Ode to Optophobia (9B)
Title: Ode to Optophobia, or: Ten Men That Loved Annie Edison (18/19)
Author: veryspecial0ne
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~2000 for this installment, ~45,000 for the series thus far.
Disclaimer: Shippers gonna ship, ficcers gonna fic. Neither of those gonna own Community.
Spoilers: Through the end of Season 2, technically, but details from S3 have been adopted too.
Summary: Chapter Nine (in which Annie is loved but she still might be a little insane), Part Two. Starring Jeff Winger.
A/N: Unbeta'd. Title is from the song "Ode to Optophobia" by Danielle Ate the Sandwich. Penultimate installment! Day of fic! RIP fandom!
Previously: Chapter 9A.
Jeff leans back against the door to the dressing room. "Annie, come on. Britta was actually right about something;" (which earns him a smack to the arm) "if you stay in there by yourself you're just gonna keep working yourself into a panic."
"Psychologists should not be allowed to be maids of honor!" comes a high-pitched cry from the other side of the door.
"Well, she's gone now," lies Jeff with a pointed look at Britta, who rolls her eyes and quickly disappears to make his statement true. "So it's just you and me, kid. Come on."
"'Come on, kid,'" Annie repeats through the door in that pale imitation of a sarcastic voice that Jeff hates. "Seriously? You can't do any better than that?"
"Well, I need to conserve my super-speechmaking abilities since I decided to improvise my vows. Right now I'm leaning towards starting with 'if you peed your pants, I'd still love you,' but who knows what'll come out in the mo--"
The door flies open to Annie squawking "WHAT!" but before she can even finish the word, Jeff has slipped in past her and shut the door behind him.
"Gotcha."
Annie's eyes start to well with tears. "That's not funny."
"Hey, hey, hey," Jeff tries as he smoothes his hands up and down her back and over her shoulders, cautious not to pull her fully into him so she won't ruin his tuxedo. "You're gonna...wreck your makeup, or something."
"It's waterproof," says Annie in a shaking voice. "I even tested it by watching 'Moulin Rouge' with Troy."
"All right, well, just...try and breathe, hmm?"
Annie takes in a few heaving, shaking breaths and her eyes seem to clear. "There we go. Now, use your words. Is something wrong with your dress?"
"No."
"Then why--" Jeff eyes the soft terrycloth robe she's wearing.
Annie rolls her eyes. "Well I couldn't let you see me in it!"
"I thought you weren't going to let me in." He smirks, which gets him another eye roll and also another smack on the arm. "Is it something with the seating?"
"No."
"The hydrangeas?"
"No."
"The justice of the peace?"
"No."
"It's not your dad, is it?" Jeff looks over his shoulder at the closed door.
"No, that's all fine," Annie insists.
"So where's my optimistic girl, hmm? The same one that's been telling me for almost a decade that she really thinks Lindsay Lohan is going to pull it together this time?"
Annie shakes her head sadly. "Not anymore. There's no coming back from a collaboration with Mel Gibson."
Jeff frowns at her. "So there's no problem with the wardrobe, the ceremony, or the people attending it."
Annie shakes her head.
Jeff drops his hands from her shoulders. "Huh."
Annie grabs his hands before he can shove them in his pockets. "And not you! God, of course there's no problem with you! Look at you!"
Jeff obliges with a nearby mirror, adjusting an errant hair before he receives smack to the arm number three. When he looks back at Annie, though, she's finally smiling.
"Yes, you look fantastic. You're a stud, you're James Bond, you're a more handsome Ryan Seacrest. Everyone in this room knows it."
"Well then it would be a shame to waste all this beauty on just the two of us in your dressing room, right?" Jeff says patiently. "Here's a thought -- there's a whole ballroom full of people out there waiting to get to stare at us for hours."
"You would turn our wedding day into a honeymoon for your ego," says Annie, her smile straining a bit. "Now I know why you proposed in the first place. You may not believe in marriage, but you sure believe in your face."
Jeff raises his eyebrows at her, sure she's finally going to blurt out whatever's bothering her without realizing she's doing it until she runs out of breath. Instead she takes his face in her hands and kisses him, hard, and though Jeff knows on some level that there are much more pressing issues afoot, sometime in the last several years he's finally come to terms with the fact that when Annie grabs him like this? He's going to reciprocate, no matter how inappropriate the time or place. He's got priorities.
The terrycloth robe gives him a good grip as he takes Annie's waist in his hands and maneuvers her onto the vanity table right next to them. She hums into his mouth, the closest thing to a sign of contentment that she's shown since Jeff was dragged to her dressing room door by Britta. Annie hooks one arm around his neck as far as she can go, so that his nape is tucked right into the crook of her elbow. Her other hand finds his jaw, his neck, any bit of skin that isn't covered up by the tuxedo that Jeff loved until about ten seconds ago.
