Title: Syntax
Author: Sophistocrat
Summary: Future. Literati. They thought before was all they had; that they had moved on; that it had been just a phase; that when she walked out of Truncheon, they had finally ended; that now they had closure... Before was nothing. It was only the beginning.
Pairing: Literati. As far as I'm concerned, nothing else exists.
Disclaimer: Yes, I own Gilmore Girls. All of it. Naturally.
A/N: Another setting up sort of chapter. I tried, but I really can't rush into the whole (gasp) "Jess?" (gasp) "Rory?" oh-my-god-type-thing, so you're going to have to wait it out. But at least their names get mentioned in this one. Oh and if you catch any grammatical errors, please let me know!
Also, since Kassandra27 was a bit confused, I thought I would give some clarifications as to the plot and such.. This story states sometime around Thanksgiving 2008, so when Taylor discovers the vandalism in the prologue, that took place in mid-to-late November time frame. This chapter starts three weeks earlier, right after the November election in 2008. Rory finds herself out of a job, and so she is contemplating the next step in her life. Yes, Jess was responsible for the vandalism at Doose's, and yes, he's going to be there when Rory finally decides to go back to Stars Hollow, no, the girl mentioned in this chapter is not going to be reappearing much, and yes, things are going to get interesting. How interesting? You'll just have to wait and see... And one last thing: I've decided that this will be a happy-ish Lit.
Chapter 1: Heartburn
Three Weeks Earlier...
"I swear to God, it was almost freaking patriotic the way the entire third floor was covered in beer cups – God! You know those plastic red and blue ones that say SOLD on the bottom? They have those funny ridge things that curl over at the lip? I swear to God, I don't know why they don't make white ones – now that would a freaking money machine – red, white, and blue beer cups. God, have you ever seen anything so patriotic?"
She hadn't.
"Like, God, I wanted to freaking call them up right then and tell them to do it. Right then. Make those white plastic SOLD beer cups, you know. God... Freaking money machine. I would have done it, too, but then Jerry – hey, do you want those jalapeno poppers?"
She didn't.
"I'm telling you, these are the cheesiest jalapeno poppers in Iowa. Freaking cheesiest. And I should know – I've lived here since I was six and a half. God, that's a long time. You know that dairy farm an hour from Des Moines? Past that billboard for Marmy's tapioca pudding pie – by that town hall thing – that's where I lived for eight years when I was little. I swear to God, that place was like rural. Cows and chickens and everything. Hey, you want to take a road trip? Ginny's still got that keg of Samuel Adams in the back of her four by four, and Jerry's freaking good at reading maps. I swear to god, it's like intuition, the way he can read maps – you in the mood?"
She wasn't.
The election had barely been over for a week, but already Rory Gilmore knew that she did not want to spend the rest of November celebrating in Iowa – she had endured enough celebrating on election night to last her for many months to come.
She'd learned from her days with Logan and his friends that drinking wasn't her thing, and if Louie's drunken rant wasn't enough of an indication, Rory was fairly certain that every person under 30 who had worked on the Obama campaign in Iowa would be drinking their ears off until Christmas.
She could understand, in a way. She had, after all, suffered with them through the past five months – five months of caffeine-and-takeout-fueled, thirty-six hour shifts simultaneously handling the phone, fax, and e-mail; five months of thirty minute naps every two days; five months of running back and forth between campaign headquarters and makeshift hotel board rooms three times in an afternoon – up until election night around 10:52 p.m. eastern standard time, when CNN projected an Obama victory.
But now, as the adrenaline high of the win began to fade, Rory could hardly wait to take the first flight out of Des Moines International Airport. Her once-filled planner now stared blankly back at her, all campaign workers had been officially cleared of duty as of two days ago, and Rory's last pay check on the job was now resting in her hands.
She could, she reasoned, probably stay for a few more weeks and ingratiate herself with some of the older, more experienced, higher level campaign managers. Some of them were expected to be officially part of Obama's White House counsel, and Rory knew she would have little trouble in proving her trustworthiness to them, seeing as it was that she comprised one half of the two people in the entire lower-level campaign staff who were currently sober.
The muffled sounds of the celebrations in the room next door, however, chose that exact moment to recall one too many unappetizing thoughts of the bacchanalian frat parties she had gone to with Logan at Yale, and she suddenly couldn't bear the thought of staying a minute longer in Iowa.
Folding the last of her shirts neatly, she placed them in her suitcase and clicked it shut.
"I sent my CV out to some places," she vaguely told her mom over the phone two weeks later.
