It Was The Smartest Thing I Ever Did, Because Now You're Here (1/?)
Title: It Was The Smartest Thing I Ever Did, Because Now You're Here
Author: x_avecia_x
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Nothing at the moment, maybe a bit of foul language
Word Count: 2,377
Disclaimer: I do not own Community - although I would totally marry Dan Harmon then claim half in our (inevitable) divorce settlement - that is unless he conceeds to my end game Jeff/Annie demands.
Summary: Annie and Jeff deal with the consequences of their attraction.
Author's Note: Ok, this is going to hopefully start off a bit mysterious and then jump back in the second chapter to the references to Halloween in this chapter. I have no idea how this is going to be recieved because I'm acutely aware that I have in no way managed to nail these characters 'voices' as such. But hell I'm just going with it, I'll write it for myself and see how it goes. Enjoy!x
_____
Friday 9th December 2011
Annie woke up and promptly shielded her eyes from the bright lights of what she presumed to be the campus medical centre. The last thing she remembered was standing in the queue for lunch before everything went blank.
She had been feeling a little off for the last few weeks but with the stress of several papers being due before the winter break, stupidly she put it all to the back of her mind and focused on school. If it wasn’t to do with her classes she didn’t want to know.
And that was a decision she was very much regretted when faced with six pairs of worried eyes looking back at her.
‘Oh thank sweet baby Jesus that you’re ok Annie. You’ve been out for the count for the last ten minutes.’
Annie grimaced a little, trying to force out a smile for Shirley as she managed to sit up a little in the bed. The smile came a lot easier when she realized that one of the pairs of eyes staring back at her was Pierce (and the irony of that statement considering everything that had happened at the end of last semester was not lost on her). Maybe, in the ten or so minutes she had missed he had finally decided to rejoin their group.
‘Sorry guys, I don’t remember anything. One minute I was arguing about chicken fingers with that dinner lady who hates Jeff and the next thing I know I’m here. Do they know what happened?’
‘No sweetie,’ Shirley answered, knowing that out of all of them, her Mother Hen qualities were the ones that were likely needed at this point in time - well, that and the fact the rest of that group were totally emotionally inept at being any kind of reassuring.
‘But they did check your blood pressure and ran some blood tests...’ offered Britta who was at the other side of the bed from Shirley.
Well that explained the huge bandage on her left arm at the elbow.
‘...although we don’t know anything else because apparently being a study group doesn’t qualify us as family...’
Judging by the ‘pfft’ Britta added to the end of that sentence Annie was sure she was about to be on the receiving end of a rant about nuclear families being less than the norm these days and the injustice of living in a society that tolerated applying labels to socially acceptable relationships, so with the way Annie’s head was swimming she quickly jumped in to stop her.
‘That’s ok, thanks Britta. I’ll speak to the doctors and will let you know later what’s going on if it’s anything serious.’
Everyone eyed her like she was about to totally freak out, making her feel almost forced to talk but Jeff beat her to it.
‘Are you sure there’s nothing you want to talk about? You don’t usually get sick and it freaked us all out watching what happened. Troy’s only just stopped crying,’ he added as if to emphasize his point.
‘Hey, I’m just a very emotional person!’ Troy retorted, earning a comfort hug from Abed who nodded in agreement, ‘and besides, you weren’t there the first time something freaky happened to her or did you forget me telling you about that time she ran through a plate glass door back in high school? I pee’d my pants that day.’
Annie’s attention was caught by the rapid inhalation of breath from every member of the study group and the low growl of ‘Troy!’ that erupted from Jeff’s mouth. Her mind may have been a touch foggy after coming around from her state of unconsciousness but she was still capable of putting two and two together.
That, and the group were hardly ninjas at being subtle.
‘Wait a minute, you guys think I’ve been taking pills again?’
There was a rush of ‘no’s!’ and ‘of course not’s!’ that trickled off into a sombre silence.
‘Oh my god, you do!’
