I don't own or operate or control PLL. This is just my attempt playing in their sandbox. This is a slightly retooled version of a story I started before, but deleted because it didn't fit canon anymore at all. This one is current to 4x20.
Raleigh, North Carolina
February 28, 2020
She couldn't remember what writing fiction felt like anymore.
Her writer's brain wasn't processing anything that didn't have to do with Clinton-era rhetoric and Reagan Administration delivery. The voice in her head no longer sounded like her own; instead she read back her writings in a twisted impression of her candidate, his pauses and inflections so ingrained in her mind that turning it off was becoming harder and harder.
She was pretty sure that going straight from graduation to working for a Senate campaign had broken her somehow, but compared to the still-healing scars of her past these breaks had a purpose and that had to count for something.
It had to.
Once she got to write the junior senator from North Carolina's victory speech following the presidential election in November maybe then she'd try going back to writing about darkly-lit bars and jukeboxes stuck on B26… and then add in the murderous stalker team and a true-crime writing journalist with questionable morals for a bit of added spice.
Actually she'd probably just end up getting appointed as Director of Speechwriting and spend the next four years doing this all over again, just no longer moving from hotel room to hotel room and coffee shop to coffee shop in between long stretches of hours on a campaign bus that went from rocking her into sleep to rocking her into puking.
"Aria, you got the Columbus speech draft yet?"
She blinks as she turns away from the bright screen of her laptop, her eyes taking a second to adjust to the dim lights of the campaign office she's in. It must have been well after 5 o'clock since the sun is no longer lighting up the room and instead a few single desk lamps cast an eerily glow that fails to reach her area in the corner of the space.
Ben Castle stands before her in his wrinkled suit pants and un-tucked dress shirt, his tie long gone and probably only to be found when his poor assistant tries to clean up the mess he makes at his desk at the end of every night.
"No, I've got the domestic speech. I think Fisher has Columbus."
"Starbucks, Columbus is domestic policy." Aria's eyes narrow at the mention of her Secret Service codename before letting her confusion take over.
"But I thought Columbus was about exploration or something…"
"I think you're thinking of Christopher Columbus there Skippy." The upward quake of Ben's lips as he looks at her reminds her of the look Spencer always gave them when the girls had said something silly, but that moment passes quickly as she focuses on the topic at hand.
"Well, whatever I'm thinking of I'm clearly wrong or just mentally stuck in the 15th century when we still had continents to explore. Regardless, I just got the C-Section on mental health to finish before I'll send it off." Aria's attention turns back towards the screen, the blinking cursor mocking her as she struggles to find a way to put a bit of a lyrical flare into a paragraph that discusses strengthening America's mental health system in conjunction with tightening background checks on gun sales. It's nothing new in this primary season, in fact she's pretty sure the 5 other candidates vying for the Democratic nomination are saying the same thing, but it's her job to make sure her guy's words stand out.
"Good, because I got something we have to talk about."
"I didn't drink your damn latte Ben; go sniff around the interns for signs of caramel."
"We got a $2,500 gift in from the Springer Preservation Fund." His words are like a cold splash of water, chilling the pit of her stomach and causing her fingers to stop on the keyboard. She knew that name—and the woman attached to it.
"You can't be serious." Aria's brown eyes search Ben's face for some sign of a but, something that would give more to the story, but she finds just as much confusion on his face as she assumed he saw on hers. Except he doesn't look anywhere near as pale as I suddenly feel.
"Marshall just called up and told me it came into the Pennsylvania office an hour ago via courier. Dianne Fitzgerald even signed the check herself." Ben pulls out a chair and sits down on it with a whoosh of air, his chin coming to rest on fists he props up on the top of the seat. "The question none of us can seem to answer is why a long-time Republican donor would suddenly start sending us money. The closest link we can come up with is you." Aria chews at her bottom lip as she stares ahead, trying to ignore the memories of Rosewood and Ezra and love and sadness that were flooding into her brain.
Every single day since she packed up her car and drove to New York City and Columbia University, Aria has been waging a battle with herself to forget the past that could easy pull her down. Rosewood and the people in it had long ago stopped being home for her; instead it remains as a bastion of all that she's done wrong in her life. This campaign, this mission of hers to get a candidate that could change the world for the better elected, is supposed to be her penance.
It all starts to feel tainted now.
"I don't know what game she's playing." Aria finally answers him as she snaps back to reality, her fingers starting to tap out some subpar prose that Senator Wright would mock her for later. The typing was a nervous tick, something meant to distract her and Ben as she still ponders what Dianne would want with her and her candidate. "She throws around money to get rid of unexpected and unwelcome things, not support them and help them grow. Unless this is an anthrax-laced check of mass destruction, I've got nothing."
"Bribe us somehow?"
