[fic] just trying to get the good (2/2), ben/april, nc-17, 15000 words
Title: Just Trying to Get the Good (Part 2/2)
Author: allthingsholy
Pairing: Ben/April (Parks & Rec)
Rating: R? NC-17? Let's say NC-17.
Words: ~15000 total; ~6500 this part.
Notes: Thanks so much to cypanache for looking over all of this one, two, three times and helping me work out some plot and characterization kinks. Thanks to ishie for the once-over and slybrunette for being the best cheerleader ever. Cross-posted to geegollythanks, a Ben/April shipping community that everyone should check out because these two are awesome. Title from "The Future's Nothing New" by The Alternate Routes.
----
After The Bulge, Ben decides to try harder to be a normal person, a functioning member of society, something other than a waste-of-space asshole. For every step Ben tries to take forward, April’s determined to take two steps back.
He wakes up in the morning and actually makes breakfast, scrambles eggs and fries bacon. He steers clear of waffles, sure, but give a guy some credit for trying.
Even though he makes enough for two, April stands at the counter and picks at a pop-tart. She throws her crusts at him and even though he’s somehow shaking crumbs out from under the flap of his collar in his mid-morning meeting, he doesn’t relent.
He turns off the tv and reads a book instead. April plugs her iPod into the speakers and cranks club music until he’s rocking a truly impressive headache.
“Jesus, Ben, this isn’t a library.” She’s got her hands on her hips and what he’s come to realize is the April version of a pout on her face. “‘Man vs. Food’ is on. Let’s go.”
Ben doesn’t look up from his book, like if he avoids eye-contact then winning this battle is just within his reach. “Why don’t you do something other than watch tv tonight? Don’t you have homework?”
“It’s July, asshole.”
The sex does not get more tender. Even if Ben tried, April has more tricks up her sleeve than any 22-year-old has a right to know. They have sex on the floor in the hallway, one night in the backseat of his car while it’s still parked in the garage. There’s a particularly memorable encounter after April brings home a “Vote Knope!” yard sign, proving that Ben’s new life-attitude only extends so far. Ben shoves the sign behind a cabinet, next to an old Slip ‘N Slide and a dusty lawn dart set.
So. Baby steps.
--
Tom throws an Entertainment 720 party at the Snakehole. They’re promoting Dennis Feinstein’s new fragrance (and how he got away with the licensing for a perfume named “Sluts” is something Ben will never understand) and Tom’s convinced it’s a total coup, that it’s the thing that’s going to break them, send them into the multimedia conglomerate stratosphere. Those are the exact words he uses. The whole thing’s ridiculous.
Ben begs out early, has one beer and then sneaks out the front door. He doesn’t tell April he’s leaving.
He gets a text a half hour later. “Hey asshole, where are you?”
He’s well into his nightly routine now, sweatpants-ed and Food Network-ed, and he texts her back: “Home. Headache. Have fun.” And maybe he left because he’s 36 and the Snakehole is for twenty-somethings, because April is a 20-something and should be out there having fun and living her life, not sitting at home feeling sorry for herself all the time. And it’s not that she’s not old enough to make her own decisions (god knows April Ludgate is perfectly capable of making up her own mind, and he’s got a hickey just above his collarbone to prove it) but still.
He gets a text back not two minutes later. “Fucker. Come back and get me.”
He waits almost ten minutes before he answers her and he spends that whole time thinking about the lights in her hair that night at the Bulge. “Can’t. Private time with Nigella. Sock’s on the door.”
She doesn’t text him again, but he hears her come in sometime after midnight (Donna was there to drive everyone home again) and he’s not sure, but she might be humming. He hopes she danced.
--
Eventually Ben pushes it one step too far. (Truth be told, it’s probably, like, 30 steps too far, but he’s working with limited knowledge.) He finds the marshmallow gun under the sofa one afternoon while April’s at her parents’ house for some birthday party and he’s waiting on the couch when she gets back. Andy used to drag her into the living room on Saturday mornings to make blanket forts, and whatever new found energy Ben’s got, it doesn’t include blanket forts.
April comes in and shrugs her bag off her shoulder, walks toward the couch and then sees him. Everything in her face goes entirely still and her voice is oddly low when she asks, “What are you doing?”
Ben holds up the gun. There’s a bag of mini-marshmallows on the cushion next to him and he makes a truly awkward attempt at a smile. “I found this.”
April walks toward him and takes the gun from his hand. She’s really calm about it, so calm it’s almost creepy, and Ben watches her as she walks down the hallway and throws the gun in her room.
When she comes back, there’s something off about her face and Ben realizes that for as much time as he’s spent with April (on the couch, at work, inside her, whatever) there are whole parts of her he’s never gotten at. She stops a few feet from the couch.
“What are you doing?”
This is some sort of trap. He can’t see exactly how, but this is not going to go well. “I told you. I found it. It was under-”
But April shakes her head at him. “That’s not what I mean. These past few weeks, you’ve been, I don’t know.” Her hands are just hanging there at her sides, and god. She’s so young. “I don’t need your help.” Her voice cracks. Jesus, what the hell did he step in?
“We both need something.” That much is pretty fucking obvious. April's more tense than he’s ever seen her.
She bites off her words and her hands are balled into fists. “And what, you think you’re the something I need?”
Woah. Not the point. “I never said that.”
“But you think that if I’m all better then suddenly you’re all better? You can’t even put up a fucking yard sign.” April’s voice is a lot more flippant than she probably feels given the fact that she looks about ready to burst into tears.
And that isn’t what he’s been doing. Is that what he’s been doing? Using April as a pathetic proxy so he can pretend he has his shit together? He starts toward the garage. “You want me to put up the yard sign? Fine.”
But April’s in his way and she doesn’t budge an inch. “I want you to stop treating me like solving all my problems somehow solves all of yours.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.” And so what if it is? At least he's trying, or trying to try. Whatever. Fuck.
“Bullshit. Why do you even have to mess with things?”
And Ben doesn’t care that it’s almost certainly misdirected anger because they’ve spent so long just simmering in their own juices, stewing in each others’ misery, that the explosion feels fucking great and finally raising his voice is the best he’s felt in weeks. “Because we’re both miserable." He’s just so fucking angry all of a sudden, and it’s the first time he hasn’t tried to stifle it with a clipped smile or inappropriate sex. "Jesus, April, isn’t not giving a shit just fucking exhausting?”
April huffs out a breath and shakes her head and he can see her get a handle on whatever made her so unhinged, reign back in whatever had her so close to actually being vulnerable. She spins on her heel and heads to her room and whatever tenuous thing they had going, it's snapped right the fuck in two.
Ice Clown Gets Kicked While Down.
Great.
--
They don’t speak to each other for a week. At work, she calls him Mr. Wyatt.
Probably just to spite him, April throw herself into Leslie’s campaign. Elections are in October, so they have two months to get her name out there, make the community aware of the fact that she’s more than just “Park Lady” now. It’s part of the reason Leslie’s so stressed out about Harvest Festival, like, if it tanks right before the election then she’s got absolutely no chance. And it’s not that Leslie tries to put more pressure on everybody else but she can do 200 things at once and expects that much of everyone else too. It’s more than a little wearing.
