Chapter Text
“Staci,” Hudson called from her desk, “Get off your ass and give me the papers already, damn it.”
Staci rolled his eyes theatrically, “I’m bringing, I’m bringing them. Sheesh.” He leaned over his outdated PC unit and towards Rook, “Mind helping me look for them, Rookie? I, uh, may have misplaced them. It’ll be written for a ‘Faith Seed’.”
Rook raised a brow at that, a small frown edging its way onto her face. Still, she pushed away from her desk and strode around towards his. Despite being in his mid-twenties, Staci acted like a hopeless teenager and thought it was endearing. It was funny, especially when his problems didn’t affect Rook, but it certainly wasn’t cute.
“Why is Rook heading towards your desk?” Hudson asked, her voice dripping with suspicion.
Rook ignored them both as she got to work routing through Staci’s mess of a desk. Papers and loose sheets battled for space that half-used pens and crumpled styrofoam cups hadn’t already conquered. Compared to her immaculate desk, Staci Pratt’s looked like a warzone with no definitive victor. It was also a troubling insight into Staci’s psyche, one Rook hadn’t been prepared to look into.
“Cause I asked her for a lap dance - what do you think, Joey? She’s helping me look for them.”
“If you lost those papers, Pratt, I swear to God-”
“I didn’t lose shit.”
“Staci, I need those papers for this stupid report! You promised you’d look after them and return them when I needed them. This is the third time you’ve done this!”
“Oh my God, I said I’ll give them to you! Just wait!”
“Anything particularly important about these papers?” Rook asked as she gingerly dislodged a file from a precarious tower of papers stacked far higher than they physically should have been able to.
Did Staci play Jenga with his documents? It was impossible to be this disorganised.
“Those Seeds are causing a ruckus again,” Joey replied with a sigh, rubbing at her eyes, “Mary-May insists that shit is getting real shady down where they are and keeps having us haul ass there only to find nothing conclusive. I’m getting real tired of all of this. Faith Seed’s the newest one - accused of making people huff some weird plant.”
“These Seeds seem to cause a lot of trouble.”
Staci shrugged inelegantly as he balanced a plastic cup on a stack of folders in one hand and rummaged around in his bulging desk drawer with the other.
“A whole lot. Started off with the locals complaining that they were buying off a lot of land - all legally, mind you - which isn’t even an offense, but people can be really annoying. Then it turned into minor stuff like noise complaints, “suspicious behaviour”, one or two brawls or allegations towards animal abuse.”
Rook paused her search momentarily.
“Those don’t exactly sound like minor infringements. Especially for a small place like this.”
“The allegations were dropped and noise complaints are probably one of the most common offenses reported in Hope County.” Joey gave a mirthless laugh, “Jesus, if you ever meet the Drubmans or that Boshaw guy, my suggestion is to pack a pair of earplugs.”
“I met Boshaw.”
“Then you probably already know how bat-shit crazy the people here can be. They’ve all got some record, or some allegations against them but it’s never anything sinister - the Seeds included. They’re all just annoying as hell. And unfortunately or otherwise, you can’t jail someone just for that.” Hudson muttered under her breath, “Even if a certain Hurk Senior deserves it.”
“But the Seeds don’t have minor-”
“Fount it!” Staci sang, waving a sizable folder in the air.
“Finally. Hand it over, Pratt. This is the last time I let you borrow any of my sheets again.”
“Oh, come on, Hudson,” Staci grinned as he got up to hand the folder over to her, “It’s not like you did much to get this. You pushed a coupla buttons and printed some pages, whoop-de-doo.”
Hudson snatched the file out of his hands and did a quick scan of its contents.
“And if you ever printed anything yourself, you’d know how much of a pain in the ass it is to use that hunk of junk.”
“It’s only ‘cause the printer can smell your fear, Hudson. Show it who’s boss and it won’t mess with you.”
Hudson flipped the file shut and sent him a nasty look, “Get out of my space, Pratt. I’m about done with your bullshit right now.”
Staci sniggered and returned to his desk, “Your lips say “no”, but your heart says “yes”.”
“You are a nuisance, a public menace and I’d happily pull extra shifts for the rest of my career if Whitehorse would just kick you off the force.”
