fic: think about direction, leslie/ben, pg-13
title: Think About Direction
author:
shornt
pairing: Ben/Leslie
rating: PG13 (alludes to sex)
words: ~2060
notes: This is mostly me trying to justify the fact that Leslie seemed to have no clue that Ben was going through a crisis, which really bugged me in the episode. So it's basically Ben's descent into crazy and why Leslie hadn't caught on. And title from "Stand", the extremely relevant REM song that accompanied Ben's claymation. Thanks as always to fairytiger for insisting that I shouldn't hate this. I've been in a bit of a rut of my own, heh.
When Ben walked out of City Hall for the last time as a member of Pawnee’s local government, it didn’t feel like the end of the world. He sent a text to Leslie, knowing she would have some ends to tie up and expecting another break-in attempt to grab some work from her office, and drove himself home with a lopsided smile on his face.
It had been the first time he used the word out loud, and he liked the way it sounded. In love. With Leslie. He loves Leslie Knope. He’s in love with her. He loves her so much he gave up his job. And maybe that should be a big deal, but he’s too far gone, thinking if he should say the word to her tonight, if it’s way too soon because they’ve only been back together for a week and a half, but really it’s been over a year since she’s entered his life and...
And he just wants her to know, already.
But as usual, Leslie has a few tricks of her own. He surely never envisioned the elderly court stenographer in his mind, but once she was safely home and Leslie pulled the car into her own driveway, it was easy to fall into her and look forward to two weeks of this.
---
Until two weeks becomes just one week, and one week becomes job searching and shopping for relatives and stopping Andy from attempting javelin throws with broken blinds from the windows and cutting off Leslie’s salgar supply when she starts getting too jittery.
“Ben, now that I’ve created salgar, are you telling me I shouldn’t put it on my popcorn? Kettle corn is an important staple! It’s sweet, it’s salty, it’s awesome, and will you please stop looking at me like that?”
“Put the salgar down,” he says slowly, his eyes narrowing even as his lips twitch up into a smile. “You didn’t fall asleep until five in the morning last night, and that’s insane even for you.”
“It’s my last weekday before I go back to work! Of course I’m supposed to stay up late, that’s what you do. It’s not my fault you pooped out on me at two!”
Which just devolves into a ridiculous chase around her house, salgar being ground into the carpet by their footsteps until he manages to grab her around the middle in the kitchen, socks slipping on the linoleum as she laughs breathlessly. And then dumps the remaining salgar in his hair.
“That’s what you get,” she teases, ruffling it even more with her fingers.
It turns into a whipped-cream-in-the-bedroom kind of night. Ben has no complaints.
---
But Monday morning rolls around, and Leslie’s out of bed and backing her car out of the driveway before Ben’s even conscious of the fact that she kissed him goodbye and left a now-cold waffle on his bedside table.
Right. Leslie has a job. He doesn’t.
He also hasn’t had actual free time in months, maybe even years, and frankly he’s forgotten how to spend time by himself. He’s used to Leslie chattering, or Andy turning his amp up way too loud, or April throwing Skittles at his head. But a day, all to himself, with no interruptions and no obligations and no plan?
This might actually be the most terrifying thing to happen.
---
Leslie gets into her campaign. Usual workdays turn into out-the-door-early and home-after-dinner. Weekends fill with strategy meetings. She scrunches her face in confusion the first time Ben kisses her hello at night with a face full of beard stubble, but it ends up just making her giggle when he immediately backs her up to his bedroom and rubs it against her skin.
Later that night, when they’re cocooned in about five blankets because April likes keeping the house cold, Ben forgets about the day he spent trying to “get” soap operas. He kisses her on the shoulder, tightening his hold around her waist, relishing in the chuckle out of her mouth.
“Okay, but shaving tomorrow, yes?” She runs the pads of her fingers against his jawline, leans up and kisses under his ear.
“I don’t know, it’s kind of rustic, don’t you think?” Leslie just rolls her eyes and snuggles closer to him, sighing happily.
“So how was your day alone?”
“It was... fine.”
