Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nicole was ten years old the first time she heard about the moon being a ghostly galleon. Some poem. About some lovesick girl. Still, the part about the moon resonates sometimes, on nights like this.

Give or take some ambiance, of course. The poet probably didn’t have the gravel lot behind Shorty’s bar in mind. But the gravel lot behind Shorty’s bar was where Waverly Earp was currently standing, power grunting as she hucked bulging trash bags into the bin with a clatter, so needs must, and all that.

Nicole curled a little tighter against the cold trying to leech through. Waverly stretched into a backwards bow, tired at the end of a closing shift. Coatless, and hurrying. Slamming the back door against the moon, galleon or not.

Nicole moved on, pacing through the rest of her patrol loop with her eyes roving and her ears pricked. Chance and opportunity were fine, but damned if she’d pine. This wasn’t like high school. She wouldn’t be hurt by the unobtainable. Not when the night was so calm and open. Waiting.

“Welfare check,” Sheriff Nedley barked into second shift’s nadir moment of vulnerability. Bellies full from the lunch everyone else called dinner, eyelids drifting downward. Nicole started, and tried to look alert.

“Sheriff?”

“Third Concession.”

Nicole sighed and stood, a knuckle at the small of her back, grunting at the hot spike from the weight of her service weapon. Nedley eyed her.

“What?” She huffed.

“I tell you to take the kid, you gonna shoot me with that?” Jerking his chin towards the holster. She went slit eyed.

“Maybe.”

“Take the kid anyway. Maybe it’s time you put me out of my misery.”

“What, your misery of making me the kid’s Field Training Officer? Didn’t you tell me it was an honor and a privilege?” She gave him her best innocent face.

“C’mon, Haught,” Nedley shot back an old, well worn weight behind his words. An old argument they’d circled before. The question of small town succession.

“C’mon, Sheriff. You know the town isn’t ready for someone of my, um, persuasion.”

“Persuasion.” Nedley blew his scoff through his mustache. “If that means ‘competent,’ then nope.”

“You’re buttering up technique needs a little work.” She clapped her uniform cover into her head. “Lebucean!”

“Ma’am?”

“Welfare check.”

Lebucean bounced up with intensity. Verve, even. It was cute, and annoying. Exactly like finding a Mormon missionary on the doorstep. Youth, in all its excitement and newness. She was careful not to smile, but she did toss him the keys. Despite standing totally still, he gave the impression of wagging.

*
They pulled onto the verge running in front of the little house. The cat's paw breeze making the windchime strung on the porch give one light tink. The only movement, the only sound. She looked at her trainee, his eyes scanning across the field of observation.

“Who called it in?” he asked softly, and cleared his throat.

“His sister. She usually talks on the phone with her brother once a day, or every other day.”

“Now?”

“Nothing for almost a week.”

He grunted, visibly assimilating and collating. He would learn to do it faster, more privately, but his starting place was solid.

“What do you see?” Nicole asked, looking out the windshield.

“A waiting place,” he said, and jerked the door open.

“Well, now,” Nicole said to herself, joining him on the porch, but no one answered the echoing thumps of his giant D-cell Maglight on the door, or his bellows about being a sheriff's deputy.

“Hmm,” he said, not mentioning the sour smell curling light as pollen into Nicole’s nostrils.

“Yup,” she agreed, waiting for him. He smiled, just a tiny flick.

“Hey boss, do you think this is the right moment to inform you that I had a small passion for lock picking, in my youth.”

“Youth,” she snorted. Fifty seconds later, they were standing in a small foyer, and the smell was too strong for anyone to ignore. Filling the space with gyres and eddies. Lebucean’s throat bobbed once, twice. He licked his lips.

“Alright?” Nicole asked, watching the tight pull of his muscles. Academy was a rough cut, but it took a joiner to make something graceful and strong. He was hers to finish. She’d never coddle him, but she’d never break him, either.

“Alright,” he agreed, and started his sweep at her nod.

The mortal remains were on the couch. The bucket he’d put over his head hadn’t maintained the sort of structural integrity he must have been hoping for. The hole in the back of it matching a new Jackson Pollock on the wall and ceiling. The shotgun was between his knees, the wire he’d threaded to the trigger still in his hand. Whatever his final expression had been, it was lost to the hydrostatic shock.

In front of her, Lebucean breathed out sharp and frozen. The high smell was clotting into even the least gifted nose, and this was his first body. She was certain of it. “Okay,” he said, and she watched the line of his shoulders. “Okay. Okay, brother. Whatever it was, it’s over now. We’re here to take care of the last part.”

If his voice wavered a note, right there at the first word, Nicole decided not to notice.

*
“Now,” she told him, hours later. After the ambulance had come from town, and the sister had come from far out of town, and the two responding deputies had thoroughly missed the supper everyone else called a late night snack. “Now for the last step.”

Leaning against the wall, Lebucean pretended not to droop. “What’s that, boss?”

“I teach you how to blow it all off, without becoming an alcoholic.”

He laughed, and Nicole kept the keys. Driving them to Shorty’s with just a short pit stop for civvies, arriving still out of sync. Ready for their warm-up drink when most the revelers were blearily staring into their personal last call steins. Still, she found them a corner booth, and went to the bar to retrieve the beers.

“Hello, Waverly,” Nicole said when the eyes of the bar’s proprietor roved towards her in a practiced bartender’s scan. “How’s tonight?”

“You’re showing up late,” was her answer, and Nicole shrugged.

“Held up on a case. I would have gone home, but I gotta keep an eye on the kid.” She hooked a discreet thumb towards the back table. Waverly’s eyes followed over, and back.

“Everyone okay?” Her hands were unmoving on the tap, the hovering pint glass filling with nothing but air.

“Not mostly,” Nicole told her, and it flashed regret across Waverly’s face. She wasn’t like the masses, wanting that shiver of voyeurism. Waverly cared.

“How’s Purgatorian entrepreneurship going?” Nicole tried to steer them out of the awkward corner she’d dumped them into.

“Busy,” Waverly told her, filling the glasses. “Enjoy your beers, Deputy.”

“I sure will.” She cleared her throat. “I'm switching to days, next week. Maybe we could get some coffee? My treat.”

“Maybe,” Waverly agreed with the same ease she always agreed with, and turned towards the next customer. Nicole watched her go.

At the table, Lebucean took his pint glass happily. “She shot you down again, eh boss?”

“She never shoots me down.” Nicole straddled the seat. Some previous person had left it backwards to the table, and taking a god granted opportunity wasn’t showing off. If Waverly happened to glance over, well, it was a free world for eyeballs, wasn’t it? “It’s called a long game, Lebucean. You wouldn’t understand, still being a fetus, and all.”

Lebucean snorted heartily, lapping foam against the far rim of his glass. Nicole lifted a mild eyebrow back at him. Somehow he managed to stay remarkably steady under her disapproval.

She paced two beers into him. Enough to make the crease between his eyebrows slide back into the flawless matrix of his still smooth collagen, but not so much he ever got drunk. Then she sent him home, and drank her own third. Resisting the urge to run a finger down her own permanent brow lines.

In the far corner, Waverly was hoisting chairs onto tables. Nicole weighed a few bills down with an empty glass, slipping out the door and breathing in the sharp winter tang of her township at rest.

She had two hours until she needed to sleep, and an urge to wander.

“Help!” The cry rang down the sunny afternoon corridors of the Municipal Centre, stabbing hot and electric into Nicole’s muscles. Rearing her back as something dark and frantic rounded the corner and flung itself mostly across the duty desk, gripping at Nicole with wild urgency.

“My baby!” the woman shouted fully into Nicole’s face.

“Hello, Wynonna,” Nicole greeted her interruption. “I was having a very nice day, thanks for asking.”

“Was?” Wynonna squinted suspiciously, from very close by.

“Hey, Alice,” Nicole ignored the face hovering in front of her own, in favor of the face’s thirteen-year old progeny. Cringing behind her mother’s shoulder, mumbling groundward with the unique humiliation of being alive in public while pubescent.

Wynonna slid down from the tall duty desk, pressing at her ribs and wincing. “Ugh, tall fuckin’ desk. Need you to watch the kid.”

“We’ve been over this, Wynonna. The Purgatory Sheriff's Department is not a babysitting service.”

“Back in three, mebbe four hours.” Wynonna kissed her child enthusiastically on the cheek, making the kid squirm under the transfer of humiliation. “Be good.”

Nicole listened to the retreating sounds of Wynonna’s tornado of personality, eyeing the kid. “Standard agreement?” she asked.

Alice considered it. “Screentime first, filing second.”

“Not a chance.”

“Three-to-one ratio,” Alice countered, face set and narrow.

“Homework first, thirty minutes of filing second, then unlimited but supervised screentime until someone picks you up.” Alice opened her mouth, avarice surmounting puberty, but Nicole pointed a sharp finger. “Final offer.”

Alice nodded, shrewd about what side of the bread might be buttered, and Nicole hucked a thumb back towards her desk. “The homework station is ready for you.” Alice shuffled towards her, but “hey,” Nicole made her pause. “What the hell does your mom do, anyway?”

A mystery Nicole had been enduring for the full five years she’d been a Sheriff’s Deputy. Wynonna’s urgent, chaotic, and never-spoken job. As always, Alice just shrugged, as if she could ever explain the gaping chasm that was adult motivation.

*
“Nicole.” Waverly’s voice brought Nicole’s head up from her stack of data entry drudgery.

“Hi.” She grinned back, dimples out.

“Wynonna texted me; asked me to pick up the tiny terror.” Waverly proved remarkably immune to dimples.

“She’s in the holding cell,” Nicole jerked a chin. Waverly’s brow creased. “She chose it,” Nicole added, leading Waverly across the hall to the cell. “I made sure the door lock was disabled.”

“I’m way safer than you guys, when the zombies come,” Alice pointed out, gathering the jacket she’d been lying on top of.

“I’ve been considering a scientific theory that all teenagers are actually aliens,” Nicole told Waverly, leaning a shoulder, watching Alice escape them as quickly as possible, disappearing in the direction of outside and freedom. Waverly laughed.

“I kinda remember thinking the same thing at thirteen, but in reverse. All adults were boring and embarrassing.”

“Well, um,” Nicole rubbed the back of her neck, suddenly outclassed on her own territory, without the next conversational gambit. They usually did this at Shorty’s. “Drink?” she asked, smiling with the best C-game.

“You’re asking the owner of a bar out to drinks?” Waverly slowly ground Nicole’s ego into a bitter dust.

“Yes,” Nicole nodded enthusiastically. Sometimes the only way out was through.

“What happened to your banker friend, from the city?” Waverly crossed her arms. She looked exactly like what 8 year-old Nicole had imagined Ms. Penny from Matilda had looked like. Hot, with just a hint of disapproving authority.

“Umm.” Nicole reviewed mentally. “Oh! You mean Jackie. The CFO?”

Jackie the CFO possessed a jawline that never failed to cut directly into the quick of Nicole’s deeply homosexual soul, and an approach to sexual congress so athletic it was almost terrifying.

“You had to think about that,” Waverly said, with a tone that implied Nicole might should examine her life choices. “You had to think about which woman I was referring to, and you wonder why we don’t have drinks, or coffee, or fuck on the bearskin rug you keep in front of your fireplace.”

“So, I’m guessing no drinks,” Nicole hazarded. Waverly rolled her eyes expressively, and gave Nicole an excellent view of her departing stalk.

Nicole stood in the holding cell, frowning. “I have no idea what the hell just happened,” she told the security camera. Slowly, horribly, the camera swung back, then forth, and Nicole felt the shiver creep up her spine.

“Lebucean!”

Later, once she’d piled her trainee with enough paperwork to buckle him, Nicole sat at her desk and contemplated what the hell might make an Earp tick. As usual, she didn’t get very far.

The call on the non-emergency line crept softly into Nicole’s brain. The slowly rising tempo in the dispatcher’s voice breaking into her full consciousness milliseconds before the woman put her hand across the lower receiver and bellowed full force across the bullpen: “Sheriff! Phone!”

Inside his office, Nedley jerked like his spine had been pulled by a sky hook. So busy flinching that he, per usual, failed to execute Ms. Linda’s orders to her satisfaction. Which, to be fair, required zero-to-phone in less than a second. “Sheriff!” And holy god, did the woman take obvious joy in emoting. “Heave your fat butt up, and answer the phone.”

Limited by the transferring phone call to nothing but a dyspeptic glare, Nedley snatched up the handset.

On hiring, Nicole had claimed the desk with the best view of the Sheriff’s domain. Five years later and she’d never felt any shame. Peering through the slats of Nedley’s stately, and always open, Venetian blinds. The ever increasing pinch of his face winding an ever increasing twist into her own gut.

“Haught.” He leaned his knuckles onto her desk, glowering at her studiously bent neck.

“Sheriff?” she asked, the air of perfect, near-injured innocence. A sheriff’s department pumped gossip as its life blood. Eavesdropping through open blinds was practically her civic duty. He knew it. She knew it. He knew that she knew, and etcetera.

“Quit the shit, and follow me,” he snapped. Nicole dropped the innocence, and nodded.

“Gladys Thourgood called it in.” He briefed her from the driver’s seat of his own PSD unit. “Hunkered down in the corner of that decrepit old barn she’s got, way out on the corner of her property. Claimed she followed a trail of chicken feathers. She tried to flush him out, but said there was too much carrying on.”

“Carrying on,” Nicole repeated. Nedley, two hands on the wheel, risked a long look.

“What?” Nicole defended. “Wouldn’t you ‘carry on’ a little bit if Gladys Thourgood came after you with a broom?” Nicole couldn’t help the frost that crept into her tone.

Nedley suppressed a smile. “Okay. Fair. But settle down. This is gonna be on you, and we don’t want an incident.”

“Incident,” Nicole snorted. Nedley just blew some air through his mustache and bumped them down the rutted drive.

True to description, the barn was swaybacked and dry rotted, standing more from habit than from structural soundness. Nicole eyed the building, Nedley’s unit idling beneath them and Nedley himself eyeing first the barn and then her. He sucked in a preparatory inhalation, but she cut him off. “C’mon Sheriff. We both know someone has to go in, and we both know it ain’t gonna be you.”

Nedley grunted, and they clambered out to stand in the barnyard. Joined in short order by a woman with a steely grey bun, a floral house dress, and a staunch air of it being unwise to mess her around.

“Sheriff,” she greeted them.

“Gladys,” Neely greeted her back, nodding his respect to an equal, but it didn’t save him. Gladys crossed her arms. Nedley, Nicole knew, had very little defense against stout and grey haired women crossing their arms at him. She suspected a formative experience.

“Here’s what I want to know, Randall.” Gladys went straight for the underbelly. “What exactly is Purgatory’s Sheriff’s Department doing about this issue?”

“Well, we’re here, ain’t we,” Nedley pointed out, but all it did was tighten the line of Gladys’ jaw.

“I might be an old biddy you’ve written off, but I remember you in short pants, Randall Nedley. And I also remember when the Sheriff of Purgatory knew how to keep this sort of chaos out of people’s homes.”

Everyone looked at the decrepit barn.

“Out of people’s barn,” Gladys corrected. “And chickens,” she added. “Chickens ain’t easy to come by. It’s bad enough with the weasels in the coop, and opossum in the eggs, and rats in the feed. Now this.”

Nedley gave her a doleful sort of look, perfected by holders of public office everywhere. Nicole, a mere deputy and currently glad of it, drifted slowly towards the barn’s gaping doorway. It lacked a door, or even hinges, but the sun’s angle created an interior darkness that still managed to block her view inside the space.

She shuffled forward cautiously, stopping when she heard the light growl. Squatting back on her haunches, heels in a crackling pile of ancient straw and blown leaves. Her arms folded over her knees, chin on resting on a forearm. Waiting.

In the corner, hunkered tight against warped boards, was a naked boy. Teeth bared, chest rolling with a ceaseless rumble.

“Hello, kiddo,” Nicole told him softly.

The boy, swaddled in naught but dirt and clutching one very surprised looking chicken to his chest, fell silent. Eyes darting towards, and away, and back towards. Keeping her in the best part of his vision.

“My name’s Nicole,” she told him.

Silence.

“I’m here to help you.” She kept her tone easy, eyes focused slightly to the right of his shoulder, not moving. He shifted, crackling the leaves underneath his feet, and did not speak.

“It’s pretty cold in here.”

Silence.

“You like that chicken, huh?”

The boy squeezed his chicken, and growled.

Progress.

*
Forty-five minutes later, Nicole handed a still goggle-eyed chicken to Gladys, herded the boy towards the open tailgate of Nedley’s unit, and stovepiped him into a spare PSD sweatshirt in one smooth motion. He screeched as the fabric pulled over his head, but he didn’t fight. Just bared his teeth once she got the neck opening past his chin.

“Sleeves work like this,” she told him, reaching up the cuffs, fishing his unresisting, but unmoving twig arms through the openings.

“That was my chicken,” he told her, heels skidding a little as she manoeuvred him bodily into the back seat.

“Actually,” she snapped the outboard seat belt closed over him, “that was not at all your chicken. Though by now I’m pretty sure that chicken thinks you’re Jesus.” She paused, thinking. “Or possibly Cthulhu.”

In the seat, the boy yanked against the belt, activating the lock on the ratchet and trapping himself in tighter. Nicole grabbed the belt, holding it still. “Stop that, please,” she told him. He glared, but went limp.

“What’s your name?” she asked, testing this newfound compliance. The kid pinched his lips white, and looked away. “If you tell me, it will make it easier to find where you’re supposed to be.”

He snuffled once, the way hopeless children do. Held by the nape, and knowing any fight would come back onto them doubled.

“Yeah,” Nicole said softly. “Okay, kiddo. It’s okay.” She unsnapped the seat belt, freeing the tensioner before closing it back over him.

*
“What do we do with him?” Nedley asked, looking skeptically through the window into the backseat of his own unit.

“Same thing we do every night, Pinky,” Nicole deadpanned, furrowing something into Nedley’s brow.

“What?”

“Nothing. Nevermind. What happens is that I take him to the same place I took the other kids.”

“Are they really kids?”

Nicole felt it stiffen into the space between her vertebrae. “Would you like to rephrase,” she offered, and Nedley looked abashed.

“That’s not…” he trailed off. “Aw hell. I’m sorry, Haught.”

Nicole softened. “I understand what you were trying to say.”

“You know that stuff doesn’t matter to me, right? He looked over, and even his clothes looked defeated. Rumpled and worn with care. “If it were left up to me, I’d make you Sheriff in a heartbeat.” He hitched his belt up, like an emphasis, his waistband immediately slid back under his belly. Nicole made a note for more salads, and fewer burgers.

“Hey,” Nicole smiled, surprised at its genuineness. Surprised that it didn’t rasp at her heart with hatred. “Look, Sheriff, it’s okay. Being a deputy is way more than I ever thought I’d get to be. I can make it be enough.”

“Of course it ain’t enough,” Nedley snapped, then immediately relented. “But like the great spiritual leader, Mick Jagger once said: you don’t always get what you want.”

“Yup,” Nicole let the moment slide away, returning to the subject of the kid. “I’ll take him to Jerome, same as always.”

“Hey,” she added, fifteen klicks down the road, looking at the side of his face and smiling. His eyes flicked from the road, and into that glance she told him, “sometimes, you get what you need.”

Neldey cleared his throat hard, and stared resolutely straight ahead for the rest of the drive, a blush high on his cheeks.

*
“You ain’t trailing no clouds of glory.”

Nicole paused, hipshot from her windup to donkey kick the gate shut, looking up towards the house at the end of the short garden path.

Standing on the front porch was a man. Size fifteen special-order Nikes planted, arms crossed, fortitude shining. Looking like King Leonidis astride the pass at Thermopylae. Or the Titan of Braavos standing dominion over the harbor. Or maybe just Peter at his gate, peering down at some unworthy thing.

In other words, Jerome.

“What?” Nicole snapped, leaping from zero to exasperated in a single, effortless bound.

“It’s a poem,” Jerome told her.

“I know that.” Nicole finished kicking the gate shut. “Wadsworth. I took Freshman Lit. What I’m asking is, why is it a poem?

“Because of the part about ‘Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come.’”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re getting at,” she told him, extra prim to cover up the extra blatant. Nicole knew exactly what he was getting at.

She made it to the porch, but Jerome declined to cede any ground. Frowning and tapping a long finger against a magnificently bulging bicep. From behind him, projecting through the open portal he was guarding, rose the spine-shredding ululating of an immature mammal with poor impulse control in the throes of being thwarted. Nicole craned, trying to see into the house. Jerome didn’t bat a lash.

“What I am getting at - using imagery you profess to be familiar with, you ignorant little troglodyte - is that last time you came here trailing some wormy little puppy, I told you the house was full.” Nicole opened her mouth, but Jerome was holding full court, and was not to be denied his moment.

“I’m simultaneously intimating, through the intense forbearance in my tone, that I also said the word ‘full’ for each of the three other little lost children you’ve dumped on my door. Which, if you do the math, brings the number of grimy climbing boys crying ‘weep! weep!’ you’ve brought to this house up to four. And despite all those repetitions of the word ‘full,’ here you are, with this fifth little boy, full of some false belief that the quality of my mercy is not strained.”

Nicole considered the amount of imagery Jerome had managed to stuff into that little monologue. Then she looked him in the eye and said: “While I was walking to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives. The seven wives had seven sacks, the seven sacks had seven cats, the seven cats had seven rats. Rats, cats, sacks, wives, how many were there going to St. Ives?”

She grinned.

The hinges of Jerome’s jaw stood out in bass relief.

“See?” Nicole smiled far, far past sincerity. “I know math poetry, too.”

Jerome stood, unmoving, unblinking. Nicole would not swear on her soul that he was even breathing.

“The laughter of a child is the light of a house?” she suggested, deciding ingratiation might go before pride. A fact that was, at the end of the day, supported by the alphabet itself.

Behind Jerome’s significant shoulder, the sounds of a large herd of small elephants, or a small herd of large elephants thundered from an unsighted back room. The screeching Dopplered up, and then faded back down as the pack passed unseen. Nicole ignored it with the full resolution of her soul. “C’mon, there’s room. He can sleep on the pull out couch you tortured me with that one time.”

Jerome squinted thoughtfully, returning to tapping a finger against his crossed bicep. Nicole allowed a surge of hope.

“I’m trying,” Jerome said, slow and deep in thought, “to decide if it’s okay to make a joke about pulling out if there’s already two kids sleeping on that bed.”

“No,” Nicole snapped against the vertiginous plummet of hope. “It’s one-hundred percent not appropriate.”

Inside the house, something fragile and probably precious crashed. Giving off a tinkling, cracking finality that shot through the sudden, nearly anechoic silence.

“So,” Nicole said slowly, fascinated by the vein throbbing at Jerome’s temple. “What you’re saying is no.”

“What I’m saying,” Jerome repeated, staunchly ignoring the throbbing vein, “is no. Absolutely not. No way in the exothermic, or possibly endothermic Hell can I absorb another child into this house without descending into an actual and real nuclear emergency.”

They both looked over at Nicole’s cruiser, the window framing a small face. Nicole swallowed hard. Jerome smiled a little. “I’ve heard that you can wrap a towel around an alarm clock, and stick it in his basket. It’s supposed to mimic his mama’s heartbeat, keep him from whimpering.”

From behind Jerome, visible only to Nicole, crept a devil jinn. A third the size of a man, and his hair a wild poof. His shirt declaring him straight outta naptime, and his hands full of a cracked RC truck.

“Papa Jay.” The waver in his voice made Leonidas falter, and the Titan fall to one knee. “It broke. Christopher made it all smashed.”

Jerome, eye-to-eye with the rugrat, pulled the small body against him, huge hands cradling around the boy’s, helping him hold the broken precious. “Little lion, this particular situation is the exact thing that glue was invented for.”

“Is glue the exact thing Christopher was invented for?” The boy wasn’t to be placated that easily, but Jerome laughed.

