ff: Dreams
Title: Dreams
Timeline/spoilers: Post 'I'm Leslie Knope' through "The Smallest Park" / season 4
Word count: about 1,700
Author's note: I really should stop writing Leslie/Ben fic until 1 am in the morning, this is becoming a habit. And I have no idea where this came up when all I can think about is Leslie Knope and Joe Biden in a room. And also I think I need better titles.
Dreams
For someone who realized she was in love with her boyfriend when the said boyfriend was breaking up with her, she thought she was doing fine actually. They had been together only for two months, had had a brief summer affair, and he was taking himself out of the equation so that she could have the dream she wanted the most in life. Sitting there opposite to Ben, wanting to touch him but unable to bring herself, Leslie Knope realized that she was in love with Ben Wyatt, that she loved him with all of her heart and that she had never felt that way for another man before in her life. She had realized it only a minute too late.
After things were said and they parted their ways, she walked to her office holding the box near, and dear, to her heart and left the office two hours early, which was a first for her. She thought she would be bursting into tears any minute but she didn’t. She simply wanted to talk to someone, she wanted to call Ann, but knowing the number of car accidents caused by drivers using mobile phones while driving, she decided to pull over the car and texted Ann. When she parked in her driveway, Ann was already at her porch, holding two pints of Ben&Jerry’s ice-cream and a bag of take-out from JJ’s Diner.
“I knew it was bound to happen but I just didn’t realize it would hurt so bad.” she told Ann while staring at the bottom of the empty ice-cream carton. “He gave me this.” She grabbed the box from her bag and handed it to Ann. The look on Ann’s face spoke things she knew in her heart. “He broke up with me so I could have my dream.”
“Leslie, I don’t know what to say. I know how much you want to be in the city council, it’s your dream. And I also know how much you liked him.”
She wanted to open her mouth to correct Ann by admitting that she actually loved him, in the present tense, that she only realized the depth of her own feelings when it was all over, but she couldn’t. Instead she took the box back from Ann and pinned her first official campaign object on her blazer. “At least I have the design for my campaign, I won’t have to hire someone.” she said with a broken smile.
She found herself lying in bed in dark, staring at the ceiling after Ann left another pint of ice-cream and a bottle of wine later. Thoughts rushed through her mind, which was quite usual because most of the time her best ideas came to her before sleep did. For the first time though she wished she could just shut down her mind and go to sleep because she did not want to think about whether she made the right choice by choosing her career over her love life, whether she was right to follow her mother’s motto that a woman needed to be strong and did not need a man to bring her down and about how she would be able to go on with her life seeing Ben and not being able to just kiss his terrible face.
When she woke up, she had a new thing to write down in her dream journal. “I married Ben and we were happy.” She stared at her entry and accepted the fact that it would always remain as a dream and would not be her reality. She closed down the journal and threw it into nearest drawer.
Once she announced that she was running for city council, the campaign simply took over her life and she did not have even the slightest time to think about Ben. If she was being honest though, she would accept that she was putting work first and pushing herself to her limits to forget about him. She was trying very hard though. She would see him walking in the courtyard from her window and would turn her head away to keep herself from staring at his butt. She would hear his footsteps coming into the Parks department and would grab the next document and read through the details of the city’s sewage system. She would check her planner five times every hour and compare it to the one she kept during when they were dating so that she would avoid running into him. She would reply to his emails in all her professionalism and proofread them at least twice to make sure she wasn’t using the letters ‘x’ and ‘o’ next to one another and the word ‘kisses’ and unnecessary exclamation points. She would treat him simply as a friend and a colleague and nothing more.
“You should talk to him and tell that you just want to stay friends, I’m sure he’ll understand.” Ann told her one afternoon when Leslie offered to eat lunch in her office upon seeing Ben eating his at the courtyard.
“I’m pretending to be his friend, I don’t have to tell him that.”
To the outside world, she was simply Leslie Knope working on her campaign who was single and didn’t have a boyfriend or the prospect of a relationship who had a colleague called called Ben Wyatt from Minnesota who had decided to stay in Pawnee after arriving to the town as a state auditor. According to her dream journals, she was madly in love with said Ben Wyatt, missed him like crazy, thought about him all the time and wanted to be with him. Sometimes she wished a fire broke out in her house so that the journal would burn and would not be used as evidence against her if somebody accidentally found it. She didn’t have the willpower to destroy the journal herself.
As time passed and leaves started to fall and it started to get cold and she had come to the end of the last project she and Ben would ever be working on, she was ready to buy a new dream journal and put away the old one that was now full of entries related to Ben. She was alone at her house, trying to process what Ann had told about her being a steamroller earlier in the day. She knew she was right and that she needed to talk to Ben and just end their whole interaction. She knew he was struggling as well in his own way though his so-called sadness baths were too unorthodox for her. It was going to be for the best if they simply didn’t have anymore contact.
