Chapter Text
Luke’s parents had been soulmates. They’d been fiercely in love with each other, every second of every day, and it showed. In the way they led their lives, raised their kids, run their business, everything.
In a way, it even showed after Luke’s mom died. His dad was never the same after that.
It had made Luke angry, for a long time. People always talk about the benefits of finding your soulmate, besides just the romantic gooey part. Psychology studies have proven that two soulmates in love can feel each other’s emotions, even if they’re far away. Medical studies said that two soulmates in love can even heal physical injuries, making them less intense, speeding up the healing process. If you get a cut on your hand, your soulmate will wake up with a matching cut. Halves the damage, doubles recovery rate. This only happened with soulmates in love, of course. Soulmates who hadn’t met, or didn’t love each other, didn’t get any of these little bonuses.
Of course, Luke’s parents had loved each other to the core, but there was no recovery to speed when there was no recovery at all. Luke’s mom died from cancer when he was 10, and Dad survived for a decade longer. He still died too damn young. Luke wasn’t sure whether the sickness had claimed him in the end, or just a broken heart.
So, suffice to say, as a young man Luke wasn’t too enthusiastic about looking for the soulmate.
In the middle of his right bicep, in medium-sized black letters, read One Cup of Coffee, Please. The first thing his soulmate would ever say to him. It wasn’t the first thing Rachel ever said to him, that’s for sure, but she was a free spirit and wasn’t too keen on destiny controlling her life either, so they got on, for a while. Anna was the same way. However, the older he got, the more people were settling down, and the less options there were for casual dating.
He decided to open a diner.
Lorelai met Christopher when she was 12 years old. They were at a Memorial Day party thrown by Christopher’s parents, who had just moved to Hartford from Providence. Lorelai was just settling into her sarcastic, rebellious phase, and Chris was the only human even remotely close to her age. He was standing by the back window of the Hayden’s mansion, gazing longingly at the grass outside, and she came up behind him at said, “You look like a caged canary.”
He whipped around and gasped. “Oh my god,” he said, “it’s you!”
She frowned. “What’s me?”
He didn’t seem to pick up on her confusion, a grin breaking out across his face. “You’re pretty,” he declared, looking her up and down. “But we’re only twelve! You’re twelve, right? Isn’t this too early? I always thought you had to be a real-grown up for this.”
“For what?” Lorelai asked, still confused, and he seemed to slow down for the first time.
“Come on,” he said slowly, like she was an idiot. He untucked his button-down shirt from his pants, looked around from adults, and then lifted the shirt up so she could see the words printed on his skin, just left of his belly button. You Look Like a Caged Canary, it read solemnly.
“You’re my soulmate,” he said wistfully, and he was staring at her with big blue eyes and Lorelai felt like the air was being sucked out of her lungs.
“Well, that can’t be right,” she said. She unbuttoned the top of her cardigan and pulled at the top of the neckline of the shirt, so he could see her soulmate mark printed right over her heart. Mother would say it’s indecent, showing a boy most of her breast like that, but she made sure he could read the Sit Down, Shut Up, and Wait Your Turn, clearly printed there.
The boy looked pained. “Oh,” he said, wide-eyed, and re-tucked his pants. “I...do you think there’s a mistake?”
“I don’t think soulmate marks make mistakes,” she said, letting her collar snap back into place.
“But...it’s you. I know it’s you,” he said, and he circled around her, and finally announced, “I’m Christopher Hayden.”
“Lorelai Gilmore,” she declared back at him.
Chris and Lorelai never told their parents about that meeting. It was a their little secret, between the two of them, and despite the awkward guilty feeling in her gut, Chris was nothing but nice to her. He was more than nice - he concocted up plans with her, he complained about his parents, they broke into the wine cellar together, they snuck out after school - they were partners in crime, for years.
When Lorelai was fourteen, and Christopher had liberated his dad’s car and had illegally driven them out for fast food, and he bought her milkshakes and the awkward guilty feeling was threatening to bubble over, she kissed him.
He stood stock-still as soon as she did it, and she backed away, a little embarrassed. “I just wanted to see what it was like,” she muttered, looking down. The car was behind them and she was considering making a break for it, when a smile broke out over his face and he dropped both bags of chicken nuggets on the parking lot concrete.
“God, Lor,” he said, crossing the distance between them and cradling her head in his hands. “I knew you’d come around,” he said, and he kissed her again.
They dated, for a while. Chris was ecstatic, and Lorelai let herself be happy. After all, she was Chris’s soulmate, and he loved her for it. He loved her.
They dated, for a while, until Lorelai got pregnant, and they got into a fight. The fight.
