A/N: I wasn't sure of whether I wanted this to be in here or not, but the initial requester for the fic wanted to see some of the rehab stuff. So, well, we're here!

This, however, is the end of this story. I hope y'all enjoyed it, because it was strange and new for me given the connection to the real person Aubrey Plaza and not the character April.

"Ugh, this is stupid," she says, forcing the tip of the pencil into the page until the plastic housing bends and breaks. "This is... s-stupid!"

She gets up and pushes the chair out from behind her, storming off and out of the therapist's office. Every single time they attempt to help her it all feels like a black void and noise and everything she tries to write is a mess, like the mechanical skill was just as lost as the perceptive thought of idea to paper. Beyond being annoying and simply frustrating, it's all a pathetic thing that she's twenty one and can't even write a sentence anymore.

Speaking is hard enough. Sometimes the words still feel insufficient and come unsure, stuttery, and there's a part of April clawing in worry that she'll never find the time to say all of them again. Now, on top of that, she can't even figure out how to write. Before she can scream out loud in frustration, she has to remember to call Andy.

Fucking worthless, she thinks. It's all pointless. Who cares, anyways?

The professors that ask for essays would care. Leslie would care. Everyone would care if she couldn't ever figure this out again, so she leaves her appointment because it's all stupid and she's annoyed at literally everything anyone is saying to her right now. It's all a big mess, just like this stroke thing, and she wishes it never happened to her. Life is already a sack of shit with the way her brain already worked before the stroke, and the people she'd hurt, and now there's this entirely different, daily problem on her hands that she just doesn't know how to handle. Stalking off to the lobby, she texts Andy to let him know she needs picked up.

That's pathetic, too. She can't even drive herself anywhere, either. Before she would have just walked out to her car, drove herself to her house, and been fine. Now she can't even do that, and Andy sticks firmly to that so much so that he made her promise not to do anything like that. The thing that mostly got her to agree was his voice and how weird and shaky it got when he asked her to promise. Tiring didn't even begin to describe whatever their back-and-forth was before this, so she did.

Now it's a big, obnoxious mess.

When he shows up, she sighs and walks with him back to the car. Slipping her arm around his back, April sidles up to him and loves how comfortable they can be without that barrier separating them. There's no reason to act like they don't care anymore, and there's no reason to be standoffish or anything other than stuck to the other one all the time. With everything else in her life being annoying and a total nightmare, at least Andy was a comfort. Something went right for once, and this big, cuddly doof she really likes is definitely a great thing to have gone well, so she smashes her face into his arm and grumbles nonsense as they walk back to his car.

"You wanna talk about it?" he asks from the other side of the car, opening his door after jostling the handle a bit. April has to do the same on her side.

"Talk about..." she can feel the word and almost bristles in anger when it doesn't come out at first. She sighs. "About wh-what?"

Sitting down, she notices Andy's eyebrows furrow and his eyes follow her. "Dunno, you weren't supposed to be out for another hour."

"It's... nothing," she manages to get out.

"Okay, but if you want to talk," he says slowly and without ever looking away from her, "just let me know. I said I wanted to help, and I mean it."

"Sure," she nods.

When they get back to Burly's place, the increasingly boring day thankfully lurches to a halt and it's just the two of them hanging out. Now that the local government is shut down in Pawnee, there really isn't that much to do. Sometimes Andy tries to go back to work but there's really no reason for him to be there so she just laughs and pulls him back into bed. It seems as good a time as any to focus on her rehabilitation and working through things she knows she can beat, but now that she's actually doing it there's nothing but frustration and annoyance around every corner.

Doctors are as useless and obnoxious as usual and this time they think they're helping her but they only feel like overbearing parents, and she already has two of those so why the hell would she bother with paying someone to be a third. Lying down on the couch, she's just so tired of the whole day. The whole ordeal makes her feel like shit and she just wants to forget it.

"You want some leftover pizza?" Andy asks, unsure. A cardboard box shifts and she can hear him sniff loudly. "Ew, nevermind. I'll go throw this out and order another one."

"Sounds good," she smiles and when he walks by he leans down and kisses her.

Satisfaction, joy, love, relief... the emotions that conflict over those few seconds after they kiss are wild, changing, and April doesn't know how to handle them sometimes. They usually overcame her at night when she wakes up from a troubled sleep with Andy nuzzling her shoulder and asking if she was okay, coming to a head when she can't remember what she wants to say so she leans over and kisses him. Smiling to herself, eyes closed, she hears him in another room calling the place they always order from.

It's easy getting lost in someone, but finding her way back to herself has never been easier with him. Things aren't just about him, or just about her, they're about them. He wants to help her, and she wants to smother him in kisses to let him really know what she feels, and they both want to be together. There's no reason to hide otherwise, but everything in the last few weeks has been slowly breaking her down. One day she might be able to work her hands and get her brain to function at all, and she can write a few words in a coherent pattern, but this isn't the norm. Instead she's used to crushing pencils and getting so infuriated she wants to throw a chair through a window.

After a minute or so, Andy returns and sits down on the floor in front of the couch with his back against the front edge of the cushions. She naturally lets a hand droop over his shoulder and Andy's head shifts to the left and kisses her wrist.

"You're bummed," he states.

You're too good, she thinks.

"C'mon, I'm not that dumb," he jokes but that's not at all funny to her. He takes her hand in his right and runs his index from knuckle to knuckle.

