In Memoriam
Plunk-clink. The gravel isn't really capable of breaking the thick glass of the whiskey bottle when Kevin accidentally drops it a little too hard to the ground, neck still in his hand. He has one hand to his head, a large grin plastered on his face, but his eyes are red and cheeks raw from crying jags. His back, propped against the wooden signpost, is starting to hurt a little. Doesn't matter.
"Man, Jonsy... 'member that time'n Irons chose you to be th'John on the pros'tutin bust... and you gotall pissed and told us to start callin' you by'n yer first name?"
Hahahaha! It rings out in the night air, over the near-torrential rainfall that's plastered his dark blue dress-suit against his skin, hair stuck to his face in matty sheets. He's actually sitting in about an inch of water total, head swaying back and forth as Kevin alternates between hysterical fits of inebriated laughter and sudden open sobs. His voice is much too low to sound anything but out of place as he cries, chains of quiet "a huh, a huh" that would signal assent to a passerby if not for his obvious body language.
He's a mess, quite obviously.
Shaking his head, Kevin draws his knees up and buries his face into an arm. A distant, sober part of him is glad nobody's here to see this display, but the more present, completely ripped part of him is hard-pressed to care. Right now it's about all those people whose molecular genetic material is still spread all over the looming canyon of dirt and construction behind him, behind this signpost immediately before the chainlink, barbed wire, electrified fence. Trespassers will be shot, apparently.
And that logo -- that fucking logo -- was everywhere.
Who cares.
He takes another swig.
"'mso fuckin' sorry, Chickenh'rt..." Brad Vickers. The same Brad Vickers whose funeral Kevin was still dressed up from.
"Shoulda been there'n... how'd you get through this'shit 'n get offed by some fuckin' pinko?" He gestures with his bottle. "Whatever..."
The bad thing about drinking hard liquor for so long is that it starts to lose its burn. As such, Kevin's nigh able to swig this 40 oz. bottle like Coca Cola, and proceeds to.
"...Leon, Chris, Jill... Claire'n allthatshit... allcausa some fuckin' fag with a god complex..."
Suddenly, he starts to get up. It didn't make sense to him, but when you were this drunk, little did sense matter in the great scheme of things. Kevin actually falls over and if not for the water, would have skinned his face, but stumbles up once more with the help of the signpost.
He looks at the bottle, standing (well, maybe more like shuffling) there in the rain, and takes another long drink before wiping his mouth with his sopping shirt-sleeve, then turning the bottle on its end, pouring the contents out onto the ground. Taking it by the neck once again, Kevin hurls it over the fence, almost falling into it with the effort.
"YOU DIRTY FUCKIN'... SONS OF BITCHES!!" It doesn't come all at once, but under the heavy weight of mental impairment and mental stress, Kevin's anger simply tears out of him, without direction. It's more like a croak, starting low then ending higher on the register than he would have been able to when sober. When his voice breaks, as does his resolve, and the tears start again, much more angry than sad or depressed. It bounces back at him from the canyon.
"I'M GONNA KILL ALL OF YOU!!" He points, swinging his arm down. It almost knocks him over, and he curses under his breath, then starts stumbling away, backwards.
"FUCKIN' WHORES!! SONS OF BITCHES!! YOU'RE ALL FUCKIN' DEAD!!"
He stops about ten feet back, chest heaving.
"...dead," he says, straining to see through the darkness which he's too drunk to realize is really just his hair. "All of you. Fuckin' dead."
Kevin pauses, then shakes his head again, and turns to stumble away towards the city.
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Miraculously, with a foggy recollection of yelling at a hill, Kevin awakes, soaked on his couch with a pounding headache. He smells like sewage and dirt, and strains to pull himself into a sitting position with the sound of his intercom buzzer screaming in his ears, all at once resisting the urge to throw up or pass out from his hangover. After a moment's deliberation, he decides to answer.
With herculean effort, he pushes himself up and doesn't really walk but falls to the far wall, catching himself against it, and punches the "answer" button on the copper plate by the door. It might be Yoko.
"What?"
It's static-laden and foggy, but at the same time, it's clear.
"Kevin?"
Jules. If it was possible to double-take in this position, Kevin would have; for now, he simply stares at the plate and his mouth falls open. Wait, was it...
"J-Jules?"
A laugh. It sounds weak, but in good humor. "Yeah, man. Buzz me in, would you?"
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Kevin spends the next ten minutes pacing, hangover forgotten, mind racing. Maybe he got lost on his way up -- he'll just wait.
Jules... fucking JULES, Vincenzo Juliani, the little squat half-Italian-half-Mexican under Kevin's charge in Raccoon City... but more than that, his friend. His friend he'd assumed lost with the rest of them, now miraculously alive. Kevin wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry, so he settled on something inbetween; he ran and got Jules a beer.
Outside, a "thanks man, seriously, I appreciate it", then a knock.
Kevin tears to the door, unlocks the deadbolt then throws it open, beer in hand. His grin fades at the empty space, then he looks down.
"Man, you look like shit," says Jules from his automated wheelchair, with a wide grin on one side of his face. The other is nearly devoid of muscle, skin over bone where the other apple of his cheek would have pulled it taut against his jaw. He reaches up and Kevin takes his hand in a handshake, then pulls him into a tight hug, realizing too late that a) Jules was always stronger than him and b) he was going to have to kneel for this. "You gonna invite me in, or what?"
