I was just listening to music tonight and these words flew from my fingertips with very little thought - I can only hope I strung them together somewhat coherently.

Disclaimer: I don't own a damn thing.

He wrote most of The Subsect in a worn composition notebook on a beach in California when he could still pretend he was reviving the beat generation; back when he saw her in every brunette with blue eyes sipping at a morning cup of coffee, the ones who poured over trashy novels at the corner café – books she never would be seen with. Every single one of them turned out to be a close facsimile but nothing of substance ever lurked beneath the surface. When his dad kicked him out and he was quite literally forced to do the 'Kerouac thing' back across the country to his old stomping ground, he still searched for her on every corner, in every hidden nook in the Strand, on the bus, in the record store, at Battery Park. Sometimes he cursed her existence; she had ruined dating for him, ruined random hook ups with girls that didn't mean a damn thing, every passing female a reminder of the fact that they weren't her.

When he settled in Philadelphia, convinced the guys to publish his shitty ass novella, he finally found a girl worth trying for. She was a blond with a great ass who was wholly unafraid to tell him to go fuck himself in the moment called for such words – they frequently did. They lasted seven months. Just long enough for him to crank out his next book on some old school typewriter that Liz found for him in a secondhand shop while working the ren-fair circuit (the only gift, besides life, that his mother had ever given him – perhaps he should have given TJ more credit). After a long day working the press he went upstairs to find her sitting on his bed with the manuscript in hand and tears in her eyes. "It's her, isn't it? She's on every goddamn page of this thing."

All he had been able to do was shrug and stare at his shoes when her palm connected with his cheek after she'd strewn the pages all across the floor.

Everything had been fine, he'd grown used to the solitude, but then he found himself in Hartford as he tried to convince bookstores to stock The Subsect while his second book went to an editor. He hadn't meant to find his way to her door but when Luke had told him that she'd dropped out of Yale and stopped speaking to Lorelai… When Luke insinuated that maybe she needed him the way that he had once needed her, he found himself walking up the drive to that big old mansion that personified everything he stood against. She was still beautiful and he was happy to see her hair long again; the years had been kind to her but seeing her suddenly made him feel every bit of his twenty-one years and then some. Like he was trying to fit a piece of a puzzle that pictured the Mona Lisa into one of those little kid puzzles with the silly pictures and large pieces. Oh he tried. And he felt like he'd gained some footing until that blond dick had shown up.

"This isn't you!" He had felt heartbroken by those three words. She wasn't Rory anymore, not anything close to the girl he had fallen in love with. He was certain that she was still in there, hidden beneath the surface, but he didn't have the time or the patience to peel away the layers she had put on for the sake of fitting in.

"It is what it is; you, me." He let her go because, dammit, he loved her enough to know that he wasn't what she wanted right then. Maybe she would find her way back to him someday or maybe she would let that pretty boy put a ring on her finger and become a New England housewife. She was more Rory than she had been that night in Hartford but she was still a far cry from the girl he once knew – then again, maybe he was a far cry from the boy she had once knew too. They weren't those crazy kids who had fallen in love with nary a thought to the potential fallout. They had fallen in love at seventeen like they were built to last forever and now they were strangers at twenty-two.

The first time he had opened the paper to find her name on the byline he had quite literally fallen off his chair; as much as it pained him to admit it, he had really given up hope that she would find her way back to the path that she belonged on. When they both ended up in the Hollow later that year for the wedding that had been more than a decade in the making, they had kept things polite and distant but as best man and maid of honor there were just things they couldn't avoid – like a dance. Her chin against his shoulder and her fingers laced through his as they spun around in the middle of the town square to some eighties psychedelic rock song he told her that he was glad to see her, really her, for the first time in far too long; she had smiled, called him Dodger, and kissed the underside of his chin as the song drew to a close.

He had been certain that that was it. Closure. Until a year later when she showed up on his doorstep with his second book in hand, her fingers marking a page somewhere toward the middle, and tears that he could make out through the steady downpour that had been cursing Philadelphia for days. "I've read this book twenty times," she told him. "And somewhere during the twenty-first time tonight I realized something; they're us, aren't they? Every single page is you and me and this cat and mouse game we've been playing for almost a decade."

"Rory…"

She stepped up to him then; her eyes were level with his nose on a good day but something about knowledge brought confidence and she was up on her tiptoes to look him in the eye. "You really do love me, don't you? You always have. I've made you wait for so long, Jess. Can you forgive me?"

"That's an awful lot of assumptions to make in one night, Gilmore." He watched her face fall and she turned away from him but he caught her arm to pull her back. "They may be assumptions but I never said they were wrong."

"Dodger," she growled and he laughed against her lips as he kissed her.

I still love you, the girl from Mars
-Ash