Curse youuuuuuu

A howling shriek sliced the air like a knife, cutting through Nancy's waning focus and jolting her into alertness.

Following the events on the balcony had been the equivalent of untangling yarn. Something of a mess, even for someone with her level of supernatural experience. First, Luigi had flipped around a great many times, moved his body in manners that would make a contortionist look like they had a crook in their back and then, suddenly stopped. Stopped moving, stopped shouting at what must have been an apparition, stopped everything. This was a good thing, she supposed, him disposing of it so quickly. Still, even in her head the praise sounded more like a question.

Luigi was stood not behind, but on the railing, overlooking a drop about twenty times higher than Nancy's averted fall.

"Have you lost your mind?" She yelled, hoping her voice carried. "Get away from there!"

"Beats takin' the stairs!"

Nancy screwed her brow, but it did not take long for Luigi's actions to explain his words. He climbed the railing one-handed, vaulted across so as to miss the garden. She dropped with him in a way when her heart sank to the pit of her hollow stomach.

Fortunately for Nancy, and for Luigi's own mortality, he landed on his feet with little discomfort to show for it. Ta-da, he said with a gesture, opening his arms and bowing. What he got, as opposed to what he thought he deserved, was a well-deserved thump on the shoulder.

"Don't you ever pull a stunt like that again."

"Easy," he winced, sounding particularly frail in that moment. "Might still need that arm."

Following on, Luigi and Nancy descended the steps, wary of any non-existent tiles.

"So how'd you do it?" She started once they left behind the mansion, heading out into the wider Mayor Street.

"It was nothin'. Nothin' special, anyhow. I just thought, here's this thing that happened in the past that's out to get me. Fighting back's the worst I can do. 'Cause the past is just that, you know? Gone."

"I don't know how true that is." Nancy sighed as she rubbed the stress on one side of her temples.

Oh, she wished she believed Luigi. She really, really did. But Krueger had been going after her, chasing her friends through nightmares for four years. The message, she believed. It just so happened to be coming from the wrong receiver.

"Hey, I reconciled, didn't I? And I can reconcile again, if you catch my drift." He flexed barely-there muscle on his biceps.

"Because you're being so subtle about it." Nancy rolled her eyes. Luigi dropped his arms because flexing them hurt that much.

By this time, Nancy had placed the picket fences of Mayor Street well behind her and was walking through a dense forest with an open window to the sky. She led the path now and pushed aside a twisting bramble to avoid Luigi being whacked in the head by it.

"So what do you think?"

"About what? The president?" Nancy scoffed.

"Don't be a smart alec. I mean about what's goin' on here," Luigi said, with a sterner edge than usual. "Krueger. What's he want with Subcon?"

Somewhere beyond the forest someone was throwing a party, music pumping but faint from so far away. It was the same song, and she knew this because those last few days were stuck deep in her memory, Tina told her she'd missed out on at the

"Nancy?"

Nancy rolled back a little, Luigi confused as to why she was so startled, before remembering the question.

"Because it's a dream world he doesn't have control over. If he takes point here, then that's another couple thousand people who fear him. Convert that into the power he'd gain from absorbing their souls, and-"

Nancy volunteered to cut herself off when she saw the look on Luigi's face. Some trains of thought were better left unfinished.

Neither of them said anything, for a time. Nancy pretended to be interested in the trees she passed by and, as she made her way over a bridge, the stream below. Luigi did the same, though looked a lot more genuine in his fascination.

"Wanna hear my theory?"

"Sure," Nancy said. "Hit me."

"Krueger's tryin' to open some portal between our worlds. Your Earth, and my world. 'He's gotta know about the Mushroom Kingdom if he knows about Subcon, know what I mean?"

Not really, Nancy wanted to say, but she figured that was less than productive.

It was an odd transition, leaving the forest. One second Nancy's shoes were so wet that the cold seeped through her socks, pressing against blades of damp grass.

The next, gravel crunched at her feet and confirmed she was out of the woods and deep in the concrete meadow she grew up in. Springwood, a portrait of middle-class, plain-bread America. Every house looked identical to the one beside it. Every house had the same white picket fence, the same freshly-trimmed lawn, the same three floors with all the rooms structured the same way.

The only non-constants in the town were Nancy, Luigi, and the building looming large in front of them. The one where all the light had blazed from.

Nancy felt herself, for but a moment, lose her breath.

Springwood High, more than an institution for the nurturing of impressionable minds, resembled the world's biggest disco ball, colour bursting through the door, sliding down the steps. Of course, Springwood High had never looked so appealing on any day that Nancy attended school. Glen, Tina, Rod, they'd all gone to the prom and universally reported a good time. If the decision was up to her she would have chosen otherwise, even without the benefit of hindsight, but the chemistry assignment due for tomorrow had beckoned her attention.

Always a study rat, that Nancy. Study rat. Tina coined the term, and they had all followed suit in using it.

Tina…

The slice of evening before prom had been one of the last times she saw Tina, Glen, and Rod together.

When she returned to the present, Nancy's breathing sounded the way rickety floorboards felt. Shaky. Uneven. One wrong step away from breaking.

"Hey, if-"

"I'm fine," she said, smiling for Luigi, if not for herself. In reality a foot just stepped on that rickety floorboard, and Nancy's adrenaline had rocketed up to the point where she could taste her heartbeat. Thick, like the pulp of an orange.