‘Annie,’ and her head shot in the direction of Pierce, who looked uncharacteristically stricken by this point and the vague memory of ‘you’re my favourite’ became a passing thought in her head, ‘I turned into a dick when I was hooked on my pain meds...’
At which point Jeff groaned and jumped in to avoid Pierce making the situation any worse.
‘No Pierce, you were a dick long before that - the pills just kicked it up to monumental proportions. And just to clarify,’ he continued turning back to face the person lying on the bed, ‘we’re not saying you’re acting like a dick, what we’re saying Annie is that you’ve not been you’re usual Tracy Flick self recently...’
Abed muttered an appreciative ‘nice’ as Jeff continued, ‘...and we’ve learned our lesson from Pierce, and Abed’s endless testimonies on character observations and plot twists. We learned we need to pay attention - so of course it’s going to cross our mind that your previous problems might have been something to do with this.’
Jeff had been trying to be as diplomatic as possible and yeah, maybe she did find it hard asking for help or controlling her urge to just medicate her stress away, but the fact that her friends had so quickly jumped to the conclusion she was using again cut her deep.
‘Thank you for the concern,’ she all but whispered, ‘but for your information I’ve been clean for well over two years now and if any of you had bothered to ask about what was wrong before you jumped to conclusions you might have been surprised to know that I’ve just not been feeling well! It’s winter for heaven’s sake! Have you guys never heard of people catching a cold or maybe even flu?’
The end of her rant finished more on a shout at which point the nursing assistant came in and promptly shooed the group out for causing a disturbance as Annie rubbed her temples, staring at the ceiling. When she finally heard the door click shut and the last murmurs of ‘sorry Annie’ faded away she looked back down and practically jumped out her skin to find Jeff still standing at the foot of the bed.
‘So you really haven’t had a relapse?’
‘Really,’ she sighed wearily, trying to avoid any further eye contact, ‘now can you please just leave?’
‘No.’
Annie groaned and slouched back down on the bed, deciding that if he wouldn’t leave, then she would make it just as painfully difficult for him as possible until he gave up.
‘You do realize this is the first time we’ve been alone since Halloween.’
‘And?’ he shrugged.
‘Just saying...’ she mumbled, her hope that the mere mention of the word ‘Halloween’ would have him running for the door disappeared quickly into the ether.
‘I haven’t been avoiding you if that’s what you’ve been thinking.’
Annie realized then just how terrible she was at internalizing her highly audible snort.
‘Sure you haven’t, just like you didn’t avoid me the entire Summer, the year before last.’
Jeff groaned and moved to take a seat beside her on the bed, then thought better of it when he noticed her death glare, and settled for standing next to her bed.
‘Look I know I haven’t handled things between us particularly well...’
‘Understatement of the year - after I forgave you for ignoring me that entire summer, and for actively going out of your may to meddle in my love life, you practically called me delusional six months ago when I brought up the possibility that you had feelings for me. All I asked was that you tell me, and the rest of the group, what had been going on. And you cleared that one up perfectly for me in one word - nothing. That wasn’t embarrassing at all.’
She sounded like a pathetic, bitter little girl taking a sulk - but dammit, he started it by refusing to leave.
‘Annie, this is a much more complicated conversation than you think and for the record, just like the men’s bathroom, I don’t think the medical centre’s triage room is the place for it.’
Jeff’s tone of talking down to her like she was a child always had a knack of pushing her buttons (and often elicited an ironic display of just how childish she could be, stopping short only of standing there, stamping her feet on the floor and yelling out ‘no’ in the highest pitched scream she could muster).
But she managed to hold back on reaching nuclear explosion territory despite how much of a condescending ass Jeff Winger was being right now.
‘There’s never a right time for talking about us, is there Jeff?’
He looked completely uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation (much like she imagined she might have looked that day when they all watched as Jeff completely refused to give any weight to her argument that there might have been something between them). And it honest to God broke her. He may have made her feel like crap but she never wanted to make him feel that way (even if he totally deserved it).
