A/N: I've been very desperate lately for more This is Us fanfiction, especially now that the show's on hiatus, so I decided that I'd better start contributing myself! This is the product of that. I had a lot of feelings involving Kevin this season and this story kind of just wrote itself. I really thought they might go in the direction of actually talking about/diagnosing Kevin with depression after the addiction storyline, but they never did. Here I've tried to stick to canon as much as possible while exploring that possibility.

I've also played with the present tense and different timelines, so to clarify...things in regular text are the present day (Around the time of "the Fifth Wheel"), while everything in italics are snapshots from the past.

Trigger warnings for mental health issues, depression, and the brief implication of suicidal thoughts.

"Now if I seem to be afraid to live the life that I have made in song / well it's just that I've been losing so long"-"These Days"

Kevin Pearson knows how to be angry. Anger is an easy emotion. It rolls off of him in waves, as naturally as reflex. Simple. Comfortable. Familiar. And consuming. Anger boils up inside of him until at last it breaks free like the rush of an opened dam. It always has. It probably always will.

Kevin has been angry for a long time.

He's nine years old and the worst at everything. Well, best at sports, maybe, but that doesn't count. That doesn't matter to his parents as much as other things. Things like swimming or singing, which Kate is best at. Or puzzles or homework or school, which Randall's best at. Randall is best at a lot of things, actually. He's definitely the best at making Mom happy. And Kate has Dad. And then there's him. He's eHe'HEsomewhere in between, or maybe at the bottom. Just Kevin. Forever stuck somewhere on the sidelines while the rest of his family plays on the starting lineup.

He likes school, but not for the same reasons that Randall and Kate do. Mostly, he likes having friends who like him back. Who pick him first in gym class and trade grapes for cheese sticks with him at lunch. Making friends is something he's good at. And he likes recess, too, and the notes his mom sometimes tucks into the back of his lunchbox, and the talks he has with Kate's friend, Sophie, during science. But he's also bad at math, and he can't do art, and he's always getting sent home with notes about his "behavior"…mostly that he talks too much when he isn't supposed to, that he's a disruption to the class. Sometimes that's how he feels at home, too: like a disruption. Occasionally he'll overhear his parents whispering about him at night in disappointed, hushed voices. So sometimes it's just easier to act the part.

xxxx

In March, they're sent home with their second report cards of the school year. Kevin rips his open while still at the school, as he and Kate are waiting to be picked up. It's always a good idea to check these things out first before handing them over to your parents. At least then you know in advance if you're going to be yelled at. But this time his report card is surprisingly good. He's gotten mostly B's. And he's even managed a C+ in math, now that he sometimes goes to tutoring hours after school. But best of all, there's an A. An A-, a wonderful A-, in Language Arts.

His parents are thrilled. His dad claps him on the back and his mom tacks the report card up on the fridge right alongside Kate's. But it's impossible to ignore that Kate hasn't gotten any C's, or that her teacher has scribbled a note on the bottom of hers saying she's a "pleasure to have in class." And it's equally impossible to ignore that Randall's, when he brings his home a week later, printed on the fancy paper of his fancy special school, is the best of them all. All down the line, in a neat row, is a string of bold, black letter A's. Kevin thinks his parents look a little happier about that than they had for him. And why shouldn't they? An A is a lot better than a C, after all. Dad lets Kate pick what treat they should have to celebrate, and Mom has Randall add his report card to the fridge.

Suddenly Kevin is no longer excited about his C+ in math. It looks a lot less impressive sandwiched between Kate's and Randall's grades than it had when he'd first seen it in the school parking lot.

No matter how hard he tries not to, he gets angry just from looking at the papers on the fridge, every time he walks into the kitchen. His report hangs a little lower on the white expanse of the freezer side, where it has begun to look increasingly pathetic next to those of his siblings': a constant reminder that he isn't good enough, and he probably never will be.

