Far as she could see, Nancy had two options. Either she stayed behind to fight, or ran, bringing Luigi deeper into her own personal nightmare.

Freddy was still, not his usual, sadistically joking self. That was until the bladed glove reached up to his face, razors pulling at the skin. Nancy found herself unable to look away.

With no discomfort he tore off the flesh mask, and became Freddy once again; discarding Glen as easily as blinking.

In his usual manner, stalking forward like slow death, he moved towards her. Nancy inched back.

A glance behind her revealed the refreshments table. Before she had more than the vague contours of a plan, Freddy had gotten close enough to grab her or slice her to ribbons.

"This is your last dance, Nancy."

Freddy reared the fist with the bladed glove back, prepared to strike, but that was about as far as Nancy let him go. With an urgency stunning even herself, her hand swept out and grabbed something.

It was a punch bowl that she brought down on Freddy. It shattered on his head in an explosion of glass shards and sugar-laden juice. He spent a second or two sputtering and contemplating what had just happened, before the anger returned to his eyes.

Freddy was clutching his head, still groaning after most of the glass had clattered on the floor. Nancy was never one to miss a moment and while Freddy was still in recovery, took a fragment from what was left of the bowl and stabbed him in the neck. Much like, she imagined, he wanted to do to her.

The result was, in a word, gory. Gasps and cries of terror came from the crowd. Blood squirted in red streams from the wound.

After his getting up from Wart's magical barrage, and living after the guard's stabbing him through the heart, Nancy was under no illusion that this would defeat Freddy. But it hindered him. For now, a hindrance was enough.

By the time he removed the impromptu knife, she had already taken off. Her vision had gone woozy, disorienting her a little, as if the the gymnasium had tilted on a point. This was no major worry to Nancy, though. What did worry her was the prospect of Freddy catching up – and she heard him in her periphery, laughing through a sprint.

Escaping to the football field was not an option. The hallway doors were not close, but close enough to give a fighting chance.

Or so she allowed herself to believe. She wasn't about to look over her shoulder and be proven wrong.

Have to get to Nancy, have to get to Nancy, have to

By now Luigi had all but suffocated, his heart choking, every breath a heaving gasp. He had played the part of dodging gymnast back on Mayor Street, but this was a different sport and one he'd abandoned for a reason.

He tried to cast his mind elsewhere, search for proof that he could survive. Could get through this. He hadn't hacked it in tryouts. Only so much had changed since then.

Have to…get to…

Nancy.

Forgetting his own strength or lack thereof for a second, Luigi thought about the woman depending on him. He thought of all the Subconians, those lost, those lives still hanging by a thread.

Then he asked if he could live with himself knowing he'd given up on them.

The answer was obvious.

Tapping into a burst of strength from deep within, his sight beginning to haze over, he rose to full height. He didn't shrug off the opposition as much as he bowled over the inner circle of Chucks and knocked over a few standing behind them.

That still left a wall of Chargin' Chucks in his way. Screaming, he roared past them, forcing a path as he forced them to the ground. Some tried to grab him, but their grip either proved not sturdy enough, or Luigi proved too limber for them to do anything but fall on their face.

Finally he passed the goal line and dropped the ball, triumphant.

Mom, Dad, Luigi thought, smiling so much it hurt, if only you could see me now.

Luigi took in the scene and captured it in his mind; less the Koopa football players groaning on their backs, more the feeling of victory, the knowledge he could have made the league. If only he had given himself the chance.

But before he could waste much time on the what ifs of the past, urgency called, and he ran for the fence as fast as he could. As fast as he could being slower than his usual, but he was doing the best he could under the circumstances. Had he stayed a second later he would have noticed the Chucks disappearing, leaving the world as clouds of steam.

No need to worry, he thought, almost choking on his own breath. Your cavalry's a-comin' soon.

She'd done well for herself all things considered. Said no to a perfect life, bashed Krueger on the head and stabbed him in the neck, and then promptly departed.

"Come back here! I'm not finished with you!"

The same did not hold true the other way around. Stumbling mid-run, Nancy pushed open the doors leading out of the gymnasium and into the hallway, leaving behind a very confused crowd. From the gymnasium to the hallway involved going up a flight of stairs, three flights, in fact, which Nancy imagined would slow her ascent drastically.

Fast as her body would allow, she pounded up the steps. Without issue she passed the first flight. Halfway up the second flight of stairs Freddy made his presence known and had started to run after Nancy much faster than she was running herself. She saw him – and, somehow worse, heard him gleefully huffing his way up.

"You can't win, Nancy! You're in my world, my domain!"

Nancy had not at all slowed down but the heat was metaphorically and physically on her back now, Freddy only a few steps behind.

"It's not your world, Krueger! Not now, not ever!"

