Sorry for the delay fans! I was working a second job over the holidays. That really put a damper on writing. Here we are though.
The team finished loading up the Earp's pickup truck and drove the route to the prison given to them by Victoria. Wynonna and Waverly took the pickup, while Nicole and Doc took his car taken from the Stone Witch.
They crossed the beautiful wilds and farmlands of the ghost river triangle before eventually leaving even that behind.
"It really hurt, not telling me about this problem. First you were afraid to let me know about Nicole, now this. I know that after disappearing for 15 years, I have no right to expect you to just trust me like that never happened overnight." Wynonna let her feelings out. "But I want to earn your trust, and I'm not going to disappear on you again.
Waverly shook her head, a sad frown on her face.
"It's not that I don't trust you 'Nonna. It's that I don't trust myself. I had a voice in my head telling me to kill you. I wanted to pretend I wasn't a threat to you. Telling you would force me to acknowledge it and… I wasn't brave enough to do that." Waverly's voice choked as she seemed to have difficulty voicing her feelings.
"It doesn't matter what's in your head, as long as you're in there too Waves." Wynonna sought to sincerely reassure her sister. "Although it was extremely fucked up having to torture your possessed body. Try not to make me do that one again."
"Trust me, I'll try."
The trip lasted for hours, but eventually they pulled to a stop. Not for seeing the base, the whole group knew that they had to stop well out of site, but at the point where they knew it had to be close. They also made certain to pull the cars well out of sight of the crude dirt road.
"From here we march on foot." Doc drawled when the whole group met up outside the cars.
They gathered their supplies, each one having to haul a pack of various equipment (mostly weapons, courtesy of Wynonna), and moved parallel to the road. The scenery was extremely flat, empty grassland making it difficult to remain out of sight of the road. At points they gave up, taking into consideration the extreme unlikely-hood of anyone actually passing on said road.
It was nearly an hour's march, but eventually the group spotted a chain link fence topped with barbed wire on the horizon.
"There it is." Nicole pointed it out first.
"Now to get inside." Wynonna spoke up. "Have we seriously not considered the fact we only have one Harry Potter toy here?" She suddenly considered. "I don't think we can all play hide behind the invisible guy."
"We will need to lower their defenses. Enter in turns if we have to." Doc suggested. "Either me or you can incapacitate the human guards. Waverly, I know you are no witch, but you were able to perform that summoning spell nonsense for Dolls before. Do you think you would stand a chance of lowering those magical wards we were warned about?"
Waverly shrugged.
"I don't know. I only know what little about magic my courses in ancient history and mythology taught me. I'm pretty certain I can read anything they can throw at me in there though, so I'm still the best chance we have."
"It'll have to do. What order should we do this?" The elder Earp questioned.
"There will be no way to remove the guards that won't be found out within minutes. Whereas Waverly here's mission will take an indeterminate amount of time. So she must go first." Doc reasoned.
"So it's decided." Wynonna declared. "You up for it Baby Sis?"
"Are you kidding? I've been waiting for forever to actually do something on this team." Waverly enthused. "I am so in."
Without warning, the elder Earp tossed the brooch to the smaller girl, who just barely caught it.
"Alright then. You know the plan, get in there, make us an opening, and get out."
Waverly nodded and started towards the base while affixing the brooch. Before she got far though, Nicole grabbed her by the shoulder, spinning her around, and pulled her into a kiss.
Waverly was caught by surprise at first, but quickly melted into her taller lover's embrace.
"Here."
The Earp girl was so dazed by the kiss that she didn't even notice at first that Nicole had pulled back and placed a police walker-talkie in her hand.
"So you can call for backup if things go sour." She explained.
Waverly shook off the daze caused by the kiss and nodded.
"Thanks. Don't worry about me though. I'm basically a spy already. I mean, I watched D.E.B.S: like, nine times? I've got this." The younger Earp reassuringly explained.
Nicole laughed and quickly gave her another kiss on the forehead.
"I don't think that's quite the same Baby, but you'll do great. Now go on and get rescuing."
Waverly fixed the brooch to her shirt and promptly faded from vision.
"Is this thing working?"
"Unless you suddenly got a lot better at camouflage, then yes." Wynonna answered.
"Alright then I'm going in." Waverly gave warning as she headed towards the camp.
The walk towards the camp was long and lonely, and the scenery was flat and unchanging. Waverly was alone with her thoughts, a state which had taken a whole new frightening meaning of late. However, her possessor was still strangely silent much to her relief. As such, she arrived to stand beneath the razor-wired chain fences of the camp without incident.
The entire camp was quite small as military bases go. One structure about the size of a large house, two more roughly like small cabins or large sheds, a decent stretches of open space between them all, with trucks and jeeps scattered across it. The perimeter just had a single chain link fence topped with razor wire and four watch towers; all currently manned.
"Okay, how should I do this? What would Wynonna do?"
She heavily analyzed her options.
"No obvious breaks in the wire. They can't see me, but I can't move the wire."
