Gen Short Fics Post, part 1
An Actual Senior Citizen (G, Britta/Pierce friendship) Based on this prompt: Britta is the only one who volunteers to go with Pierce to the hospital to get his casts taken off.
She wasn't expecting him to cry or anything. He's Pierce. She was expecting him to pinch the nurses' asses and tell the doctor he should be working in tech support, not medicine (because the doctor is Indian, geddit? She doesn't have the heart to tell him the doctor is actually Pakistani.)
But he does cry. Having a cast removed is basically the least painful medical procedure since getting your mom to kiss one of your booboos and make it better, but Pierce starts bawling the second he sees the funky scissors the doctor needs to use to cut the casts off.
"Umm, miss," the doctor says. He gestures with the scissors and Pierce flinches. "Can you, um, do something about that, miss?"
"Uhhh," Britta stalls for time, trying to find somewhere to put her purse. Finally she puts it on the floor. Eww, hospital floor. She makes a mental note to Purell the crap out her purse later. Or actually maybe to blackmail Jeff into washing her car by threatening to touch him with it before she Purells it. Yeah, better plan.
"Oh, Brittles," Pierce moans. He is pressed back flat against the bed, which is elevated at an angle that looks like it's torturing his back. In a hospital gown, with his hair all cockeyed, he looks surprisingly old. Pierce in her mind is more like an albino child than an old man, but no, here he is, a man old enough to have dodged the draft, old enough to have made and lost half a dozen fortunes in the short span of her own lifetime. An actual senior citizen, alone. Nobody else wanted to come along to the hospital. They all mysteriously had plans that were both urgent AND vague.
So that's how Britta ends up holding Pierce's hand for the first, and last, time.
***
Doc and Marty (R for language, Pierce/Jeff prequel fic) Based on this prompt: Pierce in his 40's meets Jeff in his teens. The former is a huge player and inspires Jeff to become the man he later becomes. But neither of them remember the encounter when they meet up again in the study group, years later.
Convenience store jobs suck, no question. But that's all Jeff can get, the frickin' weekend swing shift at the gas station down the block from his mom's place. It's usually dead slow between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning, so he can get his homework done and then sleep a little or play his Game Boy. He's probably too old for the Game Boy but whatever, it's his, goddammit, he bought it with his money and he can't leave it at his dad's because it'll disappear, get pawned for Night Train or something. And at least working weekends it's kind of like he has a life. It gets him out of the house. Sometimes girls come in, and sometimes real live women.
One winter Saturday there's a fucking blizzard outside and so everyone's staying home, so Jeff spends a lot of time assessing his acne situation, which should probably be upgraded to an Acne Situation. Then he does his English homework in like ten minutes and makes himself a Suicide Slushie, which is all the flavors mixed together into a vortex of frozen suck. Then this hot rod--no, it's an honest-to-goodness DeLorean, a freaking DeLorean--hops the curb and skids to a stop millimeters away from one of the gas pumps. The driver's door opens like a wing and this old dude pops out. He's wearing a Triple Fat Goose coat like a rapper, even though he's milk white. Jeff confirms the location of the silent alarm button for the millionth time. (He gets nervous, okay. He's thin and tall and basically anything could take him out if it wanted to, except for an actual human girl. Those never want to.)
The guy saunters in, like saunters for real. He has crazy spiked hair, so high it's reaching for the ceiling. He loads up on the following. Seriously, this is an actual list of shit he buys: three boxes of condoms, two boxes of tampons, one air freshener, a fistful of Slim Jims, some Snapple, a road atlas, an umbrella, two gallons of washer fluid, a rain poncho, $60 of scratch-off lotto tickets, some day-old sandwiches, a dozen eggs, ten mustard packets, a Wall Street Journal and a Hustler, a baseball cap that says "Colorado Is For Lovers," and a set of sexy-lady mudflaps. He pays in a combination of credit cards, checks, and handfuls of change. It takes Jeff twenty minutes just to rustle up enough bags and boxes to fit everything, and then the dude tips him fifty bucks to carry it all out to the car. The car, by the way, is filled with the most incredibly hot women Jeff has ever seen outside of the magazines in the top rack. They giggle and laugh and coo and his pants get so uncomfortably tight he thinks he might explode.
When Jeff comes back in the store, the guy, who he is pretty sure is drunk or high or both, is finishing up his trig assignment. "Good luck, shorty," the guy says, sashaying off into the night.
Jeff starts buying hair gel. He tries and tries to replicate the crazy confident guy's hair, spending even more time in the bathroom until he finally gets it right. And that math homework? He gets an A.
***
Like a Rock (G, Abed/Jeff friendship) Based on this prompt: Abed & Jeff go on some sort of adventure. Or really, any Jeff & Abed friendship.
When Abed needs to buy a van so he can finally make his homage to Little Miss Sunshine, the only person he even bothers asking to come help him shop is Jeff. Because Pierce's advice would be ridiculous, Troy would only look at things with racing stripes, and the girls are hopeless. (That's not sexist, two of them don't even have cars, and Shirley's minivan is almost older than Annie.)
"Umm, sure," Jeff demurs, sliding his phone into his pocket. Abed's pretty sure he could ask Jeff to help him pan for gold in the Ron Howard Memorial Fountain (across from the Luis Guzman statue, and don't tell the Dean that Ron Howard's not dead, or he'll start hyperventilating) right now and Jeff would agree. He met some girl at the Apple store and all he does is text now. That and curse about the dropped calls.
At the dealership Abed finds the perfect van, a Volkswagen in good shape, and it's even yellow like the one in the movie. He sits in the back and imagines he's Paul Dano, his heart broken and wind in his hair. "You get in the driver's seat," he tells Jeff. "You're Greg Kinnear."
Jeff shakes his head but does it. "I've been called worse."
"Now flip out," Abed instructs. "You're getting pulled over by a cop and your dead father's body is in the back. Flip out but without yelling or getting intense or anything."
"That's not how I flip out, Abed."
"You're Greg Kinnear." Patiently.
Jeff sighs. He turns back to look out the windshield, gripping the steering wheel. After a moment or two he sighs again, more loudly.
"That's perfect," Abed says. He switches seats.
"What the hell are you doing, Abed?" Jeff asks, looking in the rearview mirror.
"Nothing," Abed says, and continues sitting like he's a little girl in shorts and cowboy boots. "I'm going to need you to get in the passenger seat."
Jeff does, contorting his long body over the lump of the transmission. "Now what?"
"Pretend you're Toni Collette."
***
Hot Ashes For Trees (R for language, Britta prequel fic) Based on this prompt: britta's high school days
Her favorite spot in the whole school is the second-floor bathroom overlooking the shitty little courtyard. She goes there first thing every morning, after her mom drops her off, which is too fucking embarrassing because her mom's car is basically a rusty tin can. The windows can be jiggered open for optimum cigarette-smoke venting, and someone equally as bored as Britta is slowly helping her cover one of the stall walls with the lyrics to Wish You Were Here.
Britta perches on the windowsill, blowing smoke out the window, looking at her handwriting and the stranger's handwriting mixing on the wall. They both use black Sharpies, it looks like, but the other girl (presumably it's a girl, all the dudes at Britta's school are either meatheads or math geeks, and besides this is a ladies' room) prints in all caps. Britta's cursive is aggressive and fluid. The wall looks like the product of a schizophrenic. It's the most interesting thing about this mid-century concrete block shithole.
Cigarette finished, Britta tosses the butt outside and then leans her face out into the fresh air for the moment. Mountains ring the city, hem her in. The sky is a million miles high. With a sigh she leaps down from the sill, her heavy Docs clomping onto the floor and the spikes on her mohawk shuddering with the impact. Another fucking day in this fucking place. Welcome to the machine.
***
Room 303 (G, Troy futurefic) Based on this prompt: TROY GROWS UP TO BE A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER
The first day he can get into his room (and how cool is that, man, his room, his very own classroom) Troy gets in there and opens the blinds up and lets in all the light he can. It's just a room, four walls, a floor, a ceiling, some furniture. But he can see it in his mind already: the bulletin boards where he'll pin their art, the sand and water tables where they'll work on their fine motor development, the carpet squares they'll sit on when he reads them stories before naptime.
The second thing he does is unpack the cardboard box full of things his friends gave him at graduation. There's a sundial from Pierce, "so the little ankle-biters can learn to tell time like real men." There are well-used cookie cutters from Shirley, perfect for the play kitchen he's going to put in one corner. From Jeff there's a little fake-wood placard that says "Mr. Barnes," and Troy can't help but smile when he puts it on his desk. His desk. Britta gave him a huge stack of CDs of cool kids music, the Barenaked Ladies and Kanye West's poorly-received collaboration with Raffi among them. Annie's gift was a huge bag of personalized pencils and stationery and scratch-and-sniff stickers and gold stars; they go right in the top desk drawer, where he'll always be able to get to them.
Last out of the box is Abed's gift: a signed copy of Oh The Places You'll Go. Signed by Abed, that is. Troy sits down in his desk chair (again: his desk chair) to read the inscription one more time.
For Troy, for all the places you'll go. Just watch out for where the sidewalk ends. And don't eat any green eggs and ham. Give them to any very hungry caterpillars you run into out there in the big world. Good luck, we love you.
***
As Seen on TV (R for language, Britta gen) Based on a throwaway comment I made about what Britta's job might be.
It was only supposed to be for the holidays: selling Snuggies at a kiosk in the mall could only ever be the most temporary of temporary jobs. But there are no jobs in Greendale and Britta needs to make rent and the only good thing about this job is that it is in the shitty mall, so none of her friends every come here. (Anarchists avoid malls on principle, and the study group people go to the other mall because it has a Target attached to it and that's everyone's favorite store, except for Pierce, who has an inexplicable fascination with Sears.)
