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arvinsescape · 3 years

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Meet mum.

A/N: I do not think Nikki would be like this. Written for entertainment purposes only. As always hope you enjoy! I only changed the setting of the request.

Based on this request: Hey I was wondering if You could do a Tom imagine where he brings the reader home to meet his parents and brothers but his mum don’t like her and judges her but Tom gets angry and sticks up for her ect.

Warnings: Language.

W/C: 2.5K. Wow how’d this get so long?

To say you were nervous too meet Tom’s family was an understatement. The only member of his family that you had officially met was his brother Harry, who you got on with really well. You were going to a restaurant in town, completely Tom’s idea, he was adamant that it was time you met the rest of his family and you were excited but also nervous.

You finished up getting ready and made your way downstairs were Tom and Harry were waiting.

“Sorry, I just needed to finish my hair off. It wasn’t cooperating.” You said as Tom grabbed his keys, wallet and jacket. He moved towards, placing a swift kiss to your cheek.

“That’s alright darling, we’ve got loads of time. You look beautiful by the way.”

“You look so nervous Y/N! Lighten up, my family are amazing, I’d say you’ve met the worst of us when you met Tom.” Harry laughed as he took in your tense posture.

“Oi! Don’t start already, you only get worse when Sam is with you.” Tom laughed as he gave Harry a light slap to the back of the head. “He’s right though love, they’re lovely, they’ll love you.” Tom reassured you with a smile as he grabbed your hand and you all made your way to the car.

The drive to the restaurant was quite relaxed, making your nerves die down slightly and you mostly had Harry to thank for that. He was consistently making jokes in order to settle your nerves. As you pulled up you realised that you were the first ones to arrive, having not spotted anyone else’s car. You made your way in, taking your seats at the large table, looking at all the empty seats, reminded you just how big Tom’s family was, and the nerves came back quicker than they’d settled.

“Sorry I’m late! Didn’t finish work on time!” A voice pulled you from your thoughts. You looked at the male as he approached the table, this was Harry’s twin Sam, that much was obvious. “You must be Y/N! I’ve heard a ridiculous amount about you.” Sam teased as he pulled you into a hug. “Sam, the better twin and superior brother.” He joked as he punched Tom’s arm before hugging him too. Okay maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.

“This is going to be a long dinner then?” Tom groaned as he watched the twins greet each other. You engaged in small conversation as you waited for his parents and final brother to arrive. It wasn’t too long after that they did. Paddy making his way over first.

“Hey guys!” Paddy said as he approached the table, taking a seat next to Sam.

“You won’t get a hug from him Y/N. He’s a typical teenage boy, I’m sure stuff like this has inconvenienced his night somehow.” Harry laughed as he watched Paddy pull his phone from his pocket.

“Shut up Harry! You were a teenager once you know. Hi Y/N, it’s nice to finally meet you.” Paddy said as he offered you a small smile.

“Where’s mum and dad?” Tom asked as he furrowed his brows.

“Dad was parking the car and mum went straight to the loo, they won’t be long.” Paddy answered, more interested in his phone than the conversation. You laughed at his typical teenage response to social events, reminding you of how you were at that age. Just after he’d said it you watched another man arrive at the table, presumably Tom’s dad.

“Y/N, this is my dad Dom. Dad this is Y/N” Tom said as he got up to hug his dad. You stood up as well extending your hand for him to shake unsure of what he would have expected as a first response, a hug would be too much maybe?

“It’s nice too meet you.” You said shyly. Dom laughed as he pulled you into a hug, startling you at first.

“We’re huggers if you hadn’t already gathered. Well, everyone except Paddy, he needs a couple years.” Dom laughed as he let go of you and took his seat next to Paddy. Tom grabbed your hand under the table, giving it a small squeeze to reassure you that this was going well.

“Paddy how many times do I have to tell you, it’s rude to be on your phone at the table.” A woman’s voice suddenly interrupted the light conversation. You looked up at Tom’s mum, she was beautiful. Paddy groaned before shoving his phone back into his pocket. “Hi Tom.” His mum said as she hugged him, she eyed you up and down, before mumbling a quick ‘hi’ and sitting down in the final seat. Your nerves were back, had you done something to offend her?

Tom cleared his throat awkwardly before engaging in conversation with Sam. Harry leant over towards you. “Ignore her, she can be like that sometimes, she’ll snap out of it.” Harry whispered as he gave you a reassuring smile.

You all ordered after five minutes and light chatter, started out amongst the table. As the starters were served, Dom switched the attention to you, which in hindsight, you really wish he hadn’t.

“So, Y/N? What do you do for work? Tom’s told us a lot about you but at the same time not all that much.” He laughed.

“Yeah it’s cause he’s always talking about how pretty she is.” Paddy mumbled as he stuffed his fork into his mouth, Tom’s cheeks burned red as he mumbled a ‘fuck off’ in his brothers’ direction. Paddy laughed at him before adding. “Not that he’s wrong! I didn’t mean that in a bad way, it’s just all he usually talks about when you come up in conversation.” Paddy stumbled over his words as he thought he may have caused offence, you laughed, again being reminded of when you were an awkward teenager and thinking anything you said would be taken as offence.

“I’m a book editor. I’m hoping to move into script editing because I think that’d be more fun but for now, I’m with the books.” You answered confidently as you smiled at Dom. Your smile faltered as you heard a scoff come from Nikki’s direction. Tom eyed her carefully before he cleared his throat and spoke up.

“Yeah, it’s great. She gets to travel with me a lot because she doesn’t have to go into a workplace to do her job.” Tom said as he finished his starter. Shortly after they were cleared. Tom took your hand again under the table, interlocking your fingers.

“That’s great! How long have you been doing that?” Dom asked, taking a sip of his drink.

“About three years, I graduated at 21 and got straight into it.”

“Ah, so you’re the same age as Tom then?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, he’s a couple months older than me.”

“So how did you meet? Like I say Tom has told us a lot about you but at the same time nothing at all.”

“We met in a pub actually.” You laughed as you recalled the memory. “I wasn’t sure Tom would remember talking to me let alone remember he’d taken my number. He was really drunk.” You teased as Tom went red again. Everyone laughed except for Nikki, who eyed you in a way that made you feel quite small all of a sudden.

“So, did you know who he was then? When you gave him your number?” She asked in an accusatory tone.

“I mean yeah, I’ve seen all the marvel films, so I did know who he was, but that didn’t really matter to me. I liked Tom for Tom.” You answered carefully.

“I’m sure you did.” She said as she gave you a sarcastic smile before sipping her drink.

“Mum.” Tom groaned before squeezing your hand that was still in his.

“What? I’m just making small talk.” She answered as Sam and Harry rolled their eyes. Paddy shifted awkwardly in his seat as he watched the conversation unfold. Luckily the main course arrived to settle the tension.

“So are you hoping to get into script editing through Tom’s career.” Nikki asked. Dom choked on his drink out of shock as you dropped your fork back onto your plate. The question completely taking you off guard. Tom’s hand found your thigh as you saw him tense next to you.

“You don’t have to answer that Y/N.” Sam said as he smiled at you.

“No, it’s okay. That’s not how I’m hoping to get into script editing. I’ve been applying for different companies for a while now, before I met Tom actually, I just haven’t had any luck.” You answered as your eyes met hers.

“But surely you would have hoped Tom’s career would help if you haven’t had luck.” She sneered.

“Nikki.” Dom hissed.

“No that’s not it at all.” You answered, slightly offended. You knew what she was implying but it wasn’t true. You could make your own way in the world.

“We’ll see.” Nikki said as she continued to eat. The atmosphere around the table had shifted dramatically it was incredibly awkward now.

After you had finished your mains, things hadn’t got much better. Everyone was engaging in small talk, but no one dared shift the attention back towards you. Well, for a while anyway.

“That’s a nice necklace.” Nikki suddenly said out of nowhere. You clutched the necklace that was around your neck, it suddenly felt very heavy around your neck.

“It’s from-“

“Tom? Yeah I’d have guessed. Is it real gold?”

“Yeah but-“

“Of course it is.” She sneered as she rolled her eyes at you. You suddenly felt like this wasn’t going anywhere and you felt the tears brewing in your eyes. You excused yourself from the table, finding your way into the bathroom.

“What the fuck was that?” Tom asked his mum as his nostrils flared.

“Don’t swear Tom.” Nikki replied. Paddy was eyeing the exit at this point. He knew it wasn’t going to end well.

“Okay, sorry for my language. My question still wants an answer. What. Was. That?” He asked through gritted teeth. He’d never in his entire life felt so angry with his mum. He looked at his dad who just offered him a small smile.

“I don’t know what you mean. I was just making conversation.”

“No, you weren’t. You were being rude. Why?”

“I’m just making sure she’s good enough for you.” Nikki answered her son, honestly.

“By making her look like a money grabbing, opportunity seeking bitch?” Tom fired back. Trying to keep his anger under control. He didn’t want to cause a scene in the middle of a restaurant. Nikki just shrugged and he felt some of his anger spill over.

“That’s not fair mum! I pursued her! She hasn’t once asked me to help her further her career, in fact she’s very careful to try and keep herself distant from what I do and what she wants to do. That necklace you felt the need to point out, came from her grandma, it was left to her after her grandma passed away. Something her granddad bought for her grandma. But of course, you’d have known that had you let her speak. I am so beyond angry with you right now, mum. You had no right to speak to her like that, you don’t know her, I do. I’m also a little offended that you take me for someone who can fooled. I get it you want to protect your kids, but you can’t treat people like that. You need to give her another chance, because I love her, and your little show tonight won’t change that.” Tom felt some of his anger dissipating. His brothers and dad looked at him, almost as if they were proud?

Nikki’s expression dropped at her son’s words. She suddenly felt immensely guilty. Tom was right, she’d taken it too far and judged the poor girl without giving her a chance.

“I’m sorry Tom.” Nikki said sincerely trying to meet her son’s eyes.

“Not me you should be apologising to.” Tom crossed his arms as he refused to meet his mum’s gaze.

“Your right.” Nikki swallowed as she got up from her seat.

“I swear if you’re on your way to upset her again, I’m going home.” Tom called after his mum as she made her way into the bathroom. He sighed as he looked at his dad.

“I know your angry son and I know she had no right. But forgive her yeah? She had your best interests at heart even if she went about that the wrong way.” Dom said as he offered his son a reassuring smile.

“I know. It just upset me that she treated her like that.”

