IndiANNa by kittu9 (T)

[stars-inthe-sky.livejournal.com]

Fandom: Parks and Recreation
Pairing: None
Length: ~1400 words
Author on LJ: kittu9
Author Website: tomatocages

Why this must be read: Ann Perkins gets a bad rap sometimes, mostly because the writers never seem quite sure of what to do with her (besides using her as half of one of the best Bechdel-passing friendships on network TV). Here, we explore a bit of Ann's backstory, rendered in a deft and frankly honest hand, and (aside from the lack of Michigan) who's to say it isn't canon?

Jobs are hard to come by these days, sure, but Ann’s been a nurse for over ten years. Maybe some hospitals wouldn’t hire her now because of what they’d have to pay her—in her head, Ann can hear Leslie chirping that Ann is worth the money, that she is beautiful and good and smart—but experience talks and Ann’s record is pretty good. She has days where she thinks about going back to school for the three semesters it would take to get her nurse practitioner license, and then she thinks of the prescription pad and DEA number that would come with it: she can feel her hands start shaking, a little, just at the idea of it. There are a lot of good things about Indiana, but there’s some bad to go along with it. Ann’s usually able to skirt the issue, at least in her own mind, but she knows what controlled substances can do to a life, what the temptation to redirect prescriptions can do for the gray area. Ann lives a small life, and even if Leslie understands in all the wrong ways, Ann’s content.

Some days she’s less serene about her schedule—nine years and counting at Saint Joe’s, and the floor still can’t decide if she’s on days or nights, eights or twelves—but that’s mostly her own fault, for not getting married, for not having kids, for dating guys who have no expectation save that she grab a six-pack on the way home. After nine years of showing up, the other nurses are okay with Ann too, and she can believe that no one will kink her IV lines once she leaves a room (nurses eat their young, her instructors used to say, and even though only one girl from Ann’s nursing cohort has lost her license, Ann believes the adage). Realistically, Ann doesn’t have to abide by any schedule other than her own; when she’s had her fill of being needed, she can clock out and go home.

The shift differential isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. Ann has owned her house free and clear for years.

*
Even though Andy was an ass, in retrospect, Ann still kind of misses him. He was big and dumb and occasionally sort of mean, but she could usually count on him to be at home. Most of Ann’s family cannot make this claim: after Ann’s father left and her mom got fat, got diabetes, and got bogged down in the ruins of her life, and Ann’s brothers got hooked on crank, Ann had to make of herself what she could.

What Ann could do was continue to give handjobs under the bleachers, and remain unfazed in her encounters with various bodily fluids. Given the choice between haunting trailer parks (Ann knows that some of the guys she fooled around with were married, or at least had kids) and getting a scholarship and a job that would put her in an actual tax bracket, Ann went with her best option.

All this history doesn’t immediately explain why she still lives in Indiana, twenty minutes from where her family self-destructed. It does not explain why she is working terrible hours at a hospital that mostly caters to drug addicts and diabetics; she could have all this and more in Illinois, possibly with a better salary and definitely with better take-out options. Indiana could be a kind of penance, but save for Christmas and Easter, Ann stopped going to church when she was in nursing school, and she’s never once felt guilty about her life choices.

IndiANNa