Chapter Text
She can’t stop thinking about Benji Wyatt.
Ben Wyatt.
It’s just so bizarre.
After Leslie sets the rest of accounting students up, she wanders to her office and sits down and relives it all over again like a hazy, mystical dream.
She cradles the framed news clipping in her hands and stares at Ben’s picture intently, trying to puzzle out what could possibly have turned the boy mayor into the jumpy, unshaven man currently sitting in the meeting room and teaching freshmen how to do their taxes.
Leslie gazes down at the inked version of him looking for answers, but eighteen-year-old Benji Wyatt just stares back, calm and self-assured as always.
Then there’s the other thing, the thing she really can’t stop thinking about. He knew her name. He knew enough about her projects to think they’re awesome.
They are awesome. That’s obvious. But no one has exactly said it before, and her stomach keeps doing these strange flip-flops whenever she thinks about it.
Her thoughts drift to her mother, to Pawnee—but then Leslie thinks of Partridge, Minnesota impeaching a kid and she’s struck with such an immense and shocking twist of guilt that it knocks her almost breathless.
She shoves the picture into her bottom drawer and out of sight.
***
Leslie sinks into her work with a smile and a quadruple-shot mocha with extra whip and the rest of her morning passes in a blur of phone calls and event planning.
She has a flurry of conversations with various volunteers and vendors and partners and university departments and she’s only interrupted by Eric banging loudly on her door two times.
The first time it’s to drop off her stack of council motions from the meeting she missed, all stamped ‘approved’. Leslie starts to ask him when the meeting minutes are going to be out, but he rolls his eyes, bangs her door frame twice and strolls away whistling to himself. God, Eric’s a turd. An actual human turd dressed in a salmon shirt, tan khakis and chelsea boots.
She can’t believe she’s going to have to ask him to run with her. She’s explored other options, but no one else has panned out yet. It’s kind of a boring job. Leslie even asked the head of the accounting students’ society if she had any recommendations, but she’d said the only guy who was good enough with numbers and administration would never do it in a million years.
It’s not like Eric’s good at either, but that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone.
Leslie gets a running start on some of the projects from the approved pile before he interrupts for the second time. It’s midday and he’s here to tell her the electoral commissioner has arrived to officially open the nomination period. Eric dumps a warm, fresh copy of the electoral regulations on her desk unceremoniously (as if Leslie couldn’t recite them all backwards in her sleep) and picks up one of her snow globes. He inspects it with casual disinterest while Leslie jumps to her feet, scooping up her election binder, some post-its and several coloured pens.
“Come on, Knope. He won’t wait all day.”
He puts the snowglobe down in the wrong spot and heads for the door as Leslie fumbles to keep a hold of all her things. He looks back as she jerks to keep a couple of pens rolling off the binder cover and then he sighs, bangs the door frame again and trots off down the hall without her.
Jerk.
She clutches her things to her chest and barrels towards reception at a run.
***
Armed with a giant stack of fresh, blank nomination forms, Leslie spends the afternoon collecting the mountain of signatures she needs to nominate her full election ticket.
It’s absolute chaos and Leslie loves every moment of it. She is on a top-secret mission, stealthing around campus and avoiding the watchful gaze of her electoral rivals. She’s not sure she has any, actually, but it’s always better to be on the safe side. And there really is something to be said for the adrenaline rush she gets from dashing around like a spy.
For hours Leslie blows across the university grounds, hurtling breathlessly in and out of buildings and through walkways like a sneaky tropical hurricane, heart pounding with the heady thrill of it all. This must be what it feels like to be in politics for real. To be a government whip, or one of those faceless men in suits who power walk around conferences with phones pressed to their ears, whispering urgently, cutting deals and taking names.
This must be how it feels to be her mother, she thinks, wiping her forehead and grinning.
By the end of the afternoon, with her matted ponytail clinging to her neck and her back damp with sweat, Leslie rolls back into the student association with most of the forms signed.
Peer tax assistance ought to have wrapped for the day not long ago but she pokes her head into the meeting room despite herself. Just in case.
