Holiday Fic! (Part Three)
For stillscape, who asked for Ben/Leslie and Christmas plaid. This got rather fluffy. I hope you like it. :)
The Stockings Were Hung
“Where’s your stocking?”
“Huh?” Leslie glances over at Ben, who crosses the room to the fireplace and taps his fingers along the mantle. “Oh. I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have a stocking?”
“No.”
“You, Leslie Knope, recovering hoarder and owner of enough Christmas decorations to fill two houses, you don’t have a stocking?”
She raises an eyebrow and carefully places another ornament on their Christmas tree. Considering Ben’s proclivity to question the need for this many decorations (as if Christmas is the time of year to be a minimalist-pfsh), this sudden incredulity is a little strange. “No, I don’t have a stocking.”
“You don’t have a stocking?”
“Are you feeling okay?” She goes to him and lays a hand over his forehead. He feels warm, but that could just be because he’s standing next to the fire. “Let me take your temperature.”
“I’m fine. But, seriously…you really don’t have a Christmas stocking?”
“Ben!”
“Sorry. Sorry. I’m just a little bewildered, I guess.”
She shrugs. “Why is that so surprising?”
“Because. You’re…you.” He frowns, apparently dissatisfied with his explanation, as well he should be. Occasionally, she thinks there’s no rhyme or reason to his expectation of her. “I mean, look at our house. It’s like Christmas exploded. But you’re standing here telling me that you don’t own a stocking…”
“Is that a big deal?”
“No. Maybe. No. It’s just weird. The stockings are the best part of Christmas.”
Crap on an icicle-he really is suffering delusions. Everyone knows the best part of Christmas is the tree. Or the songs. Or the cookies. Or finding the perfect present and blowing everyone else out of the water. Or the culmination of all of those things. But definitely not the stocking. “Now I’m sure you’re sick,” she says. She grabs his hand and tugs him over to the couch, pushing him down. “You rest. I’ll get you a cold compress.”
“I’m not sick, Leslie.” He reaches up for her other hand so he’s holding them both and looks up at her; in this light, she can’t tell if his eyes are glassy. “Look, I know I’m overreacting here, but you just caught me off guard. It’s not important.”
“You don’t have a stocking either,” she can’t help but point out.
“My mom burned my stocking.”
“What? Why?”
Ben shrugs, a gesture that makes it seem like no big deal; the way his eyes drop to watch his thumbs run gently over her knuckles tells a different story, though. “My paternal grandmother made them for us, and my mom went through kind of a manic purging phase after my dad left.”
“And she burned your Christmas stockings.”
“She felt bad about it afterwards.” He looks up and smiles sadly, and Leslie hates his mom just a little, the way she hates anything that hurts him. “But it was my favorite part of Christmas morning. The stockings were the first thing you could see coming down the stairs, and…I don’t know. It was always exciting, seeing them and knowing Santa came.”
It’s a sweet mental image: tiny Ben excited over the arrival of Santa Claus. Heartwarming in a way many of Ben’s childhood stories aren’t because a lot of them end in weird twists of madness. Like burning all the Christmas stockings. “I bet you were adorable.”
“I was very cute. Yes.”
She smiles, leaning down to kiss him, not protesting when his hands wrap around her lower back and tug her into his lap. He presses his forehead to hers, or, well, the furry white strip around her Santa hat, and sighs. “You never had one as a kid?”
“I guess. It wasn't a big part of Christmas, though. And I never bothered as an adult. Who wants to see a lone stocking hung up on the fireplace?”
“That is kind of depressing.”
He kisses her cheek, the pad of his thumb swiping along her bottom lip as he does, and then he pulls back. He’s looking at her, though; that look that she still can’t give words to, but which makes her stomach flip-flop every time. “Come on. Let’s finish the tree.”
“Sure,” she agrees, though her mind is already mulling over this problem and possible solutions. It’s okay, though. She can multitask.
