Green Flower
Mon, Mar. 12th, 2007 03:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annarti
Title~ Green Flower
Author~ Annarti
Disclaimer~ Mine~ all mine~
Notes~ Meet Lorenz, otherwise known as Random Dream Boi. It suits him. This is part one of the dream in fic form. Part two won't get written cos it's just stupid, and part three will be. With any luck, other bits will be too, assuming I can find out more about this boi =3
~ ~ ~
Lorenz had been dreading Valentine’s Day for the past few weeks now, and now that it was here, his fears were most definitely justified. Valentine’s Day was an entirely different kind of busy. Instead of just having a nice easy ‘banquet for fourteen’ slapped on the railing over his work station, there were so many dockets for two people that they were overlapping.
He took a deep breath as he scanned over the next five table orders and scratched the back of his neck. ‘Four entrées, thanks Michelle!’ he called over the din from the other side of the kitchen, then reached up to take down one of the curvy rectangular plates.
‘Damn you, I was just about to take time out to breathe!’
Lorenz grinned as he crouched down and yanked the fridge door open, pulling out the box of sandwiches. ‘You had a breath ten minutes ago!’ he scorned. ‘That should keep you going for at least the next hour.’ He began struggling with the lid of the sandwich box.
‘There’s a table for four out there?’ she asked, as she scanned Lorenz’s bunting of yellow dockets.
Lorenz nodded as the lid finally came free. ‘Mhmm, they’ve got two kids with them, hence the sandwiches.’ He lined eight of them up on the plate, making sure the salmon looked just right and discarding one where the avocado had gone slightly brown.
‘Picky,’ Michelle said with a shake of her head. ‘As if the kids are going to notice anyway.’
Lorenz shrugged and dusted his hands on his pants. ‘Parents might.’ He picked up the plate and held it out for her, just as Matt rushed in from the scullery carrying a stack of soup bowls to restock the plate warmer. He crashed into Lorenz’s waiting plate of sandwiches and sent them flying.
Lorenz gasped as the plate slipped from his grasp. He grabbed at the air and made a fist, as though trying to catch a mosquito.
He missed the plate, but that wasn’t what he had been trying to catch. What he’d caught instead was time.
The kitchen fell silent. The chefs all stood like frozen statues, watching crêpes that floated in mid-air over their frying pans. Matt’s and Michelle’s open-mouthed faces stared at the motionless sandwiches, frozen in mid-flight.
Lorenz sighed and rubbed at the back of his neck, then knelt down and picked the plate out of the air, resting it on his knees as he rearranged the sandwiches on it as quickly as possible. He swung back to his feet and set the plate back on the bench, glancing around the kitchen before holding out his fist to start time flowing again.
Except it already was. It wasn’t up to normal pace yet, but while he’d been fixing the sandwiches and rearranging the smoked salmon slivers in them, time had been slipping. It was very slow at the moment, but things were definitely moving. Michelle’s head was slowly turning away from where the sandwiches had been falling towards him, the crêpes were falling back into the chef’s frying pan, and the low rumble of sound was creeping back into the kitchen.
Lorenz stood quietly as he watched everything speed up around him, still holding his fist out in front of him. He should be still holding time in that fist. Everything should still be frozen solid. Why was everything moving?
Michelle’s brow slowly furrowed. ‘Loz?’ she asked, her voice deeper as it drew out each letter with concern. ‘Are you okay? You look a bit pale. Do you want me to get you a drink?’
Even in that sentence her words were speeding up. Lorenz stared for a few moments longer as time reverted to its normal pace. His hand was still fisted and trembling slightly, he noticed.
He looked down at his shaking fist, then let it loose and grasped at the air again. The noises of the kitchen dulled, but only because it was being drowned out by the blood rushing and ringing in his ears. He grabbed at time again, trying to take hold of even a tiny thread of it, but it still continued on its own merry way. His olive green eyes darted around the room, flitting from one moving object to the next as his right hand continued to try and grip at the air. He tried to find one thing, anything in the room that would obey his desperate command to just stop.
‘I can’t stop time anymore,’ he murmured, feeling a sudden pain in his hands as he formed the words.
