Jeff/Britta Short Fics Post
Snow and Secret Handshakes (G, Jeff/Britta, Ensemble-y)
Troy’s car won’t start, and it takes all seven of them to figure out how to attach the jumper cables to Shirley’s van. (Jeff says he’s parked in the lot way the crap over on the other side of campus, but Britta’s pretty sure that’s a lie. He’s not wearing boots, he’d never park so far away if he thought he would have to walk more than fifty feet in the snow in his fancy shoes.)
It’s Annie and Shirley who do most of the figuring out, consulting driver’s manuals and Wikipedia and valiantly ignoring Pierce, who is barking things about electron flow and neutral magnetic poles and the Volkswagen Thing he used to drive back in the Dark Ages. Troy watches Pierce like a hawk, smacking his hands away from the engine. Pierce’s ridiculous fleece court jester hat bobs and weaves in the snowy air.
Britta hangs back with Jeff and Abed, stamping her feet for warmth.
“This is a great snowstorm,” Abed says, sticking out his tongue. “It’s like cotton candy is falling from the sky.”
Jeff gives him the side-eye. “You enjoy that cotton candy, Abed. I’ll stick with this tall hazelnut nonfat soy latte.”
“Your drink’s got more names than Moon Unit Zappa.” Britta points out.
“Moon Unit Zappa? Did you check the expiration date on that joke before you opened it?”
Beside the car, Troy and Pierce suddenly yelp in unison, jumping back. Pierce’s jump becomes a tilt and he pitches over into a snowbank. Britta doesn’t know if she should laugh or call 911.
She and Abed are dusting Pierce off when Troy’s engine suddenly roars into life. Annie and Shirley exchange an adorable little victory high-five, and then Troy and Abed do their equally adorable high-five, too. Then all four of them seem to realize it’s freezing and they jump into their vehicles like matched pairs of superheroes, waving as they drive off.
“Guys, let’s invent a secret handshake,” Pierce says, looking between Britta and Jeff with hopeful puppydog eyes. “We could adapt any of the several dozen I had to learn before I became a level four laser lotus.”
“Maybe later, Pierce,” Jeff says firmly. “I think we should get you to the infirmary first. You got a good shock there.”
“Shock? I don’t remember a shock.”
Britta exchanges glances with Jeff. “It knocked your hat off!”
“I was wearing a hat?”
Jeff shakes his head. “Come on, Pierce, we’ll walk with you.”
Crossing the quad, which looks like it has just barely survived a close encounter with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Jeff and Britta walk on either side of and slightly behind Pierce, keeping an eye on his footing on the sidewalks. Apparently the Dean is saving money on snow removal by using sugar instead of salt. This works about as well as you might expect.
When Pierce inevitably slips, Jeff darts forward to catch him, tossing his coffee in Britta’s direction. She fumbles it, mittens
making her clumsy, but then makes a last-second save. Jeff gets Pierce back on his feet and looks over at Britta expectantly, gesturing for his cup. She hands it back, making a face at him.
He sticks his tongue out at her, but ten seconds later his free hand is held out toward her at waist level. He wants a low-five.
Sorry, Pierce. They already have their own secret handshake.
***
Nurse Ratched (PG, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: Jeff gets sick, Britta takes care of him. Her tries using his lawyer powers to convince her that the best way to make him feel better is for her to dress up as a sexy nurse.
Once the meds kick in, it's Little Jeff who starts doing even more of the thinking than normal. "Britta!" Jeff calls from the living room.
"Come here, I found something, it's so important, Britta, so, so important, you need to see this, I am not kidding." He legit sounds drunk, the way he's babbling.
Britta sighs a huge sigh and gives the soup a last stir before going to check on him. "What? And put your shirt back on, I am not interested in seeing your chicken pox."
"Oh, OK. He shrugs half-into the shirt and holds his phone out toward her. "Remember that thing I told you about earlier?" He waggles his eyebrows, but he's drugged to the gills and they don't waggle in tandem.
"Which thing? Because, among other things, earlier you told me that Pierce is a secret emotional genius, that it's impossible to eat more than six saltine crackers in one minute, and that you don't need to obey gravity because you're too awesome."
"No, none of those things. It was the..." He gulps, and looks around wildly. "The sexy nurse thing," he whispers, trying to make it all sensual, but failing because of all the drooling.
"Okay, a) I am not putting on a sexy nurse outfit, b) where would I even find one, c) if you tell me you own one I won't be surprised, but d) I am still not putting on a sexy nurse outfit, no matter what you found."
"But Britta!" he whines. He wipes sweaty hair away from his eyes and points his phone in her general direction. Sweaty, deluded Jeff is the least-sexy Jeff she's ever seen, and that includes pop-and-locking Jeff. "It's on Wikipedia!"
Britta sighs again. "The only nurse I am ever going to be for you is Nurse Ratched."
That shuts him up, and she goes back to the kitchen. The soup actually smells damn good, and she is just ladling it out when he starts yelling again. "Britta! You'll never guess what you find if you search for 'Nurse Ratched' with safe search off. This is really inspiring!"
Definitely time for more medication.
***
Too Pretty to Die (G, Jeff/Britta, Firefly crossover) Based on this prompt: britta gets jeff addicted to arrested development (or if you haven't seen it, parks & rec or firefly or buffy, whatever)
"Okay, what? First off, did you say 'space western?'"
"I sure as hell did," Britta replies, unpacking the grocery bags Jeff's dropped on her counter. He starts pawing through the bags, searching for the beer. "Let me get that," she says, bumping him sideways with her hip. "You'll break all the eggs with your massive hands."
He plays the hip-check like it's much worse, like her tiny self could actually damage him, a walking, talking Vitruvian Man. "Well excuse me for having hands that are proportional to the rest of me, and for being skeptical of the unlikely combination of the words 'space' and 'western' That sounds like crap, Britta."
She hands him a beer and goes back to extracting all the foodstuffs for their upcoming DVD marathon: fancy cheeses, generic crackers (the delivery vehicle for expensive cheeses doesn't, itself, need to be expensive), some protein bars in stupid-looking packaging that he insisted on, even though she knows he'll be stuffing himself with fat and carbs just like she is, imported beer, trail mix that they made themselves by squabbling for like half an hour over which things from which bulk bins to mix in one bag, some chicken fingers and french fries from the hot bar, and a misspelled 'Hapy Aniversery' cake that was on clearance. Discount cake, that's like, two of Britta's most favorite words.
Anyway. "Trust me, it is amazing. And every chick in this show is smoking hot."
"I knew there had to be a reason you liked it. You don't seem like a sci-fi kinda girl." Jeff loads the first course onto a tray he snags from the top of her fridge. It's funny to see him making himself so at home in her home, kind of...heartwarming? It's something.
"One of the many, many reasons I love this show goes by the name Nathan Fillion," Britta replies. "And once you meet Malcolm Reynolds, you yourself will fall absolutely head over heels in love with him, too."
"I think that's illegal in most states," Jeff says, carrying the tray into the living room.
She follows with the beer. "Well, we could change that if you guys would just keep signing those online petitions I keep sending you the links to."
Jeff sighs. "Okay, okay. Space western time. Why did I ever agree to this?"
She rolls her eyes and goes to put the first disc in. "Because I'm charming, duh."
"That's what you think," he says, but he's grinning.
***FOUR HOURS LATER***
"God, I'm so tired," Britta yawns, rubbing her eyes. "Aren't you?"
Jeff doesn't look at her. "What?"
Ha. He's totally infatuated, she can tell by how he's leaning forward, elbows on knees and chin in hands, staring at the screen. "So who do you love more, Jeff, the badass captain, the badass first officer, the badass pilot, the badass mechanic, the badass priest, the badass soldier, the badass Companion, the badass doctor, or the badass, um, badass?"
"Definitely the space hooker. And be quiet, Britta, I can't hear Mal's witty retort."
Laughing to herself, Britta grabs another slice of cake.
***EIGHT HOURS LATER***
Britta wakes up on the downside of a sugar rush, feeling jittery but warm. Jeff is snoring beneath her on the couch, his chest rising and falling beneath her cheek, one arm wrapped haphazardly over her and a blanket tangled around their feet. The DVD is still playing, Mal and Inara bantering on the screen, too pretty to die. Britta snuggles in closer, smiling.
***
Halcyon Days (R, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: Jeff and Britta accidentally end up on vacation together. Hilarity (and sex) ensues.
Britta's on the beach, in a goddamn bikini, alright? That's when things are supposed to get better, right, universe? She's single and thirty and this is what single thirty-year-olds do: start a blog, let it take them on an adventure, (where adventure = into the bed of a swarthy, sensitive young foreign man), and then get a book deal out of it. She hasn't seen (or read) Julie and Julia or Eat Pray Love or any of those other ones, but she gets the gist. So why isn't the universe cooperating?
Her first mistake, Britta supposes, hating that she can be obsessing over her first mistakes on a blanket on a white sand beach attached to an incredibly overpriced and gimmicky singles resort just as well as she could be obsessing about them at home in her sweatpants and the Uggs that she doesn't let anybody know she owns--anyway her first mistake was starting a blog about being single and thirty. Mistake 1.5 was actually being good enough at writing to develop a small but rabidly devoted following. And then came the second and biggest mistake: accepting the first sponsor gift that came her way. It was all the zeroes on the stupid check they sent her to pay for her plane tickets that sealed the stupid deal.
So here she is, in pigtails and a bikini (a goddamned gold bikini, because she was a nerd before she was a blogger and a feminist before she was anything else), sitting on the sand, laptop hidden in her beach bag because she'll order a drink that's served in half a coconut before she'll be the kind of tool who brings a COMPUTER to the BEACH.
Someone gets in her sun. "Um, excuse me, you're blocking my light, buddy. Move along." She waves a hand without looking up. The clientele at this resort is not nearly as photogenic as their website promised, not that that's important or she'll include it in her review post.
"You're blocking my sand."
What? "That doesn't even make any sense!" She looks up-- "Jeff? What the hell are you doing here?"
"I'd ask you the same thing, except I can already tell: you're getting skin cancer."
"I suppose that explains...this getup?" She gestures; he's wearing huge sunglasses and a long-sleeved white shirt, casually half-tucked into cargo shorts. No, wait, they're definitely jams. Cargo jams. She snickers. His feet, shod in expensive-looking technical sandals, are admirably well-groomed, but they're the feet of a man who spends all his time in a cold-ish climate: pale as the belly of a dead fish.
"Whatever. The light shining off of your bikini is blinding. It's like your nipples are trying to guide in a plane."
Britta rolls her eyes. "I repeat, what are you doing here?"
"Isn't it obvious? I'm on vacation!" He shakes out his own towel beside hers and settles down, relaxing, propping himself up on his elbows and surveying his new domain like a silverback already on the prowl for teenage gorillas who are exploring their newly-discovered sexuality.
Wait. What? She shakes her head, thinking. "Jeff Winger...on vacation...at a singles resort. I know why you're here! You're having a midlife crisis!"
"What? No!" But he runs a hand through his immaculate hair, a dead giveaway.
Britta smirks. "Loser."
"Hey, you're here too, Gloria Steinem. What are you doing with that gold bikini, trying to shackle some unsuspecting IT geek enjoying a weekend away from the server farm into a relationship where he'll spend the rest of his life mourning the halcyon days when he used to live in his mother's basement?"
She cocks an eyebrow. "'Halcyon?'"
"I spent the flight studying for my comp midterm." He pulls his phone out of one of the thousands of pockets attached to his jams. "I have a Word of the Day app." He thumbs through and holds it up, showing her.
"Nerd," she says, and he grins back.
