#and I'm an Old who can't figure out the queuueueu time system and whether it matches with the actual time

[lepus-arcticus]

OMENS: CHAPTER FOUR one | two | three trigger warnings apply

KICKING HORSE B&B JULY 23 - 6:23 AM

Pale sunlight streamed into the room, warming Scully’s cheek, a peaceful change from last night’s storm. She grumbled and stretched underneath the covers, rotating a sore ankle on a cool patch of sheets before letting her eyes flutter open. No one could accuse her of being anything resembling a morning person, but she’d never had the ability to sleep in after a night of drinking.

She surveyed the room in the lavender dawn, sober now, and made mental notes for her own apartment before remembering that there wasn’t much point in redecorating when you had a rapidly approaching expiry date. Her nightmare bled back into her memory in snippets, skin and blood and sweetness and dread, tears and panic, Mulder at the door.

She winced and eased herself up on her elbows, and then the headache hit her, a bolt of pain behind her eyes. Oh, fuck. Jesus. Oh. She needed water, and coffee, stat. She hoped Rhiannon was up.

She fingered her wristwatch on the bedside table, squinting to look at the time. Early, but not so early that it was impolite to be up and about in the house. Gingerly, she rolled out of bed and felt around the footboard for her robe. She slipped it around her shoulders, and stiffly padded out into the hall. Her mouth tasted awful, so she dipped into the bathroom to brush her teeth and finger-comb her hair, and then felt inspired to check in on Mulder.

She shouldn’t have been so harsh with him last night. He was only making sure she was okay. But that dream…

The door to his room was slightly open, and she could hear the steady, muffled sway of his snore. She peered inside, careful not to make a sound. He was completely buried in blankets, save for one long, bare foot sticking off of the edge of the mattress, toes twitching. A swell of guilty affection washed over her, and she had the urge to creep over and run her fingernails down the curve of his arch, see if he was ticklish.

Instead, she turned and moved down the hall, descending the stairs as the Bishop women and their dogs looked on. The wood creaked under her feet, and the sound summoned Hypatia, probably the only creature in the house unafflicted with a hangover. She met Scully a few steps up, whimpering in pleasure, slapping her with her tail and blocking the way downstairs. “Hey, sweet girl…” Scully massaged one of the dog’s fleecy ears between her thumb and fingertips, and maneuvered her way around her massive wriggling body and into the kitchen.

There was no evidence of yesterday’s dinner to be found. The kitchen practically sparkled, and something enticingly yeasty scented the air. A large pot of coffee was percolating, black and seductive, on the tiled counter, and the room was suffused in sunrise, beaming in from the attached conservatory.

A bittersweet hum trickled through the air, a melody that Scully recognized. The water is wide, I cannot get o’er, she thought, and heard ghostly strains of her father’s tuneless Navy warble. The memory tugged at her ribs. She followed the sound and found Rhiannon in the lushness of the conservatory, her frizzy corkscrew hair loose around her waist, lovingly plucking mint leaves one by one from a large potted bush propped up on a wooden bench. The conservatory was packed full of plant life⁠—ficuses and string-of-pearls, roses and tomatoes, and an assortment of herbs that would rival an 18th-century apothecary.

“My father used to sing that song to my sister and I when he was home from sea,” Scully said in greeting.

Rhiannon looked up and smiled. “Oh, good morning, Dana. I hope I didn’t wake you.” An embroidered velvet robe in faded garnet hung off of Rhiannon’s shoulders. With the halo of sunlight around her, the scene resembled a Mucha panel, especially when Hypatia left Scully’s side to wrap herself around Rhiannon’s hips. Her hair was so long that a tendril caught in the crimpy fur of Hypatia’s backbone, dragging in an alluring loop.

“No, no, you didn’t wake me,” Scully said, a little entranced. She wondered if she’d ever seen such a pretty scene in her life.

“I’ve got biscuits in the oven, care to join me in the kitchen? How are you feeling?”

“You know, I’d love a cup of coffee.”

Rhiannon chuckled softly at that, pressing a few more mint leaves into the handful she’d collected. “Perhaps the whiskey wasn’t the brightest idea. But the bottle invited itself to the table, and that’s the story I’m sticking to.”

“It was a wonderful dinner, Rhiannon. Thank you. I really wish you’d have let me help you clean up, though.”

“Oh, hush,” Rhiannon said, as she traipsed neatly across the tile past Scully and into the kitchen, depositing the mint leaves into a copper pot on the stovetop. She rattled four mismatched mugs down from the hutch in the corner, picked up the coffee pot, and tilted it over the largest one, the black stream of steaming liquid making Scully’s mouth water. “Now, Dana, how do you take your coffee? Cream, sugar? Or if you’d like, I can make it my way.”

