Disclaimer: Still don't own. Please continue not to sue me.
A/N: Self-indulgent fic is self-indulgent. I was trying to write a different story, which required some back-story, and then this came into being. Jess PoV, the summer after season 3, lite Lit, rambling internal monologues. Read, enjoy, let me know what you think.
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Sometimes he holds his breath over the phone. Like maybe that will make him disappear. He doesn't know what disappearing will accomplish. He jumped on a bus and went cross-country and he still doesn't know what he was trying to accomplish. Disappearing was supposed to make things easier but all it's really done is put sand in his shoes.
He thinks he just wants to tell her he's sorry. Not for what he did but for how he did it. Jess knows enough to know he did wrong by her, that he took the coward's way out by leaving without a word. But everything sounds stupid in his head—he can't take it back, doesn't think he even wants to—so he wills all his non-words to get the message across.
It never works and she hangs up with the same frustrated sigh every time.
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He wants things to work with Jimmy. He does. But they might as well be strangers who just happen to share genes.
Sasha invites him to stay—she's got an easy smile and a weird sense of humor that should annoy Jess more than it does—and Jess really thinks about it. He left everything behind for the chance to know his father and now it feels like that's all he has and he doesn't even know what to do with it. He decides to stay for the summer. But Jimmy doesn't know how to be Jess' father and Jess doesn't know what it means to have one—doesn't really even know how to be a son because he had Liz. He thought he was beginning to get a rough idea of what it meant to be a nephew or a boyfriend or just somebody to anyone but he screwed all those things up too—and Jess doesn't belong there.
Jimmy has a family, Jess is his son, but the two aren't mutually inclusive.
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Jimmy gives him five hundred dollars and an awkward hug and Jess gets on a bus, goes up to San Francisco. He walks Broadway and Union Square, Fisherman's Warf and Golden Gate Park because it feels like the thing to do. He gets sick of the tourist spots quickly—he grew up watching both the overly excited and the unapologetically bored being lead like sheep around New York—gets on the first bus that stops and just rides it around with the rest of the wandering masses. He looks for quiet corners to get lost in; places where he can bum a smoke and act like it's where he belongs.
Jess spends an hour and a half hunched in a corner of City Lights Bookstore, reads Howl for the umpteenth time. He pockets one of the pins up by the cash register, one with Ginsberg's face on it (he loses it three days later when he's standing shin deep in the Pacific. The water's cold, the sand is annoying and there are girls spread out on beach towels working on cases of melanoma).
He resists the urge to call her from the pay phone across the street (the loose change in his pocket jangles like a warning, a reproach, tells him he's being stupid. She's somewhere in Europe right now anyway).
He gets a copy of Plutonian Odes from a library and rides the bus to the Mission. Jess sits on the grass in Dolores Park until the summer sun leaves him and the streetlights flare to life.
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He calls the diner but its not Luke who picks up. He wants to say, "I'm okay," (it's not a lie. He's got something resembling food in his stomach, a book in his back pocket and enough money in his wallet that he's not worried about what he's going to eat tomorrow), but he doesn't. It feels like a waste—of money, of time, of everything Jess spent his time in Stars Hallows fighting for, fighting against.
Jess wonders if this is what he's got left to look forward to, whether all his life will ever be now is a series of phone calls where nobody speaks.
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The cops wake him up when he's dozing on a bench, tell him no ones allowed to loiter in the park after dark. Cops haven't scared Jess since he was thirteen but he feels worn down to the quick as is, doesn't feel like wasting the energy required to play a menace to society.
"You got somewhere else to go kid?" The string-bean cop asks while his balding partner eyes him like he's something you might find on the bottom of a shoe.
"Yeah." Jess answers, one hand grabbing hold of his duffle, the other rubbing over the quarters in his pocket.
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The last of the money Jimmy gave him goes to buy him an egg McMuffin and a bus ticket home. He stands in the Grey Hound station chewing on the spongy biscuit and squishy egg-like product, eyeing the ticket prices.
Jess decides not to go back to Connecticut—Stars Hallows was a lot of things but it wasn't home, not ever and Jess doesn't know why he ever pretended it could be—really only hesitates for a minute before asking for a one-way ticket to New York.
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Stars Hallows always made Jess feel small. It's weird, considering the town was the size of a thumbtack. Everyone knew everyone and crowded into Miss Patty's studio to endure town meetings and had picnic basket auctions and gave a damn about what everyone else was doing. It was a Stepford-suburban nightmare he willing went back to for a girl who found out he wasn't worth it in the end.
New York is different though, better, because no one knows him—no one spares a second glance in his direction—there's no expectations to meet or requirements to fulfill. Jess knows there's no disappointing New York.
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He calls up an old friend—friend is a word best used loosely—and finds himself with a place to live.
He inherits a mattress from whomever it was occupying the corner of the room that now houses his crap. He trudges down to the Salvation Army three streets over and puts money down on an used set of sheets and a pillow, throws out the old ones with their mysterious brown-yellow stains. He walks around the city, navigates the labyrinth of streets, find out his old familiar places and falls into new ones. For all the changes, the city's still the same. It takes a while, monotonous days over slow weeks, but Jess isn't sure he can say the same.
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Summer's winding down and he realizes the school year will be starting soon. 22.8 flashes in his head and he wonders whether she's back yet. His call goes direct to voicemail—she enunciates, clear and too the point, 'please leave me a message and I'll get back to you', Jess thinks he can hear her mother heckling her in the background, wonders whether he's just imagining—and opens his mouth. It feels like it should be a defining moment, a last chance—yet another on the long chain of last chances the universe has dealt him—and Jess really feels like this is it.
I'm sorry I left you and I'm sorry I never told you and I'm sorry I wasn't good enough—I'm sorry you thought you loved me. I loved you. I know it.
The machine tone goes off in his ears, his time's run out. All the words press down on the tip of his tongue, bang into teeth but never make it out—"To rerecord your message press 5"—he puts the receiver down.
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He gets a shitty job as a delivery boy with crappy pay and reacquaints himself with a standard of living he hasn't had to endure since he was seven and Liz had them living with one of her dead beat boyfriends in a trailer out in Jersey.
He stops making calls.
He's making his own way, which is all he's ever wanted, really. To be left alone. To sink or swim on his own terms. He's not happy, but no one ever asks him whether he is or not. Jess thinks it might not actually matter.
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The End
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