Escape Hatch - Part 1
anonymous
June 11 2011, 02:31:53 UTC
A/N: This prompt has been haunting me ever since I saw it (because I have a serious thing for Ben/April that I cannot explain, hopefully I'm not the only one) and since there needs to be at least one fill for them, I thought I'd give it a shot. This got fairly long, so I'll probably post it in stages over the next two days, but it is completely written.
Timeline: This veers off the canon timeline about mid-way through "Media-Blitz" imagining a reality where April never forgave Andy and took the job with Chris and Ben never really recovered from the Perd Hapley debacle so he went back to Indy with Chris before the Harvest Festival went up. So while there is background Andy/April and Leslie/Ben neither one of them are in a relationship. Okay, everyone oriented? Let's go.
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There are days Ben is pretty sure Chris does things just to fuck with him.
Like the time in Wabash when he inexplicably managed to put his hands on wheatgrass and celebrated Ben’s birthday with ‘smoothies for everyone!’
Or the time in Hookersville, when he invited everybody to a town-hall meeting “because we want to hear all of your wonderful ideas” (the fact the town is still named Hookersville should be enough to tell you no one there has even a decent idea, let alone a ‘wonderful’ one).
But this. Hiring April Ludgate as his assistant? This is Chris’s piece de resistance. His Sistine Chapel and Mona Lisa and Hallelujah Chorus all rolled into one.
Chris doesn’t have to come up with ways to fuck with Ben any more. April does it for him.
All the time.
---
It starts with the post-its. Chris’s stupid color-coded post-its with cheerful little messages like “Good job” and “Superstar” and occasionally “Rework budget projections factoring in 3-year tax abatement” (That’s the problem with Chris’s post-its. Every sixth one or so there’s a truly brilliant idea tucked away amidst the unnecessary positive reinforcement, so you can’t just throw them all away. You actually have to read them first).
Except suddenly the post-its have gotten exponentially less positive and a lot more creative. The first one is on his desk one afternoon when he comes back from lunch, simple and eloquent and to the point.
“LOSER”
Ben looks up to find April just staring at him, face completely blank. He looks back down at the note, fiddles with it for about three seconds too long, then tears it up and throws it in the trashcan.
Yeah, that’s his first mistake.
Looking back he realizes he shouldn’t have acknowledged it at all, should have just ignored it completely. Put his files down on top of it and kept on working like it wasn’t even there. But he did and she knows it and she knows it bothered him and now she’s got a new toy. An amusement. A plaything.
It’s a very similar feeling to being the ‘catnip mouse’ dangled from a bit of string when said cat still has her claws.
Timeline: This veers off the canon timeline about mid-way through "Media-Blitz" imagining a reality where April never forgave Andy and took the job with Chris and Ben never really recovered from the Perd Hapley debacle so he went back to Indy with Chris before the Harvest Festival went up. So while there is background Andy/April and Leslie/Ben neither one of them are in a relationship. Okay, everyone oriented? Let's go.
======
There are days Ben is pretty sure Chris does things just to fuck with him.
Like the time in Wabash when he inexplicably managed to put his hands on wheatgrass and celebrated Ben’s birthday with ‘smoothies for everyone!’
Or the time in Hookersville, when he invited everybody to a town-hall meeting “because we want to hear all of your wonderful ideas” (the fact the town is still named Hookersville should be enough to tell you no one there has even a decent idea, let alone a ‘wonderful’ one).
But this. Hiring April Ludgate as his assistant? This is Chris’s piece de resistance. His Sistine Chapel and Mona Lisa and Hallelujah Chorus all rolled into one.
Chris doesn’t have to come up with ways to fuck with Ben any more. April does it for him.
All the time.
---
It starts with the post-its. Chris’s stupid color-coded post-its with cheerful little messages like “Good job” and “Superstar” and occasionally “Rework budget projections factoring in 3-year tax abatement” (That’s the problem with Chris’s post-its. Every sixth one or so there’s a truly brilliant idea tucked away amidst the unnecessary positive reinforcement, so you can’t just throw them all away. You actually have to read them first).
Except suddenly the post-its have gotten exponentially less positive and a lot more creative. The first one is on his desk one afternoon when he comes back from lunch, simple and eloquent and to the point.
“LOSER”
Ben looks up to find April just staring at him, face completely blank. He looks back down at the note, fiddles with it for about three seconds too long, then tears it up and throws it in the trashcan.
Yeah, that’s his first mistake.
Looking back he realizes he shouldn’t have acknowledged it at all, should have just ignored it completely. Put his files down on top of it and kept on working like it wasn’t even there. But he did and she knows it and she knows it bothered him and now she’s got a new toy. An amusement. A plaything.
It’s a very similar feeling to being the ‘catnip mouse’ dangled from a bit of string when said cat still has her claws.
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