Thanks to Grizzly for betaing
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Special thanks to gilmoregirl1979: Your music idea did it hon'!
Chapter 3: Bargaining
After the initial shock had passed and Luke had convinced himself that he had lost his mind, things had been crazy, but a bit easier. He had never been one to deal particularly well with new situations and tended to ignore them as long as he could.
He was convinced that Lorelai's voice was haunting him because of the fight and that she would disappear by the time they made up again. Currently, they were not even close to making up and hadn't talked since the fight.
She hadn't come to the diner since the fight three days ago, but he was sure that her coffee addiction would get the upper hand sooner or later and she would enter the diner again, talk to him in person and her voice would vanish from his head once he had the real thing back. He had spent quite some time sitting on the couch in his apartment coming up with that theory and it helped to ease his mind.
Of course, the Lorelai voice had a lot to say about his theories and she didn't agree at all, but she wasn't real so why should he care? He had tried different things to get rid of her, but nothing had worked so far. He had tried headphones, loud music and deafening silence. He had tried to distract himself with work and he had tried to ignore her and not react to anything she was saying, which turned out to be impossible.
She was infuriating- just like the real Lorelai, whom he hadn't seen in days. He didn't have time though to contemplate this particular situation further this morning because he had to go down into the diner and open. It was half past five already and he had to stock the storeroom before he could open.
He knew that the Lorelai voice was still asleep. He had learned over the last couple of days that as long as he thought quietly, as stupid as that sounded, she wouldn't make an appearance until shortly before eight.
He couldn't explain why he knew that a voice in his head was still asleep, but somehow he felt it. It felt like part of his body and his brain was still asleep, he was slower than usual, couldn't think as fast and had problems coordinating his movements sometimes. He often thought he felt like he had taken too much pain medication and that it had made him numb and slow.
He trudged down the stairs from his apartment to the diner, careful not to trip, because that would wake her up.
When he arrived downstairs he took a turn left towards the back entrance, where the bread guy had put the bread in front of the door, just like he always did. He picked the box up and carried it inside, groaning slightly under the weight of the box.
He pushed the door to the storeroom open with his shoulder and put the box down first, before he looked around. The voice and his attempts to get rid of it had made him neglect his work since the fight and the state of the storeroom clearly showed that. Several boxes had just been put inside the room without any system. Normally he would unpack a delivery as soon as he got it, because that helped him keep track of what he needed to order and what he still had in stock.
He looked around and tried to decide which box to unpack first, although it didn't really matter. His system was messed up and he had to unpack them all so he could start with any box.
He walked to the first shelf and found the fun cutter thingy, as Lorelai had once put it, and then opened the first box, the one right in front of him. He found tins with beans in it, so he put them on the shelf that he had once labeled "beans".
By six he had only two boxes left to unpack, the one with oil and another with flour. With a sigh he heaved the oil up onto the top shelf and wondered why he had decided to label the top shelf "oil". The bottles were heavy and it would have been more reasonable to place the napkins on the top shelf. But no, back then he had labeled the shelves according to how often he needed the things and so oil, which he only needed a new bottle every day had landed on the top shelf. Stupid system, he told himself quietly, so the voice wouldn't wake up.
The flour was even heavier and he was fed up with stacking the shelves so he just grabbed the whole box and lifted it up onto the top shelf, right next to the lettuce. He miscalculated just how heavy it was though and started cursing when his arms gave out. He should have known that with part of his body still asleep he wouldn't be able to lift a box that heavy, but now it was too late.
The box with the flour crashed to the floor, several packages ripped and he was covered in white powder
"God damn it!" he cursed and wiped his face with one hand, while he took his cap off with the other and waved it around to get the flour off.
"What a mess," he heard the voice giggle and groaned loudly, because now the calm time of the day was over. She starting laughing in his head and that made him even more furious than he already was.
"Would you shut up?!" he asked abrasively, put his cap back on his head and tried to beat the flour out of his flannel shirt, without much success. When he finally accepted that it was useless he stepped back from the white mess on the floor, left the storeroom and walked back upstairs to get changed.
Still wiping his face he walked into his apartment and blindly took a turn to the right towards his bedroom area where his closet was. He miscalculated the distance though and tripped over the guitar that was leaning on the wall beside his bed. The instrument fell on the floor and he winced at the sound it made when it hit the hardwood floor.
He crouched down and inspected the guitar carefully, checking to see if anything was broken. Luckily he couldn't find a single scratch and placed it carefully back against the wall, where it had stood before.
"Why do you care so much about this guitar? Do you even know how to play?" the Lorelai voice asked teasingly.
Luke was about to answer when the memory hit him.
"Come on honey, try again," the blonde woman encouraged the small boy who sat next to her on a brown leather couch holding a guitar. He looked annoyed and the lesson obviously wasn't going as he wanted.
