"Or maybe the dean was right?" Annie asked. "About us?" She searched his features, looking for confirmation of what she'd been so certain of when she'd come up with the whole stupid crack-Troy-and-record-a-taunting-message-to-get-Jeff-to-admit-he-wanted-her plan. Phrasing it as the dean's theory — let me be the fiftieth person to ask he'd said — was easier than citing her own recorded and digitally-altered voice.

"Annie, no." Jeff stepped towards her and gripped her firmly by the shoulders. "I took this case because I wanted to help you."

Her eyes narrowed as she scanned Jeff's face and for the eighty thousandth time couldn't decide what she was seeing, whether it was all in her head or whether he'd been gaslighting her for years (as if that was better). "Then what's this?" She glanced down, indicating his hands on her with a tilt of her head.

"It's platonic shoulder-holding," he said immediately. His tone was light and even, all surface and no depth. She knew him well enough to recognize when he was giving a rehearsed speech. "Look, I'll show you…" Jeff turned, but they were alone in the hallway; there was no one else there for him to demonstrate with. "Okay, well, still. You're my friend and I care about you," he continued, a slight edge creeping into his voice (or was she imagining it?) "so I agreed to help you. We're friends!"

Surely she wasn't imagining the desperation under those words. But in that moment, Annie was tired. Tired of Jeff and his evasion, tired of running in circles, tired of burning herself out to make something out of nothing. "It's a guy putting quarters down butt cracks, Jeff. Let's just let it go," she said. She wasn't sure whether it was the ass-crack bandit or the whole stupid Jeff-and-Annie imaginary nonsense, and just then she didn't really care.

Jeff glared at her, maybe because the words had come out more hostile than she'd meant them, and turned to walk away. Then he turned back, shaking his head. "You know, you're the one who wanted this. You came to me."

Annie scoffed. "This isn't what I wanted, Jeff, you know that."

"I don't know what you want. Why are you even here?"

"What?"

"Why are you still at Greendale? Britta, Troy, okay, they're not going to do anything else with their lives. Abed, who knows why he does anything, and Shirley and I work here, but you had an actual job. Pharmaceutical rep is related to your degree, even! And you walked away from it to, what, to become some kind of investigator —"

"I'm here because I care about this school!" Annie snapped. She straightened up to her full height, just over a head shorter than him in her heels. "I care about this school and the people in it! And I switched to part-time, and I hate it, which you of all people should respect," she added. "You're changing the subject, just like you always do."

"What?"

"Do you remember last Halloween? We did a couples costume, Jeff."

"Technically," he pointed out, "you were the wrong kind of Ring girl, so we didn't."

"You wanted to! You wanted to." She jammed a finger into his chest. "It was your idea. You wanted me to wear a little spangly number for you but of course you didn't come out and say that—"

"Well…"

"And last Christmas we threw a party together and Abed asked if I was moving in!"

"Okay, well, that's Abed." Jeff raised his hands defensively. "You can't put any stock in what he says."

Annie ignored him. "And then you disappear for eight months," she snarled, "and I find out you're teaching here, and the only way I see you is if I sign up for your stupid class—"

"That is not at all what happened—"

Technically he was correct, which really just made her angrier, and it was close enough. "And you ask why I'm here?" She threw up her hands and spun around, tossing her hair. "I cannot believe you."

"Annie." From behind her, Jeff clapped a hand on her shoulder, which she shoved off. "Listen, sometimes there's a great temptation to be selfish—"

She turned, then, because what he was saying was somehow even more ludicrous. "In what possible way am I being selfish?"

"I didn't say you were!" Jeff snapped. "I'm saying I'm trying not to be! No matter how much I'd like to—"

He broke off, suddenly, apparently realizing what he was saying. Annie's eyes widened. "You'd like to what?"

Jeff took two steps backwards. "We're friends, all right?"

"Jeff!"

"We're friends!" he repeated, storming off.

Of course then there was the ACB capture party and Starburns in a cage and Ian Duncan acting cagey, and when she saw Jeff again he clearly just wanted to pretend the previous conversation had never happened. And then they found out Pierce had died, and the whole thing — the ass-crack bandit, the recorded phone call, Jeff's selfishness — seemed silly.

Hours later they met on the steps outside the library, and shared a silent hug. At least, it was silent at first — and frankly, after the day she'd had, Annie was fine with leaving things unspoken and letting the whole matter drop.

"We're friends, right?"

At first she thought she was imagining Jeff's words, but no, he was just speaking quietly and to the top of her head. "Of course," she told him, and felt him relax a little against her. "Of course we're friends."

"Listen," Jeff said, releasing her from his embrace and leaning back a little to look her in the eye, "about what I said before…"

Annie sighed. "It's okay," she said, hoping to fend off whatever halfhearted semi-apology he'd psyched himself up for.

"I think you should think about leaving Greendale," Jeff said. "It's a terrible school, and you already have one bachelor's from here, and it doesn't deserve your time. You can't get what you want out of Greendale."

She peered up at him, nonplussed. Of all the things she'd expected him to say, this had not been one of them. "What?"

"The Greendale that can give you what you want doesn't exist and you can't just wish it into existence. Take it from me, its leading alumnus if you don't count Luis Guzman: it's a pretty lousy school. I mean, even if it wasn't, it's just a community college. And you're Annie Edison!" He said her name as if he were playing some kind of trump card. "You could go anywhere, do anything. You aren't trapped here. You can just walk away."

