#only adds fuel to my 'kev's mom was polyamorous as fuck' fire thank you very much

[kariachi]

This was supposed to be short, but I got rambling about Kevin’s past and what we’re told in UAF and the Rooters arc and... my poor son.

Have some shit.

Whatever the circumstances of him ending up on the streets, Kevin most likely felt going home would be worse than being homeless given that kids his age and younger (and with how well established he seems we're likely talking younger, it seems likely he's not new to this life) tend to stick close to home and not be gone especially long unless something happens to them. More specifically they generally don’t have the means to get far, tend to stick to areas they know and therefor are likely to be found in rather quickly, and more often than not quickly realize that whatever has driven them to run away is less horrible than being alone in the dark and the cold while you’re hungry and there’s bugs and animals running around. So normally, a runaway his age generally at least tries to go home if nothing horrible happens to stop them. But, again, we see Kevin’s hideout, he’s very well established, meaning it’s more likely than not he’s been in that spot for a relatively long time.

And when we look at what we see in the reboot, which isn’t a proper one-to-one for OS but can give us insight? Where he has no powers and still is very blatantly the victim of neglect, emotional, and verbal abuse at the very least? While OS!Kevin directly states that the issues with his family are due to them “not being thrilled with having a freak for a son”? He may not be entirely on the wrong track. He probably would’ve been safer at home, but given that kids who aren’t ‘normal’ tend to experience more and worse abuse, and he states he was born with his powers implying they’ve been notable for a long-ass time and therefor he would’ve been seeing the response to them for a long-ass time... It’s entirely possible, maybe even likely, that OS!Kevin was dealing with a whole other level of parental abuse than Reboot!Kevin, and Reboo!Kevin also clearly does not have any drive to go back home despite everything he’s been through.

And of course this is all assuming that he is a runaway. In OS he simply refers to his family as “long gone”, which doesn’t really tell us anything, but in UA he specifically states he was thrown out. Harvey says he wasn’t, but also doesn’t actually back up the statement with anything based on the transcripts I’m looking at, only going directly into claiming that he demolished his childhood home.

Which stands out to me, because it doesn’t really fit what we’ve seen of Kevin. He doesn’t demolish his own shit, and the shit he does demolish is generally either for work or retribution. That retribution may only be required in his own mind, and/or only when he’s unstable, but it’s still a consistent thing with him. It’s not until after he seems to run out of people to get back at that he starts targeting people to feed his addiction, and at no point are we given a reason to believe he targeted Harvey. 

Which is really fucking important to consider. Kevin very clearly has issues with his stepfather in UA- again, he blames him for his ending up on the streets- but despite having put a guy in traction over a tenner, we don’t see any real indication he intended to hurt him. Even when he threatens him, which only comes after telling him to get out of his way, the fact he holds it as a threat for as long as he does before Harvey calls his bluff implies that it was a bluff. Add in the fact Kevin at first assumes that the way they would be protecting Gwen would be to have his mother in there with her, and you get the feeling Kevin’s least likely to do things to harm his family. Which itself tracks with Hit ‘Em Where They Live, where he straight up says that they should kill anyone who threatens their families (which also means his treatment of Devlin in Ken 10 is an even greater crossing of the event horizon for him than originally intended- the Kevin we see in that future is the farthest gone, so much so that even this has left him in his quest for vengeance and power).

So, if Kevin’s not really a person who goes around destroying his own things, and he’s not a person who really threatens or even takes to threats to his family, why the fuck would he demolish his own home? And, even more importantly, how? The Kevin we meet in OS didn’t have that sort’ve power, unless he fucking ran a car into it, in which case we get back to why. And if it had been an accident, we then go back to two factors- 1) runaways his age don’t stay gone unless they can’t come back or feel that being gone is better than what’s waiting at home, and 2) Kevin thinks he was tossed out. If he just ran away due to the consequences of his actions, which seems to be what Harvey is implying, why would he think that? What consequences were there that made him think he was being kicked out?

Bringing us to a point- I don’t think we can trust what Harvey says here. It contradicts the other information we have, not just from out of Kevin’s mouth but from what we’ve seen of his behavior in the three series that existed at the time. Things don’t really add up. But then...

And then we get the Rooters arc. That makes Devin a non-entity and calls into question the stories of the parents Kevin is given in UAF, given at best his mother’s brain was messed with by Servantis and at worst, those weren’t his parents. The latter of which actually makes more sense with what we’re given. First, while we don’t know where for certain Bellwood is, it has to be in the west because there’s not deserts and wild cactus in the east, and WoG tries to say his parents are in Bellwood because he’s originally from there, but a young child getting all the way to the east coast from that far is incredibly unlikely, unless he was abandoned there, which again contradicts Harvey’s claim that they didn’t abandon him. Second, the easiest to way to keep Kevin in Bellwood- where Servantis needs him for his sleeper agent deal- is to put his family there, but the easiest way to do that would be to fake it. Moving Kevin’s original family there requires messing with a load of people’s minds because there’s a whole fucking family there to poke at any holes. Adding Kevin to a local family encounters the same problem. But if, say, you had a couple of the Rooters pretending to be his family while acting as his handlers...

