Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

July 2011

Things are fine. 

Ben watches Leslie from afar as she meticulously plots out her campaign. She’s flushed with excitement about it; she veritably glows.

So… she didn’t actually need him in her life to be happy. This is fine. He anticipated it. Nothing ever lasts, and it’s fine.

She’s not talking to him much, so it’s easy to detach. Now, if it were different… if she were to start trying to hang out with him… that would be an issue.

But she’s respecting his space, and he’s respecting hers. Their verbal interactions are curt, professional, and unfun. Every so often, their eyes accidentally meet across a room, and despite the bomb that goes off in his chest when this happens, they turn their heads quickly away. When she has to pass through his office to talk to Chris, he frequently finds himself just about to leave for an important appointment. Now and again, they have a meeting together, and it’s easy to set his gaze in a generic neutral space, looking at everyone and no one at once — massive amounts of eye contact isn’t really his thing anyway, he leaves that to Chris. 

Nothing is particularly enjoyable, but once again, it is fine.

You could still quit your job, Ben. How ‘bout that?

But he’s had this thought too many times, and it always leads him to a place of pure, paralyzing terror. Ice Town screams “failure!!” at him from the past, and no matter how he feels about Leslie, he can’t let something like that happen again. If he resigns in the hopes of a relationship with Leslie, there’s no way around it: it will be a resignation in disgrace.

He’s been disgraced enough (and Partridge will never let him forget it).

But still… God. 

Leslie.

August

It’s 2 a.m. and Ben hears the sounds of youthful intoxication entering the house. It’s not surprising; he’d known they were going to the Snakehole Lounge tonight. In fact they invited him, but he wasn’t really in the mood, and he knows they care about him marginally more as a designated driver than as a friend. He wonders who they roped into being their DD when he declined.

He’s pulling the pillow over his head to block the sounds when he hears another voice, not currently intoxicated, and achingly familiar.

“April, you’ve gotta help me out here! He’s drunker than you… RRG! I can’t actually carry you, Andy, you know that, right?”

Ben sits up in bed, steeling himself, and then leaves his bedroom to help her. To help Leslie. 

She’s all dolled up in the cutest green dress he’s ever seen, and he can’t help imagining her flirting with some drunk dude who doesn’t deserve her. (Or maybe someone who does deserve her, which in theory is great. Because she’s his friend, technically, and friends want other friends to be happy. Yeah.)

He clears his throat to alert everyone to his presence. Andy and April barely notice him; Andy’s singing “I Fell in the Pit” while April accompanies him with a sea shanty about drowning yer skull, yo ho, yo ho. But when Leslie spots him, she looks like a deer in the headlights. She blatantly checks him out and he suddenly realizes he’s only wearing a T-shirt and boxers. He probably should have put on sweatpants.

“Oh look it’s Benjamin!” she says loudly and far too fast. “Benjamin Wyatt. That’s who that is — gah!” Andy slumps against her and nearly knocks her and April over. Ben belatedly remembers why he’s there, and rushes to help.

Leslie grunts. “Get his… arm… dammit…”

“I’ve got it, Leslie…”

He hasn’t actually said her name in a while. It feels sweet and cozy leaving his lips, and he glances briefly at her. But she doesn’t notice; she’s struggling too much with trying to hold up April — who, judging by the wry smirk on her face, seems to be deliberately making herself a dead weight.

“Come on… heave ho…” Leslie says.

April giggles. “She said she’s a ho, Andy did you hear her? LESLIE’S A HO!”

“Hey, April,”  Ben says, as they make their way into the bedroom, “she’s actually helping you right now, so let’s try to avoid name-calling…”

“You got it, butthead,” she says. Ben purses her lips, once again tempted to remind her that he’s technically her boss, but once again shrugging it off as pointless.

“Okay, Andy first,” Leslie says, as they prepare to roll their charges onto the bed. “Ready? Go.”

“Hey!” Andy shouts, suddenly sounding more lucid as he hits the bed. “You two!” He points from Leslie to Ben and back as they stand over him.

Their eyes flash together, then away. “What?” Leslie asks, plopping April next to her husband.

“You liked each other!” Andy exclaims. “Whatever happened to that?”

Ben feels his face go white. Leslie gives him a look: You told Andy?

He gives her a slight shake of his head, trying to explain with his eyes, but Andy’s poking Ben’s stomach with his foot and it’s derailing him. “Hey! Seriously! You two should date. It’d be super cute.” Andy’s wide-eyed innocence is painfully endearing.

Well, at least we were stealthy enough that Andy didn’t know. The dark, raised-eyebrow stare that April is giving him from under her pillow suggests that she may not have been so easily fooled.

“We’re friends,” he says distractedly and, even to his own ears, unconvincingly. Leslie gives him a sharp, wide-eyed look, and he can’t tell if there’s pain behind it because he’s keeping her firmly in his peripheral vision. “And besides, it’s…”

But he doesn’t need to finish; Andy has fallen dramatically asleep, snoring and cuddling April like a hibernating bear.

April’s voice, muffled under the pillow, comes back to his ears. “Bye, weirdos.” Of course she doesn’t thank them.

Ben and Leslie retreat to the living room. “Sorry about that,” he says, after a few moments of awkward silence. “I didn’t tell him about us actually dating… only that we… liked each other, back when that’s all that it was.”

“Oh!” Leslie says, her voice unnaturally high and squeaky. “Did we, indeed, like each other?”

At first he thinks she’s being sarcastic, but, no, she’s on the verge of freaking out, playing a character who’s not only clueless but apparently has amnesia. She can’t seem to stop: “I was… unaware of this… liking of each other. Good evening to you, good sir.” 

She’s on her way to the door, but he laughs and touches her arm to stop her. She casts her eyes down at his hand on her arm, and then back up at him. Ben would be lying if he said he doesn’t feel a massive jolt throughout his entire body. He pulls his hand away, but tries to keep it light. “It’s okay, Leslie. We don’t have to pretend it never happened, you know. Not when it’s just us.”

Her entire body melts and slumps, and she exhales. “I have no idea how to do this,” she says. “This kind of a break-up is… bizarre.”

“Yeah,” he says. Because we were on the verge of telling each other we loved each other, he thinks, and then it all had to fucking end. 

She clears her throat. “It sucks,” she says.

“That it does.”

Leslie frowns and crinkles her brow, peering intently at his OK Computer T-shirt. “Ben… that shirt used to be white, didn’t it?”

“Oh! Yeah. Welcome to my freshly dyed pink shirt, courtesy of April’s brand-new red sweater that she tossed in with my stuff.”

Leslie laughs, plucking at it. “I kinda like it,” she says. “Pink’s a good color on you.”

Oh no. 

“Well,” he says, a bit hoarsely, “It’s kinda dark in here. It’s probably not… that good.” 

He’d been doing somewhat well, feelings-wise, but now she’s really, really close to him, and she’s kind of… ogling him. He still can’t believe how attracted she has always been to him, like he’s some sort of sex symbol she can’t get enough of. To say that he’s never seen himself this way would be the understatement of the century. And it does things to him, the way she’s gazing at his bicep…

“Ben…” she begins.

But she’s interrupted by the sound of a very loud basso profundo barf from the bedroom, followed in short order by a second, mezzo soprano offering.

He drops the bridge of his nose to his fingertips and shakes his head. “I should go make sure they’re not drowning in their own puke,” he says. “Because this is my life now.”

“You want me to come help?” Leslie asks matter-of-factly. It’s slightly disconcerting how easily she’s able to remove herself from that moment they were just sharing; he’s not recovered yet. Or maybe the moment was all in his head.

“Nah, this isn’t my first rodeo with these two. I’ll be fine. You should get some sleep. Rest up for your campaign planning.” He smiles at her, nearly referencing the campaign speeches he used to hear her make in her sleep, but refraining. It’s all about refraining these days.

She nods. “Yeah,” she says, “yeah.” She gets weird again and sticks out her hand. “Fare thee well.” Her mouth twists and her head shakes. “That’s not right. I’ll get it soon.”

He shakes her hand. “Fare thee well, Leslie.”

Neither April nor Andy is drowning in their own vomit when he returns to them. But he can’t move them in order to clean up, so he just tries to make them comfortable and props them up on their sides and puts a box of Saltines and two water bottles next to their bed. It’s all he can do. He returns to bed, feeling temporarily giddy and alive.

But it passes.

Life without Leslie…

He’ll get used to it. He has to. Surely there must be more to life than Leslie.

Rare coins, for instance. He reaches for the new one by his bed, the three-legged buffalo nickel. It’s nice. Surely the coins will be enough.

When he wakes up, it has fallen out of his hand.

September

It’s a few weeks before Ben experiences another provocation to the abstraction that currently comprises his heart. He actually hasn’t thought about the Parks and Recreation department at all that day, which is rare, given how many ups and downs that department goes through in a typical week. (Today, his mind has been refreshingly distracted by the horror show that is Entertainment 720’s bookkeeping.)

When he turns the corner to walk down the main hallway as he’s leaving work, he stops in his tracks.

An unfamiliar man is walking out of the Parks office, with a very familiar figure draped in his arms, sounding delirious and singing a song about calamari — to the tune of that Cinderelly song, he’s pretty sure.

“Calamari, calamari, all I hear is calamari, from the moment that I sneeze up till the bees are buzzing wuzzing… Why are there bees in this song? Ron, how… how did the bees get in here?”

Ron?

It takes Ben a second to recognize the clean-shaven, pastel-clad individual carrying Leslie, turning away and down the hall.

Why is he carrying her? She’s acting like she did when she had the flu, but something tells Ben it’s different.

“Okay,” Ron says, and his voice finally renders him identifiable. “Forget home. I am taking you to the hospital to get your stomach pumped.”

What the…

Ben sprints down the hallway and skids to a stop next to Ron, before picking up the pace again and walking alongside him; he doesn’t want to stop this process, if Leslie truly needs a hospital.

“Ron? What’s, um… what’s wrong with her?”

Ron glances in his direction, giving him a knowing look. “She’ll be fine. My ex-wife is Satan herself, but Leslie will be fine.”

Ben tries to wrap his head around the implications. “Did she… did she poison her?”

“Technically, my mother’s mash liquor does indeed meet FDA standards for a poisonous or deleterious substance, but as you can imagine, my family has never abided by federal guidelines.”

“What…” Ben’s head is spinning. He doesn’t know what happened, and he can’t waste time figuring it out, even if an illicit substance in City Hall probably should concern him as Assistant City Manager. He doesn’t give a shit about his job right now.

Leslie hasn’t even noticed him. She’s still crooning her garbled, charming songs. He tries not to notice the unflattering part of himself that resents that Ron is the one carrying her, that she seems to be conscious of Ron’s presence but not his.

This should be me. I should be taking care of her.

“Here, Ron, give her to me.”

Ron stops walking and surveys him up and down, and Ben gets the distinct impression that Ron doesn’t think he’s strong enough to lift an adult human. He gets an absurd desire to blurt out that he once hooked up with Leslie against the door of Ann’s office, and he held her up quite capably, and he was damn good at it.

Shut up, you stupid, stupid brain. Get over yourself.

“I don’t think that would be the best idea, Ben,” Ron says.

Ben swallows. He wants to protest, to explain why he, in fact, should be the one to do this.

But all of his rebuttals fall flat. Ron has known her longer, and apparently his mother and/or ex-wife and/or himself are responsible for her current condition. 

And Ben? He’s not Leslie’s boyfriend. That was his decision as much as Leslie’s; he could have left his job. He didn’t. He hasn’t. This fact seems to be written plainly all over Ron’s face, and Ben notes that it’s in a big-brotherly, protective fashion rather than any sort of romantic possessiveness.

Or maybe he’s just projecting all of that and Ron has no thoughts in his head besides getting Leslie to the hospital.

Which should, in fact, be the top priority.

Ben nods quietly and starts walking again, faster now. “I’ll get the doors for you,” he says.

Ron gives him a brief nod. “That would in fact be quite a help.”

Leslie’s voice trips over itself as she has now moved onto her own personalized version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “Mine eyes have seen the story of the pooping of the bird, it is flying in the bathroom and my mom is such a nerd, it hath shat on Halley’s Comet and I knitted you a shmerd, his poop is marching on…”

Ben laughs in spite of everything. The thing about drunk Leslie is that she’s just a more ridiculous version of her silliest self, and he loves her silliest self so damn much. 