You’d managed to stop the tears and you were splashing your face with cold water trying to get rid of the redness in your face. Would Tom believe you if you said you weren’t feeling well and let you go home? No, then you’d be taking him away from his family. You were pulled from your thoughts as another person joined you in the bathroom. You didn’t look at them, didn’t want to draw attention to your tear stained face.

“Y/N? I’m sorry.” You heard you were shocked as you turned around to see Nikki. You didn’t say anything, not wanting to upset her further.

“I mean it. I’m sorry. I just get so protective of him you know. He has had girlfriends like that in the past and I’m just scared someone will take advantage of him again. I know I shouldn’t treat him like he’s naive, but I can’t help it sometimes. I’m truly sorry for the way I have treated you tonight. It was unfair of me to judge you when I don’t know you.” She said as she smiled at you. You sighed as you took in her words.

“Look, I get it. I get that you want to protect him but I’m not like that I swear. I really do love Tom for Tom. I’d love him whatever he did for a living.” You said sincerely. Nikki smiled as she pulled you into a hug. You hugged back.

“Okay, let’s get you cleaned up. Let’s start again?” She asked you hopefully.

“I’d like that.” You mumbled as she helped you fix your appearance. You made your way back to the table Tom, instantly standing and pulling you into a hug.

“Are you okay? Did she upset you again?” Tom whispered protectively into your ear. “Tell me if she has, we’ll go if that’s what you want.”

“It’s okay Tom. She apologised. We’re going to start again. I get were she was coming from in a way.” You whispered back as he squeezed you tighter.

“Doesn’t make it right.” He mumbled and you hummed in agreement before whispering “let it go, okay,” kissing his cheek before you both sat back down. He didn’t let go of your hand all night. The rest of night went by without any more awkwardness, in fact when you left, you’d argue that you and Nikki had gotten quite close. Tom let his anger towards his mum disappear over the course of the night and when you all left to go home you made plans to do the same again next week and everyone left far happier and content than when they’d arrived.

#tom holland #tom holland imagine #tom holland one shot #tom holland x reader #tom holland fluff #tom holland angst #tom holland x y/n

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garbagevanfleet · 3 years

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Brightest Blue (series)

SURPRISE VALENTINE’S DAY UPDATE!

PART FIVE

Pairing: Josh x reader Warnings: flirting, alcohol, mentions of smoking Summary: Things are changing. New state. New school. New roommate. You just pray things are going to click into place. Notes: This chapter is so cute to me. Pajama party anyone? As always, thanks to the actual best editor alive today, @lantern-inthenight

MASTER POST

taglist: @valleyd0ll @satingrass-maidensfair @guitarfingers @thebohemianpenguin @peaceisouranthem @oblvions @hansonobsessed

@bigblack-catattack @myownparadise96 @lara-gvf @anditsmywholeheart @kill-fear-the-power-of-lies

It was undeniable that winter was on its way. The weekend brought predictions for temps in the lower 40’s and, even in the warmth of the apartment, you felt perpetually chilled.

Kate had messaged you late on Friday asking if you wanted to get coffee Saturday morning, and you had excitedly agreed to meet her at the local cafe called The Daily Grind (which, admittedly, you chose because of the cute name).

She had seen you bundled up like a burrito in two sweatshirts and a long-sleeved tee underneath and laughed, but you explained to her how you had never really been in temps this cold before.

Your fingers were wrapped as tight as they could go around your mocha as you watched her sip her black coffee, her maroon-painted lips leaving a mark on the white mug.

“When we’re done here, would you want to go with me to a thrift store? My mom sent some money for me to buy warmer clothes when she saw the weather for this area,” you said with an excited tone. “She’s afraid I’m going to get pneumonia.”

She hummed in an interested tone. “That sounds like fun. Which one do you wanna check out first?”

“You’ve been around here longer, so I’ll let you pick.”

“The one on Maple is the one where all the rich sorority girls go, so I bet you’d find some good stuff there,” she informed, tapping her nails against the ceramic.

You beamed a smile, relishing in the sunny feeling that only spending time with other girls gave you. “You wanna drive or me?”

+++

“Do you think if I buy a pair of jeans a size too big I could get away with wearing leggings under them?” you asked, flicking through the hangers. “I feel like the wind here cuts right through my denim.”

“Maybe two sizes bigger so you can wear sweatpants.” You knew she was teasing you by her playful tone, but that was actually kind of brilliant, you thought. “You should try this one.”

You had to get onto your tippy toes to see her over the long rack. She was holding up a soft-looking sweater, multicolored horizontal stripes running across the fabric. The color pattern reminded you of Twiggy from the ’60s.

“It’s cute,” you agreed, taking it as she handed it to you. By the time you were ready for a fitting room, you had a pile of things and the employee on duty looked not very excited to have to put them back when you were done, but luckily she wouldn’t have to. Pretty much everything fit perfectly.

You were shocked to see the total - where you were from, all of that would have been well over $60, even second hand, but you ended up forking over a measly $35, and you figured most of that total was from the nearly new jacket you had found.

As she was driving you back to the coffee shop, you exclaimed giddily, “I’m so excited to have warm clothes. Now Josh can finally have his sweatshirts back.”

She looked over at you surprisedly. “That’s Josh’s?”

“Yeah, he gave me three and I’ve been alternating between them.” You reached forward to turn her radio up a notch, Janet Jackson’s “All For You” perking your ears.

“Are you sure he wants them back?” she asked, giving you a coy smile that you didn’t understand.

You adopted a puzzled look. If she was alluding to something, it was lost on you. “Why wouldn’t he? They’re still perfectly fine - I was even careful not to get my perfume on them.”

Now stopped at a red light, she turned to give you a squinty look until she seemed to realize you were serious. “Nevermind,” she relented, smirking forward at the road.

When you got back home, Josh was gone. You shot him a message inquiring as to his whereabouts and started snipping the tags off of your new clothes with a pair of pruning shears. You were exponentially grateful for the fact that the washing machine in your building had been repaired - and with a shocking amount of haste too.

The smell of the laundry room down the hall was pleasant. It reminded you of the times when your mom would wash all the towels and blankets in the house, and that was a job that either required a laundromat, or an entire day switching loads.

At the end of your shopping day, you made out with three new sweaters, two pairs of thicker jeans, a new coat, a winter hat, and an actual pajama set, which would be infinitely warmer than the shorts and tank top you’d moved in with.

You cheerily popped your new clothes into the washer, along with a tide pod, some of your bras and underwear, and closed the lid.

Around 1 pm, Josh still wasn’t back and hadn’t replied, so you decided it was a perfect time to work on some self-care. The yoga mat you had packed had yet to see the light of day in Michigan, so you dug it out, unrolled it in your room, changed into some easy clothing, and pulled up a beginner’s tutorial on your phone. By the thirty-minute mark, you were sweating and tired, but the stretch in your muscles was oddly pleasant on top of the discomfort, so you pushed yourself to keep going until the video was done. The cute blonde running the tutorial suggested you take some time in your cool down to look inward, as she thought that was a big part of yoga. So, you laid there on the mat, staring up at your ceiling for a good, long while, just taking time to reflect and enjoying it.

Your room, and the whole apartment really, had become home so quickly. You hadn’t ever had the opportunity to test the theory before, but you had always imagined that leaving home would make you feel out of place.

But you didn’t.

Sure, you missed home in the way that any human that came from a loving and supporting family would, but you were expecting to ache for it. You had taken a long time in your backyard and in your favorite spot back home, just so you could have a final fix, but all that was to you now was a fond memory.

After a few moments of being alone with your thoughts, you were going to get up and take a shower, but you had decided to postpone it. While you were staring up at the ceiling, you realized that there was a lot of unused space that the sun hit toward the top of the room. Wasted sun was a felony in your book. You spent about an hour pulling down your curtain rod, removing the fabric, and replacing it with hanging pots of all sizes and lengths.

Your string of hearts, your pearls, your golden pothos - the thought of them being the first thing you saw when you opened your eyes in the morning was one that made you feel sentimental. You’d just have to be careful with watering.

Once you were satisfied with the placements, you made your way to the bathroom. As you waited for the shower to heat up to a tolerable temperature, you took some time to pluck any stray hairs around your eyebrows and gently brush the knots out of your hair. Self-care had always felt like a long term investment to you - one well worth it.

The warm spray of the shower felt amazing on your tired muscles, so you took your sweet time getting clean and enjoying it, then blow-drying your hair on low heat when you were finished. After, you excitedly got out your new pajama set, clipped the tags, and put it on.

Shortly thereafter, you heard a key slip into the lock on the front door. You were cuddled up on the couch, enjoying the feel of the soft fabric on your freshly scrubbed skin as you watched through the complete second season of the Simpsons, popcorn in your lap.

When he stepped into the house, he raised his eyebrows at you, surveying the area.

“What?” you asked, giving him a confused look.

“Just looking for the books and the homework.” You rolled your eyes at him before he continued on with, “I just always assumed that when I wasn’t around, you were doing boring, adult things.”

You gave him a playful shrug as you gestured to the noticeably book free space around you.

He squinted at you suddenly. “Are you in your pajamas? You know it’s like 3:30 in the afternoon, right?”

“They’re new!” you quipped. “And I was excited to wear them. You don’t have to be jealous, you could go get yours on and join me.”

The offer seemed to be tempting him. “I have a better idea. How about you go change, and we’re going to go to a party tonight.”

You scowled at him, crossing your arms over your chest. “Are you crazy? I’m already in my pajamas. I’ve already taken my bra off! Once it’s off, it doesn’t go back on.”

He laughed, loud and unabashed, showing you all of his teeth. The sound made your cheeks flush.

“C’mon, I bet Kate will be there,” he reasoned. “And I obviously will be. And I’m positive Jake will be too. This might be your chance to get them to hook up.”

You bit your bottom lip in consideration. “The timing would be kinda perfect; she could have the whole day tomorrow to process it and then tell me about it on Monday.”

He was smirking at you when you looked back up at him, making you tuck your hair behind your ear anxiously. “If I come, do you promise not to leave me alone?”

He nodded at you confidently. “I will not leave you.”

The very first thing you did was message Kate. It was vital that she was there, just in case Josh got too drunk to remember his promise. You didn’t have a hard time socializing, per-say. You were just nervous about your first real social event here.

Josh was right though - it wouldn’t kill you to make some more friends.