Hell, why not. “Well, usually I just have a little soy milk, but when in Rome…” Scully smiled politely, leaning up against the counter and trying to ignore the pulse in her temple. She watched as Rhiannon caught a curled shard of cinnamon from a corked ceramic jar, and grated a nugget of nutmeg over it into a rough stone mortar. She added a swift dash of some mysterious blend from another jar, and ground it all together, rotating the pestle and humming lightly as she worked. A mound of butter was produced from the old-fashioned icebox, and she slid a generous pat of it onto a knife and into the mug, adding a fat pinch of the powdered spices, catching Scully’s slight grimace and imploring her not to knock it until she tried it.

“Here,” Rhiannon handed her the resulting brew, and Scully dutifully took a sip. A flood of heat and life immediately moved through her head, through her chest, down into her belly. It was delicious. It might have been the best cup of coffee she’d ever had.

“Oh my God, this is incredible,” she gushed over the rim of the mug, amazed, taking another sip. “... I really might never go back to soy.” Rhiannon laughed, busying herself with making another cup. “You’re quite the cook, Rhiannon. You’ve never thought of doing it professionally?”

“No,” she said, at work at the mortar. “No, I love what I do. I’ve always felt so connected with animals. Cooking’s just a hobby of mine, that’s all. An obsessive hobby, I’ll admit, but a hobby.”

“You’re, um. A medical doctor as well as a veterinarian, is that correct?” Scully asked.

“Well, I’m only certified in veterinary medicine, but my mother was a healer of sorts, so I learned a lot from her. I can handle the basic first-aid stuff⁠—when a kid from town needs stitches, when there’s an uncomplicated homebirth over at the settlement and they need assistance, that sort of thing - and I find a lot of concepts and practical applications carry forward. Medicine is such an instinctual practice anyway.”

“Hmm.” Scully cringed internally, but fought back the urge to argue with her. “Rhiannon, you know that you can’t legally practice medicine without a license.”

Rhiannon shrugged. “Is helping a neighbour out in a pinch the same as practicing medicine? Nobody’s going to sue me, Dana. Horizon isn’t New York.”

“That it is not,” Scully agreed. When they’d driven in to the police station the previous afternoon, they’d found it nestled in the middle of all of seven interlocking streets. The rest of the town, in name, was a scattering of isolated farmhouses and homesteads. She took another sip of her coffee. “Mulder mentioned that you performed an autopsy on Hugh Daly’s horse?”

“I looked him over…” Rhiannon said carefully, stirring spices into her own cup. “It was strange… it was as if Ghost just… laid his head down in the river. There aren’t many examples of suicidal behaviour in animals, unless you’re counting that bridge in Scotland where all those dogs are always jumping to their deaths. He was such a beautiful horse, wasn’t he?”

“Mmm,” Scully agreed.

“Hugh, um. Hugh bought that horse for Anna as a wedding gift. Oh, you should have seen her, Dana. She was like a fairy. She rode up to the church bareback, and she… she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and you know, it’s funny… that day… all I can really remember clearly are the soles of her feet, how dirty they were…” Her eyes misted over, unexpectedly, and she blinked up at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pressing her face into one of her wide sleeves and trying to compose herself. Her grief suddenly filled the room like smoke, and Scully couldn’t help but ache for her.

“I never liked that man,” Rhiannon said. “He was trouble from the start.” Scully furrowed her brows, uncomfortable. “You’re, um...You’re taking a look at Anna today, is that right?”

“Yes,” Scully replied softly. Theo’d arranged for a cleared-out room in the police station and had borrowed the requested materials and tools from Rhiannon’s supplies. Better than a bathroom, she supposed, thinking of Home, but if the photographs were any indication, Anna’s body was so thoroughly wrecked that she wasn’t sure there was much she could determine from it.

“I was the one who… who identified her body. Out in that field. Hugh was raving, out of his mind, he wouldn’t even look at her, wouldn’t even come close. God, I don’t think I’ll ever get over seeing her like that… Theo let Marion see her too, that stupid, thoughtless man. He shouldn’t have done that.” She gripped the counter ledge, coffee abandoned, her eyes still swimming.

Scully reached out and touched her arm. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Rhiannon. I don’t know if I said it last night.”

“Those girls, Dana… they’re my daughters.” Rhiannon dashed a tear from her cheek. “And I failed. I failed to protect them.”

“This is not your fault,” Scully said. “You can’t take that on. But what you can do is tell us everything you know. About Anna, about Hugh, about anyone who might have wanted to hurt her. Beginning with how she came to live with you in the first place.”