*****
This is the thing other people don’t understand about being a hoarder: the benefit is that you usually have what you need for a project somewhere in the mess. And given how many projects Leslie completes every month, it’s really a necessity to have those things at hand.
Parsing down her craft supplies when she and Ben moved in together was one of the hardest things she’s ever had to do. Sure, maybe he had a point about the paint so old it was dry and cracked, and the ribbons that weren’t even long enough to tie into a bow, but she still disagreed that a scrap of paper wasn’t just as good as a whole sheet (they’d eventually compromised on this, and she’d kept anything bigger than one third of a page). But she’d been insistent about keeping her sewing supplies, ignoring the fact that the amount of fabric she had could fill a room by itself. Even after they had organized it into a fairly confined space (liveable, Ben had assessed it), he’d still been skeptical.
Now she has the chance to prove him wrong.
As soon as she can find what she’s looking for.
It takes her a few minutes even though the containers are labeled in Ben’s neat script by either type of fabric, color or both, mostly because she has to move the boxes around the room to find the one she needs. When she finally reaches the container, buried in the back corner under three other boxes, she lets out a triumphant cackle, opening it and pulling out two bolts of fabric. They’re both plaid: festive, Christmas-y red and green; their dominant color the inverse of one another. Neither has ever been cut. She bought them at a low point during their breakup, seeing the plaid and being reminded of Ben, but she’d never been able to bring herself to make anything with it.
Now she has the occasion; can think of nothing this fabric is better for: it’s perfect for Christmas stockings.
Perfect for Ben’s Christmas stocking.
She has the whole thing planned out (green for him, red for her); has already started working on embroidering their names into the white fabric she found to frame the tops of the stockings. It’s a new challenge, living with the person she’s trying to surprise (never mind the fact that she can have visitors over now and can’t leave things out in plain sight; Ann nearly saw the scarf Leslie is knitting her before she managed to kick it under the couch). This stocking project has been a test of her sneakiness, but so far she’s been pulling it off with tremendous aplomb. Ben doesn’t suspect a thing.
He also has a point about the awesomeness of stockings. She’s already found over a dozen little gifts to put inside his, delighting at the idea of finally having a real reason to buy stocking stuffers. It’s taken Christmas shopping to a whole new level.
And if she already had to alter her pattern to make the stockings long enough to fit all of the presents, well…
She shakes her head. They’re going to look great.
*****
“Ben?” Leslie lifts her head off of her pillow and leans over Ben’s face, close enough that her nose nearly touches his. His eyes are shut and his breathing even, and when he doesn’t open his eyes and scream (like he did the last time she did this), she takes it as a sure sign that he’s asleep. Grinning, she slips out of bed, careful not to make too much noise as she creeps out of the room.
Downstairs, she flicks on the tree lights, illuminating the shiny wrapping of all the presents they’ve already placed under the tree. Her stockings are hidden in a box under the couch with the reindeer-shaped hooks she bought to hang them from the mantle. She pulls them out carefully, centering the reindeer on the mantle, and then tacking the stockings up. They look lovely in the light of the tree, even if they did turn out a little, almost absurdly, long. Oh well. It’s more traditional, she rationalizes, given that stockings started out as actual undergarments hung by the fireplace.
Ben’s stocking stuffers are buried under her knitting, and she retrieves them noiselessly to fill his stocking. It droops a little under the weight (thank goodness she reinforced the hook), and bulges in places, but that’s the point, right?
She cocks her head, studying it critically, and decides it doesn’t look bad, just a little overstuffed. But that’s probably just because it’s next to her present-less one, so she retrieves a bag of chocolate Santas from the kitchen and puts it in her own stocking. It slithers down to the toe, a bulky lump in the bottom.
It’s a slight improvement; the best she can do tonight.
When she crawls back into bed, curling herself around Ben, her last conscious thought is of how excited he’s going to be in the morning.