He could just hear Michelle’s snort over his ringing ears. ‘Poor you, you’ll have to join the ranks of the normal people now.’ Her hand reached out to take the plate of sandwiches and set it on her entrée plates. ‘Where am I going?’
Lorenz shook his head slowly, his right hand still grasping unsuccessfully at the air.
Michelle looked at him for a few moments, though with compassion or disdain, Lorenz couldn’t tell. Then she shrugged, looked up at the most recent of the yellow dockets and disappeared out the door.
‘I can’t stop time anymore.’ The words were reaching into his mind now more than blind fear.
He took a deep breath and did his best to let it out smoothly, staggering over to the corner where he could slide down between two stainless steel cupboards. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply again, hugging himself with both arms and knotting his fingers into his shirt.
It didn’t work. Closing his eyes just meant his thought swamped his vision, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to think right now. He opened them again and watched the activity of the kitchen, watched the foodies as they stacked plates and carried baskets of bread out to the tables, watched the chefs toss food around in woks and saucepans, flipping savoury crêpes onto plates to be filled with a manner of delicacies.
Frying pans sizzled, fridge and oven doors thudded open and closed, Chrissie the kitchen manager yelled, and slowly, Lorenz’s mind went blank. His fingers loosened their grip on his shirt so his hands could flop down onto the cold floor tiles. He blinked slowly, listening to the now-rhythmic beating of his heart and his slow, smooth breaths.
He just needed a little time to relax, that was all. Everything would work out. He just needed to relax.
He wasn’t aware of his back sliding down the cold metal until he was lying on the floor staring up at the ceiling. Chrissie’s face appeared in his view and said something, then waved a hand at him a few times and disappeared again.
He heard people talking over him sometimes, but they were just voices. No words or tone, just more sounds to listen to but not hear, more faces to watch but not see.
Someone pushed something into his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. Something soft and spongy, slightly cold and damp with something slimy in the middle. It was an avocado and smoked salmon sandwich.
Lorenz bit his bottom lip and frowned at the ceiling. He couldn’t think. He had to keep a clear mind, just relax, breathe deeply… He could feel his heartbeat quickening though as thoughts and memories clawed their way forwards in his mind. He could feel his hand clenching around the sandwich, squeezing it out between his fingers.
‘Come on, Loz.’ Matt’s words were muffled slightly as Lorenz’s mind was unwillingly dragged back to full consciousness. ‘And you were supposed to eat that, not mutilate it. It’s been six days. Have you eaten anything at all?’
Six days. Had he really been lying here that long?
Lorenz slowly closed his eyes slowly, feeling them prickle with heat as a tear squeezed out from under each lid. His hands were aching again and he clenched his fingers more tightly around the sandwich, dragging himself to a sitting position to hug his knees and rest his forehead against them. He held his breath as his face pulled into a grimace, knowing that if he tried to breathe now there was no way he could keep it calm and controlled. He clenched his eyes shut to hold back the tears and bit his bottom lip to keep it from trembling, but it was no use now.
Six days. It was gone. He could see everything in his mind, everything his overactive imagination could come up with, and it terrified him. His hands throbbed as gripped the sandwich with one and knotted the other in the black and white checks of his pants. He shuddered as he choked back a sob in an effort to breathe, but what was the point now? It was gone.
There was a hand on his shoulder, probably Michelle’s, silently encouraging him to let it all out.
‘I can’t,’ he began, unable to finish the sentence now, partly because of the sobs that now choked every breath, partly because he knew everything it meant. ‘I can’t…’
‘Shh,’ Michelle said quietly, rubbing at his back. ‘Come and sit down. We’ve got someone who can help.’ She patted him and rested both hands on his shoulders.
Lorenz allowed himself to be guided through the kitchen and out into the dining room, somehow managing to drag one foot in front of the other. Six days. He gripped his face with one shaking hand as Michelle sat him down at one of the tables, the soft cushioned leather of the chair cool against his hot back.
There was a large, balding man in a brown coat sitting at the table. A red coat hung behind him in the vague shape of a woman, but Lorenz couldn’t lift his head enough to see what she looked like. He didn’t care.
He leant his elbows on the table and pulled his bandana off, dropping it on the dark polished wood. He rested his temples against the heels of his hands, raking his fingers through his hair and reading the ‘CanTeen’ words printed on the bandana over and over again.
