Wynonna Earp: Poor Little Asshole
Title: Poor Little Asshole
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Wynonna Earp, Willa Earp, Waverly Earp, Ward Earp, Mama Earp, Gus McCready, Curtis McCready
Summary: Wynonna's complicated relationships with parents, sex and bodily autonomy start early. An exploration of Wynonna's early years, leading up to that moment in "Whiskey Lullaby" when the demon offers her a choice.
Baby Waverly is about the size of a whole loaf of bread, which seems impossible to Wynonna because according to her teacher, all of that fit inside Mama somehow. She sneaks into the kitchen one time and shoves the bread up her shirt, tries to imagine carrying all that around inside her. Where did Mama’s guts go? All that stuff, like her stomach and her intestines and her liver and her bladder? They’re learning about the organs in school, and Wynonna had to label all the parts and colour them but she didn’t see any giant empty space in there big enough for a whole baby. Did the doctors take her guts out when they put the baby in and then put them back when they took Waverly out?
(She doesn’t remember Mama’s belly being that big, but she remembers Mama and Daddy bringing Waverly back from the hospital, so she must have been. Wynonna keeps pretty busy at school and playing outside pretending she’s the Heir and climbing trees, so she probably didn’t notice.)
“How did the baby come out?” Wynonna whispers to Willa once. Mama and Waverly are asleep on the sofa in the other room, Waverly curled up on Mama’s chest, Mama with her head flung back on the pillows and her mouth hanging open, damp strands of hair loose and sticking to her neck. “Do you think -“ she stops, giggles, checks to make sure Mama’s really sleeping, then hisses, “do you think she pooped it out?”
“Wynonna,” Willa says, snappish and tired, and Wynonna shuts her mouth right away.
Willa is older and way cooler than Wynonna and she knows lots of really awesome things, but she doesn’t always like to tell Wynonna everything and she really doesn’t like it when Wynonna asks after she says no. Right now she’s cleaning her practice pistols, everything spread out in front of her on a tarp on the floor, the smell of the solvent stinging Wynonna’s eyes and the inside of her nose. Wynonna isn’t allowed to touch them or even come too close, though she’s been inching closer by wiggling her toes forward and then following with her butt and Willa hasn’t noticed yet.
Willa looks up and sighs. “I don’t know, Wynonna,” she says. “I don’t know anything about how babies are born. That’s not the kind of stuff me and Daddy talk about.”
“I bet it is like pooping,” Wynonna says, regaining her courage. “That’s why nobody wants to talk about it and all the ladies make that shushing sound and glare when anyone brings it up, and why people like Muriel McCarthy say it’s dirty and Jenny Leeson should be ashamed.”
“Daddy says Muriel McCarthy is a judgy bitch who deserves to get dragged behind the back of a truck,” Willa says, calm as anything, without looking up from her work. Wynonna stares at her, and after a second Willa looks up and sees her expression. Just like that Willa’s face changes, and the smile that always makes Wynonna feel safe and warm and happy comes out like the sun and the strange blankness disappears. “Wynonna I’m kidding,” she says. “And I bet you’re right, I bet it’s exactly like pooping. I bet at the hospital there’s a big ol’ wading pool and Mama had to squat over it and then the doctors fished Waverly out with gloves on.”
Wynonna howls and screeches with laughter, but that wakes Waverly up and she takes to screaming and the smile slides back off Willa’s face again. Wynonna doesn’t want Mama to get mad and so she slips out the side door and runs runs runs for the fence, heart pounding hard in her chest.
Wynonna still doesn’t know anything about babies, but she gets her first kiss from a boy in the first grade.
Her class is on its annual trip to the skating rink in December, everyone with their coats and boots and mittens all in a line as they make the trek from Purgatory Elementary to the local arena. Some of the other girls have their own skates, and Samantha Baker even has a stupid figure skating outfit with a sparkly yellow tutu that’s supposed to make her look like Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Like Belle would ever go skating in a tutu, but whatever, Wynonna doesn’t care. Everybody knows the worst part of the movie is when the Beast turned back into the boring human.
Mama gave her Wynonna dollars to rent skates from the arena, and she’s supposed to get figure skates but last year on the kindergarten trip Wynonna kept getting the toe pick caught in the ice and she’s not going to do that this time. This year she gets a pair of hockey skates, and they’re big and black and they look super cool, and Wynonna sits and grins to herself while the arena attendant laces them up. She has to get told three times to stop wiggling or the skaes won’t be tight enough.
Skating is still really really hard, though, the ice is smooth and slippery and Wynonna doesn’t have a lot of balance even on the ground some days, but she also doesn’t care if she falls so it doesn’t really matter. She falls a lot and bumps her knees, her butt, her elbows, even her forehead once or twice, but it’s fun. Wynonna chases the boys and they chase her and she ignores the wobbly knots of kids making their way around the edge - and Samantha and her friends doing graceful figure-skating flips in the middle - and pretends she’s flying.
And then Pete catches her when she’s trying to see if she can make it all the way across, grabs her by the arm so her feet fly out from under her, and either Wynonna falls hard on her back and Pete falls even harder on top of her or she grabs onto him too, so she does. “Are you crazy!” Wynonna yells. “You almost made me fall down!”
Petra grins, his smile all crooked, and Megan and the other girls always talk about how cute Pete is and Wynonna never cared but maybe she gets it. Maybe, if he wasn’t so annoying. That doesn’t mean she’s going to stop glaring, because cute boys and stupid boys can still be the same thing. Then Pete darts forward, and he presses his lips to Wynonna’s.
Just for a second, then he skates away, flashing her one last grin over his shoulder and leaving her standing there in the middle of the rink in complete confusion. Then Megan Halshford skates over as Wynonna narrows her eyes. She has custom Disney figure skates, pink for Sleeping Beauty, which aren’t as bad as the stupid Belle tutu outfit, but they’re pretty close.
“Did Pete just kiss you?” Megan asks, her eyes all wide and scandalized like Muriel “the bitch” McCarthy.
You saw him, says the voice in Wynonna’s head that sounds like Willa if Willa were harder and meaner, but she knows better. “Yeah,” Wynonna says instead. She turns and finds Pete across the rink, playing crack the whip with his buddies. He’s at the front, obviously, and cackling like a rooster. She can still feel his mouth on hers, like weird invisible pressure.
It wasn’t terrible. Of course, it wasn’t amazing or anything, it’s not like any cartoon birds came out and started singing, but … it wasn’t the worst?
“Careful,” Megan whispers, leaning in close like she has a very important secret. “People might think you liked it.”
Wynonna blinks. “What if I did?” she asks.
She didn’t mean it like that. It was a question, an actual question, like, would it be so bad? Is it really so awful to like a kiss, aren’t kisses supposed to be good things, all the movies make it look like a thing people do for fun, because they like each other, and if she isn’t supposed to like it does that mean that Pete did something bad to her? Is she supposed to punch him?
Wynonna gets what actually Megan meant a second later, but by then it’s too late. Megan’s eyebrows shoot up her forehead, and her eyes go big and her smile gets bigger, and then she turns and her hair swirls around her in a dark halo and she skates away over to Samantha and the others. Wynonna watches the little flakes of ice fly away from her blades, a growing sense of ickiness twisting in her stomach.
The whisper makes it all the way across the skating rink. Wynonna watches it happen, the girls huddled together, peals of laughter passing between them in waves. For a while it’s just Samantha and her friends, but then one brave girl, one of the ones who wears her hair in braided pigtails and sticks her cap on backwards and plays basketball with the boys at recess, she skates across to the boys and tells them. They don’t giggle but they do stare, and they all turn and watch Wynonna as she stands frozen in the middle of the rink.
What she wants to do is pretend she has a stomach cramp, skate back to the edge and let the teachers fuss over her and bring her hot chocolate so she can lie down on the bleachers until it’s time to go home. But Wynonna thinks of Willa in the backyard, standing with Daddy’s gun in her hands, arms braced even as they tremble with the weight, thinks of her aiming and shooting can after can after can until they all fly off the fence with a perfect hole dead in the centre.
Wynonna wants to run. What she does is lift her head, find her balance and go right back to skating. She skates right for Samantha and Megan and doesn’t stop, ploughs right through them so they fall in a heap while squealing and screaming and clutching at each other until they all collapse onto the ice. Then Wynonna gets in trouble and has to sit on the sidelines until it’s time to go, and that’s perfectly fine, because it’s what she wanted anyway.
After everyone’s done and on their way out, Wynonna grabs Pete by the collar and shoves him into the wall. She’s a little wobbly off the ice but her skate guards grip the rough carpet and he didn’t expect it so he doesn’t fight back. “Hey,” Wynonna snaps. “Don’t ever kiss me again.” Pete raises both hands in that way boys do when they want to agree but also want everybody to know they think you’re crazy, and Wynonna rolls her eyes. Megan and Samantha are watching from the door to the change room, eyes sharp and beady with their hands up by their mouths ready to whisper. Something inside Wynonna’s chest turns white hot and then bursts.
Wynonna kisses Pete hard on the mouth, and if it was not terrible when he kissed her, it’s definitely even less terrible kissing him, his mouth soft with surprise instead of all weird and puckered. She pulls back, hopes her cheeks don’t look as red as how hot they feel. “At least, not unless I kiss you first,” she says. She lets him go, picks up her jacket and clomps back into the dressing room.
Samantha and Megan move out of her way before she gets there, and that feels even better.
Wynonna learns a pretty neat trick that day. It’s hard to whisper about somebody if they do the whispered thing really loud in front of everybody first.
“Wynonna, what’s this?” Daddy holds up a piece of paper, wrinkled from where she’d shoved it in the bottom of her backpack. Across the room Willa freezes, homework stacked in a neat pile by her elbow, her fingers gripping her pencil so tight her thumb bends the wood. “You gonna tell me what I’m supposed to think?”
Wynonna could pretend she has no idea what he’s talking about but it’s a little late for that. Annoyance prickles in her chest but she shoves it down, and she scuffs one shoe against the floor and mentally calculates whether she could book it for the door in time. “That my teachers are overreacting and it’s really not that big a deal?” she hazards, because hey, why not. She tries an extra cheesy grin for luck.
Willa shakes her head slowly, one to the right, one to the left, eyes wide, but Willa always freaks out way too much for somebody who learned to fire a gun when she was two years old. This time, though, maybe she’s not too off base, because Daddy’s eye twitches like somebody stuck a knife in it. “You think this is funny? This says they caught you behind the equipment shed kissing some boy!”
“I kissed him, we weren’t kissing,” Wynonna says, the words sinking down into a mutter. There’s a difference, though it doesn’t sound like that’s going to matter much to Daddy. Kissing is like what the eighth-graders do, and there’s hands and not a lot of room for air and Wynonna isn’t interested in that yet, no way. She likes to kiss boys sometimes, that’s all, it’s fun, and pushing them away afterwards makes her feel powerful. Besides, the boys get to chase the girls around the playground and tie them to the swing sets with skipping ropes and kiss them and nobody seems to care. Wynonna wasn’t even using skipping ropes, and Mike definitely liked it.
“I will not have one of my daughters grow up to be some kind of whore!” Daddy roars, and Wynonna actually jumps, stumbles back. The paper all but disappears, crumpled in his fist.
Somewhere in the house Waverly lets out a cry, then stops, the sound cutting off sharp and almost startled. Where’s Mama? Wynonna wonders, but Mama doesn’t come out, doesn’t appear with Waverly in her arms to see what’s going on and why Daddy’s yelling. The house is silent, echoing with the aftershock of that word still ringing against the walls.
Wynonna doesn’t know what it means, but this is Purgatory. She’s heard it before.
“Daddy,” Willa calls out, cajoling. Daddy turns to glare at her but Willa doesn’t flinch. “Wynonna, go play outside,” she says, cool and smooth and absolutely unmoving. Usually when she gives orders like that Wynonna makes a face and says you’re not my mom but this time she hightails it without needing a second telling.