"Into what? Firing me? Right now I'm long gone and away from her son which is probably right where she wants me. Taking a chance by screwing up my life would be idiotic and she's smart enough to know that." Taking a sip from her water, Aria puts it down before shrugging her shoulders. "Maybe she just wants our attention in case we win."
"No, that doesn't feel right. She's up to something, I can just taste it." Ben mutters, shaking his head. Aria is apt to agree with him, knowing Dianne wouldn't be poking around without a reason, but she also has the sense of mind to let the situation play itself out. In the grand scheme of things Dianne Fitzgerald is just a tadpole in the large pond of politics that this campaign was swimming in.
"So are you really going to sit here and worry about an old society lady when the latest Gallop poll has Robertson gaining at our expense?" Aria questions as she arches an eyebrow at Ben, goading the older man in hopes his clockwork mind will stop spinning around with thoughts of her situations.
"That Gallop poll is crap. Did you read the wording? Robertson was going to come out better no matter what with that leading the country crap. Did they write the damn thing right after the stump speech in Iowa? Just ask who the hell you'd vote for for God's sake." Ben stands up and turns the chair back around to face Aria, the brunette girl smiling at her success. "Get that speech over to the Senator as soon as you're finished." He orders while heading away from the desk, his hands shoved into his pants pockets. "And don't think I didn't notice what you just did there. You're good but you ain't that good" She chuckles at the comment but doesn't follow up, instead focusing on the speech at hand.
Her past can wait for another day. Elections, and the future, don't allow people the luxury of stopping and ruminating on the past.
Sometimes it's just better to leave doors closed, no matter what the mess is behind them.
Her lids start to become heavy and a burden to keep open about an hour into her typing. The idea of closing her eyes for a brief moment, just to let them rest, becomes too much to ignore and very soon her head finds its way to her keyboard, sleep and the dreams of Rosewood it is bound to bring claim her quickly, politics be damned.
"ARIA! WAKE UP!" The scream across the open office space caused the brunette to jolt up in fright, the sleep scared away by a loud and southern-tinged voice.
"WHAT?" She answered back without thought, her brown eyes searching around the room for the source of her abrupt and terrifying awakening. The jean and sweater clad figure of Senator Elias Wright caused her to groan, her hand coming up to rub her sore neck. "Was that really necessary sir?"
"Probably not. I just like yelling." His face was alight with a smirk and he walked like the weight of an entire campaign wasn't upon him. He was always like that late at night, as if something about the shadows allowed him to shuck off his worries and live like he did before he became a politician. He strolled over to her desk and turned around the chair Ben had been in earlier, straddling it like he owned the place.
Which he did, technically, but that's for another day.
"What do I owe the pleasure of a visit from you at," She grabbed her iPhone 10 and squinted at the screen, "12:29 AM, sir?"
"Well I got your email with the speech attached and grew concerned when the body of the message just had a bunch of random letters and a long string of ones."
"Crap, I must have fallen asleep on the computer again." The older man shook his head, eyeing the Starbucks cup sitting on the edge of the wooden desk, Aria's name written boldly across the side of it.
"All that caffeine is going to kill you." Aria snorted at the comment, running her fingers through her hair as she struggled to completely get her bearings.
"Well wouldn't that be some narrative? Campaign staffer dies of caffeine overdose, candidate now leading the anti-coffee crusade." She rolls her head as she laid out the morose headline, the senator fixing her with a paternal gaze. "Fine, fine, I'll try to lay off the coffee… or at least be near a bed when I crash."
"At the rate you're going I might just have to outfit all my offices with a rollaway bed when you come to town." Aria's face looked a bit too eager for the senator's liking, causing him to fix her with a look that clearly said that wasn't his preferred option. "You should get to your hotel. I didn't pay for that thing not to get slept in."
"What do you mean you didn't pay? I'll have you know the Campaign to Elect Elias Wright was responsible for the purchasing of that room." Aria's voice took on a grand tone as she mocked the ending of most campaign ads, grabbing a cup of water she also had on her desk, her throat scratchy.
"And if we take a loss on it we can just use the money from our good friend Dianne Fitzgerald to cover it?" Aria coughed a bit as the caviler mention of Dianne's name by the senator caught her off guard. He had a habit of doing that, brazenly pushing the sore spots of people in order to see their gut reaction.
"Did you come looking for me for answers about that? Because, as I told Ben, I don't have any." Her voice has an edge of defensiveness about it, the sort of edge Elias hated hearing in the voice of a girl he'd quickly come to see more as a daughter than anything else. It didn't hurt matters at all that she happened to be the same age his stillborn daughter would have been had she survived.
"I came to see how you were handling it, and obviously the answer is not well."
