Title: Simplicity
Author: Ky (venom69)
Fandom: Gilmore Girls
Rating: Teens & Up
Summary: He likes to think that there was never a time when they were apart.
Character/Pairing: Luke/Lorelai
Spoilers: Set during late season 7.
Warnings: Language.
Author’s Notes: Song belongs to Dixie Chicks. Written for cassievalentine in the JJBaby ficathon. It seems fair that the first GG fic I post be for Cass.
Disclaimer: Usual guff. Not mine, promise to put them back where I found them.
Date: 31/03/07

***

All my love will fly to you
Each night on angel's wings
Godspeed
Sweet dreams

***

He likes to think that there was never a time when they were apart.

She moved on - got married, even - and he moved on - though he didn’t get married again, at least - and they drifted apart and didn’t speak and all of the rest and then one day she was just there again.

Back in his life, in his bed, and in his heart.

It’s easier to pretend that year didn’t happen; easier to just forget that there actually was a time when he had to force himself not to think of her.

Luke doesn’t like to believe that he spent the entire duration of her relatively short marriage pining for her – though, certainly, there was some pining in the beginning – and he likes to tell himself that he moved on quite adequately, all things considered.

Liz – and, to a lesser extent, TJ – will happily tell him that he is full of it, but that was nether here nor there coming from them, really.

Though, for as much as he liked to pretend that there had never been a time when they weren’t together, he was pointedly aware that she had changed.

She was more guarded now; she had been hurt again.

He was more guarded, too, because he knew what it was like to have her and let her go and he was in no hurry to repeat that experience.

Twice was more than enough, for him.

With their respective changes in mind, Luke considered that it was, perhaps, not meant to be that easy for them to pick up where they left off.

Could it really be so simple that all she had to do was walk up to him and everything else clicked into place?

But, really, at that stage in his life, Luke had been prepared to take what he could get and run with it.

If it was going to be that simple, who was he to argue?

When her divorce was final, some months after her separation, she walked into the diner and into his arms - to the sounds of hushed delight from his customers - and that had been that.

***

He remembers thinking that it was going to be around town within the hour. He also remembers not really caring about that.

She had hugged him for all she was worth; her face buried in the crook of his neck as her arms had shaken with the effort of keeping their bodies connected. At the time, he hadn’t seen it for what it was.

Luke had hesitantly would his arms around her waist and held her.

He had taken it with a grain of salt - he hadn’t, at that point in time, known that she’d just gotten divorced - and simply been content to hold her and offer whatever platonic comfort she had been seeking. They had been working on being friends and he had taken the hug to be another step in that direction.

But then her hips had moved just so and the idea that what they were doing - in the middle of the diner, no less - was anything resembling platonic had flown from his mind in tandem to all of the blood in his body heading rapidly south.

He hadn’t pushed her away and maybe a gentleman would have.

But Luke had never really considered himself the quintessential ‘gentlemen’, so he thought that it was OK that he had let her lead him upstairs.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

Either way, it worked out pretty well for him and he never planned to complain.

***

He remembers answering her phone the next morning while she clutched the blankets over her head and declared it 'ridiculously early to be getting calls' at that hour.

Luke remembers Rory’s slight gasp of surprise to hear his voice stop her apology at calling at a ridiculously early hour - like mother, like daughter, apparently - and then he remembers her gasp of understanding that followed just a heartbeat later.

Rory had asked him to pass a message on - and he still swears blind that those two have some kind of secret code that he doesn’t know about - before she had awkwardly brought their conversation to a close.

Dutifully, he had passed the message on.

Lorelai had laughed.

From her position in his bed, clad only in a flannel shirt that she’d pulled on at some point during the night, she had peeked out from under the blankets, looked at the expression on his face and laughed for a good, solid minute.

It hadn’t actually been until that moment that he had realized exactly how much he had missed her.

So he’d laughed too.

***

He remembers the looks.

Babette had winked at him, patted him on the ass - and he thought he should be used to that after more than a decade - and called him a stud.

