Wires and Waves

Summary: 4x21. Rory has enough money for a cab and so doesn't call Dean for a ride home. Jess shows up too early and, while waiting outside her dorm, has a chance to re-think his proposal. Season 5 re-write: What if Rory stayed in touch with Jess throughout his transformation into the guy we see in Season 6?

A/N: This is getting redundant at this point, but thanks so much for all the reviews, at this rate this fic will be done in a couple of weeks, and you've all made it such a wonderful experience for me. Hope you enjoy this chapter, I found it pretty hard to write…

A quick apology to continuity-pedants: the timing here is not always going to be completely true to the show, for the sake of the plot. Sorry! I'll always mention the episode to give a vague idea of where we are in the series, even though the plots won't always track, and I'll be skipping over or combining a few.

Episodes: So…Good Talk

Disclaimer: I own nothing. If I did, this would be a lot better written.

By the time Rory's text reached him, Jess was still pretty much in a daze. He was having trouble believing that any of the events of the past twelve hours had actually taken place, given that he'd been achingly coming to terms with the fact that he was once again banished from Rory Gilmore's life ever since she'd ignored his attempt to talk after their fight. By that point he'd had a chance to cool down after the humiliation of being talked down to by whichever asshole was currently circling her, and was ready to talk. Not to grovel about that particular fight, since he still felt he was pretty much in the right on that one, but to talk about the time that they were together, because that fight had gone to show just how much was still unresolved from back then. But when he'd reached out by text, he'd been met with deafening silence, and it hit him that she'd meant what she said about their trial friendship being over. And that had hurt. A lot. But it had been a few weeks since then, and while the Rory-shaped hole in his life was still painful, he was now starting to feel a sense of liberation, relieved that he would not have to watch from afar as the love of his life fell for some other guy, which he'd just kind of accepted as his lot before the party incident.

And then Rory Gilmore had showed up at his door, wearing a suit that looked ridiculous on her, and as always all self-preservation instincts had immediately scattered. And then she'd disappeared again without a word.

And the sad thing was a part of him had been expecting it since the moment she appeared at the door: even while he was holding her, he felt as though his arms were suddenly going to slip through the air as she vanished into nothing. And so when she disappeared again a part of him was already steeled for it, and opening his eyes to see an empty space next to him elicited only a dull, gnawing ache, rather than the unrelenting pain of some of their early fights. That was that, then, a brief blip of weakness on her part and ecstasy on his, and then she was gone, unlikely to be heard from again.

Not wanting to hang around in an apartment full of memories of her, he'd headed out towards one of his usual haunts to grab some breakfast, and it was on the way that his phone buzzed. Having already begun to re-adjust to the idea that she was this time definitively out of his life, he almost dropped the phone when he saw her name flash across the screen. As he had the night before, he again saw her as something illusory, bound to slip away before he got a real hold on her, and so he opened the text as quickly as possible, half expecting it to somehow delete itself before he could read it.

And then he saw its contents and he was even more stunned. He texted back straight away, before she could somehow take at back, only typing one word in his hurry: Where?

Rory had put a lot of thought into their meeting place. She'd wanted it to be somewhere neutral, in New York (she was hardly going to expect him to come to her after all she'd done), where she wouldn't be distracted by any remnants of the past, whether it be from the day she'd skipped school to visit, or from their most recent encounter. She'd end up suggesting a coffee shop (she was still a Gilmore after all, and wasn't about to embark on an emotionally fraught conversation without any caffeine in hand) fairly near where he lived, but far enough so that she could take a different route into the city than she had the last time, to better help her internalise the fresh start she was trying to achieve with this meeting. What kind of a start she wanted, she couldn't say, she just knew that things couldn't go on as they had, and that she needed to apologise for letting it get to this stage.

True to form, she showed up early so that she had a chance to equip herself with the aforementioned caffeine, and also so she could run through what she wanted to say before he got there. But then after that she was left sitting there, coffee acquired and words rehearsed multiple times, left with nothing to do but try to suppress her growing nerves before he materialised.

And then he appeared, and naturally everything she'd wanted to say immediately fell out of her head. He looked good – well, he always looked good, how self-important did she have to be to assume that her crappiness would have taken a visible toll on him – although she thought she just might be able to detect some of her own nerves mirrored in his movements as he made his way over. Her instinct was to look away, chicken out of meeting his eye in her customary way – but no, she wasn't going to be a coward that day, so instead she met his eye as he walked over. She still felt incredibly awkward – how was she supposed to greet him after everything that had happened? Hug? God no, any kind of physical contact would feel extremely loaded after what had just come to pass. Get up? Too formal. God, when did this get so hard? Maybe when you had sex with him and ran away, a voice in her head chimed in, helpfully.

But now he was at the table, and all she could manage was a smile that seemed inappropriate at this point, and a feeble, "Hey, want to sit?" He obliged, wordlessly, his expression unreadable. Not knowing what to do with his silence, she decided to launch into a rough approximation of what she'd intended to say before he'd showed up and scrambled her every thought process, "I am so unbelievably sorry for leaving like that. I don't know what else to say, there's no excuse. It's something about us, when I'm with you I just make these stupid, impulsive choices, and then I run away, and it's not fair to you, and I'm just so incredibly sorry."

And for a moment she thought he was going to revert to the grumpy, uncommunicative Jess of two years ago, and make some kind of monosyllabic faux-acknowledgement of what she'd said before dismissing her with some sarcastic comment (which she couldn't say she didn't deserve), but then she saw something in his face soften, and he just asked, in a quieter voice than she was used to from him, "Then why'd you do it?"

