A/N: Sorry I haven't put out any new chapters of my ongoing stories lately. My muse has been tending toward these out-of-nowhere probably-one-shots. I've been suffering extreme sleep deprivation the last week or so, and it seems to make me want to write, but also be far less certain of the quality of my writing...or even whether I'm writing something worthwhile. Your reviews will be greatly appreciated to help me sort all this out.
This particular story grew out of one of the mini-headcanons that occurred to me a few months ago. I didn't name the baby in the story because this could easily fit in the "Pay the Piper" storyverse *and* the "EverFixed Mark" storyverse, and depending on which "reality" we're talking about, the baby could be either Gary or Tony.
The Mumford and Sons song "Little Lion Man" kept going through my head during this story...particularly the line: "Tremble little lion man, you'll never settle any of your scores."
Okay. On to the story:
Jess deposited the baby boy in his bassinet gingerly, so that he wouldn't wake up again. It was the third attempt at getting the kid out of his arms and into the soft blankets, and he had no desire to be buffeted about the ears by the infant's gravelly screaming for another hour or so...thus the laying him down *very* carefully. It wasn't until he had finished doing so without incident that he realized he'd been holding his breath. The relieved exhalation was nonetheless quiet and only stirred the baby's cobweb-fine hair for a split second.
As he straightened - still carefully, lest the slightest movement cause the creak of a floorboard and render the entire exercise useless - he spotted a ragged scrap of paper with familiar handwriting on one of the wompyjawed stacks of clutter adorning the bookshelves TJ was so proud of. He picked it up with a crumpled brow.
Liz was sitting at the kitchen table with a pair of bent nose jewelry making pliers, twisting strands of pewter.
"What's this?" Jess asked, approaching the table with the soft, wrinkled strip of paper in his hand.
"What's what?" Liz asked without looking up from her work, intent upon a spiral she was fashioning out of the soft metal.
"This," he reiterated, sticking the thing in front of her face, causing momentary irritation as evidenced by the crease in the skin between her eyebrows as she tried to push the paper away with her elbow - an acrobatic, but ineffective maneuver. It was a check, so old it was faded, and from its texture, may have gone through a load of wash at one time or another. The check sender was one "Lucas Danes" and the amount was no piddling change.
"Oh, that! That was in the take-out menu rack, right?" she conjectured, incorrectly.
"Shelf," he corrected absently, pulling it back and holding it up to the light for closer examination, as he'd had no opportunity to do so in the darkened bedroom. "It's from 1996!"
"Isn't that trippy?" Liz asked, grinning up at him for a second, gesturing with the wire she'd been so cautious with the moment before. "I found it in an old purse when I was looking for loose change - got stuck in the lining...no wonder I never cashed it!" She laughed. "And did you see the name? "Elizabeth Bertolini! I forgot I was ever a Bertonlini. That explains some Christmas cards." Her chuckle was in genuine amusement, unfazed by the memory blip.
"Why was Luke sending you money?" Jess asked, ignoring the rest. Bertolini wasn't exactly a name that had pleasant memories attached, and it wasn't a stroll down brain-scar alley he was looking for. He couldn't figure out an explanation. Luke wasn't stupid enough to give Liz a loan, and he certainly wouldn't have had any cause to repay one. There was nothing Liz would have made or done that would have warranted paying for. Even bailing her out of a bad situation Luke would have had enough sense to do in person, so she didn't use the funds to get herself into a deeper mess. Didn't make any sense.
"Oh, you know Luke," Liz commented vaguely and with bemused but tired affection in her voice.
"Yeah..." Jess conceded. "Why was he sending you money? -this much money?"
Liz shrugged and shook her head as if the question was ridiculous. "He always did! You know that."
Jess frowned, leaning forward on the balls of his feet and squinting into the bowl of rotting fruit and eggshells on the table that was supposedly compost. "No. I don't know that. What did he send it for?"
His mother shrugged her shoulders again helplessly. "Well, it's not like Jimmy was sending anything."
