A/N: I'm gonna try this theme week thing again. This time, it's angst week! That means four days of stuff that is meant to pull at those heartstrings, evoke an emotional response, and get you wondering why the author (hi!) is such an awful person. Today isn't very extreme, so don't worry.

Sadly, this means most of my requests are on hold at the moment (only because they don't fit the theme) but I will gladly take any you want to send into my tumblr (anotheropti)!

The first time April realizes she misses him more than anything is when she goes to a pub, alone, in Washington D.C. in some effort to get rid of her growing anger at the stupid job with Ben. She takes an overly long detour, avoiding a busy section of town just to get away from the number of people there, and the walk gives her time to think about everything from why she was so bothered with being told to fix a typesetting and why she barely takes a step into the rowdy, noisy establishment before she has to leave.

No more than a minute, and she has to get away. For some reason it feels pointless, and constricting even if there was just one particularly loud group of people in a corner that could never conceivably look at let alone talk to her, so April doesn't bother attempting to stay and drink for whatever reason she felt it was necessary. It hits her that it's their routine. If she can handle it, they head out to a bar and get drunk together and make fun of people passing by, the band playing, and play darts with warm faces and stumbles in their step. He'd hug her close, be warm, and they'd spend a good portion of the night making out in a dark corner or, sometimes, he'd toss her onto a pool table and they'd get kicked out.

None of that is there, and when April takes out a poorly rolled joint to stab away at the nerves it all comes crashing down how uneven life is in Washington.

There's no fun, no flamboyance, and no Andy. It's not the same at all, and they knew it was going to be like this since the start of it and April told herself it would be okay, and that Andy was always a phone call away; he would be right there, right at her fingertips, but he really isn't. He has his own life, so when he doesn't answer it's fine, but there are times he doesn't answer that take that original feeling and crush it back into place. Taking a short puff, looking over her shoulder in nervous worry, she tosses the little cigarette on the ground and stamps it out, accepts the little ranting Leslie in her head, and finds the walk unbearably long.

Thankfully, when she tries to call him there's but one ring.

"Hey babe! What's up, everything going awesome over there?" Andy sounds so damn excited she has an unstoppable smile on her face, and almost misses a walk light.

"Yeah, it's fine," she says in a small voice, tired and only now feeling a little warmth and comfort. "Anything cool in Pawnee?"

"Oh, duh, there's this super awesome dinner-thing that Leslie is putting together and she wants me to handle people at the entrance. Like, taking their coats and stuff," Andy says with what has to be a huge grin on his face and April chuckles picturing it. "I wish you were here, you'd think it was dumb... but, y'know, there's free booze!"

"That sounds great," she sees her building and sighs, knowing that he's getting ready to leave just as she's about to sit down and relax for the night. It's different than at home, where relaxing at night meant Andy falling into the couch with a lazy flop, April slinking onto him and appreciating the lovable squish of his belly and sliding her legs between his.

"You okay, babe?"

April's pulled from her revery as she takes the elevator. "Yeah," she deflects him even though she knows she shouldn't. There's no point in making him worry.

"You just sound-"

"I'm fine, Andy," she reassures him.

"Oh, okay," he replies and she wishes he'd push the issue just for a reason to talk to him more.

"Um, you sure you're okay?" Andy's voice is quiet, like someone will hear them talk. It's a habit of his, asking about these things after a few drinks or getting a pizza, and always quiet in the norm,ally busy hours.

"I'm..." she looks around the elevator and no one's there, but it's still too much, "can I talk about it when I get back to my apartment?"

"Yeah, sure! Wait... how long is that gonna be? Leslie needs me to go, like, super early and do other stuff," he sounds like he wants to apologize but the amount of times he's apologized for this and April's tried to scold it out of him have worked, sadly, quite well. "I'm getting paid, like, eighty bucks though."

"It'll just be a second. Can you stay on the call for a few minutes?"

"Babe, totally! I'll stay up all night if I can," and April smirks, the elevator doors opening.

She takes a brisk walk back to her apartment and when she opens the door the place is just as dull as before. She put up a few pictures she took from Pawnee, a little photo of them from the wedding on the kitchen counter that greets her every time she comes in the door so that she can pretend it's like he's there too. There was no way she could have gotten away with taking one of the signs off the wall and on a plane, but she does have another picture on the coffee table in the miniature studio living space. April's lived in dreary loneliness before, but that wasn't when the antidote to all of that was in her life and halfway across the country. By the time she sat down on the chair she couldn't quite sprawl out on, Andy was still on the call.

