Fic:: Both Hands [Parks and Recreation] [2/2]
Fic:: Both Hands [2/2]
by Raven
17,000w, Parks and Recreation, Leslie/Ben, April/Andy.
[Please see part one for content notes and summary]
After the dust had settled from the initial invasion, Leslie called Ben a jerk and a cynic and he called her a daydreamer and a credulous innocent - April secretly quite enjoyed it - and at the time, Ann put it all down to cabin fever. Since the barrier went up, they’ve heard of a few successful long-distance calls - Ben once spoke to his sister in Minnesota, Ron once spoke to his mother, a hundred miles across Indiana, and some guy at City Hall claims he got a call from the Indiana statehouse a week after the barrier went up - and not on the same day, so people keep trying, but for all meaningful purposes, the world has shrunk to the ten square miles within the circle of the barrier, underneath the hanging ship.
Because they do pick stuff up with Ron's ham radio - broadcasts from west of the Mississippi, sometimes, and once, weirdly, the BBC World Service - they know they're not alone on the surface of the earth, but sometimes April thinks that makes it worse. Better to be all that's left than just sitting here like idiots, like the front page of a textbook on Divide and Conquer 101.
*
"So, Pawnee is special," Ben's saying, unrolling a large paper plan onto Ron's beautiful wooden table. He spreads it out with his right hand, holding it in place with his hip rather than with his other hand, and Ann loses her patience.
"Ben, you need to let me look at that arm right now," she orders, and he looks up at her, startled, and waves her away with his uninjured hand. "I know it's gonna hurt. I’ll be careful, okay? You giant baby," she adds, and he smiles a little, sighs and nods.
Ann clucks as she loosens the sling around his neck, and that starts out as something she's doing for dramatic effect, but his skin is feverishly warm under her hands and she's kind of always aware, now, of how little is left in those boxes she brings up here. "Tell me something," she says, speaking quickly so he's paying attention to her voice rather than flinching away from her hands. "In all the work you've done on them, have you ever come across something that the invaders want? That we could... trade for?"
He's about to say, Leslie - she can see his mouth make the shape of the word - but all she hears is, "No. I never have."
"Okay," Ann says. "Okay, now tell me why Pawnee is special."
His answering glance tells her he knows he’s being distracted, but he gestures with his right hand again and goes on. "Not Pawnee, I guess. Sweetums. The invaders' base on Earth - possibly their only one, or their only local one, I don't know - is in the old Sweetums factory. I can understand why - it's build to withstand explosions of boiling molasses, it's all breeze blocks and six-feet-thick concrete walls." He stops, hissing with pain. "When I say base, I actually mean a real facility for, I don't know what you would call them, shuttlecraft? Small ships that go up into the big one and dock. They're using all the water as a power source."
"Like, hydroelectric?" Ann asks, not looking up.
"Freakier than that," April says from behind Ann, surprising her. "Like, I saw it all light up, it looked... nuclear."
"Possibly literally," Ben says, and hisses again; Ann's working her way across the part of his arm where the bullet passed through the flesh.
"So what does this mean?" she asks.
"I think," Ben says seriously, "that the power for everything the invaders do - the barrier, whatever it is they're doing in the city council chamber, the ships, everything - comes from the factory. So if Ron, April and I go down there with some of the things Ron is building, then we can... cry havoc."
"And let loose the dogs of war," April says, with satisfaction, and then glares at them when they turn to look at her. "What, I'm not allowed to know stuff?"
"And the best thing is, they underestimate us. They're not... logical?" Ben inclines his head. "At least, I don’t think they can really conceive of our internal lives. They're logical, but I think they believe our behaviour is pattern-emergent. Like we're ants, or termites."
There's a pause, then, while they all look nervously around them, the regular chittering of the woods sounding unnaturally loud.
"Anyway," Ben says, pointedly, "I genuinely believe we've got a chance. We get in there, blow out their circuits, somehow. Ron's working on it."
"How does it help us?" Ann asks.
"At the very least - fuck, Ann!"
"Sorry," Ann says, her thumb now pressing into Ben's wrist.
"At the very least," Ben says again, "there probably won't be an alien presence down here for a few days. No droids, they need power. If you want to try calling people outside of town, that'll be the time, the barrier should come down for a while. We can take a trip into the outside world. And apart from all those things" - he gestures with his right hand again - "there's the morale aspect." He grins. "Suddenly, we've punched up, you know?"
"Yes, your highness," April says, holding her hands to her ears like two cinnamon danishes, and Ben's making a face at her when Ann makes a noise that's halfway to a sigh, and they all go quiet.
"Ben," she says, after a minute, "you know your arm was broken, right? I can't even begin to understand how those things transmit force, but as well the entrance and exit wounds, the bone was broken.”
"Okay." Ben sounds uncertain. "I figured maybe, right after it happened... so, what?"
"Well," Ann says, "it didn't heal right."
"Oh, great," Ben says, and then: "Why are you looking at me like that?"
*
After Ann had stopped worrying about people getting influenza from close proximity, she started worrying about them getting cholera from river water. Leslie's project to clean up the Pawnee river had been progressing, but it was nowhere near finished; the water from the faucets had been through the sanitation system but it took all day to fill a bucket. Leslie held Ann’s hand and said she would do something about it; she had a plan.
In retrospect, the worst part about the whole thing was that they weren’t actually shouting, so Ann walked blithely into the room in time to hear Ben finish a sentence with: “Collaborator.”
Leslie said, “Get out.”
A couple of days after that, Ann was able to wash her hair and her clothes in clean, if not quite potable, water. Ben didn’t come back.
*
"I haven't got anything to give you," Ann says, apparently to herself, and April figures it out, a second before Ann lets go of Ben's hand and says: "We're going to have to" - and makes a really precise, totally gross gesture.
"Ewww," April says, "Ann, that's disgusting" - and Ben's eyes widen and he takes a half-step backwards.
"Urgh," he's saying, "no, no, I'm fine, I'm right-handed, I'll just deal."
"Sure," Ann says, and when April and Ron look at her with surprise she looks pissed, which April thinks is a good look on her. "So I'm not following the rules to the letter any more! I'm still not doing anything to him that he doesn't want me to do."
"That's what she-"
"April, shut up," Ben says, clipped, and April realises, suddenly, that he's in pain.
"Ben," Ann says, quickly, "it's up to you, but..." She pauses. “It’s been a while already. If you want the full use of your arm in the future, you know what I think you should do. I mean, there are risks, but...”
"Urgh," Ben says again, but he's got that determined look that he usually only gets around Leslie, and for a moment April really hates him for making this a thing that's going to happen. Then she gets over herself and goes inside to make sure they've still got a pot of water, and a fire burning.
"Now," Ben is telling Ann, "now, or probably never."
After a little while Ron comes out with two bottles from that box no one is supposed to know about, holds them out to Ben and says, "Son, you choose which one you want" - and he doesn’t even complain when Ben picks the clear grain alcohol over the fifteen-year-old single malt. Ben drinks a couple of shots of it, they wait a minute for it to go to his head, and then April gets the hot water and Ann makes Ron wash his hands and between them they break the bone and reset it. April used to love Ann's stories from the hospital but this isn't gross in the cool way, it's just gross and awful, gross like the destruction of things. April sits with Ben for a while afterwards, listening as his breathing slows, and then she gets up and calls Leslie, because seriously, fuck this.
*
"April!" Andy clambers up the ridge as fast as he can, grabs her around the waist and awkwardly twirls her, and it is so great to see him that she doesn't, straight away, start asking questions like what the hell and what are you doing here? And then Leslie comes over the hill and that makes sense of that.
"Beautiful April," she says, and Andy leaves off hugging April for a moment so Leslie can hug her instead, and it's only been, like, a few days, but it's genuinely so great to see Leslie, standing out here like she belongs, like April doesn’t have a life that’s falling into separate pieces.
"Leslie was awesome," Andy's saying, "they were all like, it's nearly past curfew, and she was like, I'm Councilwoman Leslie Fucking Knope, and we still had to dodge, you know, death rays but seriously it was so awesome."
"That's totally how it happened," Leslie tells April, who laughs. They walk up to the cabin arm-in-arm, talking and laughing, and then there's a movement from above them, Ben's voice says, "Leslie?" - and Leslie tenses so quickly April can feel it, Leslie's fingers digging into her arm.
Leslie says, uncertainly, "Ben... April said you wanted to see me."
"April?" Ben says, confusedly, "she said that you wanted..."
That's April's cue. She takes Andy by the shoulders and they walk around the back of the cabin to where Ron and Ann are roasting something that smells deliciously like dead animal. Behind her, she hears Leslie ask, "What happened to your arm?" and April turns firmly away, sits down by the crackling flames and holds out her hands to the warmth.
"Seriously, babe, Leslie was awesome," Andy is saying, "she just... you know."
"I know," April says. "Ron, is that..."
Ron nods, stoic, and hands her what's basically a plate of meat. "Went hunting this afternoon."
"Animals can't cross the barrier, can they? Game stocks will need replenishing soon," Ann says, and off Ron's look, adds: "What? My dad hunted. I guess we should probably eat what we can and hope the animals keep on... doing it."
"Deer-meat," Andy begins, "and..."
"Venison," Ron corrects, his face absolutely serious as though it's the most important thing in the world. April sticks her tongue out at him a little.
"Venison," Andy says, "and Twinkies. It's, like, the best meal ever."
April's had better. But she's got to admit it's not bad. The fire is warm and smells good, and Ann's not being that annoying, and Ron has actually not been annoying at all since this whole thing started - it's like he's been trying to tell them all this survivalist crap as long as he's known them and now everyone knows he's right he's not gonna be a jerk about it - and Andy's here, sweet, wonderful Andy, who genuinely does think venison and Twinkies is the best meal ever. April snuggles into his shoulder and feels, if not exactly happy, at least content.
At least, until there's the sound of raised voices inside the cabin, and then something crashing - "I hope that's not his other arm," Ann says, and it's what April was thinking so she can't even glare - and then the door opens and they hear Leslie shouting, "Fuck the symbolic import, how about helping people?" and they all wince.
"Urgh," Andy says, "I guess they’re doing it again."
April grimaces. And then Leslie comes out, walking slowly, and says, abrupt: "I'm going back into town. Andy" - her expression softens - "you stay if you want, I'll get someone to come get you in the morning."
"He can come with me," Ann says, quickly, and Leslie nods.
"Thanks," she says, and gives Ann a hug, then Ron, then April. April doesn't pull away. And then Leslie walks off down the ridge, so after a minute they see her car lights rise then dip, the low sound of the engine disappearing slowly into the distance. Nobody says, nice job, April, but April hates them all anyway.
Later, when Ron has gone inside to take inventory and Ann has gone somewhere to do whatever it is Ann does, and it's just April and Andy by the dying embers of the fire, he turns to her and says, a little querulously, "I don't get it."
"Me neither," April says, lazily. She loves Andy, and he loves her, and she sometimes thinks it really ought to be that simple, for everyone. But then, Leslie ran for city council; Ben went to Washington; and so did April. Maybe it can't be.
“But they're on the same side," Andy says, and April considers.
"I guess," she says after a minute, "that Leslie thinks we should do things how we used to do them, if we can, and Ben thinks we should do things like blow shit up."
