Chapter Text
Beautiful futures don’t come easy.
Long distance is brutal. There are times where Nancy misses Ace so badly her chest hurts. There are nights when she stays up on video chat with him for hours.
Ace doesn’t know why she’s so certain she’ll get the transfer to Boston, but Nancy holds onto confidence. When the approval comes through, she still cries a little from relief.
There are things about her future she doesn’t know, of course.
Ace’s proposal, the how and the where and the when comes as a complete surprise. He expects her to be more surprised that he has Kathryn Drew’s wedding set for her. She’s not, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t cry when he slides it onto her finger.
He proposes on Christmas Eve.
He can’t understand the significance. He can’t possibly. And yet, when it’s nearly midnight, mere minutes before it’s about to become Christmas Day, he asks her to marry him.
“I like the house,” Ace says, leaning over to whisper in her ear, “But that mailbox has got to go, right?”
Nancy looks at the wrought-iron mailbox, and thinks about one Christmas that will happen years into the future.
“I kind of like it,” she tells him.
He looks at her like she’s crazy, but even after they move in, he lets her keep the mailbox.
And then, just like Ace of the future told her, Nancy finds out she’s pregnant.
Morning sickness is brutal with the twins. Nancy’s feet swell. She feels like she’s the size of an elephant. Or a house. Or a barn. Or an ocean.
She waddles around the house. She waddles around the office. She ends up taking an early maternity leave. Growing two humans is exhausting.
Ace doesn’t quite believe her when she tells him it’s going to be twins. He’s skeptical all the way up until her first ultrasound appointment. When he sees their two little shapes on the monitor, Nancy watches as he holds back tears.
Later, on their way home, Nancy clutches the photo of her girls and almost can’t help her own tears. She could blame hormones, but she knows the truth. She’s been hoping to meet them ever since one very cold and snowy Christmas Eve. She’s been scared, in a way, that maybe she was going to miss out on them.
Their girls are born one dreary Sunday in the middle of the afternoon, quite a bit before their expected due date. Nancy doesn’t remember much of the experience after a point, just the sureness of Ace’s presence beside her, and then after, sitting in her hospital bed staring down in awe at the two bundles of little humans in her arms.
She hadn’t realized that it was possible to physically hold happiness, but here it is. At some point Ace climbs into the bed beside her, and together they look down into the little faces of their girls.
The peace only lasts until Carson, Ryan, and Ace’s parents come bursting into their hospital room. Ryan is holding a bouquet of pink balloons larger than any other Nancy has ever seen in her entire life.
The years after are their own sort of blur. There are sleepless nights, caused by crying children and hard cases at work.
The girls’ first day of preschool. (“I know my ABZs now, Mommy.”)
Their first ballet class. (“Look, mommy, look. Tendu, tendu, pas de bourrée.”)
Skinned knees. Snuggles. Fights. Kisses. The look in Ace’s eyes when he throws them up in the air and catches them. Lucy laughing hysterically as he tries to juggle for her. Katy standing on Ace’s toes as he walks her around the room.
Dancing with Ace at George and Nick’s wedding. Holding Ace in her arms after his dad’s funeral, and then late at night when she wakes with an empty bed to find him just sitting in the living room. She wraps her arms around him and holds him. He’s there, and she’s there with him, and that seems to be enough to handle the grief for now.
Driving home late on Christmas Eve, heavy snowfall. Almost home. A patch of ice.
Nancy feels the car spin out of her control. Her foot hits the breaks sharply.
And then—
Nancy wakes up to a quiet house and an empty bed. She wraps herself up in her robe, runs a brush through her hair, and slips out of the bedroom she and Ace share.
It’s the day after Christmas. Ace has been hard at work with the girls already, because when she peeks into the playroom, she sees the dollhouse that was downstairs is now set up in the little corner they’d surreptitiously cleared away for it. Both girls are moving their dolls through the house, and chatting together the way children do when they play.
How about we pretend your doll is married to my doll, and then this doll will be the baby?
Okay, but how about it’s Christmas?
Okay. How about your doll gives my doll this for Christmas?
This is a plastic ear of corn from their kitchen set that is nearly the size of the doll, but proportions don’t matter when you’re six.
Nancy leaves them be. She’s sure Ace is keeping an ear on them with the video baby monitor they still use sometimes when the girls are upstairs and they’re both downstairs.
She finds Ace in the kitchen pouring two cups of coffee. He turns when he hears her enter.
“You sleep okay?” he asks.
She nods. Gratefully, she takes the coffee he offers her and blows a cooling breath across the top.
“I remember,” she tells him. “It all came back.”
His smile is large. “I knew it would.”
“I know you did, but thank you anyway for being so great.”
“Nancy,” he says, almost teasingly. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
She smiles knowingly. “At the time, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
He hums out an mmhmm. “So that mailbox?”
“I didn’t really like it all that much,” Nancy says. “But in a weird way, I knew I needed it.”
She sets her coffee down on the table and moves into his embrace, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I knew that in some strange way, I needed to be here yesterday. I knew I needed to see our future.”
“You’re saying you wouldn’t have said yes to marrying me if you hadn’t been here yesterday?”
She shakes her head. “I’d already said yes to you in that universe. In every universe, Ace, when you tell me you love me, I’m going to have loved you back. I promise.”
He touches his forehead to hers. Close. Intimate. “Every universe?”
She laughs a little. “Every. Single. One.” On each word, she gives him a tiny kiss.
Ace reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the mistletoe card from their Bingo game. He grins a little as he fans it in the space between them.
