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Abed Nadir has been thinking about media representation a lot lately. His own, in particular.
He wasn't lying last year when he told Jeff he knew the difference between real life and TV. At that point, with the plot arcs tangling messily and stretching on over the summer, it seemed obvious to him that no matter how many hijinks they had, the study group was still way too un-relatable to be a TV show. But by now he's figured out that Jeff Winger is a big ball of deconstructed leading-man tropes, and that's a trope in and of itself. And even if it maybe hasn't been that funny lately, they are definitely in a sitcom.
Therein lies the problem. Because TV doesn't have any neuroatypical bisexual men of color. At all.
And this means that either they aren't on TV, or that, more likely, Abed is the sole representative of a huge demographic which is all watching him for their narrative structure. That's a lot of pressure. It worries him.
His Season 3 arc was kind of a downer, he knows. He wasn't too happy about it himself. But what he's really worried about is the viewers. He grew up not seeing anyone like himself on TV, apart from jokes and case studies. He was doing pretty well for a while; it would suck for his character arc to end with him still broken.
He's spend the last month or so trying to figure out what he can do to redeem himself. Troy's back, and they're still friends and Abed's doing a lot better with him around, but somehow the magic is a little bit gone. The therapy sessions with Britta are still happening, and Britta is so patently bad at them that they actually do make Abed feel a little better. The group is doing okay. Everybody but him is definitely better for the three years they've shared; Jeff and Britta almost got drunk-married again (maybe the third time they'll do it for real), and Annie might just be on the road to finding somewhere closer to her age to obsess about. Pierce is... Pierce, but better. Shirley is still Shirley, who was always better. Troy has a solid, real job as the True Repairman, and he's freaking out less about it than he could be. Everything could be okay, if it wasn't for Abed. Who has been feeling, lately, more and more like he doesn't really exist. He was always the outsider, sure, but he used to be the outsider for the purpose o making commentary on the insiders. Now he's just outside.
He wonders, eventually, if his problem is not working the labels. Maybe he'd be doing better if he just embraced being in a box already. So he brings it up to Troy.
"Troy?" he says one night, when they're in their bunk beds in the former Dreamatorium. They don't do bunk bed talk a lot, sure, but they're both cool when it ends up happening.
Above him, Troy rolls over onto his side. "Yeah?"
"Do you think I should get a formal diagnosis?"
Troy sits up quickly, banging his head on the ceiling, and yelps. "What? Where did that-- Ow. Sorry. A formal diagnosis of what?"
"Of whatever I have. My parents took me to a bunch of doctors when I was young, but none of them could figure me out and so they gave up. There's been more research since then. I could probably get diagnosed."
Troy peers over the side of the bed at him, barely visible in the dark. "That is not the kind of bunk bed talk I was expecting," he says faintly. "Abed, what for?"
"I don't know. It might help other people. It might help me."
"Abed, I--" Troy's voice sounds kind of choked. "I don't think you should do that. Nobody cares what-- whatever. You're just you. Unless you really want to know."
"Not really. I'm okay just being me. I just thought it might make other people more comfortable."
"So don't. It'd be like that-- that box? With the bad stuff in it that you can't put back in once you open it? Stuff would stop being the same."
"Pandora's Box. Cool. Okay."
Troy lay back on his bunk, leaving Abed a dark ceiling to look at. After a minute, though, his voice dropped back over the edge. "Abed?"
"Yeah?"
"Why are you asking me?"
"Because you're my friend. And because you said sometimes you know better than me."
Troy breathes out heavily. Apparently being on the verge of tears hasn't gone away. "Oh god. Abed, I am so, so sorry I said that. And I'm so sorry I sent that text. I was scared and then I was angry, and I didn't think and I didn't mean it. I swear I didn't."
"I'm sorry I sent that email," Abed says after a minute.
He is. He hadn't had to do it; nobody had asked him to outline Troy's weaknesses. But he'd been angry too, and half of it had been trying to prove that Troy wasn't smarter than he was and that was definitely because of the impersonator business. But he knows now that he shouldn't have done it.
"Forget it," Troy says, and Abed assumes he means it.
They both lie in silence for an unspecified amount of time, and then Troy says, "Abed?"
"Yeah."
"I love you. And there's nothing wrong with you."
And, okay, that works.
----
The next day, Abed stops Britta at the door at the end of their study group and tells her, "I'm quitting therapy."
Britta stops being distracted and stares at him. She looks a little less artfully tousled than usual and her lipstick is smudged; she and Jeff are probably having secret sex again. They'll figure it out someday. "What?" she demands. "Why? You can't do that, I'm not done psychoanalyzing you."
"I can and I am," Abed says.
Britta narrows her eyes. "But why? Am I not a good enough therapist for you?"
Abed ignores that. Instead he asks, "Are you familiar with the concept of fix-it fic?"
"Fixifixiwhat?"
"Fix-it fic. That's what I'm doing. I'm writing my own."
He leaves Britta there, brow wrinkled in puzzlement, and heads to class.
---
For Annie he leaves a note, because he has no doubt she'll get incredibly emotional when she hears what he has to say and that's just awkward and confusing for him to deal with. He and Annie don't understand each other at all and clearly never will, but he allows himself the luxury of thinking he's done a better job of respecting her boundaries than she has of his. That might not be true, but Abed is entitled to feel selfish indignation once in a while just like anyone else. He never shut Annie in a locker in her own brain.
They do live together, though, and he doesn't want to stop being friends with her completely, so he leaves the note in a bowl of buttered noodles as a gesture of reconciliation before he leaves for his filmmaking class that morning. It reads simply:
Annie,
You are henceforth banned from the Dreamatorium. Sorry.