"You're helping him do that," Andy points out, "but we still, eat Twinkies and hang out and do stuff we used to. Like, as well."
"I told you I didn't get it either," April tells him, and realises all at once how cold it is; Andy’s shivering and her fingers are numb. "Come on. Let's go inside."
They damp down the last of the flames, April doing most of the work while Andy unearths his cane from under a pile of fallen leaves, and inside the cabin Ron is yawning, holding a Zane Grey novel with one hand while whittling a small flute with the other. It's later than April thought.
"You should get some sleep," Ron tells her, before he goes into the other room to claim his plank of wood, "big day tomorrow."
April nods. She lies down and flips through Ron's book, trying to calm her mind. Ben's still awake, too, and he won't be quiet, wide-eyed on some potent cocktail of grain alcohol and pain and the absence of Leslie, but Andy is surprisingly good at this - April can hear him in the bunk below, saying soft little things like, "It's okay, dude, you're okay, shhh, shhh", meaningless and soothing - and the regular creaking, the sound of them rocking back and forth, becomes part of the small sounds of the woods and the night, and April sleeps.
*
A ton of people died on one day, and you couldn’t deal with all that at once; then a ton of people died over a few days, and you could sort of figure that out, but it became a real thing, the place they lived now, one quiet night when the power went out. From Ron’s cabin, slightly elevated over Pawnee, you could see it - it didn’t go all at once but gradually, so a wave of darkness spread slowly across the town, building by building and block by block, grids and constellations of streetlights fading into nothingness. April was shivering as she watched, and she jumped, startled at the sound even though Ben’s voice was quiet; she’d started to think for a minute it was just her, all by herself, left alone on this hillside watching the lights go out.
“April,” Ben was saying, low and determined, “we’ve had the world ending in fire. Let’s not wait for the ice.”
That was the night Ron started making a detailed inventory by gaslight of everything he’d cached away over the years, alcohol and water purification tablets and guns and ammunition, and Ben wrote the couple of lists, what we know and what we can do, that eventually became the first few pages of Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration, and April just sat there, and breathed, and thought, over and over, we will end you, motherfuckers.
*
Ann is beginning to wonder if she's the only person in Pawnee who isn't running some kind of demented secret scheme.
Firstly, there's Leslie. Leslie, who thinks it's perfectly reasonable to wake her up in the morning with, "Ann. Ann, wake up. I have an idea! It's an awesome idea and it's so awesome I can't tell you about it! Also, we have eggs! Do you want eggs?"
They do have eggs - Millicent has been turning Ann's once-unremarkable lawn into a kind of fenced-off smallholding, planted with potatoes and radishes and playing host to a couple of chickens and a small unhappy pig who used to belong to the Pawnee Historical Society and who, Ann suspects, will probably live to a ripe old age as long as Leslie's around - and that's probably why Ann's forgiving, if confused. "Leslie," she mutters, "that doesn't even make sense."
"It does," Leslie says, cheerfully. "It's an awesome halfway idea. When it's an awesome all-the-way-there idea I'll tell you all about it."
"I can't wait," Ann says, and that's halfway, if not all the way, to sincere.
"And hey, seeing as how you're awake, you can come with me" - and Ann might have chosen to say something at that point about Leslie Knope the human steamroller, but it's a clear, sunlit day, another in a string of them as winter seems to be thinking better of itself, and she's probably not getting any more sleep today anyway. Leslie wants to go to Ramsett Park, so after breakfast they walk down and Leslie says hi to nearly everyone they meet, and she's so bright, this morning, so radiant with inner light, that Ann just smiles and goes along with it. In the park, everything looks decrepit, somehow all the worse for the sunshine - the cold weather has not been good to the rows of makeshift huts and tents - and Leslie's looking it over with a critical eye, making a list while she walks. "Corrugated iron," she says, apparently to herself, and sets out along one of the long rows.
"Hey," says a small voice, and Ann looks down to meet the eyes of the little girl they met the other day. "Are you the lady who brings the medicine and the candy?"
"Yeah," Ann says, "but not today, honey."
From Leslie's expression, she's getting the same question; after a minute, she comes back to Ann and says, "I wish we could do more. I thought we could at least get some sheet metal, that will keep the rain out better than canvas. But some guy over there told me he went to Home Depot and they were all out."
'I guess other looters got there first," Ann says, and wonders for the thousandth time how that turned into a normal thing to say.
They're heading back, Leslie still thinking out loud about potential roofing solutions ("We could cut up old Sweetums plastic crates? No, people would dream of being chased by giant candy canes") when a familiar voice yells, "Who goes there? Advance and be... something!"
"Andy?" Leslie says, and they both take a tentative step forwards. "Are you... breaking into a hair salon?"
"I understand why you might think that," Andy concedes, using his cane to gesture at the sign above his head, which reads "Salon At No. 5" in pink loopy calligraphy, and then at the giant hole in the plate glass window. "I'm not, though!"
Leslie opens her mouth, presumably to dispute this, and then April bounces through the hole in the window. "I am!" she declaims, gives them all a suspicious look and grips a black cloth bag to her, protectively. Something clanks inside. "We were never here! The rebel alliance needs us!"
Ann bursts into laughter. "Tell Princess Leia I'm coming to check on her later today, okay?"
"Yes, boss!" Andy salutes, and the two of them bound off down the sidewalk, April saying something to Andy that makes him laugh delightedly as they round a corner.
"I'm glad they still have fun together," Leslie says, a little wistful, and Ann squeezes her hand.
That ought to be enough mysteries for one day, but then that afternoon Ann is hunting around the kitchen for something for lunch for her and Leslie, when the doorbell rings and it's Stuart, that guy from City Hall she used to share an office with forever and a day ago, and he's holding two large unmarked earthenware bottles. "Hey, Ann," he says, awkwardly. "Can I... um, can I store these here today? Just for a couple of hours."
"I guess," Ann says, a little uncertain. "Uh, okay. Um, what are they?"
"I got them from the high school science lab," he says, "I used to teach chemistry, you know, before I ended up at the department of health" - which, as responses go, Ann thinks, certainly spawns more questions than it answers - "and uh, you know, don't open them. Or, spill them, or anything."
"Okay," she says, a little doubtful, "you can put them here, next to this can of... weedkiller."
"Oh, that's Millicent's donation," says Stuart, mystifyingly, and disappears, leaving his mysterious bottles behind him. Ann shakes her head.
It's kind of a relief, therefore, to be crossing the checkpoints before dark, which are still quite terrifying but least make sense, and leaving her car in the little clearing in the woods and clambering up the ridge to Ron's cabin. She has an impression of noise and activity, which is weird - even now, Ann associates this place with solitude and calm - and then she gets up there and there are people consulting books and hammering things and Ron and April are sitting in a circle of lengths of lead piping and ordering yet more people around. "Wow," Ann says, to no one in particular, and picks her way through all the controlled chaos to the little bench at the side of the cabin and sits down next to Ben, who has a book closed on his index finger and an expression of relative calm.
"Hey, Ann," he says, eyes glittering. "What can I do for you?"
"Oh, don't let me distract you from..." Ann waves a hand. "Committing a felony."
"Yeah," Ben says, "so it turns out the list of things you need to build a bomb is shorter than you might think."
"Not a bomb," Ron puts in, over the sound of hammering, "a small incendiary device."
"Right," Ann says. "Of course. Does the list include - picking items quite at random here - acid? Maybe peroxide? Weedkiller?"
Ben nods. "Hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide - I had no idea people put that stuff on their hair, it smells like a cluster headache - sugar, water, weedkiller, some other things. Ron made the list and I arranged to get everything on it. It didn't take long."
"You're pretty scary, sometimes," Ann tells him. "You remind me of someone else I know. Listen, I came up here to check on you."
“Ann, it’s really not necessary...”
“And in case you were wondering, the password is now Fleetwood Mac sex pants,” Ann says, and steamrollers on. It's struck her that part of the brightness in his eyes is amusement, and part of it isn't. She undoes the sling from around his neck and checks the dressing and puts her hand on his forehead like he's six, and he submits to it quietly so when she's done she finds it kind of awkward to break the silence. "Yeah, the wound is infected," she says after a second, "but I don't." She pauses. "I don't have anything else to give you. I guess I thought by now I'd have something to give you."
"I know," Ben says, sighing. "It's okay, really."
"It's not," Ann says, and it's weird, because she's been a nurse all her working life and she understands how often, in times of deep, searing personal crisis, people just go on - just get to their feet and figure out what needs to be done and go on - and she's always figured that the invasion is like that, just the same thing made bigger. People build huts in the public parks and they keep on living. It's weird how the enormity of the thing hits you in quiet moments, and not even the worst ones, just passing moments: like out here on a hillside under a dimming sky, watching Ron and April hammer nails into pipes. "It's really kind of not."
"Yeah," Ben says, still quietly. After a moment, he adds, "How's Leslie?"
Ann frowns; it's the first time he's asked her that. "Actually, I should head back into town, she'll be missing me."
"Ann, please," Ben says, and Ann gets up and gathers her things together.
"Leslie's dedicated," she says, as she starts off down the hill, “compassionate” - and, over her shoulder - "and stubborn as all hell."
*
A couple of nights before they're due to go down to the factory, April hitches a ride with Ann back into town, and Ben comes too. Andy didn't know they were coming, so the look on his face when he opens the door is awesome in itself, but he grins and he swings April around as best as he can, awkward and loving, and they end up making out on the couch, which is more awesome, and then April remembers all at once that here they have a bed, an actual bed with an actual mattress and two pillows, so she takes Andy's hand and pulls him into the bedroom and that's even more awesome.
They don't talk about why tonight, of all nights. It's easier that way. They doze off wrapped up together, contented, and it’s funny but April genuinely thinks it's possible to be happy, in passing moments, even now, and that’s a warming thought on the way to sleep.
She wakes up suddenly in the middle of the night, maybe two or three in the morning, and her first instinct is that the aliens have done something, like, phase two or something - but Andy's still sleeping, and everything seems quiet. April gets up to check it out anyway. Looking blearily out into the apartment, she can see Ben, standing by the open front door and, in the dim light from the porch, the flash of blonde hair. April goes back to bed.
*
“Ready?” Ron asks, and April nods. They’ve worked on this for days, they’ve got everything they’re going to need and they’ve been through the plan, like, a dozen times, which is eleven times more than April needed. They’re ready.
They set off into the woods, and probably Ben shouldn't be coming along - he's always shivering, now, and off-balance as he stumbles around one-handed - but April doesn't have the energy to argue him into staying behind, or the will. This is just how it's going to be, so she helps him along with a hand under his elbow on occasion, and doesn't swear at him too much when he falls behind. "Good girl," Ron tells her, in a quiet moment, and she snarls and asks what he's talking about, but he just gives her a look.
They make it down to the gap in the fence, moving slowly, and it still looks like it's going to plan when April looks up and says, "Shit."
"What?" Ben asks, coming up behind her, and then, "Shit."
On the other side of the fence, it's a mass of silver. The little droid things are trundling back and forth, the faceless spheres they have instead of heads turning towards the sound of voices. "How many were here when you came wire-cutting?" April whispers, urgent.
"A couple," Ben whispers back. "Maybe three. There must be... twenty of them. I guess they're getting wise. Shit."