As he holds the front door of City Hall open and Ron strides out with her, down the steps and toward the parking lot, Ben reminds himself that he should probably keep the word “love” out of his head. But as they walk, Leslie’s hand flops down and brushes against his, and he takes it. Ron looks down and shakes his head; Ben releases her hand.

When they get to Ron’s car, Ron pauses. “My keys are in my back pocket,” he says, staring at an unknown spot in the distance.

“Oh. Okay, right, got it.” Without even thinking about it, Ben aims his hand for Ron’s back pocket, but Ron gives him a loud “a-HEM!” and nods down significantly at Leslie.

“I’ll get the keys. You take this.” Ben’s arms go out automatically as Ron rolls Leslie into them.

Leslie lands in his arms, warm and soft, and his concern skyrockets as he feels how sweaty she is. Her arms drop around his neck and she stops singing, nestling herself in his shoulder; she seems to be starting to fall asleep.

He looks up at Ron, a new emotion growing inside him: bewildered anger.

“Ron… were you there? How did you let her get like this?”

To his credit, Ron appears deeply uncomfortable; chastened. “You know Leslie,” he says gruffly. “She’s a grown woman. She makes her choices.”

“Yes, but…” Ben purses his lips in consternation. Of course Leslie makes her own choices, and usually they’re fantastic choices, but sometimes they are very, very bad, and she benefits from someone who can be her rock of sanity… just as she can sometimes be the rock of sanity for that… other person.

Ron looks down for a moment, standing there with the back door open, and then back into Ben’s eyes. He seems to understand Ben’s point without it having been spoken aloud.

“This was not my finest hour,” Ron says. And then, nodding, he says, “I’m sorry.”

Ben feels like a real partner in this moment. Holding his dearest love in his arms, defending her honor, knowing she would do the same for him. He can see it so clearly for a few glorious seconds: being a true partner to Leslie. Being there at her side, helping each other through all their troubles. Talking about the future. Calling her “honey” or “babe” or "snugbug" or some pet name that they weren’t together long enough to decide upon.

Carefully, he sets her down in the back seat and buckles the middle seat belt around her waist. Her eyelids are still drooping, her body limp.

“Leslie?” he says quietly, feeling cold inside. “Leslie, stay awake, okay? I don’t think you should be sleeping right now.”

Her eyes blink open, and when she’s able to focus on him, she smiles serenely. “Oh,” she says. “There you are.” She pulls at his tie and tugs him in close, nuzzling his nose with hers. She suddenly sounds incredibly sober. “I was waiting for you, Ben.”

She brushes her lips to his. She tastes like the poison Ron described, but he doesn’t care. He lingers a few beats too long before he pulls back and touches her cheek.

“You need to get to the hospital.”

“Sure as shootin’, Brunhilda. Beelzebub. Bratwurst. Sorry. I can’t get your name right. Blarneystone! Nailed it.”

“Okay. Time to go.” Ben retreats and locks eyes with Ron in the front seat. “Will you call me later? Give me an update?”

Ron nods. “I will indeed."

And before he can think of anything else to say, Ron is driving away. And that’s as it should be.

Because Ben has no reason to be at Leslie’s side when she wakes up.

He’s still reeling, wracked with fear, feeling the ghost of her lips on his. But there’s nothing he can do but fold up his heart again and tuck it away, heading home to work on his spreadsheets.

Quit your job.

But he doesn’t.

The next day, when he sees Leslie in a meeting, she doesn’t give any indication that she remembers the encounter. She doesn’t remember kissing him or being held in his arms, doesn’t remember that he was frantic with fear for her well-being.

He spies the paperwork underneath her meeting notes; it’s a campaign speech, riddled with notations and emphasis marks.

Just as well she doesn’t remember.

Chapter Text

October

Ben’s patiently assisting Jerry with the errors in his newly-filed PC-10 forms. It’s totally cool that he’s in the office, Leslie’s totally used to this now and it’s all totally fine. 

She has learned that it’s okay to be in Ben’s presence as long as she keeps her brain laser-focused on her Parks work or on the campaign. If she lets her mind wander, or if she lets their interactions get too familiar, she starts wading into dangerous waters. But as long as she’s hyper-professional all the time, she can keep Ben at the outskirts of her mind, even when he’s in the room with her.

(The trouble is, he always seems to be at the outskirts, even after he leaves the office. He wanders the periphery of her consciousness, looking a little lost. But she can ignore him, for the most part.)

When he entered the office earlier he gave Leslie a brisk nod, and she did the same for him, and she went on about her business. Which, today, involves an in-depth analysis of the Pawnee Goddesses retreat.

Right now there’s very very important work to be done: showing off her new Pawnee Goddesses badges. Well, not showing off, per se; she’s doing an inventory of all the available badges and deciding which ones to keep (probably all of them), which ones to retire (probably none of them), and what additional badges she needs to design (about a million). Also, some of the images seem to be incomprehensible to an outsider, so they might require a redesign.

And if she gets to show them off in the process, so be it! She’s had to start applying them to the back of her purple vest, as the front is completely full. Popping a piece of gum into her mouth, she turns to Donna.

“Okay! Next up is Donna. How ‘bout the badge on the top right? Can you tell what it is?”

Donna eyes it cannily. “Hmm-kay. That one looks like… a demon baby. Is it Best Impression of the Girl from The Exorcist?”

“Good Lord, Donna! No! This is Best Corn Husk Doll. My beautiful sparkling Ann failed so miserably at it that I had to show her how it was done.”

April puts in her two cents: “If you make a Best Impression of the Girl from The Exorcist badge I’ll think your club is a lot cooler.”

“Duly noted, April.” Leslie turns in the direction of Ron’s office. “Swanson! Tell me what you see here, underneath Sickest Break Dance.” She points to the badge in the middle left on the back of her vest.

Ron narrows his eyes. “It closely resembles a human rear end. But I can’t imagine that’s what it’s supposed to be.”

“No! Rrg! Why would I put a butt on a badge?”

April pipes up again. “Because you have a nice butt. Obviously.”

Somewhere behind Leslie, Ben clears his throat. Leslie remains steadfastly facing away from him.

“Well, it’s not a butt. It’s a peach. Best Painted Peach Pit.” (Leslie has decided that the best way to push through her lingering and ever-present fury at Greg Pikitis is to embrace peaches in all their forms.)

“Perhaps, then, you should have put a peach pit on there, rather than the entire fruit,” Ron says.

Leslie shakes her head. “I tried that, but it looked like a turd. I’m sticking with the butt. With the peach.”

“Whatever works for you. And your club. Which everyone wants to be part of… instead of mine.” Ron sighs and buries his face in his work, which is so unusual for him that Leslie takes note. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he’s pouting. 

Poor Ron. I should throw him a bone. She starts making plans in her head, plans for a new club, one that would recruit boys and girls who want the exact kind of experience that Ron Swanson would offer… Yes, that’s a great idea… She’s probably gotten enough feedback on the badges by this point, maybe she should move on to her next project, which she now thinks should be putting an ad in the paper advertising for this new club… and she can call it the—

“Hey, Leslie, didn’t I spot a new badge on the front of your vest, too?” It’s Jerry who’s speaking, interrupting her train of thought. “Right above the rainbow?”

Leslie turns to him, leaving Ben in soft focus at the corner of her eye. “Jerry! How surprisingly observant of you! I think you deserve a badge.”

Jerry squints. “I don’t have my glasses. Let me come closer, what’s it for?” He abandons his work with Ben to inspect the badge.

“Jerry, come back, we haven’t—” Ben says futilely.

Leslie allows Ben to materialize in full focus in her sight line, and abruptly she’s flustered and red in the face. Because as Jerry has started walking over to scrutinize the badge, she has remembered what it says, and she’s not ready to see Ben’s reaction to it.

(He used to tell her he loved her eyes.)

“Um, this one?” She pulls the gum out of her mouth and squashes it over the words on the badge. “That’s, uh…” Her mouth feels like it’s filled with cotton candy. “Eyes. Just… Eyes.”

“Really? That’s so generic,” Jerry says.

“Well, clearly, Jerry, you just don’t get it. Back to work with you.”

Jerry looks confused, but shrugs and heads back to his desk. But Ben is staring at her now, amused, and he doesn’t immediately resume his work with Jerry.

“Eyes?” Ben gives her that quirky side-smirk of his. “So… anyone with eyes is eligible?”

Leslie lifts her chin. “That’s correct. And I have eyes, so… I gave myself the badge.”

“Darn,” says Ben, “I should’ve tried for that one. I’d be hopeless at all the others.”

“Nah, I think you’d’ve had a decent shot at Most Rustic Port-A-Potty Beautification.” She realizes she’s creeping in Ben’s direction, and can’t seem to stop her feet.

“Oh! Yeah, you’re right, that sounds right up my alley,” Ben says. “I beautify Port-A-Potties all the time.”

“And very rustically, I must say.”

“Very.” Ben’s eyes narrow and he peers more closely at the badge; she’s only a few feet away from him now. “Um, so… why is there gum on it?

“Oh, I was just done with the gum, and I wasn’t near a trash can, so I—”

“Free gum?!” Andy barrels over to her, swipes at Leslie’s chewed-up gum, and pops it into his mouth as he speeds over to April’s desk. “Yes! It’s still super minty!”

“Smart, babe,” says April, wrapping her arms around him.

“Oh!” Jerry says, reading the now-unobstructed words on the badge. “Prettiest Eyes. Well, isn’t that cute.” He smiles and goes back to his paperwork.

Ben shifts his shoulders and before Leslie can stop it, she’s staring directly into his eyes. Or rather, he’s staring into hers, and he’s just been told that they’re pretty, and now he must be analyzing whether they are in fact the prettiest eyes ever, and how can she compete with all the eyes in the world, and Ben’s probably thinking she’s an egomaniac because she told him she gave herself the badge, or maybe he’s not thinking about her at all and she’s overanalyzing everything and—

“That’s a good one for you,” Ben says. “I won’t fight you for it.” His crooked smile tells her that whatever he’s thinking about her, it would make her ache to hear it.

Then his smile fades and he sets his shoulders again and taps his folder on Jerry’s desk, attention directed at the paperwork again. “There’s another error here, on page 4…”

The significant look was so fleeting that Leslie almost thinks she might have imagined it. But no, it was real and Ben apparently still thinks she has pretty eyes. Maybe even the prettiest.

Well. It was nice to have a moment with him, to be reminded of what they’d once had. But ultimately they made this decision together, and he’s moved on too.

Just like she has.

“Heh. So he’s free now?”

This is Marlene Griggs-Knope’s charming and tasteful reaction to the news that her daughter is no longer dating Ben Wyatt. Leslie purses her lips and casts her eyes around the scholarly books and quaint trinkets in her mother’s house.

“Not really, Mom. He’s everyone’s boss, so if I can’t date him, you can’t date him. And don’t you dare try.”

Leslie clears her throat and digs into her dinner. Her mom is an amazing cook. “So anyway. Didn’t you volunteer to co-chair that walk-a-thon that’s coming up? How’s that going?”

Instead of answering, her mom reaches across the table and gives her hand a squeeze, which, coming from Marlene, is equivalent to a giant bear hug.

“I liked him,” Marlene says.

Leslie rolls her eyes. “Yeah, no kidding, Mom. You tried to jump his bones.”

“I mean… I liked him for you.”

Oh.

Leslie hasn’t cried about this break-up since it happened. She cried plenty before the break-up, while she was building up to it, but after it was accomplished, she closed the door to her feelings. Everything has been about her job, and her campaign, and keeping the two separate. She’s thrown herself into her work, AKA the reason she ended the relationship in the first place. She’s not supposed to be the kind of woman who is defined by a man.

But seeing the genuine sympathy on the face of the woman who usually only thaws during one Hallmark Christmas movie per year is making Leslie’s defenses crack. A lump rises in her throat.

“Well, other fish in the… you know, back on the horse and… birds and the bees…” Leslie grimaces. “I dunno, Mom, I’m mixing up my animal metaphors, but it’s fine, right? You always told me not to worry about men.”

