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Language:
English
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Published:
2017-11-13
Words:
1,675
Chapters:
1/1
Comments:
50
Kudos:
454
Bookmarks:
77
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4,568

other people

Summary:

There is no attempt #2, but there are Neighborhoods #3940 and #9696.

Notes:

For sonatine, who wrote the words "ben's is just a massive ice sports complex / permanently under construction".

This is entirely because I can't see Adam Scott as anyone but Ben Wyatt anymore.

ALSO I ALMOST FORGOT: thank you to lazulisong for telling me what team I could reference to let people know 'oh yeah duh that guy's in the Bad Place', and to spooky for confirming the waffle pun.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

EVERYTHING IS AMAZING, reads the wall outside Leslie Knope’s office in bold, traffic cone orange letters. ALSO, YOU’RE DEAD.

“Do you think it’s too much?” she asks her supervisor when he comes to perform the readiness assessment on Neighborhood #9696.

“Yes,” he responds. “Change it.”

She does not.

“Wow,” the human exclaims, staring at Leslie’s painstaking work with wide, bulging eyes. “That’s a lot of waffle shops!”

Leslie continues to hold her smile tight and neat, barely twitching at all. She has been smiling for an hour already and it’s not that her face isn’t used to it, exactly, but it’s not used to doing it for an actual real dead human. Only the practice dummies at the training center, who are much smarter than this actual real dead human is turning out to be. “Well, Mark,” she says, stressing her graceful patience and bottling up the urge to rip off his toenails, “you’re in the Good Place. And in the Good Place you can have waffles whenever you want.”

“I kind of like pancakes more,” Mark says.

In her college days Leslie was known best as Not You Again. She graduated summa cum laude in the History of Pain with a minor in Applied Bureaucracy. Leslie has spent her entire existence - all of everything’s existence, to nitpick, which she knows Mark hates, which she will take great pride in inflicting upon him - preparing for this moment.

“I’m sure you won’t still be saying that after you’ve tasted the waffles in this neighborhood,” she beams, jovially elbowing Mark in his weak fleshy middle.

Mark almost has dimples when he quirks up a half smile at Leslie from the corner of his mouth. It's very youthful, convivial. It says boy am I glad I'm here and not, you know.

Leslie smiles.

Four hundred and ninety-three years later, Mark still thinks Jeremy Jamm is his soulmate. Leslie makes sure to slide an extra plate of waffles towards them to share when she checks on them every afternoon at Waffley Good, pretends to nearly catch them trying to surreptitiously catch a glimpse of Ann’s ass. Precious, perfect, diabolical sunflower Ann, who takes to wearing her human flesh suit beautifully and without complaint. Hellfire gazelle Ann, who causes Mark to whisper fuck, I'm pathetic even in his sleep, who keeps Leslie’s secrets.

Every afternoon Mark chokes down one delicious, syrupy bite after another. He pines, and he hates himself, and he hates Jeremy, and he hates waffles, and he slips away on his own and tries to jerk off to thoughts of Ann somewhere secluded, only to be caught. Usually by Jerry, who is terrible at all other jobs to which Leslie assigns him, but not infrequently by the marauding bands of raccoons Leslie then gets to pretend to worry about in front of the entire neighborhood for however long it takes her to get through a six-inch binder and accompanying 139-slide PowerPoint presentation.

Leslie loves binders. The spine-rending wails and sobs of agony inelegantly produced by the more old-fashioned methods preached by her predecessors have nothing on the self-muffled screams and inadequately-suppressed tears a good binder can elicit. In year 237, Jeremy ripped off his own fingernails after listening to a paltry 36 hours of Neighborhood building codes. How amazing is that? How efficient?!

That is progress. The false neighborhood system is a future Leslie is proud to be a part of.

Everything is amazing in Neighborhood #9696.

Or.

Everything would be amazing if not for one pesky detail.

Neighborhood #9696 is nowhere near Neighborhood #3940.

That part kind of sucks.

When they meet, they meet at Joan’s place.

It's easiest that way: first, because Joan doesn't care about anything that's not a scoop or an opioid; second, because it’s impractical for them to go anywhere else. The other planes of reality the humans could never begin to comprehend all have terrible traffic during shift changes, and their house isn’t anywhere near the train station. And then there are the fraternization codes prohibiting them from visiting each other at work more than once per century. While Leslie’s supervisor doesn’t care one whit what she does as long as her humans exist in eternal agony and she doesn’t waste his time, Ben’s supervisor is much more the hands-on type. Every ten years he stops by Neighborhood #3940 to tell Ben how well Ben’s doing and how much he cares and how Ben can ask him for anything.

