A/N:

This is the very definition of an early post (it's technically Monday for me, so...), so don't get too excited about this happening often. I had this on the burner for a day or two, I forget, and have been chipping away at it. It is not positive, there is actually nothing happy-go-lucky here at all. I didn't even hold back on the ending like I usually do (though to be honest I very nearly wimped out early on), so yeah. I have to post this or else my anxiety will literally ruin me every time I look at it. Anyways, I hope you can still enjoy the read. Remember to hit me up on tumblr, etc.

Title is a lyric from Godflesh's "Defeated"

Empty: that was the only way April could describe the feeling every single morning. Everything feels empty, from the way her feet barely make noise while she moves through the house to the sound of her own voice at work, and April tries every day to remember what it's like to know otherwise. At first she wanted to move out and stay with her parents for a little while, but every day she tries there's another memory that April refuses to detach from. Sometimes she finds solace listening to his music, just to hear his voice again, and other times just seeing anything with that stupid logo makes her cry for the rest of the night. Crawling into bed, she'd hold their pillow close to her and bury it in her chest for hours on end in the hope that she might just wake up from this nightmare.

It never worked, no matter how tightly she squeezes her eyes and hopes – prays – that she'll hear his laugh again when he trips into bed April knows he'll never come back. No matter the force of will she tries to exert on the untouched spaces in their bed she knows it will always remain the same – empty.

On the morning that Andy was supposed to return from London, April rushed to work in an attempt to burn through the hours of the day fast enough to get Andy back home quickly. At the office, she couldn't stop thinking about seeing his big, dumb face again and all the things they'd missed out on for weeks. Scribbling down nonsense notes and barely paying attention to the phone, April waited impatiently for her lunch break when he should have called her. Instead the break went by without so much as a ring from her phone. Heading back inside, she found everyone – and April was disturbed when everyone included Jerry and Ann – standing in a sort of awkward line in and around Leslie's office. Leslie was sitting down with her hand over her mouth and when she registered that April was staring at their strange procession, she blinked a few times and motioned for April.

Inside, Ann was doing the same hands-over-mouth thing Leslie was and for some reason that annoyed her where Leslie doing it was concerning. The others were in the little central room, a few of them sitting down with Ben and Ron standing up while leaning against a wall for support. Between all of them, there was a heavy air inside the building. April pushed herself through the small crowd and leaned against Leslie's cabinets lining the wall facing her computer screen, trying to follow the older woman's eyes to the screen. It was a live feed of a joint news report from Pawnee and Eagleton, with the oblivious face of Perd Hapley widely on display and his voice coming out of Leslie's speakers. It looked like this recording was now looping based on the sudden appearance of a little slider at the bottom of the screen.

"…in what some are calling an event, today a plane crash from London to Eagleton was recorded in Central Maine. We know that there were fourteen Eagletonians and one Pawneean on this plane…"

April remembers blinking rapidly and every single muscle in her arms going tense in that exact moment, right before Perd says another word.

"Those are, in fact, numbers. We also know another number – at this time there have been no survivors found-"

When she was a teenager she had been punched in the gut once so hard that all the air left her and if she had any sort of comparison to what it was like to hear those words it would be a vicious punch to her chest. That wasn't quite it though, because she distinctly recalled a collapsing sensation in her stomach and was thankful for the support of the lining behind her. Ann was looking at her, searching her face for a response, and Leslie had turned around to April and clearly had been fighting off the better part of a breakdown. April struggled to maintain her balance, her hands gripping metal for dear life in the hopes that her nails would keep her standing, and she felt like her face was about to light on fire from all of the heat. Outside Leslie's office, Donna and Tom were sharing sympathetic looks and Ben stood up to say something to Ron. Ann had stood up and moved a chair over to Leslie's desk, moving April into it. She barely recognized moving at all, but when she blinked again she was face level with Leslie and trying to shake herself back to reality where this wasn't happening.