It’s empty. Leslie lets out a long sigh and closes her eyes. Relieved. She’s relieved, she tells herself. She’s disgusting right now anyway.
Clinging to her binders, she heads back to her office and dumps everything down on her desk, collapsing into her chair with a satisfied sigh. Then she notices her snowglobe. It’s not back where it should be, but it’s not where Eric left it, either. And there’s something sticking out from under it—a note. She shifts the snowglobe so she can read it.
Hi Leslie. I asked where your office was so I could say thank you for this morning, but you’re not here, obviously. I hope that was okay of me. So: thank you, and it was nice to meet you too. See you around, I hope.
Ben Wyatt
It’s written neatly on crisp white grid paper. Of course it is. Leslie picks it up with trembling fingers, reads it three times in a row and then carefully folds it and slips it into her pocket.
Crap. Ben Wyatt was here, in her office, looking for her, probably just minutes ago.
Her first coherent thought is that she’s incredibly grateful she put his picture in her drawer this morning. Her second coherent thought is that she absolutely cannot afford to have a Ben Wyatt related spiral right now. Not when she has nominations to finalise.
Later.
She’s going to think about this later.
Right now, she’s going to take this nervous energy and she’s going to pull herself together and face up to asking stupid Eric to be her stupid general secretary candidate.
Leslie undoes her ponytail and brushes her hair out so it’s mostly straight again, even if it is a little damp, and ties it back up into a loose bundle at the nape of her neck. She hasn’t so much as trimmed it since the miserable Angela Lansbury fiasco in high school sophomore year and it’s getting unmanageably long. She picks out a fresh t-shirt from the pile of spares in her cupboard, changes into it and pulls her blazer on over the top.
She’s more or less presentable, she thinks. She’s still hot and flushed but at least now preppy Eric can’t make fun of her for being a sweaty mess. So there.
Holding her head high and steeling herself, Leslie heads down the hall to Eric’s office to get this over with.
***
Ben Wyatt does find Leslie Knope, in a meandering, roundabout kind of way.
She’s been on his mind all morning and well into the afternoon, smiling at him encouragingly whenever he closes his eyes. It’s all a little insane. Leslie Knope knows who he is and... doesn’t hate him? She seems to be on his side, actually, if he can bring himself to believe it. He’s pretty sure she’s the first person who hasn’t looked at him with some semblance of pity or derision in all the years since it happened. Not counting Louisa. Which he doesn’t, because counting your therapist is cheating.
He’d known who Leslie was in some sense from reading about the student association. On paper she had reminded him a lot of a younger man he’d once known, long dead and buried in an abandoned construction site in Partridge, Minnesota. A successful version, obviously. All of Leslie Knope’s projects are amazing. Not disasters.
It would be worth watching her, he’d thought, to see what she’s doing right that he had gotten so wrong before. But since actually meeting her this morning, what Ben wants more than he’s wanted anything since the disaster of 1993 is to be Leslie Knope’s friend.
So after tax assistance wrapped up for the day, Ben had tried to find her, only to find an empty office instead. He’d left a note and a prayer and then he’d found he had no idea how to get back out of the building. It’s kind of a poetic irony, he supposes. He’s come here to do the tax thing and maybe start to find his bearings, figuratively speaking, only to get lost, literally speaking.
It’s embarrassing how long he’s been trying to find his way out.
A dingy fluorescent light flickers above him as he looks around. Turn left, turn right, or go straight ahead? If this were Dungeons and Dragons he’d go left. Left it is.
He turns a corner and finds himself in a hallway he’s sure he just walked through when a door to his right bursts open and he’s sent flying into the wall by something barreling into his chest.
It’s Leslie Knope, of course.
“Oh, crap,” she says, stumbling backwards, clinging to a horde of paperwork. “I’m sorry. I’m so—Ben?”
She really is a scrappy little thing.
She’s tiny, though too awkward and angular to be called petite. Her face might be delicate if her eyes weren’t quite so huge or quite so hungry, if her eyebrows weren’t so badly overplucked, if her front teeth weren’t a little chipped.
