- -
If I need some other love,
Give me more than I can stand
And when my smile gets old and faded,
Wait around I'll smile again
Shouldn't be so
complicated
Just hold me and then
Just hold me again
Can you help me, I'm
bent
I'm so scared that I'll never
Get put back together
You're breaking me in
And this is how we will end
With you and me... bent
-- Matchbox 20, 'Bent'
--
Many things were planted
already at the head and the foot of his grave; blooming decorations that
wafted sweet honey to the smell of the breeze. Rory ignored many things,
unable to look, unable to see. She used Babette's hand-sized shovel to
dig out a small pile of soil where there was a gap in planted flowers
that choked his gravesite in their very abundance.
In the small hole she'd
dug, she stuck a white rose, and then covered its lower stem with the
freshly dug dirt, which inched up under her nails as she ground her
whole hands into the dark, heavy soil, rich with nutrients that would do
nothing to save him. He, who was so far below the ground and couldn't
know that these affections had been planted to keep him company. All
they did was make each planter feel an eighth the better, for knowing
they'd left a part of themselves of their choosing as decoration above
the land that was packed down on his casket, sealing it away from the
world he had left, leaving nothing but his body behind.
Her rose thus planted, her
sorrows given an image with petals as soft as his lips (had been), Rory
rose from her knees, and after dusting the dirt off of her blue jeans,
she left the gravesite, and its haunting stone slab, behind.
--
"Avril Lavigne, in my
house? Say it isn't so!"
"But that would be a lie,"
Rory told her mother plainly, loving and hating the teenage angst-driven
lyrics as they rasped from her throat to converge with the stereo-boomed
pieces of a well known rocker's voice in the air. Isn't anyone trying
to find me? she mouthed from her place atop her back on her
too-small bed.
The music was gone with a
swift punch of the "stop" button from Lorelai's finger. Rory heard the
sound and her brows flinched, though her eyes didn't dare close. But she
didn't move her head to meet her mother's stern expression; her
cornflower blues continued to circulate around the dotted plaster of her
ceiling.
"You're staring so hard,
you'd think there was a picture of him up there," came Lorelai's voice
from so far away.
"I can see him..."
"When can we have fun with
the lunacy jokes again, daughter of mine? When can they stop applying to
you, and therefore make you laugh? Do you remember laughter? You used to
know it well. You used to shake hands with it, even when not drunk."
"I don't know. Any of it."
"Since when are you okay
with not knowing anything? Where are your dictionaries, your
encyclopedias, your weapons of immaculate intelligence?" Lorelai stepped
close enough to the bed so that she could lean over her daughter and
obstruct her view of the ceiling and his invisible image that danced
among the spots of plaster. "Where has my daughter gone?"
"I don't..."
Lorelai nodded, and stepped
away. Her voice was uncharacteristically low and cold as she said what
needed saying: "You can't tell me, because you don't know. You don't
want to know a damn thing but him anymore."
Though Rory's throat choked
on misery grasping and failing to be sobs at what was happening to all
of the living relationships in her life, her mother was well out of the
room when she turned on the tortured tunes again, singing along to a
girl whose lyrics before she'd always despised, and laughed at, in that
way that was foreign to her now. What was laughter, what was happiness,
when not recognized anymore? Nothing but memories that were taken along
with him.
--
She had become accustomed
to the blackouts, so much so that it was almost a comfort now, as she
was confronted by one again. The stereo was drowned out by the sound of
harsh waves as concussion-like black invaded her, from peripheral
version in, swarming to the inner-most center of her pupils.
And there was Dean. He was
quiet, squatting in the corner, with his hands trapping his nose and
lower face, seeming to be in deep contemplation. She wanted to snatch
him again and drag him into her world, like she had for those short
seconds, but the futility of such actions seemed to wash over her as he
looked her way and shook his head, anticipating everything.
"Why do you come to me?"
"Because you're right
here."
