Summary: In one night, her entire world was flipped on its axis. Everything she had worked so hard for—Everything that she sacrificed her time, her energy, and her relationships to was gone. Rory had done the thing no one in High-Society dared to do. She had dosed the bridge to her future in gasoline and handed Emily the matches. Now, she would have to figure out how to get through college with no safety net, none of Lorelai's moral support, and without her grandparents funding; all because she refused to marry some guy named Colin McCrae.

WARNING: Fic contains coarse language and some adult themes, please read at your own discretion. (Seriously, the M-rating is there for a reason.)

YOU JUMP, I JUMP

CHAPTER ONE

"If you're going to go to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl ㅡ because the enemy's there, and not because you don't like his hairdo or his goddamn necktie."
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

The first thing Lorelai Gilmore noticed upon arriving at her parents' house was a silver Mercedes sedan and a black BMW sports car parked in front of the courtyard fountain. The second thing she noticed was that her daughter's blue Toyota Prius was nowhere in sight. She had beaten her there which in itself was something of miraculous seeing as Rory was always annoyingly on time. She parked her Jeep behind the BMW and frowned when she noticed the Yale University license plate. Her Emily-senses were tingling and she hoped that this wasn't another attempt at her mother playing matchmaker. She remembered with a shudder the last 'quality' man that Emily had introduced her too. (Chase Bradford was his name, but the only quality of his Lorelai remembered was his ability to turn an awkward dinner alone with her parents into the most mind-numbingly boring two-hours of her life. To think if her father hadn't let her climb out the window, it would've been longer. Small blessings and all that.) She debated whether or not to brave the Fortress of Solitude alone or wait for Rory and after a minute decided to do just that; turning on the radio and jamming out to the Suzi Quatro's 'Wild One'.

She started to nod her head to the music and shimmy her shoulders to the beat before breaking out into the lyrics. "I'm a blue-eyed bitch and I wanna get rich. Get outta my way 'cause I'm here to stay. I'm a wild one. Ohh, I'm a wild one…"

She beat her hands against the steering wheel like it was a drum and started making electric guitar noises with her mouth. "The wild one. Ohh, I'm the wild one—"

"AH! Mom?"

Outside stood Emily Gilmore with her lips pressed into a thin line. She appeared seemingly out of thin air like Freddie Kruger in the opening credits of 'A Nightmare on Elm Street'. A long, manicured talon rapted on the glass. "What are you doing?" She asked.

"Uh...Looking for my lipstick?" Lorelai fumbled beside her and pulled out a tube out of the cupholder. "Ah, here it is!"

"You need your radio on to look for your lipstick?"

"No. The radio was already on and then they started playing Suzi Quatro and she was like one of my all-time favorites in high school…"

"—And you forgot to look for your lipstick," Emily finished.

"Momentarily."

"Well, you found it. So come on…"

"Can I just wait til this song is—" Lorelai started to say, but her mother fixed her with her with a look of disapproval that rivaled Mrs. Van Uppity's. "Right. Okay, I'm coming." She grabbed her coat and purse from the passenger seat and got out of the Jeep.

"I can't believe you." Emily placed her hands on her hips and huffed.

Lorelai slipped her arms into her coat and fought back a groan. Two seconds in and they were already fighting—that's gotta be a new record. "Can't believe what, Mom?"

"You couldn't come inside for one second without Rory," she said.

"Mom, I told you I was—"

"—Looking for your lipstick. Yes, you were a looking for a lipstick that was sitting six-inches from you. Really, Lorelai you must think I'm an idiot to buy that excuse."

Lorelai mentally rolled her eyes. She should've grabbed the bottle of Advil from the glovebox. "Hey, can we not fight? We don't have our buffer right now."

