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Connor works late on Tuesday nights. Nancy knows this because she casually asked Bess when would be a good time to have the next Game Night and she said Tuesday because Ace would definitely be free.
There isn’t going to be a next Game Night and everyone but Bess (still desperately trying to patch up their fractured friend group) knows it. But it got Nancy the information she needed and she figures she’s pretty much disappointed everyone in her life by now, so why not add Bess to the pile.
Which is why, when she enters the morgue on Tuesday (with a key card ‘borrowed’ from Connor’s desk after the last case he helped on), she finds herself freezing, and not because of the snowflakes melting in her hair or the carefully controlled clinical temperature.
Because Connor isn’t there.
Ace is.
Her mouth dries because- because he looks good. Professional. It’s the same way he always looked at home in the kitchen of the Claw, despite his obnoxiously patterned shirts and general disregard for hygiene codes.
He’s in white scrubs which, frankly, no one should be able to pull off but he somehow does. His hair is still shorter than usual, but a little more grown out than the last time she saw him, somewhere in between the two times she’s run her hands through it – once under the lust spell and once in a future that never happened.
He’s propping himself over the desk with one hand braced against it, the other jotting down notes on a folder in a confident, purposeful way, like someone who knows what they’re doing and is good at it. Which he is, she realises. Not that she’d ever doubted he would be anything but brilliant at anything he set his mind to, but she’s been keeping her distance for so long, it never occurred to her that he would have grown into his job so swiftly.
She drinks him in for a moment longer – the stubborn wave of hair that untucks from his ear, the slight flex of his arm as he writes – then abruptly turns on her heel, aiming for the door, hoping a plunge back into the icy winter weather will cool the burning of her cheeks.
“Nancy?”
Caught, she turns back towards him, shoulders rising in an attempt to make herself look as small as she feels under his wary gaze. She hates that look so much; hates that she put it there, wishes he’d do her the courtesy of glaring so she could bounce off his walls instead of being offered glimpses through a window into his hurt. But then, that is shuttered too, his features arranging into an impassive expression, void of feeling.
“I didn’t know you’d be here.” She rushes in lieu of a greeting.
He purses his lips which only draws her attention to them.
“Leo has a piano recital.” He tells her. “Connor asked to swap shifts.”
“Ah.” Nancy twists her fingers together until it almost hurts, the pressure on her joints a welcome distraction from his carefully blank expression. “That’s nice. He must be really proud-“
Ace sighs, snapping the folder shut. “What do you want, Nancy?”
You.
She flounders, squeezes her fingers together until her skin goes white, holds onto her hands to stop her reaching for his.
“This obviously isn’t a courtesy call.” He continues, although his tone picks up at the end, almost making it a question – like he hopes she’ll say he’s incorrect, that she’s not here on business but pleasure and her pleasure is him. His expression is still neutral, except she knows him and can pick up the tiny traces of hope in the set of his jaw, the lift of his eyebrows.
“I-“ Nancy drags her gaze from his face, from the creases at the corners of his eyes that are asking her to prove him wrong. “I need some autopsy reports.”
She practically feels the slump of his shoulders reverberate through her own.
“Of course.” He says and it’s entirely without bitterness, just resignation, the tiredness she sees every morning when she looks in her mirror. “What do you need?”
She almost wants him to fight her, to raise his voice, to get in her space so she can do the same and expel some of this energy that’s built up throughout these months of loving him, energy that has nowhere to go so buzzes inside her like a swarm of insects. Most people would describe love as butterflies, but Nancy’s is wasps, angry and hurt and looking to lash out and be swatted away. She wants him to yell so she can walk away, justified and righteous even if it stings, but of course he won’t.
He's gentle and kind.
He’s Ace.
So instead, she digs out the list she’s written of every empty grave in the cemetery and he ducks into the office to make copies for her.
“The carpark will close in ten.” Ace informs her as he hands the stack of copied reports. “You don’t want your car to get stuck till the morning.”
“I didn’t drive.” She tells him absently, already drawn into scanning the top page of the first report although her mind isn’t processing many of the words when he’s standing so close.
“Did you walk here?” He asks, bewildered. “In this weather?”
It’s been snowing for almost the entire day, the town already looking like a picturesque Christmas postcard this morning when she opened her curtains. The roads are decently clear – Horseshoe Bay is well prepared for winters in Maine – but it’s cold and icy with a harsh salty wind whistling through the streets from the ocean.
She opens her mouth, closes it again, unsure how to tell him she can’t get behind the wheel of her trusty old Sunbeam without remembering how it felt when she was rammed off the road; how it felt when her head cracked off the window; how it felt when she was falling to her knees and gathering his body into her lap. The first time she’d tried to take it off the drive, her hands had shook so hard it was impossible to get a grip on the stick, her foot automatically slamming on the brake in a panic when the wheels moved an inch.
