Title: The Goodbye Girl
Author: BehrBeMine
Disclaimer: Very much not mine. Any of it.
Summary: Shattered glass and overturned cars drive her to dredge up questions she'd long since left behind.
Pairing: Rory/Dean
Rating: R
Note: ggfic100 Prompt #58: Hold.
Another Note: All lyrics belong to Matchbox Twenty and Avril Lavigne.
Author's Note: So, we have reached the end of this short saga. I hope that you enjoy it; that's all I can ask for.
Chapter 3: Cry, Baby
- -
If I need some other love,
Give me more than I can stand
And when my smile gets old and faded,
Wait around I'll smile again
Shouldn't be so complicated
Just hold me and then
Just hold me again
Can you help me, I'm bent
I'm so scared that I'll never
Get put back together
You're breaking me in
And this is how we will end
With you and me... bent
-- Matchbox 20, 'Bent'
--
Many things were planted already at the head and the foot of his grave; blooming decorations that wafted sweet honey to the smell of the breeze. Rory ignored many things, unable to look, unable to see. She used Babette's hand-sized shovel to dig out a small pile of soil where there was a gap in planted flowers that choked his gravesite in their very abundance.
In the small hole she'd dug, she stuck a white rose, and then covered its lower stem with the freshly dug dirt, which inched up under her nails as she ground her whole hands into the dark, heavy soil, rich with nutrients that would do nothing to save him. He, who was so far below the ground and couldn't know that these affections had been planted to keep him company. All they did was make each planter feel an eighth the better, for knowing they'd left a part of themselves of their choosing as decoration above the land that was packed down on his casket, sealing it away from the world he had left, leaving nothing but his body behind.
Her rose thus planted, her sorrows given an image with petals as soft as his lips (had been), Rory rose from her knees, and after dusting the dirt off of her blue jeans, she left the gravesite, and its haunting stone slab, behind.
--
"Avril Lavigne, in my house? Say it isn't so!"
"But that would be a lie," Rory told her mother plainly, loving and hating the teenage angst-driven lyrics as they rasped from her throat to converge with the stereo-boomed pieces of a well known rocker's voice in the air. Isn't anyone trying to find me? she mouthed from her place atop her back on her too-small bed.
The music was gone with a swift punch of the "stop" button from Lorelai's finger. Rory heard the sound and her brows flinched, though her eyes didn't dare close. But she didn't move her head to meet her mother's stern expression; her cornflower blues continued to circulate around the dotted plaster of her ceiling.
"You're staring so hard, you'd think there was a picture of him up there," came Lorelai's voice from so far away.
"I can see him..."
"When can we have fun with the lunacy jokes again, daughter of mine? When can they stop applying to you, and therefore make you laugh? Do you remember laughter? You used to know it well. You used to shake hands with it, even when not drunk."
"I don't know. Any of it."
"Since when are you okay with not knowing anything? Where are your dictionaries, your encyclopedias, your weapons of immaculate intelligence?" Lorelai stepped close enough to the bed so that she could lean over her daughter and obstruct her view of the ceiling and his invisible image that danced among the spots of plaster. "Where has my daughter gone?"
"I don't..."
Lorelai nodded, and stepped away. Her voice was uncharacteristically low and cold as she said what needed saying: "You can't tell me, because you don't know. You don't want to know a damn thing but him anymore."
Though Rory's throat choked on misery grasping and failing to be sobs at what was happening to all of the living relationships in her life, her mother was well out of the room when she turned on the tortured tunes again, singing along to a girl whose lyrics before she'd always despised, and laughed at, in that way that was foreign to her now. What was laughter, what was happiness, when not recognized anymore? Nothing but memories that were taken along with him.
--
She had become accustomed to the blackouts, so much so that it was almost a comfort now, as she was confronted by one again. The stereo was drowned out by the sound of harsh waves as concussion-like black invaded her, from peripheral version in, swarming to the inner-most center of her pupils.
And there was Dean. He was quiet, squatting in the corner, with his hands trapping his nose and lower face, seeming to be in deep contemplation. She wanted to snatch him again and drag him into her world, like she had for those short seconds, but the futility of such actions seemed to wash over her as he looked her way and shook his head, anticipating everything.
"Why do you come to me?"
"Because you're right here."
"No," she corrected, "why do you come to me? Why not to Lindsay, or your parents, your little sister?"
"Lindsay," he scoffed as means of an answer, jerking his eyes away and letting his bangs sway into his face, like those from a head-banging rockstar. "I see you, and so I come to you. Rory... you're all that's there."