Sipping her hot chocolate, she decided to go through the journal one last time before she put it away in the box with her older journals. “Ben took me ice-skating and broke his leg”. “His mother was really nice”. “We babysat his niece and her first word was waffles”. “He brought me more éclairs”. “We stole the keys to Donna’s family lake house and spent one weekend there, drinking champagne and reading Harry Potter”. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Just like the fatal epiphany she had during the worst possible moment, another one came crashing to her while she was sitting on the floor of her living-room, crying over what she had written in person in her dream journal.
She no longer cared about what her ultimate dream was, she simply wanted at least one of the dreams she had actually written down in her journal to come true.
She thought she was imagining him when she saw him walk towards her as she sat down at the bench in the smallest park in Indiana, which happened to be their park and their last project. She really was not expecting that he would bother to read a text message coming from her at 10 pm. She was positive that he would not actually show up on one of the coldest nights they had had. Yet there he was, with his hands in his pockets, looking at her in that boyish way of his. She felt her heart swell. No matter how much she hated doing other things while driving, she had prepared a speech in her head and was ready to give it but the way he seemed to be pulling away from her was making things harder. The fact that she was in love with him and that he could simply reject her wasn’t helping either.
When she was finally done and her chest felt lighter, she took a deep breath and prepared for the worst. The worst never happened. The lips she yearned for were on hers, his hands were in her hair. She had missed everything about him. She had forgotten all about the cold and also the fact that she had almost lost him forever. When they finally parted, she let out a sigh of relief and remained in his arms, squeezing him tightly before lifting her head to meet his eyes. He was looking back at her with the biggest smile.
“This is a dream come true.” she whispered before reaching for another kiss.
She stopped the car when they were passing by a 24-hour open drugstore. “I need something.” she said and saw him smirk. “I have condoms already at home, you pervert.” she playfully shoved him. “Do you want to join?”
Together they got off the car. “What do you need?” he asked her as they walked hand in hand towards the store. She had missed the feeling of his fingers laced to hers.
“A journal.” she simply replied and led them to the stationery aisle.
“Why do you need a new journal at 11pm on a Thursday?” he asked.
She looked at him and smiled. “For my new dreams.”
Timeline/spoilers: Post 'I'm Leslie Knope' through "The Smallest Park" / season 4
Word count: about 1,700
Author's note: I really should stop writing Leslie/Ben fic until 1 am in the morning, this is becoming a habit. And I have no idea where this came up when all I can think about is Leslie Knope and Joe Biden in a room. And also I think I need better titles.
Dreams
For someone who realized she was in love with her boyfriend when the said boyfriend was breaking up with her, she thought she was doing fine actually. They had been together only for two months, had had a brief summer affair, and he was taking himself out of the equation so that she could have the dream she wanted the most in life. Sitting there opposite to Ben, wanting to touch him but unable to bring herself, Leslie Knope realized that she was in love with Ben Wyatt, that she loved him with all of her heart and that she had never felt that way for another man before in her life. She had realized it only a minute too late.
After things were said and they parted their ways, she walked to her office holding the box near, and dear, to her heart and left the office two hours early, which was a first for her. She thought she would be bursting into tears any minute but she didn’t. She simply wanted to talk to someone, she wanted to call Ann, but knowing the number of car accidents caused by drivers using mobile phones while driving, she decided to pull over the car and texted Ann. When she parked in her driveway, Ann was already at her porch, holding two pints of Ben&Jerry’s ice-cream and a bag of take-out from JJ’s Diner.
“I knew it was bound to happen but I just didn’t realize it would hurt so bad.” she told Ann while staring at the bottom of the empty ice-cream carton. “He gave me this.” She grabbed the box from her bag and handed it to Ann. The look on Ann’s face spoke things she knew in her heart. “He broke up with me so I could have my dream.”
“Leslie, I don’t know what to say. I know how much you want to be in the city council, it’s your dream. And I also know how much you liked him.”
She wanted to open her mouth to correct Ann by admitting that she actually loved him, in the present tense, that she only realized the depth of her own feelings when it was all over, but she couldn’t. Instead she took the box back from Ann and pinned her first official campaign object on her blazer. “At least I have the design for my campaign, I won’t have to hire someone.” she said with a broken smile.
