Ship: LL
Rating: PG, subject to change
Summary: Someday, Lorelai will learn to adjust to the unbelievable.
Spoilers/Timeline: post-R&R
Disclaimers: These characters are the property of Amy Sherman-Palladino and her minions. I am a lowly student. Don't sue.
AN: Hey, if you see a dead horse, why not beat it? Or, my attempt at a post-R&R story.
When Rory was eighteen months old, she mastered the art of locking doors. They had just moved into the little half-house near the inn, one room with a loveseat and a full bed and a curtain around the bathtub. No kitchen, either, just a microwave and toaster stacked precariously atop a bookshelf.
She smiled and said it was fine; she didn't have time to learn to cook.
The front door had a push-button lock, the type you see on bathrooms; the bathroom didn't have a door at all. It all seemed fine until Lorelai walked out one morning and couldn't walk back in. Rory was inside, quiet as always; she had somehow managed to lock the door. No amount of pleading would convince her to open it again. Lorelai sagged against the surprisingly solid doorframe, hands empty of keys and full of junk mail.
She couldn't force the door, couldn't risk the cut glass and sharp shards of a broken window. She felt it for the first time, that choking, strangling fear twisting up inside her, some biological byproduct of motherhood, like breastmilk and stretch marks. All she could think was that Rory was inside and she was outside and anything could happen.
She ran to the inn without thinking, and found Duane, the night manager and resident Toolbox Guy. He patted her shoulder (which she'd always hated) and walked her back to the house without bothering to grab his tools.
"I'll show you a little trick, so if this ever happens again, you won't need tools, and you won't have to panic."
Duane pulled out his wallet and extracted a credit card. He had the door open in seconds, and she was on her knees with Rory in her arms before he even had the chance to move out of the doorway. He'd given them a few minutes, then taken them both back outside, keys gripped firmly in hand, and shown Lorelai how to slip the card in and ease the lock open.
She smiled over Rory's head, and thanked him, and didn't tell him that at seventeen, she was still too young to own a credit card.
She felt it again, walking back toward the Dragonfly, that strangling fear inside her, knowing something was wrong and there wasn't a thing she could do about it.
But this time there would be no Duane, and it couldn't be fixed with a credit card.
She'd put one hand on Rory's shoulder, only to have it shrugged away.
"Go. Go back to the inn. Just go." Her voice was thick with tears.
"I'll be at the Dragonfly whenever you need me." She'd kept her voice even, and angry, and
unnaturally calm, forced herself not to look back as she walked away.
She made it precisely three steps into the lobby before she was accosted by a very distraught, yellow-robe-wearing Lulu. "Oh, Lorelai, I'm so glad you're here – did you bring the band-aids?" Lulu was in danger of leaving bruises on Lorelai's forearm.
"Um, Lulu, the—" she closed her eyes in frustration. Of course. She'd forgotten the band aids. "I'm sorry, I was out. I thought we had some at home, and – we didn't."
"Oh, that's too bad, because Kirk has all these little cuts from where he fell into the holly bush; they're all over his bottom and they haven't quite stopped bleeding, so he can't put any pants on until he gets some band aids."
"Lulu, believe me, there is nothing I want more than for Kirk to wear pants. I'll check with the other guests – I'm sure at least one of them will be freakishly well-prepared."
As if on cue, Taylor strode into the room.
"Well, Lorelai, I must say I'm terribly disappointed. I don't know what you put in this inn to make it so terribly frightening for visitors, but Stars Hollow cannot have this kind of behavior."
Lorelai put one hand to her forehead. "Taylor, I promise you, it did not take the Dragonfly to make Kirk freak out. Just please tell me you have some band aids."
"Now, Lorelai, you can't tell me you're opening an establishment with out a first ai—"
"I almost opened it without doors, Taylor, the band aids were kind of an afterthought."
"Well, it seems I always have to be the one to bail you people out. I'll bring some down from my room."
"Terrific. Lulu?"
Lulu rushed over to Taylor and clamped onto his arm. Lorelai rubbed hers in relief. "Oh, thank you, Mr. Doose, Kirk always tells me how good you are to him. I'll never forget when he told me about the peaches…" Lulu's voice trailed off as she followed Taylor up the stairs.
Without the immediate crises of Kirk's bottom and Taylor's emerging fan club, the empty lobby felt suddenly stifling and small. Lorelai crossed back out onto the porch and sank onto the front steps, head in hands, wondering whether she would be forced to repeat this day in some sort Bill-Murray-starring hell and how many tries it would take to get it right.
Heavy footsteps crossed the porch behind her: heavy malefootsteps. She felt a strange new constriction in her chest.
He reached down and rested one hand on her shoulder; she simply shook her head. "Explaining everything that has happened in the last twenty minutes would take much longer than twenty minutes and possibly the rest of my life."
