Work Text:
-08
annie (5/15): IMG_3892.JPG
annie (5/15): IMG_3895.JPG
annie (5/26): so jeff accidentally ruined garrett’s wedding today.
annie (5/28): and in other greendale news, turns out a freshman has been breeding cats in his dorm room. for a while. please appreciate the fact that you didn’t have to witness the carnage!
annie (6/02): guess what??? I got the internship :-) if you somehow happen to get this in the next hour, don’t mention it to anyone else because I haven’t told them yet.
troy (6/11): hi!! im in chile now. pls explain jeff thing?
troy (6/11): also congrats that’s so cool!
troy (6/11): also when i call you remind me to tell you what happened when we left buenos aires
annie (6/12): yay, same time zone! How long are you staying?
troy (6/12): we’re leaving the 16th
annie (6/12): can I call you on saturday? I’ll tell you everything.
annie (6/12): I have more news :-))
troy (6/12): sounds good
-04
“Ghosts aren’t real, Troy,” Annie says, exasperated, from the next cobweb covered, definitely haunted room. Of course she thinks that.
And right after she says that, as if Annie has some kind of ironic ghost curse, there’s a slamming of several doors from the hallway that she must hear, and it’s too violent and synchronized to be natural. Before Troy is able to react to it, Abed calls to them from the hall.
“Um, guys? You might want to see this.”
Troy and Annie come out immediately from their respective haunted rooms, and there it is, floating in the space at the top of the stairs. From the lower level, Shirley screams.
“Okay…” Annie says, voice wavering. “I don’t know how to explain that.”
-02
The second time Annie kisses a boy, it takes him five and a half seconds before he opens his mouth. She takes stock of where their bodies are, and one of his hands is heavy, blocking sound from her ear, while the other rests tentatively on the front side of her shoulder. She considers that she could move it for him. Then, she will have gotten to second base.
Later, she is told that she was “kind of weird” about it, to which she takes great offense.
Annie’s mom told her once that she “can’t exactly see her coasting on her looks and personality,” and frankly, Annie agrees; so she relies on being smart, and knowing exactly what she’s supposed to do, and she, like everyone, wants to get where she wants to be. And where she wants to be—needs to be, since it’s already her senior year of high school—is second base.
And if she’s good enough, she might get to second base with someone cuter, or older, or more popular. Maybe even—however trite it may be—the most popular boy in school. It’s good to have goals.
-07
It’s sometime in the early morning, and Annie has been trying to sleep for so long that she’s scared to check the time. A couple months ago, even though she wears an eye mask now, she started putting a scarf over her bedside clock before she went to sleep—it’s borderline superstitious, but it’s a rule of hers. It, like sleepytime tea, the eye mask, and never sleeping in, has become imperative.
Tonight, every passing second of sitting still with her own thoughts wakes her mind up more.
Annie sits up and sighs, pushing the mask off. She can tell by the flickering glow under the door that the tv is on, and the kitchen light. It’s more yellow than the others. When she opens the door, she expects to find Troy and Abed in their usual places. She doesn’t remember how many Pirates of the Carribeans they’re watching, but she suspects they’re still going.
Instead, it’s just Troy.
Which makes sense, actually, with the kitchen light. Troy doesn’t like completely dark rooms (“I’m not scared, Annie, I’m a grown man. It’s just for ambiance,”) and the kitchen light is his favorite.
He turns back to her and smiles. He’s watching Scooby Doo. Annie makes tea and sits on the couch.
“You can sit in Abed’s chair, if you want.”
So she does, curling her legs up. Troy looks at her again, with a different expression this time.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m really tired,” she says. Troy and Abed know she has trouble sleeping sometimes, lately, so this is enough of an answer for him, but Annie feels like she’s lying even though it’s true. “I’m kind of angry. But I don’t know why.”
“Oh. Yeah, I get that. Do you want to talk about it anyway?”
Annie wants to say no, because most of her would rather not, but the part that does is the reason she’s out of bed in the first place.
“I thought I would be happier by now. Than I am. I feel stupid for—expecting that, I guess, or for not being able to make it happen. This is stupid, I just need to sleep.”
“That’s not stupid, it’s normal,” Troy says kindly.
“Do you feel like that?”
Troy takes a few seconds to answer. “Not really,” he starts, and Annie can’t help but roll her eyes. “But, that’s because I met all you guys, and I live here with you and Abed, and we do fun stuff, and that makes me happy, and it’s enough for me right now. But maybe it’s not for you, and that’s fine. You have a lot of ambition.”
“Hm.” Annie thinks. “It’s mostly Abed, though, right?”
“Yeah, but not just Abed.” Troy smiles.
“I used to feel like that all the time, though,” Troy says, after a pause.
“But not anymore?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
“I used to do a lot of stuff to make other people like me, you know?” Annie nods, because she does. “Like my family. Oh, and remember Connor?”
“Ugh, I forgot about Connor.”
“He was the worst.”
“Yeah, fuck him.”
“Yeah. But it was the wrong stuff. Not that that’s what you’re doing.”
“I think it’s always kind of what I’m doing. Less that I used to, though.” Troy smiles again.
A few minutes later, after they rip the mask off the bad guy in proper Scooby Doo fashion, Annie speaks again.
“I have a job interview on Tuesday, with a pharmaceutical company.”
“Cool. Are you nervous about it?”
