Residue from Last Night (1/2)
Title: Residue from Last Night (1/2)
Author: veryspecial0ne
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~2500
Disclaimer: Nothing has ever been less mine than Community.
Spoilers: Through the end of Season 2.
Summary: He pounds on the door and calls out "Annie, it's Jeff," because freaking her out by knocking unexpectedly the day after someone tried to break in is the last thing he needs. If he has to calm her down and then convince her to come crash with him this will take twice as long, and he's not convinced he can't catch something disgusting by mere osmosis from the store mere feet below him. "Open up."
A/N: Prompted by khan81 over at the Annie fanworks meme at community_tv : "Jeff/Annie-She stays at his apartment after hers is broken into." I took the opportunity to rework something I had been messing around with back in November or so. Title is from "Armour" by Ane Brun. Also, my first Community fanfic and the first one I've written at all in years!
Months ago, it was Troy that told Jeff that Annie doesn't speak to her parents, that her parents got divorced when she was twelve and she barely ever saw her father after that anyway, and that Annie's working her way through school while living in that crappy apartment. And Jeff's first thought was that this (the money issues) explained why Annie's excited talk about transferring to a real school seemed to have fizzled out in the last year or so. And his second, disgusting, perverted, man-is-evil thought was that she lived alone, above a sex shop, and that she not only had probable daddy issues but there were no parents in the picture to ever disapprove of him, the disgusting, perverted older guy who sometimes can't stop himself from craning his neck to see just how good of a view up her short skirt he can get today. And then the next day he saw Shirley wipe a milk mustache off of Annie's lip with a napkin in the cafeteria and rescinded that last part.
So it's fitting, somehow, that it's Troy who calls him one evening in the middle of June to ask if Chang has vacated Jeff's couch yet, and Jeff is still riding on the high of having his apartment to himself and so he lets out an exulted "yes" before thinking to play it cool until he finds out why Troy would be asking.
"…Why?" Jeff asks belatedly, warily, knowing that relations between Troy and Pierce were still frosty at best and hoping against hope that Troy wasn't looking to become Jeff's next squatter.
But instead Troy tells him that the shithole Annie calls "home" was broken into last night and Jeff, without knowing why, stands up from the very couch he'd just been ready to defend at any and all costs. "Well, they tried to break in," Troy amends. "She said they got through about half the locks, so she didn't find out until she woke up this morning."
Jeff lets out a breath he's all too aware he was holding, slowly and quietly, so Troy won't hear.
"Anyway, she kind of needs a place to stay tonight until she can get the broken locks replaced."
"Why are you asking me?"
Troy sighs. "She won't call you. She doesn't even know I'm calling. But Shirley and Andre have got the baby, and Abed's with his dad for the summer, and Annie's allergic to Britta's cats…" He doesn't give a reason why Annie can't stay with him and Pierce, and Jeff doesn't ask for one, assuming that the older man is still refusing to speak to Annie; the perceived betrayal of his "favorite" in the cafeteria standoff during paintball seems to have nettled him more than anything else that had occurred that day. It's really the first time that Jeff hasn't known what to say to make Annie feel better. Troy continues, "I tried to bring up maybe calling her mom. I think she still lives just down the street from campus…but Annie made it pretty clear she'd rather stay there with the broken locks. Or get a motel room, and you know the kind of motel room she can afford is probably gonna be even worse. Like, I'm talking Bates Motel, man."
"Yeah."
"So I figured if I called you, you could convince her to stay with you even though she's getting all Britta-level proud about it, since you lived in your car that time and might know what to--"
Jeff interrupts, "I said 'yeah.'"
"Oh." Troy pauses. "Like yeah, you'll do it?"
"I'll head over now."
And he does.
There's no lock on the front door of Annie's building. Jeff isn't surprised. He knows which door is hers by the ancient but cheery "WELCOME!" mat in the hallway, which is even less surprising. It's no wonder someone chose this door to try some B&E. He pounds on the door and calls out "Annie, it's Jeff," because freaking her out by knocking unexpectedly the day after someone tried to break in is the last thing he needs. If he has to calm her down and then convince her to come crash with him this will take twice as long, and he's not convinced he can't catch something disgusting by osmosis from the store mere feet below him. "Open up."
