[karana]

Chapter 1

It was nearly dark in the room, just like outside. It was raining. It was silent in the room. Her room.
There were two pictures in frames standing on her bedside table. Both frames were light pink. The only color in the room so it seemed.
One of Rory and one of Luke. The table was white and grey and had wheels, like the other thousands in this building.
The bed was white and grey and had wheels, like the other thousands in this building.
The walls were white. Only white.
But her skin was grey. More black around her eyes, but grey in general. Sometimes more white, but today it was grey.
She hadn´t seen them in months, hadn´t spoken to them in months. But it was better this way. Better for them. Not for her. But it wasn´t the only thing that was killing her, so she told herself it didn´t really matter.
The last time she had seen them should have been the happiest day of her life. Of their life. Their life together.
“Mom, are you ready? Everyone is here! They are all waiting for you!” Rory was shouting. “Yes, I am! Come in!” she shouted back, screaming louder than the voice in her head that kept telling her “You can´t do this!”.
When Rory entered the room she looked stunned at her mother. She had seen the perfect dress many times before, but never on her mother. The cream white skirt and the flowers on the camisole. She had decided against the veil and wore a tiara instead.
And it really was perfect. Not only the dress. Everything. It was a beautiful day in September, it was warm but not hot. The whole town was outside in the garden of the Dragonfly waiting for the bride. Emily sat next to Mia in the front row while Richard was waiting in front of the door to walk his only daughter down the isle. He was chatting with April who was, like Rory, one of the bridesmaids about books and science. Luke was waiting under the chuppah, Jess trying to calm him in the function of the best man. Everything was perfect, maybe too perfect.
“Wow, you´re so beautiful!” Rory said and hugged her mother.
“Thank you!” Lorelai forced a smile and ignored the voice in her head once more.
“You´re ready?” Rory asked again, her mothers hands still in her own. “You can´t do this to him” the voice in Lorelai´s head said again. She hesitated a moment. Then she reassured herself: She couldn´t tell her daughter either.
“Yeah, let´s go!”she said then and they walked out of the room she had used to get ready. Leaving her normal clothes, her purse and shoes behind. Her old life.
She felt blinded by the sunlight outside and blinked before she could make out her father and April.
“Lorelai” Richard smiled warmly and took her arm. He squeezed it, but didn´t get any reaction from her. Maybe she was just too nervous.
The music started and together they walked down the isle, towards the man she loved, but she couldn´t look at him. She focused on the way, careful not to trip. She heard gasps and whispers, even some sniffles, but couldn´t concentrate on them. The voice in her head was getting louder and louder.
Then she stood next to him. Her father kissed her cheek and gave her hand to her fiancé, who laced his fingers through hers. The priest started his speech, but she wasn´t paying attention.
This should be the happiest day of her life and she had been waiting forever for it to arrive.
First because Rory had been crazy and dropped out of Yale, then because of the whole April thing. Nearly it would have been their end, when they had stopped to talk to each other. But they had re-learned it and now here they were.
She wanted nothing more then to marry him, to be his wife until the end of time.
“You cant do that to him” the voice said again.
Since she had got the call yesterday, right before her bachlorette-party, this voice was in her head, telling her the same thing over and over.
It had been a scare, nothing more, but now it was reality and after the call she had thrown up, because of the shock. She had wanted to run to him and tell him. Make him reassure her that everything would be fine. But when he had walked through the door, kissing her and wishing her a nice evening she just couldn´t. She couldn´t tell him, she couldn´t do this to him. It would kill him, just like it would kill her and she wouldn´t be able to forgive herself.
“I do” she heard him say and suddenly realized that it was her turn now. She saw that the priest opened and closed his mouth,without hearing him, then looked at her expectantly. She looked at him, then turned and looked at Luke for the first time.
He wore his black tux. He was shaven. He wore a white dress-shirt. No cap. He had a new hair-cut. Very short. He looked so amazing. Perfect. And he was smiling. At her, just for her. Her eyes teared up and she crasped his hand so tight it must hurt him. But his smile got wider and he whispered “I love you”. That´s when she knew for sure. She couldn´t do that to him.
“No!” she whispered back, his smile froze. A tear left her eye and she said it again, louder this time.
“No! No! No!” her voice cracked and she shook her head along with the words she wasn´t able to say anymore and the tears which were streaming down her face.
She saw Luke´s eyes open wide in shock, the smile leaving his face, like the color. That´s when she pulled her hand away, took one last look at him and then she ran. She ran through the garden and the hotel, out the door and to her car. When she pulled out of the driveway she heard Rory calling her, but she couldn´t look back, because she knew then she wouldn´t do it. But she had to. It was for their own good.
She drove to the airport and was glad that she had some clean clothes left in the car. She hadn´t planed this and she had no idea where to go she just knew that she had to get away as far as possible, so they wouldn´t find her. That´s how she ended up in San Fransisco, on the other side of the continent half a year ago.
She couldn´t get the look on his face out of her head when she had said “No”. And Rory´s voice calling her. She felt the desperate need to seen them and talk to them again, but she knew she couldn´t give in. She focused on Luke´s smiling face in the frame.
Maybe he was able to smile again like that. Maybe now, maybe some time in the future. But he would smile again and then he would find a new woman.
“You kept this in your wallet? You kept this in your wallet!”
“Eight years!”
“Eight years!”
And she knew he wouldn´t. But she needed the fantasy that he would and so she kept talking herself into believing it. At least during the day. At night when she would cry her eyes out once more and call his name over and over, she knew it wasn´t true.



