the storms in july

[fandrastic]

Title: the storms in july
Author: fandrastic
Spoilers: up the S2 finale
Rating/Warnings: T for language
Word Count: 5,066
Disclaimer: the author owns nothing that the reader recognizes

It happens like this.

Pierce turns down Jeff’s invitation back into the study group and leaves them all dumbfounded, glancing at one another for a proper explanation. The room is soaked in weighty silence for several long moments before Abed murmurs aloud.

“The Fellowship has been broken,” he remarks quietly, steepling his fingers.

Under normal circumstances, Jeff would have rolled his eyes or offered up a sudden quip, but he sees Britta’s brows are furrowed and Troy’s worried that he’s going to have to move out of Pierce’s place and Shirley’s torn between ‘loving thy neighbor’ and ‘ignoring that old fool’. Annie’s face is unreadable.

The room is a mess and the whole situation is borderline ridiculous. Half of the group is painted up like traffic cones, leaving orange fingerprints and smears on the tables and chairs as they fidget awkwardly. They’re all still in costume and looking at him for answers. But Pierce called them out and turned them down, and in the wake of the failure of his patented ‘Winger Speech’, there’s nothing left that Jeff can do. So, he crosses his arms across his chest in a signal of defeated irritation, and avoids their prying eyes.

The guilt they all feel is apparent, but it’s also mixed with a sense of relief. The group had voted Pierce out in the first place for a reason, and while perhaps this wasn’t the way they wanted him to leave, the end result was what they had all wanted.

Except for Annie.

She hasn’t been this mad in a long time, and finds that her hands are shaking slightly at her sides. There is orange paint drying all over her, clumped in her hair and her clothes and clinging determinedly to her eyelashes. She knows that she looks seven different shades of bizarre, but there are more important things for her to worry about. Rising from the study table, she doesn’t spare anyone else a glance as she heads for the door, despite Shirley’s soft calls of “An-nie, An-nie wait!” and an audible sigh from Britta.

“Don’t follow him, Annie. It’s just what he wants.” Jeff warns, warns her like he’s some sort of legitimate leader, like he has any right to be a figurehead after what just happened.
Annie rounds on him, her tiny hands clenched into tinier fists. The group is surprised, stunned actually, at the sudden fire in her eyes and stiffness in her stance. There are words on her tongue that she wants to scream at them all-they’re the ones that wanted Pierce to leave anyway, and even though they all had treated the older man poorly, she was the only one who had wanted to give him a second chance, to keep their group together. They were supposed to be a family.
She wishes things could go back to only a few minutes before, when they were happily discussing classes for next semester, giving play-by-plays about paintball, and sharing a small smile with Abed over their kiss-it was all so comfortable, so normal for them. But now, now she’s glaring at them in a way that makes them wonder why they ever compared her to a Disney character.
Annie’s jaw is tight with tension and her eyes are narrowed when she finally finds the right words. Jeff’s eyes are locked with hers, and in this moment she hates him, hates his smirk and his attitude and his lies. If she were truly brave, she’d slap him, but her hands are trembling almost visibly now, so she resorts to words.
“Don’t you dare tell me what to do, Jeff.”
She leaves behind a trail of flaking orange paint and she’s pretty sure she’s left behind her favorite barrette, but nothing in the world could possibly make her turn back now.

.annie edison.

She spends the summer alone. She doesn’t mind, not really.

