Work Text:
It was New Year’s Eve 2019 and the town of Horseshoe Bay closely resembled the picture-perfect setting in the snow globe on the counter. A light layer of snow was dusting the streets, Christmas lights were still twinkling in windows, loved ones were beginning to gather to ring in the new year, and Nancy Drew was staring miserably at the sorbet options in front of her.
“It feels like 2019 has been four years long. I’m ready to be rid of it,” she grumbled to her companion, pausing her pity party only to offer the ice cream shop worker a small smile at the end of her request for a single scoop of raspberry sorbet.
Ryan Hudson, on the other hand, was all smiles. Banana split in hand, he had already left a generous tip by the time Nancy’s smile dropped. A gesture for her to pick a spot to sit in the completely empty room soon followed.
“You’ve been sad lately.”
A serious understatement. Had Nancy not been so listless, it might have even elicited a snort. Instead, she barely shrugged.
“Well, I killed someone, so,” she pointed out, eyes darting to the worker to make sure that they hadn’t overheard that particular detail as she slid into her seat.
(They had not.)
“And Temperance released a tsunami that was going to wipe out the town,” Ryan countered between spoonfuls of sundae, sliding into the seat next to her. “After hexing children. And a bunch of other really bad things, including murder, over hundreds of years. I know it’s not something that you wanted to have to do, but you had no choice. You saved lives.”
The pause before he delivered his next words was enough for Nancy’s eyes to narrow in suspicion, but Ryan’s twirling of the stem of a just-eaten cherry between his fingers was the larger red flag. It was a nervous tic that Nancy had discovered last time there was a Drew House ice cream party. The subject of the chore wheel had come up. Nancy’s eyes had tracked the little sliver of red the entire time Ryan had lied about his dishwashing capabilities.
Just what had she agreed to when she’d accepted his casual invitation to grab ice cream?
“Ryan…”
The warning slipped from her lips before he could get too far into whatever pre-planned speech he had, the trap he’d set for her revealing itself and making Nancy feel foolish for not picking up on things sooner.
He’d taken her to an almost abandoned secondary location and everything. She was officially off her game.
But Nancy having a crisis about falling into a well meaning trap didn’t stop Ryan’s comforting words from being lobbed her way, one sentiment after another falling on ears that refused to hear it.
“We’re all just worried about you. I’m worried about you. Your friends haven’t heard from you. You haven’t left the house in weeks. You didn’t make the DND session for our new campaign and that was in the living room. I respect your needs and I get that you want to lock yourself away to process… that night, but are you sure it’s just that?”
Nancy watched as Ryan took a turn glancing over towards the ice cream parlor staff member, relief evident on his features as it became abundantly clear that their conversation was indeed entirely private. The sound of short clips being scrolled through at an alarming pace was an obvious sign that the teenager’s mind was occupied elsewhere.
“Just that feels like it’s enough, considering how it was only a few weeks ago,” she pointed out. Even she, currently unable to detect anything, could hear the falseness in her voice.
She couldn’t tell him about Ace. Couldn’t share that she had finally embraced Horseshoe Bay as her perfect, haunted hometown, just in time for her to see reminders of her best friend and the life they could have lived together in every place she looked. Nick's apartment building? The youth center? Her own house? If she'd needed any confirmation that Temperance was right about her forecast, her fridge full of sorbet courtesy of Ace was enough.
It was one thing to mourn something short lived. It was another thing entirely to have had the worst happen, only to be reversed purely so the threat of it happening again could serve as her personal torture for years to come. It hadn’t been real, but she had lived it. And if she had to put her friendship with Ace into low power mode to ensure that he survived, it was a sacrifice that she had no choice but to make.
But maybe Ryan was meant to be the family detective. It felt like he was seeing right through her. As a result, the comforting sentiments just kept coming.
“You know what I meant,” he sighed. “Ace asked me to do a wellness check to make sure you were still alive. I don’t even know how you’ve done it, but you’ve managed to avoid both me and Carson. And we live with you. At least until you move to Icarus Hall next week. So let me worry. Have you been eating? Drinking water? Getting any sun? Look, I just-I want to be there for you. Could you meet me, maybe, a quarter of the way?”
