I do love it when fics explore the idea of Derek living with Infinite KnowledgeTM and potential other changes that happen to him post-dawtde BUT I do wish people would explore the other side.
What if Derek lost his Infinite Knowledge, but still remembers how it was when he had all of the Knowledge
So, walk with me here. We don't know a lot about Derek pre-gates, but what we do know is this. He was a gifted kid, raised by a single mother. He got a scholarship and went to a prestigious university, only to drop out. During sfawtde, he doesn't seem phased through everything that happens (at least at first). He purposely misleads the audience by mentioning only half of his observations. He is aware that someone is following him, and he is not afraid to interact with it. He doesn't like admitting that he is scared, yet he still believes that he has the upper hand. He is playing by the rules in one moment, and then, in the next, he breaks them. He plays the game and plays it to win.
So the guy probably has a little bit of an ego problem.
While I do think that events in sfawtde got him humbled, I don't think that it fixed the problem itself. So imagine him sacrificing himself for Avery and for the world, fully accepting that he is dead, and then suddenly waking up in the hospital. He is not dead, he is saved, Avery found him, and he can get up from his computer and look away from his screen, and there is no knowledge threatening to burst his head open, and...
Derek misses knowing everything, knowing things not a single mortal human knows. He misses being the only one who can understand not only complicated problems but also things that exist on a whole other scale of reality. What he has to deal with now - recovery, finding a job again, groceries, the usual deal of living your life on the planet Earth - seems to be so trivial and boring, when you used to know everything. To deal with rude customers, paying taxes, being stuck in traffic, figuring out the steps of getting to know the other person, and maintaining relationships with them feels so...unnecessarily complicated
Is Derek glad to be alive? Of course. Is he glad he can meet Avery, talk to him face-to-face, and get to know him like normal people do? Of course.
But the same way, you can still see his old self poking out through the events of dawtde, you can still see how he misses the feeling of knowing everything there is to know.
It is a confusing feeling, and it makes Derek's stomach twist with how he longs for the knowledge he used to have.
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