Work Text:
There is a man in Miss Holloway's dreams.
He has always been there, lurking around the edges, and he always smiles, though she cannot remember the shape of it any more than she remembers the rest of his face. She can conceive of that smile --- knows that it is bright and wide, that it feels like candlelight and fireworks and a warm cup of coffee --- but she cannot picture it, and nor could she draw it, if pressed, even with all the artistic talent in the world. The memory has always vanished by the time she wakes, like paint blurred by water, and any attempt to summon it back to herself only sends it skittering further away.
She stands in a glade. It's a familiar location --- a small clearing just on the edge of the Witchwood, near enough to the edge to hold more comfort than fear, tinged with a sort of nostalgia born from so many mornings and afternoons and evenings spent there --- but there's something different about it this time. Someone different, rather, for the branch-turned-bench on which she usually sits is, oddly, already occupied. For all the Miss Holloway of Miss Retro's feels a muted sort of surprise at that fact, the Darlene Holloway of her high school days seems to feel nothing of the sort. The person sitting there turns, and waves, and smiles, and Miss Holloway knows him. Knows the face and the smile and the jacket. Knows the shape of his soul in a way that takes her breath away. Knows that she has questions to ask him and hopes that the answer to one particular question will be yes. Darlene simply smiles back, and Miss Holloway can't see that smile either, but she remembers it when she wakes with sore cheeks and wonders what caused that grin.
She wonders, sometimes, whether she would have gone into the music industry at all without her dreams to fuel her. She has a knack for music, of course --- has loved singing since before the dreams, when the only things she couldn't afford forgetting but failed to remember were the dry textbook facts that her teachers loved to test --- but she isn't sure she'd have made a career out of it without something to drive her. It's not even that song writing is easy; in many ways, there's nothing that comes harder to her than scraping herself out onto a page. It's just that there's no other way to go about explaining the gaping loss even she can't explain: nothing else that has ever ameliorated the ache so much as writing, and nothing like words to soothe the stinging tenderness of a wound that can't heal without being named and yet eschews being seen by daylight.
It has been years since Miss Holloway thought of her high school. In many ways, the place was worlds different from the tales of Hatchetfield High that she hears from across the counter-top at Miss Retro's, but, in all the ways that matter, nothing can truly be said to have changed. She can't particularly say that she misses it. Yet, as she dreams of standing in those familiar halls, books clutched tightly in both hands, eyes scanning the crowd around her, she knows that she misses something. Feels a dull ache where someone else should be: a vacuum at her side that she has forgotten how to fill but the Darlene she used to be cannot stand. Knows that she can't really stand it either, but doesn't have much of a choice in the matter. It's a pain she's lived with for longer than she remembers, since she can't even remember when it started, but there's nothing about the practice that has made perfect or prepared or anything other than exhausted.
When the crowd pause briefly, she wonders at it. Looks to see what's causing it. Almost wishes she hadn't, for he stands there as he always does. He's smiling, but it's... wrong, somehow. Twisted in a way that hurts to see because it's so unlike what it should be --- happy and genuine and not tinged with the bitter sadness she sees in it now --- but she can't explain how she knows that when she's only ever seen it dark. She goes to call out to him, his name already on the tip of her tongue even though it feels wrong too, but then his smile drops. Then he turns. Then he starts to walk away. And then she's running after him before she even thinks about it. Her books fall from her hands with a great cascading pattern of thumps, but she pays them no mind, just as she tries to ignore the crowd around her. They're harder to disregard, for there seems to be more of them even than before, and every one of them is pushing and prodding and getting in her way, but she continues on despite them. She can see him --- can see Duke, see Douglas --- but his retreating back gets further and further away with every glimpse she gets, and her hands remain empty as they reach for him with a well-worn sort of desperation until-
There are tears on her cheeks when she wakes, and she wishes she remembered why.