"Mom, I can't play it. My fingers are too short," he protested, but looked miserable as he said it. It was obvious that he wanted to play whatever it was that she was teaching him, but he wasn't being very successful and that discouraged him.
"Luke, of course you can do it. You just have to relax your fingers. Do it like this," she replied and wiggled the fingers of her left hand in front of his eyes. Her own blue eyes were sparkling, her lips formed a bright smile and her chin-length blonde hair bounced with the movements of her arm and fingers.
"No, I don't want to," the boy replied and pouted, looking down sadly at the guitar in his hands.
"Come on, baby," she laughed and tickled him, "play for mommy."
"Nooo," the boy squealed and started to laugh while he tried to catch her hands. She wouldn't stop though and within seconds he was lying on the couch, laughing loudly, the guitar still in his left hand. When he started gasping for air she stopped and helped him to sit up on the couch.
"Now try again," she encouraged and smoothed his dark blonde hair with one hand. He looked up at her and when she nodded and smiled he smiled back, looked back down on the guitar, readjusted his fingers and tried it again. This time it worked and he played the first chords of Stairway to Heaven. He smiled brightly when he looked back up and she hugged him to her and placed a kiss on his hair and he felt loved and safe and happy.
"No," Luke replied, "I don't know how to play." The pain the memory had caused him was audible in his voice. However since she could feel what he was feeling she had felt it as well.
"You're lying," the Lorelai voice said softly after a long moment of silence during which he had walked to the closet and had grabbed a new flannel shirt. He froze when he heard her, anger welling up inside of him.
"You heard that?" he asked the voice and didn't care anymore that he had tried to ignore it or to convince himself that it didn't exist.
"I saw it," she replied. "Your mother was beautiful," she added and sounded so touched by his memory that he couldn't stay angry at her.
"Yes, she was," he simply agreed and went into the bathroom to change, which was completely unnecessary, but he couldn't help it. She didn't comment though and he went back down to the storeroom to clean up the mess he had made earlier.
The Lorelai voice was strangely quiet while he opened the diner and served Kirk his breakfast. However not only was she unusually quiet, but the diner was also strangely empty, which could have been caused by the bad mood he had been in since the fight with the real Lorelai. He hadn't kicked people out of the diner, but he had threatened to do so and had generally just been in a mood. He had yelled at Babette when she had ordered a burger without salad, telling her that she should eat the burger as he prepared it, or get out of his diner. He had burned Kirk's toast which hadn't
bothered him and he had thrown a plate after Taylor when he had asked him about a stack of flyers, while the Lorelai voice had made him crazy by teasing him about it. His feeling of annoyance hadn't gone too well with her feeling of amusement and so he had lost it and thrown Andrew's empty plate after Taylor. It had crashed into the wall and the remaining ketchup on it had left a stain on the wall.
It was half past seven and Kirk was still sitting in the diner when Luke decided that he could use the time he had now to read the newspaper. In general he always did that in the evening, but the voice in his head and the constant fights he had with it were wearing him out and he was too tired in the evening to read.
"I'm in the kitchen, call if somebody needs me," Luke told Kirk, who only nodded, and then went back into the kitchen. It was a narrow kitchen, but he had managed to squeeze a small table and two chairs in there beside the huge fridge. The newspaper still lay on the table, where he had put it this morning and he sat down in the wooden chair and opened it, immediately flipping to the sports section.
"It's strange that I suddenly understand it when I read about baseball stats," the Lorelai voice said and he just grunted in acknowledgement.
"You know, you don't need to actually speak or grunt. Your thoughts are just as crystal clear to me. And I have to compliment you on your reference this morning, I'm impressed," she said.
"What reference?" he asked her in his thoughts.
"Ah, see now you're getting the hang of it. I don't want people to think you've lost it because you're talking to yourself all the time. And I am talking about your TV reference. Kirk's shirt really looks like John Boy's."
"Glad that you approve of my thoughts, but can I read my newspaper now?" he replied sarcastically.
"Sure, but make sure you squeeze in the entertainment page. As long as I don't know what my real body is doing I want to make sure I don't miss anything," she replied. Another grunt from him, another giggle from her and he could read his newspaper again. After the sports section he read the political and local pages, before he opened the entertainment page, so that she would leave him alone.
Not really interested he read about the new Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown scandals, read a review about a show called "Sex and the City" and finally a small report about a charity function in LA where they had collected money to help people with cancer. He gazed at the word "cancer" and then stared into space, overcome by another memory.
"Hey, dad," Luke said quietly when he stepped into the unfriendly looking hospital room that had been his father's home for the last four months. William didn't reply, he just lifted his left hand a few inches off the cover and then let it fall down again.