It feels like he's exploring those little valleys, as if he's never felt her hands before, and it's strangely intimate but entirely comforting. It feels, oddly enough, calming and soothing. His finger touches the slopes of her knuckles and she just breathes out, trying to answer him.

"Dunno, I'm still... still, st-still having problems," she struggles to say, but Andy never says anything to push her or interrupt her. It's nice. "I can't figure it out. Ugh... it's the worst."

"You wanna talk about it?" he turns around but still holds her hand. "I mean, if you're cool with it."

For a second she just watches him. The way he never looks away from her like this bores him, or that there's something else on his mind, and she smiles softly back at him. He at least pretends to look like he's listening to what she's saying and not how she says it, and that makes things slightly easier. His fingers still feel like the thing that keeps her lungs working and that's oddly reassuring. Those stupid people at the clinic just stared and made her feel strange and uncomfortable, but knowing Andy made his unwavering eye contact make her feel at ease.

"I'm not... I'm not doing so great. I can't ev-ev-even, I can't even say anything right and I'm supposed to write it all too," she shakes her head and feels the growing anxiety in talking build up. "Don't worry about it, Andy."

"I don't wanna push it, but I said I wanted to help and you wanted me to help," Andy shrugs and looks down at their hands for a second. "I dunno how I can, but maybe we can... y'know, do this."

"We could, like, tr-tr-tr... try," April winces and shakes her head quickly. "We can try to work here."

"I could get a dictionary and learn a bunch of cool words to spell and say, too," he starts getting excited and his eyes light up making April chuckle. "I mean, you should still go to the doctors and do everything, y'know, regular and stuff."

"Doesn't hurt to have... another t-teacher," she leans down and kisses him again, this time fuller and harder.

It's hard to speak what she's feeling, so actions work. They work much, much better and make everything simpler and the concepts are a lot simpler to grasp for the both of them. He doesn't have to be anxious that she's just fucking with him - and, really, that should hurt her but on some level she knows she deserves that reservation - and she doesn't have to struggle to explain that she wants him. Pulling away, she realizes he hasn't moved his hand from hers and that relaxing play from his fingers on the back of her hand is still sending shockwaves through her.

"So-"

The doorbell rings and Andy finally turns away, letting go to get the pizza. When he returns she's an inch from jumping him. He goes to get a drink and when he gets back she opens the first box and sees a double order of extra cheese. For whatever reason, and she doesn't question it, that makes her stand up and turn him around towards the couch. They don't get to the pizza for a half an hour, leaving it to cool in favor of something much better.

So, while City Hall stays an obliterated wreck on the inside, they work.

Andy's a natural teacher, his eye contact exhilarating and calming all at once somehow, and he never pushes her to finish sentences or to write them out. That's the plan - she speaks, then writes it down. Something about that was way easier than the slow pace she had at the clinic. They wanted her to start from the very beginning but the ease of it was just as frustrating as they thought writing complicated things would be. Alphabets and number lines got fucking boring and just made it easier for her to get angry at everything, but they just wrote out transcripts of stupid conversations at Burly's.

It's never stupid to him, though. When she can't figure a word out - sometimes it's the physical motions, sometimes the spelling, and sometimes she knows the meaning but having it in the middle of her sentence feels so strange and unusual that she has to fight her hands into writing - he'll ask her what it means and look at the dictionary to make sure she's right, and watch her write it out intently. When she can't get her hand to work he sits behind her and guides her hand.

By the time night falls, she's written everything they've said for hours down on paper. The conversations are stilted sometimes, sure, but it helps. Her stutter might not be gone, but that's for a speech coach to help her with and not Andy's job. Still, he does the same thing that guy does and listens to every word she says and considers it instead of looking like he's waiting on her next word in an anxious fit. But with Andy, there's a different respect there and it feels like something growing between them.

Some days, after leaving the clinic and taking a bus, something feels wrong. Maybe it's her skin itching, or her hair feeling extra thin, or breathing takes just an extra microsecond to think about instead of just happening, but it makes her nervous and by the time she gets back to Burly's she's just happy to have someone tell her she's fine. It's never a real problem. The next day she asks her therapists if she's going crazy, and the word hypochondriac gets thrown around a lot until it becomes meaningless. Eventually, she takes a notepad with her on the bus and whenever something like that happens she writes that word down, over and over again, until it gets pounded into her mind that she's not actually going to start bleeding out of her eyes because her heart feels like it's beating too fast. There won't be another stroke just because she can feel something vaguely off.

When she gets home, and it's so nice to call it that, she's greeted by Andy. They can talk and start their work for the day. Talk, order food, write, and of course she'll be overcome with everything he's offering her that every night ends exactly the same way - tied up in covers and entangled in each other.

I love you, she thinks.

It hits her, and hits her hard, thinking that. So hard that it might take her another month to let him know, but it's definitely there.

I love you, she thinks.

"I love you," she says plainly the next day.

His face lights up, like he's never heard anything better in his entire life. He picks her up and spins her around, laughing and making April's cheeks redden. By the time she's back on the ground he's out of breath and staring at her with that massive grin spread across his face. Dimples and those awesome valleys of emotion between his wrinkles at the corners of his mouth make her chest burn with those three words all over again.

It's at most another four seconds after she says that, but it's a worrisome eternity to her.

"Dude, I love you too," he almost shouts.

She probably could have done without the dude but it still makes her smile wide and lock her wrists behind his neck. They'll take a day off.