Reflect (Genuflect) (GG)
A preceding note: This isn't in my usual style, but I've been reading a lot of the Gilmore Girls and Supernatural stuff coming out these days and I wanted to see if I could write something in that shorter, bite-ier style. Let me know your thoughts. Oh, and if you spot the plot lying around here, let me know too.
title: Reflect (Genuflect)
author: mhalachaiswords
fandom: Gilmore Girls
summary: Things in Rory's life move in circles, and she never knows where she's going to end up.
rating: pg
disclaimer: Characters and settings not mine
pairing: None; reference to past Rory/Dean, Rory/Logan, and especially Rory/Jess
genre: character study
setting:: after the end of the series
words: 2,630, complete
She's riding on a bus again, feeling as thought she may throw up. She's done this before, the first day she rode on the bus to Chilton all by herself, no Lorelai there to hold her hand, to embarrass her in cowboy boots and cutoffs, no Lorelai there to rescue her from her own mistakes. She rode to Chilton on the bus, her kilt scratchy against her legs and her backpack dragging her down, slowing the bus against gravity. She had worried that Chilton students might see her on the bus, and wonder at her.
She quickly learned that no one in her class took public transportation to school.
Her bag is too heavy now on her lap as she watches the highway speed by, the curling fingers of fog pushing back the darkness of the night, moonlit leaves blurring into watercolor smudges of blacks and grays.
Things in her life move in circles, and she never knows where she's going to end up.
~~~~~
She shaved her legs for the first time when she was twelve. She and Lane had whispered about it for days, about someone daring to be that grown up. Only girls with real underwire bras shaved their legs, Lane had confided to her in hushed tones, as if Mrs. Kim could hear them all the way across town.
That night, Lorelai stayed late at work and Rory took a long bath in the upstairs tub, reading poetry by Sara Teasdale that she didn't understand, and drinking the ginger tea she didn't like.
Some whispered memory of the conversation with Lane came to her as she set the book aside. Her mother's razor sat on the edge of the tub, harmless and pink. Rory wondered what it would be like. How she would look like with shaved legs, if she'd look older, if she'd look like one of those girls.
She lathered soap on her legs, left one first, and carefully drew the pink razor up from ankle to knee. The solid line in the soap wasn't straight, and suddenly Rory didn't want to be doing this, to be growing up. If there was one thing she'd learned from Lorelai, that was growing up wasn't always worth it.
Her hand shook as she tried again. Her soaped fingers slipped on the razor handle and she dropped it into the tub, not understanding at first the line of red welling up on her leg.
Every story she had ever read, of suicides and murders and ladies with sliced wrists in warm bathtubs came back to her, as she watched her blood drip into the tub, staining the water red.
She wondered when Lorelai started shaving her legs, if Lorelai ever slipped with the razor and thought she was going to bleed to death in the luke-warm soapy water of the porcelain tub.
Rory was in bed when Lorelai came home from work, bandage on her leg and face buried in her pillow and hands smelling like bathroom cleaner from scrubbing the bathtub for an hour.
She wore jeans to school for two weeks straight to cover the sharp red line of shame on her skin, in the hot humid air of a Connecticut June.
~~~~~
The sunlight in New Mexico is different from home. Rory sits with the other Barakers, as some imagineless hack dubbed them on a stretch of freeway in San Francisco, drinking bad coffee in a cheap diner while they wait. All they seem to do is wait. Wait for the next speech, for the next reaction, the next quote, the next deadline. It's been four months, and they've stopped looking for new ideas.
It's the key of a successful political campaign, Rory hears one of the reporters mutter to no one in particular. No one wants new ideas.
"There are no new ideas," Rory hears herself saying, pouring another artificial sweetener into the coffee she's stopped drinking. "Only new faces."
No one bothers to respond
The light outside shivers, then dims. A flash thunderstorm appears, roiling the sky.
No one moves. No one has an open laptop, in this little backwater town diner. No new ideas to report, after all.
Rory picks at the colored polish on her thumbnail, wondering if this is why she suffered through Chilton, through Yale, through Mitchum.
Why she walked away from Dean and Jess and Logan.
Why she hasn't called home in weeks.