She comes back when her stomach growls for dinner and Daddy doesn’t say anything about it. Neither does Mama, or Willa, and Wynonna isn’t dumb enough to push her luck. Daddy has that smell on him again, and he disappears into the barn pretty quick after supper and they don’t see him for a while. Willa is wearing makeup, though not the fancy kind, just a lot of blush and powder on her cheek. She heads up to her room as soon as the dishes are done and closes the door, and Wynonna knows better than to try to knock.
The next day at school Wynonna sneaks into the classroom a little before the bell rings and wrestles a dictionary off the high shelf. Not the student ones they each have in their desks but the big one the teacher keeps away from them because it has the bad words in it, because Wynonna’s pretty sure anything like that. It takes her forever to find the word whore because it’s one of those stupid words that doesn’t start with H even though it sounds like it should, but even when she finds it, everything makes even less sense than it did before.
Why would Daddy think Wynonna kissed Mike for his lunch money? Wynonna stares at the dictionary for a good half a minute and shakes her head. She pulls out her gum and sticks it between the pages, then steals a pen, opens to a random spot and writes turn to page 895 for a surprise.
Mama doesn’t ever want to talk to Wynonna about boys, or kissing, or - God forbid - sex. “Oh Wynonna, you’re too young for that,” she says, patting her on the cheek, as though Willa wasn’t out back in the woods with Daddy practicing how to kill Revenants at Wynonna’s age, like Willa doesn’t come home in the middle of the night exhausted and smelling of gunpowder and sulphur. Still nobody will explain to Wynonna why sex is worse than demons.
“But Mama -“ Wynonna protests, “How am I supposed to know if I’m too young for it if I don’t even know what it is?”
Mama’s eyes go hard like flint. “Trust me,” she says, her words like bullets. Waverly burps spit-up onto her shoulder. “You’re not ready for the consequences.”
Later on, health class is all about puberty and periods and acne and body hair and the teacher watching them with narrowed eyes, daring them all not to snicker while the dancers on the TV screen chant Hepatitis B is a real bad rap! One brave idiot wrote something about sex and put it in the anonymous question box, but all the teacher says is “Very funny” and then promises that whoever wrote this will be in trouble, if they ever find out who.
(Everybody looks at Wynonna, but she didn’t do it. It’s way too obvious. She’ll bet that whoever did used their wrong hand because nobody at Purgatory is dumb enough to try that in a school where everyone knows each other’s handwriting.)
Wynonna sure isn’t stupid enough to ask the teachers, and Mama disappeared a while back and never came home so it’s not like she can try that one again. But they have a library with computers, and this is 2000, the dawn of the information age! Nobody has to rely on grown-ups anymore as long as they have the internet. The future is a wonderful thing.
The future also comes with web search tracking and paranoid librarians, which is how Wynonna gets herself banned from the computer lab for the rest of the year. But hey, at least she knows what sex is now.
Honestly it seems … kinda anticlimactic after all that, not to mention a little bit physically improbable, but it’s something to cross off her list.
She tells Willa about the librarian’s face, and the principal putting her head in her hands and saying Why in that voice adults do, and Wynonna saying that the health teachers wouldn’t tell her anything and she just wanted to know what it was. She tells her that the principal decided not to call Daddy as long as Wynonna promised not to do it again because nobody wants to have that conversation, and Willa actually laughs, a real laugh, the kind that makes her have to bend over at the waist and clutch at her sides as tears leak out of her eyes.
Wynonna remembers that laugh, files it away in her memories like a precious heirloom tucked into a drawer to be pulled out and turned over in her hands years later. She remembers Willa’s laugh because that’s the last one. That summer Willa is snappish and impatient and almost paranoid, preoccupied with something she won’t talk to Wynonna about but that keeps her up at night. Wynonna doesn’t like being yelled at and likes letting people know they’ve hurt her even less and so she pulls away. She keeps the memory of Willa’s laughter close, tells herself that soon whatever this is will pass and she’ll get her sister back.
In September seven demons attack the homestead with guns and fire and drag Daddy and Willa away. Their laughter cuts through the roaring flames and shattering glass and snapping wood, cuts through Wynonna’s skin and sticks for years and years. Wynonna tries to stop them. She fails worse than she’s ever failed in her life.
In October Wynonna breaks into Uncle Curtis’ liquor cabinet and drinks as much as she can choke down, to see if it will help numb the yawning horror that lives in her gut or quiet the screams she hears in her head every time she closes her eyes, shut out the stiff line of Daddy’s spine when Peacemaker jumped in her hands. It doesn’t. The liquor burns her throat and it tastes like engine oil and Wynonna throws up all over herself.
Uncle Curtis finds her curled up on the floor, exhausted, and he pulls her into his lap and ignores her shouting and swearing and trying to punch him, and he holds her until she cries herself out.
“Why would they take Willa?” Wynonna asks him. Her face is all slimy with tears and snot. Her mouth tastes sour and gross, and she wishes she had some water to rinse it except that might bring more up. “I saw them, they came for Willa. Why would they want her?”
Uncle Curtis’ hands go still where they were stroking her hair. “I don’t rightly know, Wynonna,” he says, and his voice is ugly and sad at the same time, like he wants to be angry but there’s not enough of him left to set on fire. “They’re monsters through and through, that’s for certain.”
“I hope they burn in hell,” Wynonna spits. “All of them.”
“Oh I don’t doubt they will, baby girl,” says Uncle Curtis - ah, there’s the anger - and he gives her shoulder a strong, reassuring squeeze.
Wynonna sees demons everywhere.
Not - literally, though sometimes she turns around real fast and swears she sees glowing red eyes and hollow black sockets, but they’re gone when she blinks and whirls around. But the seven men who showed up at the homestead, who laughed and set those fires and dragged Willa through the window, they kept their faces hidden and they could be anybody. Not just anybody in the Ghost River Triangle but right here in Purgatory, and any time a man walks by with the right height or build Wynonna’s shoulders climb up to her ears and her heart starts to jackhammer and she wants to shoot them or stab them in the foot or crawl under a table and cry until she throws up all at once.
Nobody believes her of course. Daddy always said nobody would and that’s another reason why the Heir had to be the one to kill them, but - Gus, that hurts. One time after Wynonna says “demons” one too many times Gus grabs Wynonna by the shoulders. Her fingers dig in tight and she shakes Wynonna hard, and it shocks the mad right out of her and leaves her wide-eyed and gasping.
“You ever say that word again and I’ll slap you right across the mouth,” Gus says, spitting mad as Mama used to say, but there’s fear there too, underneath it all. “You hear me, Wynonna? There ain’t no such thing as demons, and the sooner you get that through your head the better before something even worse happens to you.”
“Oh yeah, like what?” Wynonna shouts. She wants to pull away, rub her hand across her face to hide the burning behind her eyes, but Gus has her held in a pretty good grip and Wynonna can’t wrench free.
“Like they’ll send you away!” Gus shouts back. “Do you understand? You keep talking like that and the doctors are gonna decide there’s something seriously wrong with you!”
Wynonna yanks one arm free, and she pushes at Gus until she manages to wriggle away. “Maybe they should! Maybe if I get out of this stupid hick town somebody might actually listen to me and do something about it! Demons came to my house and they took Willa and we have to find her before it’s too late!”
“You don’t think we’re trying?” Gus’ face has gone all hard now, and it’s funny but she never used to look this old. Now her face looks like somebody chiselled it out of the mountains - or maybe Wynonna’s just angry and feeling mean. “We’ve been searching for months and nobody’s found anything, not even a trace. I loved Willa like she was my own daughter, I protected her as best I could and I still failed, and now -“ Gus’ nostrils flare, and her eyes go tight around the edges. “Dragged off the way she was, it’s probably better if she died quick.”
Everything turns red. “How dare you!” Wynonna screams. The urge flares up inside her to - break something, anything, everything, push over the china cabinet and stomp on every one of Gus’ stupid pretty plates with the blue swirls that she used to like to trace the patterns on when she was little. Except that even thinking about it brings up the memory of the windows smashing and the crash of glass on the floor and Willa’s terrified shriek as they dragged her through, and Wynonna can’t breathe. Imaginary smoke chokes her lungs and the fear presses against her chest and she runs, pushing Gus aside and slamming out the front door.
She finds a tree and climbs it, ignores the unsteady branches and the sticky sap that makes her palms gritty and jams herself in against the trunk. The needles tickle the back of her neck and an angry bird shrills at her from a little ways above but Wynonna doesn’t care, because the darkness inside her wells up too much too fast and she can’t stop it. At least there’s no one here to watch when she finally can’t take it anymore and bursts into awful, messy, humiliating tears.
Gus comes after her when the sun comes down, and Wynonna’s feet have turned to pins and needles and her hands are stiff. “Wynonna,” Gus says. Her voice sounds a lot like Mama used to when she gets like this, like she wrapped all the anger in a cheesecloth and squeezed it until there’s nothing left but tired curds at the bottom. “I’m sorry about what I said about Willa. I hope we find her and bring her back safe and sound. You know I do.”
Wynonna wants to ask her why she’d even say that, what could possibly be so bad about being kidnapped that death would be better, except she learned a long time ago that some questions don’t have the answers you want. Her brain shies away from it like a skittish pony and finds something else instead. “I think everybody would be happier if I got taken and Willa was still here,” Wynonna says. Her voice sounds quiet and small and stupid in her own head.
It’s easier to say than she thought it would be, but it still aches like a bruise on bone. She can’t look at Gus when she says it, afraid of what she’ll see, and so she jams her face against her knees and speaks into her jeans. She hears Gus’ sharp intake of breath anyway. “Willa wouldn’t have missed and shot Daddy. Willa wouldn’t go crazy and smash things and get mad and make everybody feel bad. Willa would’ve - she’s smart, she’d figure out a way to kill all those de- all those bad men and find me.”
Gus says nothing for a long time, then she sighs. “Wynonna, come on down,” she says. “It’s time for dinner and Waverly is worried you’re going to get carried away by birds. Guess she was pretending to be a Disney princess and scared herself.”
Wynonna snorts. Waverly’s imagination is probably the only thing protecting her from all of this, since it’s easy to convince her that bad things didn’t happen and good things did, but sometimes the things she comes up with are really weird. She scrubs her eyes and climbs down, and Gus lays a hand on Wynonna’s shoulder and leads her in for dinner.
Gus didn’t say no Wynonna don’t be silly we love you and want you and we’d never wish Willa was here instead of you, but what did Wynonna expect? Gus has never been a hugs and kisses person. She’s never been warm and cuddly, she’s even married to Uncle Curtis but half the time she’s punching him or calling him names and that’s what makes him make that dopey “I’m in love” grin. Gus doesn’t get mushy around anyone except for Waverly, and that’s just because she’s basically a baby. Still, Wynonna can’t help feeling like somebody opened up her skin in the middle of the night and filled her full of fire ants and then stitched her up again.
Fights at school help a little bit. Wynonna starts looking for them, listening for the whispers and the giggles she’s spent the last few years trying so hard to ignore. Turns out it’s easier than she thought it would be to find them: girls huddling in corners and throwing her pointed glances, hissing the Earps always were freaks, my dad says trouble follows them around; boys nudging each other in the ribs, sneaking looks at Wynonna with something between fear and awe, I heard she’s the one who shot her dad, I bet she killed the sister too and hid her in the walls. After a while the whispers stop as soon as they see Wynonna, so she has to start being sneaky about it.
As the weeks creep by and the weather turns chill and the grass crunches with frost under her sneakers, the fights do less and less to keep the itch away. And the thing is Wynonna doesn’t actually want to hurt anyone, not real bad anyway. If she fought as hard as the anger inside her she’d be sending her classmates to the hospital and that would make her as bad as they say she is, and - she’s not. She’s not. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one day, but right now that feels like jumping into the deep end of a dark lake that Wynonna can’t see the bottom of, and she’s not ready.
One day at recess Wynonna stakes out a spot at the back of the playground under the old oak tree. Most of the leaves have fallen, and it’s oddly calming to sit and stare at the perfect patterns of frost that rim the edges and travel along the veins. She presses her finger against the smooth surface of the leaf, watches as the heat from her skin melts a clean circle in the middle of the white powder. A strange tickle starts up in her mind, and without really thinking Wynonna reaches into her pocket and pulls out a pack of matches she swiped from Uncle Curtis’ drawer.
