Disclaimer: I don't own Community. If I did, Abed Nadir would be directing Batman vs. Superman and ensuring it didn't suck. (I don't own DC comics either, but if I did yadayadayada…)

Authors note: the format of these chapters and weeks varies - some are entirely original content and some present what is essentially an AU riff on the episode that corresponds to that week. In the latter case, although I try to make them as standalone as possible some knowledge of the episode in question is desirable. Parts of this chapter are very much in the second category.

Chapter 3 - Advanced Disney Animation

Week 4

(Annie doesn't know Troy and Abed well enough to ask them. She's forced to resort to desperate measures to get volunteers for Duncan's experiment.)

"Pleeeaaaase Jeff. I've already got Joelle to come along and I only need one other person and Duncan will let me in his psych class, but I've only got until tomorrow!" Annie had been begging for almost two minutes now and her eyes had been getting bigger and more puppyish by the second. Worse, she had backed him into a corner and there was no one else to take the heat from the eyes.

"No Annie! There is no way I am going to sit in on one of Duncan's ludicrous - " dammit, are those tears? Annie's eyes had suddenly got even more luminous.

"Jeff, I really need this credit!" She was touching his elbow now, for crying out loud. "Look, I'll make you a deal - give me your phone number and I'll send you a message when it's safe to leave. You won't have to stay long, I promise."

Jeff suddenly grinned. "Edison - was this all a devious ploy to get my phone number?"

"What? No!" Annie was suddenly blushing furiously. "I mean…"

"It's all right. Give me your phone."

Annie passed it over. Jeff typed in something and pressed "send". His own phone warbled in response. "There - we've got each other's numbers now." He smiled and started to turn away. "See you tomorrow, Edison."

Annie looked down at her phone and read the message he'd sent from it. Jeff, missing u already - u r so hot! Annie

"JEFF!"

xxxxxx

(Next day)

Annie was as good as her word. After arriving a couple of minutes after the appointed time to minimise any snark Duncan might have felt like handing out - and almost being run down by a furious Chang in the process - he'd been sat down by a visibly relieved Annie in the waiting room and told the start of the experiment had been delayed by five minutes. Jeff contented himself with playing a game on his phone until barely 20 minutes later he felt it vibrate with an incoming message.

Experiment is to test patience. Throw a tantrum and leave and you'll have done your bit. A.

Jeff waited another two minutes, stood up suddenly and shouted "This is ridiculous!" kicked his chair and stormed out.

Eighty bucks for sitting in a chair for twenty minutes playing on my phone. He thought to himself. It's almost like being a lawyer again.

His phone vibrated again.

PS You're not all that:-)

"Edison!"

xxxxxx

Week 5

(Tuesday)

One of Annie's extra credit voluntary activities was as a member of the School Song Committee the Dean had set up to produce a new Greendale anthem. Annie had commissioned a local songwriter to produce a draft, a guy called Vaughn Miller. Vaughn was nice - he called her mountain flower, though he was very sad at the moment. He'd had a bad break up apparently.

xxxxxx

On Wednesday at four o'clock Jeff was standing outside the library with Annie's schedule in his hand looking at a green block from 4-5PM labelled "Free Time - Study Room B" and a thoughtful expression on his face. Right, time to see if I can get the kid to do my homework for me, he thought to himself. He walked up to the front desk, put on his most charming smile and asked the librarian for directions to Study Room B. She flushed slightly under Jeff's attentive look and told him it was actually in the Learning Resources Center. She pulled out a map of the campus.

"The Learning Resource Center is here," she said, drawing a circle on the map. "If you get lost trying to find it, this is my phone number - " She wrote 'Diane' on it followed by a series of numbers - "call me and I'll give directions." Jeff looked at the map, the Learning Resource Center was on the opposite side of the quad from the library and visible from the steps. Jeff threw Diane a brilliant smile, promised to call her if he got lost, and headed out of the library.

(Study Room B)

"Hiya, Edison," Jeff said with a grin as he walked through the door. "Is this inconvenient?"

Annie looked up with a smile of her own. "Not at all Jeff, what can I do for you?"

"Well, other than brightening up my day with that smile -" Annie smiled even wider "- I was hoping for some help with the homework Chang set us."

"Really, Jeff? It's not that difficult - take one regular verb from each of the -er, -ar and -ir types that we haven't covered in class and conjugate it in the past and present tenses."

"Well, you see -" said Jeff. Annie cut him off before he could say any more.

"If you weren't paying any attention in class you won't know what we covered in there?"

Jeff put on his best aren't-I-adorable smile. "It's like this - there's this girl who sits about three rows in front of me with really pretty dark hair which bounces in the most distracting fashion every time she puts her hand up to ask a question. And she does that a lot - so you see it's really your fault, Edison."

Annie tutted at him. "Come over here Jeff and I'll show you what to do."