Anyway. The kiosk is called As Seen On TV. Britta's pay stubs literally say As Seen On TV. Shit is ridiculous. She spends most of her shifts slumped bored on a stool, texting people or playing Words With Friends and sometimes re-enacting the "I'm squishing your head" sketches from Kids in the Hall, vainly hoping that someone will recognize what she's doing and nerdily whisk her away from this madness.
Here are the people who buy Snuggies: moms. Grandmoms. Teen moms. And, very rarely: stoners.
Mom-types can tell that Britta needs a mom, and this is like, magnetism for their mom-ions or whatever. Stoners can tell that she's lit up a few in her day, and every now and then she gets a nickel bag on commission, which is nothing to complain about. But the moms...the moms are bad. Guilt-trip city.
"Do you think this would be a good Christmas present?" A mom asks, holding the sample Snuggie up critically, as if it is more than what it looks like, which is a handful of child-laborer-made acrylic.
"Oh, it's a great Christmas present. Very popular," Britta replies. She smacks her gum, can't help it.
"Oh, well I don't want to get something too popular. I'm trying to be 'hip' this year."
People who use air quotes can never be hip, lady, Britta thinks. "It's kind of ironic to get one of those. Irony is totally..." she starts to say awesome or cool but decides to shoot the moon. "Totally rad."
"Hmmm..." the woman hands the Snuggie back to Britta, who gingerly folds it. She's like allergic to them or something, they make her forearms break out in a rash. The woman picks up a boxed Snuggie, begins to read the total bullshit plastered all over it.
"Well let me know if you need anything," Britta says. She has to basically climb up into the damn stool, no, scale it like it's the goddamn Matterhorn.
Her phone buzzes. It's a text from Jeff: Troma marathon at Abed's. U in? Stop at market first, we need beer, chips, cocktail wienies.
Britta sighs, very loudly, and the woman who is taking forty-five goddamn minutes to decide whether or not she should buy a flammable plastic sack with a zipper for one or more of her children huffs even more loudly, scandalized. Britta rolls her eyes, thumbs flying over her phone's keyboard. Stuck at work for approx. next century. Have fun trying to have fun without me.
***
A Greendale Faculty Meeting (G) Based on a discussion about things people wanted to see on the show.
"First of all," Duncan starts, before anyone else has even finished adding things (sugar, creamer, 5 Hour Energy, Bailey's) to their coffee. Duncan drinks tea, Earl Gray, hot; this takes zero seconds to prepare and so he usually begins the meetings. Someone in the back of the room groans Not this shit again. I would like to say thank you to the Dean for finally switching all datekeeping at Greendale to the Continental style. Way to class up the place, Dean, cheers!"
"Oh, well, thank you, Professor Duncan, and cheers to you!" The two men air-clank their respective mugs at each other from across the room, and the Dean adds a flourishing bow that sloshes the foam off the top of his cup and down to the floor. He rubs at the spot with the toe of one wingtip, just making the problem worse. "Anyway, yes, here at Greendale we are doing things a la mode, as they say,"
"No one says that," someone pipes up crossly. "That's for pie, not calendars."
"Marjorie, make a note, that's one strike against the French department. Keep it up, Madame Robespierre, and I'll have to ask you to leave the room again, s'il-vous plait," The Dean takes his place at the podium, adjusts his glasses, and shuffles a tremendous pile of papers waiting there for him. "Now. It's almost Valentine's Day, and you know what that means!"
Silence. Maybe a cricket or two. "You know what that means!" The Dean trills fiercely, and all of a sudden the door of Conference Room 2B is thrown open so hard that it bangs off the opposite wall and loudly shuts again. A muffled curse is heard, and then the door opens again and the Human Being steps inside, carrying a struggling puppy. Both are covered head to toe in raspberry jam, although the puppy is making a lot of headway clearing off the Human Being with his tongue.
"What in the blue blazes?" Professor Whitman stands up, and then climbs onto his chair for a better view. The entire Culinary Arts faculty rolls its eight collective eyes.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you the heart of our campus: the Human Being!"
The Human Being looks around and smile-grimaces at them all.
"The actual, literal heart, I mean," the Dean continues. "That's what the jam is for, right? The blood? The heart of our campus? Human Being, go on and distribute the flyers, so we can make sure everyone understands. I'll take the puppy, okay? Come here, Snookums!"
The Human Being drops the puppy, and it bounds over to the Dean, immediately smearing jam and fur all over his shirt. He doesn't seem to mind. The Human Being begins handing out sticky flyers it extracts from a jam-covered satchel.
"This is a joke, right?" It's Professor Duncan, oddly enough, who is the voice of sanity this time. "You're going to have a jammy ghost walk around campus in an attempt to raise awareness for heart disease?"
"What's more heart-healthy than a brisk stroll across our beautifully landscaped campus?"
"Our campus was landscaped by colorblind prisoners on a work detail from the drunk tank at the county jail," someone reminds him, but is ignored.
"What's the puppy for?" Whitman asks. He's standing with his arms crossed and his tie, somehow, over both of his arms. It's very weird.
"Oh, well, you know, we still have all the puppies from the puppy parade. Aren't they cute? I've been keeping them in my office so I can keep an eye on their housebreaking progress." The Dean holds the puppy up by its armpits and it looks around anxiously in an eerie recreation of the Human Being's look moments before. "Snookums here is one of the prodigies of the litter!"
Of course Snookums chooses that moment to pee everywhere. Fortunately it only takes a janitor five minutes to get pee and raspberry jam out of the carpet. This is Greendale. He's had to remove that combination before.
***
Mouse Blazer (G, ensemble) Based on this wacky prompt: britta makes money by making and selling tiny animal outtfits on ebay. the gang goes over to her house for something or other and troy finds her work room. hilarity ensues.
Britta's apartment is closest to the bowling alley and so that's where they go after kicking the chess club's ass at Rock-n-Bowl. Unfortunately Britta's apartment is also the size and temperature of a refrigerator.
"Britta! What's the meaning of this? Are you poor, too?" Pierce asks, wrapping his scarf more tightly.
"It's okay, Britta," Annie says, slinging a supportive arm around Britta. "Your place looks really cute!"
"Is your thermostat set at a negative number?" Jeff asks, zipping up his jacket.
"The landlord controls the thermostat," Britta replies tightly. "Welcome to my home, guys. I'd give you a tour, but you can see all of it already."
Abed is already rifling through Britta's DVD stash. "'Idiocracy'--on the Wilson Brothers Scale, not as good as 'Bottle Rocket,' but it'll do."
They settle in for the movie, crammed onto Britta's couch and beanbags. Quarters are close, which is good, because it's so cold. Annie and Shirley are wearing their mittens and holding hands, and Jeff has deigned to put on Pierce's tweedy driving cap. This looks exactly as ridiculous as you might expect.
Britta is rustling up snacks when Troy comes into the kitchen. "Uhh, where's the bathroom, Britta? Do I have to pee in the sink?"
Britta rolls her eyes. "See that thing that looks like a shutter? It's a door. The bathroom's in there."
"Oh, cool," He takes a handful of vegan goldfish crackers and heads off, and then a moment later lets out a shriek of either pure joy or pure terror.
Abed jumps off the couch and into a judo pose. "Troy!"
"Damn, Britta!" Troy calls. "You a freak, girl!"
"I knew it!" Pierce hops up, the others on his heels.
"What in the Jame Gumb?" Jeff says, peering over everyone else's heads into the nook off the bathroom. "Is this when we find out you're a serial killer who specializes in killing really tiny midgets and then building a shrine out of their belongings?"
"Seen that, not as good as it sounds," Abed says dismissvely. "This looks more like a crime scene on CSI: Lilliput."
"Guys, relax," Britta herds them away, batting a tiny baseball uniform out of Troy's hands. "I'm not a serial killer. I make miniature clothes and sell them online. It's not exactly lucrative but it helps pay the rent."
"Um, Britta? Why does this argyle sweater have five armholes?" Shirley holds up the sweater, painstakingly knit in a preppy bubblegum pink and lime green color scheme.
Six pairs of questioning eyes all turn to her. Britta pushes her mouth to the side, waffling. "Uh. It's...it's a dog sweater, okay?"
"I should have known it," Pierce says. "First the frog in the sombrero, then the cat in the tie, then the dragon-turtle costume."
"What? That costume was for me, not an animal."
"It fits your pattern. Profiled!" Pierce makes finger guns at Britta, blowing on the tips of his index fingers theatrically.
"Um, Pierce, what are you doing?" Troy asks.
"New catchphrase I'm working on. What did you think?"
This being the study group, everyone has an opinion, but Jeff reins them in. "Guys, wait. One weirdo topic at a time. So, Britta, if I wanted to buy, say, a blazer for my mouse or suspenders for my chinchilla, where might I find your online store?"
Britta sighs again and looks away. "Etsy dot com slash house pet liberation front. And I'll thank you in advance for not giving me any crap about that, Man With Novelty Law-Themed Vanity Plates."
Shirley whips out her phone. "I'm gonna bookmark that, Britta. You know my boys have been telling me that their hamster is going bald. Maybe a tiny hat would help Hammy feel less embarrassed."
Troy laughs. "Yeah, and Annie's Boobs sometimes get cold. Annie's Boobs could use a sweater."
Annie and Britta immediately commence a fast-paced and thoroughly footnoted oral feminist treatise on the inappropriateness of naming your monkey after your friend's body parts, but through it all, Britta is grinning.
