Into her hand
Bull riders use the term "into her hand" or "into my hand" to describe the scenario in which a bull is spinning in the same direction of a rider's riding hand. For example, a right-handed bull rider on a bull that spins to the right is riding a bull "into her hand."
It's a genuine miracle that Officer Nicole Haught is not behind the wheel of her department-issued patrol vehicle when it finally dawns on her just what happened with Waverly Earp this morning. These revelatory moments, the consequential ones at least, tend to be all-encompassing. The eyes may be open but they cease to see. Sound waves ricochet across the ears but the messages fail to move the drum. It's like the world is trying to get in but all it gets in return is a busy signal. Call back later. It's almost as if the human body views such pivotal epiphanies as so vital to its continued survivability that it shuts off power to anything it views as momentarily non-essential - sort of like a modified fight or flight response. Such an occurrence at the wrong place or the wrong time? Ill-advised. A temporarily comatose deputy driving through downtown could wreak havoc. Could. Given the general sleepiness of Purgatory in winter, though, even during the busier hours of the day, the victims of such an event are more likely to be parking meters and curbs than citizens.
Instead, Purgatory dodges potential catastrophe. Officer Haught is off-duty, finally, safely settled at home. With her uniform discarded in the dirty clothes basket and her hat perched haphazardly on the chair in the living room, Nicole is stretched out on her bed in a more domestic uniform - flannel pajama pants and a well-worn hoodie. She takes another sip of beer from the mostly empty bottle in her hand. A trickle of condensation creeps down her thumb, and she flicks it away unconsciously.
Today had ended up being just one headache after another. Nicole goes down the list of events in her head like she's playing the world's worst game of BINGO. First she wrote an admittedly unusual report and submitted it to her boss, only to have him question her sanity and her willingness to stay in Purgatory. Attempt number two met with the same fate. So...check one. Shortly thereafter, she got called out to Allen St. by a "concerned citizen" - her money's on Donna from the beauty shop, since she lives down the road and can invariably be found with her nose pressed to her front window when she's home (incidentally, Nicole suspects there's a strong correlation between this and Donna's position as the town gossip). Once there, she found a handful of teenage boys just on the verge of doing something stupid. They're the kind of kids who dare each other to do progressively stupider feats until, inevitably, one of them catches a charge and gets to ride downtown like a big kid. Although they all went home to their parents today, Nicole committed their faces to memory, sure that one of them will end up in the back of her car in the next year or so. Check two.
No sooner had she gotten back in her vehicle and pointed it in the direction of the office than the radio squawked to life, redirecting her to a domestic situation developing a few blocks from her location. Evidently, one of Purgatory's finest fellows had gotten drunk as a skunk and thought arguing with his girlfriend was a good way to spend the twilight hours. His neighbors disagreed, having grown tired of the noise and called the cops. Domestics are usually stressful, volatile, an endless he said/she said. By the time the dust settled at this one, the drunk had been sent off to his sister's house for the night to sober up and cool down, but not before vomiting all over the curb by Nicole's squad car. Check three. Once more at the station (and after a quick run through the car wash), the deputy had enough time to write up her daily reports and submit the final version of her "totally normal, not in any way, shape, or form supernatural" report from last week's events. And check four.
The TV drones in the background. Nicole watches without seeing. Instead, she turns her bottle around in her hands, using her fingernail to catch the edge of the damp label.
Three times. That's how many times she had to write her report on last week's events. Three times she had to relive it in encyclopedic detail. She's tried to establish a clinical distance about it.
Tried being the operative word.
Her body goes cold remembering the frightening speed at which the initial attack unfolded. Even though it didn't help her report, to be honest, it's a bit of a blessing that she doesn't have a lot of visual memories to replay over and over again like some sort of morbid highlight reel. For the most part the images are broken, fragmented. Flashes of light, bits of sky. Darkness. Mostly darkness. But where sight had failed, her other senses had stepped up to compensate - Henry was right about that, at least. So, no, she doesn't have the image of blood coating her uniform seared into her brain. Nor is she forced to replay the sight of her own blood dripping down the steering wheel, pooling on the floorboard, or smeared onto the driver's side door panel. But she remembers plenty.
She remembers the unique sensation of feeling the sticky warmth of her blood soaking into her uniform at the same time that its absence from her veins left her body temperature plummeting. Like having the flu, being buried under a veritable mountain of blankets but still unable to stop the shivering.