The answer to that question was a resounding no. And Nancy would’ve said such, had she not decided that the same thing could be conveyed by shoving a huge spoonful of raspberry sorbet into her mouth.
Her immediate grimace was apparently not enough to indicate her response. Ryan took it as a positive sign.
“Okay, emotional vulnerability. I’ll go first,” he offered, clearly encouraged by the curious look she managed even through the pain of eating entirely too much sorbet at once.
“You know, I didn’t just ask you to come here because I know sorbet is your comfort food. I asked you to meet me here because I come here every year on New Year’s. To remember Lucy. Tonight is kind of a milestone date. I wanted… I dunno. To talk about her with someone who would understand.”
By the time he’d paused, Nancy had managed to defrost. However, his words were instantly crushing.
Thanks to Lisbeth, Nancy knew what it felt like to be punched in the face. That had hurt less.
Nancy had been so absorbed with her grief over what she’d done, for what could have been, that she hadn’t looked around enough lately to realize what everyone else might be going through. The town was still rebuilding. Nick and George were undoubtedly still reeling from their breakup. And Ryan… she had just assumed that he had invited her for a night on the town (read: for ice cream, and then a quick trip right back home) to give Carson a break from her haunting the halls.
“I didn’t-” Nancy started to say, about to insist that she hadn’t known the importance of the location. But, in fact, she had. It had come out months ago, around the same time she’d discovered what Lucy had planned for the night she had been born. “You come here every year?”
Ryan waved off her floundering, but didn’t go so far as to offer her a reassuring smile. Instead, he confirmed what he’d already said, a casual shrug not quite masking the sentimental nature of their conversation.
“I do,” he nodded. “And I order the same thing we got the last time I saw her in person. New Year’s Eve, 1999.”
Nancy clocked the fact that Ryan’s eyes grew a little misty as he looked at his banana split, but she wasn’t about to speak up and derail the conversation. Instead, she offered him the space to go on.
And he did. Without hesitation.
“I know I’ve told you this, but Lucy… we just got each other. When I was around her, it didn’t matter that I was a Hudson. That I was a hilltopper. When we were together it was like the rest of the world just… faded away. We could be ourselves. I was my best self, even. The last date night we had was twenty years ago today. I got sent to boarding school right after and then, well, you’ve read the emails. You know our story.”
The mist had disappeared, evaporated by the warmth of his memories, but Nancy was desperate for any new Lucy detail she could unlock. With only a bit of gentle prodding, Ryan soon continued.
“We banked on the fact that no one was going to want ice cream in the middle of winter, so we came here,” he shared, eyes unfocused as he drifted a million miles away. “Split a sundae. We… we talked about how if we ever got married, we’d have an ice cream cake. I told her that that would make it hard to smash into each other’s faces. It was stupid, but I thought that moment was the pinnacle of what a marriage should be. The chance to laugh together in front of everyone you loved.”
Nancy listened intently to every word that Ryan said, absorbing each piece of the memory into the always shifting picture that she had of Lucy Sable. And, for that matter, Ryan.
If someone had asked Nancy a year ago if she thought she’d be sitting in an ice cream parlor on New Year’s Eve, having a heart to heart with Ryan Hudson, she would have laughed in their face. Instead, she was hanging on his every word as he shared a precious memory about the woman who had been taken from them both far too soon.
“Lucy argued that we could compromise by just doing whipped cream. Before I knew it, she’d proved her point. I was still wiping hot fudge off my face when we hopped into the photo booth. Grabbed our jackets to head to her spot in Sylvan Woods to ring in the new year,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.
“We watched the fireworks from her tree. Not up in it since neither of us felt like scaling a tree that night, but you could see the sky well from nearby. I remember we talked about how it was crazy that people thought computers weren’t going to work at the stroke of midnight. I handed her a mix CD I’d made for her to pop into her CD player in the new year, for when I couldn’t be with her. A little The Cure, some Green Day, Wonderwall. Songs that made me think of her. And then… we talked about how ringing in the new millennium together was a sign that we just might be together forever.”