Emily frowned but didn't say anymore as she ushered her daughter inside. Lorelai handed her coat and purse off to the maid, Louisa, who put them in the small closet by the entryway. Then they walked past the stairs to the parlor where Richard Gilmore was entertaining guests. An older man, not as aged as Richard nor a young as Lorelai, in a dark navy suit and tie sat on one of the creme-colored loveseats in a quiet discussion with her father about the fluctuating stock market. He had dark brown hair with wisps of grey around the temples and finely groomed beard. Beside him was a blonde at least half his age wearing a black cocktail dress, showing a bit too much cleavage, and sipping on a gin martini. She looked boredly around the room every few seconds, unwilling/unable to participate in a conversation about stocks and uninterested in engaging the young man across from her. She perked up with interest when Lorelai entered the room, happy for the time being to see someone closer to her own age. Although, Lorelai guess that she had at least a good five years on her. The last guest was even younger than the blonde but not by much. He looked to be about Rory's age with dark brown hair and dark eyes and a clean-shaven face. ( Lorelai reasoned that if she were five years younger, she would've found him very attractive. But she wasn't, so she didn't.) He sat with his arm slung over the back of the loveseat and one hand holding a rock glass filled with scotch. He looked just as bored as the blonde but was trying to mask it whenever Richard or, what she guessed, his father looked his way. His dark eyes turned on her with interest, gliding down her figure appreciatively.

Emily took her arm and steered her towards the couple sitting on the loveseat. "This is my daughter, Lorelai," she said, "Lorelai, this is Andrew McCrae and his wife, Veronica—" There were the subtlest undertones of condescension as she spoke the woman's name, letting Lorelai know that the blonde was someone her mother deemed inferior to herself. "—and this is their son, Colin."

Lorelai plastered on a society smile and shook the man's hand. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you. Richard and Emily had told me so much about you," Andrew smiled.

"Oh, I'm sure," she said giving her mother a side-eyed look.

"Lorelai, what would you like to drink?" Richard asked moving towards the drink cart.

"I'll have what she's having," and Lorelai turned to her mother. "Mom, can I talk to you in private?"

"Lorelai we have guests."

"It'll just take a minute." She said and turned to Andrew, "Excuse us. We're just going to have a spur of the moment conversation." Then she walked out of the parlor with her mother in tow.

"Lorelai you're pulling me," Emily complained as she was dragged into Richard's study.

Lorelai let go of her mother's arm and closed the door behind them; effectively cutting off their conversation from eavesdroppers. Then she turned to her mother, wild-eyed and angry. "What are they doing here?"

"They're here for dinner."

"No, don't give me that crap," she said. "What are they doing here? I know what you're doing and they shouldn't be here!"

"Nonsense, Lorelai." Emily huffed, annoyed. "I invited them for dinner. It's been four years, I thought it was time."

"And you didn't think to warn me?" She asked. "I can't believe you would do this! Then again, I shouldn't be so surprised—I mean you are you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh, it's nothing. You just do what you always do—making decisions without consulting the rest of us. I could've been better prepared. I would've done something had you told me—"

"Done what? What are you going on about?" Emily crossed her arms over her chest. "I don't see why you're so upset. Rory already knows—"

Lorelai shook her head. "No, she doesn't."

Emily stopped and looked at her daughter. "What?"

"Rory doesn't know. I haven't told her yet," she confessed.

Emily's face turned an alarming shade of red. "Well, when were you going to tell her? On her wedding day? Lorelai—"

"I know."

"—you were the one that wanted to tell her. Your father and I—"

"I know."

"—offered to tell her on her eighteenth birthday, but you said—"

"I KNOW!" Lorelai yelled clenching her hands in her hair. In the last minute, all the color had drained out of her face, leaving her white as a sheet. "I know what I said! But I couldn't do it. I just couldn't fucking do it, Mom. I wanted her to be a kid. I didn't want her to go through high school with this nose tied around her neck—Oh god, she's gonna kill me!"

Meanwhile, Rory had just pulled into the driveway behind her mother's Jeep. She checked her reflection making sure that her makeup was perfect before climbing out of the car; brushing her hands down the fabric of her light pink dress, hoping to smooth any wrinkles out from the ride. (Godforbid, there be a wrinkle and her grandmother notice, she wouldn't hear the end of it.) Then she headed towards the front door but paused as soon as she saw the Mercedes and BMW parked there. Ugh, not again.