"No," she corrected, "why
do you come to me? Why not to Lindsay, or your parents, your
little sister?"
"Lindsay," he scoffed as
means of an answer, jerking his eyes away and letting his bangs sway
into his face, like those from a head-banging rockstar. "I see you, and
so I come to you. Rory... you're all that's there."
She didn't want to say the
words that came from her mouth, but maybe it was her mother's face
flashing before her eyes that drove her to speak. "Dean, I'm living in
'The Ring' here. Seriously, can you stop?"
He leveled her with his
eyes, so easily, and she realized that she, too, was only seeing one
person anymore. That he was all that was there, as well. "No,
Rory. Right now, I can't."
She swallowed. There was
something -- a lump of cancer, a storm of tears -- in her throat. "Then
help me understand."
"You won't."
"Let me try!" She knew her
mind gone mushy was nothing for quoting academia or garnering any
explanation of the great expanse that spread between their two worlds,
but it wasn't in her to give up, even now. Now that she'd become wrapped
up in some warped version of 'The Twilight Zone', and since when, she
wondered, was that still on the air?
"There's no way," he told
her, and she fought not to believe him. Not to take all of his words to
be the absolute truth.
He was up from his corner
now, circling where she laid as she stared up at the void where stars, a
ceiling, or sunlight should be. When he spoke again, his voice was as
calm as always it remained in this place. "You know you still
name your appliances, Rory. And then tell Lorelai it's ridiculous."
"You spy on me?" Her voice
didn't even pretend to accuse; what she spoke were just words.
"...Who are you trying to
be?" he asked her, as was his way now, never answering anything.
She breathed through deep,
troubled thoughts. There was a deep silence, and then troubled words: "I
don't know... I don't. I have no idea."
She propped her head up on
her arm, watching his pacing, wishing his legs would slow and he would
come to her. She wanted to believe she had the strength to yank him back
again, this time for longer, but he would have none of it, it seemed.
She resorted to poetics, at last. "There are those who are prettier than
me..." she mentioned, trying again to understand.
"But I don't see them."
"Those with silkier voices.
Their windows don't even break when they 'sing'."
"I don't hear them."
She used tired hands to rub
her eyelids as she wished to rub along his inner thighs. "Those who
wouldn't have hurt you this way."
"But I don't want them," he
told her, his eyes full of plenty of want, all aimed straight from his
core to hers.
"You should. You should
have."
"But I never could. I never
did."
The lump in her throat
bubbled up past her lips, garnered tears on her lashes. "I'm sorry!"
"Rory... I'm not."
She was so lost in his eyes
that she didn't recognize which one of their voices it was who
whispered, "Stop looking so closely, and maybe you'll see." He came
closer to her, both of them damning those words lost between them. She
reached out to touch his cheek as he dropped to his knees with such
force beside her; her hand brushed through him, and his lashes trembled
as if from wind he couldn't feel. Her hand tangled in the mass of
nothing as it went through his skin, through his skull, and she felt
none of it, only a tingling in her long fingers that pried and screamed
to feel him again, the way that she could have years ago, days ago, and
didn't. Wasted time was a cruel thing as she was confronted with its
repercussions, in blackouts, time and time again.
--
Life was pushing her along,
the way that it did to those who would rather linger among the shadows
and the dead. Lane was there the day Rory threw clothes into her small
short-stay suitcase in a disorganized manner, which did not go
unnoticed. Nothing could, nothing did, anymore.
"Rory." Lane's eyes were on
her for ten seconds instead of the baby that kept alternating between
cooing sweet sounds and spitting up sour milk in Rory's best friend's
arms. "Where's the checklist, the first version and the final draft that
once in a while you'd laminate? How do you know you're going to remember
all your stuff if you don't write and rewrite it down?"
