(no subject)
Title: The Fall of the House of Shepperd
Author: Lady_Alianna
Rating: T
Warnings: Mentions of attempted suicide
Summary: Slowly, surely, a family collapses from the inside.
Author's Note: I wrote backstory! *whimpers* over a thousand words of backstory!
When he was little, John Shepperd wondered why his mother never took him or his twin sister, Amy, to meet her friends from work. Now he doesn’t wonder. Now he knows. Diana Shepperd is ashamed of her marriage. On one level, he can understand why, for the Lady Diana Hathaway, only daughter of the Earl of Bisley, an American soldier is marrying down. On another level, he hates her. He hates her because she doesn’t fit in. All of his friend’s mothers, all of his father’s fellow officer’s wives, don’t work. They have mid length hair that isn’t quite blond and isn’t quite brown, that falls to their shoulders in gentle waves. They have eyes that aren’t quite blue and aren’t quite grey, and gently tanned skin. Their only foreign languages are French with a smattering of Spanish. Diana isn’t like that. She works for an English foundation to do with antiquities and Archaeology, her hair is black and straight and falls to her waist, and her eyes are flashing hazel against her white, patrician face. She can speak and write Latin and Ancient Greek fluently, and argue in French, Italian, German and Russian. She is not the stereotypical officer’s wife, whose main concerns are ferrying her children to Little League, and what’s on the table for dinner, who went to a local community college, and forgot everything they learnt five minutes after they left. Diana lets her children walk home from Little League and dancing, and has made an art form out of ordering take-out when her husband isn’t home. The rest of the time she does steak and chips, the one thing she can’t mess up. She attended Oxford University, and John has seen one of her books in the local library- The Role of Women in Greek Culture, by Dr. Diana Hathaway, and it doesn’t escape his notice that she publishes under her maiden name. It doesn’t escape his notice, that, as he is their father’s child, Amadea is their mothers.
When he is fourteen, everything changes. Amy starts wearing make-up and short skirts, his father is promoted to full colonel, and, most impacting of all, one of his mother’s friends dies. He is sad, in a sort of detached way, because he’d met Mari a few times, and liked the cappuccino skinned woman, who seemed to be made up of shades of brown. It is not Mari’s death that impacts him, but the aftermath.
The realization comes after, with the first set of insidious rumors, going round the high school, and with Jimmy Shereton’s quiet whisper that did he know his mother was a lesbo. He broke Jimmy’s nose. He was sent to the headmaster, given a speech about unacceptable violence, and had his parent’s called in. When he sees them coming in the doorway, he realizes just how thin his mother is, a shadow of a woman whose cheekbones seem like their going to cut through her skin. His father does all the talking, then and on the way home, and it is as he watches his mother chopping onions to go with the steak that he realizes he hasn’t heard her speak since the funeral.
That night, his parents have an argument. John’s heard them disagree before, but it’s always ended with apologies, compromises, and if his father was in the wrong, a bouquet of flowers. This argument is different. It starts with David asking icily what she thought of John’s behavior, and escalates when she shrugs. Soon, John and Amy are sitting hunched in their seats, tying to ignore their father’s yells. He gets louder and louder, until Diana gets to her feet and walks out. The slam of the front door is loud in the sudden silence.
A week later, Diana takes half a bottle of sleeping pills. John wakes up at midnight to his father’s shouts, hurrying out into the hall to see Amy calling an ambulance, and David shaking Diana, desperately trying to wake her up. Diana is diagnosed with severe depression, and pretty soon the rumors are that she’s not only a lesbo, but a psycho lesbo at that. John gets into a real fight after Jimmy says that, fighting him until a teacher threw water at them and dragged them apart. That time, John was suspended for a week.
During that week he asked his mother whether she really was a lesbian. She didn’t say anything, and he took that as an answer. They’d pushed to have her institutionalized, but David wouldn’t let them, and by John’s sixteenth birthday everything seems as it was before at home, except for the underlying tension that permeates the way they deal with Diana. At school, on the other hand, things are getting worse ad he is delighted when his father is transferred to a base in California. But even there, it seems, someone knows that Diana Shepperd tried to commit suicide, and a daughter of one of his father’s fellow officers mentions it. He ignores her.