April takes to it like a fiend. Spends more time at Leslie’s house doing campaign things, more time canvassing and dragging people to events. And even though Ben’s 99% sure she started out doing it just to fuck with him (he’s come home to “Vote Knope!” pamphlets so many times in the past week he’s lost count, and the pile of signs behind the cabinet in the garage is getting pretty impressive), he can tell she likes it. And maybe that has something to do with him, with what he said to her, because it’s obvious that she does care, not just about Leslie winning, but about Leslie.
Ben does not miss the irony in the fact that all his honest effort got him nowhere and getting her mad enough to scream at him seems to have done the fucking trick.
If any of what he said got to April, it’s no doubt that he took her words to heart. After a dozen failed attempts at being a contributing member of society, Ben has to admit what a sham it was before, how focused he was on making April feel better instead of actually focusing on his own problems. As if making breakfast and trying to get April out of the house didn’t just mean he had a lot of time on his hands to be the same cranky bastard as before.
He tries going out with Tom but spends most of the night pissed at the fact that if April were with him, she could help him decide whether or not Tom’s wearing a woman’s blazer and when he gets home that night, he can’t help but check for a sliver of light from under April’s bedroom door.
And maybe checking up on April is falling right back into old patterns, but still. Baby steps.
--
He comes back late from work one night and April’s sitting on the couch with her laptop cycling through a bunch of songs. She doesn’t really look at him when he comes in. She’s been doing that for a week, not really talking to him, being ambivalently hostile. He’s been working his way through a Pamela Dean cookbook (and telling himself it counts as making an effort) while she sits at the table and throws her wadded up McDonald’s wrappers at his back. It’s super fucking awesome.
Some Beyonce song (it’s probably Beyonce, it’s maybe Rihanna, he’s a full grown man, he isn’t supposed to know these things) is blaring from her laptop and Ben’s halfway to his room when April says, “I’m picking a new campaign song for Leslie, want to help?”
Two months ago she wouldn’t let him look at the campaign posters without a heaping serving of pity on the side. Now she’s shoving it in his face and loving it. Her mouth’s twisted into this half-formed smile and it’s so fucking ugly, so fucking wrong, that Ben turns around and sits down on the couch right next to her. “We should look for something to appeal to the youth vote, I think.” He leans over and clicks on a song, something peppy and fast that he’s never heard before and bops his head along with the beat. “What about this one?”
April changes it to another, and then another, and they go back and forth like that. Ben snaps his fingers, says things like, “This one doesn’t quite capture Leslie’s pep.” Or “I think ‘Let me see them Hanes’ is just Leslie’s message in a nutshell.”
And then April scrolls down and clicks and it’s “Whoomp! There It Is.” She’s not smiling anymore. She’s looking at him like it’s painful, all wide eyes and pursed lips, and he knows she knows exactly what she’s doing, that she googled him back during all that Crazy Ira bullshit and some things just stuck, because she’s April and that’s just how she is.
He wants to say something biting to one-up her, maybe lean over and play a Mouse Rat song, but instead he just taps the space bar and the room’s really quiet all of a sudden.
Of all the things Ben tried to pull April out of her funk, genuine honesty was never one of them and no, he’s not yelling this time, but the truth is still probably his best bet. His tongue sticks in his throat a little bit when he tries to talk. “You know, I spent 18 years running away from the worst thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t go back to Partridge for a decade after I went away to school.” April doesn’t pull her laptop away or anything, doesn’t give him the finger and run away to her room, so he keeps talking. “It’s just a shit-ton of wasted time, after awhile.”
For them, it’s almost sentimental. When he looks over, April’s looking at him-actually looking at him-and it’s a whole lot more intimate than the month and a half he spent fucking her. She’s so fucking full of promise it’s unbearable and the feeling that comes to life in Ben’s chest feels a lot less like sympathy than affection. He leans over and taps the space bar but when he gets up off the couch and goes toward his room, April pauses the music again. “Do you think you loved her?”
April’s voice is tiny and genuine and when he looks back at her, she’s as vulnerable as she was the night they fought. There’s no heat now though, just genuine curiosity and something that looks an awful lot like guilt.
Ben turns around and slides his hands into his pockets. He doesn’t let himself think about it too often because it’s literally the most depressing thing in the world to think about, whether or not he loves Leslie when they’re not even together anymore. Sometimes he thinks yes, sometimes he thinks no. Sometimes he think he fell in love with a lot of things, Pawnee and his job and the way the town made him feel, but when he looks at all of that hard enough it’s really just Leslie all over again. So he just shrugs a shoulder and says, “I don’t know. I definitely don’t love feeling like this all the time.”
It may not be profound but it at least has the benefit of being true.
--
They have a sort of truce after that. Ben stops pushing so hard and April stops fighting and they’re just kind of doing it, just being real people. April even comes into the kitchen to “help out” with the cooking, which mostly consists of stealing bits of carrot off the cutting board and calling him Benjy Crocker. She sits on the counter and tells him all about the new porn series she’s thought of, Ben and Nigella and all sorts of world cuisine and sexual positions he’s pretty sure are physically impossible. And when Ben leans over and lobs the ladle at her, cocks an eyebrow and winks, April huffs out a laugh that’s the best thing Ben’s heard in a long fucking time.
He wakes up one Sunday morning and April’s sprawled out on the sofa watching tv. He makes a cup of coffee, a few pieces of toast, and when he takes them into the living room, April doesn’t look at him but she does slide her feet off the cushion on his side of the couch. They sit and watch some nature program about gorillas and Ben reaches out and slides a hand around her ankle, dips his thumb into the hollow around her tendon. They haven’t fooled around since they stopped being dicks to each other and his hand on her leg isn’t entirely sexual, but he can’t help but feel super aware of her next to him, extra conscious of how much this is like the first time they fucked. Or maybe it’s not so much like that at all anymore. Things are by no means perfect but it all feels a little less dire. Going to work in the morning isn’t quite so hard. Walking into the Parks Department for meetings doesn’t make him want to die. And Ben thinks if Ron asked how April was doing now, telling him she’s fine wouldn’t be as much of a stretch.
--
There’s another Harvest Festival meeting. They’re in the Parks Department conference room and Jerry and Leslie are trying to nail down the placement of all the food vendors. (Jerry got put in charge of food under the strict understanding that he was not actually to eat any of it until he was very much off-duty, lest they have another incident.)
Leslie’s noticeably distracted. She keeps interrupting mid-sentence to ask about something they just got done talking about, and when she tells them all to take a five-minute break, Ben stays behind in the room. Maybe he’s growing. Maybe he’s faking it, but even the effort feels like a step in the right direction.
Leslie’s at the head of the table totally engrossed in a spreadsheet. Ben taps his pen against his notepad. “Everything okay?”
Leslie looks up like she didn’t even know he was there and given how distracted she’s been, maybe she didn’t. She opens and closes her mouth a few times, and maybe it’s a little less painful to look at her than it was yesterday? It’s hard to keep track.
“Oh,” Leslie says. She puts the spreadsheet down and nods to herself a few times. “Yeah, everything’s fine.” Her smile’s fake. Even if he hadn’t dated her for three months, even if he wasn’t probably still totally crazy about her, he’d be able to tell so he just kind of cocks his head and waits for her to say something.