*
Once they're all settled in again, warming frozen extremities with mugs of hot cocoa, Troy looks over at Abed. "What do you think, man? 'Mouse Blazer' would be a great name for the Troy and Abed in the Morning house band!"
***
Big Head Jeff & The Monsters (R, parody, ensemble) Based on the prompt: I WANT AU FIC WHERE THEY'RE A BAND
Big Head Jeff and the Monsters blows up huge on the blogosphere almost the moment they release their remix of Ke$ha's Tik Tok
on SoundCloud. The invitation to Coachella follows soon after. In three weeks they go from study room hijinx to hookers and those designer drugs that are sold as bath salts at convenience stores. Six months after that it's the cover of Rolling Stone. They're all naked on the cover, even Pierce and Shirley, all of them zonked out on Xanax, smearing peanut butter all over each other because Annie Liebovitz told them to.
The inevitable backlash begins when their original songs prove highly-derivative of the themselves-highly-derivative songs featured on Glee. Troy goes solo and Abed defects with him, and even though Disco Spider is a terrible name for a band made up solely of a rapper and a bass player, they're still the most successful of them all. Shirley disappears completely. No joke, no one can find her after she changes all of her Facebook photos to .jpg'ed snippets of the Book of Revelations. There's a rumor that she's joined a cult and is preparing for the coming nuclear apocalypse somewhere in the deserts of Utah, but nobody cares enough to investigate except for some overinvested fans on the internet.
Pierce takes some bad acid at Burning Man and dies three weeks later, having read Into the Wild shortly before dropping the acid and attempting to recreate Chris McCandless' journey after. Attempting to recreate Chris McCandless' journey only in a more hardcore and better-funded fashion, which means: Antarctica. January. Nude. His cremains are shot into orbit on the first Russian commercial space flight, as specified in his will. There is no funeral, and very little mourning.
For a while, Jeff, Britta, and Annie tour as The Threesomes, a sort of twee acoustic indie band that is usually called She and Him and She in alternative newspaper headlines. The sex is amazing, but life on the road takes its toll, and they split up when it turns out everyone in the band who can get pregnant is, and everyone in the band with the ability to be a father is.
Things are complicated. The children need a lot of therapy. And sometimes, watching 4D SpaceTV™ (copyright 2019, ComNBCUniversalCast.com, LLC) and drinking Starbucks Brand Trenta Soylent Green, the children see the crazy lives of people on situation comedies and think, my life would be so much better if I was on TV.
***
The Long Way Home (G, Annie/Britta friendship) Based on this prompt: more about Annie and Britta's shopping trips!
This is the way it usually goes: Annie texts her way too early on a Saturday morning, Britta showers and then blow-dries her hair into submission, and when she's halfway dressed she'll hear Annie's car horn wheezing in the street below her apartment.
On the way to the mall they'll stop at the Starbucks drive-through and Britta will order a large coffee with soy milk and two sugars and Annie will convert that to Starbucks-speech for the attendant, and they'll split a vegetarian breakfast sandwich because the protein will give them the energy to make the long walk from the parking lot to the actual mall. Inside the mall there's both an Auntie Anne's AND a Mrs. Field's, and shopping is tough, you need complex carbs to survive a sample sale at Nothing But Shoes--but they always go to Forever 21 first, and Britta bites back everything she could say about shoddily-manufactured third-world goods and the terrible implications they have across multiple levels of both culture and society. What can she say, she's a sucker for cheap v-neck t-shirts.
Annie's kryptonite is the bookstore, and mall bookstores are usually bottomless pits of despair, but this one is actually both independently-run and classy, which means that after the early-afternoon sugar crash they usually drag themselves over there, grab handfuls of magazines, and spend an hour or two in matching armchairs, resting their feet on each other's laps and occasionally sharing choice tidbits from Bust (Britta), the New York Times Book Review (Annie), Mother Jones (Britta), National Review (Annie), and then there is always a shared perusal of National Geographic, which reminds Britta of her childhood because she loved the photos and which reminds Annie of her childhood because she loved the articles. Without fail they both always pick up something from the remainder bin. They have a little book club going with Shirley. It's nice to have a just-the-girls thing, and the boys apparently use that time to cultivate their facial hair or come up with pranks or maybe do both at the same time.
Saturday afternoons the mall gets crowded with teenagers, so that means it's time to catch a movie, overdose on the yellow salt that masquerades as popcorn, throw Sour Patch Kids at the screen during the stupid or scary parts. Then it's more shopping, the fancy department stores this time, getting sprayed with perfume samples and then walking all over, repeatedly smelling their wrists to see how the scents evolve over time. There's new lipsticks to try and there's Britta's traditional tirade about how the whole purpose of makeup is to make a woman's mouth look like a simulacrum of a vagina, during which tirade she always gets overly loud and excited and Annie will have to calm her down by pointing out a really cute purse.
By then they're usually broke, and halfheartedly regretting whatever they spent, even though neither one has ever actually returned anything bought on one of these trips. Sometimes Britta even falls asleep as Annie's driving her home, and Annie will smile to herself, and take the long way.
***
Hawthorne (R) Based on this prompt: since it was hinted at in a very misleading spoiler: i want a drabble where pierce is actually jeff's biological dad (Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking missing moment)
So Jeff used to date this girl who worked in an office and who kind of looked like the nebbishly-hot girl on that show The Office, so if he was over there on a Thursday night they would watch it and he would do his best Halpert impression and then he would put a new coversheet on her TPS report, if you catch that drift.
Anyway one time the creepy old dude on that show was talking about how a man might have slipped in once. Which is basically what his mom tells him when she comes for her biennial visit. They're in a shitty bar in the valley and his mom is chain smoking, her fuchsia lipstick smeared all over the butts heaped in the ashtray, and they're both at the simmering-gently level of drunk when she tells him that the seventies were a weird time and she doesn't know any other way to tell him other than that one night at a party she did some lines and thus his dad might not be his dad. Well okay, it's not exactly like what happened to that creepy old dude but that's the connection his schnockered brain makes. Someone else slipped in.
"Who was it?" Jeff asks, looking at his mother's Long Island Iced Tea and absolutely fucking hating it, just so much disgust piling up for that unclassy drink and the unclassy woman drinking it. She's dripping with cheap jewelry and wearing a raccoon coat (seriously) and she has his upturned nose and frankly great cheekbones, so geriatric horndogs were eyeing her when they came in, and uggh. He motions for another drink. He needs another drink BAD. He doesn't need a father so who cares who is father is. He is Jeff Winger, a fucking grownup, okay, MOM, and no thanks to you, either.
"Jeffrey." His mom rolls her eyes, obviously thinking That was so long ago and there are so many Long Island Iced Teas between me and now and then. "He only told me his last name."
"Stop drawing it out, alright? Spit it out! Get it over with!" The rage that came so quickly to hand in that parking lot with Pierce feels palpable beneath his skin. He looks down at the fist he's unthinkingly made, at the way it makes veins stick out in his forearm. "Just tell me."
His mother lights one cigarette from another, stabs the butt out with unexpected ferocity. "I think it was Hawthorne."
***
Catharsis: Nature's Way of Telling You to Grow the Hell Up (R, Pierce/Abed friendship) Based on this prompt: I WANT THE CONVERSATION WHERE PIERCE ROPED ABED INTO HIS SCHEME. (Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking missing scene)
Abed is in the cafeteria, storyboarding a video profile for Garrett's latest adventure in online dating, when Pierce swoops into the opposite side of the booth. He is balancing two coffees on top of his portfolio and Abed grabs both before Pierce can drop them or try to juggle them or otherwise make a mess.
"Aybed, my good man. What a surprise to find you here just when I happen to have a spare cup of nature's jet fuel."
"Jet fuel is nature's jet fuel," Abed replies, and sips experimentally. It's hot and brown, just as advertised. "How can I help you today?"
Pierce takes a neatly-collated sheaf of photocopies out of his portfolio and pushes it across the table. Abed leafs through it, at times re-orienting it so the illustrations make more sense, although it's not necessarily an appreciable difference. "This is my Master Plan," Pierce says.
Abed raises an eyebrow. He's sure he heard capitals letters in there somewhere. "You know who else had a Master Plan--"
"Jimmy Carter is not relevant to this conversation, Aybed. Do you need something to help you focus? I thought coffee would be enough for someone of your obviously weak constitution, but I'm sure there's something in my pill case that would work, as long as we use the pill splitter."
Abed pushes his coffee back across the table, just in case. "Pierce, what do you want? The group is kind of mad at you now, I don't know if you've noticed, and an alliance with you would threaten my status as the Lovable Oddball. I'm only a few quirks away from being a Stamp Collecting Headcase."
Pierce puts on his game face, clears his throat, and delivers his pitch. "Aybed, this is what I'm saying. We're not stamp collectors, we're emasculated predators. We need to be running wild!" There's a hand gesture here that almost knocks the hat off the dude in the booth behind theirs.
"You're projecting, Pierce. I'm not emasculated."
"Yeah? When was the last time the group let you make your own decisions about chasing skirts? Or let me pick my own damn meals? They discount us because they think you were born yesterday and and I was born so many yesterdays ago that I might as well be dead!" He slams the table for emphasis, and Abed wonders if Jeff learned that from Pierce or vice versa. The echo of a real family within their makeshift family is fascinating.
