twentysomething

Title: And I Might Never Leave Again

Fandom: Parks and Recreation

Pairing: Leslie/Ben

Summary: ""Is the water working in the rest of the house?" he asks, his padfolio slipping off his lap onto the couch. Leslie frowns.

"Yeah, more or less," Leslie says slowly, not really sure where he's going with this. Ben shrugs again.

"You want me to take a look at it?" he offers."

Length: 3300 wordsish

Warnings: I DON'T EVEN KNOW, MAN. GROSS DOMESTICITY.

Notes: So, I don't even know how I started watching Parks and Rec, but now it's in my blood, like a crack demon and I can't stop it, and I want Ben and Leslie to get together so badly, I would stab people with knives for it. But anyway, I was re-watching "Leslie's House" today and thinking to myself that Leslie doesn't seem like the DIY kind, because something would happen and she'd forget about whatever just broke and the tasks would pile up. And I think I saw in another fic that someone had the Wyatts own a hardware store, and I liked that, and I think this happened then. Ben is Leslie's (handy)man.




Leslie is so screwed.

Fred the plumber refuses to come out to her house since that one time he got a little trapped under a tiny avalanche in the kitchen and Leslie is beside herself and coincidentally a little ripe. Her water's spitting out of the shower and dribbling out of the spout and she's thinking about going to the rec center and taking a shower at the pool, but then she flips on the lights in her bedroom and blows a fuse.

"Poop," Leslie mutters, sitting in the relative darkness.

Which is, of course, when the doorbell rings.

"Coming, coming," Leslie calls, stubbing her toe on the door frame in her haste.

"Crap, crap, crap," she hisses as she flings open the door.

"Is- I'm- Should I go?" Ben asks, looking about as flustered as she feels.

"Oh, crap, Ben, I'm sorry," Leslie says, rubbing a hand over her face. "I completely forgot we were supposed to have our brainstorming session." Ben shrugs easily enough, motioning back out toward his ridiculous, white, Dodge Neon rental car.

"I mean, I can come back sometime later, if you're busy," Ben suggests, and even though it would probably be for the best, she finds herself going, "No, no, come in," anyway.

"I'm sorry, I'm just-" Leslie runs her hands through her hair. "I'm a mess, today's been a little wacky." She leads Ben into the living room and he carefully shifts three back-copies of the Journal to one side of the couch so he can sit. He's wearing jeans, which is a little baffling to Leslie's mind, but at least he's wearing one of his more endearingly atrocious plaid shirts, which is a nice, grounding focus point.

"Yeah?" he asks, the corner of his mouth just barely twitching up. "Raccoons?" Leslie rolls her eyes at him, but she's still a little pleased that Ben has integrated himself into Pawnee enough that he knows raccoon are a menace and libraries are to be avoided at all costs.

"No, my stupid shower isn't working and then the lights went out in my bedroom and Fred the plumber is a big baby and I just don't know when I'm going to have time to deal with all of it," Leslie sighs, but reaches for her binders, stalwart in her dedication to awesome civil service. Ben raises his eyebrows.

"Is the water working in the rest of the house?" he asks, his padfolio slipping off his lap onto the couch. Leslie frowns.

"Yeah, more or less," Leslie says slowly, not really sure where he's going with this. Ben shrugs again.

"You want me to take a look at it?" he offers. Leslie blinks, but she leads him back to the bathroom anyway, pretty certain there's nothing embarrassing back there, like gross old razors or anything.

"Do you know a lot about plumbing?" she asks, sitting on the closed toilet lid as Ben crouches down next to her bathtub. He frowns as the water sluggishly pours out.

"Well, my dad owned the hardware store, and as a kid, I would just hang around there for hours. All the guys in the town would come in and I guess I learned a little bit about everything," he explains, standing up to try running the shower. "Yeah, you probably need to replace the mixing valves." Leslie feels like the blank expression on her face must be pretty epic, because Ben just smiles and nudges at her shoe with his.

"C'mon, I'll take you." Ben says and Leslie just follows his lead for once, frazzled, tired, and willing to let him make the decisions.