He stood there completely mute (she’d have to remember to tell the group it was in fact possible to render Jeff Winger speechless - memories of what happened after The Debate pushed firmly back into the box in her brain she’d filed them under ages ago).
‘Look...’ she paused, holding her breath, ‘...in order to avoid yet another epic display of you once again being a jerk, all I want to do is put it all behind me, two summers ago, last year...and Halloween too. I get it. You’re not avoiding me and hopefully you’ll believe me when I tell you I’m not taking drugs to cope with my so-called unrequited feelings for you. It’s all good.’
She tried to pull off a smile that teetered on the edge of breezy but failed miserably when Jeff noticed the smile fade away into a grimace with the blinding pain in her head and tightness in her abdomen. The look on his face of being torn over what to do for her just made her feel even worse.
‘God how pathetic do I sound? You make me sound pathetic Jeff. That’s a new low, even for you.’
‘You don’t sound pathetic Annie, we’re just all really concerned for you. I just thought that after Halloween maybe this was my fault. I suppose I felt guilty - at least, that’s what I think it was, it doesn’t happen very often. You should feel honoured.’
Annie rolled her eyes at the thought of how she was the one lying in a treatment room in Greendale’s medical centre, yet Jeff Winger was still trying to make it about him. But he raised his eyebrows in a way that threatened to draw out a smile from her.
‘Well there’s no need to feel guilty. The only thing that’s wrong with me is feeling a little stressed right now with my assignments - so I should just focus on school, and not let the weekly drama we go through...as a group...’ she added as an afterthought, ‘get to me.’
Annie was relieved that she finally seemed to be getting through to him as he nodded in understanding.
‘So,’ he breathed out, looking a little bit more settled, ‘you’re not relapsing and you don’t hate me?’
‘I’m not going to get out of here and go to the nearest pill pusher. And I don’t hate you Jeff, I just don’t really understand you for the most part.’
‘If I’m honest, sometimes I don’t understand myself either, but I’m sure Abed has some theories,’ he mused, ‘just don’t believe everything he tells you.’
Jeff noticed Annie’s smile that turned into a yawn and moved towards the door to leave, only stopping when she called back out to him.
‘Hey Jeff, how did I get to the medical centre anyway? You know, after passing out.’
He moved back towards the bed and stood even closer to her than he had before.
‘Well after Pierce nearly put his back out bending over to pick you up into a fireman’s lift, I carried you here.’
She went to say something but her brain just finally caught up and processed that last piece of information.
‘Oh,’ and suddenly Annie felt so very wrong for having berated him earlier like he owed her some kind of explanation, but she couldn’t quite get the ‘sorry’ out that might have been more appropriate, but she settled for a ‘thank you, I appreciate what you did.’
And she thinks that it might just be enough for now to keep things ticking along between them, for the sake of their friendship at least.
‘It’s nothing really. After all, I did say that when it comes to you, I’d consider breaking a light sweat. It was barely even that - you should eat more.’
And with that he left. But not before giving her the most affectionate of head pats (making her tense again with anger) before it turned into the back of his fingers trailed down her cheek, lingering for a second before leaving for real that time.
Annie swore things were easier before she ended up at Greendale. It was on days like today that she really wished she was back on Adderall, because maybe then when she inevitably checked herself back into rehab for going crazy she’d have a better excuse than ‘Jeff Winger drove me nuts.’
She wasn’t crazy though, but she felt like she was on her way back there. He’d denied knowing anything about ‘The Annie of It All,’ yet the moment she came back to Greendale for her junior year of college it was back to the same old longing stares and chemistry that Jeff claimed he had with everyone.
She’s pretty sure that all these other people he has chemistry with didn’t get pulled into a dark study room with him on Halloween. She’d have liked to have seen that happen.
Actually, no.
The idea of seeing him with other people like that just made her feel sick again.
