Chapter Text
six.
Troy isn’t sure if he wants to meet his soulmate.
“She’s sad a lot, mama,” he sighs one day after school. His knees still sting from around recess time, when he thinks she must’ve tripped and scraped herself up or something. “I don’t wanna be around someone who’s just sad all the time.”
But his mom just tilts her head and sighs softly, smiling as she reaches out and cups his cheeks.
“It seems that way because you can only feel her pain now,” she tells him. “When you meet her one day and you have your first kiss, you’ll be able to feel her happiness and joy and love, too, and it’ll be the most wonderful feeling in the world.”
He huffs out another sigh and stubbornly kicks at the ground, which just makes her laugh and move her hands from his face onto his shoulders, gently pushing him forward into the kitchen where he drops his backpack and plops into one of the chairs at the table.
“So you can feel when Dad’s happy?” He asks warily as she slides a glass of milk in front of him, along with two chocolate chip cookies on a plate. He’s not sure, but he thinks maybe her smile falters for just a second.
She doesn’t answer his question.
“You just be patient and one day it’ll pay off, okay?” She says with a sort of forced cheeriness, then smooths her hand over his hair and presses a kiss to his forehead before heading out of the room.
He thinks about that for a long time, nibbling on his cookies with one hand while the other the other rubs gentle circles into his knee, hoping the residual stinging will wear off soon. Just be patient. He guesses he doesn’t really have a choice.
And then it comes out of nowhere one night in December.
He’s at the dinner table with his parents and his nana, attempting to hide his string beans under his mashed potatoes when suddenly he feels like he’s been punched hard in the stomach. He falls out of his chair and onto his knees, gasping.
“Troy?” His mom practically leaps up before kneeling down beside him on the floor and he thinks she might be asking him what’s wrong, but he can’t actually hear. There’s something drowning her out, like the screeching of a panic alarm except it’s coming from inside his own brain and covering his ears does nothing. His face is hot and his eyes are burning and he thinks he must be crying but he can’t really focus on that because he’s too caught up in the way he feels like he can’t breathe suddenly—like someone’s reaching directly into his chest and squeezing all the air out of his lungs.
He’s never felt anything like this before. Everything is too much all of a sudden—the lights, the sounds, even his mother’s arms around him as she tries to calm him down. All he can do is scream. He screams because he’s confused and because everything hurts inside and because he feels like his heart is being ripped straight out of his body and he doesn’t know why, and he’s so fucking scared.
He screams and keeps screaming, and sobs and hiccups as he breaks away from her and runs to his room. He shuts the door and dives onto his bed, wrapping himself up tight in his favorite blanket and praying for whatever it is to stop. He needs it to stop.
It doesn’t. He shakes and cries until he just blacks out, and comes to in the morning with a pounding headache and a sick feeling in his stomach. His mom is perched on the edge of his bed and she pulls him into a hug as soon as his eyes are open, and he just crumples. He feels like crying all over again but he doesn’t have anything left in him—no energy, no tears, and he’s still confused.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that, baby,” she whispers. “I was hoping you wouldn’t have to. Not until you were older, anyway.” She rubs gentle circles in between his shoulders and he relaxes a little, letting his eyes fall shut again.
“Go through what?” He asks in a small voice. His throat is scratchy and hoarse and it hurts to talk. “What was that?”
She sighs and squeezes him a little bit tighter.
“I think your soulmate got their heart broken last night.”
***
ten.
Some people don’t have a soulmate.
It’s an incredibly rare condition, affecting less than 1% of the population worldwide. Lots of people never find their soulmates, but to be born without one at all is almost unheard of. Abed knows this. He’s done exhaustive research.
Everyone thinks he’s one of those people. Kids at school, his teachers, doctors, every therapist he’s ever been forced to see—hell, he’s pretty sure his own dad even thinks he’s destined to be alone, even if he’ll never say it out loud.
Because how could anyone possibly be meant to love him?
Well, someone is.