"April, I'm sorry," Leslie finally spoke out, and April felt like it was hitting her again. "We just found out… and, and, and I-I saw a live report going on and I…"

April just sunk deeper into the chair, trying to work through the information. The people around her were starting to become incredibly distant figures in the room, the only thing in her mind being that painful, sharp gash working its way through her stomach. Her eyes were blank, scanning the computer screen for an April Fool's Joke and finding nothing telling her it was all just some insanely twisted joke being played on her. It took her another few seconds to realize that she was just sitting in Leslie's office with her mouth half open, eyes buried in a screen, before the real, dead weight of the thing fell on her.

"No," she whispered to herself. "He missed the plane, he always misses stuff. He's always late."

April could hear Ann make a noise behind her, a sort of painful squeal, and Leslie shook her head sadly while still trying to keep her eyes focused on April without melting down with her. April started babbling incoherently, saying words she thought but she knew came out as nothing but intertwined, broken nonsense. Her hands were clutching her knees, digging deeper and deeper into her flesh and April felt herself shaking in the chair. Leslie put a hand on her knee and April shoved hers inside Leslie's, savoring the warmth of another person's skin against hers for a moment before she started shaking violently again. It didn't take long for April to feel something warm and wet on her cheek, still trying to deny everything she heard, and Leslie pushed April into her chest and wrapped her into a hug.

"He missed his flight, right?" April could feel the whine of tears in her voice, and she could barely stop herself from shaking anymore. "Andy's just… he's just gonna be late, right? Right, Leslie?"

"Shh," was all Leslie had to say to her, and April felt herself break a little.

She felt everything in her body stop for an instant, and everything start back up like a labored line of workers with no motivation. No spirit, no ambition, her muscles and organs found their way back to work with a disgruntled sigh and her body shook itself back to motion. By now April was smashed against Leslie with her head in the older woman's shoulder, trying not to let herself cry the jacket into wet pile of fabric. A few times she felt herself make a noise she would have smacked herself for even mistakenly creating, but April couldn't control what was happening. Andy was just taken from her and things began to creep up in her head – things like everything she thought she'd said that went unspoken, or the way Andy would tell her he loved her, and the way his laugh made her feel warm and at home – all of them piling up and erupting in a mess of tears. April's throat felt like it was on fire from the hoarse noises she had started to make, her eyes already unable to focus now blurry and tear-stained.

"April, come on," Leslie stood and pulled April up alongside her, "let's go home, okay? I'll take you back home, and you don't have to do anything all right?"

April's entire body was giving out and before she had even made it out of Leslie's office, Ann and Ron were taking her from Leslie with one arm slung over each of them. They had to practically drag her down to the car and, when Leslie said she'd take care of it herself, Ron shook his head and pushed himself into the driver's seat. April had barely taken notice of anything at this point but she was thankful for his steeled resolve in that moment. On the ride back to her house, and only her house she reflected with another shiver, she searched for Leslie's hand in the car and held on.

When they left her on the couch, Leslie refused to leave at first. April kept blinking away any tears, trying to figure out how she could find the emergency escape from this awful nightmare. In the worst of them she had never even considered this – Andy was just Andy and that wasn't supposed to stop. He wasn't supposed to stop anything and now – and April felt vomit rising to her mouth when she thought it – he wasn't anything. He was gone. Her Andy was just gone.

"April," Leslie started quietly when April pulled herself into a ball and stared into the space between where Leslie sat and the television, "do you want to-"

Leslie was barely holding on and, although she would never know this sudden deafening silence within April, she sat next to April and put her head in her hands. Together they sat like that for a while, the weight of everything bearing down on Leslie while April kept struggling for thoughts or really anything at all to ground her. She came up short however, holding her hands in their clasped place on her shins – hoping that she could crush life back into her lungs and find something other than Andy in her mind.

