Author's Note: Thank you so much to all the reviewers. This chapter is as much a catharsis for me as it is an update haha. I am still not OK from yesterday.
Temporality was nonexistent in purgatory.
Abbie knew not how long she remained there – hours, days, weeks, years – they all blended together into one giant, indistinguishable mass of suffering.
After some unknown measure of time, she was greeted with the greatest and most unexpected of surprises: a knock at her dollhouse door. The noise was hollow and unearthly against the plastic.
Memory-Abbie said, "I don't think you should answer it."
"Why not?" asked the other.
"It might be someone evil."
"It's not," refuted Memory-Jenny.
The door opened before anyone could make a move to answer it.
"Abbie?" someone called wildly.
She instantly recognized the voice. "Jenny?"
Sure enough, her curly-haired sister climbed through the threshold. "This is our dollhouse," she murmured in wonder. "This is where we felt safe." Her eyes snapped to look at Memory-Abbie and Memory-Jenny, before she was bombarded by a suffocating hug from her older sister.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded.
The Memory-Mills sisters disappeared from view, as if to give them privacy. They seemed to sense that something was awry.
Jenny's brow was creased in a perplexed frown. "I'm not sure," she said. "I think I might be dead."
Abbie's eyes widened and were filled immediately with tears. "What?"
"The Horseman," Jenny explained vaguely. "I was in a car accident… That's not important – you need to get back, Henry Parrish –"
"I know," Abbie interrupted, "He's evil, I know. But how can you say what happened to you is not important? How could you be here if you're dead?"
"How else could I be here?" she countered wryly. "I'm not a Witness or a witch or anything else supernatural; my paths to purgatory are limited."
"No," said Abbie, shaking her head in denial. "You can't be dead."
"Abbie, there's more at stake here. You need to go back, you need to help the others."
"How are Crane and Katrina?"
"I don't know. I was on my way to see them when… you know."
A solitary tear rolled down Abbie's cheek. "Even if I could go back," she said, "I don't know how."
"How did Katrina leave?" asked Jenny.
"I took her place."
A dark shadow of anger and disappointment overtook her sister's features. "How could you? After hearing all those goddamn prophesies, how could you? Why would you sacrifice yourself for her? How could Crane let you?"
"It's his wife," she murmured. "We needed a witch. He wanted her back. I wanted to face my demons, to face Moloch."
"You must have known."
Abbie shot her an injured, repentant look. "He didn't stop me," was all she said.
Jenny tightened her jaw in determination. "Whatever," she said. "Screw him. Screw 'Witnesses' with a capital W – you two may have some sort of bond that transcends space and time and all that bull, but we have something just as strong: we're sisters. We're blood. I'm going to get you out of here."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm going to take your place. That has to be it, doesn't it? Why else would I be here? Nothing like a little divine intervention to set things right."
"Jenny –" Abbie started, about to protest.
"No," she interrupted. "You know you have to go back. You know."
Her eyebrows formed an inverted arch in conflict. "I can't just leave you here."
"You have to."
"But –"
"No!" Jenny said forcefully. "You have to leave!" Her eyes began to glisten with not-yet-fallen tears. "Before, I envied you – I envied that you had been chosen for this instead of me; I don't envy you anymore."
Abbie smiled sadly, but Jenny went on, "The least I can do for the cause is take your place here – I'm sure you'll have your work cut out for you when you get back."
She looked as if she wanted to say something in response, but couldn't find the words. Her sister saved her the trouble. "There isn't any time to waste, Abbie. You have to go now." Her line of sight flitted to the door, which now had rays of light filtering through its window.
"Look," murmured Jenny.
Abbie snapped her head to see.
"You've gotta go," she reiterated.
The elder Mills pulled her sister into another tight embrace. "We'll get you out of here," she mumbled into her shoulder, through her tears. "I won't leave you here – you hear me? We. Will. Get. You. Out."
"I know you will," she replied, only half-believing her. "Now go." She pulled away and lightly pushed her towards the door.
When Abbie finally gathered the mental strength to open it, she was consumed by a retina-burning white light.
. . .
She awoke with a start, as if fresh life had been breathed into her lungs, and found herself on the forest floor. She was covered in dirt and leaves and everything around her was utterly placid – dead. No birds chirping, no leaves rustling. Nothing. Only the sound of her own heart hammering in her ears.
Dammit, cursed Abbie internally. She didn't know where to start, or even where she was – she assumed she was still in Sleepy Hollow, but there were no guarantees even on that front. She could be in any nameless woods, in any part of the country – the world.
She needed to find Crane.
She searched her heart, searched for the memory of him. In purgatory, during the tests, she'd had an obscure awareness of him; it was as though they were somehow tethered to one another by an invisible rope. She searched for it now, but could not locate it. The feeling was gone.
All she felt in her heart was a fractured sort of trust.
He hadn't made her stay in that prison, but he hadn't stopped her – not like she'd tried to stop him when that poison had touched his lips. His betrayal had been too abstract to recognize for what it was in that moment, but he had delivered her soul to Moloch.
"Crane!" came an unbidden cry, a sob.
More softly: "Ichabod."
Nothing. Silence. Not even a sign that hell was unfolding around her, that Armageddon was upon them.
She knew that she was as useless alone as he was.
Her eyes scoured the landscape; every tree, every pile of dead leaves looked the same.
