Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nick

His first feel as he closed his rented car door and started walking toward the Roxy wasn't insanity. Although it probably should have been. It was guilt. This was a huge night for his parents. An important night. And the truth was, he wasn't here for it. Not really. He was here because for more than twenty years he'd been staring at his vacant, salty palm and seeing a ghost date. That date, unchaffed despite the thousands of ropes and lines that had slipped through his grip, had been there since she'd written it. It had remained even after the ink had been soaped away. Had melted the frost off every beer he'd ever wrapped his hand around. Had blazed when he'd entwined his fingers with Claire's for the first time.

What surprised him when his mom told him the date of the theater's closing night party was that he wasn't surprised at all. He wasn't the science guy Elliot was, but he had a pretty good connection with the universe, knew what he felt and paid attention. And this was one of those feelings. There was some kind of answer here, in Port Haven, where he grew up and fell in love for the first time - the only time maybe - on this date a 16 year old girl had inscribed on his hand over two decades ago. Yesterday.

He looked down at his palm out of habit as he turned the corner onto Main St., watched the lights from the Roxy steal across his skin and dropped his hand, his eyes climbing to the marquee. His moms had posted a farewell in those stark, black letters, but what he saw, for a moment, was Now Showing...Your Desperation, Your Lunacy, Your Creepy Obsession...

He walked on.

His gaze fell to the crowd assembled on the wet pavement in front of the doors. It had stopped raining, and he surmised that his moms were in that throng somewhere, probably getting ready to speak. He knew most of the faces. Guilt welled up in him again. They had all come to support his parents, to see them off into their retirement with love and well wishes. To be there for them on one of the most bittersweet nights of the life they shared. And his eyes were searching not for blonde hair, but dark, not for a content, grateful couple looking to the future, but for an expectant, solitary woman still gazing into the past. He stopped before he crossed the alley between him and the theater. What was wrong with him? Did he actually think she would be here? That she would even remember?

Alice

She felt like her bones were made of electricity. Weightless, vibrating, trying to lift her off the ground as she walked. His mom had said he probably wouldn't make it, may not get back to port in time to catch his flight, but she felt sure he'd be here. The way he had stared at the date she'd written on his hand...he had to remember...didn't he? She scanned the crowd as she stopped near her mom and Elliot, then took a hesitant step away so she'd be easily spotted. Did she want him to spot her? No. She wanted to see him first, have a second to process that he had come, and then...and then what? She was sixteen. He would be what? Forty? How would she explain that? And even if he came, it would be to celebrate with his moms. Stupid to think he'd remember a date a girl wrote on his hand over twenty years ago, dash across the world to make his moms' special night about her. But she wasn't just a girl. The way he looked at her when they were together, the things he said...she wasn't just a girl. Couldn't be. But...

Her eyes snapped onto his like magnets, the rest of him just an aura of dust. Nick's eyes, looking right back into hers like a horde of people weren't crowded between them. Like they'd been looking for her for a lifetime.

Nick

Alice. It was her. Alice. She was here. Had actually come here, on this day, for him. She was standing there with Kat and Elliot just like it had always been, scanning the crowd, searching, for him, her face tense and sad and hopeful and he wanted to go to her and take all that away, take away all that doubt and agony and waiting and make her understand -

- and then those dark bright eyes found his. Belonged to his and why couldn't he take a step? Why couldn't he take a step when everything he'd never been able to grasp was surfacing in those shadowy pools, waiting to give him the answers...

Something was wrong. She was perfect...but something...

No. This...this was Alice. But it couldn't be. This girl was...she was...he glanced around to see if anyone else hovered nearby, some teenage boy behind him she could have been eyeing. But he was alone on the sidewalk. He looked down at himself. Usually when he had dreams like this, he was a kid, the teenage version of himself, but aside from the leather, these were his adult clothes, clothes he remembered buying with his adult bank card in an overpriced port town in Nova Scotia. And when he looked back up at her, those dark bright eyes - eyes he'd looked into so many times, eyes he knew - were waiting for his.

Alice

It was the anchor on the back of his jacket that got her moving.

