Fic:: Both Hands [Parks and Recreation] [1/2]
So I tried to write a Parks & Rec story that was serious! political! drama! And then couldn't. I think it's because Parks & Rec has ambition, and competing ideologies, pragmatism, idealism, feminism and congressional re-election campaigns! It's already serious political drama - with pratfalls, cock jokes and true love. I adore it.
Anyway, I sat down to write it regardless, and a few hundred words later the aliens invaded, and there were another many many many words after that. Kind of not sorry. Proper notes and acknowledgements at the end, but
forthwritten and tau_sigma helped me an enormous amount with this. It's in two parts because of LJ's posting limits - the link to part two is at the bottom. Also, a brief content note: there is some depiction of violence in this story, but I don't think it's terribly graphic; if you want more detail, please feel free to get in touch.
Fic:: Both Hands
by Raven
17,000w, Parks and Recreation, Leslie/Ben, April/Andy. Aliens have invaded Pawnee; Leslie and Ben are fighting a lot. April's actually not sure which of those is scarier.
April comes into the house as night is falling and throws down her bag. "Leslie and Ben had another fight," she says.
"Urgh," Andy says, because what else do you say to that. He's rooting around their kitchen cupboards, looking for a tin of something. April doesn't help. She sits down on the couch that's leaking stuffing and rests her head on her knees.
"They just yell about all the same things all the time," she says after a minute. "Then he cries and she cries and they make up and have stupid lame make-up sex where I can hear them and it's the worst and it's awful and I hate it. It's like watching your parents fight, urgh, gross."
Andy doesn't respond to that, because, yeah, it is gross. Instead, he taps the cane. Ron made it and it'll probably last longer than Andy's going to be alive. "Don't say lame like it's a bad thing."
April lifts her head and glares. "It hurts you. It's lame."
He smiles at her and starts throwing things off the couch in a heap: some notes for a song he's writing, a broken can opener, a copy of Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration, their TV remote control, which for some reason they still have even though they traded the TV for five cases of Nutri-Yum bars, and a couple of plecks. Eventually, Andy produces a tin of beans from somewhere, and she takes it from him and looks for a knife to open it with - Ron showed her how, back in the beginning - and they sit down to dinner, passing the tin from hand to hand. After a while, when the sun is quite down, she checks the bathroom to see if there's water - there is, a blurry brown trickle - and washes her hands. She fetches her kit from everywhere she's stowed it, the weapon with the full clip, the couple of grenades, lays it all neatly on the table.
"You gonna be okay, babe?" Andy asks.
April nods. She can't take him along - she's going on foot through the scrub and the trees, avoiding the droid patrols, and it's too risky. "You?"
"Yeah," Andy says, with difficulty.
April kisses him and thinks she'll send a text to Leslie so she'll come check on him, just in case. She closes the door behind her and then ducks in the shadows. Something's moving on the middle of the road, and she realises in a flash of surprise that it’s one of them, which is weird: other than the ones that lurk in City Hall, you hardly ever see them now. They look like a human skeleton would look, if the bones were encased with a smooth, shining silver layer and then each rib were hooked between strong fingers and drawn outwards, all in crazy angles like twisted piano wire. The one that's passing by has big hollow sockets where its eyes might have been, and it's moving, concertina-like, sinister, down the street. April waits. She pauses another minute, looking into shadows for watching eyes, and then she shoulders her bag and sets out into the darkness, her feet silent on the sidewalk cracks.
*
Leslie is the only person who even tried, on principle, to call the invaders by name. Even then it was an approximation - their name for themselves can't be pronounced using a human larynx and if it could, would take approximately a minute and a half to say in its entirety - but there were a couple of attempts at standard abbreviations, the sort of thing that might have ended up in the AP Stylebook before the Associated Press became somewhat less relevant than it had been previously.
These days everyone calls them the invaders, or the aliens, or just, with a gesture skywards, them.
*
Ann leaves town just before dark, before curfew. She crosses Leslie's checkpoints without any trouble, but makes sure to cross at the last possible moment, hitting the last one before the sun quite dips out of a dim autumnal sky. (She's turning into one of those people who used to come to the Parks Department public forums, she thinks, ruefully: they're not Leslie's checkpoints.) She hasn't been stopped; the invaders don't, in a manner of speaking, man the checkpoints themselves - the droids are small but lethal, heat-sensing and cued to the temperature of a human body - but she was watching for the flash of eyes nevertheless, the moving, spindly shadows. She keeps on going, speeding up, her breath coming faster, and by the time she reaches the rendezvous point, about a half-mile short of the barrier between Pawnee and the outside world, twilight is becoming true night.
It doesn't take long. The voice out of the dark calls, softly, "Ann? Is that you?"
"Password?" she calls back.
A rustle of paper, then a groan. "The rooster crows at midnight. I guess it's Andy's turn to pick them. Do you need some help?"
"Thanks." Ann gets out of the car and kills the lights entirely, smiling to herself in the dimness. The last few times she's done this, it's been meetings with someone she doesn't know or someone who looks vaguely familiar, whom she might have seen once at City Hall or at the hospital and now has to trust, like some arcane article of faith. Despite everything, it's sort of nice to see Ben, scrambling over the edge of a ridge and dropping feet first to land by her side. He helps her heft out the boxes, glancing in each one as he takes it out of the trunk. Ann catches his eye and says, "You know Leslie wouldn't like it, if she knew I was doing this."
"I know." He smiles ruefully at her and picks up another box by the handle, with his right hand. His left arm is in some sort of makeshift sling, made out of what looks like an old Mouse Rat T-shirt, and Ann's professional instincts snap into focus.
"What happened to your arm?" A horrible thought occurs. "You and Leslie haven't started" - she mimes throwing a plate - "have you? Have you?"
"No." Ben sighs. "No, I went wire-cutting with Ron and he wanted to stop and forage - why does he make me do that? Who wants to eat acorns when we live in the processed food capital of America?”
“You got attacked by an acorn?” Ann asks, amused.
“No, by one of Leslie’s patrols." He shrugs, lopsided. "At the old Sweetums factory.”
"Seriously, dude, they're not Leslie's patrols." Ann sighs. "I'll take a look at it when we're settled."
"It's fine, really," Ben says, sharp, and Ann sighs. She's the one who brought it up, so she's only got herself to blame that they can't avoid the subject any longer.
"You... and Leslie."
"Yeah." Ben glances at her. "We're not getting along."
"I heard." Ann sighs, then, more tentatively: "I heard the C-word got used.”
Ben shivers, and Ann isn't sure if it's what she said or just the cold; after a second he's calm, like they're discussing the weather. "Something like that," he says. "Are you here... because you're here? Or because you're dropping off supplies?"
Ann glares at him. "If that's your half-assed way of asking will I listen to you announcing your grand plan, then yes. Only because there's nothing on TV tonight. Or tomorrow night, or any night. Don’t start thinking I like you, Ben Wyatt, or that I give a damn about anything you do."
Ben grins and murmurs, "Ovaries before brovaries."
*
They don’t know if Chris is alive or dead. They do know that he was probably one of the first people to see, through the scars of green light lining the sky, into this new world that they live in now; April, who couldn't sleep, got up to let Champion out and saw the first of the ships come down. Of course the department took it upon themselves to track him down, along with the other early-morning runners - Leslie said, "We have to, we're Parks and Recreation" - but no bodies have ever been found.
*
Ben sits cross-legged on the ground, leaning against the side of Ron's cabin, and says, "Thank you all for coming."
April glances around the little clearing, at the frost forming on the leaves. They've got kerosene lamps lighting up the space, and through the shadows, April can make out Ann, and Donna, and Stuart, Ann's old officemate, and Jerry, and JJ from the diner, and Tom's surprisingly awesome ex-girlfriend Lucy, and a whole ton of other people she doesn't care enough to know the names of. Ron's sitting next to her, his presence comforting. April misses Andy.
"I'll keep this short," Ben goes on, and there's some restrained whooping at the back. It's getting seriously cold out here. "You all know the general thrust of it by now."
Some guy apparently thinks the word 'thrust' is funny and April elbows him in the jaw. Ben waits, patiently.
"We keep ourselves to ourselves," he says after a moment. "When we get in their way, they shoot, maim and abduct. When we don't, they don't. We can't cross their checkpoints after dark, but they don't come running when we cross them at twilight. Within the barriers, we keep ourselves, in nearly every sense of the word."
April nods to herself. Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration was published anonymously - if "published" is even the word for a hundred-page polemic stapled together, passed from hand to hand and photocopy to photocopy - but April's not an idiot, and she used to proofread Ben's position papers for Congressman Murray. She read it in the bath, after they could fill the tub again, called Andy to get in the water with her and let it slop out the sides, both of them ignoring the discomfort of a space far too small for two, peering at the blurring page headed, what happens after the breakdown of human society?
Ben has since said that "self-refrigeration" wasn't the best choice of totally made-up word, that it was unnecessarily dramatic - but as the weeks and months pass, while they keep to curfew, dodge patrols, get used to life without enough electricity and never going further than ten miles from home, April keeps remembering the old story about the spider and the fly, and thinks he got it right first time.
"This is it, then," Ben says. "I think I have a plan. I think it's a good plan. One of our, ah, agents" - he pauses again, meets April's eyes - "will be heading out tomorrow to confirm whether it is, in fact, a good plan. In the meantime, guys, I need you to start figuring out how to build... well, a bomb. Not a big one," he adds, hastily.
There's a murmur at that, and for once no commentary from the back row. April curls her hands into half-moon shapes and holds them to her ears, catching Ben's eye; he glares at her with affection. Ron says, "Why?"
"Because," Ben says, "I think we're uniquely positioned to make use of it."
Jerry raises a hand and says, "Ah, how..."
