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Ace has never been good at leaving well enough alone.
It’s what got him into trouble with Grant, with the witness protection database, with Daniel West.
It got him possessed by Joe Kelsey at the warehouse, got him stuck in the liminal space, got him mixed up with Bertram Bobbsey.
It’s the reason he struggled for and clung to Amanda for so long, and Laura even longer.
It’s why he so seldom lets a conversation with his father pass without a transformation into a fight.
But that impulsivity, that tenacity—it also got him his friends. His crew. His role in the plucky, heroic team striving to keep Horseshoe Bay safe from the mystical powers of evil.
And Nancy.
In whatever capacity he got her, or lost her.
He’s never known how to lie down and shut up when he takes a beating, can’t help every last attempt to make peace or explain himself or find just one more piece of the puzzle—because then he’ll have the answer, he knows he will; he’s almost there, please just give him a second.
So even with the way his mouth has dried and his stomach twists and his heart feels ripped from his chest (hey, fuck the Copperhead, who even needs him?), his brain won’t get on board, won’t stop his feet from pushing him after Nancy as she bursts out of his apartment, cruel words and heartache hanging in her wake.
Stupid, he thinks. Selfish, headstrong, foolhardy, masochistic, asinine—
His mind rattles off a few more epithets borrowed from his dad and past girlfriends and certain library rivals. He grits his teeth, shakes them away.
In the hall, what’s left of his heart stops. He’d been prepared to run down the stairs, catch Nancy by the hand in the building’s doorway, have it out on the street for the whole town to see, even if she ended up destroying his soul in the process. Nothing makes it that far.
Nancy doesn’t even hear the door open, doesn’t hear him come out, but she’s there. She’s pressed against the wall just outside, eyes screwed shut, cheeks already red and blotchy and streaked with the first leaked tears.
Before he can recover his swallowed tongue and speak, she lets out a choked, wretched sob, and he is utterly destroyed. And utterly free of any doubts about the truth or falsity of the words she used like knives against him.
He’s touching her arm before he can stop himself, before he can decide if it’s a bad idea. Because Nancy’s in pain, so there’s really no other option.
“Nancy,” he says again, and when he hears his own voice, distant, like he’s outside his body, he almost sounds exasperated. But all he can feel is fear, choking him, clinging to his back like his own version of the wraith, turning his bones to ice.
She startles at his touch and when she looks at him, she breaks down all over, trembling and shaking her head before he can say anything else.
“No,” she says. “I’m—I didn’t mean to—I’m leaving, Ace, let go of me.”
Ordinarily Ace wouldn’t dream of physically holding onto someone telling him to back off, but, God, something is so, so wrong here. Even as she speaks Nancy leans into his touch, into him, the crown of her head landing just above his heart.
He pulls her closer and she doesn’t fight him, letting go of her own weight as his arms wrap around her waist and his lips brush across her hair.
“Nancy, please,” he says, and his voice cracks. “What can I do? Whatever this is—how do we fix it? What the hell is making you cry like this?”
“I can’t tell you,” she says, and her face presses harder into his chest. Her hands twist into his shirt. “I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you.”
Her chant grows shaky, and then muffled as shuddering sobs overtake her again.
He hates to lose an inch of where their bodies touch, where he can feel her safe and warm against him, but he manages to pull back enough that he can grab her face in his hands, slide his thumbs and his palms over her cheeks again and again in a vain attempt to wipe away her still-flowing tears.
Her eyes are wild when they meet his, full of fear and heart-wrenching sorrow and—he can’t even think it, can’t let his mind go there, but it looks like lo—
“Nancy, please,” he says. “Please, let me help you, what is—what is going on, is it—Temperance, or—did something happen with Carson, or Ryan, or—or some new mystery—”
“No!” she chokes out, frantically shaking her head. “Ace, you have to stop. You have to let me go, please.”
“I can’t,” he says, voice a hollow echo of hers. “Nancy, you know I can’t.”
