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i am meant to be wherever you are next to me.
and i could see it right from the start —
that you would be my light in the dark.
oh, you gave me no other choice but to love you…
all i want to do is come running home to you.
and all my life i promise to keep running home to you.
can’t say how the days will unfold.
can’t change what the future may hold.
but i want you in it—
every hour, every minute…
— Grant Gustin
It’s been a week since Troy left. Abed doesn’t seem to notice.
Annie’s been watching him. Waiting for the worst, 9-1-1 on speed dial, keeping movies with boats hidden. But Abed wakes up every day, gets dressed, and goes to class as if nothing’s happened, as if his reality hasn’t been altered so significantly that even Annie cannot comprehend the empty space where Troy used to be.
“He’s just in denial,” Britta tells her when she brings it up, sounding way too casual about such a tragedy. “It’s the first stage of grief, followed by three others and then acceptance. He’ll be fine, his brain just isn’t processing that Troy’s gone yet. Don’t worry about it.”
Annie wants to point out the callousness with which Britta refers to her ex-boyfriend’s absence, as if it doesn’t matter, as if there’s no reason to worry over Abed actually going crazy this time, because in the movies the character learns to move on and see the beauty of life or whatever but this is real life and a world where Abed and Troy aren’t together isn’t one that makes sense.
Still, later at dinner, Annie asks Abed what he and Troy did today, just to see if maybe, just maybe, for once in a million years and universes, Britta is right. Abed cocks his head and stares at her.
“Troy left a week ago,” Abed says, and starts clearing the dishes. Annie, on a whim, calls up Jeff and tells him she loves him.
oh, my darling, darling, darling
i take a risk when i try to be understood…
i’ve drawn too close to let go now…
guaranteed chemistry, i’m not lying, only dying!
if we meet someday, we’ll never need to change—
no place can urbanize our lives.
lately, i can’t get you off my mind!
can’t get over just how you’re designed!
since your face, i can’t help being kind!
take my thoughts of you and press rewind…
— Wild Party
It’s been a month since Troy left. Abed is living in circles.
It’s like he’s stuck in a time loop. Every morning, Annie watches him get up and pull on an outfit that’s one eighth his clothes, one eighth Annie’s, and three-fourths Troy’s. Then he leaves in his flower skirt and letterman jacket and heads off to class, never doing the homework but always getting A’s anyway, probably by some gracious gift of Jeff, who’s taken to coming over at two a.m. to take Annie out to “breakfast”.
“I think he loves you,” Abed tells her one night. “Like I love Troy. Well, except not. Because I’m in love with Troy and I don’t think Jeff can ever really be in love with anybody, but I think you’re the closest he’ll ever get.”
Annie doesn’t tell him that she and Jeff have been “together” for three weeks. She doesn’t tell him about the aromantic pride bracelets they both wear around their wrists. She doesn’t tell him about how Troy had used to kiss Abed goodnight on the forehead whenever he fell asleep before the credits rolled.
“He’ll come back to you,” she tells him instead, and Abed rolls his eyes.
“He’ll come back for me, Annie, before we leave again,” he says, and picks up his bag to go. “Everybody knows the prince and princess never end up where they started.”
Annie wants to ask who’s who. Instead she decides to sneak into Jeff’s apartment this time, and accidentally sets off the buildings’ alarms and leaves them standing in a crowd in the freezing cold for eighteen minutes while Jeff grumbles and tugs her closer under his jacket.
all you had to do was stay;
had me in the palm of your hand, then
why’d you have to go and lock me out when i let you in?
all you had to do was stay, stay,
stay.
— Taylor Swift
It’s been a year since Troy left. Abed took apart the bunk bed two nights ago and is sleeping on the floor in a pillow-blanket fort.
Annie sneaks inside on the anniversary. He’s been in there all day, and he hasn’t eaten. She brings spaghetti. They watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and she lets him babble on about what an underrated and fantastic polyamorous couple Ferris, Sloane, and Cameron are until it’s nearly midnight and he’s only mumbling redundancies.
“Hey,” she nudges him, picking up a yellowed and rumpled stack of papers and thumbing through them. “What are these? I’ve never seen them before.”
