Disclaimer: I own nothing but the computer this story is being written on and the hands that are writing it. The opening quote is from "The Perfect Dress"

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!

I must say thank-you for all of the reviews. FIFTEEN for one chapter? Unheard of. I am glad that all of you reviewed, and I have a couple of responses. If I don't respond to your review, don't take it personally.

Pishymeow: I wasn't really sure at first if your review was good or bad. I know that them being stuck somewhere and having to work things out seems a little too easy, but it's fun and I hope that I do it justice.

MM Vermelha: Anything for my friends from South America!

Gymtig: Hm…I hope you're not expecting anything too dirty. Remember this fic is rated K+

Biscottimoment: LOL I'm the same way.

And now for the conclusion…

When it Snows

Part 2

Remember the snow? The snow never lies.

The 911 operator was slowly losing his will to live.

"My daughter is stranded somewhere in this God awful storm! She could be bleeding or freezing to death. How would you like it if your daughter was freezing to death! Here's an idea. Since you claim that the weather is too bad for the police to go looking for her, how about you go yourself! Then you can go into the ditch somewhere and see how it feels!" Emily was yelling as loudly as she could, pacing back and forth in her living room.

"Ma'am, I understand your frustration. As soon as the snow lets up the police will be out searching all the roads for drivers needing assistance. It is simply too dangerous right now. Even if your daughter is in trouble…"

"Even if?!? So now you're calling me a liar?"

"No, ma'am. All I'm saying is that we don't know for sure that she's hurt, so there's really no reason for you to panic."

"I am not panicking. If you want to see panicking, I can show you panicking, but this is not panicking! This is me being infuriated at the man who should be fearing for his life right now!"

"Ma'am, I need you to understand that sending the police out right now would do your daughter no good. If she is in trouble they won't be able to find her until the snow lets up, and they would be risking their lives in the process."

"Well then, I sure hope that if your house is ever burning down the fire fighters decide to wait until the smoke clears to come rescue you because they're not going to be able to see you and they might be risking their own lives."

Fortunately for the operator, Emily chose that moment to slam the phone back into its cradle, saving him from the embarrassment of having to say anything else.

--

"Ah, ambiance," Lorelai stated as Luke lit the candle inside the coffee can. She was sitting wrapped up in his sleeping bag. He was visibly shivering, but continued to insist that he was fine and didn't need her to share.

"Now you see," he explained, "the candle will warm up the coffee can and the can will act like a radiator, warming the entire truck."

Lorelai smiled. "Yet another good reason to drink coffee. So let me ask you something."

"Yes?"

"Candles burn oxygen, right?"

"Right."

"And humans breathe oxygen, right?"

"Right."

"So do you think that, between the two humans and the one candle in here, there's going to be enough oxygen to go around?"

"Probably not."

"Luke!"

Luke smiled. "Relax. This truck is nowhere near air-tight, especially with the broken window."

"So tomorrow morning when the police drive by, see the truck upside down, and come down to see if we're alright, they're not going to find two dead bodies and a burnt out candle?"

"Nope. They might find two alive and slightly cold bodies and a burnt out candle, considering this is a really cheap candle and I don't think it will last all night."

"Just checking."

"So…" Luke started.

"Luke, do you hate me?" Lorelai asked, her voice turning serious.

"What?!?"

"You heard me."

"No, Lorelai, I…why are you asking me this?"

"Because I left the twister mat at home. No, really, it just seems like as good a time as any to have this conversation, especially since you can't run away from me. I mean you could, but I figure it's safe to bet that you probably won't."

"I don't hate you."

"You could, you know. I deserve it." Lorelai looked down at her hands

"Do you hate me?" Luke leaned towards her a little, daring her to look him in the eye as he answered.

"No, Luke, of course not. How could I? I'm the one who," she swallowed, "who cheated on you. All you ever did was want to be a good dad. But I was too selfish to let you do that. I was jealous, god, jealous of your daughter. I'd had you for ten years, and I couldn't even let her have you for a few months."

When Luke didn't respond, Lorelai continued talking. "It's just that…I was so close. So close to finally having it. The whole package. I could actually feel it. I could see myself, walking down the aisle, dressed in the perfect dress. I could see us waking up together every morning. I could see you talking to my stomach and hiding my coffee from me. I could even see us forty years from now, both with gray hair, sitting across from each other at a table in a retirement home playing poker. And then you weren't ready. And I got scared. Really scared."