She had had her heart set on leaving Iowa that week after elections, but never got around to doing it. There had been too much paperwork lying around, and her fellow campaign workers had been too hung over to bother, even with the incentive of double-overtime pay.
Working in an awkward and tension-filled silence with a tight-lipped Harvard graduate who obviously took the Harvard-Yale rivalry a little too far, answering Rory only with a terse "yup" every time she tried to initiate conversation, Rory had hurried through the filing and packing in record time. Somehow, organizing papers in chronological and alphabetical order helped take her mind off of the small issue of what the heck she was going to do with her life post-Obama campaign, and the hefty check that was wedged under the door of her hotel room promptly after the boxes were delivered to headquarters didn't hurt, either.
"Not the New York Times or anything, but I was talking to Frida the other day – "
"Ooh, Peter Sellers moustache Frida?" Lorelai interjected.
"Yeah, Peter Sellers moustache Frida. You know, she actually got that Sally Hansens do-it-yourself upper lip wax thing at Sav-on, and if you stand five feet away from and squint your eyes, you would never even guess that she has an uncontrollable facial-hair-growth problem."
"Shut up!" Lorelai gasped, "You lie – I printed that picture out that you sent me, taped it to the garage door, stepped twenty yards back, put on my fish goggles with the water droplet stains that make everything really blurry, stood on my head for twenty seconds, and still, I saw the Peter Sellers moustache. There's no way a dinky do-it-yourself thing from Sav-on could ever save Frida."
"No, honestly – I could hardly even tell. It was like Frida 2.0 minus the robot android implication."
"Oh, speaking of which, you know that really fuzzy animal character from that old space-age Walter Koenig movie that we saw last Labor Day?"
"You mean that one that kept wiggling its ears?"
"Yeah! That one. I was thinking that if you sheared the fur off of that thing, it would look like exactly like that android from the Star Trek Deep Space Nine commercials on UPN."
"Mom, I think that thing was an android."
"Uh, no. That was clearly a creepy mutant half dog half deer from the planet Zethion, not an android. But man, do you remember when it said – "
"Anyways," Rory interjected, "back to Frida – it turns out that her cousin is actually the artistic director of the Style section at the Wall Street Journal, and she was telling me about how no one under twenty-five gets assigned anything other than pushing papers. Like, it's an actual policy. So I'm going to wait it out a couple of years, I guess, before I send my stuff out to them. But I did try the New York Post, the Boston Herald, and some other places like that."
"Oh yeah?" Lorelai asked. "What'd they say?"
"Well, I haven't really heard back from them, yet."
"Oh," Lorelai said, trying not to sound disappointed, "Well, maybe there's been some wild west John Wayne hold up at the fax machine. When did you send them?"
"Five days ago."
"Oh."
Pause.
"Well... keep trying, kid."
After another week of trying, however, it became clear that no attempt at a reply would made with the Thanksgiving holiday looming ever near.
Rory realized this as she held her cell phone to her ear listening to the automated messages at the New York Post.
"... for the tip line, please press four. If you are calling for the Employment Offices at the New York Post, please stay on the line. You will be connected with an operator shortly."
But after fifteen minutes of listening to elevator music (or was it dentist office music? She couldn't tell), the hand holding her cell phone slackened, and Rory drifted off to sleep.
The last time she had seen him had been just over six months ago, in Philadelphia, when her flight from New York to Iowa had been forced to touch down due to threats that heaviest hail storm in three decades would hit the eastern seaboard. Rory would be damned if she admitted to herself that the first thing that had occurred to her when the pilot had announced their unexpected landing in Philadelphia over the scratchy overhead speakers was Jess, but then Rory would be damned if she ever admitted anything to herself when it came to Jess.
And yet, sitting at the gates amidst a crowd of impatient Iowa-bound travelers and trying to find a comfortable sleeping position in her seat, her eyes had engaged, at the dissent of her common sense and better judgment, in a fierce staring contest with Book Reviews section of Philadelphia Inquirer left behind on seat next to hers. A good fifteen minutes of stealing glances at the half-crumpled pages to her left while reading and rereading the same line in her book had passed before Rory came to the decision that she was, after all, a self-professed bibliophile, and what normal bibliophile would simply sit next to a book review without picking it up to read?
If there had been an ad for Truncheon, or if Jess' book had been reviewed, or if there had been any mention at all of an upstart publishing company run by a mysterious dark-haired young man, Rory might have been satisfied. She might have set the paper back down, she might have sought out one of the reviewed books at the duty-free kiosk by the bathroom, she might have gone to the food court for a sourdough pretzel and some coffee.
