A/N: I always felt like I started Picking Up the Pieces a little too abruptly so I decided to write a prequel of sorts that frames the story. This story begins roughly a week after the events of 6x18: The Real Paul Anka and is completely AU.
Chapter 1: Rory
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked…I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Lavender and pink sunrises greet her over and over as she turns down strange, winding roads. Left. Right. It doesn't matter. There's a feeling of peace here. She doesn't know where she's going or where she's been but she's on her own.
Rory.
His voice is gravelly but soft as he trails searing kisses down her torso. She arches towards him, her hands tangling into his dark hair. He traces words into her skin, a novel taking shape in the curve of her neck—
Gilmore!
She ducks and something goes flying past her head and crashes into the building behind her. It bursts suddenly into a fiery storm, raining bits of debris down on them.
"Move down the street," she shouts to her news team as they run for cover, ducking their heads.
She tugs on her Kevlar, assessing the safest location—
Mommy!
A tiny blonde child reaches for her, her identical blue eyes brimming.
Rory reaches out to pick her up but someone snatches her up before she can.
"You'll muss Mommy's dress," Logan says. He picks up the little girl gingerly and holds her up to Rory. "We have to go now. Can you give Mommy a kiss goodnight?"
The child nods tearfully and plants a kiss on her mother's cheek. "Why do you have to go?" The little girl asks sullenly.
"Daddy's getting an award tonight," Rory explains sweetly, smoothing some of her daughter's hair back.
"And he's going to be late if we don't hurry," he reminds Rory pointedly.
She leans over to give her daughter a kiss goodnight—
Rory's eyes snap open. Confused, she picks her head up off her philosophy textbook.
"Hey Ace, welcome back to the land of the living." Logan treads out of the kitchen, a drink in his hand.
Twisting her neck from side to side to work out the kinks, she stares at him for a moment in sheer disbelief. "How long was I asleep?"
Logan shrugs. "Relax. You've only been out for an hour or so."
Rory frowns, looking down at the notes spread on the table in front of her. "You could've woken me. I have a ton of work to do," she grumbles. She can't really remember her dream anymore but something about it nags the edge of her consciousness, an odd sense of longing for something coupled with an inexplicable irritation at Logan.
"Sorry. You just looked like you needed it. You should get more sleep."
She looks up from the shuffle of notes she was trying to make sense of when she fell asleep. "And you shouldn't drink while on painkillers," she reminds him.
Logan takes another sip from his glass. "I'm fine. I barely took any today. It's just a couple of broken ribs. They don't even hurt that much."
Her face flashes with concern. "Why don't we stay here tonight? Watch a movie or something?"
"A movie?" He says dubiously. "It's Saturday night."
She tugs at the hem of her sweater. "It's just been such a long week. And you're still injured. I thought it would be nice."
"Colin and Finn and I were thinking we could go to New York actually," he proposes.
"Oh," she lets out, disappointed.
"Come with us. I'll get a room in the Plaza and we'll stay the rest of the weekend. Eat champagne and strawberries for breakfast again, do you remember that?"
"Yes, and it was great." She gestures towards her laptop. "But I wasn't in school then. I didn't have paper stuff and homework and I've promised Paris I'll—"
"We'll just go for the night then," he cuts in. "It beats sitting here in the apartment and staring at the TV when we could be clubbing in New York."
She bites her lip. "I don't feel like clubbing."
"Fine." He spits evenly. "Don't come. Stay here and watch a movie."
"Logan—" She attempts to plead.
"Look, you can stay here if you want but I only have a month before my life as I know it is over and I am not going to spend it sitting in my apartment."
"Your life is not over," she sighs with exhaustion.
"It is from where I'm standing," he protests, his voice rising with frustration as he tosses a shirt haphazardly into his suitcase.
"How convenient for you," she mumbles under her breath.
He reels around. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It's an excuse, Logan," she tells him firmly. "It's an excuse you give yourself to go out and get drunk every night and jump off cliffs and…god knows what else."
"So go rat me out to Honor again," he snarls, gesturing wildly. "You can complain about how irresponsible I am and then compare notes on how I drink too much."