MONTAGE: moments from an accidentally shared vacation
They have dinner in the pool. Not at the pool or beside the pool but in it, because this is the global epicenter of Things That Are Tacky and they have a floating restaurant. This, of course, is a disaster: Britta spills guacamole in the pool (awkward and gross) and Jeff drops his sunglasses and neither of them will dive in to retrieve them because neither one wants to mess up their hair.
Britta can't take the sanitized-for-your-pleasure world of the resort and so they try to dress like locals and slip away from the beaches and palms and explore the broken little village where all the resort workers live. Jeff tries some street meat and an hour later when they are strolling silently down a deserted beach that is clotted with seaweed and garbage but nonetheless actually, frighteningly, kind of romantic, he is abruptly seized by food poisoning. Britta spends that night alterately pressing cool towels to his forehead and watching Jersey Shore with Spanish subtitles. Even in the bathroom, busy worshiping the porcelain throne, he demands recaps.
They go on a boat tour of the island's coastline and Jeff's obsession with really high SPFs comes in very handy because everyone else on the boat ends up looking like steak tartare. When they get back to the resort Britta and Jeff prance into the bar, barely containing their glee at everyone else's misfortune. They get hammered on hard liquor and end up making out in a cabana until a cleaning lady who doesn't speak English pries them apart with a broom.
They spend a lot of time loitering on the beach, Britta flipping the pages of Infinite Jest just to make it look like she's actually reading it. Jeff plays Angry Birds. Once he scoops her up and carries her out into the waves and tosses her in. They end up winning a chicken fight, which is not something Britta ever thought she would participate in, let alone be proud of. When they get back to their towels, his phone and her book are gone. "Fuck it," he says, and puts his hands on her hips and pulls her close, and she feels her breasts mash against his chest, his lips on her own. He smells like SPF90 and Acqua di Gio and she can feel his heart racing, like her own.
When they finally sleep together, it's on that crummy beach in the village, and she gets sand in her sarong (and elsewhere), and his hair is crusted with saltwater, and there's a hungry-looking dog that keeps appearing and reappearing like a goddamn ninja...but it's amazing. Afterwards he looks at the weird-ass depression their entwined bodies made in the wet sand and muses that he wishes he still had his phone so he could take a picture. Britta takes one with her phone. "Some day we'll show this to the grandkids," she says, partly to see how he'll react and partly because that's what she actually wants to happen.
He steps forward, into the sex-hole (eww), which brings his face closer to her own. "That dent," he says, being all serious and deep, as if he's not talking about a stupid sex-dent. "Was a little lopsided. We might have to make another one. You know, if it's going to be a family heirloom."
***
Catching Feelings (PG, Jeff/Britta, brief mention of Troy/Annie) Based on this prompt: jeff and britta agree to be friends with benefits but to pull the plug if anyone "catches feelings." britta, much to her disgust, does in fact, catch feelings and pulls the plug on the whole thing. jeff is dismayed.
St. Patrick's is the last day they do it...they get plastered in a charming pub downtown and then in the cab back to his place she breaks down, crying, distressing the cab driver immensely, and Jeff can't get Britta to calm down. He even stands on her stoop in the rain, pleading, but she's just sniffling wetly and the stupid cab driver has a hero complex and is waiting for Jeff like an angry dad whose daughter has been brought home weeping on prom night.
"You better go," Britta says. "I can't do this anymore."
So he goes.
Jeff has a couple usual girl-trouble cures, but it's really hard to justify 12-year-old scotch, Icelandic face creams, or $75 boxers on a community college student's non-existent salary. So he tries a new and depressingly cheap solution: kitten videos on YouTube.
He is hunched over his netbook in the study room, watching a kitten try to figure out why it can't attack another cat that happens to be inside a clear plastic box, when Abed comes in. Dammit.
"What are you watching?" Abed peels off his messenger bag and pulls out his chair, little movements whose precision has long since stopped creeping Jeff out.
"Porn. I'm watching hardcore pornography, Abed,"
"Cool. Cool, cool, cool."
Jeff pushes his computer aside with a sigh and flips through a textbook desultorily.
"Oh, don't let me stop you, Jeff. You could probably pleasure yourself in front of me and I wouldn't notice."
Jeff tries to get his eyebrows to say everything his mouth refuses to.
"In fact, Troy and Annie once had sex in the bottom bunk while I was in the top bunk. I slept through the whole thing, although I did have some intriguing dreams..."
Of course that's the moment that everyone else chooses to walk in the room. There are some puckishly adorable reactions on display (and Pierce, who is carrying a Shamrock Shake, should receive an Oscar nomination for Best Spit Take), but all Jeff can pay attention to is Britta.
She slides into her usual seat, and it's fortunate that everyone else is so involved with Annie and Troy and Abed. "Hi," he says, half under his breath.
"Hi," she says, with that stupid steely resolve he is all too familiar with in her voice. The whole "friends with benefits contract" was her idea, and he supposes he should be proud of her for following through on all of its Byzantine clauses--even though he's now reduced to, let's repeat it, watching cat videos on YouTube for emotional consolation. Let's repeat that again. No wait, it's too depressing.
"How are you doing?" he asks, attempting to be gallant.
"I'm okay," she says. And then she looks up at him, and like always, she must see something in him that he only rarely catches glimpses of himself, but was starting to see more, the more she hung around: someone worth confiding in. "Fine. I'm not okay. I'm a walking advertisement for the miracles of waterproof mascara."
He reaches for his netbook. "Have I got something to show you."
(Note: This is what Jeff shows Britta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bmhjf0rKe8)
***
A Giant Towel Warmer That You Can Have Sex In (R, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: The second time they had sex.
There's a reason Jeff's car has heated seats, okay? It's wintertime and snow has turned Greendale whiter than an Aryan Nation meeting but Britta's ass (and assorted other parts of her) are nice and warm. Nice AND warm. Like one time she used her tax refund to spend one single night at a fancy-ass hotel because Thom Yorke had once spent the night there, and that fancy hotel had had towel warmers, which had blown her mind with their awesomeness. A warm towel, whenever you want it? Sign me up, this entitled jagoff lifestyle has its privileges.
So basically Jeff's car is like a giant towel warmer that you can have sex in. Not that she was intending to have sex in Jeff's car, let alone with Jeff. Sometimes Abed eats lunch in here, so Goddess knows what kind of crumbs she could be rolling around in.
They're both drunk. It's midterms and the best way to study is with your two friends Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker, right? Right. Good to drink but not to drink and drive. That's why she followed Jeff out here and stole his car keys and dropped them down that sewer grate and then, while he bitched at AAA over the phone for like 45 minutes, she fell asleep in the warm back seat of his car. And that's why, after he climbed in beside her, ranting about how it's illegal to deny someone service just because they're drunk, she had gotten caught up in brushing the snow off his jeans, the warmth of him radiating through them. He'd grabbed her hand off his knee like it was a hot coal, and then next thing she knew her tits were out in the open and he was looking very pleased with himself.
So yeah, her whole back is warm from the seats, and her whole front is warm from...well just from him. He's breathing hotly into her neck, face not where she can see it, and she wants to see him, wants to see what this means to him. She turns his face up to hers, his pupils shot like she's some sort of drug. She's urging him on with her thighs, her heels tracing weird patterns in the fogged-up windows. It's not pretty, it's not elegant, and when they're done he'll definitely have to get his upholstery spot-cleaned...but it is them.
***
Moving On (PG-13, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: jeff and britta have been together-ish for a while but neither has made the move to be more serious. britta is going to sign a new lease on her apartment and jeff is acting all insulted that britta would do this without asking him to look it over as a lawyer (britta: but you're NOT a lawyer. jeff: ouch.), but really he's just pissed that britta didn't even consider them moving in together.
Jeff carries in all of their Chinese takeout except for the two containers of wonton soup, leaving those to Britta. They have so much food that an innocent bystander might be forgiven for thinking that they are preparing to hibernate, not ride out a predicted weekend blizzard, but whatever. That's why Jeff lifts weights, so he can shovel out his car after a night in Britta's criminally non-maintained parking lot, cart around lots of Chinese food, open beer bottles one-handed, and, later on, carry his semi-girlfriend over his shoulder like a caveman hauling a cavewoman off for an afternoon of trying to invent fire via genital friction.
"Why are you making that face," Britta asks, already scooping snow peas and rice into her mouth with a plastic spoon. She plops down on the loveseat, sitting crosslegged. She's wearing a denim skirt and thick tights and socks, so it's not like he can really see anything, but there's something a little devilish about it anyway. Her hair's all frazzled by the wind, a blonde froth around her wind-flushed face. It's a Friday afternoon, a whole weekend stretching ahead of them, and the fact that he is actually pleased by the prospect of getting snowed in here, with her, makes him feel a little tingly on the inside. Jeff Winger, tingly. It's been a long time since he's felt tingly, if he's honest with himself, like maybe since Erica Heller slapped him for looking up her dress in second grade.
"Nothing," he says. "A metaphor got away from me in my head."
She raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything, licking sauce off her fingers before turning on the TV. Jeff unpacks the rest of the food on the coffee table, pushing aside piles of her damn trashy magazines. (Well, okay, even he can admit that Bust and Mother Jones aren't the trashiest of magazines. There are a couple of his Maxims in the pile, though.)
He goes into the kitchen to scrounge up a beer, and has to move a big pile of junkmail and papers on the counter to find a plate. One of the papers has a legalish look about it, and sure enough it's a lease. Britta's new lease, not signed yet. He can't help it and starts reading, leaning against the wall and sipping on his favorite import--she's finally learned to start keeping it around.
"They're saying the county's supposed to get ten more inches tonight," she calls in from the living room.
"The county won't be the only thing getting ten inches tonight," he says automatically, distracted by the lease.
"Don't flatter yourself," Britta says, but laughs. Then: "What are you doing in there? General Tso is getting cold."
"I'm reading your new lease."
"What?"
"I'm. Reading. Your. New. Lease," he says, exaggerating the pauses. He snags another beer for her and goes back to the other room, sitting down in her comfiest (okay, only) armchair.
"Um, why? It's the same as my old lease, I think."
"Did you actually read it?"
"Of course!"
"So you're okay with this clause that says the landlord can come in whenever he wants without telling you first?"
"What?"
He waves the papers at her. "How long have you lived here, a couple years? Who knows how often he's been in here. He could have a camera hidden anywhere. He could be watching us through eyeholes in that painting like a Scooby Doo villain right now." Jeff raises his voice, loud enough so that her bitchy neighbors will probably come over and complain, like they did that one time she tied him to the bed and things got a little out of hand. "We're on to you, man! Stop your masturbating RIGHT NOW!"
"Jeff! Shut up!" She rushes over, practically flings herself at him to grab the lease. "It does not say that."
"It does." He points, and waits as she wades through the legalese. She settles down onto his lap and he attempts to tame her frizzy mane idly, working out knots. All of the good product is at his place, but she's probably got a decent gel and mousse here he could combine if he was at all interested in making progress. He likes this look, though: it's total Sex Hair.
"It really does say that, that's bullshit!"
"Why didn't you ask me to look this over before you signed it? You're always telling me to use my lawyer powers for good, and not for talking my way out of parking tickets,"
"You're not a lawyer, Jeff."
"Ouch," He feigns a direct hit, hand over his heart.
Britta crumples the lease into a little ball and attempts to make an impossible shot--the trash can is all the way on the other side of the room. She sighs, crumpling her face in a way that is so adorable it must be unconscious, because he can't imagine her ever presenting herself as so vulnerable. He slings an arm across her legs, hand on her hip to pull her a little closer.
She tenses, not surprising him in the slightest, but she doesn't run. He supposes this is what passes for progress in their...relationship. Whatever it is. They sleep together and they argue together and they laugh together and they fail classes together, and they practically--practically--live together. And you can bet that his lease is airtight. If his lease was freshly-made bed, you could bounce a quarter off it.
