Chapter Text
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if I never laid eyes on you, would I feel something missing?
Happy Accidents - Saint Motel
Billy
“Why are we still called the Dunne Brothers?” To her credit, Karen is probably the only one besides Camila who can get away with bringing the subject up.
As much as Karen adds to the band, Billy thinks he sometimes preferred it when it was just his brother and the herd of friends that had grown up hanging out in the garage. It was just easier before everyone started to have input.
Billy doesn’t think of it as his band, so much as he thinks of himself as the only one who knows what it is to be responsible for someone other than themselves. He’s aware enough that this thought wouldn’t go over well, so he never says it out loud. It used to be easier to swallow his tongue before they spent weeks living off of pasta and canned tomato sauce, but at least LA is warm enough that if their electricity gets cut, they won’t freeze to death.
He’s only half-listening while they discuss the name change. His protests are automatic, and when he gives in it’s because if he’s truly being honest, he doesn’t have the energy to care tonight. He doesn’t notice his leg is shaking until Camila presses a hand to it. When she does, he just switches to the other. He’s trying not to think much about a time when her touch was all he needed to soothe the bubbling anxiety in his chest. The flask of alcohol he pours into his coffee helps with that.
When he sees her for the first time, he’s lifting his mug to his lips, savoring the burn of the liquor as it slides down his throat. He must be far drunker than he thought, because the room spins and she becomes its focal point. She’s refilling coffees a few tables away, loose strands of red hair falling into her face.
He can’t take his eyes off of her and he also can’t figure out why. She’s beautiful, sure. But Los Angeles was built with beautiful people. There’s a pretty enough looking girl anywhere he looks. It’s not a sufficient explanation for the slowing of time around him.
As if she can feel him looking, her head shifts up and her eyes lock onto his. This is the moment when he should look away, but he’s far too caught up in trying to figure out why he feels like he’s seen her before. A slow smile spreads across her face and she transforms into something luminous. His breath catches.
Camila tugs at his arm, asks him, “You okay?”
“Mhm.” He kisses her cheek absently and dumps the rest of his flask into the mug in front of him, figures it’s as good a solution as any.
“Great! The Six it is.” Eddie is looking at him like he’s won an argument, and Billy doesn’t have the heart to tell him it was one-sided.
“Do you want some coffee for your whiskey?” If he thought her smile was glowing, then her voice stirs something bright and warm in his chest that he immediately classifies as wrong. All he can do is open and close his mouth with an audible click.
It’s Camila who answers the woman, and for some reason he can’t define, this makes him feel guilty. “No, thank you. Can we just get a bill?”
“Sure thing.” He watches her at the till, looks away when she looks at him again with eyebrows raised. When she returns, he’s intentional in his effort to examine a scratch on the surface of the table with his eyes and the pad of his thumb. “Shit. Do any of you have the time?”
Billy is wearing a watch but reading it would require him to have a brain that’s functioning, and the haze of alcohol and whatever the fuck else is wrong with him right now makes that impossible. It’s Warren who gives her the time.
“Oh fuck, I’m gonna be late.” Billy does look up again when she says it, sees her already running towards the door. A man calls after her, presumably her boss, and she yells an unapologetic, “Sorry Dave, playing at the Troubadour remember?”
If he was unsettled before, it only gets worse when he has the distinct sense that he’s lost something. They leave the cash on the table and pile out of the booth. Eddie and Warren are riding high on the small success of a shitty band name, and Billy figures he’ll let them have it for the night before he sets things back to right tomorrow.
They stop for a smoke outside, and Billy habitually lights Camila’s then his own. He inhales, holds the smoke in for long enough that his chest feels tight, hopes it will buy him the time he needs to respond to Camila’s puzzled expression convincingly.
Instead, when he opens his mouth, he digs the hole deeper by saying, “You guys go home. I, uh… I think I just need to take a walk or something.”
Graham is looking at him as if he’s grown another head, and Camila places a hand on his arm that could only be described as concerned. “Are you sure, baby? Aren’t you tired?”