And she does. Her gaze is steely, set…almost formidable. But for once Jeff will not be cowed -- not by her formidable face and for god's sakes, please, just this once, not by her tears. He steps in, closing the door behind him and leaning on it, careful not to touch anything with his bare skin. "Get a bag. You're staying at my place tonight."
Annie rolls her eyes. "Troy."
"Yup."
"I can take care of myself."
Jeff quirks an eyebrow.
"I can! My place didn't actually get broken into last night, did it?"
"You had nothing to do with that!"
"Did too. The locks they couldn't get through were the ones I made my landlord add before I moved in." She's ridiculously smug about this. Jeff, however, doesn't have the time. He swears he can feel some kind of rash starting to creep across his skin, starting at his feet and slowly working its way up his body. Jeff's body, frankly, is too precious for this. He takes his weight off of the door, standing both in Annie's personal space -- she's hardly retreated into her apartment at all since he came in, perhaps in some misguided attempt to make him feel unwelcome -- and standing to his full height.
"Annie. You can shove it in my face all you want. I get it. You're independent. Good for you. But you're also roughly one-quarter my size, and half of that is your chest. So you can yell at me for this later, and you can fight it all you want, but purple belt or not, I am leaving this apartment in five minutes with you in tow if I have to throw you over my shoulder and put you in the trunk of my car. I'm guessing in this neighborhood, no one will look twice at it."
Annie's face turns the same purple color as that belt she's so proud of with suppressed rage, but they're out the door in four minutes and sixteen seconds.
It's half an hour of icy silence and half an hour of high-pitched but somewhat righteous acrimony later that Annie, finally calmed and resigned to a night on Jeff's couch (after confirming that it's been thoroughly cleaned since Chang left), commandeers his coffee table for her study materials; Jeff sits on the other end of the couch and watches television. Her concentration never seems to waver, though Jeff looks over at her more than once to check. Her ability to tune out distraction has clearly become well-honed and it now makes a little more sense that she was able to sleep through someone trying to break through the door to her one-room apartment twenty feet from her bed. And even though her textbooks and neatly organized notes are taking up every square inch of the table except for one corner occupied by Jeff's water glass, she stays shrunk into her corner of the couch -- not like she's still mad enough at Jeff to want to stay far away, but like she's afraid to let her actual person take up any more room. Jeff decides to just wait her out; after all, it is June, and even Annie can only do so much work in advance for the following semester's classes.
Jeff is proven right when after an hour, Annie very slowly packs up her books and slides them carefully and a little reluctantly into her hastily packed overnight bag.
He knows he'll regret asking this but at least it should get her speaking to him: "Learn anything?"
She nods and then she's off, describing the epics she's been reading in preparation for a mythology class -- not that the epics are even assigned reading, mind, just because she feels they'll be useful. Jeff's bored for about ten minutes, but at least she's talking to him easily, and by the time they're engaged in a debate about whether a Cyclops is blinking or winking when he closes his eye, Annie's taking up a normal person's amount of space on the couch. (They come to the resolution that the difference between a Cyclops blinking and a Cyclops winking is an emphatic tilt of the head. Jeff's shin brushes against Annie's knee as he shifts and neither of them make an effort to move away,)
Annie yawns and it's way before Jeff's bedtime but he gets his backup sheets and blankets (also freshly laundered) from his hall closet. When he hands them to Annie she takes them with more grace and gratefulness than she's shown all night. Jeff suspects the darkness outside and the reality of the approaching night have finally made her fully appreciate what it means to not have to sleep in her apartment again tonight, token of her independence or not. Once the linens are in her hands, Annie lets out the tiniest little gasp, like she's just remembered something that only the feel of the sheets could have possibly triggered, and asks hastily, "Britta hasn't been over here lately, has she?"