Luke sighed and reached out to play with the edge of the sleeping bag where it flowed off of her lap. "It wasn't all your fault," he assured her. "I never should have hid April from you. I should have told you about her from the start. I should have let you be involved in that part of my life."

"But you couldn't. And I understand that. I can't say that I would have done anything differently." Lorelai stretched out her hand and wrapped it around his own where it sat by her knee. "I'm sorry things ended the way they did."

"Yeah, me too. You know I don't hate you, but you know who I do hate? Christopher."

"Yes, I think you made that painfully obvious. Quite literally. He had a black eye for more than a week."

"He deserved it. He took advantage of you. You went to him for comfort, which makes since seeing as he's one of your oldest friends, and he let it go to far."

"He didn't force me. I knew what I was doing."

"Tell me something. If you hadn't gone to him that night, would you have eloped with me the next morning?"

Lorelai sighed. She sat back and allowed herself to remember that morning. Picturing in her mind the look on his face as he had stood there, listening to her confession, was enough to break her heart all over again. But as much as she wanted the answer to his question to be, 'yes, I would have gone with you to the ends of the earth,' she knew in her heart that it wasn't true. So she answered him honestly. "Probably not."

"Why not?"

"Because I was hurting too much. I wanted to, really I did, but I didn't want to run off and marry you just because you felt like it was the only way to keep me. I wanted it to be what you wanted too. But it wasn't. You didn't want me anymore. That was clear the next day when I saw you in the street."

"I did too want you. Yeah it took me a few hours to come to my senses, but it took me eight years to even get up the nerve to ask you out. Did you really think that I was going to drop everything and marry you without putting even a minute's thought into it?" Luke was shouting now, his hand pulled back away from hers and gesturing expressively.

"If you really loved me you would have!" Lorelai yelled back.

"And if you really loved me you wouldn't have given me an ultimatum!"

Lorelai forced her voice back to a normal volume and said, "If you really loved me, I wouldn't have needed to."

Luke closed his eyes, defeated. "So does this mean that we were never really in love?"

"I guess it does," Lorelai answered, not believing her own words for a second.

Luke gave off a small "humph," that could have been interpreted as a chuckle.

"What?" Lorelai asked.

"I'm just wondering if Andrew will give me my $14.99 back."

"For what?"

"For that damn self-help book, because if we were never really in love then that book did me nothing. It led me to you, and for the first time I thought I knew what love was. But I guess I was wrong."

"I guess we both were."

"Hey Lorelai?"

"Yeah?"

"Were we really wrong?"

"God I hope not."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't imagine anything ever being more wonderful than what I felt for you, so if that's not being in love I'm afraid that when love does come along I'll be disappointed."

"Well then, I hope not too."

--

2:30 AM

The candle slowly flickered, drowning in a pool of its own wax. It wouldn't last much longer. Luke and Lorelai were now both lying down, wrapped in the sleeping bag, with Lorelai's head on one end of the truck and Luke's on the other, back to back. They had been trying to sleep for the past hour and were failing miserably, due to the cold, the lack of comfort, and quite possibly more than anything the conversation they'd had.

"Are you sleeping?" Lorelai asked.

"Yes." Luke responded in a voice that was clearly not asleep.

"Ha ha good one. What are you thinking about?"

"You. Love. Us. Christopher." He punctuated each thought as a completely separate entity.

Lorelai turned so that she was on her back, propped herself up on her elbows, and looked down at him. "So as long as we're not sleeping, and since we've already brought up the subject of 'us' many times, can I ask you something else?"

"Sure."

"If I hadn't slept with Christopher, but I still hadn't gone with you that next morning after my performance in the street, would we still be together?"

Luke sighed. "I don't know. At that point we had both asked to elope, and we had both said no. Where would that leave us?"

"Right back where we started?"

"I suppose. Why do you ask?"

Now it was Lorelai's turn to sigh. "I'm ending it with Christopher."

Luke turned to his back and imitated her posture, looking back at her. "Why?" he asked. "Because you had a fight?"

"No."

"Well then…"

"Because I don't love him. Since we talked about love I've been laying here thinking that, even if you and I weren't in love, which I still don't believe, by the way, I know for sure that Chris and I aren't in love. We've had a relationship for more than 20 years…more than half of our lives. If we were in love, we would have made it work years earlier."