That her mother had fallen for an “anyway, here’s Wonderwall” guy was enough to elicit a genuine smile from Nancy, but that soon faded as she was reminded of the bittersweet nature of the story.
“We were so young and my dad was so determined to put a stop to us, but we really believed we’d make it. Right until the end.”
With a shake of his head, Ryan rejoined the present. And one look at Nancy’s face was enough to get him back on track. For what? Nancy wasn’t sure. But she didn’t even have to ask, as Ryan quickly supplied an answer.
“I know what you’re thinking - I’m really sad, why is my dad making me even more sad on New Year’s Eve? And the answer to that is that a) I want to share more about Lucy with you. I like getting to remember her as she was and this is the first year that I’ve had someone to share these memories with.”
“...and b)?” she asked, truly unsure of where their conversation could be heading next.
“B) is that I’ve had a little chat with my old pal, Mr. Ace.”
Oh.
Nancy was sure that her face was saying more than any words possibly could to indicate her feelings about the segue. Several emotions had indeed shot across her face in rapid succession - heartbreak, frustration, despair, anger. One had only to observe her for that brief moment to get a quick lesson on the stages of grief.
She didn’t want to do a deep dive. And Ryan could tell.
“Nancy, just hear me out,” he protested, clearly following her line of sight as she glanced towards the exit. “You’re miserable. He’s miserable. I have eyes - I know where things were heading and I know they sure aren’t heading there now. What happened?”
“It’s complicated,” she insisted. To which he had an entirely too quick rebuttal.
“Well, your avoidance tactic of stuffing your mouth with sorbet so you can’t talk is a no-go now that you’ve finished your scoop, and I’ve got no place to be…”
They sat in silence for a full five minutes before Nancy gave in and decided to open up. Carefully.
How was one supposed to talk about a curse when the rules around it were so vague?
“The night of the New Genesis, it wasn’t just the Temperance thing that happened,” she explained. “In the span of seconds, I lived months. You died. I watched it happen. We had a funeral. And Ace… we were together. And then there was a terrible accident. He died in my arms. It was so real . All of it.”
Another minute passed before Ryan reached over to rest a hand on her shoulder.
“But it wasn’t real, Nancy. I’m still here,” he gave a quick squeeze. “And Ace is fine.”
“Well, he won’t be,” she shot back, on high alert for any sign that the universe’s interpretation of “acting on her feelings” was incredibly loose. Was just speaking of it enough? Had she already said too much?
Unfortunately, it was too late to turn back if so. There hadn’t been any major signs from the universe that something was amiss… and it felt so good to finally get things off her chest. The weight hadn’t fully lifted from her shoulders, but she could stand a little more upright now that she was starting to share the burden of it with Ryan.
“If I act on my feelings for him, he’ll die. When I-” she broke off, quick to alter her words both for self-preservation and because they were in public. “When Temperance died, she released a curse that made that inescapable. I’ve lost him before and I can’t do it again. I can’t live in a world that he’s not in. It’s enough just to know that he’s out there and that he’s okay.”
The tears now forming in her own eyes were enough to spur Ryan into action, his shoulder squeeze soon upgrading to a full side hug.
“Nance… you’re the smartest person I know. If anyone can figure out how to break a curse, it’s you. But you do yourself a disservice by keeping this all to yourself. I’m getting into the mystical relic business - let me help you. And Bess? She’s taking over from Hannah as Keeper. You and your friends have been able to solve every mystery this town has had to offer. We can figure this out.”
Nancy was no stranger to despair. In the past year she’d become very well acquainted with it. But somehow she’d never managed to sound so despondent as she did when she asked “but what if we don’t?”