"Jerry, contrary to popular belief I am not Princess Leia" - April snorts - "I am an accountant from Minnesota." Ben waves a hand. "That's why I need all of you, I have no idea. Could someone, some brave and courageous someone, maybe begin by visiting the public library?"
"No need," Ron says, rising to his feet inexorable as a tide, and April figured all along he would have it covered, so it probably all depends on her now, which is kind of shitty.
*
Ron's not the only one who’s just moved kit and caboodle out into the woods. A lot of Pawnee neighbourhoods were seriously damaged in the first attacks, and even given that, Ann suspects some people just like it out here: unless you happen to look down towards the town and the admittedly quite noticeable alien ship hanging above it, you can kid yourself that not much has changed. Ann watches Ron cracks open the boxes and casually hand out basic medical supplies, cleaning alcohol, gauze, analgaesia tablets, wondering how organised the distribution would have to be for him to start disapproving of it again, and wishes Ben would let her take a look at his arm.
"Thanks," he's saying, breaking down one of the empty boxes, his eyes on it so Ann takes a moment to realise he's talking to her. "I know you don't like doing this, and I'm not going to ask..."
“Shut up,” Ann says. "Next week's password?"
Ben flashes her a grateful smile, and then grimaces. "Pickle hair."
*
What April misses most of all - okay, not most of all, but of the little things - is getting to take a bath whenever she wants. She likes hot water, solitude and steam: she’s got the last, blowing softly to see her breath, and the rest all sucks. There’s a gas lamp and a makeshift electricity supply and four people all crammed in, each with a bunk perpendicular to the wall that's basically a couple of planks of wood with the handful of blankets Ron allows as within the spirit of manliness. Ron's in the other room, with some guy who's come out of Eagleton - he brought candy bars and medical supplies as a mark of good faith - and April gets the bottom bunk in here and one of Ron’s old paperbacks as her only alternative to sleeping. She reads until it gets pretty late, slips out for some drinking water - Ron has a supply of water purification tablets that could last them all into 2020 - and comes back in quietly, pausing for a moment in the doorway.
Ben has the top bunk, mainly because he wasn't around when April called dibs on the one below it. He's lying there with his eyes half-closed and one hand flung out behind his head, and something makes April say, “Yeah, so, Ann said Leslie hates you now.”
He turns and stares at her and okay, that was mean and April's not really sure where it came from. She looks back up at him and feels so tired, suddenly, too tired to form words, so she reaches for the ladder and clambers up to sit beside him. "Sorry," she says very quietly.
He gives her a quirk of the lips in response; April guesses it's meant to be a smile. "You gonna be okay?" he asks after a while, hugging his knees one-handed to give her space to sit.
"Fine," she tells him, because she will be. They sit there for a while, leaning against the wall with their feet hanging off the edge. If Andy were here he'd be sleeping, April thinks suddenly. Andy doesn't have trouble sleeping, especially when there are people around.
"April," Ben says, after a while, "you know when we first met, you were a surly, apathetic, probably depressive girl with scarcely any ambition to speak of?"
April flicks her eyes over to him, then away. "Whatever."
"And then you spent a lot of time with Leslie Knope, and became a much less surly and notably competent public servant, who sometimes occasionally maybe thought of being happy?"
"What about it?" April turns her whole body to face him, because yeah, she gets there are some issues here, but if Ben tries to talk shit about Leslie to her, she swears to God she will fuck him up.
He stares at her for so long that some of the tension goes out of her body, and she's leaning back against the wall again when he says, "You and I have a lot in common."
April rolls her eyes again, with feeling. "God, Ben. If you love her so fucking much, why don't you just marry her. Oh, wait."
Ben laughs a little at that. "Yeah." He shifts the sling away from his hand and April looks down at his wedding ring, shining in the dim light. "Yeah, I know, I know."
What it is, April thinks, is that Ben can't do for Leslie what she does for him, not in a kinky way but just, like this. None of them can cast her light. And maybe before everything, April wouldn't say this next part out loud, but it's pretty late in the day now. "I would do," she says, "anything, for Leslie."
"Me too." Ben glances at her. "But you're risking your life tomorrow, for me."
"Not for you, asshole," she says, affectionately, "for..." She waves a hand, to indicate, everyone, everything, or maybe just the town. Just Pawnee. They exchange small smiles and she knows that they're both thinking about Leslie, again.
She goes to sleep a little later without shifting down to her bunk, but he moves to one side to let her stretch out a little, reaches out for his notepad. She listens to the scratch of his pen for a while, her eyes closed, until she's thinking weird disconnected thoughts about the invaders and Andy and mice running over the floor of the cabin, and the sound has become part of the dream.
*
There are people living in the Pawnee public parks. Leslie takes this very personally.
Ann knows she's pretty lucky; her own house was untouched, and is now also occupied by Leslie, Donna, Tom, a couple of girls who worked in the hospital with her and bafflingly, Millicent Gergich, but Ann doesn't mind that - many hands make light work of boiling water, collecting processed food and keeping Leslie from climbing the walls. It's some kind of stupid irony that in the first attacks, the lines of flame cut up the open spaces into a neat, burnt-grass grid system. People keep to their own squares and leave others as common, so you can walk between the lines of tents and corrugated iron huts as though you were striding down a city street. It's a miracle of spontaneous organisation, Ann thinks, or maybe not so miraculous, given this is Pawnee, Indiana, home to Councilwoman Knope. Really, Ann's pretty lucky.
*
"Hey, you're her," shouts some guy with a lot of beard, "you're the robot lady" - and Leslie flinches and Ann wonders, not for the first time, whether there was something kind of strange about this town even before the aliens invaded. It is sort of Leslie's fault, to be fair, that there are now four robotic checkpoints at half-kilometre intervals on the roads out of Pawnee, before the barrier, but for one thing everyone's better off that way and for another thing, they're not Leslie's robots. (Also, Ann thinks it's weird that the aliens think in metric. Ben has some sort of explanation for it that involves them learning to communicate from European TV. Something like that.)
"Sir," Leslie says, sounding calm even though her nails are digging into Ann's palm, "before those checkpoints were put in place, we were all being forced to live inside the town. Had you forgotten that?"
Ann certainly hasn't; after a couple of weeks of the entire population of Pawnee and Eagleton living in basically one square mile, she was starting to think about tuberculosis and influenza and other things from pages one through three of her nursing textbooks; after a month of it, Leslie, telling no one except Ann, went into the old city council chamber, her hands held up high above her head and said, "Guys, we need to talk. Or ladies. If you have gender."
She hasn't said, and Ann hasn't dared ask, exactly what happened in there, but now people are living in an area of about ten square miles, which includes a good deal of open space, so by the time you get to Ron's cabin in the woods, right by the edge of the barrier, the ship isn’t directly over your head: you can see open sky. And all of that's fine where influenza and tuberculosis are concerned, but the aliens don't like it when you approach the barrier too closely after dark, which is why they have the checkpoints and the lethal little robots. Of course the townspeople call them Leslie's robots. Or robots, or whatever. Of course. Ann rolls her eyes and cuts in, "Sir, if you don't need any assistance, we'll be moving along."
He subsides, muttering under his breath, Leslie flashes Ann a grateful look and they move along.
"Why do people do that?" Leslie's saying. "I just... people are all, no, we mustn't negotiate, we mustn't cooperate, but when it makes things better for everyone, I just..."
She trails off, and Ann's pretty sure she knows who 'people' means in that sentence; she gives Leslie's hand another squeeze. "I mean, look at that," Leslie goes on, motioning to a row of huts covered with a single sheet of corrugated iron. "Maybe we can..." She pauses. “You know. Figure out a way for people to be more comfortable, at least.”
"One thing at a time," Ann says. There aren't a lot of people around, just some kids playing with a deflated football. Leslie leans down to talk to them while Ann looks nearby to see if there are any adults keeping an eye on them. After a minute, she spots a guy on a deckchair out of the wind, glancing at the kids occasionally and then going back to whatever he's reading - from the tattered look of it, Ann guesses it's Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration.
"It says in here," he says, suddenly looking up, "that the aliens are keeping us alive to turn us into batteries. Or make us into a giant pantry for their armies of space whales."
"Okay, sir," Leslie says, with a fixed smile, "but while you're sitting there being defeatist, fatalistic and an all-round bummer, can we offer you medical assistance?"
She motions to the box Ann is carrying, and Ann opens it dutifully to hand out some bandages and medical ethanol and some blister packs of antihistamines. "Let us know if we can help you with anything else," Leslie says, cheerily, and the man holds up a hand.
"Are you... who are you?"
"Councilwoman Leslie Knope," Leslie tells him, still cheerily.
"Sure," the guy says, "sure, I saw you on TV one time, but why are you still..."
"My term's not up, sir, and we're doing our best," Leslie tells him, and they carry on going. The supplies have come from the Pawnee hospital and some primary care practices around town - how Leslie negotiated that, Ann's still not sure - and in two hours they hand out several boxes' worth of basic medical supplies and some harder stuff, mostly painkillers. Ann's not supposed to prescribe ad hoc like this, but she's almost stopped noticing; the world has gotten bigger than Ann Perkins's licence to practise.
"Oh, look," Leslie says, mildly, as they open the last box, "there's less stuff here than I thought there was going to be. How interesting, Ann."
Ann holds her gaze, then can't quite help the small smile. After a second, Leslie smiles back.
The last person they meet is a little girl, sneezing almost constantly - Ann immediately wants to listen to her lungs - who nevertheless looks up at Leslie and says, through a blocked nose, "You're the lady who brings us stuff!"
Leslie promptly hands over a lollipop - negotiated from a primary care provider, seriously - and says, "Let us know if there's anything you need!"
"What she needs," Ann says, quietly, "is antibiotics. Winter's coming."
