Archive of Our Own

 one.

“Play safe baby. You know the rules.”

“I will. I love you mama.”

Four words. All of them short and near-instinctual, most of them monosyllabic.

Four words and still, not twenty-four hours later, Michelle is gone.

At four years old, Waverly does not connect one event to the other. Not yet.

At four years old the seeds of doubt are barely sown because all she knows is that her mama is gone and there were no goodbyes. Her mama has simply vanished; no explanation. Waverly does not wonder then what role her own heart has to play in it all because it is much too busy breaking.

Somehow, the house feels cold when Waverly steps inside with only a child’s sense of time to guide her, hinged mainly around the workings of her stomach. She has been out all day, playing make believe with her best imaginary friends, and it was good fun but now it must surely be dinnertime.

Never an especially conventional or predictable person, her mother still never once left her girls without all the provisions they needed. They didn't go without food or clean clothes or anything in that vein - Michelle saw to that.

It had taken Waverly years before she realised that this was her mother’s way of doing her best for her family.

The summer vacation sings its dreaded swansong, but the weather is still fine. Yet the house is cold and cloying the instant Waverly gets to the porch, imperiously telling an imaginary, shadow figure that it is time for dinner now - he has to go home for a while.

But when she makes it to the kitchen, there is no dinner waiting on the counter.

Ward is there though, smoking a cigarette and running his finger around the rim of an empty glass, cut with little lines and diamonds that had always fascinated Waverly, especially when they glinted in the light.

“Where’s mama?”  

She does not bother saying ‘hello’. Her father’s communication with her had always been perfunctory and she had learned by now that he preferred it when she got straight to the point. Anything else floats by like dust in a chink of sunlight.

“Gone.” Ward grunts; one word almost too much effort.

“When is she coming back?”

“She’s not.”

Waverly furrows her brow. That doesn't make any sense. Her mama goes out a lot - but she always makes sure she comes back.

“But - “

Eyes red-rimmed, Ward’s gaze finally jumps to Waverly’s face quick as a flash and Waverly takes an instinctive step backwards. She stumbles slightly over the skirting board.

She knows better than to draw his full attention like that. She craves it but she knows it rarely brings anything good.

There is no ‘but’, not where Ward Earp is concerned.

He watches her for a second, looking like a man who has never seen his own child before, and just when Waverly thinks he might say something more he mashes the brown stub of his cigarette into the dregs of a dirty, stained ashtray on the table. He lights another immediately and somehow, that tells Waverly that the conversation is over.  

“I’m hungry,” she says, hoping this will divert the anger she can see bubbling under his skin. In her short life she has already learned the signs - the red of his eyes, the angle of his shoulders, that particular sharp look he had only just removed from his face.  

He shouts for Wynonna then, and it is only when her sister confirms that mama is gone for good that Waverly believes it. Wynonna’s jaw is set and there is an expression of anger on her face that looks a little too wet around the edges to be entirely believable.

Still, Waverly runs to her room without a moment’s hesitation because the news is too much to bear, but her father always got angry when she cried.

Wynonna follows eventually with a ragged-looking grilled cheese sandwich for her, and she puts an arm around Waverly's shoulder while they both wait for a cacophony of ugly, hiccuped sobs to subside.

The sandwich sits on the bedside table all evening and Waverly cries into her pillow long after they hear their father slam the door and stalk into the night. This is Wynonna's sign to go to bed too, and Waverly is grateful for the first time that Wynonna sleeps like the dead and snores loudly to prove it.

Her mama had promised Waverly a birthday party. There was going to be cake, and balloons.  

Her mama loves her like Wynonna does. She is - was - the only other one.  

Waverly loves her mama too, but it doesn't bring Michelle back.  

She cries for her mother on many nights, well after summer has slipped into its autumn jacket. She only becomes cognisant of Wynonna’s absent snores when it is too late. Even at four, she cannot pretend that her sister had not heard the sobs she tried to muffle into her bed linen. Those nights sit between them for years, never spoken about; a secret never to be told .

-----

The first time it happens, Nicole cannot hide that it is an accident. Her face has always been a beacon, shining with emotion, and Waverly knows instantly that Nicole feels she has overstepped.

But for Waverly, that could not be further from the truth.

Because she had known Nicole's feelings for weeks. It had been the one thing keeping Waverly from falling apart entirely.

She just didn’t know how to tell Nicole that. At least, not out loud.

Nicole laid her love over Waverly’s body with every stray touch and Waverly was doing her best to return each gesture tenfold.

She wanted to arch into Nicole’s embrace every time, not just for the sake of touching but to better feel the hot brand of emotion - of pure love - pass from Nicole’s fingertips and down, down, down into Waverly’s bones.

She has never known a feeling like this before, like she is on fire and all too willing to burn. 

Waverly had thought she had known love before.

And of course she has; mama, Gus, Curtis, Wynonna…

But this is something so new, so unprecedented that it takes Waverly a good, long while with Nicole to realise that love could feel like several things at once. Sometimes loving Nicole - and receiving her love in return - felt like the gentle, pooling heat of a hearth in winter.

Sometimes, it felt like an earthquake beneath her ribcage.

Waverly hadn’t realised that the tiniest press of skin to skin could be a form of art; I love you carved between two bodies like the ancients adorning their temple walls.

Reverence. It takes so many forms.

Nicole bled love and she breathed love and so Waverly felt the warmth of it long before she heard it in short and simple words.  

She felt love when Nicole’s body was pressed against her under the covers, their legs twined together and Nicole’s arm slung inelegantly over Waverly’s waist like the dip in her body was made only for Nicole to slot into. She felt it with a gentle slide of Nicole’s hand across her back when they stood in the kitchen, bleary in the morning gloom; physical contact for physical contact’s sake. She felt it when they held hands, never in public in those early days and rarely even in the time after, because the comforting grip of Nicole’s fingers made Waverly think she might be an anchor - all steel and strength and soul holding them steady against the crash of rough seas.

Nicole says I love you with her lips at Waverly’s neck and her hand between Waverly’s thighs and she says I love you at every possible moment with the little glimmer of light in her chasmic brown eyes.

And then, one day, completely without warning she says it verbally and it is seems that she shocks herself just as much as she shocks Waverly.

She has spent the recent trajectory of the relationship doing her level best to keep things slow, to keep them from rushing, and Waverly can tell immediately in the still that follows that Nicole is mentally berating herself for pushing too far, too fast.

And perhaps things have been fast between them, but Waverly has never concerned herself with it half so much as Nicole has. What’s more, Waverly had known they were in love - how could they not be? - but feeling Nicole’s love is so different to hearing it hovering in the air between them. 

Hearing I love you slip between Nicole’s lips in words is like a flood. There is a deluge in Waverly and it strains the dam she had been unconsciously constructing for years.

She had not known how she might feel in this moment. She had expected buoyancy, freedom, body-bending happiness. If Nicole Haught loved her, loved Waverly when she could choose anyone else, then there could surely be nothing better in the whole world.

So, of all the things she might have anticipated, Waverly had not expected a knot of fear pulled tight in the pit of her stomach. At first, she does not understand it. All she knows is that she freezes. She clams up and her mouth won’t work . Nicole does not know yet that Waverly had already told Wynonna the depth of her feelings - fear-blinded and feverish - because Willa was pointing a gun at Nicole and how could Waverly not simply know in that moment that this woman was the love of her life?

But this, saying it to Nicole , felt different than saying it to someone else.

In fact, it was almost laughable - would become a joke many years later - how Nicole’s mouth had worked too quickly and yet Waverly’s had not worked at all. And they both of them panicked . Their reasons were wildly different, their panic silent and unspoken, but it had happened to them both the same.  

They are standing in the hallway of the homestead first thing in the morning, Wynonna absent and thrown desperately into work after... Willa .  

They are both sleep-hazy and slow, and Waverly loves it when they are like this. They feel almost normal and that in turn feels wonderful. 

Nicole, with her hand on the front door handle, had positioned herself between Waverly and the exit. She is in her smart navy shirt and beautifully form-fitting khaki pants when it simply happens.

“Don’t come outside, it’ll be cold,” she says, opening the door a crack and eyeing the slim, wintry dawn with a guarded, careful expression. Already, she knows how Waverly suffers the bad weather. 

Waverly is still in her pyjamas and fluffy dressing gown, having given Nicole the priority to get ready - she was far more likely to get in trouble for being late to work. They could have showered together, dressed together, but they both know how it always ends and they simply do not have the time.

It had been hard enough to do Nicole’s braid without slipping her hands down her neck, her shoulders, her strong back…

Ignoring the pinprick of a bitter breeze lurking outside, Waverly steps closer and cranes up for a goodbye kiss, knowing even as they bend together that one embrace can never suffice when it comes to Nicole. It is like they are never sated.

It is a gift in most ways, but Waverly had started to worry in recent days that perhaps it was all part of the strange and terrifying force that was settling in her stomach like acid. It had taken her a while to accept the fact that she was no longer alone in her own body, but there was little she could do now to deny it.   

The only thing that had made her feel better was that Nicole never seemed to still her own hands either. They always seemed to be reaching for Waverly, even halfway across a room so maybe - just maybe - this feeling is not supernatural. Maybe it is Waverly; maybe it is this two of them.

Maybe it is just love .

Nicole kisses her back easily, and Waverly takes as much as the other woman wants to give, happy and content and safe in the knowledge that they are no longer fighting, that Nicole won’t turn her cheek this time. 

(Whatever has Waverly in its grasp, whatever is trying to take her soul cannot seem to seep into her veins when she and Nicole are like this. When they are happy.

And it knows. God Waverly shudders when she thinks how this thing knows that Nicole could be its undoing. It is stronger when Nicole is not around, or when they fight, and worse than anything this monster in her blood is smart. It sharpens Waverly’s tongue, does its best to create distance between her and Nicole. It wants to dismantle Waverly piece by piece from the inside out and it knows Nicole is the key. Waverly is starting to think it could have her, if only it lets Nicole go).

Still caught in the here and now, Nicole finally fixes her fingers at Waverly’s shoulders.

“I have to go to work baby,” Nicole insists with a breathless pant, the scratch of her woolen work beanie oddly comforting against Waverly’s skin when their foreheads tilt together.

“I know ,” Waverly grumbles with a pronounced pout that she knows from sure and certain scientific experimentation works wonders on her girlfriend. She pulls away to look at Nicole properly. “All those other people out there need you and all that jazz, but what they don’t realise is that I need you more .”

Nicole chuckles at that, her lips pressed together and her eyes mischievous. She is starting to catch on that something is amiss, but she does not know for sure yet that Waverly means this in more ways than one, because there is a demon beneath her skin and Nicole is keeping her safe. 

“But what do you need me for Wave?”

Waverly cannot stop from laughing, all bad thoughts banished for a moment. She wonders briefly if her laughter had ever been this easily won in the time before Nicole, tinkling like a windchime.

“Get home tonight and I’ll show you,” she says, arching up to whisper into Nicole’s ear. The gesture sends a warm and familiar tremor through Nicole which, in turn, blows the ice from Waverly too.

“I hate that I have to go,” Nicole murmurs, “but I promise I’ll be back in time for that offer.” 

She pecks Waverly on the lips one final time.

“Okay,” Waverly says, resigned as they pull away. “I don’t want to make you late.”

Nicole takes a step back until she is half out the door, aware that this is the only way she will force herself to leave. When she speaks again, it is clear her brain is on its way to work too, slightly more absent than a moment before. 

This is why, Waverly thinks, it happens as it does. 

“It’s fine, don’t worry. Bye baby - I’ll see you later. Love you.”

It happens as easily as breathing, like their love has become such a part of Nicole that she forgets herself; like they have been saying it forever.

In Waverly’s mind, they have been. Just not in words. And so even then, she does not say them back.

She wants to, can feel her heart bursting with the truth of it. But her throat sticks, and for some reason she stays entirely silent.

In front of her, Nicole's face arranges itself carefully - like a jigsaw. Waverly cannot quite tell what Nicole is waiting for. She might be waiting for Waverly to react badly - to say that it is not time to talk of love. She might be waiting for Waverly to say it back.

In the end, Waverly does not say either. Her brain is screaming at her to speak, but maybe the blackness in her blood is starting to stick tighter in her veins - like tar or silt; something dirty. 

After a pause which is barely a beat too long, Nicole makes to leave as if nothing had happened. Her face is still unreadable and Waverly truly cannot tell if her girlfriend is relieved or disappointed.

Waverly dares to hope that Nicole might think the slip passed by unnoticed, but she knows that this is not true.

She tries to move, terrified that Nicole will think that Waverly does not love her back, and she feels an insistent prickle under her skin that she will only be able to name as Mictian one day in the future. The force in her is reeling at Waverly’s panic. It is broiling. It is enjoying this.