"Okay," April says, suddenly making a decision. "Ben, we're leaving you behind. Deal with it. Ron..."
"Not to worry," Ron says, calm and smiling, and sets down his pack. From inside, he pulls out a couple of square feet of aluminium sheeting, one of the large malleable pieces they looted from Home Depot. "We're covered."
Ignoring both of their protests, he curves the metal around himself like he's some kind of Roman centurion, and before anyone can stop him, he steps up close to the fence and says, at normal volume, "Gentlemen."
There's a noise like machine-gun fire; April and Ben both jerk backwards. After a second, Ron peels the metal sheeting away from himself; it's charred and blackened in places but otherwise quite intact. "Reflective," he says, as though it should have been obvious from the start.
"That's crazy," Ben says, breathing audibly, "that should never have - that's crazy."
"We're about to break into an alien base to blow up their fusebox," April reminds him. Working quickly, she pulls out the sheeting and starts tessellating it into layers.
"Uh," Ben is saying, "I'll stay behind, you were right" - but April shoves the metal at him impatiently, doing it one-handed on purpose, and in a minute they're standing by the gap, and maybe Ben's right and this is crazy but April's pissed now, she wants this done. She takes Ben's arm, steadying him, and Ron holds up three fingers, then two, then one.
Later, she'll only remember heat and fear, as though they were re-entering the atmosphere from space. Her feet carry her across the twenty feet of open ground like they're not under her conscious control, everything in her mind a blur of run run run. She finds the inner factory wall by hurtling straight into it, and then she edges along with the metal behind her and gets behind the big doors and only then looks out to see Ben and Ron, a few paces behind her but alive and moving and then they crash into the factory entrance with a noise like - well, sheet metal falling off a roof. They all lie still for a second, and April gets a glimpse of one of the old Sweetums campaign posters peeling off the wall, and it must be truly ancient because it's something about elections for city council with a picture of Bobby Newport against a picture of Leslie aged ten - and then she's on her feet again, and they're moving, leaving the metal set out ready behind them.
The open space at the end of the hallway is just as she remembers it, enormous and deserted and haunted by water, dripping and sloshing and echoing through the damp air. "They really do underestimate us," Ben says, low and thoughtful, and then Ron and April start emptying their packs and Ben gets down on the ground, spreading out the big plan.
"No time," Ron tries telling him, but Ben holds firm, grabbing the lengths of piping and handing them to April and pointing out exactly where they go. April isn't sure how he knows what the explosion pattern ought to look like, or if he knows at all or if this all just educated guessing, but they've risked their lives to get here and what the hell, it's got to be something to do with the lines of lights on the walls. They put the pipes in a radial pattern, and Ben adjusts a couple with the help of the plan, and Ron flips a few of them up for some reason he thinks is important, and then there's a lot of fussing with wires and antennas and radio equipment that only Ron can do. April and Ben are both just crouched down and waiting, and April's nerves are jangling and she can see Ben looking anxiously at his watch.
"Come on," April whispers, "come on, come on" - and then in not-very-far distance, they hear a sound. It's indistinct; it could be little robot wheels trundling through water.
"That will do," Ron says, somehow in a ponderous tone even now, and they're up and moving. As they crash through the doorway into the hall, the sound is getting louder and louder behind them, less just generic splashing and more ominous whispers of metal.
"Fuck!" April yells, as the first bullets pass over their heads and they all somehow duck instinctively but keep on running, crouched and awkward. Halfway down the hallway Ben stumbles and can't stop himself from falling with his immobilised arm; April grabs him before he quite goes over, but she has to stand up for a second and a bullet passes within an inch of her left ear.
"Fuck," Ben mutters, pulling her back down, "fuck..." - and April remembers inconsequentially that this is how he got shot the first time, and concentrates hard on her feet moving as another bullet passes overhead.
And then they’re in the entrance hall, Bobby Newport's face looking out over the sheets of aluminium, and Ron stands his ground, putting himself between them and the droid as April grabs her shield and grabs another one for Ben. "Go!" Ron shouts, and they're moving again, through that purgatory of yelling and fire and heat and metal wanting to twist and warp in April's hands, and the hole in the fence is probably getting bigger like a hole in someone's pants because they all throw themselves at it so much, and she's through and Ben's through and then after a long, awful moment, Ron emerges from the building and he's not exactly strolling, but he's not running as he comes through the fence.
"How did you," Ben says, out of breath, "that thing was so close, how did you..."
"There was one lead pipe left," Ron tells him, "and sometimes they explode on impact."
April giggles, a little hysterically, and holds out her hand to help Ron up, and also to help Ben get over the next few feet of uneven ground, and they start along the path into the woods. They come to a halt about a quarter-mile away, all looking down the incline towards the factory, and then they turn and stare at each other. Finally, Ron seems to make a decision. "Son," he says, looking at Ben, "I think you should do this."
He pulls out the detonator - it used to be Ron's cell phone; when Ann asked if he might need it, Ron smiled serenely, shook his head, and said, "Never again" - and hands it over to Ben, who handles it like a holy object.
"I think April should do it," he says, very seriously. "She did... more than anyone could have asked."
April takes Ben's hand, rests it on the button and glares at him. He looks surprised for a second, then smiles. They press the button together, Ron looking on like some sort of benevolent god, and for a minute they just stand there, April still holding Ben's hand, while nothing seems to happen. It's another bright day, winter edging in so it’s cold like ice but still with that intense sunshine filtering through the branches. Ron looks at home out here, as he always does; Ben is very pale in the whitewashed light.
Then they hear it. It's not even a sound, April thinks confusedly, or if it is, it's a sound she can only hear with her bones, a sound like some great quantity of water is hitting an unyielding surface far below her feet, the vibration passing subsonic and unsettling through her body.
Above them, the ship disappears, fizzles from presence to absence like someone pulled the aerial out of the TV.
"Suck it, fuckers!" April yells, punching the sky, possessed suddenly by memory: of Andy, standing in Ramsett Park when the lights came down; of Leslie, never not moving so she never has to be still and think; of stupid Ann, missing stupid Chris; of holding Ben down so they could break his arm, jesus; of late nights and cold mornings and how no one ever seems to sleep any more and how much she misses hot baths and every other thing, every big and every stupid annoying awful little thing.
Ben smiles, Ron favours her with a look of deep satisfaction, they all breathe in the new and pervasive smell of burnt sugar, and they trudge on home.
*
The door to the cabin usually isn't locked. Ann knocks once for the sake of it, gives Donna a look and they both barge inside. Ron's sitting at his desk in one corner, April's stretched out on the top bunk. "We did it," she's telling Ron, holding up her phone on speaker: there's nothing to be heard but static.
"Where's Ben?" Ann half-yells. "Where's Leslie?"
"Calm yourself, woman," Ron says, and Ann actually might punch him right now. "Leslie's not here. Ben is in the other room, sleeping. What do you want?"
"Did you take him with you?" Ann demands, and when Ron nods, she turns to Donna and puts a hand on her heart. It's over.
"Yeah, actually, Ann," April says, sitting up, her eyes narrowed. "Ron and Ben and I went down to the Sweetums factory and we, you know, kinda blew the hell out of their circuits, so you might have noticed the ship's disappeared, Ron says that the barrier is coming down."
"It is," Ron says. "This" - he gestures at April's phone, still wailing static - "is proof positive. When the barrier is fully discharged we should have contact with the outside world."
"Yeah, so," April goes on, sickly-sweet, "I don't know what you did with your morning, but I'm sure it was just as awesome."
"Leslie," Ann says. "She left a note. She said..."
"Gone bargaining," Donna says, waving a scrap of paper. "We haven't seen her. No one has seen her."
"We thought she might have come to see Ben, but okay, no, and we can't call her because of the static, and she was going to..." Ann pauses. "She was going to meet with the invaders."
"She had seven days," April says, urgently. "That's tomorrow."
"Or sooner," Ann says, "or sooner. She was going to go meet them. She was going to go meet them, on their ship."
April looks like she's going to vomit. Ron says, "Are you saying that Leslie was - when we..."
"Leslie?" says another voice. Ann turns to see Ben standing there, framed by the doorway and dishevelled by sleep.
Donna takes a step forwards, and it's crazy but right at this moment all Ann can think about is how brave Donna is, moving towards him with her arms out and saying, "Ben, honey, we don't know, we don't know, maybe she wasn't..."
But Ben just says, "Leslie?" again, as though she might be in the other room, as though he's calling her name. As though, Ann realises with something approaching religious certainty, that's all, now, he's ever going to do.
*
They keep the fire burning.
Donna takes April home to Andy; Ron says he's going to try to catch some sleep. The power is out and all cell phones are broadcasting static. Ann paces up and down; Ben lies flat on his back, looking up at the stars; then they switch places; then they switch back. They don't sleep, and they don't talk, and in wordless rhythm between themselves, they keep the fire burning.
Around two o'clock in the morning Ann thinks she hears Ben say something into the sky that she can't quite make out; she wants to ask him, not what he said, but how they'll do it, when they have to do things like eat and sleep and talk again, and after that maybe she does sleep a little, because there's a gap in her consciousness for a while, but it's not quite a forgetting, just a small space between the solid black of night and a faint dawn. The light is rising dim and bleak in the east. She lies quite still, looking at the patterns in the bare branches above her head, and then just before sunrise Ben makes a strange, inhuman noise and hands her his phone.
Ann notes, as though from a great distance, that she and Ben both use the same picture as a lock screen - a shot of the three of them hugging on election night - before she focuses on the message overlay: coming home - L.
*
"Andy, get up!" April jumps out of bed, jumps through the bedroom door, then has to jump on short notice over a giant yellow plastic box that wasn't there the night before. She stubs her toe on the edge of it, says, "Fuck, fuck it, fuck!" and then falls into Leslie's arms.
"April!" Leslie says, hugging her tight and then holding her at arm's length. "April, what is it?"
April calls her a bunch of things, basically the rudest things she's ever called anyone, and then bursts into tears. By the time Andy's gotten up and come out into the living room - why is their living room full of giant yellow plastic boxes? - April's sort of able to talk again, and she's stumbling through some kind of explanation, but Andy just grabs Leslie while shouting, "You're not dead!" and Leslie steps back.
"What?"
"Your note," April says, and hiccups. "We thought you might be on the ship. The ship Ben and I" - another hiccup - "exploded."
"Oh, April," Leslie says, and she's sounding a little choked up. "I'm sorry. When the barrier came down, I had to go, you know? I had to go - after what Donna said, I looked some stuff up in the library" - a pause, like she's deciding whether or not to spit - "and you know what they have in hospitals? Radioactive stuff! Like, for when people have cancer. And while I was there I got a ton of other stuff. Oh, April, I'm so sorry."
"We couldn't call you," April says, still sniffling, "we tried and tried. And then you texted..."
"Well, yeah," Leslie says. "I wanted to see if you could text from the other side, I texted you and Ben and Ann." She pauses, as though she’s just realised what she’s saying. ”Oh. Ben... and Ann.”
"You can text people now," Andy says, after a second, and his voice is strange. He holds up his phone, which is lighting up every few seconds. He flicks it off vibrate and it starts making a message tone, only continuously, message after message after message.
"All the messages," April says, in wonderment, "from outside Pawnee."
Leslie gives her another hug, careful and deliberate. "You did that, April," she says, very serious.