She didn't want to say the words that came from her mouth, but maybe it was her mother's face flashing before her eyes that drove her to speak. "Dean, I'm living in 'The Ring' here. Seriously, can you stop?"
He leveled her with his eyes, so easily, and she realized that she, too, was only seeing one person anymore. That he was all that was there, as well. "No, Rory. Right now, I can't."
She swallowed. There was something -- a lump of cancer, a storm of tears -- in her throat. "Then help me understand."
"You won't."
"Let me try!" She knew her mind gone mushy was nothing for quoting academia or garnering any explanation of the great expanse that spread between their two worlds, but it wasn't in her to give up, even now. Now that she'd become wrapped up in some warped version of 'The Twilight Zone', and since when, she wondered, was that still on the air?
"There's no way," he told her, and she fought not to believe him. Not to take all of his words to be the absolute truth.
He was up from his corner now, circling where she laid as she stared up at the void where stars, a ceiling, or sunlight should be. When he spoke again, his voice was as calm as always it remained in this place. "You know you still name your appliances, Rory. And then tell Lorelai it's ridiculous."
"You spy on me?" Her voice didn't even pretend to accuse; what she spoke were just words.
"...Who are you trying to be?" he asked her, as was his way now, never answering anything.
She breathed through deep, troubled thoughts. There was a deep silence, and then troubled words: "I don't know... I don't. I have no idea."
She propped her head up on her arm, watching his pacing, wishing his legs would slow and he would come to her. She wanted to believe she had the strength to yank him back again, this time for longer, but he would have none of it, it seemed. She resorted to poetics, at last. "There are those who are prettier than me..." she mentioned, trying again to understand.
"But I don't see them."
"Those with silkier voices. Their windows don't even break when they 'sing'."
"I don't hear them."
She used tired hands to rub her eyelids as she wished to rub along his inner thighs. "Those who wouldn't have hurt you this way."
"But I don't want them," he told her, his eyes full of plenty of want, all aimed straight from his core to hers.
"You should. You should have."
"But I never could. I never did."
The lump in her throat bubbled up past her lips, garnered tears on her lashes. "I'm sorry!"
"Rory... I'm not."
She was so lost in his eyes that she didn't recognize which one of their voices it was who whispered, "Stop looking so closely, and maybe you'll see." He came closer to her, both of them damning those words lost between them. She reached out to touch his cheek as he dropped to his knees with such force beside her; her hand brushed through him, and his lashes trembled as if from wind he couldn't feel. Her hand tangled in the mass of nothing as it went through his skin, through his skull, and she felt none of it, only a tingling in her long fingers that pried and screamed to feel him again, the way that she could have years ago, days ago, and didn't. Wasted time was a cruel thing as she was confronted with its repercussions, in blackouts, time and time again.
--
Life was pushing her along, the way that it did to those who would rather linger among the shadows and the dead. Lane was there the day Rory threw clothes into her small short-stay suitcase in a disorganized manner, which did not go unnoticed. Nothing could, nothing did, anymore.
"Rory." Lane's eyes were on her for ten seconds instead of the baby that kept alternating between cooing sweet sounds and spitting up sour milk in Rory's best friend's arms. "Where's the checklist, the first version and the final draft that once in a while you'd laminate? How do you know you're going to remember all your stuff if you don't write and rewrite it down?"
Rory gave Lane a look, spared a glance at the baby, but for once saw none of its beauty. None of its half-Lane-ness that she'd adored since the day it sprang out of its mother. She saw little other than what Dean's mother must have seen when called to the police station to identify the body. She would be glad to be away from Stars Hollow, and it was the first time she could remember thinking that since she used to want to get away from Dean. Now she just wanted to get away from everything else. Everything around here that was a constant reminder that she'd lost him too soon, and had whispered unheard declarations to him far too late.
She couldn't love her friends like she used to; she couldn't look her mother in the eye. She couldn't let them look back and see what was there, that it was nothing. That she was much like a seashell, gutted and smoothed, its insides concave and utterly empty.
"Why are you leaving, Rory? As your best friend, I'm telling you, I deserve to know. Where are you going?"
Rory's eyes flitted to Lane and her beautiful baby again. "I'm going home, Lane. It's time I stopped hanging around here and moping so close to his grave."
"Okay, um, don't kill me for saying this? But Dean: not so much a part of your life for the past how many years?"
