Disclaimer:  Not mine.

Archive Rights: Sure, just ask me first. 

Rating: PG.

Summary:   My good friend Bijal said, "I want you to write Lorelai/Luke fic." And I said, "Okay."

Category: UST 

Feedback: pleasepleaseplease 

Author's Notes: A post-ep ficlet for "The Fundamental Things Apply."

The first time Luke wakes up, dragged into conciousness by his own internal alarm clock, it’s dark and he’s beyond disoriented. He knows this isn’t his bed he’s stretched out on, knows it’s not a bed at all, but for a moment or two all other pertinent information lies beyond his reach.

And then he remembers. The genuine surprise in Lorelai’s eyes when she realized just how many movies he hasn’t seen. Her childlike enthusiasm when she watched him watch one of her favorites, to see if he loved the parts she loved. The way she smiled in delight when she opened the door in the first place, even before she’d seen the bags of food in his hands.

He’s on Lorelai’s couch, and it’s a soft couch, wide and inviting and utterly comfortable. He wonders, and just for a moment, how much more comfortable her bed would be. And he falls back asleep, warm beneath a blanket, thinking of how warm her bare skin would feel against his own.

The second time Luke wakes up, daylight has crept across the living room and he’s startled into a full-blown panic. His legs tangle in the blanket when he tries to leave the couch in search of a phone, and he nearly goes down but catches himself in time. Bleary-eyed and grasping, he gets his hand around the portable phone strewn among the mess on the coffee table, and dials a number from memory.

“This is Caesar, and I’m not home right now. Leave a message or try me at Luke’s. Peace.”

So he follows Caesar’s advice and his next call is to his own diner, and when the line is picked up, he falls back against the couch cushions in stark relief.

“Luke’s Diner. Caesar speaking.”

“Oh, thank God.” It’s all he can manage for a moment as he tries to control his breathing. The threat of Taylor Doose hunting him down eases away until he can form more words. “How did you -? When did -?”

“Luke, that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Listen, Caesar --”

“Got it covered, man. Lorelai called me, butt crack of dawn. Said you was sick. You sick?”

Luke doesn’t get sick -- Luke takes vitamins and washes his hands a few dozen times a day, serves up greasy, hearty fare he himself avoids at all costs. 

“Yes,” he says, glancing around at the Gilmore’s living room, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. 

Lorelai handled this, he thinks. Lorelai woke up in time to find Caesar’s number, Lorelai had the situation under control before six a.m. without coffee in her system? “Yes . . . I’m sick.”

And Caesar laughs, snickers really, and says, “You should stay in bed, then.”

“It’s not like that,” Luke grunts into the receiver. “And don’t tell people where I am, either. I don’t want people teasing Lorelai. I don’t want people walking right up to Rory, asking her a thousand questions.”

“So, when Taylor and Miss Patty came in for breakfast and asked where you were, you’re saying I shouldn’t have told them you’ve been at Lorelai’s all night?”

“Caesar, I swear to --”

More laughter and Luke realized he’d just been yanking his chain. “She said you was sick, I said you was sick. Alright?”

He could hear Kirk in the background, calling for Caesar, so he let him go. “I’ll be in later.”

“Don’t forget to cough, man.”

Luke hangs up, leaves the phone in the mess he found it. Works the blanket from the tangle of his legs and pulls it up into his lap. The soft, pink blanket smells like Rory, obviously taken directly from her bed, and he thinks it might just mean something, the fact that he can distinguish Rory’s scent from that of her mother’s.

Some time during the night, Lorelai had taken off his shoes, stripped him of his baseball cap. It was a testament to just how tired he was, how tired he always was, that she’d been able to wrestle him out of his top layer of flannel without him even waking. 

He was even missing his socks, and he remembered, suddenly, telling Lorelai how much he hated to sleep with his socks on. Rory had been in middle school, and Lorelai had been sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee, waiting for her. It would have been in the mid- to late-nineties that he’d told her that.

She won’t respect the few rules of his establishment, won’t listen to him if she’s not in the mood to take him seriously. She lives her life in stark contrast to the rather spartan way he lives his -- full of color and clutter. Half the time he’s sure that if he didn’t serve the best coffeee in the tri-state area, he’d have been dropped from her hectic life years ago.

And yet, his folded flannel shirt is lying over in the armchair with his hat on top, and there on the floor are his shoes. With his socks tucked neatly inside them.

A piercing shriek startles him out of his reverie, before he has a chance to wonder at the mysteries of Lorelai’s mind for the hundred thousandth time.

“Maury! MAURY! Lookit, c’mere! Luke’s car is still here! Thank God, I thought those two kids were never gonna do it! MAURY!”

end