Midwest Skies: Leslie and Ron (a Parks and Rec fic)
Title: Midwest Skies
Fandom: Parks and Recreation
Disclaimer: Property of NBC, Michael Schur and Greg Daniels, and the cast and crew. I don't own anything, not even any money, so it's all really moot.
Summary: Ron helps Leslie through a difficult time.
Spoilers: Up through "Li'l Sebastian" 3x16
Pairing: Ben/Leslie (implied), Ron/Leslie (-ish), Ben/Ann (implied)
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: I don't even know, except to say that it's all cypanache's fault. She started me thinking on Ben/Ann, which I really kind of like at the moment, but I couldn't finish my piece after I saw a touch of hers, which shouldn't be a surprise because she's a million times more awesome than I am. So, instead, here I am with the beginnings of my fledgling Leslie/Ron universe. Gods help us all.
It’s been a pretty rough couple of months for Leslie Knope.
Scratch that.
It’s been a pretty rough couple of years for Leslie Knope.
Scratch that, too.
It’s been a pretty rough couple of decades for Leslie Knope.
Her father dies and neither she nor her mother is as devastated as she thinks the situation demands. They just go on as they always have. Two against the world. And it’s not easy, looking up to Marlene.
The man she loved for nearly six years falls in love with her best friend, who dumps him on the same day he is going to propose. Both occurrences are kind of her fault. She dates around and the one time she starts to feel a spark, it’s pulled away.
She breaks up with her secret boyfriend to pursue elected office, only to have him date her still best friend. There’s a pattern here, but she knows it’s her own fault for seating herself beside the most beautiful woman in the world. And she doesn’t think she’s going to break his heart this time. She thinks they’re going to be genuinely gorgeous together.
But none of that is a problem now.
The thing that is, the thing that’s really setting her off, the thing that’s making her vision blur in rage as she attacks it with her nails, the last straw on that proverbial camel’s back, is a damn mosquito bite on her elbow. There’s one on her ankle and one on her wrist just below her watchband, but the reason she’s suddenly swinging a binder through the air and knocking over cups of pens and screaming at the empty space between her desk and Tom’s is because of the tiny red patch on her elbow.
“I can’t find it!” she screeches as her inbox goes clattering to the floor.
Maybe it’s because she hasn’t been sleeping. She never did much of all that, but now she can’t remember the last time she closed her eyes for more than ten minutes. She finds herself doing strange things, like cutting holes in her socks to use them as gloves and introducing herself to trees, but she’s generally tried to keep these episodes under wraps.
She is running for office, after all.
Ron wades through the collection of her co-workers who all stopped to watch her tirade and leads her to his office.
She can’t make out his words, but she knows he thinks this bleeding of emotion means she’s healing. Means she’s figuring it out. Means she’s getting better.
She’d say it’s fifty-fifty.
It could be a necessary turn around phase. Instead of dying her hair and binge-buying beds for a dog she’ll never own and going on a string of first dates, she loops The Sorcerer’s Stone just to fill the silence until even her neighbors’ son complains. It could be that her brain just needs time to catch up to the reality of her choices, to operate within the boundaries of consequence.
Or it could be that she’s losing her mind. She’s not quite sure and no one has had the balls to tell her.
“Leslie, our meeting with William Barnes is in forty minutes.”
Ron wields his name like a bladed code word, using it to sheath whatever madness she’s stumbled upon and tuck it safely behind the mask of a woman she thinks she used to be. It’s so easy to slip into being that confident, savvy persona. It’s so easy to smile and discuss her ambitions like she never had an idea of anything different. All it takes is a reminder and Ron’s hand on the small of her back, leading her to her car.
-
Ron knows Bill Barnes is many things--many intelligent, sly, furtive things--but the consultant doesn’t understand the first thing about Leslie Knope. The respect he affords her is real, but it honors her image over her heart, and nothing about Leslie is more important than heart.
Which is why he’s seriously considering sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.
Just the fact that he is even examining the possibility of breaking one of his highest and most adhered to requirements for a tranquil existence should punctuate the seriousness of his intent.
Because somewhere along the way Leslie’s opinion started to matter. Not enough to change his mind about anything, not enough to make him reconsider his positions. But enough that he began to notice. In between the grandiose planning and the exuberant naivete, in between Camp Athena, humming bird feeders, and the gods be dammed pit, he found himself less and less appalled by her positivity and compassion, taking them as a matter of course rather than just another nuisance born of Marlene Griggs-Knope’s intimidating presence and inability to take no for an answer. She wormed herself into his unconscious, sunk teeth into the cracks in his reasonings, until he realized he wasn’t dismissing her out of hand, but actually listening to her ridiculous schemes on the off chance that there might be a practicable idea lurking under the rose petals and sunbeams.