Meanwhile Pierce is still fillibustering, and Abed has to admit that Pierce has a Congress-level gift for rousing pedantry. And somewhere around the page with the Venn diagram titled Study Group Members and their Psychological Weaknesses, where he sees his own name, along with Jeff's, Britta's, and Pierce's, entirely enclosed in the circle labeled Daddy Issues, Abed decides to go along with it. "Despite the evidence of a possible psychotic episode here, indicated by the obscene marginalia and the obsessive-compulsive cataloging of every group member's daily routine, I see the potential for character growth, Pierce," he says.
Pierce shows off his most diabolical smile. "Character growth? This is catharsis! Nature's way of telling you to grow the hell up!"
***
A Complicated Person (R for language, Troy/Abed friendship, dark) Based on this prompt: COULD YOU DO FIC ABOUT ABED FILMING TROY CRYING? (Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking missing scene)
Levar Burton being there sucks, having his brain in a panic loop like it was that one time when his arm got stuck inside a Pringles can sucks, but the thing that sucks the most? Is Abed, on the other side of the camera.
When Troy's done crying, and the reality that the coolness beneath his damp face is the tile floor of a hospital bathroom hits him, he looks up, expecting Abed to put aside the camera and fist bump him or at least tell him about a similar scene from a movie, maybe that scene where Conan the Barbarian first gets enslaved, you know, a scene all about foreshadowing heroic redemption, but all Abed does is leave the room.
"Fuck you, Abed," Troy tells the door as it closes, and then he cries a little more, but there's anger behind it this time, like after the keg flip when he'd realized that he'd just taken something he loved out of his own reach. That he'd cockblocked his own happiness.
When Troy goes back to the waiting room, the girls want to know why his hand is all messed up, knuckles bleeding, but he doesn't tell them about punching the bathroom wall so hard he'd dented it right beside the Wash Your Hands If You Don't Want Everyone You Love To Die From A Drug-Resistant MRSA Infection poster. He tells them that he slipped in the parking lot, but he's not sure they believe him.
Later Abed asks him to film a talking head.
"I'm more than a talking head, man," Troy tells him. "I am a complicated person with complicated thoughts and emoTIONS!" He loses a little control at the end, and the nurses and orderlies, who obviously have no idea why strangers and cameras have been all up in their break room all day, shake their heads at the noise.
"I don't understand what the problem is, Troy."
That's what the problem is, Abed."
***
The Adventures of Abed Nadir (PG, Abed gen) Based on the prompt: Pretty much anything with Abed and Gobi, he always seemed like a fun character.
Nights the falafel shop is open: all of them.
Nights the falafel shop is busy: Friday and Saturday, because there's a movie theater next door.
Abed's earliest memories are the sounds of movies filtering up to his room above the theater: lasers and gunshots and spaceships and cowboys and voices professing love, hate, laughter. He didn't start speaking until really late, the kind of late that made everyone worried about him, and while he was building up his words inside of himself he would lie with an ear on the carpet in his room, so he could hear and feel the voices below. When he finally spoke it was in complete sentences, and he could mimic any accent perfectly. That was when he started to be put in special classes, when his dad started losing his hair.
When Abed was in high school, manning the fryers with one hand and doing his homework with the other, he took a hand drill and made the tiniest hole in the wall above the bank of fryers, so he could see and hear whatever was playing. It was weird, he and his dad never actually went to the movies, but movies suffused their pores like the scent of canola oil. Gobi really liked Westerns, gritty dark ones like Unforgiven and Tombstone, but Abed really liked cheesy comedies, the Mighty Ducks movies and even the last gasps of the Major League franchise as it limped along toward a merciful killing.
Abed knew that if you plotted these two likes on a Venn diagram, never the twain would they meet, and that made him sad in an abstract way, in the way that he felt things, like his emotions were there, just playing in the theater next door. That was what he told the school therapist, anyway, and she nodded and said hmm and continued to give him things to practice, like mimeographed worksheets with drawings of faces on them, and little lines under the faces where he was supposed to fill in the emotion the face was displaying. It felt like busywork, like all his other homework, but he did it anyway.
Abed and Gobi didn't go to the movies, but there was always a TV going in the kitchen, barely audible above the snapping oil and the barked orders in English and Arabic, and one night a show came on that fit perfectly in the Venn diagram: The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.
"What is this garbage?!" Gobi snapped, looking up from the prep table where he was shredding lettuce.
Abed just shook his head mutely, staring rapt at the screen, at the cartoonish face of the man in the cowboy hat.
When the first commercial break began, Abed suddenly realized that for several minutes nothing had happened except for he and his father, watching television. No yelling, no cooking, no distraction. And his homework helped him realize the expression on his father's face: happiness.
A month or two later, they were in the kitchen, of course, when Abed handed Gobi a cardboard box with the shipping labels on it, postmarked The Genuine O.K. Corral.
"What is this?"
"Happy birthday, Dad." Abed had trouble with his father's expression this time: there were tears, maybe, but his mouth wasn't curved in a sad way, and besides his father's normal expression was hard to decipher.
Gobi opened the box, peeled back the layers of tissue paper. Inside lay a brand new, guaranteed authentic cowboy hat. His father let out a noise, also unidentifiable, and Abed cocked his head, concentrating, trying to figure out what his father was feeling.
The ensuing hug made it clear.
***
One of the World's Top Ten Huggers (PG, Shirley/Britta/Annie friendship, very fluffy) Based on this prompt: I want Annie/Britta friendship, preferably where they both agree that Jeff is a dickhead. I don't really care how contrived it is, just give me ladies being awesome. Shirley would be a welcome addition if you feel so inclined.
"I just really want him to get his comeuppance, Britta. He can't mess around with people like that all the time. He strung us both along just because 'Little Jeff' told him to!"
"Relax, Annie, you're starting to spit more than Glen Beck!" Britta grabs for Annie's wildly flailing hands, which is dangerous because not only are Britta's nails still wet, but Annie's holding a brush and bottle of very expensive organic nail polish that Britta had to order off the internet from, like, Uzbekistan, and it took forever to get here and when it got here she realized her monitor wasn't calibrated right and the color was more chartreuse than...well than a color Britta actually likes. "It's not about Jeff getting his comeuppance. This isn't the Simpsons, he's not Homer. This is real life, and karma will come back and bite him in the ass, and we don't need to do anything to help it."
"Karma? Karma?! We're not in Tibet, Britta."
"Yeah, and if we were, we'd be more worried about the Dalai Lama than about some jackhole who sometimes wants to put his tongue in our mouths."
Annie shudders. "You make it sound cheap and gross."
Britta sighs, and wants to rub at the bridge of her nose, but. Wet nails. "It wasn't cheap and gross, okay? It was grownups doing what grownups do. We're not bad people for getting sucked in by his charm. We can stay friends with him."
"That seems weird. Can people really do that? I mean, can people really move beyond those...feelings?" Annie finally puts the brush back in the bottle, so Britta puts her hands back on the table and Annie begins to wave a piece of paper in their general direction. Organic polish, they learned earlier, takes a long time to dry, and Annie still needs a few touch-ups.
"People do it all the time," Britta says.
Annie raises an eyebrow. "How do you know Dildopolis' motto?"
Britta rolls her eyes. "I get around, okay? Sheesh. Anyway, trust me. Things will be more awkward than usual for a while, but soon we'll all be back to driving the Dean crazy and barely passing Anthropology together."
"Speak for yourself, I'm carrying an A in that class."
"Damn, girl!" Shirley comes back in the living room, carrying a tray piled high with fresh cookies, a pitcher of mimosas, and three glasses. "You need to help us out! Those boys can't study to save their lives!"
"I know that, Shirley! I caught Troy making up mnemonic devices for his own name. For his own name!"
Britta laughs and experimentally taps one nail against her glass, happy when the polish doesn't smear. She grabs a handful of cookies--Shirley's cookies are insanely good when they're still warm, and the whole house smells like what Britta imagines heaven must smell like. "This is really nice, you guys," she says, caught up in a little wave of hard-won happiness.
"Yeah!" Shirley throws her arms out and Annie and Britta jump into them, and Shirley, in addition to being an amazing baker, is one of the world's top ten huggers. It must be a mom thing.
"Thanks for having us over," Annie says, once they're all back sprawled on the couch, watching Party Down (Shirley doesn't like the profanity, but they all like Adam Scott). "I never got invited to sleepovers when I was in school."
"And none of the sleepovers I ever got invited to had champagne," Britta says, clinking glasses with the other two.
"Oh!" Shirley suddenly jumps up and rushes back to the kitchen "I forgot!"
When Annie turns to Britta, she's grinning. "I'm so glad that this Jeff thing didn't ruin the study group, or our friendship, Britta. I've never had friends like this before. People who like me for me! It's amazing!"
"Oh, Annie!" Britta jumps down to that end of the couch and sits crosslegged, facing Annie, one hand on her shoulder. "We'll always be friends. Women stick together!"
"Uh, what are you two getting up to?" Shirley asks from the doorway, and Britta makes a mental note that the next issue she and Annie need to tackle is Shirley's latent homophobia, but then she sees the bowls on Shirley's tray.
"Oh! Chips and homemade guacamole! Awesome, Shirley!"
Shirley sits down, and Annie clears a place on the coffee table for the tray. Britta grabs a chip and has it dipped and in her mouth before she sees Shirley's face--tastes what's in her mouth--spits it out.
"That's not guacamole, Britta. It's a face mask, my mother's recipe. It helps stimulate your pores!"
Britta sucks down half a mimosa. "Right now all it's doing is stimulating my gag reflex!" Suddenly Britta is aware that Annie is laughing at them, a stream of pealing giggles that turns into an out-and-out tsunami of belly laughs. At first Shirley's just smiling, but then her smiles breaks wide and becomes laughter.