"What am I going to do?" Britta says, staring blankly at her front door. On the doormat their discarded boots are slowly melting, laces tangled.
"Move, I guess," he says, and rubs one of her shins experimentally, little static sparks crackling. She half-frowns absently, watching his hand on her leg.
They watch more of the news for a while, not moving or speaking or eating. "This is nice," she says, suddenly, when a commercial snaps them out of the reverie. "Sitting here."
"My lap is an awesome place," he agrees, and she is looking at him through her lashes, kind of an I want to sex you right here on this Salvation Army armchair look that makes his pants suddenly tight. She lowers her mouth onto his and he will never get used to this but he is used to this, the taste of her and what she'll do with her tongue and what he can do with his to make her gasp and reach for the buttons of his shirt.
In the end he carries her more fireman-style than caveman-style, and has to do some crazy pirouette to make it through her narrow bedroom door, but when she's on the mattress and he's on top of her, he pauses and says her name.
"What?" she asks, eyes a little glassy.
"My apartment has two bedrooms, you know."
"I know."
"Just..." All of a sudden he realizes he's about to cockblock himself. Is this part of getting old, too, Pierce? What? Stop thinking of Pierce! "Um, you could move in with me. It's closer to school and the rent would be cheaper and you could use a real washer and dryer instead of those communal monstrosities downstairs that get water marks all over my shirts. And we spend all our time together anyway. You could have your own bedroom."
She rises up on her elbows, smiling. "Why would I need my own bedroom?"
***
You Can't Get Drunk on Champagne (PG-13, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: Britta goes out for her once annual dinner with her rich parents. A member of the group (your choice!) happens to be at the same restaurant. Awkwardness ensues.
Once a year Britta needs to remember which fork is used for which course and what kind of wine goes with the vegetarian entree at her parents' country club's brunch, and she needs to remember to do laundry beforehand so she has clean underwear on beneath her dress, in order to never again recreate the Pantyless Gin Heiress Debacle of 2005, as several Greendale-area society blogs christened it.
The valet looks disgusted at her beater, but Britta looks down her nose at him, helped by her highest (and only) Louboutins. (A Christmas present from her mother, not regiftable or returnable and only useful for certain specific occasions. Totally out of place in her Gender Studies classes at Greendale, for example.) She teeters into the banquet hall and toward her family's table, where her mother frostily welcomes her and her father, when she drops a kiss on his cheek, already smells like the family business.
"Hey, sis," Britta's brother Axel says. (Yes, Axel--their mother is Swedish, they all have ridiculous names.) He toasts her with his mimosa, and pours her one from a massive pitcher.
"Hey. Where's Sven?"
"Your older brother is at a...hockey match," her mother says. Britta's mother, Astrid, is a legendary ice queen, even in the rarefied circles in which her family runs. Britta can count on one hand the number of times her mother has ever touched her. She's trying to move beyond that, to get over the instinct it's given her to never get close to anyone so that they can't hurt her, but that's all she can do: try.
"He painted his face," her father says. "And all of his children's faces, too." He arches an eyebrow and sips at his martini. It's ten A.M. on a Sunday. Does anything more need to be said about Britta's father? She tries not to think about him at all, and about 360 days a year, it works.
Britta gulps down half her mimosa right off the bat, feels champagne shimmer all through her bloodstream. Her parents and brother talk, and she talks too, but it's the same as always: they all talk and no one listens. Conversations as empty and echoing as the inside of a drum.
When the champagne has done its duty and wants out, Britta excuses herself and heads to the ladies room. Her face in the mirror is flushed with stress and morning booze, there's a grease spot from spilled bechamel on her flouncy chiffon dress, the Louboutins are gorgeous but making her insteps cramp.
She slips out onto the piazza for a moment to rub some feeling back into her feet (and, okay, sneak a cigarette) and enjoy the air and the sunshine and the birds singing. It's almost a normal Sunday morning, if she blocks out the ridiculous luxury of the golf course and the expensive cars in the parking lot...one of which she recognizes. Why one black Lexus should stick out to her among a sea of identical black Lexii she doesn't think about, but there's a familiar spiky hairdo sticking up on the other side of it. Shoes dangling from one hand and cigarette from the other, she sets out across the toe-tickling expanse of the green.
Jeff is arguing with the valet in Spanish, and when he sees her coming he doesn't look surprised, just gestures for her to hurry. "What's pendejo mean?"
She tells him, and he curses, and obviously the valet is more fluent in English than Jeff is in Spanish. Britta steps into the conversation and straightens things out, because she, at least, has been using Annie's notes as more than emergency wrapping paper for Troy's birthday presents.
"What are you doing here?" Jeff wants to know, once he's taken pictures of his car with his phone before the valet drives off, "for insurance purposes." Not Thank you or anything, but What are you doing here?
She feels really short, standing barefoot next to him on the hot asphalt, sunlight glittering off all the cars around them. "I have brunch with my parents here once a year."
"They let hippies in here? I've never smelled patchouli, and I'm here all the time. Dinner with the partners, dates with girls with expensive taste...this place is great." He notices her shoes. "What's wrong with your feet?"
Britta looks down. There are huge blisters on each of her big toes, swollen and red. "These shoes suck." She gestures with them, with her thousand dollar shoes. She could feed a village in Africa for a year with the profits from selling these shoes on eBay. Why doesn't she do that? Britta wonders distantly.
"Are you drunk?" Jeff asks, putting on his suit jacket.
"Only on champagne."
"You can't get drunk on champagne."
"You can if you drink enough of it."
He cocks his head. "Are you smoking again?"
She takes a last drag and chucks the butt, aiming for the green and only coming up a little short. "No."
There's a pause while he considers her, and she considers him back. He fits in really well here. He's, like, Generic Background Guy #5, tall and lean and handsome and vaguely vulpine. Just looking at how perfectly groomed he is makes her feel messy.
Finally he asks: "Are you okay, Britta?"
"No," she blurts, and she's not sure which of them must look more surprised.
"Um," Jeff says, and then Britta steps into his personal space, the asphalt searing her feet. She stoops and abruptly bends to put her shoes back on, and he reaches out to steady her.
"Thanks," she says, and gulps down whatever shadow emotion has filled her throat and made it tough to breathe. They walk back in together and he meets her family and then looks at her closely again, concern etched in the lines on his brow that he probably pretends aren't there when he's spending his nightly hour and a half gazing into his bathroom mirror. But then ditches his lawyer buddies to sit there and talk high-class booze with her father and ski resorts in the Alps with her mother and 80's hair bands with her brother. Britta just sits there, hearing how his inconsequential patter interweaves with her family's inanities, and she takes her shoes off underneath the table and presses her bare feet into the soft, cool carpet, just breathing, breathing freely for the first time in what feels like forever.
***
Like Normal People (R, Jeff/Britta, angsty) Based on this prompt: I'd love to see a fic that had Britta avoiding Jeff (like walking the long way to class to avoid walking with him, or ducking into the meat section of the grocery store when she spots him there) and Jeff noticing it and confronting her, leading to them having a conversation about the fact that they are barely friends anymore. Wouldn't even need to be overtly shippy, just a nice friendship study. I think it would be cool to dig in a little to Jeff and Britta's current relationship, since the show is really giving us nothing.
The study room is nice and all, but it's a terrible place to, you know, actually study, so Britta's taken to holing up in one of the library carrels between classes. It's mostly quiet, the light is nice, no one bothers her. It's just her and her psychology textbook, these days--her only other class is Biology and now that she's made up with Todd behind the study group's back, he's agreed to let her copy his homework in exchange for a nickel bag every week. Let's just say Todd's not as perfect as he seems.
She's deep into some seriously disturbing stuff on wire mothers, about ready to travel back in time and punch Harry Harlow in the neck, when someone coughs loudly, making her jump half out of her seat.
"Whoa, whoa, settle down, Beavis."
"What do you want, Jeff?" She looks back at her notebook, filled with looping doodles, with lines that never end.
He sighs. It would be inaudible if the library wasn't so quiet. "Are you hiding? Shirley told me to come over here and ask if you were hiding."
"What? No!" She stands and looks around, over the tops of the other carrels, searching for Shirley's hair. No dice. "Why would I be hiding? I'm just trying to study. None of you guys are in Psych 101 and it's too loud in the study room to concentrate."
"It's not loud in the study room."
"Pierce joined the African Drum Troupe last week, of course it's loud in there." She sits back down, her back to him in a universal-to-everyone gesture of go away.
He's Jeff, so he sits down in the carrel beside hers. Britta hisses: "What are you doing?"
"Studying."
"Hilarious." Britta rolls her eyes, goes back to the textbook. There's a picture of some poor long-dead rhesus monkey, staring at her with grainy black-and-white eyes, clutching a bundle of wire and cloth. She flips the page, but just goes back to drawing in her notebook. She can hear Jeff already tapping away on his phone.
"I lied," Jeff says, after a couple minutes. "Shirley didn't send me over here. She told me you were here, but she didn't tell me to come talk to you."
"Okay." She erases something, to make it sound like she's being productive.
He sighs again, and his chair scrapes, and then he's peeking in over her shoulder, all up in her personal space. "I know you're probably just upset because R.E.M. broke up, but are you mad at me or something?"
"Back off, Jeff." Under the guise of packing up her stuff, she throws an elbow in his direction, and he moves away, just barely.
"You're mad at me, then. Look, I know we ended things kind of awkwardly, but, that can't be it, right? Right. We always said it was just going to be casual--"
She shakes her head forcefully, sensing him already starting to get himself worked up, about to go all Winger Speech, which always helps him feel better. "I need to be somewhere."
"Gotta mediate a dispute between the cats? Try out some of those anger management techniques you keep telling Pierce about?"
"Would you just shut up?" She tries to keep her voice calm, but there's too much pressure built up behind the thought and she gets all high-pitched at the end. They're left staring at each other in the middle of the hallway, heads poking up out of carrels all around them. Jeff rolls his eyes.
"We need to talk," he says.
"We've never talked," she says. She's making eye contact like a motherfucker. Her therapist would be proud--not Duncan, her real therapist, the one at the women's center where she's been volunteering all semester.
"Yeah, well, maybe that's part of the problem."
"Part of the problem is that you are being really mean to me lately. Mean to everybody. You made Shirley cry the other day! Troy thinks you're always picking on him, even Pierce thinks you're being a jerk. And you're confusing the hell out of Annie with this ridiculous 'I want you but I'm not going to do anything about it' crap! You need help, Jeff." Once it's out of her mouth, that last sentence hangs in the awkward space between them, but she gets the cathartic nature of the Winger Speech. Blood roars in her ears with a rhythm like one of Pierce's drum solos.
He just stares at her, and in this lighting his crow's feet are really visible. She remembers watching his face as he slept, thinking that it was the only time he ever let down his guard. She remembers how much she cried the first time she talked with Dr. Prasad and can't even picture Jeff walking into the same room as a therapist, let alone sitting down and talking with one.
"Okay," he finally says. "Okay." He jangles his keys, one of the universe's most annoying sounds. Jeff's mouth flattens so far it almost disappears, and then he's looking up at her, making eye contact. "Okay. Let's talk about it. Let's go get dinner."
"Jesus Christ, are you hitting on me?" She hoists her bag higher on her shoulder, straightens to her full height plus four inches of heel. "What is wrong with--"
"Britta. No. I am not hitting on you. Just--just--just calm down, alright?" He crosses his arms and then uncrosses them, pushing a hand through his hair. "We used to be friends, do you remember that? It was like a million years ago, and we used to be friends and we hung out and we did shit together that wasn't sex or fighting. Remember?"
There is a hollowness inside her bones that is the shape of their friendship. "I remember."
"Then let's talk about that. Go to dinner and talk about that. Like normal people."
"Like normal people?"
"Yeah."