He wasn’t sure which was cause and which was effect, or if they somehow built independently of each other, but Leslie herself began to matter. As much as he loathed her optimism, as often as he wished he could just drop her on the side of the highway like an unwanted puppy, it would hurt something inside to see her finally disillusioned.
So he looked out for her.
He took Paul’s doubt and cynicism and criticism, and he steered her away from the most unrealistic of her blithe machinations. Caring by nature, solitary by choice and lonely by habit, his self-imposed guardianship of Leslie filled not only his quest for purpose in a career which, by virtue alone, was purposeless for him, but also helped bridge that gaping hole in the worth of his personal life left by his ex-wives and their defects.
Looking out for Leslie professionally naturally blurred into looking out for Leslie personally, and it was so easy to feel the licking flames of necessity. Leslie’s confidence and smiling disposition acted as a double-edged sword. The men confident enough to approach her were usually too arrogant, too abrasive or too self-absorbed for the fledgling success she was finding in the work she loved, and the men compassionate enough to nurture and appreciate her charity were often too blinded by her overwhelming drive and sense of purpose to see much of a need.
And then there was Ben.
Which brings him back around to blatantly interfering in her life, against all reason and nature, all sense and reserve.
When Barnes sends Leslie off with a colleague for heaven knows what, Ron pins him with an ice-rimmed stare. He watches apprehension flare in the other man’s eyes, but it quickly settles into haughty annoyance.
After a moment, Barnes barks a short laugh and breaks their staring contest with a shake of his head.
“Ron Swanson,” he sighs, “why are you here?”
He considers the undercurrents of the question. There are games being played here, and he’s never liked following the rules. If Leslie is a chisel, a precision tool carefully shaping her community, then Ron has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
“I’m making sure you don’t destroy her.” No preamble, no threat. Just a statement of fact. Even if the other man decides to drag this melodrama out, at least his hand is open.
Barnes breaks out into a slow grin.
“I am going to make her.”
He feels his hackles rise at the menace in Barnes’ voice, but he keeps himself still.
The other man settles back in his seat and straightens his coat.
“Listen, Ron,” he starts. “I don’t want to do this with you. This is completely on the level; it’s Leslie’s show. She calls the shots, because when it comes down to it, it’s going to be her issues, her platform, her name on the ballot. I’m just here to help navigate as she wets her toes in these murky political waters. And if that job was yours before, I’m sorry, because it’s mine now.” He pauses for a moment as if he’s unsure of how to phrase his next bit in a way that Ron can understand.
“I’m not the villain in this story.”
-
People talk about courage. They talk about it like it’s stepping in front of a bullet meant for someone else, like it’s throwing someone out of the path of a speeding car. And it is. But it takes a whole other kind of courage to get up every morning, day after day, and face the reality of one’s dreams coming together.
She can compare it to only one thing.
In all of the legends of the Genii, those lucky mortals received their hearts’ desires with a catch.
That catch is killing her.
She should have learned her lesson after Mark. She should have remembered this feeling before she gave another piece of her soul to some untouchable face.
She’s not stupid.
She’s not stupid and she’s not blind and she’s not naive. She just thinks the world would be a better place with a little more effort, a couple more smiles. And she knows right down to her bones this is what she was always meant to do.
When she was a child, she envisioned holding every elected office from city council to president. She practiced her inaugural addresses in front of a sea of stuffed bears and carried a packet of her political platforms in her backpack. When she pictured her future, it always came with a white house staff rather than a picket fence and 2.5 children. She never imagined it would hurt like this.
She’s not used to expecting knifes in her back, but this one feels almost like penance.
She knows she broke his heart. There wasn’t any way it wasn’t going to hurt like hell. For him, for her. For both of them. She expected something to die inside of her.
But it didn’t die.
It’s still alive and it’s fierce and sometimes she thinks it’s going to swallow her whole. But then she takes one look at her proposals and plans, and the needs of her community tighten the tourniquet a little tighter and she can go on for one more day.
So when she sees the elated smile on his face disappear as he meets her eye, when she catches him sneaking out of Ann’s office at lunchtime, she doesn’t blanch and excuse herself to throw up in the bathroom. She doesn’t hit him or curse him or scream at the injustice of it all. She doesn’t even freeze for more than half a moment.
Instead she wipes the surprise from her expression and plasters one of those excruciating smiles she’s getting so good at on her face. She tells him she was coming to look for Ann, that she has to take a rain check on going out to eat. She ignores his mumbling and his wobbling and his agonizing embarrassment, and a very gallant thought strikes her.
