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The concept of the past is fundamentally simple you do something, spend some time over something and the moment slips by, already behind you like the next patch of gravel on a highway.
Not for Nancy, it wasn’t.
Her highway ran in circles: carefully intermingling circles that desperately revisited her naivete as proof of where she stood now.
But that didn’t mean it was any less daunting.
Nancy hadn’t spoken for what seemed like a long time. Fisted in her hand was a small cardboard square, barely the size of her palm but holding the culmination of all her fears. It was the symbol of the Tall Thing… Simon.
Thinking about the entity took her memory to exactly a few months ago when she destroyed its source of power. Nancy could still hear the hiss of the Tall Thing’s flesh scorching off itself; she could feel the heat wave of the huge orange flames that sprouted from the lighter in her hands;
Carson was shouting for her to come back to him;
Simon was beckoning for her to join him in the fire.
What scared her was that though the rest of the memory was a lingering smudge on wet glass, Nancy distinctly felt the embers of her flatlining self-preservation
She wanted to join him, just for once, to see how it would be if she fought for that control.
She could remember how she hoped it would change her into someone that was not Nancy, not this insecure schoolgirl who had once bent through the torn steel fence because she was curious.
For that one millisecond of a moment, Nancy Drew had not wanted to be herself.
And it scared her.
She believed she got rid of Simon once and for all. But here it was, the same symbol staring back at her like two eyes of a hawk, a small message handwritten on the back:
You owe him a soul.
Another girl was kidnapped and it was all Nancy’s fault. If only she had thought clearly and if only she—
A snap of a finger brought her back to her kitchen, where familiar faces were looming over her with varied degrees of worry and concern.
Nancy shot out of her chair, pushing through a very determined Nick, George and Bess to swipe her keys from the marble platform. Ignoring their cacophony of ‘Nancy wait’s and ‘Nancy stop’s, she slammed the door on their faces.
The porch steps were sectioned blurs of grey beneath her feet, she all but bolted towards her car.
—
Nancy had never been one to feel angry with supernatural entities that messed with her.
After all, they too were lost souls who were attracted by the one thing they had in common: fascination with what made someone terrified, what made them tick, what tipped them from disbelief to blind belief.
But this one mere checkbox in her list angered her to no length.
No, it made her hate how she wasn’t in control of the one moment that put her where she was now.
As long as Simon was alive and preying on young children like her, that selfish control freak inside Nancy would always rear its ugly head.
No one had followed her, Nancy had observed with fuming relief.
Good, she preferred if she did this alone.
Nancy revved it to the Historical Society. The one thing that she needed to kill Simon was the one thing she didn’t have last time.
A cursed object for transfiguring his evil into a physically hurtable portent.
Hannah had been reluctant to give it to her, but there was a lot that they owed each other, and an effigy of a magically malleable portent with no questions asked was a favour called even.
Nancy was running off the perfectly manicured lawn of the Historical Society when she heard the distinct rumble of a vessel she hadn’t heard in what seemed like a long while.
Oh how she had dreamt of Florence pulling up at the Claw one drizzly day, its engine sputtering and singing a tune that only he could assume to be a conversational lament.
Oh how she had wanted to hear the same sound every time she was losing hope in the last few weeks, every time she thought about him coming back.
Ace stood at the gate of the Society.
He looked all the same and yet so drastically different.
His hair grew shinier as her feet pounded beneath her, his muscled form grew nearer with every step.
His eyes seemed new and somehow bluer, holding the light of old secrets.
“Ace,” his name rang out in her voice with absolutely no qualms about her shame and no shame about her qualmless desperation.
“Nancy. Hey."
God, why did her heart jump at his voice? Had she missed him that much? Her name sounded like a ballad on his lips, like a cruel knife which dug deeper into her burned heart that had waited for her name in that voice. But at least it was him. Ace’s voice made even death by drowning sound poetic to her.
"Have you been crying?”
Nancy now stood a few feet away from, her paper-holding fist pressing deeply against the strap of her satchel. She pointedly ignored his question, willing for the saltiness that threatened to trickle down her nose to go back.
“You’re home early.”
Great, that was the first thing she’d said to the one man she’d wanted to see.
( It was one of the first times Nancy had wished to take up Bess on her lesson on polite conversation starters. )
“Yeah… You going somewhere?”
