Fic: Unity (4/?)
Title: Unity (4/?)
Pairing: Ben/Leslie
Word Count: 2300 (this part)
Rating: Very light R
Setting: Post-Smallest Park
Summary: Loosely, this is series of moments that make up Leslie’s ideas for the unity quilt. Somewhere along the way it’s morphed into a lot more.
A/n: So this finally happened. Thank you to everyone who has been sticking with me through the fairly long stretches between updates. And even more thanks to everyone who has left feedback on this fic. The encouragement is such great motivation to continue this, you guys don’t even know.
Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 a/ b
Leslie is crying.
It’s soft, almost unnoticeable except that Ben’s thumb follows the trail of her tears, not so much wiping them away as he is tracing them. She can see him memorizing this moment, filing away her tears and the feeling of their legs tangled together and the way she looks in the dim light of her bedroom, hair mussed and goose pimples rising on her bare skin. She’s missed that-the way he looks at her, absent of pain and unfulfilled longing. Missed the sight of him in her bed and the way he can’t seem to stop touching her after they have sex and how sometimes in these closest moments, he shares her pillow. Missed all of him, really, much more than she thinks she realized. She can only feel how much she ached for him now that he’s here, like that first sip of water that reveals an unacknowledged thirst. With him here, decisions made, her heart finally lets her feel everything it’s spent months suppressing, and it’s too much. The understanding of that pain, the sort of happiness of which she’s in awe, and that tremulous unspoken knowledge between them that they nearly let each other go tonight.
She went to the smallest park-their park-with every intention of saying goodbye to him, and she knows he would have accepted that farewell with whatever little grace remained between them. And only a decision that foolish, she thinks, could lead to the type of epiphany she’d had while sitting on that bench waiting for Ben.
Already, Leslie holds those moments in the park close to her heart, a shield against the real world when it inevitably collapses in on them.
Ben can’t stop touching her. His fingers move aimlessly away from the path of her tears, rediscovering the rest of her in slow brushes of his fingertips. A thumb skittering across her eyebrow; soft strokes against her neck and shoulder; curlicue dances down her spine. She shifts closer, so close she can feel his breath whispering against her face, and his hand returns to wipe away the last tears from the corner of her eye.
I was going to let you go, she thinks of telling him. I was going to give you what you wanted. But maybe he already knows or maybe it doesn’t matter anymore or maybe the words just won’t come. No more than she can speak of reasons and realizations or her understanding of loss right now. It’s too much in this moment where every touch is meaningful and every kiss they share is solace. Too much on top of everything that has already happened tonight.
Someday, though.
Someday she’ll explain.
The sun had been low in the sky when she arrived at the park, passively sinking below the horizon without much fanfare. It was that dull gray sort of sunset that belongs to November, but she’d sat on the bench and wished it would never end. Everything that was coming weighed heavy on her heart, but it had been her father who was on her mind.
Somewhere inside her memories that are half-real, half-imagined, Leslie remembers her father kissing her goodbye for the last time. And it had been that thought that burrowed through the fog of anxiety she’d felt as she waited for Ben, lodging itself in her mind and not letting go.
She’d had the chicken pox, maybe, or the flu-some misfortune that knocked the life out of her. Christmas day had been a frenzy of wrapping paper and chaos seen through the glassy eyes of a child who didn’t want to admit she was sick. She thinks it was her father who finally carried her to bed as she sobbed, sitting by her side and reassuring her until she fell into a hard-fought sleep.
Two days later, he’d gone alone to visit her nana in Florida, and a few days after that, he was dead. Thinking about it now always leaves her with the unsettling feeling that she and her mother escaped something thanks solely to a germ she picked up at school. It’s a notion she can never follow completely to fruition, full of too many what-ifs she doesn’t want to explore.
That last kiss, though. It was nothing more than a press of his lips to her sweaty forehead accompanied by some soft words she can’t remember. She’d blinked at him through sleep-heavy eyes, and she hopes she told him she loved him; in her half-real, half-imagined memory, she’s allowed to think she did. He’d straightened her blankets and smoothed her hair back, and then he was gone.