*****
Despite her late night activities, Leslie is up before both Ben and the sun, sleeping even less than usual because it’s Christmas. No matter how old she gets, it’s simply impossible not to get up once it’s officially Christmas morning (a 5am dictate her mother placed when she was a kid and which has remained her official start time), and she nudges Ben awake with a couple of well placed pokes. “Wake up!” she orders, kissing across his jaw and up to his lips. He responds lazily, groaning a bit as she continues to prod him, and wraps an arm around her waist, trying to pin her back down to the bed.
“Too early. Sleep a few more hours.”
“No, no, no. Come on! It’s Christmas! Time to see if Santa came.”
“Can’t we see when the sun comes up?”
Leslie brushes her fingers through his hair, scratching lightly at his scalp until he finally opens his eyes and blinks groggily. “This is my favorite part,” she says. “Seeing the tree all lit up with the presents underneath.”
“Is that going to be different than it was last night?”
“Yes. Because now it’s Christmas.”
Ben smiles and pulls her in for another kiss. His hands tangle through her hair, lips becoming a distraction from her original plans, but this is certainly a new tradition Leslie can get behind.
It’s a little closer to dawn by the time they stumble out of bed.
She prods Ben down the stairs first, wrapping her arms around his shoulders as they descend and nuzzling his neck in an attempt to hide her excited smile. When they get downstairs, Ben takes her hand and interlocks their fingers, smiling at her like he’s just as anxious, but she barely notices as she finds the light switch and flicks on the tree lights.
She glances up at him, waiting for him to notice the stockings, but he’s just staring at her, eyes crinkled in delight. He nudges her shoulder, looking over at the fireplace, and she follows his gaze, mouth dropping open when she finally sees what’s come over him.
“What did you do?”
She drops his hand, wandering into the living room, gaping at her stocking. It’s filled to the brim, possibly even more stuffed than Ben’s, and she reaches out to touch it, not quite believing her eyes. “What did you do?” she repeats, turning to look at him again.
“Nothing. It was all Santa.”
“Ben…”
He shrugs. “I thought maybe…Knowing you, you might…” He trails off, still smiling sheepishly, and she shakes her head.
“You ruined my surprise,” she chastises, although somehow that doesn’t really seem important.
“It was just a suspicion, Leslie.” He crosses the room and wraps his arms around her, pulling her snugly against him. “I didn’t know until about an hour ago. But it’s perfect. They’re perfect.”
“Not too long?”
“Well…Maybe we better not light a fire while they’re up.”
She grins and pulls him down for a kiss, delighted when he steps back and reaches for his stocking. “Now can we open these?” he asks, almost as impatient as she is. “The suspense is killing me.”
Yeah. She can understand why he loves this so much.
This is for americnxidiot, who asked for Leslie and Ben sending out Christmas cards together. I hope you like it. This holiday fic is turning out to be quite flufftacular.
Love, Leslie and Ben
Leslie stands at the dining room table, hands planted on the back of a chair as she stares down at whatever she's working on. She's biting her lip, brow furrowed in concentration. It's a sight Ben has seen dozens of times now, but it still makes him pause for a moment, leaning against the doorway and gazing at her until she notices he's there. She smiles, a look not directed at him so much as it is knowing, and he finds himself crossing the room to her, wrapping his arms around her waist and kissing the back of her head before he rests his chin against her shoulder. "What're you working on?" he murmurs. The table is effectively organized: boxes of envelopes; multiple books of stamps; stacks of cards; a huge pile of colored pens--all strategically placed around the table with typical Leslie Knope fluidity. He imagines that sending out their wedding invitations in a few months will be tackled in a similar manner: precise and systematic.
"Christmas cards," explains Leslie, moving her hands to rest against his forearms. "I organized them by topic this year. Snowmen, Christmas trees, Santa..."
"Very efficient."
"You think? Last year I had them organized by month, which didn't seem ideal at the time, but now that I'm looking at this..."
"By month?"
"Well if you make ten a month for the whole year, it's much less overwhelming."
"You made these?"
