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Nancy doesn’t do well with idleness.
At this point in her life, her nature has firmly settled into proactive, solution-oriented amber. If there is a problem, she will seek the answer, to the detriment of—anything, really. Her safety. Her relationships.
Her heart.
If Temperance thought she could get away with cursing Nancy and Ace and then fucking off to hell, well, that’s just proof that she never really understood who she was dealing with.
And, okay, maybe there was a brief moment where Nancy stumbled, tried to play the selfless hero, attempted to shield Ace from the inevitable explosion that is long-term exposure to Nancy Drew. She’s only human, after all, despite how she sometimes acts, what she sometimes tries to convince herself.
And even that wasn’t idleness so much as regrouping, right? Because of course it was always going to end up here. She was never going to lie down and lose him. Even if she tried, he was never going to let her. Their friends were never going to let her.
They know her better than she ever expected, Nancy has to admit. And love her more fiercely than she ever could have dreamed.
Which—that’s what Temperance really underestimated, isn’t it? The power of love. It was her blind spot with Charity and Beckett, too. And as much power as their love had, Nancy thinks what she feels for Ace—for all of them—just might top it.
Bolstered by this realization, Nancy flings herself into action. She dutifully reports to her shifts at the Claw. She even shows up early, once, to George’s melodramatic surprise. She actually sits down for dinner with her dads, instead of begging off as “not hungry” and wandering the kitchen in the wee hours of the night, chewing tasteless handfuls of cereal or toast just to take the edge off the constant gnawing pain in her stomach. She spends hours digging through books and artifacts in Icarus Hall, combing through pages and pages of Temperance’s notes, looking for anything that might help her unravel the curse wrapping barbed wire around her heart.
Even after a few days, her friends seem a bit surprised by the increased enthusiasm (even if only increased from a zero to, like, a solid three) of her return to the land of the living. She’s not surprised to see them exchanging surreptitious looks they apparently think she doesn’t notice, but at least they keep their whispers at a low enough volume she isn’t even that tempted to eavesdrop.
When Ace walks in for one of his last shifts as Nancy is talking to Bess and Nick by the lockers, Nick falters, in the middle of cracking a joke, at the sight of him. Tension ratchets through the room.
It’s the first time Nancy has seen Ace since she left his apartment that day, clinging to the memory of his hand squeezing hers in a gentle goodbye, trying to keep hold of the hope battling the fear in the back of her throat. She’d thought she would be prepared to see him, now that they were (sort of) on the same page, but she’s coming to realize she’s never really prepared to see him. His arrival always makes her heart skip a beat, brings her to attention, sparks a thrill through her body as she waits to see what joy or angst or mystery his presence might bring.
Conscious of their other friends helplessly casting looks between them, Nancy manages a tentative smile in Ace’s direction. She’s unable to take her eyes off him, drinking in the sight in a way she’s so rarely allowed herself lately. “Hi, Ace,” she says.
Bess drops the cup she’s holding with a disproportionately loud clatter. Luckily, it’s made of plastic and not glass, so there’s no breakage, and it’s mostly empty, so there’s not much of a mess.
The spell of awkwardness effectively broken, Bess and Nick buzz into motion, grabbing for paper towels and shooting repeated pointed glances at Nancy, at Ace, and at each other.
Nancy looks back at Ace.
“Hi,” he says, drifting a bit closer to her, eyes locked to hers. Not too close. Not close enough. “Uh, if you guys have this handled, I’m gonna go clock in.”
Nancy nods. Bess and Nick are both crowded over the really very minor spill, soaking up the incredibly small amount of liquid and attempting (badly) to pretend they aren’t intensely watching and listening to this exchange. They’re lucky she loves them enough to find it more endearing than annoying.
“Yeah,” she says wryly. “I think we’ll manage.”
Ace quirks a small smile at her, and she tries not to let her heart leap at him too obviously as it pounds in her chest. He just nods and sets off toward the kitchen.
Bess’s expression as Ace passes her is a blend of shock, inquisition, and a hint of betrayal, but he just smiles at her, too. “See ya in there.”
It’s more than clear Bess has questions, but Nancy doesn’t offer any answers as she trails after him, leaving a safe distance and moving straight through the kitchen and back to the dining room without daring to glance toward the sink.
George shoots her an exasperated look, immediately shoving a tray into her hands. “There you are. Look alive, Drew, we’re drowning out here. Table seven.”
The rest of Nancy’s shift flies by with enough customers and chaos that she doesn’t really see much more of Ace—just glimpses of a black baseball cap standing steady at the sink, a flash of his movements as he jumps in to help push food out the windows to the swamped waitresses, the occasional crack of his voice calling back and forth with the line cooks.
It’s enough, she thinks. Just being in the same building as him. Knowing he’s around. Knowing he’s okay. It’s enough for now.