…A week later, he pulls all three reports off the fridge and throws them in the trash while his parents are upstairs, just so that they'll stop taunting him. He winds up grounded for the whole weekend, because Dad has already taken out the trash by the time his mom realizes what's missing from the fridge.

In his room, deprived of his Gameboy and with nothing to do but stew in his anger, Kevin only gets madder.

He had once hated drinking.

He can't remember much about the first time he got drunk, only that it was at a homecoming party at Richie Larson's house after the football game sophomore year, and he had felt extremely lucky to have been invited. Richie, who was a senior, had mostly invited other upperclassman, plus some of his friends who had graduated and were now in college. It had been made very clear to Kevin that the only reason he'd been invited was because he was on the varsity football team. But all the cheerleaders had been allowed to come, too—Sophie included—so he hadn't minded one bit how he'd gotten there, only that he stayed as long as possible. He doesn't remember much else, let alone the actual drinking, but he does know that he hadn't enjoyed it much, at first. He had felt like a fool. It hadn't gotten him anywhere with Sophie. And he had hated the loss of control. He had felt like he wasn't himself. Not long after, he had found out the truth about his dad, which had solidified the feeling.

These thought are almost laughable now. The very things he had once hated about alcohol are what now led him to constantly seek it out.

He can't stop picturing Tess's face, frightened and confused, in his rearview mirror.

He's seventeen, and his Dad is an alcoholic, and Kevin can't seem to stop being angry, even though he knows it's ridiculous and he knows that it's wrong, and he can see his mom glaring at him with every additional word that he speaks. He can see his Dad's face getting flush with guilt—or is it embarrassment?—too. And Kevin just looks away from him, getting even angrier still, and says something else to add fuel to the fire, not caring that he'll regret it later or that his mom will be mad at him for days. Not caring that his dad might even contemplate taking a drink. He can see it in his father's eyes sometimes, when they flicker over to the old bottle of wine Mom keeps on display from their honeymoon; he can see the longing. And he can't even bring himself to feel bad about it. Part of him, the sick, twisted, angriest part, deep inside, almost hopes that his dad will go for the drink. It's a sort of challenge. Or maybe a dare. Can you do it? Can you keep your promise? Do you even care about us at all?

And he knows his dad does, and he knows his dad will, but none of that matters in the moment, because Kevin had thought he'd known everything about him, after all, and then he'd turned out to be an alcoholic. He'd turned out to be such a drunk that Mom had kicked him out of the house for it—even if only for a little while. And now Kevin doesn't feel so sure about anything anymore. It feels a lot like a betrayal, as if there's a whole separate part of his father, a terrible part, and he's just been leading the family on this whole time, letting them all keep thinking he was great and wonderful and perfect. And all his life Kevin had fallen for it, thinking, hoping, that he would grow up to be just like him.

So he continues to make comments. Mostly when they're already arguing, but not always. And every time his dad stays silent about it, just long enough for Kevin to almost regret saying anything—almost. Then, without fail, he caves, and lets himself get mad back: yelling, dishing out punishments as Kevin stares back at him in defiance. Each time, afterwards, Kevin lies in his bed until the satisfaction wears off, as it always does eventually, and is replaced by restlessness. On these nights, he's never able to get a full night's sleep.

xxxx

He tells his mom to move Dad's AA stuff before the coach from Pitt arrives at their house for recruitment, and he makes sure to say it loudly enough for his dad to hear it from the other room. When the recruiter does arrive, Kevin's rude to him, too, and he doesn't even really know why. There's no real reason for it, and yet it feels good, in the moment, because he knows that he's making his parents just as angry as he's been feeling lately, all the time. Besides, he doesn't want to go to Pitt anyway.

After, they get into their biggest fight yet.

