A/N: My inspiration's been letting me down, and it seems I can only do spur-of-the-moment oneshots right now, but it's better than nothing right? This came out of nowhere, I've been sort of moody lately, and well, it is what it is. Fair warning: you may want to have a pack of Kleenex ready. I know I cried writing this one, I'm like Luke in "Those are strings Pinocchio", a blubbering freak. Some of it may be a little OOC, so keep that in mind. That said; enjoy, and please review.

Disclaimer: I, the author of this story, do not own any of the characters associated with Gilmore Girls. That honor belongs to the wonderful Amy Sherman-Palladino. I have no intention of making any money on this (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm losing money over it...).

She found her in a closet. After half an hour of seeking, during which she had actually looked in that closet twice, Rory found her. Hadn't it been for the sound of someone going through something that sounded like paper, Rory figured she would have been at it for another half hour. She crouched down, and reached in among the heaps of folded clothes and hanging coats, until she felt the outline of the little girl that was her daughter.

"Mommy!" a voice from within the clothes exclaimed. "You found me!"

"You're getting better kiddo, wait until we go to grandma Lorelai's next time, you can challenge her and have us turn the entire house upside down."

Her daughter, a beautiful four-year-old with the same bright blue eyes as Rory, crawled out from her hidingplace. Rory stood up and was about to leave, when her daughter tugged at the hem of her shirt.

"Mommy. Who's this?"

She turned towards her daughter, who was holding a photograph. She instantly recognized it, and slowly reached for it. From the faded photograph, Jess smiled weakly at her, his eyes pleading her to just snap the photo and get it over with. She hadn't looked at this since… well since she got it processed. By then it had already been too late.

"Mommy?"

Her daughter looked at her, and Rory sat down on a pile of linen.

"That's Jess." she said simply, unable to take her eyes off the photo.

"He looks tired."

"He was."

"Was he your friend?"

She tried to remember. Were they friends? Apart from that time, she hadn't seen him since she walked out of Truncheon, and they didn't end that meeting well. She had had plenty of opportunities to see him after that, but it was always something that stopped her. During the campaign trail, before she had quit, she had visited Philadelphia, but she didn't dare to visit him. It felt wrong, and besides, she was busy. At least she had told herself that. She happened to be in Stars Hollow when Liz' and TJ's second child was born, and she heard from Luke that Jess would come see his new sibling. She stayed inside and blamed work. When Luke and Lorelai finally got married, and Jess was supposed to be Luke's bestman, she was hopeful. She had finally mustered up the courage for the possibility of facing him, but three days before the big day Jess called Luke and cancelled out of the blue. It bothered her that he pulled such a stunt on Luke so close to the wedding, and Luke ended up having TJ as his bestman.

"Yeah, he was a friend of mine." she forced herself to say. "A very long time ago."

"A hundred years ago, like in the fairytales?"

"Not quite that long, but long enough." Rory smiled at her daughter.

"Where is he now?"

A surge of pain stung her heart. She really didn't want to go into that, but she knew her daughter. She was a Gilmore, after all, and stubbornness ran in the family.

"Honey… Jess isn't around anymore."

"Like great-grandpa?"

Rory nodded, feeling sad at the mentioning of her grandpa, who had died only a year before from another heart attack.

"Yeah." she said with a strained voice. "Like great-grandpa."

She looked again at the picture, the last one she had of Jess. It had all come so suddenly.

A couple of months after she turned down Logan's proposal she found out she was pregnant. She panicked, seeing her entire future crashing down in two seconds flat. Only after a united Gilmore-intervention, she had calmed down, and subsequently quit her job on the campaign trail. Her boss was kind enough to let her stay on the paper and work from home, and she wrote short pieces during almost the entire pregnancy. In January she gave birth to her daughter, Julia Lorelai Gilmore. She knew it was her and Logan's, but she didn't tell him. He had moved on, and so had she. Her family knew, and they respected her wish not to tell either Logan or the little girl anything. All was good, up until a startling phone call in July, a month after the wedding, when Julia was 1½ years old.

