Disclaimer: Not mine. Not ever going to be mine. Only the particular way of stringing the words together.
Author's Note: The first Gilmore fanfiction I ever wrote...sad that it's also the best-executed piece. I'm regressing. :) Review, please, make me happy. And this one is for Syf, of course.
Camlann
She's been looking for a happily-ever-after. She wakes up late on Saturday mornings, light streaming through the slats in the blinds, and she scrounges coffee from wherever she can get it, and sometimes it hits her this way. Sometimes it's a punch in the stomach, and she can't breathe, and she knows she is never going to find a prince or a knight-in-shining-armor. It's then that she goes and gets at least two more cups of coffee.
Sometimes she thinks that all the books she's ever read have been searching for a happily-ever-after--even Tolstoy, even Salinger. She wonders if happy endings only happen in books; sometimes she wonders if even books don't have happy endings any more. There isn't much to love about post-modernism.
One day, she wanders into a bookstore in Hartford for no good reason other than that it's there and it's a bookstore, and she listens to two high school girls debate fantasy. Fantasy still has happy endings, it seems, even if the genre is going to the dogs. She wonders if that's the only place where it's left, in fantasy. She picks up a taped-together copy of Tennyson on a whim, pays the ludicrous two bucks for it, and wanders out in search of more coffee.
It's not that she's unhappy, exactly, she thinks, as she probes her mind carefully around the edges of the subject. She's been desperately unhappy before: when Dean broke up with her, and when Jess left, and when she realized what exactly she had done in her little-girl's bedroom in the big Gilmore house on a warm spring night. So this is not unhappy, really, not anymore; she'd just like a happily-ever-after.
She finds a cafe that smells like it might have half-decent coffee and wanders in. She pages through the Tennyson idly--Idylls of the King, not a half-bad choice for a gloomy mental debate on romance. Gareth and Lynette have always been her favorite, almost incongruously cheerful for an Arthurian legend. She sips her barely okay coffee and reads the undeniably turgid poetry; somehow it makes her feel better.
She thinks about how dreams are never exactly how you think they're going to be: how Dean gave her trinkets--a bracelet, a box of cornstarch (sort-of), a car...and then how he was angry and (unaccountably) jealous. How Jess understood her and her books and why she needed them, the books, that is...and how he didn't care, sometimes, and he never explained. How he took off. How Dean made her turn into something she wasn't, something she didn't want to be.
She shakes her head. The dregs of her coffee are cold and bitter. It isn't like her to be this depressed; she might as well go read The Bell-Jar for all the warm fuzzies she's feeling today.
There's a kid sitting at the table next to hers, reading a book. Something happier, she hopes. She finds herself repeating not Plath, not Plath, not Plath and almost laughs. It isn't Plath; it's The Sword in the Stone. Curious. Half-way decent literature, and a definite comfort read.
The kid notices her looking at him and grins, and for once she's not comparing the smile to Dean or Jess. "I think this version is my favorite," he says, tipping his head to show he's seen her Tennyson.
She laughs and shakes her head. "No one beats Malory."
"Yeah, right." They launch into an easy conversation on Arthur and hit Beowulf and The Mists of Avalon, too, just for grins. When she pays for her coffee, he tries to follow her out, tempting her with Chaucer, but she doesn't let him. Doesn't even give him her number.
It's nice to talk books, she thinks, but she knows about boys. And she's pretty sure she's run out of rain checks on that happily-ever-after.