Go Big, Go Home (Part 1/?)
Rating: PG 13 in this episode (swearing)
Timeline/Spoilers: Takes off from somewhere between "Pawnee Rangers" and "Meet and Greet" - AU from there. (The only spoilers I've read beyond this - which are really minimal - aren't really consistent with where this is going.)
Word count: about 2300
Summary: Leslie and Ben both have some work to do after they break up. Hijinks ensue. If you can say that about responsible grownups like these two.
Thanks to rikyl and stillscape for all the help and encouragement! And to the ficathon for all the prompts, some of which might be addressed in upcoming parts.
Comments are the best thing ever - tell me what you think!
Ben’s hoping to avoid getting puked on.
“You’re doing fine.”
“Really? Because she looks like she’s not happy. Are you happy, Lilah?”
“She’s fine. She just makes that face when she... oh, hang on, let me take her.”
“Oh, okay, yup, by all means.”
While his brother changes the baby, Ben wanders into the kitchen and tackles the breakfast dishes. They’ve had as lazy a Saturday morning as you can have with a 6 week old in the house, but it’s noon, so he figures it’s time to help out. He only comes here about once a year, usually, but his brother’s Chicago kitchen is still a familiar enough place for him; things are predictable.
He looks out the kitchen window into their neighbours’ small back yards. He used to live in a boring box of an apartment in Indianapolis - if you can call it living there when he was on the road so much. But somehow, even though it’s an actual house, this feels more urban to him, more crowded, with neighbors able to see into each other’s lives. He does appreciate the possibility of just walking out to grab a coffee or have dinner, but it’s never inspired envy, never felt like something he wanted for himself. Not even when home was a crappy motel room in Upper Nowheresville, Indiana. Maybe he’s just a small town guy at heart.
Paul comes back in with Lilah, who’s wearing a fresh sleeper and looking bright-eyed. He puts her in a bouncy chair on the counter, set carefully back from the edge, and she settles in to survey the scene. He pulls sandwich ingredients from the fridge and cupboards, while Ben finishes the dishes and starts another pot of coffee.
“Emma’s really sleeping the sleep of the dead. Sweetheart, your mama is tired out. How many times are you waking her up in the night, hey? I’d be so dead if it were me.”
“What, you don’t have some sleep banked from when you were a teenager?”
Paul chuckles at this. “Wouldn’t that be fricking great if that was how it worked? Nah, it’s not so bad, really. Law school was worse.”
Ben moves over to the baby, takes a little foot and starts to waggle it around. She smiles at him; at least he thinks she does. Maybe it’s just gas again. “Hey, you. Are you just giving your parents a hard time? Is that it?”
“So, listen, what’s up with you?”
Ben stays focused on the baby. “Not much. Finishing up budget season.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Ben starts waggling his fingers in front of Lilah’s face. She follows his hand with her eyes - not very well, but he figures she’s just getting the hang of watching things.
“You’ve been there a year, right? Is it weird to be staying in one place?”
“No, that’s not it...” Ben’s voice peters out.
“But I’m on to something.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Is it the woman you were seeing?”
Ben looks up, meets his brother’s eye. Paul’s still putting sandwiches together, but he’s giving Ben an appraising look.
Paul is four years older, and took Ben on as a roommate when he needed to leave Partridge, just before Paul himself was starting law school in Madison. The only problem with a brother like that is that you end up not being able to bluff him.
“Mostly.”
“And you still have to see her at work every day.”
“Not every day.” Ben looks down, not quite at the baby.
“Ouch.” Paul lets the silence fall into the room, only for a moment. “But it’s not entirely about her, is it?”
“No. I mean...” Ben straightens up, but keeps a finger in his niece’s tiny fist. “I did decide to stay there because of her, or at least partly. Mostly. I don’t know any more.”
“So what’s keeping you there now?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I still mostly feel like I’m in the right place. If anywhere can be. Despite everything. I certainly don’t feel like picking up and moving back to Indianapolis. Not that I ever really lived there much either. But...”
“So maybe it’s not the place that’s the problem.”
“Meaning...?”
“Maybe it’s you. I mean, maybe it’s not the geographical location; it’s your place. In general.”
Paul slides him a mug of coffee, and Ben turns as he drinks so his body is between the mug and the baby, who’s still got his finger in a deathgrip.
“Look, you did a job where you moved around constantly for, what, a decade or so, and now you’ve plunked yourself in a small city. It’s quite a switch. I think the trick is, figure out why you made this switch in the first place. There had to be more going on than a crush on a woman. Even if it had worked out with her, you’d still need to figure that out eventually, right?”
“Figure what out?”
