Title: This Is How I Disappear
Rating: R
Date Written: 12-26-07
Disclaimer: I don't own any of this. Gilmore Girls belongs to Amy Sherman-Paladino and the folks at the WB (or the CW, whatever they call it these days). Title comes from the song of the same name by MCR.
Summary: Implied Lit, some parts Logan-centric. Set two years after series finale. Logan tries to make sense of his life while Rory finds happiness in hers. Slight angst, some romance.
A/N:I know all my Lit readers a scratching their heads right now wondering what the hell I'm writing, but don't worry. This will be a shorter type story than what I usually write, with characters I don't usually use, in a setting that I rarely write about. Adventurous, yeah? I'd love to get some response for this, reviews equal updates.
Chapter One: To un-explain the unforgivable
California.
Burning sun and shinning bodies, everything partially man-made but better for it. Silicone and self-tanning, bleached teeth. He was the master of cocktail negotiations and playing it up, showing face, having a good time. Business had begun to do him well.
Of course, it hadn't started out so smoothly. Crashing companies and putting up a fight with his father and his big checks that just kept rolling in--gathering speed the way planes did before they collided with the ground.
He was alone out here, alone with his Porsche and his apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay and his fat bank account. He hadn't planned on it working out like this. No, not at all.
But Rory had been a wild card. He had assumed--however stupidly--that she would go along with this, with sticking with him for a few years and taking care of her own career a little later. That had been his plan. Fuck if it didn't work out.
She had turned him down. Shot his proposal straight to shit. He'd seen something in her eyes, a determination, something akin to protectiveness. It was like really looking at her for the first time. Loosing her. When you're going down everything begins to make sense.
Driving with the top down. Saturday afternoons with sunglasses and curves that looked out over the Pacific. So blue. The kind of thing that could swallow you up and rest you down in it's sloshing basin of cool darkness. He was pulling eighty on the hairpin turns, that's what his goddam car was made for.
A dolled up face in the passenger seat. One of those healthy girls that refused to dye her hair but wore way too much mascara. Golden skin with some kind of C name that had probably been invented by cliché type naturalist parents in Berkley.
She was the anti-Rory. Sleeping Beauty and Rose Red, the shock of sand against the surf.
From a different world, this girl. Someone who could care less about schools covered in Ivy and old families from tinny states with big names. It's comforting, being able to start over at twenty-four. Most people never even get the chance.
He wasn't going to pass this up. This. Whatever the hell any of this was. It was a novel-esque kind of life.
Candy mouth and hairless limbs and eyes that waft in the airways and tan soft arms that crush against the leather interior of his hundred thousand dollar sports car--
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet . . .
Nothing about this had been easy. Was Jess every easy? That worked out just fine, when she thought about it. It gave her time to weigh her options, make up her mind, enough time to make her want him. Was she being played? No. Just handled by someone who knew women the way she knew words.
She liked his confidence. But--more than that--his uncanny ability to quickly fall into her steps, to actually look at her when she talked.
That meant something.
The year was ending, October, November, December. Months and months of go away, come here, let's talk, lets avoid the obvious.
She was slowly loosing her mind. Talking with Jess, seeing Jess, wanting Jess--it was like someone had taken the hard core of her seventeen-year-old desire and charged it twenty times over. What was this? It was her newfound ability to think without her blinders on. Things were becoming clear in every direction she looked. Her past, her writing, her dreams. She saw the pulsing press of her veins hidden beneath her sleeve.
Thump, thump, thump . . .
She could feel the thunder of a base-line racket through her chest. Finally, something more than DAR functions and boys that looked good in resume-form only.
What could he say? He'd thought less and less about her the longer they'd been away. Being refused hadn't been so shocking, not completely. Her opposition had felt more like a last-ditch attempt not to conform. With pastels and polo's and pink fingernails she didn't have many other options. Turning down marriage probably made her feel more independent, like the adult that she so desperately wanted to become.
But people ask questions to get answers. Right or wrong, yes or no, rebuke or laughter. He couldn't help but feel a little bit cheated. If he had bothered to get to know her maybe he would have realized that Rory Gilmore would never become anyone's wife. She was too independently driven to sign herself away like that.
Holding everyone at arms length. What was so terrible that she couldn't share?
Across the country and joyriding at breakneck speeds, Logan acknowledged the fact that she never gave him the chance to know.
They say that too much of anything will make you crazy. Or sick. Tired
Rory could only disagree.
She'd admit to the last one, but she felt more worn out than anything. Was it possible to be exhausted from too much happiness? They say everything is a matter of science.
It took all she had to cover herself and collapse beside him. Still weak from their previous activities, she curled up beside Jess with her senses cooling, calming themselves, the muscular sections of her body deliciously spent.
She was chocking on her own wonder. In her mind she played the idiot and the scholar. What moron would have waited nearly six years the way she had? This moron, she chided herself, on the fast track to slumber. Could never have it any other way.
And all she could think in those last dying seconds before unconsciousness was that she has finally found it, made it, finally, finally.
In sleep our dreams are won.
He got the things he expected to receive. Money, credibility, exaggeration and flamboyant success. No surprises.
It's easy to say I Love You. Lying and believing the crap you push on other people only made him stronger. The fact that he would never accomplish anything worth writing a novel about--that just made him thin, like a membrane that was slowly dissolving. Water that pushed through his skin, it was only a matter of science. Osmosis where his hands were shriveling, collapsing in on themselves, becoming smaller and smaller until he was part of the earth. Rushing out, this was how people lost themselves in their lives.
Clear and growing steadily into nothing, he was fading into the background, fading from high and tangible to less and less, fading into water and eternal sleep.
So blue. He was a speck beneath the surface. How far do we sink before we become less than ourselves?
In death all our losses disappear.
