A/N: Thank you for the reviews.
Ready?
A couple of weeks later.
Lorelai woke up with a startle to see Paul Anka staring at her from beside the bed, his eyes intensely focused on her face.
"Oh, geez!" she mumbled, trying to shake herself into awareness. "What, Timmy fell down the well?" She sighed. Glancing over at Luke, she decided there was no waking the man, so instead she grabbed her robe and stood up. "Swear, if you just want someone to watch you walk down the stairs again, I'm… something. But it will be terrible!" she tried to threaten the dog as she scratched his ears. "Ugh, I'm too tired for this."
She followed him down the stairs, but stopped after a few steps, as she heard a noise from the first floor. "Bark if it's a thief?" She tried, getting only a confused look from the dog. "Ok, you either don't know what a thief is or…" she tilted her head to try and listen.
"Damn it!" there was a whine from downstairs, and Lorelai breathed a sigh of relief when she recognized her daughter's voice.
"This definitely counts as guard dog duty, well done. Take that, Luke, saying you're useless! We're going to hold this over him forever now, aren't we, baby?" she mumbled to the dog as she made her way down the stairs. "Rory?" She asked as she opened the door to her daughter's old room, finding her standing in the middle, chewing her thumb as she stared at the room.
"Hm?"
"I'm fairly confident giving me a heart attack isn't going to help whatever is wrong," Lorelai pointed out.
"Hm?" She asked again and her brow furrowed further.
"Rory, it's two in the morning."
"Oh, that."
"Yeah, that." Lorelai looked at the kitchen with a wistful sigh. "Coffee?"
"I don't have time."
"The floor's been doing pretty good at not floating away without you standing on it so far, I think you can find some."
"You're hilarious," Rory frowned.
"Are you in labor? I assume you're not, you're just standing there and haven't cursed once, but thought I should ask."
"No!" She answered quickly. "Why would you say that?"
"I don't know, it's two in the morning, what do you want me to think?" Lorelai sighed. "Ok, I'm making coffee, 'cause this is going nowhere and I'm too tired to think and then you can tell me what's wrong."
"I'm not sure this is the right way to handle a crisis!" Rory called to her mother from behind the door and Lorelai shrugged.
"Maybe not, but it's the right way to handle two am," she whined in return.
"So if I come to you tomorrow at two am and I tell you I'm in labor, you'll say 'wait five minutes, I need to make coffee'?" Rory asked, finally walking out of the room and sitting at the kitchen table.
"No, I'd get Luke to make the coffee while I put clothes on. Multitasking." She set the coffee machine running and sat across from her daughter, putting a hand on hers gently. "What's wrong?"
"Everything." Rory took a deep breath. "Everything is wrong and I'm not ready, and I know you're going to say no one's ready to have a baby, but I'm a hundred percent more not ready than everyone else."
"That's not true."
"Oh, right," she snorted.
"Ok, you remember who you're talking to, right? I didn't even have a crib for you!"
"Fine, there's some people who are more not ready, but I'm pretty high up there too," Rory conceded. "Less ready. God, I can't even think anymore."
"When's the last time you got any sleep?"
"About three months ago," she sighed, staring at her bump. "I'm sorry. At least one of us should be sleeping right now, I'll go." She tried to stand up, but Lorelai stopped her, her hand still holding on to Rory's.
"You're going nowhere. I'm guessing it's going to be a no on coffee, but I'll get you some tea, how does that sound?"
"I'll take the coffee. It's not like I don't want to sleep," another whine.
"You're almost there," Lorelai reminded her.
"And there's a lot of sleep with a newborn?" Rory asked as she watched Lorelai pouring two cups full and setting them down on the table.
"You can hand her to someone else and get some uninterrupted sleep once she's here, so yeah, actually, there is more sleep than you're having now."
"Do I point out that she's going to need to eat?"
"She's going to have to learn to take a bottle when you start work again," Lorelai shrugged. "You have options."
"Oh, God, I hadn't thought about that. There's so much stuff!"
"Great going, Lorelai, you've made it worse," she scolded herself, scooting her chair closer to Rory's. "It's going to be fine."
"Nothing is going to be fine. There's nowhere to put a crib!" Rory threw a hand towards her old room.
"Yeah, that's true. But we can move your desk to the garage for a while."
"Oh."
"If we take the armchair out too, it'll give you more room to breathe in there."