"I don't know. I was just lying there, you know…after," and she couldn't help but blush slightly, cursing her trite, prudish ways, "and I just started thinking about the complexity of this whole thing," she said, gesturing between them, "and how we hadn't even spoken in weeks, and how I'd just made everything infinitely more complicated, and I don't know, I panicked. I'm sorry," she said again, lamely.

"No, I mean why did you show up in the first place? You cut me out of your life and then after weeks of silence show up at my door, and then…that?" This was the most visibly hurt she'd ever seen him, and while it pained her beyond belief to know she'd caused it, a small part of her was touched that he'd let her see him like this, where before he would have just disappeared or got mad.

"I don't know, it just happened. I was with- something almost happened with…"

"Logan," he finished for her, and now he did look mad. "What, so this was some sort of revenge move?"

"What? No! God, no, I promise, it was nothing like that. I just- me and him, we almost- but I couldn't go through with it, because for some reason all I could think of was you," and at this his expression changed, tipping away from the anger that was threatening to overflow, leaving pure confusion in its place. "And my mind just kept cycling through everything that happened between us, good and bad, and I just couldn't deal, I thought the only way to make it stop was to see you, maybe find some form of closure. And then…"

"Right."

"I'm so sorry, Jess," she said for the millionth time, "about this, about that stupid phone call from the party, I can't keep using the past to justify doing crappy things."

Again she found herself at a loss as to how this new Jess would react – they'd never had a conversation this open before. After a beat, he responded, "Look, I'm not going to lie to you – it sucked, waking up alone that day, it sucked that you did that to me. But I can't pretend I don't understand why someone would run when faced with a complicated situation."

Taken aback by his honesty, not to mention his understanding, Rory paused, before responding in kind, with as much honesty as she could muster, "I don't know how to act around you, Jess. I love talking to you, I love being your friend. But there's still something holding me back when things get too real, there's still a part of me that thinks if we get close again you'll start shutting down on me again – hiding things, lying to me, and then one day I'll call you up and there won't be an answer. I know it's hypocritical of me after how I've been behaving, I just thought if I couldn't offer you a proper friendship it'd be best for both of us if we stopped talking."

Jess let out a long sigh, taking in what she'd said. After what felt like an eternity, he said, "I never apologised, did I? For how I was when we were together?"

"It's not like I was perfect either – I compared you to Dean, I didn't always tell you how I was feeling…"

"That's no excuse, I didn't exactly encourage any kind of emotional intimacy," and she was struck by that phrasing, and couldn't help but briefly flash back to that self-help book receipt he'd written his number on, back when she first started to realise that maybe he was changing. "Look, I was an idiot back then – I was pissed at my parents, and I took it out on everyone around me. I'd never really been in a real relationship before – even outside of romantic relationships, I'd never been truly close to anyone before: things with my Mom, well…" he trailed off and cleared his throat, evidently still finding the topic of his childhood pretty hard to talk about. "Anyway, I just didn't know how to be a boyfriend to you, and I knew it, which just made me feel crappy all the time, and I'd do things like lash out at you, which you didn't deserve. I gave you no reason to trust me, and I still got pissed when you didn't. And then that thing, at Kyle's party- I'd just found out I wasn't graduating, and I just felt like everything was slipping away from me, you included, and I guess I just wanted to do something that would solidify what we had, that would make you forget all the other stuff. But obviously that was stupid, and I'm so sorry for your pressuring you back then, and for yelling at you after. And then I knew I'd screwed everything up so badly, I didn't think there was a way to fix any of it, and I was scared of seeing you again – dealing with your pity, your disappointment – and so I ran. I'm sorry for all of it, Rory, I really am. But I'm trying to change, to be better, and I don't know if I can do that with you still treating me like I'm the guy I was two years ago."

Rory was surprised to feel tears welling up – that was probably the most she'd ever heard him say in one go, definitely the most he'd ever talked about himself, and she didn't know how much she'd been needing to hear it until then. She blinked the tears away impatiently, and replied, "I don't want to be the person that drags you back when you're trying to move forward. You say your changing and I believe you, I've seen it myself, and at first I didn't let myself believe it was really happening but now I know it is, and I'm happy for you. I understand why you did the things you did, and I do forgive you, I just need to learn to trust you. And I want to. I really do want you in my life, Jess, and I want you to trust me too, though I understand if you can't after what I did. But this is all still really new to me, and with everything that's going on right now, I don't know that I can ever offer anything more than friendship. If that's not enough, I understand, I can walk out of here and go back to being that girl you avoid when you come to see Luke. But I do really want to be your friend – and not just like we were before – real friends, who hang out from time to time and can talk about more than surface level things. Is that something you feel like you could do?"

"I'd like that," he replied, choosing his words carefully, "and I hope that someday you'll stop expecting me to disappear at any moment."

"Same to you," Rory said, with a slight smile. There was a brief pause, both of them emotionally drained after what they'd just gone through together. "Listen, I should probably get back to school, but I'll call you?"

"I think you have the number," he replied, introducing the first bit of levity to the conversation.

"I should have it lying around somewhere," she shot back, grinning now as the tension dissipated. "Bye, Jess," she said, getting up to leave.

"Bye, Rory," he replied, and with that she walked back to her car, feeling the lightest she'd felt in weeks.

A/N: Please review, I love to hear your thoughts 😊