“I’m not sure what Christopher was invented for, but I’m willing to bet a pound of flesh that the world is going to find out. Woe unto us on that day.”

The little lion scoffed his baby scoff, but his short little spine melted into what must feel like a pillar of the earth holding him. Nicole turned, and walked back towards her cruiser, and her own slightly larger little lion. Or puppy?

Whatever he was, he was clearly hers. At least for tonight.

*
“You don’t eat cats, do you?” she asked, once she was back in the cruiser. The boy eyeballed her in the rear view mirror, and didn’t answer.

*
The deep night found Nicole casting in a wide circle around her house, under the slivered and waning moon. She wanted to be roaming her town, watching the stars wheel and her people sleep. Maybe ending up at the quarry. Or maybe ending up outside Shorty’s to make sure that last call didn’t cause a ruckus.

But inside her house, curled on the camp bed she’d pulled from the closet, was an invisible tether. Keeping her circling, waiting for the possible cry of a child in the night.

“Good morning, boss,” Lebucean greeted her cheerfully. Nicole narrowed her eyes. They felt gritty from a nearly sleepless night, and this malicious good cheer was currently a lot to ask.

All the worse because the trouble she’d been waiting for hadn’t come until morning. When she’d rousted the kid. Barefoot and thin in Nedley’s PSD sweatshirt and a pair of pants she’d scrounged from the back of her own closet. No underwear, no coat, and Nicole caught short.

Now he was standing behind Nicole, the sleeves of Nedley’s sweatshirt rolled up into sausages at his wrist, and the cuffs of her jeans flapping against his ankles. A thin and unimposing boy. Silent, nameless, and deeply unforeseen.

“Lebucean,” Nicole triggered the opening action of her plan without even a twinge of consciousness. “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘advancement opportunity?’

Lebucean’s smile slackened considerably, but Nicole hid her grin not at all.

Unto every trainee was distributed a certain amount of shit. A ritual as old as hierarchy. She’d fill out his protective custody check-offs later as recompense, but he didn’t need to know that yet.

The road that split off from the blacktop right at the municipal line was almost as nice as the Province maintained roads. Recently graded and cambered, with still-black tar tacking down the gravel that had been scattered across the roadbed.

Nicole eased the cruiser through the final open gate, and wondered how much it cost to rent a grader, and a tar spreader, and a gravel truck. She weren't no expert, but she was pretty sure the answer was a metric fucktonne. Give or take a fudge factor.

There was a reason only the craziest Ayn Rand types preached that the rugged individual shouldered their own three hundred metres of frontage road. Yet here she was, fresh from driving down nearly a kilometre of private access road. Terminating in a view of neatly rowed truck gardens, kept in the front yard of every one of the neatly maintained houses

“Deputy,” a voice cut off her survey, and she turned to find someone leaning on a farm implement. A trim man with the complection of someone who worked outside but still understood how sunscreen worked. Middle-aged, and middling height, and hair a middle brown, but he was well above the average amount of lean and hardened muscles.

Every one of the neatly maintained houses faced the southern exposure, basking their tiered ranks of solar panels in the prairie sunshine. Plus cords of wood stacked along their eastern flanks, and neatly painted oil tanks on level concrete pads.

“Help you?” The man asked, giving Nicole her own little survey.

“Deputy Haught, Purgatory Sheriff’s department,” Nicole said, laconic like she’d learned out in the sticks. Academy had prepared her for the city, and the city was clipped words and mirrored sunglasses. But Purgatory was not the city, and this little enclave wasn’t hardly even Purgatory.

“And what’s Purgatory’s finest doing here?”

“Found a kid,” she told him. “A boy, nine or ten years old. No records, no history, no name. Good health, just not talking much.”

The man’s eyes traveled down her body, then slowly back up. A clear appraisal. Nicole let some of the laconic shift into something else. Something that stood with its chin down and its eyes up. Something that could, if it wanted, curl a lip. It made the man’s expression change. New assessments flickering behind his eyes as he calculated new things.

“Well, now. Who the hell are you?” he asked, sounding like a man who hadn’t been surprised in awhile.

“I’m Deputy Haught, Purgatory Sheriff’s department,” Nicole repeated, flat and cold. “As I said, sir, I’m investigating a found child.” She held a picture of the boy out. The man looked down for about a nanosecond, then back up.

“What makes you think he’s ours?”

Nicole held his eyes, and held her tongue, and kept holding out the picture. The man quirked up the barest of eyebrow, calculation turning into amusement.

“Look around, Deputy,” he told her, waving an expansive arm. “Tell me what you see.”

Nicole looked around, finding new details even as she kept his motions in the periphery of her vision. The neatly maintained houses were surrounded by neatly squared off fields of green and gold crops, interspersed with low buildings that looked suspiciously like a neatly maintained animal barn. Built for horses, or maybe cows. And beyond the fields, humped low against the horizon were skeletal structures she heavily suspected were part of an obstacle course.

“You see unity, Deputy.” The man answered for her, putting a little cut of sharpness into her title. “You see clarity. A sense of community and purpose that’s vanishing out in the chaotic and broken world. You see,” he paused, well practiced effect, “purity.”

Nicole felt the icy sweep of ancient instincts lifting her nape hair into a ruff. Horripilation, she thought vaguely. A definition taught to her by a passing acquaintance who’d treated a young Nicole very kindly. A woman who most definitely would not meet this man’s purity standards.

“Tell me, Deputy Haught. Have you ever thought about what's going to happen to those as—” he gestured with a false delicacy, “—conflicted as you, when the pillars of society fall?”

“Does this boy live in your community?” she snapped, thrusting the picture back towards him. The man made a show of studying it. The curve of the boy’s unsmiling cheeks, and the sober canting of his eyes.

“That boy is not one of us.”

Nicole snorted, rich and deep. The man looked at her, flat and without any brotherly love. “You’ve made your choice to be out in the world, Deputy. I can’t dissuade you. But you’d do well to remember the difference between God and Mammon.”

Thumping her tires over the minimal ridge between the private and the public roads, Nicole cursed not at least asking for some of the kid’s goddamn underpants.

*
Two hours later, Nicole was silently considering how apt the God talk had been. Because the philosophical, if not theological underpinnings of the phrase ‘Man proposes; God disposes’ felt like the only thing that could summarize needing to stand in front of Wynonna Earp, and say, “I have a boy.”

“Mm,” Wynonna hummed, unsurprised. And why not? It was Purgatory, after all. Capital of weird shenanigans and freaky doings. Not to mention gossip.

“I’m serious,” Nicole snapped, deciding anger was probably the best offence.

“Oh, I know,” Wynonna assured her, the corners of her lips curving up.

Nicole crossed her arms, and tried to focus on the real point. That getting a boy was not the same as getting an impulsive goldfish. There might be pet stores, and those stores might cover a goldfish nose to tail, but for reasons still unfathomable she’d been unable to find any Boy stores. There weren’t even generic Child stores.

“Oh, quit feeling so fucking sorry for yourself,” Wynonna told her. “This is the exact situation Wal-Mart was invented for.”

“I thought Wal-Mart was invented as a golden idol to late-stage capitalism,” Nicole grumbled.

“Keep that up, cowboy, and I’ll make you go on your own.”

Nicole shut her mouth. Wondering all over again if Wynonna considered her some sort of friend, or just some sort of charity case, as she climbed obediently into Wynonna’s truly shitty truck. Hissing out her nose when the end of a broken spring drove straight into the meat of her ass.

“So,” Wynonna said lightly, 10 klicks out of town, “this is fairly non-standard.”

“What?”

“You taking that kid. I seem to remember there being an entire governmental agency that was created specifically to keep random people from appropriating children?”

“You’re one to talk,” Nicole scoffed, looking resolutely out the window.

“Me?” Wynonna asked, her voice so mild Nicole looked over in suspicion. “And what is it you think you know about me?”

“I know you’ve got a weird job no one talks about, and a weird past that no one talks about, and a kid of your own that people definitely don’t talk about.”

“Yup,” Wynonna said, like finality. Nicole rolled her eyes.

“Other interesting news,” Wynonna continued. “I can’t help but notice that your patheticness around Waverly has increased. Which has surprised everyone, because we thought you’d already hit rock bottom.”

“Who’s everyone?” Nicole asked, fully alarmed, but Wynonna waved it away.

“Me n’ Alice, of course.”

Nicole glowered.

“Word of advice,” Wynonna said, once it became clear Nicole wasn’t going to take the speaking stick. Nicole grunted, like maybe that could just make Wynonna shut up. Which was a stupid plan from creation, because nothing had ever shamed Wynonna into silence before.

“Waverly went through a world of shit to be the person she is today.” She cut her hand against the opening of Nicole’s mouth. “I’m definitely not going to fill in the background. Waverly can do that, if and when she chooses to. What I can tell you is that she’s not interested in some casual lay.”

“That’s not what—” Nicole sensed her own danger, and threw on hard rudder. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because, Haught, you think you’re smooth, and I like ripping the scales of illusion from people’s eyes. It makes me feel all tingly.”

They didn’t talk again until the bedroom section of Wal-Mart. When Wynonna nudged her, and said, “The kid is ten, dipshit. He isn’t going to want Paw Patrol sheets.” She tossed a set of solid grey sheets at Nicole’s chest, impact making her huff.

*
Lebucean’s cruiser was idling at the curb when Nicole got home. The sight made her unconscious foot ease off the accelerator, back brain nattering that they hadn’t seen her, and she could very probably run.

Grimly, she pushed the pedal back down, and turned into the drive. Surveying the kid as they all climbed out of the cars. Her trainee had lent his jacket to her inadequately clothed little goldfish. Or puppy. Or fucking iguana.

But c’mon, he wasn’t any of those. That wasn’t how this particular story came to be.

“Haught,” Lebucean greeted her, the mirror of his sunglasses hiding his eyes, his voice without inflection. It almost made Nicole smile. There weren’t any proficiency check sheets for subordination so smooth it cut, but it was vital knowledge. She ticked a mark on the tally she kept in her head. Soon.

Tonight, she just thanked him, and dispatched him, watched her comfort zone retreat with his taillights.

“So,” Nicole started, desperately trying to reach back into her own pre-teenage years. All she could find was a fading image of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the exact taste of Hi-C Ecto Cooler. The boy shuffled in the spare pair of boots Nicole had decided basically fit his feet that morning.

Memories didn’t seem to be much help. Though, they were still above Jerome on the helpfulness list. The traitor.

“So,” she started again, resolute. Nicole Haught, adult human female, had survived Academy, and being a trainee, and being shot at. She could absolutely survive talking to a ten year old. “I went to the store and got you a bunch of your own stuff. And I ordered you a bed, so you don’t have to sleep in the cot. It’ll be delivered tomorrow.”

The kid took the bags she handed him, quick and obedient. The fire he’d shown in the barn banked below coals.

“Maybe, since you’ll be here for a while, you want to tell me your name?”

“That kid, at that man’s house,” he said instead, watching his own thumb slowly worm a hole through the thin plastic of a handle loop. “He was like us, right?” His voice faded, but he pushed on. “He was like me?”

Nicole imagined the pressure of longing that must exist inside his little boy chest, and wondered if he even had language for that kind of wanting. To say that he looked out into the world day after day, and never saw himself reflected back by another. To see it for five minutes, and have no power to gain it back.

Hell, what forty year-old had that kind of language? “Yeah,” she said, watching the curve of his cheek, and how he was still too cold. “The other kids, inside the house. They are like you.”

“They live there, but I’m going to stay here.” It wasn’t a question, but Nicole nodded, tensed for the why, but all he did was look at her, and away. Thumb quiet, just holding the bags.

“Benjamin,” he told the empty street. “My mama named me Benjamin.”

“Benjamin,” Nicole repeated, nodding soberly. Filing away the possible mama, and her possible whereabouts. “It’s cold out here. Why don’t we go inside? You can try on all that stuff, and make sure it fits before we cut off the tags and wash it. Okay?”

He nodded, and followed her inside.

*
The knock on the door made Nicole mutter about fresh hells.

They’d been home all of ten minutes. The kid, Benjamin had hightailed it to the back room, to try on clothes, or build a pipe bomb, or whatever it was ten year-old boys did.

She had occupied herself by standing in the kitchen and panicking. Three sets of clothing and a coat were great and all, but kids also needed square meals, and also that pyramid shape was important, too, and Kraft dinner probably wasn’t approved by either of those shapes, and probably he would stop growing if she didn’t feed him Brussels sprouts right this exact night and—

The impatient second knock made her yank it open with too much force. Outside, her visitor blinked mildly over her brace of brown grocery bags, making everything that had already been wobbly in Nicole’s world waver and flip.

Mostly her stomach.

“Waverly,” she yelped a little too loud. Cleaning her throat before trying again. “Waverly Earp.”

“That’s me,” Waverly told her. Nicole nodded, rapid and grinning. Waverly raised an expectant eyebrow.

“Oh!” Nicole swung the door wide. “Sorry, long day. Come in.”

Waverly put the bags down on the kitchen counter, and looked expectantly at where Nicole had trailed her into the room. “Knife, and cutting board?”

“This is very strange,” Nicole told her, not altogether adverse to giving Waverly whatever she needed, or even whatever she wanted, but also confused. Was there a word for that?

Waverly grinned. “Wynonna said you looked in over your head. She was all for letting you squirm, but I have more natural mercy.”

“A tapeworm has more natural mercy,” Nicole muttered. Waverly dimmed a watt, then seemed to decide she hadn’t heard. “But, look, I totally have everything under control.”

“Of course you do,” Waverly said. Nicole squinted, but couldn’t find any lack of sincerity in Waverly’s words. “Maybe I just wanted to come meet the kid.”

Nicole made a non-commital noise, and got out a knife and cutting board. Watching as Waverly arranged things, and quizzed her over her possession of basic spices. She looked impressed when Nicole produced each one.

“I do know how to cook,” she groused.

“Then you can do it next time,” Waverly said, and the hope in Nicole’s chest felt sharp as the stab through Mercutio's ribs. She wrestled it down. The world rotated on a smooth synovial layer of social niceties. They weren’t promises. She had no reason to hope.

Except for how Waverly cut her eyes over, deft between strokes of the knife. And how Nicole found an urgent need to pour a glass of water that put her back to all that.

*
Waverly made pasta, doctoring the jarred sauce until it actually looked like what the commercials implied it would taste like. Poured over mushrooms and spiral noodles. “Pretty basic,” she shrugged. “Weekday food.”

“It looks amazing,” Nicole told her. And, realizing she couldn’t put it off any longer, she added, “I’ll get the kid.”

Benjamin emerged at her knock wearing the new blue jeans and black hoodie. Still creased from their store fold, and unwashed. “They aren’t itchy?” Nicole asked. He shrugged, and slid past her nearly on the wall, and they ate one of the quietest dinners of her life.

*
Waverly put the last pot into the drain board, with a clatter and a hand clap of satisfied doneness. Nicole winced, and glanced towards the hallway.

“Nicole. Ten year olds sleep like the zombie dead. Plus, they don’t go to sleep at 8 o’clock.”

Nicole allowed some doubt, but Waverly waved her off. “It’s true, I saw it with Alice one time. Wynonna popped a bunch of those packing bubbles right outside her room, just to show me.”

“You help raise her?” Nicole asked, resting a hip against the counter. In five years, this was probably the most they’d ever talked.

“Sure. She’s my niece. And Wynonna needed help when Alice came back. Gus stayed for a week or so, but she’s a rip the bandaid off kind of person. And it was never going to be smooth anyway.”

Nicole dredged up the spotty Earp history that she’d absorbed by osmotic gossip over the years. Deciding to detour around whatever had kept Alice away from her mother. “Her daddy isn’t in the picture, right? He ran off, or something?”

Waverly shifted, shying away from something tender that wasn't for Nicole. Maybe wasn’t yet for Nicole? “Sorry,” she backpedaled. “None of my business.”

“It’s okay,” Waverly said. “He was,” she paused, and tried again. “I think he wanted to stay, to be a good man. But he made some bad choices, and they had a stronger pull on him.”

Ah, heroin. Your sweet, family destroying call. Nicole pushed off the counter. “You want a beer?”

Waverly hesitated, and Nicole felt the coming excuse.

“C’mon. Least I could do,” she tempted, and Waverly shrugged into a smile. The capitulation felt like the first burst of citrus on Nicole’s tongue.

“Benjamin,” Waverly said once they settled on the porch, taking a pull of her beer and looking steadily into the soft dark. The moon would rise late, and linger deep into the morning. Waxing towards full.

“Benjamin,” Nicole agreed.

“He watches you, especially when your hands go near your belt”

True. He had watched her. Then later he’d hunched down small when his knife had mis-balanced, clattering off the plate. But Nicole was a cop, with a damn good reason to be so immersed in body language. There weren’t as many reasons for a bar owner to become so expert.

“I saw,” Nicole finally said.

“He’s going to live with you?”

Nicole took a loose fingered draught off her own bottle. “Wynonna already quizzed me about my plans to sell him on the dark web, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“She told me,” Waverly shot her an amused glance. “Do you have any plans to sell him on the dark web?”

“Not currently,” Nicole deadpanned.

“But you know it’s weird he’s here, and not in foster care?”

Actually, it was weird he wasn’t with goddamn Jerome. The traitorous jerk. Still, the question hung between them.

“This is where he needs to be,” Nicole finally said. “He’s part of my...” she thought. “He’s part of my tribe.”

Waverly looked over, very obviously comparing Nicole’s red headed nature against the boy’s dark eyes. Nicole grinned, sharp edged and toothy. Feeling the beer in her blood, and the pretty woman beside her, and the secrets of Purgatory swirling between them. The forever unspoken, and the willfully ignored.

Waverly looked at her for a long, long beat. Maybe dancing on the edge of her own story. But then she clicked her empty down on the porch, and stood. Nicole started to follow, but Waverly kept her down with a hand on her chest.

“I’ll be back in two days,” Waverly told her sternly. Nicole’s head tipped back to see the suddenly taller woman.“If I come back, and find out you’ve sold him, so freaking help you. Understand?”

Nicole stuffed her hands into her pockets, and felt something light as the updraft under a bird’s wings fill her chest. “I’ll cook.”

“Dang skippy you will,” Waverly assured, and walked herself to her car.

*
Nicole lay in her bed, listening for the boy, and reviewing the push of Waverly’s fingers on her shoulder, and the shape of her smile.

There was a possibility that somewhere in the multiverse, there was truth to Wynonna’s statement about her patheticness.

There was a much higher possibility that here in this particular bifurcation, Nicole was feeling the kind of dire lesbian danger that she knew she’d only care about long after it was too late.

She was drinking her coffee and staring out the window over the sink when the kid stole into the kitchen. High above, the half moon was nothing but a pale hole in the daytime sky. She turned from it, leaning her butt against the lip of the counter as the kid tried to wedge himself into a chair without pulling it back.

She cradled her hands around the mug, relishing the sting of heat on her fingers. “I made oatmeal,” she broke the silence, “but I’ve also got granola if you’d like that better.”

He looked at the pot on the stove, then cast around for the potential granola. Looking for the right answer. He didn’t seem the same boy that had hissed and spit inside the falling down barn. Then again, that boy hadn’t yet been inserted into a stranger’s home.

“Your choice,” she said lightly. He licked his lips, looking at the oatmeal. She pushed a bowl towards him, and nudged the milk and brown sugar along similar tracks. He doctored the bowl, resolute as the silence pressed down all over again. The digital age had killed even the clock tick.

“Hey.” Her voice made the rim of milk in his spoon lap into waves. Too abrupt. She tried to soften. “Did you sleep okay?”

He nodded stiffly, eyes firmly on his cereal. The YouTube videos she’d binged on last night said to be honest when a kid was suddenly dumped into the household. So here went honesty.

“I’m a little nervous,” she admitted. His eyes rotated up without any corresponding head movement. Like perhaps he’d decided she was a T-Rex, and he was invisible if he stayed motionless.

Or perhaps the spitfire she’d met in the barn had been operating on terror and adrenaline, and the boy at her table didn’t have anything left but exhaustion and dull dread. “I don’t know very many ten year olds, and I’m not sure what you guys like to talk about.”

She left it open, but he didn’t rush in. Too much to hope for.

“So here’s what I think we should do. I’m the adult, and it’s my job to make sure you’re safe, and your belly is full, and you’ve got a warm coat. But I might need help getting the rest of the things right. Things you like to do for fun, and what kind of food you like to eat, and what kind of household stuff you like having. Does that sound like a good division of responsibilities?”

Across the table, he nodded, solemn.

When she stood to get more coffee, she touched the table next to his elbow. “I’m very glad you’re here,” she told him. Watching the fine tremors that were wracking him under his sweatshirt.

*
A few hours later, she sat in the passenger seat of a cruiser, watching her other charge eating his sandwich.

“What?”

“Nothing, boss,” he said, exactly like it was something

“Hmm,” Nicole hummed back at him, doubtful.

“I was wondering how you ended up in Purgatory.” He contradicted his own claims of nothingness.

“That bitch Atropos snipped my string, and here I lie.”

Lebucean nodded thoughtfully. “I like it. Sounds confessional, while still making pretty much no sense.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “So now you reciprocate, and tell me how you ended up in Purgatory.”

“I grew up in Iqaulit. The bustling capital city of seven thousand, give or take. Left at nineteen. Two years of college, and then half a year of Academy. That was enough of Calgary. Enough of any city.”

“Yeah, but why Purgatory?”

He shrugged. “Why not? I had to go somewhere after Academy, and Purgatory had an opening. Sheriff was the first to respond with a job offer.”

She wavered on the edge of believing it. Could Purgatory just...be like that? Attracting a small town boy who wanted to grow his own small town roots, and picking Purgatory based solely on whim and happenstance?

“‘Course,” Lebucean took a bite of his horrific cheese and mayonnaise sandwich, swallowing it down. “That was before I knew how much of the town was practicing an alternative lifestyle.

No. Purgatory could not just be like that, Nicole thought sourly. That was far too much to ask for. Because Lebucean had ridden a float for Purgatory’s Pride parade, wearing very little but spangled underwear, a cowboy hat, and an ally pride flag drawn across his pecs. He didn’t care about what innies, or outies, or combinations thereof got up to in the dark.

Plus the way he was smiling slyly at her lack of rise. She realized all over again how straight and white his teeth were. The strange things you notice when you spend so much time around someone.

“Alternative?” she asked.

“Full fathom five my father’s bones lie,” he mis-quoted, matching cryptic for cryptic, but Nicole just snorted. He shrugged, but his grin was wry.

“Okay, okay. Look. I’m a white boy, Deputy, but I grew up in Nunavut. I’m like one of those non-Catholic kids who gets sent to Catholic school for enrichment, and ends up absorbing rudimentary Jesus trivia. You know?”

“No,” Nicole told him. “I really do not know.”

“I heard the old stories, too. Not at home like my friends, but at the library kiddie hour, and circle time in school, and when the elders would get together at the basketball games. It wasn’t Jesus, though. I overheard just enough to understand that everything has a spirit, but not all spirits are human.”

“So,” Nicole managed a nonchalance her heart certainly didn’t feel, “you’re an agnostic animus?”

“Nah.” He sipped from his steaming thermos, watching a blue Subaru pass them by. “I just know how to recognize certain things.” He spared her a glance that wasn’t at all spare of seeing. “You know?”

Nicole was forced to admit that this time, yes, she knew perfectly.

*
The kid’s industrious butt was sticking out of her hallway closet when she walked through the door. She stood awhile, watching as he tried to wiggle behind a tote containing her camping gear.

“Whatcha looking for?”

He stiffened, whacking an elbow on the jamb as he spun. She winced in sympathy, and wondered if now was an opportune time to advise him against professions based on situational awareness. Fear flicked across his face, but then he stuck out his chin.

“Nuthin’.”

“Well,” she bent to unlace her heavy utility boots, “if ‘nothing’ happens to come from Wal-mart, let me know. That place is like magic.”