Waverly hates it. She wants to claw her own skin off and bleed the poison out, consequences be damned. She wants to give Nicole something more than a life filled with this kind of evil and danger. 

“Baby wait!” Waverly calls and Nicole turns immediately, something like hope on her face. “I forgot something." 

Waverly runs to the kitchen to collect a little foil prism from the fridge, and when she gets back to the door Nicole is on the porch again, 

“I made you lunch,” Waverly says, handing the sandwich over. Ham salad, mustard bought in special. “You never eat enough when you’re on duty. I worry about you.”

Nicole smiles, more than is warranted for a simple sandwich.

She takes the package, letting her little finger coast atop Waverly’s for a moment.

It is clear, then, that she knows what Waverly is trying to say.

It doesn’t alleviate the guilt and it is not enough, not really, but Nicole knows .

That will have to do for now.

two.

Ward Earp had always been distant, and that in itself was bad enough. But he is more distant with Waverly.

For a while, some vague awareness that things are different sits with her but in many ways she is too young to truly understand.

Or rather, she is too young to put her finger on it. She is aware of something, some ineffable parental double standard that she cannot quite articulate and by the time she learns to do so, her father is nearly gone.

She is still young, but her mother's departure means she grows faster than her body in so many ways and soon her father's fluctuation between volatility and extreme disinterest cannot be hidden, no matter how hard Wynonna tries.

Ward shouts at Willa. He shouts at her all the time.

He used to shout at Waverly too, especially when she cried or left her books in the wrong place, but by the time she is six Ward has long since stopped seeing her at all. 

In fact, as much as she truly fears her father's temper, sometimes it is tempting to commit some minor transgression just to see if he will notice her. It would be worth it, she thinks, if she could have her father’s attention or focus for even a moment or two.  

He shouts at Willa almost daily - things about practising her aim or learning about people from the past - but when the shouting is over he also makes amends.

He spends time with her. He spends time with Wynonna too.

And after a while, Waverly notices that the only one he never makes an effort for is her. They spend no time together without others present, Waverly is rarely given pocket money, her height is never measured on the blank wall near the living room...

After losing her mother, she spends her time wishing she could be brave like Willa (who never cries when their father shouts) or funny like Wynonna (who always has a way to make everyone else in the family smile). But at six Waverly supposes she is neither of those things because she never seems to impress Ward.

Most days, she is lucky if she interacts with him at all.

Then, one night around a week before her family shrinks yet again, Waverly finds her father at the kitchen table in the dead of night.

This is not all that strange for Ward himself, but rarely does Waverly creep around the house after dark. She had awoken from some kind of fiery, distant nightmare however, and had needed a glass of water.

Her father’s voice, sharp and staccato, had almost made her scream into the dark of the kitchen because initially she had missed his silhouette sat stock-still in the old wooden chair.

“What are you doing up?”

Even at six, Waverly hears the layers to the question. Not just why is she running the risk of a post-curfew trip around the house, but why is she - Waverly - here in particular? Why isn’t someone else here? Why is she here at all? His voice is lucid and fast-moving like the brook out in the garden. It is his whiskey voice, or so Waverly understands it. It is a cruel voice most of the time. 

“I need water,” she explains, finding herself whispering although she does not know whether this is to try and quell her father’s temper, or simply to accommodate the way the night always seems to blanket itself in a strange hush.

Her father says nothing to this, only watches as Waverly struggles to collect a glass from the high draining board, and then stretches further still to switch on the tap.  

She is still small for her age, and somehow this seems to annoy her father more. She thinks that is why she is not allowed to add her mark to the wall.

After a moment or two as she fumbles in the dark, Ward eventually stands with a sigh and moves heavily to the sink, reaching over Waverly and holding the glass under the stream of water she had managed to turn on.

He passes it down to her, watches her strangely as she gulps the water back.

Swallowing and wiping at a stray drop on her bottom lip, Waverly’s own inquisitive gaze meets her father’s.

“What is it papa?” she asks, using a name he seldom encouraged and feeling inexplicably bold at addressing him without good cause in the first place.

Again, she wonders if perhaps him shouting at her would be better than nothing at all.

“Nothing,” Ward says coldly after a moment, taking the glass from her and filling it again. His hands seem unsteady as he moves but when he speaks again his voice warms a degree or two. “I just forgot how big you were getting.” 

Waverly frowns, because the opposite is true. She had not even been able to pour herself a glass of water.

“We should make a mark on the wall,” he says, and Waverly feels her heart speed up. “Would you like that, Waverly?”

 He is still speaking in his whiskey tone, and Waverly wonders if that means he does not actually mean what he is saying. Wynonna says that sometimes, after their father drinks.

He’d had all that whiskey, she’d say. He didn’t mean it, just forget he said anything at all.

“Yes,” Waverly says uncertainly, dimly aware that nothing about this interaction feels right. “I’d like that, please.”

“Okay then.” 

“You promise?”  

This question, however, is a step too far and Ward makes as if to turn from her, voice hollow again.

“Am I not a man of my word?” he asks, in an accusatory tone that sounds faintly ridiculous, even to Waverly’s young self. He spits the next sentence; venom on his tongue. “The fact you’re even here is proof enough of that.”

This means nothing to Waverly at the time, and she is more focussed on having her height recorded in the days to come. She is delighted enough, even, to throw her arms around her father as best she can with her glass of water. He goes stiff at her touch, and Waverly jumps back quickly. She does not think she has ever hugged him before now. It feels strange. She cannot decide if she wants to do it again. 

“Thank you, I love you.”

As soon as she says it, it feels strange. She cannot remember the last time she said those words to her father. She is not even sure if they are true. She only knows that they are what you are supposed to say, and that she wants her first mark on the measuring wall more than she wants anything else. She is not above buttering people up to get it.

She just wants to feel a part of something.

Ward clears his throat in a way that sounds tight and strained, but he says no more. 

Slowly, almost sadly, Waverly goes back to bed but she does not sleep again until dawn.

Ward Earp tries to save his daughters.

It is perhaps the only other time he has done anything for Waverly even if, in all honesty, it was more about her sisters than about Waverly herself.

He tries to save them but he dies anyway. So does Willa.

Years later, Waverly returns to the homestead and stares at Wynonna and Willa’s names on that one, white wall. For the first time in her life, she remembers that strange, almost inexplicable interaction with her father; how he was drunk and strangely on edge. The words I love you in the context of her father meant even less to her as an adult than they did fifteen years earlier.

They weren’t true, but she had said them anyway. And then her father had died before she could find a way to repair things between them. She thinks, then, that she said it because she wanted it to be true, because she had wanted to make them true one day.

Because, perhaps, she could have willed his love into existence if had only she tried harder to be the daughter he really wanted.

-----

Wynonna’s fingers close so strongly over her nose that they hurt, but she has been numb for days and it is just nice to feel something for a change. 

It is nicer still to feel the sweet strength of Nicole’s arms around her when she comes to on the barn floor.

Mictian is gone, she knows it the moment she wakes up. 

She feels light-headed and woozy, but the weightlessness is soul-deep as well. Mictian had been weighing her down for weeks, like she had been carrying it on her back without reprieve, and there was no mistaking that the weight was all but gone.

When she had let him back in after Wynonna, Mictian had tortured her with memories that weren’t her own; with her sister’s memories of arguments with Nicole.

They had fought about Waverly and, through Wynonna, Mictian had fanned the flames of confrontation. Mictian had said terrible things to Nicole in both sisters’ voices. The demon had attacked Nicole with Waverly’s own fists. The thought of it all makes bile rise in Waverly’s throat and for a moment she truly believes she is going to throw up again.  

Nicole should have run a million miles, and yet through some kind of miracle she was still there, helping Wynonna to carry a weak and tired Waverly back to the homestead. Nicole limps and places her own weight strangely as they walk, and Waverly worries at how badly hurt she is.

There are so many things to talk about now, not just with Nicole but with Wynonna too, because Mictian had told Waverly lots of things and she does not know where to begin.

Her head spins and she almost crumples twice on the way back the house.

Sleep. She needs to begin with sleep.

They all do.

As soon as Waverly is safely on the couch, Nicole excuses herself to make Waverly some tea - very obviously leaving the sisters alone to talk.

They have both felt Mictian under their skin, have felt the pull of the darkness and the discomfort of knowing just how easily the demon had let them enjoy it. That, Waverly thinks, was the worst part. She had never felt so depraved before, and the fact that Mictian had convinced her to find pleasure in others’ pain would stay with her forever. 

“Wynonna,” she says softly as her sister settles on the couch. They both stare ahead, eyes boring through the walls of the homestead’s unkempt living room. They have both had good reason to let standards slide recently, but it gives Waverly something to think about.

First thing tomorrow, she decides, I’ll clean this whole place top to bottom. It will feel normal. It’s something normal people do .

“What is it, babygirl?”

Wynonna sounds tired. Waverly knows for a fact that her sister is coasting towards exhaustion. Mictian had shown her everything. She wonders if the creature had told Wynonna half so much about what fears kept Waverly up at night. 

Fears that she might not be an Earp; that she was going to lose everyone she loved. 

Somewhere in the distance, the kettle clicks and it sounds like an explosion. Waverly feels herself flinch and out of the corner of her eye she sees Wynonna turn fast at the motion. Still she does not meet her sister’s eye.

It wasn’t a boiling kettle that had set her off, but a sudden realisation about the loss in her life.

Everyone she loved, bar two, all of them dead or gone. She thinks of the circular bruise that had only just faded from beneath the soft swell of Nicole’s breast. She thinks about the bruises no doubt swimming to the surface in that very moment. 

Nicole should not be here, with the Earps.

“This is the curse, isn’t it,” she murmurs, settling her aching, angry palms atop her knees. She spreads her fingers, bites them down over the bones in a bruising grip. Her nails dig through her pants. It is okay, because she is feeling again. 

The last few days had been a black blur. She had felt nothing, only Mictian. Her body had barely registered hunger or exhaustion or pain. She had lost her sense of fear, of calm, of love. But now, she is feeling again and everything hurts, inside and out.

“What do you mean?”

It is easier, Waverly decides, if they don’t look at each other right now.

“All of this hurting. All of the people we love getting hurt...leaving us…”

Waverly fights back a sob and she hears Wynonna swallow against something too.

“None of us are gone, Waverly,” Wynonna says, still quiet but fiercer now. Waverly digs her nails deeper.

“We could have been…”

“But we’re not. None of us are going anywhere again ever again. And fuck Waverly I’m so sorry. It took me so long. And Nicole she tried t- "

“None of this is your fault. Either of you,” Waverly says, but her voice is still hollow at its core.

As if on cue Nicole returns with two cups of tea, even though she knows Wynonna hates the stuff. She sets them on the coffee table, atop a mess of ripped open envelopes and scanned copies of BBD files. 

She watches them both carefully for a moment but says nothing before drifting unsteadily away again, a gentle hand on Waverly’s hair as she passes by. 

Somewhere in the back of her mind Waverly recalls having seen others from the team here too. She wonders if any of them stuck around. She hopes Nicole finds some company until Waverly can speak with her.

God, she hopes Nicole still wants to speak to her. She should run for her life - Waverly half wants her to - but there is a selfish spark in Waverly (deeper now, perhaps, because of Mictian) that cannot bear the thought of being without her.  

“Wynonna, Mictian said - ”

“Fuck whatever that monster said Waves. I hope it’s burning right as we speak.”  

Waverly knows that Wynonna is doing this deliberately, this avoidance tactic. But if she needs a little more time, then who is Waverly to deny her that? 

After a pause, Wynonna seems to notice the two cooling mugs of tea for the first time. She looks quickly around the room, as if expecting Nicole to be sitting there, eavesdropping.

“Where’s Haught?” she asks suddenly. “She got pretty banged up.”

Waverly winces and Wynonna shoots a hand to Waverly’s arm, squeezing tight.

“Don’t go there kiddo. It wasn’t your fault, Nicole knows that.”

“But everything that was said…”

“Go to her. Let her tell you for herself.” 

“Tell me what?” Waverly asks, feeling fear flood her down to her fingertips.

Wynonna reads the emotion on Waverly’s face immediately. “That she still lo...you know. You’re not gonna believe things are okay until you hear it from her, Waves. You’ve had enough pain now babygirl, so much more than anyone so good as you deserves. Don’t do it to yourself now. Not now you’re free.” 

Waverly watches Wynonna then, really looks at her sister for the first time in weeks. She knows that Wynonna drew back from saying love because she does not know where Waverly’s relationship has progressed. All the same it is like Wynonna holds a mirror up to Waverly, both of them unable to speak of love like it is an allergy threaded into Earp DNA. Like they’ll burn alive if they say it aloud to anyone but each other. 

