Author's Note: So, this is it. The last chapter. I don't want this story to be over; I've fallen in love with writing it! But all things must come to an end, and I have an idea this has gone on for far too long anyway, so here we go.

Since this is the last chapter, I'd really appreciate reviews from everyone, whether you've been consistent before or not, whether on this particular chapter or the complete story as a whole. I am currently writing the sequel, as in I took a break from doing so just to post this one, so we'll see if it gets on Fan Fiction or not. To those of you who have reviewed consistently, it really, really helped me and meant a lot to me, and I hope to do the same for you in your stories. Enjoy it.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

She didn't want to go. The acrid smell of buses at the bus station, all parked in one heaping mass of steaming, boiling metal, made her stomach turn and burned her tongue. He was standing next to her, not touching her with his hands but with everything else, his hip pressed against hers, his arm brushing her shoulder.

"I can drive you back," he said for the twentieth time, even though they both knew he couldn't. He had a meeting with a new printer today, one that Matthew would castrate him for if he missed it, regardless of how intimidating he was. He had a life to lead now, a life he couldn't just walk away from whenever he felt like it if he had any hope of retaining it.

"You have to work," she reminded him needlessly, loving that she could say that to him even if she wanted nothing more than the beauty of him and his car. Stanley, she remembered with a smile, melting with the pavement like yesterday.

He nodded and fell silent as they stood waiting for the bus to start admitting its passengers. Hesitantly, for the first time in a very long time, she reached her fingers up to run through the tangles of his midnight hair. He glanced over at her in surprise as she drew her hand back.

"I'll . . . I'll come see you again?" She asked, as if he dictated every move she made. Something had changed between them in the kitchen, and now the road before them looked terrifying and exciting but bright with promise, instead of dark with inevitable doom. She was different and he was different, maybe in just the right way for things to work this time. She was going to try. She was going to fight to hang onto him, because she couldn't imagine ever living without him now that she had found him again.

"Of course. Who wouldn't want to come back to charming Philly?" He was being only half-sarcastic, because whether he liked it or not, he was a man of the city and the city suited him. He liked the namelessness of it, how you were simply one face in a thousand that no one could ever remember, a mindless somebody walking around with a life and a history and a dream no one knew anything about. He liked how he and Rory could melt into the crowd with the beautiful commodity of privacy that was so undervalued in Stars Hollow, how they could have a conversation without a whole medical experiment of a town leaning toward them with their damn hands cupped around their ears. Perhaps that was part of what would make it . . . he didn't know, better? No, not better . . . purer . . . this time.

She smiled, a distracted smile that told him she wasn't thinking about Philly at all, not really. He immediately knew her silent question without her asking it. "I'll come see you, too," he said nonchalantly, as if he were speaking about the Californian current or ice caps or the price of a pair of flip flops, but her eyes instantly lit up and he understood it meant the world to her. Yale wasn't really his style, and Stars Hollow was one hell of a whack job, but for her he'd do it all over again, probably in a damn clown suit if she asked him to.

She raised herself up a minute amount on her toes and pressed her lips to his. It wasn't so much of a desirous kiss, or even a boiling kiss, but a soft, sweet, thank you kiss. It made him think of music notes and fountain pens and flower petals, and it left him in a half-delirious state that he hadn't been in in awhile. He took a deep breath and grinned, a slow, easy grin which only a very, very select amount of people (one) could attest to ever having seen.

"Thank you for having me," she murmured shyly as the bus to Hartford started to load. He put a hand on either side of her face, threading through her soft brown hair, amazed at how real and tangible it was between his fingers.

"Try not to be so much trouble next time, okay?" He joked huskily, feeling how her warm breath hit the middle of his neck every time she exhaled. For half of a crazy, partially insane second, he attempted to find something with which he could convince her to stay. She'd be allowed to read whatever book she wanted, or have the entire upstairs to herself, or maybe the moon? He wasn't sure. But then he got a hold of himself and remembered that she had to go, that she had to get back to school, and that they were going to have to get used to this since . . . he felt a little shaky even thinking it . . . since they were trying again. Or at least that seemed to be the unspoken consensus.

