Title: Others' Mistakes
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Summary: AU. Jess is a goody-two-shoes Gilmore. Rory is a bad-girl Mariano. Everything else proceeds as planned. Set in early season two.
A/N: Ooh. My first AU in a while. I like it. I hope you do too. More to come very soon.
Rated: T 'cause I like expletives.
October 8, 1984
Jimmy Mariano leaned against an outside hospital wall, a cigarette dangling from his fingers. His wife of four months was inside, sprawled on a bed, screaming. He'd tried to be helpful to her; he'd rubbed her back, gotten her ice, everything her older brother had told him to do. But it wasn't enough, and he'd gotten kicked out of the room.
Jimmy shook his head. What kind of life was this? He'd only known Liz for ten months, just long enough to fall in love and then back out again, just long enough to get her pregnant. They'd only gotten married because Liz's older brother had found out about the pregnancy, and threatened Jimmy's life if they didn't get married.
He didn't think it would last long, though. As a matter of fact, he had a sneaking suspicion that the second he saw the baby, he was going to run like the wind in the opposite direction.
Christopher Hayden was bored.
He'd been watching Quincy earlier, but that had bored him as well, so he was currently throwing a tennis ball against the glass wall of his parent's pool house. He knew that he would be in deep shit if the ball were to penetrate the wall, where it would most likely bounce into the water below and splash his older sister, currently pretending to write a paper at a table poolside.
But since he was only throwing the ball gently, he didn't really think that was going to happen. Instead, he figured he would throw the ball about twenty more times, before finally becoming totally bored out of his mind, at which point, he would return to his room and try to call his girlfriend, who was currently pregnant and demanded nightly phone calls from the one who impregnated her.
Dr. Cutty swiftly traveled from one bed to the next, hardly believing what had transpired. On the one day he had the ward to himself, with a promise that every mother-to-be was far enough from delivery to not make any difference, he had not one, but two deliveries impending. First, from Lorelai Gilmore, who had shown up in the emergency room three hours ago, scared and parent-less, refusing to go back to her parents' doctors; second, from Liz Mariano, a visiting New Yorker, who refused to go to the hospital in Stars Hollow, which was too small for her taste.
"Ten centimeters," he declared, coming from between the knees of one girl and discarding his gloves before sliding over to the next. His second nurse placed a new pair of gloves on him, allowing him to sigh and announce, again, "Ten centimeters dilated." He threw off his gloves and placed his hands on the knees of the girl in front of him. "Get ready to push," he said, and then glanced at the other girl. "Both of you."
Liz had no idea what was happening. The girl in the bed less than ten inches away from her seemed to be in her same predicament, however. Luckily, though there was a shortage of obstetricians, there was a surplus of anesthesiologists, and Liz could feel nothing from the waist down, and barely felt lucid from the waist up.
Of course, that could have been the quart of wine she'd devoured during dinner with her father and older brother, and not the epidural.
Either way, she didn't like the word "push". That meant work. And work was one thing Liz Danes Mariano absolutely could not stand.
Lorelai Gilmore stared at the man at the end of her bed, scared out of her fucking mind. Her words, too. Those words just kept floating through her mind, in the air in front of her eyes, coming out of others' mouths. She wasn't entirely sure what all this "giving birth" entitled - the most she could tell you was what she'd learned from TV and movies, and she figured that most of that was outrageous lies.
She glanced at the woman in the bed next to her. Her eyes were half-closed with pleasure, and she looked remarkably like Lorelai had seen her friends look during pot-filled evenings. Lorelai wondered if that was the anesthesia doing that. Her anesthesia hadn't worked that well. She wished she could have some of whatever her companion had gotten.
Margaret Smith was new. It was her first day at work. Unfortunately, she was an obstetrics nurse. And there was only one obstetrician on work tonight. And only one other nurse. And two impending deliveries.
Marge felt like the teenager lying in bed next to her. So, feeling akin to the girl, she left Dr. Cutty at the foot of the bed and grabbed the girl's hand.
Lorelai delivered first, and the older, more jaded nurse moved from Liz's side to pick up the child and deposit her under the warming lamp where the babies were cleaned. The nurse glared at Marge, who was beaming at Lorelai and squeezing her hand.
Dr. Cutty snapped the nurse back to attention, and she ran back to Liz's side, where Liz quickly delivered. The doctor neglected to announce the sex of either child, which neither mother thought strange, one being supremely inebriated and the other being extremely frightened. The older nurse deposited the second child next to the first and then responded to a page, rushing from the delivery room on Dr. Cutty's heels, downstairs to the emergency room where a third delivery was impending.
Marge, suddenly alone in the delivery room, moved to the warming lamp and began cleaning the babies off. Unfortunately, she had been paying no attention, and didn't know which child belong to which mother. And there was a significant difference between the two - namely the sex.
Flustered and suddenly worried, Marge picked up the now clean infant boy and laid him on Lorelai's chest, before doing the same with Liz and the little girl.