"I know, and wasn't that my mistake? Doesn't that have to be the reason why I'm being tortured this way?" Rory busied her hands and her eyes with dumping particles of clothing, some unwashed, some she'd never wear, into her small suitcase that she'd brought to Stars Hollow six days ago. On the day that would be remembered by pitifully less people than was deserved. "It's time I got back to New York. Got back to work. Wrote about other things that aren't so close to me."
"Lorelai was right..." Lane said, shaking her head. "It really is like we don't know you anymore. We don't even recognize you, Rory. Come back to us, be the reason I made you a godparent again."
"Lane." Finally, Rory stopped, and tried to genuinely look at the face she'd been excited to tell of her first kiss, the face she'd broken the news to after her first break-up. The face that was there before Dean, and was still there after he'd left. "I have to find it, again."
"Find what?"
"...Me. Who I was."
"You're in there somewhere, Rory. You believe that still, right? You'll get over this. You know that."
"Did I put a pink sweater in here? Because I borrowed Mom's pink sweater to sleep in a few nights ago, and if I pack it, I'm going to hear her hollering from a state away."
Lane sighed, saddened by this experience. Needing to perk up for the baby's sake, thinking it wouldn't do a thing for Rory, she touched her best friend's shoulder and said goodbye, for the time being. "Get home safe, Rory."
Rory continued packing to purposefully shut out the fact that the emptiness she felt was no worse now that Lane had left than it was when she entered the room. Her silence fed the void as she searched in vain for a sweater that, like her mind, just wasn't there.
--
"You'd better become more normalized when you get back to New York," Lorelai admonished. "Or I'll have to bring Michel to your new place and together we'll exorcise the demon that's eating your brain. I'll chant the foreign words; he'll put the sticks to the voodoo doll."
Rory tilted her head at her mother, knowing she would normally fill this space with words of humor and sarcasm, something to comfort the way her humanity was oozing away from her body. "Am I forgetting anything?"
"I'll say," said Lorelai, holding her arms open for a big squishable hug.
Rory let go long before the intended eternity had passed, and soon enough she truly was alone, in her car; back on the freeway, she dared to close her eyes at the exact spot where she'd witnessed her undoing. Where she'd seen Dean's hair bloodied and matted on his head full of death and nothing else. All of her usual safe driving eccentricities were shoved aside in favor of her need not to see that place, and look for any purple blood soaked through the highway pavement. Silly though it was, it was all she could do not to keep her eyes closed for the rest of the drive. Car horns could still startle, she found, even when in this state of mind, and soon enough she was past the forbidden scene of horrors, and was on her way to her small apartment in very large New York.
Her place was the same as she'd left it, when again she arrived. The keys complained when turned in the rusty old locks, and her apartment door still creaked as it was opened. She walked in, threw most of her mail away, deposited her suitcase inside her bedroom, and fell, exhausted, into her bed. She inhaled the sheets, and instead of smelling Bounty fresh, they reeked of old dirt and what lies beneath.
"I can't do this," she said to the walls, who may or may not have been listening.
--
"Sherry, hi," said Rory in a fabulous mock-happy tone. Her cell phone now had use again. "It's Rory Gilmore. I'm back. Oh, it was fine, it was good," she lied as her boss asked the usual after-vacation questions. "Listen, I'm ready to get back to work, like, now. As soon as possible, really. Do you have anything that needs attention? I am all about giving attention to something else."
Sherry came up with a story, stating that Rory was in luck, as Damian had declined it in favor of taking a short vacation of his own just recently. "It's not a serious piece," Sherry divulged, "but if you're wanting to get back into the swing of things in such short order, it should do."
"Great," Rory remarked in that same tone she thought she'd like to adopt forever, jotting down the details on a notepad kept on the fridge at all times. "So you'll let me know of the flight details before the end of the day? Awesome, and their full names are? Uh-huh... Yes..."
When she hung up, there was a sufficient amount of details displayed on her notepad sheet with the cute kitty on the top and the "From the paws of Rory" displayed neatly underneath it. Personalized stationery. It was a Lorelai idea that made its way into Crapshack, Jr.
Okay. So she would leave tomorrow after she'd just left her old home to come to the new home she'd left six days ago only to find Dean dead. Yes, it seemed the only plan was to keep moving, and stop surrendering to the darkness that claimed whenever it chose to mame. So much of her heart was fighting to continue singeing Dean's image into itself like a tattoo, but her brain was starting to come into consciousness again, beginning to salve the wounds until they could scar over, and she could move on without being pointed at like the thing with two heads by her own eyes reflecting back from every mirror.