In the back of her mind she wonders what they’re all doing, what countries Britta is gallivanting through, what movies Troy and Abed are trying to spoof this week, how fast baby Ben is growing, but she tucks those thoughts away. Pierce had left the group for good, and even though he could be kind of a jerk most of the time, he was a part of their rag-tag little family. And yet, the rest of them hadn’t even batted an eyelash at the thought of voting him out. Dimly, she wonders how long it’ll take before they decide that she-the ace of hearts-should leave as well.
But, she reminds herself optimistically, summer isn’t for agonizing over the school year. She’s read enough chick-lit to know that summer is for things like gauzy cotton sundresses and votive candles in the dark and the kind of music Vaughn used to play for her on the quad (breezy, acoustic, major chord changes). Summer is for change, she’s believes, it’s for doing things that she normally wouldn’t do.
And so, she decides she’s going to get a haircut.
That idea is replaced to painting her bedroom teal (okay maybe just an accent wall).
She instead throws out her beloved backpack and buys a cute chocolate colored satchel. She feels more grown up than she expected.
She doubts that anyone will notice.

Shirley calls (ooh, hello an-nie!) and asks politely about her summer before not-so-slyly asking if she has any free time to babysit. Neither of them mentions paintball. She hasn’t babysat in years-when you have a pill addiction that makes you run through plate glass doors, people stop trusting you with their children-but Shirley explains that Elijah and Jordan are at sleep-away camp and she just needs her to watch baby Ben for a few days while she and Andre spend a long weekend in Denver. Out of habit of wanting to please people, she agrees, and baby Ben really is adorable, and for the last weekend in June, Annie finds herself playing house with a baby that’s not hers.

Ben likes her well enough, mainly because she feeds him and changes him and makes all sorts of fun, wide-eyed faces at him. She takes great (guilty) pleasure in singing him to sleep with the lilting Yiddish lullabies her mother sang to her before the divorce and her pill addiction shot everything to hell.
The baby in her arms makes her think a little about her old, outdated ten year plan and her crush on Troy and how nothing, nothing ever seems to turn out the way she wants, but then he smiles, and it’s wide and drool-y and perfect, and she thinks that maybe things aren’t so bad after all.

There’s an advertisement for Hawthorne Wipes playing late one evening in July and she can’t help but remember that at this time last year, she was at a Fourth of July picnic at Pierce’s mansion with the rest of their study group-only Jeff wasn’t there, and neither was Britta, now that she recalls-but it was fun, fun like the parties she saw in the movies or on television. She pictures it in her mind and sees red plastic cups and tiki torches and hears laughter and music and the booming of fireworks. It was nice to get together, to eat and swim and light off dozens of sparklers, and even nicer to know that they didn’t need Jeff or Britta around to have a good time.
In retrospect, Annie wonders absently if the reason the two of them missed the party was because they were together. She wouldn’t be surprised. But she pushes away those thoughts and changes the channel with a firm press of a button on her remote.
She’s almost positive that Pierce is still having a party for Independence Day, and she knows that she’s not invited.

The summer job she has as a hostess at the fancy new bistro downtown has left her with enough money that she feels comfortable in splurging on a few new things for her apartment at Crate & Barrel, as opposed to scouring the Dollar General down the street for hand towels that aren’t bedecked in gingham. The walk through the store front is exhilarating, because there’s a decent sum of money in her wallet set aside just for this trip, and while she’s been a legal adult since she turned eighteen, she feels very much like a grown up when she’s surrounded by house wares.
She eyes a stylish, modern looking arm chair and runs a slim finger down the side seam of a colorful throw pillow, mentally calculating the cost of the chair with her newspaper clipped discount, when she spots Jeff and Britta (of course) arguing (of course) in a nearby aisle about two different French press coffee makers. They share scowls but stand with a closeness that she can only assume comes from sleeping together. Repeatedly.
More than anything, she wants to be cool about this, she wants to be able to look at Jeff and have him look back at her without her heart twisting girlishly beneath her ribs, but she can’t. She’s evolving, slowly but surely, but it’s taking time and no, she’s not so sure that he and Britta aren’t sleeping together again and no, she doesn’t want to think about how that makes her feel. She wants to say that it doesn’t matter (there’s nothing there, no ‘annie of it all’) and that she can totally walk over and smile and chat like the two of them hadn’t betrayed her trust by hooking up all year (she’s not juno, okay homeslice).
So she leaves the clipped-out coupon on the seat of the cute white arm chair, a gift to the next passerby and leaves the store without another look. If either of them sees her, they don’t follow after her, so there’s that.

