There's always a girl, crying and helpless. In her head, Kate screams Wynonna and Waverly screams Willa and all three of them merge into one another, innocents caught in a crossfire, dark gold hair and blue eyes and a drowning sorrow none of them can ever really shake.
This is not the first time she's slammed her way out of a saloon to run to a rescue.
(Over a hundred years ago, a man — a hard man, maybe a good man, maybe a complicated man — waged a war against the evils of his world, against the things that snap and stab, steal and cut. To win a war, you need a weapon. To wield a weapon, you need a champion. And when that champion dies, a brimstone curse licking fire around the edges of their grave, you need someone to pick that weapon up and continue the fight. An heir.)
Her leg aches where a bite, burrowed down into the muscle of her thigh, is still torn and raw, but she can't feel it as she barrels out of the old Post Office and into the cold, snow and mud and gravel spraying as she pelts through the town to the little church. Kate is begging in her head, and she's turning the corner, losing her footing; she's pulling up to the homestead to see Waverly there tip-toe on a stool, a noose around her neck.
A scream splits her head and for a moment she feels the earth shake again under her feet, threatening to rip her open the way rock and soil and roots have torn apart here. She knows that scream, even if she's never heard it before. She'll never be able to not hear it ever again.
The last time someone hurt Edward Little, she tore them apart, literally, with her bare hands, and that was before the dream of the bear, the constantly simmering rage pooling in her stomach, the blind need to protect what's hers—
—The Milton church isn't large. It was built for this small town, not a great city and large congregation or to host grand events. Its doors are not the massive, imposing things of a cathedral, heavy enough to withstand battalions. Wynonna Earp hits them with the implacable fury of a bolt of divine lightning, and they blow open before her like screen doors in a summer storm.
Her hair is mussed from her run, her jeans soaked; not the usual picture of an avenging angel, despite the gimlet eyes and the fury burning through her. But she'd reached for Peacemaker in the same moment she raised her booted foot to slam into the double doors, and now her arm lifts as she marches into the church, down the aisle, without breaking stride. The Buntline Special's nose points toward heaven as she pulls the trigger. In the open, Peacemaker is loud, startling; inside, it's an avalanche of sound, rolling like thunder, the acoustics of the building helpfully pushing it along.
She takes it in: the wolf, the man, the girl, the shredded clothes cast around the struggle. Wynonna has always chafed under authority, but she wields it now like she wields that gun: voice sharp, a tool of promised violence if she's not obeyed, and immediately. "Get back."
cw: reference to attempted hanging
This is not the first time she's slammed her way out of a saloon to run to a rescue.
(Over a hundred years ago, a man — a hard man, maybe a good man, maybe a complicated man — waged a war against the evils of his world, against the things that snap and stab, steal and cut. To win a war, you need a weapon. To wield a weapon, you need a champion. And when that champion dies, a brimstone curse licking fire around the edges of their grave, you need someone to pick that weapon up and continue the fight. An heir.)
Her leg aches where a bite, burrowed down into the muscle of her thigh, is still torn and raw, but she can't feel it as she barrels out of the old Post Office and into the cold, snow and mud and gravel spraying as she pelts through the town to the little church. Kate is begging in her head, and she's turning the corner, losing her footing; she's pulling up to the homestead to see Waverly there tip-toe on a stool, a noose around her neck.
A scream splits her head and for a moment she feels the earth shake again under her feet, threatening to rip her open the way rock and soil and roots have torn apart here. She knows that scream, even if she's never heard it before. She'll never be able to not hear it ever again.
The last time someone hurt Edward Little, she tore them apart, literally, with her bare hands, and that was before the dream of the bear, the constantly simmering rage pooling in her stomach, the blind need to protect what's hers—
—The Milton church isn't large. It was built for this small town, not a great city and large congregation or to host grand events. Its doors are not the massive, imposing things of a cathedral, heavy enough to withstand battalions. Wynonna Earp hits them with the implacable fury of a bolt of divine lightning, and they blow open before her like screen doors in a summer storm.
Her hair is mussed from her run, her jeans soaked; not the usual picture of an avenging angel, despite the gimlet eyes and the fury burning through her. But she'd reached for Peacemaker in the same moment she raised her booted foot to slam into the double doors, and now her arm lifts as she marches into the church, down the aisle, without breaking stride. The Buntline Special's nose points toward heaven as she pulls the trigger. In the open, Peacemaker is loud, startling; inside, it's an avalanche of sound, rolling like thunder, the acoustics of the building helpfully pushing it along.
She takes it in: the wolf, the man, the girl, the shredded clothes cast around the struggle. Wynonna has always chafed under authority, but she wields it now like she wields that gun: voice sharp, a tool of promised violence if she's not obeyed, and immediately. "Get back."