“You should go to lunch with Ann in my place. She’ll love the company.”
His startled eyes connect with hers in the first genuine glance he’s given her since the night she ended it.
She wants him to know it’s okay. She wants him to know he deserves some comfort after all she put him through. She wants to hide her resignation, her anger and desolation, because none of this was his fault. He was just collateral damage and she’s sorrier than he’ll ever know.
The searching look he gives her almost does her in, almost makes her forget the reparations she is trying to pay, but something in him must recognize something in her because he breaks their stare just as she is about to take everything back.
“Thank you, Leslie.”
This is what it must feel like to bleed to death, she thinks.
-
He grew up Catholic, kneeling before the altar of something fathomless, so he’s intimately familiar with the idea of martyrs. But it’s been a long time since catechism and he can’t quite remember the specifics anymore. He can’t recall any parables to ease his mind, any allegories to assuage the ineffectual feelings he gets as he watches the slouch in her shoulders and the perpetual crease on her brow. His job makes her inescapable and his nature leads him to worry.
Instead, he buys an unadorned little pendant, barely the size of a dime, with the image of St. Anthony embossed in the gold, and leaves it on Leslie’s desk. He doesn’t think about the fact that it’s the first piece of jewelry he’s bought for any person, woman or otherwise, since his ex wives’ rings. He doesn’t think about how his gift might be misconstrued. He doesn’t think about the impropriety.
Because St. Anthony is a doctor of the church. Because the man is the patron saint of lost things. Because he wants to heal her. Because he thinks she just might be a lost daughter.
It would be worth anything he could give for her to find faith again, and not in the corrupt institutions he worshiped as a boy, but faith in herself, in the decisions she knows are right and the sacrifices she knows are necessary.
Leslie like this isn’t really like Leslie at all.
She raps on his door, catching him as he’s gathering his things to leave for the day.
She holds up the little piece of paper that was enclosed in the box and gives him a lopsided smile.
“You think I’m lost?”
Ironically is the only way she can seem to hold a coherent conversation these days. Or dressed in five layers of professionalism and false brightness.
His eyes carefully take inventory of her. She’s thinner, but she’s not worn or haggard. He can almost imagine those lines on her face were there in the days before she met William Barnes, before she thought she had to choose one joy over another. It’s as if her physical body has recognized her internal struggles and has hardened itself in preparation, as if she was truly steeling herself for battle. It looks good on her. It looks as if she found a way to grow into her abilities, to hone her wild enthusiasm, give it direction and turn it into a compact, deadly weapon. It looks as if she’s settling into early middle-age with a resigned dignity. From the outside no one would ever guess.
Her eyes give her away, but, then again, they always had.
“Or you think I’ve lost something. My touch, maybe? or my mind?” She smirks at him and leans a shoulder against the doorframe, folding her arms across her middle.
She’s beautiful like this, he decides. Maybe he was wrong. In his haste to preserve her innocence, maybe he missed the point.
He’s always trained himself to be attracted to strength in women. His mother was all floral prints and flour-covered hands and softness. His mother let his father walk all over her, and who is he, if not his father? So he chose women who would never submit to his dictatorial demeanor, who would never let themselves be bullied by their husbands, and who, if he was honest, punished him for those parts of his father he couldn’t erase from his being.
And it strikes him that Leslie is becoming the perfect amalgamation of silk and steel, vigor and vitality. She’s everything he appreciated about his mother, without those faults his disposition led him to despise. Maybe Bill Barnes is doing her a favor, stripping her down to bone and reflex, setting flame to the old so she can rise again, fuller and more complete.
He was wrong to assume this is a breakdown. It’s a transformation.
She pins him with an iron glare and he feels something primitive inside howl in recognition.
“Are you trying to fix me, Ron?”
He gives the only answer he can.
“You’re not broken.”
Slowly, she breaks out into a grin that grows razor-pointed edges as she mulls that thought over.
“No, I’m not.”
-
She wears his token around and she thinks it just might save her.
She’s not broken.
Finally, after weeks of wondering what, how, and why, finally she has something to sink her teeth into.
She’s not broken.
It’s as if a fog has been lifted, the haze of doubt and distrust worn away. She is able to see the wounds for what they are, see solutions where before there was only gloom. The picture isn’t pretty or simple, it doesn’t mean it hurts any less, but it’s crystal clear.
Plans collide and rearrange in her head, and she picks up the phone and does something she’s never done since the beginning of the friendship.
She calls Ann and makes sure it’s all right if she drops by at a reasonable hour with dinner. She even gives the other woman plenty of time to prepare, just in case.