Rory gave Lane a look,
spared a glance at the baby, but for once saw none of its beauty. None
of its half-Lane-ness that she'd adored since the day it sprang out of
its mother. She saw little other than what Dean's mother must
have seen when called to the police station to identify the body. She
would be glad to be away from Stars Hollow, and it was the first time
she could remember thinking that since she used to want to get away from
Dean. Now she just wanted to get away from everything else. Everything
around here that was a constant reminder that she'd lost him too soon,
and had whispered unheard declarations to him far too late.
She couldn't love her
friends like she used to; she couldn't look her mother in the eye. She
couldn't let them look back and see what was there, that it was nothing.
That she was much like a seashell, gutted and smoothed, its insides
concave and utterly empty.
"Why are you leaving, Rory?
As your best friend, I'm telling you, I deserve to know. Where are you
going?"
Rory's eyes flitted to Lane
and her beautiful baby again. "I'm going home, Lane. It's time I stopped
hanging around here and moping so close to his grave."
"Okay, um, don't kill me
for saying this? But Dean: not so much a part of your life for the past
how many years?"
"I know, and wasn't that my
mistake? Doesn't that have to be the reason why I'm being tortured this
way?" Rory busied her hands and her eyes with dumping particles of
clothing, some unwashed, some she'd never wear, into her small suitcase
that she'd brought to Stars Hollow six days ago. On the day that would
be remembered by pitifully less people than was deserved. "It's time I
got back to New York. Got back to work. Wrote about other things that
aren't so close to me."
"Lorelai was right..." Lane
said, shaking her head. "It really is like we don't know you anymore. We
don't even recognize you, Rory. Come back to us, be the reason I
made you a godparent again."
"Lane." Finally, Rory
stopped, and tried to genuinely look at the face she'd been excited to
tell of her first kiss, the face she'd broken the news to after her
first break-up. The face that was there before Dean, and was still there
after he'd left. "I have to find it, again."
"Find what?"
"...Me. Who I was."
"You're in there somewhere,
Rory. You believe that still, right? You'll get over this. You know
that."
"Did I put a pink sweater
in here? Because I borrowed Mom's pink sweater to sleep in a few nights
ago, and if I pack it, I'm going to hear her hollering from a state
away."
Lane sighed, saddened by
this experience. Needing to perk up for the baby's sake, thinking it
wouldn't do a thing for Rory, she touched her best friend's shoulder and
said goodbye, for the time being. "Get home safe, Rory."
Rory continued packing to
purposefully shut out the fact that the emptiness she felt was no worse
now that Lane had left than it was when she entered the room. Her
silence fed the void as she searched in vain for a sweater that, like
her mind, just wasn't there.
--
"You'd better become more
normalized when you get back to New York," Lorelai admonished. "Or I'll
have to bring Michel to your new place and together we'll exorcise the
demon that's eating your brain. I'll chant the foreign words; he'll put
the sticks to the voodoo doll."
Rory tilted her head at her
mother, knowing she would normally fill this space with words of humor
and sarcasm, something to comfort the way her humanity was oozing away
from her body. "Am I forgetting anything?"
"I'll say," said Lorelai,
holding her arms open for a big squishable hug.
Rory let go long before the
intended eternity had passed, and soon enough she truly was alone, in
her car; back on the freeway, she dared to close her eyes at the exact
spot where she'd witnessed her undoing. Where she'd seen Dean's hair
bloodied and matted on his head full of death and nothing else. All of
her usual safe driving eccentricities were shoved aside in favor of her
need not to see that place, and look for any purple blood soaked through
the highway pavement. Silly though it was, it was all she could do not
to keep her eyes closed for the rest of the drive. Car horns could still
startle, she found, even when in this state of mind, and soon enough she
was past the forbidden scene of horrors, and was on her way to her small
apartment in very large New York.
Her place was the same as
she'd left it, when again she arrived. The keys complained when turned
in the rusty old locks, and her apartment door still creaked as it was
opened. She walked in, threw most of her mail away, deposited her
suitcase inside her bedroom, and fell, exhausted, into her bed. She
inhaled the sheets, and instead of smelling Bounty fresh, they reeked of
old dirt and what lies beneath.