She tapped into a burst of speed and blistered away from Freddy, reaching the top of the stairs. She stopped. It was risky business, this maneuver, but at this point risky business was her whole life.

Freddy reached the step just below and, gripping the railing, Nancy jammed her foot against his thigh. The force was enough to send him down the stairs as a tumbling red and green ball. Nancy didn't look back, for fear of losing more of the precious little time she had.

If all a student wanted to do was leave one of the classes on the first floor and head home, then the hallway was the ticket. This benefitted Nancy greatly, Nancy who doubted she would have had the energy to ever make her feet climb again. She felt hot underneath the dress, skin clammy and soaking wet from her sweaty neck to her cramped feet. Hard to run in heels. Harder still, downright impossible, when you had the demon lord of dreams and nightmares breathing hot terror down your spine.

But Nancy did, indeed, see the light. Metaphorically, anyway. In actuality the hallway was depressingly lit, unaffected by the jovial spirit and vivid colours of the gymnasium. She knew there were other paths that intersected and perhaps were quicker, but with the lights shut off, those were not privy to her.

Her lone beacon of shining hope, the front doors leading into and out of the school, seemed to beckon her by merely existing. Anxiety told her that her heels would break or cause a slip, but somehow neither of those things happened.

The doors, after seeming so far away for so long, were in her grasp. Nancy steeled her wrist around the knob and, putting her whole arm into the motion, yanked for dear life. The door flew open, almost slammed off its hinges…

…and there was a figure standing, half their face tired and sweating, the rest covered in darkness.

Nancy screamed, for the two seconds it took for her to realise that the figure was not a stranger. They were a man, and the man was Luigi.

She embraced, hugging very closely, like they were sheltering each other with their hands, before separating. It was dangerous to stay in such a position for long. All danger was life and death.

"What happened?" Nancy squinted, checking Luigi and the dirt all over his uniform.

"Remember when I told you about me playing football career in highschool?"

Nancy shook her head, looking wild and confused.

"Exactly."

"Come on," Luigi said. He skipped along the steps, and even Nancy with her focus elsewhere, noticed he was moving slower than usual. "I don't know how much time we got left, but we're probably cuttin' it fine."

"You're right!" And neither Nancy nor Luigi turned around at the presence of that voice, though likely they ought to. "And your time, Nancy, is up!"

Before Nancy or Luigi could properly compute that it was Freddy behind them, he secured with a deathgrip her arm and stopped her in place. She groaned as she tried to yank herself forward to no avail. Luigi looked shocked, unsure of what to do.

Nancy reversed her strategy which she used to dispatch Freddy inside of the school, and kicked backwards, hoping to snag something.

"No, Nancy! You'll-"

But it was too late for Luigi's warning to mean anything, because Nancy had already set her balance off and was tumbling down.

Through sheer miracle, or perhaps Freddy's intervention, Nancy's face remained unharmed. In her current position and state of mind Nancy could only do what immediately came to her. When instinct told her to kick Freddy until he let go, she operated the foot he was holding onto like a machine gun, shooting it backwards in rapid-fire motion.

Luigi, overcoming his own fear, did his part too, kicking Freddy's side and ribs.

This joint assault yielded no fruit until she lucked out, her heel going through his eye. Freddy screamed, an ear-ringing sound reminiscent of his being set on fire all those years ago. Luigi extended a hand to Nancy. With his support, she ascended. In the process of attempting to score a good blow one of Nancy's heels had slipped until it fell off outright, but it was a small price to pay for freedom, no matter how temporary it would prove to be.

"Could've had it all, Nancy," Freddy yelled. "Could've had it all!"

Nancy, ignoring Freddy and running alongside Luigi, asked:

"Where are we going?"

"Anywhere but here," was his response, short and concise, on account of his shortened breathing.

They continued to rush forward onto the streets of fake Springwood proper, with its fake houses and fake well-kempt grass filling out fake lawns. Now on a pavement, Luigi looked back and found that Freddy was nowhere to be seen, gone from the steps of Springwood High.

"Uhh, Nancy, I don't think we-"

"This way," she said, relatively calm but not at all diminished in her authority.

They peeled out of the street and into a well-kept secret of an alleyway hidden next to what used to be Tina's house. Rats scoured a bin with its lid open and the collective of flies made a great buzzing noise, but both Nancy and Luigi were moving too fast to care about the place's squalor.

It was this nonstop, almost blind running that caused them to come to a skidding halt when Freddy appeared. His grin was yellow, gleaming like rotten syrup in the endless moonlight.

Just as Nancy made use of all her little advantages, so did Freddy. The minute shock of seeing him again after such a short time was all he needed. Snarling, he struck her with a slash of his bladed glove. He only made good on one target; Nancy's right shoulder now characterised by three jagged lines written in blood. She twisted around but did not move otherwise. Luigi grabbed her hand and yanked her away.

"My foot," Nancy groaned, the ground thudding through her sole.