Rory still remembered the phone call. A nurse matter-of-factly asked her if she was Rory Gilmore, proceeding with telling her that one Jess Mariano had been admitted to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia a couple of days earlier. They had been asked to call her by mr. Mariano himself, he requested to see her, immediately. She was in Hartford at the time, having dinner with her mother, Luke and her grandparents. Leaving Julia with her mother, she drove to Philly, breaking at least a dozen safety rules. She remembered thinking that the police would've had a field day, considering how fast she was going. Once she was in Philly she got lost twice, before finding the hospital. Soon enough she stumble into his room, and the sight of him almost made her cry.

He was pale, and his once so muscular body was thin, making him look like a shadow. He tried smiling, but it clashed with his appearance, and she asked him what was wrong, was he going to be ok?

"I…" he began. "It's leukemia, and it's violent, off the charts violent."

Rory could only stare at him. It seemed to her like a very bad joke, worse than her mother's jokes that often didn't even have a punch line. Leukemia. She tried the word. It sounded so vicious, like a scheming evil that just jumped you out of the blue.

"How…?" she began, but couldn't make herself finish the question.

"They're not sure." he said, as if reading her mind. "Could be a day, could be a week or a month. They estimate that I will be… gone by the end of the year."

"What?"

Her world seemed to fall apart, she could almost hear the cracks form and the seams rip open. Jess, her Jess, town hoodlum, Dodger, Kerouac… Her Jess was dying.

"I'm sorry…" she whispered. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"

With great difficulty, Jess sat up straight, and looked at her.

"Why are you sorry, Rory? I should be sorry, I'm the one kicking the bucket."

"I'm sorry for Truncheon. For leading you on, for being so mean to you, and lying, and letting you down."

"Rory." he said calmly. "As much as I would like to say that I hate you for that, I can't. Sure, I was pissed for a while after you left, but then I realized that I had done the same thing to you. I left for California without telling you, I barged in and out of your life without caring whose toes I stepped on."

Rory looked at him. There was still a bit of that old Jess in there, a spark in those brown eyes that she had found so exciting. She sniffled, trying to compose herself.

"I have a daughter." she said after a moments silence.

"A daughter?" he echoed surprised. "Wow, Luke certainly left out that piece of news… Seems the Gilmore tradition continues. I take it you named her Lorelai, or did Logan intervene?"

"Logan's not around." she answered. "He doesn't even know she exists."

"He… doesn't?"

"He proposed to me when I graduated. I turned him down, and he turned his back on me. A couple of months later I found out that I was pregnant, and once the shock had cleared I decided I would do this without him."

"I'm proud of you, Rory." Jess smiled. "You have any pictures?"

She nodded, going through her purse until she found her digital camera. She always had it with her nowadays, always snapping photos of things that appealed to her. She showed Jess a picture of her rocking baby Julia in her arms. Somehow, they both managed to look straight into the camera, and their blue eyes sparkled out of the picture.

"She's adorable." he said, handing back the camera to her.

"She is."

"And her name is Lorelai, right? Come on, don't tell me you broke the tradition."

"I sort of broke it. It's enough with two living Lorelai's and one dead, so I named her Julia Lorelai."

Silence took over. She didn't know what to say. A doctor came in to check on Jess' vitals, humming to himself, and leaving without giving her any hope to hold on to.

"You're really going to…?"

"Die? Yeah, I'm afraid so."

"Are you scared?"

"Not as much as I thought I would be." he said contemplatively. "To die will be an awfully big adventure."

"I never had you pegged for a Peter Pan-man." she chuckled.

"You kidding? Peter Pan was my hero when I was little. I waited for him every night when I just wanted to get away. Liz had another boyfriend, and there would be screaming and anger, and I just wanted him to come and take me to Neverland. I'm thinking of bribing death into letting me into Neverland by the way."

She smiled at him. He was so brave, or at least he tried to be. He could still joke about death, and he could still make her smile.

"How's that working for you?" she asked.

"I'm thinking I could claim to be a Lost Boy back from vacation. If that doesn't work I'll just force him to read The Fountainhead until he gives in."

"Death is a he?"

"And butt-ugly."

They both laughed.