While all this has been going on, Amy has been changing, and it is soon after the move that John looks at her and doesn’t see Amy, his twin sister, but Amadea, a near-total stranger. That hurts. She haunts the library now, and John has seen her poring over their mother’s books. Her grades are getting better and better, until they’re straight As, while the only place he’s doing well in is Math. By the time he is eighteen, it is a relief to go off to the Academy away from it all.
The first time he comes home, its only his father in the house and David explains that Diana is writing a book on Alexander the Great’s mother, Queen Olympias, and decided to stay with some friends in the South of France to write it. Amy chose to stay with her, nearer her university of Oxford. After that, John only goes home when he has too. By the time of his graduation, he hasn’t seen his father in nearly a year, and his mother in twice that long. They all attend, and John’s mother kisses his cheek with cool red lips, and gives him a copy of Anna Karenina. They take him out to dinner and Amy talks about her first in Classical History from Oxford, and the offers of a job at The British Museum. John is faintly surprised when the thought of his twin living so far away, putting down roots, doesn’t really hurt. And so they slip apart. Amy works at the museum, marries a man called Liam FitzGerald and has a daughter called Rebecca, Diana writes about Adriane of Crete, and Antonia Caenia, Vespasian’s lover, David retires from the Army, moves to New Orleans, and John is stationed all over the world, until, finally, he is sent to Antarctica. Six months after he arrives, a message arrives in the mail from Amy -Dinah Joanne Fitzgerald, Six pounds, two ounces, eighteen inches. 2:30 a.m. 23rd June, 2004.- For a moment, he considers writing back, them someone comes in to tell him that he’s been ordered to fly some big shot general in, and things snowball and before he knows it he’s about to step through a large metal ring to another galaxy, under the command of a Marine Colonel. In the end, it doesn’t really feel like he’s abandoning them, because they haven’t been a family for so long.
Author: Lady_Alianna
Rating: T
Warnings: Mentions of attempted suicide
Summary: Slowly, surely, a family collapses from the inside.
Author's Note: I wrote backstory! *whimpers* over a thousand words of backstory!
When he was little, John Shepperd wondered why his mother never took him or his twin sister, Amy, to meet her friends from work. Now he doesn’t wonder. Now he knows. Diana Shepperd is ashamed of her marriage. On one level, he can understand why, for the Lady Diana Hathaway, only daughter of the Earl of Bisley, an American soldier is marrying down. On another level, he hates her. He hates her because she doesn’t fit in. All of his friend’s mothers, all of his father’s fellow officer’s wives, don’t work. They have mid length hair that isn’t quite blond and isn’t quite brown, that falls to their shoulders in gentle waves. They have eyes that aren’t quite blue and aren’t quite grey, and gently tanned skin. Their only foreign languages are French with a smattering of Spanish. Diana isn’t like that. She works for an English foundation to do with antiquities and Archaeology, her hair is black and straight and falls to her waist, and her eyes are flashing hazel against her white, patrician face. She can speak and write Latin and Ancient Greek fluently, and argue in French, Italian, German and Russian. She is not the stereotypical officer’s wife, whose main concerns are ferrying her children to Little League, and what’s on the table for dinner, who went to a local community college, and forgot everything they learnt five minutes after they left. Diana lets her children walk home from Little League and dancing, and has made an art form out of ordering take-out when her husband isn’t home. The rest of the time she does steak and chips, the one thing she can’t mess up. She attended Oxford University, and John has seen one of her books in the local library- The Role of Women in Greek Culture, by Dr. Diana Hathaway, and it doesn’t escape his notice that she publishes under her maiden name. It doesn’t escape his notice, that, as he is their father’s child, Amadea is their mothers.
