What Normal People Do

by Gileonnen

Summary:

Annie has put a lot of time and effort into being a normal person. Troy and Abed, not so much.

Chapter 1

If it'd been anyone but Troy and Abed, Annie would have just assumed they were gay. Two attractive young men, without girlfriends, sharing one bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment? Seriously?

But it's Troy and Abed, and even when they curl up together on the lower bunk, it's because they're using the upper bunk to anchor their blanket fort. And that's just logical, the way things are logical for Troy and Abed – and okay, their logic isn't like normal-people logic, but it's internally consistent enough that she can track it from one end to the other. When they drag her into the Imaginarium for a showdown with the Blorgons, she knows that she's supposed to be the Inspector's associate, and it's her job to be tender and empathetic when the Inspector can't make human feelings come together right.

She likes being the one who teaches the Inspector to feel. It feels like something she does, and not like something the inspector's associate does, and sometimes she really needs to know what she's supposed to do. There's no way to study being Annie Edison, and she's always secretly a little afraid she's failing.

Like when they're all watching Battlestar Galactica (classic series) and Troy's fallen asleep on her shoulder, and he's sort of drooling on her blouse – it's a little cute the way his mouth hangs open when he sleeps, but not cute enough that Annie wants to get slobber on her boobs, and she looks to Abed and very clearly signals "A little help here?" with her eyes. He just looks at her like some kind of puzzle, head tilted to one side as though he's computing the exact dimensions of the inside of her cranium.

It's creepy. It's also a little cute, but it's mostly creepy.

"A little help?" she says through a plastered-on smile, pointing to Troy.

"He looks okay," Abed replies, and what does she say to that? Maybe he'd get offended if she pushed Troy over to one side, and no one has actually seen Abed offended, so she has no idea what he'll do.

He curls up against her other side then, pointing at the screen and explaining something about Starbuck that she's only half listening to, because by then she's kind of in a sandwich and it's occurring to her for the first time that maybe Troy and Abed aren't just not-gay, maybe they're straight, and maybe it's really sketchy for her to be living with them in a two-bedroom apartment where one of the bedrooms is designed for fighting Blorgons.

"Um. Abed?" she says.

"Annie," he answers, like he doesn't know that he needs to inflect it like a question. Like he doesn't know that's how normal people talk.

"Abed? I thought you didn't like ... touching ... people?" She's remembering when he leaned in to her, talking in that Don Draper voice that made her feel like the only girl in the world, and she's remembering that he definitely touched her then.

"I don't like touching people without context," he says.

"This is context?"

"It's an intimate social setting. We've been living together for three months," says Abed, like that explains anything, and maybe she doesn't want him to explain anything because she is like three seconds away from a face-fanning panic attack here.

Troy startles awake then, just before it can get any more awkward. "I was dreaming about pancakes," he says. His eyes are wide, his shirt collar askew. "Do you ever wonder about pancakes? They're like cakes ... but from a pan."

"When we get married? Wedding pancakes," says Abed, and he and Troy slap their chests and slap their hands in front of Annie's boobs.

She pushes off from the couch, breaking their secret handshake in half. They both look up at her like she's kicked their puppy, but she has to put her foot down here or she's never going to put it down. "Wait!" she says. "Wait. You're getting married?"

"Imaginary-married," Troy clarifies, rolling his eyes. "You wanna come, too?"

She looks from one to the other. Troy looks hopeful, the way he looks hopeful when they're asking her to make shadow puppets or to help them build the world's tallest paperclip castle. Abed only looks careful, like he's trying to work out her cues. They're tousled manchildren who smell like popcorn and grape soda – and they have just proposed to her. They have just proposed a crazy imaginary threesome wedding with wedding pancakes.

"That sounds like fun," she says, and offers each of them one of her hands.