"I can't do this," she said
to the walls, who may or may not have been listening.
--
"Sherry, hi," said Rory in
a fabulous mock-happy tone. Her cell phone now had use again. "It's Rory
Gilmore. I'm back. Oh, it was fine, it was good," she lied as her boss
asked the usual after-vacation questions. "Listen, I'm ready to get back
to work, like, now. As soon as possible, really. Do you have anything
that needs attention? I am all about giving attention to something
else."
Sherry came up with a
story, stating that Rory was in luck, as Damian had declined it in favor
of taking a short vacation of his own just recently. "It's not a serious
piece," Sherry divulged, "but if you're wanting to get back into the
swing of things in such short order, it should do."
"Great," Rory remarked in
that same tone she thought she'd like to adopt forever, jotting down the
details on a notepad kept on the fridge at all times. "So you'll let me
know of the flight details before the end of the day? Awesome, and their
full names are? Uh-huh... Yes..."
When she hung up, there was
a sufficient amount of details displayed on her notepad sheet with the
cute kitty on the top and the "From the paws of Rory" displayed neatly
underneath it. Personalized stationery. It was a Lorelai idea that made
its way into Crapshack, Jr.
Okay. So she would leave
tomorrow after she'd just left her old home to come to the new home
she'd left six days ago only to find Dean dead. Yes, it seemed the only
plan was to keep moving, and stop surrendering to the darkness that
claimed whenever it chose to mame. So much of her heart was fighting to
continue singeing Dean's image into itself like a tattoo, but her brain
was starting to come into consciousness again, beginning to salve the
wounds until they could scar over, and she could move on without being
pointed at like the thing with two heads by her own eyes reflecting back
from every mirror.
--
Tossing and turning, she
worked hard at getting rested that night. Every time she closed her
eyes, his voice was ghosting along her subconscious, his eyes bearing
into her soul. And the darkness was ever his companion.
Long after she'd originally
planned, Rory fell into sleep, her face gnashed into the pillow, her jaw
set in a grim line, as if anticipating what was to come.
"You're getting further and
further away..." Dean said to her, the bright spot amid the void and
whatnot that surrounded him.
Her lips moved as she
slept, able to comprehend her dream self to an extent. "Since when you
do find me here? I need to... dream in peace."
"You want me to leave?"
"Dean, you have to. You
have to stop this, go away... walk into the light, or whatever. Stop
being Seth Green in 'Idle Hands' about the whole thing."
"Rory, you're the light.
It's why I can't stop... and it's why I'm always looking at you."
Steeling her nerves, she
forced out what followed: "You know that's not what I meant. Can you
follow me everywhere or does it stop when I enter Utah tomorrow?"
"You're going to Utah,
right. 'To interview boys who have dropped all pretense of religion,
forsaking their beliefs to help wage war on other countries.'" The quote
of Sherry's phone call earlier was delivered with what seemed a great
deal of sarcasm.
"They're in the army, yes.
You can hear my phone calls? Dean, that's just creepy now." She couldn't
feel a sense of tangible self in this dream sequence; it was the first
time he had dared to reach her here. Always before he waited until she
was awake, conscious, and better prepared to be ripped from one world
into the space between it and another.
"I have to keep an eye on
you. It's important, Rory."
If she could roll her eyes,
she would have, as anger was starting to seethe into her. If she could
feel her arms, she would cross them under her breasts, and somehow she
would make her eyes glare at that soul of a boy she loved, loved, loved
past death. She didn't know how to keep loving him and forsaking her
sanity and everyone else in her life. Exhausted by the way she'd been
avoiding everything, her thoughts now went to avoiding him, thinking
perhaps those other things would come back.
"Trust me, it's not that
important, and I'm fine." She ignored the way that her dream voice
wavered, and was glad now not to feel her own arms, for they would
betray her and crash into him again, pulling him to her in vain while
his shape wouldn't move. She wasn't alone without him; she was alone
within his death span, eyes blind to all else because he was dragging
her down. They were alone together.