She debated whether or not she should turn around and leave. It would've been easy. No one would even know she was there. She could turn back right now and head back to Yale; making up some excuse like a flat tire or food poisoning. (Lorelai had done it before—To her, it had been preferable to drink an entire bottle of laxative than to sit through yet another blind-date orchestrated by her mother. Although, Rory doubted she would be willing to go that far.) She had thought that after Graham Sullivan, aka diaper-boy, aka James-Spader-wannabe, that Emily had learned to leave well enough alone. After Rory had been ditched on the shotty side of New Haven with no money and no way to get home, her grandmother had been extremely apologetic. Rory had sat her down and told her that she didn't want distractions while she was in college; that she wanted to focus on her major, her articles for the Yale Daily News, and her internship in Boston over the summer. She had stupidly thought that Emily had understood, seeing as she hadn't brought up boys or dating since—But, no. It was like her mother had said all those years ago: "I talk and I think I'm being clear, but all she hears is blah, blah, blah, Ginger—"

Rory took a step back towards her car, but then she thought about what her mother would say if she ditched; her mind already playing her mother's coffee-induced rant in her ears: "Where's your solidarity? Betrayed, lied to, and humiliated by the fruit-of-my-loins—I can't believe…" Nope, that was worse, she decided and while Emily was difficult on her best day, it was nothing like Lorelai Gilmore on her worst. Her mother would talk her ear off and keep her up all night just for kicks, she hated to think what she'd do if she was ditched at Friday Night Dinner; so, with a sigh, Rory marched up to the front door and rang the bell.

"Good evening, Ma'am."

"Good evening, Louisa." She smiled politely at the maid as the older woman took her coat, but that smile dropped off her face when she heard her grandmother and her mother arguing. The thick door to the study muted the sound enough to where Rory couldn't hear exactly what they were saying, but she could hear the anger and the frustration in their tone. Fighting between her mother and grandmother was a common occurrence. But it was never this bad. Rory knew it was bad because they had made a poor attempt at hiding it, whereas normally they would duke it out at the dinner table. "How long…?"

"It just started, Ma'am," Louisa grimaced as a particularly loud screech punctuated her words.

"Why don't you go hide in the kitchen. I'll put my coat away."

Louisa shot her a grateful smile and handed Rory back her coat and purse before speed walking down the hall towards the kitchen. She watched her go knowing that after tonight there would be no more Louisa. Most likely, she would quit and after three months Louisa had managed to stick it out longer than any maid that Emily Gilmore had hired in the 21st-Century. Rory would miss her.

She hung up her coat in the closet and was about to head for the study when Richard called out to her. "Rory is that you?"

She sighed and veered off to the parlor. "Hi grandpa," she said. Richard was standing by the drink cart and Rory walked up and hugged him. "Sorry, I'm late. I honked."

"Ah, another scuba diver?"

"Skydiver doing forty-five in a seventy. By the time I got to the exit, I was ready to push him out of a plane and feed him spiders."

He laughed as he handed her a club soda. Then, he lead her over to the couches where the McCraes were seated. "Rory this a friend of mine, Andrew McCrae," he said smiling as the two shook hands, "and his wife, Veronica, and his son, Colin."

"It's nice to meet—" Rory jumped as a loud crash sounded from the study. She whipped her head back to the door of the parlor as if by doing so she would be able to see through the walls and see her mother and grandmother fighting.

Richard tightened his hold on his granddaughter's arm to prevent her from leaving. "Andrew and I are old golf rivals," he said forcing a smile as yet another crashed sounded from within the study. He all the sudden felt the need to pray for the safety of his stamp collection, not to mention his first-edition Kafkas. "He and I are still battling it out to see which one is worse."

"Modesty doesn't become you, Richard," Andrew laughed. It was common knowledge that Richard Gilmore's golf game was on par with that of Arnold Palmer or Tiger Woods. He could've played professionally if he wasn't groomed to the insurance business like his father or his father's father before him.

Richard chuckled at that comment and gestured for Rory to sit on the loveseat besides Colin. The man straightened up and dropped his arm off the back of the seat, bringing his scotch up to his lips as Rory sat down. "So Rory, Richard tells me that you're attending Yale?"

"Yes. I'm going into my second-year."

"And your majoring in Journalism? Working for the Yale Daily News?"

"Uh Huh…"

"That's a very reputable paper."

"Yes."

"Have you started looking into any internships?"

"Actually, Rory was interning in Boston this summer," Richard supplied when it looked like Rory hadn't heard the question. She had been staring over Andrew's head since she sat down. But she wasn't looking at the ceiling, or the wall, or even the water lily painting that one could see through the open doorway hanging in that hall. She was watching the corner, the corner to where her grandfather's study was located, looking for any sign of Emily or Lorelai. "What was that paper called, Rory?"

"What?" At the sound of her name, she turned her head to look at her grandfather's face. There was a slight downturn of his mouth.

"What was the paper you were working at in Boston?" He repeated.