Rhiannon sniffed, considering this. “It was that brother of hers. She had to get away.” Abel Stoesz, again. “Abel is… he’s controlling, he’s possessive… even after she made it clear she wasn’t ever going to go back to the colony, he’d come here, screaming at her from the driveway…” Rhiannon ran water from the sink into a blue-tinted Ball jar, and sipped at it, regaining her composure. “He’s been especially persistent with her since she married Hugh, though. It’s a good thing Fox is going to talk to him today, although I wish Marion wouldn’t go with him and subject herself to that. Sometimes I wonder why on earth she went into law enforcement. She’s such a sensitive spirit. But anything to impress Theo, I suppose. She worships the ground that man walks on.”

Scully turned this over in her mind. “If it’s any consolation… Mulder, he’s sensitive too, and it doesn’t negate his strength or his capability. I may not always agree with him, but he has this… incredible ability to get to the heart of an issue, to understand perspectives and motivations that other people might not consider. His compassion makes all the difference in our work. I’m sure it’ll prove to be the same with Marion as well.” She left out Mulder’s desperation, his obsessive nature, how wholly and intensely he took on the pain of the people left behind. How every unsolved case was a new gaping wound that would never scar over.

Rhiannon assessed her for a few moments as she sipped at the jar, leaning back on the wooden island across from her. “You two must be very close.”

“We’re partners,” Scully said. “We’ve been through a lot together.” Suddenly self-conscious, she drew deeply from her mug, draining it, willing her cheeks to cool. A timer sounded, and Rhiannon turned her attention to the oven, opening the ceramic door to reveal a tray of fluffy biscuits. The smell was incredible. Scully hadn’t had an appetite in months, but there was something about Rhiannon’s cooking that was just… different. It was nourishing, appealing in a way that her usual diner fare and dry green salads just weren’t.

Rhiannon retrieved a jar of preserves⁠—“Last year’s serviceberries were so prolific that I made fifty jars, can you believe that? And I’m pretty sure that Theo’s eaten forty of those”⁠—and plunked it on the worn kitchen table. She plucked the steaming biscuits from the tray and piled them onto a chipped blue china serving platter, setting it down on the table next to a bowl of oranges. Hypatia paced, looking for a handout.

Just as Scully was working up the energy to ask Rhiannon for a second cup of coffee, the front door was unlocked from the outside, and Marion, stately and clean in a freshly pressed uniform, strolled into the kitchen. “Morning, Dana,” she smiled at Scully, and gave Rhiannon a kiss on the cheek. Scully’s mind lingered on last night’s dream, the scent of cedar, the woman’s bow-shaped lips poised above her own, and she blinked down at the tile.

Rhiannon asked Marion if she’d like a cup of coffee, and Marion declined. “You’re on a real health kick lately, Mare,” Rhiannon complained, but Marion just shrugged and took a jam jar of water to the table.

Just then, Mulder bounded down the stairs in his running shoes and a Knicks tank, rattling the walls, his hair sticking up in every direction. “Morning, womenfolk,” he said, squinting in the sun. Scully pressed coffee-warm fingers to her pounding temple, and wondered how on earth it was possible for him to run with a hangover. Where did he get all of that energy? Hypatia whined excitedly at the sight of him and rushed to his legs, but he sidestepped her, patting her awkwardly on the head after a moment of hesitation, and made for the sink. He turned on the tap and stuck his mouth under the running water, sucking at the stream obscenely. “Mulder⁠—” Scully scolded him, embarrassed, but the other women just smirked.

Mulder leaned against the counter and wiped his mouth with the hem of his shirt. Scully found herself looking at the lines of his hipbones disappearing into his sweats, and ripped her eyes away, but Rhiannon caught her and smiled knowingly.

“I’m seriously outnumbered here without Theo,” he quipped. “Marion, you okay if I go for a run before we leave?”

“Of course. Take your time. I’m still waking up, and it’s not like they’re expecting us.” Marion scuffled her nails on the tabletop, eyeing him openly.

“Fox, do you mind taking Hypatia with you? She doesn’t need a leash. There’s a lake a little way along the path out back, she’ll take you right to it and bring you back,” Rhiannon said, clearly not expecting him to refuse. Scully glanced at Mulder and caught him looking at her, defeated.

“Save some breakfast for me, Scully,” Mulder squeezed her shoulder on his way past her, last night’s tense exchange wordlessly forgiven. He begrudgingly held the screen door open for the dog, who trotted happily past him and down into the front yard.

“Uh, yum, Dana,” Marion laughed, once he was out of earshot. “Fox is a hunk under all that trenchcoat. I think I was too distracted by that awful tie of his to notice last night.”