The frost melts first, turning to water in the second before evaporating in a wisp of smoke, then the leaf catches, curls in on itself and turns to ash. Wynonna stamps it out before the flame can reach the grass - she’s not stupid - and she digs a hole in the ground with the toe of her sneaker and hides the curly, burnt-up matchstick and the charred remains of the leaf before kicking over some extra dirt and grass. And it’s funny, but there’s a strange warmth in her chest that wasn’t there before, and everything feels a little less overwhelming than it did a minute ago.
She starts small, lighting matches in her room, seeing how long she can hold on and watching the flame creep down the little paper stick before she loses her nerve and blows it out. Soon that gets old, and so Wynonna moves on to pieces of paper, keeping them between two fingers until it burns too close and dropping them into a metal wastebasket. The fire helps, though Wynonna has to keep her eyes open and her attention fixed or her memory slips and she hears the laughter and the breaking glass and Willa’s screams.
It grounds her, keeps her from doing something even worse. The fires keep her going all the way through the winter; through the first Christmas without Daddy and Willa, through the new year and the star of a whole new millennium of suck, through the river running fast and high with snowmelt while Wynonna stands at the edge and wonders how long it would take to sweep a body away. But then one day Miss Hanson calls Wynonna’s diorama - the only school assignment that’s kept her interest since Willa disappeared - an aberration, and there’s only one thing Wynonna can think of to do.
Wynonna comes back from her mandatory stay at St. Victoria’s to find Gus waiting on the porch with her bags packed. There’s a woman waiting next to her and a shiny black car in the driveway. “I’m sorry Wynonna,” she says, her face impassive like she practiced all day in front of the mirror so she could talk without making her face move. “But we have Waverly to worry about, and we can’t have you here pulling stunts like that.”
There’s a rock sitting in Wynonna’s throat, but she’s cried more in the last few months than she ever wants to cry in her life and she won’t do it again, not in front of Gus and that strange woman who’s watching her with those eyes that see too much. “Fine,” she says. She stalks up the steps, snatches her bags and swings them over her shoulder. The duffel smacks awkwardly against her hip. “You liked Willa better anyway. When she comes back you can all laugh about how life is so much better now that I’m gone.”
“Wynonna,” Gus says, and now her voice cracks, just for a second, but she finds her footing. “Troopers came by this morning. They found Willa’s - she’s not coming back, baby girl. They’ve called off the search.”
Wynonna freezes, and for a second she almost takes it all back, almost turns and runs right into Gus’ arms and buries her face in her chest and begs her to start over, but that’s never worked on Gus before and Wynonna isn’t going to humiliate herself now. She thinks of fire, imagines it burning all the weakness inside her and turning it to ash. Imagines the cold March wind catching the pieces and carrying them away over the snowy homestead.
“Well like you said, right,” Wyonna says without turning. “She’s probably better off dead.”
She stomps to the car, shoves herself in and slams the door behind her. The social worker doesn’t try to talk to her, so at least there’s that. Wynonna presses her forehead to the car window, closes her eyes so she doesn’t get dizzy watching the trees flash past, and rolls her head side to side so she’ll leave a big smudge on the glass.
(The social worker notices but doesn’t get mad, and Wynonna can’t tell whether she’s relieved or disappointed.)
Her first foster home kicks her out within a week. Wynonna viciously hopes that’s some kind of record.
As soon as Wynonna turns twelve, two officers show up at the door of her foster home and take her away to juvie. “Wynonna -“ calls Call-Me-Carol, her second foster mom, frowning over her shoulder at Wynonna as the officers hold out a piece of paper.
“I didn’t do anything!” Wynonna bursts out. She’s eating granola for crap’s sake, does that look like a juvenile delinquent breakfast? “Not this time, I swear!”
She really hadn’t, is the worst part, but apparently doesn’t matter. Apparently someone in some big city office somewhere has had it out for Wynonna for a while now. They’ve been waiting with their finger on the button for her to reach juvenile detention age, and all those charges nobody could do much of anything about when she was too young have now officially been put on her record.
(Wynonna’s pretty sure that’s illegal. But as she very quickly finds out, absolutely nobody gives a damn.)
Juvenile prison itself is not so bad for someone like Wynonna, whose worst problem is attitude and not shitty parents or an abusive pimp or homelessness or a drug problem. She’s not suicidal, she doesn’t carve up her arms or the inside of her thighs with anything sharper than a blunt fingernail, all she has to worry about is demons in her head and memories that her counsellors say are inventions of her own mind to protect her from the reality of her family tragedy being tragically mundane. You know - garden variety crazy.
The other girls, they’ve had it way worse than Wynonna, but the weird thing is, it’s not their stories of the drugs or the abuse or even the pimps that keep Wynonna awake at night. It’s the girls who walk in with their jumpsuits stretched tight over heavy bellies, and it makes no sense and Wynonna won’t pretend it does but that’s what sends the shiver of fear up her spine, whether they light up or hunch in on themselves when the others ask about the baby daddy. And maybe these girls will leave juvie and get their lives turned around and be awesome moms and everything will be wonderful and fantastic and full of rainbows and unicorns but - Wynonna isn’t that kind of person. She killed Daddy and she couldn’t save Willa and there is no Come to Jesus salvation moment waiting for her.
Wynonna is reckless and careless and irresponsible and stupid, she’s made mistakes and she’s hurt people and yes, okay, she’s set fires and stolen things and caused minor damage to private property, but the thing is, that’s just stuff. Having a baby, that’s screwing up a whole entire person, maybe for the rest of their life, and Wynonna felt awful that time she tried and failed to kill a houseplant - how much worse would it be if she left a baby on the corner of her windowsill and forgot about it until it was brown and crunchy?
Wynonna is twelve years old. She’s seen her father die and her sister stolen, but the idea of getting pregnant and not being able to stop it is the scariest thing she can think of. Health class always talked about how it would ruin your life or your chances at getting into a good university and Wynonna always rolled her eyes - she was doing that on her own just fine, thanks - but they never bothered to tell her that she’d be ruining a whole new person’s life. Funny, they might have actually gotten somewhere if they’d tried that tack.
Juvie teaches Wynonna three things: how to take a sucker punch, how to keep her mouth shut, and that if the zombie apocalypse happens, she should hit up a pharmacy and grab all the birth control she can before anything else because she can find food and water and guns or what the hell ever but she is never, ever, ever doing that to a helpless human being.
Juvie sucks. Mandatory counselling sucks. Group homes suck. Parole officers suck. The next few years are pretty much one giant suck-fest, made worse by the fact that Wynonna still has to attend the worst sucking chest wound of it all, Purgatory High. The one good thing is seeing that Waverly has managed to escape the Earp curse and has become little Miss Popular, though the selfish, ugly part of Wynonna that is slowly growing and festering inside of her can’t help but resent her for it, just a little.
The other good thing is that once she turns thirteen, the school nurse finally gives in and finds a way to sneak her a package of birth control pills every month. “I want you to know that this does not mean you shouldn’t take other precautions,” she tells Wynonna the first time, then stops and gives her a hard stare. “You’re very young, and if someone is pressuring you -“
Wynonna looks at the cardboard square with the tiny little pills arranged in a circle behind the layer of hard plastic and feels an odd pressure release in her chest, as though a bubble popped and took some of the ever-present dread with it. “Nobody’s making me do anything,” Wynonna says. “I just, I don’t want to worry all the time, that’s all.”
The nurse studies her a moment, then nods. “Fair enough,” she says. “If your doctor won’t give you a prescription, or if you’re worried about paying for it, keep coming to me and I’ll see what I can do.”
It’s the nicest thing an adult has done - will do - for her for years.
After all that, Wynonna’s first time isn’t all that special. Or - it’s actually pretty okay, it’s certainly not terrible, and she wanted to do it, but she doesn’t know the guy’s name and she definitely was not in love. She’s fifteen, or sixteen, or something, and she’s at some party because she knew it would piss off the asshole hosting it, and some dick named Travis or Chad or Lance slides up to her and says, “I bet you’re too much of a feminist to sleep with me.”
“Okay first of all,” Wynonna says, gesturing expansively, then pauses and deliberately tips her entire cup of cheap-ass beer all over the guy’s white shoes. “Whoops,” she adds, smiling brightly and twirling a strand of hair around one finger of her free hand. “My bad.”
He glares at her, calls her a name that definitely is not going to help him on the getting laid front, then stomps off toward the kitchen to go ruin some poor rich housewife’s fancy microfibre towels by sopping up the mess. A different guy, perched on the couch across the room, catches Wynonna’s eye and grins, then salutes her with his bottle before tossing her a quick wink.
And what the hell. She’s on the pill, she has condoms in her pocket, there’s not enough alcohol in this shitty Molson to impair her judgement but just enough to give everything a soft glow, and if she waits too long then the first time might be special and meaningful and no, no, Wynonna really is not ready for that. “You,” Wynonna says, pointing with her empty cup. “You, I will sleep with.”
The guy laughs, and he leaves his bottle on the side table but not before borrowing a napkin from a discarded pile to use as a coaster. See, what a gentleman. “Who’s gonna say no to that,” he says, and slings his arm around her shoulders.
It takes more time to get all their clothes off than to actually do the sex, and when the guy - Wynonna didn’t ask his name, he didn’t offer - flops back onto the pillows with a satisfied grin on his face, Wynonna frowns. “We are not done,” she says, accusing. “That was not it.”
He blinks at her, but he looks more bemused than insulted, so that’s something. “What do you mean, that was not it, are you an expert?”
Wynonna hopes she’s not flushing as hard as she feels she is. “Listen, buddy, I’ve done - things, and I know how stuff goes, and it’s supposed to feel a certain way, all right? When I’m by myself I have a rockin’ good time, is what I’m saying, and this? This was pretty ‘meh’.”
He stares at her, and for a long second Wynonna actually feels a thrill of fear - she’s heard things, in juvie, in the group homes, situations like this are where guys who seemed okay can suddenly turn not-okay, and Wynonna can take care of herself but naked is not her favourite way to defend herself - but then, out of nowhere, he laughs. “‘Meh’, huh,” he echoes. “Wow, that’s - gee, thanks. Well, no, if all you can say about it is ‘meh’ then I guess we’re not done, are we.”
Wynonna tosses her head to hide the flash of relief. “I guess we’re not,” she says, all lofty and airy on purpose to hide the last of the flutter of nerves.
He snorts, flips her over and kisses her, and this time it’s definitely better than ‘meh’.
Wynonna isn’t the only girl at her school having sex, she’s just the only one being unapologetic about it and not giving people shit for their choices. If the other girls want to pretend they’re not screwing their boyfriends then that’s their business, Wynonna doesn’t give a shit, but she sure as hell isn’t going to take them seriously when they try to judge her for her own. But funny thing about enjoying sex and taking responsibility for her actions, it means that when the first accidental pregnancy hits Purgatory High, it’s not Wynonna Earp, class freak extraordinaire, it’s Becky Porter, class president and junior editor of the yearbook. Go freaking figure.
She finds out the same way everyone does, through whispers, and at first Wynonna tries not to listen because Becky is - well, she’s perky and way too involved in school spirit and trying to convince Wynonna to join some sort of social club because college applications aren’t that far away, right!! but she’s not actually a bitch. Plus this is a whole new millennium, they have clinics now, she’ll come back to school next week pale and embarrassed and she’ll skip phys ed for a week or so and be right back to normal. She’ll be fine.
Except Becky doesn’t come back, not for days, then weeks, then months, and the whispers keep coming. Finally Wynonna can’t take it anymore and she asks around, and turns out Becky’s parents - her super intense, white picket fence, Stepford-smile, sign their daughter up for fifteen extra-curriculars and set a 9pm curfew parents - sent her away to some sanctuary in the Rockies run by a bunch of nuns to have the baby in secret before giving it up for adoption.
