Fic: A Blank Piece of Paper (Jeff/Britta)
TITLE: A Blank Piece of Paper
WORD COUNT: 7090
PAIRING: Jeff/Britta hurt/comfort, ensemble friendship in the background
RATING: R for language and character injury
SPOILERS: up to Early 21st Century Romanticism. I started this before Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking aired, so it goes a little AU.
NOTES: this is the first time I’ve written anything that switches perspectives, so if you feel so inclined, could you let me know if that worked, particularly the characterization of Jeff?
A Blank Piece of Paper
“I think you’re all crazy, and I hope Saint Peter will take your mental illness into consideration when you get to the pearly gates and he’s deciding if you can pass go and collect $200 or if you should GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL!”
“Alright, we get it Shirley, you think this is a dumb idea,” Britta says, shaking her head. “Just relax, okay? The prank’ll work out fine,” This even though she herself has serious doubts-and if the buzzkill is doubting the awesomeness of your prank, that should be a sign. It’s just that it’s an elaborate prank-they’re putting plastic wrap over every single toilet seat on campus, to protest the recent installation of new toilet paper dispensers that only roll in the paper-hanging-under direction-and it requires a lot of stealth and strategy, neither of which is exactly a strength of Troy, Abed, Pierce, or Shirley.
“Maybe you should just go,” Annie whispers at Shirley. Annie’s overdressed in solid black, even down to her headband, looking like the world’s cutest ninja, but Britta has to admit that she’s good at sneaking around. And she herself is all in black, too, but it’s not like that’s a big change from her normal outfits. She’s wearing flat-heeled boots for once, though: much better for an evening of both a drizzle and some mild breaking and entering.
Clutching her purse, Shirley nods. “Maybe I will. I never realized campus is so dark at night. Don’t you all think there should be more streetlights? I am going to write a strongly-worded letter to the Dean about this!”
“Oh come on!” Pierce says, rolling his eyes. He’s mostly all in black, too, but Britta’s pretty sure that’s a coincidence. She’s still undecided about Troy and Abed’s matching camouflage, though-and their face paint is starting to run in the rain. “You’re not the mom of this whole school! And be quiet, someone’s coming!”
“Make me!” Shirley hisses, but Troy, who is their eyes and ears behind, suddenly makes a bird-like sound. Nevermind the fact that nobody could think of a bird that makes noise at night; they just wanted to make bird sounds. Abed chirps back and sets down the handles of the wheelbarrow full of industrial-size rolls of plastic wrap they (read: Britta) swiped from the cafeteria supply room.
“Man and woman!” Troy stage-whispers. “It’s a man and woman! Or a man and a man in a skirt!”
Exchanging glances, Britta and Annie roll their eyes. “You should be the front man and I should be the tail,” Annie says. “We’re so much better at this stuff!”
“No kidding!” Britta replies, helping Abed move the wheelbarrow behind a shrub. This has been the procedure every time they’ve encountered someone on campus: hide the wheelbarrow, pretend to mill around like it’s totally normal to encounter groups of people all dressed in black on a community college campus on a Friday night, wait for the passersby to, well, pass.
This time, though, the passersby are Jeff and his date, huddled close under a comically small umbrella. The date is a statuesque redhead straight out of central casting, although at least she looks old enough to remember life before those adhesive strip thingies you can use to pull blackheads out of the darkest depths of your pores.
“Funny meeting you here, cast-of-Scooby-Doo-if-Scooby-Doo-was-remade-for-today’s-more-demographically-diverse-times,” Jeff says, glancing over at his girl. “You don’t look like you’re up to any shenanigans at all. Guys, this is Veronica. Veronica, this is my Spanish study group,”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Veronica says. “Is that a wheelbarrow?”
Crap. “What?” Britta asks, edging closer to Annie so they are shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the wheelbarrow. Annie looks over and gives her a little conspiratorial smile.
“And that’s our cue to go. Have fun doing whatever it is you’re obviously not doing,” Jeff says, wrapping an arm around Veronica.
No sooner has he finished speaking than a loud electronic wail splits the air. It sounds weird, almost…European, and they all look around for the source of it, realizing suddenly that blue and red lights are flashing, patterning the buildings and cars around them.
“Oh, great! It’s the fuzz,” Britta says, and then she has to explain what ‘the fuzz’ means to everyone except Jeff and Pierce, and by the time that’s done, they can actually see the Greendale Campus Security golf cart clattering noisily down the wet street toward them at a sort-of-slightly-quick rate. Troy screams and then gulps, having the grace to at least look chagrined.
“Now what?” Abed asks. “There are only ten toilets left. We’re so close to completing our mission!”
Veronica looks over at Jeff. “What are they talking about, Jeffrey?”
Britta bites back a smile as she heads around the shrubbery to go out and meet the security guards-if there’s anything Britta’s learned, it’s that being tiny and blonde are great tools to have at your disposal when dealing with authority figures.
**
It’s just like it is in the movies: one moment she’s stepping off the curb, pushing wet hair out of her eyes, and the next moment there’s suddenly a car in front of her, an actual car, and that’s what the security guys are chasing, she has a second to realize that-and then the next thing Britta sees is darkness.
She isn’t out very long. Or it doesn’t seem like it could’ve been long, because when she next opens her eyes she’s on the ground and her vision is full of stars. Someone’s scream-crying: Troy? Annie and Shirley are talking over each other and somebody’s scooping her up by the armpits and putting her in…the wheelbarrow? There’s something wet and coppery-tasting all over her face and her pants are wet with something and she’s afraid maybe she peed herself? and fell over somehow? It kind of seems like that’s what happened. Abed’s face looms above her as he starts pushing the wheelbarrow, Pierce and Troy running ahead of him to open doors, Annie and Shirley taking her hands and saying reassuring things. And because she’s facing backwards in the wheelbarrow, the last thing Britta sees before the dark spots on the edge of her vision merge with the stars in the middle of it is Veronica, under the umbrella, and Jeff, standing in the rain, staring at the car with the Britta-shaped dent in the hood.
**
It’s the most surreal accident Jeff has ever seen, and he used to work for a firm where one of the partners had made his name by literally chasing ambulances (that’s how he got that weird hole in his hand, actually). About eight hours after it happens, when he finally gets a chance to stop moving and think about it, the thing that sticks out most is how ordinary-for Greendale-the day was before the accident. There was the study group getting wound up in some sort of scheme, there was a hot girl in the bookstore who he’d met and then asked out to dinner while they were both browsing the lifestyle magazines, there was a class of some sort that he’d already forgotten by the time he’d grabbed his Emergency Date Shirt And Tie from his Lexus-and then there’d been Britta getting hit by a car.
It was dark and rainy and he didn’t really see it happen, but he heard the car’s brakes, heard Annie scream, heard Britta make this weirdly loud, almost animal sound, breathless and pained. And Jeff’s never been a guy who’s good in emergencies-emergencies are situations where he himself is not in control, and fuck that, universe-but he’d surprised himself with the torrent of legal invective he’d directed at the poor sonofabitch who’d been driving the car, some shaking teenager scared shitless by the guy verbally tearing him a new asshole while a crew of lovable misfits heaped a bloodied girl in, of all vehicles, a wheelbarrow.
That had been the end of the date that had never even begun, and Nurse Jackie had been his usual incompetent self, which meant Jeff had chased the ambulance, Annie riding shotgun and her phone on speaker so she could talk to everyone else, lagging behind in Shirley’s van, traveling at legal speeds.
And then there was the waiting, interminable waiting, after they’d triaged Britta and somehow, insanely, decided that she could wait to see a doctor, so he’d stood there by her gurney in the goddamn hallway, because the ER was full, and she’d looked so scared and small and literally covered in blood that he had wanted to hunt down whoever was in charge of the hospital and punch him in the face with a meat tenderizer until he looked one tenth as messed up as Britta.
Annie and Shirley had kept her talking, because Annie said that was the best way to make sure she didn’t have a concussion, and listening to Britta be herself underneath all that blood and the awkward way she wasn’t moving her torso had been the surrealest thing of all, and he’d actually had to excuse himself and go find a quiet corner where he could just exist and breathe for a minute or two, feeling a torrent of emotions made up of thousands of drops he’d never once in his life bothered to differentiate or identify. And then when he’d come back to find the gurney missing, he’d thought she’d actually, like, died or something, and there was an unending moment where his brain had filled with white noise, until Shirley had taken his hand and drawn his head down to her shoulder, so basically the top of her boob-which, seriously, Shirley? Seriously?-and said that Britta had finally been taken into an exam room.
