Fic: Mastermind (2/2)
Title: Mastermind (2/2)
Author: jheaton
Pairing(s): Jeff/Annie
Spoilers: through 1.25
Rating/Warnings: PG
Word Count: ~2400
Disclaimer: Community and the associated characters are (C) 2010 NBC Universal
Author’s Note: Written for Minor Characters Week.
Part 1
The best plans, Dean Pelton reasoned, were the simplest ones. The last time Jeff and Annie had kissed, they were both on the debate team, so the dean figured that if he got them working together on some other activity, kissing would inevitably follow. Annie was already involved in more organizations than anyone else on campus, so it was really just a matter of finding one that he could convince Jeff to join. But which one? The Greendale Astronomical Society? Chess and Games Club? Hillel?
The Greendale Gazette Journal Mirror. It was perfect. The paper needed an editor-in-chief, which would appeal to Jeff's vanity; it came with a private office with a sofa and a desk, which would appeal to his materialism and his desire to get as far away from the rest of the student body as possible; and it carried an English credit, which would appeal to his laziness. And as a former lawyer, he probably wrote well enough to make him a credible choice for the job. He added the newspaper offices to the list of places around campus he planned to install surveillance cameras.
The dean was proud of that part of the plan. He needed to continue observing Jeff and Annie, so he could track the progress of the plan and make any small adjustments that might be necessary to keep it on track. The cameras were the perfect way to do that, and since he had already arranged for cameras to be installed in the women's bathrooms to cut down on the toilet seat theft problem--never let it be said he didn't respond to the concerns of the student body!--it would be easy enough to get the techs to install them in other places around the campus as well. Cameras would be placed in the Spanish classroom, the cafeteria, various hallways and common areas Jeff and Annie were known to frequent, the parking lots, and of course Group Study Room F. The study room would be wired for sound as well; he had wanted microphones installed alongside all the interior cameras, but the budget just wouldn't support the expense. The camera in the Spanish classroom would at the insistence of the union be turned off while class was in session; they also had refused to let him to place cameras in staff offices. But he could live with that. How likely was it that anything would happen in a professor's private office that would have an impact on the plan?
* * *
Three weeks! Slater must have made her move the same day he'd offered Jeff the editorship. The dean was more than a little surprised; relationships between students and professors were rare at Greendale, and Slater in particular had, to his knowledge, had never been known to dilly-dally with the student body, even students with bodies as nicely developed and irresistibly touchable as Jeff's. On the other hand, maybe she was just really good as keeping her dalliances under wraps.
The relationship was dangerous. Not because he expected it to last; on the contrary, he expected it to end quickly and brutally. Slater was a whiz with numbers, but normal human emotions seemed beyond her. He fully expected her to dump Jeff sooner or later, and probably in the most callous and dismissive way possible. Therein lay the problem. Once dumped, Jeff might turn to Annie for comfort, but that would make Annie Jeff's rebound, and you can't really count on rebound relationships to last. In order for the plan to work, Jeff would have to break up with Slater, not vice versa. And he knew just how to make it happen. All he had to do was engineer a relationship between Annie and some other student. Jeff would of course be consumed with jealousy, and would be driven to steal Annie away from the other guy.
The other guy in the scenario, the dean decided, would be Vaughn Miller. To someone as straight-laced as Annie, Vaughn would seem edgy and slightly dangerous rather than pot-addled and harmless. She would find his ridiculous songs sweet. And it didn't hurt that he had a nice body. Really nice. Best of all, it was well known on campus that Jeff loathed Vaughn, so seeing Annie with him would be particularly infuriating.
The dean stopped to talk to Vaughn in the cafeteria a few days later, ostensibly to compliment him on his impressive hacky sack skills but really to casually draw his attention to Annie when she walked past on the way to her regular table. He seemed interested, and sure enough, the next day the dean saw Vaughn serenading Annie on the quad, Annie reveling in the attention, and Jeff looking on with distaste. And a day or two after that, he caught Jeff lurking behind a bush watching in disgust as Vaughn taught Annie to ride a skateboard. Success!
Except when all was said and done, Annie and Vaughn were still an item. The dean had been right that Jeff would want to break up the new couple, but Jeff tried to set her up with Troy Barnes instead of himself, and the whole thing had blown up in his face. The dean had underestimated Jeff's commitment to his relationship with Slater. And, apparently, Annie's and Vaughn's commitment to one another. That made things a lot trickier.