"Okay," she agreed. Her eyes darted to the doors of the bus and she looked back at him pleadingly, his thoughts reflected with absolute perfection in her face.

"Rory," he warned gently, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and feeling the shape of her cheekbone with his thumb, "You have to go. Yale. Remember Yale?"

"Yale who?" She asked a little desperately, causing him to smirk and his insides to viciously wrench at the same time.

"Funny, Gilmore. Really funny."

She looked down to the concrete floor beneath them and he followed her gaze, to where the edge of her heel barely was avoiding a wad of purple gum. Long, drawn out goodbyes were not them, never had been, and anything eloquent that could have been said at that particular moment was communicated between their eyes, silently, which somehow made it better. All of the sudden, the smelling, hot, sticky bus garage seemed like the only place in the universe he wanted to be. His throat became tight.

"I feel like something out of Margaret Mitchell," he said nervously as she still hesitated to leave. She smiled. It felt natural and normal, being like this again, but at the same time, it was uncharted territory once more because they were unpredictable. They reacted together like two halogens thrown in the same room, with fire and sparks and explosions, completely at random.

"Was that your attempt at being romantic?" She asked, grinning. He studied her penetratingly, a half tender smirk on his face, if there was such a thing, and the cautiousness in his eyes was gone.

"Maybe."

"You're horrible at it."

Carefully entwining his fingers with hers, he muttered, "I know."

She wanted to say something, he could tell, but she didn't. They were still playing on the edges, being very wary not to knock their fragile relationship off its orbit, knowing that one wrong word could send the other running with nothing but a shattered dream to evidence of what had been.

Or could it?

He wasn't so sure words could separate them anymore. Maybe they never had.

The announcing system made the final call for the Hartford bus but neither moved. She touched the patch on his sleeve with an almost melancholy remembrance, but a smile made her face innocently lovely once more. "Give me the book in your pocket," she said steadily, her stare fixed on him. "I know you brought me a copy."

Wordlessly, he pulled out an unblemished print of The Subsect from the folds of his jacket and held it out to her. She took it, momentarily traced her index finger over his name on the cover, and gave him a pointed look that was meant to tell him to walk with her to the bus door, which he did.

She was half way up the steps before she turned around one last time. "Call me," she demanded, pleading and determination and fear, so much fear, etched in her blue eyes as they blistered him.

He had to stop himself from automatically coming in after her, and instead he leaned against the open door. "I'll call you." She searched his face and he felt it, his heart breaking for how hard she had to work to make herself trust him. Didn't she understand that . . . Dammit. He could write it out on paper but not put it into words.

"Rory," he said, returning her searing gaze with his own. "I'll call you."

She nodded and some of the worry was eased by her expression, replaced by . . . what? A nameless emotion, something like excitement but almost sacred, and it made his stomach clench in a way that finally spoke of tomorrow instead of yesterday. If they were really going to do the Gone with the Wind thing, she should stop midstep and fly back down into his arms for another burning kiss before being wrenched to her seat by the bus driver. However, they weren't like that, so instead he read something like need in the desire in her eyes and it was enough for him. "Goodbye, Rory," he said jokingly, calling back on a distant memory that he hadn't allowed himself to uncover for years.

"'Bye, Jess," she answered, smiling, because they both knew what they had known on that day in New York nearly four years ago: it wasn't goodbye, not even close, more like the exact opposite. He, never able to stay and watch her leave, turned around and faded into the boiling, color-melting crowd.

"Her heart--is given him, with all its love and truth . . . She knows he has failings, but she thinks they have grown up through his being like one cast away, for the want of something to trust in, and care for, and think well of . . ."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

For a long time, she sat still in her seat, almost inhumanely motionless. Her hair hung down on either side of her face, hiding her. She could be a runaway, a drug dealer, a knocked up college kid, a wife fleeing from an abusive husband. No one knew and no one asked because no one really cared. They walked by, seeing her but not truly seeing her, and went to their own seats.

