Crow Hop (n.)

Stiff legged jumps by a horse. Sometimes a bucking bronco who is no longer trying hard to buck a cowboy off will only crow hop. A crow hop can also happen when a horse is trying to stop forward motion and the rider is handling the reins incorrectly.

"Cause of death appears to be deep lacer-"

When the words on the medical report start to bleed into one another (again), Officer Haught closes her tired brown eyes before using her knuckles to rub at them absentmindedly. She supposes it isn't surprising that her eyes have started crossing - it's the seventh time she's read through this file today alone, searching for a new angle, for any sliver of information she may have overlooked before. Three women are dead. That's a bad week for a big city, but Purgatory? That's a nightmare. And with no indication that the spree is over...she glances at the report once more, but the words have yet to rearrange themselves into something resembling English.

Leaning back in her chair, Nicole blinks lazily at the ceiling tiles, noting that the water stain on the tiles above the receptionist's desk hasn't grown. Well, at least there's one positive for the Sheriff's Department this week. The bullpen is quiet tonight. Neadley is off-duty - perks of being the Sheriff. Two deputies are out in the county on patrol. But it's Saturday night; it's just a matter of time before a drunk and disorderly call comes in like clockwork. For now, though, she's left holding down the fort alone.

With a sigh, Nicole stands, shaking the stiffness out of her limbs and rolling her neck like a runner before a heat. Her eyes clearly aren't ready to cooperate, and her limbs ache after hours spent hunched over her desk, analyzing case notes and crime scene photos. Grabbing her coat, she wanders out of the bullpen, needing to get some blood flowing into her extremities. Just this side of the lobby, she spies the empty break room and decides to make a pit stop. There's a pot of coffee on the warmer. Considering she's the only person in this part of the building and has been for the past, oh, two hours, she knows this coffee will be awful, but she just can't bring herself to make the effort to brew a fresh pot. In the end, the substance she pours into her mug has a consistency more like engine sludge than coffee, and although she shudders at the sight, it doesn't stop her from grabbing the mug and heading out the glass doors of the lobby. Perks of the job, right?

The cold slaps her in the face as soon as she clears the door. It takes her a moment to catch her breath, the frigid air biting at her lungs. Full dark has settled over Purgatory, the easy beauty of twilight having passed by unnoticed while Nicole had her head buried in case files. Reflexively, she raises her mug to her lips, the steam warming her rapidly chilling face, and takes a sip.

Christ...that's about one step above motor oil.

She sputters but manages to keep from spitting the coffee back out, a feat that may as well be considered a miracle. Steeling herself, she takes another sip. It goes down easier this time, so she continues. Rolling her neck again, she lets the cold wake her body and lets the heat of the "coffee" take the edge off the cold. Yeah, this break is just what she needed - a few minutes away from death to clear her mind.

Nicole gazes skyward, searching for patterns among the stars to replace the blood spatter clouding her vision. The night is cloudless, the stars incandescent. She finds Orion without even trying, the hunter standing strong as always in the winter sky. Following the line of stars like her father taught her, she searches the sky until she finds Perseus perched low near the horizon, readying for his ascent. Nights like these always remind her childhood nights spent in a sleeping bag in the bed of truck, her father pointing out the stars, sipping whiskey out of his flask while she sipped hot chocolate from her Batman thermos.

Her breath plumes in the cold, and she closes her eyes. It's a mistake. Without the stars to distract her, her mind wanders to the one place she's been trying to avoid - Waverly.

Shit.

Nicole loves being a cop, and working a Saturday night shift is par for the course. Tonight, however, where she is isn't the issue, not really. It's where she isn't.

Back on Tuesday afternoon, she had drawn the short straw in the bullpen and had to run out to pick up lunch for the guys over at the diner. At that point in time they'd already caught two dead bodies; they were lucky to have time to eat at all, honestly. Sitting on the stool at the counter, waiting on the kitchen to prepare enough food to feed an army, Nicole had been looking at her phone mindlessly in the half-empty diner. It had been on the late side by the time she left the station, so most of the lunch crowd had come and gone already, but a handful of customers remained. If anyone had looked at her, they would have assumed she was killing time on her phone. In reality, Nicole had been running through one of her favorite exercises - without looking, she was methodically selecting each customer in the place, recalling basic descriptors and their location relative to one another. Without looking. It's a cop habit, one that she's proud of. She had just gotten to the gentleman in the corner with the denim overalls and terrible comb-over when off to her right she heard Waverly's name.

