Tristan Dugrey leaned back into the plush leather seat of his chauffeur driven car and closed his eyes. This being the last ride he planned on taking in his dad's car, he decided to enjoy it. Tristan was just resting because soon it would be show time. All the scenes he had been planning in his head all those nights at military school would finally be taking place.

Tristan noticed how he no longer felt uncomfortable at the thought of returning to his house, his room, his family. Probably because of what lay ahead for him. Tristan was only coming back to finish the job. To cut any remaining ties to him and the hellhole known as his childhood, and then he would be free.

He would go into his house, tell his dad that he was tired of being his trophy son that he could hide away at military school one day and then bring to company lunches to brag about the next. Tristan would tell his dad that he wouldn't be attending Harvard like he hoped. He would tell him that the only reason he applied to his father's alma mater is he knew how upset he'd be when Tristan decided not to go there.

Tristan was moving in an entirely different path. He had changed during military school. He had become smarter and harder and a bit colder. He had spent all those lonesome family visiting hours perfecting that detached air he had always had in the past. Tristan looked forward to seeing his father's face, after he finally realized he no longer held power over Tristan's life. It would be like seeing a King after abdication, an emperor with no throne.

How the mighty will fall, Tristan thought to himself.

And then of course there was the other matter of business. Something that was far much more significant than yelling at his father, because face it it's not hard to yell at someone you've hated your entire life. Cutting ties with his father didn't prove he was a new person, Tristan knew this. He also knew what other ties he had to cut. Ties that had sunk into him so deeply that sometimes it was like he didn't even know he still had. He had tried to write it off as an insane crush, an infatuation with what he couldn't have but every time he sat down at a piano bench, or smelled hot coffee, or even thought of Chilton he knew it was so much more.

It was the one thing that kept him connected to here. Here, the place he hated with his parents who had spent his entire life ignoring him and when they finally did notice him, their knee-jerk reaction was to send him away to military school.

No, it wasn't leaving his parents that made Tristan so nervous at all. It was something else. It was someone else. Someone lighter and sweeter than his cold-blooded mother and father. Someone who smelled like peaches, and had chocolate brown hair, and wonderful blue eyes. Eyes that were so much more innocent than his own blue eyes.

It was Rory Gilmore.

It was his Mary.

Well not his Mary. She was never his, Tristan checked himself.

And with that reminder the small smile that had appeared on Tristan's face resurfaced under a cool demeanor that he had been developing all his life.

This girl, the one who always made Tristan think of those porcelain dolls with the china faces, was the reason Tristan needed to come home. He needed to prove she wasn't so much to him anymore, that he had changed. He needed Rory Gilmore to be the game she always thought she was to him instead of the one he didn't fight hard enough for so that he could spend a free moment and not instantly think of her blue eyes and wish.