FIC: A Pawnee Christmas [PG13]
Title: A Pawnee Christmas
Pairing: Leslie/Ben
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 4874
Spoilers: Through "Fancy Party" and sort of "Jerry's Painting"
Summary: “Dammit, Ben, pick one. I’ve been waiting to start this because I thought you should pick first. Y’know, since it’ll be your first Christmas here.”
A/N: So, this was written because I felt there were some missed opportunites for great Christmas moments in Season 3 (plus, we're at the halfway point to Christmas!). Because this is a story about Ben's first Christmas, the timing is all artistic liscense. Basically, "Fancy Party" happened, but nothing after that, except for Ben moving in with April and Andy. There was no "I think we like each other" or Tom dating in this 'verse. Thanks for reading!
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“Hey there, Ben Wyatt, Assistant City Manager,” Leslie says with a warm smile as Ben leans a shoulder against the open doorway to her office.
“Hey Leslie Knope, of the Parks Department,” he replies, returning the smile. He hears a groan from Tom’s corner of the room and he turns his head slightly to see Tom rolling his eyes as he swivels his chair towards Ben.
“Ugh. Seriously. Get. A. Room.”
Ben’s smile falters a little, but Leslie starts to say something, talking over Tom and ignoring him completely.
“I’m glad you’re here, actually, you have to pick out of this hat,” she says, pointing to an upside-down construction hat that was perched on the edge of her desk. It was filled with tiny folded strips of paper.
“Does it say…does it say “Ass” on there?” He asks as he moves closer. Leslie nods quickly but gestures impatiently at the hat again.
“Pick, pick, it’s for Secret Santa,” she says, her tone slightly annoyed, but she’s betrayed by her wide grin. He hesitates, wonders for a moment why Leslie was involving him in this.
“This isn’t just for you guys?” He asks and she shakes her head vehemently, frustration evident on her face as she picks up the hat and wiggles it.
“Dammit, Ben, pick one. I’ve been waiting to start this because I thought you should pick first. Y’know, since it’ll be your first Christmas here.”
His heart swells and he dips his hand into the hat, needing no further encouragement. Leslie bolts out of her chair and into the next room to pass the hat to everyone else, obviously eager to involve the rest of the department in the game. Ben unfolds his slip of paper as Leslie coaxes April to participate.
And he freezes. A small, neat, half-cursive, half-printed “Leslie Knope” stares back at him. He feels…something well up in his stomach and start to travel into his chest. It feels a little like panic. Yep, he’s panicking.
Anyone else. Anyone else in this office would be easy to shop for. Tom? Easy. Cologne, skin products, literally anything that had to do with self-grooming. April? God, so easy. Music. Even Ron. He could buy Ron something for his wood shop, or something for his grill, or just…something else. He knew there was more that he could get Ron, the man had many extracurricular activities, but his brain was shutting down and he couldn’t think.
Because Leslie? What the hell could he get Leslie?
Aside from the obvious answers. He knew what she liked, that wasn’t the issue. But what could he get her that said “Hey, you’re a really cool person and I like you a lot as a friend, but maybe you could sorta notice me as something a little more than that? I mean, if you wanted, no pressure, it’s just that you make me feel all sorts of things and I was hoping that you felt something of the same thing, if you know what I mean.”
Which is a lot to ask of a gift.
“Hey,” Tom’s voice breaks him from his train-wreck of a thought process. “She forgot to tell you, your budget for this is zero dollars. You can’t spend any money.”
Shit. Shit shit shit. He was so screwed.
***
Ben can’t stop staring at the little slip of paper with Leslie’s name on it, which is partially why he ends up running smack into Andy in the middle of the hall. (Also, Andy is trying to perfect his new “moves”, which was spinning in circles on his rollerblades while holding his guitar, so that’s the other reason.)
“Whoa, sorry, roomie,” Andy says as he wobbles forwards, forcing Ben to reach out and steady him.
“No, no,” Ben says as he pats the guitar. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“Looking at that piece of paper?”
He glances back down at the slip, clutched between his thumb and forefinger. Andy strains to peek.
“Oh! Secret Santa! I wonder if it’s too late,” Andy says, rolling over to his shoeshine stand to put his guitar away. “I hope Leslie doesn’t mind me playing. I did it last year, and got Tom, and wrote him a song. He didn’t really appreciate it like I thought he would, maybe this year I could get April, though. Lucky, that you got Leslie, huh?”
His eyes shoot up to meet Andy’s happy stare. Andy wiggles his eyebrows and Ben narrows his eyes.
“What do you mean?”
Andy shrugs, his eyes twinkling. “You know. Lucky you drew her. Now you can get her something for Christmas and it wouldn’t seem weird.”
Ben can’t think of anything to say so he just continues to stare at Andy. Andy smiles conspiratorially and leans forward, lowering his voice.
“You know, dude. You know.”
And Ben almost laughs, because he does know, but he can’t believe Andy does too. So he does the only thing he knows how in situations like this and changes the subject.
“Well, if you do draw April, you still have to get her a real present. You can’t use this as an excuse to save money.”
Andy smiles. “Oh, I know. I’ve got a lot of stuff planned. Which, by the way, I hope you like to get up early on Christmas morning. I’m waking you up at seven, by the latest.”
Andy punches his shoulder and begins rolling away, leaving Ben to stand in the hallway smiling happily, still clutching at that little slip of paper.
***
“Ben, what’re you doing?” Leslie’s voice floats up to him from somewhere below. He adjusts himself on the ladder, twists around until he sees her.
“Um, hanging this ornament. Isn’t that…isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?”
She smiles up at him and he has to steady himself. She looks beautiful, her blonde hair sticking out of the knit cap she is wearing, an oversized parka dwarfing her small frame. The cold, biting air lends a rosy glow to her cheeks and she brings a gloved hand up to rub at her nose.
Ben would give anything to be the one to warm her up right now, forgetting for a brief moment that they were in the middle of Lot 48, setting up for the Winter Wonderland. Wishes they weren’t surrounded by their co-workers and many volunteers.
