wizened_cynic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wizened_cynic) wrote2006-05-18 02:25 am
wizened_cynic) wrote2006-05-18 02:25 am
Entry tags:
we are the practitioners of loss
Claire-fic. With references to the second part of this. Alex/Olivia shippers need not read. Really.
I cannot think of a clever title right now. Deal.
ETA: I just noticed there's actually a shitload of references to other Claire fics, but I'm too lazy to find which ones, so if you remember, good for you; if you don't, just forget it.
I. Denial
In Lorelai's defense, Claire shouldn't have chosen International Grab Bag Night at Al's to tell Lorelai that she was actually an Assistant D.A. from Manhattan who had been living under an assumed identity for the last three years, after being shot by a professional assassin hired by a Colombian drug lord.
One minute Lorelai was sniffing the paper bags of takeout and trying to decide whether the food leaned towards Thai or Mexican, and the next Claire was telling her that she'd lied to Lorelai for as long as Lorelai had ever known her.
It wasn't exactly Lorelai's fault that she didn't believe Claire then, was it? How was Lorelai supposed to know Claire was being serious? They were in the middle of discerning the ethnic origins of their dinner through its smell.
"April Fool's Day was over a month ago," Lorelai told her as she peered into one of the bags. She was making her bet on Thai. There was a certain peanutty aroma to it. "Hey, you had your chance then and you gave it up. You don't get to get back at me for the Jell-O incident until next year. It's not fair."
The other bag smelled less like Thai and more like raw seafood that had been left on a counter for a very, very long time. It could also be Indian; Lorelai detected a hint of mango chutney.
She decided to leave this one for Claire. Their relationship had arrived at the stage where mandatory politeness was no longer an issue, and it was too cumbersome to give the other person what you secretly wanted just to prove your devotion to her, and Claire was going to take two bites and then order pizza anyway.
"Lorelai," Claire said quietly. Her lips were pursed and she was wearing the same expression she got when Taylor put her in charge of strategically placing two dozen birdfeeders in the town square.
She left the room without finishing her sentence, and Lorelai yelled, "I'm not waiting for you." She tore open her bag and discovered something which, at one point in its existence, might have been chicken green curry and/or an enchilada.
Claire came back holding a shoebox. "Listen to me for a minute," she said. "I need you to hear this from me."
Lorelai didn't know what to expect --- a secret stash of porn, maybe, or a nine-millimeter, or, and Lorelai was too embarrassed to even admit she ever thought about this, a ring --- but it didn't matter either way, because there was no way she could have remotely guessed this was coming.
Lorelai had been through a number of bad surprises in her life, with getting pregnant at sixteen making the top of the list. For twenty-one years it had stayed in first place, but its glory days ended as soon as Lorelai saw the yellowed newspaper, a weathered copy of the New York Ledger with her girlfriend's picture on the front page, accompanied with big block letters saying NO LEADS ON SLAIN A.D.A.
"You are fucking kidding me," Lorelai said. She was talking to God, but in retrospect, it also worked for Claire as well.
She tried to laugh it off, tell herself it was some stupid gag Paris and Rory put Claire up to, but Claire was just sitting there, not saying anything, and Lorelai couldn't see her eyes because the light was hitting her glasses the wrong way and all Lorelai saw were glints of pink and green and gold, and Lorelai thought, I am going to throw up now.
This isn't true, she thought. This can't be true can't be true can't be true.
"I'm sorry," Claire said. "I couldn't tell you before ---"
Lorelai cut her off. "Excuse me," she said, and ran to the bathroom.
This time she really did throw up.
*
II. Anger
For a while Lorelai was so angry that she lost the ability to speak.
The whole town was in shock. It was probably a more disturbing turn of events than Claire turning out to be a completely different person.
At first she was just angry at Claire for not telling her sooner.
"I couldn't!" Claire's voice came through the door of the closet. "It would have jeopardized everything! Oh, for god's sake, Lorelai, get out of there before you suffocate."
Lorelai hugged a pair of Manolo Blahniks to her chest and prayed to the god of designer footware to give her the strength not to open the door.
Then she was angry at Claire for lying the whole time.
"Isn't it the same?" Paris asked. They were in the dining hall, having breakfast. Lorelai needed emotional support in the form of sugary cereal, and the editors of the Yale Daily News were happy to oblige.
"It's not the same," Lorelai said. The Lucky Charms had turned the milk a lurid shade of purple. Claire hated marshmallows in her cereal for that very reason.
