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the only way to heal is to let that pain become love
I really want that, she had said. And she meant it; more than she thinks she’s meant anything in a very long time. So she commits herself to love. The bruises and gashes the wraith left behind start healing immediately, but it takes a few weeks for them to fully disappear. She picks up extra shifts at the Claw and is punctual for probably the first time since she started the job. George doesn’t say anything about it, of course, but Nancy catches her angling a smile away from her view; notes the quiet gratitude on her face when Nancy volunteers to close up so she can squeeze in a date night with Nick. The bruises get lighter.
Nancy spends time with Bess, shopping and workshopping (dating outfits and dating profiles respectively). It doesn’t help the Odette situation overly much, but she catches the tension loosening in Bess’ shoulders after a particularly successful retail therapy session. The gashes heal over.
She spends time helping Nick remodel his empty units; collecting paint stains and spackle dust on her oldest pair of jeans and letting herself appreciate how much healthier and happier they are as friends, soaking in the gratitude she feels to have him in her life. The fatigue recedes.
She spends time with her fathers, learning one and relearning the other; she lets herself be loved by them in a way that she doesn’t think she’s been capable of since her mother passed away. The throbbing, sluggish pain that’s weighed her body down for weeks fades away and she feels the vitality of her age for the first time in what feels like forever.
Slowly, carefully, she puts the pieces of herself back together. It’s a gradual process, and she doesn’t notice any drastic changes, but one day she wakes up and getting out of bed isn’t a fight. Another, she looks in the mirror after getting dressed and recognizes the woman that stares back at her from the glass. She takes a few small cases on (nothing supernatural, she’s not ready yet); she restores a beloved family heirloom and is paid in lemon bars. The citrus dances on her tongue all the way home and she realizes at some point she had stopped really tasting food; it had all turned to ash on an anxious tongue. It pulls her up short and she finds herself cooking her and her father’s favorite pasta bake that night, just to remind herself of the small joy that comes from eating good food with good company.
Throughout the days of healing, those words remain crystal clear at the front of her mind; let the pain become love. She carries them with her and lets them be the armor she needs on the hardest days; when she and Ryan bury Celia in a small, private ceremony, when she commits to trying therapy and leaves her first session with red-rimmed eyes, when the spaces where a particular someone is missing seem to ache with loneliness.
She thinks maybe they’re the most important words she’s ever heard, and fights the urge to argue with herself that the person that said them wasn’t even real, that none of it was. Because the Ace that stood in front of her on the Bluffs was an amalgamation of real. The Ace of her dreams was the combination of every patient smile, every helping hand, every kind word, and every time he dropped everything to help her without hesitation. The care in his seafoam eyes was real, the fondness in his embrace was real; she’s experienced them both outside the dreamscape too many times to count.
It’s what makes his absence so hard. Knowing that he loves her, but not in the way she loves him. Knowing that he’s thriving, somewhere that isn’t by her side. But she’s dealing with it to the best of her ability. Letting herself love him means letting him go; supporting him where he’s happiest, letting him grow away from her, away from them.
She can’t pretend it doesn’t tear at her heart. She finds she’s no longer used to researching alone; too accustomed to his steady presence by her side, even when his technological expertise isn't really needed. When she’s marrying condiments and wiping tables at the end of a shift, she aches to hear the deep, scratchy hum of his voice floating in from the kitchen, harmonizing with some tacky 80’s song. She feels unbearably fragile when it never comes. It’s only been a little over two weeks since he left, but it feels like a small eternity.
Nancy Drew is healing, but she doesn’t feel whole.
----
As November gives way to December, the biting cold of New England winter properly descends on their sleepy town. A small dusting of snow turns the streets of her childhood idyllic and the annual Horseshoe Bay Winter Festival date is announced. Nancy agrees to close the Claw for George so she can show Nick the festival he hasn’t yet seen as a new transplant to the town. George offers to close the whole restaurant early as the winter season is always slow for them, and almost everyone in town will be at the festival, but Nancy insists it’s fine, she doesn’t mind staying to take care of any stragglers that may wander in. The festival is just an excuse for businesses to sell seasonal wares and residents to wear pretty clothes and celebrate the holidays, and she’s not much in the mood for the bedlam of it all.