"Meaning you can't?" Annie rolled her eyes. "Jeff, you're here because you want to be. Yes, it turns out you didn't know the first thing about running a private practice, but there are other options. You talked the court into giving you your law license back, you can talk your way into a job anywhere."

"You need to recognize that this place is what it is," Jeff continued doggedly, refusing to let her shift the focus of the conversation back onto him. "There's not this better version of Greendale that you can will into existence. It's a failure and —"

Annie didn't know what they were arguing about any more, but she didn't let that stop her. "Did you even try calling anybody from your old firm?" she asked, trying again to make her point. "That one guy? What's his name, Mark?"

He raised his voice, talking over her. "Maybe the best it can do no matter how hard it tries or how much it wants to be more for you, all it can offer you is platonic shoulder-holding!"

Annie shrank back involuntarily, suddenly aware of her heartbeat pounding in her ears. She looked up at him, aghast.

Jeff looked back down at her, his expression unreadable. "And you deserve better."

"Jeff," Annie began. She trailed off as she realized she had no idea how to respond to that. "I missed you."

He grimaced, as though she'd just confirmed some fear.

"You just vanished back in January. If it wasn't for your commercial I'd have worried you died."

"The commercial, yeah," Jeff said, shaking his head. "Didn't really work out."

"I tried calling." Annie bit her lip. "After you ignored my third voicemail I decided you were too busy to meet me for lunch."

"I didn't want you watching me fail —"

Without thinking Annie reached up and shoved him in the chest, as hard as she could. "I could have helped! I would have helped! Obviously you needed management and I just got a degree in administration!" Hospital administration, but even so… "You think I want to be peddling antidepressants?"

"They at least can pay you," Jeff countered.

"Maybe if you hadn't been pushing people away, you could have, too!"

Suddenly all the air seemed to go out of him. "I'm not…" Jeff sighed, rubbing his temples with one hand. "Listen to me when I say this. Greendale is a really crappy school and you deserve better. Better even than the imaginary version of how Greendale would be after you've saved it, and definitely better than the broken-down old wreck that you—" He stopped as she held him at his bicep.

"Jeff," Annie said, and stopped, because she couldn't think what else to say.

"That you're wasting all this energy on," Jeff continued slowly, twisting out of her grasp. "You're Annie Edison. You can do anything. You can do better than Greendale."

"When you say 'Greendale' you're talking about yourself, right?" She pressed on despite his pained expression. "Right? Now it's not that I'm too young for you or you aren't attracted to me or I'm imagining things—"

"You were never imagining anything," Jeff said quietly.

Under other circumstances Annie's heart might have leapt at this admission, but at the moment it seemed to her a tiny and piddling concession to reality. "Now it's that you're not good enough for me? That's what you're saying, right? Right?"

He quickly regained his composure. "I'm just saying you can do better than this hellhole of a school."

"Right?" she repeated in exactly the same tone.

"We're friends, and I want the best for you."

"Right?"

"What do you want me to say?" Jeff scowled and shook his head, as though Annie were presenting him with some kind of impossible logic problem.

"Are we in a men's room?" Annie looked around. "Is that the problem? Do we need to go to a hotel bar so you can give me a straight answer? Don't I deserve a straight answer?"

He looked at her and she looked at him and she wondered, for a moment, if she'd gone too far, if he was going to finally shoot her down once and for all. It would be a relief, really, after all he'd put her through.

Then his face tightened, as he came to some decision. "I'm sorry," he said, and walked away.

She could have chased after him. Maybe he was expecting her to, even. But instead she just stood there, open-mouthed and speechless. Same old, same old. Nothing ever changed.

He was never going to change.

The next couple of weeks were a little awkward, but only a little. Annie had dropped Jeff's course, so they only saw one another at committee meetings, and he usually spent those focused more on his phone than on the people in the room. If he seemed a little more taciturn than before, a shade darker, it was subtle enough that Annie told herself she was imagining it. And she was tired of imagining things, when it came to Jeff Winger.

After Pierce's bizarre bequest (and the revelation that Jeff had stolen Britta's underwear, ew, as if she needed another reason to distance herself) Annie hadn't expected to end up paired with Jeff in Lava World, but what with one thing and another — certainly through no effort on her part — that's what happened. Maybe Jeff had finagled it, or maybe it was random chance that when the game had started, she and Jeff and Duncan had gone one way, and Troy and Abed and Hickey and Shirley another, and then Duncan had slipped and fallen in the first five minutes, leaving just the two of them.

It wasn't impossible that Jeff had pushed Duncan. They'd been standing close together and Annie's back had been turned at the time, and afterwards Duncan had shot Jeff a nasty glare… but, again, Annie was tired of reading into things. Once it was just them, Jeff had surprised her by getting into the post-apocalyptic scenario, spinning an extemporaneous story about how they'd survived the end of the world together and become lava freebooters. She'd tried to resist, but he pitched such an attractive fantasy that she went along with him despite herself. He went so far as to outline the rules for lava jousting, just to get her to smile. And for a little while they weren't… whatever they were, or had been. They weren't a pair of former Spanish study group members or a community college teacher and his former-student/former-almost-not-really-ex-girlfriend, they were Jeff & Annie, Lava Knights.

Of course then the rest of the world showed up, and it wasn't long before they were defending Shirley Island from Britta and Hickey. Britta knocked Annie into the lava and then Jeff, before Shirley Island broke apart and they were left alone in the wreckage.

