Fic: Four Times Jeff and Britta Got Married and One Time They Didn't
TITLE: Four Times Jeff and Britta Got Married and One Time They Didn't
PAIRING: Jeff/Britta
RATING: R for language
WORD COUNT: 2,300
SPOILERS: All episodes. Ends in the year 2038 so I guess you could say it goes AU.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This was based on a prompt fro malo_malo in my Open J/B Prompt Post and posted here in its own entry because it's too long to be a comment!fic.
1.
“Okay, that’s $80.00 for two mani-pedis and $37.99 for the combination skin facial. And is your anniversary this month? We’re running a special: ten percent off all couples massages if you were married in September.”
Jeff puts an arm around her shoulders so quickly that Britta almost gets whiplash. “September 17. I’ll never forget it, right, honey? Not after the crap you gave me that one year I did.”
“Oh, you know me and the crap I like to give you,” she says, leaning into his shoulder and smiling at the Fem-bot manning the salon’s register. Seriously, the woman is wearing so much foundation it’s like she’s been shellacked.
“I’ll just need to see some proof, like your marriage license or something like that.”
“Who carries around their marriage license?” Jeff asks, layering on the Winger charm.
“You’d be surprised.”
“Surprise me.”
“We often get newlyweds, or couples who bring in their wedding invitations.”
“Oh yeah? What if we were gay married in some other state, would you still let us get a discount?”
“Miss, I don’t see what gay marriage has to do with this.”
Britta draws herself up to her full height, forgetting that she’s wearing flip-flops. “I’ll have you know that my husband is an attorney. A civil rights attorney.” She tickles Jeff lightly along his ribs, knowing that the face he’ll make to cover his laughter will make him look angry.
“September 17, great, congratulations,” the Fem-bot says, and ten minutes later Jeff and Britta are nude, not touching, and enjoying complementary glasses of champagne.
“Happy anniversary,” Jeff says, with lots of vibrato because a taciturn Eastern European woman is beating on his back like she’s Rocky and he’s a side of beef.
Britta sighs and sinks into the massage table, half-asleep already. “Here’s to the next three years.”
“Three? Make it thirty.”
2.
Pierce’s hive throws a picnic/indoctrination at the park and since it’s the first nice day of spring and they’re all a little stir-crazy from a long and terrible winter, all six of them go.
“This sacramental wine is actually bourbon and grenadine,” Jeff declares, mouth twisted halfway off his face.
Shirley pokes at a platter with a coffee stirrer. “These communion wafers are deep-fried Hydrox.”
“These nachos are totally legit,” Troy pronounces. Abed nods, his mouth too full to speak.
Annie swats his hand away when he reaches for another. “You guys, I’m not sure we should be eating or drinking anything here. What if it’s drugged?”
“Good point, Annie. Britta, taste everything and tell us if your spidey senses start tingling.”
“Shut up, Jeff. I agree with Annie, because God only knows what they put in this crap. I’m going to go find the bathrooms, and I hope that when I’m come back I don’t find you guys wearing robes and chanting like when we went to Pierce’s house for that frolf tournament.”
But when she comes back, the picnic tables are deserted, and on the ground someone has made an arrow out of nachos, pointing toward a path leading into a dark, foreboding wood. Britta sends a group text that says What are you guys up to now? and, sighing and pulling her jacket tighter, heads down the path.
The trees arch overhead, only a little bit of sunlight slanting in. Weird birds make weird noises, or maybe they are regular birds making regular noises, but Britta’s never been much for paying attention to birds, and even though her brain still knows that they’re within walking distance from a playground she used to go to all the time as a little kid, it’s still creepy. This whole woods could be full of cult members and rabbits and shit.
The path turns through an aisle between blooming plants, some sort of bushy, fragrant flowers tufting in huge pink blossoms around and over her. Britta inhales deeply-they’re peonies. She only recognizes them by the smell: it’s like her grandmother’s perfume. She wrenches a couple off their stems, figuring that some flowers will look nice on their picnic table once they extricate themselves from this ridiculousness and have a real picnic with Not Dogs and lemonade.