Suddenly, it occurred to Lorelai that maybe Claire had been lying about her preferences for breakfast foods all along. Maybe Claire didn't hate marshmallows in her cereal. Or maybe, Lorelai gritted her teeth at the thought, maybe Claire hated marshmallows in her cereal but Alex loved them. Who the fuck knew anymore?
Rory took the bowl away from her when Lorelai got into a heated discussion about the possible cereal conspiracy and began spilling milk everywhere. "I think you're making it a bigger deal than it really is." When Lorelai gave her a look that said, Fourteen hours of labor and you're on her side?, Rory quickly clarified, "Okay, Mom, I understand that you betrayed by all of this --- and I do too --- but it wasn't like she had any choice. And I don't think she was lying about the cereal either. It's pretty disgusting."
"Even if she did lie about everything," Paris added, "can you really blame her? She got shot. I should ask her for an exclusive interview on behalf of the paper."
"Thank you for exploiting my family's tragedy, Paris," Rory said, and they began bickering.
All Lorelai could think about was the scar on Claire's shoulder, the one Claire had said came from protecting a family of squirrels from the neighborhood bully. Lorelai should have known then that Claire had been lying. Claire never struck Lorelai as the type who would want anything to do with squirrels or any other small, furry objects. How had Lorelai been so blind?
It was a cool scar though, Lorelai had to admit. But she liked it better when it was Claire's scar, and not Alex's. She liked Claire's story behind the scar more than Alex's.
If Claire had lied about that, did she lie about loving Lorelai too?
Then it hit her. Claire had never admitted she loved Lorelai in the first place.
So Lorelai was angry about that, until she realized, watching as Paris and Rory debated about the exact definition of oxymoron, that Claire had put Rory in danger. All those months of living in Stars Hollow and being part of Lorelai's life --- Claire didn't just put Lorelai in danger, she put Rory in danger too, as well as Lorelai's parents, and Luke, and Sookie and Michel, and everybody else in Stars Hollow. People Lorelai cared about. People she loved.
That was what angered Lorelai most. That was the one thing she might never forgive Claire for.
*
III. Depression
Lorelai was tired of being angry all the time, but Claire made it so easy. Lorelai would come home to find Claire on the phone, talking to people in New York, to her old friends, probably. Lorelai couldn't tell if Claire sounded happy or not, but she could tell Claire was making plans. She'd already quit her job at Wolfram and Hart. It was a matter of time before she quit Stars Hollow.
Lorelai braced herself for the inevitable.
"Just talk to her," Luke said, when Lorelai complained about not having enough whipped cream on her pancakes. He handed her the whole can, which he never did, so he must be feeling really sorry for her.
Lorelai informed him that she and Claire were no longer on speaking terms.
"How can you two not be on speaking terms?" he asked. "You live in the same house."
"I'm avoiding her," Lorelai told him. "And she's avoiding me."
"So you're mad at her for avoiding you because you're avoiding her?" Luke reasoned. "That makes sense."
Lorelai sprayed whipped cream onto his hand. Luke glared. "Exactly how long are you going to be avoiding her for?"
"Do you want the exact number of years, or just a ballpark figure?"
"You two need to just get over yourselves." Luke shook his head and went to refill a customer's coffee.
Lorelai didn't actually plan on being mad at Claire for the rest of her life. She would stop being mad as soon as Claire came to her and apologized and made up for all the lies she'd fed Lorelai with at least two weeks of mind-blowingly acrobatic sex.
Claire did come to Lorelai and apologize.
Then she told Lorelai that she was going back to New York.
"I thought running away was my specialty," Lorelai fumed. She wished she had the nerve to say it to Claire, but she settled for bitching about it to Rory.
Luke let Claire borrow his truck to move her things. There were a lot more of them than there had been when she first moved in. Some of Lorelai's things had probably been mixed in, but Lorelai didn't have the strength to go through every one of the boxes to pick them out, because if she had to, she would cry, and the last thing she needed right now was to let Claire see her cry.
Lorelai went to work early the morning Claire was due to leave. She thought she could probably get through the day if she didn't have to see Claire, but no, Claire just had to show up at the Dragonfly to give Lorelai back her keys.
"So," Claire said. She wasn't smiling. She was wearing her glasses, the tortoiseshell ones Lorelai liked, and hair was falling out of her ponytail, and her eyes were the color of the sky right before it was going to rain.
"Yeah," Lorelai said.
And then she left.
Lorelai slept in the kitchen for a week before Rory finally caught her under the kitchen table. "Mom," she said, her tone suggesting that perhaps Lorelai should spend some time in a mental hospital, "what are you doing?"
