Chapter Text
Finding a cure for this soulmate nonsense would make Waverly less miserable if not happy. A magical soap to unmark her would do the trick. She didn’t ask for this, she certainly didn’t ask for the words ‘I didn’t know Shorty’s had wet t-shirt competitions’ written indelibly on her wrist.
Honestly, who is this boy she’s going to meet. She could guess: the kind of yahoo idiot that passes through Purgatory looking for work, or even worse, the kind that choses to move here and stay. She supposes it could be worse. She doesn’t have to worry about Champ or Ryan S or Matt Mackie being her soulmate because they’ve talked at her plenty of times. Never anything about t-shirts. Wet or otherwise.
The day she’s offered the job at Shorty’s she wants to refuse, she really does. But what else would she do? Resist fate? Yeah right, she’s been fate’s bitch since the day she was born.
She dates a few guys, finally gets caught up with Champ who is stupid, condescending, but means well, can be sweet, and is really good in bed. She likes to think she’s happy, but still the words stay on her wrist. She studies, she works, she tries not to think about her soulmate, but it’s with simmering anxiety that Waverly goes to work at Shorty's.
The worry simmers persistent and frustrating until one day… it’s gone. Just a month after her twenty-first birthday, Waverly wakes up for work, and that gnawing day-in day-out anxiety is gone.
Two states over, a young woman passes her final officer’s exam, shakes her instructor’s hand and formally files her application for the first town ready to take on a deputy. It’s a funny thing to call a town: Purgatory.
//
Nicole never worries about the whens or hows of meeting her Soulmate. With 'I’m just a bit jumpy, had a crazy night’ written on her wrist though, Nicole does worry for her. She knows her soulmate is a girl. It had never occurred to her to believe otherwise. So all she wonders is if her soulmate is okay, if she’ll be scared of Nicole for some reason. Her soulmate has suffered enough.
Nicole remembers at eight years old feeling a pain in her chest, an emotion so powerful it took the breath from her lungs and brought tears to her eyes. She grieved, though no one she knew had died. That was a rough year for Nicole and she’ll forever be convinced that what she felt, came from her soulmate. Lots of people say it’s impossible, a romantic fantasy about as real as angels or the tooth-fairy. Nicole has always been a romantic.
On the morning she leaves, Nicole packs up the last of her things into boxes and hugs her family goodbye, her mum crying while her sister battles complex but tearless emotions. Nicole loves them dearly, but it’s time for the next part of her life, so she gives them both a final squeeze and slips into her car. A thrill runs through her. She’s felt these little jolts of excitement for months, expected when moving, but there’s something else under the excitement too. Her Mom tries to tell her it’s just nerves.
“Just cause you’ve spent your days till now swaggerin round all bold and brave, doesn’t mean you’re immune to nerves.” Her Mom has always teased Nicole for her cockiness. “Barely the safe side of conceited, Nicole Haught.” But then she’s always been supportive of her daughter too.
“It doesn’t feel like nerves, Mom. It feels like…” She pressed a hand over her heart and her Mom’s expression softened.
“You think it’s her?” Her Mom isn’t a believer.
Nicole just shrugged with a smile. She knows what she feels. She knows.
Twelve hours to Purgatory and she feels like she can’t get there soon enough.
//
Soon, Waverly’s worry is replaced by something else. At first she didn't notice, or she dismissed the quiet calm feeling that smothered the worry. Exactly a week after the anxiety leaves(she marked the day in her calendar as a little blue cross), she decides she has come to some kind of acceptance. Another week after, she names the feeling contentment and breaks up with Champ.
Champ was surprised to say the least. “What the fuck, Waverly?”
“I’ve outgrown you.” Waverley didn't pull any punches. She doesn’t need to please Champ or any of his friends, not when she has herself, when she has her own spirit and intelligence.
Three weeks after, Waverly is buying vegetables at the grocery store when unprompted excitement swells suddenly in her chest leaving her giddy like she's walking on air. It sits right beside and with that feeling she named contentment. She’s felt these phantom emotions before, had glared at the words on her wrist resenting them even as she never believed anything about soulmate connections. Now she almost jumps for the joy of her feelings, a grin on her lips. Ahe presses a hand to her chest as she renames the feeling; affection and longing flood through with her excitement so bright and strong they bring tears to her eyes.
She glances at the words on her wrist as she pays for her groceries clamping down hard on the emotions. She refuses to give this idiot the time and energy: Waverly Earp is in command of her life. She didn’t break up with Champ just to fall into another boy’s arms. She meant it when she told him she needed space and time, needed her independence right now. She has bigger things to think about.