Nancy leans in a little more, looping one arm and then the other around Ace’s neck. “You know we’re married. You don’t have to use mistletoe as an excuse to kiss me.”
He bumps their noses together. “I’ll take every reason. You know that.”
“Every reason?”
Mimicking what she did before, he kisses her in between each word as he says, “Every. Single. One.”
And then he gives her a long, lingering kiss. She melts into it.
“Hey Ace,” she says when he pulls away.
He hums. “Yeah?”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Hi Mom. Welcome back.”
Nancy turns her head on her pillow to look for the source of the voice. She finds it after a few seconds. The light in the room is bright against her eyes, so it takes a moment for them to adjust enough to see the figure sitting beside her.
Of her two girls, Lucy is the one who keeps her hair short. She’s also the one with the tiny ring on one side of her bottom lip. Katy’s hair is long past her shoulders, and her style is completely different from her sister’s.
Nancy’s throat feels dry, but she licks her lips anyway and manages to say, “Hi, baby.”
Lucy holds a straw to her mouth, and Nancy gratefully takes a few sips of water. “Doctor says you’re doing great.”
“I feel like I got run over by a truck.”
“Do you remember what happened?” Lucy asks her.
Nancy tries to sit up, but Lucy puts a hand on her shoulder. “None of that now, Mom.”
“It was my appendix,” Nancy says, remembering a burst of sudden pain in the kitchen, doubling over and— “Did I ruin Christmas?”
Lucy laughs quietly. “No, Mom. You just scared us all half to death.”
“Where’s…” Nancy looks around. “Where’s your father?”
“He’s outside, talking to the doctors. Katherine’s with him.” Ah, yes, that’s right. Calling her baby girl Katy is a thing of the past. Katherine Hardy-Stewards is a lawyer.
Lucy watches Nancy for a moment, before saying, “If you promise to stay in bed, I will go tell them you are awake.”
Nancy’s still capable of smirking. Lucy takes after her father too much sometimes. She has a sharp eye and a sharper mind. “I promise,” Nancy says.
Honestly, she’s a little too tired to really put an effort into getting out of bed. Her body seems to protest the very thought of moving.
“Grammy!” The little girl who runs around the bed before her own mother can stop her has strawberry blond pigtails each tied with a Christmas ribbon. She hops up onto the chair Lucy vacated and leads in to look intently at Nancy.
Elle Stewards is just as stubborn as her mother Katherine, just as curious as Nancy herself at that age, and Nancy suspects, even more daring, though she’s not sure how such a thing could be possible. She blames the influence of Elley’s older brother Andrew.
“I’m okay, babydoll,” Nancy tells her. Elle screws up her face.
“I’m not a baby, Grammy,” she protests, just as her mom catches up with her.
“Let Grammy call you whatever she wants today,” Katherine says, scooping up Elle. Nancy remembers when pulling Katherine into her own arms was so easy.
“Nancy,” someone says from the doorway, and Nancy’s whole attention swivels to that voice.
Ace is at her side a moment later, leaning a cane on the side of the hospital bed as he lowers himself into a chair beside her. They reach for the other’s hand at the same time. Despite the years, his hand fits into hers the way it always has.
“Why do I always have to watch you extra hard around Christmas?” he asks. Nancy doesn’t try to pretend there aren’t tears in his eyes.
“I’m sorry I scared you, love,” she says.
“Never mind that.” Even as Ace says it, she hears the break in his voice. “Never you mind. They’ve gotten you all fixed up and you’re going to be fine.”
“Appendicitis is apparently pretty rare in a person your age,” Lucy says.
“Hey now,” Nancy and Ace say at the same time.
Ace leans down and presses a kiss to the back of her hand. “You have to promise me, Nance, that should you choose to go first, you don’t do it around Christmas.”
“Easter then?” she teases, even as she squeezes his hand in reassurance.
“The fourth of July,” Lucy deadpans, having heard this back-and-forth several times through their growing up.
“I still remember that Christmas,” Katherine says, shifting Elle from one hip to the other. “Didn’t you have some kind of car accident?”
“Long story,” Nancy says at the same time Ace says, “It’s hardly time to rehash that now.”
“Someday though?” Lucy asks. “Before you two are gone.”
Nancy closes her eyes. Ace’s hand is warm on her arm. “Not going anywhere,” she mumbles, even as she feels sleep pulling at her.
“Me neither,” she hears Ace say faintly, through a tunnel.
The following Christmas, despite a complete recovery and insisting that she’s fine to help out, Nancy’s only job is to sit by the fire and hold her newest grandbaby—Lucy’s this time—as he sleeps in her arms.
This time it’s a grandson.
“I have something for you,” Ace says from his recliner. He’s been leafing through a book Lucy gave him that morning. His glasses are perched low on his nose. He wears house slippers, his yarmulke, and an old dressing robe. Nancy doesn’t think she’s seen any other human quite as handsome.
“You do?” Nancy says quietly, careful not to wake the sleeping little one.
“Found it the other day while Elle and Drew and I were looking for a good board game.”
He uses the lift in the chair to help him up to his feet and his cane to shuffle over to her. After fishing around in the pocket of his robe, he passes her a very old, very faded, very familiar card.
It’s from an old game of Bingo they would play with the girls every Christmas, until they got too old. Faded, but still there, is the echo of a drawing of a sprig of mistletoe.
Ace holds it over her forehead.
“Look where you’ve found yourself, Miss Nancy Drew,” he says teasingly.
“Kiss me quick,” she tells him. “Before you lose your chance.”
His eyes sparkle. He does not kiss her quick.
But oh, he does kiss her.
end.