"Shut up," April says. "Shut up, shut up" - and she's kind of crying again, but it's okay.
*
April and Andy's living room floor is covered in yellow boxes, all marked with a very interesting variety of Hazchem symbols. Ann looks down at them for a second and then in wonderment at Leslie, and then there's nothing but Leslie, alive and bright and real. "Beautiful Ann," Leslie is saying into her shoulder, "I should have told you about my plan."
"Yeah, you should, oh my God, Leslie," Ann says, and then she pulls back from the hug for a second, just taking in the sight of her, and Leslie holds still under that scrutiny. And then they both have these huge jaw-cracking smiles and they're kind of just dancing around the room, avoiding the boxes, giggling, drunk on joy.
"Stop it," April says, but she's maybe kind of smiling too, and then Andy grabs April's waist and they're slow-dancing and Ann laughs out of nothing but pure delight. Everything is perfect and wonderful.
And then there's another voice. "Leslie?"
It's Ben. He's standing in the doorway, not coming any further, but everyone else in the room seems to freeze at once. April and Andy abruptly stop dancing; Ann lets go of Leslie's hands. Leslie takes a couple of determined steps forward, then no more.
"Where..." Ben pauses for a second, then tries again. "Where have you been?"
"Eagleton," Leslie says, and Ann can't read her expression. Her hands are raised in front of her, held still in some inconclusive gesture. "Eagleton hospital, actually. To get radioactive sources to trade. And also fresh supplies of antibiotics. And painkillers."
"Antibiotics and painkillers," Ben repeats, as if he doesn't know what the words mean. "I thought that's what you were trading for."
"Not quick enough." Leslie sounds defiant, angry.
"You didn't know the barrier was down for sure until you crossed it," Ben says, after a moment, and that's anger in his voice, too, thick and poisonous. "Leslie, it could have killed you. Why the hell did you-"
"Because!" Leslie yells back, and then all the fight seems to go out of her at once, her shoulders slumping. "Because," she says, quiet and exhausted, "you were in so much pain. And if your arm gets infected..."
"Fuck, Leslie," Ben says, his voice cracking, "fuck" - and he comes properly into the room, Leslie takes another step forwards, and Ann suddenly can't bear to look at them crossing that distance between them and watch whatever it is that's going to happen so shatteringly intense and private all over April and Andy's living room. She takes them both by the arm, ignores them when they try to complain, steers them into Ben's room or Ben's old room or whatever they call it now, pushes them both inside and shuts the door. After a pause, she opens one of Leslie's boxes, picks out a pill bottle, opens the door a crack to throw it in, and shuts it firmly a second time.
"Urgh," April says, giving Ann possibly the first look of gratitude she's ever given her. This is turning out to be a hell of a day.
*
So, after that, Ann calls her mom. They talk for a half-hour until they get cut off; then Ann calls her back and they talk for another forty-five minutes and it's great, it's the best thing. In between times she lends Ron her phone so he can call his mom - she hears him tell her, "I am very happy my friend is not dead", and kind of wants to burst into tears herself - and Andy goes over to tell Donna and Tom what's going on and on the way back he calls his old drummer, the one who went to California, and it turns out that all the people they're calling are alive. It turns out that people are alive, and they might not be happy or particularly well-nourished or whatever, but they're alive and that, today, is more than enough. In the meantime April is trying to figure out if the internet is working and it looks like it is, but it's weird, looking at websites frozen in time, news tickers still talking about Mysterious Lights Seen Above Major Cities and winter weather forecasts for the wrong winter. April seems to think it's cool, but it gives Ann a weird, dislocated feeling, and she's sort of relieved when Ron taps her shoulder to return her phone and says, "You have a voicemail."
When she hears who the voicemail is from, she puts it on speaker instantly.
"Ann Perkins! Your voice is literally the best thing I have ever heard! Even on your voicemail! People have been saying that long-distance calls are possible again! The aliens - I'm sorry I can't pronounce their name, I think with more practice I will crack it - are in uproar! I'm at the statehouse and they're telling me that the walls the invaders built are coming down all over Indiana! Isn't that just the greatest? I will try to call you again soon!"
It's timestamped with today's date. "That is the second best thing I've ever heard," Ann says, and has to sit down.
"The statehouse," April says. "He means, in Indianapolis. How did he get there? Like, I thought he was abducted or whatever."
"I guess," Ron says, deadpan, "he had his running shoes" - and Ann laughs, delightedly, wants to hug Ron and kiss April and dance around the room with Andy. She doesn't do any of those things except the last, and April glares a little but her lips are twitching and her heart's clearly not in it.
"You should tell them," Ron says, and Ann never figured Ron for a coward but whatever, it's been a couple of hours, Ann Perkins is gonna step up. She knocks on the door of Ben's old room, and when there's no answer, takes a deep breath and goes inside.
Leslie and Ben are on the bed, fully dressed on top of the covers as though they fell asleep where they landed, and they're wrapped up in each other, Leslie's arms inside Ben's shirt and his left hand tangled in her hair. Ann tries saying their names a couple of times and Ben doesn't respond at all - that's the prescription-strength opiates, Ann thinks with relief - and Leslie barely twitches, mumbles something incomprehensible and sinks back into sleep.
"I'll come back later," Ann tells them both, hearing the affection in her own voice, vivid as a living thing. "Okay? Okay."
A little later she makes up a dose of Leslie's amoxycillin for Ben, puts it in a little dish and gets a glass of water and leaves them both beside the bed, and after that she and April go out into the yard and spread a blanket and have some sort of spring picnic of tinned beans and Pop Tarts. It's a beautiful day.
*
Chris calls back. He’s not surprised that they’re doing okay, and they’re managing; he’s not surprised Ben and April blew up a factory; he’s not surprised Leslie negotiated water, electricity and open space out of the invaders; he misses them all a lot. He’s seen the inside of one of the ships. “It’s not that great,” he says, and Ann almost wants to laugh.
“I probably won’t see you soon,” he goes on, “you know, the distance...”
“I know,” Ann says. “That’s also... not great.”
“No,” Chris says, “but maybe Ben and April can blow something else up.”
Ann nods, though he can’t see her. What the hell, she believes in them. Maybe they can.
*
Because, of course, it doesn’t last. A week later, after the entire town has finally stopped smelling of synthetic caramel, long-distance calls start dropping out again. The old council chamber was deserted for a while, but people going near it are reporting that they want to throw up again, and sometimes, early in the morning and late at night, April thinks she can see, out of the corner of her eye, the shadow of a ship hanging over the town. It sucks, but April didn't expect that it wouldn't happen; she guesses the invaders probably have electricians or mechanics or whatever, and in the meantime, Leslie is rallying people to get as much stuff as they can before the barrier closes them off again, so people are looting out-of-town gas stations and Ron's taking out hunting parties. But whatever happens, it was worth it, worth everything, almost. She tells Andy that in the quiet time after they've gone to bed, and he smiles and kisses her and then falls asleep mid-sentence, which is pretty cute; she snuggles down beside him feeling not awesome and ecstatic or whatever, but okay.
Early in the morning, she gets up for some water and finds that Leslie and Ben are already awake, or still awake, she's not sure; they're lying on the couch together and his head is on her shoulder and they look like they've been there a while. "Leslie," Ben's saying, tiredly, "you can't seriously be saying..."
"Why not?" Leslie snaps back. "Why not? I arranged a meeting with them and then I never had it. And now I've gotten these things I can negotiate with, it's important to move forward."
"You don't even know if they want..." - Ben glares across the room at the giant yellow boxes - "radioactive sources like those. Maybe they're digging up Siberia for a reason, maybe what they had in mind was full-blown plutonium reactors."
"Maybe not, and I have to try," Leslie tells him. "We can use it as a bargaining chip for something else. Maybe pushing the barrier further outwards? Maybe a later curfew? You don't know unless you try."
"What about helping organise resistance, rather than hoping the invaders honour their bargains?" Ben demands, and gets cut off by a bleeping sound. "Oh. Pills."
"I'll get them for you, it's okay," Leslie says. She kisses the top of his head and goes to the kitchen. "What are you hoping to achieve in the long run, other than draining people's resources?" she calls over her shoulder. "I mean, say you do successfully sabotage the invaders again..."
"They're not doing the thing again, are they?" Andy says, worriedly, from behind April. He's still in bed.
"They're not," April confirms, watching Ben watching Leslie as she comes back into the room. He takes the pills one-handed, shifts to let her sit, and they curl back up together comfortably.
"It's important on a social level," Ben's saying, "to know that collectively you still have agency."
"The people's collective agency elected me to be their city councilwoman," Leslie says, "and I mean to serve them as long as I can."
"I know," Ben says, softly, and kisses her.
"Eww," April says quietly to Andy, "they're the worst."
"I still think you're wrong, though," Ben goes on, and Andy gives April another worried look and Leslie starts waving her hands around.
"I'm not wrong," she says, punctuating each syllable with a gesture, "you're just a hopeless romantic who's read too much science fiction about rebel alliances and lost causes."
Ben glances at her. "I'm a hopeless romantic? This from a woman who believes in the power of a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens to change the world?"
"It's the only thing that ever has," they say together, in very different tones of voice, and Ben waves his uninjured hand and says, "No. Not this time. Not now."
Leslie glares at him. "You're a cynic."
"How can I be a cynic and a hopeless romantic?"
"Natural talent," Leslie says. "Also, you suck and I hate you."
"Fine," Ben says, "fine, I hate you too" - and April buries her head in her hands.
"The worst," she says, through her fingers. "Why don't you just have sex in public, God."
Leslie looks confused and Ben laughs, clear and bright. "I should head out in a while," he says to Leslie, a little regretfully, "I need to meet Ron, we were going to figure out our next steps now the barrier will be back soon.”
"I'll come with you," Leslie says, instantly.
"Are you sure?" Ben asks, but he doesn't sound unhappy about it. Leslie helps him up and April gets them a bottle of drinking water to take with them and doesn't even bother saying anything. "Aren't you just going to spend the whole time complaining about the illegitimacy of terrorist methods?"
“Yeah," Leslie says, laughing, the breeze from the open door stirring her hair. “Don’t you ever give up?”
"No.” Ben sounds surprised. "Never give up," he says, taking her arm, "never surrender" - and they go out into the morning light, holding hands. April shuts the door behind them, smiles for a moment, then goes back to bed to make out with Andy.
end.
notes:
-I am incredibly grateful for a lot of people and their help with this story. tau_sigma provided many tips on what, exactly, one might steal from a hospital;
forthwritten provided all manner of information about broken bones, the resetting thereof, the inadvisability of open fractures, the world without antibiotics, and how to build a bomb. (And also said to the bartender, while I was cheerfully explaining this last, "She's a writer, not a terrorist.") They also had all manner of morbid and creepifying suggestions for what the aliens wanted. The aliens didn't want any of those things. ("How about harvesting human bodies for CARBON?" / "How about no.") Sorry, honey. <3
-Shim wanted to know how I could have gone 17,000 words without a Princess Leia gold bikini joke. I put one in.
-And, finally, "Both Hands" is my favourite break-up-make-up song: I don't know who it was who introduced me to this lovely cover, but way to make me fall for it all over again. I am writing graffitti on your body / I am drawing the story of how hard we tried. Yes. Thank you too, whoever you are.
raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are
comment(s). Comment there or here.
by Raven
17,000w, Parks and Recreation, Leslie/Ben, April/Andy.