Her friend is hedgy with her and they’re halfway through the first boxes of takeout before she looks ready.
“If you want to talk about Ben, I want to listen,” she says at last. “I’m still your friend.”
She watches a dull blush creep over Ann’s face and she can’t help but heave a sigh for how beautiful her friend really is.
The physician’s creed is first do no harm, but somewhere along the way she’s pretty sure Ann picked up the same motto. It made things a little awkward when they first breached the subject of Mark, but nothing she ever said then caused any particular wound. She’s not so sure the same will apply here, but something has to shift.
If there’s anything the past couple months taught her, things sometimes have to get worse before they can get better.
“You two are cute together.”
She can’t find another modifier. Everything else rings false or forced in her head, and she knows it will sound that way to the ear. But it’s true. She never considered it before. First he had been Mean Ben, then she never stopped thinking of him as her Ben. The more thought she gives it, the more perfect they seem. Maybe Ann will never understand political role play or the importance of one really great towel, but Ann is the sort of woman who wants to settle into a domestic routine, have children, and only have to worry about which dish to cook for her family in the evening. She’s the sort of woman who wants to fret over preschool applications and healthy lunches and whether a cat or a dog would be the best pet in a home with young children. She’s the sort of woman who finds joy in taking care of her family and her friends and her garden and her neighborhood.
And Leslie’s never seen life quite the same way, not in the same order.
She knows her friend will be the best wife and mother, and she can’t help but think that he deserves that.
Ann still hasn’t recovered herself enough to respond.
“He’s really skinny though, isn’t he?”
Ann’s astonished eyes finally find hers. An eternity stretches between them, a million things passing in a glance.
“Yeah, totally too skinny.”
Then she laughs, the awkward edges bleeding away.
-
He realizes it’s pride swelling in his belly before the shock has completely worn off.
When they first walked into the office, hand in hand, rage blinded him. The downright temerity rendered him immobile, but he was on his feet and stalking toward them before he could even rationally work through the whole situation.
Leslie had not only been upset about losing Ben.
She had to see him in the arms of her best friend.
No wonder.
Everyone else is frozen in various degrees of surprise when he makes it to the main office. April is glaring daggers at Ann; Jerry is startled and gaping confusedly; Donna is bouncing her gaze between the pair and Leslie’s door; and poor Tom is looking rather like a kicked puppy, whether at his again unfruitful infatuation with Ann or Ben’s obvious bro-trayal, he can’t be sure.
He gears up to throw them out, but Leslie beats him there. She hugs Ann and starts talking to her about heaven knows what, steering her into her office.
Leslie gives him a pointed look over her shoulder before she disappears behind her door with Ann, and it hits him.
She’s not okay.
She’s not okay, but she’ll pretend until she is.
“Come with me,” he barks.
He seats himself behind the desk, clenching and unclenching his shaking hands.
“I take it Leslie sanctioned this,” he says at last.
The other man only nods.
“How long?”
“Sorry?”
“How long do you plan on rubbing her nose in it?”
Ben flinches satisfactorily.
“I didn’t mean--I didn’t want to hurt her. It just sort of . . . happened, with Ann.” He gets up and starts pacing the room. “I didn’t want any of this, but I couldn’t stop it. And--and she hurt me first. Leslie dumped me. She broke it off with me because I’m a scandal, because it’ll hurt her chances if it ever comes out. She didn’t want to be with me.”
Fury spirals out of control, but he keeps his voice steady.
“You’re an idiot.”
“Excuse me?” Ben demands.
“I said, you’re an idiot. You’re going to be another Brendanawicz. Ann’s going to leave you high and dry when she realizes she doesn’t know what she wants.”
The other man drops into the chair, scrubbing his face with his hands.
“Yes, okay, I was mad--is that what this is about? I was mad, and that’s maybe a little why it happened. But that’s not how it is now.” He sighs. “I like Ann.” He pauses a second. “And what was I supposed to do? Wait around? Hope that something would change? That she wouldn’t get elected?”
He feels a snarl rise in reaction to the last, but he keeps himself steady.
“I couldn’t do that to Leslie. She deserves it.”
For a moment, a glow of appreciation appears in the younger man’s eyes, like he remembers seeing during those long hours spent over the Harvest Festival.
Finally, he sighs and shakes his head.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Leslie’s grown teeth.”
The other man raises an eyebrow.
“And she’ll never forgive you if you screw her best friend over.”
Ben breaks into a rueful grin and nods.
“I don’t know much, but that I do know.” Ben stands and holds his hand out. “Thank you, Ron, for looking out for her.”
He’s not sure if he’s giving away too much, but he stands and takes the younger man’s hand.