"And when did you figure this out? Just now?"

"No. The truth is that I've always known that. I knew it the morning after we fought, when I woke up in his apartment and knew that it was the last place on earth that I wanted to be. I knew it when he told me he loved me only a couple days later. I knew it when we started dating and I know it now."

"So why did you go out with him at all?"

"I…I guess I thought he deserved a chance. No, that's not true, but that's what I've been telling myself. I was in pain—still am, actually—and he comforts me. When we're together I'm sixteen again and I can temporarily forget that I've lost the only man I ever loved. But as soon as I leave him I feel the pain again, stronger than before. He's like some sort of drug for me. He always has been. Like an old addiction that I can't seem to ditch. I go to him when I'm down; he picks me up for a while and then drops me again. It's always been like that."

"So…where does that leave us?"

"I don't know, Luke. I don't think we can just pretend that these last few, horrible months never happened. I don't think we can just go back to the way we were."

--

7:00 AM

The police car followed the snow-plow down the highway, looking for stranded motorists. They'd found an abandoned Jeep, matching the description of one owned by a Ms. Lorelai Gilmore, who had been missing since the previous night according to her mother.

Far off in the right ditch, covered by nearly a foot of snow but still visible, the officer in the passenger seat spotted an overturned pickup truck. He pointed it out to his partner, who parked the squad car. They got out and slowly made their way to the truck, climbing over snow drifts that were as much as 3 feet deep. Both were fearing the worst as they approached the cab, digging through the snow that had piled up against the window.

--

Luke and Lorelai, at this point sleeping with their heads at the same side of the cab, spooned together for warmth, were awoken by the beeping noise of the snowplow. It took them a moment to register where they were and what had happened. Looking around they realized that the windows of the truck were almost entirely buried in snow. They tried both doors but neither would open, and they weren't able to roll the windows down.

"Help!" They both cried as they heard voices outside.

--

"Help!"

The police officers heard someone—maybe two someones—cry from inside the truck.

"Hello? Are you hurt?" one of them called back.

"Hello?" Luke yelled. "We're okay, but we're stuck in here."

"Okay, don't worry, we'll get you out."

--

8:00 that evening

Lorelai was parked in front of the diner, a place she had been avoiding like the plague for nearly four months. The diner was empty; Luke was wiping tables and putting chairs up. Lorelai took a deep breath and then went in.

Luke knew who it was without looking up. "Hey."

"Hey back."

"Coffee?"

"Do you have to ask? And a burger, if you've got any left," Lorelai said as she sat down at the counter.

"You look nice."

"Yes, well, I went out for dinner."

"And so the burger is…dessert?"

"I went out for dinner, but I didn't eat. However, you can be assured that Christopher is completely out of the picture."

"One burger, coming right up." Luke disappeared into the kitchen and then came back out. He was carrying a burger and fries in his left hand, and his right hand was hidden behind his back."

"Ah!?! Were you saving that for me?"

"Maybe."

"Am I that predictable? You knew that I would be here and you made me a burger. That's cute."

Luke pulled his other hand out from behind his back. He was holding a white rose."

Lorelai was speechless.

"Peace?" Luke asked.

"Uh…yeah, peace." Lorelai gave Luke a weird little smile.

"So I was thinking," Luke began, leaning in closer.

"Yeah?" Lorelai leaned in as well, so that their faces were only about six inches apart across the counter.

"If we can't go back to the way things were when we were together…"

"Yeah…"

"And we can't go back to the way things were before we were together…"

"Yeah…"

"Lorelai?"

"Yes?"

"Would you like to go to dinner sometime with me?"

Lorelai put a surprised look on her face that may or may not have been real and asked, "Lucas, are you asking me out?"

Luke smiled. "Tomorrow night?"

"Okay, but…"

"But?" Luke looked scared.

"But…what about tonight?"

"What about it?"

"You got some big plans, or…"

"No," Luke smiled, "no I don't. Why, you have something in mind?"

"Well…I'm here, and you're here, and I'm eating dinner…could this be a…a date?" Lorelai had a mischievous grin plastered all over her face.

"I suppose," Luke answered, mimicking her grin, as he walked to the door of the diner, turned the sign to "closed," and locked the door.

--END--