Her eyes are wide, not accusing, but Jeff must look somewhere close to as uncomfortable as he feels, because Annie rushes on. "I just mean since you had the couch cleaned." To her credit, she quickly realizes that doesn't sound much better and amends further. "The dander! The cat dander, sometimes it sticks to her clothes and travels with her, and I didn't want to be sleeping on it all night if she'd been over here recently…"
"No," Jeff manages, finally spurred into speech. "She hasn't been over here since before Chang started staying with me…and I haven't been over to her place in ages either, so I don't think you have to worry."
"Great," says Annie with relief and every sign of being done with the subject of Britta spending any time at Jeff's. "It happened a while ago when she came over to my place and I couldn't figure out why I was suddenly allergic to my own couch."
"We actually, um," Jeff continues in what he recognizes is the worst impression of nonchalance he's given in a long time without being able to stop himself, "we're not…you know…anymore. We're not…"
"Compartmentalizing?"
And Jeff sees with amazement that Annie's actually smirking a little bit. He clutches the spare pillow he has yet to put down.
"I already knew," she admits.
Jeff furrows his brow. "You did."
"Britta told me. When she was over."
Jeff blinks, dumbly. "Oh. Okay. I just wasn't sure if…yeah."
Annie rolls her eyes, just a little bit. "Just because I can't go into her apartment without leaving looking like I've got a double case of pinkeye doesn't mean we don't talk."
"I just meant…you guys seemed to be fighting a lot this year."
Annie shrugs. "So? We're friends. Some friends just fight. You and I fight all the time."
"Not all the time," Jeff protests, not sure why he's pushing the point.
Annie raises an eyebrow and reminds him, "We fight about fighting about fighting."
"That's the group."
Annie seems to consider it and concedes, "Fine, not all the time. But more than I fight with any of my other friends."
"Except Britta."
Annie's nose scrunches in more consideration, but her expression is still light. "Nope, it's probably about the same amount. Maybe it just seems like Britta and I fight more…since it tends to end in, you know, Habitats for Humanity getting destroyed."
"Or me getting hit in the face," Jeff gently chides her.
"Or oil wrestling."
Jeff clutches at the pillow again. "Yeah," he chokes out, and hopes the strain in his voice is less obvious than it sounds to him. "As opposed to our fights, which end with…"
"You running away crying?" Annie offers with a smile, not unkindly.
"Or, you know, me getting hit in the face again." Jeff shoves the pillow into Annie's arms on top of the stack of linens and stalks off towards the bathroom. "You got everything you need?" he calls, without stopping or turning around, and then without waiting for an answer continues, "I'm just gonna start getting ready for bed."
He shuts the bathroom door behind him and glares at his reflection briefly before carefully setting the running water to the notch indicated by the stolen Italian faucet he had Troy put in and splashing his face.
Damn it, he used to be so good at pretending not to care.
Scratch that. He used to be good at not caring, and then he had to get good at pretending not to care, and now…he doesn't even know what's going on anymore.
Annie, seemingly done crafting the couch into a makeshift bed, softly knocks on the bathroom door while Jeff's brushing his teeth to see when he'll be done, but he mumbles around a mouthful of toothpaste that she should just come in if she wants to brush hers. She hesitates, but soon they're sharing the sink casually, if not quite comfortably. They're both still fully dressed but it's uneasily domestic. Her little travel vanity case is perfectly organized by the order in which she uses things; she brushes and flosses, and then slathers on chapstick before washing her face. Jeff's been flossing now for about three times as long as he usually does, but he's strangely mesmerized by Annie's unadorned face, exposed by the cloth headband she's using to hold her hair out of the way as she scrubs it from the smooth porcelain Jeff is accustomed to seeing to a clean, shiny pink. She splashes water on her face to rinse off the soap and beads of water cling to her lips, still waxy from the chapstick, like dewdrops forming on rose petals.
When she's done, she reaches for the perfectly folded pink pajamas she carried in with her and holds them awkwardly until Jeff has finally thrown his floss into the garbage can and leaves. Neither of them has said a word since she walked in.
When she calls "good night" through his closed door, he's already ensconced in his bed, ready for a long stretch of being unable to fall asleep but unwilling to face any alternative.