He scoffed, and she peered at him. “Those are the first places that will be raided, when chaos reclaims society,” he told her, smooth and automatic as the Lord’s Prayer. Bless us Father, for we have indoctrinated unto the next generation. “Kill zones,” he added, squinting knowledgeably. And yeah. Yup. Those skeletal shapes back at the compound had definitely been obstacle courses, and Nicole was willing to bet her $300 utility boots that her little iguana had run it more than once.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she let him know.

*
They watched TV after dinner, because Nicole didn’t know what the hell else to do with him. Beside her, Benjamin kept the lift and fall of her bottle in the corner of his eye.

She wondered what he’d been looking for in the closet. He’d been trying to see behind the totes, not inside the totes. Verified by the fact that the clear tape she’d used to seal them against moisture was flawed only by her own adult sized fingerprints. Meaning he was either nosy in a curiously contained sort of way, or he was looking for something that wouldn’t be inside a tote.

She thought about the second beer in her fridge, a delicious German sour that would go down biting and smooth. Instead, she suggested they spend her day off braving the kill zone to find better entertainment.

*
She bought him a Nintendo. Well, she bought him an extensive amount of clothing, a baseball set, a chessboard, a LEGO rocket, and something about exploding kittens that looked dubious but made him almost laugh.

Mostly though, she bought him a Nintendo. Then spent the drive home flicking glances into the rearview mirror, seeing the serious bend to his head and listening to sad meeping noises of his avatar dying.

Electronic noises were still emanating when Waverly knocked on the door. “Proof,” she said, pointing a spatula, “of unsold-ness. Also of the amazing longevity of modern rechargeable batteries.”

“You’re going to regret that move, once you haven’t seen his eyeballs for two full months.” Waverly noted, heavy with some sort of Alice-based experience.

They listened to death noises, and Nicole felt a stir of loyalty. “I don’t think he’s ever used a game system before today.”

“He’s ten,” Waverly pointed out.

“I mean, he basically knew what it was, but he needed some help with the power button.” The system meeped. “Plus he dies a lot.” The system made the sparkly noise of respawning. “But he’s already getting way better.”

“A ten year old Gen-Z child who is currently holding his first electronic game system?”

“Mmm,” Nicole stirred the taco crumbles while Waverly processed.

“That’s impos—” she cut herself off. Started over again. “Nicole,” tentative, caught between teasing and true concern, “did he come from the dark web?”

“No,” Nicole assured, but got stuck. Benjamin wasn’t an open case, not really. But he was a minor, and he wasn’t precisely a closed case, either. “His people believe Armageddon is pretty much inevitable, and that modern culture is meant to keep the circus goers fat and happy while Rome burns.”

They both looked towards the living room. “I think he spent a lot of time chopping wood,” Nicole summarized.

“Woah,” Waverly said, eyes wide. “That’s a lot of historical allusion for a cop.” Nicole pointed her spatula again, eyes narrow. “But seriously, aren’t weird cults more of an American thing?”

“Mmm,” Nicole hid the obfuscation inside a hum. It made Waverly cross her arms

“What’s the point in being friends with a cop if you won’t give me the good gossip?”

“Oh, she says we’re friends?” Nicole shot back, smiling. It flicked some microexpression across Waverly’s face that was too subtle for Nicole to follow, before Waverly tucked it away again.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, friend,” she said, a little too flat to be pure teasing, moving towards the nine hundredth repetition of sad noises coming from the couch.

Nicole finished the taco preparations, listening to Benjamin describing the many, many ways to die in the Mushroom Kingdom and, thinking about Wynonna’s words. Wondering if false friendship had been one of the things that Waverly had fought and conquered in order to come into her own.

*
They went back out onto the porch, the heat lamps Nicole had installed making the night redshifted.

“I’m assuming cults don’t usually just let their children go.” Waverly picked the adult conversation back up like they hadn’t spent two hours between then and now.

Nicole went for the grunting sort of deterrent.

“It begs the question,” Waverly prodded, because of course she did.

“We found him naked, hiding in Gladys Thourgood’s falling down barn and clutching a support chicken for courage. I’m pretty sure they didn’t just let him go. I think he kind of ran away.”

Ran. Sure.

“Which is not at all a police matter, and also he’s staying with you because you are his tribe.”

“Yeah,” Nicole agreed, listless against the bare edge of exasperation in Waverly’s voice. The secrets that had swirled and eddied between them last time now feeling leaden.

“Well, that’s all very mysterious,” Waverly said. Nicole braced for an interrogation, but it didn’t come.

“Yeah,” Nicole just said again, into the quiet Waverly had allowed. Relaxing into the night, and the alcohol just enough to open her mouth again. “Incidentally, how long do you think it’ll take before he stops being afraid I’m going to beat the shit out of him on a daily basis?”

The think was there for Waverly’s benefit, to do with as she willed. From the way her eyes slid over, then away, she knew it.

“Every day builds your track record.” Waverly took a swallow of her beer, then made her decision. “But it’s possible he won’t fully believe you’ll never hit him, or back him into a corner, until you have to come get him from the pokey, sixteen years of age and one in the morning, and you take him for pancakes and discussions of good decisions, and the only real punishment is the way he can feel your disappointment.”

Nicole looked down a tunnel comprised of six years, and felt the buzzing vertigo. She tried to breathe deeply.

Waverly finished her beer, then prized a second from the six pack Nicole had tucked outside of the heat lamps circumference. When she sat back down, the gap between them on the top step was smaller.

“You went quiet,” she said, nudging her a little with an elbow.

“Yeah,” Nicole said, drawing herself back from looking through the years, and looked instead at her companion. “Would you like to play a game about exploding kittens?”

Waverly’s brow pinched.

“Card game!” Nicole lept to reassure. “It’s a card game. No kittens explode. All kittens are a-okay.” She smiled, hopeful.

“Huh,” Waverly said, without any other modifying input. She stood, handing over her half drunk beer and Nicole realized that she was going to leave and never come back and their last interaction, for the rest of eternity, would be about not-really-exploding kittens.

“You’re cute, Nicole, but kind of strange.” Waverly leaned towards her, and Nicole barely had time to appreciate the kiss she pressed into her cheek. The way her hand rose to cradle her other cheek against the pressure. “I’ll be here on Wednesday. It’s your turn to cook.”

“But,” Nicole said weakly, confused by the sudden double fisting and the scent of Waverly’s soap. “I cooked this time?”

“Yes,” Waverly said, and walked to her car. Nicole held her beers, and watched her drive away.

*
“Sorry, kiddo.” Nicole pressed the cold cloth against the back of Benjamin’s neck. “No more pop flies for a while, okay?”

Benjamin nodded, awkward since he was hunched over on the couch, pinching his bleeding nose. “My shirt,” he said, nasal and soft.

His shirt indeed. Spattered in the blood that fountained from his nose at the exact same velocity as her guilt. The parabola of the ball lost in the dazzle of the low afternoon sun. His glove off-center, but the ball driving straight for his nose.

“I think it’s stopped. But yeah, your shirt might never be the same.”

Nicole of two weeks past would have been surprised by the genuine regret in her own voice. Because frankly the shirt was horrible. A sharp looking red and blue plaid, right up until the starkly clashing orange yoke and pocket flaps registered, and froze the visual cortex.

She’d cringed when Benjamin had started sneaking glances at a full rack of the things. Touching his fingers tentatively to a pearlescent snap when he’d thought Nicole’s back was turned. Anxiety flashing across his face when he’d realized she’d seen him, then confusion as she’d reached over to size it against him.

She’d cut the tag off in the parking lot, and told him to wear it for the milkshakes they were rewarding themselves with, having survived the kill zone. He’d lived in it ever since, and now his favourite was ruined, but the line of his profile stayed smooth. Were ten year-olds supposed to be so stoic?

Nicole strongly suspected not. She strongly suspected he’d been taught not to pine after soft, loved things. She strongly suspected the nature of those lessons.

“No use in just giving up, though. This is supposed to be what laundry spray is for.”

He gave her one of those looks. Complex and deeply layered. Implying he had no fucking clue what she was talking about, while simultaneiously implying this certain weakness would not serve her well come the armageddon. Still, he released his nose, and popped all the snaps with a ripping noise. Standing bare chested while she sprayed, and giving Nicole her second good inspection of the curious concavity of his pectoral muscle.

He stood next to her. To supervise the spraying, and to eyeball the box of laundry pods.

“What are those?”

“Laundry soap.”

He poked one, frowning at it’s soft squish, then transferring his doubtful eyeball towards her.

In truth, Nicole always felt a little stab of guilt about those pods. Her small twice-weekly contribution to the choking of the seas. Damned if she was going to use whatever system of rock beating or soap grating the kid found morally correct, though. It all made her a little more caustic than needed when she eyeballed him straight back.

“Someday soon we're going to talk about the opportunity cost of time vs money, as it applies to the Libertarian stance of rugged individualism,” she told him.

He nodded, obedient. And that was the contradiction in her little iguana. At some point, someone had trained him to question and be heard. And at some point, someone had trained him to keep his little trap shut.

She could both sides working inside him, pulling at his spirit.

*
The miracle of laundry spray was delivered unto the doubtful, and when she pulled the shirt out of the dryer, he smiled.

The weather turned overnight. Descending into a misery of sleet and freezing rain. Nicole managed a short jaunt around midnight, but came back rimmed in ice that felt like it had sunk into her bones. Making her slow and tired in the morning.

On the couch, Mario died. Nicole felt her eyelid twitch.

On the couch, Mario respawned. Gently, Nicole reached over, and pulled the system from the kid’s hands.

“I want to see your eyeballs,” she told him.

He blinked them at her.

“Get your coat. We’re going to the library.”

It made his breath catch, as something shivered straight through the skinny little core of him. Nicole opened her mouth, to explain that libraries were not poorly disguised gathering spots where the weak and old could be picked off, but the kid was already up and moving towards his coat and mittens.

Oh. Oh.

She’d never seen him excited before. It was...cute. The way his foot ticked, and his hands gripped into the fabric just above his knees. Nicole watched him, when the road allowed. He caught her looking, making himself relax back into the seat, but he practically galloped through the door.

“You know what section?” she asked him, casting an uncertain eye over the kids section. It seemed to sprawl all the way from board books, to some surprisingly sexy looking covers for teens. An unnecessary question, since Benjamin was already slotting himself down rows, crouching over the bottom shelf to tick his fingers along the books. Pouncing when he found what he wanted, and plucking it out. Some series, if the breadth of the shelf occupied by the color complemented spines was anything to go by.

“What’s that?” she asked, and it made the pads of his fingers go white against his prize. Nicole craned to see the cover, looking at a pre-teen boy holding a lightning bolt.

“It’s Percy Jackson. If you like that, you might like Harry Potter, too.” The unexpected voice pulled them both around. “Wizards, instead of demi-gods.”

“Waverly,” Nicole said, happiness surging into her chest.

“Me,” Waverly agreed easily, like she had no problem claiming herself. Nicole grinned. Beside her, Benjamin shifted.

“You want to stay here for a little while? You can start that, or look for something else.”

“This one.” His voice was high, fingers still clutching. Nicole just nodded.

“Okay. Go find a chair, but come find me, if you get bored. Okay?” But he was already headed towards a pod of seats.

“I had no idea he liked to read,” Nicole admitted, trying to remember if there had been any lingering glances at the pathetic offerings at Wal-Mart. And if there had been, what else had she missed? Could the kid accidentally cut his leg off, or something, and she’d just keep drinking her Saturday night beer?

“Parenting books.” She spun towards Waverly, who started back a little. “I need many, many parenting books. Right now.”

Waverly rubbed a hand across her lips. Very much like she might be fighting a smile.

“You can’t smile at my existential crisis.”

Waverly bit her lower lip, hard. “Oh,” she managed, “I really, really can.”

“You’re a terrible friend.”

Nicole felt it, then. Knew the words would come, even before Waverly stopped fighting her grin and just laughed. “Oh, she says we’re friends?”

“I deserved that, I suppose.” Nicole leaned a shoulder cautiously against the upright part of a shelf, arms crossed and enjoying the moment. She knew exactly how to do this part. The court, and the spark.

Waverly didn’t spark back, though. Just cocked her head a little, eyes searching across Nicole’s face. “You’re doing a good job,” she said softly. Nicole’s eyes transferred automatically over the other woman’s shoulder, finding Benjamin sitting in a chair, head bent over his book.

“Yeah?” Nicole asked, and immediately regretted the amount of emotion in her voice. It was the kind of desperation that made people avert their eyes, and shift uncomfortably. Too much, and too public.

Waverly didn’t pull away, though. Just crinkled a little around the eyes. A look that managed to soothe without stinging.

“Um, thanks,” Nicole mumbled back, looking down. Shrugging, and finding her grin. Reaching for the part of herself who could parry and riposte. “I’m…” but the quip died unformed.

She was exhausted, and off stride, and she was legitimately worried about the stupid brussels sprouts. Trying to brush that off felt too much like lying. Beyond that, flirting in that kind of way had always and ever made Waverly back away.

“Thanks,” she said again. “That means a lot to me.” Waverly, whose own smile had drifted towards politeness, flicked out again, genuine.

On impulse, Nicole reached out. A light touch to pull straight an almost-curl in Waverly’s long hair. Waverly allowed it. Looking at Nicole in that way women had. The eternal mystery inside the satisfied little uptick at the edge of her smile.

Nicole let go, and made sure to stay on her side of the personal bubble. “Thanks,” she said, one final time. Waverly’s smile curled again, pleased. Nicole had never had this before. A woman that preened under her being real, instead of her being a flirt.

“Anytime,” Waverly said, sounding like she really meant it.

“Come to dinner. My place, on Wednesday.” Nicole had the immediate counteroffer. “The kid likes you.” She dangled the carrot.

“I like the kid,” Waverly offered, the tease deep in her eyes. Nicole smiled at it, and didn't tease back.

She was learning. Standing passive as Waverly took her leave around a corner and out of view. It was new, to stand still and not chase, but she couldn’t say she minded.

She browsed for 20 minutes, eventually pulling down a book. She wasn’t much of a reader, but if the kid liked the library, well, she’d spend more time in libraries. She had to nudge Benjamin, a touch on his knee, to pull him from whatever literary world he’d immersed himself in. This boy, who kept people always at the edge of his vision.

“You’re fast,” she told him, looking at the number of pages tucked under his left thumb. “This is a series, right? You want to get the next one, too?”

“To take home?” He seemed caught somewhere between hope and horror.

“Yes. To take home.”

“You have a library card?” Same inflection.

“Yes.” Nicole suppressed a sigh, finding another clash between cultures.

“That’s how they track you. The government. That’s how they pull you in, and make you soft.”

“I vote, too,” she told him, probably a little too tart. He was only ten; he hadn’t chosen what he’d been taught. She held her hand out for the book. “Go get the other one. It’s my library card, and the government already knows about me.”

“Yes,” he agreed, emphatically, finally landing on hope. Shifting between feet as she waved the books under the scanner at the checkout kiosk. Keeping them in his lap in the car, holding loosely, stroking the glossy library binding. Smiling. She tapped the steering wheel, deliberating, deciding to go for it.

“Who taught you all those things about the government?” She tried to keep it as casual as possible, making sure to keep her eyes on the road.

“Micha,” he told her easily enough. She pursed her lips, picturing the man who’d waxed so lyrical at the compound.

She pulled the car into the driveway, but didn’t reach for the ignition. They sat, and the kid did the thing he did. Focusing every ounce of attention, but none of his vision, on her.

“Do you know what a paradigm is?” she asked. He gnawed a lip, but shook his head. “It’s a way of looking at the world.”

He nodded, obedient.

“Okay,” she said, thinking. “Okay. It’s like this. It’s like…” Inspiration struck. “Video games!”

Benjamin looked a little doubtful, but Nicole regrouped. “You like playing video games, right?”

He nodded.

“And you know that there are a lot of people, a lot of adults who don’t really enjoy them.”

He nodded again.

“So the kid paradigm is that video games are great, and the grown up paradigm is that video games are boring and frustrating.”

He did not nod. His brow crinkled down.

“The point is that it’s possible for two different people to look at the same thing, and have two different thoughts about them. Does that make sense?”

“Kind of,” he told her.

“Okay, so, the way Micha sees the world, the way he thinks civilization is going to end, that’s a paradigm. It’s his way of looking at the world. But that doesn’t mean it has to be your way of looking at the world.”

Benjamin fiddled with the corner of his book. “The point is,” she continued, “is that you get to decide. And you get to take as long as you want to. It might take years, but all the best things do.

“Okay?” she finally asked.

“Okay,” he whispered back, barely above the noise of the engine. Nicole figured it was a start.

*
On the couch that night, she watched from the corner of her own eye each time he darted a look her way, hesitance in every line of his face.

“Need something?” she tried softly, when it seemed like he might not be able to unstick himself.

“I—” he finally tried, cautious. She hummed back at him, letting her eyes run over her own text. He clutched his fingers together; her heart willed him along. “Maybe, hot chocolate?” he asked. Nicole smiled, and snapped her book closed.

“The exact thing.”

Chapter Text

The thing Nicole would remember the most was: there hadn’t been any sense of foreboding. No weird hesitations as she sipped her coffee, or when she grabbed the keys out their bowl.

The moments between Lebucean stepping into the fatal funnel and Lebucean being shot was mostly the hot spurt of adrenaline, and her hand telescoping out like a robot appendage in a fruitless grab for his shirt collar.

Then, just compressed bursts of time. Leaving him there, splayed out on the front stoop. Securing the shooter. Nedley’s arrival. The wail of an ambulance. The hospital. The attending doctor’s grim and accusing look.

Nicole sprawled in a waiting room chair, tipped her head against the wall, and tried to breathe. Feeling the rotation of the earth pull at her bones. It must have been a time consuming thing, because the shadows were at a different angle when a woman approached. “Deputy, can we call anyone for you?”

Nicole picked her head up to look at the set of scrubs. A painfully young First Nation woman with M.D. on her nametag. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. I’ll get out of your hair.”

The woman looked pointedly around the otherwise empty waiting room, and pinned her with a surprisingly fierce look. “Or, I could call someone for you. Keep you from ending up right back here.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but—” she trailed off. The ‘but’ was, there wasn’t a single damn person she could call to pick her up. Except her boss. And Nedley was...he was busy. “But I’m okay. Promise.” She tried her best smile. Women loved her best smile.

Inconvenient, to discover that the pretty lady doctor was made of some sort of smile-resistant Kevlar. Three minutes later, the calling of Waverly Earp had been negotiated, completed, and there was action taken sufficient to the doctor’s satisfaction. She patted Nicole’s knee briskly before leaving. Like the rib thump of a good dog.

Nicole sifted around inside, to see if she had the wherewithal to feel affronted. Nope. She let her head fall back onto the wall.

Lebucean had tried to scream. Right at first. Right after the bullet had tumbled him onto his back. Mouth open to the sky, and no sound from his punched out lungs. Body arched into a panic that Nicole couldn’t even soothe because she only had one body and her knee was in the kidney of the man who had shot her trainee.

“Nicole?” Waverly asked tentatively. Nicole picked her head back up, and clambered upright. They stood there, looking at each other.

“What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” Nicole tried, but it crashed before takeoff. Her eyes filled with tears that she blinked away furiously. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“Mm,” Waverly grabbed an elbow, giving her a push start in the right direction. Nicole sat in the passenger seat, and tried not to sniffle. At the curb outside Nicole’s little blue house, Waverly twisted the ignition off.

“Oh,” Nicole started, you don’t have to dying under the force of Waverly’s glare.

“Shut up, Nicole. We’re going to go in, and we’re going to let Nedley go home. You’re going to eat the food I make, and drink the whiskey I give you, and sleep in the bed I shove you towards.”

The tears were back. Scalding and humiliating. She swallowed.

“Hey,” Waverly ghosted a hand against her knee, butterfly light, but not moving. “Let’s go inside, okay?”

Nicole nodded, leading Waverly up the path and through the front door. Nedley, who’d left the hospital to take Benjamin duty, looked up from the couch.

“I’ve got this,” Waverly told him.

Nedley looked at Nicole. Blowing air into his mustache, but snapping the television off.

Nicole obediently ate the food, and chose the Xanax the hospital had prescribed over the whiskey, and slept the sleep of the unrighteously drugged.

In the morning, she found a note from Waverly, saying there was coffee in the machine, and to be sure and eat breakfast. Nicole touched the edge of it, and poured herself a cup of coffee. Drinking in front of the window. The moon was nowhere in sight.

The day was awful. Spent talking to her union representative, and making her statement, and reminding herself that Leubecan would be fine. That he was fine. He was alive, for his mother to love, and for a girl to marry him someday, and to be a good cop. He was fine, he would be fine. Kevlar was an amazing substance.

She spent a lot of time staring into space.

The next day was still awful. Spent at her desk, assigned to paperwork while her fellow deputies scrambled to cover two vacant beat shifts. She watched their tired eyes and did not cry at work.

The next week was awful. She went to work, and did her desk assignment without fuss, and went home to sit with her solemn little iguana.

Leubecan came back. Holding himself stiffly against his cracked ribs, but grinning as he pulled his shirt up to display a spectacularly coloured bruise. Sprawling across the entire left side of his torso.

“He’s okay,” Nedley said behind her shoulder, where Nicole was hovering in the door to the file room.

“Yeah,” Nicole said, low and rough.

“You’re okay, too, Haught.” His hand rested on her shoulder. Nicole straightened her spine, and took a breath.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Good girl.” Nedley patted her a little. She looked over her shoulder at him. He cleared his throat, dropping his hand. “Er. Woman. Good, um, woman.” He gave one last pat, decisive. “Good deputy.” She rolled her eyes a little, and the wrinkles around his eyes softened.

It got better.

“How about a movie night?” She asked. Benjamin gave her the side eye, and she nudged a toe into his thigh, reaching across the couch cushions. “Proper,” she insisted. “Blankets, and popcorn, and soda with ice. We can invite Waverly.”

Waverly deserved to see that Nicole had put herself back together, and could care for Benjamin. Yes. That was the reason. Only that, and nothing more.

Benjamin brightened, and nodded. So Nicole executed her plan. Nesting everyone on the couch after dinner, instead of retreating to the porch. Queuing up How To Train Your Dragon on Netflix.

The title screen made Waverly look over, the corners of her lips ticking up into a smile Nicole couldn’t read. Maybe she could somehow communicate, using nothing but eyebrow twitches and one flared nostril that it was for the kid?

But nope, screw it. Nicole loved the stupid movie. Originally watching it out of desperate boredom on a transatlantic flight, but ending up charmed by the hapless Viking boy and the dragon he befriended.

Nicole couldn’t resist another sideways glance, but all she caught was that same smile on Waverly’s face. A quiet little curve that made her seem like she knew a secret. Between them Benjamin, popcorn bowl in his lap, leaned into the low blue light, watching.

Ten minutes in, Waverly abandoned the popcorn and stretched her arm across the back of the couch. Her eyes on the screen as the misfit Viking boy used his wiles instead of his brawn to capture one of the dragons terrorizing his home village. Yet somehow Nicole’s world had shrunk to the soft brush of fingertips against the back of her shoulder.

On the screen, the skinny Viking boy trapped, then freed the dragon. It roared at him, then tried to fly off. Crashing into trees and rocks, hampered by the section of tail fin the boy’s cruel trap had sheared off.

On the screen, the dragon bellowed.

On the couch, the boy leaned forward and vomited into his lap.

“Shit!” Nicole jumped up with a cry. Below her, Benjamin cringed and wretched.

*
When it was done, he stared straight ahead, blank faced with shallow breaths. A thin and sour fluid soaking into his sweatpants.

Nicole slid to kneel between the couch and coffee table, hands on her knees. “Okay,” she said, “it’s okay.” But he scrambled into a crouch, teeth bared and fingers curled. He had frozen, and now he would fight. The boy from the barn, front and center.

Waverly started to reach out, operating on some Alice ingrained instinct, but Nicole flicked a hand out, shaking her head. “Waverly,” Nicole controlled the scene, eyes steady on the boy. “Can you wet a cloth, so Benjamin can wipe his face?”