“Always.”
-
whyagain july - august 2011
-
Fandom: Parks and Recreation
Disclaimer: Property of NBC, Michael Schur and Greg Daniels, and the cast and crew. I don't own anything, not even any money, so it's all really moot.
Summary: Ron helps Leslie through a difficult time.
Spoilers: Up through "Li'l Sebastian" 3x16
Pairing: Ben/Leslie (implied), Ron/Leslie (-ish), Ben/Ann (implied)
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: I don't even know, except to say that it's all cypanache's fault. She started me thinking on Ben/Ann, which I really kind of like at the moment, but I couldn't finish my piece after I saw a touch of hers, which shouldn't be a surprise because she's a million times more awesome than I am. So, instead, here I am with the beginnings of my fledgling Leslie/Ron universe. Gods help us all.
It’s been a pretty rough couple of months for Leslie Knope.
Scratch that.
It’s been a pretty rough couple of years for Leslie Knope.
Scratch that, too.
It’s been a pretty rough couple of decades for Leslie Knope.
Her father dies and neither she nor her mother is as devastated as she thinks the situation demands. They just go on as they always have. Two against the world. And it’s not easy, looking up to Marlene.
The man she loved for nearly six years falls in love with her best friend, who dumps him on the same day he is going to propose. Both occurrences are kind of her fault. She dates around and the one time she starts to feel a spark, it’s pulled away.
She breaks up with her secret boyfriend to pursue elected office, only to have him date her still best friend. There’s a pattern here, but she knows it’s her own fault for seating herself beside the most beautiful woman in the world. And she doesn’t think she’s going to break his heart this time. She thinks they’re going to be genuinely gorgeous together.
But none of that is a problem now.
The thing that is, the thing that’s really setting her off, the thing that’s making her vision blur in rage as she attacks it with her nails, the last straw on that proverbial camel’s back, is a damn mosquito bite on her elbow. There’s one on her ankle and one on her wrist just below her watchband, but the reason she’s suddenly swinging a binder through the air and knocking over cups of pens and screaming at the empty space between her desk and Tom’s is because of the tiny red patch on her elbow.
“I can’t find it!” she screeches as her inbox goes clattering to the floor.
Maybe it’s because she hasn’t been sleeping. She never did much of all that, but now she can’t remember the last time she closed her eyes for more than ten minutes. She finds herself doing strange things, like cutting holes in her socks to use them as gloves and introducing herself to trees, but she’s generally tried to keep these episodes under wraps.
She is running for office, after all.
Ron wades through the collection of her co-workers who all stopped to watch her tirade and leads her to his office.
She can’t make out his words, but she knows he thinks this bleeding of emotion means she’s healing. Means she’s figuring it out. Means she’s getting better.
She’d say it’s fifty-fifty.
It could be a necessary turn around phase. Instead of dying her hair and binge-buying beds for a dog she’ll never own and going on a string of first dates, she loops The Sorcerer’s Stone just to fill the silence until even her neighbors’ son complains. It could be that her brain just needs time to catch up to the reality of her choices, to operate within the boundaries of consequence.
Or it could be that she’s losing her mind. She’s not quite sure and no one has had the balls to tell her.
“Leslie, our meeting with William Barnes is in forty minutes.”
Ron wields his name like a bladed code word, using it to sheath whatever madness she’s stumbled upon and tuck it safely behind the mask of a woman she thinks she used to be. It’s so easy to slip into being that confident, savvy persona. It’s so easy to smile and discuss her ambitions like she never had an idea of anything different. All it takes is a reminder and Ron’s hand on the small of her back, leading her to her car.
-
Ron knows Bill Barnes is many things--many intelligent, sly, furtive things--but the consultant doesn’t understand the first thing about Leslie Knope. The respect he affords her is real, but it honors her image over her heart, and nothing about Leslie is more important than heart.
Which is why he’s seriously considering sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.
Just the fact that he is even examining the possibility of breaking one of his highest and most adhered to requirements for a tranquil existence should punctuate the seriousness of his intent.
Because somewhere along the way Leslie’s opinion started to matter. Not enough to change his mind about anything, not enough to make him reconsider his positions. But enough that he began to notice. In between the grandiose planning and the exuberant naivete, in between Camp Athena, humming bird feeders, and the gods be dammed pit, he found himself less and less appalled by her positivity and compassion, taking them as a matter of course rather than just another nuisance born of Marlene Griggs-Knope’s intimidating presence and inability to take no for an answer. She wormed herself into his unconscious, sunk teeth into the cracks in his reasonings, until he realized he wasn’t dismissing her out of hand, but actually listening to her ridiculous schemes on the off chance that there might be a practicable idea lurking under the rose petals and sunbeams.
