Work Text:
A young man stands in his kitchen, staring into his refrigerator. Approximately nineteen years ago he was born, and six years ago, he was given a name. These numbers mean very little to him now, and in time they will mean even less.
Your name is John Egbert, and you aren’t quite sure what you’re supposed to be doing.
Well, no, that’s only partially true. You’re standing in front of your fridge, staring blankly at the well-stocked shelves and scratching at three days worth of scruff on your chin. You should be deciding what to eat, but nothing looks appetizing. This has been the case every time you’ve opened the fridge doors over the last hour, but you still keep checking.
So you know what you’re supposed to be doing right now, at this exact moment, but that just seems to make your overall lack of direction even more crushing.
It’s been just over three years since you and your friends beat Sburb. You won the game, and your prize was a whole new world. It’s developed into a bizarre mishmash of earth familiarity and alien bizarreness, although you don’t see much of either, tucked away in your little corner of the consort kingdom. Your friends reach out to you sometimes- Dave sends you pictures of Jade and Karkat scaling shitty Libertys. He invites you to come hunt for them, but you always come up with an excuse to stay home. Jane gives you brief updates on CrockerCorp, and tells you that you’ve got just as much a stake in the company as she does, if you want it. You tell her you wouldn’t have the first idea what to do as a CEO. Rose tells you about the brooding caverns, how busy she and Kanaya are seeding the source of an entire species. She invites you to come visit, but honestly, the caverns just look really gross. Besides, you wouldn’t want to interrupt their married life. The only person you message first anymore is Terezi, and even then, it’s not like she’s actually around these days.
While your friends unearth jpeg relics and start companies and rebuild a species from the ground up, you mope around your house, trying not to look at the birthday banner that you never bothered to take down. Sometimes you watch movies, or play video games, but nothing really holds your interest. Usually you spend your days lounging in bed like a sad sack and scrolling through social media. All of your friends are living their lives, and you can’t even choose what to eat for lunch. How are you supposed to figure out what you’re going to do with the rest of your immortal life?
The refrigerator spits lukewarm air at you. It’s been open for too long, but you just keep staring at the shelves, torn with indecision. You have milk for cereal, but the box of Apple Jacks is almost empty, and you hate the grainy dust that accumulates at the bottom of the bag. There’s leftover pizza, but you’re not quite sure how long it’s been in there, and you aren’t about to open the box and find out. There’s fresh vegetables and some chicken, but you don’t have it in you to cook an actual meal.
Maybe if you try again later, something will appeal to you. Just leave it alone for a bit, and an answer will jump out at you like it was always there. You’ll feel silly for waffling over it for so long.
You shut the refrigerator.