A/N: Thank you so much for the reviews! Immediately after I had posted I was sort of overwhelmed with the feeling that this was the crappiest piece of writing I had ever posted. Luckily, by the time I had almost convinced myself to remove it, I had already turned off my computer, so saved by the off-switch there, I guess... As mentioned, this will be from Lorelai's POV, sort of. You'll know what I mean. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: I do not own Gilmore Girls and I am not making any money off this.

Chapter two: Home

You'll be the vein, you'll be the pain
You'll be the scar
You'll be the road rolling below the wheels of a car
And all of those thoughts on God
Don't know if I'm strong enough now
You'll be the vein, you'll be the pain
You'll be the catalyst

- Anna Nalick

Lorelai didn't say anything, didn't move an inch. It was like a dream, a beautiful, distrubing dream. A surreal, Rory-looking postcard coming to taunt her and tease her until she found the will-power to tack it to the door next to the other ones. She wondered if, now that her world had finally crashed into too many pieces to collect, she would be able to find enough power to get out of bed.

This time, she'd painted herself a pretty convincing prodigal daughter. Ratty, dishevelled hair, sunkissed skin, worn jeans and that t-shirt Rory had borrowed from her ages ago. Would she ever have the heart to wear it if she ever got it back? (and she wasn't saying she'd get it back. Hell, she wasn't sure she'd ever get Rory back, not with that... boy driving)

"I told her," Lorelai thought to herself, as she looked at the Rory-mirage. "I told her, if she wanted to throw away her life for a boy, he'd better have a motorcycle..."

She'd dreamed up these scenarios for weeks. Rory coming home, saying it was all a mistake, that Jess was a finished chapter (or maybe even finished permanently), that everything would be fine. She had called and called, only to be asked not to call. She had fallen to pieces with every postcard, and still desperately held onto it, because it was the only contact she'd had with her daughter. Lorelai thought she'd done everything humanly possible, but it had taken her father, Rory's beloved grandfather, dying for her to say she'd come home. Maybe that had been a dream too? A delusion she had plunged into and gotten stuck in because the wound from reality was still raw on her soul.

This must be it. She had finally lost touch with reality, she was no longer tip-toeing around earth, she had really taken off. A solitary tear rolled down her cheek.

"Go away..." Her whisper barely carried, but she was sure the hallucination would hear it and leave her alone. No use haunting those who have lost their mind.

In a blink, the Rory that wasn't Rory was by her side, the bed squeaking in protest as she shimmied her way onto it and embraced Lorelai.

"Mom, come back... Are you sick, you want me to call anyone? Should I call Luke? Or Sookie?"

Luke. She hadn't seen Luke in... a while. She could no longer recall how long ago it was since she had last seen him. There had been yelling, blaming and a whole lot of bitterness. She made coffee at home, vats and vats of coffee to go, but they tasted as bitter as her falling out with Luke. She tried making her own danish, her own burger, even tried to play bagel hockey on her own, but it all turned into nothing, trash to feed the overflowing cans outside.

Sookie kept things up and running at the inn. She would come over with papers to sign, real food, and sympathy. Lorelai signed the papers, put the food away until it went bad and disregarded the sympathy. It was only salt in wounds that just wouldn't close because the postcards always cut them open when they had just begun healing. Sookie had been the one to tell her she had called Rory, and that Rory would come home. She figured even Sookie had realized that futile hope and the make believe versions of reality that followed, however temporary, was better than nothing.

"I'm calling Luke," the Rory-hallucination said resolutely, when Lorelai wouldn't answer. Another blink, and she was gone.

Finally.

Lorelai let out a shaky breath, buried her face in the cover, and tightened her grip on the ball point pen she had snitched from Richard's office during the office party. He'd caught her, but only snickered at her, too satisfied about bagging the Swede to tell her off. It had been their little, trivial secret, and it had been nice. The pen had been the first and hereunto the only thing she'd found that had belonged to her father. She knew it was stalling the inevitable, but that pen just made him seem... less gone.

The house had fallen quiet again, or at least quiet enough that she believed she was all alone. Solitude was her new safety zone, what had she ever needed people for? They either left her, were disappointed by her or yelled at her. Second by second, she drifted into solitude, that blessed zone between asleep and awake. It didn't last long.

Downstairs, the door slammed open, and an unmistakeably gruff voice called out.

"Lorelai! Lorelai!"

The voice was jarring, and it pulled her mercilessly out of her lull. Luke? What was Luke doing here? Then she remembered. This was a hallucination. This was not real. She had lost it. Still, she heard hurried voices coming from the living room, followed by heavy footsteps up the stairs and loud thuds just outside her door. Her door opened.

"Lorelai? Lorelai, are you all right?"

The smell of fresh coffee teased her nostrils. Involuntarily, her eyes refocused and found Luke's worried face in the fog. "Funny," she thought. She had never been able to duplicate the smell of fresh brewed coffee from Luke's even in her wildest imagination. That could only mean... This was real. Luke was in her house, in her room, with coffee. Someone had called Luke over. The Rory-mirage wasn't an illusion. Rory... Lorelai sat upright, dropping the pen.

"Rory!" she cried out, her voice breaking after staying silent for so long. "Rory!"

Luke took a step back, watching baffled, as tears began trickling down Lorelai's face. Behind him Rory came tiptoeing up the stairs.

"Mom?"