He reaches out for the nearest card and plucks it from the pile. Up close it's more obvious that it's handmade: a detailed Christmas tree covered in tiny, sparkly candy canes. He thinks the amount of work that must have gone into crafting this--all of these--and, well, it's not so surprising, but he's overwhelmed all over again by her thoughtfulness.
"Yeah," she says, her tone giving no hint that she knows that for most people this is an unusual phenomenon. "But sometimes it's hard to think of Christmas in July." She picks up a card and hands it to him and Ben laughs at the slightly sadistic sight of a snowman, complete with sunglasses, melting on the beach. "That's not even the worst one," she sighs. "There's a sunburned, shirtless Santa in there somewhere."
"Good lord."
"Oh well. We can send that one to Jerry."
"We?" He steps away so he can see her face, sitting down at the table and looking up at her. "Yeah, we," she says. "As in you and me. I mean, we're engaged, we're living together, I just thought..." Her brow furrows for a second and she taps her fingernails against the edge of the table. "Did you want to send out your own?"
"No, no, no...This is great. I just hadn't thought about it. I don't usually send out Christmas cards."
"Don't usually?"
"Okay. Never. I have never sent out Christmas cards."
"I should have known." Leslie sits down next to him, lifting her feet to rest in his lap. Immediately, he wraps his hands around them, ignoring the sting of cold because she insists on being barefoot in the house even in December. "What with your hatred of the post office."
"I don't hate the post office."
"You do."
"No. I just hate going to the post office. There's a difference."
Leslie rolls her eyes. "Well I will go to the post office, and you can silently support them by putting postage on the envelopes." She pushes the piles of envelopes and stamps closer to him and tosses him a red pen. "Now I got family addresses from your mom when she was here last month, and your sister gave me stuff for your dad's side of the family, but I don't know who else you want to send cards to."
"Um..."
"Who sends cards to you?"
"No one?"
"Ben!"
"I'm serious, Leslie. I think this is a dying art. Although," he says, eyes drifting over the piles of cards, "you may single-handedly be reviving it."
"Or maybe your nomadic lifestyle just didn't lend itself to mail."
He smiles and squeezes her feet. "Maybe."
Leslie taps her pen against the table and then against her lips, studying him thoughtfully. After a moment, she draws her feet away from him and swings around to face the table, digging through a pile of Christmas cards. "Fine, Christmas card virgin. We'll start simple."
"Okay."
She pulls out a card and holds it up, and good lord--it really is a terrifying, sunburned, shirtless Santa under a palm tree. "We'll start with Jerry. That way if we mess up, it won't matter."
"Is Santa stranded on that island?"
Leslie glances at the card and shrugs a shoulder. "I'm sure the reindeer will rescue him."
"Of course."
Leslie opens the card and sets it on the table, writing the date in the corner and addressing the inside to the entire Gergich family, and then she pauses, all momentum lost. "I never know what to write in his card."
"Merry Christmas?"
"Hope you feel better in the new year?"
"I wouldn't write that."
She groans. "Fine." The pen moves across the card stock, her neat script spelling out a cheerful Christmas wish. "It's boring, so I guess that's perfect for Jerry."
"Yeah. I'm sure he'll love it."
She slides the card across the table to him, already reaching with one hand for another, but her efficiency is lost on Ben, who is staring at the card with something akin to awe. It's silly--ridiculous, even, given the ring on her fourth finger and the fact they're living in a house together, her things mixed with his in a way that means home more than any place he's ever lived on his own--but there's something about seeing their names together at the bottom of that card that makes his stomach flip over.
"Which do you think for Ann?" asks Leslie. With effort, Ben tears his eyes from her Love, Leslie and Ben and glances at the two cards in Leslie's hands, not really seeing either.
"Um..."
"I think the tree."
"Yep. Yeah. Good."
She frowns, setting down the card and looking at him with concern. "Are you okay?"