Finally Leslie breathes out, this great big sigh that shakes her shoulders, and he can see her hesitate a long time before she says, “It’s the campaign.”
Ah. He must have some sort of visible reaction because Leslie’s immediately backtracking. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-I didn’t mean-”
But Ben holds up a hand. “It’s fine.” And it is, it totally is, except for how it makes him feel like there’s a vice around his chest, this thing that came between them, this thing that ruined everything, and really it’s the last fucking thing he wants to talk about, and yet. “What’s wrong?”
Leslie shakes her head. “Nothing in particular, just.” She bites her lip and god, he used to love when she did that. “It’s just a lot to deal with, you know?”
“Yeah, I do.” And he does. So he asks what’s going on and listens while she tells him about the long hours and the stress, how it’s everything and nothing like she thought it would be. By the time Jerry and Donna get back, some of the air has come back in the room and it’s actually not so awful. Maybe he really is growing.
Leslie starts talking about cotton candy stands and he looks out past her shoulder to where April’s sitting at her desk. Maybe his mind’s playing tricks on him, but he could almost swear she smiles at him.
--
It's a Saturday and Ben leaves the house, actually goes out and runs errands and buys groceries. Late August is basically awful. Summer is the only time he really misses Nebraska, when the river makes the city a hot, humid mess.
April apparently doesn't share his distaste because when he gets back to the house, she's sitting in the backyard, feet propped up on a lawn chair and a bottle of tequila on the table next to her. Ben puts away the bags of things he brought back and then slides opens the back door. "What are you doing?"
"Knitting a sweater." April doesn't look at him. She's got her head tipped all the way back and her hair twisted up. She looks peaceful but that's probably more due to the alcohol. He can't tell how much she's been drinking but her words aren't slurred or anything so it's probably not too much. Yet.
He steps outside and shuts the door, crosses to the table but keeps to the shade. They got the lawn set at Goodwill for a steal, so it's battered and beat to shit but April looks comfortable enough. He pulls out one of the chairs and sits down. "What are you drinking?"
She slides the shot glass across the table, then nudges a bottle of lemon juice toward him. "Drink up."
"What the hell is this?" He has never seen anyone drink this before. And he went to college, where basically the only liquid that was off-limits was lighter fuel.
April seems unfazed. "It's a legitimate shot in Venezuela."
"It's a really sad margarita."
"Whatever." April rolls her neck and her head lolls toward him. There's a line of sweat under her ear that’s working down toward her collarbone and Ben's suddenly very aware of the fact that they haven't had sex in awhile. And he's in the middle of imaging a host of different things (the backyard's pretty shaded, their neighbors are cool enough, no one else is outside in this fucking heat anyway) when April says, "I saw Andy today."
Oh. So that explains that.
The sum total of what April has said about her relationship with Andy since they split is about the same as what she's said to him about her favorite shades of nail polish. (For the record, black and probably purple, going by the most frequently used. Not that he's kept track or anything.) And it's not like April really does feelings (though at this point, he's come to realize that that's more than a little debatable) so he's sure as shit not going to ask. For want of a better option, he leans over for the shot glass and downs it in one and Jesus fuck, it burns like heartbreak.
"That's fucking awful." God, his eyes are watering.
April rolls her eyes. "Pussy."
It takes four more shots between them before she brings up Andy again. She was canvassing at an apartment complex across town and he answered the door. April doesn't seem worked up about it, which is almost definitely worse than if she were in hysterics.
There's a small part of him that wants to look at this as payback, wants to remind her how long she spent throwing Leslie in his face and there's a stack of yard signs in the garage that makes a damn convincing argument. But this new thing between them (on one hand, it's just civility, but on the other it feels a lot more like camaraderie), it's tentative and fragile and fuckall if Ben's going to screw with it. So instead of needling her, he just listens to everything April has to say. Granted, the April version of spilling her soul is basically the Leslie version of ordering a sandwich but he gets the gist.
Eventually she stops talking and just kind of sits there spinning the shot glass in her hands. Ben leans his elbows on the table and picks at a gash in the plastic.
“I’m sorry.” If it weren’t so quiet, Ben might’ve missed it, but he doesn’t. When he looks up at April, she’s picking at the label on the bottle of lemon juice. “For the yard signs and all Leslie’s campaign stuff, whatever.” She meets his eyes. “I’m not always a bitch, you know.”
He can tell how much seeing Andy must’ve shaken her because it’s the most sincere apology he’s ever gotten from her. It helps stem the little piece of him that wants to say some version of “I told you so,” and instead he says, "It helped. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was horrible. But it's not like I could avoid all that forever. It's not like it goes away."
If somebody had asked him in June to guess the one person he'd come through this break-up with, April would have been at the bottom of the list. If somebody had asked him the one person he'd be fucking for the majority of the summer, the result would have been pretty much the same. But they’re still a unit, a fucked-up crazy Ben and April unit, and when he starts talking about all the ways he’s tried to put himself back together it feels a lot less like being a pushover and a lot more like taking one for the team. He talks about Leslie and Partridge and tries to tell her some version of a story about things not going the way you think they will, how you have to rally and keep going, soldier on and all that trite Hallmark bullshit, only a little less Hallmark and a little more April Ludgate. He can't tell if he's successful but at least she doesn't walk out on him.
He ends up talking for awhile and by the end of it April's just kind of staring at him. "And, you know, I had an actual conversation with Leslie the other day. And it was good, I mean, it wasn't great or anything, but it was a step."
"I get it," April interrupts. "Your heart grew three sizes that day." It has a lot less bite in it than it would've had a week ago. Even a lot less bite than it would've had three months ago. April takes a deep breath and stands up. "God, it's disgusting out here, can we go inside already?"
It's not exactly "thank you" and it certainly isn’t “I’m sorry,” but it'll do.
--
Just when it feels like they’ve been planning the Harvest Festival forever, it’s right around the corner, time to start setting up tents and first aid stations and clearing the lot for the Fat Coaster. Entertainment 720’s handling some of the logistics and it’s nice having Tom around more, even if Jean-Ralphio’s still a giant tool. Ben stays late one night to make sure all the licenses are cleared, stops by the grocery store on his way home and picks up ice cream and the makings for enchiladas (definitely not because April takes way too much pleasure in insulting his attempts at Mexican food). But when he walks through the door, bags in hand, April’s sitting on the couch waiting for him. She’s got the marshmallow gun in front of her, so. This is either a really good sign or a really, really bad one. Ben takes a very careful step forward but she raises the gun and says, “Not so fast.”
Ben shakes his head, still super wary of where this is all headed. “April, what are you doing?”
She slides the pump back and fires, one single mini-marshmallow that hits him in the shoulder. “Nothing. What are you doing?” And there’s not exactly a smile on her face but there’s definitely the start of a grin, a light in her eyes he hasn’t seen in a really long time. It’s pretty much exactly the reaction he was hoping for last time he tried this, but back then it was about a lot of other things and trying to make her smile was all wrapped up in his own bullshit. Now he’s just genuinely relieved.