He wore one of his grey T-shirts that were much too big now and he looked tired and exhausted although it was only nine o'clock in the morning.
"You had breakfast yet?" Luke asked, not really knowing how to deal with his father when he was in such a bad shape. There were better days and there were worse days. This was one of the worse ones.
"Have my breakfast right here," William replied with a raspy voice and pointed to one of the IVs to which he was hooked up.
"Yeah, right… right," Luke said for the lack of anything else to say and sat down on the chair beside his father's bed and awkwardly looked around the room. He came here every day, sometimes several times a day, but still the hospital made him uncomfortable. He dreaded coming to the hospital and although he felt bad about leaving his father alone he was always relieved when he was able to go again.
"How's the store doing?" William asked and wrinkled his forehead while he watched his son carefully.
Luke squirmed under his father's gaze and didn't dare to look into his pale face. He knew that he had to lie to him again and tell him that the hardware store was doing fine, although it wasn't. It just wasn't Luke's thing. He didn't know anything about running a store and he was at a loss when the guys from the construction companies called and wanted advice on which new screws to use or which power tools to buy. He was good at fixing things, but he was far from being an expert. His father had been a carpenter before he had opened the hardware store to have more time for his family, but he was just the son of a former carpenter and that wasn't enough to keep the store running.
"Fine," he replied quickly and readjusted the cap on his head.
"You could take that damn thing off when you visit someone in hospital," William said and jerked his chin in the direction of the cap. It was an argument they had nearly every day, so Luke just sighed and took it off. "Another haircut wouldn't hurt," William went on. He was always lecturing Luke about small things when he was annoyed with him about something bigger. He knew that Luke was lying about the store and Luke knew that his father knew he was lying about the store, but it was just too hard to face the problem. They both knew they were running out of money, but neither of them had any idea what to do.
All their savings had already been used up and Luke was thinking about selling the house. He could see no other solution. William refused though and without his father's permission he couldn't sell it. William wanted Luke to keep it so that he could live in it when he had his own family. But what William didn't know was that Luke had already moved into his old office over the hardware store, because it was more convenient for him to live where he worked and also the place wasn't as big and empty as the house.
"Who is at the store now?" William asked breaking the silence that had dragged on.
"No one, I closed it for the morning," Luke replied honestly and rubbed his eyed tiredly. He had spent the previous night trying to understand his father's system so he could do the tax return, but he hadn't been able to manage. He had called his father's friend Buddy early this morning and had asked if he would help him. Buddy had agreed and Luke was driving over to his restaurant directly from the hospital.
Luke worked at the restaurant when the hardware store was closed on the weekends and he enjoyed that a lot more than working in the hardware store. He loved cooking and he was good at it. It gave him satisfaction knowing that people loved what he prepared, as opposed to the annoyed construction workers, who couldn't hide their annoyance about the fact that Luke didn't have the same knowledge about hardware as his father.
"You shouldn't close the store for too long, it's not good for business," William said and sounded really tired.
"I know, but I have to drive over to see Buddy, he is goings to help me with the tax," Luke replied and sounded apologetic. He hated disappointing his father and it hurt him to see him so weak. The old William would have ranted about the tax and then done it himself, but now he was lying in bed, hooked up to machines and was so exhausted he could barely keep his eyes open.
"Then you'd better go. The sooner you're done, the sooner you can open the store again. It's all we have left," William replied and closed his eyes.
"Ok, see you tomorrow dad," Luke replied, giving his father's hand a manly squeeze and left the hospital.
That had been the last time Luke had seen his father alive. He had sold the house. He had turned the hardware store into a diner. Both were things he had to do in order to pay the debts and make a living, but still he knew that his father wouldn't have approved. And that hurt, knowing that he had let his father down.
Luke snapped out of his daze when Kirk yelled something from the diner. He could still feel the hurt in his chest and the tears prickled his eyes, but he pulled himself together really quickly. Memories and the hurt and pain that came with them, were something he had learned to deal with. Lorelai hadn't, at least not when it came to Luke.
"I'm so sorry," the Lorelai voice sobbed in his head and it hurt him to hear her cry.
"Stop crying, it's ok. That's life," he told her and shrugged as he took a deep breath to compose himself before he entered the diner.
He felt like the wind had been knocked out of him when he saw her. She was standing there in his diner, right in front of his counter, a bewildered look on her face.
She looked distressed, but as beautiful as always. Luke felt the familiar flutter in his stomach as the butterflies erupted and he couldn't help but smile. The pain from the memory was washed away by his happiness at seeing her again after so many days. After a few seconds he was able to regain a neutral expression though and he knew that on the outside it looked like he was just happy to see a friend again.
"Whoa!" the voice in his head exclaimed when it felt the full extent of his feelings for Lorelai, that he always kept inside.
TBC