Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sunlight streams through the open curtains of Nancy’s bedroom, falling across her bed and into her eyes, and she squints against the sudden brightness as she slowly comes back to consciousness. She doesn’t actually remember falling asleep, just knows it had been late when she had collapsed on the bed, and she’s disoriented now by the blazing sunlight pouring through the window. 

Nancy gropes blindly for her phone, trying to pinpoint exactly what time it is. It’s later in the day than she normally wakes up, and her alarm should have gone off by now. 

It’s not on the nightstand, however, or on the desk, and it’s not anywhere between the covers. She panics for a moment, worried she’s lost it, before finally locating it under her pillow. 

She presses the home button, but nothing happens. It’s dead. 

Great. 

She counts to sixty in her head, and then heaves herself out of bed, grabbing her phone, and trudging downstairs to the kitchen in search of coffee.

A minute later, there’s a bagel in the toaster, coffee brewing in the pot, and her phone is plugged into the charger in the kitchen. 

Nancy hovers over her phone, tapping her fingers impatiently against the counter. She knows it won’t make her phone charge any faster, but they have a lot to do if they want to find the final Copperhead victim and stop Temperance, and she’s irritated by the late start to her day. She needs her phone now , and she can’t afford to waste time waiting for it to charge. 

The toaster dings, and the coffee maker beeps, and Nancy steps away to fix her breakfast, but she’s back a moment later, pressing the home button to see how much juice it’s gained in the last minute and a half. 11%. Damn. 

She turns her back to scarf down her bagel over the sink, washing it down with the hot coffee. She washes her few dishes, dries them, and puts them away, then turns back to the phone. 16%. 

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” she mutters. 

She checks the chore wheel, hurriedly wiping down the counters and sweeping the floors. She unloads the dishwasher. She straightens out the small amount of clutter on the kitchen island. 

There’s nothing else to do after that, so she checks her phone again. 23%. Good enough. 

It takes another thirty seconds for the phone to boot up, and Nancy holds her breath, feeling like a horse at a starting gate, itching to go . Finally, the screen lights up, and Nancy seizes it, navigating to her messages app. 

Immediately, the phone starts buzzing with incoming messages, and Nancy catalogs them as they flash across the screen. There’s a missed call from Ace at around 3 AM, then a series of missed calls from Bess, all within the last hour. Two more missed calls from Agent Park. And finally a text message from Bess. 

Meet at the Historical Society as soon as you get this . 

Nancy is out the door before the phone has even stopped buzzing.

Time is weird. It felt like ages waiting for her phone to charge, though logically, Nancy knows it was only a few minutes. The drive to the Historical Society, however, takes at least a quarter of an hour, but it all feels like a blur. It seems like barely a moment before Nancy is pulling into the driveway, haphazardly parking her car, and dashing up the front steps. 

Bess is inside, seated behind the welcome desk with Agent Park leaning over her shoulder. They’re both bent over one of the huge tomes of records from the archives, but they look up when Nancy comes through the front door. 

“Hey, I got your text.” Nancy smiles at them, shrugging out of her coat, but her smile dims at their grave faces. “Are we still waiting on the others?”

Bess bites her lip, glancing down at the book in front of her and then back up at Nancy. Nancy takes a step closer to the desk, and Bess stands abruptly. She doesn’t slam the book closed, but it’s a near thing. Instead, she shoves out of her chair and hurries around the edge of the desk, putting her body between Nancy’s probing eyes and whatever she and Park were looking at. 

“Bess, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing! Nothing’s wrong.” Bess tries to smile, but her hands are fluttering and her voice is shaking. She’s a truly talented grifter, Nancy knows, but she’s an absolutely terrible liar. Bess must know she’s not fooling anyone, because she sighs, and her hands are steadier as she gestures to the sofa in the next room. “Why don’t we sit?”

Nancy waits patiently as Bess fusses with the throw pillows on the sofa, adjusting and readjusting them before finally giving up and kicking them to the floor. 

Agent Park has followed them from the front hall, and he takes up a position behind Bess’s shoulder. He hasn’t said anything to Nancy yet, but his eyes haven’t left her since she walked in the door. Looking at him and Bess now, she’s reminded suddenly of the way Carson and Kate used to sit her down to deliver bad news. She can almost hear her mother’s voice: Sweetheart, I’m afraid the cat has to be put down. Honey, I got some news from the doctor the other day. Darling, we have some new information about your great-aunt’s plan to bring about the apocalypse.  