Patty had called him a Rooster and he hadn't got the reference, though at the time he had thought that it was probably a good thing.

Kirk had offered him relationship advice and Luke thought that he deserved some kind of medal for not laughing at him.

April had squealed with a kind of delight that only someone of her age could muster. She had hugged him, hugged Lorelai and then declared that it was the best news she’d heard in 'like, forever.'

Rory hadn’t said much - but the awkward phone call really had been enough - but she had smiled softly the first time she’d seen them together post-reuniting.

Taylor had, of course, brought it up at the town meeting and while Kirk had jumped to their defence - though saying that he still had the ribbons available should they be required could hardly be considered a defence - Luke had simply taken her hand and smiled.

“We wont need the ribbons.” She had told him, full of infectious confidence.

He had nodded and silently vowed to himself that he wasn’t going to screw this up again.

***

He remembers her sitting at the counter, coffee and horrifically unhealthy breakfast in front of her.

She had ignored the plate of fatty, grease-laden food that he had handed her and simply waved an apple under his nose and waited for him to have some kind of grand revelation.

“What?” He had asked, wondering if she had finally - and certifiably - lost the plot.

“Do you know what this is?” She had frowned.

“Yes.” He’d looked at the non-descript green apple in her hand. “I’m surprised you do, though.”

“Luke.”

“Lorelai.”

“Luke.”

She - like a lot of women he knew - had seemed to be under the impression that he could understand what she was thinking simply by the way she said his name.

He - like every man he knew - had not had a chance in hell of getting it right even if he had tried.

“It’s an apple, Lorelai.”

She had nodded. “Yes it is. And it’s in my hand.”

While he had quietly admitted to himself that seeing her with an apple in her hand was a miracle in itself - though he liked to think that her body might finally be raging a long-overdue war against all of the “food” she normally ate - she had continued to wave the apple around as though he was supposed to understand something pivotal from her hand gestures.

It hadn’t been until Sookie entered and stopped short when she saw the offending - though apparently meaningful - apple in Lorelai’s hand that Luke received conformation of his obtuseness.

“No!” She had called.

Lorelai had turned on the stool and held the apple out proudly. “Yes!”

“No!”

He remembers being grateful that the people in town were used to their slightly crazy antics.

Not one person had looked up from their meal or conversation.

“Yes!”

“No!”

It had been like watching a tennis match. While high.

He'd growled and rolled his eyes. “For God’s sake will one of you just tell me what the hell is going on?”

“You don’t know?” Sookie had frowned. “He doesn’t know?”

“Nope.”

“How can he not know?” Her gaze had moved quickly to him. “How can you not know?”

Luke had folded his arms across his chest and done his best to glare the answer out of either one of them. “I don’t speak fruit.”

Sookie, having apparently recovered from her shock, moved to the stool next to Lorelai and rolled her eyes at him.

“Apples are the Lorelai Gilmore pregnancy test.” She had frowned and turned her attention to the woman beside her while he had tried to convince his heart to leave his throat. “Wait, have you done a real test? Cause, you know, apples aren’t always right…”

And she’d raised her eyebrows in a way that Luke really hadn’t wanted to think about.

“Went to the Doctor this morning.”

“All confirmed?”

“Yep. All confirmed.” She had turned her attention from Sookie’s excited features to stare at him expectantly, waiting for some kind of reaction. “I’m as pregnant as it gets.”

For all of thirty seconds or so, blind panic had washed over him.

The world around him had gone dark and fear had clutched at his throat and made it impossible for him to speak or move or think or do anything more than try to breathe.

But then his brain had kicked in and a little voice from somewhere had whispered, Hey, you already have a kid, and he had smiled.

***

He remembers, a few days after she told him - in her usual round-about-way - coming home to find Christopher standing in the driveway.

Luke had forced down the surge of jealousy that had washed over him when he’d first seen the other man.

He had forced himself to calmly get out of his truck, calmly close the door, calmly walk up to them and calmly say, “Hey.”

And then Christopher had held out a hand and said, “Congratulations on the baby.”

