A/n: I don't own, please don't sue.

This tkes place during the finale.


Lorelai wiped her eyes as she pulled up in front of Luke's Diner. She could almost hear the 'You'll thank us later' in her parent's eyes. She saw something in her daughter she thought she'd never see, something she'd hoped she'd never see.

She saw pleasure. Beneath the fear and confusion and the hurt and anger, Rory was taking a little bit of pleasure int he fact that she'd just thrown it all away.

"Come on Mommy!" She'd heard Rory whine on the day of her first college fair. She'd only been four.

"I'll be late!" She'd said that when she was eleven, going to her first seminar.

"What if I don't get in?" Fifteen. Three weeks before Chilton. Two weeks later Lorelai'd gone to her parents.

She was damned for it now, there was no changing that.

"I got arrested!" Last week. When she still had her daughter.

When she'd still have a reason to do all that she did. When'd her heart wasn't in a million and twelve pieces. When she could still feel her heart, still feel her body. When she could still hear her daughter's excitement as she rambled on about how amazing her professors were and how Paris was being neurotic. When she could still see it all.

See everything.

"I love you." She cried and whispered and shouted those words and never hid them from anyone. Rory Gilmore loved her mother. Lorelai Gilmore love her daughter. They were supposed to be best friends.

Well, her best friend just moved to Alaska.

Lorelai wiped her eyes again and took a deep breath, trying to compose herself at least a little before she told Luke. He'd know what to do. He always did. He was her Diner Man. He'd never been wrong before. Well, the break up, but they didn't talk about that.

He'd be just as devastated as she was.

He loved that little girl.

But that little girl was gone, replaced but a woman Lorelai didn't recognize.

One she wasn't sure she wanted to know.