Chapter Text
The first thing Waverly sees is Nicole.
Everything's out of focus, like the blurred haze of a long lingering dream.
Everything but Nicole.
Her eyes are dark and wide, crystal sharp with concern, but steady. So steady. She has one hand outstretched toward Waverly, beckoning. Her lips form words Waverly can't make out over a furious roar that makes the ground quake beneath her feet.
Waverly reaches out, but her arms feel sluggish, as if she's struggling to move in the deep depths of the ocean, the water's heavy pressure keeping her immobile. Fear spikes through her and she tries again, to no avail. Nicole turns to her side and shouts at something. Or someone. And a glow appears next to her.
It grows brighter and brighter until it explodes in a brilliant flash of white and the world snaps into place.
Waverly stumbles, finally released from invisible bonds that had trapped her in blistering heat. But she can't maintain her balance, legs weak and wobbly, worse than a newborn foal. She pitches forward, bracing herself for impact against the cold, hard ground, but someone catches her, breaking her fall. Warm arms envelop her gently.
"I've got you, baby," an achingly familiar voice whispers in her ear.
"N-nicole?" Waverly manages to breathe out. It hurts to speak. Her mouth is so dry that her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth.
"Yeah, it's me, Waves." Nicole pulls away slightly, smiling through tears.
It's then that Waverly notices the blood streaming down the side of Nicole's face, the cuts and bruises along her forehead and cheeks. She cradles Nicole's jaw between her hands. "Are you…?"
"I'm okay," Nicole reassures her. "And you're okay. Everything's gonna be okay."
"Haught, get her out of here!" Dolls appears in the periphery of Waverly's vision, gun blazing with rapid-fire shots. "Go, go, go!"
"Don't gotta tell me twice," Nicole grunts as she hooks one arm underneath Waverly's knees and the other behind her back. She lifts Waverly, bridal style, and kisses her forehead. "Just hold on tight."
Waverly wraps her arms around Nicole's neck and shoulders, clinging tightly as Nicole carries her away. She chances a glance back, just barely making out a blonde woman running from Doc. He curses at her, shoots in her direction twice but misses, too distracted with helping Wynonna and Dolls drive back a massive form in a hail of bullets. The thing is dark and misshapen, a horrifying fiend straight out of a night terror. It screeches in agony as they it drive back through a gateway emblazoned in golden sigils.
Stomach twisting, Waverly shuts her eyes tightly and buries her face in Nicole's shoulder, breathing in her girlfriend's soothing scent of vanilla and spice and sweat.
"...the salt suppresses her abilities…"
"...terminate the subject…"
"...tied to Doc. We can't just…"
The hushed whispers grow louder as Waverly comes to again. She struggles to open her eyes, her mind swimming through a cloud of unfocused awareness. There is a chill that has settled through her body, no doubt a result of losing the unbearable heat that had coursed through her, imprisoning her for God knows how long.
What had she done? Her memories are foggy and distorted, fragments of facts and images coursing through her mind. She's lost track of any sort of concept of time, all the memories blending into one inconsistant story that makes no sense at all.
"...warheads…"
"...gateway…"
"...black badge…"
Whispers of the past overlap with the current, trying to reveal a roadmap of events that is more a web of unbearable confusion.
When she's finally able to open her eyes, she instantly recognizes the hospital from a memory of Nicole in the same bed not that long ago… or at least she thinks it was not that long ago.
The room is small, but somehow accommodates the group that has apparently taken up residence, including a folding table that's set up in the corner, two very familiar forms turned away from her, pouring over whatever is on the table.
"So the solution is to find her and then just leave her somewhere in the ground?" The disapproval in Dolls's voice is clear, despite being turned away from her.
"That's the plan, Stan." Wynonna responds, her voice muffled by whatever she's eating.
"Were you ever planning on telling me you had a witch buried in the salt flats?"
"Gee, I don't know. Tell me again how you escaped the Black Badge prison and diverted a military air strike on Purgatory..."
"That's classified."
"Yeah I thought so."
Waverly winces, shifting slightly and noticing her hand is currently occupied. Looking to her right, she finds her fingers intertwined with long, tapered digits that belong to the tall form slumped over the side of the bed, obviously sleeping. Nicole. The first thing she notices is that the woman's hair is longer, by at least an inch or two and she's instantly worried that maybe more time has passed than she thought. What had she been doing the whole time? She remembers Willa, and some sort of substance on the ground before the heat consumed her, but everything else is a blur.