She breathes deeply, trying not to get angry. "I never ratted you out to Honor," she answers calmly.
He throws back another sip of whiskey and slams his glass on the table. "Like hell you didn't."
Her face flushes remembering the short but frustrating dinner he stormed out of on Thursday because he couldn't handle Honor lecturing him about his drinking. She'd driven them home in the Porsche biting back retorts the entire way about how Honor's assessment was spot on. "I didn't have to tell Honor anything because it's blatantly obvious. You broke three ribs jumping off a cliff. You can't even go one night without getting completely plastered."
"What the fuck is your problem?" He yells. "Where is this coming from?"
"Are you kidding me?" She spits with disbelief. "You're—"
"You're twenty-one, not ninety," he cuts in scathingly. "I don't know what your deal is lately, but you need to lighten the fuck up."
She flinches, stepping away from him. "Don't talk to me like that," she warns him quietly, but firmly.
Logan zips his suitcase, shaking his head with disgust. "Oh, so I'm not allowed to drink or swear now? What's next? Dancing? Sex?"
She clenches the end of her hair with frustration. "Would you just stop yelling at me?"
He shoulders his bag, striding towards the door. "My pleasure," he calls as he slams it shut behind him.
Rory sinks onto the bed, biting back tears. They've been fighting constantly since he returned from Costa Rica a week ago with three fractured ribs. It's a new, yet ugly turn in a relationship that's been fraught with varying hurtles of difficulty for months now.
"Relationships take work," she remembers Emily lecturing her mother once. "You can't just give up because it's not sunshine and roses every second."
She sighs, wiping her tears with the sleeve of her sweater. She doesn't know what to do. None of her other relationships ever managed to slog through a rough patch for this long. Dean flat out broke up with her, twice, and Jess just took off when things started to unravel.
It's temporary she repeats to herself. It's become her mantra in the last week. Logan's going to graduate soon. He'll take a job with his father and he'll stop drinking so much. He'll be the charming, exhilarating man she fell in love with. She reminds herself of this every morning when she kisses him goodbye on the way to class, smelling last night's scotch on his breath. I chose him. I love him.
And yet…she keeps finding herself staring into space, snapping back to class or the paper or dinner with Logan in a sudden lurch.
She sees a dark head bent towards hers, eager to hear her thoughts, feels a searing kiss against her lips that makes her knees grow weak. Gasps at the fleeting expression of confusion and hurt Jess allowed himself before he steeled himself against her once again.
She's tried all week to push it from her mind. She's thrown herself into her schoolwork, into the paper, initiated sex with Logan with a single-minded intensity.
None of it works. Something is fundamentally wrong but she can't bring herself to do anything about it. Life is full of choices and she made hers. She's an adult now and she can't go about her life constantly changing her mind on a whim. She made her decision and now she has to stick to it.
She notices her overnight bag sitting on the floor next to the closet, Logan must've pulled it out for her earlier, assuming she would come with him. She picks it up, running her hand along the embroidered strap. She went home to Star's Hollow last weekend, trying to sublimate the gnawing guilt she felt over after seeing Jess, and the weekend before that as well, avoiding Logan.
She opens the bag thoughtfully. If she goes home for the third weekend in a row Lorelai and everyone else in town will suspect something's wrong. And yet…she finds she doesn't care.
She craves the comfort of home where her mother will fill the silence with her constant babble and Luke will sympathetically, wordlessly make her pancakes. She'll sit in on Lane's band practice and listen to Taylor lecture someone about littering. She'll help Kirk pare down his resume, which she did promise to do some weeks ago and let Sookie smother her with food.
Decided, she throws some clothes in her bag, scrawls a note to Logan, and takes off into the April night, blaring the Foo-Fighters all the way.
"Mom?" She calls, cracking open the front door.
"Rory?" Her mother pads into the foyer, surprised. "What are you doing home?"
"I have tons of homework," she answers simply, walking through the living room. "I thought I'd come home and do it here, less distractions."
"Well don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see you but—"
She comes to a halt in the kitchen where Luke and April are sitting at the table. April is explaining something to Luke, a pizza crust in her hand.
"—April's staying here for the weekend," Lorelai finishes.