Rory Gilmore, however, was not running away this time. Her fingers were wrapped securely around the edges of The Subsect, and for the first time in many days she was allowing herself that peaceful feeling of happiness in its most tranquil form. It didn't matter that the man who sat next to her smelled funny or had Cheeto dust all over his holey shirt. It didn't matter that the traffic was bad and the bus driver was worse, in a horrible mood, yelling at whoever might manage to capture his attention. Because she had The Subsect, and she had its author, whether he was with her at the moment or not.

Her heart fluttered nervously when she thought of him, but it was more of the innocent nervousness than the pained dread mixed with desire that had filled her body for two years now. It was that same feeling she'd had when she was seventeen, a feeling that she'd always thought had something to do with her inexperience and age at the time because she had never gotten it again, but now she realized it was Jess, no matter what age, no matter what year, no matter how or where or why.

"Where're you going?" The man suddenly grunted, scratching his chin with a thick finger. She swallowed heavily, her private thoughts interrupted, and turned to glance once more out the window before looking back to her right.

"Hartford," she said vaguely, unwilling to give detailed information to a person who appeared to have been sleeping it off for the last week or so. However, she couldn't ignore him. It just wasn't in her to do something like that, to judge someone and then write them off without getting to know them. Her mother always complained about that.

"Do you go to school there?"

Although she really wanted to quit this conversation and sink back into her thoughts that resembled a conference analyzation, as well as immerse herself in the book that was felt like it was literally burning holes through her fingertips, she politely and evasively responded, "No, not anymore."

"Ah." There was a long pause and, thus freed from socializing, her mind instantly was back in Philadelphia like it had never really left, wandering the hallways of the publishing house and basking in the familiarity, the Jessness, of his bedroom. How it almost, almost, felt like home, and how the restless look in his eyes had, if not vanished, at least dimmed, how he was so careful with her, the side of him that no one else knew about, the side of him that was all hers. That made her shiver.

They might not last. He might not last. He might change his mind that afternoon, and decide he wasn't going to throw himself back into that mess that they had created, the physical tensions and sarcastic banter and sultry kisses. He could just take off again, fade into oblivion, and she would be left behind, safely enclosed in the walls of Yale University with her blood pounding against her veins and every muscle in her body screaming for escape. It could happen. It had happened before.

But it wouldn't happen this time. She closed her burning eyelids and she knew it, knew it with a conviction that nearly killed her and seemed almost religious. They had both grown up, both of their souls had mingled to the point where abrupt separation was no longer possible. She took a deep breath and the fear that was in her stomach was suddenly gone, because she knew that in a few hours a number would scroll across her caller ID and it would be his.

Maybe she'd never know him completely, maybe he would always contain the mazes and twisting, tangled paths that she couldn't navigate down, a whole other region of his mind opening when she finally thought she'd mapped it all out. But she needed that. She needed the challenge, the way he faced off with her, the way he touched her with hands like down feathers and bruised her lips with kisses like lightning. It was an actual ache.

She was just opening the book with fluttering fingers when the man spoke again. "I read that," he said with a heavy sigh as he shifted in his seat and changed positions. She felt her heart skip a beat and glanced back down at the cover in front of her.

"You read this?"

This is what he wants. Forget the intellects, the critics, the professors, the philosophers, she thought, surveying the world-weary man with new eyes that had finally been unbandaged, that could see almost the way he had always seen, understand the truth he somehow possessed but had always danced elusively from her fingertips. This is what he wants.

"Yeah. It's a helluva book. Helluva author. Real upfront, to the point, cut the shit, you know?" He asked, running a hand idly over his three-or-four day stubble and not knowing that every word he was saying was twisting Rory's heart.

"Amazing author," she whispered, and her body began to throb with the tender hope of going back to something that she had been disconnected from for far too long.

He nodded as she opened the cover, her eyes full with crystal tears that stood motionless on her each eyelash, and then, once she read the quote from Leaves of Grass that the precise, focused handwriting seared in her memory had written on the first page, they spilled over silently down her cheeks.

"O I have been dilatory and dumb;
I should have made my way straight to you long ago;
I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.
I will leave all, and come make the hymns of you.
As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully to you,
I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you."

The man said nothing as she cried.

The End of Redemption