"Oh. It was called the 'Boston Paper-Boy', but it wasn't a newspaper; more of an online magazine. They don't print a lot and have a very small circulation," she said.

"I see. Were you able to publish any articles?" Andrew asked.

"A couple," she admitted, "mostly it was fact-checking and filing though."

"It's refreshing to see young people with ambition," Andrew remarked turning his eyes on his son. "Perhaps you could teach my son how to be more focused on his schoolwork, instead of going off with his friends and sinking a yacht."

For the first time since Rory sat down, she turned to look at her seatmate. He was tense, jaw clenched and glaring at the bottom of his glass. It wasn't a leap to say that he didn't want to be there any more than she herself did; and that that comment about the yacht was a sore spot.

"Uh…" Rory didn't know what to say; so she decided to say nothing taking a slow drink of her club soda. An awkward silence passed through the group and it was made especially uncomfortable with Lorelai and Emily's voices screaming at each other in the distance.

"Oh, Rory, your grandmother and I got you a gift," Richard said standing up from his chair and moving over to the windows where on top a table sat a wrapped box with a large silver bow. He picked it up and deposited it on his granddaughter's lap. "Happy birthday."

"Grandpa you didn't have to get me anything," she smiled.

"Nonsense. You only turn twenty once, young lady, and that deserves a gift."

He gestured for her to open it, so Rory placed her club soda on the end table by the couch and tore away the fancy white paper. She picked up the large velvet box and ran her fingers along its soft edges. It was a jewelry box, but it was too large to be earrings or even a necklace, and it looked to be much older than something you would buy at a store; the black velvet having faded to a navy blue color. She flipped it opened and looked puzzled at its contents.

"Wow, that's—uh—I mean thank you."

"It belonged to your grandmother," Richard told her. "She wanted you to have it."

Inside the box sat a tiara. But it wasn't of those plastic tacky things you'd find in the party section of a Walmart. No, this was something else. It was something you'd expect to see in a museum or at the Buckingham Palace surrounded by bulletproof glass and guards with big furry hats. It looked to be made out of some metal, silver probably and fashioned to look like a garden of flowers with spiraling leaves and budding bulbs. There were sparkling clear gems at the center of each fauna surround by a cluster of what could only be pearls in an assortment of colors, pink, white, and black. It was stunning. It was old. It was way too expensive. Rory was afraid to even touch it for fear of somehow breaking it.

"It's beautiful." And she meant it. It was just—too much—Way, way too much.

"Can I see it?" Veronica had leaned forward with interest the second she recognized that Rory's gift was a jewelry box.

"Oh, sure." Rory turned it around to show the blonde, who let out a gasp.

"Wow."

Yeah, wow. Wow, wow. She didn't know how else to describe it, all her years of writing and being a walking thesaurus had failed her and all she could think of was—Wow, just wow. Rory turned it back around and closed it after Veronica was done looking, then set it on the end table.

"It was rumored to have belonged to a duchess. Your great-great uncle smuggled it out of Austria during the First World War."

"So he stole it?" She asked reclaiming her club soda.

"No."

"Well, that's what smuggling implies," Rory reasoned. "If someone had asked him to take it out of the country then we shouldn't still have it—I.e he stole it."

"We don't have any thieves in our family," Richard said.

"What about Aunt Marilyn?"

"Aunt Marilyn is a special case."

"—Huh, I seem to recall your father trying to steal a zebra, Richard," Andrew remarked jokingly.

"What great-grandfather, Charles? No way."

"Andrew," Richard stressed.

"Yes. It was while he was at Yale, my father was arrested with him also."

"Really?"

"Yes. It was Charles, Daniel, which was my father, and their friend, Elias," he said. "Story was they got drunk at a speakeasy, this was during prohibition, and my father bet your great-grandfather three-hundred dollars that he couldn't break in and steal a zebra from the zoo. Well, he broke in and when the authorities found them they had locked themselves in with the chimpanzees and were giving them whiskey. They were arrested on breaking and entering and possession of an illegal substance."

Rory cracked up laughing and even Colin smiled into his scotch. "Andrew," Richard tried to scold the other man, but he was having a difficult time keeping the smile off his face. "Did you have to tell her that story?"

"Yes, he did," Rory said without skipping a beat.

