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Jeff, Friday, Week One
It could be worse. Really, he should be looking at the fact that he’s still in contact with her at all as a blessing. Jeff had been expecting to watch her walk out of his life, whether it be through an immediate, sharp cutoff or gradually texting less and less until it withered away to nothing. Her staying in consistent, excruciatingly thrilling contact is better than that, he supposes. Some part of him still lights up every time he gets one of her texts, or when what’s left of the committee puts her on speaker, or when they facetime, which seems to be happening every Friday like clockwork. She’s Annie. He can’t help it.
But something about it stings. No, not something. That would imply he doesn’t know what it is. He knows damn well, no matter how badly he wishes he could forget. Letting her go is much, much harder when he has to watch her drift away.
“...but then my supervisor said I’d done everything just right and he gave Lewis this look, like…you know that look Shirley always had when Pierce really crossed a line?”
Jeff smiles back at her. He’d known she was going to take the world by storm and never look back. He’s happy for her, at least on one level. Many other levels are lamenting for himself, but that’s not important right now. “That’s the Annie I know.”
Annie smiles and does that satisfied shoulder shimmy she always does. Jeff tries not to think about how hard it is to watch through a screen.
—---------
Annie, Friday, Week Two
“...so if everything goes well, Britta’s on track to finish her two year degree in three years.”
"I knew she could do it!" Annie exclaims.
“No you didn’t,” Jeff deadpans.
“Well…” Ok, maybe she’d had her doubts. Britta had once diagnosed her with Munchausen’s by proxy because she’d mentioned that Abed had a cold in passing, and Annie is now poised to finish her second degree soon while Britta keeps plugging away at her first. “I hoped.”
“It’s kind of inspiring. Like watching a turtle somehow manage to cross the interstate.”
“Jeff!” she half-laughs, half-chastises. She’d never actually want him to stop, but if she doesn’t playfully object it doesn’t feel playful anymore.
“I’m serious,” Jeff says, almost sounding it. “She knew what she wanted from the start and she’s not letting the fact that it’s taking almost a decade get her down. Sometimes I wish I had that kind of followthrough.”
Annie feels her heart warm a little. Yes, Jeff will joke about the group, and especially Britta, but it’s the nice thing he says after the joke when he’s established his too-cool-to-care credentials that’s what he really feels. Hopefully that also applies to the things that he says in an otherwise abandoned study room after having a slight emotional breakdown, but that’s for another time.
“You follow through just fine when something makes you care,” Annie points out. So far, spite, ego, and
love
Annie herself have all done a pretty good job at that.
“So never then?”
Annie watches him shift cockily as he leans back in his chair. She’s half convinced that he’s intentionally flexing his upper body muscles to taunt her. It’s infuriating that this stupid screen is keeping her from reaching out and running her hand along his biceps. It figures that as soon as Jeff started to stop stopping her she'd end up on the other side of the country.
“I miss…” she knows it’s stupid, but she stops herself. She’s been burned one too many times, and part of her is afraid that if it happens now Jeff will just stop facetiming her until she gets back and then act like nothing ever happened. “...everyone.”
“We miss you too.”
—----------
Jeff, Friday, Week Three
“I don’t know, some days it’s just really frustrating that you’re not here,” Annie tells him. “There’s so much stuff I’d love to show you. They have some really nice restaurants -not that I’m eating out a lot- and the museums! There are so many good museums!”
Jeff smirks. It’s been a go-to for hiding his actual emotions for a long time and he’s not expecting it to fail him now. “Are you expecting me to enter a museum of my own free will?”
Annie smirks back. “Maybe if it’s the air and space museum, since if I remember correctly a certain someone writes to astronauts.”
Jeff groans. “I’m gonna murder that kid.”
“I think it’s sweet. Everybody should get to have heroes, and you grew up in a generation where you got to see astronauts do more than just burn up on re-entry.”
Jeff feels himself tense up at the word “generation.” Too bad, he’d started to go a little lax at “sweet.”
“Yeah, back in ye olden times our astronauts had the good grace to explode instead.”
Annie rolls her eyes playfully. “Sure, you had the Challenger explosion, but you had the golden days of the space shuttle, and Apollo 13-”
“Woah, hang on there,” Jeffi interrupts. “Apollo 13 was in April of 1970.” Jeff’s heart sinks. “How old do you think I am?” he asks, doing his best to sound playful and taunting instead of like he’s bracing himself to have to explain that no, he hadn’t watched the moon landing live and there hadn’t been a manned moon mission in his lifetime.
“Ha! See, I knew you were a space nerd.” Annie gloats, confusing him enough to delay the host of issues they’d been about to touch on for another time. “Who else would know that off the top of their head? Not just ‘before I was born,’ a specific year.”
“Someone who heard about it their whole life and saw the movie.”
“Liar. Doesn’t bother me though, I’ll go to the air and space museum, and I’ll be thinking about you every time I look at anything. If you’re lucky maybe I’ll send you some of the pictures.”
She does. He really wishes his eyes were drawn to the air- and space-craft instead of Annie, and that the first thing he wondered about was what it was like to sit inside one and not who she’d gotten to take all these pictures that he swears are all from about the same height.
—----------------
Annie, Friday, Week Four
“...I’m actually making a lot of friends here,” Annie tells him. It’s not…untrue, exactly. By quantity she’s made friends with a lot of the other interns. By quality, though, they all feel oddly shallow. There’s always something looming over them, be it the work itself or the knowledge that in a few weeks they’re all going back home and will probably never see each other again, or the fact that they’re clearly just being polite to her because they have to work with her even though they’re way more qualified than she is. “It’s weird. I’m so used to being mocked for overachieving, but I feel like it’s almost the other way around here.”
