Fic:: Nothing Beside Remains [Parks & Rec/Pacific Rim]
Basically another installment of Ben Wyatt and April Ludgate, my favourite sitcom nihilists, otherwise known as Parks and Recreation JAEGER PILOTS. No spoilers for Pacific Rim and none but the tiniest for Parks & Rec.
Fic:: Nothing Beside Remains
by Raven
2500w, Parks and Recreation/Pacific Rim, gen fusion, Ben, April & Leslie.
"I should never have done that." Ben sighs. "Now we have to be human experimental subjects."
i.
It turns out that Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt are not drift-compatible. Leslie's shaking her head, kind of half-hurt, half-baffled.
"It's just that," Ann says, hesitantly, "that some people aren't - with anybody. Leslie, don't look like that!" She puts an arm around Leslie's shoulder and squeezes. "Some people aren't. They just aren't, okay? Some people - outshine all others."
"You're just saying that to make me feel better," Leslie says, into her shoulder.
"What better reason is there to say anything?" Ann demands. "Besides, it's true. It's true, Leslie. Look at me."
Leslie looks at her. Ann sighs. "And now," she goes on, "the bad news."
*
ii.
"You know," Ben says, thoughtfully, "I understood that they wanted to test everyone on the government payroll. I really did. And then they told me I wasn't drift-compatible with my wife. Which is… I can understand it. That I was drift-compatible, in general, but with one of my friends. Which - is okay, it's a thing that happens. And then I thought that being in Chris's head would probably be like bright sunshine when you're hungover, but okay.
"This is not… okay."
April slams a door in his face.
*
iii.
The guy from the government - who wears cheap suits but, weirdly, really nice shoes - looks at Ben and then at April and then back again, and then says: "You're not… married."
"Yes, we are," Ben says, through gritted teeth, "but to other people. Those people, in fact."
The guy gets up and shoos Leslie and Andy away from the glass panel in the door. Their complaints are audible but Doppler-distorted, sounding strange as they head down the hall. Ben and April are in the conference room in the Parks Department, and there's some mysterious machine humming in the background and a lot of wires and electrodes spread out on the table and Ben is thinking, with visceral abruptness, of pictures he saw of the first test subjects, back before they realised they needed two of them. His mind presents him with bleeding eyes and lolling heads before he can stop it and he shudders; the guy glances at him, cool and unnerving, and says, "Ben - it is Ben, isn't it, not Benjamin? Will you hold this wire? And you too, Mrs. Dwyer."
Ben rolls his eyes and catches April on the downswing of doing the same thing; they exchange tiny smiles and both hold out their hands for the wire. It's just a wire, Ben thinks, confusedly; stripped of insulation at the tip, like something out of a high school physics lab. Ben holds one raw-metal end and April holds the other and they look at each other.
"Right," the guy says, and Ben is actually starting to hate him quite a lot. "Normally at this stage I'd say something about pivotal moments in your relationship, but - uh. Have you ever…"
April is thinking that if he says, have you ever had sex, she'll say yes - it'll shut him up and it'll make Ben squirm - but the guy just trails off, looking awkward. "Uh," he says again. "Is there a song you both know?"
"This is ridiculous," Ben says, standing up, letting go of the wire, and weirdly, April feels that - she feels the drop of the wire on the table as though it were on her hand, even though Ben's on the other side, about six feet away - and maybe he gets that, because he sits down again, looking a little confused.
"Ben," the guy says, earnest - April hates him - and clasps his hands. "I understand this is very strange for you. But please try."
"Fine," Ben says, "fine." He lifts a hand, and slowly, deliberately, smiles at April. "Perhaps you're unaware, sir, that April's husband Andy is… uniquely talented."
April gets it. Fluttering her eyelashes, she says, "He's a genius lyricist."
"I lived with April and Andy for some time," Ben continues, with another quick glance at April, "so I was able to witness some of his creative process close-to."
April tells him about "Pickle Hair". Ben tells him about "Sex In Space". They tag-team "5000 Candles in the Wind", humming snatches of it in turn. At lunchtime they slip away to meet their respective partners, moving in swift and easy rhythm down the hall, and they promise to get the guy some Tylenol.
*
iv.
The problem is, "Pickle Hair" is catchy. Later that afternoon, Ben is reading a report at the department conference table, waiting for Leslie to finish up for the day, and April's working out the animal control monthly budget. She's humming, and then he's humming, and they look at each other then deliberately stop, and then a minute later they're doing it again. And then for some reason, Ben's making a quiet clicking sound under his breath, and singing very quietly, I'm not like them / but I can pretend and that's not one of Andy's, but then April remembers, suddenly, when Andy was writing that song and she was playing In Utero a lot, and Nevermind, because it got dark out early and everything, even inside, was wintry and haunted by cold. And it's weird, but she can picture that whole scene so clearly, that album playing in the background, Ben curled up in one corner of the couch, taking up hardly any space, so - and this is the weird part - she thinks she didn't notice he was there, at the time.
