Hi, all! Wow, thanks for the amazing response to this story, I so appreciate all the reviews, anonymous and otherwise. This chapter was fun to write, but I feel I must admit something...I'm not a huge GG fan, I'm kind of just a Jess and Luke fan. oops. I really tried to keep all the GG characters as true to life as possible, I hope it works out for everyone.

I really didn't want this story to become "Season 2/3 of Gilmore Girls featuring Peter Petrelli" I think I at least allude to most of the Jess-centric events in these seasons, but ya know, I took some 'artistic liscence' ha! I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! As always, please review!

Having spent quite a while in the quaint town of Stars Hallow, Peter, begrudgingly living under the alias Jess Mariano, could definitively say that it was a very strange place to live; and as a boy who had died twice, read the minds of his entire household, and regularly flew about New York City, he felt justified in considering himself quite the authoring on the matter of strangeness.

For a boy from a city where its possible to live a lifetime in an apartment without ever knowing the family across the hall, it was strange that the average customer in his "Uncle's" diner knew his or her front neighbor, back neighbor, side neighbor and every other which way neighbor with alarming levels of intimacy. They gave each other nicknames like Town Loner, or Town Troubadour or The Guy with the Hat, if someone was new to town and wore a hat. For goodness sake, they held regular town meetings; he hadn't known that people still did that. Strange.

Recalling his fashion plate niece and sister-in-law, it was strange to watch mothers and daughters prancing about it matching garish outfits, holding hands nonetheless. Strange.

To a city dweller, who had been surrounded from birth by the unceasing cacophony of people, cars and commerce, the sheer oppressive volume of silence in a tucked away hamlet could be strangely deafening. Night was the worst, though Luke's stertorous snoring was oddly comforting, his brother also being a hopelessly noisy sleeper, and Peter had taken to playing music to chase away the buzzing silence as he slept. Strange.

Strangest of all was the sheer niceness of nearly all the inhabitants. They cared about one another, helping and supporting their fellow townsfolk as they saw the need. Here existed community in its truest form. Peter would have fit in quite well. Peter was a nice guy. This was a nice town. Too bad he wasn't Peter anymore; his brother had made that painfully clear.

"Remember, Pete," he had said in parting, "you're not going there to make friends or converts to the 'I Love Peter' fan club, got it? Your Jess back-story is incredibly flimsy, the last thing we need is people trying to get to know too much about you. Keep the information to a very bare minimum. Just, you know, try not to be so friendly. I know how painful that will be for you," he had rolled his eyes dramatically.

"Honestly, Nathan, for some reason I'm not feeling too friendly at the moment.

For the first few weeks the combination of homesickness, grief over the loss of his father, anxiety over the safety of his family and the unshakeable paranoia that every seemingly well-meaning inquiry into his life was in fact a covert attempt at exposing his true identity all worked together to make him quite the unpleasant character.

Taylor Doose, the pompous windbag of the town, had been exceptionally easy to dislike, and apparently the feeling had been mutual. Jess was from New York City. New York City was known for being overrun with dangerous criminals. Logically, Jess was a dangerous criminal. If reality hadn't been so very far from the unfounded accusation, Peter might have been upset. Being in actuality the perennial good guy, he found it kind of funny, even when Taylor unkindly filled unsuspecting townspeople's minds with errant rumors of the hooligan and his seedy past. In Peter's mind the old curmudgeon was doing him a favor by spreading the word to stay far away.

As time passed and Peter fell into the comforting arms of Routine, his roaring pain lulled into submission by the previously un-experienced mind-numbing delights of manual labor courtesy of Luke and the diner, he couldn't help himself from, God forbid, beginning to like the people he met around town.

He had to admire Luke, the faux lumberjack hiding a heart of gold behind a bad impression of a tough guy. Who else would have taken in a friend's angst-ridden teenage brother for an indefinite period of time? Peter knew that he hadn't exactly been the easiest houseguest, either. In the beginning he had been morose, unresponsive and insufferably woebegone and the situation hadn't much improved for Luke once the kid actually ventured out of the house. 'Go for a walk, I said,' Luke had cursed his bright idea after hanging up with gnome-less Babette, having already fielded an irate Taylor hours before. 'Get out, go explore. Shoulda kept my big mouth shut.'

