Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognize from Gilmore Girls

It was two nights before her graduation from Yale that Rory Gilmore decided she'd finally embraced genetics and gone completely nuts. What else could explain the guy that appeared before her as she went from the bathroom to her bedroom? Because he wasn't just there, he'd materialized out of thin air while she watched. She stopped as if hitting an invisible brick wall and gaped at the strange interloper "Whoa -- what? Who are you?"

"I'm the ghost of Christmas future," he said seriously, then ruined it by grinning. "I'm Mike."

Rory wasn't sure whether to stand her ground or lock herself in the bathroom and call for help from the window when this Mike person made the decision for her. "You don't need to hide in the bathroom, I come in peace."

"Excuse me for fearing for my life, but when some strange guy pops out of thin air in my hallway, I have every right to freak out."

"I did not pop."

He seemed mildly irritated but harmless, so Rory took a good look at him. Handsome, possibly a couple years younger than her, blue eyes and a face that looked oddly familiar. "Do I know you from somewhere?" She asked reflexively, to which Mike grinned somewhat smugly. "I'm your brother."

Rory blinked. "I don't have a brother."

"Not yet. Right now I'm but a glimmer in our mother's eye."

"Sure." She was beginning to regret not fleeing to the safety of the bathroom. "And you, what, decided to pull a Marty McFly?"

"Who?"

"You are obviously no brother of mine if you don't know that."

Mike sort of smiled and shook his head. "I'm screwing with you. Of course I know Marty McFly. Back to the Future," he added, sensing her disbelief. "Look, Rory, I didn't just drop in from the future to talk movies. I came to….give you options, I guess."

"What, winning lottery numbers? Cure for cancer? Tell my fortune?"

"Yeah, that last one. Sort of. Can we eat? I'm hungry -- been kind of a long trip."

Okay, Rory, think. Either this guy was a nut who'd broken into her house (but what about the whole materializing thing? Trick of the light, surely) or she was hallucinating. Either way, she figured her best bet was to keep him talking until she could figure out his motives and a plan. "Um, sure. Kitchen's this way." She was careful not to touch him as she passed and cursed Logan with the fire of a thousand suns for being away on a business trip until the next day. "Help yourself," she offered and sat herself at the counter. "So how long a trip?" She asked casually (and more than a little curiously).

"What?" Mike asked, his head in the fridge. Rory repeated her question. "You said it was a long trip. How long?" Mike surfaced with the leftover spaghetti from two nights ago and popped it in the microwave. "'Bout twenty years. How does this thing work?" Rory cocked a brow, then remembered that he was supposed to be from the future, and they obviously didn't have primitive microwaves twenty years from now.

"Okay, so let's say that you're on the level," she began as he tucked into his meal. "What 'options' have you come to give me?"

"I came to tell you not to marry Logan."

She was silenced for a moment from sheer surprise before finding her voice. "Excuse me?"

"He's going to propose this weekend, after your graduation. Say no."

"I-"

"Seriously, Ror," he put the spaghetti aside and leaned on the counter across from her so their eyes could meet. "If you say yes; if you marry him, your life is over." Rory jumped to her feet, still shocked but quickly becoming angry. "I don't know who you are, or how you got in here, but you have no right to dictate my life!" Mike stared at her intently for a second before bursting out in laughter.

"What?!" She demanded. "How is that funny?"

"It's not," he assured her quickly and took a large step backwards. "Don't hit me. It's not funny, it's just so you."

She glared furiously at him for a long minute before crossing her arms. "How do you know he's going to propose?" She asked defensively. Serious again, Mike picked up his abandoned spaghetti. "Because I'm your brother, dummy."

"You realize that I don't believe you, right?"

He rolled his eyes. "Duh. I'm not an idiot, Rory, which is why I brought proof." He dug in his back pocket and pulled out a photograph. She snatched it from him when he offered and hated herself for the surprise she felt upon seeing Lorelai and Christopher's (older) faces grinning back at her from either side of the image of the guy eating her spaghetti. "My eighteenth birthday," he explained. "Hell of a party."