(Never mind that this advice has probably and perversely led Leslie to obsess about men. But ultimately her mother has always been right.)

(So why are there tears in Leslie’s eyes now?)

Marlene sighs. “Come here,” she says, and Leslie flies around to the other side of the table, kneels, and leans against her mom, crying as she hasn’t allowed herself to cry in a long, long time.

“There, there,” Marlene says, with the kind of patient impatience that has always characterized her mothering. She pats Leslie’s back exactly twelve times before holding her daughter at arm’s length. Her expression is still supportive, but it contains a simple challenge: pick yourself up, dear. “All right now?”

Leslie nods, wiping a tear away. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

Her mom kisses her forehead, squeezes her shoulder twice, and sends her back to the other side of the table.

“Now. You wanted to hear about the walk-a-thon?”

Leslie lets her mom divulge all the juicy details about the drama going on among the co-chairs and the rest of the planning committee. There are several unshed tears that Leslie holds back, tabling them for later. Marlene won’t want her to start up again.

But by the time she gets home, she can’t unlock the tears anymore.

Leslie and Tom are leaving the office, both decked out in Tom’s Entertainment 720 T-shirts, the only clothes available to them after their brawl in the mobile hot tub. Fortunately Tom has redeemed himself of his egomaniacal campaign sabotage by showing Leslie the video biography he made of her life. She can’t help but forgive Tom, but the frustrations of the day are still churning within her.

“Hey, you wanna be extremely fashionably late to April and Andy’s Halloween party?” Tom asks.

Leslie’s heart does a bizarre twisting wiggle. Ann has already texted her that she has left the party, so there will be no BFF to hide behind. “Um…” is all Leslie can get out before Tom stands and faces her with his cherubic countenance set in a pout.

“Pleeeeeease? I’m all depressy about E-Sev-Twent. Being the most attractive man at that party will cheer me up. But I can’t show up alone. Come on, Leslie! You don’t wanna make a broke man cry, do you?” He actually bats his eyelashes at her.

Leslie smirks and cuffs him on the shoulder. “Fine. But no more than an hour, okay? It’s getting late.”

It’ll be fine. She sees Ben all the time at work, and this will be just another place that Ben is. April and Andy will have more parties in the future and she can’t just not go to April and Andy’s parties forever.

He’ll probably be asleep already anyway. Or rather, trying to sleep; Ben can’t sleep through April and Andy’s shenanigans. She once recommended a decent brand of ear plugs to him, and she hopes he’s still using them.

Anyway, she’ll be fine.

When they show up, there’s still a respectable amount of partygoers. Tom heads immediately for the CD player, to change up the music. Leslie scans the place rapidly, but to her surprise, she not only doesn’t see Ben, she doesn’t see the hosts of the party. Her office-mates are no longer there, either. To her dismay, the first person she recognizes is Orin.

Well, whatever, he’s a human being; presumably he possesses the ability to pass on basic information.

“Orin!” she says, smiling as she strides confidently up to him and his ominous black cloak. “Buddy! Hey! Great to see you again!”

Orin stares at her with sunken eyes. “Do you know how many people on Earth have died since we last saw each other?”

“Um, nope, I don’t happen to have that statistic handy, and while don’t get me wrong, I’m eager to hear that fascinating piece of trivia—”

“It’s going up as we speak. 106 people die every minute.”

Leslie tries not to grimace. “Great! Hold that thought — where are April and Andy?”

A slow smile spreads across Orin’s thin, pale face. “There was blood.”

Leslie frowns. “Blood? Is everybody okay?”

“The wrestler attacked the tax man. He put him in a headlock. The tax man resisted passively… until passive resistance was no longer an option, and he struck the wrestler’s nose. There was blood.”

Leslie’s trying to make sense of all of this. “The wrestler… Andy? He told me he was gonna dress up as Chuck Liddell. And the tax man…” Her stomach drops. “Nobody goes to a Halloween party dressed as a tax man. Do you mean Ben? Andy attacked Ben?”

But Orin has receded into the murky depths of his mind, smiling fondly at the memory of the brawl. As Leslie searches around for someone else to ply for details, the door opens and the three residents of the house return. Ben is there, and April, and a grinning and broken-nosed Andy. 

All of the tension of the day resurfaces and bursts forth. Leslie morphs into a protective lioness and can’t even be bothered to feel awkward around Ben. She runs at Andy and grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him.

“You put him in a headlock?” she shrieks. She refuses to process what she glimpses in her peripheral vision: Ben, staring wide-eyed at her, mouth open, shoulders rising and falling in astonishment.

“Hey, Leslie! Relax!” Andy says, laughing, although he looks a little nervous about the finger she’s wagging near his nose. “It was all in good fun. Me and Ben are super-cool now.”

“I don’t care about now, I care about earlier! Why would you do that? Don’t test me, Dwyer, I almost drowned Tom earlier today!”

“Jeez, Leslie,” Andy says, and now he looks kinda scared of her.

“Leslie,” says April, her arms folded, “don’t get me wrong, you’re super awesome right now, but if you hit my man I’ll have to set you on fire.”

“Then light a match, April!” Leslie backs Andy into the wall, her finger still stuck in his face. She has zero plan, none whatsoever. All she knows is that Andy hurt Ben.

“Leslie!” Ben breaks in, and the spell of fury breaks as she turns to really look at him for the first time. “I’m okay,” he says. “Andy’s the one with the broken nose. I’m completely fine.” He rolls his eyes a bit. “I mean… Andy could probably have gotten his point across in a less violent way—”

“Damn right he could!” Leslie cries indignantly.

Ben gives her a look. “Hey, didn’t I just hear you say you almost drowned Tom?”

Leslie is discombobulated; she takes her hands off of Andy. “That was— that was totally different —”

“Anyway… Andy was trying to get me to be less passive-aggressive. And it worked. So… it all worked out. Okay?” Ben holds her gaze steadily, and reality begins to settle back into its foundation.

Ben’s apparently fine. His friendship with Andy seems better than it was yesterday. Leslie herself holds no moral high ground on nonviolence today. And moreover, she is ostensibly someone who doesn’t have any particular investment in Ben’s interests over Andy’s. 

So she should probably back down at this point.

“Okay,” she says.

Conceding is no fun. She hopes she never has to go through it in her City Council race.

April hooks her arm through Andy’s and they head over to greet an increasingly-inebriated Tom, leaving Leslie and Ben standing in the same general vicinity.

“So I guess I’m gonna go try to finish up my work,” Ben says, indicating his room.

“Still working on that audit?” she asks. “Trying to get everyone from my department to file their paperwork on time?”

“Yes…” he says cautiously. “I mean, it’s not just your department, it’s all of them…”

“Good,” she says. “You know I think you’re a fascist when you try to cut our budget. But on-time paperwork filings? I’m super on board with that.”

He smiles at her and looks relieved. “Well… good.” He gives her the impression that he’s trying to think of more to say, but eventually he gives up. “Good night, Leslie.”

“Wait,” she says. “So… you’re magically less passive-aggressive now, huh?” she asks, smirking faintly. They hadn’t been together long enough to get in any real fights. But a few minor spats had given her a sense of what he’d be like if they encountered a significant disagreement, and it would be filled with irksomely veiled digs and jabs. For someone so blunt and forthright at work, he’s remarkably evasive in his personal gripes. “That sounds like a good change to me.”

He smiles, relaxing a bit. “I know,” he says, and then very quietly: “The dishes thing.”

“The dishes thing.” Her smirk is in full force now. They lock eyes and share the memory together for a solid three seconds before Ben is the one to break the connection. Looking down at his shoes he says, “Uh… thanks for… defending my honor, I guess. That was nice of you.”

“Guess you defended yourself pretty well, too,” she replies. Against her will, she’s aroused by the whole sordid tale that’s coming together in her mind. Ben’s passive resistance? Hot. His final explosion of self-defense? Even hotter.

“I guess,” he says. And with one final glance into her eyes, he says again, “Night.”

“G’night.”

He doesn’t linger, just heads into his room.

Leslie tries to mingle with the party die-hards, but she’s not really feeling it. When the allotted hour is up, she collars a drunken Tom and tells him it’s time to hit the road. She makes her farewells and drags Tom outside.

“27 million three hundred thousand,” declares a hollow voice, seemingly from nowhere. Leslie jumps and turns around, finding Orin standing directly behind her on the front walkway.

“What? How did you get out here?” When Orin doesn’t respond, she realizes that’s the answer to his earlier question: how many people have died since they last saw each other. She doesn’t even attempt to continue the chummy act from earlier.

“Jeez! Do you literally count the days between the times you’ve seen people, just so you can calculate that?”

“Yes.”

“Ugh. Okay. Well… have fun with that, I guess. Tom, can you try to stand? Pretty please?”

While driving Tom home, she finds that Orin’s ridiculously morbid computations have gotten her counting the days since she last kissed Ben. She doesn’t usually indulge in brooding like that. 

If she goes the rest of her life without ever kissing Ben again…

Dammit, Orin.

But then Tom starts crooning TLC’s “Waterfalls” in the passenger seat and she forces herself to perk up. She’s got a great government job with wacky co-workers she loves and she’s running for City Council. All her dreams are coming true. What more could she want?

Right?

Chapter Text

Early November

For a while, Leslie’s been kind of withdrawn from Ben. She’s doing her campaigning thing, and while they’ve had some fraught moments together, most of the time she has just seemed like she wants to move on from him.

Until… recently.

It started when he got a random voicemail from her one night, just telling him a story of one of Pawnee’s infamous raccoons getting stuck in her trunk. It made perfect sense for her to leave him this voicemail, because he had actually, bizarrely, once made a joke about that exact scenario. He laughed as he listened to it; it made him feel warm and tingly inside, having her voice in his inbox.

Two days later, there were three texts in a row. Each buzz of his phone was more exciting than the last. He responded only with a little typed-out smiley face, with a dash for a nose and a parenthesis for a mouth. He didn’t want to encourage too much interaction, but he secretly wished for more. When it never came, he felt… empty.

The day after that, there were four texts. He responded with a tentative “haha.”

And the day after that — today, in point of fact — is when he sees her striding purposefully down the hallway to his office as he’s entering it. Work is over for the day — he’s just going back to his office to collect his things — and she’s got an unmistakable luster in her eyes that tells him she’s going to ask him to hang out. 

“Ben!” she calls out, waving, and he pretends to get a call on his cell phone. But she’s not deterred; she waits patiently, right next to him, smiling brightly until he finishes his conversation with nobody — he’s never been very good at faking a phone call. He hangs up and faces her.

“Hellooo….” he says, cautiously.

“Ben! Wanna get dinner tonight?”

Ever since this new initiative of hers has begun, he’s been uncertain as to what she wants. Is she over him, and she wants to be “just friends”? Or is she trying to keep some zombie version of their relationship alive? Either way, it sounds pretty unpleasant for him. He draws back from her a pace. “Leslie… you know that we…”

She laughs maniacally and cuffs him on the arm. “Come off it, old sport! What what!” she says, suddenly and inexplicably British. Then she clears her throat and drops the accent. “Not like that. Just… as friends. Because friends get dinner together. Right?”

Ben swallows. He isn’t prepared for this; he’d thought that she understood, just as well as he does, that they can’t hang out anymore. Glancing furtively into Chris’s office, he says, “I, um… can’t. I’m really swamped with work. I… think I’m actually gonna just order something and eat it here.”

“Oh! Well, I could do that, too. Chinese food, soda, and a giant stack of paperwork! What could be better?”

“No, I… really need to work. I think you’d distract me.”

Leslie looks palpably hurt. “But… we’ve worked in the same space before. I thought we worked better together.”

“Yes, but that was when we…” He hears Chris take a phone call in his office and stops short; continuing that sentence could be risky.

No, he cannot work casually with her now. Back then, their minds were sharpened by the magnetic feeling of being together. Now, all he’d be able to think about would be the fact that they’re not together.

“Just… not tonight. Okay?” he says decisively.

She nods steadfastly. “Not tonight. Buuuut… maybe soon!” And she’s gone before he can clarify his meaning.