When you were in the bathroom brushing your teeth, Kate messaged back saying that she would never miss getting to see you drunk, and you didn’t have the heart to tell her you had to drive, so you opted to leave that part out. You worked on picking out a good, sensible outfit and took your time to put on makeup again. Admittedly, it felt kind of nice - you used to wear a full beat all the time, but somewhere along the line it started to feel tedious, which is something you never wanted any of your favorite things to feel, so you put the whole idea of it on the shelf for a while.

When you finally emerged from your room around 8, Josh was sitting on the kitchen counter, phone in his hands as he furiously typed out a message. You listened to the pleasant sound of his fingers tapping on the glass screen for a moment before speaking.

“Who are you messaging?” you asked, but it didn’t grab his full attention right away.

“Just one of the other theater guys,” he said through a near sneer. The only time you ever saw him looking distressed was when it came to his production. “Trying to tell me what I can and can’t do with my own production-”

When he looked up at you the rest of his thoughts seemed to escape him, all the emotion in his face and posture crumbling away.

You folded your hands together, giving him a concerned look. “Are you okay?”

He tucked his phone into the pocket of his pants, abandoning whatever he had been so intent on doing just seconds ago.

“Yeah, I just haven’t ever seen you dressed up before.”

The extra attention made you slump back against the hallway wall, giving him a nervous grimace. Through pursed lips, you asked, “Is it too much?”

His eyes popped open, along with his mouth. It took him a moment to speak actual words - like he wanted to say a lot all at once. “What? No! I’m just stupid,” he assured, running his fingers through his curls. “It took my brain a moment to process.”

You gave him a forgiving smile, opening the fridge and grabbing out a carton of juice. He watched as you took a swig, letting you swallow before asking, “Do you want me to drive?”

Your eyebrows raised in surprise, finger swiping away a stray droplet. “Can you?”

“Drive?” he laughed. “Yes. I can drive.”

“Legally?” you pressed, handing over the carton to him when you caught him eyeing it. He took a drink right from the spout as well, giving you a wink that made you lovingly roll your eyes.

+++

You two seemed to unintentionally match. He was in a pair of khaki pants, a black long-sleeved shirt, and a denim jacket on top. You were positive he was going to freeze solid one of these days because he always seemed to be way underdressed for the weather.

As you went to get out of the car, he stopped you with a touch to your knee. “You should take off your jacket and hat and leave them in here; I wouldn’t ever trust leaving them unattended at a party.” He paused before speaking again. “Not that anyone would necessarily steal them, just that people get drunk and think stuff is theirs.”

“Like you did with the wallet?” you teased, making him rub at the back of his neck.

“Yes,” he said pointedly through a grin. “Like that.”

He held the sleeve of your jacket as you shrugged out of it, abandoning it into the back seat. You took just a second to mourn the fact that it would be cold when you went to put it back on.

In the rearview mirror, you fixed your hair, having been mussed by the removal of your hat, and then stepped out. He ushered you along first, reaching past you and pushing the door open for you when you had reached it. The music hit you like a wall, loud and energetic - followed quickly by the smell of alcohol. A cloud of smoke hung subtly near the ceiling, giving the room an air of mystery. You realized you hadn’t made a move to enter the house when you felt his hand on the middle of your back.

“Everything okay?” he asked, just above the volume of the music. You nodded, feeling silly for holding him up, and stepped inside.

People were moving to the music like blood reacting to a heartbeat, swaying around to the rhythms all in a pleasant unison. The scene was oddly hypnotic as the colors danced around.

The second that people could see Josh behind you, they started calling his name. Your stomach lurched for a second, scared that he was either going to leave you or drag you to a group that you didn’t know, but he waved them off instead.

“I’ll catch you guys in a minute,” he shouted through a grin so charming they couldn’t seem to muster up a shred of annoyance toward him. Then, he spoke the next part right against your ear. “You want a drink?”

“Just one,” you agreed with a nod, shivering ever so slightly as his breath hit your cheek.

In the kitchen, huddled around an island covered by bottles, was a group of people, all very visibly drunk. One of those people was Kate, dressed in a crisp looking pair of jeans, a white crop top, and a red checkered flannel shirt, left open to expose her midriff.

When she caught sight of you, she gave you a big, toothy smile. The sharp fringe of her bob moved just enough to sometimes expose a pair of gold disk earrings.

“Need a drink?” she asked as she broke away from the rest of the crowd. “I’ll make it for you.”

You put your hands up, laughing at her enthusiasm. “I’m going to let Josh make it for me,” you informed, knowing full well that she would make it strong enough to get you drunk and keep you in that state for the whole evening.

The one that Josh ended up making for you was, undeniably, a rum and Coke. Not your most favorite thing ever, but then again, this one was mostly just Coke. You made a mental note to thank him for being so considerate.

The three of you ended up in the living room, right in the throws of all the action. You’d been to a few parties back home, but this felt kind of different. Back home, it was always hot, so the parties usually spilled out into the yard in all directions. Come to think of it, you’d never been to a party where the guests weren’t making prominent use of the pool. But here everyone was packed in tightly, making a large house feel tiny.

Kate found you all a nice little corner with a love seat and some kind of weird puff you think you were meant to put your feet on. Settling in there meant you’d have to share the space with a couple of other people, but it felt worth it to not be standing in the middle of the room. Being out in the open made you feel nervous - like you were being circled by sharks.

The songs changed, but the beat seemed to stay pretty much the same, making it easy for the time to slip by without your acknowledgment. By the time you checked your watch, it was nearly eleven.

True to his word, Josh didn’t leave your side the whole night. People kept popping in and out to get a word with him. You couldn’t hear them well because he was sat across from you, but he was laughing quite a bit. Some of it looked kind of forced, but most of it seemed genuine - like he was actually having a nice time.

It wasn’t until you were close to getting ready to leave that you saw Jake making his way down the stairs, one hand on the wooden railing to steady himself and the other wrapped around a red cup. You flashed him a smile when his eyes landed on you, and he gave you one back, giving you a feather-light punch to your shoulder when he reached you.

“Move over,” he demanded in Josh’s direction, sitting nearly on top of him on the couch, with only light complaints from his twin.

“You smell like sex,” Josh said through a fake grimace, pressing his elbow into Jake’s ribs.

“Can’t imagine why,” Jake responded with a smirk, lifting the cup to his lips as you giggled at him.

The realization struck you as his eyes landed on Kate next. “Oh, Jake, this is my friend Kate. Kate, Jake Kiszka.”

She reached out and took his hand to shake and at the same moment, Josh laid his hand on your leg and through a grin, asked, “Should we take off?”

You laughed, giving him a nod.

“Kathrine, Jacob,” Josh started, clapping his hands together in front of him. “We are leaving. See you guys soon?”

“We should actually get tacos,” Kate stated seriously to the group as a whole, and then just to Josh said, “And my name is Kathleen.”

#brightest blue fic #josh kiszka fic #josh gvf #Greta Van Fleet #greta van fleet fic #greta van fleet fan fiction #josh gvf fic

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atruththatyoudeny · 4 years

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Monthly Reads | June 2020

Another 28th, another fic rec for you. Here are all the fics I read and loved this month. Happy reading!

✸ Caves End | jacaranda_bloom | famous/not famous - slow burn - hurt/comfort - angst - minor injury - miscommunication - fluff - 40k When a recurring injury cuts short Harry’s time as the Captain of the English Football Team, he needs to rethink his career and his future. His best mate and manager, Niall, decides that what Harry really needs is a change of scenery, time to relax, and to get some perspective on his life. What Harry doesn’t expect is for them to end up in Australia, on a farm, with the most gorgeous man he’s ever laid eyes on. OR the one where Harry has lost his future, Louis has lost his past, but maybe together, they can find a way through the dark.

✸ Just for Tonight (I can be yours) | SadaVeniren | a/b/o - royalty - secret identity - secret realtionship - arranged marriage - mpreg - 42k Harry, prince of Cestrescir, has been betrothed to Ludvic, prince of Yorvik, since birth. He'd accepted a loveless marriage as his duty to his country, until an accident threw him in the path of a gentle alpha

✸ Falling in the Wrong Direction | FallingLikeThis | past character death - grief/mourning - homophobia - internalized homophobia - secrets - angst - fluff - hurt/comfort - emotional hurt/comfort - enemies to friends to lovers - 25k When Harry’s fiancé, Liam, passes away just before their wedding, he doesn’t know how to cope. As time goes on, Harry learns to heal, but is left living in the house his fiancé used to share with his best friends and Harry is uncovering a lot of secrets he didn’t know Liam had... while possibly falling for the one person who helped Liam keep them from him. Harry never quite got along with Louis, but maybe he’s the one person who can help Harry bridge the gap between the life he thought he would have and the one he is now living. A Catch and Release au

✸ we can only look behind | hereforlou | growing up together - childhood friends - slow burn - friends to lovers - friends with benefits - pining - internalized homophibia - Coming Out - 66k His mum said there was no getting an idea out of his head once it was stuck in there and Harry thought she was right. It wasn’t like he did it on purpose - his ideas were just really sticky. (Or, the one where Harry fixates through the years.)

✸ somewhere in between lightning | jassy117, nauticalleeds, shiningdistractionwrites | Love Island Au - exes to lovers - angst - pining - miscommunication - fluff - reality show - 99k As Louis took another bite, he thought back to how he had once believed that the hardest thing about being on Love Island would be Liam handling his social media. He had been wrong. It was Harry Styles, peeking over at Louis as he forked a pancake into his mouth, and gauging his reaction. It was having to quench the swelling of his heart, which felt simultaneously like hope and the breaking of a thousand pieces. --- A summer gone wrong (or very right) when, under Liam’s persuasion, Louis finds himself drunkenly applying for Love Island, and getting accepted. Oh, well. A summer spent on an island paradise couldn’t be all that bad, right? Imagine his surprise when Louis arrives in sunny Majorca to find that his first love and ex-boyfriend, Harry, is another contestant, about to capture the hearts of everyone in the villa. Most normal people don’t have to face their ex on an otherwise straight TV show. Most normal people don’t fall for their ex again in front of the whole nation, either. Too bad this whole situation isn’t normal.