She looks at him very closely, takes him in: crow's feet and hair gel and expensive cologne. There are probably words for people like him in her psychology textbook. Hell, there are probably words for people like herself in her psychology textbook. She thinks about the sign in Dr. Prasad's office, a framed quote from Thomas Moore: "Most, if not all, problems brought to therapists are issues of love. It makes sense that the cure is also love."
"Okay," she says. "Let's go."
***
Remind Me (R, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: Jeff/Britta: Phone sex after Paradigms of Human Memory where they go through all the places they won't have sex again.
"Hey, I just got home. You left a bunch of stuff here. Some sweaters, one boot, a Disney Princess toothbrush, some of that disgusting vegan lubricant. I don't know what is more gross, that lube or the fact that a grown woman uses a Disney Princess toothbrush."
"Shut up. It was on sale. Will you just put it all in a box or something? I'll come pick it up or you can bring it to campus or whatever."
"Sure. Yeah."
"Are you okay?"
"Of course."
"It's just that you paused. You never pause."
"I pause."
"You never pause, Jeff. When you're lawyering you go from zero to Alan Dershowitz in five seconds."
"'Lawyering?'"
"Yeah, lawyering."
"You go from zero to Gloria Steinem in five seconds."
"I'm not arguing with you. Are you arguing with me? Are you trying to pick a fight? Are you mad at me because you aren't going to have access to my lady parts whenever you want anymore? Because speaking of things you go from zero to over the top with in five seconds..."
"Says the lady who couldn't keep her hands out my pants that time the Dean called us to his office after Chang's car was mysteriously shrink-wrapped in the middle of the night."
"Says the guy who unclasped my bra in the middle of Annie's karate exhibition."
"You remember that? I was so impressed with myself, you were wearing two shirts and I still got that thing unhooked."
"You're always impressed with yourself."
"Yeah, like you don't think you're awesome."
"Again, I'm not arguing with you."
"You're always arguing with me."
"We don't argue, we...we talk in our own way."
"Our own way that everyone else thinks is arguing."
"We're like Troy and Abed. They have their own weird twin language."
"Gross. Please do not bring up Troy or Abed or twins or anything like that when we're reminiscing about our sexual escapades."
"Aha. I know what's going on. We broke things off like an hour ago and you're horny already. Keep it in your pants, Winger, we had sex an hour before we broke it off. Don't you remember? Sheesh."
"Yeah, I remember. Remind me, though."
"Gross."
"Like you don't like dirty talk."
"Once again, I'm not arguing with you."
"You paused, that time."
"Maybe."
"And that time."
"Okay, you're right. I paused. You win."
"Like that time we were at your place and I bet you that we'd get snowed in and classes would be canceled and your heat would go out and we'd have to resort to sex to stay warm."
"I remember that."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. That was...that was..."
"Allow me to finish that sentence for you. 'That was mind-blowing.' 'That was the most satisfied I've ever been in my life.' 'That was the sexual experience to which I will compare all other future sexual experiences for the rest of my life.'"
"You're not wrong, but what I was going to say was that that was a lot of fun. That whole weekend. Even when the delivery guy walked in on us when you were doing that thing with your fingers and your tongue and he ran out screaming."
"We never had to pay for that food, I remember. Which thing with my fingers and tongue?"
"You remember. Number five on Jeff's List of Things To Do With My Fingers and Tongue. That thing."
"Ahh, number five. A classic. Are you home now?"
"Yeah. How can you tell?"
"You wouldn't have exhaled like that if you were still on the bus."
"True."
"Remind me about this morning."
"Jeff."
"Remind me. Please."
"Whining is so unattractive."
"I'm not whining. It's more like begging. You're killing me with that laugh, you know."
"What laugh?"
"That throaty one you just did. It's a bedroom laugh."
"Like we ever did it in a bedroom."
"Two different storage closets, two different cars, a dorm room, a study table, every room in your apartment, your incredibly comfortable bed a lot, and so sorry about that irreparable damage to your headboard, both of my bathrooms, several shady hotel rooms and that one suite you got at that resort despite your ethical objections to Groupon's business model, the editor's office at the Gazette-Journal-Mirror, the room adjacent to the sex room at Pierce's mansion, that surprisingly spacious Macy's dressing room--"
"I still can't believe it had a chaise lounge, let alone one with an adjustable back."
"--the Greendale lap pool, that gazebo near the Air Conditioning Repair Annex where we found that creepy hidden camera, one taxicab, one limousine, the other room adjacent to the sex room at Pierce's mansion--"
"No, it was adjacent to the other sex room."
"Stop arguing with me."
"I'm not arguing with you. I'm a little stunned that you remember every single place where we had sex."
"Don't you?"
"We had a lot of sex. It's all kind of blurred together."
"Now who's pausing?"
"Shut up. You weren't done with the list, though. Keep going."
"Keep going?"
"Yeah."
"Are you--? What is that sound? Is that cloth rustling? Are you getting undressed?"
"Shut up. Keep going."
"Fine. That basement in the library where we found that civil defense shelter with all the surprisingly comfortable wool blankets. The bathroom at Denny's. The backseat of my car, approximately one million times."
"I really like those seat warmers."
"I really like your seat warmers."
"What does that even mean?"
"Shut up. Keep talking about my car. I mean, keep talking about us having sex in my car. And keep laughing like that."
"Jeff."
"I'm serious."
"I know you are, your voice has dropped like an octave. Did you have your upholstery treated to make it that soft? It's like a mink coat--not that I know what a mink coat feels like."
"I love it when you accidentally reveal your bourgeois origins."
"'Bourgeois?' God, keep up the dirty talk, Marx. It's so hot."
"Don't ever mention Marx when we're talking dirty again. That's the third time I've had to tell you that."
"What makes you think we'll talk dirty ever again?"
"Because I would recognize the sound of your pants coming off anywhere."
"Ha. Like I didn't just recognize the sound of your pants coming off. The zippers on those $90 jeans sound so distinctive."
"Remember the three hours you spent practicing unzipping them with your teeth?"
"Was it really three hours? I must've had some time to kill between classes."
"We did kill a lot of time in that janitor's closet."
"It's a very sexy janitor's closet. He's got that calendar with the pinup girls and the smell of the Pine-Sol just takes the edge off your cologne."
"Did you hear that? That was the sound of my pants going back on."
"Well that was the sound of my pants going back on. Put that stuff in a box, I'll come over and get it."
"Right now? I'll put everything in the box except the lube."
"You're unbelievable."
"But not wrong."
"Change the sheets and switch that Coldplay you're inevitably listening to to Stevie Wonder and we'll see how wrong you are."
"Change the sheets? We've never done it in my bed."
"There's a first time for everything."
***
Glad You're Not Dead (PG, Jeff/Britta, ensemble) Based on this prompt: Jeff gets hurt somehow, lands himself in the hospital. Cue Britta fretting in the waiting room, with the rest of the study group. Something sweetish, more on a focus about her suddenly worrying about the mortality of her surrogate family. But beat the crap out of Jeff. He's been asking for it lately.
They're all safe, that's the most important thing. Britta has done a lot of babysitting, and since the accident she's found herself constantly doing a silent headcount of the crew: AbedAnnieShirleyTroyPierce. All here. And Jeff is with the doctors. What's more safe than being with doctors?
"I'm going to go get some hot cocoa," Annie says. "Anybody else want some? When I candystriped here I loved the cocoa. This cafeteria is definitely better than the Greendale cafeteria."
Everybody else raises their hands, and then Annie realizes she can't carry all those cups, and then there's an adorable rock-paper-scissors battle that results in Annie, Troy, and Pierce all heading off to the cafeteria. Britta does her little headcount again, is distracted in the middle of it because Annie comes clipping back on her kitten heels, and wraps Britta in a hug. "He'll be fine, Britta," Annie says, squeezing her tight.
"Thanks, Annie." Britta pushes five bucks and a handful of change at Annie, but she pushes it back and heads off, Pierce and Troy towering on either side of her.
Britta sighs and paces for a while, her mind replaying a loop of Jeff climbing that stupid ladder, the Dean eyeballing his ass the whole time--like why was it Jeff who had to rescue that kitten from tree outside the Dean's ofice, isn't that why they have security people or janitors or whatever?--and of course the stupid ladder fell and the stupid kitten is still stuck up in the tree, and Britta loves kittens, why is she calling them stupid? Uggh. She does another headcount. It's kind of soothing, even though there are only two to count.
"Britta, sweetie, sit down, you're making me nervous," Shirley pats the seat beside her, but Britta just stops pacing. Shirley shakes her head. "Fine, suit yourself. But worrying won't make him better."
Britta bites back a retort--Shirley's just trying to make her feel better. She looks over at Abed instead, and he pats the seat beside him. Which is the seat between him and Shirley. Britta gives in.
Shirley reaches for her hand, and Abed pats her kneecap. "Don't worry, Britta. The others will be back in a moment. With hot chocolate." He flutters his eyebrows ridiculously, which she can't resist. It feels weird to laugh, weird but good.
"That was scary," Shirley says. "Watching him fall."
"I'd never heard a man scream like that until today," Abed says.
Britta grins. "Yeah, the Dean can reach a surprisingly high A."
"I was talking about Jeff," Shirley laughs. "When he hit the Luis Guzman statute."
Abed chuckles, and after a moment Britta does, too. "It did kind of knock all the air out of him."
"It was scary, though," Abed says. "Not as scary as some episodes of Ghostwriter, but still upsetting."
"Ghostwriter? That was the best show, man. Gabby was my first crush!" The three lost lambs are back with cups (and Hostess Cupcakes), and Britta sits back and lets the familiar sounds of the gang being the gang wash over her: Pierce not getting a reference, Annie enthusiastically joining in the nostalgia trip, Shirley offering up an opinion about whether or not ghosts can get into heaven, Troy and Abed being, well, Troy and Abed. Britta misses Jeff suddenly, and it's not missing him because he could have died, it's not missing him because what the conversation needs to make it complete is some bleeding-edge sarcasm: it's missing him because six of them is not enough.
A nurse pushes back the sliding window at the reception desk. "Is there a Miss Perry here? Miss Britta Perry?"
"Here!" Britta rushes over, juggling her cocoa and purse and cursing her heels.
"The doctor would like to speak with you," the nurse says, opening the double doors into the ER.Some young punk doctor, like seriously we're talking Doogie Howser territory, comes toward Britta. "Miss Perry? You're Mr. Winger's emergency contact?"
Emergency contact? It sounds like a statement, or maybe a question. "Um, okay?"
"You can see him now. I'll warn you, he's pretty sore. Cracked a rib or two, and he's all scraped up--he said something about hitting some hedges that felt like sandpaper? I didn't quite understand that part. Anyway, he'll be ready to go home in a bit, we just need to observe him for an hour or two for any signs of head trauma." The doctor takes her politely but firmly by the elbow and lead her into the rabbit warren of the ER, until he sweeps back a curtain and there's Jeff and the doctor just kind of disappears.
"Don't you ever get near a ladder ever again!" she blurts, and then shakes her head. "I mean, how are you doing?"
He laughs a little, but it must hurt his ribs because he tamps the laughter right down and looks like he's trying not to move. "I'll survive."
"You better," She steps right up beside the bed, sets her purse and cocoa down on the bed by his feet, ignoring the face he makes at that. She pushes hair back behind her ears and then leans in and kisses him, light and tender, only touching him with her mouth. At first he's surprised but then he's kissing back, and then her hair slips free and into their faces, and he can't move it because he's half-broken, so she has to disengage.
"Whoa," Jeff says, off-kilter for one moment in his life. He's got a black eye but, if anything, it makes him look more rakish.
"Yeah," Britta says. "I'm pretty glad you're not dead. No, wait, we're all glad you're not dead."
"So is the group gonna come in here and kiss me, too?"