He wasn’t sure which was cause and which was effect, or if they somehow built independently of each other, but Leslie herself began to matter. As much as he loathed her optimism, as often as he wished he could just drop her on the side of the highway like an unwanted puppy, it would hurt something inside to see her finally disillusioned.
So he looked out for her.
He took Paul’s doubt and cynicism and criticism, and he steered her away from the most unrealistic of her blithe machinations. Caring by nature, solitary by choice and lonely by habit, his self-imposed guardianship of Leslie filled not only his quest for purpose in a career which, by virtue alone, was purposeless for him, but also helped bridge that gaping hole in the worth of his personal life left by his ex-wives and their defects.
Looking out for Leslie professionally naturally blurred into looking out for Leslie personally, and it was so easy to feel the licking flames of necessity. Leslie’s confidence and smiling disposition acted as a double-edged sword. The men confident enough to approach her were usually too arrogant, too abrasive or too self-absorbed for the fledgling success she was finding in the work she loved, and the men compassionate enough to nurture and appreciate her charity were often too blinded by her overwhelming drive and sense of purpose to see much of a need.
And then there was Ben.
Which brings him back around to blatantly interfering in her life, against all reason and nature, all sense and reserve.
When Barnes sends Leslie off with a colleague for heaven knows what, Ron pins him with an ice-rimmed stare. He watches apprehension flare in the other man’s eyes, but it quickly settles into haughty annoyance.
After a moment, Barnes barks a short laugh and breaks their staring contest with a shake of his head.
“Ron Swanson,” he sighs, “why are you here?”
He considers the undercurrents of the question. There are games being played here, and he’s never liked following the rules. If Leslie is a chisel, a precision tool carefully shaping her community, then Ron has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
“I’m making sure you don’t destroy her.” No preamble, no threat. Just a statement of fact. Even if the other man decides to drag this melodrama out, at least his hand is open.
Barnes breaks out into a slow grin.
“I am going to make her.”
He feels his hackles rise at the menace in Barnes’ voice, but he keeps himself still.
The other man settles back in his seat and straightens his coat.
“Listen, Ron,” he starts. “I don’t want to do this with you. This is completely on the level; it’s Leslie’s show. She calls the shots, because when it comes down to it, it’s going to be her issues, her platform, her name on the ballot. I’m just here to help navigate as she wets her toes in these murky political waters. And if that job was yours before, I’m sorry, because it’s mine now.” He pauses for a moment as if he’s unsure of how to phrase his next bit in a way that Ron can understand.
“I’m not the villain in this story.”
-
People talk about courage. They talk about it like it’s stepping in front of a bullet meant for someone else, like it’s throwing someone out of the path of a speeding car. And it is. But it takes a whole other kind of courage to get up every morning, day after day, and face the reality of one’s dreams coming together.
She can compare it to only one thing.
In all of the legends of the Genii, those lucky mortals received their hearts’ desires with a catch.
That catch is killing her.
She should have learned her lesson after Mark. She should have remembered this feeling before she gave another piece of her soul to some untouchable face.
She’s not stupid.
She’s not stupid and she’s not blind and she’s not naive. She just thinks the world would be a better place with a little more effort, a couple more smiles. And she knows right down to her bones this is what she was always meant to do.
When she was a child, she envisioned holding every elected office from city council to president. She practiced her inaugural addresses in front of a sea of stuffed bears and carried a packet of her political platforms in her backpack. When she pictured her future, it always came with a white house staff rather than a picket fence and 2.5 children. She never imagined it would hurt like this.
She’s not used to expecting knifes in her back, but this one feels almost like penance.
She knows she broke his heart. There wasn’t any way it wasn’t going to hurt like hell. For him, for her. For both of them. She expected something to die inside of her.
But it didn’t die.
It’s still alive and it’s fierce and sometimes she thinks it’s going to swallow her whole. But then she takes one look at her proposals and plans, and the needs of her community tighten the tourniquet a little tighter and she can go on for one more day.
So when she sees the elated smile on his face disappear as he meets her eye, when she catches him sneaking out of Ann’s office at lunchtime, she doesn’t blanch and excuse herself to throw up in the bathroom. She doesn’t hit him or curse him or scream at the injustice of it all. She doesn’t even freeze for more than half a moment.
Instead she wipes the surprise from her expression and plasters one of those excruciating smiles she’s getting so good at on her face. She tells him she was coming to look for Ann, that she has to take a rain check on going out to eat. She ignores his mumbling and his wobbling and his agonizing embarrassment, and a very gallant thought strikes her.
