Behind Closed Doors Fic: The Team - Ben POV (3 of 3)
Length: About 800 words
Rating: R
Summary: Ben's last night in Pawnee before heading to Washington
He’s pretending to read an old copy of Newsweek that Leslie had on her bedside table for some reason, as he waits for her to finish in the bathroom.
After finishing his last bits of packing and saying his goodbyes to Andy and April - via a final slice of leftover pizza he shared with Andy, and really, just a single look he shared with April - he’d come over here as Leslie had instructed him. It was going to be a surprise, she’d said with a glint in her eye, a super-special secret surprise, what she had planned for his last night in Pawnee. He really had no idea what to expect. A petting zoo? Hot air balloons? A mariachi band?
But then when he arrived, there was none of that. Instead, she met him at the door in jeans and a t-shirt and a ponytail and welcomed him to their “normal, boring, everyday, regular evening.” Instead of a big party, or a fancy dinner out, or a special event, the idea was to act as if he wasn’t really leaving - to spend the nothing-special evening together that they’d have had if it wasn’t his last night in town.
So all evening, they've been trying to take each other for granted.
They ordered in Chinese food, and ate and drank beer while they watched Groundhog Day, and she put her legs in his lap, and when they shut the movie off they watched the news for a few minutes. All as if it were a nice, boring, ho-hum Thursday night.
They couldn't quite make it work, though. They tried to talk about the next few months as if they were no big deal, making travel plans for weekends or talking about what Ben might be doing in Washington or gossiping about someone in Pawnee, but every so often there was a note of bravado that crept into their voices, so they’d have to say something else, like “pass the soy sauce,” or even "well then." It didn’t escape his notice that Leslie skipped both the Pawnee news and the national news - neither of them was working at the state level so the Indianapolis news was the only safe one to watch tonight.
And now that he’s alone, waiting for her, it feels completely surreal. Her bedroom, with its soft colours and the lamp’s warm yellowish light, and he isn’t going to be here any more. The job, and Washington, feel like abstractions as he inhales the scent of Leslie’s room, and Leslie, and the night air, and he can’t believe, in his core, that he won’t be here tomorrow, while at the same time he knows he won’t, and, worse, he knows that once he’s on his way, he’ll be excited to be there.
It’s so different from the last time he lay in this bed and knew it was the last time he would be here. That time, for all that he knew he wasn’t being selfish, there was an element of wanting to take, take what he could while he could.
This time they’re both in this, they both know. And he knows he’ll be back. But the wrench of having to leave, he can feel it already, that ache in his gut. This time he doesn’t want to take; he wants to give to her, make her feel whole about it, and about him, even if their physical connection is going to be lost for a while, because this time the separation is about him, and she’s given him this opportunity to go and know it’s been her choice too, for him.
By the time she emerges from the bathroom in her bathrobe, fresh-scrubbed and a little shaky-looking herself, as if she's been thinking about the same things, he’s ready to throw out the pretense that this is a normal evening. She just won a damn election, and he is about to go to Washington, for god’s sake.
So as soon as she gets close enough, he reaches for her, and pulls her down on his chest, and he kisses her, and she kisses him, because she was reaching for him too, and suddenly she’s clutching at him like she did that night when she just couldn’t let him call her Khaleesi because of what she’d had to do with the pillow, and he can feel her tears on his face.
He pulls back, and wipes his palm across her wet cheeks to hold her face in his hands and simply says, “Hey.”
But she can’t look at him, she kisses him again, fiercely.
And suddenly he can’t wait, he wants her so badly, and it’s not even remotely possible to pretend that they have all the time in the world, he needs her right now, right away, and she is the same. So it’s all passionate and quick and a little messy and they leave the light on and the door open and they don’t care and he might have left a tiny bite mark at the base of her throat and he knows he’s got little half-moon marks on his shoulder from her fingernails, and then they collapse, panting, sweaty, and afterwards she laughs - she laughs! - and she turns to him and says “Well, maybe we won’t do that all over Washington” and he laughs too and pulls her close and tries not to think about Washington and they both go very quiet.
The next scene in the sequence (Leslie POV) is here.
You thought we were done with Ben, but no! The bonus, ripped-from-the-headlines scene from Ben's POV is here.
As I was writing this I was thinking of it as picking up from something else I wrote a while back: You're Leslie Knope, so maybe that would be interesting to take a look at as well.