Nancy doesn’t know what Ace tells the others, but when she walks into the Claw the next day for an early-morning Saturday shift, George has already flipped the sign on the door to Closed for Inventory. Nancy barely crosses the threshold before Bess grabs her hand and drags her to the back room, ignoring the sputtering that passes for Nancy’s barely-post-dawn communication.
George and Nick are already there, sprawled onto chairs and looking up expectantly at Bess and Nancy’s entrance.
Someone has dragged the big whiteboard into the center of the floor and wiped it clean (which, rude, Nancy was using that, but whatever), and a cup of coffee waits on the bench alongside a pile of bagels that make Nancy’s heart twist.
Her eyes skip across the room, looking for—well, the one thing she’s always looking for, these days, forever scanning her surroundings for a glimpse of the person she can’t have beyond a glimpse.
She can’t help asking. “Where’s Ace?”
“He’s helping his mom at the library today,” Nick answers, exchanging an inscrutable glance with George.
Nancy grasps onto the opportunity to analyze that instead of her own problems. Nick and George have been off, of course, since the Long Night Ball, but ever so tentatively they do seem to be drifting back together. Lingering glances. Stilted words just this side of tender and intimate. “Owner only” meetings in the back room that start after regular business hours and end who knows when.
They’re not back together, Nancy knows, still wary of the pain and betrayal and heartbreak they each suffer and wield. But she thinks they’ll get there, sooner rather than later. They still walk around with their hearts in their eyes, and the remaining pieces of them are due to catch up any day now.
Nancy can’t blame them. Whatever hurts may come, whatever devastation may fall between you, she truly believes the power of warmth and affection and love is always going to win. When you find your soulmate, your person, that’s a power beyond any—
Oh, great. She’s back to her own shit after all.
“Okay,” Bess says, half breathless, guiding Nancy by the shoulders and shoving her none-too-gently in front of the whiteboard. She presses a dry-erase marker into Nancy’s hand, and Nancy grasps it unthinkingly, opening her mouth to ask one of about a thousand questions.
Bess doesn’t give her a chance. “We’re going to have a little chat over here on the other side of the room. We being George, Nick, and myself. No need to pay us any mind.”
“What?” Nancy doesn’t try to hide her bewilderment.
“I know you had plans to scribble nonsense on the board today anyway. You know, random X’s and O’s, nothing with any sort of pattern or meaning, and certainly nothing related to what we’re talking about. Just, like—football plays!” Bess says, clapping her hands in celebration of the victory of finding a proper comparison to fling forth, turning to Nick for confirmation. “Right, Nick?”
“Yeah,” Nick says, eyebrows climbing his forehead as he looks between Bess and Nancy with a grin somewhere between indulgent and mystified as to how he ever got here. “Just like football.”
Nancy is starting to piece together the idea. It’s ridiculous, she has to say, and possibly just the kind of smartass that would pass the line of “you’re so adorable for trying” and piss Temperance off, burning the whole thing down, but—it just might work. They’re being careful. They’re being tricky. Does the curse acknowledge plausible deniability?
“So, George!” Bess says, too bright, perhaps hamming up the situation beyond required bounds. “Would you say you’ve been experiencing the dire and desolate effects of a curse lately?”
George, Nick, and Bess continue to face each other, bright smiles plastered onto their faces, but each of their gazes flicker to Nancy, to the whiteboard.
Nancy rolls her eyes, but she has to struggle to tamp down a begrudging smile as she sketches a haphazard circle on the corner of the board.
An eager buzz sparks in the air, the thrill of a fairly stupid idea crystallizing into reality and maybe actually kinda sorta working.
They’ve had worse plans.
“Well, no,” George says, eyes on Bess again. “But would you say the way you’ve been all weird and twitchy and distant lately has something to do with Ace?”
These are their baseline questions, Nancy understands, beginning at the ground floor with facts they pretty much already know, have figured out themselves, can sketch a decent picture of.
She draws another circle to the edge of the first, smaller, like the size can mitigate the stab of regret and longing in her heart.
“The better question,” Nick interjects in his own cheery acting-voice, “Is whether you’ve made any headway on a solution for...um…that issue with…” A beat as he tries to decide how literal they’re allowed to be. “The oven?” he finally offers.
An X swipes across the middle of the board, stark and frustrating.
Nancy wishes Bess had given her a marker color besides red. She can’t decide if it looks more “pirate marking the spot” or “bloody warning.”
She doesn’t notice how tightly she’s clenching the marker until Bess’s gentle voice comes out.
“Well, that’s okay…Nick,” she adds, a sloppy afterthought.
“Yeah,” George says. “Because now we can all get on the same page and figure out this stupid cur—nundrum with the oven.”
Nancy gives the recovery a six out of ten.
“Exactly,” Bess says.
“Because we all care about the oven,” Nick chimes in, growing steadier (if cheesier) with the metaphor. “And the, uh, refrigerator. And the good news is, Bess has lots of…cookbooks. And…user’s manuals. For us to do research.”
“Plus, you know, we can try google,” George adds, dry.
