A/N: Requested as "April dealing with anxiety as a parent, Andy telling the kids to do something nice for her, and then helping."
I meant to get started on those kid-focused chapters this week but, well, I didn't. Still need more time to think on them, plus there's so much going on beyond those chapters that it's gonna take a bit for me to get to them. I will, though. Don't get me wrong, I will. For now, though, have this.
Andy's not the smartest guy in the world, but he's pretty good at feeling out April's emotions.
The one time that she was mad at him for, like, months he knew something was wrong. Then again, that was a really long time ago and thinking about a time pre-April is like thinking about himself as a baby. It's just so long ago and he was so different that Andy kind-of gets confused and doesn't remember what he was really thinking about in the first place, mostly because no April in his life is one of the single most depressing thoughts he can have.
Still, he picks up on all kinds of things. There's that week or so in the month that he's extra nice to her because she seems to need it - and when she gets mad at him she apologizes and then she gets angry at herself and Andy doesn't hate much, but he does loathe when she says bad things about herself. When they had their first weekend at home, after leaving the hospital with Jack, she was so tired but stressed out that at the same time (and she refused to say a word about it to him) but he knew better. So Andy learned how to change diapers back then because April would get sick doing it, and then complain for him to do it anyways. It's whatever, he's gotten peed on by his nephews before so it's just an annoyance now.
April came home from work with a sour look on her face that was quickly hidden when Sam ran to her and hugged her. Dropping her bag on the floor with little care, April lifted the four year-old into her arms and a look of genuine joy swept over her. Andy grinned just looking at them, Sam quietly nestled in her mother's arms and April walking over to him in the living room doing much of nothing. As it turned out, being a stay-at-home dad was still cool but he did really like thinking about restarting Johnny Karate at some point.
"Hey babe," April called out to him and Andy instantly stood up. Expecting to have to take Sam from her, she simply sat there with the chubby, yet small, little girl in her arms. Motherhood did wonders for her prior frailty. "Anything fun happen while I was at work?"
"Y'know, same old crap. Picked up the kids, but I brought the other kids!" he added pointedly, sure to ease her mind that he didn't leave anyone alone at home while he picked up Jack and Robbie from school. "Made grilled cheese for everybody. There's some on the table for you! You said you liked it cold."
April gave him a weak smile and kissed Sam's cheek before letting her down to stumble her way over onto the couch. Giving a sigh, April sat down beside her and started taking her shoes off just to get the agony away from her likely tired feet.
"Thanks," April finally said. "Um, hey... could we talk?"
"Yeah, we're-" and Andy saw something in her eyes that he couldn't ever explain but he just knew it was there. "Oh! Yeah, sure."
April turned to Sam and whispered something to her, smiling, and kissed her forehead before standing up to follow Andy into her home office. It was a fair distance from the living room where Sam was, and the rest of their bedrooms, and the door had two nice locks. The key ingredient was a bit of foam in the corner facing the direction of the rest of the house that held some of the sounds inside.
Once there, Andy closed it and April tugged him towards her. He hugged her tight on instinct and April seemed to let go.
"You wanna talk about it?" he whispered, still not totally sure that they set that weird stuff up right.
"No," she choked, burying her head in his chest and grabbing at his clothes with desperate hands.
"Oh," he nodded. "That's okay... just, y'know, get it out."
There was one thing April told him she would never do. Well, there were actually a lot, and weirdly she lied about a lot of them. She said she'd never cook for him but, lo and behold, she managed to figure out how to make beef roast and it was actually not that bad. She could bake, too. It was kind-of strange, actually. Then she told him that she would never let her kids hear her, or see her, cry. In the moment it was the most heartbreaking thing to hear because Andy didn't like imagining her crying, or even thinking about it, but she made him promise not to let them see her do it. So he did. That's when they set up the baffling and put locks on her office door. It was a space for her to be safe and when she needed to just let something out, and Andy knew she needed it.
April needed to just disappear from everything for an hour or so sometimes, and Andy got that. Sure, he wished that she'd want him there (and most of the time she did) but there was the occasion where she refused to let him in and he could hear a momentary hitch of breath before a tiny, hidden sob let out.
Now, however, she didn't say anything about what was causing this. Then again by now Andy knew that there wasn't always a cause and sometimes the thoughts and worries, and everything, just sort of snuck up on her and stung her without warning. April didn't even seem agitated or angry, or her usual temperaments towards those feelings, but she just held onto him and seemed to take in as much of him as she could.
"You wanna cuddle on the couch?" Andy asked, nodding at the little loveseat in the room. It was just barely big enough to fit him, so she would have to sit in his lap. "C'mon babe, I'm here-"
"I know," she interrupted and nodded against him. Sniffing, she pawed his chest and looked up at him. "I know you are. Can I get... like, ten minutes?"