"You know, I wouldn't put it past them..."
***
Troy’s car won’t start, and it takes all seven of them to figure out how to attach the jumper cables to Shirley’s van. (Jeff says he’s parked in the lot way the crap over on the other side of campus, but Britta’s pretty sure that’s a lie. He’s not wearing boots, he’d never park so far away if he thought he would have to walk more than fifty feet in the snow in his fancy shoes.)
It’s Annie and Shirley who do most of the figuring out, consulting driver’s manuals and Wikipedia and valiantly ignoring Pierce, who is barking things about electron flow and neutral magnetic poles and the Volkswagen Thing he used to drive back in the Dark Ages. Troy watches Pierce like a hawk, smacking his hands away from the engine. Pierce’s ridiculous fleece court jester hat bobs and weaves in the snowy air.
Britta hangs back with Jeff and Abed, stamping her feet for warmth.
“This is a great snowstorm,” Abed says, sticking out his tongue. “It’s like cotton candy is falling from the sky.”
Jeff gives him the side-eye. “You enjoy that cotton candy, Abed. I’ll stick with this tall hazelnut nonfat soy latte.”
“Your drink’s got more names than Moon Unit Zappa.” Britta points out.
“Moon Unit Zappa? Did you check the expiration date on that joke before you opened it?”
Beside the car, Troy and Pierce suddenly yelp in unison, jumping back. Pierce’s jump becomes a tilt and he pitches over into a snowbank. Britta doesn’t know if she should laugh or call 911.
She and Abed are dusting Pierce off when Troy’s engine suddenly roars into life. Annie and Shirley exchange an adorable little victory high-five, and then Troy and Abed do their equally adorable high-five, too. Then all four of them seem to realize it’s freezing and they jump into their vehicles like matched pairs of superheroes, waving as they drive off.
“Guys, let’s invent a secret handshake,” Pierce says, looking between Britta and Jeff with hopeful puppydog eyes. “We could adapt any of the several dozen I had to learn before I became a level four laser lotus.”
“Maybe later, Pierce,” Jeff says firmly. “I think we should get you to the infirmary first. You got a good shock there.”
“Shock? I don’t remember a shock.”
Britta exchanges glances with Jeff. “It knocked your hat off!”
“I was wearing a hat?”
Jeff shakes his head. “Come on, Pierce, we’ll walk with you.”
Crossing the quad, which looks like it has just barely survived a close encounter with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Jeff and Britta walk on either side of and slightly behind Pierce, keeping an eye on his footing on the sidewalks. Apparently the Dean is saving money on snow removal by using sugar instead of salt. This works about as well as you might expect.
When Pierce inevitably slips, Jeff darts forward to catch him, tossing his coffee in Britta’s direction. She fumbles it, mittens
making her clumsy, but then makes a last-second save. Jeff gets Pierce back on his feet and looks over at Britta expectantly, gesturing for his cup. She hands it back, making a face at him.
He sticks his tongue out at her, but ten seconds later his free hand is held out toward her at waist level. He wants a low-five.
Sorry, Pierce. They already have their own secret handshake.
***
Nurse Ratched (PG, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: Jeff gets sick, Britta takes care of him. Her tries using his lawyer powers to convince her that the best way to make him feel better is for her to dress up as a sexy nurse.
Once the meds kick in, it's Little Jeff who starts doing even more of the thinking than normal. "Britta!" Jeff calls from the living room.
"Come here, I found something, it's so important, Britta, so, so important, you need to see this, I am not kidding." He legit sounds drunk, the way he's babbling.
Britta sighs a huge sigh and gives the soup a last stir before going to check on him. "What? And put your shirt back on, I am not interested in seeing your chicken pox."
"Oh, OK. He shrugs half-into the shirt and holds his phone out toward her. "Remember that thing I told you about earlier?" He waggles his eyebrows, but he's drugged to the gills and they don't waggle in tandem.
"Which thing? Because, among other things, earlier you told me that Pierce is a secret emotional genius, that it's impossible to eat more than six saltine crackers in one minute, and that you don't need to obey gravity because you're too awesome."
"No, none of those things. It was the..." He gulps, and looks around wildly. "The sexy nurse thing," he whispers, trying to make it all sensual, but failing because of all the drooling.
"Okay, a) I am not putting on a sexy nurse outfit, b) where would I even find one, c) if you tell me you own one I won't be surprised, but d) I am still not putting on a sexy nurse outfit, no matter what you found."
"But Britta!" he whines. He wipes sweaty hair away from his eyes and points his phone in her general direction. Sweaty, deluded Jeff is the least-sexy Jeff she's ever seen, and that includes pop-and-locking Jeff. "It's on Wikipedia!"
Britta sighs again. "The only nurse I am ever going to be for you is Nurse Ratched."
That shuts him up, and she goes back to the kitchen. The soup actually smells damn good, and she is just ladling it out when he starts yelling again. "Britta! You'll never guess what you find if you search for 'Nurse Ratched' with safe search off. This is really inspiring!"
Definitely time for more medication.
***
Too Pretty to Die (G, Jeff/Britta, Firefly crossover) Based on this prompt: britta gets jeff addicted to arrested development (or if you haven't seen it, parks & rec or firefly or buffy, whatever)
"Okay, what? First off, did you say 'space western?'"
"I sure as hell did," Britta replies, unpacking the grocery bags Jeff's dropped on her counter. He starts pawing through the bags, searching for the beer. "Let me get that," she says, bumping him sideways with her hip. "You'll break all the eggs with your massive hands."
He plays the hip-check like it's much worse, like her tiny self could actually damage him, a walking, talking Vitruvian Man. "Well excuse me for having hands that are proportional to the rest of me, and for being skeptical of the unlikely combination of the words 'space' and 'western' That sounds like crap, Britta."
She hands him a beer and goes back to extracting all the foodstuffs for their upcoming DVD marathon: fancy cheeses, generic crackers (the delivery vehicle for expensive cheeses doesn't, itself, need to be expensive), some protein bars in stupid-looking packaging that he insisted on, even though she knows he'll be stuffing himself with fat and carbs just like she is, imported beer, trail mix that they made themselves by squabbling for like half an hour over which things from which bulk bins to mix in one bag, some chicken fingers and french fries from the hot bar, and a misspelled 'Hapy Aniversery' cake that was on clearance. Discount cake, that's like, two of Britta's most favorite words.
Anyway. "Trust me, it is amazing. And every chick in this show is smoking hot."
"I knew there had to be a reason you liked it. You don't seem like a sci-fi kinda girl." Jeff loads the first course onto a tray he snags from the top of her fridge. It's funny to see him making himself so at home in her home, kind of...heartwarming? It's something.
"One of the many, many reasons I love this show goes by the name Nathan Fillion," Britta replies. "And once you meet Malcolm Reynolds, you yourself will fall absolutely head over heels in love with him, too."
"I think that's illegal in most states," Jeff says, carrying the tray into the living room.
She follows with the beer. "Well, we could change that if you guys would just keep signing those online petitions I keep sending you the links to."
Jeff sighs. "Okay, okay. Space western time. Why did I ever agree to this?"
She rolls her eyes and goes to put the first disc in. "Because I'm charming, duh."
"That's what you think," he says, but he's grinning.
***FOUR HOURS LATER***
"God, I'm so tired," Britta yawns, rubbing her eyes. "Aren't you?"
Jeff doesn't look at her. "What?"
Ha. He's totally infatuated, she can tell by how he's leaning forward, elbows on knees and chin in hands, staring at the screen. "So who do you love more, Jeff, the badass captain, the badass first officer, the badass pilot, the badass mechanic, the badass priest, the badass soldier, the badass Companion, the badass doctor, or the badass, um, badass?"
"Definitely the space hooker. And be quiet, Britta, I can't hear Mal's witty retort."
Laughing to herself, Britta grabs another slice of cake.
***EIGHT HOURS LATER***
Britta wakes up on the downside of a sugar rush, feeling jittery but warm. Jeff is snoring beneath her on the couch, his chest rising and falling beneath her cheek, one arm wrapped haphazardly over her and a blanket tangled around their feet. The DVD is still playing, Mal and Inara bantering on the screen, too pretty to die. Britta snuggles in closer, smiling.
***
Halcyon Days (R, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: Jeff and Britta accidentally end up on vacation together. Hilarity (and sex) ensues.
Britta's on the beach, in a goddamn bikini, alright? That's when things are supposed to get better, right, universe? She's single and thirty and this is what single thirty-year-olds do: start a blog, let it take them on an adventure, (where adventure = into the bed of a swarthy, sensitive young foreign man), and then get a book deal out of it. She hasn't seen (or read) Julie and Julia or Eat Pray Love or any of those other ones, but she gets the gist. So why isn't the universe cooperating?
Her first mistake, Britta supposes, hating that she can be obsessing over her first mistakes on a blanket on a white sand beach attached to an incredibly overpriced and gimmicky singles resort just as well as she could be obsessing about them at home in her sweatpants and the Uggs that she doesn't let anybody know she owns--anyway her first mistake was starting a blog about being single and thirty. Mistake 1.5 was actually being good enough at writing to develop a small but rabidly devoted following. And then came the second and biggest mistake: accepting the first sponsor gift that came her way. It was all the zeroes on the stupid check they sent her to pay for her plane tickets that sealed the stupid deal.
So here she is, in pigtails and a bikini (a goddamned gold bikini, because she was a nerd before she was a blogger and a feminist before she was anything else), sitting on the sand, laptop hidden in her beach bag because she'll order a drink that's served in half a coconut before she'll be the kind of tool who brings a COMPUTER to the BEACH.
Someone gets in her sun. "Um, excuse me, you're blocking my light, buddy. Move along." She waves a hand without looking up. The clientele at this resort is not nearly as photogenic as their website promised, not that that's important or she'll include it in her review post.
"You're blocking my sand."
What? "That doesn't even make any sense!" She looks up-- "Jeff? What the hell are you doing here?"
"I'd ask you the same thing, except I can already tell: you're getting skin cancer."
"I suppose that explains...this getup?" She gestures; he's wearing huge sunglasses and a long-sleeved white shirt, casually half-tucked into cargo shorts. No, wait, they're definitely jams. Cargo jams. She snickers. His feet, shod in expensive-looking technical sandals, are admirably well-groomed, but they're the feet of a man who spends all his time in a cold-ish climate: pale as the belly of a dead fish.
"Whatever. The light shining off of your bikini is blinding. It's like your nipples are trying to guide in a plane."
Britta rolls her eyes. "I repeat, what are you doing here?"
"Isn't it obvious? I'm on vacation!" He shakes out his own towel beside hers and settles down, relaxing, propping himself up on his elbows and surveying his new domain like a silverback already on the prowl for teenage gorillas who are exploring their newly-discovered sexuality.
Wait. What? She shakes her head, thinking. "Jeff Winger...on vacation...at a singles resort. I know why you're here! You're having a midlife crisis!"
"What? No!" But he runs a hand through his immaculate hair, a dead giveaway.
Britta smirks. "Loser."
"Hey, you're here too, Gloria Steinem. What are you doing with that gold bikini, trying to shackle some unsuspecting IT geek enjoying a weekend away from the server farm into a relationship where he'll spend the rest of his life mourning the halcyon days when he used to live in his mother's basement?"
She cocks an eyebrow. "'Halcyon?'"
"I spent the flight studying for my comp midterm." He pulls his phone out of one of the thousands of pockets attached to his jams. "I have a Word of the Day app." He thumbs through and holds it up, showing her.
"Nerd," she says, and he grins back.
MONTAGE: moments from an accidentally shared vacation
They have dinner in the pool. Not at the pool or beside the pool but in it, because this is the global epicenter of Things That Are Tacky and they have a floating restaurant. This, of course, is a disaster: Britta spills guacamole in the pool (awkward and gross) and Jeff drops his sunglasses and neither of them will dive in to retrieve them because neither one wants to mess up their hair.
