Title: You're Beautiful

Disclaimer: I own nothing, the title is from James Blunt song of the same title. No infringement intended.

Summary: Jess see's Rory on the train in New York five years after his last encounter with her. (Set after let me hear your Balalaikas ringing out episode

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Jess Mariano had changed so much since most people had seen him last. No longer was he the angry man, but instead he had become the grieving man. He had left New York determined to never look back and he did just that for three years and then suddenly, things changed.

He met her at a book expo in Toronto. She smiled at him across the huge conference room and she waved and that was it. He was hooked. Sarah was everything he thought he never wanted. She had natural red hair and was cheery and happy all the time. At first it unnerved him and then soon it became something he looked forward to. Her sunny positive way of thinking.

Sarah was an editor at one of the biggest publishing houses in Philadelphia and was sent to Toronto to snuff out the new and undiscovered talent, and woo them to the company. Jess was one of the people she was supposed to woo, but there was a different type of wooing happening.

They spent most of their first few days together getting to know each other, and suddenly Jess started to forget about the girl he had loved for so long. She suddenly became just a small town girl who had stolen his heart briefly, but he had finally met the person who would always have his heart.

Sarah and Jess spent more time together than apart, and they moved in pretty fast. Things with Sarah were easy. There was no disapproving town folk glaring at him and waiting for him to mess up. No scary snobby grandparents that just waited for him to hurt her and definitely no crazy giant ex boyfriends waiting for him to mess up. Everything came easy for them.

Jess had once heard the expression that love shouldn't be hard, and he thought that this must be true, because with Sarah everything was easy.

They got married eight months after meeting each other and it happened that Jess's second book was published a mere month after their wedding date. Jess's book which was more embraced in the literary world was hailed as a breath of fresh air by the critics and suddenly he had a career and a life. To Jess, this was a world of dreams coming true.

To the small town that once held Jess as one of its citizens; they had no idea that their local town delinquent had changed so much. Even his uncle had no idea that his nephew had changed and that his life was everything Luke had hoped for him.

Rory Gilmore was a different story. She had finished Yale after some time off, and she had found herself some may say. She worked hard and she didn't rely on connections anymore. No longer was she using her grandfather's contacts and in turn she started to feel like maybe she didn't owe him as much.

She broke up with Logan after two years of their trying to make their relationship work. Rory realized after awhile that she just wanted things to work out because it was easier than going out there and trying to find someone who would make her really happy.

Rory had never gotten back into the swing of the news world. Never found reporting or writing for the school paper as exciting and she never got that passion back. Mitchum Huntzberger had stolen it from her, but she wasn't a lost cause.

She discovered that maybe her gift for reading and for her perfect grammar may come in handy. She changed her major to English lit and she suffered through some of the worst classes, but all in all it was worth it. She became a junior editor at a company in New York a few months after graduating.

Life was what it was, and no longer was her mind befuddled with dreams she created when she was a kid. She didn't let people control her through their visions of who they thought she should be. She wasn't obligated anymore.

She visited home and she smiled and told everyone her life was great and it was. She had money and pretty shoes and she had friends. She would occasionally grace the gossip column and even people not from the society obsessed minds of Hartford Connecticut.

She met Kyle when she was firmly situated in New York. They had met at a knicks game which the old Rory would never go to. He spilt his coffee on her and then smiled at her in this sheepish way and she was hooked.

They took things really slow. They waited two months to officially date, and it took them months before they were really intimate. And it was a year of them dating for Kyle to meet her family and the town of Stars Hallow.

Kyle was smart and successful, but he didn't challenge her like Jess and Logan did, and he didn't have that spark like she had with Dean. Kyle was easy and he never made her feel trapped. Being with Kyle was easy and she liked it.

Kyle proposed to her after two years of them being together, and Rory had simply said yes and he slid the cold ring on her finger and Rory had spent hours staring at it. It felt heavy and foreign and most of all, she felt like it didn't belong on her finger, it was something meant for somebody else.

But she never said anything, and she stayed silent when her mother and Sookie planned her wedding. She was silent about it when she said her vows in front of 200 of their closet friends and family. And she never said a word on their honeymoon.

Kyle and Rory James lived in awkward bliss for a year. Kyle began to notice that the smiles he thought his wife wore were strained. She was silent and when she noticed he was staring at her she would smile wider and she would try to prove to him that she was happy. He just didn't understand it.

Kyle James didn't have to wonder about it for much longer, he got the opportunity of a lifetime and asked his wife to move with him to Paris. Rory had looked shocked and told him she just couldn't leave New York.

'I'm sorry Kyle, I can't leave. I need tobe here.' Rory would say over and over again, and finally he gave up, handed her divorce papers and set off for his new life in Paris, never understanding exactly why his wife wanted to stay in a city that she hated?

Meanwhile Jess and Sarah were blissfully married. She was pregnant and he was ecstatic. He was on his third book, and his following was getting stronger by each thing he published. Sarah just seemed to breeze in and out of things with ease and grace that he had never seen.

And then one day he got the phone call that he never imagined he would ever get. Some faceless police officer telling him that his wife was dead and that it was a tragedy. She was hit by a car while crossing a street near their home.

He had sat in their living room, a room they had painted together and he had stared into space for days. He had to call Sarah's family to come and help him with the funeral and her affairs, and he just let them do the arrangements.

Two months after the accident, Jess boxed everything and he moved to the city he had escaped from. He couldn't live in the same city anymore.

And that's when, on the morning A train to Broadway, he saw her. She had changed, and she looked different, he saw Rory, and all he wanted to do was tell her what he thought. Rory looked up and there was Jess. The person from her past that she still couldn't put in a list or a box.

Jess walked over to her as easily as he could on the crowded train and smiled. 'Your Beautiful' he said simply and suddenly, everything was back.