“You just put a red ball one branch over. You need another one right there, like gold or silver, you can’t do two red balls next to each other.”
“Oh. Sorry. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this,” he says and she gives him a sad smile, like she’s understanding something about his past that he’s not saying and he kind of regrets saying anything at all. Because it’s not something that particularly makes him sad, this lack of ornament-hanging in his life. It’s just simply something that he hasn’t done.
Though, if he had someone like Leslie in his life, someone who was so enthusiastic about ornament hanging, so enthusiastic about everything Christmas related, maybe then he would be sad about not doing it, because he enjoys doing this with her. Okay. Now he is a little sad.
But the feeling passes when Leslie steps on the bottom rung of his ladder, clutching a hand-painted ornament in her hand. He leans down to grab it and she smiles at him, a small, secretive smile that he files away in his brain as Yet Another Moment Leslie Looked Adorable. The file is getting quite large.
“This one should go there. It was painted by that little boy, over there,” she says, pointing, and Ben looks over at the group of schoolchildren that had been volunteered by their parents and teachers to help with set-up. A young boy, probably six or seven, was diligently shoveling snow off of the walkway. “He said he made it in school a year ago, when he first moved here. He saw your hat and thought you might like it.”
Ben turns the ornament around in his hand, a crude rendering of the Minnesota Twins logo staring back at him. He smiles to himself, feeling warm despite the chilly breeze that was cutting through his too-light jacket.
“So, I thought you should be the one to hang it. And, seeing as you can’t figure out how to do this right, I thought I should be the one to tell you where it goes,” she says teasingly, shrugging with one shoulder and grinning up at him. He returns the grin and holds the ornament up next to his face.
“Boss me, boss lady.”
***
The next few hours are a bizarre series of events: Ben falls off the ladder at Lot 48, Leslie is overly concerned and weirdly protective (which Ben enjoys…at first), he sits in the hospital with Leslie and Ann, and after being proclaimed “fine”, the three of them discuss Christmas trees and Leslie mentions how much she loves them, but the clutter in her house is getting bad again and she doesn’t have room to put one up, much less the time.
And that’s how Ben finds himself moving boxes out of Leslie’s living room and into her garage at nine o’clock at night, a freshly cut Christmas tree that’s ready to be decorated taking up the space where her car should be.
Leslie makes hot chocolate in the kitchen while Ann directs him around the house, telling him what to put where, for when Leslie needs to move it all back.
“Move it back? Can’t we just go through it, throw some of the stuff out?” He asks, his hands on his knees and voice strained from carrying three heavy boxes of DVD’s up to the bedroom.
Ann glances towards the kitchen. “Um. It’s going to take a lot of convincing to get Leslie to throw anything out. It’s a pretty big project to tackle.”
Ben shrugs, wipes sweat off his forehead with his shirt sleeve. He really shouldn’t have worn a thermal under his t-shirt, but it was too late now. “I don’t mind. Helping. If she’d want to.”
Ann looks at him, silently, and for a moment, Ben is unnerved. But a small smile creeps across her lips and he has the strange sense of being judged.
“You’re sweet,” she says, with a hint of warm affection.
And when Leslie comes back into the living room to hand him a mug, filled to the brim with marshmallows, his heart is a little lighter. Because Leslie’s best friend just gave him a stamp of approval and he’s standing in Leslie’s living room on non-work related matters and she gave him the most marshmallows in his hot chocolate.
He grins at her, bursting at the seams. She stands a little too close, clutching her own mug, her shoulder touching his. She looks over at the empty corner and nods with approval.
“Looks good. Are you guys ready to decorate?” She asks, sipping her drink and looking over the brim with her brows raised high.
Ann glances at her watch and sighs dramatically. “I don’t know, Les. It’s pretty late and I’m beat. I think I’ll just head home,” she says, gathering her jacket off the couch. “But, you, you guys should definitely decorate. Don’t wait for me or anything, just go ahead. Go at it.”
She says the last bit with an odd grin and shows herself out the front door. Ben is left standing in silence, still shoulder-to-shoulder with Leslie. He sips his drink, just to have something to do.
“Well,” Leslie says, breaking the pause and stepping away. He immediately misses the contact. “I’ll go get the ornament box. I hope you’re better at this here than you were at the lot. And no getting on ladders,” she says, pointing at him as she disappeared up her stairs.
He holds up his hands. “Got it.”
*
“Oh! That one is from fifth grade, when I was in the Girl Scouts,” Leslie says, plucking the Star of David made out of popsicle sticks from Ben’s hands. “Everyone else’s looked all wonky, but I sat there for hours, making sure all of the sticks were perfectly straight.”
Ben grins and picks another ornament out of the box. “I can see that. Were you one of those kids that stuck their tongue out while they worked? Like this?” He demonstrates and she giggles.
“No. You do that sometimes, though, so don’t even try to make fun. I’ve seen it.”
He chuckles and it occurs to him that in order for her to notice a small detail such as that, she had to have been looking. At him. And noticing things like that. And he doesn’t really know what that means, but it feels like it means something, so he holds on to the rush of giddiness.
“I bet you were a cute kid,” he says and she giggles again, but nods enthusiastically.
“Oh, yeah, the cutest,” she answers.
“I wonder what little Leslie Knope would have thought about little Ben Wyatt,” he muses as he hangs a plain green ornament. She smiles at him, her eyes shining brightly and she hangs her Star of David close to his fingers.
“I’m sure we would have been friends. Eventually,” she amends. “Little Leslie might have thought Little Ben was a hard-ass. At first.”
He laughs and turns towards her. “A hard-ass? Really?”
She nods happily, turning her body to mirror his stance. “Yeah! Total hard-ass. But, I’m sure she’d get over it, see he was really a sweet little boy.”
He moves towards the couch, slumps down onto it, but grins up at her. She follows his lead, seating herself on the other end, pulls her legs up and folds them underneath her.
“Well, for the record. Little Ben wasn’t much of a hard-ass, I was kind of a sensitive kid,” he says. She smiles as she reaches for her hot chocolate, sips at it as she looks at him over the top. Ben can’t remember a time he ever felt happier than this moment.