Lorelai heard the soft sound of feet as well, and turned to face the door. And there she was. Ratty, dishevelled hair, sunkissed skin, worn jeans and the top she had borrowed long ago. She wasn't Rory, and she was Rory. The eyes, the blue that couldn't be changed by anything, glowed with joy as her daughter threw herself at Lorelai. They got tangled in each other, and were soon an inseparable entity, sobbing and laughing and mumbling words that could not be heard. Luke smiled. He could come back later. He put down the steaming coffee on Lorelai's bedside table and snuck out. She'd call him. He just knew it.

During the first weeks after Rory had left, Lorelai had tried to imagine what she would say to Rory when and if she came home. Mostly, she had wanted to yell at her daughter, then hunt down Jess and do unspeakably foul and evil things to him for taking her daughter away from her. But as it turned out, she wasn't angry. She couldn't be, not when Rory had finally come home. She just couldn't yell, couldn't give Rory reason to leave again. And Jess... Well, so long as he didn't darken her doorstep anytime soon, he'd be safe.

She patiently listened to Rory telling the unabridged, unembellished story of her stint on the road. Part of her understood. She'd be lying if she'd say her and Christopher hadn't at least fantasized about it when they were young. Packing up their stuff (possibly nicking some of Emily's more valuable items and sell them for one third of what they were worth), leaving on Christopher's motorbike, not knowing where they would end up.

"So... You and Jess, huh?"

"Yeah..."

"Did you hide him in the bathroom?" Lorelai inquired, trying to hide her curiosity and worry behind jokes.

"No! No, he... He stayed in Philadelphia," Rory replied evasively.

"He stayed?"

"Yes."

"In Philly?"

"The one and only."

"Are you guys..? Is it..? I mean... You know..."

"We have issues. There's no denying it."

"I could've..." Lorelai bit her lip. Her inner screamed at her not to finish that sentence.

"I know," Rory said pointedly. "He knows. Everyone knows, okay? We like each other, but we're volatile when we're together, and as soon as we try to be apart things just fall to pieces. We just need to hash things out."

"Hash it out?"

"I know he wants me back at Yale. I know I would like to be back at Yale, but it's not something you want to admit to the person you've been quasi-Thelma and Louise-ing it with all summer."

"Was there a Brad Pitt somewhere?"

"No." Rory couldn't resist smiling. Brad Pitt. That would've been a sight.

"So, are you gonna call him?"

Her silence made Lorelai freeze inside. No. No, no, no, no. And still... yes. She knew it herself. A phone call was a crappy way to end things, any kind of thing, really.

"You need to go back to him, don't you?"

"Just to talk!" Rory hastened to say. "I won't go until after grandpa's funeral, and I will come back, I promise!"

Rory meant it, it was no doubt about it. Lorelai knew her daughter, knew what every facial expression and every inflection of her voice meant. And they were telling her Rory would come back.

Days and weeks went by. The funeral passed in a haze of tears and piles of "I'm sorry for your loss" as Richard Gilmore was laid to his final rest. Rory took Emily-duty for the entire day, staying near her grandmother for support and to run interference if needed. Emily hadn't quite forgiven her, but she knew better than to show it publicly. As Lorelai watched them, she wondered if she would ever learn to fully tolerate her mother's behavior.

Inevitably, the day came when Rory left for Philadelphia. She'd called Jess to let him know she was on her way. He was camping out with a couple of guys he'd met, "Complete nutjobs, don't say I didn't warn you", and he'd come pick her up at the train station. She was gone for a week, and Lorelai had to tell herself over and over again that her daughter had returned, that she would return again. She passed time taking down the postcards from Rory's door, putting them in a box. Her friendship with Luke resumed. He'd bring her coffee, they'd sit not talking to each other. It wasn't exactly comfortable silence, but it was a silence that said everything. She let him see the postcards before she tossed them into the cupboard, along with her Max-box and Rory's Dean-box.

When Rory finally returned, part of Lorelai wished that Rory's reckless nature had had enough, that this summer had satiated its hunger and restored her to her former glory. She asked about the trip to Philadelphia, Rory answered in clipped sentences. It wasn't over, but it wasn't continuing either. The Call had left this unfamiliar state hanging inbetween them. He had admitted he perhaps wasn't as ready as he thought he'd been. She had told him she wanted to go back to Yale, he'd said he'd figured as much, and that he was proud of her going back. They left things resolved and unresolved, shelved for a time when they could sit down and start picking through the racing months of that summer. This would take time.

It did.

Years later, at a publishing house in Philadelphia where Jess had begun working just months after their previous meeting, they finally realized that there had been a reason for their running. There was, after all, a higher meaning to the Great American Roadtrip. It was a step on the way to something that wasn't necessarily waiting for them at the next stateline.

After that conversation, Lorelai finally asked Rory why she had left. They had avoided the question, but when everything else was said, the "why" still hung in the air. Her daughter explained, retelling the meeting with Jess. It wasn't something they could boil down to just one simple thing, one event that set the rest in motion. Sometimes, things just happen, they collude, and then jump you and you're so taken by surprise that you'd rather run away than face the problem. Sometimes, there wasn't only one catalyst. Sometimes, there was a whole horde of them.

And for all that fear and running away, they had finally brought both Rory and Jess home.

A/N: That's a wrap, people! This is what my mind threw at me when I asked for Twilight. I know things were left hanging, but that's the way it came to me: open, so that everyone is free to infer and hope and guess. I hope you liked it, and that you will drop a review.