That night Wynonna wakes up in a heavy sweat, a panicked scream stuck halfway in her throat, and she scrabbles at her shirt and pulls it up, presses her palms against her stomach. Only when she feels the flat planes of her hipbones, sticks her finger into the indent of her navel does her breath release, and Wynonna turns and presses her face into her pillow to hide the hot rush of tears. It’s the first nightmare she’s had since she was ten that isn’t about demons or Willa or Daddy - and the first one where waking up actually makes it better.
She’s half convinced the only reason she actually graduates high school is the teachers don’t want her sticking around, but whatever. Wynonna gets her stupid diploma and that’s it, she is outta here. Of course she’s not really gone forever, Wynonna comes back to check on Waves now and then, make sure she’s doing okay, but the world is so much bigger than Purgatory and the Ghost River Triangle, and Wynonna is determined to see it.
The night Wynonna leaves Purgatory for good, she doesn’t even remember what she and Gus were fighting about, or how it started. Maybe it was because Wynonna left for a year to hitchhike across South America and didn’t call, maybe it was something stupid like she came home and walked into Gus’ house without telling anyone and opened the fridge and started drinking orange juice straight from the carton with the door open. It could’ve been anything.
By the end, though, it’s a screaming match, both of them up in each other’s space, red-faced with fists clenched and eyes blazing, both of them fit to castrate a cow just by looking at it, as Uncle Curtis sometimes used to joke. Wynonna had grabbed two of Gus’ favourite china plates and smashed them on the wooden floor, just like she used to think about doing as a little kid. Gus straight up called Wynonna poison - you’re toxic Wynonna, and worst of all you don’t even realize - and told her she should get right with herself before she took Waverly down with her.
“I would never hurt Waverly,” Wynonna snaps, the fight flying out of her for a second, replaced with shock and hurt like she’d been hit with a wave of ice-cold water. “All my life that’s the one thing I’ve never done. Whatever I did, whatever mistakes I made, I’ve only ever hurt myself!”
(As soon as she says it, Wynonna gets hit with a montage of every reason why that was the stupidest thing she could possibly have said. It’s like America’s Funniest Home Video’s Greatest Hits, only instead of cute animals and toddlers running into doors it’s fire and death and car crashes and people’s lives left in ruins, all because of her.)
“I don’t know which is worse,” Gus says, and now she’s not yelling either, now she’s sad and tired and resigned and Wynonna really wishes Gus would haul off and hit her in the face instead. “That you think I’m stupid enough to believe you, or if you’re fool enough to believe yourself.”
It’s true, but just this once Wynonna really wishes Gus didn’t have to say it. She presses her mouth thin, feeling her lips tremble again as the tears threaten to well up inside her, and she wishes, oh she wishes she were more like Willa, because all those years of training, fighting alongside Daddy, Wynonna can’t remember a single time Willa ever cried. Willa had ice in her veins and steel in her bones and all Wynonna has is a bunch of stupid, ugly feelings.
“Did you ever love me at all?” she bursts out, and she didn’t mean to say it except maybe she did, because right now Wynonna feels like punishing herself and maybe hearing Gus admit it once and for all will finally do the trick and Wynonna can stop rubbing salt all over the gaping sore of Willa’s death.
“Oh, Wynonna,” Gus says. She sits down right there in the kitchen in a heavy whump, the chair skidding across the floor so the legs scrape against the tiles. “Baby girl, not loving you has never been the problem. The problem is I loved you too damn much.”
So why, Wynonna wants to ask. Why did you never say it, why didn’t you keep me, why did you send me away, except she knows the answer. Because love doesn’t fix it, love doesn’t magically make anything better, because sometimes loving a thing only gives it the power to hurt you. And when that thing is Wynonna Earp, loving her is like loving fire; much better to keep it contained, and far away from the things you actually want to keep safe.
“Yeah, fine,” Wynonna says, hearing the echo of herself that day on the porch all those years ago. An odd calm settles over her, like the middle of a storm when the winds die down and the pressure drops and everything feels still and silent for that moment while the world draws a breath. “You know what, why don’t I just save you all the trouble.”
“Wynonna…” Gus says, disappointed as Wynonna brushes past, then, “Wynonna!” sharp and warning when she slams her way out the front door.
If Waverly had been home that night maybe it would’ve been different. If she’d heard the fight and run downstairs, if she’d called out “Wynonna!” and asked her where she was going, if Wynonna had turned around and seen her big brown eyes, maybe she wouldn’t have had the guts to go through with it. But Waverly is out with her friends, or her job, or one of her millions of social activities, or whatever it is - Wynonna can’t keep up - and there’s nothing keeping Wynonna and her pride from stalking all the way to the bus stop and catching the next ride out of town.
Of course it’s not really for good, and demons are real after all; Willa’s not dead, and then she is, for real this time, and Wynonna fails people in ways she didn’t know were possible - but somehow she’s still alive. Waverly tells her that’s a good thing, and the good thing about Waverly is that she says things with such conviction that it’s easy to believe her.
People love to call Wynonna reckless, but they don’t get it. Reckless would mean she doesn’t consider the risks, that she acts without fully analyzing the situation or taking precautions, that she doesn’t care about consequences or taking adequate measures to protect herself or others involved. When people call her reckless, what they really mean is doing things they don’t approve of, or taking risks they wouldn’t do themselves.
Or, you know, maybe they’re being total judgmental hypocrites, at least when it comes to sex. In all the years Wynonna’s been having sex she’s never missed a day of birth control, never done it without a condom, never been so out of control she wasn’t aware of the choices she was making. People can call her names all they like, but they cannot and will not make her feel guilty for how she blows off steam. Wynonna couldn’t save Willa, she couldn’t protect Dolls, she’s not even sure she can keep Waverly safe anymore, but she can damn well make sure that her own sexual consequences stay hers and hers alone.
Until two lines on a stupid piece of plastic take fourteen years of careful precaution and chuck it in front of a moving train. Until she falls asleep for four whole months and wakes up to one of her high school pregnancy nightmares in real life.
The demon offers her a choice, and in that moment time freezes.
Kill me, and they all die.
And yes, that includes you three … or rather, four. Or is that what you want?
It’s a taunt. He doesn’t mean it. “You don’t want that, do you?” is what people say when they want to steer people away from a decision, not try to convince them into it, and he’s trying to get Wynonna not to point Peacemaker between his stupid milky eyes and fire. If he thought she’d consider it, he never would have said it.
It’s just - yesterday Wynonna peed on a stick while Waverly made concerned noises on the other side of the bathroom door, then she saw two little lines that made the world fall out from under her. And then today she woke up from a nap to find herself suddenly seven months along, and there’s nothing she can do about it. No doctor would take care of it now, and even if they would, even Wynonna feels a little sick at the idea. Now the thing inside her isn’t just a collections of cells like it was yesterday, it’s - it’s something bigger, something terrifying and real, it’s a word that Wynona can’t even bring herself to think let alone say out loud, and it’s too late.
Unless she turns around, wakes up every sleeping person in Purgatory, then comes back here and fires a bullet into the asshole’s skull.
Nobody would know except for Dolls, and between the fire-breathing dragon stuff and whatever happened in Kandahar to make him not shut up about it, Wynonna is pretty sure he has no room to judge.
She asks Dolls. Dolls confirms, but he can’t take the shot. It’s Wynonna who has to choose.
Wynonna never asked for this. She never wanted this, and she sure as hell didn’t expect to wake up way past the point of no return, but the thing inside her didn’t ask to be here, either. It didn’t ask to chill all alone for months in magical limbo while Wynonna slept, and Wynonna might not want it, she might be scared to hell by the very idea of it, but she can’t blame it, and she’d feel pretty shitty punishing it now. If this had happened yesterday - if she’d woken up before all that time had passed - it would be a different story, but she didn’t, and now it’s too late.
Besides, if she misses even one idiot who fell asleep behind the couch or out in the woods or making out somewhere secluded, that’ll be another death on Wynonna’s conscience, and if it turns out the spell went beyond Purgatory out into the Triangle - nah. Not worth the risk, and Wynonna is nothing if not practical.
Wynonna takes a breath, and she holds the possibility of freedom in her mind for one brilliant fleeting second - and then she closes her eyes, exhales, and lets it go.
Dolls doesn’t ask her if she considered it. Wynonna doesn’t ask him if he wishes she had.
She does tell Waverly, later that night with her head in her sister’s lap, after she’s all cried out and has made herself the same ineffectual promise she’s made a hundred times never to cry again. Wynonna sucks in a wet, messy breath and swipes a hand across her eyes. “Am I a horrible person?” she asks. “I thought about it, I really did, and I wanted to. It would’ve made everything so easy. And it’s not like I’d be doing anybody any favours by bringing them into all this bullshit.”
Waverly sighs, but she doesn’t stop petting Wynonna’s hair. And this is wrong, Wynonna is the big sister and she’s supposed to protect Waverly, it shouldn’t be like this, but right now Wynonna couldn’t push Waverly away and put on her usual tough-facade armour if she wanted to. “Wynonna, I’m your sister and I love you,” Waverly says softly, brushing a strand of hair away from Wynonna’s forehead. “If you want someone to tell you that you’re awful, you’ll have to find somebody else.”
Wynonna laughs a little at that, though the sound catches in her throat, stuck in the mess of tears and mucus. God, crying sucks. “At least I’ll have plenty of people to choose from - hey!”
That last is because Waverly yanked on the ends of her hair, and when Wynonna rolls over a little to glare at her, Waverly fixes her with a stern expression that sits all wrong on her sweet face. “You were scared, and you had a thought. We all have thoughts, we can’t help that.”
That should be the end of it, except it isn’t. That strange feeling from Wynonna’s childhood comes back, of ants under her skin or a thousand bees buzzing in her blood, and all of a sudden she can’t breathe all over again. “Hey,” Waverly says, rubbing one hand over Wynonna’s back. “Hey, Wynonna, it’s okay, you can tell me. Or don’t, that’s okay too.”
She doesn’t want to. She really, really doesn’t, but half the mess today happened because Wynonna from things, and if she can’t trust Waverly after everything that’s happened then she may as well point Peacemaker at her own skull and point the trigger. “What if I’d done it?” Wynonna bursts out. “You said we can’t help what we think and that’s fine, but what if I had? What if I’d actually found a way for the demon to kill it and I actually did?”
She’s crying again, not sobbing but just kind of … leaking, and one of her hands finds the swell of her belly. Waverly’s hands still for a moment, then she tugs Wynonna up against her chest and wraps her arms around her. “Okay, well,” Waverly says, tucking her chin into the curve of Wynonna’s shoulder. “I’m glad you didn’t do it. I know you didn’t want this, and you’re scared, but I’m still glad you didn’t, because now I get to be the cool gay aunt, and who doesn’t love that?” She pauses, shifts a little and rocks Wynonna side to side for a second, and it’s stupid how comforting that feels but at this point, who cares. “But if you had … I wouldn’t have given up on the only family I have left over a baby I’d never get to meet.”
They don’t talk for a little while after that. Wynonna can’t find the words and she’s not sure she could make herself say them even if she did, and she can only hope that Waverly somehow knows anyhow. They sit together as the clock ticks into the night, and Wynonna lets her head fall back on Waverly’s shoulder and her eyes drift closed.
“Don’t leave me?” Wynonna asks finally. She’s ten years old all over again, sitting up in the tree and waiting for Gus to tell her she’s wanted.
“Never,” Waverly vows, but then she nudges Wynonna with her knee. “Except for right now, because you’ve been jiggling your foot for the past ten minutes and I’m pretty sure that means you need to use the bathroom.”
“Goddamn it!” Wynonna bursts out. “You’d think I’d cried out all the moisture in my body by now. God, this sucks!”
Waverly stands up and stretches as Wynonna manoeuvres herself to her feet. “I’ll start heating up water while you’re in there. I think we could both use some sleepytime tea.”
Halfway up Wynonna pauses, reaches down and grabs the scrap of paper with Doc’s handwriting before finally making the final push to her feet. She stares at the paper, holds it above the curve of her stomach, then exhales and slips it into her pocket The big scary future that terrified Wynonna yesterday is a lot closer than it was when she woke up this morning, but with the demon dead from now on it’ll come one day at a time, and at least she’s not alone. Whatever happens, whatever shit the curse stirs up, they’re in this together.
