They were happening for as long as he could remember.
Flashes of color, flashes of sound, flashes of vivid laughter and vivid pain. He would wake up screaming from them, a broken child that was quickly lofted from foster home to foster home, until eventually ending up in a shady inner city orphanage. He still woke at night with the memories, with the thoughts, the dreams - the emotions of another life, but he had sealed his lips shut and began to not let them shine through.
When he was about thirteen years old, he'd pieced together so much (from messy scrawls to typed up charts, he lined it all up and forced it all to make sense) that these visions became more clear - like a time he knew well and was simply a prequel to where he was now. It felt like the life he'd been meant to live - not this one. Instead of shady, dust-ridden rooms, he'd been destined for heated passion, for timeless fates. He'd been destined for friendship. For love.
He had none of that here.
He remembered him well - John Egbert. He was someone that - in the time he remembered so well, but spoke of to no one for they'd find him insane - Dave had held very dear. Someone he valued higher than anyone else, someone he trusted, and someone he would give his life so save (and in some circumstances, did). Someone a confused thirteen year old thought he might love.
And someone Dave missed very, very much.
When he was fifteen, having run out on his own and only scraped enough money in his pockets for an even shadier apartment (scrawls of a nearly-forgotten comic nestled within his pocket), he decided to look into John Egbert. If after everything he remembered, if what everything that had happened was true, then that meant that now, John should be here too, right? Maybe he wouldn't remember like Dave did, and maybe it would be hard and it would be awkward at first - but knowing he was there would make it worth it.
After much searching, and hacking into archives he found him, under the name of John Crocker, but unmistakable: a proud prankster and successful comedian, John Egbert was now the ripe age of eighty-four years old. He lived on his own by then - having had a handsome young son who was planning a family of his own, and living in a happy retirement. He found some photos of him in his youth, grainy and pieced together by biography authors. He looked just the same - he was so, fucking, beautiful.
Dave Strider hadn't succumbed to tears in a long time, until then, fingers entangled in his blonde locks in this world where he wasn't destined for anything.
This realization (affirming that his memories were more-or-less true and that he was doomed to loneliness) tore him to shambles for some time, until he turned seventeen. Converse-clad feet tread the asphalt under the hot Texan sun, when a large ruckus had formed around some event. He raised his eyebrows (eyes not hidden by shades, because if they weren't from that Bro he so remembered or from John, they weren't worth it), and nudged his way through the crowd. There was a crater - flaming and scorching with remains of some other-worldly rock - in the middle, a strange, blonde-haired infant.
Teeth dug into his lower lip as he eased his way into the crater, and gathered the infant up, claiming him as his own. There were no objections from the crowd, as the infant clung to his shirt with a sort of natural trust - as if he'd been meant for him. Because, he was.
It was difficult raising a child, Dave learned that quickly - and he learned that his part-time job of waiting tables wasn't really going to cut it for him and a hungry, demanding baby. He had to do something - he just didn't know what. After trial and error of many industries (maybe music? Construction? Something), he eventually found himself faced with those scrawls of an idiotic, ironic comic and putting pen to paper - in the exact medium the damned Egbert had loved.
He found himself writing what was intended as a plain B-list movie (John had loved those especially), still working three jobs, and only working on it late at night after he'd forced the growing baby to bed. He had to get this to work, for himself, his little bro, and for John - someone he hoped would be really proud of this, someone who might rant and rave about seeing it in theatres.
Surprisingly, when he tried to get the screenplay into production, it went pretty easily - the idiot producers saw the profit in it, laughing at the comedy that resulted from such a ridiculous idea - and that was that. Famous actors flew to the cast, it was well-directed and highly acclaimed. Almost overnight, the funds for the Strider household skyrocketed, and this growing toddler had more food and more resources than he knew what to do with. Dave thought it better to raise him still in that apartment but - things were looking up.
Still, he couldn't shake how much John would love this. Dave Strider became a big name in the movie business - brushing shoulder with Nicolas Cage and Ben Stiller - so much as even receiving movie props as gifts once they realized his interest in them (upon receiving the sunglasses from Stiller, his eyes welled up, and he was happier than ever to be able to have those hide them). He became somewhat of a fanatic - hands twisting around all these items that once would've, and once did make John's fucking day.
As his dear lil' man started getting older, it got harder. He made friends a lot like the ones he used to have - the ones that were so distant and faded by now. He found himself finding it harder and harder to listen to him (and that little Jane Crocker, she was so much like him - likely the daughter of John's respectable son), finding it harder and harder to not lose himself in his screenplays and in his obsessive nature.
Dave Strider was a shadow of what he was meant for - clinging to memorabilia and not being half the brother, the father, that his little guy deserved. Maybe he'd dug his own grave - or maybe he'd always been in it.
All he knew was he was not meant for this - none of them were meant for this, and it wasn't fucking fair.
All he was anymore was a big name and a pair of old sunglasses.