Blackdamp (n.)
An accumulation of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in excess of the percentage found in pure atmospheric air, reducing the available oxygen content to a level incapable of sustaining human or animal life. It occurs with particular frequency in abandoned or poorly ventilated coal mines, where exposed coal naturally absorbs oxygen and exudes carbon dioxide and water vapor. Odorless and non-combustible, the resulting depletion of oxygen extinguishes open flames and can asphyxiate surrounding human or animal life. Also known as choke damp.
Her breath is ragged with exertion, and her speed is reckless, but she doesn't dare slow down.
Past the smaller forge she keeps for overflow projects, she rounds the corner near the door, and instead of watching the path, her eyes lift, landing on the old photo tacked onto the weathered wooden wall, its edges yellow and curling. The shift in focus is minute, but it's enough. Her hip rams into the bench on the corner, the momentum enough to tip it sideways, and the box of scrap metal that had been precariously perched along its back edge upends, sending its contents falling to the earthen shop floor like lightning, the metal glinting and shining dangerously in the low light of the shop. The sound is thunder. Without thinking, she reaches out to steady herself, to stop what's left of her forward momentum, but her hand comes away warm. Wet.
The cut is jagged but shallow, and blood begins to well up and drip indecorously down her fingers, painting a portrait on the floor. Long accustomed to injury, she snatches a bandana from her back pocket and wraps it tightly around her palm with only the slightest of grimaces before continuing her circuit of the shop.
"What's rule number one, Mattie?" Though long gone, she can hear her father's sonorous voice in her head as clearly as if he were standing next to her, the admonition in his tone clear. The love clear, too.
When she was a girl, learning to master metal at the knee of her father, being allowed in the shop unsurprisingly came with a litany of rules and procedures. Rule number one was, well, he phrased it a lot of different ways over the years. Have patience. Make a plan, then act. Strike the metal only when ready - to do so before would be a waste of energy. In other words, slow down. And to a child, first and foremost, that translated into: "No running around the forge, Mattie!"
"Sorry, daddy." Her throat moves; her lips form the letters, but no sound comes.
She hears nothing but her own heartbeat, pounding rhythmically in her ears. It's hard to say if over time she molded her movements at the anvil to the beat in her chest, or if her heart learned to follow the rhythm of her strikes upon the metal. Either way, it's the sound she's heard her whole life - the clang of the hammer striking the white hot metal, followed by the softer tap of the hammer falling against the anvil, its energy spent before being hefted into the air to start again.
Strike (tap).
It's like a symphony in her veins.
She doesn't slow her step. She can't. There's no time.
Because she's coming.
Reaching into the back of the storage cabinet near the door, dusty with disuse, her good hand lands on soft leather. With a puff of dirt and soot, the bag dislodges from its hiding place, and making her way around the overturned table and scraps from a moment ago, she rushes once more down the length of the shop, bag in tow.
Back and forth, back and forth. The dust stirs in her wake as she wears a path into the shop floor, and bit by bit, item by item, the leather bag fills and stretches. Her pace is frantic, almost frenzied. But eventually, she does slow. Standing in front of her smithing tools, she stretches out her hand to run her fingers over the cool metal. Betty - her trusty anvil - sits silently to her right, and Mattie trembles at the whisper of shame she feels on her cheeks. Along the wall hang the flatters, the pinchers, the tongs in all shapes and sizes, these are the tools of her trade. Her inheritance. When she reaches one particular tool, though, her hand stills. Her blood beats impossibly harder in her ears.
Strike (tap).
She hesitates for a beat before grabbing it. The hammer is the oldest tool in her collection. It belonged to her great-great-great-grandpa, and like just about everything else around here, it's been passed down from generation to generation. But this one is special. When she grasps it, it's almost like an electric shock. The energy emanating from the metal is loud. It shouts. Before today it was a whisper. Before today, the energy was strange, unknown. But now - after this afternoon, after the skull - there's a familiarity within that strikes her to the bone.
So this was the one. She stares at the metal in her hand for a long minute, reading its energy, the cogs in her brain turning, before eventually clenching her jaw and shoving the hammer deep into the confines of her bag.
Picking up pace once more, she continues running from station to station, sorting through generations of belongings in anticipation of flight. In spite of the snow blanketing the ground outside, the air in the shop is still and stifling, and sweat trickles down her neck as she moves.