Peter had vehemently denied having taken anything from Doose's Market and Luke couldn't help trusting the kid's sincerity. Especially after he did sheepishly admit to the gnome-napping, "But it's not like it looks," he had explained after handing Pierpont over to his host, "I didn't steal it exactly."

"Then what the hell's going on?" Luke paced furiously, praying that he had done the right thing in bringing a thief to the Hallow. "I mean, its not like I'm getting sentimental here, I actually think this is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen, but you can't go around taking other people's stuff, kid!"

"I think I know that," he had muttered defensively, hands forced deeply into his jean pockets. He dropped his eyes to scowl at the larger man's feet. "I was walking around, I saw that the dumb thing was broken, the big pointy hat was cracked off. Brought 'im back here to glue it back on."

Peter's teenage pride could have done without Luke's apparent amusement over the situation, as was evidenced by his smirking, chuckling and his insistence on referring to his guest as "the gnome-doctor". Peter had been relieved when he was released to return the repaired Pierpont to his natural habitat. After all, Babette was neighbors with a certain intriguing young woman…

He hadn't been surprised to run into Rory Gilmore as he made his way across town to the gnome infested lawn of Babette, but when he did he couldn't help cursing his fate that A) his hands were full of contraband gnome and B) she was unfortunately accompanied by her glowering mother.

He couldn't fault Lorelai for her reticence in accepting Jess. His attempts towards unfriendliness had been at their gleaming peak during her thoughtful, though at the time unappreciated, welcoming party. He had tossed and turned in bed that night, unable to chase away their unfortunate porch-side dialogue.

She had tried to be understanding; not even making a scene when she found him slouched against her railing, beer in hand. She had spoken of "knowing what it was like" and "getting it" and "parents who don't understand"; the typical fare of whiney teenagers, but she didn't know him. She didn't know that he had buried his father only days before. She didn't know that he felt abandoned in his grief, cast off by the brother he had always adored. She couldn't appreciate the fear in the knowledge that he could have bid his loved ones his final good byes; the guilt in knowing that while his friends and family continued to fight against their shared enemy, he was safely tucked away in an alien location playing out the clichéd role of bad boy street punk. She knew nothing of his life and yet she had continued to blather on and on from the lofty heights of parental superiority, secure in her trite wisdom. Needless to say, he hadn't responded very kindly. The apex of his surliness had been capped by a snide allusion to her enjoyment of a varied and aggressive sex life with a certain diner owner. Once she had recovered from the unexpected rudeness she had muttered something about a pie, restricted him from any further use of her fridge and stormed back to her house, leaving an immediately penitent Peter in her wake.

Even as he stood on the pavement, facing the confused girl and her irate mother, he was fully aware that he had earned and deserved every barbed glare sharply hurled in his direction. "What the hell are you doing with Pierpont?!" the mother had demanded dramatically, "Somehow I'm guessing Babette didn't lend him to you for your nightly performance of Gnome Theatre."

He wanted to explain away the frostiness in her demeanor, describe the circumstances leading to his possession of Pierpont, and he could have quite easily, but as Lorelai burned holes into his head with the white hot ferocity of her displeasure, he knew that here was a person who would never want to know him. She wouldn't pry into his personal history or sit him down over a cup of coffee and force him to spill his soul. Wasn't that what Nathan had wanted? Anonymity was an effective deterrent to secret sharing, but out right hatred had to be even better. So instead of explaining what a thoughtful young man he had been in repairing the ailing gnome, he simply rolled his eyes and dryly confirmed her suspicions, "What can I say? I can't deny his gnome-like wiles."

She had torn the grinning pigmy creature from the boy's hands with a grunt, murmuring soothingly to the cradled figure as she crossed to her neighbor's yard. Rory, meanwhile, watched him with those alarmingly blue eyes so like those of his brother's wife. He would have expected to see condemnation in her open, lovely expression, but he didn't. Instead there was the delight of discovery tempered by a dash of growing enlightenment.

"What?" he asked gruffly, propping his collar up against the cool night. "Aren't you supposed to storm off together?"