"Ben," she says, not sure what she's going to say next, and finds that she's been humming under her breath all this time, too, not "Pennyroyal Tea" or "Dumb" but "All Apologies", which is the last song on that album, and she didn't think she liked it enough to know all the words. "Ben," she says again, "what, what's happening right now" - and then in her mind there's a weird fracturing so her image of her and Andy's living room is still there but different, the furniture newer and sharper at the corners, and there's a picture on the wall she doesn't recognise, something abstract and bright, and then there's the space she knows again but somehow the furniture is different again, and she looks up and says, "Ben, what-"
"My apartment in St. Paul," he says, faintly, "before I came here" - and there's something distorted and doubled about his voice, and April gets up, runs out of the Parks Department and stands still outside, leaning against the mural, and of course it doesn't help, because Ben comes right out after her and he's in her fucking head.
"Actually," Ben says, softly, "I think you're in mine." After a minute, he adds, kind of despairing, "Nirvana, really? This is because of Nirvana?"
April says, "You were already like, a hundred, when he died."
Ben glances at her. "I was eighteen. I'd just been impeached."
"Oh," she says, "oh" - and this is stupid and ridiculous, but she thinks she gets that. "I listen to them a lot," she tells him. "You know. You… lived with me."
"I should never have done that." Ben sighs. "Now we have to be human experimental subjects."
But there's a light inside his mind, something low and burning. "Your head," April half-yells at him, "is full of giant robots!"
He gives her a small, wicked, shy smile. After a moment, grudgingly, she smiles back.
*
v.
The simulations are better than anything April has ever done, including sex. They tell her the Drift will be like this, only more so, but she can't imagine the more so: she can't imagine anything more complete, more complex and effortless. Even so, it's weird that she's doing this with Ben: it should be Andy, of course it should be Andy. She calls him and talks to him after dark about what they're doing, incoherent because she can't explain it, haphazard words standing as ciphers for you can't possibly understand.
And then they're doing one of the sim exercises one day, something simple, using a computer-generated Jaeger to pick a hawk out of the sky, testing those giant claws in their potential for precision. She goes for it with the kind of focus that gets things done, that makes the changes in the world that she wants to see, whether simulated or not, and turns, and aims, and then thinks, through a slow sequence of seconds, that it's lifting from its dive too quickly and she's going to miss, and then, no, she was watching its flight (she wasn't) and extrapolating its path (she wasn't) and they both fly out, mission complete.
That's the first time April understands why you need two.
The guy who trains them both calls it power and presence: like Ben balances April or April takes the passive out of his passive-aggression or some other bullshit thing; April thinks it's that they are really, really fucking good at this. She catches the guy watching them, once, coming out of a sim as though coming up from drowning and walking out of the room still in rhythm, all neat constrained angles, not a superfluous muscle movement between them, and she wonders what that guy is thinking.
*
vi.
(They have a deal. In Ben's mind there's a dim room in summer with rays of sunlight falling over the floor in the patterns of the shutters. April doesn't step inside that light. In April's mind there's a room with the sound of someone strumming a guitar. Ben doesn't open that door.)
*
vii.
They get their letter as expected, a week or two after they've returned to Pawnee. They're done, now, but they're reservists; they need to get on with their lives while they wait, looking out over the ocean, for an attack. "From whatever," the letter concludes sombrely, "quarter that may come."
Leslie grins. "That sounds like they're expecting you to go beat up Europe, like" - and she does a very complicated impression of a Jaeger beating up a bunch of guys who may or may not have berets, or strings of onions around their necks, and she laughs, and Andy laughs, and Ben and April look at the open window, the thousands of miles of land between them and the ocean, and then at each other, hold that gaze, and don't.
And it's not that they don't talk about it, later, because they have to. Ben is thinking that he'll always be looking out in the direction the ocean, now, choosing always to linger next to windows.
"It's not that I'm jealous," Leslie says, from behind him. "You know I'm not."
Ben does know. "You're Leslie Knope," he says, with nothing but fondness.
"It's just," Leslie says, tentatively, "I just. I wonder. What is it that you and April - that Andy and me, we don't…"
Ben says, tiredly, “It’s not what you don’t have, that we have. It’s what we can do, that you can’t.”
“What?” Leslie asks, worry in her voice.
