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In two thousand and twenty, something horrible happens and America stirs, just for a moment, from the nightmare of the last few years. The nation blinks against the sunlight and, for a few precious seconds, gone are images of children in cages and unaffordable rents and medical equipment on eBay and sea levels rising, rising, rising.
And the first face it sees is Leslie Knope’s.
***
Strictly speaking, Senator Leslie Knope has no damn business at all doing what she is doing, but that has never stopped her before and now is certainly not the time to start allowing it to.
What she is doing is forming a government.
Sick of Indiana being told to compete with Iowa and Illinois and Michigan and the rest of the damn country for supplies, Leslie has persuaded several midwestern governors to form something of an anti-cartel to increase their purchasing power. And after the core governors have the thing up and running, Leslie puts feelers out to the rest of the midwest and then starts working on the south. By April, she has even secured Texas.
By May, the union has absorbed a smaller one in the north east and somehow, in a turn of events only made possible by the indomitable will of one Leslie Barbara Knope, she has the entire central eastern economic union working on a unified, evidence-based stance on social restrictions and economic reopening.
Get the rockies and the west on board, and—bar Florida, the Carolinas and Georgia—she will have more or less re-invented the United States of America.
***
Not about to be shown up by the likes of fucking Texas, the rockies and the west come on board by June.
***
There is a weekly meeting of governors that Leslie not only attends, but whips for and chairs.
Each new governor gives her the same hesitant look when they join the grouping, but no one questions her presence aloud. At least not to Leslie’s face.
After all, she is the defacto leader of the newly-dubbed majority economic union.
Leslie is the wrangler, the mediator, the peacemaker and she is the person who fields calls from Ohio and Utah and Virginia when the pressure is on to fall in line. It is Leslie who stays up into the early hours soothing and cajoling, reminding them that this is bigger than any of them or their parties.
Leslie talks the Dakotas down from a spitfire feud and organises pooled supplies for regional Montana.
She is the velvet sledgehammer and the mother hen who keeps everything together when every force of entropy says it should all break apart in a grand, biblical implosion.
It isn’t surprising that Leslie Knope becomes the reluctant public face of the union.
What is surprising about it is that it is Andrew Kaley’s idea. A small, cynical piece of her had expected the New Hampshire governor to want the spotlight for himself, but he insists she is the one who knows the message and should be the one to front up to it.
There is a discussion at the weekly roundtable where Amy Scott seems about to mutiny (“she’s not a governor, for Christ’s sake, she’s only a freshman senator”), but Kaley jumps in and Bill Bligh from Texas agrees it should be Knope, and there’s not much else said after that.
When all is said and done, no one can doubt it is the right call.
The national media circuit is a gauntlet all its own. It’s been a long time since she was mayor of Pawnee appearing on local access news, but Leslie shakes off the rust and rises to the task like she always has.
She speaks of love and hope and new hospitals, assures her nation that their governments (and it’s always governments in the plural) are working hard to look after everyone. Promises the people that although it’s going to be hard, they are going to be okay if they stay apart and hold together.
And America believes her.
***
In stolen minutes between conference calls and video meetings, Leslie finds pockets of air for herself.
She speaks to Ann and Chris and Oliver, and watches her goddaughter dance ballet through her phone screen.
She sends care packages to Tom and Donna and Jerry. Ships crates of whisky to Ron and, on more than one occasion, actually respects his requests for less contact simply because she is too tired to make another phone call. Checks in with April and Andy and finds herself disturbed by her beautiful, capable, fearsome friend’s home life.
She watches Xena the Warrior Princess on the phone with Jess, and vents to Ben about the wearisome business of leadership in crisis.
She allows herself to turn to him in the same way as almost fifty statesmen and women across America turn to her. She turns to him for comfort, to confess her fears, to be told what she needs to hear in order to carry on.
Ben is always there at her fingertips, just a text away when she needs an ear after a disastrous governors’ roundtable or a laugh when she gets disappointing news from the biotechs.
Steady, dependable Ben. Always there. Always in the periphery, holding her together while she holds the world.
***
Despite Leslie’s protests, Ben commissions Jennifer Barkley to start collecting sentiment analysis on the media coverage. It would be too on the nose to conduct honest to god polling, he says. Jen only laughs.
Sentiment analysis puts Leslie Knope’s positives at a consistent average of eighty-nine percent. FOX and Breitbart included.
***
It is a long, punishing year of push and pull, and by the following January things are beginning to show signs of looking up.
Several US biotechs and pharma companies have been sending optimistic reports in the past few weeks, but the real promise of hope seems to lie with the Australian CSIRO.
Leslie is up at all hours, on the phone alternately with the CSIRO chair and with the Australian prime minister. Both also speak to the President and neither comment on their conversations with him when they speak to Leslie, but nonetheless they seem to defer to Leslie on operational matters and that, she thinks, probably says enough about that.
It is Washington’s worst-kept secret that Leslie Knope liaises with the White House Counsel on negotiating around patents and reproduction rights if this thing turns out to be for real. She delegates to the governors the task of re-purposing pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities and having them prepare to commence production, ready for when the news comes.
***
Before all this began, if you had thought Leslie Knope was a soft-hearted negotiator you might have had a leg to stand on.
You certainly wouldn’t have one now.
There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was the tenacity of Leslie Knope and nothing else that prevented hundreds of thousands of Texans from returning to work in the peak of the crisis.
“It’s infuriating, Ben,” Leslie groans the night the deal is finalised. “They need their own state tax, but Bligh still won’t float it.”
“You got California to share tax revenue with Texas. With Texas,” Ben implores. She imagines he would have gripped her by the shoulders and tried to shake perspective into her if they’d been speaking in person, and smiles. “And they agreed to spend it on unemployment! You are a miracle worker. Cut yourself some slack.”