He nods, pulling an envelope over and picking up his pen. "Oh yeah," he says, grinning as he joins their last names together in the return address. "Everything's great."
The Stockings Were Hung
“Where’s your stocking?”
“Huh?” Leslie glances over at Ben, who crosses the room to the fireplace and taps his fingers along the mantle. “Oh. I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have a stocking?”
“No.”
“You, Leslie Knope, recovering hoarder and owner of enough Christmas decorations to fill two houses, you don’t have a stocking?”
She raises an eyebrow and carefully places another ornament on their Christmas tree. Considering Ben’s proclivity to question the need for this many decorations (as if Christmas is the time of year to be a minimalist-pfsh), this sudden incredulity is a little strange. “No, I don’t have a stocking.”
“You don’t have a stocking?”
“Are you feeling okay?” She goes to him and lays a hand over his forehead. He feels warm, but that could just be because he’s standing next to the fire. “Let me take your temperature.”
“I’m fine. But, seriously…you really don’t have a Christmas stocking?”
“Ben!”
“Sorry. Sorry. I’m just a little bewildered, I guess.”
She shrugs. “Why is that so surprising?”
“Because. You’re…you.” He frowns, apparently dissatisfied with his explanation, as well he should be. Occasionally, she thinks there’s no rhyme or reason to his expectation of her. “I mean, look at our house. It’s like Christmas exploded. But you’re standing here telling me that you don’t own a stocking…”
“Is that a big deal?”
“No. Maybe. No. It’s just weird. The stockings are the best part of Christmas.”
Crap on an icicle-he really is suffering delusions. Everyone knows the best part of Christmas is the tree. Or the songs. Or the cookies. Or finding the perfect present and blowing everyone else out of the water. Or the culmination of all of those things. But definitely not the stocking. “Now I’m sure you’re sick,” she says. She grabs his hand and tugs him over to the couch, pushing him down. “You rest. I’ll get you a cold compress.”
“I’m not sick, Leslie.” He reaches up for her other hand so he’s holding them both and looks up at her; in this light, she can’t tell if his eyes are glassy. “Look, I know I’m overreacting here, but you just caught me off guard. It’s not important.”
“You don’t have a stocking either,” she can’t help but point out.
“My mom burned my stocking.”
“What? Why?”
Ben shrugs, a gesture that makes it seem like no big deal; the way his eyes drop to watch his thumbs run gently over her knuckles tells a different story, though. “My paternal grandmother made them for us, and my mom went through kind of a manic purging phase after my dad left.”
“And she burned your Christmas stockings.”
“She felt bad about it afterwards.” He looks up and smiles sadly, and Leslie hates his mom just a little, the way she hates anything that hurts him. “But it was my favorite part of Christmas morning. The stockings were the first thing you could see coming down the stairs, and…I don’t know. It was always exciting, seeing them and knowing Santa came.”
It’s a sweet mental image: tiny Ben excited over the arrival of Santa Claus. Heartwarming in a way many of Ben’s childhood stories aren’t because a lot of them end in weird twists of madness. Like burning all the Christmas stockings. “I bet you were adorable.”
“I was very cute. Yes.”
She smiles, leaning down to kiss him, not protesting when his hands wrap around her lower back and tug her into his lap. He presses his forehead to hers, or, well, the furry white strip around her Santa hat, and sighs. “You never had one as a kid?”
“I guess. It wasn't a big part of Christmas, though. And I never bothered as an adult. Who wants to see a lone stocking hung up on the fireplace?”
“That is kind of depressing.”
He kisses her cheek, the pad of his thumb swiping along her bottom lip as he does, and then he pulls back. He’s looking at her, though; that look that she still can’t give words to, but which makes her stomach flip-flop every time. “Come on. Let’s finish the tree.”
“Sure,” she agrees, though her mind is already mulling over this problem and possible solutions. It’s okay, though. She can multitask.
*****
This is the thing other people don’t understand about being a hoarder: the benefit is that you usually have what you need for a project somewhere in the mess. And given how many projects Leslie completes every month, it’s really a necessity to have those things at hand.