She continued to watch him evenly, a small smile beginning to play about her lips.

"What?!" he asked once more, uncomfortable with the warmth spreading through his body at the emergence of that teensy smile.

Lorelai rushed pass the staring pair, informing Jess that "Not only is my fridge off limits but so is Babette's lawn, hoodlum" before tossing her daughter a significant look and sauntering in to their home.

Rory's eyes never left the boy in front of her. "When I left for school this morning Pierpont's hat was broken," she stated slyly, enjoying the uncharacteristic blush setting Jess' ears aglow. "Now it isn't."

Peter scowled, doing his best to remain aloof. "What are you accusing me of, Gilmore?"

"Fixing Pierpont," she grinned. "I'm starting to believe you're not as tough as you want everyone to believe you are.

"That's ridiculous," he muttered jocularly, turning away from the girl with feigned disgust. "I don't have to stand here and take this slander."

Rory chortled as the retreating figure swaggered off into the darkness. "See ya later, Dodger," she shouted after him, ignoring her mother's scowling face in the front window.

He spun on his heel at the odd farewell. "Dodger?"

"Figure it out," she challenged him, taking her turn to blushingly whirl away, entirely too pleased with the conversation for a girl who was very much taken, as Dean's bracelet constantly reminded her.

He watched her walk up the path to her front door before shouting out "Oliver Twist!" at her back. The pleased smile that was his reward was almost enough to negate the flare of pain in his chest at the mention of that particular Dickens novel; a first addition of that book had been one of his father's prized possessions. Arthur had known how much Peter valued that tome; the old man he had willed it to Nathan. Rory's smile may have been a comforting balm, but still he nursed the freshly opened wound as he walked across town to a cramped apartment which smelled of yeast and stale French fries and crawled between the sheets of a bed that was not his, allowing hot tears to dampen his borrowed pillow as he silently grieved for the life he had lost and the father he had never truly known.

Peter quickly fell into a comfortable behavioral pattern. He was the town hoodlum. He was short to the point of being painfully brusque with the majority of the town's denizens, reserving the bulk of his regard for the ever enchanting Rory Gilmore and his bumbling 'uncle'.

Jess would pull a prank or say something rude, the victim (usually Taylor) would complain to Luke, Rory would scold Jess, Peter would find some way of making up the trouble to Luke. His piece de resistance had been the faux murder scene. He found it unendingly amusing that the town had been in an uproar over something so inconsequential. Rory claimed it wasn't funny, but he could tell she had been fighting a grin. He had fixed Luke's toaster in apology for the complaints against his alleged nephew; it had been a simple matter of touching the broken appliance thanks to his encounter with a kid named Micah. He hadn't remembered until afterward that he wasn't supposed to use his abilities.

Rory and Jess were becoming increasingly fast friends, though sexual tension on both sides belied the teenagers' attempts at remaining purely platonic. They had the same tastes in literature, music and movies, they hated the same things, appreciated the same movements. He respected her capacity for original thought, especially once he discovered her enrollment in a private prep school; from her war stories it seemed exactly like his Academy back home. He knew the type of girl those society breeding grounds were apt to produce and it was no Rory Gilmore, with her vibrancy and spunky innocence, eyes wide in wonder as if ever new dawn was a beautiful surprise. He felt bewitched, bothered and bewildered every morning she flounced into the diner demanding her coffee. He went out of his way to casually run into her. He had purposefully drawn back from the crowd during the Christmas sleigh rides so that he could discreetly join her. He had directly disobeyed Nathan's ban on abilities to melt her rivals in the snowman competition. If Luke had suggested anyone else for the task of tutoring the failing student he would have refused. As the facts stood he most readily agreed to the experiment.

He had brought her a bright red apple and he had cleverly evaded anything closely resembling actual work. It was obvious to the empathic young man that the diligent student was severely torn between scolding him for being off task and throwing her pencil over her shoulder and joining him in his witty ramblings.