The sun started to go down, and the room took on a dark, roughly hewn yellow shade for another few minutes while April stared at the same spot on the wall she had been. Leslie stood finally, her face red and cried out.

"I have to get back to… I have to go, April," she said softly and leaned down to give April a soft kiss on the forehead.

Barely any of that made it into April's mind, where she was too busy focusing on the subtle differences in color from the setting sun and the perfect little lines the lights made on the carpet when they were cut by the blinds. Each one of those stray beams slowly shrunk, every crumbling tower coming to a halt at its base before disappearing entirely, and April felt more tears fall from her eyes in that position. Some of them could have dropped onto the floor but she wasn't really sure of anything that was happening around her at that point. The only thing that made any sense was the light – there and then gone. A few times she caught herself tracing their receding pattern with her fingers, pretending she could feel the heat fading away from her until everything was cold and black, but then she imagined that that heat was the warmth of Andy's hand, gliding comfortably onto hers. His grip loosened with the fading sun, and on the couch April saw and felt her husband's hand fall out of hers.

In the blink of an eye Andy, like those lights, went out suddenly and harshly.

April feels her own tears drenching the pillow every night, her hands idly grasping for somebody while she pushes herself into a tighter ball and keeps the warm pillow against her body for as long as she can stand it. She just wants to feel it again, to feel what it's like to have him there with her for another night at least, and she forgets to stop her alarm from ringing out endlessly in the morning. The covers have since long been abandoned, and April looks around the room like she'll find him coming out of the bathroom all disheveled and tired. Just like every day there's no one in the bathroom and there's nobody in the house besides her and Champion.

She takes Leslie's advice and doesn't go back to work again that week. The last few times she tries to go in April can barely keep it together, and it surprises everyone in the office that April's this broken. She doesn't understand why she can't just stopper the flood of memories when she sits down at the place she basically fell in love with Andy. But then she remembers the first time they hung out together in the Parks offices, the spots they'd sit and eat lunch together, and all of the times that April just couldn't stop looking at him and smiling like he was the greatest thing in the world. When she started crying by the copier Leslie had her taken home, and since then she hasn't gone to work.

In all of the time she spent with Andy, she never thought that this would be anything that was at all worth thinking about. If they split that would be its own thing, but this wasn't anything April had prepared herself for. They were happy, still completely in love, and now April was the only one of the pair even on the Earth at all – the thought sending her back to the pillow to bury her face in it and take in the smell like it was the only thing she lived for anymore.

Nights were starting to envelop days, and soon time had lost a lot of its meaning to April. She didn't even understand how she could still feel like this when she woke up – something as simple as seeing his clothes she wore to sleep strewn on the floor sent her spiraling out of control. Everyone knew cold, aloof April but now she was the broken, scared April that just wanted someone there. Eventually she decides that she should go into work, or at least try to, and get something done in her life that wasn't wallowing in her house. Unfortunately, she didn't realize how hard it would be to go to work by herself and something as simple and stupid as carpooling brought her back to crippling memories of the way they'd sit around together at City Hall doing nothing.

By the time she had made it there, the drive only being a few minutes long, April already felt her eyes watering and her legs get a little weaker. It was stupid how easily she had fallen apart, but every time she even so much as thought that her brain piled hundreds of memories and images in front of her as a sort of reminder of what she was missing. At her desk, people avoided her while April jotted down poorly scribbled notes and actually answered phone calls without immediately hanging up. Eventually someone called and April hung up the instant the phone left the base to go for a quick lunch break.

"Hey April," Ben walks by and April tries to ignore him in her quest to find somewhere quiet to be alone in but he turns around starts walking with her, "I didn't realize you were coming back to work."

"Go see Leslie," is all April can get out to him.

"Well, I was going to but I just got a text from her and she's gonna be out for lunch today," he says and April's stomach does a twist because she doesn't want to talk to anyone right now. "Why don't we just go out for lunch?"