But first, Wynonna really needs to pee.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Wynonna Earp, Willa Earp, Waverly Earp, Ward Earp, Mama Earp, Gus McCready, Curtis McCready
Summary: Wynonna's complicated relationships with parents, sex and bodily autonomy start early. An exploration of Wynonna's early years, leading up to that moment in "Whiskey Lullaby" when the demon offers her a choice.
Baby Waverly is about the size of a whole loaf of bread, which seems impossible to Wynonna because according to her teacher, all of that fit inside Mama somehow. She sneaks into the kitchen one time and shoves the bread up her shirt, tries to imagine carrying all that around inside her. Where did Mama’s guts go? All that stuff, like her stomach and her intestines and her liver and her bladder? They’re learning about the organs in school, and Wynonna had to label all the parts and colour them but she didn’t see any giant empty space in there big enough for a whole baby. Did the doctors take her guts out when they put the baby in and then put them back when they took Waverly out?
(She doesn’t remember Mama’s belly being that big, but she remembers Mama and Daddy bringing Waverly back from the hospital, so she must have been. Wynonna keeps pretty busy at school and playing outside pretending she’s the Heir and climbing trees, so she probably didn’t notice.)
“How did the baby come out?” Wynonna whispers to Willa once. Mama and Waverly are asleep on the sofa in the other room, Waverly curled up on Mama’s chest, Mama with her head flung back on the pillows and her mouth hanging open, damp strands of hair loose and sticking to her neck. “Do you think -“ she stops, giggles, checks to make sure Mama’s really sleeping, then hisses, “do you think she pooped it out?”
“Wynonna,” Willa says, snappish and tired, and Wynonna shuts her mouth right away.
Willa is older and way cooler than Wynonna and she knows lots of really awesome things, but she doesn’t always like to tell Wynonna everything and she really doesn’t like it when Wynonna asks after she says no. Right now she’s cleaning her practice pistols, everything spread out in front of her on a tarp on the floor, the smell of the solvent stinging Wynonna’s eyes and the inside of her nose. Wynonna isn’t allowed to touch them or even come too close, though she’s been inching closer by wiggling her toes forward and then following with her butt and Willa hasn’t noticed yet.
Willa looks up and sighs. “I don’t know, Wynonna,” she says. “I don’t know anything about how babies are born. That’s not the kind of stuff me and Daddy talk about.”
“I bet it is like pooping,” Wynonna says, regaining her courage. “That’s why nobody wants to talk about it and all the ladies make that shushing sound and glare when anyone brings it up, and why people like Muriel McCarthy say it’s dirty and Jenny Leeson should be ashamed.”
“Daddy says Muriel McCarthy is a judgy bitch who deserves to get dragged behind the back of a truck,” Willa says, calm as anything, without looking up from her work. Wynonna stares at her, and after a second Willa looks up and sees her expression. Just like that Willa’s face changes, and the smile that always makes Wynonna feel safe and warm and happy comes out like the sun and the strange blankness disappears. “Wynonna I’m kidding,” she says. “And I bet you’re right, I bet it’s exactly like pooping. I bet at the hospital there’s a big ol’ wading pool and Mama had to squat over it and then the doctors fished Waverly out with gloves on.”
Wynonna howls and screeches with laughter, but that wakes Waverly up and she takes to screaming and the smile slides back off Willa’s face again. Wynonna doesn’t want Mama to get mad and so she slips out the side door and runs runs runs for the fence, heart pounding hard in her chest.
Wynonna still doesn’t know anything about babies, but she gets her first kiss from a boy in the first grade.
Her class is on its annual trip to the skating rink in December, everyone with their coats and boots and mittens all in a line as they make the trek from Purgatory Elementary to the local arena. Some of the other girls have their own skates, and Samantha Baker even has a stupid figure skating outfit with a sparkly yellow tutu that’s supposed to make her look like Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Like Belle would ever go skating in a tutu, but whatever, Wynonna doesn’t care. Everybody knows the worst part of the movie is when the Beast turned back into the boring human.
Mama gave her Wynonna dollars to rent skates from the arena, and she’s supposed to get figure skates but last year on the kindergarten trip Wynonna kept getting the toe pick caught in the ice and she’s not going to do that this time. This year she gets a pair of hockey skates, and they’re big and black and they look super cool, and Wynonna sits and grins to herself while the arena attendant laces them up. She has to get told three times to stop wiggling or the skaes won’t be tight enough.
Skating is still really really hard, though, the ice is smooth and slippery and Wynonna doesn’t have a lot of balance even on the ground some days, but she also doesn’t care if she falls so it doesn’t really matter. She falls a lot and bumps her knees, her butt, her elbows, even her forehead once or twice, but it’s fun. Wynonna chases the boys and they chase her and she ignores the wobbly knots of kids making their way around the edge - and Samantha and her friends doing graceful figure-skating flips in the middle - and pretends she’s flying.
And then Pete catches her when she’s trying to see if she can make it all the way across, grabs her by the arm so her feet fly out from under her, and either Wynonna falls hard on her back and Pete falls even harder on top of her or she grabs onto him too, so she does. “Are you crazy!” Wynonna yells. “You almost made me fall down!”
Petra grins, his smile all crooked, and Megan and the other girls always talk about how cute Pete is and Wynonna never cared but maybe she gets it. Maybe, if he wasn’t so annoying. That doesn’t mean she’s going to stop glaring, because cute boys and stupid boys can still be the same thing. Then Pete darts forward, and he presses his lips to Wynonna’s.
Just for a second, then he skates away, flashing her one last grin over his shoulder and leaving her standing there in the middle of the rink in complete confusion. Then Megan Halshford skates over as Wynonna narrows her eyes. She has custom Disney figure skates, pink for Sleeping Beauty, which aren’t as bad as the stupid Belle tutu outfit, but they’re pretty close.
“Did Pete just kiss you?” Megan asks, her eyes all wide and scandalized like Muriel “the bitch” McCarthy.
You saw him, says the voice in Wynonna’s head that sounds like Willa if Willa were harder and meaner, but she knows better. “Yeah,” Wynonna says instead. She turns and finds Pete across the rink, playing crack the whip with his buddies. He’s at the front, obviously, and cackling like a rooster. She can still feel his mouth on hers, like weird invisible pressure.
It wasn’t terrible. Of course, it wasn’t amazing or anything, it’s not like any cartoon birds came out and started singing, but … it wasn’t the worst?
“Careful,” Megan whispers, leaning in close like she has a very important secret. “People might think you liked it.”
Wynonna blinks. “What if I did?” she asks.
She didn’t mean it like that. It was a question, an actual question, like, would it be so bad? Is it really so awful to like a kiss, aren’t kisses supposed to be good things, all the movies make it look like a thing people do for fun, because they like each other, and if she isn’t supposed to like it does that mean that Pete did something bad to her? Is she supposed to punch him?
Wynonna gets what actually Megan meant a second later, but by then it’s too late. Megan’s eyebrows shoot up her forehead, and her eyes go big and her smile gets bigger, and then she turns and her hair swirls around her in a dark halo and she skates away over to Samantha and the others. Wynonna watches the little flakes of ice fly away from her blades, a growing sense of ickiness twisting in her stomach.
The whisper makes it all the way across the skating rink. Wynonna watches it happen, the girls huddled together, peals of laughter passing between them in waves. For a while it’s just Samantha and her friends, but then one brave girl, one of the ones who wears her hair in braided pigtails and sticks her cap on backwards and plays basketball with the boys at recess, she skates across to the boys and tells them. They don’t giggle but they do stare, and they all turn and watch Wynonna as she stands frozen in the middle of the rink.
What she wants to do is pretend she has a stomach cramp, skate back to the edge and let the teachers fuss over her and bring her hot chocolate so she can lie down on the bleachers until it’s time to go home. But Wynonna thinks of Willa in the backyard, standing with Daddy’s gun in her hands, arms braced even as they tremble with the weight, thinks of her aiming and shooting can after can after can until they all fly off the fence with a perfect hole dead in the centre.
Wynonna wants to run. What she does is lift her head, find her balance and go right back to skating. She skates right for Samantha and Megan and doesn’t stop, ploughs right through them so they fall in a heap while squealing and screaming and clutching at each other until they all collapse onto the ice. Then Wynonna gets in trouble and has to sit on the sidelines until it’s time to go, and that’s perfectly fine, because it’s what she wanted anyway.
After everyone’s done and on their way out, Wynonna grabs Pete by the collar and shoves him into the wall. She’s a little wobbly off the ice but her skate guards grip the rough carpet and he didn’t expect it so he doesn’t fight back. “Hey,” Wynonna snaps. “Don’t ever kiss me again.” Pete raises both hands in that way boys do when they want to agree but also want everybody to know they think you’re crazy, and Wynonna rolls her eyes. Megan and Samantha are watching from the door to the change room, eyes sharp and beady with their hands up by their mouths ready to whisper. Something inside Wynonna’s chest turns white hot and then bursts.
Wynonna kisses Pete hard on the mouth, and if it was not terrible when he kissed her, it’s definitely even less terrible kissing him, his mouth soft with surprise instead of all weird and puckered. She pulls back, hopes her cheeks don’t look as red as how hot they feel. “At least, not unless I kiss you first,” she says. She lets him go, picks up her jacket and clomps back into the dressing room.
Samantha and Megan move out of her way before she gets there, and that feels even better.
Wynonna learns a pretty neat trick that day. It’s hard to whisper about somebody if they do the whispered thing really loud in front of everybody first.
“Wynonna, what’s this?” Daddy holds up a piece of paper, wrinkled from where she’d shoved it in the bottom of her backpack. Across the room Willa freezes, homework stacked in a neat pile by her elbow, her fingers gripping her pencil so tight her thumb bends the wood. “You gonna tell me what I’m supposed to think?”
Wynonna could pretend she has no idea what he’s talking about but it’s a little late for that. Annoyance prickles in her chest but she shoves it down, and she scuffs one shoe against the floor and mentally calculates whether she could book it for the door in time. “That my teachers are overreacting and it’s really not that big a deal?” she hazards, because hey, why not. She tries an extra cheesy grin for luck.
Willa shakes her head slowly, one to the right, one to the left, eyes wide, but Willa always freaks out way too much for somebody who learned to fire a gun when she was two years old. This time, though, maybe she’s not too off base, because Daddy’s eye twitches like somebody stuck a knife in it. “You think this is funny? This says they caught you behind the equipment shed kissing some boy!”
“I kissed him, we weren’t kissing,” Wynonna says, the words sinking down into a mutter. There’s a difference, though it doesn’t sound like that’s going to matter much to Daddy. Kissing is like what the eighth-graders do, and there’s hands and not a lot of room for air and Wynonna isn’t interested in that yet, no way. She likes to kiss boys sometimes, that’s all, it’s fun, and pushing them away afterwards makes her feel powerful. Besides, the boys get to chase the girls around the playground and tie them to the swing sets with skipping ropes and kiss them and nobody seems to care. Wynonna wasn’t even using skipping ropes, and Mike definitely liked it.
“I will not have one of my daughters grow up to be some kind of whore!” Daddy roars, and Wynonna actually jumps, stumbles back. The paper all but disappears, crumpled in his fist.
Somewhere in the house Waverly lets out a cry, then stops, the sound cutting off sharp and almost startled. Where’s Mama? Wynonna wonders, but Mama doesn’t come out, doesn’t appear with Waverly in her arms to see what’s going on and why Daddy’s yelling. The house is silent, echoing with the aftershock of that word still ringing against the walls.
Wynonna doesn’t know what it means, but this is Purgatory. She’s heard it before.
“Daddy,” Willa calls out, cajoling. Daddy turns to glare at her but Willa doesn’t flinch. “Wynonna, go play outside,” she says, cool and smooth and absolutely unmoving. Usually when she gives orders like that Wynonna makes a face and says you’re not my mom but this time she hightails it without needing a second telling.