More clearly-maybe more clearly than any other memory from her childhood-she remembers her mom telling her that her father had died. They’d been in the kitchen, her legs folded beneath her on the sticky vinyl cushion of the chair. There’d been a paper Santa she’d made taped to the window behind her mother’s shoulder, smiling at her as her mother explained things plainly. There had been no sugar-coating; the only courtesy her mother had paid her age was omitting the more gruesome details.
She’d cried then, partly because her mom was crying, which scared her more than anything. The rest of it had been too much, an idea beyond comprehension that settled in slowly, blanketing her as time went on. The next few days were her introduction to platitudes: a countless number of faceless people reminding her that her daddy loved her more than anything and he’d always be with her. Her nana had been the one to weave the pretty tales of heaven that her mother had foregone in favor of cold facts. All of it was recited so many times that it became rote, and she remembers parroting it back to her mother one night when she heard her crying and crawled into bed with her. Her mom had smiled and kissed her, and though now Leslie can see that comfort for what little it really was, at the time, it gave the words more power. Somehow, their perceived impact on her mother increased her own belief in the trite sentiments.
Her father didn’t want to leave. He was watching over her. He loved her.
Even as she grew older, when pained acceptance inevitably turned more complicated, tingeing her loss with guilt and questions and what felt like holes in her identity, she’d clung to those tenets. She still does, though she’s not sure why something that comforted her as a small child and then as a confused teenager still helps to fill a hole in her heart.
Her father was the first person she ever lost. If she’s honest, she barely knew him. Yet as she’d sat in her newly completed smallest park waiting for Ben, her thoughts seemed to flit to him naturally. Her father’s death is tattooed across her heart in a way she doesn’t even acknowledge often herself, but tonight, hours after some tremulous memory paved a trail to understanding, she knows she’s going to share that long-kept memory with Ben someday. Even now, unable to express themselves in words, she feels the most intimate parts of her unfolding under his gaze. For both of them, the vulnerability is still raw, yet somehow, Leslie isn’t scared.
There’s no mask to hide behind, she’d realized tonight. Not with Ben. Losing her father at such a young age prepared her for a lot of things: the other people who have come in and out of her life; the sting of letting people go. But mostly, she thinks it taught her how to mask the pain, something she’d been doing so well, it had seemed innate. Dave didn’t want to leave, but she let him go consoled by the knowledge that she’d made the right choice. Lindsay abandoned her cloaked in betrayal, and the anger had served as a weapon against her grief. Her father had been ripped out of her life, a loss complicated by her youth and calmed by constant reassurances that he would have never left her voluntarily. Mark had walked across Lot 48 and out of her life without looking back, but she’d known then what that goodbye meant: even if they still got coffee or emailed occasionally, their friendship as she’d known it was over. Mark wasn’t a fighter; he’d let himself fade from her life without effort, and overtures to keep it alive would come solely from her. Knowing that, reminding herself of Mark’s passivity, had made the ache tolerable. A way to soothe the pain before it began.
But with Ben, there’d never been a true way to mask her pain. She’d held onto him fiercely because of it, but it wasn’t until tonight, faced with the fear of finally letting him go, that she’d understood that. It wasn’t going to be a tolerable ache. It wasn’t a loss that could be covered by anger or mollified by the knowledge that he didn’t want to let her go. No platitudes would have made it better. Letting him go would have been the worst pain she’s known so far.
Even hours later, safe in his arms, the thought makes her shiver. She burrows into him, hiding her face in the curve of his neck and breathing him in, reminding herself that she’d made the right choice. She’s through with the rest of the world dictating how much happiness she’s allowed in her life.
She’s in love with Ben. Ridiculously in love with him, in a way that eclipses all the men she’s loved in the past. And all she’d been doing since the moment she realized they needed to break up is deny and trivialize that feeling. Leslie can’t remember another time in her life where she’d so blatantly suppressed her own joy.
Never again.
One of Ben’s hands finds its way under her hair, the weight of it a beautiful comfort against her neck. She smiles against his shoulder, kissing him lightly and then pulling back to look at him. He’s happy, but it’s not as weightless as hers; Ben carries worry like a constant companion, and she knows it lingers in the back of his mind even now. She knows her own will hit her hard, but it won’t be tonight, lying in his arms for the first time in months. It’s gone for now, swept away the moment he stepped toward her in the park and all uncertainty ceased.
