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The director stood centered in a circle of actors and crew, lifting his hands from his sides in grandiose motions, the silent attention of the dozens of people surrounding him making him feel larger than life. He was the real star of the production, and the gravitas in his voice showed he was not uncomfortable with that fact.
“How do we come back from doing something unforgivable? Is rehabilitation possible? When we do horrible things, are we evil or insane? Where do we draw the line between the two? Are we better than the worst things we’ve done? These are the questions I hope you’re all considering through the next couple weeks–”
Abed felt sick. He wanted to go home, despite the fact that these questions were much harder to face there than they were here. He wanted to drive from the lot on the soundstage, straight through Nevada and Utah, and land at the doorstep of the apartment he hasn’t lived in for years, walk back into a time before he’d done what he did. The closest he could get was to sneak out the back door and light a cigarette he sucked down with a marked urgency.
…
He had always loved Jeff. It was impossible to recall a time when he didn’t, even before they met, Abed had always felt like he was waiting for something, for someone who could give him a reason for why he’d ended up on this planet where nothing ever fit right. His whole life had been spent in limbo, incubating, developing, but always watching from the outside, always waiting to be let in. At one point, he’d thought maybe Jeff had brought him into the real world and had finally shown him how to integrate into the places he’d always been just outside of. Now, he knew that he had just taken Jeff with him to the fringe, out just beyond the margins of everyone else. Sometimes, he considered where they’d both be had they never met. Jeff would be a raking in cash as a criminal defense attorney. Abed would probably, definitely be dead. It wasn’t that hard to admit, considering it was some kind of miracle that he was alive even now.
Things changed somewhere between their fourth and fifth seasons. It started when Abed refused to continue work on Jeff’s commercial. The number 555 was derivative, and he didn’t like the uncomfortable chill it sent down his spine despite being nothing more than a series of shapes. “ I’m just crazy like that ,” he’d told him, and Jeff replied, “ Don’t I fuckin’ know it ”. They argued for a little longer after that, back and forth, Jeff getting louder and Abed raising his voice to match, Jeff doing that thing where his face scrunched up and he ran his hand through his hair five times a second. Then he stepped in close to Abed, kept encroaching until Abed’s heels hit the wall right next to the only thing Jeff had hanging up, a photo of the study group from years before. Truthfully, he’d been scared for a moment—instinctually shying away with a fear of being hit, a bone-deep reminder of the number of times he’d been in this position in middle school. It seemed for a second like Jeff was planning to push him, bunching the front of Abed’s shirt up in his hand, but then he kissed him instead, crashed their mouths together violently.
It was the most amazing sensation Abed had ever felt, and he knew instantly that there was a version of him that existed before this, and a new, altered one that he would be walking away as. They didn’t say anything else, just tore each other’s clothes off between panting breaths and long glances that never seemed to fully translate between one another.
That version, of course, didn’t last very long. They hooked up a couple times, which included nothing resembling eye contact, but the occasional shared laugh and one unfortunate nosebleed from Jeff. Then Troy left, and with him that iteration of Abed, the one who held all his hopes and dreams and plans for the future. Two weeks after that was the worst day of his life up until that point. Not that he’d managed to beat that record in the years since, but he got pretty damn close. He kept sleeping with Jeff through it all because only so many things could change at once before reality fell apart, and he’d already lost his best friend.
Reality managed to fall apart anyway. It was on a beautiful afternoon, chilly but not cold, a blue, cloudless, perfect sky, sort of the way people who had been in New York on September 11th described the morning. Jeff had brought him back to his condo instead of driving him home after study group. He’d been ignoring the signs for weeks: the paranoia, the shadows of Troy that passed through walls, the way he scared himself driving because he swore he saw people or animals standing on the side of the road. They didn’t discuss it, didn’t discuss anything, but Abed remembered feeling a pleased sort of anticipation sitting in the passenger seat of Jeff’s car while he drove like a complete asshole. Like everything that was wrong could be righted just by sticking close enough to Jeff’s side.
The whole thing gets sort of patchy from there, huge gaps in his memory that no sort of therapy or interrogation could seem to resolve. Truthfully, he didn’t really want to remember, which probably didn’t do anything to help. What he did remember was going up to Jeff’s place, leaning on his shoulder while he unlocked the door because he liked the smell of his cologne. Then: getting undressed and strapping Jeff into the restraints on his bed, which wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary, it wasn’t like he was even the only person Jeff ever used these with. From there, Abed’s memory cuts out abruptly. Trying to remember it feels like reaching too close to a memory of when he was a little kid, blurry around the edges and slipping away if he tries too hard to grab on.