When he is fourteen, everything changes. Amy starts wearing make-up and short skirts, his father is promoted to full colonel, and, most impacting of all, one of his mother’s friends dies. He is sad, in a sort of detached way, because he’d met Mari a few times, and liked the cappuccino skinned woman, who seemed to be made up of shades of brown. It is not Mari’s death that impacts him, but the aftermath.
The realization comes after, with the first set of insidious rumors, going round the high school, and with Jimmy Shereton’s quiet whisper that did he know his mother was a lesbo. He broke Jimmy’s nose. He was sent to the headmaster, given a speech about unacceptable violence, and had his parent’s called in. When he sees them coming in the doorway, he realizes just how thin his mother is, a shadow of a woman whose cheekbones seem like their going to cut through her skin. His father does all the talking, then and on the way home, and it is as he watches his mother chopping onions to go with the steak that he realizes he hasn’t heard her speak since the funeral.
That night, his parents have an argument. John’s heard them disagree before, but it’s always ended with apologies, compromises, and if his father was in the wrong, a bouquet of flowers. This argument is different. It starts with David asking icily what she thought of John’s behavior, and escalates when she shrugs. Soon, John and Amy are sitting hunched in their seats, tying to ignore their father’s yells. He gets louder and louder, until Diana gets to her feet and walks out. The slam of the front door is loud in the sudden silence.
A week later, Diana takes half a bottle of sleeping pills. John wakes up at midnight to his father’s shouts, hurrying out into the hall to see Amy calling an ambulance, and David shaking Diana, desperately trying to wake her up. Diana is diagnosed with severe depression, and pretty soon the rumors are that she’s not only a lesbo, but a psycho lesbo at that. John gets into a real fight after Jimmy says that, fighting him until a teacher threw water at them and dragged them apart. That time, John was suspended for a week.
During that week he asked his mother whether she really was a lesbian. She didn’t say anything, and he took that as an answer. They’d pushed to have her institutionalized, but David wouldn’t let them, and by John’s sixteenth birthday everything seems as it was before at home, except for the underlying tension that permeates the way they deal with Diana. At school, on the other hand, things are getting worse ad he is delighted when his father is transferred to a base in California. But even there, it seems, someone knows that Diana Shepperd tried to commit suicide, and a daughter of one of his father’s fellow officers mentions it. He ignores her.
While all this has been going on, Amy has been changing, and it is soon after the move that John looks at her and doesn’t see Amy, his twin sister, but Amadea, a near-total stranger. That hurts. She haunts the library now, and John has seen her poring over their mother’s books. Her grades are getting better and better, until they’re straight As, while the only place he’s doing well in is Math. By the time he is eighteen, it is a relief to go off to the Academy away from it all.
The first time he comes home, its only his father in the house and David explains that Diana is writing a book on Alexander the Great’s mother, Queen Olympias, and decided to stay with some friends in the South of France to write it. Amy chose to stay with her, nearer her university of Oxford. After that, John only goes home when he has too. By the time of his graduation, he hasn’t seen his father in nearly a year, and his mother in twice that long. They all attend, and John’s mother kisses his cheek with cool red lips, and gives him a copy of Anna Karenina. They take him out to dinner and Amy talks about her first in Classical History from Oxford, and the offers of a job at The British Museum. John is faintly surprised when the thought of his twin living so far away, putting down roots, doesn’t really hurt. And so they slip apart. Amy works at the museum, marries a man called Liam FitzGerald and has a daughter called Rebecca, Diana writes about Adriane of Crete, and Antonia Caenia, Vespasian’s lover, David retires from the Army, moves to New Orleans, and John is stationed all over the world, until, finally, he is sent to Antarctica. Six months after he arrives, a message arrives in the mail from Amy -Dinah Joanne Fitzgerald, Six pounds, two ounces, eighteen inches. 2:30 a.m. 23rd June, 2004.- For a moment, he considers writing back, them someone comes in to tell him that he’s been ordered to fly some big shot general in, and things snowball and before he knows it he’s about to step through a large metal ring to another galaxy, under the command of a Marine Colonel. In the end, it doesn’t really feel like he’s abandoning them, because they haven’t been a family for so long.