn't fault his argument, they didn't look at each other the way that Allison and Mark did. Still it left her reeling. She sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs.

She didn't have anyone left.

Graeme had been the family that she had built for herself in the wake of her grandmother's death, she had spent Christmases and summers with her parents and siblings, exploring Inverness and going on the occasional boat trip looking for Nessie.

She had a few friends of course, but none whom she could say she was particularly close to, certainly no one she would feel comfortable asking for help at a time like this.

The silence was ringing in her ears, he couldn't say anything and right now she didn't have any words for him. "You should get going. You're meant to be showing people to their seats." Her voice sounded foreign to her own ears. Rough. It was clear that she was holding back tears. "If you can, don't let Ali know I wasn't there… it's her day. Let's not make this about us and your awful timing." The laughter that bubbled at the back of her throat was as close as she got to hysterics.

"Elsie, you should still come to the ceremony," He rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably, and Elsie looked at him. Really looked at him, he was everything that she had thought about when she was younger, he was tall and handsome, he had such lovely blonde hair and blue eyes. She broke their eye contact as he continued. "Ali invited you, she wants you there. You know how much she loves you."

Elsie nodded her head. "Graeme you've just stripped away the closest thing to family I have left in my life." She heard the crack in her voice and she could feel the hot tears burning her eyes. "Don't you dare try to guilt me into going with you to this wedding. Because it will end with a scene, and Ali will never forgive either of us." Elsie let out a short laugh. "Not that it matters for me, I suppose. It isn't like I'll be seeing her around anymore." The hurt flashed in her eyes, and she could feel the undercurrent of anger bubbling inside her. "Could you have had worse timing?" She demanded of him.

Anger flashed in Graeme's eyes. "You're the one who demanded I come out with it! Don't act like you hadn't seen this coming."

Elsie raised her arms to silence him. "I can't do this right now. I can't speak to you like this." She pulled the soft fabric of her pashmina around her shoulders as she got to her feet. "I'm going for a walk. Give your sister my best wishes and I hope it's a beautiful ceremony. Do try not to shack up with one of the bridesmaids now that you're a free agent, won't you?"

Her remark was scathing and petty as she threw it over her shoulder, ignoring his indignant spluttered reply as she left out the back door.

She couldn't feel anything as she walked away, not thinking about direction, or distance or how she would get back. She didn't know how long she had been walking before she started to feel the breeze on her face. It was the breeze which caused the tears in her eyes, she told herself. She wasn't crying. She couldn't let herself, no one was dead. She had known that it was coming, if she was being honest with herself she had, but knowing that something was coming and it actually happening were two different things.

She had been so dependent on Graeme. He was her rock, he was the one she would talk to about everything. He would proof read her essays for university, he would listen to her when she would get excited about the pieces of practical work she had done. He would let her prattle on, and in return she would listen to his research. He went with her to Morrison's for their weekly shop evert Sunday afternoon. He taught her how to make perfect roast tatties for their Sunday dinner. They would go for walks to the park in the rain to feed the ducks and eat ice cream, because in cold weather your ice cream didn't melt. They lived together. Who was going to keep the flat? Could she even afford to keep their little one bed on her own? Prices in Aberdeen were extortionate. She was going to have to find a room in a flat with other people. People who wouldn't want to adhere to their TV schedule and know that 9pm was when they had the last cup of tea of the day. Only it wouldn't be a 'They' anymore. Just a Her.

Elsie's mind was racing, and she kept walking and walking until she came to the top of a hill. She was out of breath, though if that was from the exertion of walking up the hill or from the sobs that were being ripped from her chest she wasn't entirely sure. There at the top of the hill was a circle of stones there. In the back of her mind she recognised that they were familiar to her, she was certain that Graeme would have told her about it before, but she didn't much care right now. It felt to her like she had walked far enough and reached the destination she needed to be for now.

Stumbling over to the largest stone, she sat down amidst the grass and the dirt. Her pretty lilac dress was likely getting ruined but she didn't care. She had paused and that was all it took: the floodgates opened and she allowed her heart to break. She cried over the loss of her best friend, and the future that she had hoped for with him. She cried because it was unfair that she should have to be so dependent on a relationship at such an early age, and she cried because she had no idea what she was going to do. She cried until her eyes were puffy, her nose was stuffy, and her head felt like it was full of cotton wool and it was then that she stood up to make her way back to Graeme's family home and pack her bags to go back to Aberdeen. She could be out of the flat before he got back from the wedding celebrations.

At least that was her plan.

However something else happened when she put her hands on that rock to steady herself rising something happened, something that Elsie could never have expected, nor thought possible. Her head buzzed loudly and she fell to the ground in a dead faint.