I'm pretty functional, for all that.
-Abed
---
Annie is actually still pretty emotional when Troy and Abed get home that day; she's sitting one one of the armchairs in front of the TV, eating buttered noodles and sobbing. Troy scrunches up his face at her and says, "Um, Annie?" from the doorway.
Annie jumps guiltily and crumples the note up into her pocket, rubbing her eyes like she hopes neither of them will notice she has big streaks of mascara down her cheeks. "Oh! Hey, guys! Hey... Abed."
"Hey," Abed says, waving at her.
"Hey, Troy!" Annie says with manic cheerfulness, her eyes bouncing between them. "Can I just talk to Abed for a minute? In private?"
Troy glances at Abed, who shakes his head a tiny bit, and then back at Annie. "Um... no?" he says.
They have dinner and watch Inspector Spacetime together instead, and Annie corners Abed on his way to bed. "I thought we were good!" she whispers desperately, clutching him by the elbow. "You aren't supposed to lie!"
"We weren't completely good," Abed says. "But we're cool now. Just don't do it again." He takes back his elbow and goes into the bedroom. The fact that Annie didn't want to mention what had happened in front of Troy pretty much tells him that she knew it hadn't been good.
"What was that about?" Troy asks, already on the top bunk, peering down over the edge. "She didn't do anything weird, did she?"
"It's fine," Abed says. "I'm just resolving some plot points."
"Okay. Cool."
"Cool cool cool."
----
"Hey," Jeff says, sitting down next to Abed on the couch. "I got your text. Why all the mystery? I am not doing one of your My Dinner With Andre things again, I have to tell you in advance."
"Don't worry." Abed holds up a hand. "I'm just trying to fix my plot arc from last year. Like a fix-it fic, but in real life. I just need you for a couple things."
"I have actually negative idea what you just said," says Jeff. "But B-- um-- I was told that you quit therapy. I'm not sure whether I should assume that's a step in the right direction or you just got sick of Britta, but congrats, I guess."
"Thanks. So, first, I'm sorry I tried to cut off your arm. I wasn't myself."
"Yeah, about that." Jeff looks a little uncomfortable. "I had absolutely no idea that that was happening until after it was over, so don't worry about it. I kind of got that you were going through some stuff. We're all glad it's over."
"Two." Abed holds up two fingers. "Please don't call me a computer."
Jeff squints at him. "Um. Okay. Sorry?" Then his face changes. Abed isn't sure what it means. "Ohh. Oh, man." He shakes his head. "Damn. I'm really sorry. I thought it didn't bother you."
"It didn't used to," Abed admits. "I used to take it as a compliment. But most people don't mean it as one."
Jeff's face softens again, into something Abed is pretty sure is worry. It's a rare unguarded-Winger moment which Abed is, unfortunately, ill-equipped to appreciate. He knows Jeff thinks of himself as the dad of the group; trope-wise, he kind of is. He's not a very good dad a lot of the time, but a lot of real dads aren't either.
"Abed," Jeff says, "if you need anything else, let me know. I've got your back. Unless we're cutting off someone's arm or something."
"Thanks." Abed nods and stands up. If he was actually filming this, he would set it up so Jeff was watching him as he walked away. There are no cameras, but he's fairly sure that Jeff is still watching him. He would like to think so, for narrative neatness.
----
To Pierce he says, "It's pronounced Ah-bed."
----
To Shirley he says, "Jesus never said anything about homosexuality, you know."
Shirley blanches, but then she looks at Annie and nods in an I-told-you-so manner.
"Is this about Troy?" Pierce asks.
----
"Well?" Troy asks. "Was it about me?"
It's later at night than it should be, and they're both changing for bed. "Was what about you?" Abed asks, pulling on his fuzzy green pajama pants against a chair for balance.
"What you said to Shirley. I mean, that came out of nowhere. It didn't sound like you were just making a point abstractly." Troy frowns. He's sitting on the bottom bunk of the bed. "Abstractly? Is that right?"
"Yeah, that's right." Abed sits on the bunk next to Troy, scootching him over a little. "I think I did it. I fixed my plot arc."
"Cool. But Abed?" Troy jiggles up and down. "Was it about me?"
Abed is silent for a minute, and then he says slowly, or what passes for slowly with him, "If I say yes, we'll get taken off the air. Or maybe they'll show a different timeline where I never fixed the arc instead. Even if we're on NBC, which has been my guess for a while, the execs will never let a bromance-turned-romance air on mainstream TV. This will all have been for nothing."
"Abed," Troy says, actually slowly. "We're not on TV.”
"Maybe," Abed says, shrugging. He's thinking of his hypothetical viewers, and what they'll think of him if the alternate timeline airs instead of this one. He'd be letting them down enormously.
But then, two out of three, while better than nothing, is still misleading, and in any case, Pandora's Box has already been opened. He can't put the knowledge back in, and he's not unselfish enough to try. It's a gamble, but life is a gamble anyway, and if he does get it right then they'll have singlehandedly made a huge step forward in terms of representation. And he thinks about where they've been in the last three years, and where he was last month, and comes to a decision.
"You know, Reggie," he says in his worst Inspector Spacetime accent, "there's an old Earth saying that comes to mind in situations such as this."
Troy raises an eyebrow but plays along. "What's that, Inspector?"
Abed smiles. "Disregard canon," he says, and takes Troy's hand. "Acquire representation."
And, at least in this timeline, they do.