Leslie shakes her head and then shakes the box. The empty rattle is dispiriting. Sighing, Ann leans down and tries to find out from the little girl what kind of living conditions she has - does she sleep under a roof is a good first question, and then you can move on to things like whether it's warm, whether it's safe - and all the time she's talking, she's aware of Leslie standing still behind her, her presence oddly dimmed. When Ann turns something's clearly working behind Leslie's eyes, and Ann hides her smile. Whatever it is, it'll be good. Ann can wait.
*
Andy was among the few people in town who actually tried to fight back. Some people have organised resistance, and others took on the project of helping the hurt and the displaced, and still others battle on in myriad small ways, by taking away trash, and passing along secret messages, and just, living, but on the day the ships came, and those lines of green light in the sky turned into lines of flame cutting through Pawnee, Andy was there. Leslie and Ann walked across the green space in Ramsett Park, holding hands, and the doors opened and the tiny ramps slid out.
"Hey," Andy yelled, running forwards, "don't touch them, you fuck-"
The creature turned its head towards him, and there was a flash of red light and the snap and smell of burning. Andy didn't die: he limps, and he writes songs, and he doesn't play them.
*
First there's the gap in the fence, which is fine - Ben and Ron have been working on that with wire-cutters late at night, and it's really cold out and they can't wear gloves, so they take along some of the super-secret stash that Ron thinks April doesn't know about and they always come back kind of wasted - and then it's just the old Sweetums factory, it’s fine. April went on Sweetums-sponsored field trips in elementary school, she used to come bug Andy here all the time, it's fine. And then she’s being shot at, which is not fine at all.
"Stop that!" April yells, after she's already dropped to her knees and pressed herself against the fence, because her instinct for self-preservation apparently works faster than her actual brain. “That's really annoying" - and the worst part is that the thing shooting at her is one of Leslie's, no, not one of Leslie's, one of the invaders' mechanical droid things, that just goes for anything with a human body temperature so it's not even personal.
(Actually, the worst part is the gut-clenching terror. But Ron said he’d do it, or that Ben would, so April asked, like she didn't know, “Is it important?”
“Yeah, April, it is,” Ben said, in that snippy tone April hates, and she rolled her eyes at both of them and said, “Sure, so let’s send the guy with arteries full of bacon, or the one with his arm in a sling” - and they both shut up after that, because it is important.)
"I hate you," she tells the little droid, "and I hate your stupid alien overlords, and I hate stupid Ben and his stupid plan and his stupid face."
It doesn't answer.
She stays absolutely still for a minute, the smell of wet earth rich and disgusting in her nose. Something fast whistles past her head and she thinks her heart might stop from fear, but it doesn't, and it doesn’t, it keeps not stopping, and the seconds pass and April's still there, still pressed against the ground with the bulk of the factory palpable at her back. In rhythm with the pounding in April's ears, droid folds up its barrel, rotates on the spot and trundles off. It would almost be cute, April thinks, if it weren't trying to kill people all the time.
She takes a deep breath and gets to her feet. Nothing happens. She takes another breath and sprints, waiting every second the sound of something whistling towards her, but there's nothing and she takes another step and she's through the main doors.
Inside, almost nothing looks familiar. April knows, kind of, that the aliens are big on water - Leslie had to work to get even a little bit of the supply from the river back into the city sanitation system - but she didn't expect everything to be quite so wet, so sloshing and gross and damp like every municipal swimming pool she's ever been to. She runs along a hallway and it's dim, shadowy - the whole place has been gutted, made grey and featureless - and then suddenly she's in the open space of the factory floor, and she has a flashback to that time in the sixth grade when Bobby Jensen pinched her and she threatened to throw him into a vat of high fructose corn syrup. The vats are still there, cracked and leaking, smelling like burnt sweet popcorn. April’s running a curious finger down the rough sticky surface when the sound from above makes her look up.
It's a ship. It's an actual, honest-to-God spaceship. It’s not as big as the one hanging above Pawnee right now, but it takes up the whole space, hovering unsupported maybe ten or twelve feet off the ground. It's a kind of greenish colour, shifting to silver in the corners of her eyes, and it's gleaming from every surface. As April watches, the lights start to come on, long lines of light in tiny points like it's Christmas or something. The lights start spreading along the walls as well, so machines April hadn't noticed in the dimness begin to fizz and whir, and above her head something begins to rotate. Inside April's stomach, something starts to churn in horrible echo - she has a mental image, suddenly, of Andy making a face and saying, "Urgh, oogy..." - and her vision's starting to blur but she's not done yet: she whips out her phone from her pocket, takes pictures in every direction and then she starts running. She's wearing rubber-soled shoes but the sound of her feet on the ground is incredibly loud and she wonders if it’s only droids down here or the aliens just go to bed early or what, but she reaches the main doors without seeing any of them and probably that's because the horrible things are still out there in the compound waiting for her but she just wants out of here. She sprints across the open space, little shining bullets zooming behind her head but she ducks and she dodges and she still really hates Ben and Ron but their gap in the fence is wide enough for her not to struggle, thank God. She runs a quarter-mile into the woods before she even slows down, her feet tangling finally on undergrowth; she leans against a tree and breathes in, just concentrates on her breathing, deep, sustaining breath.
By the time she reaches the cabin she's exhausted; her footsteps have started to sound like a sequence of gunshots through the roar of blood in her ears and her feet are sticky in her shoes - sweat mixed with high fructose corn syrup, gross - and the sound of the door crashing back in the darkness is impossibly loud. "Ben!"
"April?" Ben jerks to his feet, reaching out with his uninjured hand. It looks like he was sleeping in a chair, waiting for her. "Oh, my God, what is that smell?" - and he stops short. "Sweetums."
"Right," April says, still breathing hard, "right, you were right, we're doing this."
"We're doing this," Ben says, eyes alight with purpose. "You're very brave," he adds, low and earnest, and April glares at him and gets on with throwing up.
*
Everyone knows about the barrier, but a lot of people have never seen it. It's barely another half-mile into the woods from Ron's cabin, if you're heading outwards from Pawnee - but going out there makes people feel what Andy calls "oogy" and Ron calls "damned peculiar"; the one time Ann went out there she thought it was just the weird effect of the light, the way the thing is twenty feet high but you can't see it, not unless you look out the corner of your eye for something like gossamer, fluttering in your peripheral vision, but she felt nauseous for a couple of days afterwards and she hasn't gone back. "There's nothing to see, why would you even go there," April complains, but Ann's pretty sure that's because April can't physically approach the barrier - some people, Ben and Donna included, just can't, so the whole place is getting bigger in everyone's imaginations, bloated with fear of the unknown.
The funny thing is, Ann must have driven through that same patch of ground a thousand times on the road from Pawnee to Indianapolis, and back again, but right now she can't remember it all that well. Mostly, she remembers Leslie, riding shotgun, talking about everything in the big wide wonderful world.
*
"Okay," Donna is saying, "I have a bad feeling about this."
"Donna, it's really fine," Leslie tells her cheerfully, "it's fine, do you want a Nutri-Yum bar?"
"It's all sugar," Ann says, and takes one herself, biting into it reflectively. They're walking along the dimmed hallways at City Hall, all three of them in a row, and Ann also has a bad feeling about this. "Leslie, when you said you had a plan..."
Leslie's plans can sometimes be great, Ann reminds herself. Leslie's plans, even if they don't always involve waffles and personalised T-shirts these days, can be awesome. Ann waits.
"So," Leslie says, rubbing her hands together, "ladies, what can you tell me about Eagleton? Other than the fact they're in here with us?"
"Nothing to tell," Donna says. "I mean, I used to go there for the mall, but since all the looting..."
"It looks like an abandoned missile silo, by Ralph Lauren," Ann agrees, and is horribly amused by Leslie's look of betrayal.
"Be that as it may," Leslie says, quickly, "what can you tell me about the Eagleton hospital?"
"You were born there," Donna and Ann say together, and Leslie rolls her eyes.
"Other than that. Other than the fact it's a fully-equipped hospital for a town that was so rich it had Michael Bublé on retainer, filled with people who were so healthy they never ever got sick. Other than the fact we are running short of a ton of things but especially antibiotics."
"Wait," Ann says, "if it's so well-stocked, then why..."
"Because it was outside the city limits," Donna says, suddenly. "I remember from way back, before the city boundaries were set, it was a zoning error..."
"Right!" Leslie claps her hands. "It's on the other side of the barrier. Right on the other side of the barrier, there is basically an entire warehouse of everything we might possibly need for the winter. All we have to do is go get it."
"Honey," Donna says, "I think you may be misunderstanding the term 'barrier', here" - and Ann’s nodding along.
"That's the thing," Leslie says. "I'm not suggesting we go in guns blazing and stage some kind of stealth dawn raid."
"Damn right," Donna says. "You know what that thing does to people? The last guy, they only found his feet. His actual honest-to-God feet, smoking from the ankles."
"I'm pretty sure that's an urban legend," Leslie says, "I mean, almost entirely sure" - and they've walked past where the department of health used to be, now, and the city manager's old office, and yes, past parks and recreation, too. Ann is getting a really bad feeling about this.
"The thing is," Leslie's saying, waving her hands, "is that we... could just ask. I mean, has anyone just asked? We need these supplies, all we want to do is cross over the barrier, and we know they do it all the time, so..."
"Leslie, honey," Donna says, "I love you, but you've lost your mind."
"No." Leslie smiles, beatifically. "I think we should go make a petition. We go in there and we ask. What's the worst that could happen?"
"We could get eaten," Donna's saying, with some very expressive hand gestures, and Ann says, "Leslie, are you sure..."
But Leslie grabs them both by the arm and pushes them forwards, and isn't this just a metaphor for everything, Ann's thinking, and then they're standing by the door of the old city council chamber, the dark wood imposing and damp, and Leslie's saying, seriously, "I am going to do this. Whether or not you guys - I mean, I did this by myself before, but I thought maybe this time..."