As it turned out, however, there was no mention of anything related to Truncheon Publishing or its owner, and Rory Gilmore found herself extremely agitated at the fact that the italicized words at the end of a review for a book called Pip's Paradox read "Simon & Schauster Publishing, New York." (But this, of course, was because Rory never could tell whether a word starting with the letters "sch" was supposed to be pronounced like the "sk" in "school" or the "sh" in "schilling." Because what other reason could there be?)
In any case, when a voice came on the speakers in the airport terminal announcing that, due to the possibility of a hailstorm, all outgoing flights were postponed for at least twelve hours, Rory's head began to race. The seats at the boarding gates were awfully uncomfortable to be sitting in for twelve hours, and who in their right minds would stay there for the night? Flagging down a cab given the weather conditions was probably next to impossible, the freeways were probably jammed with people saying their last prayers under the heavy black sky, and there was always the small matter of being hailed to death the minute she stepped out of the airport, but... the seats were really very painfully uncomfortable. Why, the odds of dying due to the back pain that would ensue was practically equal to the odds of dying due to hail pelting.
Once the decision had been made to find somewhere to stay for the night, the only logical move then was to visit Jess' bookstore. After all, they had left on friendly terms, the feelings between them had long-since passed as their lives changed, and they were responsible adults now. Besides, if the hailstorm was really going to bring the end of the world, as the anchorman of WNWS was reporting, at least Rory would not have to die across the aisle from an overweight hairdresser with premature rheumatoid arthritis. Yes, the only logical move for anyone in her situation would be to visit an old friend.
When she saw him, though, standing behind the counter with his back towards her while he flipped through a book, she wasn't so sure of her logic anymore. Certainly, she had expected an anticlimax to this whole predicament; he wouldn't be there, she had reasoned. He would be out at dinner, or sitting in his apartment blocks away reading something depressing by Ezra Pound – anywhere but there where he was.
Yet there was. His hair, as far she could tell, wasn't the way she had seen it last. At the time of Truncheon's open house, his hair had made him look older, with the neat longer locks combed and parted down the middle. It wasn't anymore – it was shorter and tousled and sticking up – and, if Rory had been any less reluctant to rehash memories, it would have reminded her of so many times when she had stolen glances at his retreating figure. When he walked out Luke's the day he fixed the toaster, when he walked away from the bus at the depot in New York that time she visited, when he walked out of Doose's after their argument about Dean and Shane, when he walked off the bridge after the Dance Marathon, when he walked off into the darkness the night of Kyle's party.
When he had turned slightly to the side, still not noticing her presence, she saw that his face didn't look the way she had seen it last either. At the time, he had allowed a light stubble to grow – a stubble, she remembered, that tickled her lightly when his face was close enough to hers – but that was replaced now with a face shaven so cleanly she swore time made him grow younger.
His clothes, too, were changed. Gone were the fitted pants and smart-looking blazer; in its place were casual jeans and a loose gray sweater that looked vaguely familiar.
Her heart didn't tighten.
No, that was just the burrito she had eaten for lunch causing heartburn.
When he had finally set the book down, it was only because a petite dirty blonde in denim cut offs had entered and walked over to him to place a kiss on his cheek. Rory turned her face away.
Her heart definitely didn't tighten then.
No, that was just the extra spicy guacamole she had asked for on the side.
It wasn't until the blonde had left five minutes later that Rory moved from hiding place behind a bookshelf by the door, and it wasn't until five minutes after then that she had placed herself in his line of sight and voiced a casual, "Hey."
His face, as always, had been unreadable, there had been no visible sign of surprise, and he hadn't attempted much more than a slow nod, but he set down his book and returned the greeting.
After explaining to him her situation, Rory had asked about the book he was reading, and they had entered into a light argument about nothing. Neither made any allusion to their personal lives, and neither asked how the other was doing in life. The only references made to their history as more than friends had been laughed off by both of them and joked about lightheartedly.
As she had slid into the seat of her cab a little more than two hours later, Rory had told herself she was glad that their feelings for each other in high school had just been the product of confused teenage whims.
Behind the counter at Truncheon, Jess had been rereading the same line in his book for the tenth time, thinking the same thing. (Because he'd be damned if he ever admitted anything to himself when it came to Rory.)
Back in her hotel room that had paint peeling at the places where the light fixtures were attached to the wall, Rory woke.
Eyeing the blank incoming tray of her fax machine, she fingered her now out-of-battery cell phone in her hand and came to a decision..
Thanksgiving was as good a time as any to visit home.
A/N: Jess is there... Rory's there... Love or hate? Let me know...