"Jess," she finally slammed a heavy text book shut, struggling with the laughter threatening to shatter her solemn scholastic dignity. "Can I ask you a question?" She didn't wait for a reply, he was quickly learning that Gilmores rarely waited. "Why do you do this? Why are you, of all people, failing? You're probably one of the smartest people in that school…"

He sighed as he heard the echoes of a thousand parent/teacher conferences chiming in on her theme. 'Peter is a very intelligent boy…'

'…needs to stop day dreaming.'

'Constantly staring out the window…'

'He was tardy three times last week…'

'Absences are really building up, Mrs. Petrelli.'

'…if only he could apply himself…'

Peter had never enjoyed school, not from his earliest years. The mind-numbing memorization of facts, the teachers' with their apparent repugnance towards anything new or exciting, the established social hierarchy amongst the students…it was no more than years and years of exercise in pointlessness. At home his parents had ensured that he received his daily dose of the mundane by, quite literally on some occasions, forcing him through the doors of the hallowed halls. Here, however, he felt no aversion to ditching a class, or an entire day if the mood struck him. What did it matter anyway, he reasoned, it wasn't really his school; he wasn't even enrolled under his legal name.

He didn't care about his education, but for some inexplicable reason, she did. Her refulgent eyes glowed beseechingly at him from across the table, willing him to want more for himself, to understand her concern. What's a guy to do when a pretty girl pouts winningly at him? Give in, of course.

"Okay, how about this?" he negotiated, subtly pushing the required reading away from him. "I will bang out this meaningless essay tonight, if," he held up a restraining finger as her face illuminated with tutorial success, "if we go and get ice cream, right now." It had taken some of his best wheedling to convince Rory than an ice cream break was both acceptable and necessary, but she had eventually broken down, her genetic sweet tooth prevailing over her educational attentiveness.

An hour later they found themselves back in her custom made car, Jess at the wheel, music blaring loudly, ice cream freezing their lips and dripping to coat their fingers in a wonderful confectionary mess. Their conversation managed to be light, flirtatious and meaningful all in the same breath, whether they spoke of ice cream and its partner the cone or debated classic vs. contemporary literature. He would look at her out of the corner of his eye while flicking his tongue to catch a wanton dollop of the vanilla treat and she would forget to breathe. She would casually brush a crumb from his jean clad thing and he would have to remind himself that Nathan would kill him if he lost control over his abilities and exploded all because of one skinny teenage girl.

They arrived at an intersection in the middle of town. If they turned left they would be back where their night had begun, if they turned right they could drive on for hours. He like that thought. She was gazing wistfully down the right side of the street, away from the diner. She caught his eyes and sheepishly turned back to the window. Rory wanted him to turn right. He couldn't suppress a smirk from charging across his face at that realization. She wanted to spend more time alone with him, away from parents or guardians or boyfriends. Rory and Jess. Jess and Rory. He liked that. He turned left.

Rory was startled when the car moved opposite of the direction that she had anticipated. Didn't he want to be with her? Had she been reading him entirely incorrectly all these months? She felt flush, sticky and embarrassed over her unfounded and unspoken sense of disappointment.

What Rory failed to realize was that Peter knew full and well exactly how their night would have proceeded had he turned right. They would have enjoyed each other's company as they had the entire evening, the jokes and friendly banter would have continued, until the accident. Jess would swerve to miss an animal, landing Rory in the hospital and her car in the junkyard. Lorelai would blame Luke and the two good friends would be on the outs. He knew because he had prophetically played out the entire event in his dreams every night for the past week. The squeal of the ineffectual breaks, the crush of metal on metal, Rory's cries of terror and pain, these were all hauntingly familiar sounds to Peter. He wouldn't put her through that for all the alone time in the world.

He drove her home in silence, pulling up her driveway with practiced ease. "I could have dropped you off at Luke's," she said to fill the silence, eyes on her anxious digits as they fiddled with the hem of her t-shirt.

"Please, it's a coupla blocks," he retorted, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck.

"Yeah, well. Thanks for the ice cream."

"Thanks for the education, teach," he smiled, daring to look over at her.

She returned the look with more bravado than she truly felt. "I had a lot of fun tonight, Jess." She dropped the pretension to worry her lip. "Too much fun. I had no right to have that much fun. Tell Luke not to pay me."