---
He flies up to Partridge for Christmas Eve, Leslie gripping his hand anxiously as his family meets her for the first time. It’s nice, but they’re back in Pawnee by Christmas night, exchanging presents with each other in the corner of Leslie’s living room she managed to clear. She takes another day off to spend with him, and then back to work. Then New Years comes so fast and she’s home another few days, and Ben can handle the endless channel-flipping and unnecessary napping of his days off. He took a trip to the bookstore for some George R. R. Martin and some Star Wars Universe novels he’s put off reading, and really, it’s not a huge deal.
He still gets to kiss Leslie at midnight, and he thinks 2012 might end up being his best year yet.
---
But it’s really, really boring, actually. He tries to think of his life before work, but all he can remember is other work. Ice town leading to college leading to internships leading to the audit office leading to the road leading to Pawnee.
Leslie’s planning a campaign relaunch, staying up late in the room down the hall so she doesn’t disturb his sleep. Not that he gets much, since he sleeps so much during the day now. He doesn’t let her know that, though, because if he’s awake, she’ll pull him into campaign work and he really thinks he should keep a fair distance. It’s his fault she lost her advisers, his fault she was polling so low.
She comes to him anyway.
“Ben?” He hears the creek of the door, her nervous shifting from leg to leg, the clank of pen against clipboard. “Are you up?”
“Yeah,” he admits, rolling over to face her. She bounces into the room, smiling.
“I have a question. And really, I’ve been thinking about it a while, and I thought maybe you would have offered by now, but--”
“You want me to be your campaign manager?” he asks. Really, he’s expected this. And not just because she’s been mumbling about it in her sleep.
“Yes! It just makes so much sense. I mean, you won your election, and you were eighteen.”
“I also brought your polls down to one percent, and let’s not even talk about my approval rating when I was in office.”
“Well, it’s gonna be my approval rating this time. And no one needs to know you’re my campaign manager! You can wear a black mask--ohh and maybe carry a red rose! And I’ll get you a big black hat, and you can talk in a Spanish accent--”
“You want me to be Zorro?”
“I don’t think swords would be very safe,” she considers. He shakes his head, reaching out to take her hand. “But Ben, really...”
“Secrets haven’t really worked in our favor in the past.” He punctuates this with a squeeze of her fingers til she meets his gaze. “I’m kind of poisonous to your campaign, I think.”
“Yeah,” she agrees, and even though it sucks, it makes him laugh. And then he’s pulling her down into his arms, converse sneakers and all, and eventually tires Leslie out enough that she falls asleep early.
For her, anyway.
---
She brings it up again in the morning. And again when she gets home late at night.
“Leslie, do you want to win?”
“Of course. But there are probably good kinds of poison out there, right?”
He sighs.
---
He likes calzones. He liked Nightmare Before Christmas. He wears a lot of plaid... Sometimes he hums music from Star Wars. That’s all... something to go on?
Really, he’s just grasping at straws as Leslie dives into her campaign. And it means less time with her, but it also means watching a woman with passion and dedication and what on earth makes Ben feel alive like that? He has no idea.
So he does a lot of weird shit, like buy a keytar to learn the Imperial March on. But after a while, it doesn’t feel so weird. It feels like moving instead of standing still. He’s totally making progress on his clay figure. And he realizes that if he doesn’t wash his hair in the morning, he has time for two extra chapters of his book. When he botches a batch of calzones, it just means scraps to give April and Andy so he won’t have to sit through them eating a frozen pizza without cooking it again. The pieces from his abandoned jigsaw puzzle go unnoticed in the usual debris of their house.
It’s awesome. He’s doing great. He emails Leslie five times a day to let her know it.
I know how you feel about calzones, but I’m telling you, these might change your mind...
Did you know that you have three blazers that are the same style but different colors?
This movie is just like, the Avatar of clay animation. It’s going to blow your mind.
What if I grew an actual beard? I could get a top hat and you could call me President Lincoln.
Alright, what do you think about plaid briefcases? Way less boring than normal ones.
Leslie responds enthusiastically from her blackberry, taking his overzealous and crazy ventures as a surge of creativity. She comes home late and tired, stays up later planning a big speech, starts trying out “Abraham” in bed (it’s super awesome, and maybe he can even work in those vampire hunter comics).