"Relax, Richard," he said leaning back in his seat and resting his arm behind his wife. "It's not like I told her of the time you went streaking through Branford courtyard—"

"Too much information," Rory winced. She lived in Branford and walked through that courtyard everyday and now, she was assaulted with the image of her grandfather's naked butt streaking past her while she stood at the coffee kiosk.

"Andrew, stop," Richard said looking a bit embarrassed, but he was smiling with that twinkle in his eye he often got when talking about Yale. The tension in the room seemed to dissipate and for a second, a split-second, Rory thought that this dinner wouldn't be so bad. That was until the door of the study opened and out charged her mother.

"Lorelai! Don't walk away from me!" Emily yelled causing everyone in the parlor to wince.

"No! Mom, no! I'm sick of this!"

Rory started to stand up, but Richard stopped her. "No, you stay. I'll handle this," he said. Then turning on his heel, marched out of the parlor, closing the doors behind him.

The doors to the parlor weren't as thick as the doors to the study, so Rory was able to make out bits of the conversation.

"What are you two doing? You're making a scene!"

"Ask her!"

"Don't turn this on me, Lorelai! You were supposed to tell her!"

"So, Rory," Veronica raised her voice to drown out the shouting. "I saw the portrait of you in the study reading and it's lovely. Who painted it?"

"Uh, I don't know. Some French-guy my grandmother hired."

"It was a lot more natural that a lot of portraits, I've seen. I would love to get the artist's contact information…"

"What are you talking about? Tell who what?"

"Yes, Lorelai, who?"

Rory was paying more attention conversation the conversation happening outside the parlor than Veronica's poor attempt at distraction. Paintings—artists—portraits—It doesn't fucking matter.

"You'd have to ask her," she said.

"What? Lorelai Victoria Gilmore are you telling me that you—" Richard's voice boomed through the house.

Okay, that's it. "I'm sorry, you'll have to excuse me for a sec," she said cutting off Veronica mid-sentence. She stood up, wrenched open the door, and stepped out into the hall.

The scene that she was meet with was not a pretty one. Her mother, Lorelai stood by the door with her coat halfway on and her hair in a wild mess of curls, that only happened when gripping it repeatedly or headbanging to Metallica. Her grandmother stood blocking the door, her face was such an alarming shade of red, it was almost turning purple, and she with her hands clenched tightly into fists at her side. But it was her grandfather who was by far the worst off. He stood all six-feet-and-four-inches of him towering over his daughter, red-faced and Rory suddenly understood what her mother meant when she said that when she told him she was pregnant, he spooked the birds.

She wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there. To walk right back into the parlor and climb out the window; cause there was no way she wanted to get involved in this. But she couldn't. She couldn't turn around and leave her mother to the lions. So, stealing her nerves, and saying a quick prayer to great-grandmother Trix, Rory stepped forward to see what all this fighting was about.

"—It was your job to prepare Rory!"

"Prepare me for what?" All three of them spun around and paled at the sight of Rory standing there with her hands on her hips. None of them answered so she turned her eyes to Lorelai.

"Mom?" Lorelai looked at the ground. "Grandpa?" But he too turned away. Rory set her sights on Emily. "Grandma, please."

Emily opened her mouth to speak—

"No," Lorelai said stepping forward. "I'll tell her."

"Well, somebody tell me something! I feel like I'm on 'The Jerry Springer Show'!" She huffed.

Lorelai stepped forward and placed her hands on Rory's shoulders. She swallowed thickly and taking a deep breath she said, "Well, babe it's like this…" And she told her. She told her of how she came to ask the Gilmores for money and how Friday Night Dinners was only the first condition of the loan. The second condition was that Emily wanted to arrange a suitable match for her granddaughter. She told her how a week after her debutante ball the Gilmores received an offer of marriage from the McCraes that Emily accepted and that she, being Lorelai, was supposed to have told her all of this on her eighteenth birthday and she made some sort of excuse about Jess, or Dean, or not having graduated fucking high school—Rory didn't know. All of her words were blending together in a string of white-noise. She could only think about how she had been sitting next to her fiancé for the past thirty-minutes—Her fiancé, she snorted. He wasn't her fiancé. She didn't pick him. He didn't pick her.

"Rory? Rory, sweetie, talk to me," Lorelai said. "What are you thinking?"

Rory looked up to see her mother's concerned face. Lorelai rubbed her hands up and down her arms, grounding her. She blinked. Then blinked again. Then abruptly, forcefully, shoved her away. "Don't fucking touch me!"