After she'd lain on the cafeteria floor for what felt like a long enough time, Annie rose and found Jeff, sitting on the floor nearby.

He smiled ruefully when he saw her approach. "I got butter on my jeans."

She smiled back, already wistful for the abruptly-ended fantasy. "Well, you win some and you lose some."

"I could stand to lose without ruining my jeans." He stood, and looked down at her. "I tried to avenge you."

Annie nodded. "Yeah."

"You'd have done the same for me," he added.

"Of course."

"I'm no hero."

"Of course not."

"Maybe I'm a little bit of a hero. I could have just left… then my pants wouldn't be stained. That's what we should have done. Hell, we shouldn't have gone to Shirley Island at all." He gestured towards the heaps of wreckage that littered the cafeteria floor. "I was going to say, my office has a lock on the door. We could have holed up there overnight, picked off whoever was left in the morning."

Annie hummed. "We'd get pretty hungry eventually."

"There's a bottle of scotch in my desk…"

She rolled her eyes. "Hungry, I said."

"…And I know a place that'll deliver pizza directly to my office window," Jeff continued. "I hauled in a couch the other day. We coulda crashed on the couch and sung lava carols all night. Don't tell me you don't like a good lava carol."

She shrugged.

"I mean, we could hole up there indefinitely. No reason to get going in the morning, if there were still raiders outside." Jeff's tone was a little — he didn't sound tense, but he did sound extremely casual. "And when we get tired of pizza, we order in Mexican, Indian, wraps… we figure out a way to get the liquor store to deliver to the window. Greendale, my bar suspension and my failed law practice, and your job too — our old lives — all a distant, faded memory. We start fresh, in my office. Finally after years, our children emerge blinking into the sunlight, ready to fight for and claim the prize…"

And there it was. Apparently the whole idea of a Jeff-and-Annie relationship was a laughable fantasy he didn't even pretend to take seriously. "Our children?" Annie felt her pulse quicken, and struggled to keep her breathing even.

"Sure," he said lightly (a little too lightly… or was she imagining that?). "I mean, we were trapped for years in there, after all. Gotta do something to ward off boredom."

"Oh, okay. I'm basically a Rubik's cube, is what you're saying? A cup and ball?" She kept her tone light to match his, though under the surface she was seething.

"No, no, no." He waved away her concern. "The child-rearing is the Rubik's cube. You, in contrast, are my beloved lava knight-slash-pirate partner-in-crime. Really, the kids were your idea," he added. "Me, I would have been perfectly happy just petting you, rubbing your feet and watching the magma churn—"

And that was the point where she'd had enough. He'd hurt her already by mocking the idea of their partnership, but to make fun of her like this? It was like he wanted to pour salt in her wounds. "Not cool, Jeff!" she snapped, her calm facade cracking. "I don't know if you're trying to be funny, or what. But not cool!"

It was slightly gratifying, the way his face crumpled. "I was just trying to say… I had fun today."

"Yeah, well, me too," she said, turning away. "I'll see you on Monday."

She didn't look back as she walked away, but then, he didn't call out to her or apologize, so, that was on him.

The week after that Jeff started coming to committee meetings with a glass of scotch.

According to Magnitude (Magnitude had become her informant in his classes, since she'd dropped Intro to Law) (Magnitude was a senior now, which seemed weird and wrong and made Annie wonder whether maybe Jeff hadn't had some teensy kind of point when he'd said she was wasting her time coming back to Greendale) Jeff was giving his class lectures with an open bottle on his desk and a glass in his hand that he refilled about once a lecture.

If he thought that all it took to get her attention was recklessly endangering what little reputation and accreditation Greendale had, that she would come prancing up to him and bat her eyelashes and ask him what was the matter, Jeff, and was there anything she could do to help, could she kiss it and make it better…

Okay, that specific mental image probably wasn't on his mind. But still. She wasn't about to give him the satisfaction.

And besides, he kept coming to the meetings, even though all he did was sullenly play with his phone and occasionally sip his drink, assiduously ignoring her (and the rest of the group, but let's be honest here, mostly her). It was all a big ploy.

When somehow the committee (except for Abed and Hickey) ended up going to a performance art piece to benefit children with cleft palates — and Annie wasn't exactly clear on what that had to do with giant ants and the petrochemical industry but never mind that — when the committee went out as a group to the thing, she'd half-expected Jeff to be a no-show, or at least to slip out at intermission. But no, afterwards he stuck around. He made a beeline for the bar and didn't so much as glance her way, but he was there. So if he was going to stay, Annie was going to leave. She said a quick goodbye to Britta, who was the belle of the ball for some reason, donned her coat, and headed out to the parking lot.

"Annie!"

At first she thought she must have imagined it, but then he called to her again, and like an idiot, she stopped and turned and saw him framed in the doorway, twenty feet away.

"Are you leaving so soon?" he asked her. "There's a cash bar and it's early yet. Come in, have a drink with Shirley and Duncan and Britta and Chang and me."

It was the most words he'd said to her in a month.

"I'm buying," he said, seeing her hesitate. "C'mon. Got that big Greendale teacher's salary. Appletini? Appletini? Appletini?"

"There's just me standing here, Jeff." She didn't smile, but still, he grinned, like he'd won some concession from her. Then his face fell when she continued, "I'll pass. Also I think Shirley already left, and it didn't look like you and Britta and Duncan and Chang were all together."