Later that evening, he finds his father in the kitchen on his knees, looking incredibly small—not at all like his dad, who isn't small at all. But nonetheless, it's his dad's voice that comes out from the body on the floor, cracking as it whispers the serenity prayer. Something inside Kevin cracks right there with him. He's crying before he knows what he's doing, before he can even think straight, acting on pure instinct before the rational part of him kicks in. The tears roll down his cheeks, and he has to scrunch up his face to keep a sob from escaping and giving him away. He hates crying, but he somehow can't help himself. He's never seen his dad look so helpless. He's never seen his dad look so weak.

He stumbles back up to his room shortly afterwards, and immediately wants to punch the wall, or at least throw something. But he knows his parents definitely wouldn't appreciate that sort of aggression, so he settles for punching out his pillow and ripping up the apology letter he'd just spent 30 minutes writing instead. Something about it is definitely satisfying. It feels good, tearing up the letter into tinier and tinier pieces. It's like he's ripping the image of his dad downstairs out of his mind.

After all, it's much easier being angry than it is admitting the truth: that he's never felt so scared.

(If his dad can't make it, who can?)

"What about your father?" Barbara asks, looking at him with that same impenetrable face.

Kevin hates therapy. He wants Barbara to just tell him already. Confirm that he's crazy and messed up and just get it over with, so he can stop freaking talking about it. But she just sits there and listens, and sometimes prompts an irritating question or two. It's infuriating.

He scratches his head in mock confusion, trying to avoid this discussion. He hates when she brings up his dad. "What about him?"

"Well, you've mentioned to me several times that he was an alcoholic himself." Alcoholic. The word still feels icy in his mind, foreign but yet all too familiar. How the hell did he end up here? Barbara pushes forward, "When you first found out about that, how did you feel?"

He doesn't have to stop to reflect on the answer. "Angry," he responds automatically. Barbara should know by now that it's always going to be anger.

At the Friday night game four weeks after the visit from Pitt, he busts his knee and is told he will never play football again. When his dad first tells him this—his voice a tone he hasn't used on Kevin since he was a child, all soothing and gentle so that he knows it must be bad, really bad—he temporally goes into denial, pretending his knee will be fine, that it will heal and he'll be back on the field in no time, despite whatever the doctors are saying. What do they know, anyway? But he can barely walk, and they put him in a wheelchair, and then crutches, and so he is eventually forced to accept that things aren't just going to go back to normal.

It only gets worse from there. His dad resorts to giving him ceaseless pep talks, and his mom never shuts up about community college, now that it's become perfectly clear that he won't get into any of the schools on his list. Even Kate goes on and on, trying to be comforting with lines like "football would have given you a permanent concussion, anyway" and "don't worry, you always figure things out without even trying." But none of them get it, not even Kate. It's not just football to him, it's his whole life. His one chance to be someone, and he's blown it. He's not good at anything else.

In the weeks that follow, he spends a lot of time lying on the couch, feeling sorry for himself. Wallowing in anger. Sometimes, he actually watches some of the tapes his dad has made of his old games, only because he knows that watching them will make it worse. Seeing the tapes is his reality check, because sometimes it can be quite easy to forget. Like a few days ago, when Sophie started talking about going to the prom together. Or when Randall finally grew the balls to ask a girl out, giving Kevin new material to tease him with for weeks. These are normal things. Things that make it seem, temporarily at least, like nothing's changed. Of course, everything has changed, so as soon as he starts to feel himself getting happy, forgetting, he puts the tapes on so that it will all come rushing back. He figures he needs to start getting used to being miserable.

The downside to this plan is that he can only watch the tapes when the rest of his family is out of the house, because one time Randall had caught him at it, crying and everything, and told their dad he thought Kevin was having some sort of a breakdown. Then Dad had told Mom and they'd of course made it some huge deal, sitting him down for a "talk" that consisted mainly of more nauseatingly inspirational bullshit and both of their pitying faces staring at him in elevated concern. He'd been so humiliated that he'd refused to talk to Randall for a week. But he's better about it now, more secretive. He doesn't even think Kate knows.

Kate had had a miscarriage. He'd done nothing. Despite her many efforts, how could Barbara possibly help him with that?