Not, of course, that talk of DNA can really apply to Waverly any more. 

“I can’t split myself in half,” Waverly says quietly, wanting desperately to be with the only two people who matter to her right now. She craves solitude with them both, separately, but impossibly all at once. She had felt like a person split in two since Mictian took her body as its own, and she had not wanted it then. Now, however, it was different. She would be with both of them if she could. 

“I’m not asking you to,” Wynonna says softly. “Go to Nicole, go check she’s not hurt. We both know she won’t accept that from anyone else.”

“She might not accept it from me,” Waverly points out, knowing how proud Nicole can be. 

“Well, give it a try anyway, yeah?”

Wynonna’s smokescreens were never half so good as she thought. Waverly knows she wants to be alone right now, so she leaves.

She finds Nicole in the upstairs bedroom, sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed and staring at the place where her ankles interlocked. She has her eyes narrowed, a few little lines cutting through the dust on her cheeks.

She has been crying, Waverly thinks, and she feels her heart splinter. 

For perhaps the only time since they have known each other, Waverly finds Nicole completely lost as she waits. She is normally so aware of her surroundings, even when she drifts she never quite switches off completely. But this time, Waverly is able to observe her for several long moments and could probably have stayed there longer if she had not chosen to break the silence. 

“Nicole?”

Nicole’s head shoots up and her eyes look a little lost as she stares across the room at Waverly.

She rushes to stand and almost, almost manages to hide the pain it causes her to do so.

She is at Waverly’s side so fast it is hard to believe that she had been knocked unconscious not an hour before. Waverly expects her to reach out, but Nicole doesn’t move. She stands a foot away and waits, watching Waverly’s face in a way that looks almost anxious.

“Waverly,” Nicole says, her voice full of tears. “Baby I’m so sor -”

“Don’t,” Waverly says sharply, feeling ready to finally succumb to the emotion trying to break the banks. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re sorry when you’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I should have known,” Nicole says, biting her lip and fervently ignoring a few tears that drip down her face. “And shit this isn’t about me but I’m your girlfriend and I love you so, so much Waverly. And I didn’t fucking know and I’m so damn sorry.”

“Yes you did,” Waverly replies, voice so heavy now with the threat of tears that she can manage nothing more than a scratchy whisper. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know, don’t tell yourself that - not when I know you saw it. Not when that was one of the few things that kept me going most of the time.”

Disbelief paints itself over Nicole’s face, mixed with so much self-doubt that Waverly suddenly understands what Wynonna meant when she said she hoped Mictian was burning somewhere deep below ground.

Nicole still doesn’t come closer and understanding hits Waverly like a bullet from Wynonna’s gun. Her body has barely been her own for weeks, and now Nicole won’t touch her until she is asked.

But she needs to be held, she wants to be held for hours and hours.

So she asks. She asks without speaking, moving closer in a silent request for contact and Nicole’s arms open the second Waverly gives her unspoken permission to touch.

Nicole pulls her tight and lets Waverly bury her head into her shoulder and together they cry.

“I hurt you,” Waverly says in amongst her tears, so quietly Nicole does not even hear her. 

Eventually, though, the wracking sobs burn themselves out and she has some sense of control again. She would be embarrassed to have cried so forcefully, but it is Nicole. There could be no safer place to strip her skin back to the nerves. They had ended up curled together atop Waverly’s counterpane, and Nicole never once gives any hint that she might eventually have to let go.

They could stay here forever, Waverly thinks. Things would be perfect if they simply never left the comfort of this embrace.

From her position snuggled into Nicole, she can hear the solid, steady beat of Nicole’s heart beneath her breast. I’m here, I’m here, it says with every thrum and Waverly knows she has never heard a better sound on all of God’s green Earth. 

But one thing is not quite right, because Nicole never relaxes entirely. Waverly is aware enough by now of her girlfriend’s body and it is settled wrong - far too tight in its position next to Waverly.

Waverly can feel the pain laced through Nicole’s bones from the blow delivered to her earlier.

Nicole had denied it when they first settled on the bed, and she had point blank refused any suggestion of calling out a doctor, but Waverly knew she was in pain.

She could not bear to think how much it must all be hurting Nicole, inside and out.

“Nicole?”

“Mmm?” 

They have not spoken in a while, and while Nicole is far from sleep she seems loathe to break the silence too quickly. 

“I wish you would let someone have a look at your injuries. I feel so guilty for what I did.”

“For what Mictian did,” Nicole corrects gently, and Waverly’s heart twists because she doesn’t deserve Nicole. She simply doesn’t.  

“Can you soak it at least? Bring the aching down a little?”

“I will baby, but later. It’s not about me now.”

But what Waverly needs now is to help as much as be helped. She needs to feel capable again.

“It is about you," she says. "Of course it is. To me it’s all about you Nicole.”

Nicole smiles. Waverly feels it against the top of her head where Nicole has propped her chin. And when Nicole speaks again, the contact between them means it rumbles through Waverly like thunder.

“I love you.”

After that, Waverly is quick to run Nicole a bath. It is the only thing she can think of - the one small gesture that might fill the silence in the wake of Nicole’s words.

She ignores Nicole’s complaints, ushering her into the bathroom with the very clear instruction that Nicole is to be in the water when Waverly returns.

Armed with a stack of clean towels, Waverly slips into the room and locks the door behind her. Nicole has finally acquiesced and Waverly wants to breathe a sigh of relief.

They cannot both fit in the tub here, although they know from experience that that particular experience can be enjoyed in Nicole’s bathroom instead.

The only thing Mictian had not taken was time with Nicole. Bar one or two moments in the later days, she remembers it all. She remembers Nicole stripping her bare for the very first time. She remembers the way Nicole had coaxed all the breath from her lungs with her lips between Waverly’s legs. She remembers the rush that came from seeing Nicole naked and flushed, laying beneath her for the first time. She remembers how her body felt like pure light when she realised that Nicole was slick and ready because she wanted Waverly.  

And she remembers that first admission of love, too. 

Mictian had not taken any of it from them and Waverly could cry at the relief of it.

She is happy, too, to have evidence that - even dog-tired and half-defeated - the hunger that stirs within her at the mere thought of Nicole has its origins in Waverly’s soul and not in Mictian’s need to devour.

She had known it already, of course she had. She had felt the insistent current of desire for Nicole long before Mictian, but that desire had only intensified when Nicole first took her to bed. It had worried her, the idea that she might be touching Nicole while her own desire was tainted with that of a demon’s.

But even with her body all her own, it felt no different. She could see the pale skin of Nicole’s arms and collar, soaked and shining where it had submerged and then surfaced again. She could see the slight swell of Nicole’s breasts, mostly obscured by lavender-scented soap suds but just visible at the top, and even though their minds are so far away from sex tonight, her body tells Waverly all she needs to know.  

Mictian had never stood a chance in their intimate moments. She had buried the demon deep and touched Nicole with her own hands and her own mouth and tongue.

She wants to cry with joy because the demon had tried to keep her, Waverly, most of all but it had used Nicole too. Indeed, Waverly sees the bruises starting up on Nicole’s arms and ribs and the relief leaves her and nausea follows in its wake. She cannot help but stare at the spots where Nicole had hit a pile of jagged, angry metal on her way to the ground. Waverly had done that to her. Nicole could say it was Mictian, but it had been Waverly’s body that struck her.

Nicole catches her looking and shifts beneath the water, so that the bubbles cover as much of her body as possible.

“It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“I hurt you,” Waverly repeats, eyes filling again. Nicole looks as if she wants to move to comfort Waverly, as though she might try to get up again, so Waverly closes the distance between them as best she can.

She drops to her knees on the fluffy bathroom rug and rests her arms against the porcelain rim of the bathtub. She drops her cheek on her forearm, looking deep into Nicole’s eyes.

Nicole holds her gaze, tracking a wet and wrinkling finger over the back of Waverly’s hand.

“No, you didn’t baby. I know it wasn’t you.”

But that is a lie, because Mictian had used Waverly’s body and voice and even if Nicole understands now, she would still have been hurt at the time.

“Well, something hurt you,” Waverly points out. “You still got caught up in all of this.”

“But it wasn’t you, so I can deal with that.”

“You shouldn’t have to deal with any of this,” Waverly counters, feeling nervous as she finally broaches the dreaded subject. “This is my shitty life, Nicole. It’s not yours. You get to leave, if you want to.”

A look of deep and genuine shock settles over Nicole’s face, mixed with a small amount of hurt.

“Waverly my life is with y - ” Nicole’s voice is strained, and Waverly regrets her choice of words immediately. “Do you want me to leave?”

Silently, Waverly shakes her head, biting her lip against a fresh wave of tears.

“Then I’m here, for as long as your answer to that question stays the same.”

“I want you here but I don’t want you hurt,” Waverly admits eventually, burying her face in her arms and hoping she can still be heard. “How selfish does that make me?”

“Waverly," Nicole says as her palm finds Waverly's cheek and urges her to look up again. "You fought off a demon for weeks and you kept it to yourself. You got free and you still gave yourself over to it again. That makes you selfless and it also makes you goddamn brave.”

Waverly had briefly filled her in on the course of events, leaving out any detail she thinks might hurt Nicole too much. 

“I’m not as brave as you,” Waverly says sadly, because it is true. Nicole had stayed even when Mictian was breaking her heart. 

“I love you,” Nicole says simply, illustrating Waverly’s point because this is the fourth time now, counting the ones in the bedroom earlier, and Waverly had not yet responded in kind.

It had been building since she was four years old - the connection between love and loss - and Waverly feels it now more than ever. And that first time Nicole had said it, it had been easy for Waverly to put her own hesitance down to Mictian.

She had told herself that the next time - if she was blessed with one - it would fall from her lips like a sigh. But she hesitates again and this time she knows the problem isn’t a demon. 

It is much, much worse than that.

The problem is her. It is Waverly herself.

And even though she knows that Mictian is gone she can only wonder if it has left some of its darkness behind in her. Perhaps it is her fault, perhaps she should have been stronger. Perhaps she forgot her own edges and let Mictian bleed into them forever.

Because there must, surely, be something wrong with her if she cannot say it now. After everything they have been through, she still can’t say it.

“Nicole…”

“No, you don’t have to say it back. You don’t even have to feel it back, okay? But Waves you could have died and I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t know how much I love you.”

Waverly struggles again, searching for words and instead only a single, formless sound struggles at the base of her throat. It sounds pathetic, even to Waverly’s ears. 

“Sssh baby,” Nicole says, sitting up to kiss Waverly oh-so softly. “It’s okay. I promise you it is.”

The water swirls around Nicole when she moves, still hot and pleasant on her skin where she reaches out to touch Waverly's face.

Waverly had taken such care to get the temperature just right.

Maybe, Waverly thinks as the sound of the water soothes them both. Maybe it is okay. Or maybe it will be .

They go to bed and curl together and it takes a while, but Nicole finally sleeps sometime around the early hours.

Waverly lets Nicole really and truly settle deep into slumber before she climbs out of bed and drifts downstairs, seeking out Wynonna.

They both know they won’t rest yet. Not until they talk about what Mictian had said.

three.

For years, no one tells Waverly where Wynonna goes.

She only learns from the kids at school that there is something called “juvie” and that it is basically like prison. She never tells Gus and Curtis that she has found out, and they spend a long time thinking that Waverly remains in blissful ignorance.

But, weeks after Waverly’s twelfth birthday Wynonna simply turns up at the McCready household one day, because juvie means juvenile and Wynonna is eighteen now.  

She arrives without much fanfare, surprisingly enough. Waverly simply gets home from school and Wynonna is there.

She is there and she looks so different but she is still recognisably Wynonna and that makes Waverly want to cry with joy.

She has missed her sister, missed having the one person around who made her laugh in any situation. More than that, though, Wynonna was the only other person on earth who knew what Waverly saw when she closed her eyes and it had been so damn lonely without her to talk to.

For a time, Wynonna had called once a week on Sunday nights, and it had been better than nothing - but barely.

Wynonna said that she couldn’t speak freely on the phone, and she got edgy and defensive if Waverly even so much as skirted the topic of revenants.

That, at least, did not change upon Wynonna’s return.  

Demons and revenants and their father’s death were all still dangerous waters. Waverly tried to speak about them on a few occasions, and every time could easily see Wynonna drawing back as her face tamped shut.  

It would be years before Waverly really understood it and, unbeknownst to her twelve year-old self, much of this time would be spent figuring things out without her sister there beside her.

Wynonna arrives back in Purgatory with no plan and no money, and with very little motivation to match. Wherever she had been, they had clearly tried to force her through the rest of her education - demonstrating a very clear ignorance regarding what it meant to force an Earp to do anything they did not wish to do.