Nancy has kept her eyes pretty firmly on the whiteboard throughout all this, which is good, because probably none of her friends can see how misty they’re getting.
“Now,” Bess says, her firm tone shaking Nancy back to business. “I have more questions. First, did the oven’s saboteur use any specific words, phrases, or verbal spells when she vandalized it?”
George snickers and Nancy bites her lip on a grin as she clicks the lid onto the back of the marker, settling in for a long morning writing vital nonsense on the board and thanking whatever higher power or universal energy gave her these people to call family.
They probably test the limits of the curse over the next few weeks, eking out details and scouring ancient texts and all the junk at Icarus Hall to try and identify and overcome Temperance’s final fuck-you.
Thinly veiled discussions of their options and ideas and dead ends permeate quiet shifts at the Claw, carpools to this place or that, even long-awaited game nights at Nancy’s house.
Even though he doesn’t work there anymore, Ace remains a fixture at the Claw after morgue hours, often tucked away into a corner booth with a cup of coffee and a basket of (he says) sub-par fries, glued to his computer like it holds all the secrets of the universe. Sometimes he’ll take a break when Bess flings herself into the seat across from him and drags him into casual, low-stakes friendship chatter, like any good platanchor would to give her friend a reminder to relax.
Whenever Nancy happens to be the waitress covering his section, she would swear on penalty of death that she is the height of professionalism. She visits his table no more than she would anyone else’s, refills his coffee with only the most customer-service-y of smiles, doesn’t lean close over his shoulder to peer at his screen, hand propped on his arm for no real reason other than she wants it to be there.
She’s being good. Mostly.
Still, she can’t deny the little shiver of happiness that slices through her any time Ace catches her eye from across the room and sends her a half smile, the kind that sends her back to early days at the Claw, early weeks forging a friendship, building trust between them without ever realizing the connection cobbling itself together under the surface, entwining their souls to the point that she can’t quite breathe right when she goes too long without seeing him.
But things are different now, too, since the Veil. Since their clash at his apartment, since her breakdown, since the failure of her self-inflicted, self-sacrificial distance.
Sometimes when she thinks about it she wants to shake herself, demand how she could be so stupid, how she could put him so at risk purely because of a selfish need to catch even a glimpse of his eyes.
But he’s okay. He’s still here. And ever since she made that mistake and collapsed off that precipice and fell to pieces in his arms (please don’t let that count as acting on her feelings, please, please don’t let the clock have started)—he has been utterly, exceptionally, perfectly platonic towards her. He keeps a reasonable physical distance, sans the occasional casual jostle of a shoulder or the odd high five in the wake of a particularly good quip. He makes no more attempts to have heartfelt discussions about feelings, offers no more encouragement for her to come to him, talk to him, whenever she might work up the heart and the words to do so.
Even his eyes could belong to a completely different man when they look her way, scraped of the longing and emotion and unspoken words that have been haunting them for what feels like so long.
It would be terrifying, this reversion in him, if she didn’t know better. It would make her sick with grief, to see her feelings so unreciprocated in the soul of the man she loves.
But instead, the more he looks at her like she’s Bess or George or Nick—like she is, of course, beloved, but viewed through a thick and unassuming layer of platonic friendliness—the more deep, desperate, definitely-romantic love swells in her chest.
Admittedly, she’s not as consistently good at playing it cool as he is, resorting a little too hard to staged-casual tones, copious use of the word “buddy,” and occasional finger guns in his general direction.
But he always just smiles at her or quirks an eyebrow, looking as oblivious as a person can look, no hint of any sparkle of deception or undue affection.
Do you trust me? she’d asked, and she takes his apparent indifference for what it is: incontrovertible proof that he does, and would do anything, even go against his instincts, to prove it.
It’s hard to forget a person risking death by poison buoyed only by your word.
She can’t deny that it’s still hard. She still wakes at night, heart racing, from nightmares of losing him. She still trembles with the ache of holding herself back from him, the fear that she’ll never be able to relax again. She still feels, most of the time, like she’s walking on eggshells, terrified that the wrong tone of voice will shatter glass and send a bullet, whether literal or metaphorical, through Ace’s head.
But it is amazing, at the end of the day, the way the spark of hope festering in her heart can drown out the screaming fear of losing him forever, the sorrow at being unable to touch him, hold him, kiss him the way she wants to.
It’s amazing the way that spark of hope can grow.
“Alright bitches, we are in fucking business!” George crows, bursting into the Claw late one night with Nick and Bess hot on her heels.
Ace jolts to attention in his booth in a way that might have looked casual if not for the fact that Nancy was fairly sure he’d dozed off over his computer.
She had been the last waitress standing for the tail end of the graveyard shift of an already quiet day, and he was the last customer to linger by at least an hour. Nancy had assured him half a dozen times that she was fine, he could go home, he didn’t need to wait for her, but he’d insisted he was staying put for totally unrelated reasons and also not even tired.