Somehow, the hardware store becomes the grocery store, too, and even the post office for stamps and they've been all over town, reminding each other about grumbled complaints of needed things from throughout the week. She lets Ben get away with buying her all sorts of ridiculous vegetables, because he thinks she can't or shouldn't live on waffles and NutriYum bars, which is, again, ridiculous. But Ben's sort of cute, pricing out noodles or something and buying store-brand things because they "taste the same, I swear, if you're going to buy Fruit Loops, they might as well be Fruity Floats."

Leslie rolls her eyes, but lets him put the bag- a bag of cereal, really- into the cart. They have completely opposite impulse junk food tastes- Leslie sneaks the Gushers under the lettuce and when she realizes that Ben's put like, two gross packages of teriyaki beef jerky in the cart, Leslie has a bizarre flash into the future where Ben has to watch his salt or he's going to have a heart attack, and thinks about future Ben's wife, making boring low-sodium food in their boring future house, and she switches it out for the regular.

She's just looking out for him.

By the time they get back home, it's getting dark and they're starving, so she lets Ben cook them dinner.

It's not until they're laughing over the second half of the second bottle of wine ending up more on the tablecloth than in their glasses, their plates empty- Leslie ate green beans, what- that Leslie realizes the last time someone ate dinner with her in the house, it was the terrible/amazing dinner party she threw for Justin. Leslie doesn't read a lot into the fact that this is a much better night. It's almost midnight, they're both sloshed and they end up falling asleep on the couch watching the Daily Show, like old people, before Colbert even comes on.

When she wakes up, there's a blanket thrown over her and Ben has already started the coffee.

She doesn't think about the last time a guy came over here, and he was gone before she could even offer to make it herself.

Ben looks like five kinds of adorable, because his hair is sticking up every which way and he's just in a plain white t-shirt and jeans, barefoot, and his toes are precious. Big, bad, town-crusher Ben Wyatt has super cute toes. Leslie is probably still half-asleep, but she thinks that Ben should tell people he has cute toes. It'd probably make them less likely to call him "Turd Boy".

"Good morning," Ben says, softly, like he's still mostly asleep, too, and this is nice- normally Leslie's running around and doing things at double time, but they stumble around the kitchen, slow, bumping hands and hips as they fuss with their coffee and Ben makes fun of her for liking her eggs over hard.

"Ugh, you're disgusting," Leslie says, wrinkling her nose, because egg yolks shouldn't move like that, it's foul, and Ben just smirks and runs his toast through them extra slow, all runny and sicknasty.

"Whatever, how are those destroyed eggs, Knope? It's like you want them hard boiled, but you're too lazy, who does that?" he shoots back, all smug and dumb and Leslie just steals his coffee. After breakfast, they realize they never fixed the shower- or the bedroom lights- or even had the brainstorming session that was the whole reason he came over, a little under 24 hours ago.

"Well, you're starting to stink, so," Ben says, all sly teasing and Leslie laughs and rubs a hand against his cheek.

"I'm sorry, what, sandpaper face?" she points out. "Come back when you don't look like Harry Potter, crazy hair."

They get distracted watching Chamber of Secrets and making fun of each other for being nerds, so it's afternoon again by the time they actually get around to the bathroom- Leslie unearths her father's old tool kit with only a little ache in her heart and hands tools to Ben when he asks for them.

They forget to turn the water off first, so they both get sprayed a little bit- Ben more than her- but enough that she gets them both towels. Despite the pale lilac towel draped around his neck, this is probably the manliest thing she's ever seen Ben do. His hands are all grimy with plumbing grit and the muscles in his forearms flex as he works at a stubborn something or another- maybe a nut or bolt or something- with a wrench. Leslie thinks she must be in a worse dry spell than she thought, because her stomach flutters a bit when he uses the back of his wrist to push his still damp hair out of his eyes.

Which is ridiculous, that's not even hot, whatever. Dirty hands and wet t-shirts are like, just, a thing she apparently has, and it has nothing to do with Ben, even if he does have cute toes and a nice smile first thing in the morning.

He fixes the lights in the bedroom, too, which is how he finds out that her dresser has a weird broken drawer, and it's not like it really bothers Leslie, but he says he'll fix it for her some time and well, she's not going to tell him no. It's not like it's stuff she couldn't do on her own, or figure out how to do, at least, but it's just sort of nice to have someone else to help out.