"So what's up?" he breaches it before she can, and before April can pretend that it's all better now. True, going back to a place where all she needed was a laptop, an internet connection, and herself was fine, but usually Andy was just in the next room or right next to her.

Washington, for all the people and wonders of a large city, is awfully lonely.

"Nothing, I just... y'know, miss you," she murmurs, unsure why it's so hard just to tell him.

"Aw, babe-"

"Ew," she grimaces but it falters, knowing that he isn't here to call her full of love or something and then she could laugh and dismiss it until he's tickled her half into a stupor and... it hurts. "That's not what I meant-"

"I know," he brushes it off because he's heard her reaction to that voice so many times before. "You wanna, like, talk?"

"D'you mind?" she wonders aloud, curiously trying to dig back for when he ever minded anything to do with her. She comes up short, these last few years.

"What? No!" he chuckles and April smiles to herself, pulling her knees up into the chair with her. She curls around herself and into the armrest.

"I thought you had to be at Leslie's thing?"

"Ugh, you're right..." Andy sounds truly torn. "I should stay and talk with you."

"No, Andy. Don't worry about me, it's just nice to hear your voice," April mutters and lets out a protracted sigh. "Missed it."

"Miss you," Andy answers back, his voice soft and sweet and with a hint of that honeyed care.

"Yeah," she laughs and bites at her fingernail, and her brain shocks her with another thought that he's trying to get off the phone quickly. It makes her laugh again. "So much. Love you."

"Love ya too," Andy says in a half singsong tone, letting the note drop quickly when April laughs a short, dry thing.

Then he hangs up, and it's like that little bit of comfort goes away. Just when she felt relaxed again, and like she could just doze off listening to Andy talk about how awesome getting to check people's coats is, she remembers, all too vividly, that she's never been more lonely in her entire life.

April's been at the bottom of her life before, and it's really strange to come out of that knowing that was that place and you never want to go back to it, but it wasn't Washington. It wasn't before Andy, when she was tired and lonely and scared and angry at everything that happened across her path, and it definitely wasn't that time in high school when she seriously contemplated doing something horrible to herself.

It's leaving London without Andy. It's telling herself that this is fine, and that things are okay. It's knowing that this is truth, but something in her mind telling her that every step of the way it's going to be even harder than before in Washington. In Washington she got to make fun of Ben, and mess with interns that barely qualify for anything but have amazing footholds in politics that will get them ridiculous jobs driven purely by nepotism, and then she could go to her apartment and call Andy. They'd talk for hours, and they probably still will now that he's in London. Hell, she made sure that he had a laptop and knew how to configure everything this time so that she could at least see him.

Now she has to watch couples, happy couples together, and know that she doesn't have that right now. Even Jerry goes home to his family and doesn't have to deal with this loneliness, so April takes it out on him even harder until she all but splashes scalding hot coffee on him. The moment she does it, she regrets it, but for a brief flash of an instant it's gratifying to know he's in pain because being this far away from Andy is just the same.

Then she gets a speech from Leslie, and has to go do some stupid HR seminar for a week and it's so amazingly boring but April's gotten used to just following the status quo in City Hall. Go to work, miss Andy, copy something or other and then answer a phone call maybe, miss Andy at lunch; she'd go to the cafeteria and eat a super greasy cheeseburger with bacon thrown on top because it makes her feel better for a second, like awful comfort, and then she'd miss smearing the grease all over his face and kissing it off of him. It's everywhere, and she hates it. Hates that Leslie has Ben, though she's never going to say it to her April is nothing but glad that Leslie is happy, and hates that people other than her get to know what it's like to snuggle into bed with their partner.

Hates that her partner is a screen now, and that he can't hug her and pick her up and spin her around like she's the most amazing person on the planet. He can't crawl into bed, hungry and with a growling chuckle that makes the night amazing, and she just misses it so much that the cheeseburger that initially worked just tastes like shit. It makes the whole world feel gray and boring, and dull, that she tries to be nice to people to make it better and it fails, miserably. But, at least, she knows that he'll be back. The only way she can get through this drudgery is the knowledge that, in a few months, he'll be snug and sound in their bed and she can wrap her legs around him and kiss him and show him how important he is to her, how much she loves him, and not have to deal with the damned self-starved seclusion.

Even Pawnee, too, with its charismatic and effusive Leslie Knope and the goofball entrepreneur in Tom, and her basically-dad Ron, all of them are fine and wonderful, but it's never the same. This city too, where she thought, after Washington, would be her safe haven of comfort, felt binding and cold.

Andy will never know, but it's much like the nights in D.C. where she spends too many nights - more than she will ever tell - curled up in bed, thankfully with Champion this time, and lets herself go for a little while.