A/N: Thanks for the reviews. Sorry the last chapter was so short. It was supposed to be longer (combined with this chapter), but it got really late, so I decided that a short update was better than no update at all. Now we can finally get back to focusing on Jess, which is what's really important anyway. Hee hee. Mmmm…sexy Jess. I certainly wouldn't mind nursing him back to health. I tried to make the medical stuff as realistic as possible, but I fudged on some stuff because I didn't want to explain everything out.

Disclaimers: all characters are the property of Amy Sherman-Palladino, I don't own nothin.

Onward to the chapter!

Chapter Six: Once upon a time, you dressed so fine.

Luke and Jess sat in the crowded waiting room of Hartford Hospital across from a family with three small, noisy children, two of who were crying loudly and none of whom appeared to have anything wrong with them. Luke was absently flipping through a fishing magazine that had been sitting on the table in the waiting room, and Jess was slumped in his chair, headphones on, reading Norman Mailor's The Naked and the Dead. They had been waiting for nearly three hours, and Luke was starting to get really annoyed and mumble to himself.

Jess pulled off his headphones, "Relax, will you? You don't really get top priority in an emergency room when you walk in on your own and there's no blood."

"Yeah, well, you could try to look sicker, sell it more. Apparently the coughing isn't doing it. Make a scene, have a seizure or something, I have to get back to the diner."

"Glad to see you're so concerned about me. I'm sure Lane and Caesar can handle the diner. Just sit back and enjoy the view."

"What view? It's just kids, everywhere, with their germs and their jam hands. Have you ever noticed that kids are always sticky, like they've got jam on their hands? Even if there's no jam in the house, somehow, they've always got jam hands."

"Fascinating." Jess put his headphones back on and turned up the volume. It was getting harder and harder to act tough and cool. He felt so shitty; all he wanted was someone to take care of him. There had never been anybody there to do that. When he was seven and he broke his arm, his friend Ruben's mom had driven him to the hospital. When he had the chicken pox, he walked down to the drugstore and bought himself calamine lotion. Liz had never been there to take care of him, the only person who ever had was Rory, and he had ruined everything. It was ruined even before he left—but it was still his fault—why couldn't he have just told her how he felt? Was it that hard? Yes. Yes, it was that hard. No one was allowed to see the chinks in his armor, no one.

The next thing he knew, Luke was shaking him awake. He took off his headphones, "What?"

"The nurse just called your name."

"Huh? Oh yeah…ok then." Jess shoved his book in his back pocket and stood up slowly, trying to mask the wave of dizziness that hit him.

"Do you want me to come with you?" Luke asked.

"Whatever, you're the boss." He really did want Luke to come with him, hospitals scared the shit out of him, but there was no way in hell he was saying that.

"Why not? It'll be good to get away from all these jam hands." Luke pretended to shudder. They followed a perky nurse in blue scrubs back into a small examination room. She pulled out a clipboard with a chart on it.

"Ok, Jess, can you just hop up on the table there for me?" Luke tried not to laugh, but the idea of Jess hopping anywhere was a pretty amusing mental image. Jess sat on the exam table, his grungy jeans and leather jacket looking out of place in the immaculate surroundings. The nurse pulled out a thermometer and slid it under Jess's tongue. "My name is Carol, I'm just going to get your vitals and history real fast, and then the doctor will be in to see you." She took Jess's pulse and blood pressure and such, and then pulled the thermometer out of his mouth. "Wow," she said. "103.6, you're one sick puppy!"

"That's me, always in the doghouse," Jess quipped with a sarcastic smile.

Carol laughed as she wrote something down on his chart.  "Ok Jess, I'm going to ask you some questions now. When did you first start feeling ill?"

"About two, three weeks ago… I don't really know, it's been awhile."

"Ok, and how long have you had a fever?"

"I don't know, I've been on the road, finding a thermometer hasn't really been a priority."

"Ok then. Can you tell me about your symptoms?"

"Umm…headache, sore throat, cough, chills."

