She's So Halogen
Chapter Six
Author-- Tinuviel Henneth
Summary-- Future-fic: One beautiful, reluctant, Pulitzer Prize-winning muse + a depressed and creatively stuck songwriter + a bevy of selfish exes, substantial egos, and senseless evasion = A good, old-fashioned romance. Unconventional 'ship alert!
Disclaimer-- I don't own any of the people you recognize. José and Katie belong to themselves, although they have been borrowed for this fic against their will. They're real people! Everybody else is fictional and was either invented by Amy Sherman-Palladino (who owns all of GG) or myself (who owns nothing). So there.
Author's Note-- Lukewarm chapter. Dedicated to my hooker-pink nail polish. It's very hard to type with wet nail polish.
*
A few hours later, Rory was sitting on a stool beside the bathroom door, reading a book and ignoring her surroundings. Every so often a roadie or a security guard would come by and ask to see her pass, which she would flash at them without looking up from the pages of her book. Manny came past once, to actually use the bathroom, but he didn't say much to her. He was reading from a rather crumpled-looking piece of notebook paper, nodding his head and smiling occasionally. His lips were silently forming each word he read. Rory felt immediately that he was looking at Dave's song. Brian had been in the bathroom twice for more than fifteen minutes each time. Seemed like the poor guy had gotten food poisoning, because he would retch terribly for a few minutes, then rest, and then retch again. It was monotonous and disgusting, and as much as Rory found him annoying, she didn't wish such a misery on anyone. It was a good thing this show was small, a short set surrounded by a bunch of other bands.
"Rory?" Dave's voice was small, he was nervous and sheepish. She glanced up at him over the top of her book.
"What, Dave?"
He frowned at her, and she felt guilty for being rude. "I'm sorry to bother you," he said, "but I really do think we should talk about what happened last night--"
"I don't," she said. He stared at her, taken aback. This was vertigo-inducing role-reversal going on. The girl didn't want to discuss feelings while the guy did? Something didn't seem right there. But Dave had always been more sensitive, and Rory had always been largely uninterested in what other people thought of her. She supposed she inherited that trait from her mother, the queen of apathy towards the opinions of the petty.
"Why not?" he asked after a moment.
She glared at him and closed her book. "I don't like to discuss how I feel," she said. "Plus right now I don't feel much of anything. I'm very drugged up for this massive hangover I've got and I can't remember anything much since I was sixteen, let alone something that clearly shouldn't have happened." She couldn't believe what she was saying. Even if she couldn't fully remember it, she felt he could. From the way his face fell, she felt it had meant something to him. But it wasn't fair to her, because there was no way the two of them could be together. She had Jared, and he had his baggage, and Rory didn't want to be adored. She had long ago given up on that, because it was a lesser emotion to respect and contempt. Not that she especially wished him to be contemptuous towards her, but she didn't want him to fall in love with her. She didn't want anyone to fall in love with her.
Dave didn't move for a few moments, he stared past her shoes. Then he rose his eyes to hers. He shook his head. "No," he said. He stepped closer and snatched the book out of her hands. She tried to take it back, but he held it up out of her reach.
"That's just mean, Dave," she whined.
He shrugged. "Not really." He grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the bathroom with him, tossed the book out, and shut the door behind him. "This is mean. Now you have to talk, and you don't want to. You know that I want something more out of you than most other guys and that scares you. Am I getting warm, here?"
She sat down on the toilet and pretended to ignore him. But the truth was, she was more aware of him than she wanted to be. Secretly, she wanted him as well.
"I have all night, Rory. We're the last band going on, and our stage time is ten o'clock." He made a show of checking his Fossil. "It's seven-thirty."
"Purist is on stage now," she sniffed.
"Is that really all you can think of to say?" he asked, exasperated.
She snapped her eyes up to meet his. "What do you want me to say, exactly? I don't have any emotional connection to what happened, Dave, as much as that hurts you. It didn't mean anything to me. I'm very sorry, but it was just sex. Not only that, but it happened while we were both drunk and not in our proper states of mind. You're still reeling from whatever latest trauma Lane has put you through, I'm wondering about the man who lives in my house in Cape May."