"Hi Luke, April," Rory greets them.
"Hi Rory," April chirps. "Do you have any experience with cell splicing, I'm trying to explain it to Luke."
"Sorry, only in theory."
"That's what I figured," April says, consulting her textbook again.
"I'm sorry, I didn't know you were coming home," Lorelai tries to explain.
"It's fine," Rory assures her mother. "It was spur of the moment thing. I can go back to—"
"You can stay at the diner," Luke suggests. "If you want somewhere quiet to study."
"I wouldn't want to put you out."
Luke waves her off. "I'll be here all weekend anyways. It'll be nice and quiet for you."
"And you can't beat the proximity to pie," Lorelai contributes, eyeing her daughter worriedly. There's something not right about this, something that makes her want to tuck her daughter into bed with a thousand blankets and a box of snack cakes and never let that sniveling little jackass near her ever again.
"No, I guess I can't resist pie," Rory agrees with a weak smile. "I'll stay."
"Great!" Lorelai proclaims. "Sit. Have some pizza. Help April make us feel stupid."
Luke lets her into the apartment later that evening, pulling a set of clean sheets from the closet.
"So um…you need anything else?"
Rory crosses her arms, looking around the room. She hasn't been up here since before she graduated high school. "I'm fine, thank you, Luke."
"Well, goodnight then."
He touches her elbow as he moves past her, a fatherly gesture that makes her smile, and opens the door. He turns, opening his mouth as if he wants to say something but he closes it again quickly, giving her a nod instead before he shuts the door behind him.
Rory sinks against the closed door, staring at the apartment. Maybe she should've gone back to New Haven after all. Standing here, in this room of stolen kisses and broken promises, she feels the farthest thing from comforted. Instead, she's haunted by her high school self.
She flutters past in her Chilton uniform, her hair loose and curly; laughing at Jess's complaints about Kirk; arguing with him about Faulkner; kissing him in nearly every corner of this apartment. She is happy and loose and whole. Her life is simple and measured; her boyfriend finally admitted to liking Bratmobile, she's going to Yale in the fall, and someday she's going to be a foreign correspondent.
The simplicity of her teens seems so far away from her now, she thinks, looking around the apartment. It feels good to be back at Yale again and the paper is going well but yet her goals seem farther out of reach now then they did at eighteen. Proving assholes like Mitchum Huntzberger wrong is going to be a hard road, one that already makes her feel weary even though she's hardly begun.
She runs her finger along Jess's bookshelf, noting the missing volumes he must've taken with him and the handful of ones he left. How did he decide what to take and what to leave, she wonders, pulling out his copy of Please Kill Me.
She flicks through the pages fondly. She really did love him once, she's more sure of that now then she ever was, but some part of her always knew she couldn't keep him. He was too restless, too damaged; he was seeking something from the world that she couldn't give him. And now that he's found it…it's too late for them.
Across the street Kirk shouts something, breaking the spell of her thoughts, and she realizes just how quiet the apartment is, just her and the sound of her breath. She eyes Jess's old CD player gathering dusk on top of the bookshelf. This doesn't surprise her, Luke isn't a huge fan of music so if Jess left anything in it, it's probably still there. Curiously, she presses power, and then play. It whirls for a second, then picks up on the track it left off on.
99 dreams I have had
In every one a red balloon
It's all over and I'm standin' pretty
In the dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here...
And here it is, a red balloon
I think of you and let it go.
A/N: So this was chapter one of several that explore Rory, Logan, Gwen and even a little of Jess in the weeks before Picking Up the Pieces began. I hope there was no confusion here, the biggest changes from canon are that Logan wasn't as badly injured, Lane and Zac did not get married and Luke and Lorelai worked out their April related issues.
I hope you all enjoyed it, please do share your thoughts. Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: I don't own Gilmore Girls, The Bell Jar or any songs subsequently mentioned or quoted in this story. In case you wanted to know, '99 Red Balloons' was written by Kevin McAlea, translated from the German song '99 Luftballons' by the band Nena, I obviously take no credit and make no money from either song. This title was inspired by the Ross Copperman song 'Holding On And Letting Go' which I also do not own and first heard on The Vampire Diaries.