It was now clear to the dean that both Jeff and Annie would need to be single before they could get together. In Jeff's case, that would be no problem; the dean expected Slater to dump Jeff any day now, so he would just sit back and wait for the inevitable while concentrating on the Annie side of the equation. It was evident that neither she nor Vaughn could at this point be manipulated into breaking up, and frankly he was a little scared to try after seeing her reaction to Jeff's meddling. It was possible that at some point Annie would tire of Vaughn's lack of structure, or that he would rebel against her love of the same, but he didn't want to bet the farm on it. What he needed was something that he could introduce from behind the scenes that would radically change the dynamic of the relationship for the worse. But what?
The answer came in the form of an article in Community College Week about the explosive growth of intercollegiate footbag at the community college level, in which the Caesar Rodney Campus of Delaware Technical & Community College was named as one of the best teams in the country. Dean Pelton happened to know the dean of the Rodney Campus; they had been classmates at Colorado State. He was sure his fellow dean would be very interested to hear about a talented hacky-sacker languishing at a school whose budget was too tight to fund a new athletic team. He was equally sure that Vaughn would jump at the chance to be on the number one community college hacky sack team in the country, even if he had to move 1,700 miles away to do so. Sure, he and Annie might try a long-distance relationship, but the dean had been a community college educator his entire adult life and had lost count of how many relationships he seen crumble after one person transferred and the other stayed behind. And someone like Annie would never move across the country just to attend a different community college.
While he waited for Rodney Campus to take the bait, the dean continued to observe Jeff and Annie, more out of habit than for any particular reason. As expected, Slater had dumped Jeff; tellingly, Jeff was now not dating anyone. Annie, meanwhile, was still dating Vaughn. The good news on that front was that the dean had seen her taking a long and appreciative look at Jeff's naked backside during his pool game with Coach Bogner, giving him some hope that she might be coming to see Jeff as someone who could be more than just a good friend. On the other hand, he also had seen her repeatedly slapping Jeff on the arm and slamming his head into the study room table, so he wasn't quite sure what to think.
Toward the end of April, the dean arranged for Vaughn and his friends to stage a hacky sack demonstration during the school's annual Arbor Day Festival, and suggested to his former classmate that he come to Greendale to see Vaughn in action. He did, bringing with him the athletic director and the captain of the Rodney Campus footbag team. All were suitably impressed, and the athletic director told the dean that he was going to fight hard to get Vaughn an invitation to join his team. Dean Pelton could not have been more excited. Greendale's Golden Age was right around the corner!
* * *
Dean Pelton collapsed into his chair at the end of the worst day of the worst month of his ten years as an educator. The entire month of May had been one disaster after another. Cleaning up after the paintball debacle had blown a huge hole in his budget. The revelation that Ben Chang was a fraud had made the dean look like a fool, since it was he who had hired Chang in the first place. And worst of all, his plan to get Jeff and Annie together was in shambles. First, Jeff had slept with his study group friend Britta Perry during the paintball war. They had given no signs since that the sex meant anything to either of them, but in the surveillance video they both seemed to be enjoying it, and his fear that perhaps it had meant something to them increased each time he watched it.
Then, in the last week of the semester, Jeff and Annie had had a huge fight. Annie had told the dean that Chang was a fraud, and when Jeff found out, he had blown up and forced her out of the study group. By the next day, things had improved somewhat, and in fact Jeff had gone so far as to kick in the door to Chang's office when he thought Chang was threatening her. The dean didn't know exactly what had happened in Chang's office--damn that union!--nor what Jeff and Annie had said to each other in the hallway afterward, but there definitely appeared to be a certain awkwardness between them.
Nevertheless, there had been reason to be optimistic on the last day of classes. Jeff had seemed to be genuinely happy to be on campus for a change, and it had taken no effort at all to convince him to attend the Tranny Dance being held the following evening. Around noon, Vaughn had come by his office to inform him of his invitation to join the Rodney Campus footbag team and his intent to transfer there. It was everything he had imagined. The following evening, Jeff and a newly single Annie would find themselves together at a romantic formal dance. Kissing would, he was sure, soon follow.
