ENDGAMES I: KING AND PAWNS

ACT TWO

Night at the apartment shared by Troy, Abed, and Annie. They hadn't written their historiography essays, or indeed made as much progress as Annie felt was seemly, so she and Jeff met up again after dinner to work on them… although that made it sound like they hadn't been in one another's company continuously, which of course they had.

Jeff was typing on a laptop at the kitchen table, while Annie sat on the sofa with her own laptop. "Hah!" Jeff cried, leaning back from his computer. "One thousand and eleven words answering the twin questions what is historiography? and is it possible for a man to die of boredom while writing?"

"Let me see, let me see," Annie said as she rose and moved to the table. "Didn't you have to write briefs and memos and things when you were a lawyer?"

"You'd be amazed how little of that work I actually did," said Jeff, cracking his knuckles. He slid his laptop over to her. "Actually, you probably wouldn't be amazed."

Annie quickly scanned the document. "Jeff," she said reprovingly. "I assumed you were joking but literally a third of this is about how boring it was to write." She deleted the offending paragraphs with a few keystrokes. "And you barely mention Marxist analysis; there's easily four hundred words begging to be written about E.H. Carr."

Jeff scowled. "You do realize Chang is probably not going to read a single word of any of these, don't you? At best he'll skim to make sure that they aren't just random keyboard mashings."

"That's no excuse for shoddy work," Annie insisted as she slid his laptop back to him. "How can you respect yourself, if you just phone in the bare minimum necessary? Monkeys just phone in the bare minimum necessary."

"Actually I think monkeys don't take community college classes at all…" Jeff trailed off, staring at her.

She returned his gaze quizzically. "What? Do I have something on my face?"

"No, no. You're just… you are stunningly beautiful. How do you get through the day like that? Knowing that everyone you meet is thinking what am I looking at here, some kind of supernatural being? Men and women both, regardless of their normal orientations, lusting after you?" He reached out to touch her, and she obligingly stepped a bit closer to his chair.

"Flatterer," she said, but she was smiling. "That's not going to get you out of doing the assignment."

"I mean every word," he assured her, "but now that you mention it, there are just so many better uses of my time than writing an essay no one will read…"

"I'll read it," Annie told him. "And the sooner you're done, the sooner we're… celebrating how done you are." She spun away, out of his grasp, and danced her way back to the sofa.

"You're a monster, you know that?" Jeff grinned, and turned back to his laptop.

After only a couple of minutes the apartment door opened and Troy, Abed, and Britta swept in.

"Oh, they're here," Troy said when he saw Jeff and Annie already there. He sighed. "Hi, guys."

"You're sitting at opposite ends of the room, with Jeff facing away from Annie," Abed observed. "Did you have a fight?"

"No, no, I got it," Britta said before Jeff or Annie could respond. "You separated physically because you get distracted staring at each another if you're in a different position. Or at least Jeff does. Am I right? If I'm right don't say anything, just exchange glances laden with romantic subtext… I thought so," she said smugly as Jeff and Annie did indeed exchange glances, over Jeff's shoulder.

"You finish your essays?" Troy asked, as he sauntered to the fridge and found leftovers.

"Mine's done," Annie said. "Jeff is still finishing his."

"Jeff would be done," Jeff declared, "if a certain someone… hey!" He broke off as Britta squirted him with a water pistol.

"I warned you," she said simply.

"I didn't even…"

"You were gonna." Britta sat on the sofa next to Annie, her feet tucked under her.

"Annie, a word?" Abed said suddenly.

She looked up from her work. "What?"

"A word," he repeated. "In the bathroom."

"In the bathroom?" She raised her eyebrows.

"I don't have a room and it would be presumptuous to ask to meet you in your room," Abed explained.

"Okay," Annie said doubtfully, as she rose and allowed Abed to lead her to the bathroom.

Troy plopped down in the space she vacated, containers of leftovers in his lap. "Food?" He offered one of the containers to Britta.

She took it but eyed the container suspiciously. "What is this?" she asked, tugging on the container's opaque plastic lid. "Ew, it's furry!"

"Oh, then it's probably the Chinese we ordered in May that one time," Troy said, with a sort of that answers that air.

"Troy, it's November," Britta told him.

He shrugged and began digging through the brown glop in one of the other containers, with a fork and a determined expression.

"How about we order a pizza?" Britta asked, putting the lids back on the containers.