"Uh... yeah, yeah," Kevin stammers, stumbling back out of the way, pulling the door with him. Jules smiles placidly and navigates his way in, the chair letting off a distracted hum, skirting half-circles around furniture and wires. He parks it beside the couch, and looks at back at Kevin, who hurriedly closes the door and skips back over to try to hide the fact he'd been staring.
"Y... you want me to...?" Kevin says, motioning at the couch.
"I can sit here if you want," Jules says, but then Kevin shakes his head, sets the beer down, and helps Jules on his one good leg out of the chair, noting as he goes to take Jules' left arm that it ends abruptly below the bicep. With some laughing and difficulty, Jules is placed against the arm of the couch, and Kevin hands him the beer and sits across in the beanbag chair on the other side of the coffee table, staring in amazement. Abject amazement, really.
"So... you look... well," Jules says, grinning that half-grin again, and laughing.
Kevin laughs too, then rolls his eyes and pushes his hair out of his face.
"Yeah, the ladies love my hangover chic. What the fuck happened to you, man?"
Jules gives him a frank look.
"You kidding? You WERE there, weren't you? You had to be."
Kevin looks at him, confused. He goes to shake his head, but stops at a 3/4 angle, and eyes the smaller man uncertainly.
"R... accoon City?"
Jules nods, but even he in his good humor can't keep his eyes from going floorward.
"...holy shit."
"It sucked. I'm still alive, though. Going to law school now. How you like that?"
Kevin knows a subject change when he hears one.
"Awesome. You were always the smartest of the three of us," he starts to laugh, but then realizes that Rodgers, third of the three amigos, wasn't here with them to celebrate.
"...he went quietly," says Jules. "Wasn't in pain or anything. Made sure of it."
It's all Kevin can do to quietly nod.
"Darla...?" Rodger's wife.
Jules falters a little, and has to re-assert his grip on the can.
"Did what he asked -- I got her out." He takes a swig. "We're..." he almost has to fight to meet Kevin's eyes, "we're married now."
Kevin clasps his hands near his mouth and shakes his head slowly.
"And what about you?" Another one of those subject-changes. "Anything new and exciting?"
Kevin laughs again.
"Well..." he thinks, "got a steady girlfriend now. And actually taught kindergarten for a while, if you can dig it."
"Wow. On both counts."
Kevin rolls his eyes again.
"Workin' for the government again. Got drafted to the STARS branch of STRATCOM that was just formed."
Jules almost drops his beer.
"STARS? Finally! Congrats, man."
Kevin does a little mock-bow.
"So what about this girlfriend? What's her name?"
Kevin leans back a little. "Yoko. She used to work for Umbrella, in Raccoon... computer scientist in the labs." He holds up a pack of cigarettes, and Jules holds up his hand as if to say 'go ahead' and 'I don't want one', simultaneously. Kevin fires one up. "Sweet little Japanese thing. She was in the Outbreak, too -- got out together."
Jules looks confused.
"...wait. I thought you and that A... Alisha?"
"Alyssa."
"Yeah, Alyssa... what happened to that? She...?"
"No, no." Kevin scratches his head. "She took off after we got out. Yoko'n I got to know each other better in her absence, so..."
Jules gives him a look that says 'I should have known'.
"No, nothin' like that. Lyssa and I weren't even a couple or anythin'. She pretty much just fucked and ran after she didn't need my protectin' anymore."
"That's shit."
"Yeah." Smoke rings. "Doesn't really matter now, I guess."
There's an awkward pause. "So... what made you wanna work for the government again?"
Kevin thinks on this. "Revenge, I guess. We're supposed to be goin' after the assholes that did that shit to Raccoon City, I suppose."
Jules gives him another look. "And you think it's gonna make you feel better?"
Kevin shakes his head. "Guess I just want someone to be accountable."
"And you still being alive and sheltered, having a girl to love isn't enough, right?"
Kevin looks up.
"Tell you what, man." Jules shifts in his seat. "We both seen some of the nastiest shit to ever happen to the human race, and we lived through it. We're still here, and there's gotta be a reason why."
At this moment, Kevin looks positively vulnerable.
"You're a hot mess, dude. Look at you. You've been given a second chance... a second chance that's a lot better than any of the first chances any of us get. Don't waste it on revenge if it's not gonna leave the world a better place than you found it."
Kevin looks down.
"I understand you want a why and a when to all the bad that happened, man." Jules says. "So do I. That's why I'm going through law school -- I want to nail these bastards, too. But destroying yourself in the process isn't the way to do it. That's giving them way too much of what you managed to scrape back together after they tried to take it all away."
Kevin swallows.
"Y... your arm." He says.
Jules looks at it, as if it's an afterthought.
"Had to cut it off," he says, "reached through a grate to get my gun, and three of them latched on. Were gonna pull it off, anyway."
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That night, after about two more hours of reminiscing, talking, asking about family and classes, Jules realizes it's time to meet his drive downstairs, and gives Kevin another hug. They promise to stay in touch and exchange numbers, and Kevin wonders vaguely how in the hell Jules was able to locate him and why he waited until now to do so.
Someone who was at such an obvious disadvantage -- without a leg, an arm, half of his face -- was able to see the light in this... and that made Kevin feel an interesting mix of shame and inspiration over his actions, his mood, his total state of mind. Was complete recovery -- mental recovery -- possible?
Kevin takes a shower and thinks on those words long and hard as he lays in bed with his last cigarette, waiting for sleep to come.
Destroying yourself in the process isn't the way to do it. That's giving them way too much of what you managed to scrape back together after they tried to take it all away.
And, as later he'll feel no small measure of guilt over, he immediately thinks of Chris.
That's his cue to let this go for the night.