--
Tossing and turning, she worked hard at getting rested that night. Every time she closed her eyes, his voice was ghosting along her subconscious, his eyes bearing into her soul. And the darkness was ever his companion.
Long after she'd originally planned, Rory fell into sleep, her face gnashed into the pillow, her jaw set in a grim line, as if anticipating what was to come.
"You're getting further and further away..." Dean said to her, the bright spot amid the void and whatnot that surrounded him.
Her lips moved as she slept, able to comprehend her dream self to an extent. "Since when you do find me here? I need to... dream in peace."
"You want me to leave?"
"Dean, you have to. You have to stop this, go away... walk into the light, or whatever. Stop being Seth Green in 'Idle Hands' about the whole thing."
"Rory, you're the light. It's why I can't stop... and it's why I'm always looking at you."
Steeling her nerves, she forced out what followed: "You know that's not what I meant. Can you follow me everywhere or does it stop when I enter Utah tomorrow?"
"You're going to Utah, right. 'To interview boys who have dropped all pretense of religion, forsaking their beliefs to help wage war on other countries.'" The quote of Sherry's phone call earlier was delivered with what seemed a great deal of sarcasm.
"They're in the army, yes. You can hear my phone calls? Dean, that's just creepy now." She couldn't feel a sense of tangible self in this dream sequence; it was the first time he had dared to reach her here. Always before he waited until she was awake, conscious, and better prepared to be ripped from one world into the space between it and another.
"I have to keep an eye on you. It's important, Rory."
If she could roll her eyes, she would have, as anger was starting to seethe into her. If she could feel her arms, she would cross them under her breasts, and somehow she would make her eyes glare at that soul of a boy she loved, loved, loved past death. She didn't know how to keep loving him and forsaking her sanity and everyone else in her life. Exhausted by the way she'd been avoiding everything, her thoughts now went to avoiding him, thinking perhaps those other things would come back.
"Trust me, it's not that important, and I'm fine." She ignored the way that her dream voice wavered, and was glad now not to feel her own arms, for they would betray her and crash into him again, pulling him to her in vain while his shape wouldn't move. She wasn't alone without him; she was alone within his death span, eyes blind to all else because he was dragging her down. They were alone together.
Suddenly, her heart began beating faster in her sleeping body, and the lips that were mouthing words and beginnings of words that ended before sound could find them went dry as leather left out too long in the sun. She felt her limbs baking under heat, as if feeling a touch of hell itself, and in her dream, she screamed, her voice being swallowed up almost before it left her too dry throat. It wasn't that he scared her, but this place he kept bringing her to, this place he could possibly keep her in, was beginning to terrify her. She was beginning to dissect things again, to weigh options on more sides than one. To see beyond the everlasting light that lit his form from behind and made his dead skin golden.
You're the light, he was insisting to her, the only light he could see, and suddenly she wanted to banish those words from her comprehension. What if they meant that he would follow her until her light was extinguished from the weight of bearing him with every second? What if, just by being with her and causing her to be there as well, he was dragging her out of existence to be with him in this dark place? Her thoughts ran amuck, and her limbs about the bed went wild as a caged tiger's, trying to claw their way out of this state of unconsciousness, and pull her back from the dark coma.
"Rory, why are you afraid?" Dean was asking, wanting to know. "What you should be afraid of is out there."
"In Utah?" Again she felt the screams emanating from her mouth. "Utah, with its religious soldiers who will no doubt drop to their knees and pray before choosing to pick up their gun?" She struggled to find breath that was quickly leaving her in some sort of panic attack. "Are you jealous of them, is that it? Do you not want me to find other men again, ever? You want me to just stay here with you, as if this hasn't been the most psychotic vacation of my life? Dean, Dean."
Despite her screams and the way she clawed at her sheets, she was sobbing now, not wanting to leave when he couldn't come with her. Not wanting him to be gone... the way that he was.
Dean's face was contorted with pain and disgust at what he was causing and caught in, and then was lit up with pure love, and he searched for her eyes until they chose to meet his. "Don't go to Utah," he told her, seemed to beg of her. "Don't go."
"Now more than ever, Dean, I have to. Go. Go away. Leave me alone, let me go, let me go." She was wailing and crying, a child of thirteen, afraid of the world she was in and wanting to turn the light on. "Let me go, let me go..." She was crying those stupid girlish tears she'd long since abandoned, shooing away the very presence that held most strongly onto her bones and the blood that ran among them.