For as much as he had once hated the man, Luke hadn't been able to bring those feelings to the forefront of his mind.

He knew - without doubt - that it had been his own hatred towards what he had perceived as a threat that had ended his relationship with Lorelai.

In a way, he had felt sorry for Chris.

He knew what is was like to love and lose a Gilmore Girl and he didn’t envy the other man.

Lorelai had told him later that Chris had come to pick up something that G.G. had left behind all of those months ago.

He’d been OK with that.

***

He remembers thinking that while he was certainly not the quintessential gentleman, he may very well have been the modern-day representation of the quintessential cave man.

Watching her stomach swell with his child had given Luke a really strange feeling of male pride.

He had spent many, many hours looking at her expanding body and smugly thinking, I did that.

But, that manly pride aside, he hadn’t been prepared for the reality of a baby.

Right from the start, he had told her that he wasn’t good with babies.

He had told her that baby paraphernalia confused him and that a screaming infant made him scared that he’d broken it. He had told her that he’d never changed a diaper and he’d reminded her that, while he was quite happy to nurse Doula while she was placid and cute, the second she seemed to need anything more than holding, he handed her back to her parents.

April had come to him fully grown and he hadn’t met Rory until she was well past the age of spitting up and screaming about it.

Though he had jokingly told her that Rory was so smart she had probably cleaned herself up as a baby and Lorelai had simply rolled her eyes and said, “I wish.”

He didn’t know where it had come from, but his fear of Babies And All Things Related almost paralysed him at times.

Through the duration of her pregnancy - both the quickest and longest nine months of his life - Baby stores had officially became his own personal hell and he wasn’t even going to think about how small the baby had been on the sonogram.

He broke things that were that small and he had known enough to know that he couldn’t just go and get a replacement baby from Doose’s.

Though he had been unexplainably glad that they were having a child together, he hadn't been able to stop the mind-numbing fear from surfacing whenever he thought of any past experience he’d had with newborns - which, admittedly, were few and far between but still scary as hell - and added that to his general dislike of anything that spent it’s days eating, sleeping and shitting.

And Lorelai - wonderfully patient woman that she could be when the need arose - had simply smiled and told him that it would be different with their child.

***

He remembers thinking that she had to be the strongest woman he had ever known.

Though he had never taken any joy in her pain - particularly if it was a pain that he couldn't defend her from - Luke had been certain that seeing her bring their daughter into the world had probably been the most amazing thing he had ever seen in his life.

There had been a part of him that had wanted to make a disgusted face and run away when the Doctor had asked if he’d like to see the head crowning, but even in the moment he had known that the split-second view he'd had would be burned into his mind forever.

While he had looked between her legs at the pivotal moments, he had spent the majority of the delivery at the other end of Lorelai. He had been there for it all, holding her hand and letting her curse him - and his mother, his father, his uncle, his sister, his cousin twice removed and just about anything else she had been able to think of that was even remotely related to him - and rubbing a damp cloth on her forehead as instructed.

He had talked to her in a low voice; reminding her to breathe through the contractions, - “I am breathing damn you!” - continuously telling her how amazing she was - “I know I am amazing, but your credentials are looking really cheap right now, Buddy!” - offering her ice chips - "You know where you can shove them, don't you?" - while the nurses had looked on in nothing short of amusement.

Though the labour had seemed to go on for hours, the birth itself was over in minutes.

One second he had been hearing about the planned removal of key parts of his anatomy and the next he had been handed medical gloves and was being asked if he’d like to cut the cord.

He had, before the Doctors had taken the baby away to be weighed and checked while several nurses with some torturous looking instruments had set to work repairing the - relatively minimal - damage that the birth had done to Lorelai.

After they had been satisfied that she was OK, he had followed behind her bed as she had been wheeled back to a private room, where the baby was waiting.

When the attending nurse had asked if he’d like to hold his daughter, Luke had thought it possible that he might never feel that kind of awe again.

The nurse had smiled and, when she had been sure that he had the baby held safely, said that she would give them a few moments alone together.