So he smiles, he wraps himself around her, and he keeps promising to show her his “work” later. She’s got enough on her plate.
---
So Chris is right. He’s definitely in the middle of a crisis, here. And the problem is, he has no idea how to get out of it. But sitting across from this guy who’s known him longer than anyone, who sat next to him in a car for years, who just made him a disgusting herbal mess to cheer him up.... he realizes he’s not alone. Leslie’s busy, but there are other people who care about him. He keeps letting himself forget that.
And he’ll have a dog for company now, apparently.
---
Naturally he takes Leslie’s most recent offer to run her campaign because he isn’t sure which of them is in a bigger mess right now. But they can help each other through it, right?
Maybe he isn’t poison.
“Why haven’t you told me you’ve had a hard time?” she asks him that night, when they’re huddling for warmth under the covers. “Also, why does no one ever talk about how cold it is after you have sex in the winter?”
“Right?” he agrees with a laugh, reaching down for another throw blanket to pull on top of them. “Better?”
“Eh. I think we should probably just be as close as possible. Body heat.” She buries her face in his neck, nipping at his skin with her teeth. “Really though. I would have helped.”
“It would have just been adding more stress,” he mumbles. “Leslie, I’m fine. I didn’t even know I was so bummed out.”
“You spent weeks on a three-second-long movie.”
“I didn’t say it was perfect. But hey, you’re still here, right? And now I have your campaign.” That seems to placate her for a few moments. He’s drifting off to sleep when she speaks up again.
“You’ll tell me when you’re going through something like that again, though. Right?”
“What would you have done? You have work and your campaign and---”
“And I always make time for people I care about,” she states with a nudge to his ribs. “I could have at least gotten drunk with you. That always works with Ann.”
“Of course.”
“Or sex stuff.”
“That happens anyway.”
“At least we get to work together again, though.”
“The Dream Team. The Dynamic Duo.”
“Ugh, don’t mention anything relating to Chris when we’re in bed.”
“I love you.”
“Get a haircut.”
author:
shornt
pairing: Ben/Leslie
rating: PG13 (alludes to sex)
words: ~2060
notes: This is mostly me trying to justify the fact that Leslie seemed to have no clue that Ben was going through a crisis, which really bugged me in the episode. So it's basically Ben's descent into crazy and why Leslie hadn't caught on. And title from "Stand", the extremely relevant REM song that accompanied Ben's claymation. Thanks as always to fairytiger for insisting that I shouldn't hate this. I've been in a bit of a rut of my own, heh.
When Ben walked out of City Hall for the last time as a member of Pawnee’s local government, it didn’t feel like the end of the world. He sent a text to Leslie, knowing she would have some ends to tie up and expecting another break-in attempt to grab some work from her office, and drove himself home with a lopsided smile on his face.
It had been the first time he used the word out loud, and he liked the way it sounded. In love. With Leslie. He loves Leslie Knope. He’s in love with her. He loves her so much he gave up his job. And maybe that should be a big deal, but he’s too far gone, thinking if he should say the word to her tonight, if it’s way too soon because they’ve only been back together for a week and a half, but really it’s been over a year since she’s entered his life and...
And he just wants her to know, already.
But as usual, Leslie has a few tricks of her own. He surely never envisioned the elderly court stenographer in his mind, but once she was safely home and Leslie pulled the car into her own driveway, it was easy to fall into her and look forward to two weeks of this.
---
Until two weeks becomes just one week, and one week becomes job searching and shopping for relatives and stopping Andy from attempting javelin throws with broken blinds from the windows and cutting off Leslie’s salgar supply when she starts getting too jittery.
“Ben, now that I’ve created salgar, are you telling me I shouldn’t put it on my popcorn? Kettle corn is an important staple! It’s sweet, it’s salty, it’s awesome, and will you please stop looking at me like that?”
“Put the salgar down,” he says slowly, his eyes narrowing even as his lips twitch up into a smile. “You didn’t fall asleep until five in the morning last night, and that’s insane even for you.”