"Nicole?" Her voice is a hoarse whisper, but that in combination with a squeeze of her hand is enough to wake the officer.
"Baby..." Nicole stands quickly, getting the attention of the others in the room. "Thank God you're awake."
Wynonna is suddenly on her other side, concern in her eyes. "How ya doing, Baby Girl?" She thinks Waverly doesn't see the way her hand lingers at her belt, where Peacemaker is sitting in its holster, but she's wrong.
There's a strange mood in the room, one of concerned hesitance and Waverly feels it instantly. It's as if they're all on edge, waiting for her to do something. "I feel… exhausted." She can't believe how tired she feels, despite just waking up. "What happened?"
Waverly notices as Wynonna and Nicole exchange looks, some sort of consensus reached between the two of them.
"Well…" Wynonna takes a seat on the edge of the bed as Dolls moves to the door, making sure it's closed securely.
When Waverly's discharged from the hospital, she can't believe Purgatory's harsh winter is already melting into spring. Gone is the frigid chill in the air and the hard frost on the ground. To say that it's jarring would be putting it mildly, and the realization that she's lost months of time forms a queasy pit in her stomach.
Her memories have been vaguely reconstructed, piecemeal, by Wynonna and Nicole and the others. She still can't remember everything that happened. But at the very least, she has a jigsaw puzzle of impressions from which she generally grasps the who, what, where, when, why and how of things despite the gaps in her own recollections.
Waverly rides back to the Homestead in the back of Dolls's SUV, pressed up against Nicole, who's holding her hand. Wynonna rides shotgun next to Dolls, cracking jokes about the townsfolk. Waverly half pays attention, but can't quite focus, not with the dread lodged in between her ribs that expands whenever she catches the others trading furtive glances with one another.
"You okay?" Nicole asks, gently lifting Waverly's hand and pressing a tender kiss to her knuckles.
She looks worried. They all do. All the time. And Waverly feels like she's on the brink of losing her shit. But instead, she just smiles, pasting on a familiar mask, one she's mastered over the years of being the perfect Earp.
"I'm fine."
Nicole searches her eyes, not looking at all convinced, but she nods anyway and they settle back to listening to Wynonna make awkward small talk about Sheriff Nedley's new found love of all things Earp.
Hearing her surname aloud causes the growing coil of tension within Waverly to splinter and crack as Bobo del Rey's words echo in her skull:
You're not even an Earp. You're not even an Earp. You're not even an Earp.
The pain that washes over Waverly is overwhelming, stifling in its intensity, that when Dolls finally parks outside of the Homestead, she claws at the door handle and scrambles out. She inhales and exhales sharply. The overpowering smell of budding flowers and newly sprouting grass saturates the air and makes her nauseated. She can feel her mouth watering, her body preparing to expel the few bites of soup she managed to swallow at the hospital, and she stumbles away from the car, needing to get away from everything. From everyone.
"Wave, what's wrong?"
She hears Nicole's voice and three pairs of boots rushing after her, but she holds a hand up to stop them.
"I'm okay," Waverly lies. "I just… I need to take a walk."
"We can come with you," Nicole suggests.
But Waverly shakes her head. "No, please, I just… I need to be alone right now."
Nicole opens her mouth to protest, but Wynonna lays a hand on her shoulder, silencing her. "You go on then, baby girl. We'll have some whiskey waiting for you when you get back."
Relieved, Waverly nods in gratitude. She continues unsteadily down the driveway and over the wooden bridge, ignoring the twinge in her heart as she passes the mailbox that proudly bears the Earp namesake on faded metal.
The first memory that comes to Waverly happens weeks later. She's working a night shift at Shorty's, sweeping the recently closed bar as she's done almost every night since Gus reclaimed it after Bobo's death. It comes so quickly to her, she's knocked to her knees in surprise.
They're in the bar and she remembers some sort of struggle. Dolls was two, maybe three times her size, but she remembers the burn of anger coursing through her, anger that was not her own. She struggled for control as her hand closed around the Deputy Marshal's neck, pinning him to a wall. He was bleeding from a wound across his cheek and she was crying, or at least she would have been if she had control of her body. She wanted so badly to stop herself, to release the man who'd smiled and called her Earp as they drank coffee across from each other, who had been nothing but a friend to her, but the burning seared through her resistance. She was so mentally spent, she didn't have the will to keep fighting. She didn't have the strength to keep her hand from squeezing tighter until she heard him gasping for air.
