Jeff/Annie - Ain't No Sunshine (When She's Gone)

[wordybee]

Title: Ain't No Sunshine (When She's Gone)
Author: wordybee
Rating: PG-13 for language(?)
Warnings: Swearing. Spoilers for 3.15 and theoretical spoilers for Dreamatorium ep.
Word Count: 4,100
Disclaimer: I don't own Community
Summary: Annie goes on a road trip. Jeff is clueless and pining and clueless that he's pining.

A/N: I made a comment that included a hypothetical fanfic that then turned into a real fanfic that then turned into a bigger fanfic because of Thursday's episode. The title is from the Bill Withers song, because I'm a sucker for 70s pop-blues and songs that repeat the phrase "I know" 26 times yet still manage to be awesome.

Jeff admits a higher-than-average level of ignorance when it comes to certain things, like the appeal of musical television dramas, and why they list the ingredients on a packet of mixed nuts, and whatever the hell goes on with Troy and Abed in their Dreamatorium, and yeah, okay, emotional things and sincerity and interpersonal relationships, too. While the former things are just idle curiosities that result in bafflement, though, the latter stuff – well, he’d been working for three years on trying to figure those out. He’d been working pretty hard at it, too. He’d thought he’d made a couple breakthroughs in recent weeks especially, like apologizing to that Kim guy, retrieving invisible Friendship Hats, realizing that he has a bit of an ego problem and going to a therapist. He thought he’d gotten pretty good at this “friendship” thing, at listening to the people he cares about and trying to make them happy.           

So it’s a surprise when Annie stops him in the hallway, her face all serious and just a little bit frightened.

She says, “Jeff, uh… Look, we’re okay as friends, all right? But I have to take some time and get some distance from you. The summer’s going to be good for that. I just need to think… I know there was some unspoken rule that we pretend like everything’s fine, but… I want everything to really be fine. So… Um… Goodbye.”

She reaches up and gives him a quick hug, but Jeff doesn’t respond, his brain still trying to figure out what’s just happened and coming up with very little in the way of answers.

Because Jeff had thought they were really fine, so maybe he hadn’t made as much progress with the interpersonal relationships stuff as he’d originally thought.

Annie is gone, down the hallway to god knows where.

Jeff thinks, I definitely missed something.

  ---------------  

The only news of Annie that Jeff gets is second-hand, from other members of the group.

When they get together about a week after the end of classes, Jeff learns that Annie’s gone on some sort of road trip from Shirley, who brings it up with great motherly concern, “She’s too young to be out there on her own. What if she gets into trouble?”

Annie apparently told everyone what she was doing except Jeff. He tries not to feel hurt about that, but it’s not too successful an endeavor.

Jeff’s also learned that, as far as anyone else in the group knows, Annie went on her trip for fun. She’d said that she had money saved up and she wanted to do something big before senior year, grad school, and internships. Jeff wants to tell them that Annie didn’t just go because it was a fun thing to do before losing herself in her career goals. He wants to tell them, just so he’d have something to say about her trip – but Jeff has a suspicion that he wouldn’t be cast in a very good light if he explained that last conversation.

Even though he still isn’t all that sure what he did wrong, specifically, Jeff thinks that the others in the group might see exactly what he doesn’t.

---------------

Jeff stopped trying to compartmentalize his friends as just his school friends sometime around when he made up fake Friendship Hats in order to help Troy and Abed (and appease Annie, whose opinion of him tended to motivate a lot of bizarre, sincere things he didn’t think he was capable of). Or maybe it was when he’d sent a text message on Valentine’s Day about how much he loved them. Or, maybe, it went all the way back to him sitting on the steps of the library, faced with having to learn for a change and being comforted by the group of people he’d just heartlessly manipulated, and he’d just never seen it or recognized it for what it was at the time. Either way, Jeff doesn’t grumble or make sarcastic excuses when Troy and Abed invite him out to play pool, because pretending that he only wanted to associate with these people within the walls of Greendale was getting to be too much work.

He buys them a round of beers and Troy and Abed stand beside the pool table like they’re really thinking hard about what shots to make. Jeff knows they’re not. Abed might be capable of sinking a couple balls by channeling a character from The Hustler or something, but Troy is hopeless at the science behind billiards and Abed has finally realized that he should learn to compromise a bit more with Troy. Their cooperation means that, as a team, they suck pretty hard at pool.