She remembers the smell. Smell is a strong memory trigger. Anytime Nicole smells the smoke of a cigar, she's transported back to childhood visits with her grandpa out on his ranch, sitting on the front porch as the sun set, listening to him tell tall tales while he enjoyed a smoke. But this - the smell of metal. Of iron. So much blood spilled in the close confines of her car - she doesn't think that smell will ever quite go away. In the safety of her bedroom, she imagines she smells it still, clinging to her nostrils, her mouth, her lungs. It haunts her.
When one of the doctors let slip that she had to be resuscitated before she ever even made it to the hospital...well. This is personal. Danger is part and parcel of the job, and she'd be lying if she said she never gave any consideration to what it would be like to go down in the line of duty. But like that? Sliced, drugged, battered. Hauled through the woods. Discarded and half buried in the snow for nature to finish. No, she'd never considered that. No one would have considered that. And Wynonna - Nicole shudders. How much more harrowing her experience had been. At least for Nicole, the events were quick, left to her fate without much fanfare.
Her hands tremble around her beer bottle, and she blinks back the moisture threatening to fall from her eyes.
Surprisingly, the doctors didn't keep her more than a few days. The miracles of modern medicine. Just as well - after the initial Black Badge questioning, her only visitor had been Nedley, keeping her up to speed on the search for Wynonna and reassuring her that her cat was doing alright. The latter, though well-intentioned, was clearly an exaggeration for her benefit, if the scratch marks on his hands were anything to go by. Still, the oppressive monotony of the hospital, with its robust offering of three TV channels (all infomercials, all the time), left her with nothing but time to think.
With Nedley refusing to bring any of the case files to her temporary office at the hospital, a gesture Nicole assumes was meant to convey fatherly concern (but came off as more on the patronizing side), she'd resorted to filling her time by combing through the facts of the case piece by piece from memory. Working under the assumption that the ambush was tied to the serial killer responsible for at least three bodies in Purgatory's morgue, she analyzed every detail, every observation, every damn fiber she could remember. She'd pick up a fact, examine it from this angle, examine it from that angle, and find its place in relation to every other piece in the file. It was like trying to put together a puzzle with no picture to reference. But with a killer on the loose and Wynonna still unaccounted for, she had to try. She had to do something.
Between the mental catalogue of crime scene minutiae, the autopsy reports on the previous victims, the details of their injuries - no, surgeries - and the bits and pieces she'd managed to ear hustle from Deputy Marshall Dolls and crew both in her hospital room and the other day at the station (for professionals they really have a lack of awareness of the volume of their voices in public spaces), she had enough pieces of the puzzle to see the rough outlines of the subject.
It sure as hell hadn't been easy to write her original report. She knows how it sounded, how it read. She felt like Purgatory's own version of Fox Mulder. But Sherlock Holmes said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Sherlock, however, also didn't have a boss telling him that was unacceptable. So. In the end, she did what she was asked. She edited. Rewrote. Re-imagined. She bent and manipulated the truth until it was almost unrecognizable, leaving her sick to her stomach with shame and head throbbing to beat the band. But with the sheriff questioning if she even wanted to stay in a place like Purgatory after all, what else could she have done?
So. Three times.
The cat leaps onto the bed and pads over to the off-duty deputy, stepping heavily onto her stomach and chest. Wincing in pain, Nicole sucks in a sharp breath and sits up more fully, letting her cat circle and settle in lap instead. With her cat purring contentedly, its eyes closed, Nicole rubs lightly at the fading bruise on her chest, a souvenir from Jack. Or the unsub, whatever Nedley wants to call him.
Not the right kind, huh? Well, not exactly my type either, Jack.
It wasn't so bad, lying in that ditch. Between the pain and the shock and the numbing cold, consciousness was fleeting. But there were times she'd open her eyes, see the sky above. Times when she could feel the barest of warmth from the sun peeking through the clouds. In those brief moments of clarity, she'd focus on her talisman again - the thing that anchors her when the world gets to be too dark, that reminds her that there's good here.
Waverly Earp, smiling at her from her front porch. As Nicole lay there, her body getting colder, weaker, she found herself wishing Waverly was with her. Her personal ray of sunshine. Maybe then the chill wouldn't settle so quickly into her bones. Maybe then she would have told her how that smile makes anything seem possible. Waiting for death, she'd found herself smiling weakly.