She comes back when her stomach growls for dinner and Daddy doesn’t say anything about it. Neither does Mama, or Willa, and Wynonna isn’t dumb enough to push her luck. Daddy has that smell on him again, and he disappears into the barn pretty quick after supper and they don’t see him for a while. Willa is wearing makeup, though not the fancy kind, just a lot of blush and powder on her cheek. She heads up to her room as soon as the dishes are done and closes the door, and Wynonna knows better than to try to knock.
The next day at school Wynonna sneaks into the classroom a little before the bell rings and wrestles a dictionary off the high shelf. Not the student ones they each have in their desks but the big one the teacher keeps away from them because it has the bad words in it, because Wynonna’s pretty sure anything like that. It takes her forever to find the word whore because it’s one of those stupid words that doesn’t start with H even though it sounds like it should, but even when she finds it, everything makes even less sense than it did before.
Why would Daddy think Wynonna kissed Mike for his lunch money? Wynonna stares at the dictionary for a good half a minute and shakes her head. She pulls out her gum and sticks it between the pages, then steals a pen, opens to a random spot and writes turn to page 895 for a surprise.
Mama doesn’t ever want to talk to Wynonna about boys, or kissing, or - God forbid - sex. “Oh Wynonna, you’re too young for that,” she says, patting her on the cheek, as though Willa wasn’t out back in the woods with Daddy practicing how to kill Revenants at Wynonna’s age, like Willa doesn’t come home in the middle of the night exhausted and smelling of gunpowder and sulphur. Still nobody will explain to Wynonna why sex is worse than demons.
“But Mama -“ Wynonna protests, “How am I supposed to know if I’m too young for it if I don’t even know what it is?”
Mama’s eyes go hard like flint. “Trust me,” she says, her words like bullets. Waverly burps spit-up onto her shoulder. “You’re not ready for the consequences.”
Later on, health class is all about puberty and periods and acne and body hair and the teacher watching them with narrowed eyes, daring them all not to snicker while the dancers on the TV screen chant Hepatitis B is a real bad rap! One brave idiot wrote something about sex and put it in the anonymous question box, but all the teacher says is “Very funny” and then promises that whoever wrote this will be in trouble, if they ever find out who.
(Everybody looks at Wynonna, but she didn’t do it. It’s way too obvious. She’ll bet that whoever did used their wrong hand because nobody at Purgatory is dumb enough to try that in a school where everyone knows each other’s handwriting.)
Wynonna sure isn’t stupid enough to ask the teachers, and Mama disappeared a while back and never came home so it’s not like she can try that one again. But they have a library with computers, and this is 2000, the dawn of the information age! Nobody has to rely on grown-ups anymore as long as they have the internet. The future is a wonderful thing.
The future also comes with web search tracking and paranoid librarians, which is how Wynonna gets herself banned from the computer lab for the rest of the year. But hey, at least she knows what sex is now.
Honestly it seems … kinda anticlimactic after all that, not to mention a little bit physically improbable, but it’s something to cross off her list.
She tells Willa about the librarian’s face, and the principal putting her head in her hands and saying Why in that voice adults do, and Wynonna saying that the health teachers wouldn’t tell her anything and she just wanted to know what it was. She tells her that the principal decided not to call Daddy as long as Wynonna promised not to do it again because nobody wants to have that conversation, and Willa actually laughs, a real laugh, the kind that makes her have to bend over at the waist and clutch at her sides as tears leak out of her eyes.
Wynonna remembers that laugh, files it away in her memories like a precious heirloom tucked into a drawer to be pulled out and turned over in her hands years later. She remembers Willa’s laugh because that’s the last one. That summer Willa is snappish and impatient and almost paranoid, preoccupied with something she won’t talk to Wynonna about but that keeps her up at night. Wynonna doesn’t like being yelled at and likes letting people know they’ve hurt her even less and so she pulls away. She keeps the memory of Willa’s laughter close, tells herself that soon whatever this is will pass and she’ll get her sister back.
In September seven demons attack the homestead with guns and fire and drag Daddy and Willa away. Their laughter cuts through the roaring flames and shattering glass and snapping wood, cuts through Wynonna’s skin and sticks for years and years. Wynonna tries to stop them. She fails worse than she’s ever failed in her life.
In October Wynonna breaks into Uncle Curtis’ liquor cabinet and drinks as much as she can choke down, to see if it will help numb the yawning horror that lives in her gut or quiet the screams she hears in her head every time she closes her eyes, shut out the stiff line of Daddy’s spine when Peacemaker jumped in her hands. It doesn’t. The liquor burns her throat and it tastes like engine oil and Wynonna throws up all over herself.
Uncle Curtis finds her curled up on the floor, exhausted, and he pulls her into his lap and ignores her shouting and swearing and trying to punch him, and he holds her until she cries herself out.
“Why would they take Willa?” Wynonna asks him. Her face is all slimy with tears and snot. Her mouth tastes sour and gross, and she wishes she had some water to rinse it except that might bring more up. “I saw them, they came for Willa. Why would they want her?”
Uncle Curtis’ hands go still where they were stroking her hair. “I don’t rightly know, Wynonna,” he says, and his voice is ugly and sad at the same time, like he wants to be angry but there’s not enough of him left to set on fire. “They’re monsters through and through, that’s for certain.”
“I hope they burn in hell,” Wynonna spits. “All of them.”
“Oh I don’t doubt they will, baby girl,” says Uncle Curtis - ah, there’s the anger - and he gives her shoulder a strong, reassuring squeeze.
Wynonna sees demons everywhere.
Not - literally, though sometimes she turns around real fast and swears she sees glowing red eyes and hollow black sockets, but they’re gone when she blinks and whirls around. But the seven men who showed up at the homestead, who laughed and set those fires and dragged Willa through the window, they kept their faces hidden and they could be anybody. Not just anybody in the Ghost River Triangle but right here in Purgatory, and any time a man walks by with the right height or build Wynonna’s shoulders climb up to her ears and her heart starts to jackhammer and she wants to shoot them or stab them in the foot or crawl under a table and cry until she throws up all at once.
Nobody believes her of course. Daddy always said nobody would and that’s another reason why the Heir had to be the one to kill them, but - Gus, that hurts. One time after Wynonna says “demons” one too many times Gus grabs Wynonna by the shoulders. Her fingers dig in tight and she shakes Wynonna hard, and it shocks the mad right out of her and leaves her wide-eyed and gasping.
“You ever say that word again and I’ll slap you right across the mouth,” Gus says, spitting mad as Mama used to say, but there’s fear there too, underneath it all. “You hear me, Wynonna? There ain’t no such thing as demons, and the sooner you get that through your head the better before something even worse happens to you.”
“Oh yeah, like what?” Wynonna shouts. She wants to pull away, rub her hand across her face to hide the burning behind her eyes, but Gus has her held in a pretty good grip and Wynonna can’t wrench free.
“Like they’ll send you away!” Gus shouts back. “Do you understand? You keep talking like that and the doctors are gonna decide there’s something seriously wrong with you!”
Wynonna yanks one arm free, and she pushes at Gus until she manages to wriggle away. “Maybe they should! Maybe if I get out of this stupid hick town somebody might actually listen to me and do something about it! Demons came to my house and they took Willa and we have to find her before it’s too late!”
“You don’t think we’re trying?” Gus’ face has gone all hard now, and it’s funny but she never used to look this old. Now her face looks like somebody chiselled it out of the mountains - or maybe Wynonna’s just angry and feeling mean. “We’ve been searching for months and nobody’s found anything, not even a trace. I loved Willa like she was my own daughter, I protected her as best I could and I still failed, and now -“ Gus’ nostrils flare, and her eyes go tight around the edges. “Dragged off the way she was, it’s probably better if she died quick.”
Everything turns red. “How dare you!” Wynonna screams. The urge flares up inside her to - break something, anything, everything, push over the china cabinet and stomp on every one of Gus’ stupid pretty plates with the blue swirls that she used to like to trace the patterns on when she was little. Except that even thinking about it brings up the memory of the windows smashing and the crash of glass on the floor and Willa’s terrified shriek as they dragged her through, and Wynonna can’t breathe. Imaginary smoke chokes her lungs and the fear presses against her chest and she runs, pushing Gus aside and slamming out the front door.
She finds a tree and climbs it, ignores the unsteady branches and the sticky sap that makes her palms gritty and jams herself in against the trunk. The needles tickle the back of her neck and an angry bird shrills at her from a little ways above but Wynonna doesn’t care, because the darkness inside her wells up too much too fast and she can’t stop it. At least there’s no one here to watch when she finally can’t take it anymore and bursts into awful, messy, humiliating tears.
Gus comes after her when the sun comes down, and Wynonna’s feet have turned to pins and needles and her hands are stiff. “Wynonna,” Gus says. Her voice sounds a lot like Mama used to when she gets like this, like she wrapped all the anger in a cheesecloth and squeezed it until there’s nothing left but tired curds at the bottom. “I’m sorry about what I said about Willa. I hope we find her and bring her back safe and sound. You know I do.”
Wynonna wants to ask her why she’d even say that, what could possibly be so bad about being kidnapped that death would be better, except she learned a long time ago that some questions don’t have the answers you want. Her brain shies away from it like a skittish pony and finds something else instead. “I think everybody would be happier if I got taken and Willa was still here,” Wynonna says. Her voice sounds quiet and small and stupid in her own head.
It’s easier to say than she thought it would be, but it still aches like a bruise on bone. She can’t look at Gus when she says it, afraid of what she’ll see, and so she jams her face against her knees and speaks into her jeans. She hears Gus’ sharp intake of breath anyway. “Willa wouldn’t have missed and shot Daddy. Willa wouldn’t go crazy and smash things and get mad and make everybody feel bad. Willa would’ve - she’s smart, she’d figure out a way to kill all those de- all those bad men and find me.”
Gus says nothing for a long time, then she sighs. “Wynonna, come on down,” she says. “It’s time for dinner and Waverly is worried you’re going to get carried away by birds. Guess she was pretending to be a Disney princess and scared herself.”
Wynonna snorts. Waverly’s imagination is probably the only thing protecting her from all of this, since it’s easy to convince her that bad things didn’t happen and good things did, but sometimes the things she comes up with are really weird. She scrubs her eyes and climbs down, and Gus lays a hand on Wynonna’s shoulder and leads her in for dinner.
Gus didn’t say no Wynonna don’t be silly we love you and want you and we’d never wish Willa was here instead of you, but what did Wynonna expect? Gus has never been a hugs and kisses person. She’s never been warm and cuddly, she’s even married to Uncle Curtis but half the time she’s punching him or calling him names and that’s what makes him make that dopey “I’m in love” grin. Gus doesn’t get mushy around anyone except for Waverly, and that’s just because she’s basically a baby. Still, Wynonna can’t help feeling like somebody opened up her skin in the middle of the night and filled her full of fire ants and then stitched her up again.
Fights at school help a little bit. Wynonna starts looking for them, listening for the whispers and the giggles she’s spent the last few years trying so hard to ignore. Turns out it’s easier than she thought it would be to find them: girls huddling in corners and throwing her pointed glances, hissing the Earps always were freaks, my dad says trouble follows them around; boys nudging each other in the ribs, sneaking looks at Wynonna with something between fear and awe, I heard she’s the one who shot her dad, I bet she killed the sister too and hid her in the walls. After a while the whispers stop as soon as they see Wynonna, so she has to start being sneaky about it.
As the weeks creep by and the weather turns chill and the grass crunches with frost under her sneakers, the fights do less and less to keep the itch away. And the thing is Wynonna doesn’t actually want to hurt anyone, not real bad anyway. If she fought as hard as the anger inside her she’d be sending her classmates to the hospital and that would make her as bad as they say she is, and - she’s not. She’s not. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one day, but right now that feels like jumping into the deep end of a dark lake that Wynonna can’t see the bottom of, and she’s not ready.
One day at recess Wynonna stakes out a spot at the back of the playground under the old oak tree. Most of the leaves have fallen, and it’s oddly calming to sit and stare at the perfect patterns of frost that rim the edges and travel along the veins. She presses her finger against the smooth surface of the leaf, watches as the heat from her skin melts a clean circle in the middle of the white powder. A strange tickle starts up in her mind, and without really thinking Wynonna reaches into her pocket and pulls out a pack of matches she swiped from Uncle Curtis’ drawer.