On the way out, she overhears someone talking about Purgatory’s new Deputy.
“Strange name,” they say with the disapproval only ever heard in small towns with historically narrow social circles. “She’s awful young, don’t you think?”
Waverly doesn’t care enough to stay, not when the call comes in from Gus.
//
It feels better than right, driving into Purgatory. Nicole can’t figure out why. No one's especially friendly, the town is kinda dusty and forlorn looking. It’s only claim to fame that Wyatt Earp lived here at one time. Yet, Nicole feels a distinct sense of coming home. She wonders if maybe she’d mistaken her love of the city all these years, if maybe she's a small town girl after all. It would be a horrible irony, of course. Queer girls and small towns don’t typically mix, and she has no intention of being closeted for any part of her tenure.
She tries forget the two years minimum service and think about the positives instead. Life get easier when Nicole finds—and rents—her little house on the edge of town. She filed the paperwork sight unseen, but she has no regrets when she sees the white picket fence, the little garden and pale blue door. This is home, she thinks and begins unpacking her things.
She hears the name Wynonna Earp first. A man she never met dies, the autopsy says stroke and word is Wynonna Earp's back in town.
Nicole doesn’t know how ‘word’ ever starts, but somehow everyone knows everything about everyone within minutes. Just like everyone knowing Nicole, why she's there and where she’d come from on her first day. She’s polite of course, and works to ingratiate herself, she waives off traffic infringements, helps old ladies across the street and drives drunken sops home instead of throwing them in lock up.
“You’re alright officer…” It’s the name "Haught" that throws off the people of purgatory.
“Haught. Nicole Haught,” she says. Her name still doesn’t roll off her tongue; Officer Haught was her Daddy after all. She keeps saying it though, and she walks how she remembers him walking with both hands on her belt, stetson sat picture-perfect and clean on her head.
The first time she hears the name Waverly Earp, one of Purgatory's drunkards stumbles away from Shortys, pisses on a wall, meanders a few blocks before finding Nicole's car waiting for him. He mumbles about his head and his too many drinks.
“Maybe, Waverly oughta cut me off a bit sooner,” he says.
Something in the name catches Nicole’s attention. Like it’s familiar. “Waverly?”
The drunk blinks at her. “You know. The nice Earp.” When she still doesn’t understand he gestures back toward the bar. “Wynonna’s little sister. Waverly serves the bar at Shorty’s. Sweetest thing. If I were twenty years younger, I tell ya…”
Nicole rolls her eyes. “If you were twenty years younger, you’d still be ten years too old.”
He just chuckles and nods, nearly falling asleep before Nicole can roll him out of her car to leave him with his sister.
//
Nicole sees Waverly for the first time outside of Shorty’s.
Nedley sees where Nicole is looking and tells her after their collar is safely in the cruiser, “Waverley Earp.”
And really she should have known who Waverly was without telling. She’s met Wynonna, for better or worse, and the Earp sisters have enough of a common look. Nicole had heard the name Waverly, found herself thinking on the girl with a smile. Now Nicole can recognise Waverly on sight and she finds she would very much like to know her. Shame Nicole’s got her cuffs on a blow-through crook from Healesville.
“I heard she works at Shorty’s,” Nicole says, her voice oddly vacant. She clears her throat.
“Wynonna’s little sister,” Nedley says with a sneer and dismissive shrug.
Nicole doesn’t take her eyes off Waverly as she says, “I’m sure she’s more than that.”
//
Nicole doesn’t get to meet Waverly straight away, and the more she sees her around town and the longer she goes without a chance to introduce herself, the more unsettled she feels. Somehow Nedley is the one to notice. She throws her paperwork across his desk and before she can stomp away he tells her to sit down.
“Nicole, you were so chipper when you got into town I thought I’d have to lock you into your own office rather than put up with it anymore. Now you’re more ornery than a hungry hound.”
Nicole tries to protest but he waves her words away.
“Now I don’t care what’s got you in a knot, if it’s homesickness or some guy that’s turned your head it’s none of my business. Just sort it out and cut the attitude, hear?”
Leaving in an even worse mood, Nicole writes up a parking fine and a speeding ticket on her way home, orders pizza and gets in her pyjamas with a glass of wine before she can really think anything. She wonders if Neadly is right, maybe she’s homesick, but when she thinks of home she doesn’t really want to go back. She misses her mum and her sister, but between skype and facebook she’s almost more involved in their lives now than when she lived right there.