The next day was when it all went to hell. Annie had come into his office and informed him that she was going to follow Vaughn to Delaware. The dean had tried his best to talk her out of it, pointing out that it was a lateral move at best, that admission officers would wonder why she had made the change, but she was firm. Something about "living in the moment." He had watched from the dance floor later that night as she said goodbye to the study group, indulging himself by imagining that her hug with Jeff was longer than those she shared with the others, that she looked a little reluctant to let him go ... but she did let him go, and then she was gone.
That had been the good part of the evening. Slater had decided all of a sudden that she wanted Jeff back, which had prompted Britta to decide that she too wanted to be with Jeff, and their jealous sniping had gotten so out of control that they both had ended up declaring their love for him in the middle of the Tranny Dance. The look on Jeff's face had been heartbreaking. Jeff was a man who had always prided himself on being able to talk his way out of any situation, but now he was lost, with no idea of what to say and no time to figure it out. The dean couldn't blame him for sneaking out when the melee started.
It was a nightmare. Any fondness Jeff might have developed for Greendale over the course of the year had surely been erased by the fiasco at the Tranny Dance, and without Annie on hand to get him to do things he was reluctant to do, he would never develop into the kind of campus leader the dean needed him to be. It was all so depressing. So much for next year being the start of a new golden age.
He glanced over at his computer monitor; the program he used to monitor the video feeds from the surveillance cameras was running, and by chance it happened to be showing the live feed from the camera aimed at Jeff's parking space, which sat empty save for a pile of broken glass. Seeing the empty space made him wonder when exactly Jeff had left, so he brought up the recorded video from that camera and started playback from 8:30 PM, which was about when he had seen Jeff make his escape from the Tranny Dance.
He sped through about 15 minutes of video before finding Jeff entering the frame ... carrying a pink duffle bag? Where ... wait, was that Annie? What was she doing there? He started tracing Jeff's path back across campus. The angle wasn't the greatest on some of the cameras, but that was definitely Annie walking alongside Jeff. It didn't make sense. He had watched her and Vaughn leave. He continued working backwards toward the cafeteria until he found the camera that had recorded Jeff and Annie approaching each other from opposite directions and stopping to talk.
This was an unexpected development. Did this mean Vaughn would be back too? If so, where was he? Perhaps ... oh.
Oh my.
Dean Pelton leaned back in his chair with a satisfied smile on his face. Maybe next year wouldn't be so bad after all.
Fin
Author: jheaton
Pairing(s): Jeff/Annie
Spoilers: through 1.25
Rating/Warnings: PG
Word Count: ~2400
Disclaimer: Community and the associated characters are (C) 2010 NBC Universal
Author’s Note: Written for Minor Characters Week.
Part 1
The best plans, Dean Pelton reasoned, were the simplest ones. The last time Jeff and Annie had kissed, they were both on the debate team, so the dean figured that if he got them working together on some other activity, kissing would inevitably follow. Annie was already involved in more organizations than anyone else on campus, so it was really just a matter of finding one that he could convince Jeff to join. But which one? The Greendale Astronomical Society? Chess and Games Club? Hillel?
The Greendale Gazette Journal Mirror. It was perfect. The paper needed an editor-in-chief, which would appeal to Jeff's vanity; it came with a private office with a sofa and a desk, which would appeal to his materialism and his desire to get as far away from the rest of the student body as possible; and it carried an English credit, which would appeal to his laziness. And as a former lawyer, he probably wrote well enough to make him a credible choice for the job. He added the newspaper offices to the list of places around campus he planned to install surveillance cameras.
The dean was proud of that part of the plan. He needed to continue observing Jeff and Annie, so he could track the progress of the plan and make any small adjustments that might be necessary to keep it on track. The cameras were the perfect way to do that, and since he had already arranged for cameras to be installed in the women's bathrooms to cut down on the toilet seat theft problem--never let it be said he didn't respond to the concerns of the student body!--it would be easy enough to get the techs to install them in other places around the campus as well. Cameras would be placed in the Spanish classroom, the cafeteria, various hallways and common areas Jeff and Annie were known to frequent, the parking lots, and of course Group Study Room F. The study room would be wired for sound as well; he had wanted microphones installed alongside all the interior cameras, but the budget just wouldn't support the expense. The camera in the Spanish classroom would at the insistence of the union be turned off while class was in session; they also had refused to let him to place cameras in staff offices. But he could live with that. How likely was it that anything would happen in a professor's private office that would have an impact on the plan?