“No. I think it’s gonna go well.”
They both leave when she can tell Troy is falling asleep. Annie gets three hours of sleep, and she deals with it.
-06
“You were wrong.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Annie responds, scrolling through her phone. “It says right here–”
“I know what it says.”
Annie purses her lips. “Look, we both just misunderstood what the other was trying to say.”
“You misunderstood me. And you were also wrong.”
“Fine, maybe I technically was.”
“I want to hear you say it,” Troy says, clearly enjoying her discomfort. Annie sighs. Okay, she can be the bigger person here.
“You were right, I was wrong.”
“Yeah you were!”
“But that doesn’t mean people can just eat soap!”
“I think we’ve established that it does.”
-09
troy (10/20): so when do i get to meet your girlfriend
annie (10/20): hmm probably when you’re at least on the same continent as her. so, up to you!
annie (10/20): just kidding, take your time :-)
troy (10/20): ;)
annie (10/20): don’t tease me.
troy (10/20): ;)
troy (10/20): pretend that’s capitalized
-01
Football sucks sometimes. It’s long and repetitive and not quite fun enough to be worth it on its own, but Troy is pretty amazing at it, and everyone really likes that he’s amazing at it—everyone, from his mom to the cool senior guys, and they barely ever like the same things. The rest of his mom’s family thinks she’s a bad Witness for letting him play. That there’s too much bad association. But she says it will help him get into a good school, so he can get a good job, which Troy thinks sounds way more boring than football, but he guesses he has to.
His coach tells him that a dance class will help with his coordination. It sounds really stupid and girly, and like something he’d be bad at anyway, but he does it.
When they get to axel turns, Troy is surprised to learn that there are some things he can do with his body that he actually enjoys.
-
When he tears his rotator cuff a week before homecoming, it’s… weird. People are disappointed, but not in him. Just in the tragic situation. And it is tragic, because he’s basically the best player on the team. (Imagine how good he would be if he was tall?) His parents are sorry he can’t play, Monica thinks it’s hot for some reason, and a girl he has history with actually gives him a handmade card, with glitter on it. And he gets to just sit on the bleachers and yell stuff at the field.
He can barely dance, though.
-05
Annie’s twenty-first is more of a disaster than Troy’s, but also a less depressing disaster. Britta cries, which is jarring for everyone, but she seems really happy by the end of the night. She makes out with Jeff again after he decks Pierce, something everyone gapes at but no one objects to—the Pierce thing, not the kissing. Annie and Shirley force Troy into karaoke, which is harder than it looks and being drunk doesn’t help.
Annie falls asleep with her head on his shoulder in the back of Jeff’s Lexus on the way home.
-10
They mostly go because Annie thinks that one day she’ll regret it if she doesn’t, plus Abed says it could be interesting. She’s always kind of wanted to go to her high school reunion all cool and successful and living in a different state.
There are drinks and food and the top 40est aughties pop. A few people she never talked to seem as eager to talk to Annie as they are to talk to Troy—asking her how she’s doing, telling her how great she looks, subtly (they think) alluding to that time she did that thing that they’ve probably been telling as a story at parties for the last ten years.
For a little while, since the excitement is still fresh, Troy has fun telling everyone who makes eye contact with him that he’s engaged. Then at 10:20, he finds Annie standing by the baby carrots.
“I hate this,” he says.
They leave the gym and go outside through the same side door Annie used to use when she stayed late and walked home, and then it’s just her and Toy Barnes, standing together on the soft grass strip that floats out into the parking lot. And it is not exhilarating or weird, and she is not back in high school again. There are other people out there, smoking against the wall, too far away for Annie to know what comes out when their mouths open wide and move like they both suddenly have something very amusing and important to say to each other.
“You want to walk around?” She asks.
“I’d rather just go back to the hotel. We can go in the pool?”
“Ew,” Annie says, smiling.
“I think it’s heated.”
-
“It’s weird being in a hotel here,” Abed says once they’re all downstairs. It’s late, and nobody else is at the pool.
“Hm. I lived in a motel for a couple weeks after rehab.” Annie lifts her feet up from the water onto the ledge of the pool, then brings them down again when it turns out to be very uncomfortable. She launches herself backwards from the wall through the warm water. She is going to take a very thorough shower after this.
“When are we meeting Britta and Jeff tomorrow?” Troy asks.
“One,” she answers. “At Britta’s bar.”
“When’s the last time you even talked to Jeff?”
“I’ll have you know I gave a thumbs up to that thing he sent us last week.”
“That’s called liking it. It’s the same feature that exists on all social media,” says Abed.
“Thank you,” she responds, with an exaggerated rise of her eyebrows.
“Britta says some of the classes at Greendale are good now, do you think that’s true?” Troy asks.
“Yeah, we did a pretty good job saving it,” says Abed.
“It’s just hard to believe.”
“Isn’t it?” says Annie.
Troy spins around slowly on his toes, arms outstretched on the surface of the water.
“I wonder if my monkey still lives there.”
“I am never forgiving you for that.”
“Yeah, okay.”
-03
“UNO, nerds!” Troy shouts after placing down a blue reverse. He drums his hands on the table, grinning so wide it looks uncomfortable.
“Britta, that would be you,” Annie says.
“Oops.” Britta fishes through what’s probably a quarter of the deck.
Annie wins.