Nancy, choosing to pick her battles and privately enjoy his wordless company, was killing time, allowing herself a rare brain break and idly scrolling social media. She leaned against the counter, listening to the ever-slowing clack of Ace’s keyboard as his coffee grew cold beside him, until their friends made their tumultuous entrance.
“What?” Nancy says, looking to the rest of the crew, the question a half laugh at Ace and George both.
“We think we have something,” Nick translates, and despite the tentativeness of his words, Nancy can hear the undercurrent of excitement and hope in his voice.
Bess continues on with the details, rushed with eagerness, dumping an armful of books on table five. “It’s a ritual to cleanse a person of the darkest sorts of impurities. To banish malicious parasites and dissipate mystical evils that cloud a psyche and strip away hidden hexes.”
“Sounds like it would have been useful against the wraith,” Ace remarks, and Bess shoots him a look.
“Yes, well, we have it now, and it sounds like it will be useful for you,” she says.
Nancy’s heart is racing, that stupid, awful, beautiful hope spinning and shining and growing in the pit of her stomach.
“Well,” she says, coming around the counter to stand with her friends. “Hit us with it. What are we looking at?”
They’re at Icarus Hall bright and early the next morning, going over the ritual for the thirtieth time and divvying up instructions.
Bess is calm, confident, in charge, handing out duties with the unquestionable authority of her status as go-to magic user. “Nick,” she says. “You’ll add the ingredients to the mixture. Each part absolutely must be added at precisely the right time, and in the correct amount. Nancy, George, and I will be acting as the conduits and reciting the spell, so it’s up to you to keep track.”
“Right,” Nick says with a nod. “No pressure.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait,” George interjects. “I know we don’t have Temperance to help us with rituals anymore, for obvious reasons, but I can’t do the spell. I don’t want to mess it up.” She casts her gaze around the room, eyes just this side of wide. “I’m not a Hudson or a Marvin or a Dow or—any of those other ancient mystical bloodlines.”
Bess shakes her head. “That doesn’t matter. We aren’t the Women in White of old. We’re forming our own coven—or, community, or collective—I haven’t settled on terminology yet.”
“I’m partial to posse, myself,” Ace offers, dry, and it’s about as weak an offering as Nancy can imagine, but she can’t help smiling anyway. He looks pleased at her amusement, which only makes her heart skip again.
Bess ignores her platanchor, still zeroed in on George. “None of them were born expert witches. They all learned. Just as I’ve learned. Just as you’ve learned, and we’ll keep learning. There’s magic in all of us,” she says, “if one only knows how to tap into it. There’s magic in you.”
George stares at her for a long moment before her eyes cut to Ace. He looks back at her without any kind of judgement or expectation, a quirk of his eyebrows suggesting just the hint of a shrug.
Just Ace. Steady as a mountain, calm as a lake after a storm, gentle as a summer breeze.
“Alright,” George says gruffly, crossing her arms over her chest and stepping closer to the grimoire and the potion ingredients cluttering the table. “What do we need to do?”
The hours it takes to prepare for the ritual—to make sure everything is ready and in place and everyone is clear beyond a doubt and quizzed thrice-over on their role and there is as little room for error or disaster as possible—feel like days to Nancy.
Per usual throughout the entire process of Operation-De-Curse-Ace-And-Nancy, she and Ace have very little interaction, assigned to different areas of the room to perform different tasks. It’s a precaution, Nancy knows, and probably a good one, but it still takes a lot of effort to keep her eyes from drifting his way every so often.
Every now and then, when she chances a glance, he’s looking at her too. She feels guilty when her heart thrills, traitorously, at the realization that something is cracking in his resolve, that something soft and tender and aching is leaking into his gaze, into his small, sad smiles.
“Maybe we should move to another room,” Bess says suddenly, and Nancy jerks her eyes away from Ace.
“Huh? Why?” she asks.
George and Bess exchange a look that communicates volumes Nancy can’t translate. If she had to guess, it’s an argument over who’s going to take on this conversation, and George loses. She sighs.
“Look. In the least creepy way possible, your guys’ thing kind of oozes out without you realizing it sometimes,” George explains, flapping a hand in their general directions.
“Our thing?” Nancy demands, a mixture of affront and embarrassment sending a flush to her cheeks and folding her arms defensively across her chest.
“Oozes?” Ace echoes, looking mildly discomfited.
“I think she means,” Nick interjects in his peacemaker voice. “Sometimes you guys get a little caught up in each other, and since we don’t know the parameters of the...situation...we probably don’t want to risk anything crossing the lines of, uh, platonic affection.”
“I think I mean the eyefucking,” George shoots back, apparently done with attempts at tact.
Nancy opens her mouth to respond, indignant, flushing exactly the same shade of red as Ace, but Bess cuts them all off with a flash of her hand.
“Alright, enough,” she snaps. “We don’t need to dig into anything that’s just going to start fights. Nancy, George, with me.”
