#oc: kenny acheson

[fatecanberewritten-writer]

Déjà Vu | Chapter One: Father

Stars Series | Déjà Vu

Friday afternoons were always the calmest in that little Scottish village, especially in the church. He preferred it to any other day of the week, even Sunday, though he wouldn’t admit that out loud. He liked the simplicity of it, the feeling of an end, but a peaceful one. The whole village had the feeling of going home after a long day.

He stood with a broom on the steps of his beloved church, sweeping away the afternoon dust. Faces he had grown to know well in his few years of living here passed him by, faces that had once been hesitant to see an eighteen year old inland pastor replace their dearly beloved and recently deceased Reverend. But quickly, with an almost devilish charm, though no one would dare to make such a comparison, he won each and every one of them over, even the former Reverend’s bitter and stubborn old widow. Now, though he was many years from earning the title by church standards, the people of Keiss happily called him Reverend. It was a very small village even by his standards, one in which everyone knew everyone, and as he watched a group of children ride by on their bikes, children who he knew by name, whose parents and grandparents he knew by name, he felt a very familiar feeling of comfort. 

The sea breeze cast a strong but not uncomfortable chill throughout the village, reminding them all that autumn was here. It had been one of those summers that refused to end, but the cold was finally beginning to settle in. Even the leaves had held onto their last bits of life for as long as they could - it was the dawn of October, and he hadn’t seen an orange leaf on the church’s witch hazel tree until that morning. As the wind slowly stilled, one came to rest at his feet, and he bent down to grab it with a smile on his face. His wife would love it - it had come from the tree she had planted, anyway. He slipped it between the pages of the bible in his pocket.

“Reverend!”

The distant shout tore the young Reverend from his peaceful thinking very suddenly, his eyebrows furrowing at the sound of distress. Looking in the direction of the shout, he found his neighbor, Farmer McGregor, pedaling towards him as fast as he could on his rickety old bike. It was odd to see the man without his truck, but the vehicle, second in his heart only to his newborn son, had been out of commission for nearly a week now. The Reverend had spent the previous afternoon trying to help McGregor diagnose the issue with the truck’s engine, but both men had come up short.

The Reverend leaned his broom against the door frame and set off down the steps to meet the man halfway. “What is it, McGregor?” he asked as soon as the man was within earshot.

“It’s your wife!” McGregor answered, and the Reverend picked up his pace considerably.

“My wife?” he exasperated. “What happened? Is she alright?”

McGregor came flying up to him, and the Reverend had to take hold of the handles to help steady him. “She’s - ” he was breathing hard, having biked faster and farther than he had in a good fifteen years, and was struggling to get out more than a syllable - “she’s - ”

The Reverend was a notoriously patient man, but with his wife’s well being on the line, his patience was wearing thin fast. “For the love of God, man, spit it out!”

“She’s in labor!”

The Reverend’s face paled as though he had seen a ghost, and the feeling he felt in his chest wasn’t far off. She was early - nearly a month and a half early. The timing of it felt like a punishment from God, because that was almost exactly as early he had been born, and he had lived with the guilt of his mother’s death his entire life.

“Robert!” 

Robert figured McGregor had continued talking to him, but he had heard nothing at all until his neighbor addressed him by his first name. He looked up into McGregor’s wide blue eyes and finally came to his senses. “I - I have to go,” he said in a weak voice, and then, in a stronger one, “I must go to her!”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” explained McGregor, hopping off of his bicycle. “Take this. It’ll get you there much quicker.”

“Is anyone with her?” Robert asked as he mounted the bike.

“Just my Èibhlin, though Mrs. Barclay might be there by now.”

Robert was flustered beyond belief, but still his rational side took control. “She’ll need a doctor. Wallace, could you - ?”

“T’was was my next stop after you,” the farmer assured.

“Alright,” Robert said, as if consoling himself. He pushed off slightly on the bike, but stopped, turning to his neighbor earnestly. “Thank you Wallace, for everything.”

Wallace nearly chuckled at the sincerity of his thanks. “Don’t you be worrying about me, Reverend. You’ve got a wife and a child to be thinking about now!”

His parting sentiment gave Robert a sense of excitement on top of his anxiety, and though he felt tears stinging his eyes as he rode home, a smile more genuine than he had ever had graced his lips. It hit him all at once: he was going to be a father. He was actually going to be a father.

He rode the bike much faster and with much more ease than his neighbor had. While it had been a good fifteen years for McGregor, twenty-three year old Robert could remember his bike riding days clearly. It had been one of his favorite pastimes as a boy, in fact, riding alone along those Highland paths with the wind gently guiding him had been the closest Robert had ever felt to God. Now, as he rode along the cliffside with the setting sun, Robert once again felt an otherworldly presence, and he convinced himself it was his God.

In the orangish haze of the end of day, he finally caught sight of the McGregor farm, and there, just past it, sat the Keiss Manse, a place that had finally begun to feel like home to Robert and his wife. And it was about to be home to another. 

He pedaled the bike more fervently as he saw a plump figure step down from the porch and wave her arms at him. Mrs. Barclay was indeed there, and her arm waving led Robert to believe that the birth was very near. The sound of his wife’s screaming reached his ears as he rode past the McGregor farm, and he stood, pumping his legs even harder against the pedals.

A sudden flashing from his right nearly blinded him, and he regretfully lost control of the bicycle altogether, tumbling ungracefully onto the dirt road. With a feeling he could almost consider rage, Robert sat up from where he had fallen and looked in the direction that the light had come from. There he found, as unassuming as ever, McGregor’s out-of-commission truck, stalled in the grass beside his barn. He couldn’t make sense of it, not at all, and as he heard his wife’s screaming again, he stood and ran the rest of the way to the Manse, missing how the headlights of the out-of-commission truck flickered with the sound.

“Are you alright, Reverend?” Mrs. Barclay called out as Robert approached.

“I’m fine,” Robert responded, uncaring, if not unaware, of the bloody scrapes on his elbows and knees. His attention was elsewhere, his eyes fixed on the door. “How is she?”

Robert met the woman in wide strides, and she struggled to keep up with him as they made their way toward the door. “In the thick of it now, I reckon!”

He flung the door open as he reached it, regretting only slightly how hard it had hit the wall behind it. “Isobel!” he cried out, not knowing which room she was in.

“Robert!” Isobel responded, her response fading into yet another scream. The candles in the windows flickered, but no one took any notice. 

Robert bounded in the direction of her cries, finding Mrs. McGregor and his beloved wife on the floor of the library, his favorite room in the entire house. Almost as soon as he entered, an infant’s crying added to his wife’s. The Reverend rushed over, falling to his bloody knees to support his wife, and they watched together as their daughter took her first breath.

Mrs. McGregor, a new mother herself, guided the child fully into the world. Mrs. Barclay ran to her side with a blanket, cleaning and covering the child before handing her to her parents. The two women sat back together, smiling at the new family.

Robert was in tears, repeatedly kissing his wife’s temple. “Thanks for waiting for me,” he mused.

Still breathing hard, Isobel laughed. “Thanks for getting here when you did. Don’t think I could’ve held off much longer!”

The Reverend laughed alongside his wife, the excitement and anxiety of the day catching up to him all at once. He had made it, she had made it. Their daughter came a month and a half early, just as he did, but she was healthy, and Isobel was alright. He thanked his God, and leaned down to kiss the forehead of his daughter.

Outside, the world was getting dark, and no one took any notice of the tabby cat jumping down from the window of the McGonagall Manse.