Author: Ozluv04
Title: The Trouble With Realism
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to the Palledinos and the WB. I'm just borrowing Rory for some angst.
Warnings: Season five spoilers.
A/N: My very first gen Rory fic. I've been wanting to write this for awhile. It's a look at Rory's thought process after her decision in A House Is Not a Home. Angsty. Feedback welcome. Enjoy!
It was hard for Rory to believe that her whole life could be turned inside out with a few well placed criticisms from a world weary man. But those words delivered so bluntly from the great Mitchum Huntzburger had been like a careless finger tipping the first domino. She had her every doubt confirmed. She wasn't good enough, tough enough, ambitious enough. There would be no hard hitting, whistleblowing exposes in her future. The closest she would get to CNN was delivering sandwiches to Paula Zhan.
Her whole life she had only ever wanted to be one thing: a journalist. Nothing else. It was her dream. She had never wavered in what she wanted. She had lists and charts and plans. It had always seemed so simple. She wasn't like those other kids, floating through college with their 'General Studies' major. She had always known what she wanted to be when she grew up.
And now she didn't. Now her confidence was shattered. She was an all or nothing kind of girl and right now shehad nothing. She was aware she was acting like a child who refused to eat anything after being told the restaurant was out of chocolate cake, but dammit she had her heart set on chocolate cake. Everything else felt like settling. She didn't want to settle.
Her mother didn't understand. Her mother couldn't comprehend that Mitchum's words felt too much like truth to dismiss. She wasn't tough, she was too content to watch the newsrooms proceedings in awe. Too eager to pour coffee, too scared to jump in. No Lorelai didn't understand. She wanted Rory to take the world by storm. To have everything she had sacrificed. She didn't want Rory to give up, to throw it all away because one man said she couldn't do it. But for Rory quitting was her only choice.
She hated seeing the disappointment in Lorelai's eyes. In her grandparents eyes. And, whether he admitted it or not, in Logan's eyes. She had let them all down. Shattered the illusion of her infallibility with a series of very un-Rory like decisions. Stealing yachts and quitting college, going to the grandparents and defying Lorelai. No one would mistake her for the perfect one now.
More than anything she hated being without purpose. She hated getting up in the mornings and having nothing to look forward to except answering asinine phone calls for her Grandfather's insurance company. She hated coming home in the evenings to awkward dinners with the grandparents, where they sat around and pretended everything was normal. She hated Friday nights most of all. Lorelai came and ate and made small talk. But it wasn't right. There was something too forced in the her jokes, something too restrained in her voice, something too distant in her hugs. Because Rory had made a choice and to Lorelai that choice was a betrayal.
Rory allowed herself to question her decision only once a day. Right before she fell asleep. At night when the darkness closed in, she let herself wonder. What if she went back to Yale? What if she said to hell with Mitchum? What if she could find the strength her mother saw in her? But she always fell asleep before she could form any answers, and the morning was far less hospitable to these kinds of thoughts. The sun wouldn't allow her todwell on what ifs. It was too intent on bathing her in reality. And if she was nothing else, Rory Gilmore was a realist.