Ben places his hands against the glass, the chill working into his bones, and says, still tiredly: “Kill.”
*
viii.
Kaiju are emerging from the ocean in grand, slimy waves and the Senate Ways and Means Committee is in session.
"Another request for an interview," April tells Ben, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the control space, pulling on her boots. "Why us? Why is it always us?"
"Because we can talk in full sentences," Ben says, grouchy as he adjusts one of the sensors.
That's not it, April knows. "We should hurry," she says, calmly, and Ben nods and reaches for his helmet. It's because, April is thinking, the others are glorious heroes, military pilots and brave cops and robotics engineers, and they look good on the recruiting posters. While the Jaeger Program is before Ways and Means, while the people who do the job that Ben used to do are crunching the numbers, the articles appear in the newspapers: carefully quotidian, with no distant gleam of metal.
"People relate to us," April says, out loud. There will be pictures, too, in the morning editions, of the small-town accountant from Minnesota and the girl who loves animals.
"They shouldn't," Ben says, still adjusting the sensor, and they aren't linked yet, they're not even looking at each other, but it's a moment of perfect understanding.
*
ix.
They beat up the monsters and they come out swinging, because, see above: they are really, really fucking good at this. Just lately the kaiju have started to emerge from the rift two by two, one taking point while the other heads towards the Jaeger, they dance their strange rhythmic dance, and then they switch places. Like us, Ben is thinking, they come in pairs. If Leslie were here she would ask if there's another pair left behind, hoping, waiting.
*
x.
"You okay?" Ben asks, and April nods, and they turn back.
The Jaegers were built with the height of the continental shelf in mind. They come in from the water at a steady pace, then April stops moving and the unlinked part of Ben's consciousness takes a moment to catch on; he smiles a little and they stop, sit down, cross-legged in their tiny, eerily backlit space. April wonders how weirdly cool the Jaeger must look, on the beach, its great robot arms hugging its knees, and gets a scrap of something from Ben, something she doesn't recognise, then an overlay flash from the Drift: an image of a beach, but not this one. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings," she says, suddenly, in a voice not her own, "look upon my works, ye mighty, and…"
"Despair," Ben says, flat. "Sorry. That was intrusive."
"It's okay," April says. "It's… a poem?"
Ben nods, and she feels his dull certainty inside her own flesh. "You think we're not going to win this war."
Ben doesn't say anything. After a while they both stand up and keep on marching, back inland, towards the new world.
end.
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comment(s). Comment there or here.
Fic:: Nothing Beside Remains
by Raven
2500w, Parks and Recreation/Pacific Rim, gen fusion, Ben, April & Leslie.
"I should never have done that." Ben sighs. "Now we have to be human experimental subjects."
i.
It turns out that Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt are not drift-compatible. Leslie's shaking her head, kind of half-hurt, half-baffled.
"It's just that," Ann says, hesitantly, "that some people aren't - with anybody. Leslie, don't look like that!" She puts an arm around Leslie's shoulder and squeezes. "Some people aren't. They just aren't, okay? Some people - outshine all others."
"You're just saying that to make me feel better," Leslie says, into her shoulder.
"What better reason is there to say anything?" Ann demands. "Besides, it's true. It's true, Leslie. Look at me."
Leslie looks at her. Ann sighs. "And now," she goes on, "the bad news."
*
ii.
"You know," Ben says, thoughtfully, "I understood that they wanted to test everyone on the government payroll. I really did. And then they told me I wasn't drift-compatible with my wife. Which is… I can understand it. That I was drift-compatible, in general, but with one of my friends. Which - is okay, it's a thing that happens. And then I thought that being in Chris's head would probably be like bright sunshine when you're hungover, but okay.
"This is not… okay."
April slams a door in his face.
*
iii.
The guy from the government - who wears cheap suits but, weirdly, really nice shoes - looks at Ben and then at April and then back again, and then says: "You're not… married."
"Yes, we are," Ben says, through gritted teeth, "but to other people. Those people, in fact."
The guy gets up and shoos Leslie and Andy away from the glass panel in the door. Their complaints are audible but Doppler-distorted, sounding strange as they head down the hall. Ben and April are in the conference room in the Parks Department, and there's some mysterious machine humming in the background and a lot of wires and electrodes spread out on the table and Ben is thinking, with visceral abruptness, of pictures he saw of the first test subjects, back before they realised they needed two of them. His mind presents him with bleeding eyes and lolling heads before he can stop it and he shudders; the guy glances at him, cool and unnerving, and says, "Ben - it is Ben, isn't it, not Benjamin? Will you hold this wire? And you too, Mrs. Dwyer."