As she continues down the path she starts to hear a faint, off-key, New Age-y chanting, like an Enya song sung by drunks, and she starts walking more quickly, figuring that she must be heading in the right direction. The path turns again, climbing a short rise, and at the top of the hill she can just make out Jeff’s leather jacket, black against the green leaves.
“Jeff!” she calls out. “Jeff! What the hell, why did you guys leave me?”
He begins frantically waving like an air traffic controller. “Stop right there! Don’t come any closer.”
“What?” She breaks into a jog, slipping in the wet grass and almost falling over. He grabs her by the elbow, sneezing almost immediately when he gets a faceful of flowers.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” says a robed guy with an impressive beard, and Jeff rolls his eyes.
“Why didn’t you listen to me? I told you to stop!”
“Hold on. Man and what?”
Their Neo-Buddhist marriage, of course, isn’t valid in reality, but annulling it involves three rituals, seven bottles of sacramental wine, learning the lyrics to Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” backwards, and spending a full-moon night in a treehouse near the sewage treatment plant. But that’s all worth it, because after she has it framed, Britta’s annulment certificate, with its intricate calligraphy and holograph of Buddha sitting on a meteor while women who look a lot like Slave Leia fan him, is a great conversation starter.
3.
“Why do you need me to pose as your wife at some horrible lawyer party?”
“I’m interviewing with this firm, Britta, and all the partners are these older white guys with trophy wives. I need to mirror them to make them want to hire me.”
“You are learning weird stuff in that Pop Psych class Duncan’s teaching, you know that? Why don’t you take Annie, she’s younger than me and looks more like a trophy wife.”
“What a feminist thing to say, Miss Perry.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t offend the delicate sensibilities of someone who just asked me to pretend to be his wife for pay. It’s the twenty-first century, Jeff. Why don’t you bring Abed? A gay man married to a Muslim, they could call you an affirmative action hire.”
“Wow, you’re just blowing the lid off of your politically correct, Vagina Monologues-loving personality today, aren’t you?”
“I suppose you won’t want me to do that at your lawyer party?”
“Absolutely not. You are to be demure and pretty and you should laugh at my jokes and not try to be funnier than me. Not that you ever are, but sometimes you try and it’s just pathetic.”
“So, what do I get out of going to this party? Other than you insulting me, that is.”
“A hundred bucks and all the booze you can drink and still remain demure.”
“A hundred? You think my soul’s that cheap, Jeff?”
“No, I think it’s the end of the month and that you’re always scrambling to make rent.”
“Make it two hundred.”
“Britta…”
“Whining is so unattractive. If you get this job you’ll be making two hundred an hour. Sure your soul will be tainted because it’s unethical blood money, but you’ll be able to afford that shaving cream made by nude Scandinavian milkmaids that you like so much.”
“Fine. Two hundred it is.”
“Great. What time are you picking me up, hubby?”
“Dear God, I’ve created a monster.”
4.
He feels like an asshole when it’s over, but, at the time, telling the girl whose name he can’t remember (and who, having just used up all of his hot water in a half-hour-long post-coital shower, is now talking at him about how incredibly fucking deep LMFAO’s lyrics are, man and eating dry cereal from the box while her wet hair drips all over his linen shirt and tile floor) that the call he just got was from his wife seemed like the quickest way to get her out the door.
Turns out he was right.
5.
When Pierce shows up to their twentieth-fifth reunion, walking and talking and thirty pounds lighter than he was in 2013, Britta decides she isn’t going to be surprised by anything else. So she isn’t surprised when she learns that Dean Pelton became a Trappist monk and now brews thick, dark beer while observing a strict vow of silence, or that Magnitude is a highly-decorated Marine, or that Star-Burns faked his death and is now an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Greendale. And she definitely isn’t surprised when she steps out of the cafeteria for some fresh air and sees that a bronze figure of Guy Fieri has joined that of Luis Guzman in the courtyard. Greendale is still pretty hard up for celebrity alumni.