“Well it’s nice to know you’re somewhere you’re appreciated,” Jeff rattles off, deadpan.
“I don’t know,” Annie replies, hoping he can’t see the nervous way she’s leaning into her screen, like she’s trying to push her way through it so she can hold him. “I don’t feel like I’m overachieving here.” She barely feels like she’s achieving at all. She loves a challenge, sure, and her supervisors have only said good things, but she feels like she’s barely keeping her head above water.
Jeff smirks. She really misses seeing that in person and on a daily basis. “That’s just because you’re used to Greendale. It’s like jumping from kindergarten to college. Trust me, you’re killing it.”
Annie feels herself smile. It’s far from the first time Jeff’s known exactly what to say when she’s feeling overwhelmed. He was the first person she ever really believed when he said she was amazing or unstoppable after a childhood full of ‘not good enough’ and ‘couldn’t you have tried a little harder?’ and ‘really dear, I expected better,’ not to mention the scraps of praise so obviously halfhearted that they made her doubt the genuine article.
But there are still times when it isn’t enough.
She should tell him. This doesn’t feel like something you keep secret from your…your…
It doesn’t feel like something she should keep from Jeff.
“I’ve…” Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like something she wants him to know either. But that’s ridiculous, she needs (or wants, she doesn’t need it, she’s gotten through this before without going to him and she’ll probably have to again, but god it would help) to hear him talk her down, and telling him is a prerequisite for that. “I’ve kinda been feeling an urge to use again.”
She sees Jeff’s posture completely change. He doesn’t actually get out of his chair, but she swears she sees it roll closer to the camera. “What?!” He exclaims. Part of her tries to project outrage or disappointment onto it, but it doesn’t stick. All that’s there is concern. That means a lot.
“I’m not actually going to or anything.”
“Good.”
“There’s just a lot of pressure out here, and it used to be how I coped with that. It’s not the first time it’s happened, I’ll get through it.”
“Are you sure? I can fly out. The Dean will approve it no questions asked, and Frankie won’t get in the way if it’s for you, so-”
“Jeff!” she cuts him off. She hadn’t known it a minute ago, but this was exactly what she’d wanted. Not him flying out, but the fact that he’d be willing to if she did need it. Just knowing she has that kind of support does wonders. “As much as I’d love to see you, you don’t need to drop everything and come out here for that. I just needed to tell someone, I guess.” As long as that someone was Jeff Winger. She feels better already.
“If this keeps up, remember you can talk to me.”
“I know. I always do.”
—------------------
Jeff, Tuesday, Week Five
He’s not worried about her, exactly.
Well, he is, but he knows she can handle it. And he knows there’s no way in hell that he’s going to make handling it any easier.
So it’s purely selfish when he breaks down and starts facetiming her on Tuesday nights when she already facetimes him on Friday nights. It’s just because he wants his dose of Annie, and he doesn’t sleep quite right if he hasn’t checked in with her in a couple of days and made sure she’s ok.
That’s not better, is it? God, he’s head over heels, and it’s embarrassing as hell, especially when no rational person in her position would feel anything back.
—--------------
Annie, Wednesday, Week Five
Twice as much Jeff is actually really helping matters.
She’s exhausted on Tuesdays, of course - on Fridays, she always knows she has two days coming up to recharge, that she can shut herself down, ease back, find some kind of balance instead of taking every file she’s supposed to be working on back to her little rental and putting in full work days like the overworked nightmare version of herself she sometimes dreams about that made it into the ivy league would. On Tuesdays, she’s still in the middle of the week, and she knows she only has a few short hours before she needs to be back bright and early at the FBI and she doesn’t have the time or energy to think about how she looks or to psych herself up for the call. She’s pretty sure she looks beaten down and half asleep.
Jeff doesn’t seem to have noticed yet. He has that same adoring look in his eye he does every Friday.
The fact that he’s doing this means a lot in itself. Jeff doesn’t commit time lightly. Even if it’s just because she mentioned her addiction was rearing its head again, it still meant something. She hadn’t asked him to do this, he’s doing it purely because he cares.
She notes that her productivity on Wednesdays starts to spike.
—-----------
Jeff, Friday, Week Five
“I just panicked. I’m not used to people inviting me to things!”
Jeff feels a full, genuine smile creep onto his face. He still can’t believe how Annie can flip from an unstoppable juggernaut to an awkward, insecure wallflower with no idea how invaluable she is to any group that includes her. “Right, I forgot how we cruelly excluded you from all our best social events.” He’s still Jeff Winger. Sarcasm is his go to, even when it doesn’t have an edge to it.
Fortunately Annie seems to take it in the spirit it was intended and chuckles. “Yeah, but you guys aren’t just friends or co-workers, you’re family. There’s never been any pressure on it because I always knew you’d accept me. And professionally I’ve been pretty good about standing up for myself, but socially…” Annie gulps in a quick, shallow breath. “Everyone here is so qualified, and they all bonded faster than I did, and they might wind up being important networking contacts in the future-”
“Annie,” Jeff cuts her off. Years of experience have taught him that the best thing for her when she starts spiraling is to jump in before she can really get going. Normally he’d also hold and stroke her shoulders to soothe her, but he doesn’t think rubbing the sides of his monitor is going to have the same effect. “Has it occurred to you that they may be asking you to get drinks with them because they like you?”
Annie hems for a moment, then haws. It seems this had not, in fact, crossed her mind. “Well they probably don’t anymore after I just stood stock still for thirty seconds like some kind of terrified prairie dog when they asked.” Jeff can’t help it. He laughs at that. He knows he shouldn’t, but the image is adorable. “Hey!”
“And you think that ruined your chances?”