As soon as she gets the taste out of her mouth, Britta joins in, too.
***
She wasn't expecting him to cry or anything. He's Pierce. She was expecting him to pinch the nurses' asses and tell the doctor he should be working in tech support, not medicine (because the doctor is Indian, geddit? She doesn't have the heart to tell him the doctor is actually Pakistani.)
But he does cry. Having a cast removed is basically the least painful medical procedure since getting your mom to kiss one of your booboos and make it better, but Pierce starts bawling the second he sees the funky scissors the doctor needs to use to cut the casts off.
"Umm, miss," the doctor says. He gestures with the scissors and Pierce flinches. "Can you, um, do something about that, miss?"
"Uhhh," Britta stalls for time, trying to find somewhere to put her purse. Finally she puts it on the floor. Eww, hospital floor. She makes a mental note to Purell the crap out her purse later. Or actually maybe to blackmail Jeff into washing her car by threatening to touch him with it before she Purells it. Yeah, better plan.
"Oh, Brittles," Pierce moans. He is pressed back flat against the bed, which is elevated at an angle that looks like it's torturing his back. In a hospital gown, with his hair all cockeyed, he looks surprisingly old. Pierce in her mind is more like an albino child than an old man, but no, here he is, a man old enough to have dodged the draft, old enough to have made and lost half a dozen fortunes in the short span of her own lifetime. An actual senior citizen, alone. Nobody else wanted to come along to the hospital. They all mysteriously had plans that were both urgent AND vague.
So that's how Britta ends up holding Pierce's hand for the first, and last, time.
***
Doc and Marty (R for language, Pierce/Jeff prequel fic) Based on this prompt: Pierce in his 40's meets Jeff in his teens. The former is a huge player and inspires Jeff to become the man he later becomes. But neither of them remember the encounter when they meet up again in the study group, years later.
Convenience store jobs suck, no question. But that's all Jeff can get, the frickin' weekend swing shift at the gas station down the block from his mom's place. It's usually dead slow between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning, so he can get his homework done and then sleep a little or play his Game Boy. He's probably too old for the Game Boy but whatever, it's his, goddammit, he bought it with his money and he can't leave it at his dad's because it'll disappear, get pawned for Night Train or something. And at least working weekends it's kind of like he has a life. It gets him out of the house. Sometimes girls come in, and sometimes real live women.
One winter Saturday there's a fucking blizzard outside and so everyone's staying home, so Jeff spends a lot of time assessing his acne situation, which should probably be upgraded to an Acne Situation. Then he does his English homework in like ten minutes and makes himself a Suicide Slushie, which is all the flavors mixed together into a vortex of frozen suck. Then this hot rod--no, it's an honest-to-goodness DeLorean, a freaking DeLorean--hops the curb and skids to a stop millimeters away from one of the gas pumps. The driver's door opens like a wing and this old dude pops out. He's wearing a Triple Fat Goose coat like a rapper, even though he's milk white. Jeff confirms the location of the silent alarm button for the millionth time. (He gets nervous, okay. He's thin and tall and basically anything could take him out if it wanted to, except for an actual human girl. Those never want to.)
The guy saunters in, like saunters for real. He has crazy spiked hair, so high it's reaching for the ceiling. He loads up on the following. Seriously, this is an actual list of shit he buys: three boxes of condoms, two boxes of tampons, one air freshener, a fistful of Slim Jims, some Snapple, a road atlas, an umbrella, two gallons of washer fluid, a rain poncho, $60 of scratch-off lotto tickets, some day-old sandwiches, a dozen eggs, ten mustard packets, a Wall Street Journal and a Hustler, a baseball cap that says "Colorado Is For Lovers," and a set of sexy-lady mudflaps. He pays in a combination of credit cards, checks, and handfuls of change. It takes Jeff twenty minutes just to rustle up enough bags and boxes to fit everything, and then the dude tips him fifty bucks to carry it all out to the car. The car, by the way, is filled with the most incredibly hot women Jeff has ever seen outside of the magazines in the top rack. They giggle and laugh and coo and his pants get so uncomfortably tight he thinks he might explode.
When Jeff comes back in the store, the guy, who he is pretty sure is drunk or high or both, is finishing up his trig assignment. "Good luck, shorty," the guy says, sashaying off into the night.
Jeff starts buying hair gel. He tries and tries to replicate the crazy confident guy's hair, spending even more time in the bathroom until he finally gets it right. And that math homework? He gets an A.
***
Like a Rock (G, Abed/Jeff friendship) Based on this prompt: Abed & Jeff go on some sort of adventure. Or really, any Jeff & Abed friendship.
When Abed needs to buy a van so he can finally make his homage to Little Miss Sunshine, the only person he even bothers asking to come help him shop is Jeff. Because Pierce's advice would be ridiculous, Troy would only look at things with racing stripes, and the girls are hopeless. (That's not sexist, two of them don't even have cars, and Shirley's minivan is almost older than Annie.)
"Umm, sure," Jeff demurs, sliding his phone into his pocket. Abed's pretty sure he could ask Jeff to help him pan for gold in the Ron Howard Memorial Fountain (across from the Luis Guzman statue, and don't tell the Dean that Ron Howard's not dead, or he'll start hyperventilating) right now and Jeff would agree. He met some girl at the Apple store and all he does is text now. That and curse about the dropped calls.
At the dealership Abed finds the perfect van, a Volkswagen in good shape, and it's even yellow like the one in the movie. He sits in the back and imagines he's Paul Dano, his heart broken and wind in his hair. "You get in the driver's seat," he tells Jeff. "You're Greg Kinnear."
Jeff shakes his head but does it. "I've been called worse."
"Now flip out," Abed instructs. "You're getting pulled over by a cop and your dead father's body is in the back. Flip out but without yelling or getting intense or anything."
"That's not how I flip out, Abed."
"You're Greg Kinnear." Patiently.
Jeff sighs. He turns back to look out the windshield, gripping the steering wheel. After a moment or two he sighs again, more loudly.
"That's perfect," Abed says. He switches seats.
"What the hell are you doing, Abed?" Jeff asks, looking in the rearview mirror.
"Nothing," Abed says, and continues sitting like he's a little girl in shorts and cowboy boots. "I'm going to need you to get in the passenger seat."
Jeff does, contorting his long body over the lump of the transmission. "Now what?"
"Pretend you're Toni Collette."
***
Hot Ashes For Trees (R for language, Britta prequel fic) Based on this prompt: britta's high school days
Her favorite spot in the whole school is the second-floor bathroom overlooking the shitty little courtyard. She goes there first thing every morning, after her mom drops her off, which is too fucking embarrassing because her mom's car is basically a rusty tin can. The windows can be jiggered open for optimum cigarette-smoke venting, and someone equally as bored as Britta is slowly helping her cover one of the stall walls with the lyrics to Wish You Were Here.
Britta perches on the windowsill, blowing smoke out the window, looking at her handwriting and the stranger's handwriting mixing on the wall. They both use black Sharpies, it looks like, but the other girl (presumably it's a girl, all the dudes at Britta's school are either meatheads or math geeks, and besides this is a ladies' room) prints in all caps. Britta's cursive is aggressive and fluid. The wall looks like the product of a schizophrenic. It's the most interesting thing about this mid-century concrete block shithole.
Cigarette finished, Britta tosses the butt outside and then leans her face out into the fresh air for the moment. Mountains ring the city, hem her in. The sky is a million miles high. With a sigh she leaps down from the sill, her heavy Docs clomping onto the floor and the spikes on her mohawk shuddering with the impact. Another fucking day in this fucking place. Welcome to the machine.
***
Room 303 (G, Troy futurefic) Based on this prompt: TROY GROWS UP TO BE A KINDERGARTEN TEACHER
The first day he can get into his room (and how cool is that, man, his room, his very own classroom) Troy gets in there and opens the blinds up and lets in all the light he can. It's just a room, four walls, a floor, a ceiling, some furniture. But he can see it in his mind already: the bulletin boards where he'll pin their art, the sand and water tables where they'll work on their fine motor development, the carpet squares they'll sit on when he reads them stories before naptime.
The second thing he does is unpack the cardboard box full of things his friends gave him at graduation. There's a sundial from Pierce, "so the little ankle-biters can learn to tell time like real men." There are well-used cookie cutters from Shirley, perfect for the play kitchen he's going to put in one corner. From Jeff there's a little fake-wood placard that says "Mr. Barnes," and Troy can't help but smile when he puts it on his desk. His desk. Britta gave him a huge stack of CDs of cool kids music, the Barenaked Ladies and Kanye West's poorly-received collaboration with Raffi among them. Annie's gift was a huge bag of personalized pencils and stationery and scratch-and-sniff stickers and gold stars; they go right in the top desk drawer, where he'll always be able to get to them.
Last out of the box is Abed's gift: a signed copy of Oh The Places You'll Go. Signed by Abed, that is. Troy sits down in his desk chair (again: his desk chair) to read the inscription one more time.
For Troy, for all the places you'll go. Just watch out for where the sidewalk ends. And don't eat any green eggs and ham. Give them to any very hungry caterpillars you run into out there in the big world. Good luck, we love you.
***
As Seen on TV (R for language, Britta gen) Based on a throwaway comment I made about what Britta's job might be.
It was only supposed to be for the holidays: selling Snuggies at a kiosk in the mall could only ever be the most temporary of temporary jobs. But there are no jobs in Greendale and Britta needs to make rent and the only good thing about this job is that it is in the shitty mall, so none of her friends every come here. (Anarchists avoid malls on principle, and the study group people go to the other mall because it has a Target attached to it and that's everyone's favorite store, except for Pierce, who has an inexplicable fascination with Sears.)