Part of her had still been mad at him as she was waiting. Instinct had left her wanting to rail against his demands, the desire barely tempered by Ann’s firm words and the knowledge that Ben had been desperate in his refusal to continue. It had been frustrating to acknowledge how inexorable the parts of their relationship were to him, even if the rigidity had the comforting familiarity of Ben at his most stubborn. These are your choices. Take it or leave it, Ms. Knope.
All or nothing.
Not that he’d ever actually said it in those terms.
The implication had hit her hard. She’d been too focused on ignoring him, on trying to convince him that they could settle for parts of a whole, to read between the lines of what he’d been saying. But it was there all along: the closest thing to a compromise he could give her.
The fact that he hadn’t laid it out in that way-that he hadn’t given her an ultimatum-was puzzling. She still can’t put her finger on the pulse of his decision: if he was too scared to give her the choice or if he was trying to respect what they’d already decided. Because they had already decided. They couldn’t be everything to each other.
Except they could be. It was just a matter of choice.
That had been the moment. A startling moment of clarity hidden behind months of denial and worry. She’d felt the fear inside of her break, the pieces dissolving as her nerves calmed, and it wasn’t until the words left her mouth that she worried maybe he would say no. That months of her inability to compromise or listen might have made him see her as so many people in her life had before-just a little too much.
There is no doubt now. Not even a shadow of it. Not in his kisses or his touch or the way he looks at her. Not when he leans in to capture her lips again, arms drawing her close as he shifts onto his back. She presses their bodies flush together, tongue drawing his out against hers, and lets herself get lost in the feeling of him. His hands are exploring, tracing teasing patterns against the skin of her back until finally one hand slips down to stoke between her legs. And there is nothing more amazing, nothing that compares to this intimacy, to this powerful relearning of one another.
Someday soon, she’ll be able to explain everything, giving something of herself to him that she’s never given anyone else. There will be apologies and laughter, plans and excitement, and the inevitable intrusion of the rest of the world.
Tonight she just wants to cherish him-the best of him and worst of him and everything in between. Tonight, she just wants to be in love.
Part Five
Pairing: Ben/Leslie
Word Count: 2300 (this part)
Rating: Very light R
Setting: Post-Smallest Park
Summary: Loosely, this is series of moments that make up Leslie’s ideas for the unity quilt. Somewhere along the way it’s morphed into a lot more.
A/n: So this finally happened. Thank you to everyone who has been sticking with me through the fairly long stretches between updates. And even more thanks to everyone who has left feedback on this fic. The encouragement is such great motivation to continue this, you guys don’t even know.
Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 a/ b
Leslie is crying.
It’s soft, almost unnoticeable except that Ben’s thumb follows the trail of her tears, not so much wiping them away as he is tracing them. She can see him memorizing this moment, filing away her tears and the feeling of their legs tangled together and the way she looks in the dim light of her bedroom, hair mussed and goose pimples rising on her bare skin. She’s missed that-the way he looks at her, absent of pain and unfulfilled longing. Missed the sight of him in her bed and the way he can’t seem to stop touching her after they have sex and how sometimes in these closest moments, he shares her pillow. Missed all of him, really, much more than she thinks she realized. She can only feel how much she ached for him now that he’s here, like that first sip of water that reveals an unacknowledged thirst. With him here, decisions made, her heart finally lets her feel everything it’s spent months suppressing, and it’s too much. The understanding of that pain, the sort of happiness of which she’s in awe, and that tremulous unspoken knowledge between them that they nearly let each other go tonight.
She went to the smallest park-their park-with every intention of saying goodbye to him, and she knows he would have accepted that farewell with whatever little grace remained between them. And only a decision that foolish, she thinks, could lead to the type of epiphany she’d had while sitting on that bench waiting for Ben.
Already, Leslie holds those moments in the park close to her heart, a shield against the real world when it inevitably collapses in on them.
Ben can’t stop touching her. His fingers move aimlessly away from the path of her tears, rediscovering the rest of her in slow brushes of his fingertips. A thumb skittering across her eyebrow; soft strokes against her neck and shoulder; curlicue dances down her spine. She shifts closer, so close she can feel his breath whispering against her face, and his hand returns to wipe away the last tears from the corner of her eye.