* * *
Three weeks! Slater must have made her move the same day he'd offered Jeff the editorship. The dean was more than a little surprised; relationships between students and professors were rare at Greendale, and Slater in particular had, to his knowledge, had never been known to dilly-dally with the student body, even students with bodies as nicely developed and irresistibly touchable as Jeff's. On the other hand, maybe she was just really good as keeping her dalliances under wraps.
The relationship was dangerous. Not because he expected it to last; on the contrary, he expected it to end quickly and brutally. Slater was a whiz with numbers, but normal human emotions seemed beyond her. He fully expected her to dump Jeff sooner or later, and probably in the most callous and dismissive way possible. Therein lay the problem. Once dumped, Jeff might turn to Annie for comfort, but that would make Annie Jeff's rebound, and you can't really count on rebound relationships to last. In order for the plan to work, Jeff would have to break up with Slater, not vice versa. And he knew just how to make it happen. All he had to do was engineer a relationship between Annie and some other student. Jeff would of course be consumed with jealousy, and would be driven to steal Annie away from the other guy.
The other guy in the scenario, the dean decided, would be Vaughn Miller. To someone as straight-laced as Annie, Vaughn would seem edgy and slightly dangerous rather than pot-addled and harmless. She would find his ridiculous songs sweet. And it didn't hurt that he had a nice body. Really nice. Best of all, it was well known on campus that Jeff loathed Vaughn, so seeing Annie with him would be particularly infuriating.
The dean stopped to talk to Vaughn in the cafeteria a few days later, ostensibly to compliment him on his impressive hacky sack skills but really to casually draw his attention to Annie when she walked past on the way to her regular table. He seemed interested, and sure enough, the next day the dean saw Vaughn serenading Annie on the quad, Annie reveling in the attention, and Jeff looking on with distaste. And a day or two after that, he caught Jeff lurking behind a bush watching in disgust as Vaughn taught Annie to ride a skateboard. Success!
Except when all was said and done, Annie and Vaughn were still an item. The dean had been right that Jeff would want to break up the new couple, but Jeff tried to set her up with Troy Barnes instead of himself, and the whole thing had blown up in his face. The dean had underestimated Jeff's commitment to his relationship with Slater. And, apparently, Annie's and Vaughn's commitment to one another. That made things a lot trickier.
It was now clear to the dean that both Jeff and Annie would need to be single before they could get together. In Jeff's case, that would be no problem; the dean expected Slater to dump Jeff any day now, so he would just sit back and wait for the inevitable while concentrating on the Annie side of the equation. It was evident that neither she nor Vaughn could at this point be manipulated into breaking up, and frankly he was a little scared to try after seeing her reaction to Jeff's meddling. It was possible that at some point Annie would tire of Vaughn's lack of structure, or that he would rebel against her love of the same, but he didn't want to bet the farm on it. What he needed was something that he could introduce from behind the scenes that would radically change the dynamic of the relationship for the worse. But what?
The answer came in the form of an article in Community College Week about the explosive growth of intercollegiate footbag at the community college level, in which the Caesar Rodney Campus of Delaware Technical & Community College was named as one of the best teams in the country. Dean Pelton happened to know the dean of the Rodney Campus; they had been classmates at Colorado State. He was sure his fellow dean would be very interested to hear about a talented hacky-sacker languishing at a school whose budget was too tight to fund a new athletic team. He was equally sure that Vaughn would jump at the chance to be on the number one community college hacky sack team in the country, even if he had to move 1,700 miles away to do so. Sure, he and Annie might try a long-distance relationship, but the dean had been a community college educator his entire adult life and had lost count of how many relationships he seen crumble after one person transferred and the other stayed behind. And someone like Annie would never move across the country just to attend a different community college.
While he waited for Rodney Campus to take the bait, the dean continued to observe Jeff and Annie, more out of habit than for any particular reason. As expected, Slater had dumped Jeff; tellingly, Jeff was now not dating anyone. Annie, meanwhile, was still dating Vaughn. The good news on that front was that the dean had seen her taking a long and appreciative look at Jeff's naked backside during his pool game with Coach Bogner, giving him some hope that she might be coming to see Jeff as someone who could be more than just a good friend. On the other hand, he also had seen her repeatedly slapping Jeff on the arm and slamming his head into the study room table, so he wasn't quite sure what to think.