"Rory—"

"NO!" She yelled stepping back and throwing her hands in the air, "stay right-fucking-there. Don't come near me! I mean it."

"Okay, okay." Lorelai put her hands up in a non-threatening way and she took a step back.

Rory let out a shaky breath and tried to find her bearings. She stalked down the hall, past the parlor door, before stopping abruptly and spinning on her heels and walking back a couple paces until she was standing in front of the water lilies. She stood there for what could've been a minute, or five, following the dips and ridges of the artist's brush strokes and breathing deeply and steadily out her nose. She looked at the flowers and thought about the tiara sitting in the parlor room. Her grandmother's wedding tiara, now her wedding tiara, that was supposed to be worn to her wedding—her wedding to Colin. She whirled around and the McCraes, who had been silently watching and listening to the whole debacle through the open door, visibly flinched. But Rory didn't see or she didn't even look their way as she walked into the room, picked up the box containing the tiara, and marched out.

Her mother and grandparents stood exactly where she had left them. She stomped up to her grandfather and violently shoved the box into his chest. "You can keep the fucking tiara," she hissed.

"Rory—"

"No, I speak. You listen. Got it?" That question was directed at all of them and Rory fixed each of them with such a vicious sneer that almost immediately and unconsciously and simultaneously they all nodded. "Good. I'm not getting married. I'm not getting married now. I'm not getting married tomorrow. I'm not getting married next week or next month or five goddamn years from now. It won't matter how long it is because if I do get married, I will still not be marrying him."

"Rory be reasonable. Colin is a very good match," Emily scolded.

"Oh, I'm sure he is. That's not what this is fucking about though, is it? I don't give a flying-Christ's-dick if he's a good match!"

"—Don't use that language!"

"Oh, blow it out your cunt, Grandma."

"LORELAI LEIGH DO NOT SPEAK TO YOUR GRANDMOTHER LIKE THAT," Richard's voice boomed.

"Hey, Hey," Lorelai said stepping between her father and daughter, "let's all calm down—"

"I am calm," Rory said.

"No, you're not."

"Yes. I. Am."

Lorelai turned to her parents, realizing she couldn't reason with her daughter. "Dad, Mom, please," She stressed, "let's keep our heads about us. We don't need to reenact a scene from 'My Bloody Valentine' here."

"You have to get married," Emily said, "the contract says—"

"What contract?" Rory whirled on her, "There's only one contract worth a damn, that's the marriage contract, and I haven't fucking signed it! And I'm not going to sign it. Period. So unless you plan to forge my signature, which is illegal, it's not fucking happening! I. Don't. Have. To. Do. Shit."

Emily's face scrunched up and turned a frightening shade of mauve. "You. Have. To."

"Or what?" Rory snapped. "What are you gonna do? What horrible fate will befall me, huh?" Emily sputtered at a loss for words and Rory looked smug. "That's what I thought—"

"W-We'll pull your Yale!" Emily shouted panicking.

"WHAT?" Richard turned to his wife in shock.

"Mom, no!"

Rory was silent thinking it over. Emily took this hesitation as her gaining the higher ground and sneered. "If you don't marry that boy," she said, "your grandfather and I will pull your funding for Yale. We won't pay for it anymore after tonight. You'll have to drop out and pay your own way through community college like all the other high school graduates from lower-income families. You'll get into thousands of dollars of student-loan debt which you won't be able to pay back because you won't be working as a journalist for the New York Times or CNN—because they don't hire journalists from community colleges, Rory—And you'll be working the drive-thru at a local McDonalds and one night you'll say to yourself, 'If only I had.'! Are you prepared for that? Are you prepared to throw away your entire future? Because that, My Dear, is what horrible fate will befall you, should you choose not to do shit."

Lorelai and Richard stood there in shock, unable to comprehend what Emily had just said. The silence that preceded her monologue was deafening, filling every square inch of that large opulent mansion. And in the other room, where the Gilmores couldn't see them, the McCraes sat at the edge of their seats, waiting with baited breath to see how the scene would unfold. Andrew sat turned towards the doors rubbing his beard with his hand and not bothering to hide the smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. He cocked his slightly to the left and glanced at his son, his grin widening. Colin was hunched forward, arms resting on his knees, and staring straight through his father to the open door. The young man's lips moved silently, but his father knew that he was praying for this engagement to fall through.