I was going to let you go, she thinks of telling him. I was going to give you what you wanted. But maybe he already knows or maybe it doesn’t matter anymore or maybe the words just won’t come. No more than she can speak of reasons and realizations or her understanding of loss right now. It’s too much in this moment where every touch is meaningful and every kiss they share is solace. Too much on top of everything that has already happened tonight.
Someday, though.
Someday she’ll explain.
The sun had been low in the sky when she arrived at the park, passively sinking below the horizon without much fanfare. It was that dull gray sort of sunset that belongs to November, but she’d sat on the bench and wished it would never end. Everything that was coming weighed heavy on her heart, but it had been her father who was on her mind.
Somewhere inside her memories that are half-real, half-imagined, Leslie remembers her father kissing her goodbye for the last time. And it had been that thought that burrowed through the fog of anxiety she’d felt as she waited for Ben, lodging itself in her mind and not letting go.
She’d had the chicken pox, maybe, or the flu-some misfortune that knocked the life out of her. Christmas day had been a frenzy of wrapping paper and chaos seen through the glassy eyes of a child who didn’t want to admit she was sick. She thinks it was her father who finally carried her to bed as she sobbed, sitting by her side and reassuring her until she fell into a hard-fought sleep.
Two days later, he’d gone alone to visit her nana in Florida, and a few days after that, he was dead. Thinking about it now always leaves her with the unsettling feeling that she and her mother escaped something thanks solely to a germ she picked up at school. It’s a notion she can never follow completely to fruition, full of too many what-ifs she doesn’t want to explore.
That last kiss, though. It was nothing more than a press of his lips to her sweaty forehead accompanied by some soft words she can’t remember. She’d blinked at him through sleep-heavy eyes, and she hopes she told him she loved him; in her half-real, half-imagined memory, she’s allowed to think she did. He’d straightened her blankets and smoothed her hair back, and then he was gone.
More clearly-maybe more clearly than any other memory from her childhood-she remembers her mom telling her that her father had died. They’d been in the kitchen, her legs folded beneath her on the sticky vinyl cushion of the chair. There’d been a paper Santa she’d made taped to the window behind her mother’s shoulder, smiling at her as her mother explained things plainly. There had been no sugar-coating; the only courtesy her mother had paid her age was omitting the more gruesome details.
She’d cried then, partly because her mom was crying, which scared her more than anything. The rest of it had been too much, an idea beyond comprehension that settled in slowly, blanketing her as time went on. The next few days were her introduction to platitudes: a countless number of faceless people reminding her that her daddy loved her more than anything and he’d always be with her. Her nana had been the one to weave the pretty tales of heaven that her mother had foregone in favor of cold facts. All of it was recited so many times that it became rote, and she remembers parroting it back to her mother one night when she heard her crying and crawled into bed with her. Her mom had smiled and kissed her, and though now Leslie can see that comfort for what little it really was, at the time, it gave the words more power. Somehow, their perceived impact on her mother increased her own belief in the trite sentiments.
Her father didn’t want to leave. He was watching over her. He loved her.
Even as she grew older, when pained acceptance inevitably turned more complicated, tingeing her loss with guilt and questions and what felt like holes in her identity, she’d clung to those tenets. She still does, though she’s not sure why something that comforted her as a small child and then as a confused teenager still helps to fill a hole in her heart.
Her father was the first person she ever lost. If she’s honest, she barely knew him. Yet as she’d sat in her newly completed smallest park waiting for Ben, her thoughts seemed to flit to him naturally. Her father’s death is tattooed across her heart in a way she doesn’t even acknowledge often herself, but tonight, hours after some tremulous memory paved a trail to understanding, she knows she’s going to share that long-kept memory with Ben someday. Even now, unable to express themselves in words, she feels the most intimate parts of her unfolding under his gaze. For both of them, the vulnerability is still raw, yet somehow, Leslie isn’t scared.