✸ Dreams Once Remembered | Chelsea Frew (chelseafrew) | rape/non-con - kidnapping - mpreg - unplanned pregnancy - angst - emotional hurt/comfort therapy - child loss - kid fic - rape recovery - 78k 16-year-old Harry Styles is on the verge of a life-changing moment. He has been put in a band on The X-Factor and he and his new bandmates are about to get ready for a glorious adventure together. In one terrible moment, all of that is stolen from Harry. Kidnapped, Harry spends the next seven-and-a half-years in a twelve-by-twelve shed, suffering repeated assault at the hands of his captor. One of these assaults results in a daughter Harry has raised entirely on his own in the small space they call Room. Now that Darcy is five, Harry is determined that she be allowed to experience the real world, and he devises a plan for them to escape. Should they escape, there are many questions. Can Darcy adjust to the outside world? Can Harry start over? What kind of relationship, if any, can he have with the band that moved on without him? Even with success far from assured, Harry knows he has to take a chance. For him, and for his little girl.

✸ No Friends and An Empty Heart | Maelstrom_Roots | Fleabag AU - mentions of suicide - attempted sexual assault - therapy - sex addicition - angst - grief/mourning - 36k When Louis Tomlinson gets an invitation for dinner with the family he's been estranged from for a year, he has only one goal: to get his sister to talk to him again. But when an unexpected guest in the form of a hot priest is also at the dinner table, Louis may have to accept that the universe has other plans for him. A Fleabag Season 2 AU featuring Fleabag Louis Tomlinson and Hot Priest Harry Styles.

✸ Still the One | dandelionfairies | kid fic - past cheating - post-divorce - 54k Harry was 15 when he met Louis, 17 when they made love for the first time, 19 when they got engaged and married. One would think he has a perfect life, right? It’s what he thought. He was 21 when he learned that Louis had an affair. It was only one time. That’s what Louis had told him. Harry tried to forgive him. He tried to move on from that horrible moment, but he couldn’t. It was his 22nd birthday when he signed the divorce papers, leaving England behind. After finding himself living in a small town in Nebraska, Harry learns to live on his own. He becomes a preschool teacher at the local school and spends his free time continuing his own painting. He’s even been lucky enough to sell a few pieces. He’s 25 when his life is turned upside down once again by the single father who has moved into the house on the property he just happens to park his trailer.

✸ You Left all your Dreams on the Threshing Floor | LadyLondonderry | fashion - journalism - bullying - past sexual assault - 27k Marcel will go home after work and he’ll clean his vest and he’ll bleach his shirt and tomorrow will be a new day. He’s got other things that he can spend his time focusing on. How to fit in a third quote onto the cover of the fall issue of Mod Mag without covering any details in the model’s face, for instance. Maybe he’ll switch to gluten-free banana bread for the meeting on Friday. He knows some co-workers likes to eat gluten free, at least. Someone will have to accept his friendship advances eventually. They’ll have to. Right? - Louis Tomlinson gets a job at Mod Magazine. He’s quickly drawn to the one person in the office who won’t give him (or anyone) the time of day; Marcel Styles, Senior Layout Editor.

✸ Shadows Come With The Pain That You're Running From (Love Was Something You've Never Heard Enough) | Anonymous | a/b/o - emotional hurt/comfort - angst - fluff - pack dynamics - mutual pining - secrets - slow burn - 51k “Thanks, Ni, I guess I needed to hear that,” Harry sighed and wrapped his own arms around Niall and squeezed him tightly not caring if Liam would be mad. He missed Niall so much. “Does it really come as a surprise to you that I’m right? Shaking my head, Haz. You should know me better,” the brunette teased. Harry giggled again. “You know Hazza, you really are so different to all the other alphas out there. You’re soft, caring, cuddly and sweet and those damn dimples. So freaking pretty, it’s almost annoying. I would hate you if you weren’t my best friend. You’d really be a brilliant omega. Nature really did a number here,” Niall mumbled. It was his turn to smash his nose into Harry’s neck and Harry was extremely thankful for that because he wasn’t sure he had his facial expression in check at all. Or a Band AU in which Harry isn't allowed to be who he really is and the North American Tour might bring some unexpected truths into the web of lies and also a bit of heat that has very little to do with the summer in the US.

✸ Confessions of a Fabricated Alpha | Anonymous | a/b/o - non-traditional a/b/o - secret identity - famous/not famous - fake/pretend relationship - rape/non-con - public humiliation - anxiety - depression - sex work - 18k Hearing it now almost made Harry hang up the phone, but he sighed and pressed one to be connected to one of their alpha operators. He’d already committed to this low point in his life and hanging up meant he couldn’t wallow in it and he was in a wallowing mood. “You are being connected to alpha operator number forty-four. Rogue will be with you shortly.” The name was said in a different voice like a voice mailbox someone might have on their office phone. It made him snort out a laugh at how stupid it all was. It felt like a budget sex line. or famous alpha Harry Styles has a secret and paying an alpha to roleplay a relationship with him over the phone is the only way he can be himself.

✸ Iron Hearts, Fire Souls | hopelesswriter | a/b/o - non-traditional a/b/o - alpha/alpha - co-workers - fluff - 26k "Lou..." “I know, Harry! I know what you’ll say, we can’t right? We can’t help each other’s needs? We can’t be what the other needs? But fuck, what about what we want?! And I say we because you’ve been saying yes to all of our dates and you've been flirting back all this time and-“ He took a deep breath. “And there is nothing that I want more right now than to kiss you.” Or the one where Harry and Louis are two single and unmated Lawyer Alphas that have to share an office and even though they shouldn't be that attracted to each other's scents, it sure isn't a big deal, right? I mean, what could go wrong?

✸ last blues for bloody knuckles | creamcoffeelou | a/b/o - strangers to lovers to strangers to lovers - mob au - religious themes - pregnancy - angst - 34k “Hi, love,” A too-familiar voice greeted him from the other side of the door. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips that he brought between two fingers as his eyes raked over Louis. All Louis could do was stare, wide-eyed at the alpha that he’d left behind so many years ago. “Harry?” His voice felt far away, like it wasn’t him that was speaking. On the other side of the door stood the one man he never thought he’d see again, and maybe the only man he never wanted to see again. A few steps behind him stood Liam and someone else he didn’t recognize, with guns tucked into their front pockets. “I need you to come with me.” OR Styles was a name everyone knew. It had evolved into something of a fairy tale, a far away problem that normal people didn’t have to deal with. Louis never thought he’d find himself falling in love with him. When he finds himself pregnant with Harry’s child, he knows he has to leave the life, and Harry, behind. For her sake. He never expected Harry to show back up on his doorstep five years later. A mob au.

✸ It Feels Different When You’re With Me | Rearviewdreamer | sign language - slow burn - 45k Harry fell in love with sign language as a kid. He never imagined the first love of his life would lead him straight to his second.

✸ let me carry your weight | soldouthaz | trainer Harry - insecure Louis - pining - smut [check tags for specific smut tags] - 28k louis is fresh out of a bad relationship with someone who made him feel awful about how he looked. on his journey to better himself, he meets harry - the ridiculously attractive and fit personal trainer.

#28th appreciation #fic rec #monthly reads #my reads #larry fics #completed fics

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hot-tae-with-suga · 5 years

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This Looks Bad || 1

Summary: Taehyung and I were just horsing around, but someone took a picture, and now everyone thinks I’m cheating on my boyfriend Namjoon with one of his best friends. Which I’m not, because I don’t (let myself) think of Tae that way. And neither does Namjoon. Right?

Reader (1st person unnamed femme OC)/Namjoon/Taehyung

Idol AU

36.2K total || Rated M || Part 2 | Part 3 (final) | AO3 || Masterlist

Genre: fluff / smut / angst with happy ending || Warnings: Misunderstandings, Failure to Communicate, Bisexual characters, Threesome (in later parts), Smut (in later parts)

Originally Posted 2019-03-25

Thank you so so so much to my editor S, and my wonderful betas from the JAG discord (L, V, and D)

DOI (Day of Incident)

Balancing my laptop on the arm of a couch with my legs curled up under myself to avoid accidentally flashing someone (because my very sparkly cocktail dress was very short) was not exactly how I’d imagined I’d be writing my thesis for my doctorate. Nevertheless, my boyfriend Namjoon had asked me to accompany him to this event with some music types from Japan, and I was nothing if not a dutiful partner.

I’d been proper arm candy for the first hour, but my Japanese skills barely stretched past nodding and smiling when Namjoon did. He saw that it was starting to wear on me, so he reminded me that my laptop was still in the overnight bag he’d packed if I wanted to go get some work done. I’d kissed him on the cheek and quietly made my escape. The stylists and coordi-noonas had wandered off to the loading dock for a smoke break, or were busy in other parts of the building, so I had the place to myself for at least half an hour before I even heard anyone else.

Voices carried down the hall, but I tuned them out until someone opened the door and strode through. I looked up to see who it was, smiling when I saw Taehyung, Namjoon’s group member I was closest to. He was followed by a pretty young woman who he was speaking to about some style of art, from the few words I caught before he greeted me.

“Hey Charlotte Bronte,” he joked. “Are you hiding from the guests of honour, too?” The woman looked confused, which was rather unsurprising given Taehyung’s habit of calling me by author’s names whenever he caught me writing. Which, at the current stage in my thesis project, was pretty much all the time.

I nodded and stood, quickly bowing to the woman he hadn’t yet introduced. “Yeah, I could only understand about two out of every ten words, so Joon sent me down here.” I quickly saved the work I’d been in the middle of and closed my computer. “If you need the room or anything, I can take off, though.” Maybe not the most subtle approach, but I’d never want to be accused of cockblocking one of my best friends. If Tae was desperate enough to drag this woman to the green room in the middle of an event, I wasn’t going to get in the way of him getting some. It was hard enough to date as an idol, so they tended to take every opportunity they could if they found someone they liked.

Taehyung shook his head. “No, I’m just getting changed a bit early because it will be way too crowded once everyone is back here,” he said, moving to grab his carefully labeled stage wear from the rack in the middle of the room. “Plus, everyone out there was boring, except Park Jiyoo,” he nodded toward his companion. “We were discussing art and photography. She is a curator at a gallery in Ilsan.”

I bowed again in her direction. “Hello Park Jiyoo, I’m-”

She cut me off. “I know who you are,” she said softly. “You’re Kim Namjoon’s girlfriend.”

I chuckled and nodded. “Among other things. I’m hiding out back here to work on my thesis project, feels like it’s all I do these days.”

“Joon-hyung got a smart girl,” Tae commented from behind the folding privacy screen at the back of the room. The hanger clinked against the metal frame as he hooked it over the edge. “Cause he’s a smart boy. They’re a matched set.”

