Plans
A/N: This is (currently) a one shot that picks up in the time after Bon Voyage. I'm getting back into writing again after a lengthy break, so more may come of this. But, for now, I hope you enjoy.
It took him a minute to realize that she was gone. He reached for her, but came up empty, his hand falling to rest on the sheet in the usual place she slept. Rolling over to look at the clock he saw that it was a little before 1am, and with a forceful sigh he dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbing them a few times before rolling over and out of bed. He grabbed his t-shirt from the chair in their bedroom, slipped it over his head, and peaked into the bathroom, which was dark and empty.
He took a deep breath, and heading for the stairs he called her name, "Lorelai?"
No answer. Once his mind caught up he realized maybe he shouldn't be as calm as he was. It was the day, after all. They had been doing well, having talked until neither of them wanted to talk anymore, but they kept talking. Kept apologizing, kept taking responsibility, kept promising and most importantly, kept moving forward.
Yesterday was a good day. They pressed each other's buttons just enough, they laughed and kissed and held each other and made lists for the trip they were going to be leaving for today.
"Lorelai?" Luke called again as he made it to the bottom step. He looked into the living room, but she wasn't there. He walked into the kitchen, noticed that the coffee pot had been turned on, but dually noted that she was nowhere in sight. After looking in Rory's room and out the window into the yard, he headed for the front door, his steps a little more urgent, his head a little more scrambled.
Talk. We'll just talk. We'll talk until we don't want to talk anymore, and then we'll talk some more.
Sounds terrible.
It will most definitely be terrible.
But worth it.
It will most definitely be worth it.
"Lorelai?" He was opening the front door, looking for a sign of her.
"Hey." Her voice sounded different. Maybe it was from all the talking, maybe she was finally losing it.
"I was starting to panic." He saw her curled up on the porch swing, coffee in hand. She sat in such a way that made her look smaller than she already was, her eyes looking straight ahead as he walked over to sit next to her.
"Sorry." She wanted to offer him more, but she felt like everything was about to break, and the more words the higher the chance of her falling apart, and she didn't really feel like falling apart. Again.
"It's the dark day." He cleared his throat and placed a soft hand on her knee. He looked at her, but she didn't look at him.
She couldn't look at him.
"Mmhmm." She took a sip of her coffee, nodding wistfully.
"Anything you want to talk about?" He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, lowering his head. He felt her pulling away, pushing him away, and if even for a moment it felt like the walls were closing in on him.
The balance of everything was so fragile, and he didn't know which way to push to make sure that it didn't all come crashing down, especially today. It was only an hour into June 3rd, but if this was any indication he felt that they were in for quite the ride.
"Nope." She wanted him to go back inside. Go back upstairs and go to bed and just let her sulk. Sit on her porch with her coffee and feel sorry for herself and the one year anniversary that they weren't celebrating. She wanted him to go away so that she could sit with her thoughts and be mad and sad and lose her mind over what they could have been doing instead.
In all of their apologies, their contritions, their confessions and heart-breaking words they had exchanged in an effort to put themselves together again, they had not talked about what they had lost in terms of all the plans they had. They talked about missing each other, being regretful, handling things differently, what they would do differently, how they wouldn't lose each other again, but they didn't talk about what their time apart, pushing and pulling at the already stretched seams of their relationship, had torn from them.
Where they could be if somewhere, along the way, everything didn't fall apart. If Humpty Dumpty had never fallen off that wall and was still whole - or maybe if he had just had a little crack instead of being shattered into a million pieces.
"Talk to me. Please, talk to me."
"I'm not upset about June 3rd like you think I'm upset about June 3rd." She swallowed the emotion burning in her throat, shut her eyes tightly and took the last sip of her coffee before putting the cup down on the porch.
"So you're not upset or you are upset just about something else?"
"About something else."
"Should I know what it is? Can we stop talking in riddles?"
She looked over at him, and could feel his frustration, see the physical toll it was taking on him as he started to tap his fingers together, letting out a slow sigh.
"We had plans, Luke. Beyond the wedding and the cake and the dress and the whole pledging our undying love to one another. We had plans."