Waverly found herself in a very difficult situation. She was invisible, undetectable by magic, yet still could not enter.
"Well, it may not be creative, but if I can't go in, then they need to come out."
She quickly dropped her pack and rifled through the supplies. It took a minute or two of shoving aside knives, eskrima rods, and—of course—guns, but eventually she found what she was looking for: a lighter.
"I'm glad she actually remembered to pack a few things that don't directly kill people. Wait a minute, what is…?"
Also in the bag, was a bottle of Jack Daniels.
"Okay, now that is very Wynonna."
She grabbed the bottle along with the lighter. Carefully, she gathered a handful of the grass into a pile at a spot where she thought a fire might best take hold and ignited it. The fire was feeble, but a hefty pour of the whiskey helped it to take hold. Soon smoke was rising and a small blaze was spreading across the field.
"Hey! We've got something out here. I need a squad, and bring fire extinguishers." The voice of one of the guards reached her from a tower.
It wasn't long before a heavily armed group of soldiers rushed from the large structure towards the gate. The leader was already shouting into his radio.
"We can control the blaze. Watch both the gate and the perimeter closely. This is very likely a distraction."
Waverly snorted to herself.
"Hit the nail on the head there."
As expected, the front gate opened to let the group rush out. Waverly was already poised and waiting and slipped in just behind them.
She immediately dismissed the smaller buildings as options and rushed into the large one. Using the distraction of the fire still, she rushed straight through its front door unnoticed.
The inside of the building, at least the initial portion, was entirely typical of a military base. Sterile gray hallways extended in all directions, dotted with ambiguously numbered doors.
Waverly knew Dolls was most likely in a basement of some sort, it seemed doubtful prisoners would be held on the ground floor in a place like this. On the other hand, she needed to find what kind of magical warding this place had running, and that could be anywhere. Even when invisible though, opening every door would not do. She needed to improvise.
The youngest Earp dropped the bag again, considered the guns for a moment, but ultimately pulled one of the eskrima rods instead. She then carefully crept through the hallways. Despite even the largest building being relatively small, it still contained multiple winding, identical hallways making navigating feel like exploring a maze.
She was thankful when it didn't take long to find what she wanted: an unarmed staffer walking between rooms. The man in question looked to be a scientist or technician by his lab coat. Other than that, he was a short, weak looking, dark haired man who looked to probably be of Indian heritage.
She waited, stalking him, until he opened a door. Thereupon, she peaked around him to confirm the room was empty. Satisfied that they were alone, she grabbed him around the neck to place him in a headlock, and pressed the tip of her eskrima rod into his back.
"Don't make a sound." She hissed.
Other than a faint whimper, he obeyed completely. She pushed him into the room and closed the door behind them.
"Wow, the pretending to have a gun bit actually works exactly like in the movies."
"What kind of magical wards protect this base and how do I disable them?" She hissed into his ear.
"You're invisible and shielded from magical scrying? You must be cloaked by a Greater Arcanum. Early Armenian runic formation? They did some amazing things in personal protection." He enthused seemingly without regards to the question.
"Just who is this guy?!"
Waverly was briefly taken aback by his apparent enthusiasm for being taken hostage as long as something interesting was used to do so.
"The wards!" She snarled as intimidatingly as she could—not, admittedly one of her more finely honed skills—and jabbed the rod into his spine to punctuate her demand.
"Aaand obeying!" He waved his hands in the air in, rather comically exaggerated, surrender. "They're all detailed on those computers." He pointed at the primary contents of the room they were in: Three ordinary desktop computers on small, bare desks.
Waverly approached the computers. Strangely, they were all already on and unlocked. Each one also had a simple notepad program running. Typed in the program was Chinese script.
"Is that…?" Waverly pondered it for a moment. "Chinese wards to protect against spirits often need to be physically attached to a building on strips of paper. Are they actually leaving it running on a word processor constantly instead?"
Waverly was slightly baffled by the apparent technological update to protective scrolls, and a little confused what advantage it had over just hanging the papers, but regardless, she closed the file on every computer.
"That won't help your friends to get in unless they happen to be dead." The man casually observed.
"I know, but I'm covering all my bases. I might want to create a distraction later."
She quickly settled at one of the computers and began searching the files. Noting how they had kept the first ward, she began by searching through text files, however she also expanded to bring up images; another obvious way to save protective spells (or so she figured at least, it made sense on the surface), particularly glyphs.
Several hits came up nearly immediately. She attempted as best she could to decipher them using her knowledge of languages to actually be able to read them and expansive cultural understanding to figure out many of the otherwise cryptic phrases.
That actually worked for several of them. She was able to pinpoint key words and phrases to decipher a probable meaning and effect. However, given her extremely limited time frame, and the fact unfortunately few magical spells (or most ancient languages at all, although only a handful of the spells were in those thankfully) can be simply read like a book, she was not capable of figuring out many of them.