The memory of an impact that came across the back of her head would have physically put her on her knees if she weren't already there. It brings her back to the present where she's alone, gasping for air. Her mind is stained with the vision of laying on the ground while Wynonna helped Dolls up. She knows it's a memory, but it's like nothing she's felt before, and definitely not one that anyone has told her about. She remembers the fear in her own sister's eyes and it hurts worse than taking a chair to the head.
She should have known. She had felt there was something missing from the story they told her when she awoke. What else hadn't they told her? Who else had she hurt?
The memories come to her at the worst times. When she's working. When she's sleeping. When she's at the market. Each one is worse than the one before and when she confronts Wynonna about them, about the secrets and the lies about the things she's done, there are no excuses but the ever present one that her sister was the heir and did everything for Waverly's own good.
The most unforgivable memory is one that shatters her completely.
Despite everything that has happened, Waverly is excited for just a normal date night. Everyone has been on eggshells around her and she's thrilled to just push it all aside and reclaim some bit of normalcy.
"I've missed you." Nicole whispers in her ear when she picks the officer up from the station, nipping teeth etching a smile across Waverly's face for the first time in weeks. She feels something other than confusion and guilt, the redhead's voice carrying every bit of the sensual need she felt herself.
She's preparing dinner, some chicken stir fry for Nicole who's currently changing out of her work uniform. It's a small slice of normal, one she has doubted would ever be possible again.
Waverly scrunches her nose as she makes quick work of chopping the peppers. She isn't quite sure if it's red or yellow peppers the redhead dislikes and she needs to clarify it. The last thing she wants is something so trivial ruining the moment. "Nicole?"
She doesn't think much about going to find the woman. Maybe she's gotten too comfortable that she doesn't think about setting the knife down first. "Nicole?"
Not expecting her, Nicole exits the bedroom just seconds before Waverly reaches the door. Unable to stop, she freezes, her eyes falling on the knife, her hand instinctively reaching for a gun that isn't there.
It's only a brief moment, but Waverly sees the look in her eyes, that momentary flash of fear, and suddenly she's flooded with a familiar heat, one that consumes her completely. It's the memory she never wanted to remember, the doubt and terror in those eyes as Nicole pleaded with her.
"Please, Baby. I know you're in there." Nicole's hands were wrapped around her wrist, Waverly's fist gripping the front of her uniform. "Fight it!"
"I don't want to fight it. This is who I am now and I definitely don't need you." Waverly laughed as she tossed the tall form against a wall as if she weighed less than a pillow, the sound of Nicole's head impacting the wall bringing the brunette back to the present.
The knife falls from her hand, clattering against the floorboards as she begins to back up. "I'm sorry." Her voice wavers as she looks down at her own hands.
"Wave?" Nicole moves forward only to be met with hands raised in her direction. "Shit I'm sorry, I didn't mean… I was just surprised…."
"No! I…" She's shaking her head, unable to fight the frigid chill of guilt that courses through her. "I'm sorry… I didn't know…" Tears well in her eyes as her mind keeps reliving the newly surfaced memory. "I hurt you…"
Realization fills Nicole's eyes as she quickly closes the distance between them. "It wasn't you, Baby. You have nothing to be sorry for." Her touch is tender, the way it always is, attempting to sooth the friction between them. Nicole has always been a very physical person, always comforting through loving caresses and it's too much.
"No no no." Waverly is quick to pull away, quick to put distance between them. She doesn't even have the strength to be upset that Nicole never told her. She just feels an emptiness growing from within. She looks everywhere but at the redhead, not wanting to see that look of fear again.
It doesn't go unnoticed. "Look at me, Wave." Nicole tries to pull her back in for a hug but Waverly stays an arms-length away.
"First Dolls… Wynonna… Doc… I thought I was strong enough to at least not hurt you." She shakes her head because she honestly had thought her love would be enough. She thought it would be strong enough. "I can't do this…" The words break her heart even as she hears them slip out, but she knows it's for the best. She's a plague on everyone's life, nothing but pain and suffering. "You were fine until I dragged you into all this shit…" Her voice quivers with emotion and her eyes burn from the pain, but still she cannot look Nicole in the eyes. Before Nicole can stop her, she grabs her bag and keys.
"Waverly."
"No… I can't do this." Waverly speaks just before slamming the door shut and running for the stairs. She needs to get away. Everyone around her has been hurt by her weakness and inability to stop that beast from using her like a meat puppet. The last thing she should be allowed is a love as pure as Nicole's. She doesn't deserve her.