"Not the armchair! It'd be nice to have somewhere to sit," Rory explained. "The vanity."
"Ok, I'll get Luke to move the desk and vanity to the garage when he wakes up, then he can bring the crib in. Or we can move the vanity and put a crib there, and turn the desk into a changing table, so we've got that covered too," she squeezed her daughter's arm gently. "This means you're staying over?"
"If the offer's still good?"
"The offer is always good. When you're ninety and come back from your mid-life crisis trip around the world, you can still stay here."
"Mid-life crisis at ninety?"
"Oh, yeah, we're solving this ageing thing in the next five years. Someone has to before I'm forced to get Botox," Lorelai chuckled. "What happened?"
"What?"
"I know you've been stressed, but I didn't think you were break into the house in the middle of the night levels of stressed," she sat back in her chair and picked up the coffee cup.
"I finish work tomorrow," Rory whispered. "All of a sudden, it's very very real and I'm… not ready."
"You are."
Rory just shook her head, staring into her own cup.
"She has clothes, diapers and between me, Mom and your baby shower, about five different things she can sleep in. Babies don't need anything else."
"No, I mean… I am not ready. Everything's going to change and it's terrifying."
"Change isn't always bad."
"Says the woman who had a new engine put in her car so she wouldn't have to get a new one."
"That's completely different, finding a good new car is miles harder than babies," Lorelai joked. "It's ok to be scared. Probably not going to go away either."
"Wow, you suck at pep talks," Rory finally smiled.
"It's true. I wasn't ready for you to talk, or start school, or leave home, that one I'm still not ready, and this whole you being a mother? Definitely not ready. You're never ready for anything your kids do, starting the second they start existing."
"So I just have to live with this?"
"You get used to it after a while, it stops being a big deal." Lorelai shrugged it off. "It doesn't matter if you're not ready. You buckle down and do what it takes and wait until they're old to admit you're constantly terrified of screwing them up."
"I'm never going to be even half as good as you."
"Yeah, you are," she gave Rory's arm another squeeze. "You are going to be amazing."
"You know, you should have less faith in someone who walked across town in the middle of the night wearing slippers."
"It's only a couple of blocks," Lorelai waved it off. "Feeling better?"
"I will the second I figure out where I can fit some clothes for both me and baby."
"See, should have bought a wardrobe, huh, then you wouldn't have this problem!" she gloated. "If you can manage with the two chests of drawers in there for a while…"
"They're full of books." Rory interrupted.
"How about we go to Mrs Kim's next week and see if they have a wardrobe?"
"You're not going to let me move the other one back, are you?"
"It would be easier for you to get the books out."
"Aw, what's that, you want to go to bed? Good night!" Rory replied in a mock voice.
"Yeah, hard being mean when you're wearing slippers," Lorelai retorted too. "You wanna watch a movie?"
"You're not going back to sleep?"
"Someone needs to keep an eye on you."
"So we're going to have a movie night right now?"
"You have a better idea?"
"Do you have any pizza?"
"You need to ask?" Lorelai grinned before going to the fridge and digging up a box.
The next evening.
Rory's phone buzzed on the coffee table and she groaned.
"Ugh, not again."
"Lorelai?" Jess asked.
She stretched, trying not to lose her comfortable spot stretched out on the couch, leaning against Jess, and picked it up. "Yeah."
"Everything ok? She doesn't usually text six times in an hour."
"Had a thing last night," Rory told him.
"You wanna talk about it?" he asked, his hand moving gently over her arm.
"I don't know," she shrugged. "Couldn't sleep, got inside my own head, one thing lead to another…" a second shrug. "I was going to call you, but it was the middle of the night so I ended up at her house. I was trying not to wake her up either, just do something that wasn't standing here working myself into a panic attack, but Paul Anka's a snitch."
"That sounds like a pretty big thing."
"It's better now."
"Ok." Jess kissed the top of her head. "You call me next time."
"I wasn't kidding when I said it was the middle of the night."
"You still call if you want to talk."
"Thank you," she smiled, nestling in closer to him. "You know I'm going to be awake a lot in the middle of the night soon, right?"
"I'll drink more coffee," he placed another kiss on her head.
"I think I've decided to crash at Mom's for a while after the baby's born."
"Ok."
"You…?"
"Always wondered how much Lorelai actually eats in a day, now's finally the time I find out."
"It's a lot," Rory smiled.
"Don't spoil it."