This wasn't originally the plan. After pushing the girl out earlier, after warning her of the danger to come, she'd clawed through the cabinet, frantic and panicked, pulling out all of the salt she could find. The salt became a circle of protection, and within its confines, she sat. And waited. The afternoon turned to evening, and the evening turned to night. The blowers continued to run, keeping the air to her forges circulating and the shop relatively well-heated. The waiting was interminable. In the hours she sat in the rocking chair, stiff and uncomfortable, her only company the cacophony of anxious thoughts in her mind and the gentle hum of the generator, another plan began to form. Whether it's a plan borne of cowardice or reason she can't really say. That's the kind of thing that can only be determined in hindsight, after what will come has come.
Because the Stone Witch will come. Whether today, tomorrow, or next week, she will come here in search of her son. And although Mattie has a gift, has power, when it comes down to it, she knows it's no match for the witch's. Glancing at the meager stocks of herbs and ingredients across from her, she shakes her head. Even if she had a well-stocked arsenal at her fingertips, she's alone here. Unprepared. If it takes an hour or a day or a week, Mattie knows what her future will be if the Stone Witch catches her. She looks again at the table to her left where hours before she bonded a naive girl to an object of evil. The dread the fills her belly shifts heavily. As much as she wants to believe differently, to believe that she could withstand the witch's power, her cruelty, she knows that ultimately it's not just her own future at stake here tonight. If she fails, then the witch gets the girl, too. And if she gets the girl, she'll get the skull, and then hell will come to Purgatory, the likes of which even this town has never seen before.
But if she removes a cog in the wheel, a point along the path? If the Stone Witch can't get to Mattie, then she can't find the Keeper of the Bones. It's like when there's a whole line of ants marching along the same trail, their destinations certain. But wipe clean the trail they're following? They halt. They make confused attempts at continuing, going left, right, backward, unable to detect the way forward. By leaving, Mattie's banking on wiping out the trail before the witch can make it to the end. It's the best shot they've got.
Strike (tap).
Only half an hour has passed since she stood up from her chair, her limbs stiff and sore. Half an hour since she held her breath and stepped over the ring of salt on the floor. Now her pack is full of odds and ends, things she might need on her journey (and a handful of things she couldn't bear to part with), and her mind has settled, focused on one final task. While running around the shop and stowing the vestiges of her whole life into one small bag, her mind has been hammering away on the topic of the Stone Witch, combing through and analyzing every scrap, every morsel passed down through her family for something, anything that could put a stop to her.
With slow, sure steps, she walks over to the closest forge, one of the smaller ones, and pulls a coal long since cold from the bed. Grasping it tightly in her uninjured hand, she turns back, eyeing the table where she bonded the poor girl to that cursed skull, before moving to the side and pressing the coal onto the wooden planks that make up the wall nearby. Her strokes are efficient. Clipped. It takes less than a minute before she's stepping back and tossing the coal back with its brethren in the forge. This...is the best she can do.
Hoisting the bag over her shoulder, the burden heavier than expected, she mutters under her breath, "Good luck, Waverly Earp."
When she steps out into the night and closes the shop door behind her, the snow is soft and silent, and the world is disturbingly quiet.
The forge in her veins falls silent.
"God, Waves, there's like twenty of these things." Sprawled across Waverly's bed, struggling to get comfortable amidst the collection of decorative throw pillows, Wynonna punctuates her complaint by flailing dramatically like she's drowning, a hapless victim adrift in a brightly colored ocean. With another wiggle, she continues, "How can you stand this shit?" Grabbing at the one by her ear, Wynonna stuffs it under her head and pulls another one close, wrapping her arms around it like a life preserver. Glancing over her shoulder, Waverly watches as her older sister, her eyes closing, settles and stills, a fraction of a smirk alighting on her face. Not that she'd ever admit to it.
"C'mon, Wynonna. When we moved back in here there were cobwebs and bats and mice!" It comes off as a whine, but when she continues, her tone takes on a more teasing note. "And I'm still not entirely sure that family of chipmunks isn't still living upstairs. Let me have my pillows."
Turning back to the rack against the wall in front of her, the one that doubles as her upscale closet, she pulls yet another dress and holds it up to herself.
And frowns.
She puts it back, slides a few articles of clothing aside and pulls another. When she turns to Wynonna, seeking a second opinion, she's met with an unamused face. And so the cycle continues. The hangers slide along the metal rack with a polished scratch, stopping and starting and stopping again as she peruses her whole wardrobe. When she gets to the gold number, though, she snatches it off the hanger and holds it up against her body for a quick once-over, not even bothering to get her sister's opinion this time. This is the one.