Britta can't take the sanitized-for-your-pleasure world of the resort and so they try to dress like locals and slip away from the beaches and palms and explore the broken little village where all the resort workers live. Jeff tries some street meat and an hour later when they are strolling silently down a deserted beach that is clotted with seaweed and garbage but nonetheless actually, frighteningly, kind of romantic, he is abruptly seized by food poisoning. Britta spends that night alterately pressing cool towels to his forehead and watching Jersey Shore with Spanish subtitles. Even in the bathroom, busy worshiping the porcelain throne, he demands recaps.
They go on a boat tour of the island's coastline and Jeff's obsession with really high SPFs comes in very handy because everyone else on the boat ends up looking like steak tartare. When they get back to the resort Britta and Jeff prance into the bar, barely containing their glee at everyone else's misfortune. They get hammered on hard liquor and end up making out in a cabana until a cleaning lady who doesn't speak English pries them apart with a broom.
They spend a lot of time loitering on the beach, Britta flipping the pages of Infinite Jest just to make it look like she's actually reading it. Jeff plays Angry Birds. Once he scoops her up and carries her out into the waves and tosses her in. They end up winning a chicken fight, which is not something Britta ever thought she would participate in, let alone be proud of. When they get back to their towels, his phone and her book are gone. "Fuck it," he says, and puts his hands on her hips and pulls her close, and she feels her breasts mash against his chest, his lips on her own. He smells like SPF90 and Acqua di Gio and she can feel his heart racing, like her own.
When they finally sleep together, it's on that crummy beach in the village, and she gets sand in her sarong (and elsewhere), and his hair is crusted with saltwater, and there's a hungry-looking dog that keeps appearing and reappearing like a goddamn ninja...but it's amazing. Afterwards he looks at the weird-ass depression their entwined bodies made in the wet sand and muses that he wishes he still had his phone so he could take a picture. Britta takes one with her phone. "Some day we'll show this to the grandkids," she says, partly to see how he'll react and partly because that's what she actually wants to happen.
He steps forward, into the sex-hole (eww), which brings his face closer to her own. "That dent," he says, being all serious and deep, as if he's not talking about a stupid sex-dent. "Was a little lopsided. We might have to make another one. You know, if it's going to be a family heirloom."
***
Catching Feelings (PG, Jeff/Britta, brief mention of Troy/Annie) Based on this prompt: jeff and britta agree to be friends with benefits but to pull the plug if anyone "catches feelings." britta, much to her disgust, does in fact, catch feelings and pulls the plug on the whole thing. jeff is dismayed.
St. Patrick's is the last day they do it...they get plastered in a charming pub downtown and then in the cab back to his place she breaks down, crying, distressing the cab driver immensely, and Jeff can't get Britta to calm down. He even stands on her stoop in the rain, pleading, but she's just sniffling wetly and the stupid cab driver has a hero complex and is waiting for Jeff like an angry dad whose daughter has been brought home weeping on prom night.
"You better go," Britta says. "I can't do this anymore."
So he goes.
Jeff has a couple usual girl-trouble cures, but it's really hard to justify 12-year-old scotch, Icelandic face creams, or $75 boxers on a community college student's non-existent salary. So he tries a new and depressingly cheap solution: kitten videos on YouTube.
He is hunched over his netbook in the study room, watching a kitten try to figure out why it can't attack another cat that happens to be inside a clear plastic box, when Abed comes in. Dammit.
"What are you watching?" Abed peels off his messenger bag and pulls out his chair, little movements whose precision has long since stopped creeping Jeff out.
"Porn. I'm watching hardcore pornography, Abed,"
"Cool. Cool, cool, cool."
Jeff pushes his computer aside with a sigh and flips through a textbook desultorily.
"Oh, don't let me stop you, Jeff. You could probably pleasure yourself in front of me and I wouldn't notice."
Jeff tries to get his eyebrows to say everything his mouth refuses to.
"In fact, Troy and Annie once had sex in the bottom bunk while I was in the top bunk. I slept through the whole thing, although I did have some intriguing dreams..."
Of course that's the moment that everyone else chooses to walk in the room. There are some puckishly adorable reactions on display (and Pierce, who is carrying a Shamrock Shake, should receive an Oscar nomination for Best Spit Take), but all Jeff can pay attention to is Britta.
She slides into her usual seat, and it's fortunate that everyone else is so involved with Annie and Troy and Abed. "Hi," he says, half under his breath.
"Hi," she says, with that stupid steely resolve he is all too familiar with in her voice. The whole "friends with benefits contract" was her idea, and he supposes he should be proud of her for following through on all of its Byzantine clauses--even though he's now reduced to, let's repeat it, watching cat videos on YouTube for emotional consolation. Let's repeat that again. No wait, it's too depressing.
"How are you doing?" he asks, attempting to be gallant.
"I'm okay," she says. And then she looks up at him, and like always, she must see something in him that he only rarely catches glimpses of himself, but was starting to see more, the more she hung around: someone worth confiding in. "Fine. I'm not okay. I'm a walking advertisement for the miracles of waterproof mascara."
He reaches for his netbook. "Have I got something to show you."
(Note: This is what Jeff shows Britta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bmhjf0rKe8)
***
A Giant Towel Warmer That You Can Have Sex In (R, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: The second time they had sex.
There's a reason Jeff's car has heated seats, okay? It's wintertime and snow has turned Greendale whiter than an Aryan Nation meeting but Britta's ass (and assorted other parts of her) are nice and warm. Nice AND warm. Like one time she used her tax refund to spend one single night at a fancy-ass hotel because Thom Yorke had once spent the night there, and that fancy hotel had had towel warmers, which had blown her mind with their awesomeness. A warm towel, whenever you want it? Sign me up, this entitled jagoff lifestyle has its privileges.
So basically Jeff's car is like a giant towel warmer that you can have sex in. Not that she was intending to have sex in Jeff's car, let alone with Jeff. Sometimes Abed eats lunch in here, so Goddess knows what kind of crumbs she could be rolling around in.
They're both drunk. It's midterms and the best way to study is with your two friends Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker, right? Right. Good to drink but not to drink and drive. That's why she followed Jeff out here and stole his car keys and dropped them down that sewer grate and then, while he bitched at AAA over the phone for like 45 minutes, she fell asleep in the warm back seat of his car. And that's why, after he climbed in beside her, ranting about how it's illegal to deny someone service just because they're drunk, she had gotten caught up in brushing the snow off his jeans, the warmth of him radiating through them. He'd grabbed her hand off his knee like it was a hot coal, and then next thing she knew her tits were out in the open and he was looking very pleased with himself.
So yeah, her whole back is warm from the seats, and her whole front is warm from...well just from him. He's breathing hotly into her neck, face not where she can see it, and she wants to see him, wants to see what this means to him. She turns his face up to hers, his pupils shot like she's some sort of drug. She's urging him on with her thighs, her heels tracing weird patterns in the fogged-up windows. It's not pretty, it's not elegant, and when they're done he'll definitely have to get his upholstery spot-cleaned...but it is them.
***
Moving On (PG-13, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: jeff and britta have been together-ish for a while but neither has made the move to be more serious. britta is going to sign a new lease on her apartment and jeff is acting all insulted that britta would do this without asking him to look it over as a lawyer (britta: but you're NOT a lawyer. jeff: ouch.), but really he's just pissed that britta didn't even consider them moving in together.
Jeff carries in all of their Chinese takeout except for the two containers of wonton soup, leaving those to Britta. They have so much food that an innocent bystander might be forgiven for thinking that they are preparing to hibernate, not ride out a predicted weekend blizzard, but whatever. That's why Jeff lifts weights, so he can shovel out his car after a night in Britta's criminally non-maintained parking lot, cart around lots of Chinese food, open beer bottles one-handed, and, later on, carry his semi-girlfriend over his shoulder like a caveman hauling a cavewoman off for an afternoon of trying to invent fire via genital friction.
"Why are you making that face," Britta asks, already scooping snow peas and rice into her mouth with a plastic spoon. She plops down on the loveseat, sitting crosslegged. She's wearing a denim skirt and thick tights and socks, so it's not like he can really see anything, but there's something a little devilish about it anyway. Her hair's all frazzled by the wind, a blonde froth around her wind-flushed face. It's a Friday afternoon, a whole weekend stretching ahead of them, and the fact that he is actually pleased by the prospect of getting snowed in here, with her, makes him feel a little tingly on the inside. Jeff Winger, tingly. It's been a long time since he's felt tingly, if he's honest with himself, like maybe since Erica Heller slapped him for looking up her dress in second grade.
"Nothing," he says. "A metaphor got away from me in my head."
She raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything, licking sauce off her fingers before turning on the TV. Jeff unpacks the rest of the food on the coffee table, pushing aside piles of her damn trashy magazines. (Well, okay, even he can admit that Bust and Mother Jones aren't the trashiest of magazines. There are a couple of his Maxims in the pile, though.)
He goes into the kitchen to scrounge up a beer, and has to move a big pile of junkmail and papers on the counter to find a plate. One of the papers has a legalish look about it, and sure enough it's a lease. Britta's new lease, not signed yet. He can't help it and starts reading, leaning against the wall and sipping on his favorite import--she's finally learned to start keeping it around.
"They're saying the county's supposed to get ten more inches tonight," she calls in from the living room.
"The county won't be the only thing getting ten inches tonight," he says automatically, distracted by the lease.
"Don't flatter yourself," Britta says, but laughs. Then: "What are you doing in there? General Tso is getting cold."
"I'm reading your new lease."
"What?"
"I'm. Reading. Your. New. Lease," he says, exaggerating the pauses. He snags another beer for her and goes back to the other room, sitting down in her comfiest (okay, only) armchair.
"Um, why? It's the same as my old lease, I think."
"Did you actually read it?"
"Of course!"
"So you're okay with this clause that says the landlord can come in whenever he wants without telling you first?"
"What?"
He waves the papers at her. "How long have you lived here, a couple years? Who knows how often he's been in here. He could have a camera hidden anywhere. He could be watching us through eyeholes in that painting like a Scooby Doo villain right now." Jeff raises his voice, loud enough so that her bitchy neighbors will probably come over and complain, like they did that one time she tied him to the bed and things got a little out of hand. "We're on to you, man! Stop your masturbating RIGHT NOW!"
"Jeff! Shut up!" She rushes over, practically flings herself at him to grab the lease. "It does not say that."
"It does." He points, and waits as she wades through the legalese. She settles down onto his lap and he attempts to tame her frizzy mane idly, working out knots. All of the good product is at his place, but she's probably got a decent gel and mousse here he could combine if he was at all interested in making progress. He likes this look, though: it's total Sex Hair.
"It really does say that, that's bullshit!"
"Why didn't you ask me to look this over before you signed it? You're always telling me to use my lawyer powers for good, and not for talking my way out of parking tickets,"
"You're not a lawyer, Jeff."
"Ouch," He feigns a direct hit, hand over his heart.
Britta crumples the lease into a little ball and attempts to make an impossible shot--the trash can is all the way on the other side of the room. She sighs, crumpling her face in a way that is so adorable it must be unconscious, because he can't imagine her ever presenting herself as so vulnerable. He slings an arm across her legs, hand on her hip to pull her a little closer.
She tenses, not surprising him in the slightest, but she doesn't run. He supposes this is what passes for progress in their...relationship. Whatever it is. They sleep together and they argue together and they laugh together and they fail classes together, and they practically--practically--live together. And you can bet that his lease is airtight. If his lease was freshly-made bed, you could bounce a quarter off it.
"What am I going to do?" Britta says, staring blankly at her front door. On the doormat their discarded boots are slowly melting, laces tangled.