Abed looks at the papers in her hands. He takes them back from her, gently, carefully, cradling the papers in his hands and smoothing out their wrinkles with his fingers.
“Love letters,” he says, too quietly. “I wrote them to Troy during the Pillowtown-Blanketburg War. I would send them across enemy lines, so he knew that we were still best friends. I don’t think we ever wanted to fight, not really. I think I was just jealous of whatever seemed to be happening with Britta and he was just scared of losing me. Not that it matters.” His voice drops to nearly nothing. “We lost each other anyway.”
Annie reaches out for his shoulder and squeezes. He’s so much quieter than he used to be. Less Abed, somehow, as if Troy took some part of Abed with him when he left by accident. Annie wonders, distantly, if it’s the same with Troy, if LeVar Burton now has to deal with a Troy who’s half Abed. She decides it doesn’t matter.
“You know he’s coming back, right?” she says, again, and Abed doesn’t shake his head. But he does meet her eyes and shrug, and that’s almost scarier.
She tucks him into bed and stands outside the blanket wall for hours, listening to his non-existent snores. She calls Jeff and speaks with him in whispers as the sun rises.
“Troy told me he’s gay,” Jeff says when she tells him about the love letters. “In like, our first year. Not that I needed him to tell me that; he and Abed always made it plenty obvious. But I figured he wanted some sort of approval from me, since I’m bisexual. So I told him I was proud of him. But we were both drunk and he didn’t remember the next day.”
Annie closes her eyes. She doesn’t mean to, but somewhere in that second and the next she falls asleep. There are no dreams.
when it’s two-forty-five and the darkness surrounds you,
just know that i’m lost too like before i found you.
it still hurts when i’m alone, wonder if you know—
i got no resentment for you or how we ended—
funny how there’s no one to blame.
call me optimistic, stupid if i’m wishing you’ll call me and say,
i wanna be wherever you are.
it’s hitting me hard, it’s hitting me harder than i thought…
faking a smile, falling apart, you’re breaking my heart…
i say i’m happy for you.
i’m not that happy for you.
— Alex Porat
It’s been five years since Troy left. Abed has finally learned to cry over it.
“I was wrong,” he sobs to Annie at three a.m. She’s thinking of moving out. Not that she doesn’t love him, it’s just—nevermind. “I was wrong. This is the darkest timeline.”
Annie shakes her head.
“Oh, Abed,” she says, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. He shakes her off, and she tries not to let her heart hurt too bad over it. “He’ll come back—”
“He’s gone,” Abed sobs harder. “He got kidnapped by pirates like three years ago and he’s gone. He left and they took him and he left me and he’s gone.”
Annie opens her mouth to answer, but Abed doesn’t let her.
“I’ve been using the Dreamatorium to see him,” he confesses. He looks her right in the eyes then. They’re too bright, and not the happy kind. “I go in there every day when you’re not home and I pretend he’s still here. Sometimes when I’m really sad we don’t even do anything. I just conjure him up and sit there with him, and he smiles at me. This isn’t like the movies. In the movies the main character is only sad for a few minutes. In the movies there are happy endings.”
He dissolves into tears. Annie wants to burn the world to the ground for hurting him. She’ll settle for asking Jeff to come with her to desecrate Pierce’s grave.
“Abed, sweetie, there are still—”
The phone rings. She picks up. Britta screams and sobs about how she’s bleeding, she’s gonna die, she drove while high and now her car’s rammed into a pole and smoking and everything’s getting blurry—
Annie grabs Abed’s hand and pulls him shrieking out of the apartment. She calls Jeff on the way over. He gets there five minutes after them, when they’re watching Britta be loaded into an ambulance by murmuring EMTs, her face covered with a white sheet.
“Oh my god,” Jeff says, swallowing. He’s holding Annie’s hand too hard, and she’s crying. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”
Abed turns to them with a blank look. His eyes are dry and shining, like headlights in the rain.
“This is the darkest timeline,” he tells them, and Jeff sobs so brittlely Annie can taste its despair in her toes.
look at where we are.
look at where we started.
i know i don’t deserve you—
but hear me out; that would be enough!
if i could spare his life—
if i could trade his life for mine—
he’d be standing here right now, and you would smile,
and that would be enough.