Author: veryspecial0ne
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~2500
Disclaimer: Nothing has ever been less mine than Community.
Spoilers: Through the end of Season 2.
Summary: He pounds on the door and calls out "Annie, it's Jeff," because freaking her out by knocking unexpectedly the day after someone tried to break in is the last thing he needs. If he has to calm her down and then convince her to come crash with him this will take twice as long, and he's not convinced he can't catch something disgusting by mere osmosis from the store mere feet below him. "Open up."
A/N: Prompted by khan81 over at the Annie fanworks meme at community_tv : "Jeff/Annie-She stays at his apartment after hers is broken into." I took the opportunity to rework something I had been messing around with back in November or so. Title is from "Armour" by Ane Brun. Also, my first Community fanfic and the first one I've written at all in years!
Months ago, it was Troy that told Jeff that Annie doesn't speak to her parents, that her parents got divorced when she was twelve and she barely ever saw her father after that anyway, and that Annie's working her way through school while living in that crappy apartment. And Jeff's first thought was that this (the money issues) explained why Annie's excited talk about transferring to a real school seemed to have fizzled out in the last year or so. And his second, disgusting, perverted, man-is-evil thought was that she lived alone, above a sex shop, and that she not only had probable daddy issues but there were no parents in the picture to ever disapprove of him, the disgusting, perverted older guy who sometimes can't stop himself from craning his neck to see just how good of a view up her short skirt he can get today. And then the next day he saw Shirley wipe a milk mustache off of Annie's lip with a napkin in the cafeteria and rescinded that last part.
So it's fitting, somehow, that it's Troy who calls him one evening in the middle of June to ask if Chang has vacated Jeff's couch yet, and Jeff is still riding on the high of having his apartment to himself and so he lets out an exulted "yes" before thinking to play it cool until he finds out why Troy would be asking.
"…Why?" Jeff asks belatedly, warily, knowing that relations between Troy and Pierce were still frosty at best and hoping against hope that Troy wasn't looking to become Jeff's next squatter.
But instead Troy tells him that the shithole Annie calls "home" was broken into last night and Jeff, without knowing why, stands up from the very couch he'd just been ready to defend at any and all costs. "Well, they tried to break in," Troy amends. "She said they got through about half the locks, so she didn't find out until she woke up this morning."
Jeff lets out a breath he's all too aware he was holding, slowly and quietly, so Troy won't hear.
"Anyway, she kind of needs a place to stay tonight until she can get the broken locks replaced."
"Why are you asking me?"
Troy sighs. "She won't call you. She doesn't even know I'm calling. But Shirley and Andre have got the baby, and Abed's with his dad for the summer, and Annie's allergic to Britta's cats…" He doesn't give a reason why Annie can't stay with him and Pierce, and Jeff doesn't ask for one, assuming that the older man is still refusing to speak to Annie; the perceived betrayal of his "favorite" in the cafeteria standoff during paintball seems to have nettled him more than anything else that had occurred that day. It's really the first time that Jeff hasn't known what to say to make Annie feel better. Troy continues, "I tried to bring up maybe calling her mom. I think she still lives just down the street from campus…but Annie made it pretty clear she'd rather stay there with the broken locks. Or get a motel room, and you know the kind of motel room she can afford is probably gonna be even worse. Like, I'm talking Bates Motel, man."
"Yeah."
"So I figured if I called you, you could convince her to stay with you even though she's getting all Britta-level proud about it, since you lived in your car that time and might know what to--"
Jeff interrupts, "I said 'yeah.'"
"Oh." Troy pauses. "Like yeah, you'll do it?"
"I'll head over now."
And he does.
There's no lock on the front door of Annie's building. Jeff isn't surprised. He knows which door is hers by the ancient but cheery "WELCOME!" mat in the hallway, which is even less surprising. It's no wonder someone chose this door to try some B&E. He pounds on the door and calls out "Annie, it's Jeff," because freaking her out by knocking unexpectedly the day after someone tried to break in is the last thing he needs. If he has to calm her down and then convince her to come crash with him this will take twice as long, and he's not convinced he can't catch something disgusting by osmosis from the store mere feet below him. "Open up."