"Leslie," Ann says, and takes her hand, and Donna pushes open the door. It creaks and sticks and Donna stops short, suddenly.
Ann turns to her. "You okay?"
"Fine," Donna says, but she doesn't look fine. "Leslie, honey, I want to - but I am actually gonna puke right now, and this is my favourite shirt."
"Go puke," Leslie says - from Leslie, that's a benediction - and Donna nods, gives Leslie's shoulders a supportive squeeze and darts off down the hallway.
"You know that's just a physical thing, right?" Ann asks seriously as they edge through the door and out into the open space. It's been transformed in here, so all the old wooden panelling, the portraits of Pawnee notables, they’re all gone. Everything is grey and murky, the lights low and reflecting off the ceiling as though off the surface of swimming pool water. It echoes like a swimming pool, too, so Ann's unconsciously lowered her voice and edged a step closer to Leslie. "I guess it's like the barrier, some people just can't get close..."
"I know," Leslie says, and Ann's grateful, because Leslie's feelings are easily hurt these days and who can blame her. "I know, April can't... or Ben."
And how do you know that, Ann wants to ask, but beside her Leslie seems to be amassing her courage. She steps forwards and says, commanding, "Hello? Is anyone there?" - and Ann thinks, fuck it, and takes Leslie's hand.
They advance up to where the old dais used to be, like children with fingers entwined, and Ann's aware, suddenly, that in the dimness above her there are structures built into the roof, huge and metallic but feather-thin, like enormous spiderwebs. Ann shudders, and a drip of water on the back of her neck makes her start, and Leslie grips her hand tight.
"Hello," Leslie says again, and something, in the dark and the murk, moves.
*
The aliens don't have mouths or ears. They carry little voder boxes strapped to their necks that do the talking for them, although the voices don’t sound synthesised - they're more like automated subway voices, emotionless and female. Ann has wondered occasionally how the aliens can hear what's said in reply, without ears, and there is a footnote in Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration offering some theories about that, but she got to the word "telepathy" and shut the book smartly on her thumb.
*
"I want to talk to you about medical supplies," Leslie says, clear and calm, and while she's explaining what she wants, Ann is peering into the dimness, looking at the three aliens on the dais, shuddering inwardly; it's not right, she's thinking vaguely, to be so frightened just at the look of them, at the silvered angular shapes, the sinister way they insinuate themselves along like snakes, but then she remembers how Andy got fried and Ben got shot and Chris, just, Chris. Fear is good. Fear is sensible.
Leslie's not sensible. "And in conclusion" - she's sounding exactly like she did when addressing Pawnee public forums, God, Ann loves Leslie so much - "I think you have a moral responsibility to help me with this." A pause. "Oh, come on, guys. You still haven't told me if you have gender, by the way. What harm can it do? Just let me up in one of your ship things, hop me over the barrier, you can watch me the whole time. It'll be fine." Amazingly, she sounds reassuring, just like she's telling someone not to worry about a broken swing set.
There's a silence, after that. Then the creature - Ann wonders for a second if referring to it that way is racist and then decides she doesn't give a damn if it is - turns towards them both and says, level as the voice that tells you about the next stop on the Chicago El: "Trade."
"Trade?" Leslie looks blank. "I, uh, don't... I mean, I already gave what I could... "
"Trade."
Leslie looks flustered for a second, then something settles in her expression. "Give me time."
“Seven days." The thing turns away and what passes for its head dips.
"Seven days," Leslie says, "but then I'm going to go up to that ship and talk to you guys properly, okay? You have to meet with me. Seven days!"
"Okay, we're done," Ann whispers in Leslie's ear, grabs Leslie's hands and pulls, dragging her down the room.
"Or sooner," comes the voice from the front of the room. Ann pushes Leslie through the door.
*
"Do I get those back any time soon?" Ben asks, motioning towards his notepad and pen with a potato chip.
"Shut up, Ben," April says, glancing up at him and then going back over a couple of lines. "It's just static, chill."
It's not as if the question of what the aliens actually want doesn't keep April awake at night. Leslie runs around and organises food drives and distributions of medical supplies and everything else and that's okay, that's one way not to think about it, and Ron, April guesses, has spent most of his life thinking about this stuff so at least he's had time to get used to the idea, and Andy can't really conceive of why bad things happen to good people anyway, so it's super awful, but this might be the one thing she and Ben actually do have in common. Sometimes, like now, they can tune into ham radio broadcasts and Ben writes down everything they hear that could be true, no matter how creepy: rumours of alien colonies in Siberia, people fleeing in great waves across the land; mysterious lights close to old uranium mines; places in Canada where no one goes outside any more, because the forests are haunted by silver-skeleton ghosts.
"Closed cities in the American midwest," Ben says, doing a passable Rod Serling, "with barriers of nuclear glass."
"Shut up, you're not funny," she says. "Here, have your stupid notepad back."
Ben looks down at the sketch. "Oh, nice," he says, super-bitchy, throwing a chip at her, "an arm in a sling and a gold bikini, beautiful" - but he does get her to sign it.
*
"Leslie," Donna is saying, "you've got five days left. What are you gonna do? You gonna go down to the chamber and knock on the door and say, hey, Mr. Alien, sir, let me in, let's talk flowers and candy and the remains of the great Tom Haverford CD collection?"
"They can have it, I ripped it to mp3 in 1999," Tom says, rummaging in what was formerly Ann's, and is now everyone's, refrigerator. It lights up: they have power today, and Ann has spent the whole afternoon boiling water for drinking in stockpots and sealing the bottles. It's beginning to get dark outside.
"No," Leslie says, fretfully, "not like that. Maybe like that, I don't know." She rests her head on the table. "Put a quarter in me, I'm out of ideas. What is that smell?"
"Oh, my God," Ann says, "that's coffee. That's real coffee, isn't it?"
"It smells like sex," Leslie says, fervently, then: "Actually, no, that's gross, forget I said that. It smells great. It smells really awesome. Nothing like sex."
Tom turns around and waves a pot at them irritably. "It comes in sealed bags," he complains, "you've only got to think to loot Whole Foods." He pauses, then adds, "I guess you all want..."
"Yes," Ann says, and pulls out mugs from her cupboards for herself, Tom, Leslie and Donna.
Tom's bringing more water to the boil. "So maybe they don't want Earth's greatest tunes. What's the well-dressed alien wearing this year? Maybe they want, like, button-down entrails or matching cummerbunds. Leslie, I'm serious," he says, forestalling whatever she was about to say. "They have to need, or want, something - you've got to think psychological. What did you give them last time?"
Leslie lifts her head. "Nothing," she says honestly. "I told them that having no water and living all close together would probably cause an epidemic and we'd all die. They don't want that. They just want us to keep on going, somehow."
Quiescence and self-refrigeration, Ann thinks, sighing inwardly. Maybe it's like The Matrix and they're all going to end up being used as batteries. Or furniture. Or juice boxes. She's not sure which of those is the most disgusting. Damn Ben Wyatt and his overactive imagination, anyway.
"This time that's not true," Leslie goes on. "And they've been here longer now and they know it's not true. Without medicines people will still die, but much slower."
"Great," Ann says, and helps Tom with the coffee. Stuff like this is probably why she never can quite bring herself to dislike Tom, or even underestimate his grasp of human nature. When he pours it out it's thick with grounds, because they can't filter it properly, and there's no thought of cream or sugar, but it smells and tastes wonderful. Stupid Tom and his stupid way of making them all feel better.
"So what you're saying," Leslie says, after they've all inhaled deeply from their mugs, "is that I've got to figure out what they want, and to do that I've got to figure out what makes them tick."
"Tick," Donna says, suddenly, "tick. Tick."
"Leslie, did you forget to wind Donna again," Tom starts, but Donna waves him quiet.
"Hush, I just thought of something," she says, quickly, nearly knocking her mug over with a gesture. "Leslie, you remember way back, they were talking about nuclear power. Like, in Europe and shit. The aliens went there first. They were looking for something, something to do with radioactive sources. Do you think..."
"Yes!" Leslie says. "Yes, that's it! Wait, that's not it. How am I going to find nuclear fuel in Pawnee? The Pawnee Atomic Energy Commission got disbanded after the Zorp cultists were run out of town."
She sounds personally offended by that. Ann grins and touches her arm. "If anyone could, you could, but we'll keep thinking." She glances out the window at the darkening sky and drains her mug. "Listen, I've got to run. Some errands to run before curfew."
"Sure," Leslie says, "sure."
Ann gives her a hug and goes into the other room to get her things. She's pulling on her coat, leaning against the wall, when she hears Leslie say, "I wish she didn't have to go. Wherever she's going."
"Girl, you know where she's going," Donna says, the wall in between them not muting the force in her tone. "She's taking gauze and Tylenol and shit and she's going out to the woods to help some people. I know you've got this thing where you don't ever talk about it but you know what she does. She's doing her job. Like you're doing yours."
"Like I'm doing mine?" Leslie repeats. "That sounds like you might think I'm doing the right thing."
"You know what your problem is, Leslie Knope?" Donna says, emphatically. "Because I don't know what it is either, but it's kinda contagious."
"Donna," Leslie says, and from the silence that follows, Ann suspects Donna may have submitted to a hug. She smiles to herself, ties her shoelaces, turns to grab her purse and realises she left it on the dining room table.
"There's something else," Leslie's saying. "I could trade for information."
"What?" Donna asks, and as Ann walks in, there's something strange about Leslie, something indefinable in her eyes.
"Information," Leslie says, almost dreamily, half-turned away so she's addressing open air rather than Donna and Ann, "like, for example, the fact my husband and his rebel alliance are out in the woods, building a bomb."
Ann catches her breath and opens her mouth instinctively, not even sure what's going to come out, but Donna gets there first. "Leslie," she's saying, soft and calm, "you gotta live a long time in that skin."