Jeff said something she didn't catch, then, louder: "I really want us to still be friends."

"We are friends," she assured him. "We're friends, and you shouldn't walk around campus with a scotch in your hand. Is that what you needed to hear? We're friends, and I want the best for you."

"I want the best for you, too!" he retorted, a little defensively maybe but then his voice was raised to carry across the gap between them. "You're still too good for Greendale, you know. You should be out laying eggs in people's brains, or whatever that was supposed to be."

"The ant queen was the villain, Jeff — she represented the oil companies!"

"Well, you could be running an oil company…" He started walking towards her, but stopped when she took a step back, and then another.

"Seriously, I don't like seeing you acting so beaten-down. The Jeff Winger I know sparkles with brilliance and eloquence. He's not drunk before lunch."

"As if I got drunk on one scotch," he snorted. "What do you need me to do? Dazzle the entire school until they declare it Jeff Winger Day? You've already laid your eggs in my brain — if I made you the ant queen, would you let me just buy you a damn appletini?"

Annie shrugged. "I'm sorry," she told him, and walked away.

That Monday was the day they rolled out the MeowMeowBeanz test. It was, Annie thought, classic Greendale: a little bit of harmless, lighthearted fun. Something that brought the community college community together, student and faculty Greendaliens alike rating one another and talking about rating one another, and… okay, that was it. Just rating and talking about rating. It was a pretty shallow social media experience, but it was fun, and Annie needed more fun in her life. Harmless, lighthearted fun.

Jeff was refusing to participate, of course. He'd stopped carrying liquor around with him (which just vindicated Annie's belief that it had been an attention-getting device), but other than that he remained mired in his usual too-cool-for-associate's-degree-school aloof habits.

And then somehow there was a dress code and classes were cancelled and the Fives were lounging in what had been the study room and the Ones were exiled to the parking lot and Shirley was chief of the Fives. And Annie, the Fouriest of the Fours, was Cardinal Richelieu to Shirley's Louis XIII . Cheney to Shirley's Bush… not that she'd describe it that way to Shirley. Really the whole thing had kind of gotten out of hand, with the futuristic dancing and the strict hierarchy, but Annie was too busy organizing secret police to care (harmless, lighthearted secret police). It was exciting, the feeling of being in charge of something larger than herself, of having power and responsibility. Shirley could have destroyed her, so she ensured Shirley needed her.

Annie was still at Greendale, but it wasn't Greendale: the experience was miles away from her usual day-to-day hawking anti-anxiety medication or sitting through criminology classes.

She hadn't laid eyes on Jeff in she wasn't sure how long, until that Shirlcycle — Shirleyday in the Old Tongue, or Saturday in the hilariously outmoded Ancient Tongue — her network of informants told her he'd finally joined MeowMeowBeanz, and not only that, but he'd leapfrogged over One, Two, and Three in a rush, making Four almost overnight.

Annie had been a Four since the Day of Inception, thirteen cycles prior, the day they'd thrown off the shackles of the old order and become New Humanity. Some might have assumed she yearned for Five status, but in fact, Annie was right where she wanted to be. Her fifth bean drifted from half-full to three-quarters; any more than that and Hickey or one of the other Fives might have become anxious and busted her down. Still, she knew the ins and outs of the system better than anyone except (maybe) the underpaid code monkeys who'd thrown it together, and she knew Jeff's rise was meteoric to the point of borderline implausible.

It gave her a little thrill to imagine him applying himself for once. The Jeff who'd led the charge to save Greendale junior year, who'd speechified them through close encounters with ghosts and bedbugs and a Mexican drug cartel, who'd stepped up for debate and model UN and who had talked his way into being a lawyer not once, but twice. That was the Jeff Winger she knew and had wanted and whom she'd thought had wanted her… in the past, for a while, in the long-long ago Before Time. Not for cycles and cycles.

Watching the talent show, organized by Koogler as a gift to the Twos and Threes, Annie wondered what exactly Jeff had planned. As he strutted out, bedecked in Four garb that really showed off his chest and his arms, Annie repressed a sudden onrush of pointlessly sexual thoughts. That ship had sailed. That ship had sailed and hit a rock and sunk into the wine-dark sea and now there was just an empty space on the dock where someone's enormous arms — seriously, they hadn't always been that big, had they?

She realized, then, that he was looking at her. Given the reports of his movements and the layout of the Arena of Talents, he couldn't have known where Annie was — yet somehow Jeff had spotted her in the crowd of faces, in the couple of seconds since he'd walked out. Silence settled over the arena, until their eyes met. You could have heard a pin drop.

Jeff grinned at her — at her! Specifically at her! — and launched into one of his speeches.

"My name is Jeff Winger. I recently became a Four. Funny thing is, when I was a Two, I didn't actually have any less…"

Annie glanced around furiously. She could feel her face reddening as she tried to gauge whether anyone else had noticed her embarrassment. She'd barely listened to Jeff's words, though the sound of his voice — confident, firm, and at least in her mind addressed directly to her — was something different.

But he pivoted, and she froze. "But I did have a lot of crazy friends. 'Hey! My name's Tommy Tanuca! I'm from Hallway C! I've got to get to the cafeteria before they run out of apples!' What's the deal with Twos and apples?"

As the crowd's laughter washed over her, Annie sat, stunned.

