AN: Written for the 15minuteficlets community on live journal.
"I didn't want a mess." April explained softly, trying to hide her tears as she sat on the bridge looking at the water, looking at anything that wasn't her father.
Luke shrugged as he dropped down next to her. The bridge was one of Jess's favorite places to go when he needed to think. Maybe hanging out at this bridge was some sort of genetic link. Though, he wasn't sure if genetics worked that way. "I know."
"I wanted to win the science fair." She explained. It wasn't the first time and it probably wouldn't be the last. "It was just a project. It's bands of lighter and darker lines. That's all."
Luke tried to hold in a bitter laugh. It was so neat with this girl, so clean, so scientific. "It doesn't work that way." Luke shrugged.
April turned to him and shook her head. "It does, really. I could show you. It is all there on the back page of my report," April explained. "The graphs always go in the back and you refer to them as appendix items, which doesn't make much sense to me because then your conclusion is like four pages from the end of your report. So, if you turn to the back… in order to find out how every thing turns out… you're stuck at appendix 5c. Appendix 5c is anticlimactic."
Luke tried not to smile as this little girl worked up a head of steam over a science report. It didn't escape his notice that this is what Lorelai would call a classic Luke rant. Only, it was an April rant. Maybe ranting was genetic. April would probably know.
"It's just," she sighed, losing momentum. "It's just an experiment. It's the scientific method. You pose a hypothesis. You test a hypothesis. You come up with a conclusion. I hypothesized that I could tell which one of three men was my father using DNA testing. I tested. I proved that hypothesis. It's over.
Luke cleared his throat trying to decide how to explain this to her. "It's not that simple," Luke shrugged. Of the two of them April was probably better at explaining things. No doubt she got that from her mother.
"It's science," April explained again, softly.
"Yeah, but it's real life too." Luke wished he had Lorelai's gift for words. He wished he knew how to explain this. "In 5th grade we did this project about cause and effect, they called it something fancy, Newton's law of something or other… But it was cause and effect. We had to build a project to show it. First the ball rolls down a shoot then a weight tips and…" Luke sighed. He wasn't making any sense at all. "You know like in that game Mouse Trap…"
April nodded. She wasn't sure where Luke was going but she knew Mouse Trap and Newton's third law of motion. "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."
Luke nodded. "Yeah, so your scientific experiment, the DNA testing, that was an action. And having to deal with the mess that is your new family, that would be the equal and opposite reaction. It's not messy, just science."
April smiled. Science she could deal with.