Suddenly, she spotted something white amongst the brown, skeletal branches: a dove.
There were no doves in the forests of Sleepy Hollow, or at least none that she had ever seen before. It could not be a coincidence.
She followed it.
As she grew nearer it fluttered from branch to branch, until they reached a clearing and it settled upon a mossy, nearby boulder. She observed the creature hesitantly and it cocked its head to the side, as if it recognized her. Its black and beady eyes gleamed, reflecting her face.
"Here?" she questioned.
This world was crazy enough that she half-expected it to respond; it did not.
She cleared the leaves in front of the rock, brushing away at the ground until she was met with a plane of dirt. Was he underground? Was she supposed to dig him up?
How many times was this damned man supposed to sprout out of the earth?
There was no chance of her making any headway without a shovel, but she was afraid that if she left to go find one she wouldn't be able to recall this spot.
"What am I supposed to do?" she wondered aloud, sitting back on her heels. She stared pensively at the damp, foreboding ground. In her soul, she knew the answer.
"Alright," she muttered bitterly, before sinking her fingers into the dirt.
She clawed at the forest floor as though the fate of the world depended on it. She clawed and clawed and clawed, until her fingernails began to loosen and the lines in her hands were completely obscured. Dirt was smeared across every inch of her and as she dug like an animal, tears began to pour from her eyes.
She was on her knees, praying, digging, sobbing, until night fell and all around her was pitch-black. And still, she continued to dig.
She dug until she was met with something solid. A coffin. She brushed the dirt from it to the best of her ability and knocked on the smooth wood. Muffled screams resounded from inside.
"Crane!"
"Mmmph!"
A frantic attempt to pry it open revealed that it was locked, but Abbie was in no state of mind to let this deter her; she grabbed the largest and nearest rock, smashing it into the pine lid with inhuman strength. Adrenaline was surging through her veins and, as she began to hear the wood splinter, she knew that if she and Crane did make it out of this alive, did save humanity, she would not survive in the world that followed. She was wild, beyond society.
She disentombed him and was met with the sight of his panicked body restrained by vines. She pulled at them, causing her dirty hands bleed and the cuts to sting the moment they were created.
Crane was able to free himself of the remaining ones, and when he was disentangled he collapsed against her numb, rigid body. She could not comfort him, she could not move. He clung to her, weeping, in a messy ditch – in a grave.
He might have cried for hours; she did not know.
He murmured her name – her first name, not Lieutenant or Miss Mills – over and over again until it became a chant. It was the only sound that pierced the motionless night.
I am so sorry, he said, and she believed.
He wept for all that had happened, for all the sins he had committed and for all he had lost.
He wept for Abbie.
He wept for Katrina.
He wept for Jeremy.
The loss of Jeremy had never really been a loss at all – you could not lose something you never had; it was a dull ache in his heart. The loss of Katrina – while now was fresh – had healed to a scar before he had retrieved her. It was reopened, a raw sore aggravated by the knowledge that the product of their love ushered in the apocalypse.
The loss of Abbie was an open wound, gushing blood.
"I am so sorry," he repeated for what might have been the thousandth time.
His tears had soaked through her sullied jeans; he was not just apologizing to her, she came to realize. All pretenses of decorum and humanity had been shed. They were only two Witnesses, now – Abbie was not a cop, Ichabod was not a professor or a soldier. They existed solely within the bounds of their duty.
"We should get out of here," she ventured.
He pulled away from her and sniffed, wiping the tears away from his face and leaving trails of dirt in their wake. "Very well," he croaked.
They climbed out of that cursed hole as if they had dug themselves out of hell itself.
When they were back on solid ground, they stood, facing each other in silence.
Eventually, Crane asked merely, "How?"
Abbie could not bear to look at him; although she believed that he was sorry, she could not forgive him, not when she had explicitly warned him of the choice he would have to make, not when he knew that abandonment was the one thing she feared most.
"Jenny took my place," she said simply, not meeting his intense gaze.
He pulled her into an embrace. Eyes screwed shut and cheek rested against her filthy hair, he begged, "Please, Abigail, please forgive me – I should have listened to you, you were right. Katrina has been abducted by the first Horseman, and Jeremy is the second – Henry Parrish was my son."
"I'm sorry," she murmured, the sound obfuscated by the fabric of his shirt. "I think Jenny is dead."
Crane veered back slightly to observe that now Abbie was the one with tears streaming down her face. He showered the crown of her head with kisses, kisses of sympathy and relief and love that he could plant nowhere else.
"My folly has come at a great personal cost to both of us," he said gravely into her hair. "There are no words to express my penitence. I deserve to have been left in that godforsaken casket to suffer for my hubris."
Abbie glared at him sternly through her tears. "This is a lesson, Crane," she told him. "These are the sacrifices we have to make. We have only each other, and we must put our personal agendas aside for the greater good."
"You are absolutely right," he agreed, voice cracking with renewed sorrow and shame. Together, he and Abbie brought salvation; he and Katrina brought ruin. The choice was clearer now than ever before.
When she was satisfied that he grasped this concept, she hugged him roughly around the waist. "If you ever leave me like that again," she started darkly, "I will shoot you." The threat was an echo of simpler times.
Ichabod smiled humorlessly, though she could not see it. "I assure you, I will not. Not even death can separate us."
Author's Note: I know I just updated, but I needed this to happen lol. Please review!