“Of course it did!”
“I mean it’s not great,” Jeff admits. But it had been the kind of thing that happened the first year he’d known Annie, and she’d wound up being…important to him. “But if you just ask if you can come next time they go, then they’ll get the message that you wanted to go with them and were just overwhelmed.”
“And they’ll think I’m a nervous, scared little mouse.”
“Which you can change by just being Annie at them.”
Annie’s face softens and Jeff sees her shoulders relax. “Why do you always have so much faith in me?”
“It’s pretty easy to have faith in something you see work every day.”
—-----------------
Annie, Tuesday, Week 6
“I thought you were having a good time with them?”
“I am,” Annie answers. “But not everyone can go out with them every time. People have different schedules.”
“What’ve you got out there that’s that important?”
Annie smiles shyly. “I told them I had a skype call…” she starts, then decides she might as well go for it. “...with my…boyfriend?” It was true, although she hadn’t been sure if she’d find the nerves to tell Jeff in those words. Earlier that Tuesday, she’d been invited to an impromptu game night at Charlie’s apartment and, after the initial rush of acceptance, she’d remembered that she had a call from Jeff to look forward to tonight and game night lost its appeal.
Well, not all its appeal, which was why she’d profusely apologized for not being able to make it, explained that she was expecting an important call and, when they asked with who in what seemed to be genuine interest (They cared about her personal life!) she’d heard herself say, to her surprise, that it was her boyfriend.
Even more surprising, a few seconds later she’d realized it might actually be true. Jeff’s been facetiming with her twice a week without fail, and more and more of that time is consisting of them just smiling at each other, not to mention how supportive he’s been, and he’s been more emotionally open with her than she can ever remember him being.
Either way, this is a means of asking what, exactly, the hell they are without actually implying that they’re anything, so that she doesn’t have to worry about it blowing up their friendship if it is platonic after all. Jeff knows he’s the only person she facetimes regularly, and she’s only had two work days since she last talked to him, so it would take some serious mental gymnastics for him to think she was talking about anyone else. It’s just the right mix of plausible deniability and clear significance.
—--------------------------
Jeff, at that exact moment
It shouldn’t be any surprise that she has a boyfriend.
Of course she does. She’s an incredible, brilliant, ridiculously attractive woman. It was just a question of how long it took for her to meet someone worthwhile.
It is a surprise that she had one before she left Greendale. If she’d met him in DC then they wouldn’t need to skype. They’d have just gone out. His brain quickly flits through a catalog of Greendale students. The candidates are not of high quality.
“And you turned them down for this guy?” He may have let her go, but if she deserves better than him she deserves better than any Greendale alternative. If it’s someone she met outside of school, well, if they were worthy then he won’t be able to make a dent in the relationship. He does his best to sound casual. “He must call you twice a week or something.” Jeff kicks himself mentally. The worst possible thing he could do right now is use himself as the bar to measure against. It sounds petty, and jealous, and it’s going to invite a comparison he really doesn’t want to lose. Besides, he’s supposed to be letting her go, he has to remember that.
“Yeah!” Annie says, gleefully. “He does. He’s really important to me. His calls have kind of been keeping me going.”
Jeff pauses a moment and resigns himself to reality. Annie sounds happy, and relieved, and almost comically smitten. The idea that it might be another disposable, non-threatening placeholder was a fool’s hope. Annie has good taste, present company, Rich, and Vaughn excluded. If she’s finally applying that taste to the men she dates she should be fine, especially if it’s someone dedicated enough to call her every Monday. “He must be pretty great. Somebody even I couldn’t find a problem with.” The second sentence just slipped out. He’s trying to be nice about this, he swears.
Annie smiles wide and warm. A smile he used to think she reserved for him. “He really is. And it’s not like there won’t be more game nights. They’re moving the one next week to Wednesday for me, it was really considerate.”
—---------------
Jeff, Friday, Week 6
“I am not acting weird,” Jeff insists, stopping himself from shifting in his chair for the fourth time in a minute because she’s already onto him and he doesn’t want to make it worse.
Annie rolls her eyes. “Yes, you are. You’ve been all over the place all night. You don’t have to be nervous, I’ve seen you freak out over all kinds of things.”
Jeff hesitates. It’s dumb, and personal, and childish. He knows it’s not going to drive Annie away (not as a friend, anyway) but it’s not right to dump his crap on her. She’s not his girlfriend and she never will be and that’s for the best. There’s no need for her to deal with massive quantities of Winger Baggage from a totally platonic, definitely casual friend.
Then again it’s Annie and she seems worried about him. Hell, she’s got good reason to be after the last few months at Greendale, when he’d been trying to run as far away from his feelings for her as possible. She might call Britta to check up on him. He’s in no mood to deal with that.
Also he’s been itching to say something about it since the call started, but that’s beside the point.
“It’s my dad’s birthday.” He feels a little ridiculous saying it out loud.
Annie makes an expression that usually accompanies her awwwws. “Jeff-”
“And I know it’s dumb letting this arbitrary date connected to someone I don’t even care about anymore screw up my life-”
“No! No, it’s not dumb at all,” Annie assures him. “I get the same way around my mom’s birthday too.” Jeff blinks and tries to think back to when Annie had been particularly jumpy, but she seems to see the thought process on his face and saves him the trouble. “It’s in the summer too. That usually makes it worse.”
“Because you don’t have your friends around.”
“Yes! And it’s not like I was going to drop this on you guys, but just having you around helps.”
“When you’re a kid, you’ve got this distant figure you want to impress-”
“And nothing’s ever good enough for them the rest of the year-”
“So every year you do your best to get them to like you-”
“And it never works.”
“And they still leave.”