[Please see part one for content notes and summary]
After the dust had settled from the initial invasion, Leslie called Ben a jerk and a cynic and he called her a daydreamer and a credulous innocent - April secretly quite enjoyed it - and at the time, Ann put it all down to cabin fever. Since the barrier went up, they’ve heard of a few successful long-distance calls - Ben once spoke to his sister in Minnesota, Ron once spoke to his mother, a hundred miles across Indiana, and some guy at City Hall claims he got a call from the Indiana statehouse a week after the barrier went up - and not on the same day, so people keep trying, but for all meaningful purposes, the world has shrunk to the ten square miles within the circle of the barrier, underneath the hanging ship.
Because they do pick stuff up with Ron's ham radio - broadcasts from west of the Mississippi, sometimes, and once, weirdly, the BBC World Service - they know they're not alone on the surface of the earth, but sometimes April thinks that makes it worse. Better to be all that's left than just sitting here like idiots, like the front page of a textbook on Divide and Conquer 101.
*
"So, Pawnee is special," Ben's saying, unrolling a large paper plan onto Ron's beautiful wooden table. He spreads it out with his right hand, holding it in place with his hip rather than with his other hand, and Ann loses her patience.
"Ben, you need to let me look at that arm right now," she orders, and he looks up at her, startled, and waves her away with his uninjured hand. "I know it's gonna hurt. I’ll be careful, okay? You giant baby," she adds, and he smiles a little, sighs and nods.
Ann clucks as she loosens the sling around his neck, and that starts out as something she's doing for dramatic effect, but his skin is feverishly warm under her hands and she's kind of always aware, now, of how little is left in those boxes she brings up here. "Tell me something," she says, speaking quickly so he's paying attention to her voice rather than flinching away from her hands. "In all the work you've done on them, have you ever come across something that the invaders want? That we could... trade for?"
He's about to say, Leslie - she can see his mouth make the shape of the word - but all she hears is, "No. I never have."
"Okay," Ann says. "Okay, now tell me why Pawnee is special."
His answering glance tells her he knows he’s being distracted, but he gestures with his right hand again and goes on. "Not Pawnee, I guess. Sweetums. The invaders' base on Earth - possibly their only one, or their only local one, I don't know - is in the old Sweetums factory. I can understand why - it's build to withstand explosions of boiling molasses, it's all breeze blocks and six-feet-thick concrete walls." He stops, hissing with pain. "When I say base, I actually mean a real facility for, I don't know what you would call them, shuttlecraft? Small ships that go up into the big one and dock. They're using all the water as a power source."
"Like, hydroelectric?" Ann asks, not looking up.
"Freakier than that," April says from behind Ann, surprising her. "Like, I saw it all light up, it looked... nuclear."
"Possibly literally," Ben says, and hisses again; Ann's working her way across the part of his arm where the bullet passed through the flesh.
"So what does this mean?" she asks.
"I think," Ben says seriously, "that the power for everything the invaders do - the barrier, whatever it is they're doing in the city council chamber, the ships, everything - comes from the factory. So if Ron, April and I go down there with some of the things Ron is building, then we can... cry havoc."
"And let loose the dogs of war," April says, with satisfaction, and then glares at them when they turn to look at her. "What, I'm not allowed to know stuff?"
"And the best thing is, they underestimate us. They're not... logical?" Ben inclines his head. "At least, I don’t think they can really conceive of our internal lives. They're logical, but I think they believe our behaviour is pattern-emergent. Like we're ants, or termites."
There's a pause, then, while they all look nervously around them, the regular chittering of the woods sounding unnaturally loud.
"Anyway," Ben says, pointedly, "I genuinely believe we've got a chance. We get in there, blow out their circuits, somehow. Ron's working on it."
"How does it help us?" Ann asks.
"At the very least - fuck, Ann!"
"Sorry," Ann says, her thumb now pressing into Ben's wrist.
"At the very least," Ben says again, "there probably won't be an alien presence down here for a few days. No droids, they need power. If you want to try calling people outside of town, that'll be the time, the barrier should come down for a while. We can take a trip into the outside world. And apart from all those things" - he gestures with his right hand again - "there's the morale aspect." He grins. "Suddenly, we've punched up, you know?"
"Yes, your highness," April says, holding her hands to her ears like two cinnamon danishes, and Ben's making a face at her when Ann makes a noise that's halfway to a sigh, and they all go quiet.
"Ben," she says, after a minute, "you know your arm was broken, right? I can't even begin to understand how those things transmit force, but as well the entrance and exit wounds, the bone was broken.”
"Okay." Ben sounds uncertain. "I figured maybe, right after it happened... so, what?"
"Well," Ann says, "it didn't heal right."
"Oh, great," Ben says, and then: "Why are you looking at me like that?"
*
After Ann had stopped worrying about people getting influenza from close proximity, she started worrying about them getting cholera from river water. Leslie's project to clean up the Pawnee river had been progressing, but it was nowhere near finished; the water from the faucets had been through the sanitation system but it took all day to fill a bucket. Leslie held Ann’s hand and said she would do something about it; she had a plan.
In retrospect, the worst part about the whole thing was that they weren’t actually shouting, so Ann walked blithely into the room in time to hear Ben finish a sentence with: “Collaborator.”
Leslie said, “Get out.”
A couple of days after that, Ann was able to wash her hair and her clothes in clean, if not quite potable, water. Ben didn’t come back.
*
"I haven't got anything to give you," Ann says, apparently to herself, and April figures it out, a second before Ann lets go of Ben's hand and says: "We're going to have to" - and makes a really precise, totally gross gesture.
"Ewww," April says, "Ann, that's disgusting" - and Ben's eyes widen and he takes a half-step backwards.
"Urgh," he's saying, "no, no, I'm fine, I'm right-handed, I'll just deal."
"Sure," Ann says, and when April and Ron look at her with surprise she looks pissed, which April thinks is a good look on her. "So I'm not following the rules to the letter any more! I'm still not doing anything to him that he doesn't want me to do."
"That's what she-"
"April, shut up," Ben says, clipped, and April realises, suddenly, that he's in pain.
"Ben," Ann says, quickly, "it's up to you, but..." She pauses. “It’s been a while already. If you want the full use of your arm in the future, you know what I think you should do. I mean, there are risks, but...”
"Urgh," Ben says again, but he's got that determined look that he usually only gets around Leslie, and for a moment April really hates him for making this a thing that's going to happen. Then she gets over herself and goes inside to make sure they've still got a pot of water, and a fire burning.
"Now," Ben is telling Ann, "now, or probably never."
After a little while Ron comes out with two bottles from that box no one is supposed to know about, holds them out to Ben and says, "Son, you choose which one you want" - and he doesn’t even complain when Ben picks the clear grain alcohol over the fifteen-year-old single malt. Ben drinks a couple of shots of it, they wait a minute for it to go to his head, and then April gets the hot water and Ann makes Ron wash his hands and between them they break the bone and reset it. April used to love Ann's stories from the hospital but this isn't gross in the cool way, it's just gross and awful, gross like the destruction of things. April sits with Ben for a while afterwards, listening as his breathing slows, and then she gets up and calls Leslie, because seriously, fuck this.
*
"April!" Andy clambers up the ridge as fast as he can, grabs her around the waist and awkwardly twirls her, and it is so great to see him that she doesn't, straight away, start asking questions like what the hell and what are you doing here? And then Leslie comes over the hill and that makes sense of that.
"Beautiful April," she says, and Andy leaves off hugging April for a moment so Leslie can hug her instead, and it's only been, like, a few days, but it's genuinely so great to see Leslie, standing out here like she belongs, like April doesn’t have a life that’s falling into separate pieces.
"Leslie was awesome," Andy's saying, "they were all like, it's nearly past curfew, and she was like, I'm Councilwoman Leslie Fucking Knope, and we still had to dodge, you know, death rays but seriously it was so awesome."
"That's totally how it happened," Leslie tells April, who laughs. They walk up to the cabin arm-in-arm, talking and laughing, and then there's a movement from above them, Ben's voice says, "Leslie?" - and Leslie tenses so quickly April can feel it, Leslie's fingers digging into her arm.
Leslie says, uncertainly, "Ben... April said you wanted to see me."
"April?" Ben says, confusedly, "she said that you wanted..."
That's April's cue. She takes Andy by the shoulders and they walk around the back of the cabin to where Ron and Ann are roasting something that smells deliciously like dead animal. Behind her, she hears Leslie ask, "What happened to your arm?" and April turns firmly away, sits down by the crackling flames and holds out her hands to the warmth.
"Seriously, babe, Leslie was awesome," Andy is saying, "she just... you know."
"I know," April says. "Ron, is that..."
Ron nods, stoic, and hands her what's basically a plate of meat. "Went hunting this afternoon."
"Animals can't cross the barrier, can they? Game stocks will need replenishing soon," Ann says, and off Ron's look, adds: "What? My dad hunted. I guess we should probably eat what we can and hope the animals keep on... doing it."
"Deer-meat," Andy begins, "and..."
"Venison," Ron corrects, his face absolutely serious as though it's the most important thing in the world. April sticks her tongue out at him a little.
"Venison," Andy says, "and Twinkies. It's, like, the best meal ever."
April's had better. But she's got to admit it's not bad. The fire is warm and smells good, and Ann's not being that annoying, and Ron has actually not been annoying at all since this whole thing started - it's like he's been trying to tell them all this survivalist crap as long as he's known them and now everyone knows he's right he's not gonna be a jerk about it - and Andy's here, sweet, wonderful Andy, who genuinely does think venison and Twinkies is the best meal ever. April snuggles into his shoulder and feels, if not exactly happy, at least content.
At least, until there's the sound of raised voices inside the cabin, and then something crashing - "I hope that's not his other arm," Ann says, and it's what April was thinking so she can't even glare - and then the door opens and they hear Leslie shouting, "Fuck the symbolic import, how about helping people?" and they all wince.
"Urgh," Andy says, "I guess they’re doing it again."
April grimaces. And then Leslie comes out, walking slowly, and says, abrupt: "I'm going back into town. Andy" - her expression softens - "you stay if you want, I'll get someone to come get you in the morning."
"He can come with me," Ann says, quickly, and Leslie nods.
"Thanks," she says, and gives Ann a hug, then Ron, then April. April doesn't pull away. And then Leslie walks off down the ridge, so after a minute they see her car lights rise then dip, the low sound of the engine disappearing slowly into the distance. Nobody says, nice job, April, but April hates them all anyway.
Later, when Ron has gone inside to take inventory and Ann has gone somewhere to do whatever it is Ann does, and it's just April and Andy by the dying embers of the fire, he turns to her and says, a little querulously, "I don't get it."
"Me neither," April says, lazily. She loves Andy, and he loves her, and she sometimes thinks it really ought to be that simple, for everyone. But then, Leslie ran for city council; Ben went to Washington; and so did April. Maybe it can't be.
“But they're on the same side," Andy says, and April considers.
"I guess," she says after a minute, "that Leslie thinks we should do things how we used to do them, if we can, and Ben thinks we should do things like blow shit up."
"You're helping him do that," Andy points out, "but we still, eat Twinkies and hang out and do stuff we used to. Like, as well."