Jeff sips his beer and listens to some low-tempo 70s blues music crackling through the speakers. He would say the place was trying too hard at the whole southern pool hall thing, but it actually wasn’t half bad.

He waits as Troy finally, finally leans forward and lines up a shot, but then Abed’s phone makes a weird bloop-bloop noise that Jeff unfortunately recognizes at the laser blast of a Blorgon from Inspector Spacetime. Troy’s phone bloop-bloops not a second later. Both the younger men stop to look at their phones.

“Hey, Annie sent another photo from the road!” Troy says. Jeff quickly moves around the pool table and sidles up behind Troy, looking over his shoulder at a picture of some orange-tinted sky and mountain peeks and just a little corner of Annie’s face. She looks like she’s smiling, even though Jeff can’t see her mouth.

“Where is she?” Jeff asks.

Troy frowns “Uhm…” he scrolls through the text message, which is (as ever) practically too well-written to actually count as a text message. “Some place outside some other place called Pueblo. Oh, she’s back in Colorado.”

Abed holds his phone up. It displays the same picture as Troy’s. It’s apparently a mass text message party that Jeff hasn’t been invited to. “She’s on her way to the Grand Canyon. Don’t you get the updates, Jeff?”

Abed’s always slightly too intelligent and curious and it makes him sound accusatory and suspicious at times like these. But Abed can’t spot a lie as well as he looks like he could spot a lie, so it’s easy for Jeff to just say, “I’ve been having trouble with my data and text lately. Stupid service provider, you know?”

Jeff thinks about Annie, miles and miles away in some place near Pueblo, Colorado, on her way to see the Grand Canyon because, why? It’s just a sight to see? For the real, American Road Trip Experience? Some sort of poetic, visual representation of the vast emptiness that is Jeff Winger’s soul? Maybe she’ll spit into it and it’ll be cathartic and allegorical, and then she’ll come home and Jeff can apologize for that thing he doesn’t quite understand.

Honestly, he thought they were okay.

---------------

Days pass and Jeff doesn’t hear from Annie once. He doesn’t get so much as an accidental chain letter full of text hearts and happy faces. Jeff suspects that Annie might have deleted him from her contacts entirely, and that’s a bit painful.

He pretends that he’s as in touch with Annie and her life on the road as everyone else. He pretends that he knows Annie’s already on her way to Niagara Falls and has promised kitschy souvenirs for each of them. When he’s unable to continue with the “technical troubles” lie, Jeff pretends to be enthusiastic about the latest photo from Annie Edison, World Traveler (or, more accurately, Continental United States Traveler) but Jeff’s really just fumbling around in the dark and it’s not his favorite place to be.

---------------

Weeks pass and Jeff’s so preoccupied with life and with where Annie is (and isn’t) that he almost misses the class registration deadline. He does a last-minute signup for some leftover General Education classes and a law class on Dispute Resolution and Ethics. It’s the last one available that fits his degree criteria and, no, the coincidental nature of the class in relation to Jeff’s current predicament is not lost on him, but he tries to ignore it anyway. Because the Universe giving him hints about things happening in his life doesn’t gel with Jeff’s theory that the Universe gives fuck-all what he does and what’s done to him, so it’s better to just pretend nothing’s up.

Besides, he gets the feeling that whatever he might learn in his Dispute Resolution class will be too little, too late by the time he learns it, and therefore ultimately inapplicable to his situation.

---------------

It’s two weeks until classes start up again and there’s been no word on when Annie’s supposed to be back. The others don’t seem worried, placated as they are by frequent texts and pictures, but Jeff is slightly nervous that Annie isn’t coming back at all. She almost left them for Delaware, almost left them for City College… so there’s a certain amount of insecurity where Annie is involved.

Jeff can’t mention his concern to the others because he doesn’t know if they know her return date from a text. He spends some more time in the dark.