Staci just threw his head back and laughed at Joey’s open hostility.
Rook shook her head and settled back into her uncomfortable, rolly-chair. She had known them for over a month now and already came to expect these sort of rancourase interactions between them. According to Whitehorse, they had this sort of weird relationship formed entirely on back-handed compliments and hollow threats from the absolute get-go. It’s not like Rook didn’t understand these sorts of friendships - she had a few that were similar enough over the years - but the tenacity with which they went at it.
As if they were actors putting on a show for no one’s benefit but their own.
Maybe it was their way of passing the time - Hope County wasn’t exactly bursting with activity and filing backlog got a bit mind-numbing when you did it for longer than thirty minutes. Rook was sure she was going to resort to the same sorts of small excitements to keep her sane soon enough.
Staci would probably be open to a verbal attack from two fronts. Joey might even be amiable to sharing some of her favourite insults and effective threats. They could turn into a game, have some sort of point system set up.
Rook was typing on autopilot, the motions robotic as she mechanically input the information from the paper in front of her into the computer while her mind went on other tangents. Staci and Joey were still talking to one another, a fluid stream of banter to keep morale high. It added to the symphony of sounds that Rook so deeply associated with the precinct.
Telephones went off, officers chattered amongst themselves, keyboards clicked away, clothes shuffled and chairs squeaked, feet tapped against the smooth, linoleum floor. The Hope County Sheriff's Department was half the size of any of the precincts that her father had worked in, but it had just as much soul. And now that Rook was a part of it, she saw more of it.
“Look alive, people.”
Rook turned to watch as Sheriff Earl Whitehorse exited his office and strode towards the middle of the bull-pen, his fingers in the looped around his utility belt. His hat was missing and the shiny, balding part of his head reflected the harsh white light, casting his face in a dark shadow. Or, perhaps it wasn’t because of the light at all - his expression was a frightening one.
He looked nothing like the jovial man she now called her boss.
“I just received word that a Federal Marshal will be joining us at the end of this week,” Earl moved his gaze across the room, skipping right past Rook, “He has a warrant for an arrest and he requests our cooperation. And we will give him our full support. Who has weekend duty this month?”
Staci and Joey raised their arms.
“The Probie and me,” Staci said.
“Gonzalez and I do too - but she’s sick, so it’ll probably just be me.”
Earl eyed Joey and Staci for a long moment before nodding. He still wouldn’t meet her eyes. It wasn’t by accident, Rook realised.
“Meet me in my office on Saturday morning so I can properly debrief you. The Marshal will be arriving around noon the same day and we can hash out any details.”
“Sheriff, who is the warrant out for?”
Rook wasn’t sure exactly who asked the question. It sounded like Nancy.
“Classified for now, Nance. I don’t know myself. These Federal types like to play like they’re above the law.”
A round of scoffs and murmurs of dissidence echoed how the other officers felt about that. Whitehorse raised a hand. Silence fell.
“Now, now. We are going to show the Marshal all the respect he is due. I expect everyone to be on their best behaviour so we can show him some real, Montana hospitality.”
The answering chorus weren’t enthusiastic, but Earl Whitehorse was already heading towards his office with little care for their reaction. He had delivered the message and now it was their headache.
“Who do you think the warrant could be out for?” Joey hiss-whispered over at them. It was a question that many of the other officers were asking all around them. Harsh murmurs and quiet speculations.
“Maybe one of the Drubmans,” Staci mused, “Old man Drubman threatened to shoot me once just cause I was on his property without a warrant. That old bastard definitely has a few skeletons in his closet he didn’t bury properly. What about you two? Who do you think it could be?”
Joey thought for a moment while Rook shrugged, “I don’t think I know the people well enough to be able to guess like that.”
“Actually, my money's on one of the Seeds. Maybe all of them.”
“What?” Staci shook his head, “No way. If they haven’t been charged with anything for six years, I doubt anything is going to happen all of a sudden.”
“I can’t explain it - it’s a gut feeling.”
“You guys did say they have a lot of allegations against them, maybe one of them stuck,” Rook supplied, typing away.
Office gossip, how far had she fallen? Too bad it was so much fun.