Bess gathers an armful of supplies and stalks off into another room, leaving George and Nancy to sheepishly trail after her. Nancy studiously avoids looking at Ace on the way out, but she imagines she can feel the weight of his eyes on her.
Bess keeps them hard at work for the next hour or so measuring out various components, running the scale from creepy to mundane. They crush roots into pastes and count out precisely the correct number of grains of salt and carefully label each bottle and bowl and vessel for Nick’s benefit.
“And then...” Bess says. “Well, what else is new, the last ingredient is blood.” She looks to Nancy with a sheepish smile. “Given that you’re both wrapped up in the details of the curse and a blood relative of the person who made the curse, you seem to be the most sensible candidate, Nancy.”
Nancy smirks humorlessly. “Of course,” she says, picking up a nearby knife and testing the weight of it in her hand. “This work?” she asks, already pressing it towards her skin.
“Geez, wait!” George interjects, grabbing the knife out of her hand. “For fuck’s sake, Drew, let me sanitize it or something first. Are you trying to get tetanus?”
“Huh,” Nancy says, raising an eyebrow. “Fair point. We don’t usually have time for details like that.”
“We work in a restaurant, don’t any of you know anything about kitchen safety?” George grumbles, peevish, digging through bottles until she finds something workable to avoid blood poisoning.
They reenter the main room just as Nick is getting up from the table where he and Ace are sitting, striding towards the stack of books Bess left across the room.
Something flutters, light and nervous, in Nancy’s stomach. She stops to examine a cluster of cluttered artifacts dumped on one of the side tables near the door, letting Bess and George move past her. Nancy’s fingers brush across the gilded edge of a warped old hand mirror. Lifting it up to peer at her reflection, she takes in the shadows under her eyes, the way her jaw won’t seem to unclench. She fidgets with her hair, stares down this other Nancy and wonders about all the variations of herself she has had to create and protect and leave behind.
She has failed so many times. She can’t fail. Not with this. Not with Ace.
The mirror lands back on the table with a little too much force, but the way the legs wobble anxiously gives her a dull sense of satisfaction.
When she looks up, George and Bess are leaning over a grimoire with Nick, so Nancy authorizes herself to sidle over to Ace’s spot arcross the room and slide into the chair next to him. He’s engrossed enough in his computer that she knows he doesn’t realize at first that it’s her.
She stays silent, letting him focus, until he glances up in her direction with something on the tip of his tongue that dies at the sight of her. His mouth curves into a soft, slightly rueful smile.
“Hey,” Nancy says softly, fidgeting with the bandage on her hand.
“Hi,” Ace says, just as quiet, and something in his voice makes Nancy ache.
His eyes follow hers to her palm, and he frowns. She sees his fingers flex against his leg before he visibly restrains himself, and she knows he wants to take her hand, check the bandage himself, reassure his senses of the press of her skin on his.
He doesn’t.
He doesn’t, but his desire for it feels like a tangible weight in the air between them.
“I’d really love it if someday we could stop using your blood as supernatural currency,” he says instead, and Nancy huffs out a humorless laugh.
“Realistic expectations only, please,” she says.
“I believe in the power of positive thinking,” he rebuts, cheerlessly bright, and for the tiniest fucking second she forgets all their problems and turmoil and danger and just enjoys standing near enough Ace to feel the hum of his warmth.
But of course, their situation is as dire and shitty as ever, and Nancy isn’t one to shy away from the reality of a situation. Usually. She certainly isn’t one to miss many opportunities to be a major bummer.
“I’m sorry I got you into this mess,” she says, and saying it out loud suddenly puts words to the grief and guilt that have been choking her since the axe met Temperance’s neck.
She almost killed Ace. She still could. Her feelings are a ticking time bomb ready to shatter her world with one false move, and she’s risked so much letting it get this far. It was stupid, dangerous, getting their friends involved—harboring this open secret that none of them are really saying but all of them know.
Ace is already shaking his head. “You did the right thing,” he says. “You saved everyone.”
She blinks against the extra moisture trying to take up residence in her eyes. “I need to save you,” she chokes the words out. “I—I have to save you.”
He opens his mouth to respond, but George barks out, “Drew!” from across the room, and Nancy welcomes her chance to escape, swiping a hand across her eyes and turning away.
They carefully pour a salt circle in the middle of the floor.
“This is exciting,” Ace says. “I’ve never gotten to be the one in the circle before.”
George rolls her eyes. “Trust me, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she says, but she can’t quite hide her smile as she turns away.
Nancy wonders if any of them ever really take the time to appreciate Ace. The way he spends so much of himself, all the time, trying to help them or cheer them up or be the steady shoulder they can rely on. She knows she’s never done enough to be the same for him. She knows she wants to, very badly.
Bess is reading the spell again, mouthing silent words to herself and scribbling notes in the margin. George and Nick are leaning over the salt circle, making tiny adjustments to the line and lightly bickering.
Without any warning, Ace grabs Nancy’s hand. She barely holds back a gasp, whirling to look at him. With a gentle tug, he leads her over to the corner of the room. A poor attempt at privacy, but no one seems to notice.