The frost melts first, turning to water in the second before evaporating in a wisp of smoke, then the leaf catches, curls in on itself and turns to ash. Wynonna stamps it out before the flame can reach the grass - she’s not stupid - and she digs a hole in the ground with the toe of her sneaker and hides the curly, burnt-up matchstick and the charred remains of the leaf before kicking over some extra dirt and grass. And it’s funny, but there’s a strange warmth in her chest that wasn’t there before, and everything feels a little less overwhelming than it did a minute ago.
She starts small, lighting matches in her room, seeing how long she can hold on and watching the flame creep down the little paper stick before she loses her nerve and blows it out. Soon that gets old, and so Wynonna moves on to pieces of paper, keeping them between two fingers until it burns too close and dropping them into a metal wastebasket. The fire helps, though Wynonna has to keep her eyes open and her attention fixed or her memory slips and she hears the laughter and the breaking glass and Willa’s screams.
It grounds her, keeps her from doing something even worse. The fires keep her going all the way through the winter; through the first Christmas without Daddy and Willa, through the new year and the star of a whole new millennium of suck, through the river running fast and high with snowmelt while Wynonna stands at the edge and wonders how long it would take to sweep a body away. But then one day Miss Hanson calls Wynonna’s diorama - the only school assignment that’s kept her interest since Willa disappeared - an aberration, and there’s only one thing Wynonna can think of to do.
Wynonna comes back from her mandatory stay at St. Victoria’s to find Gus waiting on the porch with her bags packed. There’s a woman waiting next to her and a shiny black car in the driveway. “I’m sorry Wynonna,” she says, her face impassive like she practiced all day in front of the mirror so she could talk without making her face move. “But we have Waverly to worry about, and we can’t have you here pulling stunts like that.”
There’s a rock sitting in Wynonna’s throat, but she’s cried more in the last few months than she ever wants to cry in her life and she won’t do it again, not in front of Gus and that strange woman who’s watching her with those eyes that see too much. “Fine,” she says. She stalks up the steps, snatches her bags and swings them over her shoulder. The duffel smacks awkwardly against her hip. “You liked Willa better anyway. When she comes back you can all laugh about how life is so much better now that I’m gone.”
“Wynonna,” Gus says, and now her voice cracks, just for a second, but she finds her footing. “Troopers came by this morning. They found Willa’s - she’s not coming back, baby girl. They’ve called off the search.”
Wynonna freezes, and for a second she almost takes it all back, almost turns and runs right into Gus’ arms and buries her face in her chest and begs her to start over, but that’s never worked on Gus before and Wynonna isn’t going to humiliate herself now. She thinks of fire, imagines it burning all the weakness inside her and turning it to ash. Imagines the cold March wind catching the pieces and carrying them away over the snowy homestead.
“Well like you said, right,” Wyonna says without turning. “She’s probably better off dead.”
She stomps to the car, shoves herself in and slams the door behind her. The social worker doesn’t try to talk to her, so at least there’s that. Wynonna presses her forehead to the car window, closes her eyes so she doesn’t get dizzy watching the trees flash past, and rolls her head side to side so she’ll leave a big smudge on the glass.
(The social worker notices but doesn’t get mad, and Wynonna can’t tell whether she’s relieved or disappointed.)
Her first foster home kicks her out within a week. Wynonna viciously hopes that’s some kind of record.
As soon as Wynonna turns twelve, two officers show up at the door of her foster home and take her away to juvie. “Wynonna -“ calls Call-Me-Carol, her second foster mom, frowning over her shoulder at Wynonna as the officers hold out a piece of paper.
“I didn’t do anything!” Wynonna bursts out. She’s eating granola for crap’s sake, does that look like a juvenile delinquent breakfast? “Not this time, I swear!”
She really hadn’t, is the worst part, but apparently doesn’t matter. Apparently someone in some big city office somewhere has had it out for Wynonna for a while now. They’ve been waiting with their finger on the button for her to reach juvenile detention age, and all those charges nobody could do much of anything about when she was too young have now officially been put on her record.
(Wynonna’s pretty sure that’s illegal. But as she very quickly finds out, absolutely nobody gives a damn.)
Juvenile prison itself is not so bad for someone like Wynonna, whose worst problem is attitude and not shitty parents or an abusive pimp or homelessness or a drug problem. She’s not suicidal, she doesn’t carve up her arms or the inside of her thighs with anything sharper than a blunt fingernail, all she has to worry about is demons in her head and memories that her counsellors say are inventions of her own mind to protect her from the reality of her family tragedy being tragically mundane. You know - garden variety crazy.
The other girls, they’ve had it way worse than Wynonna, but the weird thing is, it’s not their stories of the drugs or the abuse or even the pimps that keep Wynonna awake at night. It’s the girls who walk in with their jumpsuits stretched tight over heavy bellies, and it makes no sense and Wynonna won’t pretend it does but that’s what sends the shiver of fear up her spine, whether they light up or hunch in on themselves when the others ask about the baby daddy. And maybe these girls will leave juvie and get their lives turned around and be awesome moms and everything will be wonderful and fantastic and full of rainbows and unicorns but - Wynonna isn’t that kind of person. She killed Daddy and she couldn’t save Willa and there is no Come to Jesus salvation moment waiting for her.
Wynonna is reckless and careless and irresponsible and stupid, she’s made mistakes and she’s hurt people and yes, okay, she’s set fires and stolen things and caused minor damage to private property, but the thing is, that’s just stuff. Having a baby, that’s screwing up a whole entire person, maybe for the rest of their life, and Wynonna felt awful that time she tried and failed to kill a houseplant - how much worse would it be if she left a baby on the corner of her windowsill and forgot about it until it was brown and crunchy?
Wynonna is twelve years old. She’s seen her father die and her sister stolen, but the idea of getting pregnant and not being able to stop it is the scariest thing she can think of. Health class always talked about how it would ruin your life or your chances at getting into a good university and Wynonna always rolled her eyes - she was doing that on her own just fine, thanks - but they never bothered to tell her that she’d be ruining a whole new person’s life. Funny, they might have actually gotten somewhere if they’d tried that tack.
Juvie teaches Wynonna three things: how to take a sucker punch, how to keep her mouth shut, and that if the zombie apocalypse happens, she should hit up a pharmacy and grab all the birth control she can before anything else because she can find food and water and guns or what the hell ever but she is never, ever, ever doing that to a helpless human being.
Juvie sucks. Mandatory counselling sucks. Group homes suck. Parole officers suck. The next few years are pretty much one giant suck-fest, made worse by the fact that Wynonna still has to attend the worst sucking chest wound of it all, Purgatory High. The one good thing is seeing that Waverly has managed to escape the Earp curse and has become little Miss Popular, though the selfish, ugly part of Wynonna that is slowly growing and festering inside of her can’t help but resent her for it, just a little.
The other good thing is that once she turns thirteen, the school nurse finally gives in and finds a way to sneak her a package of birth control pills every month. “I want you to know that this does not mean you shouldn’t take other precautions,” she tells Wynonna the first time, then stops and gives her a hard stare. “You’re very young, and if someone is pressuring you -“
Wynonna looks at the cardboard square with the tiny little pills arranged in a circle behind the layer of hard plastic and feels an odd pressure release in her chest, as though a bubble popped and took some of the ever-present dread with it. “Nobody’s making me do anything,” Wynonna says. “I just, I don’t want to worry all the time, that’s all.”
The nurse studies her a moment, then nods. “Fair enough,” she says. “If your doctor won’t give you a prescription, or if you’re worried about paying for it, keep coming to me and I’ll see what I can do.”
It’s the nicest thing an adult has done - will do - for her for years.
After all that, Wynonna’s first time isn’t all that special. Or - it’s actually pretty okay, it’s certainly not terrible, and she wanted to do it, but she doesn’t know the guy’s name and she definitely was not in love. She’s fifteen, or sixteen, or something, and she’s at some party because she knew it would piss off the asshole hosting it, and some dick named Travis or Chad or Lance slides up to her and says, “I bet you’re too much of a feminist to sleep with me.”
“Okay first of all,” Wynonna says, gesturing expansively, then pauses and deliberately tips her entire cup of cheap-ass beer all over the guy’s white shoes. “Whoops,” she adds, smiling brightly and twirling a strand of hair around one finger of her free hand. “My bad.”
He glares at her, calls her a name that definitely is not going to help him on the getting laid front, then stomps off toward the kitchen to go ruin some poor rich housewife’s fancy microfibre towels by sopping up the mess. A different guy, perched on the couch across the room, catches Wynonna’s eye and grins, then salutes her with his bottle before tossing her a quick wink.
And what the hell. She’s on the pill, she has condoms in her pocket, there’s not enough alcohol in this shitty Molson to impair her judgement but just enough to give everything a soft glow, and if she waits too long then the first time might be special and meaningful and no, no, Wynonna really is not ready for that. “You,” Wynonna says, pointing with her empty cup. “You, I will sleep with.”
The guy laughs, and he leaves his bottle on the side table but not before borrowing a napkin from a discarded pile to use as a coaster. See, what a gentleman. “Who’s gonna say no to that,” he says, and slings his arm around her shoulders.
It takes more time to get all their clothes off than to actually do the sex, and when the guy - Wynonna didn’t ask his name, he didn’t offer - flops back onto the pillows with a satisfied grin on his face, Wynonna frowns. “We are not done,” she says, accusing. “That was not it.”
He blinks at her, but he looks more bemused than insulted, so that’s something. “What do you mean, that was not it, are you an expert?”
Wynonna hopes she’s not flushing as hard as she feels she is. “Listen, buddy, I’ve done - things, and I know how stuff goes, and it’s supposed to feel a certain way, all right? When I’m by myself I have a rockin’ good time, is what I’m saying, and this? This was pretty ‘meh’.”
He stares at her, and for a long second Wynonna actually feels a thrill of fear - she’s heard things, in juvie, in the group homes, situations like this are where guys who seemed okay can suddenly turn not-okay, and Wynonna can take care of herself but naked is not her favourite way to defend herself - but then, out of nowhere, he laughs. “‘Meh’, huh,” he echoes. “Wow, that’s - gee, thanks. Well, no, if all you can say about it is ‘meh’ then I guess we’re not done, are we.”
Wynonna tosses her head to hide the flash of relief. “I guess we’re not,” she says, all lofty and airy on purpose to hide the last of the flutter of nerves.
He snorts, flips her over and kisses her, and this time it’s definitely better than ‘meh’.
Wynonna isn’t the only girl at her school having sex, she’s just the only one being unapologetic about it and not giving people shit for their choices. If the other girls want to pretend they’re not screwing their boyfriends then that’s their business, Wynonna doesn’t give a shit, but she sure as hell isn’t going to take them seriously when they try to judge her for her own. But funny thing about enjoying sex and taking responsibility for her actions, it means that when the first accidental pregnancy hits Purgatory High, it’s not Wynonna Earp, class freak extraordinaire, it’s Becky Porter, class president and junior editor of the yearbook. Go freaking figure.
She finds out the same way everyone does, through whispers, and at first Wynonna tries not to listen because Becky is - well, she’s perky and way too involved in school spirit and trying to convince Wynonna to join some sort of social club because college applications aren’t that far away, right!! but she’s not actually a bitch. Plus this is a whole new millennium, they have clinics now, she’ll come back to school next week pale and embarrassed and she’ll skip phys ed for a week or so and be right back to normal. She’ll be fine.
Except Becky doesn’t come back, not for days, then weeks, then months, and the whispers keep coming. Finally Wynonna can’t take it anymore and she asks around, and turns out Becky’s parents - her super intense, white picket fence, Stepford-smile, sign their daughter up for fifteen extra-curriculars and set a 9pm curfew parents - sent her away to some sanctuary in the Rockies run by a bunch of nuns to have the baby in secret before giving it up for adoption.
That night Wynonna wakes up in a heavy sweat, a panicked scream stuck halfway in her throat, and she scrabbles at her shirt and pulls it up, presses her palms against her stomach. Only when she feels the flat planes of her hipbones, sticks her finger into the indent of her navel does her breath release, and Wynonna turns and presses her face into her pillow to hide the hot rush of tears. It’s the first nightmare she’s had since she was ten that isn’t about demons or Willa or Daddy - and the first one where waking up actually makes it better.
