A/N: I'm realizing how reliant I am on the alternating POV, so I guess I need to work on that? Anyways, I've got a few things locked up for the next few days so I thought I'd get a short one in before things start to get angsty. Remember you can always talk to me here or on tumblr if you've got feedback, requests, or just want to bullshit.
Hopefully it's as fun to read as it was to write!
Some days April wondered if she made a mistake, or lots of mistakes based on her life – married barely into her twenties, somehow managing to stay at a job she had no right to have kept this long, and regularly forgetting to cash checks. To anyone else, living on a mattress instead of an actual bed and eating out of used Frisbees instead of plates would seem like a nightmare become hauntingly real. Even worse, they would be strapped to an overgrown child that didn't seem to have any ambition other than being way into sex and crayons.
Good thing for her that those people sucked, because at the same time she was thinking about how she might have made a mistake her husband shouted out from behind the couch with a pot on his head. He looked around for her, but she was peeking out from the side of the kitchen counter waiting for the perfect moment to strike. It didn't take long for him to get too comfortable with the apparent safety of the situation, leaning over the arm of the couch even further until April flung the egg directly at him. Her aim was too good, pinging him directly in the makeshift helmet.
"Dead," April yelled from behind the counter, leaping up. "One shot, one kill. Game over, man."
Andy followed suit, standing up to meet her hard gaze. On that warm Saturday morning neither of them seemed particularly into the idea of getting dressed, both of them in their underwear and thin shirts. And pots and pans armor, because of course you needed that – there was a sort of correlation between the amount of stuff that had to be cleaned afterwards with the fun they had. April could barely see, the black pan they used about once a year for making a ton of pasta sliding over her eyes every once and a while. A wicked gleam was in Andy's eyes and April knew revealing her position was a bad move, but her reflexes weren't up to par with her aim.
The egg smashed on her chest, spreading the runny yolk over the white shirt and cracked shell all around the kitchen floor.
"Bert Macklin didn't get this far by playing fair," Andy grunted, pulling shades from somewhere and donning them. "Your move now, Ludgate."
April scoffed at him, the incredible image of a slightly overweight man in nothing but boxers and a pot on his head washing over her for a second before readying another egg. When she tossed it this time he managed to avoid it, letting the wall behind him take the brunt of the damage. Turning around, Andy sprinted for the bedroom. Bounding after him, April made a mad leap and landed on his back, wrapping arms around his neck trying not to slide off his back with the help of the egg yolk.
"You never thought I'd follow you this far, did you Macklin?" she whispered into his ear. "You can run, but you knew we'd find you eventually."
"No one's ever tracked me to my secret base in Pawnee," he sighed. "I hope you know what this means though - I can't let you leave… at least, not alive."
April shook her head but didn't have much time to come up with a witty retort before Andy had grabbed her arms and swung her around to the front of him. Instinctively wrapping her legs around his waist, she gave him the wry smile that he knew all too well. Laughing, he threw his shades off and walked the both of them the rest of the way to the bedroom.
Sure, April wondered a few times what her life would be like if she hadn't gotten married to Andy but that alternate reality sucked ass. She didn't think about how long the smell of rotting eggs would be in the living room either, because that alternate reality where she actually cleaned up after their regular games also sucked.
There was never a second when Andy thought that marrying April was anything other than the coolest. Every once and a while the closest thing that he'd ever even considered that was when April seemed like she hated doing all the boring adult stuff. The first time he actually paid one of the bills all she did was groan and sulk on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and watching Courage the Cowardly Dog reruns at four in the morning. Andy didn't know a lot about how he was supposed to do a relationship or whatever, but he felt really weird changing the way he did things. Partially because he was worried changing at all would change how much April was into him, which scared Andy to death nearly every day though he'd never admit it.
"Which one do you like more?" April was holding up a Halloween costume and a terribly patchwork sweater in the other hand at the department store. "I think this one could with more severed heads, but I'm not sure."
"Well, if you wore the slutty vampire thing I'm pretty sure you'd be wearing it for about ten seconds," he answered, scratching his jaw in deep consideration. "But… the sweater looks like something a crackhead would wear."