She spends the next week coming to terms with the idea that Jeff and Britta are most likely JeffandBritta, and consoles herself with a lengthy marathon of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies and several pints of Cherry Garcia. But when the week is up, she promises herself that she’s done wasting her time on a guy who refuses to see her as his equal, and vows that next semester, she won’t be so easily swayed by the charisma that Jeff Winger practically oozes. But it hurts, it hurts more than she really wants to think about. She was half in-love with him and thought that he at least toyed with the idea of liking her back, but it turns out that he didn’t, so she has to be the one to bury her infatuation. Fast.
She starts her new outlook by calling up the good-looking new guy at her temple and she invites him out for coffee. David agrees with a smile in his voice that she can hear over the phone, and there’s a sensation in her chest that feels like happiness but tastes a little like distance. It’s all a part of growing up, she supposes, and she makes sure to wear the navy blue v-neck sweater she knows does wonderful things to her… appearance.
She doesn’t even like coffee.

Abed calls her up a few weeks before classes start and asks her, in his straightforward way, if she plans on punching him in the nose on when she sees him because he kept their paintball make-out a secret from the rest of the group. Spending her summer alone and away from everyone has rubbed away at her optimism and made her just a touch more cynical, and she replies loftily that she’d only punch him if he had been sleeping with Britta on side. Abed only makes a quiet ‘hmm’ sound, like he’s pondering some sort of underlying meaning in her words, so she tells him outright that she can promise him that there will be no punching happening during their first study group session. At least by her.
She also drops a few less-than-subtle hints that she’s been really busy, so it’s not like she’d been waiting all summer for him to call or text or hell, even send her some smoke signals or something (not like last year), and he doesn’t even have to tell the group about their kiss if he doesn’t want to. But Abed makes the ‘hmm’ noise again and mutters something about symmetry and seasons and story arcs before dismissing her with a placid goodbye (cool, coolcoolcool).
It’s strange, how Abed kissing her has been the last thing on her mind the whole summer, and how he had expected her to be up in arms about it. Perhaps her ‘character’ was progressing faster than Abed’s trope-seeking brain could process.

Her twenty-first birthday is the Saturday before classes start, and the moment she wakes up in the morning, she turns off her phone. She’s not expecting any calls, not really. Shirley may want to talk later, and Troy and Abed might send her a text or two, but her birthday falls into the limbo of summer, where she’s cut off from contact from the study group. Last year she spent it alone, and received a frantic call from Shirley two days later, apologizing over and over for not remembering. But it’s not a big deal.
She spends the day cleaning her apartment from top to bottom, playing a scratched Joni Mitchell record she got at a garage sale because she’s pretty sure it’s a rite of passage or something, maybe. She cries a little during ‘Conversation’, but she’s pretty sure it’s because she gets dust in her eyes.
After scouring the place clean, she showers and spends a ridiculous amount of time in front of the mirror, trying to get a hang of a new set of hot rollers. It’s her birthday, and she’s finally twenty-one, so she’s going to go out and buy herself a drink. She’s going to look good and smile and leave her cell phone at home. Her dress is a little tight but flattering on her curves and her shoes might possibly twist her ankles, but she feels sexy (and she never does). And when she shakes out her hair to find heavy, glossy curls, it takes a moment for her to realize that woman looking at her in the mirror is her own reflection.
She only buys herself one jack and coke (no one likes a sloppy drunk girl) and when a good-looking, dark haired guy offers to buy her a second, she smiles and consents. And when he takes her back to his apartment, she tries not to think about how disorganized his living room is and instead focuses on how good he is with his hands.
In the morning, she awakens before he does, rising quietly from an unfamiliar bed. She takes back the napkin on his nightstand with her name and phone number, and before she leaves, she checks his license.
Eric is thirty-four.
She so has a type.
She walks six blocks back to her apartment and moans a little at the blisters on her heels, but she feels like a new person and the same old Annie Edison all at once. This must be what growing up is like. She kind of enjoys it. The orgasms certainly don’t hurt.
When she gets to her apartment, she checks her phone with a twinge of guilt and finds that she has five missed calls-one from Britta, two from Shirley, one from Abed and one from Jeff.
No one leaves voicemail.

