Chapter 1: I'll Kill Him!

"Mom?"

"Yeah?"

"... I'm pregnant."

Dead silence. Lorelai Gilmore all at once felt as though she was drowning. She almost didn't want to breathe, for fear it would come out in rough gasps and she would start hyperventilating. She couldn't speak. Finally, she croaked out, "Are you sure?"

Her daughter, Rory, nodded, through the tears now flowing down her cheeks. "I think I'm a month along or so. Maybe a little longer. Five, six weeks?"

Another - ahem - pregnant pause. As diplomatically as she could, Lorelai broached the most logical second question. "Who's the father?"

"Logan... I think," Rory practically whispered.

Lorelai's eyes narrowed almost dangerously. "You think or you know?" No answer. "Lorelai Leigh Gilmore..."

"It's his; it's his!" Rory confirmed quickly, desperate to avoid what just might be an explosive rant from her mother; the explosive rant she had feared for days would come, and that she still would rather avoid. "He and I... we... it's his."

The cycle thus began all over again. Upon Rory's answer, Lorelai would wait for a moment to digest the information, before moving on to the next logical inquiry. Thus, the eldest Gilmore asked, "Well... what are we going to do?"

"Don't you mean what I'm going to do? This is all on me, Mom," Rory corrected. The tears were fading; she seemed to be, slowly but surely, finding peace with her fate. "I'll get a job - I'd have to! Stay home nights; write the novel! Wash the diapers - the whole bit!"

All at once, Lorelai flashed back in time roughly 30 years. She saw herself doing all the things Rory had described - except writing a book, of course. There she was, searching for a job in the snow, the winter she and Rory had arrived at Stars Hollow. Another scene, of her changing a screaming Rory's diapers. Long nights in the potting shed behind the Inn, calming her baby down even as she knew she had to get up ridiculously early to begin cleaning the rooms.

And then, the image that made Lorelai just about snap. The face of the woman in these vignettes was not hers. It was suddenly Rory's face she saw.

"Mom? Mom!" But Lorelai barely heard her daughter's calls as she ran in a panic, out of the gazebo and down the road. She didn't stop running until she had reached Maple Street.

After walking around town for a few hours, thinking to herself, Rory arrived home at number 37 Maple. Well, her parents' home - the one she had grown up in with her mom and was now semi-crashing in. The house was quiet when she entered. Almost none of the lights were on... except for the glow of a bulb emanating from the basement...

Rory went down the stairs, pausing on the landing. By the light of the lamp, she saw her stepfather, Luke Danes, locking down the barrel of a gun. As Rory watched, Luke then set the shotgun aside, and retrieved a huge knife from a nearby table. A machete. He swung it back and forth in his grasp, his back to Rory all the while.

"Luke?" She knew he heard her, yet he did not turn around, instead pausing in his almost absent-minded contemplation of dangerous weaponry. "Luke? What are you doing?"

"Getting ready for what any good father has to inevitably do. All I need's your confirmation. Is it true?"

Rory sighed, searching and failing to find some way to placate her stepfather's growing anger. "Luke..."

"Is it true?"

"... Yes."

Rory thought that calm, honest, preferably one-word answers would keep Luke from flying into a rage. She should have known better. All the same, she was nevertheless disturbed by how Luke's body seemed to visibly twitch, shake with rage.

"The bastard! The filthy bastard! Strutting around across the world after what he did to you! I'll kill him! That's what I'll do! I'll kill him before the day's through!"

Rory laughed almost bitterly. "That'll do a lotta good," she told him sarcastically. Silently, she added: Good luck with that timetable. Logan's still in London...

Luke didn't seem to register this clear rebuttal of his proposed solution. "Second opinion: Should I shoot the little shit's dick off? Or castration by hacking it clear with this big-ass knife?" Being only her stepfather, he knew some people might find his behavior... excessive, but Damn it if Luke didn't love Rory as though she was his own daughter. Damn it if he didn't lay claim to Rory as partially his - if not in blood, then in all else. It was he who had fed her and her mother for years at his diner, looked after them - first from afar, and then within their household. He'd attended both of Rory's graduations, for Christ's sake! The passionate emotions boiling inside of him like a rumbling volcano were only quelled by Rory's gentle hand on his shoulder.

"I know what you're feeling... and I'm touched, really..." Whether this comment was genuine, or a joke at the expense of the weapons, was left unextrapolated. "But killing Logan is not the answer. I'm just as much at fault. He's engaged to another woman, for heaven's sake!"

Luke snorted. "Dean, Part II..."

Rory ignored him. "My baby is going to need a father, Luke. And trust me, you and Mom are both going to want Logan alive - maybe not now, but certainly down the road." She spun him around so that he finally faced her. "Promise me. Please. Please don't kill Logan. I'm too young to be a widow, a spinster, or whatever people now call single women out of wedlock!"

Luke sighed heavily. Then, at long last, he set the weapons aside and pulled her into a crushing hug.