“So are you looking for your match then, Taehyungie?” I teased. Even if he wasn’t bringing Jiyoo back here to hook up right this moment, I’d be a poor friend if I didn’t at least try to play wingman. “So we need to find you a goofball with little-to-no sense of personal space?” Jiyoo giggled at that.

Taehyung stuck his head around the side of the screen, obviously unbuttoning his while dress shirt. “Don’t listen to Ms. Smart Ass, she is cruel and knows nothing.” He ducked back behind the screen again, and I could hear the sound of his belt slithering out of the loops of his pants before it came flying over the top to drape over the screen. I grabbed the belt, sliding it between my hands and then folding it in half.

“Which basically means I know everything,” I told Jiyoo triumphantly. I snapped the belt against itself, the sharp noise making Tae jump and Jiyoo squeak. “But I will admit I can indeed be cruel, to boys who deserve it.”

Tae stepped around the screen, his shirt hanging completely open and off one shoulder, gathering at his elbow, while he held up his unbuttoned pants with one fist. His eyes narrowed at me.

“Give me back the belt, noona,” he warned. I giggled and held the belt behind my back, shaking my head. “The stylists have already warned me about losing costume pieces, I don’t want to get in any more trouble.”

I shook my head again, backing up as he stepped forward. The game of keep away was familiar, reminding me of nights of drinking in the dorm or playing around after a concert as the adrenaline faded. “Nuh-uh, it makes such a fun noise. I think I’d like to use it to scare Namjoon later,” I teased.

Tae took a couple long steps towards me, gaining ground quickly since his legs were to much longer than my own. “I don’t care what kinky shit you and hyung get up to, do it with someone else’s belt!”

I stepped backwards to escape the approaching man, but I’d reached the edge of the room, where a series of tables and mirrors had been set up for makeup and hair, and Tae was in front of me before I could divert course. He reached around me with his free hand, but I twisted and bent to keep the belt out of his reach. Frustrated, he dropped the hand holding his pants up, letting them fall to the floor so he could use both arms to grab for the accessory. I was laughing, switching it from one hand to the other, trying to keep it from him even though I knew that with his superior wing span he’d pin me eventually.

That’s when we saw the flash of light.

Both of us turned to see Park Jiyoo with her phone out, the camera lens pointed at the two of us, with a look of guilty embarrassment on her face. I looked down and saw what she had been taking a picture of: a half-naked Taehyung practically groping me.

“What the hell, Jiyoo-ssi?” Tae asked sharply, and the woman looked panicked. She spun around and ran for the door, both Taehyung and I close behind her.

Tae was slowed down by his loosened pants, which had fallen around his ankles, so I was the one to slide out of the green room in my stockinged feet and shout at security to stop Jiyoo. I watched her try to evade them for a few moments, but it was a narrow hallway and they were big guys, so it wasn’t long before they caught her and took her to the venue security office.

I followed, speaking to the guard in charge. “She was backstage with us, and she took an unauthorized photo, of V,” I used his stage name, trying to impress upon them the seriousness of the matter. I crossed my arms over my chest, suddenly feeling very vulnerable. I was used to being photographed when I was out with Namjoon, but this had been a private moment between friends, and I knew the situation we were in would look incredibly suggestive, even though it had been mostly innocent.

Namjoon, Taehyung and the other members were such a big part of my life now, they acted so normal, that it was easy to forget how careful they had to be with the people around them. Sometimes that nice young woman they were talking about art with wasn’t able to be trusted with their privacy. It was a wonder they ever let anyone outside their own industry in.

Venue security turned the situation over to Big Hit’s security team, who directed me to wait nearby in case they had any questions. Taehyung found me shortly thereafter, having re-dressed himself and then wandering a bit to find the security office. He wrapped his arms around me and I leaned into him, soaking up any comfort he could offer. The other members happened to file past on their way to prepare for the performance, Namjoon breaking off to join us when he noticed we weren’t where he expected.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked, immediately opening his arms and pulling me close when I extracted myself from Tae and approached him. “What’s wrong, baby? You look worried.”

Taehyung’s large hand rubbed across my back where it wasn’t covered by Joon’s arms. “There was a woman, a fan maybe? I don’t know. Someone I brought back to the green room with me when I was getting changed, she ended up taking a picture of noona and me while we were goofing off. Who knows, maybe more than one,” he explained softly.

“So what?” Namjoon sounded confused. “So she got some backstage pictures? It’s not like our relationship is a secret, so what’s the issue?”

“The pictures will look bad, Joon-ah,” I mumbled into his chest where my face was still pressed. Leaning back, I added, “Tae and I...We were in a kind of compromising position.”

Tae sighed and elaborated, “I was in the middle of getting changed, noona and I were goofing around like usual. We’ll just hope they can delete the photos off the phone and send her on her way.”

Just as he said it, their head of security stepped into the hall and approached us, while one of the venue security lead Jiyoo in the opposite direction, toward the back exit. “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” the security head lead with. “She sent a couple of pictures into a group chat before they grabbed her. One of the ones that got out…” He shrugged and looked sympathetic. “Let’s say its not flattering. I’ll contact head office, they’re going to want to get ahead of the storm that’s coming.”

***

I’d been more than a little worried that the commotion might have thrown off their performance, but all the members had been doing this for too long to let a little incident like that bleed through. I’d heard tales of shows on tour that they had performed hurt, sick, and heartbroken; one little kerfuffle with a rogue fan wasn’t going to shake them.

After the event, Namjoon came back with me to my place, as we’d planned beforehand. We’d been instructed by management not to look on our SNS or any gossip sites, management would get a handle on what was happening and didn’t want us to be unnecessarily stressed. I explained to Namjoon exactly what happened in the room, every single detail at least three times, but I still wouldn’t know how bad it was until I saw the picture.

I could only imagine the worst, though, remembering that Tae was practically shirtless, his pants around his knees, pinning me to the table with his hips and reaching around me with both his arms. My dress was so short it had ridden up high on my thighs, I’d had to pull it down before running after the girl. I’d remembered more details each time I described it to Namjoon, repeating it often enough for him to accuse me of trying to turn him on with it.

I stamped my foot and crossed my arms, pouting at him. “Kim Namjoon, this is serious! I don’t want you to think I’d ever do something like that to you,” I whined. “I just want, like, full disclosure. I don’t want you to be surprised.” He moved in front of me, putting his hands on my shoulders.

“I know baby, I know you’d never cheat, that’s why I’m not worried. I trust you, and not only that, but I trust my members. Sure, Jungkook has issues keeping his hands off his hyung’s things, and I’ve seen the way some of them look at you when they think I won’t notice, but they are my family. Closer than, even, and more loyal,”Namjoon said. He chuckled to himself, adding, “And if it was going to be any of them to try something with my girl, it’d never be Taehyung.” He ran his hands down my arms and pulled me closer.

“Hmm?” I asked. “Why?” The way he’d said that last bit struck me as weird.

He looked down at me, mumbling, “I told you, I trust you.”

“Why are you so sure of Taehyung out of all of them though? Because he’s your roommate? Am I so far out of his type that he’d never be attracted to me?” Something occurred to me, and I gasped. “Is he gay?” I started to backpedal, aware of how that could sound. “I mean, its fine if he is, of course, I’d just never had any idea, and I thought he’d had a girlfriend before-”

“Babe,” Namjoon interrupted my spiral into incoherent rambling. “Tae likes girls, and I’m sure he thinks you’re very cute. Just trust me when I say that Taehyung would never think of doing something like that to me.” He bent to give me a gentle kiss that quickly turned into something hotter.

Namjoon picked me up, not breaking our kiss, and set me on the back of my couch, his arms still around me to keep me stable. “Now,” he started. “All of your talk about this potentially naughty picture kinda got me all worked up. Were you like this?” His hands on my hips slid the dress I still wore up a little further, and he pressed himself between my legs. Evidence of just how ‘worked up’ I’d gotten him tented his pants, and I moaned feeling it against my thigh.

He kissed me again, lips sliding against mine until I pulled back enough to point out, “Yeah, just like this. But Tae was wearing way less clothes.” Namjoon laughed, shrugging off his jacket and helping me with the buttons of his shirt.

1 Day P.I (Post Incident)

The next morning I accompanied Namjoon back to the Big Hit offices, which photographers captured since they were waiting for us outside my apartment building. I wasn’t even sure how they had found out where I lived, but apparently they were motivated enough to do so and caught us by surprise. Namjoon held my hand as we walked as quickly as possible toward the car the company had sent for us, hiding behind sunglasses and masks as best we could. It took at least ten minutes longer than normal to get to the offices due to the circuitous route we had to take. Once we finally arrived and rushed inside, I thought we were safe.

I hadn’t taken the other members into account though, and we were greeted with whistles and applause as we entered the conference room.

“Taehyungie-hyung, your new girlfriend is here!,” Jungkook shouted, despite the face that Tae was just two seats away from him. Taehyung lunged to slap their maknae upside the head, and Jungkook rolled away from him in his chair, rubbing the spot he’d been hit.

“How bad is it?,” I asked the room. “We haven’t looked yet.” Jin whistled, the note falling at the end, and I knew it had to be pretty bad.

“Our managers will be back in a minute,” Taehyung said, and stood to approach us with a tablet in his hand, offering it to us. Namjoon grabbed it from him, frantically scrolling up to see the picture that was the subject of the string of comments on the screen. He hissed when it finally came into view and angled the tablet so I could see.

It was a worst case scenario. The picture was cropped so you couldn’t see that Tae’s pants were technically still on (though who knows why that fact was so important to me), the way the shot was angled made it look like my arm was wrapping around his far side, and worst of all, our faces were only inches apart. I groaned and sank to the floor in a squat, wrapping my arms around my knees.

“Babe, babe, it’s gonna be okay,” Namjoon crouched down next to me, patting me on the back. Tae sank down on my other side, rubbing my arm to comfort me.

“ARMYs are going to hate me, Joon!” I cried into my arms. “I’m going to be a villain in their eyes, like from a drama!” I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes, but I managed to keep them from falling. “Tae-ah, you’re going to catch so much hate, too!”

Before he could answer there as a noise at the door as the managers returned, all looking very serious. The three of us stood up, and I ran my hands over my cheeks to make sure they were dry. Namjoon put his arm around my shoulders and I leaned into him.

