Author's Note- Thank you, for all of your lovely feedback. I always enjoy hearing from you, even the "good chapter, more please" reviews. In this case, it really is quantity, not quality, that makes me happy. Maybe that's a little bass-ackwards, but I don't really care. I never did have my priorities straight.

4. Mending Broken Wings

"Into the sun we climb
Climbing our wings will burn white
Everyone strapped in tight
We'll ride it out
I'll be coming home next year."

-Foo Fighters

Rory opened her eyes blearily, disoriented. It took her several seconds to adjust to the unaccustomed brightness of her surroundings, and once she had, she became aware of the dull throbbing in her head. She groaned softly, putting a hand up to her forehead, both in an attempt to soothe the pain and to block out the brilliant gold sunlight that was streaming in on her.

"How you feeling?"

The voice shocked her out of her languid state and she shot upright, way too fast, apparently, because the sensations in her head escalated from mere throbbing to throbbing compounded by spinning. "Oogh," she mumbled, shooting a pained look at Luke, who was slouched in a chair next to her bed.

"I guess that means not so great?"

"Luke?" she asked warily.

He nodded. "Yeah, kiddo. Can I, uh, get you anything?"

"No." Rory stared at him, trying to remember the blurry events of the night before. "How did I get here?" she asked.

Her would-be stepfather gave her a sad smile. "Jess brought you home," he informed her.

Despite racking her (admittedly pain-fogged) brain, Rory didn't recall anything of the kind. And... Jess? "Jess?" she asked incredulously.

Luke nodded. "Yeah, when he heard you were missing, he went up to Hartford and spent a whole day looking for you."

"Oh."

Rory fell silent. She couldn't understand why anyone would go to the trouble. She'd been a prize bitch to everyone who cared about her, and she'd been doing stupid, idiotic things for months. But she especially couldn't seem to wrap her mind around the idea that, of all the people who would have been able to willingly seek her out and drag her back into their lives, it was Jess who had actually gone and done it. Rory wasn't blind, she knew she wouldn't have lasted much longer in the conditions under which she'd been living; the idea that anyone would actually want her around, though, was ludicrous. Especially Jess. Even thinking about the last time they'd seen each other was still enough to make her want to sit down and have a good cry.

She needed time to process. She needed time to understand why Luke was looking at her, not with loathing, but with the same fatherly compassion he always had. She needed time to understand why, even with all the bad blood between them, it wasn't her mother who was guarding her sleep and waiting for her to wake up. She needed time to understand why... Jess? She needed time alone.

"Um, Luke?" she asked hesitantly. "Is it okay if I take a shower?"

"What? Oh, Rory, yeah, it's your home, of course you can take a shower." He quickly evacuated the bedroom.

Rory gratefully removed the clothes she had been wearing unwashed for several days, taking a moment to fold them neatly at the foot of her bed. Then she put on a robe and pulled a change of clothes (a little too small for her, as were most of the things left in the closet at the Crap Shack, but she wasn't being choosy) out of the closet and proceeded upstairs to the bathroom.

Ten minutes and a great deal of hot water later, and Rory was clean and feeling much better. The stale, sour, hangover feeling had ebbed away, and the headache was just a lingering twinge behind her eyes. She peered cautiously out of the door of the bathroom to be sure she was alone in the hallway, then crept downstairs and after a brief pause in the kitchen she slipped out the back door, heading for the place she was sure she'd find solitude...

Jess ran a hand over his face with a sigh. Even after a healthy nine hours of sleep, he was exhausted. The forty-eight hours before that, he hadn't slept at all, and for most of that time he'd been under, for lack of a better term, 'emotional stress.' This was not how he'd pictured his return to Stars Hollow. He'd been imagining something a little more... triumphant. It was delusional, but he couldn't deny that he had imagined- more than once- being able to rub this whole town's collective nose in it. His job, his book, they weren't much, but they were his, and they were a definite step up from the state penitentiary that most of the citizens of Stars Hollow had been predicting for him.

Instead, he came back to find that his uncle had finally stepped up and taken the leap with Lorelai, and Rory- his Rory- was a broken-down shell of herself. No Yale, no Lorelai, living on the streets from what he could tell... where had it all gone wrong? What fork in the road had she taken that had unwittingly led her here?

He entered the kitchen to find his uncle pacing nervously.

"She's gone again!" Luke exclaimed.

"What?!" Jess demanded, feeling a twinge of yesterday's near-panic creeping back over him.

Luke waved a piece of paper around wildly. "She wakes up and asks to take a shower and I say sure and head down to the diner to make sure Caesar hasn't burned the place to the ground and by the time I get back there's nothing but a wet towel and this!"

Snatching the paper from him, Jess examined it. It was a brief note in Rory's handwriting. Needed to be alone to think for awhile. Please don't worry. Rory. He let out the breath he'd been holding. She was alright then, not disappeared again. He nodded to himself. "I think I know where she is," he said. "I'll go talk to her, okay?"

