{overview} the man with the master plan
:: garath reginald eddings.
Name Garath Eddings
Age 30; 29/07/1953
Occupation Various
Status Married
Fandom The Belgariad AU
Played By Billy Zane
Wiki Mr Wolf
In Short
The only tiny who is actually nearly thirty years old.
:: biography
In 1948, Alan Eddings married Ngaire Hanrahan in a modest civil ceremony. In 1953 they welcomed their first son (the first of what would be seven) - Garath. He was strong, healthy and Alan would later say his strong-will was almost immediately obvious.
It wasn't long after younger brother Zebediah was born that Alan packed up his children and headed back to New Zealand with his pregnant-again wife to take over the family farm in Central Otago, where third son Malcolm entered the world. They lived there relatively peacefully until 1962, when after Samuel and twins Timothy and Killian were born, Dylan became the youngest and the last of the Eddings brothers. Garath was nine years old, and he'd been the only one of the boys around when his mother went into labour; he doesn't remember this, years later, but he does know that the birth was difficult, and while Dylan struggled through in intensive care, Ngaire didn't make it.
He doesn't really remember her.
Most people assume that the Eddingses are Catholic - Otago farming family with seven children? It's a safe bet, right? - but while Alan sometimes let the assumption stand for convenience's sake, it's far from the truth. An unapologetic polytheist himself, Alan guided his boys to choose their own paths, follow whichever god or gods suited them best, and gave them the space in which to learn and grow and worship. It's probably a good thing, considering the time, that they were as isolated as they were.
Alan was a kind-hearted and gentle man, and a damn good father. He did his best without his wife, but seven boys were a challenge and would've been even if the last of them hadn't been born deformed, so much smaller than his brothers, club-footed and twisted. In his less charitable moments, when he's tired and he's been drinking, Garath thinks this might be why when he was eighteen, his father headed up to Christchurch and never made it there. They never saw him again.
He's wrong, but he'll never know one way or the other.
So at the tender age of eighteen, pushing himself through highschool and his juvenile record, Garath became father to his own six younger brothers. Zebediah listened to him when he felt like it, unless Garath put his foot down - but he was old enough that he could get away with it, especially since they had much younger brothers who ate up more of his time. Garath instead came to rely on Malcolm, fifteen at the time, and his girlfriend Lydia Ullman. She was working full-time after dropping out in the fifth form (much to his chagrin), and in the end the decision to relocate permanently onto the farm with her boy and his boys wasn't much of a choice at all.
They got married the following year, neither of them yet twenty.
Feeding eight mouths, putting seven of them through various levels of secondary and tertiary education, keeping them all out of trouble - it wasn't easy. It took its toll on Garath, who'd been a social drinker and came to rely on it. The anger and the exhaustion had no outlet, and he had no time for it; he had family to worry about, and he was still bound and determined to get through his education. The end goal was a PhD in Education, and he could do it. He would do it. He could do all of this.
He worked whatever he could between his hours. When his younger brothers came to him with the idea of not just fixing up the farmhouse but expanding and rebuilding - when Malcolm and Samuel put their ideas to him - he saw a tiring project that'd keep them occupied, interested and most importantly, out of trouble.
Unfortunately, it was going to cost a hell of a lot more money than they had, with bill collectors already breathing down his neck. Garath's a pragmatic sort of man, and so in the end crime does pay - their bills, that is. Lydia understood, and if it didn't give him much of a leg to stand on when the nice officer hauled his little brothers back to him by the scruff of the neck, well, he had ways around that, too.
When Garath and Lydia headed to the States for Garath to do his post-grad work overseas, they took Dylan with them- I love you, I trust you, but he gets into enough trouble when I'm watching him. We'll figure something out. They were still over there when Samuel killed himself, and Garath could barely spare the time to get back and handle the fall out. Dylan and Lydia stayed behind, and Garath knows there's only one reason he doesn't hear about that more often.
In '79, when he completed his masters, Garath brought Dylan and Lydia back to Otago and for a while, nobody was going anywhere. It's 1983, now, and as a surprisingly functional alcoholic a few months shy of thirty, he's lived more life than anyone should have to. It happens, sometimes. All you can do is grit your teeth.
:: details
While Garath has more of a sensitivity to the supernatural than your average farmboy, he's not really aware that this is anything unusual - it certainly isn't in his family, and well it's obvious enough to anyone not a complete halfwit that plenty of people in the world barely listen to the five senses they already know about. What's one more?
The truth is that his family has always been a little more sensitive to these things, and a little more connected. Maybe it's their religious practises - maybe it's something else. Maybe it's the weird river stone that Alan used to play with sometimes, the one Garath leaves locked in the box where his dad left it. Maybe that's why this family never seems to age quite right, why they've always been so connected to their land, why strange things happen to them, why they survive through so much. Maybe that's why some of them don't.
Garath is not much of a sorcerer. He's not seven thousand years old. He's not a child of the Light, and he's not going to save the world. ...but he is, when he's not drunk, easily one of New Zealand's most brilliant minds. He does know his way around spellcrafting, when he has the time. He's never going to rip mountains asunder, but sometimes convincing somebody not to look at you is a little more important. Mostly, he's a decent guy who likes to tell stories, with a capacity for pragmatic ruthlessness that is only out of place if you're not fucking paying attention.
Dr Eddings, seventy-five years old, has the luxury of being a cheerful old stoner who never talks about his past. Garath is still in the midst of living it, and it's not nearly done wrecking through him yet. Enjoy!
:: disclaimers
Garath Eddings is a younger version of Dr Eddings, who was first created for St Jude High as the history professor. He is, at this point, about as alternate universe as it gets. David Eddings & Billy Zane aren't mine, and where else was I going to use these pictures? Honestly.