Chris wanted to marry her. “Why not?” he asked, frustrated, ring thrown on the ground between them. “Maybe this was supposed to happen! Our parents approve, it’ll be good for the baby, and I don’t mind working at your dad’s firm, Lor. Everything will be ok-”
“We’re too young, Chris!” she interrupted. She could feel tears prickling behind her eyes, and she “We’re only sixteen! This isn’t a sign from the universe, it’s a sign of improper condom usage!”
“We’re not too young! Soulmates get married this young all the time!”
At this, Lorelai burst into tears. She was pregnant, and her hormones were out of control, and Chris wrapped her up in his arms and buried his head in her hair. She clutched at his sweater and sobbed into his shoulder, tears being soaked up by the expensive knit wool.
He let her cry for a minute. “I’m not your soulmate,” he said, finally, dully. “You’re mine, but I’m not...I’m not yours.”
“I’m so sorry,” she cried, sobbing even harder. “I think we just got mismatched, or something. I’m so sorry, Chris.”
“I’ve heard of this happening.” He swallowed. “To other people. I just never thought it would be me. You know?” He rubbed her back. “Are you sure we can’t try, Lor? I’ll do my best to make you happy, you know I will.” He voice cracked. “Please.”
She clutched at him tightly, and then pushed away. “You have no idea how much I wish…” her voice wobbled again. “How much I want to want you.”
He didn’t attempt to pull her back. “Are you going to keep the baby?”
“Of course I’m going to keep the baby,” she snapped.
He nodded, eyes distant. “Let me know how it goes,” he said, eyes distant. Lorelai saw him again once, the day she gave birth, and then not after that for a long time.
She ended up telling her parents. It was five months after Rory was born, and it was dinner and her Mom was harping at her that if only she had married Christopher when he asked, and she cracked.
“But he’s not the one, Mom!”
Her parents looked at her as if she was crazy, and Lorelai realized she couldn’t stay there, not with a bunch of people who thought propriety was was more important than love. She packed up her things and left with Rory the very next Monday.
The first time Luke heard his magic phrase, his heart stopped.
He was 23, and it was his second working as a waiter for Bud and Maisy at their restaurant, Sniffy’s. He asked some businesswoman what she wanted to order, and she said, “One cup of coffee, please,” and you could have knocked him over with a feather, because she must have been fifty years old, and not his type, and luckily she didn’t seem to pay him much attention as he stammered something and ran straight back into the kitchen.
“Bud,” he said, screeching to a halt right in front of his mentor, and panting, “There’s a woman - an old woman - and she said, and I ran- ” Bud didn’t seem to be understanding, so Luke raised the sleeve of his t-shirt and shoved his arm into Bud’s face. “See?” he asked desperately, his voice to a much higher octave. “She ordered coffee!”
Bud stared at his arm for a second and sighed. “Luke, son,” he said gruffly. “Did she react at all to you?”
Luke frowned. “No, not really.”
“And you want to open a diner?”
“Yes,” he answered, a little impatient.
“I hate to break it to you,” Bud said, “But hundreds of people’s first words to you will be ordering coffee.”
Luke wasn’t particularly looking for his soulmate, but the news still made his heart sink into the pit of his stomach. “What?” he questioned, rather dumbly.
Bud clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You can still find your soulmate. Loads of folks have really common phrases - you’ll just have to trust your lady friend to point it out to you. She’ll react when she hears your first words. Trust me, a big, handsome guy like you - she’ll react.”
Luke took a deep breath. “So the old lady out there - not my soulmate?” he asked.
Bud shook his head.
“Thank god!” Luke exclaimed, and Bud laughed.
Luke eventually opened his own diner, and it was a huge success. He had lots of business, a good mix of regulars and tourists exploring the town for its festivals, and Bud’s prophecy came true. Guys and girls, all ages, asked him for One Cup of Coffee, Please, and Luke got used to it. He heard the phrase so often it barely registered anymore.
There was a close call, once, the year he turned 30. It was an especially crowded spring day - there were a lot of people around for the summer solstice festival, or something stupid like that, and it was the height of his mid-morning rush and one particularly pushy woman leaned between two people sitting at the counter and said, “One cup of coffee, please,” and Luke, busy as he was, barked, “Sit down, shut up, and wait your turn,” and she just sort of froze for a second.
Luke glanced at her, and it looked a little like she was going to cry. “Aw, geez, m’am, I didn’t mean to snap at you, I’m just very busy right now. Do you want a table?”
She looked up at him. “I want a coffee,” she said flatly, and continued being very rude to him until she got it, and didn’t even leave a tip when she left.