When Ben looks at her, clutching a stack of nomination forms and binders like they are treasure, he still can’t quite believe this is Leslie Knope from the council minutes.
It’s an odd thing to form an impression of someone from a collection of council motions, budget proposals and voting records. Ben hadn’t imagined how she might look, exactly, but if he had she would have been someone more vacant, more classically beautiful. Or perhaps someone very proper, a little frumpy and straight-laced; or possibly even a punk, overripe with empathy and wielding a for-the-people, fuck-you attitude like a weapon of conquest.
But the real Leslie Knope is a normal girl in a hometown t-shirt and well-worn jeans and a blazer that doesn’t quite fit.
She reminds Ben of a baby bird, looking up at him in disbelief for the second time today.
She ought to look silly with her long craning neck and soft jaw, wide starry eyes and that latent look of hunger that can only be instinctual. But there’s something endearing about it all, Ben decides. Something uncalculating and earnest.
“I was just going to the whiz palace,” Leslie’s saying, fingers going white around the spine of one of the binders, “to see a man about some porcelain, if you know what I mean. I’m not buying cocaine. The bathroom. I was going to the bathroom.” Ben looks from Leslie, pink, to the massive amount of stuff in her arms. She flushes pinker still and adjusts her grip on her things. “Okay, no, I was looking for Eric. Who’s not here. I don’t know why I said all that just now.” Leslie stops and blinks, and finally it seems to occur to her that it’s Ben who ought to be explaining what he’s doing in this hallway. “Oh,” she says, biting her lip. “Wait. What are you…”
“I got lost,” he says, rocking on his heels. “I, um, I was just—I left—”
She nods eagerly, understanding. “I got it.”
“Oh. Um, good. That’s good.”
Leslie breaks into an honest to god grin. It’s wild and uneven and totally, artlessly captivating. Yeah. Wow. He needs to be friends with Leslie Knope.
Unable to help himself, Ben finds himself saying, “Do you wanna get a beer?” It’s out of his mouth before he can parse it, but it feels like the most natural thing in the world. Magpies collect shiny things, leaves fall in autumn, and Ben Wyatt is supposed to ask Leslie Knope if she wants to get a beer right now.
Then Leslie’s grin fades and for a few horrible seconds Ben’s sure she’s about to ask if he’s crazy or hurl a binder at him or laugh.
But she doesn’t do any of those things. She grows serious for a moment, tilts her head, seems to mull something over… and then that wicked, magic grin is back.
“Yeah,” she beams. “Okay. Screw it. Let’s get a beer.”
***
If you’d told Ben this morning that this afternoon he’d be at the Red Room sinking beers with Leslie Knope, he’d have said you were crazy.
Ben hasn’t been able to work out whether the campus bar’s name is a reference to Jane Eyre or the H.G. Wells story but either way, it lives up to it handsomely. It’s very red in here. There’s a chain of semicircular booths with red vinyl seating and stuffing poking out of well-worn seams and the box stage, rather than being black, is a dusky crimson. The staff uniforms are red, the paper coasters are red, and even the little dishes that they put ketchup in when you order fries are red.
Something by Seal is playing and he and Leslie are tucked into one of the horrible red booths, sharing a jug of upland wheat and a bowl of fries. Leslie’s blazer is folded neatly beside her and she’s shaking her hair out of its bun, letting it droop all the way down her back. She snaps the hair tie onto her wrist and props her chin on her hand, listening intently as Ben speaks.
“They were big into rhymes,” he’s saying with some bitterness, but some amusement too.
To Leslie’s credit, she’d lasted more than an hour before she’d given in and asked him about how he’d gotten impeached.
They’d talked about the student association and their majors and she’d revelled in telling him stories from her hometown. She’d been halfway through a story about her gap year spent working in reception at city hall to earn enough for college tuition (Ben had commented that it sucked that she’d had to take a year off and a look had passed over Leslie’s face that said it sucked a lot more than she was letting on), telling him about the very inappropriate but kind of awesome sexist nickname her mom had earned, when she’d stopped and looked horrified.
