A/N-Long chapter ahead, and it will be grisly. After this it'll get better, I promise. Lane, Paris, and Dave action probably next chapter. Hang in there with me, I will stay true to the Romance/Humor genre. But, as I understand it, the plot required some shaking up.

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"Liz what?" Lorelai sputtered as Rory rose to her feet and went for the door, running blind.

"Liz got in a car accident. If there's a fatality they're cryptic as all hell about it and I got them to tell me. She's in Brooklyn, we've got to get going." He looked to Rory for a moment. "Let us do this, we'll call." Rory stopped in her tracks, the frustration flooding furiously into her veins, powerful as anything she had ever experienced.

"He is out there and he needs somebody!" Rory said, yelling slightly, gesturing frantically to the door. "Do you know what this has got to be doing to him? His mother, who kicked him out of the house because he was too much work, is dead."

"Rory," Lorelai said, taking her daughters arm and sitting her back down in the chair. "Listen, they're going to go to Brooklyn. I promise you that you will hear from one of them," she shot Luke a threatening look, "and that Jess will be fine. Honey, you gotta let him deal this one on his own."

"But what if he can't?" Rory said, close to breaking into tears.

"Then he will go to somebody for help. Rory, if you don't sit down and let him figure this out, he'll never come to terms with it." She turned to Luke. "Go, call when you know more, and make sure that Jess is okay. Don't make him go if he can't."

Luke nodded knowingly and slipped into his coat as he walked out the door, the bell ringing brusquely against the situation.

"I can't stand this," Rory said, pacing and wringing her hands.

"Babe, we can't just barge into this, it isn't our situation to handle," Lorelai said, watching her daughter with a pained look.

Rory stopped and stared at her mother with realization, pain, and tears in her eyes. "It isn't his situation to handle either! She was never there for him, and he shouldn't have to be there on his own. It's one thing for Luke to handle this, she was his sister. It's another thing for her forgotten son, who she sent away to said brother, to have to come and try to understand this. It's not fair, and I refuse to let him do it alone! If you don't want me to go alone, then come with me," she said while getting her coat on and standing by the door with the keys to the Jeep in her hand.

Lorelai stared back at her daughter, seeing the concern pour from her and reverberate around the room a few times before it died down. It hit her hard and caused Lorelai to rethink her judgment. While she trusted Rory more than anyone, she also knew things that young love would do to you. It would take away your brain and replace it with false declarations of love.

She let out a sigh and rose to retrieve her coat from the hook. "This isn't going to be something that'll just save him and make it better. This is grisly, way more than it is now."

"I know."

xxx

Jess sat in the car, staring at his hands. He couldn't turn and see people on the street, looking at him as he tried to see straight. He actually couldn't avert his eyes to see what he knew to be a fairly intense conversation going on in the diner. To see how his pain hurt her, to see how Luke couldn't even compose himself into wit. To see how Lorelai was pained with both.

"Shit," he thought, finally something swimming through the junk and beginning to push the evening into his subconscious. His date was wonderful, beyond anything he had dared to live through with Rory yet. His night showed promise. He remembered thinking that maybe later he'd be able to piss off Dean a little more.

Now he was sitting in the truck, staring at his lap.

He felt the void become interrupted when Luke opened the driver's side door and he slid into the seat, resting his head against the steering wheel for a moment.

"Can you do this?" he asked, his voice low and dangerously close to breaking. If there was one thing Jess knew that he couldn't handle, it was Luke crying, breaking down on him at all for that matter.

Jess hesitated. He wasn't sure his voice even worked anymore. It was a moot point anyway. He had to go. There was not an option involved. It was his mother, he answered the phone, he had questions that, while never to be answered, needed to be asked.

"Which do you want? The lie that I'll tell or the truth? Because they're the same word but oh so different," Jess said, looking up at Luke with what he hoped was stonewall, unemotional visage. Free of his internal war.

"You don't suppose I'll get the same answer either way?"

"Guess you might." They sat silent for a few beats of pregnant silence.

"What's it gonna be, Jess?"

Jess looked up at Luke again, his eyes mirror to the fire that was smoldering not far behind them. A fire of rage, a fire of confusion, a fire of passion (or something close to it) for the situation.

"I don't have a choice."

"You do too. You can turn around and pretend as if this never happened. You can stay here and keep your hunky-dory relationship kicking and live in Star's Hollow and maybe one day many years from now, you and I will go up to New York and handle this. Then maybe we can hold hands..., and skip. But you don't have to do anything."

"I'm going. She was still my mom. There were so many nights that I would sit up, thinking of ways to make her love me. Thinking up a new way to be a better kid, so maybe she'd want me. But guess what? I fucked up. I never kept a promise, I let her down, and more than anything, let her die thinking I was a disappointment."

"Hey-," Luke started, taking Jess by his shoulders, a grimace on both of their faces in tear suppression. "You are not a failure. You are not a disappointment. You are not worthless. You have more promise than anyone in your family ever had. You keep going the way you are you could do anything you want. You can't let the fact that she thought you weren't perfect ruin your life."