Stand-up.

Jeff was trying to do stand-up.

No, he was doing stand-up.

He was killing, in fact. He had an amazing bit about apples, which the crowd ate up. The Twos, the Threes, even the other Fours and the Fives above them. Koogler's booming chortles (he'd insisted on remaining miked throughout the show) drowned out all else.

Every time Jeff paused for laughter — and he paused for laughter a lot — he'd at least glance her way. She tried to stay stone-faced, but when he started in on the way Fours walked, Annie lost it completely and once she broke she broke big. Jeff grinned up at her as she quaked with laughter, tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

By the end of his twenty-minute set Annie felt lightheaded. Her mind spun with plans. First she would have him arrested… it didn't matter what for, suspicion of being hot, whatever. The important bit there was to do it quietly, and once he was away from the arena, obviously. Her guards… whom could she trust with this? Not Craig, obviously, though he'd been her most eager sycophant… figure that out later… her guards would take him to one of the former classrooms up on the third floor, where there would be no prying eyes or ears. She would let him stew there for a few minutes… just to remind him that she was the one in control, here and now, and then…

And then Koogler and the crowd promoted Jeff to Five, on the spot. Her fantasy evaporated instantly — she couldn't arrest one of the Fives. That was why she'd kept their numbers so low. As a Five, he had all the cards…

Another, different, set of fantasies swelled up unbidden. She forced them away.

Even as a Five, he was still an interloper in her world. The Fives were as easily handled as the Threes, she just had to be a little smarter about it. Chang was a Five. Annie had made him a Five specifically to contain him, to keep him out of trouble. He had once tried to murder Craig and blow up the school, after all.

The assembly thundered around them, Jeff pointed at her (there was no way she was imagining that, at least) and mouthed something she didn't need to hear to understand.

The Fives spent their collective time lounging in the former study room, guiding society with their perfected wisdom (according to the leaflets that blanketed campus). It wasn't cramped, exactly, but there was no privacy to be had.

So it didn't surprise her when Craig — now Jeff's lickspittle, no longer hers — passed her a missive from Jeff a few centicycles after the talent show ended. An ornate scroll (no doubt calligraphed by one of the overeager floozy Threes who'd immediately thronged around him), the message said simply that he awaited her in Music Room C.

Music Room C was soundproofed and could be locked from the inside.

Jeff was indeed waiting there for her, seated in an easy chair liberated from the former teachers' lounge, one that her decorators had not yet applied a properly futuristic slipcover to. He'd traded that chest-baring Four outfit for the voluminous white caftan of a Five, she noted with a slight pang of disappointment. His feet rested on the back of a smaller plastic chair, and there was a small pitcher of water on a tray in the corner with some stemware.

He smiled when she came in without bothering to knock. The plastic chair fell over with a clatter as Jeff's feet returned to the floor. "Milady."

"You summoned me, Five?" she asked, with more insolence than she'd have dared with any other Five.

"Please, have a seat… appletini?" Without waiting for her response Jeff rose and poured a drink from the pitcher. Not water, then.

When he turned back to her, drink in hand, Annie had sat down in the easy chair. He smiled ruefully.

"You said to sit down," she observed.

"I did, yeah." Jeff thrust the glass in his hand towards her, and against her better judgement Annie took it.

She sipped it, and made a face at the taste. "Who made this?"

He shrugged. "Somebody who thinks that appletinis are one part gin, two parts vermouth, and one part apple juice." One of those floozy Threes, no doubt. "And who now thinks Jeff Winger drinks appletinis. So that was a pretty big concession on my part, I think." Jeff moved to sit down on one arm of the easy chair, forcing Annie to scoot and lean the other way if she didn't want him all up in her personal space. Which, she reminded herself, she didn't.

He cleared his throat. "I suppose you're wondering why I called you here."

"Not really." Annie set the terrible appletini down on the floor. "You want to brag and show off."

"Why are you a Four?" he asked her.

She tried to hide her surprise. There were questions and requests she'd readied herself for, but that wasn't one of them. "Why do you ask?"

"I could make you a Five, if I thought that was what you wanted."

"Every bean wants to be Five," Annie said primly. "It's the dream of New Humanity."

Jeff slid off the arm and knelt before her, close enough that if there was a sudden earthquake or something they might be thrown together and find themselves embracing and then hey, earthquake, maybe the end of the world, might as well go for it — "But not you," he said. "You'd be a Five if you wanted it."

"Some things are easier when you're a Four," Annie admitted. "There's less scrutiny in the shadows away from the hot lamps that burn in the Chamber of Wisdom."

Jeff looked blank.

"The study room."

"Ah."

"And Shirley, First of the Fives, is in charge, of course," she added. "I'm merely her Minister of Delights and Wonders."

"Uh…"

"Her personal assistant," Annie explained, because it was easier than listing off everything she actually did.

He leaned even closer to her as her pulse quickened. "So if you don't want to be queen of the school, what do I have to offer you besides a terrible appletini?"

"You don't have to offer me anything, Jeff." She glanced away. "You never have."

"I've never had anything to offer you," he countered softly.

"You're a Five." Annie swallowed, throat suddenly dry, as she looked into his eyes. "The world is opened up to you, treasures offered freely for your pleasure…"

"There's only one treasure I want," he said, and kissed her.

