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

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

Dean drove, since Lorelai and Rory were too worried to drive. Lorelai had forgotten about Luke, and the problems that had seemed so important minutes before. Chris could be hurt, and that was all that mattered. What if he died before she could apologize?

Rory was frantic. Why had her grandparents called her? What was wrong? They'd never called her and told her that they needed her there before. Was her grandfather sick? And what about Lorelai? Were they on speaking terms, or had it just been a momentary lapse in judgement? Did she really care what was wrong, or was she just trying to win her back? And Dean, was he mad at her? He was missing his best friend's wedding reception for her. He had every right to be mad. Should that matter? If someone was dying, did it matter if her boyfriend was annoyed with her? Judging by her shaking hands, she would have driven the car right off the road, and so would her mother. The only car that was available was Dean's, so he'd end up mad at her when she crashed it anyways. And sad, since she'd be in the hospital. Which just brought her back to her first thought: who was hurt? Would they be okay.

Dean glanced at Rory, sitting in the passenger seat. He tried not to look at her too much, because whenever he saw the way she was trembling, he just wanted to pull over and try to make it better. But he couldn't. The only thing he could do was keep on driving, and hope that it was only the uncertainty that was hurting her.

Emily was sitting in the living room having drinks with the Huntzbergers when Rory, Lorelai and Dean got there. "Grandma!" Rory shouted, "What's wrong?"

"Wrong?" Rory was panicking, and Dean was focused on her, worrying, so Lorelai was the only one who could assess the situation. Emily Gilmore had called up her eighteen-year-old granddaughter and told her to come over. To have dinner and drinks with her rich friends and their twenty-something son. It wasn't too hard to put two and two together.

"Next time you want to try to set your granddaughter, who has a boyfriend, by the way, up with some rich boy, don't phrase it so that she'll think something's wrong," Lorelai spat. "Just because Dean's parents aren't rich, DAR country club members doesn't mean that he doesn't care for Rory. It doesn't mean that she loves him any less."

"You're not talking about Rory, you're talking about your own stupid little affair."

"Grandma," Rory said, her eyes begging Emily to deny what Lorelai was saying, begging her to say that it was just a mistake, a misunderstanding, that Lorelai was just making things up. Lorelai was wrong, she had to be, Rory didn't want to accept that her grandmother would do something like that. She didn't want to, but she didn't have any choice. There was no way to deny it. "I trusted you," she whispered, crying again, turning on her heel, and leading Dean out of the house.

"How could you do that to her, Mom?" Lorelai yelled, not realizing that she was making a scene in front of the three people Emily and Richard worked the hardest to impress. If she'd realized it, she'd have been making a bigger scene.

"How could you?" Emily was determined not to let herself look worse than Lorelai did to the Huntzbergers. "I only tried to help her. You abandoned her for a diner owner."

"I made a mistake. I want to fix it," her eyes begged her mother to understand, to encourage her, to say that was wonderful. She didn't expect it, but she wanted it more than she could possibly verbalize. She wanted her mother to hug her, and make it all better, make Chris forgive her, make Rory and Topher let her back in. There was still a tiny bit of her that believed that was what mothers were for, and hers would do what she needed.

"Wanting to fix it doesn't change the fact that you can't," Emily said coldly. She wasn't mad at Lorelai for wrecking her plans. She was mad at her daughter because she had left her life behind. She had just turned around and left, without even a phone call to her parents in over five weeks. Lorelai wouldn't be able to fix it until everyone forgave her, and Emily wasn't ready to forgive yet.