Suddenly, her heart began
beating faster in her sleeping body, and the lips that were mouthing
words and beginnings of words that ended before sound could find them
went dry as leather left out too long in the sun. She felt her limbs
baking under heat, as if feeling a touch of hell itself, and in her
dream, she screamed, her voice being swallowed up almost before it left
her too dry throat. It wasn't that he scared her, but this place he kept
bringing her to, this place he could possibly keep her in, was beginning
to terrify her. She was beginning to dissect things again, to weigh
options on more sides than one. To see beyond the everlasting
light that lit his form from behind and made his dead skin golden.
You're the light, he
was insisting to her, the only light he could see, and suddenly she
wanted to banish those words from her comprehension. What if they meant
that he would follow her until her light was extinguished from the
weight of bearing him with every second? What if, just by being with her
and causing her to be there as well, he was dragging her out of
existence to be with him in this dark place? Her thoughts ran amuck, and
her limbs about the bed went wild as a caged tiger's, trying to claw
their way out of this state of unconsciousness, and pull her back from
the dark coma.
"Rory, why are you afraid?"
Dean was asking, wanting to know. "What you should be afraid of is out
there."
"In Utah?" Again she felt
the screams emanating from her mouth. "Utah, with its religious soldiers
who will no doubt drop to their knees and pray before choosing to pick
up their gun?" She struggled to find breath that was quickly leaving her
in some sort of panic attack. "Are you jealous of them, is that it? Do
you not want me to find other men again, ever? You want me to just stay
here with you, as if this hasn't been the most psychotic vacation of my
life? Dean, Dean."
Despite her screams and the
way she clawed at her sheets, she was sobbing now, not wanting to leave
when he couldn't come with her. Not wanting him to be gone... the way
that he was.
Dean's face was contorted
with pain and disgust at what he was causing and caught in, and then was
lit up with pure love, and he searched for her eyes until they chose to
meet his. "Don't go to Utah," he told her, seemed to beg of her. "Don't
go."
"Now more than ever, Dean,
I have to. Go. Go away. Leave me alone, let me go, let me go." She was
wailing and crying, a child of thirteen, afraid of the world she was in
and wanting to turn the light on. "Let me go, let me go..." She was
crying those stupid girlish tears she'd long since abandoned, shooing
away the very presence that held most strongly onto her bones and the
blood that ran among them.
"Don't go..." he was saying
as he faded away, ripped out through that ever-incompetent reception
from the television screen atop some devil's desk. She thought such
ridiculous thoughts as she focused her eyes so intently on his lips that
kept begging her, until his image flickered out and away, and she fell
to true unconsciousness, which wasn't light or dark, as in it she
comprehended nothing at all.
--
The insistent beeping of an
alarm clock dug through her soupy brain and managed to find her ears
beneath it and finally, after several hours of cold-water-shock-coaxing
with its deafening beeps, it was able to do its job. Rory's eyes opened,
her ears in taking the sharp sounds that were emanating from that small
box on her nightstand. Jarred as she was by it so suddenly, she couldn't
believe it when she saw the time.
"No. No, no, no! How could
I? How could... I'm going to be late!"
She'd never slept this late
without the aid of her whole three hangovers, never in her life before.
Springing out of bed, the mattress coils squeaked as did her bones as
she tested the strength of her muscles in dressing faster than was
thought to be Gilmorely possible. If she missed this flight, this chance
to get on with her life, she felt that surely she might die of the
tediousness of those blackout visits that drained her of all that was
Rory. All that she so obviously needed to get back.
There wasn't even time for
coffee, barely time for a messy half-ponytail, and not all of the
buttons on her shirt were properly placed, but in spite of it all, she
was at the door in her cow-spotted sweat pants and carry-on bag within
eight minutes. "Okay, you look like crap! It must be your daughter's
first day at Chilton," she was saying to herself as hurriedly she rushed
around, figuring she could clean herself up at some point between the
flight and the taxi to the interview. Did they have taxis in Utah?