Joey snapped her fingers, “Exactly! The Feds have got methods we can’t legally employ after all. Maybe they made something stick.”
Staci didn’t look convinced.
“I dunno. I think it’s someone else. The Seeds have a ton of money and influence - and they’re using it in Hope County. I doubt they’re infringing on much.” Staci added as a dry aside, “Expect maybe Drubman Senior’s delicate sensibilities.”
“Wanna bet?”
He met Joey’s expectant look with a crooked smile.
“Fine. Ten says it isn’t them.”
“Ten? What kinda kiddie bets do you put down? Hike it up. Fifty says it’s one of the Seeds.”
“Fifty? Jesus, how much cash do you make, Hudson? Then make it more specific. Which Seed is it going to be?”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Fifty doesn’t grow on trees.”
“Then you have to be specific as well.”
“Fine.”
Hudson held her hand out, “Fifty says it’s John Seed. Bastard probably has some dirt from his Atlanta days.”
Staci clasped it, “Fifty says it’s Hurk Drubman Senior because I hate him and I just really hope he finally gets thrown into some max security prison so I never have to see his face again.”
They shook once.
And then somehow dissolved into an hour long debate over why their ‘champion’ was more evil that resulted in no real outcome and a low-level headache to set just behind Rook’s left eye.
~ * ~
Early on Saturday morning, Staci came to pick her up from her temporary dorm. Even though the precinct was a short, twenty minute walk, Staci insisted. Said he wanted to have a quick ‘talk’ before they reached the precinct and other people stuck their noses into matters that didn’t concern them. ‘Other people’ being quite obviously Joey Hudson.
He had been acting strange all week - snappish, skittish, anxious. If Rook could get to the bottom of it before they went on their big arrest, perfect.
“Well?” Rook asked as she sipped the cup of coffee he had bought for her, “What did you want to talk about?”
It was a chilled hazelnut latte. It was nice - not the best, but certainly not the worst she had ever had. Most importantly, it was free.
“How are you feeling about the Fed coming over this weekend?”
He was jittery. His fingers kept drumming against the steering wheel and the foot on hovering over the accelerator kept bouncing by the footrest. This was the most nervous Rook had ever seen Staci, worse even than the time he had accidentally eaten Joey’s yoghurt cup and she had launched a precinct-wide hunt for it.
“I don’t know,” Rook said slowly, eyeing him as he drove around her block for the third time, “How should I feel?”
“What, like you aren’t the least bit excited, worried, scared?” He flashed her a too-big smile.
“Not really. Why? Are you?”
Staci nodded his head quickly, “Hell yeah, I’m excited. Most interesting thing that’s happened the whole time I’ve been here.”
“It’s just an arrest, same as any other.”
“Yeah, by the Federal Authorities. Whoever it is, they fucked up. Big time.”
“Then maybe we should feel apprehensive. Can’t be because of anything good.”
“You’re such a spoil-sport, Rook. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Right. What’s the real reason you wanted to talk?’
“What?” He shot her a confused look before turning back to look at the road. “What do you mean? That was the real reason.”
“You could have asked me this question at the precinct. What’s wrong, Staci? You don’t normally buy me coffees and take me on trips around my own block.”
Stacis’ grip on the steering wheel tightened. He bit his lip and moved the car to park it by the side of the road. He turned the engine off. Seems like they were going to be there a while - so long as they didn’t run late, Rook didn’t mind a temporary detour.
He took a deep breath in to steel himself before he whispered, “I don’t know if this arrest will go well.”
Okay. So Staci was just nervous, Rook could work with that.
“And why is that?”
“I’ve been seeing bad omens all around this whole week.”
And Rook was done.
Still, Staci looked spooked, and it wouldn’t exactly be polite to shrug him off after he seemed to want to properly open up (and plied her with free coffee), so Rook decided to indulge him as long as she could stand to.
“What kind of omens?” She asked, not unkindly.
“When Whitehorse told us about the arrest it was a Monday, right? Well, on Monday night, just before I went to sleep I opened my windows as wide as they could, okay, and I’ve got the type that sorta open like doors,” he mimicked pushing a window open wide, “And I swear to God an owl landed on the window just before I fell asleep, hooted three fuckin’ times and then left. I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night.”