After a few beats of comfortable silence, Leslie asks casually, “Who did you draw in Secret Santa?”
He glances over at her. “I can’t tell you that, that’s cheating.”
She smiles. “Good answer. I had to make sure you were serious about it.”
He chuckles and leans his head back against the couch, suddenly very tired. “Thanks for including me in that. It’s cool, y’know…to be able to…” he falters, having started the thought before he knew where he was going to end up. She nods, though, saving him the trouble of figuring it out.
“No problem. You’ve been a big help to our department,” she says, and it’s weird how formal it sounds, like he hasn’t spent the better part of a year becoming anything but formal with her, with her whole department. Like he wasn’t sitting in her living room, helping her decorate her Christmas tree. “Sometimes I forget that you actually have other things to do, other people to deal with. I didn’t know if you were close to anyone else at City Hall, so I thought you’d like to participate in our little traditions.”
He smiles and closes his eyes. “Yeah, it should be fun. It’ll be nice to have new traditions, here in Pawnee.”
He doesn’t open his eyes, but he hears Leslie shift on the other end of the couch, and he knows that she’s smiling back.
***
The Annual Parks Department Christmas Celebration is in full swing by the time Ben arrives, a full hour late. Andy grabs him as soon as he walks in the door and pours him a shot of what smells like rubbing alcohol, but he downs it without much hesitation. Andy cheers him on and pushes him further into the room, causing him to jostle Ron.
“Son,” Ron says, tipping his glass towards him. Ben nods once.
“Ron.”
He tries to scan the room as subtly as he can, but Tom appears next to him and shoves a beer into his hand.
“Here ya go, man, enjoy. Let me let you in on a little secret for tonight,” Tom says, his eyes wide and his grin huge. “Leslie usually gets super drunk at these things, so you can convince her to do pretty much anything. It’s hilarious. This year, I think I’m going to ask to see her Iron Man impression.”
Ben frowns. “Iron Man?”
But Tom is gone before he gets an answer and Ann is taking his place. She smiles at him as she sips on a fruity frozen drink and he briefly wonders where all this alcohol is coming from.
“Hey,” she says. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” he smiles back.
“You know,” she starts to say, then pauses. She cocks her head a little bit and looks to be sizing him up. “I know we don’t know each other too well, so this might sound a little weird. But…I’m glad you’re here.”
He quirks an eyebrow questioningly as he takes a sip of beer. Ann smiles, warm and inviting, and Ben is suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of belonging and he is eternally grateful that he’s ended up here, standing in the Parks Department of Pawnee, Indiana, drinking with the weirdest group of friends he’s ever had.
“You know. That you stayed. We all are,” Ann continues and he ducks his head and grins, so crazy happy. “But, uh, Leslie’s outside, in the courtyard. If you were wondering.”
He glances out the window and sees a small flash of blonde hair, peeking out from under her wool hat. He makes his way towards the door and is stopped twice on his way outside, both times to take a shot, neither of which he refuses.
By the time he finally opens the door to the courtyard, his chest is warm and his head is a little dizzy, but he’s still got all his wits about him. Leslie turns towards the door, gives him a smile, and turns back around to continue her admiration of…something.
Oh. Oh, wow.
Ben stands stock still for a moment, taking in the beautifully decorated courtyard, Christmas lights strung across it every which way. There’s icicle lights hanging off the roof, colored lights lining the windows, LED snowflakes hanging from anywhere and everywhere they could.
Leslie turns to him again, looks him up and down. “You’re going to get sick without a coat. It’s starting to snow again.”
He looks up to the sky, sees the first fat flakes drifting down towards him. He rolls his shirt sleeves down. “Leslie…this is. This is amazing.”
She smiles and shrugs. “I know we’re not supposed to take a stand or whatever, in government, but this courtyard, for this one night? It’s mine. And I want it to look good for our party.”
He smiles and nods enthusiastically. “Yeah, yeah, it really looks great.”
She twists her upper body towards him, hugging her arms to her chest and squints one eye at him. “It does, doesn’t it? I love this, the lights, the snow, the parties. Christmas is great, especially when you get to share it with so many people.”
“And the presents,” he adds, with a grin. She leans towards him, nudges his shoulder with most of her body, unwilling to unwrap her arms.
“Lame,” she says and he laughs. She lowers her voice to a whisper. “But yeah, the presents are pretty cool. Oh! That reminds me, we still have to do Secret Santa!”
She rushes past him to go back inside and he follows dutifully. And that’s really all he wanted to do, to just follow her inside.
But what happens next is a surreal turn of events. Leslie opens the door and pauses, turns to, Ben assumes, take one last look at the courtyard slowly filling up with snow. He pauses too, waiting for her to pass through the threshold.
But Tom yells from across the room, in a voice that’s way too loud and attention-grabbing, “Hey! Guys, mistletoe! Mistletoe!”
Everyone looks around and Ben joins the search for the unfortunate couple that’s been caught beneath the dreaded hanging plant.
And that’s when he notices everyone has turned towards him.
Oh. Oh no.
Leslie is turning back to face the inside of her department, filled with her colleagues and friends, all eagerly and silently waiting for them to do something. Her eyes rise to the top of the doorway and she freezes. Ben thinks her cheeks flush with pink, but it was snowing outside, so. Hard to tell. Who knows, really.
To say Ben is unnerved…well, that’s an understatement.
Right about now is when the words Human Disaster race through his mind and his palms start sweating and if he were speaking, his words would be halting.
“Come on, man. You guys gotta kiss,” Tom slurs in their direction and Ben wonders how long he can hesitate before it’s full-blown stalling. Or, shit, what if she gets the idea that he doesn’t want to? That he’s hesitating because he thinks the idea is gross? Shit, shit, he definitely doesn’t want that.
She turns towards him and lifts her eyebrows up and gives him a small smile. He nervously returns it and suddenly his eyes are locked onto hers and he couldn’t look away even if he wanted to, which he never, never does.