— Lin-Manuel Miranda
It’s been a decade since Troy left. Abed won’t go outside anymore.
The letter that Troy has been declared dead comes in the middle of the night, and Annie is the one to open the door. She damn near breaks down crying right there, but holds in her quivering lips and bleeding eyes until she’s broken Abed down first.
He doesn’t say a word, and that’s the scariest thing. Annie says, “Um, Abed… Troy’s dead,” and Abed just nods, stands up from his bed, and walks into the Dreamatorium. Annie’s already pulling up Jeff’s number when she realizes Abed’s left the door open, and is tearing down the tape and the paint and the engine. He’s pulling apart his dreams, his fantasies, his own version of Troy who comes home for him, and at the horrific sight, Annie finally succumbs to her sadness.
Jeff, called at three a.m. by the platonic love of his life only to hear shrieking, sobbing, and crashing on the other end, drives over in his pajamas, breaking fifty-something speed limits along the way. Annie gives him the letter with trembling hands and he pulls her into him, crying too. Abed finally stops his vicious warpath and drops to the floor, spent and gone. Jeff pulls him close too, wrapping himself around them both, as if he can keep the grief from reaching them so long as he just keeps a barrier between them and the world with his own body.
But he can’t, and the grief comes anyway, quickly, without mercy. Annie didn’t even know she was still hoping, but she must’ve been, because this feels like a whole new heartbreak from the one she felt when Troy first left, and was first taken. She tries to breathe through her sobs and thinks of the baby inside of her, the one she and Jeff asked to have medically implanted, the one she’s going to have in seven months, and she cries as she thinks of how Troy will never meet him.
Sebastian is born three weeks early. His middle name is Barnes, after Troy, and Abed is the third person to hold him. He hasn’t made a movie since they heard the news, working as a secretary for a boss who doesn’t have the chance to hate his antics because he no longer indulges in them.
Annie finds herself sleepwalking to the medicine cabinet in the middle of the night. Jeff’s got more bottles of Jack Daniels than he’s had in the last eight years combined. They share a look over Sebastian’s sleeping head one night and throw everything they can afford to away.
Annie wonders what Abed is up to. She lives with Jeff now, with her husband and her son the way she should, and yet every night she wakes up to Sebastian’s cries expecting them to be Abed’s. But her baby’s screams are innocent, confused, and hungry, and Abed’s are devoid of innocence, filled to the brim with heartbreak, pain, and a gaping silence where his will to live used to be.
Annie forces Jeff to start seeing a therapist with her. She wonders if maybe it was a mistake, bringing a child into such a cold and unforgiving world. When she asks Jeff, in tears one night, he only stares at her, as if it’s a stupid question, and maybe it is, but she still doesn’t know what his answer is.
should’ve known, now i feel insane… am i insane?
i’ve waited way too long; yeah, i know you’ve changed.
you have a different face to me.
you say it’s all alright, but you’re not who’s up at night.
this feels like all a lie and nothing else is right.
you’re laced inside my mind.
i’m holding on, i know it’s wrong, but i can’t see your side.
and everything has changed; you’re only in my brain;
i can’t seem to let this be, but i guess i’ll refrain…
oh, you’re in my head, and i keep on forgetting.
oh, you’re here instead, and it seems never-ending.
oh, i know you’ve changed; you don’t feel the same.
oh, you’re in my head…
— Peter Manos
It’s been a two decades since Troy left. Abed has developed cardiomyopathy and mostly works from home.
Annie spends most of her days torn between Abed, Jeff, and Sebastian. Jeff’s gotten better at being self-sufficient, but he’s older now, and his knees are weak. She’s so young compared to him, enough so that strangers have started assuming he’s her father instead of her husband. She sort of hates it, but she also sort of understands.
He’s still handsome though. Still smart, still sarcastic, still kind. The person she loves is still there, beneath all the old and all the bitter, and that’s all that matters, really.
She’s driving Sebastian home from school when she gets the call from Andre. Shirley’s been dead for a year and six months now, fallen to cancer, and Andre’s getting married again. It’s been only six months, but he says he loves Mason, who Annie only knows as Sexy Dreadlocks, and he thinks it’s time. Life is short. Annie shrugs and agrees, congratulating him as she carries Sebastian’s backpack inside.
