Jeff walks down the gray hall with long strides. The suit feels a little too much for this particular occasion, but he's not making an appearance as a boyfriend, but as a (tentative – he has no idea if she's going to pull out some moral bullshit and stop him) lawyer.

And anyway, Annie likes him in suits.

xxxxx

A day ago, Jeff had been taking a nap in his office during lunch when his secretary had woken him up with an urgent call.

From the Denver Police Station.

Ms. Edison, she'd just said as an explanation.

Mind wondering foggily why Annie was calling him instead of being at her estranged/not-estranged mother's wedding, he'd answered the phone.

Five minutes later, he was making rapid calls trying to clear his day so he could go down to Denver and figure out why the hell his girlfriend was being accused of murdering her own mother.

xxxxx

So here he is, waiting in front of a glass panel for a guard to bring his girlfriend (it's been… what? Barely two months?) out.

For the first time, Jeff views the situation in a completely different way.

This isn't a meeting with some jackass who banged his rich daddy's car into a statue at night, completely sloshed, or a pot-bellied business man whose wife has promised him a lot of money and a night that will be completely worth his while, if he just managed to get 'this troublesome little nonsense' thrown out of court.

This is him waiting to meet his wrongly accused girlfriend so they can figure out a way to get her out of jail.

Moments later, she appears and sits down opposite him with a faint smile.

And fuck it, this sucks. Annie isn't supposed to be wearing an orange jumpsuit, or supposed to be sporting slight cut-marks around her wrists that no-doubt she got when police officers snapped cuffs on her.

At the mental image of the police snapping cuffs around her delicate wrists and pushing her into a squad car, he grits his teeth.

Annie – who looks like she cares more about what Jeff is feeling, despite the fact that she's been in jail for a night – moves forward to place her mouth carefully near the little mike in front of her.

"What's wrong?" There's note of exasperation in there somewhere, like she's trying to say 'yeah, I know what's wrong, Jeff, I'm just trying to start the conversation!'

He narrows his eyes at her and shakes his head.

"Lost a pen earlier."

She snorts. "Must be eating away at you."

He nods. "Yep."

She tilts her head to the side. "How come?"

"It seems like I can't look after anything, right now, that's why."

He wants to bite his tongue almost immediately, because damn it, he wasn't supposed to say it out loud.

Annie's halfway to her Disney Face (he's already decided that when they're in trial, he's making her milk that for all it's worth) when he starts talking again.

"Look, just – let's focus, okay?"

Annie nods and stiffens herself a bit ("are you trying to be formidable?"). "How's the group?"

Christ.

xxxxx

Satisfied that their friends are well, and that Britta isn't planning on bombing the facility to break her out, and that Abed and Troy have been fed, Annie leans back in her chair for a moment before moving forward again to look him in his eyes.

"And what about you, Jeff?" There's something in her eyes; she expects a certain answer, but he doesn't know what she wants, so he just settles for snark.

"Oh, I'm fine. I'm just sitting at a correctional facility, so I can get started on making a good case to a court for my girlfriend to be exonerated."

Annie sighs and shakes her head before looking back at him.

He's not sure if this means he's said what she expected, or he hasn't.

Whatever. This is his job, and he's going to focus on it before going back to his mom's house and contemplating his girlfriend's inexplicably calm and introspective behaviour when she should be freaking out because she's in jail over a big tumbler of scotch.

"Tell me in detail what happened since you left Greendale."

xxxxx

Apparently, everything had been fine until the night before last.

Annie was supposed to have met her mom at the hotel she was at, as some sort of mother-daughter bonding thing that her mom had wanted to do before the wedding the next day.

Except she'd never turned up, and her phone had been switched off.

Annie falters a little when she gets to the part of her giving up hope that her mom would show (he knows very well though that's she probably raided the minibar and burst into tears), but then continues with the story.

She'd gone to sleep, then woken up at seven and had decided to go to her mom's new house to talk.

When she'd reached the house, though, no one had answered.

The next part surprises him.

She'd been about to leave, when her shoe had stepped on a key – an extra key to the front door.

Annie's voice gets bitter and her words are heavy as she reluctantly recounts how she walked in ("..like a fool, Jeff!"), too busy dealing with anger to think about why the key was in plain sight or anything.

She hadn't been too busy to see the spread-eagled and bloody body of her mother lying in the floor in front of her T.V.

Jeff winces and wishes that there's some way he can avoid asking Annie more questions.

He can't.

xxxxx

They stare in silence at each other, as Jeff resists the urge to punch the glass away, so he can reach out and grab Annie.

(Her hand is making little vague designs on the glass pane, only about two inches from his on the other side of the glass, which twitches involuntarily. Annie's hand stills.)

There's a shuddered intake of breath from her, and Jeff's head shoots up in alarm.

Annie's staring at him with bright, slightly watery eyes.

"It's like we're just not supposed to be together."

What?

He doesn't need to vocalize this, Annie's still talking.

"I mean, we dance around each other for four years in college, dealing with everyone and everything telling me that we shouldn't be together…"

He doesn't know where she's going with this.

"And then there were all the rules. Maybe it's just the way the world works – maybe thirteen years really is too much of a difference. Or maybe we're just too wrong for each other."

The fuck?

"And now the judicial system is keeping us apart. Because I was in my mom's house when the police came! I-"

He knows why she's saying this crap – she has, after all, had enough time to be melancholy and come up with a thousand things that are going wrong and will (because really, this is Annie Edison), but Jeff starts to feel something snap inside of him.

"Even Abed once told me something about our two-foot height disparity… I don't remember properly what he'd said, but-"

He's finally with an amazing human being, and really, if this is the way the universe works, then fuck the universe.

"Damn the rules." It comes out as a rebellious mutter, but she hears and stops ranting.

"What?"

He looks up. "Damn the rules. Damn the system. And damn our two-feet height disparity!"