"Oh, totally! Babe, you should relax! You just got off work and you're-"
"Alone?" April corrected.
"Well, duh," Andy laughed. He knew that's what she wanted, but April still seemed worried that he thought she was avoiding him.
"Thank you," she said, bouncing her foot like she was antsy to say the words. April looked down and blinked, rubbed the bridge of her nose, and then smiled at him. "You're the best husband."
"And you-" he added, hugging her once more before walking over to the door to leave. "You are the greatest wife and awesome and the best mother and you're-"
"God, shut up," she smirked, blinking through misted eyes, and Andy took that as his cue to exit.
Once outside he walked over to the living room, a plan forming in his head.
April spent the time in there thinking. Thinking usually was such a problem, but there were days when it was right. A sudden, leering terror would crawl into her brain and poison her and April would have to spend hours avoiding any concentrated thought about those fears just because she wouldn't dare spend a moment thinking about them. Then there are days where she knew to stare that in the face and answer every horrible question with a sure voice because, at the least, she knew these truths.
What if I get fired? Andy will have to get a job again and I'll need to get a new one and the kids will go hungry and I'll be a terrible mother.
That's what her thought process is like. She shredded the wrong file on accident for the first time in her entire career. Most of the time, in Pawnee, when she shredded the wrong papers it was on purpose but that was back when she worked for the government and Ron Swanson, so fucking up like that was pretty much expected and rewarded. Now, though, shredding up a paper like that could mean ruining someone's potential future, and in her case ruining five people's potential futures by being awful at her job. It didn't matter that her boss just laughed and told her the digital copies would work just fine, because April stared at those little paper shreds like she'd almost washed her own life away.
April couldn't bear to think about what would happen if she'd actually gotten in trouble over that. The best part about her job was how easy it was, but apparently she could still screw some things up. Then what would happen? They had some savings, and it got a little bigger when they sold the plot the cabin in Pawnee was on instead of simply renting it out anymore. The hassle of paperwork and phone calls and scheduled wiring was too much and Andy couldn't do it, as much as she loved him April didn't want him filling out that kind of paperwork monthly, so April just had Donna sell it. Nonetheless, when April saw those bits of paper fall to the ground and realized her mistake the first thing that flashed through her mind was Robbie walking up to her and telling her that she was hungry and April, broke and jobless, had nothing to give her.
The thought alone made her shiver in the room.
By the time she'd left her office, April had a solid cry into a pillow just to get it out of her and told herself, repeatedly, that it was going to be okay. Making her way into the living room where she expected it to be just Andy, there was the couch folded out with a blanket covering up four kids teasing and poking each other. She must have blocked out the sound with the white noise in her head, because the yelling and general brightness in the mood was unmistakeable. When she walked in, Sam was the current target of a clearly long-standing hug war. That's what Robbie called them at least, when in reality they were just times that she liked to cuddle with her siblings.
"Ma!" Robbie whined, throwing off the blanket and pointing at the screen. "Dad said we can watch Death Canoe 11 and you're gonna watch it with us and we're all gonna have a sleepover on the sofa and we're gonna eat pizza rolls and he said-"
"He said all of that, huh?" April looked over to see Jack walking out with a proud look on his face, a huge plate of steaming microwaved foods in his hands, and Andy trailed behind him.
"What, I thought it'd be fun," he shrugged. She saw what else he was saying there, and what he meant by this.
April felt a tugging at her hand and realized that Robbie had gotten up and was pulling at her to come. Smirking, April rushed after her, bounding onto the already depressed pull-out between a twin giggling and Robbie still huddled up with her sister. By the time Andy got into the mix he was tossing twins onto him to use as pillows, a holographic remote in his hand, and Jack clambered between the whole mess of Ludgate-Dwyers to sit the already scavenged plate of breading with supposedly-pizza goopy guts on the blanket.
April sidled up against Andy as best she could, making sure to have Robbie by her side until Sam made her way into the crook of April's arm. It was fine, though. They didn't really pay attention to the movie, far too interested in overly hot food and switching places. The previous hug fights get started again, and really that just meant that they ended the night snoozing together, the little ones falling asleep halfway through the movie, in a huge, comfortable pile on the couch.
April went to sleep with her head on Andy's shoulder, surrounded by her kids. In that moment, it seemed like her worries were less bothersome. Not that they disappeared, but that they fell to the side when she played with Sam's hair or Victoria squeezed out the insides of her single roll on the plate so she could just eat the outsides (and subsequently made fun of by Jack) and all of that, the dumb minutia and the silly comforts of plain family life, felt really, really cool. Andy gave her a few looks throughout the night but she never answered them the same way as when she got home from work. There would be time for that again, later, but for now she wanted to watch a canoe, somehow in space for some reason, kill a bunch of awful would-be porn stars.
Andy would take care of the eye-covering. It just made her laugh, and, really, that's what she needed.