"The sheets smell like her," Lorelai said, and then this choking sound came out of her, and it wasn't until Rory put her arms around her and Lorelai felt Rory's shirt growing damp that she realized she was crying.
*
IV. Extreme Giddiness
It took half a jug of Founder Day's punch and two drunk phone calls to get Claire back. If Lorelai had known that was all it took, she would've gotten wasted way sooner and then exercised her talent of drunk-dialing old acquaintances.
The important thing was, Claire came back.
If it was possible to get even more drunk on that knowledge, Lorelai was that. Drunk. Out of her mind drunk. So drunk she was reaching her zen place. She was lying in bed beside Claire, watching Claire sleep, studying the way her eyelids fluttered, and this was it, this was Lorelai's zen place. She had reached her zen place. She had achieved self-actualization. She was at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Hell, she was setting up camp at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
"Quit it," Claire muttered as she turned over.
Lorelai had to stop smiling for a minute, so she could reply. It was a good thing, because her face was going to crack in half from all the smiling. "Sorry," she whispered, lowering her head onto the pillow. Claire had her back to her now, and Lorelai stroked the ridge of her spine with her thumb.
"Go to sleep, Lorelai."
But Lorelai couldn't. She was smiling too big and every cell in her body felt like they were going to explode into song and dance. Which would be quite a scene considering most of her cells didn't have legs. Or voices. In addition to that, Lorelai had the terrible urge to wake everybody up and tell them that Claire was back. Claire left, like every other person Lorelai thought she could spend the rest of her life with, Rory excluded, but Claire came back.
She was sure if she woke Rory up right now, Paris would kill her --- Lorelai, not Rory; and if Lorelai woke Sookie up right now, she'd also wake Davey and Martha, and then Sookie and Jackson would kill her; and if she woke Luke up right now, Luke would say, "Good for you, Lorelai, but it's four in the freaking morning, what is WRONG with you?"; and if Lorelai woke Emily up, Emily would say, "I must say your taste in women are much more dignified than your taste in men, Lorelai. Speaking of which, how is Alexandra doing? Please send her my regards. She's always invited to have dinner with us, you know. Are you two full-time lesbians now?" and Lorelai would never hear the end of it.
So instead Lorelai just lay on her side of the bed and listened to Claire sleep, and watched the hand of the clock tick-tock its way around in a circle. Like a child on Christmas morning, she willed for morning to arrive, so that she could tell everyone that she had Claire again.
*
V. Paralyzing Self-Doubt
Claire never told stories about her week when she came home on Friday afternoons. "My work just isn't that terribly interesting," she said when Lorelai bemoaned about the lack of funny anecdotes. Lorelai knew Claire was lying because Claire had come home one weekend with a blowup doll.
"Can I name her?" Lorelai had asked.
"No. You may not name the evidence."
"I think I'm going to call her Shirley. Hi, Shirley. It's nice to have you here with us. You can just make yourself at home. Could I get you something to drink?"
"I am going to take a shower," Claire announced. "And when I come back, Shirley will be quietly sitting in the trunk of my car, and not in the living room having tea with you as you introduce her to Paris's craft corner, because you will be in bed and naked."
"She's so demanding," Lorelai said to Shirley, who agreed.
Lorelai was paralyzed with a sudden spell of weltschmerz that night. She'd read somewhere once that it was a physiological response, that all mammals felt sad after they had sex, but this wasn't sad as much as it was the entire weight of the world falling on her and making her feel small and ugly and resentful.
"Why won't you take me to your office?" Lorelai asked.
Claire stopped running her fingers through Lorelai's tangled hair. "What?"
"It's like you don't want me to know that part of you. The other you. Your other life."
"It's not what you think, Lorelai."
"You know, now that I think about it, I don't know anything about you. I don't know what you were like when you were a kid. I don't know which kids tortured you in high school. I don't know where you worked and what people you worked with, whether you liked Mortal Kombat better or Street Fighter."
"Well, what do you want to know?"
"Everything," Lorelai blurted. "It's not fair that you know everything about me, and I don't know anything about you."
So Claire brought her to work the following Wednesday, and then kicked Lorelai out of the courtroom for making faces in the galley.
"Objection!" Lorelai protested during the ten-minute recess. "The judge didn't even say anything."
"That's because she was too busy asking me who you were and why I'd brought you here. You're lucky she didn't hold you in contempt."
