Title: Sometimes You Do

Summary: All that mattered was that Rory Gilmore was slowly, painfully, finally going home.

A/N: Okay. So. Here it is. This fic is REALLY long and will probably take me ten years to post, even though it is complete. This is the latest installment of the Redemptive!Dean verse, so if you're not a fan of Dean Forester, you might want to turn back now, especially if the notion of Dean/Rory squicks you out for whatever reason. I make no promises on how this story ends up in terms of their relationship, but it explores it quite thoroughly over the next 40 chapters or so. (Yes, 40, I am that wordy.) If anyone wants a detailed clarification on the timeline of this verse, I can try to put something together, but I'll just say this is a future fic set after the end of the show (by maybe about four years or so) and it takes place about a year after the last fic in this verse, which was the lovely "Summer Project" by sendintheclowns.

A/N 2: This is a long piece, so I have a decent list of acknowledgments. First, thanks to geminigrl11 for a fast beta. It was a remarkably effort and I appreciate it greatly. Second, thanks to Piratelf, who gave me a thorough read through to make sure that the story arc made sense and worked. Her insights were greatly useful and improved the story a great deal. Now she just needs to finish her own fic... And last, but really not least, sendintheclowns is basically the reason I write. She humors me, she plots with me, she reads my work time and time again. She's my cheerleader, my slave driver--my everything. I have been working on this piece for well over a year now, and I'm sure she remembers every up and down I've had with it. This fic is because of her, and so I dedicate it to her utter awesomeness, which she shares with me day after day (after day!).

A/N 3: This chapter is slow, I know. But it's a 40 chapter fic. Exposition has to occur! Please, indulge me, just a bit :)

Disclaimer: So not mine.

-o-

Part of her wondered if she should have traveled by plane. It would have been faster, after all, and after years away from home, it wasn't like she didn't have plenty of experience. She even had some frequent flyer miles, but the airline was incredible stingy about those, and when they tried to tell her that flying to Alabama would be much nicer than flying to Connecticut, she figured it just wasn't worth the effort.

Or the money. Not that money was really an issue. She had money, her own and her grandparents. In fact, at the mere mention of being homesick the last few years, first class plane tickets had showed up in her mailbox nearly instantaneously. Apparently, her homesickness paled in comparison to how sick her home was for want of her.

Okay, yes, that was a self-centered way of looking at it, but really. With grandparents like hers, it was true. Her mother was a bit more subtle about it, but it held true there, too.

And either way, after four years away from home, she missed it, too. She missed the low-traffic streets, the eccentric group of people who made up the microcosm that was Stars Hollow, the way that everybody knew everybody and how she had a usual down at Luke's Diner. Well, not exactly a usual, since her usual was variable from day to day, but usually Luke always knew to bring her coffee, just the way she liked it, even if he groused about it. Which, really, was all that mattered.

Life on the road, life in big cities--it was so anonymous. That was why she'd left the campaign trail to begin with--it had been exciting, yes, but Rory found that her small town background gave her a low tolerance for excessive excitement. Besides, not knowing what city she was in day-to-day, and sometimes even moment-to-moment, made her slightly schizophrenic.

The job in question, the one she'd quit--or had been fired from, depending on who she was telling--had settled her in Detroit, which wasn't as far away as she could have gotten from Stars Hollow, but certainly far enough. The San Francisco Chronicle had offered a position, but that was too close to Logan, and the Detroit Free Press simply offered her more variety in what she wrote. Front page articles. Even the editorial, from time to time.

It wasn't quite the New York Times, but it was a solid career-maker. But, even with her name in print, no one cared about who she was or what she did. It was rather a change for her, this sudden lack of prestige, and she liked to think it wasn't just her ego that took a hit, but her need for companionship. She didn't care if she was famous; she just wanted to be a person sometimes.

Which was maybe why she was coming home. That and the fact that she'd sort of quit her job.

Sort of, as in completely and totally. As in, she'd had a meltdown in the office and told everyone how wrong they were and how real journalism wasn't just cold hard facts and that the problem with the press today wasn't bias or sensationalism but a lack of connection between the people and their constituents. All very true, all very noble. Very Jerry Maguire in the best sense. She'd shown her boss the money, and he'd pretty much shown her the door.