Chapter 2
Wake me up inside,wake me up inside
It was 2 am and he lay awake in bed. He couldn´t remember the last time he had slept a whole night through. At least not without alcohol. He didn´t drink that often, just sometimes. It helped him to forget. At least for a few hours.
Forget how beautiful she had been walking down the aisle in her perfect dress. Forget the tears in her eyes when he had waited for her answer. Forget that she had said no. Forget that she had run away and left him.
It had been eight months and it didn´t hurt any less. He wondered if he would be able to move on. Sometime in the future. The point was that he didn´t want to move on. He wanted her. Only her. He had for the last eleven years.
“Is it really happening?”
“It is really happening!”
He hadn´t seen her since then, not a glimpse, nothing.
They had found her car a week later at the airport. Empty. Only her wedding dress had been in it. Her credit card bill had showed them that she had booked a flight to LA. Rory and Richard had gone there a month after the wedding and searched for her, but without a result. But he thought it had been stupid to think that they would find her there, in a city with so many people. And he knew Lorelai. If she didn´t want them to find her, they wouldn´t find her.
What worried him the most was the fact that she not only had said no to him, but hadn’t had any contact with anyone since then. Not her parents, not Sookie or Rory.
Michel was doing her job at the Inn, while they had hired someone new for the counter.
Rory wasn´t the same anymore. She didn´t understand the world anymore. Her mother left her without an explanation.
Emily and Richard were just as desperate. They had lost their daughter for the second time in their life and it was hard for them to act like it meant nothing. To keep the illusion for their friends.
It was still nothing compared to the state Rory was in. She was just as numb as he himself was.
She came to Luke´s several times a week and they talked. About everything, but not about her. They would only talk about her when one of them couldn´t bear it anymore or something happened.
Like when Rory had got her letter only saying how much she loved her and she shouldn´t worry.
Like when she had sent Luke a letter, telling him how much she loved him and always will and that she needed to keep the ring. She did not say why.
That had been weeks after her disappearance and they had been relieved that she was at least alive.
But when she did not come back and there wasn´t anymore news from her they both knew that something was terribly wrong.
A week ago had been the last time he had heard something from her. At least he thought so.
In the middle of the night the telephone had rung and when he answered it, it had been silent. At first he had thought it was a joke and wanted to hang up, but then he had the feeling that it wasn´t.
“Lorelai?” he asked and thought that he heard a gasp.
“Lorelai is that you?” Silence
“Lorelai, please. If it is you please say something!” Nothing
“I just want to know that you are okay. That you are safe and healthy. I´m worried sick about you and so is Rory” he heard a sniffling sound and he knew it was her. He knew that he would get to her with Rory.
“I love you so much and I just want you to come back!” The line went dead, she had hung up.
He stood up and walked downstairs. He was still living in her house. In their house. Now his house. It was killing him, but he couldn´t help himself. He couldn´t go back to his apartment, because it would make it final that she wasn´t coming back.
He still hoped that one day he would come home and she would sit in the living room and tell him how sorry she was. Or he would find her asleep in the bedroom, so he could run his hands through her hair again.
That he couldn´t do it anymore was hard for him. That he couldn´t see and talk to her was torture and the fact that she wasn´t in his life anymore was killing him slowly and painfully.
Until her first letter had arrived he had convinced himself that they were over, that he could never forgive her and what she had done. But when the letter came and she wrote that she loved him, it sounded honest, even if they were just words on a white paper.
And the fact that Rory knew nothing either had helped also. Helped him to forgive her.
Now after more than half a year, he sometimes wished he wouldn´t have done it, because then he wouldn´t miss her this painfully.He really wanted to hate her. Needed to even, but wasn´t succeeding.
He hadn´t cried. He had soothed Rory and Sookie several times, one time even Emily, but he hadn´t cried. He couldn´t. It had been the same situation when his father had died. But he didn´t want to compare the situations, because she wasn´t dead and she would be back in his life at one point or the other. Someday he would see her again. He needed to. Because without her he couldn´t live.
But he couldn´t die either. He was just numb.
“Lorelai, where are you?” he asked the dark living-room and all he got was a sigh from Paul Anka, who lay on the couch on one of Lorelai´s shirts. He refused to give away the shirt. But Luke understood him. He sometimes opened her shampoo or her perfume just so that he would have her scent for some seconds. Or play the message on the answering machine just to hear her voice.
“Ah, Luke, come on! Now that you are living here we need a new text on Frida or she will get angry!”
“Who the hell is Frida?”
“The answering-machine, duh!”
“An answering-machine can´t get angry!”
“You don´t know Frida, so it’s better not to risk anything! Come on tell me what to say!”
“Why can´t you just say: This is Lorelai Gilmore and Luke Danes’ house. We are not at home so please leave a message after the beep?”
“See, was that so hard? People you heard what the master said!” she laughed
“You recorded that?”
“I still am!” she giggled
“Give me that! Lorelai! Give me that damn tape!” Luke shouted
Beep
When he looked on the clock he saw that it was half past three. He had spent one and a half hours staring into the dark. But he wasn´t wondering or thinking about it anymore. Since she was gone this was normal. But he had to open the diner, so he walked back upstairs to at least lay down for one more hour.
When he opened the bedroom door, he closed his eyes and he could see her lying in bed, asleep, waiting for him so she could snuggle up next to him. But when he opened them he found the bed empty. She was still gone.