And with that thought she promptly threw up over the side of the bed before calling for a nurse.
Author: x_avecia_x
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Nothing at the moment, maybe a bit of foul language
Word Count: 2,377
Disclaimer: I do not own Community - although I would totally marry Dan Harmon then claim half in our (inevitable) divorce settlement - that is unless he conceeds to my end game Jeff/Annie demands.
Summary: Annie and Jeff deal with the consequences of their attraction.
Author's Note: Ok, this is going to hopefully start off a bit mysterious and then jump back in the second chapter to the references to Halloween in this chapter. I have no idea how this is going to be recieved because I'm acutely aware that I have in no way managed to nail these characters 'voices' as such. But hell I'm just going with it, I'll write it for myself and see how it goes. Enjoy!x
_____
Friday 9th December 2011
Annie woke up and promptly shielded her eyes from the bright lights of what she presumed to be the campus medical centre. The last thing she remembered was standing in the queue for lunch before everything went blank.
She had been feeling a little off for the last few weeks but with the stress of several papers being due before the winter break, stupidly she put it all to the back of her mind and focused on school. If it wasn’t to do with her classes she didn’t want to know.
And that was a decision she was very much regretted when faced with six pairs of worried eyes looking back at her.
‘Oh thank sweet baby Jesus that you’re ok Annie. You’ve been out for the count for the last ten minutes.’
Annie grimaced a little, trying to force out a smile for Shirley as she managed to sit up a little in the bed. The smile came a lot easier when she realized that one of the pairs of eyes staring back at her was Pierce (and the irony of that statement considering everything that had happened at the end of last semester was not lost on her). Maybe, in the ten or so minutes she had missed he had finally decided to rejoin their group.
‘Sorry guys, I don’t remember anything. One minute I was arguing about chicken fingers with that dinner lady who hates Jeff and the next thing I know I’m here. Do they know what happened?’
‘No sweetie,’ Shirley answered, knowing that out of all of them, her Mother Hen qualities were the ones that were likely needed at this point in time - well, that and the fact the rest of that group were totally emotionally inept at being any kind of reassuring.
‘But they did check your blood pressure and ran some blood tests...’ offered Britta who was at the other side of the bed from Shirley.
Well that explained the huge bandage on her left arm at the elbow.
‘...although we don’t know anything else because apparently being a study group doesn’t qualify us as family...’
Judging by the ‘pfft’ Britta added to the end of that sentence Annie was sure she was about to be on the receiving end of a rant about nuclear families being less than the norm these days and the injustice of living in a society that tolerated applying labels to socially acceptable relationships, so with the way Annie’s head was swimming she quickly jumped in to stop her.
‘That’s ok, thanks Britta. I’ll speak to the doctors and will let you know later what’s going on if it’s anything serious.’
Everyone eyed her like she was about to totally freak out, making her feel almost forced to talk but Jeff beat her to it.
‘Are you sure there’s nothing you want to talk about? You don’t usually get sick and it freaked us all out watching what happened. Troy’s only just stopped crying,’ he added as if to emphasize his point.
‘Hey, I’m just a very emotional person!’ Troy retorted, earning a comfort hug from Abed who nodded in agreement, ‘and besides, you weren’t there the first time something freaky happened to her or did you forget me telling you about that time she ran through a plate glass door back in high school? I pee’d my pants that day.’
Annie’s attention was caught by the rapid inhalation of breath from every member of the study group and the low growl of ‘Troy!’ that erupted from Jeff’s mouth. Her mind may have been a touch foggy after coming around from her state of unconsciousness but she was still capable of putting two and two together.
That, and the group were hardly ninjas at being subtle.
‘Wait a minute, you guys think I’ve been taking pills again?’
There was a rush of ‘no’s!’ and ‘of course not’s!’ that trickled off into a sombre silence.
‘Oh my god, you do!’
