While You Were Sleeping: Prologue
Title: While You Were Sleeping: Prologue
Pairing: Leslie/Ben
Word Count: About 300
Rating: G
Setting: AU season 3
Summary: Ben Wyatt is living a quiet, routine life until one event turns everything upside-down. Basically, it's the plot of While You Were Sleeping in the Parks-verse.
Author's Notes: I owe a huge thank you to angelica_rules, who has been encouraging me to write this for a year now, and was kind enough to read and give me feedback on these first few chapters. I don't know what I'd do without you! I also owe a big thank you to Roda, who helped me brainstorm this fic many moons ago. This definitely wouldn't have happened without your help!
Prologue
Every morning, Ben Wyatt's alarm goes off at 6:15am. He hits the snooze button twice before he gets up.
Coffee is a necessity before anything else. He drinks it while checking the news on his computer. Most days, he feeds Tobias, the stray cat who sleeps on his fire escape almost every night. Then he showers, dresses, and spends too much time on his hair before he finally gives up, sighing at his reflection in the mirror.
He's out the door by 8:05.
He arrives at work by 8:35, gets his second cup of coffee, and enjoys the thirty minutes or so of quiet before people start rolling in. His office-mate, Chris Traeger, arrives at 9 on the dot each day, never anything less than totally enthused about life. Ben tunes him out by absorbing himself in spreadsheets and numbers, and looks forward to lunch, when he gets the office to himself for forty minutes.
At least twice a week, Chris asks him to come out after work or go running or join him on a double date, and most of the time, Ben turns him down. He usually stays late in the office until his eyes can't focus any more, and then he heads home. He eats dinner, watches some television, reads a little if his eyes aren't too tired, and then he goes to bed.
This is his life. It's mundane. It's responsible. It's everything he wanted when he was an eighteen-year-old kid running from his mistakes. Fall. Winter. Spring. Summer. Day after day. Year after year. His routine.
Until suddenly, one not so unusual November day, it all changes.
That's the day he meets Ann Perkins.
Chapter One