Chapter Text
Two score and seven years ago, somebody dropped a bomb.
It wasn’t your average kind of bomb, either--none of that ‘I guess our building is toast,’ crap. You’re talking ‘aw shit, I guess our entire city is royally screwed’ in regards to that bomb. It was big and cylindrical and gray; it had all the features a sensible bomb had to have. And probably a few extra. Goddamn, it must’ve been one hell of a bomb.
It came down at a time of day that no one ever seems to remember. Prebombers are constantly fighting over it, like if they guess right down to the correct minute they’ll win a prize. “It was ten thirty-five in the morning--” “--No, Darlene, it was eight o’clock at night!” “Shut the fuck up Edith, we all know it was three forty-seven in the afternoon.” And then they bark and caterwaul at each other all throughout the night in their apartment complexes, and the only thing they manage to successfully do is take away your time to catch some Z’s. Absolutely incredible.
But anyways, back to the bomb. That fan-freaking-tastic specimen that no one seems to agree fell at an exact time, but definitely fell on a certain little city called Houston. Your good old birthplace, twenty-eight years in the future.
When it touched down, Houston was dead silent. Emphasis on the word “dead.” No time to scream, really. People got seared to a crisp faster than they could blink. Two million people up and gone in a puff of carbon. Bro says you were lucky you weren’t there. You have half a mind sometimes to point out that he probably wasn’t there either, but what do you know, really? Bro could be old as prehistoric dino shit and he’d never let you be the wiser.
Like you said earlier though, two million people died in Houston. That’s not a number to sneeze at, no matter how hard your nose is itching. That’s a serious fuckin’ number. There is no object that could be considered underwhelming if there’s two million of it in quantity. But of course, it still looks like a paper cut in comparison to the two hundred and fifty million others that were similarly fried that day, all throughout the U.S. Because that was a thing that happened.
...Shit. You probably should’ve started off by saying that two score and seven years ago, somebody dropped bombs --plural. But it’s a little late for that. And it’s not nearly as catchy.
So here you are, surrounded by two hundred and fifty-two million corpses and the shells of their cities, the one you’re mainly concerned with being named Houston. Everything’s dead. Half the people that are dead don’t even know why they’re dead, who made them dead. Buildings don’t fucking talk, so they don’t have any questions to ask. They just groan and creak when the first breeze whistles its way through the exposed wood and metalwork, carrying off the dust and death. And the people hiding inside the wood and metalwork, they’re the ones that climb out and ask questions. They’re furious, hysterical, drowning in feelings they don’t even have the goddamn brainpower to properly comprehend. Most of the questions they ask never get a proper answer.
They end up taking their frustration out by building a city right on top of the old one. Other places follow their lead.
Houston, the newer version you’ve grown up in almost your whole life, ended up being a patchwork mess. Charred bricks and not-charred bricks, rusty metal and not-so-rusty metal. If risk analysts were still around, they’d probably bust a blood vessel looking at the damn city. Dirk gets twitchy every time he looks at your apartment building.
Life dragged itself out of the ruins and built itself a new set of legs to stand on, but it walks differently, now. That many people can’t just die without leaving some reminders. The lifestyles from Before, those are straight-up surreal and inefficient compared to nowadays, if you’re being honest.
Apparently people used to take their time to chew, chug, check their faces in the mirror--so on, and so forth. No nutrition pills, no ever-present IVs, no breath-holding required. It sounds wild in theory. The world must have been a chaotic and pretty fuckin’ exciting place when the air was actually breathable.
But enough about the world, enough about Before, and enough about Houston. You haven’t gotten a chance to properly talk about yourself. Not that there’s much to say. Or really, there’s not that much you want to say. But it’s easiest to just roll your eyes, and recap the basics.
You were born and have a birthday, just like everybody else. You had a young mom and a dad that seemed to feel pretty okay about you, just like everybody else. You lived in the Underground with your parents up until the age of five, just like everybody else. On your birthday you were issued your first gas mask and sent back up to the surface with your family, just like everybody else. A month after you moved to the Above, something you can’t remember fell through and you were forced to shack with your dad, and only your dad; soon afterwards he demanded that you start calling him Bro--and when this happened, it was not just like everybody else. Then you became a part-time swordsman and Dirk showed up one day on your doorstep looking like he was being held in that spot via gunpoint and somehow, against all the odds, your DJing career lifted off, just a tiny bit. And none of that really seemed to line up with other people’s experiences. But about a year ago, on your eighteenth birthday, when you opened the box and found your new, ass-spankingly-new mask--jacked up with LEDs and personal effects thanks to Dirk--it was kind of like everybody else. Just a little.
Now things in your life are considerably normal. You walk down the street and see men, women, and kids roaming side-by-side with faces of plastic and polycarbonate. The Prebombers loiter by storefronts to mutter about the good old days. The sky cycles from orange to navy to orange and the rare sight of clouds makes you nervous. The radio station plays the same three songs everyday; not one of them has a human voice in its tune. You head to work and DJ at the local nightclub from ten at night to one in the morning every weekend. Protesters line the roadside on your way there and protest about who-knows-what, their voices muffled through their masks, their fists waving towards the sky.
“We’re unhappy!” they shout. “You should be unhappy, too!”
And you don’t necessarily disagree with them, but you don’t bother to nod your head either. They clearly haven’t had a chance to stop and smell the toxic fumes; otherwise, they’d just be focusing on living day-to-day like the rest of society.
Your name is Dave Strider, and you know that no matter how hard people may try, things aren’t going to get any better.
You’re okay with that.