Lorelai's got some weird thing about snow, so the wedding is on the deck of the Inn at sunset, despite the fact that it's cold enough to freeze your shadow to the ground. At least they put up space heaters, mindful of how many infants and elderly people are in the crowd, but Kirk (who is performing the ceremony, for some bizarre reason that Jess doesn't want to know) still looks like he's about to commit seppuku in protest.
Willa, a child of summer, is utterly uninterested in doing anything but curling into the lapels of Jess' coat and waiting for this to be over, so he carries her down the aisle. She has her little basket of flower petals too, but she only takes one handful, and it stays clenched in her hand until she finally remembers to throw it - straight into the face of Taylor Doose, who is of course sitting in the very front row. Jess has never been prouder of her than he is in that moment.
Luke's grinning like a madman when they reach the altar, and leans in to give Willa a kiss. She smacks him in the face with her basket. Fondly, Jess assumes.
"That was for luck," Jess tells him, just as the music starts. Luke just keeps grinning, straightening his shoulders and turning his face to the open door.
Lorelai is bare-shouldered and holding a gigantic bunch of cheap, plastic poinsettias, and she and Luke both keep breaking into fits of laughter throughout the entire ceremony, which only gets worse the more flustered and annoyed Kirk gets (he has to start the vows over twice, because he loses his place). Jess stands stoically next to a tuxedo'd Lane and tries not to make eye contact with Rory, who is snorting into her mother's bouquet and making faces at him and Willa. Lane keeps poking him, every time Rory pulls off a particularly good one.
The entire crowd is on the brink of losing it by the time Kirk finally gets to the end, clenching his fists and glaring at the couple. "I now pronounce you man and bride," Kirk says, "you may kiss the wife." He frowns. "Wait, I meant - the other way around," he says quickly, but Luke and Lorelai are already going at it like they're teenagers instead of the middle-aged divorcees they are, so nobody really hears him.
Willa perks up a little as everyone starts clapping and laughing, and Jess steps back, barely edging out of the way of T.J., who practically throws himself into Luke's arms the minute he and Lorelai break the kiss. Somebody wolf-whistles in the crowd; Jess suspects it was his mother.
Lorelai, hugging Rory and crying, turns to the crowd and yells, "somebody owes me three hundred bucks!" Luke, finally extracting himself from T.J., rolls his eyes dramatically, and Kirk seems to be trying to subtly escape, inching his way through the wedding party and back towards the crowd. Rory, seeing this, instantly grabs his jacket and pulls him back, and Jess winces as the chaos starts to snowball downhill from there, Lorelai cackling on the sidelines as Luke gestures angrily.
In the eye of the hurricane, Lane elbows Jess, grinning. "Beautiful ceremony, huh?"
Willa snuggles deeper into Jess' coat, for once uninterested in pandemonium, and Jess shrugs. "Coulda been worse," he says.
In a stroke of profound wisdom and business savvy, the bar is not open. Jess pays six dollars (six dollars!) for a glass of red wine and spends the reception arguing about his book with Paris Gellar, who seems to have finally grown into her personality as a fire-breathing dragon with the addition of a pixie haircut and a gigantic engagement ring.
"She's cute," Paris finally says, off-hand, right after she finishes eviscerating Jess' characterization. Apparently she's finally noticed that there is a child on Jess' lap, happily munching on Sookie's fancy kid-version of hor d'oeuvres. "Where'd you get her?"
"Target," Jess says. "Picked her up on discount."
Paris hums, reaching out and tentatively patting Willa on the head, like a cat. "Hello," she says formally. "My name is Paris. I knew your father in high school."
"Hi," Willa says. It's a new word, one of her favorites.
Paris looks mildly startled that Willa can command the power of speech. "Hi," she says, tilting her head at Willa curiously. "Did you enjoy the wedding?"
Willa ignores her, picking up another cracker and cramming it in her mouth.
"Are you a guest of the bride or the groom?"
Willa throws her half-eaten cracker back on the plate and selects a piece of weirdly spiced chicken, instead.
"Oh," Paris says, frowning. "I thought she could talk."
"You're an only child, aren't you," Jess says.
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"Never mind," Jess tells her, and finishes his wine.
Some genius apparently had the idea to use a cordless microphone for the speeches, which means that it quickly is thrown to the mercy of the crowd, who steps up to the challenge with relish. T.J. will hold the record for longest, saddest speech ever in the history of weddings, probably, and the weirdest comes from some guy that nobody's ever seen before, who apparently showed up with an invitation addressed to "River Phoenix" and keeps telling everyone he and Lorelai went to high school together. Lorelai swears she's never seen him before in her life.