She saw the confusion dawn on his face. Saw his struggle. Saw him choose to deny what was right in front of him, give his head a shake and pivot, bolting back up the sidewalk. And she might have stayed frozen there, rejected, devastated, but that anchor, faded and shrinking in her vision was straining the connection between them, and suddenly she knew if she let him get too far it would snap.

"I see a friend, be right back," she whispered to her mom and Elliot. She didn't look back as she hurried away, heard her mom chirp a festive assent.

She knew he'd heard her approach when he sped up and rounded the corner. She broke into a trot, turned up the narrow street to follow him, but he had already crossed to the shady side, where a silver car was parked. The headlights flickered and she realized he'd remotely unlocked it.

"Wait!" She called, quickening her pace.

He didn't turn around, opened the door and slid behind the wheel. A moment later he whizzed by her, his gaze firmly ahead, her dress fluttering in his wake.

Nick

It was stupid to come here. He knew he shouldn't have, had already given his moms a plausible excuse. So why had he done it?  His hands tightened on the wheel, his knuckles flushing white. Before he'd gotten out of this car, he'd been a sane man. A little unsettled maybe, a little nostalgic, but sane. And now he was quantifiably crazy. Now he had hallucinated his girlfriend from twenty something years ago in front of that theater. Exactly - he might as well admit it - where he had wanted so desperately to see her. Where he had waited, if mostly subconsciously, over two decades to see her.

But his brain had forgotten to age her. Of course it did, he had only ever seen her as a teenager, and his scrambled mind had pulled her from his memories. Which meant she hadn’t really been there. Or if she had, he hadn’t had a chance to spot her before he'd snapped. But she probably hadn’t been. Probably not. He supposed he could ask Ell or Kat…

Stop it, dude, he told himself. Just stop it before you lose what little sense you have left. She's moved on with her life, isn't even on social media, obviously has more important things to do. Go home to Claire and let this go or you're going to lose her too. They had already argued about the length of the engagement, how it got longer every time he was offered an interesting job. Any job. She probably had one foot out the door already.

So he drove back to the airport, his foot jammed on the gas, the tug of Port Haven like a mooring line from which he fought to untangle himself. Finally he gave up, slowed his roll as he dropped off the car and headed for his departure gate, settled for whatever slack he could get.

Chapter Text

Alice

It had been weeks since Nick had bolted from the Roxy, but the pond had let her go back. The first time, they'd had a pretty disastrous conversation at The Cove. But then, on the eve of the new millennium, he had given her the fishhook bracelet, had kissed her as they killed the lights. She absently touched the braided rope hugging her wrist as she remembered, her fingers straying to test the barbed clasp. How could his adult self have abandoned her on the street like that? How had they drifted apart? What had happened in his life to make him so…so…But that wasn't really fair, was it? He'd had every reason to doubt what he saw, to want to escape what probably looked to him like some kind of crazy hallucination.

And now he was here again. In Port Haven. And whatever the reason for his return, he had apparently convinced himself that she was nothing more than a dead ringer for that long ago Alice. Just Kat's daughter. A kid. Seeing that faded anchor on his back again as she'd opened the front door was enough of a blow, but when he'd looked into her face as if he were completely unfazed by her, had proceeded to chatter at her while she stood there dying, it agitated something inside her, unsettled her, made her…restless.

She'd told her mom she was going back to the pond, back to the past, where her best friend was waiting. But as she stood at the edge of the water, she found, for the first time, that she didn’t want to jump. She sat on the rock instead. Sat there so long that the sun began to sigh into dusk, the birds quieting in the chill. She was stiff when she finally rose, shook it off as she walked back up the path…past Elliot's house, then her own, skirting the fence and heading down the long road toward town.  She looked up at the sky, spotted the first of the stars just before a drift of woolen clouds blotted them out. The air stirred, smelled like rain.

She stopped on the sidewalk across from the Oateses' house. It was only a few blocks from the theater, and she tossed a glance in that direction. The street was empty, but lights had begun to glow in the windows of the shops and bars. Low thunder rumbled overhead as she remembered Joyce and Jude's retirement party. How he had left her standing there without so much as a cursory glance and sped away.