He didn’t want to listen to what they were talking about. It would only make things worse. Who could help? There was nothing to help with. He’d never heard of this happening before. How could anyone help?
The bandana helped to put things into perspective. It terrified him, true enough, but it wasn’t the end of everything. Not just yet.
He dropped his hands to the table, palms up and fingers curled naturally inwards. They were still trembling, still embedded with a dull ache, and they were red and blotchy too, like they always were when he cried a lot. He clenched them both into fists, and they trembled more with the familiar action, even when he relaxed them again.
He watched his right hand intently, then grasped out with it, trying to catch a finger on one string of time. Just a single thread would do. The tiniest strand, anything to convince him he could still do it.
The voices around him fell silent, and he glanced up in dumb hope, but it was only because they were all watching him, watching his hand grip again and again at something that couldn’t be grasped.
He caught a flash of red out of the corner of his eye as the red coat rounded the table to him, and he held his hand in a shaking fist as he eyed the red coat. One hand reached into the pocket and drew out a camera, then pushed a button to bring it beeping to life.
The red coat knelt down so the woman’s face was at his level, hidden behind the camera. Something about the sharp beep and bright little red light on the front of the camera told Lorenz this was a bad idea, so he turned the back of his head to her.
His eyes fell instead on the brown coat of the new man. He cocked his head curiously to one side. ‘Who are you?’ he asked mildly.
His friends and the two newcomers exchanged glances and looked sideways back at Lorenz, their faces full of pity.
This man knew he could stop time, or at least had been able to. Lorenz had always been careful with who he told, but he’d never seen this man before in his life. How did he know? What made him think he could help?
‘Who are you?’ he tried again, hearing mild irritation in his voice now.
‘You don’t recognise him?’ Michelle asked, her voice slightly higher pitched with nerves. She turned back to the brown coat. ‘But you told us you were his dad.’
Lorenz slapped his hands on the table, suddenly strong and firm as he shoved the chair back and sprung to his feet. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘Who the hell are you?’
[scene missing]
[insert gratuitous Charlie’s Angels-esque breaking into a giant flower show at night here]
(Yes, the dream did that. I told you it was silly and not worth ficcing =P)
Author~ Annarti
Disclaimer~ Mine~ all mine~
Notes~ Meet Lorenz, otherwise known as Random Dream Boi. It suits him. This is part one of the dream in fic form. Part two won't get written cos it's just stupid, and part three will be. With any luck, other bits will be too, assuming I can find out more about this boi =3
Lorenz had been dreading Valentine’s Day for the past few weeks now, and now that it was here, his fears were most definitely justified. Valentine’s Day was an entirely different kind of busy. Instead of just having a nice easy ‘banquet for fourteen’ slapped on the railing over his work station, there were so many dockets for two people that they were overlapping.
He took a deep breath as he scanned over the next five table orders and scratched the back of his neck. ‘Four entrées, thanks Michelle!’ he called over the din from the other side of the kitchen, then reached up to take down one of the curvy rectangular plates.
‘Damn you, I was just about to take time out to breathe!’
Lorenz grinned as he crouched down and yanked the fridge door open, pulling out the box of sandwiches. ‘You had a breath ten minutes ago!’ he scorned. ‘That should keep you going for at least the next hour.’ He began struggling with the lid of the sandwich box.
‘There’s a table for four out there?’ she asked, as she scanned Lorenz’s bunting of yellow dockets.
Lorenz nodded as the lid finally came free. ‘Mhmm, they’ve got two kids with them, hence the sandwiches.’ He lined eight of them up on the plate, making sure the salmon looked just right and discarding one where the avocado had gone slightly brown.
‘Picky,’ Michelle said with a shake of her head. ‘As if the kids are going to notice anyway.’
Lorenz shrugged and dusted his hands on his pants. ‘Parents might.’ He picked up the plate and held it out for her, just as Matt rushed in from the scullery carrying a stack of soup bowls to restock the plate warmer. He crashed into Lorenz’s waiting plate of sandwiches and sent them flying.
Lorenz gasped as the plate slipped from his grasp. He grabbed at the air and made a fist, as though trying to catch a mosquito.
He missed the plate, but that wasn’t what he had been trying to catch. What he’d caught instead was time.