Annie leans into the camera and gives a half smile. “ If it helps, I like you.”
Somehow, it does help. “I like you too.”
—-------------------
Annie, Tuesday, Week 7
“I’m just saying it’s really, really hot out here.”
Jeff’s faux-outraged face gapes back at her from her laptop screen. “And what, you prefer freezing your ass off?”
“No, I prefer bundling up to sweating enough to power the Hoover Dam.”
Jeff chuckles. “Well I guess you’d better get used to it.”
Annie blinks. “Why?” Global warming is set to raise the temperature in Colorado, but she’s talking to Jeff, not Britta.
Jeff looks similarly confused. “Have they not offered to bring you on full time yet?”
“Jeff, they’re not going to give me a job.” She’d known it was astronomically unlikely when she got the internship, which had been a pleasant surprise in itself, but she knew it with certainty now. Yesterday her supervisor had called her into his office, sat her down, and gently explained that while he’d wanted to get her into a work study program that would’ve gotten her foot in the door while she finished her degree in DC, her history with Adderall was a dealbreaker that he hadn’t been able to convince people to see past.
She’s not quite done processing that herself though, and she’d prefer to keep today’s conversation light so she keeps it to herself for now. She’ll feel better telling Jeff about that when she’s back home and she can hold him while she does it. Besides, her supervisor had offered to write her a letter of recommendation if she applied to the academy in four years with her degree finished and a decade of sobriety getting her past the drug regulations, so it’s not as big of a deal as it seems.
Jeff seems to put it together though, to finally realize that Annie isn’t going to be spending the rest of her life in DC, whether it’s from something in her face as she says it or whether it’s from the fact that if they were going to she’d know by now. She can see it on his face even before he asks “Then you’re coming back?”
She smiles. “Of course I’m coming back. And when I get home me and my boyfriend are going to bundle up inside and keep each other warm,” she tells him, surprising herself a little. It feels nice to be that bold with him, now they’re bordering on official.
He’s left speechless, and she’s kind of flattered to know she can have that effect on him.
—-------------------------
Jeff, Thursday, Week 7
It’s weird that it isn’t weird.
Wednesday night around 9:30, so 11:30 her time, he’d heard his phone buzz and opened it to find that Annie had sent him some revealing but not quite explicit pictures of herself with the message “three more weeks :)” accompanying them. Clearly they’d been meant for her boyfriend and, it being late and her probably being tipsy, she’d sent them to the wrong number. He hadn’t felt right not letting her know but he’d also had no idea how to respond to that, so he’d eventually settled on sending back the only lightly sarcastic “your boyfriend’s gonna enjoy those,” and only received “<3” as a response. No “oops.” No “oh my god I’m so embarrassed.” Not even a “if this were anyone else I’d be mortified but we’re so close.” Just a heart. For pointing out that she’d accidentally sexted the wrong person. Sarcastically.
Annie being cool with sexting is unexpected to begin with, even if it makes sense once the concept is presented to him. Annie being completely casual about accidentally sexting her ex-crush is downright baffling.
Maybe she’s worried he’ll freak out. He’d come close to putting his cards on the table when she’d left, so she knows he’s still pathetically pining for her. So maybe she’s afraid that this will open the floodgates and make things unmanageably weird between them so she’s trying to avoid poking it and hoping it will go away. It’s what he’d do.
He regrets deleting the pictures that night, but he’d known that was going to happen. That’s why he did it.
—----------------------------
Annie, Friday, Week 7
“So game night was good?” Jeff asks. He seems nervous, but maybe that’s not surprising. With what she’d sent him after game night, maybe it’s finally hitting him that they’re really going for this. Her best bet is probably to be normal. The more Jeff realizes that their being together isn’t going to break either of them and that it’s going to be their normal now, the more he should ease into it.
“It was fun. The other interns are good people. They’re no study group, and we’ll probably all drift apart after we go home, but I like them and maybe I’ll wind up working with some of them in the future.” She’s hoping they don’t drift apart, but she has no expectations. After all, the study group is essentially her family but Troy and Shirley have been mostly out of contact for the last year and she hasn’t skyped any of them but Jeff alone since she got to DC, relying on the group calls to catch up. She can’t expect her ten week internship friends to outperform the most important people in the world to her.
“They might surprise you,” Jeff points out. “Do you think I was expecting a random fake study group to become a weird symbiotic blob?”
Annie feels a little rush at that. It’s always nice to hear Jeff opaquely admit how important the group is to him, but he’s also got a point. She never would’ve expected, say, the tall asshole and the blonde he was trying to trick into sleeping with him to become the love of her life (possibly, anyway, let’s not rush this Annie) and her best female friend. Connections like that had a way of sneaking up on you, and she’d certainly felt a connection when she’d listened to Charlie’s stories about growing up on a potato farm, and Nicole gushing about her girlfriend back in Connecticut, and seen how raptly interested and disbelieving they’d all been hearing stories about Greendale (and Jeff) and the group (and Jeff) and how hard it had been getting by on her own after she got thrown out at 18.
Also she might be really good at Settlers of Catan.
“You’re right,” she tells Jeff, and sees him puff up a little like he always does when someone admits that. “Still, it’s hard to let myself get attached sometimes.”
“Take it from someone who never used to get attached, it’s no way to go through life. Let people in or it might be too late.”
—-------------------------
Jeff, Tuesday, Week 8
He can do this.
It’s hard, sure, but so was letting Annie go. He got through that. This should be a cakewalk in comparison, because that was the moment that led to this. He made the decision to be sitting here, asking this that day, so really this is the path of least resistance. He’s already on this road and the road not taken is just a thought exercise even if it leads to heaven.
