Comments | stiffleaves: Fic: Beginning Again

stiffleaves

Fic: Beginning Again

Aug 22, 2012 01:25

Title: Beginning Again
Fandom: Parks and Recreation
Pairings: April/Chris, Chris/Jen Barkley (+ the merest hint of Leslie/Ben)
Rating: R
Word count: ~4900
Summary: This is a sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which is about Chris and April's affair in January 2014 (while April is married to Andy and Chris is in a long-distance ( Read more... )

fanfic, parks and rec

Comments 22

craponaspatula August 22 2012, 22:52:17 UTC

You continue to sell me on these things and I don't know how you do it. Really. This is amazing, in and of itself, and also how it shouldn't work but TOTALLY DOES. Just stunning.

stiffleaves August 22 2012, 23:58:07 UTC

Thank you so much! It's so, so good to hear that it works and seems to ring true. Yay!

lizinstereo August 23 2012, 00:35:54 UTC

I don't know how you make this work and seem completely natural. Your Chris voice is fantastic.

stiffleaves August 24 2012, 00:46:02 UTC

Awesome. Thank youuu!

saucydiva August 23 2012, 03:29:37 UTC

You know how much I love this and our twisted ship. I really enjoy this one-step-forward-two-steps-back you've got with April and Chris as individuals- she takes a positive step, then drifts, and he drifts, then starts taking steps. That really speaks to me as someone in her twenties a person, because being proactive all the time is hard. I like that it can be temporary.

And seeing the way that the relationships between everyone shifted over two years. Completely believable. Entirely depressing.

Favorite scene: the kissing/talking scene in Indianapolis.

Also? Love the reason you have for him saying everyone's name all the time. Too cute.

stiffleaves August 24 2012, 01:05:26 UTC

That really speaks to me as someone in her twenties a person, because being proactive all the time is hard. I like that it can be temporary.That's so true. You know how I wanted this to be almost excruciatingly real in certain respects, and that's certainly one of them. It might make for a more satisfying read or a more wholesome development if we could be completely sure that April will be fine in the end. Or if we could completely believe that Chris would have been okay even if Jen had rejected him, if we could be entirely certain that it was more about taking the step than it was the result. But I don't think that's how it works. I think life can be dangerous like that. Chris could have taken the right step and yet gotten the wrong result, and then drawn in on himself even more than before as a consequence of the rejection. It's still not clear if he and Jen are going to succeed in working everything out either. And April is better off now than she was before, but it's not at all certain she'll actually succeed in finding happiness ( ... )

jncar August 24 2012, 03:54:14 UTC

Your Chris is so real and complex in this series. You do such wonderful things with his character. This series is complicated and bitter and melancholy, but also hopeful. I like that. And I like seeing April evolve and grow, and Chris deciding what he really wants out of life. Good stuff.

stiffleaves August 24 2012, 14:53:49 UTC

Thank you so much! My love for Chris is deep and not at all theoretical, I think. :) After I wrote the first part, I kind of couldn't not write the second. I didn't want to leave them hanging in that hopeless place forever; that wouldn't be any more of a realistic outcome than a super happy ending would be either. Anyway. Thanks for reading!

beetsbearsbsg November 13 2012, 07:27:45 UTC

Alright. Here it is. My basic reaction is that I feel really sorry for the characters in this story (& that would be Chris, April & Jen). It seems like Jen, Chris & April are all desperately trying to feel love in unrealistic ways. But I don't think that is even it though. I'm not sure what it is...but after reading this story I don't feel like any of their lives are better off than where they started.

All I can really say is that you created a greatly complicated and emotionally fueled plot and I think that's fucking amazing. YOU'RE FUCKING AMAZING.

stiffleaves November 17 2012, 14:28:16 UTC

Thanks for reading! Glad you find it complex and emotionally charged. :)

I don't know if Jen is trying to feel something in an unrealistic way. I think Jen is probably fine. I do think she loves Chris, but, being Jen Barkley, she was okay keeping it long distance and casual. She has a lot of other things to do, after all. But I'd like to think when Chris said he couldn't do that anymore, she cared enough about him to want to give the relationship another go on his terms. She'd rather be with him than not be with him -- and she never knew how much he was bothered by the casual nature of their relationship, because he was too afraid to tell her.

So I think the characters are probably slightly better off than they were when in the beginning. April and Chris felt stuck in their lives, but they both managed to move on. There's no guarantee that their lives will be any better from now on just because of that, that's true. But there's at least a chance that they will be.

beetsbearsbsg November 18 2012, 04:33:44 UTC

Man. I guess we just have different ideas of what type of person Jen is. Reading how you wrote Jen's reaction to being more serious with Chris I just had the feeling that what she was agreeing to was to appease Chris' 'Go big or go home' attitude towards their relationship. Her agreement to being more serious comes off more like she is undertaking a side work project than a major change in her personal life, it all just doesn't feel like she is 100% serious. I guess I took the pause and her weak statement of an "okay", smile, "why the hell not ?!" to be kind of patronizing. Like she admires Chris' got gettem attitude but in the back of her mind she honestly doesn't think there will ever be room or time for a full time Chris Traeger.

stiffleaves November 18 2012, 11:16:10 UTC

Oh, that's fine. I like that there can be different interpretations of what she actually means and wants. :) I just think there is a sweetness to Jen as well. She's not all hard shell and super-calculating core all the time. We see that in the producer's cut of Win, Lose, or Draw I think, when she tells Chris she isn't going to miss much about this ridiculous nothing town, but she is going to miss him. And more recently in her interactions with Ben in Halloween Surprise she's also quite sweet and emotionally astute. So I don't think her deal is that she is career-driven but emotionally stunted. No, she's also quite capable of expressing genuine feelings, but she's not going to do so in a very tearful, melodramatic way. She's just going to say what she means. And here, what she is agreeing to is not to sleep with other people, see her boyfriend every couple of weeks, and take vacations with him, so it's not exactly like she's agreeing to marry him. It's a small step. It might turn into a bigger step if Chris does decide to move to DC, ( ... )