And she does. Her gaze is steely, set…almost formidable. But for once Jeff will not be cowed -- not by her formidable face and for god's sakes, please, just this once, not by her tears. He steps in, closing the door behind him and leaning on it, careful not to touch anything with his bare skin. "Get a bag. You're staying at my place tonight."
Annie rolls her eyes. "Troy."
"Yup."
"I can take care of myself."
Jeff quirks an eyebrow.
"I can! My place didn't actually get broken into last night, did it?"
"You had nothing to do with that!"
"Did too. The locks they couldn't get through were the ones I made my landlord add before I moved in." She's ridiculously smug about this. Jeff, however, doesn't have the time. He swears he can feel some kind of rash starting to creep across his skin, starting at his feet and slowly working its way up his body. Jeff's body, frankly, is too precious for this. He takes his weight off of the door, standing both in Annie's personal space -- she's hardly retreated into her apartment at all since he came in, perhaps in some misguided attempt to make him feel unwelcome -- and standing to his full height.
"Annie. You can shove it in my face all you want. I get it. You're independent. Good for you. But you're also roughly one-quarter my size, and half of that is your chest. So you can yell at me for this later, and you can fight it all you want, but purple belt or not, I am leaving this apartment in five minutes with you in tow if I have to throw you over my shoulder and put you in the trunk of my car. I'm guessing in this neighborhood, no one will look twice at it."
Annie's face turns the same purple color as that belt she's so proud of with suppressed rage, but they're out the door in four minutes and sixteen seconds.
It's half an hour of icy silence and half an hour of high-pitched but somewhat righteous acrimony later that Annie, finally calmed and resigned to a night on Jeff's couch (after confirming that it's been thoroughly cleaned since Chang left), commandeers his coffee table for her study materials; Jeff sits on the other end of the couch and watches television. Her concentration never seems to waver, though Jeff looks over at her more than once to check. Her ability to tune out distraction has clearly become well-honed and it now makes a little more sense that she was able to sleep through someone trying to break through the door to her one-room apartment twenty feet from her bed. And even though her textbooks and neatly organized notes are taking up every square inch of the table except for one corner occupied by Jeff's water glass, she stays shrunk into her corner of the couch -- not like she's still mad enough at Jeff to want to stay far away, but like she's afraid to let her actual person take up any more room. Jeff decides to just wait her out; after all, it is June, and even Annie can only do so much work in advance for the following semester's classes.
Jeff is proven right when after an hour, Annie very slowly packs up her books and slides them carefully and a little reluctantly into her hastily packed overnight bag.
He knows he'll regret asking this but at least it should get her speaking to him: "Learn anything?"
She nods and then she's off, describing the epics she's been reading in preparation for a mythology class -- not that the epics are even assigned reading, mind, just because she feels they'll be useful. Jeff's bored for about ten minutes, but at least she's talking to him easily, and by the time they're engaged in a debate about whether a Cyclops is blinking or winking when he closes his eye, Annie's taking up a normal person's amount of space on the couch. (They come to the resolution that the difference between a Cyclops blinking and a Cyclops winking is an emphatic tilt of the head. Jeff's shin brushes against Annie's knee as he shifts and neither of them make an effort to move away,)
Annie yawns and it's way before Jeff's bedtime but he gets his backup sheets and blankets (also freshly laundered) from his hall closet. When he hands them to Annie she takes them with more grace and gratefulness than she's shown all night. Jeff suspects the darkness outside and the reality of the approaching night have finally made her fully appreciate what it means to not have to sleep in her apartment again tonight, token of her independence or not. Once the linens are in her hands, Annie lets out the tiniest little gasp, like she's just remembered something that only the feel of the sheets could have possibly triggered, and asks hastily, "Britta hasn't been over here lately, has she?"
