"I'm your moon, you're my moon, we go round and round
From out here it's the rest of the world that looks so small
Promise me you will always remember who you are
Who you were, long before they said you were no more."
They both have bad days. There are days when Abed can't talk, and there are days when Troy can't do anything else. There are days when Abed doesn't want to be touched, and days when Troy feels like he's going to fall apart if no one hugs the shattered pieces back into place.
They try to make sure these days never coincide.
It's not a perfect system, but it's the best one either of them has ever had.
It's on an entirely different type of day, one where Abed says he's going float away if no one holds him down, that a metaphor strikes Troy. It happens while they're entangled and Troy is acting like a human blanket because Abed says that the weight helps, lifts the fog out of his mind and makes him able to think straight again.
Troy isn't exactly thinking straight right now, but that's beside the point.
The point being that he is getting stealth-attacked by a literary device. It surprises him, because Abed is usually the one with strung-out metaphors to help him make sense of the world. It doesn't stop him from blurting it out, though.
"You're Pluto."
Abed blinks at him, and Troy thinks this might be the first time Abed's really been able to look at him in an hour at least.
"Like the dog? Because as far as cartoon dogs go, I've always felt more connected to Snoopy. Pluto is really confined to his interactions with others, whereas Snoopy-"
"Not the dog," Troy interrupts, "The-uh-you know, the planet."
"Pluto isn't a planet anymore."
The metaphor is already on the verge of falling apart, but Troy powers onward. "I know. I took astronomy in Freshman year, remember?"
"We didn't have as many plotlines together back then," Abed reminds him. But he's nodding. Clearly he remembers (if only because Abed doesn't really forget anything).
"Well, I don't remember much about that class," Troy admits. "But I remembered Pluto, because it really-" there's no other way of putting it- "wrinkled my brain. Okay, so Pluto's got this moon, right? And it's called Charon. I think. Anyways, Pluto's really small, or Charon's really big, or something, and they're almost the same size, and the gravity works out so they don't orbit each other. They face each other and orbit everything else together. It's like they're each other's moons."
Considering the way Abed starts smiling less than half-way through this monologue, Troy figures he already knew the information, just hadn't quite found a way to incorporate it into his elaborate world of symbolism yet. He seems pleased to have a place to file it away now. He thinks this all over for a long moment. "Why am I Pluto?" He questions finally.
"Because you just-are," Troy says, and it occurs to him that in freshman year he would have wanted to be Pluto, because Pluto was bigger and cooler and people had heard of it. Or he would have wanted to be another planet entirely because really, Pluto wasn't that big or that cool.
Now he was perfectly content with letting Abed be Pluto, as long as they got to orbit together like that.
"Do you think," Troy continued suddenly, "that Pluto was bummed when they said it couldn't be a planet anymore?"
Abed considers for a moment too long. No one says anything about this being December 9th, but the date is stamped into their collective consciousness, so maybe Abed knows a thing or two about being Pluto today.
"Maybe," he concedes after a few minutes. "I think after so many years it doesn't like being told it isn't good enough."
Troy allows his head to sink onto Abed's chest, nodding slightly as he does so.
No one says anything about how, in two weeks or so, Troy's family will call just to remind him that he is no longer welcome on the day when they all get together and avoid the reality of Christmas, because he spends his December 9ths like this. On that day, he figures Abed will let him be Pluto if he wants or needs to be.
That's all he's expecting, or asking for. And no, it's not a perfect system. But they make it work.
Troy thinks that's what you do when you're someone's moon.