She gets him settled at the table, looking at Jeff on the couch, their coffee table covered in papers from his latest case. He’s trying to save a group of girls from their abusive group home, specifically one named Scarlett, who he met picking up Sebastian one day. He’s saved so many children by now—Anthony, Robert, Jeremy, Mark… Annie’s so proud of him. She almost can’t believe he was ever who he used to be.
“Abed called,” Jeff says when she kisses his head, tucking her skirt under her legs and sitting down beside him. “He wants you to come over, if you can. I offered to drive over there instead, but he said it had to be you.”
Annie guides Jeff’s head away from his work, pulling his face towards her for a kiss. She’s been pretending to be in love with him for ten years in front of other parents who don’t want to understand what queerplatonic partners are, and she’s gotten pretty fucking good at it. They don’t kiss very often anymore, but when they do, she feels warmth curl in her belly where Sebastian used to be, though it’s never butterflies like every romcom describes. Only a soft reminder of how good it feels to be close to someone she loves, even if it’ll never be like that.
That's okay. He doesn’t love her like that either.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll head over there now. You can order pizza for dinner. I love you.”
He answers in kind, and kisses her again, and she thinks of how much she misses him, even though they’re together every day. She decides to stop by Britta’s grave on her way home, hating how close together the years are on her tombstone, such a bright light cut short by the same sort of addiction that nearly befell Annie before she found her family. She’s sorry every day that that same family couldn’t save Britta the way it has saved her.
In Apartment 303, Abed is quiet. He’s sitting in Troy’s letterman jacket and his old green pajamas, breathing steadily. He’s watching the TV and eating buttered noodles. If it weren’t for the silver hairs starting to creep from his scalp and the wedding ring burning through her finger, she’d almost think it was back then again. The good old days.
“Hi, Abed,” she says, setting her bag down by the door. “How are you, sweetie?”
Abed doesn’t look away from the screen. It’s not playing anything.
“I told Troy I loved him in season one,” he says, as if that’s an answer. “He said no, which I guess makes sense. I’ve always hated the miscommunication trope more than the unrequited love one, but I changed my mind that day. Because every time he looked at me he knew, and I couldn’t hide from him anymore. It was the only time I ever regretted telling him the truth. I guess maybe best friends should lie to each other sometimes.”
Annie didn’t know that. Then again, there’s a lot of things she doesn’t know about Abed. He changes so much that at some point she just gave up on keeping track.
Troy never did.
“I’m sorry,” she says, even though she’s not sure she means it, because in a way she’s almost happy that Troy died knowing somebody loved him like that, so fiercely and so beautifully, because she can’t imagine dying not knowing Jeff loves her. “Is that why you called for me? Jeff said you called for me.”
Abed looks up at her then. He wrinkles his nose.
“No. I called you here because I missed you and we’re friends. What do you wanna watch?”
Annie’s heart breaks in her chest again. She hides it with a smile.
“Whatever you want, buddy,” she says, laying her head on his shoulder, but it sounds more like I miss you too than anything else, and she does. Still.
Always.
sleep on me; feel the rhythm in my chest, just breathe.
i will stay, so the lantern in your heart won’t fade.
kiss my lips; feel the rhythm of your heart and hips.
i will pray, so the castle that we’ve built won’t cave.
the secrets you tell me, i’ll take to my grave.
there’s bones in my closet, but you hang stuff anyway.
and if you have nightmares, we’ll dance on the bed.
i know that you love me, love me,
even when i lose my head!
(guillotine.)
— Jon Bellion, Travis Mendes
It’s been a quarter of a century since Troy left. Abed dies by sleeping pills with a note under his pillow reading just pretend like you’re asleep.
Annie’s the one the landlord calls. Abed leaves her and Jeff all of his things, and Troy’s too, because of course those were left to Abed in some heartbreakingly unspoken way when Troy left all those years ago. Abed is buried in his old green pajamas and a blue hoodie Troy used to wear whenever they watched Kickpuncher 3. Annie doesn’t let herself cry, terrified that if she starts she won’t ever stop.