"It's all your fault, you know. You were so serious up there. I'm not used to Serious You." It was impossible to get used to Serious Prosecutor Claire when Lorelai had drawn a smiley face on her stomach that morning with chocolate syrup, and then licked it off. Making faces was the only way to keep Lorelai from breaking into a fit of giggles.
Claire sent Lorelai back to her apartment and told her to stay there until dinner.
"But it's Bring Your Girlfriend to Work Day," Lorelai whined. "Not Bring Your Girlfriend to Work and Then Leave Her Alone in Your Apartment Day."
"There are half a dozen boxes in my spare room," Claire said. "Baby pictures, yearbook photos, college transcripts. Help yourself."
"That's not fair," Lorelai grumbled. Claire knew she wouldn't be able to resist an opportunity for an archaeological dig that could possibly turn up photographs which could be used to humiliate Claire in the future.
Claire's apartment was one of those modern architectural types, with glass everywhere and walls jutting out at strange angles. The first thing Lorelai noticed was the unmistakable smell of Chanel No.5 and guilt. The apartment reeked of Emily.
When she saw the entertainment system, which could've been the identical twin sister of the one Rory got for her dorm in her first year, she knew her mother had gotten here before her.
Lorelai flipped open her cell phone and dialed. "My mother furnished your entire apartment and you neglected to tell me about it?"
Claire sighed. "This is really not the time."
"I cannot believe she did this. Again. I am getting a beanbag chair and putting it in the living room. And oh, oh, I cannot believe this. Emily got rid of the monkey lamp. How could you let her?"
"Calm down for a minute. The monkey lamp is in my bedroom, right beside my bed." Lorelai heard a shuffling noise, and then Claire saying, "What do you want, Jessica?" and she decided that she would pester Claire later.
She still had investigative work to do.
She found the bullet one of those boxes found in offices, used to store files that nobody ever needed but everybody was too afraid to throw out. It said CABOT, A. on the side label. And then, in a different colored marker, CLOSED, on the top of the lid.
Lorelai didn't realize until after she'd opened the box that it was the evidence for Claire's shooting. Claire's murder.
There were no autopsy reports though, no pictures of Claire all broken and bloodied, for which Lorelai was grateful. There were pictures of the scene afterwards, yellow police tape and a patch of darkening blood on the ground, glistening. There were witness statements, a blood-stained shirt in a Ziploc bag, ballistic reports. Then, finally, the bullet, in another Ziploc bag, a smaller one, the kind Lorelai would use to carry baby carrots in, if Lorelai didn't think carrots tasted foul and hurt her jaw and that vegetables shouldn't be considered as snacks, ever.
She thought about the scar on Claire's shoulder, how the raised skin was pink and shiny and harder, tougher, than that on the rest of her body, as though it were trying to hide something.
The bullet was smaller than Lorelai had imagined. It didn't look like it could do much damage, let alone nearly kill Claire. But if that bullet hadn't almost killed Claire, then Claire would never have ended up in Witness Protection, and Lorelai would never have met her.
The bag opened with a snap as Lorelai took out the bullet and held it in her palm, The metal was cool at first, but warmed up as soon as Lorelai made a fist. It felt slick in her hand, and Lorelai closed her eyes and pictured that split second when that bullet had entered Claire.
She opened her eyes and put the bullet back into the evidence bag. Her hand smelled hot and coppery afterwards, like blood.
Claire called and told her where to meet for dinner. "We'll be eating with some of my friends." She paused, hesitant. "Is that all right?"
"Sure," Lorelai said. She was shaking a little. It didn't really matter anymore that Claire had a life Lorelai didn't know about. At least Claire was alive. At least Lorelai still had the chance to figure out who Alex Cabot was.
She met Olivia Benson at dinner. Lorelai recognized her as the woman from the video footage of Claire's funeral, only she looked different now. Her hair was longer, her face softer. Her eyes were dark and warm, and when she smiled at Lorelai, Lorelai's stomach churned, not because she was jealous, but because she knew, for three years, while Lorelai had Claire, Olivia had nothing but that jagged piece of metal that had been inside Claire for maybe twenty minutes. Olivia had crime scene photos and ballistic reports and a bloody lavender top, and that was it.
Lorelai didn't feel jealous as much as guilty, for having Claire all this time. But the way Olivia looked at Claire now said it was all right. That she'd moved on, they'd both moved on. Three years was a long time.
Olivia cracked a joke, made everyone laugh, and she was telling Lorelai about the time Claire got thrown in jail for talking back to a judge ("You were in the slammer?" Lorelai screeched, and Claire said, "It's not like what you're thinking!") when Lorelai felt Claire's hand on her knee. It's okay, Claire was saying. I chose you.