Anyways, Lorelai was the closest of a reaction he’d ever gotten, but as he got to know her, he realized Lorelai wasn’t the type to keep things to herself. The way she chattered? She definitely would have told him.
Luke kept the horoscope around, though. He didn’t want to cheat on his future soulmate - whoever they were - but he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Lorelai was something special.
It was two weeks after Lorelai and Rory had moved into their new house, and Lorelai had dropped Rory off at school when she decided to celebrate her new financial responsibility by splurging on some non-Independence Inn coffee, for the first time in what felt like years. People in town always seemed to mention Luke’s diner positively, so she poked in there for the first time on a Monday in spring.
Apparently Luke’s was as good as people made it out to be, because business was booming. She fought her way through the line of people at the cash register and apologetically squeezed in between Andrew and one of his friends sitting at the counter, so she could get the attention at the guy with his back turned to her behind the counter. “Excuse me,” Lorelai said to Andrew, who smiled back at her, and then she said loudly, “One cup of coffee, please.”
“Sit down, shut up, and wait your turn,” the guy snarled, not turning around.
Lorelai froze. This was it, the moment she had been waiting for. He would turn around and they would be soulmates, and it would make every hardship worth it, the fights with Christopher and her parents, and running away, all of it. This was him! He was tall, and broad-shouldered, and when he turned around and made eye contact...there was no sign of recognition in his eye.
She frowned. This should be it, it should be just like when she were twelve with the Oh my god, it’s you, you’re my soulmate, and why was he frowning at her like that?
“Oh, geez, m’am,” he apologized. “I didn’t mean to snap at you, I’m just really busy right now.”
And all of the sudden it hit her, and it felt like she was falling into a black hole. She had been mismatched again. She wasn’t it for Christopher, and this guy wasn’t it for her. She found her soulmate. She wasn’t his soulmate.
He was looking really concerned how. “Do you want a table?” he asked.
She decided then, split-second, that she could never do to anyone what Christopher had done to her, however inadvertently. She wasn’t going to saddle anyone with that kind of guilt or expectation. She wasn’t even going to see this guy again, if she could help it. Pulling together whatever sort of mask she could muster, she made sure her face was blank and replied, “I want a coffee.”
“Just a few minutes,” he assured her, coming out from behind the counter, and god, he was so pretty, she wanted to cry from the unfairness of it. “There’s a table right there in the corner.”
“But there’s a large pot of the black elixir of life behind your counter,” she argued.
He sighed, and led the way over to the corner table. “Here or to go?”
“To go,” she said quickly, not sitting down, following him back behind the counter.
“I’ll be right with y- geez, what are you doing? You can’t follow me back here!”
“Give me the coffee!” she yelled, and she was being a little ridiculous, but her heart was broken, so what.
He got a stubborn gleam in his eye, and took her by the shoulders and manhandled her back to the corner table, pushing her into the seat. “Stay here and I’ll get it for you when I get to it,” he ordered, and reached behind him to grab something from a nearby self. “Here’s the paper to entertain you while I’m gone.”
“Wait,” she said, snatching his wrist to stop him as he turned away, but releasing it like she had been burned. “How can I call you back?”
He studied her. “I’m Luke, I own the place,” he said, gesturing to the sign outside.
“Duke?” she asked. He sighed and walked away.
After several minutes of him clearly avoiding giving her coffee, she stood back up again and marched to the counter. “Duke!” she shouted. He didn’t look at her, so she asked, “When’s your birthday?”
He looked up at that. “November 6th,” he said warily, and she slammed the newspaper on the counter and started scribbling with a pen she found in her purse. Satisfied, she tore the strip out and handed it to him.
He laughed at her caption under Scorpio. “Alright, alright,” he agreed, handing her a giant to-go cup. “That’ll be 95 cents.”
She all but threw her change at him, grabbed the coffee and left.
As she strolled back down the sidewalk towards home, she decided to call in sick to work that day. This was a big day in her life, and even if she didn’t ever tell anyone, it would always be the day she met the one. Loads of couples celebrated that.
She bitterly took a sip of Luke’s coffee, and damn if it wasn’t delicious.She took a second sip and picked up her pace home. This was a sick joke from the universe, she could tell. She hadn’t been there for Christopher, so she would get written off too. It would have been the perfect time to meet her soulmate. She was a real adult now, 27, and she had her own house, and the perfect kid, and a good job, and she was settled and ready to start a life with a partner, a real partner. Luke would have been perfect too, she could tell. She didn’t know much, except that he was tall and gorgeous and owned his own successful business and made the world’s best coffee-
Lorelai reached home and settled herself down for her longest wallowing session of all time.