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"You're all pigs," Annie scolds the growing crowd of guys. "But thank you for donating."
"How'd you like to be constantly sexualized?" Britta challenges them, then cringes at Duncan's eager face. "Ugh. Don't answer that."
She still feels gross.
Not just from being coated in oil, but from Annie's words replaying in her head.
I only kissed Jeff to see if I could do it. Because I wanna be cool and sexy, like you.
Britta scrubs her hair, tries to rinse the thought out, make it run down the drain.
Like water lodged in her ear, it stays.
It stays.
**
She's still a kid, after all this time. Still reacting to outside stimuli. Never sure of what she wants.
That's what Annie keeps telling herself.
That if that asshole hadn't yelled, "Go on, kiss her!", she wouldn't have been remotely interested in locking lips with the ever-exasperating, never-put-together, all-too-compelling Britta Perry.
"It's Jeff's fault, too," Annie thinks, glaring at his past insistence that they all "consider each other as sexual prospects."
She tries to push away those awfully bad (awfully good) thoughts about absorbing some of Britta's cool "fuck you and your mom, too," attitude through a kiss.
She can't.
**
Britta starts considering Annie's hands in more detail, oddly enough, thanks to Shirley.
Because Shirley had gifted Annie a hand-me-down Kitchen Aid mixer, and now they're baking chocolate chip cookies together, along with Troy and Abed.
She contemplates her quiet brilliance, too. How she transforms the exact measurements of baking into an art, like when she's carefully shaving excess flour off the top of a measuring cup with a butter knife.
She watches Annie tilt her head back as she savors the first bite of a piping hot cookie.
She shouldn't intrude on this quasi-intimate moment, but she wants to.
**
Annie studies the bold, black cursive on her pink top: I kissed a girl...and I liked it!
"You're sure this is okay, Britta?"
"Wear your truth, Annie. If anyone gives you shit, Abed and I will beat them up."
She doesn't expect Pride to feel so freeing, so life-affirming.
She gets a pink lesbian pride flag draped over her shoulders at some point and thinks, "I'm here. I'm queer. I'm home."
Bittersweet tears burst out—joy at finding herself, regret for years of self-hatred.
Annie lets them billow out behind her. Casts them away.
She lets forgiveness and Britta in.
**
"Fuck, Annie," Britta gasps as she grinds down on her girlfriend's thigh with increasing desperation.
Denying herself sexual pleasure has never been her forte, but she's tried not to rush into this.
Annie whispers, "Gimme more, Britta. I want all of you," as they break apart from their next kiss.
She's done waiting if Annie is, too.
"You're sure?"
Annie's nodding into their next kiss while she tugs at her own sleep shirt.
"I promise," Britta murmurs, her voice shaking as she strips in front of her for the first time, "I'm gonna take such good care of you, babe."
**
"Summer's in the air, and baby, heaven's in your eyes. I'm your national anthem," Annie sings along to part two of however many mixtapes make up their extended road trip playlist collection.
"I'll always pledge allegiance to you," Britta tells her as they get on the highway before wryly adding, "God knows we christened that last motel room in Arizona with each other's names enough times."
"The sex was crazy good, even for us," she agrees before clutching Britta's free hand on the gear shift and quietly admitting, "I could get used to this."
"What part?"
"Making memories with you."
**
"It's just—Annie's so fuckin' pretty, Jeff—"
"So you've told me," he quips, moving Britta's beer away from her.
She scowls at him, reclaims her Blue Moon, gulps down the last dregs of it, and continues her monologue.
"But she's more than that, too, she's brilliant and assiduous—" the word sticks on her tongue like molasses "—and caring and...yeah. And I know I'm drunk," she rambles on, "but it's happy drunk. No worries 'bout a thing. Hakuna Tamata."
She snorts at her mistake; Jeff shakes his head. "Let's get you home."
Britta snags the last word. "Annie's my home now."
**
"Don't let yourself get too comfortable here," Annie whispers to herself—she made that mistake last time with Greendale, and now she's back, armed with a degree that's led to a garbage "job" hawking medical "supplies," aka pens.
She's tempted, not to sabotage herself, but to go for reinvention, except she's invested in four years of failure (at least), and what's she got to show for it, really—
"Annie."
Britta's voice, barely more than a whisper, knifes through her self-doubt.
She mouths, "We got this," with enough conviction to help Annie to believe it, and she reminds herself: "I've got Britta."
**
Britta enjoys their collective second graduation more than the first.
Turns out that having a plan, a job, and the best damn partner she could hope for—all those trappings she'd once dismissed as stodgy elements of conformity, of a robotic, picket-fence life—makes for a pretty good transition.
They all—or the remainders of what used to be a better "all," one that included Troy and Shirley—go around making toasts, gathered in The Vatican after all the pomp and circumstance.
"To finding a path and making your mark on it," Britta improvises.
She's done wandering, done wondering.
She knows what—and who—she wants.
**
It happens unexpectedly. Quietly.
Just Annie telling Britta, "Mark—that new lab tech—and his wife are having a baby."
Britta's silent for a few beats before answering, "Do you want kids, Annie?"
"Part of me does, yeah. You?"
"I—I could."
Annie jokes, to avoid breaking down more than anything, "What happened to hating the nuclear family?"
Britta laughs. "We're a lesbian and a bisexual who might need to adopt. Traditional America hates us."
Annie tackles their research—Britta, their budget.
The adoption process takes years, feels like decades.
Finding Emma makes the whole ordeal worth it.
"So," Annie breathes, "we're moms now."
**
Annie and Britta don't have to try to give Emma their fierce, undying, unconditional love.
Unlike their parents, they just do it.
Which is how they end up making a blanket fort with her one Saturday morning. She turns it into a pirate ship, her stuffed teddy bears becoming first mates.
"This reminds me of the Dreamatorium," Annie murmurs softly to Britta, who nods and grins at the memories, grins wider still as their imaginative, inquisitive seven-year-old growls, "Arr, matey!" without a hint of civility.
They lean into each other and pull Emma close, too, to pass their love on.