Lorelai had said she thought they had electricity now, and had smiled
that smile of hers for Rory's grandmother who never "understood a
back-handed comment that came out of that mouth".
Rory liked thinking of
these things, liked that she could recall them finally, but she was out
of time, and out of breath, and she practically leapt for the door
handle of her apartment. She almost had the handle turned when her body
collapsed seemingly of its own volition, leaving her unconscious on her
apartment floor, suitcase in hand, hair all a blur, with no head wound
to speak of to physically hold her eyes closed. But closed they were,
and gone to the present world was she.
-
The darkness wasn't her
only companion, but this time it brought not only Dean, but colorful
images broadcast in the space between himself and her blinking eyes.
There were many murmurs of sound, to accompany light-speed views of her
face as it changed from age 15 through to 23, from chubby schoolgirl
cheeks to hollow ones more befitting a woman of her current age, all
seen from the viewpoint of a Dean who had looked at her, alive, and
admired such things himself.
She could hear their banter
bubbling past their lips, and before long she could see him in the
images, too, as they washed over her. She saw his left hand trembling
just slightly as he leaned in and kissed her in the middle of a sentence
(and the middle of a store). "I got kissed!" she could hear, in
strangled teenage language, as the particular image faded away. "And I
shoplifted!"
She tried to laugh, but
more so than that, she wanted to cry.
Seeing herself in a car,
that wonderful car that he'd built her and she'd never gotten to drive,
she watched his lips move as they neared her face, but his words were
muted.
But then she could see them
both on the last day of sophomore year at Chilton -- she could see his
green truck, and his back turned to her. And she could hear their words
spoken then, could feel the heat emanating off of him from all of his
anger, and the heat from her pounding heart that had melted at the sight
of him leaving her, the way that she was always leaving him.
"Dean!" she'd cried.
"What?"
"Stop."
"Why?"
Sigh. "Because I love you,
you idiot!"
Colors swirled together,
stars shot across the daytime sky, as they kissed and were together, for
those moments, that time.
"What am I doing here,
Rory?" she could hear coming from a Dean of uncertain times, when she
was outside of her grandparents' place in her blue-sequined dress and
tiara, as confused as he was of what he was asking. What he was
expecting. What the two of them were to each other.
"You're picking me up,"
she'd told him, as if questions didn't matter because she didn't want to
examine them. She'd tried to make her drunken eyes glow bright enough to
infect his again with the gaiety they'd been stumbling around in,
together.
She could hear his words
before they even left his mouth, as he shook his head solemnly. "I don't
belong here..." he'd said for both of their benefits. "Not anymore."
And she'd let him go. He'd
left, then, and she'd let him go...
You forget how horrible
pain is until you're in it, came Dean's voice, and then Dean was
before her, staring into her eyes. Aiding her in taking the lashings of
all else there was to hear. He touched her cheek as more words came
washing over her senses, and she felt it there without the aid of the
physical sensation. Of course I had to come to your graduation. I
stayed in the shadows, so I wouldn't bother you.
Why was his voice
everywhere, everywhere? Why were his eyes so intent on claiming her own
-- why did she not want to look away for a short second and find her
bearings? Her bearings... where had they all gone?
He reached out to stroke
her cheek with his thumb, and as the translucent illusion of his skin
barely ghosted over hers, goosebumps rose to prickle her flesh like tiny
needles, startling her into further sensation. Rory. I like your bed.
I like... everything about you.
Rory, I want... I...
"Dean!" she screamed at
him, at the figure that was so gently stroking her face, his unnatural
touch bundling her nerves like cable wires that were becoming ready to
electrocute the love out of them both. "Let me go! Let me..."