“So tell me about your boyfriend?” he finally manages to get out. It shouldn’t have taken that much effort.
Annie’s brow furrows for a brief moment in what he could’ve sworn was confusion, but it immediately gives way to that soft smile Jeff remembers her using when he tackled her to save her from a tiny car explosion, or when she convinced him to do the right thing. Stupid, stupid Jeff.
“He’s amazing. He’s exactly what I’ve needed to get through this internship. He’s a little vain, but he’s not shallow, and he’s smarter than he lets on. He’s kinder than he lets on too.”
The look on her face is practically starstruck. “Some young up and comer?” Jeff asks. He’s not sure why that’s the first thing he needs to know, but he has a feeling he wouldn’t need to dig too deep to find out.
“No,” Annie answers, so giddily that it could almost come across as playful if that had made any sense. “He’s a little older, but I like that.” Annie seems to fluster herself and continues quickly. “Of course, I’d still be with him if he weren’t, but it’s a bonus, not a downside.”
Jeff hesitates. This is the hardest and most important thing to ask, but she’s already shown the answer on her face and in her voice. “And he makes you happy?”
“Yeah,” Annie says, dreamily. “He really does. I just hope I make him as happy as he makes me.”
Jeff forces a smile. “I’m sure you make him happier.”
Annie smiles back, so he must be hiding the pain pretty well.
—--------------------
Jeff, Friday, Week 8
“It’s just overwhelming, you know? I have two weeks left, most of it I’m going to be working, and I feel like there’s still so much in DC that I haven’t seen.”
Jeff gets that bouncy feeling in his chest that only Annie seems to be able to bring out of him. Only Annie would be worried about optimizing her free time like this to see everything. “What is there left to see?”
“Do you have any idea how many memorials and monuments and museums there are in this city?” Annie asks, almost indignantly. “I’ve been to most of the big ones but I don’t want to miss out on a hidden gem just because it isn’t popular.”
“It’s not like you won’t be back,” Jeff assures her. “One day, when you actually work there running the world, you’ll be able to go to all the giant hunks of marble you want.”
Annie shifts in her seat. “Ideally, yes. In a few years if I get into Quantico I’ll be back, or at least in driving range. But there’s a very real chance they won’t take me.”
“Trust me, they’ll take you,” Jeff says. Then, against his better judgment, he makes a suggestion. “And I will personally fly out and take you to any monument, memorial, or museum you want.”
“Really?” Annie asks, hope clear in her voice.
“Yeah,” Jeff doubles down. God, that was stupid. Years from now when she gets into Quantico she’ll probably be settled down with her stupid boyfriend and he’s just promised to pay for a cross country flight so that he can fly into her again like a moth at a flame.
“Then I’ll note them down as reserved for a visit with Jeff Winger. Gives me something to look forward to.”
—--------------------
Annie, Tuesday, Week 9
“So are you disappointed you only have a week and a half left?” Jeff asks. He’s been saying things like that a lot. He’s always thought she deserved better than Greendale, and she gets the sense that this is his way of processing the idea that she’s coming back to it.
“Maybe a little,” she tells him. “It’s been nice to be in a properly professional environment for once, but it’s all been kind of a whirlwind. And a lot of what they’ve had us doing is the basic menial stuff so that they don’t have to. I’d love to actually work here some day, but being an intern is exhausting. I’m looking forward to coming home.”
“You know you could look for something there. Maybe try to-”
“Jeff,” she stops him. “There’s no reason for me to stay here. I can’t apply for Quantico for another three years, and I can get a forensics job in Greendale just as easily as I can here. I want to come home.” She doesn’t quite have the guts to add to you on the end of the sentence. In trademark fashion for them, they’ve still been dancing around everything. Besides, as much as he’s a reason, and a big one, he isn’t the only reason. All her stuff and most of her friends are in Colorado and all DC has is frustratingly hot weather, a mind-boggling number of monuments, and a cost of living that had almost kept her from taking the internship to begin with.
Jeff looks like he wants to object for a moment, but then it passes and he just smiles. “I’m looking forward to welcoming you back.”
Annie feels herself flush. “So am I.”
—---------------------------
Annie, Friday, Week 9
“We talk about the internship so much, but I feel like we never talk about what’s going on with you,” Annie says. It’s been bothering her the last week or two. Jeff’s seemed better on their calls, but the last year before that he’d been in a dark place. She’s hoping that him being more open with her, finally willing to be with her, is a sign that he’s doing better, but she can’t help but worry.
“You don’t want to hear about Greendale,” Jeff says, almost dismissively.
“Yes I do. It’s home, and I’m always interested to hear what’s going on with you.”
“I just…” Jeff pauses, sighing. Something in his body language wrenches Annie’s heart. “I still feel like I’m trapped here. And I’ve made my peace with that, mostly. Whatever I’ve said about Greendale in the past, it’s not that bad of a place to be. It gave me all of you, and it made me a better person. But it isn’t the same without all of you, and being here with only Britta left just makes everyone being gone hurt more. I sit in that chair in the study room and almost nobody that’s supposed to be looking back at me is there.”
It makes sense. Annie’s been feeling it a little herself, and she hasn’t had to walk the same halls and sit in the same rooms where they were all a family. That has to make it worse. “Will my coming back help?”
Jeff’s body language shifts from sad to serious. “Annie, don’t feel like you have to come back for-”
“Jeff! No. I’m already coming back. In a week. No matter what. What I’m asking is when I come back whether that will help with this.”
Jeff shifts in his seat again, then hesitates before saying, “it might.”