Here’s what the cops told him, during the week he spent in jail while Jeff was in the hospital: he returned to the room with a long, serrated knife pulled from the wooden block on his kitchen counter, held Jeff down, and cut his arm off. At least, got so close to cutting his arm off that there was really nothing for the doctors to do in the emergency room except finish the job. According to Jeff, he’d talked about the darkest timeline while tying a shockingly effective tourniquet, and even when he pulled out the knife Jeff was laughing, sure that he was just having one of his moments, playing some kind of character. Then he’d torn the knife through Jeff’s skin, still talking about the darkest timeline, some twisted sort of logic telling him that taking Jeff’s arm off was the only way to fix everything that had fallen apart outside his control. The screaming was loud enough that practically everyone on Jeff’s floor called 911, and they got there just as Abed was becoming frustrated with how long it was taking to cut through Jeff’s bone.
Jeff woke up four days after losing somewhere around half the blood in his body, and a few days after that was present enough to decline to press charges against him, which was gracious, to say the least. Shirley picked him up from jail, the only one of the group still willing to see him after what he’d done, and even she didn’t look him in the eye as she drove him straight to an inpatient mental hospital. Britta kept vigil at Jeff’s bedside, never sleeping more than an hour at a time and eating nothing but granola bars and fruit cups for two weeks. Annie cleaned out Jeff’s condo after they found out how much a biohazard crew would cost, which involved cleaning literal liters of blood, throwing out most of the furniture in his bedroom, and ripping up the carpet.
Abed spent the following six months at the hospital, where he spent equal time coloring pictures of various woodland creatures and screaming into his pillow in utter disbelief at what he’d done while psychiatrists experimented with various iterations and dosages of antipsychotic medication. When he wasn’t doing those things he was writing letters to Jeff that he never sent, ones that apologized for not knowing how to apologize thousands of times over. He gained twenty pounds, had near-constant muscle tremors, spent weeks unable to get out of bed, and had to be stopped from attempts to cut his own arm off on a couple occasions. Every doctor there agreed it would be best for them both if they never spoke again, and a decent number of them stood there in abject horror when a guy missing his right arm was there to pick Abed up when he was discharged.
The first thing Abed said was ‘ I’m so sorry ’. The first thing Jeff said was ‘ I missed you ’. He’d never loved anyone more. He’d never hurt anyone more, either.
…
Jeff looked up from the tabloid magazine sitting open on his lap. “Hey, how was work?”
“Fine,” Abed murmured, sitting down next to Jeff and leaning his head on his shoulder. The fact that his arm ended a few inches above where his elbow would be was entirely impossible to ignore. However, he’d barely registered the prosthetic arm sitting on the coffee table. That much, at least, had begun to feel commonplace. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, babe,” Jeff replied, not even bothering to ask Abed what he was referring to when there was nothing else he was ever referring to, “You know it is.”
“It’s not. It never will be.”
“Well, it happened,” Jeff shrugged, “I mean, do you ever think that maybe you had a point?”
“Never,” Abed answered. Every single second of the two years since the cops had knocked down Jeff’s door to now had been a single, unending nightmare that Abed was constantly begging to wake up from.
“I guess what I mean is– well it sucks, and I remember how fucking bad it hurt before I passed out pretty much every night when I’m trying to fall asleep, but now that I’ve adjusted– my life is better now than it had been. I’ve got you, and I’m less self-conscious, which doesn’t really make sense, but I sort of realized no one cares how much I weigh when I’m missing a whole arm, and you and I are actually together, which I sort of doubt would’ve happened otherwise–”
“So what, you think it was a good thing that I cut your fucking arm off ?” Even saying the words made bile rise in his throat.
“Well, right before, you said ‘ I wish I didn’t have to do this ’, and I guess sometimes I believe it. That you had to, for things to turn out right in the end. You’ve always had premonitions.”
“ Premonitions are delusions disguised as preternatural ability,” Abed said. This was a direct quote from his favorite psychologist from his hospital stay. “You sound crazy.”
“You’re one to talk, babe.” Jeff grinned, and Abed knew he didn’t mean it, not in any real sense.
Abed obviously didn’t have much of a comeback for that one. He wondered though, if he’d hurt Jeff’s mind and his body in equal measure. He was shockingly happy, the first year after the incident was a long road to recovery, during which he was angry and frustrated and upset and mourning what his life had been before this came in and complicated it, but none of those feelings had ever been directed towards Abed. Sometimes, it felt like Jeff thought some unseen force had taken his arm off, some fictional Evil Abed rather than the one directly in front of him. But Abed had nothing to complain about, not when he went back to his apartment and Jeff had moved in there, and his first night home they slept in the same bed, and then just kept doing that every night afterwards. Abed would dream about Jeff, the same dreams he’d had for years, just the two of them together in Jeff’s car, or at the study room table, or in the back of Duncan’s Anthropology classroom, talking about things he could never quite recall. He’d wake up in the middle of the night and be halfway convinced he’d imagined the last two years. Then he’d see Jeff’s arm, the scarred end of his limb, the way his shoulder joint twitched in his sleep, or the prosthetic arm sitting on top of the dresser, and be reminded that what he’d done in a few minutes would be with Jeff for a lifetime.