She’s half convinced the only reason she actually graduates high school is the teachers don’t want her sticking around, but whatever. Wynonna gets her stupid diploma and that’s it, she is outta here. Of course she’s not really gone forever, Wynonna comes back to check on Waves now and then, make sure she’s doing okay, but the world is so much bigger than Purgatory and the Ghost River Triangle, and Wynonna is determined to see it.
The night Wynonna leaves Purgatory for good, she doesn’t even remember what she and Gus were fighting about, or how it started. Maybe it was because Wynonna left for a year to hitchhike across South America and didn’t call, maybe it was something stupid like she came home and walked into Gus’ house without telling anyone and opened the fridge and started drinking orange juice straight from the carton with the door open. It could’ve been anything.
By the end, though, it’s a screaming match, both of them up in each other’s space, red-faced with fists clenched and eyes blazing, both of them fit to castrate a cow just by looking at it, as Uncle Curtis sometimes used to joke. Wynonna had grabbed two of Gus’ favourite china plates and smashed them on the wooden floor, just like she used to think about doing as a little kid. Gus straight up called Wynonna poison - you’re toxic Wynonna, and worst of all you don’t even realize - and told her she should get right with herself before she took Waverly down with her.
“I would never hurt Waverly,” Wynonna snaps, the fight flying out of her for a second, replaced with shock and hurt like she’d been hit with a wave of ice-cold water. “All my life that’s the one thing I’ve never done. Whatever I did, whatever mistakes I made, I’ve only ever hurt myself!”
(As soon as she says it, Wynonna gets hit with a montage of every reason why that was the stupidest thing she could possibly have said. It’s like America’s Funniest Home Video’s Greatest Hits, only instead of cute animals and toddlers running into doors it’s fire and death and car crashes and people’s lives left in ruins, all because of her.)
“I don’t know which is worse,” Gus says, and now she’s not yelling either, now she’s sad and tired and resigned and Wynonna really wishes Gus would haul off and hit her in the face instead. “That you think I’m stupid enough to believe you, or if you’re fool enough to believe yourself.”
It’s true, but just this once Wynonna really wishes Gus didn’t have to say it. She presses her mouth thin, feeling her lips tremble again as the tears threaten to well up inside her, and she wishes, oh she wishes she were more like Willa, because all those years of training, fighting alongside Daddy, Wynonna can’t remember a single time Willa ever cried. Willa had ice in her veins and steel in her bones and all Wynonna has is a bunch of stupid, ugly feelings.
“Did you ever love me at all?” she bursts out, and she didn’t mean to say it except maybe she did, because right now Wynonna feels like punishing herself and maybe hearing Gus admit it once and for all will finally do the trick and Wynonna can stop rubbing salt all over the gaping sore of Willa’s death.
“Oh, Wynonna,” Gus says. She sits down right there in the kitchen in a heavy whump, the chair skidding across the floor so the legs scrape against the tiles. “Baby girl, not loving you has never been the problem. The problem is I loved you too damn much.”
So why, Wynonna wants to ask. Why did you never say it, why didn’t you keep me, why did you send me away, except she knows the answer. Because love doesn’t fix it, love doesn’t magically make anything better, because sometimes loving a thing only gives it the power to hurt you. And when that thing is Wynonna Earp, loving her is like loving fire; much better to keep it contained, and far away from the things you actually want to keep safe.
“Yeah, fine,” Wynonna says, hearing the echo of herself that day on the porch all those years ago. An odd calm settles over her, like the middle of a storm when the winds die down and the pressure drops and everything feels still and silent for that moment while the world draws a breath. “You know what, why don’t I just save you all the trouble.”
“Wynonna…” Gus says, disappointed as Wynonna brushes past, then, “Wynonna!” sharp and warning when she slams her way out the front door.
If Waverly had been home that night maybe it would’ve been different. If she’d heard the fight and run downstairs, if she’d called out “Wynonna!” and asked her where she was going, if Wynonna had turned around and seen her big brown eyes, maybe she wouldn’t have had the guts to go through with it. But Waverly is out with her friends, or her job, or one of her millions of social activities, or whatever it is - Wynonna can’t keep up - and there’s nothing keeping Wynonna and her pride from stalking all the way to the bus stop and catching the next ride out of town.
Of course it’s not really for good, and demons are real after all; Willa’s not dead, and then she is, for real this time, and Wynonna fails people in ways she didn’t know were possible - but somehow she’s still alive. Waverly tells her that’s a good thing, and the good thing about Waverly is that she says things with such conviction that it’s easy to believe her.
People love to call Wynonna reckless, but they don’t get it. Reckless would mean she doesn’t consider the risks, that she acts without fully analyzing the situation or taking precautions, that she doesn’t care about consequences or taking adequate measures to protect herself or others involved. When people call her reckless, what they really mean is doing things they don’t approve of, or taking risks they wouldn’t do themselves.
Or, you know, maybe they’re being total judgmental hypocrites, at least when it comes to sex. In all the years Wynonna’s been having sex she’s never missed a day of birth control, never done it without a condom, never been so out of control she wasn’t aware of the choices she was making. People can call her names all they like, but they cannot and will not make her feel guilty for how she blows off steam. Wynonna couldn’t save Willa, she couldn’t protect Dolls, she’s not even sure she can keep Waverly safe anymore, but she can damn well make sure that her own sexual consequences stay hers and hers alone.
Until two lines on a stupid piece of plastic take fourteen years of careful precaution and chuck it in front of a moving train. Until she falls asleep for four whole months and wakes up to one of her high school pregnancy nightmares in real life.
The demon offers her a choice, and in that moment time freezes.
Kill me, and they all die.
And yes, that includes you three … or rather, four. Or is that what you want?
It’s a taunt. He doesn’t mean it. “You don’t want that, do you?” is what people say when they want to steer people away from a decision, not try to convince them into it, and he’s trying to get Wynonna not to point Peacemaker between his stupid milky eyes and fire. If he thought she’d consider it, he never would have said it.
It’s just - yesterday Wynonna peed on a stick while Waverly made concerned noises on the other side of the bathroom door, then she saw two little lines that made the world fall out from under her. And then today she woke up from a nap to find herself suddenly seven months along, and there’s nothing she can do about it. No doctor would take care of it now, and even if they would, even Wynonna feels a little sick at the idea. Now the thing inside her isn’t just a collections of cells like it was yesterday, it’s - it’s something bigger, something terrifying and real, it’s a word that Wynona can’t even bring herself to think let alone say out loud, and it’s too late.
Unless she turns around, wakes up every sleeping person in Purgatory, then comes back here and fires a bullet into the asshole’s skull.
Nobody would know except for Dolls, and between the fire-breathing dragon stuff and whatever happened in Kandahar to make him not shut up about it, Wynonna is pretty sure he has no room to judge.
She asks Dolls. Dolls confirms, but he can’t take the shot. It’s Wynonna who has to choose.
Wynonna never asked for this. She never wanted this, and she sure as hell didn’t expect to wake up way past the point of no return, but the thing inside her didn’t ask to be here, either. It didn’t ask to chill all alone for months in magical limbo while Wynonna slept, and Wynonna might not want it, she might be scared to hell by the very idea of it, but she can’t blame it, and she’d feel pretty shitty punishing it now. If this had happened yesterday - if she’d woken up before all that time had passed - it would be a different story, but she didn’t, and now it’s too late.
Besides, if she misses even one idiot who fell asleep behind the couch or out in the woods or making out somewhere secluded, that’ll be another death on Wynonna’s conscience, and if it turns out the spell went beyond Purgatory out into the Triangle - nah. Not worth the risk, and Wynonna is nothing if not practical.
Wynonna takes a breath, and she holds the possibility of freedom in her mind for one brilliant fleeting second - and then she closes her eyes, exhales, and lets it go.
Dolls doesn’t ask her if she considered it. Wynonna doesn’t ask him if he wishes she had.
She does tell Waverly, later that night with her head in her sister’s lap, after she’s all cried out and has made herself the same ineffectual promise she’s made a hundred times never to cry again. Wynonna sucks in a wet, messy breath and swipes a hand across her eyes. “Am I a horrible person?” she asks. “I thought about it, I really did, and I wanted to. It would’ve made everything so easy. And it’s not like I’d be doing anybody any favours by bringing them into all this bullshit.”
Waverly sighs, but she doesn’t stop petting Wynonna’s hair. And this is wrong, Wynonna is the big sister and she’s supposed to protect Waverly, it shouldn’t be like this, but right now Wynonna couldn’t push Waverly away and put on her usual tough-facade armour if she wanted to. “Wynonna, I’m your sister and I love you,” Waverly says softly, brushing a strand of hair away from Wynonna’s forehead. “If you want someone to tell you that you’re awful, you’ll have to find somebody else.”
Wynonna laughs a little at that, though the sound catches in her throat, stuck in the mess of tears and mucus. God, crying sucks. “At least I’ll have plenty of people to choose from - hey!”
That last is because Waverly yanked on the ends of her hair, and when Wynonna rolls over a little to glare at her, Waverly fixes her with a stern expression that sits all wrong on her sweet face. “You were scared, and you had a thought. We all have thoughts, we can’t help that.”
That should be the end of it, except it isn’t. That strange feeling from Wynonna’s childhood comes back, of ants under her skin or a thousand bees buzzing in her blood, and all of a sudden she can’t breathe all over again. “Hey,” Waverly says, rubbing one hand over Wynonna’s back. “Hey, Wynonna, it’s okay, you can tell me. Or don’t, that’s okay too.”
She doesn’t want to. She really, really doesn’t, but half the mess today happened because Wynonna from things, and if she can’t trust Waverly after everything that’s happened then she may as well point Peacemaker at her own skull and point the trigger. “What if I’d done it?” Wynonna bursts out. “You said we can’t help what we think and that’s fine, but what if I had? What if I’d actually found a way for the demon to kill it and I actually did?”
She’s crying again, not sobbing but just kind of … leaking, and one of her hands finds the swell of her belly. Waverly’s hands still for a moment, then she tugs Wynonna up against her chest and wraps her arms around her. “Okay, well,” Waverly says, tucking her chin into the curve of Wynonna’s shoulder. “I’m glad you didn’t do it. I know you didn’t want this, and you’re scared, but I’m still glad you didn’t, because now I get to be the cool gay aunt, and who doesn’t love that?” She pauses, shifts a little and rocks Wynonna side to side for a second, and it’s stupid how comforting that feels but at this point, who cares. “But if you had … I wouldn’t have given up on the only family I have left over a baby I’d never get to meet.”
They don’t talk for a little while after that. Wynonna can’t find the words and she’s not sure she could make herself say them even if she did, and she can only hope that Waverly somehow knows anyhow. They sit together as the clock ticks into the night, and Wynonna lets her head fall back on Waverly’s shoulder and her eyes drift closed.
“Don’t leave me?” Wynonna asks finally. She’s ten years old all over again, sitting up in the tree and waiting for Gus to tell her she’s wanted.
“Never,” Waverly vows, but then she nudges Wynonna with her knee. “Except for right now, because you’ve been jiggling your foot for the past ten minutes and I’m pretty sure that means you need to use the bathroom.”
“Goddamn it!” Wynonna bursts out. “You’d think I’d cried out all the moisture in my body by now. God, this sucks!”
Waverly stands up and stretches as Wynonna manoeuvres herself to her feet. “I’ll start heating up water while you’re in there. I think we could both use some sleepytime tea.”
Halfway up Wynonna pauses, reaches down and grabs the scrap of paper with Doc’s handwriting before finally making the final push to her feet. She stares at the paper, holds it above the curve of her stomach, then exhales and slips it into her pocket The big scary future that terrified Wynonna yesterday is a lot closer than it was when she woke up this morning, but with the demon dead from now on it’ll come one day at a time, and at least she’s not alone. Whatever happens, whatever shit the curse stirs up, they’re in this together.
But first, Wynonna really needs to pee.