Thank you again for the request @theengineerfromplansvszombies ! Apologies for the delay! Here's is just a snapshot of what I think their childhoods/early adolescence might have been like. CW: Domestic abuse, child neglect, and alcoholism.
Ralph
Third youngest out of a total of 6, with Ralph being one of four boys. There's an even two year gap between each of them.
Father is firm, but fair. Mother is a free spirit who never lost her show stopping confidence and her flapper days.
Birthdays and especially sacred. Like, I'm talking all-hands-on-deck to make sure the guest of honor has a special day.
But a few days before it's their Mother's turn in the spotlight, a distant relative from Pasadena passes suddenly, which puts the actual funeral on the morning of her birthday. Thankfully, the kids are permitted to stay home.
12 year old Ralph thinks it's honestly bullshit to have to go to a funeral on your birthday, so he shoves one of the dining room chairs into the kitchen to try and take the helm himself. Cake can't be that hard to make, right?
Narrator Voice: It was, in fact, much harder.
Thankfully, 16 year old Agatha Dunn gets home from her part-time job just in time to prevent a flour and vegetable shortening coated Ralph from burning the entire house down.
"Jesus, Ralph. Mom's already got one funeral to deal with, don't make her have a second one!"
The kitchen ends up getting an emergency deep clean to hide the evidence, which, ironically becomes an even better present for Mom to come home to.
In an ironic twist, Ralph now has quite the nose for household cleaners and can pick up even the smallest whiff when he's tasked to secure crime scenes.
Stefan
Despite the stereotype of the large, Polish Catholic family, Stefan grew up an only child. But he wasn't necessarily his parent's only child.
Before immigrating to the States, Inga and Karl Bekowsky had two other children, both of whom tragically passed away before they reached the age of 5 due to scarlet fever.
This made Stefan basically the 'miracle child', which made Inga *very* protective of him.
"Stupid tie..." A 12 year old Stefan huffed, trying to loosen the brand new neck-tie his mother had knotted around him for Easter mass. He had gotten permission to walk over to the Dabrowski's house to give his classmate Gabe the catcher's mitt he'd borrowed over the weekend, only to find Gabe getting pummeled into the dirt by a trio of 7th graders in the empty lot near the playground.
"Hey!" He reached for the nearest hunk of gravel before whipping it squarely at one of their backs. "Get the fuck off of 'em!"
Poor Inga almost faints on the spot when Stefan returns home with a bloody nose and dirt all over his church clothes.
["What on earth happened?!"]
Stefan tries to walk past her, only for her to hold steadfast onto his shoulder. She lets go as soon as she sees him wince.
"...Gabe and me climbed a tree and fell into some mud." Stefan muttered, keeping his eyesight scarce.
"Mud?" She balks. "Stefan, it has not rained for weeks! Where would you have found such a thing?"
"Stefan." Karl kneels down to his level, holding out a damp washcloth. He hesitates a moment before taking it, his small fist curling around it.
"...Gabe can't stick up for himself 'cuz he's smaller than everybody else. I was just trying to get them to leave him alone."
Surprisingly, Inga doesn't cry. Instead she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, in and out. When she opens them again, she cups his cheek and wipes away a bit of dirt with her thumb.
"My boy does not need his Mother's arms to prop him up if he has a strong pair of his own to carry him, then." She smiles softly.
["But you did win, didn't you, son?"] Karl whispers with a wink.
Stefan gets a bit more freedom from then onward. So long as he promises to at least try and keep his church clothes clean.
Rusty
Finbarr was very much an accident child. By the time he was in elementary school, his two older brothers were already married and out of the house.
His father was a dockworker, mother was a seamstress. After a debilitating knee injury, Mr. Galloway took to the bottle. Mrs. Galloway began taking overnight shifts in order to keep the household afloat, which often left Rusty alone to his own devices.
He often played hooky, getting into smaller skirmishes with other gangs of neighborhood boys after the sun went down. Rusty had a reputation of having a mean right hook, which earned him quite a few admirers. And rivals. Mostly rivals.
There was always a sense of tense awkwardness when he would see them in the pews the following morning at mass while he was an altar boy.
Although his rough and tumble reputation did end up netting him his first girlfriend in junior high.
Roy
Similar to Rusty, Roy's father was fond of the bottle. His mother was fond of gambling. Neither of them were fond of each other.
Not that Roy was a perfectly behaved child, either. Being a textbook latchkey kid likely didn't help.
While most families decorated their walls with family photos, Roy's childhood home was pocked with holes in the drywall.
By the time he was 11, Roy was basically used to the rotating cast of 'friends' that would be hanging around the house while the other parent was out.
In fact, every new bottle of high end perfume or gilded compact of face powder that ended up on his mother's dresser would often spur some kind of fight, as would the faded lipstick stains on his father's dress shirts.
Roy ended up becoming a bit of a crack shot with a slingshot that summer. Whenever the shouting and door slamming got to be too much of a headache, he's fish out a few of his old man's empty pilsners from the garbage and use them for target practice behind the garden shed.
Once you get into a rhythm, you didn't have to think much.
By early fall, the fights started growing more volatile, often with his mother storming off into the night and not coming back until the next morning.
While his pride wouldn't let him ever say it out loud, sometimes Roy wished she'd take him with her.
One day, after an especially vicious bout the night before, Roy decides to take the long route home from school.
To his surprise, the front door was already unlocked. Usually neither of them would be home until after dark.
The first thing he notices is that the drawers and cabinets are open and emptied. Roy gets a sinking feeling in his chest that they've been robbed, until he see that the tin coffee canister where all of the spare change gets tossed is untouched.
No. No way.
She couldn't have been serious. His mother was vain, and short tempered, and called him a brat more than his first name, but she always came back.
He runs down the hall to the master bedroom.
There's nothing but empty drawers.
In fact, the only thing left on the dresser is a single bottle of perfume, with barely more than three drops left in the vial.
As he silently sets it up behind the garden shed, he realizes that it's his most challenging target yet.
But not for the reasons you might think.
He pulls back the drawstring.
Once you got into a rhythm, you didn't have to think much.
Herschel
Biggs was one of the oldest boys out of his rather large pack of siblings, but was outnumbered by sisters.
Their own father was rarely home, working overnight in the rail yards. Their mother was chronically ill and often bedridden.
With so many mouths to feed, Herschel dropped out of school roughly around the 8th grade in order to help support the family.
Herschel was always a bit of a shyer, soft spoken child, but was often far more responsible and mature for his age. Especially when it came to taking care of his much younger siblings.
He was the voice of reason, a mediator when it came to squabbles, and a gentle helping hand whenever anyone got nicked by scrapes or bruises.
In a way, Herschel became a secondary father figure.
But that often left little time for *him* to play and act like a real child, making quiet moments where he could be the one to decide for himself an uncommon treasure.
One of his favorite pastimes, when he could find the time, was to try and check in on all of the strays in the neighborhood, feeding them scraps when he had some to spare.
While he didn't mind dogs, for whatever reason Herschel seemed to resonate with cats a bit more.
Calico, black, ginger, tabby, didn't matter what kind of cat or its personality, every one of them was his favorite.
According to one of his older sisters (who secretly followed him to see just where exactly Herschel was wandering off to) he often talked to the cats in the same way he did for his younger siblings when tearing up food scraps:
"Now, I don't wanna see any kind of fighting, got it?" "We can play later, you gotta eat first." "See? No need to fight. Got enough for everybody."