It's been ages since she's been out with the girls. Back in high school, they'd been inseparable, but even in the intervening years, when they'd all settled into their own routines with their own lives and own relationships, they might go out once a week, whether it was to grab a cup of coffee or to hit up a club in the city. But then Wynonna came back to town a few months ago, Purgatory's own pariah returning triumphantly, trailing sarcasm, irreverence, and destruction in her wake.
And everything changed.
Some parts changed overnight, with the world of the revenants and the curse and the heir taking center stage in a way they hadn't been since she was a child. Other parts were a little slower - the pulling away from her old routines, the move back out to the homestead. More and more she's been M.I.A. from her pre-existing social obligations, skipping coffee to hang out at the station, poring over books and looking for clues in the Black Badge Division office. Or there was the trip to the city last month she missed because she was in the middle of performing some sort of ancient ritual in an attempt to catch and kill August, the demented old mirror-demon with his sights on her sister.
At the thought, she sighs. What the heck is my life right now?
The crazy part is that she's fully aware that she's enjoyed these things, from skulking around Bobo's trailer park doing "recon," to digging through research - her research - trying to identify the seven revenants who attacked the homestead that night. For the first time in a long time, she feels awake, like she's finally getting a chance to stretch her limbs after years of being cramped at odd angles.
But she's stretching in ways the girls don't understand. They never could. Inevitably, they've seen her around town, following Wynonna or Dolls like a shadow. They've seen her Jeep parked outside the station with increasing frequency. In the beginning, her excuses were taken at face value, met with playful teasing and nothing more. But as the weeks passed by, she put less effort into her excuses, either unable or unwilling (she hasn't pinned that down just yet) to care enough to sugarcoat the lie.
She should have expected the result, should have been prepared. Invitations became few and far between. Texts were increasingly infrequent. Distance sprouted like weeds. There were whispers. Judgements. Gossip.
About her.
All of it makes her feel like a kid again, like walking into school for the first time after the attack on the homestead, a hundred eyes on her, her classmates turning to one another and whispering about her. About the littlest Earp, the one with the crazy sister and the dead dad. No one would sit with her at lunch for the rest of the year. There were days when she got tired of the stares, of being so obviously alone, that she would forego lunch and just spend the period in the library instead, surrounded by books full of other worlds and other people far, far away from Purgatory.
"OK, but you're seriously going to spend your Friday night with whatsherface and her minions?" Wynonna scoffs, reclining serenely amidst the pillows on the bed, her legs pulled up and feet planted near the edge of the bedspread.
Snapping out of her thoughts, Waverly turns and walks by, pushing Wynonna's feet off her bed for the umpteenth time tonight. "I'm a happily single Virgo with hair for days," she responds, flipping said hair over her shoulder dramatically. "I need a little fun."
Fun is part of it. Life can't all be revenants and curses, after all. But beneath the shallow rationale, the one she sold her sister and the one she tried to sell herself, albeit with little success, tonight she's on a mission. After the attack, after...everything that followed, Waverly spent years working and clawing her way into the good graces of the people of this town, altering her tastes, her hobbies - anything and everything that could possibly pose a problem - all in a bid to never be that scared, lonely kid eating lunch in the library by herself again, unable to face the whispers and stares of her classmates. To be anything but a freak.
Stopping in front of her vanity, Waverly shucks off her t-shirt and sweats and removes the dress from its hanger.
Most of the town isn't treating her any differently now than they did last year, still greeting her as affectionately as ever when they pass in the street, still offering a kind word and asking after her health when they stop in at Shorty's. But the girls aren't most people. And the radio silence, the cold shoulders - the flashbacks they bring are visceral, and her stomach clenches again at the thought.
So. Tonight is a mission. Truth be told she had toyed with the idea of throwing an engagement party herself here at the homestead, but after talking with Steph and dropping some less than subtle hints, they had invited her out tonight to a place in the city for Steph's bachelorette party, and this is her best shot to try and reestablish contact with her old friends, with her old life.
Gingerly, she places one foot in first, followed by the other before pulling, the dress sliding up her legs. The fabric scratches her skin.
She catches Wynonna pulling a face in the mirror and pauses, the dress only halfway up her torso. "What? It'll be fun. Just the girls. No guys allowed."
As soon as the words are out of her mouth, she regrets them. Watching Wynonna in the mirror is like watching a cat ready itself to pounce on its prey, all eyes and teeth. She's practically wriggling in her pillow cocoon, like Waverly had just served up a big fat canary on a silver platter.