Not quite fired, but told to leave if she couldn't shut her trap and do her job. So she quit, citing irreconcilable differences. Part of her thought her boss should care.

He didn't.

Her mom knew, so her grandparents knew, but the town didn't. So flying seemed like too much of a huge affair. And, besides, it would cost a fortune to have her stuff shipped cross country. Because she had stuff. Plenty of it. Even with a room full still at her mother's house, it was remarkable how much she still had collected.

Also, she'd never rented a truck before. And how hard could it be? Sure she was spending an arm and a leg on the diesel fuel for the thing, not to mention the ridiculous daily price to truck all the way from Michigan. But it was an adventure. In the truest sense of the word, since she really didn't have a great sense of direction, nor did she have tons of experience driving stick.

And so she was afraid to get out at rest stops during the night and had taken out one drive-thru sign by neglecting the height of her vehicle. But that was what insurance was for, wasn't it?

It didn't matter. None of it mattered. All that mattered was that Rory Gilmore was slowly, painfully, finally going home.

What happened next--well, that was anyone's guess.

-o-

It was just like it always had been. Simple, homey, familiar. Stars Hollow. Forever and always.

Her windows were down and her radio was blaring. All in all, a good way to finish this leg of her journey--at least roads that she knew this time around, which helped her avoid the multiple "detours" she'd been taking throughout her trek. And Connecticut was just pretty. Prettier than the flatlands, prettier than the industrialized cities. It was just pretty. And scenic. And home.

She was even mildly proficient with the standard transmission by this point, which was good. She was tired of killing the engine when traffic backed up behind her. She figured that traffic was probably pretty tired of that, too. Though that was supposed to be their problem, that didn't save her from the embarrassment.

After all, she was an adult. A fully capable adult who simply struggled with something like a stick shift. Totally normal. Sane people bought automatics anyway. Besides, with the journey so close to an end, her driving capabilities (or lack thereof) was really a moot point.

Needless to say, she was dirty and she was tired and she was glad to be home.

Her heart felt warmer just turning onto the familiar streets of Stars Hollow. People she recognized were milling about. Doing their normal business. Just like she'd never left.

That was the appeal of this place. The appeal and the reason she'd probably wanted to leave. Routine was safe; it was also boring.

Which was why it was good to break away from and just as nice to come back to for a reprieve. Until her situation was sorted out, anyway. She just needed to update her resume, regroup, and figure out which adventure was next for her. Maybe global traveling. Green Peace, perhaps, though they probably wouldn't be thrilled to know how horrendous her gas mileage was on her trip out here.

But something. Something new and grand and noble and wonderful. Because life was hers and she was going to take it for all it was worth. She didn't even need a plan, even though the whole concept of going without one went against her nature. Not knowing what came next was not her way, but she was changing. Growing up. She could do this. She was doing this. Just let Stars Hollow see her now. They'd sent her off in style, and she would come back to them and they would see her as the success story they'd craved all along.

And they did--see her, that is. The success part, maybe not quite yet. Because she was hardly turned onto the main street of town when her truck spluttered--once, twice--before giving a horrific cough, and died. Smoke hissed from the hood and when she turned the key and pressed the clutch...nothing.

It was dead.

Deader than a doornail. Perfect.

At midday, the entire town would see her there, sitting upon her truck of glory. The rumors would be flying before she even got a chance to call her mother.

Even as she was thinking it, there Taylor already was, a little grayer up top than usual, same stuffy fashion sense, same zealous way of moving as he charged onto the street in partial awe and partial horror.

"You can't park this here!" he cried. "You'll block all my customers!"

"Hi, Taylor," she called, smiling and waving and ignoring him entirely. It hardly seemed worth the effort to explain that his customers all walked to his store and that they all knew where it was, anyway, so her blocking the sign wasn't actually that big of deal.

"But you can't!" he exclaimed. "I know you've been away, but surely you remember!"

She pushed open her door, clamoring out. Her legs felt stiff and there was a crick in her back. "I think I kind of have to," she explained. "I think it's kind of dead."

A crowd was gathering, from inside the store, from surrounding stores. Whispering and wide-eyesd.

"But my store!" Taylor wailed.

She smiled sheepishly, tucking a strand of greasy hair behind her ear.