Her throat was made of sandpaper as she swallowed. She looked over at Luigi, whose face glowed red, then yellow, and then green, illuminated by the apparent party going on. Beneath the rainbow, though, she read much of her own anxiety. That mask of complacency, harnessing and hiding the storm, was starting to slip. Nancy wondered if this wasn't anything to do with what happened to Wart and the guard.

"You're not doin' this alone," Luigi said, and for some reason, perhaps his assuredness, for a moment he resembled her father.

Despite that resemblance, Nancy had no want to repeat history and bring him along, as she had Don Thompson. He was in too deep already, but this was different. This, Springwood, was her nightmare and hers to face alone.

And if that meant self-sacrifice…well, so be it.

"Actually, I am. I appreciate it, really, but it is my nightmare."

Luigi gently conceded the point and backed away. Then his eyes shot open.

With more confusion than outright fear, Nancy followed his line of sight until she found the cause of his gaping reaction. Gone was her trademark pink sweater ("is it just always winter for you," Rod had asked once and thought he was so funny and clever) and khakis. Instead of that ensemble, Nancy found herself dressed as she would have for the prom. Dazzling in a silk dress and the pearl necklace that adorned her collarbone. The same silk dress her mother had planned on her wearing.

Oh my god, Nancy mouthed, suddenly very cold. The weather was not particularly chilly.

"Guess blue is both our colours," Luigi said jokingly, but Nancy could tell he was trying to act as if this was all okay, all normal.

Now, Nancy put as much stock into trusting Luigi as she did Neil and Kristen, and Joey and Kincaid. But this, the way her skin crawled at the idea of Freddy changing her clothes like that on a whim, she could not voice and make her feelings known. This, she planned on keeping bottled up.

She began making her way up the steps, one by one. Each slab seemed packed with the same dread that rumbled through her own conscious, and Nancy tried not to think back to the house on Mayor Street and her fall only broken by intervention.

There would be no saviour. Not this time.

Nancy was halfway up when someone called out to her. She flipped her head back to see Luigi at the bottom of the stairs.
"Good luck."

But it was not Luigi speaking, his mouth a thin line and resolute on her behalf. It was Freddy, stood behind him, waving in a like-new black tuxedo. Not once did his lips move so much as an inch.

Nancy swallowed a hard lump and, saying nothing in response, continued her ascent.

The funky synths of Madonna's Everybody powered Nancy's entrance, calling her out to the dancefloor. The dancefloor had been designated the basketball court in the gym. Her fellow classmates danced and gyrated and, if they could get away with it, danced and gyrated against each other under the relentless lights. Those with less confidence shimmied on the outskirts. Purple rained down. So did yellow, green, blue, everyone glowed all colours out on the dancefloor. Nancy remained ambivalent to the whole experience and Freddy's wanting her to take a trip down memory lane. It was more a dance to the graveyard. Springwood High a neon coffin.

Some of her old classmates waved, and she responded in kind by ineffectually waving back or muttering a hello. A few of the guys she passed had looked her up and down, which prompted Nancy to wonder if the dress wasn't covering enough. Boys will be boys, Mom would've said.

She stepped around a crowd gathered at the drinks table, a stretched oval repurposed from the cafeteria with a white sheet, also repurposed and yellowing, draped over it. Here, fruit punch was being served out of a glass bowl.

Nancy already felt like she'd stepped into a time machine. Now she felt like thin air and prone to flying at the sight of the smallest danger. Her duty to the Subconians, however, nulled any personal shortcomings and concern for herself.

Nancy went unnoticed as she made her way to the dancefloor proper – perhaps because Krueger wanted it that way, perhaps because she had not seen any of her old friends.

Squinting, wanting to avoid voluntarily blinding herself, she looked around. She did recognise a couple of familiar faces, mostly friends of friends, or classmates in outfits they bothered to put some effort into for once.

The volume of people fluctuated. Some left, others entered as funky synth transitioned into Physical Attraction, a slinkier number, though no less catchy.

It took Nancy some time to notice her friends were present. Glen was with Tina and Rod, dancing on his own, rejoining them every so often. Tina must have cracked a joke, likely about her castrating Rod by forcing him into a suit and tie, because their bright mouths opened wide and they all laughed together. Together.

Glen.

Nancy knew she could've gone for it. Right then and there. No one stopped her or blocked her off. Part of her knew this to be a ruse; another part of her, lonely and vulnerable and just so tired of it all, wanted to believe. She wanted to think Tina, Rod and Glen spent their time in the afterlife in this teen disco, dancing endless nights away. Glen, with his dark eyes and handsome face. She'd harboured crushes, sure, but Nancy hadn't understood love…not until Glen Lantz.

A couple passed by, two kids in her English class, and for a brief slip in time Nancy was impressed that Rudy Goldman had shacked up with a girl like Harper Campbell.

And then they were looking at each other, Nancy and Glen, from across the floor. She'd singled him out in a heartbeat, and before her mind gave the command, oh my god spilled out as a whisper from her lips.

22-year-old Nancy Thompson was in that moment a little girl again, butterflies in her stomach, after all these years still mad about and madly awkward around the boy she loved.

Still Glen.

It had always been Glen.