“Ace,” she says, breathless. “What are you—?”
She watches as something new washes over his expression, something fearful and determined and raw.
“Nancy,” he says, mouth pressing into a taut line before twisting, brimming over with all the things vocabulary could never access. “If this is—I mean, this is either going to work or it isn’t, so it shouldn’t matter what we do now. What we say. And I just—if this is the only chance, I have to tell you—”
“No!” Nancy says, sharp, pressing a hand against his lips. His entire body goes still and loose. “Not yet. This is going to work. Don’t give up on me yet.”
His gaze is steady, so she pulls her hand back.
“Never,” he says.
She blinks back the tears that spring up at the gravity of his voice, and she nods once, decisive.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, then, let’s do this.”
Turning back to the rest of the group, Nancy pitches her voice up to catch all their attention. “I am done living in fear of a twice-dead, blood-borrowing, face-stealing, narcissistic, psychopath bitch and her little magic tricks. Bess, are you ready?”
Bess looks up from the book, then back down at it again. “Fuck it,” she says. “As we’ll ever be, yeah?”
Nancy grins. “Nick?”
Nick rubs his hands together, bouncing on the balls of his feet like he’s squaring up for a fight. “Ready for my audition for Masterchef,” he says, and Nancy clocks the affection in the way George rolls her eyes, tries to hold the spirit of the power of love in her heart.
“Time to rock and roll,” George agrees dryly.
“Okay,” Bess says, and they all pretend not to hear the quaver in her voice. “Ace. Into the circle with you.”
With a grim smile and a tiny salute, Ace steps into the salt circle. He turns to face them, shoving his hands in his pockets, and rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet, awkward.
“I’m sure you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today,” he quips, deadpan.
It feels impossible, not being able to stand near him, stay with him, keep him steady, hold his hand, like he’s done for her so many times.
Lead weighs her heart down through her chest and all the way to the floor, locking her in place but crushing her lungs on the way, making breathing an Olympic sport.
Ace looks at her, and his eyes are so full of emotion and wordless communication that it more or less renders her previous objections moot. She knows her responding gaze is just as damning, her lips sliding into a tiny smile as her heart falls to molten honey.
It takes more than a little effort for her to break eye contact, but finally she turns away, gathering around the table with the others, looking to Bess for final directions, though they’ve heard it all before.
“Nick, the most important thing is timing. Keep your pace steady and consistent. Don’t rush yourself. Accuracy is key.”
“Slow and steady,” Nick agrees. “I can do that.”
Bess continues. “George, we’ll start together, but you’ll keep the chant going even when Nancy and I stop. Whatever is happening, you must keep up the chant til the end.”
George nods.
“When the potion is charged, Nancy, you and I will handle the next steps. We have to transfer the liquid into the blessed bowl, and then use the sprinkler to apply it to the target. That would be Ace,” she adds, with a glance up at the group.
“We know, Bess,” George says, exasperated.
Bess shakes her head. “Right. Of course.” She presses on. “Since we’re using your blood for the ritual, Nancy, you’ll keep hold of the bowl. The silver will act as a conduit and contact with your skin will keep the potion at its most powerful. And we want all the power we can get.”
“Got it,” Nancy says.
“And...I suppose that means I’ll do the sprinkling. Exactly thirteen times, moving in a circle around the ring of salt, while the chant is consistently maintained.” She smiles tightly at the others. “Simple enough, isn’t it?”
“Easy peasy,” George says flatly.
“Once the potion is done, is there anything else I can do?” Nick asks.
Bess’s expression is grim. “Yeah,” she says. “We’ve no idea what breaking the curse is going to bring forth. You just need to stand by and stay ready for a fight.”
The heaviness of the weighty unknown settles over the group.
“In case I didn’t mention it before,” Ace says, quiet. “Thank you guys.”
George quirks an eyebrow at him. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say anytime,” she muses. “But this time? Our pleasure.”
After so many spells and rituals and seances, Nancy keeps expecting this supernatural life they live to feel...well, not routine, exactly, but a little less surreal. Yet each time she has to memorize a new chant or measure out precise amounts of inexplicable ingredients, she can’t ever seem to silence the little voice in her head shouting, are you fucking kidding me? This is real?
Hands clasped in theirs, Nancy’s voice blends with George’s and Bess’s, a continuous loop in a language she’s pretty sure isn’t quite Latin. She watches Nick’s careful, steady hands combine the ingredients Bess has laid out into a large carafe, painstakingly matching his time to a quiet beat he’s tapping with his foot.
She flinches, a little, when he pours her blood in, but she’s pretty sure that’s psychosomatic.
When the last ingredient is complete, Nick steps back and Bess lets go of the other girls’ hands.
“Nancy, the bowl,” she says.