"I know," Leslie says, gentle as a kiss. "I didn't mean it."
[on to part two]
raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are
comment(s). Comment there or here.
Anyway, I sat down to write it regardless, and a few hundred words later the aliens invaded, and there were another many many many words after that. Kind of not sorry. Proper notes and acknowledgements at the end, but
forthwritten and tau_sigma helped me an enormous amount with this. It's in two parts because of LJ's posting limits - the link to part two is at the bottom. Also, a brief content note: there is some depiction of violence in this story, but I don't think it's terribly graphic; if you want more detail, please feel free to get in touch.
Fic:: Both Hands
by Raven
17,000w, Parks and Recreation, Leslie/Ben, April/Andy. Aliens have invaded Pawnee; Leslie and Ben are fighting a lot. April's actually not sure which of those is scarier.
April comes into the house as night is falling and throws down her bag. "Leslie and Ben had another fight," she says.
"Urgh," Andy says, because what else do you say to that. He's rooting around their kitchen cupboards, looking for a tin of something. April doesn't help. She sits down on the couch that's leaking stuffing and rests her head on her knees.
"They just yell about all the same things all the time," she says after a minute. "Then he cries and she cries and they make up and have stupid lame make-up sex where I can hear them and it's the worst and it's awful and I hate it. It's like watching your parents fight, urgh, gross."
Andy doesn't respond to that, because, yeah, it is gross. Instead, he taps the cane. Ron made it and it'll probably last longer than Andy's going to be alive. "Don't say lame like it's a bad thing."
April lifts her head and glares. "It hurts you. It's lame."
He smiles at her and starts throwing things off the couch in a heap: some notes for a song he's writing, a broken can opener, a copy of Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration, their TV remote control, which for some reason they still have even though they traded the TV for five cases of Nutri-Yum bars, and a couple of plecks. Eventually, Andy produces a tin of beans from somewhere, and she takes it from him and looks for a knife to open it with - Ron showed her how, back in the beginning - and they sit down to dinner, passing the tin from hand to hand. After a while, when the sun is quite down, she checks the bathroom to see if there's water - there is, a blurry brown trickle - and washes her hands. She fetches her kit from everywhere she's stowed it, the weapon with the full clip, the couple of grenades, lays it all neatly on the table.
"You gonna be okay, babe?" Andy asks.
April nods. She can't take him along - she's going on foot through the scrub and the trees, avoiding the droid patrols, and it's too risky. "You?"
"Yeah," Andy says, with difficulty.
April kisses him and thinks she'll send a text to Leslie so she'll come check on him, just in case. She closes the door behind her and then ducks in the shadows. Something's moving on the middle of the road, and she realises in a flash of surprise that it’s one of them, which is weird: other than the ones that lurk in City Hall, you hardly ever see them now. They look like a human skeleton would look, if the bones were encased with a smooth, shining silver layer and then each rib were hooked between strong fingers and drawn outwards, all in crazy angles like twisted piano wire. The one that's passing by has big hollow sockets where its eyes might have been, and it's moving, concertina-like, sinister, down the street. April waits. She pauses another minute, looking into shadows for watching eyes, and then she shoulders her bag and sets out into the darkness, her feet silent on the sidewalk cracks.
*
Leslie is the only person who even tried, on principle, to call the invaders by name. Even then it was an approximation - their name for themselves can't be pronounced using a human larynx and if it could, would take approximately a minute and a half to say in its entirety - but there were a couple of attempts at standard abbreviations, the sort of thing that might have ended up in the AP Stylebook before the Associated Press became somewhat less relevant than it had been previously.
These days everyone calls them the invaders, or the aliens, or just, with a gesture skywards, them.
*
Ann leaves town just before dark, before curfew. She crosses Leslie's checkpoints without any trouble, but makes sure to cross at the last possible moment, hitting the last one before the sun quite dips out of a dim autumnal sky. (She's turning into one of those people who used to come to the Parks Department public forums, she thinks, ruefully: they're not Leslie's checkpoints.) She hasn't been stopped; the invaders don't, in a manner of speaking, man the checkpoints themselves - the droids are small but lethal, heat-sensing and cued to the temperature of a human body - but she was watching for the flash of eyes nevertheless, the moving, spindly shadows. She keeps on going, speeding up, her breath coming faster, and by the time she reaches the rendezvous point, about a half-mile short of the barrier between Pawnee and the outside world, twilight is becoming true night.
It doesn't take long. The voice out of the dark calls, softly, "Ann? Is that you?"
"Password?" she calls back.
A rustle of paper, then a groan. "The rooster crows at midnight. I guess it's Andy's turn to pick them. Do you need some help?"
"Thanks." Ann gets out of the car and kills the lights entirely, smiling to herself in the dimness. The last few times she's done this, it's been meetings with someone she doesn't know or someone who looks vaguely familiar, whom she might have seen once at City Hall or at the hospital and now has to trust, like some arcane article of faith. Despite everything, it's sort of nice to see Ben, scrambling over the edge of a ridge and dropping feet first to land by her side. He helps her heft out the boxes, glancing in each one as he takes it out of the trunk. Ann catches his eye and says, "You know Leslie wouldn't like it, if she knew I was doing this."
"I know." He smiles ruefully at her and picks up another box by the handle, with his right hand. His left arm is in some sort of makeshift sling, made out of what looks like an old Mouse Rat T-shirt, and Ann's professional instincts snap into focus.
"What happened to your arm?" A horrible thought occurs. "You and Leslie haven't started" - she mimes throwing a plate - "have you? Have you?"
"No." Ben sighs. "No, I went wire-cutting with Ron and he wanted to stop and forage - why does he make me do that? Who wants to eat acorns when we live in the processed food capital of America?”
“You got attacked by an acorn?” Ann asks, amused.
“No, by one of Leslie’s patrols." He shrugs, lopsided. "At the old Sweetums factory.”
"Seriously, dude, they're not Leslie's patrols." Ann sighs. "I'll take a look at it when we're settled."
"It's fine, really," Ben says, sharp, and Ann sighs. She's the one who brought it up, so she's only got herself to blame that they can't avoid the subject any longer.
"You... and Leslie."
"Yeah." Ben glances at her. "We're not getting along."
"I heard." Ann sighs, then, more tentatively: "I heard the C-word got used.”
Ben shivers, and Ann isn't sure if it's what she said or just the cold; after a second he's calm, like they're discussing the weather. "Something like that," he says. "Are you here... because you're here? Or because you're dropping off supplies?"
Ann glares at him. "If that's your half-assed way of asking will I listen to you announcing your grand plan, then yes. Only because there's nothing on TV tonight. Or tomorrow night, or any night. Don’t start thinking I like you, Ben Wyatt, or that I give a damn about anything you do."
Ben grins and murmurs, "Ovaries before brovaries."
*
They don’t know if Chris is alive or dead. They do know that he was probably one of the first people to see, through the scars of green light lining the sky, into this new world that they live in now; April, who couldn't sleep, got up to let Champion out and saw the first of the ships come down. Of course the department took it upon themselves to track him down, along with the other early-morning runners - Leslie said, "We have to, we're Parks and Recreation" - but no bodies have ever been found.
*
Ben sits cross-legged on the ground, leaning against the side of Ron's cabin, and says, "Thank you all for coming."
April glances around the little clearing, at the frost forming on the leaves. They've got kerosene lamps lighting up the space, and through the shadows, April can make out Ann, and Donna, and Stuart, Ann's old officemate, and Jerry, and JJ from the diner, and Tom's surprisingly awesome ex-girlfriend Lucy, and a whole ton of other people she doesn't care enough to know the names of. Ron's sitting next to her, his presence comforting. April misses Andy.
"I'll keep this short," Ben goes on, and there's some restrained whooping at the back. It's getting seriously cold out here. "You all know the general thrust of it by now."
Some guy apparently thinks the word 'thrust' is funny and April elbows him in the jaw. Ben waits, patiently.
"We keep ourselves to ourselves," he says after a moment. "When we get in their way, they shoot, maim and abduct. When we don't, they don't. We can't cross their checkpoints after dark, but they don't come running when we cross them at twilight. Within the barriers, we keep ourselves, in nearly every sense of the word."
April nods to herself. Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration was published anonymously - if "published" is even the word for a hundred-page polemic stapled together, passed from hand to hand and photocopy to photocopy - but April's not an idiot, and she used to proofread Ben's position papers for Congressman Murray. She read it in the bath, after they could fill the tub again, called Andy to get in the water with her and let it slop out the sides, both of them ignoring the discomfort of a space far too small for two, peering at the blurring page headed, what happens after the breakdown of human society?
Ben has since said that "self-refrigeration" wasn't the best choice of totally made-up word, that it was unnecessarily dramatic - but as the weeks and months pass, while they keep to curfew, dodge patrols, get used to life without enough electricity and never going further than ten miles from home, April keeps remembering the old story about the spider and the fly, and thinks he got it right first time.
"This is it, then," Ben says. "I think I have a plan. I think it's a good plan. One of our, ah, agents" - he pauses again, meets April's eyes - "will be heading out tomorrow to confirm whether it is, in fact, a good plan. In the meantime, guys, I need you to start figuring out how to build... well, a bomb. Not a big one," he adds, hastily.
There's a murmur at that, and for once no commentary from the back row. April curls her hands into half-moon shapes and holds them to her ears, catching Ben's eye; he glares at her with affection. Ron says, "Why?"
"Because," Ben says, "I think we're uniquely positioned to make use of it."
Jerry raises a hand and says, "Ah, how..."
"Jerry, contrary to popular belief I am not Princess Leia" - April snorts - "I am an accountant from Minnesota." Ben waves a hand. "That's why I need all of you, I have no idea. Could someone, some brave and courageous someone, maybe begin by visiting the public library?"