“Oh, god, I’m sorry. I’m talking about—sorry, the city council thing—I’m sorry, if it’s…”
“You can ask,” he’d said, topping up her beer. “It’s cool.” And as he was saying it, he’d realised it really kind of was.
So he’d filled her in on the hard details, left out the gorier ones. Glossed over Henry dragging him to New York for six months so he couldn’t give his divorced parents the slip before he went off to Carleton College a semester late. Omitted the reason he left Carleton entirely. And when he mentioned that his comedian brother is off to make it big in Chicago via New York City and Leslie mused that it should be the other way around, he hadn’t told her that she’s all too fucking right about that.
But he had told her about Partridge. His hometown’s biggest distinction used to be that it was just outside a soybean farm, twelve miles from a town big enough to have a Walmart and a Sunglass Hut. Now it’s that they elected and impeached a teenager. And yeah, it was every bit as rough as you’d expect.
She winces as he’s telling her about the media coverage.
“Ouch,” Leslie says heartily, shooting him an empathetic look. She picks up the jug of beer and refills his glass. “I still think they’re all total jerks. It’s awesome that you tried something.”
It’s surreal that this is how she sees the world. He lifts the glass to his lips and looks over the brim at her intently. “You’re the only person who could possibly think that.”
She shrugs as he drinks. “Well if you don’t try, what are you even doing? Everyone should try more.”
“Yeah, but no one should bankrupt a town.”
“You were eighteen!”
“I was nineteen, actually.” Getting elected had been the best birthday present ever. Until it had all gone to absolute shit.
“You know, you can be like that if you want, but I’m not gonna enable you. So would you just shut up and drink, Wyatt?”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re bossy?”
Leslie grins and sips her own beer. “Every week of my life since I was six years old.” She pauses to eat a fry and says with her mouth half-full, “So why accounting?”
Ben chuckles despite himself, an ironic smile in the corner of his mouth. It’s a fair question with a tangled mess of answers. Because this is where he fucked up in Partridge and he won’t forgive himself until he learns. Because learning this lesson is the least he can do to repent for all the misery and destruction. And because in a tiny, humiliating corner of his mind that he tries his best to silence, tries to pretend doesn’t exist at all, he’s still insane enough to want another chance.
“I guess I’m trying to prove I can be responsible,” he says. “That’s kind of why I’m doing the tax thing, you know? To prove I can handle money and not screw everything up.”
There had been weeks of pathetic pep-talks in the mirror between Ben seeing posters for the program and actually signing up to do it. There’s not much use being an accountant who’s afraid of other people’s money. Which he is. He’s hoping this will be like exposure therapy, or whatever. Today has been a million different kinds of stressful in that regard, but he doesn’t want to think about that any more. He’s done for now. He got through the day without fucking up, and that’s… well, it’s certainly worth celebrating over a beer.
“I mean, you get that, right?” he continues. “You want to run for office. You need to know you can handle stuff.”
“Yeah,” Leslie murmurs, nodding. She narrows her eyes, a small crease forming between her eyebrows as she thinks about something. “Ben?”
“Yeah?”
“You knew my name.” Oh. He’d kind of thought he’d gotten away with that. She eyes him curiously, tapping her glass with her fingernails. “How did you know my name?”
Ben admits that he read about her in the council minutes and Leslie stares at him like he’s transmuted himself into a cactus before her very eyes.
“In my defense,” he says after an awkward beat, “Carleton didn’t have anything like this going on and I was pretty curious about who was doing all the awesome stuff here. It’s… it’s great. That you care this much.”
Leslie looks at her hands curled around her glass and swallows, blinking. “Yeah, well, you’re the first one who’s noticed.” She winces after saying it and drops her eyes to a paper coaster, fiddling with it.
Ben frowns. That can’t be right, surely. “Well, then everyone else has got to be insane.”
She goes a little pink again and pours herself another glass of beer.
After that, conversation drifts back to lighter things.
