Disclaimer: I own nothing but the computer this story is being written on and the hands that are writing it. The opening quotes are from "Love and War and Snow" and "Women of Questionable Morals."
Synopsis: What if Chris and Lorelai hadn't made up during The Great Stink, and Connecticut was hit by an early snowstorm? L/L
A/N: Assume that Lorelai and Chris drove separately to Friday night dinner, and that Rory never showed up.
A/N II: If any of you are reading my other fic, The Balance of the Universe, don't worry, I'm not taking a sabbatical. If any of you are not reading it, you should be!
When it Snows
Part 1
"Everything's magical when it snows, everything looks pretty. Do you know that the best things in my life have happened when it snowed? My best birthday, my first kiss, Rory's first steps…When it snows, something inside me says, 'hey, that's your present.' I don't think it'll ever change. Flakes, flurries, swirls, crystals, whatever form it comes in. I'll take it. We go back, snow and me. We have a beautiful history."
Lorelai put on her coat slowly, still refusing to look Chris in the eye.
"Are you sure you should be driving?" her mother was asking, "It looks like the snow is only going to get worse."
"Well, then I'll just have to make it home before it does. Good night mom, dinner was great."
"Well then, at least drive carefully. And call me when you get home. Are you sure you shouldn't stay?" Emily was still talking, but Lorelai was already on her way to her car.
"I'll be fine!" she called back, thinking only of getting out of that house and away from Christopher, who was still standing next to Emily in the foyer.
He has no respect whatsoever for my opinions. I have a kid, god damn it, and my opinion on child-rearing should count to someone!
She realized that in her head she wasn't yelling at Christopher, but at Luke. At that realization, she sighed. Maybe Sookie was right. Maybe as frustrated as I am with Chris, maybe that's just me missing Luke.
Her train of thought continued as she slowly navigated the road from Hartford back to Stars Hollow. She was so distracted; in fact, that she hardly noticed the snow getting heavier and heavier, until seemingly out of nowhere she was in a complete white-out. She slowed the Jeep down to 15 miles per hour and gripped the steering wheel so hard that she was sure her knuckles were white inside her gloves.
She could no longer see five feet in front of the jeep, and had no idea where the road was. This became painfully obvious as she felt the tires being pulled to the side in a snow drift, and soon she was in the ditch, tilted at a 45-degree angle.
"Hmph," she breathed, as she realized that she was stranded, after a horrible fight, during her precious first snow-fall of the year.
--
Back at the elder Gilmore house, Emily was starting to panic. It had been more than 1 hour since Lorelai had left, and yet there was still no phone call. She picked up the phone and dialed the number of her daughter's cell, only to be startled by a loud trilling from the direction of the living-room sofa. She followed the sound only to discover Lorelai's cell-phone, which had apparently slipped out of her purse and ended wedged inside the couch.
--
Lorelai was desperately trying to remember every cheesy cable movie she'd ever seen about someone getting stuck in their car during a snowstorm. She knew two things for sure: she shouldn't run the engine and keep the windows up because she could die of asphyxiation, and she was really screwed because she'd lost her cell phone.
Whose bright idea was it anyway to buy a jeep? They have absolutely no insulation. Plastic windows? Who ever heard of plastic windows.
She killed the engine but left the key turned half way so that her lights would stay on, hopefully alerting any passing vehicles. She searched her entire car for anything remotely resembling a blanket. She found one of Rory's Yale sweatshirts and put it on over her dress. Eventually, though, it got so cold that she had to turn the car back on, deciding that suffocating sounded more pleasant than freezing to death. She ran it for ten minutes just to warm it up and then turned it off again. Then she pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them, trying to think warm thoughts.
--
Damn snow.
Luke pulled his truck over to the side of the road under a bridge to wait for the white-out to end. He was simultaneously thanking God for four-wheel drive and cursing Him for the stupid weather.
It's October. When was the last time we had a white-out in October? Damn weather. Damn snow. Damn truck. Damn suppliers that make me go all the way to Hartford just to correct some stupid paperwork error. Damn me for deciding not to leave Hartford at 4 when the meeting was over, thinking I could wait out the snow for a couple hours. Damn weather forecaster for not predicting this blizzard.
The absolute worst of the snow was done in a half hour, and Luke decided to keep going, even though he could still see no more than 50 feet ahead of him.