Richard recovered from the shock first and turned to his wife. "I think Lorelai was right," he said placing a hand on Emily's shoulder, "we all need to calm down."

"Dad's right." Lorelai tried to shake off how weird those words felt coming out of her mouth. "Mom, take a minute and think about what you're doing—what you're saying," she pleaded turning away from her daughter so she missed the determined look that pasted over her daughter's face.

"Okay."

Lorelai whipped her head back around, "What? Rory—"

But Rory wasn't standing there anymore. She had brushed past her mother, heading straight for the coat closet, slipping on her coat and pulling her phone out of her purse. Then she dialed a number and held the device up to her ear.

"Rory! What are you doing?" Lorelai screeched horrified as her daughter called the Yale administration office.

"Yes, hello. Who would I talk to about dropping out of Yale? Un huh. Un huh. Yes, patch me through. No I don't mind holding—" She turned her head towards her mother and fixed her with an icy stare.

"Rory," Richard dropped his hand off his wife's shoulder and turned his granddaughter with alarm, "hang up that phone. We can discuss this, figure out a compromise."

"Yes, honey, you don't have to do this," Lorelai agreed. "Let's discuss this."

Rory cocked her head and frowned. "What's left to discuss?" She asked. "We've already discussed it. I'm not marrying that guy and grandma's agreed to let me out of the engagement as long as you two don't pay for Yale—There's your compromise right there, Grandpa—and I'm okay with that, so what's left to discuss? Dinner? Ya'know, I've lost my appetite and I really need to start packing, so I'll take a rain check on that too—" She cut off mid-sentence as she directed her attention to her phone. "Oh, hi. Who am I speaking with? Oh, Janet? Hi, Janet. Look, I'm sorry for calling so late, I know you got other things to do so I'm gonna cut to the chase, okay? Okay. Here's the situation, come second-Semester I'm not going to be able to afford to attend Yale—I know, it sucks. Un huh. Okay. Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. No, I'll hold. You're fine, Janet, talk to your supervisor. I can wait—"

"Wait wait wait!" Lorelai rushed forward and tried to grab the phone out of Rory's hand. She ducked under her mother's grabbing hands and twisted the phone out of her reach. Putting the device behind her back, she started back into the library. "Rory gimme that phone!" She yelled running after her.

"Lorelai! Rory!" Richard scolded following after them and Emily just stood there staring at nothing. She didn't even flinch when two seconds later a crash sounded from the dining room as the girls ran into Louisa, breaking four of her favorite china plates, and Richard yelling at them all the while.

After what felt like an eternity, but in reality was only a couple of seconds, Veronica poked her head out of the parlor and saw Emily standing there in a comatose state. She took pity on the older woman and walked up to her with a gin martini and a warm hug. "Emily, here." She handed her the drink and lead her calmly back to the parlor sitting her on the armchair next to the loveseat and smiled at her. "Drink it'll help," she said in her low southern drawl.

Then turning to her husband, she placed her hands on her hips and frowned. "Andrew," she stressed.

"Yes, dear?"

"Go out there and help Richard wrangle those two before they destroy Emily's beautiful house," she said. "Colin, you go too."

"No."

Veronica raised a finely plucked brow. "No?" She repeated. "Andrew—"

"Veronica," Andrew said using the same tone as his wife.

"Don't sass me," she warned.

"I'm not." He said, but she rolled her eyes. "Look," he stood up and straighten his tie, "it's not our place to get involved. This is family business—"

"And, what has this whole evenin' been about?" She asked. "Joining our families, right? So you go out there and help Richard. And Colin, you get to the kitchen and make some coffee—something strong with a bit of whiskey, okay?"

The McCrae men opened their mouths to protest, but Veronica fixed them with a stern look and pointed to the door. "Get going. Now."

"Yes. Ma'am," they said and left Veronica alone to handle Emily.

The two men walked into the dining room, where Louisa was sweeping up shards of glass, three-bitter-lettuces, and croutons. The older woman looked irately up at them. "Do you need something?" She huffed a little less polite than she had been earlier.

"Colin, help the maid clean up the glass," Andrew said leaving no room for discussion before he followed the Gilmores into the den.