“Well, you can’t argue with a plant above a door, can you?” She jokes and he lets out a nervous chuckle, a sound that’s almost unrecognizable to his ears as something he produced.
“Or the drunkards that take orders from it?” He offers quietly and she grins and it just might be the most beautiful thing he’s seen all night, and the courtyard was damn impressive.
So it’s almost involuntary, really, the course that his body takes right then, as she smiles radiantly up at him. His head ducks low and her eyes close and their lips softly touch and Ben can’t believe that this is how this is finally happening. In a room with everyone they know. Watching them.
But all these thoughts seep out of his mind and dissipate into the air when he feels her lightly respond under him, her lips parting ever so slightly, allowing him in without sacrificing any semblance of professionalism and a fuse blows somewhere in Ben’s brain when he realizes she wants this.
He hears Tom whoop and Andy call for a round of high-fives as his hands find her hair and his fingers tangle themselves in her curls. He holds her head close to him, keeping her there, runs his tongue lightly over her bottom lip and he thinks he feels her sway underneath him. Her hand comes up to rest against his cheek and he feels her tongue swipe lightly back, but she pulls away, breaks the contact before she can follow through on that last promise.
They stand there for a moment, smiling happily at one another, her hand resting on his cheek, his hand clutching her hair. Ben glances around the room. No one is looking at them anymore. He jerks his head towards the door.
“Do you…do you wanna go somewhere? Else? We could talk, or. I don’t know, exchange gifts,” he says softly, still halfway afraid her answer could be no, even though a few minutes before he would swear it was an unequivocal yes.
She cocks her head. “How do you know I have a gift for you?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean--I mean, I have something…for the thing, the exchange. Secret Santa. Oh, unless you need to stay here and. Do that.”
She looks around, taking in everyone’s actions and seems to come to a conclusion in her mind. “Nah, it looks like everyone’s having a good time. They can do it themselves this year. Let’s go to my car.”
*
Ben meets her at her car after retrieving his gift for her. He climbs inside, the car already warm, the radio blaring cheery Christmas music. Leslie turns and starts to speak before he can even try and get a word out.
“So, I’m guessing you had me? For Secret Santa?”
He nods and she smiles.
“I had you, too,” she says, reaching into the backseat and pulling a neatly wrapped gift into her lap. “And, well, the budget was supposed to be zero dollars, but I needed some stuff to start it, so I had Ron buy the supplies, so technically I still spent zero dollars, and…well, just open it.”
She holds the gift up and he takes it, smiling at her as he carefully rips the paper off. She fidgets until he finishes and a thick slice of dark cherry wood sits in his lap.
“Turn it over,” she says, a barely detectable tremor in her voice, and he’s struck suddenly by how rare it is to see Leslie Knope so unsure of herself, how odd it was for her to be nervous over what he was going to think of her.
He flips it over and his heart hops, skips, and jumps a few beats before resetting to its normal pace.
It’s a plaque, with a picture attached to the top. The picture is of the two of them, taken during the Harvest Festival. They are both wearing their green STAFF shirts and they are standing in front of one of the cotton candy machines. Leslie has an arm wrapped around his middle and his arm is slung over her shoulders and they are both squinting into the camera, the sun obviously shining in their eyes. Ben remembers Ann taking the picture, remembers complaining about how the sun was too bright and he wouldn’t be able to keep his eyes open for long, remembers Leslie pinching his side and telling him to stop being such a baby.
There is an engraving underneath the picture, reading:
Harvest Festival 2010
Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt
Our Project
His fingers trace the outline of the words and Leslie shifts.
“So? What do you think? Ron helped, obviously, but it was my idea. I thought it would be a good memento, for the Harvest Festival, and for your first big project in Pawnee,” she rambles and he finally looks up at her and grins.
“I love it. It’s going in my office, right next to my desk, so everyone that comes in has to see it,” he says and Leslie grins shyly, her head dipping a little. “Really. Thank you.”
She nods and he moves to hand her his gift, wrapped in a cardboard tube. “Now, it’s…sort of fragile, in a weird way. So, be careful.”
She opens it, tearing through the paper much quicker than he had, pops the tube open and a newspaper page falls out. She looks at him questioningly as she unfolds it.
“It’s, um…it’s an article. That I had Shauna do. It’s an interview, with me. And it won’t run, because it’s not really news, but I had her do it anyway, and write this article up and print it, which really took a lot of convincing, since they had to fire up the machine for only one page, but…”
Leslie grins and reads the headline out loud. “ ‘Why I Picked Pawnee: The Ben Wyatt Story’. ”
He rubs nervously at the back of his neck.
“Yeah. I just…really wanted to get you something that…that would, sort of do two things, I guess. One, I wanted to get you something really special. Something that you would really like, but also, and I guess it’s really still a part of one, but two, I really wanted to get you something that would let you know,” and he falters here, runs his finger along a groove in the car seat. “That would let you know how I, how I feel about you.” He looks up at her and smiles nervously, only to find that she’s already smiling sweetly at him.
“And how is that, exactly?”
He blows out a puff of air, laughing slightly. “Well, the mistletoe thing kind of gave me away, but uh, I like you. Kind of a lot. And I’d really like to ask you to dinner, or to a movie. Or whatever you want to do.”
“So?”
“Um. So…so, what?”
“So, ask me then. If you want to, then just do it.”
He smiles, his heart swelling a full three sizes. “Okay. Would you like to go to dinner with me? Tomorrow night, at, let’s say, seven?”
Leslie smiles. “Sure, I’d love to. As long as you also come over tonight so we can make hot chocolate and watch A Christmas Story.”
He grins. “Deal.”
“Deal,” Leslie echoes and shifts a little closer. “And, I know there’s no mistletoe right here, but we could pretend there is, right? To get in the spirit of Christmas?”
Ben glances up at the ceiling of her car as he leans closer to her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I totally see it.”
Leslie is still giggling when their lips meet and Ben thinks that a Pawnee Christmas is the best kind of Christmas.