--
Around a half-hour after Lorelai first went in the ditch, the snow had lightened up from the level of a white-out blizzard to only a heavy snowstorm. She could see about 50 feet in all directions, which increased her hope that someone would see her. At one point she guessed that she could probably drive if she could only get her car out of the ditch. So she turned the engine on, put the car in drive, and hit the accelerator.
The wheels whined and spun, succeeding in only digging themselves deeper in the snow. Lorelai slapped the steering wheel in frustration, which of course did nothing but hurt her hands.
Her efforts had warmed the engine back up a bit, which warmed the inside of the jeep a bit. Lorelai once again cut the engine and threw her head back in resignation.
--
About 50 feet ahead of him Luke could make out a vehicle off to the side, tilted at a 45 degree angle.
--
Lorelai thought she heard the rumble of a noisy engine approaching. In the hopes that she was right, she started pumping the brake pedal to repeatedly engage and disengage the brake lights.
--
The car (or truck? He couldn't tell) was flashing its break lights, presumably as some sort of distress signal. Luke pulled as close to the side of the road as he dared without risking going in the ditch, about 20 feet behind the stranded vehicle. Odd, it looked suspiciously familiar. Wait a second…11:00 on a Friday night, on the road from Hartford to Stars Hollow? Could it possibly be…?
--
Lorelai could see her rescuer approaching in her side mirror. It was a man, with broad shoulders. He looked tough. Her fear of being stranded on the side of the road was replaced with a new fear of having to accept a ride from a complete stranger who was obviously strong enough to do just about whatever he pleased…Lorelai forced the thought from her mind.
--
Luke was standing up to his knees in a snow drift, tapping on the window of the jeep. Lorelai turned and let out a little gasp as she recognized the face on the other side. She unzipped the window. "Luke?"
"Lorelai, are you okay?"
"Oh yeah, just peachy." She put extra emphasis on the last word.
"Do you…want a ride or something?"
"Nah, I thought I'd sit here and reenact the Donner party."
"By yourself?"
Lorelai scrunched her eyebrows, pretending to consider the possibilities. "Yeah, I guess that wouldn't work too well, would it."
Luke opened her door and extended her his hand to help her over the snow bank and to his truck. She hesitated for a moment, much like she had done more than two years earlier at his sister's wedding. Dancing with Luke had seemed to her then to be almost as ridiculous of an idea as going with him was now, but not dancing with him would have been even a worse idea, much like sitting here in her poorly insulated jeep and freezing to death would be. So she placed her hand in his and followed him to the truck.
They rode in silence. Luke was concentrating mostly on the road, and the snow, which had picked up again after its brief rest. The wind had also picked up blowing drifts of snow in a snake-like pattern across the highway and making it seem as though twice as much snow was falling as actually was.
"Do you have your cell phone?" Lorelai's voice broke the silence after several minutes. Luke stole a glance at her ever so briefly before returning his attention to the road. "I told my mom I'd call her once I got home so she'd know I was safe. She's probably wondering where I am, but I left my phone at her house on accident."
"I got rid of it," Luke stated flatly. "I only bought it because…" he didn't need to finish that sentence.
"Oh." Lorelai said, imitating his tone. Against her will Lorelai remembered the first cell phone Luke had owned. Nicole had convinced him to buy it, and he had gotten rid of it after their breakup. History repeats itself, I guess.
More silence followed. However, as we all know, Lorelai is not good with silence. So she starts talking about the last thing Luke wants to hear, simply because he has no choice but to listen and she needs to talk.
"Christopher and I had a fight."
Luke said nothing, choosing to keep his eyes on the road and his mouth shut.
Lorelai's voice revealed that she was near tears, but she gave a little laugh as she said, "Sherry wants him to send Gigi to Paris to be with her, and he thinks it's a great idea. He's going to send his four-year old kid to be with a woman that she doesn't even remember in a country that is 8 hours away by plane. And he's not even going to take her himself. He's going to send her with the nanny."
Luke knew that he was supposed to say something at this point, but he also knew that nothing he could possibly say would be satisfactory.
"It's a little ironic, you know?" Lorelai continued, desperately needing to fill the silence. "I go from being with a man who is so good a father that he neglects his girlfriend, to being with a man who is a horrible father but dotes on his girlfriend."
"Sure is," Luke finally says. He is trying desperately not to be involved in this conversation, as he knows that it is going in a very dangerous direction, but Lorelai is succeeding in drawing him in, just like she always does.
