One Less Mistake

Summary: What if Lorelai hadn't gotten pregnant until she was 20? What if she had agreed to marry Christopher when she did? AU.

Pairings: Rory/Dean, Lor/Luke/Chris

Disclaimer: All of these characters belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Emily held the ringing phone to her ear. "Hello?" the voice on the other end asked.

"Lorelai?"

"Hey, Mom. This is a bad time. Do you mind if I call you back?"

"Do I mind if you call me back? Yes, of course I mind. If you didn't want to talk, you should have turned your cell phone off."

"But I'm waiting for an important call."

"Oh, so you're not too busy to talk to someone you want to talk to."

"A work call, Mom."

"On your cell phone?"

"Fine. I can see I'm not going to get anything done until I let you say what you want to say. What is it, Mom?"

"I was worried about you. No one's heard from you since Rory's birthday."

"No, Mom. You haven't heard from me since Rory's birthday. If you check the calendar, you'll see that Rory's birthday was only about five weeks ago. There have been times that I haven't talked to you for two months at a time. And if I was dead, or dying at the hospital, they would have called my parents, so you can be fairly certain that I'm fine."

"Who's heard from you?"

"What?"

"You said that I haven't heard from you in a month. That implies that someone I know has. Christopher? Did you call Christopher? Oh, please say you called Christopher."

"No. Rory, she came to visit me."

"Rory."

"Yes."

"Rory went to visit you?"

"Yes, Mom, Rory came to visit me."

"So, you two are on good terms then, right?" she waited, but the only sound she could hear was a slight sniffle from her daughter. "Well, if she came to visit you, you must be."

"No, she came. But then she left. She told me she was being disloyal to her father, and she left." Emily's heart went out to Lorelai. She wanted to be mad at her -hate her for what she did to their family- but she couldn't. Lorelai was still her baby girl, her only child.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't lie to me. This is exactly what you wanted."

"No, it's not, believe it or not."

"Not." Emily sighed.

"No mother wants to hear her daughter cry," she whispered as she slid the phone into the cradle.

Lorelai stared at her phone. She had run. But it had caught her. It had caught her. She had lost everyone she had ever loved. She had thrown it away over a fling. She needed to see Luke. At least she had Luke. "Michel, cover for me please," she choked, running out of the inn.

"It will be hard. God only knows what I will do without you here. Go only if you absolutely must," was his sardonic reply. But Lorelai didn't hear it. She was already halfway down the street. She ran through the snow in her high heels and work clothes. She was insane. She was desperate. She was running. She was caught. She was falling apart. She needed Chris. She needed Rory. She needed Topher. She needed to be drinking the coffee her son made in the kitchen with her daughter, sitting in the chair her in-laws had given her for her wedding. She needed her home. She needed her mother. She wanted Luke. She was an idiot.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chris took a sip of his chai latte and grimaced as be turned back to his work. Who honestly cared if the tech companies drowned. He remembered a time when he had loved this job. Not anymore. He got bored really easily. It said a lot about Lorelai that she had not bored him once in twenty-three years of being together, plus ten years of friendship. He banged his head against his keyboard. Why did everything in his life come back to her? Hadn't he had even one thing in his life that he hadn't included her in? What had she been doing in the past five weeks? Five weeks, and three days, actually. The one surprisingly good thing in his life was that Rory had stayed with him. Lorelai had left, but Rory stayed, and her boyfriend who had always viewed Lorelai's new boyfriend as a father had stayed too. Topher thought he didn't know about Luke. The other man. But he knew. He had heard her call out his name drunkenly that night. He had known for sure when Dean had asked if he blamed him. Damn the stupid society that said men couldn't cry. Crying helped.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rory was in Stars Hollow. Of course she had to be. Jess and Lindsay lived there, and their wedding was in two days. But she didn't want to be there. Dean had been right. She shouldn't have agreed to do this. She wouldn't be able to handle being in the same room as her mother. She was having trouble dealing with being in the same town as her mother. She wouldn't let herself cry, not in front of Jess and Lindsay, not so near to their special day, even though crying was the only thing she felt like doing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Topher clutched the token his mother had given to him. It hadn't been a present for anything. One day, she had just given it to him. An old token that she got at whatever sort of arcade they had when she was growing up. One little thing she had kept to remind her of her childhood, one little thing she had passed on to Topher, telling him to give it to his daughter, who would give it to her son, until it was an ancient heirloom. Their little joke. He was sick of the anger, and he couldn't hold onto it without trying, without physically calling up the picture in his mind of her with Luke. He didn't want to anymore. For the first time in his life, he collapsed in tears, crying over the token, crying over his mother.