Title: Beauty in the Breakdown
Author: Angeleyez
Disclaimer: Don't own the title or the story. I don't even own the CD that plays the song that named the story. Wish I did though.
Summary: Sometimes he stares too long. Sometimes she can only taste her own guilt. Sometimes it hurts. But it's nice to be needed. (Rory's POV on her and Dean.)
A/N: Title from "Let Go" by Frou Frou. This is complete, by the way. A one shot. Thanks to Mai because she's Mai. Thanks to Lia because she's Lia. And thanks to Lee for being Lee and for betaing. Feedback would be much appreciated.
It's nice to be needed.
To walk around with a heightened sense of superiority knowing that it's her, only her. This is all so new for her, so different. She isn't used to the loss of rationality, or the inability to plan ahead. Pro and con lists are obsolete now because they require too much thought. With this, with him, it is better not to think at all.
-x-
She remembers sitting in class in high school, confident with the secondhand knowledge she has been collecting from books ever since she was old enough to read. It has always seemed like she had the upper hand when it came to answering questions, taking tests, completing homework.
A certain kind of feeling comes with being correct, a strong surge of pride that explodes within her whenever a teacher commends her on a job well done. There is no doubt that being the best, being favored, is something that people crave. She thrives on it.
Back at Stars Hollow High, she never minded being the odd girl out because she had something the other girls didn't. She was right, and she was smart, and she was appreciated. Every time her hand went up while all the others stayed down, there was the inevitable spark that maybe she was worth just a little bit more.
It felt good.
-x-
It's nice to be wanted.
To walk around with the knowledge that she is preferred, desired to the point where his hands shake as he slips them beneath her dress. She can make his heart race and his knees knock together and his blood boil and his mind stop, and anyone else just falls short.
When he looks at her, she feels prettier, special, like she's saving him and he's thinking thank god, thank god it's her. It's love, she reminds herself. This is why she's comes out on top, because she makes him smile, makes him laugh. Makes him happy.
It's a stronger emotion than what she's used to. It's different from any other normal boy-girl relationship she has been involved with, different from what she imagined it could be like.
It makes her skin tingle.
-x-
College is nothing like she expected. She hides beneath her shell whenever faced with an awkward situation; she is too shy to do something more. Over the years, she has become so used to being approached by someone else that she has no idea how to do this herself.
Boys were somewhat of a foreign territory until Dean sauntered by, with the brown hair hanging in his eyes, and the over confident voice in her ear, his hand too close to her shoulder as he sat behind her on the bus to Chilton. He was something special, she remembers. He made her feel special too.
Any boy interested after that pursued her. Friends, while few and far between, seemed to fall into her lap, Paris and Lane included. Lane was a play date set up by Rory's mother when she was a child, and it was more luck than anything else that the two girls clicked, shutting off the need for more friends in either of their lives.
But now, college is new. College is different, the scary kind of different. This brand new place that isn't home, where people don't automatically like her, and where her work does not automatically receive top marks. Here, she can fall behind. Here, she can lose herself, and flounder with the rest of the kids who all were the best back in their hometowns. Not here though, where the stakes are raised, and the real world is seeping in, and she cannot find a reason or a comfort or something to keep her head above water.
It's scary here. She isn't used to being so afraid.
She isn't used to being on the outside, looking in.
-x-
It's nice to be craved.
To walk around with an almost primal instinct, knowing when he's looking at her. She can feel his eyes on her back as she strolls through town, a concentrated look so that she knows what he's thinking. He's picturing her beneath him, between the sheets, pale skin revealed smooth.
The thought doesn't frighten her like she originally believed it would. Instead it brings her excitement, this wonderful secret between her and him. Just them, this tiny world made of four walls and pink sheets, and a twin bed he used to sit next to her on while they traded chaste kisses when her mother was out.
She likes picturing his hands, swallowing hers up in them, remembering how they felt over the flat expanse of her stomach. Against her thighs. Tracing small, dizzy circles.
She gets dizzy too.