He sets the grocery bags very carefully on the floor and lunges for her. She’s quick though, up and off the couch before Ben’s even halfway across the room. The gun’s not that big and she’s careful with her shots, only fires when she knows they’ll land, and Ben takes a few in the chest, more than one to the face, one very nearly in his mouth. He picks up speed and chases her down the hallway but she surprises him by taking a right turn into his bedroom and now she’s firing with reckless abandon, mini-marshmallows landing on his sheets, rolling down behind his bookshelves, underneath his dresser. Ben would probably be pissed if she weren’t so damn gleeful about it, so wildly, enthusiastically pleased to be fucking with his stuff. Because for the first time, the joy looks genuine, and then she leans her head back and laughs and it’s like something in Ben’s chest bursts open, something wild and uncontained, because if April can be that fucking happy again then maybe there’s hope for him yet.
Ben advances on her until her back’s against his bedroom wall and then he’s got her wrists over her head, the gun still dangling from her hand. And Ben doesn’t care that he’ll be finding marshmallows in his things for weeks, doesn’t care that there’s a carton of ice cream melting on the living room floor.
She arches her back toward him and squirms a little against his hands. “Is that C-3PO on your dresser?” Her voice doesn’t exactly falter but there’s this tiny note of uncertainty, this little moment where her eyes flicker down to his mouth and she takes a breath and it’s maybe the only time he’s ever seen her almost ask for something in his life.
And because tender is exactly the wrong move here, he squeezes her wrists and leans toward her. “Fuck you,” he says, and then he's kissing her and it’s not so different than it used to be, but it is. It’s definitely slower, a little gentler and a little less desperate, and it goes on for forever. She grinds her hips into his and when he lets go of her wrists she wraps an arm around his neck while her other hand snakes up the back of his shirt. He nips at her lip, tangles a hand in her hair, and god, he's never spent so long just kissing her.
By the time he backs them up toward the bed, April's tugging his shirt over his head and reaching down to unbutton his jeans, and when he trips a little bit stepping out of them, she smiles against his mouth and it's, god. It’s kind of amazing.
They don't stare longingly into each others' eyes. She still runs her nails down his back a little harder than necessary and she has more than a few dirty things to whisper into his ear. But when he slides into her, he slips an arm around her waist and pulls her toward him and her hands on his back pull him closer and it feels like a lot. When she spins them around, plants her hands on his chest and rocks her hips and moans, she keeps her eyes on his the whole time. And it’s not that it’s romantic, it’s just that it’s-fun, or easy, or whatever. It’s exactly what it is, not anything else, and that’s pretty fucking amazing enough on its own.
They end up sprawled across the foot of the bed, April on top, and by the time he slides a hand down to press his thumb to her clit, they're both already so fucking close that April tips her head back and comes. He watches her, manages to hang on until she finally opens her eyes and smiles this wicked little grin, this fucking amazing happy thing, and he reaches out and pushes her hair behind her ear. He pulls her down toward him and flips them over and it's not more than a few thrusts before he collapses down on top of her, lips pressed to the side of her neck.
April doesn’t leave right after. She wraps the sheet around herself and slings a leg off the bed, kicking it back and forth. Ben’s still got a hand on the back of her thigh and when he slides his fingers against the skin there, she huffs out a laugh and pulls away from him. “Stop it,” she says and god, she’s ticklish after she comes? Is this really the first time he’s ever noticed that? It makes him want to press her back against the pillows and find every spot that makes her smile and flinch. Instead he find a marshmallow under his pillow and tosses it at her, arcs it right onto her stomach and when she lifts a hand to flip him off, she’s laughing.
--
The first night of Harvest Festival, it's already better than last year. No power outages, no Indian curses, no Joan Callamezzo running around trying to ruin everything. Perd Hapley even does a broadcast from the coaster that's Leslie's sure will win him a local media award.
It's not actually as awful as he thought it would be. There's a moment in the staff tent where Leslie smiles at him like they've just pulled off something incredible and Ben remembers a lot of things all at once (cotton candy and secret handshakes and feeling like the king of the whole fucking world) but it's not unmanageable.
He stays until everything's squared away (and double- and triple- and quadruple-checked) and when he goes to leave, there's a hand at his elbow pulling him back.
It's Leslie. Of course it is. She has this hesitant, awkward smile on her face and he makes sure his own smile’s genuine when he looks back at her. (It's almost not even that hard.)
"I just wanted to say thanks. For everything you did this year." She gestures toward the Ferris wheel and the game tents, toward the whole fair like he made it happen and for the first time, he looks at it too. Not as just a reminder of last year and everything that changed since then, but as something with as much promise as Leslie always seems to think it has. It's a good feeling. And he thinks maybe he did fall in love with his job and the city and all the crazy things about it, and maybe that did have a lot to do with Leslie, but maybe he fell in love with other things too, and those things are still there.
He's not eighteen anymore. It's not Partridge, if for no other reason than the fact that he's still here. It doesn't seem like much, but it feels like a whole hell of a lot.
He turns back to Leslie, reaches out and squeezes her wrist. "You too."
He takes his time walking back to the parking lot, makes sure to stop by the Li’l Sebastian memorial to say goodbye to Ron. When he gets to his car, April's sitting on the trunk looking out at the fair. He walks over and leans against the bumper. "You ready to go?"
April doesn't turn away. It's well past sunset and all the lights are on, the rides flashing different colors and the music from the mainstage audible even from halfway across the lot. He wonders what memories this place has for April, whether really looking at it all feels as important for her as it does for him. He wants to ask but he doesn't, just nudges her knee with his hip. "April?"
She shakes her head and the lights from the carousel catch her hair. "I think I'm going to stay. Tom convinced Jean-Ralphio that flashmobbing the bandstand would be great PR."
“Is anybody going to do it with him?”
“No.”
“Does he know that?”
“No.”
He laughs and turns his keys over in his hands. "Yeah, that might just be too sad to witness."
April pushes herself off the trunk and sways toward him when she lands. Her hand's warm around his wrist when she catches herself and she lets it lay there a second before pulling away. "Fine, go home. Tell Nigella I said hi."
He drops his eyes and smiles, unlocks the car and opens the door.
"Ben?"
April's a few cars down and Ben has to raise his voice over the music. "Yeah?"
"She's going to win." April shifts back and forth on her feet. "Leslie. She's going to win."
It takes him a second to smile but he does, nods his head and says, "Good."
April doesn't say anything else but she smiles at him like she means it and then turns and heads back to the fair. He watches her weave between the aisles on the way back to the entrance and she's well out of sight by the time he starts the car.
He drives home with the windows down and for the first time it feels like the summer's coming to an end. The air almost feels like fall.
When he pulls into the garage, he sits in the car for a long second, leans back against the headrest and waits. He thinks about the Harvest Festival and Partridge, about sad margaritas and marshmallow guns, about towns (home, blonde, and otherwise) and starting over.
When he finds the yard signs behind the cabinet, they don't look any worse for being stuck in the garage for a few weeks. He swipes at a line of dust with his sleeve and then picks a spot in the yard that’s visible from the corner. Vote Knope! The ground's soft enough that it doesn't take more than a few good pushes to get the sign to stick.
He stands there awhile looking around the yard and even though it’s probably just his imagination, he thinks he can see the top of the Ferris wheel over the trees across the way.