“We need to name her.” He had said, looking down at the bundle wrapped tightly in the pink hospital blanket.

She had nodded her agreement. “Mmm... Lorelai.”

“Yeah... how about something else?”

“Lai for short.”

Though she had stopped swearing like a drunken sailor - on leave - she had clearly not been in complete control of her faculties.

Luke had leant down and kissed her forehead, mindful of the peaceful bundle in his arms. “We’ll have this conversation when the drugs wear off.”

***

He remembers that the baby had the ability to charm just about anyone - Emily and Richard Gilmore included, regardless of the fact that she was born out of wedlock - and Luke had planned to use her soft, dark, hair, 'new baby smell' and bright blue eyes to his advantage until it stopped being cute.

During the days that had followed the birth - while they had spent hours continuing their search for the right name - he had taken far too much pleasure in reminding Lorelai of her post-birth drug-induced stupor.

But she had taken just as much joy in watching him change a diaper - seriously, what the hell was in the milk they fed her that made it come out like that? - so they had called it even.

After he had taken the baby to the diner for a few hours, to give her a break, Lorelai had presented him with a harness that had strapped the baby to his chest and he remembers that he had quietly enjoyed the warm presence against him.

Problems and all, life with a newborn baby and April staying for the summer - with Rory coming home more often to see her little sister - had been about as close to perfect as he would ever likely get.

***

He likes to think that the peace he has right now - drifting somewhere between the waking world and the land of slumber - will last forever, but a shrill wail rings out again and forces him to move.

Forcing his body from the warmth of the bed and the woman that sighs in her sleep at the movement, he moves to the crib that sits under the bay window and lifts the fussing bundle out.

"Hey you." He holds the baby to his bare chest and tries to rock her back to sleep.

She lets out whimpers and almost-cries for almost fifteen minutes before she finally settles back into a fitful sleep.

“Sweet dreams.”

Luke thinks that, unless they had a child, anyone who says that they are tired is fair game and he is going to go for their blood.

Regardless of how hard he has worked since he was old enough to do it, Luke has never known what being tired truly feels like until this moment.

They are both forcing their lethargic bodies out of bed God only knows how many times a night with the screaming baby as she shouts her violent protests against reflux to the world.

Once he is sure that she is sleeping soundly and tucked securely beneath the blanket, Luke turns and moves back to the bed, slipping under the blankets in search of the dwindling warmth that he left.

A voice mutters from his side as Lorelai moves across the bed and presses herself against his side. "She OK?"

No matter how many times Luke says "I've got her, you sleep." in the middle of the night, she is always awake at the sound of her baby's heartfelt cries.

Pulling her into his arms, he nods. "She's asleep."

"Emma." She mutters sleepily. "We should call her Emma."

Luke thinks about it for a moment and imagines her tiny face in his mind.

Imagines calling the name in pride when she joins to baseball team. Imagines hugging her when she joins the math club. Whichever.

He imagines cursing it as she sneaks into the house at a ridiculous hour in sixteen years time, coming home from somewhere he doesn't want to know about but Lorelai probably already does.

Imagines it being called out as she graduates High School and Collage. Imagines it being said by a Priest as she stands at the alter with her partner of choice.

It surprises him that he thinks so far into the future.

He tells himself that he's never had to name another person before and careful consideration is only fair.

"Emma Gilmore is a good name." He finally says.

"Danes." Lorelai counters quickly. "Emma Danes."

Something - pride, joy, contentment, love - grips him and Luke finds himself unable to speak.

Nodding, he kisses the top of her head and inhales the fresh scent of her hair.

He remembers being with her the first - and second - time. He remembers losing her both times. He remembers her walking into the diner that day almost a year ago.

Into his arms, his bed, his heart.

He likes to think that there was never a time when they were apart.

And in moments like this - her in his arms while the baby, Emma, is sleeping soundly - Luke wonders if they ever really were.

***

End

Prompt Details:
Num: 9
Yes please: Girl: Bright blye eyes, dark hair.
Submitted by: cassievalentine