waverly lane 🦄 waverly earp. (amazeballs) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2018-09-12 20:51:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, * kit, c: waverly lane, r * laura, r: elle marshall |
WHO: Elle Marshall & Waverly Lane
WHEN: Friday, August 31, 2018; Afternoon
WHERE: The Pourhouse
SUMMARY: Waverly has a dream and needs to talk to Elle about it.
WARNINGS: Mentions of death and demons?
Waverly hadn’t meant to fall asleep on her break before the bar opened. It had been a product of having stayed up way too late the night before talking to Remington on the phone, a habit that was simultaneously an all too frequent occurrence, and also one for which she had no regrets. She didn’t mind curling up in her car with the windows down for 15 minutes, but sleep had become an increasingly dangerous thing for her being as prone to too real dreams as she was. This particular afternoon, the gamble caught up to her and going back to work required a steelier resolve than she was sure she possessed. As she walked back inside, the place empty save for Elle as that night’s staff wasn’t scheduled for another half hour, Waverly’s hands shook and her expression proved impossible to compose. She could still hear herself screaming in the background, still see their father being dragged through the yard while Willa was carried off kicking and screaming. She could hear the gunshot, and imagine the smell of copper in the air even if she was sure that she’d imagined it. Waverly took a deep breath and then pressed her lips together, trying hard to look like she was fine. Waverly was terrible at pretending that she was anything other than what she was, though. Elle was busy at the bar, restocking the shelve to prep for that evening’s business and, as Waverly grabbed the rag on the counter to start wiping it down, she found that she couldn’t hold in her dream. “Do you remember the night Willa and Daddy were taken?” she blurted out, regretting it instantly. There was no taking her words back, though. “I mean. I don’t know. I suppose I mean what I asked.” If Elle had been even slightly more uncoordinated, the question might have distracted her into dropping the bottle of whiskey she had in her hands. Luckily, Elle gripped the neck of the bottle tighter as she recalled that night from her own perspective. She didn’t know if it was a good thing or not that she already knew what Waverly was talking about. Good, maybe, in that she had already gone over the moment a hundred times in her head before and that this wasn’t the first time she was hearing about it. Bad, though, because now that Waverly knew, what would she think of her? And why did Elle care so much about that? Waverly wasn’t really her sister -- except that didn’t feel right. Everything in Elle screamed that they were family. Slowly, Elle set the bottle down and turned to look at Waverly. “I remember.” “Okay,” Waverly replied, her voice hitching up an octave. She worried at the inside of her lip, averting her gaze for the moment while she collected her thoughts. It had been a lot of emotions for a fifteen minute nap, she thought. The dream could have had the courtesy of waiting until she had a solid eight hours in front of her to adjust. Blowing a breath out through her lips, she looked back up at Elle who, for all intents and purposes, Wynonna. Though they’d only known each other for a matter of months, Waverly couldn’t help the way she could look at Elle and feel the same sense of certainty that her counterpart felt with Wynonna. Well. Certainty and definitely a bit of the frustration that came with being related to someone as stubborn as her sister, though it was easy to remember that it was a feeling that belonged to Wynonna and not Elle. “Okay,” she said again. “I just, you know, remembered it.” She gestured over her shoulder with her thumb. “Out back. Not that the where matters just, you know, details. So you’ve had more than two minutes to process it, right? Just wondering.” If there was a prize for rambling when she was overwhelmed, Waverly would win it. Elle’s gaze settled on Waverly and she tried to settle her nerves as she waited for the other shoe to drop, as she tried to shove all of her emotions and thoughts to the back of her mind, to lock them away in a closet where she couldn’t reach them again. That was the Wynonna in her, she reminded herself, but it was also a bit of Elle. She’d gotten good at avoiding her feelings well before Wynonna appeared in her subconscious. She’d had more than two minutes. That was an understatement. “It was the first…” she started, but she quickly found that she couldn’t finish that sentence. She tried to start again. “Almost a year ago. Not a great place to start.” “Oh, god. Elle,” Waverly said, quickly sliding up onto a barstool and setting the cleaning rag to the side, momentarily forgotten. She was distressed by her dream but she was far more motivated to be there for the woman who was becoming as good as her own sister than for herself. “My first involved me in a cheerleading uniform and a super hot redhead, and--” she trailed off, pressing her lips together to shut herself up. “Right, yes. I