Parsing down her craft supplies when she and Ben moved in together was one of the hardest things she’s ever had to do. Sure, maybe he had a point about the paint so old it was dry and cracked, and the ribbons that weren’t even long enough to tie into a bow, but she still disagreed that a scrap of paper wasn’t just as good as a whole sheet (they’d eventually compromised on this, and she’d kept anything bigger than one third of a page). But she’d been insistent about keeping her sewing supplies, ignoring the fact that the amount of fabric she had could fill a room by itself. Even after they had organized it into a fairly confined space (liveable, Ben had assessed it), he’d still been skeptical.
Now she has the chance to prove him wrong.
As soon as she can find what she’s looking for.
It takes her a few minutes even though the containers are labeled in Ben’s neat script by either type of fabric, color or both, mostly because she has to move the boxes around the room to find the one she needs. When she finally reaches the container, buried in the back corner under three other boxes, she lets out a triumphant cackle, opening it and pulling out two bolts of fabric. They’re both plaid: festive, Christmas-y red and green; their dominant color the inverse of one another. Neither has ever been cut. She bought them at a low point during their breakup, seeing the plaid and being reminded of Ben, but she’d never been able to bring herself to make anything with it.
Now she has the occasion; can think of nothing this fabric is better for: it’s perfect for Christmas stockings.
Perfect for Ben’s Christmas stocking.
She has the whole thing planned out (green for him, red for her); has already started working on embroidering their names into the white fabric she found to frame the tops of the stockings. It’s a new challenge, living with the person she’s trying to surprise (never mind the fact that she can have visitors over now and can’t leave things out in plain sight; Ann nearly saw the scarf Leslie is knitting her before she managed to kick it under the couch). This stocking project has been a test of her sneakiness, but so far she’s been pulling it off with tremendous aplomb. Ben doesn’t suspect a thing.
He also has a point about the awesomeness of stockings. She’s already found over a dozen little gifts to put inside his, delighting at the idea of finally having a real reason to buy stocking stuffers. It’s taken Christmas shopping to a whole new level.
And if she already had to alter her pattern to make the stockings long enough to fit all of the presents, well…
She shakes her head. They’re going to look great.
*****
“Ben?” Leslie lifts her head off of her pillow and leans over Ben’s face, close enough that her nose nearly touches his. His eyes are shut and his breathing even, and when he doesn’t open his eyes and scream (like he did the last time she did this), she takes it as a sure sign that he’s asleep. Grinning, she slips out of bed, careful not to make too much noise as she creeps out of the room.
Downstairs, she flicks on the tree lights, illuminating the shiny wrapping of all the presents they’ve already placed under the tree. Her stockings are hidden in a box under the couch with the reindeer-shaped hooks she bought to hang them from the mantle. She pulls them out carefully, centering the reindeer on the mantle, and then tacking the stockings up. They look lovely in the light of the tree, even if they did turn out a little, almost absurdly, long. Oh well. It’s more traditional, she rationalizes, given that stockings started out as actual undergarments hung by the fireplace.
Ben’s stocking stuffers are buried under her knitting, and she retrieves them noiselessly to fill his stocking. It droops a little under the weight (thank goodness she reinforced the hook), and bulges in places, but that’s the point, right?
She cocks her head, studying it critically, and decides it doesn’t look bad, just a little overstuffed. But that’s probably just because it’s next to her present-less one, so she retrieves a bag of chocolate Santas from the kitchen and puts it in her own stocking. It slithers down to the toe, a bulky lump in the bottom.
It’s a slight improvement; the best she can do tonight.
When she crawls back into bed, curling herself around Ben, her last conscious thought is of how excited he’s going to be in the morning.