Even so, Wynonna obtains sufficient schooling documentation to just about qualify her for a job, and then enough legal paperwork to immediately disqualify her again.

But after less than two weeks kicking around the McCready household under Gus’ constant and somewhat haughty observation, she had found bar work a town over and whatever little storm had been brewing between Wynonna and her aunt seems to settle for the timebeing.

“She likes you better than me,” Wynonna says, in answer to Waverly’s persistent questioning over why Gus has been so strict, so reserved even, around Wynonna. “Are you happy now? Should get you in an interviewing room at juvie, Jesus .”

Ignoring the obvious deflection, Waverly furrows her brow and stares down at her sister.

Wynonna is laid flat out on her back in the grass, her dark hair fanned out around her. She glances up at Waverly as she leisurely drops a fistful of candy into her mouth.

Of course, things were different now but somehow it was like nothing had changed between them.

It was absurd, really, because Waverly was double the age she had been when the homestead was attacked, and Wynonna was actually an adult now. It is a weird feeling, because Waverly had missed so much of her sister's youth. But, then again, so had Wynonna. 

They had not spent such a consistent, uninterrupted stretch of time together since before the attack. Even before Wynonna was taken away, she had not spent much time with Waverly, haunted and hampered as she was by the memory of what she had done.

For a solid year after, she had watched Waverly out of the corner of her eye, almost like she was expecting that - with age - Waverly would turn one day and condemn her for the loss of their father.

But Waverly knew it had all been accident. 

Both Curtis and, especially, Waverly had greeted her back like nothing had changed, but Gus - for all the genuine love she carried for Wynonna - was still reserved when they were together. It had been over a month, and Waverly could not understand it. Wynonna was holding down a job, she wasn’t misbehaving (and, if she was, she had a whole new group friends and a fresh location to do it) and Waverly knows it is helping, but not as much as either sister would like.

After the attack at the homestead, people had always treated the girls like they might explode at any time. And, of course, Wynonna had. It was like Gus was still waiting to see whether the bomb had finally had its wires cut. Where she had years of time to test the matter with Waverly, Wynonna was still relatively unknown in this respect.

But Waverly wanted to trust that things were different now, because she and Wynonna were getting on and if they squabbled then it was over the kind of mundane, sisterly stuff that Waverly had all but craved to concern herself with over the years.    

“She does not like me more,” Waverly retorts eventually, referring back to their aunt. 

Wynonna just snorts and shakes her head. “You’re the straight-A student, on the cheer team, you always do your homework on time, and you’ve never even had a detention.” She wrinkles her nose. “It’s disgusting. You’re really tarnishing my hard-earned badass reputation with that kind of goody two-shoes crap. And you’re going to give yourself a headache if you hang there much longer.”

Conceding defeat, Waverly rights herself. She had been dangling six feet off the ground, knees hooked around a sturdy elm branch. She hadn’t climbed a tree in years, but had decided that it was harder for certain conversations to be scary if you are upside down when you have them.

She gets herself to the ground and snags some of Wynonna’s candy before sitting cross-legged, back resting against the gnarled, mottled old tree trunk in the McCreadys’ backyard .

“Gus and Curtis love us both, Wynonna.”

Wynonna rolls her eyes. “Love can’t always change the fact that you don’t like someone. Gus doesn’t trust me. No one here does. I can’t even walk into the grocery store without feeling twenty sets of eyes on me.”  

This is a lie. There have never been twenty people in that store at once before. Still, Waverly bites her lip against a memory - Wynonna getting into trouble for stealing a sole, yellow Honeydew melon from old Mr Morris’ store. That had been a commotion that even Waverly had found funny at a time when most of Wynonna’s misdemeanours had frightened her, simply because of the arguments they had caused.

Even so, all that fighting over a melon had been funny because Wynonna had only wanted to throw something at Oliver Murphy and had lacked an appropriate missile.  

Oliver, one of the kids in Wynonna’s grade, had been asking questions about Ward and Willa again. Everyone had being doing it at the time, especially if they were Wynonna’s age.  

It was a weekend and the kids had been walking around town near the store. Wynonna had simply picked it off the little display under the awning and thrown it. It was stealing but not proper stealing, but ever since then Mr Morris had treated Wynonna like a shoplifter.

It is still funny, but only until Waverly realises that this kind of thing from Purgatory’s residents might chase Wynonna away again.

“Well, I like you,” she says quickly. “And I trust you.”

Wynonna laughs, but something in the sound isn’t quite right. It is heavier, hindered by an emotion neither of them expected.  

“What did I tell you about damaging my badass reputation?” she jokes as she sniffs. Then, sounding uncertain, she adds, “sorry. Most people just say ‘thanks’ don’t they?”

“It’s fine,” Waverly says, tilting her chin and poking her tongue out playfully. “You might be a jerk but I still love you.”

“That’s so magnanimous of you,” Wynonna shoots back, eyebrow raised as she bites her lip against a smile.

“Not really,” Waverly replies as she affects an air of deep pity. “It’s a hard, thankless job but someone’s got to do it, I suppose.”

This time, Wynonna laughs properly - deep and delightful to Waverly’s ears.

“Oh yeah, there’s the Earp coming out .”

Wynonna departs Purgatory the way a snake leaves behind its skin. Waverly had read once in a book that snakes moulted because it let them keep growing, because it was one of the few ways they possessed to slough off the parasites and limit the damage they can do.

But she does not think of any of this when her sister disappears and the door swings shut behind her.  

In fact, Waverly does not think of much of anything at all.

“Where are you?” she asks down the phone the first time Wynonna calls. The line is bad and her sister’s voice is tinny and far-off.

“Nowhere you’ve heard of. Nowhere I’ve heard of. Europe - Greece somewhere.”

It has been months. They did not even know if something bad had happened to her. They did not even know if she was alive for goodness sake.

Waverly tries not to be angry at her sister, tries not to think of the piles of research hidden under the floorboards in her room. The work Wynonna should be doing.

“Do you know when you’ll be back?”

“No,” Wynonna says, and she almost sounds sorry about it.

The night after Wynonna leaves the house feels empty and cold. As she lays in bed, too exhausted even to sleep well, it occurs to Waverly for the first time.

She thinks back to every failed interaction with her father, to the way her mother had not loved her enough to stay.

It’s you, an ugly voice in her head tells her. You’re the Earp curse.

-----

“I wish you didn’t have to go,” Waverly says, laying flat out on her stomach with her chin resting on the backs of her hands. 

She is naked, they both are, but it cannot stay that way much longer.

Nicole turns back from the dresser, an apology on her face.

“Funnily enough I’m not overjoyed at leaving you like that,” her eyes drift over the line of Waverly’s back, linger on the curve of her ass, and then travel back to Waverly’s face again, “to go out into the cold and the dark.”

Nicole fishes a black tank top from one drawer, and drops it at the foot of the bed.

“Night shifts are the worst ,” Nicole adds bitterly, narrowing her eyes as if it were all the shirt’s fault.

Waverly laughs. “You’re so mean, leaving me to sleep alone. To be cold alone,” she starts injecting a healthy dose of drama into her voice because she knows how it makes Nicole smile. “To dream about you and then wake up alone. Especially since you’ve started something you can’t finish.”

Nicole rolls her eyes as she steps into fresh underwear. “We both know that I finished it. Twice.”

“Well I seem to remember someone telling me the first time that two was often considered a poor effort when a lesbian was involved.”

This makes Nicole laugh again, which has the fortuitous knock-on effect of stilling her movements, right as she was about to put her bra on.

“Well I seem to remember someone assuring me that they didn’t have a third in them that time. Pretty sure I won that debate.”

“Baby if you think I was in any way a losing party I don’t know what to tell you. And if in the future you feel so inclined as to win another one of those arguments, I’m sure I’ll let you.” 

“Get me off split shifts this weekend and I’ll restart the bet now.”

“High odds?” Waverly asks seriously.

“The highest,” Nicole says in the soft whisper she knows sets Waverly’s blood simmering. Grinning when words momentarily fail Waverly, she goes back to her bra.  

“Leave it for a sec,” Waverly says gently. “You can do the pants first.”

“Bossy,” Nicole replies, smiling.

Waverly pulls a and-what-of-it? sort of face. "Since when don't you enjoy it?" 

“Never said I didn’t.”

“Yeah well, if you’re leaving me like this then I need to string it out as long as possible.”

“Carry you through until tomorrow?” Nicole says mock-seriously, even as she very obviously bites back a fond grin. 

“Well you never know what I might need to resort to once you’re gone and I’m on my own here.”

Nicole abruptly stops as she turns to collect her pants. She pauses briefly before slowly turning back to face Waverly, a mingled look of warning and desire on her face.

“Don’t,” she says, her voice low as she quirks her eyebrow.

“Don’t what?” 

“Don’t leave me with that image when you know I have to go sit in a squad car all night with Nedley.”  

“Why not?” Waverly asks innocently, eyes roving over Nicole's torso. “You’re leaving me with this image. Fair’s fair Nicole.” 

“Oh no,” Nicole says, bending down to steal a quick kiss. “No, no, no. You watching me get dressed now is not comparable to me trying not to picture you touching yourself while I’m sat with my boss. And you know it.”

“Well, I’ll be thinking of you while I do it,” Waverly says, feigning an apology in her voice as if to say that makes it better, right? She bites her lip as the words visibly hit Nicole, not sure if she is smiling because this is all so suggestive, or because she is enjoying the wind-up.

“Waverly,” Nicole scolds, voice mocking and not at all angry. It is obvious that Nicole is savouring this as much as Waverly. She pauses every so often, drinking in the sight of Waverly atop the blankets.  

“Yes, Nicole?” 

“I’m getting dressed now,” Nicole says pointedly, finally clipping her bra behind her back and holding eye contact the entire time.

“Meanie,” Waverly says, poking her tongue out.

Nicole pulls the straps over her shoulders, but does not hurry to put her tank top on.

“Mmhm, so awful to you,” she agrees, returning for another kiss. Waverly arcs up to meet her and although she expects Nicole to pull away after one - they are both aware they cannot really be trusted to put on the brakes - she lingers like that for a while.

They embrace, mouths wet and breath hot, until Nicole’s phone buzzes with her contingency final warning alarm. It is not the first time they have distracted each other before work, and it certainly won’t be the last.

“Truly terrible,” Waverly adds, stretching out their conversation. “Shame you can’t even fall back on being a good kisser.” 

(Nicole is good, and she knows it a little too well for Waverly’s sanity sometimes). 

“I never knew you hated it so much baby,” Nicole jokes, voice a whisper as she leans back as if to kiss Waverly again. Unhesitating, Waverly moves to meet her, groaning when Nicole pulls away at the last minute. “Don’t worry, I won’t subject you to it again.”

They both laugh. It is impossible not to when they are together and they are this happy. 

“Just kiss me goodbye you idiot.”

So she does. She leaves Waverly with the imprint of a kiss so filled with heat that although Waverly had been half-joking about touching herself later, she starts to think she might have no other option.  

Finally, Nicole steps back and finishes dressing. With a long, regretful look at Waverly she collects a rucksack from by the door and pauses with it on her back.

“I let the cat in before we came up here - ”

“We came down there too to be fair.” 

“Baby I really, really can’t be in the same enclosed space as Randy Nedley and be thinking about it.”

“Randy Nedley and randy Ni- ”

“And I’m not going to let you finish that sentence. The point is: Calamity Jane won’t give you any trouble. I should be back by dawn okay? But don’t get up special for me. I’ll just come nap with you for a bit then we can make a late breakfast.”

“Sounds perfect,” Waverly murmurs, staring up at Nicole and thinking that she must look strange and dreamy, but it really does feel as though she has stars in her eyes. She has dreamed for so long of something just like this. She has yearned for excitement, sure, but it has always come hand-in-hand with this: with safety and security and with someone who just makes life easy.

“More perfect if I didn’t have to leave you, but yeah. Do you want me to bring you up a cup of tea before I go? Save you getting out of bed?” 

Waverly considers the offer for a moment, but decides she is tired enough to sleep.

“You wore me out, I guess,” she says, unable to resist one last comment before finally moving up the bed and under the covers. “Thank you, though.”

“Of course Waves. And I hate it but I really gotta go. Sleep well, yeah?”

“Are you on patrol for anything in particular?” Waverly asks, thinking that her ability to sleep at all will kind of hinge on the answer she gets, even if she thinks she already knows.

“We have to find Bryce Cooper’s body, or at least follow some leads on who might be behind all this crazy stuff happening at the moment.”