In the time that it had taken for Andrew to enter the den, things between Rory and Lorelai and Richard had escalated to ridiculous proportions. The first thing he noticed was Richard waving his arms wildly trying to catch either his daughter or granddaughter as they ran around the room in a flurry of limbs that rivaled that of the Tasmanian devil, Taz—Except there were two of them and they were moving parallel to one another around the dark, leather couches again and again. "In all my years, I have never before seen someone behave as irrationally as the two—LORELAI, STOP THROWING COASTERS!"

Andrew barely had enough time to duck out of the way as one of the small, cork disks went whizzing past his head—In any other situation, this would've been hilarious. If this had happened in a courtroom, Andrew would've been amused. If he had seen it on 'Dr. Phil' or 'The Murray Show', he would've laughed until his sides were splitting. But this was not some made-up hoax to raise viewership, so the only thing splitting was Andrew's headache.

"You're making a Huge, mistake!" Lorelai wailed at her daughter. "Don't do this, Rory! Don't throw away everything we worked for!"

"Who's WE?" Rory screamed, clutching the phone to her chest. "There's no We! Not anymore—We used to make decisions as a team, or at least I thought we did—"

"We did! We do! We're still a team, Rory! Please, hang up the phone—"

"—No! We're not a team! We stopped being a team the second you signed my future over to Grandma!"

"—We can work this out. I promise—"

"NO, WE CAN'T! IT'S OVER. I'M DONE."

Lorelai froze, her eyes widening. Rory stood opposite to her, face red and mascara-tears streaming down her face, leaving black, ugly slug-trails down her flushed cheeks. There was something in her expression that broke Lorelai's heart—to see her little baby in so much pain—she couldn't bear it, looking at the ground she said, "You don't mean that."

"But I do," Rory swore with such conviction, such resolve, that it made Lorelai wince. "Of all people, I didn't expect this from you. You're pulling the same shit that grandma and grandpa tried with you twenty years ago—Except, I didn't do anything wrong! I didn't get pregnant! I didn't fuck up my life at sixteen!"

The look that passed over Lorelai's face was that of a whipped dog. She had heard this speech before, but never from her daughter. Rory had always been on her side...that is until now.

"I did everything right. I tried to be the perfect daughter—the perfect granddaughter," Rory shot a glance at Richard, who grimaced at her words. "I watched the right movies. I listened to the good music. I kept up with all the pop-culture references and drank the-fucking-kool-aid because you wanted a best friend and not a daughter to make up for the sixteen-goddamn-years of living in this house. I went to the best schools, got the highest grades, and graduated valedictorian so I could apply to the ivy-league colleges that you would've gone to—And, for what? A brighter future? Nah, that's the bullshit you've been telling yourself every time you felt guilty seeing me spend my weekends at home studying, instead of having friends or a fucking-social-life. Everything has been you vicariously living through me, don't pretend it hasn't—So yeah, I'm fucking done. I'm done trying to make up for your mistakes, Mom. I'm done being your due-over. I'm just...done."

She put her phone to her ear and, in a tone much softer and calmer than before, said, "Yeah, Janet can you send a list of those colleges to my school email. Thank you. You've been a huge help. I will. Goodbye." She flipped the phone closed and slipped the device into her purse on her shoulder and turned toward the door.

"R-Rory…" Lorelai's voice cracked with unshed tears. Her deep blue eyes pleaded with her not to leave. But Rory shook her head.

"Sorry, Mom, but you're the one who threw away my future, not me." Then she turned on her heels and left; the front door slamming behind her echoing through the halls of the house with finality.

A/N: This is an AU universe set at the beginning of Season 5. For the purposes of this fic, some things will change and some things will stay the same.

AU: *The Grandparents are still together, although their relationship is rocky. *Everything with Jess stays the same.*Rory didn't sleep with Dean at the Dragonfly's test run. But Dean did kiss her in the hallway when he was bringing in the doors. Rory responded by pushing him off her, but she was unable to yell or do anything else because Tom interrupted them.*Rory didn't go to Europe with Emily. Instead, she managed to swing an internship at a small online magazine in Boston, called The Boston Paper-Boy, and had been staying with Christopher and Sherry over the summer in order to avoid Stars Hollow—I.e. Dean.*Christopher and Sherry actually have a good relationship.*Rory's birthday has been changed from October 8, 1984, to September 12, 1984. *In addition to Friday Night Dinners, Emily also arranged it so that she could choose Rory's husband. *Rory had been engaged to Colin McCrae since a week after her Debutante Ball. Lorelai was supposed to have told Rory on her 18th Birthday, but she didn't.