“Hey, you know I don’t mean it,” Jeff said, leaning over to kiss Abed on the cheek, “And I know you think I suffer endlessly now, but I promise, I really don’t. Things are frustrating, or uncomfortable, occasionally awkward, but I adjusted. Evolved . I didn’t know I could do that.”
“This better not end with you thanking me for trying to kill you.” Abed said, getting up from the couch and heading over to the kitchen, Jeff following behind him. He pulled the water pitcher from the fridge, and Jeff held out his glass for him to fill.
“You weren’t trying to kill me,” Jeff said after downing half the glass, a long enough pause that Abed would’ve forgotten what they were talking about if only he had the ability to forget, “Everyone thinks I’m crazy when I say that, but you weren’t.”
They’d learned to work in tandem, figuring out exactly what Jeff could do and what he needed help with, how to fill the gaps for one another. He put a handful of potatoes in a bowl and passed them to Jeff to rinse. Jeff placed them on the cutting board for him to chop. Jeff put the pan out, turned the burner on and added oil, and pulled chicken out of the fridge while Abed started to cook. Sometimes, they worked so well together that Abed nearly forgot why he needed to actually learn how to tie shoes, why they’d bought an automated can opener, why Jeff would leave paperwork from the law office on his desk if it required the use of scissors and why all his button-up shirts had been exchanged for sweaters.
“Not sure it makes much of a difference what I intended,” Abed replied, “I mean, I’m pretty sure my intention had been to bring back my dead best friend by way of sawing through your humerus.”
Sometimes, it almost felt like it was for the best, that Abed would never have to see the look on Troy’s face when he told him what he’d done. It made him angry sometimes, the fact that Troy had left on a doomed journey, the fact that he was gone without a trace, the only evidence he’d ever existed at all his things in their shared bedroom.
Fourteen days after it had departed, the Childish Tycoon was found a little less than a hundred miles off the coast of California. Following an extensive search by the Coast Guard, the only item recovered was a cell phone that had once belonged to Levar Burton. Three days after that, both Troy Barnes and Levar Burton were declared dead. They had a vigil in the study room, practically the entire Greendale student body spilling out into the library. When it was Abed’s turn to speak, no words could come out. The only thought in his mind was how much he hated him for leaving. They’d donated most of his clothes after a year, given Shirley his action figures and stuffed animals for her sons. Abed had kept a few things, his old Kickpuncher t-shirt and his favorite sweater tucked away in his dresser drawer and both their matching mugs on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard, a few old notebooks from school, solely for the doodles in the margins. He no longer saw him out of the corner of his eye, but the feeling of being followed by his presence would never go away.
“And who could blame you for trying?” Jeff replied.
Well, just about anyone could blame him, and he’s pretty sure any sane person would . The girls had started to come around in the last few months, and he knew they still loved him deep down, but none of them could look at him directly or make conversation without it turning out awkward and stilted or be alone in a room with him. He scared them, and he understood why quite perfectly; he’d be terrified if he was in their shoes. He didn’t understand why Jeff wasn’t , even now.
They had started coming out to visit Jeff and Abed in California and invite them out to Atlanta or DC or Denver for the holidays, and on the good days Abed could forget the manner in which it all fell apart. Shirley, Annie, and Britta have mostly accepted their relationship, which, from their perspective, had run the gamut from confusing to unhealthy to life-threatening. They used to ask Jeff why he still let Abed touch him, how he slept in bed next to him at night, what was wrong with him that he started dating the guy that very nearly killed him while Abed sat there frozen. It reminded him of being a kid sometimes. Despite not having been one for decades, he could still feel it. Being stuck at the lowermost tier of production jobs and having a youngish-enough face, he’d learned to take it.
But now him and Shirley send cards back and forth, and he shares playlists with Britta, and Annie will hug him too tight and put her head on his shoulder while they tell stories about when they all lived together, and she was by far the easiest one to talk about Troy with.
He wasn’t sure if he was forgiven. He’d never ask, too scared to hear the answer. But he’d been evil and insane and somehow, he knew they still loved him anyway. That even when he’d been hurt by the way they talked about him, they still loved him. The same way he still loved Troy the whole time that he hated him for leaving and hated him even more for dying. So he went back to set the next morning, and in the slow, lulling moments between takes, he thought about everything they’d lost and wouldn’t be getting back, and decided he had no choice but to live with it.