So he scrunches himself down in one of the hard plastic waiting room chairs, the kind of chair that is incredibly uncomfortable for anyone taller than a large potted plant, and then, because it makes sense at the time, he texts Britta. He types, and then stares at the screen for a while, feeling like his brain is Leonardo DiCaprio in Titantic and his body is Kate Winslet, only with a less-impressive rack. He finishes the message and sends it out of instinct, and then jumps half-out of the chair when Britta’s phone, which duh, Jeff is in her purse on Annie’s lap, starts chirping. Jeff’s face floods with heat for the first time since…well, probably since the first time he ever blushed.
Annie gives him a funny look, like a quizzical Bambi is how he would describe it to Britta if she were here, and Jeff locks his emotional shit down. Focus. Control. Both things that would make this situation less of a disaster. He spends the next hour mindlessly thumbing through sports scores on his phone, pretending to read them and then sometimes mistakenly actually reading one and having a reaction to it that then seems inappropriate because one of the Seven Greendale Samurai is in the ER getting her face put back together and who the fuck is he to care what a score will do to his fantasy Premiership League team? Conflicted, is what he is.
“She’ll be fine, Jeff,” Annie says, and he glances up. Troy is napping beside her, curled up like a pretzel in a sweater, Pierce and Abed are playing gin rummy, and Shirley is absorbed in Oprah’s magazine (which: uggh), but Annie is watching him from across the room.
“Um,” he says, because it’s Annie and behind the Disney face she has a mind like a bear trap and he is not comfortable with her knowing the deeply pathetic depths of how vulnerable he is feeling right now. Even thinking about thinking about how vulnerable he is right now makes him wonder, yet again, what it is about Greendale that makes it a Mecca for neurotics. “Yeah, I know she’ll be fine,”
“It’s okay,” Annie goes on. “It’s really sweet that you’re this discombobulated over Britta getting hit by that car. You’re a good friend,”
Oh, Annie. He’s had some thoughts-okay, and some dreams-about her-okay, and about Britta-okay, about her AND Britta together-oh and sometimes HE is there too-that make him a really terrible friend to both of them. And that thought reminds him that he’s Jeff Winger and he has deeper reserves of emotional bluster than the Middle East has of oil. “’Discombobulated?’ Crank it down a notch, Scripps-Howard,”
Annie just smirks. “Jeff Winger knows the name of a spelling bee?”
“Jeff Winger’s the biggest nerd in this room,” Abed pipes up, and Pierce nods. After a second, so does Shirley.
Jeff shakes his head. “I hate you guys,”
“But we love you, Jeff,” Troy says, without moving or even opening his eyes. “And we can hear you worrying about Britta even though we’re asleep and you’re not talking. So chill, dude. She’ll be fine,”
Abed takes his BFFs momentary consciousness to ask a very important question: “Do you think she’ll have a scar, like a pirate? And if so, what will her pirate name be?”
The rest of them are tossing around names-Shortlegs McGee, the Dread Pirate Perry, Cap’n Pout-but Annie’s still looking at him. Relationships are complicated, she mouths, and he nods and then says “Yes,” and then he thinks Fuck it and he sends her a text and when she finishes reading it she somehow manages to look both happy and sad.
His text was: An important thing has been crystallized for me today: Britta is my kryptonite. Her reply reads: I’m glad you’re at peace with that, and you ARE the biggest nerd in the room. Good luck, Jeff. You’re going to need it.
**
After everything-X-rays and gauze and bandages and poking and prodding, and being thankful that she wore underwear for once-Britta still has to fill out a shitload of paperwork. Because she doesn’t have health insurance and basically this is going to bankrupt her. An orderly pushes her out to the discharge desk, and she can see the study group mostly asleep out in the waiting room: Troy, Abed, and Annie in a pile of adorable, Pierce in a non-adorable slump, Shirley listlessly flipping through a magazine, and Jeff, having a staring contest with a wall.
When he sees her he gets up, and she puts on a big smile, then dials it back when the skin stretching pulls on the stitches the doctor used to close the big gash in her hairline.
“Hi,” he says. “You look terrible,”
“Thanks,” The nurse on the desk hands her a clipboard and a pen, and Britta’s headache reasserts itself-the doctor said it might stick around for a while. Shit. She’s got like half a dozen prescriptions to get, too. “The car didn’t kill me, but the paperwork might,” she says, half to Jeff and half to the nurse. The nurse just goes back to playing solitaire on his computer, but Jeff makes what she recognizes as his Panic Face, last seen when he realized one of Chang’s hermit crabs was missing. She waves a hand at him. “I’m fine,” she says, because it occurs to her that he might not know that.
“There’s still blood all over you,” he replies, and it’s true, she’s a mess in a hospital gown and jeans that weren’t torn when she put them on this morning, but he’s acting funny, avoiding eye contact and scrubbing a hand through his hair like a teenage boy.
“You should see the other guy,” Britta says, trying to get him to not be so weird, and it works: he cracks the tiniest of smiles. “I’m fine, really,” she continues. “They put me on some good drugs, so I’m more worried about how I’m going to pay for them,”
“Well stay away from Pierce,” he says, hooking a nearby chair leg with one foot and dragging it over. “And don’t worry about paying for it. I’m suing the crap out of that asshole. Reckless endangerment, damage to public property, hell, if he used mouthwash this morning I’ll get him for driving while ability impaired,”
“You’re not a lawyer anymore,”
He reaches out and fiddles with one of the brakes on her wheelchair. “I’m close enough,”
She looks down at his big hand and its impeccable cuticles. “Whatever you are, I’m glad you’re here,”
“Well, get used to me, kitten. As soon as they release you I’m taking you home,”
“What?”
“Shirley’s van is older than even the concept of airbags, and I don’t think you really want to ride with Pierce. Sure, I’ll have to put down some newspapers in case any of your bandages leak or you start oozing puss-“
“Gross,” Britta interrupts, looking back at her paperwork, but something about this, about this verbal sparring, puts a warmth in her chest, behind her breastbone, not heartburn or even shock from getting hit by a car, just this funny feeling of home.
**
Once the paperwork is done, Jeff pushes Britta out to the waiting room so she can be hugged gingerly by Shirley, Annie, and Troy, accept a handshake from Pierce, and be patted lightly on the kneecap by Abed.
“Oh, Pumpkin!” Shirley exclaims. “I’m so glad you’re okay!”
“Thanks, Shirley,”
“I’m sorry I didn’t have the camera going then, Britta. The evidence that that guy was not driving safely would have been inevitable,”
“It’s alright, Abed, don’t worry. I’m just sorry you won’t be able to finish the prank,”
Troy crosses his arms. “What do you mean, won’t be able to finish the prank?”
“Yeah, we’re going back to campus as soon as you leave here,” Pierce says. “So hurry, why don’t you?” After a moment, and several raised eyebrows from the others, he continues: “Congratulations on not dying,”
“Um, thanks?”
“This must be a hell of a prank,” Jeff says. “What were you guys doing, anyway?”
Annie looks at him. “It’s a secret. You didn’t want to get involved, so you’ll just have to be surprised like everybody else,” There’s an edge to her voice, hard to define but noticeable, and Britta looks between her two closest friends-but her two closest friends are also really good at acting. They just look like themselves, not like themselves hiding something.
“I’m sure I’ll read about it in the next issue of College Pranks Monthly,” Jeff says, his voice going up into a higher register, as it does when he gets extra sarcastic. “Good thing I just renewed my subscription!”
Annie just sniffs and turns away from him, going to retrieve Britta’s purse. Jeff loudly says he’s going to go pick up Britta’s prescriptions and then walks out.
“Well,” Shirley says, glancing over at Abed, who is looking back and forth between Annie and Britta and scribbling something in a notebook that Britta knows is where he keeps his juiciest story ideas. Shit. This is going to come back and bite someone in the ass. The only question is who, and when?
**
In Jeff’s car, which is so warm and comfortable inside that Britta imagines that the only similar sensation must be being in the womb, the shock and the adrenalin crash catch up to her, and she drowses, lulled by the mutter of the engine. The seatbelt hurts her tender ribs, and lolling her neck to try to ease the pressure on her head only works a little, but he’s just as smooth and confident driving as he is when trying to charm a lunchlady into giving him extra edamame on CelebrASIAN of Food Days (every third Wednesday, and yes, Chang has already spray-painted RACIST onto the banner in the cafeteria). He doesn’t even turn on the radio, and the car is ghost-silent inside. She drifts on a lovely cloud of pain meds until she feels the car stop at the curb in front of her building.
“Sorry,” he says, actually looking apologetic. “That was supposed to be more of a coast than it turned out,”
“S’no problem,” she says, mouth a little thick. Britta goes to shake her head but that hurts, so pride be damned, she waits for him to come around to her side of the car and help her out and up, all the way up to her third-floor walkup. It is a special kind of agony, dragging herself up those stairs, and it’s nice to have him to lean on.