"I mean, if Anna abandoned April and then wanted you to send her to Europe three years later, would you do it?"
"Probably not."
"You'd at least go with her, right?"
"Yeah."
"What are the odds of me getting any verbs out of you tonight?"
"Not good."
"So…" Lorelai's was about to speak again when a pair of headlights came seemingly out of nowhere from the other direction. Luke swerved to the right to avoid a head-on collision. The truck fishtailed to the left, and then to the right as Luke overcompensated, and then skidded out of control into the ditch, rolling completely onto the passenger side.
"Oh my God!" Lorelai exclaimed.
--
Emily was beginning to panic. She dialed Lorelai's house number for the 200th time. And for the 200th time she heard Lorelai's voice, doing her best pot-head imitation, "Sorry, dude, I'm just way too stoked to talk right now, so, like, leave a message."
Emily hung up the phone. It was now past 11, more than two hours since Lorelai had left. Emily picked up the phone once again, but this time dialed 9-1-1.
--
"Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God!" Lorelai was still screaming over and over again.
"Are you okay?" Luke asked as soon as she stopped screaming long enough to take a breath. He turned the key to cut power to the engine.
"Well, let's see. I'm in a truck that has just rolled into the ditch. So yeah, I'd say that, unless by some miracle a pack of hungry wolves shows up, this day couldn't get any better."
"But you're not hurt."
Lorelai reached a trembling hand to the side of her head, where she'd banged it against the side of the truck. "I'm not bleeding," she announced.
"Good."
"What about you?"
"I think I'm alright. Remind me to send a gift basket to whoever invented the seat-belt when we get home." In fact, Luke's seatbelt was the only thing holding him in place at that moment. He was nearly suspended in mid-air.
Lorelai chose to ignore the fact that he'd said 'when we get home,' implying that they were going together to the same home. She instead focused on getting her own seatbelt undone, which was easy for her as all of her weight was against the door of the truck. Once she was free she maneuvered herself so that she was upright, with her back against the roof of the cab.
Luke was having a bit more trouble. He couldn't just release the seatbelt. That would cause him to fall directly on top of Lorelai. He stretched his feet down towards her and turned in his seat so that his back was against the door of the truck and his legs were resting against the seat. Lorelai came as close as she could to standing upright and guided him to do the same as he unfastened his seatbelt. As his feet hit the passenger door that they were both standing on he stumbled against her, pushing her back against the roof of the cab. This momentum caused the truck, which was already in a position that defied physics, to roll the rest of the way so that it was completely upside down, throwing Lorelai backwards onto the roof of the cab and Luke forwards on top of Lorelai. It was something that, had they been watching it on television would have been hilarious, but being that it was very real and very scary, no one was laughing.
"Ooph," Lorelai let out as Luke's weight knocked the wind out of her. Not only was this a horribly uncomfortable position, but it also brought Luke and Lorelai uncomfortably close to each other. Luke scrambled to get off of her, pulling himself first to his knees and then backwards to sit cross legged at one end of the truck, while Lorelai first caught her breath and then also sat herself up, sitting cross legged at the other end.
"Now what?" She asked.
"Well," Luke began as turned and tried to see out the window, "we could go out there and try to flag down some help."
"Is there an 'or,' because other than you, me, and whoever that idiot was I haven't seen a single car yet tonight? Plus I'm wearing the wrong shoes for that."
"Or, we stay in here and wait until morning."
"But isn't the gas tank going to explode? In the movies whenever a car rolls over the gas tank always explodes."
"It's not likely," Luke assured her.
"So…we just sit here and freeze?"
Luke opened the glove box to reveal what looked like a blanket rolled to the size of a shoe. He threw it at Lorelai.
Lorelai turned it over once or twice in her hands and said, "Oh, now this is cute. My dolly will be nice and warm."
"It's a thermal sleeping bag. You don't keep one in your car?"
"No, camper Joe, I don't."
"Tell me you at least have an emergency kit."
"Um…"
"You know: a candle, matches, coffee tin, energy bar, red bandana, road flares…"
"No, I can't say that I do."
"How can you not have an emergency kit? You drive in the winter. What if you were in an accident?"
"If I were in an accident I would wait patiently for a man with an emergency kit and a thermal sleeping bag to drive by."
Luke rolled his eyes.
--
A/N So this was originally going to be a one-shot, but it's already 7 pages long. There will probably only be one more chapter. Please review! I might not finish it at all if no one reviews. So review, please!!!!!