Chapter Text
The first memory you have is not, in fact, your memory at all. You no longer remember what your actual chronological first memory of your life is, but you remember watching a videotape on your television once of a younger, fuzzier version of you sitting in front of a Christmas tree in footie pajamas, mangling a wrapped box and accidentally flinging a set of blocks across the room in your excitement. A younger version of your Bro sat next to you, laughing and helping you pick up the scattered toys. You don’t remember this memory from your own point of view, but from the impassive view of your mother’s camcorder, her laughter hollow and electronic from the other end of a television screen, captured in an electronic prison and unable to replay it in your own mind.
You shut the television off and stare at the reflection on the glass of the screen in silence. Words and thoughts tumble in your mind. This is not the first time you’ve been reminded of a memory after the fact and had to rewrite the details into your mind. In fact, this has been happening more and more recently, to the point where you often wonder if the things you remember are your memories at all, or dreams and second hand stories you’ve obsessively collected and plastered to the inside of your mind, hoarding information and storing it away into the cavern of your brain. You don’t know when it started, whether you forgot a majority of your childhood, but you know when you started to remember. It was as if for the first twelve years of your life, someone forgot to press the record button and you only have occasional glimpses of your past.
Snapshots of your life sometimes filter through.
Moments of memories of childhood friends come and gone. Your parents, back when they were together and you were one big happy family with the two of them and their two children, the epitome of the American dream with a big house with a picket fence and a tire swing in the front yard. Your father, a tall and muscular man with light strawberry blonde hair, which your brother was fortunate enough to inherit, working on the family car in your driveway as your brother teaches you to skateboard, your mother humming to herself as she works in the garden.
Your first day of school in the first grade, where a few kids made fun of your unusual albino complexion, but for the most part ignored you, except for a few intrepid loners who became your companions for the remainder of grade school. John, who’s father got a job in Washington and had to move at the end of your second grade year, but whom you’ve kept in touch with over the internet. Rose, your cousin (or something… you’re not sure, Bro said her mom was his sister, and you’re his brother, so doesn’t that make you her uncle? That’s weird to think about, so you try not to think about it much) who lives in New York, who you’ve gotten really close with, introduced you to Jade over pesterchum and you introduced her to John, completing your circle of friends. You don’t remember the lessons taught by your teachers, though you have the knowledge ingrained in you.
Shortly before your fifth birthday you remember waking up in the middle of the night to the telephone ringing, your mother answering it in the next room. You can’t make out what she says so you watch the light from under your doorway to the bedroom you share with Bro, shadows pacing through the illuminated crack. Her voice grows increasingly more frantic and you start to panic; you’ve never heard her like this before. You look over to the other bed in the room and are met with amber eyes mirroring your look of worry.
The door opens and in the doorway stands your mother, grief stricken, as she clutches the phone to her chest. You and Dirk sit up and regard her with worry, as she gasps out that your father’s life was taken in a massive accident out on the highway. Bro is the first out of bed to be at her side, you follow shortly after and are pulled into a hug; you all stumble to the master bedroom and collapse on the bed, tears in your eyes as you cry yourself to sleep.
It was the only time you ever saw your brother cry.
Your mother lost her job and picked up a nasty drinking habit, leaving her mostly comatose on the couch while crime dramas played for hours on end after you got home from school. You preferred when she was asleep, because if she was awake she was just a barely contained mess underneath a careful poker face. For the next two years your brother functioned as your guardian, when he wasn’t busy with his friends and brushing you off as the uncool little brother he didn’t want to hang out with. You’d follow him around when he was home though; learning everything you could about being cool and ironic. He taught you how to feed yourself, do basic chores, stuff that your mother would usually do but was too inebriated to in addition to some rad music and how he made his own beats with turntables he bought using money from a paper route he’d had.
Your mother ranged from deliriously happy and functioning to depressed and emotional on the couch or locked in her room, to angry for no apparent reason, and you’d decided the best way to deal with her outbursts was to lock yourself in your room and pretend that nothing was happening. She’d alternate between yelling and throwing things to weeping and locking herself in her room and sometimes she’d even seek you out and apologize, covering you with kisses and affection you knew would only come after she’d trashed the kitchen particularly hard. Eventually things would calm down or your brother would talk her back into a normal mood until she started drinking again. You’d just play on your computer or mix some music until he came back and played video games with you.