Abed hasn’t told anyone about his soulmate. He hasn’t told anyone about the phantom pains he gets from time to time—a stubbed toe, a skinned elbow, normal kid stuff. He hasn’t told anyone about the time he spilled a can of Diet Squirt all over himself because his soulmate hit their funny bone on something just as he was going to take a sip. He doesn’t tell anyone about the occasional inexplicable moments of sadness and definitely not about the repetitive, stinging pain on the back of his upper thighs sometimes, that makes him feel sick thinking about what it might come from.
He keeps it all to himself. He doesn’t need anyone accusing him of making it up or worse, believing him and then calling his soulmate a freak, too.
Nobody needs to know.
He tries to figure things out about them, but he doesn’t have that much to go on. Everybody gets sad sometimes. Everybody gets injured once in a while. It’s kind of a hopeless cause.
But somebody out there loves him. Somewhere out there, he has a friend. A best friend, even. And he’s going to find them one day. He just will.
He’s absolutely sure of it.
***
fourteen.
Troy kisses a lot of girls.
It happens pretty easily. Lots of girls like him. He kisses them on dates and at parties, under the bleachers after football games and behind open lockers in the school hallways. He thinks he must be pretty good at it by now.
None of them are his soulmate. He kisses them and he knows right away that they’re not the one, but they don’t seem as disappointed about it as he does. They shrug it off and say you don’t need to be with your soulmate to have a good time. They say hoping to find your soulmate isn’t realistic, anyway.
But Troy doesn’t understand the point in kissing someone over and over again if it makes you feel nothing. He keeps kissing different girls, because he really wants to find the right one, but the truth is he doesn’t feel even an initial attraction to them. He’s just going through the motions.
He feels kind of bad about football. The padding helps, but some pain is inevitable, and he’s too good to not play. When he gets a concussion at the end of his freshman season, the first thing he does is send a silent apology to his soulmate for the inevitable headache.
He knows she can’t hear him, but it makes him feel a little better anyway.
***
nineteen.
Greendale doesn’t have the ideal student body for Abed to pull off a perfect Breakfast Club homage, but their Spanish class is just diverse enough that he ought to be able to throw together a band of lovable misfits in a pinch, if he can find enough of them hanging around the library.
He already has Jeff as his cocky-yet-secretly-soft, conventional white-guy lead, Britta as his fiercely independent love interest. Him? He’s the nerd friend, he knows that. He grabs himself a know-it-all, a fun mom, an embarrassingly out-of-touch old man, and he’s almost there, there’s just one thing he’s missing. He huffs and scans over the first floor of the library until he sees a big purple R, standing out from the gray background of a classic letterman jacket.
A jock. Perfect.
Troy— he remembers his name from the first day of class— gives him a weird look as he explains the study group situation, but he shrugs and follows him into Study Room F anyway.
It goes about as well as any Breakfast Club knockoff can go. Their descent into conflict and chaos isn’t entirely graceful, but it’s good enough, and he’s just waiting for the right moment to hop in with his monologue when Annie says something that makes his brain shut down.
“And YOU’RE a stupid jock who lost his scholarship by dislocating both shoulders in a keg stand!”
“Keg FLIP, they’re very hard to pull off!”
Then all of them are yelling, but Abed doesn’t hear a word of it.
He can’t.
He’s too busy remembering.
A chilly Friday night in November. One of his clearest, most vivid memories to date. Sudden debilitating pain in both his shoulders; so bad he’d fallen off his bed in shock, opened his mouth to scream but no sound had come out. His arms, perfectly intact despite feeling like they’d been yanked out of their sockets, throbbing for the longest time.
Someone else’s pain. The worst pain his soulmate had been in since that head injury a few years back— Abed didn’t know what it was exactly, but considering the headache that had lingered for days, he’d assumed it was some kind of concussion, at least. That was when he’d put it together, with all the bumps and bruises and sore muscles he’s felt by proxy over the years, his soulmate had to be some kind of athlete.