"Oh, uh, sure, if you don't feel like Chinese…" Troy rose. "I'll call it in."

"So this is a thing, huh?" Britta asked Jeff as soon as he was gone. She moved from the sofa to a kitchen chair next to him.

"I guess." Jeff didn't look up from his work.

"You and Annie, me and Troy…" Britta continued.

"Uh huh."

"Of course," Britta said as though the thought had just occurred to her, "Troy and I got together a while back."

"Uh huh."

"It probably would have happened earlier, except he was away in the AC Repair Annex all summer," she said artlessly.

"Yep."

Britta folded her arms and scowled at Jeff. "Why were you never even a little bit jealous?"

He finally looked up. "What?"

"I mean, you and I had this on again, off again thing for… well, for a while," she said. "But I've never seen you get jealous of Troy. You've never been jealous in your life!"

"I've gotten jealous," Jeff said. He was unsure why they were having this conversation but he was unwilling to concede the point.

"Name one time."

"Uh… Vaughn, our first year here. That jerk from City College who screwed up paintball sophomore year…" Jeff struggled to think of other examples. "Rich!"

"Okay, firstly, those guys were all into Annie," Britta said. "Or she was into them. Secondly, I do remember you being jealous of Vaughn over Annie and your solution was to throw Troy at her."

Jeff looked bemused. "Heh, yeah. I forgot about that."

"But you weren't jealous of Troy. And you definitely weren't jealous of me and Troy. You've never been jealous of me and anybody."

He stared at her. If he didn't know her better he'd think she was fishing for some kind of validation on the grounds that she was jealous of his relationship with Annie. But while Britta constantly sought validation on a variety of points, Jeff was sure that wasn't one of them. "Where are you going with this?" he asked bluntly.

She shook her head angrily. "I'm happy with Troy. It's going really well, scary well, I keep thinking I'm going to screw it up and them somehow that doesn't happen, and Abed and Annie are his roommates but they don't throw things at me, and…" Seeing Jeff's expression, Britta stopped. "I've had some bad experiences."

He nodded slowly.

"I'm happy. But I look at you and Annie, and I'm like, they are so into each other it's godawful, and I wonder why you and me weren't like that. I mean," she continued quickly, "I'm fine with not being into you, but you were never into me like you're into her. Why was that?"

"Because we were a terrible couple and we only hooked up out of mutual self-loathing?" Jeff asked. "I'm not being glib," he added. "We were a terrible couple and we only hooked up out of mutual self-loathing."

"Speak for yourself, mister self-loathing guy," Britta snorted.

"Okay, I was being a little glib." Jeff cocked his head. "We were a subpar couple and we hooked up out of weakness and boredom rather than any remotely romantic impulses or deeply felt emotion. It makes sense that we'd both be happier with other people."

"Yeah, well, I'm not used to seeing ex-boyfriends being happy with other women," she said. "Usually when I get a new ex-boyfriend I don't stick around to see them live happily ever after with the one true love that I was just warming them up for."

Jeff smiled.

"I said 'one true love' and now you're thinking about Annie, aren't you?" Britta accused him.

His eyes widened slightly. "No…"

She scoffed.

"Fine, I was," Jeff retorted. "Is that so wrong? I mean, yes, we've been together for like a week…"

"I'm surprised you don't know the exact number of hours," Britta said.

"And yes, I keep thinking about five, ten, thirty years ahead and how I want to spend the rest of my life with her and yes, I'm maybe a little terrified that she'll lose interest, or that I can't turn this off when I need to and I become just a pit of emotional neediness and drive her off, or that when she finishes becoming the incredible woman that she already mostly is, that incredible woman won't want someone like me, and yes, I am dealing with that by not thinking about it, but…" He noticed he'd been speaking louder and faster, and stopped. "What was the question?"

Britta brightened. "Who cares? Look at you being all self-aware! That was a breakthrough."

"That was not a breakthrough," Jeff replied wearily.

"That was totally a breakthrough. You been therapized!" Britta grinned. A thought struck her. "Hey, would you be willing to sign an affidavit describing this as a successful therapy session?"

In the bathroom Annie sat primly on the closed toilet seat and stared at Abed, who hopped onto the counter by the sink. He stared back at her.

Eventually she cleared her throat. "Abed," she said. "What did you need to talk to me about?" She glanced around. "In the bathroom?"

Abed looked at her, saying nothing.