"So you're saying the second one," she nodded, throwing the crappy packaged costume on the floor and putting the gross sweater in the cart. "You're right, but I really think this could do with some extra bloodstains though."
"Yeah, they'd really bring out your eyes," Andy answered looking around for the next aisle to visit.
April smiled and went ahead, looking at a little notepad and checking out each aisle. Andy had the boring groceries list and April was in charge of the festivities for the party. Sure they had days where they paid bills and went to work, having boring adult weeks, but then they'd throw an early-Fall pre-Halloween Halloween party like that night. Every year they had two parties – one before and on Halloween, but the first one was mostly to appease April since they never invited anyone to those – and every year the same repetitious agonizing over how boring everything was turning would dissolve into a morass of cheap beer and even cheaper fake guts.
The mundane things didn't bother Andy, and he knew that April liked at least some of them, so he had assumed some of those duties. Tossing cartons of cereal and gallons of milk into the cart was his job, and then April would slide a crate of Miller in with the rest of the stuff along with anything she had managed to scrounge up from the sparse offerings in early September.
"Find anything cool?" Andy asked, fingers tapping the cart impatiently.
"They had all the same dumb stuff from last year," April said, looking a little downcast. "The caplets weren't even there this time. How will we have a party without fake blood?"
"Don't you have like a lifetime's supply in the closet?" he had seen the crates in there and, to be honest, he was a little frightened of asking her why she had them.
"I popped all of them in Jerry's car last week," she mumbled. "He left his keys on his desk, and I kinda got carried away."
"Awesome!" he exclaimed, putting stuff on the little belt as the cashier checked out item after item, staring with dead eyes at the scanner.
"No, not awesome – I wanted to fill the bathtub this year," April stood waiting for every bag, moving them into the cart when the frail looking teenager working that night finally got finished. "You know that Elizabeth Bathory is, like, my role model. I wanted to try it out with the fake stuff before I got too invested."
"You know that's just a legend," a timid voice coming from the cashier interrupted. "She just killed-"
"Oh my God, this is why we do self checkout," April yelled, grabbing the remaining bags and storming off with the cart in her off hand.
Later that night, after Andy had driven them around all of Pawnee looking for any dollar store or department store looking for massive stocks of fake blood, April finally gave in and just dressed up in the weird sweater which Andy was starting to think was just some homeless guy's shirt based on there being no tag and smelling badly of hard liquor. At first she just sat on the couch, scowling and drinking. Andy tried everything from telling her how creepy she looked to telling her how sexy she looked, but none of it was working.
In a fit of desperation he searched her closet in the bedroom, hoping to find something. Sadly, April had definitely used all of those capsules (there had to be hundreds, he thought) and literally filled Jerry's car with the stuff. Andy wished he could have been there to see that.
"Sorry, babe," he said, slumping down next to her on the couch. "This year's not-really-Halloween Halloween sucks."
"I just wanted to know what it felt like to bathe in blood," she said sadly, dropping her head onto Andy's shoulder. "Is that too much to ask for?"
"Nah, I'm sure it woulda been hot," he took a sip from his beer and heard her chuckle. "And yeah, you really did use all that stuff, there's nothing left in your closet."
"Oh you shoulda seen it, I thought Jerry was gonna have another heart attack," April laughed into her drink. "He was all, 'oh my God, I just had it reupholstered!'"
Andy snorted, laughing at the image of Jerry waving his hands and getting excitable over something so dumb. April put her beer down and resumed her position, maneuvering her head so that she was facing Andy's cheek and apparently waiting for him. When he turned his head she gave him a half-smile that he returned for a second before the whiff of the sweater was caught in his nostrils again.
"Thanks for trying," she said, giving him a short kiss. "You're the best, y'know that?"
"Love ya," he said, feeling that familiar mixture of pride and short burst of happiness in his chest.
Worrying was never Andy's strong suit anyways, and April seemed happy to be sitting at home drinking with him and watching terrible fake skeletons slowly illuminate in the dark. He figured that would have to do, since the next day meant doctors' appointments and more adult things.