Well, sometimes you have to take the wins where you can get them, she supposes.
***
It is more than a year, start to dwindling finish, before America steps into the sunlight again.
In the aftermath, when the nation has begun to process its deep grief over its losses, when everything begins to settle, not into the old way but into a new one, Leslie is struck by the simple truth that the world has changed.
The world has changed and they have changed with it.
They pulled together and did what was needed. People grew vegetables in their yards and cooked for their neighbours. They emptied schools and built hospitals. They put on hold every little thing that made up a life and found a new way of being.
With the will to survive, with determination and love in their hearts, people simply found a way to endure.
It feels like it should have been harder.
It feels like they could do it again, if they had to.
Leslie thinks of children in cages and unaffordable rents and rising sea levels and dares to hope.
***
The midterms are fast approaching and Leslie finds herself heavily touted on the midwest campaign trail. Through the primaries and even on the campaign proper, a picture with majority union leader Leslie Knope is precious currency.
She is thrust into not only the midwest media circuit but back onto the national stage, not because of crisis response, but simply because she is Leslie Knope and that seems to mean something these days.
She is invited to host Saturday Night Live and they run a sketch with Kate fucking McKinnon playing her opposite Alec Baldwin and Brad Pitt.
Leslie can’t understand why any of this is happening to her when all she did was put forty-odd people on a video conference and make them do the work that had to be done anyway.
It is surreal.
When she spends a few days tagging Ben’s campaign in the Indiana ninth, she mentions this to Jennifer Barkley, who laughs at her and tells her can’t expect much else when she’s practically the girl from that damn Tom Petty song.
Leslie doesn’t understand.
“You’re like a national mother figure,” Jen explains, “and you’re very attractive, Leslie. People like that. You’re comforting and highly competent but also really hot. Think of yourself as America’s MILF.”
Leslie isn’t quite sure what to do with that and it must show on her face, because Jen leans in and says, “They’re buying what you’re selling. Don’t overthink it. Call me after all this and we’ll talk.”
And with a wink and a toss of her tawny hair, Jen sashays off into the scrum, leaving Leslie heartily confused.
***
Everyone but Leslie Knope understands exactly why Indiana turns blue in the midterms.
***
“Jen thinks you’re holding out on her,” Ben says over dinner at his place. It is Thanksgiving a few weeks after the midterms and Leslie, for once, is glad to have caught a breather.
She is in her third week of the first lot of paid time off she’s taken since before Interior. She spent a week in Pawnee with her mom, who had been strangely effervescent the whole time, seeming halfway giddy with pride in her daughter for the first time in Leslie’s life.
Since being back in DC she’s been using the time to scrapbook and plan out gifts for all the birthdays and anniversaries she has to celebrate in the coming year.
It has been peaceful. Leslie is beginning to appreciate peacefulness.
It’s just Ben, Jess and Leslie tonight and none of them had the will or inclination to cook a full Thanksgiving fare with turkey and trimmings and pumpkin pie, so they’ve settled for making their own pasta and drinking wine by the fire in the kitchen.
It is simple and rustic and everything Leslie could want.
She rolls her eyes. “The election’s two years away. Jen needs to chill.”
Ben picks up his wine glass and swirls it, watching the pinot swish around. “Ah, I’m not sure she’s talking about the Senate, Leslie.”
“What?”
“I mean… I think we all assumed.” Ben exchanges the wine glass for a forkful of ravioli and glances sidelong at Jess, who shrugs and nods.
“Assumed what?”
He gives her a strange look and smiles while he chews and swallows. “Have you, uh, have you googled yourself lately?”
“No,” Leslie frowns. “Why?”
Ben reaches across the table and rests his fingertips on her wrist like a reassurance. “I think you should google yourself.”
Leslie lifts an eyebrow and gives him a fond, indulgent little smile. “Okay, weirdo.” She leans down to grab her purse and fishes her phone out from its over-cluttered depths.
The news headlines render her breathless.
Senator Leslie Knope expected to announce 2024 White House bid
Disunion on the horizon as Kaley and Knope expected to clash
Knope ‘generally presumed’ to be Democratic frontrunner for 2024
She scrolls and scrolls and they just keep going.
‘I have no intention of running against … Knope’: Kaley
“Crap on a cardigan,” Leslie whispers. “What is this?”
“So I might be wrong, but I think people are expecting you to run for President.”
“Crap on a capsicum, Ben, this has… this one has endorsements in it.”
“I know. I can’t believe you don’t have a google alert on yourself.”
“But… why?”
“Because you’re qualified. Because you saved America. Because—”
Leslie flushes and waves her fork. “No, I didn’t. That’s ridiculous. I just got people to stop panicking and work together.”
“No, you were defacto President of the United States for a year. Stop being modest.” He puts his fork down and rests his fingers on her wrist again, holding her gaze with his deep brown eyes, all soft and warm with admiration. He speaks softly. “Leslie, this is it.”
Leslie drops her fork gently and blinks back tears. “I don’t know what to say,” she whispers.
“Say you’ll run for President, dumbass.”
“Jess,” Leslie chokes, half laughing and half sobbing. Beautiful, irreverent Jess. “Oh my god.”
Jess grins and holds up a glass. Ben is just a fraction of a second behind her, beaming like he has been waiting for this his entire life.
Leslie takes a moment before she follows their cue. She catches Ben’s eye and lets the steadiness of his gaze assure her that she isn’t dreaming. And then she raises her glass.
The crystal sings as the three glasses meet, ringing out loud and bright like a herald’s bell.
“To Knope for America,” Ben smiles.
“To Knope for America.”