Waverly nods and feels her expression grow tight. She had thought as much. It hadn’t become any easier since Mictian, knowing that Nicole was straying more and more into the orbit of the Earp curse with each passing day. She might know now about the red-eyed men who lurk in the night and tear people apart, but it couldn’t alleviate Waverly’s guilt. She somehow felt that Nicole’s involvement was all her fault. She felt like the odds were stacking against them, that something was coming to tip the scales of how much Nicole could do to help.

“Hey,” Nicole says, catching Waverly’s expression and drifting back to the bed. She kisses Waverly on the forehead. “I can handle myself, okay? So don’t worry.” 

“I know you can Nicole,” Waverly says, thinking that that is partly the problem. Anyone with less drive or competence would have run a mile already. “But I’m always going to worry about you.” 

Nicole cannot argue with that, because she worries about Waverly too.

“Well I’ll take care of myself for you then, how about that?”

“I like the sound of that,” Waverly says, managing a smile. “Just don’t stray too far, okay?”

It means many things, that request, and Nicole hears them all. 

“Never Waves.” 

“Promise?” 

“I promise.”

Nicole shouts a goodbye up the stairs when she finally leaves, and she tells Waverly again that she loves her.

She is rushing not to be late now, and so the door closes almost immediately after she speaks.

It is easier that way, Waverly thinks in the silence that follows. Even with Nicole on her way into town, Waverly does not dare to break the hush with a whispered response.

Nicole had promised that she wouldn’t stray, but Waverly knew by now that people always leave her eventually.

Her loving them only seemed to speed up the departure, and she wants Nicole here with her as long as possible.

Waverly wakes at four o’clock in the morning, disorientated for a moment to be in Nicole’s bed alone.

She had set an alarm earlier that day and fumbles for her phone in the dark.

She calls up her message to Nicole.

“Just let me know you’re safe when you get a second.”

It is no I love you , but she hopes Nicole might read it as one and the same.

four.

Waverly is twenty and she is arguing with Champ. She is always arguing with Champ in one way or another.

But tonight she feels the blood boiling in her veins in a way that is so very unlike her.  

If anything, she resents that more than anything else. Even more than the emotional absenteeism and the infidelity. She resents that he even has the power to make her so angry in a way she only remembers as a child, screaming into her pillow at the sheer frustration and sadness of being so, so alone.

Because Waverly is nice. And if she cared to look deeply enough she would maybe acknowledge that niceness has been a crutch for a long time. That she has turned a blind eye to behaviour from Champ and from girls like Steph and Sonja that she should have cut out a long time ago. But for an unbearable length of time she was the freak orphan with the freak big sister and the dead bigger sister, and she came from a murder house that, in reality, she had long since left to rot and turn to ruin. And yes, ‘nice’ is default for Waverly - it always has been - but ‘nice’ also makes it hard for kids to exclude her, to have a good enough reason for the whispers and the looks.

‘Nice’ gets her by, eventually. But now there is little more in life than simply getting by.

And where getting by had been nine tenths of the law in high school, things are different now. The idea of settling sits beneath her tongue like rotten fruit, and she longs to spit it out.

And worst of all, if she is being honest, is Champ.  

Champ, who doesn’t actually seem to know better, doesn’t seem to have the mental or emotional capacity to care for more than his own immediate - and stereotypically carnal - needs. Champ, who probably doesn’t even realise that what he does hurts, that this kind of emotional void has characterised so many of Waverly’s relationships - her disinterested father, her eldest sister who was a product of their father’s unfair standards, her mother who simply hadn’t felt that she could stay. Champ, who doesn’t even have the integrity of character to admit when he has been made.  

Waverly has seen the texts, she knows he has cheated again. He won’t admit it, though, even as Waverly drops heavier and heavier hints that she knows where he goes on some evenings.

Because her brand of ‘nice’ has always, to Champ, been carte blanche to take advantage.

Waverly knows her faults, knows she can be childish and dramatic and has no real frame of reference for how to handle conflict like an adult, but she still does not like the feeling of pure anger pulsing through her, not like this. And, once more, Champ has driven her here.

“If you’re not willing to discuss this like an adult then neither am I,” she half-shouts, feeling her cheeks grow red, feeling herself wanton and filled with fire. “You keep lying to me and I don’t think I’m asking a lot for you to just come clean for once.”

Champ holds his hands up in an acquiescence that is entirely insincere. He comes off as arrogant in his defiance, and Waverly shocks herself with her desire to see that shit-eating grin wiped off his face.

That is not her. None of this is her. She cannot even say why this is the final straw. It is not the first time he has cheated. Almost certainly, it will not be the last.

That is when it clicks. She is mad at herself for letting this drag on.  

“Babe, I don’t know what you’re t- ”

But that is enough. She has heard enough.

“Forget it Champ,” she spits, cobra-like and almost ready to strike with words rather than deeds. But she can feel the fight draining from her. “I’m not listening to this. But I’m telling you now that if you walk out that door tonight - when I know exactly where you’re going - then you might as well not bother coming back tomorrow.”

It is not the first time she has threatened the possibility of a break up, but she has never before believed so strongly that she might actually go through with it.

“I’m just going out with the guys. We want to drink somewhere other than Shorty’s once in a while you know.”

He is lying. Even if Waverly hadn’t seen all the messages on his phone, Champ has never been bright enough to lie convincingly.

“Then you’ve made your decision,” she says, crossing her arms and closing herself off as best she can. “So don’t come running to me tomorrow. I’ve had enough Champ.”  

Standing across the room, Champ all but whines.

“Waverly, c’mon. Don’t be stupid about this.”

“Don’t you dare call me stupid. I’ve got at least enough sense to know a lie when I see one.”

But Champ truly thinks he has the upper hand. He mutters something ugly about not wanting to seem whipped around the guys, something that makes it seem like this is Waverly’s fault for trying to build a relationship she didn't even initiate. He was the one who pursued her in school, after all.

Champ collects his jacket from where he had cast it across the couch earlier and he shrugs it on as he heads to the door.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says evenly, smiling in a way that is probably supposed to be reassuring but just comes over as smug. He thinks he has gotten away with it again.

“Good luck with that,” Waverly scoffs. “Because you’re certainly not coming back here.”

“We love each other Waverly,” Champ says. “I know you won’t let that go over a couple of pints out of town.”

“I’m trying, Champ,” Waverly says, doing her best to keep from crying at the sheer frustration of being treated like she is an idiot, or a child. “I’m trying to love you but it doesn’t work if you keep hurting me.”

For the briefest of moments, Champ looks as though this might have reached him and he might actually try to salvage their relationship. Waverly dares to hope, and feels all the worse for it when Champ finally leaves.

The door clatters shut and Waverly makes a point of locking it behind him. He does not carry a spare key.

She will not admit it later, but she cries herself to sleep on her own that night. At twenty, she is above crying over a cheating manchild who can barely even tie his own laces, but she is not above crying at being abandoned yet again.

The symbolism in Champ’s decision was clear. His heart was gone, if it had ever even been there in the first place.

Champ panics at Waverly’s follow-through, when an official break-up takes place the next day. She leaves his things in the bar for him to collect, and takes pleasure in the sound of his friends’ laughter.

It is clear that Champ had not expected Waverly to make good on her threat, and it is the first time he really and truly has to beg her ear for another chance.  

Then, after two weeks of solid grovelling, Waverly relents.

It isn’t the begging that does it, not really. In fact, that had been more unpleasant than particularly charming or winning. It was the fact that - barring Wynonna who had left again anyway - no one else had ever come back to her before.

-----

Aside from the obvious, the worst part of this is that Nicole was the one who was mad a few weeks ago, and she never approached it like this. 

There have been times in the relationship when Waverly has felt the weight of her inexperience, but it has never been as bad as this. 

All the other times - coming out to herself (and being outed too, she supposes), physicality with a woman - Nicole had been there to hold her hand. This time, however, Nicole felt far away and it was almost entirely Waverly’s doing.

Sure, Nicole had messed up. She had messed up big time. But she was also trying to talk things through and Waverly was rebuking her.

And there was no good reason for it.

Except, if she is being honest with herself there is a reason, even if it is not a good one. It is, in fact a very, very bad one. Because the truth is Waverly has only ever had one other relationship that mattered this much and she and Wynonna certainly did not tackle their issues like this. It is hard fighting with Nicole because fighting with Champ had mattered in an entirely different way. It had mattered because it threw all of his shortcomings into sharp relief and as such made Waverly question her own judgement for sticking with him. But arguing with Nicole mattered because the relationship mattered, and that meant it hurt all the more.

(The fact that it also served to this time throw all of Waverly’s shortcomings into sharp relief was little more than extra shit in an already shit situation.)

She didn't know how to do any of this, because no one had ever showed her.

She rarely argued with Gus and Curtis, and her problems with Wynonna had been exorcised in other ways.

Between her friends at school, Champ, Willa, and her father, all Waverly had ever learned was how to punch back. It wasn't until Nicole had showed her that you didn't need to throw punches at all that Waverly even knew it was an option.

It sounds stupid. She feels stupid, but most of all she just feels dirty for seeing an avenue to hold the power in a relationship for once, and proceeding to seize it with both hands. 

This is especially the case when Waverly thinks about how Nicole had handled the tension over Black Badge taking away her status as Deputy.

She had been upset, yes. 

There had been a few terse words and a turned cheek, yes.

But she had come to the homestead to talk it out, and to support Waverly as she spiralled over her true parentage. She had been mad at Waverly, but she had still been a good girlfriend. 

Waverly feared she could not say the same for herself.  She was short with Nicole, made all the worse because more often than not there was an audience for it. She was practising her cold shoulder too, but only when she wasn't snappy and disagreeable. And all the while Nicole was trying to keep a dialogue going.

Because Nicole had probably had long-term, meaningful relationships before. Because she had had something worth saving before.

And this was all the more uncomfortable because Nicole had never wavered in her affirmations of love.

I did it because I love you, she had said. And it wasn't an excuse, nor did Nicole dress it up as such, but she was still brave enough to say it.

Days later, when Waverly was still ignoring her, Nicole had said it all again by text.

I know I've upset you, and you're right to be mad. I never thought of it as treating you like a child and that's the thing. I didn't think. It was stupid and I'm sorry. I understand you don't want to talk to me right now but we need to sort this - one way or another. I'll be here when you want to come by my place and I still love you more than anything. Even if I haven't done a good job of showing it recently.

And the thing is, Champ had not been above using the I love you card when he was grovelling. 

This was not like that.

Nicole really did love her, and she had been showing it every day. She had been doing a good job, arguably better than Waverly in many ways.

But still the distance yawned between them, and it was all a case of 'six of one and half a dozen of the other' - as Gus would say.

“How long, in seriousness, are you going to do this?” Wynonna asks, keeping her eyes fixed on the road and her hands clamped down on the steering wheel.

Waverly had offered to drive them to work, but this was one of the few avenues Wynonna still possessed to let off some steam. Her foot heavy on the pedal, the engine revving slightly, the wheels thundering on the rough tarmac of Purgatory’s unkempt, pockmarked roads - it was no whiskey shot (or five), but it was good for her.

“Do what?” Waverly asks, genuinely nonplussed for a second.

“Ignore your girlfriend,” Wynonna says, eyes leaving the straight, empty stretch of road for the briefest of moments to track to Waverly's phone. Her notification light flashes obstinately up at them, evidence of messages Waverly has not yet opened. 

She had thought about it, had thought about cutting the cold shoulder off there and then because it wasn't doing anyone any good, but then she realised that she would not know what to say either way. 

“I'm not - ” she starts and then realises how pointless and painfully transparent the lie is. Instead she says, “I don't know.”

“Well, at least you've moved to honesty,” Wynonna observes. “Which is better than your denial stage. Not even Doc was buying that, what with you saying things were fine and then biting Nicole’s head off two seconds later. Lord knows I've given that girl some shit but remind me never to cross you again because you are brutal .”

“Gee, thanks. Your piercing observations are as well-timed as always.”

“Oh sorry, is there a good time for this shit? It's not like you're obligated to tell me your relationship stuff kiddo but be honest with me here. Because the rest of us don't even know what you two are fighting over so, at this point, do you know?”

“Yes,” Waverly says pointedly. Knee-jerk defence tactics, just the way their father had done.

“Really?” Wynonna raises one eyebrow in carefully cultivated look of disdain. “You know what started the fight and why you're still fighting now, yeah? You know why you're now ripping into Haught for absolutely nothing at all?”

Ouch.

That somehow feels like foul play and, already bad-tempered, Waverly feels her irritation spike again.  

“Since when did you of all people get good at conflict resolution?” she asks, snapping far more than intended.

(Or perhaps some ugly part of her intended it just as it came out.) 