"Plans are part of all that, aren't they?" He wasn't quite sure that he was following her, but that wasn't necessarily something new. As they tried to untangle the last year of their lives some things got a little jumbled, some conversations didn't quite make sense at first, but slowly they would start to take shape.
"That day that I ran into you with Doula?" Her voice rose a bit at the end to make it a question, and he sat back and looked over to her.
"I remember." He nodded at the memory of them looking sweetly at his niece, and all of the things that moment did and did not hold.
She drew in a deep breath, hoping the air would give her some buoyancy and help her stay afloat. In the vein of openness and communication she decided to keep going, "I walked out of Doose's, and I saw you there with this smile looking down at this little, new, tiny, pink baby."
She hesitated, trying to decide if she was ready for him to really see her in all of her insane, life shattered glory, and he reached over and held her hand, not saying a word, which she took to mean that she should keep going.
"I had this moment. This time stand still, psychotic break. Mental break. Breakdown. Break," she rambled, feeling the tears in her eyes, and his eyes on her, but she ignored both. "I just broke."
"Lorelai," he was starting to feel where this was going, both from her words and the way her entire body curled in on itself, and he could tell that this wasn't some conversation about what fuck ups they had been, this was the conversation about how fucked up they had made everything.
"Something in me, something that I hadn't let break - like the last straw or whatever - it broke. Seeing you there, with the baby, it broke." She could feel the tears on her face, she could feel the moment coming back to her. The moment she had pushed out of her mind as quickly as she could.
"I always thought it was so ridiculous - people saying that time stood still, or that they felt separated from reality or whatever - it seemed so completely ridiculous and then it happened." She gulped for air she didn't know she needed, and Luke reached over and started rubbing her hair gently as it fell in soft curls down her back.
"Hey - look, June 3rd, it sucks. We knew that. If this is too much, if you don't want to talk right now, we don't need to. Don't feel like you'll mess everything up if you need to take a day."
There had been a lot of crying, yelling, sadness and anger over the last few days, but this was different. This was broken. Heart broken, crushed, demolished, torn apart, in a million pieces, broken. He didn't want to push her.
"I walked out and you were there, and I swear to god, Luke, for a minute, just a minute it was like everything stopped. Everything. I had been so used to hurting and all of a sudden I see you standing there and I'm not hurting anymore. I had this overwhelming sense of calm and clarity," she smiled, remembering the moment and the feeling and the quick reprieve it gave her from all the stuff. The big, bad, grown up stuff that she had been dealing with.
Luke leaned over and kissed her temple, soft and sweet and comforting, and she closed her eyes, before shaking her head back and forth, "I thought - there he is. There he is." She laughed.
"Lorelai," he wasn't sure what to say, he wanted her to keep going but she was breaking right in front of him and he didn't know if he would be able to put her back together again when this was all done.
And yesterday had been such a good day.
"Hey, Lorelai," he kissed her again, trying to get her attention, but she opened her eyes again, and the one million broken pieces of Lorelai let the tears take over for a minute. "Let's just table this until tomorrow. Until June 4th." He hoped that the emotions would be a little more muted then, because this was, honestly, scaring him.
"So I see you there, with the baby, everything has stopped, time is standing still, I'm in the middle of a mental breakdown, but I have the clarity to think - hey, all that stuff, the pushing away, the postponing the wedding, the marrying Christopher, all that stuff, it didn't happen. That wasn't reality. You, standing there with the baby - that was reality." Her tears picked up and Luke sat back, leaning his head back and grabbing the bridge of his nose and the incredible broken Lorelai was starting to come together - not in a healing, putting back together the pieces way, but in a he was finally starting to see where this conversation was going way.
"I thought, 'Oh, there's my husband, my Luke, and our baby.' For a minute the entire town, world, whatever, stood still and I thought that everything didn't get so fucked up, and there you were, with our daughter, waiting for me to come out of Doose's. That of course you didn't come in, because a stroller would never fit in there, and she was sleeping, and you offered to stay outside with her so that I could run in."
And that's when he broke with her. That's when he came tumbling down from the wall right behind her, landed next to her broken shell and collapsed into a million pieces himself.