A ticker-tape parade, it was not. And it was exactly what she should have expected when she loaded the truck up. This was just the way life was for her, for people in Stars Hollow. It was almost reassuring in its utter awkwardness. Almost, but not quite.

Welcome home, Rory Gilmore.

-o-

"You couldn't just come in quietly, could you?" was the first thing her mother said to her when she entered Luke's Diner.

Rory grinned at her. "It wouldn't be very Gilmore-like of me, would it?" Rory said back, shrugging her shoulders. True, it had been slightly mortifying, but certainly not anything out of the realm of her experience. Not that she often had her U-Haul die on main streets in small towns, but she was used to finding the limelight unexpectedly. It sort of went with the territory of being Rory Gilmore, in Stars Hollow or otherwise.

Lorelai sidled into the seat across from her. "I see you've already gotten back into your old ways," she said, nodding at the cup of coffee in her hand.

"Never got out of them," Rory said. "Besides, it seemed wrong not to stop by since the truck broke down so close to the diner. I knew Luke would be thrilled to see me."

"Oh, yes," Lorelai said, looking over her shoulder at Luke, who was having a flustered exchange with Ceasar at the window. "He looks quite thrilled."

"He's just your typical guy," Rory explained. "Reluctant to show his feelings. The repressed emotions of American machoism. Not to be confused with the Mexican brand, which is, in fact, much more severe."

"More severe?" Lorelai asked, raising her eyebrows. "You mean there is a breed of man less communicative than Luke Danes?"

"It's a scary thought, but all too true," Rory said.

"So you mean my crush on guys named Pablo who are rough and strong is only because of a stereotype?"

"Of the worst kind," Rory supplied. "You are partially responsible for cultural repression."

"Now I have to turn my attention to Italian men."

"Ah, one cultural stereotype for the next. Sometimes, I forget where I am."

"Home sweet home," Lorelai said. "What are you going to do about the truck?"

"I thought about leaving it there and setting up home."

"I think the rental company might object."

"I could buy them out," Rory offered.

"How about you just get it fixed," Lorelai suggested. "You know, they've invented these crazy places called car repair shops. I'm not sure if you've seen them in your vast experience in the real world."

"Seen them, no," Rory said, taking a sip of her coffee. "But heard of them, yes. I just wasn't sure such aspects of civilization had reached Stars Hollow."

"Yes, even with our provincial ways, we have car repair shops. In fact, we even have tow trucks."

"Ooh, more than one?"

"I do believe there are two," Lorelai said. "Maybe three, depending on what Kirk's up to."

"Well, as I only have one truck..."

"Do you want me to call?"

Being grown up was overrated. She smiled brightly. "Yes, please."

"Ah, the joy of having a daughter," her mother said, pushing herself up from the table.

"You know you miss being needed."

"Right, since my entire identity revolves around motherhood," her mother said. "I'll call, but you're going to go in there and figure it out."

"Yes, ma'am," Rory said. "I will completely handle dealing with the mechanic myself. No problem."

Lorelai was moving toward the counter, to find a phone and a phonebook, Rory could assume. Lorelai didn't own the diner, but she might as well have, as much influence as she had on Luke. Her mother turned and looked at her, smiling one more time. "Welcome home, Rory."

And Rory couldn't help but smile back. If there was something she missed most, that was it. That warm, familiar feeling, that sense of love and security. So her mother didn't have home-baked cookies set out a little homemade doilies. It was still her mother, which meant more than anything. No matter how far she went or how much she learned, there was nothing like Lorelai. "Thanks, Mom."

-o-

By the time she'd finished her second cup of coffee and downed a doughnut, the truck had been picked up and hauled off, amid much fanfare of course. The crowd that gathered was as shameless as it was pathetic, all speculating on the vast amount of stuff Rory had acquired in her years away and why on earth it was all coming back in town.

That pleasantly amused her as much as it not-so-pleasantly frustrated her. That Stars Hollow could care so much about her was the feeling of home she'd craved. However, that feeling of being under the microscope made her wish she'd taken another route into town. She was not quite ready to discuss her reasons for coming back. Nor was she ready to answer the questions as to where she was going next. Because she didn't know.

She didn't know. She was Rory Gilmore and she didn't know.

