xp_logs | Kevin/Gabe: After the War

Gabe is hurting and Kevin tries to help. Awkwardly.

"Gabe!" Kevin showed up unannounced to the younger man's suite. "Hands off cocks, feet in socks, as my drill sergeant used to say. We've got a job."

He'd heard the mission debrief and after visiting Jean went looking for his younger friend. Kevin was extraordinarily good at reading between the lines and guessing what actually happened, and it seemed ugly. He wasn't about to leave him to process it alone.

Gabriel, who had been half-napping on the couch in freshly laundered athleisure, did not rise to greet him. "Do we?" That Sydney had found him was no surprise. Gabriel hadn't been reclusive, not exactly, but he had not gone out of his way to be particularly social. There was a deep exhaustion in him, one that he'd hoped had just been from taxing himself to drag Jean out of hell, but he knew he was fooling himself. "If this job involves formalwear of any kind, I might be out."

"No formalwear. But we need to move in five minutes, so whatever you need to get pretty is going to be truncated." Kevin said, oddly overly aggressive with the man. "Move, we're on a timeline here."

"Okay, okay." Gabriel raised his eyebrow at the urgency. But he'd never known Kevin to be needlessly hyperbolic, and so he arose. "Give me a sec. Don't get too comfortable." He disappeared into a blur; two minutes later, he'd changed into a denim jacket, an oversized black T-shirt and jeans, run a comb through his hair, clipped his fingernails and brushed his teeth. "I resent that you think I need time to get pretty, by the way."

"Yes, I should be massaging your ego even more." He said, leading him down to a car and setting off. Fortunately, it was a relatively short drive that involved a significant amount of silence. Kevin kept brushing off more details about the job and Gabe didn't want to volunteer anything, so it mostly turned into a quiet war over the radio channel until Kevin finally pulled into a dingy roadside place. He jerked a thumb at the door as he locked up the car, and they entered the grimy bar. The sign said 'Lou's' and looked like Lou might have handpainted it.

"Oh." Gabriel said, scanning the place. "Well, this setting I really should have expected." The whole atmosphere -- shabby in a way that Gabriel found privately relaxing -- practically demanded a private fiction, and so Gabriel created one. Lou, he figured, was an old Army buddy of Kevin's from back in the day. It would never be clear which war, or what day. But Lou always tried to give Kevin free drinks, and Kevin always insisted on paying in a ritual that both men knew was ultimately pointless.

None of this, of course, he vocalized. "What are we doing here?"

"Drinking. For now." Kevin adjusted his suit jacket as he walked it. The bartender looked up, past the half dozen eldery and crusty regulars sitting near the grimy bar. He waved as he walked in and held up a finger. "Pitcher of pilsner and a couple of whiskies." He said before finding a table near the back for them.

Gabriel wanted to protest that he didn't want a drink. Or at least that he didn't have a taste for one. But that wasn't entirely true, and Kevin would know it, and then he'd have to explain that what he really worried about was repeating old patterns. So instead, he sat and shrugged his jacket off, grimacing a bit at how sticky the table seemed to be. Still, it was every bit the opposite of Costa's bar, and that's what he needed right now. "Not the worst place a man has ever taken me, I'll grant you that."

"Just wait. This place has plenty of time to get worse." Kevin said as their drinks hit the table. Before the tired waitress left, he motioned for two more whiskies and pushed one to Gabe.

"Drink." He said, holding his up in toast before downing it immediately.

"Cheers," the younger man replied. He touched the drink to the table before downing about half of it. Then, ever the bartender, Gabriel took the pitcher and poured them two glasses of beer. "So." He wasn't entirely sure what to say. "Come here often?"

"Never. Passed it on the highway a couple of times." Kevin said brightly, draining off half the pint in one pull. "So, do you want to talk about what happened?"

"Oh." Gabriel decided to drink the rest of the whiskey in one big swallow. "You heard." Of course he'd heard.

"Well, I might have. I meant, even after 50 years at the CIA, I am exceedingly stupid." Kevin said, refilling his glass. "Amanda gave me the basic rundown. You can fill in the blanks or not. Your call."

"The basic rundown." Gabriel grabbed the beer. He wasn't sure what the basic rundown constituted, but he expected the forced orgy was far from basic. And he wouldn't even know how to explain it to Kevin, let alone the pit in his stomach it had opened up that seemed like it would never close. He was suddenly exhausted again

"It went to shit so fast," he said, picking up the beer. And it all did, but at least this would sound like it was about Garrison. "I keep — I mean, it just... turned."

"Can I be a very old man and tell you a war story?"