His voice is soft and April knows he's trying to be helpful, but every inch of her feels like dead weight and April wants nothing more than to get away from him. Looking around her she spots a bathroom and quickly makes her way inside, hoping that he'll lose interest and wander off if she waits long enough. Inside, she stands staring at one of the mirrors. Her eyes look empty and stare distantly at the mirror as if trying to find something beyond it, and she could still see the bags under her eyes from the last few weeks' sleep deprivations. Running the faucet, she splashes some water in her face and tries to relax – to calm down and not let another fit of shakes and violent tears overwhelm her again. She could do this.

"What are you doing?" and it's Ben, opening the door to women's room and looking at her like she was the one doing something wrong. "C'mon, I can't be out forever."

"Dude, get out," April scoffs and pretends like she was doing something with the mirror other than washing away nerves.

"April," and there it is again, that voice that Ben tries every once and a while like April's some sort of sick animal that just needs to babytalked to health.

"Ben," she mimics him and suddenly she regrets her tone, biting her lip and shaking her head. "Sorry, I-I guess it's an instinct."

"That's okay," he says and now he's standing next to her and his arm is on her shoulder and all April can think is that it would so much better if it were Andy's hand. "I haven't actually seen you eat anything in days anyways, so let's go out and get something."

But April can't feel herself breath anymore, the feeling of Ben's hand on her shoulder sending another crashing torrent of memories onto her. She could feel him standing behind her, hugging her around the chest and pulling her body closer into his before she turned around and leaned in on her toes to give him a brief kiss, and April's head starts to spin as a result of the sensation. Ben realizes what's happening and keeps a tighter grip on her, but all she wants to do is find the nearest liquor store and drown in whatever was on sale. April moves around in a semicircle, looking up and hoping that she'll see Andy standing there just waiting for her to do something but when it's just a wall April loses control of her legs and falls back a little. She should have felt lucky that Ben was there, but at the same time April wonders what it would have been like to have her head smash against the hard stone flooring, and when he catches her she wishes that he would have let her momentum take her away from all of this.

After a minute of taking deep breaths, April found her balance again and stood up, turning around to meet Ben's eyes. She couldn't take the feeling of unshed tears in her eyes anymore and soon she found herself doing the same to Ben's jacket that she had to Leslie's months ago. April knows that she's starting to become delusional, but every time she has one of these minor breakdowns she hopes that she'll wake up from everything and find Andy sitting there waiting for her. Instead, all she has is Ben's shoulder to bawl into.

"I miss him so much," she mumbled into Ben's shoulder, not caring how close of a moment this was for the two of them. "I wanna see him again."

"We all miss him, April," Ben says and she can feel him sighing and stabilizing himself. "And we all miss you too."

April goes home early, after lunch, and Ben drives her back. Ever since that day she gets these shivers, those shaky and hoarse cries, and she can't get anything accomplished no matter how hard she tries. Walking into the house, she scratches Champion idly and tries again to forget everything. April attempts to find a little blankness in alcohol but all that ends up doing for her is making her hold Champion close to her and cry, remembering Andy's face when he found the dog in the corner of the shelter and his stupid grin the whole way home. She can't help it that she's gotten so used to just opening up in the middle of public places, but away from everything she felt like crying was even more pathetic – April knew she should have been able to move on by now. She should have stopped all of this, this awful pattern that now was ending with her blasting The Awesome Album over and over again, but she couldn't and the forty certainly wasn't helping things along.

Even though they never really thought about it when he was around, April starts regretting that they barely have any pictures of them together that aren't badly taken phone snaps. Despite that, she finds herself singing along to a song she's heard countless times now and flicking through dozens of pictures of them. Drowning in memories and cheap booze is the only thing April knows, focusing on Andy's voice in the songs and passing out with a bottle in her hand before the album has time to finish looping again.