“Well good. And if you don’t want to be at Greendale anymore with us gone, maybe you can start looking at bar requirements for other states? Nobody said you can’t follow, I don’t know, Shirley, or Abed.” Or me, she thinks. She thinks that still might be a little too much right now though. “If you set yourself up right and are willing to learn new state and local codes, you could practice law just about anywhere. LA, Georgia, Virginia maybe-”
“What?”
“What?”
—-------------------
Jeff, Tuesday, Week 10
“Oh, before I forget, I’m delaying my flight home.”
Jeff’s heart sinks, which he immediately feels bad about. This is a good thing. It’ll start out as a couple of days, then it’ll turn into a month, then a career. She’s staying with the FBI, they saw her value, and now she won’t be stuck in Greendale languishing in obscurity keeping a broken down lawyer she can’t date company. “Annie, that’s amazing. Congra-”
“Not because of work!” Annie interrupts, exasperated. “I was going to fly home Friday night because I didn’t have much reason to spend a tenth weekend here, but Nicole suggested everyone go out for drinks Friday night to celebrate surviving the internship so some of us reshuffled our flights. It actually works out better, this way I can leave Saturday afternoon instead of having to get on the flight exhausted, and I was able to move the flight for free.”
Jeff breathes out a sigh of relief, which doesn’t go unnoticed. “You were afraid I was staying, weren’t you?”
“Maybe for a second.”
“Well don’t worry. I can’t wait to see you in person.”
“Do you have someone to pick you up from the airport?”
Annie smiles shyly and rocks a little in her chair. “I was hoping my boyfriend would pick me up.”
Oh. Right. He’d almost forgotten for a moment. Who else would she want to see the second she got off the plane? Certainly not her platonic community college friend. He probably won’t even see her for another week, because any sane man with the opportunity would whisk her away to spend days in bed as soon as they dropped her luggage off at 303, maybe with a fancy dinner first if he showed godlike restraint and was determined to treat Annie right, like Jeff liked to believe he’d do. “Of course. That’s kind of what boyfriends are for.”
“Half the reason to be in a relationship really.”
“Think you can count on him?” It’s pathetic, but on the off-chance that Annie’s boyfriend has some unavoidable conflict, Jeff knows he’ll jump at the chance to stand in.
“I know I can,” Annie answers with a pleased smile that Jeff has to stop himself from misreading as smug.
When she sends him her flight information, he assumes it’s just so that he’ll know when she’s touching down safe.
—---------------------------------
Annie, Friday, Week 10
For the first two rounds, everyone’s just talking about the internship. It’s what binds them together, so of course it’s the first and most prominent topic of conversation.
Over the third, they mainly talk about their career plans. None of them have managed to secure a permanent position or a way into Quantico, so there’s a wide range of directions they’re planning on going. It’s at this point that Annie lets slip that she almost got into a program that would’ve put her through Quantico. There’s a reasonable amount of friendly competitive outrage and half-hearted booing for a minute until she gets to the part about her being turned down for her history with Adderall and the tone immediately swings around to wholehearted support.
The fourth round is largely spent on well-intentioned but, due to the alcohol, somewhat half-baked brainstorming on how Annie could best build a 2018 Quantico application from Colorado. Some of the ideas may be workable. Possibly. It’ll be easier to tell when she sobers up.
It’s the fifth round when conversation swings to what everyone will be going home to. And, with six appletinis under her belt (she’d been thirsty between rounds two and three, so sue her), Annie finds herself gushing more about Jeff than she’d been expecting to.
Indeed, she finds herself so overwhelmed by her love for him that she decides she needs to make a quick call.
—------------------
Jeff, Friday, Week 10.
He's jumpier than he expected to be.
He'd just talked to her three days ago, he shouldn't be missing her this badly. Apparently at some point he'd stopped noticing how important their calls had been to keeping him sane, and now on this Friday where Annie has other things to do, he just doesn't know what to do with himself even though he knows he's going to see her tomorrow (he might have goaded Britta into staging a surprise welcome home party at 303 so that he can see who her stupid boyfriend is and make sure he sees her before he whisks her away). His mind has decided that Friday nights are Talking to Annie time, and in the absence of Annie it is left untethered and lost.
So when his phone rings, it’s in his hand in under two seconds, and answered almost the moment he sees who's calling.
"Hey, Annie-"
"Jeeeeeeeeeffffffffff!"
Jeff smiles to himself. It's clear Annie is happy party drunk, not sad drunk or scared somewhere on the streets of DC trying to get home.
"That's me."
"Just haaad to call you. Got to talkin bout you. I love talkin bout you."
"You having a good time out there?"
"Yeh. Everybody's talkin bout home. You're my home."
Jeff decides to take that in the general platonic sense of "the group is my home" rather than the impossible romantic sense of "I can't wait to come home to Jeff and anywhere he is is home." He really wants to misinterpret it though. It's very tempting.
"And I'll see you tomorrow when you get home." That might blow the surprise party, but it's not like she'll remember this that clearly. Besides, it’s vague.
"I can't wait. Been wanting to see you for so long. Wanted to ask you to fly out but it woulda been too much."
"I missed you too."
"I love you."
Jeff freezes. It's amazing, really, how he's imagined her saying those words for years and every time his reaction has been different. He hadn't thought up a situation where it would hurt previously but apparently reality had covered that for him.
"You've got a boyfriend."
Annie laughs for some reason. " Haha, yeah. Love my boyfriend."
"And you're drunk."
"Yep!"
"And you called me." Jeff never would’ve guessed that Annie would be the type to drunkenly walk up to the edge of an affair, but there’s something weirdly gratifying about him being her first choice for it.
"Who else would I call?" She sounds genuinely confused, although she seems out of it enough that that may not mean anything.
Something occurs to Jeff. She won't remember this anyway. And if she does, she'll already be absolutely mortified by it. Making this situation worse would be near impossible. He may never have another chance. If need be he could always say he told her what she wanted to hear to avoid ruining her night.