Shirley and Annie are sitting on one of the benches watching a pack of men and children play catch beneath the fairy lights, and Britta heads over to them. It’s so good to actually see them in person, rather than on a screen, and as she settles in next to Annie Britta feels some tension letting go around her heart.
“Jeremiah, come here and blow your nose for Grandma!” Shirley fishes a tissue out of her purse and holds it out for the little boy who comes trotting up to them to oblige. “Go on, get back out there and play. And don’t let your brother keep knocking you over.”
“I can’t believe you’re a grandmother, Shirley,” Annie says. “I have a hard enough time believing that my kids are going to be in college soon.”
“I’m sure people are always mistaking you and Melissa for sisters,” Britta says. Annie’s daughter is slender, dark-haired, and obviously tough as nails, since she and her father have formed an impenetrable wall of flag-football defenders around her quarterback brother. Jeff isn’t as fast as he used to be, but he still can’t get through them.
“Well, every now and then.”
“You’ve really done a great job with them. I don’t know how you two did it, raising kids and running businesses at the same time. Your kids aren’t half as screwed up as some of the kids I know.”
“Thank you. That means a lot coming from someone who spent the year after we graduated as a pretzel vendor at a Renaissance fair.”
“Yeah, I saw a lot of kids get warped for life there because their parents insisted on speaking in fifteenth-century English even though they lived in Missoula.”
Shirley lets out a bleat of laughter seemingly in spite of herself. “So tell us about this new thing, about driving around,” she says, without looking at Britta. “I think it’s been about five years now? How do you even get mail?”
“Who gets mail anymore, Shirley? I’m sure they get their bills online.”
“Yeah, the only bill we have is our credit cards. There’s no electric bill for a camper.”
“I can’t imagine it,” Shirley sniffs.
“Once he was sure I wasn’t going to kill myself driving the camper, Jeff bought himself a motorcycle. So sometimes he drives ahead of me and picks our campsite for the night, and sometimes I drive ahead of him. And sometimes we put the sidecar on the motorcycle and leave the camper behind for a few days. It works for us, Shirley,” Britta says.
“I still can’t believe you’re not married, you never had babies.” Shirley begins to cluck disapprovingly, but catches herself and crosses her arms instead.
Britta’s heard that hundreds of times, from her mother, from his mother, from random old ladies at Laundromats across the country. And she knows it’s coming from a place of love, so she replies the way she always does, with a gentle, even tone: “We made the choices that were right for us.”
Shirley watches Jeff playing with her grandchildren near the spot on the lawn where the hippies used to play hackysack, and Britta gets a sudden surge of memory: the strong green smell of the grass and Vaughn’s hands on her back. Now if she were to get down in the grass and make out with somebody it would take her five minutes to get back up. “A man should be a father. A woman should be a mother.”
“Shirley,” Annie says. “Just because that’s what worked for you and me doesn’t mean that’s what would work for Britta and Jeff.”
“I just want you to be happy, Britta,” Shirley sighs. “You tell me that you are, but sometimes I have trouble believing you.”
“I don’t know what I can tell you to convince you if you won’t believe me after all these years.”
Annie reaches for one of Britta’s hands, wraps both of hers around it. “I know you’re happy, Britta.”
“I still can’t imagine it,” Shirley sniffs. “Never knowing where you’re going to spend the night.”
“Where are you going to spend the night, Shirley?”
“The same place I spend every night. In bed, next to my man.”
Britta looks over at Jeff, who is bent over, hands on knees, his back shaking with laughter that drifts to her on the wind. It’s the laugh she’s lived with for the last twenty years, her best friend’s laughter, the sound that accompanies her wherever she goes. The last thing she hears every night and the first thing she hears every morning. He must sense her eyes, because he looks up and meets them, the smile that spreads across his face conjuring up one of her own in return. “Me too.”
