A/N- This was partially inspired by Unwritten.25's For You I Will. The idea of Ace vs. Rory just sparked it all off...
Also, some credit is due to watram who has been helping me to compile a List of Reasons Why Lit. Many of those reasons have found their way into this fic, and were it not for that, this would be a far poorer story. Now enjoy, and review if you want to see aftermath!
Let Me Hear Your Balalaikas Ring Out
She hasn't been able to stop thinking about him since he left the night before. Actually, if she's honest, she hasn't really been able to stop thinking about him since the very first moment their lips met, in a secret tryst behind the Independence Inn so many years ago... but honesty, painful honesty, has always been his thing, not hers, and she doesn't want to start thinking too hard about this, about him. If she does that, she will have to be honest with herself, and something in her knows that's too dangerous. She doesn't quite know why, but she doesn't want to think too hard about that, either, because that would be dangerous, too.
An involuntary smile creeps onto her face when she walks out of the mansion and sees him standing in the driveway, tossing rocks at her window. He starts when the door opens, but upon seeing her, he grins. "What are you doing?" she asks.
"I didn't know if it was okay to knock or not," he mock-whispers. Rory can't help but think that it's kind of sweet, how he's managed to pass off something that could be construed as a romantic gesture as no big deal.
"She's not here," she assures him. "She's playing bridge tonight."
Jess looks her over, and inside he cringes just a little. She looks like a bland society girl, none of the vivacious, quirkiness that he was so drawn to when they were younger. The sick part, though, is that he knows that underneath this façade, she's still his Rory. He caught glimpses of it last night, moments when the too-polite, wealthy mask slipped away. It was there the first moment she saw him at the end of her driveway, that special little smile he liked to think she reserved just for him. It was there in her excited ramblings as she gazed down at the cover of his modest little novel. The girl he loves is still in there. But she's lost her way, and he hopes that tonight he'll find a way to remind her.
"I parked on the street so she wouldn't see."
Rory can't help but smile. "You're very good at covert ops," she says.
"Years of practice," he shrugs off, thinking of a scruffy teenager shoplifting cameras in New York. He brushes away the memory. "So where do you wanna go?"
"I don't know, I don't know the area that well," Rory tells him.
"You live here!" he says incredulously.
She shrugs, a little embarrassed. "I know, but Hartford's still a mystery; even when I went to Chilton, I just got right on the bus and headed home, so I don't even have any old high-school hangouts to revisit." She was always in such a rush to get home because she wanted to see him. What good was exploring Hartford without Jess? "And these days I've mostly just been eating here."
"Well, I'd just prefer somewhere that doesn't have food in the title."
"Meaning?"
"Olive, chili, soup. No gardens, no plantations."
It's such a Jess thing to say that she's tempted to laugh. She suppresses the urge, though, because it's a kind of laughter she hasn't felt in months- free and wild and unrestrained- and of all people, it shouldn't be him who makes her feel so whole and right, not when her boyfriend doesn't really even make her smile anymore... Rory has to stop that thought cold, because she knows the conclusion it leads to. It's a conclusion she's come to many, many times over the last two and a half years, and it's just too painful to think of anymore. So instead of dwelling on it, she simply says, "Got it. Something... funkier."
"Steer me to the college district, I'll find us something funky," he tells her. He wants to show her the world he lives in, the bohemian underground full of colorful persons and hole-in-the-wall hangouts. It was the kind of thing she would have loved once upon a time, the kind of world he always imagined her inhabiting... maybe with him, if he was incredibly lucky. Something funky might be a good setting to remind her of who she's supposed to be. Who she has to be, if he's going to keep his sanity. Over the last year, the one thing he's become absolutely certain of is that he loves Rory Gilmore wholly and completely. His life has other constants now, it's true, but that's the biggest one, the one tucked closest to his heart. If she slips away any further, she might completely lose who she used to be, and the idea makes him feel nauseous. Growing up shouldn't change your personality.
"Sounds good," Rory replies, loving the idea of going somewhere new and interesting and so wildly different from anywhere she would go normally. That was always the way with Jess- he opened up her horizons. Even in the smallest of things, he was always bringing a fresh perspective to what she had previously thought to be a universal constant. And that's the danger- though so similar in so many ways, in others they're vastly different. She is steady, thinking out every step before she takes one, and he plays the hands of chance repeatedly. In that regard, they are polar opposites. And everyone knows what is said about opposites...