Her apartment isn’t exactly a hospital room, but once she’s back home Britta snaps out of her daze enough to realize that she needed a shower five hours ago. (Well, technically, this morning before she even went to school she needed a shower, but whatever.) They have a halfhearted sort of fight about whether or not she should be in a slippery shower alone, and finally she acquiesces and lets him drag an ottoman into her bathroom and hang out there with 911 already dialed on his phone, finger hovering over send, while she gets in the tub.
It turns out that the awkwardness of getting undressed in front of someone with whom you once did the nasty is canceled out by the awkwardness of trying to take off your own necklace when some of your ribs did the nasty with the hood of a Chrysler. Then it turns out that it hurts too much to try and contort herself in the necessary ways to even give herself a sponge bath, so she pushes the sliding glass door open and holds the sponge out at him.
“Britta,” he says, with that undertone he sometimes uses that means What are you doing, crazy person?
“I can’t do it,” she says. “I can’t reach, alright? Please help me,” And as she says that, it occurs to her that that’s something neither of them has ever said to the other before, in all the long-ish history of their friendship.
At first his touch is infinitely delicate, but then she tells him: “If a car can’t break me, you can’t, either,”
The sponge pauses on her back. “Nothing’s broken, right? I mean, you don’t have a cast someplace I can’t see, do you?”
“I’m naked, Jeff,” Fortunately rolling her eyes doesn’t hurt.
“I noticed,”
“No, nothing’s broken,” Britta sighs and looks at him in the mirror rather than turning her head. His face is oddly still, a stillness she doesn’t see from him very often. There’s a meditative quiet, steam rising off the bathwater because her apartment is perpetually cold. Britta thinks about how weird but also how effortless this is, trusting him this much.
Jeff puts aside the sponge. “I don’t think stitches are supposed to get wet. What do you want me to do, just wash the bottom of your hair?”
“Is there a lot of blood in it?” God, that’s the weirdest thing she’s ever said.
He leans back, considering. He’s doing a really good job not checking her out, she’s got to say. Maybe he’s not attracted to bruises? Another point for Winger. “Mmm, kind of? It’s mostly around your face,”
“Could you get that with the sponge?”
“I could try,”
“Okay,” She shuts her eyes in anticipation, hears his jeans creak as he moves-they must be new. Then his breath is on her forehead and the sponge pats along over her face. The water dripping from the faucet is impossibly loud.
At last Jeff leans away, and she opens her eyes to find him staring down at the sponge, now streaked red. “This is messed up, Britta. This whole day has just been jacked the eff up,”
“’The eff?’”
“I’m trying to respect the injured,”
“It’s not my ears that are hurt,”
“Or your nipples. They’re functioning just fine, which begs the question, why is your bathroom so cold, Britta? Oh, I see your eye-rolling muscles weren’t damaged either. Wonderful news!”
**
After he gets Britta dried and dressed and settled on her couch, Jeff orders pizza, and they fill the time it takes to get there arguing about which is the best season of The Office . When he looks back on it, he realizes that he picked the fight in the first place because the odd intimacy in the bathroom threw his equilibrium for a loop, that seeing her so subdued totally destroyed the status quo.
The pizza is late, so Jeff harasses the delivery girl into giving them free breadsticks, and then Britta chastises him for the harassment while eating 75% of the breadsticks. He argues back that pizza delivery girls are rare and therefore are more used to harassment, and that really it wasn’t harassment, it was just social engineering. He was proving a point. She asks what point and he bullshits something about how if you’re not tough to people everyone will go around thinking they’re a special snowflake and nothing will ever actually get done. And then he finds her DVDs of the complete series of the original British The Office and they have to revise the conclusion of their previous argument thusly: British The Office > season 3 of the American The Office >practically anything else now on TV, including the current season of The Office. So all in all it’s a regular evening, except for the fact that yelling and laughing make her ribs hurt. But since she spends half the night laughing, and the other half yelling at him for making her laugh, he doesn’t feel very guilty about it.
Around episode 3, when they’re done with the pizza, he cleans up, appalled by the condition of her little kitchen. He starts the dishwasher, wipes off the counter, throws out some takeout containers masquerading as Petri dishes. She has a bachelor’s fridge: condiments and alcohol. The freezer is stuffed to the gills with expensive vegetarian TV dinners. He wraps the leftover pizza carefully in plastic wrap and puts it in the fridge, where it sits in the center of the middle shelf, utterly alone.
There’s a pass-through from the kitchen to the living room, and a breakfast bar littered with detritus. He can see Britta, the light from the TV diffusing in her hair as she sits propped up on pillows, one arm wrapped protectively around her torso. It’s time for her meds, so he scrounges a clean glass and fills it with water, shakes out the appropriate dosages, and lines up the prescription bottles on the breakfast bar. After a moment’s consideration he writes out the schedule of what she needs to take when, printing in big clear letters on the back of the menu that was taped to the pizza box.
She looks over as he comes back into the living room, and then winces, turning carefully back to the TV. “Here’s your drugs,” he says, holding out the tray.
She looks up at him without moving her body at all, her eyes dark. There’s a pebbling of tiny scabs at the corner of one eye: road rash. He pushes a lock of hair away from it, careful around the big cut in her forehead, and she doesn’t flinch. She takes the glass and her pills and mutters a ‘Thank you,’
Jeff sits down on the other end of the couch and restarts the DVD, surprised that she paused it to begin with. He’s even more surprised when Britta, done swallowing, carefully rotates herself so her feet are in his lap. He exes his wrists over her crossed ankles.
“Thank you, Jeff,” she says. “For everything you’ve done today,”
“I’m sorry, what?” He cups a hand around one ear.
“I said, thank you for everything you’ve done today,”
“Come again?”
“Do you need a Q-Tip? I said, thank-oh. Asshole,”
But when he looks over at her, she’s smiling.
**
Later her carries her to bed, proud of his stealth because she doesn’t wake up when he lifts her, just makes a soft noise and burrows closer. Of course she hasn’t made her bed in, apparently, forever, and so he wakes her up tucking her in.
“Jeff?” she asks.
At first he thinks that’s a dumb thing to ask, who else would it be? Then he remembers that it’s dark and it’s Britta, the kind of girl who’ll make out with a hippie on a community college lawn, so maybe she does need to ask something as simple as who’s there whenever she wakes up. And then he hates himself a little bit. “Yeah, it’s me,” He flips the comforter up over her and then pats her ankle, because that seems like one part of her that isn’t hurt.
“Are you going home now?”
“Uh,” He clears his throat, looks around even though it’s totally dark. “I think I should stay here and keep an eye on you,”
“Okay,” she says, sleepily, and he hears blankets rustle as she settles in. “Good,”
“Um,” he says again, looking at the Britta-shaped lump under the covers, the still-damp hair curled on her pillow, and it actually hurts to see her this way, to see Britta soft and vulnerable for once. Jesus, even Pierce has started calling her The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. (Britta had refused to read the book, calling it ‘misogyny masquerading as feminism’ and ‘too mainstream,’ and then proceeded to debate all five of her detractors simultaneously.) (Jeff hasn’t read it either, but that’s because he’s Jeff Winger.)
Yeah, dammit. He’s Jeff Winger. He will take off his tie and socks and belt and pants and be okay with adding another layer to the laundry monster on her floor. He will go around to the other side of the bed, put his watch and phone on the tower of books she’s using as a table there, and then he will get in her bed. And when her eyes snap open when he does that, he will just play it Winger Cool.
By stuttering.
“Cat got your tongue?” Britta asks archly. Fortunately it’s a full moon, and blue light streams in through the curtains: he can actually see that her right eyebrow, traditionally more eloquent than the left-and okay, maybe he does pay a lot of attention to her face, but whatever, man, this isn’t fifth grade, you don’t have to pretend girls aren’t the greatest thing ever-has literally gone into an arch shape.
Jeff pretends to spit out something. “No, but cat hair does. Gross, Britta. Control your beasts,”
Her eyes narrow. “Susie B is dead, you dumbass. I had to put her to sleep a year ago, or don’t you remember?”
“And the crazy cat lady hasn’t gotten a new one yet? Color me shocked!”
She shifts, an abbreviated movement that looks painful. “You’ve probably never had a pet, I understand why you don’t understand,”
Of course things had to get serious. “You’re right, I’ve never had a pet. We weren’t really a family that had the money for it, or stayed anywhere for very long, or spoke to each other or functioned effectively or any of that other Ozzie and Harriet bullshit,”
It takes her a moment to respond, like she’s deciding something, and then she surprises him. “Dude,
I know you’re old, but ‘Ozzie and Harriet?’”
