Chapter Text
You look at old photos and you don’t recognize yourself. It’s so funny to you, and you start with a snort, then a giggle, and then full-on hysterical laughter. You’re wheezing, barely able to breathe, choking on every bit of air you manage to get in.
Maybe this is how you die. Laughing yourself to death. Wouldn’t that be the most fucking hilarious death in the universe? Probably a just death. You double over when you think it could be heroic.
Tears are flowing down your cheeks and you hate yourself, so fucking deeply it aches, a hollow space in your gut. The Dave in these pictures is dead and gone; the only thing left of him is these ridiculous pictures, selfies taken in the stupidest ways imaginable.
If only Bro could see you now.
He never laughed much. When he did, it was a quiet chuckle that you didn’t register for a moment, and he was already leaving by the time it hit you, just when you started to get proud of yourself, because you finally did something right.
He left you a lot, and you wish it had made you independent. You wish you didn’t rely on other people for every-goddamn-thing. You’re a sham, barely a person. Your entire life revolved around him, and then when he died, it left you reeling. You never loved him, but you needed him.
And now where are you?
In your room, one you haven’t been in for years, surrounded by reminders of who you used to be. Who Bro molded you into (who you molded yourself into for him). And you don’t know if you ever really broke that mold, or if you just gave up, sank into the ground and became nothing instead.
“Bullshit poetry,” you mutter to yourself, wipe your eyes. You’re not laughing anymore. You drop down to sit on the messy floor, pictures all over the place, glossy prints getting smudged under you.
It’s funny, how much you avoided thinking about this. You distracted yourself for so long, managed to pack away all of this dumbass garbage, put it in a suitcase and buried it in the back of a closet full of shitty swords and cherry bombs. Maybe it’s because you didn’t have him that you floundered and failed your way through the meteor, managed to trick everybody into thinking you’re a real person, not an outline, just a bunch of pieces you’ve picked up throughout your life, vaguely in the shape of a person. If they looked too closely, they would realize there’s nothing there at all.
You tried to make yourself something once Bro was gone. Anything. You wanted so badly to be worth something, to be more than a failure.
Because you know that you are. You never lived up to what you were supposed to be—a hero.
Everybody else is. Anybody could look at your friends and call them heroes without hesitation. Bro was, too. But you’re the outlier here, not a hero, not anything.
Were you ever anything, really?
Even when Bro was alive, before this stupid game, you weren’t much. You couldn’t fight, couldn’t play music, couldn’t take pictures. Nothing measured up to his standards. And those were your standards then, right? You didn’t have any frame of reference, you just wanted to be like Bro. You wanted to matter.
But you never did. You know that, you’ve always known that, but it still stings. What stings even more is that you wish you had made him proud. You want that more than anything.
Here, among scattered selfies, you accept it. You don’t fight, it, because you’ve tried, you’ve argued with yourself for ages, but you can’t fool yourself.
You wish… You wish it was different. You wish everything was different. You wish you weren’t you.
Sometimes you wish you hadn’t played the game at all, hadn’t made it off Earth. At least if someone is dead, they have an excuse to be useless. You sure as hell don’t have that.
You don’t have anything.
x
John finds you there, appearing out of the wind. He lands softly next to you.
“Dave?”
“Hey, Egbert. What’s up, windbag? Ha, get it?”
He folds himself up next to you. “Wanna talk about it?”
No, of course you don’t. You don’t deserve the time or energy of anybody else. John’s been your best friend your whole life and he deserves so much better than you. And then there’s Jade, sweet, fantastic Jade, all wide-eyed excitement to just exist. And Rose, your sister, always so sharp and curious. John’s just the embodiment of good, of what is really means to be a hero.
Your friends are the kind of people who should create a new universe. And you don’t deserve them. A kind of resigned anger, acceptance that you’ll never be who you were meant to be, settles in your chest, thick and uncomfortable.
Bro told you that you were useless. You always hoped he was wrong.
But here he is, John, your best friend. Who kept in contact with you for years, along with Jade and Rose. You don’t understand why they’re here, when you’re so… you.
Are you that manipulative? You must have actually learned something from Bro. You knew you were good at it, every time your friends spoke to you and seemed happy. You tricked your way into their hearts, like a parasite.
A tiny, tiny voice in the back of your head says no.
Rose is too smart for that. Or overconfident enough to not realize? Jade’s so intuitive, she wouldn’t fall for it. Or maybe she’s naive. And John? John…
You wish he wasn’t looking at you like that, a puppy-dog expression trying to will you into doing whatever he wants. You see his face and you want to spill out your whole life, open up your chest to expose your insides. He could watch the gory mess inside you and you bet he would still say something nice.
Ha, nice guts.
He wouldn’t see the poison in you, black tar inching through your veins, holding together the bits and pieces you’ve stolen from others. So much of it was Bro.
So much of you is Bro.
It hits you like a punch to the throat. It’s him, you’re him. That’s what’s wrong with you.
A hero wouldn’t hurt a kid. A real hero wouldn’t do anything he did.
Sitting in your old room, with a quiet John beside you, something unravels. The puppet strings he’d still been pulling, always had been, they snap and you’re almost a real boy, trying to pick yourself up.
You still have time to become something. You can change. There’s still time. You can toy with time, slide your hands into the flow of the universe and manipulate it to your needs. You’re not hopeless.
You think about Bro’s dead body. You think I didn’t love him. Then you decide not to lie to yourself. I loved him.
All of your life has revolved around Bro.
It doesn’t have to anymore. It just took you three years to realize that. You look at your old pictures and it’s actually a little funny now, not in the scarily desperate hysterical way that it had been earlier, but in a mildly amusing way. Mostly it makes you sad, to think of who you were.
But now… now you can be something else.
“Yeah,” you finally say. “I wanna talk about it.”