"I had fun too," he smirked, cutting her off before she could begin to ramble in earnest. "I've never had so much fun studying."

She scoffed loudly. "Maybe because you didn't actually study anything."

Any trace of jocularity melted from his expression as he turned in his seat to face her. "Trust me," his voice hummed huskily, "I was studying something." As soon as the words escaped his mouth he wanted desperately to bite them back. He turned to face front with a groan, dropping his forehead into the palm of his left hand with a dull thwack. "Geeze, I'm sorry, I dunno where that came from…it was so, so stupid…"

"Jess…" he looked up when he felt a delicate hand resting on his shoulder. The she was kissing him. It was soft and innocent but pregnant with the promise of untapped passion yearning for arousal from its 16 years of peaceful slumber. Her lips were pliant and trembling, his hungry yet gentle. This was new, uncharted territory for the young woman, the clenching and tightness throughout her body, the igniting of every nerve ending touched by his wandering hands, the desire to cry and scream and laugh all bombarding her overloaded senses in unison. Dean had never made her feel like this. Dean had never…oh no, Dean…

"Rory?!"

The pair pulled apart as a third voice roared from behind the car, floating easily through their lowered windows. They both simultaneously looked back through the rear window at the nearly comatose boy with a Doose's market apron slung over his shoulder. In her preoccupation with Jess Rory had completely forgotten that Dean had promised to stop by after work. He stood at the edge of the driveway looking pathetically heart broken, mouth agape and shoulders down around his knees.

No one dared to speak, not until Dean slowly shook his head and began to back away from the heartrending scene.

"Dean, wait!" Rory had scrambled out of the car, rushing after her boyfriend, leaving Jess to follow her lead at a much more relaxed pace. He leaned against the car, finding it difficult to watch his rival argue with the girl he loved. Dean's pain was too raw, too palpable for the empath to bear, especially knowing that he had been the cause. Neither boy had to suffer long, Dean apparently didn't have much to say except that it was over, if Rory wanted to be with Jess than she should be with Jess. Peter didn't look up until the extremely tall young man had walked away in aversion, leaving his former girlfriend alone on the pavement with tears pooling in her eyes.

"So…" he said hesitantly, walking up behind the conflicted young woman. She turned, blinking away the guilty tears. Guilt over what, he couldn't help but wonder as he slowly closed the gap between them.

"Hey," she replied, hugging her forearms against her stomach.

"Everything okay?" he asked, knowing that it wasn't.

She shrugged, lifting a corner of her mouth along with her shoulders. "I don't know. I feel bad that it had to happen like that but at the same time…I'm kind of relieved."

"Relieved, huh?" He drew dangerously close to her.

"We were growing apart," she admitted, "It was bound to happen, but he was still always such a nice guy to me, I know you didn't like him, but he is a genuinely good guy and I've been treating him like crap lately and then this just tops it all off…"

"Can I tell you a secret?" He silenced her, reaching out to take one of her hands in his. "Want to know why I've never liked Dean? I was jealous," he whispered conspiratorially into her ear, eliciting a coquettish giggle from the still sniffling girl.

"Jealous over what?" she asked knowingly, taking a teasing step away from the boy with the blazing eyes.

"Oh, I dunno, maybe his job," she reached out to playfully punch his arm, "maybe his girlfriend."

"Well," she stepped back in to brush against Jess, "I'm not his girlfriend anymore."

"Huh, fancy that." He tentatively rested his hands at her hips, relaxing as she leaned into his touch.

"So what do we do now?" She asked breathlessly.

"We could try that kiss again," he suggested mischievously, "My best work always has been done under moonlight."

As he leaned forward to share in their second more fevered kiss, he mentally batted at the pesky concerns nipping at the outer edges of his mind. Was it really fair to become involved in a relationship when he held such an enormous secret? He didn't know how long he would be in town. Rory didn't even know his real name. He was very much living a lie, and now he would be pulling an innocent bystander into the muck and mire of such a life.

Still, it wasn't his choice to live under an assumed identity, lying about his past, present and future on a regular basis. They had told him to pretend to be Jess Mariano, and if Rory Gilmore wanted Jess Mariano, then who was Peter Petrelli to stand in her way.