Not tonight, not ever. He can’t be her friend. If he’s in her presence, he can’t avoid loving her.

Chris Traeger’s selective obliviousness, which was such a godsend when Ben and Leslie were having a secret forbidden relationship, is starting to get on Ben’s nerves. Chris has just suggested, with blithe nonchalance, that the two of them accompany Leslie to the Reasonabilists’ cult meeting — erm, gathering at the park tonight. Ben speaks up automatically, trying to thwart this plan.

“Oh, I don’t think we have to do that…”

“No, no, no, I insist...”

As Chris continues talking, Ben and Leslie share a series of glances: Leslie’s hopeful (and slightly maniacal) grin turns inquisitive, and Ben gives her a look that he hopes will make her understand. But she doesn’t.

And Chris is set on this.

Great. Extra hours with Leslie after work. Before they got together, this would have given him butterflies in his stomach. Now, the butterflies quickly morph into drunken slugs.

I should never have kissed her.

He erases that thought rapidly. Not kissing Leslie, at the moment he first did it, was never an option. So he just has to live with the consequences, and the consequences make him feel like a recently snared fish, flopping around on the deck of a boat, waiting patiently to be gutted when she inevitably starts dating someone else.

After they head to the adjoining office, Leslie peers at him with mischievously sparkling eyes. “Well, it looks like we’re kind of forced to hang out with each other!” she says, triumph gleaming in her whole expression. She reaches for him as though to give him another light punch on the arm, buddy-buddy-style, but he dodges it.

He’s actually a little irked; why can’t she see how bad an idea it is for them to spend extra time together? What does she think they’ll gain from this? He has to cut it off, and he’ll be as blunt about it as possible with Chris still only a few feet away.

“Yeah, listen… I’ll— I’ll come for a bit, but… if it’s okay with you, I’m not gonna stay. It’s just, y’know, still kinda weird, right?”

Leslie says “yeah” about fifty times, and that she totally gets it.

She doesn’t get it.

And he’s about to explain it, quite patiently, before she grabs the camera operator by the arm and says, “Time for a confessional, right? Right. Bye, Ben!” She’s gone, and with her, the cameras.

He sighs and slumps, simultaneously wishing he didn’t have to see her after work, and looking eagerly forward to it.

Looking forward to it was a horrible idea. It hurts so damn much. While Shauna Malwae-Tweep interviews their trio about the Reasonabilists, his mind is only somewhat on the conversation. Chris and Leslie are answering all of her questions anyway — why, exactly, does he need to be there again? Besides the fact that Chris has it in his head that he and Leslie are some sort of dream team?

He’s standing right next to her. It used to be that when they stood next to each other, he could feel an invisible thread of connection between them, even long ago when she hated him. This is worse than her hating him. Now it feels like they exist in different parallel universes, kinda like when Ro and La Forge were out of phase with the rest of the Enterprise crew in TNG.

The interview ends, and Chris claps him on the back as they walk away. Chris has a twinkle in his eye. “Ben! Did you catch that?”

“Catch what?”

“Shauna Malwae-Tweep was absolutely, definitively, unequivocally flirting with you. And not only that, I do believe you were also flirting with her.”

Ben’s stomach drops. “Really? I don’t even remember what I said. I was kinda phoning it in.”

“Ben, the chemistry between you was off the charts. Even I would not be able to leap to the top of those charts. And I think that you should go for it.”

Ben steals a look back at Shauna, who’s talking to Leslie now. All he sees is Leslie.

“Erm… I dunno. I’m not sure I’m up for dating right now.”

“Sure you are! Ben, you haven’t dated anyone in ages, and I’ve got my eye on you — you’re ready.” Chris stops walking and pivots to face Ben, his eyes wide and earnest. “May I be frank with you?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “I know that you wanted to date someone at City Hall, and that I was tragically put in the position of denying you that request. I also know that you haven’t dated anyone since then. I suppose you still don’t want to tell me who it was? Or rather, you don’t want to finally tell me that it was Jennifer from Economic Development?” Chris winks at him.

Ben always expects Chris to be more perceptive than this. He’s good at his job and he’s super healthy, which theoretically should sharpen his mind. But all the brain food in the world hasn’t allowed him to see the truth in many, many cases, this first among them.

Ben half-smiles noncommittally and puts his hands in his pockets. Chris laughs. “Okay, okay. I won’t ask again. But if you’re still carrying a torch for Jennifer, you must know that it’s time to move on. You can never, ever date her. So why not pursue someone you can date?”

Ben stares off at a nearby tree, searching for an answer, and finding nothing except leaves.

“I guess,” Ben says, finally. “You’re right. It’s never gonna happen with… Jennifer… and I might as well try to move on.”

“Way to go, buddy!” Chris says, and then his eyes grow even wider. “Oh my. She’s coming over.”

“Leslie?” Shit. It was automatic.

Chris laughs. “No, silly, Shauna! Prepare your suavest mannerisms.”

“I don’t… have any… I wouldn’t really call myself suave, I… oh! Hi.”

And there she is. Shauna, touching his arm. 

“Hey!” she says. “I just wanted to check in with you, Ben. I noticed that you didn’t answer many of my questions, and I have a few follow-ups that I’d like to address to you, personally.”

He tries to be attracted to her. He supposes that, in a Knopeless vacuum, he could find her attractive.

“Great, um… fire away.”

Chris is grinning like the Cheshire cat. “Well, I’ll be off on my rounds. Gotta keep a sharp eye out for Zorp!” he says, laughing, then grows serious and says to Shauna, “In case I’m still on the record, I must make it absolutely clear that I do not, in fact, expect Zorp the Surveyor to appear tonight, or ever. There is no need for Pawneeans to panic in any way, shape, or form, about the existence of a 28-foot tall lizard god with a volcano mouth.”

And then Chris is gone in a flash, so quick that Ben has no idea which direction he’s headed.

“Well!” Shauna says, with a winning smile. “I guess I’ll… get started. Um… how do you, Ben Wyatt, personally view the followers of Reasonabilism?”

“Well, it’s just like Chris and Leslie said. This group is a part of the town’s history, and—”

“But you, Ben. I don’t want the party line, I want your own unique thoughts. I suspect that you probably have some interesting takes.”

“What makes you say that?”

She grins. “I’ve just got a hunch about you. I have very good instincts.”

He’s flattered, he can’t help it. “Well… I think this whole story says a lot about Pawnee, actually. This is a creative, passionate town, and the fact that people invented their own religion and have stuck to it all these years is actually kind of compelling. I don’t believe a word of it, but I think it gives these people meaning… and there’s a lot to be said for that.”

Shauna practically bats her eyes at him. “Wow! That’s fascinating!” Really? Fascinating? He kind of thinks she just wants to get laid, that she didn’t totally listen to the words he was saying. 

“You’re not from Pawnee, right?” she asks. “You moved here recently?” Well, at least she knows something about him. He’s flattered once more. Then again, she’s a reporter, and it’s her job to know these things.

“Yes, less than two years ago.” This surprises him as he says it. It feels so much longer.

Apparently Shawna agrees to some extent. “Well, you sound like a life-long Pawneean. How did you come to love this town so much?”

“Oh, well, that would be Leslie, actually.” He smiles involuntarily. “She’s talked to me so much about this town and how much she loves it; she really made me see the beauty in it.”

“Oh!” Shauna looks surprised and glances back in Leslie’s direction. Ben doesn’t follow her gaze. “I got the impression from her, just now, that the two of you don’t talk much.”

Ben suddenly realizes, with a flash of mild panic, that she must have asked Leslie about him. Specifically, about whether he’s single. Leslie’s reaction to this question could tell him a lot about how she views him. Has she moved on to friendship before he’s been able to, or is she trying to rekindle something impossible?

He steals a glance at Leslie out of the corner of his eye. She looks absolutely frantic at the sight of him talking to Shawna.

Absurdly, hope stirs within him. She still likes me.

Like. What a ridiculous word. He loves her, and under the current circumstances, there’s nothing he can do to change that. A while back, he would have bet money on her loving him, too. Now, his perceptions are so jumbled up that he can’t figure out what’s true.

Even if she does love him, it doesn’t matter.

He’s said something else to Shauna, apparently, although he doesn’t remember what it was, and she laughs heartily and touches his arm again. His first thought is guilt: Leslie’s watching. He shouldn’t make her jealous.

But… why? That’s ridiculous. They have to get over each other. There’s no other option. If Leslie’s watching, then let her watch. He has to move on, and so does she.

“Hey, um… I’ve gotta get interviews with Herb and the other Zorpies for a bit, but… I’ll catch up with you later?” Shauna asks, sounding hopeful.

Ben nods. “Definitely. I’ll be here.”

He doesn’t know if he likes her. All he knows is that he has to make every attempt possible to stop loving Leslie.

He can feel her staring lasers at him after her rival walks away, and has the urge to meet her gaze. If he does, there’s every possibility he’ll run to her and take her in his arms and reassure her that there’s no one else but her.

And then both of their careers will be over. Her campaign will be over.

So he resists, and walks off to find Chris again.

When Shauna finds Ben later, he lets himself fall easily into conversation with her. It’s nice. She’s nice. When he laughs, it’s genuine. He tries to focus on the positive: this is a good person, and I am actually allowed to date her.

And then Leslie is there again, bringing a hailstorm of awkwardness, calling him boring and telling Shauna to keep her pants on. It’s really, really immature. He’s annoyed, and he tries not to let her derail him. So when Shauna suggests going to Tom’s party, he makes no bones about being interested in it as well. He’s not actually super interested; loud, raucous, Tom-related parties aren’t usually his thing. But he knows that Leslie has an obligation to remain here at the park, and maybe this is the best way to get away from her.

Then Shauna’s gone. “Wow. What an unbelievably unpleasant person,” Leslie says of Shauna.

Ben purses his lips. “Are you… mad about something, somehow?”

“Mad?” No! No, why would I be mad? I haven’t been mad since last week, when Jerry ate the waffle I was saving in the office fridge.”

Ben, forgetting his annoyance, immediately recognizes the severity of Jerry’s crime. “Oh, no. He didn’t. It wasn’t… it wasn’t Sprinkle Waffle, was it?” Leslie sometimes saves one waffle from a JJ’s meal, adding icing and sprinkles to it at home and eating it the next day for lunch.

“It was Sprinkle Waffle!” she huffs.

Ben shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Leslie. Did you make a picture on it with the sprinkles, or…”

“Of course I did, it was…”

“Wait, lemme guess. Was it Lil’ Sebastian?”

“No, but that would be a good one.”

“Joe Biden?”

“He’s too beautiful to be waffle-ized.”

“Sunflowers? Like the mural?”

She smiles, her anxiety and affectations melting away before his eyes. “You got it. Although sprinkle-sunflowers on a waffle just kinda look like a yellow blur.”

He laughs, then realizes that he’s fallen back into the ease of conversing with her. The longer this goes on, the more painful it’ll be when it ends. “Well… okay. Just… take care of yourself, if you’re stressed out about something.” He starts to walk away.

“Um…” Leslie says deliriously. Ben turns back to her. All her tension has returned, and it pains him to see it. But there’s nothing he can do. “Um. There’s something I…” She flails around for more to say.

Ben waits patiently, but she’s got nothing.

“See you later, Leslie.”

It’s ridiculous that he’s still here at the park. It’s ridiculous that Chris is still here, that anyone is taking this seriously. Yes, he meant what he said to Shauna earlier about how the Zorpies represent the passion of Pawneeans. But now that he’s not speaking to a member of the press, he doesn’t feel terribly connected to his adopted town right now.

Shauna told him, as she left, that she was heading over to Tom’s party. And she said it with a significant glint in her eyes. So… maybe I’ll see you there? she had said.

Maybe, he’d replied, and he’s pretty sure he said it flirtily.

And then, just in case there had been any doubt, she’d pressed a small piece of paper into his hand. Her phone number.

If he goes over to the venue, he can envision a number of ways the night could proceed. The only (realistic) one that appeals to him is heading home early and spending an hour on chess.com trying to crack a 1500 rating. But it would be good for him to go to the party. It would hasten his moving-on process if he allows the night to go a different direction, one that ends with at least a kiss and maybe more.