Anyway. The kiosk is called As Seen On TV. Britta's pay stubs literally say As Seen On TV. Shit is ridiculous. She spends most of her shifts slumped bored on a stool, texting people or playing Words With Friends and sometimes re-enacting the "I'm squishing your head" sketches from Kids in the Hall, vainly hoping that someone will recognize what she's doing and nerdily whisk her away from this madness.
Here are the people who buy Snuggies: moms. Grandmoms. Teen moms. And, very rarely: stoners.
Mom-types can tell that Britta needs a mom, and this is like, magnetism for their mom-ions or whatever. Stoners can tell that she's lit up a few in her day, and every now and then she gets a nickel bag on commission, which is nothing to complain about. But the moms...the moms are bad. Guilt-trip city.
"Do you think this would be a good Christmas present?" A mom asks, holding the sample Snuggie up critically, as if it is more than what it looks like, which is a handful of child-laborer-made acrylic.
"Oh, it's a great Christmas present. Very popular," Britta replies. She smacks her gum, can't help it.
"Oh, well I don't want to get something too popular. I'm trying to be 'hip' this year."
People who use air quotes can never be hip, lady, Britta thinks. "It's kind of ironic to get one of those. Irony is totally..." she starts to say awesome or cool but decides to shoot the moon. "Totally rad."
"Hmmm..." the woman hands the Snuggie back to Britta, who gingerly folds it. She's like allergic to them or something, they make her forearms break out in a rash. The woman picks up a boxed Snuggie, begins to read the total bullshit plastered all over it.
"Well let me know if you need anything," Britta says. She has to basically climb up into the damn stool, no, scale it like it's the goddamn Matterhorn.
Her phone buzzes. It's a text from Jeff: Troma marathon at Abed's. U in? Stop at market first, we need beer, chips, cocktail wienies.
Britta sighs, very loudly, and the woman who is taking forty-five goddamn minutes to decide whether or not she should buy a flammable plastic sack with a zipper for one or more of her children huffs even more loudly, scandalized. Britta rolls her eyes, thumbs flying over her phone's keyboard. Stuck at work for approx. next century. Have fun trying to have fun without me.
***
A Greendale Faculty Meeting (G) Based on a discussion about things people wanted to see on the show.
"First of all," Duncan starts, before anyone else has even finished adding things (sugar, creamer, 5 Hour Energy, Bailey's) to their coffee. Duncan drinks tea, Earl Gray, hot; this takes zero seconds to prepare and so he usually begins the meetings. Someone in the back of the room groans Not this shit again. I would like to say thank you to the Dean for finally switching all datekeeping at Greendale to the Continental style. Way to class up the place, Dean, cheers!"
"Oh, well, thank you, Professor Duncan, and cheers to you!" The two men air-clank their respective mugs at each other from across the room, and the Dean adds a flourishing bow that sloshes the foam off the top of his cup and down to the floor. He rubs at the spot with the toe of one wingtip, just making the problem worse. "Anyway, yes, here at Greendale we are doing things a la mode, as they say,"
"No one says that," someone pipes up crossly. "That's for pie, not calendars."
"Marjorie, make a note, that's one strike against the French department. Keep it up, Madame Robespierre, and I'll have to ask you to leave the room again, s'il-vous plait," The Dean takes his place at the podium, adjusts his glasses, and shuffles a tremendous pile of papers waiting there for him. "Now. It's almost Valentine's Day, and you know what that means!"
Silence. Maybe a cricket or two. "You know what that means!" The Dean trills fiercely, and all of a sudden the door of Conference Room 2B is thrown open so hard that it bangs off the opposite wall and loudly shuts again. A muffled curse is heard, and then the door opens again and the Human Being steps inside, carrying a struggling puppy. Both are covered head to toe in raspberry jam, although the puppy is making a lot of headway clearing off the Human Being with his tongue.
"What in the blue blazes?" Professor Whitman stands up, and then climbs onto his chair for a better view. The entire Culinary Arts faculty rolls its eight collective eyes.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you the heart of our campus: the Human Being!"
The Human Being looks around and smile-grimaces at them all.
"The actual, literal heart, I mean," the Dean continues. "That's what the jam is for, right? The blood? The heart of our campus? Human Being, go on and distribute the flyers, so we can make sure everyone understands. I'll take the puppy, okay? Come here, Snookums!"
The Human Being drops the puppy, and it bounds over to the Dean, immediately smearing jam and fur all over his shirt. He doesn't seem to mind. The Human Being begins handing out sticky flyers it extracts from a jam-covered satchel.
"This is a joke, right?" It's Professor Duncan, oddly enough, who is the voice of sanity this time. "You're going to have a jammy ghost walk around campus in an attempt to raise awareness for heart disease?"
"What's more heart-healthy than a brisk stroll across our beautifully landscaped campus?"
"Our campus was landscaped by colorblind prisoners on a work detail from the drunk tank at the county jail," someone reminds him, but is ignored.
"What's the puppy for?" Whitman asks. He's standing with his arms crossed and his tie, somehow, over both of his arms. It's very weird.
"Oh, well, you know, we still have all the puppies from the puppy parade. Aren't they cute? I've been keeping them in my office so I can keep an eye on their housebreaking progress." The Dean holds the puppy up by its armpits and it looks around anxiously in an eerie recreation of the Human Being's look moments before. "Snookums here is one of the prodigies of the litter!"
Of course Snookums chooses that moment to pee everywhere. Fortunately it only takes a janitor five minutes to get pee and raspberry jam out of the carpet. This is Greendale. He's had to remove that combination before.
***
Mouse Blazer (G, ensemble) Based on this wacky prompt: britta makes money by making and selling tiny animal outtfits on ebay. the gang goes over to her house for something or other and troy finds her work room. hilarity ensues.
Britta's apartment is closest to the bowling alley and so that's where they go after kicking the chess club's ass at Rock-n-Bowl. Unfortunately Britta's apartment is also the size and temperature of a refrigerator.
"Britta! What's the meaning of this? Are you poor, too?" Pierce asks, wrapping his scarf more tightly.
"It's okay, Britta," Annie says, slinging a supportive arm around Britta. "Your place looks really cute!"
"Is your thermostat set at a negative number?" Jeff asks, zipping up his jacket.
"The landlord controls the thermostat," Britta replies tightly. "Welcome to my home, guys. I'd give you a tour, but you can see all of it already."
Abed is already rifling through Britta's DVD stash. "'Idiocracy'--on the Wilson Brothers Scale, not as good as 'Bottle Rocket,' but it'll do."
They settle in for the movie, crammed onto Britta's couch and beanbags. Quarters are close, which is good, because it's so cold. Annie and Shirley are wearing their mittens and holding hands, and Jeff has deigned to put on Pierce's tweedy driving cap. This looks exactly as ridiculous as you might expect.
Britta is rustling up snacks when Troy comes into the kitchen. "Uhh, where's the bathroom, Britta? Do I have to pee in the sink?"
Britta rolls her eyes. "See that thing that looks like a shutter? It's a door. The bathroom's in there."
"Oh, cool," He takes a handful of vegan goldfish crackers and heads off, and then a moment later lets out a shriek of either pure joy or pure terror.
Abed jumps off the couch and into a judo pose. "Troy!"
"Damn, Britta!" Troy calls. "You a freak, girl!"
"I knew it!" Pierce hops up, the others on his heels.
"What in the Jame Gumb?" Jeff says, peering over everyone else's heads into the nook off the bathroom. "Is this when we find out you're a serial killer who specializes in killing really tiny midgets and then building a shrine out of their belongings?"
"Seen that, not as good as it sounds," Abed says dismissvely. "This looks more like a crime scene on CSI: Lilliput."
"Guys, relax," Britta herds them away, batting a tiny baseball uniform out of Troy's hands. "I'm not a serial killer. I make miniature clothes and sell them online. It's not exactly lucrative but it helps pay the rent."
"Um, Britta? Why does this argyle sweater have five armholes?" Shirley holds up the sweater, painstakingly knit in a preppy bubblegum pink and lime green color scheme.
Six pairs of questioning eyes all turn to her. Britta pushes her mouth to the side, waffling. "Uh. It's...it's a dog sweater, okay?"
"I should have known it," Pierce says. "First the frog in the sombrero, then the cat in the tie, then the dragon-turtle costume."
"What? That costume was for me, not an animal."
"It fits your pattern. Profiled!" Pierce makes finger guns at Britta, blowing on the tips of his index fingers theatrically.
"Um, Pierce, what are you doing?" Troy asks.
"New catchphrase I'm working on. What did you think?"
This being the study group, everyone has an opinion, but Jeff reins them in. "Guys, wait. One weirdo topic at a time. So, Britta, if I wanted to buy, say, a blazer for my mouse or suspenders for my chinchilla, where might I find your online store?"
Britta sighs again and looks away. "Etsy dot com slash house pet liberation front. And I'll thank you in advance for not giving me any crap about that, Man With Novelty Law-Themed Vanity Plates."
Shirley whips out her phone. "I'm gonna bookmark that, Britta. You know my boys have been telling me that their hamster is going bald. Maybe a tiny hat would help Hammy feel less embarrassed."
Troy laughs. "Yeah, and Annie's Boobs sometimes get cold. Annie's Boobs could use a sweater."
Annie and Britta immediately commence a fast-paced and thoroughly footnoted oral feminist treatise on the inappropriateness of naming your monkey after your friend's body parts, but through it all, Britta is grinning.