"No need," Ron says, rising to his feet inexorable as a tide, and April figured all along he would have it covered, so it probably all depends on her now, which is kind of shitty.
*
Ron's not the only one who’s just moved kit and caboodle out into the woods. A lot of Pawnee neighbourhoods were seriously damaged in the first attacks, and even given that, Ann suspects some people just like it out here: unless you happen to look down towards the town and the admittedly quite noticeable alien ship hanging above it, you can kid yourself that not much has changed. Ann watches Ron cracks open the boxes and casually hand out basic medical supplies, cleaning alcohol, gauze, analgaesia tablets, wondering how organised the distribution would have to be for him to start disapproving of it again, and wishes Ben would let her take a look at his arm.
"Thanks," he's saying, breaking down one of the empty boxes, his eyes on it so Ann takes a moment to realise he's talking to her. "I know you don't like doing this, and I'm not going to ask..."
“Shut up,” Ann says. "Next week's password?"
Ben flashes her a grateful smile, and then grimaces. "Pickle hair."
*
What April misses most of all - okay, not most of all, but of the little things - is getting to take a bath whenever she wants. She likes hot water, solitude and steam: she’s got the last, blowing softly to see her breath, and the rest all sucks. There’s a gas lamp and a makeshift electricity supply and four people all crammed in, each with a bunk perpendicular to the wall that's basically a couple of planks of wood with the handful of blankets Ron allows as within the spirit of manliness. Ron's in the other room, with some guy who's come out of Eagleton - he brought candy bars and medical supplies as a mark of good faith - and April gets the bottom bunk in here and one of Ron’s old paperbacks as her only alternative to sleeping. She reads until it gets pretty late, slips out for some drinking water - Ron has a supply of water purification tablets that could last them all into 2020 - and comes back in quietly, pausing for a moment in the doorway.
Ben has the top bunk, mainly because he wasn't around when April called dibs on the one below it. He's lying there with his eyes half-closed and one hand flung out behind his head, and something makes April say, “Yeah, so, Ann said Leslie hates you now.”
He turns and stares at her and okay, that was mean and April's not really sure where it came from. She looks back up at him and feels so tired, suddenly, too tired to form words, so she reaches for the ladder and clambers up to sit beside him. "Sorry," she says very quietly.
He gives her a quirk of the lips in response; April guesses it's meant to be a smile. "You gonna be okay?" he asks after a while, hugging his knees one-handed to give her space to sit.
"Fine," she tells him, because she will be. They sit there for a while, leaning against the wall with their feet hanging off the edge. If Andy were here he'd be sleeping, April thinks suddenly. Andy doesn't have trouble sleeping, especially when there are people around.
"April," Ben says, after a while, "you know when we first met, you were a surly, apathetic, probably depressive girl with scarcely any ambition to speak of?"
April flicks her eyes over to him, then away. "Whatever."
"And then you spent a lot of time with Leslie Knope, and became a much less surly and notably competent public servant, who sometimes occasionally maybe thought of being happy?"
"What about it?" April turns her whole body to face him, because yeah, she gets there are some issues here, but if Ben tries to talk shit about Leslie to her, she swears to God she will fuck him up.
He stares at her for so long that some of the tension goes out of her body, and she's leaning back against the wall again when he says, "You and I have a lot in common."
April rolls her eyes again, with feeling. "God, Ben. If you love her so fucking much, why don't you just marry her. Oh, wait."
Ben laughs a little at that. "Yeah." He shifts the sling away from his hand and April looks down at his wedding ring, shining in the dim light. "Yeah, I know, I know."
What it is, April thinks, is that Ben can't do for Leslie what she does for him, not in a kinky way but just, like this. None of them can cast her light. And maybe before everything, April wouldn't say this next part out loud, but it's pretty late in the day now. "I would do," she says, "anything, for Leslie."
"Me too." Ben glances at her. "But you're risking your life tomorrow, for me."
"Not for you, asshole," she says, affectionately, "for..." She waves a hand, to indicate, everyone, everything, or maybe just the town. Just Pawnee. They exchange small smiles and she knows that they're both thinking about Leslie, again.
She goes to sleep a little later without shifting down to her bunk, but he moves to one side to let her stretch out a little, reaches out for his notepad. She listens to the scratch of his pen for a while, her eyes closed, until she's thinking weird disconnected thoughts about the invaders and Andy and mice running over the floor of the cabin, and the sound has become part of the dream.
*
There are people living in the Pawnee public parks. Leslie takes this very personally.
Ann knows she's pretty lucky; her own house was untouched, and is now also occupied by Leslie, Donna, Tom, a couple of girls who worked in the hospital with her and bafflingly, Millicent Gergich, but Ann doesn't mind that - many hands make light work of boiling water, collecting processed food and keeping Leslie from climbing the walls. It's some kind of stupid irony that in the first attacks, the lines of flame cut up the open spaces into a neat, burnt-grass grid system. People keep to their own squares and leave others as common, so you can walk between the lines of tents and corrugated iron huts as though you were striding down a city street. It's a miracle of spontaneous organisation, Ann thinks, or maybe not so miraculous, given this is Pawnee, Indiana, home to Councilwoman Knope. Really, Ann's pretty lucky.
*
"Hey, you're her," shouts some guy with a lot of beard, "you're the robot lady" - and Leslie flinches and Ann wonders, not for the first time, whether there was something kind of strange about this town even before the aliens invaded. It is sort of Leslie's fault, to be fair, that there are now four robotic checkpoints at half-kilometre intervals on the roads out of Pawnee, before the barrier, but for one thing everyone's better off that way and for another thing, they're not Leslie's robots. (Also, Ann thinks it's weird that the aliens think in metric. Ben has some sort of explanation for it that involves them learning to communicate from European TV. Something like that.)
"Sir," Leslie says, sounding calm even though her nails are digging into Ann's palm, "before those checkpoints were put in place, we were all being forced to live inside the town. Had you forgotten that?"
Ann certainly hasn't; after a couple of weeks of the entire population of Pawnee and Eagleton living in basically one square mile, she was starting to think about tuberculosis and influenza and other things from pages one through three of her nursing textbooks; after a month of it, Leslie, telling no one except Ann, went into the old city council chamber, her hands held up high above her head and said, "Guys, we need to talk. Or ladies. If you have gender."
She hasn't said, and Ann hasn't dared ask, exactly what happened in there, but now people are living in an area of about ten square miles, which includes a good deal of open space, so by the time you get to Ron's cabin in the woods, right by the edge of the barrier, the ship isn’t directly over your head: you can see open sky. And all of that's fine where influenza and tuberculosis are concerned, but the aliens don't like it when you approach the barrier too closely after dark, which is why they have the checkpoints and the lethal little robots. Of course the townspeople call them Leslie's robots. Or robots, or whatever. Of course. Ann rolls her eyes and cuts in, "Sir, if you don't need any assistance, we'll be moving along."
He subsides, muttering under his breath, Leslie flashes Ann a grateful look and they move along.
"Why do people do that?" Leslie's saying. "I just... people are all, no, we mustn't negotiate, we mustn't cooperate, but when it makes things better for everyone, I just..."
She trails off, and Ann's pretty sure she knows who 'people' means in that sentence; she gives Leslie's hand another squeeze. "I mean, look at that," Leslie goes on, motioning to a row of huts covered with a single sheet of corrugated iron. "Maybe we can..." She pauses. “You know. Figure out a way for people to be more comfortable, at least.”
"One thing at a time," Ann says. There aren't a lot of people around, just some kids playing with a deflated football. Leslie leans down to talk to them while Ann looks nearby to see if there are any adults keeping an eye on them. After a minute, she spots a guy on a deckchair out of the wind, glancing at the kids occasionally and then going back to whatever he's reading - from the tattered look of it, Ann guesses it's Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration.
"It says in here," he says, suddenly looking up, "that the aliens are keeping us alive to turn us into batteries. Or make us into a giant pantry for their armies of space whales."
"Okay, sir," Leslie says, with a fixed smile, "but while you're sitting there being defeatist, fatalistic and an all-round bummer, can we offer you medical assistance?"
She motions to the box Ann is carrying, and Ann opens it dutifully to hand out some bandages and medical ethanol and some blister packs of antihistamines. "Let us know if we can help you with anything else," Leslie says, cheerily, and the man holds up a hand.
"Are you... who are you?"
"Councilwoman Leslie Knope," Leslie tells him, still cheerily.
"Sure," the guy says, "sure, I saw you on TV one time, but why are you still..."
"My term's not up, sir, and we're doing our best," Leslie tells him, and they carry on going. The supplies have come from the Pawnee hospital and some primary care practices around town - how Leslie negotiated that, Ann's still not sure - and in two hours they hand out several boxes' worth of basic medical supplies and some harder stuff, mostly painkillers. Ann's not supposed to prescribe ad hoc like this, but she's almost stopped noticing; the world has gotten bigger than Ann Perkins's licence to practise.
"Oh, look," Leslie says, mildly, as they open the last box, "there's less stuff here than I thought there was going to be. How interesting, Ann."
Ann holds her gaze, then can't quite help the small smile. After a second, Leslie smiles back.
The last person they meet is a little girl, sneezing almost constantly - Ann immediately wants to listen to her lungs - who nevertheless looks up at Leslie and says, through a blocked nose, "You're the lady who brings us stuff!"
Leslie promptly hands over a lollipop - negotiated from a primary care provider, seriously - and says, "Let us know if there's anything you need!"
"What she needs," Ann says, quietly, "is antibiotics. Winter's coming."
Leslie shakes her head and then shakes the box. The empty rattle is dispiriting. Sighing, Ann leans down and tries to find out from the little girl what kind of living conditions she has - does she sleep under a roof is a good first question, and then you can move on to things like whether it's warm, whether it's safe - and all the time she's talking, she's aware of Leslie standing still behind her, her presence oddly dimmed. When Ann turns something's clearly working behind Leslie's eyes, and Ann hides her smile. Whatever it is, it'll be good. Ann can wait.