He can hear the desperation in his own voice and he wants to be embarrassed by it, maybe should be, but all the rejection in her words is vandalized by the quake in her voice and the look on her face: wrecked beyond repair.
Something is very, very wrong.
“I’m here,” he says, gazing into her damp eyes and willing her to hear him. “I’m here, Nancy.”
Her chin quivers and he pulls her back against his chest, stroking her hair. “I’m here,” he repeats, willing the words to act as some kind of magic spell to fortify and brace them.
She doesn’t speak as he continues to murmur into her hair. “I’m here. I’m here, sweetheart.”
The endearment slips past his lips before he knows it’s coming, and they both go still. Ace’s mind flies again to Joe Kelsey. He tries not to think of the dark turns that story endured.
Nancy slides out of his embrace, but she lets her hands trail along his arms, tangling her fingers with his. Her grip is so tight it’s almost painful, but in this instant, he would cut off his hands before he let her let go.
“Ace,” Nancy says, her voice rough, thick with tears. “Do you trust me?”
There’s no hesitation. “Unequivocally.”
Her lips tip up just the tiniest bit. As small as the smile is, it hits Ace like sunlight.
“I need you to listen to me, okay? It’s important. And I need you to understand.”
Ace nods, a little hypnotized by her intensity and the flush in her cheeks.
“You have no idea,” she says, in her most deathly serious Nancy-is-being-precise voice, “how much your friendship means to me. How important you are in my life, to my dads, to our friends. I don’t know what I would do without you, because you are my friend. My best friend. Okay?”
Ace’s mind races as he puzzles through whatever clue Nancy is trying to give him. None of this is new information, not really, so there has to be something under the surface.
There’s a different energy crackling off Nancy now, and he recognizes the high of a new plan forming in her beautiful, incomprehensible brain. So, whatever she was trying to do in his apartment, she’s decided it wasn’t working. She’s switching to plan B. Or maybe C, or T, or Z. He has no way of knowing what she’s attempted or discarded in a month of radio silence.
He lays it out on a mental murder board, studies it like a logic problem, picks it apart like a malfunctioning piece of code.
We are friends. And those feelings that you have for me, I do not share them. And I never will.
You have no idea how much your friendship means to me. How important you are in my life.
Okay?
Find the similarities. Find the differences. Tone. Anger. Softness. Desperation. Lies. Truths.
Do you trust me?
What can Nancy rely on him to pick up on? What can she offer in pieces but not see through to the end?
I’m doing this for us.
I don’t know what I would do without you.
Where is Nancy going to attempt to fall on a sword to save someone else? To save him?
What is the endgame?
Here in the hall, she isn’t saying she doesn’t have feelings for him.
She isn’t saying she does, either.
But…he knows. In his heart. In the way her eyes always find his across the room. In the hands that land on his shoulders, his arms, like they belong there. In the scent of her perfume leaning close over his shoulder. In the texts that light up his phone just a little too late in the night.
He knows. He can trust it.
There’s nothing to be afraid of, he thinks. But clearly there is.
Nancy is afraid.
But she’s looking at him with a clarity in her eyes that she didn’t have inside, and he realizes with a funny jolt in his chest that as much as he trusts her (completely, haphazardly, irretrievably)—she trusts him, too.
Trusts him to figure it out.
Trusts him to know that she can’t say the things they’re both feeling. Can’t let him say them, either.
She has to know that now that he has this knowledge, these little scraps of information, he’s not going to let it go.
He’s not good at leaving well enough alone, so he’s going to solve the puzzle, solve the problem, kiss her senseless and whisper all the ways he loves her into her skin until his voice gives out.
They’re going to do it together.
He has no idea what his expression is doing, what kind of mental acrobatics are showing in the furrow of his brow and the set of his jaw as he works through all this.
Whatever it is, it makes Nancy smile. A smile that reaches both sides of her face, creeps up to her eyes.
God, he has never loved her more.
So now he just needs to behave very hard like he doesn’t, until he can figure out whatever the fuck is going on and they can fix it, together.
Should be a snap.