"Don't go..." he was saying as he faded away, ripped out through that ever-incompetent reception from the television screen atop some devil's desk. She thought such ridiculous thoughts as she focused her eyes so intently on his lips that kept begging her, until his image flickered out and away, and she fell to true unconsciousness, which wasn't light or dark, as in it she comprehended nothing at all.
--
The insistent beeping of an alarm clock dug through her soupy brain and managed to find her ears beneath it and finally, after several hours of cold-water-shock-coaxing with its deafening beeps, it was able to do its job. Rory's eyes opened, her ears in taking the sharp sounds that were emanating from that small box on her nightstand. Jarred as she was by it so suddenly, she couldn't believe it when she saw the time.
"No. No, no, no! How could I? How could... I'm going to be late!"
She'd never slept this late without the aid of her whole three hangovers, never in her life before. Springing out of bed, the mattress coils squeaked as did her bones as she tested the strength of her muscles in dressing faster than was thought to be Gilmorely possible. If she missed this flight, this chance to get on with her life, she felt that surely she might die of the tediousness of those blackout visits that drained her of all that was Rory. All that she so obviously needed to get back.
There wasn't even time for coffee, barely time for a messy half-ponytail, and not all of the buttons on her shirt were properly placed, but in spite of it all, she was at the door in her cow-spotted sweat pants and carry-on bag within eight minutes. "Okay, you look like crap! It must be your daughter's first day at Chilton," she was saying to herself as hurriedly she rushed around, figuring she could clean herself up at some point between the flight and the taxi to the interview. Did they have taxis in Utah? Lorelai had said she thought they had electricity now, and had smiled that smile of hers for Rory's grandmother who never "understood a back-handed comment that came out of that mouth".
Rory liked thinking of these things, liked that she could recall them finally, but she was out of time, and out of breath, and she practically leapt for the door handle of her apartment. She almost had the handle turned when her body collapsed seemingly of its own volition, leaving her unconscious on her apartment floor, suitcase in hand, hair all a blur, with no head wound to speak of to physically hold her eyes closed. But closed they were, and gone to the present world was she.
-
The darkness wasn't her only companion, but this time it brought not only Dean, but colorful images broadcast in the space between himself and her blinking eyes. There were many murmurs of sound, to accompany light-speed views of her face as it changed from age 15 through to 23, from chubby schoolgirl cheeks to hollow ones more befitting a woman of her current age, all seen from the viewpoint of a Dean who had looked at her, alive, and admired such things himself.
She could hear their banter bubbling past their lips, and before long she could see him in the images, too, as they washed over her. She saw his left hand trembling just slightly as he leaned in and kissed her in the middle of a sentence (and the middle of a store). "I got kissed!" she could hear, in strangled teenage language, as the particular image faded away. "And I shoplifted!"
She tried to laugh, but more so than that, she wanted to cry.
Seeing herself in a car, that wonderful car that he'd built her and she'd never gotten to drive, she watched his lips move as they neared her face, but his words were muted.
But then she could see them both on the last day of sophomore year at Chilton -- she could see his green truck, and his back turned to her. And she could hear their words spoken then, could feel the heat emanating off of him from all of his anger, and the heat from her pounding heart that had melted at the sight of him leaving her, the way that she was always leaving him.
"Dean!" she'd cried.
"What?"
"Stop."
"Why?"
Sigh. "Because I love you, you idiot!"
Colors swirled together, stars shot across the daytime sky, as they kissed and were together, for those moments, that time.
"What am I doing here, Rory?" she could hear coming from a Dean of uncertain times, when she was outside of her grandparents' place in her blue-sequined dress and tiara, as confused as he was of what he was asking. What he was expecting. What the two of them were to each other.
"You're picking me up," she'd told him, as if questions didn't matter because she didn't want to examine them. She'd tried to make her drunken eyes glow bright enough to infect his again with the gaiety they'd been stumbling around in, together.
She could hear his words before they even left his mouth, as he shook his head solemnly. "I don't belong here..." he'd said for both of their benefits. "Not anymore."
And she'd let him go. He'd left, then, and she'd let him go...
You forget how horrible pain is until you're in it, came Dean's voice, and then Dean was before her, staring into her eyes. Aiding her in taking the lashings of all else there was to hear. He touched her cheek as more words came washing over her senses, and she felt it there without the aid of the physical sensation. Of course I had to come to your graduation. I stayed in the shadows, so I wouldn't bother you.