"Get shut down?" She asked begrudgingly, fighting the smile the question came with. He grinned. "Yup. My friends were totally hot for Mom after that. None of theirs ever let them have parties, let alone throw one that the cops shut down."

"The Lorelai Gilmore special," she agreed. "Okay, I'm not saying I believe you at all, but I'm not going to bash you with the pool cue like I planned."

"Good to know. That's why you're my favourite sister -- Gigi would have skewered me first, asked questions later."

"Gigi?" Now that she was over her fear of the guy, this night was becoming ridiculously interesting. Mike nodded with a bit of a grimace. "The difficult child. But I didn't time-travel to talk about sister screw-up, I came to talk you out of throwing your life away on Logan."

"Uh huh, and how would marrying him be the end of my life?"

"Rory, twenty years from now you're not Christiane Amanpour, you're Mrs. Logan Huntzberger."

"Meaning?"

Mike scrubbed a hand through his hair in apparent frustration. "Meaning you made so many sacrifices for him that you lost Rory Gilmore along the way. Just before your marriage you passed up a huge job opportunity because he needed to relocate for work. Two years after that you left your mediocre newspaper job to go on maternity leave and you never went back. Get it?"

"I would absolutely not-"

"But you did, Rory. And you know why? Because Logan wanted his kids to have at least one attentive parent -- like he never had -- and with him away on business all the time, you agreed to stay home for a few years."

Thoroughly indignant now, Rory defended the man she loved. "Logan would never ask me to sacrifice my career for him, and he would definitely not work all the time. His biggest fear is him turning into his father but you make him sound exactly like Mitchum." Mike shrugged and frowned almost sadly. "That's because he is. Mitchum died from a heart attack five years into your marriage and left his empire to Logan."

Rory smiled as a realization hit her: Mitchum was too mean to die. She was listening to this…this illusion as if he were actually her brother from the future. She was probably just overly tired and stressed, and that was causing this daydream. She decided to humour her imaginary brother. "So what happens next?" Mike regarded her suspiciously but continued on. "The kids got older and you felt you'd been out of the game too long to jump back in, so you joined a couple of committees. Broke mom's heart," he shook his head as if to loosen the bad memory. "Now, in my time, I mean, you're a Society Wife in a rocky marriage." Rory snorted at the absurdity of it. "There's no way I would let myself hit bottom like that. That's just not like me."

"People change. You certainly did."

"That was a great story and all, but I just don't believe you. I mean, my mother would never name her kid Mike." He was unoffended and smirked. "They named me after Dad's grandfather; the one who left him all the cash."

"I'd like you to leave now."

"Just promise me that you'll think about it. At the very least, give yourself a long engagement and some time to spread your wings." He started to disappear, causing Rory to blink in disbelief once again. Mike winked at her. "See ya in the future, sis." And then he was gone. Rory closed her eyes and took a deep breath as if to cleanse her mind of the major hallucination she'd just had. When she opened them again, she found herself staring at the glowing numbers on her alarm clock. "A dream," she breathed and rolled over in her bed. "Of course it was just a dream. Mike," she said with a laugh. "Yeah, right." Lorelai would get a huge kick of the whole thing when Rory met her for lunch. When she found the half-eaten spaghetti on her counter, she decided that she must have eaten it before bed and that had caused the whole thing.

When Logan proposed to her after graduation as predicted, the dream cast a shadow over the entire day. She accepted and never told him, of course, but didn't quite know how to explain it away to herself.

When Lorelai and Christopher announced they were expecting a baby in the midst of her wedding plans, Rory felt sick to her stomach.

And when the biggest job opportunity she'd had to date came up ten days before the wedding, Rory told Logan with nothing but dread. He'd been thrilled for her but had regretfully informed her that his job necessitated that they move to Boston. That evening Rory threw up the contents of her dinner before calmly going to Logan's office where he was working late (which Rory objectively took as a glimpse into her future), gave him back the large diamond he'd had made for her, and went home to her mother.