He makes sure that Leslie’s not watching him, then hunches his shoulders and tries to crawl inside his jacket as he leaves.

Wishful thinking that he could get out of there without her noticing.

“Hey! Hey, where you going? Where you headed off to? Do you want to play a fun game with me that I made up called Chess Risk? It's half chess, half Risk and takes like 15 hours to play.”

It’s becoming clearer that she’s not just trying to monopolize him as a friend; she still has feelings for him, if he dares to flatter himself. And it’s just not fair to him. She’s being unfair.

“Okay, yeah, I think I'm gonna go,” he says.

“I… whoo… okay.”

“All right?” He shouldn’t have phrased it like a question. Be more decisive, Ben… He takes a few steps.

“Oh my god!” Leslie’s voice has taken on a higher-pitched, more urgent tone. Ben turns back to her.

“What?”

“I forgot! I have a thing… I need to show you.”

A… thing?

“Oh.”

“I need to… bring you there right now, it's so… amazing, it's gonna freak you out. It's, uh, it's something that we need to get in my car and go to, so let's do that.”

Her tone is so insistent that he thinks there’s no way this is another delaying tactic. It has to be work-related, this is her Urgent Work Problem voice. He has to go with her; it must be important.

“Okay.”

“Come on.”

Ann intervenes, trying to stop Leslie, but Leslie is unstoppable. The expression on Ann’s face, as Leslie yanks him away by the wrist, gives him pause. But this is Leslie, and she’s ultimately very professional… right? There’s no way she’d abandon her post just to disrupt his life.

If he were in the car with a stranger right now, he’d be dead sure he was being kidnapped. He idly wonders whether, if Leslie were to go nuts and murder him, the camera crew would intervene on his behalf. Probably not. He goes back to ignoring them.

Because Leslie’s already nuts, and she’d never murder him. However, she does seem hell-bent on screwing up his life.

It’s been close to half an hour, with Leslie providing a never-ceasing monologue to entertain him, or, more accurately, to keep him quiet. A few times he’s tried to interject, but she just keeps barreling forward, as though silence is her mortal enemy second only to Ben getting a word in edgewise.

“And that concludes the story of how my car got a coffee stain on the passenger seat. Next, I will tell you about the ever-present ring of bird poop on the windshield, and the steps I have taken to try to remove it. It all started with…”

Ben has always been charmed by Leslie’s endless patter when she gets into it, but tonight, for the first time, it grates on him. He’s trying to listen to what she’s saying, and to engage with it, but she seems to be talking at him rather than to him. When he notices that they’re going in circles, and that Leslie keeps making a look of consternation like she’s desperately trying to think of something to show him, he can no longer pretend to pay attention.

It’s just not fair. She’s the one who decided to run for office…

Another thought taps insistently at the back of his mind — you could quit — but he pushes it away.

He calls her on her BS: “...We’ve already been down this street.” There’s a grim joke somewhere in there, something about having already gone down the road of dating each other. But he refrains from attempting it.

Not long afterward, she’s pulling into an abandoned gas station that looks like it could be the set of a horror movie called Haunted Gas Pump IV: Revenge of the Unleaded, and declaring that it was once owned by Mick Jagger.

This has to stop. Ben’s heart feels like it’s been turned inside out and painted over with wet chalk.

“I know what you're doing, Leslie.” He tries not to make it sound like an accusation, but… well, it kinda is one. And it’s true.

“I'm… showing you a part of Rock and Roll history!” she says.

“You can't do this. Y’know, we broke up. And I kind of feel like we shouldn't… hang out together, just the two of us.” It hurts like hell, but he’s used to this. Delivering the bad news that no one wants to hear. This is what he does. “Because every time we do, it just makes it harder. Y’know?”

“Okay,” she says. And then again, defeatedly: “Okay.”

He does a slow, reluctant about-face and shuffles back to the car — there’s nothing else he can do. She’s gotta drive him back to his car, and the silence that’s emanating from her tells him she’s done with her scheming for the night. She gets in next to him and starts the car.

Leslie’s mortal enemy, silence, has claimed her. It’s unnerving, and he almost turns to her a few times, with the instinct to strike up a conversation, but has to stop himself. The third time, he catches a glimpse of her profile in his peripheral vision. Her jaw is set; she’s holding back tears. He knows that look. He’s seen it during every inspirational montage in every documentary they’ve watched together.

We never finished watching Ken Burns’s The Civil War. And now we never will, not together.

He slumps back in the seat, and Leslie takes notice. She opens her mouth to say something, then closes it, and opens it again.

“Do you want me to drop you off at the party?” she asks. The flatness of her voice is painful to him. “Or… just skip it and go straight to Shauna’s house?”

He refuses to take the bait. “My car is fine.”

They’re almost there. They pull up next to his car and sit in hers for a few long moments, both taking shaky breaths.

They’ve made out in this car before. Right here, in these two seats, leaning over the console.

Now, they’re both miserable, breathing out their sadness into the air like puffs of noxious cigar smoke.

“Um, okay. Well, here we are,” she says.

He angles his body toward hers. “Leslie…”

She screws up her face and shakes her head. “Gotta go, Zorp’s coming soon, bye.” She runs out of the car without even locking it.

Probably a good thing. He doesn’t even know what he was going to say.

He goes to Tom’s party, looks around at the extravagance, and shakes his head wearily. He’s about to leave when he spots Shauna across the room, talking to two other women.

He could go over to her, and it could be fun. They could chat about which part of the party is the most ridiculous.

But there’s only one person he’d really want to have that conversation with. He leaves without saying hi to anyone except Roy Hibbert.

He plays chess online for a while, but doesn’t break 1500.

Chess Risk… He finds himself laughing as he turns off his computer. If anyone could come up with a plausible way to fuse those two games… well, it would be himself, but Leslie would be a close second.

Leslie.

She really messed him up today. For the umpteenth time, he has the same thought: It’s not fair of her. He’d thought he had a good handle on Leslie and all her quirks and excesses, but there’s even more intensity to her that he’s discovering now that they’ve broken up.

And still, it doesn’t scare him away.

Tonight, she completely sabotaged his prospects with another woman, dragged him along on a wild goose chase, and wasted his time.

It shouldn’t be the most romantic thing ever, but he’s the guy who’s in love with Leslie Knope, after all, and this is the most Leslie Knope behavior in the world. It’s infuriating… and it makes him love her all the more.

Maybe… maybe he should just say screw it and quit his job… maybe, if this is how she feels about him, if she is this passionate… He can see it in his mind’s eye, making the romantic gesture, running to her house in the rain and shouting at her window…

Her campaign could survive it, surely, she’s such an amazing candidate…

But the ever-present fear of failure grips him like a vise. He can’t be the laughingstock of another town he loves. The terror of being disgraced again, of having nothing, is palpable. He can’t just throw himself at Leslie’s feet as a fool, a jester in a dunce cap. How unimpressive he would be. And she deserves someone of the highest caliber.

So. He’s keeping his job, and she’s keeping hers, and that’s the end of it.

Shit.

He doesn’t sleep much. When he finally does fall asleep, it’s only because he’s soothed himself by playing through half a mental game of Chess Risk.

April and Andy never came home last night. Ben realizes this as he closes the door after Leslie leaves in the morning, after she knocked incessantly on the door and tricked him into revealing that Shauna wasn’t there. And she seemed… surprisingly fine. Breezy, cheeky. Very different from last night.

She apologized; she was mature. He should be happy about that.

“And it wasn't until just now that I realized the romantic part of our relationship is over.”

He’s still reeling from that.

That sentence hit him like a ton of bricks, even though it shouldn’t have. If she’s able to give up her feelings that easily, to transform their familiar interactions into something completely unromantic… maybe they really can just be friends. He’s seen it happen before. Chris is great friends with all his exes. It’s possible.

He feels gray and empty.

Back in his room, he picks up Shauna’s number and stares blankly at it, knowing that any sane person would call her. So why can’t he do it?

Chapter Text

Mid-November

Leslie is sooo cool with this whole friendship thing. Everything is great. She and Ben are friends. Yay! It’s basically the best thing of all time.

(She is holding onto these beliefs with a death grip and a wild-eyed smile.)

Really, it’s been good in the days since the End of the World event. Ben doesn’t seem to be dating Shawna, which makes everything better, not that it matters, and it’s almost reached a point where it feels like it did in the beginning: when Leslie and Ben were first becoming friends, but didn’t necessarily like each other yet. 

It’s great! Just great. 

(...if she ignores the fact that the phase before they liked each other was immediately followed by them liking each other so much they couldn’t hold it in anymore.)

Anyway.

Because she is the chillest person in the world, she can totally be around him as much as possible and she won’t want to make out with him. Totally. She can even say things to him like “amen, brother” as she briefs him on the status of the Model UN event. 

Brother. 

Sure, she can morph her romantic feelings for him into sibling-ish affections. Boom! She’s done it already. Who cares that he’s so freaking cute right now, when he’s psyched that they get to be Denmark and Peru? It doesn’t matter at all, even though Denmark and Peru are objectively the best possible combination of countries they could be together and Ben gets it and no one else could ever possibly get it and she’ll never find anyone else like him in all 193 nations of the world, ever. 

All good!

“So which countries do we think we’ll need to bring on board with us?” Ben says, continuing the most exhilarating planning session she’s had in a long time. “France for sure, and probably Brazil...”

“I agree, but we’ll also need to be flexible; our GMO strategy will go over better with some countries than with others, and we’ll need to make sure we feel them out in the moment to see who’s simpatico with us.”

“Very true,” Ben agrees. “And our backup plan, if we can’t get enough countries to agree with us… how about… improved irrigation systems?”

“Ooh, that’s perfect,” Leslie says. “It’ll be a smooth switch-over because the GM crops will already require revamped irrigation.” She tosses her hair triumphantly. “We are gonna crush this thing. We’ll have an advantage here because our proposed treaties will already be in lockstep with each other.” It briefly crosses her mind that she’s crowing about “winning” in an exercise that’s supposed to be about working together (with children, no less), but her competitive spirit barrels through and shoves those thoughts aside.

Ben nods thoughtfully, stroking his chin; he’s equally obsessed with winning. “We could simply coordinate our strategies, but you know what would really give us an edge? Merging our treaties.”

Leslie’s heart flutters. “You wanna… merge treaties with me?”

Ben’s face shows a flash of seriousness, like he regrets his remark and maybe even resents hers. But then he smirks again, with a “screw it” expression. “Hell yeah, I do.”

She grins. “I bet our treaties are gonna merge really, really nicely together.” Friends friends friends! Be friends! “Anyway, that’s flipping awesome,” she says, and raises her hand for a high five, which he gives her.

Ben clears his throat and bends down, peering very interestedly at the paper in front of them on the table. Unfortunately, Leslie does the exact same thing at the same time, and their heads knock painfully into each other.

“Ow!”

“Oof. Ow.”

“You okay, Ben?” She rubs the spot on his forehead where they hit each other. “Where was it, here?”

“Yeah. Um… a little to the right. No… my right.”

She watches as he closes his eyes, completely losing himself in the moment as she soothes his wound. Her head doesn’t hurt at all anymore. She rubs his forehead until his eyes pop open in alarm, and then she retracts her hand.

“Ahem. Right.” She dives back into the paperwork before he can do it again. Or so she thinks.

They bonk heads again.

This time, mercifully, they’re overcome by a fit of laughter.

“I’m just gonna sit over here,” he says, planting a chair catty-corner from her, “lest we both lose all our brain cells before the event.”

Leslie nods fervently. “We’ll definitely need brain cells,” she says.

They continue on as if nothing happened. And really, nothing did. It was just two friends basking in each other’s touch and physical proximity and desperately wanting more of it. 

Totally normal.

“Security Council, we need you to lead us, or billions of people will starve to death… But most importantly, have fun!”

Shortly after Leslie opens the Model UN proceedings with three raps of her gavel, the camera crew grabs her for a quick confessional. She has just shared a spellbinding moment with Ben, who looked at her with such admiration that she could practically feel the beating of his heart from across the line of faux-dignitaries. His entire face had broken into the most beautiful smile she had ever seen.

(It’s super normal for friends to look at each other like that, right? And to want to run into each other’s arms and make out with each other? Right?!)