Rating: R
Summary: Ben's last night in Pawnee before heading to Washington
He’s pretending to read an old copy of Newsweek that Leslie had on her bedside table for some reason, as he waits for her to finish in the bathroom.
After finishing his last bits of packing and saying his goodbyes to Andy and April - via a final slice of leftover pizza he shared with Andy, and really, just a single look he shared with April - he’d come over here as Leslie had instructed him. It was going to be a surprise, she’d said with a glint in her eye, a super-special secret surprise, what she had planned for his last night in Pawnee. He really had no idea what to expect. A petting zoo? Hot air balloons? A mariachi band?
But then when he arrived, there was none of that. Instead, she met him at the door in jeans and a t-shirt and a ponytail and welcomed him to their “normal, boring, everyday, regular evening.” Instead of a big party, or a fancy dinner out, or a special event, the idea was to act as if he wasn’t really leaving - to spend the nothing-special evening together that they’d have had if it wasn’t his last night in town.
So all evening, they've been trying to take each other for granted.
They ordered in Chinese food, and ate and drank beer while they watched Groundhog Day, and she put her legs in his lap, and when they shut the movie off they watched the news for a few minutes. All as if it were a nice, boring, ho-hum Thursday night.
They couldn't quite make it work, though. They tried to talk about the next few months as if they were no big deal, making travel plans for weekends or talking about what Ben might be doing in Washington or gossiping about someone in Pawnee, but every so often there was a note of bravado that crept into their voices, so they’d have to say something else, like “pass the soy sauce,” or even "well then." It didn’t escape his notice that Leslie skipped both the Pawnee news and the national news - neither of them was working at the state level so the Indianapolis news was the only safe one to watch tonight.
And now that he’s alone, waiting for her, it feels completely surreal. Her bedroom, with its soft colours and the lamp’s warm yellowish light, and he isn’t going to be here any more. The job, and Washington, feel like abstractions as he inhales the scent of Leslie’s room, and Leslie, and the night air, and he can’t believe, in his core, that he won’t be here tomorrow, while at the same time he knows he won’t, and, worse, he knows that once he’s on his way, he’ll be excited to be there.
It’s so different from the last time he lay in this bed and knew it was the last time he would be here. That time, for all that he knew he wasn’t being selfish, there was an element of wanting to take, take what he could while he could.
This time they’re both in this, they both know. And he knows he’ll be back. But the wrench of having to leave, he can feel it already, that ache in his gut. This time he doesn’t want to take; he wants to give to her, make her feel whole about it, and about him, even if their physical connection is going to be lost for a while, because this time the separation is about him, and she’s given him this opportunity to go and know it’s been her choice too, for him.
By the time she emerges from the bathroom in her bathrobe, fresh-scrubbed and a little shaky-looking herself, as if she's been thinking about the same things, he’s ready to throw out the pretense that this is a normal evening. She just won a damn election, and he is about to go to Washington, for god’s sake.
So as soon as she gets close enough, he reaches for her, and pulls her down on his chest, and he kisses her, and she kisses him, because she was reaching for him too, and suddenly she’s clutching at him like she did that night when she just couldn’t let him call her Khaleesi because of what she’d had to do with the pillow, and he can feel her tears on his face.
He pulls back, and wipes his palm across her wet cheeks to hold her face in his hands and simply says, “Hey.”
But she can’t look at him, she kisses him again, fiercely.
And suddenly he can’t wait, he wants her so badly, and it’s not even remotely possible to pretend that they have all the time in the world, he needs her right now, right away, and she is the same. So it’s all passionate and quick and a little messy and they leave the light on and the door open and they don’t care and he might have left a tiny bite mark at the base of her throat and he knows he’s got little half-moon marks on his shoulder from her fingernails, and then they collapse, panting, sweaty, and afterwards she laughs - she laughs! - and she turns to him and says “Well, maybe we won’t do that all over Washington” and he laughs too and pulls her close and tries not to think about Washington and they both go very quiet.
The next scene in the sequence (Leslie POV) is here.
You thought we were done with Ben, but no! The bonus, ripped-from-the-headlines scene from Ben's POV is here.
As I was writing this I was thinking of it as picking up from something else I wrote a while back: You're Leslie Knope, so maybe that would be interesting to take a look at as well.