Chapter Text
“We’d been having really bad flashbacks,” Nancy explains on an EMT’s borrowed cell phone, letting the tears into her voice. Behind the ambulances, the warped, wet wood of Badham Preschool slowly burns, sending thick plumes of smoke up into the chill October air. “Neither of us could sleep, and we ended up thinking that maybe if we just burned the school down, it would help us. Be cathartic.”
“Oh, sweetie,” her mother says. She sounds anguished, Nancy notes distantly.
“And then… he was there, Mom. He had some burns, but he was alive. He’d survived and disguised himself and gotten a whole new identity. He said he’d been drugging us so we’d hallucinate. Killing our classmates. H-he tried to kill us, too.” It’s a story backed up by the presence of a horribly wounded dead body and DNA evidence, a story that will hold up as long as no grownups look too closely. Somehow, Nancy doesn’t think they will.
“Baby. This should never have happened- we failed you. I’m so sorry. We all failed you. All of you.” She sounds close to tears.
The last thing Nancy wants is to comfort her own mother right now. She has the energy for maybe two things, namely taking some painkillers and listening to Quentin’s still-beating heart while they share a rough blanket.
“Mom, I need to go, I don’t feel well enough to talk. My head really hurts… we crashed the car.” It’s not a matter of faking pain, because she is in pain. All she has to do is stop blocking out the agony that she’s already feeling. Let herself be aware of the stinging cuts on her legs and arms, the way her heavy head throbs. The way her own heart is pounding, so aware of how close it came to being permanently stilled.
“Okay, but the minute you get to the hospital-“
Inside the first parked ambulance, Quentin screams. She doesn’t bother ending the call or dropping the phone. Just runs. Adrenaline floods her tired body- she shoves through police officers and firefighters and vaults into the back of the ambulance.
If I lied to him, told him the nightmare was over when it wasn’t, if we aren’t safe-
If Quentin is dead, she wants to die, too.
Pushing paramedics aside, slapping at their prying hands, she hauls herself onto the gurney. Her hands shake as she frantically feels Quentin’s pale throat, his soft stomach, his chest. No cuts. That means nothing. There’s a million ways Freddy can kill.
It takes a few moments for her brain to catch up with her senses. Quentin’s got his hands around her own, his bleary eyes open: “Nancy, it’s okay, it’s okay, I’m alive.” Then he shudders, all his muscles tensing, and gasps like he can’t even find the air to scream.
She doesn’t want any of these people to touch him, puts her body between the uniformed strangers and her helpless Quentin. “What’s wrong with him?” What’s wrong with you, she wants to say, why haven’t you helped him, what is your fucking deal?
One of them replies. The mouth noises don’t add up into words. Her eyes flicker shut, open again. The walls of the ambulance are made of newsprint. The oxygen nozzles are the bones of snakes. She slaps herself upside the head. Get it together, Nancy. Fuck. Although she’s too tired for anything to make sense, and everything is overwhelming, she doesn’t want to sleep until she knows he’s safe.
“The spiders. The jar of spiders… they were black widows. Apparently people don’t die unless they’re immunocompromised or really young or old, but it was a lot of spiders. They said the hospital has antivenom just in case.”
“The sooner you move- we can get him strapped in and head out,” says an EMT with, she is fairly sure, a human face.
“Okay. But I’m not leaving him.”
They don’t make her leave. One less adult she has to fight. Quentin’s still miserable, though; his pale face all sweaty, his body tense.
“It’s okay. Just keep breathing. That’s pretty easy, right?”
“In comparison, yeah,” he chokes out, wincing on a laugh.
Nancy ends up unstrapping herself from the padded seat to sit on the edge of the gurney, gripping the plastic tightly. We’re alive, she reminds herself. We’re alive, we’re alive. She doesn’t have to watch herself from some outer vantage point.
“You can get closer. If you want.”
She does want. What she wants is to cling to him, their limbs entwined, her head tucked just under his. “Is this okay?”
He nods against her hair.
And she can feel when the venom hits him, feel his body arch and his muscles tighten, the way his jaw clenches as he tries not to scream- but they can be white-knuckled and miserable together. She would take all of his pain, if she could.
The ambulance stops and they’re getting unloaded, and people are bustling around them, and the paper-pale sky is so fucking bright, and Quentin’s parents are shouting, and someone with cold fingers is touching her arm. Go away, she wants to tell all of them. You can’t help, you couldn’t help, leave us alone. But that requires energy she doesn’t have. Instead she buries her face in the warm darkness of Quentin’s armpit, and then…
A heart monitor is beeping. Someone makes announcements on an intercom in another room. Nancy slams back into her body, thrashing as she jolts awake.
“Hey, careful, you’ll rip your stitches.”
Quentin. Quentin is here. She calms down and lets awareness seep in: the scratchy hospital blankets, the too-small bed with railings on the side, the door peeking out onto a sterile mint green corridor. Her whole body feels numb in a glorious way.
Holy shit we’re alive. Holy fuck I fell asleep. Instead she says, “How’re you doing?”
“They’re waiting to see if I get approved for an experimental antivenom made with sheep or some shit. Right now, it’s just painkillers and muscle relaxants and waiting it out.” And then: “Holy fucking shit. That hurts.” Quentin curls up into a ball, taking little gasping breaths as he rides out this latest attack of poison. Nancy makes herself as small as possible and squeezes her hands. In a way, this is all her fault.
“I thought you’d be safe if I was the one who fell asleep,” she says when Quentin is lucid again, his mesmerizing gaze fixed solemnly on her. “That was how it always worked… back then.” She doesn’t want to mention how small and vulnerable and scared they all looked in those photos. The grotesque injuries that seemed too big for their bodies. The way they all stared blankly at the camera, as if they were so used to a lack of privacy that they didn’t mind becoming evidence.
Quentin just blinks up at her. He remembers things that she doesn’t; maybe this is just a memory where it’s the other way around. “What do you mean?”
She fidgets, fingernails scraping over a loose cuticle. “He said I could decide what happened. Because I was his favorite. That any injuries I volunteered for, anything I did… no one else would have to suffer like that.”
When she looks at him again, there’s a kind of exhausted devastation in his red-rimmed eyes. “Nancy,” Quentin says quietly. “He told me the same thing.”
She’s cried. She’s screamed. This goes beyond that. It’s like a knife to the gut. Nancy crumples under the weight of her devastation and grief, shaking with horrible silent tears.
Quentin’s arms hover around her. “Is it okay if I-“
“Yeah,” she manages, and she loves that he asked. Even after all they’ve been through together, all they’ve admitted to each other, all that they’ve shared.
When she was a kid, she was so proud of herself for not crying. For being a good girl. Being strong.
She doesn’t have to be a good girl anymore. She isn’t a good girl; she’s a girl who survives, and no one is allowed to tell her that good girls don’t scream. Good girls don’t murder their abusers, either. Fuck being Fred Krueger’s definition of good.
“I know,” Quentin keeps saying, his voice soft. “I know, Nancy, I know.” Somewhere amidst the sobs that wrack her body, the warm width of his hand finds hers. She holds on tightly, squeezes. He squeezes back.