Waverly padded away. Nicole shuffled two centimetres closer. “It’s okay, Benjamin. You got a little sick, and that’s okay. Everything’s okay. I promise. Remember the barn?”

He glared at her, adrenaline curling his lip and panting his chest. Trembling. “Remember,” she prompted. “It was just me and you, and we sat until you felt ready. We’ll do the same thing here.”

“Hey, baby boy,” Waverly said softly, behind Nicole and holding out a damp cloth, and a glass of water. “Would you like these things?”

He didn’t move.

Waverly set the cloth down on the edge of the couch, and wedged the cup between two cushions. Moving back to sit with her back against a chair, head lower than the boy’s. She picked up the book sitting on the coffee table, reading aloud from the dog eared page.

They listened to the heroics of a Demi-god. Two pages. Three. Four before the real child on the couch drooped. Wilting sideways, into a limp curl. Nicole held out her hand, and Benjamin took it, letting her lead him towards the bathroom. Leaving a pile of sleeping clothes on the counter while he showered, pulling back the covers as he slid into bed.

“Do you want me to stay?” she asked, but he kept his back resolutely towards her.

Back in the living room, Waverly was leaning against the chair, head tilted back to rest against the seat cushion, eyes closed. “I’ve never really liked cops,” she said without preamble, and without opening her eyes.

Nicole just stood, feeling a wave of tiredness roll across her. Waverly’s eyes opened, and it pierced all the way through her. “The previous Sheriff, before Nedley was a grade-A dedicated asshole—

An asshole that happened to share Waverly’s last name, but it didn’t seem like the right moment to steer the conversation.

—and Nedley, well,” Waverly’s lips twisted. “Nedley was good at following orders.”

“Sheriff Nedley’s a good man.” Nicole’s defense was automatic, and Waverly tipped her head a little in acquiescence.

“He’s stronger now. Took him awhile to get there, though.”

“And what am I?” Nicole asked, a compulsion she couldn’t forstall. Waverly stood, instead of answering. Wrapping a hand around Nicole’s bicep, keeping her still for a soft kiss, right at the corner of her mouth.

“You’re someone who’s making me think twice about a few of my preconceived notions.”

*
Nicole leaned in the dark doorway of Benjamin’s room. Waverly had taken her leave without any more explanation, and her boy was asleep. Or at least faking it pretty well.

She sighed, silent. Standing until she could force herself towards her own rest.

In the morning, he returned to haunting the walls. Safe from her reach.

“Hello, Lebucean. Did you know that it’s Take A Kid to work day?”

Announced loud enough for the entire bullpen, but projected directly towards Lebucean, whose head snapped up from its studious bend.

He winced against his ribs, then gave her a narrow look. Nicole happily ignored him, in favor of handing a book and a couple loonies to Benjamin.

“Go learn to file. It’s a vital life skill. Then read your book and get a snack from the vending machine as necessary. Come find me when you’re truly hungry.”

The kid still wouldn't fully meet her eyes, and stood too hunched on himself, but he took the offering and nodded.

Behind her, Lebucean sighed. Nicole pivoted. “Don’t lose him.”

Lebucean slumped, and muttered at his desk.

*
She slunked back across the threshold three hours later.

“Wow,” Waverly told her. Sitting on the business side of the duty desk, the way the Earp sisters did. Allowed near free reign of an active Sheriff’s department for reasons still unfathomable to Nicole. “You look,” she visibly groped for polite phrasing, and equally visibly gave up. Shrugging. “Really terrible.”

“I fought the law, and the law won,” Nicole moaned.

Waverly’s nose scrunched into an adorable confusion. The woman had no bad looks. “You are the law.”

“I’m the enforcement branch. The law is the judge, and the judge won. No warrant.”

A beat of silence. Nicole waited for Waverly to fill it. The ball had always, and ever been in her court anyway.

“I was thinking,” Waverly said with a new tone that didn’t seem to have much to do with warrants. “I was thinking I could come over. Wednesday. For dinner?”

Nicole did some rapid calculations, significantly hindered by the pretty woman staring at her. Wednesday was three days, and it was three days to the fu... “Thursday would be better.”

“Thursday,” Waverly agreed. Spinning out of the high stool behind the duty desk.

“I’ve always invited you before.” Nicole felt it like hope, and tried to squash it. Yet, that kiss.

“Things change.” Waverly rounded the duty desk, hand back on Nicole’s arm. Reaching on tiptoes to kiss her cheek.

“I guess they do,” Nicole allowed, still under the touch. “Gonna tell me what changed?”

“No.” Waverly marched herself out the door. Nicole felt that stab of danger again. A delightful shiver. Pivoting to watch the other woman’s pert stride. Definitely the stride. Yeah.

Nicole grinned, not caring about how dopey it must be. Fading when she got a fleeting view of Waverly meeting Wynonna in the hall. The ever mysterious woman led a man by the elbow. Pulling him hunched and struggling with the shackles at his wrists and ankles.

He looked over, and for one long second their eyes met. He looked away. Nicole frowned. His blink had been...sideways?

Waverly, Wynonna, and the strange man disappeared behind the door Nicole had never been invited behind. The one with the frosted glass, stenciled with:

Nicole shook her head sharply. Pushing away nictitating membranes in favour of finding her two charges and declaring it time to be properly hungry.

Someday she’d find out what gave Wynonna Earp the right to clip a badge onto her belt, and to wield her power against what should be Nicole’s own citizens.

Someday, but not today. She could wait.

*
On the other hand, never let it be claimed that Nicole Haught and impulse control were best friends.

“What the hell does Wynonna Earp do?”

Sheriff Nedley looked up from his paper strewn desk, brows beetling down. “What?”

“Wynonna Earp. What does she do, back there in that office?”

Nedley looked back down. “Go away, Haught.”

She didn’t tell him no. Nedley was the sheriff, and Nicole was his deputy. That meant something. But Nicole, too, could cross her arms and lower her brow. Nedley put down the paper he’d picked up. “Services,” he said, with deep finality. “Wynonna Earp offers the Municipality of Purgatory services.”

“Services,” Nicole repeated, arms still crossed.

“That’s what it says on her door, innt?” Nedley picked his paperwork back up, squinting at it. “Since we’re on the subject, I’ve noticed the other Earp sure has taken to hanging around a lot, lately. Right wherever you happen to be.” He peered over the top of his papers. “Have you also noticed that?”

“Hm,” Nicole said. Nedley looked down all over again.

“You can go.”

Nicole went.

*
That night, after the dishes were drying and her uniform had been laid out, Nicole wrapped herself into a quilt and sought out the boy. Finding him out on the porch. Shivering and brooding into the sky.

“Only a couple more nights,” Nicole said softly. As always, tension surged into Ben’s stringy muscles. His shoulders pulled inward as he shuddered. Shying away from the hand Nicole tried to put on his back.

Once more into the breach. Nicole kicked Jerome’s gate shut, looking up at the man on his porch. Still with giant feet and arms crossed, but this time he leaned on a post and smiled. “I swear to god,” she threatened, “if you start quoting obscure poetry at me, I’m going to punch you in your not insignificant dick. I am not in the mood.”

“Deputy Haught,” he said, rich with indulgence, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Desperation,” Nicole said, with more honesty than was probably good for the ‘ol pride. Jerome straightened up, disappeared, and came back with two glasses and a bottle.

“Sit,” he directed her towards a brace of lawn chairs, handing her a couple fingers of clear liquor.

“What is this?” She sniffed it, but Jerome just smiled.

“Something my daddy said would put hair on my pecker.”

Nicole slammed it down, gaped, horked, and went through some sort of reflexive tearing up. “Working already,” she strangled, vocal cords still writhing in shock and awe.

Jerome paused, lips pooched towards his own sipping glass, then put it down. “I ain’t never seen no one do that before.”

“Don’t,” Nicole advised. He chuckled into his glass, and Nicole realized how silent the house was. Exactly zero caterwauling. She peered around.

“Where are the rugrats?”

“The kid took them for a jaunt. To protect my little sons of Maine and Kings of New England against willing and cheerful infanticide.”

The kid was not Benjamin, Nicole reminded herself. It was Jerome’s son, Theo. The little boy, now a man with a son of his own, who’d started, well, everything.

It was almost like a family tree, she mused. The way you could trace the momentum of decisions. From the moment Jerome had decided to hold instead of revile his terrified and sobbing son, down the years to this moment. Nicole, and her alcohol.

“I said, no goddamn literary quotes,” she told him with bad humour. He laughed.

“You said no obscure poetry. Cider House Rules is neither poetry, nor obscure.”

“English teachers,” Nicole muttered, remembering 100 endless minutes, three times a week. The way her classmates could see things inside the books that the authour ain’t even wrote down.

“Oh ho,” he chortled. “Heav'n has no rage, like love to hatred turn'd, Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd.”

She socked him. Hard. He rubbed his arm, wincing.

“Not the aforementioned dick?”

“Wrong angle.”

“Well, thank Christ for small miracles,” he grunted. “Are you maybe a little drunk?”

“Yes.”

“Pliant,” he grinned. “I like it. Now, tell me why you came.”

“Benjamin,” was all she said.

“Your own little bird.” He tapped a finger on his glass, drawn down into contemplation.

“Iguana,” she contradicted, cradling the empty cup under her chin. “He mentioned a mother, but I haven’t been able to find anything. Yet.”

“We don’t tend to have records,” he reminded, making her grimace.

“No.” was all she said, thinking about the papers she’d bought. Nicole Rayleigh Haught popping into being at age nineteen. She had thought it enough, at the time. The trappings of bank account, and job, and drivers licence. Enough for enfranchisement, and Friday night pizza, and being a small town cop. Not enough to hold up against a Mayor and town council that liked to dig.

How could she have known, twenty years ago, how tight the box would get? She huffed, stewing in her discontent.

“So,” Jerome finally said, the question small enough to ignore if she’d wanted. She sighed.

“I told him, the first day, that it was my job to keep him fed, and warm, and safe. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?” She cut her eyes over. “A whole lifetime more.”

“Ah.”

“Ah? I say all that, and all I get is ah?”

“Hrm,” he added, amusement glinting low as he rumbling like a big cat. Stretched and content on the savannah. She slumped, and rubbed her face.

“He’s so afraid,” she said, low. “Afraid of me, and afraid of himself, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

Jerome padded away, silent on his big feet, returning with a business card. Handing it over as he settled back down. “Family therapist.” He winked as she took the card. “Family.”

It took another half hour to sober up. When she made to stand, Jerome clasped her on the shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I think you’ll do great. If you decide on the long game.”

She reached up to squeeze his hand, before moving down the porch stairs. “Wait,” he called out, so Nicole waited, hand on the gate latch and looking back at him. Jerome’s lips quirked. “How do you know it’s not insignificant?”

“Big socks,” Nicole threw over her shoulder, yanking the gate closed.

*
And then, just like that, it was time. Time and tide might wait for no man, but there were other cycles that held the weight of inevitably, too.

Nicole let the boy out onto the porch with a towel wrapped around his waist, because she’d forgotten to buy him anything better. The wind was calm, and the porch heaters combated the late winter chill. Still, Benjamin shivered.

“It’s okay, kiddo,” she said softly, but Benjamin just shrank tighter. In the east, the lower rim of the moon tore itself from the horizon. Nicole felt the call of it start to hum in her bones.

It wasn’t a teen fantasy romance. There was no squirming moment of in-between. There was no pain. How could an intrinsic part of her nature cause pain? There was just one form, then the next. Nicole blinked, and a half-sized raven sat in the puddled towel.

She almost cooed. He was adorable, jet black and so pint-sized, but something was wrong. Even as she watched, he reared back. Wings mantled as he brought one foot forward to rend, his beak open for biting.

She looked at his silhouette, and it was wrong. It was wrong inside her belly, and choking into her lungs. It made her pitch onto her knees, and keen, and reach for her boy. Her little iguana, who was really her little bird.

The moon was inside her marrow, but she was an adult. She could resist. The boy didn’t have a choice. He’d been held down, and had all his choices taken from him.

He gaped his beak wider, but let her wrap gentle hands against his wings and fold them down against his body. Cradling him against her own heartbeat as she rocked the both. Fingers gentle against his wasted flight muscles, picking up the vibration of his trembling.

*
“Change,” Nicole told the leopard sprawled across Jerome’s porch. Digging the tip of her boot into his ribs for good measure. Making the four ravens standing on his ribs jump into the air, and the little lion cub sitting on his head bare his teeth. Another full grown raven perched on the porch rail.

She waited in the kitchen until the man, wearing a pair of sweatpants and no shirt, joined her.

“Look,” was all Nicole said, holding out Benjamin in her cupped hands. Gently, Jerome pulled the stark black wings out from the boy’s shifted form, revealing the crook to both his wings. Running a gentle finger down the fragile bones.

“Broken,” he said softly.

Nicole let out a breath. As if she’d somehow needed a second opinion before it could be true. They had stolen flight from the boy.

The moon set just before morning’s nautical twilight, and by sunrise the children were tumbled together, slackly asleep in the dubious pullout bed. Without common orientation, and limbs flung over each other. Her own boy center of the pile.

She sipped coffee, and felt all over again the grit of a sleepless night. Jerome sat with her, but Theo leaned on a wall, eyes on his own son. The little lion sharing the bed with the fledglings.

“They maimed him.” Nicole broke the silence. Making Jerome grunt, and Theo’s eyes flick over to her. “They beat him, and made him fear himself, and then decided that all that breaking was too metaphorical.”

She stared straight ahead. She didn’t need to meet their eyes for this. Some truths you just knew in your bones, and those truths didn’t need justification. “It won’t stand.”

“And so, just like that, the cause becomes personal.” Jerome looked at his son, something tender on his face. Theo looked steadily back, something thankful on his own face.

Nicole hadn’t been there, seventeen years ago when an eight year-old Theo had first shifted. The joy in his parents shattering as their son became something reviled. A trickster. A carrion eater. A bringer of pestilence and ill luck.

She hadn’t been there months later when Jerome struck out on the road with his outcast son, leaving behind a wife and a whole community. Hadn’t been there the first time another family, lacking Jerome’s own strength of will, had left another little raven child on his front step.

Had, in fact, only known Jerome long enough to help find and deliver the last four of the nineteen raven children the man had raised before Nicole had come along.

Nicole paused, thinking the deeper logistics through for the first time. Feeling hot realizations cascading. “Hey,” she barked, drawing down on a startled Theo. “What’s the max number of kids that have lived here at one time?”

Theo shifted, and glanced curiously at his father. “There were six of us, just before I moved out.”

“And, at that time, did someone sleep on a pullout bed?”

“Of course.” Theo missed the tightly fractional shake of Jereome’s head, but Nicole didn’t.

“Were there multiple someones sleeping on the pull out bed?” she asked, steady. Jerome slumped a little. Theo shrugged.

“Sure, sometimes.”

“You lied,” Nicole said, looking at Jerome. He lifted his hands.

“I nudged.”

Nicole made her eyes go cop flat. “You nudged.”

“You have a habit of repeating things I say, in a very different tone of voice. Did you know that?”

“You manipulated me.”

He gave her a sad look. “Mercy, Nicole. I was young, once. A young father, on fire with all the things I would change to make the world better for these children, but that was time and years ago. I am legitimately at capacity.” He took a breath. “I need you young bucks. Someone who will do better than I did.”

“You didn’t do so bad, old man.” Theo answered. Jerome put a hand over the one Theo had moved forward to put on his shoulder.

“I saved kids, but I didn’t change the world.” He looked between them. “I wanted to, but I didn’t, and now it’s unto the next generation. So I nudged, and I admit that I hoped. Tell me you regret it, and I’ll take him.”

Nicole followed his eyes. Seeing her own dark head, her own skinny limbs in the heap. “No,” she said. Jerome smiled. “But you can’t put the world on me, Jerome. I get people hurt.” She swallowed, head bent to talk to her own hands. “I get them shot.”

Jerome stood, and put his hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently.

*
The only solution to a night like they’d had, was pancakes. No whole wheat, no fruit. Just white flour, sugar, and too much maple syrup. With a plate of bacon to share.

“Don’t tell Waverly.” She dumped half the serving onto Benjamin’s plate. He stared at it. Shoulders hunched in as he stabbed holes into his innocent pancakes. Syrup oozing into the gouging wounds.

The sullen boy full of secrets, present all over again. But the secret was out, so why did he still feel backed into that corner? Was it shame at his wings? Nicole thought about the card Jerome had given her, tucked into her wallet.

At home Benjamin picked up the hard blue racquetball he’d left in the drive. Whipping it furiously against the garage door with a hollow booming, turning his palm pink with the slap of it’s return.

“Hey,” she said, but the ball just went harder and faster. His lips skimmed back in a snarl.

“Enough.” Nicole reached out and caught it. Benjamin let out a furious cry.

“That’s mine!”

“Benjamin, take a deep breath. Okay? You’re upset, and I want to talk about it.”

“Give it back!” Fists balled as he hissed air through his teeth.

It was a sort of talking, Nicole decided. Maybe the only kind of talking he was capable of at the moment.

“Play me,” Nicole told him instead, holding the ball out on her palm. He snatched it, crashing it savagely down with a grunt, bouncing the rubber off the ground so it rebounded off the wall. She batted it back on instinct, and it snapped straight off the wall. Benjamin caught it.

“Out,” he snarled. “It has to bounce on the ground first.”

“Play again,” Nicole shot back. Sprinting hard after the spinning serves Benjamin lobbed off the wall. Back and forth with nothing but their grunting and panting, until Nicole fumbled her return. Benjamin snatched the ball, whipping it directly towards her. She put her hand out, but it smacked off her bicep.

“Out.”

“Best out of five.”

“You have to run for the wall when you fumble. If you make it before you get hit, you get to stay in,” he told her, before hurtling the ball. She nodded, and scrambled to return.

“Out.” When it bounced twice before she could return. But he didn’t talk about winning. Just started another round.

“Out.” When the angle shot the ball off into the walkway bushes.

“Out.” When she fumbled again, the ball bouncing off her butt mid sprint.

“Out.” When the ball landed outside the hastily marked boundary line.

“Out.”

“Out.”

“Out.”

“Out!” Nicole cried, when her own throw thudded against the back of Benjamin’s shoulder. Fingers reaching for the wall, fast off the block after his fumble. A miracle, really, that she’d caught him.

Nearly an hour to crumble his shield wall of anger. Long enough that her knees throbbed, and she ached with an ominous twinge that meant she’d be sore tomorrow. All worth it, when Benjamin finally paused, breathing deep, and flushed with nothing more than pumping blood. Holding the ball instead of serving.

Nicole bent over, hands on knees and deeply thankful to be standing still. “I think you won.” She twisted a little, to grin up at him, but he just toed the ground.

“Come on, let’s cool down.” Nicole stood up, groaning, but holding her hands out for some catch. “But take it easy on me, I’m old.”

He didn’t smile, but he did toss her an easy underhand. She tossed one back. He gave her an arching pop fly. She sent a slow roller to hook towards his chest. Sinking into the rhythm. The easy flex of muscles that gave her little iguana something to do, and somewhere to be. Rewarded after only another five minutes.

“Do I have to leave, now that you know?” He gave her a lazy drive, watching her hands instead of her eyes.

“No,” Nicole told him, swift and sure. “It’s your ball, and your Nintendo, and your clothes, Benjamin.” She tossed the ball. He returned it. “It’s your home, for as long as you want it.”

The thing that had been so tight behind Benjamin’s eyes relaxed, for the very first time in their acquaintance. Nicole tossed the ball up, then caught it. Their hot breath billowing in the growing chill.

“Should we go hydrate?” she asked, and her little bird, home to roost, nodded.

The doorbell ringing snapped Nicole straight into one singularly and overwhelming realization—it was Thursday. It had been Thursday of all the hours that had passed since midnight.

“Shit.”

“Unusual start,” Waverly said, grinning a little from the entryway.

“I, um, forgot.” Nicole admitted. Something flashed across Waverly’s face, quick as light glinting off a school of fish.“I’m sorry,” Nicole added. “Crazy night.”

“Sorry I missed it,” Waverly said, light. Nicole hummed noncommittally, swinging the door open.

“Trust me, it was better off missed. But come hang out with Benjamin while I explore the kitchen.” Waverly hesitated, saw Nicole notice, and stepped through the door.

“Hey Benjamin,” she told the face that popped up over the arm of the couch. Holding up another hand with two books. “I brought Harry Potter.”

Nicole retreated into the kitchen, staring hopelessly into the refrigerator. There was food, but no obvious path towards dinner.

“Hey.” The warmth of Waverly’s fingertips through her shirt made her jump. “Oh, sorry. You looked a million miles away. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Nicole mustered a smile. “How do you feel about pizza?”

“Rarely vegan.”

“Right.” Nicole slumped. “Um. Pasta to the rescue?”

“Sure,” Waverly said softly, hands in her pockets. Standing there as Nicole started reaching for pasta and sauce. “You didn’t answer.”

“Answer what?”

“Are you okay?”

“Not much sleep.” Nicole mustered up a smile, but Waverly chewed on her lip.

“Okay,” she said. “What can I help with?”

Nicole frowned at the package of pasta. “Do you think the internet has a good recipe for vegan carbonara?”

“Yes, but you’ll need nutritional yeast.”

Nicole just blinked at her.

“Nicole,” Waverly stood with her elbows tight to her body. “Should we reschedule?”

“No. I’m fine. I can make red sauce.” Nicole tried, but she knew her smile was tenuous. Waverly did not loosen, but she nodded.

A very uninspired sauce, it turned out. Prepared with the opening chapters of Harry Potter’s adventures drifting in from the front room in Waverly’s voice. Plated up too bland, and too sweet all at once. At the table, Benjamin grimaced and poked at the pile of noodles on his plate.

“Eat it.” Nicole advised, but Benjamin looked up.

“It’s gross. You’re a bad cook.”

“Hey,” Waverly cut in, sharp. “That wasn’t very kind, Benjamin.”

Tension crackled around the table. Benjamin’s eyes sliding between the two women, his uncertainty obvious. Was Waverly allowed to correct him? Nicole didn’t know.

“You can have peanut butter and jelly.” Nicole tried to yank their dirty laundry back into hiding. Then looked down at her plate. “Hell, we can all have it, I guess.”

Waverly looked down at her plate, then back up. Something gentle in her eyes. “Next time will be better.”

“Sure.” Nicole wanted to believe it.

*
Nicole came to, with the water snapping off, and Waverly’s footsteps heading out towards the porch. Shit, she hadn’t helped.

“Hey.” Nicole sat next to her on the porch step. Around them, the cold snapped at the circle of electric heat, but couldn’t penetrate.

Waverly ran a fingernail down the seam of the label on her own bottle, eyes on the movement. “I’m sorry if I overstepped, talking to Benjamin like that.”

“No, it’s okay. You were right. He had a rough day, too, but he wasn’t being very kind. I’m sorry you had to see the less desirable side to this little family.”

Waverly laughed, one little huff. “I’ve seen Alice at her worst. I know kids are narcissistic little monsters.”

Nicole smiled a little, but Waverly looked tentative. “Anything I can do to help?”

“No. He’ll be fine,” Nicole said, because what other options were there? In the muted light, that expression flashed across Waverly’s face again. There and then gone.

Nicole thought about the card Jerome had given her, still in her wallet. She’d need to call. She could do that tomorrow, maybe. But the address was in the city, and she’d need to schedule time off work.

Waverly’s voice brought her back all over again. “You seem, maybe not okay? Which is okay. It’s okay to not be okay. There’s been a lot for you, recently. Lebucean, and having Benjamin. I just thought I could listen, if you wanted.”

Nicole took a pull of her beer, to stop the pressure of words. All spillways could do was open, with no understanding of the consequences on the downstream side.

“I’m fine.”

“Yeah.” Waverly said, taking a draught of her bitter IPA. “Okay.”