"Shhh," he told her, to
soothe her panic, and she listened as if his words were real. As if they
transcended the barrier placed between them. As if she didn't just
believe she was insane, and this was her multi-colored breakdown. "Be
with me just once more, one more time," he whispered in her ear. "And
then it can be over, you'll see."
"I can't see anything but
you!" she said immediately, spewing honesty like uncontrollable vomit in
his face. The face that made her teeth chatter with the cold reality
that she wouldn't be seeing it again. His death she had known and
started to come to grips with; his absence was what was going to be the
real challenge, to live on in spite of being truly alone.
He smiled at her sadly, his
lips shaking, eyes brimming with tears of solid anguish.
"I've done what I came to
do. Now it's our last goodbye."
--
Tidal waves crashed over
dead fish bones buried in the ocean. Television screens lost picture, as
electricity was stolen from their tightly bundled wires. The world's
wars cried until all of their tears rained down on the heated ground to
cool it with the agony that they were lost souls, gone, and this
moisture was all that was left of them. She heard it... she heard it
all.
And then she woke up. She
woke this final time, and knew that Dean was gone.
--
"Welcome to this Tuesday
edition of the New York Nightly News," said a broadcaster on the screen,
and Rory sat with a bowl of sugar puffs and milk, inhaling the food that
she could finally taste with vigor again, staring at the most lively
creatures in her apartment that she was banished to till tomorrow, for
by the time she had awakened, alone and on the floor, she had missed her
flight.
Her flight that was a story
on the news that night. Her plane to Utah, which had reportedly crashed
shortly after take-off, killing everyone aboard, as well as those that
were hit from the ground level. Rory's hand shook as it paused with her
spoon halfway to her mouth. The plane crashed at 2:26 p.m., it was said.
On this Tuesday, a week after Dean's death...
She thought of the bathroom
mirror.
She dropped the bowl of
cereal, ignorant of the splash of milk that she would rue later, and
immediately went to her small suitcase she'd brought back from Stars
Hollow, digging through it for the smashed up article that she'd kept as
a dear thing, like a stuffed animal that brought comfort despite its
unseeing eyes. She searched the printed words with eyes so quick,
absorbing every sentence's meaning with the superhero-like speed she'd
gained in her time as a practicing journalist. She stopped and sagged
back on her heels as she encountered the obituaries' details of Dean's
death, a week ago, at 2:26 p.m.
--
Whenever Dean appeared to
Rory after that, it was from her knowingly conjuring his image in her
mind. There were no more conversations, only the memories stored in her
brain, and the pictures that she took out and framed. His physical
presence was truly gone, as together they had said goodbye to the
blackness when he promised that it was the end. It wasn't long before
she trekked back to Stars Hollow, to right a few wrongs, as her old self
kept coming back to her in waves until they washed over her comfortingly
with every waking moment. (And even in her dreams, which returned to
dancing pop-tarts wearing stunning top hats.)
She gave Lorelai genuine
hugs, squeezing her so tightly there were broken bone jokes cracked for
long minutes afterward, which Rory laughed at, because they were funny.
Because she could feel her mother again, feel love for those alive
again. Because she could feel, period. She felt something so much
other than dead, and it was a wonderful thing.
She returned to Dean's
grave after giving the gazillion hugs that she needed so badly to share.
She thought she might thank him, in a big movie-screen moment, when he
couldn't hear her. Thank him for however he was able to hang back long
enough after his life was taken to save her own. Thank him for holding
her hand and caressing her lips, all of those times when insanity was a
likely prospect. She thought she might ask the grey stone why, and wait
for an answer from the inscripted name and dates, as if they had his
lips still to speak on their behalf.
Her sparkling eyes began to
fade in their glory as she came upon his headstone, but there was a
small smile that remained, even for him, even as he was gone. For as she
looked at his gravesite that had been so clogged with perfumey goodness
mere days before, she found that her single white rose, so hastily
planted, but so deeply lodged, was the only flower that remained alive,
that yet bloomed for him, for his memories, that were of her.
- -
end