~~~~~
She wrote her first story when she was seven. She'd imagined it out for days, dancing with princes and rabbits, imagining the sweep of a princess dress on the stairs. Her story was perfect.
She'd spent a whole night awake, flashlight under her covers, as she laboriously wrote word after word. She fell asleep with her flashlight still on, curled around her notebook the way she used to curl around her teddy bear.
In the morning, her story wasn't perfect at all. The words on the page didn't match what she had seen in her head. The magic wasn't there, and Rory couldn't figure out why.
She hid the story at the very back of her sock drawer, safe from Mommy because Mommy never saw the point of a storage place for socks that would just get worn again anyway. Rory had to figure out how to be a better writer, like those dead authors at the bookstore.
One day, she'd be perfect.
~~~~~
She tries to write. After the daily story is filed, she lies on her stomach on her motel bed and stares at her laptop screen. She can't think of anything to write. She has no stories to give to others. She's not the kind of girl to whom Things Happen.
Maybe that is her problem. She can't write what others want her to write. That's why the thing with Mitchum went so badly. He wanted her to write stories people wanted to read. He wanted her to write stories that would sell.
But she's never been able to write for other people. The only person she writes for is herself, but that's never been good enough. Not real enough.
It was good enough for Jess. He did what Rory always said she would do -- made himself into a story, put himself on paper, bound himself up and showed himself to the world, inviting rejection, criticism, adulation.
She imagines that he would say she's lying to herself, if she thinks writing it all down will make her more vulnerable. He knows that everything's real, nothing is fictional, except the lies everyone tells themselves to get through a day.
He tried to tell her, so many times, and she would never listen to him. Couldn't listen to him. Couldn't let that dark-haired boy strip away the lies she surrounded herself with, reasons and excuses that she couldn't put her fictions down on the page and make them real.
She knows he has a new phone number. That's about the only good thing about the Big Brother society they live in; she can always find the one person in her life who has never lied to her.
She pretends that she hasn't memorized his number, that she doesn't type it into her cell phone at three in the morning, that she doesn't want to hear what he'd tell her about the life she is living.
It's one of the many lies she tells herself about Jess.
~~~~~
Ignoring the poker game at the table before her, staring at a badly made vodka tonic, she wonders what it will all be like in three years. Present will fade into past; past moves into history.
"Ace!"
She looks up, startled, already answering before she remembers that the only person who ever called her Ace is a continent away, not willing to wait for her to grow into the person she wanted to be.
The poker player holds up his card in triumph, not seeing the flush on Rory's face, the wretch of being pulled back into a world where all she was, was fictional.
Abandoning her drink, she goes up to the bar and buys a cup of tea. The locals are sitting on the fringes of the bar, eyeing the intruders with wary eyes. It's like being back in Chilton, the imagined grime on her skin of not belonging. The feeling is the same now, only the bars and the diners change. She knows there used to be a place that she doesn't feel like an intruder, but that place belongs to the past. Not Yale, not Chilton, not the Gilmores' house in Hartford.
Not even Star's Hollow, not since she slept with a married man, broke up a marriage, left home in a tantrum over Yale, left her childhood self behind.
Maybe that was what Jess was trying to tell her. That people like them don't belong. They see things on the outside and aren't afraid to tell the truth.
Maybe she does have stories to tell after all.
They're just not the fiction she's been living.
~~~~~
It's October, and she's a year older. Her birthday is celebrated on a moving bus. One of the junior New York Times reporters gives her a stale cupcake bought at a truck stop and she starts crying. Everyone ignores the tears. Half of them have already had birthdays on this bus.
She washes the cupcake down with some tepid coffee, and watches the numbers tick by on her cell phone clock.
At two in the morning, she can't stand it any longer. She calls home.
When the answering machine picks up her call, the odd sensation of loneliness pushes down on her chest. She contemplates hanging up, but finds herself speaking quietly into her phone.
"Hi, Mom. Happy birthday to me, I guess." The bus slows, approaching a mess of traffic on the highway. It's two in the morning and it's New York State, of course there's a traffic jam. "I'm fine. Just older."
The yellow streetlamps that line the highway cast everything in tones of sepia. The pickup beside the bus has a busted taillight and the gun rack is held onto the cab with duct tape. Rory wishes she could open the window.