Ice Clown Gets Down, Turns Things Around. It might be a few weeks before he puts it in the Journal, but still. Baby steps.
Author: allthingsholy
Pairing: Ben/April (Parks & Rec)
Rating: R? NC-17? Let's say NC-17.
Words: ~15000 total; ~6500 this part.
Notes: Thanks so much to cypanache for looking over all of this one, two, three times and helping me work out some plot and characterization kinks. Thanks to ishie for the once-over and slybrunette for being the best cheerleader ever. Cross-posted to geegollythanks, a Ben/April shipping community that everyone should check out because these two are awesome. Title from "The Future's Nothing New" by The Alternate Routes.
----
After The Bulge, Ben decides to try harder to be a normal person, a functioning member of society, something other than a waste-of-space asshole. For every step Ben tries to take forward, April’s determined to take two steps back.
He wakes up in the morning and actually makes breakfast, scrambles eggs and fries bacon. He steers clear of waffles, sure, but give a guy some credit for trying.
Even though he makes enough for two, April stands at the counter and picks at a pop-tart. She throws her crusts at him and even though he’s somehow shaking crumbs out from under the flap of his collar in his mid-morning meeting, he doesn’t relent.
He turns off the tv and reads a book instead. April plugs her iPod into the speakers and cranks club music until he’s rocking a truly impressive headache.
“Jesus, Ben, this isn’t a library.” She’s got her hands on her hips and what he’s come to realize is the April version of a pout on her face. “‘Man vs. Food’ is on. Let’s go.”
Ben doesn’t look up from his book, like if he avoids eye-contact then winning this battle is just within his reach. “Why don’t you do something other than watch tv tonight? Don’t you have homework?”
“It’s July, asshole.”
The sex does not get more tender. Even if Ben tried, April has more tricks up her sleeve than any 22-year-old has a right to know. They have sex on the floor in the hallway, one night in the backseat of his car while it’s still parked in the garage. There’s a particularly memorable encounter after April brings home a “Vote Knope!” yard sign, proving that Ben’s new life-attitude only extends so far. Ben shoves the sign behind a cabinet, next to an old Slip ‘N Slide and a dusty lawn dart set.
So. Baby steps.
--
Tom throws an Entertainment 720 party at the Snakehole. They’re promoting Dennis Feinstein’s new fragrance (and how he got away with the licensing for a perfume named “Sluts” is something Ben will never understand) and Tom’s convinced it’s a total coup, that it’s the thing that’s going to break them, send them into the multimedia conglomerate stratosphere. Those are the exact words he uses. The whole thing’s ridiculous.
Ben begs out early, has one beer and then sneaks out the front door. He doesn’t tell April he’s leaving.
He gets a text a half hour later. “Hey asshole, where are you?”
He’s well into his nightly routine now, sweatpants-ed and Food Network-ed, and he texts her back: “Home. Headache. Have fun.” And maybe he left because he’s 36 and the Snakehole is for twenty-somethings, because April is a 20-something and should be out there having fun and living her life, not sitting at home feeling sorry for herself all the time. And it’s not that she’s not old enough to make her own decisions (god knows April Ludgate is perfectly capable of making up her own mind, and he’s got a hickey just above his collarbone to prove it) but still.
He gets a text back not two minutes later. “Fucker. Come back and get me.”
He waits almost ten minutes before he answers her and he spends that whole time thinking about the lights in her hair that night at the Bulge. “Can’t. Private time with Nigella. Sock’s on the door.”
She doesn’t text him again, but he hears her come in sometime after midnight (Donna was there to drive everyone home again) and he’s not sure, but she might be humming. He hopes she danced.
--
Eventually Ben pushes it one step too far. (Truth be told, it’s probably, like, 30 steps too far, but he’s working with limited knowledge.) He finds the marshmallow gun under the sofa one afternoon while April’s at her parents’ house for some birthday party and he’s waiting on the couch when she gets back. Andy used to drag her into the living room on Saturday mornings to make blanket forts, and whatever new found energy Ben’s got, it doesn’t include blanket forts.
April comes in and shrugs her bag off her shoulder, walks toward the couch and then sees him. Everything in her face goes entirely still and her voice is oddly low when she asks, “What are you doing?”
Ben holds up the gun. There’s a bag of mini-marshmallows on the cushion next to him and he makes a truly awkward attempt at a smile. “I found this.”
April walks toward him and takes the gun from his hand. She’s really calm about it, so calm it’s almost creepy, and Ben watches her as she walks down the hallway and throws the gun in her room.
When she comes back, there’s something off about her face and Ben realizes that for as much time as he’s spent with April (on the couch, at work, inside her, whatever) there are whole parts of her he’s never gotten at. She stops a few feet from the couch.
“What are you doing?”
This is some sort of trap. He can’t see exactly how, but this is not going to go well. “I told you. I found it. It was under-”
But April shakes her head at him. “That’s not what I mean. These past few weeks, you’ve been, I don’t know.” Her hands are just hanging there at her sides, and god. She’s so young. “I don’t need your help.” Her voice cracks. Jesus, what the hell did he step in?
“We both need something.” That much is pretty fucking obvious. April's more tense than he’s ever seen her.
She bites off her words and her hands are balled into fists. “And what, you think you’re the something I need?”
Woah. Not the point. “I never said that.”
“But you think that if I’m all better then suddenly you’re all better? You can’t even put up a fucking yard sign.” April’s voice is a lot more flippant than she probably feels given the fact that she looks about ready to burst into tears.
And that isn’t what he’s been doing. Is that what he’s been doing? Using April as a pathetic proxy so he can pretend he has his shit together? He starts toward the garage. “You want me to put up the yard sign? Fine.”
But April’s in his way and she doesn’t budge an inch. “I want you to stop treating me like solving all my problems somehow solves all of yours.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.” And so what if it is? At least he's trying, or trying to try. Whatever. Fuck.
“Bullshit. Why do you even have to mess with things?”
And Ben doesn’t care that it’s almost certainly misdirected anger because they’ve spent so long just simmering in their own juices, stewing in each others’ misery, that the explosion feels fucking great and finally raising his voice is the best he’s felt in weeks. “Because we’re both miserable." He’s just so fucking angry all of a sudden, and it’s the first time he hasn’t tried to stifle it with a clipped smile or inappropriate sex. "Jesus, April, isn’t not giving a shit just fucking exhausting?”
April huffs out a breath and shakes her head and he can see her get a handle on whatever made her so unhinged, reign back in whatever had her so close to actually being vulnerable. She spins on her heel and heads to her room and whatever tenuous thing they had going, it's snapped right the fuck in two.
Ice Clown Gets Kicked While Down.
Great.
--
They don’t speak to each other for a week. At work, she calls him Mr. Wyatt.
Probably just to spite him, April throw herself into Leslie’s campaign. Elections are in October, so they have two months to get her name out there, make the community aware of the fact that she’s more than just “Park Lady” now. It’s part of the reason Leslie’s so stressed out about Harvest Festival, like, if it tanks right before the election then she’s got absolutely no chance. And it’s not that Leslie tries to put more pressure on everybody else but she can do 200 things at once and expects that much of everyone else too. It’s more than a little wearing.