One night she went off worse than usual and Bro decided to join you in your room until she calmed down. There was banging on your door but you both ignored it in favor of the shitty skateboarding game you were getting some sick combos in. Bro always won, but you still had fun playing with him when he decided to grace you with his unbelievably cool presence. Things fell silent and you didn’t think anything of it, falling asleep on your side at the foot of your bed with the controller still in your hands.
The next thing you knew your Bro was shaking you awake and pushing you towards the door, saying something about the hospital and how you needed to leave right now. You walked out the front door and saw the bright red and white lights of the ambulance backing out of your driveway, jolting you awake. You turned to Bro to ask what was going on, but he only shook his head and led the way to the car.
You remember sitting in a hospital waiting room staring at the gritty ceiling tiles and hearing your brother’s footsteps approach, the clomping of motorcycle boots before he plops into the seat next to you. After a while a doctor comes out and tells you your mother is good to go home again with heavy bandages around her wrists, just to keep her away from sharp objects and to call 911 if anything happens. You and your bro load her into the car and take her home; a week later you’re back in the hospital and this time the doctors weren’t able to revive her.
At the tender age of eight and sitting in a shitty hospital waiting room, you realize you’re an orphan.
Unlike your father’s funeral, your mother’s is held on a rainy and cold day in the middle of December, shortly before Christmas. People whose faces and names you don’t remember give you their condolences, tell you they’re sorry for your loss, and sometimes provide a funny story about your mother before her death. You’re numb to it all and barely paying attention. What could these people possibly know about your mother? The person they’re describing sounds nothing like the temperamental woman you knew.
You stand next to your brother at the service and realize at some point your hand found his and was squeezing it tightly. They deliver her cremated ashes to you afterwards in a ceramic urn. Bro makes no move to take it from the attendant, so you decide to take it and keep it. This marks the first of the dead things in jars you eventually have a collection of.
You go home and the next day Bro tells you he’s going to be your guardian, for all intents and purposes. You tell him that he pretty much already was before your mother died, so nothing will change there. He also tells you that he can’t be your guardian officially until he graduates and can move to Houston to work on being a DJ full time, so while he’s working on school and has a job at a local garage to support you both, you’ll still have to feed yourself and do your own homework when you get home from school. You shrug. You’ve been doing that already.
“No big deal, we’ve got this, I’ve got this, lil man,” he says, giving you a crooked grin. It’s the only one you’ll remember seeing on him for several years.
Sometimes Bro needs to leave for several days at a time, often out wooing club owners on weekends to get them to give him a job, so he gets one of his friends to stop over and stay with you. You’re offended that he thinks you need a babysitter, but give up on arguing with him when you realize most of them just want a place to crash for the night and watch tv, have some food and smoke a bowl away from their own nosy parents. Most of the time they leave you alone. But sometimes you decide to join them in watching TV or playing video games.
Bro’s best friend comes over the most often when Bro needs a babysitter for you, a tall lanky brunette named Dan who likes to get a little close with you physically. A little too close for your liking, frankly. You’re actually quite a cuddler when you want to be, but usually that was with your mother before she kicked her own bucket. Bro wasn’t the touchy-feely type, and you didn’t mind, but sometimes you liked to curl up next to someone while watching TV. You’re a kid, so sue you. It turns out Dan didn’t mind this, in fact he encouraged you, spending the quality time with you that you so wanted with someone, anyone now that you never got to see Bro and barely had any friends in school. Sometimes his hands would roam, tickling you, touching you, until they’d slip not-so-innocently under your clothes. But he didn’t take it any further than that until you got comfortable, leaning against him while watching some cartoons on tv. Then his hands were moving again, this time under your pants, and you didn’t protest because while it felt weird it wasn’t like it hurt or anything, in fact it was starting to feel kind of good, and oh hello you didn’t realize that was a sensation you’d like until he started touching you that way. He pulled you into his lap and pressed his lips to your ear, whispering, “Feels good, doesn’t it? Don’t tell your brother,” and you gasped, arching back to press against his chest. A warm feeling began to pool in your belly and your limbs twitched, lost in the sensations that were being thrust upon you. His hands continued to travel, scraping his nails up your torso and tilting your head to the side so he could kiss along your jaw, your neck, biting at your shoulder; you flinched and tried to move away, but his arms only held you tighter.