The morning that classes begin, she stands in front of her bathroom mirror with a critical eye.
She supposes she’s different now-she’s lost her childhood and her backpack and some of her inhibitions-but she’s still the same, still Annie Edison: The Day Planner. Her hair is down and somewhat curled and she’s wearing cute black pumps instead of flats, but she’s still stupidly doe-eyed and still stupidly hung up on Jeff. It doesn’t matter what promises she makes herself, he’s still on her mind and she hates it.
The only thing she can do at this point is wait it out, wait out the crush that never seems to fully go away. She tried burying it in ice cream and rational compartmentalization and even a one night stand on her birthday (with a guy she really did seem to click with) but in the end, she knows that as soon as she walks into the study room, it’ll all come rushing back. She loved Troy blindly for years, and prays to all that is holy that she’ll have a better record this time around. She hasn’t even left the safety of her apartment yet and she’s already bracing herself.
With shaky determination, she hitches her purse up a little higher on her shoulder, smoothes down the floral print of her skirt, and takes a deep breath. If there’s one thing she’s good at, it’s surviving in the midst of adversity. She’ll be pleasant and helpful and if Jeff looks at her, looks at her like she’s the only person he sees, well, she’ll remember that it’s all in her head. It’s all she can do.
And maybe, now that she’s twenty-one, she’ll be grown up enough to follow through with her threats-like forgetting that she ever had feelings for him. She can only hope.

.jeff winger.

He spends the summer alone, for the most part. And it drives him fucking crazy.

He can’t possibly imagine what the rest of the group is doing, not when this is the second summer in a row that he had been divided from them all. The previous summer had been spent in self-imposed solitude, where he received weekly guilt-laced e-mails from Shirley about not patching things up with Britta, while also fending off Pierce’s multiple requests to join him and his ‘companions’ at his lakeshore summer home. Things had ended at Greendale the year before on a remarkably awkward note, and he had tried his hardest to distance himself from it. Last summer had obviously been tainted by, um well, the two crazy/jealous women fooling themselves into thinking they loved him and then telling (declaring) it to him in front of two hundred plus people so that he ended up looking like the bad guy for fleeing the scene. Oh, and there was also the fact that he kinda made out with the study group’s proverbial Disney princess.
Last year he was pretty much trying to avoid everyone.
This year, they’re all avoiding him.
He works surprisingly hard at convincing himself that he could care less how upset they all were at what happened during paintball, but he doesn’t feel any better. He doesn’t want this summer to be as crappy as last year’s. But so far it is.

When Shirley calls him two weeks after the semester ends, he can make out the raucous sounds of Elijah and Jordan running around in the background, and can hear the quiet burbling noises that baby Ben makes as she holds him in her arms. She uses her patented gentle voice to talk to him politely about his summer so far, before she gets down to business.
She asks him plainly about Pierce, if he’s heard anything and if the older man plans on joining their group again. There’s a lengthy monologue about Christian goodness and turning the other cheek, almost lecturing him as if he alone had totally shunned Pierce during their last meeting.
And he can practically hear her frown of disapproval when he reveals that he hasn’t talked to anyone from their group since that day. She sighs a motherly sigh, filling him in on what the rest of the group is doing. Britta is spending a few weeks in some foreign country (chile? yeah, that sounds right) under the guise of obscure charity work. Troy is still living with Pierce, but has practically moved in with Abed at the GCC dormitories. Abed spends a vast majority of time at his family’s falafel shop, but he and Troy have been going through and watching his movie collection in reverse alphabetical order. As for Annie, she’s not really sure what she’s been up to, but she babysat Ben for her just the other week.
When their conversation ends, he doesn’t feel any better or worse, and worries how long this summer is going to last.