Rook wanted to tell Staci that owls hooted. Of course they hooted, that was kinda their thing. She didn’t, instead she let him gather his wits, clench his hands into white-knuckled fists and continue. Rook hoped they reached the precinct on time.
“On Tuesday, Rook, someone came by my house in the morning and knocked on the door three times. When I went to check, they were gone. Like there hadn’t been anyone and I remember how distinct the knocking was. Do you know what this means?”
It meant a kid was playing a prank. A modified version of ‘ding-dong-ditch’ and three knocks were sure to get Staci’s attention. But he was on a roll and didn't stop to let her interject. Rook wished she hadn’t let his bribery work and just laughed when she had the chance.
“On Wednesday, Rook, my clock broke. You wanna know what time?” She had a feeling he’d tell her regardless, “Three thirty-three! Might as well tattoo ‘fucked’ on our foreheads!”
“Wait, wait, why is three thirty-three bad?”
“Haven’t you seen any horror movies? Three threes are the devil’s number! It’s the Mark of the Beast!”
Rook had had about enough. Staci was just being ridiculous now. But still, she was going to persevere for as long as her stamina lasted because they were partners and something told her it was taking a lot for him to openly admit his fears.
“I think you’re just nervous about the arrest and you’re looking for trouble where there isn’t any.”
“No - no, Rook, you aren’t listening to me! Do you know what date was on Friday?”
She sighed loudly.
“No,” she intoned, taking a loud sip of her coffee, “What date was it?”
“It was Friday the thirteenth, Rook. That’s the unluckiest day like - ever!”
“First,” She held up her index finger, “that’s three sixes, Staci, that are the Mark of the Beast.” She held up a second finger, “Two, that was Friday and today is Saturday so it doesn't even matter.” She held up her ring finger, “Three, the number four is unlucky in some East Asian cultures; it doesn’t mean there’s a problem with a number or a date. Get it together, Pratt.”
Staci met her eyes and for the first time since the day she met him over a month back, he looked deadly serious. His eyes didn’t waver. They held hers, unblinking, his mouth turned down into a nervous frown, his eyebrows furrowed together.
“Rook, I’m serious. Fine, forget all the scary crap I’ve been seeing and experiencing. I’ve got a feeling - in my gut, Rook - that if we go through with this arrest, we may not make it back out alive.”
He wanted her to believe him. It was why he had wanted to talk to her in private. But even if she did believe him, what then? It wasn’t like they could avoid their duty, their responsibility. Staci was scared and that was okay, it was perfectly normal to be nervous. Rook was a bit antsy herself. But why he thought Rook could provide a solution where there wasn’t one, well…
“We’re going to be fine, Staci.”
He groaned aloud, smacking his hands against the steering wheel, “Ugh, you’re not-”
Rook raised her hand to quiet his protests, “We’re going to be fine, Staci. Because we are going to go in, get the job done and get out, okay? We won’t linger and we won’t attract any danger to ourselves. In and out, quick and clean.”
Staci looked away, seemed forlorn almost, that she wouldn’t take what he was saying more seriously. But it didn’t matter if Rook did or not. She wasn’t sure how she should explain that there literally was no alternative.
Rook couldn’t use her words. Instead, she reached out and clasped his shoulder, squeezing it. He gave her a weary glance, but when he saw that her expression was a kind one, he slowly let his guard down again.
He wasn’t back to his usual, annoying self, but he wasn’t an anxious mess. That wouldn’t go away until they executed the arrest successfully and then she could tease him all about it. For now, she decided to distract him.
“I heard talk that we might be able to take the helicopter. Is there anyone who can legally fly one in the precinct?”
“Yeah,” Staci said as he turned the car back on to finish the final lap around her block before they headed towards the precinct, “Hudson and I both know how to.”
“You can pilot a helicopter?”
He snorted, “You sound surprised.”
“Of course I do. You’re not exactly what I’d call ‘accomplished’ when you need me to get most of your shit sorted out for you.”
“Yes, I can pilot a helicopter, thank you very much. You’ll find I am a man of many talents. And those talents come at the cost of being unable to manage normal, daily tasks. Like printing. And filing. It’s a perfectly normal tradeoff.”