realize this was not the time nor the place for that bit of trivia, so.” She blew out a sigh and leaned forward on the counter. “Do you know what happens to Willa, then? I didn’t dream that far. I just saw [...] Daddy.” It was easy to slip into a habit of feeling like she was talking about them when she was talking about Wynonna and Waverly of the dream world but, right not, they all felt interchangeable. She could still feel the fear of that night, and the utter devastation of know her father was gone. Elle bit back a laugh at Waverly’s dream -- it sounded so much like her -- and tried to focus on that feeling instead of on how unfair it seemed. All she’d seen of Wynonna had been traumatic in some way or another; where were her cheerleading uniforms? Her hot -- well, there was that one dream of the woods, but it came on the tail of something awful, too. It was safer to laugh than to open the door, but it was opening anyway, with Waverly’s questions. “They took her,” she stated, trying to keep her voice even. She remembered so much. The smell of gunpowder, the way the air filled with the metallic iron scent of blood. She remembered feeling broken and alone and scared that she was going to lose Waverly next, and she didn’t have anyone else but Waverly and their aunt Gus. She remembered being torn between wanting to do what she’d been trained to do and wanting to run far away with Waverly and not look back. “We thought she died, I’m pretty sure. But she wasn’t dead.” Elle remembered having to kill Willa, but she didn’t want to break that news to Waverly too. It made sense, really, though Waverly found herself having been hoping for a different outcome. How horrible to lose a father and a sister in the same night. Though, if she thought too hard about it, she had to admit that she probably lost more than that that night and what she’d lost couldn’t possibly compare to what Wynonna had lost. Waverly nodded slowly, processing her dream and the details of Elle’s dream. “Well,” she started, voice going up an octave, “...shit.” She had a feeling she’d been planning something more profound in response, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say. Sitting up, she said, “On a scale from one to ten, how inappropriate would it be to have a drink before the bar opens?” Dryly, Elle laughed. “Yeah. Shit.” There really was little to be said or done about it. Elle sometimes felt detached from those memories -- or she tried to detach herself from them, so they wouldn’t hurt so much. The truth was more that they hurt all the time, and she couldn’t shake it. Wynonna had messed up their entire family in inconceivable ways. At Waverly’s question, Elle turned to glance at their stock of liquor bottles. “Well…” she began, a slow smile forming. “Normally I’d say it’s really inappropriate, but,” she reached to put two shot glasses on the bar top, “I say it’s fine under these circumstances. Not every day you remember your big sister shootin’ your daddy as demons drag him and your other big sister away.” “It’s not her fault,” Waverly said. She could still feel everything that her dream self had felt and yet she couldn’t bring herself to blame Wynonna for what had happened. “They came into our home and they ripped our family apart. Wynonna wouldn’t have had to try to fight back if they hadn’t dragged them off in the first place. It’s on them. What did I do except sit there and scream and cry like that would save them anymore than that bullet did?” She picked up one of the shot glasses, the acknowledgement of the fact that her dream child self hadn’t done anything at all to help nagging at her more than she might have expected. Waverly tossed back the shot and set the glass back down on the counter with the smallest wince. “Not every day you start thinking demons are normal, either.” Why couldn’t she have started dreaming about puppies? Puppies would have been nice. “You were just a little girl,” Elle reminded her, frowning slightly as she thought about how helpless Waverly must have felt, and how wrong it was that a child ended up feeling like she hadn’t done enough. Elle hadn’t seen much of their childhoods, but she could tell that something had gone majorly wrong for both girls to carry so much guilt around with them. She poured a full shot of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum. She usually drank scotch, but … “You know,” she paused to down the shot, “I had a dream where I shot one of those fuckers in the middle of the bar. Their bar. Shorty’s. Aunt Gus was there, and you.” She smiled faintly. “She called him a nutsack.” Waverly eyed Elle knowingly. “So was Wynonna.” Because, when it came right down to it, they had both been too young for the tragedy of that night. Wynonna should never have had to pick up that gun, let alone try and shoot it. They’d lost everyone but each other, it seemed, and Waverly wasn’t sure there was ever an age where you could be old enough for that. Grabbing up the shot glass, Waverly knocked it back, setting the empty glass back down on the counter with a small smile, grateful for the slight turn in topic. “Well, I mean, he was probably a nutsack, let’s be