Orange

Dave taps his fingers against the window in a steady rhythm as the subway speeds on. It's difficult to understand the whirl of events that had happened since the end of the game, even for him. He's not really surewhy anything even happened, because, really, he had been expecting what he thinks everyone else had been expecting.

He had thought he would simply fade to nothingness once all had been said and done.

And yet, here he is, sitting on the subway like a normal fucking day in the city. The scenery whips past, blurring from green to grey to black and back again. He's alive and he's human and he's home again.

But he's not home. Not by a long shot. He's alone and strapped for cash and trying to figure out what the hell he's supposed to do in this goddamn city.

No one even knows he's alive.

Dave slides down the seat, finally ceasing the endless tapping (much to the relief of his fellow passengers). It's not long before he's fidgeting again, though, and soon he's stretching the hem of his scarf to its limits. With an annoyed, albeit internal, grunt, he forces himself to drop the scarf. These are the only clothes he has, retina-scarring though they may be, and he has to take care of them. Who knows how long he'll need them?

He can't exactly go around naked, after all. Modesty and public decency aside, he'd end up looking like some kind of beaten war hero.

Which he is. He helped saved the world and for what? So that he could come back and struggle instead of just disappearing into the welcoming nothingness? Dave is tired of struggling. He just wants it all to end. This isn't his world, these aren't his people. He's all that's left of a broken world and no one is there to remember him.

But he remembers them, and it makes it just that much worse.

Dave sits up again and begins to tap his foot, this time in another rhythm. He's a human metronome and he can't seem to stop. Tap, tap, tap. The other passengers find his constant fidgeting annoying, but he can't do a thing about it. Tap, tap, tap.

This isn't how he had wanted it. It shouldn't be him snaking train rides from stop to stop, it shouldn't be him stealing coins from fountains when no one is looking. He should be at his apartment in his bed with his bro playing some sick jams on the other side of the door. It didn't end up that way, though, and now it's some other kid, some lame prick he had to go back to save because he was too fucking useless to—

Dave takes a deep, slow breath and stops. The other kid. The other.

But when he's being honest, really honest, below that layer of pseudo honesty where he's truly resentful of this fucking world and everyone in it, he knows that he's the other. He's the spare, not the other kid. Not the other him.

Past him.

It's not really past him, though, not anymore. They've gone beyond that and now maybe even Dave is past Dave and it hurt his mind to think about. His head hurts a lot these days, because when you're hungry and poor and alone in a place you don't even want to be, you think about things. And for Dave, thinking about things means thinking about time and all the damned problems and paradoxes that go along with it.

Because he's a paradox. He's willing to admit that now, after hours of careful deliberation spent waiting for the night security guard to just get the fuck away from the fish pond at the old mall. He's a paradox and he shouldn't even be here.

After all that thinking, Dave could come to only one conclusion. He's here because the game wants one last sadistic dig at him, a reminder of why you shouldn't try and bend the rules. He's here because it's a punishment. He has to live his life alone, apart from these friends from another life and watch the world move on without him, the product of a completed session. Everything is back to normal, like nothing had ever happened.

And Dave is the only exception. He isn't part of a completed session, he's the dregs of a failed one. No one remembers and no one will remember. He's leftovers at the back of the fridge that remain forgotten until everything else is gone and he's too rotten to be of any use.

He doesn't hate his friends and he doesn't hate himself. That's what he tells himself, anyway, trying to push the misguided anger down. These are the cards he's been dealt and he might as well play to the end. He's been doing that long enough to know the cheats, anyway. They'll live and he'll live and they might as well be on opposite sides of the fucking planet because he is never, ever going to ask them for help. Not from John "How Are You Doing?" Egbert or Rose "Psychobullshit" Lalonde or even Jade "Ascended" Harley. Not from any of them.

They aren't his friends to ask.

The door slides open and a blonde, bespectacled youth shuffles in. Dave's heart stops and he stares hard at the boy as he takes a seat opposite him. But he knows. He can tell by the way the boy barely spares him a second glance, the way he slouches in his chair and turns up his music like he doesn't have a care in the fucking world. The kid doesn't even remember him.

And that makes Dave angry.