Work Text:
After 10 years of marriage Todd and Malinda are getting divorced. Todd is a short 30 year old man with black hair who works as a manager at a mall. Malinda is a tall 28 year old woman with light brown hair who works as an interior designer. They have four kids and live in Alabama.
They only got married because their parents had forced them to after they found out that Todd got Malinda pregnant when she was 18 and he was 20. (Malinda gave birth a few months before they were married.) During the time they were married Malinda has caught Todd using drugs and cheating on her multiple times, and she has come to realize she is into women. They had a semi-peaceful divorce with the only incident being when Todd started yelling about how unfair it was that Malinda was getting most of what they had.
At the end of the divorce Malinda had the 3 story house, 2 of the 3 cars and the kids because Todd was still on drugs at the time.
After the divorce Todd went to rehab for a year or two and got a lot better. He was a lot healthier and was a lot kinder then he used to be. He was now trying to get custody of their 4 kids. The custody battle happens over the course of a few months. In these few months the kids mostly spent time with their grandparents from both sides or their mom. Malinda was the one to get the twins, Samuel and Kyle(12), and their younger sisters, Emily(8) and Iz(4). The court decided this after they found out that, when Todd's parents died he had gotten back on drugs and started drinking which had caused him to be fired from his job. Malinda and the kids went and celebrated later that night at their favorite restaurant. This is where Malinda meets Suzin, a black, female, police officer and they become friends.
Todd was in such dismay that Malinda got most of what they had and custody of the kids that he was drunk and high for a week straight. One night he got black out drunk and super high, and in his drunkenness high he found his way to Malinda’s house and proceeded to smash one of the cars to the point it was totaled, he broke a few of the windows of the house, and burned the grass. Todd passed out in the backyard, thankfully after he put the fire in the grass out.
When Malinda came home she found everything and looked around the house to make sure nothing else was ruined which is when she found him passed out on the ground when she got home from work at six o-clock that night. (The kids were at friends houses that night as it was a Friday night and that was why they didn't call her or the police.) She quickly called Suzin, her now girlfriend, to come get him and then Malinda sued him for the money to fix what he had ruined. The court found Todd guilty and made him pay for the damage and sent him to jail for 8 years.
When Todd got out of prison Samuel and Kyle were 20, and their younger sisters, Emily and Iz were 16 and 12. He wanted to spend some time with his kids but Malinda told him no every time he asked, as did the twins when he asked if they wanted to spend some time with him. In his desperation to be with them, he kidnapped Emily and Iz while they were on their way home from school. He used their phones to tell the twins that they were going to a friend's house to study for a few hours.
The twins found it a little weird because the girls didn't usually study for anything but said okay and that they could go anyway. When Malinda got home it was 8 that night, she found the twins freaking out a little. When she asked them what was wrong they told her the girls said that they were going to a friend's house for a few hours, but when they would do this they were usually home by then, but they weren't and they were worried about the girls.
Malinda told them they would wait another hour and that if they weren't home by then she would take it to the police. And that is what she did when the girls still weren't home by 10.
Todd had kept the girls in his basement for a few weeks. He would give them food and water regularly. Whenever Todd went in there he would usually beat them for one thing or another. Emily would always stand in front of Iz or hide her somewhere in the basement so he couldn't get to her.
This caused Emily to get the majority of the beatings he inflicted upon them. He would only ever beat them when he was high, drunk, or when they refused to call him dad because he hadn't realized that they didn't recognize him because he looked very different after 8 years. When he would come down from his high or become sober, he would always buy toys for them right after. He did this because he thought that it made what he was doing okay.
One day he took the beating too far and killed Emily by accident. This is when he realized what he was doing was wrong so he grabbed Iz while she was in the middle of a panic attack, because she just watched her sister get beat to death, and locked her in the trunk of a car that he stole. He then smashed said car into a pole and put Emily's body in the front seat to make it look like she was the one that took Iz and left. It was about an hour or two later that the twins found the car, and as Kyle called Suzin and the cops, Samuel called their mom.
A month later they had a funeral for Emily. Malinda got Iz into therapy and finally got the full story a few months after that. Malinda had sat there with Suzin and the both of them held onto Iz for hours as they all cried. Sam and Kyle were contemplating murder however. The twins called the cops and told them what happened after Malinda,Suzin, and Iz feel asleep and got Todd arrested.
After finding out that Todd wasn’t getting out of prison for a very long time. Malinda, Suzin, the twins, and Iz were overjoyed at the news. Even though they were happy that the piece of garbage that hurt their sisters was in jail the twins still wanted revenge. So Samual and Kyle devised a plan to ruin Todd’s life even more.
After a few weeks of planning, they decided to set fire to his house. Sam and Kyle told Iz what they were going to do and she wanted to go with them. About a week later the three of them left the house at around midnight. It was about a three hour drive from where they were to Todd's home which was farther into Alabama than they were. It was about 3 in the morning when they got there.
Sam made Iz stay in the car as he and Kyle set fire to a house. They sat there for a few minutes admiring the view until they heard police sirens. Sam told Klye to take Iz home before the cops got there. When the cops got there they only found Samual who said he was the one to set fire to the house because the man that lived there hurt his younger sisters. He was in jail for 15 months.