Leslie finishes the story about her mom’s nickname. Ben tells her about Henry’s improv troupe (they’re actually kind of good; the upstanding citizens, or whatever, had been better, but Henry had left them in New York when he’d moved back to Chicago), and they trade stories back and forth about high school clubs and Model UN. Ben admits to being somewhat obsessed with Star Wars and Leslie tells him about a themed restaurant called Jurassic Fork that she insists he needs to visit if he ever happens to be in Pawnee. He learns that Leslie collects newspapers and snowglobes and a whole lot of other things, by the sounds of it, which makes him feel a lot better about the stacks of comic books he’d brought with him and his rare coins album back home.
By the time the bartender calls last drinks, Ben’s pretty sure he and Leslie Knope are going to be very firm friends.
***
Still too young for serious hangovers, Leslie wakes up before the burst of dawn and bounces straight over to the student association to set up for free breakfast. She works alone for a couple of hours before her volunteers arrive and by eight o’clock Leslie has rows of pancakes on the grill plate, getting all nice and gooey with deep bubbles. She’s just started flipping them when she hears a voice that’s quickly becoming very familiar.
“I’m not stalking you, I swear.”
She looks up to see Ben Wyatt grinning at her from the front of the queue. His hair’s clean today. And he’s shaved. Leslie pokes one of the pancakes, amused. “Really?”
“I come every week. Tuesday and Thursday. You’re, uh, not usually here.”
“That is when breakfast’s on,” she teases. “But I am, actually. I’m usually out the back cooking other stuff.” Leslie gestures at another tent behind the one she’s standing under. Volunteers scurry back and forth with trays, some empty and others full of piping hot food. “But I’m launching a petition today, so I wanted to be up front. You’re really always here?”
Ben scratches his head. “My aid package kind of leaves a lot to be desired.” He helps himself to sausage, scrambled eggs, bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms. “I’m back in for tax this afternoon, by the way,” he says, grabbing plastic cutlery and looking for all the world like he intends to leave without a single sweet thing on his plate. Leslie frowns.
“What, you don’t wanna wait for a pancake?”
“Oh, no thanks. I’m not really into sweet breakfast. And I’m sort of late for class.”
“But pancakes are awesome.”
“Okay.”
A terrible, terrible thought occurs to her. “Do you not like waffles either?”
“They’re fine?”
“They’re fine?”
“They’re… good?” he tries. Leslie quirks her lips and drums the edge of the grill with the spatula. It makes a metallic clang and Ben sighs. “Sure. Okay. I’ll take a pancake.”
“Thank god,” Leslie says, carefully tipping the edge of one up so she can see how close it is to done. Nearly golden. Awesome. “Well, while you wait can you sign my petition?” She points at a clipboard next to the tray of eggs with a gloved hand. “And then can you get everyone in the queue to sign it? It’s for subsidised appointments at the campus doctor. Deductibles are insane and that’s if you even have insurance in the first place…”
Ben looks from Leslie to the petition to the massive queue and shrugs as if to say, ‘ah, screw it.’
It’s not exactly her fault if Ben’s breakfast goes cold or if he ends up missing his early class. Who can blame a guy for being super passionate about subsidised health care? Certainly not Leslie Knope.
***
After a morning spent competing with Ben for the most petition signatures (Leslie wins, of course) and loosely agreeing to meet up after he’s done with tax in the afternoon, Leslie’s day takes a hard left turn later that morning when she asks Eric to run as her general secretary.
She opens the door to his office to find Eric and Ashleigh from the journalism society sitting across the desk from each other, breathless and dishevelled. The desk would make a very convincing set piece in a movie about a bombing.
Fighting the urge to roll her eyes (seriously, does no one have any respect for elected office around here?), Leslie summons every ounce of presence and decorum, squares her shoulders, and through the widest, most painful smile in the world she asks whether they might discuss the position of general secretary.
Even her mother would be proud of her composure, Leslie thinks.
Eric and Ashleigh exchange a look Leslie doesn’t understand as Eric gets to his feet and takes a hesitant step towards her, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Can we go outside for one sec?”
“Oh,” Leslie says, adjusting her grip on her padfolio. “Yeah. Sure.”
Leslie follows him into the hallway, apprehensive, and...
Oh.
She really hadn’t anticipated that he might say no.