April takes to it like a fiend. Spends more time at Leslie’s house doing campaign things, more time canvassing and dragging people to events. And even though Ben’s 99% sure she started out doing it just to fuck with him (he’s come home to “Vote Knope!” pamphlets so many times in the past week he’s lost count, and the pile of signs behind the cabinet in the garage is getting pretty impressive), he can tell she likes it. And maybe that has something to do with him, with what he said to her, because it’s obvious that she does care, not just about Leslie winning, but about Leslie.
Ben does not miss the irony in the fact that all his honest effort got him nowhere and getting her mad enough to scream at him seems to have done the fucking trick.
If any of what he said got to April, it’s no doubt that he took her words to heart. After a dozen failed attempts at being a contributing member of society, Ben has to admit what a sham it was before, how focused he was on making April feel better instead of actually focusing on his own problems. As if making breakfast and trying to get April out of the house didn’t just mean he had a lot of time on his hands to be the same cranky bastard as before.
He tries going out with Tom but spends most of the night pissed at the fact that if April were with him, she could help him decide whether or not Tom’s wearing a woman’s blazer and when he gets home that night, he can’t help but check for a sliver of light from under April’s bedroom door.
And maybe checking up on April is falling right back into old patterns, but still. Baby steps.
--
He comes back late from work one night and April’s sitting on the couch with her laptop cycling through a bunch of songs. She doesn’t really look at him when he comes in. She’s been doing that for a week, not really talking to him, being ambivalently hostile. He’s been working his way through a Pamela Dean cookbook (and telling himself it counts as making an effort) while she sits at the table and throws her wadded up McDonald’s wrappers at his back. It’s super fucking awesome.
Some Beyonce song (it’s probably Beyonce, it’s maybe Rihanna, he’s a full grown man, he isn’t supposed to know these things) is blaring from her laptop and Ben’s halfway to his room when April says, “I’m picking a new campaign song for Leslie, want to help?”
Two months ago she wouldn’t let him look at the campaign posters without a heaping serving of pity on the side. Now she’s shoving it in his face and loving it. Her mouth’s twisted into this half-formed smile and it’s so fucking ugly, so fucking wrong, that Ben turns around and sits down on the couch right next to her. “We should look for something to appeal to the youth vote, I think.” He leans over and clicks on a song, something peppy and fast that he’s never heard before and bops his head along with the beat. “What about this one?”
April changes it to another, and then another, and they go back and forth like that. Ben snaps his fingers, says things like, “This one doesn’t quite capture Leslie’s pep.” Or “I think ‘Let me see them Hanes’ is just Leslie’s message in a nutshell.”
And then April scrolls down and clicks and it’s “Whoomp! There It Is.” She’s not smiling anymore. She’s looking at him like it’s painful, all wide eyes and pursed lips, and he knows she knows exactly what she’s doing, that she googled him back during all that Crazy Ira bullshit and some things just stuck, because she’s April and that’s just how she is.
He wants to say something biting to one-up her, maybe lean over and play a Mouse Rat song, but instead he just taps the space bar and the room’s really quiet all of a sudden.
Of all the things Ben tried to pull April out of her funk, genuine honesty was never one of them and no, he’s not yelling this time, but the truth is still probably his best bet. His tongue sticks in his throat a little bit when he tries to talk. “You know, I spent 18 years running away from the worst thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t go back to Partridge for a decade after I went away to school.” April doesn’t pull her laptop away or anything, doesn’t give him the finger and run away to her room, so he keeps talking. “It’s just a shit-ton of wasted time, after awhile.”
For them, it’s almost sentimental. When he looks over, April’s looking at him-actually looking at him-and it’s a whole lot more intimate than the month and a half he spent fucking her. She’s so fucking full of promise it’s unbearable and the feeling that comes to life in Ben’s chest feels a lot less like sympathy than affection. He leans over and taps the space bar but when he gets up off the couch and goes toward his room, April pauses the music again. “Do you think you loved her?”
April’s voice is tiny and genuine and when he looks back at her, she’s as vulnerable as she was the night they fought. There’s no heat now though, just genuine curiosity and something that looks an awful lot like guilt.
Ben turns around and slides his hands into his pockets. He doesn’t let himself think about it too often because it’s literally the most depressing thing in the world to think about, whether or not he loves Leslie when they’re not even together anymore. Sometimes he thinks yes, sometimes he thinks no. Sometimes he think he fell in love with a lot of things, Pawnee and his job and the way the town made him feel, but when he looks at all of that hard enough it’s really just Leslie all over again. So he just shrugs a shoulder and says, “I don’t know. I definitely don’t love feeling like this all the time.”
It may not be profound but it at least has the benefit of being true.
--
They have a sort of truce after that. Ben stops pushing so hard and April stops fighting and they’re just kind of doing it, just being real people. April even comes into the kitchen to “help out” with the cooking, which mostly consists of stealing bits of carrot off the cutting board and calling him Benjy Crocker. She sits on the counter and tells him all about the new porn series she’s thought of, Ben and Nigella and all sorts of world cuisine and sexual positions he’s pretty sure are physically impossible. And when Ben leans over and lobs the ladle at her, cocks an eyebrow and winks, April huffs out a laugh that’s the best thing Ben’s heard in a long fucking time.
He wakes up one Sunday morning and April’s sprawled out on the sofa watching tv. He makes a cup of coffee, a few pieces of toast, and when he takes them into the living room, April doesn’t look at him but she does slide her feet off the cushion on his side of the couch. They sit and watch some nature program about gorillas and Ben reaches out and slides a hand around her ankle, dips his thumb into the hollow around her tendon. They haven’t fooled around since they stopped being dicks to each other and his hand on her leg isn’t entirely sexual, but he can’t help but feel super aware of her next to him, extra conscious of how much this is like the first time they fucked. Or maybe it’s not so much like that at all anymore. Things are by no means perfect but it all feels a little less dire. Going to work in the morning isn’t quite so hard. Walking into the Parks Department for meetings doesn’t make him want to die. And Ben thinks if Ron asked how April was doing now, telling him she’s fine wouldn’t be as much of a stretch.
--
There’s another Harvest Festival meeting. They’re in the Parks Department conference room and Jerry and Leslie are trying to nail down the placement of all the food vendors. (Jerry got put in charge of food under the strict understanding that he was not actually to eat any of it until he was very much off-duty, lest they have another incident.)
Leslie’s noticeably distracted. She keeps interrupting mid-sentence to ask about something they just got done talking about, and when she tells them all to take a five-minute break, Ben stays behind in the room. Maybe he’s growing. Maybe he’s faking it, but even the effort feels like a step in the right direction.
Leslie’s at the head of the table totally engrossed in a spreadsheet. Ben taps his pen against his notepad. “Everything okay?”
Leslie looks up like she didn’t even know he was there and given how distracted she’s been, maybe she didn’t. She opens and closes her mouth a few times, and maybe it’s a little less painful to look at her than it was yesterday? It’s hard to keep track.
“Oh,” Leslie says. She puts the spreadsheet down and nods to herself a few times. “Yeah, everything’s fine.” Her smile’s fake. Even if he hadn’t dated her for three months, even if he wasn’t probably still totally crazy about her, he’d be able to tell so he just kind of cocks his head and waits for her to say something.