She’d pulled the cover back over it, left it in front of the house where it’s still sat now, under a heavy layer of snow, mourning the loss of its second owner in as many years.
“Give me a sec to get changed,” Ace is saying, moving to the desk and shuffling files away, not waiting for her to answer. “And I’ll run you home in Florence.”
There he is. The man she knows (knew) and loves (no past tense there). The one constantly trying to shoulder her burdens, take her mental and physical load and help carry it.
“Oh. Oh, no, it’s fine-“
“It’s snowing-“
“-I can walk-“
“Nancy.” He says, resolutely, putting a hand on top of the papers she’s pretending to study. “It’s just a ride home. It doesn’t mean anything.”
He’s wrong. It means everything.
It means twenty minutes in a confined space, a familiar space, one that should feel safe but instead has danger settled into the grooves of the console and the worn leather of the seats because Florence is comfortable and that’s the last thing Nancy can afford to be around Ace right now.
She’s silent a beat too long and he sighs, withdrawing his arm and with it the offer to spend a little bit longer in his presence.
Nancy is a woman starved, so she hears her voice saying-
“Actually- that would be great. Thank you.”
It’s stilted and not the words she intended to say when she opened her mouth but now they’re out there in the open and she’s already trampled over his heart enough to risk taking them back.
He gives her a tiny smile, that particularly Ace one he does where his lips press together, not really turning up and the only way you know it’s a smile is because it’s there in his eyes, imperceptibly radiant.
“I’ll get my coat.”
*
They sit in silence as Ace drives. It’s too dark to read the files, but Nancy fidgets with them anyway, tucking down a corner and smoothing it back out repetitively until the paper softens and creases. Ace’s hand flexes on Florence’s wheel, clearly as agitated as she is.
The snow is coming thick and fast now, so their pace is slow and steady, elongating the journey and the time they’re stuck in this tension.
There’s been tension between them before; awkward tension when she scrambled for him under the power of the dress, angry tension when he’d held her accountable for the Aglaeca situation, thrumming tension when he tried to talk to her on the deck of the Claw and she’d pushed him away. Good tension too, the kind that crackles and expands until it snaps into something more - except they’d never got to the more, the opportunity snatched the moment Nancy took Temperance out, leaving her with only the dream of it, looking back on a future that had to stay in her past.
Now this tension, that’s been there since the night of the Veil, when she shrugged him off despite wanting nothing more than to climb into his arms and for once willingly give up the load she carries. The tension that’s only ricocheted, getting tighter and louder after she stormed out of his apartment, throwing out lies and accusations he didn’t deserve.
“Hey.” She says suddenly, unable to help herself. “I’m sorry.”
He spares a glance over at her before redirecting his eyes to the road. In the passing glow of the streetlamps, she sees his throat move with a heavy swallow.
“For what I said in your apartment.” She clarifies, even as her internal alarm bells start ringing. Careful, Drew, don’t get too close. “I- I could’ve done that better.”
Ace’s thumb taps against the wheel once, twice, three times before he takes a breath.
Whatever he’s going to say, she’ll never know because they’re both jolted forward by an unexpected force, a metallic crunch and screech of wheels as the car that drove into the back of Florence speeds off into the night.
Nancy’s seatbelt snaps her back against the leather, her head bouncing off the headrest and making her ears ring. She closes her eyes, disorientated, because she can’t be here again, can’t look over and see his seat empty, the glass smashed by the force of his body flying through it-
“There, there, girl.”
She opens her eyes and Ace is stroking Florence’s dash, making little sympathetic noises. He must have pulled them over to the sidewalk after the collision - the engine is off and the interior light flicked on, washing them in a watery yellow glow. It’s not the most flattering, picking up the dark circles under his eyes, but he’s alive and fussing over his car, seemingly unphased by what Nancy had been sure was their final moments.
“Ace?” She whispers, not entirely convinced this isn’t an elaborate illusion.
He looks over at her and her intake of breath is sharp when his blue eyes catch hers.
“You okay?” He asks and she dissolves into tears of panic, tears of relief, tears she’s been holding in for weeks not and letting build and build until he broke her dam with those two words and confirmation that she’s not killed him yet.
She wraps her arms around her middle, desperately trying to hold herself together despite feeling everything break apart in Florence’s passenger seat. The stack of reports slide out of her lap, scattering across the footwell in a gross parody of the snow that still falls steadily outside the window.
“Woah, hey, it’s okay.” He falters in the wake of her tears. “It was just a bump, some idiot turned too fast on the ice and caught us from behind.”
