Never-Changing is a drabble, based on an idea of how things might (or might not) look after time has passed in Stars Hollow. A way to work out some pre-revival nerves.
Disclaimer: Not mine, and the concept is Junienmomo's.
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It was official.
Only Babette looked the same.
Creeping through Stars Hollow, Kirk Gleason filmed carefully, subtly, and without permission. Time had changed very little in the town, thus the title of his upcoming film, "Eternity". He was very proud of it. All the old footage that never quite made it into other projects finally had a purpose, making Lulu happy, and Kirk felt he was making a wonderfully deep point about the beautiful unchanging nature of Stars Hollow.
Then, of course, he began to notice. After a while, even Kirk Gleason could notice things. Lulu had worked wonders on him that way.
It was not merely that silver had plated the whiskers of Luke's stubble, or that Taylor had become rather unwieldy in girth, or even that Miss Patty looked sadly haggard. Lorelai was not quite the taut-skinned lovely of his youthful dreams, and Dean Forrester frankly looked as if he'd been off battling demons. Even Lulu showed signs of aging, not that Kirk was foolish enough to tell her. Jackson and TJ seemed relatively untouched, until Kirk used the zoom feature, and he had quite rapidly un-zoomed, before having new night terrors for a week.
No, Kirk had to face a terrible fact.
Other than the buildings, only Babette remained the same in appearance.
This discovery led to his crouching amongst garden gnomes, waiting to find out if it was excellent cosmetic application, surgery, or deals with unholy forces.
Shivering, since garden gnomes featured in a few of his new night terrors, Kirk trained his night-vision camera upon Babette. Her raspy-screechy calls for her pet cat sounded the same. Her round cheerful face remained the same. Kirk couldn't help it. He'd look down at the old footage stored on his smartphone (considered by some to be somewhat smarter than Kirk), then up again at modern Babette, with his mouth hanging open. Make-up off, hair frizzled, Babette was exactly the same as she looked on the old footage.
Kirk's nerve finally broke. There was only one possible explanation, beyond good DNA and maybe some injections. Babette was not really human. She was something else. Something that lived in his night terrors, come to life. Eternal life.
Babette was… pre-embalmed!
Kirk broke from cover, screaming.
When he calmed down, some days later, he was very reassured to find that Lulu had accidentally-on-purpose erased all his footage, and lost his camera by selling it on e-Bay.
Babette was not the only thing in Stars Hollow that remained unchanged.
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AN: The actor who plays Dean has been on the long-running show Supernatural, in which his character does, in fact, fight demons. Had to do it.
Sally Struthers, the actress who portrays Babette Dell, was arrested for drunk driving a few years ago. In my family, heavy drinkers are referred to as "pre-embalmed", but you can imagine where such a term would take Kirk's brain.