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twenty one.
He can pinpoint the exact moment Abed reads his text.
He tries to ignore it, but it’s hard. He’s been telling himself, through this whole ridiculous charade so far, that Abed doesn’t have feelings. Abed doesn’t care about their friendship, Abed only cares about himself. Why else would he have let this stupid war spiral out of control? He can’t make any real sense of it.
He wonders if he let Laybourne get to him too much, if they could’ve settled this more reasonably. He’s so used to everything with Abed being easy - only because, he realizes, he’s always been so careful about not letting his feelings get in the way.
And now he has.
He’s let his feelings get in the way, and to feel alright, he has to convince himself that Abed hasn’t. Abed’s feelings didn’t get in the way, Abed is just like this. Just difficult.
Difficult and unfeeling.
The inconvenient truth is that Abed does feel things. Stronger than most people, actually. Troy suppresses that truth when he hits send.
Hey, dick. Read your dumb email. Really enjoyed it. Guess what? You may have been my best friend, but we both know I was your first friend. And what I know, but you don’t know, because you have mental issues, is that you’re never going to have another friend, because NOBODY ELSE WILL EVER HAVE MY PATIENCE WITH YOU.
But it’s impossible to suppress the wave of grief, of sorrow and pain that racks his body only moments later. It physically hurts him. He steels himself on the outside, but inside he falls apart.
Because he knows this feeling.
He felt it once when he was six. He’s never been able to forget it. He’d found out years later, it was the night Abed’s mother left him - and so feeling the exact same way now, it’s impossible to ignore what he’s done.
He’s broken Abed’s heart.
And the ceasefire, honestly, isn’t much consolation.
For whatever reason, over the past year, he’s been able to feel when Abed is happy, which is endlessly confusing to him, because they’ve never kissed. So he hasn’t told anyone, because really, what’s there to say? It must not be that big of a deal - except it means that when they do make up, he knows that Abed doesn’t really feel happy at all. He feels… some positive emotion. Relieved, maybe. But it’s tinged with sadness, with lingering heartache, and so Troy can’t really bring himself to be happy either.
It helps a bit to know that Abed doesn’t stop caring about him. When he leaves for the AC school, he feels that heartache again - Abed’s, and his own. The awful thing is, truest repairman or not, he doesn’t know how to fix them.
Soulmates don’t always end up together, they don’t always find each other, and when they do, they don’t always work out. His whole life, he’s insisted that that would never be him, but Abed being his soulmate had thrown a real wrench into that plan. Having to accept that he would fall in love with a man wasn’t something he’d been anticipating. At this point, he thinks he must’ve just taken too long to come to terms with it. It’s too late.
Britta doesn’t believe in soulmates. But when he comes back from AC school, she wants him.
He kisses her and feels nothing at all.
***
twenty two.
He spends most of senior year feeling numb.
It’s a coping mechanism. Everything is changing - the Greendale era of his life is drawing to a close. Troy starts dating Britta. Jeff graduates early. It’s everything he doesn’t want. Much easier on him, really, to block it out instead of feeling it.
The odd thing is that Troy doesn’t seem to feel much either. Abed has never been able to block Troy’s feelings the way he can his own - not his sadness or his pain or his joy, which he’s been able to feel for almost two years now. He’s pored over soulmate literature trying to figure out why and it leads him nowhere except Halloween 2010, that one night nobody remembers. He’s never felt entirely settled about that, but what’s he supposed to say? Everyone thinks he’s insane as it is.
He thinks Troy should feel… something. He’s top of the class at AC school, he has a girlfriend. He even seems happy on the outside. But he’s feeling almost as numb as Abed is.
With a few exceptions. The first one he notices is at InspectiCon, flares of negativity and hurt that he eventually recognizes as jealousy. Well that’s fucking rich, he thinks. The next that he notices is when he breaks up with Britta, something that feels like relief. He’s pretty sure it’s Troy’s and not his, but he supposes it could be both. He’s a little too weirdly tangled in the situation, unsure of how hard Troy is really leaning into their body switching bit, to know.
What he does know is that Troy goes back to not feeling much after that.
So he makes sure that he does, too.
***
twenty three.
Abed isn’t really okay with letting him go.
Troy feels it as he’s pulling away in the Childish Tycoon - the fear, the pain, the heartbreak. That’s all he ever seems to do anymore, make Abed’s heart break. He’s tired of it.
He wonders if Abed knows he’s doing this for them. He knows deep in his heart that if he ever wants to be with Abed, he has to be apart from him first. He needs to figure out who he really is or else they’ll be stuck exactly as they are for the rest of their lives - unsure, paralyzed, suffocating under the weight of all the words they’ve left unsaid. Forever circling one another in the purgatory of What Might Have Been.
He can’t ask Abed if he knows that, though. He can’t tell him what this is really for, or else it’s a moot point. All he can do now is trust, and by the time he makes it to the Atlantic coast, he feels his anxieties ease and give way to a new feeling: hope.
And if they’re truly meant to be, then Abed feels it, too.