---------------

When Jeff sees Annie again – wearing jeans, which is bizarre, but maybe it’s uncomfortable to travel for a long time in floral skirts and cardigans – it’s the first day of classes. She hasn’t even been home yet. She’d apparently gotten Troy or Abed to sign her up for the semester’s classes just after she’d left and there she was – not gone, not leaving them for something else bigger and better (and Jeff has to wonder what he was thinking, what Annie could possibly want other than the study group and Greendale – a nomadic life on the open road, Healthcare Administration degree be damned?) but back.

She looks at him with some degree of uncertainty. She actually looks a lot like the last time he’d seen her: serious, slightly frightened. There is just something different, though…

Then Jeff figures it out. He knows now why she left and what she’d been talking about before she did. He wants to tell her that. He wants to say, I know what I did and I missed you, Annie, and I wish you didn’t need space from me.

He walks in the other direction, which… yeah, that seems to be about on par with his history of poor judgment where Annie’s concerned.

---------------

Annie finds him in the study room. He’d thought it’d be too obvious for her to suspect, but apparently Annie’s got some sort of internal GPS tracker on Jeff because she does find him, and it only takes about ten minutes for her to do so.

“Jeff?” she calls, cautious.

“I hope you at least brought me back a keychain,” is Jeff’s blithe reply.

He’s lying on the study room couch and she moves around to look at him. There’s an uncomfortable feeling in his chest that’s only intensified when Jeff’s mind goes, I ruined this, didn’t I?

Because Annie isn’t looking at him with that little sparkle in her eyes that he’s been noticing and ignoring and erasing from his memory ever since their first day back their second year. She’s just looking at him. Like he’s her friend and nothing else because she’s driven a shitload of miles over the last couple months and apparently every single one of those destroyed a little bit of that crush she’d had on Jeff Winger. Annie had gone away and come back, but she hadn’t come back to Jeff.

She holds a keychain with a barrel attached to it that has “Niagara Falls” stamped on the side. She sets it on Jeff’s chest when he refuses to reach up and take it from her outstretched hand.

“Thanks, but I was hoping for the Grand Canyon.”

He can hear her fidgeting with the brightly colored bag slung over her shoulder.

“Jeff, you know I care about you, right?”

It’s apropos of absolutely nothing, but it’s got the word care in it and Jeff’s interest is piqued a bit.

“I know.”

Annie stubbornly refuses to not look at Jeff. It’s disconcerting, because Jeff stubbornly refuses to look at Annie and it feels like two magnets repelling each other.

“And you know why... I talked to you before I left, right? You know what that was about?”

“I didn’t. I know now.”

“You didn’t?”

Her surprise is what makes Jeff look at her. There’s genuine confusion and, judging by the pink tingeing her cheeks, a small amount of embarrassment.

Jeff sighs.

“Look, Annie, you have to realize that my powers of observation have mostly been used for evil and it’s been kind of hard for me to adapt them to good and pretty much everything about you is good. You’re kind of a blind spot. So, no, I didn’t know what you were talking about when you left, but I know now. I get it, Annie, I do.” He sits up and she sits down on the couch next to him. “You were mad because I was an idiot who didn’t see that you were still upset about the Transfer Dance and how I dealt with it.”

“And?”

Jeff rubs his hand over his face. “And what? I’m sorry? I should’ve done a better job of considering your feelings? This apology is pretty late, Annie.”

She gives a wan little smile. “There’s no expiration date on apologies, Jeff.”

Except there is and Jeff had waited way too long. Long enough that Annie went on a two-month exploration of the country and ignored him every moment of it, then brought back a hunk of plastic painted to look like a barrel which, were barrels even actually associated with Niagara Falls anymore? Didn’t that connection die with half the people who actually tried to go over the Falls in a barrel? It was kind of a morbid souvenir, actually, and Jeff sweeps it away from him. It half-wedges between the cushion and the arm of the couch and Jeff doesn’t act particularly concerned about it being lost forever in the pandimensional portal that is the average sofa.

The silence that follows is awkward and only ends when Jeff realizes he’s going to be late to his first class. He gets up and is halfway out of the room when Annie stops him.

“You forgot your keychain,” she says. She holds it up to him and he takes it, shoving it into his pocket with the intention on shoving it into his locker later, where he will put his great powers of forgetting and ignoring to use by forgetting and ignoring it. Jeff knows that if he really wanted to forget about it, he’d just throw it away. He also knows that he’s never going to do that.