For a time, how long was impossible to guess, but for a time the universe drifted into soft focus and the only things she was aware of were his mouth on hers, his arms around her, his body pressed against hers. She was dizzy and feverish and drunk, and all she wanted was more of the disease…

Then sanity returned, and she pulled back. He jerked away as she shoved him, rolling back on the balls of his feet and standing up once more. She felt sweat forming on her brow as he stared down at her, mouth agape.

"Jeff…"

"Sorry?" His voice was thick and uncertain.

"Fives aren't supposed to taint their perfected wisdom fraternizing with —" Annie broke off and took a deep breath. "Why do you keep doing this to me?"

"What?"

"Why do you keep playing with me?" She struggled to maintain composure — she certainly wasn't going to let him see her cry. "I know you don't mean to be c-cruel, I just — do you think this is easy for me?"

"What? Playing with you? No, I —" He sputtered incoherently, reached out to stroke her cheek as though with tender affection.

She leaped to her feet and into his personal space, see how he liked that. "You think just because you're a Five you're untouchable?" When he took a step back she took two steps forward, which meant she had to crane her neck at an awkward angle to look him in the eye, but in the moment she didn't care. "I will destroy you! I will make it my mission to throw you to the Ones! Your name will be poison for kilocycles! Jeff Winger scrawled on the Wall of Archtreason!"

He looked at her wide-eyed with a mix of lust and confusion. "The what?"

"I don't know!" She shook her head angrily. "Stop changing the subject!"

"What do you want from me?" Jeff snarled. "What do I keep doing wrong?"

"I don't want anything from you!"

"I tried just ignoring it, but no, we could never just be friends. I tried to spin up some fantasy world where we could actually be together, I tried to buy you a drink like a normal person, I don't know what this is if it isn't meeting you halfway—" He gestured to his Five caftan.

"You're the one who said you wanted to just be friends and, oh, friendship is so important, and —"

"I never said I wanted to just be friends! I might have said friendship was the only option, but that's a far cry from —"

"What kind of bull-crap lawyering are you trying to —" Annie broke off as Jeff lunged for her, to silence her with a kiss. She was having none of it, and danced away. "Oh, no! No, you don't — you can't refuse to be with me in the real world, at Greendale, and then say you want to play lava-house and, and make me your Five's Concubine —" That last one wasn't even a thing, but that didn't matter. They could make it a thing — Jeff could — that was enough. "You can't do this to me, Jeff!"

"I definitely never said I didn't want to be with you!" Jeff's face was as red as Annie's felt. "I said it's not possible!"

"Oh, right. Because there's a big difference there, practically speaking. 'No Annie, that kiss was a mistake,' 'No Annie, you're imagining things,' 'no Annie, relationships are just too complicated and anyway I'm sleeping with Britta!' Bluh bluh bluh, that's what you sound like!"

"You deserve better than —"

"Of course!" Annie interrupted. "I forgot your latest and greatest, 'no Annie I'm too much of a loser failure to be with you!' Well in case you hadn't noticed Jeff, you just made Five! In record time! All the beans were eating out of your hand!"

"Maybe, but in the real world—"

"In the real world, you faked a law degree successfully for years! Then when you got caught, did you go to prison? No! You talked them into giving you your accreditation back if you got a degree from Greendale! Which you did! Plus you're stupidly handsome, and don't think I didn't notice those arms! Face it, Jeff, nobody who knows you would ever call you a loser or a failure!"

"In the real world I started a business that failed in less than a year —"

"Eighty-three percent of new businesses fail in their first year!"

"And meanwhile, you're Annie Edison." When he said her name he dropped, briefly, into a hushed tone and a lower register. "Before you even came to this toilet of a school, you'd already overcome more adversity than most people endure their whole lifetimes. You're the smartest woman I've ever met, you're ruthless and ambitious and when you walk into a room all the other women may as well pack up and leave because you outshine them the way the sun outshines stars. You deserve someone who will help you be incredible, not someone who'll only…" Jeff trailed off.

Somewhere along the way they'd both gotten out of breath. They stood like that, staring at one another, chests heaving, for a few kilocycles. Microcycles. Who could tell?

Annie felt flush and a little dizzy. Was she hyperventilating? Stupid Jeff making her hyperventilate, she'd show him! With a roar Annie launched herself at Jeff, leaping up at him. His low animal growl thundered in her ears as he caught her and then her feet weren't on the floor and her arms were around him and his around her and…

And…

And…

And when they emerged from the music room, almost a decicycle later, Annie was red-faced and a little woozy, no longer confident about what was real and what was fantasy. Jeff didn't seem to be in any clearer a state of mind, so when the proletariat guard surrounded them and started talking about Britta, Mother of Ones, their main response was confused blinking.

Annie, Shirley, everyone had underestimated Britta. None of Annie's lieutenants were capable enough to quash the rebellion without her guidance, so by Monday everything was back to normal and everyone agreed that they were just going to delete the MeowMeowBeanz app and pretend the whole "New Humanity" had never happened.

Annie couldn't help a pang of disappointment; she'd enjoyed stepping out her familiar student role, and making her mark. But like a sandcastle in the face of the tide coming in, her New Humanity vanished without a trace. Everything was like it was.

Almost everything was like it was. There was the matter of the several hickeys, proof positive that she hadn't hallucinated it all. The two her neck, she hid with a scarf. Watching Jeff on Monday, knowing that he had bruises matching hers… They hadn't talked about it, yet, but he was actually looking her in the eye and smiling and cracking wise during Monday's committee meeting, like he used to. No, not like he used to, exactly…

New Humanity was a small price to pay.

