15 minute fic

Title: Scientific Method
Fandom: Gilmore Girls
Rating: G

Word 132 for 15 minute ficlets

“I didn’t want a mess.” April explained softly, trying to hide her tears as she sat on the bridge looking at the water… looking at anything that wasn’t her father.

Luke shrugged as he dropped down next to her. The bridge was one of Jess’s favorite places to go when he needed to think. Maybe hanging out at this bridge was some sort of genetic link… He wasn’t sure if genetics worked that way. “I know.”

”I wanted to win the science fair.” She explained. It wasn’t the first time and it probably wouldn’t be the last. “It was just a project. Bands of lighter and darker lines. That’s all.”

Luke tried to hold in a bitter laugh. It was so neat with this girl. So clean. So scientific. “It doesn’t work that way.” Luke shrugged.

April turned to him and shook her head. “It does, really. I could show you. It is all there on the back page of my report.” She explained. “The graphs always go in the back and you refer to them as appendix items… which doesn’t make much sense to me because then your conclusion is like four pages from the end. So, if you turn to the back… in order to find out how every thing turns out… you really are stuck at appendix 5c. Appendix 5c isn’t sort of anticlimactic.

Luke tried not to smile as this little girl worked up a head of steam over a science report. But it didn’t escape his notice that this is what Lorelai would call a classic Luke rant. Only, it was an April rant. Maybe ranting was genetic. April would probably know.

“Its just…” She sighed losing the head of steam she’d worked up. “Its just an experiment. It’s the scientific method. You pose a hypothesis. You test a hypothesis. You come up with a conclusion. I hypothesized that I could tell which one of three men were my father using DNA testing. I tested. I proved that hypothesis. Then it’s over. You fold your tri-fold board up and put it in the closet and don’t even think about it again until you open up that closet the next year to store your next tri-fold board.”

Luke cleared his throat as he tried to decide how to explain this to her. “It’s not that simple.” He shrugged. Of the two of them she was probably the one who was better at explaining things. She probably got that from her mother.

”It is science.” She explained again, softly.

“Yeah, but its real life too.” He wished he had Lorelai’s gift for words. He wished he knew how to explain this. “In 5th grade we did this project about cause and effect… they called it something fancy… Newton’s law of science or something… but it was cause and effect. You built a project to show it… You know stuff like in that mouse trap game.”

April nodded. She wasn’t sure where Luke was going but she knew the mouse trap game and Newton’s third law of physics. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Luke nodded. “Yeah… so your scientific experiment… the DNA testing… that was an action. And having to deal with the mess that is your new family… that would be the equal and opposite reaction. It’s not messy, just science.”

April smiled. Science she could deal with.