It took Nicole almost three days of radio silence to realize that she’d fucked up. Plus another half hour to find Wynonna. Doing a full loop of the town, only to find her in the file room of the Municipal Centre, boots up on the table, reading a file.

A blue file. Stamped with a familiar crest.

“What?” Wynonna peered over the edge of the stiff blue folder, two-hole punched sheets curled over the top.

“That’s a PSD file.”

“So?” Wynonna said. Nicole narrowed her eyes.

“So, why do you have it?”

“Nedley.”

“Nedley,” Nicole echoed, and maybe Jerome was right about that repeating thing.

“Mm,” Wynonna hummed, light. Nicole breathed out her nose.

“What is it that you actually do, Wynonna?”

“Uphold truth, justice, and the American way.” Wynonna grin was edged as a shark’s.

“We’re Canadian.”

“The true North, strong and free.” Wynonna let her boots thump down, leaning forward to rest her chin on her laced hands. “Except you aren’t here for relations of the international type, are you?”

Well damn Wynonna anyway, pretending to be too self absorbed to pay attention. Nicole took a breath, and tried to regroup. She had a mission. “I, um, think I might have screwed up. With Waverly.”

“Oh, you absolutely did, cowboy.” Nicole felt that as a drop of her stomach. The sisters Earp had clearly been discussing Nicole. “Are you here to ask me why Waverly’s mad at you?” Wynonna was not subtle in her delight.

“No.”

“For some reason, I’ve decided not to believe you, Haught.” The grin vanished, like it had never been. “But here’s the deal, Red. I’m definitely not going to give you any advice on Waverly. You want to unfuck yourself, you’re gonna have to figure it out on your own.”

Nicole rubbed the heel of her hand into her swelling headache. “Would it kill you to actually help me?”

“No. I just don’t want to.”

Nicole clenched her teeth. Wynonna watched the grinding with something that seemed almost sympathetic. Nicole wondered all over again, for the hundredth time, if Wynonna considered them friends. “Look, I learned a long time ago not to interfere in Waverly’s business. They were hard lessons, and I’m not looking to repeat them. You want to fix this, you’re gonna have to be, like, an adult about it. Use your words.”

“Gross,” Nicole muttered, and Wynonna gave her a real smile.

“Riddle me this, Haught Shot; have you ever noticed that in Purgatory the truth really is stranger than fiction?”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re trying to tell me,” Nicole said, flat.

“Willing to bet you do, though.” Wynonna’s eyes held something shrewd, and knowing. She might not know what, but she knew there was a what to know.

Nicole snapped her mouth shut over her retort. Wynonna’s smile was the absolute definition of shit consumption. Abetted by a little paw curl of her fingers, believably feline in her cruelty. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

*
The truth shall set you free.

Nicole very much doubted it. But eventually, every human reaches capacity for their own bullshit and suffering.

She called Lebucean, situated him onto her couch with a pillow for his ribs and an exhortation against letting the kid die, and let her feet carry her towards town.

*
So it all became full circle. Hovering in the gravel lot behind Shorty’s bar, waiting for Waverly to finish tossing trash bags into the dumpster.

Not totally the same, though. This time, she walked out into the circle of sodium light.

“Oh!” Waverly started, hand fluttering to her chest. “Jesus. Where did you come from?”

Nicole stopped, setting her feet just so. Waiting.

“You’re not here for the dumpster, are you?” Waverly frowned at her. “That will make you sick.” Nicole looked at the dumpster, then away. Waverly laughed. “Okay, point taken. You don’t slum.”

Nicole agreed with a small noise.

“You know,” Waverly leaned forward, conspiracy in every line. “I know someone else who’s that shade of red.”

Oh, Nicole was absolutely certain she did. Waverly squinted, suddenly suspicious. Even with her heart so high in her throat, Nicole couldn’t resist the pull of that timing. She uncurled, and trotted out of the light. Padding back when she was presentable.

“Holy Mary, mother of god,” Waverly breathed. “Holy shit. Holy, holy fuck.”

“You’re very profane when you’re surprised.”

Waverly starred, eyes wide and breath caught.

“So, um.” The hammer of blood in her temples was nearly intolerable. “Surprise!”

“There was a fox,” Waverly told her.

“Yes,” Nicole agreed.

“Then it went there,” she pointed across the lot.

“Yes.”

“And you came back. First a fox, and then you.”

“Yes.”

“A red fox.”

“Yes.”

Waverly pulled in a long stretch of air through her nose, and blew it slowly out her lips. It felt like free fall. The certain pull of gravity, and the yank of the parachute still Schrödinger’s.

“Of. Fucking. Course.” It came out sharp and annoyed, but deep in Waverly’s eyes was a burning curiosity. Nicole felt it heating through her chest like lightning. Hope.

*
“Um,” Nicole managed. Sitting at one of the back tables in Shorty’s, mug of coffee in her hand. Waverly sat across from her, hands around her own coffee mug, eyes narrowed into something that implied dissection. Or vivisection. Nicole swallowed.

“I’m guessing you didn’t plan for this part?” The coolness in Waverly’s amusement undermined the hope Nicole had felt, pricking at something that felt like it might be the first rise of a stinging humiliation.

“Nope. Not in the least.” Nicole looked up, but the evaluation in Waverly’s eyes didn’t change.

“It begs the question: why now?”

Nicole licked her lips. “Too many secrets.”

“Yeah,” Waverly snorted a little. “Those have a way of piling up, don’t they?” Nicole tested the words for recrimination, but it seemed more resigned than bitter.

“I’m sorry,” Nicole tried. “About the other night. For ignoring you, and shutting you out.”

“Well,” Waverly softened away from both examination and resignation. “I’m starting to realize you might have reasons to be distracted. Still managed to piss me off, though.”

“To be fair, that’s been your standard Nicole-based response for the last five years. I seem to piss you off naturally.” She tried for a joke, but Waverly just ticked an eyebrow up.

“Any idea why that might have been?”

“Maybe,” Nicole mumbled. Too many casual CFO’s, and CEO’s, and barristers in the city. Too much obfuscating, and artful dodging, and letting her eyes rove while keeping them shuttered.

Waverly was silent, and Nicole fought the resentment. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair. She’d had a secret, and it had to be protected, and she had lived under that weight for so long.

She shoved it away. Adults took responsibility. Even when it wasn’t fair. Even when it was frightening. Adults anchored themselves, and did not drift, and they did it because they wanted to.

She cleared her throat, focusing on the grain of the table below her hands. For all its shitty dive bar nature, Shorty’s had solid wood tables. She wondered if that was a choice Waverly had made. Painstakingly finding what was complimentary from the dross of country estate sales. “I’ve never given you any reason to see me as anything solid.”

“Yes,” Waverly said, and it hurt, “but Nicole,” it made Nicole look back up, to see Waverly’s face wasn’t remote. She was smiling, a little sad, and a little fond. The hope surged back up. “Any idea what might have changed?”

“No.” Her voice sounded oddly hoarse, like she’d been crying.

“It took awhile, but I eventually I saw you. How you’re so good with Alice, and then you had Lebucean, and Benjamin. I thought you were finally becoming part of this town, and that made me think maybe I could be a part of you. But I learned a long time ago not to give my time to people who don’t give it back to me.”

“I want to give it back to you.” Nicole had rarely offered anything quite so true.

“I think you kind of proved that, out by the dumpsters.” Nicole blushed a little, lost in her own impetuousness, but Waverly had already shifted serious again. “Shifting like that, showing me, was the easy part, though.” Nicole’s head snapped up, but Waverly was already patting the air. “Okay, not easy. Just the simplest part. Now you have to actually, you know, make words into explanations.”

It felt like ice in her veins. It made her shake. Eighteen years of silence. Nearly two decades. The span of time it took to nearly raise a child, she’d spent nurturing and growing barriers. But without this, without at least a beginning effort, there would be no Waverly.

Nicole opened her mouth.

“I was born in a community west of here. Over the mountains. It was...fine. My parents weren’t the best, but I had other people. It was good enough.”

A glance towards, and away, compelled to capture the moment Waverly stopped believing. But Waverly was just listening. “I, um, I shifted the first time when I was nine. That’s pretty average. Some go as young as seven, some as late as thirteen. We had a party. It was considered a good match.”

“You’re like Reynard, all those folk tales.”

“What?” It came out too sharp, too afraid.

“A clever little guy. Showed up in a lot of manuscript illuminations.” She waved it away. “It’s not important right now. What does ‘match’ mean?”

Nicole tried to keep up. “No one knows what a child is going to shift into, if they even will shift, until it happens. Some end results are considered better than others.”

“Mm,” Waverly made a little noise, eyes remote. Nicole maybe wasn’t the wisest, but she knew a thinking look when she saw one. She licked her lips, tensed for what was to come.

“You said Benjamin is your tribe.”

“Yes.” Nicole refused to make it sound like a confession.

“So, he’s a shifter?”

“Yes.”

“Have you read Phillip Pullman? With the daemons?”

“Demons?” Something clenched into her stomach, but Waverly made another waving gesture.

“Nevermind. Learning new things. Lots of thoughts. Random connections. What does it mean that you grew up in a community?”

“We—shifters, I mean, most of us live in communities. Little enclaves, scattered all across the world. Among society, but not really in society. I lived there until I was nineteen, and I decided I wanted something bigger.”

“That must be getting hard, in today’s world. All the surveillance cameras and gps chips in our smartphones.”

“Easier than you think. The world already has all kinds of separate communities. The Hasidim, the Amish, they stand out because they make it a point to stand out. But the Mennonites, the Seventh Day Adventists, they don’t get noticed. We give each other jobs, teach each other’s kids. Insular. No one questions, because no one knows there is anything to question.”

Waverly tapped a finger on her chin, lost to some internal tide. Nicole felt the creeping discomfort of being too exposed. “You’re taking this remarkably well.” Nicole couldn’t keep the tentative tone out of her voice, but Waverly grinned. Small, and almost private.

“Were you expecting more screaming?”

“Yes?” Nicole hazarded. “I don’t know. I’ve never done this.”

“So,” Waverly glinted, just a little, “I’m taking your confessional virginity?”

Nicole blushed all over again, and Waverly seemed to find it worthy of mercy. “Purgatory’s a weird place, Nicole. I’ve got my own stories.”

It turned out that bravery felt like a pull behind the stomach. “Will you tell me, someday?”

“Mmm,” Waverly hummed, finger tracing down to press into the dimple in Nicole’ s cheek. “I think maybe I will.”

“Good,” Nicole breathed, smiling, smiling. Letting her own palm curve around Waverly’s cheek. “That’s good.”

Waverly reached up to pull her hand away, and Nicole wondered how she’d mis-stepped. The moment of ice sublimating when Waverly smiled, pulling her hand around to kiss her palm. Nicole’s flush managed to deepen.

“I’m going to take you on a date. Okay?”

“Yeah.” Nicole had to clear her throat again. “Yes. I want that. A date. Please.” Waverly pressed a fingertip back into her cheek, then released. Like she was testing capillary refill. Which — yeah.

“Redheads maybe shouldn’t blush, Nicole.”

Nicole smiled, dopey and not caring.

*
The other pisser about being an adult was: responsibilities. Re: the way they cut into just floating around like a teenager in love.

“What happened to you?” Lebucean asked, peering up from the couch, a stiff cushion clutched to his sternum.

“Nothing,” Nicole said, light and happy.

“You’re smiling.”

“I do that sometimes.”

“Uh huh.”

Nicole pursed her lips, a failed bid to stop smiling. “Where’s the kid?”

“Crawl space, I think.” Nicole blinked. Lebucean shrugged as best he could, more in his hands than his shoulders. “What?”

“What?” she said back, mocking. Lebucean seemed genuinely mystified. “Watching Alice has never been like this.”

“Oh, no.” Lebucean put up a hand, winced, and pressed his other hand against his ribs. “Ouch. Stop. Please. Nature versus nurture is definitely above my pay grade, boss.”

Nicole just rolled her eyes. Going to the hall closet to slitherer down the access hatch in the floor. Left handily open by her little iguana.

It was easy to find him. The crawl space had, after all, made the home inspector whimper in some kind of ecstasy. It wasn’t a wet hole in the ground. It was a poured concrete slab, vapor sealed and enclosed into the conditioned envelope of the house. Neatly scattered with PVC pipes, pex lines, and ducting.

It was tall enough for Benjamin to fit without much discomfort, but Nicole wasn’t so lucky. She crabbed over to where he sat, cross-legged and thunking a knife into a floor joist. He’d carved BENJI into the wood, with a surprisingly even hand. She rolled into a spine curving hunch to trail her fingers over the letters. “This is nice. Now the house knows who you are.”

“Houses can’t know things,” Benjamin informed her. “They aren’t alive and they don’t have brains.”

“How did you end up down here, anyway?” Nicole decided to sidestep debating anthropomorphism with a ten year old.

“It’s the last place I hadn’t looked.”

Nicole had been aware, peripherally, of the kid’s explorations into the far flung places of the house. Moving from the closet she’d caught him inside, out to the shed, and through most of the cabinets and storage cubbies.

“Micha said,” Benjamin carved out another shaving of wood. “He said out in the world, they’d put me in a cage, and never open the door again. He said they wouldn’t give me any water, or food, and that I’d die like that, and they’d be happy I was dead.” He cut his eyes towards her, and away. Like he was pretty certain, but wouldn’t mind improving that certainty by another sigma.

“No cages,” Nicole told him. She’d tell him today, and the next, and the one after that. On and on, until he believed beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“I know that now,” he said, and used his highly evolved opposable thumb to whack the blade tip into the joist. A little pattern of distress marks.

“Who called you Benji?” She watched the side of his face. Her fragile little savage, who could only talk when his hands were busy.

“My mama. But she died. Micha said it was a baby name.”

Well, that explained why she hadn’t been able to find mama. Nicole took a breath, squashing Micha’s existence back down into a box she’d marked later.

“Lebucean wants hot chocolate,” she told the kid. He flicked the knife closed, and handed it to her.

Her deputy took his hot chocolate with good grace. Then she and Benjamin worked together to lever him off the couch without folding him in the middle, laughing at his mostly hammed up groans.

The moon was high outside, but Nicole stayed inside once Benjamin was asleep. Clicking through webpages, until she found the right things. A beginner’s chisel set, and three lengths of redwood.

“Carve the joists if you want, but this might be pretty, too.”

He took the bundle, stroking a palm across the leather of the rolled chisel holder. “Do you think Benji is a baby name?” he asked her.

“Nope,” she said, and he nodded.

She drove him to the city two days later, Benjamin curled tight and silent all the way through, until they were in the parking lot. Frowning as he looked up at the chrome and glass building that housed the therapist’s office.

“It’s okay to be nervous.” Nicole told him, waiting to open the door until he was ready. He glanced at her, and back to the building.

“Why do I have to talk to this lady?”

“Benji,” she said, and he looked at her. “Remember when we talked about paradigms?” He nodded. “The things that I’ve told you about the world, and the things that Micha has told you about the world, they’re never going to fit together. That means you’re going to have to decide what you believe about the world. Deciding those things, it can be confusing. It can even be scary. This woman, it’s her job to help.

“Does that make sense?”

“Not much,” he said. Nicole smiled.

“That’s okay. She can help you with that, too.” She paused, then fully submitted to operant conditioning. “And, we can have ice cream after every session. Because I’ll be proud of you just for walking through the door, and bravery deserves recognition.”

Benjamin took a deep breath, and yanked his door open.

Nicole sat on a chair in the waiting room. Benjamin had been invited into the office fifteen minutes before, and she’d already reaped as much entertainment as the Highlights magazines were going to provide.

Her phone pinged, and she fished it out of a hip pocket.

[WAVERLY:] Full moon. Required, or just fun?

Nicole smiled at the phone. Waverly had been doing that, texting little questions. A couple each day. Trying to learn. She typed Mostly required in reply.

She thumbed the phone open a couple times, but Waverly didn’t text back before the office door reopened.

“Ice cream,” Benjamin told her. The edges of his eyes pinched and his fingers restless.

“Yup,” she agreed, fingers light on his shoulder. He relaxed under the touch, one tiny ratchet.

Her phone didn’t ping again until they were back home, seated at the table to eat a dinner they’d half ruined with soft serve.

[WAVERLY:] Does it hurt? The movies make it seem like it hurts.

Nicole watched three little bubbles flick on and off the screen, before the text finally popped up.

[WAVERLY:] I hope it doesn’t hurt.

Doesn’t hurt, Nicole texted back, Benjamin watching with interest.

“Phones at the table are rude,” he told her.

“Hmm,” Nicole told him, reading Waverly’s emoji. A smiley face, blushing, with eyes squeezed in happiness.

Nicole hesitated, then sent back a little winking face, lips pressed into a kiss. Her pulse thumped, but Waverly’s reply pinged back right away.

[WAVERLY:] Promises, Deputy.

“You turned red,” Benjamin told her, still following events. Nicole put the phone down.

“Eat your dinner.”

The final text pinged while Nicole was brushing her teeth. She shifted foot to foot as the brush vibrated for another half century before it automatically shut off.

[WAVERLY:] Are you free Saturday evening?

Yes, Nicole typed. Then had trouble spitting and rinsing through the hard skim of her helpless smile.

Chapter Text

Nicole stood in her bra and brooded into her closet. Inside was a button down shirt, ironed and sharply crisp. Also inside was a dress, falling softly.

Which one would Waverly prefer? Which one did Nicole prefer?

“Stupid gender binary bullshit,” she muttered, switching to brooding on the plight of the modern lesbian. Clothing, clothing everywhere, and not a stitch to wear. Weren’t they supposed to be beyond this?

On the bed, her phone started buzzing with the drop-dead alarm she’d set. She yelped Pavlovian style, and yanked out the shirt. The settling fabric felt like confidence, with the fit across her shoulders and the stiffness of the collar. She didn’t need to write a thesis on why. She could do her penance later.

“Come on,” she told Benjamin, grabbing the backpack they’d purchased together from the miracle called Wal-Mart. “Time to go.”

“Why do I have to go there?”

“Because you do.”

“Why can’t I stay here?”

“Because you can’t.”

“Well, why can’t I stay with Toby?”

“Because I said— wait,” Nicole frowned. Opened her mouth to ask who in the sweet hell was Toby, and snapped it shut just in time.

Lebucean was Toby. Lebucean had a first name. Right, right. “He’s busy, and I thought you might like to spend time with some other kids.”

Benjamin crossed his arms, and stared at the ground. Nicole let her breath trickle out, slow.

“If you tell me what you’re worried about, I might be able to help.”

“Nothing.”

Nicole just looked at him, neutral.

“When will you be back?” He watched his own toes flexing on the hardwood, smearing a fogged outline.

“I’ll pick you up in the morning. First thing.”

Benjamin nodded, and did not look up. Nicole laid a careful hand over the back of his neck, squeezing gently when he tensed. Holding until he relaxed.

“Do you have your phone?”

A cheap tracfone had been the second Wal-mart purchase. Now tucked into his pants pocket. They’d entered numbers into it, sitting in Nicole’s car and eating hot dogs from the dubious parking lot food cart. Back when he’d been excited to spend time at Jerome’s house.

He nodded.

“If you call, or text, I will answer. If you need to come home, I will come get you.” She moved to poke at his cheek, annoying, until he squirmed. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” he said, swatting at her hand. Finding his shoes, and fiddling with the radio buttons in the car, and turning around exactly once to wave from the top step of Jerome’s porch. Nicole smiled.

*
“Hey, sailor.”

Nicole frowned at Waverly. Seated on the top step of Nicole’s own porch when she pulled into the drive.

“I’m a cop.”

“It’s a vibe,” Waverly informed her, standing. “Don’t ruin it.”

“Far be it from me.” Nicole smiled back. She told herself to stop smiling like a moron. She failed to stop smiling. “Sorry,” she added. “For being late. I had to take Benjamin to a friend’s house.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Waverly told her, standing. Sliding a palm, soft, down the arm of Nicole’s shirt until her fingers circled a wrist, pulling Nicole closer. The heels on her ankle boots bringing their faces level enough to easily press her lips against the corner of Nicole’s mouth.

“Tall,” Nicole murmured, the electric zip of the kiss thrilling into her.

“You’re one to talk,” Waverly grinned back at her, running a finger under the collar of her deep blue shirt. “This is nice.” Nicole twitched, and Waverly’s smile shifted, pleased. “Come on, we’ve got reservations.”

“Fancy,” Nicole said, letting Waverly lead her towards her car, pausing while Waverly opened the passenger door with a little flourish. Cocooned in the smooth ride, it took three repetitions of Nicole flicking the screen of her phone to life before Waverly looked over.

“Sorry.” Nicole pressed the phone screen down onto her knee, cutting the light. “Benjamin wasn’t a hundred percent excited about being dropped off for the night. I don’t want to miss it, if he texts me.”

Waverly made an understanding little noise, but Nicole remembered that people had made a habit of overlooking Waverly. She wouldn’t be one of those people.

“Sorry,” she said again.

“Will you tell me about him?” Waverly spared her another glance, the sweep of headlights in the oncoming lane lighting up her profile.

“Yeah,” Nicole agreed, then stared at her lap. Waverly glanced over.

“You don’t have to,” she reassured.

“No,” Nicole managed. “I— you remember I told you about how there’s communities scattered around. Of shifters. Benjamin’s from one close by. Out east of town.”

“But they weren’t good to him? And that’s why he’s with you?”

“Did you know,” Nicole said into the soft and flickering darkness. “Did you know that scientists have observed ravens using theory of mind? If someone cheats them, they remember that individual and won’t team up with them again.”

“I didn’t know that,” Waverly admitted, glancing over again. “Doesn’t surprise me, though. The way they look at things, heads all cocked. You can tell they’re thinking about you.”

Nicole breathed, cradled in the dark car and inside all the secrets she’d ever held.

“Is Benjamin a raven?” Waverly asked softly.

Nicole thought of twisted faces, clenched fists. Hatred and condemnation, and Benjamin’s slim shoulders.

“Yes.”

“And that...is complicated, for some reason?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand,” Waverly admitted softly. Pulling into the parking stall, and twisting, crooking a leg up on the seat to fully look at Nicole. “I’d like to,” she added into the too long silence. “Will you tell me?” after another beat.

“Yeah,” Nicole whispered, low and into the dark. “Yes, I’d like to.”

They sat, not moving. Waverly made an uncertain noise. Nicole reached over and worked a finger under the palm Waverly had rested on her knee, until Waverly lifted it enough to slide under and link their fingers together. “It’s hard to just start talking, after so long not talking, but I do want to tell you.”

“We’ve got time.” Waverly gave her hand a squeeze. Her smile open and trusting.

*
Waverly held the door for Nicole. Nicole pulled out a chair for Waverly. The maitre d’ passed out menus. A server asked about water.

Nicole let the bustle of it suppress the conversation. Then she had to wait while they listened, and judged, and returned with alcohol.

Across the table, Waverly’s throat bobbed with a sip of wine. Nicole watched, and remembered that most bravery was manufactured. You just did it, and hoped for a good outcome.

Waverly smiled, open and sweet. Nicole licked her lips. “You have to understand that there’s a lot we don’t know about ourselves,” she began, bringing Waverly’s attention back. “I’ll answer all the practical questions you have, but the existential ones about why and how,” she spread her hands. “I just can’t.”

“Just start at the beginning,” Waverly encouraged, eyes fast on Nicole. Leaning in towards the little candle lit centerpiece. Nicole made her mouth open, and hoped it would be like running downhill.

“We don’t, um, we don’t really have a word for ourselves. Like an indigenous community, where the name for the tribe just means people or humans. I don’t know if we’re homo Sapiens, or some other offshoot, or if we’re just, um, magic.”

She darted a glance up, waiting for the willing suspension of disbelief to break. Startling a little when Waverly reached to run her fingers lightly down Nicole’s own. “Don’t discount the magic in the world, Nicole Haught.”

“I’m guessing you don’t mean the magic of Disney?” Nicole managed. Waverly silently wove her fingers to lace between Nicole’s. “Actual, real magic?” She double checked.