Credits roll on the TV screen in front of her, and Nicole shakes her head, trying to ditch the melancholy, but instead she rattles loose the memory of today's...unusual encounter with Waverly outside the station.
Even as distracted as she was when they had nearly collided earlier, her memory of the conversation is remarkably intact. Truthfully, her memory of all things Waverly-related or Waverly-adjacent is embarrassingly clear - like "hope to God no one else figures that out because it can never be lived down" kind of clear. So, like she's doing one of her cop exercises, she rewinds and replays the scene, observing the interaction as an objective third party and gathering data for analysis.
Eyes closed, she tips her head back, draining the dregs of beer out of the bottle before pulling it down, away from her lips.
And that - that is the moment it hits her. The realization causes a chain reaction that, perhaps later (much later), she'll find hilarious.
In surprise, she inhales sharply, which, as it turns out, is the exact wrong thing to do with a mouth full of beer. It starts to go down the wrong pipe, which naturally leaves her a coughing, spluttering mess, her face quickly reddening to a shade not too far off from the color of her hair. It's like her body suddenly forgot how to function.
The cat darts away, annoyed at being moved and at the droplets of beer clinging to her fur. She begins to clean her coat, pausing every few seconds to throw indignant looks at her owner.
Holy shit.
She blinks rapidly. Her jaw hits the floor.
"HOLY SHIT." When she speak the words aloud, the cat looks up at her with distaste.
So to summarize, when she'd asked to talk to Waverly, Waverly responded that they were "totally overdue for a talk."
Way to be non-specific, Nicole. Real helpful.
And then there's the kicker - "I just discovered it when I met you. You're kind of special."
Kind of special?!
Nicole finds it difficult to resist the urge to bury her head in the comforter. Her groan, though, would make Tina Belcher proud.
She's been so wrapped up in this Purgatory bullshit that she's completely missed what was literally two feet in front of her face. This girl, the one she's crazy about, the one she's promised to wait patiently at a distance for - this girl stood in front of her today and told her she feels it, too.
Waverly was right there, RIGHT THERE, calling her special, and all Nicole took away from it was-
Oh my god. No...
Nicole finally remembers how the conversation ended - with her accusing Waverly of making fun of her, and then stomping off in a huff.
Christ.
Waverly was right there, with her awkward jokes and her willingness to be vulnerable. This is the Waverly Nicole loves to see, the one that's open, honest. It's not Waverly the barmaid or Waverly the town mascot. It's just...Waverly.
And what did Nicole do?
Without stopping to wonder why Waverly was there or considering what might have been on her mind, she just barrelled right over her, the pent-up frustration of writing and rewriting that damned report and of reliving that attack erupting at the worst possible time. Such amazing powers of observation...
She bangs her head frustratedly into the mattress.
Worst. Cop. Ever.
Nicole sits up and grudgingly gets out of bed, heading to the kitchen to grab another beer.
Well, that's check five then.
BINGO.
When Nicole's shift starts the next day, she immediately heads out on "patrol." Naturally, she starts her patrol at Shorty's. Important police business. As soon as she walks through the doors, she spies a woman behind the bar, but not the one she's hoping to find. This one is older, with an air of confidence that can only come from being in charge. Gus. The deputy approaches the dimly lit bar top and asks, "Excuse me - is Waverly working today?"
"She's not due for another hour," Gus responds, eyeing Nicole critically. "You, uh, must be Officer Haught," she continues. Nicole furrows her brow, unsure where this is going, but nods all the same. "Waverly's told me a lot about you."
Nicole's eyebrows shoot up of their own accord, and she feels the blush rising in her cheeks. Cocking her head to the side, Gus scrutinizes the deputy's reaction before nodding to herself, her expression unreadable, but a ghost of a smile lingering at the corners of her mouth.
"Check the farm road on the west side of town." With a wink, Gus turns her back on Officer Haught and sets to work stocking the glassware on the other side of the well.
Thoroughly confused, Nicole accepts the advice and the dismissal, striding back out the double doors to her waiting vehicle.
For the hundredth time in the last twelve hours she repeats her apology in her head before chastising herself for creating this mess in the first place. Purgatory passes by her windows, unseen. In a matter of minutes the town fades into country, brick buildings replaced by wooden barns, concrete replaced by pastures. A small silhouette stalks down the road in the distance.
She takes a deep breath.
This conversation has GOT to go better than the last one.