"I love you, Mom." Rory looks at the chipped red polish on her thumbnail and wonders when she last shaved her legs. "I just wanted to say that."
The Washington Post reporter in the seat behind her stars to hum an old Nirvana tune. Rory's heard him sing; she fell half in love with him that strange night in New Orleans.
"And say hi to Luke for me."
She hangs up, and punches Jess's number into the number pad before she gives up and turns the phone off.
She digs in her purse for a fifty-cent notepad and a cheap pen stolen unthinkingly from an IHOP at three in the morning one dusty September night. She puts the pen to the paper and draws a hard line, an inkless scar on the page.
She tries again, and this time the ink flows, memories sliding over the page.
~~~~~
When she was in the third grade, their January project was to write an autobiography of an event in their lives.
Rory carefully, faithfully, transcribed from memory the just-passed Christmas at her grandparents' house. The apple tarts, the eight-course meal, how Mom hadn't looked at Grandma once at the dinner table, how Grandpa barely acknowledged their presence.
She wrote how her Mom wasn't Mom in that house, how Grandma always seems happy to see Rory but then ignored her, how Grandpa looked at Lorelai and was so sad, when they all thought Rory wasn't paying attention.
They always thought Rory wasn't paying attention, when really she saw everything they did. She just pretended she didn't.
Rory finished her school project, ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet. Then she handed in a biography for Mom's Jeep and got the first F of her life and Mom had gone down to the school and yelled at the teacher and Rory's grade had gone up to a B when the principal finally had to intervene.
Mom dragged her into Luke's and ordered them both burgers, her eyes still flashing with anger. Rory was too afraid to speak, not of Mom, but of all the things she'd seen and couldn't tell.
Then Luke came over and asked Mom was wrong, and Rory could see that Luke really wanted to know, that he liked Mom a lot, and that Lorelai refused to see it.
She lowered her eyes and put a fry in her mouth. Another thing she couldn't unsee.
~~~~~
Thanksgiving dinner at the Gilmores' never changes.
Grandma and Grandpa are older, Mom is older, and Rory feels that she's back in the third grade. She can't understand how no one sees what a hypocrite she is, what a liar she is.
It's a polite fiction, pleasant lies, to pretend she doesn't notice these things about her family, how her mother is wearing Luke's necklace but not talking about him at all, how Grandma's cutting remarks at Mom feel rehearsed, how Grandpa isn't really paying attention to what's being said.
She wonders what they would say if they knew she saw these things.
There's a story around this dinner table, questions even Rory doesn't know how to answer. Why didn't Grandma have any more babies? Did Grandpa regret not having a son? Why did Mom keep a baby she hadn't planned on? Was Rory the only way Lorelai could find to escape from this house?
She sits at the dinner table, counting peas with the tip of her knife, thinking of the pages of faded memories hidden in her suitcase.
Strangely, she thinks that Lorelai would be the one to feel the most betrayed by all the stories Rory imagines.
~~~~~
She can't tell the story she wants, not now. There's truth and there's fiction, and then there is the harm Rory can cause by putting one and the other onto the same page.
All the same, she thinks of writing her mother's story, but Mom is too much like Rory, and Rory is too much like Grandma. They're all the same, these three Gilmore women, even though none of them will admit it. Their story is Rory's story, and so she will write down her polite fiction, the observed truths she stacks up like matches in a box.
Senator Obama is talking about health care again, but she's seen the text of the speech before and she can ignore him safely. He may have new ideas, but there are only so many ways to say the same thing, and she can recite the text of his speech in her sleep.
Instead, she lets the sound echo around her in this small-town gymnasium, redolent with the faint smell of basketballs and pompoms and high-school sweat. The notebook on her lap is turned to a blank page. All the memories the pages hold are familiar and as close to truth as Rory dares.
If she writes this story, she can't give it to her family. She can't give it to anyone until her words can't hurt her family any more.
It's a curious thought, to think of her family dead. The hubris to imagine she will outlive them is staggering.
But thinking of her mother, alone if Rory dies first, is the loneliest thought she has ever had.
The clapping begins. Rory ignores it all.
Because no story should start with "Once upon a time," Rory presses her pen to the page and begins.