I cannot think of a clever title right now. Deal.
ETA: I just noticed there's actually a shitload of references to other Claire fics, but I'm too lazy to find which ones, so if you remember, good for you; if you don't, just forget it.
I. Denial
In Lorelai's defense, Claire shouldn't have chosen International Grab Bag Night at Al's to tell Lorelai that she was actually an Assistant D.A. from Manhattan who had been living under an assumed identity for the last three years, after being shot by a professional assassin hired by a Colombian drug lord.
One minute Lorelai was sniffing the paper bags of takeout and trying to decide whether the food leaned towards Thai or Mexican, and the next Claire was telling her that she'd lied to Lorelai for as long as Lorelai had ever known her.
It wasn't exactly Lorelai's fault that she didn't believe Claire then, was it? How was Lorelai supposed to know Claire was being serious? They were in the middle of discerning the ethnic origins of their dinner through its smell.
"April Fool's Day was over a month ago," Lorelai told her as she peered into one of the bags. She was making her bet on Thai. There was a certain peanutty aroma to it. "Hey, you had your chance then and you gave it up. You don't get to get back at me for the Jell-O incident until next year. It's not fair."
The other bag smelled less like Thai and more like raw seafood that had been left on a counter for a very, very long time. It could also be Indian; Lorelai detected a hint of mango chutney.
She decided to leave this one for Claire. Their relationship had arrived at the stage where mandatory politeness was no longer an issue, and it was too cumbersome to give the other person what you secretly wanted just to prove your devotion to her, and Claire was going to take two bites and then order pizza anyway.
"Lorelai," Claire said quietly. Her lips were pursed and she was wearing the same expression she got when Taylor put her in charge of strategically placing two dozen birdfeeders in the town square.
She left the room without finishing her sentence, and Lorelai yelled, "I'm not waiting for you." She tore open her bag and discovered something which, at one point in its existence, might have been chicken green curry and/or an enchilada.
Claire came back holding a shoebox. "Listen to me for a minute," she said. "I need you to hear this from me."
Lorelai didn't know what to expect --- a secret stash of porn, maybe, or a nine-millimeter, or, and Lorelai was too embarrassed to even admit she ever thought about this, a ring --- but it didn't matter either way, because there was no way she could have remotely guessed this was coming.
Lorelai had been through a number of bad surprises in her life, with getting pregnant at sixteen making the top of the list. For twenty-one years it had stayed in first place, but its glory days ended as soon as Lorelai saw the yellowed newspaper, a weathered copy of the New York Ledger with her girlfriend's picture on the front page, accompanied with big block letters saying NO LEADS ON SLAIN A.D.A.
"You are fucking kidding me," Lorelai said. She was talking to God, but in retrospect, it also worked for Claire as well.
She tried to laugh it off, tell herself it was some stupid gag Paris and Rory put Claire up to, but Claire was just sitting there, not saying anything, and Lorelai couldn't see her eyes because the light was hitting her glasses the wrong way and all Lorelai saw were glints of pink and green and gold, and Lorelai thought, I am going to throw up now.
This isn't true, she thought. This can't be true can't be true can't be true.
"I'm sorry," Claire said. "I couldn't tell you before ---"
Lorelai cut her off. "Excuse me," she said, and ran to the bathroom.
This time she really did throw up.
*
II. Anger
For a while Lorelai was so angry that she lost the ability to speak.
The whole town was in shock. It was probably a more disturbing turn of events than Claire turning out to be a completely different person.
At first she was just angry at Claire for not telling her sooner.
"I couldn't!" Claire's voice came through the door of the closet. "It would have jeopardized everything! Oh, for god's sake, Lorelai, get out of there before you suffocate."
Lorelai hugged a pair of Manolo Blahniks to her chest and prayed to the god of designer footware to give her the strength not to open the door.
Then she was angry at Claire for lying the whole time.
"Isn't it the same?" Paris asked. They were in the dining hall, having breakfast. Lorelai needed emotional support in the form of sugary cereal, and the editors of the Yale Daily News were happy to oblige.
"It's not the same," Lorelai said. The Lucky Charms had turned the milk a lurid shade of purple. Claire hated marshmallows in her cereal for that very reason.
Suddenly, it occurred to Lorelai that maybe Claire had been lying about her preferences for breakfast foods all along. Maybe Claire didn't hate marshmallows in her cereal. Or maybe, Lorelai gritted her teeth at the thought, maybe Claire hated marshmallows in her cereal but Alex loved them. Who the fuck knew anymore?