“It’s my last weekday before I go back to work! Of course I’m supposed to stay up late, that’s what you do. It’s not my fault you pooped out on me at two!”
Which just devolves into a ridiculous chase around her house, salgar being ground into the carpet by their footsteps until he manages to grab her around the middle in the kitchen, socks slipping on the linoleum as she laughs breathlessly. And then dumps the remaining salgar in his hair.
“That’s what you get,” she teases, ruffling it even more with her fingers.
It turns into a whipped-cream-in-the-bedroom kind of night. Ben has no complaints.
---
But Monday morning rolls around, and Leslie’s out of bed and backing her car out of the driveway before Ben’s even conscious of the fact that she kissed him goodbye and left a now-cold waffle on his bedside table.
Right. Leslie has a job. He doesn’t.
He also hasn’t had actual free time in months, maybe even years, and frankly he’s forgotten how to spend time by himself. He’s used to Leslie chattering, or Andy turning his amp up way too loud, or April throwing Skittles at his head. But a day, all to himself, with no interruptions and no obligations and no plan?
This might actually be the most terrifying thing to happen.
---
Leslie gets into her campaign. Usual workdays turn into out-the-door-early and home-after-dinner. Weekends fill with strategy meetings. She scrunches her face in confusion the first time Ben kisses her hello at night with a face full of beard stubble, but it ends up just making her giggle when he immediately backs her up to his bedroom and rubs it against her skin.
Later that night, when they’re cocooned in about five blankets because April likes keeping the house cold, Ben forgets about the day he spent trying to “get” soap operas. He kisses her on the shoulder, tightening his hold around her waist, relishing in the chuckle out of her mouth.
“Okay, but shaving tomorrow, yes?” She runs the pads of her fingers against his jawline, leans up and kisses under his ear.
“I don’t know, it’s kind of rustic, don’t you think?” Leslie just rolls her eyes and snuggles closer to him, sighing happily.
“So how was your day alone?”
“It was... fine.”
---
He flies up to Partridge for Christmas Eve, Leslie gripping his hand anxiously as his family meets her for the first time. It’s nice, but they’re back in Pawnee by Christmas night, exchanging presents with each other in the corner of Leslie’s living room she managed to clear. She takes another day off to spend with him, and then back to work. Then New Years comes so fast and she’s home another few days, and Ben can handle the endless channel-flipping and unnecessary napping of his days off. He took a trip to the bookstore for some George R. R. Martin and some Star Wars Universe novels he’s put off reading, and really, it’s not a huge deal.
He still gets to kiss Leslie at midnight, and he thinks 2012 might end up being his best year yet.
---
But it’s really, really boring, actually. He tries to think of his life before work, but all he can remember is other work. Ice town leading to college leading to internships leading to the audit office leading to the road leading to Pawnee.
Leslie’s planning a campaign relaunch, staying up late in the room down the hall so she doesn’t disturb his sleep. Not that he gets much, since he sleeps so much during the day now. He doesn’t let her know that, though, because if he’s awake, she’ll pull him into campaign work and he really thinks he should keep a fair distance. It’s his fault she lost her advisers, his fault she was polling so low.
She comes to him anyway.
“Ben?” He hears the creek of the door, her nervous shifting from leg to leg, the clank of pen against clipboard. “Are you up?”
“Yeah,” he admits, rolling over to face her. She bounces into the room, smiling.
“I have a question. And really, I’ve been thinking about it a while, and I thought maybe you would have offered by now, but--”
“You want me to be your campaign manager?” he asks. Really, he’s expected this. And not just because she’s been mumbling about it in her sleep.
“Yes! It just makes so much sense. I mean, you won your election, and you were eighteen.”
“I also brought your polls down to one percent, and let’s not even talk about my approval rating when I was in office.”
“Well, it’s gonna be my approval rating this time. And no one needs to know you’re my campaign manager! You can wear a black mask--ohh and maybe carry a red rose! And I’ll get you a big black hat, and you can talk in a Spanish accent--”
“You want me to be Zorro?”
“I don’t think swords would be very safe,” she considers. He shakes his head, reaching out to take her hand. “But Ben, really...”
