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: Sorry, it's going to be a bit of a short one today – last chapter I somehow managed to put in a bunch of stuff that was originally intended for this one, and so I'm coming up a bit short on what I had planned for this. Not to worry though, next time it'll be back to your regularly scheduled long ramblings (and then the time after that should be the last chapter, so stay tuned)…
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: But I'm A Gilmore!
Disclaimer: I own nothing. If I did, this would be a lot better written.
Lorelai was sadly proven right as to the true extent of the post-punch hangover – it only managed to really hit its stride during the drive back to Yale, and Rory was quite surprised when she found that she'd made it all the way back in one piece, given her all-consuming headache. And the constant throbbing of her head had also been accompanied by her mother's advice echoing in her ears the whole way back: talk to him. And so, when she got in she picked up the phone and dialled, almost without thinking about it – she was so reduced by the hangover that the internal squabble that usually played out within her whenever the matter of Jess came up was for once silenced.
She didn't even know what she was going to say, her mother's words had just been echoing around her head for so long that she felt she had no choice but to obey. She knew she couldn't keep going on as she had been, but she had no concrete plan for how to break out of this rut.
The phone rang for a few seconds, and then there he was, in her ear again, as he'd been so often over the past year, "Hello?"
"Tell me something," Rory said without fully realising why, at this point being steered more by the hangover than her own intellect.
"What?" was his confused response.
"Tell me something about you," she elaborated. "I'm trying to trust you, I want to trust you, I really do. And I see how you've changed, but somehow I can never make myself believe it. So please, just tell me something about you, something the old Jess would never have told me."
"I've been avoiding Liz lately," he replied, catching her off guard with his sudden forthrightness.
"You have?" Rory asked, still mentally catching up – she hadn't really expected a genuine reply, and she was touched that he would jump right in to this kind of conversation after such an abrupt beginning. "I thought she was doing so much better?"
"She has, that's kind of the problem. I'm happy that she's got her life straightened out, and that she's so happy with TJ (even though I still find it tough to spend upwards of five minutes in his company), but I still feel a kind of whiplash from knowing what she was like before."
"What was she like?" Rory asked. He'd never been particularly forthcoming about his mother or anything related to his childhood before, and she'd always been curious about how he'd come to be the seventeen-year-old ball of defiance that'd emerged in Stars Hollow those three years ago.
"She was never horrible, she was just stressed out for the most part and just…not there. Like, whenever she got a new boyfriend, she'd just kind of disappear into him, which sucked, because for the most part they were pretty awful. And even when there wasn't a guy, she wasn't the best at taking care of us, and I'd have to figure out meals and stuff for myself if I didn't want to live off microwave popcorn."
"That sucks, Jess, I can't even imagine what that was like," Rory said, and she meant it. In her fragile state she was embarrassed to find that she was almost welling up, imagining Jess as a kid trying to fend for himself, while miles away she was being showered with affection by a whole town's worth of people.
"It is what it is, it's not something I'm that hung up about," he replied, and she believed him, this didn't seem like the typical brush off she'd gotten used to when they were dating. "It's just now, everyone else only knows her as this better version of herself, who's responsible and in a healthy relationship, and I'm the only one who knows what she was like before. It makes it hard to be around her sometimes. And then I feel bad for avoiding her, because it's not her fault that I can't merge the old her and the new in my mind."
"Yeah, but it's more than just adapting to how she is now, it's having to deal with everyone assuming that this is always how she was and retroactively undoing everything she did wrong in the past."
"Exactly. And the fact that she's probably going to end up having another kid, and it'll be like a do-over."
"That's not how it's going to be, Jess. Yeah, it sucks that she wasn't there for you in the past, but she is trying to be now – she loves you, and you guys will always have your own relationship regardless of whether she has another kid. Take it from someone who has seen their Dad suddenly become Mr Responsibility the second time around – it sucks, but you learn to live with it."
"I know. I will. It's just hard, you know?"
"I do," she said, trying hard to convey the amount of sincerity she felt over the phone, as well as her gratitude that he'd complied so simply with what she'd asked of him, proving for the umpteenth time that yes, he really had changed and was someone she could grow to trust with time. "And thank you, for indulging me and my weird requests."
"Do I get to know where this came from?"
"That would be Miss Patty's Founders' Day Punch, mostly."
"Ah, say no more."
"You're familiar with it?"
"No, but if Miss Patty made it, I assume it's pretty deadly."
"I still have bathroom tile imprints on the side of my face from my night spent lying there to attest to that."
"I hope that's some public Stars Hollow (and therefore assiduously cleaned by Taylor) bathroom and not the one in your house, which likely hasn't been cleaned since before you were born?"
"I think you'd rather not hear the answer to that." She heard a shuffling on the other end of the phone. "What are you doing?"
"Putting a tissue between me and the phone – I feel like your bathroom floor spores are somehow going to be transported to me through the earpiece."
"Now I realise why you were so resistant to getting a cell phone, if you have this caveman level of knowledge about them."
"Hey, no one ever got bathroom floor poisoning from two tin cans tied together with string, that's all I'm saying."
"Impeccable reasoning as always."
"Thank you." He paused, before asking, "And what occasion prompted your sudden foray into Patty's mixology experiments?"
"Why, the grand opening of the Stars Hollow Museum, of course."
"Doesn't a town need to have had something interesting happen to it at some point in its history to have a museum?"
"I'll have you know Stars Hollow might possibly have contained several residents who maybe sort of knew people who kind of resembled presidents at one point or another, and we have the correspondence to prove it."
"Well, I'm sold, I'll pre-order my tickets tomorrow."
"You'll be lucky if it's still going by this afternoon."
"Color me surprised."
"So, that was my tumultuous day, what have you been doing?"
"Oh, you know, this and that," he said, and for the first time in their renewed acquaintanceship, Rory picked up on some of the evasiveness of old.
"Oh, yes, that classic activity," she said, drily.
"You know, the odd bit of gnome stealing, a smattering of loitering menacingly on corners: my classic past times."
"Seriously, Jess, what have you been doing?"
"Nothing of interest," he replied, and she was frustrated to hear that old tone he would use when trying to shrug her off, "working mostly."
"All day every day? Let me get Erin Brockovich on the phone."
"You don't get to be a Walmart employee of the month by slacking off, I'll have you know."
"I guess not," Rory replied, drily, "but-"
"Now tell me more about this museum, if I'm going to be tragically denied the experience of going I should at least get to know what I'm missing out on."
Too hungover to fight back, Rory reluctantly allowed herself to be drawn back into their normal banter, but she couldn't shrug off the feeling that he was keeping something from her, just like he always used to, and that feeling gave all the doubts that had gradually been fading away something tangible to hold onto. What was he hiding from her now?
A/N: Sorry folks, that's it for now, as I said up top, the next (and penultimate) chapter should be back to normal length. In the meantime, please review! It really encourages me to get a move on with writing when I'm in one of my (frequent) creative and energetic dips. Thanks so much for reading!