Chapter Text
There was nothing.
There was nothing for so many years, so many aeons, thousands and millions of aeons. There wasn’t light, there wasn’t darkness, and there wasn’t any warmth or cold. There was nothing .
And then there was something but things stayed uninhabitable. The deaths happened in less than a second and then he was back and then it repeated. Over and over and over and over and over again for what felt like an eternity. He didn’t even have the time to feel anything or think about it, it was all so fast for so many years that he wasn’t even tired or in pain.
And then one day he actually woke up, the world had calmed down enough for him to be able to take a breath.
And that was more torturous than the nothing which had preceded it. He woke up on his back, staring up at a familiar place and finally being able to think things through. There wasn’t a single building as he walked around, because what was he supposed to do? There were plants but they were different from those he knew in the past.
And the pieces fell into place that night as he leaned against one of the large rocks he had found. This
was
the past, he was not supposed to be born yet, nothing really was born yet. He was in a time before, the first creature had yet to step out of that primordial soup.
And he felt lost because he’d never known his curse would be this bad. He had known he would maybe outlive all his loved ones, but outliving the world itself?
He cried that night because he wasn’t a scientist but he was educated enough to know he’d be alone for a long time.
He kept dying, sometimes surviving twenty-four hours but usually not going past twelve. He didn’t know if he was ageing, he felt like he wasn’t though. Forever nineteen, he held onto the memories tightly from before the end, those nineteen years which had not been good but they had at least been better than this emptiness.
He remembered the people he loved, the people he hated, he remembered the pleasures and the pains, and he walked. Because that was all he had the motivation to do, walk around and remember everything. He wasn’t sure what he missed the most, he just knew he would do anything for something as small as the taste of heavily processed junk food or beer, or the feeling of someone’s lips on his or someone’s arms holding onto him.
Or the sight of that hair, loud and bright matching its owner.
Sometimes, whenever he had even an inch of motivation to do more than walk for miles remembering, he’d find a stick and some soft mud and he’d draw everything he could think of. He’d draw his family, his old school, his friends, and the last thing he saw before the nothingness arrived.
He started thinking out loud just to hear a voice, he was slowly slipping closer and closer to pure insanity with each time he died.
There were moments though where he was amazed, where he’d look at something and he’d forget all the pain and craziness because it’d be so grand. Dinosaurs were one of those things for the first few years of their existence.
He started learning how to actually survive without being eaten or perishing from dehydration or starvation. He would live for months at a time by that point, watching as things very slowly shifted around him until one day the dinosaurs died out.
And then the primates truly got their footing and he was hopeful because that meant he was slowly getting closer to the one thing he missed the most.
People.