*
Once they're all settled in again, warming frozen extremities with mugs of hot cocoa, Troy looks over at Abed. "What do you think, man? 'Mouse Blazer' would be a great name for the Troy and Abed in the Morning house band!"
***
Big Head Jeff & The Monsters (R, parody, ensemble) Based on the prompt: I WANT AU FIC WHERE THEY'RE A BAND
Big Head Jeff and the Monsters blows up huge on the blogosphere almost the moment they release their remix of Ke$ha's Tik Tok
on SoundCloud. The invitation to Coachella follows soon after. In three weeks they go from study room hijinx to hookers and those designer drugs that are sold as bath salts at convenience stores. Six months after that it's the cover of Rolling Stone. They're all naked on the cover, even Pierce and Shirley, all of them zonked out on Xanax, smearing peanut butter all over each other because Annie Liebovitz told them to.
The inevitable backlash begins when their original songs prove highly-derivative of the themselves-highly-derivative songs featured on Glee. Troy goes solo and Abed defects with him, and even though Disco Spider is a terrible name for a band made up solely of a rapper and a bass player, they're still the most successful of them all. Shirley disappears completely. No joke, no one can find her after she changes all of her Facebook photos to .jpg'ed snippets of the Book of Revelations. There's a rumor that she's joined a cult and is preparing for the coming nuclear apocalypse somewhere in the deserts of Utah, but nobody cares enough to investigate except for some overinvested fans on the internet.
Pierce takes some bad acid at Burning Man and dies three weeks later, having read Into the Wild shortly before dropping the acid and attempting to recreate Chris McCandless' journey after. Attempting to recreate Chris McCandless' journey only in a more hardcore and better-funded fashion, which means: Antarctica. January. Nude. His cremains are shot into orbit on the first Russian commercial space flight, as specified in his will. There is no funeral, and very little mourning.
For a while, Jeff, Britta, and Annie tour as The Threesomes, a sort of twee acoustic indie band that is usually called She and Him and She in alternative newspaper headlines. The sex is amazing, but life on the road takes its toll, and they split up when it turns out everyone in the band who can get pregnant is, and everyone in the band with the ability to be a father is.
Things are complicated. The children need a lot of therapy. And sometimes, watching 4D SpaceTV™ (copyright 2019, ComNBCUniversalCast.com, LLC) and drinking Starbucks Brand Trenta Soylent Green, the children see the crazy lives of people on situation comedies and think, my life would be so much better if I was on TV.
***
The Long Way Home (G, Annie/Britta friendship) Based on this prompt: more about Annie and Britta's shopping trips!
This is the way it usually goes: Annie texts her way too early on a Saturday morning, Britta showers and then blow-dries her hair into submission, and when she's halfway dressed she'll hear Annie's car horn wheezing in the street below her apartment.
On the way to the mall they'll stop at the Starbucks drive-through and Britta will order a large coffee with soy milk and two sugars and Annie will convert that to Starbucks-speech for the attendant, and they'll split a vegetarian breakfast sandwich because the protein will give them the energy to make the long walk from the parking lot to the actual mall. Inside the mall there's both an Auntie Anne's AND a Mrs. Field's, and shopping is tough, you need complex carbs to survive a sample sale at Nothing But Shoes--but they always go to Forever 21 first, and Britta bites back everything she could say about shoddily-manufactured third-world goods and the terrible implications they have across multiple levels of both culture and society. What can she say, she's a sucker for cheap v-neck t-shirts.
Annie's kryptonite is the bookstore, and mall bookstores are usually bottomless pits of despair, but this one is actually both independently-run and classy, which means that after the early-afternoon sugar crash they usually drag themselves over there, grab handfuls of magazines, and spend an hour or two in matching armchairs, resting their feet on each other's laps and occasionally sharing choice tidbits from Bust (Britta), the New York Times Book Review (Annie), Mother Jones (Britta), National Review (Annie), and then there is always a shared perusal of National Geographic, which reminds Britta of her childhood because she loved the photos and which reminds Annie of her childhood because she loved the articles. Without fail they both always pick up something from the remainder bin. They have a little book club going with Shirley. It's nice to have a just-the-girls thing, and the boys apparently use that time to cultivate their facial hair or come up with pranks or maybe do both at the same time.
Saturday afternoons the mall gets crowded with teenagers, so that means it's time to catch a movie, overdose on the yellow salt that masquerades as popcorn, throw Sour Patch Kids at the screen during the stupid or scary parts. Then it's more shopping, the fancy department stores this time, getting sprayed with perfume samples and then walking all over, repeatedly smelling their wrists to see how the scents evolve over time. There's new lipsticks to try and there's Britta's traditional tirade about how the whole purpose of makeup is to make a woman's mouth look like a simulacrum of a vagina, during which tirade she always gets overly loud and excited and Annie will have to calm her down by pointing out a really cute purse.
By then they're usually broke, and halfheartedly regretting whatever they spent, even though neither one has ever actually returned anything bought on one of these trips. Sometimes Britta even falls asleep as Annie's driving her home, and Annie will smile to herself, and take the long way.
***
Hawthorne (R) Based on this prompt: since it was hinted at in a very misleading spoiler: i want a drabble where pierce is actually jeff's biological dad (Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking missing moment)
So Jeff used to date this girl who worked in an office and who kind of looked like the nebbishly-hot girl on that show The Office, so if he was over there on a Thursday night they would watch it and he would do his best Halpert impression and then he would put a new coversheet on her TPS report, if you catch that drift.
Anyway one time the creepy old dude on that show was talking about how a man might have slipped in once. Which is basically what his mom tells him when she comes for her biennial visit. They're in a shitty bar in the valley and his mom is chain smoking, her fuchsia lipstick smeared all over the butts heaped in the ashtray, and they're both at the simmering-gently level of drunk when she tells him that the seventies were a weird time and she doesn't know any other way to tell him other than that one night at a party she did some lines and thus his dad might not be his dad. Well okay, it's not exactly like what happened to that creepy old dude but that's the connection his schnockered brain makes. Someone else slipped in.
"Who was it?" Jeff asks, looking at his mother's Long Island Iced Tea and absolutely fucking hating it, just so much disgust piling up for that unclassy drink and the unclassy woman drinking it. She's dripping with cheap jewelry and wearing a raccoon coat (seriously) and she has his upturned nose and frankly great cheekbones, so geriatric horndogs were eyeing her when they came in, and uggh. He motions for another drink. He needs another drink BAD. He doesn't need a father so who cares who is father is. He is Jeff Winger, a fucking grownup, okay, MOM, and no thanks to you, either.
"Jeffrey." His mom rolls her eyes, obviously thinking That was so long ago and there are so many Long Island Iced Teas between me and now and then. "He only told me his last name."
"Stop drawing it out, alright? Spit it out! Get it over with!" The rage that came so quickly to hand in that parking lot with Pierce feels palpable beneath his skin. He looks down at the fist he's unthinkingly made, at the way it makes veins stick out in his forearm. "Just tell me."
His mother lights one cigarette from another, stabs the butt out with unexpected ferocity. "I think it was Hawthorne."
***
Catharsis: Nature's Way of Telling You to Grow the Hell Up (R, Pierce/Abed friendship) Based on this prompt: I WANT THE CONVERSATION WHERE PIERCE ROPED ABED INTO HIS SCHEME. (Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking missing scene)
Abed is in the cafeteria, storyboarding a video profile for Garrett's latest adventure in online dating, when Pierce swoops into the opposite side of the booth. He is balancing two coffees on top of his portfolio and Abed grabs both before Pierce can drop them or try to juggle them or otherwise make a mess.
"Aybed, my good man. What a surprise to find you here just when I happen to have a spare cup of nature's jet fuel."
"Jet fuel is nature's jet fuel," Abed replies, and sips experimentally. It's hot and brown, just as advertised. "How can I help you today?"
Pierce takes a neatly-collated sheaf of photocopies out of his portfolio and pushes it across the table. Abed leafs through it, at times re-orienting it so the illustrations make more sense, although it's not necessarily an appreciable difference. "This is my Master Plan," Pierce says.
Abed raises an eyebrow. He's sure he heard capitals letters in there somewhere. "You know who else had a Master Plan--"
"Jimmy Carter is not relevant to this conversation, Aybed. Do you need something to help you focus? I thought coffee would be enough for someone of your obviously weak constitution, but I'm sure there's something in my pill case that would work, as long as we use the pill splitter."
Abed pushes his coffee back across the table, just in case. "Pierce, what do you want? The group is kind of mad at you now, I don't know if you've noticed, and an alliance with you would threaten my status as the Lovable Oddball. I'm only a few quirks away from being a Stamp Collecting Headcase."
Pierce puts on his game face, clears his throat, and delivers his pitch. "Aybed, this is what I'm saying. We're not stamp collectors, we're emasculated predators. We need to be running wild!" There's a hand gesture here that almost knocks the hat off the dude in the booth behind theirs.
"You're projecting, Pierce. I'm not emasculated."
"Yeah? When was the last time the group let you make your own decisions about chasing skirts? Or let me pick my own damn meals? They discount us because they think you were born yesterday and and I was born so many yesterdays ago that I might as well be dead!" He slams the table for emphasis, and Abed wonders if Jeff learned that from Pierce or vice versa. The echo of a real family within their makeshift family is fascinating.
Meanwhile Pierce is still fillibustering, and Abed has to admit that Pierce has a Congress-level gift for rousing pedantry. And somewhere around the page with the Venn diagram titled Study Group Members and their Psychological Weaknesses, where he sees his own name, along with Jeff's, Britta's, and Pierce's, entirely enclosed in the circle labeled Daddy Issues, Abed decides to go along with it. "Despite the evidence of a possible psychotic episode here, indicated by the obscene marginalia and the obsessive-compulsive cataloging of every group member's daily routine, I see the potential for character growth, Pierce," he says.