*
Andy was among the few people in town who actually tried to fight back. Some people have organised resistance, and others took on the project of helping the hurt and the displaced, and still others battle on in myriad small ways, by taking away trash, and passing along secret messages, and just, living, but on the day the ships came, and those lines of green light in the sky turned into lines of flame cutting through Pawnee, Andy was there. Leslie and Ann walked across the green space in Ramsett Park, holding hands, and the doors opened and the tiny ramps slid out.
"Hey," Andy yelled, running forwards, "don't touch them, you fuck-"
The creature turned its head towards him, and there was a flash of red light and the snap and smell of burning. Andy didn't die: he limps, and he writes songs, and he doesn't play them.
*
First there's the gap in the fence, which is fine - Ben and Ron have been working on that with wire-cutters late at night, and it's really cold out and they can't wear gloves, so they take along some of the super-secret stash that Ron thinks April doesn't know about and they always come back kind of wasted - and then it's just the old Sweetums factory, it’s fine. April went on Sweetums-sponsored field trips in elementary school, she used to come bug Andy here all the time, it's fine. And then she’s being shot at, which is not fine at all.
"Stop that!" April yells, after she's already dropped to her knees and pressed herself against the fence, because her instinct for self-preservation apparently works faster than her actual brain. “That's really annoying" - and the worst part is that the thing shooting at her is one of Leslie's, no, not one of Leslie's, one of the invaders' mechanical droid things, that just goes for anything with a human body temperature so it's not even personal.
(Actually, the worst part is the gut-clenching terror. But Ron said he’d do it, or that Ben would, so April asked, like she didn't know, “Is it important?”
“Yeah, April, it is,” Ben said, in that snippy tone April hates, and she rolled her eyes at both of them and said, “Sure, so let’s send the guy with arteries full of bacon, or the one with his arm in a sling” - and they both shut up after that, because it is important.)
"I hate you," she tells the little droid, "and I hate your stupid alien overlords, and I hate stupid Ben and his stupid plan and his stupid face."
It doesn't answer.
She stays absolutely still for a minute, the smell of wet earth rich and disgusting in her nose. Something fast whistles past her head and she thinks her heart might stop from fear, but it doesn't, and it doesn’t, it keeps not stopping, and the seconds pass and April's still there, still pressed against the ground with the bulk of the factory palpable at her back. In rhythm with the pounding in April's ears, droid folds up its barrel, rotates on the spot and trundles off. It would almost be cute, April thinks, if it weren't trying to kill people all the time.
She takes a deep breath and gets to her feet. Nothing happens. She takes another breath and sprints, waiting every second the sound of something whistling towards her, but there's nothing and she takes another step and she's through the main doors.
Inside, almost nothing looks familiar. April knows, kind of, that the aliens are big on water - Leslie had to work to get even a little bit of the supply from the river back into the city sanitation system - but she didn't expect everything to be quite so wet, so sloshing and gross and damp like every municipal swimming pool she's ever been to. She runs along a hallway and it's dim, shadowy - the whole place has been gutted, made grey and featureless - and then suddenly she's in the open space of the factory floor, and she has a flashback to that time in the sixth grade when Bobby Jensen pinched her and she threatened to throw him into a vat of high fructose corn syrup. The vats are still there, cracked and leaking, smelling like burnt sweet popcorn. April’s running a curious finger down the rough sticky surface when the sound from above makes her look up.
It's a ship. It's an actual, honest-to-God spaceship. It’s not as big as the one hanging above Pawnee right now, but it takes up the whole space, hovering unsupported maybe ten or twelve feet off the ground. It's a kind of greenish colour, shifting to silver in the corners of her eyes, and it's gleaming from every surface. As April watches, the lights start to come on, long lines of light in tiny points like it's Christmas or something. The lights start spreading along the walls as well, so machines April hadn't noticed in the dimness begin to fizz and whir, and above her head something begins to rotate. Inside April's stomach, something starts to churn in horrible echo - she has a mental image, suddenly, of Andy making a face and saying, "Urgh, oogy..." - and her vision's starting to blur but she's not done yet: she whips out her phone from her pocket, takes pictures in every direction and then she starts running. She's wearing rubber-soled shoes but the sound of her feet on the ground is incredibly loud and she wonders if it’s only droids down here or the aliens just go to bed early or what, but she reaches the main doors without seeing any of them and probably that's because the horrible things are still out there in the compound waiting for her but she just wants out of here. She sprints across the open space, little shining bullets zooming behind her head but she ducks and she dodges and she still really hates Ben and Ron but their gap in the fence is wide enough for her not to struggle, thank God. She runs a quarter-mile into the woods before she even slows down, her feet tangling finally on undergrowth; she leans against a tree and breathes in, just concentrates on her breathing, deep, sustaining breath.
By the time she reaches the cabin she's exhausted; her footsteps have started to sound like a sequence of gunshots through the roar of blood in her ears and her feet are sticky in her shoes - sweat mixed with high fructose corn syrup, gross - and the sound of the door crashing back in the darkness is impossibly loud. "Ben!"
"April?" Ben jerks to his feet, reaching out with his uninjured hand. It looks like he was sleeping in a chair, waiting for her. "Oh, my God, what is that smell?" - and he stops short. "Sweetums."
"Right," April says, still breathing hard, "right, you were right, we're doing this."
"We're doing this," Ben says, eyes alight with purpose. "You're very brave," he adds, low and earnest, and April glares at him and gets on with throwing up.
*
Everyone knows about the barrier, but a lot of people have never seen it. It's barely another half-mile into the woods from Ron's cabin, if you're heading outwards from Pawnee - but going out there makes people feel what Andy calls "oogy" and Ron calls "damned peculiar"; the one time Ann went out there she thought it was just the weird effect of the light, the way the thing is twenty feet high but you can't see it, not unless you look out the corner of your eye for something like gossamer, fluttering in your peripheral vision, but she felt nauseous for a couple of days afterwards and she hasn't gone back. "There's nothing to see, why would you even go there," April complains, but Ann's pretty sure that's because April can't physically approach the barrier - some people, Ben and Donna included, just can't, so the whole place is getting bigger in everyone's imaginations, bloated with fear of the unknown.
The funny thing is, Ann must have driven through that same patch of ground a thousand times on the road from Pawnee to Indianapolis, and back again, but right now she can't remember it all that well. Mostly, she remembers Leslie, riding shotgun, talking about everything in the big wide wonderful world.
*
"Okay," Donna is saying, "I have a bad feeling about this."
"Donna, it's really fine," Leslie tells her cheerfully, "it's fine, do you want a Nutri-Yum bar?"
"It's all sugar," Ann says, and takes one herself, biting into it reflectively. They're walking along the dimmed hallways at City Hall, all three of them in a row, and Ann also has a bad feeling about this. "Leslie, when you said you had a plan..."
Leslie's plans can sometimes be great, Ann reminds herself. Leslie's plans, even if they don't always involve waffles and personalised T-shirts these days, can be awesome. Ann waits.
"So," Leslie says, rubbing her hands together, "ladies, what can you tell me about Eagleton? Other than the fact they're in here with us?"
"Nothing to tell," Donna says. "I mean, I used to go there for the mall, but since all the looting..."
"It looks like an abandoned missile silo, by Ralph Lauren," Ann agrees, and is horribly amused by Leslie's look of betrayal.
"Be that as it may," Leslie says, quickly, "what can you tell me about the Eagleton hospital?"
"You were born there," Donna and Ann say together, and Leslie rolls her eyes.
"Other than that. Other than the fact it's a fully-equipped hospital for a town that was so rich it had Michael Bublé on retainer, filled with people who were so healthy they never ever got sick. Other than the fact we are running short of a ton of things but especially antibiotics."
"Wait," Ann says, "if it's so well-stocked, then why..."
"Because it was outside the city limits," Donna says, suddenly. "I remember from way back, before the city boundaries were set, it was a zoning error..."
"Right!" Leslie claps her hands. "It's on the other side of the barrier. Right on the other side of the barrier, there is basically an entire warehouse of everything we might possibly need for the winter. All we have to do is go get it."
"Honey," Donna says, "I think you may be misunderstanding the term 'barrier', here" - and Ann’s nodding along.
"That's the thing," Leslie says. "I'm not suggesting we go in guns blazing and stage some kind of stealth dawn raid."
"Damn right," Donna says. "You know what that thing does to people? The last guy, they only found his feet. His actual honest-to-God feet, smoking from the ankles."
"I'm pretty sure that's an urban legend," Leslie says, "I mean, almost entirely sure" - and they've walked past where the department of health used to be, now, and the city manager's old office, and yes, past parks and recreation, too. Ann is getting a really bad feeling about this.
"The thing is," Leslie's saying, waving her hands, "is that we... could just ask. I mean, has anyone just asked? We need these supplies, all we want to do is cross over the barrier, and we know they do it all the time, so..."
"Leslie, honey," Donna says, "I love you, but you've lost your mind."
"No." Leslie smiles, beatifically. "I think we should go make a petition. We go in there and we ask. What's the worst that could happen?"
"We could get eaten," Donna's saying, with some very expressive hand gestures, and Ann says, "Leslie, are you sure..."
But Leslie grabs them both by the arm and pushes them forwards, and isn't this just a metaphor for everything, Ann's thinking, and then they're standing by the door of the old city council chamber, the dark wood imposing and damp, and Leslie's saying, seriously, "I am going to do this. Whether or not you guys - I mean, I did this by myself before, but I thought maybe this time..."
"Leslie," Ann says, and takes her hand, and Donna pushes open the door. It creaks and sticks and Donna stops short, suddenly.