Jess keeps making ominous eye contact with Luke as the mic gets closer and closer, and the agitated looks he gets in return are worth all the effort to keep a straight face. Jess finally snags the microphone from a dangerously tipsy Michel, and looks Luke straight in the eye as he slowly and deliberately hands it over to Paris. Luke deflates in relief, like somebody's popped him like an angry balloon.
("That was my wedding present," Jess tells him later. Luke shoves him into a potted plant.)
Rory and April's speeches are last and make everybody cry, so somebody hurriedly turns on some music, and Luke and Lorelai shuffle their way through a weird, 80s pop song that nobody knows the words to. The second dance belongs to Liz and T.J., who join them on the floor and perform some kind of coordinated partner-switch routine that Luke seems really confused about, and after that it's a free for all.
Jess has worked out a plan for this; he dances once with Rory, who grimaces dramatically throughout, and another with Lorelai, who gives him shit the entire time under her breath, and then proceeds to go "ouch!" loudly and limp back to her table. Nobody else asks Jess to dance.
"You're welcome," Rory says pointedly, plopping down at his table and immediately slipping out of her heels. "Just so you know, if any of our parents get married again, you're not getting a repeat performance. This was a one time gift, on the day of my mothah's weddin'."
Jess rolls his eyes at her impression, which hasn't improved at all in the intervening years since he's last heard it. "You're a hero and a scholar, Godfather."
"Yeah." Rory grins at Willa. "And how are you doin', Willa?"
Willa just slumps against Jess' chest, exhausted by the day and also probably mildly traumatized by all of the people who keep coming up to coo and make faces at her.
"Tired, huh?" Rory says sympathetically. "I know the feeling."
"I'm gonna have to take off pretty quick here," Jess says apologetically. "We've got maybe twenty minutes before she starts to lose her shit."
"I'll hold her while you say goodbye," Rory offers eagerly, already extending her arms to Willa. She smiles sunnily as Willa slumps her way into her lap instead. "Go on, I'll be right here."
"If she starts yelling at you, just yell back," Jess advises. Rory waves him off distractedly.
Luke is involved in what looks like a painfully intense conversation with April, so Jess snags Lorelai's arm instead. She turns around and hugs him, so she's definitely drunk. Jess endures it.
"Leavin?" she asks, and laughs at the look on his face, after she releases him from the hug.
"Places to go, people to see, you know how it is," Jess says. Lorelai nods sagely. "Listen, tell Luke..."
"Yeah," Lorelai says.
"And you..." Jess rubs the back of his neck, wincing.
"Yeah," Lorelai says, grinning. "I got it. We both got it, you know? Get outta here, kid."
Jess gives her a smile and a shrug, and escapes, and she laughs at him again as he leaves. Well, it's her wedding day, Jess figures. He'll let her have that one.
Rory walks them home, soothing Willa as she walks with surprising grace and dexterity, for somebody who has very little exposure to children on a daily basis. She seems offended when Jess points that out, indignantly telling him about a few years of afternoons spent babysitting her half-sister. Jess didn't even know she had a half-sister.
"Well," Rory says, "she's my dad's kid with this woman he sort of left my mom for, and then she left him and Gigi, and then he and my mom got married and that was a whole other thing - "
"Okay," Jess interrupts, "I get it."
Rory laughs. She's clearly a little drunk too, a sight that Jess never thought he'd actually see. He always thought of Rory as a bit of a prude when it came to that sort of thing, which was maybe a little unfair. But she did sort of act like it, back in high school. "She's cute. She's in junior high now, which is so weird. I don't see her much, but we email back and forth."
"Doula's turning six in a couple months," Jess says, shaking his head.
"God," Rory says emphatically. "I know."
They both look down at Willa, who is just hanging out in Rory's grip, looking annoyed and cold.
"It's a weird life, man," says Rory.
"No shit," Jess says.
Jess has the diner apartment to himself tonight, and Rory helps him put Willa down into one of the beds, repurposed to be toddler-proof. She passes out the second her head hits the pillow, utterly wiped. Jess runs a careful hand over her hair, watching her little hands clench instinctively in her sleep for a moment. She does that a lot; Jess isn't sure what it means, but he likes to think she's reaching out for him.
Rory's drinking water at the sink in the kitchen, her heels abandoned by the door. Her hair's long nowadays, down to the middle of her back, and in her bridesmaid dress she looks like she's seventeen again, at a different wedding, on a different day. Jess feels annoyed, and sad, and a little out of breath.
"No Logan tonight, huh," he says, just to be a jerk. The best way to kick himself in the ass is to be one, he's found.
"Broke up," Rory says nonchalantly, but her shoulders tense. She spins around and shrugs, still holding her glass of water. "For good this time, I think."
Jess sits down at the table, and very carefully does not have an opinion on that.
"What about you?" Rory seems to sense the danger in the question as soon as it's out of her mouth, a weird look passing over her face. "Never mind, please don't answer that."