He is tired. Exhausted, in fact. Sort of wants to just go home, toss back another beer, and curl up beside Camila. The problem is that there’s another part of him that feels the same way he does when there’s a melody forming at the very edges of his mind, and he feels like the only thing for it is to move his body. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
Absolutely not. The thought is reflexive, invasive. When he thinks about it later, he will be more than a little unsettled by it. For now, he just swallows and responds, “No you go home and get some rest, you have that interview tomorrow.”
He kisses her on the cheek and waves at them all as they pile into the van. When they’ve pulled away from the curb, he starts walking.
Twenty minutes later, he finds himself outside of the Troubadour. After, if anyone were to ask him why he did it, he would almost certainly say that he doesn’t know because the truth of it is too hazy and uncomfortable. If he’s being honest, he feels more than a little creepy. He’s not sure if there is a charge to get in, but he slips inside right behind a large group of wealthy looking men to avoid it either way.
The woman singing isn’t the one he just saw at the diner, and he’s still trying to parse the mix of relief and disappointment when she finishes and makes the introduction for the next musician. “Come on up, Daisy Jones.”
Daisy Jones.
And there she is, on stage with a guitar, smiling out into a modest audience. He’s still trying to figure out what he’s even doing here when she opens her mouth to sing and his world tilts. Or maybe it levels out. It feels like there was something dislocated behind his ribcage that has just clicked back in place.
Her voice is soft and sweet and sad, but there’s something strong in it he thinks she hasn’t quite tapped into yet. Even like this it sounds haunting; it stills the entirety of the restless crowd, and his heart right along with them.
It makes him want to throw up.
When her eyes lock onto his he can’t explain how he knows she’s surprised. She’s too far away for him to pinpoint any change in her facial expression, but she’s looking at him still and his heart is beating again, wild and out of rhythm.
Whatever this is, it’s the opposite of what he needs.
He leaves as quickly as he arrived, hitches a ride home to the canyon and tells himself that he’s sated whatever strange curiosity dragged him into the club in the first place. When he crawls into bed beside Camila, wraps his arm over her and feels her press back against him in her sleep, he ignores the echo of the song in his ears.
Daisy
Daisy supposes she should feel more unsettled than she does when she sees the same man from the diner in the crowd at the Troubadour. Maybe it’s the benzo she took to calm her nerves before the performance, but she isn’t bothered so much as she is curious. It had been one thing, looking up to see his eyes on her at work. It’s a normal place to feel like she’s run into someone familiar – in a city like LA, people often stick to the same reliable places.
Of course, the diner where she works is mostly just reliably cheap and reliably bad.
Still, she’s not sure why it feels like she knows him from somewhere. Maybe it’s just the sad eyes, the curly hair, the sharp jaw; all are a dime a dozen on the strip, where dreamers come to strum to crowds of ten and hope they’ll be discovered. Maybe it’s because he looked at her with eyes too intense for a stranger.
This is an argument to put him firmly in the category of ‘probably a murderer’ but her self-preservation skills haven’t necessarily been the best lately so it’s no surprise when she just feels a mixture of interest and confusion instead.
He leaves partway through her first song anyways, clearly having sated whatever need brought him here in the first place. She barely notices the vague sense of disappointment once it’s drowned out by the applause of the crowd, and by the time she finishes her three-song set she’s almost forgotten him entirely.
Simone wraps her into a hug, and she barely has time to put her guitar away before she’s being pulled towards the bar and introduced to Teddy Price.
She knows who Teddy Price is. When he offers her a card, she pretends not to be impressed.
When he tells her he can shape her, she stops being impressed at all.
---
“Daisy, please tell me you weren’t rude to him.” Simone is seated on one end of the couch, and Daisy is cross-legged on the carpet with a notebook in her hands.
She doesn’t look up from her writing, just responds in the most innocent tone she can muster: “I’m never rude.”
“Daisy.”
“What?”
“I love you, but you’re rude all the time.”
“Well, I think that’s rude.” Daisy looks up just in time to get a throw pillow to the face, tries and fails to stifle a laugh.
“Teddy Price is a good man. If he wants to give you a leg up, you should let him.”