-x-
When Jess would come over when her mother wasn't home, she would sometimes purposely wear a low cut shirt just to see his reaction. She knew when his thoughts traveled from their topic of conversation to her body; her lips, legs, chest. An accidental flash of her bra strap if her shirt slipped lower on her shoulder, a snapshot of the material if she leaned too far, too close.
From him, she learned passion. She learned how to lose control.
But their entire relationship was evanescent, and he was so gone before anything more could happen. He left before the emotion became too strong, before she learned what true irrationality and instinct could do.
His offer to take her away was too rushed and desperate to be anywhere close to romantic. She thinks that he needed her, wanted her, loved her. She thinks leaving with him could have been something amazing and new and something more than what she had been stuck with then.
But then there was uncertainty. It would have been great if she could have believed he had really changed. Believed that in the time span of a few short months, he could pull his act together and stop running, but now, really, he was just asking her to run with him.
She could have said yes.
And the next day, he could have changed his mind.
-x-
It hurts. Like small droplets of blood, bright dots form in front of her eyes, smearing together, blurring and blinding and overwhelming.
Questions like why and how and what were you thinking surface, screaming in her head, an overplayed song she cannot stop.
Then, she falls asleep. Or he kisses her. Or she closes her eyes and remembers what it's like to feel this way.
And it's quiet.
-x-
The situation is easiest when she dresses Lindsay up in the tailor-made suit of the villain. She pictures the blonde pre-marriage, in the town meeting, glaring back at her from several rows up. She paints jealousy across the images, green and black, and shaded-in insecurities that were allowed to shake the marriage because they had never been erased to begin with.
She hears her mother describing the fights they have had, Lindsay demanding a townhouse and other unreachable dreams, objects symbolic of a successful marriage, because she's clawing, gripping to keep it from slipping. Rory shuts out the logical reasoning that Lindsay is afraid, acting irrational because of it, and she's not pushing Dean away, but she's trying so hard to keep him there. Dean's the one moving. He's the one taking baby steps back, building a wall. He has the skills from staying out late and not telling Lindsay where he's going, abilities he picked up from construction, lifting, hammering, reinforcing. This is what he has now, Rory suddenly remembers. He's dropped out of college. He's dropped out because of Lindsay.
She transforms the happy memory of their wedding day into something different, something bad. She has to do this, calm herself, assure herself that Dean was unhappy from the start. Lindsay is and always will be the mistake, a way to get himself over Rory, a desperate act that went too far.
She does her best to arrange all of these shades of gray, reasons and desperations, tears and fights; something to back her actions up. But on certain nights, she dreams in muted black and white, stilted silent movie frames of her real life, the screen crackling and heavy and suffocating.
Then she wakes, and Lindsay is the bad guy, and she's only trying to save Dean while keeping herself intact.
-x-
Sometimes when she sees him around town, he stares a second too long. His eyes get serious, trying to tell her something, more secrets, more questions, more, more, more. His lips curve in an upside down smile, and when he waves, she doesn't wave back.
Sometimes when she kisses him, she can only taste her own guilt, sour and sharp, like heavy misformed words, the way her mother sounded in her head when she told her she was wrong. It tastes like the bile that rises in her throat when she thinks too much, and doesn't cry, and it really hurts.
Sometimes she thinks this is right; she is doing the right thing. She is exploring love from a new perspective, helping Dean escape from the hole he dug. She thinks she loves him back even though reality says otherwise, but it doesn't matter because she's right. He's right. Together, they are and always have been right.
Inside, she always knows that it's wrong. The knowledge burns and twists and reflects in her mother's eyes; disapproving, disappointed, distant.
She can touch the wall but cannot pass through it, so she turns away.
-x-
She thinks the fall from her pedestal will be quick but painful, a long way down from what she's built up. It will be a searing kind of landing, one that reverberates throughout her broken body because loneliness is a myth she only thinks she's experienced.
Sometimes she thinks she's crazy for what she's doing, that she should put an end to it.
But then he kisses her like she's the last person in the world, like he's drowning, and he's taking her with him.
His hand is bigger on hers, gentle. He pulls her closer. Sighs into her. Wants her, loves her, needs her.
It's nice to pretend and forget. It's nice to be loved and desired.
It's nice to be needed.