Notes: I am the Bad Wolf. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here.

s3 Prompt: Evil timeline Jeff crosses paths with real timeline Annie to warn her about Evil Abed. Written for a quick-fic battle.

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Time On His Back

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He hadn't seen her in nearly four months, the longest spring of his life, and to look at Annie now was to look at the Ghost of Christmas Past. It was numbing, frightening, almost brain-melting to stand before his friend at the sunlit Greendale campus, and look into her bright eyes again. These were happy eyes, lovely eyes. They were tempered by struggle but unburdened by genuine tragedy.

Jeff had loved her eyes when they were youthful, loved them when they were guilty, and loved them when they were stark mad. In the space beneath his ribcage where his great speeches once came from, he felt only how deeply he loved every version of these eyes.

Tilting her head, hair spilling in a soft brown wave, Annie asked him all the wrong questions. "How did you grow a goatee so fast? And why are you pretending to have only one arm?"

It was difficult to think, seeing her face to face again like this. Jeff wanted to answer her questions; he was here to do a job and that job involved many explanations with large doses of panic on the side. He was here to warn her and the group about Abed finally tipping into head-on supervillainy. There was a loophole in time, and like the lawyer Jeff had once been, he was going to slip through the loophole and cinch it tight.

Jeff the Liar was going to save the goddamn world.

Not that it would mean anything to Annie, of course. That Annie back in the white room, or this Annie under the Colorado sun. He was a year older, and she was a year saner. He didn't know if any part of his world still could be saved, where Annie Edison was concerned.

"You look pretty today," he said.

This wasn't what he was here to do. He should be warning everyone about Abed, but... "Really pretty."

This Annie blushed, and then preened. She looked almost anywhere but his eyes, and it made Jeff think of all the times he'd fed her silky words or longing looks, only to turn his back afterward. What an asshole he'd been, to waste so much fucking time.

The knife twisted in Jeff's ribs when he looked at this lovely woman and thought how far she could fall, how deep the well inside her mind could be, if he failed.

"I've got to go, Annie." He relished her name, lips seizing over the chance to say it again, aloud, to her. "I've got a thing. But I wanted you to hear it. Whatever happens today, whatever insanity Greendale throws at us, just remember it. You're beautiful, and I've thought so since the day I met you. Everything else I will ever tell you may be a lie, save that."

The smile was gone, the girl was gone, and the woman who reached out to touch his good arm said his name carefully. "Jeff. What's going on?"

He grinned, hoping he could still pull the face she was familiar with every day.

Abed was coming. The loop had to be cinched. Time was on his back.

"Goodbye, Annie."