These are the thoughts that are filling her mind as the camera kids ask her some question or other.

“Ben? Yeah. I mean, you know the story. Due to my campaign, the romantic aspect of our relationship is over. And I'm totally fine with that. But Ben and I have so much

in common. I mean, we're amazing friends. And friendship is better, because friends help you move. They drive you to the airport. Boyfriends just… love you and marry you.”

The interviewer kid gapes at her blankly. “Uh, that’s all great stuff, but I asked you what you and Ben’s first move in the mock UN thingy is gonna be.”

“Oh. That. Um.” She glances over and sees that Ben is taking his position, beckoning her. “Why don’t you follow me and find out? Here we go.”

Help you move and drive you to the airport… Surely she could have thought of more things that friends do. Ben means more to her than that, right?

Boyfriends just love you and marry you…

She banishes the image of Ben in a tux, at the altar, his eyes full of love while she walks down the aisle toward him.

Leslie knows that it’s not ideal when she gets snatched away from the scenario to take some campaign photos, but Ben has to understand. He knows how important this campaign is to her. He’s known it all along, and it’s the reason they had to break up, and… yes, of course he’ll understand.

So why does he sound all sarcastic when he repeats her phrasing about “treading water until she’s ready”? She already knows he had the potential for passive-aggressiveness, but he wouldn’t be passive-aggressive about this, would he?

Well. Anyway. Her photo op goes great, and she can fully commit to the scenario now. She returns to the table fresh-faced and ready to roll. 

“So! Are you guys ready to polish off this treaty?”

“Oh, uh... actually, I merged our treaty with Russia and China's treaty.” Ben says it so casually, as though he has every expectation that Leslie will be understanding about this shocking act of treachery. They, Leslie and Ben, Denmark and Peru, had planned to merge their treaties, and instead he went behind her back and merged with whatever countries happened to be nearby?

It hurts more than she can express.

“I got cut out of my own treaty?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, and now his voice has got an edge to it. “I got sick of treading water, so I swam over to Asia, made a deal.”

Now it’s clear. He was being passive-aggressive before. And that makes Leslie mad, mad, mad. When she doesn’t tell the truth, it’s because she is too damn passionate to see the truth clearly. But when Ben doesn’t tell the truth? It’s because he’s too cowardly to be straightforward. 

And why? Why does he have to be like this in interpersonal relationships, when he can be so blunt and clear-cut when making budget cuts in a work setting?

It makes her roar inside; it makes her blow up the whole event without even realizing what’s happening.

But it doesn’t make her stop loving him. If anything, she loves his passive-aggressive little butt even more.

Leslie refuses to label the event as a disaster, but it’s clearly one of the worst things she’s done as a City Council candidate. Thank goodness her campaign staff left before it all went to hell.

Cassidy, AKA France, reminds Leslie how easy it would be for her to call the press and tell them about it. Ultimately she doesn’t call them, but it chastens Leslie greatly. How did she let this happen? Candidate Knope is supposed to be on her best behavior.

The answer, of course, is Ben. And boyfriends. And how they love you and marry you, and how Ben can’t do those things.

It makes her crazy. But she promises herself, as she negotiates with him in an April-facilitated meeting, that friendship can be better than what she described in her confessional.

They come to a detente, as it were, between their two warring nations: an agreement to have a five-minute conversation every day at work. And Leslie feels very chill and reasonable about it. No, not the fake-chillness that she has sometimes been accused of, but a true and unimpeachable, smooth and savvy chillness.

Even Ann is impressed.

“Really? You agreed to that?” Ann asks, regarding the new five-minute rule, when Leslie visits her in her office.

“I proposed it.”

“Wow. That’s very… mature of you. Of both of you.” Ann presses her lips together in that way she does when she’s trying not to say something.

“What?” Leslie asks.

Ann shakes her head rapidly. “I promised myself I wouldn’t say anything like this.”

“Well now you have to say it. Out with it, Perkins, or I’ll pester you forever.”

Ann loses the battle with herself. “Gah! Fine. It’s just… I don’t know if it’ll work.”

Leslie bristles. “Oh, you think that exes can never be friends?”

“I didn’t say that. I know plenty of exes who are friends with each other. I mean, I’m friends with Andy, and I’m sort of friends with Chris, I guess. But you and Ben?” She sighs. “Please don’t make me say it.”

“Say it.” Leslie doesn’t mean to let her voice drop a gristly octave, but apparently it happens anyway. She sounds like a demon baby; Ann almost jumps out of her seat.

“You’re too perfect for each other!” Ann chirps. “So perfect that you’re always gonna end up wanting to be together again. I think if you’ve really committed to not being together… you’re gonna have to avoid contact as much as possible.”

Leslie lifts her chin. “Dear Ann, you bitter cynic, you wide-eyed romantic. Only a mystical golden pheasant like yourself could pull off such a combination. I will defy your expectations, pheasant.”

Leslie sweeps out of Ann’s office more determined than ever to make this work. She is, as ever, so chill.

Cassidy is the last student to leave the City Council chambers after Leslie and Ben give the kids a chance to visit it. She’s glowing, and Leslie loves to see her happy and excited again. The last thing she needs is another young idealist growing jaded about politics.

“Seriously, Ms. Knope, this was fantastic. Even if you hadn’t said we were going to hold the Model UN here, I would have loved to see this place. I hope to run for office someday. After the other day, I wasn’t sure I could say this, but… I really do want to be like you when I’m older.”

Leslie’s heart is touched (and her ego is mollified, but she tries not to focus on that part of it).

“Thank you, Cassidy. Really. That means so much.” She sighs. “It’s probably for the best that you learn now that your role models aren’t gonna be perfect. It’ll set you up to allow yourself to fail sometimes.” She surprises herself as she says these words. She’s not sure she herself has learned the lesson she’s imparting; she tends to think of all her role models as perfect, and doesn’t really tolerate much in the way of failure for herself. But it feels right as she says it. 

Maybe she could try being her own role model. It might make her take more responsibility for her actions as a candidate.

“That’s amazing advice,” Cassidy says. “I won’t forget it.”

This is why it’s worth it, Leslie reminds herself. This is why she and Ben broke up. Because of moments like this, when she can truly be a good example for this young woman. She has to give her candidacy a fighting chance. And she will.

She turns around; Ben is still there, next to the speaker’s podium. He seems to have watched the whole exchange. When Leslie makes eye contact with him, he looks down, but it’s too late to hide the fond expression on his face.

As it so happens, Leslie spent the entirety of her free time yesterday evening (which really wasn’t very much) practicing five-minute conversations she could have with Ben. She has trained for this. She glances at her watch, and… it’s go time.

“So, Ben, did you watch Jeopardy last night? I did okay, I got—”

Ben laughs, interrupting her. “Leslie, did you literally just check your watch before starting this conversation?”

Leslie falters. Even with all her prep, she hasn’t planned for this to be one of his responses. “Oh. I mean, yes, of course I did. We have to keep these to five minutes, right? So—”

“I figured the five minutes thing was just approximate,” he says. “We can go a little over or under.”

Leslie tries not to stew in a panic; she has planned for these interactions to be very precisely structured. If she’s not precise, she could talk to Ben forever.

“I’m not sure if— okay. Um…”

“Hey,” he says, his eyes filled with sincerity. He nods around the quaintly grand room. “This was great. I think we almost made up for our horrendous behavior at their event.”

“Almost.” She sighs. “That whole thing was mostly my fault. I—”

Ben shakes his head and puts his finger over his mouth. “I believe one of the stipulations of our agreement was that these conversations be fun. Talking about blame isn’t fun.”

Leslie returns his magnetic smile. God, he’s cute.

“So,” he says, taking a breath, “I did, in fact, watch Jeopardy last night, but I was doing paperwork while watching, so I missed a lot of the questions.”

“Oh, I was doing paperwork, too.”

“Yes, but you have an ability to multitask that I don’t have.”

“Did you at least hear all the questions in the Vice Presidents category?”

Ben’s eyes light up, and then his brow wrinkles in disappointment. “They had a Vice Presidents category? Damn! I forgot to unmute it for Double Jeopardy.”

“I know you do that sometimes, so I wrote down the questions for you.” She whips out some index cards.

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Of course you did.”

“Of course I did.” She smirks at him. She knows he’s a sucker for trivia about any members of the Presidential line of succession. Of course he’d prefer something more obscure, like Secretaries of the Treasury, but he’ll take what he can get. “You ready?”

Ben leans over the podium. “Ready as I’ll ever be. I’ll take VPs for 600, Alex.”

Leslie raises an eyebrow. “Skipping 400?”

“For now. It’s a strategic move.”

She clicks her tongue. “Sorry, no Daily Double for you here: ‘One of the two 20th Century VPs who had been governor of New York.’”

He nods and grins in satisfaction. “Got ‘em both for you — Roosevelt and Rockefeller.”

“Correct! You pick again, Contestant Wyatt.”

“Same category, 800.”

“Now that is the Daily Double! How much do you wager?”

“Given that I have the maximum possible score from the first round, including finding the Daily Double on the last $200 clue and doubling my entire earnings” — his voice takes on that hotshot-nerd lilt of his, the one that everyone but her hates — “I now have $36,200 to risk… and I will make it a true Daily Double.”

“I’d expect nothing less. Here’s Ben Wyatt going for a new Jeopardy record: ‘By taking over for a deceased president, he established a precedent.’”

“Jeez, the puns on this show, I can’t decide whether I want to chuckle fondly or stuff my socks in my ears.”

Leslie cackles, then grows serious. “Well, who is it? Mind the buzzer!”

“Right, right. Who is Harry S Tru— Oh wait, no, this isn’t limited to the 20th Century. Um… okay, that was… um um um… Oh, right, he established the precedent, so it was the first one. Who is Tyler? Taking over for William Henry Harrison, of course.”

“Darn you, I thought I was gonna stump you with that one.”

“Alex Trebex doesn’t say ‘darn you’ after someone gets a clue right,” he objects.

She smirks, then challenges him with the next three questions, loving the banter even more than the history. They’re laughing up a lively, nerdy storm… when the mirth drains from Ben’s face. “Um…”

And then, dammit all to hell, Ben checks his watch.

“Um, it’s been… yeah,” he mumbles.

Leslie is startled. “Like seven minutes, sure, but you said we could go over…”

“Well, I just… have to get back to work now.”

“But…” She swallows. “Don’t you want the Final Jeopardy clue?”

“Oh, I… I had unmuted it by then,” Ben says, backing away toward the door. “I saw it.”

“Right. Of course. Okay.” Recalibrating… “Um… see you tomorrow! For our regularly scheduled fun!”

Ben forces a smile. “Yeah. See you.”

The thing is, now that Leslie knows she can push the envelope, she pushes it to eight minutes the next day. And to nine minutes the day after that. And the day after that, when she gets so busy at work that she doesn’t see him all day, she figures she can make up for it by leaving him quite a few voicemails about the Liberian election. She knows he’ll be just as thrilled about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s reelection as she is, so why shouldn’t she call him about it? 

And when she doesn’t get a response from him, she texts Ann. 

She texts Ann a lot.

The next day at work, when she shows up at Ben’s desk, he appears wary of her.

“I thought we were only talking to each other at work,” he says, displaying the record of her voicemails on the screen of his phone and giving her a questioning shrug.

“We are!” she trills. “It was just… you know. I mean, it was Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. It would basically have been a criminal act for me not to call you. Plus we didn’t get to have our usual five-minute chat yesterday.”

Ben sharply intakes his breath, then sighs in defeat. “Okay,” he says. The fact that he doesn’t want to push back more about it feels like a bad sign.

He looks at the clock, and he cuts off their conversation after five minutes.

Leslie smiles fiercely as she leaves, repeating this is sustainable, this is sustainable, over and over and over as she goes back to work.

But she knows it’s not, so the next day, she comes in with a proposal for a new project: the Smallest Park Initiative, an undertaking tailor-made for her and Ben, something that Chris simply can’t say no to. She drags Ben into Chris’s office before he even knows what’s hit him, and grins as Chris fawns over the project and calls them his “dream team.”

