Work Text:
Los Angeles isn’t how the movies promised. It’s flatter. Not emotionally — literally. The city stretches out forever like someone spilled buildings across a desert and called it urban planning. Abed takes the bus most days, headphones in, camera zipped up in his bag like a secret he’s not sure he’s allowed to use anymore. He works as a production assistant on a show that’s kind of like 30 Rock, but not really. He doesn’t hate it. He likes the set, the patterns of it — how every morning starts with the same call sheet, how the coffee is always bitter and the actors always tired, how his job is to stay quiet and hold things and fix problems before anyone notices them. It’s not creative work, exactly, but there’s a rhythm to it. A formula. He understands formulas.
He doesn’t talk much on set. He nods, smiles, carries cables, puts markers on the floor for eyelines, resets props when the background doesn’t match the continuity photos. Sometimes a writer says something clever and someone else laughs and for a second it almost feels like Greendale again, like the study room during a good bit, like laughter used to mean something. But mostly he listens. Observes. Catalogs. He’s gotten really good at watching people fall in love from a distance — co-stars, characters, people who get paid to make longing look effortless. He’s memorized the way tension builds in a scene: one glance, one brush of fingers, one unsaid thing. It’s always about what’s not said. That’s the trick. Everyone’s afraid of the line that breaks the spell.
He hasn’t heard from Troy in over three years.
He used to check his email obsessively, then less, then only when he needed to forward his W-9s. He still has Troy’s old messages saved in a folder marked “Africa Arc,” like it’s just a season he hasn’t finished rewatching yet. He doesn’t open them anymore. Not because it hurts too much — that’s a cliché, and Abed doesn’t do clichés unless they’re thematically earned — but because rereading them doesn’t change the fact that they stopped coming. The last message just says, “We lost Wi-Fi but we’re safe! Found a place with really cool goats. I’ll send pics when I can. Miss you.” There were no pictures. No follow-up. Just silence, like a show cut to black mid-sentence. He kept expecting a post-credits scene. A call. Anything. But nothing came.
Annie sends updates every few months. She’s in Washington D.C. now, doing something with the FBI, or maybe something near the FBI. Abed’s not entirely sure, and he doesn’t ask. Britta texts too, usually at weird hours, usually about things like rent or depression or trying to unionize her fellow bartenders at The Vatican. Jeff called once on New Year’s Eve and left a voicemail where he half-apologized for something, then got distracted and started singing part of a Third Eye Blind song before hanging up. He texts occasionally, but nothing more than check-ins. Abed supposes most of his time is spent with Britta. Shirley calls like an overbearing mother, but it helps. It makes him feel less lonely.
Only a little.
Nobody talks about Troy anymore. Not really. Not out loud. Like if you say his name, it’ll remind everyone how long it’s been since he left and how none of them really know what happened after that.
Abed does talk about him. Sometimes. Quietly. When he’s alone. Sometimes he says his name like it’s part of a scene direction. “Abed enters. Pauses. Thinks of Troy.” It helps, in a way. Makes the silence feel scripted. Like it’s supposed to be there.
His apartment is small and always kind of cold, even in summer. The kitchen has one window, and the fridge makes a rattling noise when it’s tired. There’s a photo on it, slightly crooked. Troy dressed as Ripley from Alien, Abed in his Han Solo vest, both of them younger and lit by string lights. Troy is laughing. Abed is looking at him like he doesn’t want to look anywhere else. He doesn’t remember who took the picture. Probably Annie. It just appeared in his backpack one day when he was unpacking in L.A., and he never moved it. The magnet holding it up is weak and falls off every few weeks, so he started using tape. Bright red, cartoon-themed tape he bought on impulse. It looks like it belongs in a different apartment, a brighter one.
He tries not to think about what that night felt like — the way Troy leaned into him during the group photo, the way their arms brushed like it meant nothing and everything at the same time. Abed catalogs things like that. Keeps a mental archive. Not because he can’t let go, but because he never got a final scene. No closing shot. No music cue. Just a slow fade-out and a lot of time.
He doesn’t date. He doesn’t say that like it’s tragic, just true. There’ve been people — a girl on set who liked his shirts, a guy who talked about film theory until Abed corrected him and the vibe died instantly. But nobody ever made him laugh like Troy did. Nobody looked at him like he was the center of the frame. And no matter how many times he edits footage or cuts to a new angle, the shot always feels empty. Like the best actor walked off set and never came back.