Annie's attire, however, provides no such barrier, and the knot securing the robe at her waist easily falls into just two loose sides of a sash as a slim vertical line of her torso becomes exposed. Jeff's hand slips inside in a flash, finding the expanse of skin he wanted as he spreads his hand across her lower back. Annie nips at his lower lip, sucks it into her mouth, runs her tongue along it while she has control. Jeff finds her spine and works his fingers all the way up, bump by bump, until he reaches the back of her neck, where he gives her a squeeze before sliding all five of his fingers through her hair, as far as they'll go, so that he's practically holding the entire back of her head like an NBA player palming a basketball. His other hand goes to guide her bare thigh to his waist, but Annie's way ahead of him and so he just presses her knee to his hip while her calf runs up and down the length of his own thigh.
"So, you guys are supposed to start getting married now," announces Britta from the other side of the door.
Jeff groans in annoyance before even breaking the kiss, then pulls just far enough from Annie to look her in the eye and whisper evenly, "That's two." He punctuates the statement by holding up the hand that had been on her knee with two fingers in the air. "She gets one more of those and then she is out." He tilts his face to the ceiling in a frustrated bid for control before relinquishing his hold on Annie to cross over to the door. "We need ten more minutes," he says to Britta through the door. "Annie needs to get her dress on."
"You guys," whines Britta.
"I didn't want him to see me in it, that's all!" yelps Annie, turning pink, still perched on the vanity but tying her robe shut. Jeff pouts at her.
"Well, either way--"
"Just tell them we'll be starting a little late," interrupts Jeff. "It's not like any of them have anywhere else to go. Hell, let Abed do his standup if he wants, just leave us alone!"
Britta's voice snipes back, "You know, I'm the maid of honor. I'm supposed to be the one in there right now."
"Britta, if you go right now and exercise your weird wedding powers to buy us ten minutes, I will tell you another sixty seconds of the story of the time I visited my father's grave."
There's a pause. "Two minutes."
"Ninety seconds."
"Fine," comes Britta's muffled voice. "But I get to be the one with the stopwatch this time!"
Quick footsteps indicate that she's running away, either to set her stalling tactics into motion or to make sure Jeff doesn't have time to shoot down her stopwatch condition. He turns back to Annie, who has hopped down from the table and is already checking her makeup for signs of dishevelment in the mirror, until she suddenly stands up straight.
"Oh crap, I need Britta's help to lace me into my dress!"
Jeff, still trying to use deep breaths to send his body the message that it's not happening right now, so calm down, nods. "Yeah, okay. I'll go get her." He can't stop himself from coming up behind her and nuzzling her neck one last time. "So I'll...see you out there." he adds, trying to sound casual about the gravity of what he's actually saying, as well as Annie's seemingly seamless switch back into wedding prep mode.
"That's the plan. If you're sure you're not going to change your mind." Annie's voice is playful, but this time there's something to their old joke that Jeff's never seen in her eyes before, reflected back at him in the mirror.
"Annie?"
"What?"
"What's up?"
Her eyes go wide in a way that seems studied now. "Nothing."
"Annie."
"Nothing!"
Jeff turns her to face him. One hand tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, and the other palms the crown of her head, his fingers once again spreading across her scalp and tilting her head back so her face is pointed directly at him, rather than him getting her gaze through her eyelashes.
"If you've got something to say, Annie, this is the time. Right now. Because there's no predicting what Abed will do if you decide you need to say something in the middle of the ceremony, but I guarantee we don't want to find out what it is."
Annie only breathes, drinking in the eye contact like water.
He says her name one more time.
"Annie."
"You're sure you're not going to change your mind?" she nearly whispers.
"Is this verbal agreement legally binding?"
Annie stamps her foot.
"Yes, Annie, I'm sure."
"You've changed your mind about me before," she points out painfully.
Jeff shakes his head. "I never changed my mind about you. I changed my mind about us."
"Same thing."
"Not the same thing."
Annie just blows out a tense breath, still not looking reassured.
"I'm part of us, Annie," Jeff tries to clarify. "I changed my mind about me. And that was years ago, and it only took me a week--"
"Three."
"Two."
"Fine."
"--to figure out that changing your mind is stupid sometimes. Just because you form a new opinion on something doesn't mean the new one is right. It's just new. I decided we could be together. Then I decided we couldn't be. That second opinion was wrong, and it was stupid, and so I learned from that and I fixed it. We fixed it."
Annie's doing that thing where her head starts to tilt and her eyes start to soften. "I thought that Jeff Winger never learns."
"Well, you're a smart girl, Annie, but sometimes you're just wrong."
This smack lands square on his chest, which is just the way Jeff likes it.
"Go get Britta," she says, and the conversation is done, which is even more the way Jeff likes it.
Fifteen minutes later, Annie's floating towards Jeff where he stands, next to Professor Whitman. He's sure he's supposed to notice something about her dress -- it's white, right? And he should maybe be feeling some kind of trepidation -- he's Jeff Winger, right? And he had been expecting to be bothered by the sight of the man walking her down the aisle -- it's Pierce, right? (Though Annie swears that Jeff will soften towards Pierce once again when he receives the very special wedding present the two of them had worked on together, which she still can't mention without giggling.) But all of those things are taking the back burner to Annie Edison's face right now.
After all, if Jeff Winger's learned one thing, it's how to prioritize.
Next: Chapter 10.