“Secrets haven’t really worked in our favor in the past.” He punctuates this with a squeeze of her fingers til she meets his gaze. “I’m kind of poisonous to your campaign, I think.”
“Yeah,” she agrees, and even though it sucks, it makes him laugh. And then he’s pulling her down into his arms, converse sneakers and all, and eventually tires Leslie out enough that she falls asleep early.
For her, anyway.
---
She brings it up again in the morning. And again when she gets home late at night.
“Leslie, do you want to win?”
“Of course. But there are probably good kinds of poison out there, right?”
He sighs.
---
He likes calzones. He liked Nightmare Before Christmas. He wears a lot of plaid... Sometimes he hums music from Star Wars. That’s all... something to go on?
Really, he’s just grasping at straws as Leslie dives into her campaign. And it means less time with her, but it also means watching a woman with passion and dedication and what on earth makes Ben feel alive like that? He has no idea.
So he does a lot of weird shit, like buy a keytar to learn the Imperial March on. But after a while, it doesn’t feel so weird. It feels like moving instead of standing still. He’s totally making progress on his clay figure. And he realizes that if he doesn’t wash his hair in the morning, he has time for two extra chapters of his book. When he botches a batch of calzones, it just means scraps to give April and Andy so he won’t have to sit through them eating a frozen pizza without cooking it again. The pieces from his abandoned jigsaw puzzle go unnoticed in the usual debris of their house.
It’s awesome. He’s doing great. He emails Leslie five times a day to let her know it.
I know how you feel about calzones, but I’m telling you, these might change your mind...
Did you know that you have three blazers that are the same style but different colors?
This movie is just like, the Avatar of clay animation. It’s going to blow your mind.
What if I grew an actual beard? I could get a top hat and you could call me President Lincoln.
Alright, what do you think about plaid briefcases? Way less boring than normal ones.
Leslie responds enthusiastically from her blackberry, taking his overzealous and crazy ventures as a surge of creativity. She comes home late and tired, stays up later planning a big speech, starts trying out “Abraham” in bed (it’s super awesome, and maybe he can even work in those vampire hunter comics).
So he smiles, he wraps himself around her, and he keeps promising to show her his “work” later. She’s got enough on her plate.
---
So Chris is right. He’s definitely in the middle of a crisis, here. And the problem is, he has no idea how to get out of it. But sitting across from this guy who’s known him longer than anyone, who sat next to him in a car for years, who just made him a disgusting herbal mess to cheer him up.... he realizes he’s not alone. Leslie’s busy, but there are other people who care about him. He keeps letting himself forget that.
And he’ll have a dog for company now, apparently.
---
Naturally he takes Leslie’s most recent offer to run her campaign because he isn’t sure which of them is in a bigger mess right now. But they can help each other through it, right?
Maybe he isn’t poison.
“Why haven’t you told me you’ve had a hard time?” she asks him that night, when they’re huddling for warmth under the covers. “Also, why does no one ever talk about how cold it is after you have sex in the winter?”
“Right?” he agrees with a laugh, reaching down for another throw blanket to pull on top of them. “Better?”
“Eh. I think we should probably just be as close as possible. Body heat.” She buries her face in his neck, nipping at his skin with her teeth. “Really though. I would have helped.”
“It would have just been adding more stress,” he mumbles. “Leslie, I’m fine. I didn’t even know I was so bummed out.”
“You spent weeks on a three-second-long movie.”
“I didn’t say it was perfect. But hey, you’re still here, right? And now I have your campaign.” That seems to placate her for a few moments. He’s drifting off to sleep when she speaks up again.
“You’ll tell me when you’re going through something like that again, though. Right?”
“What would you have done? You have work and your campaign and---”
“And I always make time for people I care about,” she states with a nudge to his ribs. “I could have at least gotten drunk with you. That always works with Ann.”
“Of course.”
“Or sex stuff.”
“That happens anyway.”
“At least we get to work together again, though.”
“The Dream Team. The Dynamic Duo.”
“Ugh, don’t mention anything relating to Chris when we’re in bed.”
“I love you.”
“Get a haircut.”