Why was his voice everywhere, everywhere? Why were his eyes so intent on claiming her own -- why did she not want to look away for a short second and find her bearings? Her bearings... where had they all gone?
He reached out to stroke her cheek with his thumb, and as the translucent illusion of his skin barely ghosted over hers, goosebumps rose to prickle her flesh like tiny needles, startling her into further sensation. Rory. I like your bed. I like... everything about you.
Rory, I want... I...
"Dean!" she screamed at him, at the figure that was so gently stroking her face, his unnatural touch bundling her nerves like cable wires that were becoming ready to electrocute the love out of them both. "Let me go! Let me..."
"Shhh," he told her, to soothe her panic, and she listened as if his words were real. As if they transcended the barrier placed between them. As if she didn't just believe she was insane, and this was her multi-colored breakdown. "Be with me just once more, one more time," he whispered in her ear. "And then it can be over, you'll see."
"I can't see anything but you!" she said immediately, spewing honesty like uncontrollable vomit in his face. The face that made her teeth chatter with the cold reality that she wouldn't be seeing it again. His death she had known and started to come to grips with; his absence was what was going to be the real challenge, to live on in spite of being truly alone.
He smiled at her sadly, his lips shaking, eyes brimming with tears of solid anguish.
"I've done what I came to do. Now it's our last goodbye."
--
Tidal waves crashed over dead fish bones buried in the ocean. Television screens lost picture, as electricity was stolen from their tightly bundled wires. The world's wars cried until all of their tears rained down on the heated ground to cool it with the agony that they were lost souls, gone, and this moisture was all that was left of them. She heard it... she heard it all.
And then she woke up. She woke this final time, and knew that Dean was gone.
--
"Welcome to this Tuesday edition of the New York Nightly News," said a broadcaster on the screen, and Rory sat with a bowl of sugar puffs and milk, inhaling the food that she could finally taste with vigor again, staring at the most lively creatures in her apartment that she was banished to till tomorrow, for by the time she had awakened, alone and on the floor, she had missed her flight.
Her flight that was a story on the news that night. Her plane to Utah, which had reportedly crashed shortly after take-off, killing everyone aboard, as well as those that were hit from the ground level. Rory's hand shook as it paused with her spoon halfway to her mouth. The plane crashed at 2:26 p.m., it was said. On this Tuesday, a week after Dean's death...
She thought of the bathroom mirror.
She dropped the bowl of cereal, ignorant of the splash of milk that she would rue later, and immediately went to her small suitcase she'd brought back from Stars Hollow, digging through it for the smashed up article that she'd kept as a dear thing, like a stuffed animal that brought comfort despite its unseeing eyes. She searched the printed words with eyes so quick, absorbing every sentence's meaning with the superhero-like speed she'd gained in her time as a practicing journalist. She stopped and sagged back on her heels as she encountered the obituaries' details of Dean's death, a week ago, at 2:26 p.m.
--
Whenever Dean appeared to Rory after that, it was from her knowingly conjuring his image in her mind. There were no more conversations, only the memories stored in her brain, and the pictures that she took out and framed. His physical presence was truly gone, as together they had said goodbye to the blackness when he promised that it was the end. It wasn't long before she trekked back to Stars Hollow, to right a few wrongs, as her old self kept coming back to her in waves until they washed over her comfortingly with every waking moment. (And even in her dreams, which returned to dancing pop-tarts wearing stunning top hats.)
She gave Lorelai genuine hugs, squeezing her so tightly there were broken bone jokes cracked for long minutes afterward, which Rory laughed at, because they were funny. Because she could feel her mother again, feel love for those alive again. Because she could feel, period. She felt something so much other than dead, and it was a wonderful thing.
She returned to Dean's grave after giving the gazillion hugs that she needed so badly to share. She thought she might thank him, in a big movie-screen moment, when he couldn't hear her. Thank him for however he was able to hang back long enough after his life was taken to save her own. Thank him for holding her hand and caressing her lips, all of those times when insanity was a likely prospect. She thought she might ask the grey stone why, and wait for an answer from the inscripted name and dates, as if they had his lips still to speak on their behalf.
Her sparkling eyes began to fade in their glory as she came upon his headstone, but there was a small smile that remained, even for him, even as he was gone. For as she looked at his gravesite that had been so clogged with perfumey goodness mere days before, she found that her single white rose, so hastily planted, but so deeply lodged, was the only flower that remained alive, that yet bloomed for him, for his memories, that were of her.
- -
end