When she shows up to tell him, fist raised to the car window at 4 am when he wakes up automatically, without having to hear the noise, he's seventeen. At first, he thinks she must be lying. It doesn't make sense. He was just home and his dad had been fine, completely fine. There was no fire. Why would there be a fire? It doesn't make sense. (None of it makes any sense.)

Nevertheless, he suddenly finds himself overwhelmed by the urge to go home and talk to his dad, feeling an immediate and desperate need to apologize to him. Earlier, when he'd talked to his mom on the phone, he'd been so afraid of his dad's reaction that he hadn't been able to do it. Now…well, clearly something has happened. Something with Kate. She's full on sobbing, and she looks as if she's walked there, and he isn't sure if she's gone mental, or fallen and given herself a concussion, or what. All he knows is that he has to get her home—now—and he has to talk to his dad. Dad will know what to do. He always knows what to do.

Kate falls into him, then, in a slouchy, desperate hug, and he almost loses his balance on his crutches, but he manages to steady himself just in time. He put his arms around her without knowing why she's even crying. Why won't she stop crying? But of course it's Kate, so he'll stand here all night if he has to. As it is, it takes only fifteen minutes to calm her down enough to coax her into the car.

"Kate—"

"No, listen, listen to me Kevin!" she protests shakily, between long, gaspy breaths, "H-he's gone, he's go-gone." But who? Gone where? He forces himself to stay calm, but she's really starting to scare him. What the hell is she even talking about?

"Look, we're going to go home Kate, okay? I'm going to take us home now."

"No. No, no, no, no. You c-can't, Kev."

"Just get in the car Kate. Please."

His sister finally relents, and he ends up dropping Sophie—who seems unusually quiet and who keeps looking at him with wide, panicked eyes, but who insists that he borrow her car so that he and Kate won't have to walk the several blocks between the two houses—off first. Then he drives home, even though Kate is in the passenger seat the whole time, shaking her head and repeating his name and muttering inconsolably about things that don't make any sense. He drives home.

It's only when he pulls up to blackened, skeletal remains of his childhood that he realizes home no longer exists.

He relies on anger then, too. He's used it to get through every other moment of his life, after all, so why not then? At first, he directs the anger at his mom. For not buying batteries. For using that stupid old crockpot. For not making him apologize right there on the phone. Better yet, for not forcing him to come home.

He could have been at home. If he had, maybe he could have done something, maybe he could have stopped it from happening, or made his dad stay outside. But instead he'd been too busy having sex with his girlfriend. He quickly pushes these thoughts aside. It's much easier to just be angry.

So he gets angry at Kate. Briefly. Not about her dog—God, never about the dog—but about how she told him. Running out to find him in the dead of night because she couldn't stand him not knowing, only to fumble over the words, and not make any sense, and break down in his arms before he had even known what was going on. But Kate is practically inconsolable these days, and besides, he can never be mad at her for long. So he quickly redirects this anger, too, at his mom. After all, she's the one who told Kate and Randall without him, and then didn't even make sure to get to him before Kate could. It's just one more grievance to add to the list against her.

They're staying at a small, but clean and relatively cheap motel about 20 minutes away from their (old, gone) home. Randall starts cooking them all breakfast every chance he gets, and for some reason, this, too, seems infuriating. Kevin confronts him about it one morning, but Randall obviously doesn't get it, because he responds back with "it's just breakfast." Then their mom tells Kevin to cool it, and no one else says anything until they've all finished their eggs in silence.

It isn't just his family. Kevin is angry with the doctors, too. What the hell kind of doctor says someone is fine one minute, then tells that same someone's wife that he's dead a minute later? He thought the whole point of doctors was to save people. They should have known something was wrong. They should have done something. Instead they'd just sat there and let him die.

Him.

