Summary: There are lots of things you can forget. Your first best friend's favorite color, the street you grew up on, the number of freckles on your first boyfriend's face. Saving the world isn't the kind of thing you can just forget. Especially not if you're the only one alive to remember it.
John is the only one left and he makes sure no one will forget his friends' actions, even if they never knew their names.
Prompt: #8 (I will never forget this)
Disclaimer: I do not own John Egbert or Homestuck. An appreciative nod of thanks and gratitude to Andrew Hussie for his creative prowess.
Author's Note: So this is a new thing I'm doing where I roll a die and write the prompt that comes up! I dunno how to make series and shit on , but there is a series posted on my AO3 account.
It wasn't easy. Somehow he knew in the back of his mind that this was inevitable, planned from the very beginning, that all good adventures came to an end and that soon the rush of the moment would fade into nothing more than a half-memory to be conjured in agonizingly dull moments. But he'd also thought, in what was chronologically his youth, that he would have company…well…forever? He never imagined any end to their story that would result in him standing all by himself in the middle of the darkness, hands clasped protectively around a thin, dopey-looking frog. He'd thought that he'd be able to survive the end of the world because he wouldn't be facing it alone.
But he was alone.
All alone.
Forever.
He'd made them all gravestones, on a whim. He needed to make sure people remembered.
It was surprisingly difficult to do, given that he was a god and all that. First he had to pick places they would like and then he had to make sure that they were near the people they would want to be near ("near" being a kind of hazy and cosmically relative term) and of course he had to make sure they weren't completely awful. He'd always considered himself a giver of pretty sweet presents, though. He spent centuries planning them, and made sure every one was perfected in his mind before he put it into practice. He had to make them just right, flashy for some and subtle for others. Some people he knew so poorly that he felt guilty as he made their effigies, fire burning in his gut at he looked at the mockery of a grave and wondered if they would even like it and knowing he would never really know for sure. Over time, he came to terms with the fact that it didn't much matter if they would or not, since it wasn't really for them. It was for him. Sometimes he thought he'd go mad if he didn't have something to remind him that it had all happened and that he wasn't crazy and that once upon a time, he hadn't been alone.
He made Jade a constellation, and the beings that could see her often whispers prayers to him in her name. He colored it just right, bright like her eyes with little stripes of colors for the rubber bands he knew she stopped needing a long time ago.
He made Rose a legend, whispered in the ears of young girls who wandered alone and battled demons, and soon her tale became almost great enough to be a person all its own. Once there was an uproar when they thought she'd been reincarnated, but when he went to meet the woman, she didn't see him.
He made Dave an icon too, but that all spiraled out of control and became something more of a mock cult practiced by many who called themselves few. Somehow, he thought he'd appreciate it anyway, and let it develop as it desired. He decided that nothing he could have imagined could beat the monuments built up in Dave's name anyway.
Karkat got a whole species. John wasn't sure if this was some kind of abuse of his powers, but he didn't care. They were small and very loud and they didn't built staircases. And they didn't worship him. They acknowledged him, but they always looked to the sky and regarded him with a kind of condescending tolerance. He gifted them with his knowledge of curses and obscene gestures, and he got them returned as the only kind of offerings they ever thought to give him.
Vriska received an element in her memory, thin blue veins that quickly became popular in that region of reality and for far longer than he thought, he got to look at cerulean jewelry.
The other trolls, the other kids...they got theirs too. Great landscapes, haunting melodies, books, even a few planets. He relied on the knowledge that he had partially gained from his lost ghost selves, and as centuries passed below and minutes passed above, almost a hundred monuments were placed in time and space to keep their memories alive. He felt guilty leaving them out. Just because he didn't remember them didn't mean they didn't need to be remembered, and at that moment, he wished more desperately than ever that one, just one other, could have survived to help him. He tried to share some of their culture, what little he knew of it, but that went horribly and he decided that if there was anything he should just ignore in the whole universe, that was it.
He even made something for his father, but he destroyed it immediately. Just looking at it made him feel kind of sick.
When he was done remembering the people, he started remembering the things. Mostly he would sit on the shoulder of an ordinary person and he would talk to them, plant images in their heads. Sometimes the words stuck and sometimes they didn't. He inspired people to build beautiful statues of creatures they'd never seen, craft weapons they didn't understand, and design houses with architecture that was derived from the hazy memory of a sixteen-year-old boy who'd never cared for that kind of thing.
That wasn't enough. He needed to know. They needed to know. He couldn't directly affect the world, not really. He could just kind of…nudge it. He decided, after a great deal of thought, to tell someone. Appearing in the flesh and scaring the crap out of people was fun, but he kind of wanted...he didn't care if anyone believed him. He just wanted them to hear the story. After a great deal of deliberation, he decided to do as he had done for Rose and Dave and Aranea and tell someone a story.
It took a long time to find someone with an open enough mind to hear everything he had to say. That gave him plenty of time to get all his words in order. It was a lot to remember, but he wouldn't ever forget it.
He sat patiently on the desk, waiting for his "chosen one" to come and sit down. He patted the keyboard invitingly and leaned over, resting his chin over the boy's shoulder.
"Hellooo, testing, testing, is this thing on?"
The boy shook his head, looking mildly concerned, but eventually chalked it up to his own sarcastic thoughts.
"Good. Right. Let's begin! I hope you have a pen, 'cause I'm not gonna repeat this for you."
John sat back and stared up at the ceiling and began to remember.
"A young man stands in his bedroom..." he starts.
The wind blows gently through an open window and on it John hears the ghosts of voices of the long dead.
I'll never forget, he promised silently, introducing the "insufferable prick." You won't be forgotten.
A/N: The ending feels rushed to me. Bluh.