She turned her attention back to the house just as the door opened. She knew it would be him, and it was. She had time to notice that he was dressed casually, like he might be going out for a few drinks, before he spotted her. He froze at the top of the stairs, his gaze turning inward. Then he sucked in a quick breath, shuffled off the porch and headed toward Main Street. Like he hadn’t even seen her.

A wave of fury knocked her into motion. She rode it as she followed him, her fists balled at her sides, her jaw clenched.  He sped up when he heard her footfalls. Her nostrils flared. Not this time.

"Nick!" She called.

He didn’t turn, kept walking.

"What? Now I don’t even exist?" She yelled, that wave breaking on the last word.

He halted in the middle of the street.

She slowed to a stop a few feet behind him, stared at the anchor on his back. He didn’t move, didn’t even breathe.

A raven cawed from a telephone wire above, its wings thumping as it lifted off. A car hissed across Main Street. And then the world fell quiet.

Alice knew this was a fragile space. A tipping point. But she was tired of balancing the past and the present, tired of carrying those scales, of being responsible for their equity. It wasn't her fault she had fallen into the pond. Wasn't Nick's fault either. But…

"You know who I am," she said. Her own words surprised her a little, but she went on. "Deep down, you know."

He stood there for a long time. A fine rain started to fall. She watched it dust his shoulders like glitter.

Finally, he pulled in some air. She held her own breath.

"You're not Alice," he said.

"Nick - "

He spun toward her, his eyes moving over her face, her body, settling on hers. "You're not Alice," he said again. "Not my Alice. You're Kat's Alice…or…" He pushed a hand through his hair, his eyes wide. "Am I talking to a delusion? How the hell crazy am I?"

Her chest ached. No one would have expected him to believe what he was seeing, but it hurt just the same.  That he refused to see her. That he…that he didn’t believe what they had could be magic. And now he thought this whole thing was some form of insanity, and she couldn’t let him. Couldn’t be the reason his view of himself…of her…darkened. She grabbed at her fingers, looked down at them as she tried to think of a way to convince him. And there it was.

"Look, this isn’t your fault…" he'd started to say when he saw her face change. "Whatever this is…whatever I'm seeing in you - "

She held up her wrist and looked him in the eye.

Nick

The bracelet. It was the bracelet he'd made for Alice, had given her all those years ago. Snuggled around Kat's daughter's wrist as if he'd just put it there. As if it belonged there. How big a mental break was this? Did Kat even have a daughter? Yes, she did. He remembered Elliot telling him about her a few months after she was born. But that bracelet…that bracelet was no coincidence. He'd know it anywhere, had crafted it with his own hands. Had, in fact, just lifted it from a box in his old room hours ago and…Did she steal it? He patted his jacket, felt it in the inside pocket where he'd slid it earlier. But there it was, on this girl's wrist.

"Why am I seeing you now?" He whispered, mostly to himself. "After all this time. Why now? Is it because of the engagement?"

The girl - Kat's daughter - knit her brows. "The engagement?"

"I need some kind of help," he said.

"No," she said, worry scattering the puzzlement in her expression. She walked toward him, ducked into the line of his vacant gaze to pull his attention. "You're seeing me now because I'm here. I wrote that date on your hand because I knew the date of the retirement party," she said, flinging a hand toward the theater. "I picked it so you'd have a reason to come, and nobody would be surprised or think it was weird and we could..."

She paused, seemed unsure of what to say next, how to continue. "I don't know," she finally sighed out. "I don’t know. When I wrote that date on your hand, I didn’t consider that you probably wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t think about what I’d say when…" she trailed off again.

He studied her expression - the same one he'd seen on Alice's face every time she'd tried to explain to him why she had to go, why he couldn’t call her, why she never knew when he was going to see her again. And for one second…

Alice

She saw it in his face, that tiny spark, that quick flicker of belief, and she seized on it.

