Advanced Homage Appreciation
Author's Note: I was rewatching Cooperative Polygraphy this morning while working on another story (a much longer one that might, one day, see the light of day) when this idea took over my brain, begging to be written. I'm still quite unsure if anything I write is even in character, but I'm deeply enjoying my forays into the universe of Community. I hope you enjoy!
When asked, Abed would say he did all of it for humming and pancakes, but that wasn't the whole truth. Those had been unexpected benefits for sure but they weren't the primary reasons why he'd chosen to lead Annie into an online romance with Olympic hopeful pole-vaulter Brent Underjaw. It would be more accurate to say he was doing an homage. One he had thought Annie would catch on quickly since it was based on one of her favorite movies; You've Got Mail with America's sweethearts, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. She hadn't though. Instead, she'd fallen for the handsome, clean cut blonde stock photo he'd payed ninety-nine cents for.
He'd had the whole thing planned too. He would start corresponding with her online under that fake identity, changing his writing style just a little so it wasn't too obvious it was him, but not so unrecognizable that Annie might not have an inkling. Then once the romance would begin to spark, Annie would start telling him about Brent…
She always did that for some reason, ever since the beginning of the study group, maybe because he'd casually mentioned her being in love with Troy after the group first got together? Still, he'd known about her crush on Vaughn before anyone else, and about her thing for Rich as well. He'd been the first person she texted when the doctor had turned her down too. He knew all about her feelings for Jeff, he'd gotten texts after texts about him through out their first summer break, and even though Annie had not told him exactly about the kiss – he'd heard about it from Leonard instead – he had suspected something was going happen between them. But it hadn't though, because Jeff was too afraid of what people might say to go for the woman he obviously cared about. In a way, this whole plan had been influenced by Jeff, because Abed didn't want to be like him, and regret not going for the woman he also cared about.
…anyway, she would start telling him about Brent and he would play the supportive friend about it. He would tease her gently about it and make a few jokes at her suitor's expense. – "What kind of a last name is Underjaw anyway? Do you think it's because he comes from a long line of people with gigantic underbite?" She had slapped his arm playfully at that, telling him to be nice. – And then, in step three, he would have to let something slip, something he shouldn't know and that Annie had only told Brent - maybe about her romantic fantasy of someone taking her hand in his for the first time in front of Cinderella's Castle at Disneyland - and then he'd have to backtrack and pretend she'd mentioned it to him as well. She'd start wondering at that. Could it be? Abed? No! That would be crazy! She'd think, and this would be around the time when they would start touching more. They already did that quite a lot, hold hands or walk arm-in-arm, but Annie was always the initiator of that, this time it would be him. This was the step he'd been just about to embark on when Pierce died and everything came crashing down.
Now Troy was going to leave, and Annie was angry with him, and he had no idea how to fix it. He wanted to go back to the sweet spot of step two, when Annie was happy and humming and made them pancakes and spent tons of times with him. Or he wished he would have sped up his timeline and had already reached step four, when Annie would have asked Brent to meet face to face and he would have been the one standing there, by the fountain at Greendale, holding a single sunflower – a callback to that one time Brent had compared her to one – and she would have smiled wildly and told him she'd wanted it to be him, she'd want it to be him so badly.
For the first time in ages, Abed found himself wondering if movies really were just lies and wish fulfillment.