Jess doesn't. "I'm sorry," he says, instead. "About Logan, I mean."
"No, you're not," Rory says with a snort. She pauses. "And neither am I."
"Fair enough," Jess says.
Rory turns back around to refill her water glass, and then fills up a second one for Jess, sliding it over to him across the table. She takes the same chair Luke always sits in. A strange silence hangs, for a long moment. Jess drinks some water to try and clear it away, but it doesn't work.
"I'm moving," Rory finally says. "To Los Angeles."
Jess stares at her, caught in intense, sudden disgust. "Why?"
She laughs. "I got a job offer."
"In Los Angeles?"
"It's CNN," Rory says. "I'd hoped to work out of the New York office, but...it's an on-air position, and their studios are in L.A., so..."
"On-air?" Jess asks. He blinks at her. "You mean, on television?"
Rory nods, her face glowing with a sort of muted pride. Jess can't help but smile at her, and a matching one breaks out on her face, slowly growing in intensity.
"It's still just a minor correspondence position," Rory says, "more like, a consultant? It's a new show they're putting together, kind of like an updated Meet the Press, and they only want me for this one specific segment at the end that they'll play over the credits, but - I get to write my own scripts, and there's room to advance, and if I can start building an audience..."
"Holy shit," Jess says, "Rory, holy shit."
"I know," she says, and laughs again. "It's - yeah. Kind of a dream come true."
"That's," Jess says, at a loss for words, "I mean. That's incredible."
"I haven't told everybody yet," Rory says, blushing a little. "Mom knows of course, and my grandparents. And Luke. But I didn't want to steal the wedding thunder."
"Rory," Jess says, reaching out despite himself. Rory takes his hand and squeezes it, ducking her head so that her hair falls across her face. He laughs, incredulously, and squeezes back.
"Logan didn't want to come with me," she says. "It's - you know. We were kind of dragging it out, anyway. I thought after all this time apart, we could maybe start over fresh, but - that never works. I knew better, but I still...hoped."
"Yeah," Jess says. They're still holding hands, which could get weird pretty fast, but he doesn't want to let go yet. "I know the feeling."
Rory tilts her head up again, shaking her bangs out of her eyes. "Yeah, well," she says, visibly shaking off the melancholy. "I just hope you were being a cynical New Yorker when you told me how horrible L.A. was."
"L.A. is horrible, and don't act like you're not just as East Coast as I am," Jess says. "But hey. Anything for a dream job."
"Is that why you moved to Philly?"
"Hey now," Jess says, and Rory laughs. "Philly's not so bad."
"Nah," Rory agrees, and they sit there for another long moment, holding hands and grinning.
Jess pulls back first. "Congratulations."
"Thanks." Rory's eyes scrunch up as she smiles, and for the first time tonight, Jess starts to notice the differences - the little lines around her eyes, the jawline that's a little more pronounced. Her arms have a bit of muscle to them now, and there's a red, angry scar on her collarbone that's probably from that car accident last year that scared the shit out of everybody. She's not seventeen anymore. Neither of them are. "Well, I'm sober enough to walk back now, I think. Whataya say, Dodger - walk me to the door?"
"Sure," Jess says, still out of breath. Like he could ever say no.
Rory leaves with a careful hug and another smile, and it's not until she's halfway down the street that Jess realizes he'd forgotten to tell her about his new book.
Well, he figures, she's got enough on her plate. He goes back upstairs, laughing at the image of her reading it on a beach, wearing corduroy pants and a blazer. She's gonna hate the ending, he thinks, strangely at peace with it. He wrote Rory a book already, with an ending tailored just to her taste. This new one - this one's for him.
Willa's snoring again when he slips back into the apartment, and Jess goes over to check on her, just to be neurotic. There're piles of boxes and shit everywhere, since Luke now uses this place for storage (and the occasional sleepover, when April manages to coax the keys out of him), and next to the bed, there's that old record player of Jess', that he'd left behind when he moved out. Next to it is a box with a couple of his old books spilling out of it, and Jess picks up the top one - a battered copy of Everything is Illuminated - and flicks through it, seeing his own teenage scrawl in the margins. Sliding down onto the floor next to Willa's bed, Jess starts reading his own notes, shaking his head at himself. He really was an arrogant dipshit, is the thing.
His younger self had underlined a passage, one that Jess in the present has forgotten about. "'This is love, she thought,'" Jess reads, out loud. Willa, on the bed above his head, snores along softly. "'Isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?'"
In the margins, in blue ballpoint pen, is written: fuck you. Jess muffles his laugh into the bed skirt.
"Get over it," Jess tells himself, and tosses the book away. Definitely time for bed, he thinks.
Quote belongs to Jonathan Safran Foer, obviously. Great book, by the way