A/N: The last time I watched this miniseries, this line stood out to me. Why does he call her Dee? This is just going to be a little story, a little bit of "flash fiction." Nothing too serious or in-depth.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the characters or ideas created by Stephen King. I borrowed them for the entertainment and amusement of my audience.
SUMMARY: "He calls her Dee. Now why does he do that, I wonder?"
GENRE: Drama
RATING: G
DATE: July 10, 2014
::~*~::
Steve slipped quietly into the empty office, closing the door behind him. Throwing himself into the chair in front of the desk, he waited patiently for the office's owner to appear. Checking his watch, he figured he had maybe five minutes before she was due to appear. He rubbed his hands over his eyes, trying to rub the sleep away. He had been up most of the night after she had confessed her plans to him, his nerves completely shot to pieces. She had said it almost casually as though it was an everyday conversation, but it had stopped him cold and left him dumbfounded. He'd been stricken silent for a good three minutes before he'd trusted himself to start speaking again.
The door opened behind him and Joyce came rushing into the office, a whirlwind of business attire and blonde curls everywhere.
"Hey, Dee," he greeted casually.
She stopped suddenly as though she had run into an invisible wall. "What?" she replied. She continued moving, but slowly and methodically. She carefully sat in her chair behind the desk and fixed him with a wary gaze.
Steve leaned forward with a grin. "I said 'Hey, Dee.'"
"What's that?" she responded, now shuffling papers on her desk, her attention on them instead of him. "Some new-fangled nickname for me?"
"Sure," he said. "Dee for dedicated. Like you are to my family's house and history." His eyes widened a little bit, mockingly, but she was focused on a piece of paper in her hand and missed it. "Or, maybe Dee for demented, because that's what you'd have to be to go traipsing through my ancestral home."
Joyce stopped reading the paper in front of her and raised her eyes to meet Steve's. She put the paper down, her hands smoothing it on the surface of her desk. "I thought we were finished with this conversation."
"No," he replied. "You finished with this conversation last night when you refused to listen to reason. I'm bound and determined to argue with you every step of the way. It's a dangerous place, Dee."
She rolled her eyes at the new nickname he had so generously bestowed upon her. "It's a dead cell," she fed him the same line she fed her students, but Steve knew better. There was no such thing as a dead cell where Rose Red was concerned.
He sat back in his chair, a little too smugly for Joyce's liking. She braced herself. "Well, you can't enter the house until I give permission and I'm not giving any permission until you listen to me, so we might as well butt heads over this issue again. You wouldn't want to be arrested for trespassing, now would you?"
"You wouldn't dare!"
"I would and I will. You'd be far safer sitting in a jail cell then you would be in Rose Red."
She pinched the bridge of her nose as though thwarting an oncoming headache. "I have a class in ten minutes. I can't argue this right now. If you're serious about holding access to the house over my head," he nodded emphatically, "then let's discuss this over dinner tonight."
Steve was a little disappointed that this wasn't being resolved right then, but he had known coming in that it probably wasn't going to be. She was between classes after all. Maybe a small part of him had hoped that having the night to think about it, she would have realized how foolish it was and said so immediately.
"Sure thing, Dee," he replied, a little bitterly. The bitterness must have been lost on her, as she smiled brightly at him before leaving the office.
As he left the office behind her, another, darker, thought came to mind. Dee is for death.