There’s no mask to hide behind, she’d realized tonight. Not with Ben. Losing her father at such a young age prepared her for a lot of things: the other people who have come in and out of her life; the sting of letting people go. But mostly, she thinks it taught her how to mask the pain, something she’d been doing so well, it had seemed innate. Dave didn’t want to leave, but she let him go consoled by the knowledge that she’d made the right choice. Lindsay abandoned her cloaked in betrayal, and the anger had served as a weapon against her grief. Her father had been ripped out of her life, a loss complicated by her youth and calmed by constant reassurances that he would have never left her voluntarily. Mark had walked across Lot 48 and out of her life without looking back, but she’d known then what that goodbye meant: even if they still got coffee or emailed occasionally, their friendship as she’d known it was over. Mark wasn’t a fighter; he’d let himself fade from her life without effort, and overtures to keep it alive would come solely from her. Knowing that, reminding herself of Mark’s passivity, had made the ache tolerable. A way to soothe the pain before it began.
But with Ben, there’d never been a true way to mask her pain. She’d held onto him fiercely because of it, but it wasn’t until tonight, faced with the fear of finally letting him go, that she’d understood that. It wasn’t going to be a tolerable ache. It wasn’t a loss that could be covered by anger or mollified by the knowledge that he didn’t want to let her go. No platitudes would have made it better. Letting him go would have been the worst pain she’s known so far.
Even hours later, safe in his arms, the thought makes her shiver. She burrows into him, hiding her face in the curve of his neck and breathing him in, reminding herself that she’d made the right choice. She’s through with the rest of the world dictating how much happiness she’s allowed in her life.
She’s in love with Ben. Ridiculously in love with him, in a way that eclipses all the men she’s loved in the past. And all she’d been doing since the moment she realized they needed to break up is deny and trivialize that feeling. Leslie can’t remember another time in her life where she’d so blatantly suppressed her own joy.
Never again.
One of Ben’s hands finds its way under her hair, the weight of it a beautiful comfort against her neck. She smiles against his shoulder, kissing him lightly and then pulling back to look at him. He’s happy, but it’s not as weightless as hers; Ben carries worry like a constant companion, and she knows it lingers in the back of his mind even now. She knows her own will hit her hard, but it won’t be tonight, lying in his arms for the first time in months. It’s gone for now, swept away the moment he stepped toward her in the park and all uncertainty ceased.
Part of her had still been mad at him as she was waiting. Instinct had left her wanting to rail against his demands, the desire barely tempered by Ann’s firm words and the knowledge that Ben had been desperate in his refusal to continue. It had been frustrating to acknowledge how inexorable the parts of their relationship were to him, even if the rigidity had the comforting familiarity of Ben at his most stubborn. These are your choices. Take it or leave it, Ms. Knope.
All or nothing.
Not that he’d ever actually said it in those terms.
The implication had hit her hard. She’d been too focused on ignoring him, on trying to convince him that they could settle for parts of a whole, to read between the lines of what he’d been saying. But it was there all along: the closest thing to a compromise he could give her.
The fact that he hadn’t laid it out in that way-that he hadn’t given her an ultimatum-was puzzling. She still can’t put her finger on the pulse of his decision: if he was too scared to give her the choice or if he was trying to respect what they’d already decided. Because they had already decided. They couldn’t be everything to each other.
Except they could be. It was just a matter of choice.
That had been the moment. A startling moment of clarity hidden behind months of denial and worry. She’d felt the fear inside of her break, the pieces dissolving as her nerves calmed, and it wasn’t until the words left her mouth that she worried maybe he would say no. That months of her inability to compromise or listen might have made him see her as so many people in her life had before-just a little too much.
There is no doubt now. Not even a shadow of it. Not in his kisses or his touch or the way he looks at her. Not when he leans in to capture her lips again, arms drawing her close as he shifts onto his back. She presses their bodies flush together, tongue drawing his out against hers, and lets herself get lost in the feeling of him. His hands are exploring, tracing teasing patterns against the skin of her back until finally one hand slips down to stoke between her legs. And there is nothing more amazing, nothing that compares to this intimacy, to this powerful relearning of one another.
Someday soon, she’ll be able to explain everything, giving something of herself to him that she’s never given anyone else. There will be apologies and laughter, plans and excitement, and the inevitable intrusion of the rest of the world.
Tonight she just wants to cherish him-the best of him and worst of him and everything in between. Tonight, she just wants to be in love.
Part Five