She found herself lying in bed in dark, staring at the ceiling after Ann left another pint of ice-cream and a bottle of wine later. Thoughts rushed through her mind, which was quite usual because most of the time her best ideas came to her before sleep did. For the first time though she wished she could just shut down her mind and go to sleep because she did not want to think about whether she made the right choice by choosing her career over her love life, whether she was right to follow her mother’s motto that a woman needed to be strong and did not need a man to bring her down and about how she would be able to go on with her life seeing Ben and not being able to just kiss his terrible face.
When she woke up, she had a new thing to write down in her dream journal. “I married Ben and we were happy.” She stared at her entry and accepted the fact that it would always remain as a dream and would not be her reality. She closed down the journal and threw it into nearest drawer.
Once she announced that she was running for city council, the campaign simply took over her life and she did not have even the slightest time to think about Ben. If she was being honest though, she would accept that she was putting work first and pushing herself to her limits to forget about him. She was trying very hard though. She would see him walking in the courtyard from her window and would turn her head away to keep herself from staring at his butt. She would hear his footsteps coming into the Parks department and would grab the next document and read through the details of the city’s sewage system. She would check her planner five times every hour and compare it to the one she kept during when they were dating so that she would avoid running into him. She would reply to his emails in all her professionalism and proofread them at least twice to make sure she wasn’t using the letters ‘x’ and ‘o’ next to one another and the word ‘kisses’ and unnecessary exclamation points. She would treat him simply as a friend and a colleague and nothing more.
“You should talk to him and tell that you just want to stay friends, I’m sure he’ll understand.” Ann told her one afternoon when Leslie offered to eat lunch in her office upon seeing Ben eating his at the courtyard.
“I’m pretending to be his friend, I don’t have to tell him that.”
To the outside world, she was simply Leslie Knope working on her campaign who was single and didn’t have a boyfriend or the prospect of a relationship who had a colleague called called Ben Wyatt from Minnesota who had decided to stay in Pawnee after arriving to the town as a state auditor. According to her dream journals, she was madly in love with said Ben Wyatt, missed him like crazy, thought about him all the time and wanted to be with him. Sometimes she wished a fire broke out in her house so that the journal would burn and would not be used as evidence against her if somebody accidentally found it. She didn’t have the willpower to destroy the journal herself.
As time passed and leaves started to fall and it started to get cold and she had come to the end of the last project she and Ben would ever be working on, she was ready to buy a new dream journal and put away the old one that was now full of entries related to Ben. She was alone at her house, trying to process what Ann had told about her being a steamroller earlier in the day. She knew she was right and that she needed to talk to Ben and just end their whole interaction. She knew he was struggling as well in his own way though his so-called sadness baths were too unorthodox for her. It was going to be for the best if they simply didn’t have anymore contact.
Sipping her hot chocolate, she decided to go through the journal one last time before she put it away in the box with her older journals. “Ben took me ice-skating and broke his leg”. “His mother was really nice”. “We babysat his niece and her first word was waffles”. “He brought me more éclairs”. “We stole the keys to Donna’s family lake house and spent one weekend there, drinking champagne and reading Harry Potter”. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Just like the fatal epiphany she had during the worst possible moment, another one came crashing to her while she was sitting on the floor of her living-room, crying over what she had written in person in her dream journal.
She no longer cared about what her ultimate dream was, she simply wanted at least one of the dreams she had actually written down in her journal to come true.
She thought she was imagining him when she saw him walk towards her as she sat down at the bench in the smallest park in Indiana, which happened to be their park and their last project. She really was not expecting that he would bother to read a text message coming from her at 10 pm. She was positive that he would not actually show up on one of the coldest nights they had had. Yet there he was, with his hands in his pockets, looking at her in that boyish way of his. She felt her heart swell. No matter how much she hated doing other things while driving, she had prepared a speech in her head and was ready to give it but the way he seemed to be pulling away from her was making things harder. The fact that she was in love with him and that he could simply reject her wasn’t helping either.
When she was finally done and her chest felt lighter, she took a deep breath and prepared for the worst. The worst never happened. The lips she yearned for were on hers, his hands were in her hair. She had missed everything about him. She had forgotten all about the cold and also the fact that she had almost lost him forever. When they finally parted, she let out a sigh of relief and remained in his arms, squeezing him tightly before lifting her head to meet his eyes. He was looking back at her with the biggest smile.
“This is a dream come true.” she whispered before reaching for another kiss.
She stopped the car when they were passing by a 24-hour open drugstore. “I need something.” she said and saw him smirk. “I have condoms already at home, you pervert.” she playfully shoved him. “Do you want to join?”
Together they got off the car. “What do you need?” he asked her as they walked hand in hand towards the store. She had missed the feeling of his fingers laced to hers.
“A journal.” she simply replied and led them to the stationery aisle.
“Why do you need a new journal at 11pm on a Thursday?” he asked.
She looked at him and smiled. “For my new dreams.”