Britta texts him when she gets back from Chile, complaining about her sunburn and flying coach and whether or not the correct pronunciation of the country is ‘chilly’ or ‘chee-lay’ and he laughs to himself. These are things he honestly does not care about, but having Britta talk to him is a good sign that he’s not universally hated by his motley little Greendale family. He texts her back (get over it, get over it, and who knows, spanish is clearly not my strong suit) and it’s almost as if everything is back to normal. Her replies are just as colorful and bitter as expected, and that familiarity feels great after several weeks of no communication.
Subtlety has never been her forte, and she brings up Pierce and the demise of their study group with little warning. He sighs, and it makes him feel old (which is never okay) and tells her exactly what he told Shirley not too long ago. But Britta, ever the Greendale parent, sides with him and agrees that Pierce is acting out, and they shouldn’t play into his hands.
But there’s a part of him that’s weak and soft and wonders if it’s really their fault that Pierce left, but he knows that Britta will scoff if he mentions it. So he stays quiet and tries not to think about how things have changed.

Things get better once he’s able to hang out with Britta, instead of being cooped up in his apartment all summer. They hang out because they’re best friends and it’s not (too) awkward because they know each other; know the good and the bad and all that trite crap he can’t believe he’s able to think about with a straight face. Pre-Greendale Jeff probably would not recognize himself now.
But Britta is still Britta, and knows exactly how to piss him off or guilt him into things, like going to the stupid hipster wedding of one of her stupid hipster friends from her more rebellious youth. Yeah, because nothing screams anarchy like holy matrimony.
She punches him soundly in the arm for that one.
So she drags him to the mall and argues with him over coffee pots, argues with him like he really cares or has an opinion on which one her friend will like better. She comments on his mood and he comments on her face and they’re sniping at each other like children in the middle of Crate & Barrel. It’s not malicious but he’s sure it’s more than irritating to the other customers.
Britta obnoxiously waves two identical-looking French presses in his face (jesus christ he could care less) and out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees someone he recognizes. Batting her hands away, he turns just in time to see the swish of a familiar skirt through the entry way of the shop. Annie.
He finds it hard to believe that she didn’t seem him and Britta, not when they were making as much noise as they were, and finds himself frowning. Her (non-existent) dismissal rubs him the wrong way for some reason, and Britta picks up on the change in his demeanor and selects a wedding gift without another word.
It puts him in a mood for the rest of the day, and a part of him can’t help but resent Annie for always (always) making him feel things he just doesn’t want to feel.

He sleeps with Britta the night his air conditioning goes out and he’s forced to take shelter at her place.
The sex is familiar and great and she kisses him like it’s habitual or effortless or something. He really doesn’t have anything to complain about, but there’s a goddamn voice in the back of his head that recoils at the domesticity and the effect that last summer's ‘I love you, Jeff’ had on him. It terrifies him-and not in the ‘holy shit look you have genuine romantic feelings for this woman now what the fuck should you do about it’ way, it’s more of a… dread. Like, it's great sex, but deep down, it's just not what he wants, or who he wants--not that he knows what (and who) he does want, because he doesn't, okay?
There is no way he’ll be able to tolerate another confession like that from her, not when their friendship is so vital to his sanity. Greendale is fucking ridiculous one hundred percent of the time, and having Britta there to banter and annoy makes it easier to stomach.
Luckily, she looks just as introspective as he does, and when the subject is brought up, the sex seems to be stricken from the record. At one point in their lives, maybe they would have worked out. And they’ll always be close; best friends or favorites or whatever, but if they keep trying to mix in sex, things are going to fall apart.
The next night when his air is still out, he stays over, but he sleeps on the couch.
He doesn’t mind.