"You alright?" Luigi looked over at her and seemed to be genuinely concerned.

"I'll be fine," Having said that, she felt it might eventually be true.

By now, Luigi and Nancy had well broken free of the alleyway and were, once again, running along the streets of Springwood.

"So, what happened to you?"

"Maybe we can save the talking for another time?"

He blushed skittishly, and then after that promptly shut up.

After five minutes, they began slowing down not out of necessity but out of safety. The thought occurred to Nancy that, like in the cave, they had given slip to Freddy. She was confident Luigi thought the same too, absolutely sure when he began walking along the pavement outside of Glen Lantz's house. Nancy looked longingly at the building, only to see that the light had been turned off.

"So." Luigi threw his arms up in a big, freeing gesture. "You never did tell me. What happened at Springwood High?"

Nancy sighed, then exhaled with great relief as if smoking a cigarette.

She explained mostly everything to Luigi, from the reunion with Glen, Tina, and Rod, the reveal that Glen was Freddy in disguise, the stabbing Freddy with the makeshift sword of glass.

In comparison, his game of football did not seem quite so interesting.

"And that's his house?"

"Yep. We…well we used to live across from each other. Sometimes we'd sneak out, climb into each other's windows. Mom never suspected me of anything so daring, so I was never caught."

Nancy chuckled, and as a result Luigi felt comfortable doing the same.

After a while, he said:

"You loved him, didn't you?"

Nancy gave a rather somber nod.

"It's a beautiful thing, young love. Never had much of it myself though."

"You?" Nancy scoffed, expecting some confidence on Luigi's part to shine through – instead, he only looked confused.

"Yeah. Thing about love is, you gotta know who you are before you get into it. I just wanted to be everyone else."

Nancy waited, measuring out a pause of a few seconds in her head before she asked:

"Did she- did they have a name?"

"You know, the worst part is, I can't even remember."

And then Luigi looked to the moon, as if expecting to find the answer there.

Nancy had not been paying much attention to her surroundings, at least beyond the simple acknowledgement of them. The bringing up of Glen's house had prompted her to change that, however.

Because now she was walking past Glen's house again, the lights still off, her house on the other side of the road.

Some might have chalked this up to a one-time anomaly or excused it by way of misremembering on their part, but Nancy knew better. And her little theory was proven when she, a third time, walked past the Lantz household.

"Stop."

Luigi took another few steps, then did so. He didn't look at Nancy with any sort of doubt and anger, only the want for an explanation.

"What is it?" Then his eyes looked down at the pink cotton around her neck. "I did prefer the sweater."

"Look, never mind that. How long, would you say, have we been walking for?"

"if I had to guess? I don't know, maybe thirty minutes?"

Nancy muttered oh my god before she realised her lips were even moving.

"Hours."

"What?"

"It's a time loop. He's had us running in circles, along the same street in Springwood, for hours!"

"Jesus Christ," Luigi whispered, disturbed but, on the outside, not as panicked as Nancy. But then he began to contemplate the meaning of their wasted time, the consequences, that Freddy had the rest of Subcon to terraform if he so desired, and then…

"Jesus!" He clutched his head, grabbing a solid chunk of cap. "What do we do?"

"Just," Nancy huffed as she paced back and forth, "give me a second, alright? Give me a second. I can't believe it, he was playing us the whole time…"

Luigi's brow furrowed in concentration, and he squinted, consternated, before settling on a more assured expression.

"I might have somethin'."

Nancy stopped along that invisible track. Her eyes were as wide as they were expectant.

"This is a dream, right?"

Nancy's yes in response may as well have been her saying duh.

"And the only rule of dreams is that there are no rules, correct?"

"I'm sorry." Nancy folded her arms. "Where are you going with this?"

"We're gonna think our way to the temple. What Krueger imagines, he creates. Where we imagine, we end up."

Two things came to Nancy initially after Luigi gave his pitch. First, she never expected to hear something so bold coming from him. Second, it was the best idea either of them had – and it had about as much chance of working as rats growing wings.

"Okay." Nancy nodded, both to appear like she agreed fully and to psych herself up. "Okay, it's something."

"Better than nothin, right?"

"Guess it is." Nancy closed her eyes instinctually, not knowing or questioning why. "Where in the temple, exactly?"

"The room with the conveyor belt. An' all those guys with the masks, building that robot."

Nancy gulped. Slipping into dreams was one thing. Teleporting across the same dimension, transmuting all those protons and electrons from one place to another, that was a whole other brand of hocus pocus.

There were risks, and then there was outright playing hooky with your life.

"Do you think it'll help if we hold hands?"

"Couldn't hurt," Luigi said. He extended his, melding them together with Nancy's.

"You're thinkin' it?"

"Yes," Nancy said, shivering.

"Alright. Three. Two. One…"