“Possibly,” Waverly said, eyes bright and steady as she pulled their linked hands towards herself. Running the pads of her free fingers over Nicole’s knuckles. Looking at Nicole like there was nothing else in the world beyond her story.

“Um,” Nicole sputtered a little, distracted. “The point is: There are lots of things we don’t know about ourselves. Biologically, physiologically, evolutionarily, we’re a mystery. Spiritually, though.” She paused, struggling. “Spiritually, we’re just people. Some of us are good, and some bad. Successful, or failures. Rule followers, and rebels.” She shrugged, a little helpless. “We’re just people.”

“With tails.” Waverly noted, a subtle tease that didn’t sting. Nicole let her smile be a tiny curl, so Waverly had to lean in more to catch it.

“Only sometimes.” She paused. “Is there really magic in the world?”

“Yes,” Waverly told her.

“That sounds like a story,” Nicole said. Waverly reached up, and touched her cheek, gentle. Nicole tipped her head into the touch, letting it settle her.

“Will you tell me about Benjamin?” Waverly asked, curiosity instead of redirection.

“He’s a raven.”

Waverly sat back. “That’s the second time you said that. And it’s the second time you’ve sounded...loaded.”

“Yeah,” Nicole said, toes on the edge, looking at the fall. “Did you know that in the Quran, it's a raven that showed Cain how to hide Abel’s body?”

“No.” Waverly was watching her carefully. Nicole let her gaze go a little vacant, reviewing things she knew.

“It’s almost the world over; ravens as tricksters and ill omens. The druids had Morrígan, the raven of war and the battlefield. Shakespeare, Marlow, Spenser, they all used the image of a raven as foreshadowing. Poe had his ominous bird of yore. Claude Lévi-Strauss said ravens are a structural construct that people use to resolve the conflict between something living being suddenly dead.”

She shook herself back, quirking an eyebrow, wry. “It’s even in the Torah. Noah sent out a raven, but it was too busy eating all the drowned people to bother coming back.”

“Grim,” Waverly said.

“We’re people, Waverly. We have our biases, and blind spots. And we have our prejudices.”

“And one of those prejudices is against ravens. Or, people who shift into ravens?”

“Both. Worse for the people who shift.”

“So in these communities of yours, it’s possible for a child to be loved and cherished, then suddenly be rejected as a monster. All for something that’s innate to their nature.”

“Yes.” She made herself meet Waverly’s eyes. Waverly ran her fingers down to the point of Nicole’s chin.

“But not you.”

“Not me.”

“Okay,” Waverly said

*
Waverly twisted off the ignition outside Nicole’s house. Nicole looked over, faintly surprised.

“Would you like to invite me in?” she asked, direct and sounding fond. Nicole felt something spark through her, electric.

“Um, would you like to come in? I’ve got beer, and I’ve got coffee.”

“Yes. I would like to come in.”

Nicole led her to the porch, and into the dark house. Groping for a light switch. “Beer?”

“No,” Waverly said, looking at her.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“No.”

They stood there, looking at each other. Nicole opened her mouth. Nicole closed her mouth. Nicole said, cautious, “what—”

“Jeezum Pete, Nicole. You cowboy up and kiss me.”

“Jeezum,” Nicole said back with a slow consideration, eyebrows rising up at the same pace. “Cowboy.”

“Jerkface,” Waverly said with a fake exasperation, reaching out and pulling Nicole forward. Starting chaste, and ending decidedly not chaste.

“Gonna have to thank Pete,” Nicole finally said, the shape of her words brushing against Waverly’s own lips. Waverly shoved her backwards. Two handed, but Nicole caught her wrists and pulled Waverly along with her.

“Jerkface cowboy.” She grinned, spoke, into a kiss, and Waverly giggled back, holding them nose to nose.

“Maybe I should ride you.”

Nicole pulled back. “I’m the cowboy. Wouldn’t I have to ride you?”

“Don’t let semantics waylay the messenger from her appointed rounds, Nicole.”

So Nicole didn’t. Running her hand into the heavy weight of Waverly’s hair, kissing her soft and warm. Nuzzling her nose down, mouthing at the skin below her jaw when Waverly tipped her head back, breathing out all at once, arching forward.

Nicole smiled into Waverly’s skin, and used the very edge of her teeth. She pulled back, pressing her thumb to the faint red mark. “Am I doing okay?” she asked, voice full of all her assurity and all her vulnerability, and all the harmonics in between.

Waverly, dark eyed in the low light, pressed her palms into Nicole’s cheeks. Cool, and steady. “Yes. Very okay.”

Nicole felt her smile blooming, helpless, unstoppable. Holding still and calm while Waverly ran her hands all the way down to grip into her belt loops, pulling them against each other. “Do you have a bedroom, somewhere in this house?”

“Let’s go find out,” Nicole murmured back. Stepping backwards, looking steadily at Waverly as she pulled her in her wake.

“Better watch where you’re going,” Waverly said, yanking her still by the waistband. Pivoting her gently, hands sliding to cup around the points of her hips. Warm and flush against Nicole’s back. “Wynonna can sense sex injuries from a thousand paces.”

“Please,” Nicole shuddered, shuffling them carefully down the hall, “my lady boner.”

Waverly laughed, bright and open. It rose hard into Nicole’s chest, pricking at the corners of her eyes; the unexpected lilt of Waverly’s delight. She spun back around, just past the doorway. Breaking Waverly’s hold, crowding into her and splaying a hand on her back to keep her close. “Turns out I do have a bedroom.”

“So you do,” Waverly said, low with promise. Nicole swallowed, and Waverly pressed her mouth against the motion. Pulling back when Nicole shuddered, finger tips making tiny circles at the nape of Nicole's neck. “Still okay?”

“Yeah,” Nicole said, fast and breathy. Waverly’s fingers soothed down the bunched muscles in her shoulders, pressing lightly into the winding tension. “Nervous,” Nicole admitted when Waverly looked at her, searching.

“It’s just me,” Waverly said.

“I know. I know it’s you. It’s just been awhile since this has, um, meant anything.” She waved a hand, circling the bedroom, and the press of their bodies, and the way she could feel her pulse bounding against Waverly’s hand. She cast a look around the bedroom, vaguely searching. “I’m not sure it’s ever actually meant anything, before.”

Waverly nudged her face back around with a thumb, gentle. “Let’s change that, okay?”

“Yeah,” Nicole breathed all over again, following Waverly’s guiding hand down for a kiss. Letting Waverly steer her backwards, until her thighs hit the edge of the mattress. Following the downward pressure at her shoulders, sitting. Flopping backwards at Waverly’s shove, and making a little oof noise when Waverly clambered up to straddle her hips.

“That was an offensive noise,” Waverly told her, grave. Holding stern as Nicole curled her hands into the perfect, swooping line of Waverly’s waist.

“Shut up,” Nicole advised, running her hands under Waverly’s shirt. Pulling her down until their chests were together. Waverly’s hands braced beside Nicole’s ears and their faces inches apart. Waverly kissed her, slow. Sitting back up to straddle her hips, fingers at the front of Nicole’s shirt.

“I like you,” Waverly said, working a button through cloth. Nicole pillowed her head on a crooked arm, watching. “I like you, and I’m going to show you what this is like when it means something.”

“Okay,” Nicole whispered as Waverly peeled the edges of her shirt back, gently cupping over her bra, one thumb grazing across her nipple. Nicole jerked a little, and Waverly watched her, careful. Leaning down when Nicole let out a little breath, edging the lace aside to close her mouth around the same spot, tongue warm and soft. Nicole arched, hand on the back of Waverly’s head.

“Up,” Waverly shuffled back onto her thighs, pulling Nicole to sit up. Shucking the pretty blue shirt down her arms, flicking the clasp of her bra one-handed. Making an insufferably smug noise when it sagged open.

“I didn’t know you’d be such a showoff,” Nicole told her, prim.

“Hm,” Waverly snorted, eyebrow arched and one hand flat on her sternum, pushing her back down to the bed. Following her down to kiss up her stomach, mouthing below the curve of her breast. Nicole sighed, and Waverly pressed up onto her hands, looking down.

“Happy noises,” Nicole told her, and Waverly made another pleased sound. Lowering back down to bite over a clavicle, soothing with her tongue when Nicole shivered. A pattern, teeth and tongue, roving, until Nicole was panting and her hand was twisted into Waverly’s hair. Not sure if she wanted to press her closer, or pull her head away.

“Just me,” Waverly murmured again, wiggling upward to kiss her, hand on the side of her face. “Just me, and the way I make you feel.” Rolling onto her side to get a finger behind the button of Nicole’s pants.

“Good,” Nicole mumbled, feeling the dip of the bed as Waverly manoeuvered around on the mattress. “I want,” but she lost contact with Waverly’s skin, and lost the words. Waverly paused, kneeling by Nicole’s feet, hands on the cuffs of Nicole's pants. “Naked,” Nicole cut to the chase, and Waverly chuckled low, hands crossing to pull her own shirt over her head. Standing to finish pulling Nicole’s pants off, and shimmy out of her own.

“Better?” she asked, while Nicole blinked at her, eyes on the shadows that dipped between the cut of her muscles. Nicole whimpered something guttural, and Waverly laughed again. Settling her weight back, pressing a thigh between Nicole’s own.

“You’re pretty,” Waverly said, pressing her thigh up, and Nicole clutched onto her hips, white licks of impulse inside her nerves. Waverly’s nose soft on her cheek, her breath trickling out warm.

“You are,” she managed, and Waverly darted forward to nip her lower lip, sliding her hand flat down Nicole’s stomach.

“You’re the pretty one, and it’s my turn,” Waverly whispered into her ear, fingers pulling wetness up to slide across her clit. Nicole made a noise, wanton and willing, and Waverly moved up onto an elbow, looking down as Nicole’s thighs trembled and her toes curled under the circle of Waverly’s fingertips.

“You're blushing again,” Waverly told her, pushing the ball of her foot into the tensed top of Nicole’s own, moving her hips to press against the back of her hand as she slid two fingers inside, rocking.

“I am not Nicole hissed, eyes squeezed shut to find the twin rhythm that Waverly was rocking into her hips and whispering into her ear. Chasing the slide of skin on her skin, and the gusts of breath on her face, and the hook of Waverly’s coaxing movement. Around, and above, and through. Until the pressure collapsed into a bright point, and throbbed outward. Melting slack and sated as Waverly slowed.

“That’s what it feels like.” Waverly tipped Nicole’s head to the side with slick fingers, kissing her languid and sprawled over her body. “That’s what we feel like, you and me.”

“Let’s do that again,” Nicole told her.

*
Later, Nicole lay on her back, naked and looking aimlessly at the ceiling. Running her hands idly along Waverly’s sides, sprawled with their legs tangled and Waverly’s chin sharp on Nicole’s sternum.

“Hey,” Waverly murmured, one finger tapping nail first into Nicole’s clavicle. “Where did you go?”

It pulled her back, into the soft warmth of the sunrise bedroom. “Sorry,” she murmured back, tightening her hands, grounding herself to the bed and the woman in it. “I’m here.”

Waverly leaned up on her elbows, her hair sheeting around both their faces. “But where did you go?” she asked again. Nicole ran her hand down Waverly’s temple and cheek, flicking lightly at her chin.

“You are so pretty,” she hushed, but Waverly narrowed her eyes.

“Are you deflecting?”

“Only a little,” Nicole told her, moving them both until she leaned on the headboard, Waverly tucked into her side. “I was thinking about you.”

“Mm,” Waverly hummed, pleased. “What about?”

“Wondering where someone like you came from,” Nicole said simply, surprised when Waverly tensed. Flashing across her face, before it was gone, and she was smiling.

“Oh, that’s easy. I sprung fully formed from the earth, ready to do battle.”

“Okay, Athena.” Nicole pinched Waverly’s hip, just a hint of nails. Waverly grew still under her touch, and Nicole ran the pad of her fingers over the already fading mark. “You don’t have to tell me. At least not right now. We can take our time.”

“No.” Waverly looked at her, the mirrored surface she’d thrown up so quickly dissolving. “Sorry. I’m used to being vague. Not vague is,” she waved a hand, stuck, “I’m not used to it.”

“I might have some experience with that,” Nicole pointed out dryly. Rubbing briefing at the goosebumps rising on Waverly’s arms, even as the other woman snorted. “Look, I think what we need is clothes, and then hot chocolate.”

She stood, puttering around to find soft pants and a shirt for Waverly. Helping her slip them on, and rolling the cuffs up around her hands and feet. Standing back to leer and waggle her eyebrows obnoxiously. “Fun sized.”

“Average sized,” Waverly grumbled back, pushing her back to stand by the bed. “I was promised chocolate.” She snapped her fingers, and pointed grandly in the wrong direction from the kitchen. “Fetch, Jeeves.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” Nicole snapped a little scout salute, feeling Waverly’s eyes on her as she retreated.

She was stirring a pan of milk at the stove when Waverly padded out, dressed and wrapped in the blanket she’d pulled off the bed. Pressing warm against Nicole’s back, smushing her face between Nicole’s shoulder blades. “The bedroom got lonely,” she said, muffled.

“Milk is ready,” Nicole jerked her chin. “I’ll bring this out to the couch.”

The warmth at her back slid away, and Nicole followed. Sitting against the armrest opposite Waverly, pushing her bare feet under the edge of the blanket. Waverly stared at the finger she was running around and around the rim of her mug. “Thanks.”

They sat, Waverly curled tight, chin on her knees and the blanket pulled snug.

“What’s your favourite colour?” Nicole broke the moment. Tension creased between Waverly’s eyebrows, and Nicole quested out to press her foot into the top of Waverly’s. “I want to know you, Waverly. The big things, and the little things. It doesn’t have to be heavy.”

“I like all the colours,” Waverly protested, mildly. “And I was born on a Friday.” She shrugged, cautious, like the conversation was groping through the dark.

“Friday’s child is loving and giving,” Nicole said, flexing her foot rhythmically. Waverly smiled, sad and small. “What are you afraid of, baby?” Nicole tried a more direct tack, voice gentle. Waverly’s eyes flicked up at the diminutive, then away.

“Nothing. Old, dead things. It’s stupid.”

“Waverly,” Nicole scooched closer, putting her hands on Waverly’s tented knees, looking at her with as much sincerity as she knew how to muster. “I turn into a fox, and now I know that you look way better than me naked. What do you think I could possibly judge you over?”

Waverly hunched down and didn’t answer.

“Will you tell me about the magic in the world?” Nicole asked, soft and low. Slowly, Waverly uncurled, latching onto Nicole’s shirt and flailing until they were both under the blanket, Nicole’s cheek resting between Waverly’s breasts, and Waverly’s fingers in her hair. She took a deep breath, and it rumbled under Nicole’s ear.

“Magic is all around, if you know how to look. In the air, and the water.” She paused, and Nicole could hear the smile, “inside you.” Fingers trailed, cool and slim, down her front until they dipped below the drooping waistband of her sweats. Nicole felt her lower abdominals clench.

“Ah, um, how, how did it get there?” Nicole refused to acknowledge any sort of blush.

“No freaking clue.” Waverly slid her hand over Nicole’s hip, cupping against the curve of her butt. Less distracting, but still close comfort.

“How can you see it?”

“I’m an Earp,” was all Waverly said. Nicole leaned back into her circling arm, until she could see Waverly’s profile. Watching as Waverly’s final hesitation broke. “A hundred years ago, a man named Bulshar cursed my great grandfather, Wyatt Earp. Forcing his descendants to spend their lives trying to kill the same seventy-seven people, over and over again. Until Wynonna and I broke the curse.”

There was a world of story behind the words. A world, and for the first time the idea that there was time to explore it. Nicole nodded slowly. “Look, there’s only one thing I really need you to tell me.”

Below her, Waverly stiffened. “Okay,” she said, resolute, and Nicole grinned.

“What the fuck is it that Wynonna does? Because I swear to god, that one guy she was leading around last week had gills.”

Waverly barked a laugh, jerking hard enough to jostle Nicole.

“Really,” Nicole pressed her advantage. “Please. I’m desperate to know what she does.”

“Oh, she’s a demon bounty hunter,” Waverly said. Nicole heaved up, until she could look at Waverly, but Waverly looked straight back with the flat evenness of someone telling an irrefutable truth.

“Of course she is,” Nicole muttered, dark.

*
Nicole coasted to a gentle halt outside Jerome’s house. Getting the passenger door, and taking Waverly’s hand as they walked up the path. On the porch, Jerome watched their approach, a little half-sized raven laying feet-up on his lap. Beak gaped in hazy stupor under the fingers gently massaging his chest muscles.

“Nicole,” Jerome said, but he was looking at Waverly.

From inside the house was a rhythmic thumping that sounded suspiciously like small feet jumping on a pullout bed. Jerome glanced over, then back, eyes hooded.

“It’s okay,” Nicole said, squeezing Waverly’s hand. “Waverly, this is my friend Jerome. Jerome, this is Waverly. And of course, that’s Benjamin.

Benjamin made a deeply blissed out raven sound, beak still gaping, as Jerome gently flexed his wings.

“The Earps are always welcome here.” Jerome nodded in greeting, grasping the raven boy and setting him to perch on one knobby knee. Waverly grinned back at him.

“Nice to see you again, Jerome.”

Nicole felt a cold shiver of new and irreconcilable realizations. “Wait,” she swiveled from Jerome, to Waverly, back to Jerome, who gave her an innocent look. “You knew? The Earps, and Purgatory, and the demon bounty hunting? This whole time, and you knew?”

“Try to keep up, Nicole,” Waverly told her, droll. Squeezing her hand before dropping it and kneeling by Jerome’s chair, peering at Benjamin. Nicole slitted her eyes at Jerome. He grinned back, smug.

“Hello, Benjamin,” Waverly said, offering a hand. Benjamin stepped carefully over to perch on her wrist, biting softly at her thumb for balance. “Let’s go inside, get you packed up.” She stood, careful, disappearing towards the sound and fury coming from inside.

“Traitor,” Nicole hissed the moment Waverly was out of sight.

“Oh, settle down,” Jerome waved a lax hand at her. “You’re just peeved that I knew something the big, bad police detective didn’t know.”

Nicole huffed, and plopped down on the edge of the porch. “I’m not a detective,” she glowered, but all Jerome did was smile.

“Congratulations, by the way. For finally pulling your head out of your own ass. You were getting insufferably mopey.”

“Huh,” Nicole grunted. Jerome shrugged, his grin making it false modesty. “What were you doing, anyway, with his wings?” Nicole decided a good ‘ol redirect was in order, settling back against the porch upright.

“Limbering him up.”

“You think he can fly again?” Nicole perked up.

Jerome grunted, thinking. “I don’t think he’ll ever be a long distance flyer, but I think we might be able to get him in the air again.” He looked over, and Nicole knew she wasn’t controlling the longing on her face. “It won’t be a miracle,” he cautioned.

Nicole nodded, mouth opening, but closing quickly when Waverly followed Benjamin back out the front door. Dressed in jeans and his horrible cowboy shirt, boot heels thumping. “Pancakes,” Benjamin dictated, bossy and hopeful, looking between herself and Waverly. Nicole heaved herself up, reaching to ruffle his hair. He jerked back, offended, smoothing it down.

“Say thank you to Jerome,” she nudged. Benjamin lifted his fist, solemn. Jerome wrapped his own hand into a massive fist, bumping the kid’s knuckles.

“Stay loose,” Jerome told him.

“Yeah, man,” Benjamin grinned, and Nicole reached out to grip him lightly by the neck, steering him back towards the gate.

“Pancakes for three,” she said, Waverly matching her footsteps, the boy relaxed and light under her touch. But pancakes, it turned out, were not a vegan substance. Waverly ate toast instead, and when Nicole leaned across the table to kiss the crumbs away Benjamin made a gagging noise.

“Pretty good likelihood you’ll want to kiss someone, someday,” Waverly told him, but Benjamin shook his head.

“I won’t,” he insisted. Scandalized in the way only a pre-pubescent on the cusp of hormonal catastrophe could manage. Swaying back and giggling when Waverly reached over and prodded his shoulder.

“Just you wait,” Waverly said, but Nicole barely heard it, the air suddenly feeling too thick. Full of the woman sitting next to her, and the boy across from them who had giggled instead of flinched.

Later, she kissed Waverly goodbye on the porch and thought about moments. About how many slipped by, and what it was like to actually catch one, see it stretch out into the future, gossamer and delicate. And about what a dangerous occupation wanting was.

“I don’t like you.” Wynonna shoved a coffee cup over the tall duty desk, sloshing a dribble of milky liquid down the side.

“I find you very confusing,” Nicole muttered, pulling the lid off to peer inside, searching for any obvious tampering. Wynonna rolled her eyes.

“I didn’t spit in it. Waverly says we're friends now.”

“Friends like these.” Nicole sniffed at the liquid. Wynonna didn’t take the bait, though. Leaning casually against the desk, inspecting her fingernails.

“You ever seen Waverly mad?”

Nicole conceded with a snort, far from gracious. The hot comfort of a double double sliding down her throat when she took a sip. “Thank you,” she remembered her manners, teeth bared.

“Yeah,” Wynonna shoved away from the desk. “We’ll do it again, real soon.”

“Happy birthday to me,” Nicole sighed.

Two hours later, the second Earp sister leaned on the duty desk, the edge hitting higher up her torso. “Hi,” she said, light and happy.

“Hey,” Nicole smiled, flicking her eyes over to indicate Waverly should invite herself to the business side of the swing gate. Feeling discrete fingers hook into her duty belt and tug, light and fond. Nicole darted a quick look around, and leaned to kiss Waverly. “Hi,” she repeated, dopey and not caring, and Waverly grinned back.

“You’ll be the scandal of the town, Deputy. Kissing in your uniform.”

“You owed me,” Nicole told her. “For sending Wynonna my way this morning.”

“You’re going to be friends now,” Waverly enthused.

“Super.” Nicole chirped. Waverly glanced over, sharp, and Nicole smiled until her dimples showed.

“She grows on you,” Waverly said, suspicious of the cheer.

“Like a social disease,” Nicole agreed, nodding. Waverly poked her sharply, then leaned against her shoulder.

“Can I come over tonight? I was thinking dinner and an age appropriate movie. Plus, it’s your turn to cook.”

“Of course it is,” Nicole agreed, getting another look. Nicole contrived to appear innocent on all counts.

“Glad you understand.” Waverly pressed a kiss into her cheek. “Gotta go. Bad guys to catch.”

“Hey,” Nicole caught Waverly’s retreating shirttail. “I want to come. Not this time, obviously. But soon. Now that I know. I can help.” Waverly chewed on a lip, and Nicole smiled all over again. “Wynonna and I are friends, now. What better way to bond?”

“Sneaky,” was all Waverly said, pulling her shirt free and barreling through the swing gate.

*
It took three days, before Wynonna’s terrifyingly shitty truck caromed to a halt in front of Nicole’s house. Sproinging and rocking, and making Benjamin forget all about their game of catch in favour of gaping.

“Some day,” Nicole told Wyononna, “I’m going to haul that thing out into the desert and shoot it out of my misery.”

“Only if you’re tired of living,” Wynonna assured her, hitching a thumb. “I brought Alice.”

“I see?” She couldn’t keep the question out of her voice, once again flat footed and rove to disadvantage by an Earp.

“She’s the babysitter. You and I have something to do.”

“Mom,” Alice groaned, adding significant syllables, to very little effect.

“I’m not a baby,” Benjamin pointed out, face going a little mulish. Nicole decided against telling him how the adorable flop of hair over his forehead negated the whole vibe.

“Fine. She’s the companion kid,” Wynonna pivoted, impressively smooth parenting for someone wearing a deeply un-maternal leather jacket. Handing over two twenties. “She even comes bearing pizza money. Now,” she switched to Nicole, “get in the truck.”

Nicole crossed her arms, and did not get in the truck.

“Waverly,” Wynonna said. “I will not hesitate to play the Waverly card.”