Rory took the bowl away from her when Lorelai got into a heated discussion about the possible cereal conspiracy and began spilling milk everywhere. "I think you're making it a bigger deal than it really is." When Lorelai gave her a look that said, Fourteen hours of labor and you're on her side?, Rory quickly clarified, "Okay, Mom, I understand that you betrayed by all of this --- and I do too --- but it wasn't like she had any choice. And I don't think she was lying about the cereal either. It's pretty disgusting."
"Even if she did lie about everything," Paris added, "can you really blame her? She got shot. I should ask her for an exclusive interview on behalf of the paper."
"Thank you for exploiting my family's tragedy, Paris," Rory said, and they began bickering.
All Lorelai could think about was the scar on Claire's shoulder, the one Claire had said came from protecting a family of squirrels from the neighborhood bully. Lorelai should have known then that Claire had been lying. Claire never struck Lorelai as the type who would want anything to do with squirrels or any other small, furry objects. How had Lorelai been so blind?
It was a cool scar though, Lorelai had to admit. But she liked it better when it was Claire's scar, and not Alex's. She liked Claire's story behind the scar more than Alex's.
If Claire had lied about that, did she lie about loving Lorelai too?
Then it hit her. Claire had never admitted she loved Lorelai in the first place.
So Lorelai was angry about that, until she realized, watching as Paris and Rory debated about the exact definition of oxymoron, that Claire had put Rory in danger. All those months of living in Stars Hollow and being part of Lorelai's life --- Claire didn't just put Lorelai in danger, she put Rory in danger too, as well as Lorelai's parents, and Luke, and Sookie and Michel, and everybody else in Stars Hollow. People Lorelai cared about. People she loved.
That was what angered Lorelai most. That was the one thing she might never forgive Claire for.
*
III. Depression
Lorelai was tired of being angry all the time, but Claire made it so easy. Lorelai would come home to find Claire on the phone, talking to people in New York, to her old friends, probably. Lorelai couldn't tell if Claire sounded happy or not, but she could tell Claire was making plans. She'd already quit her job at Wolfram and Hart. It was a matter of time before she quit Stars Hollow.
Lorelai braced herself for the inevitable.
"Just talk to her," Luke said, when Lorelai complained about not having enough whipped cream on her pancakes. He handed her the whole can, which he never did, so he must be feeling really sorry for her.
Lorelai informed him that she and Claire were no longer on speaking terms.
"How can you two not be on speaking terms?" he asked. "You live in the same house."
"I'm avoiding her," Lorelai told him. "And she's avoiding me."
"So you're mad at her for avoiding you because you're avoiding her?" Luke reasoned. "That makes sense."
Lorelai sprayed whipped cream onto his hand. Luke glared. "Exactly how long are you going to be avoiding her for?"
"Do you want the exact number of years, or just a ballpark figure?"
"You two need to just get over yourselves." Luke shook his head and went to refill a customer's coffee.
Lorelai didn't actually plan on being mad at Claire for the rest of her life. She would stop being mad as soon as Claire came to her and apologized and made up for all the lies she'd fed Lorelai with at least two weeks of mind-blowingly acrobatic sex.
Claire did come to Lorelai and apologize.
Then she told Lorelai that she was going back to New York.
"I thought running away was my specialty," Lorelai fumed. She wished she had the nerve to say it to Claire, but she settled for bitching about it to Rory.
Luke let Claire borrow his truck to move her things. There were a lot more of them than there had been when she first moved in. Some of Lorelai's things had probably been mixed in, but Lorelai didn't have the strength to go through every one of the boxes to pick them out, because if she had to, she would cry, and the last thing she needed right now was to let Claire see her cry.
Lorelai went to work early the morning Claire was due to leave. She thought she could probably get through the day if she didn't have to see Claire, but no, Claire just had to show up at the Dragonfly to give Lorelai back her keys.
"So," Claire said. She wasn't smiling. She was wearing her glasses, the tortoiseshell ones Lorelai liked, and hair was falling out of her ponytail, and her eyes were the color of the sky right before it was going to rain.
"Yeah," Lorelai said.
And then she left.
Lorelai slept in the kitchen for a week before Rory finally caught her under the kitchen table. "Mom," she said, her tone suggesting that perhaps Lorelai should spend some time in a mental hospital, "what are you doing?"