"I love you too."
"Awwwww, Jeeeefff!"
"I've loved you for years and I knew it wasn't right, wasn't what you needed. It was so hard."
"Wellll it's easy now. You've got me. You've always got me. I'll see yah tomorrow. Don't be late! I love you."
On top of everything else, it figures that Britta had let the surprise party slip. What else could he be late for?
‐‐—-----------------
Annie, Saturday, Week 10 (technically)
For the first ten minutes, she's too excited to be mad. Traffic is a thing, and flights never get in on time anymore, and she has to get her luggage off the carousel anyway. So she stands by her gate, happily vibrating in anticipation and trying to peek through the crowd and use his height to spot him before he spots her.
Twenty minutes in she starts to get a little pissed. She'd texted him before she went through security, she'd asked if he'd pick her up on Tuesday, she'd sent him her flight information. She’d also drunk-dialed him last night, but her memories of that are distinctly pleasant so she’s pretty sure they didn’t have a fight bad enough for him to bail on her. He should be here by now. He's getting smacked in the chest after their dramatic airport reunion kiss.
Forty minutes in, she starts to get worried. Jeff would never just forget about this. He would've at least texted her, and the airport isn't forty minutes away from his apartment so it's not because he's driving. Maybe something happened to him. He could've been in a crash, or had a heart attack, or, or…
She should call him, just to make sure
‐‐—----------------
Jeff, Saturday, Week 10 (technically)
Surprise parties are less fun when the surprisers are stuck waiting at attention for this long. Annie's flight should've gotten in almost an hour ago, which means she should've been here almost half an hour ago. Out of an abundance of caution, they’ve been in position for 45 minutes.
Maybe her boyfriend couldn't wait, Jeff thinks. Maybe they'd decided she could drop her stuff off at home after their marathon week-long lovemaking session. Jeff pictures the guy and his smug, not as handsome as he thinks it is face. Or rather what he thinks that face will look like. He expects it to be very punchable, but he doesn't plan on stooping to that.
His phone rings. It's Annie. Then he remembers: last night, she'd told him not to be late to the surprise party, so she knew it was coming, maybe her flight was delayed and she’s letting them know so they don’t do exactly what they’re doing now.
"Hey Annie-"
"Where the hell are you?!"
Jeff blinks. "303?"
"What the hell are you doing there?!"
Jeff furrows his brow at this seemingly random hostility. "Waiting for you?"
"Why aren't you at the airport?!"
"I thought your boyfriend was supposed to pick you up?"
"He was!"
Jeff straightens. His priorities have just shifted. Annie is alone and pissed at an airport, abandoned by some jerk that was supposed to care about her. His duty is clear.
"I'll be right there."
‐‐—---------------
The airport
Jeff spots her quickly. She's a little more dressed up than he expected, probably for the asshole that stood her up, and she's sitting on an airport bench radiating anger. It's practically a beacon to follow.
Annie spots him almost as fast. It's not like she's had anything better to do than endlessly scan the crowd for the hour she’s been here , intermittently checking her phone to see if he actually had died this time.
Annie stands and stomps toward Jeff, luggage rolling along behind her.
"What. The. Hell." She asks, firmly. She doesn't want to shout in the airport, and also she doesn't want her first time seeing Jeff in the flesh since they got together to be a fight, but she has a right to be pissed about this.
"Yeah," Jeff says, much more casually than he has any right to. "Who stands up Annie Edison?"
"Exactly," Annie says, still cold, aiming to let him know that a little self-deprecation won't get him out of this
"Who is this guy anyway? Doesn't know what he's missing."
"You!" She soft-shouts. "You are! Where the hell were you?"
Jeff looks at her completely baffled. "Me? It was supposed to be your boyfriend!"
"Yeah! You!" There's a long pause. The expression on Jeff's face is almost unreadable by the sheer range of emotions it displays.
"Me…"
The shock in Jeff's voice is palpable. Annie feels her heart sink. She did it again. She read into things, and she assumed Jeff would jump at the chance to be with her. She’s been through some pathetic relationships, from her gay high school boyfriend using her as a beard, to being catfished by Abed, to that girl from her English class at Greendale who’d downplayed what they were doing as casual experimentation when Annie bought her flowers, but being in a relationship that her partner wasn’t even aware of takes the crown for the saddest. How had this even happened? Annie thinks back to the first call when she'd referred to him as her boyfriend. She doesn't have time to start dissecting it though, because Jeff resumes normal functionality.
"You know, as a general rule, when you start dating someone they're supposed to know."
"I was clear!" Annie counters, shifting into defensive mode, no longer as sure of that as she was. "I told you that I turned them down for game night for a skype call with my boyfriend on that skype call. Did you think I was skyping someone else that night?"
"You never said it was that day! The call could've been any time!"
"The sext wasn't a clue?"
"I thought it was an accident!"
"Well what about the flirting then?"
"You mean our completely normal interactions?"
"If that's our normal then maybe we should've started dating a long time ago!"
"Maybe we should've!" Jeff answers, and the sudden agreement calms them both.
Another pause settles over them, during which time most of the handful of spectators they'd attracted lose interest and go about their business.
Jeff speaks first. "Then all that stuff you said about your boyfriend supporting you, and keeping you going through the internship, and making you happy?"
Annie nods. "Yeah, it was about you. And it was all true. I wouldn't have handled this nearly as well without you."
"I help you that much?"
Annie smiles and reaches a hand up to caress his cheek. "Of course you do. Why would you doubt that? And that was when you didn’t even realize we were dating. Think about what you could do if you tried."