She tasks Jeff with helping her decide what to keep. Sebastian takes the trash bags full of clothes and movies to donate out to the car, where he drives them carefully to the nearest Savers using his newly printed learning permit and a nervous yet sweet excitement. In the end they have only one box of Troy and Abed things they can’t let go, including their Inspector Spacetime and Constable Reggie costumes, their Kickpuncher DVDs, and the remains of the Dreamatorium engine. Lastly, buried at the bottom, there’s a single unmarked disc, in impeccable shape and a plain, transparent CD case.
Annie pulls it out while Sebastian and Jeff are out at the park. Sebastian’s taken to long walks in the sun, headphones blasting Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey while Jeff rolls his eyes and tries not to be too offended by the well-meaning passersby who assume he’s Sebastian’s grandfather.
He’s getting so old. They both are.
The disc takes a minute to start up. For a moment Annie worries that they’ve broken it somehow, then that maybe there was never anything on it in the first place, then panics at the thought that she might miss out on Abed’s greatest masterpiece and fail him in the most horrible and terrible way by throwing it away without a second thought. But eventually, after an agonizing sixty seconds, it starts playing without trouble, and the first word from the speakers is enough to send her flying into tears.
“Abed!” Troy exclaims adoringly from the screen, his smile young and infectious and so, so alive, and Annie cries and cries and cries the whole way through the one-hundred and seventy-two minute film compiled of every single moment Troy and Abed have ever spent together that Abed was lucky enough to have had his camera out for. As she slips the disc back inside its protective case, still hiccuping with sobs, she feels a crease under her fingers, and pulls out a small note with a single number on it, clearly erased over and over and over again throughout the years.
9125
The number of days since Troy left. The number of days Abed watched this film immortalizing him. The number of days Abed lived after half his soul caved in.
Annie cries so hard she can’t breathe, working herself into her first and last panic attack. She still remembers how it felt to die, again and again and again as her heart failed to beat right.
She puts the disc and the note back inside the case. She fusses with the rest of the items, feeling their reality beneath her fingers, willing it to calm her.
And then, folded and taped into Abed’s bowler hat, she finds a ragged and winkled piece of paper, its creases worn and well-loved. A certificate. Signed by Troy Barnes and Abed Nadir the day Troy left, never to return. A paper that Annie sits there holding in her hands until Jeff gets home three hours later, tears streaming down her cheeks without sobs, no cries left within her.
“What is it?” Jeff asks her, placing his gentle hands on her arms. He sends Sebastian up the stairs away from his catatonic mother, not bothering to reassure him she’ll be okay. He’s still the same old Jeff she met in 2009 when there were still stars in her eyes and magical people in the world. “What is it, sunshine?”
Annie doesn’t move. She waits for him to take the paper, and she waits for him to read the same words she has, and she waits for him to cry.
And cry he does, over the death that parted Troy Barnes and Abed Nadir far too soon, and that parts them even now, that parts them even still, and Annie cries with him and they both cry together and Sebastian makes dinner.
when i start to tumble from the sky, you remind me how to fly.
lately, i’ve been feeling unalive, but you bring me back to life.
but when he loves me, i feel like i’m floating;
when he calls me pretty, i feel like somebody;
even when we fade eventually to nothing,
you will always be my favorite form of loving.
— Beach Bunny
It’s been half a century since Troy left. Abed has been gone for twenty-five years.
It feels like it was yesterday. Annie’s hands are wrinkled now, and Jeff is on death’s door. Sebastian has a daughter of his own now, named Letitia. Her older brother Chadwick died, leaving her in Sebastian’s care, and he does everything he can for her, keeping her as happy as humanly possible with his husband, a man named Chris Rogers who he met at a frat party in college. (Neither of them are even in a frat.) Annie doesn’t see her son very often anymore, but she still loves every single moment she gets to spend with him.
Duncan died of alcohol poisoning a couple years ago. It seems his drinking problem never really got solved, and Jeff sort of sunk into himself after that. Annie is by his side when he finally succumbs to old age, passing away in his sleep with a glass of scotch half full on his bedside table. She calls up Sebastian the next day to tell him his father’s gone. It’s the worst day of her life.