The compost bowl no longer held his gaze as, suddenly standing ramrod straight, Jess stared wide-eyed at the far wall. "Luke sent child support!?" The question was blunt-edged with a tone of rigid shock.
The feathered tawny strands of hair bobbed around as Liz nodded in a sorta-kinda sideways fashion. "If you wanna call it that."
Jess' chest tightened a bit as he watched the woman who didn't raise him work with nimble fingers on an intricate filigree, with no thought of what her life used to be. It felt as if he'd half swallowed a chicken bone and it lodged in his larynx, and a muscle twitched halfway between his jawbone and his eye. He could feel his head start nodding in a slow, shallow rhythm.
His words were almost whispered. "So Luke wound up paying for your booze and your drugs and the parasites who freeloaded off anything we had."
"Come on..." Liz shoved verbally, angry at being dragged to a place she hadn't been in a long time. "He payed for your school clothes!"
"The finest the Salvation Army had to offer..." Jess drawled sandpaper, trailing off bitterly.
"Don't knock it!"
"I learned how to pick people's pockets and knock bags of groceries out of their arms just so they'd lose track of a can or two that scattered, so that we wouldn't starve!"
"Always so dramatic," Liz remarked quietly with a roll of the eyes.
Jess' eyes flashed and he didn't think about the swing of his arm until it had swept the tray of hard, clear plastic from the table onto the floor, sending beads rattling in every direction.
Liz yelped and stared at him, frightened by the lightning bolt of violence, even directed at an inanimate object. She'd seen him provoked beyond all thinking and still, he didn't throw things around the room. She did. He didn't.
"Don't you GET IT!?" He screamed so hard it turned his throat raw. When he heard the frightened squall from the other room, it tore him open. Without a word, he went back into the darkened bedroom, head hanging. When he came back, he was soothing and shushing, cradling the little boy and rocking him back and forth.
Liz had gotten the dustpan and broom and was cleaning up his mess. Talk about role reversal. He was going to get the broom and do it himself. But the baby was more important. Couldn't do both at once.
It wasn't worth it. He knew that. All the yelling and the screaming in the world couldn't change anything. It couldn't undo everything that had happened to him...to them...or between them. It couldn't turn back the clock and the calendar, or even make Liz see that things could have been different. He could have had a childhood like Doula. Maybe not quite. Liz would have needed to be much further down her road of personal recovery for that to have been possible. But...
He shook his head. None of it mattered. He smoothed his rough fingers over the baby's soft cheek. He stared at him: clean and plump and soft and blessedly ignorant. He'd grow up not knowing there was any world but this. Stars Hollow. The nutty, kooky, safest place in the whole world. Jess' head bowed protectively and reverently and sadly over the whimpering smallness in his arms. Those arms held tighter and the snug fleeced bundle helped to ease the pain in his chest. Please grow up happy. I need you to. ...Please.
He didn't apologize. Liz finished up with the floor and started separating the beads from the dustpan back into the now cracked craft tray. He was sorry. He never meant to do something like that, but Liz wouldn't look at him and neither one of them could talk.
When the baby had quieted down and Liz had stopped, kind of dully frozen in the middle of sorting the yellows and the greens, Jess walked over and held her son out for her to take. She looked up at him vacantly. He placed the little boy on her lap so that she'd have to reach her arms around him to keep him there...definitely made sure she had him securely before letting go.
"I need-" he broke off, eyes trailing around the floor. "I'm gonna go over to Luke's." The words were quiet and went unanswered as he buried his hands into his pockets and walked to the door. He didn't bother to say he'd be back. His stuff was there. She'd figure it out.
He found himself standing outside the door wiping his knuckle back and forth across his lips, trying to think...not exactly of anything in particular. Just trying to think. When his brain refused to function it was a matter of empty emergency. When his head wouldn't reboot, he started shuffling toward the diner.
Toward Luke.
A/N: Thoughts? Anything interesting? Thought provoking? Should I burn it with fire? LOL