Her eyes are wide, not accusing, but Jeff must look somewhere close to as uncomfortable as he feels, because Annie rushes on. "I just mean since you had the couch cleaned." To her credit, she quickly realizes that doesn't sound much better and amends further. "The dander! The cat dander, sometimes it sticks to her clothes and travels with her, and I didn't want to be sleeping on it all night if she'd been over here recently…"
"No," Jeff manages, finally spurred into speech. "She hasn't been over here since before Chang started staying with me…and I haven't been over to her place in ages either, so I don't think you have to worry."
"Great," says Annie with relief and every sign of being done with the subject of Britta spending any time at Jeff's. "It happened a while ago when she came over to my place and I couldn't figure out why I was suddenly allergic to my own couch."
"We actually, um," Jeff continues in what he recognizes is the worst impression of nonchalance he's given in a long time without being able to stop himself, "we're not…you know…anymore. We're not…"
"Compartmentalizing?"
And Jeff sees with amazement that Annie's actually smirking a little bit. He clutches the spare pillow he has yet to put down.
"I already knew," she admits.
Jeff furrows his brow. "You did."
"Britta told me. When she was over."
Jeff blinks, dumbly. "Oh. Okay. I just wasn't sure if…yeah."
Annie rolls her eyes, just a little bit. "Just because I can't go into her apartment without leaving looking like I've got a double case of pinkeye doesn't mean we don't talk."
"I just meant…you guys seemed to be fighting a lot this year."
Annie shrugs. "So? We're friends. Some friends just fight. You and I fight all the time."
"Not all the time," Jeff protests, not sure why he's pushing the point.
Annie raises an eyebrow and reminds him, "We fight about fighting about fighting."
"That's the group."
Annie seems to consider it and concedes, "Fine, not all the time. But more than I fight with any of my other friends."
"Except Britta."
Annie's nose scrunches in more consideration, but her expression is still light. "Nope, it's probably about the same amount. Maybe it just seems like Britta and I fight more…since it tends to end in, you know, Habitats for Humanity getting destroyed."
"Or me getting hit in the face," Jeff gently chides her.
"Or oil wrestling."
Jeff clutches at the pillow again. "Yeah," he chokes out, and hopes the strain in his voice is less obvious than it sounds to him. "As opposed to our fights, which end with…"
"You running away crying?" Annie offers with a smile, not unkindly.
"Or, you know, me getting hit in the face again." Jeff shoves the pillow into Annie's arms on top of the stack of linens and stalks off towards the bathroom. "You got everything you need?" he calls, without stopping or turning around, and then without waiting for an answer continues, "I'm just gonna start getting ready for bed."
He shuts the bathroom door behind him and glares at his reflection briefly before carefully setting the running water to the notch indicated by the stolen Italian faucet he had Troy put in and splashing his face.
Damn it, he used to be so good at pretending not to care.
Scratch that. He used to be good at not caring, and then he had to get good at pretending not to care, and now…he doesn't even know what's going on anymore.
Annie, seemingly done crafting the couch into a makeshift bed, softly knocks on the bathroom door while Jeff's brushing his teeth to see when he'll be done, but he mumbles around a mouthful of toothpaste that she should just come in if she wants to brush hers. She hesitates, but soon they're sharing the sink casually, if not quite comfortably. They're both still fully dressed but it's uneasily domestic. Her little travel vanity case is perfectly organized by the order in which she uses things; she brushes and flosses, and then slathers on chapstick before washing her face. Jeff's been flossing now for about three times as long as he usually does, but he's strangely mesmerized by Annie's unadorned face, exposed by the cloth headband she's using to hold her hair out of the way as she scrubs it from the smooth porcelain Jeff is accustomed to seeing to a clean, shiny pink. She splashes water on her face to rinse off the soap and beads of water cling to her lips, still waxy from the chapstick, like dewdrops forming on rose petals.
When she's done, she reaches for the perfectly folded pink pajamas she carried in with her and holds them awkwardly until Jeff has finally thrown his floss into the garbage can and leaves. Neither of them has said a word since she walked in.
When she calls "good night" through his closed door, he's already ensconced in his bed, ready for a long stretch of being unable to fall asleep but unwilling to face any alternative.