“What you really want to be when you grow up.”
“Yes, thank you, that’s a small, manageable question. I feel much better.” Ben puts his mug on the counter, carefully far from Lilah.
“Well, I’m a father now. I have more practical concerns to deal with, so I have to make sure other people are having the appropriate existential crises.”
He puts a plate in front of Ben. “Here. You better practice eating one-handed in case you ever decide to do this yourself.”
Ben glances at Paul, frowning.
“Oh, shit. Sorry. Bad timing for that kind of thing.” Paul claps his arm around Ben’s shoulder briefly as he heads toward the laundry room.
Ben turns to watch his brother go, then looks back at Lilah. This time she’s definitely smiling. He smiles back.
“Sweetie, your father can be such an asshole.”
And he raises an eyebrow at her before taking a huge bite of the sandwich. With one hand.
********
It’s a quiet day at the Parks Department. April is scratching messages into her desk; Donna’s catching up on paperwork; everyone else is at meetings, except Ron who is in the courtyard staring down a pigeon.
Andy is heading back to his office, which means he jumps across the permits desk and tumbles to the floor, which then gives Donna time to get up and block his way before he gets up and through the glass door.
“Let’s talk about your roommate.”
Andy straightens his tieclip. “April?”
Donna glares. “No, your actual roommate.”
“Ohhh! Ben!”
“Yeah, genius, the guy, the one you aren’t married to. What’s his type?”
“His type? What, woman...lywise?”
“Uh-huh. I figure it’s time to fix him up with somebody local. Get him past his breakup and down the road to nerd love.”
“Hah! He doesn’t have a breakup to get over!”
“Shows what you know. What, you don’t notice when he’s not around?”
“Not really. When he’s home he mostly stays in his room anyhow. Unless he wants to play Mario Kart.”
“That only happened once. And he sucked.” Donna hadn’t realized April was listening.
Andy giggles “Yeah, he did.”
He scratches his head. “Wow, I am so wrong about this stuff. I totally thought that was gonna happen.” Andy looks toward his office.
“What are you talking about, roller-skater?”
“Well, I guess since he’s been dating someone else it’s over and done with now, but you’d think he’d have told me, since we’re brothers and all...”
Donna stares.
“Ben used to like Leslie. And he thought she liked him too. But that was ages ago. And it was against the rules because they both work at City Hall, which I thought would have been super-hot, actually.” He turns to April. “Babe, do you know who Ben was going out with?”
“No. Probably someone lame. Who was into, like, government and Harry Potter and stuff.”
Donna looks at April, waits. After a beat, April looks up, lifts an eyebrow ever so slightly. Donna raises both of hers, with more emphasis.
We’ve got to do something about this.
Yeah. I guess.
“But who would he like? Donna wants to find him someone new.”
April looks back down at the desk. “I don’t know... Lara Croft crossed with Beyonce, maybe.”
“Great, honey, that’s awesome - Donna, that’s the person to find. That’s so nice of you!”
There is almost-perfect understanding at the Parks Department.
******
Leslie pushes her door open, brushing against an apparently unstable stack of unread newspapers, which tumbles down. Onto her foot. Dammit. And, ouch. She steps over it and heads into the kitchen, where she opens the fridge and takes a shot of whipped cream directly from the can. What is the point of living alone if you can’t do this kind of thing when you want to without being judged?
Although, to be fair, not everyone judges you - even if they do, maybe, see you, say, pouring chocolate syrup into your mug and drinking it, without even having any coffee in the mug in question, maybe, sometimes, all they do in that case is come up and kiss you and grin down at you like an idiot and tell you that you taste like chocolate. And then kiss you again.
But there are judgemental people out there, and she’s really glad none of them is in her house at the moment.
Still clutching the can, she shuffles back into the living room and settles on the couch, grabbing the remote as she bounces into the cushions. She punches in the channel, and settles back for a moment. Congressional hearings on the deficit? Which she thinks she might have seen last night, even? That’s beyond perfect for what she needs right now - she’s got to make a schedule and create customized talking points for visits to key business owners to talk with about her candidacy. William and Elizabeth had some ideas for her today, but she’s got to make sure they are including all the vendors who have helped her out in the past - with the Freddy Spaghetti concert, with Harvest Festival, with Camp Athena.
She’s brought home the summary report for each of those projects, and takes in just a little breath when she turns to the budget page in the Harvest Festival document, with Ben’s handwritten notes in the margins. But then she works steadily, only pausing every so often to yell at the television, and for a shot of whipped cream.
After an hour, her phone timer goes off, and she makes a couple of quick final notes before closing her binder.