Gabriel was mid sip and practically choked on his drink as he snorted. He held up a hand and coughed. "Please," he said, a little pleased that his private joke had more or less come to fruition. The waitress came back, dropping two more whiskies on the table with a handful of napkins. "I would expect no less."

"I was on Hill 205 in Korea. We worked with engineers for weeks to create interlocking defenses. Trenches, mines, snares, obstacles... Rangers did everything in the book to hold it. And then one day 30,000 Chinese troops showed through and went through all of it so fast we might have built them a fucking highway straight to us for all the good it did." Kevin polished off his beer and refilled it before he picked up his shots.

"The best plans turn. Or break. Or explode. At some point in every engagement, things turn. You adapted. That's all you can ask."

"Not fast enough," Gabriel said. "I just — I don't know. I'm fast. I make time my bitch. I keep feeling like I could have gotten him out."

"Kane... You know, I reviewed Amanda's account. It feels like he made a choice." Kevin said quietly. "He chose to hold the rear. I don't know. I want to say I'd do the same, but I don't know if I have it in me. I can't imagine what that decision takes. But I think he made it and that being guilty about it isn't right. Our world is full of 'mights', but that's hindsight."

"You think I don't know that?" The words flew out of Gabriel with a defensiveness that surprised him. "I mean, fuck, hello, the world went to shit, and there I was, picking up pieces and trying to figure out what the hell any of us could have done. And the answer is always nothing. I could have done nothing." He sounded bitter and jaded. And what he wanted to say was that he was tired of feeling so powerless, but that wasn't the kind of earnest thing he'd ever voice to Kevin. "I don't know," he said, quieter now. "You obviously know it sucks enough to take me out here."

"Yeah. You needed to say it." Kevin said, He was openly contemptuous of a lot of therapy, but he'd been in the field for so long he'd accidentally figured out a few things over the years. "It's awful, kid. There's no way to make it right. But it happened and it isn't your fault."

The door of the bar opened and a collection of contractors came in, loud and obnoxious. They were regulars, and they called out for drinks just as one pointed to Gabe.

"Hey, who let the beaner in?"

Kevin smiled to Gabe, almost beatifically as he stood up and walked over. "The beaner? That's my son." He said and his punch took the man off his feet. He snuck a grin back to Gabe moments before his friends dogpiled Kevin to the floor.

Gabriel had, for a second, been stunned. He'd found his heart dropped, and just like that, Kevin had lifted it up again. He smiled and shook his head, then downed the remaining whiskey on the table and chased it with most of his remaining beer. He stood, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, as Kevin flailed under a pile of racist assholes from god only knows where. This, he suspected, was the real reason that Kevin had brought him here.

He stepped rather calmly and dispassionately toward a bearded man who was atop Kevin. The guy started to pull his fist back to throw a punch. Then, with the slightest flair of his powers, Gabriel tackled the man to the ground and punched him square in the jaw.

Kevin was fighting dirty, smashing a man in his instep until a bone broke. He wiggled out and took a punch to the jaw in order to lay a kick into his first target. He gave a bloody grin as he felt a rib give under the kick.

It did not take long for Gabriel to lose himself in the brawl. It wasn't that he lost the specifics of the situation; not exactly. But there was so much he wanted to fight against, and so he expressed it through his fists. When two pairs of hands tried to grab him, he slammed his elbow into one man's nose. When the other man managed to connect a punch to his cheek, Gabriel let the pain course through him before standing and tackling the man to the ground.

Gabriel was not, of course, a trained fighter, or a particularly graceful one. But he made up for it in speed.

***

Kevin passed the icy bottle of beer over to Gabe, more for the bruises than the booze. He was splattered in blood. He'd taken the brunt of the brawl, but two guys against five, especially with a racist comment had left them in the parking lot and their opponents leaving in police custody.

"So, I feel better."

"Yeah?" Gabriel pushed the beer against his jaw, grateful for the momentary relief. His knuckles had scrapes. "Yeah." He would no doubt be sore tomorrow; he'd barely recovered from the mission. But it had been surprisingly nice to go berserk. "I'm not starting a fight club with you, though. You'd kick my ass."

"Damn right. I have at least three inches and a hell of a lot of practice on you." Kevin said. "You know a priest taught me how to box? Seriously."

"I don't doubt it. That sounds like the kind of misguided thing they did to keep kids out of trouble back in your day." The mention of church threatened to cloud Gabriel's mood a bit, but he brushed it off and handed the beer back to Kevin. "Thanks. That was... thanks."

"I figured. We can have a serious talk later but..." Kevin said. "I've seen a lot. I've seen loss and trauma. I won't force you but I understand a lot of shit. You might laugh, but I've helped people through similar things. I might be able to suggest something useful. If not, I'll always take you out to get beaten up."