“Shut up. Don’t you need to sleep to recharge your sarcasm reserves?”
“Yeah, I’m basically a sarcasm sloth,”
“I don’t think you understand how sloths work!”
“I don’t think you understand how sarcasm works!”
“What?”
Britta laughs. “Okay, I admit I had no idea where I was going with that. But give me a break, I’m on some high-class-country-club-lady painkillers,”
“I have understood how sarcasm works since I was in the womb, Britta,”
“That’s grossly appropriate because do you know what the word ‘sarcasm’ translates to? Tearing flesh!”
“Remind me to take away your entomological dictionary, I’m getting so sick of hearing the origins of words. You’re like the Abed of language,”
“That’s etymological dictionary, moron. Entomological is bugs,”
“You’re the worst, Britta,”
“Yeah, that’s why you’re in bed with me,”
“I’m in bed with you because in a couple hours when you wake up and need your drugs again, because right now you’re a helpless kitten who only thinks she’s a cougar, you’ll need me to go get them,”
“A cougar! I’m 30!” There’s a beat, the first beat in the whole conversation. “I can see you smirking, you know! I can hear you smirking,”
He really is. “All I can hear is you keeping me awake,”
For whatever reason, this seems to deflate her. “Oh. Sorry,”
He reaches out, touches her forearm because that’s the closest part of her to him. “Don’t be. That was the most fun I had all day,”
She cracks a sideways little mouth-twisting Britta-smile. “Me too,”
**
In the middle of the night, the bed gets too hot and Britta wakes up, sweaty and contorted into the only weird shape that seems to not aggravate most of her bruises. Jeff is snoring, manly lumberjack snores, even, blankets flung away from his body, which is splayed out almost aggressively. Good thing she has a large bed.
Britta extracts herself from it with difficulty, and in the bathroom she pees and then investigates her various wounds under the high-def lights that she only bought because one of her sisters-in-law said that in addition to helping you put on your makeup better, they also use thirty-five percent less energy than regular bulbs.
It’s the forehead cut that worries her most: even the doctor had said that it will probably scar. The bruises on her ribcage make her look like she was one of those beef carcasses that Rocky Balboa trained with, and even her shins have these weird horizontal bruises, from the bumper of the car. Her body can obviously remember the accident, but her mind is having trouble with it. Everybody was there, she remembers, and riding in a wheelbarrow is super uncomfortable. That’s about it.
She snags shorts and a tank top from a pile on the bathroom floor and carefully puts them on, testing her limited range of motion. She goes and gets her own drugs, just to prove a point. And then she brushes her teeth, because Jeff’s in her bed and now that she’s more awake than she’s been all night she needs to ask him about something.
Back in the bedroom, he’s awake, watching for her.
“So,” Britta sucks in a deep breath, meets Jeff’s eyes, which are dark and mostly unreadable in the bad light. “What was going on with you and Annie today at the hospital?”
He gives her a long, level look as she carefully climbs back in bed, arranges herself more comfortably. He waits until she’s done moving to reply: “I told her that you’re a drain I’m circling, Britta,”
“Um,” She thinks about it for a little bit. “What?”
He scoots closer, pushes hair off her forehead so lightly she can just barely hear it susurrus across the bandage there. “For the second time, why can’t you see that for the compliment that it is?”
“You remember that?”
He leans in, kisses her lightly, their mouths barely touching. After a startled moment she kisses back.
“Yeah, I remember that,” He leans away. “Am I hurting you?”
“Only a little bit,” she replies, thinking that that’s what grownups do to each other. She cups a hand around the back of his skull, pulls his face back to hers. “You’re a giant puddle of goo, Jeff Winger,”
“Oh yeah? Well just remember that you’re a drain,”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Britta says, and then gives him a scouts-honor sign, and then he makes her pinky swear that’s the truth. He won’t accept a kiss as proof, he needs the pinky swear. She gives it and kisses him anyway.
**
The next morning is a Tuesday and he has class and also a round of golf with some buddies from his old life, but he blows that stuff off. Jeff wakes up at his normal time, Crack of Dawn, and slips out of bed, dressing quickly in his Emergency Running Shorts and an extra large T-shirt he finds in one of Britta’s drawers. It has a faded graphic for an oil change place and he can’t tell if it’s a leftover from some boyfriend or a post-ironic faux-vintage thing. Whatever. Britta is sound asleep, wheezing softly, and he writes her a quick note, putting it on top of her phone because basically everywhere else in her room looks like a clothing-and-shoe bomb exploded on it.
It’s weird to go running in a different neighborhood, but it clears his head. There are times when he’s running that Jeff Winger slips out of his grasp, and it’s like he’s a totally different guy, an empty piece of paper. And there’s something about running that keeps all those choices, all the things that could be written down, from being terrifying. He stops at a corner store and buys eggs, cheese, bread, coffee, a newspaper because he feels like being retro.
And he also feels…really good. Better than I just won a case or I just registered for Underwater Basketweaving or even I just had sex (the Winger version, not the Lonely Island version. The Winger version has a much lower budget, for one thing.) Burden lifted, decisions made, that kind of cheesy good. Like he’s feeling everything good: the pavement beneath his feet, cracks and all, the indefinable smell in the air that says spring is coming, the sort of…lightness in his mind and heart because he knows he’s going to go back to Britta’s place and make her a kickass breakfast and be absolutely charming, and that she will charm him back, somehow, because that’s just the way they are with each other. Just the way they’ve always been with each other, from the very beginning.
And okay, you know what? It’s not like he can’t also feel the cracks in the sidewalks, or the gum stuck to them, or that he can’t also smell that there’s apparently a lot of public urination in Britta’s dive-bar-and-hobo-filled neighborhood. It’s all a part of the same picture, and he wouldn’t change a goddamned thing. It’s real. That’s what the blank piece of paper means. He will write his own story, and it will be real, and she will be in it, best friend and makeout partner and whatever else is down the road for however long they will travel that road together.
**
Britta wakes up to sunlight draped over her like a blanket, the curtains in her room drawn back and Jeff sitting in the comically small chair that goes with her vintage dressing table, his feet up on her bed. He’s shoveling scrambled eggs in his mouth and reading a newspaper that’s propped against his knees. He’s wearing long, basketball-ish shorts and her first semi-coherent thought of the day is that average-size dudes could probably wear his shorts as pants. Brother is tall, you dig?
“Oh, hey,” he says. “How are you feeling? Want some eggs? Coffee?”
“Coffee would be great,” she says, taking a deep, experimental breath to see if things hurt less-they do, just a smidgen. “And maybe some drugs, Dr. Winger,”
He gives her a grin that’s so very Jeff that he’s probably got it patented, and stands, heaping his plate and the paper by her feet. “I’ll be right back,”
“I’ll be here,” Britta replies, and she’s got to admit, Domestic Jeff Winger is kind of both hot and frighteningly…different from King of Sarcasm and Buttondown Shirts Jeff Winger. There’s something undeniably nice about it, though, being taken care of. Taking care of herself is something she’s gotten used to, although her facility at it has been debated by a long string of people, starting with her mother.
Britta squeezes her mouth to the side to help clear her head, and scoots up, leaning back against the headboard for the support it gives her ribcage. She spots the note on her phone, reads it, smiles, crumples it and drops it in the narrow space between the bed and the bedside table. That’s a legit place to store documents one might want to keep, right?
There are texts from the study group. Abed: Hope you’re functioning properly this morning. Annie: I’m so happy you’re OK! Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help! You need Anthro notes?!?! XOXO. Shirley: Get well soon, Pumpkin! I’ll stop by later with brownies! Troy: u feelin better yet? dean just announced 1st annual gcc high heel marathon n we need u on r side, i am v. bad at this. Pierce’s text is an ASCII get-well card, which is impressive, considering how long it took Pierce to figure out how to copy and paste. Her last unread message is from Jeff: Glad you’re not dead. Catch you on the flipside, homie.
Britta is not one to miss an opportunity like this, so that’s what she says when he comes back with breakfast and drugs.
Jeff’s shoulders sort of instinctively pull up high under his ears and then he composes himself, putting on an exaggerated leer. “Word,” he says, dragging out the d and flashing every white man over the age of 30’s version of a gang sign.
Britta laughs, covering her mouth because she’s in the midst of chewing. It is actually, no, literally, delightful to see someone who takes himself so seriously be so silly. She is full of delight. “You’re in a good mood this morning,”
He settles back down, picking up the paper again. “Yeah, I am. I went for a run, that always clears my head,”
“Well, I’m glad your head is clear,”
He smiles, a smaller, quieter, rarer smile this time. It reminds her of his face about two seconds after she threw a bag of faucets at him. (Of course, by three seconds after he’d been back to hitting on her, so. Some kind of point proven, Universe?) “So am I,”
WORD COUNT: 7090
PAIRING: Jeff/Britta hurt/comfort, ensemble friendship in the background
RATING: R for language and character injury
SPOILERS: up to Early 21st Century Romanticism. I started this before Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking aired, so it goes a little AU.