The End
Thanks as always for reading! Please, please let me know what you thought.
Pairing: Leslie/Ben
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 4874
Spoilers: Through "Fancy Party" and sort of "Jerry's Painting"
Summary: “Dammit, Ben, pick one. I’ve been waiting to start this because I thought you should pick first. Y’know, since it’ll be your first Christmas here.”
A/N: So, this was written because I felt there were some missed opportunites for great Christmas moments in Season 3 (plus, we're at the halfway point to Christmas!). Because this is a story about Ben's first Christmas, the timing is all artistic liscense. Basically, "Fancy Party" happened, but nothing after that, except for Ben moving in with April and Andy. There was no "I think we like each other" or Tom dating in this 'verse. Thanks for reading!
-------------------------------
“Hey there, Ben Wyatt, Assistant City Manager,” Leslie says with a warm smile as Ben leans a shoulder against the open doorway to her office.
“Hey Leslie Knope, of the Parks Department,” he replies, returning the smile. He hears a groan from Tom’s corner of the room and he turns his head slightly to see Tom rolling his eyes as he swivels his chair towards Ben.
“Ugh. Seriously. Get. A. Room.”
Ben’s smile falters a little, but Leslie starts to say something, talking over Tom and ignoring him completely.
“I’m glad you’re here, actually, you have to pick out of this hat,” she says, pointing to an upside-down construction hat that was perched on the edge of her desk. It was filled with tiny folded strips of paper.
“Does it say…does it say “Ass” on there?” He asks as he moves closer. Leslie nods quickly but gestures impatiently at the hat again.
“Pick, pick, it’s for Secret Santa,” she says, her tone slightly annoyed, but she’s betrayed by her wide grin. He hesitates, wonders for a moment why Leslie was involving him in this.
“This isn’t just for you guys?” He asks and she shakes her head vehemently, frustration evident on her face as she picks up the hat and wiggles it.
“Dammit, Ben, pick one. I’ve been waiting to start this because I thought you should pick first. Y’know, since it’ll be your first Christmas here.”
His heart swells and he dips his hand into the hat, needing no further encouragement. Leslie bolts out of her chair and into the next room to pass the hat to everyone else, obviously eager to involve the rest of the department in the game. Ben unfolds his slip of paper as Leslie coaxes April to participate.
And he freezes. A small, neat, half-cursive, half-printed “Leslie Knope” stares back at him. He feels…something well up in his stomach and start to travel into his chest. It feels a little like panic. Yep, he’s panicking.
Anyone else. Anyone else in this office would be easy to shop for. Tom? Easy. Cologne, skin products, literally anything that had to do with self-grooming. April? God, so easy. Music. Even Ron. He could buy Ron something for his wood shop, or something for his grill, or just…something else. He knew there was more that he could get Ron, the man had many extracurricular activities, but his brain was shutting down and he couldn’t think.
Because Leslie? What the hell could he get Leslie?
Aside from the obvious answers. He knew what she liked, that wasn’t the issue. But what could he get her that said “Hey, you’re a really cool person and I like you a lot as a friend, but maybe you could sorta notice me as something a little more than that? I mean, if you wanted, no pressure, it’s just that you make me feel all sorts of things and I was hoping that you felt something of the same thing, if you know what I mean.”
Which is a lot to ask of a gift.
“Hey,” Tom’s voice breaks him from his train-wreck of a thought process. “She forgot to tell you, your budget for this is zero dollars. You can’t spend any money.”
Shit. Shit shit shit. He was so screwed.
***
Ben can’t stop staring at the little slip of paper with Leslie’s name on it, which is partially why he ends up running smack into Andy in the middle of the hall. (Also, Andy is trying to perfect his new “moves”, which was spinning in circles on his rollerblades while holding his guitar, so that’s the other reason.)
“Whoa, sorry, roomie,” Andy says as he wobbles forwards, forcing Ben to reach out and steady him.
“No, no,” Ben says as he pats the guitar. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“Looking at that piece of paper?”
He glances back down at the slip, clutched between his thumb and forefinger. Andy strains to peek.
“Oh! Secret Santa! I wonder if it’s too late,” Andy says, rolling over to his shoeshine stand to put his guitar away. “I hope Leslie doesn’t mind me playing. I did it last year, and got Tom, and wrote him a song. He didn’t really appreciate it like I thought he would, maybe this year I could get April, though. Lucky, that you got Leslie, huh?”
His eyes shoot up to meet Andy’s happy stare. Andy wiggles his eyebrows and Ben narrows his eyes.
“What do you mean?”
Andy shrugs, his eyes twinkling. “You know. Lucky you drew her. Now you can get her something for Christmas and it wouldn’t seem weird.”
Ben can’t think of anything to say so he just continues to stare at Andy. Andy smiles conspiratorially and leans forward, lowering his voice.
“You know, dude. You know.”
And Ben almost laughs, because he does know, but he can’t believe Andy does too. So he does the only thing he knows how in situations like this and changes the subject.
“Well, if you do draw April, you still have to get her a real present. You can’t use this as an excuse to save money.”
Andy smiles. “Oh, I know. I’ve got a lot of stuff planned. Which, by the way, I hope you like to get up early on Christmas morning. I’m waking you up at seven, by the latest.”
Andy punches his shoulder and begins rolling away, leaving Ben to stand in the hallway smiling happily, still clutching at that little slip of paper.
***
“Ben, what’re you doing?” Leslie’s voice floats up to him from somewhere below. He adjusts himself on the ladder, twists around until he sees her.
“Um, hanging this ornament. Isn’t that…isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?”
She smiles up at him and he has to steady himself. She looks beautiful, her blonde hair sticking out of the knit cap she is wearing, an oversized parka dwarfing her small frame. The cold, biting air lends a rosy glow to her cheeks and she brings a gloved hand up to rub at her nose.
Ben would give anything to be the one to warm her up right now, forgetting for a brief moment that they were in the middle of Lot 48, setting up for the Winter Wonderland. Wishes they weren’t surrounded by their co-workers and many volunteers.