"I want to know why she thought I was so bad. What did I seriously do that was so different from any other kid on the block? I never killed anybody, I never owned a gun, I smoked cigarettes, read, and on occasion vandalized the school. What was so goddamned horrendously awful about me that constituted this? I need to ask that question before I can move on from this."

xxx

"They aren't going to be initially happy with us, you realize this?" Lorelai checked as she and Rory buckled themselves into the Jeep, disheveled. "They'll probably be angry in fact."

"I realize that." Rory sat in the car, ready to go, holding back tears. Lorelai sighed and unbuckled her. "Excuse you?"

"Do you want to go and talk to him?"

"Of course I do, but-," Rory said, cut off.

"But what?"

"Sometimes, when you have the best intentions at heart, talking to somebody in a grief period can be the worst thing."

"Uh, babe, it's Jess. You're the only one he actually talks to."

"Still! Mom, this situation is hard enough without me imposing."

"Then why are we?" Rory sat for a moment, looking at her mother unimpressed.

"Because. Whether or not he likes it, he needs me. And I won't let him go alone. And what about Luke? Liz was his sister. Luke is like my surrogate dad, I can't leave him alone with this either." Lorelai blew out a breath and turned over the engine. She saw Luke start the truck and slowly crawled out of the spot, keeping a cautious distance.

They started off on the highway, words staying few and far between, between both cars and their enclosed passengers. Mostly Luke asked Jess if he was hungry. Lorelai usually asked Rory the same, and asked her to change the radio station. Nobody dared to dwell. It was a matter of going to New York, confirming it, and whatever happened from there was a matter of pure decision.

"I suppose there'll be a funeral," Lorelai said as they crossed the state lines into New York.

"I would imagine." Rory sighed painfully. "These next few weeks are going to kill him."

"He'll end up being fine. This is going to be the hard part."

Five hours later, Jess, Rory, Lorelai, and Luke all walked out of Reddington Grace Hospital, all walking separately, looking and presumably feeling weary. None of them had spoken to one another within the last 25 minutes. Instead they opted to all listen to Luke's pen scratch across the surface of the release forms and Lorelai calling nearby hotels. Only one night, she had said. One night for one room, two for another. Rory wouldn't miss school, but Lorelai couldn't leave the inn. Luke had called Caesar and told him about the arrangement.

Jess had mostly sat there, looking vacant. Rory wanted nothing short of holding him there in her arms until he felt whole again. She knew better, but the desire still lingered on her fingertips, on the front of her brain, in the heels of her feet. She instead chose to sit next to him in the various waiting rooms, sending him supportive glances when the situation felt appropriate, standing nearby when he would let her.

He thought once that he had reached for her hand, but it could've been in his head. Jess wanted to hold her hand and let loose some of his pain while he did it. He needed a moment of normalcy. If only he could get his brain and his arm to cooperate.

Luke spent most of his night taking the reigns and keeping his head on straight. Liz had been his little sister. And while they had been distant, especially since their dad died, he still felt the blow of the loss. He chose to take it with a grain of salt, free his emotions and go about this in a very business like fashion. He didn't have the time or the mental capacity to handle this now. Maybe one day when he was polishing silverware after closing, a particularly difficult but endearing piece of flatware would let loose the realization, but until then, he intended on living in a funny form of denial, for everyone's benefit.

Lorelai had stayed close to Luke, squeezing his hand reassuringly on occasion. Upon their arrival at the hospital, Luke had sought her out. She played her role well, and appreciated that he was still letting her in, despite the fact that she wasn't sure why. Jess wasn't cold, but definitely colder than Luke. She saw a few exchanges of looks when the emotions had managed to settle momentarily, but other than that, they all sat in basic silence.

"We're staying at the Best Western down the street. Follow us, we'll find a parking spot in the structure next door," Lorelai said as she turned to the other three and pulled her keys out of her pocket. Her voice was scratchy from not being used, mistaken by Jess for a moment as being teary.

"Yeah…yeah, that's fine," Luke said as he ran his hand over his eyes and Jess stuffed his hands in his pockets. He rethought it and took a moment to take Rory's hand in his, giving it a squeeze. Rory looked up with a look on her face that showed nothing short of amazement and adoration, and Jess looked like a lost puppy, clinging onto Rory and her sanity as if they were his last links to reality.

"Yeah," Jess said, daring to smile, even a little. Luke and Lorelai hugged for a moment and let go, her giving him a chaste kiss to his cheek, he returning the favor and tapping Jess's shoulder.

"Let's go." Jess hugged Rory briefly and they went off to the truck, while Rory and Lorelai went to the Jeep.

"You know what?" Rory said to Lorelai, her heart lightening. "I get the feeling it's only uphill from here."

A/N-Exactly. We're all good from here on out. Not as long as I anticipated, but longer than some. Read and review! Hope you enjoyed it.