This is the story of a girl named Lorelai. There was one before, and another before her, but their stories are both the same and apart.
All stories are, after all.
end
title: Reflect (Genuflect)
author: mhalachaiswords
fandom: Gilmore Girls
summary: Things in Rory's life move in circles, and she never knows where she's going to end up.
rating: pg
disclaimer: Characters and settings not mine
pairing: None; reference to past Rory/Dean, Rory/Logan, and especially Rory/Jess
genre: character study
setting:: after the end of the series
words: 2,630, complete
She's riding on a bus again, feeling as thought she may throw up. She's done this before, the first day she rode on the bus to Chilton all by herself, no Lorelai there to hold her hand, to embarrass her in cowboy boots and cutoffs, no Lorelai there to rescue her from her own mistakes. She rode to Chilton on the bus, her kilt scratchy against her legs and her backpack dragging her down, slowing the bus against gravity. She had worried that Chilton students might see her on the bus, and wonder at her.
She quickly learned that no one in her class took public transportation to school.
Her bag is too heavy now on her lap as she watches the highway speed by, the curling fingers of fog pushing back the darkness of the night, moonlit leaves blurring into watercolor smudges of blacks and grays.
Things in her life move in circles, and she never knows where she's going to end up.
~~~~~
She shaved her legs for the first time when she was twelve. She and Lane had whispered about it for days, about someone daring to be that grown up. Only girls with real underwire bras shaved their legs, Lane had confided to her in hushed tones, as if Mrs. Kim could hear them all the way across town.
That night, Lorelai stayed late at work and Rory took a long bath in the upstairs tub, reading poetry by Sara Teasdale that she didn't understand, and drinking the ginger tea she didn't like.
Some whispered memory of the conversation with Lane came to her as she set the book aside. Her mother's razor sat on the edge of the tub, harmless and pink. Rory wondered what it would be like. How she would look like with shaved legs, if she'd look older, if she'd look like one of those girls.
She lathered soap on her legs, left one first, and carefully drew the pink razor up from ankle to knee. The solid line in the soap wasn't straight, and suddenly Rory didn't want to be doing this, to be growing up. If there was one thing she'd learned from Lorelai, that was growing up wasn't always worth it.
Her hand shook as she tried again. Her soaped fingers slipped on the razor handle and she dropped it into the tub, not understanding at first the line of red welling up on her leg.
Every story she had ever read, of suicides and murders and ladies with sliced wrists in warm bathtubs came back to her, as she watched her blood drip into the tub, staining the water red.
She wondered when Lorelai started shaving her legs, if Lorelai ever slipped with the razor and thought she was going to bleed to death in the luke-warm soapy water of the porcelain tub.
Rory was in bed when Lorelai came home from work, bandage on her leg and face buried in her pillow and hands smelling like bathroom cleaner from scrubbing the bathtub for an hour.
She wore jeans to school for two weeks straight to cover the sharp red line of shame on her skin, in the hot humid air of a Connecticut June.
~~~~~
The sunlight in New Mexico is different from home. Rory sits with the other Barakers, as some imagineless hack dubbed them on a stretch of freeway in San Francisco, drinking bad coffee in a cheap diner while they wait. All they seem to do is wait. Wait for the next speech, for the next reaction, the next quote, the next deadline. It's been four months, and they've stopped looking for new ideas.
It's the key of a successful political campaign, Rory hears one of the reporters mutter to no one in particular. No one wants new ideas.
"There are no new ideas," Rory hears herself saying, pouring another artificial sweetener into the coffee she's stopped drinking. "Only new faces."
No one bothers to respond
The light outside shivers, then dims. A flash thunderstorm appears, roiling the sky.
No one moves. No one has an open laptop, in this little backwater town diner. No new ideas to report, after all.
Rory picks at the colored polish on her thumbnail, wondering if this is why she suffered through Chilton, through Yale, through Mitchum.
Why she walked away from Dean and Jess and Logan.
Why she hasn't called home in weeks.
~~~~~
She wrote her first story when she was seven. She'd imagined it out for days, dancing with princes and rabbits, imagining the sweep of a princess dress on the stairs. Her story was perfect.