NOTES: this is the first time I’ve written anything that switches perspectives, so if you feel so inclined, could you let me know if that worked, particularly the characterization of Jeff?
A Blank Piece of Paper
“I think you’re all crazy, and I hope Saint Peter will take your mental illness into consideration when you get to the pearly gates and he’s deciding if you can pass go and collect $200 or if you should GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL!”
“Alright, we get it Shirley, you think this is a dumb idea,” Britta says, shaking her head. “Just relax, okay? The prank’ll work out fine,” This even though she herself has serious doubts-and if the buzzkill is doubting the awesomeness of your prank, that should be a sign. It’s just that it’s an elaborate prank-they’re putting plastic wrap over every single toilet seat on campus, to protest the recent installation of new toilet paper dispensers that only roll in the paper-hanging-under direction-and it requires a lot of stealth and strategy, neither of which is exactly a strength of Troy, Abed, Pierce, or Shirley.
“Maybe you should just go,” Annie whispers at Shirley. Annie’s overdressed in solid black, even down to her headband, looking like the world’s cutest ninja, but Britta has to admit that she’s good at sneaking around. And she herself is all in black, too, but it’s not like that’s a big change from her normal outfits. She’s wearing flat-heeled boots for once, though: much better for an evening of both a drizzle and some mild breaking and entering.
Clutching her purse, Shirley nods. “Maybe I will. I never realized campus is so dark at night. Don’t you all think there should be more streetlights? I am going to write a strongly-worded letter to the Dean about this!”
“Oh come on!” Pierce says, rolling his eyes. He’s mostly all in black, too, but Britta’s pretty sure that’s a coincidence. She’s still undecided about Troy and Abed’s matching camouflage, though-and their face paint is starting to run in the rain. “You’re not the mom of this whole school! And be quiet, someone’s coming!”
“Make me!” Shirley hisses, but Troy, who is their eyes and ears behind, suddenly makes a bird-like sound. Nevermind the fact that nobody could think of a bird that makes noise at night; they just wanted to make bird sounds. Abed chirps back and sets down the handles of the wheelbarrow full of industrial-size rolls of plastic wrap they (read: Britta) swiped from the cafeteria supply room.
“Man and woman!” Troy stage-whispers. “It’s a man and woman! Or a man and a man in a skirt!”
Exchanging glances, Britta and Annie roll their eyes. “You should be the front man and I should be the tail,” Annie says. “We’re so much better at this stuff!”
“No kidding!” Britta replies, helping Abed move the wheelbarrow behind a shrub. This has been the procedure every time they’ve encountered someone on campus: hide the wheelbarrow, pretend to mill around like it’s totally normal to encounter groups of people all dressed in black on a community college campus on a Friday night, wait for the passersby to, well, pass.
This time, though, the passersby are Jeff and his date, huddled close under a comically small umbrella. The date is a statuesque redhead straight out of central casting, although at least she looks old enough to remember life before those adhesive strip thingies you can use to pull blackheads out of the darkest depths of your pores.
“Funny meeting you here, cast-of-Scooby-Doo-if-Scooby-Doo-was-remade-for-today’s-more-demographically-diverse-times,” Jeff says, glancing over at his girl. “You don’t look like you’re up to any shenanigans at all. Guys, this is Veronica. Veronica, this is my Spanish study group,”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Veronica says. “Is that a wheelbarrow?”
Crap. “What?” Britta asks, edging closer to Annie so they are shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the wheelbarrow. Annie looks over and gives her a little conspiratorial smile.
“And that’s our cue to go. Have fun doing whatever it is you’re obviously not doing,” Jeff says, wrapping an arm around Veronica.
No sooner has he finished speaking than a loud electronic wail splits the air. It sounds weird, almost…European, and they all look around for the source of it, realizing suddenly that blue and red lights are flashing, patterning the buildings and cars around them.
“Oh, great! It’s the fuzz,” Britta says, and then she has to explain what ‘the fuzz’ means to everyone except Jeff and Pierce, and by the time that’s done, they can actually see the Greendale Campus Security golf cart clattering noisily down the wet street toward them at a sort-of-slightly-quick rate. Troy screams and then gulps, having the grace to at least look chagrined.
“Now what?” Abed asks. “There are only ten toilets left. We’re so close to completing our mission!”
Veronica looks over at Jeff. “What are they talking about, Jeffrey?”
Britta bites back a smile as she heads around the shrubbery to go out and meet the security guards-if there’s anything Britta’s learned, it’s that being tiny and blonde are great tools to have at your disposal when dealing with authority figures.
**
It’s just like it is in the movies: one moment she’s stepping off the curb, pushing wet hair out of her eyes, and the next moment there’s suddenly a car in front of her, an actual car, and that’s what the security guys are chasing, she has a second to realize that-and then the next thing Britta sees is darkness.
She isn’t out very long. Or it doesn’t seem like it could’ve been long, because when she next opens her eyes she’s on the ground and her vision is full of stars. Someone’s scream-crying: Troy? Annie and Shirley are talking over each other and somebody’s scooping her up by the armpits and putting her in…the wheelbarrow? There’s something wet and coppery-tasting all over her face and her pants are wet with something and she’s afraid maybe she peed herself? and fell over somehow? It kind of seems like that’s what happened. Abed’s face looms above her as he starts pushing the wheelbarrow, Pierce and Troy running ahead of him to open doors, Annie and Shirley taking her hands and saying reassuring things. And because she’s facing backwards in the wheelbarrow, the last thing Britta sees before the dark spots on the edge of her vision merge with the stars in the middle of it is Veronica, under the umbrella, and Jeff, standing in the rain, staring at the car with the Britta-shaped dent in the hood.
**
It’s the most surreal accident Jeff has ever seen, and he used to work for a firm where one of the partners had made his name by literally chasing ambulances (that’s how he got that weird hole in his hand, actually). About eight hours after it happens, when he finally gets a chance to stop moving and think about it, the thing that sticks out most is how ordinary-for Greendale-the day was before the accident. There was the study group getting wound up in some sort of scheme, there was a hot girl in the bookstore who he’d met and then asked out to dinner while they were both browsing the lifestyle magazines, there was a class of some sort that he’d already forgotten by the time he’d grabbed his Emergency Date Shirt And Tie from his Lexus-and then there’d been Britta getting hit by a car.
It was dark and rainy and he didn’t really see it happen, but he heard the car’s brakes, heard Annie scream, heard Britta make this weirdly loud, almost animal sound, breathless and pained. And Jeff’s never been a guy who’s good in emergencies-emergencies are situations where he himself is not in control, and fuck that, universe-but he’d surprised himself with the torrent of legal invective he’d directed at the poor sonofabitch who’d been driving the car, some shaking teenager scared shitless by the guy verbally tearing him a new asshole while a crew of lovable misfits heaped a bloodied girl in, of all vehicles, a wheelbarrow.
That had been the end of the date that had never even begun, and Nurse Jackie had been his usual incompetent self, which meant Jeff had chased the ambulance, Annie riding shotgun and her phone on speaker so she could talk to everyone else, lagging behind in Shirley’s van, traveling at legal speeds.
And then there was the waiting, interminable waiting, after they’d triaged Britta and somehow, insanely, decided that she could wait to see a doctor, so he’d stood there by her gurney in the goddamn hallway, because the ER was full, and she’d looked so scared and small and literally covered in blood that he had wanted to hunt down whoever was in charge of the hospital and punch him in the face with a meat tenderizer until he looked one tenth as messed up as Britta.
Annie and Shirley had kept her talking, because Annie said that was the best way to make sure she didn’t have a concussion, and listening to Britta be herself underneath all that blood and the awkward way she wasn’t moving her torso had been the surrealest thing of all, and he’d actually had to excuse himself and go find a quiet corner where he could just exist and breathe for a minute or two, feeling a torrent of emotions made up of thousands of drops he’d never once in his life bothered to differentiate or identify. And then when he’d come back to find the gurney missing, he’d thought she’d actually, like, died or something, and there was an unending moment where his brain had filled with white noise, until Shirley had taken his hand and drawn his head down to her shoulder, so basically the top of her boob-which, seriously, Shirley? Seriously?-and said that Britta had finally been taken into an exam room.
So he scrunches himself down in one of the hard plastic waiting room chairs, the kind of chair that is incredibly uncomfortable for anyone taller than a large potted plant, and then, because it makes sense at the time, he texts Britta. He types, and then stares at the screen for a while, feeling like his brain is Leonardo DiCaprio in Titantic and his body is Kate Winslet, only with a less-impressive rack. He finishes the message and sends it out of instinct, and then jumps half-out of the chair when Britta’s phone, which duh, Jeff is in her purse on Annie’s lap, starts chirping. Jeff’s face floods with heat for the first time since…well, probably since the first time he ever blushed.
Annie gives him a funny look, like a quizzical Bambi is how he would describe it to Britta if she were here, and Jeff locks his emotional shit down. Focus. Control. Both things that would make this situation less of a disaster. He spends the next hour mindlessly thumbing through sports scores on his phone, pretending to read them and then sometimes mistakenly actually reading one and having a reaction to it that then seems inappropriate because one of the Seven Greendale Samurai is in the ER getting her face put back together and who the fuck is he to care what a score will do to his fantasy Premiership League team? Conflicted, is what he is.
“She’ll be fine, Jeff,” Annie says, and he glances up. Troy is napping beside her, curled up like a pretzel in a sweater, Pierce and Abed are playing gin rummy, and Shirley is absorbed in Oprah’s magazine (which: uggh), but Annie is watching him from across the room.
“Um,” he says, because it’s Annie and behind the Disney face she has a mind like a bear trap and he is not comfortable with her knowing the deeply pathetic depths of how vulnerable he is feeling right now. Even thinking about thinking about how vulnerable he is right now makes him wonder, yet again, what it is about Greendale that makes it a Mecca for neurotics. “Yeah, I know she’ll be fine,”
“It’s okay,” Annie goes on. “It’s really sweet that you’re this discombobulated over Britta getting hit by that car. You’re a good friend,”
Oh, Annie. He’s had some thoughts-okay, and some dreams-about her-okay, and about Britta-okay, about her AND Britta together-oh and sometimes HE is there too-that make him a really terrible friend to both of them. And that thought reminds him that he’s Jeff Winger and he has deeper reserves of emotional bluster than the Middle East has of oil. “’Discombobulated?’ Crank it down a notch, Scripps-Howard,”
Annie just smirks. “Jeff Winger knows the name of a spelling bee?”
“Jeff Winger’s the biggest nerd in this room,” Abed pipes up, and Pierce nods. After a second, so does Shirley.
Jeff shakes his head. “I hate you guys,”
“But we love you, Jeff,” Troy says, without moving or even opening his eyes. “And we can hear you worrying about Britta even though we’re asleep and you’re not talking. So chill, dude. She’ll be fine,”
Abed takes his BFFs momentary consciousness to ask a very important question: “Do you think she’ll have a scar, like a pirate? And if so, what will her pirate name be?”
The rest of them are tossing around names-Shortlegs McGee, the Dread Pirate Perry, Cap’n Pout-but Annie’s still looking at him. Relationships are complicated, she mouths, and he nods and then says “Yes,” and then he thinks Fuck it and he sends her a text and when she finishes reading it she somehow manages to look both happy and sad.
His text was: An important thing has been crystallized for me today: Britta is my kryptonite. Her reply reads: I’m glad you’re at peace with that, and you ARE the biggest nerd in the room. Good luck, Jeff. You’re going to need it.
**
After everything-X-rays and gauze and bandages and poking and prodding, and being thankful that she wore underwear for once-Britta still has to fill out a shitload of paperwork. Because she doesn’t have health insurance and basically this is going to bankrupt her. An orderly pushes her out to the discharge desk, and she can see the study group mostly asleep out in the waiting room: Troy, Abed, and Annie in a pile of adorable, Pierce in a non-adorable slump, Shirley listlessly flipping through a magazine, and Jeff, having a staring contest with a wall.
When he sees her he gets up, and she puts on a big smile, then dials it back when the skin stretching pulls on the stitches the doctor used to close the big gash in her hairline.
“Hi,” he says. “You look terrible,”
“Thanks,” The nurse on the desk hands her a clipboard and a pen, and Britta’s headache reasserts itself-the doctor said it might stick around for a while. Shit. She’s got like half a dozen prescriptions to get, too. “The car didn’t kill me, but the paperwork might,” she says, half to Jeff and half to the nurse. The nurse just goes back to playing solitaire on his computer, but Jeff makes what she recognizes as his Panic Face, last seen when he realized one of Chang’s hermit crabs was missing. She waves a hand at him. “I’m fine,” she says, because it occurs to her that he might not know that.
“There’s still blood all over you,” he replies, and it’s true, she’s a mess in a hospital gown and jeans that weren’t torn when she put them on this morning, but he’s acting funny, avoiding eye contact and scrubbing a hand through his hair like a teenage boy.
“You should see the other guy,” Britta says, trying to get him to not be so weird, and it works: he cracks the tiniest of smiles. “I’m fine, really,” she continues. “They put me on some good drugs, so I’m more worried about how I’m going to pay for them,”
“Well stay away from Pierce,” he says, hooking a nearby chair leg with one foot and dragging it over. “And don’t worry about paying for it. I’m suing the crap out of that asshole. Reckless endangerment, damage to public property, hell, if he used mouthwash this morning I’ll get him for driving while ability impaired,”
“You’re not a lawyer anymore,”
He reaches out and fiddles with one of the brakes on her wheelchair. “I’m close enough,”
She looks down at his big hand and its impeccable cuticles. “Whatever you are, I’m glad you’re here,”
“Well, get used to me, kitten. As soon as they release you I’m taking you home,”
“What?”
“Shirley’s van is older than even the concept of airbags, and I don’t think you really want to ride with Pierce. Sure, I’ll have to put down some newspapers in case any of your bandages leak or you start oozing puss-“
“Gross,” Britta interrupts, looking back at her paperwork, but something about this, about this verbal sparring, puts a warmth in her chest, behind her breastbone, not heartburn or even shock from getting hit by a car, just this funny feeling of home.
**
Once the paperwork is done, Jeff pushes Britta out to the waiting room so she can be hugged gingerly by Shirley, Annie, and Troy, accept a handshake from Pierce, and be patted lightly on the kneecap by Abed.
“Oh, Pumpkin!” Shirley exclaims. “I’m so glad you’re okay!”
“Thanks, Shirley,”
“I’m sorry I didn’t have the camera going then, Britta. The evidence that that guy was not driving safely would have been inevitable,”
“It’s alright, Abed, don’t worry. I’m just sorry you won’t be able to finish the prank,”
Troy crosses his arms. “What do you mean, won’t be able to finish the prank?”
“Yeah, we’re going back to campus as soon as you leave here,” Pierce says. “So hurry, why don’t you?” After a moment, and several raised eyebrows from the others, he continues: “Congratulations on not dying,”
“Um, thanks?”
“This must be a hell of a prank,” Jeff says. “What were you guys doing, anyway?”
Annie looks at him. “It’s a secret. You didn’t want to get involved, so you’ll just have to be surprised like everybody else,” There’s an edge to her voice, hard to define but noticeable, and Britta looks between her two closest friends-but her two closest friends are also really good at acting. They just look like themselves, not like themselves hiding something.
“I’m sure I’ll read about it in the next issue of College Pranks Monthly,” Jeff says, his voice going up into a higher register, as it does when he gets extra sarcastic. “Good thing I just renewed my subscription!”
Annie just sniffs and turns away from him, going to retrieve Britta’s purse. Jeff loudly says he’s going to go pick up Britta’s prescriptions and then walks out.
“Well,” Shirley says, glancing over at Abed, who is looking back and forth between Annie and Britta and scribbling something in a notebook that Britta knows is where he keeps his juiciest story ideas. Shit. This is going to come back and bite someone in the ass. The only question is who, and when?
**
In Jeff’s car, which is so warm and comfortable inside that Britta imagines that the only similar sensation must be being in the womb, the shock and the adrenalin crash catch up to her, and she drowses, lulled by the mutter of the engine. The seatbelt hurts her tender ribs, and lolling her neck to try to ease the pressure on her head only works a little, but he’s just as smooth and confident driving as he is when trying to charm a lunchlady into giving him extra edamame on CelebrASIAN of Food Days (every third Wednesday, and yes, Chang has already spray-painted RACIST onto the banner in the cafeteria). He doesn’t even turn on the radio, and the car is ghost-silent inside. She drifts on a lovely cloud of pain meds until she feels the car stop at the curb in front of her building.
“Sorry,” he says, actually looking apologetic. “That was supposed to be more of a coast than it turned out,”
“S’no problem,” she says, mouth a little thick. Britta goes to shake her head but that hurts, so pride be damned, she waits for him to come around to her side of the car and help her out and up, all the way up to her third-floor walkup. It is a special kind of agony, dragging herself up those stairs, and it’s nice to have him to lean on.