Finally, Bess speaks. “Nancy…” She hesitates for only a moment before she remembers the steel in her spine. “Nancy, it’s Ace.”

It’s not what Nancy expects her to say. 

“What — Ace?” Bess nods. Nancy can feel her heart trying to leap out of her throat, but she swallows it down and aims instead for nonchalance. “What about Ace?”

For half a second, she thinks Bess is talking about Ace’s confession from the other night. It figures she would know about it — she’s Ace’s platanchor, after all — and normally, Nancy’s sure she would be begging for details. 

But if this were about Nancy’s love life, Bess would be squealing and smiling on Nancy’s window seat, not sitting stiffly on a sofa at the Historical Society. No, this has to be about Temperance.

“Ace is next. He has the final piece of Charity’s soul.”

“No.” Nancy doesn’t fully realize that she’s said that out loud until she feels Bess’s hand squeeze her knee in sympathy. 

“I know, but it’s going to be alright. We’re going to figure it out, Nancy,” she’s saying, in a voice that is clearly meant to be soothing but just feels condescending. Bess goes to take Nancy’s hand, but Nancy jerks away from her touch. 

“No, I mean — no .” She stands up and steps back, unable to stomach Bess’s well-intentioned comfort. “It’s not possible .”

“Nancy…” Park finally speaks, and Nancy physically recoils. His tone is gentle, patient, but firm; it’s the voice he uses with families, with the loved ones of patients and victims, but that’s not what she is. She wants to grab his shoulders and shake him, make him listen, because that’s not what she is . That’s not what Ace is. 

“It’s not,” she insists. “He can’t be.” She’s met with silence and twin looks of pity. “I’m not in denial! It’s literally not possible! Look, Rebecca’s family is from Poland — they didn’t come to the U.S. until the 1940s, they couldn’t have been at Gettysburg,” she explains. “And if Thom had an ancestor in the 20th Maine Regiment, he would have turned up on one of our genealogy searches.” 

It’s sound logic — Nancy knows it’s sound logic, because she’s been repeating it like a mantra in her head ever since they pieced together the Copperhead’s goal. She’s looked at the facts, and the facts say that Ace is safe, and the image of his frozen chest that has been haunting her since the Sandman incident is just a dream. 

“Right,” Bess says carefully, “but I was going through the archives, and I realized — Ace didn’t have an ancestor that fought with the Maine 20th, but he did have an ancestor — a female ancestor, Gertrude Hardy — that was at Gettysburg as an army nurse. Just like Charity.”

“She didn’t appear on the genealogy search,” Park cuts in, “because, well —”

“She was a woman?” Nancy asks bitterly. She drops back onto the sofa 

“Yeah.” He at least has the good grace to look embarrassed by the oversight. “But she could have easily picked up a piece of Charity’s soul on the battlefield and passed it on to Ace.”

“She died in 1942,” Bess adds softly. “Ten days before her one hundredth birthday. So she wasn’t picked up by Ace’s algorithm either.”

“Okay, but — but —” Nancy falters as she tries to process the new evidence. Her mind is spinning, trying to find a way around it. It can’t be Ace. She can’t lose him. 

Her brain snags on something else. “Wait, no,” she declares, remembering another detail of their search. “That still doesn’t make sense. If it’s from Thom’s side, then Ace isn’t the first born — he has an older brother. So what about Grant?”

Nancy watches the surprise flit across their faces triumphantly. Bess had clearly forgotten about Grant, and Park, she supposes, wouldn’t have known about him. But as quickly as Bess’s face fills with hope, it falls again. 

“I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe…maybe because Grant wasn’t born in Horseshoe Bay, it skipped him?”

“Matthew Burke wasn’t born in Horseshoe Bay either,” Nancy reminds her with a smirk. They’re wrong about Ace, and she’s just proved it. He’s fine. 