She flips the TV to the science fiction channel, and uncoils herself from the couch. In her bedroom, she changes out of her blazer and work clothes into flannel pajama pants and an old Camp Athena t-shirt. Her hair is briskly caught up in a couple of ponytails, and, just like that, she has switched gears.
Three hours later, the timer on her phone goes off again. She emerges from the spare room closet, wiping her forehead with her wrist and blowing the stray hairs off her cheek with a sideways puff.
She surveys the room; there are bins ready to go to the women’s shelter, bags of recycling and garbage, and only a few neat stacks of things on the bed that still need to find a place at her house. The room is otherwise clean and decluttered. She grabs a bag to start hauling it out.
Once the bags and bins from the guest room are stashed in the garage along with all the others, she finds a blue padfolio on the dining room table, crosses “guest room” off a list. She starts
a new shopping list; more bins, bags, and cleaning supplies, because she’s running out faster than she’d anticipated. She adds a few items to her to-do list, including dropping off a load of donated items at the women’s shelter tomorrow, so they can get into use faster, and also because she wouldn’t be able to fit any more into her car if she waited until she finished the next room.
Flipping to a calendar, she writes “basement” into the next three days, considers, and then adds a fourth day.
Not many rooms left on the list now.
She wanders back into the spare room, and stands in the middle, looking around her. It still has plenty of stuff in it, but it’s just a normal amount of stuff now. The things she loves most are still here; her grandmother’s mahogany dresser, and her childhood bookshelf with her old bunny perched on it. Most of her favourite books are still there, too - she could only bring herself to send about a third of them to the childcare centre. She considers, with a tinge of regret, her spare copy of Go, Dog, Go.
She takes a deep breath, and lets it out, slowly. She steps back into the hallway, shutting off the light and closing the door behind her.
Then she takes a quick shower to wash off the grime, puts on an oversized Harvest Festival t-shirt, and finally slides into bed. She reaches under the covers to pull out a pillow, throwing one arm over it and curling up. Even though it doesn’t really smell like Ben any more, and maybe she should just throw the pillowcase in the wash after all these weeks, she presses her face into it anyhow, inhaling deeply.
She’s asleep within a couple of minutes, thinking about her next campaign speech. If she’s going to be multi-tasking by practicing while she’s sleeping, she might as well be thinking about the right speech, she figures. Even if there’s nobody there to give her any feedback in the morning. Part Two.
Timeline/Spoilers: Takes off from somewhere between "Pawnee Rangers" and "Meet and Greet" - AU from there. (The only spoilers I've read beyond this - which are really minimal - aren't really consistent with where this is going.)
Word count: about 2300
Summary: Leslie and Ben both have some work to do after they break up. Hijinks ensue. If you can say that about responsible grownups like these two.
Thanks to rikyl and stillscape for all the help and encouragement! And to the ficathon for all the prompts, some of which might be addressed in upcoming parts.
Comments are the best thing ever - tell me what you think!
Ben’s hoping to avoid getting puked on.
“You’re doing fine.”
“Really? Because she looks like she’s not happy. Are you happy, Lilah?”
“She’s fine. She just makes that face when she... oh, hang on, let me take her.”
“Oh, okay, yup, by all means.”
While his brother changes the baby, Ben wanders into the kitchen and tackles the breakfast dishes. They’ve had as lazy a Saturday morning as you can have with a 6 week old in the house, but it’s noon, so he figures it’s time to help out. He only comes here about once a year, usually, but his brother’s Chicago kitchen is still a familiar enough place for him; things are predictable.
He looks out the kitchen window into their neighbours’ small back yards. He used to live in a boring box of an apartment in Indianapolis - if you can call it living there when he was on the road so much. But somehow, even though it’s an actual house, this feels more urban to him, more crowded, with neighbors able to see into each other’s lives. He does appreciate the possibility of just walking out to grab a coffee or have dinner, but it’s never inspired envy, never felt like something he wanted for himself. Not even when home was a crappy motel room in Upper Nowheresville, Indiana. Maybe he’s just a small town guy at heart.
Paul comes back in with Lilah, who’s wearing a fresh sleeper and looking bright-eyed. He puts her in a bouncy chair on the counter, set carefully back from the edge, and she settles in to survey the scene. He pulls sandwich ingredients from the fridge and cupboards, while Ben finishes the dishes and starts another pot of coffee.
“Emma’s really sleeping the sleep of the dead. Sweetheart, your mama is tired out. How many times are you waking her up in the night, hey? I’d be so dead if it were me.”
“What, you don’t have some sleep banked from when you were a teenager?”
