Nothing
--Crescent Moon19

Disclaimer: Don't own don't sue thank you.

Back in Stars Hollow:

"Rory? Are you here?"

"In here Mom."

She feels a brief something upon the realization that under any other circumstance, her mother would have yelled "Marco!" in a voice that would make dogs deaf. But then it is gone, chased out by the mind-numbing nothing she has forced into her brain to stop the flow of thoughts.

"Rory? What are you doing?" She leans against the doorway, regarding her daughter with a tilt of her head.

"Nothing." Lorelai feels panic begin to set in when she realizes that her daughter, the one with an outline, a thesis, supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion for everything has nothing to say about the nothing that she is apparently doing. She cautiously steps into the room with all the grace of someone awaiting an upcoming explosion of the emotional magnitude and sits next to her daughter on the bed.

"Nothing? At all? Not sitting, not couch potato-ing like the best of the has-beens of the last decade, not counting the holes in the ceiling, not… thinking…?" With panic comes nerves, and with nerves comes rambling.

"Nothing at all, Mom. Not anything, not something, not counting the different ways the construction company that made this house sucks at making hole-less ceilings, and definitely not thinking." She wishes that her mom would just leave her alone in her nothingness. She doesn't think she can withstand another round of warily skirting around the pink-and-yellow polka dotted elephant in the room, and she surely can't handle defending Jess while thinking that it's all her fault, her fault.

"You wouldn't happen to be thinking nothing about a certain delin—James Dean wannabe that skipped town, would you?" Lorelai refrains from using the word "delinquent," knowing that it might set Rory off.

Rory is shocked at her mother for both pointing out the oddly colored elephant and being considerate enough to at least pretend to give Jess a chance. Even though it's her fault that he's gone. And suddenly, the explosion that Lorelai has been waiting for happens—Mount Rory erupts with enough distressed guilty ramble to clog up the air for decades.

"It's all my fault! Ok well fine maybe not all my fault since he is the one who got up and left and I certainly didn't make him do that it's not like I stood there and threatened to force read him The Fountainhead if he didn't leave but it's my fault because I knew that he wasn't mad at me, I knew that something was wrong, I knew and I still didn't do anything as if I foolishly hoped that he would tell me of his own violation when I really haven't even given him a real reason to trust me with his deepest darkest secrets when I haven't even trusted him with my deepest darkest secrets and—"

"Rory! Stop! Breathe!" For both their sanities, Lorelai interrupts her and forces her to stop. But once the dam is broken, nothing can stop Rory's emotions from flooding out, be it in the form of words or tears. Rory buries her head in her mother's lap and cries, cries while her mother strokes her hair softly, cries for all the had-beens and could-have-beens and for the lack of will-bes, as Lorelai stares off into space and thinks troubled thoughts.

Guess who rocks? My reviewers do! gilmorejunkie1230, Curley-Q, ArabellaKye, and Literati and naley forever are my new favorite people. gilmorejunkie1230 and Literati and naley forever get cookies for reviews that were longer than one sentence.

Just to address some concerns:
Yes, I know this is short. Unnaturally short in fact. I did it on purpose, because it showed emotion well without over-doing it too much. This chapter's my last pre-written chapter, so updates shall now become sporadic and unpredictable. On the bright side, since I'm moving out of the mind and into the human world, the chapters should be longer. As soon as I get around to writing them, that is.

Review please?