“Nancy, no.” Park’s voice is harsh, and it breaks through her relief. He takes hold of her shoulders and gently turns her to face him. “It’s still Ace.” Nancy opens her mouth to argue, but he cuts her off. “The firstborn theory was just that — a theory. One that turned out to be wrong.” He takes a deep breath, then continues, “Ace told Bess he had a dream about Gettysburg. We may not have an answer as to why or how this is happening, but it is still happening.” 

At last, Nancy believes him. 

Bess is rambling again about how they’re going to stop the Copperhead and Temperance and save Ace, and Park is watching them with so much sadness and so much kindness, and Nancy cannot stand their grief. 

She jumps to her feet, brushing off their concern. “Where is he?” she demands, business-like. No response. “Bess, you said Ace talked to you today — where is he?”

“H-he said something about — the library,” Bess gets out, “but I don’t think — Nancy?”

Nancy doesn’t wait for Bess to finish. She doesn’t even stop to grab her coat off the hook in the hall. She sweeps purposefully out of the Historical Society and lets the door slam shut behind her. 

Nancy has been waiting outside the library for close to an hour when Ace finally emerges. 

Nancy had left the Historical Society fully intent on tracking Ace down, charging him after him, confronting him and forcing him to face her. But when she pulled up to the library, she spotted Florence parked in the lot, just a few spaces away from Rebecca’s sedan, and she couldn’t.

She remembered the Aglaeca’s curse, and showing up at Carson’s door with pizza the night before their deadline, desperate for her last conversation with him not to be a fight. She didn’t want to think about Ace doing the same with his mother — didn’t want to think about him giving up. But Ace had always given her as much time as she needed; she couldn’t begrudge him this time now. 

Instead, she had gotten out of her car and settled against the hood to wait for him. 

She sees him as soon as he walks out. He’s got his hands in his pockets and his head down against the wind, but he glances up and freezes when he sees her.

She exhales sharply as their eyes meet, and despite the yards between them, it’s like her breath knocks him back into motion. He jogs down the path and across the street, coming to a stop two feet away from her. Just far enough that she can’t reach him. 

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“What are you doing at the library?” Nancy had promised herself she wouldn’t pry, but some impulses are so deeply ingrained that they’re impossible to turn off. Whatever she had intended, the words are out there now, and she can’t take them back.

Ace shrugs. “I had some overdue books to return.”

Nancy studies him, but he’s the same as ever. Calm and steady, content to be silent until she’s ready to talk. The only difference she can see is the beginning of a couple dark circles under his eyes, and she remembers the missed call notification on her phone. 

Her hands curl into fists and her eyes burn as she imagines Ace waking up from a nightmare, imagines the realization washing over him and the accompanying horror, imagines him trying to call her only to get her voicemail. All because she forgot to plug her stupid phone into the stupid charger. 

She closes her eyes to will the tears away before they can really start to form, and then something heavy and soft lands around her shoulders. When she opens her eyes again, it’s to see Ace retreating back out of reach, now sans coat. 

Nancy can’t help but notice the blue pullover he’s wearing underneath, and she prays to whatever god will listen that it’s actually as lucky as Ace claims it is. 

She bites her lip, not wanting to talk about it yet, but needing to know. As always, Ace waits her out. 

“You called me last night.”

“Yeah.”

“Ace, I’m so sorry,” she bursts out. “I didn’t mean to ignore you, it’s just that my phone died —”

“It’s okay.” She knows he means it, too, because Ace always means it. 

They stand there for a long minute, two feet between them, and Nancy wants to touch him so badly, but she can’t bring herself to move. She knows what’s coming next, and she doesn’t want to hear it. Doesn’t want to let go of the last shred of hope in her heart telling her that Bess and Park are wrong. 

But even a long minute is still just a minute, and eventually Ace has to speak. 

“It’s me,” he says simply. “The last piece of Charity’s soul — it’s in me.”

All Nancy can say is, “I know. Bess told me.” A beat, and then: “Why does our timing always suck?”

Ace smiles at her then, a little sweetly, a little sadly, and Nancy smiles back. Park was right. No matter how or why this is happening, it is happening, and she can’t avoid it any longer. 

She takes one small step forward, and then throws herself across the distance between them, letting Ace catch her. 

“I don’t want to die, Nancy,” he whispers softly against her hair. 

“I’m not going to let you, Ace,” she whispers back against his collar.

Her arms curl around his neck, his wrap around her waist, and she holds him tight against the world.