I wanna see him again

Those words echo through April's mind for a long time, and it's a while before she eventually puts down the over-the-counter cocktail she's thrown together. She won't lie to herself and pretend that it wouldn't be easy to just finish it off and fall asleep without getting back up, but April can't even bring herself to do that simple action without thinking about how disappointed Andy would be in her. She just sees his face frowning when she holds the handful of tablets in her hand and can't put them anywhere other than on the table.

That night, after she crawls into bed and finally manages to fall asleep, April has a dream where she sits on a bench on a street she doesn't recognize and sees him. He's walking down the street with his hands in his pockets, eyes squinting against the brightness of the sun, and then he walks up to her and takes one of his hands out of a pocket and presents it to her. She takes his hand and they start walking down the street for a while, and she realizes that neither of them are saying a word at all. It seems okay though, and they continue walking down the street for a while before Andy lets go of her hand and walks away. She tries to follow him but she can't remember the way he goes so she spends the rest of the dream sitting in the middle of the street in the hopes that she'll figure out how to follow him.

April has this dream for a week and each time Andy walks up to her, smile on his face the size of a country mile, she nearly falls apart. It's almost enough to make her reconsider finding that pile of pills again. One night her dream takes a twist when he actually says something to her. The sound of voice is amazing, seeing his mouth move and his eyes full of life makes her stomach do a twist and April realizes how artificial and weak just hearing him sing on record is. This felt like reality to her.

"Hey," and his voice breaks in a way that makes April clutch her stomach like she's just been shot.

"Hi."

At least that's what April tries to say, but she can't get the word out. Her mouth feels like someone stuffed cotton inside and every time she tries to respond all she can do is choke back the syllable. For an instant Andy gives her a surprised look before everything blurs back into a haze. Waking up one night, she sits up in bed and scrambles to find the half-empty bottle sitting beside the mattress. Cracking open the cap once again, April drains it and falls back into bed where she can have a night of hazy, dreamless sleep. At least when she was drunk she could just hope that Andy would turn up in some motel in Pennsylvania trying to make his way home. At least she had that delusion for herself, so that when she speaks to herself at night she pretends that somewhere he's going to hear her.

"I'm sorry I never really told you how much you matter," she slurs to herself and the black room around her, her throat heavy, "Like, you don't even know, man. It's been the fu-fuckin' worst here. I miss everything… just, I just wanna see you again so much Andy."

The only response she gets is the heavy breathing of Champion by her feet and a low howl of a midnight wind outside. Some insane notion in the back of April's mind is screaming at her that he'll be there to answer, and then when he doesn't she can barely feel the shaking begin. Inside her room all she has is the empty bottle and the dog to keep her company, staring up at the ceiling and hoping that everything could just go back to what it was. April just wanted to see him again, and to run from the swirling madness inside of her that led to her marathon crying sessions and spending more and more money on liquor every week. Rolling her hands up in the pile of blankets, April manages to slide herself in between their spots and take up as much of the bed as possible before falling back to sleep.

As soon as she closes her eyes, the image comes back to her, the street, and Andy. The skies are a little darker and the houses look less like homes on the corridor road, shattered windows and beaten doors lining the street like badly-wrapped candies. Andy doesn't walk over to her with a comforting intent this time, either. When he reaches her, April smiles but the only thing she sees in Andy's eyes is a sad disappointment.

"You never believed in me," he says angrily with a strange glint in his eyes that April doesn't even recognize. "I was always barely anything to you, so you should be happy."

April tries, wants – desperately needs – to tell him he's wrong. The insanity he's speaking makes April's chest heave in rapid succession, breaths barely coming out one after another in a wild attempt at keeping her alive, and all she wants to do is to stop him. But she can't – her own silence louder than the empty words Andy was yelling.

"Face it, you never loved me. I was just a big joke to you, a big dumb joke you never really wanted around."

"That's-" and April's throat strangles the rest of the words out from her.