"Have I told you how glad I am that you dumped that rodeo clown yet?"
"Only a dozen times," Waverly sighs. "It hasn't even been twelve hours since it happened." And it's only been a couple of hours since Waverly told her sister about it, but clearly she had started celebrating immediately.
"Yeah, well, dude, get used to hearing it. I plan on saying it at least once a day for the next month. Maybe longer. Can't say for sure." The smile on Wynonna's face is radiant.
It's a little unsettling.
"Just promise me it's for good this time. I am not going to be throwing you an engagement party if you end up with him."
Waverly resumes dressing, tugging the top up and getting her arms through their respective holes. "Please. Like you'd ever be caught dead doing something as normal as an engagement party."
The bed squeaks a few times and then falls silent. Waverly jumps a little when sure hands grip the back of her dress and zip it up in quick, efficient fashion. She mumbles a "thanks" over her shoulder, but Wynonna doesn't respond. At least not directly. "You look nice." The words are soft. "You sure you want to waste it on that crowd?" Waverly rolls her eyes. A compliment couched in an insult. That's more like it.
Without waiting for a response, Wynonna continues, "I'm gonna head out, meet up with Dolls and see where we stand on the seventh."
"Maybe Doc has some ideas?" she offers, and Wynonna's mouth pulls down at the corners, but only for a moment. And then it shifts and hides, as if it were only a trick of the light. In the end, Wynonna settles on a shrug. "Nah, he made it perfectly clear this morning that being on Team Earp is bringing him unwanted attention with the local population of walking dead. So..." The annoyance in her voice is plain, but there's a strain of hurt as well.
"But he's got to help…" Waverly's voice trails off, her brow furrows. How could he not see this through?
Wynonna clenches her jaw and shakes her head a fraction. There's something else there, something she's not saying. For all her bluster, her oldest sister has a terrible poker face. But if she isn't willing to talk, Waverly isn't going to push it. Not right now, at least. The moment passes.
Wynonna grabs her leather jacket off of the highback chair nearby, and as she shrugs it on, her eyes fall across the way to the fireplace, where a skull now has pride of place there atop the mantle, its hollow eyes facing the room as if it's been watching the scene unfold.
"You sure you don't want me to take your new BFF here to Dolls? See what Black Badge can find out about it?" Wynonna strolls over to the fireplace and bends at the knees, putting on her meanest glare and engaging in a staredown with a foe long-since dead.
"No!" Her answer is automatic, and maybe a tad more emphatic than she had intended. Wynonna looks back over her shoulder and cocks her head, confused.
Walking to the doorway, she clarifies, "I mean, Uncle Curtis left it to me. If I give it up to Black Badge who knows if I'll ever see it again, right?"
Straightening, Wynonna shrugs her shoulders yet again before answering, "Whatever. Just...call me if you come back early." And with that, she's gone, the front door closing with a squeak behind her, leaving Waverly staring straight across at the skull. Her skull. Well, not her skull, but…
It's a weird feeling, like she's made up of half oil and half water, the two sides of her sliding past one another and never meeting, never mixing. There's pride in her role, honor at being trusted to be the Keeper of the Bones. But the smile that's threatening to break out falters, falls. Her brow furrows. This...isn't normal. The Earp's don't do normal, not even in an inheritance. And tonight is about proving that she can be normal. That she can still fit in.
"Hmph."
She doesn't have time for this. Not tonight. Heading back to her room, she stops to grab her favorite tights and spends a minute wriggling her way into them, shimmying on the bed and dislodging a few of her pillows. From there it's short work to finish getting ready, brushing her hair, selecting a pair of shoes, and fixing her makeup (although it took her an embarrassingly long amount of time to decide on the socially appropriate shade of lipstick for the occasion).
When she eyes the finished product in the mirror, a self-satisfied smile creeps up her face. If this is a production, and Waverly, or "Normal Waverly" rather, is a role, then this is the perfect costume. Flashes of gold and black and skin - the glamorous girl looking back at her looks ready to take the club by storm. Not a freak. Life doesn't have to be all death and revenants, and she can prove it.
Glancing at the clock overhead, she mutters under her breath and grabs her coat before heading toward the front of the house.
"This is going to be fun. You're going to have a great time." The words come out a little hollow, a touch tired, but she doesn't notice. Smiling and nodding to herself, she grasps the cool brass knob on the front door, flips the lock before opening the door and crossing the threshold into the night.
The skull watches from the mantel in silence.