The kitchen fell silent. The chefs all stood like frozen statues, watching crêpes that floated in mid-air over their frying pans. Matt’s and Michelle’s open-mouthed faces stared at the motionless sandwiches, frozen in mid-flight.
Lorenz sighed and rubbed at the back of his neck, then knelt down and picked the plate out of the air, resting it on his knees as he rearranged the sandwiches on it as quickly as possible. He swung back to his feet and set the plate back on the bench, glancing around the kitchen before holding out his fist to start time flowing again.
Except it already was. It wasn’t up to normal pace yet, but while he’d been fixing the sandwiches and rearranging the smoked salmon slivers in them, time had been slipping. It was very slow at the moment, but things were definitely moving. Michelle’s head was slowly turning away from where the sandwiches had been falling towards him, the crêpes were falling back into the chef’s frying pan, and the low rumble of sound was creeping back into the kitchen.
Lorenz stood quietly as he watched everything speed up around him, still holding his fist out in front of him. He should be still holding time in that fist. Everything should still be frozen solid. Why was everything moving?
Michelle’s brow slowly furrowed. ‘Loz?’ she asked, her voice deeper as it drew out each letter with concern. ‘Are you okay? You look a bit pale. Do you want me to get you a drink?’
Even in that sentence her words were speeding up. Lorenz stared for a few moments longer as time reverted to its normal pace. His hand was still fisted and trembling slightly, he noticed.
He looked down at his shaking fist, then let it loose and grasped at the air again. The noises of the kitchen dulled, but only because it was being drowned out by the blood rushing and ringing in his ears. He grabbed at time again, trying to take hold of even a tiny thread of it, but it still continued on its own merry way. His olive green eyes darted around the room, flitting from one moving object to the next as his right hand continued to try and grip at the air. He tried to find one thing, anything in the room that would obey his desperate command to just stop.
‘I can’t stop time anymore,’ he murmured, feeling a sudden pain in his hands as he formed the words.
He could just hear Michelle’s snort over his ringing ears. ‘Poor you, you’ll have to join the ranks of the normal people now.’ Her hand reached out to take the plate of sandwiches and set it on her entrée plates. ‘Where am I going?’
Lorenz shook his head slowly, his right hand still grasping unsuccessfully at the air.
Michelle looked at him for a few moments, though with compassion or disdain, Lorenz couldn’t tell. Then she shrugged, looked up at the most recent of the yellow dockets and disappeared out the door.
‘I can’t stop time anymore.’ The words were reaching into his mind now more than blind fear.
He took a deep breath and did his best to let it out smoothly, staggering over to the corner where he could slide down between two stainless steel cupboards. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply again, hugging himself with both arms and knotting his fingers into his shirt.
It didn’t work. Closing his eyes just meant his thought swamped his vision, and he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to think right now. He opened them again and watched the activity of the kitchen, watched the foodies as they stacked plates and carried baskets of bread out to the tables, watched the chefs toss food around in woks and saucepans, flipping savoury crêpes onto plates to be filled with a manner of delicacies.
Frying pans sizzled, fridge and oven doors thudded open and closed, Chrissie the kitchen manager yelled, and slowly, Lorenz’s mind went blank. His fingers loosened their grip on his shirt so his hands could flop down onto the cold floor tiles. He blinked slowly, listening to the now-rhythmic beating of his heart and his slow, smooth breaths.
He just needed a little time to relax, that was all. Everything would work out. He just needed to relax.
He wasn’t aware of his back sliding down the cold metal until he was lying on the floor staring up at the ceiling. Chrissie’s face appeared in his view and said something, then waved a hand at him a few times and disappeared again.
He heard people talking over him sometimes, but they were just voices. No words or tone, just more sounds to listen to but not hear, more faces to watch but not see.
Someone pushed something into his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. Something soft and spongy, slightly cold and damp with something slimy in the middle. It was an avocado and smoked salmon sandwich.
Lorenz bit his bottom lip and frowned at the ceiling. He couldn’t think. He had to keep a clear mind, just relax, breathe deeply… He could feel his heartbeat quickening though as thoughts and memories clawed their way forwards in his mind. He could feel his hand clenching around the sandwich, squeezing it out between his fingers.