“You just put a red ball one branch over. You need another one right there, like gold or silver, you can’t do two red balls next to each other.”
“Oh. Sorry. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this,” he says and she gives him a sad smile, like she’s understanding something about his past that he’s not saying and he kind of regrets saying anything at all. Because it’s not something that particularly makes him sad, this lack of ornament-hanging in his life. It’s just simply something that he hasn’t done.
Though, if he had someone like Leslie in his life, someone who was so enthusiastic about ornament hanging, so enthusiastic about everything Christmas related, maybe then he would be sad about not doing it, because he enjoys doing this with her. Okay. Now he is a little sad.
But the feeling passes when Leslie steps on the bottom rung of his ladder, clutching a hand-painted ornament in her hand. He leans down to grab it and she smiles at him, a small, secretive smile that he files away in his brain as Yet Another Moment Leslie Looked Adorable. The file is getting quite large.
“This one should go there. It was painted by that little boy, over there,” she says, pointing, and Ben looks over at the group of schoolchildren that had been volunteered by their parents and teachers to help with set-up. A young boy, probably six or seven, was diligently shoveling snow off of the walkway. “He said he made it in school a year ago, when he first moved here. He saw your hat and thought you might like it.”
Ben turns the ornament around in his hand, a crude rendering of the Minnesota Twins logo staring back at him. He smiles to himself, feeling warm despite the chilly breeze that was cutting through his too-light jacket.
“So, I thought you should be the one to hang it. And, seeing as you can’t figure out how to do this right, I thought I should be the one to tell you where it goes,” she says teasingly, shrugging with one shoulder and grinning up at him. He returns the grin and holds the ornament up next to his face.
“Boss me, boss lady.”
***
The next few hours are a bizarre series of events: Ben falls off the ladder at Lot 48, Leslie is overly concerned and weirdly protective (which Ben enjoys…at first), he sits in the hospital with Leslie and Ann, and after being proclaimed “fine”, the three of them discuss Christmas trees and Leslie mentions how much she loves them, but the clutter in her house is getting bad again and she doesn’t have room to put one up, much less the time.
And that’s how Ben finds himself moving boxes out of Leslie’s living room and into her garage at nine o’clock at night, a freshly cut Christmas tree that’s ready to be decorated taking up the space where her car should be.
Leslie makes hot chocolate in the kitchen while Ann directs him around the house, telling him what to put where, for when Leslie needs to move it all back.
“Move it back? Can’t we just go through it, throw some of the stuff out?” He asks, his hands on his knees and voice strained from carrying three heavy boxes of DVD’s up to the bedroom.
Ann glances towards the kitchen. “Um. It’s going to take a lot of convincing to get Leslie to throw anything out. It’s a pretty big project to tackle.”
Ben shrugs, wipes sweat off his forehead with his shirt sleeve. He really shouldn’t have worn a thermal under his t-shirt, but it was too late now. “I don’t mind. Helping. If she’d want to.”
Ann looks at him, silently, and for a moment, Ben is unnerved. But a small smile creeps across her lips and he has the strange sense of being judged.
“You’re sweet,” she says, with a hint of warm affection.
And when Leslie comes back into the living room to hand him a mug, filled to the brim with marshmallows, his heart is a little lighter. Because Leslie’s best friend just gave him a stamp of approval and he’s standing in Leslie’s living room on non-work related matters and she gave him the most marshmallows in his hot chocolate.
He grins at her, bursting at the seams. She stands a little too close, clutching her own mug, her shoulder touching his. She looks over at the empty corner and nods with approval.
“Looks good. Are you guys ready to decorate?” She asks, sipping her drink and looking over the brim with her brows raised high.
Ann glances at her watch and sighs dramatically. “I don’t know, Les. It’s pretty late and I’m beat. I think I’ll just head home,” she says, gathering her jacket off the couch. “But, you, you guys should definitely decorate. Don’t wait for me or anything, just go ahead. Go at it.”
She says the last bit with an odd grin and shows herself out the front door. Ben is left standing in silence, still shoulder-to-shoulder with Leslie. He sips his drink, just to have something to do.
“Well,” Leslie says, breaking the pause and stepping away. He immediately misses the contact. “I’ll go get the ornament box. I hope you’re better at this here than you were at the lot. And no getting on ladders,” she says, pointing at him as she disappeared up her stairs.
He holds up his hands. “Got it.”
*
“Oh! That one is from fifth grade, when I was in the Girl Scouts,” Leslie says, plucking the Star of David made out of popsicle sticks from Ben’s hands. “Everyone else’s looked all wonky, but I sat there for hours, making sure all of the sticks were perfectly straight.”
Ben grins and picks another ornament out of the box. “I can see that. Were you one of those kids that stuck their tongue out while they worked? Like this?” He demonstrates and she giggles.
“No. You do that sometimes, though, so don’t even try to make fun. I’ve seen it.”
He chuckles and it occurs to him that in order for her to notice a small detail such as that, she had to have been looking. At him. And noticing things like that. And he doesn’t really know what that means, but it feels like it means something, so he holds on to the rush of giddiness.
“I bet you were a cute kid,” he says and she giggles again, but nods enthusiastically.
“Oh, yeah, the cutest,” she answers.
“I wonder what little Leslie Knope would have thought about little Ben Wyatt,” he muses as he hangs a plain green ornament. She smiles at him, her eyes shining brightly and she hangs her Star of David close to his fingers.
“I’m sure we would have been friends. Eventually,” she amends. “Little Leslie might have thought Little Ben was a hard-ass. At first.”
He laughs and turns towards her. “A hard-ass? Really?”
She nods happily, turning her body to mirror his stance. “Yeah! Total hard-ass. But, I’m sure she’d get over it, see he was really a sweet little boy.”
He moves towards the couch, slumps down onto it, but grins up at her. She follows his lead, seating herself on the other end, pulls her legs up and folds them underneath her.
“Well, for the record. Little Ben wasn’t much of a hard-ass, I was kind of a sensitive kid,” he says. She smiles as she reaches for her hot chocolate, sips at it as she looks at him over the top. Ben can’t remember a time he ever felt happier than this moment.