How had that happened? After all her time working to get into Yale, all her time working to get out of Yale, all her dedication to a career, her future, the plan, how had she ended up back here? It was like a bad chick flick or an even worse novel where the world-wearied heroine finds herself inexplicably drawn back home.

It couldn't be her. It wouldn't. What would Paris say? What would her grandparents say?

She needed a plan. An escape route.

But first she needed to get her truck fixed. All her desires to get out of the limelight aside, her bill from the company was going to be ridiculously huge if she didn't get it back soon. Dealing with such companies made her wish she'd studied math more. Not that she really liked math all that much--it was far too cut and dry, which was also its appeal, but there was never enough room for discussion. For debate. Rory like discussion and debate, so, therefore, she'd just have to pretend like she totally understood the rationale of the trucking company to charge her obscene amounts of money.

So, repair shop. Her car had been here once, at her grandfather's insistence, but then that car had been totaled--by Jess, no less, though it wasn't really his fault. At least not technically, in her mind, though everyone liked to blame him. How was he supposed to control the actions of random wildlife? And really, if Jess had just run the dumb deer over then she would have probably cried and been upset with him and they would have broken up sooner rather than later even though they weren't even dating at that point because she'd been with Dean. It was Dean's car, well, Dean's car for her, and he'd been upset--but the funny thing about all that was he was the one who was least worried about the car. All the time and effort he took to make it, the great measures he'd gone through to prove that it was worthy (to prove that he was worth), and he'd never even mentioned the car after the night she told him she'd gotten it wrecked.

It was still the plainest display of love she'd ever received. Not just the car itself, but how he'd never expected anything in return and how it'd always just been about her.

Too bad she hadn't loved him. And too bad she no longer had the car (because, really, that'd been a pretty cool car).

But that was then. This was now. But maybe it was her circular thoughts about Jess and Dean and the car that made her see Dean the moment she entered the shop.

At first, she was fairly confident he was a mirage. Or a mind trick. Her overactive imagination creating the image of the last person on her mind. But there he was. Tall. Dark. Handsome. And greasy, yet surprisingly sexy in his jeans and gray button up shirt with the logo stitched on the breast-pocket.

If it was a fantasy, it was a good one and maybe if she looked hard enough, Jess would appear in the corner with a book and a cup of coffee looking literary as all get out and her daydream would be complete.

"You here for the truck?"

Rory jumped, startled. It was Gypsy. Stars Hollow's own down and dirty mechanic. She wasn't part of the fantasy, though Rory did think the outfit did things for her figure. "Uh, yes," she said. "The U-Haul."

She nodded across the way where the would-be Dean was disappearing back under the hood with some tool that Rory could not identify. "I wish I could have seen you drive it," Gypsy said with a shake of her head. "Small girl like you, must have been quite a scene. Your mother must be proud."

"Yeah, of all the things I've done, driving a U-Haul will definitely lead off her Christmas letter this year."

Gypsy just looked at her. "It's over there. I've got Dean working on it. Shouldn't take too long. But he can explain that."

That all sounded good until Rory realized that Gypsy had just said Dean. Seeing people was one thing--her imagination was pretty vivid. Hallucinating names? Not so much. Auditory fabrications were not normal, not even for someone like her.

"Wait, did you say Dean?" Rory asked, hoping to clarify her confusion.

Gypsy glanced at her blandly. "Yeah, Dean," she said again, nodding toward the tall man half obscured by her truck's open hood. "I know he's new here but I promise you he's got all the credentials you want. Too damn qualified to work here if you ask me. But he agreed to minimum wage, so who am I to question it?"

"Oh," Rory said, feeling oddly deflated. So it was Dean. Her Dean. The Dean. Working on her truck. It was like some weird case of deja vu, and really it wasn't going to get any less weird standing here or going of there and talking to him. Because she wasn't talking to him but to a mechanic fixing her truck. There was a difference, right? There was a difference.

So she moved. Slowly and awkwardly through the melee of the garage until she was next to the truck that had been her home for the last week. She stood there, watching, waiting, looking at the long figure hunched under the hood and she was struck suddenly how it wasn't quite her Dean anymore. Her Dean had never had arms like that.

Suddenly, he surfaced, wiping his forearm across his sweat-filled brow. It was exactly like some ludicrous TV commercial--for what, she wasn't sure. Maybe antiperspirant? A clothing line? The touch, the feel of cotton?