Her songs never feature any names. It's been mentioned before, apparently, on internet forums and social media sites, though she's never looked at them herself. She's merely been told --- by her once-agent and by journalists alike --- that the fans she's somehow managed to amass have running conspiracy theories over who the you in every song might be. She has been asked, by those same parties, to name the you, and her cryptic answers have been dismissed as mystique or a publicity grab or secrecy, but she's never been able to help that; after all, it's not like she knows any better. All she knows is a shadowy figure that haunts her present by way of a past she'll never know, too blurry to even qualify as a silhouette, too ephemeral for the weight he carries. All she knows is that the weight gets a little easier to carry when she's holding a pencil as well.
It's the diner, this time, and a reality that's a little more familiar than the other versions of herself. Her hands know the shape of themselves. Her bones sit more naturally, even if far less comfortably, for they've been worn down with the harshness of time and adulthood and life on the road. The jukebox is, oddly, silent, and the only sound in the place is a clock she doesn't quite recognise. It sits on her wall, just to the right of the door and its bright bell, and the sound of ticking in omnipresent. Merciless. Inexorable. It scares her in a way that little else ever has, like it's threatening to take something away from her, and the mere thought has her hands shaking with the visceral certainty of dream fear. The diner is empty. It stays empty. The bell stays silent, and there is only the tick-tick-tick-tock of that bright yellow clock. She wakes not when the door opens but when her dream self burns a finger on the stove, and she's rarely woken with such bereavement.
Miss Holloway likes running the diner. That's not to say that she's stopped writing, of course, but there's a newfound peace to her routine. A comfortable familiarity that came either from Hatchetfield being a small town or from getting to stay in the same place for more than a week at a time, though she's never quite sure which. Life on the road was satisfying in many ways, but it was lonely in a way she'd never been able to shake. Something about travelling so regularly --- about being surrounded by faces she'd never really know or remember or understand --- just hadn't sat right with her. Opening Miss Retro's had... Well, perhaps not fixed the sensation, but improved it. She feels less adrift, anyway, most of the time, and her regulars make her smile even when she doesn't feel like doing so. She knows their orders by heart, their names by their faces, and, if she keeps a hot cup of coffee and a slice of pie under the counter for one particular regular, then so be it.
She's never seen a maze like this one. It's not particularly frightening, nor dangerous as far as she can tell. There's no malice in it, and, though she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is lost, she doesn't feel that something has trapped her there either. She merely is, and is lost, and is trying to find her way out. It's one of those old orchard mazes, of the sort that tends to accompany hay rides and apple picking, and she's always been fond of those so she just starts walking. Takes right turns as they appear before her, for she's heard that taking all right turns will reveal a way out, and lets the time pass. Ignores the fact that the maze doesn't make sense. That the passageways are still the same length, even though they should be getting shorter. That she should be at the centre by now, if not entirely out.
And then she hears music.
It's a song, and it's familiar enough for her to know it in her bones because it's one of hers. More than that, really: it's the first one she'd ever written, from before the idea of singing as a career became anything other than a pipe dream. She's never quite figured out what inspired it --- never quite put her finger on why she'd had the cause to write a romance ballad halfway through high school when she'd never even dated back then --- but it's one of the few that's gotten close to what she aches to remember. She can never sing it without wanting to cry --- usually can't even get through it without actually crying --- and to hear it now stings just as keenly.
When he arrives, he does so without warning. She has no explanation for why he's there, nor any sense of how he'd come to be there, but she can't bring herself to care. Can't bring herself to feel much more than relief, and it settles the thing she cannot name more than ever before. She knows its name now, and she carves into her memory until she thinks it'll stick. Douglas is its name --- is his name --- and even as she knows which turns to take now, she loses herself in the syllables instead. In the familiarity of the name even though she's never heard it applied to Duke before. In the paradoxical peace of it all. She doesn't remember the name when she wakes, but she remembers the peace.
There is a man in Miss Holloway's dreams, and she may not know his face but she knows the shape of mourning him.