We only see his mom and Harvey in two episodes- in Vendetta, where a man WoG would later reveal was a Rooter gets framed for Devin’s murder, attacks Kevin’s mom’s house while she’s so luckily not there, and she’s the one who informs him of what happened to Devin, leading to him killing said Rooter. This could serve two purposes for Servantis- who had to be involved if Ragnarok was a Rooter- in that it both proves Kevin isn’t going so soft he won’t still kill a bitch (if which case he’d probably need to be brought in and reprogrammed again) and would get rid of Ragnarok, who presumably had made himself disposable one way or another given he was dropped into the fucking sun.

Meanwhile, Harvey only shows up on screen during Absolute Power Part II, where Kevin has snapped but is targeting the wrong Tennyson, and the Tennysons are planning to kill him before he can, at which point Harvey... riles him up. Somebody he has a clearly bad history with shows up, calls his memory of what had to one of the most major events in his life bullshit, accuses him of having destroyed his childhood home, specifically notes his dad's being dead for some reason, gets in his way, and challenges him. Nobody in their right mind would’ve let Harvey get involved just in general, this is a not a situation where you want somebody the guy has beef with coming in if you don’t absolutely need the fucker, and that’s before you consider that the way he handles things is iffy and his claims don’t line up with what we know of Kevin and what he’s capable of.

But, looking specifically at the counter of Kevin’s memory of events and the claim of destruction, they make sense as a form of manipulation. Firstly, by making Kevin question his own memory- which again is liable to upset him and therefor get him more riled up, more likely to kill Ben which is what he’s been a sleeper agent for in the first place. It’s entirely possible that the story is one Servantis implanted in Kevin in the first place, which is why he doesn’t react more too it. Given in AF he ‘learns’ while he’s mutated how to shapeshift materials he’d made from, despite having already been shown doing this in OS, and the severely conflicting accounts here plus his minimal reaction compared to what you would expect, it’s entirely possible that dealing with energy doesn’t just fuck with his head, but also fucks with what Servantis did to his head. So a false memory of demolishing the house and running off gets superseded, and Harvey was bringing things back in line while also fucking with him and, again, riling him up.

Meanwhile, the claims of destruction don’t really make sense, Kevin isn’t known to shit where he eats and is clearly shown to not want harm on his family, even during this arc where he’s at least as bad off mentally as he was after a load of time alone on the streets which likely didn’t help his mental state, so what the fuck was going on there? And why bring it up like that, ‘we didn’t throw you out, you demolished the house’ and nothing further? But then you remember, part of how Servantis manipulates Kevin is through guilt. I’ve done a whole other post on Servantis’s manipulations, check the analysis tag, but Servantis has been shown giving a twisted viewpoint of reality and pushing guilt and responsibility onto Kevin in order to manipulate him, and the idea that he would do the same to push him further from the edge- especially with Ben right the fuck there and willing to get involved, especially to rescue what he thinks is a civilian? Not farfetched.

Get Kevin angry, upset, confused, get Kevin to start threatening his poor innocent stepfather, so Ben gets involved and Kevin, now more riled up than he was before, is more likely to kill him before he can be killed in turn and Servantis’s plans all fall apart at the seams.

I’ve seen some people suggest that the abandonment thing was the fake memory, which would scuttle this, but I don’t think it’s likely. For one thing, if these are his real parents, Servantis would have already been fucking with their heads to implant Devin and such, and I doubt he would’ve missed such a big hole as ‘not making sure one of his parents knows the history I need them to know’. For another, given Servantis would’ve wanted Kevin to stick around Bellwood to ensure close proximity to Ben- not only would this be less likely to happen if his parents were hanging around the place and he thought they’d thrown him out into the cold, but also it would be more likely to happen and make him even more trackable if, say, he felt guilty about demolishing the house and running away and therefor felt the need to make it up to his mom by doing things like buying her a new house and hanging around. Not things one does when they feel they were abandoned to the whims of fate.

Again, Servantis is known to use guilt to manipulate Kevin, and it adds another layer to bringing up the house thing. It wouldn’t just be feeding off guilt of the moment to worsen his mental state, but dragging in guilt he’s been dealing with since Servantis put that shit in his head, which would make the whole thing hit harder.

All of which is to say, here at the end, that given the Rooters arc makes what we’re shown of Kevin’s family and what they say questionable at least and an active lie at worst, Kevin was probably not a runaway in the original series. If he was it would still say a whole hell of a lot as I said at the start of this post, and again the reboot- being made by the collection that created him- gives us a damn good insight into his situation and why he may have run, but out of everything we hear in the sequels regarding Kevin’s pre-premiere history, his own claim of being thrown out is the one that aligns the most with what we already know about him, about his history, and about how mutants seem to be treated in-universe.

So, yeah, more likely than not OG!Kevin was neglected and majorly abused at home- verbally and emotionally at the very least- and could very reasonably be assumed to have eventually just been abandoned entirely.