AN: When I first posted this, I figured that if it did become a collection, it would be just the Luke-centric one-shots that have been floating around in my head. While that's still what most of them are/will be, this one deviated from that by not being specifically Luke-focused. Still, I decided I'd rather have just one collection of one-shots going, so this title is going to broaden its horizons a little bit… and I do mean a little bit, since everything I have in mind is JavaJunkie, so it's always going to feature Luke pretty prominently.

I discovered this piece on my computer this week, almost finished but forgotten about for the last year and a half. I really did love it when I wrote it, so I figured it was time to finish and post it finally. I wrote it just before the revival episodes came out, so it ignores them completely. Author's note finished now.

Lorelai is debating the merits of either the Fuji apples or the Granny Smith in the produce section of a suburban Hartford grocery store when a long-forgotten voice evaporates the mental pro/con list that's growing in her head.

"Since when do you eat apples?"

Her eyes snap up to find the familiar form of Max Medina in the aisle in front of her. He's acquired a few more lines around his eyes in the years since she last saw him, but for the most part his dark good looks are the same as ever.

"Max! Hi. The apples are, um, recent," she says as a small, secret smile flits across her face.

"You live around here now?" he asks, the tone of his voice failing to conceal the shock he feels at the possibility that she may have actually moved away from the town she'd always seemed so attached to.

"Oh, no. Just got hit by sudden chocolate cravings on the way home from my parents' house," she chuckles. "This place just popped up at just the right time and we decided it was just as well to get a few things out of the way while we're here. You know my love affair with food," she rambles a bit nervously. "The cupboards are always running empty."

It's been years since she's seen or thought about Max and having her ex-fiancé appear suddenly in front of her is still a little awkward, despite the fact that the better part of a decade has passed since the end of their relationship.

"You live around here?" She echoes his question, mostly to fill the silence. Filling the silence is not usually something she struggles with.

"Yeah. Just a couple miles east of here," Max, despite all of his constant composure, is clearly not immune to the awkwardness of this stilted conversation, either. "So, how are you these days?"

"Oh, I'm good," she smiles, and there is a subtle softening to her face that makes him curious, "I'm great actually."

"And how's Rory?"

Lorelai has always lit up when talking about Rory's achievements, and today is no different. "She's fantastic. She's Rory. She graduated from Yale, and she's got a great job that she loves, and she works too hard and doesn't come home to visit Mommy nearly enough."

The way her face softens and her eyes shine reminds him why he fell in love with this woman in the first place. Her glow has not diminished in the years since their breakup. If anything, it's brighter now. For a moment, he wonders if, just maybe, they might have a chance at trying again, if she regrets the way they ended the way he sometimes still does. Then, he catches a glimpse of a twinkle from her left hand.

"You're married," he comments, unable in his surprise to find anything more eloquent to say as he stares at the twin rings on her finger.

"Yeah," she smiles softly down at her rings, "It finally stuck this time." He has no way of knowing that there is far more than just her broken engagement to him behind that statement. It's on the tip of his tongue to ask about her husband when suddenly the question becomes redundant as a figure appears and it becomes crystal clear who that husband is.

A pair of broad shoulders looking decidedly uncomfortable in a dress shirt and tie round the corner of the aisle and their owner drops several items into her basket, eying the apples she still holds in her hands and failing to notice the unexpected visitor frozen on the other side of the display.

"Get some of both. I'll eat whatever you don't," he tells her, nodding at the apples in her hands.

She smiles blindingly up at him when he drops in a tub of caramel apple dip that she hadn't even asked for. Luke, feigning ignorance, pretends he has no idea why she's batting her eyelashes at him and continues setting his groceries in the basket.

"Or, you could make pie with whatever I don't eat," she says, looking hopefully up at him through her lashes, "we really like apple pie."

Luke straightens and shoves his hands in his pockets, then hunches his shoulders as he ducks down to meet her eyes.

"Clearly, we have to blame the fact that you now eat actual raw apples on the baby," he gripes. "The rest of your disgusting eating habits, however, I know you have had for at least a decade—and I suspect much longer—so you cannot blame them on my child. There is no we. You want apple pie," Luke tells her dryly.

It's clear to Max that he was forgotten the moment Luke Danes rounded the corner. A cynical, slightly bitter, corner of his brain says nothing new there. He stands watching them gazing at each other and sparring back and forth, one looking up, adoring and coy, the other looking down, exasperated and indulgent—both as clearly smitten as they had been years ago—and he wonders just how often they do this.

"But your child just happens to like Twinkies and coffee and marshmallows and apple pie, just like me."

Luke rolls his eyes and moves close to her side to place one large, warm hand on the small of her back, and the other on the heretofore unnoticed bump on her abdomen that wouldn't yet be glaringly obvious if you didn't know to look for it.

"Please tell your mother salad, not sugar," he pleads, his long-suffering blue eyes directed at the burgeoning bump.

"I thought you didn't want to change me," she pouts.

"I don't want to change you, I'd just like you to live to see our tenth anniversary," he returns. "I'm buying broccoli."

"Learn the Rory eyes quick, kid," Lorelai tells the bump urgently, "he'll do anything for the Rory eyes." Turning her eyes back up to Luke's, she tells him "she doesn't want broccoli. She told me."