He just… wouldn’t have expected it to be this athlete. The one still wearing his high school letterman jacket to college, the quarterback slash prom king who wants you to know he’s the quarterback slash prom king, who doesn’t seem interested in even knowing Abed’s name, perfectly content to just call him Slumdog Millionaire, because why wouldn’t he be? Guys like Troy don’t fall in love with guys like Abed, it’s basically a universal rule.
That’s his soulmate?
Only one way to find out.
He makes sure the rest of the group is occupied, all yelling at each other before he rests his hands down in his lap, bites his lip as a means of bracing himself and then pinches his own wrist, hard.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Troy stop yelling at Annie, right hand abruptly covering his left wrist. He frowns as he looks down at it, rubbing his thumb a couple times over the exact spot Abed had pinched himself. Abed feels his own eyes widen, blood rushing in his ears as Troy looks back up.
“You think it was EASY being the most popular kid in school?” He shouts, and Abed feels very, very fucked.
He slams his hand down on his textbook and launches into his Breakfast Club monologue, hoping that it’ll take his mind off it.
It doesn’t.
***
twenty.
It’s not supposed to end this way.
Zombies are supposed to be fake. Zombies are supposed to be up there with vampires and werewolves in the category of spooky-scary, not scary-scary, the fun monsters that can’t actually hurt you. They’re not supposed to be a real threat; he shouldn’t be legitimately scared for his life right now. His life, and Abed’s. Troy looks down at him from the window, calls his name— Abed turns to him and Troy can see it in his eyes: he’s resigned to the fact that he’s about to die, and it’s not fair.
They were supposed to have more time.
Troy was supposed to have more time to figure out why Abed makes him feel the way he does. More time to figure out why just brushing his hand against Abed’s is a bigger deal to him than every kiss he’s ever had with a girl. More time to figure out why he can pick Abed immediately out of a crowded room, always drawn to him by some invisible thread; more time to figure out why seeing Abed upset makes him physically hurt, why seeing him melt down makes Troy feel like he’s losing his mind.
Of course, he knows. They say that about soulmates, you always know. But he wasn’t ready.
Except now, he has to be ready. It’s that, or let Abed die without ever knowing how he feels. And even Troy can admit his stupid pride is worth so, so much less than Abed’s soul.
“I love you.”
Recognition flashes behind Abed’s steely gaze.
“I know.”
He watches Abed get bitten, so it’s only fitting that Abed’s the one to bite him. The first one, anyway. The recognition in his eyes from before is gone as he sinks his teeth into Troy’s flesh, and he should’ve known that it would be. The thing that bites him isn’t Abed anymore, not really, but it looks like him and he supposes that’s the best he can ask for at this point, in his time of dying.
Except he doesn’t die.
His body starts to deteriorate and his brain falls into a bloodthirsty trance, and he’d feel horrified about that if he could feel. And then suddenly he can feel again, his humanity flooding back as the cool air stings his skin. That first breath feels like a shock, and in his first lucid moment he does what he always does.
He looks for Abed.
Abed looks right back at him. And he doesn’t ask what the hell is going on, he doesn’t say anything about being zombified. He says:
“You love me.”
Troy doesn’t even finish nodding in response before Abed grabs him by the waist and kisses him, and it’s everything. There’s no more doubt in Troy’s mind that Abed is his soulmate. His heart soars, head spinning and knees buckling. He clings to Abed’s shoulders as he falls further into the embrace.
He feels peace, joy, love, complete and total ecstasy, almost too much and he realizes it’s because it’s not just his; it’s Abed’s too. He’s not limited to just feeling Abed’s pain now, and fuck, it’s a beautiful thing.
“I love you too,” Abed says when they finally manage to break apart for a moment. “In case that wasn’t clear.”
Troy smiles, tears slipping down his cheeks. “It was. But I’m glad you said it.”
Abed pulls him back in and this time Troy’s reaction is faster. Their bodies fit together just right, like they’re made for each other— which, he supposes, they are.
He’s so busy being happy that he doesn’t notice the thick cloud of smoke rolling toward them.