Sometimes, when the show wraps early, he goes to the pier and sits with his shoes off, just staring out at the water. He doesn’t swim. He just watches. Imagines a boat coming in. Imagines someone waving from the deck, calling his name. He knows it won’t happen, but that doesn’t stop the scene from playing in his head. Hope isn’t logical. Hope is a B-plot with no resolution and too much screen time. But it’s there.
He dreams about Troy, once in a while. Not the early Troy — not the one from the study group, not the goofball sidekick — but an older version. Tired eyes. Sunburned nose. Laugh lines. In the dream they’re sitting on the floor of the Dreamatorium, only it’s real this time, no blueprints on the walls, just sheets and light. Troy looks at him and says, “I missed you in every version of my story.” Abed wakes up before he can say anything back. He never dreams the endings. Just the middle. Just the part where everything still could be something else.
On set, someone drops a light during a rehearsal, and the crash makes everyone jump. Abed doesn’t flinch. He’s used to the sound of things falling apart. He resets the fixture, gaff tapes the cord, checks the levels. He’s efficient. Invisible.
He still has the voicemail saved on his phone. The last one Troy left before they lost contact. It’s mostly background noise — wind, static, maybe a goat. Then Troy saying something that cuts off at the end: “I just wanted to say—” Click. Nothing more. Abed used to imagine what came next. Still does, sometimes. Maybe “I just wanted to say I’m okay.” Or “I miss you.” Or “Don’t forget me.” Or, maybe, “I love you.” He doesn’t know. That’s the worst part. He’ll never know.
He records himself sometimes, late at night. Little monologues. Audio logs. Not for anyone. Just to keep his voice from forgetting how to speak honestly. One of them starts like this: “If you’re out there, I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re safe. I hope you haven’t erased me from your highlight reel.” He doesn’t send them. Just saves them. Adds them to the digital drawer labeled TT — Background. It’s full of scraps. Voice memos. Tweets. Their old (fake) morning show. A six-second video of Troy falling into a beanbag chair and shouting “YOLO!” with his arms outstretched. Abed watches that one a lot. It makes him feel both better and worse.
One time, he thought he saw him — walking past a food truck downtown, just a glimpse of his shoulders, his walk, the way he carried himself like he was listening to a beat nobody else could hear. Abed followed for three blocks before realizing it wasn’t him. The guy turned around and gave him a weird look, and Abed mumbled “Sorry, wrong timeline,” and left. It’s the fifteenth time that’s happened. He keeps count. It feels like something he should document, even if it never leads anywhere.
He narrates his life in second person sometimes. It helps create distance. “You’re doing fine. You’re holding it together. You’re functioning. You’re not thinking about what his laugh sounded like when he was tired or how he always slept facing the door like he was waiting for something.” That kind of thing. It’s easier than using “I.” Easier than admitting you still feel like you’re missing your scene partner in every shot.
When it rains — which it rarely does — Abed walks without an umbrella. Not because it’s cinematic, but because it reminds him of that episode they filmed during a thunderstorm, the way Troy grabbed his hand and said, “Don’t let the wind steal you.” It was a joke. But it stuck. Abed doesn’t let the wind steal him. He anchors himself to memory. He’s good at that.
The Dreamatorium blueprints are rolled up in his closet. He doesn’t look at them often. Doesn’t need to. He remembers every line. Every room. Every possibility. Sometimes he thinks about unrolling them, building a new version. A grown-up one. But he doesn’t have anyone to build it with.
If Troy came back — if he showed up at the door, if he said nothing, just stood there with that look he used to get when he forgot his line and hoped Abed would save the scene — Abed wouldn’t say anything. He’d just move aside. Let him in. Sit down. Maybe start a movie. Let the silence say everything else. He doesn’t need grand gestures. He just needs presence. He just needs him to be there.
But that’s not how it works. Not in real life. Not in this version of the script.
So Abed goes to work. He drinks burnt coffee. He resets props. He goes home. He watches old footage. He tapes the photo back up. He waits. And when people ask how he’s doing, he says, “Good. Just tired.” And that’s mostly true. The tired part, anyway.
And at night, when the city is quiet and the fridge is buzzing and the traffic hums like a distant laugh track, Abed whispers lines to himself in the dark, lines he never got to say, like:
“I loved you.”
“I didn’t know how to stop.”
“I still don’t.”
And the scene fades.
But he stays.
Just in case.