"You're free now April! It's gonna be awesome, you'll see – you can forget about me, go find other people, go actually fall in love," he swings his hands in a wide circle around him and April's whole body is on fire. "Look at it like getting your life back!"

The scene dissolves in her mind, Andy's face in the center of the melting void and all the anger it holds. It was all nonsense, but then April wonders if that's what Andy actually thought – if that's what he died thinking. Andy had a weirdly sensitive side that he revealed only occasionally, usually burying some emotion, but this was one side of him she never expected. It brings her out of sleep for a moment and she wakes up the next morning with a throbbing headache and a sore throat. Her hands search the bed for something to hold onto, but they come up short. She spends another shower trying to wash the tears out of her, but the only thing the water gets done is letting April cry in some imagined privacy. At least in there she pretends that it's just water rolling down her face and the pain feels less real in a brief respite – a safety of running water and horrified thoughts.

When she steps out of the shower and finds the will to put clothes on, April still has what Andy said running through her mind. One arm through a sleeve – you hated me – and another chill. She slips into the same pajama pants and there he is, screaming getting your life back over and over again. April can hear the heartbreak in his voice and wants to touch him, to hold him and let him know that's all a lie. She just wants to see him again, to tell him everything and let him know how much he really mattered. It doesn't take much of this before she's sitting down in the living room, holding onto that stupid jersey, and April stares off – away – into the wall ahead of her as if time will bore through the siding, the flesh of the structure, and she'll find him hiding within. She'll find Andy and get to tell him that he was; no, she has to correct herself, Andy is loved.

Another morning, another shot. April can barely keep the stuff down anymore, but she drinks anyways. Half of the time she's in such a stupor she can't even stand up, let alone go to work. The others try to say she's spiraling, that she's too dependent – but they don't know. None of them know what it's like to sit there, one day ready to restart your life, and feel everything disappear. Every single day of her life she tries to stop, to go forward, but all she can hear – everything she knows – is that one dream. April doesn't understand how he can think that, and it consumes her.

You never loved me

And April can't stop hearing him. In everything, in everyone, she hears him say those words over and over. In the walls his voice is like mice scurrying against joints, carrying those painful four words throughout the house like the plague they've become to her. In every inch of the house, all the squalor and stench, she wishes to be back – to be alive, and free again. April hears miniscule noises that she mistakes for his footsteps, aching to see him there in bed with her until she pushes down and hears the springs squeak again. She just wants to know what it's like to be free again, to be free-

You never loved me

To live in the silence, where those words lay absent and away and where she can find him again. April wants to live, to be free, but she can't bear the pain of those words. They begin to melt together into a chaos of sound, with each syllable reverberating off of the walls and return to itself to intermingle as a fuzzy, drowning torrent of noise. She grabs another bottle, barely has time to open, and is already halfway through when she hears it again – feels it rising in the back of her skull like a persistent knock.

youneverlovedme youneverlovedme

It's everywhere – in her blood, her bones, her home, the world. Those words penetrate everything April has ever known and she just wants them to stop, to see them for the lies they truly are, but she doesn't know how. She doesn't know what to do without him, and with those words surrounding everything she can't handle it. Trapped in her own home, a prison of insomnia and alcohol, she waits for the words-

youneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedme

-to stop, for her mind to be clear again. Everything will be okay, she tries to tell herself, and he knew – he knew, yeah definitely; he knew what she felt. He knew that he was-

youneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedme

-loved; he has to have known. She can't sleep without telling him, but then she can't sleep at all with the racket in the floor and the walls. In her body, she feels every word run across her skin like a venomous parasite burying itself deep in her. They won't stop and she just wants them to leave – leave, go away, she wants them gone; she wants them gone – but then she has to remember his voice, and then…

youneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedme

Then she has to hear the words again, spinning circles in her like an animal circling its prey. She can't escape – she wants to, she wants to be free but then she can't. She can't. She can't.

She can't.

youneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedmeyouneverlovedme