Other Than J/B Shippy Short Fics Post
I'm Gonna Buy an Ice Cream Factory (G, Troy/Britta) Based on this prompt: can you do troy britta? maybe jeff finding out they've been hooking up on the dl and being torn between minor jealousy and wanting to high five troy and mock britta for being a cougar? lol, that's a lot of emotions. just any troy britta would be lovely.
When Troy invites her over to watch the final space shuttle launch, Britta is expecting Abed to be there, and maybe Pierce, but no, it's just her and Troy, in Pierce's cavernous mansion. Her and Troy and the bottle of wine she brought.
"Oh," Troy says, looking at it but not taking it from her. "Did you bring a bottle opener, too? Pierce only drinks wine from boxes."
"Do you mean corkscrew? Because a bottle opener won't open this."
Troy bites his bottom lip and chews on it idly. "I don't know. Pierce's kitchen is like one of those corn mazes at the fair. You get in there and you think you know exactly where you're going, but you just end up crying and covered in hay." Troy moves back so she can step inside, and the sound of her heels echoes in the foyer.
Oh. Hmm. "Well, we don't have to drink it. I brought it to thank Pierce for his hospitality, I kind of thought he would be here."
"He has his Beginner Cosmetology class tonight. Besides, Pierce doesn't think the moon landings or anything actually happened. Watching the Discovery Channel with him is a pain."
"Well, thanks for inviting me over." After a moment, as they tromp down an endless hallway, plushly carpeted and wallpapered like a 1970s motel, Britta asks: "Why did you invite me over?"
"I dunno. We never hang out, but you're really cool. And Abed has a date tonight."
"A date?"
"Yeah, he gave that librarian another chance." Troy's mouth twists, and Britta reaches out to touch his shoulder. "But whatever dude, we're not joined at the hip or anything. And I love the space shuttle."
It's vintage Troy: 100% heart, 100% sincere. Britta lets the touch turn into a full-on hug, and Troy squeezes back and then lets her go so quickly a draft ruffles her hair.
Pierce has a full-on screening room with a popcorn machine and upholstered seats, and once Britta settles in Troy brings her, unsolicited, popcorn with the perfect amount of butter and Dr. Pepper in a glass with very little ice. "Wow, thanks, Troy,"
"No problem," he grins over at her, and then he hits a few buttons on a big-ass remote and the house lights go down and the massive screen lights up.
"This is like IMAX," Britta says around a mouthful of popcorn. "The detail is amazing."
"Yeah, being rich is awesome. I can't wait to be loaded and crazy like Pierce. I'm gonna buy a human-size hamster ball, and an elephant, and an ice cream factory."
Part of Britta wants to say What are you going to do, mix them all together? but lately she's been trying to avoid being a blatant asshole all the time. Maybe it's part of getting older and realizing that protecting yourself from everything sucks, because nothing gets in, and you feel nothing...whatever. She wants to feel things. "That does sound awesome."
Troy smiles at her, barely visible in the bad light, and they watch in silence for a time, and Britta feels some remnant of a childhood rush, when they would watch shuttle launches in assemblies and this crazy future thing was a Big. Fucking. Deal.
The shuttle takes off, this beautiful silver streak in the blue, blue sky, and Britta's heart crawls up in her throat, remembering her childhood--God, a quarter of a century ago--another shuttle, grainy on her grandmother's old TV, first a silver streak and then a cloud of gray.
"Britta?" Troy is looking over at her. "Are you okay? You're crying."
Britta wipes at her eyes. "I'm fine. It's just...every time I see one of these I think of Challenger. Do you remember..." But then she falters, because of course he doesn't.
"It's okay," he says, and puts his popcorn down, and next thing she knows he's hugging her, a hug that smells like butter and whatever his spicy cologne is. And it's the sweetest thing anybody's done for her in forever, so she finds his mouth with her own, and kisses him.
Jeff has ways, and he weasels it out of her. "You and Troy? Damn, girl. I had no idea you were a cougar."
"Shut up. It was sweet. He loves space."
"God, what's that like, loving things?"
"Just imagine feeling the things you only feel about yourself about other people."
He swipes a French fry off her tray. "That sounds awful."
Just then Troy comes in, and Britta stands, gathering up her bag. "For your sake, I hope someday you know."
***
Locomotor Development in Early Hominids (G, Troy/Annie, mostly friendshippy) Based on the prompt: TROY/ANNIE (IN ANY FORM YOU WANT, WHETHER PLATONIC OR ROMANTIC) AFTER THEIR MOMENT IN MIXOLOGY CERTIFICATION. BONUS POINTS IF ABED POPS UP.
It's Annie's first hangover, and Googling for cures is eye-opening and terrifying, but she drinks orange juice and takes aspirin and puts on her favorite cardigan, with its perfect slightly-stretched-out elbows, and goes to school.
In the study room, Jeff and Britta, unsurprisingly, are missing. Shirley's hair looks like it's trying to escape her scalp, Abed is wearing aviator sunglasses and very carefully rotating his head from side to side like a human periscope, and Pierce's casts have, overnight, been covered in ear-blisteringly profane graffiti. Only Troy looks relatively unscathed.
"Good morning, Annie," he says, as she sets down her anthropology book and opens it to the proper chapter.
