Summary: Future Jess-centric fic. "Night was a time of repentance, of forgiving not only others, but yourself, a time of remembrance (and sometimes the act of not-remembering, known as forgetting)."

Disclaimer: As you probably already have noticed, I do not own the show, Jess, or any other characters from Gilmore Girls that were mentioned. The lyrics in the beginning and end are from "Hallelujah" by Jeff Buckley. The quote in the first paragraph can be found in On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I don't own Cingular, Pontiac, the Ramones, the Clash, Aerosmith, or Guns N' Roses. I don't own A Separate Peace, which is by John Knowles. Wow, that's one long disclaimer.

Author's Note: I wrote this about a year ago and posted it on my other penname, Clashowl (just so you know—if it seems familiar, it's not because I'm copying anyone's story), but in consolidating my two accounts I'm moving it over to this one, editing it as well.

This was written before Jess returned during Season 6, and it is now officially AU. For the purposes of this story, Jess never came back after 'Last Week Fights, This Week Tights.'

Read and review!

A MIDDLE GROUND

CHAPTER 1

by Occhio di Lince

It's not a cry that you hear at night, it's not somebody who's seen the light, it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Although it had been slowly becoming night for a long time, the room suddenly felt like it had been plunged into the middle of the night. The middle of the night is the loneliest time of the day, a time when you are completely alone, even if you are not, in actuality, alone. Night was always the coldest time, when temperatures dipped below normal and the winds picked up, whipping through the windows that you had forgotten to close that afternoon. It was a time of repentance, of forgiving not only others, but yourself, a time of remembrance (and sometimes the act of not-remembering, known as forgetting).

And despite all this, night was still more favorable to Jess than day. Day was like California, he sometimes thought: sunny, happy, bright. Night was more like New York: dark, angst-filled, gloomy. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emtpyheaded.) And he would choose dark over bright any day. He had chosen darkness over brightness before… look where that got him.

But now he was stuck in that place of in-between, not quite sunny enough to be considered Californian, yet not dark enough to be New York. So he moved again, from California to New York, from New York to St. Louis, Missouri, somehow along the way making it to Seattle for a brief stint at a Community College there. He likes St. Louis, the city is decent, the people aren't awful. The Mississippi River looks like crap, nothing like what he expected, but he grew up around the Hudson, so he was accustomed to it.

He lived right in the middle of the two of California and New York, right in the middle of lightness and darkness (on his optimistic days he tended to believe that he was ever so much closer to the lightness, but too often he found himself thinking that he was edging towards the darkness even more). He was right in the middle of the country. It seemed slightly ironic to think that Jess, who had always preferred to be just a casual observer from the outside, now lived in the very middle.

He suddenly woke up, and although he could not even remember falling asleep last night, here he is and the sun is streaming in through the window.

"Fucking alarm," he said, as he sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and he looked behind him at the alarm clock. It was that cheap kind that you get for $5.97 at a drug store, with the bright red numbers and the blaring alarm. He had to be at the school for work at 7:30 (yes, he worked at a school, as unbelievable as that may seem), and he had just enough time to shower before he had to leave.

He is positive that the reason he took the job as a substitute teacher was not that he secretly harbored some odd passion for the high school life, which he enjoyed revisiting, but that it pays well and doesn't make him feel like a complete dumbass (which, unfortunately, many of his previous jobs did make him feel like). He enjoyed the feeling that he could be in a school without being forced to, and whenever he wanted to, he could just quit and stop going there.

Jess put on the television as he poured himself a glass of water, and watched a glimpse of the news. He turned it on just as What's-Her-Face with the local news started flipping through her papers like the newscasters do oh so well at the end of the broadcast, and the station changed to commercials.

He drank the water in a few very quick gulps, and almost choked on it as he hears the Ramones play on a Cingular commercial. He hates this, how good bands' music is suddenly being heard on all different types of commercials. The Clash on a Pontiac commercial (and Pontiac's not even a cool car), Aerosmith here and there, Guns N' Roses on… was it a shampoo commercial? All that did was make people associate the songs with the product, not the band.

The answering machine beeped (how had he not heard that last night?) and Jess pressed play. Hey, Jess, it's Luke. I, uh, hope I have the right number. You really should change the message on your machine, I can't tell if this is you or not. Well, I haven't talked to you in awhile, so I was thinking we should catch up, or something like that. Call me when you get this. Jess let out a sigh as he heard the message. He really meant to call Luke, he even had picked up the phone many times in the last year, but before he managed to dial the number he had hung up, thinking he was crazy for almost calling him. He really should call Luke.

After writing a note to himself to remind him to call Luke back and leaving it on the kitchen table, he walked out of the apartment, locking his door. The elevator is broken, and he walks down the four flights of stairs, still empty in the early hours. He passes Apartment 2B just as Mrs. Finken is opening her door.

"Good morning, Jess," she cried out loudly, and the way he can tell that she's staring at him reminds him suddenly of Miss Patty, back in Stars Hollow. Jess looks at her and nods, muttering a greeting, and continues.

The school is only a few blocks away, and he walked, arriving there in only a few minutes. He checked in with the main office and gets his list of classes for the day before heading to the first one, which thankfully is American Literature: Then and Now, which, apart from the cheesy name, may actually be interesting.

The class is reading A Separate Peace, and after writing the page numbers on which the students will find quotes to analyze as class work on the board, he sat down behind the teacher's desk and began to read his own book.

Jess looked up from his book after a moment, and almost enjoyed being in the classroom at this moment, in the teacher's chair, the power seat, and not sitting in the back, pretending not to pay attention, like he had done for so many days in his teenage years.

He looked closer at the class, and saw the boy in the back that could so easily (so easily) be him, and another boy to the side of the classroom, obviously struggling with the assignment, who reminded him of Dean, and a girl with headphones on that seemed like Lane. He looked around the room once more, and saw the girl close to the front, with her head down close to her desk and her pencil flying across her paper, and he just knows that had this been 10 years ago, and a private school in Hartford, not public school in Missouri, that the girl he saw would have been Rory, and he wants to kill himself for remembering.

Baby, I've been here before, I've seen this room and I've walked this floor

Review! Please excuse my rant about music in commercials, it's something that really annoys me and I had to include it in here. Should I continue? (And no, he's not still hung up on Rory.)