This is how she finds herself stacking chairs alone at nine p.m. the night of the festival. She really doesn’t mind; it’s cathartic and she knows she would have been miserable if she’d attended as Bess had begged her to. Because it’s about the time of night that all the stalls close down and the town market turns into a ballroom. She grew up watching her dad pull her mom onto the dance floor to sway softly to the oldies that pumped faithfully through the speakers every year. They always seemed so in sync, so incandescently happy to be wrapped up in each other. In her youth, she found it unbearable (as all children do when presented with evidence that their parents are in love with each other), but now she’d given anything to go back to those times, to know her mother was healthy and happy and in love with her life. She knows that her dad, too, is skipping the festival for his own reasons, and resolves to spend some time with him when she gets home that night.
Knowing she only has a few more tables to wipe down before she can power everything off and lock up, she decides on a whim to prop the door open and see if she can hear the music from where it is being broadcast from speakers a few streets over. Sure enough, she can just hear faint crooning over a jazz trumpet that seems to be winding down towards the end of a song. She turns away from the door and is about to take her rag back up to finish off her side work when she hears footsteps crunch in the snow on the stairs outside. She frowns faintly and summons up her best customer service voice, preparing to explain sorry we’re closed, the festival - except when she turns back to the door it’s not a customer.
The man that’s been starring in her dreams more often than not is looking back at her, and for once Nancy Drew finds herself tongue-tied. She wants to ask him what he’s doing here, when he got back, but she can’t make herself do anything but take in the details of the person she’s missed beyond measure. His face, his lovely, beloved face; calm and open and softly fond. She feels the last piece of herself that was still nebulously out of reach slide back into place, like a lock clicking open.
It takes her a few seconds to drag her eyes away from his smile, to notice that he’s wearing a suit, and the effect is devastating. She doesn’t know what her pulse is doing, but it can’t be healthy in a twenty year old female. Her mouth is dry and she should say something, but all the words have clogged up in the back of her throat. He seems to sense this and casually moseys into the restaurant, up to her.
He gets close enough for her to count the individual slow flakes in his hair before he speaks and the baritone of his voice makes something inside her chest cavity shiver.
“Hey Nancy, Bess said I’d find you here,”.
Ah, that explained the suit; he must have attended the festival to reunite with their friends. The logic of it isn’t helping her heart palpitations at all.
“I was kind of hoping I’d see you there, I saved you a dance,” he teased, eyes sparkling with mirth.
“Oh, uh, well, someone needed to close up shop so…” she trails off eloquently, finally getting something that resembles her bearings.
“That’s okay, we can still have a dance, how ‘bout it?”
He holds out his arm in offer, and Nancy has to blink several times to retain a semblance of sanity. The man she’s in love with is standing in front of her, asking for a dance, looking like everything she’s ever wanted. The very taken, absolutely not single man she’s in love with.
“Isn’t your dance card full, I mean...shouldn’t you be getting back to Amanda?” she asks, noting the strange absence of the girlfriend who tends to stick like a barnacle to his side.
His smile softens even more; she would call his gaze adoring if she didn’t know better and wasn’t trying to keep herself realistic.
“Amanda and I...the trip gave us the time we needed to figure out we weren’t compatible in the long run,” he explains, closing the gap between them, “We decided we were searching for different things. She left to look for her mother, and I started home.”
She should feel like a terrible person for the relief that sweeps through her at this proclamation, but she can’t find it within herself when the thought of him finding love and happiness with someone else has been tugging on her heartstrings for weeks. Still, though, she feels immeasurably sad for him. She knows his heart as surely as he knows hers; she knows how much he craves care and affection from the people he loves.
“I’m sorry, Ace,” she whispers, genuinely, as his hands find hers, and he laces their fingers together. She never wants him to be sad, this beautiful boy who has come to mean so much to her.
“Thanks, Nance, but I’m okay with it, really,” he confessed, “It gave me a sense of clarity that I needed, made me evaluate what it was I really wanted,”.
“And what is it you want?” she breathes, not daring to break the fragile atmosphere that’s fallen around them like spun sugar.
He chuckles, once, to himself while looking at their joined hands, and then raises them to her line of sight.
“Right now, I want a dance with my favorite detective,” he beams at her, eyes crinkling, “and in the long run I’d like her to remember to bring lotion to work because she always forgets how chapped her hands get from the ridiculous amounts of D-10 we go through on a daily basis.”
