Author's note: As always, huge thanks to Jeffwik for beta reading this and making sure it makes sense! This story was originally intended to be a prologue of a longer work, but it grew so much that I decided it was worth publishing on it's own. It is instead now the first part of a series, and the longer work will form the second - it's mostly written, and I'll start publishing it shortly after this. (As always, this is Dan Harmon's sandpit not mine. I don't own anything you recognise.)
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March 20th, 2009 - Jeff
Greendale Episcopalian Church
"In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Alan Connor; and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him and give him peace. Amen."
Jeff mumbled 'Amen' with everybody else as the priest finished and watched as Alan's mother, her face smeared with tears – so somebody loved the greasy SOB then, he thought to himself – walked up to the grave and scattered a handful of earth on the coffin. Jeff queued up behind Ted and Mark to await his turn, pasting an appropriate expression of manly grief on his face as he dropped the earth into the grave.
As he walked away, Ted beckoned him to one side. "Terrible business," he said.
"Just awful," Jeff nodded solemnly. "To be killed by a heart attack at his age…" he shook his head, as though too broken by grief to carry on.
"Overwork they're saying," Ted said, equally sombre. "He literally gave his life to the firm."
Jeff nodded. "An example to us all." Though whether the heart attack came before or after he went face down into a plate of Bolivia's finest export – Jeff knew perfectly well Ted was thinking exactly the same thing as he was, but Jeff wasn't inclined to speak ill of the dead, even on the passing of a lizard like Alan.
"I need you to do me a favour," Ted said, throwing an arm companionably across Jeff's shoulder. "I need somebody to go through Alan's papers and email records and identify everything he was currently working on and see it's reassigned."
"Of course," Jeff said.
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(Offices of Hamish, Hamish & Hamlin, two weeks later)
Jeff's blood ran cold. He had been finishing off the job of auditing Alan's email account and online file storage and was doing a routine check on an innocent sounding directory ("T&S Claims, FY2008"). There he had found a subdirectory containing an explosive set of correspondence between Alan and a South American based online-only degree mill called Colombia University of the Arts and Sciences – a body Jeff was intimately familiar with. His worst suspicions were realised when he read the correspondence and saw that, yes, Alan had tracked down his fake qualification and had received confirmation that Jeff had obtained his degree from there. Jeff spent the rest of the afternoon diligently deleting every last trace of the correspondence, then going through all of Alan's papers to track down and destroy all the hard copies he could find (which included a copy of Jeff's degree certificate). He didn't start to breathe again until he had gone down to the IT department and got the geeks who lived there to purge the backups as well.
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September 10th, 2009 - Abed
Greendale Community College
Abed Nadir looked at the piece of paper in his hands -
Hello,
I'm interested in putting together a Spanish Study Group for people who are interested in helping each other learn and in being helped at the same time, and maybe have a bit of fun while doing so! If you are interested in joining such a group, please write your name below mine and pass the paper on.
Thank you very much and I hope to see you soon!
Annie Edison
Abed didn't sign the paper - somebody had already scribbled an obscene picture on it - but it did cause something to tick over in his highly analytical brain as he called up his list of goals for the perfect college experience -
Item 1 - bond with a group of loveable misfits.
To say he had been struggling would be an understatement - he would talk to somebody, think the conversation had gone well, only for them to back away nervously the next time he approached them - but as the piece of paper returned to the brunette girl who had started it off and Abed watched her sunny, optimistic smile crumble into pure misery it occurred to him that a study group might be the 'in' he was looking for.
Working with lightning speed, his brain calculated the perfect mixture of tropes in order to ensure the widest possible range of storylines.
I need an even number to maximise the number of potential couples. Four is too small, eight is too large, so six it is. The "Friends" formula of course, but sometimes the old ones work best.
He almost smiled as the perfect solution occurred to him.
The three faces of Adam and Eve. Father, hunter, shaman. Mother, seductress, virgin.
A swift cataloguing of the - brief, awkward - conversations he'd had over the last few days made it clear who the candidates would be.
Annie, the girl trying so hard not to cry over her failed invitation, was clearly the innocent face of Eve. Shirley, who had started talking about her children almost before Abed had got her name, was clearly the mother. Which left the worldly, knowing face of Eve. Of course it has to be Britta, he thought, recalling the beautiful blonde who had been the only one in the class to treat him kindly and smile when she saw him a second time.
Now for Adam - Abed himself would be the shaman of course, no other choice was possible. For the hunter, the warrior - equally obviously it had to be the good-natured jock with the letter jacket. Abed frowned slightly when it came to the patriarch of the triumvirate - the king/father, but after narrowing the choice down to the drug dealer or the semi-retired businessman, he thought Pierce Hawthorne offered the greater opportunity for comic relief.
Now to recruit them.
As the class broke up, Abed walked up to the brunette who still looked so upset. "Annie," she looked up, surprised to hear her name. "Are you still interested in forming a study group?" Abed actually felt himself rock back slightly as her face suddenly lit up in an extraordinary smile.
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End note: story has three origins. Firstly, the first story I ever published ("And Everything Goes Back To The Beginning") was a story where Annie didn't join the study group, and for a while now I've wanted to do a companion piece where it's Jeff who doesn't join. Secondly, I've wanted to do a story where Jeff stays a lawyer and thirdly when I was helping to beta read Jeffwik's story "Everything Falling Into Place" (if you haven't yet read it - do) I liked the idea of somehow postponing the first meeting between Jeff and Annie until she was out of her teens enough that I wanted to do my own take on it. This story is the result of a realisation that I could achieve all three of these goals with a single work. So...