He was startled. "You have a boyfriend?" he asked incredulously. "On top of everything else, you have a boyfriend?"
She signed and looked down. "I don't love him," she said truthfully. "He's more of a security blanket. But he loves me, Dave. He loves me more than I do, and he believes in me. I don't think that I should break his heart just because I don't feel the same."
Dave rolled his eyes. "Rory, that exactly why you should leave. He thinks that you love him, he wakes up in the morning and wonders what you're doing at that moment. This morning, he did it like he always does, not for a nanosecond considering that you would be waking up beside someone who's not him."
"It's not that easy," she said uselessly. "It's just not that easy."
Dave nodded then, as though he understood. And, maybe he did. Maybe he understood it better than Rory herself at that moment. But it didn't matter anymore. What he felt was that Rory was the muse on whom he wrote that song, the muse on whom he would write several more like it in brilliance. He didn't want to let her go, but it wasn't fair to anyone to force her to stay. "Alright," he said.
She gazed up at him with damp eyes. "What?"
"I don't really know, Ror. We might have had something worthwhile. I'll see you next time we're in New York."
He shut left the door open behind him when he left. She stared out the door at her book, lying there helplessly a few feet away. Four Blondes, Candace Bushnell. She was still on the second Blonde. That was when she decided to let herself cry.
*
Lane had never felt so stupid on stage. She was accustomed to feeling so in the zone and so adored. But tonight she felt awkward and strange and silly. Her drumming was perfect, of course, but her soul wasn't in it. In fact, her soul felt bent. What Rory had said had left its mark. Where exactly did she get off believing she had some sort of hold over Dave?
He had come into her dressing room an hour before they went on stage, presented her with a piece of crumpled paper, and walked back out without a word. She had read if over too many times to count when Liam came into the room and bodily removed her to the stage. She couldn't fathom it, she simply couldn't. After one night with Rory, Dave had managed to accomplish something that had previously been beyond him by light years.
Lane didn't think she was being selfish in not understanding why Rory could have conjured such brilliance when Lane had not. After all, he had braved her mother to be with her. There was no crazy, deeply traditional Korean woman to defend himself against with Rory. There were just Rory's own mental blocks against intimacy. Lane had always teased her about her inability to commit, and how she just drifted from man to man with no emotional attachment to any of them. Lane doubted many of them were reduced to sniveling twits who wrote brilliant-- albeit semi-disturbing-- songs for her after one night.
She had actually started to cry the first time she read the song over. It was heartbreakingly sad, telling a very sad tale. It was told from an outsider's point of view, the observer of a doomed relationship. The observer doesn't understand what he or she is talking about, merely describes the emotions and actions of the two parties involved, and their ultimate undoing at each others' hands. When the girl's suicide comes up, the description of the scene disconcerted her. How would Dave know, let alone understand, the emotions involved? (She neglected to remember that his own older brother, Tyler, had killed himself when Dave was ten years old and Tyler was seventeen).
Lane looked out over the crowd of adoring fans and for the first time since their first gig twelve years earlier, she couldn't feel an ounce of their support. She felt as though the plexiglass panels were doing more than simply purifying her drums' sound. They were boundless separation planes, sequestering her away from everyone else. And she felt stupid. She felt insignificant, and like she didn't belong. She had never felt that way before.
She just couldn't get past what Rory had said, and moreover, how she had said it. Why was she clinging so tightly to Dave? She didn't want him for herself, of course, she had José. However, she didn't want anyone else to have him either. She had long ago escalated him, put him on a pedestal far above anyone else. He didn't belong down on the level of the lesser being of Earth. He was special, he was unique. He was her Dave, damn it! He and Rory were not supposed to have anything to do with each other. He was her ex, Rory was her best friend, they were supposed to stay that way forever and ever. They weren't supposed to be together.
They weren't.
------chapter finis
A bit more insight into Lane, a lot more insight into Rory. Just wait till you meet Jared!
--T. Henneth / story completed 12 June 2003 / chapter posted 23 August 2003