Realizing she needed to get this done fast, Waverly prioritized what she had found. First, she took those which needed countered, rather than just broken or cleared (which in this unusual, case she assumed deleted the files would do for). Not being in any way trained in magic, she had little clue how to perform such counters, but she did her best. Fortunately, several were essentially self-explanatory, needing only obvious reversals or otherwise outlining in the course of the spell how to counter it. Finishing that, she carefully and fully deleted the other files.
"That should slow them down." Waverly mumbled once she was satisfied that she had done all she could.
"Well, a little bit I guess." The man behind her commented. He still sounded nervous (and maybe a little bit socially awkward), but Waverly couldn't help but pick up a judgemental edge to his tone.
He suddenly pulled out the chair to the unit left of her. Before Waverly could even protest, he opened the command prompt and rapidly typed in a series of commands. Only moments after he completed, the computers all began opening, modifying, and closing files faster than her eyes could follow before all promptly shutting down.
"What?!" She couldn't think of anything better to ask in her shock.
"There, that will deactivate all of the security protocols. I would be very careful now, we keep ghuls here, which now have now no ruqyah to contain them." He matter of factly explained.
"But why?" She asked, curious as to why one of their scientists would help her.
"Just get Dolls out of here, okay?" He stared intently at where he thought she was (which was a little off) and them hurried out of the room.
"That was… weird." Waverly reflected. However, she didn't have time to figure out the why of it.
"Wards are down, I'm coming back." She reported through her radio, and then rushed back out of the building.
She immediately looked for the guards who rushed out to fight the fire spotted them still gathered around the scene. As she expected, there were still several minutes to spare before some of the troops on sight returned in through the gate and brought higher ups out to examine the scene. She took the opening to hurriedly dash out the gate.
After the long journey back, and after she once again saw the welcome sight of her family, she decided to have a little bit of fun.
She spotted Nicole sitting next to the truck, carefully checking and rechecking her equipment. With the utmost care to not let her footsteps be noticed, Waverly snuck up behind her and kissed her on the cheek.
"What the?!" The redhead jumped, snatching her gun off the ground.
Waverly giggled.
"Really? Not the time Waves." Nicole scolded, her smile ruined the conviction in it though.
"I'm an Earp, times don't get much calmer than this." She explained as she removed the brooch, slowly forming into view.
"Fair point." Nicole conceded.
"Well, I do believe that means I'm up ladies." Doc drawled, as he too finished checking his guns.
"Here you go" Waverly threw him the brooch. "Don't get killed, alright?"
"My dear, I have never failed a rescue." He confidently affirmed as he caught the small bauble.
"How many rescues have you actually attempted?" She asked, honestly somewhat curious, given he was a lawman of sorts.
"Well let us not quibble over the details. Suffice to say, I have never failed."
With that dubious reassurance, he disappeared from view. Waverly could momentarily see his footsteps in the grass leading off into the distance before those too, faded from view.
Waverly sat down beside her girlfriend on the grass and leaned close.
"So are you ready for this? I know you've never exactly been in something as intense as this. Attacking a top secret military base and all."
Nicole just shook her head with a sort of exasperated smile.
"Neither have you, Waverly. You all may talk tough about being an Earp, and I've seen enough to know it is crazy as all hell, but you've never done anything like this. You don't have to try to sell yourself as Wynonna, if I wanted her I would have said so."
Many things passed through Waverly's mind, ways that she could answer Nicole.
She could tell her how hard it was not to compare herself to Wynonna. How everyone else including—especially—her parents looked to either of her older sisters for anything. Whether good or bad, whether they loved them or hated them, people always looked to her sisters. Or even how lost she felt without Wynonna. That maybe she was sometimes resentful of her older sister, but mainly she just missed her.
Waverly didn't say any of those things.
Instead, she pulled Nicole into a kiss.
A shocked Nicole didn't even try to hold her balance when their lips connected, leaving Waverly to fall on her back with Nicole on top of her. After a moment stunned though, the redhead rapidly recovered and took eagerly to the kiss. Soon, they found themselves idly exploring each other in the grass.
"Well, I do believe that is a job well done." The voice of Doc Holliday suddenly broke into their revery. "We do need to hurry. I would reckon we have fifteen minutes, give or take, until they start reinforcing. That is, if I read their maps correctly."
"Well that is amazing!" They heard Wynonna very conspicuouslyshout from the other side of the pickup. "You cleated the way that quickly and scouted their maps? We are very ready. Because we were all getting ready while you were gone. Not doing other things."
Waverly and Nicole got the hint and separated. The hurriedly fixed their clothes and came around to the other side of the truck.
"Okay.." Doc drew out the word as he saw them emerge into view. He stared suspiciously, but more at Wynonna for the game she was playing than the two of them. The eldest Earp winked at them as she saw them appear.
"Yep, see? All ready. Let's do this."
"Let's." Nicole agreed with a nod.
The four of them checked their guns, exchanged looks to ensure each of them was ready, and marched towards the base.
Please read, review, and pass it along. And, of course, yearn in the depths of your very soul for Wynonna Earp Season 3.