She's So Halogen
Chapter Nine (Epilogue)
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-- Well... here it is. The last chapter. It's...it's...over! ::whimpers::
*
Sixteen months later
Lorelai Victoria Gilmore-Danes was sitting on her daughter's couch in her New York apartment, absently flicking through the channels on the television. Nothing had caught her fancy yet and she was starting to doubt that New York cable had anything to offer her. She had an hours old empty box of Chinese take out open on the coffee table in front of her; her feet were up resting beside the box. The twins, almost twelve years old, had begged Lorelai to come down to the City to visit their beloved older sister. Being the masochist she was (and secretly wanting to see Rory as well), she had agreed.
Their trip had been a mistake from the beginning. When they arrived at Rory's apartment, Lorelai found more than she bargained on, and in a strategic maneuver to not let the twins know what exactly she had walked in on their sister doing, she had offered to buy them ice creams at the stand down the street to give Rory and Dave a chance to get dressed. She didn't understand it. When she was six months pregnant, no one could have gotten her within ten feet of a naked Luke. Another difference between the Gilmore girls.
When Rory and Dave had come down and joined Lorelai and the twins on the street, Lorelai jokingly said to the pair, "I guess that makes up for all the times I didn't catch you in high school, huh?"
Dave pointed out the obvious. "There wasn't really anything going on in high school."
"In general," Lorelai replied. The twins were giggling between them, so she had a fairly good idea they were completely aware of what their mother had seen. She was tempted to ask them how they thought their sister had gotten pregnant, but didn't. Mostly because that would make her feel stupid. She'd given them the sex talk when they were seven. She couldn't remember why she'd chosen that particular moment. She'd never officially given it to Rory.
At the present moment, Dave had the twins ("heathens," he called them) out and about and Rory was at a book signing in the Village for her new novel, Long Walks on the Beach. Lorelai, upon reading the book, had been unsettled by the fact the main character Margaret had a personality exactly like hers. Flattered, of course, but unsettled. It was disconcerting to have yourself immortalized in literature with a new name. A particularly bad name, for that matter. Margaret indeed. Lorelai snorted indignantly at the thought.
Finally admitting the fact the television had nothing to offer her, she tossed the remote onto the coffee table (not realizing until she did it that the surface was glass and she could have broken it). She hopped off the couch and wandered to the kitchen, suddenly ravenous. Rory always had excellent taste in men. They all could cook marvelously, and Dave was no exception. She rifled through their refrigerator trying to find something that wasn't more than three days old. She finally pulled out a Rubbermaid box containing some sort of pasta in a red sauce with chicken breast. She lifted the lid to vent and tossed it in the microwave.
While she waited for the food to heat up, she poked around the apartment. Actually, it would be more accurate to say she went into Rory's old office, where the nursery was going to be. A few coats of pale yellow paint covered up the pretty toile wallpaper. A blank white strip was left at the top and at the baseboard, and Lorelai figured they were going to have Zach come in and work his paint-y magic on it for personalization. The room was mostly empty, because all of Rory's office stuff had been relocated to the spare bedroom. It didn't really matter if they finished the room before the baby came because they planned on being in Cape May then, but when the parents had to be in New York, they had to have a place for baby, too.
Lorelai looked up at the spiral staircase and remembered how Rory had argued with Dave about location of baby's room. "We can't put the baby in the loft bedroom, Dave. Hello, what if he or she falls down the staircase?"
"But," Dave had said, "a baby doesn't have a lot of mobility until it's several months old."
"I'm not that shortsighted," Rory had snapped. "But think of what a hassle it would be to have to run down our staircase at two in the morning and run up the other one. At least if the baby's in the office, we only have to run down one staircase."
Rory won the argument. Dave had to agree with her that navigating two spiral staircases in the dark of the wee hours of the morning did not sound a bit appetizing. He had called Brian and Zach to help him move everything out of the office and up to the loft the very next day. He wouldn't let her lift anything heavy, which she found ridiculous. She gave him a dissertation about how women in China used to go into labor, give birth in the rice paddy, and work efficiently the whole time. "Are you a Chinese woman, then?" he had retorted.
Lorelai could still smell the paint in the airless, windowless little room. She wondered why anyone would put a baby in a room without a window. It seemed mean. Maybe they would have Zach paint a trompe l'oeil window, too. That would be cute. They could build a little windowsill and hang curtains and everything. She made a mental note to tell them about her idea.