“I never claimed to be,” Wynonna retorts, sharp but not piercing, just enough to put the brakes on Waverly's impending onslaught. She softens as she says, “but I do know that I care about you. And you care about Nicole. So maybe she fucked up and maybe she has some amends to make but she can't if you won't let her. And God knows that girl is almost sickeningly in love with you, but it doesn't mean you can keep on at her indefinitely. In fact it's precisely the reason you shouldn't.”

“Say what you mean,” Waverly says, voice hollow, because she can feel Wynonna holding back and maybe, just maybe, she needs some Earp tough love now more than ever.

“Honestly Waves? I don't know what I mean. But I do think that if I were her, I'd worry you were pressing my buttons and I'd worry that you were testing me. Trying to make me prove how sorry I am, how much I love you. And I know we never exactly got a glowing representation of a healthy partnership from mom and dad and that's exactly what is worrying me about you right now babygirl.”

“You think I'm being like dad?” Waverly asks, feeling as though a bucket of ice has been tipped over her head. She feels an imaginary cold trickle down her back. This the worst possibly scenario. She cannot turn into him.

“It's not that dire yet,” Wynonna says, snorting. “I'm just saying don't let him dictate your life. He's gone. For God's sake don't resurrect him now.”

“Do you think I've gone past a point of no return? With Nicole I mean?” Waverly asks, feeling her throat thicken just as her phone buzzes in her lap. 

“Judging by that, no. But dad used to push and push too, so don't assume she doesn't have a line because you're playing a dangerous game. Everyone has a line. It's up to you how close you want to get to hers, and I know you'll never forgive yourself if you cross it and it breaks you guys apart for good.” 

“I'm just,” Waverly inhales. “I'm so upset with her Wyn, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do.”

“If you still love her, you make it work. And if you don't, well then..." Wynonna says and shrugs. The rest hardly needs to be said but the idea of breaking up is too much for Waverly to think about.

Now, visualise someone you hate. Nicole Haught two days ago?

The idea of ever coming close to hating Nicole almost makes her dizzy in a way that has nothing to do with physical exertion.

What? I don't hate Nicole, we just had a fight!

After they spar, Wynonna eyes Waverly seriously as they sit on the mat together, panting and gulping back water.

“At least now you know,” Wynonna points out, apropos of nothing. At Waverly's confused looks she adds, “you know that it's just a fight. You don't hate her so you can probably move past it. Sooner rather than later.”  

It all makes sense then and Waverly isn't quite sure if she wants to hit Wynonna (again) or hug her.

What follows is the last dregs of her anger (still swilling in her shoes and making her churlish and poor company) mixed with a rising sense of embarrassment.

She is acting like a child even after she told Nicole she was not one. She is doing it in front of everyone, in front of a group of people who she had wanted to take her seriously and show her respect.

She was doing it to Nicole, who she still loves and who she wants to keep as her girlfriend. She wonders if Nicole's view of her has been irreparably changed. Nicole is still in the wrong but why should she want to date a woman who can't conduct herself maturely? 

Waverly has to end this conflict, she just doesn't know how, especially when she is undeniably still angry and liable to lash out. 

She could tell Nicole the truth; that she is out of her depth and doesn't know how to do this, how to be a girlfriend to someone who actually cares, how to accept love and commitment. She could tell Nicole that she loves her, but it seems wrong to say it now. 

Perhaps Nicole had not done the best job recently, but in fairness neither had Waverly.

Something has to give.

Trying not to think too much, Waverly goes to Nicole's empty desk, well aware that she is not working now. Being at home is probably sending her up the walls, but she is all but contractually obliged to observe certain periods of leave if she wants to be deemed fit for the field.

That is why Waverly does it. The first small olive branch - a beginning of sorts - is easier to deliver when Nicole is elsewhere.

I want to fix this written in blue biro on an ugly yellow post-it note.

Somehow it is still easily forgotten in the face of more unfounded frustration.

One tiny note apparently does not stop Waverly from stooping yet lower with too much champagne in her system.

Wanting to fix it does not stop her from ruining it before she has a chance. Loving Nicole does not stop her from hitting destruct. 

She had known it all along; she was the problem. Her love was the curse. 

And in the end, maybe it hardly matters that she left a note, because Nicole never gets the chance to read it anyway.

five.

Curtis McCready dies on a sweltering September afternoon, under a sky as pallid as a puddle.

The weather had been humid and overcast for weeks, unbearably stuffy and sticky in the worst possible ways.  

Champ had spent all morning moaning about heading out of town in this weather, but Curtis had always had a quiet way about him that seemed to quell dissent.  

He didn’t shout - had never once in all the years Waverly knew him raised his voice. He never needed to.

He was a man of few words and deep sentiment; old school and built with honour in his blood.

Champ was one of the few people he might have needed to tell twice, but it was only Wynonna (and perhaps Gus) who tried their luck a third time or more.  

He just had a steady way about him, and Waverly loved the bones of him.

He was everything Ward had never been and probably the only reason Waverly was able to bear the thought of her failed relationship with her father. He had never been like Ward until the day he emulated him in the worst possible way; by following him into an early grave at the hands of Purgatory’s supernatural hoard.

Gus says it was his heart, but Waverly knew perfectly well that his heart was just fine. Relatively speaking at least.

In both the symbolic and the literal sense, his heart beat well for a small town man in his late sixties.

He had been going for regular check-ups at the hospital since they discovered a murmur in his chest a year ago. Waverly had worried herself into knots at the time, convinced a heart attack was imminent, but twelve months later and Curtis might have been a prime candidate for a stent or a pacemaker in the near future, but he should have had years left in him.  

He always downplayed these trips to the hospital, and by now both Waverly and Gus knew better than to let him go alone. If left to his own devices, he would return home hours later and simply say that the appointment went ‘well’. He was not one for elaboration.  

So Waverly went with him, although he tried to shoo her from the truck, on the morning of what would be his last appointment.  

“I don’t need you fussing over me girl,” he had teased, no malice in his voice. “You’re young, you shouldn’t be spending your time at hospitals with an old man like me.”

“It’ll take an hour, tops,” Waverly said, shaking her head in amusement. “And if I don’t come, then you’ll get Gus - and then you’ll really know the definition of someone fussing over you.”

This had given Curtis a good, deep belly laugh.  

“You’re right - as always. Some things never change. With you or her.”

If Waverly had known one thing growing up, it was that love existed and it lived in the McCready household between her aunt and uncle. It gave her hope that she’d find it out here too, but it also probably left her clinging to Champ for far, far too long.

Gus fussed nonstop over her family and Curtis pretended it bothered him, but it could not be more obvious that they were the loves of each other’s lives. Curtis, with his love of silence and solitude, let Gus talk and talk and talk most days - and rarely did she do more than bat a tea towel at him when she caught him zoning out. They were different people, but they worked because of love.

It made Waverly’s heart soar and it made her lonely all at once, because she had never experienced anything close to that kind of connection.

Excepting, of course, the love her aunt and uncle had extended out to her over the years.

So she gets into the truck, ready for Curtis' appointment because she cares. 

They drive to the hospital the way they used to drive together when Waverly was a child and Curtis could see the sadness bearing down on her. Some things, he knew, could not be solved by lengthy chats and hearty portions of Gus’ chocolate pie. 

Not many things could not be solved this way admittedly, but he saw Waverly’s need for something else, too. And so he would load them both into the truck on days like that and drive and drive with barely a word passing between them. Waverly could look out of the window, find a strange and inexplicable sense of comfort in the looming mountains on the horizon, and Curtis could play his best Glenn Campbell cassette, and, eventually they healed together.  

Out of a sense of nostalgia, Waverly plays Southern Nights on the trip to the hospital and all told they are back by lunchtime.

“See, I told you,” Curtis tells her on the return trip. “Right as rain - no need to fuss.”

“‘It’s not fussing Uncle Curtis - just love,” Waverly tells him and flashes a cheeky grin.  

“I know it Waverly. Don’t I know it.”

"Even so, let’s not forget that the doctor said you need to work on your cholesterol. Or that she mentioned the dreaded Diabetes word again. I keep telling Gus to stop buying all those cookies.”

“Now that is fussing,” Curtis points out, but he is smiling and Waverly knows the point still stands.

“Yes, well. Fussing is sometimes a very serious symptom of love, they go hand-in-hand” she points out. “Gus and I love you, we want you around with us forever.”  

“Well that’s good, because they’ll cut my head clean from my body before they take me from this place.”

He shouldn’t have said it. It makes Waverly feel sick to think he ever once said those words. 

She does not believe for a single second that it was “his ticker”, the way Gus puts it to everyone who calls the house. The phone rings for what feels like days.

It had not just been Waverly who loved him, for all the good it had done him now.

If the hospital visit had not been enough to confirm that it wasn't a heart attack, then the pale, horrified look on Champ’s face for days does the trick. 

He does not say what happened in so many words. But Waverly gets the gist.

There should not, she decides, be enough room in one heart for all this hurt.

But the hurting does not stop. She wonders if it ever will.       

-----

Waverly hovers above a hospital bed, kissing Nicole on the top of her head. It almost makes Waverly cringe to feel how cool and clammy Nicole’s skin has become.

It had not been better to see her writhing and burning in pain, but the fire under Nicole’s skin had felt like a fight. This pallor felt like a slow and certain death instead.

She could not lose Nicole. There was nothing more to it than that.

Whatever the price, she would pay it herself. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Wynonna, because there was only one other person on earth she trusted as much. But the problem was that that person was dying in front of Waverly and everyone seemed to expect her to sit idly by and wait.

The waiting was torture. Too much time with her thoughts. 

She had lived long enough with a voice in her head - a voice that should have belonged to someone else but instead sounded so painfully like her own - telling her that people would leave if she loved them too much. People died if her love found a voice, Waverly had learned that the hard way. 

And yes, she had not told Nicole aloud - and she had still ended up like this.

But because Nicole is fearless enough to speak her own truth, she says it to Waverly again, right before the doctor puts her under. This time, Waverly does not fool herself that she might say it back because Nicole deserves better than to hear it from her like that. She does not want Nicole to think she is dying, or that Waverly is saying it only because Nicole is dying.

Nicole is dying. 

Nicole deserves better than a hospital gown and a hospital bed. She deserves more than this shitty, stupid life she has been foisted with because she chose Waverly. and she sure as hell deserves better than some painful, pointless death that comes decades too early. 

(And it does not help when, an hour down the line, Waverly discovers a wife. Shae is beautiful, smart, and competent and she has a life for herself, a life she could offer to another woman. A woman like Nicole. All Waverly can give Nicole is this chaotic, dangerous dumpster fire of a reality. All she has given her for days on end is a nasty, passive-aggressive cold shoulder because Waverly had wanted to punish. She had acted like a child and now she would never unhear the way Nicole had all but begged to have her apologies heard because she believed she might not get another chance).

Nicole deserves so much better than Waverly had ever given her - she deserves someone like Shae - and still Nicole had been the one to look out for everyone but herself.

I don’t want to be a burden…

Give Calamity Jane to Nedley, okay?

I am so sorry Waverly, for everything.

It does matter. Especially now. I just really thought I was doing the right thing.  

If I don’t...I need you to know...I have never loved anyone the way that I love you .  

Then the doctor sedates her, and Waverly’s heart almost falls out of stomach, self-doubt creeping through her like ice.

She starts to worry that she might not hear Nicole’s voice again, that Nicole might not hear hers. She might have missed not just this chance, but every other chance Nicole has given her beforehand to admit the depth of her feelings.

What if Nicole dies, she asks herself then, what if she dies thinking that you weren’t in love with her?

But she knew. Waverly might have been scared, but there is more than one way to say I love you , and she poured her heart into every other gesture...

Surely Nicole must have felt it. 

But, Waverly knows, for her to have withheld her feelings for so long out of fear was one thing. To expect Nicole to simply know better was another entirely.

Thiopental could kill her. Give her Propofol.

Oh God, I’m just making this worse…

For the second time, Waverly bursts outside. The cold hurts her cheeks and she revels in it. It wasn’t by Shae's design, but Waverly had felt so small and stupid in that hospital room, and even if it meant leaving Nicole for a moment, she had to get some air.

She was scared. Scared and young and somehow it made her feel like a shadow compared to Shae. 

Shae - Nicole’s wife - is a doctor. She’s smart and she can make herself useful. She probably just saved Nicole’s life where Waverly might have hammered the last nail into the coffin.

Wynonna was helping. Dolls and Jeremy were helping. According to the latest text update, even Rosita had turned out despite Waverly's betrayal. 

The only person with nothing to offer was Waverly herself. There was nothing she could do but love Nicole - and it wasn’t good enough. 

Something in her buckles at that realisation and, rushing back inside to lock herself into the bathrooms, she sobs.

Even if Nicole had known how loved she was, it wasn’t good enough.