“You should go to lunch with Ann in my place. She’ll love the company.”
His startled eyes connect with hers in the first genuine glance he’s given her since the night she ended it.
She wants him to know it’s okay. She wants him to know he deserves some comfort after all she put him through. She wants to hide her resignation, her anger and desolation, because none of this was his fault. He was just collateral damage and she’s sorrier than he’ll ever know.
The searching look he gives her almost does her in, almost makes her forget the reparations she is trying to pay, but something in him must recognize something in her because he breaks their stare just as she is about to take everything back.
“Thank you, Leslie.”
This is what it must feel like to bleed to death, she thinks.
-
He grew up Catholic, kneeling before the altar of something fathomless, so he’s intimately familiar with the idea of martyrs. But it’s been a long time since catechism and he can’t quite remember the specifics anymore. He can’t recall any parables to ease his mind, any allegories to assuage the ineffectual feelings he gets as he watches the slouch in her shoulders and the perpetual crease on her brow. His job makes her inescapable and his nature leads him to worry.
Instead, he buys an unadorned little pendant, barely the size of a dime, with the image of St. Anthony embossed in the gold, and leaves it on Leslie’s desk. He doesn’t think about the fact that it’s the first piece of jewelry he’s bought for any person, woman or otherwise, since his ex wives’ rings. He doesn’t think about how his gift might be misconstrued. He doesn’t think about the impropriety.
Because St. Anthony is a doctor of the church. Because the man is the patron saint of lost things. Because he wants to heal her. Because he thinks she just might be a lost daughter.
It would be worth anything he could give for her to find faith again, and not in the corrupt institutions he worshiped as a boy, but faith in herself, in the decisions she knows are right and the sacrifices she knows are necessary.
Leslie like this isn’t really like Leslie at all.
She raps on his door, catching him as he’s gathering his things to leave for the day.
She holds up the little piece of paper that was enclosed in the box and gives him a lopsided smile.
“You think I’m lost?”
Ironically is the only way she can seem to hold a coherent conversation these days. Or dressed in five layers of professionalism and false brightness.
His eyes carefully take inventory of her. She’s thinner, but she’s not worn or haggard. He can almost imagine those lines on her face were there in the days before she met William Barnes, before she thought she had to choose one joy over another. It’s as if her physical body has recognized her internal struggles and has hardened itself in preparation, as if she was truly steeling herself for battle. It looks good on her. It looks as if she found a way to grow into her abilities, to hone her wild enthusiasm, give it direction and turn it into a compact, deadly weapon. It looks as if she’s settling into early middle-age with a resigned dignity. From the outside no one would ever guess.
Her eyes give her away, but, then again, they always had.
“Or you think I’ve lost something. My touch, maybe? or my mind?” She smirks at him and leans a shoulder against the doorframe, folding her arms across her middle.
She’s beautiful like this, he decides. Maybe he was wrong. In his haste to preserve her innocence, maybe he missed the point.
He’s always trained himself to be attracted to strength in women. His mother was all floral prints and flour-covered hands and softness. His mother let his father walk all over her, and who is he, if not his father? So he chose women who would never submit to his dictatorial demeanor, who would never let themselves be bullied by their husbands, and who, if he was honest, punished him for those parts of his father he couldn’t erase from his being.
And it strikes him that Leslie is becoming the perfect amalgamation of silk and steel, vigor and vitality. She’s everything he appreciated about his mother, without those faults his disposition led him to despise. Maybe Bill Barnes is doing her a favor, stripping her down to bone and reflex, setting flame to the old so she can rise again, fuller and more complete.
He was wrong to assume this is a breakdown. It’s a transformation.
She pins him with an iron glare and he feels something primitive inside howl in recognition.
“Are you trying to fix me, Ron?”
He gives the only answer he can.
“You’re not broken.”
Slowly, she breaks out into a grin that grows razor-pointed edges as she mulls that thought over.
“No, I’m not.”
-
She wears his token around and she thinks it just might save her.
She’s not broken.
Finally, after weeks of wondering what, how, and why, finally she has something to sink her teeth into.
She’s not broken.
It’s as if a fog has been lifted, the haze of doubt and distrust worn away. She is able to see the wounds for what they are, see solutions where before there was only gloom. The picture isn’t pretty or simple, it doesn’t mean it hurts any less, but it’s crystal clear.
Plans collide and rearrange in her head, and she picks up the phone and does something she’s never done since the beginning of the friendship.
She calls Ann and makes sure it’s all right if she drops by at a reasonable hour with dinner. She even gives the other woman plenty of time to prepare, just in case.
Her friend is hedgy with her and they’re halfway through the first boxes of takeout before she looks ready.