"Is this," she began, her eyes narrowing, "about rent? Because I'm not moving out, okay, and Jeff isn't moving in, and we had this discussion already about Troy and Britta, and if one of them moves we'll deal with it then and…" She trailed off as Abed slowly shook his head no. "Okay, do I need to keep guessing?"

"I'm really happy for you," Abed told her.

"Oh." Annie waited for him to elaborate, but when he didn't, she spoke. "Thank you?"

"I see you and Jeff Winger, and I think 'ah, that's love.' Beautiful." Abed was looking right at her, Annie realized, but his eyes weren't actually focused on her.

"Well, we just started going out, I think it's too early to put, you know, a label on it," she said carefully.

"No, you're wrong, Annie. It's love. I know. I know what love looks like. Intense. Passionate. Permanent. Boundless. He's been hurt so many times before. His father leaving him. Failing out of college. Getting his legal credentials taken from him. I assume other bad things, also." Abed blinked, twice, deliberately. "But now he has you."

Annie leaned forward and squinted at him. "Okay," she said slowly, smiling. "Drop the act, Robert Stack. You're trying to freak me out."

Abed shook his head again. "No. I'm trying to find a way to tell you how I feel."

"How you feel?" she repeated skeptically.

"How I feel when I see you with him. So joyous, so full of life, so beautiful."

"Aw," Annie cooed. She sobered. "But also oh, as in, oh, no, you're full of it."

"It causes me pain. It shouldn't." Abed lowered his head.

"Okay, so…" Annie raised her hands. "I think I've got this. You're claiming to secretly be in love with me… because you think that might break up me and Jeff… because you think that might save the study group as an entity… because you think that's the only way to keep Jeff as a friend." She ticked each point off on her fingers. "Not just Jeff, but me and… Shirley and Pierce?"

Abed opened his mouth, then closed it again, then opened it again. "And Britta."

"I think you're stuck with Britta," Annie told him. She patted his knee sympathetically. "You're stuck with all of us."

"You're going to leave." Abed was still looking at the floor. "Jeff will go with you. Shirley is already half out the door. Pierce will wander off when Jeff goes. Britta and Troy will break up and Britta will move to Dallas. This is the last season of Fringe and it's only thirteen episodes and I hate when a series that used to have twenty-two episodes in a season gets cut to thirteen, there should be more, it's like a half-season, two half-seasons make one whole season so when you say season six do you really mean six seasons or do you mean four and a half seasons because of shortening…"

"Abed!" Annie cut him off. "It's going to be okay. It is! People care about you… I care about you. I'm not going to just vanish because I'm in a relationship."

He looked her in the eyes. "You'll move out. Britta will move in. That will be the first step."

"I don't think that's going to happen…"

"Britta is insecure. Troy is optimistic. There'll be space in the apartment when you move in with Jeff."

"What? No!" Annie lifted her arms to fend away imagined codependence-demons. "Abed, Jeff and I just got together. We're not about to rush into cohabitation, I promise…"

Abed shook his head. "You say that, but it's going to happen. It's already started. You're the endgame couple."

"Okay. Okay," Annie said. "Okay. What would it take to convince you that you aren't on the verge of suddenly losing all your friends?"

"If you and Jeff un-resolved your sexual tension," he said promptly.

"That's not happening. I mean, it's not possible. Also: ew." A thought struck Annie. "What if, though," she said warmly, "instead of losing all your friends, we all continued to be your friends for… like, a set period of time. Jeff can draw up a contract, which we'll all sign, promising to stay friends no matter what."

Abed considered this. "No," he said. "Eventually people will die, or get drafted and have to live on a army base in West Virginia, or move to Dubai to be part of an oil billionaire's informal harem of semi-captive women. Those might not be the most likely scenarios," he admitted, "but things do change."

"Ah, yes!" Annie cried, as though Abed had fallen into her rhetorical trap. "But what we do is, see, we give the contract a sunset clause of… say, six months. Around graduation, it'll expire and then we negotiate a replacement contract. If we can't come to an agreement then, we stop being friends."

Abed boggled.

"But! If we do sign another contract, or an extension of the existing one, then boom, we're friends for another six months or however long we agree to. And until contract negotiations come up, we can't stop being friends, because we're contractually obligated," Annie said brightly. She drew up, plainly pleased with herself.

"That's brilliant," Abed said. "I love it."

END ACT TWO