Nicole gave her love freely and easily, and she accepted it in much the same manner; she never questioned, she never pushed, and she never once asked for more. 

But Waverly could have done more. She should have done more.

Waverly knows that Shae hadn’t meant anything by it, that she was a doctor and had another layer of nuance with which to consider what was unfolding before her.

But Waverly could not abide the suggestion that she should wait around for a some scrap of a chance to say goodbye.

If Nicole wakes up one final time, maybe Waverly will get to say goodbye. No, that wasn't good enough.

She bristles at the suggestion, even more so than at the unintentional implication that nothing could be done, that Nicole was a lost cause.

She knows then, more than ever, that she will never give up on Nicole. She will never give up on the two of them, not until Nicole tells her enough is enough.

And Waverly understands that after what she has done, Nicole might draw the line. She has cheated now, after all. The thought only makes her feel more nauseous than she already does.

She remembers how it felt to scream and shout at Champ every time she caught him out. She vowed she would never make another person feel so small, so used. And look where all her empty conviction had gotten her... 

It makes her wonder, too, whether things might be different if she had only behaved like an adult and talked things through with Nicole. If she had been with Nicole these past few days, talking and mending and loving, Nicole might not have been alone when the widow Mercedes came calling. Nicole might even have been at the homestead, where the ancient earthly defences against the supernatural might have meant she would never have been attacked at all.

Whether anyone else thought it or not, this was Waverly’s fault. Whether Shae thought Waverly knew her own girlfriend or not was immaterial. Nicole might not run from danger but the Earps had brought danger right to her door. Those were two different things entirely.

This time, Waverly vows to something she will stick to: that even if Nicole leaves after all that has happened between them, Waverly will give her that chance by ensuring that she lives.

She loves Nicole, and while she knows that she has moved far from the realm of rational thought, stood there watching the love of her life slip into death convinces Waverly of one thing. 

Saving Nicole is her sole responsibility now. 

For the first time, she really and truly knows what might have gone through Nicole's head when she took the DNA results. It doesn't make it okay and Waverly can only hope to god that she gets a chance to be a tiny bit mad about it (and about a secret, supermodel-esque wife too) when all this dust settles, just as she hopes Nicole gets the chance to be mad about Rosita. 

(The idea of Nicole finding out what Waverly has done is heartbreaking but if she lives to be mad it is a hundred times better than the alternative.)

Because now Waverly gets it. She just wants to stop Nicole from suffering, and she knows she'll do anything to make it happen. She would swap places, if that was the kind of magic needed. This kind of panic, fuelled by love, didn't seem to know any bounds and Waverly thought that perhaps the instinct to protect at any cost made a little more sense now.

And perhaps the last few days should stand as cautionary tales but they don't. Oh, they don't.

I'm not saying goodbye.

Mattie the Blacksmith had talked of a twin, had talked of the power of two witches working together and bound by something deep - be it by love or blood or friendship.

But Mattie was gone now and, so far as Waverly could assume, Greta had only herself and her spells left to mark the old times.

There was hurt behind Greta Perley’s eyes, the kind of hurt that Waverly feared for herself.  

If anything, Greta's pain only makes the urgency in Waverly's chest tighten its grip. It stops her from thinking properly. It stops her from asking questions. 

(Because if she is being honest there is something darker too in the witch’s stare, something testing and calculating, but Waverly ignores it because Nicole's blood is filling with iron and that is all that really matters.)

Selfishly, so very selfishly, she only takes. She doesn't even think to ask, doesn't even hesitate a moment just to bring up Mattie properly and to offer her condolences.

She knows, deep in her soul that it is all a trick, but she gives herself willingly to it.

Shae is nowhere to be found when Waverly returns, a slip of paper clutched so tightly in her hands that it becomes a concertina.

Waverly wonders if Shae left on her behalf, or if perhaps things were finally starting to sink in. Surely even if they are estranged - even if Shae is a doctor - this cannot be easy.

In fact, Waverly is surprised that the news of a wife isn't hitting her harder. Shae has made it clear that they are over, and it mostly hurts to know that Nicole had felt she couldn't say anything. That and the fact that Shae is beautiful and tall and smart, but with qualifications and a profession to show for it. She hadn't spent over two decades in the same place. She hadn't stalled in her education. She probably didn't struggle to reach jars at the top of cupboards and she certainly shared Nicole's love of climbing and camping - which Waverly decidedly did not. (She was trying but it's not like they'd really had a lot of time for hobbies recently.)  

In fact, if she stops to think about it, Waverly feels woefully inadequate in comparison.

As it is though, she does not stop to think about it. In fact, she scarcely thinks of this news at all. She cannot tell if perhaps it will hurt more later, if (when, she must think of it as a when) Nicole wakes and the certainty of her survival overtakes the blinding fear of her death.

More likely though, Waverly thinks that this is her conscience’s way of reminding her that she had no right to be angry. She has no moral high ground. Nicole was married and it was wrong not to tell Waverly, but it was clear her relationship with Shae was long finished. Evidently they have stayed on talking terms, but there was no crime in that. Especially since one topic of conversation seemed to be Waverly herself.

She loves you, Waverly Earp. 

All told, it was nothing compared to all that champagne and to...Rosita.

And all the fighting was nothing compared to what Waverly believes that she and Nicole have together. So, she leans down once more and takes her dying girlfriend's cold, cold hand.

The sensation makes bile rise in Waverly's throat. All this time knowing each other and Nicole's hands been so consistently wide and warm that Waverly had barely noticed it. Now though, they are curled at Nicole's sides, too chilly to belong to the woman Waverly has known. 

The doctors had put Nicole under but, not content to take any chances, she whispers into Nicole's ear anyway, too quiet for anyone else to hear if they were to walk in. 

“Nicole? Baby? It's Waverly.” She winces. That was a dumb thing to say. “I know you'd know that. They said you were unconscious and wouldn't hear me, but I don't care. I'm so, so sorry Nicole. This is all my fault. I should have been there with you. Or I should have just told you to go, but I just didn't want to do all this without you by my side. Plus, I knew you'd never leave.”

Waverly swallows, hears the sound like it is three times as loud as it should be. 

“Except…” she feels her voice grow thick. “Except it kind of feels like you're leaving now. And I’m going to tell you now that you can't. You can't leave like this baby. You keep telling me I’m bossy sometimes and I know you're joking but…”

She doesn't notice that she is crying until the first tears fall onto the sheets like little raindrops.

Pat, pat, pat…

Her voice goes so tight it hurts, pitching higher so that she has to clear her throat before she can continue.

“I know it's just your little joke but this time I'm going to tell you that you're not allowed to go. And because I'm bossy you have to listen to me. Nicole you've never given up on anything in your life, so please don't give up now.”

Waverly sniffs and the sound is ugly, embarrassing even, except that there is no one here to listen. She has not cried like this since Mictian left her. That time, Nicole held her. It felt like a million years ago. It felt like yesterday too.

“I, uh. I have to go out for a second. I promise I won't leave you for long so you better promise me you'll be here when I get back.” 

Don't die, baby.

She won't say it. She won't say that three-letter word.

“I'm going to make this right Nicole. I promise I will.”

I love you.

She won't say that either, not while Nicole is only hanging on by a thread.

There will be a better time. There has to be. 

“I'm going to move heaven and earth. I swear it.”

A promise is the same as an I love you right now, at least as far as Waverly is concerned.

Nicole doesn't die. The cost is steep and that is fine because Nicole is worth silver and gold and rubies. She is worth diamonds and, thank God, she lives. 

Curtis died. Dad and Willa too. They didn't come back (not properly, anyway). Even when Champ came back he never stayed, and only Wynonna seems to have settled now.

But Nicole didn't need to come back. She never left in the first place.

Nicole doesn't die.

And it is the best, quietest I love you Waverly has ever heard in her life.

+one. 

Alice Michelle Earp is physically present in their lives for less than ninety minutes, but she hangs heavy in their hearts from the moment they each set eyes on her.  

She is perfect, because she is Wynonna’s. And she is perfect, too, because in some tiny way she is all of theirs. 

She goes to Waverly quietly, although of course Wynonna does not give her over that way.

Waverly’s heart is torn as she leaves the bar with that tiny, new life bundled up in her arms. She wants to hold Wynonna and keep her shattered pieces from falling apart entirely, even as she knows that this is their only chance to save little Alice.

So, Waverly runs. She holds onto this new, unsullied life as tightly as she dares, and she runs and runs, knowing that Nicole will be there to meet her.

Nicole, who is alive. Nicole who loves her and didn’t die, didn’t leave Waverly all alone.  

Except, Waverly realises as she throws herself into the car and looks down at her niece, they are none of them alone now. Alice will be with them all.

Oh God. Her niece. 

It takes Waverly until they are ten minutes out of town before she realises it.  

She makes a sound when she does, and Nicole looks across the car, eyes wide and startled. Her gaze darts to the mirror, searching for an assailant that mercifully does not exist.  

“No, no it’s nothing like that,” Waverly breathes, almost too scared to break the hush as she wills Alice not to cry. It seems unlikely that this would be a death knell now, but Waverly is terrified to tempt fate.

Nicole visibly relaxes, eyes flicking between Waverly and the road ahead as she waits for Waverly to speak again.

“It just hit me, I think,” she murmurs, gazing at the downy-dark hair on Alice’s crown. “The word ‘niece’. And the word ‘aunt’, by extension I suppose.”

Nicole chuckles, a little louder than Waverly had spoken and Alice shifts. She lets out a tiny murmur before settling again, almost as if she is drawn by Nicole’s laughter. 

Me too kid, Waverly thinks. Me too.  

Alice grips onto Waverly’s finger, and the determined strength in her little hand brings a lump to Waverly’s throat.

“It’s a good word,” Nicole says gently. “They both are.”

“I guess it doesn’t count technically,” Waverly ventures, nervous to bring this up in case Nicole thinks it is a subtle dig at her and the DNA test. “But Wynonna said - ”

"It counts,” Nicole says quickly, but not awkwardly; no hidden meaning. “It will always count Wave. You’re her aunt. Of course you are.”

“And you?” Waverly asks, nerves increasing and her stomach in knots.

“And me what?”  

“It counts, yeah? For you too?”

It has been a tough couple of days, what with the arguments and the near-death experience, with the secret wife and with, well, bad decisions on Waverly’s part. Many, many bad decisions - not all of which Nicole is aware of yet.

Feeling anxious, she watches as Nicole’s face twists and at first Waverly thinks she has pushed her - pushed whatever scraps are left of them as a couple- too far. But then she sees the truth of it; Nicole is overwhelmed. 

“I uh.” Nicole pauses, takes a couple of deep breaths. She clears her throat. “I’d like that. But only if you want it to count for me too?”

“I want that more than anything.”

“I love you, Alice Michelle,” Waverly whispers against Alice’s tiny face. She should be sent away with only love, so Waverly holds her tears back. Another Earp is leaving her, but this time there is hope mingled in with the pain like little fronds of gold thread because Alice has given them all something more to fight for.

She has given them a higher cause.

Nicole had taken a moment with the baby beforehand, all the better to give Waverly the time she needed.

And then Alice is gone, almost like she was never there in the first place, and even the soft new baby smell of her fades fast in the choppy, unforgiving wind.

As soon as her arms are empty, Waverly cries and seeks to fill them again.

Nicole is there, waiting for her.

She shouldn’t be, for any number of reasons.

She should have left. But she was there anyway.

-----

There is no escaping the sorry party. It comes swiftly and there are no hats. 

Even taking into account all of the forgotten birthdays prior to Ward’s death, it is still the worst party Waverly has ever known.

They cry.

They both cry even though it feels like their eyes are raw and their bodies are dried up and empty.

It hurts because they love and that is something, Waverly supposes. 

There is a time, though, where she worries that love might not be enough.

Nicole explains the DNA tests (again) and the estranged marriage (for the first time).

She explains the trying to tell Waverly, the desperately wanting to share that part of her past. She recounts the difficulty in finding the correct moment to drop such a bombshell. And even Waverly has to acknowledge that there really has been no appropriate time amongst first dates and Bobo’s spiked champagne, amongst Mictian, a scarecrow demon, and a possible revenant baby at the end of one very accelerated pregnancy. 

“I guess, part of me was ashamed too,” Nicole admits, trying her hardest to hold Waverly’s eye but failing at moments too. “I’m not ashamed of falling in love with her, or of falling out of it again. It wasn’t real, I think I knew that at the time, but I think I knew it especially when I first set eyes on you. We hadn’t even spoken but the feeling was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. I just knew. I never had that with Shae and if you could force her to be honest she’d say the same about me.  