Rook rolled her eyes, and mumbled, “God give me the confidence of this man.”
“Ha! It isn’t confidence, Probie, it’s pure skill-”
“Deer!”
“Shit!”
~ * ~
It was near deafening inside the chopper. True to his word, Staci and Hudson were in the front, operating the vehicle as they were the only ones who had the proper licences. Rook considered, as the Marshal and Whitehorse talked about the case, how she could twist Staci’s arm into teaching her how to pilot one.
He had given her a run down off all the important buttons before they left, but there were so many buttons and having an angry Federal Marshal barking down your neck wasn’t exactly conducive to a productive learning environment. Rook was fairly sure she could get the bird into the air, probably, but not much else.
The Marshal was showing Whitehorse some video about the Seeds. Intel they had gathered from testimonials. Murder, theft, vandalism, torture, kidnapping, forced conversion, the Seed Family’s list of felonies was longer than Staci’s entire Chinese takeout order.
Rook recalled how, only a few weeks back, Staci had called the family harmless.
The group they were about to face didn’t seem harmless.
Rook was antsy. It was her first big hunt in a long, long time. Her blood sang and her nerves thrummed and her skin tightened to the point it border on painful. Every sense was on high alert, adrenaline pumping through her veins. This was what she had been craving. The exhilaration. The adrenaline rush. This was the kind of police work she had always dreamed of doing. That she had foolishly once tried doing herself.
Whitehorse passed the tablet over to her and she watched them too. Rook recognised some of the people, their names. Mary-May, Pastor Jerome. Some guy called Nick Rye. She listened to what they had to say, watched the secret camera recordings (her belly flipped uncomfortably when she saw how effortlessly Joseph Seed plunged a man’s eyes into his skull, how gruesomely, how unaffected he stood, with a man’s blood quite literally on his hands), she heard what the Marshal had to say about the group.
Eden’s Gate.
Project of Eden’s Gate.
Peggies.
The word rolled off the tongue with uncomfortable ease.
Surely it wasn’t that bad. Rook had done rounds of the county with Staci. She met some of the people. They were a bit… extreme. But they were in Montana and people in tiny communities had that about them. She bet more than half the people she had met owned doomsday shelters that weren’t from the 50’s and 60’s.
And then they passed by a massive statue of Joseph Seed, and Rook began to wonder just how out of their depth they really were.
The helicopter landed, Whitehorse gave her a quiet instruction to keep close and keep quiet. Staci’s fears and his omens, it seemed, weren’t absolute nonsense. They hadn’t taken the Seed family and their Peggies quite as seriously as they should have.
There was shouting and hollering and a thirst for their blood as soon as their feet touched the ground. Vicious attack dogs tugged at their leads, spittle flying from their mouths, jaws lined with razor sharp teeth itching to sink into their flesh. Peggies, all shapes and sizes and forms and backgrounds, glared down at their small group of four as they traversed the marked huts and cottages. Mean and shifty, all of them.
Rook’s skin crawled and she struggled to keep her composure. She saw Joey was as well.
“You aren’t welcome here!”
“Get out!”
“The Father has done nothing wrong!”
“Leave!”
Their words and screams and the barking and the palpable anger - it compounded and built and loaded up until the pressure was almost visible. Rook felt like a bottle of soda had been shaken far too hard. And something was about to explode.
The church was somehow even worse.
The musky smell of incense. The sharp odor of recently snuffed candles. The waxy tang of lit ones. The feelings of human fear and human anger - so tangible you could taste it, bitter and acidic, in the back of your tongue.
Rook couldn’t breathe as she stood there.
The air was too thick. The Peggies that passed by her - ignoring every word from them but obeying one hushed command from their Father - the heavy looks they sent her chilled her to her very core. They did not belong. And nothing was going to convince Rook otherwise.
Standing in that church, four hollowed, hallowed, grim faces staring down at her with scrutiny and judgement. Rook was a child again. A child that had swum too far into the deep end and was struggling to stay afloat. The water lapped at her, trying to drag her under. It was getting harder to resist.
