#3 days late for the ritualistic stabbing once again

[lighthouseshepard]

first day of T: oh man!! ive waited so long for this! i can't believe i get to do this once a week forever how exciting!

T, now: oh. this again. jfc alright

[leiascully]

OctoberFicFest Day 3: Rainy Day

Tagging @xffictober

TW: canon-typical violence

It’s a bad day for a murder.  It’s never a good day for a murder, Mulder thinks, but this one is especially bad.  It’s been raining and cold all week, going from drizzling to pouring as they’ve closed in on their culprit.  Ritualistic killings: very messy, the victims partially dismembered and the entrails arranged in script that Mulder is glad he doesn’t have the ability to read.  A haruspex, he thinks.  Their second, after the one Clyde Bruckman helped them trap.  The local PD have rigged a tarp over the latest corpse to try to keep the rain off, so that Mulder and Scully can interpret the details as the photographers do their work of documenting this poor woman’s grisly end and the detectives gather what evidence there is.  Skin and hair, blood and fiber: the murderer seems himself as an artist working in multiple media.  It’s gruesome.  The rain patters harder on the tarp, drips through in icy rivulets, as if the very sky wants to erase the evidence of this crime and wash the victim clean.  

Scully’s hair is wet.  It clings to her face, falls in clumps in front of her eyes.  She keeps lifting her gloved hand as if to push it back and then remembering. Mulder gives quiet thanks for the big impermeable trench coats they wear while tromping across wet fields and through rain-glazed towns. Too enormous to be stylish, maybe, but they keep the rain out better than trendier outerwear.  At least there’s no mud in this alleyway to tug at her heels or slop over the edges of his shoes.  Mulder stoops to examine a loop of intestine, a lobe of liver, crouching by the body.  The plastic covers on his shoes slip and rustle.  Rain trickles down the back of his neck.

By the time they get into the rental car again, they’re both soaked and stiff with cold.  The seats of the rental car squish a little as they heave themselves out of the car.

“I’m going to take a bath,” Scully says wearily.  “I just need to be warm before I can think about anything else.”

Mulder nods.  After, he assumes, they’ll order dinner and go over the notes from the case.  That’s their routine.  At least it’s a big enough town to get food delivered.  

He spends a long time in the shower, thawing out each of his limbs in turn.  He wiggles his fingers and toes and lets the water sluice through his hair.  He carefully doesn’t think of Scully soaking in her own bathroom on the other side of the wall or wonder whether she poured the shampoo into the tub to make bubbles for some semblance of luxurious relaxation.  When he’s out and toweled off, he calls the local Chinese place and orders their usual: lo mein, General Tso’s, and broccoli beef with egg rolls and steamed rice.  Scully hasn’t had much appetite lately, but he can always tempt her with Genera Tso’s.  

The delivery guy is there and gone again in half an hour.  Mulder sets up the containers on the rickety table in his room and waits for Scully.  She taps on the door between their rooms, her timing impeccable as always, and he lets her in.  Her hair is up in a towel and her feet are bare.  She’s wearing a pair of her old-fashioned pajamas and she’s put a bra on.  Not that he’s looking, but he’s trained to observe.  Despite Scully’s willingness to appear before him in her sleepwear, she still retains some strict sense of propriety, it seems.  She goes to the bed and sits cross-legged on the corner of it, tucking her feet under her.  They’ve learned from experience that the motel chairs aren’t worth dragging in, as if they only thrive in their native environments.  The room 21 subspecies, too fragile to survive in room 22.

“Feeling better?” he asks.  

“Still cold,” she says.  “I thought I’d packed a sweater or two, but apparently I left them on my bed.”

He digs in his suitcase and comes up with his Oxford sweatshirt, well-worn, the fuzz on the inside tough from years of washing.  He hands it to her.  “Here.  Downy fresh.”

“Won’t you be cold?” she says.

He shrugs.  “I’m hot-natured.” 

She wrestles it over her head, stretching the neckline around the towel bundled over her hair.  But she hums with contentment once it’s on.  He passes her a box of rice and her chicken, balancing the lo mein between them on the Gideon Bible from the nightstand; the phonebook isn’t thick enough to be sturdy.  Over the years they’ve gotten eating out of the boxes down to a science: fork up a bite of rice, stab a morsel of whatever else they order, and enjoy.  Outside, it’s still raining.  Drops drum on the roof as Scully flicks open the file with her free hand.  She sighs and turns the photographs face down.

“Haruspicy?” she asks, opening the flaps of her takeout box.

“It makes more sense than anything else,” he says, winding some lo mein noodles around his fork.  The noodles flop in a way that should be disturbing, given his recent close encounter with entrails, but they’re both good at compartmentalizing.  

“I wish it didn’t,” she says.  

“It’s not my cup of tea either,” he tells her.

“My kingdom for a tasseomancer,” she says, smiling slightly.  

“That’ll be the day,” he agrees, and they settle in, snug in their shoddy lodgings.