Annie had a vague sense that the ball was in her court, so she texted Jeff about talking and then spent the afternoon fretting over the text's wording and how it might have been misinterpreted and what Jeff's response of ok could have possibly meant.

Their extremely vague plans were, however, preempted by the sudden need for an emergency session of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to reconcile Hickey with his estranged son, which when Annie thought about it was kind of implausible. But then, no more implausible than an emergency session of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to intervene on behalf of a possibly suicidally depressed acquaintance.

The game went well, or at least happened. Hickey and his son ended up engaged in the game together, and nobody got physically injured, so that was a success in Annie's book.

After the game ended (for Annie, Jeff, Britta, the dean, Shirley, and Chang, at least; Hickey and his son insisted on playing through and Abed indulged them) she and Jeff ended up at a quiet bar a couple of blocks from her apartment, warily watching one another sip cocktails.

"The game worked out, at least," Annie observed, to break the silence.

Jeff shrugged. "The necromancer got away. But yeah, Hickey and his son were talking."

"I was a little surprised that your character didn't come on to mine, at any point. Not that you needed to, or anything, it's just… usually when we're in some kind of fantasy scenario…"

"Usually when we're in some kind of fantasy scenario, you're some version of you, not Hector the Well-Endowed." Jeff sipped his drink. "As a man of the modern world, I might not see gender, but Sir Riggs Diehard is avowedly heterosexual. If you were Hectorina…"

"No," Annie said quickly. "Hectorina? Ew. No, no, no. Carmen."

"If you were Carmen the Well-Endowed," Jeff said with a nod, "I'd have…" He stared off into space a moment. "Hold on, I'm visualizing Carmen the Well-Endowed."

Annie giggled. "Jeff!"

"Ever see Red Sonja?" He grinned.

Annie hadn't, but she knew the reference well enough. "Carmen does not wear a chainmail bikini. She wears armor." She ran a finger along the edge of the table. "Functional armor. Maybe very form-fitting leather. A big two-handed sword taller than she is…"

"High heels built into the boots?"

"Obviously." Annie nodded. "And even though she lives in the woods like a hobo and doesn't spend any time on them, her makeup and hair are always perfect."

"To Carmen," Jeff said, lifting his glass.

"And her lover, the violent and dashing Sir Riggs," she replied, lifting her own.

"And to their murder-hobo love," Jeff paused to take a drink, "and their psychotic adopted hobbit child, Tiny Nubbins."

She smiled. "Oh, Hickey was our kid? It wasn't some OT3 situation?" Seeing Jeff's incomprehension Annie started to explain, but then thought better of it. "Riggs is apparently a little older than Carmen is, what with having a grown son, but he carries himself very well."

Jeff looked thoughtful. "I was about to make a joke about the dean's character having actually been a small child, but then I remembered that I killed him, so, pretty bleak mental image."

"I think that whole last scene was noncanonical…" Annie took a deep breath. It was now or never, she told herself. "Jeff, what are we doing?"

He tensed up and glanced over her shoulder (towards the exit?). "Huh?"

"I want to be cool and adult about this…" She could hear her own voice quaver; it was already a struggle to keep from breaking. "But I don't know what it is I'm being cool and adult about!"

"Jesus, Annie, I —" Jeff shifted in his seat, nonplussed. He raised one hand as if to reach for her, let it drop. "Contrary to your expectations, this isn't actually a situation that I've been in before."

Annie raised an eyebrow. She was pretty sure he'd spent a couple of hours making out with other girls, in his life. Maybe not in a soundproofed music room while a violent revolution led by a woman with mustard on her face raged outside, but still.

"What I mean by that," he said quickly, "is that you're this special category, and… when you care about someone, you try to express it in ways that are safe, and…"

"If you're about to say that it was a mistake —"

Jeff held up both his hands. "No! That's not what I'm saying. It's just… it's easy to fantasize, right? Because fantasies are private and self-contained and they don't get messy with all the troubles of the real world. And when you have something that you've fantasized about, maybe for a long time, then if you actually do it, then there's the risk that you'll be disappointed, and you're opening yourself up to a chance to be hurt that you could otherwise avoid."

She looked at him, trying to process this. Was he worried that she would disappoint him? That he'd put her on too high a pedestal?

"I don't want to disappoint you, and hurt you, and prove all my worst fears right," Jeff said. "If we do this… this isn't something we could undo."

Annie stirred her cocktail with a plastic straw. "I think we're already past that point."

"Maybe. I really thought, when I graduated, that I wasn't going to see you again," he said.

"Well, that's dumb. You think I'd let you just wander off like that?"

He shrugged. "I figured if I wanted to know what you were doing I'd have to read about you in the newspaper like everybody else."

Annie smiled, then realized he was at least halfway serious, and her pulse quickened at the compliment, all the more precious because Jeff didn't even notice he was giving it. He really did think of her as being in some special class of her own, apparently. He'd said, more than once, that he'd been pushing her away because he felt unworthy of her, but she hadn't really believed it, until now.

"You didn't come back to Greendale just for me, did you?" he asked her with an odd solemnity.

Annie shook her head, because of course she hadn't, but then paused to consider. "Not just for you," she said finally. "I don't like my job and I do like my friends besides you and the school really needed someone to step in and run a Save Greendale committee… but at the same time, I can't pretend you weren't a factor. You and I had unfinished business."