Abed and Troy call him in August to invite them all out for lunch and to help brainstorm some ideas for Annie’s twenty-first birthday. The meeting is kept a secret from her, but from the looks on everyone else’s faces when he joins them at their table, it seems that no one has really had much contact with Annie all summer.
Troy has made a handwritten list of things that he and Britta are not allowed to do, because Annie deserves a better birthday party than his was. Britta looks sheepish, but agrees with a nod. They’re all about to go over the list when Abed drops a bomb, so to speak, on them.
Abed gives a composed speech about bookend episodes-which sort of goes over everyone else’s heads-and he’s about to cut him off so they can get back to business when he reveals that he and Annie made out at paintball. A lot. They made out a lot and there was tongue and Annie was kind of awesome, so yeah. Han and Leia.
He doesn’t gape. He doesn’t stare, or frown or boil with rage. He absorbs Abed’s words like a heavy punch to the gut, exhales, and tries to focus on the first line of text on Troy’s list.
(number one: let annie get whatever drink she wants-she’s an adult, even if she wants a seven and seven)
Britta and Shirley are all aflutter or some crap like that, demanding details and explanations and any sort of update Abed can provide. Troy is watching them, looking on like a proud father. The whole situation is surreal.
There’s no reason that he should be upset or irritated by this (there is but there isn’t but there is) and so he tamps down any of the stupid, impetuous things that come to mind and instead shakes Troy’s list in their faces.
Attention regained, they hunker down to plan Annie’s birthday.

He doesn’t hear a word of it.

Turns out, there’s not going to be a birthday for Annie because she won’t return anyone’s calls. Smugly, he thinks that if she sees it’s him calling, she’ll pick up, and he makes a show of dialing her number from memory. Like it means something.
It goes straight to voicemail, just like everyone else’s calls (and her recorded voice is sweet and bright and belonging to an annie he can’t quite remember).
Troy looks close to tears, looking back and forth between him and Britta like they’re supposed to know what to do now, like they’re really the ‘Greendale Parents’. It sort of turns his stomach.
Shirley frowns worriedly as she calls upon the good Lord, and prays audibly while Abed tries calling instead. He too dials from memory. Voicemail.
He spends the night back at his place, drinking scotch and halfheartedly organizing his DVD collection. Britta calls at one point, but he just sits there and watches his phone ring. She doesn’t leave a message.

It’s embarrassing how much thought he puts into getting ready for the first day of classes.
He literally makes a mental pro/con list on whether or not to bring his own pen to class and it kind of makes him want to kill himself a little.
(pro: annie always has pens to spare even if they are purple, con: she went fucking postal last time she lost a pen, oh, and also she might hate you)
Luckily, he spends as much time as always in front of the mirror perfecting his hair, so while yeah, he’s vain, at least it’s not out of the ordinary-like his inability to sleep last night. That was weird.
The ride to Greendale is awkwardly silent, just him and his thoughts, but at least it’s better than dealing with Britta and her thoughts first thing in the morning. Still, the drive goes far too fast for his liking and he finds himself sitting stupidly in the parking lot, engine idling. He tries to turn on the radio, but Britta’s stealthily reprogrammed all his stations to whatever douchey music she listens to; angry chick rock or whatever.
In his rearview mirror he sees Pierce, walking towards the building, and he hates himself for the frown that tugs at his lips. This is one of those moments where he’s expecting Dean Pelton to pop up with inappropriate closeness or Professor Whitman to spout off some Dead Poets Society drivel, but there’s nothing, only the sound of his car running and a voice in his ear that sounds suspiciously like his conscience. Irritating. No wonder he's spent years tuning it out.
And when he sees Annie, he'll just avoid contact with those stupid doe eyes of hers and just... 
Who the fuck is he kidding?
Today is going to suck-there’s no getting around that. But the least he can do is man up and face this stupid soul-sucking school head on.