"I wouldn't have guessed you'd be so handy," Leslie says blithely, obscurely pleased, but Ben's face does this weird, twisty, sad thing for a moment and Leslie wonders what is wrong with this guy that he takes everything the wrong way. "Not that you're not good at stuff, you are, obviously, but I mean, around the house. It's... nice." She feels dumb, using "nice" all the time, even if it's mostly in her thoughts and he wouldn't know, because nice is just such a bland word to describe Ben, who's not bland at all. But nice is the only thing coming up in her mind, and at least it's you know, nice. Not "mean". Ben's smiling again, though, so. Anyway.

"Thanks, I think," he says, in his usual, self-deprecating acknowledgment of a compliment. Leslie just squints up at him, because it's almost sunset and Ben's opened the front door and the golden-orange light of late fall Pawnee is wonderful and bright and in her eyes.

"You're welcome," she returns, near-automatically and awkwardly formal, considering they've spent almost the whole weekend together. Leslie abruptly realizes she hasn't spent this much continuous time with one person- when not at work- since Dave left.

"So, see you tomorrow?" Ben finally says. "Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel?" She can't help but laugh and push him out the door, the moment of strange self-consciousness gone.

"Oh my god, get out of here, dweeb, before I have to like, shove you into some lockers, like the cool kids do." she threatens him and Ben laughs as he gets in his car.

"Yeah, okay, wizard. I saw all those Harry Potter books on your shelf," he calls out the window, and then he's pulling out of the driveway before she can zing him back.

The house is weirdly quiet, which is stupid, because Ben isn't loud or anything, so it doesn't make any sense that it's "quiet" all of a sudden without him there, but it is too quiet, so Leslie just puts on Prisoner of Azkaban even though she's doing laundry in the other room and can't really watch it.

The next weekend, Ben comes over to fix the dresser and ends up hanging Leslie's birdhouses- all of them- in the backyard, too. By the time he's done- and they're both covered in grass stains from falling off of Leslie's rickety, old stepladder- they're both hungry and Leslie has managed to eat everything but the vegetables Ben put in her "crisper" drawer. He pronounces it "not enough to make dinner with", so they order out for Chinese and spend the whole time they're waiting for it complaining about how hungry they are, roughly every two and a half minutes or so.

"If we die right now, from hunger, I just want you to know," Ben says solemnly, and Leslie's chest feels tight all of a sudden. "If you play "Whoomp! There It Is" at my funeral, I will haunt your ass so hard, it won't even be funny." Leslie laughs, but there's something a little manic about it, like she's almost disappointed, which doesn't make any sense.

"No, really, it'll make that Indian curse look like The Haunted Mansion. Like, the terrible Eddie Murphy one," Ben is grinning and his head is completely flopped back along the back of the sofa and Leslie doesn't know when Ben became her best friend- other than Ann, she mentally amends, faithfully- but she's glad he is.

When the Chinese food finally gets there, they dig in on the living room couch like heathens and Leslie's face goes red for no good reason when Ben moans his way through a container of beef Lo Mein.

Somehow, it sort of becomes this thing.

After hanging up the birdhouses and eating, Leslie mentions that there are weird cracks in her patio, maybe they can tackle them together and the next day, Ben shows up with a trowel and some cement. The weekend after that, it's the loose banister up to the attic and she even makes Ben her mom's apple pie to say thank you. Her piece is mostly ice cream, so she's not sure how good it is, but he seems to like it. It's an unseasonably warm day, so they sit out on the fixed patio and eat while they listen to a bunch of strange wildlife noises. Ben tries to convince her that he hears a cougar or something, but Leslie works for the Parks Department- she's not going to let some city boy from Minnesota freak her out. But she does lock her door that night. In case.

Ann asks her to go shopping the next Saturday and Leslie wants to say no- which is weird and crazy on like, ten different levels, because she always wants to go shopping with Ann- and it's not like she and Ben have plans really. They don't really plan anything out and Leslie thinks maybe that's what she likes so much about it. She's totally comfortable around him- which isn't new, actually, but she's really still not sure what, exactly, that means.

But she says yes to Ann anyway. Leslie spends most of the morning idly checking her phone and Ann calls her on it about the seventh time in the hour.

"What's up with you?" she asks, not upset, but clearly a little confused. "Are you waiting on a work call, or something?"