Twenty minutes later and the homework was essentially done. Rather to Jeff's surprise he had done much of it under Annie's supervision instead of him watching approvingly as she did it for him. Even more to his surprise, he found he didn't mind - she's almost as good at tutoring slackers as I am at slacking Jeff thought to himself. As they finished and Jeff started packing his stuff away he decided to bring up something that had been niggling him.

"Edison, can I ask you a personal question? Feel free to blow me off it it's inappropriate."

"I suppose so Jeff, what is it?"

"Why does Troy keep referring to you as 'Annie Adderall'?"

Annie froze. Yeah, that's inappropriate. "Hasn't he told you?" She said through gritted teeth.

"Something about overdosing on pills and running through a plate glass window, but Troy isn't the most reliable of narrators."

Annie came this close to telling him it was none of his business, but then realised that he could probably find out anyway if he wanted to know badly enough - Jeff may be lazy at times, but he wasn't stupid and still had contacts from his lawyer days - so she told him her side of the story instead. About being mercilessly bullied at school, having no friends, retreating into studying and comfort eating as work and food where the only things in her life that didn't hate her. And how when even the studying got too much a family friend who was a doctor recommended Adderall to help her concentrate better. She took it and it worked, she took it again until it stopped working, so she took more and more to make it work again, and so on until one day she felt reality coming apart at the seams and ran through a cafeteria window to get away from it.

Jeff didn't say anything apart from the occasional question to draw her out further while he maintained a carefully concerned expression on his face - if she hadn't been so absorbed in her story Annie might have realised she was being expertly cross-examined by a top courtroom lawyer - she finished off her story by telling of how her mother had tried to stop her going to rehab by threatening to cut her off for disgracing the family name if she did, and when Annie went anyway she carried out her threat, with the result that Annie had seen nothing of her parents since that day.

"You'll probably want to leave now." She ended up saying.

"Why?"

"The coolest guy in Greendale can't afford to be seen with the junkie girl who's so unpopular even her own mom want's nothing to do with her, right?" Said Annie, bitterly.

Jeff was silent for a long moment.

"My dad used to hit me." He said quietly. Annie looked up at him in shock. "He'd come home drunk and start hitting my mom, if I tried to make him stop he'd hit me instead. If I tried to hide, he'd come looking for me after he got bored hitting mom and hit me anyway. When my parents got divorced he went to court and demanded no custody rights whatsoever - he didn't want to see me again. At the end of the trial, I watched my mom's divorce lawyer climb into a fancy car and drive away - it was that day I decided I wanted to be a lawyer, to be the guy who gets to drive away."

"Jeff, you don't have to -"

Jeff ignored her. "So Annie Edison, junkie girl with no friends, if I walked out because you had a crappy childhood what would that say about me?"

Annie had no idea what to say, so instead she reached across the table and took hold of Jeff's hand. He didn't look at her, but did turn his hand so Annie got a better grip. She squeezed as hard as she could. "And besides," said Jeff with a wry smile on his face, "who would I get to do my homework for me?" Despite everything, Annie choked out a laugh.

Jeff stood up.

"C'mon," he said. "Let's go to the cafeteria. I'll buy you a coffee and we can spend half an hour talking about stuff that doesn't suck."

"So long as it's not a skinny latte." Said Annie. "I hate that stuff - far too much milk and not enough coffee."

Jeff chuckled. "Deal." He said.

xxxxxx

(Britta has confessed to cheating on one of Chang's tests. Jeff has offered to defend her in a "Greendale Court" disciplinary hearing.)

On Thursday, Annie got a text. Want to see me be a lawyer? Borchert Hall 11AM. PS Don't scream. J.

Annie snuck in through a side entrance and watched proceedings from the stands. She was glad Jeff's blonde friend got off, though she thought the whole trial was a very… Greendale experience. And Jeff looked nice in a suit. Really nice.

xxxxxx

(Friday, Study Room F)

"...did you see the expression on Chang's face when Annie Adderall put her hand up again -" Troy said.

"Stop that, Troy." Jeff didn't look up from his phone.

"Er, stop what Jeff?"

Jeff put his phone down and looked straight at the younger man. "Her name is Annie Edison, or just Annie, nothing else. Look, you're a great guy and a really good friend, but if you don't stop calling her that right now you and I are going to have issues."

The rest of the study group looked at Jeff in shocked silence.

"Since when did you care about anything other than hair product?" Britta eventually blurted out.

"Ooh, plot twist." Abed said immediately after. Jeff never took his eyes off Troy.

Sorry," the younger man said. "You know I didn't mean anything by it, right?"

"Sure Troy, just remember in future that's all."

"Will do Jeff."

xxxxxx

Author's note: this was a strange chapter to write. The middle section was not supposed to be anything more than Jeff exploiting Annie to get his homework done, but as I was writing it the stuff about their childhoods basically insisted on being written and the chapter never felt right until it was. I hope it doesn't seem out of place.