She can’t stay in their house anymore. Memories of her husband are everywhere, alongside memories of her beloved family of whom she’s the last one standing, all the brightness they loved in her diminished down to gummy smiles. She tells Sebastian she’s going home, and buys Apartment 303 again with what money of Pierce’s she can get her hands on. It’s got a few more stains than it used to, and the dead Dreamatorium has been painted over, but she still feels like it’s been waiting for her all this time, so she paints it back black and puts up the orange tape and pulls the broken engine from her box of Troy and Abed things and hopes she can get it working again, even though there may be a few kinks.
As she’s putting the blanket fort back up, this time content to sleep inside it, she steps on a creaky floorboard and nearly falls right through as it breaks beneath her foot. Catching her balance and then her breath, she leans down on her aching knees and pulls the broken plank out of the hole, finding a stash of yellowed papers beneath it.
She sits down on her bed, in the exact same spot Troy and Abed’s used to be (she remembers), and reads over the hundreds of letters in her hands, shared between Troy and Abed back during the wartorn days of Pillowtown and Blanketsburg. Feeling guilty, she adds some pillows to her blanket fort before sitting back down again, her eyes glistening as she takes in all their stupid words, their movie references and TV quotes, their bad grammar and punctuation spelling out their love for one another across enemy lines.
The letters are hopelessly romantic, in every sense of the word. She puts them in the Troy and Abed box, underneath the bowler hat holding their marriage certificate, and she puts the box inside the Dreamatorium and closes the door.
She doesn’t fix the floorboard. That hole is a permanent fixture of her life now. She looks at the pictures of Abed and Troy on the walls, at how big and innocent their grins are, and then at the picture of Jeff she keeps on her bedside table, and she smiles.
She thinks she’s starting to understand.
you said, “forever,” in the end i fought it.
please be honest, are we better for it?
thought you’d hate me, but instead you called me,
and said, “i miss you.”
i caught it.
you said, “forever,” and i almost bought it.
i miss fighting in our old apartment.
breaking dishes when you’re disappointed—
i still love you, i promise.
nothing happened in the way i wanted.
every corner of this house is haunted.
and i know you said that we’re not talking—
but i miss you, i’m sorry.
i don’t wanna go; think i’ll make it worse—
everything i know brings me back to us.
i don’t wanna go; we've been here before—
everywhere i go leads me back to you.
— Gracie Abrams
It’s been three-quarters of a century since Troy left. Abed has been gone for fifty years.
Annie lives alone in Apartment 303. There are pictures of her family everywhere. The neighbors check in on her, along with Sebastian and Chris, who have their own grandchildren now. She tries to act happy when they come over, and she is happy, in a way, but there’s a part of her missing ever since Jeff passed away, and even twenty-five years without him haven’t done anything to lessen the well of emptiness inside of her, even if the hurt has become more of an aching pain than a sharp stab of longing.
She tells her great-grandchildren the same stories about her family as she did to her granddaughter, and to her son. She hates the fact that she outlived all of them, even though she knows that she’s the youngest, so she should’ve. She tried to visit Greendale awhile back, but it had been taken over by City College. The only thing left of it was a plaque dedicated to Dean Pelton, which had been thrown along with all of his costumes into a dirty cart in the back of the theatre department. Annie doesn’t cry over them, but she thinks about it all the way home.
There, she opens the Dreamtorium for the first time since she moved in and turns off the engine, taking it apart and putting it back in the box of Troy and Abed things. She walks around the house, filling the box up to the brim—with a few of Shirley’s sweaters and pie recipes, with Britta’s leather jacket and unfinished feminist manifestos (all terribly bad), with Pierce’s empty pill bottles and cookie wand (surprisingly still intact even after hours of playtime), with Jeff’s old phone (sporting all their old cringey contacts) and journals (which he started filling out soon after she told him to at war, and which he gave to her upon his death, along with a written guide pointing her to all the pages where all he did was gush and gush about how lucky he was, is, to have and have had her). With her own purple pens, and pastel cardigans, and barrettes, and the marriage certificate she and Jeff signed over seventy years ago, at her proposal. She puts all of it in, without discrimination and without doubt.