‘Come on, Loz.’ Matt’s words were muffled slightly as Lorenz’s mind was unwillingly dragged back to full consciousness. ‘And you were supposed to eat that, not mutilate it. It’s been six days. Have you eaten anything at all?’
Six days. Had he really been lying here that long?
Lorenz slowly closed his eyes slowly, feeling them prickle with heat as a tear squeezed out from under each lid. His hands were aching again and he clenched his fingers more tightly around the sandwich, dragging himself to a sitting position to hug his knees and rest his forehead against them. He held his breath as his face pulled into a grimace, knowing that if he tried to breathe now there was no way he could keep it calm and controlled. He clenched his eyes shut to hold back the tears and bit his bottom lip to keep it from trembling, but it was no use now.
Six days. It was gone. He could see everything in his mind, everything his overactive imagination could come up with, and it terrified him. His hands throbbed as gripped the sandwich with one and knotted the other in the black and white checks of his pants. He shuddered as he choked back a sob in an effort to breathe, but what was the point now? It was gone.
There was a hand on his shoulder, probably Michelle’s, silently encouraging him to let it all out.
‘I can’t,’ he began, unable to finish the sentence now, partly because of the sobs that now choked every breath, partly because he knew everything it meant. ‘I can’t…’
‘Shh,’ Michelle said quietly, rubbing at his back. ‘Come and sit down. We’ve got someone who can help.’ She patted him and rested both hands on his shoulders.
Lorenz allowed himself to be guided through the kitchen and out into the dining room, somehow managing to drag one foot in front of the other. Six days. He gripped his face with one shaking hand as Michelle sat him down at one of the tables, the soft cushioned leather of the chair cool against his hot back.
There was a large, balding man in a brown coat sitting at the table. A red coat hung behind him in the vague shape of a woman, but Lorenz couldn’t lift his head enough to see what she looked like. He didn’t care.
He leant his elbows on the table and pulled his bandana off, dropping it on the dark polished wood. He rested his temples against the heels of his hands, raking his fingers through his hair and reading the ‘CanTeen’ words printed on the bandana over and over again.
He didn’t want to listen to what they were talking about. It would only make things worse. Who could help? There was nothing to help with. He’d never heard of this happening before. How could anyone help?
The bandana helped to put things into perspective. It terrified him, true enough, but it wasn’t the end of everything. Not just yet.
He dropped his hands to the table, palms up and fingers curled naturally inwards. They were still trembling, still embedded with a dull ache, and they were red and blotchy too, like they always were when he cried a lot. He clenched them both into fists, and they trembled more with the familiar action, even when he relaxed them again.
He watched his right hand intently, then grasped out with it, trying to catch a finger on one string of time. Just a single thread would do. The tiniest strand, anything to convince him he could still do it.
The voices around him fell silent, and he glanced up in dumb hope, but it was only because they were all watching him, watching his hand grip again and again at something that couldn’t be grasped.
He caught a flash of red out of the corner of his eye as the red coat rounded the table to him, and he held his hand in a shaking fist as he eyed the red coat. One hand reached into the pocket and drew out a camera, then pushed a button to bring it beeping to life.
The red coat knelt down so the woman’s face was at his level, hidden behind the camera. Something about the sharp beep and bright little red light on the front of the camera told Lorenz this was a bad idea, so he turned the back of his head to her.
His eyes fell instead on the brown coat of the new man. He cocked his head curiously to one side. ‘Who are you?’ he asked mildly.
His friends and the two newcomers exchanged glances and looked sideways back at Lorenz, their faces full of pity.
This man knew he could stop time, or at least had been able to. Lorenz had always been careful with who he told, but he’d never seen this man before in his life. How did he know? What made him think he could help?
‘Who are you?’ he tried again, hearing mild irritation in his voice now.
‘You don’t recognise him?’ Michelle asked, her voice slightly higher pitched with nerves. She turned back to the brown coat. ‘But you told us you were his dad.’
Lorenz slapped his hands on the table, suddenly strong and firm as he shoved the chair back and sprung to his feet. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘Who the hell are you?’
[scene missing]
[insert gratuitous Charlie’s Angels-esque breaking into a giant flower show at night here]
(Yes, the dream did that. I told you it was silly and not worth ficcing =P)