"I don't want to hold you back."

Annie groaned and rolled her head back, then looked up at him. "Because having you in my life does so much to drag me down, what with you constantly undercutting my confidence by telling me all about how I'm not special and you don't believe in me…"

That got a smile out of him.

A couple of nights later they went on something that was unambiguously a date. For the first time there was no deniability, no we're-just-playing-pretend scrim of fantasy. Instead there were cloth napkins, and a cocktail menu, and making out in Jeff's car and Jeff's living room and Jeff's bedroom and the floor of Jeff's bedroom and —

Of course they couldn't keep it secret, not given the way they were both grinning like idiots all the time and holding hands and sneaking away together. Plus she'd been complaining to Abed about Jeff, off and on, since he reentered her life, and when she suddenly stopped doing that, Abed noticed. Their friends were varying degrees of disinterested and supportive, with the exception of the dean, who made knife-eyes at her for two days before shamefacedly apologizing and admitting he'd overreacted. Jeff had even stopped constantly badmouthing the school, though that was probably because they were starting to run out of agenda items on the Save Greendale list. The athletic field had grass and the interior of the math building had no grass: progress! In fact the campus was, she was certain, worth a positive amount of money, which hadn't been true since the Ford administration.

About a month after she heard him tell someone else she was his girlfriend for the first time, she threw him a birthday party, and that night he thanked her, very enthusiastically, for his present.

In general things were very good, verging on great. The only dark clouds on the horizon were her continued dislike of her job hawking pharmaceuticals (she just didn't think about it when she wasn't doing it) and the nagging feeling that she was maybe letting down fourteen-year-old Annie who'd wanted to be curing cancer or clerking for Ruth Bader Ginsberg or investigating X-Files with Fox Mulder by now.

Then the school board announced that now that it was worth enough to sell, they were selling the school to Subway.

That morning, before the possibly-final committee meeting, Annie stood in the study room with the lights out. In the semidarkness, she watched the motes of dust as they danced in the sunbeams over the table. Their table.

"Annie?"

She turned, saw Jeff, and smiled away the heavy blackness in her gut. "Hey, you."

"What're you…?" He trailed off as she stepped close to him and gave him a peck on the cheek. "Okay, I'm not complaining, but…?"

"We're going to save Greendale, Jeff." She grinned the most confident grin she could muster. "Everyone will be here in a minute, we can go over plans then."

"We saved Greendale already," Jeff pointed out, in the ponderous tone of someone who thinks they're stating the obvious.

Annie scoffed without letting her smile go. "Clearly it didn't take, you silly billy!"

"Okay, now I'm complaining—"

"Idea one. Social media. Hashtag SaveGreendaleCC. It can't just be hashtag SaveGreendale or people will think we're talking about the town," Annie explained, punctuating her words with a playful poke of Jeff's shoulder. "Or the town in Wisconsin. Or the Neil Young album. It's a minefield. Idea two, we stage some kind of viral video to raise awareness. People doing something embarrassing and unpleasant, but harmless, like, I don't know, dousing themselves with ice water and challenging celebrities to do the same and put the results on YouTube. It's rough but I think there's something there. Item Three, bachelor auction—"

"What? No. No. Annie, no." Jeff studied her expression, eyes narrow, as if he knew she wasn't actually feeling game for a last-minute Hail-Mary salvation ploy. He took her by the shoulders and pulled her close.

Annie sagged against him, letting him wrap those gigantic arms around her. "We've got to save Greendale," she mumbled. "If we don't—"

"If we don't, then it becomes a Subway Sandwich University." Jeff was rocking her slightly, now. "Shirley becomes a professor of bread, or something. Abed goes off to LA to make whatever's replacing television. Britta enrolls to become a sandwich artist, which, hell, that might be a good career path for her. Craig's the administrator who turned Greendale around, so they've got to keep him, Duncan and Hickey go to the next community college up the street, and Chang… I don't know, fuck Chang."

"But… what about us?" Annie whispered.

"You set the world on fire and I get to watch?" Jeff offered as he ran his hands up and down her back.

She groaned, rubbing her forehead against his chest. "We just barely work here, at Greendale, with the lava and the beanz and all the, you know, madness. What are we going to do?"

"I was thinking maybe we order some pizza for the last meeting, make it an occasion…"

Annie pulled her head up to glare at him. "Well, excuse me for trying to fix things! I thought you might care!"

"I do care!" Jeff assured her. He was being all jocular, like he knew better than to fret. "I care about you, and a smidge less than that I care about me. Then there's scotch, and then a pretty big gap, and then Abed and Troy and Shirley and Britta, and I guess Duncan and Craig and Hickey… again, fuck Chang… and then everybody else in this school, the state, country, world, et cetera. But Greendale? The school itself? It's just buildings. Ugly buildings. We steal our debate trophy from the case on our way out, and then we can go anywhere."

"Jeff, you're not listening to me! If we're not here, at Greendale, then how does this," she gestured to the space between them, "even work?"

"We have had sex off-campus, so, really well, in my experience…" Jeff smiled, and Annie let herself smile a little, too. "Babe, it's going to be all right."

And, crazily enough, it was.

Notes:

Thanks to Bethanyactually and Amrywiol for reading and offering notes.

I know this ends kind of abruptly, but that's it. There isn't more.