Her hands shook. She gripped her utility belt tighter, hoping no one would see. Rook had stared down the barrel of a gun once before and she thought that was the most frightened she had ever been. This trumped that.
The ‘Father’ said his bit, called out Whitehorse and dubbed her “Hell” (which was a far more flattering nickname than some of the other ones she had accrued over the years). The Marshal spat his back.
The three heralds of death drew closer behind Joseph Seed when the order came to arrest him. Whitehorse held his hands out and implored Rook not to.
“Let’s all just calm down. Marshal, Joseph. Please. Rook, stand down for a moment.”
Rook remained where she was. Rooted to the spot.
“Arrest this son of a bitch!” The Marshal roared, glaring at Rook as if she was the one protesting.
“God will not let you take me,” Joseph said, voice soft and calm.
It carried through the church with far more effectiveness than the Marshal’s spittle-full vitriol did.
Rook, unsure what else to do, took a small step forward.
“Rook, Eleanor - just stop, for a moment.”
One of the men behind Joseph Seed, the brown haired one, gasped quietly. A pregnant silence settled over the church as all four of the Seeds looked her dead in the eye.
“Eleanor Rook,” Joseph murmured softly.
Rook paused, not sure how to respond. This wasn’t part of the handbook on how to deal with perps. None of this was.
“Er,” she answered, “Yes?”
“Stop talking to him and arrest this son of a bitch, Rookie! That is an order!”
“Marshal, stand down!”
Joseph Seed’s eyes seemed to soften impossibly behind his yellow-tinted visors. The brown haired man took an aborted step forward, only to be stopped by the large, red hair mountain of a man. The girl didn’t seem to understand the tension and was as clueless as Rook was about what was happening.
“Eleanor,” Joseph murmured, “sometimes the best thing to do is to just walk away.”
Rook stopped in her tracks. The Marshal and Whitehorse were yelling at the top of their voices - conflicting orders and threats flying with little rhyme or reason. But Rook wasn’t listening to them. Couldn’t listen to them over the beating of her heart right in her ear drums.
Something about the three men that stood before her wasn’t - it wasn’t right. No, that wasn’t it. She recognised them. But she couldn’t remember where. Or when. It wasn’t deja vu, it was something else.
“Eleanor,” The brown haired one said, blue eyes wide with desperation and something else - bright despite the gloom in the church, “Walk away, please.”
Rook crinkled her nose, her eyebrows furrowing as she stared at them in unabashed confusion. They spoke her name with such familiarity it was jarring. And she had only ever read theirs from a file. She hadn’t met them before though, she was sure she hadn’t. Rook would have remembered them if she did.
They weren’t exactly your normal group with tattoos and carved skin. The red haired one especially had half his face covered in burn scars - that wasn’t a feature you just forgot. They were all fairly attractive too, even in the darkness, with their too-blue eyes and appealing features. The girl was pretty, but not like them. She was pretty in a waifish, elfen sort of way with the flowers in her clothes and the lace in her dress and her sharper eyes and rounded nose.
The prayer beads wrapped around Joseph Seed’s hand tinkled as they knocked against one another. The distant barking of the dogs and the quiet fluttering flicker of the candles competed with the deafening drumbeat of her heart. Joseph Seed and his siblings - their unnerving, thousand-pound stares bored into her.
No one spoke.
No one breathed.
“Put those fucking handcuffs on him right now, Rookie, or so help me I will make it so you can’t even find a job flipping burgers!”
The silence was broken and Rook jerked into action. Whitehorse had taken a step back, defeated.
Rook was left with only one option.
Joseph Seed’s skin was warm beneath her touch as she secured the handcuffs around him. He did not resist her, didn’t in any way hinder her. Just let those heavy, yellow-tinted eyes peer into her soul. Until all her sins and virtues were laid bare before him.
“Eleanor,” the brown haired one murmured, voice cracking.
“It’s probably not even her,” the red haired mountain man mumbled softly.
Two sets of piercing blue eyes bored into Rook’s back as she put one hand gently on Joseph’s bare shoulder - careful not to brush against the raised flesh of his self-inflicted scars - and began to lead him away, following after Whitehorse and the Marshal.
“It is her, brother. She came back to us. Like Joseph said she would.”