I think I’m just ashamed that I acted so recklessly. That I never - we never - just cut it clean. I was worried you’d think it meant I had doubts about divorcing. I never did, we just had so much studying ahead of us when we broke up and marriages help with the fees. We were friends still and it just seemed sensible - we both knew we’d make a clean break the second one of us met someone else.”

“When did you tell her you needed the divorce?” Waverly asks softly. It is not a test - she is genuinely just curious.

Nicole bites her lip, looking embarrassed. For a second, Waverly’s stomach flips over as she fears it might have been only recently. Only since Alice.

But then Nicole sweeps the rug right out from under her feet.

“Do you remember when you got shot? Or grazed, as you put it,” she asks, before laughing at herself. “Stupid question, I know. Like you’d forget.”

“I remember,” Waverly says, waiting for Nicole to make her point. It takes a few beats of silence before she realises that it is the answer. That Nicole is embarrassed because she knew so early on. “Oh.” 

“Oh,” Nicole echoes, waiting to see Waverly’s response.

“I...Nicole I hadn’t realised.”

Nicole laughs. “You hadn’t realised that I was head over heels in love with you from day one.”

It is neither an explicit statement nor a direct comment. She is not poking fun at either one of them. She is just being Nicole; soft and serious and (more often than not) direct. 

She goes on to make it clear that this is all only an explanation, that she was wrong, that she is sorry. In fact Nicole is sorry a hundred times over and it makes Waverly cry because Nicole had only ever tried to act with the very best of intentions. She had made the wrong decision, but the very act of trying was set deep in Nicole’s bones. 

And then it comes to Waverly, and she has to admit what she had done. She has to try and explain why she had done it - to explain that she was angry and spiteful and petulant; a child.  

And the thing is, Nicole does not hurt like Waverly or Wynonna; Nicole implodes she does not explode.

Nicole blames herself and she questions every one of her own actions because she had always done everything to help Waverly understand all those newfound feelings for another woman. And for a moment Waverly really thinks she has lost everything, realises that she did not even really know just how easily Nicole is the best thing that ever happened to her until, yet again, she is almost gone.

She watches Nicole shut down, each muscle in her face slackening into a mask as she retreats inwards.

“No,” Waverly says, diving to take Nicole’s hand where it rests on the table. Nicole goes tense under Waverly’s touch and for a heart-stopping moment she thinks Nicole will cringe away from her. She does not move, however, and Waverly sees the cogs turning. “No, no, no Nicole. Please. Don’t go wherever it is you’re going. Shout at me. Scream at me. Give me the hell I gave you. But don’t do what you’re doing right now.”

“The results,” Nicole gasps out, eyes full of tears that she cannot seem to let herself shed. Waverly feels herself starting to cry again. “If I hadn’t driven y-”

“I’m going to need you to stop right there,” Waverly says, voice authoritative until she slides into a joke that she can only hope will make things better and not worse. “This is my fuck up okay? You go get your own fuck up because this one’s mine.” 

Nicole does laugh, but there is no humour between them now.

 “That’s the point Waves. My fuck up start-“

“Starts and ends with you putting that envelope in your purse, okay?” 

Somehow, that message gets through quickly, but others take longer.

“Will you ever trust me again?” Waverly asks eventually, not out of selfishness this time but because if Nicole can’t, because even if it breaks their hearts, this can’t go on. They cannot be a they if Nicole loses all trust in Waverly never to make the same mistake again.

Waverly knows what it is like to live without trust in your partner, and she won’t put Nicole through that. She has done enough damage already.

She adds, “I mean, I know I’ve given you no reason to…”

Nicole thinks for a moment, but for Waverly it feels like hours. Her organs feel like they are tangling around each other, winding between her ribs.

“It’s not you that I can’t trust, I don’t think,” Nicole says eventually, speaking slowly and chewing over each word.

This is not the response Waverly had expected. “What do you mean?” 

“I can see that you’re sorry, Wave,” Nicole says, looking first at their conjoined hands and then at Waverly’s tear-streaked face. She had tried to keep it together during her admission because Nicole deserved that. But when it came down to it, Waverly had broken down easily. “I can see that you believe it wouldn’t happen again. But it’s me.” 

Nicole’s eyes go distant again for a moment, a sad little frown sitting on her forehead, one parentheses without its end point.

“Baby? What is it?" 

“I don’t think I’ve ever really got it, you know? Why you wanted me when you’re, well, you. Every superlative in every language. I don’t know if I trusted myself to be enough then, and I really don’t know that I can trust it now.”

Nicole’s voice cracks and Waverly wonders if it is the same sound made by her own heart splintering in synchronicity.

“It doesn’t even make sense that you think that,” Waverly says, crying again. “When that’s always what I thought about you. You’re the sun Nicole, and I hate what I’ve done to you. You should hate me too, and if there’s something you need me to do to make it up to you then you need to say. Because I’ll do it. Because I l- “

For a second, she really thinks about saying it then, but for all Waverly knows Nicole could be close to ending things and leaving Waverly for a better life. 

Waverly’s love has never done more than driven people away before.

“Because I’m so, so sorry.”

But Nicole does not leave even if, in her attempt to work through things alone, she grows distant for a while. They spend as much time with each other as ever - more than ever, probably - because they know they need to band together to get through everything that has happened.

The threat of Bulshar looms over them on top of everything else, and they all need a plan of action when he finally rears his ugly head.   

After a few painful weeks in which Nicole works through whatever process it is that goes on in her head when she grieves, they stay up late one night talking. They talk about what hurts - what will always probably hurt a little bit - they talk about what they need from one another, and they talk, frankly, about what they really want in the future, in their future.  

And when they are done talking, they touch. 

They touch in a way they have not touched since before an envelope full of DNA results plunged everything out of orbit. 

Nicole touches Waverly in a way that makes her truly believe that there is still love there, between their bodies and between the sheets, in spite of what happened with Rosita. 

(She had never doubted Nicole, not really, but Waverly had been acutely aware that any act of infidelity comes with a steep, steep price.) 

They have, in fact, slept beside each other every night since Alice was born, but this is the first night they have slept together.  This is the first night they work sighs and groans from each other’s bodies and it is like a dam breaking.

In the weeks that follow, they learn each other all over again.

It is almost as though they hit reset; they each take a do-over and they start again. It is better this way with no grudges, no point-scoring, no holding on to the things they cannot change.

Because they are trying again. They are really, really trying.

And after those first few stilted weeks it stops feeling awkward. It stops feeling like they are bumping into each other at every turn, getting under each other’s feet in the most metaphorical of senses. They stop apologising for offhand comments, stop feeling scared to venture into difficult conversations or even to make the odd joke. 

It starts working again. They remember how fun it is to be so wholeheartedly in love.

We’re all going to die anyway, so what’s the point?

The point is that I love you and if that’s our destiny then I am pretty darn stoked .  

Just try not to die, okay?

(Translation: I love you too).

“Hey, Waves?” Nicole whispers one night, voice casting out into the silence that falls after they work their hands between each other's legs and eventually come together.

“Mmhm?” Waverly asks, floating in a contented bubble as Nicole rakes soft fingers up and down her bare back. She has never been this in love. Even with Nicole. She had not thought she could love her more but somehow, now, she does. And she knows Nicole feels the same.

It was not long ago that an entirely different conversation started this way. One about bruises and beatings.

“Tell me a story.” 

“What do mean?”

“Just tell me something. Anything. The silence feels too loud tonight,” Nicole says and somehow Waverly knows exactly what she means. It sometimes feels as though the night is howling at them, making them aware that something is out there, advancing slowly closer.

“What do you want the story to be about?” 

“Us,” Nicole says, and Waverly can hear her smiling. “Or you. About the you I never got to know.”

“But that’s a sad story.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Nicole points out and Waverly feels something in her brain finally, finally settle into place. It doesn't all have to be sad. Of course it doesn't. 

“Once upon a time,” Waverly begins, voice quiet as her hands seek Nicole under the covers and she finds her waist. She lays her palm flat and strokes it in tiny circles, “there was a little girl. And she lived in a little town. It wasn’t an especially nice town sometimes. It had lots of nice fields but lots of scary, unsettling forests. But at first, the little girl didn’t know about any of this and, for a short while, she thought she was happy.” 

“What made her happy?” Nicole prompts, still smiling. 

“All the things that make lots of little girls happy,” Waverly says, casting her mind back. “Dance lessons. Running races. Hopscotch.  Larger Than Life by the Backstreet Boys.” This makes Nicole laugh and Waverly feels it tingle pleasantly down her spine, happiness like a spark of electricity between them. “Games with her big sisters. Hugs from her mama.”

Waverly feels some of the laughter leave Nicole’s body at these latter exaples, but she is in a flow now and so she goes on.

“You see, the trouble with this story is that people start leaving the little girl, and she doesn’t know how to keep them in the horrible little town.”

“So was she lonely?” Nicole asks, voice careful.

“Maybe. Mostly I think she was waiting,” Waverly decides, realising it is true only as she says it. She had been waiting a lifetime for Nicole Haught. And she was done tying herself into knots as she passed the time.

It had to be now. It could only ever have been now.

“Waiting sounds a little better I suppose,” Nicole observes quietly.

“It is,” Waverly agrees, “although I don’t think she thought so at the time.”

“That makes sense,” Nicole says in a very transparent affirmation. “Did she at least know what she was waiting for?”

“No,” Waverly says, voice certain. “Not at the time. She’d be much older when she worked it out.”

“But she does work it out then?” Nicole asks in a rare outward attempt to seek some reassurance.

“Eventually, yes. It takes her kind of a while because she’s scared and a little bit silly at times. But eventually she works out that she is waiting for someone to stick around.”

“I think a lot of people are waiting for that." 

“Maybe, but the truth is the little girl has a big secret. She starts to think that maybe it’s her. Maybe she gets people killed or makes them run away. Because every time she loves someone, then bam. They just vanish somehow. And sometimes they come back but mostly they don’t. So the little girl tries to stop loving because she gets too scared to love people if they're just gonna leave.” 

Halfway through this part of the story, Nicole’s hand stills at Waverly’s shoulders. Then it wraps around them and holds her tight. 

“Oh Waverly. You don’t have to do this anymore, I’m so, so sorry I asked...”

“But she can’t help it,” Waverly goes on, ignoring the tears on her cheeks and the way Nicole’s hand shakes against her skin. “She can’t help loving people and she especially can’t help falling in love with the most beautiful woman in the whole world. But she stays scared too, even when she falls madly in love.”

“And that’s okay,” Nicole whispers, pressing their bodies closer together. 

“Is it?” Waverly asks, voice doubtful.

“Of course it is. Anyone who loved that girl would know how big her heart is and that it’s made out of pure, shiny gold. They’d know how she wrote love into packed lunches, or warm baths, or midnight texts, or even post-it notes and a witch's horrible spells. They’d know that she loved deeply in this universe, but that she loved just as much in other universes too. In other terrible universes where pickles haven't been eradicated and somehow get put into salads.”

Waverly laughs, wiping the tears from her cheeks even as Nicole does the same thing.

“It doesn’t change some things though. Like how the girl could have done more, sooner.”

“Well that's okay too,” Nicole says pointedly. “Because the story isn’t over yet. There's always more time. As much time as necessary.” 

“But still,” Waverly counters, "the girl grows up to know that time isn't a given. It takes her too long to work that out, but she gets there eventually."

Nicole hums her assent at this, and Waverly lets them both process the conversation before she whispers a question between them, the air in the room a static charge.

“Do you want to know how the story ends?”

"Of course I do."

"I guess it's no fairytale, but it still ends with an I love you .”  

She hears Nicole’s breath catch slightly, feels her own flutter in her chest. Because she has said it now. And if she truly is cursed in her own way then she has started it all off again. But they already know that Bulshar is out there waiting. He has already taken one of their own and loving Nicole won't stop whatever he has planned.

Loving Nicole might be the armour they both need to win. 

And if Waverly regrets all the missed opportunities she also knows that she will never want to swap this moment, not when it feels like this. It feels like she is finally breathing freely, like her lungs are finally full and her heart fuller still. 

The silence shifts to something more pleasant, because it presents no barriers to their emotions - nothing to stop Nicole hearing her perfectly when says the words for the first time. 

In the chink of light squeezing between the curtains, Waverly can see Nicole’s face when she says them again, and again, and again. 

Her expression is moonlit and magical, worth every secret fear Waverly has harboured for nearly two decades. 

Nicole sits up and flips Waverly onto her back so that they can lose themselves in each other again.

“Waves.”

It is the second time that night that Nicole breaks the silence.  

“Yeah?”

“Say it again, I’m worried I dreamed it.”

Waverly laughs, but the words fit in her mouth so perfectly it is like sugar on her tongue, speaking the truth so freely.

“I love you Nicole. I love you, I love you, I love you .”