---------------

“Something’s wrong,” says Britta as they’re leaving their Intro to Literature class. Because Britta might be as messed up as Jeff is when it comes to emotional insight, but she’s amazingly conscious of details, and Jeff sulking through class, low in his too-tiny desk and actually taking notes on what the professor is saying about the semester to come? Well, she doesn’t miss it. Jeff would normally appreciate that particular feature of his friend, who has no idea she’s actually got innate ability in something that Jeff finds worthy of respect, but he’s trying his best to feel sorry for himself and her skills are just an unwanted distraction from that goal.

“Nothing's wrong,” Jeff replies. He has about an hour to kill before his Dispute Resolution and Ethics class but he walks away from Britta as if he’s already running late.

She, of course, barely falls behind. Britta Perry is like a ferocious pit bull when it comes to Jeff’s emotional stability these days. Jeff blames her Psych classes… and her basic personality.

When Jeff turns left and left and right and goes down a hall and somehow ends up in disused classroom he realizes a few things: one, that he’s out of places to hide; two, that Britta is really good at keeping up with him despite the fact that his legs are much longer than hers and even Jeff hadn’t had a clue where he’d been going; and three, her expression is speaking volumes on how Jeff was very much not leaving the room without explaining what was wrong. Jeff tries to think of a good lie.

She surprises him by saying, “It’s about Annie, isn’t it?”

At his blank (but probably very telling, somehow) look she continues, “I know she didn’t talk to you all summer."

See, Britta has an eye for details.

---------------

“Britta, as nice as it is that you’re trying to Psych Major me without completely butchering the DSM for a change, I don’t think getting relationship advice from my former friend-with-benefits is strictly within the realm of ‘sane decisions’.“

Britta gives him a look. “The key word there is friend, Jeff.”

“No, the key word is sane. Which this isn’t. Which is why I’m not going to do it, so if you would just step aside, I can go to my locker, kill some time, attend my painfully relevant ethics class, and go home. Where I will watch television, drink a protein shake, and prepare myself to repeat all of this, every day, with only slight variation, until I can graduate and move to Denver.”

More looks. They increase in severity, and Jeff wonders if Britta’s professors are going to train the instinct to give people the stink-eye out of her before she becomes a licensed therapist, or if that’s something that they’re just going to have to work around.

“You cannot be serious,” she says. “Jeff, you like Annie.”

Jeff does not sputter. “No. I’m mad that she never bothered to text me while she was gone, that’s all.” Looks. “That’s all.”

She points at his face, “You like Annie.”

“I don’t.”

“I’m trying to help you!”

“Well, don't!”

Britta huffs and crosses her arms over her chest. “Jeff, this is deflection. You’re turning away your feelings for Annie because you think it’s too late for you to feel them. Because you’re a jerk and it takes you forever to get anything important.”

Jeff glares. “You are the worst therapist I have ever had. And my last one gave me pills that turned me into the Incredible Hulk.”

He feints to the left then slips to the right and around her when Britta moves to block him. Not that it does much good, because it takes no time at all for her to catch up with him. Jeff does some internal grumbling about the similarities between Britta Perry and a bad cold. Or maybe a leech.

“Jeff! Just be honest! You can still win her back!”

A noisy leech.

Jeff turns around and Britta has to slide to a stop so she doesn’t run into him. “Why do you care so much about this, Britta? Shouldn’t you be jealous—“

“Ha!”

Jeff does some more glaring. “Well, shouldn’t you at least be self-righteously screaming at me for sticking my tongue down a teenager’s throat? That was the tune to this song last time around, wasn't it?”

“Annie isn’t a teenager, Jeff,” Britta says. “And I like her. I like you. You’re two of my best friends and I want my friends to be happy. I want you both to be happy, okay?”

It’s the sincerity in Britta’s words and expression that makes Jeff sort of deflate, all the anger and frustration rushing out of him in a deep sigh. It’s replaced by nausea and fear.

“Talk to her,” Britta says, voice soft.

Jeff actually preferred the anger and frustration to this sense of worry and there’s a tiny part of him that’s angry with Britta for stubbornly busting down all the walls he’d built up. But he nods.

