FINALLY! I got a good draft for Kevin.
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After the events of the film, Kevin returned home shaken but alive, clutching the Polaroid photos he had taken while traveling with the Bandits. His only proof that it had all been real. But the adventure ended in horror. At its climax, his parents reached for the smoldering fragment of Evil. Kevin cried out,
“It’s pure Evil — don’t touch it!” But they ignored him, and in an instant they were obliterated, blown into drifting ash before his eyes.
Authorities could make no sense of it. In official records, the tragedy was attributed to a gas explosion, a house fire, anything but the truth. Kevin was sent to live with his grandparents, who could only comfort him so much.
When he began therapy (still a boy), Kevin tried to explain. He insisted that his parents had touched Evil itself, that he had traveled through time, that the photographs he carried proved it all. But the doctors dismissed it: school trips, actors, museum displays, an overactive imagination trying to cope with trauma.
When Kevin grew hysterical, crying out,
“No, it’s real — I went through time!” the therapists labeled him delusional. When the Polaroids were finally taken away for “analysis” and never returned, Kevin broke down further, feeling violated, erased, and unheard. His escalating behavior landed him in a psychiatric ward for nearly a year.
By the time he was released, close to age 13, Kevin was quieter, more withdrawn,
broken a little, but not gone. Though the doctors helped him become “stable” again, the trauma left scars.
At school, he was
the weird kid, the boy who lost his parents in a fire and had once claimed to travel through time. He didn’t crave romance, never kissed a girl, and drifted on the fringes of his classmates’ lives. He made a handful of friends, other outsiders who accepted him without questions. Teachers described him as
“bright, but distracted.”
As he grew, Kevin still buried himself in history books. (old habits never die, It would seem). Reading about wars, inventions, and lost eras gave him comfort.
BUT, also a secret hope. Sometimes he would pore over old illustrations or photographs, half-believing he might spot the Bandits hidden in the background. Though he never spoke of it again to adults, the hope that it had all been real never truly left him.
By adulthood, Kevin works at a small mom-and-pop shop near his grandparents’ home. The family who runs it knew his grandparents well and offered him a place when no one else would. Kevin is quiet, polite, and dependable. To most, he seems a little dead inside, dulled by years of being dismissed. Yet those who look closely still see the spark in his eyes. A sign that the dreamer, the boy who ran through time, never fully died.
@Manny