“We will,” Ryan insisted, the determination in his tone enough of an anchor to keep her from drifting out to sea. “Look, if you have a great love, you don’t just give up on it. If you think you’ve found your person, you go to great lengths, you exhaust all options. Leave no stone unturned. Twenty years ago, I was sitting here with the love of my life, planning a future. When I was sent away, I was always thinking about what the next email I’d send her would say. I scaled a fence to escape boarding school to see her. I hitchhiked. For love. I knew that Lucy was it for me. But by the time I finally made it back to Horseshoe Bay it was too late for us.”
Nancy had never sent Ace a playlist or even an email, but their love language was dropping files into their private server, text messages where they told each other things that no one else knew. A notoriously bad texter, she was always thinking of things that she wanted to send to him. When she was in a moment of crisis, she wanted him there. And he was there. Always. From her very first day at the Claw, their first shared break, she’d trusted him enough to spill her feelings. When she found the words, he was there to hear them and to support her. That fondness had only grown from there.
Ace was it for her. She hadn’t realized it immediately, but like all mysteries the answer had been revealed over time. She’d followed the clues and cracked the case. By the time she had lost him in Temperance’s dreamscape, she had never been more certain of anything. And that was terrifying.
The risks were huge. Insurmountable, even. And yet…
Nancy wasn’t so stubborn that she couldn’t recognize that she had been presented with something that Ryan and Lucy hadn’t been - a choice. Life was long, and it was entirely possible that she and Ace could both move on and be happy enough . But Nancy had never been good at leaving a mystery unsolved.
“Even knowing what you know now, how it ended…” she trailed off, eyes laser focused on Ryan as she asked the one question for which the answer could tip her over the edge. “Would you do it again?”
“In a heartbeat,” he answered, not leaving any room for doubt.
And she believed him.
Nodding, Nancy was just about to concede that Ryan had made a solid argument when she heard the tinkling of the door’s chimes announcing someone’s arrival. The fact that she always had to sit facing the door (just in case) was her saving grace.
“Ryan,” she stressed, equal parts panicked and annoyed as one of the primary subjects of their conversation came into view. Not just into view, but directly into their path.
It was clear that Ryan’s plan had been even more elaborate than Nancy had given him credit for, and though her eyes were wide with panic… on some level, she’d come to expect Ace’s arrival. If Ryan was sending her through a trial by fire, it only made sense that she wouldn’t get to procrastinate the final step.
“Just talk to him,” Ryan reasoned, ignoring her pleading looks as he stood to discard his trash and leave. “Don’t start the new year with any regrets.”
And with a nod towards Ace in both greeting and goodbye, he was off.
Then there were three once again - Nancy, the love of her life, and the ice cream parlor worker who continued to not pay them any attention.
“Hi,” Ace kicked them off, his greeting as tentative yet warm as it had been when he’d returned to the Claw after waking from his coma. Back then a double apology had soon followed. Now, he had no reason to apologize.
No, that was all on her.
“Hi,” she parroted, her own hello laced with nervousness.
The good news was that simply looking at him wasn’t enough to be considered acting on her feelings, even though the way she was doing it was without a doubt conveying just as much as words could. The bad news was that she didn’t just want to look at him. She wanted to tell him everything, take a walk through the winter wonderland outside hand in hand, kiss him at midnight as the fireworks exploded.
Nancy could tell that he was assessing her, reading her in the very specific way that only he had been able to. So much so that it was like he was telepathically able to pick up on her desires, because without prompting, he’d put the plan that had just started to form in her mind into motion.
“Sometimes it’s easier to talk when you’re in motion. Let’s take a walk,” he suggested, grabbing her empty sorbet cup and spoon with one hand and gesturing towards the exit with the other.
In another life, his words had led to their first kiss. And then a whole lot more than that. He had taken her through town, giving her a pep talk that ended with words she would never forget.
They love you. I’m with them.
This night’s walk couldn’t be that walk. It couldn’t end with those words. But in the spirit of the season and in starting the new year right, with Ryan’s story about Lucy and his parting words still ringing in her ears, Nancy accepted that it could be the start of something.
And for the time being, that was enough.