It's him who Kevin is angriest with for the longest. Furious. Full-bodied, shaking anger that overwhelms and encompasses him until he can't even think about anything else. Because his dad went back in the house. He'd gone back in when the house was up in flames, and he didn't have to. And he hadn't just gotten the dog, he'd stuck around for other things, too. Photo albums and family videos and things that didn't matter. He'd stayed in the smoke even longer for stupid photos. And he'd fucking died on them because of it.

(How could he have let himself die?)

Kevin learns very quickly that rehab, most of all, requires energy. Therapy requires energy. And he also finds, nearly as quickly, that he's getting more and more tired by the hour. It's much easier to fake it during the day—the old act, revisited—but it's different at night, when he's all alone in his big, spacious private room in the big, spacious rehab facility in which the judge has placed him.

He's tired. He's much too tired.

He can't tie the tie. His mom's yelling that they have to leave, and he hasn't even tied his tie. For a moment, he panics. Then Kate's at the door.

"Kev, we have to go."

He blindly nods and takes the tie with him in the car, only to struggle with it even more in the moving vehicle. Randall offers to tie it for him. Of course he does. He tears it off and throws it aside. It's not like he needs a stupid tie, anyway.

xxxx

At the funeral, he fights with Randall over a silly watch that doesn't really matter to him. He makes a scene, and he makes Kate angry without meaning to, and he only feels better for like, half a second afterwards. And he knows even before he does it that it isn't worth it, but all he can think about is that he can't stand to hear one more "old family friend" tell him any more stories about his dad. Then he sees the watch on Randall's wrist, and it does piss him off, for a minute, because no one had even told him it had been saved. He hadn't thought there was anything left. So he's across the room before he's aware of moving, yelling at Randall with an entire room full of people as spectators, who don't do anything to stop him and who don't say anything about it afterwards, all because they feel too sorry for him. He's just the poor, useless son of Jack Pearson, with a dead father and a temper problem.

There's so much to be angry about that it seems impossible, inconceivable, to be anything but. How could anyone not be angry?

He comes close to tears only once, when Mom takes them to that stupid tree and they spread the ashes, and he can feel his eyes getting wet. Kate and Randall are already both bawling, and his mom is too, and when it comes down to holding his dad in his hands, he does come close. But he pushes the feeling aside as he spreads the ashes. It's easier when he remembers how angry he is at people. He repeats the web of names in his head: Mom. Kate. Randall. The doctors. Dad.

In the end, Kevin Pearson doesn't cry on the day of his dad's funeral.

In the two weeks that come after, Kevin doesn't get out of bed. At first it's easy for this to go unnoticed. They still have a while before they have to go back to school. And there are two bedrooms in the motel. Kate and Randall have taken to alternating nights sleeping with Mom on Dad's side of the bed. Besides, they never bother him before noon anyway. Kevin has never been a morning person. As long as he drags himself up when his mom calls him for dinner, it seems almost plausible that he could extend this phase indefinitely without anyone blinking an eye. He finds that the thought doesn't bother him nearly as much as it might once have. Nothing seems to bother him lately like it used to. His whole life has become one giant nothing. A permanent, widening blank.

The only one who does notice, after just the first few days, is Kate. She's taken to cracking open his closed bedroom door in the middle of the day, to squint at him through the darkness. Sometimes she brings him food, or fresh water. For the most part, Kevin keeps the lights out and the curtains closed, and his face pressed to the pillows. He always pretends to be asleep, napping, when she comes in, but even so it usually takes her several minutes to leave. He knows that she's aware that he's faking it. But she never says anything about it, to him or to anyone else. For his part, Kevin knows, too, that Kate has been sneaking junk food between meals, eating it in their motel room's one tiny bathroom, which is the only place guaranteed to offer her privacy. But he doesn't say anything about that, either. They've always had an unspoken, but shared, agreement to keep one another's secrets.