“We’ve made a statement on Namjoon’s behalf, that the picture was a private moment that was taken out of context, captured by an over enthusiastic fan who was in an unauthorized area,” Manager Sejin told us, with a sharp look at Taehyung. I had a feeling he’d be getting in trouble for bringing someone “backstage” without clearing it with management. Sejin continued, “It’s a start, but we will need to do more to stay clear of a major scandal.”

I was a little worried about what exactly “more” entailed.

***

Sejin’s “more” turned out to be a complete media blackout, at least on my part. I had to take all of my SNS accounts private, or deactivate them, and I wouldn’t be able to attend any events or even be seen in public with any of the band until this all blew over. The last part would be easy enough, with Namjoon needing to concentrate on finishing their new album and my own thesis due date looming, we weren’t going to be going out together a lot anyway.

Big Hit and the group would also be making an effort to emphasize that everything was fine on their end, lots of content with Namjoon and Taehyung together on their SNS to show there was no tension between them and reassure the fans.

“I hate this,” Namjoon said, his arms wrapped around me as we sat on the couch in his studio. We’d retreated there after the meeting with the managers, to get the last bit of time together we would have for a while.

I nodded. “Me too,” I agreed. “But, we’ll make it through this, right? Its not like we were going to see each other a lot in the next few weeks anyway, with our own obligations we’ll be so busy.” I twisted in his arms to be able to see his face. “We’ll text and call and FaceTime.”

Namjoon smiled. “You gonna tune in to my vlive when I get bored in the middle of the night and can’t just come over to bug you?” he teased. I blushed.

“I always do,” I reminded him. I stretched to kiss his cheek softly. “I’m gonna miss your face.” He pulled me up so that my face was even with his.

“I’m gonna miss your everything,” he said, and returned the kiss, on my lips. “Gonna have to figure out a way to sneak out, like when we were first dating. Or maybe we should sneak you in.”

I smiled against his mouth. “Mmm, every girl’s dream, being snuck in like a dirty secret to fuck in your shared room,” I joked.

Namjoon chuckled and kissed me again. “I’m sure Taehyung won’t mind, since he’s the one who got us in this mess.”

I smacked him playfully. “Don’t blame Tae!” I admonished him. “It’s my fault, too, I was the one who stole his belt. I shouldn’t have been teasing him like we do at the dorm.”

“You didn’t bring some outsider into our space,” he argued. “And Tae will be forgiven much faster than you will be.” His tone was light, but there was a bit of annoyance or even anger behind it.

“Don’t, Joon-ah.” I spoke softly, still curled up against him. “He’s your dongsaeng, don’t go there.” I leaned down and pressed a kiss to his neck. “Let’s not talk about that, it’s the last time we’ll be together for a while. I’m gonna miss this, being with you like this.” His head fell back, giving me room to trail kisses down toward his collarbone, exposed by the tank top he was wearing. I couldn’t help but lick along the ridge of bone, dipping my tongue into the hollow by his throat.

Namjoon groaned and pulled his arms from between us so he could lift me by the hips, turning me and settling me back down so that I was straddling his legs. I rolled my hips against him and celebrated the moan the move drew from him with a nibble on his earlobe. His large hands slid up over my waist and started pushing my shirt up, pulling it over my head. He threw it to the floor, his hands back on me as he claimed my mouth.

Our kisses grew heated, no longer about enjoying the last moments we had together and instead building toward something more. My hands were fisted in Namjoon’s hair, holding his head at the perfect angle for me to dominate our kiss. One of his hands had slid under the waistband of my pants, gripping the skin at my hip, and the other was fumbling with my bra strap when the door opened behind me.

I shrieked and looked frantically for my shirt, but Namjoon had thrown it to the other side of the narrow room. Instead I curled my body in toward my boyfriend, only showing my bare back to our unexpected visitor. Namjoon leaned to one side, keeping an arm around me so I didn’t fall off, and grabbed a zippered hoodie from the back of his chair, wrapping it around me.

“What the hell, Tae?” Namjoon bit out.

Taehyung stood by the door with his hand over his eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he was apologizing. “I just came to tell you that security is ready to take noona back to her place.”

I sighed and dropped my forehead to Namjoon;s chest, and he squeezed me close for a moment. “Of course it had to be Taehyung, didn’t it?” he murmured, close enough so that only I could hear. I barked a laugh, earning a look from Taehyung that I didn’t acknowledge.

I stood up, zipping up Namjoon’s hoodie so that I could reach up my back to refasten my bra where he had managed to undo one hook. Joon stood up behind me, grabbing my arms and holding them, making me arch forward awkwardly. “Hey!,” I objected, but he just leaned down and kissed the spot where my neck meets my shoulder, sucking long enough that I knew I’d see a mark there in the morning. I let it happen, forgetting myself in the moment and relaxing back in to him.

Namjoon finally pulled back, and I could hear the smile in his voice as he declared, “There. Mine.” His oddly possessive comment made me turn to look at him, but instead of looking down at me, his head was turned toward Taehyung.

I pulled away from him and grabbed my abandoned shirt off the floor, balling it up and shoving it into one of the oversized pockets of the hoodie. “I’m keeping this, by the way,” I told Namjoon, grabbing my purse as well.

He whined, “But it’s my favourite! I’ll get cold.”

I returned to him and reached up to pat him on the head. “It smells like you, so I like it. You have plenty of other sweaters.”

He hugged me again, and gave me a fond little kiss on the forehead. “You’re lucky I love you,” he warned me.

I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

***

That night we chatted on the phone. We didn’t usually need to talk again when we’d seen each other throughout the day, we weren’t that kind of couple. The events of the day, though, had left us both feeling a little more needy than normal.

“So, how was your day?” Namjoon asked, his usual conversation opener. I was sitting on my bed with my laptop open in front of me, going through my SNS accounts. I couldn’t resist posting one last picture to my twitter feed before making it private, knowing ARMYs would take a screenshot before it disappeared. It was a shot I’d taken a couple a weeks earlier, we were laying in bed after we’d woken up, and he was holding my hand up to his mouth to kiss it. His expressive eyes stared at me through the screen and I felt like I could still feel the love that had overwhelmed me at that moment. I’d captioned it simply, ‘Steadfast’, needing to make my loyalties known when the world was going to make a lot of assumptions about things they didn’t know. Namjoon and I were in it for the long haul, we would remain steady through this storm.

“What, before or after I was told I wasn’t allowed to see my boyfriend or some of my best friends for weeks?” I replied, though I immediately regretted how passive agressive my words sounded. “Any day I get to see you is better than one I don’t, though,” I added to help soften them.

“I know, the whole situation is fucked up,” he agreed. “But I have total faith in us, we can get through this.” We lapsed into silence, neither of us wanting to burden the other with complaints about a situation we were both stuck in.

“Oh,” I remembered something I wanted to ask. “What was with your little possessive act in the studio today, with Tae? I felt like you were marking your territory or something.”

“Ah,” he said, suddenly sounding shy. “I was just realizing that people might assume we’d broken up or something. Got a little over enthusiastic.”

He hadn’t really answered my question about Taehyung, but I let it go. “I’m not a possession, Joon-ah. Even if someone were to think I’m single, I am perfectly capable of telling them I’m not.”

Namjoon sighed. “I’m sorry, babe. This whole thing is messing with me.” I stayed silent for a beat, waiting for him to add something more. “And I won’t do it again.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “I’m not looking forward to wearing turtlenecks for the next week.” Again we fell silent, unsure that there was anything more to say.

“I love you.” Namjoon’s sudden declaration wasn’t rare, but it was exactly what I needed to hear.

“I love you, too.”

Silence fell between us. It was a comfortable one, though, borne of having shared everything we needed to and merely enjoying each other’s presence, even on the phone.

“We should probably get to bed, though,” I finally said.

“Uh huh,” he mumbled noncommittally, which meant that instead of going to bed, he was going to stay in his studio for a few more hours at least. Usually I would nag at him about getting enough sleep, but I figured he might need the cathartic release that music brought him.

5 days P.I.

“Joon-ah, what does 《bros be-pore hoes》mean?” I asked, knowing I was likely mispronouncing the English phrase. My English was pretty good when it came to academic subjects, but idioms still escaped me.

“What now?” Namjoon asked. We were on the phone again, our nightly ritual of the last several days, to compliment the steady conversation in texts we exchanged throughout the day. Last night he’d initiated a video call during our talk, apparently hearing my voice had made him really miss me in a certain way, and he wanted to show me the evidence. I’d never really been one for phone sex before, but it had at least taken the edge off. It was something I was going to have to get used to before their next extended world tour, at least.

I scrolled through the replies to the latest picture in the group’s feed, a candid shot of RM and V eating noodles. I had to separate them in my head, the men I knew and their stage personalities that they shared with the world, it was the only way to stop me from going off on the people in comments lusting after my man.

“There’s this hashtag people keep using, I know I’m mispronouncing it,” I clarified. “What does it mean?”

“ 《Bros be-pore-》-” he stopped midway, then said it again with what I could only assume was the correct English pronunciation. “Oh, 《bros before hoes》. It’s a rhyme in English. It’s about choosing your brother over-,” he coughed. “About choosing your brother over a woman.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice. “So they think you’ve forgiven Taehyung and chosen him over me.”

“Babe…” I could hear his bed shifting, he was moving around in his helpless frustration. “It was a long shot that they’d believe our statement, you know that. This is the best case scenario right now: they aren’t losing faith in Bangtan and fearing we’re going to break up. We just have to wait until this blows over, or some other scandal takes its place.”

I knew he was right, but it still hurt to hear him say that the best case scenario was having his fans call me an adulteress. I tried to keep quiet, but a hiccuping sob escaped me, making Namjoon curse.

“Babe, I don’t want you to be alone right now. I’m gonna find a disguise or something and come over,” he muttered.

“No, please, I’m fine,” I tried to convince him. “I’ll be okay.” My voice was as shaky as my insides felt.

“I’ll be there in like 20 minutes, tops,” was the last thing he said before hanging up.

6 days P.I.

I’d fallen asleep in Namjoon’s arms after crying my heart out the night before, and barely remembered him tucking me in to bed before sneaking back to the dorm. I’d awoken feeling better, more secure in our relationship and more confident than ever that we were going to be able to see this through to the other side.

Then I checked my phone. It turns out that my boyfriend was super smart, but be could also be a gigantic idiot.

“Joon, how could you?” I hissed into my phone. I was alone in my office at the university, no one to hear me, but I knew he was surrounded by people on his end and didn’t want them to head me screaming at him.