PAIRING: Jeff/Britta
RATING: R for language
WORD COUNT: 2,300
SPOILERS: All episodes. Ends in the year 2038 so I guess you could say it goes AU.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This was based on a prompt fro malo_malo in my Open J/B Prompt Post and posted here in its own entry because it's too long to be a comment!fic.
1.
“Okay, that’s $80.00 for two mani-pedis and $37.99 for the combination skin facial. And is your anniversary this month? We’re running a special: ten percent off all couples massages if you were married in September.”
Jeff puts an arm around her shoulders so quickly that Britta almost gets whiplash. “September 17. I’ll never forget it, right, honey? Not after the crap you gave me that one year I did.”
“Oh, you know me and the crap I like to give you,” she says, leaning into his shoulder and smiling at the Fem-bot manning the salon’s register. Seriously, the woman is wearing so much foundation it’s like she’s been shellacked.
“I’ll just need to see some proof, like your marriage license or something like that.”
“Who carries around their marriage license?” Jeff asks, layering on the Winger charm.
“You’d be surprised.”
“Surprise me.”
“We often get newlyweds, or couples who bring in their wedding invitations.”
“Oh yeah? What if we were gay married in some other state, would you still let us get a discount?”
“Miss, I don’t see what gay marriage has to do with this.”
Britta draws herself up to her full height, forgetting that she’s wearing flip-flops. “I’ll have you know that my husband is an attorney. A civil rights attorney.” She tickles Jeff lightly along his ribs, knowing that the face he’ll make to cover his laughter will make him look angry.
“September 17, great, congratulations,” the Fem-bot says, and ten minutes later Jeff and Britta are nude, not touching, and enjoying complementary glasses of champagne.
“Happy anniversary,” Jeff says, with lots of vibrato because a taciturn Eastern European woman is beating on his back like she’s Rocky and he’s a side of beef.
Britta sighs and sinks into the massage table, half-asleep already. “Here’s to the next three years.”
“Three? Make it thirty.”
2.
Pierce’s hive throws a picnic/indoctrination at the park and since it’s the first nice day of spring and they’re all a little stir-crazy from a long and terrible winter, all six of them go.
“This sacramental wine is actually bourbon and grenadine,” Jeff declares, mouth twisted halfway off his face.
Shirley pokes at a platter with a coffee stirrer. “These communion wafers are deep-fried Hydrox.”
“These nachos are totally legit,” Troy pronounces. Abed nods, his mouth too full to speak.
Annie swats his hand away when he reaches for another. “You guys, I’m not sure we should be eating or drinking anything here. What if it’s drugged?”
“Good point, Annie. Britta, taste everything and tell us if your spidey senses start tingling.”
“Shut up, Jeff. I agree with Annie, because God only knows what they put in this crap. I’m going to go find the bathrooms, and I hope that when I’m come back I don’t find you guys wearing robes and chanting like when we went to Pierce’s house for that frolf tournament.”
But when she comes back, the picnic tables are deserted, and on the ground someone has made an arrow out of nachos, pointing toward a path leading into a dark, foreboding wood. Britta sends a group text that says What are you guys up to now? and, sighing and pulling her jacket tighter, heads down the path.
The trees arch overhead, only a little bit of sunlight slanting in. Weird birds make weird noises, or maybe they are regular birds making regular noises, but Britta’s never been much for paying attention to birds, and even though her brain still knows that they’re within walking distance from a playground she used to go to all the time as a little kid, it’s still creepy. This whole woods could be full of cult members and rabbits and shit.
The path turns through an aisle between blooming plants, some sort of bushy, fragrant flowers tufting in huge pink blossoms around and over her. Britta inhales deeply-they’re peonies. She only recognizes them by the smell: it’s like her grandmother’s perfume. She wrenches a couple off their stems, figuring that some flowers will look nice on their picnic table once they extricate themselves from this ridiculousness and have a real picnic with Not Dogs and lemonade.