Jeff looks down for a moment. "I don't know. Some of it's all my baggage, but I guess some of it is that I can't believe someone like you needs someone like me."
Annie shakes her head. "Not needs, wants. And not someone like you, you. You support me, you listen to me, you make me laugh, you make me feel safe, you're-" Annie blushes, looks to the side for a moment, and adds in a smaller voice, "-you're really hot, not that that matters as much as the other stuff. You make me want to share my life with you. I might love you."
"I know I love you."
Annie smirks up at him. “Gee, romcom much?”
Jeff feels a slight blush coming on and, drawing on years of tested, ingrained instincts, deflects from it with sarcasm. “We’re in an airport Annie. It’s the path of least resistance.”
Annie’s smirk intensifies. “Well, then I guess we have to do this.” With that, she hooks her arms around Jeff’s neck and leans up for a kiss.
Tropes or no tropes, Jeff isn’t complaining. Security is though, and after the first few minutes ushers them out of the building, then taps on the window of Jeff’s car a few minutes later.
Against every instinct he has, Jeff talks Annie out of heading straight back to his apartment and steers her into the surprise party. She deserves better than jumping straight into bed, and their friends have been waiting for almost two hours now.
—-------------------------
Annie, Washington DC, Week 231 (not that anyone’s counting)
“So I trust you,” Annie tells Nicole, who is currently leading a blindfolded Annie by the arm, “but this is getting a little unsettling.”
Nicole makes a dismissive pffft. “We’re almost there, and you’ll thank me afterward.”
“You’re not one of those people who joins the FBI because they’re secretly a serial killer, are you?” Annie asks. She’s fairly sure that’s not a thing that happens in real life, but her inner Abed hasn’t stopped suggesting the trope since five minutes after the blindfold went on, especially after they got in the taxi. She does trust her old internship friend, she does, really, and she’d been delighted when they’d wound up in the same class at Quantico, but she’s a naturally paranoid person. Living above a sex shop at 18 will do that to you. As much as she believes the best of people in general, there are only six specific people in the world she trusts unconditionally and one of them is dead. That’s why she’s been making good use of her training and tracking every turn the cab makes. She’s pretty sure they’ve driven out to DC and are somewhere near the national mall, but she can’t be completely sure with all these potholes and her perception of time is getting wonky. It had been a long cab ride.
“If I were, I'd take a little more pride in my craft than just telling you I have a surprise for you and putting you in a cab,” Nicole says, sounding almost insulted. “That’s rookie stuff. Not to mention then the driver’s a witness. Anyway, we’re here.”
Annie reaches up to take off her blindfold, reasonably confident from the sound of traffic and the muggy summer air that she isn’t going to see a serial killer lair. She blinks away the light and then sees…
“Jeff!” He’s standing there, hands in his pockets, back to the sun so he looks like a renaissance representation of a saint, smiling at her. It was kind of a dick move to make her take the blindfold off looking into the sun, but she can’t argue with the dramatic effect.
“Hey-” Jeff starts, but before he can say anything else he has the wind knocked out of him by a high-momentum Annie hug.
“I missed you,” she says quietly into his shirt. It’s been 20 weeks since they’ve seen each other while Annie’s been training in Quantico, and it’s felt like a year. It’s easier than last time because they’re clearly, definitively together, and they facetime almost every night instead of twice a week, but it’s harder too because now she knows what it’s like to sleep in his arms and that’s made being on the opposite side of the country from him much harder.
“I missed you too,” Jeff says into her hair.
Annie pulls back reluctantly so that they can converse properly. “What are you doing here? There was no reason for you to come all the way out here.” They’d agreed to meet in LA in a week, where Annie would be starting her first official assignment at the field office and they’d be making their first real home together instead of haphazardly trying to integrate each other into their apartments.
He strokes her shoulders like he’s always done, for ten years at this point. “Yeah there was. I wanted to see you.”
“Flatterer.”
“Yes I am, thank you for noticing. Anyway, I had a promise to keep.”
“Oh?”
“Four years ago, I told you that I’d fly out and take you to any monument, memorial, or museum you wanted. Today, I’m following through on it.” Annie peeks around Jeff’s torso and sees the entrance to the National Air and Space Museum. “I wanted to surprise you, but I knew you’d need a reason to drive up from Quantico, so I got in touch with your friend Nicole.”
Annie looks back to Nicole, who bows with an overexaggerated hand flourish. “At your service.”
Jeff raises an eyebrow. “Honestly I was expecting a little more subterfuge than ‘put on this blindfold I have a surprise for you’ from an FBI agent, but I can’t argue with the results.”
“Hey, simple works.”
Annie looks back to Jeff, suppressing the grin that is launching a coup for control of her face. “And what makes you think this is the one I’d pick, hmmm?”
Jeff smiles back down at her. “This is just where we’re starting. We go here, then you get to pick where we go the rest of the day.”
The grin makes further progress in its campaign across Annie’s Face. “There’s something very appealing about a man who keeps his promises.”
Jeff forces his face into an approximation of worry. “There is? Damn. Well, fine, go be with this guy.”
“I think I will, thank you very much. Have you got a girl you can go crying to, take around to your museums, maybe spend the rest of your life with?”
“You know, funnily enough I do, right here.”
Annie gazes into Jeff’s eyes, leans up, then suddenly remembers something. “Nicole’s not coming with us, right?” she asks, glancing back at her friend. “No offense.”
“None taken. I’m going to the botanical gardens with Kathy, figured if I was driving up here she might as well fly out. See you dorks later.”
Nicole turns to leave and Annie wastes no time in leaning up, going through with the kiss she’d previously aborted, then grabbing Jeff’s hand and dragging him into and through the Air and Space Museum.