In their talks, in the so sorries and how could we have been so stupids, the plans they made - those things that would certainly have been coming together now, a year to the day after that wedding that never happened - those were never talked about. They were locked away and avoided because no matter how many pieces they were in, no matter how broken they already were, acknowledging the loss of those things and those plans and those adventures - those were the things that would destroy them, and with everything hanging so delicately in the balance, neither wanted to go there.
Until tonight, when, looking at the pieces of Lorelai he realized that beyond the hurtful actions and inactions, was the need to mourn a beautiful life they would never have. Even if they could scrape themselves up and make something beautiful from all the pieces - that life, that original life they had planned, would never happen. They could have a wedding. They could have a baby - but it would be laced with the memories of the last year, of their first attempt at those things and how wrong it all went.
Luke and Lorelai could piece themselves back together, and those pieces could live a happy and full life, but it would be a different life than they would have been living if everything hadn't fallen apart in the first place.
"We had plans, Luke. We talked about them. We had plans." She laughed bitterly, shaking her head and swiping away the tears.
"I remember the plans, Lorelai." He couldn't look at her. He couldn't bring himself to look at her. Feeling it for himself was enough, but seeing her feel it too was too much. He didn't know if there was more of him to break - didn't know if he could reduce to pieces that small.
"We were going to have a family." The word family got stuck in her throat as Luke leaned forward again, elbows on his knees, rubbing his eyes.
"We can still have a family," he tried to assure her.
"We're going to miss out on the third kid."
"What?" He didn't know why, but there was a slight laugh that escaped after the question.
"We were going to start after a month or two - start trying to have a family. We could have a baby by now. Or about to have one. But, instead, we're sitting here trying to figure this all out and trying to figure out what we do next, and in the meantime time is just ticking by, making a complete mockery out of all of our plans."
"Time has a way of doing that." He nodded, suddenly very aware of the quiet house and that it was just the two of them in it. Or on the porch, as the moment would have it.
"Now we have to go do it all again - the figuring out, the proposing or deciding to get married, the getting married, the making new plans, the starting the family - now we're so far behind where we planned on being -"
"We're not that far behind - we can still do whatever we want, Lorelai," he cut her off, then hesitated for a minute. "When you said that we are going to miss out on the third kid - do you mean Rory, April, 3rd kid, or do you mean a 3rd kid between just the two of us? Because I remember being a little unsure about the 3rd kid between just the two of us."
"Between the two of us. And we were -" she swallowed "-we were unsure. But, it was always a possibility - it was a 'we'll have one, then probably have another and after that one, if we still want a third one, we will, and if not, we won't. Maybe it would have never happened, but it was possible."
"Why isn't it still possible?"
"Because, we lost a year. Everything is behind now, and instead of having a family we're trying to string the Ballad of Luke and Lorelai back together, and that third kid is getting farther and farther away. It was a possibility - a choice - one that we probably wouldn't have made, but we could have made it. Now, it's gone." She let herself go for a moment, before finishing, "and what if that kid was the one to cure cancer or something equally miraculous?"
Luke laughed, thankful for her trying to lightening up the conversation.
"I don't want to rule anything out. Third kid, 9th kid, anything."
"I think I'd like to rule out kids 4-9." She laughed, picking up one of the pieces from Lorelai and putting it back together.
"Yeah, probably for the best." Luke laughed, picking up another piece. "I hate this. For us, for the third kid, for the world at large waiting on the miraculous things that third kid may have done."
"I didn't want to talk about this today," Lorelai wiped the last few tears from her eyes and looked across the yard, her eyes coming to rest on the chuppah.
"I'm glad you did." Luke reached over and pulled her to him as she began to unfold, lowering her legs so that they dangled off the swing.
"Luke?"
"Yes Lorelai?"
"Do you still want this -after I showed my cards and admitted to a made for TV movie mental breakdown?"
"I think I may want it a little more, actually."
"Good." She smiled, and he smiled into her hair, placing a quick kiss atop her head as a few more pieces found their way back together.
"We should make some new plans," Luke cleared his throat.
"That would be nice," she sighed, and a few more pieces brought themselves back together.