"No," Leslie says, because while she and Ben are still technically colleagues, since Ben took over for Chris when Paul announced his retirement, rather than his return. But she thinks of them as friends first, these days. She just can't stop wondering what Ben is doing with his Saturday instead of hanging out with her, that's all. Maybe she's been sucking up all his free time- after the shower, he just didn't know how to say no, and has been doing all of Leslie's stupid DIY home repairs instead of- well, yeah, Leslie has no idea.

"Is everything okay?" Ann looks so sweet and concerned that what comes out of Leslie's mouth is some jumbled version of the last three weekends- eating vegetables and having eight birdhouses in the oak tree in her backyard, now, and Ben.

"Oh, Leslie," Ann finally says and she takes Leslie to the Cinnabon and buys her a cinnamon bun, and is Leslie dying or something?

"So, you know you're in love with him, right?" Ann asks and Leslie nearly does die, choking on icing-covered deliciousness.

"What?" Leslie gasps, half-surprise, half-oxygen deprivation. Ann just stares at her.

"I mean, everyone knows he has that thing for you, so if you're not in love with him, you've got to stop leading him on." Ann tells her, serious as all get out, but Leslie still feels like she's getting Punk'd. Leslie has a hysterical moment of wondering if that show is even still on the air.

"Ann, you've got to be-" Leslie stops, mid-thought, because she thinks about Ben's toes and how she likes it when he's in her kitchen, wearing his stupid old jeans and t-shirts and fixing her stuff. "Oh, crap. I'm totally in love with Ben."

Ann just nods sympathetically.

"But hey," Ann starts, cheerful and optimistic. "At least you know he's totally into you." Leslie frowns.

"I don't know, I mean, he could just-" Leslie's feeling panicky, because now that she's realized she's in love with Ben, she also knows she's been in love with him forever, and it's going to hurt like a mother if she screws it up, and he moves back to Indy or something.

"Leslie, he goes grocery shopping with you." Ann says, soothing. "And there's also that thing where he pretty much took a job here so he didn't have to go back to Indianapolis, all so that maybe, someday you'd go on a date with him."

Looking at it that way, yeah, it seems pretty obvious.

Ann makes her buy an entirely new outfit before she lets Leslie go to Ben's apartment.

"I'm sure he likes you for your mind, etcetera, but this doesn't hurt, either," Ann says with a wink, and Leslie refuses to think about the fact that she bought new underwear. And that's the thing, isn't it- Ben's seen her, sweaty and gross, no makeup on, and he's still here. Something about it settles her feminist heart and she knocks on Ben's apartment door, confident as hell. And if she listened to Jock Jams on the drive there, no one else has to know.

"Leslie," Ben breathes out and looking at him now, she doesn't know how she missed it. The way they stand probably too close to each other, the way that if she stepped just a little bit closer, they'd fit together perfectly, like puzzle pieces. "What's up?"

"So, it's come to my attention that-" Leslie is such a dork. "Aw, screw it."

She has to go on her tip toes to do it, but she leans up and kisses Ben, wrapping her fingers around the collar of his stupid plaid shirt. There's a moment where Ben makes this sweet, muffled noise of surprise, but then his hands are threading into her hair, his left- or maybe it's her left, his right- thumb brushing just behind her ear, making her shiver.

"I like you," Leslie breathes against his mouth, when they break for shallow, gasping breaths. "Okay, that's an understatement. I really like you." Ben just sighs happily, his hands tracing down her back, over her side, like he can't stop touching her, like he has to be certain it's her and she's sort of glad she bought new underwear, after all.

"Yeah?" he asks, and he's grinning like Leslie's never seen before and she falls in love with him all over again, because she put that smile there, that's for her, and that's crazy.

"Like, a lot." she admits and Ben's still grinning even when he kisses her again, both still half out in the hallway.

"Me too," Ben says, quiet and happy, his restless hands stroking her hip.

"Do you wanna maybe come make dinner with me?" Leslie asks, weirdly shy, because it's really not any different than the last three times she's had Ben over. Ben kisses her, quick, then lingering, and quick again, like he's worried she's going to tell him to stop or something equally dumb, and he wants to stockpile his kisses.

"Always," he agrees, and it feels like he doesn't just mean dinner. It's the best thing Leslie's ever heard.