It was gun shots that awakened her. Actual gunshots, she recognised the sound because there had been an Army Training Facility out by one of the Vet Clinics that she had done her placement in the year before. Elsie could feel her heart hammering against her chest, her heartbreak momentarily forgotten as she pushed herself up to her feet, staring at the man, dressed as an English Redcoat, who was pointing what looked like a very old gun at her.

It was on pure instinct that she ran, scrabbling to her feet and pushing off in the opposite direction. She didn't know what was going on, sure it was Halloween, perhaps this was a thing in Inverness, maybe they all liked to dress up like Redcoats and chase each other around the woods. But it was very clear that Elsie was not a part of whatever type of… re-enactment that they were participating in, so why would the man have pointed his gun at her?

Elsie ran without care, she lost her flimsy shoes somewhere in the forest, too frightened to stop and slip them back on. She knew that there would likely be twigs in her hair and scratches on her arms from the way she had been pushing herself through, desperate to find someone, anyone, who could tell her what was happening. She kept running right up until she all but ran into someone. She paused a few feet shy of him, hesitant. This man must had also been a part of the re-enactment because he was wearing the same Redcoat outfit that the others had been wearing. He didn't point his gun at her. He did, however, pin her with what she thought was possibly the eeriest look she had ever been pinned with. Interest, lust and something else she couldn't quite place.

"What have we here?" He asked, though it was clear that he didn't really want an answer, he was just speaking to hear himself talk, and to keep her where she was. She felt wary, like she was stepping into something that she had no place stepping into.

"I'm Elsie Duncan." She stumbled slightly over her words. "I was at a wedding in Inverness, but went for a walk and appear to be a little lost." She looked at him, he had to be at least mid-thirties, what on earth was he doing playing dress up like this? "And who are you?" She asked him.

The look on his face was comical, as though he had already expected her to know who he was. "I'm Jonathan Randell Esquire, Captain of his majesties Eighth Dragoons, at your service."

She stared at him for a moment then let out a giggle, this was so absurd. "You can't be serious?" She asked him. "Who are you really?" Elsie knew a little about Jonathan Randell, he had been quite the figure around these parts back in the 1740s. Graeme had been looking into him as part of his thesis, the guy was into some dark stuff, had been backed by a rich old dude called the Duke of Sandringham and had, quite literally, gotten away with murder.

The man did not flinch at her giggling. "I assure you, my lady, I am who I say I am." He looked her up and down once more. It made Elsie look down at her dress, it was fairly modest, it didn't show off her cleavage and it was full length right down to her ankles, the man was looking at her as though she were dressed in lingerie. The look made her uneasy, it was that sense of unease that caused her to bolt. She barely made it three steps and he was atop her. Elsie screamed at the top of her lungs and lashed out at him. "Get the hell off of me!" She tried to kick him where it would hurt him most but the man was clearly apt at dodging such attacks.

He smirked down at her, pinning her to the forest floor. "You speak like a lady of England, but dress like a whore." Elsie squirmed beneath him, hating the feeling of his nose right up against her neck, sniffing her.

"Get off of me!" She screeched again, managing to head-butt him in a way that got him off of her but hurt like hell in the process, she pushed herself roughly off the ground and started to run again, but he was faster than she and pulled his sword, his very real looking sword, and buried it in the tree a little too close to her neck for comfort.

"Who are you?" He demanded again.

"I already told you, my name is Elsie Duncan." She spat at him. Afraid to move, in case she managed to wriggle against the blade and kill herself she was very still. "I'll have you know there are people waiting for me and if I don't make it back to my wedding party they'll come looking." She lied.

It was almost like he knew it was a lie, because his eyes flickered with mirth and something akin to pity. She wasn't sure how it happened, or why he was doing this, but the man seemed determined that she was a prostitute. He was pulling at her skirt now, trying to expose her, trying to rape her. It was such a foreign concept to her. She had always been told that it was the people close to you that you needed to worry about, that there weren't really any men in the woods waiting to get you. Elsie couldn't even speak. Everything was happening too fast, and like nothing she had ever experienced before.

Then, as quickly as they had been on her, the hands let go of her skirts and his body was pulled away from her. Before she had a second to breathe Elsie found herself hauled into the arms of a man in a kilt. The man who had saved her. For a moment she wondered if he was indeed part of Ali's wedding party, given his full highland outfit. She opened her mouth to thank him, offer her appreciation and perhaps find out a little about what the hell was going on. Before so much as a word came out of her mouth the man raised the butt of his sword and brought it down with a clatter to the back of her head and Elsie's world, for the second time that day, went dark.

A/N: So hi. This is a thing that appears to be happening. I adore Outlander, but sadly I do not own it, or Jamie. I am, however, responsible for the brainchild that is Elsie. There are not a lot of Outlander Fics, and I love a Jamie/OC, so I thought I may as well try. Do please review if you enjoy and would like me to continue! I would love to hear what you think!