As she continues down the path she starts to hear a faint, off-key, New Age-y chanting, like an Enya song sung by drunks, and she starts walking more quickly, figuring that she must be heading in the right direction. The path turns again, climbing a short rise, and at the top of the hill she can just make out Jeff’s leather jacket, black against the green leaves.
“Jeff!” she calls out. “Jeff! What the hell, why did you guys leave me?”
He begins frantically waving like an air traffic controller. “Stop right there! Don’t come any closer.”
“What?” She breaks into a jog, slipping in the wet grass and almost falling over. He grabs her by the elbow, sneezing almost immediately when he gets a faceful of flowers.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” says a robed guy with an impressive beard, and Jeff rolls his eyes.
“Why didn’t you listen to me? I told you to stop!”
“Hold on. Man and what?”
Their Neo-Buddhist marriage, of course, isn’t valid in reality, but annulling it involves three rituals, seven bottles of sacramental wine, learning the lyrics to Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” backwards, and spending a full-moon night in a treehouse near the sewage treatment plant. But that’s all worth it, because after she has it framed, Britta’s annulment certificate, with its intricate calligraphy and holograph of Buddha sitting on a meteor while women who look a lot like Slave Leia fan him, is a great conversation starter.
3.
“Why do you need me to pose as your wife at some horrible lawyer party?”
“I’m interviewing with this firm, Britta, and all the partners are these older white guys with trophy wives. I need to mirror them to make them want to hire me.”
“You are learning weird stuff in that Pop Psych class Duncan’s teaching, you know that? Why don’t you take Annie, she’s younger than me and looks more like a trophy wife.”
“What a feminist thing to say, Miss Perry.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t offend the delicate sensibilities of someone who just asked me to pretend to be his wife for pay. It’s the twenty-first century, Jeff. Why don’t you bring Abed? A gay man married to a Muslim, they could call you an affirmative action hire.”
“Wow, you’re just blowing the lid off of your politically correct, Vagina Monologues-loving personality today, aren’t you?”
“I suppose you won’t want me to do that at your lawyer party?”
“Absolutely not. You are to be demure and pretty and you should laugh at my jokes and not try to be funnier than me. Not that you ever are, but sometimes you try and it’s just pathetic.”
“So, what do I get out of going to this party? Other than you insulting me, that is.”
“A hundred bucks and all the booze you can drink and still remain demure.”
“A hundred? You think my soul’s that cheap, Jeff?”
“No, I think it’s the end of the month and that you’re always scrambling to make rent.”
“Make it two hundred.”
“Britta…”
“Whining is so unattractive. If you get this job you’ll be making two hundred an hour. Sure your soul will be tainted because it’s unethical blood money, but you’ll be able to afford that shaving cream made by nude Scandinavian milkmaids that you like so much.”
“Fine. Two hundred it is.”
“Great. What time are you picking me up, hubby?”
“Dear God, I’ve created a monster.”
4.
He feels like an asshole when it’s over, but, at the time, telling the girl whose name he can’t remember (and who, having just used up all of his hot water in a half-hour-long post-coital shower, is now talking at him about how incredibly fucking deep LMFAO’s lyrics are, man and eating dry cereal from the box while her wet hair drips all over his linen shirt and tile floor) that the call he just got was from his wife seemed like the quickest way to get her out the door.
Turns out he was right.
5.
When Pierce shows up to their twentieth-fifth reunion, walking and talking and thirty pounds lighter than he was in 2013, Britta decides she isn’t going to be surprised by anything else. So she isn’t surprised when she learns that Dean Pelton became a Trappist monk and now brews thick, dark beer while observing a strict vow of silence, or that Magnitude is a highly-decorated Marine, or that Star-Burns faked his death and is now an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Greendale. And she definitely isn’t surprised when she steps out of the cafeteria for some fresh air and sees that a bronze figure of Guy Fieri has joined that of Luis Guzman in the courtyard. Greendale is still pretty hard up for celebrity alumni.
