Somewhere in Kings Row, a man sits at a dirty bar. Long black hair hides his face, but the several empty shot glasses around his bloody knuckles tell his night's story. Another person sinks on the barstool next to him and turns to face him. His words spilled from his mouth in smooth curls of menthol scented smoke while one hand lifted one of the many empty shot glasses.
"So...this is it then?"
For a moment, nothing more was said. The man sitting at the bar slowly breathed in and sat up to remove the hair from his eyes. "Yeah..." he said. His voice grinding like worn gears.
"Vance...You've been here for the past four weeks, every night, drinkin' yourself blind."
That's right. This man was Quinton Vance. A man's man. A soldier's soldier. At least, he was. Right now, he was a train wreck on two legs. He turned and rested his scarred and bloody elbow in a mess of broken glass upon the bar. "You been watchin' me?" He asked. A coy smile spread across his lips. He was trying to feign okay.
"Yeah...I have. And you're ****** up. Look man, I know you're tore up about your kid, but there ain't a damn thing you can do to fix that..."
Vance sighed deeply and found himself jolted into the deepest recesses of his mind. Even after plowing through a sea of alcohol and fist fights, he found he could not drown the memory. He couldn't drown the images. How he watched that pick-up truck plow into her car. How he broke the windshield with his bare hands and tried desperately to pull a still smoldering engine from his daughter's lap; how he watched her take her last before fire fighters could arrive. There wasn't enough vodka in the world to drown that...
"She woulda' been sixteen..." Vance, while nodding and looking this stranger in the eye. He then turned his gaze toward the multitude of shot glasses and blinked. He wanted to cry. he wanted to sob his ******* soul out right there on that bar...but he couldn't. It had been trained out of him, torn out of his soul by years of living in the proverbial hell that was a warzone.
"Cricket woulda' been....sixteen, man...today...Ya know...it'd be okay, if I had someone to hate for this. If I had someone to blame...someone to ******' KILL!...But...I don't, man...it was an accident...So what do I do, man?...What do I do?"
The stranger said nothing for a moment. He could look Vance in the eye and see that his soul had been ripped right out of him. He was a hull. Scarred, battered and emotionally shattered. He sighed and put an arm around Vance. "C'mon bro...let's get you outta here...."
Hours later, Vance woke up. But he was not at home. He woke up at a table. Several men in uniform were there. Vance smacked once then licked his lips before wincing at the bright light in the room. "Damn...." he said, obviously wrestling with the hangover from hell. "Where am I?"
"You're at Vanguard Headquarters, Mr. Vance..." a familiar voice said. Vance held the sides of his head and murmured. "Why...the hell am I here, Mama Grey?" he asked.
"Because we want to help you...You can't continue to drown yourself in alcohol and self loathing...Representatives from The Pentagon wanted us to find you..."
A man in what appeared to be a green uniform sat down in front of Vance and leaned forward. "Son, you look like hell on two legs..." he said as he removed his green beret and put it on the table.
"Listen to me, son. I know what it's like to bury a child...it ain't easy. I know yer ex-wife says it's yer fault. I know that the person responsible was just a kid that wasn't payin' attention. There's no one to bleed for it and I know that's what's killin' ya tha' most. But, you gotta keep livin'. You gotta try to get past it. Now, there's talks about reactivatin' yer old unit, but in the meantime, I got some work for you to do..."
"What kind of work, General?" Vance asked, tilting his head. The General could see the shift in his gaze. Nothing piques a lion's interest like the scent of blood...
"The kind you do best...suit up."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_ck97ZkSIg
[This is actually the VERY first CoH video I done. I just kept it under wraps. I used Cyberlink Power Director to create it. I'm incredibly novice at video editing, but I'm a big boy and can take the harshest of criticism. More than anything, i just want to get better at them.]
For you, anything you want