It doesn’t help, salt water tracking thick and fast down her cheeks as she fumbles for something, anything to get herself back under control; from his perspective this is a huge overreaction, but, like always, Ace is patient and compassionate and doing his best to console her. She doesn’t deserve it, not even slightly after she hurled poisonous words in his face then avoided him for weeks, but Ace has never run into a problem he hasn’t tried to fix.
“Hey!” He’s unbuckling his seatbelt now, reaching over the console to catch her shoulders as though his hands could contain the shivers wracking her body. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. It’s just a fender bender, Nancy, we’re okay, you’re okay.”
Her hands flail to catch his wrists, one of his palms moving to cradle her jaw.
“It’s just the weather and some asshole and a bit of bad luck.” He continues to reassure, his thumb stroking over her cheek, catching helpless tears. Her breathing hitches as she tries to get it back under control, tries to use his grip on her shoulder to ground her and stop her from floating off into that other life when she was in the driver’s seat and he was next to her until he wasn’t.
“Nancy, Nancy,” He says soothingly, both hands on her face now, cupping her cheeks and forcing her to look at him as he offers her comfort.
She gulps down air, watches him nod encouragingly at her.
“There you go,” He placates, relief flooding his voice. “There you go, see? That’s it, Nancy.”
She tightens her hold on his wrist, slides her hands over his skin until she can feel the steady rhythm of his pulse underneath her fingertips.
“That’s it, Nancy.” He repeats. And then- “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Her stomach plummets. The panic that had been ebbing away, chased off by his voice and his touch, immediately begins to rise to the surface, clawing up her throat like the seaweed wreath. She needs to get out now because what if that was a warning like the barometer cracking, Temperance chiding her for not playing by the rules, what if- oh god, what if her apology counted as acting on her feelings, what if the curse took it as her negating her denials and has already taken affect, what if letting him hold her together as she broke down, absorbing his affection like water in drought has doomed him-
“Nancy?”
She zones back into her body to see his concerned expression, forehead creased as he holds her face. She can’t help the automatic itch she feels to reach out and smooth over the lines, rub the stress and worry from his face; she was sure they were never there before he met her.
“I can’t do this.” She whimpers.
Ace nods understandingly, though he can’t possibly understand.
“I’m going to get you killed.” She whispers, unable to raise the thought any louder in case the volume gives it more power.
“What are you talking about?” He breathes, leaning over her further as though he could protect her body with his own. The bleak light from Florence’s roof catches on his not-long-enough-yet hair, giving him a faint halo as he delicately holds her face, like she’s made of glass. Despite his gentleness, she still feels like she could shatter under his touch.
She blindly presses the release for her seatbelt, other hand scrambling for the door handle so she can tumble out into the night. The cold air hits her like a smack to the face, stinging the dried salt of her tears. She can hear his noise of surprise even as she slams Florence’s door, ignoring it and stumbling over to the sidewalk, clutching her scarf to her face as the snow comes down harder, swirling with a vengeance, matching the churning of fear in her stomach.
“Nancy!”
She’s barely made it a block away when catches the sleeve of her coat, but she yanks herself free instantly, shoulders hunched against the snow as she stubbornly trudges onwards.
“Nancy, come on, it’s not safe out here-“
“Go away, Ace!” She shouts over her shoulder, lets the howling wind carry her harsh words back to him.
“You know I’m not going to do that.” He says back, putting on a burst of speed so he’s beside her.
She comes to an abrupt halt, almost growling in frustration.
“Just stop!” She practically screams at him, wants him riled up and pissed off and ready to abandon her in the middle of a snowstorm. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”
“Because I love you.”
The sensation that overtakes her is two-fold; first a glowing, heart-thumping, life affirming warmth that bursts like a supernova through her body, sending tingling rays of light shooting through her veins until she feels like she could float. Then, rapidly, it cools, a heavy sinking weight that threatens to force her to her knees; all encompassing dread.
“Take that back.”
“No.” Ace takes a step closer to her; her feet feel like they’re held in blocks of cement, unable to move back out of his path. “Nancy, you’re my friend and if we’re never more than that, that’s fine. But whatever is going on, whatever is making you- making you like this-“ He gestures fruitlessly towards her as she shakes uncontrollably. “You’ve got to tell me what’s going on. Let me help, let me in.”
This hallucination is my promise to you. On my lips right now is a curse that I will release the moment that I die.
She stares at him, the panic not exactly disappearing but somehow plateauing, urgent but easing off.
It will kill Ace if you ever act upon your feelings for each other.
“Please, Nancy.” He pleads, hand reaching to catch hers. This time she lets him, her frozen fingers wrapping around his.
But it will be soon.
She moves her other hand to his chest, rests it over his heart, feels the catch in his breathing at the unexpected gesture.
And it will be painful.
“There’s a curse.” She says. “And now we don’t have much time.”