"I told you I didn't get it either," April tells him, and realises all at once how cold it is; Andy’s shivering and her fingers are numb. "Come on. Let's go inside."
They damp down the last of the flames, April doing most of the work while Andy unearths his cane from under a pile of fallen leaves, and inside the cabin Ron is yawning, holding a Zane Grey novel with one hand while whittling a small flute with the other. It's later than April thought.
"You should get some sleep," Ron tells her, before he goes into the other room to claim his plank of wood, "big day tomorrow."
April nods. She lies down and flips through Ron's book, trying to calm her mind. Ben's still awake, too, and he won't be quiet, wide-eyed on some potent cocktail of grain alcohol and pain and the absence of Leslie, but Andy is surprisingly good at this - April can hear him in the bunk below, saying soft little things like, "It's okay, dude, you're okay, shhh, shhh", meaningless and soothing - and the regular creaking, the sound of them rocking back and forth, becomes part of the small sounds of the woods and the night, and April sleeps.
*
A ton of people died on one day, and you couldn’t deal with all that at once; then a ton of people died over a few days, and you could sort of figure that out, but it became a real thing, the place they lived now, one quiet night when the power went out. From Ron’s cabin, slightly elevated over Pawnee, you could see it - it didn’t go all at once but gradually, so a wave of darkness spread slowly across the town, building by building and block by block, grids and constellations of streetlights fading into nothingness. April was shivering as she watched, and she jumped, startled at the sound even though Ben’s voice was quiet; she’d started to think for a minute it was just her, all by herself, left alone on this hillside watching the lights go out.
“April,” Ben was saying, low and determined, “we’ve had the world ending in fire. Let’s not wait for the ice.”
That was the night Ron started making a detailed inventory by gaslight of everything he’d cached away over the years, alcohol and water purification tablets and guns and ammunition, and Ben wrote the couple of lists, what we know and what we can do, that eventually became the first few pages of Quiescence and Self-Refrigeration, and April just sat there, and breathed, and thought, over and over, we will end you, motherfuckers.
*
Ann is beginning to wonder if she's the only person in Pawnee who isn't running some kind of demented secret scheme.
Firstly, there's Leslie. Leslie, who thinks it's perfectly reasonable to wake her up in the morning with, "Ann. Ann, wake up. I have an idea! It's an awesome idea and it's so awesome I can't tell you about it! Also, we have eggs! Do you want eggs?"
They do have eggs - Millicent has been turning Ann's once-unremarkable lawn into a kind of fenced-off smallholding, planted with potatoes and radishes and playing host to a couple of chickens and a small unhappy pig who used to belong to the Pawnee Historical Society and who, Ann suspects, will probably live to a ripe old age as long as Leslie's around - and that's probably why Ann's forgiving, if confused. "Leslie," she mutters, "that doesn't even make sense."
"It does," Leslie says, cheerfully. "It's an awesome halfway idea. When it's an awesome all-the-way-there idea I'll tell you all about it."
"I can't wait," Ann says, and that's halfway, if not all the way, to sincere.
"And hey, seeing as how you're awake, you can come with me" - and Ann might have chosen to say something at that point about Leslie Knope the human steamroller, but it's a clear, sunlit day, another in a string of them as winter seems to be thinking better of itself, and she's probably not getting any more sleep today anyway. Leslie wants to go to Ramsett Park, so after breakfast they walk down and Leslie says hi to nearly everyone they meet, and she's so bright, this morning, so radiant with inner light, that Ann just smiles and goes along with it. In the park, everything looks decrepit, somehow all the worse for the sunshine - the cold weather has not been good to the rows of makeshift huts and tents - and Leslie's looking it over with a critical eye, making a list while she walks. "Corrugated iron," she says, apparently to herself, and sets out along one of the long rows.
"Hey," says a small voice, and Ann looks down to meet the eyes of the little girl they met the other day. "Are you the lady who brings the medicine and the candy?"
"Yeah," Ann says, "but not today, honey."
From Leslie's expression, she's getting the same question; after a minute, she comes back to Ann and says, "I wish we could do more. I thought we could at least get some sheet metal, that will keep the rain out better than canvas. But some guy over there told me he went to Home Depot and they were all out."
'I guess other looters got there first," Ann says, and wonders for the thousandth time how that turned into a normal thing to say.
They're heading back, Leslie still thinking out loud about potential roofing solutions ("We could cut up old Sweetums plastic crates? No, people would dream of being chased by giant candy canes") when a familiar voice yells, "Who goes there? Advance and be... something!"
"Andy?" Leslie says, and they both take a tentative step forwards. "Are you... breaking into a hair salon?"
"I understand why you might think that," Andy concedes, using his cane to gesture at the sign above his head, which reads "Salon At No. 5" in pink loopy calligraphy, and then at the giant hole in the plate glass window. "I'm not, though!"
Leslie opens her mouth, presumably to dispute this, and then April bounces through the hole in the window. "I am!" she declaims, gives them all a suspicious look and grips a black cloth bag to her, protectively. Something clanks inside. "We were never here! The rebel alliance needs us!"
Ann bursts into laughter. "Tell Princess Leia I'm coming to check on her later today, okay?"
"Yes, boss!" Andy salutes, and the two of them bound off down the sidewalk, April saying something to Andy that makes him laugh delightedly as they round a corner.
"I'm glad they still have fun together," Leslie says, a little wistful, and Ann squeezes her hand.
That ought to be enough mysteries for one day, but then that afternoon Ann is hunting around the kitchen for something for lunch for her and Leslie, when the doorbell rings and it's Stuart, that guy from City Hall she used to share an office with forever and a day ago, and he's holding two large unmarked earthenware bottles. "Hey, Ann," he says, awkwardly. "Can I... um, can I store these here today? Just for a couple of hours."
"I guess," Ann says, a little uncertain. "Uh, okay. Um, what are they?"
"I got them from the high school science lab," he says, "I used to teach chemistry, you know, before I ended up at the department of health" - which, as responses go, Ann thinks, certainly spawns more questions than it answers - "and uh, you know, don't open them. Or, spill them, or anything."
"Okay," she says, a little doubtful, "you can put them here, next to this can of... weedkiller."
"Oh, that's Millicent's donation," says Stuart, mystifyingly, and disappears, leaving his mysterious bottles behind him. Ann shakes her head.
It's kind of a relief, therefore, to be crossing the checkpoints before dark, which are still quite terrifying but least make sense, and leaving her car in the little clearing in the woods and clambering up the ridge to Ron's cabin. She has an impression of noise and activity, which is weird - even now, Ann associates this place with solitude and calm - and then she gets up there and there are people consulting books and hammering things and Ron and April are sitting in a circle of lengths of lead piping and ordering yet more people around. "Wow," Ann says, to no one in particular, and picks her way through all the controlled chaos to the little bench at the side of the cabin and sits down next to Ben, who has a book closed on his index finger and an expression of relative calm.
"Hey, Ann," he says, eyes glittering. "What can I do for you?"
"Oh, don't let me distract you from..." Ann waves a hand. "Committing a felony."
"Yeah," Ben says, "so it turns out the list of things you need to build a bomb is shorter than you might think."
"Not a bomb," Ron puts in, over the sound of hammering, "a small incendiary device."
"Right," Ann says. "Of course. Does the list include - picking items quite at random here - acid? Maybe peroxide? Weedkiller?"
Ben nods. "Hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide - I had no idea people put that stuff on their hair, it smells like a cluster headache - sugar, water, weedkiller, some other things. Ron made the list and I arranged to get everything on it. It didn't take long."
"You're pretty scary, sometimes," Ann tells him. "You remind me of someone else I know. Listen, I came up here to check on you."
“Ann, it’s really not necessary...”
“And in case you were wondering, the password is now Fleetwood Mac sex pants,” Ann says, and steamrollers on. It's struck her that part of the brightness in his eyes is amusement, and part of it isn't. She undoes the sling from around his neck and checks the dressing and puts her hand on his forehead like he's six, and he submits to it quietly so when she's done she finds it kind of awkward to break the silence. "Yeah, the wound is infected," she says after a second, "but I don't." She pauses. "I don't have anything else to give you. I guess I thought by now I'd have something to give you."
"I know," Ben says, sighing. "It's okay, really."
"It's not," Ann says, and it's weird, because she's been a nurse all her working life and she understands how often, in times of deep, searing personal crisis, people just go on - just get to their feet and figure out what needs to be done and go on - and she's always figured that the invasion is like that, just the same thing made bigger. People build huts in the public parks and they keep on living. It's weird how the enormity of the thing hits you in quiet moments, and not even the worst ones, just passing moments: like out here on a hillside under a dimming sky, watching Ron and April hammer nails into pipes. "It's really kind of not."
"Yeah," Ben says, still quietly. After a moment, he adds, "How's Leslie?"
Ann frowns; it's the first time he's asked her that. "Actually, I should head back into town, she'll be missing me."
"Ann, please," Ben says, and Ann gets up and gathers her things together.
"Leslie's dedicated," she says, as she starts off down the hill, “compassionate” - and, over her shoulder - "and stubborn as all hell."
*
A couple of nights before they're due to go down to the factory, April hitches a ride with Ann back into town, and Ben comes too. Andy didn't know they were coming, so the look on his face when he opens the door is awesome in itself, but he grins and he swings April around as best as he can, awkward and loving, and they end up making out on the couch, which is more awesome, and then April remembers all at once that here they have a bed, an actual bed with an actual mattress and two pillows, so she takes Andy's hand and pulls him into the bedroom and that's even more awesome.
They don't talk about why tonight, of all nights. It's easier that way. They doze off wrapped up together, contented, and it’s funny but April genuinely thinks it's possible to be happy, in passing moments, even now, and that’s a warming thought on the way to sleep.
She wakes up suddenly in the middle of the night, maybe two or three in the morning, and her first instinct is that the aliens have done something, like, phase two or something - but Andy's still sleeping, and everything seems quiet. April gets up to check it out anyway. Looking blearily out into the apartment, she can see Ben, standing by the open front door and, in the dim light from the porch, the flash of blonde hair. April goes back to bed.
*
“Ready?” Ron asks, and April nods. They’ve worked on this for days, they’ve got everything they’re going to need and they’ve been through the plan, like, a dozen times, which is eleven times more than April needed. They’re ready.
They set off into the woods, and probably Ben shouldn't be coming along - he's always shivering, now, and off-balance as he stumbles around one-handed - but April doesn't have the energy to argue him into staying behind, or the will. This is just how it's going to be, so she helps him along with a hand under his elbow on occasion, and doesn't swear at him too much when he falls behind. "Good girl," Ron tells her, in a quiet moment, and she snarls and asks what he's talking about, but he just gives her a look.
They make it down to the gap in the fence, moving slowly, and it still looks like it's going to plan when April looks up and says, "Shit."
"What?" Ben asks, coming up behind her, and then, "Shit."
On the other side of the fence, it's a mass of silver. The little droid things are trundling back and forth, the faceless spheres they have instead of heads turning towards the sound of voices. "How many were here when you came wire-cutting?" April whispers, urgent.
"A couple," Ben whispers back. "Maybe three. There must be... twenty of them. I guess they're getting wise. Shit."
"Okay," April says, suddenly making a decision. "Ben, we're leaving you behind. Deal with it. Ron..."