"Lord, help me," Luke mumbles as he rolls his eyes. The arc of his eyes allows them to land on the frozen form of Max, still watching from across the apple stand and he straightens.

Max watches as the larger man automatically stiffens and steps closer to his wife, the hand at her back slipping around to rest at her waist, tucking her into his side in an unconsciously protective move. Lorelai's eyes shift to his face at the unexpected movement and then follow his line of sight across the piles of red and green and yellow apples.

"Oh!" she exclaims, suddenly recalling Max's presence. "Luke, you remember Max, right?" Lorelai looks a little sheepish as Luke turns incredulous eyes on her. "Max, you've met my husband, Luke Danes."

The tension in Luke's shoulders lifts a little and a smile tips his lips, as it always does, at the word husband. In Luke fashion, he just turns narrowed eyes on Max as he assimilates the presence of this old enemy. He had been an enemy, Luke acknowledges now as he never really had then, an enemy in the battle for this happily-ever-after which he'd only just barely begun to fight back then and which still seems so recently won.

"Max," Luke finally acknowledges, reaching a hand out. Max watches his hand being engulfed in Luke's larger, rougher one and his eyes widen as Luke's grip presses the bones of his hand into each other painfully.

"Luke," Max responds, trying not to react. He's not entirely sure if Luke's gesture was conscious or not, but he figures it doesn't really matter. Whether he'd wanted to admit it or not, he'd known years ago that Lorelai was a little bit in love with this man, and it hadn't been hard to see that the feeling was more than reciprocated, whether it was acknowledged or not. If that hadn't waned in the decade since he'd first noticed it, he's smart enough to realize that there's no point in even considering interfering now.

"Congratulations," he manages smoothly, retracting his hand and flexing it a little. "On the wedding and the baby," he nods at Lorelai and the hand that rests on her abdomen. "How long have you been married?"

He's a little surprised when the chorus of answers says only "two years." Given what he'd seen years ago, he had assumed that Luke would step in as soon as he was out of the picture. They could have been married three times that long by now. Logically, he knows he probably would have heard if she got married while Rory was at Chilton, but it's been more than six years since she graduated. More than long enough for Luke to make his move.

"Well, congratulations," he says again, and again their answer comes in a chorus of "thanks."

They stand in an awkward, three-cornered silence for a moment before Luke turns to Lorelai.

"I'm gonna go... grab your ice cream," Luke nods to the other side of the store, grimacing as he says the words "ice cream." He offers Max a less-crushing handshake this time and Lorelai squeezes the hand on her hip as it slips away.

"Get both kinds!" She calls as he rounds the corner toward the frozen foods.

"One!" a disembodied grunt returns from the other side of the aisle.

"Thanks for that," she turns to grin at Max, "I was totally losing the battle for any ice cream before you showed up. He's trying to cut me off."

"Glad I could, uh, help."

"Of course, he grunts and grumbles all the time, but when the midnight cravings hit and I tell him 'Luke, your baby wants peanut butter fudge,' somehow peanut butter fudge always ends up on my nightstand," she rambles, smiling softly.

"A man takes care of his family."

"Yeah. Luke's good at that," she says, turning unconsciously reverent eyes in the direction that Luke disappeared in.

"So, I was right." It's more of a statement than a question, but Lorelai knows it needs a response. That long-ago argument over Luke and this thing between them hangs in the air.

"To be fair, I didn't even know it at the time, but yeah. You were right."

"I should have known it then. There always was something in the way you looked at him."

Lorelai looks down. "I really am sorry, Max, for the way I handled things then. I didn't understand what I was feeling about Luke and I didn't handle things with you well. I'm sorry for that. Luke has always been important to me, but it took me a long time to realize just how important he was, and I hurt a lot of people, including us, in the process."

Looking at her, Max can tell she means it. Knowing Lorelai, he had probably seen how she and Luke felt about each other far more clearly than even Lorelai had back then. Luke, he thinks, had been more aware, even then. He gives her a forgiving smile and lets it go.

"It's all the in the past now," he dismisses. "I'm glad you're happy," he tells her sincerely.

"I hope you are, too." He can tell she means it, means in that way that all sickeningly-happily-married couples do, with the we just want everyone to be as happy as we are unspoken in the subtext.

He reaches across to shake her hand and drop a friendly kiss on her cheek, tells her congratulations again as he says goodbye, and moves to find the asparagus he'd been searching for when he bumped into her.

When he turns to move toward the checkout, they're there again across the store. Luke is dropping not one but two pints of ice cream into the basket alongside a head of broccoli and Lorelai's face is tipped up at him in that radiant, adoring way again as gruff Luke Danes runs a hand over his unborn child and lets a hint of a smile surface for its mother. Their connection is palpable even from across the store. There are more brief touches as he watches, the rolling of eyes, a sigh of exasperation, an item removed from the basket by one and then returned by the other. Through it all runs a thread of oneness that lingers even as they disappear from sight.

AN: This no longer fits in canon since the revival episodes came out last year, but I have a like/hate relationship with the revival, and am choosing to ignore it here in favor of my preferred version of their happy ending. I'd love to hear your thoughts!