Then again, Rory (and Dave by extension) had yet to really be open to her ideas. A phone conversation didn't go by that Lorelai didn't ask when they intended to get married. Rory always either skillfully dodged the question or shrugged and said, "Whenever Dave deigns to ask me." Lorelai didn't especially have a problem with her grandchild being born out of wedlock, but she had a fairly good idea her own parents were shitting elephants over it. Imagine, first their daughter, then granddaughter. Lorelai often defended Rory by saying that she wasn't sixteen; she was almost thirty-one, and would be by the time the baby was born. Rory and Dave would eventually get married; Lorelai and Christopher had been damned from the start.
She wondered what the baby's room in Cape May looked like. She hadn't been down the that house since the past Christmas, when Dave had cooked for everyone (because Rory would have botched it). The house was small but comfortable, though Lorelai wondered how they would fit more than one kid in it if they decided to have any more. Georgia, as Christopher's thirteen-year-old daughter preferred to be called, had come down with her father for the dinner. She and the twins had wreaked havoc on the skeletal off-season town population, running amok in the streets. Even Emily and Richard Gilmore had come down, and they praised Dave up and down about the delicious food. Emily offered him a job as her chef, but Lorelai and Rory both advised him to graciously turn it down ("and run away," as Lorelai added in an undertone).
The microwave beeped, and Lorelai was rocketed out of her reverie. She shuffled out of the purgatorial not-an-office-not-yet-a-nursery. She got a fork out of the drawer and removed her food from the machine. She poked at the steaming red and white puddle and decided it was suitably heated. Grinning to herself and feeling proud that she had been clever enough to heat it up perfectly without blowing anything up, she scurried back to the living room and plopped back on the couch. Between bites, she alternated between glaring at the faux sheepskin rug and the stupid TV.
She set her dish down on the coffee table beside the empty Chinese food box and picked the remote up again. She flicked through a dozen or so channels and found, to her delight, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to be on. She squealed and put the remote down beside her on the couch. She curled up and pulled one of the throw pillows onto her lap. It was the point where the rich girl had a bunch of people searching through hundreds of candy bars for the golden ticket.
Lorelai drifted to sleep sometime before the end of the movie, and when Rory came home, a different movie was more than half over with. Lorelai was stretched out over the entire length of the couch. Rory tossed her key card onto the table beside the door and shucked off her sandals. Her feet were swollen. It was August and Rory felt fat and uncomfortable, no matter how often Dave said he loved how she looked.
"Mom?" Rory said, sitting on the chair nearby. "Mom?"
Lorelai was gradually roused out of her nap, and when she saw the new movie, she swore like a sailor and pouted. Rory quirked an eyebrow at her. "I fell asleep during Willy Wonka," Lorelai said sheepishly.
"Anathema!" Rory squeaked, pretending to be horrified. She saw the dish of pasta Lorelai had abandoned on the table and frowned. "Hey, missy, no one told you that you had free rights to our refrigerator. I'll have you know Dave made that for me for when I got home. It's full of onions and I've been craving onions for a week now."
Lorelai shrugged. "Oh, pardon me. There's still some left."
Rory wrinkled her nose. "How long has it been sitting out?"
"An hour?" Lorelai guessed. "It's not growing legs or teeth, Ror. I think it's probably safe."
"That's so not funny." She got up and walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. She had drunk a lot of water since finding out about her pregnancy. She found that she actually liked it for the first time in her life. Coffee, unfortunately, was another story.
"So, do you know what the baby's going to be yet?" Lorelai called a minute later.
"Um, a baby?" Rory replied. She set her empty glass on the counter by the sink.
Lorelai rolled her eyes. "I mean, boy or girl."
Rory stood in the kitchen doorway, looking at her mother tiredly. "I want to be surprised." Dave really, really wanted to know, and it amused Rory to no end to watch him squirm in annoyance because she wouldn't let the technician or the doctor tell them the baby's sex. However, when it came to Rory and the baby, Dave was a pushover. And he knew Rory knew it.
"Couldn't the doctor just. . . tell Dave and not you."
Rory raised an eyebrow at Lorelai. "Have you met Dave? There is no possible way he could keep that information secret. He'd probably tell Zach or Brian and one of them would inadvertently tell me, therefore killing the surprise. And, by extension, killing Dave because I would murder him."
"Or pull a Lorena Bobbit," Lorelai suggested.
"Gross," Rory admonished.
"Yeah, you're right," Lorelai agreed. Then she grinned conspiratorially. "Hey--"
"No, mother," Rory said rather boredly. "I am not going into that with you again." Lorelai asked her all the time how Dave compared with that poster of the naked man that used to hang in Rory's office.
"Oh, whatever," Lorelai muttered.
"Perv," Rory said under her breath.
"Daughter of perv," Lorelai said in sing-song voice. She even had a little dance to go with it. Rory shook her head and sighed. Lorelai changed the channel.