Pierce shows off his most diabolical smile. "Character growth? This is catharsis! Nature's way of telling you to grow the hell up!"
***
A Complicated Person (R for language, Troy/Abed friendship, dark) Based on this prompt: COULD YOU DO FIC ABOUT ABED FILMING TROY CRYING? (Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking missing scene)
Levar Burton being there sucks, having his brain in a panic loop like it was that one time when his arm got stuck inside a Pringles can sucks, but the thing that sucks the most? Is Abed, on the other side of the camera.
When Troy's done crying, and the reality that the coolness beneath his damp face is the tile floor of a hospital bathroom hits him, he looks up, expecting Abed to put aside the camera and fist bump him or at least tell him about a similar scene from a movie, maybe that scene where Conan the Barbarian first gets enslaved, you know, a scene all about foreshadowing heroic redemption, but all Abed does is leave the room.
"Fuck you, Abed," Troy tells the door as it closes, and then he cries a little more, but there's anger behind it this time, like after the keg flip when he'd realized that he'd just taken something he loved out of his own reach. That he'd cockblocked his own happiness.
When Troy goes back to the waiting room, the girls want to know why his hand is all messed up, knuckles bleeding, but he doesn't tell them about punching the bathroom wall so hard he'd dented it right beside the Wash Your Hands If You Don't Want Everyone You Love To Die From A Drug-Resistant MRSA Infection poster. He tells them that he slipped in the parking lot, but he's not sure they believe him.
Later Abed asks him to film a talking head.
"I'm more than a talking head, man," Troy tells him. "I am a complicated person with complicated thoughts and emoTIONS!" He loses a little control at the end, and the nurses and orderlies, who obviously have no idea why strangers and cameras have been all up in their break room all day, shake their heads at the noise.
"I don't understand what the problem is, Troy."
That's what the problem is, Abed."
***
The Adventures of Abed Nadir (PG, Abed gen) Based on the prompt: Pretty much anything with Abed and Gobi, he always seemed like a fun character.
Nights the falafel shop is open: all of them.
Nights the falafel shop is busy: Friday and Saturday, because there's a movie theater next door.
Abed's earliest memories are the sounds of movies filtering up to his room above the theater: lasers and gunshots and spaceships and cowboys and voices professing love, hate, laughter. He didn't start speaking until really late, the kind of late that made everyone worried about him, and while he was building up his words inside of himself he would lie with an ear on the carpet in his room, so he could hear and feel the voices below. When he finally spoke it was in complete sentences, and he could mimic any accent perfectly. That was when he started to be put in special classes, when his dad started losing his hair.
When Abed was in high school, manning the fryers with one hand and doing his homework with the other, he took a hand drill and made the tiniest hole in the wall above the bank of fryers, so he could see and hear whatever was playing. It was weird, he and his dad never actually went to the movies, but movies suffused their pores like the scent of canola oil. Gobi really liked Westerns, gritty dark ones like Unforgiven and Tombstone, but Abed really liked cheesy comedies, the Mighty Ducks movies and even the last gasps of the Major League franchise as it limped along toward a merciful killing.
Abed knew that if you plotted these two likes on a Venn diagram, never the twain would they meet, and that made him sad in an abstract way, in the way that he felt things, like his emotions were there, just playing in the theater next door. That was what he told the school therapist, anyway, and she nodded and said hmm and continued to give him things to practice, like mimeographed worksheets with drawings of faces on them, and little lines under the faces where he was supposed to fill in the emotion the face was displaying. It felt like busywork, like all his other homework, but he did it anyway.
Abed and Gobi didn't go to the movies, but there was always a TV going in the kitchen, barely audible above the snapping oil and the barked orders in English and Arabic, and one night a show came on that fit perfectly in the Venn diagram: The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.
"What is this garbage?!" Gobi snapped, looking up from the prep table where he was shredding lettuce.
Abed just shook his head mutely, staring rapt at the screen, at the cartoonish face of the man in the cowboy hat.
When the first commercial break began, Abed suddenly realized that for several minutes nothing had happened except for he and his father, watching television. No yelling, no cooking, no distraction. And his homework helped him realize the expression on his father's face: happiness.
A month or two later, they were in the kitchen, of course, when Abed handed Gobi a cardboard box with the shipping labels on it, postmarked The Genuine O.K. Corral.
"What is this?"
"Happy birthday, Dad." Abed had trouble with his father's expression this time: there were tears, maybe, but his mouth wasn't curved in a sad way, and besides his father's normal expression was hard to decipher.
Gobi opened the box, peeled back the layers of tissue paper. Inside lay a brand new, guaranteed authentic cowboy hat. His father let out a noise, also unidentifiable, and Abed cocked his head, concentrating, trying to figure out what his father was feeling.
The ensuing hug made it clear.
***
One of the World's Top Ten Huggers (PG, Shirley/Britta/Annie friendship, very fluffy) Based on this prompt: I want Annie/Britta friendship, preferably where they both agree that Jeff is a dickhead. I don't really care how contrived it is, just give me ladies being awesome. Shirley would be a welcome addition if you feel so inclined.
"I just really want him to get his comeuppance, Britta. He can't mess around with people like that all the time. He strung us both along just because 'Little Jeff' told him to!"
"Relax, Annie, you're starting to spit more than Glen Beck!" Britta grabs for Annie's wildly flailing hands, which is dangerous because not only are Britta's nails still wet, but Annie's holding a brush and bottle of very expensive organic nail polish that Britta had to order off the internet from, like, Uzbekistan, and it took forever to get here and when it got here she realized her monitor wasn't calibrated right and the color was more chartreuse than...well than a color Britta actually likes. "It's not about Jeff getting his comeuppance. This isn't the Simpsons, he's not Homer. This is real life, and karma will come back and bite him in the ass, and we don't need to do anything to help it."
"Karma? Karma?! We're not in Tibet, Britta."
"Yeah, and if we were, we'd be more worried about the Dalai Lama than about some jackhole who sometimes wants to put his tongue in our mouths."
Annie shudders. "You make it sound cheap and gross."
Britta sighs, and wants to rub at the bridge of her nose, but. Wet nails. "It wasn't cheap and gross, okay? It was grownups doing what grownups do. We're not bad people for getting sucked in by his charm. We can stay friends with him."
"That seems weird. Can people really do that? I mean, can people really move beyond those...feelings?" Annie finally puts the brush back in the bottle, so Britta puts her hands back on the table and Annie begins to wave a piece of paper in their general direction. Organic polish, they learned earlier, takes a long time to dry, and Annie still needs a few touch-ups.
"People do it all the time," Britta says.
Annie raises an eyebrow. "How do you know Dildopolis' motto?"
Britta rolls her eyes. "I get around, okay? Sheesh. Anyway, trust me. Things will be more awkward than usual for a while, but soon we'll all be back to driving the Dean crazy and barely passing Anthropology together."
"Speak for yourself, I'm carrying an A in that class."
"Damn, girl!" Shirley comes back in the living room, carrying a tray piled high with fresh cookies, a pitcher of mimosas, and three glasses. "You need to help us out! Those boys can't study to save their lives!"
"I know that, Shirley! I caught Troy making up mnemonic devices for his own name. For his own name!"
Britta laughs and experimentally taps one nail against her glass, happy when the polish doesn't smear. She grabs a handful of cookies--Shirley's cookies are insanely good when they're still warm, and the whole house smells like what Britta imagines heaven must smell like. "This is really nice, you guys," she says, caught up in a little wave of hard-won happiness.
"Yeah!" Shirley throws her arms out and Annie and Britta jump into them, and Shirley, in addition to being an amazing baker, is one of the world's top ten huggers. It must be a mom thing.
"Thanks for having us over," Annie says, once they're all back sprawled on the couch, watching Party Down (Shirley doesn't like the profanity, but they all like Adam Scott). "I never got invited to sleepovers when I was in school."
"And none of the sleepovers I ever got invited to had champagne," Britta says, clinking glasses with the other two.
"Oh!" Shirley suddenly jumps up and rushes back to the kitchen "I forgot!"
When Annie turns to Britta, she's grinning. "I'm so glad that this Jeff thing didn't ruin the study group, or our friendship, Britta. I've never had friends like this before. People who like me for me! It's amazing!"
"Oh, Annie!" Britta jumps down to that end of the couch and sits crosslegged, facing Annie, one hand on her shoulder. "We'll always be friends. Women stick together!"
"Uh, what are you two getting up to?" Shirley asks from the doorway, and Britta makes a mental note that the next issue she and Annie need to tackle is Shirley's latent homophobia, but then she sees the bowls on Shirley's tray.
"Oh! Chips and homemade guacamole! Awesome, Shirley!"
Shirley sits down, and Annie clears a place on the coffee table for the tray. Britta grabs a chip and has it dipped and in her mouth before she sees Shirley's face--tastes what's in her mouth--spits it out.
"That's not guacamole, Britta. It's a face mask, my mother's recipe. It helps stimulate your pores!"
Britta sucks down half a mimosa. "Right now all it's doing is stimulating my gag reflex!" Suddenly Britta is aware that Annie is laughing at them, a stream of pealing giggles that turns into an out-and-out tsunami of belly laughs. At first Shirley's just smiling, but then her smiles breaks wide and becomes laughter.
As soon as she gets the taste out of her mouth, Britta joins in, too.
***