*
Wynonna tapped the wheel to the music. Jimmy Hendrix’s Foxy Lady.

Nicole slid her eyes over, careful. Wynonna sang absently to the windshield about being a sweet little love maker. “Where are we going, anyway.”

“Me to know, you to find out.”

Nicole grunted at her. Wynonna smirked, and turned the radio up. Some folk song, filling the cab with throbbing harmonies and deep bass guitar.

“White Winter Hymnal,” Wynonna said, without any prompting. “By Fleet Foxes.” Nicole kept her head very still, looking straight out the windshield. The notes crackled along her skin. “Good, eh?” Wynonna nudged the volume up another click.

“Wynonna,” Nicole said, turned it back down, slipping a warning into the word. “Where are we going?”

“Chillax, Haught. I’d give you a roadie, but,” she shrugged, helpless under Nicole’s obvious squareness. Nicole just slumped down, resigned as Wynonna guided the truck out past civilization, watching the salt flats going by.

“Nedley is going to care, if you’re dragging me out here to murder me.”

“Shut up,” Wynonna advised, stomping the truck to a rocking halt. Radio still on as she hopped out and dropped the tailgate. Throwing back a tarp to show weapons crates stamped with CSIS | SCRS.

“Holy,” Nicole breathed, once Wynonna flipped back the closest lid.

“Yes. Exactly.” Wynonna grinned, triumphant. Fishing her phone out and stabbing a finger down. Out of the truck, U2 started belting out words about a brown eyed girl.

“Wait.” Wynonna frowned down, scrolling for long seconds. “Goddamnit.” She looked up. “Can you just pretend it’s playing What Does the Fox Say?”

Nicole felt herself going narrow, and sharp.

“You know,” Wyonna flailed an explanatory hand around. “Cat says meow, dog says woof, but what does the fox say?”

“Waverly told you.” It was her cop voice, flat and hard, but Wynonna laughed.

“Nicole, you asshole. I’m the Earp heir. I have a cursed gun. I’m a demon bounty hunter with ambiguous connections to government black ops on both sides of the border. Alice’s father is a freakin’ vampire, for fuck sake.”

“He’s what?” Nicole asked, startled. Wyonna huffed.

“Focus, Haught. We’re talking about you, and your poorly concealed secrets.”

“Are you telling me,” Nicole said slowly, testing the theory as she went, “ that you’ve always known.”

“Incidentally,” Wynonna added, pulling a rifle from the foam of its case, “your fake papers are for shit.”

“Yeah, well. How good were you, when you were nineteen?”

“Better than you.” Wynonna grinned, and nudged a crate with her toe. “Wanna shoot things?”

“Very much yes.”

“So,” Nicole continued, once a dozen paper targets, and two posts, were in shreds. “If you already know about me, why are we way out here?”

Wynonna looked confused. “To shoot things.”

Nicole huffed. “And?”

“And nothing?” Wynonna pointed vaguely at the targets, like she was showing off the very obvious shooting part of their current occupation.

Nicole dropped the barrel of the rifle she was holding down to point at the ground, squinting suspiciously. “I thought you were going to threaten me.”

“Why would I threaten you?” Wynonna sounded irritated, which wasn’t as satisfying as Nicole wanted it to be.

Nicole opened her mouth to say regrettable words like Waverly, and shovel, but Wynonna was already turning away, digging something from the bed of the truck.

“You know what’s funny,” she said, spine pushed up against the cab of the truck. “I haven’t been an active asshole for almost two decades, but here you are, only five years in, thinking you know things. She laughed, hollow and small. “This goddamn town.”

Nicole must have looked a little abashed, because Wynonna shrugged one shoulder up. “It’s okay, Haught. I probably am an asshole.”

Nicole wanted to say I think maybe you’re not, but it felt caught in her throat. She forced her fingers to stop twisting against each other, diverting to holding out a hand towards the bottle dangling from Wynonna’s fingers. “Share.”

“Done shooting?” Wynonna asked, handing the bottle over when Nicole stashed her rifle next to Wynonna’s in the crate. The booze burned sweetly when Nicole tipped her head back. Pressing her own back against the metal of the cab, shoulder nearly brushing Wynonna’s.

“Hey,” Nicole finally said. Glancing sideways to see the soft smile that was on Wynonna’s face. “I’ve seen you with Alice, and with Benjamin. I know you’re not an asshole.”

“That kid,” Wynonna said, distant and soft, like she wasn’t quite seeing the flat horizon in front of them.

“They do that to you, don’t they?” Nicole pulled her shoulders in, embarrassed when Wynonna looked over, but soldiered on. “They civilize you.”

“Your emotions disgust me.” Wynonna snatched the whiskey bottle back, eyes slitted.

“Yeah,” Nicole agreed, easy and smiling. “Exactly.”

“Gross,” Wynonna muttered, a smile on the lips as she tipped the bottle up.

They got drunk, then got sober, then Wynonna drove back with the radio singing about the girl next door, and the fox she’d been waiting for. “I'm your ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!”

“No,” Nicole said, flat. “Waverly is.”

Wynonna shut her mouth so fast it clicked. There was blessed silence the rest of the ride.

Alice was standing in the yard when they pulled up. A little ‘tween raven clutching to the dish towel she’d taped around her forearm, frantically flapping as she sharply dropped her arm.

“Is that bullying behaviour, or just some weird game?” Wynonna asked diffidently. “I have trouble telling the difference.”

“She’s helping him.” Nicole said. Wynonna looked over at her. “It’s physical therapy. He had some, um, bad breaks. Missing some feathers. We’re trying to strengthen his wings.”

“That is Benjamin, right? My kid hasn’t attracted a familiar or anything, right?”

“That’s Benjamin, yes.”

“Well, that’s a trip,” Wynonna said. Looking over with a little shrug. “Knowing something exists, and seeing it in the feathers are two different things.”

Nicole gave her own little shrug. She’d known about the proverbial feathers from her first conscious moment.

“Gonna keep him?” Wynonna asked, eyes on Alice as she dropped her arm again, Benjamin flapping. Nicole just snorted. Wynonna looked over, something like approval peeking from under her casual Wynonna façade.

“Well, comes time to get him papers, come to me. Alright?”

“Yeah,” Nicole said, too soft. Cleaning her throat before she tried again. “Yes. But I think it might be him keeping me.”

“Yeah,” Wyonnna said, looking at the kids in the yard. “Obnoxious little bastards, aren’t they? Fuck up your vagina, then they fuck up your life.” But she didn’t exactly sound sad about it.

“Gross,” Nicole said, and yanked the passenger door open.

*
“Wynonna abducted me, the other day.”

“Abducted is a very strong word,” Waverly mumbled, cuddled warm and soft in the middle of Nicole’s bed.

“Drug me off into the desert. Forced alcohol down my throat,” Nicole refused to waver on the kidnapping aspect. “There was gunpoint, even. Gunpoint happened.”

“Well, that does sound like Wynonna.” Nicole couldn’t see Waverly’s face, spooned together with her nose pressed into the back of Waverly’s head, but she could hear the smile.

“Said you were an accomplice, too. Threw you right under the bus. I barely made it out alive.”

“Poor baby.” Waverly twisted, until they were nose to nose, breathing softly into the little gap between their faces. “It sounds very harrowing.”

Nicole grinned, but let it fade as she pulled back far enough that Waverly lost the Cyclops look. “She’s never what I expect,” Nicole admitted.

“Mm,” Waverly said, making a sleepily dissatisfied noise. Wiggling and pushing until Nicole was on her back, Waverly draped over her right side. Head on Nicole’s shoulder, an arm across her chest, and a leg across her thighs. Pressed tight, the way Nicole had already learned she liked to be.

“I’m not sure what she wanted, though.” Nicole curled an arm around Waverly’s back.

“I’m pretty sure she wanted to go shooting,” Waverly said, faint with sleep. Nicole pressed a kiss to the top of her head, feeling Waverly go fully slack.

Outside the window, the moon drifted from behind a cloud, fat and waxing gibbous. Nicole watched it, eyes finally drifting shut as Waverly slept, warm and snuffling softly, on her shoulder.

She dreamed of running lithe and sure across the snow, the dark flitting of her pack surrounding her. Ending curled in a snug den, her nose warm under the tip of someone else’s tail, the ridge of another’s spine brushing her own. Pack.

In the morning, she barreled through Wyonnna Earp, Services, catching the woman herself sitting at a table, looking up in startlement. Nicole put a giant coffee and a large box of Timbits in front of her.

“For the record, I don’t like you much either,” Nicole told her. Wynonna grinned, full and happy. “This is also the strangest friendship I’ve ever participated in,” Nicole added after a pause, in one of those spasms of honesty that Wynonna seemed to draw out into the world.

Wynonna winked. “You’ll never find better, though.” Tossing up a Timbit, and catching it in her teeth.

Nicole thought she might be right.

*
“I don’t like these pants.”

Yeah, well, Nicole wasn’t particularly excited about her own tight compression into two layers of wool uniform. She breathed hard out her nose, tapped a finger against her thigh.

“I don’t like them,” Benjamin repeated, voice climbing a register.

“Put them on anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you to.” Benjamin scowled at the floor. “It’s a shirt and pants, kid. It’s not like I’m dressing you in a sailor’s suit.” She managed sardonic instead of exasperated, but Benjamin just looked confused.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I’m not torturing you nearly as much as you think I am.”

“But you admit you’re torturing me,” Benjamin said, sulky. Nicole pointed towards his room.

“Go put on the horrible pants.”

“I don’t like dressing up.” Benjamin picked at the pants in his hand. Nicole bit back a sigh. Thinking on those parenting books she’d read, and the doctor in the city.

“Okay, look.” She meant it metaphorically, but he looked up at her. Face set into defiance, and that shadow hardly there. Hardly there, but not gone. Might never be fully gone.

Nicole kept her hands by her side, and her voice even. “You can wear the clothes you’re wearing.” A fairly respectable set of jeans, and his horrible shirt. “You’ll stick out a little, but you’re a kid and people will overlook it. So that part only matters if you care.” Benjamin looked at her, wary.

“But?”

“But the reason we're dressing up is Lebucean. Toby. He’s done something not everyone can do. He worked really hard, for a long time. Dressing up is a way of showing you respect his accomplishment.”

He looked back down at the pants in his hand. “Mama made me dress up for Meeting. There wasn’t any accomplishment there.” Still sulky, but the strain of that shadow was hoarse in his throat.

“What is Meeting,” Nicole asked.

“Wednesdays,” he told her. “In the big hall.”

“Did you talk about god?” Nicole tried to follow the path.

“There is no god. Religion is the superstition of a weak mind.” Benjamin chanted it, a rote thing. Nicole ticked another little mental box, tallying the true nature of Micha’s compound. “Sometimes it was outside, in the obstacle course. But if it was inside, we had to dress up.”

Nicole could feel the time ticking away, but this was important.

“What did you do inside?”

“Talked about surviving the end of the occupying civilization. Did our tests.”

“What kind of tests?” Benjamin shrugged, eyes skating around the room. Door, window, the space below the couch. Nicole felt a foreboding.

“Just answering questions, or showing we knew how to do something we’d been practicing. About weapons, and the government, and about taking care of ourselves.” Standard anarchic survivalist bullshit, but his hand was creeping towards the knot in his clavicle, chest rising shallow.

“Benji,” she said, soft enough to call his attention back. “Were you scared, in the hall? Did scary things happen?”

Inside her safe house, inside her safe living room, standing clean and well cared for in a patch of sunlight, something reached out to rip at her boy. Inside Nicole, something shifted, wanting free from its box of later.

“Dr. Fuchs says it’s okay to be afraid.” he mumbled, touching his thumb to the pad of each finger, fast, and then slowing. A calming exercise, from the eponymous Dr. Fuchs, family therapist.

“It’s absolutely okay to be afraid,” Nicole said, but Benjamin twitched a little, fingers tapping. Nicole stood, present but silent, as his breathing slowed, and his fingers stopped. He swallowed, licked his lips, looked up at her.

“I want to wear a tie,” He told her, jaw jutting out. “For Toby. To show him I know he worked hard.”

“You sure?” she asked, following the side step. He nodded, so she stood in his bedroom after he’d changed into his black trousers and green dress shirt. “Can’t tie it backwards,” she said, pivoting him gently and putting her arms around him, looking over his shoulder to thread the knot. He touched it, and grinned into the mirror.

“Like a boss,” he said. Nicole rolled her eyes.

“Alice is not a good resource for vocabulary,” she griped, but Benjamin just grinned harder.

They drove to the Municipal Centre, and Nicole guided him towards a folding chair next to the Earp clan. “Little man!” Wynonna greated him. Alice rolled her eyes, and Benjamin just looked at her flatly.

“I’m almost as tall as you are.”

“So you are,” Wynonna agreed, while Waverly smiled at it all with an indulgence that caught in Nicole’s chest.

“Hi,” she greeted Waverly softly.

“Deputy,” Wavery said back, fingers curling just above Nicole’s elbow, squeezing gently. “You guys look nice.”

“Thanks for coming,” Nicole said to Wynonna, whose smile turned sharper when it wasn’t directed at a child. Inside, Nicole felt that box shift.

“Sure. I never turn down free booze.”

“We’re in a police precinct.” Nicole frowned at her, but Wynonna just winked and tapped a pocket.

“Fantastic,” Nicole muttered. Wyonnna made a subtle tippling motion with thumb and pinky, grinning. Dropping it when Nicole didn’t take the bait, head cocking to the side.

“Big day,” she observed, a question in the flat delivery. “You are clearly very excited and happy.”

Nicole darted a glance around, caught in her own indecision. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” She jerked her head towards the side of the room. Wynonna and Waverly both looked at her, a focus that made them look like the sisters their physical resemblance sometimes missed.

Waverly nodded, discrete, at the two kids, and Wynonna gestured grandly. “Lead on, McDuff.”

“It’s ‘Lay on, Macduff,’ and that was about a fight to the death.”

“That might be fun,” Wynonna said cheerfully, following Nicole towards a quiet pocket. “S’up, Deputy Dawg?” she added, when Nicole just looked at her, lost. Wynonna followed her eyes as she looked to Benjamin, then scanned across Nicole’s face. “The kid okay?”

Nicole licked her lips, swallowed. There was a line. It was grey, and thin, but it was there.

“Nicole?” Wynonna asked, softly, but Nicole twisted away from the question. From the back of the room, Lebucean entered, finally moving easily again, buttoned into his own tight uniform and grinning around the room.

The line between upholding the law, and enacting the law. Something she’d never thought she’d cross.

“I need to talk to you, and Waverly.” She cast around for any sort of five second summary, but ended up with, “it’s important.”

“Tonight?” Wynonna asked, something focused and hard creeping out between the words. A fierce loyalty that always surprised, seeing it on Wynonna Earp’s face.

Then again, maybe Nicole needed to stop being surprised by surprise. Inoculated by Wynonna’s friendship, and Waverly’s steady attention, and Lebucean not dying on a cold and unimportant porch, and Benjamin’s toys spreading through her previously orderly house. And the irrelevance of the line, when it tried to box in pack.

“Tomorrow. Benjamin needs a quiet night at home.” Wyononna glanced at the chairs again. Alice and Benjamin and Waverly, heads all leaning in close to each other. “He’s okay,” Nicole added. “He’s going to be okay.”

“Tomorrow,” Wynonna agreed, concern on her face. “What—” but she was interrupted by the door creaking open. Nedley, in his own finery, a little tight across the gut.

“Sit down,” he gruffed from the front of the room. Nicole brushed past Wynonna, sitting as Nedley started to talk. Words about small town life, and what an honor it was to be chosen by it, and what an honor it was for Lebucean to choose right back.

“What I’m saying to you, Purgatory Sheriff’s Deputy Tobias Lebucean, is wear the uniform well. Be worthy of this town, and this town will find you worthy.”

The back of Lebucean’s neck stiffened. She couldn’t see his face, but Nicole had spent hundreds of hours with him. She knew what somber pride and willing dedication looked like on him.

Afterwards, Nicole ate the mediocre cake, and sipped the fruit punch she refused to let Wynonna spike. Handing Benjamin a napkin to wipe off the deeply red frosting he’d gotten on his nose from orking down a tender inner piece of the cake-based Purgatory Sheriff’s Department shield.

“It’s all pretty inspirational,” Lebucean said once he’d rotated around the room to her little patch of wall. Looking slightly sheepish, the way most people did when they found themselves alone at the center of attention. He sipped his own fruit punch.

“Nedley's a good talker,” she agreed.

“You’re a good field training officer,” Lebucean added. Cheeks faintly red, and a hand tapping nervously at his thigh before he made himself settle. “Anything to add?”

“Always know where the line is,” Nicole told him. “Always know what matters enough to make you move it.”

“Don’t worry,” she added when his brow wrinkled down into confusion. “It’ll make sense, eventually.”

She took her kid home, then. Changing into softer clothes and tossing the ball to him. Hard line drives, and easy lobs, and darting backspins, until he was panting, loose and easy inside his own skin.

*
They met at Shorty’s, because Wynonna was never going to be anyone but herself. Matching Nicole and Waverly’s soft drinks with a lowball glass of whiskey. “So,” she prompted, once they were all seated at a round table, elbows equidistant from each other.

“Um,” Nicole began, not at all like a boss. It was one thing to mentally firm up your jaw, and plant your feet, and make your stand. Another thing to actually say the words that would tip it into the real world.

Wynonna tapped her fingernail against her glass, but Waverly just watched, her eyes bright and interested. Nicole smiled at her, giving herself a moment to feel the way Waverly smiled right back.

“Hey,” Wynonna snapped her finger, startling them both. “Explanations now, disgusting googly eyes later. Alright?”

“Yeah,” Nicole pulled herself back to the present. “Okay. I,” she faltered on the edge again, forcing herself over. “The man who hurt Benjamin, I want to go teach him a certain lesson.”

“Fuck him up good,” Wynonna agreed happily, but Waverly frowned, head cocked and surveying. Nicole dropped her eyes, watching her fingers rotating her drink.

“Micha,” she said. “His name is Micha.”

“Fuck Micha up good,” Wyononna amended, fingers flicking like it wasn’t no thing, but Waverly had gone still. Nicole managed a half-second glance, shoulders tight for what was to come.

“Nicole,” Waverly’s voice was softly concerned. It made Nicole shuffle and flinch. Sneaking a glance at Wynonna, who was darting between her and Waverly, looking deeply interested. She looked back at her drink.

“The thing you need to know about shifter communities is that we’ve never progressed much beyond the medieval. An eye for an eye.” She looked up. “What cage would hold us?”

“Oh,” Waverly sat back, suddenly satisfied. “I might have a solution to that.”

“But,” Nicole sputtered back. She had her line, and she was going to cross her line, and what? “I was going to be heroic?” Nicole finished, almost a whine. Waverly patted her gently.

“Tell me everything,” Nicole breathed, and so they talked. Extensively. Endlessly. Theory supplied by Waverly, which frankly went over both Nicole and Wynonna’s heads. Logistics organized by Wynonna who appointed herself subject matter expert and highest ranking officer. Pontificating with her own glass, switched over to Sprite.

In the end, what it all boiled down to was: Wednesday.

*
“There are parts of this that don’t make any sense, you know.” Waverly spoke into the blissful dark of her little owner’s apartment above the bar. Having pulled Nicole upstairs after Wynonna had left. Benjamin safe at Jerome’s, and Lebucean out on his very own patrol. All her little charges taken care of, and now Nicole headed to her own well deserved rest.

“Hmm,” she grunted, drifting towards sweet oblivion. Waverly poked her in the kidney.

“Hey. I said it doesn’t make any sense.”

“What doesn’t?” Nicole moaned, wiggling away from the prodding.

“Why you- they- why shifters hate Benjamin so much.”

“Star-bellied Sneetches,” Nicolle mumbled, yelping and twisting when Waverly poked her again. “Is that necessary?”

“Apparently,” Waverly answered, prim. “Are you going to explain?”

“There is no explanation,” Nicole grumbled, catching Waverly’s pokey fucking finger. “Stop that. It’s true. Star-bellied Sneeches looked down on regular Sneetches because they decided to. Shifters hate ravens because we decided to hate ravens.”

“Mh.” Waverly hummed, dissatisfied, but Nicole was awake now.

“Prejudice never makes sense to someone outside the system, Waves.”

Waverly heaved herself onto an elbow, yanking her hand free to trace over Nicole’s brow, the bridge of her nose, tapping her lips. Thinking. Nicole could spend hours, days, watching Waverly thinking. She was so much better at it than anyone else Nicole knew.

Second to all that, though - maybe equal in its own way - was the talking. Finding words that made Waverly’s shape of the world go calm and quiet, so that it could understand Nicole’s own. The moment of understanding between two minds that was as sweet and sharp as the movement between two bodies. “Do you, personally, consider the Dalit’s impure?”

“The untouchables of India?” Waverly asked.

“Yes. They live a hell of a life, because Indian culture has spent two thousand years caring about the caste system. Building it up, keeping it strong, learning all the little social cues and non-verbal stuff that signals status. Can’t say any of it makes much sense to me, though.”

“Mh,” Waverly said again, still thoughtful. “Okay, but, India’s also got dogma, and stories, and superstitions to explain why it’s okay to look down on the Dalit. They have internal consistency, even if it doesn’t make sense to outsiders.”

“Just so stories,” Nicole said. Waverly prodded her in the side.

“Ravens are tricksters, the world over. Sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Shifters decided it was for the worse. We don’t need it to make sense, in order to keep it going.” Nicole could feel Waverly’s eyes on her, their faces lit by the dim reflection of the street light.

“You shook it off, though. You aren’t infected by that.”

“I am,” Nicole admitted, low. Boneless under the slide of Waverly’s fingers through her hair. “It’s in me.” Waverly frowned. Nicole caught her hand, kissing the palm. “No one is truly colour blind, and no one is truly without tribe. All we get is the choice to question, and all we can do is try harder.”

Waverly took her hand back again, pushing Nicole onto her back and pressing their lips together. Chaste and soft, but lingering. “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.”

Nicole grinned. “A good man.”

“Mmm,” Waverly hummed. “For a certain value of manliness.” She leaned in again, teeth setting into Nicole’s bottom lip, sharp and nipping. They kissed, gentle and murmuring wordlessly, until Waverly pulled back. “What about Micha, and his compound?”

“What do you mean?” Nicole tried to focus past the low buzzing in her blood.

“Identity,” Waverly murmured almost to herself, before bringing herself back to the room. “Separatism is always about identity.”

“Okay,” Nicole agreed, trying to follow.

“Not just any old identity, though. Not even deeply ingrained ones like your ethnicity, or being a redhead.” Waverly grinned, impish. Nicole huffed. “Identities only moves towards separatism if they feel threatened, somehow.”

Nicole shook her head. “Too abstract.”

“The Québécois,” Waverly said. “The Mouvement souverainiste du Québec isn’t really about language. Quebec isn’t going to stop speaking French any time soon. The real reason is that francophone culture, their shared and unique identity, is being eroded by a much more populous anglophone nation.”

“Getting less abstract, but how do we get back to Micha?”

“The smaller communities are usually crazier than the bigger ones, but their foundation is no different. Extreme libertarians, white supremacist, Christian fundamentalists, those second amendment nuts in the States. They all have a central rallying point, and a pretty hot conviction they can do it better.”

“It.” Nicole smirked. Waverly poked her cheek.

“Societal Organization. Culture. Government. Rule. It.

“Okay,” Nicole agreed. “Ten-Four. Separatists think they can do it better. We still have to get back to Micha.”

“Behave,” Waverly told her, flicking the point of her chin. “The point is, the shifter communities you’ve described don’t have much interest in the wider world, but they don’t have much interest in fighting it either. Insular and inward looking, but not separatist. So why has Micha taken a perfectly stable insular group identity, and driven it towards separatism?”

“Power,” Nicole said, and it was Waverly’s turn to cock her head. “The Québécois don’t want to be a small French fish in a big English pond, so they decided they needed a whole new pond.” She paused. “It’s always about power.”