No, it’s something else, and as she gets to the bottom of her second glass she’s just about ready to consider an incredible, ridiculous, and hopelessly romantic option. She traces her fingertips over the words on her wrist and she sighs.
“Waverly Earp, what have you done to me.”
//
Waverly’s feet have started to drag over the past few weeks. At first the funeral and everything happened and somehow Waverly skated through without a tear. She honestly felt too warm, too content and excited waking every day to mourn. Wynonna too caught up in her own conspiracies didn't notice any change in Waverly and when it’s confirmed Revenants are active again in Purgatory, there’s black badge for her to worry about.
Waverly tries to help Wynonna and Dolls, but she's sidelined as always, and that’s what she tries to blame for the dark cloud dimming her sunshine, stealing the skip from her step. A weeks go by she feels less warm, less excited and more impatient. Impatient for what, she can’t guess, she doesn’t know. It’s a restless kind of longing for something, something close yet out of reach and it only gets worse, her mood darkening regardless of what’s happening on any day.
Gus is the one to confront her, corners her on shift and demands to know what the hell’s crawled up her butt in the last few weeks.
“Nothin,” she says crossing her arms over her chest. It doesn’t really fly when she’s already thrown a beer at one patron, broken three glasses and threatened to break a bottle over another guy’s head – just that morning.
Gus is still looking at her, both eyebrows raised.
“What?”
“You’ve always been an honest kid.” She looks down to where Waverly is absentmindedly running her fingertips over the words on her wrist. “If you gotta leave Purgatory to find this person, find what you want—”
“Come on Gus, do you really think this is the guy I want?” She brings her wrist up to eye height to show 'I didn’t know Shorty’s had wet t-shirt competitions'. Gus knows the words, everyone in Purgatory has had a good laugh, but apparently Gus needs reminding. “Why would I chase after this swizzle stick?” She huffs a sigh and tucks both hands into her armpits, just to get the damn words out of her sight. “Besides…”
Gus waits a respectable time before prompting. “What, Baby Girl?” Waverly mumbles her response, not sure if she’s ready to acknowledge her suspicions aloud. At Gus’s prompting, Waverly rolls her eyes.
“I’m pretty sure the idiot’s already here.”
“You think they’re here?” Gus suddenly looks about as excited as Waverly at the prospect of this boy. “Baby girl, I thought you’d be leavin Purgatory.”
“Yeah, well.” Waverly shrugs again, and when Gus pulls her into her arms, she struggles not to cry.
That afternoon, as she’s locking up shorty’s Waverly sees Nedley and the new deputy pushing some blow-through into their police cruiser. She sends up a prayer to whoever is listening that the guy being pushed into the car isn’t the one she’s been waiting for.
//
By the next morning, Waverly is starting to feel better, like crying it out with Gus released some pressure inside her. At least she thinks that’s why. Strange dreams followed her through sleep – a faceless sheriff’s officer saying her name softly. She goes into Shorty’s feeling optimistic about the day, less worried about the boy, and not thinking at all about who might walk in.
Accross town, Nicole Haught irons her uniform, sweeps a brush over her hat and straightens her collar in front of the mirror.
“Maybe one more,” she mutters, letting another button loose on her shirt to see what it would look like.
She tries to tell herself that it’s no pressure, that she’s just going to ask a girl out on a date, no big deal. But, it is a big deal because what if Waverly is the one stirring all these feelings. She hasn’t even met her yet and Nicole is already jumping out of her skin with excitement. She glances at her wrist again. Just a bit jumpy. Had a crazy night. She’s going to try not to sneak up on this girl. But then, if this is fate, then there’s not a lot she can do.
With a few minutes before she has to leave, Nicole picks up her hat. Cradling it in her hands she says aloud, “I’ve been meanin to introduce myself. I’m Officer— wait no, I’m Nicole Haught.” She gives a nod at her reflection. “I’m Nicole, Nicole Haught. And you are Waverly Earp… or does that make me sound like a creeper?” She shakes her head. “Nope, tiny town. And she’s a popular girl. So popular.”
Nicole closes her eyes and presses two fingers to the bridge of her nose feeling an unfamiliar surge of nerves. Waverly is popular. And pretty. So pretty with a sweet personality to match a sweet smile if all accounts are to be believed.
“C’mon Haught,” she says again. “You got this.”