Scully felt a grin tug at her lips, despite her best intentions. She suddenly realized how much she missed having female friends; Ellen’s cupboard full of cheap, secret wine, her college roommate Andrea’s fresh flower habit. Melissa, of course, with her incense and her crystals and the way she insisted on carefully studying the full astrological chart of every person Scully slept with.

She leaned towards Marion conspiratorially, nostalgia thrumming. “You should see him in glasses.”

8:04 AM

Mulder’s feet pounded mercilessly into the wet, mulchy grass at a counter-rhythm to the ferocious throb in his head. The trail to the pond was a worn, crushed valley through a field of knee-high wilderness. Wildflowers bloomed, silvery wolfwillow spicing the air with a sour, soaked-fur smell. The dog ran gracefully in front of him, darting off into the distance before returning to circle around his feet, panting joyously. Mulder had the distinct impression she was making fun of him.

“You’ve got four legs and I’ve only got two, you foul hellbeast⁠—” he called to her on her next rocket away. “This whole thing is rigged!” She barked happily in response, and reared onto her hind legs before jolting back to him for another relay.

His thoughts turned to Scully. God, sitting in that bed with her… he’d gotten dangerously close to doing something he’d certainly regret. Whiskey always made him dumb as shit, impulsive.

And her nightmare. He’d only been dozing, and her scream through the wall had been like a wave of ice water over him. How he’d wanted to run in there, wrap her in his arms, chase the shadows away. But she was right. She didn’t need him. Not like that.

He smelled the lake before he saw it, a moist earthy fetor tossed over the land like a wet blanket. As he came upon the glittering water, spooking a few mallards into flight, he noticed a rotting boat in the reeds on the far bank, turquoise paint flaking off in sheets. Just for something to do, he circled the lake at a sprint until he was closer to it. The dog trotted behind him, nose to the ground.

“Don’t eat anything weird,” he warned her, almost tripping as he drummed his heels to a stop. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and his stinging eyes. The morning sun shattered off of the surface of the lake and warmed the back of his neck, and he took a moment to kick out his legs a little as he caught his breath, bending to massage his aching right knee. The dog began to whimper irritably, a low growl that crescendoed into a keening whine. She threaded her long snout under his elbow.

“Hey⁠—stop it⁠—” He brushed her nose away, and returned to pressing his fingers around his oft-tortured patella. Scully’d been trying to get him to wear a knee brace lately, but he didn’t think he was ready to admit that he needed one. Maybe he should just swallow his ego before he did permanent damage, and had to resort to pumping on the elliptical with the government trophy wives at the Planet Fitness down the street from his apartment.

The dog moaned low, insistent, and let loose a stream of discontented yips. He looked up at her to find her crouching, her ears plastered backwards on her skull. “What the hell is wrong with you?” He chuffed a knuckle on her muzzle, and when she didn’t look up at him, he followed her eyeline.

The bottom of the boat was pooled with lakewater and blood.

A dead fox was curled in the murk, his toothy maw twisted into a grimace, as if in pain. The kohl tips of his ears were ragged. His eyes were closed. The dog yowled and whimpered behind him, pacing.

The sweet, mushroomy smell of death furled up from the corpse as Mulder leaned over it, looking for a wound. A few flies buzzed in circles around the eyes, nose, and mouth of the creature. As he got closer, he noticed the wriggling white body of a maggot crawl from the fox’s black-rimmed lip. A cold chill pierced Mulder’s stomach, and he retched into the grass beside him as he whirled away from the scene, losing what was left of last night’s dinner. The dog wailed.

He spat, and looked back up in horror.

“Fucking Jesus fuck,” he swore, scrunching his eyes and scrubbing his face with his palms. The dog’s crouching body was a coil of tension behind him. He backed away, but she wouldn’t follow.

“C’mere, dog,” he called, his voice rusty with bile. “Get away from that.”

The dog dainted a wide berth around the boat, starting and stopping, and Mulder called her again. “C’mon girl. Let’s go. C’mon.” She finally worked up the courage to pass it, throwing back a fierce growl as she skittered along. Mulder spat again, wishing for some water, and launched into a punishing pace back to Kicking Horse.

The sense of unease swirled around him. The dog ran in front this time, leaving him in the dust, eager to get home to her mistress. The fox in the boat couldn’t be a coincidence. Not with his name. Not with Scully’s vulpine head of hair.

Two omens in two days. Shit. And this one was personal.

#I FORGOT I HAD A BANK APPT #and I'm an Old who can't figure out the queuueueu time system and whether it matches with the actual time #so it's here an hour early! sorry lol #omens #txf fic