Shirley and Annie are sitting on one of the benches watching a pack of men and children play catch beneath the fairy lights, and Britta heads over to them. It’s so good to actually see them in person, rather than on a screen, and as she settles in next to Annie Britta feels some tension letting go around her heart.
“Jeremiah, come here and blow your nose for Grandma!” Shirley fishes a tissue out of her purse and holds it out for the little boy who comes trotting up to them to oblige. “Go on, get back out there and play. And don’t let your brother keep knocking you over.”
“I can’t believe you’re a grandmother, Shirley,” Annie says. “I have a hard enough time believing that my kids are going to be in college soon.”
“I’m sure people are always mistaking you and Melissa for sisters,” Britta says. Annie’s daughter is slender, dark-haired, and obviously tough as nails, since she and her father have formed an impenetrable wall of flag-football defenders around her quarterback brother. Jeff isn’t as fast as he used to be, but he still can’t get through them.
“Well, every now and then.”
“You’ve really done a great job with them. I don’t know how you two did it, raising kids and running businesses at the same time. Your kids aren’t half as screwed up as some of the kids I know.”
“Thank you. That means a lot coming from someone who spent the year after we graduated as a pretzel vendor at a Renaissance fair.”
“Yeah, I saw a lot of kids get warped for life there because their parents insisted on speaking in fifteenth-century English even though they lived in Missoula.”
Shirley lets out a bleat of laughter seemingly in spite of herself. “So tell us about this new thing, about driving around,” she says, without looking at Britta. “I think it’s been about five years now? How do you even get mail?”
“Who gets mail anymore, Shirley? I’m sure they get their bills online.”
“Yeah, the only bill we have is our credit cards. There’s no electric bill for a camper.”
“I can’t imagine it,” Shirley sniffs.
“Once he was sure I wasn’t going to kill myself driving the camper, Jeff bought himself a motorcycle. So sometimes he drives ahead of me and picks our campsite for the night, and sometimes I drive ahead of him. And sometimes we put the sidecar on the motorcycle and leave the camper behind for a few days. It works for us, Shirley,” Britta says.
“I still can’t believe you’re not married, you never had babies.” Shirley begins to cluck disapprovingly, but catches herself and crosses her arms instead.
Britta’s heard that hundreds of times, from her mother, from his mother, from random old ladies at Laundromats across the country. And she knows it’s coming from a place of love, so she replies the way she always does, with a gentle, even tone: “We made the choices that were right for us.”
Shirley watches Jeff playing with her grandchildren near the spot on the lawn where the hippies used to play hackysack, and Britta gets a sudden surge of memory: the strong green smell of the grass and Vaughn’s hands on her back. Now if she were to get down in the grass and make out with somebody it would take her five minutes to get back up. “A man should be a father. A woman should be a mother.”
“Shirley,” Annie says. “Just because that’s what worked for you and me doesn’t mean that’s what would work for Britta and Jeff.”
“I just want you to be happy, Britta,” Shirley sighs. “You tell me that you are, but sometimes I have trouble believing you.”
“I don’t know what I can tell you to convince you if you won’t believe me after all these years.”
Annie reaches for one of Britta’s hands, wraps both of hers around it. “I know you’re happy, Britta.”
“I still can’t imagine it,” Shirley sniffs. “Never knowing where you’re going to spend the night.”
“Where are you going to spend the night, Shirley?”
“The same place I spend every night. In bed, next to my man.”
Britta looks over at Jeff, who is bent over, hands on knees, his back shaking with laughter that drifts to her on the wind. It’s the laugh she’s lived with for the last twenty years, her best friend’s laughter, the sound that accompanies her wherever she goes. The last thing she hears every night and the first thing she hears every morning. He must sense her eyes, because he looks up and meets them, the smile that spreads across his face conjuring up one of her own in return. “Me too.”