Disclaimer: I do not own the Rights to any of the story lines or characters of the TV show 'Gilmore Girls.'
Star Light star bright,The first star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.
Rory sits on the window seat, staring into the night sky. She was humming an old nursery rhyme her mom used to sing to her whenever they were under the night sky and the stars were twinkling.
Now it was just her. Her and twilight.
Beneath the stars lay her neighborhood, unkept, dangerous, gray and depressing. It was an indication of her life as it stood now, not as it once was.
With a sigh she folded her legs close to her body and witnessed a star falling gracefully through the darkness.
She made a simple wish.
That she could go back to one point in her life where things weren't terribly bad and steer it clear of the things that lay in her future.
Basically she wanted to change her life.
Though she wanted many things in her life.
To have her mom back.
To not have met her ex-husband.
To not have felt the urge to say she would go to Yale when Harvard was her dream. Why did she throw away her dream?
Even now she can't work out the why she had done it. Once she thought it was for obligations to her grandparents, but now it seemed almost like she had taken the road because it was the one of non-resistance rather then the right one.
With a heavy sigh she peers out of the old window and decides to get ready for bed.
When she was in the bathroom she got a shock when she sees herself in the mirror, as she does everyday.
This thirty year old woman who looked back at her, appearing every bit her age and more, she could see the bones in her face jutting out unflatteringly; she was gaunt and weary.
Where did her youth go? How was it that she had not noticed?
Sitting in her decaying apartment, the only one she could afford, she spent her weekend praying to a god she does not even know exists.
"You rang?"
A fat man was at the end of her bed looking at her curiously, his blond balding head glowing in the dull glow of her bedroom light.
She screamed and scrambled over to the other side of the room, grabbing the closest thing she could find as a weapon.
A broom.
With it she waved at him.
She did not over think the reason why he was in her room or how he had gotten in there unnoticed, she was too petrified to even think of thinking.
She was in her nightdress, and that was all she cared about.
The man looked at her with hilarity and slumped down his big body at the end of her safe, secure bed and lit a cigarette.
She watched him with amazement.
"Who are you?"
He blew out a ring of smoke and looked her over with little emotion playing on his fat slovenly face and grinned, showing not only how more unattractive he was, but also his yellow stained teeth.
"I'm your guardian angel, sweetcakes."
Rory waved at the door. "Take what you want and get out of here."
"Hey," he replied indignantly, obviously offended by her calling him a thief. "I'm only here because you asked."
The guy did this strange thing with his vocal cords and sounded very feminine and unsure, he sounded an awful lot like her.
"Oh please send my guardian angel down to take me back to one point in my life where things weren't terribly bad and steer me clear of the bad things that lay in my future," he stopped and pointed. "Is this not what you said?"
She was horrified.
This was indeed what she had said, but in her head. To the stars. Not to some slob who has got smokers breath and a gut so big it could form it's own country.
So she repeated. "Who are you?"
Seemingly bored with this line of questioning he lay out on her bed and used her bedside table mug as his ashtray.
"My name's Bob and I'm your guardian angel. Haven't been around too much on the account of you ignoring me but when you hit rock bottom, I couldn't resist."
He struggled.
It was only when Bob decided to rearrange his underwear that Rory noticed a couple of wings jutting out of his back. It was grotesque, and she felt the urge to be sick.
If he were her guardian angel, it would explain her crappy decisions.
"Hey lady. I don't make the decisions. You do. I just try and help."
She was mortified. Could he read her mind?
"Yep, plain as if you actually called me a fat slob to my face."
Rory felt herself redden and reached for her own packet of cigarettes. She had started smoking after her divorce from her asshole ex and now the thought of stopping seemed too painful to consider.
She lit one and leaned on the windowsill watching him.
"Why are you here? Am I going to die?"
Bob the fat angel sprawled out on her bed groaned. "I am here because you asked me here. You want to change some shit in your life, make it better right?"
Rory doesn't know where to take this, here was an ugly angel on her bed smoking, making strange bodily noises and speaks English so poorly that she had to lean in closer when he talked to work out what he was saying. He was supposed to help her?
"I guess."
"You guess? You pull my ass down from Heaven down to this Earth place so you can guess?"
If he was her guardian angel why was he so mean to her? Wasn't there a code of practice for these beings to follow? Didn't he even like her?
"Oh I like you girly. I just think you're a little on the stupid side."
"Thanks."
"What I mean is, you have had a magnitude of opportunities for a good life and you have purposely chose the complete opposite. Like you wanted this shitty life."
"I don't want this shitty life you prick. I haven't had these amazing opportunities you speak of."
"You have and you know it," he pointed his finger at her and scrutinized her face. "You wanna change some shit? Then I'm going to have to do something. Something you may not be all that comfortable with. I'm going to have to take you back."
She had no idea what he was talking about but she did not like the sound of that at all. Rory looked at his brown wings sticking out of his back and shivered.
"To where?"
"To the past. To some major life paths that you chose to ignore. Major decisions that would have effected the direction of your life, we are going to investigate the paths you did not take. Get my drift? We're going to change your past to find out your future."
Rory took another drag of her cigarette and threw the broom down.
She needed to sit down, and as Bob seemed harmless enough, she took a seat next to his animated feet.
Rory had a guardian angel.
His name was Bob.
He was a smart-ass who smoked and he was fat and ugly and didn't give a shit about her.
This was perfect.
"What did I ignore then?"
He thought about it for a moment then drank from the cup he was using as an ashtray.
She tried her hardest not to dyreach.
"We'll start when you're in your teens, we'll start with Tristan and work our way from there."
Rory was confused.
"Who?"
Bob appeared annoyed and slapped her across the back of the head and she yelped and slapped his face in retaliation. He enjoyed this and so she made a mental note not to do it again.
"Tristan! Tristan DuGrey from your highschool? Whatsamacallit? Tristan DuGrey, one of the major choices you chose not to take."
Rory thought back to school at Whatsamacallit, also known as Chilton and she remembered Tristan. But vaguely, it was a long time ago and he was only there for a couple of years with her. She remembered his blue eyes and his grin and the way he poked fun at her.
Oh how could she have forgotten him?
"Him? He was a choice?"
"Yup. If you wanna we can go back to the turning point of your life and see what would have happened if you didn't run out of the piano suit like a baby."
Rory thought back to the piano suit and suddenly felt a wave of what she felt back then. He was a choice? He was just a boy, and she knew many in her life. What made him so different?
"Well if you stop being so damn slow, we can go back and see."
She didn't like it that he can read her mind, there was no room for privacy.
"Do you think I like it either? I hear more insults in one hour then you hear in a lifetime," he groans and rolls to his feet, on the account of his rather large gut. "And you think you have problems."
He dangled his chubby hand at her and wiggled his fingers.
It was apparent that he wanted her to take them and for a reason that maybe life would be better with a fat angel then in her crappy little apartment, she took his hand.
And her life changed.