Her apartment isn’t exactly a hospital room, but once she’s back home Britta snaps out of her daze enough to realize that she needed a shower five hours ago. (Well, technically, this morning before she even went to school she needed a shower, but whatever.) They have a halfhearted sort of fight about whether or not she should be in a slippery shower alone, and finally she acquiesces and lets him drag an ottoman into her bathroom and hang out there with 911 already dialed on his phone, finger hovering over send, while she gets in the tub.
It turns out that the awkwardness of getting undressed in front of someone with whom you once did the nasty is canceled out by the awkwardness of trying to take off your own necklace when some of your ribs did the nasty with the hood of a Chrysler. Then it turns out that it hurts too much to try and contort herself in the necessary ways to even give herself a sponge bath, so she pushes the sliding glass door open and holds the sponge out at him.
“Britta,” he says, with that undertone he sometimes uses that means What are you doing, crazy person?
“I can’t do it,” she says. “I can’t reach, alright? Please help me,” And as she says that, it occurs to her that that’s something neither of them has ever said to the other before, in all the long-ish history of their friendship.
At first his touch is infinitely delicate, but then she tells him: “If a car can’t break me, you can’t, either,”
The sponge pauses on her back. “Nothing’s broken, right? I mean, you don’t have a cast someplace I can’t see, do you?”
“I’m naked, Jeff,” Fortunately rolling her eyes doesn’t hurt.
“I noticed,”
“No, nothing’s broken,” Britta sighs and looks at him in the mirror rather than turning her head. His face is oddly still, a stillness she doesn’t see from him very often. There’s a meditative quiet, steam rising off the bathwater because her apartment is perpetually cold. Britta thinks about how weird but also how effortless this is, trusting him this much.
Jeff puts aside the sponge. “I don’t think stitches are supposed to get wet. What do you want me to do, just wash the bottom of your hair?”
“Is there a lot of blood in it?” God, that’s the weirdest thing she’s ever said.
He leans back, considering. He’s doing a really good job not checking her out, she’s got to say. Maybe he’s not attracted to bruises? Another point for Winger. “Mmm, kind of? It’s mostly around your face,”
“Could you get that with the sponge?”
“I could try,”
“Okay,” She shuts her eyes in anticipation, hears his jeans creak as he moves-they must be new. Then his breath is on her forehead and the sponge pats along over her face. The water dripping from the faucet is impossibly loud.
At last Jeff leans away, and she opens her eyes to find him staring down at the sponge, now streaked red. “This is messed up, Britta. This whole day has just been jacked the eff up,”
“’The eff?’”
“I’m trying to respect the injured,”
“It’s not my ears that are hurt,”
“Or your nipples. They’re functioning just fine, which begs the question, why is your bathroom so cold, Britta? Oh, I see your eye-rolling muscles weren’t damaged either. Wonderful news!”
**
After he gets Britta dried and dressed and settled on her couch, Jeff orders pizza, and they fill the time it takes to get there arguing about which is the best season of The Office . When he looks back on it, he realizes that he picked the fight in the first place because the odd intimacy in the bathroom threw his equilibrium for a loop, that seeing her so subdued totally destroyed the status quo.
The pizza is late, so Jeff harasses the delivery girl into giving them free breadsticks, and then Britta chastises him for the harassment while eating 75% of the breadsticks. He argues back that pizza delivery girls are rare and therefore are more used to harassment, and that really it wasn’t harassment, it was just social engineering. He was proving a point. She asks what point and he bullshits something about how if you’re not tough to people everyone will go around thinking they’re a special snowflake and nothing will ever actually get done. And then he finds her DVDs of the complete series of the original British The Office and they have to revise the conclusion of their previous argument thusly: British The Office > season 3 of the American The Office >practically anything else now on TV, including the current season of The Office. So all in all it’s a regular evening, except for the fact that yelling and laughing make her ribs hurt. But since she spends half the night laughing, and the other half yelling at him for making her laugh, he doesn’t feel very guilty about it.
Around episode 3, when they’re done with the pizza, he cleans up, appalled by the condition of her little kitchen. He starts the dishwasher, wipes off the counter, throws out some takeout containers masquerading as Petri dishes. She has a bachelor’s fridge: condiments and alcohol. The freezer is stuffed to the gills with expensive vegetarian TV dinners. He wraps the leftover pizza carefully in plastic wrap and puts it in the fridge, where it sits in the center of the middle shelf, utterly alone.
There’s a pass-through from the kitchen to the living room, and a breakfast bar littered with detritus. He can see Britta, the light from the TV diffusing in her hair as she sits propped up on pillows, one arm wrapped protectively around her torso. It’s time for her meds, so he scrounges a clean glass and fills it with water, shakes out the appropriate dosages, and lines up the prescription bottles on the breakfast bar. After a moment’s consideration he writes out the schedule of what she needs to take when, printing in big clear letters on the back of the menu that was taped to the pizza box.
She looks over as he comes back into the living room, and then winces, turning carefully back to the TV. “Here’s your drugs,” he says, holding out the tray.
She looks up at him without moving her body at all, her eyes dark. There’s a pebbling of tiny scabs at the corner of one eye: road rash. He pushes a lock of hair away from it, careful around the big cut in her forehead, and she doesn’t flinch. She takes the glass and her pills and mutters a ‘Thank you,’
Jeff sits down on the other end of the couch and restarts the DVD, surprised that she paused it to begin with. He’s even more surprised when Britta, done swallowing, carefully rotates herself so her feet are in his lap. He exes his wrists over her crossed ankles.
“Thank you, Jeff,” she says. “For everything you’ve done today,”
“I’m sorry, what?” He cups a hand around one ear.
“I said, thank you for everything you’ve done today,”
“Come again?”
“Do you need a Q-Tip? I said, thank-oh. Asshole,”
But when he looks over at her, she’s smiling.
**
Later her carries her to bed, proud of his stealth because she doesn’t wake up when he lifts her, just makes a soft noise and burrows closer. Of course she hasn’t made her bed in, apparently, forever, and so he wakes her up tucking her in.
“Jeff?” she asks.
At first he thinks that’s a dumb thing to ask, who else would it be? Then he remembers that it’s dark and it’s Britta, the kind of girl who’ll make out with a hippie on a community college lawn, so maybe she does need to ask something as simple as who’s there whenever she wakes up. And then he hates himself a little bit. “Yeah, it’s me,” He flips the comforter up over her and then pats her ankle, because that seems like one part of her that isn’t hurt.
“Are you going home now?”
“Uh,” He clears his throat, looks around even though it’s totally dark. “I think I should stay here and keep an eye on you,”
“Okay,” she says, sleepily, and he hears blankets rustle as she settles in. “Good,”
“Um,” he says again, looking at the Britta-shaped lump under the covers, the still-damp hair curled on her pillow, and it actually hurts to see her this way, to see Britta soft and vulnerable for once. Jesus, even Pierce has started calling her The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. (Britta had refused to read the book, calling it ‘misogyny masquerading as feminism’ and ‘too mainstream,’ and then proceeded to debate all five of her detractors simultaneously.) (Jeff hasn’t read it either, but that’s because he’s Jeff Winger.)
Yeah, dammit. He’s Jeff Winger. He will take off his tie and socks and belt and pants and be okay with adding another layer to the laundry monster on her floor. He will go around to the other side of the bed, put his watch and phone on the tower of books she’s using as a table there, and then he will get in her bed. And when her eyes snap open when he does that, he will just play it Winger Cool.
By stuttering.
“Cat got your tongue?” Britta asks archly. Fortunately it’s a full moon, and blue light streams in through the curtains: he can actually see that her right eyebrow, traditionally more eloquent than the left-and okay, maybe he does pay a lot of attention to her face, but whatever, man, this isn’t fifth grade, you don’t have to pretend girls aren’t the greatest thing ever-has literally gone into an arch shape.
Jeff pretends to spit out something. “No, but cat hair does. Gross, Britta. Control your beasts,”
Her eyes narrow. “Susie B is dead, you dumbass. I had to put her to sleep a year ago, or don’t you remember?”
“And the crazy cat lady hasn’t gotten a new one yet? Color me shocked!”
She shifts, an abbreviated movement that looks painful. “You’ve probably never had a pet, I understand why you don’t understand,”
Of course things had to get serious. “You’re right, I’ve never had a pet. We weren’t really a family that had the money for it, or stayed anywhere for very long, or spoke to each other or functioned effectively or any of that other Ozzie and Harriet bullshit,”
It takes her a moment to respond, like she’s deciding something, and then she surprises him. “Dude,
I know you’re old, but ‘Ozzie and Harriet?’”
“Shut up. Don’t you need to sleep to recharge your sarcasm reserves?”