Finally Leslie breathes out, this great big sigh that shakes her shoulders, and he can see her hesitate a long time before she says, “It’s the campaign.”
Ah. He must have some sort of visible reaction because Leslie’s immediately backtracking. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-I didn’t mean-”
But Ben holds up a hand. “It’s fine.” And it is, it totally is, except for how it makes him feel like there’s a vice around his chest, this thing that came between them, this thing that ruined everything, and really it’s the last fucking thing he wants to talk about, and yet. “What’s wrong?”
Leslie shakes her head. “Nothing in particular, just.” She bites her lip and god, he used to love when she did that. “It’s just a lot to deal with, you know?”
“Yeah, I do.” And he does. So he asks what’s going on and listens while she tells him about the long hours and the stress, how it’s everything and nothing like she thought it would be. By the time Jerry and Donna get back, some of the air has come back in the room and it’s actually not so awful. Maybe he really is growing.
Leslie starts talking about cotton candy stands and he looks out past her shoulder to where April’s sitting at her desk. Maybe his mind’s playing tricks on him, but he could almost swear she smiles at him.
--
It's a Saturday and Ben leaves the house, actually goes out and runs errands and buys groceries. Late August is basically awful. Summer is the only time he really misses Nebraska, when the river makes the city a hot, humid mess.
April apparently doesn't share his distaste because when he gets back to the house, she's sitting in the backyard, feet propped up on a lawn chair and a bottle of tequila on the table next to her. Ben puts away the bags of things he brought back and then slides opens the back door. "What are you doing?"
"Knitting a sweater." April doesn't look at him. She's got her head tipped all the way back and her hair twisted up. She looks peaceful but that's probably more due to the alcohol. He can't tell how much she's been drinking but her words aren't slurred or anything so it's probably not too much. Yet.
He steps outside and shuts the door, crosses to the table but keeps to the shade. They got the lawn set at Goodwill for a steal, so it's battered and beat to shit but April looks comfortable enough. He pulls out one of the chairs and sits down. "What are you drinking?"
She slides the shot glass across the table, then nudges a bottle of lemon juice toward him. "Drink up."
"What the hell is this?" He has never seen anyone drink this before. And he went to college, where basically the only liquid that was off-limits was lighter fuel.
April seems unfazed. "It's a legitimate shot in Venezuela."
"It's a really sad margarita."
"Whatever." April rolls her neck and her head lolls toward him. There's a line of sweat under her ear that’s working down toward her collarbone and Ben's suddenly very aware of the fact that they haven't had sex in awhile. And he's in the middle of imaging a host of different things (the backyard's pretty shaded, their neighbors are cool enough, no one else is outside in this fucking heat anyway) when April says, "I saw Andy today."
Oh. So that explains that.
The sum total of what April has said about her relationship with Andy since they split is about the same as what she's said to him about her favorite shades of nail polish. (For the record, black and probably purple, going by the most frequently used. Not that he's kept track or anything.) And it's not like April really does feelings (though at this point, he's come to realize that that's more than a little debatable) so he's sure as shit not going to ask. For want of a better option, he leans over for the shot glass and downs it in one and Jesus fuck, it burns like heartbreak.
"That's fucking awful." God, his eyes are watering.
April rolls her eyes. "Pussy."
It takes four more shots between them before she brings up Andy again. She was canvassing at an apartment complex across town and he answered the door. April doesn't seem worked up about it, which is almost definitely worse than if she were in hysterics.
There's a small part of him that wants to look at this as payback, wants to remind her how long she spent throwing Leslie in his face and there's a stack of yard signs in the garage that makes a damn convincing argument. But this new thing between them (on one hand, it's just civility, but on the other it feels a lot more like camaraderie), it's tentative and fragile and fuckall if Ben's going to screw with it. So instead of needling her, he just listens to everything April has to say. Granted, the April version of spilling her soul is basically the Leslie version of ordering a sandwich but he gets the gist.
Eventually she stops talking and just kind of sits there spinning the shot glass in her hands. Ben leans his elbows on the table and picks at a gash in the plastic.
“I’m sorry.” If it weren’t so quiet, Ben might’ve missed it, but he doesn’t. When he looks up at April, she’s picking at the label on the bottle of lemon juice. “For the yard signs and all Leslie’s campaign stuff, whatever.” She meets his eyes. “I’m not always a bitch, you know.”
He can tell how much seeing Andy must’ve shaken her because it’s the most sincere apology he’s ever gotten from her. It helps stem the little piece of him that wants to say some version of “I told you so,” and instead he says, "It helped. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was horrible. But it's not like I could avoid all that forever. It's not like it goes away."
If somebody had asked him in June to guess the one person he'd come through this break-up with, April would have been at the bottom of the list. If somebody had asked him the one person he'd be fucking for the majority of the summer, the result would have been pretty much the same. But they’re still a unit, a fucked-up crazy Ben and April unit, and when he starts talking about all the ways he’s tried to put himself back together it feels a lot less like being a pushover and a lot more like taking one for the team. He talks about Leslie and Partridge and tries to tell her some version of a story about things not going the way you think they will, how you have to rally and keep going, soldier on and all that trite Hallmark bullshit, only a little less Hallmark and a little more April Ludgate. He can't tell if he's successful but at least she doesn't walk out on him.
He ends up talking for awhile and by the end of it April's just kind of staring at him. "And, you know, I had an actual conversation with Leslie the other day. And it was good, I mean, it wasn't great or anything, but it was a step."
"I get it," April interrupts. "Your heart grew three sizes that day." It has a lot less bite in it than it would've had a week ago. Even a lot less bite than it would've had three months ago. April takes a deep breath and stands up. "God, it's disgusting out here, can we go inside already?"
It's not exactly "thank you" and it certainly isn’t “I’m sorry,” but it'll do.
--
Just when it feels like they’ve been planning the Harvest Festival forever, it’s right around the corner, time to start setting up tents and first aid stations and clearing the lot for the Fat Coaster. Entertainment 720’s handling some of the logistics and it’s nice having Tom around more, even if Jean-Ralphio’s still a giant tool. Ben stays late one night to make sure all the licenses are cleared, stops by the grocery store on his way home and picks up ice cream and the makings for enchiladas (definitely not because April takes way too much pleasure in insulting his attempts at Mexican food). But when he walks through the door, bags in hand, April’s sitting on the couch waiting for him. She’s got the marshmallow gun in front of her, so. This is either a really good sign or a really, really bad one. Ben takes a very careful step forward but she raises the gun and says, “Not so fast.”
Ben shakes his head, still super wary of where this is all headed. “April, what are you doing?”
She slides the pump back and fires, one single mini-marshmallow that hits him in the shoulder. “Nothing. What are you doing?” And there’s not exactly a smile on her face but there’s definitely the start of a grin, a light in her eyes he hasn’t seen in a really long time. It’s pretty much exactly the reaction he was hoping for last time he tried this, but back then it was about a lot of other things and trying to make her smile was all wrapped up in his own bullshit. Now he’s just genuinely relieved.