Eventually, he knows they're going to make him go to school again. And Sophie won't let him avoid her forever (he's surprised that she's let him go this long, honestly). He's going to have to come back into himself, which really means that he'll have to be able to fake it and go through the motions, pretending to be okay. He thinks he'll do all right with it. Kevin has always been a decent actor. Still, the thought of leaving his bed, putting in the effort to play his expected role, to shower, get dressed, eat, go on…it all sounds simply exhausting. It makes him pull the blankets around himself more tightly and burrow further down amongst his pillows.

Kevin tries not to think too much anymore, about anything. He just rolls over and closes his eyes. He's been doing a lot of sleeping these days.

Anger is a good shell. He can hide under it. Tuck himself up inside of it until it overtakes him, thickening, bulging, hardening until it is nearly impossible to get at what lies underneath. He's built it around himself liked a walled fortification, and then he's wallowed in it.

That's why it's so easy, now, as he's sitting next to his therapist, surrounded by his family, to raise his voice, to snap back, to take things too far. He's falling back on his old fortifications. He's letting himself rely on his anger.

Kevin Pearson knows how to be angry.

He had also known that the whole "family therapy" concept was a bad idea from the beginning. He had tried to warn Barbara, but she had insisted. She wouldn't stop talking about the "process," and so he'd finally caved and agreed. And then his family had arrived and he'd immediately regretted the decision.

He had known it would go poorly. He had known and he had tried to stop it from happening, he really had. He'd rehearsed everything he wanted to say, carefully scripted it, practiced his lines. And when he'd said them, he could tell his family had rehearsed their parts just as carefully. They gave him their predictable, mechanical responses, and everyone had nodded like they'd understood one another, and he had tried to let that be the end.

Dammit Barb. He knows she was trying to help, he does, but he hadn't realized she was planning to be so damn pushy about it. He for sure hadn't known she would bring up shit he had told her in their other sessions. That couldn't be legal, right? What the hell ever happened to patient confidentiality? He hadn't had long to ponder it, though, because then she was talking about his dad, and he had known everything would go downhill fast.

It had.

Dammit Barb. Their faces when he calls his father an addict say it all. It doesn't matter that the words are true. They don't talk about it, at all. End of story. That is the unspoken rule of the family: they never talk about it.

He's twenty-six, and lying on the floor of his mother's living room at midnight, talking with Kate, who's on the couch. They've both returned home for Randall's wedding tomorrow. Go figure, Randall is getting married, while Kevin has just signed off on his divorce. There's a sick irony to it that makes him want to scream.

The lights are all off and he can't quite make out Kate's face, but they're both still tipsy enough from the rehearsal dinner to be whispering sleepy confessions to one another through the darkness. Stuff they haven't been able to admit to each other in the daylight.

"Sometimes I think I purposefully sabotage myself," Kate whispers, her voice still thick from the alcohol. "I mean, I lost all that weight for this wedding, right? And then I bought a stack of bridal magazines a mile high just so I would feel bad about not looking like the friggin' models in them, drowned myself in chicken wings as compensation, and ended up having to take my bridesmaid dress out two sizes in the last month." There's a pause as she takes a deep, heavy breath. "I mean, it's just ridiculous! It's like I need to be fat. Not because I feel good that way, but because I feel worse! Does that even make sense?"

Kevin turns away from her as she talks, even though he knows it's too dark for her to see him anyway, even if she wanted to. It's a long time before he responds.

"Kate," he says finally, "I just cheated on my wife because things were going too well for me. Trust me, I get the self-sabotage thing."

His wife's—or, his ex-wife's—face floats back into his mind, from the night he admitted to what he'd done. He can still picture it perfectly, her kind face, so excited to see him, crumbling instantly in anger and disappointment, all from pain that he himself had caused. It's seared into his brain forever.

He suddenly wishes he could pour himself another drink.

"Definitely the dumbest thing you've ever done," Kate responds, a moment later. "And I still don't get it, by the way."

