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For a while, touching Ace is terrifying.
Nancy tends to be a fairly disciplined person, diligent in all her efforts and ruthlessly effective in reaching her goals. When she decides to form a habit, there isn’t much that can dissuade her from consistently enacting it, cementing it into her routine.
That’s the only reason she was able to avoid Ace for an entire month—to tamp down on the instinct to reach out and touch him, smile too brightly at him, embrace the feelings exploding in her heart and tell him everything.
Nancy is good at forming firm habits, and a habit that was actively preventing the death of the man Nancy is in love with proves especially difficult to shake.
That first day, after the curse was broken, she’d been able to break through the fear and lose herself entirely in him, fill her heart back up with joy and the heat of his body against hers and the sound of his laughter and the softness of his hair and love, love, love.
But darkness always finds a way to creep back in.
She still has nightmares, every now and then. Still wakes up gasping, crying, scrambling to make sense of reality and trauma and fear and pain and loss. Still has that moment where she feels achingly alone, feels utterly lost, feels the lack of Ace like a hole in her soul that can’t be filled.
It helps, of course, that Ace is there, pulling her into his arms, soothing her with quiet words and gentle touch, helping her breathe back into consciousness and peace.
Even so, she can’t erase the memories. Even so, she can hear Temperance’s voice floating through the air around her; can feel the bitter cold of that night on the side of the road; can taste the lingering promise of death, bitter on her tongue.
It will be soon, she thinks. And it will be painful.
What is soon?
Hours stretch into days stretch into weeks, and Nancy doesn’t know how to let go of this clenching ache in her stomach, this ball of fear that can never quite unravel.
That day at Ace’s apartment, before they broke the curse, she hadn’t realized how easy it would be to forget the danger, to forget why she had to miss him so long.
The low timbre of his voice speaking softly, close to her, the unflinching lock of his eyes on hers, drawing her in; she’d drifted closer and closer without even realizing it, mind so muddled and drunk off his presence that she’d almost killed him—would have, if not for the warning shatter of the barometer.
Even though he’s okay now, he’s safe now, they’re okay now, her mind tunnels down rabbit holes of terror and what-if.
How far would she have gone? How much damage would she have done? How surely would she have doomed him?
And an even darker thread to pull, late in the night, deep in her heart: how can she be sure she won’t, even now?
She can’t let go of the tension in her chest whenever he gets in a car. Can’t stop her flinch when he walks under the decorative hooks in the Claw. She obsesses over whether something he’s about to eat might have traces of raspberries, never mind the fact that his extremely mild allergy barely causes a blip in his day even if he is exposed.
In the middle of the night, she wakes and centers herself on the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath her cheek, the comforting bump of his heartbeat. Each pulse feels like a miracle. She doesn’t know how trust the next will come.
Relief rockets through her when his key jingles in the door of his apartment, startling her away from the case file she’d been reading on his couch.
He’s perfectly on time, exactly when she expected him, completely in one piece, but there had still been a part of her that was certain he was hurt—that the heart emoji she’d texted him an hour ago had been the final nail in his coffin, or the way she’d held him last night, or their last kiss, their last I love you, some combination of affection damning him forever.
“Hey,” he says, shrugging out of his coat and tossing it over a nearby chair.
“Hey,” she echoes, relief surging through her, leaving her limbs loose and shaky and her heart racing and her eyes pricking with tears.
And then he’s in front of her, leaning down to kiss her hello, and Nancy—
She flinches away. Just a little, but it’s enough.
There’s a long pause where Ace just looks at her. She swallows hard, embarrassed by her reaction, but not sure how to walk it back.
“Is this the part where we talk about it?” he finally asks.
Nancy blinks, smoothing her hands over her jeans self-consciously. “Talk about what?” she asks lightly, one last-ditch attempt at avoidance she knows won’t work.
Ace smiles, but there isn’t any humor in it. He sits down beside her on the couch and takes her hand, twining their fingers together.
“This thing where we broke the curse but you’re still looking at me like I’m made of glass.”
Nancy wants to deny it, but she’s still trembling so hard Ace’s hand is shaking in hers.
“I—” she says, but her voice cracks. “I just—you—”
But Ace knows her. He knows what she’s trying to say even when she isn’t all the way sure herself.
“I’m safe, Nancy. We broke the curse. You saved me. I’m okay.”
“I know,” she says. “I know that.”
His thumb slides over the back of her hand. “But you’re still scared,” he says. It isn’t a question.
Nancy shakes her head, wishing the motion could clear out all the dark thoughts, all the terror. “I watched you die, Ace. I watched you die, and it was my fault. I can’t do that again, I can’t.”
“People die every day, Nancy,” he says, but his tone is gentle. “We can’t stop that.”
She opens her mouth to protest as reflexive, trembling tears spark in her eyes, but he presses the softest, gentlest kiss to her lips instead.
“Nancy Drew,” he says, “I am wildly in love with you. I have no intention of going anywhere. But I also have no intention of bubble wrapping our hearts.”
He pulls her hand up and presses it flat against his chest, over his heart.
“We know as well as anyone that life hurts just as much as death,” he continues. “But we’re so lucky. We're still here, and we’re whole, more or less.”
She huffs a laugh at that. “And we’re together,” she concedes, feeling the chokehold of fear in her throat loosen, just a bit. It’s amazing how well he can soothe her with just a few words. Just by being here, beside her, looking at her with those eyes.
His answering smile is brilliant, and she has to remind herself to breathe.
“And we’re together,” he echoes, bringing her hand up so he can kiss her palm. “Everything else we can handle. Right?”
Happy ever after isn’t guaranteed. Nancy knows that. She’s always known that.
But right here, right now, in the life she’s living, she’s so fucking happy it hardly seems possible.
Of course...in the time she’s known Ace, she’s seen and felt and done so many things that have stretched her definition of possible.
She thinks about Charity and Beckett, sacrificing everything to protect the world from Temperance, their love binding them together across death and generations. She thinks about the power of love between Odette and her Englishwoman, how the words of their love letters were enough to banish the Aglaeca and bring back the girl.
She thinks about the love between Ryan and Lucy, between Carson and Kate, between George and Nick. The kind of love that can change worlds.
She thinks about every ghost they’ve faced and monster they’ve battled, every supernatural disaster and tangled mystery and baffling development, and through it all love, her love for her family, for her town, for her friends, for her crew, for Ace.
“Bring it on,” she says, and pulls him in for another kiss.
Fuck a curse; Ace is right. Nancy knows they’re stronger.