All right. Here's my first stab at a Red Eye fic. If it stinks bare with me. If it doesn't, enjoy. In either case tell me in review form. As for the story itself, in the movie, Jackson gives pretty much no information on his own personal life, leaving a lot of room for people like me to play around and give him a customized bio. Hope you like it, and that it doesn't seem stupid or anything. Now for the disclaimer:
I hereby claim that Jackson Rippner belongs to Dreamworks and is not a product of my own mind. I also hereby give the responsibility of the inspiration for this story to the Dreamworks film, Red Eye (duh). Now that we've got all of this boringness out of the way, time to get on to the interesting stuff.
Once, in the not too distant past, there was a family of four, living in a remote city in a secluded house. The names of the parents were Greg and Sandra Rippner and they were the proud parents of two boys, the older of which they called Jack (but he preferred to be called Jackson), and the younger was Richard. They were separated by five years, but in spite of this age difference, they were surprisingly close.
This was not a happy family by any definition of the term. Greg Rippner had a terrible temper and was prone to unprovoked fits of rage, which he would brash out on his wife and children. Sandra was often abused, and resultingly, she became an alcoholic. She never defended Jackson and Richard as she was always too drunk. The two boys felt alone in the world, constantly receiving beatings that they didn't deserve.
Of this unhappy family, we are going to be following this story mainly from the older boy, Jackson's point of view. When we enter the story, Jackson is ten and Richard is five. Jackson hates his name. His classmates at school always made fun of him for it. He would be pushed around and taunted seemingly endlessly, and since he was a small boy without much muscular strength, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He would often wonder how the other boys could find so much entertainment about something so mundane as a person's name for so long, but somehow they did.
In spite of his misery at school, he preferred that to his homelife. He didn't live far from his school, and every day, he and his brother would walk home, taking as long as possible, and talking about many things. Perhaps it was these long walks and talks that made the Rippner brothers so close. However, eventually they would always come home to a messy house, fix themselves meager dinners and hide away in the one room they shared to do homework. When they arrived they were rarely greeted. Their father was always away at work and their mother was normally very intoxicated and lying on the couch in a semi-conscious state.
Sadly this was the best time of the day. When their father got home, he would always be angry and yelling. Richard would often ask Jackson why he was so angry all the time. Jackson would simply shrug. As far as he was concerned there was no reason for his father to be so upset, and he would never come right out and ask. That would result in a beating. His father was always angry about something at work, and would come home and continue to be angry about the messy house, and slap and yell at his mother about cleaning it and fixing dinner. Sometimes he'd even slap her until she was unconscious, but this didn't happen often. Then their father would come upstairs to their room and stand in the doorway like a big guard blocking a prisoner's escape, glare at them with his piercing blue eyes and demand why they didn't help their mother with the house. The boys would cower against the far wall, apologize and promise that next time they would help their mother. The father would say that wasn't good enough, call them useless, yell at them some more, and beat them. It hurt Jackson to be beaten, but it hurt him even more to watch his brother get beaten.
Jackson sometimes speculated that his father was constantly searching for reasons to be angry. It was almost as if, Greg Rippner wasn't happy unless he was shouting at, berating, or beating someone. He was very afraid of his father. So was Richard. Though most of you will agree that this is not the way a family should be… that this is not how two young innocent children should live, they had to lead this terrible life anyway every day.
So, what did you think? Love it? Hate it? Kindly review.
As for the story itself, it's not always going to be this impersonal a narrative, this was just sort of an overview of the condition of his family, to give you a general idea of how he and his brother lived. Next chapter should be much more detailed.