She'd spent a whole night awake, flashlight under her covers, as she laboriously wrote word after word. She fell asleep with her flashlight still on, curled around her notebook the way she used to curl around her teddy bear.
In the morning, her story wasn't perfect at all. The words on the page didn't match what she had seen in her head. The magic wasn't there, and Rory couldn't figure out why.
She hid the story at the very back of her sock drawer, safe from Mommy because Mommy never saw the point of a storage place for socks that would just get worn again anyway. Rory had to figure out how to be a better writer, like those dead authors at the bookstore.
One day, she'd be perfect.
~~~~~
She tries to write. After the daily story is filed, she lies on her stomach on her motel bed and stares at her laptop screen. She can't think of anything to write. She has no stories to give to others. She's not the kind of girl to whom Things Happen.
Maybe that is her problem. She can't write what others want her to write. That's why the thing with Mitchum went so badly. He wanted her to write stories people wanted to read. He wanted her to write stories that would sell.
But she's never been able to write for other people. The only person she writes for is herself, but that's never been good enough. Not real enough.
It was good enough for Jess. He did what Rory always said she would do -- made himself into a story, put himself on paper, bound himself up and showed himself to the world, inviting rejection, criticism, adulation.
She imagines that he would say she's lying to herself, if she thinks writing it all down will make her more vulnerable. He knows that everything's real, nothing is fictional, except the lies everyone tells themselves to get through a day.
He tried to tell her, so many times, and she would never listen to him. Couldn't listen to him. Couldn't let that dark-haired boy strip away the lies she surrounded herself with, reasons and excuses that she couldn't put her fictions down on the page and make them real.
She knows he has a new phone number. That's about the only good thing about the Big Brother society they live in; she can always find the one person in her life who has never lied to her.
She pretends that she hasn't memorized his number, that she doesn't type it into her cell phone at three in the morning, that she doesn't want to hear what he'd tell her about the life she is living.
It's one of the many lies she tells herself about Jess.
~~~~~
Ignoring the poker game at the table before her, staring at a badly made vodka tonic, she wonders what it will all be like in three years. Present will fade into past; past moves into history.
"Ace!"
She looks up, startled, already answering before she remembers that the only person who ever called her Ace is a continent away, not willing to wait for her to grow into the person she wanted to be.
The poker player holds up his card in triumph, not seeing the flush on Rory's face, the wretch of being pulled back into a world where all she was, was fictional.
Abandoning her drink, she goes up to the bar and buys a cup of tea. The locals are sitting on the fringes of the bar, eyeing the intruders with wary eyes. It's like being back in Chilton, the imagined grime on her skin of not belonging. The feeling is the same now, only the bars and the diners change. She knows there used to be a place that she doesn't feel like an intruder, but that place belongs to the past. Not Yale, not Chilton, not the Gilmores' house in Hartford.
Not even Star's Hollow, not since she slept with a married man, broke up a marriage, left home in a tantrum over Yale, left her childhood self behind.
Maybe that was what Jess was trying to tell her. That people like them don't belong. They see things on the outside and aren't afraid to tell the truth.
Maybe she does have stories to tell after all.
They're just not the fiction she's been living.
~~~~~
It's October, and she's a year older. Her birthday is celebrated on a moving bus. One of the junior New York Times reporters gives her a stale cupcake bought at a truck stop and she starts crying. Everyone ignores the tears. Half of them have already had birthdays on this bus.
She washes the cupcake down with some tepid coffee, and watches the numbers tick by on her cell phone clock.
At two in the morning, she can't stand it any longer. She calls home.
When the answering machine picks up her call, the odd sensation of loneliness pushes down on her chest. She contemplates hanging up, but finds herself speaking quietly into her phone.
"Hi, Mom. Happy birthday to me, I guess." The bus slows, approaching a mess of traffic on the highway. It's two in the morning and it's New York State, of course there's a traffic jam. "I'm fine. Just older."
The yellow streetlamps that line the highway cast everything in tones of sepia. The pickup beside the bus has a busted taillight and the gun rack is held onto the cab with duct tape. Rory wishes she could open the window.
"I love you, Mom." Rory looks at the chipped red polish on her thumbnail and wonders when she last shaved her legs. "I just wanted to say that."