He sets the grocery bags very carefully on the floor and lunges for her. She’s quick though, up and off the couch before Ben’s even halfway across the room. The gun’s not that big and she’s careful with her shots, only fires when she knows they’ll land, and Ben takes a few in the chest, more than one to the face, one very nearly in his mouth. He picks up speed and chases her down the hallway but she surprises him by taking a right turn into his bedroom and now she’s firing with reckless abandon, mini-marshmallows landing on his sheets, rolling down behind his bookshelves, underneath his dresser. Ben would probably be pissed if she weren’t so damn gleeful about it, so wildly, enthusiastically pleased to be fucking with his stuff. Because for the first time, the joy looks genuine, and then she leans her head back and laughs and it’s like something in Ben’s chest bursts open, something wild and uncontained, because if April can be that fucking happy again then maybe there’s hope for him yet.
Ben advances on her until her back’s against his bedroom wall and then he’s got her wrists over her head, the gun still dangling from her hand. And Ben doesn’t care that he’ll be finding marshmallows in his things for weeks, doesn’t care that there’s a carton of ice cream melting on the living room floor.
She arches her back toward him and squirms a little against his hands. “Is that C-3PO on your dresser?” Her voice doesn’t exactly falter but there’s this tiny note of uncertainty, this little moment where her eyes flicker down to his mouth and she takes a breath and it’s maybe the only time he’s ever seen her almost ask for something in his life.
And because tender is exactly the wrong move here, he squeezes her wrists and leans toward her. “Fuck you,” he says, and then he's kissing her and it’s not so different than it used to be, but it is. It’s definitely slower, a little gentler and a little less desperate, and it goes on for forever. She grinds her hips into his and when he lets go of her wrists she wraps an arm around his neck while her other hand snakes up the back of his shirt. He nips at her lip, tangles a hand in her hair, and god, he's never spent so long just kissing her.
By the time he backs them up toward the bed, April's tugging his shirt over his head and reaching down to unbutton his jeans, and when he trips a little bit stepping out of them, she smiles against his mouth and it's, god. It’s kind of amazing.
They don't stare longingly into each others' eyes. She still runs her nails down his back a little harder than necessary and she has more than a few dirty things to whisper into his ear. But when he slides into her, he slips an arm around her waist and pulls her toward him and her hands on his back pull him closer and it feels like a lot. When she spins them around, plants her hands on his chest and rocks her hips and moans, she keeps her eyes on his the whole time. And it’s not that it’s romantic, it’s just that it’s-fun, or easy, or whatever. It’s exactly what it is, not anything else, and that’s pretty fucking amazing enough on its own.
They end up sprawled across the foot of the bed, April on top, and by the time he slides a hand down to press his thumb to her clit, they're both already so fucking close that April tips her head back and comes. He watches her, manages to hang on until she finally opens her eyes and smiles this wicked little grin, this fucking amazing happy thing, and he reaches out and pushes her hair behind her ear. He pulls her down toward him and flips them over and it's not more than a few thrusts before he collapses down on top of her, lips pressed to the side of her neck.
April doesn’t leave right after. She wraps the sheet around herself and slings a leg off the bed, kicking it back and forth. Ben’s still got a hand on the back of her thigh and when he slides his fingers against the skin there, she huffs out a laugh and pulls away from him. “Stop it,” she says and god, she’s ticklish after she comes? Is this really the first time he’s ever noticed that? It makes him want to press her back against the pillows and find every spot that makes her smile and flinch. Instead he find a marshmallow under his pillow and tosses it at her, arcs it right onto her stomach and when she lifts a hand to flip him off, she’s laughing.
--
The first night of Harvest Festival, it's already better than last year. No power outages, no Indian curses, no Joan Callamezzo running around trying to ruin everything. Perd Hapley even does a broadcast from the coaster that's Leslie's sure will win him a local media award.
It's not actually as awful as he thought it would be. There's a moment in the staff tent where Leslie smiles at him like they've just pulled off something incredible and Ben remembers a lot of things all at once (cotton candy and secret handshakes and feeling like the king of the whole fucking world) but it's not unmanageable.
He stays until everything's squared away (and double- and triple- and quadruple-checked) and when he goes to leave, there's a hand at his elbow pulling him back.
It's Leslie. Of course it is. She has this hesitant, awkward smile on her face and he makes sure his own smile’s genuine when he looks back at her. (It's almost not even that hard.)
"I just wanted to say thanks. For everything you did this year." She gestures toward the Ferris wheel and the game tents, toward the whole fair like he made it happen and for the first time, he looks at it too. Not as just a reminder of last year and everything that changed since then, but as something with as much promise as Leslie always seems to think it has. It's a good feeling. And he thinks maybe he did fall in love with his job and the city and all the crazy things about it, and maybe that did have a lot to do with Leslie, but maybe he fell in love with other things too, and those things are still there.
He's not eighteen anymore. It's not Partridge, if for no other reason than the fact that he's still here. It doesn't seem like much, but it feels like a whole hell of a lot.
He turns back to Leslie, reaches out and squeezes her wrist. "You too."
He takes his time walking back to the parking lot, makes sure to stop by the Li’l Sebastian memorial to say goodbye to Ron. When he gets to his car, April's sitting on the trunk looking out at the fair. He walks over and leans against the bumper. "You ready to go?"
April doesn't turn away. It's well past sunset and all the lights are on, the rides flashing different colors and the music from the mainstage audible even from halfway across the lot. He wonders what memories this place has for April, whether really looking at it all feels as important for her as it does for him. He wants to ask but he doesn't, just nudges her knee with his hip. "April?"
She shakes her head and the lights from the carousel catch her hair. "I think I'm going to stay. Tom convinced Jean-Ralphio that flashmobbing the bandstand would be great PR."
“Is anybody going to do it with him?”
“No.”
“Does he know that?”
“No.”
He laughs and turns his keys over in his hands. "Yeah, that might just be too sad to witness."
April pushes herself off the trunk and sways toward him when she lands. Her hand's warm around his wrist when she catches herself and she lets it lay there a second before pulling away. "Fine, go home. Tell Nigella I said hi."
He drops his eyes and smiles, unlocks the car and opens the door.
"Ben?"
April's a few cars down and Ben has to raise his voice over the music. "Yeah?"
"She's going to win." April shifts back and forth on her feet. "Leslie. She's going to win."
It takes him a second to smile but he does, nods his head and says, "Good."
April doesn't say anything else but she smiles at him like she means it and then turns and heads back to the fair. He watches her weave between the aisles on the way back to the entrance and she's well out of sight by the time he starts the car.
He drives home with the windows down and for the first time it feels like the summer's coming to an end. The air almost feels like fall.
When he pulls into the garage, he sits in the car for a long second, leans back against the headrest and waits. He thinks about the Harvest Festival and Partridge, about sad margaritas and marshmallow guns, about towns (home, blonde, and otherwise) and starting over.
When he finds the yard signs behind the cabinet, they don't look any worse for being stuck in the garage for a few weeks. He swipes at a line of dust with his sleeve and then picks a spot in the yard that’s visible from the corner. Vote Knope! The ground's soft enough that it doesn't take more than a few good pushes to get the sign to stick.
He stands there awhile looking around the yard and even though it’s probably just his imagination, he thinks he can see the top of the Ferris wheel over the trees across the way.
Ice Clown Gets Down, Turns Things Around. It might be a few weeks before he puts it in the Journal, but still. Baby steps.