She reads all of Troy and Abed’s letters again before going to bed. She drinks a cup of tea while putting the letters back in the box, then closes it for the last time, writing The Study Group on its side. She stares at the words for an hour before heaving herself up again with too much effort and scratching it out with furious Sharpie scribbles, writing instead My Family. She remembers to turn the lights off this time and gets into bed, falling asleep.
She breathes until twelve-fifty-three, and then she doesn’t. The box is buried with her, at Sebastian’s weepy request.
we don’t believe what’s on tv,
because it’s what we want to see.
and what we want we know we can’t believe.
we have all learned to kill our dreams.
i need to know that when i fail, you’ll still be here.
cause if you stick around, i’ll sing you pretty sounds,
and we’ll make money selling your hair…
i don’t care what’s in your hair,
i just wanna know what’s on your mind.
i used to say i wanna die before i’m old,
but because of you, i might think twice.
— twenty-øne piløts
It’s been a century since Troy left. Abed has been gone for seventy-five years.
The Study Group is gone. Greendale is gone. The Dreamatorium is gone. The world lives on.
Sebastian and Chris live on. Letitia lives on. Elijah, Jordan, and Ben live on. And so do their grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and so on and so forth, forever and onwards. The world lives on.
The anniversary rolls around, and the headline news of the day is of a sunken pirate ship found off the cost of Los Angeles, holding the DNA-matched corpses of Troy Barnes and LeVar Burton. LeVar’s body is given back to his family, who have him buried with his wife, and Troy is buried with Abed, who is the only written record of family they have left for him. The world does not mourn them. The world does not care. The world lives on.
In Troy’s closed hand when he is found is a bottle. It holds an old piece of paper, one that’s ninety-four years old at least, and nobody dares to read it. Troy’s body is buried with the bottle still in his hand, no mortician willing to take the risk of breaking his fingers for a peek.
I’ll let you in on the Study Group’s last secret—
The paper reads,
im coming back for you, inspector spacetime.
The paper reads,
goodbye, buddy.
The paper reads,
i love you, abed.
The paper reads,
help.
The paper
is blank.
cause we are, we are shining stars.
we are invincible; we are who we are.
on our darkest day, when we’re miles away,
we will come, we will find our way home.
— fun.
It’s been a week since Troy left. Abed notices.
Annie watches him sleep. He’s wearing Troy’s blue hoodie, and his old green pajamas. The TV is still playing Inspector Spacetime, but quietly enough for it not to matter. She’s too tired to be awake anymore, but she feels like if she leaves him for even a moment, he might disappear. So she stays, listing Spanish terms in her head to keep her eyes open, reminding herself to give Britta and Shirley her notes tomorrow because god knows they won’t do it themselves.
Abed suddenly sits up, his eyes wide open, and Annie shrieks, dropping her phone to the ground. Abed looks at the phone, then looks at her, then sets his eyes on the door, staring.
After a one-hundred-and-seventy-two seconds, counted along with the frantic rhythm of her heartbeat, Annie reaches for his shoulder.
“He’s home,” Abed suddenly says, and throws off the covers.
“What—” Annie says, and that’s when the knocking starts.
Abed sprints across the apartment and nearly falls into the door in his rush to open it, staring at his dream in orange and blue pajamas with a bottle in his hand.
“I couldn’t leave you,” Troy says, breathless, and Abed smiles. Troy beams, stepping forward until he can grasp Abed’s face. “I couldn’t leave you, I just couldn’t leave you, I could never leave you—”
Troy cuts himself off, kissing Abed as if the world won’t start spinning again until he does, and, unbelievably, Annie feels the ground shift beneath her feet as their lips meet. She watches them, cradled together in the doorway in their pajamas, their faces splitting and merging in their joy, their hearts beating in time, and for the first time in all her years lets herself admit that maybe Pierce’s death really was for the best.
“I love you,” Abed says, and Troy beams at him and tackles him back into the blanket fort, the two of them disappearing behind bright pink sheets. But Annie can still see their silhouettes. She can still hear their laughter. They are still there, still here, outside of her head and breathing, together. Together.
Together.
Annie, on a whim, calls up Jeff and tells him she loves him.
please
don’t
ever become a stranger
whose laugh
i
could recognize anywhere.
— Taylor Swift