"Not to worry," Ron says, calm and smiling, and sets down his pack. From inside, he pulls out a couple of square feet of aluminium sheeting, one of the large malleable pieces they looted from Home Depot. "We're covered."
Ignoring both of their protests, he curves the metal around himself like he's some kind of Roman centurion, and before anyone can stop him, he steps up close to the fence and says, at normal volume, "Gentlemen."
There's a noise like machine-gun fire; April and Ben both jerk backwards. After a second, Ron peels the metal sheeting away from himself; it's charred and blackened in places but otherwise quite intact. "Reflective," he says, as though it should have been obvious from the start.
"That's crazy," Ben says, breathing audibly, "that should never have - that's crazy."
"We're about to break into an alien base to blow up their fusebox," April reminds him. Working quickly, she pulls out the sheeting and starts tessellating it into layers.
"Uh," Ben is saying, "I'll stay behind, you were right" - but April shoves the metal at him impatiently, doing it one-handed on purpose, and in a minute they're standing by the gap, and maybe Ben's right and this is crazy but April's pissed now, she wants this done. She takes Ben's arm, steadying him, and Ron holds up three fingers, then two, then one.
Later, she'll only remember heat and fear, as though they were re-entering the atmosphere from space. Her feet carry her across the twenty feet of open ground like they're not under her conscious control, everything in her mind a blur of run run run. She finds the inner factory wall by hurtling straight into it, and then she edges along with the metal behind her and gets behind the big doors and only then looks out to see Ben and Ron, a few paces behind her but alive and moving and then they crash into the factory entrance with a noise like - well, sheet metal falling off a roof. They all lie still for a second, and April gets a glimpse of one of the old Sweetums campaign posters peeling off the wall, and it must be truly ancient because it's something about elections for city council with a picture of Bobby Newport against a picture of Leslie aged ten - and then she's on her feet again, and they're moving, leaving the metal set out ready behind them.
The open space at the end of the hallway is just as she remembers it, enormous and deserted and haunted by water, dripping and sloshing and echoing through the damp air. "They really do underestimate us," Ben says, low and thoughtful, and then Ron and April start emptying their packs and Ben gets down on the ground, spreading out the big plan.
"No time," Ron tries telling him, but Ben holds firm, grabbing the lengths of piping and handing them to April and pointing out exactly where they go. April isn't sure how he knows what the explosion pattern ought to look like, or if he knows at all or if this all just educated guessing, but they've risked their lives to get here and what the hell, it's got to be something to do with the lines of lights on the walls. They put the pipes in a radial pattern, and Ben adjusts a couple with the help of the plan, and Ron flips a few of them up for some reason he thinks is important, and then there's a lot of fussing with wires and antennas and radio equipment that only Ron can do. April and Ben are both just crouched down and waiting, and April's nerves are jangling and she can see Ben looking anxiously at his watch.
"Come on," April whispers, "come on, come on" - and then in not-very-far distance, they hear a sound. It's indistinct; it could be little robot wheels trundling through water.
"That will do," Ron says, somehow in a ponderous tone even now, and they're up and moving. As they crash through the doorway into the hall, the sound is getting louder and louder behind them, less just generic splashing and more ominous whispers of metal.
"Fuck!" April yells, as the first bullets pass over their heads and they all somehow duck instinctively but keep on running, crouched and awkward. Halfway down the hallway Ben stumbles and can't stop himself from falling with his immobilised arm; April grabs him before he quite goes over, but she has to stand up for a second and a bullet passes within an inch of her left ear.
"Fuck," Ben mutters, pulling her back down, "fuck..." - and April remembers inconsequentially that this is how he got shot the first time, and concentrates hard on her feet moving as another bullet passes overhead.
And then they’re in the entrance hall, Bobby Newport's face looking out over the sheets of aluminium, and Ron stands his ground, putting himself between them and the droid as April grabs her shield and grabs another one for Ben. "Go!" Ron shouts, and they're moving again, through that purgatory of yelling and fire and heat and metal wanting to twist and warp in April's hands, and the hole in the fence is probably getting bigger like a hole in someone's pants because they all throw themselves at it so much, and she's through and Ben's through and then after a long, awful moment, Ron emerges from the building and he's not exactly strolling, but he's not running as he comes through the fence.
"How did you," Ben says, out of breath, "that thing was so close, how did you..."
"There was one lead pipe left," Ron tells him, "and sometimes they explode on impact."
April giggles, a little hysterically, and holds out her hand to help Ron up, and also to help Ben get over the next few feet of uneven ground, and they start along the path into the woods. They come to a halt about a quarter-mile away, all looking down the incline towards the factory, and then they turn and stare at each other. Finally, Ron seems to make a decision. "Son," he says, looking at Ben, "I think you should do this."
He pulls out the detonator - it used to be Ron's cell phone; when Ann asked if he might need it, Ron smiled serenely, shook his head, and said, "Never again" - and hands it over to Ben, who handles it like a holy object.
"I think April should do it," he says, very seriously. "She did... more than anyone could have asked."
April takes Ben's hand, rests it on the button and glares at him. He looks surprised for a second, then smiles. They press the button together, Ron looking on like some sort of benevolent god, and for a minute they just stand there, April still holding Ben's hand, while nothing seems to happen. It's another bright day, winter edging in so it’s cold like ice but still with that intense sunshine filtering through the branches. Ron looks at home out here, as he always does; Ben is very pale in the whitewashed light.
Then they hear it. It's not even a sound, April thinks confusedly, or if it is, it's a sound she can only hear with her bones, a sound like some great quantity of water is hitting an unyielding surface far below her feet, the vibration passing subsonic and unsettling through her body.
Above them, the ship disappears, fizzles from presence to absence like someone pulled the aerial out of the TV.
"Suck it, fuckers!" April yells, punching the sky, possessed suddenly by memory: of Andy, standing in Ramsett Park when the lights came down; of Leslie, never not moving so she never has to be still and think; of stupid Ann, missing stupid Chris; of holding Ben down so they could break his arm, jesus; of late nights and cold mornings and how no one ever seems to sleep any more and how much she misses hot baths and every other thing, every big and every stupid annoying awful little thing.
Ben smiles, Ron favours her with a look of deep satisfaction, they all breathe in the new and pervasive smell of burnt sugar, and they trudge on home.
*
The door to the cabin usually isn't locked. Ann knocks once for the sake of it, gives Donna a look and they both barge inside. Ron's sitting at his desk in one corner, April's stretched out on the top bunk. "We did it," she's telling Ron, holding up her phone on speaker: there's nothing to be heard but static.
"Where's Ben?" Ann half-yells. "Where's Leslie?"
"Calm yourself, woman," Ron says, and Ann actually might punch him right now. "Leslie's not here. Ben is in the other room, sleeping. What do you want?"
"Did you take him with you?" Ann demands, and when Ron nods, she turns to Donna and puts a hand on her heart. It's over.
"Yeah, actually, Ann," April says, sitting up, her eyes narrowed. "Ron and Ben and I went down to the Sweetums factory and we, you know, kinda blew the hell out of their circuits, so you might have noticed the ship's disappeared, Ron says that the barrier is coming down."
"It is," Ron says. "This" - he gestures at April's phone, still wailing static - "is proof positive. When the barrier is fully discharged we should have contact with the outside world."
"Yeah, so," April goes on, sickly-sweet, "I don't know what you did with your morning, but I'm sure it was just as awesome."
"Leslie," Ann says. "She left a note. She said..."
"Gone bargaining," Donna says, waving a scrap of paper. "We haven't seen her. No one has seen her."
"We thought she might have come to see Ben, but okay, no, and we can't call her because of the static, and she was going to..." Ann pauses. "She was going to meet with the invaders."
"She had seven days," April says, urgently. "That's tomorrow."
"Or sooner," Ann says, "or sooner. She was going to go meet them. She was going to go meet them, on their ship."
April looks like she's going to vomit. Ron says, "Are you saying that Leslie was - when we..."
"Leslie?" says another voice. Ann turns to see Ben standing there, framed by the doorway and dishevelled by sleep.
Donna takes a step forwards, and it's crazy but right at this moment all Ann can think about is how brave Donna is, moving towards him with her arms out and saying, "Ben, honey, we don't know, we don't know, maybe she wasn't..."
But Ben just says, "Leslie?" again, as though she might be in the other room, as though he's calling her name. As though, Ann realises with something approaching religious certainty, that's all, now, he's ever going to do.
*
They keep the fire burning.
Donna takes April home to Andy; Ron says he's going to try to catch some sleep. The power is out and all cell phones are broadcasting static. Ann paces up and down; Ben lies flat on his back, looking up at the stars; then they switch places; then they switch back. They don't sleep, and they don't talk, and in wordless rhythm between themselves, they keep the fire burning.
Around two o'clock in the morning Ann thinks she hears Ben say something into the sky that she can't quite make out; she wants to ask him, not what he said, but how they'll do it, when they have to do things like eat and sleep and talk again, and after that maybe she does sleep a little, because there's a gap in her consciousness for a while, but it's not quite a forgetting, just a small space between the solid black of night and a faint dawn. The light is rising dim and bleak in the east. She lies quite still, looking at the patterns in the bare branches above her head, and then just before sunrise Ben makes a strange, inhuman noise and hands her his phone.
Ann notes, as though from a great distance, that she and Ben both use the same picture as a lock screen - a shot of the three of them hugging on election night - before she focuses on the message overlay: coming home - L.
*
"Andy, get up!" April jumps out of bed, jumps through the bedroom door, then has to jump on short notice over a giant yellow plastic box that wasn't there the night before. She stubs her toe on the edge of it, says, "Fuck, fuck it, fuck!" and then falls into Leslie's arms.
"April!" Leslie says, hugging her tight and then holding her at arm's length. "April, what is it?"
April calls her a bunch of things, basically the rudest things she's ever called anyone, and then bursts into tears. By the time Andy's gotten up and come out into the living room - why is their living room full of giant yellow plastic boxes? - April's sort of able to talk again, and she's stumbling through some kind of explanation, but Andy just grabs Leslie while shouting, "You're not dead!" and Leslie steps back.
"What?"
"Your note," April says, and hiccups. "We thought you might be on the ship. The ship Ben and I" - another hiccup - "exploded."
"Oh, April," Leslie says, and she's sounding a little choked up. "I'm sorry. When the barrier came down, I had to go, you know? I had to go - after what Donna said, I looked some stuff up in the library" - a pause, like she's deciding whether or not to spit - "and you know what they have in hospitals? Radioactive stuff! Like, for when people have cancer. And while I was there I got a ton of other stuff. Oh, April, I'm so sorry."
"We couldn't call you," April says, still sniffling, "we tried and tried. And then you texted..."
"Well, yeah," Leslie says. "I wanted to see if you could text from the other side, I texted you and Ben and Ann." She pauses, as though she’s just realised what she’s saying. ”Oh. Ben... and Ann.”
"You can text people now," Andy says, after a second, and his voice is strange. He holds up his phone, which is lighting up every few seconds. He flicks it off vibrate and it starts making a message tone, only continuously, message after message after message.
"All the messages," April says, in wonderment, "from outside Pawnee."
Leslie gives her another hug, careful and deliberate. "You did that, April," she says, very serious.