Daisy loves Simone enough that she resists immediate rebellion. She’s not sure what it is about people telling her what she should do that makes her want to do the exact opposite, but it’s so baked into who she is on a cellular level that the best she can offer is to bite her tongue. Simone knows her well enough by now to let it go, though Daisy suspects it’s not a topic off the table for long.
She returns to her notebook, scratches out the last three lines she has written, then gives up entirely. “You want a glass of wine?”
“Another one?”
Daisy just shrugs and gets the half-empty bottle of red from the kitchen. She forgoes the glass when Simone refuses, for the sake of not needing another dish in the sink and also because she’s just going to finish the bottle anyways. She takes a sip, and in her best imitation of nonchalant, asks “Did you see that guy at the show tonight?”
“Yes, for sure. I saw that guy.”
“I don’t know. Curly hair, scowl on his face. Pretty.”
“Daisy you’re describing a third of the men in Los Angeles.”
“Never mind, I just thought I knew him from somewhere.” She doesn’t like the confused look Simone is giving her, doesn’t want to have to try to provide an explanation for something she doesn’t even understand. “I’m going to head to sleep. Morning shift.”
She doesn’t remember her dreams that night – never really does, with all the pills – but when she wakes in the morning she has the sense that he was in them.
---
She’s all but forgotten him when she walks into work a week later to find him seated at a table in the corner. He’s alone this time, and when he lifts his head to look at her she feels the same static crackling in her fingertips as she did both other times. It pisses her off, actually. Enough that she strides over to him and smacks her hand on the table.
He doesn’t even fucking jump.
“Are you stalking me or something?”
The look on his face is incredulous. “I’ve been here for two hours.”
“Yes. At my workplace. And you were at my fucking show last week.”
He lies like someone who doesn’t normally get called on it, “Was I? Don’t remember.”
“Bullshit.”
He scoffs at her, “Look I’m trying to do something here.” Her eyes follow his down to a piece of looseleaf paper on the table, and she promptly grabs it.
Her first thought is that anyone who writes song lyrics on loose pieces of paper probably is a psychopath of some variety. Her second thought is that what he’s got written isn’t all that bad. Her third thought, she speaks aloud, “Wow. Trying to impress your girlfriend?”
“It’s not your business.” He’s reaching for the page, but she’s already moved out of range. “It’s for a producer.”
She sucks a hiss of breath in through her teeth and can see the clench of his jaw in response. Tries not to think about how much she’d like to see him do it again.
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
“You don’t think it’s good?” He doesn’t say it like doubts himself. He says it like a challenge.
She slides into the seat across from him and looks at the page again. “Well for starters, it’s not done.”
Daisy didn’t think his glare could become sharper, but apparently she was wrong because he’s looking at her now like he might be able to dissolve her if he tries hard enough. “What do you mean it’s not done? It’s a whole song. It takes us like four minutes to play.”
“It doesn’t go anywhere. And it doesn’t circle back to the beginning either. So what is it even trying to do?”
“It’s a love song. It doesn’t have to go anywhere, it just is.”
He’s obviously not used to criticism, but then, neither is she. “The first verse is beautiful. The moon metaphor, the fire. But you can’t just keep beating someone over the head with beauty and expecting them to stay interested. There’s no tension.”
“I don’t see why there has to be any tension.”
“And that’s why your song is boring.” She reaches across the table and plucks the pen out of his hand, starts crossing out lines. In her peripheral she can see him looking at her in disbelief. “Also. Don’t write a fucking song in pen.”
“Are you serious right now?” Apparently, she is serious, although she’s not sure why. She ignores him in favor of alternating between chewing on the end of the pen and writing down a few lines. “Could you at least stop eating my pen?”
“Get a pencil.” She turns the page towards them, knows that the smile on her face is self-satisfied. “Here.”
He scoffs again, but she sees the moment he reads the words from the furrow in his brow. “These are…”
“Great. Yes, I know.”
“How does this help me?” He seems to have forgotten to be annoyed for a moment, looking up at her with his fingertips brushing the paper. “Now it’s just a song you wrote half of, that I can’t play.”