"Is anyone surprised?" Aria lent back into her seat, her arms folded across her chest. "I think everyone around here knows I like to avoid my past and they respect it. Well, everyone except you, sir." He smiled sadly at her words, knowing their truth. Often he finds it hard to separate that fatherly instinct of his and he knows that the young brunette bears the brunt of the concern.
"Sometimes, even though we don't like it, the best thing to do is not ignore your past but learn to live with it."
"If you keep coming out so strongly for the pro-gay marriage amendment, you're going to lose North Carolina." Elias' face immediately dropped into a downturned expression, his eyes getting a bit steely. Aria read the look loud and clear, but she was no longer that girl who would back down from a fight. "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were doing 'unwanted show-and-tell'. My bad." His lips pursed at her words and he took a moment to study her annoyed look. He spoke again after a beat.
"You know nothing about what happened to you in Rosewood is a secret anymore, right? The minute we really kicked off this campaign you had a Secret Service shakedown and boy did they not like what they found." If he was expecting a reaction, he didn't get one. Aria remained unimpressed, staring at him expectantly as she waited to see where he was going with this. "I bring this up because at some point you need to come to terms with the fact they-"
"Sir, unless you want me to stop trying to get you elected and instead go into some extreme therapy, today is not that point and tomorrow isn't going to be it either." They started at each other in silence for a moment, both unwilling to weaver from their point even though they knew the other was right.
"There aren't very many people anymore who will argue with me like that." Elias told her as he finally broke the silence, the less argumentative tone immediately causing both sides to relax. Aria let out a grim laugh as she rested her arms on her desk and lent forward into a stretch.
"And I will be one of them when we're in a room with other people."
"Oh don't even dare doing that when Anna is in the room. She'd get a kick out of it." Aria chuckled at the idea of Mrs. Wright laughing at someone pushing back against her husband's mighty will. It wasn't a flux that the press called him The Stubborn Southerner. Elias Wright was like a dog with a bone when he had his mind set. People that he came to trust had to have the same mentality or else they'd get trampled over by him. It was that fact that so many people credited as the reason why this relatively new senator (only in his 2nd term) had a very good chance of making it to the top office: he and his staff were out to win and win they would.
"Do you remember the first time we met?" Elias' eyes light up at the memory, a laugh escaping him before he could contain it.
"How could I forget? I had thought I was walking into that classroom just doing an easy favor for a friend. I didn't expect to get blindsided by a student who picked up on something 28 journalists and my own wife had failed to." Aria smiled in satisfaction at the reminder of her intelligence. Pride might not be one of the good virtues, but it sure made her happy sometimes.
"So you just thought you got away with sounding like an adulterer and a Nazi?"
"Basically."
"Are you saying you thought you put the Wright spin on things?" Elias' face fell flat at the corny pun, Aria starting to cackle with laughter.
"You start using that in the speeches I'll fire you no problem."
"I'll believe it when I see it." It was an idle threat and they both knew it. This type of synergy wasn't something you messed with when the presidency was on the line, especially not when every other speechwriter he'd worked with had quit or been fired in under a month. "So did you come here to just play father or was there a real point to this?"
"Maybe that was the point." Aria served him with a look, one that showed just how much she didn't want to ever speak about Byron Montgomery. While he hadn't been the one that actually killed Alison, that honor belonged to no one since the girl had been alive the entire time, his actions that night and after Ezra had broken her heart did nothing to endear him to his little girl. The lies and deceit were too much for her to deal with to this day. "Someone needs to make sure you aren't burning too bright."
"Are we really going to go down this road again? Between you and Ben you'd think I was a crystal meth addict instead of someone who just has a lot on their plate and not enough hours in the day."
"You wouldn't be like this if we hired you an assistant." Her brown eyes rolled at the senator's comment, tired of the men in her life trying to insert themselves in her work in the name of her best interests.
"Well you probably wouldn't be this close to the nomination if we did either, so you pick your poison." Elias sunk back in his chair, staring firmly at the girl who refused to wilt under his glare.
"It was pride that changed angels into devils…" Aria rolled her eyes at the quote, opening up her laptop to pull up the speech she'd sent to him.
"I'll make sure I say an extra Hail Mary tonight Saint Augustine. Now, don't we have a speech we should be working on?"
"Why do you think she sent the check?" Her eyes bounced from the computer screen to stare at his, her pain in thinking about the situation and the memories it brought up clear.
"I think she did it to get her name in the picture." She admitted after a beat, reaching out for her glass of water. Aria took a sip before placing it back on her desk, her finger toying with the rim of the cup. "Dianne isn't ready to say her full piece, but she's setting it up so when she wants to we'll listen."
"And will we?"
"I don't know." Aria looked up at the sign on the wall, Wright for President, before pointedly staring at the senator. "Why don't you ask the guy in charge?"