"The sheets smell like her," Lorelai said, and then this choking sound came out of her, and it wasn't until Rory put her arms around her and Lorelai felt Rory's shirt growing damp that she realized she was crying.
*
IV. Extreme Giddiness
It took half a jug of Founder Day's punch and two drunk phone calls to get Claire back. If Lorelai had known that was all it took, she would've gotten wasted way sooner and then exercised her talent of drunk-dialing old acquaintances.
The important thing was, Claire came back.
If it was possible to get even more drunk on that knowledge, Lorelai was that. Drunk. Out of her mind drunk. So drunk she was reaching her zen place. She was lying in bed beside Claire, watching Claire sleep, studying the way her eyelids fluttered, and this was it, this was Lorelai's zen place. She had reached her zen place. She had achieved self-actualization. She was at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Hell, she was setting up camp at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
"Quit it," Claire muttered as she turned over.
Lorelai had to stop smiling for a minute, so she could reply. It was a good thing, because her face was going to crack in half from all the smiling. "Sorry," she whispered, lowering her head onto the pillow. Claire had her back to her now, and Lorelai stroked the ridge of her spine with her thumb.
"Go to sleep, Lorelai."
But Lorelai couldn't. She was smiling too big and every cell in her body felt like they were going to explode into song and dance. Which would be quite a scene considering most of her cells didn't have legs. Or voices. In addition to that, Lorelai had the terrible urge to wake everybody up and tell them that Claire was back. Claire left, like every other person Lorelai thought she could spend the rest of her life with, Rory excluded, but Claire came back.
She was sure if she woke Rory up right now, Paris would kill her --- Lorelai, not Rory; and if Lorelai woke Sookie up right now, she'd also wake Davey and Martha, and then Sookie and Jackson would kill her; and if she woke Luke up right now, Luke would say, "Good for you, Lorelai, but it's four in the freaking morning, what is WRONG with you?"; and if Lorelai woke Emily up, Emily would say, "I must say your taste in women are much more dignified than your taste in men, Lorelai. Speaking of which, how is Alexandra doing? Please send her my regards. She's always invited to have dinner with us, you know. Are you two full-time lesbians now?" and Lorelai would never hear the end of it.
So instead Lorelai just lay on her side of the bed and listened to Claire sleep, and watched the hand of the clock tick-tock its way around in a circle. Like a child on Christmas morning, she willed for morning to arrive, so that she could tell everyone that she had Claire again.
*
V. Paralyzing Self-Doubt
Claire never told stories about her week when she came home on Friday afternoons. "My work just isn't that terribly interesting," she said when Lorelai bemoaned about the lack of funny anecdotes. Lorelai knew Claire was lying because Claire had come home one weekend with a blowup doll.
"Can I name her?" Lorelai had asked.
"No. You may not name the evidence."
"I think I'm going to call her Shirley. Hi, Shirley. It's nice to have you here with us. You can just make yourself at home. Could I get you something to drink?"
"I am going to take a shower," Claire announced. "And when I come back, Shirley will be quietly sitting in the trunk of my car, and not in the living room having tea with you as you introduce her to Paris's craft corner, because you will be in bed and naked."
"She's so demanding," Lorelai said to Shirley, who agreed.
Lorelai was paralyzed with a sudden spell of weltschmerz that night. She'd read somewhere once that it was a physiological response, that all mammals felt sad after they had sex, but this wasn't sad as much as it was the entire weight of the world falling on her and making her feel small and ugly and resentful.
"Why won't you take me to your office?" Lorelai asked.
Claire stopped running her fingers through Lorelai's tangled hair. "What?"
"It's like you don't want me to know that part of you. The other you. Your other life."
"It's not what you think, Lorelai."
"You know, now that I think about it, I don't know anything about you. I don't know what you were like when you were a kid. I don't know which kids tortured you in high school. I don't know where you worked and what people you worked with, whether you liked Mortal Kombat better or Street Fighter."
"Well, what do you want to know?"
"Everything," Lorelai blurted. "It's not fair that you know everything about me, and I don't know anything about you."
So Claire brought her to work the following Wednesday, and then kicked Lorelai out of the courtroom for making faces in the galley.
"Objection!" Lorelai protested during the ten-minute recess. "The judge didn't even say anything."
"That's because she was too busy asking me who you were and why I'd brought you here. You're lucky she didn't hold you in contempt."
"It's all your fault, you know. You were so serious up there. I'm not used to Serious You." It was impossible to get used to Serious Prosecutor Claire when Lorelai had drawn a smiley face on her stomach that morning with chocolate syrup, and then licked it off. Making faces was the only way to keep Lorelai from breaking into a fit of giggles.
