Chapter Text
Slowly, slowly, slowly. Dave Strider begins to remember.
---
It begins with his mother. He is ten and excited to start fifth grade. She runs a comforting hand along his shoulders as he scarfs down his breakfast. Dave swallows, turns to smile at her, and the food gets stuck in his throat.
For a second—one minuscule moment—he sees her. But she's not the same woman who he's known his whole life. She’s younger, and her pink eyes glint in a way that indicates she's had too much to drink again. She giggles and wraps loose arm around his shoulder, giving him a drunk kiss on his cheek. She’s just slightly taller than him, younger than she is now, but still older than him. Her pink scarf has been replaced with one made of alternating shades of blue.
There is a sharp tug in his chest. A name balances on the tip of his tongue, threatening to slip out of his mouth; Roxy.
In the next breath, the recognition is gone.
Dave is left with a lingering sense of nostalgia and a strange longing.
His mother gives him a questioning look and he almost tells her; I knew you.
---
It happens again with his brother. Dave is thirteen and angrily running his tongue over the metal gear glinting on top the dull white of his teeth. Dirk, several years his senior, is back visiting from god knows where. It’s just the two of them, their mother and Rose having gone out to run errands earlier that morning.
The sunlight streams steadily through the slanted blinds, warming Dave’s pale skin. His brother sighs in content.
"Reminds me of Houston." he says offhandedly.
Dave freezes, that same sense of Deja Vu slowly trickling back into his chest through the spaces between his ribs.
He licks his cracked lips.
"W-what?"
Dirk chuckles, darting a hand out to ruffle his younger brother's hair.
And Dave flinches.
"Houston, bro." Dirk says, "Been livin' there for months, little man."
Fear shoots in a cold wave, down Dave’s spine.
And then his face is being seared by the heat of the southern sun, despite having never been to Texas in his entire life. He hears the sharp clatter of metal on metal, feels the sweat on his brow—feels the sharp sting of a sword nicking his shoulder. He can taste bitter iron spilling from his split lip. His heart contracts in fear. Dirk is standing across from him, only he's not Dirk. He’s older—more filled in—clad in a white polo and trucker hat, his sword lazily draped over his shoulder. Waiting. Dave’s vision grows fuzzy behind a pair of triangle shaped lenses that are both strangely foreign and horribly familiar at the same time.
And then just as fast as the first time, the memories fade. This time however, instead of a gentle yearning for the ghost of someone near to him, Dave is left with a heinous chill deep in his bones, and the taste of bile burning the back of his throat. For a heartbeat, he misses the shades, and the protection they provided.
Dirk, the real one—young, face void of beards and scars—clears his throat. Dave gives him a noncommittal shrug and hollow hum.
"Sure, man." he grunts, his own voice sounding false to his own ears.
His brother rolls his eyes and turns on the TV.
Dave feels uncomfortable in his own skin, and an unexplainable dread clings to him for the rest of the day.
---
Unsurprisingly, Rose is next. Dave is sixteen and by this point has accepted he's is slightly losing it, if only a little. So he's not entirely shocked when on one quiet afternoon, Rose makes a snide comment in a sultry tone and suddenly an entirely different Rose is in front of him.
The room is different, purple and glowing with a soft ebbing blue-red light. To their right, a clock counts down. The two of them are swathed in that same deep purple. Rose’s eyes are red; she's crying but pretending that she isn't. Dave feels the familiar weight of aviators resting on the bridge of his nose and curve of his cheeks. His hand tightens—muscle memory kicking in—around the sword dangling in his loose grip.
Rose hiccups and Dave’s red irises flick up to her purple ones. She knows this must be done, but she's still afraid. She had told him once that being able to see often left her blinded with possibilities. But Dave can tell from the look on her face that this was their only option.
And deep down, he knows it too. He’s lived through the other timelines, all gone sour with doom. He knows that this is the only way. As the time counts backward down to zero, Dave takes in his sister and thinks, I hope we meet again.
When he snaps back to reality, his brain is muddle with memories of seers and knights. Slowly, his red eyes flick up to meet her purple ones once more.
Dave nearly crumbles when he fails to see the same recognition there. He wants to grab rose by her shoulders and shake her. "You are a seer, why can't you see me?". He wishes he could scream.
She cocks a delicate, blonde eyebrow at him.
"Okay there, David?" she asks.
In another life—different yet somehow the same—Dave would've rolled his eyes. He would've told her to fuck off in a twangy accent, unfamiliar, yet fitting for his own timbre.
But Dave is not in that life. He is in Washington, sitting across from his twin sister, voice untainted by a drawl.
"Sure am, Rosalie." he replies automatically.
That catches her off guard. She looks at him for a moment, perplexed. Then she returns to her knitting, a light smirk playing on her black painted lips.
It's only hours later that Dave realizes, calling him David had been her thing. An inside joke amongst their family as a result of their mother choosing short, simple versions of names for her children. Dave realized that it had always been him at the butt of those particular name jokes; he's never called her Rosalie before.
At least, not in this life.
And then that bitter twinge of nostalgia returns. He misses her.
---
It’s years before Dave’s next incident, as he's taken to calling them now. Every once in a while he will wake up in a cold sweat, the faint echo of foreign memories circling the back of his mind. He still thinks of the color navy and bottles of liquor, of shitty swords and hot gravel on the roof of an apartment. Of knights and seers and tumors and games. But as the years pass, Dave never remembers more than a flash here and there. As he enters college, he's all but dismissed them as a result of his childlike imagination.
And yet, a part of him--the part of him that frowns when his mother has a second glass of wine at dinner, that flinches when his brother moves toward him too quickly, that sometimes sees Rose with white hair and grey skin instead of platinum locks and a rosy complexion--refuses to let him forget entirely. But however persistent, that part has grown smaller as time passes and Dave grows. By the time he's finished high school, he's ready to move on and forget the strange not-memories.
---
This new life, sans creepy visions, would've been his. but due to a last minute change in the enrollment process a mere week before move in day, Dave is informed that his roommate is no longer a dude from Australia of all places, last name Stanley, first name George. Instead he was going to be stuck with another Washington native, last name Egbert, first name John. As Dave’s eyes skimmed that name in the brief email he'd received that morning, his heart leapt from his chest and took residence in his throat.
That same, achingly familiar nostalgia starts to surround him.
Dave let his head drop to the cool wood of the desk below him with a thud. He let out a groan as a familiar feeling of discomfort slowly crept over him. At this point, Dave thought to himself, he might as well skip college altogether and become a psychic.
That night, he dreamt of the apocalypse and a purple moon.