“Maybe,” Waverly said, thoughtful. “Different kinds, though. Sovereignists want separate, but they still believe in the idea of government. The doomsday cults don’t want equality, though. They want to watch it burn, and they want to be the one who gets to throw the match. To punish the world for having overlooked them.”

“So doomsday cults are just schoolyard bullies, write large?” Nicole asked.

“Yes,” Waverly nodded. “Like those red pill dopes, thinking their inability to get laid is because of some feminist matrix twisting society. They’re the only ones who can truly see the world.” Waverly paused. When she spoke again, her voice was gentler. “It would explain Benjamin.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said shifters in general don’t like ravens, but I’m guessing that chaining them up and breaking their bones isn’t actually normal.”

“No.”

“Well, one quick and dirty way to consolidate power in leadership is to distract the constituents. Encourage them to find an internal enemy, and focus on abusing them.”

“Tale as old as time,” Nicole said, sad and bitter. Waverly’s hand stroked over Nicole’s far shoulder. Nicole let herself be still under it.

“Good thing you’re here,” Waverly said, and pressed her head into the hollow between Nicole’s collarbones. “Sleepy.”

Nicole held her, and felt her own sleep moving far away.

*
She made pancakes for dinner that night, adding chocolate chips and waiting until Benjamin had cleared his plate. Still, he could tell. Sitting in front of his empty plate, fingers fiddling against each other.

“Benjamin,” she started, but his head snapped up, eyes hard.

“Why is your voice like that?”

“Like what?” Nicole tried to sound normal.

“Like I’m a baby. That’s how adults talk when something bad happened.”

Something bad, like having to tell a child their mother was dead.

“Sorry,” Nicole said. “You’re right. I’ll be normal.”

Benjamin nodded, formal. “Thank you.” Nicole thought it wiser not to smile.

“I actually wanted to ask you some questions about the place you used to live. About Micha.”

Benjamin’s lips pressed into a white line, nostrils flaring.

“Your name is Benjamin,” Nicole followed the script Dr. Fuchs had given her. “Sometimes I call you Benji, because you said that was okay. You used to live with Micha, but now you live here with me. You’re safe here, and it’s okay if you say you don’t want to talk about this.”

“Why do you want to ask me?”

Nicole watched his breathing, and the amount of strain around his eyes. “I want to go talk to Micha, all the people at the compound about how they treated you, but I need to know a little more about them before I can go.”

“Why do you want to talk to them?”

“Because I don’t want what happened to you to happen to any other kid.”

Benjamin sucked his lower lip between his teeth, rocking his jaw in hard deliberation. “Okay,” he finally said.

“We can stop anytime.”

“Okay,” he said again.

“Do you remember Micha coming, or was he always there?”

“He came when I was little.” Benjamin’s eyes roved around the corners of the kitchen. “Mama was different, after he came.” He stilled, remembering. “She used to sing a lot, before Micha and the others came. Then she stopped.” He looked at his fingers. “I miss her.”

“I know you do, kiddo. You’re doing great. This is going to help me a lot.” Benjamin nodded. “Can you tell me about the others, who came with Micha?”

“They didn’t come with him. They came later. Mike and John.”

“Did you do survival training before all those people came?”

“No.” Benjamin shook his head. “Micha came to the house where school was one day, and explained how the government was bad, and how important self reliance was. That’s when we started.”

“That’s super information,” Nicole told him. “When you started training, did all the grown ups seem excited?”

Benjamin shrugged. “The guys who came after Micha came were all excited. They’re always the leaders when we do exercises.”

“Okay,” Nicole told him. “That’s all I needed to know.” Nicole expected him to need action, a ball or the scooter Wynonna had brought over, but all Benjamin did was sit.

“Will the next raven kid still have to go live with someone like you or Jerome, once you finish talking to them?”

Shit. Nicole blew out a breath, and tried to find the best kind of honesty. “Probably the next raven kid, and then next after that, yes. But I think someday, if we talk to enough people, there will be a raven kid who gets to stay home.”

“Okay.” Benjamin nodded, but he didn’t stand up. “Can we,” he started slowly. “Can we sit on the couch and watch a movie?”

“We can make popcorn,” Nicole said, standing. On the couch, Benjamin spread the blanket over both of them, close enough she could feel his warmth.

*
“Micha, and two lieutenants.” Nicole took the information to Waverly and Wynonna. “Sounds like they pretty much held a coup, and now those three are the power structure.”

“Three isn’t so bad,” Wynonna said, tapping her upper and lower canines together, eyes distant in thought.

“Three of them, and three of us,” Nicole agreed, but Wynonna frowned.

“Waverly isn’t coming to the compound.”

Nicole looked at Waverly, expecting fireworks, but Waverly just nodded along. “There are things I’ll need to take care of here.”

“Things,” Nicole said, flat and dry. Waverly smiled.

“My code name is Angel Pants,” was all she said.

Then it was Wednesday. The three of them standing in a tight little group as Waverly pulled out a pair of handcuffs from her ridiculous purse. Twirling them around a finger, and winking at Wynonna. Who, of all things, blushed.

“I told you to stay out of my dresser,” she hissed. Waverly simpered back.

“What are they?” Nicole reached for them.

“Don’t!” Waverly jerked them back, but too late. A creeping tingle shot from Nicole’s fingers, out through the crown of her head. She gasped, and jerked her hand back. “You shouldn’t touch,” Waverly added, way too late.

“Urfgh,” Nicole added, cradling her hand against her chest. Wynonna grinned a real grin, dimples and all. Plucking the cuffs out of Waverly’s hand and stowing them in a leather case on her gun belt.

“What are those?” Nicole asked, resisting the urge to suck her numb fingers.

“Oh,” Waverly shrugged a little. “They’re magic.”

“Celestial, even,” Wynonna said, grinning.

“We are having a long talk when I get back,” Nicole told Waverly. Waverly reached over, and patted Nicole’s arm.

“First thing,” Waverly agreed.

Nicole huffed. Being a friend to Earps hadn’t actually made the world any less confusing, and Nicole was still sorting out her feelings about all that. Beside her, Wynonna made a very soft sound, exactly like a whip crack. Studying her fingernails closely when Nicole whipped her head around.

“Stop that,” Waverly said mildly, eyeing them both as she crossed her arms.

Wynonna stiffened, slowly dropping her hand.

Nicole looked smug.

Waverly tapped one foot, once.

“Um,” Nicole mumbled.

“Ready?” Waverly asked, light and deceptive. Nicole found herself nodding, quick snaps nearly in tempo with Wynonna. “My heroes,” Waverly said happily, smushing them all into the tight circle of her arms.

“This is undignified,” Wynonna mumbled, right as Waverly pressed her face into the little crevice between their cheeks, temple to temple with them both. Nicole was the only recipient of the butt pat, though. She grinned hard at Wynonna, who let her face go slack and disgusted.

*
Nicole brought the cruiser to a slow stop, tires just a whisper on the blacktop but leaving the ignition on.

She and Wynonna looked at the building, matching the description Benjamin had given for the meeting hall. “In and out,” Wynonna said. “Five minutes.”

“Yup,” Nicole agreed, but didn’t reach for the door handle. Trying not to fidget under the wrong feeling of her clothes. Just a shirt and pants. A citizen, not a police officer. She shuddered, light, all along her length.

“Nicole,” Wynonna said.

“Five minutes,” Nicole croaked. “I’ll be fine.”

Wynonna let the silence stretch, and stretch before she broke it. “This isn’t vigilantism.” Nicole snorted. “It’s not.” Wynonna insisted.

“Benjamin never ruined my vagina.” Wynonna smiled, deep and rich. Nicole couldn’t help but smile back. “He’s still mine, though. He’s mine, and someone hurt him. On purpose.”

“Yeah,” Wynonna said, low and contemplative. Maybe seeing Alice. Maybe seeing someone else. What did Nicole really know about the woman?

“You haven’t gone rogue, Haught,” Wynonna said, but Nicole just snorted. Wynonna sighed, and sat.

“I knew a guy once.” She broke the silence again, eyes far away, seeing something that wasn’t outside the windscreen. “He grew up with people who hurt him, and scared him, and exploited him. He escaped, and despite enduring a truly shit beginning, he ended up being smart, and brave, and loyal.” Her voice went quieter, and future away “A great guy. The best.” She blinked hard, shaking herself back to the car. “He figured out how to be all those things without having a Nicole. So imagine what Benjamin’s going to be, with you in his corner.”

Nicole swallowed hard, seeing that path again. Stretching out into the future, and the swell of wanting.

“This isn't revenge, Nicole.” Wynonna said. “Even if we didn’t have the magic on our side. Even if our only reason for being here was to beat the everloving shit out of this Micha guy. It still wouldn’t be revenge.”

“It feels kind of like revenge,” Nicole said, but Wynonna shook her head.

“This is to keep Micha from the next Benjamin.” She dropped down, softly sad. “To keep him from the next Dolls. For all the kids that don’t, or can’t run away and end up safe and warm. This isn’t revenge, Nicole. Its prophylaxis.”

“So,” Nicole said, shaky, once she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to cry. “What you’re saying is: we’re condoms?”

“That’s right,” Wynonna smiled, dark and wide. “Let’s get to the fucking.”

“We could just use the doorknob,” Nicole suggested, standing outside the door to the building Benjamin had described as the meeting hall, but Wynonna shook her head.

“Lacks panache,” she said simply, then wiggled the battering ram a little. “Now, fucking help me, this thing is heavy as shit.”

Nicole sighed, and grabbed the handles on her side. Swinging on a count of three, straight into the seam of the door. It made a huge booming noise, and the door shuddered open with a splintering crack.

“Panache,” Nicole said to herself, as seventy people swiveled to look at the two of them.

“Hey folks,” Wynonna said, letting the battering ram drop heavily.

Micha watched them walk up the center aisle. Everyone watched them walk up the center aisle. Nicole felt the weight crawling between her shoulder blades.

“Sheriff's Deputy Nicole Haught,” Micha said, shifting to look at Wynonna. “And friend.”

“Wynonna Earp,” Wynonna said.

“To what do we owe the pleasure? As you can see, you’ve come at an inopportune time.”

“No pleasure,” Wynonna said, and quick as a snake she slapped the cuffs against his bare forearm. Micha grunted, the shiver that Nicole had felt at just a touch locking his muscles.

He started to resist as Wynonna got the first cuff on, spinning him, but she put a knee into the crook of his own, collapsing him down onto one knee. Snapping the second cuff behind his back, and pulling up on the chain until his shoulders felt the tension.

Four seconds. An eternity in crowd control. Enough for eyes to slit, and muscles to tense. In the front row, two men had half stood. Mike and John, she presumed.

She pulled her weapon. Standby position, barrel down and her finger laid along the frame. She stepped up closer to Wynonna. Closer to Micha. Looming above him. Looking steadily at the two other men.

Humans, for all their tricksy thumbs and big brains, for all their cars, and lattes and civilization, were fundamentally naked chimpanzees with poorly draining sinuses. Inside their medulla and their hypothalamus were hypnic jerks, and the whisper that trees were very excellent for hiding in, still and quiet, until the danger had passed.

Shifters were not naked apes. The Great Rift Valley had not written trees and tribe into their chromosomes.

So Nicole stood over Micha’s bent neck. Loomed over his twisting scrabble to crane up against the creaking of his shoulder sockets. Stood like that, and stared at the men with the bunched fists and glittering eyes. Curled a lip, and met their eyes, and reached down into the parts of them that understood dominion. Dominance. The red at the tooth, and the claw.

The room muttered to itself, uncertain. Mike and John stared, half crouched. Nicole raised her weapon, center mass on the closest man. Beside her, Wynonna pulled her ridiculous revolver, one handed but still clearing the long barrel from the holster, bringing it up to point at the other man. The gun muttered to itself, yellow lights flashing back towards the trigger.

“I will hurt you bad,” Wynonna said, voice clear and carrying.

The room held its breath. Slowly, slowly, the bigger man raised his hands, nodding as his fingers splayed in placation. Both men sat.

Nicole dropped her barrel back down, and holstered the pistol. Besides her, Wynonna kept her long gun steady.

“Stand up,” Nicole said to Micha. Then, to Wynonna: “let him stand.”

He stood. His eyes were hard. “You’re risking all this for one throwaway raven child?” he asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

Nicole put a hand on his shoulder. She’d thought about how to do this part. How to tread that grey line. It wasn’t the Caution she’d said so many times before. They were not headed to the PSD holding cell. “I indict you Micha—”

He exploded. Snarling, twisting, shifting.

The cuffs glowed.

Micha howled. In their seats, the two men watched as Wynonna finally holstered Peacemaker, helping Nicole drag Micha out.

*
“I was honestly pretty certain we were going to die,” Wynonna said. Back in the car, her hands gripped white onto her knees. Micha collapsed into the rear, behind the grate of the prisoner cage. Nicole kept her own hands tight on the wheel, to stop the tremors.

“Mm,” Nicole managed. Wynonna squirmed.

“You did something, back there,” she said, voice only brushing up against being a question. Like maybe she didn’t actually want to know.

“Mm,” Nicole repeated. Wynonna looked at her, cautious.

“Are you, like, the pack leader now?”

“Um,” Nicole resolutely did not look at her companion. “I’m not exactly...not.”

“Well, fuck,” Wynonna said. Nicole nodded. That pretty much summed it up.

*
Micha was sullen but compliant as they hauled him out of the back of the cruiser. Hustling him into Shorty’s.

“Oh,” Waverly said as they came through the rear door, her face creasing into relief. Wynonna winked at her, and they shoved Micha into the cage. A bolted together construction they’d assembled in the empty space by the pool table, just enough room inside for a chair.

“This isn’t the police station,” Micha said.

“No shit, Wolf-lock.” Wynonna shoved him down into the chair, and swung the door closed.

“A werewolf,” Micha scoffed, amused when he looked at Nicole. “You let them think we’re werewolves?”

“‘All were-creatures are therianthropes, but not all therianthropes are were-creatures.” Nicole said, shrugging a little at the unnecessary pedantism.

“Therianthrope,” Waverly mouthed.

“What?” Nicole curled an almost smile into her outraged look. “I know words.”

“You do,” Waverly said, low and looking at Nicole’s lips, “don’t you?”

“Prisoner!” Wynonna yelped, pointing at the cage. Waverly smiled, just the bare curve of her lips.

“Jesus,” Wynonnna muttered, but turned to Micha, snapping at the side of the cage. “Come over here and turn around. I’ll unlock the cuffs.”

Micha just looked at them, and Waverly bared her teeth without amusement. “Don’t get too excited. The cage is like the cuffs, but stronger. You try to shift in there, you’re gonna end up inside out.”

It was the reason Waverly had stayed behind, instead of storming the compound. Whatever she’d done, it apparently had a shelf life, but that wasn’t something Micha needed to know.

He let Wynonna undo the cuffs. Awkward without a slot in the bars, but it wasn’t like Candian Tire had actual home assembly cells. They’d done what they could.

“All this,” Micha asked again, “for one little raven boy?” Sitting again, rubbing his wrists.

“Watch your mouth,” Wynonna snapped. Micha looked over at her, a slow twist of the neck. Head low, lip up to scent, the locking stare of a predator. Wynonna’s throat bobbed, and she stood very still.

“You disgust me,” Micha said, eyes hard on Wynonna, but the words going to Nicole. “Consorting with these blind little grubs.” He looked at her. “Their blunt teeth and weak little eyes.” He switched to Waverly, eyes colds. Nicole slunk forward, the edge of the cage’s field buzzing on her skin. Micha’s eyes flashed. “Your stink is all over her.”

“You even look at her—” Nicole ground out, but Micha wasn’t done.

“He killed his mother, you know. Your little carrion boy.”

Nicole growled, resonance in her chest. The lines of Micha’s face hardened, his lip curling.

“What do you mean, he killed his mother?” Waverly asked, quiet. Micha slid his eyes over without turning his head. Nicole stepped a pace closer, muscles hard and ready, but Micha ignored her.

“She protected him,” Micha spoke, ignoring Nicole. “After he presented. Let him fly. Ignored the warnings. Ignored the history. For that she died, crushed into her car when her seatbelt anchor failed. Freak malfunction they called it, but the boy with hardly a bruise.”

“You tried to destroy a child for nothing but superstition?” Waverly was white around the lips. “For nothing but chance and bad luck?”

“One person has already died for their hubris.” Micha finally turned his head towards Waverly. “Nature demands he be controlled.”

“Is that when you pulled his feathers?” Nicole pressed against the buzzing, invisible barrier. “Is that when you broke his bones? The day his mother died?”

“In the old days we would have staked him out, vitals exposed for the scavengers. We showed him mercy, and in repayment he waited for a windy day. That had to be prevented.”

Nicole could feel it. Benjamin’s frantic heart, letting the extra lift carry him away despite the missing flight feathers. Felt his white fear when they dragged him back to the meeting hall, the clench of it slipping into her stomach and pressing her bladder.

“How?”

“A chisel,” he told her, “and a mallet. Fast.” He shrugged. “Merciful.”

Nicole imagined his screaming. Had he begged, after that first snap, or had he gone limp?

“He’s just a child.” Waverly’s voice was a condemnation, but Micha scoffed.

“He’s a perversion.” His eyes slid to Nicole. “Just like you.”

“Hey!” Waverly barked, hand slamming the bars of the cage. “Don’t look at her.” Nicole wrapped it around herself. The rage in Waverly’s voice, and the narrow slit of Wynonna’s eyes. She stepped forward again, the buzz becoming a crackling.

Nicole thought of her people, still living the same life she had fled two decades ago. Insular, without the poison of Micha’s separatism, but still, they’d been smug. Considering themselves above, outside. Watching and judging, but never intervening over the neglect of her own parents.

“Pathetic little man,” she said, her own voice low and dark. “All of you, so pathetic. Trying to hide away from the world. Each community with their own little reason, because it’s all too big and complex for you to understand.”

“But it’s something you understand?” Micha’s voice was a sneer.

“Yes,” Nicole said, eyes hard on his own. “I am the watcher in the dark.”

“And what are you going to do, little Red Riding Hood?”

“Drag you into the light. Child abuse is a violation of Alberta’s Protection Against Family Violence act of 2000. A peace officer may arrest without warrant a person the peace officer believes on reasonable grounds to have committed an offense under section 13.1, subject to imprisonment for a term of not more than 90 days.”

“Jail.” Micha stood, the chair legs screeching back over the metal floor as he stood, as he loomed. “What cage could hold me?” He flicked his fingers at the very temporary nature of his current lodgings. “I’m in the town bar. Are you going to magic the holding cell in the Municipal Centre? Or get me special accommodations up in Calgary?

There it was. The fundamental problem. The same thing she’d asked Wynonna and Waverly. How do you hold smoke, or chain darkness?

Nicole grinned. “I am the watcher.”

Everyone looked at her. She pressed even closer to the cage. “Me.” She took another step. “These women.”

“You.” Micha snorted.

“We,” Nicole repeated, calm and factual. She’d been afraid when she’d been alone, but she was no longer alone. The mantle wasn’t heavy, when there were people standing next to you. “We are the watchers, Micha, and we are watching you.”

“So, you’ll just come get me every time you think someone at the compound has stepped out of line? Fool me once, shame on me, but you’ll never get away with that handcuff trick a second time.”

Nicole looked at Waverly. How did you chain darkness? You found the light. “There’s a difference,” she told him, “between punitive and restorative justice. In Canada, incarceration is restorative, but as you said, we can’t put you in jail.”

Wynonna stepped forward, and pressed the prongs of an electric prod against Micha’s neck. He jerked away, but the cage was small. She didn’t activate the trigger. All she did was let Waverly step forward, and put her hand on the stick.

“As you said,” Nicole told him steadily, “prison won’t work for you, but the point of prison is punitive, to remove someone’s freedom. It turns out, we don’t need a cage to do that.”

There was no cracking energy, nothing to indicate Waverly was doing anything, but Micha sagged back from the touch of the prod. Knees crumpling as he curled on the floor of the cage. He moaned.

Wynonna opened the door, and he fell half out, slack and unmoving. Nicole toed him in the ribs. “Get up.”

He got up, sagging, one hand pressed to his chest, but his eyes were hard. He drew in a long breath, rattling it into the back of his throat, collecting the phlegm he spit at her boots. Nicole stared at the foamy little spot, right between her feet. “Whoring collaborator. Choosing the fallen world.”

“Jesus Christ,” Wynonna sighed, casually exasperated. “It always comes back to the dick with guys like you, doesn’t it. Women are sluts. Women are whores. Women are bitches. Gay penises might be interested in your asshole, better freak out. Trans women have given up their penises for something better, so it’s okay to murder them. Her glare hardened. “A woman dies in a car crash, and you break a child’s bones because you’re too weak to lead your community through grief. You disgust me.”

Micha stalked forward. A big man, with muscles smooth below his shirt. A predator even without his ability shift. Used to women and children giving way. Except Wynonna stood her ground.

“Here’s the thing,” she said, conversational as she reached for the Louisville Slugger she’d stashed against the rail of the pool table. “Deputy Haught is a police officer. She holds the line.” She swung, hard and violent. The crack of Micha’s humerus giving way was a wet snap. Micha fell again, little wet grunting noises whistling out his nose. Wynonna stood over him. “I’m not Nicole.”

“This is a new world, Micha,” Nicole added, watching him rock. “Your little compound, built on fear, is dying.”

“What gives you the right, little bitch?” he snarled, but Nicole just grinned.

“I’m the law, Micha. I watch, and what I watch is you.”

*
They all stood outside, once the ambulance had rolled away. Wynonna still holding her bat, and Waverly tucked against Nicole’s side.

“Well,” Nicole tried for a summary, but couldn’t find anything inside.

“Yup,” Waverly agreed.

“Here.” Wynonna handed Nicole a folder of papers. Directly on top was a stiff cardstock birth certificate, Nicole and Benjamin’s name both neatly entered into boxes. Nicole touched the embossed seal, and saw that under the first packet was a second little sticky tab. Nicole flipped to them, finding documents with only her name. All that she’d been missing.

“Quis custodies ipsos custodies,” Future Sheriff Haught?” Wynonna said, when Nicole looked up, mouth open in surprise and something full in her eyes.

“Who watches the watcher?” Nicole asked. Wynonna winked, reaching around to smack Waverly on the ass, making her yip.

“Come on, Angel Pants. Let’s go get the kids.”

*
“An angel?” Nicole asked, mouth sagging open all over again. Sprawled on her own couch, clutching the beer Waverly had handed to her. Voice screeching far past dignity.

Sitting against the opposite arm, Waverly smiled.

Time drifted into high summer, smelling of baking grass and long brewed iced tea. Nicole propped her own glass against her knee, hand sliding on the condensation. Beside her, Waverly lounged in a floppy hat, and some light reading on the history of linguistics.

Nicole still wasn’t much of a reader, but later they would go to the library, for some air conditioning and to exchange Benjamin’s heavy-ass stack of books for another spine bowing supply.

In the sky, a growing raven boy circled, surrounded by his flock. His wings would never bear him as they had, but they would bear him well enough.

“Hmm,” Waverly made a happy noise, catching Nicole’s eye when she looked up. Behind them, inside the screen door, was a scene of chaos. Piled breakfast dishes, and tumbled sleeping bags, but it was quiet now.

“Let’s never have five kids,” Nicole said, grinning, satisfaction in her chest when Waverly laughed.

“One is enough.” She sharpened a little, realizing the territory they were straying into. Waverly’s grip on her book was suddenly tighter, but Nicole flapped a lazy hand.

Once upon a time, she’d been impulsive. Driven by impetuousness and running against the wind. She didn’t regret that Nicole, but she didn’t want to be her any longer. She and Waverly would talk about a long life together, but today was for sitting on the porch with her family.

She leaned over and kissed Waverly, because she wanted to, because she could. Waverly switched to gripping her shirt, and making another happy noise.

It would do. When the moon rose, crescent and waning, Nicole did not notice.