“If you want to talk about Ben, I want to listen,” she says at last. “I’m still your friend.”
She watches a dull blush creep over Ann’s face and she can’t help but heave a sigh for how beautiful her friend really is.
The physician’s creed is first do no harm, but somewhere along the way she’s pretty sure Ann picked up the same motto. It made things a little awkward when they first breached the subject of Mark, but nothing she ever said then caused any particular wound. She’s not so sure the same will apply here, but something has to shift.
If there’s anything the past couple months taught her, things sometimes have to get worse before they can get better.
“You two are cute together.”
She can’t find another modifier. Everything else rings false or forced in her head, and she knows it will sound that way to the ear. But it’s true. She never considered it before. First he had been Mean Ben, then she never stopped thinking of him as her Ben. The more thought she gives it, the more perfect they seem. Maybe Ann will never understand political role play or the importance of one really great towel, but Ann is the sort of woman who wants to settle into a domestic routine, have children, and only have to worry about which dish to cook for her family in the evening. She’s the sort of woman who wants to fret over preschool applications and healthy lunches and whether a cat or a dog would be the best pet in a home with young children. She’s the sort of woman who finds joy in taking care of her family and her friends and her garden and her neighborhood.
And Leslie’s never seen life quite the same way, not in the same order.
She knows her friend will be the best wife and mother, and she can’t help but think that he deserves that.
Ann still hasn’t recovered herself enough to respond.
“He’s really skinny though, isn’t he?”
Ann’s astonished eyes finally find hers. An eternity stretches between them, a million things passing in a glance.
“Yeah, totally too skinny.”
Then she laughs, the awkward edges bleeding away.
-
He realizes it’s pride swelling in his belly before the shock has completely worn off.
When they first walked into the office, hand in hand, rage blinded him. The downright temerity rendered him immobile, but he was on his feet and stalking toward them before he could even rationally work through the whole situation.
Leslie had not only been upset about losing Ben.
She had to see him in the arms of her best friend.
No wonder.
Everyone else is frozen in various degrees of surprise when he makes it to the main office. April is glaring daggers at Ann; Jerry is startled and gaping confusedly; Donna is bouncing her gaze between the pair and Leslie’s door; and poor Tom is looking rather like a kicked puppy, whether at his again unfruitful infatuation with Ann or Ben’s obvious bro-trayal, he can’t be sure.
He gears up to throw them out, but Leslie beats him there. She hugs Ann and starts talking to her about heaven knows what, steering her into her office.
Leslie gives him a pointed look over her shoulder before she disappears behind her door with Ann, and it hits him.
She’s not okay.
She’s not okay, but she’ll pretend until she is.
“Come with me,” he barks.
He seats himself behind the desk, clenching and unclenching his shaking hands.
“I take it Leslie sanctioned this,” he says at last.
The other man only nods.
“How long?”
“Sorry?”
“How long do you plan on rubbing her nose in it?”
Ben flinches satisfactorily.
“I didn’t mean--I didn’t want to hurt her. It just sort of . . . happened, with Ann.” He gets up and starts pacing the room. “I didn’t want any of this, but I couldn’t stop it. And--and she hurt me first. Leslie dumped me. She broke it off with me because I’m a scandal, because it’ll hurt her chances if it ever comes out. She didn’t want to be with me.”
Fury spirals out of control, but he keeps his voice steady.
“You’re an idiot.”
“Excuse me?” Ben demands.
“I said, you’re an idiot. You’re going to be another Brendanawicz. Ann’s going to leave you high and dry when she realizes she doesn’t know what she wants.”
The other man drops into the chair, scrubbing his face with his hands.
“Yes, okay, I was mad--is that what this is about? I was mad, and that’s maybe a little why it happened. But that’s not how it is now.” He sighs. “I like Ann.” He pauses a second. “And what was I supposed to do? Wait around? Hope that something would change? That she wouldn’t get elected?”
He feels a snarl rise in reaction to the last, but he keeps himself steady.
“I couldn’t do that to Leslie. She deserves it.”
For a moment, a glow of appreciation appears in the younger man’s eyes, like he remembers seeing during those long hours spent over the Harvest Festival.
Finally, he sighs and shakes his head.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Leslie’s grown teeth.”
The other man raises an eyebrow.
“And she’ll never forgive you if you screw her best friend over.”
Ben breaks into a rueful grin and nods.
“I don’t know much, but that I do know.” Ben stands and holds his hand out. “Thank you, Ron, for looking out for her.”
He’s not sure if he’s giving away too much, but he stands and takes the younger man’s hand.
“Always.”
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whyagain july - august 2011
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