You started to panic, feeling trapped, but unable to move, heart beating out of your chest. He released your throbbing member and ground your hips against his, and you were able to feel his own erection through his jeans. Dread started to pool in your stomach, though for what you didn’t know, you just knew you didn’t want to be here right now, you had to get out, had to get away, but his hands were stronger than you and kept you in place, digging in painfully when you tried to get away. Suddenly you were being pinned to the couch, your pants and underwear dragged down to your knees and your arms pinned behind your back by one strong hand. You started to protest, to shout, until his other hand struck you across the back of your head, sending stars across your vision, and forced your face into the cushions. You flailed and thrashed as best you could as you felt a hand parting your ass cheeks, felt something wet drip between them and something else touching down there that you most definitely didn’t want down there no matter how good you were feeling earlier. “Shut the fuck up,” he growled fiercely before you felt the most unbearable pain of your life, a burning and tearing sensation that caused your brain to overload and tune out.
You feel like it’s not real, like everything that’s happening is just on a tv screen somewhere and you’re the impassive audience chewing popcorn and passing judgment on the actors in this movie. But one of the actors looks like you, moans like you, and screams like you while Dan has his way with your limp body.
The movie fades to black and you don’t remember what happens after that, but you’re aware of your body feeling heavy, your mind hazy as you become aware of the sounds outside your head. You hear voices, and you’re not sure which are real and which are the ones in your head telling you everything will be alright but that you’re a horrible human being for liking what just happened, you had to have liked it, didn’t you, because you felt good and got off on it too, right?
The next thing you remember for certain is waking up in your bed, struggling to crack your eyes open because they hurt from all the tears you’ve cried, you must have cried them, as your pillow is wet and you don’t know how else that could have happened. You shift under your covers and immediately regret that decision, pain shooting up your spine and you let out a choked breath. The noise causes movement next to your bed and your eyes flick over to see Bro slouched in a chair next to you, shades discarded, watching over you as you sleep. He reaches a hand out to you and your gut reaction is to immediately flinch backwards. More pain shoots throughout your body and you grind to a halt, a pained whimper escaping your throat. Bro stops, hand outstretched towards you, and settles for putting it lightly on top of the hand you had outside the covers closest to him, leather gloves and cool fingers barely touching your skin. The two of you stare each other down for a long moment before he speaks.
“I never should have trusted him. I’m so sorry, Dave. This will never happen again.” His voice is soft, apologetic, and his poker face is completely gone as his expression shows the tumult of emotions he’s going through, which you’re sure your face is going through as well. Rather than say anything back (you’re pretty sure based on the pain in your throat your vocal chords are shredded anyways) you flip your hand over and grasp his hand in yours, a silent tear leaking from your eye as you feel something break within your heart. You feel safe knowing he's there to watch over you, a comfort that travels from the hand he holds through the newfound hollowness in your chest as you drift to sleep again. He doesn’t leave your side, his jaw tightening on occasion as he decides what he’s going to do.
You prefer not to think about these events, and indeed have spent years perfecting the art of blocking out bad memories, but lately your mind has been bringing them up without your consent, turning your dreams into nightmares and creeping into your waking thoughts as well. As more of your memories make their way from the blanker side of your memory into the forefront of your thoughts, more of the unpleasant ones come back to haunt you as well.
One day you wake up and realize you’ve forgotten how to smile. When you try to fake one, the corner of your mouth pulls up awkwardly in the mirror in a grin you’ve since learned to turn into a sarcastic smirk, but you can never truly smile again. You play it off, scoffing to yourself about the irony of the cool kid losing his ability to smile when he never used it in the first place, hiding it under your aloof façade.
Your name is Dave Strider, and at the age of twelve you realize that not only are you broken, but you never even had the chance to know what it was like to feel whole.