"Which is good, since I have unlimited time to sit here and hear about the last twenty minutes."
Lorelai jerked back and found herself staring up at the one person she wanted to see even less than Naked Kirk. "What are you still doing here?"
"Well, I finished Gnomes of the West, and New England Latticework turned out to be a real page-turner."
"Can you not see that this is the worst night in the history of bad nights to have this conversation?"
"As a matter of fact, I can see that." Jason raised his arm and made a show of checking his watch. "So, what time is breakfast served tomorrow? Because your chef is extraordinary. If she can do that with pot roast, I can't wait to see what she accomplishes with eggs."
"Jason, you can't come back for breakfast tomorrow."
He stared at her for a moment; perhaps the exhaustion in her voice was finally beginning to chip through the delusional exterior.
"Who did you think I was?"
Perhaps it was something else.
"What?"
"When I walked out here, you thought I was someone else. Who was it?"
She buried her face in her hands again. "Jason, I am not having this conversation with you."
"And what is 'this conversation'?"
She answered him in a flat, sing-song voice. "Well, in the last two weeks, I've eloped and given birth to three children. Mr. Lorelai and I are very happy; we've purchased a minivan and we're looking into a time-share."
"You're not ready to talk tonight; that's fine. I'll give you some time to think things over, and I'll be back. We can sit down together then."
"Jason, I am not sitting down with you. Not today, not tomorrow—"
"But soon, and for the rest of your life?"
He grinned. She glared.
"Okay, okay, bad sense of timing. I'll leave you to your glowering. Goodnight, Lorelai."
"Goodbye, Jason."
She rested her forehead on her palms as he walked past her and down the path, gravel crunching and skittering noisily beneath his shoes. She was still sitting there a few minutes later, when the footsteps came trudging back.
"For the love of God, are you incapable of hearing the word 'no'?"
"What?"
Of course. Of course this was the moment Luke would pick to come trudging back. Lorelai stared up at him; he was staring back at her as if she were one of the predicted cross-dressing midgets. She let her head sink back into her palms. This was, without question, the strangest night of her life.
"Luke, I'm sorry, I'm thought you were Jason."
"Jason's still here?" She could hear the testosterone creeping into his voice.
"No, Jason is not still here, Jason got into his car and headed back to Delusionville." She sighed, let the sarcasm drain from her voice; what was left was tinged with exhaustion. "He just left; I thought you were him coming back again."
"Oh."
She heard him shift back and forth, feet shuffling, then felt, rather than heard, the boards creak as he sank down beside her. He was careful to leave a few precious inches between them. After a moment, she heard him shift again, felt the light pressure of one tentative hand resting on her shoulder blade.
No one had touched her that way since the seventh grade. In a different moment, she would have laughed.
"You okay?"
"No, I'm not okay. I couldn't be less okay if—" she broke off; Luke had snatched his hand away as if he'd been stung. Clearly, her ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time was improving. Lorelai reached out and grasped his hand in both hers, forced herself to look up and meet his eyes. She wasn't going to give him the chance to misunderstand her again. Not now. "Luke, I promise, this has nothing to do with you. I went home, and Rory—" her voice shook, and she broke off, turning to stare straight ahead. "—Rory and I had this huge argument, and I had to come back here and deal with Jason and Taylor and Kirk's bottom—"
"Please, don't ever say those words again."
"—and now I'm exhausted and so I decided to sit out here and wait for the fourth horseman to ride by and I didn't mean to take it out on you." She held in a breath, as if waiting for a verdict, and after a moment felt him relax, his fingers curling around hers. She let the breath out slowly, but when he spoke, his voice shook with uncertainty.
"So everything's okay, then? With you…and me." He studiously avoided using the word us. She noticed.
"Yeah, everything's okay." She glanced back, and managed a small smile to reassure him, and he smiled back, and for a moment, just a moment, he looked like he was about to lean in again…
She tore her eyes away and stared straight ahead. It was all far too much, far too fast. She needed to think. She needed to process. She needed some semblance of sanity.
"I think I just need to sit out here for a while."
She didn't say alone. She didn't have to.
He released her hand, and she didn't turn back to him – she didn't want to see the look in his eyes. He straightened up slowly, spoke slowly, as if she were a skittish thing that couldn't be startled.
"We're still on for tomorrow?"
She made the usual mistake of thinking out loud. "Tomorrow, tomorrow is…Sunday. Sunday when we're going to the movies." How can I forget this? "Yes, tomorrow, great."
"Okay."
"Okay."
He started to turn away, but paused mid-step. "You know what you want to see?"
She waved him off. "Pick something. If I like it, I'll love it, if I hate it, I'll mock it and make you miserable."
"Okay." He paused to reach down and squeeze her shoulder, lightly, before he walked away.