A/N: Nothing is mine. Title from the Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam song.
It takes Luke about thirty seconds into the wedding to figure out something's up, even with the morning-long, wedding-superstition observance creating a decent buffer for her and Mom to un-puffify their faces and wipe their eyes, and stumble through the worst of the shock-stilted questions.
But she's running on maybe an hour's worth of sleep and (painfully) decaf coffee and three sprinkle donuts, and she keeps moving her hands over the front of her dress (the chiffon light under her fingers but is it tighter than it was last week?), and she knows Luke sees something in her eyes, that her ragged exhaustion isn't just from a late-night elopement and playing time-manager to her mother all day.
Rory manages to avoid his questioning looks during all of the ceremony and most of the reception, until he catches her by the dessert table with the fancy Mallomars arrangement.
"You okay?" His tie's loose and rumpled, and he's still got icing left under his chin from when her mom tried to shove a slice of cake into his mouth. He seems so happy, and Rory feels her stomach drop for the millionth time that she's got an baby-shaped anvil teetering on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. "You look -"
"Full of cake?" she supplies. "I am, by the way. How did Mom convince you to have five? That's impressive, even for her."
Her weak jokes don't land. Luke just stares at her harder.
"You look something. Don't know what, but something."
Rory stays quiet and grinds the toe of her ridiculously tall pumps into the grass (are her feet swelling already?), knowing her expression is radiating unhappiness but unwilling to stop it. The entire last year has been a highlight reel of her selfish decisions, an uncontrollable spinout into the Worst Choices Ever, and she just racked up another that morning by telling her mother about the pregnancy on her wedding day. Luke is number two on the list of people She Should Absolutely Not Tell For At Least Another 12 Hours, and she doesn't intend to cross his name off too.
Seeming to recognize the patented Gilmore pout, Luke sighs. "Look - you wanna dance?"
The question catches Rory totally off-guard. She was expecting some more needling, at least, or maybe an awkward hug or another plate of food pushed in her direction. They hadn't done any sort of traditional father-daughter dance; Luke had grumbled to her mom about not wanting the attention, but Rory had caught his sympathetic expression when she'd turned away.
In the space of her silence, Luke offers his hand. She takes it, glad for the unacknowledged detente, and follows him onto the dance floor as Lane cues up a song with a sweet 3/4-time piano. Luke moves them into a waltz and Rory follows along, happy to drift while he does the heavy lifting. Over his shoulder, she spots her grandmother trying to escape what looks like Kirk monologuing by the punch bowl; Sookie puttering around a last, still imperfect tray of hors d'oeuvres; Jess and April with their heads bowed together, laughing over a shared iPhone.
So many people left to disappoint.
The song shifts into a Sinatra standard, and Luke stills them until they're mostly just moving on the spot.
He takes a deep breath. "Rory, you know you can tell me anything, right? Or not. Whatever you want. Just - if you decide you want to, I'm here. And I promise I won't start ranting, no matter what it is."
At the quirk of Rory's eyebrow, he adds: "Okay, I probably will, but I won't mean most of it, I swear."
"Luke," she sighs, "this is your day. This is yours and Mom's happy day, and I don't want to make it about my stuff."
"Seriously Rory, is everything okay?" He squints at her, real concern in his eyes for the first time. "I don't care what day it is, if something's wrong and we can help you -"
"No, Luke, I -"
"Is it about a job? Did you lose a job? Or Peter - Paul, I mean Paul. Did that bozo do something? Oh god, you're sick. Are you sick?"
He's full-on panicking now, voice starting to rise, and the part of her that would normally find a Luke Danes freak-out funny gets pushed aside fast by the desperate worry that's lining his face.
"Luke! No, it's not about a job, and Paul already broke up with me so it's definitely not about him, and no, I'm not sick. Don't worry."
"Oh thank god," he exhales, relieved. "Well, if you're healthy and okay, then it's none of my business. But I mean it - you let me know if you ever want to, y'know, talk."
Then he just looks at her, smiling that resigned little half-smile that pretends to say I'm enduring your craziness but really is all affection. And suddenly her secret doesn't feel so much like a mutual burden to be shouldered but news she wants to share. (Rory knows she's going to keep it - she's known since the conversation with her father, after sleepless hours running through her choices, Googling clinics and adoption agencies and first trimester symptoms.) And on a separate but much more important list of People I Want to Tell About My Pregnancy, Luke is still second from the top. It surprises her a little, actually; there's Lane and Sookie and Logan, who she clearly needs to deal with at some point, but after her mom, it was Luke she thought of next.