Later that day she called her mom and Luke, telling them what had happened and saying she would be staying a couple of days. She had tried to talk to the doctor, and after a lot of persuasion he had caved in and told her that things weren't looking good. Jess would be lucky to have a week. When she broke the news to her mother, Lorelai wanted to take the entire family to Philadelphia, but Rory declined. She didn't think Jess wanted a big wake at his bedside. After all, he called her, only her. He hadn't even called Luke, or his mother. Rory promised she would be back soon, and she told them that she'd give Jess their love and support.

They had a good couple of last days. She drank coffee, and told him about Julia, Stars Hollow, her work and books she had read. He listened mostly, sometimes chiming in with anecdotes of his own. Matt had finally made them cave in, and they were opening the Cedar Bar Redux in a month.

"Thank God I probably won't be around." he joked. "I have no idea how I could agree to Cedar Bar Redux. I kick my ass over it still."

She didn't feel quite comfortable with him talking so easily about death, but she tried to focus on keeping him happy, keep him from thinking too much about the pain, because she knew that he was in pain. She convinced him to let her take a photo of him, she confessed to not having any left of him, and he reluctantly agreed to one photo, the one that would be the last.

One evening, just when she was about to go to sleep in a bed next to his, she heard him whisper from the darkness.

"Rory? Can you come here?"

She got out of bed and tiptoed over to his side.

"What is it Jess?"

"Could you… I don't want to be alone."

He sounded scared. Carefully, she crawled in under his covers. He wrapped his arms around her, and she could hear his heart beating violently.

"Jess, what's the matter?"

"I'm… I'm scared."

"Is something wrong? Should I call the doctor?"

"No, I'm just so scared. I can feel it coming closer and closer every day, and I'm in a fight I can't win here. I thought I could do this alone. I told Matt and Chris not to come visit me. I didn't tell Liz, or Luke. I didn't call Jimmy, and up until a couple of days ago I had no thought of calling you, and then… I just did. I wanted someone here, and you were the first to pop up in my mind."

He was definitely fighting something, although Rory suspected that right there and then it was the tears. She crept closer, gently stroking his face, his hair, repeatingly whispering:

"I'm here…"

Within ten minutes he was fast asleep.

She woke up from Jess tugging at her arm.

"What is it?" she asked sleepily.

The look on his face, that seriousness mixed with a sense of eerie calm caught her, and she sat up straight. Suddenly, it dawned on her.

"No…" she begged. "Please, not yet…"

He smiled, a faint smile. A couple of tears were running down his face, but his gaze was calm.

"It's time." he whispered.

Had she been able to physically hold him back from dying she would have. As it was now, it was impossible. She bent down over him, giving him a soft kiss on his lips, feeling how he kissed her back.

"Wait for me, will you?" she told him. "Wait for me in Neverland."

A nod, and then he was gone. Tears were running down her face now, too, and she called in the doctor. They turned off all the machines that had been hooked up to him, and left her alone to take farewell. As soon as the door had closed, Rory broke down in sobs, crying into his damp hospital pajama, feeling the warmth of his body disappearing. Her Jess was gone.

When she returned home, Lorelai and Luke understood what had happened. Julia spent a week with Emily and Richard to let Rory deal with the situation. She held a short wake for Jess, with only a handful of people present. She didn't cry, she knew she couldn't. He would never have wanted her to. And she knew he was okey. He was in Neverland, with all the other Lost Boys. Her own Lost Boy had returned home.

"Mommy?"

"What?" Rory said, returning from her memories.

Her daughter had taken the photo from her, and was now studying it hard.

"Was he my daddy?"

The question almost broke her heart. She knew she should tell her daughter the truth, that her father was alive, but didn't know she existed because Rory had chosen not to tell. But then again, what did it matter? Julia was her daughter, through and through, not a trace of Logan visible in her appearance. Rory swallowed hard.

"Yes honey. Jess was your daddy. And mommy miss him very much."

Her daughter came over and nuzzled up against Rory.

"I miss daddy, too."

Rory had to blink hard not to have tears running down her face. She once again took the photo her daughter was holding, and looked at it. She had a piece of him left. Even if Julia wasn't Jess' child, he was still there somehow, to look after her, to keep her on her feet, to remind her of him. Her Dodger.