***
Afterwards, Leslie wanders, ghostlike, back towards her office.
It’s not that she wants Eric. She doesn’t. It’s just that she needs someone. She’s going to look so stupid running in the election without a candidate for the second most important position. Possibly, she could look so stupid that it causes her to lose.
And this election is supposed to be it for her. At least until she’s old enough to think about running for city council and governor and president. This is the Leslie Knope version of a debutante ball. It’s supposed to be a triumph and she’s watching it go down the toilet.
Crap.
Maybe now’s a good time to take that road trip to Indiana’s largest rocking chair, or drive to Massachusetts to see the ocean. Leslie has always wanted to see the ocean. She could be there by the weekend and by the time she drives home again she’ll have missed the nomination deadline, but she will have seen the glistening, infinite expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and really, the wonders of nature are better than elected office. They’re so much better. Except that... no, they’re kind of not. But seeing the ocean would still be pretty awesome.
She’s almost through with talking herself out of her epic Atlantic road trip and into trying to solve her problem when there are two knocks on her office door. She looks up sharply, expecting to hurl a well-earned glower at Eric, but it’s just Ben holding his nerdy accountant stuff, smiling. He’s such a dork.
“Hey,” he says. “We just wrapped up. I thought I’d say hi?”
Leslie pushes her hair over her shoulder, shaking it out a little, and tries to sound upbeat. “Ben, hey!”
He doesn’t buy it, frowns a little. “Is everything, uh…?”
“Yeah! Yes, fine. Great! I was just…” She sighs, lets her head drop into her hands for a second before looking back up. “No, everything is kind of terrible.”
“Oh.” Ben picks his way through her piles of documents on the floor and settles on the couch next to her desk. He sets his padfolio down next to him, calculator on top. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
Leslie shrugs. “I don’t know. I mean, yes. I mean… no? I’m just kind of screwed, Ben. The guy I thought was gonna be my general secretary said no and he wouldn’t say why and it was super cryptic and weird and I don’t know if he’s running for it on his own or if he’s just not running and now no one’s running and we’re just not going to have a general secretary. I asked everyone and no one wants to do it. I might just have to learn it! And I don’t know anything about accounting!” This is just occurring to her now and it’s a terrifying thought. Math has never been her strong suit. “But I might look so stupid running without a general secretary that I lose to someone else who wouldn’t even try to learn accounting and there’d still be no general secretary and the student association could die. It could die, Ben! The university could just cancel all the leases and pull our funding! It’s a disaster!”
Ben blinks. “Wow,” he says, scratching his head and looking over at something on her desk. “That’s… that’s a lot of stuff.”
Leslie picks up her snowglobe and rolls it around in her hand, feeling its weight. She studies the little Pawnee City Hall inside, avoiding Ben’s gaze. She shouldn’t have said all that just now. It’s too much for someone she’s just met. Even if it is Ben Wyatt, her secret hero. Not that he knows that. She’s just glad she hasn’t taken his photo out of the drawer yet.
“Yeah,” she says. “So anyway, I think I should maybe just go to Massachusetts for the next week or two. See the ocean. Have you ever seen the ocean? You could come, if you want.” No. He’s doing peer tax assistance. “Crap, no, you can’t.” Damn it. “Well, it was an idea.”
She looks back up to see Ben flicking through the copy of the electoral regulations Eric had left the day before, smoothing his dumb tie with his other hand. It seems like he knows what he’s looking for because he makes a satisfied noise when he stops on a page two-thirds through and scans it until he finds the right section. “Hm,” he says, thoughtful. “If an elected official resigns, there’s a by-election for the position, not a countback.”
“Well, yeah.” Leslie frowns. “I know that.”
He looks up. “Why not just get someone who doesn’t want the job to run now and then just resign after the election? That should buy you some time to find someone who actually wants to do it.”
Oh. She knew the rule, but she hadn’t thought of that. So Ben’s kind of a genius. A nerdy, dorky genius who appreciates political life and reads council minutes for fun and knows his way around a set of electoral regulations. Now that’s what she needs in a friend.
“Crap, that’s a really good idea.”