There. Projects. The ultimate loophole. Leslie will develop project after project after project, and she’ll never have to be apart from Ben. They can forge a new kind of relationship, one based on work, glorious work. Sure, regular old “friends” may just drive you to the airport, but work friends? They help you reach your ambitions and goals. And that’s way better than love and marriage.

This is sustainable.

Chapter Text

Late November

Well, the Model UN thing proved that it literally does not matter how insane Leslie gets: nothing can make Ben want her less. In fact, her unhinged behavior has made him want her… more? Jeez, what does this say about him? Should he try going to therapy? His sister swears by it…

The thing is, if therapy would make him the kind of person who wouldn’t love Leslie anymore, then he doesn’t want therapy. Even if he still can’t be with her.

She’s not making any of this easy. After formulating their sensible plan to chat for five minutes a day at work, her communication habits have grown more frenetic. She finds the thinnest threads of reasons to contact him and to extend the length of their work conversations, and he doesn’t have it in him to enforce the established boundaries, especially after giving her a bit of leeway on the “five minutes” rule. (After all, is seven minutes really that different from six? Ten minutes from nine? The limit gets longer and longer…)

Maybe she doesn’t actually have feelings for you, he tries telling himself. He has to consider the possibility, after all, even if he knows it’s probably delusional. Maybe this is just what it’s like to be friends with Leslie. 

He almost asks Ann. Hey, Ann, please describe the precise nature of Leslie’s monomaniacal clinginess as your best friend.

But ultimately, he’s afraid to find out. The thought that Leslie still has feelings for him is incredibly painful, but the thought that she might be “just friends” with him is even worse.

Ugh. He’s been living in this limbo far too long. Maybe it’s time to be blunt and brutal. It would be devastating to cut all ties with her, but sometimes… it seems like it’s the only possible solution.

And then, just as he’s having this thought, Leslie shows up, positively bouncing up and down, and drags him into Chris’s office. Apparently she’s come up with a new project that she intends to foist upon him.

“Hey, Chris? Chris! Ben and I had this great idea to create the smallest park in Indiana on the site of the last telephone booths! RIP telephone booths. Good idea, right?”

Chris extricates himself from a yoga pose that makes him look like an octopus, and beams. “Oh, how wonderful! A new Leslie and Ben project! You came up with this together?”

Ben clears his throat. “Um… Leslie may be stretching the definition of the word ‘we’ here…”

“Ha ha, silly goose!” Leslie says, her mouth set in a smile that looks like she’s baring her teeth. “It was basically both of us who came up with the idea, because I thought of it right after making a Game of Thrones metaphor.” Her eyes are incredibly wide and perky, as though this makes total sense. She turns back to Chris. “The budget’s gonna be crazy small, it will barely make a dent in the town’s resources. Even Ben thinks so, right, Ben?”

Chris turns to him. “Do you, Ben?”

Ben opens and closes his mouth, dumbfounded. “I haven’t exactly gotten the chance to…”

“Here ya go!” Leslie shoves a budget proposal into his hands. Even at first glance, he can see that it’s eminently reasonable — not just for a Leslie project, but for a government project in general. He has no earthly reason to say no to this besides the fact that his stomach is twisting itself into a very confusing knot at the thought of working with her.

“Um… yeah. It looks good. Really…” He goes over it again, taking in the import of each line item. Such good ideas! And such an economical use of resources… He smiles at her. “Really good.”

“Great! So we’re doing this together,” she says vivaciously.

Chris holds up his hand for high fives. “Sounds good to me!” Then he returns to the floor with his legs twisted up with his arms like a precariously balanced octopus.

After they leave the office, Ben stands stock still for a moment next to his desk. “Leslie… what just happened?”

She clears her throat. “New shared project! Hooray, right?”

He blinks, unable to make sense of any of this. It all happened so fast.

“It was a little… startling, not getting a heads-up” he says, with a reproachful look.

Leslie barks out a laugh. “More fun this way, am I right? Live on the edge! Whoo! Okay, our first meeting is today at three. Meet me in Parks!” And she flits away.

He checks his planner; 3 to 3:45 is the only gap in his schedule. She must have snooped earlier and checked.

She’s nuts. Bonkers. Bananas. And I still love her like crazy.

Dutifully, Ben turns up in the Parks Department offices at 3 p.m. He is pleased to discover that Leslie’s actually calmer when she’s been given permission to speak to him for hours on end. Which makes sense — he’s always known he makes her calmer. He brushes away the implications of this.

He likes this project. He had been thinking, as he walked over here from his office, that she might insert a bunch of extra busy work to force them to remain together for longer than necessary, but she’s remaining quite focused and on-task. He adores watching her brain at work.

“And then what we’ll do,” she says, at the end of the meeting, “is we’ll get Donna to launch a media campaign, since she’s so good with Twitter and all of that. We get onto every list of Midwest tourist attractions — you know how some people just check those lists and hit every single one of them on a cross-country trip. Tom can help out with that, he knows people at a couple of different websites that write stuff like that. So. Tourism boost! Our small businesses will benefit like crazy. Good stuff, huh?”

Ben blinks. He’s been thinking of this mostly as a way to beautify Pawnee for the sake of Pawneeans; how had he not thought of the tourism aspect? Here he was thinking that Leslie was thinking only of her own pet project, her own department, her own city. But she’s thinking more broadly, helping the entire town, reaching out to the entire country.

Smart. Jesus, she’s smart. And resourceful, and generous…

He sighs. “Yeah. It’s good stuff.”

Leslie beams with pride. Ben’s heart flips around in his chest.

On day five, after they’ve made quite a bit of progress, Leslie has a brain wave: there’s a strip of tree guard fencing that’s been wasting away in the back of the Animal Control Department for years; no one can ever seem to find a use for it. She drags it up and dumps it onto a desk with a loud clatter.

“There! We can finally get rid of this thing. We’ll stick it around the edge of the park, the length is perfect. It’s nice, and best of all, it’s free!”

“Yes!” He high-fives her. “We knew the park was still missing something.”

“This was totally it, right?”

“Totally it.” He looks over their 3-D model of the park, to which he mentally adds the fencing, and smiles at it. Then he notices something new: Leslie has put two dolls in the model since he saw it last. A man and a woman, sitting on a bench. The woman is blonde and gorgeous and full of life. The man is turned away from her, forcing himself to ignore her vibrancy. Ben feels an absurd urge to rearrange the dolls so that they’re either holding hands or on completely different sides of the park, and he can’t figure out which would be better.

Anyway. Reality.

The reality is that this park is going to be the sweetest thing in Pawnee, and it’s all thanks to Leslie. He can’t believe that, when he first met her, he thought she was just like every other government official who tries to spend money recklessly and selfishly. No. She’s utterly one-of-a-kind, just like this park.

She’s staring at him pertly, her eyes wide. “What?” she asks.

“I was just thinking… um…” Don’t do it, Ben, just stay focused on the details… “It’s just a really great idea.” Damn. Oh well. “This park. You really knocked it out of the, um…” He makes the dumbest face as he realizes where his sentence is going.

“Park?” Leslie asks amusedly, tilting her head.

“Yeah. Park.”

“I knocked the park out of the park.”

“You did.” He laughs. “You know who that joke would kill with? Accountants.”

“Oh, I believe it. There’s this one accounting firm in town that I worked with for a project a while back, and they would go nuts over that.”

“I’ll bet.”

She looks down for a moment, flipping the pages of a legal pad. “I’ve heard they’re always hiring, you know.”

Ben swallows. “Oh. Um, that’s… fine.”

“I mean if you ever wanted to do something else.” Her eyes shoot up to his and pierce him straight through the heart, dispelling any silly ideas he might have had about her thinking of them as just friends. “Just… you know. A random thought I had. Totally out of the blue.”

Ben feels a sense of indignation rise within him. If she wants to say something, why doesn’t she just come out and say it? 

He knows that’s unfair; he has problems with passive-aggressiveness. But still. This is his job she’s being flippant about. He’s earned it. He risked a lot for it. Why should it be up to him to make such a radical change?

But Ben, was it ever your dream to be Assistant City Manager? You wanted to be an elected official. Second to that, a campaign manager. Does this job really mean that much to you?

Does it mean more than Leslie?

Are you operating out of anything other than fear right now?

He opens his mouth, unsure of what’s going to come out, when he sees his turmoil suddenly reflected back in Leslie’s eyes in a rare moment of genuine interpersonal insight from his true love.

“Never mind,” she says. “Forget I said that. We’re working together. Right? Right. Perfect.” She sidles up to him, her brief era of introspection at a close. “And we always will. Eh, partner?” She claps him on the back jovially.

He forces a smile. “Um… let’s… yeah. What’s next on the agenda?”

She sits down in a chair and taps some paperwork into a straight rectangle. “Permits! I know you love a good permit application as much as I do. Wanna flip for electrical installation?”

He swallows again. “You know it.” She takes out a coin. “Heads,” he calls as she flips it.

He’s calm on the outside, but his heart is walloping his chest erratically. Had he been about to consider leaving his job for her? Maybe. Would that have been a good idea?

No.

Yes.

He can’t think, can’t make decisions, can’t figure out anything anymore, not when he’s around Leslie.

Oh no, no…

It doesn’t matter how enjoyable the work is, how good her ideas are, or how much he loves and respects her. 

He can’t do this anymore. At all.

When he breaks the news to her the next morning, she steals all his pens and pencils. Or at least she tries to; she misses two of them, and he watches her go through a very brief internal struggle as she decides whether she should go back and get them. She chooses pride and doesn’t turn back, striding out the door with his writing implements.

It’s the weirdest, cutest thing he’s ever seen, and he stares at the near-empty cup and grazes the rim with his thumb, where she touched it. He misses her already.

Maybe I should go after her. Tell her I was wrong, that we can still interact… There’s got to be a way…

But there isn’t. There’s no way around this. He lets his head fall to his desk, then picks it up and gets back to work. He doesn’t go after her.

By noon, she has practically broken his cell phone with voicemails.

“Ben! Hey. FYI, we’re doing a town hall meeting about the park. Bye! It’s Leslie.”

“Oh! Forgot to tell you, it’s at five p.m. Today. And I invited the entire town. Sincerely, Leslie Knope.”

“Just one more tiny little thing, can you bring all the park-related paperwork you haven’t filled out yet? Because I was thinking of getting the townspeople to each fill out THEIR versions of how they think we should fill out the paperwork, and then we’d compare and contrast, and have a little roundtable about the effectiveness of each person’s ideas.”

“That last message was from Leslie, by the way. And so is this one.”

“Hey, do you think we should drug test everyone before they come into the meeting? I think that might be wise. Just to make sure the ideas are coming from clear-headed minds. We can just set up a little curtain and have everyone pee into cups and then Ann can run the tests while we hold the meeting. It’ll only add an hour and a half onto the meeting, tops.”

…And it just goes on and on. There are twenty voicemails in total.

He’s made it clear that she can text or call him for work-related emergencies, and she hasn’t been abusing that privilege until now… until he told her their work relationship must end. Now the privilege is most certainly being abused. It’s not just the calls and texts; the town hall meeting itself is an embarrassingly transparent ploy to extend the project. And then somehow, all before sunset, she drums up a bunch of protesters to rail against the park that she herself planned, so they’ll have to have an environmental impact report?

She’s no longer prioritizing helping the community. She’s just being selfish, and you know what? She’s making it easier for him now. He has to take this moment, when he’s pretty damn furious, to make it official.

He breaks up with her yet again, this time as a colleague, in front of the stricken face of Chris Traeger. He can’t believe she’s made him break up with her four times: as a boyfriend, as a friend, and now twice as a co-worker. It’s just not right. Maybe he can leverage this anger to successfully get over her this time.

He’s not even fully conscious of everything he says as he perfunctorily lines the park with red ribbon, but it consists of plenty of vitriol:

“Leslie here is a team of one… she kinda steamrolls the rest of her team… I don't think we should work together anymore.”

It feels horrible and cathartic at the same time. He doesn’t want to say these things about her… but maybe this will burn the bridge. Maybe she won’t even want him after this. And at this point, that’s just what needs to happen.

He snips the ribbon in the least ceremonious way possible. “Oh, and the park is open. Yay!”