George continues without a falter as Nancy stops chanting, too, snatching up the blessed silver bowl, pressing as much of her skin to it as she can as she holds it out to Bess, who picks up the carafe and carefully pours in its contents. Despite the fact that Nancy knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that all the ingredients started out very much room temperature, she feels the bowl heating up under her hands.
Just when it gets hot enough to sting, to make her teeth clench, the heat leaches away, and the bowl begins to chill. Then it’s shifting back to hot, then to cold, oscillating at such a speed it makes Nancy’s head spin a little.
Bess dips the sprinkler into the bowl, and Nancy watches as the thick liquid sluggishly fills the device. Her heart is pounding as Bess steps away from the table. Ace watches her evenly, mouth set in a firm line, posture stiff and straight.
“Sorry if this hurts,” Bess whispers.
With a flick of the sprinkler, she begins the application, slowly circling Ace, covering him in tiny drops of frankly disgusting liquid. He jerks a little and looks to Nancy as the first burst hits him, but past that point he never moves. Never flinches. Never takes his eyes off Nancy.
After the allotted thirteen sprinkles, Bess returns to the table and sets down the sprinkler. She looks, as the rest of them do, expectantly towards Ace.
Nancy clutches the bowl, willing more power into the spell.
Ace blinks, tucks a bit of hair behind his ear, nervous habit. At first it seems like nothing is going to happen, and cold fear rises in Nancy’s heart.
Then Ace’s eyes start to flutter, and he wobbles, unsteady on his feet.
“Ace?” Bess asks, her voice carrying over George’s.
He doesn’t answer, and there’s another moment of tense uncertainty.
Then Ace stumbles out of the circle like he’s tripping over his own feet, scattering the crystals of salt as he shuffles clumsily toward the rest of the crew. His eyes are glazed over and half unseeing as he coughs weakly into his elbow, ever considerate.
“Is he supposed to be able to cross the line?” Nick asks, tone just barely tinged with panic.
“No,” Bess answers, voice small and words clipped. “He is not.”
Ace coughs again, harder this time, and sways, haphazard, precariously unbalanced. He drifts farther from the circle.
Nancy drops the bowl on the table and takes a step in his direction, but Bess cuts her off, throwing up an arm to block her path.
“Don’t!” she says sharply.
“Bess—”
“The ritual isn’t over! We can’t risk muddling it.”
All at once Ace’s coughs turn to choking, retching, and panic drowns every thought in Nancy’s mind. What if they were wrong? What if they fucked up the ritual? What if her actions went too far after all? What if she has to watch Ace die, again?
Nancy is shaking, terror and ice burning through her heart. Beside her, George keeps chanting, but her voice is trembling. Nancy watches as a tear streaks down her cheek.
“Bess,” Nancy says, her tone a rubber-band warning.
Bess, please, she doesn’t say. It’s hurting him—please!
“I know,” Bess says, snatching the grimoire off the table and flipping frantically through its pages. “There must be something—there has to be—”
Ace’s whole body stiffens before it lurches forward, and he catches himself, just barely, on the edge of the table, rattling its contents.
George’s chant breaks off with a gasp. The silence rings in Nancy’s ears for what feels like an eternity.
Ace makes one more choked sound, clutching the table so hard his knuckles go white. His hair falls into his face and his eyes roll back as his mouth falls open.
Half a dozen of Temperance’s fucked-up moths crawl out of his mouth like frenzied ants evicted from their hill, dropping down onto the table and scuttling haphazardly across the smooth wood.
Many things happen all at once, in the span of an instant:
“Oh my God!” George yelps, grabbing hold of the front of Nick’s shirt and stumbling back into him apparently before thinking better of it. For his part, Nick’s hands land on George’s waist, pulling her protectively against his body, away from the table.
Eyes wide, Nancy gapes at the moths before her gaze flies to Ace, faster than her feet or hands could move, checking for damage, scanning his arms, his back, his chest, his face, as he hunches over and struggles to catch his breath, apparently restored to his senses.
And meanwhile Bess, bless her, lets out an earsplitting shriek and slams down the book she’s holding with a resounding WHAM, crushing the moths under its weight with unnerving precision and power.
There’s a beat of heavy silence, the five of them glancing between themselves, hardly daring to breathe.
Tentatively, they creep in towards the table. Glancing towards the others for moral support, Bess lifts the heavy text.
The remains of the moths twitch, causing the crew to flinch back, but then they go still. For a moment, they catch a staticky glow and fade, like the light of a TV flickering out as it’s shut down. Then they’re crumbling, shattering into dust just like their wretched creator.
“Holy shit,” George says.
“It worked,” Bess breathes. Then she squeals: “It worked!”
There’s a rumble of noise and bustle and excitement, and Nancy doesn’t remember launching herself into Ace’s arms, but suddenly that’s where she is, tears streaming down her face and mixing with his own as he gasps for breath, his nose sliding along her cheek, his lips brushing the skin beneath her ear, his hands pressed into her back so hard she might bruise but she doesn’t care, it doesn’t matter, because Ace is alive and the moths are dead and maybe, just maybe, she is finally allowed to hope.