"Move, I guess," he says, and rubs one of her shins experimentally, little static sparks crackling. She half-frowns absently, watching his hand on her leg.
They watch more of the news for a while, not moving or speaking or eating. "This is nice," she says, suddenly, when a commercial snaps them out of the reverie. "Sitting here."
"My lap is an awesome place," he agrees, and she is looking at him through her lashes, kind of an I want to sex you right here on this Salvation Army armchair look that makes his pants suddenly tight. She lowers her mouth onto his and he will never get used to this but he is used to this, the taste of her and what she'll do with her tongue and what he can do with his to make her gasp and reach for the buttons of his shirt.
In the end he carries her more fireman-style than caveman-style, and has to do some crazy pirouette to make it through her narrow bedroom door, but when she's on the mattress and he's on top of her, he pauses and says her name.
"What?" she asks, eyes a little glassy.
"My apartment has two bedrooms, you know."
"I know."
"Just..." All of a sudden he realizes he's about to cockblock himself. Is this part of getting old, too, Pierce? What? Stop thinking of Pierce! "Um, you could move in with me. It's closer to school and the rent would be cheaper and you could use a real washer and dryer instead of those communal monstrosities downstairs that get water marks all over my shirts. And we spend all our time together anyway. You could have your own bedroom."
She rises up on her elbows, smiling. "Why would I need my own bedroom?"
***
You Can't Get Drunk on Champagne (PG-13, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: Britta goes out for her once annual dinner with her rich parents. A member of the group (your choice!) happens to be at the same restaurant. Awkwardness ensues.
Once a year Britta needs to remember which fork is used for which course and what kind of wine goes with the vegetarian entree at her parents' country club's brunch, and she needs to remember to do laundry beforehand so she has clean underwear on beneath her dress, in order to never again recreate the Pantyless Gin Heiress Debacle of 2005, as several Greendale-area society blogs christened it.
The valet looks disgusted at her beater, but Britta looks down her nose at him, helped by her highest (and only) Louboutins. (A Christmas present from her mother, not regiftable or returnable and only useful for certain specific occasions. Totally out of place in her Gender Studies classes at Greendale, for example.) She teeters into the banquet hall and toward her family's table, where her mother frostily welcomes her and her father, when she drops a kiss on his cheek, already smells like the family business.
"Hey, sis," Britta's brother Axel says. (Yes, Axel--their mother is Swedish, they all have ridiculous names.) He toasts her with his mimosa, and pours her one from a massive pitcher.
"Hey. Where's Sven?"
"Your older brother is at a...hockey match," her mother says. Britta's mother, Astrid, is a legendary ice queen, even in the rarefied circles in which her family runs. Britta can count on one hand the number of times her mother has ever touched her. She's trying to move beyond that, to get over the instinct it's given her to never get close to anyone so that they can't hurt her, but that's all she can do: try.
"He painted his face," her father says. "And all of his children's faces, too." He arches an eyebrow and sips at his martini. It's ten A.M. on a Sunday. Does anything more need to be said about Britta's father? She tries not to think about him at all, and about 360 days a year, it works.
Britta gulps down half her mimosa right off the bat, feels champagne shimmer all through her bloodstream. Her parents and brother talk, and she talks too, but it's the same as always: they all talk and no one listens. Conversations as empty and echoing as the inside of a drum.
When the champagne has done its duty and wants out, Britta excuses herself and heads to the ladies room. Her face in the mirror is flushed with stress and morning booze, there's a grease spot from spilled bechamel on her flouncy chiffon dress, the Louboutins are gorgeous but making her insteps cramp.
She slips out onto the piazza for a moment to rub some feeling back into her feet (and, okay, sneak a cigarette) and enjoy the air and the sunshine and the birds singing. It's almost a normal Sunday morning, if she blocks out the ridiculous luxury of the golf course and the expensive cars in the parking lot...one of which she recognizes. Why one black Lexus should stick out to her among a sea of identical black Lexii she doesn't think about, but there's a familiar spiky hairdo sticking up on the other side of it. Shoes dangling from one hand and cigarette from the other, she sets out across the toe-tickling expanse of the green.
Jeff is arguing with the valet in Spanish, and when he sees her coming he doesn't look surprised, just gestures for her to hurry. "What's pendejo mean?"
She tells him, and he curses, and obviously the valet is more fluent in English than Jeff is in Spanish. Britta steps into the conversation and straightens things out, because she, at least, has been using Annie's notes as more than emergency wrapping paper for Troy's birthday presents.
"What are you doing here?" Jeff wants to know, once he's taken pictures of his car with his phone before the valet drives off, "for insurance purposes." Not Thank you or anything, but What are you doing here?
She feels really short, standing barefoot next to him on the hot asphalt, sunlight glittering off all the cars around them. "I have brunch with my parents here once a year."
"They let hippies in here? I've never smelled patchouli, and I'm here all the time. Dinner with the partners, dates with girls with expensive taste...this place is great." He notices her shoes. "What's wrong with your feet?"
Britta looks down. There are huge blisters on each of her big toes, swollen and red. "These shoes suck." She gestures with them, with her thousand dollar shoes. She could feed a village in Africa for a year with the profits from selling these shoes on eBay. Why doesn't she do that? Britta wonders distantly.
"Are you drunk?" Jeff asks, putting on his suit jacket.
"Only on champagne."
"You can't get drunk on champagne."
"You can if you drink enough of it."
He cocks his head. "Are you smoking again?"
She takes a last drag and chucks the butt, aiming for the green and only coming up a little short. "No."
There's a pause while he considers her, and she considers him back. He fits in really well here. He's, like, Generic Background Guy #5, tall and lean and handsome and vaguely vulpine. Just looking at how perfectly groomed he is makes her feel messy.
Finally he asks: "Are you okay, Britta?"
"No," she blurts, and she's not sure which of them must look more surprised.
"Um," Jeff says, and then Britta steps into his personal space, the asphalt searing her feet. She stoops and abruptly bends to put her shoes back on, and he reaches out to steady her.
"Thanks," she says, and gulps down whatever shadow emotion has filled her throat and made it tough to breathe. They walk back in together and he meets her family and then looks at her closely again, concern etched in the lines on his brow that he probably pretends aren't there when he's spending his nightly hour and a half gazing into his bathroom mirror. But then ditches his lawyer buddies to sit there and talk high-class booze with her father and ski resorts in the Alps with her mother and 80's hair bands with her brother. Britta just sits there, hearing how his inconsequential patter interweaves with her family's inanities, and she takes her shoes off underneath the table and presses her bare feet into the soft, cool carpet, just breathing, breathing freely for the first time in what feels like forever.
***
Like Normal People (R, Jeff/Britta, angsty) Based on this prompt: I'd love to see a fic that had Britta avoiding Jeff (like walking the long way to class to avoid walking with him, or ducking into the meat section of the grocery store when she spots him there) and Jeff noticing it and confronting her, leading to them having a conversation about the fact that they are barely friends anymore. Wouldn't even need to be overtly shippy, just a nice friendship study. I think it would be cool to dig in a little to Jeff and Britta's current relationship, since the show is really giving us nothing.
The study room is nice and all, but it's a terrible place to, you know, actually study, so Britta's taken to holing up in one of the library carrels between classes. It's mostly quiet, the light is nice, no one bothers her. It's just her and her psychology textbook, these days--her only other class is Biology and now that she's made up with Todd behind the study group's back, he's agreed to let her copy his homework in exchange for a nickel bag every week. Let's just say Todd's not as perfect as he seems.
She's deep into some seriously disturbing stuff on wire mothers, about ready to travel back in time and punch Harry Harlow in the neck, when someone coughs loudly, making her jump half out of her seat.
"Whoa, whoa, settle down, Beavis."
"What do you want, Jeff?" She looks back at her notebook, filled with looping doodles, with lines that never end.
He sighs. It would be inaudible if the library wasn't so quiet. "Are you hiding? Shirley told me to come over here and ask if you were hiding."
"What? No!" She stands and looks around, over the tops of the other carrels, searching for Shirley's hair. No dice. "Why would I be hiding? I'm just trying to study. None of you guys are in Psych 101 and it's too loud in the study room to concentrate."
"It's not loud in the study room."
"Pierce joined the African Drum Troupe last week, of course it's loud in there." She sits back down, her back to him in a universal-to-everyone gesture of go away.
He's Jeff, so he sits down in the carrel beside hers. Britta hisses: "What are you doing?"
"Studying."
"Hilarious." Britta rolls her eyes, goes back to the textbook. There's a picture of some poor long-dead rhesus monkey, staring at her with grainy black-and-white eyes, clutching a bundle of wire and cloth. She flips the page, but just goes back to drawing in her notebook. She can hear Jeff already tapping away on his phone.
"I lied," Jeff says, after a couple minutes. "Shirley didn't send me over here. She told me you were here, but she didn't tell me to come talk to you."
"Okay." She erases something, to make it sound like she's being productive.
He sighs again, and his chair scrapes, and then he's peeking in over her shoulder, all up in her personal space. "I know you're probably just upset because R.E.M. broke up, but are you mad at me or something?"
"Back off, Jeff." Under the guise of packing up her stuff, she throws an elbow in his direction, and he moves away, just barely.
"You're mad at me, then. Look, I know we ended things kind of awkwardly, but, that can't be it, right? Right. We always said it was just going to be casual--"
She shakes her head forcefully, sensing him already starting to get himself worked up, about to go all Winger Speech, which always helps him feel better. "I need to be somewhere."
"Gotta mediate a dispute between the cats? Try out some of those anger management techniques you keep telling Pierce about?"
"Would you just shut up?" She tries to keep her voice calm, but there's too much pressure built up behind the thought and she gets all high-pitched at the end. They're left staring at each other in the middle of the hallway, heads poking up out of carrels all around them. Jeff rolls his eyes.
"We need to talk," he says.
"We've never talked," she says. She's making eye contact like a motherfucker. Her therapist would be proud--not Duncan, her real therapist, the one at the women's center where she's been volunteering all semester.
"Yeah, well, maybe that's part of the problem."
"Part of the problem is that you are being really mean to me lately. Mean to everybody. You made Shirley cry the other day! Troy thinks you're always picking on him, even Pierce thinks you're being a jerk. And you're confusing the hell out of Annie with this ridiculous 'I want you but I'm not going to do anything about it' crap! You need help, Jeff." Once it's out of her mouth, that last sentence hangs in the awkward space between them, but she gets the cathartic nature of the Winger Speech. Blood roars in her ears with a rhythm like one of Pierce's drum solos.
He just stares at her, and in this lighting his crow's feet are really visible. She remembers watching his face as he slept, thinking that it was the only time he ever let down his guard. She remembers how much she cried the first time she talked with Dr. Prasad and can't even picture Jeff walking into the same room as a therapist, let alone sitting down and talking with one.
"Okay," he finally says. "Okay." He jangles his keys, one of the universe's most annoying sounds. Jeff's mouth flattens so far it almost disappears, and then he's looking up at her, making eye contact. "Okay. Let's talk about it. Let's go get dinner."
"Jesus Christ, are you hitting on me?" She hoists her bag higher on her shoulder, straightens to her full height plus four inches of heel. "What is wrong with--"
"Britta. No. I am not hitting on you. Just--just--just calm down, alright?" He crosses his arms and then uncrosses them, pushing a hand through his hair. "We used to be friends, do you remember that? It was like a million years ago, and we used to be friends and we hung out and we did shit together that wasn't sex or fighting. Remember?"
There is a hollowness inside her bones that is the shape of their friendship. "I remember."
"Then let's talk about that. Go to dinner and talk about that. Like normal people."
"Like normal people?"
"Yeah."