Paul chuckles at this. “Wouldn’t that be fricking great if that was how it worked? Nah, it’s not so bad, really. Law school was worse.”
Ben moves over to the baby, takes a little foot and starts to waggle it around. She smiles at him; at least he thinks she does. Maybe it’s just gas again. “Hey, you. Are you just giving your parents a hard time? Is that it?”
“So, listen, what’s up with you?”
Ben stays focused on the baby. “Not much. Finishing up budget season.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Ben starts waggling his fingers in front of Lilah’s face. She follows his hand with her eyes - not very well, but he figures she’s just getting the hang of watching things.
“You’ve been there a year, right? Is it weird to be staying in one place?”
“No, that’s not it...” Ben’s voice peters out.
“But I’m on to something.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Is it the woman you were seeing?”
Ben looks up, meets his brother’s eye. Paul’s still putting sandwiches together, but he’s giving Ben an appraising look.
Paul is four years older, and took Ben on as a roommate when he needed to leave Partridge, just before Paul himself was starting law school in Madison. The only problem with a brother like that is that you end up not being able to bluff him.
“Mostly.”
“And you still have to see her at work every day.”
“Not every day.” Ben looks down, not quite at the baby.
“Ouch.” Paul lets the silence fall into the room, only for a moment. “But it’s not entirely about her, is it?”
“No. I mean...” Ben straightens up, but keeps a finger in his niece’s tiny fist. “I did decide to stay there because of her, or at least partly. Mostly. I don’t know any more.”
“So what’s keeping you there now?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I still mostly feel like I’m in the right place. If anywhere can be. Despite everything. I certainly don’t feel like picking up and moving back to Indianapolis. Not that I ever really lived there much either. But...”
“So maybe it’s not the place that’s the problem.”
“Meaning...?”
“Maybe it’s you. I mean, maybe it’s not the geographical location; it’s your place. In general.”
Paul slides him a mug of coffee, and Ben turns as he drinks so his body is between the mug and the baby, who’s still got his finger in a deathgrip.
“Look, you did a job where you moved around constantly for, what, a decade or so, and now you’ve plunked yourself in a small city. It’s quite a switch. I think the trick is, figure out why you made this switch in the first place. There had to be more going on than a crush on a woman. Even if it had worked out with her, you’d still need to figure that out eventually, right?”
“Figure what out?”
“What you really want to be when you grow up.”
“Yes, thank you, that’s a small, manageable question. I feel much better.” Ben puts his mug on the counter, carefully far from Lilah.
“Well, I’m a father now. I have more practical concerns to deal with, so I have to make sure other people are having the appropriate existential crises.”
He puts a plate in front of Ben. “Here. You better practice eating one-handed in case you ever decide to do this yourself.”
Ben glances at Paul, frowning.
“Oh, shit. Sorry. Bad timing for that kind of thing.” Paul claps his arm around Ben’s shoulder briefly as he heads toward the laundry room.
Ben turns to watch his brother go, then looks back at Lilah. This time she’s definitely smiling. He smiles back.
“Sweetie, your father can be such an asshole.”
And he raises an eyebrow at her before taking a huge bite of the sandwich. With one hand.
********
It’s a quiet day at the Parks Department. April is scratching messages into her desk; Donna’s catching up on paperwork; everyone else is at meetings, except Ron who is in the courtyard staring down a pigeon.
Andy is heading back to his office, which means he jumps across the permits desk and tumbles to the floor, which then gives Donna time to get up and block his way before he gets up and through the glass door.
“Let’s talk about your roommate.”
Andy straightens his tieclip. “April?”
Donna glares. “No, your actual roommate.”
“Ohhh! Ben!”
“Yeah, genius, the guy, the one you aren’t married to. What’s his type?”
“His type? What, woman...lywise?”
“Uh-huh. I figure it’s time to fix him up with somebody local. Get him past his breakup and down the road to nerd love.”
“Hah! He doesn’t have a breakup to get over!”
“Shows what you know. What, you don’t notice when he’s not around?”
“Not really. When he’s home he mostly stays in his room anyhow. Unless he wants to play Mario Kart.”
“That only happened once. And he sucked.” Donna hadn’t realized April was listening.
Andy giggles “Yeah, he did.”
He scratches his head. “Wow, I am so wrong about this stuff. I totally thought that was gonna happen.” Andy looks toward his office.
“What are you talking about, roller-skater?”
“Well, I guess since he’s been dating someone else it’s over and done with now, but you’d think he’d have told me, since we’re brothers and all...”
Donna stares.
“Ben used to like Leslie. And he thought she liked him too. But that was ages ago. And it was against the rules because they both work at City Hall, which I thought would have been super-hot, actually.” He turns to April. “Babe, do you know who Ben was going out with?”