Ben rolls his eyes and catches April on the downswing of doing the same thing; they exchange tiny smiles and both hold out their hands for the wire. It's just a wire, Ben thinks, confusedly; stripped of insulation at the tip, like something out of a high school physics lab. Ben holds one raw-metal end and April holds the other and they look at each other.
"Right," the guy says, and Ben is actually starting to hate him quite a lot. "Normally at this stage I'd say something about pivotal moments in your relationship, but - uh. Have you ever…"
April is thinking that if he says, have you ever had sex, she'll say yes - it'll shut him up and it'll make Ben squirm - but the guy just trails off, looking awkward. "Uh," he says again. "Is there a song you both know?"
"This is ridiculous," Ben says, standing up, letting go of the wire, and weirdly, April feels that - she feels the drop of the wire on the table as though it were on her hand, even though Ben's on the other side, about six feet away - and maybe he gets that, because he sits down again, looking a little confused.
"Ben," the guy says, earnest - April hates him - and clasps his hands. "I understand this is very strange for you. But please try."
"Fine," Ben says, "fine." He lifts a hand, and slowly, deliberately, smiles at April. "Perhaps you're unaware, sir, that April's husband Andy is… uniquely talented."
April gets it. Fluttering her eyelashes, she says, "He's a genius lyricist."
"I lived with April and Andy for some time," Ben continues, with another quick glance at April, "so I was able to witness some of his creative process close-to."
April tells him about "Pickle Hair". Ben tells him about "Sex In Space". They tag-team "5000 Candles in the Wind", humming snatches of it in turn. At lunchtime they slip away to meet their respective partners, moving in swift and easy rhythm down the hall, and they promise to get the guy some Tylenol.
*
iv.
The problem is, "Pickle Hair" is catchy. Later that afternoon, Ben is reading a report at the department conference table, waiting for Leslie to finish up for the day, and April's working out the animal control monthly budget. She's humming, and then he's humming, and they look at each other then deliberately stop, and then a minute later they're doing it again. And then for some reason, Ben's making a quiet clicking sound under his breath, and singing very quietly, I'm not like them / but I can pretend and that's not one of Andy's, but then April remembers, suddenly, when Andy was writing that song and she was playing In Utero a lot, and Nevermind, because it got dark out early and everything, even inside, was wintry and haunted by cold. And it's weird, but she can picture that whole scene so clearly, that album playing in the background, Ben curled up in one corner of the couch, taking up hardly any space, so - and this is the weird part - she thinks she didn't notice he was there, at the time.
"Ben," she says, not sure what she's going to say next, and finds that she's been humming under her breath all this time, too, not "Pennyroyal Tea" or "Dumb" but "All Apologies", which is the last song on that album, and she didn't think she liked it enough to know all the words. "Ben," she says again, "what, what's happening right now" - and then in her mind there's a weird fracturing so her image of her and Andy's living room is still there but different, the furniture newer and sharper at the corners, and there's a picture on the wall she doesn't recognise, something abstract and bright, and then there's the space she knows again but somehow the furniture is different again, and she looks up and says, "Ben, what-"
"My apartment in St. Paul," he says, faintly, "before I came here" - and there's something distorted and doubled about his voice, and April gets up, runs out of the Parks Department and stands still outside, leaning against the mural, and of course it doesn't help, because Ben comes right out after her and he's in her fucking head.
"Actually," Ben says, softly, "I think you're in mine." After a minute, he adds, kind of despairing, "Nirvana, really? This is because of Nirvana?"
April says, "You were already like, a hundred, when he died."
Ben glances at her. "I was eighteen. I'd just been impeached."
"Oh," she says, "oh" - and this is stupid and ridiculous, but she thinks she gets that. "I listen to them a lot," she tells him. "You know. You… lived with me."
"I should never have done that." Ben sighs. "Now we have to be human experimental subjects."
But there's a light inside his mind, something low and burning. "Your head," April half-yells at him, "is full of giant robots!"
He gives her a small, wicked, shy smile. After a moment, grudgingly, she smiles back.
*
v.
The simulations are better than anything April has ever done, including sex. They tell her the Drift will be like this, only more so, but she can't imagine the more so: she can't imagine anything more complete, more complex and effortless. Even so, it's weird that she's doing this with Ben: it should be Andy, of course it should be Andy. She calls him and talks to him after dark about what they're doing, incoherent because she can't explain it, haphazard words standing as ciphers for you can't possibly understand.