Ben’s concept of eternal torment is a permanently-unfinished winter sports complex. He calls it his ice town, even though it’s not a proper town because none of them are proper towns, and most of the ice is melted for effect. He has a Quebec politician, a poet, a player for the Canucks, and Banksy. It’s a powerful lineup by anyone’s standards, giving Ben endless chances to prove himself and his vision.

Chris always asks Ben if he thinks Neighborhood #3940 is headed in the right direction. If there's anything Chris can do to help.

“It’s like,” Ben pulls the leopard print throw further up his naked chest, “like he’s too good at this, you know? It’s like he can’t help but torture everyone no matter where he is or who he’s talking to. We used to be at the same level, but ever since Chris got promoted…”

“Hey,” Leslie wraps one of her smaller flesh limbs around his larger flesh limb. It feels nice, in that disgusting, human way. Like covering herself in pudding and not even boiling it off. “You’re going to get there,” she says. “We’re going to get there. Yesterday I wrote a memo for Ron on how my four are doing. Jeremy doesn’t sleep anymore, he just cries himself to more crying. And it hasn’t even been 500 years yet!”

“You’re amazing.” Ben grins the way he does when he’d like to consummate their flesh suits one more time for the road. She places her hands on the pert butt she specifically requisitioned for him and leans forward. He stops her with a touch on her nose and a question. “How many pages?”

“16,000,” Leslie boasts.

“Babe.”

Ron sends Leslie’s memo back with a hatchet stuck in the middle. The clear praise – Ron would never lend one of his tools to the unworthy – makes Leslie flush up with pride. “This is it, Ann,” she says at lunch, only stopping herself from using the praise hatchet to shovel her waffles into her flesh maw because of Ann’s wonderful, thoughtful insistence that the humans would find it suspicious. “This is his way of telling me he’s going to appoint me to a subcommittee on the Neighborhood Association – maybe Parks? – and then from there who knows how many humans I can torture? Forty? Forty million? Why stop there!?”

“Now Leslie,” Ann cautions, but that’s only because she doesn’t understand how Ron communicates.

“No, Ann. I will not now!”

“…what?”

“What?”

They dive apart when someone approaches their table, but it turns out to only be Donna, and not Marcia trying to get away from her ‘soulmate’ Mona Lisa again. Donna arches an eyebrow at Leslie and points accusingly behind herself. “I am a professional, Knope. If she ruins my intricate psychological network of horrors I can not be held responsible for what happens to her.”

‘Her’ is an eye-rolling April, draped in a black shroud with a wheezing raven perched on one shoulder. A scythe taller than she is rests on her other shoulder. “Why can’t I just throw them in lava Leslie,” she complains all in one exhaled breath. “La. Va.”

And then it’s back to work, because Jeremy and Jessica might not find anything wrong with what April’s wearing, but Mark and Marcia will. Their concept of the Good Place has nothing to do with grim twentysomething reapers. That’s a subject at the training center so basic Leslie doubts anyone has even made a binder about it; the message would fit on a poster. Ann rushes off to make a diversion and Leslie and Donna pull April around the corner to the back of Waffley Good where the waffles are pulled into existence (and also spat on before being served).

“Lil Sebastian,” Leslie sighs. She feels her headache lessen slightly when he blinks into existence next to her. The best architectural decision she ever made was sneaking into the warehouse dimension and stealing a verified Good Place Lil Sebastian.

He stares up at her. He radiates goodness and purity.

Conceptually, Leslie should hate him and everything he stands for. In actuality… “get April something more appropriate to wear, Lil Sebastian.”

April’s shroud does not blink out of existence. There are no flashes of light, or fairy dust; no glimmers of sunshine. There is only a shroud one moment and a perky lime green dress the next. April’s raven has turned into a hamster. Her scythe into a bouquet of daisies. April mutters fire and retribution when Leslie pushes her back out to the front of the waffle shop.

It’s cute, if old-fashioned.

Leslie makes a note to take special care to teach April what she knows. Perhaps she’ll start with Manipulating Poorly-Repressed Childhood Traumas. That was always a favorite of Leslie’s in school.

Somehow April’s first lesson turns into a swarm of bees. Not particularly innovative, but still.

Bees are a classic even Leslie can’t argue with.

Things almost fall apart on a daily basis in Neighborhood #9696. In all honesty, Leslie likes it better that way: there is a challenge to guiding her charges that really makes it all worthwhile. She would be bored without it, she thinks, if she were just rolling them over hot coals or forcing them to listen to polka music in a car next to a demon poking them with vegetables. It wouldn’t be so rewarding. Jeremy’s tears would feel empty. Having a demon rip out Marcia’s hair wouldn’t mean anything.

As it stands, Leslie is proud of the place she and Lil Sebastian built.

Hell, truly, is not made alone.

Notes:

Just imagine Lil Sebastian popping cacti into being on his back when asked for paperwork. You're welcome.