Chapter 3Call my name and save me from the dark
“Good morning Miss Gilmore! Are you ready for the big day?” the nurse asked when she entered Lorelai’s room. But she got no response. Lorelai was staring out the window beside her bed with the same blank look, she had done it the past few months she had spent in this room. She couldn’t exactly see what was outside because the plastic tent around her bed made her vision blurry.
“Miss Gilmore, are you awake?” the nurse asked concerned, and walked to the opening in the tent. Lorelai didn’t even look at her. In general, she gave her at least a grunt or a sigh in response.
She had never had a patient who had been so heart-broken and lonely like this woman. She never had visitors or got calls; although, unlike many older patients, she seemed to have a family. The pictures on her bedside-table proved that. She had never asked who the persons were, but because she cried herself to sleep looking at said pictures she figured Lorelai must love them a lot.
One of her colleagues had asked her once if those two were dead. It had ended with Lorelai screaming at her that her Rory was not dead. They had needed to give her something to calm her, otherwise it would have caused problems so shortly after the operation.
“Good morning Miss Gilmore!” the doctor greeted when he entered the room. He wore one of those special dresses so he could enter her tent. “Everything looks good we can give you the bone marrow today. Thank god we found a donor. You’re really lucky, you know. I will put this on your IV and then you have to do the rest of the work, okay?” he tried to get a reaction, but wasn’t lucky either. With his rubber glove covered hand, he stroked over her cheek, which caused her to flinch like it caused her pain. He knew it didn’t.
He did what he had to do, then left the tent and signalled the nurse to come with him.
“I just talked to the psychologist and he said that he is sure now, she resigned.”
“That’s what we already told you”
“But it is so important at this phase that she wants to live. When she doesn’t want to, we can’t do anything. It’s completely up to her now.”
“We tried everything, but without success. When she first came here she was so hopeful, but now she is just depressive and sad.”
“Has she said anything about somebody we could call?” the doctor asked.
“No, she is not answering any questions concerning her family. One of the persons’ names on the pictures must be ‘Rory’ though, that’s what she screamed, when she was upset about Eva a while ago, right after her operation.”
“We have to do something. She is too young to die like that. Try and see if you can find out anything. Maybe from the insurance. I will try and find out which colleague was her doctor maybe that will give us some clue as to where she comes from at least.”
“I will try, but I can’t promise anything” the nurse said and looked at Lorelai, who was still in the same position, with the last infusion of the donor’s blood running into her veins.
“Miss Gilmore, the plan looks like this: We need to operate on you as soon as possible before the tumor starts spreading. It sits in the left part of your lung and we have to cut it out. The chemo-therapy and the radiation reduced its size, but it didn’t destroy it. We can not wait any longer. Afterwards we can hope that we cut out everything. But to be sure you will get some more chemotherapy and then we maybe will need to find a donor to re-install your immune-system. Do you have anymore questions?”
“You told me all that a thousand times already. Why should I have more questions?”
“Maybe something you forgot to ask”

“No, I don’t care. Just start so that everything will be over soon” she said and the doctor knew by the look in her eyes that she wasn’t talking about her time in the hospital.
It was around noon when the last drop of the donor’s blood had entered her body. She should be hopeful, that her body would accept it and start to produce antibodies of her own again, but she didn’t care.
Since the day she had last looked into a mirror, she didn’t care anymore.
When she had arrived in San Francisco after a week in LA and had been in the hospital for the first few days she had had the hope that once this was over she could go back home and explain to them what had happened. Luke would forgive her, Rory would be more than happy and everything would be perfect again. But the longer all the therapies took, the smaller her hope became.
And then she had taken a look into the mirror after the operation and after the start of the new chemotherapy. She was so thin, really skinny. Her skin was pale, transparent and grey-ish. Her eyes had lost every sparkle. Her cheek-bones were more prominent than ever. And her hair, her long brown, beautiful curls were completely gone. She didn’t even have eyebrows anymore. Not one single hair. She knew that she once had been beautiful, but that was gone. She was nothing more than the shadow of her former self and she had needed some time to recognize and understand that it was really her who looked back at her from the mirror.
How could she do that to Rory and Luke? How could she make them look at her, when she looked like this? She had decided then, that they should remember her the way she had been and the way she had looked. She had decided she would never go back. And if she would never go back, why should she live? For what? And for whom?

TBC