And then they're doing one of the sim exercises one day, something simple, using a computer-generated Jaeger to pick a hawk out of the sky, testing those giant claws in their potential for precision. She goes for it with the kind of focus that gets things done, that makes the changes in the world that she wants to see, whether simulated or not, and turns, and aims, and then thinks, through a slow sequence of seconds, that it's lifting from its dive too quickly and she's going to miss, and then, no, she was watching its flight (she wasn't) and extrapolating its path (she wasn't) and they both fly out, mission complete.
That's the first time April understands why you need two.
The guy who trains them both calls it power and presence: like Ben balances April or April takes the passive out of his passive-aggression or some other bullshit thing; April thinks it's that they are really, really fucking good at this. She catches the guy watching them, once, coming out of a sim as though coming up from drowning and walking out of the room still in rhythm, all neat constrained angles, not a superfluous muscle movement between them, and she wonders what that guy is thinking.
*
vi.
(They have a deal. In Ben's mind there's a dim room in summer with rays of sunlight falling over the floor in the patterns of the shutters. April doesn't step inside that light. In April's mind there's a room with the sound of someone strumming a guitar. Ben doesn't open that door.)
*
vii.
They get their letter as expected, a week or two after they've returned to Pawnee. They're done, now, but they're reservists; they need to get on with their lives while they wait, looking out over the ocean, for an attack. "From whatever," the letter concludes sombrely, "quarter that may come."
Leslie grins. "That sounds like they're expecting you to go beat up Europe, like" - and she does a very complicated impression of a Jaeger beating up a bunch of guys who may or may not have berets, or strings of onions around their necks, and she laughs, and Andy laughs, and Ben and April look at the open window, the thousands of miles of land between them and the ocean, and then at each other, hold that gaze, and don't.
And it's not that they don't talk about it, later, because they have to. Ben is thinking that he'll always be looking out in the direction the ocean, now, choosing always to linger next to windows.
"It's not that I'm jealous," Leslie says, from behind him. "You know I'm not."
Ben does know. "You're Leslie Knope," he says, with nothing but fondness.
"It's just," Leslie says, tentatively, "I just. I wonder. What is it that you and April - that Andy and me, we don't…"
Ben says, tiredly, “It’s not what you don’t have, that we have. It’s what we can do, that you can’t.”
“What?” Leslie asks, worry in her voice.
Ben places his hands against the glass, the chill working into his bones, and says, still tiredly: “Kill.”
*
viii.
Kaiju are emerging from the ocean in grand, slimy waves and the Senate Ways and Means Committee is in session.
"Another request for an interview," April tells Ben, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the control space, pulling on her boots. "Why us? Why is it always us?"
"Because we can talk in full sentences," Ben says, grouchy as he adjusts one of the sensors.
That's not it, April knows. "We should hurry," she says, calmly, and Ben nods and reaches for his helmet. It's because, April is thinking, the others are glorious heroes, military pilots and brave cops and robotics engineers, and they look good on the recruiting posters. While the Jaeger Program is before Ways and Means, while the people who do the job that Ben used to do are crunching the numbers, the articles appear in the newspapers: carefully quotidian, with no distant gleam of metal.
"People relate to us," April says, out loud. There will be pictures, too, in the morning editions, of the small-town accountant from Minnesota and the girl who loves animals.
"They shouldn't," Ben says, still adjusting the sensor, and they aren't linked yet, they're not even looking at each other, but it's a moment of perfect understanding.
*
ix.
They beat up the monsters and they come out swinging, because, see above: they are really, really fucking good at this. Just lately the kaiju have started to emerge from the rift two by two, one taking point while the other heads towards the Jaeger, they dance their strange rhythmic dance, and then they switch places. Like us, Ben is thinking, they come in pairs. If Leslie were here she would ask if there's another pair left behind, hoping, waiting.
*
x.
"You okay?" Ben asks, and April nods, and they turn back.
The Jaegers were built with the height of the continental shelf in mind. They come in from the water at a steady pace, then April stops moving and the unlinked part of Ben's consciousness takes a moment to catch on; he smiles a little and they stop, sit down, cross-legged in their tiny, eerily backlit space. April wonders how weirdly cool the Jaeger must look, on the beach, its great robot arms hugging its knees, and gets a scrap of something from Ben, something she doesn't recognise, then an overlay flash from the Drift: an image of a beach, but not this one. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings," she says, suddenly, in a voice not her own, "look upon my works, ye mighty, and…"
"Despair," Ben says, flat. "Sorry. That was intrusive."
"It's okay," April says. "It's… a poem?"
Ben nods, and she feels his dull certainty inside her own flesh. "You think we're not going to win this war."
Ben doesn't say anything. After a while they both stand up and keep on marching, back inland, towards the new world.
end.
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comment(s). Comment there or here.