His uncle hesitated, looking uncertain. "Maybe I should...?"

"No offense, but you're not the comforting type."

"But maybe it would be better if Lorelai...?"

Again, Jess shook his head. "She needs to talk to her mom eventually, yeah, but right now she needs somebody who'll be able to relate."

"Lorelai understands running away from home..."

"She understands running, but she doesn't understand feeling like you don't have a home, or like you can't go back," Jess said firmly. It was the closest he and Luke had ever come to directly discussing his teenage years beyond: "I was a moron." "Yes you were." Luke looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. Jess turned and headed out the door.

As he had suspected, she was perched on the edge of the bridge, ankles crossed above the still water, staring at her hands which were folded in her lap. Jess was reminded forcibly of the night they had first gotten together, and it took him several seconds to realize that he'd stopped in his tracks at the sight of her. He shook his head, trying to remind himself that allowing her to have that much of a visible effect on him was a very bad idea.

"Hey," he said, approaching her.

She started at the sound of his voice, staring up at him with a look like a blue-eyed deer before an oncoming car. "Hi," she replied in a small voice. Jess sat down beside her calmly, giving her a reassuring look. "Luke said you brought me home?"

He shrugged. "Yeah."

"How did you find me?"

"Wandered around Hartford all day," Jess replied. "Showed your picture to anybody who would look. Went to your grandparents."

"What?" Her expression was incredulous, and he could almost have laughed at the open shock on her face.

He gave her a small smile. "As promised, no black eye."

"You remember that?" Rory asked in a quiet voice. Her gaze softened for a moment into a look he couldn't remember seeing before, but before he could decipher it she was back behind a mask of curiosity and hesitant friendliness.

"Forget one of the single most terrifying experiences of my life? Not likely," he joked, though the sentiment was true.

She gave him an uncertain smile. "Well, that's understandable. Grandma is a very... memorable woman. She and Grandpa were looking at real estate in Stars Hollow once, and Kirk has never been the same. He still gets this twitch every time he hears she's going to be in town and then he does this thing where he kind of shrinks in on himself. It's a good thing he knows the town so well, or he'd probably hurt himself trying to avoid her..." She trailed away, looking at him curiously. "Why are you smiling?"

"You nervous?" Jess asked. The rambling had been noted.

She nodded, glancing away. "It's been a long time."

Understatement. One year, five months, and twenty-seven days was too long to be away from her. Even if all he got out of this visit was burying the hatchet, he was desperate for any kind of contact with her. "I'm kind of nervous, too," he confessed.

"At least we're on the same page," she replied. It wasn't true, though. They weren't even close to on the same page, because he had a heart that still belonged entirely to her and she had a... Logan. The thought made him morose. Silence passed for a minute or so before Rory asked, "Why?"

"Why am I nervous?" Jess asked, confused. "I think that should be pretty obvious, Rory."

She shook her head. "No, that's not what I... I just meant, why did you even bother to come find me?" she asked.

He wasn't sure what it was: maybe it was the wording, or maybe it was the innocent frankness in her tone, but her question terrified him. She honestly believed that no one wanted her around, and it scared him to see just how damaged and insecure she was underneath it all. He had caught glimpses of it in her before. He had seen that her humility wasn't feigned, and that she clung to the people that she believed she could rely on. He had wondered if it was because of her flaky and unreliable father. But never before had he seen her like this, with all her defenses stripped away, all her reserves of inner strength sapped, and her light all but burnt out.

"Rory, everyone was so worried about you!" he exclaimed, desperate to make her see. "You were missing for three weeks!"

"I wasn't missing!" she protested.

He shook his head. "No one knew where you were, that's missing. Check a dictionary," he said sharply. "Your mother was practically making herself sick, she was so scared."

"Then why wasn't she here when I woke up?" she asked, her quiet tone a vivid contrast to his harsh one.

Jess almost laughed. "Believe me, she wanted to be. She slept in a chair in your room all night, but then Sookie called this morning, and I think a stove exploded or something so she had to run up to the Dragonfly for damage control."

"Oh." She stared at her sneaker-clad feet.

After a brief hesitation, during which he decided that there was a difference between being sensitive and just plain coddling, Jess said, "Nobody hates you, Rory. You know that right?"

"They should," Rory replied. "I've been awful. I've got a criminal record and everything."

"I think you're going to have to tell me that story," Jess said with a grin, not even bothering to address the first part of her comment. In his mind, it was too ridiculous to merit comment

She gave him a hesitant smile. "Well, it involves a late night, a bad mood, and a yacht..."

A/N2- This is the last chapter that I had written up beforehand, so updates will be a little slower from here on out. However, reviews *will* encourage me to write faster. (Was that a subtle enough hint, or am I still lacking finesse?)