“I didn’t even think! I grabbed a hat and coat that weren’t mine that would fit!” he explained.

“Yeah, but you grabbed Taehyung’s coat, Namjoon. His Gucci coat! And you’re of a similar enough build that it’s easy enough to mistake you in the dark!” I wasn’t even sure when or where the photographers had caught him, only that the news sites were splashed with the image of a tall man with a very distinctive coat at my apartment complex in the middle of the night.

“You didn’t notice either,” Namjoon pointed out.

I ground my teeth. “I was emotionally distressed,” I bit out. “And now people think that Tae snuck over here to see me last night, and that you’re a fool to have forgiven him.

“I’ll fix it,” he promised, hanging up without even a ‘goodbye’. Or an ‘I love you’.

8 days P.I.

“Buying all the members copies of Tae’s coat wasn’t exactly how I imagined you’d fix things, Joon,” I said a couple of days later.

“Now they can’t say for certain who it was,” Namjoon said with pride in his voice.

“Yeah,” I signed. “Now I could be fucking any member of BTS.”

Namjoon scoffed at the idea. “Not any of them, I’m several centimeters taller than most of them.”

“You’re taller than Tae, and they still confused you,” I pointed out.

“I’m sorry.”

11 days P.I.

“Do you think Yoongi would start dating that girl for us?” I asked.

Namjoon mumbled, “Sorry, what?” He was distracted again. He was distracted a lot during our nightly phone calls these days. Working on the album, writing songs, and collaborating with both his members and other producers kept him busy.

“That idol singer he made a song for. If he started dating her, it would at least be something else for people to focus on,” I explained.

He sighed. “I don’t think he’d do it, but you can ask.”

16 days P.I.

It’s the first day we don’t talk.

I told myself we were both busy, I’d forgotten until it was too late to call. But so did he.

It hurt more than I wanted to admit.

20 days P.I.

The managers had decided it was safe enough for me to come visit Namjoon at the dorms. He hadn’t mentioned anything about it when we’d talked, but he texted me that morning to come over in the afternoon and to be cautious.

As the day went on, the data I was supposed to be analyzing was going blurry in front of my eyes. I couldn’t concentrate any longer.

I was leaving straight from the university to minimize the chances of someone seeing or following me, though the crowd camping outside my building had pretty much dispersed. After weeks of no nighttime visitors and my going nowhere except to the school and to run exceedingly boring errands, they’d mostly given up. Still, I had the taxi drop me off several blocks from the dorm, and donned a hat, sunglasses, and a mask before I got out.

Security was waiting for me at the private entrance and I slipped inside, letting out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I made my way to the boy’s dorm and hesitated before I barged in like I used to. It felt weird being there, probably because things had begun to feel increasingly weird between Namjoon and I.

Seokjin looked surprised when he opened the door after I rang the bell, whether it was due to my bothering to ring or that he was surprised to see me at all, I wasn’t sure. Jimin, Taehyung, and Jungkook were all relaxing in the common area, Jimin on his phone while Tae watched Jungkook play Overwatch on his laptop, but they looked up in sync when I came padding around the corner. Jimin and Jungkook both jumped up to give me a hug, and Tae waved from the couch. I could see the hesitation on his face, and it broke my heart a little that he decided not to come hug me like he usually did, but I understood why.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Jungkook said. “Rapmonnie has been an asshole!” I laughed.

“So, I’m here for your benefit, not Namjoon’s?” I joked.

“Yes!” Jimin insisted. The boys sat back down, and I leaned on the arm of the couch, not intending to stay and chat for long. “He’s been super grouchy. That’s why Yoongi-hyung asked if you could come visit.”

The happy feeling I’d felt building inside me, that Namjoon had wanted to see me, had asked the managers if there was any way I could come visit, suddenly left in a rush. “Oh,” I said simply. Unsure what to do now, since Namjoon obviously wasn’t eagerly awaiting my visit as I’d assumed, I slid off the arm and into the couch, pulling my purse into my lap. My coat was still on, since I’d planned on heading to the studio to hang out with Namjoon after dropping off my stuff but now...

“Aren’t you going to go see him?” Taehyung asked softly.

I shrugged. “He knows I’m here.” At least, he knew I was planning on coming to visit after our texts this morning. “He told me to come to the dorm. I’m sure he’ll come back when he wants a break.”

Taehyung shrugged and turned back to Jungkook’s screen. I settled in, shrugging off my warm jacket and laying my legs along the couch, not quite reaching Tae at the other end. I watched Jungkook play for a little while, but my mind wasn’t on the game. Part of me kind of wanted to leave, to see if Namjoon would even notice that I hadn’t come over, but I dismissed that as too petty. Not that I wasn’t already being petty by not going to the studio, but I knew he would come back to the dorm at some point.

I felt useless, just starting off into space, so I pulled out my phone and started re-reading through some of the data analysis for my thesis project. I had to switch apps back and forth in order to make some notes, which was getting annoying, so I asked Taehyung if I could borrow the tablet sitting beside him to email myself some points to include in my own analysis.

“What are you doing?” Jimin asked, looking up from his phone.

I scoffed. “Boring math stuff,” I replied, my eyes darting from one screen to the other as I typed a short sentence about a possible bias in the data.

Jungkook took an interest and exited the lobby he was in, getting up and crouching behind me so he could see my screen. “What’s with all the dots?” he asked.

I laughed mirthlessly. “I’ve graphed all the data points from my research. In an ideal world, they are all supposed to fall between here-” I pointed to a spot on the graph, “-and here, in an even spread.”

“But a bunch are all together there at the end,” he commented.

“Yep,” I confirmed. “Which means either my data is incomplete, or there is a bias that we haven’t accounted for.” I let my head fall back so I could look at Jungkook upside down. “Which means I need to find it or find more data to include in the analysis.”

“Aish,” he muttered, bracing his arm on the couch beside my head and leaning his chin on it. “It’s all just dots on the screen to me. You’re so smart, noona.”

Footsteps sounded behind us and we both twisted to see who had come in, since we hadn’t heard the door.

It was Namjoon. Of course the first time I see him in weeks, I’m sprawled out on the couch having an intimate looking conversation with his friend while another had grabbed my feet out of habit and was giving me a massage, a fact I hadn’t even noticed in my concentration.

“Hyung, look who came to visit!” Jungkook said, bouncing to his feet.

“Hey,” Namjoon greeted us all collectively. His hands were shoved in the pockets of his oversized knit cardigan, horn rimmed glasses framing his eyes, and a black ball cap pulled down over his blonde hair. After so many weeks not seeing him, he looked like a wet dream.

“I came back to see if anybody wanted to go grab some food with me,” he continued. Silence hung in the room. I tried to tell myself that he’d just forgotten that I couldn’t go out with them, but their silence proved that everyone else had managed to remember.

Seokjin cleared his throat and stepped up next to Namjoon. “How about the four of us go grab something and bring it back here,” he suggested. “Give you two a moment to yourselves?” I met Jin’s eyes, thanking him silently.

I’d never seen the lot of them scramble so quickly to get out the door.

I had stood up while they were all running around, sticking next to the couch, my hands in the back pockets of my jeans. Once the room cleared and we heard the front door close, I looked up at Namjoon and approached him slowly.

“Hey stranger,” I said, and went to wrap my arms around his waist, but he stepped back. I frowned in confusion. “Joon-ah, what’s wrong?”

He reached down and grabbed something from the floor next to my purse, the hoodie I’d stolen and brought back to return in his hand. “Is this it? Because if you’re here to break up with me, I don’t want to draw this out.”

“What?” My confusion only grew, now that he was speaking nonsense.

“You’re returning my shit, you didn’t come down to the studio or even tell me you were here, you’re- you’re fucking flirting with Jungkook!” he rambled, his voice getting heated. “Just do it, already!”

I couldn’t help the edge in my voice, an automatic response to the aggression in his. “I can’t believe you,” I growled. “I’m here, I snuck over here just to see you, because I thought you wanted me, that you needed to see me. I brought your favourite hoodie because it doesn’t smell much like you anymore because I’ve been wearing it for weeks and I wanted to trade you for another one. But I get here and find out that it wasn’t even you who wanted me here, it was fucking Yoongi who asked, because you’re being as asshole to all of them.” I crossed my arms over my chest, huffing at him. “And I’m not flirting with Kookie! He asked me what my thesis is about! And as far as I know, you are the only man in existence who finds my discussing statistical analysis sexy.”

I watched his face soften as I spoke. “Babe, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I’ve just been so busy-”

“I’ve been busy too, Namjoon,” I pointed out, my righteous anger not yet slaked. Now it was my turn to step back and avoid his embrace. “And I didn’t pull away like you did. Don’t try and pretend this is just about today.” Frustrated tears fell down my face, and I was helpless to stop them; pretty much any strong emotion made me cry. “This doesn’t exactly bode well for the future of our relationship, does it? Because after you’re done this album, then it’s weeks of promotions, and then your world tour. And it’ll be even harder if I take the job in Busan!”

I hadn’t meant to tell him like this. The offer from a university near my hometown I’d received a couple days previous had been weighing on me and I’d been looking for a chance to tell him about it.

Namjoon froze, his face contorting again. “Busan? You’re moving back to Busan?”

I let my arms curl around my abdomen, feeling very small and sick to my stomach. “My thesis advisor sent part of my draft to a colleague at the university there, and he offered me a job,” I explained. “I haven’t decided anything, and it wouldn’t be until after graduation, but…”

Namjoon scoffed. “Well, good luck with that. You think Tae- or-or- Jungkook would be any better than I am at long distance?” His stutter when he got angry was something I’d never seen directed at me before. “Good luck with that,” he repeated.

“Why the fuck do you keep thinking that I’d leave you and start dating one of them?” my voice had finally risen enough to be called a shout. “They are my friends. How many times do you need to hear it? I’m not interested in dating any of the other members!”

“Because I know you’re attracted to them!” Namjoon shouted back. “You told me, back before we started dating, before I confessed, that you thought every one of us was attractive.”

“But I’m not in love with them, you idiot, I’m in love with you! You’re impossible sometimes, you know that?” I threw my hands up, grabbing my purse and sweater off the couch. “Talk about a double standard. You work with some of the most attractive women in the world, I have to sit there and watch you actively flirt with them on camera, and you smile and give them that look-” I gripped the strap of my bag and shook it in his face. “But I trust you to know the difference between casual attraction and wanting to pursue a relationship, and to come home to me.” A sob wracked my body, the tears coming all at once and my throat constricting painfully. “I trust you. But if you can’t trust me the same way, then there’s no point to this, I guess it’s over.”