Carol took off her stethoscope, "Can you take your jacket off for me?" Jess removed his leather jacket and the nurse put the stethoscope to his chest, under his shirt, and asked him to breath deeply. She did the same thing to several spots on his chest and back, and then asked him to cough. Unfortunately, once he started, it took him a couple of minutes to stop, leaving him breathless.

"How long have you had the cough?"

"Three weeks, maybe." Jess choked out.

"And does it hurt when you cough?"

"Fuck, yes."

"What about when you breathe deeply?"

"Yeah, really sharp, like knives."

Carol checked the chart and then closed it. "I'm going to send you down the hall for some chest x-rays, and the doctor will see you. Just change into that gown there, and someone'll be in to take you to x-ray in just a second." She smiled as she pulled the curtain closed behind her.

Jess made Luke turn around so he could change into the flimsy hospital gown Carol had left for him. An orderly came in with a wheelchair.

"Mr. Mariano, I'm here to take you to x-ray, if you could just have a seat right here."

"I can walk." Jess said.

"I'm sure you can, but it's hospital policy, sir."

Feeling like he had to get the last word in, Jess growled, "I'm not a sir," under his breath as he sat down. This was so humiliating—he wasn't helpless. A fat technician with really cold hands positioned him in front of the x-ray machine, and within a few minutes he was back in the little curtained off cubicle with Luke, staring up at the white ceiling again. He wanted to lie down, but he didn't want Luke to think that he was a wimp, so he just sat there, willing the doctor to come in so he could get this over with and go back to bed.

As if on cue, the doctor walked in. She was a fairly pretty middle aged woman with short black hair. She was carrying Jess's chart and a packet of x-ray pictures with her. "Hi, Jess," She introduced herself. "I'm Doctor Ballard. And this is..?" She gestured to Luke.

"Luke Danes, my uncle." Jess supplied.

"Nice to meet you Mr. Danes. Well, I want to start off by having a listen of your lungs." She put her stethoscope in her ears and listened to his chest and back just as Carol had done. She also asked him to cough, but he managed to control it that time. "And can I see your fingernails for just a second?" Jess thought that was a weird question, but he complied anyway.

"Ok," she said, "Let's have a look at these x-rays." She clipped the x-rays up to the light board on the wall behind Jess. He turned to look. "These are your lungs. You can see right through here is a whitish, fibrous looking area—that's pneumonia. It appears that you have a pretty serious bacterial pneumonia infection in both lungs. Also, the sharp pain with breathing that you described and your chest x-rays also show that you probably have pleurisy, which is an infection of the lining of the chest cavity, which can cause pretty severe pain, as you know, and it can cause fluid to surround your lungs if you don't treat it. You must be one tough cookie, because you didn't even wince when I asked you to cough for me, and pleurisy this advanced is painful enough to make most people cry when they cough that hard. The good news is, that it is very treatable, and we should have you up and about in a week or so."

"That long?" Jess asked.

"Yeah, well, you want to make sure that the lung tissue is healed before you return to your normal activities or you can do some permanent damage. What I'd like to do is admit you to the hospital, just for a day or two, so that we can give you some high-dose IV antibiotics to battle the infection and some breathing treatments to help you breathe easier and to alleviate some of the pain. I won't keep you here too long, I just want to make sure your body can fight off the infection without straining your body's defenses anymore."

Luke stood up and shook Dr. Ballard's hand. "Thank you so much, Doctor."

"No problem, someone will come by in a minute to take you up to your room, and I'll come by to check on you tomorrow morning. It was nice to meet you both." She left the exam room, the curtain swishing behind her.

"Well, I guess I'll go call Lane and tell her that she and Caesar should just go ahead and close tonight, since I'll be here."

"You don't have to stay, you know. I'm a big boy."

"I know I don't have to stay, I just want to. It would suck to get left alone here. I'm just going to go out to the lobby and call Lane, be back in a minute." Luke left in search of a payphone. He found one near the lobby restrooms, dropped a quarter in and called Lane at the diner to let her know what was going on. After he hung up the phone, he hesitated for a minute and then dropped in another quarter and dialed.

"Hi, Lorelai…"

Stolen from episode 2x05: Nick and Nora, Sid and Nancy