Subtly angling her body, she chanced a glance out of the corner of her eye to the table closest to the counter on her right hand side.

Ah...Purgatory's Plastics. Great.

There were two of them: a bottle blonde who looked persistently put out with everyone and everything, and, surprise, another blonde. Both dined on salad and Diet Coke, a pack of cigarettes sat within easy reach for a post-meal treat. Figures. Nicole didn't know their names; she hadn't had to interact with them in the line of duty yet, thankfully, but she has seen them in here before, the quintessential mean girls that seem to show up in every town.

"I can't believe Waverly's throwing me an engagement party Saturday night. Like...where has she been?" scoffed Blonde #1, her tone the equivalent of a verbal eye roll. Nicole dubs her HBIC.

With HBIC having given the green light, Blonde #2 joined in. "I know right? C'mon, Steph, you can't seriously be thinking about going! I mean...it's Waverly, but she's still an EARP. And it's at the Murder House! Having an engagement party there will probably curse your whole marriage or something. Do you want to risk that?"

HBIC responded, "I figured I'd do her a favor and grace her with my presence. Chrissy is going with me. You and Sonja don't have to go if you don't want to. None of the other girls she invited are going to go, either. It's not like this is my real engagement party, anyway - we're still on for our girls night in the city next weekend. No freaks allowed."

At this point, a shit-eating grin bloomed on Blonde #2's face, and Nicole found herself gripping the counter so hard her knuckles turned white, trying desperately to maintain control over her emotions. If it wasn't for the waitress, who chose that moment to bring out the bags with Nicole's food, she may have ended up doing something she'd come to regret. Instead, she paid for the food, clenched her jaws, and shot a cold glare at the ladies as she passed on her way out of the diner, lacing it with as much authority as she could muster. It was the look she gave to perps. The lackey looked up as if she had felt the chill but looked away quickly at the fierceness of the deputy's gaze. HBIC never even noticed.

After she delivered lunch to the bullpen, Nicole returned to her desk, but her own bagged burger sat untouched. After all that, she found she had lost her appetite.

Sighing, she opens her eyes and looks at the stars again. It's been four days since the diner. The anger had boiled hot and sweet for awhile. But now, mostly she's left with a mixture of dread and hurt. It's easy to be angry with Waverly's friends for their general shittiness. There's even a moment or two where Nicole feels her anger turning to Waverly herself for keeping such company, but that thought goes just as fast as it comes. Small town. Limited options.

And that's really the root cause of some of her hurt. Even though she's been here closing in on six months now, Nicole is an outsider. She doesn't know most of these people, and although she's earning a good reputation in her professional capacity and working herself into routines here in town, she's not truly been accepted as one of their own yet. Hell, she could be here five years and still be considered an interloper. It's the nature of the small town mentality - they're cliquish as all get out. Not to put too fine a point on it, but being the outsider in a place like this, well, it's lonely. Sure, Saturday night shifts are part and parcel of working in law enforcement, but Neadley likes to assign her this schedule because unlike some of the young guys on the force, she doesn't complain about it. And why would she? It's not like her dance card is full. At least when she's working she doesn't have time to lament her loneliness.

The fact that Waverly planned a party and deliberately excluded Nicole, though...that's the kicker. Was she ever in the running for an invite at all, or is this a Purgatory-born only affair? Who knows. Obviously she isn't interested in spending time with the girls from the diner. Attending an engagement party for HBIC seems like torture poorly disguised under a thin veneer of glitter. Lipstick on a pig and all that. But spending an evening with Waverly? Laughing and drinking and just having fun?

She sighs and sips her coffee again.

Heaven.

And if the other ladies dared to repeat the same bullshit from the diner in front of Waverly herself? Well. Her jaw clenches and her hands itch at the thought. She'd take an inordinate amount of pleasure putting them in their place.

Yeah, that's definitely a motivating factor.

The ferocity of the instinct to protect Waverly takes Nicole a little off guard. She's a cop. A huge part of her job is to protect the people around her. Protecting people is just what she does - it's who she is. But with Waverly it's like that impulse got jacked up on steroids and entered the Ms. Universe contest.

She watches a plane move across the night sky above, the slow blink of a light on the wing allowing her to track its trajectory through the atmosphere. A shiver runs through her.