honest. Have you had any other dreams?” That brought a grin out of Elle. “He so was. Most of them are.” As far as Elle was concerned, hating Wynonna for something her ancestor did was bullshit. She didn’t deserve that, no matter what Wynonna had done. Her smile faded slightly. “I dreamt about their uncle’s motorcycle. That’s why I bought mine, because it was just like the one in the dream. I, ah.” Her cheeks brightened. “Had sex with a guy in the woods. A guy who was definitely not Hunter.” She paused to decide whether or not to be upfront with Waverly about Willa. It still hurt to think about, but keeping it from her felt wrong, too. “And Willa. Not great stuff about Willa, though. She… wasn’t who we thought she was. Wasn’t who we wanted her to be.” Snorting, Waverly said, “That sounds about as awesome as my cheerleader dream. Is Hunter in your dreams otherwise?” The girl she’d dreamed about definitely wasn’t Remington, either, though Remington wasn’t in her dreams at all. “Oh,” she replied. Waverly couldn’t explain why, but she thought that sounded right, as not right as it was. “What happened with Willa?” Elle shook her head, “no, he’s not.” Yet, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t pretend. Waverly here wasn’t her little sister she was trying to protect. She was her friend, her employee. The dream stuff fudged those lines a lot, but she could keep some of it intact. She could try. “It’s… are you sure?” she asked, leveling her gaze at the younger woman. “You can’t take it back once you know. But you’ll be prepared, too, for when you see it from your side.” Waverly looked away, considering Elle’s question. Did she want to know after having already experienced more tragedy than she’d been prepared to deal with that afternoon? No, not really. She didn’t want to know more terrible things about a life that she wasn’t even entirely sure belonged to her. But she was Waverly Lane and, maybe in another life, she’d been Waverly Earp. She could handle anything that came her way, and she’d do it head on. Looking back at Elle, she took a deep breath and nodded. “All right, yes. Yeah. I want you to tell me.” Elle’s lips were pressed together in a fine line. She’d been dreading this ever since she’d found out who Waverly was. Ever since she’d seen it herself, really. There was no escaping what she’d done. She held it close to her chest for a reason: she didn’t want to see people look at her differently than they already did. “I had to kill her,” she stated plainly, looking everywhere but at Waverly. “She wasn’t… she was our sister, but she wasn’t who we thought she was. She was different. She was working with Bobo, she was going to cross the line with him. And she did, but she summoned this monster and it was either slow or fast and I chose fast and -” Elle’s breath hitched in her throat. She could feel the agony like it was her own, and she quickly wiped at her eyes. “I think I’m bad luck for everyone around me. Or she is, anyway.” Waverly opened and closed her mouth, trying to respond but struggling to find words or even the ability to process what Elle had said. She closed her eyes and too a deep breath before opening them again. She reached out and grabbed the bottle, deftly undoing the cap and filling the shot glasses again. “To hell with etiquette, I think we both deserve one more drink.” She pushed the glass toward Elle with a small nod, the knowledge that it was going to take a lot more than twenty minutes to process the Earp family issues sitting heavy on her heart. A corner of Elle’s mouth twisted upwards in a wry smile. “Atta girl.” It was the sort of behavior that Elle normally discouraged, but Waverly was right. To hell with etiquette. They deserved another drink. She took the glass and lifted it slightly towards the young woman she’d started to call sister in her heart. “I don’t know what Wynonna would do without Waverly… or Doc, or Dolls. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She laughed. “Who knew I was such a sap. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here.” Waverly lifted her glass in response, a weary smile on her face. “You won't have to find out,” she replied decisively. “Whatever happens in our dreams or in their lives, you're family now and I've got your back.” She took the shot and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth as it burned its way down her throat. “All right,” she said, swiveling on her stool to face the front door and sliding to her feet. “Let's do this.” The words you’re family now sent off a burst of warmth in Elle’s chest, and she quickly downed her shot to cover for how it made her feel. Waverly was right. Family meant a lot to Wynonna, and it meant a lot to Elle too, no matter how complicated it was. Was this how Wynonna felt, Elle thought, ready to face each day as long as her sister was by her side? Elle cast Waverly one more smile and then stepped away from the bar to open up the doors. “Once more unto the breach,” she joked, but it wasn’t just in reference to their work day. It was more than that - and would be more than that, as long as they were entwined. “Something tells me us Earps can handle anything.” |