Before she can finish that thought, though, the light whirr of a familiar engine interrupts them. Logan, of course, choses exactly the wrong moment to come home. As he leads her away, she's tempted to shrug away the arm he slings protectively, heavily around her shoulders.
Perhaps if she had, the misplaced infidel's guilt she felt along with Jess' eyes would have been shrugged away as well. But she didn't.
They go out. They do not go somewhere funky. Instead, they go to the same damn pub they go to every damn night. Logan is not polite. Jess and Logan have an innuendo-filled exchange regarding the length of his... novel. Rory all but smells the testosterone in the air, and can't help but wonder if the look in Jess' eye is about his own pride... or if, by some sickly ironic miracle, it's for her.
She feels guilty when she has to confess that she hasn't yet read The Subsect. She started it, but sleep overcame her and she hadn't been able to keep her eyes open long enough to finish.
Jess has finally had enough. He tried to put up with all of Logan's jibes in the hopes that eventually the blonde asshole would pour enough alcohol into himself to warrant a trip to the men's room, leaving Jess an opportunity to speak to Rory freely. But there is only so much he's willing to endure, even for her.
To his relief, she follows him out of the bar.
"Jess, wait! Jess, I'm sorry," she stutters out.
"I shouldn't have done this," he says bluntly.
Rory needs to apologize. "He's just... in a bad way lately..." Except that it's not just lately. She's seen him get this way before, and she chose then to ignore it because that was easier.
"He's a jerk!" Jess insists.
"He was. In there, definitely." And also to Marty- her friend Marty!- and when he organized a highly embarrassing interruption of Professor Bell's philosophy class when she was giving Anna from Chilton the tour of Yale, and a whole host of other times...
"I read that guy the second I saw him. I should've begged off."
The idea makes Rory sad. "Well, I didn't want you to!"
"He better not come out here!" Jess says harshly. He wants her to know that, even for her sake, there's only so much he's going to take lying down. He's already let his self-esteem go to hell for her once.
She has to justify this. She has to make it okay. She's not sure why it's so important that Jess approve of this relationship when her own mother's opinion really didn't matter that much, but it is. "Please, Jess, he's had a lot to drink, he's tired from traveling. This isn't him, I swear."
He recognizes her attempt to justify this pathetic excuse of a boyfriend, and it infuriates him. "What the hell's going on?" he demands harshly.
"I told you, he's... he's tired," Rory stutters out, her argument already losing steam. "And his family's been bugging him right now..." It's a pathetic attempt at avoiding what he really means, and they both know it.
"I mean with you. What's going on with you?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean! I know you! I know you better than anyone!" Rory has to look away as he says it, because the terrifying thing is that it might be true. "This isn't you!"
"I don't know," she says, defensive.
"What are you doing? Living at your grandparents' place, being in the DAR, no Ya- why did you drop out of Yale?"
His tone is disgusted, and it irritates her. Who does he think he is? What gives him the right to judge her for dropping out? It's not like his track record is any better. But his tone isn't just disgust, and the disbelief underneath it scares her. Has she really changed that much?
"It's complicated!" she bluffs, her head spinning as she scrambles to find a reason, any reason, to give her current lifestyle validity.
"It's not! It's not complicated!"
"You don't know!" she asserts.
"This isn't you! You going out with this jerk? With the Porsche? We made fun of guys like this!"
It terrifies her to realize that he's right. He's right and she, for once, is wrong, and it makes her angry. Angry that he's judging her. Jess, who she never in their entire acquaintance ever judged her, is pointing the finger. "You caught him on a bad night-" she begins, the volume of her voice rising as her emotions begin to spin out of control.
"This isn't about him!" Jess exclaims, gesturing wildly, desperate to make his point. "Okay? Screw him! This is about you! What's going on with you? This isn't you, Rory. You know it isn't. What's going on?"
She just stares in the face of his unblinking gaze, unable to say a word.
Finally, Jess sighs and looks away, shaking his head. "You're not the same," he says quietly.
And it's too much. Everything he's said is hitting a little too close to home for her comfort and it scares her and all these unnamed emotions are exploding inside her and she's not sure how to process them all, so she latches onto one that comes easily, because it was already near the top- anger.
"Of course I'm not the same!" she shouts. "How could I possibly be the same anymore? Everything changed, Jess. My whole world flipped upside-down and I had to go with it or I was gonna go crazy! How do you recover? How do you fix a broken heart? Tell me that! I don't need you standing here and pointing fingers at me! That's just too much. You don't just get to flit in and out of my life whenever you feel like it and just expect everything to be exactly the same as when you left! You always do that, you always pop in, drop some kind of bomb into my life, and then run away again, and I'm tired of it!"
