Summary: For every man in her life, Lorelai has fallen in love with a flower. And whenever that man disappeared, that flower was banned from the Gilmore house, never to be seen again. After Max, she hated daisies; after Christopher, she could not bear to see red roses. When Luke is alone in his apartment one November thirty-first, surrounded by pressed flowers and memories, what will he discover?

Author's Note: I have learned that if I post the first chapter of a story before the entire thing is finished, then I lose interest and abandon it. Therefore, I have this entire story completed, and I wait only for reviews in order to post it. So read and review!

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Rain lashed the windows in wind-driven bursts, each frigid gust shattering a thousand crystal water droplets against the immovable pane of glass that looked out of the dark apartment into the gray gloom of the outside world. The streets of Stars Hollow were completely obscured by the weeping sky, by curtains of rain that shivered and rippled, distilling the image of the quiet town and breaking it up into a shower of mirages that fell and glittered like shards of shattered glass.

Luke Danes stood hunched before the battered window, hands hidden in his pockets, shoulders hunched, head bowed in the very image of melancholy. Half-lidded eyes glared out at the world with a gaze that might once have been hateful, but now carried only a beaten-down weary resignation, and the faintest gleam of regret. With a heavy sigh, Luke reached up and removed the blue baseball cap that perched backwards on his head, twisting it around his calloused fingers, hiding the brown skin underneath the deep turquoise, fancying to himself that it looked as though he had plunged his fingers into a fragment of the sky.

Shaking his head to clear it of such useless and gloomily poetic thoughts, he turned his back to the shuddering curtains of rain, forgetting the town that slept quietly amid the storm and narrowing his world until it contained only the darkness before him, the mahogany shades of walls that had been in shadow too long and soaked up the lack of light, so that even if the sun were to suddenly burst forth from between the clouds, the room would remain as dark as it had ever been.

With a grunt that might have been a muttered curse, Luke crossed the room in three powerful strides, standing and glaring at the glazed and shimmering glass panel on the door, where the words he saw every day were reflected back at him in reverse. A grim smile touched his lips as the thought occurred to him; that today was a reversal, a mirror image, a twisting and turning inside-out of his comfortable universe. It was a day when the sun was darker and harsher than the night could ever be; a day when all that should have been right made him ill, a day when the deep love and respect he had always felt for his father turned into a kind of hatred, a sharp pain of desertion that had not been dulled by time.

In a sudden flare of unreasoning anger, he turned his back on the door, his eyes falling upon the calendar pinned to the opposite wall; below a picturesque whirlwind of golden red and lustrous brown that twisted itself into the word November, there lay a slow progression of numbered days, each one with a methodical slash slicing through it; each one except for the very last, where a red glare leaped out at him where he had thrown the marker at the small black 30 that burned into him across the sable room.

Fine. His lip curling into a disgusted sneer, he stalked over to the calendar and slammed his fist against the insolent mosaic of fall. Fine. I don't need him. I don't need any of them. I never have, and I never will. The calendar folded under this furious assault, fluttering down to the floor to lay there like a slaughtered bird, a reminder of all that he dared not contemplate, of all that he hated to remember. With a half-voiced snarl of uncontrolled rage, Luke smashed his foot into the wall, dealing it a vicious blow; when it refused to bend, he slammed his fists into the wood, again and again, until he felt sure his knuckles were bruised and bleeding, and there were splintering cracks in the wood where his hammering had broken through.

Teeth clenched, shoulders stiff with an insane rage, at the world, at himself, at the calendar that dared to remind him of his hidden pain and the unbreakable procession of Time that had brought the fateful day around once again, he smashed one scratched and bloodied fist into the wall again; haunted with the vague notion that if he could break the inflexible wood, punch through the unreasoning barrier, than maybe he could also break through the claustrophobic continuation of day and night and night and day, break through the laws of the universe and return to a day when it was not raining, a day when the very air around him was not stained with shadows, a day when every breath did not cause a searing pain in his heart, a day that was not the thirtieth of the November; a day that was not dark.

Withdrawing his fist to continue his ruthless punishment of his apartment wall, Luke was distracted by a soft thump, the sigh of ruffled pages, the undetectable vibration of something hitting the dust-covered floor. Glancing up, he noticed the shelf that had been nailed by his own hands to the wall just above him, and realized that his constant pounding must have knocked some disused knickknack from its perch to lie in tarnished glory on the floor. Face twisting into a scowl, he took the two steps away from the wall with a childish stamping of his feet, an irrational rage taking hold of him that demanded he show his spiteful anger to the world. Peering intently through the gloom cast by the drawn curtains, he barely managed to make out a dim glimmer of golden words, the vague shape of a book lying at his feet; and then, once he had distinguished it from the surrounding dust, he had to fight hard not to simply kick the stupid thing against the wall for daring to disturb him.

Finally, after a few moments of silent struggle, he bent down and picked up the errant book, cradling it surprisingly gently in his large hands, hands that were more accustomed to clenching the hilt of a hammer than to riffling through the delicate pages that now lay open before him, strangely inviting in their crisp white smoothness. Wonderingly, almost breathlessly, he allowed his fingers to roam across the gleaming pages, tracing the words as though he were blind, as though he had been dazzled at the sight of a thing so beautiful and so serene intruding on his day of violent grief.

His unreasoning rage soothed by this unexpected sight, the heat that flushed his skin cooled by the frigid pages, Luke allowed his scowl to fade, to be replaced by an almost childlike fascination, a need to touch and look and taste the world around him, a need to rediscover what he had lost in the storms and rages that battered his weary mind for unbroken hours. He turned the book over in his hands, absorbing it, admiring it; closing the pages, he glanced at the front cover, his expression of wonderment fading as he caught sight of the golden words that gleamed up at him from the darkness.

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A/N: The next four chapters or so deal with each of Lorelai's boyfriends. These are not in chronological order; instead, they are in roughly decreasing order of seriousness and required wallowing-time. There are two stories going on here; one in normal type, which is the present, and several scenes in italics. These are fictional flashbacks that I made up. There will be a note at the beginning of each chapter telling when the flashbacks are supposed to have taken place.