The Washington Post reporter in the seat behind her stars to hum an old Nirvana tune. Rory's heard him sing; she fell half in love with him that strange night in New Orleans.
"And say hi to Luke for me."
She hangs up, and punches Jess's number into the number pad before she gives up and turns the phone off.
She digs in her purse for a fifty-cent notepad and a cheap pen stolen unthinkingly from an IHOP at three in the morning one dusty September night. She puts the pen to the paper and draws a hard line, an inkless scar on the page.
She tries again, and this time the ink flows, memories sliding over the page.
~~~~~
When she was in the third grade, their January project was to write an autobiography of an event in their lives.
Rory carefully, faithfully, transcribed from memory the just-passed Christmas at her grandparents' house. The apple tarts, the eight-course meal, how Mom hadn't looked at Grandma once at the dinner table, how Grandpa barely acknowledged their presence.
She wrote how her Mom wasn't Mom in that house, how Grandma always seems happy to see Rory but then ignored her, how Grandpa looked at Lorelai and was so sad, when they all thought Rory wasn't paying attention.
They always thought Rory wasn't paying attention, when really she saw everything they did. She just pretended she didn't.
Rory finished her school project, ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet. Then she handed in a biography for Mom's Jeep and got the first F of her life and Mom had gone down to the school and yelled at the teacher and Rory's grade had gone up to a B when the principal finally had to intervene.
Mom dragged her into Luke's and ordered them both burgers, her eyes still flashing with anger. Rory was too afraid to speak, not of Mom, but of all the things she'd seen and couldn't tell.
Then Luke came over and asked Mom was wrong, and Rory could see that Luke really wanted to know, that he liked Mom a lot, and that Lorelai refused to see it.
She lowered her eyes and put a fry in her mouth. Another thing she couldn't unsee.
~~~~~
Thanksgiving dinner at the Gilmores' never changes.
Grandma and Grandpa are older, Mom is older, and Rory feels that she's back in the third grade. She can't understand how no one sees what a hypocrite she is, what a liar she is.
It's a polite fiction, pleasant lies, to pretend she doesn't notice these things about her family, how her mother is wearing Luke's necklace but not talking about him at all, how Grandma's cutting remarks at Mom feel rehearsed, how Grandpa isn't really paying attention to what's being said.
She wonders what they would say if they knew she saw these things.
There's a story around this dinner table, questions even Rory doesn't know how to answer. Why didn't Grandma have any more babies? Did Grandpa regret not having a son? Why did Mom keep a baby she hadn't planned on? Was Rory the only way Lorelai could find to escape from this house?
She sits at the dinner table, counting peas with the tip of her knife, thinking of the pages of faded memories hidden in her suitcase.
Strangely, she thinks that Lorelai would be the one to feel the most betrayed by all the stories Rory imagines.
~~~~~
She can't tell the story she wants, not now. There's truth and there's fiction, and then there is the harm Rory can cause by putting one and the other onto the same page.
All the same, she thinks of writing her mother's story, but Mom is too much like Rory, and Rory is too much like Grandma. They're all the same, these three Gilmore women, even though none of them will admit it. Their story is Rory's story, and so she will write down her polite fiction, the observed truths she stacks up like matches in a box.
Senator Obama is talking about health care again, but she's seen the text of the speech before and she can ignore him safely. He may have new ideas, but there are only so many ways to say the same thing, and she can recite the text of his speech in her sleep.
Instead, she lets the sound echo around her in this small-town gymnasium, redolent with the faint smell of basketballs and pompoms and high-school sweat. The notebook on her lap is turned to a blank page. All the memories the pages hold are familiar and as close to truth as Rory dares.
If she writes this story, she can't give it to her family. She can't give it to anyone until her words can't hurt her family any more.
It's a curious thought, to think of her family dead. The hubris to imagine she will outlive them is staggering.
But thinking of her mother, alone if Rory dies first, is the loneliest thought she has ever had.
The clapping begins. Rory ignores it all.
Because no story should start with "Once upon a time," Rory presses her pen to the page and begins.
This is the story of a girl named Lorelai. There was one before, and another before her, but their stories are both the same and apart.
All stories are, after all.
end