Then, he saw her. Of course, she was staring and staring with her mouth wide open to boot. His brow furrowed a little bit and then a smile broke across his face. "Rory?"

"Uh, hi," she finally said, shutting her mouth and smiling herself.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

Rory was so distracted by the deepness of his voice and the soft crinkles around his eyes that she nearly forgot to answer. "Oh, it's my truck," she said. "Well, it's U-Haul's truck. But I'm renting it. And it broke down. As you know. Since you're working on it."

He was nodding at her as realization settled over his features. He'd always been cute, which had been part of his appeal, but he'd never been quite this...manly before. In fact, none of her boyfriends had. She'd always preferred the intellectual types, which was part of the reason she figured she'd never made it work with Dean. Dean was smart, smarter than he gave himself credit for, but the type of guy to sit around and contemplate the misogynistic subtleties of Hemingway, he was not. And Logan had been business-oriented in that aristocratic way that was sexy with a suit like he owned it. He could talk literature, thanks to his extensive education, but there was little passion to it. Of them all, Jess had been the most intense in his pursuit of literature in a very pure, if rebellious and somewhat Bohemian kind of way. But Jess hadn't cared enough to humor things like wearing suits, though, so that was a point for Logan.

Dean looked good in a suit, too, though.

Who was she kidding, Dean just looked good. Greasy, sweaty, manly and Rory found her heart racing.

"Well, you probably drove the poor thing to its death," he said looking back at the behemoth.

She just stared at him. "Oh. Well. I do seem to have that effect on mechanical devices sometimes."

Dean laughed and Rory thought her knees might give out. The depth of his voice, the curve of his smile--just wow. "Well, do you want to know the damage?"

She winced, her focus going again to the truck. Even Dean, in all his manliness, could not detract from the fact that her rental truck was still stuck in a repair shop. Not that it didn't make it more pleasant to hear and not that she didn't have rampant fantasies running through her head of it getting too hot in the garage, requiring Dean to remove his shirt and wipe his brow, the sweat glistening in the luminescent sun rays...but her truck. Her truck. She could finish writing her soft porn novel later. "I'm going to have to assume that's a rhetorical question," she said. "Want, not so much. Need to, very likely, unless I want to rack up a million dollar rental bill."

Dean, for his part, was oblivious to her fantasies. She couldn't decide if that was good or bad. "It's your clutch," he said.

"Clutch?"

"Yeah, the thing you use to shift gears."

"Oh. Clutch." She knew what a clutch was. Of course she did. How could she drive from Michigan and not know what a clutch was?

"Yeah, well, it's slipping, not holding a gear. If it can't hold a gear, then it can't go anywhere, hence the reason it decided to park itself out on Main Street."

She was listening, of course, well, kind of. She was watching him speak and following the nearly melodic rise and fall of his voice as he babbled car knowledge that completely escaped her. He could talk mechanics to her all day long if he looked like that.

He finally noticed that her mind was in left field. He cocked his head. "Does that make sense?"

"Clutch. Gears. Got it. How do we fix it?"

"Well, I've got to remove the transmission and the clutch assembly to get to the place I need to work on. Once I get it out, it's not so bad. But I will need to order the part. We don't usually stock clutch disks for trucks this size."

Rory was sure that this was all very important for her to listen to but she was still distracted by the image of a sweaty, shirtless and very greasy Dean, who, in her mind, was now smiling at her while slinging a wrench onto a low-slung tool belt.

"So, give it a few days and we'll have it good as new," he concluded with a rather triumphant smile.

It occurred to her, rather suddenly, that now was the time to respond. Preferably without reciting content from what would surely be a best-seller with repressed housewives everywhere.

Dean shifted awkwardly. "Check back in with us on Friday then," he said.

"Friday. Yes. Okay. Friday would be great. End of the week. Right before the weekend. Good way to end a week, checking up on a rental check. Nothing I would love more." Except of course, that image--

She mentally stopped herself. She really needed to focus. Moreover, she needed to act like the sophisticated, mature woman that she was and stop drooling over Dean like he was a piece of meat (a nice looking piece of meat, but still--).

"Great," he said. "See you then."

That was definitely something she could look forward to.