"Shut up," April says. "Shut up, shut up" - and she's kind of crying again, but it's okay.
*
April and Andy's living room floor is covered in yellow boxes, all marked with a very interesting variety of Hazchem symbols. Ann looks down at them for a second and then in wonderment at Leslie, and then there's nothing but Leslie, alive and bright and real. "Beautiful Ann," Leslie is saying into her shoulder, "I should have told you about my plan."
"Yeah, you should, oh my God, Leslie," Ann says, and then she pulls back from the hug for a second, just taking in the sight of her, and Leslie holds still under that scrutiny. And then they both have these huge jaw-cracking smiles and they're kind of just dancing around the room, avoiding the boxes, giggling, drunk on joy.
"Stop it," April says, but she's maybe kind of smiling too, and then Andy grabs April's waist and they're slow-dancing and Ann laughs out of nothing but pure delight. Everything is perfect and wonderful.
And then there's another voice. "Leslie?"
It's Ben. He's standing in the doorway, not coming any further, but everyone else in the room seems to freeze at once. April and Andy abruptly stop dancing; Ann lets go of Leslie's hands. Leslie takes a couple of determined steps forward, then no more.
"Where..." Ben pauses for a second, then tries again. "Where have you been?"
"Eagleton," Leslie says, and Ann can't read her expression. Her hands are raised in front of her, held still in some inconclusive gesture. "Eagleton hospital, actually. To get radioactive sources to trade. And also fresh supplies of antibiotics. And painkillers."
"Antibiotics and painkillers," Ben repeats, as if he doesn't know what the words mean. "I thought that's what you were trading for."
"Not quick enough." Leslie sounds defiant, angry.
"You didn't know the barrier was down for sure until you crossed it," Ben says, after a moment, and that's anger in his voice, too, thick and poisonous. "Leslie, it could have killed you. Why the hell did you-"
"Because!" Leslie yells back, and then all the fight seems to go out of her at once, her shoulders slumping. "Because," she says, quiet and exhausted, "you were in so much pain. And if your arm gets infected..."
"Fuck, Leslie," Ben says, his voice cracking, "fuck" - and he comes properly into the room, Leslie takes another step forwards, and Ann suddenly can't bear to look at them crossing that distance between them and watch whatever it is that's going to happen so shatteringly intense and private all over April and Andy's living room. She takes them both by the arm, ignores them when they try to complain, steers them into Ben's room or Ben's old room or whatever they call it now, pushes them both inside and shuts the door. After a pause, she opens one of Leslie's boxes, picks out a pill bottle, opens the door a crack to throw it in, and shuts it firmly a second time.
"Urgh," April says, giving Ann possibly the first look of gratitude she's ever given her. This is turning out to be a hell of a day.
*
So, after that, Ann calls her mom. They talk for a half-hour until they get cut off; then Ann calls her back and they talk for another forty-five minutes and it's great, it's the best thing. In between times she lends Ron her phone so he can call his mom - she hears him tell her, "I am very happy my friend is not dead", and kind of wants to burst into tears herself - and Andy goes over to tell Donna and Tom what's going on and on the way back he calls his old drummer, the one who went to California, and it turns out that all the people they're calling are alive. It turns out that people are alive, and they might not be happy or particularly well-nourished or whatever, but they're alive and that, today, is more than enough. In the meantime April is trying to figure out if the internet is working and it looks like it is, but it's weird, looking at websites frozen in time, news tickers still talking about Mysterious Lights Seen Above Major Cities and winter weather forecasts for the wrong winter. April seems to think it's cool, but it gives Ann a weird, dislocated feeling, and she's sort of relieved when Ron taps her shoulder to return her phone and says, "You have a voicemail."
When she hears who the voicemail is from, she puts it on speaker instantly.
"Ann Perkins! Your voice is literally the best thing I have ever heard! Even on your voicemail! People have been saying that long-distance calls are possible again! The aliens - I'm sorry I can't pronounce their name, I think with more practice I will crack it - are in uproar! I'm at the statehouse and they're telling me that the walls the invaders built are coming down all over Indiana! Isn't that just the greatest? I will try to call you again soon!"
It's timestamped with today's date. "That is the second best thing I've ever heard," Ann says, and has to sit down.
"The statehouse," April says. "He means, in Indianapolis. How did he get there? Like, I thought he was abducted or whatever."
"I guess," Ron says, deadpan, "he had his running shoes" - and Ann laughs, delightedly, wants to hug Ron and kiss April and dance around the room with Andy. She doesn't do any of those things except the last, and April glares a little but her lips are twitching and her heart's clearly not in it.
"You should tell them," Ron says, and Ann never figured Ron for a coward but whatever, it's been a couple of hours, Ann Perkins is gonna step up. She knocks on the door of Ben's old room, and when there's no answer, takes a deep breath and goes inside.
Leslie and Ben are on the bed, fully dressed on top of the covers as though they fell asleep where they landed, and they're wrapped up in each other, Leslie's arms inside Ben's shirt and his left hand tangled in her hair. Ann tries saying their names a couple of times and Ben doesn't respond at all - that's the prescription-strength opiates, Ann thinks with relief - and Leslie barely twitches, mumbles something incomprehensible and sinks back into sleep.
"I'll come back later," Ann tells them both, hearing the affection in her own voice, vivid as a living thing. "Okay? Okay."
A little later she makes up a dose of Leslie's amoxycillin for Ben, puts it in a little dish and gets a glass of water and leaves them both beside the bed, and after that she and April go out into the yard and spread a blanket and have some sort of spring picnic of tinned beans and Pop Tarts. It's a beautiful day.
*
Chris calls back. He’s not surprised that they’re doing okay, and they’re managing; he’s not surprised Ben and April blew up a factory; he’s not surprised Leslie negotiated water, electricity and open space out of the invaders; he misses them all a lot. He’s seen the inside of one of the ships. “It’s not that great,” he says, and Ann almost wants to laugh.
“I probably won’t see you soon,” he goes on, “you know, the distance...”
“I know,” Ann says. “That’s also... not great.”
“No,” Chris says, “but maybe Ben and April can blow something else up.”
Ann nods, though he can’t see her. What the hell, she believes in them. Maybe they can.
*
Because, of course, it doesn’t last. A week later, after the entire town has finally stopped smelling of synthetic caramel, long-distance calls start dropping out again. The old council chamber was deserted for a while, but people going near it are reporting that they want to throw up again, and sometimes, early in the morning and late at night, April thinks she can see, out of the corner of her eye, the shadow of a ship hanging over the town. It sucks, but April didn't expect that it wouldn't happen; she guesses the invaders probably have electricians or mechanics or whatever, and in the meantime, Leslie is rallying people to get as much stuff as they can before the barrier closes them off again, so people are looting out-of-town gas stations and Ron's taking out hunting parties. But whatever happens, it was worth it, worth everything, almost. She tells Andy that in the quiet time after they've gone to bed, and he smiles and kisses her and then falls asleep mid-sentence, which is pretty cute; she snuggles down beside him feeling not awesome and ecstatic or whatever, but okay.
Early in the morning, she gets up for some water and finds that Leslie and Ben are already awake, or still awake, she's not sure; they're lying on the couch together and his head is on her shoulder and they look like they've been there a while. "Leslie," Ben's saying, tiredly, "you can't seriously be saying..."
"Why not?" Leslie snaps back. "Why not? I arranged a meeting with them and then I never had it. And now I've gotten these things I can negotiate with, it's important to move forward."
"You don't even know if they want..." - Ben glares across the room at the giant yellow boxes - "radioactive sources like those. Maybe they're digging up Siberia for a reason, maybe what they had in mind was full-blown plutonium reactors."
"Maybe not, and I have to try," Leslie tells him. "We can use it as a bargaining chip for something else. Maybe pushing the barrier further outwards? Maybe a later curfew? You don't know unless you try."
"What about helping organise resistance, rather than hoping the invaders honour their bargains?" Ben demands, and gets cut off by a bleeping sound. "Oh. Pills."
"I'll get them for you, it's okay," Leslie says. She kisses the top of his head and goes to the kitchen. "What are you hoping to achieve in the long run, other than draining people's resources?" she calls over her shoulder. "I mean, say you do successfully sabotage the invaders again..."
"They're not doing the thing again, are they?" Andy says, worriedly, from behind April. He's still in bed.
"They're not," April confirms, watching Ben watching Leslie as she comes back into the room. He takes the pills one-handed, shifts to let her sit, and they curl back up together comfortably.
"It's important on a social level," Ben's saying, "to know that collectively you still have agency."
"The people's collective agency elected me to be their city councilwoman," Leslie says, "and I mean to serve them as long as I can."
"I know," Ben says, softly, and kisses her.
"Eww," April says quietly to Andy, "they're the worst."
"I still think you're wrong, though," Ben goes on, and Andy gives April another worried look and Leslie starts waving her hands around.
"I'm not wrong," she says, punctuating each syllable with a gesture, "you're just a hopeless romantic who's read too much science fiction about rebel alliances and lost causes."
Ben glances at her. "I'm a hopeless romantic? This from a woman who believes in the power of a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens to change the world?"
"It's the only thing that ever has," they say together, in very different tones of voice, and Ben waves his uninjured hand and says, "No. Not this time. Not now."
Leslie glares at him. "You're a cynic."
"How can I be a cynic and a hopeless romantic?"
"Natural talent," Leslie says. "Also, you suck and I hate you."
"Fine," Ben says, "fine, I hate you too" - and April buries her head in her hands.
"The worst," she says, through her fingers. "Why don't you just have sex in public, God."
Leslie looks confused and Ben laughs, clear and bright. "I should head out in a while," he says to Leslie, a little regretfully, "I need to meet Ron, we were going to figure out our next steps now the barrier will be back soon.”
"I'll come with you," Leslie says, instantly.
"Are you sure?" Ben asks, but he doesn't sound unhappy about it. Leslie helps him up and April gets them a bottle of drinking water to take with them and doesn't even bother saying anything. "Aren't you just going to spend the whole time complaining about the illegitimacy of terrorist methods?"
“Yeah," Leslie says, laughing, the breeze from the open door stirring her hair. “Don’t you ever give up?”
"No.” Ben sounds surprised. "Never give up," he says, taking her arm, "never surrender" - and they go out into the morning light, holding hands. April shuts the door behind them, smiles for a moment, then goes back to bed to make out with Andy.
end.
notes:
-I am incredibly grateful for a lot of people and their help with this story. tau_sigma provided many tips on what, exactly, one might steal from a hospital;
forthwritten provided all manner of information about broken bones, the resetting thereof, the inadvisability of open fractures, the world without antibiotics, and how to build a bomb. (And also said to the bartender, while I was cheerfully explaining this last, "She's a writer, not a terrorist.") They also had all manner of morbid and creepifying suggestions for what the aliens wanted. The aliens didn't want any of those things. ("How about harvesting human bodies for CARBON?" / "How about no.") Sorry, honey. <3
-Shim wanted to know how I could have gone 17,000 words without a Princess Leia gold bikini joke. I put one in.
-And, finally, "Both Hands" is my favourite break-up-make-up song: I don't know who it was who introduced me to this lovely cover, but way to make me fall for it all over again. I am writing graffitti on your body / I am drawing the story of how hard we tried. Yes. Thank you too, whoever you are.
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