Toward the end of April, the dean arranged for Vaughn and his friends to stage a hacky sack demonstration during the school's annual Arbor Day Festival, and suggested to his former classmate that he come to Greendale to see Vaughn in action. He did, bringing with him the athletic director and the captain of the Rodney Campus footbag team. All were suitably impressed, and the athletic director told the dean that he was going to fight hard to get Vaughn an invitation to join his team. Dean Pelton could not have been more excited. Greendale's Golden Age was right around the corner!
* * *
Dean Pelton collapsed into his chair at the end of the worst day of the worst month of his ten years as an educator. The entire month of May had been one disaster after another. Cleaning up after the paintball debacle had blown a huge hole in his budget. The revelation that Ben Chang was a fraud had made the dean look like a fool, since it was he who had hired Chang in the first place. And worst of all, his plan to get Jeff and Annie together was in shambles. First, Jeff had slept with his study group friend Britta Perry during the paintball war. They had given no signs since that the sex meant anything to either of them, but in the surveillance video they both seemed to be enjoying it, and his fear that perhaps it had meant something to them increased each time he watched it.
Then, in the last week of the semester, Jeff and Annie had had a huge fight. Annie had told the dean that Chang was a fraud, and when Jeff found out, he had blown up and forced her out of the study group. By the next day, things had improved somewhat, and in fact Jeff had gone so far as to kick in the door to Chang's office when he thought Chang was threatening her. The dean didn't know exactly what had happened in Chang's office--damn that union!--nor what Jeff and Annie had said to each other in the hallway afterward, but there definitely appeared to be a certain awkwardness between them.
Nevertheless, there had been reason to be optimistic on the last day of classes. Jeff had seemed to be genuinely happy to be on campus for a change, and it had taken no effort at all to convince him to attend the Tranny Dance being held the following evening. Around noon, Vaughn had come by his office to inform him of his invitation to join the Rodney Campus footbag team and his intent to transfer there. It was everything he had imagined. The following evening, Jeff and a newly single Annie would find themselves together at a romantic formal dance. Kissing would, he was sure, soon follow.
The next day was when it all went to hell. Annie had come into his office and informed him that she was going to follow Vaughn to Delaware. The dean had tried his best to talk her out of it, pointing out that it was a lateral move at best, that admission officers would wonder why she had made the change, but she was firm. Something about "living in the moment." He had watched from the dance floor later that night as she said goodbye to the study group, indulging himself by imagining that her hug with Jeff was longer than those she shared with the others, that she looked a little reluctant to let him go ... but she did let him go, and then she was gone.
That had been the good part of the evening. Slater had decided all of a sudden that she wanted Jeff back, which had prompted Britta to decide that she too wanted to be with Jeff, and their jealous sniping had gotten so out of control that they both had ended up declaring their love for him in the middle of the Tranny Dance. The look on Jeff's face had been heartbreaking. Jeff was a man who had always prided himself on being able to talk his way out of any situation, but now he was lost, with no idea of what to say and no time to figure it out. The dean couldn't blame him for sneaking out when the melee started.
It was a nightmare. Any fondness Jeff might have developed for Greendale over the course of the year had surely been erased by the fiasco at the Tranny Dance, and without Annie on hand to get him to do things he was reluctant to do, he would never develop into the kind of campus leader the dean needed him to be. It was all so depressing. So much for next year being the start of a new golden age.
He glanced over at his computer monitor; the program he used to monitor the video feeds from the surveillance cameras was running, and by chance it happened to be showing the live feed from the camera aimed at Jeff's parking space, which sat empty save for a pile of broken glass. Seeing the empty space made him wonder when exactly Jeff had left, so he brought up the recorded video from that camera and started playback from 8:30 PM, which was about when he had seen Jeff make his escape from the Tranny Dance.
He sped through about 15 minutes of video before finding Jeff entering the frame ... carrying a pink duffle bag? Where ... wait, was that Annie? What was she doing there? He started tracing Jeff's path back across campus. The angle wasn't the greatest on some of the cameras, but that was definitely Annie walking alongside Jeff. It didn't make sense. He had watched her and Vaughn leave. He continued working backwards toward the cafeteria until he found the camera that had recorded Jeff and Annie approaching each other from opposite directions and stopping to talk.
This was an unexpected development. Did this mean Vaughn would be back too? If so, where was he? Perhaps ... oh.
Oh my.
Dean Pelton leaned back in his chair with a satisfied smile on his face. Maybe next year wouldn't be so bad after all.
Fin