‘Annie,’ and her head shot in the direction of Pierce, who looked uncharacteristically stricken by this point and the vague memory of ‘you’re my favourite’ became a passing thought in her head, ‘I turned into a dick when I was hooked on my pain meds...’
At which point Jeff groaned and jumped in to avoid Pierce making the situation any worse.
‘No Pierce, you were a dick long before that - the pills just kicked it up to monumental proportions. And just to clarify,’ he continued turning back to face the person lying on the bed, ‘we’re not saying you’re acting like a dick, what we’re saying Annie is that you’ve not been you’re usual Tracy Flick self recently...’
Abed muttered an appreciative ‘nice’ as Jeff continued, ‘...and we’ve learned our lesson from Pierce, and Abed’s endless testimonies on character observations and plot twists. We learned we need to pay attention - so of course it’s going to cross our mind that your previous problems might have been something to do with this.’
Jeff had been trying to be as diplomatic as possible and yeah, maybe she did find it hard asking for help or controlling her urge to just medicate her stress away, but the fact that her friends had so quickly jumped to the conclusion she was using again cut her deep.
‘Thank you for the concern,’ she all but whispered, ‘but for your information I’ve been clean for well over two years now and if any of you had bothered to ask about what was wrong before you jumped to conclusions you might have been surprised to know that I’ve just not been feeling well! It’s winter for heaven’s sake! Have you guys never heard of people catching a cold or maybe even flu?’
The end of her rant finished more on a shout at which point the nursing assistant came in and promptly shooed the group out for causing a disturbance as Annie rubbed her temples, staring at the ceiling. When she finally heard the door click shut and the last murmurs of ‘sorry Annie’ faded away she looked back down and practically jumped out her skin to find Jeff still standing at the foot of the bed.
‘So you really haven’t had a relapse?’
‘Really,’ she sighed wearily, trying to avoid any further eye contact, ‘now can you please just leave?’
‘No.’
Annie groaned and slouched back down on the bed, deciding that if he wouldn’t leave, then she would make it just as painfully difficult for him as possible until he gave up.
‘You do realize this is the first time we’ve been alone since Halloween.’
‘And?’ he shrugged.
‘Just saying...’ she mumbled, her hope that the mere mention of the word ‘Halloween’ would have him running for the door disappeared quickly into the ether.
‘I haven’t been avoiding you if that’s what you’ve been thinking.’
Annie realized then just how terrible she was at internalizing her highly audible snort.
‘Sure you haven’t, just like you didn’t avoid me the entire Summer, the year before last.’
Jeff groaned and moved to take a seat beside her on the bed, then thought better of it when he noticed her death glare, and settled for standing next to her bed.
‘Look I know I haven’t handled things between us particularly well...’
‘Understatement of the year - after I forgave you for ignoring me that entire summer, and for actively going out of your may to meddle in my love life, you practically called me delusional six months ago when I brought up the possibility that you had feelings for me. All I asked was that you tell me, and the rest of the group, what had been going on. And you cleared that one up perfectly for me in one word - nothing. That wasn’t embarrassing at all.’
She sounded like a pathetic, bitter little girl taking a sulk - but dammit, he started it by refusing to leave.
‘Annie, this is a much more complicated conversation than you think and for the record, just like the men’s bathroom, I don’t think the medical centre’s triage room is the place for it.’
Jeff’s tone of talking down to her like she was a child always had a knack of pushing her buttons (and often elicited an ironic display of just how childish she could be, stopping short only of standing there, stamping her feet on the floor and yelling out ‘no’ in the highest pitched scream she could muster).
But she managed to hold back on reaching nuclear explosion territory despite how much of a condescending ass Jeff Winger was being right now.
‘There’s never a right time for talking about us, is there Jeff?’
He looked completely uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation (much like she imagined she might have looked that day when they all watched as Jeff completely refused to give any weight to her argument that there might have been something between them). And it honest to God broke her. He may have made her feel like crap but she never wanted to make him feel that way (even if he totally deserved it).