She looks at him very closely, takes him in: crow's feet and hair gel and expensive cologne. There are probably words for people like him in her psychology textbook. Hell, there are probably words for people like herself in her psychology textbook. She thinks about the sign in Dr. Prasad's office, a framed quote from Thomas Moore: "Most, if not all, problems brought to therapists are issues of love. It makes sense that the cure is also love."
"Okay," she says. "Let's go."
***
Remind Me (R, Jeff/Britta) Based on this prompt: Jeff/Britta: Phone sex after Paradigms of Human Memory where they go through all the places they won't have sex again.
"Hey, I just got home. You left a bunch of stuff here. Some sweaters, one boot, a Disney Princess toothbrush, some of that disgusting vegan lubricant. I don't know what is more gross, that lube or the fact that a grown woman uses a Disney Princess toothbrush."
"Shut up. It was on sale. Will you just put it all in a box or something? I'll come pick it up or you can bring it to campus or whatever."
"Sure. Yeah."
"Are you okay?"
"Of course."
"It's just that you paused. You never pause."
"I pause."
"You never pause, Jeff. When you're lawyering you go from zero to Alan Dershowitz in five seconds."
"'Lawyering?'"
"Yeah, lawyering."
"You go from zero to Gloria Steinem in five seconds."
"I'm not arguing with you. Are you arguing with me? Are you trying to pick a fight? Are you mad at me because you aren't going to have access to my lady parts whenever you want anymore? Because speaking of things you go from zero to over the top with in five seconds..."
"Says the lady who couldn't keep her hands out my pants that time the Dean called us to his office after Chang's car was mysteriously shrink-wrapped in the middle of the night."
"Says the guy who unclasped my bra in the middle of Annie's karate exhibition."
"You remember that? I was so impressed with myself, you were wearing two shirts and I still got that thing unhooked."
"You're always impressed with yourself."
"Yeah, like you don't think you're awesome."
"Again, I'm not arguing with you."
"You're always arguing with me."
"We don't argue, we...we talk in our own way."
"Our own way that everyone else thinks is arguing."
"We're like Troy and Abed. They have their own weird twin language."
"Gross. Please do not bring up Troy or Abed or twins or anything like that when we're reminiscing about our sexual escapades."
"Aha. I know what's going on. We broke things off like an hour ago and you're horny already. Keep it in your pants, Winger, we had sex an hour before we broke it off. Don't you remember? Sheesh."
"Yeah, I remember. Remind me, though."
"Gross."
"Like you don't like dirty talk."
"Once again, I'm not arguing with you."
"You paused, that time."
"Maybe."
"And that time."
"Okay, you're right. I paused. You win."
"Like that time we were at your place and I bet you that we'd get snowed in and classes would be canceled and your heat would go out and we'd have to resort to sex to stay warm."
"I remember that."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. That was...that was..."
"Allow me to finish that sentence for you. 'That was mind-blowing.' 'That was the most satisfied I've ever been in my life.' 'That was the sexual experience to which I will compare all other future sexual experiences for the rest of my life.'"
"You're not wrong, but what I was going to say was that that was a lot of fun. That whole weekend. Even when the delivery guy walked in on us when you were doing that thing with your fingers and your tongue and he ran out screaming."
"We never had to pay for that food, I remember. Which thing with my fingers and tongue?"
"You remember. Number five on Jeff's List of Things To Do With My Fingers and Tongue. That thing."
"Ahh, number five. A classic. Are you home now?"
"Yeah. How can you tell?"
"You wouldn't have exhaled like that if you were still on the bus."
"True."
"Remind me about this morning."
"Jeff."
"Remind me. Please."
"Whining is so unattractive."
"I'm not whining. It's more like begging. You're killing me with that laugh, you know."
"What laugh?"
"That throaty one you just did. It's a bedroom laugh."
"Like we ever did it in a bedroom."
"Two different storage closets, two different cars, a dorm room, a study table, every room in your apartment, your incredibly comfortable bed a lot, and so sorry about that irreparable damage to your headboard, both of my bathrooms, several shady hotel rooms and that one suite you got at that resort despite your ethical objections to Groupon's business model, the editor's office at the Gazette-Journal-Mirror, the room adjacent to the sex room at Pierce's mansion, that surprisingly spacious Macy's dressing room--"
"I still can't believe it had a chaise lounge, let alone one with an adjustable back."
"--the Greendale lap pool, that gazebo near the Air Conditioning Repair Annex where we found that creepy hidden camera, one taxicab, one limousine, the other room adjacent to the sex room at Pierce's mansion--"
"No, it was adjacent to the other sex room."
"Stop arguing with me."
"I'm not arguing with you. I'm a little stunned that you remember every single place where we had sex."
"Don't you?"
"We had a lot of sex. It's all kind of blurred together."
"Now who's pausing?"
"Shut up. You weren't done with the list, though. Keep going."
"Keep going?"
"Yeah."
"Are you--? What is that sound? Is that cloth rustling? Are you getting undressed?"
"Shut up. Keep going."
"Fine. That basement in the library where we found that civil defense shelter with all the surprisingly comfortable wool blankets. The bathroom at Denny's. The backseat of my car, approximately one million times."
"I really like those seat warmers."
"I really like your seat warmers."
"What does that even mean?"
"Shut up. Keep talking about my car. I mean, keep talking about us having sex in my car. And keep laughing like that."
"Jeff."
"I'm serious."
"I know you are, your voice has dropped like an octave. Did you have your upholstery treated to make it that soft? It's like a mink coat--not that I know what a mink coat feels like."
"I love it when you accidentally reveal your bourgeois origins."
"'Bourgeois?' God, keep up the dirty talk, Marx. It's so hot."
"Don't ever mention Marx when we're talking dirty again. That's the third time I've had to tell you that."
"What makes you think we'll talk dirty ever again?"
"Because I would recognize the sound of your pants coming off anywhere."
"Ha. Like I didn't just recognize the sound of your pants coming off. The zippers on those $90 jeans sound so distinctive."
"Remember the three hours you spent practicing unzipping them with your teeth?"
"Was it really three hours? I must've had some time to kill between classes."
"We did kill a lot of time in that janitor's closet."
"It's a very sexy janitor's closet. He's got that calendar with the pinup girls and the smell of the Pine-Sol just takes the edge off your cologne."
"Did you hear that? That was the sound of my pants going back on."
"Well that was the sound of my pants going back on. Put that stuff in a box, I'll come over and get it."
"Right now? I'll put everything in the box except the lube."
"You're unbelievable."
"But not wrong."
"Change the sheets and switch that Coldplay you're inevitably listening to to Stevie Wonder and we'll see how wrong you are."
"Change the sheets? We've never done it in my bed."
"There's a first time for everything."
***
Glad You're Not Dead (PG, Jeff/Britta, ensemble) Based on this prompt: Jeff gets hurt somehow, lands himself in the hospital. Cue Britta fretting in the waiting room, with the rest of the study group. Something sweetish, more on a focus about her suddenly worrying about the mortality of her surrogate family. But beat the crap out of Jeff. He's been asking for it lately.
They're all safe, that's the most important thing. Britta has done a lot of babysitting, and since the accident she's found herself constantly doing a silent headcount of the crew: AbedAnnieShirleyTroyPierce. All here. And Jeff is with the doctors. What's more safe than being with doctors?
"I'm going to go get some hot cocoa," Annie says. "Anybody else want some? When I candystriped here I loved the cocoa. This cafeteria is definitely better than the Greendale cafeteria."
Everybody else raises their hands, and then Annie realizes she can't carry all those cups, and then there's an adorable rock-paper-scissors battle that results in Annie, Troy, and Pierce all heading off to the cafeteria. Britta does her little headcount again, is distracted in the middle of it because Annie comes clipping back on her kitten heels, and wraps Britta in a hug. "He'll be fine, Britta," Annie says, squeezing her tight.
"Thanks, Annie." Britta pushes five bucks and a handful of change at Annie, but she pushes it back and heads off, Pierce and Troy towering on either side of her.
Britta sighs and paces for a while, her mind replaying a loop of Jeff climbing that stupid ladder, the Dean eyeballing his ass the whole time--like why was it Jeff who had to rescue that kitten from tree outside the Dean's ofice, isn't that why they have security people or janitors or whatever?--and of course the stupid ladder fell and the stupid kitten is still stuck up in the tree, and Britta loves kittens, why is she calling them stupid? Uggh. She does another headcount. It's kind of soothing, even though there are only two to count.
"Britta, sweetie, sit down, you're making me nervous," Shirley pats the seat beside her, but Britta just stops pacing. Shirley shakes her head. "Fine, suit yourself. But worrying won't make him better."
Britta bites back a retort--Shirley's just trying to make her feel better. She looks over at Abed instead, and he pats the seat beside him. Which is the seat between him and Shirley. Britta gives in.
Shirley reaches for her hand, and Abed pats her kneecap. "Don't worry, Britta. The others will be back in a moment. With hot chocolate." He flutters his eyebrows ridiculously, which she can't resist. It feels weird to laugh, weird but good.
"That was scary," Shirley says. "Watching him fall."
"I'd never heard a man scream like that until today," Abed says.
Britta grins. "Yeah, the Dean can reach a surprisingly high A."
"I was talking about Jeff," Shirley laughs. "When he hit the Luis Guzman statute."
Abed chuckles, and after a moment Britta does, too. "It did kind of knock all the air out of him."
"It was scary, though," Abed says. "Not as scary as some episodes of Ghostwriter, but still upsetting."
"Ghostwriter? That was the best show, man. Gabby was my first crush!" The three lost lambs are back with cups (and Hostess Cupcakes), and Britta sits back and lets the familiar sounds of the gang being the gang wash over her: Pierce not getting a reference, Annie enthusiastically joining in the nostalgia trip, Shirley offering up an opinion about whether or not ghosts can get into heaven, Troy and Abed being, well, Troy and Abed. Britta misses Jeff suddenly, and it's not missing him because he could have died, it's not missing him because what the conversation needs to make it complete is some bleeding-edge sarcasm: it's missing him because six of them is not enough.
A nurse pushes back the sliding window at the reception desk. "Is there a Miss Perry here? Miss Britta Perry?"
"Here!" Britta rushes over, juggling her cocoa and purse and cursing her heels.
"The doctor would like to speak with you," the nurse says, opening the double doors into the ER.Some young punk doctor, like seriously we're talking Doogie Howser territory, comes toward Britta. "Miss Perry? You're Mr. Winger's emergency contact?"
Emergency contact? It sounds like a statement, or maybe a question. "Um, okay?"
"You can see him now. I'll warn you, he's pretty sore. Cracked a rib or two, and he's all scraped up--he said something about hitting some hedges that felt like sandpaper? I didn't quite understand that part. Anyway, he'll be ready to go home in a bit, we just need to observe him for an hour or two for any signs of head trauma." The doctor takes her politely but firmly by the elbow and lead her into the rabbit warren of the ER, until he sweeps back a curtain and there's Jeff and the doctor just kind of disappears.
"Don't you ever get near a ladder ever again!" she blurts, and then shakes her head. "I mean, how are you doing?"
He laughs a little, but it must hurt his ribs because he tamps the laughter right down and looks like he's trying not to move. "I'll survive."
"You better," She steps right up beside the bed, sets her purse and cocoa down on the bed by his feet, ignoring the face he makes at that. She pushes hair back behind her ears and then leans in and kisses him, light and tender, only touching him with her mouth. At first he's surprised but then he's kissing back, and then her hair slips free and into their faces, and he can't move it because he's half-broken, so she has to disengage.
"Whoa," Jeff says, off-kilter for one moment in his life. He's got a black eye but, if anything, it makes him look more rakish.
"Yeah," Britta says. "I'm pretty glad you're not dead. No, wait, we're all glad you're not dead."
"So is the group gonna come in here and kiss me, too?"
"You know, I wouldn't put it past them..."
***