Ann turns to her. "You okay?"
"Fine," Donna says, but she doesn't look fine. "Leslie, honey, I want to - but I am actually gonna puke right now, and this is my favourite shirt."
"Go puke," Leslie says - from Leslie, that's a benediction - and Donna nods, gives Leslie's shoulders a supportive squeeze and darts off down the hallway.
"You know that's just a physical thing, right?" Ann asks seriously as they edge through the door and out into the open space. It's been transformed in here, so all the old wooden panelling, the portraits of Pawnee notables, they’re all gone. Everything is grey and murky, the lights low and reflecting off the ceiling as though off the surface of swimming pool water. It echoes like a swimming pool, too, so Ann's unconsciously lowered her voice and edged a step closer to Leslie. "I guess it's like the barrier, some people just can't get close..."
"I know," Leslie says, and Ann's grateful, because Leslie's feelings are easily hurt these days and who can blame her. "I know, April can't... or Ben."
And how do you know that, Ann wants to ask, but beside her Leslie seems to be amassing her courage. She steps forwards and says, commanding, "Hello? Is anyone there?" - and Ann thinks, fuck it, and takes Leslie's hand.
They advance up to where the old dais used to be, like children with fingers entwined, and Ann's aware, suddenly, that in the dimness above her there are structures built into the roof, huge and metallic but feather-thin, like enormous spiderwebs. Ann shudders, and a drip of water on the back of her neck makes her start, and Leslie grips her hand tight.
"Hello," Leslie says again, and something, in the dark and the murk, moves.
*
The aliens don't have mouths or ears. They carry little voder boxes strapped to their necks that do the talking for them, although the voices don’t sound synthesised - they're more like automated subway voices, emotionless and female. Ann has wondered occasionally how the aliens can hear what's said in reply, without ears, and there is a footnote in Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration offering some theories about that, but she got to the word "telepathy" and shut the book smartly on her thumb.
*
"I want to talk to you about medical supplies," Leslie says, clear and calm, and while she's explaining what she wants, Ann is peering into the dimness, looking at the three aliens on the dais, shuddering inwardly; it's not right, she's thinking vaguely, to be so frightened just at the look of them, at the silvered angular shapes, the sinister way they insinuate themselves along like snakes, but then she remembers how Andy got fried and Ben got shot and Chris, just, Chris. Fear is good. Fear is sensible.
Leslie's not sensible. "And in conclusion" - she's sounding exactly like she did when addressing Pawnee public forums, God, Ann loves Leslie so much - "I think you have a moral responsibility to help me with this." A pause. "Oh, come on, guys. You still haven't told me if you have gender, by the way. What harm can it do? Just let me up in one of your ship things, hop me over the barrier, you can watch me the whole time. It'll be fine." Amazingly, she sounds reassuring, just like she's telling someone not to worry about a broken swing set.
There's a silence, after that. Then the creature - Ann wonders for a second if referring to it that way is racist and then decides she doesn't give a damn if it is - turns towards them both and says, level as the voice that tells you about the next stop on the Chicago El: "Trade."
"Trade?" Leslie looks blank. "I, uh, don't... I mean, I already gave what I could... "
"Trade."
Leslie looks flustered for a second, then something settles in her expression. "Give me time."
“Seven days." The thing turns away and what passes for its head dips.
"Seven days," Leslie says, "but then I'm going to go up to that ship and talk to you guys properly, okay? You have to meet with me. Seven days!"
"Okay, we're done," Ann whispers in Leslie's ear, grabs Leslie's hands and pulls, dragging her down the room.
"Or sooner," comes the voice from the front of the room. Ann pushes Leslie through the door.
*
"Do I get those back any time soon?" Ben asks, motioning towards his notepad and pen with a potato chip.
"Shut up, Ben," April says, glancing up at him and then going back over a couple of lines. "It's just static, chill."
It's not as if the question of what the aliens actually want doesn't keep April awake at night. Leslie runs around and organises food drives and distributions of medical supplies and everything else and that's okay, that's one way not to think about it, and Ron, April guesses, has spent most of his life thinking about this stuff so at least he's had time to get used to the idea, and Andy can't really conceive of why bad things happen to good people anyway, so it's super awful, but this might be the one thing she and Ben actually do have in common. Sometimes, like now, they can tune into ham radio broadcasts and Ben writes down everything they hear that could be true, no matter how creepy: rumours of alien colonies in Siberia, people fleeing in great waves across the land; mysterious lights close to old uranium mines; places in Canada where no one goes outside any more, because the forests are haunted by silver-skeleton ghosts.
"Closed cities in the American midwest," Ben says, doing a passable Rod Serling, "with barriers of nuclear glass."
"Shut up, you're not funny," she says. "Here, have your stupid notepad back."
Ben looks down at the sketch. "Oh, nice," he says, super-bitchy, throwing a chip at her, "an arm in a sling and a gold bikini, beautiful" - but he does get her to sign it.
*
"Leslie," Donna is saying, "you've got five days left. What are you gonna do? You gonna go down to the chamber and knock on the door and say, hey, Mr. Alien, sir, let me in, let's talk flowers and candy and the remains of the great Tom Haverford CD collection?"
"They can have it, I ripped it to mp3 in 1999," Tom says, rummaging in what was formerly Ann's, and is now everyone's, refrigerator. It lights up: they have power today, and Ann has spent the whole afternoon boiling water for drinking in stockpots and sealing the bottles. It's beginning to get dark outside.
"No," Leslie says, fretfully, "not like that. Maybe like that, I don't know." She rests her head on the table. "Put a quarter in me, I'm out of ideas. What is that smell?"
"Oh, my God," Ann says, "that's coffee. That's real coffee, isn't it?"
"It smells like sex," Leslie says, fervently, then: "Actually, no, that's gross, forget I said that. It smells great. It smells really awesome. Nothing like sex."
Tom turns around and waves a pot at them irritably. "It comes in sealed bags," he complains, "you've only got to think to loot Whole Foods." He pauses, then adds, "I guess you all want..."
"Yes," Ann says, and pulls out mugs from her cupboards for herself, Tom, Leslie and Donna.
Tom's bringing more water to the boil. "So maybe they don't want Earth's greatest tunes. What's the well-dressed alien wearing this year? Maybe they want, like, button-down entrails or matching cummerbunds. Leslie, I'm serious," he says, forestalling whatever she was about to say. "They have to need, or want, something - you've got to think psychological. What did you give them last time?"
Leslie lifts her head. "Nothing," she says honestly. "I told them that having no water and living all close together would probably cause an epidemic and we'd all die. They don't want that. They just want us to keep on going, somehow."
Quiescence and self-refrigeration, Ann thinks, sighing inwardly. Maybe it's like The Matrix and they're all going to end up being used as batteries. Or furniture. Or juice boxes. She's not sure which of those is the most disgusting. Damn Ben Wyatt and his overactive imagination, anyway.
"This time that's not true," Leslie goes on. "And they've been here longer now and they know it's not true. Without medicines people will still die, but much slower."
"Great," Ann says, and helps Tom with the coffee. Stuff like this is probably why she never can quite bring herself to dislike Tom, or even underestimate his grasp of human nature. When he pours it out it's thick with grounds, because they can't filter it properly, and there's no thought of cream or sugar, but it smells and tastes wonderful. Stupid Tom and his stupid way of making them all feel better.
"So what you're saying," Leslie says, after they've all inhaled deeply from their mugs, "is that I've got to figure out what they want, and to do that I've got to figure out what makes them tick."
"Tick," Donna says, suddenly, "tick. Tick."
"Leslie, did you forget to wind Donna again," Tom starts, but Donna waves him quiet.
"Hush, I just thought of something," she says, quickly, nearly knocking her mug over with a gesture. "Leslie, you remember way back, they were talking about nuclear power. Like, in Europe and shit. The aliens went there first. They were looking for something, something to do with radioactive sources. Do you think..."
"Yes!" Leslie says. "Yes, that's it! Wait, that's not it. How am I going to find nuclear fuel in Pawnee? The Pawnee Atomic Energy Commission got disbanded after the Zorp cultists were run out of town."
She sounds personally offended by that. Ann grins and touches her arm. "If anyone could, you could, but we'll keep thinking." She glances out the window at the darkening sky and drains her mug. "Listen, I've got to run. Some errands to run before curfew."
"Sure," Leslie says, "sure."
Ann gives her a hug and goes into the other room to get her things. She's pulling on her coat, leaning against the wall, when she hears Leslie say, "I wish she didn't have to go. Wherever she's going."
"Girl, you know where she's going," Donna says, the wall in between them not muting the force in her tone. "She's taking gauze and Tylenol and shit and she's going out to the woods to help some people. I know you've got this thing where you don't ever talk about it but you know what she does. She's doing her job. Like you're doing yours."
"Like I'm doing mine?" Leslie repeats. "That sounds like you might think I'm doing the right thing."
"You know what your problem is, Leslie Knope?" Donna says, emphatically. "Because I don't know what it is either, but it's kinda contagious."
"Donna," Leslie says, and from the silence that follows, Ann suspects Donna may have submitted to a hug. She smiles to herself, ties her shoelaces, turns to grab her purse and realises she left it on the dining room table.
"There's something else," Leslie's saying. "I could trade for information."
"What?" Donna asks, and as Ann walks in, there's something strange about Leslie, something indefinable in her eyes.
"Information," Leslie says, almost dreamily, half-turned away so she's addressing open air rather than Donna and Ann, "like, for example, the fact my husband and his rebel alliance are out in the woods, building a bomb."
Ann catches her breath and opens her mouth instinctively, not even sure what's going to come out, but Donna gets there first. "Leslie," she's saying, soft and calm, "you gotta live a long time in that skin."
"I know," Leslie says, gentle as a kiss. "I didn't mean it."
[on to part two]
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