*****
Despite her late night activities, Leslie is up before both Ben and the sun, sleeping even less than usual because it’s Christmas. No matter how old she gets, it’s simply impossible not to get up once it’s officially Christmas morning (a 5am dictate her mother placed when she was a kid and which has remained her official start time), and she nudges Ben awake with a couple of well placed pokes. “Wake up!” she orders, kissing across his jaw and up to his lips. He responds lazily, groaning a bit as she continues to prod him, and wraps an arm around her waist, trying to pin her back down to the bed.
“Too early. Sleep a few more hours.”
“No, no, no. Come on! It’s Christmas! Time to see if Santa came.”
“Can’t we see when the sun comes up?”
Leslie brushes her fingers through his hair, scratching lightly at his scalp until he finally opens his eyes and blinks groggily. “This is my favorite part,” she says. “Seeing the tree all lit up with the presents underneath.”
“Is that going to be different than it was last night?”
“Yes. Because now it’s Christmas.”
Ben smiles and pulls her in for another kiss. His hands tangle through her hair, lips becoming a distraction from her original plans, but this is certainly a new tradition Leslie can get behind.
It’s a little closer to dawn by the time they stumble out of bed.
She prods Ben down the stairs first, wrapping her arms around his shoulders as they descend and nuzzling his neck in an attempt to hide her excited smile. When they get downstairs, Ben takes her hand and interlocks their fingers, smiling at her like he’s just as anxious, but she barely notices as she finds the light switch and flicks on the tree lights.
She glances up at him, waiting for him to notice the stockings, but he’s just staring at her, eyes crinkled in delight. He nudges her shoulder, looking over at the fireplace, and she follows his gaze, mouth dropping open when she finally sees what’s come over him.
“What did you do?”
She drops his hand, wandering into the living room, gaping at her stocking. It’s filled to the brim, possibly even more stuffed than Ben’s, and she reaches out to touch it, not quite believing her eyes. “What did you do?” she repeats, turning to look at him again.
“Nothing. It was all Santa.”
“Ben…”
He shrugs. “I thought maybe…Knowing you, you might…” He trails off, still smiling sheepishly, and she shakes her head.
“You ruined my surprise,” she chastises, although somehow that doesn’t really seem important.
“It was just a suspicion, Leslie.” He crosses the room and wraps his arms around her, pulling her snugly against him. “I didn’t know until about an hour ago. But it’s perfect. They’re perfect.”
“Not too long?”
“Well…Maybe we better not light a fire while they’re up.”
She grins and pulls him down for a kiss, delighted when he steps back and reaches for his stocking. “Now can we open these?” he asks, almost as impatient as she is. “The suspense is killing me.”
Yeah. She can understand why he loves this so much.
This is for americnxidiot, who asked for Leslie and Ben sending out Christmas cards together. I hope you like it. This holiday fic is turning out to be quite flufftacular.
Love, Leslie and Ben
Leslie stands at the dining room table, hands planted on the back of a chair as she stares down at whatever she's working on. She's biting her lip, brow furrowed in concentration. It's a sight Ben has seen dozens of times now, but it still makes him pause for a moment, leaning against the doorway and gazing at her until she notices he's there. She smiles, a look not directed at him so much as it is knowing, and he finds himself crossing the room to her, wrapping his arms around her waist and kissing the back of her head before he rests his chin against her shoulder. "What're you working on?" he murmurs. The table is effectively organized: boxes of envelopes; multiple books of stamps; stacks of cards; a huge pile of colored pens--all strategically placed around the table with typical Leslie Knope fluidity. He imagines that sending out their wedding invitations in a few months will be tackled in a similar manner: precise and systematic.
"Christmas cards," explains Leslie, moving her hands to rest against his forearms. "I organized them by topic this year. Snowmen, Christmas trees, Santa..."
"Very efficient."
"You think? Last year I had them organized by month, which didn't seem ideal at the time, but now that I'm looking at this..."
"By month?"
"Well if you make ten a month for the whole year, it's much less overwhelming."
"You made these?"
