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There are many, many universes where Troy and Abed get married. There are even more where they don't. In some universes, Troy and Abed wed in a completely platonic fashion. In other universes, they remain unwed in a very unplatonic fashion. In nearly every universe, they grow old and die together, buried in adjoining plots, as side by side in death as they were in life.
In a rare few universes, they don't get to grow old. Troy dies in a shooting months before his thirtieth birthday. Abed is killed by a passing car at the tender age of twenty five. Cancer strikes Troy at twenty seven, his strong athletic figure wasted into a shadow of itself. Abed is on his way home from an overseas project when the plane goes down, never to be found.
These universes are tragic, a darker timeline than many. Yet these, with all the lost opportunities and lost lives, the one left behind learning to live without their closest friend, their life partner, their world, are not the worst of the possible universe.
Of those universes, there are only three.
In each of these three, they differ in many respects. In one, Jeff and Annie are married, an unstoppable team of law and justice, as Annie might have once called them. In another, Shirley's Sandwiches is a worldwide chain of eateries, serving fresh and delicious sandwiches to everyone who comes through their door. In all of them, one thing is true: there is no TroyandAbed. There is just Troy, and just Abed.
It is not as though they never met, although the universe might have been kinder that way. It is that they met, they were friends, they were best friends, they were everything... and then they were not.
It may have been an argument gone on too long, or perhaps even worse, simply drifting apart, but Troy and Abed do not share an apartment, do not share stories and adventures, do not share lives. They are simply a footnote in the other's biography, telling of a friendship that did not last.
These three universes, with only Troy, and only Abed – these are the cruelest universes of all