After a few beats of comfortable silence, Leslie asks casually, “Who did you draw in Secret Santa?”
He glances over at her. “I can’t tell you that, that’s cheating.”
She smiles. “Good answer. I had to make sure you were serious about it.”
He chuckles and leans his head back against the couch, suddenly very tired. “Thanks for including me in that. It’s cool, y’know…to be able to…” he falters, having started the thought before he knew where he was going to end up. She nods, though, saving him the trouble of figuring it out.
“No problem. You’ve been a big help to our department,” she says, and it’s weird how formal it sounds, like he hasn’t spent the better part of a year becoming anything but formal with her, with her whole department. Like he wasn’t sitting in her living room, helping her decorate her Christmas tree. “Sometimes I forget that you actually have other things to do, other people to deal with. I didn’t know if you were close to anyone else at City Hall, so I thought you’d like to participate in our little traditions.”
He smiles and closes his eyes. “Yeah, it should be fun. It’ll be nice to have new traditions, here in Pawnee.”
He doesn’t open his eyes, but he hears Leslie shift on the other end of the couch, and he knows that she’s smiling back.
***
The Annual Parks Department Christmas Celebration is in full swing by the time Ben arrives, a full hour late. Andy grabs him as soon as he walks in the door and pours him a shot of what smells like rubbing alcohol, but he downs it without much hesitation. Andy cheers him on and pushes him further into the room, causing him to jostle Ron.
“Son,” Ron says, tipping his glass towards him. Ben nods once.
“Ron.”
He tries to scan the room as subtly as he can, but Tom appears next to him and shoves a beer into his hand.
“Here ya go, man, enjoy. Let me let you in on a little secret for tonight,” Tom says, his eyes wide and his grin huge. “Leslie usually gets super drunk at these things, so you can convince her to do pretty much anything. It’s hilarious. This year, I think I’m going to ask to see her Iron Man impression.”
Ben frowns. “Iron Man?”
But Tom is gone before he gets an answer and Ann is taking his place. She smiles at him as she sips on a fruity frozen drink and he briefly wonders where all this alcohol is coming from.
“Hey,” she says. “Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” he smiles back.
“You know,” she starts to say, then pauses. She cocks her head a little bit and looks to be sizing him up. “I know we don’t know each other too well, so this might sound a little weird. But…I’m glad you’re here.”
He quirks an eyebrow questioningly as he takes a sip of beer. Ann smiles, warm and inviting, and Ben is suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of belonging and he is eternally grateful that he’s ended up here, standing in the Parks Department of Pawnee, Indiana, drinking with the weirdest group of friends he’s ever had.
“You know. That you stayed. We all are,” Ann continues and he ducks his head and grins, so crazy happy. “But, uh, Leslie’s outside, in the courtyard. If you were wondering.”
He glances out the window and sees a small flash of blonde hair, peeking out from under her wool hat. He makes his way towards the door and is stopped twice on his way outside, both times to take a shot, neither of which he refuses.
By the time he finally opens the door to the courtyard, his chest is warm and his head is a little dizzy, but he’s still got all his wits about him. Leslie turns towards the door, gives him a smile, and turns back around to continue her admiration of…something.
Oh. Oh, wow.
Ben stands stock still for a moment, taking in the beautifully decorated courtyard, Christmas lights strung across it every which way. There’s icicle lights hanging off the roof, colored lights lining the windows, LED snowflakes hanging from anywhere and everywhere they could.
Leslie turns to him again, looks him up and down. “You’re going to get sick without a coat. It’s starting to snow again.”
He looks up to the sky, sees the first fat flakes drifting down towards him. He rolls his shirt sleeves down. “Leslie…this is. This is amazing.”
She smiles and shrugs. “I know we’re not supposed to take a stand or whatever, in government, but this courtyard, for this one night? It’s mine. And I want it to look good for our party.”
He smiles and nods enthusiastically. “Yeah, yeah, it really looks great.”
She twists her upper body towards him, hugging her arms to her chest and squints one eye at him. “It does, doesn’t it? I love this, the lights, the snow, the parties. Christmas is great, especially when you get to share it with so many people.”
“And the presents,” he adds, with a grin. She leans towards him, nudges his shoulder with most of her body, unwilling to unwrap her arms.
“Lame,” she says and he laughs. She lowers her voice to a whisper. “But yeah, the presents are pretty cool. Oh! That reminds me, we still have to do Secret Santa!”
She rushes past him to go back inside and he follows dutifully. And that’s really all he wanted to do, to just follow her inside.
But what happens next is a surreal turn of events. Leslie opens the door and pauses, turns to, Ben assumes, take one last look at the courtyard slowly filling up with snow. He pauses too, waiting for her to pass through the threshold.
But Tom yells from across the room, in a voice that’s way too loud and attention-grabbing, “Hey! Guys, mistletoe! Mistletoe!”
Everyone looks around and Ben joins the search for the unfortunate couple that’s been caught beneath the dreaded hanging plant.
And that’s when he notices everyone has turned towards him.
Oh. Oh no.
Leslie is turning back to face the inside of her department, filled with her colleagues and friends, all eagerly and silently waiting for them to do something. Her eyes rise to the top of the doorway and she freezes. Ben thinks her cheeks flush with pink, but it was snowing outside, so. Hard to tell. Who knows, really.
To say Ben is unnerved…well, that’s an understatement.
Right about now is when the words Human Disaster race through his mind and his palms start sweating and if he were speaking, his words would be halting.
“Come on, man. You guys gotta kiss,” Tom slurs in their direction and Ben wonders how long he can hesitate before it’s full-blown stalling. Or, shit, what if she gets the idea that he doesn’t want to? That he’s hesitating because he thinks the idea is gross? Shit, shit, he definitely doesn’t want that.
She turns towards him and lifts her eyebrows up and gives him a small smile. He nervously returns it and suddenly his eyes are locked onto hers and he couldn’t look away even if he wanted to, which he never, never does.