But Kevin is already replaying it all in his head. Sophie's bumbling laugh, her hurried excitement, their own soft whispers through the darkness as they lay side by side in the evenings and talked about their futures. Most of those conversations, in the weeks before he'd left to film that dumb movie and make an even dumber, much dumber, mistake, had involved her gentle prying and his own, equally adamant hesitations. The anxiety that everyone always associated with Randall had come for a visit with him, too. "She wanted to start having kids," he confesses softly, coming back into the conversation with Kate. And with her, he doesn't need to say the second part, the horrible part: I slept with someone else to get out of it.

The pause is weighty between them. Nothing they've said is anything they don't already know about one another—if anything, Kate understands him too well, she always has. But it's still the first time they've admitted these things openly, out loud. It feels differently, somehow.

"For the record, you'd make a great dad, despite what you think" Kate whispers back at last. Kevin has to shove his face into the side of his pillow to prevent a tear from falling. Her words are irrelevant now. It's too late for all that anyway. Sophie has made that much perfectly clear.

He still manages to mumble back a shaky "yeah" to his sister, because he knows she won't let him sleep otherwise. "And listen," he adds, "If you let yourself be confident for once, you'd still be the same Kate. But you might even find out you like her."

When her voice comes back, it's just as shaky.

"Yeah."

Things have only gotten worse. With his mom…with Randall. He had tried so hard not to get angry. He had avoided saying the stuff he sometimes thought precisely for that reason. He knew they wouldn't take it well. He knew they would get mad, that he would get mad. And then Barbara had gone and asked him about it out of the blue, so that he couldn't avoid it, and they'd all ended up getting just as mad as predicted. And he, he had risen to the bait even though he'd sworn that he wouldn't. And he'd started yelling back. Like he was 16 again.

It's just so damn easy to get angry. (Why does he always have to be so freaking angry?)

By the end of it, he'd managed to reduce his sister and mother to tears and leave even Randall seething. Randall was actually yelling back at him. Really yelling, with below the belt stuff about him faking his addiction and grasping for attention. That's how he knows he's really done it this time. Randall rarely dishes out digs like that back at him. And maybe some of it is true. Maybe even most of it.

(He thinks, very briefly, about sneaking out to get a drink. But then he remembers Tess.)

The truth is, he isn't actually angry with them. Not his parents. Not Randall. Certainly not Kate or Sophie. Not anyone. Not anymore.

When he starts taking the pain pills, when he starts drinking even more and loses Sophie again, and then loses his dad's necklace, and spirals out of control, it feels a lot like a natural progression. As if he should have seen it coming all along. As if this was always the way his life was going to accumulate, and the pieces of his great fall are simply wedging themselves into their proper place at long last.

He can feel himself slipping, and he knows that it's dangerous. It hasn't felt this bad since right after Dad, back when he wouldn't get out of bed. Like it isn't worth it, anything. Like there's no point to his job or to his relationship, even to himself. All the negative thoughts he's tried so hard to bury for years and years are beginning to resurface. It feels as if everything will always be doomed to fail. His leg, his relationships, his career. Maybe things would always be this wretched, because after all, he's the type of person who deserves it.

He doesn't know how to get the thoughts to stop, or at least slow down, beyond getting up to grab another drink. And after a while, he begins to wonder if he even needs the alcohol to numb him anymore. He feels nothing anyway. He's ceased to care.

Kevin Pearson stopped being angry at other people a long time ago, and started being angry at himself. It's himself he hates. And so every time he loses his temper he spends twice as long berating himself for it, kicking himself for losing control and hurting the people he cares about again, and never hurting himself enough. He can never be angry enough towards himself. He knows he doesn't deserve to be happy even as he strives for it. And so every time he starts to fix things, to climb a ring up on the ladder of life, he only waits for an opportunity to knock himself back down.

His mom hardly calls, and he knows that it's his own fault. And after The Manny fiasco, when he'd moved into Randall's basement, Randall and Beth had both hated him for it, and he can't blame them, because he was never a good brother, and that's all his fault too.