"You're mean." They watched some asinine sitcom rerun for a few minutes.
"How do you do it?" Lorelai asked, an eyebrow raised.
Almost afraid to ask, Rory said, "Do what?"
"You know. . .it. You're all pregnant and stuff. I don't get it." Lorelai shrugged sheepishly. Rory gave her the most horrified look yet. "No, I haven't been mulling over it this whole time. I was just thinking, because I have no experience in the area, how a six month pregnant woman has sex."
Rory rolled her eyes. "Well, it's difficult," she said. The two, once again proving that they were more like sisters than mother and daughter, shared a look and promptly dissolved into giggles.
"What do you mean difficult?" Lorelai asked.
"Hard," Rory replied, blushing.
Lorelai snickered. "I made you say 'hard'!"
"Once again: perv." Rory crossed her arms over her abdomen. She looked cute annoyed, Lorelai decided. She looked happy and glowy. It was the best she'd seen her daughter look in years.
"Oh, well, there's worse things I could be. I could be like Michel, for one thing." Lorelai laughed at Rory's frightened look. "Hey, what are you going to do about baby clothes if you don't know the sex?"
"Everything comes back to sex with you, doesn't it?" Rory said, half exasperated. "Anyway, the baby will just wear lots and lots of yellow. Yellow is androgynous. It is mellow and everyone can wear it."
"I would advise you to never use the word 'androgynous' around me ever again. It's scary and then it makes me think of that annoying Garbage song and then I get even more scared." Lorelai shivered.
"Yeah," Rory agreed. "I'm not all that fond of yellow, to tell you the truth. It's too. . ."
"Yellowy?" Lorelai offered.
"Obviously," Rory allowed patiently. "But more than that. It's bright and respectful. It's a very unostentatious color. It's easy to paint over." Lorelai watched her daughter's face carefully as Rory chose her words. There was some subtext to what she was saying and Lorelai didn't understand it completely. "Dave hates the color," Rory continued. "He wants green, but I say green reminds me too much of blue, which is a boy color. On the reverse, he wants purple. Purple is related to pink, which is a girl color. Red and orange are out for being too intense. This, of course, leaves us with yellow."
"You think too much."
"Lane tells me that all the time."
"Have you spoken to her lately?" Lorelai asked, surprised. Rory gave her mother a cool look.
"I saw her in July with her new boyfriend. He's very cute and sweet and he has no outstanding children by women with whom his relationship remains unresolved. She acts like the old Lane when she's around him."
"The old Lane?" Lorelai implored, not sure what Rory meant.
"Before life happened and we grew up," Rory said. "She's fun again."
Lorelai smiled. "Is she excited about your baby?"
"Are you kidding? She called godmother duty when we found out we were pregnant. She's very devoted to this whole thing." Rory smiled to herself. After Lane and José's divorce was finalized, the band took a month-long break. Lane went to her parents' hometown in Korea and toured the country, absorbing so much of what she had resisted over her formative years and exorcising all her Dave-related demons. She had come back a fresher, much happier woman.
"That's incredible," Lorelai said. She looked at the screen. "Oooh! A Friends marathon! We are so watching this." Rory didn't bother to argue.
About an hour or so later, Dave and the twins returned from their exhausting trek around the city. Dave had barely pecked Rory on the cheek in greeting when he sat down in the upholstered chair and tapped out. The Gilmore girls looked at each other evilly and then made fawning noises.
The twins went and did their own things. Lucas, fondly nicknamed Butch by his mother, had gone into the kitchen as soon as they got home and had been digging around in the cupboards for twenty minutes. Catherine, who Lorelai called Praline because of the kind of ice cream she ate an absurd amount of during her pregnancy with the twins, was in the bathroom fixing her long dark hair. It never ceased to amuse Dave that his girlfriend had younger siblings who went by Praline and Butch.
Rory sat back and put a hand on her stomach and closed her eyes. Lorelai watched her oldest daughter drift away with a small smile on her face. She went into the kitchen and found Butch sitting on the floor, eating out of a box of cereal with a manic glint in his eyes. She gave him a weird look but didn't say anything. She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Dave's coveted Heineken. It had a post-it note stuck to it that said: "Note to Rory: beer not for baby," in Dave's small, cramped writing. This struck Lorelai as funny, since she knew very well that Dave knew Rory would never touch beer.
"I'll try to remind her," Lorelai said aloud to no one in particular. Then she left the room.
The End
Well, I'm short of time at the moment, so I'll write a separate chapter of responses and thank yous to everyone when I do have more.
I hope that you enjoyed the trip here. Did I succeed in getting a "good, old-fashioned romance" as I advertised in my summary?
-T. H. / 21 September 2003