“Well, you can’t argue with a plant above a door, can you?” She jokes and he lets out a nervous chuckle, a sound that’s almost unrecognizable to his ears as something he produced.
“Or the drunkards that take orders from it?” He offers quietly and she grins and it just might be the most beautiful thing he’s seen all night, and the courtyard was damn impressive.
So it’s almost involuntary, really, the course that his body takes right then, as she smiles radiantly up at him. His head ducks low and her eyes close and their lips softly touch and Ben can’t believe that this is how this is finally happening. In a room with everyone they know. Watching them.
But all these thoughts seep out of his mind and dissipate into the air when he feels her lightly respond under him, her lips parting ever so slightly, allowing him in without sacrificing any semblance of professionalism and a fuse blows somewhere in Ben’s brain when he realizes she wants this.
He hears Tom whoop and Andy call for a round of high-fives as his hands find her hair and his fingers tangle themselves in her curls. He holds her head close to him, keeping her there, runs his tongue lightly over her bottom lip and he thinks he feels her sway underneath him. Her hand comes up to rest against his cheek and he feels her tongue swipe lightly back, but she pulls away, breaks the contact before she can follow through on that last promise.
They stand there for a moment, smiling happily at one another, her hand resting on his cheek, his hand clutching her hair. Ben glances around the room. No one is looking at them anymore. He jerks his head towards the door.
“Do you…do you wanna go somewhere? Else? We could talk, or. I don’t know, exchange gifts,” he says softly, still halfway afraid her answer could be no, even though a few minutes before he would swear it was an unequivocal yes.
She cocks her head. “How do you know I have a gift for you?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean--I mean, I have something…for the thing, the exchange. Secret Santa. Oh, unless you need to stay here and. Do that.”
She looks around, taking in everyone’s actions and seems to come to a conclusion in her mind. “Nah, it looks like everyone’s having a good time. They can do it themselves this year. Let’s go to my car.”
*
Ben meets her at her car after retrieving his gift for her. He climbs inside, the car already warm, the radio blaring cheery Christmas music. Leslie turns and starts to speak before he can even try and get a word out.
“So, I’m guessing you had me? For Secret Santa?”
He nods and she smiles.
“I had you, too,” she says, reaching into the backseat and pulling a neatly wrapped gift into her lap. “And, well, the budget was supposed to be zero dollars, but I needed some stuff to start it, so I had Ron buy the supplies, so technically I still spent zero dollars, and…well, just open it.”
She holds the gift up and he takes it, smiling at her as he carefully rips the paper off. She fidgets until he finishes and a thick slice of dark cherry wood sits in his lap.
“Turn it over,” she says, a barely detectable tremor in her voice, and he’s struck suddenly by how rare it is to see Leslie Knope so unsure of herself, how odd it was for her to be nervous over what he was going to think of her.
He flips it over and his heart hops, skips, and jumps a few beats before resetting to its normal pace.
It’s a plaque, with a picture attached to the top. The picture is of the two of them, taken during the Harvest Festival. They are both wearing their green STAFF shirts and they are standing in front of one of the cotton candy machines. Leslie has an arm wrapped around his middle and his arm is slung over her shoulders and they are both squinting into the camera, the sun obviously shining in their eyes. Ben remembers Ann taking the picture, remembers complaining about how the sun was too bright and he wouldn’t be able to keep his eyes open for long, remembers Leslie pinching his side and telling him to stop being such a baby.
There is an engraving underneath the picture, reading:
Harvest Festival 2010
Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt
Our Project
His fingers trace the outline of the words and Leslie shifts.
“So? What do you think? Ron helped, obviously, but it was my idea. I thought it would be a good memento, for the Harvest Festival, and for your first big project in Pawnee,” she rambles and he finally looks up at her and grins.
“I love it. It’s going in my office, right next to my desk, so everyone that comes in has to see it,” he says and Leslie grins shyly, her head dipping a little. “Really. Thank you.”
She nods and he moves to hand her his gift, wrapped in a cardboard tube. “Now, it’s…sort of fragile, in a weird way. So, be careful.”
She opens it, tearing through the paper much quicker than he had, pops the tube open and a newspaper page falls out. She looks at him questioningly as she unfolds it.
“It’s, um…it’s an article. That I had Shauna do. It’s an interview, with me. And it won’t run, because it’s not really news, but I had her do it anyway, and write this article up and print it, which really took a lot of convincing, since they had to fire up the machine for only one page, but…”
Leslie grins and reads the headline out loud. “ ‘Why I Picked Pawnee: The Ben Wyatt Story’. ”
He rubs nervously at the back of his neck.
“Yeah. I just…really wanted to get you something that…that would, sort of do two things, I guess. One, I wanted to get you something really special. Something that you would really like, but also, and I guess it’s really still a part of one, but two, I really wanted to get you something that would let you know,” and he falters here, runs his finger along a groove in the car seat. “That would let you know how I, how I feel about you.” He looks up at her and smiles nervously, only to find that she’s already smiling sweetly at him.
“And how is that, exactly?”
He blows out a puff of air, laughing slightly. “Well, the mistletoe thing kind of gave me away, but uh, I like you. Kind of a lot. And I’d really like to ask you to dinner, or to a movie. Or whatever you want to do.”
“So?”
“Um. So…so, what?”
“So, ask me then. If you want to, then just do it.”
He smiles, his heart swelling a full three sizes. “Okay. Would you like to go to dinner with me? Tomorrow night, at, let’s say, seven?”
Leslie smiles. “Sure, I’d love to. As long as you also come over tonight so we can make hot chocolate and watch A Christmas Story.”
He grins. “Deal.”
“Deal,” Leslie echoes and shifts a little closer. “And, I know there’s no mistletoe right here, but we could pretend there is, right? To get in the spirit of Christmas?”
Ben glances up at the ceiling of her car as he leans closer to her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I totally see it.”
Leslie is still giggling when their lips meet and Ben thinks that a Pawnee Christmas is the best kind of Christmas.
The End
Thanks as always for reading! Please, please let me know what you thought.