He stood there completely mute (she’d have to remember to tell the group it was in fact possible to render Jeff Winger speechless - memories of what happened after The Debate pushed firmly back into the box in her brain she’d filed them under ages ago).
‘Look...’ she paused, holding her breath, ‘...in order to avoid yet another epic display of you once again being a jerk, all I want to do is put it all behind me, two summers ago, last year...and Halloween too. I get it. You’re not avoiding me and hopefully you’ll believe me when I tell you I’m not taking drugs to cope with my so-called unrequited feelings for you. It’s all good.’
She tried to pull off a smile that teetered on the edge of breezy but failed miserably when Jeff noticed the smile fade away into a grimace with the blinding pain in her head and tightness in her abdomen. The look on his face of being torn over what to do for her just made her feel even worse.
‘God how pathetic do I sound? You make me sound pathetic Jeff. That’s a new low, even for you.’
‘You don’t sound pathetic Annie, we’re just all really concerned for you. I just thought that after Halloween maybe this was my fault. I suppose I felt guilty - at least, that’s what I think it was, it doesn’t happen very often. You should feel honoured.’
Annie rolled her eyes at the thought of how she was the one lying in a treatment room in Greendale’s medical centre, yet Jeff Winger was still trying to make it about him. But he raised his eyebrows in a way that threatened to draw out a smile from her.
‘Well there’s no need to feel guilty. The only thing that’s wrong with me is feeling a little stressed right now with my assignments - so I should just focus on school, and not let the weekly drama we go through...as a group...’ she added as an afterthought, ‘get to me.’
Annie was relieved that she finally seemed to be getting through to him as he nodded in understanding.
‘So,’ he breathed out, looking a little bit more settled, ‘you’re not relapsing and you don’t hate me?’
‘I’m not going to get out of here and go to the nearest pill pusher. And I don’t hate you Jeff, I just don’t really understand you for the most part.’
‘If I’m honest, sometimes I don’t understand myself either, but I’m sure Abed has some theories,’ he mused, ‘just don’t believe everything he tells you.’
Jeff noticed Annie’s smile that turned into a yawn and moved towards the door to leave, only stopping when she called back out to him.
‘Hey Jeff, how did I get to the medical centre anyway? You know, after passing out.’
He moved back towards the bed and stood even closer to her than he had before.
‘Well after Pierce nearly put his back out bending over to pick you up into a fireman’s lift, I carried you here.’
She went to say something but her brain just finally caught up and processed that last piece of information.
‘Oh,’ and suddenly Annie felt so very wrong for having berated him earlier like he owed her some kind of explanation, but she couldn’t quite get the ‘sorry’ out that might have been more appropriate, but she settled for a ‘thank you, I appreciate what you did.’
And she thinks that it might just be enough for now to keep things ticking along between them, for the sake of their friendship at least.
‘It’s nothing really. After all, I did say that when it comes to you, I’d consider breaking a light sweat. It was barely even that - you should eat more.’
And with that he left. But not before giving her the most affectionate of head pats (making her tense again with anger) before it turned into the back of his fingers trailed down her cheek, lingering for a second before leaving for real that time.
Annie swore things were easier before she ended up at Greendale. It was on days like today that she really wished she was back on Adderall, because maybe then when she inevitably checked herself back into rehab for going crazy she’d have a better excuse than ‘Jeff Winger drove me nuts.’
She wasn’t crazy though, but she felt like she was on her way back there. He’d denied knowing anything about ‘The Annie of It All,’ yet the moment she came back to Greendale for her junior year of college it was back to the same old longing stares and chemistry that Jeff claimed he had with everyone.
She’s pretty sure that all these other people he has chemistry with didn’t get pulled into a dark study room with him on Halloween. She’d have liked to have seen that happen.
Actually, no.
The idea of seeing him with other people like that just made her feel sick again.
And with that thought she promptly threw up over the side of the bed before calling for a nurse.