Nancy wished she could stay and look at the evening sun setting like a shadow on his sweaty chiselled jaw.
But she had a monster to burn and a girl to save.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. We could catch up another time maybe? Good to see you.”
She hopped off the brick pavement and made her way to her car. Nancy was just inches from the handle to her door when his footsteps sounded behind her.
“Bess called me.”
She froze.
“You can’t go back there alone, Nancy.”
She refused to look at him.
The paper came undone out of her fist slowly, she didn’t want to let it go.
She wanted to hold onto it, throw it into the fire that scorched her monster as she saved another innocent girl from becoming like her.
“And where exactly are you proposing my destination is?”
“You’re going back to Simon.”
Damn it.
“Did Bess tell you that? Because she could be an unreliable source.”
She felt Ace move behind her, the metal zip of his billowing jacket clanging against the metal of her car. He smelt like he always did, only now devoid of the dish soap musk— melting butterscotch, honey-lemon and so much like the musty endearing inside of Florence.
“Bess didn’t tell me.”
Her heart skipped a beat at his closeness, she forgot what words were.
Of course, he wasn’t too close to invading her personal space. But oh how she wished he had invaded it; oh how she wished he would get closer.
She wanted him to press himself against her, she wanted to play with fire.
“I know you Nancy, you want to destroy that thing. But you shouldn’t go alone.”
“It ruined my childhood. And now it’s going to ruin another little girl's. It ruined me.”
She was crying indeed. They were tears of humiliation, anger and the road not taken because a vengeful entity had to take away her control on memory.
“You’re not ruined.”
It sounded an awful lot like his reassurance to her at the bluffs. “You were not born broken.”
“I have to do this Ace. Let me go.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
He wasn’t. His hand hadn’t strayed from his sides, he wasn’t leaning against her door, he wasn’t scolding her about her decision.
Damn it, he wasn’t stopping her.
But then again, that was who Ace was: he never put someone’s decisions down, even in the most fatalistic of times.
He’d said she shouldn’t be doing this alone.
And so she did all she could muster in the nick of the moment: she held his warm hand and muttered a soft okay, watching quietly as he opened the door for her.
—
“You’re okay…” Ace hadn’t stopped repeating that ever since the firefighters had shown up.
The warehouse was a clammery mess. Everybody was layered with soot and flames hissed under the water projecting from the pipes.
Nancy’s fist wasn’t pressed with the crumpled edges of the paper anymore. Instead, it was in the grip of the girl she had saved.
She wanted to tremble, watching the destruction that had sprouted from her fingertips.
Nancy had burned the place down, scorching the effigy in her hands after linking it to Simon.
But Ace's arms around her diminished it all to a lull that she wanted to ignore. Their arms were tangled around each other, a mess of heavy ash on fragile flesh holding close.
Precisely in those moments, space was an undefined entity.
Plastered between their arms was 7 year old Raine Corning, the girl Nancy and Ace had saved from Simon.
Ace was the one carrying most of the captive's weight, rocking her while she sobbed into his shoulder. Nancy's hand was held prisoner in Raine's hysterical palm, pressing all three of them closer together.
Ace and Nancy were hugging her, like they were too afraid she'd break without them holding her in place. And they were right, Raine wouldn't let go of either of their arms, convulsing in fear.
Tears were flowing freely now, Nancy observed that of herself with some semblance of relief. They paved their way through the soot settled on her cheeks.
With her red rimmed eyes piercing his soul and a blistered hand gripping his tightly, Nancy let out a small choked breath.
"He's gone."
"Yes, you did it."
"He's… really gone."
A hysterical bout of victory seized her laughs, turning them into sobs.
"I did it Ace!"
Nancy's eyes dimmed with the end of the chase, the satisfaction of another demon defeated. "I did it, I kicked the monster out of my house, and now he can never get to anyone. Ace…"
She dove for his other shoulder, hiding herself from the world as she came undone in his arms, her inexplicable grief only privy to him.
He cradled both the vulnerable souls in his arms. Ace blinked back his own tears as Nancy's wet his shirt.
Ace bit his lip, running his shaking taut jaw along Nancy's temple.
His lips brushed her copper hair, his closed eyes marvelling the imprint of her hair, dulled by the soot but brightened by the flames long behind them.
His face didn't leave the crook of their looped arms, he pulled her towards him tighter in desperation.
"You're safe Nance."