Kate had a miscarriage and he hadn't even known. He hadn't picked up her calls, or answered her messages. He hadn't been there. He'd been too busy messing up every other capacity of his life. He'd screwed things up with Soph. Again. He'd slept with some woman he hadn't even remembered from high school and then spent the night begging on her front lawn. He'd lost Dad's necklace.

Worst of all, by far, he'd endangered other people. Drivers and families in other cars on the road. His niece. Beautiful, sweet Tess. Her terrified face is still swimming around in his head. He can't get it out.

xxxx

His dad died still mad at him. And it's his, Kevin's, fault, all his fault. He wasn't there. He didn't stop him from going back inside. He didn't even apologize. He was never a very good son. As a matter of fact, he was never a very good anything. And looking at himself now, he knows his dad would be so disappointed. He will never forgive himself for that. How could he?

He deserves everything Randall said to him. The others, too. He deserves it all.

It was stupid of him to come here; it's just made everything worse. Kate, oh god Kate—and he hadn't even known. He fingers his phone in his pocket, but he makes no attempts to call her. What is there to say?

And Randall, with Deja…. He's only intruding. He can't do that his brother and Beth again.

Then why has he come here in the first place? Because you were going to tell him. You were going to tell him you have a problem. Oh, yeah. But it's not like he can now. Not when their problems are so much more real. What is his problem, anyway? It's of his own doing. He should be able to get himself out of it.

His head is throbbing. He takes another gulp of his beer. Everything feels very loud.

He has to get out of here.

He grabs the keys.

The worst part, he thinks, is how desperately he still wants a drink. Even after he's ruined everything because of it, made some of the biggest mistakes of his life and hurt practically everyone he loves, he still just wants to pour himself a glass. How messed up is that? That's why they call it an addiction, a voice, sounding suspiciously similar to Barbara's, whispers in his ear. He shuts his eyes and gulps down some water, trying to tell himself he can beat this, trying to stop wishing the water was whiskey instead.

Maybe it would be all right, he thinks, every now and then, to have just a small drink…as long as he stopped taking the pills. All of this was because he'd mixed the pills with alcohol, wasn't it? He'd become addicted to the pills. That was the real problem here. After all, he'd been fine before his knee had gone out, hadn't he? He drank every once in a while, even often, and had been fine. You weren't fine, the voice whispers. He pushes it aside. He had at least been functioning, hadn't he? He'd been working on films, real films, and he'd gotten Sophie back. He had even been making things better with Randall. It was the pills, that was what had done it. And he could give those up now. No. The voice persists. It's the alcohol too.

It feels like he's sixteen all over again, catching his father staring a little too intensely at his empty wine bottle on the kitchen shelf, or eying Miguel's bottle of beer when he was over to watch football. Kevin had been so angry at his father then. He had thought his dad didn't care, maybe, or that he was too weak to stop himself even if he did. But now it's as if he's staring down at himself, catching himself in the same act, and thinking those same thoughts. Except he's the weak one now—much weaker, so much weaker, than his father ever was. He can't do it. He won't make it.

He pulls himself up from his position laying on the ground, and forces himself to stand. After putting the empty water glass on the nightstand, he falls back into the spacious bed, not even bothering to pull back the sheets. His mom will be there tomorrow, to come and pick him up, and take him home. Barb thinks he's ready to continue his recovery on his own, to face his family again after that disastrous therapy session. Kevin isn't sure that he's at all equipped to do either.

As he lays there, his eyes firmly shit, the wariness carrying him over into the beginnings of sleep, he finds himself again thinking the thoughts of a much younger version of himself, from another time lying in a foreign bed, on the bumpy mattress of a motel pull-out couch. A part of him, however small, however buried from that time onward, is stronger than ever now. And he finds himself hoping, in some far off, distant part of his brain, that when he falls asleep tonight, he won't wake up in the morning.

Kevin Pearson is very used to being angry. But now he wonders if it wouldn't be easier, feeling nothing at all instead.