Ben grins wolfishly. “Yeah, I know.”
“Don’t get smug now, Wyatt.”
He rolls his eyes goodnaturedly. “Can I keep these?” he asks, holding the regulations up. Leslie nods yes. “Awesome.” He moves his calculator so he can stow them inside his padfolio, closes it, and places his calculator neatly back on top.
Wait.
Calculator.
Ben’s an accounting nerd now. An accounting nerd who appreciates political life and reads council minutes for fun and knows his way around a set of electoral regulations.
That’s not just what she needs in a friend. That’s what she needs in a general secretary. She bites her lip. Should she ask? She’s kind of desperate. And he’s kind of perfect. It’s such a good idea, there’s really no way she can’t at least try.
“Ben?”
“Yeah?”
“Would... you run with me?” Leslie puts the snowglobe down and sits forward in her chair intently. “Please?”
“Oh—no, uh, Leslie—”
“You’re like, a total numbers genius. And you know how stuff like this works! You’ve done it before for real! And you thought of having a dummy candidate just now, but really, you’d be perfect—”
He’s holding up his hands, shaking his head firmly. “Look, um… I’d love to help you, but—I told—I can’t. I really can’t.”
“But you wanted to prove you can be responsible, right? This would be great!”
“No,” he says, tensing, hands still in the air. “No, I’m not—it’s not a good idea.” His eyes darken with warning, almost pleading. “It’s… it’s just, it’s too big, Leslie.”
She opens her mouth to protest, to say she really needs someone as smart as him, to tell him he can do this, she knows he can. And wouldn’t it be awesome, if they ran together? But Ben shrinks back from her with his hackles up, retreating to the place he’d gone to yesterday morning when she had first recognised him. So Leslie relents. She closes her mouth and leans back into her chair.
Ben deflates a little, sighing. “I’m sorry. I just... I can’t.”
“Okay,” Leslie breathes. Her shoulders sag a little and she looks at her hands. “I’m sorry. Okay. I guess I’ll just… I’ll find someone else.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Cool.”
“Okay.”
“Hey.” Leslie looks up. He’s softened a little, eyes warm brown again. “If they don’t actually have to be good, I’m sure I can find someone from the accounting society who’d sound good enough on paper.”
So it’s not the perfect solution, but it’s something. He’s not mad she asked. At least, not so mad he doesn’t still want to help. Leslie smiles a little. “Thanks, Ben.”
He shrugs, smiling back. “You deserve to be president.”
***
Ben follows through the next day with a general secretary candidate who’s certainly no savant, but he’s good enough for now. Josh signs his form on the express condition that he won’t actually have to do the job which is a profound relief to everyone involved.
The very last form Leslie has to fill in is her own. She’s been saving this, waiting for it.
Grinning broadly, almost feverishly, she writes her name and her student details and scrawls her signature at the bottom. It’s done.
A thrill passes through her as she stands up straight and looks down at the form. Sees her name printed neatly, the word ‘president’ next to it.
“Ben?”
He pushes off from her desk, where he’d been leaning, and comes around to her side. “Yeah?”
“Do you want to nominate me?” He raises an eyebrow as if to confirm she really means him. As if there’s anyone in the world she’d rather have nominate her for student association president. God. Leslie clicks the pen impatiently. “Seriously. Will you? Please?”
“If you want,” he says, sounding a little dubious.
She pushes pen and paper towards him. “Yes.”
He signs the form, smiling, and Leslie only allows herself a minute to look at their signatures next to each other on the paper before she bundles it up with the rest, ready to submit.
Crap on a cadillac. She’s actually running for president.
***
With her nomination paperwork copied for her personal records and the originals all submitted days ahead of the deadline, Leslie leans back into the delicious, demanding chaos of her regular life. She goes to class, runs all her usual programs and develops new ones, starts copying election policies from her dream binder onto first drafts of her campaign flyers.
She sees Ben Wyatt almost daily and plans the first hundred days of her presidency by night.
But as it happens, she never does get the council minutes from the meeting she missed while she was in Pawnee.
And that turns out to be a very big problem.