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i.
“You know we’ll never know what happened here tonight. Our subconscious brains are retaining the trauma, of course, but our conscious minds have been wiped,” Abed sighed. “Such are the trappings of the genre.”
As totally down as Troy normally was with Abed’s strangely accurate meta analyses, he had his limits. And most days, that one would strike him as Way Too Weird… except this time the circumstances themselves were just as odd. Shirley looked weirdly ashamed, Chang looked far too satisfied, Jeff was covered in cat scratches, and they all had headaches, confusion, and a common gross chalky taste in their mouths. Troy brought his hand to the area where his right shoulder met with his neck, and gingerly poked at the bruise there. The bruise… shaped… strangely… like a human bite mark???
At that moment, he made a conscious decision to stop thinking about whatever had happened that night. Including the strange butterflies he got in his stomach as he watched Abed inspect his own bruises. He looked away. If no one else remembered what had been done or said that night, he didn’t need to, either. Nope. No way.
ii.
Abed had lied. Of course he had- could none of his friends lip-read? Troy hadn’t said anything close to “I know you hate when they do this in movies.” Or whatever. That’s the kind of thing Abed would say to him. No, Troy’s farewell was much simpler. Much less dramatic.
“Don’t watch the BoC season finale without me. I’ll be home soon.”
Abed sat alone on his bed- as he had for the past two hours, twelve minutes, and thirty six seconds- still ignoring Annie’s periodic pacing past the entrance to his room. He knew she was worried. He didn’t really care. Abed just continued clenching and unclenching his fists, digging half-moons into his palms. He wasn’t sure how many seconds and minutes and hours and days had to pass to fulfill Troy’s definition of “soon,” but it’s not like he was counting.
iii.
Troy knew he looked calm, but his blood was pounding in his ears. No matter what Britta said or thought, this wasn’t just him being a psycho girlfriend. This was him being… Troy.
This was him knowing that the doughy little man currently whimpering at the mere sight of his fist deserved to hurt, because he would have hurt Abed without a second thought. Anyone who caused Abed pain deserved whatever they had coming to them. In Toby’s case, Troy hoped for broken bones. Or a plane crash. A lifetime ban from all things Inspector related. Whatever.
By the time Abed was freed from his Dimensionizer prison, however, Troy had all but forgotten Toby. No longer a threat to Abed, no longer his concern. He felt a knot forming in his throat, but swallowed it as he entered the Gluon chamber with the only person he could ever fathom being stuck to for the rest of forever.
iv.
After the battle… things were different. Of course they were still best friends. Yeah. Always. But Abed wasn’t speaking, that first morning after, and flinched when Troy’s hand brushed his as he passed the cereal box, and the cords on his hoodie were chewed to a pulp by noon. Troy spent the day feeling sick, and gathering fluffy down shrapnel from around the apartment, where it had been thrown in exhausted heaps the night before.
He found Abed lying ramrod straight in bed, eyes wide open, breathing even. Wordlessly, Troy piled blanket after blanket upon his friend, stopping only when he was afraid of crushing Abed’s lungs if he added any more. He left the room and came back with a glass of special drink, which he left by the bed. He turned out the lights and closed the door behind himself.
Maybe Abed not being able to talk that day was affecting his speech too. But Troy figured he had communicated what he needed to say the best way he could.
And Abed had smiled at him as he left the room. He had felt it, even if he didn’t see. That was okay. That was enough.
That was more than enough.
v.
“Clone Troy”
“Clone Abed.”
Everything that came afterward reached Abed’s ears through a filter, as though it was being spoken through a tin can phone stretched between treehouses. It didn’t feel like he was saying the words that came out of his mouth. That was someone else. He was someone else. They were both someone else.
Suddenly Troy’s arms were around him, and Abed was himself again. And he hated it. And he squeezed his best friend tighter, and felt Troy’s heartbeat quicken and his chest begin to expand as though to speak, but no words came out.
Abed figured he understood.
He let him go.
~~~
i.
Troy had been home for a week, and the only thing bothering Abed about the level of normalcy was the fact that everything actually was normal. Everything he knew about situations like this said that Troy should have returned a changed man, with stories to tell and new goals to strive for and 14 million dollars to spend on a place that wasn’t his old bedroom in his old apartment with his old best friend. It went against the spirit of the monomyth to just… fall back into old patterns like that.
The more Abed thought, the more he guessed that in many ways, Troy had changed. He did have stories to tell, many of which centered on pirate attacks and a friendly shark named Francis. He had new goals, like filling an Olympic sized pool with jello and seeing if they could swim in it. And he did have 14 million dollars. Because after all, that was a lot of jello.
He also had a new confidence- a swagger in his step that in no way resembled the fake bravado he had worn like armor in the first years Abed had known him. This was real. This was a Troy who knew who he was.
This was the Troy who sat on the counter while Abed washed their breakfast dishes, and said with all the surety and volume of a man who had sailed around the world:
“I love you.”
Abed paused in his scrubbing of a particularly stubborn syrup patch and looked over his shoulder. Troy’s eyes didn’t waver from his. There was no fear, no uncertainty, just a small earnest smile.
Abed quelled the instinctive urge to respond with a cocky “I know.” The idea gave him a headache and put a gross chalky taste in his mouth.
What was weird about the level of normalcy was the fact that everything was normal.
“I love you too.”
Nothing had ever felt more natural to say.
How fantastically weird.