Well, maybe it's not that surprising. Christopher may be her father, but Luke is her dad.
Impulsively, Rory leans forward on her tip toes, feeling 12 instead of 32, and whispers into his ear. By the time she pulls back his face has gone slack in surprise, his grip on her hand and waist like a vice.
"Luke?"
"Pr-pregnant?" He looks like he can barely get the word out. "You're really ... pregnant?"
"Apparently."
Luke's brow creases like he's trying to tally up receipts from the last two centuries.
"Was it, uh -"
"Not planned, nope." Rory shrugs, faux-cavalier. "Not at all in the plan."
"What does, uh, Paul think?"
She feels her face fall. This is the part she dreads; explaining her scared, stupid choices and waiting for Luke's face to change, too.
"It's, um, it's not Paul's baby."
Luke's eyebrows practically hit his hairline in surprise, but he mercifully swallows back the next obvious question. Instead, he starts moving his feet as the song changes again, swaying just enough to ward off attention from Miss Patty and Babette.
"Wow - uh, this is - wow." He shakes his head, still fumbling through the shock. "Are you ..?"
"Happy? I think so," she says, cautiously. "I mean, I'm decided, for what it's worth."
That seems to steel Luke's nerves, and he squeezes her hand.
"Whatever you need," he says, firm and serious, looking her straight in the eye. "You know that, right?"
"I know." She does know, and it makes everything a little easier, though the idea of curling up in her old bed and letting her mom and Luke take care of her life is more tempting than she wants to admit. "Are you - disappointed?"
"What?" He seems even more shocked by her question than the pregnancy. "Rory, no. Of course not. Not about this - never about this."
"But the menu!" Rory almost wails, surprising herself with the force of her reaction and how much the gentleness of his words undoes her. "You put my New Yorker piece on the back of your menu, and you and Mom are always so supportive, and I just keep jumping from bad choice to worse. I've been flailing since practically college. I mean, who does that? What kind of person takes all these amazing opportunities and, and just wastes them? Just - throws them away? This person right here, that's who."
She's keeping up the pretence of dancing and stage-whispering her panic, but she's still in full-on spin-out mode, nine years of crappy choices and excuses and an impressive dedication to sticking her head in the sand crashing down around her while Luke stares at her, gobsmacked.
"I just keep picking whatever's easiest, because maybe I think I'm less likely to screw up? Or not picking anything at all, and just pretending I know what I'm doing and dressing it up as some romantic adventure. I'm 32 years old, for crying out loud. I shouldn't - I shouldn't be so scared of living my life." She gulps back tears. "I'm so scared, Luke."
Wordlessly, he pulls her into the warm circle of his arms, and Rory exhales ragged little puffs of breaths into the shoulder of his suit jacket. When he steps back, it's to frame her shoulders with his hands, still keeping her close.
"I'm gonna let you in on the big secret of the adult club - we're all scared," Luke says quietly. "I mean, look at your mom and me. We still have trouble talking about the big stuff sometimes, because we're worried it'll scare the other person off or make them upset or whatever other crazy stuff we come up with. And you're not a disappointment, Rory. You just ... have a little growing up left to do. But hell, isn't that all of us? I mean, Jess is the most well-adjusted person in our family, for god's sake. And you've got a plan now, right?"
"License. Book. Apartment. Baby." She laughs a little; it still all sounds so crazy, even boxed into sparse, tidy sentences. "Those are the headlines, at least."
"Then you're good," he says, with conviction. "You have a plan and you have us."
This time, it's Rory who throws her arms around him, feeling like it's the silliest, smallest gesture in the world compared to how much her heart is bursting. She may be the centre of her mother's universe, and her grandmother's love is as unmovable as a mountain (like her grandfather's was), and her father loves her imperfectly, as best he knows how, but Luke - she thinks of coffee cake and balloons, mashed potatoes and porch repairs - loves in little, steady ways that remind her she has always it, no matter what.
"You're a great dad, Luke," she whispers to him, and knows by his watery bark of a laugh that he understands she's not just talking about April. "And you're going to be an amazing grandfather."
The most important list, Rory thinks as he covertly wipes his eyes and grabs her hand again, whirling her across the dance floor to where her mom and grandmother and April and Jess and Sookie are waiting, is The People I Will Always Be Grateful For.
And Luke?
He's right at the top of that one, too.