Maybe she is allowed to love him.
Some part of her knows George and Bess and Nick are still here, still working through their own relief and recoveries, but the world is a dark void and the only pinprick of light she can see is this, is Ace, his arms around her and his hair brushing her skin and his voice in her ears.
She holds him tighter than she’s ever held anything in her life, and she thinks there might be real odds she never lets go of him again. She finds she didn’t actually realize how constricted the vice around her heart had been all these months. Not until now, as it tentatively loosens, as she can feel his heart beating, too, in time with hers.
“I’m sorry,” she finds herself whispering, again and again. “I’m so sorry.”
He shakes his head without pulling away from her, and one of his hands rubs soothing circles into her back. The pressure of his grip grounds her in a way nothing ever has, makes her feel safer than she’s ever dared to dream in a life full of danger and darkness and deceit.
Finally, she realizes what Ace is saying, repeating, promising.
“I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”
It’s quiet when Nancy and Ace enter his apartment, warm darkness enveloping them after the bright artificial light of the hallway.
The drive to the loft wasn’t entirely silent, of course, but neither was it what Nancy would describe as chatty. She feels frozen, somehow. She has no clue what to say, what action to take. It’s not a very familiar feeling for her, and not a particularly comfortable one.
The curse is broken. They’re safe. This is all she’s wanted, dreamed of, barely allowed herself to hope she could get. And she feels like she can’t move.
“Can I get you anything?” Ace asks, sliding her coat out of her hands and jerking his head toward the kitchen. “Something to eat, something to drink?”
Nancy shakes her head. “No, I’m fine,” she says. He trails after her as she wanders aimlessly through the apartment, taking it in as though she’s never seen it before, though they both know better. After another stretch of anxious silence, she sits on the edge of the couch, picking lightly at a loose thread on the arm.
There’s always this weird sense of feeling adrift, after their adventures—or whatever you want to call them—end. It doesn’t feel like letdown, exactly, but her body never knows what to do when all the adrenaline drains from her body and there is no present threat of death or haunting and she can just breathe. This post-danger drain is worse than any of the others. But it’s more than just that.
She feels nervous, ridiculously, in a way that’s amplified here in Ace’s space, where another version of her—
Nothing has to happen right now. She doesn’t need to feel like a nervous teenager after prom, or a girl fresh off a first date, not knowing if the boy she likes is going to kiss her goodnight.
But it also feels ridiculous to pretend she doesn’t want him to. They both know good and well how they feel, what they’ve ached for all this time.
She wants to kiss him so badly. She wants to do more than that.
She doesn’t want to fuck it up.
Nancy’s past relationships, when they reached the point of physical intimacy, have tended to start in a burst of passion and heat and single-minded determination towards a concrete goal.
Even in the projected future Temperance had shown her, it had been like that. She’d told Ace she was going to tell him something, but they were both already at least three steps past that point. They’d barely made it through the door of his apartment before she’d grabbed his jacket and pulled him in, kissing him fast and hard and deep like she had only moments to make up for all the lost time she’d spent not doing this.
And as it turned out, a few stolen moments were all she had, in that reality.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that kind of approach, that cut-to-the-chase attitude, not inherently. But she doesn’t want it to be like that here, now. She needs to know, to feel, to truly believe that she can move slowly, savor it, trust that he’ll still be in her arms in an hour, in a day, in ten years. That she can have this, and keep it. Keep him. Love him.
Like he understands—and he probably does, Ace always seems to understand—he settles slowly onto the couch beside her, both of them facing straight ahead. He’s quiet, unassuming. Radiating patience and comfort and love.
She wants to say something, turn to him, reach for him, but words wither and die on her tongue.
Their hands lay four inches apart on the cushion. Not that Nancy’s counting.
She lets her hand creep towards his, skin brushing skin. He’s slow but steady, assured in his movements, as he gently turns his hand and slides his fingers between hers, pressing their palms together. She turns her head to face him, and he mirrors her, their faces less than a breath apart.
He smiles, just a little, and suddenly she’s smiling too, and it’s just that easy. Because this is not some random guy. This is not anyone else in the world. This is Ace. Her best friend, the man she loves, probably her soulmate.
She tilts her chin and their lips meet and they’re kissing, finally, his free hand coming to slide through her hair, hers gripping the front of his shirt like he’ll fly away otherwise. She’s smiling against his mouth and he’s huffing out a laugh and it’s gentle and it’s sweet and it’s worth any price.
This kiss lasts a long time, giving and taking and slowly moving deeper, pulling each other closer, memorizing the feeling and the relief and the steady build of more, more, more.
She’s hit with the cold loss of him when he pulls back, just barely, and she’s about to protest but then his lips are on her neck and she’s gasping, tangling her hands in his hair. In one smooth move he pulls her into his lap and kisses her again, and again, and again.
When she whispers, “I love you,” she isn’t afraid at all.