Claire sent Lorelai back to her apartment and told her to stay there until dinner.
"But it's Bring Your Girlfriend to Work Day," Lorelai whined. "Not Bring Your Girlfriend to Work and Then Leave Her Alone in Your Apartment Day."
"There are half a dozen boxes in my spare room," Claire said. "Baby pictures, yearbook photos, college transcripts. Help yourself."
"That's not fair," Lorelai grumbled. Claire knew she wouldn't be able to resist an opportunity for an archaeological dig that could possibly turn up photographs which could be used to humiliate Claire in the future.
Claire's apartment was one of those modern architectural types, with glass everywhere and walls jutting out at strange angles. The first thing Lorelai noticed was the unmistakable smell of Chanel No.5 and guilt. The apartment reeked of Emily.
When she saw the entertainment system, which could've been the identical twin sister of the one Rory got for her dorm in her first year, she knew her mother had gotten here before her.
Lorelai flipped open her cell phone and dialed. "My mother furnished your entire apartment and you neglected to tell me about it?"
Claire sighed. "This is really not the time."
"I cannot believe she did this. Again. I am getting a beanbag chair and putting it in the living room. And oh, oh, I cannot believe this. Emily got rid of the monkey lamp. How could you let her?"
"Calm down for a minute. The monkey lamp is in my bedroom, right beside my bed." Lorelai heard a shuffling noise, and then Claire saying, "What do you want, Jessica?" and she decided that she would pester Claire later.
She still had investigative work to do.
She found the bullet one of those boxes found in offices, used to store files that nobody ever needed but everybody was too afraid to throw out. It said CABOT, A. on the side label. And then, in a different colored marker, CLOSED, on the top of the lid.
Lorelai didn't realize until after she'd opened the box that it was the evidence for Claire's shooting. Claire's murder.
There were no autopsy reports though, no pictures of Claire all broken and bloodied, for which Lorelai was grateful. There were pictures of the scene afterwards, yellow police tape and a patch of darkening blood on the ground, glistening. There were witness statements, a blood-stained shirt in a Ziploc bag, ballistic reports. Then, finally, the bullet, in another Ziploc bag, a smaller one, the kind Lorelai would use to carry baby carrots in, if Lorelai didn't think carrots tasted foul and hurt her jaw and that vegetables shouldn't be considered as snacks, ever.
She thought about the scar on Claire's shoulder, how the raised skin was pink and shiny and harder, tougher, than that on the rest of her body, as though it were trying to hide something.
The bullet was smaller than Lorelai had imagined. It didn't look like it could do much damage, let alone nearly kill Claire. But if that bullet hadn't almost killed Claire, then Claire would never have ended up in Witness Protection, and Lorelai would never have met her.
The bag opened with a snap as Lorelai took out the bullet and held it in her palm, The metal was cool at first, but warmed up as soon as Lorelai made a fist. It felt slick in her hand, and Lorelai closed her eyes and pictured that split second when that bullet had entered Claire.
She opened her eyes and put the bullet back into the evidence bag. Her hand smelled hot and coppery afterwards, like blood.
Claire called and told her where to meet for dinner. "We'll be eating with some of my friends." She paused, hesitant. "Is that all right?"
"Sure," Lorelai said. She was shaking a little. It didn't really matter anymore that Claire had a life Lorelai didn't know about. At least Claire was alive. At least Lorelai still had the chance to figure out who Alex Cabot was.
She met Olivia Benson at dinner. Lorelai recognized her as the woman from the video footage of Claire's funeral, only she looked different now. Her hair was longer, her face softer. Her eyes were dark and warm, and when she smiled at Lorelai, Lorelai's stomach churned, not because she was jealous, but because she knew, for three years, while Lorelai had Claire, Olivia had nothing but that jagged piece of metal that had been inside Claire for maybe twenty minutes. Olivia had crime scene photos and ballistic reports and a bloody lavender top, and that was it.
Lorelai didn't feel jealous as much as guilty, for having Claire all this time. But the way Olivia looked at Claire now said it was all right. That she'd moved on, they'd both moved on. Three years was a long time.
Olivia cracked a joke, made everyone laugh, and she was telling Lorelai about the time Claire got thrown in jail for talking back to a judge ("You were in the slammer?" Lorelai screeched, and Claire said, "It's not like what you're thinking!") when Lorelai felt Claire's hand on her knee. It's okay, Claire was saying. I chose you.