Daisy is surprised he doesn’t simply claim it immediately, then annoyed that she wants to give him any credit for not stealing her work without hesitation. “You can use it if you want, with writing credit. But you’ll owe me a favor.”
“A favor?”
“That’s what I said.”
“What sort of-”
“Doesn’t matter, I’m not cashing in now.”
“Are you planning on starting work today or just harassing customers?” Dave calls to her from behind the counter. She resists the urge to point out that the man in front of her is the only one in here.
“What’s your name?” She stands, tosses the pen onto the table beside the lyrics.
“Uh… Billy Dunne. Yours?” His hand is rubbing the back of his neck, and she’s surprised he’s still holding to his earlier lie.
“Don’t pretend you don’t already know it.”
Billy
When he get’s back home and Camila asks him how choosing a song is going, he just shrugs. He can’t put his finger on why he doesn’t want to tell her about the bizarre writing interaction at the diner. Maybe because he still feels a little bit humiliated. He’s not too proud to admit that his writing isn’t the best in the world, but there is something deeply frustrating about how much better she made it.
“I don’t know what to play. Nothing we have works.” Except that one.
He has more reason than just ego to avoid picking it; he’s not sure the band is going to go for having a complete stranger’s name on their writing credits, and he’s equally unsure that he wants to tell them about it.
Camila smooths the blankets on the bed and runs through suggestions of every song he’s ever showed her. She looks wounded when he turns each of them down, and the look on her face makes him really want a drink.
“Isn’t there anything else you’ve been working on?”
He chews the inside of his cheek, tries to understand why he has virtually no desire to show her this song. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t make sense for him to have written it anymore. It’s sweet but it’s also melancholy. His love for her has always been anything but, and his lyrics for her reliably reflect that.
In the end, he can’t come up with an excuse and can’t justify fucking up what may well be the band’s only chance.
“Okay well. We’ve got this one.” It doesn’t matter who ‘we’ includes, right? If it ever comes up, he’ll tell her then. Chances are, they’re going to flop when they play for Teddy Price no matter what song they choose.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” She pats the bed beside her, and he sits down with his guitar and the folded piece of paper. The new lyrics aren’t memorized yet, and he has to shift the melody just a bit to accommodate extra syllables.
When he starts playing though, he already knows it’s going to be the song that gives them the best chance. He can almost hear her – Daisy’s – voice in them. Can picture the notes he sings in a minor key coming from her mouth. His voice wasn’t quite made for this song, and that’s why he hadn’t been taking it seriously. But now, the way he has to reach for the notes fits with the tremble of the lyrics themselves.
“God, it’s beautiful Billy.” Camila leans over to kiss him on the shoulder when he’s done. He presses his mouth to her hair, tries to figure out why he feels like he will come to regret this one day.
---
When they play it for Teddy Price, Billy’s hands shake so badly that he’s surprised he manages the chord progressions. The band sounds better than they ever have, though. Maybe it’s just the energy of finally feeling like there is something they can do to get what they want. Whatever it is, it’s magic in the room. Even Eddie looks dumbfounded when they finish.
Teddy sits stoic in a chair, arms folded. There’s a long minute where he doesn’t say anything, and in that silence Billy pictures the long drive home to Pittsburgh, the same sad streets they left behind, the whole of them working jobs at the factory.
Then: “Well done. You have yourselves a shot.”
Just like that, they’re discussing show schedules and signing papers. It’s not an album deal, but it’s the potential of one if they do well enough. They’ll get to record two singles, something to put on the radio if they start getting any attention. If it fails, they’ll be on the hook to pay back the studio time; failing is not an option.
When Teddy has him write down the names for the writing credits, he shows no indication that he recognizes a Daisy Jones. Billy would be lying to himself if he said he didn’t at least briefly consider not including her, but if he’s going to succeed, he thinks they should do it honestly. Or at least, legally.
He still hasn’t mentioned it to Camila, and now it’s beginning to feel like a ridiculous thing to have left out. If it is, he also supposes it doesn’t matter whether he tells her about it at all. It’s by no means the first lie of omission he’s told her, but it is the first one he can’t find any good reason for.