It’s nothing like what they had envisioned; the park isn’t even finished. But none of this is what they envisioned, back when they first kissed. Why should they have imagined that anything good could come of this relationship anyway, since it had to be scandalously secret? It was doomed from the beginning. And so was this shitty park.

Chris hops into his car before Ben gets to his, and Leslie, after a few moments of stunned silence, runs after him.

“Ben!” she calls.

Ben turns on his heel to face her. “What? What could you possibly have to say to me?”

“I… it’s just that…” She stares at him with that face of hers and she looks genuinely pained, like a faithful dog who has no idea why you might need a break from its constant attentions. He starts to soften, but looks down at his shoes.

“Did you really mean all that?” she asks. “That I steamroll people? I steamroll you?”

He sighs wearily and drags his hands down his face. “I’m going home,” he says, without answering the question. If Leslie doesn’t already understand this about herself, he can’t help her.

She doesn’t follow him any further.

He keeps expecting a text or a call from her, but nothing comes. He does get a call from a political pollster, and he takes it. It’s mildly interesting talking about national politics, but then they ask him if he’s supporting any specific politicians in the local races in his hometown, and he pretends to lose reception.

Silence again. He feels like shit.

Andy tries to get him to play Clue along with April and Orin, which sounds absolutely terrifying as Ben can only imagine that it’ll end in Orin actually murdering him. With the candlestick. In the conservatory.

So he stays in his room.

Chess isn’t interesting. Letters to Cleo isn’t interesting, nor are stamps. Watching the DVD commentary on Game of Thrones… well, that is interesting, but it doesn’t make him stop thinking about Leslie.

He flips through the plans for their park, which still lie open on his desk. He hadn’t sentimentalized it much while they were planning it, but now that it’s all over, he mourns the beautiful little park they were supposed to create together. Now it’s just another dismal patch of Pawnee land among many.

Don’t think that! Pawnee is freaking beautiful! 

It’s Leslie’s voice in his head. It doesn’t matter on how many levels he breaks up with her, that rabidly passionate voice will always be in his head.

Ben’s heart feels bitter and old. While this is probably the most dramatic thought he’s ever had since I’ve ruined my hometown, he can’t help thinking: I’ll never love again.

The next day, Ann comes to see him, and it’s certainly not about the Health Department. It’s wildly inappropriate that she’s talking to him about Leslie stuff at work. Nevertheless, it’s happening. The conversation somehow gets to a point where Ann is declaring that she’d eat ten cheesecakes for Leslie, and while Ben maybe wouldn’t do that, he can think of a million crazy things he would do for her. When she shows him Leslie’s endless barrage of text messages about him, he can’t help smiling.

When Ann’s rapid scrolling slows down in response to his interest, his eyes catch some of the conversation:

—HE DOESN’T WANT TO WORK WITH ME

—HOW CAN HE NOT WANT TO WORK WITH ME

—Leslie, honey, I’m so sorry, but this is for the best. Think about your campaign!

—WE ARE THE DREAM TEAM, EVEN CHRIS SAID SO

—Remember earlier? When you said you’d do what Ben wanted?

—I can’t stop thinking about it!

—Tell me what to do!

—NOW!

—IDK, Leslie. I thought we already figured this out. 

—I have no more brilliant insights.

—Can we just move on from it?

—Okay?

—Leslie?

—You still there?

—Ann you were right

—You sunny sunflower

—Sorry I’m short on inventive Ann metaphors right now

—I’m still steamrolling you even after I told you I wouldn’t

—Leslie, it’s okay. You’re fine. It’ll take practice.

—And I love you no matter what!

—I steamroll you and I steamroll him and it sucks

—Crap crap crap what do I do

It’s self-aware enough (and cute enough, and heartbreaking enough) that when she calls him later, he screens the call but doesn’t dread listening to the voicemail.

“Hey. It’s Leslie… you know that already. I know Ann talked to you, and she said you’re not abjectly furious with me at the moment, so I was hoping you might meet up with me at the Smallest Park at seven tonight for one final chat. And I swear to you, I’m serious about the word ‘final.’ I just want to say a few words, and I want you to see the finished park. 

“Um… okay. Let me know. Bye.”

She sounds defeated. It breaks his heart.

Of course he’s going. He can’t let that mournful appeal be the last speech she ever makes to him.

Ben’s astonished with the progress she made on the park in just over twenty-four hours. She must have eschewed all other work in order to get this done.

It pierces his heart to see all of the details they planned together that have come to fruition. He has no idea how she recruited the workers to get everything done so quickly, and he suspects she did a fair amount of it herself through sheer force of will. 

They’d tentatively planned for a tiny pedestrian bridge, but it hasn’t materialized. Deep down he’d always known the park was too small for that, although he enjoyed Leslie’s enthusiasm for it. But there are a few extra touches that hadn’t been in their model, like the dedication plaque on the base of the lamppost. Leslie always goes the extra fifteen miles.

She’s waiting for him on the bench; her brilliantly red coat makes him think it’s Valentine’s Day instead of just before Thanksgiving. Against the backdrop of pink flowers in the planters and the fiery burst of color in the garden patch at her feet, Leslie looks like an intrinsic part of the park, as though it would be incomplete without her. She looks so stunning that he keeps trying to avert his eyes from her. But ultimately he can’t.

“I wasn't sure you were gonna come,” she says, standing up and not taking any steps toward him.

“Well,” he says with as much detachment as possible, “I got very curious when you only left me one voicemail message instead of your usual twenty.”

She holds his gaze, and her eyes are clear. “I'm trying to be a little less intense, and a little more considerate. Here, have a seat. But only if you want to.”

“Okay. I want to.” He takes a seat. The bench is perfectly placed. Leslie doesn’t sit next to him; she stands in front with great formality, like she’s delivering a eulogy. (She is, in a way.)

And she begins:

“I never listened to what you wanted, or how you wanted us to be when things… ended between us. I just decided what I wanted, and I got upset when you didn't want the same thing. I know that's not fair, and I'm very sorry.”

Ben’s head has drooped to his chest. He does his best to lift it and look her in the eyes. “Well, thank you. I appreciate that.”

“If you don't want to have any more contact with me… I finally understand.” Her voice shakes just the slightest bit, making him lean forward, in her direction.

“I— I don't want that. Really. But I just think it's for the best.”

“Okay.” She’s nodding. So serious, so mature.

“Okay,” he repeats. And then it hits him: there’s nothing more to say. The conversation is over. Every future conversation between them is over before it has begun. They will barely be acquaintances from now on, and he has no idea what to look forward to.

“Okay,” he whispers, a breathy echo of himself. He gets up, unable to bear the pain of looking at her again.

“There is another option.” The shock of hearing her voice, after resigning himself to never doing so again, is staggering. He looks back at her.

There’s a quaver of desperation in her voice and her posture, and Ben grows apprehensive; after such an impressive display of self-awareness and restraint, has she suddenly lost all her growth? Is she going to make them do this all over again?

But no: he could never have prepared himself for what she says next.

“We could just say ‘screw it’ and do this thing for real.”

This hits him like a meteorite; he remembers thinking almost exactly this same phrase during the End of the World fiasco… but he shakes off the immediate burst of irrational hope that burgeons within him. This is just another of her wacky ideas; she hasn’t thought this through.

“What?” he asks.

“I miss you like crazy,” she says. The meteorite grows and becomes a comet shooting excitedly through his chest; he looks down to try to mute his feelings. “I think about you all the time.” The comet turns into a massive star. “I want to be with you…” The star bursts and it’s a full-on supernova; her words permeate his entire being. “So let's just say ‘screw it!’”

He looks up at her face, shining with a brightness that illuminates a path for a future in which he can see actual happiness.

Stay sane, keep it together, make sure she really understands what she’s suggesting… “No, we would have to tell Chris…”

“Yeah,” she says.

“It could turn into a scandal…”

“Yeah.” Holy crap, she honest-to-goodness looks like she grasps the full ramifications of all of this. But Ben can’t let go just yet.

“It could hurt your campaign. I mean, how would you imagine we do this?”

“I don't know. But I… I know how I feel, and I want to be with you.” Her demeanor changes; she pulls herself back from an emotional precipice. “But I'm done steamrolling people. This is how I feel. How do you feel?”

Gobsmacked, is how he feels. This isn’t supposed to be how his life goes. He resigned himself to mundanity a long time ago. Since when is he the guy who someone risks everything for? How is this real? How is Leslie standing there in a red coat in front of him, declaring her devotion with an expression of pure vulnerability on her face?

But it is real.

The fear of disgrace has hung over him like an Ice Skate of Damocles ever since he was eighteen, and nothing has successfully broken through it until now, with Leslie Knope declaring her willingness to sacrifice her entire professional life for him.

He knows exactly how he feels.

With a greater certainty than he has ever felt about anything, he takes two long steps toward her and kisses her, and with it he feels months of tension leave their bodies. His knees go weak; he holds her tighter. They are finally where they’re supposed to be.

“Ben,” she whispers, between kisses, and with a pang he realizes there are tears in her eyes. He pulls back; she looks gorgeous in the light of the single lamp. “I’m really so, so sorry. I made this all so much harder than it needed to be.”

He brushes a tear away from her cheek. “Hey, it’s not like I was perfect either. This whole time I’ve been too fearful of professional disapproval. I could’ve been so much braver from the beginning, I could have just…” He stops short; he’s still not ready to say he’ll quit his job, even though he knows that that’s probably the direction this is going. But if he says it now, she’ll start urging him not to, and he can’t interrupt this moment. “And I know I’ve been passive-aggressive about some things.”

Leslie laughs, scoffs, and sniffs at the same time. “Yeah. Well. That’s true. I know what I’m getting myself into.”

He laughs with her. “So do I,” he says. They both look into each other’s eyes with a peaceful euphoria he had never known was possible. Yes, they know each other’s flaws very well now. “And hey,” he says. “If you hadn’t done your steamrolling thing, maybe I would’ve given up on this. You didn’t let me give up. And I’m so grateful you didn’t.”

“Oh, great! I’ll just keep steamrolling, then!” she says brightly, but the break in her voice and the lingering tear that falls from her eye tell him that she’s kidding. Mostly, at least.

He holds her close, kissing her head, and she starts squeezing him to a degree that might be painful under other circumstances, but right now it feels just right. He squeezes her back, as though they can retrieve six months’ worth of embraces right here in this pocket-sized park. She strokes her fingertips up and down his spine and he starts to lose quite a few brain cells to the hasty production of oxytocin.

“I like this coat,” he says, tilting his head down and plucking at it. “Red’s good.” He’s losing any and all eloquence he might have otherwise had.

“Mm.” She kisses him again, more slowly now, with unhurried precision.

He’s forgetting everything, forgetting that they ever broke up, forgetting what they have to do tomorrow. All he knows is that he wants to hold her forever.

Hold her… and more.

“Do you wanna get out of here?” she asks, as though reading his mind. Or, more likely, she’s reading his body.

He takes a moment to look around. Dream team, Chris had called them so many times, before declaring the dream team dead at his own request. But they really are. This park is gorgeous, and even though he was too proud and bitter to finish it out with her, the design was all them. Them, together. He’ll never abandon one of their shared projects again; he’s in this for keeps.

If this is what their life is gonna look like, it’s going to be amazing.

…But yes, he does indeed want to get out of there.

“Yeah,” he says. 

“My place?”

He grins. “Hang on a second.” He takes out his phone and calls Chris, hoping it will go to voicemail so that he can just get it over with as fast as possible. Mercifully, the answering machine picks up. 

“Hey, Chris. I know this is gonna come as a shock, but I have to let you know that Leslie and I are dating. We know this violates your rule, and we’re prepared to face the consequences. Have a good night, and we’ll see you tomorrow.” He puts his phone away and sighs, feeling utterly free.

Leslie is beaming back at him, looking rather impressed.

“Okay, then,” he tells her. “My place.”

Leslie nods, knowing what this means: no more sneaking around. No reason to care if April and Andy spot them and they call Tom and Donna, who immediately start tweeting about it. This is real, and it’s going to be public, and it’s going to be messy, but no one can take away what they have with each other.

How did we ever think we could be apart? he asks himself.

He remembers again that it will be Thanksgiving in a few days, and thinks he’s never understood the meaning of gratitude more.