"Good morning, Troy," she replies carefully, folding her hands together over her book. It's not like her hangover is really that bad (she guesses), but things just feel...weird, and Annie feels like it's important not to let on about that. "Is everyone ready to study?" Shirley grunts, Pierce is snoring, Troy smiles, and Abed stares at her like she's John Connor and he's the Terminator. Or maybe it's the other way around, it's been a while since Annie's seen that movie. "Okay," she says, clearing her throat. They like it when she reads the introductions to the chapters aloud--Abed says it reminds him of vintage newsreels, and Pierce says it reminds him of his GPS. "Chapter three. Locomotor Development in Early Hominids..."
When Annie looks up fifteen minutes later, Abed is asleep, chin propped in his hand, and Shirley is awake, but barely, staring at Annie with a bleary expression. Pierce's chair is empty, but Annie looks under the table and sees him sprawled out on the floor, his technicolor casts splayed.
"Yeah, it's pretty gross," Troy says. "I think he made those cutoffs himself."
Annie shudders. Pierce's thighs are the last thing a hungover person needs to be seeing. "Chapter four? Let's go for chapter four."
"Mmm, good," Shirley murmurs. "Storytime. This chair is so comfortable. And so is this table..." She leans over and puts her cheek right over a game of hangman that was probably scratched into the table when it was new, during the Eisenhower administration. Troy laughs, but quietly, and at first Annie wants to be mad, but then she can't, because it's Troy, and being mad at him is like being mad at a puppy. He must read something in her face, because he composes himself, almost like he's zipping all the emotion back inside him--there's something very Troy about how he does it, anyway. Annie sighs and begins packing away all her supplies. "I don't know why I even bothered coming to school today anyway."
"Because you love school," Troy stage-whispers at her, very slowly, like he's trying to explain something to a toddler. He takes off his hoodie, wads it into a ball on the table, and then, very tenderly, he grabs Abed's bent arm and straightens it, until Abed's head is pillowed on Troy's hoodie and both of his arms are dangling toward the ground.
"That looks uncomfortable," Annie whispers back, slinging her bag over her shoulder.
"Abed's very flexible," Troy says, coming around the table to meet her at the door. "He'll be fine. One time when we were watching Zombie Mother Teresa he fell asleep on the ladder between the top bunk and the bottom bunk." Annie feels her eyes widen involuntarily, and Troy rushes on, holding the door for her. "I was in the top and Pavel was in the bottom and we both had the flu and Abed was bringing us soup and cold medicine all night. He was really tired."
"Oh, well that...makes a lot of sense, actually."
"Yeah, Abed's a great friend." Troy looks back behind them for a moment, and then he turns back to Annie. His smile is contagious, and she grins back at him.
"So are you, Troy."
"Yeah, I'm awesome. Now let's go get lunch."
***
Someday We'll Find It (G, Troy/Annie, mostly platonic) Based on this prompt: TROY WALKS IN ON ANNIE IN THE SHOWER BY ACCIDENT.
Annie is counting down the requisite sixty seconds before she can begin to rinse out the conditioner when she hears something melodic. It's hard to tell over the sound of the shower, but it might be...singing? She grasps the shower curtain tight to her chest and peeks around it.
Troy is just shutting the bathroom door. He's wearing a towel tucked around his waist, Abed's iPod tucked into that, and nothing else. Oh.
"The lovers, the dreamers, and me," Troy sings, in his rather lovely alto, checking himself out in the mirror. He slicks back his hair, points finger guns at himself, cracks a toothy smile. Then he flexes his biceps, one and then the other, and kisses them.
Annie can't help it, him preening like that is too adorable. A peal of laughter escapes her.
"Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection," Troy continues, now flexing his pecs in rhythm to the song.
Laughing so hard she has to lean against the shower wall to steady herself, Annie presses a hand over her mouth, simultaneously trying to blink conditioner out of her eyes. This is almost as bad as the time she'd woken up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and overheard Troy and Abed re-enacting the "Druish Princess" conversation from Spaceballs. She'd spit her water all over the hallway and had to clean it up with Abed's Inspector Spacetime robe. On the plus side, at least that had been a great opportunity to teach Abed about Oxy-Clean.
All of a sudden the shower curtain is drawn back. Troy shrieks and Annie finds out her hands aren't big enough to cover everything she wants to cover.
"Uhhhh...." Troy says, taking out his headphones.
"Troy! I'm taking a shower!"
"Uhhhhhh......"
Annie grapples the shower curtain back. "Maybe Shirley was right and we need to make hangtags for every doorknob that say what gender is inside any given room." She has to yell to make her voice heard, so she cranks the shower off.
"Uhhhh...."
"Troy, relax. We need to handle this like adults."
"Um. Okay." Kermit's tinny voice trickles out of Troy's headphones. "Okay. As an adult, I think that Shirley's idea is stupid, and I agree with what Britta said."
"What did Britta say?"
"She said: 'Shirley, that's exactly the kind of thinking that got us into Afghanistan.'" Troy's Britta impression is uncanny, down to the hyperbolic hand gestures.
"That doesn't make any sense. Would you hand me a towel? And pull Abed away from his Legos, I think we need to have a house meeting."
Six hours later, once they've finally hammered out a meticulously footnoted document detailing the apartment rules on knocking before entering, successfully made hummus and celery sticks to eat while hammering out said document, and watched a particularly diplomacy-heavy episode of Battlestar Galactica for inspiration, Annie finally realizes that she never got all the conditioner out of her hair. She follows the proper procedure for claiming the bathroom (which now involves putting a Princess Annie magnet in the proper place on the floorplan attached to their fridge) and goes to finish the job.
It turns out that "Rainbow Connection" sounds really great with the acoustics of their bathroom, and when she falls asleep with it still stuck in her head, she's smiling.
***
Pandas Don't Live in Petri Dishes (R, Troy/Britta, Jeff POV with a smattering of Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: britta and troy are together-ish and troy goes to jeff to ask for advice and finds that jeff is most unwilling to talk about it. troy asks if jeff is jealous and jeff isn't sure. it's awkward. no preference whether it ends j/b, t/b or ambiguously. just would love to see the troy/jeff sort of competitive dynamic explored especially concerning britta.
There is a great disturbance in the force: Troy is in Abed's seat, and Abed is in Shirley's, and Shirley and Pierce are sitting beside each other.
"Has hell frozen over?" Jeff asks, pulling out his own chair. "I didn't get any tweets about that, and yet half of you are in the wrong place."
"What's wrong with sitting next to your boyfriend?" Annie asks, and Jeff realizes that there is an even greater disturbance: she is pants. Corduroys. And a graphic tee. Annie and Abed look like the kind of wholesome, mixed-race couple most often seen cavorting in fake snow in an Old Navy commercial.
Jeff grimaces. "I think we all knew that you two would someday be together, but Shirley and Pierce?"
"Jeffrey, you know my heart belongs to Andre."
"So explain this, then." He flutters a vague hand in Britta and Troy's direction. "What is going on here?" His voice goes up at the end because the expression on Troy's face is both indescribable and disconcerting.
"Um, so--" Troy begins, but then Britta raises her own hand--which is twined with Troy's. Jeff is immediately reminded of the poster for the 1991 Spike Lee masterpiece "Jungle Fever."
"Troy and I are dating, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mister Man."
"You and Troy. Are dating."
"For realsies," Troy says.
Jeff supposes that cements it. Something that is also indescribable, but which he suspects is an emotion, lodges itself in his throat, so he clears it. "So what you're saying is that everyone in the study group is paired off except for me."
"And me!" Pierce says, but Jeff doesn't pay attention because in the next second a familiar hand clenches on his shoulder and then slides down his chest in the general direction of his belt buckle, and it takes him the next twenty minutes to convince Dean Pelton that he's perfectly happy being alone.
"So you and Britta, huh?" Jeff says, when Troy's the only one in the cafeteria at lunchtime and it's not like he could legitimately dodge him by saying he has to do homework.
"Yeah. Hey, I know that this is awkward--"
"You know how we could make it less awkward? By not talking about it."
It turns out that not talking about it just makes it worse.
And then March rolls around and everyone is reminded that the dynamic threesome of Jeff, Troy, and Abed signed up to fill a bracket in the Dean's first annual Three-on-Three on 3/3 Basketball Tournament. And that their team is named the Dynamic Threesome. (At the last minute the Dean makes them change it to Team Diversity.)
In the locker room before their first game, versus the sure-to-be-challenging Team Hipsters (Leonard, Pierce, that one janitor who looks like Eddie Pepitone), Abed psyches himself by stretching while listening to the complete Rocky soundtrack. Jeff rolls his eyes and tries to focus on gelling his hair just enough so that it will stay in place but not so much that it will look like a Lego man's hair.
"So, uh, Jeff," Troy says, sidling up behind him at the mirror.
Oh, crap. Jeff stops gelling for a moment, errant forelock making him look like Alfalfa. Gah. "What?"
"This is like weird and all but I need some advice. On a girl. On a girl that I'm dating." He takes a breath and attempts to make eye contact, but Jeff refuses to play that game. This is going to be excruciating enough as it is. "On Britta," Troy stage-whispers.
"Yeah, I figured when you said it was a girl you're dating that you meant Britta. Unless you're getting some on the side, in which case my best advice is to never take both girls to the same hotel, and delete all texts the moment after you read them, no matter who they're from."
"That is gross and disrespectful toward women."
"You really are dating Britta."
"That's what I told you in the first place. Anyway, I could use some advice on how to, like, date her right."
Whaaaat? "As far as I can tell, just don't let her catch you eating at a chain restaurant or talking smack about Etsy and you'll be golden."
"That's what I need advice on. Talking to her. How do you do it and have it be legit?"
"Uh...can you explain what you mean by 'legit?'"
Troy sits down on the bench closest to Jeff. He and Abed are wearing matching 70's-style throwback uniforms, down to the sweatbands and polyester short-shorts, and Troy's puffed his hair out for the occasion. Which means it's even harder to take him seriously than it usually is. "We like don't ever talk. We're either playing video games or messing around with Abed or...you know." He makes a hand gesture that Jeff's never seen before but understands anyway.
"So what's the problem?"
"I dunno...Britta is hot and all but sometimes I just want to talk, you dig? About important stuff. I like the way she listens."
"Troy, you're 21 years old. You should be with a girl who only wants to get out of bed if there's a zombie apocalypse. You've got the rest of your life to be stuck with somebody who wants to listen and and cuddle all the time."
"I'm not you, man. I want different stuff." Troy gets up, shaking out his knees and elbows. It should be ridiculous but it isn't. "But how did you know she never wants to cuddle with me, either?"
"I dated her, too," Jeff says, even though that's a gross misrepresentation of whatever went on between them, and even though he and Britta did a lot of cuddling. Which he fucking misses, not that he would admit it under the threat of torture or the destruction of his AmEx gold. "She's prickly. I don't think she knows how to cuddle."
"Really? It seems like a basic concept. Even baby pandas do it, I saw it on a nature show."
"She's a human being, not a baby panda, Troy. That means some of her wires got crossed when she was growing up and she's not going to behave like a specimen in a petri dish."
"Pandas don't live in petri dishes, dude. You need to pay more attention in Biology."
His hair isn't cooperating, and Jeff wipes his hands roughly down the sides of his jersey. "All I'm saying is that Britta isn't exactly a normal person. She's hard to predict."
"No kidding."
For a second, just a split second, Jeff looks at Troy and sees himself at that age: cocky and good-looking and getting more ass than a toilet seat. Deathly terrified of having to hold an actual conversation with a woman. How is it that Troy, the study group's naïf, is so far ahead of Jeff on the spectrum of Doing Relationships Right? "Look," he sighs, shifting uneasily. "It took me twenty years to find a woman who didn't scare, bore, or intimidate the crap out of me, conversation-wise. Maybe you just need to keep looking."
Troy crosses his arms over his chest, narrows his eyes. Kid's not tall, but he's strong, and Jeff instinctively draws himself up to his full height. "Are you saying I should break up with Britta?"
Fuck. "That's not what I said at all."
"Are you jealous, man? Is that what's going on?"
"Why would I be jealous?"
"I dunno. Maybe you still have feelings."
"I don't have feelings, Troy. Feelings are for prepubescent girls and Morris Albert."
Troy fights a smile off his face, looking away from Jeff's reflection and putting his hands back on his hips. "Whatever, man. I know she meant a lot to you. She means a lot to me. I'm taking care of her."
"Don't let her hear you say that." The one time he made the mistake of trying to take care of Britta--offering to bring over soup when she had a cold--she changed his name in her phone to REINFORCER OF GENDER STEREOTYPES. Nevermind that when he tried to argue that her listening to his verbal spasms about his mom and his dad and all the horrible shit he'd done as a lawyer was her reinforcing gender stereotypes. Things could get so emotional between them, so intense...but always in this weird quiet way: a thousand hushed confessions when they were curled up on his couch or in her bed or even just sitting too close to each other in the back of a class. Maybe that's what hurts the most about letting go of Britta: letting go of a friend.
"Hey, Jeff, are you okay?
"What?"
"You just looked kind of sad for a minute there."
"Whatever. Can we stop talking about our feelings now and go kick those old dudes' asses?"
"You're the captain, captain," Abed says, his reflection popping up behind Troy's and startling them both. "O captain, my captain. Your behavior is highly illogical, captain." He cocks his head. "Sometimes when you keep saying something over and over again it loses all meaning. Interesting."
Jeff meets Troy's eyes finally, as they turn away from the mirror. "You'll figure it out. Just give it time."
"You too, man. You too."
***
Mr. Barnes (R for language, Troy/Abed friendshippy, dark) Based on this prompt: Troy/Abed, hurt/comfort, in which Troy is hurt and Abed is scared & shows ~the depth of his love~ (because sometimes I get insecure on Troy's behalf)
Abed has met Troy's father. His name is Mr. Barnes, he's tall and wide, refrigerator-shaped, smells like Marlboros, has a girlfriend named Brandy. He lives on the side of a hill outside Greendale, in the house Troy grew up, .25 miles from a strip mall and .75 miles from a comic book shop. Abed has been to the mall and the comic book shop, but he's never been to Troy's dad's house.
"I am not going there, man," Troy says, even though he's driving there right now.
"I don't understand," Abed says. "You're driving there right now."
"Just--" Troy flutters his hands around the steering wheel, interrupting himself. "He's just an asshole, Abed. When we get there, you're going in, you're getting the check. He owes me that money, I need it for school, and then I am done with him. Forever, man."
"I don't understand," Abed says again, thinking maybe Troy didn't hear him through his own agitation. And the radio, which Abed turns down.
Troy takes a deep breath, like he does when he sees a big spider. Usually he asks Abed to move big spiders, so Abed wonders if maybe going to his father's house and getting a check is the equivalent of a nightmarish monster spider, such as those seen in the hit 1990 film Archnophobia.
"Look, Abed, my dad and I don't really get along. But he promised to pay my tuition at Greendale for two years, and I have to go get the last check. But I don't want to talk to him or even look at him, okay? So when we get there, you go in there and you get it. He'll probably be really racist to you, but I don't think that will bother you." Troy looks over at him, first in the rearview mirror and then by actually turning his head, and the expression in Troy's eyes is weird, somehow more afraid than Troy's eyes when he saw Levar Burton.
"I won't mind," Abed says, because it's true. People are just afraid of things that are different, that's what racism is, and Abed's always been different from everyone else, skin color and behavior and everything. It doesn't bother him because it's all he's ever known. "I'll go get it."
Troy sniffs, an actual sniff, and Abed feels a sudden sharp pang of worry, like an icicle laid right down next to his spine. The worry is nebulous, but familiar--maybe it deserves a capital letter. The Worry is a thing that has always lived in the same room and breathed the same air as Abed: the Worry that his parents would break up, the Worry that his mother will never come back, the Worry that the study group will destroy itself somehow. The Worry that Troy will be broken.
Abed rolls up the left cuff of his sweatshirt and reaches over to pat Troy's shoulder. "Everything will be okay, Troy. Don't Worry." He tries to make the capital audible.
Troy sniffs again, and wipes at his eyes, his lower lip wobbling. This is a sign, Abed knows, of impending tears.
"My father is a bad dude, Abed," Troy gulps air, staring at the bumpers ahead of them. They're on the interstate, winding into the suburbs. Everything is curiously gray: buildings, sky, road. "He had a really bad childhood and he's not any better as a grown up. He's a waste of a life. I just want to get away from him foreve.,"
That hangs in the air between them, and Abed isn't sure what to do next, so he lets his hand rest on Troy's shoulder, and then he squeezes a little bit. Troy sniffs again, but, for the first time in all the time Abed's known him, which sometimes feels like forever and sometimes feels like less than a day, Troy doesn't cry.
***
When Troy invites her over to watch the final space shuttle launch, Britta is expecting Abed to be there, and maybe Pierce, but no, it's just her and Troy, in Pierce's cavernous mansion. Her and Troy and the bottle of wine she brought.
"Oh," Troy says, looking at it but not taking it from her. "Did you bring a bottle opener, too? Pierce only drinks wine from boxes."
"Do you mean corkscrew? Because a bottle opener won't open this."
Troy bites his bottom lip and chews on it idly. "I don't know. Pierce's kitchen is like one of those corn mazes at the fair. You get in there and you think you know exactly where you're going, but you just end up crying and covered in hay." Troy moves back so she can step inside, and the sound of her heels echoes in the foyer.
Oh. Hmm. "Well, we don't have to drink it. I brought it to thank Pierce for his hospitality, I kind of thought he would be here."
"He has his Beginner Cosmetology class tonight. Besides, Pierce doesn't think the moon landings or anything actually happened. Watching the Discovery Channel with him is a pain."
"Well, thanks for inviting me over." After a moment, as they tromp down an endless hallway, plushly carpeted and wallpapered like a 1970s motel, Britta asks: "Why did you invite me over?"
"I dunno. We never hang out, but you're really cool. And Abed has a date tonight."
"A date?"
"Yeah, he gave that librarian another chance." Troy's mouth twists, and Britta reaches out to touch his shoulder. "But whatever dude, we're not joined at the hip or anything. And I love the space shuttle."
It's vintage Troy: 100% heart, 100% sincere. Britta lets the touch turn into a full-on hug, and Troy squeezes back and then lets her go so quickly a draft ruffles her hair.
Pierce has a full-on screening room with a popcorn machine and upholstered seats, and once Britta settles in Troy brings her, unsolicited, popcorn with the perfect amount of butter and Dr. Pepper in a glass with very little ice. "Wow, thanks, Troy,"
"No problem," he grins over at her, and then he hits a few buttons on a big-ass remote and the house lights go down and the massive screen lights up.
"This is like IMAX," Britta says around a mouthful of popcorn. "The detail is amazing."
"Yeah, being rich is awesome. I can't wait to be loaded and crazy like Pierce. I'm gonna buy a human-size hamster ball, and an elephant, and an ice cream factory."
Part of Britta wants to say What are you going to do, mix them all together? but lately she's been trying to avoid being a blatant asshole all the time. Maybe it's part of getting older and realizing that protecting yourself from everything sucks, because nothing gets in, and you feel nothing...whatever. She wants to feel things. "That does sound awesome."
Troy smiles at her, barely visible in the bad light, and they watch in silence for a time, and Britta feels some remnant of a childhood rush, when they would watch shuttle launches in assemblies and this crazy future thing was a Big. Fucking. Deal.
The shuttle takes off, this beautiful silver streak in the blue, blue sky, and Britta's heart crawls up in her throat, remembering her childhood--God, a quarter of a century ago--another shuttle, grainy on her grandmother's old TV, first a silver streak and then a cloud of gray.
"Britta?" Troy is looking over at her. "Are you okay? You're crying."
Britta wipes at her eyes. "I'm fine. It's just...every time I see one of these I think of Challenger. Do you remember..." But then she falters, because of course he doesn't.
"It's okay," he says, and puts his popcorn down, and next thing she knows he's hugging her, a hug that smells like butter and whatever his spicy cologne is. And it's the sweetest thing anybody's done for her in forever, so she finds his mouth with her own, and kisses him.
Jeff has ways, and he weasels it out of her. "You and Troy? Damn, girl. I had no idea you were a cougar."
"Shut up. It was sweet. He loves space."
"God, what's that like, loving things?"
"Just imagine feeling the things you only feel about yourself about other people."
He swipes a French fry off her tray. "That sounds awful."
Just then Troy comes in, and Britta stands, gathering up her bag. "For your sake, I hope someday you know."
***
Locomotor Development in Early Hominids (G, Troy/Annie, mostly friendshippy) Based on the prompt: TROY/ANNIE (IN ANY FORM YOU WANT, WHETHER PLATONIC OR ROMANTIC) AFTER THEIR MOMENT IN MIXOLOGY CERTIFICATION. BONUS POINTS IF ABED POPS UP.
It's Annie's first hangover, and Googling for cures is eye-opening and terrifying, but she drinks orange juice and takes aspirin and puts on her favorite cardigan, with its perfect slightly-stretched-out elbows, and goes to school.
In the study room, Jeff and Britta, unsurprisingly, are missing. Shirley's hair looks like it's trying to escape her scalp, Abed is wearing aviator sunglasses and very carefully rotating his head from side to side like a human periscope, and Pierce's casts have, overnight, been covered in ear-blisteringly profane graffiti. Only Troy looks relatively unscathed.
"Good morning, Annie," he says, as she sets down her anthropology book and opens it to the proper chapter.
"Good morning, Troy," she replies carefully, folding her hands together over her book. It's not like her hangover is really that bad (she guesses), but things just feel...weird, and Annie feels like it's important not to let on about that. "Is everyone ready to study?" Shirley grunts, Pierce is snoring, Troy smiles, and Abed stares at her like she's John Connor and he's the Terminator. Or maybe it's the other way around, it's been a while since Annie's seen that movie. "Okay," she says, clearing her throat. They like it when she reads the introductions to the chapters aloud--Abed says it reminds him of vintage newsreels, and Pierce says it reminds him of his GPS. "Chapter three. Locomotor Development in Early Hominids..."
When Annie looks up fifteen minutes later, Abed is asleep, chin propped in his hand, and Shirley is awake, but barely, staring at Annie with a bleary expression. Pierce's chair is empty, but Annie looks under the table and sees him sprawled out on the floor, his technicolor casts splayed.
"Yeah, it's pretty gross," Troy says. "I think he made those cutoffs himself."
Annie shudders. Pierce's thighs are the last thing a hungover person needs to be seeing. "Chapter four? Let's go for chapter four."
"Mmm, good," Shirley murmurs. "Storytime. This chair is so comfortable. And so is this table..." She leans over and puts her cheek right over a game of hangman that was probably scratched into the table when it was new, during the Eisenhower administration. Troy laughs, but quietly, and at first Annie wants to be mad, but then she can't, because it's Troy, and being mad at him is like being mad at a puppy. He must read something in her face, because he composes himself, almost like he's zipping all the emotion back inside him--there's something very Troy about how he does it, anyway. Annie sighs and begins packing away all her supplies. "I don't know why I even bothered coming to school today anyway."
"Because you love school," Troy stage-whispers at her, very slowly, like he's trying to explain something to a toddler. He takes off his hoodie, wads it into a ball on the table, and then, very tenderly, he grabs Abed's bent arm and straightens it, until Abed's head is pillowed on Troy's hoodie and both of his arms are dangling toward the ground.
"That looks uncomfortable," Annie whispers back, slinging her bag over her shoulder.
"Abed's very flexible," Troy says, coming around the table to meet her at the door. "He'll be fine. One time when we were watching Zombie Mother Teresa he fell asleep on the ladder between the top bunk and the bottom bunk." Annie feels her eyes widen involuntarily, and Troy rushes on, holding the door for her. "I was in the top and Pavel was in the bottom and we both had the flu and Abed was bringing us soup and cold medicine all night. He was really tired."
"Oh, well that...makes a lot of sense, actually."
"Yeah, Abed's a great friend." Troy looks back behind them for a moment, and then he turns back to Annie. His smile is contagious, and she grins back at him.
"So are you, Troy."
"Yeah, I'm awesome. Now let's go get lunch."
***
Someday We'll Find It (G, Troy/Annie, mostly platonic) Based on this prompt: TROY WALKS IN ON ANNIE IN THE SHOWER BY ACCIDENT.
Annie is counting down the requisite sixty seconds before she can begin to rinse out the conditioner when she hears something melodic. It's hard to tell over the sound of the shower, but it might be...singing? She grasps the shower curtain tight to her chest and peeks around it.
Troy is just shutting the bathroom door. He's wearing a towel tucked around his waist, Abed's iPod tucked into that, and nothing else. Oh.
"The lovers, the dreamers, and me," Troy sings, in his rather lovely alto, checking himself out in the mirror. He slicks back his hair, points finger guns at himself, cracks a toothy smile. Then he flexes his biceps, one and then the other, and kisses them.
Annie can't help it, him preening like that is too adorable. A peal of laughter escapes her.
"Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection," Troy continues, now flexing his pecs in rhythm to the song.
Laughing so hard she has to lean against the shower wall to steady herself, Annie presses a hand over her mouth, simultaneously trying to blink conditioner out of her eyes. This is almost as bad as the time she'd woken up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and overheard Troy and Abed re-enacting the "Druish Princess" conversation from Spaceballs. She'd spit her water all over the hallway and had to clean it up with Abed's Inspector Spacetime robe. On the plus side, at least that had been a great opportunity to teach Abed about Oxy-Clean.
All of a sudden the shower curtain is drawn back. Troy shrieks and Annie finds out her hands aren't big enough to cover everything she wants to cover.
"Uhhhh...." Troy says, taking out his headphones.
"Troy! I'm taking a shower!"
"Uhhhhhh......"
Annie grapples the shower curtain back. "Maybe Shirley was right and we need to make hangtags for every doorknob that say what gender is inside any given room." She has to yell to make her voice heard, so she cranks the shower off.
"Uhhhh...."
"Troy, relax. We need to handle this like adults."
"Um. Okay." Kermit's tinny voice trickles out of Troy's headphones. "Okay. As an adult, I think that Shirley's idea is stupid, and I agree with what Britta said."
"What did Britta say?"
"She said: 'Shirley, that's exactly the kind of thinking that got us into Afghanistan.'" Troy's Britta impression is uncanny, down to the hyperbolic hand gestures.
"That doesn't make any sense. Would you hand me a towel? And pull Abed away from his Legos, I think we need to have a house meeting."
Six hours later, once they've finally hammered out a meticulously footnoted document detailing the apartment rules on knocking before entering, successfully made hummus and celery sticks to eat while hammering out said document, and watched a particularly diplomacy-heavy episode of Battlestar Galactica for inspiration, Annie finally realizes that she never got all the conditioner out of her hair. She follows the proper procedure for claiming the bathroom (which now involves putting a Princess Annie magnet in the proper place on the floorplan attached to their fridge) and goes to finish the job.
It turns out that "Rainbow Connection" sounds really great with the acoustics of their bathroom, and when she falls asleep with it still stuck in her head, she's smiling.
***
Pandas Don't Live in Petri Dishes (R, Troy/Britta, Jeff POV with a smattering of Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: britta and troy are together-ish and troy goes to jeff to ask for advice and finds that jeff is most unwilling to talk about it. troy asks if jeff is jealous and jeff isn't sure. it's awkward. no preference whether it ends j/b, t/b or ambiguously. just would love to see the troy/jeff sort of competitive dynamic explored especially concerning britta.
There is a great disturbance in the force: Troy is in Abed's seat, and Abed is in Shirley's, and Shirley and Pierce are sitting beside each other.
"Has hell frozen over?" Jeff asks, pulling out his own chair. "I didn't get any tweets about that, and yet half of you are in the wrong place."
"What's wrong with sitting next to your boyfriend?" Annie asks, and Jeff realizes that there is an even greater disturbance: she is pants. Corduroys. And a graphic tee. Annie and Abed look like the kind of wholesome, mixed-race couple most often seen cavorting in fake snow in an Old Navy commercial.
Jeff grimaces. "I think we all knew that you two would someday be together, but Shirley and Pierce?"
"Jeffrey, you know my heart belongs to Andre."
"So explain this, then." He flutters a vague hand in Britta and Troy's direction. "What is going on here?" His voice goes up at the end because the expression on Troy's face is both indescribable and disconcerting.
"Um, so--" Troy begins, but then Britta raises her own hand--which is twined with Troy's. Jeff is immediately reminded of the poster for the 1991 Spike Lee masterpiece "Jungle Fever."
"Troy and I are dating, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mister Man."
"You and Troy. Are dating."
"For realsies," Troy says.
Jeff supposes that cements it. Something that is also indescribable, but which he suspects is an emotion, lodges itself in his throat, so he clears it. "So what you're saying is that everyone in the study group is paired off except for me."
"And me!" Pierce says, but Jeff doesn't pay attention because in the next second a familiar hand clenches on his shoulder and then slides down his chest in the general direction of his belt buckle, and it takes him the next twenty minutes to convince Dean Pelton that he's perfectly happy being alone.
"So you and Britta, huh?" Jeff says, when Troy's the only one in the cafeteria at lunchtime and it's not like he could legitimately dodge him by saying he has to do homework.
"Yeah. Hey, I know that this is awkward--"
"You know how we could make it less awkward? By not talking about it."
It turns out that not talking about it just makes it worse.
And then March rolls around and everyone is reminded that the dynamic threesome of Jeff, Troy, and Abed signed up to fill a bracket in the Dean's first annual Three-on-Three on 3/3 Basketball Tournament. And that their team is named the Dynamic Threesome. (At the last minute the Dean makes them change it to Team Diversity.)
In the locker room before their first game, versus the sure-to-be-challenging Team Hipsters (Leonard, Pierce, that one janitor who looks like Eddie Pepitone), Abed psyches himself by stretching while listening to the complete Rocky soundtrack. Jeff rolls his eyes and tries to focus on gelling his hair just enough so that it will stay in place but not so much that it will look like a Lego man's hair.
"So, uh, Jeff," Troy says, sidling up behind him at the mirror.
Oh, crap. Jeff stops gelling for a moment, errant forelock making him look like Alfalfa. Gah. "What?"
"This is like weird and all but I need some advice. On a girl. On a girl that I'm dating." He takes a breath and attempts to make eye contact, but Jeff refuses to play that game. This is going to be excruciating enough as it is. "On Britta," Troy stage-whispers.
"Yeah, I figured when you said it was a girl you're dating that you meant Britta. Unless you're getting some on the side, in which case my best advice is to never take both girls to the same hotel, and delete all texts the moment after you read them, no matter who they're from."
"That is gross and disrespectful toward women."
"You really are dating Britta."
"That's what I told you in the first place. Anyway, I could use some advice on how to, like, date her right."
Whaaaat? "As far as I can tell, just don't let her catch you eating at a chain restaurant or talking smack about Etsy and you'll be golden."
"That's what I need advice on. Talking to her. How do you do it and have it be legit?"
"Uh...can you explain what you mean by 'legit?'"
Troy sits down on the bench closest to Jeff. He and Abed are wearing matching 70's-style throwback uniforms, down to the sweatbands and polyester short-shorts, and Troy's puffed his hair out for the occasion. Which means it's even harder to take him seriously than it usually is. "We like don't ever talk. We're either playing video games or messing around with Abed or...you know." He makes a hand gesture that Jeff's never seen before but understands anyway.
"So what's the problem?"
"I dunno...Britta is hot and all but sometimes I just want to talk, you dig? About important stuff. I like the way she listens."
"Troy, you're 21 years old. You should be with a girl who only wants to get out of bed if there's a zombie apocalypse. You've got the rest of your life to be stuck with somebody who wants to listen and and cuddle all the time."
"I'm not you, man. I want different stuff." Troy gets up, shaking out his knees and elbows. It should be ridiculous but it isn't. "But how did you know she never wants to cuddle with me, either?"
"I dated her, too," Jeff says, even though that's a gross misrepresentation of whatever went on between them, and even though he and Britta did a lot of cuddling. Which he fucking misses, not that he would admit it under the threat of torture or the destruction of his AmEx gold. "She's prickly. I don't think she knows how to cuddle."
"Really? It seems like a basic concept. Even baby pandas do it, I saw it on a nature show."
"She's a human being, not a baby panda, Troy. That means some of her wires got crossed when she was growing up and she's not going to behave like a specimen in a petri dish."
"Pandas don't live in petri dishes, dude. You need to pay more attention in Biology."
His hair isn't cooperating, and Jeff wipes his hands roughly down the sides of his jersey. "All I'm saying is that Britta isn't exactly a normal person. She's hard to predict."
"No kidding."
For a second, just a split second, Jeff looks at Troy and sees himself at that age: cocky and good-looking and getting more ass than a toilet seat. Deathly terrified of having to hold an actual conversation with a woman. How is it that Troy, the study group's naïf, is so far ahead of Jeff on the spectrum of Doing Relationships Right? "Look," he sighs, shifting uneasily. "It took me twenty years to find a woman who didn't scare, bore, or intimidate the crap out of me, conversation-wise. Maybe you just need to keep looking."
Troy crosses his arms over his chest, narrows his eyes. Kid's not tall, but he's strong, and Jeff instinctively draws himself up to his full height. "Are you saying I should break up with Britta?"
Fuck. "That's not what I said at all."
"Are you jealous, man? Is that what's going on?"
"Why would I be jealous?"
"I dunno. Maybe you still have feelings."
"I don't have feelings, Troy. Feelings are for prepubescent girls and Morris Albert."
Troy fights a smile off his face, looking away from Jeff's reflection and putting his hands back on his hips. "Whatever, man. I know she meant a lot to you. She means a lot to me. I'm taking care of her."
"Don't let her hear you say that." The one time he made the mistake of trying to take care of Britta--offering to bring over soup when she had a cold--she changed his name in her phone to REINFORCER OF GENDER STEREOTYPES. Nevermind that when he tried to argue that her listening to his verbal spasms about his mom and his dad and all the horrible shit he'd done as a lawyer was her reinforcing gender stereotypes. Things could get so emotional between them, so intense...but always in this weird quiet way: a thousand hushed confessions when they were curled up on his couch or in her bed or even just sitting too close to each other in the back of a class. Maybe that's what hurts the most about letting go of Britta: letting go of a friend.
"Hey, Jeff, are you okay?
"What?"
"You just looked kind of sad for a minute there."
"Whatever. Can we stop talking about our feelings now and go kick those old dudes' asses?"
"You're the captain, captain," Abed says, his reflection popping up behind Troy's and startling them both. "O captain, my captain. Your behavior is highly illogical, captain." He cocks his head. "Sometimes when you keep saying something over and over again it loses all meaning. Interesting."
Jeff meets Troy's eyes finally, as they turn away from the mirror. "You'll figure it out. Just give it time."
"You too, man. You too."
***
Mr. Barnes (R for language, Troy/Abed friendshippy, dark) Based on this prompt: Troy/Abed, hurt/comfort, in which Troy is hurt and Abed is scared & shows ~the depth of his love~ (because sometimes I get insecure on Troy's behalf)
Abed has met Troy's father. His name is Mr. Barnes, he's tall and wide, refrigerator-shaped, smells like Marlboros, has a girlfriend named Brandy. He lives on the side of a hill outside Greendale, in the house Troy grew up, .25 miles from a strip mall and .75 miles from a comic book shop. Abed has been to the mall and the comic book shop, but he's never been to Troy's dad's house.
"I am not going there, man," Troy says, even though he's driving there right now.
"I don't understand," Abed says. "You're driving there right now."
"Just--" Troy flutters his hands around the steering wheel, interrupting himself. "He's just an asshole, Abed. When we get there, you're going in, you're getting the check. He owes me that money, I need it for school, and then I am done with him. Forever, man."
"I don't understand," Abed says again, thinking maybe Troy didn't hear him through his own agitation. And the radio, which Abed turns down.
Troy takes a deep breath, like he does when he sees a big spider. Usually he asks Abed to move big spiders, so Abed wonders if maybe going to his father's house and getting a check is the equivalent of a nightmarish monster spider, such as those seen in the hit 1990 film Archnophobia.
"Look, Abed, my dad and I don't really get along. But he promised to pay my tuition at Greendale for two years, and I have to go get the last check. But I don't want to talk to him or even look at him, okay? So when we get there, you go in there and you get it. He'll probably be really racist to you, but I don't think that will bother you." Troy looks over at him, first in the rearview mirror and then by actually turning his head, and the expression in Troy's eyes is weird, somehow more afraid than Troy's eyes when he saw Levar Burton.
"I won't mind," Abed says, because it's true. People are just afraid of things that are different, that's what racism is, and Abed's always been different from everyone else, skin color and behavior and everything. It doesn't bother him because it's all he's ever known. "I'll go get it."
Troy sniffs, an actual sniff, and Abed feels a sudden sharp pang of worry, like an icicle laid right down next to his spine. The worry is nebulous, but familiar--maybe it deserves a capital letter. The Worry is a thing that has always lived in the same room and breathed the same air as Abed: the Worry that his parents would break up, the Worry that his mother will never come back, the Worry that the study group will destroy itself somehow. The Worry that Troy will be broken.
Abed rolls up the left cuff of his sweatshirt and reaches over to pat Troy's shoulder. "Everything will be okay, Troy. Don't Worry." He tries to make the capital audible.
Troy sniffs again, and wipes at his eyes, his lower lip wobbling. This is a sign, Abed knows, of impending tears.
"My father is a bad dude, Abed," Troy gulps air, staring at the bumpers ahead of them. They're on the interstate, winding into the suburbs. Everything is curiously gray: buildings, sky, road. "He had a really bad childhood and he's not any better as a grown up. He's a waste of a life. I just want to get away from him foreve.,"
That hangs in the air between them, and Abed isn't sure what to do next, so he lets his hand rest on Troy's shoulder, and then he squeezes a little bit. Troy sniffs again, but, for the first time in all the time Abed's known him, which sometimes feels like forever and sometimes feels like less than a day, Troy doesn't cry.
***