“Yeah, I’m basically a sarcasm sloth,”
“I don’t think you understand how sloths work!”
“I don’t think you understand how sarcasm works!”
“What?”
Britta laughs. “Okay, I admit I had no idea where I was going with that. But give me a break, I’m on some high-class-country-club-lady painkillers,”
“I have understood how sarcasm works since I was in the womb, Britta,”
“That’s grossly appropriate because do you know what the word ‘sarcasm’ translates to? Tearing flesh!”
“Remind me to take away your entomological dictionary, I’m getting so sick of hearing the origins of words. You’re like the Abed of language,”
“That’s etymological dictionary, moron. Entomological is bugs,”
“You’re the worst, Britta,”
“Yeah, that’s why you’re in bed with me,”
“I’m in bed with you because in a couple hours when you wake up and need your drugs again, because right now you’re a helpless kitten who only thinks she’s a cougar, you’ll need me to go get them,”
“A cougar! I’m 30!” There’s a beat, the first beat in the whole conversation. “I can see you smirking, you know! I can hear you smirking,”
He really is. “All I can hear is you keeping me awake,”
For whatever reason, this seems to deflate her. “Oh. Sorry,”
He reaches out, touches her forearm because that’s the closest part of her to him. “Don’t be. That was the most fun I had all day,”
She cracks a sideways little mouth-twisting Britta-smile. “Me too,”
**
In the middle of the night, the bed gets too hot and Britta wakes up, sweaty and contorted into the only weird shape that seems to not aggravate most of her bruises. Jeff is snoring, manly lumberjack snores, even, blankets flung away from his body, which is splayed out almost aggressively. Good thing she has a large bed.
Britta extracts herself from it with difficulty, and in the bathroom she pees and then investigates her various wounds under the high-def lights that she only bought because one of her sisters-in-law said that in addition to helping you put on your makeup better, they also use thirty-five percent less energy than regular bulbs.
It’s the forehead cut that worries her most: even the doctor had said that it will probably scar. The bruises on her ribcage make her look like she was one of those beef carcasses that Rocky Balboa trained with, and even her shins have these weird horizontal bruises, from the bumper of the car. Her body can obviously remember the accident, but her mind is having trouble with it. Everybody was there, she remembers, and riding in a wheelbarrow is super uncomfortable. That’s about it.
She snags shorts and a tank top from a pile on the bathroom floor and carefully puts them on, testing her limited range of motion. She goes and gets her own drugs, just to prove a point. And then she brushes her teeth, because Jeff’s in her bed and now that she’s more awake than she’s been all night she needs to ask him about something.
Back in the bedroom, he’s awake, watching for her.
“So,” Britta sucks in a deep breath, meets Jeff’s eyes, which are dark and mostly unreadable in the bad light. “What was going on with you and Annie today at the hospital?”
He gives her a long, level look as she carefully climbs back in bed, arranges herself more comfortably. He waits until she’s done moving to reply: “I told her that you’re a drain I’m circling, Britta,”
“Um,” She thinks about it for a little bit. “What?”
He scoots closer, pushes hair off her forehead so lightly she can just barely hear it susurrus across the bandage there. “For the second time, why can’t you see that for the compliment that it is?”
“You remember that?”
He leans in, kisses her lightly, their mouths barely touching. After a startled moment she kisses back.
“Yeah, I remember that,” He leans away. “Am I hurting you?”
“Only a little bit,” she replies, thinking that that’s what grownups do to each other. She cups a hand around the back of his skull, pulls his face back to hers. “You’re a giant puddle of goo, Jeff Winger,”
“Oh yeah? Well just remember that you’re a drain,”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Britta says, and then gives him a scouts-honor sign, and then he makes her pinky swear that’s the truth. He won’t accept a kiss as proof, he needs the pinky swear. She gives it and kisses him anyway.
**
The next morning is a Tuesday and he has class and also a round of golf with some buddies from his old life, but he blows that stuff off. Jeff wakes up at his normal time, Crack of Dawn, and slips out of bed, dressing quickly in his Emergency Running Shorts and an extra large T-shirt he finds in one of Britta’s drawers. It has a faded graphic for an oil change place and he can’t tell if it’s a leftover from some boyfriend or a post-ironic faux-vintage thing. Whatever. Britta is sound asleep, wheezing softly, and he writes her a quick note, putting it on top of her phone because basically everywhere else in her room looks like a clothing-and-shoe bomb exploded on it.
It’s weird to go running in a different neighborhood, but it clears his head. There are times when he’s running that Jeff Winger slips out of his grasp, and it’s like he’s a totally different guy, an empty piece of paper. And there’s something about running that keeps all those choices, all the things that could be written down, from being terrifying. He stops at a corner store and buys eggs, cheese, bread, coffee, a newspaper because he feels like being retro.
And he also feels…really good. Better than I just won a case or I just registered for Underwater Basketweaving or even I just had sex (the Winger version, not the Lonely Island version. The Winger version has a much lower budget, for one thing.) Burden lifted, decisions made, that kind of cheesy good. Like he’s feeling everything good: the pavement beneath his feet, cracks and all, the indefinable smell in the air that says spring is coming, the sort of…lightness in his mind and heart because he knows he’s going to go back to Britta’s place and make her a kickass breakfast and be absolutely charming, and that she will charm him back, somehow, because that’s just the way they are with each other. Just the way they’ve always been with each other, from the very beginning.
And okay, you know what? It’s not like he can’t also feel the cracks in the sidewalks, or the gum stuck to them, or that he can’t also smell that there’s apparently a lot of public urination in Britta’s dive-bar-and-hobo-filled neighborhood. It’s all a part of the same picture, and he wouldn’t change a goddamned thing. It’s real. That’s what the blank piece of paper means. He will write his own story, and it will be real, and she will be in it, best friend and makeout partner and whatever else is down the road for however long they will travel that road together.
**
Britta wakes up to sunlight draped over her like a blanket, the curtains in her room drawn back and Jeff sitting in the comically small chair that goes with her vintage dressing table, his feet up on her bed. He’s shoveling scrambled eggs in his mouth and reading a newspaper that’s propped against his knees. He’s wearing long, basketball-ish shorts and her first semi-coherent thought of the day is that average-size dudes could probably wear his shorts as pants. Brother is tall, you dig?
“Oh, hey,” he says. “How are you feeling? Want some eggs? Coffee?”
“Coffee would be great,” she says, taking a deep, experimental breath to see if things hurt less-they do, just a smidgen. “And maybe some drugs, Dr. Winger,”
He gives her a grin that’s so very Jeff that he’s probably got it patented, and stands, heaping his plate and the paper by her feet. “I’ll be right back,”
“I’ll be here,” Britta replies, and she’s got to admit, Domestic Jeff Winger is kind of both hot and frighteningly…different from King of Sarcasm and Buttondown Shirts Jeff Winger. There’s something undeniably nice about it, though, being taken care of. Taking care of herself is something she’s gotten used to, although her facility at it has been debated by a long string of people, starting with her mother.
Britta squeezes her mouth to the side to help clear her head, and scoots up, leaning back against the headboard for the support it gives her ribcage. She spots the note on her phone, reads it, smiles, crumples it and drops it in the narrow space between the bed and the bedside table. That’s a legit place to store documents one might want to keep, right?
There are texts from the study group. Abed: Hope you’re functioning properly this morning. Annie: I’m so happy you’re OK! Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help! You need Anthro notes?!?! XOXO. Shirley: Get well soon, Pumpkin! I’ll stop by later with brownies! Troy: u feelin better yet? dean just announced 1st annual gcc high heel marathon n we need u on r side, i am v. bad at this. Pierce’s text is an ASCII get-well card, which is impressive, considering how long it took Pierce to figure out how to copy and paste. Her last unread message is from Jeff: Glad you’re not dead. Catch you on the flipside, homie.
Britta is not one to miss an opportunity like this, so that’s what she says when he comes back with breakfast and drugs.
Jeff’s shoulders sort of instinctively pull up high under his ears and then he composes himself, putting on an exaggerated leer. “Word,” he says, dragging out the d and flashing every white man over the age of 30’s version of a gang sign.
Britta laughs, covering her mouth because she’s in the midst of chewing. It is actually, no, literally, delightful to see someone who takes himself so seriously be so silly. She is full of delight. “You’re in a good mood this morning,”
He settles back down, picking up the paper again. “Yeah, I am. I went for a run, that always clears my head,”
“Well, I’m glad your head is clear,”
He smiles, a smaller, quieter, rarer smile this time. It reminds her of his face about two seconds after she threw a bag of faucets at him. (Of course, by three seconds after he’d been back to hitting on her, so. Some kind of point proven, Universe?) “So am I,”