Her anger is spent and the volume of her speech drops down to a normal level. "Of course I'm not the same. How could I be?" Her voice breaks with the unshed tears in her eyes. "How can I be Rory if there's no Jess?"
It's not a punch-in-the-gut feeling that Jess experiences; that's too cliched. It's something equally airless, though, in the silent eternity after the words tumble unexpectedly out of her mouth. He has no idea how to interpret them, but they're simultaneously painful and a source of hope.
The tears in Rory's eyes suddenly spill over and she claps a hand over her mouth. "I didn't mean to say that out loud," she whispers through her fingers. Her other arm wraps around her torso in an attempt to shield herself from some unknown foe.
Jess lets out a heavy breath, not quite a sigh but something like it. "Come here," he says quietly, opening his arms to her.
She hesitates on the verge for an instant and knows that the point of no return wasn't when she blurted out that deep truth. It's right here, right now, in this second when she can chose between finally getting to be the one who walks away and... Jess. This is one of those defining moments in her life, and for perhaps the first time, she actually recognizes it as it comes around. And so she pauses a moment in the suspended seconds before the plunge, savoring the choice. And then she flings herself into his arms, tears flowing uninhibited down her face.
He just holds her close, letting her cry on his shoulder as he rubs her back a little awkwardly. Finally the tears stop, but she doesn't look up. She just stands there in his arms with her face pressed into his shirt. Quietly, she begins to speak. "Every time you left, it was so hard, Jess. It was like everything got claustrophobic and the whole world was just shaking its head and saying "I told you so" and I couldn't breathe. And then there was Dean, and I thought it would be good, that he would fill the hole, but it wasn't and he didn't. It wasn't right. And then there was Logan and then there was Logan's father and everything he said about... about me not being good enough. And then there was the yacht and the jail and I just couldn't take it anymore."
"And here you are."
"And here you are," she says, the words given significance as she finally looks up into his eyes. "Everyone else has said the same things to me. But it makes sense from you. It always makes sense from you."
It's too much, too fast, Jess knows. And if he doesn't stop her soon, she'll surely say or do something she'll regret tomorrow. So he puts a finger to her lips to prevent her from saying anything else. "I know," he says quietly. "I know what you mean." He gives her a gentle squeeze, reassuring her again. "I have to go."
Rory feels panic flood her and her fingers, which somehow became wrapped around the collar of Jess' jacket, clamp down, terrified that after all that's been said, he's just going to disappear again.
But he just laughs. "I have to get back to Philly, but I'll be in contact. Promise, okay? Luke's got my number and address if you want them. We can get caught up at a better time."
"Okay," she says, forcing her fingers to unclench.
Jess looks at her for a long moment, debating kissing her but ultimately deciding against it. He doesn't need to complicate things any more than they are at the moment. She's got plenty to sort through for now. But she takes the decision out of his hands when she leans in and presses a soft kiss to his lips.
It's short and almost chaste, but it's also beautiful and a little bittersweet. Two sets of lips that have been kept apart for far too long meeting again cannot be reunited completely innocently. After a second, she pulls back and rests her forehead against his.
"Jess," she breathes in.
"Rory," he breathes out.
Their names mingle and Jess sees what she meant. Somehow, it's become impossible to imagine one without the other. Two names, two lives, two hearts that have somehow gotten so tangled together that an attempt to separate them could only cause a horrible snarl in the weave. It didn't break it, and they're still breathing in tandem. It's undefinable, this thing between them, but he doesn't care. He doesn't want to define it. He just wants to know that maybe, finally, he can have her heart.
"We must look like idiots standing here," she says eventually.
"Don't care," he responds.
"We've got to move eventually."
'Don't want to,' is the first response that comes to mind, but he has to. He really does have to get back to Philadelphia. "I've got to go, but we'll keep in touch."
Rory smiles, and it feels like it fits on her face. She doesn't know what any of this means, but she doesn't need to. It's Jess. That's all she needs to know. The rest will take care of itself. His arms fall away, and she feels cold, but he gives her a reassuring look. "Talk to your mother," he tells her firmly.
She nods, and then he's walking away. This time, though, she knows he's coming back. She turns around and marches back into the bar, fight face on, suddenly rejuvenated and ready to take on the enormous task of overhauling her life. Beginning with Logan Huntzberger...
A/N2- I'm not a huge fan of the ending line(s), but other than that, this might be the coolest thing I've written. I love this one, I won't lie to you. Enjoy!