LA didn't quite work out the way he'd planned it. It was loud, and noisy, and everybody lied, even when they were telling the truth. It was nothing like the movies and nobody really understood him. He lasted for about a season, he figured. It was about the right amount of time to give a show, to see if it developed into anything interesting, but this time there were no characters that he could see himself being involved with, and his arc was unpleasant. So he went back to where he belonged, where people could see his value and appreciate him. Maybe he just needed a spin-off first, in a familiar setting, before branching out into a whole new project. But Greendale wasn't quite the same with pretty much everyone gone…
It was a Friday evening and someone was screaming in the lockers. It was a high-pitched, panicky and distressed wail that went on and on, seemingly without pause for breath.
Georgia stopped in the middle of the hallway and listened. It was definitely coming from a locker, the third one on the right, next to the Wood Crafts classroom. The one with the faded 'I HEART GREENDALE' sticker. The 'HEART' was crossed out and someone had scrawled 'loathe' in black Sharpie instead.
The wail continued.
Georgia ran into the Wood Crafts room. It was late enough that even the staff had gone home – although, she thought, given that it was Greendale, that could mean it was any time after 1pm. She grabbed a claw hammer from a desk, where it lay next to a model of what might have been a dog, when viewed with charitable eyes and preferably without any light, and ran back out into the hall.
The wail had died down to a long, low moan now. She didn't waste any time, just stepped over to the locker.
"Cover your eyes," she said. "I'm hoping this works."
She wedged the end of the claw hammer into the gap between the locker door and the edge, and gave a quick shove. Something gave with a sharp, metallic twang and the door flew open.
Greendale's lockers were things of a bygone era, when schools had more money and fewer students. They were battered and dented and graffitied to within an inch of their grey, metallic lives. They weren't huge, but they were big enough that a slender person could fit inside, with a bit of enforcing.
The thin occupant of the locker was wedged in, his knees up to his chest and face buried, showing only dark, tousled hair. His arms wrapped around himself, long brown fingers twisted up in the fabric of what looked to be a baggy jumper. He was still moaning, a sound that set Georgia's teeth on edge.
"Hey," she said, putting down the hammer and dumping her bag next to her. "It's okay, the door's open now. You can come out."
He gave no sign that he had even heard her.
Georgia sighed, then sat down with her back to the locker doors beside the open one. "You're Abed Nadir, right? I remember you. You made films around campus. You were one of the Greendale Seven."
The wail stopped and an eerie silence filled the hallway. Georgia didn't turn, didn't look to see if he had moved – she knew he hadn't. But he was silent now, maybe listening. She continued talking, half to herself.
"I studied film for a bit, I was going to go into set design. I always thought that would be sort of neat, y'know, deciding what sort of things this character would have around their apartment, what sort of art or wallpaper or dishes or books…I mean, even if nobody ever looked at the books and they weren't even part of the story, you'd know, right? I mean, you'd have to know that they had the right books or DVDs on the shelves. It's such a big part of what makes a person, what they enjoy and so on."
There was the faintest sound from the locker beside her, as if someone had lifted their head and inched forward. She ignored it.
"All those little things just go into making a place feel right, y'know. It's not as obvious as the clothes that someone wears – I mean, if you look at Buffy then you get the characters just from what they wear. But you can't put them in a white box, they have to live somewhere, and it has to be believable – even if you're not looking at everything in it, everything has to work and be right."
"You'd have to account for character development. Things change. People move on. Season seven wouldn't be the same as season one."
His voice was slightly different from how she remembered it from the times she'd seen him speaking in front of others, such as when he'd made a movie where he'd explored religion on campus. It was as if he'd been someone else during those times, and this was him, the real Abed. He spoke quickly, his words in a hurry to get out in case maybe they were wrong, or the ideas were too tangled to let go of each other.
"That's true," she mused. "I watch different things now to what I did seven years ago. But there's still some old favourites that come back. Characters wouldn't change completely, they'd just grow and change in subtle ways. Like curling up under a blanket to watch episodes of your favourite show."
"Where you know the moves and everything's predictable."
She heard, rather than saw, the shuffle of his movement forwards. Then he was sat next to her on the dirty linoleum flooring, staring forwards across the hall to the opposite lockers. He was thinner than she remembered, with dark shadows around his eyes and hollows under his cheekbones.
"Sometimes predictable can be good," she agreed.