The world can be an ugly place. It can be cold and cruel and senseless; she sees it every day. Christ, just look at the files on her desk. Every cop has a secret, though. They all have something that keeps them grounded, something that reminds them of all of the things right in this world. Couldn't do the job without it - it's too easy to get lost in the darkness. The most potent talisman Nicole's ever seen just happens to be the smile of one Waverly Earp. It is sunshine incarnate. It is pure; it is beautiful. And it's so goddamn warm. She finds herself bending towards Waverly like a plant bends toward the sun. Who can argue with a biological imperative?

Here she is, standing outside the cop shop, a half-full mug of motor oil mocha in her hands on a cold Saturday night. Waverly is miles and miles away, and yet Nicole finds herself warming like she's on a beach in August.

Nicole shakes her head, a grin pulling at the corners of her mouth.

That's all Waverly.

She yanks the glass door open, striding through the now sweltering lobby and back to the dingy break room, where she ditches the remainder of her drink down the drain and leaves her mug in the sink. The coffee pot in the corner gurgles once, and Nicole glares at it.

That's what I thought.

Back in the bullpen, she returns her coat to the rack by the door before settling back into her chair and eyeing the files on her desk. The fresh air has done its work - her brain is firing on all cylinders again. The crime scene report from victim number three is sitting on top, begging for a fresh read, but Nicole hesitates to pick it up, not quite ready to abandon the sunshine and face the darkness again. Part of her wants to abandon her post and ride patrol, and if perhaps this patrol happens to take her out past the Earp property, well, that is just a coincidence...

She shakes her head, trying desperately to rid herself of that notion before it takes root. As a compromise, instead of giving into temptation, she turns her cop brain on Waverly. A critical part of being successful in law enforcement is the ability to read people and situations and to be able to assess and analyze them both thoroughly and quickly. So, how about a quick exercise in analysis on Waverly? Hell, maybe it'll help her get in the right headspace to delve into the players in this murder case.

Or it's just an excuse. But whatever, Nicole.

Mean girls aside, in her dealings around town, Nicole has noticed that by and large, people love Waverly. She's practically the town mascot. It's not a role she fell into easily, though. Given her history - the death of her father and sister, the years spent in the shadow of Wynonna's very public rebellion, and the general town assumption that the entire Earp family is a little off their collective rocker - it's amazing that she's as popular as she is. But it's not luck. Nicole has watched her when they've crossed paths around town; she's observed how she interacts with everyone from the town drunk all the way up to Sheriff Neadley. No, it's not luck. With the deck stacked against her at an early age, Waverly learned how to play a role from the get go, and she is damn good at tailoring herself to the people she's with. In order to survive the small town life, she became a chameleon, her survival mechanism helping her blend in to her surroundings until the townsfolk started to forget her origins.

From what Nicole has been able to observe and deduce, Waverly has made herself what other people wanted.

The thing about playing the chameleon, donning costume after costume and playing part after part - it can be hard to remember which one's real.

Wynonna's return three months ago seems to have been the shout that triggered an avalanche, in retrospect. It's like Waverly can no longer be bothered to remember her lines. She's worn her unease with the whole thing on her sleeves at times. Nicole remembers back to Waverly's interactions with Champ at Shorty's memorial. It's like she was up on stage and he was giving her her cue, but she had memorized the lines from the wrong play.

Thank God Waverly cut him loose...finally.

Whatever her involvement with Wynonna and Dolls in this Black Badge business, it's been fascinating for Nicole to witness Waverly coming and going into the station, usually with a stack of books or papers under her arms, enveloped in a new air of confidence and purpose. She's coming into her own, and watching this process unfold is nothing short of captivating for Nicole. The party thing - this is a blip on the radar. Waverly's still working things out for herself.

But when she figures it out…

When Waverly figures it out, when she sees herself and the world around her clearly for the first time in god knows how long, Nicole will be there waiting.

Another long-suffering sigh escapes her lips, and she reaches under her collar to rub at a stiff muscle in her neck.

It's one thing to intellectually understand the process, but that doesn't mean she has to be thrilled about waiting. So, instead of spending her Saturday night in the company of Waverly Earp, she's spending the night with casefiles and crime photos. And maybe having just a tiny little pity party of her own. Hell, maybe if she was better at this chameleon game herself, she could figure out what it is Waverly might want in her, and then maybe she'd be at that stupid party herself.

There's a knock at the door, and Nicole starts.

Wynonna stands in the doorway, an open bottle of whiskey in her hand, and by the looks of it already on her way to drunk. "Saturday night. I'm the town pariah with 10 years of bad deeds and social suicides to make up for...what's your excuse?"