---------------

Jeff doesn’t “talk” to Annie that day, or the next, or the one after that. Britta mutters things in passing like “avoidance” and “self-fulfilling prophecy brought on by fear of perceived rejection” which, honestly – pretty hard to mutter in passing, so Jeff has to give credit where credit is due.

Even though Jeff doesn’t have the Big Discussion with Annie that Britta is prompting, though, he stops treating Annie like she’d done something wrong and starts treating her like a friend again. It feels almost like old times, except Jeff can no longer ignore the fact that Annie makes him smile when she smiles, makes his heart do ridiculous fluttery things, makes him think about a future that isn’t Jeff dying alone (and makes Jeff want that future, too). It’s stupid and cheesy and Britta notices every second of it and makes Jeff relive and acknowledge those seconds by scowling knowingly when she runs out of psych terminology to spit at him in the hallway.

---------------

It finally happens, though. Two weeks after Jeff’s talk with Britta, he’s standing by his locker and Annie is suddenly standing next to him. He swears there’s a secret ninja class that Britta and Annie have taken that allows them to just be there even when it makes no sense.

“Hey, Jeff,” she says. “I think we need to talk.”

So, it isn’t even Jeff who starts the big conversation (which he was totally going to start, he swears – he was just trying to find the right words) but Annie, who apparently spoke to Britta at some point the previous week. She tells Jeff as much, and thankfully there is nothing in Annie’s explanation for this sudden Important Talk that implies Britta told Annie Jeff’s side of the story. The two women had just had a conversation that’d been eerily similar to Jeff’s conversation with Britta, and Annie was simply braver than Jeff.

“I think I owe you some kind of explanation…”

“Annie, it’s fine.”

Annie frowns. “No, it’s not. I think the problem with us... We’re not as clear as we should be with each other.” She sighs and leans against the locker next to Jeff’s, her gaze on the floor. “I’m trying to think of where to start.”

She seems to arrive at some sort of conclusion when she looks up at him and asks, “You remember Britta and her crazy obsession with her carnie ex-boyfriend? And how she and Shirley both said that I’d find a guy who I just couldn’t shake, who I might develop that same sort of unhealthy relationship with?”

Jeff doesn’t like where this is going. “Yeah,” he says cautiously.

“That’s where it started. I started thinking about us… And then I went into the Dreamatorium with Abed, and he helped me work some stuff out. About my relationship with the group, and with you, about how I kept trying to get you to see how upset I was about everything between us but you weren’t getting it.”

“You sought council with Abed in the Dreamatorium?”

She shrugs. “It was actually really helpful.” Her gaze drops to the floor again. “But the Dreamatorium experience, coupled with the talk of that crazy-inducing guy… Well, I’ve only ever been really crazy about one guy, Jeff, and that’s you. Even when I was mad at you, I was still crazy about you. That got me worried. I didn’t want you to be my version of Blade, so I decided that the best option was to get away from you.” She inhales deeply. “When Britta was on lockdown at my apartment, she was absolutely obsessed with contacting Blade. I figured, if I could go all summer without you, without talking to you, then that meant you weren’t Blade to me.”

Jeff takes some time to close his locker, just for a few seconds to absorb this information. He leans against the locker alongside Annie, but he doesn’t look at her. He’s addressing the wall across from him as he says, “So… Uh… What did you figure out on your trip, then?”

“You’re my friend.”

Oh.

“Oh.”

There’s a small level of comfort in the fact that Jeff isn’t Annie’s crazy-unhealthy-man-obsession. He likes that they’re friends, he really does. If it’s the only thing they can be, well – Jeff isn’t going to be happy about it, per se, but it won’t change how much he cares about her and wants her to be happy. He’ll be glad that they still like each other at all.

He turns to tell Annie as much but before he can open his mouth, she stands up on her tiptoes and kisses him. It’s a small kiss, just a few seconds of barely-there lips and a waft of pleasant perfume, but there’s intent there that doesn’t translate to just friends. Jeff looks at her. She’s smiling and there’s a sparkle in her eyes that’s similar to that sparkle Jeff had seen-but-ignored, then didn’t-see-and-missed-desperately, but not quite. It’s mingled in with a certainty that makes all the difference.

Jeff grins.

“You know, I like this much better than that Niagara Falls keychain.”

He’s still probably going to put the ugly barrel on his key ring anyway, though.