"Nick...It's me. I'm me. Alice. Y-your Alice. The reason I'm sixteen isn't because I'm some crazy vision. It's because - " she heard her next words before she said them and they sounded insane even in her head. He was never going to believe it. So instead, she said, "It'll be easier if I show you. I - I can show you. Come on."

She started to walk, stopped and turned back when he didn’t follow. He looked skeptical, wary even.

"You’d rather believe you’re crazy than give me a few minutes to explain?" She asked, making her voice as light as she could. Was she really going to do this? Yes, if he'd let her. He deserved to know. He had always deserved to know.

He stared at her for a long moment, then gave her a shrug of resignation that looked disturbingly like a descent into madness and followed her back to the farm.

Chapter Text

Nick

They stood at the edge of the pond, their breath mingling with the wisps of mist rising off the water.

"Is this the part of the story where the ghost from my past lures me into the creepy bog, and when they find me in the morning, floating in the gloom, they are unable to explain my death?" Nick asked, his eyes on the pond.

Her uneasy smile was familiar, even in his peripheral vision. He took in a steadying breath.

"This will probably be even weirder," she said.

"Cool, cool," he said, nodding.

She seemed to wait until things stilled, until he felt quiet…ready. And then she told him the most ridiculous, impossible, astonishing story he had ever heard.

The rain fell cool and steady as she talked, pattered the forest canopy and peppered the surface of the water. At one point, they meandered out onto the long rocks she kept gesturing toward and he gazed down into the depths, but he didn’t interrupt her once. Didn’t emote. Didn’t change his expression. When she was finished, he stared at their dark, rippling reflections for a long time. He felt her jittering like a tangle of downed wires as she hovered at his shoulder, but she waited. For whatever conclusion he would come to, whatever it was that he was going to say.

He had followed her out here, hadn’t he? Had wanted to believe…something. Had wanted not to be crazy, or maybe to just embrace his lunacy. Had wanted her to be real. And this story, this far-fetched fantasy…it would make sense, if it were true. It would explain everything. All he had to do now was choose whether or not to believe it. He had either lost his mind, which was the most likely explanation, or this girl, Kat's daughter, was Alice. His Alice. And the world as he knew it had been nothing more than a sheen…a deflective skim of oil floating atop an abyss.

He looked up at her and his heart lurched. The rain had dampened her hair into a cascade of waves. Alice. He watched her try to swallow whatever hope was rising in her. His eyes flicked to her bracelet, back up to her face. "This is crazy," he said.

She nodded.

"And you know I'm going to need to talk to Ell and Kat about this."

"Yes," she said.

"And you're telling me they'll confirm what you just told me?"

"Yes," she said again. "They may be mad that I told you, but I don't think either of them would lie to you. Not now."

"Neither do I," he said. Then, "Alice wouldn't lie to me either."

"No," she said, her eyes brimming. "I wouldn't." She'd barely choked out the words.

He saw the hurt in her face and his chest caved. It was the way he'd said her name, like she was dead or lost.

"I'm sorry," he said. But it wasn't enough. Her lips were quivering, those tears ready to spill. She stepped back, hugging herself, looking around for some way to escape the pain he'd caused her. He reached out without thinking, pulled her into him and wrapped his arms around her.

"I'm sorry," he said again.

He felt her sob a few times and then clutch at his jacket to catch her breath.

And for a moment he didn't know where he was. When he was. Only that it was her. Alice. His Alice. She was the only thing that had ever felt like this. She was the only one who had ever fit against him like she was -

Sixteen.

She was sixteen. And he wasn't. Hadn't been for a long time. He grasped her arms, tried to pry her from him, but she wouldn't be moved.

"Alice," he said. He gave her a gentle shake and felt her own grasp tighten. "Alice…Alice I can't."

He tried to keep the force all in his hands, but she was securely against him, warm and solid and stubborn.  He tried again, careful not to press his fingers too hard into her flesh, but as he pulled the rest of his weight back, he lost his center of balance and stumbled. She withdrew a little and attempted to right him, slipped on a patch of moss and pitched forward into him instead, her eyes wide, the momentum knocking them both off the rocks.

They crashed through the surface of the pond, his cry of surprise snuffed out as the murk swallowed them.