He emphasizes his point by brushing his thumb up and down her right index finger where her skin has indeed dried and cracked from all the washing and rinsing she’s done that day. She wants to be embarrassed, caught out as she is, but the comforting combination of his fingers massaging hers and the display of how well he knows her warms her from the inside out, like her heart is a window that someone has taken care to light a candle in, a warm glow to lead the way home on a cold, dark night. She feels a low flush rise slowly on her cheeks and tries to center herself; he is her friend and he loves her as he loves all of his friends and none of this means that she can allow the sparking thing inside of her to turn into a wildfire.
“C’mon Nance, one dance, it’s so quiet you can hear the music from the deck,” he requested lowly.
Against her mind’s last-ditch attempt to consider self-preservation, she lets him lead her out of the front door of the Claw and onto the snow-covered deck. She finds he’s right; she can more clearly hear the music floating their way from distant loudspeakers. Lilting violin fills the air around them and Nancy has just focused in to hear the words i'll move the mountains if he wants them out of the way when Ace brings her sharply back into the moment by taking off his suit coat and wrapping it gently around her shoulders and giving them a light squeeze. He takes her hands once more, setting them on his shoulders, before moving his to her waist.
It takes her a full five seconds to start breathing again.
Ace, seemingly dialed into her responses (and oh, wasn’t he always, weren’t they such a perfect team because they had a synergy together that Nancy has never experienced with another human being in her life) smirks very faintly at the catch of her breath.
He doesn’t say anything, but starts swaying her gently around the deck. It’s hardly even dancing, this easy rhythm, but she’s already storing the tenderness of this moment away in her mind, to be pulled out and examined like a beloved photograph when the nights are long and lonely.
In the silence between them, Ace pulls her impossibly closer; she can feel his breath at her ear and the puff of wet warmth tingling across her skin is completely eradicating her ability to remain rational about the situation. Good friends dance platonically all the time; just last week Bess pulled her aside during a slow shift to whirl around the dining room in tune with some saccharine pop song. She can’t let this mean anything more than it is.
The delicate voice warbles around them he moves me with a smile; the difficult I'll do right now, the impossible will take a little while and Nancy feels she like she’s back at the edge of Dead Man’s Bluff, back in the dreamscape letting him see all the sharp edges; here is where the pain lives, here is where I’m broken, love me anyway? Will you hold me?
She pulls back just a little, just enough to look into his eyes. They are deep and dark and so full of an emotion that sits on the tip of her tongue but remains just out of reach.
“Ace,”
“Nancy,” he counters, gaze still locked with hers.
She can’t know what he reads in her face, but his mouth tightens just a little with sadness, like it does when she says something negative about herself that she knows he wants to fight about. He’s always let it go before, knows she lashes out when pushed, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to let it go now.
He draws back a little further and takes his hands from her waist. Nancy feels her heart drop somewhere south of her stomach and knows that the moment is over, that it’s time for her to pack away the love she bears for this brave, beautiful boy, to gather the shredded remnants of her wits and strike up a casual conversation about his trip or what’s happened in Horseshoe Bay since he left.
Before she gets the chance, his hands move to frame each side of her face, and he smiles so so warmly at her before he presses his lips to her forehead for a long moment. Nancy feels hot pressure well up behind her closed eyelids for how much affection is behind that kiss. Sure enough, when she opens her eyes to look at him, his face is indeed blurred by the tears catching and spilling down her cheeks.
“Ask me what I want again,” he whispers, still cradling her face so delicately; like it’s the most precious and priceless thing he’s ever held.
And Nancy, well.
Nancy Drew has never let the fear of falling stop her from doing anything, and she’s not about to start now, not when taking a leap of faith could mean getting what she wants so desperately she can feel the longing build to a fever pitch inside her.
“What do you want?” she asks, barely breathing.
Ace smiles down at her; the big, beaming, beatific smile that she’s only earned a handful of times before, and she has scarcely a moment to think of the dreamscape I thought you’d never ask before his lips descend on hers, wild and wanting and more intense than she could have ever imagined.
These past few weeks she’s chosen to do the hard work of healing, has taken his quiet surety of her capability and let it guide her, and she feels, to the marrow of her bones, that she’s finally tipped a scale. She has been healing (you weren’t born broken, you’re hurt), planting herself anew (the only way to heal is to let that pain become love), but now (knock ‘em dead).
Now she blooms.