He reaches out for the nearest card and plucks it from the pile. Up close it's more obvious that it's handmade: a detailed Christmas tree covered in tiny, sparkly candy canes. He thinks the amount of work that must have gone into crafting this--all of these--and, well, it's not so surprising, but he's overwhelmed all over again by her thoughtfulness.
"Yeah," she says, her tone giving no hint that she knows that for most people this is an unusual phenomenon. "But sometimes it's hard to think of Christmas in July." She picks up a card and hands it to him and Ben laughs at the slightly sadistic sight of a snowman, complete with sunglasses, melting on the beach. "That's not even the worst one," she sighs. "There's a sunburned, shirtless Santa in there somewhere."
"Good lord."
"Oh well. We can send that one to Jerry."
"We?" He steps away so he can see her face, sitting down at the table and looking up at her. "Yeah, we," she says. "As in you and me. I mean, we're engaged, we're living together, I just thought..." Her brow furrows for a second and she taps her fingernails against the edge of the table. "Did you want to send out your own?"
"No, no, no...This is great. I just hadn't thought about it. I don't usually send out Christmas cards."
"Don't usually?"
"Okay. Never. I have never sent out Christmas cards."
"I should have known." Leslie sits down next to him, lifting her feet to rest in his lap. Immediately, he wraps his hands around them, ignoring the sting of cold because she insists on being barefoot in the house even in December. "What with your hatred of the post office."
"I don't hate the post office."
"You do."
"No. I just hate going to the post office. There's a difference."
Leslie rolls her eyes. "Well I will go to the post office, and you can silently support them by putting postage on the envelopes." She pushes the piles of envelopes and stamps closer to him and tosses him a red pen. "Now I got family addresses from your mom when she was here last month, and your sister gave me stuff for your dad's side of the family, but I don't know who else you want to send cards to."
"Um..."
"Who sends cards to you?"
"No one?"
"Ben!"
"I'm serious, Leslie. I think this is a dying art. Although," he says, eyes drifting over the piles of cards, "you may single-handedly be reviving it."
"Or maybe your nomadic lifestyle just didn't lend itself to mail."
He smiles and squeezes her feet. "Maybe."
Leslie taps her pen against the table and then against her lips, studying him thoughtfully. After a moment, she draws her feet away from him and swings around to face the table, digging through a pile of Christmas cards. "Fine, Christmas card virgin. We'll start simple."
"Okay."
She pulls out a card and holds it up, and good lord--it really is a terrifying, sunburned, shirtless Santa under a palm tree. "We'll start with Jerry. That way if we mess up, it won't matter."
"Is Santa stranded on that island?"
Leslie glances at the card and shrugs a shoulder. "I'm sure the reindeer will rescue him."
"Of course."
Leslie opens the card and sets it on the table, writing the date in the corner and addressing the inside to the entire Gergich family, and then she pauses, all momentum lost. "I never know what to write in his card."
"Merry Christmas?"
"Hope you feel better in the new year?"
"I wouldn't write that."
She groans. "Fine." The pen moves across the card stock, her neat script spelling out a cheerful Christmas wish. "It's boring, so I guess that's perfect for Jerry."
"Yeah. I'm sure he'll love it."
She slides the card across the table to him, already reaching with one hand for another, but her efficiency is lost on Ben, who is staring at the card with something akin to awe. It's silly--ridiculous, even, given the ring on her fourth finger and the fact they're living in a house together, her things mixed with his in a way that means home more than any place he's ever lived on his own--but there's something about seeing their names together at the bottom of that card that makes his stomach flip over.
"Which do you think for Ann?" asks Leslie. With effort, Ben tears his eyes from her Love, Leslie and Ben and glances at the two cards in Leslie's hands, not really seeing either.
"Um..."
"I think the tree."
"Yep. Yeah. Good."
She frowns, setting down the card and looking at him with concern. "Are you okay?"
He nods, pulling an envelope over and picking up his pen. "Oh yeah," he says, grinning as he joins their last names together in the return address. "Everything's great."