“No. Probably someone lame. Who was into, like, government and Harry Potter and stuff.”
Donna looks at April, waits. After a beat, April looks up, lifts an eyebrow ever so slightly. Donna raises both of hers, with more emphasis.
We’ve got to do something about this.
Yeah. I guess.
“But who would he like? Donna wants to find him someone new.”
April looks back down at the desk. “I don’t know... Lara Croft crossed with Beyonce, maybe.”
“Great, honey, that’s awesome - Donna, that’s the person to find. That’s so nice of you!”
There is almost-perfect understanding at the Parks Department.
******
Leslie pushes her door open, brushing against an apparently unstable stack of unread newspapers, which tumbles down. Onto her foot. Dammit. And, ouch. She steps over it and heads into the kitchen, where she opens the fridge and takes a shot of whipped cream directly from the can. What is the point of living alone if you can’t do this kind of thing when you want to without being judged?
Although, to be fair, not everyone judges you - even if they do, maybe, see you, say, pouring chocolate syrup into your mug and drinking it, without even having any coffee in the mug in question, maybe, sometimes, all they do in that case is come up and kiss you and grin down at you like an idiot and tell you that you taste like chocolate. And then kiss you again.
But there are judgemental people out there, and she’s really glad none of them is in her house at the moment.
Still clutching the can, she shuffles back into the living room and settles on the couch, grabbing the remote as she bounces into the cushions. She punches in the channel, and settles back for a moment. Congressional hearings on the deficit? Which she thinks she might have seen last night, even? That’s beyond perfect for what she needs right now - she’s got to make a schedule and create customized talking points for visits to key business owners to talk with about her candidacy. William and Elizabeth had some ideas for her today, but she’s got to make sure they are including all the vendors who have helped her out in the past - with the Freddy Spaghetti concert, with Harvest Festival, with Camp Athena.
She’s brought home the summary report for each of those projects, and takes in just a little breath when she turns to the budget page in the Harvest Festival document, with Ben’s handwritten notes in the margins. But then she works steadily, only pausing every so often to yell at the television, and for a shot of whipped cream.
After an hour, her phone timer goes off, and she makes a couple of quick final notes before closing her binder.
She flips the TV to the science fiction channel, and uncoils herself from the couch. In her bedroom, she changes out of her blazer and work clothes into flannel pajama pants and an old Camp Athena t-shirt. Her hair is briskly caught up in a couple of ponytails, and, just like that, she has switched gears.
Three hours later, the timer on her phone goes off again. She emerges from the spare room closet, wiping her forehead with her wrist and blowing the stray hairs off her cheek with a sideways puff.
She surveys the room; there are bins ready to go to the women’s shelter, bags of recycling and garbage, and only a few neat stacks of things on the bed that still need to find a place at her house. The room is otherwise clean and decluttered. She grabs a bag to start hauling it out.
Once the bags and bins from the guest room are stashed in the garage along with all the others, she finds a blue padfolio on the dining room table, crosses “guest room” off a list. She starts
a new shopping list; more bins, bags, and cleaning supplies, because she’s running out faster than she’d anticipated. She adds a few items to her to-do list, including dropping off a load of donated items at the women’s shelter tomorrow, so they can get into use faster, and also because she wouldn’t be able to fit any more into her car if she waited until she finished the next room.
Flipping to a calendar, she writes “basement” into the next three days, considers, and then adds a fourth day.
Not many rooms left on the list now.
She wanders back into the spare room, and stands in the middle, looking around her. It still has plenty of stuff in it, but it’s just a normal amount of stuff now. The things she loves most are still here; her grandmother’s mahogany dresser, and her childhood bookshelf with her old bunny perched on it. Most of her favourite books are still there, too - she could only bring herself to send about a third of them to the childcare centre. She considers, with a tinge of regret, her spare copy of Go, Dog, Go.
She takes a deep breath, and lets it out, slowly. She steps back into the hallway, shutting off the light and closing the door behind her.
Then she takes a quick shower to wash off the grime, puts on an oversized Harvest Festival t-shirt, and finally slides into bed. She reaches under the covers to pull out a pillow, throwing one arm over it and curling up. Even though it doesn’t really smell like Ben any more, and maybe she should just throw the pillowcase in the wash after all these weeks, she presses her face into it anyhow, inhaling deeply.
She’s asleep within a couple of minutes, thinking about her next campaign speech. If she’s going to be multi-tasking by practicing while she’s sleeping, she might as well be thinking about the right speech, she figures. Even if there’s nobody there to give her any feedback in the morning. Part Two.