I tried to move around him, heading for the door, but he stopped me by wrapping his arms around me. “Please, don’t go,” he begged softly. I felt his body shake with sobs to match mine, though he was better at keeping them quiet. “Don’t leave me like this, please. I can do better.”

“What more do you want from me, Namjoon?” I asked, not moving as tears fell down my face. I was afraid to move, to look at him, not knowing what I would see on his face.

He spun me around, sinking to his knees in front of me. “I see now how I’ve fucked up,” he admitted, his voice muffled by my shirt where he pressed his face into my soft abdomen. “I guess I just got too far into my own head, and I lashed out at you, and I just miss you so goddamn much it hurts.”

I let my things fall to the floor and wrapped my arms around his head. “I miss you, too. It’s been breaking my heart, feeling like you’re pulling away from me.” I felt him turn his face up toward me and looked down to meet his eyes. “This doesn’t work without that trust, Namjoon. I can’t keep doing this.”

“Please,” he choked out a sob, rubbing his face against me again. “Let me try again, I can make it up to you. I can do better, I swear. We can be better together, just don’t leave me.”

“Can we be better?” I asked, more to myself than to him. “We have no idea when things will get back to our normal, this could go on for months.” My heart was breaking even though I knew I had to say the words. “And even then, I’m still busy, you’re still busy, and you’re going to be travelling for extended periods. And who knows where I’ll end up working.” I swallowed, trying to keep my voice even. “Should we just- just cut our losses now?”

“No no no,” Namjoon chanted. “Don’t give up on us, on me. Please.” He stood up, and I let my arms fall back to my sides. I looked up into his face and saw the pain spilling out of his eyes.

I’d spent the last days wondering if he’d been distant because he didn’t love me anymore, that he’d stopped caring when I wasn’t constantly there to remind him. The tortured expression on his face made those worries seem ridiculous. His love for me, his enduring affection and care, was plain as day.

“I don’t want to,” I whispered. “I don’t want to give up, I mean.” I leaned into him and hugged him around the waist. “I love you too much to give up.”

He returned my embrace, one of his hands reaching up to cup my head, tangling in my hair. We stood there for several minutes, each lost in our own thoughts, but so grateful to simply be in each other’s arms.

I finally pulled back and sniffled, wiping the back of my hand across one cheek. Namjoon’s strong hands cupped my face, this thumbs wiping away the rest of the tears. Once that was done, he leaned down and gave me the sweetest kiss on my mouth, just a soft brush of his lips on mine.

We heard a door close down the hall and turned to see Yoongi walking in from his room. “Thank fuck,” he cursed, seeing us embracing. “I was afraid I’d be coming out to see you alone and crying after the shouting, but looks like you’ve made up. Are you going to stop biting my head off now?” Namjoon laughed softly at his hyung’s question.

“Thank you, Yooni-ssi,” I said, turning to him. “I hear you’re the reason I was allowed to visit.”

Yoongi shrugged. “He was unbearable, and you said you missed him,” he brushed off my thanks.

“You were talking to Yoongi-hyung?” Namjoon sounded surprised. Doubt crept into my mind, wondering if his newly revealed irrational jealousy was going to make for another fight.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “I texted him a few days ago to ask if he’d start a scandal to take the spotlight off of us. And he asked how I was doing.”

Namjoon laughed. “I didn’t think you were actually going to ask him!” he admitted.

I bit my lower lip, knowing I needed to be upfront. If Namjoon was going to take issue with me contacting my friends just because they were guys, I needed to know as soon as possible. “A few of the other members texted me, too, asking how I was handling things. I thought they were just being sweet, but now I think they might have been worrying over you.” I met his eyes, looking for any clue as to how he’d react. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I didn’t think it would be a big deal.”

Namjoon pulled me close again, placing a kiss on my temple. “It’s fine, you don’t have to tell me about your friends texting you.”

Wanting to make myself clear, I added, “You don’t have a problem with us being friends, do you?”

Namjoon looked me in the face again. “Of course not. What did you think, I was going to ask you to cut them off? Imagine Jimin if you just suddenly stopped being friends with him. It would break his little heart.” He smiled at me. “I’m sorry my stupid jealous freakout has you doubting your own friendships. I just- I guess I’m not all that good at long distance after being able to be with you for so long. That’s on me, though, something I have to work on for myself. Because I do trust you, implicitly. I swear I do.” I felt like that wasn’t the whole story, not the root of the problem anyway, but it was enough for me, for now.

My boyfriend leaned down to kiss me again, this time a little harder, more like he usually did when he was just saying hi. I let my lips fall open as his tongue swept inside to meet my own. He moaned a little into my mouth, pressing his body closer until we heard someone clearing their throat.

“Ah hmm,” Yoongi coughed very deliberately from where he sat on one of the couches, staring at his phone. “Are you done? Cause the guys want to know if its safe to come in with the food, and I’m hungry.”

***

I leaned back in my chair, resting my hands on my over-full belly and sinking into the comforting feeling of Namjoon’s arm around my shoulders. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like a relief to be back here, hanging out with all of them again. Namjoon especially, of course, but I missed the camaraderie of the whole group as well.

“Do you want to come back to the studio with me?” Namjoon asked as he pushed his chair back from the takeout container covered table and stood. “I can play you what I’ve got so far.” I nodded and moved to stand up as well, knowing that ‘listening to what he’s got’ was code for some time alone, which we both needed and knew we weren’t likely to get if we stayed at the dorm.

“Hyung, can we hear too?” Jimin asked, rushing to stand with us. Taehyung and Jungkook both jumped up as well, though the maknae was still bent in half, shovelling another bite of noodles into his mouth. “You’ve been such a bear, we’ve kind of been afraid to ask.”

Namjoon leaned into me and groaned, but I could see the dimple in his cheek, so he was smiling at their antics. It warmed my heart, that he was willing to indulge them even though he knew they were using me as a buffer. “Fine,” he sighed for dramatic effect, his smile gone when he straightened to look at them. “It’s still pretty rough, though.”

Even rough, the little snippets he played for us held a lot of promise. The three boys were obviously as into it as I was, asking Namjoon to play some parts over and over and throwing out ideas of their own. He’d been working with other writers and producers, as usual, but I felt like I was starting to recognize the spin he put on each piece of music.

“And Taehyung already laid down vocals for this one,” Namjoon reached around me and clicked to open a new file on his computer, the smooth notes filtering through the speakers. He pulled his arms back around my waist, holding me tight on his lap, a position so easy and familiar it was hard to believe we’d been fighting at all.

Taehyung’s voice filled the room, the deep soulful tone sliding around the melody, and I smiled. “Oh my goodness, Tae!” I gushed. “Your voice is absolutely- It’s like, toe-curling!”

Namjoon chuckled behind me. “Don’t you usually call his voice panty melting?” he asked, loud enough for the others to hear over the music, much to my shame.

I blushed. “I didn’t think that phrase was entirely appropriate, given the circumstances,” I muttered, and they all laughed quickly before quieting down to listen to the rest of the song. Taehyung’s haunting voice was lamenting a love he could not have, purely due to circumstances out of their control. Tears sprung to my eyes, and I leaned back to ask Namjoon, “You wrote this one, didn’t you?”

He nodded, and added, “Taehyung helped with the melody and some of the lyrics. Not sure this one is going on the album, but maybe we’ll release it on soundcloud or something.”

I snuggled further into his lap, pulling his arm around me until he squeezed me so tight I could barely breathe. The combination of the sweet lyrics and Tae’s voice were only making that time alone with Namjoon more urgent. “Do you think I could spend the night?” I asked softly. “Ask Taehyung to pile in with one of the others, just for tonight?”

I felt Namjoon smile, since I couldn’t see him. “I dunno, baby, I think Taehyung might not mind watching,” he said, louder than I had been, deliberately making it so the boys could hear.

Jimin started laughing so hard, he curled into a ball and rolled sideways on the couch, bumping into Taehyung beside him. Tae’s face coloured and he looked pointedly at the floor as Jungkook giggled and slapped his knee.

I rolled my eyes. “Ugh, Joon-ah, don’t be such a pervert,” I admonished him. “Come on, isn’t it time you took me to bed?” I knew that would get a reaction, and it did, everyone laughing at my intentional hypocrisy.

“Aish, noona, I never thought you’d be so cold,” Jungkook said. When I shot him a confused look, he continued, “You get turned on by Taehyung, and then you kick him out of his own room to bang Namjoon-hyung.”

I laughed at his analysis. “Or, my lovely boyfriend wrote a song for me, which he got his friend to sing because he knows how much I love his friend’s voice,” I argued. “Really, it’s Joon-ah who is using Tae as foreplay.”

The guys laughed at that and Namjoon grumbled, telling everybody to get out, and we all made our way back to the dorm. No one said anything, but I saw Taehyung duck into Kookie’s room as everyone headed off to bed.

***

Despite how tiring our day had been, both physically and emotionally, neither Namjoon nor I wanted to fall asleep quite yet. We’d fucked as soon as the door to his room closed, all rough hands and hard mouths, then cuddled for a while and made love a second time. Namjoon had ducked out to get a washcloth to clean ourselves up with before we fell asleep, but he hadn’t waited long enough for the water to warm up, so I yelped when the cold cloth first made contact with my cum streaked thigh.

“Sorry, babe,” he said, moving quickly so as to minimize the amount of time I had to deal with it. I sucked in a breath when he swiped over my swollen labia, and he grinned. “A bit sensitive, hmm?”

“Just a bit,” I confirmed, and pushed his hand away when he moved to shock me again. He dropped the cloth to the floor, and I tried to see where it landed so I wouldn’t step on it in the morning, but he flopped on top of me before I could spot it. “You should really hang that up or something,” I pointed out.

“Mmm,” he hummed against my throat where he’d nestled his head. “Missed this.”

“What, squishing me to death?” I asked, slowly shoving him until he rolled onto the other side of me, but he pulled me with him so I was lying half on top of him. “You just missed sex,” I accused, trying to play it off like a joke, but I still worried that’s all he wanted me for.

Namjoon shook his head. “Nope, I’m sure it’s you,” he asserted. He kissed my neck softly, then pulled his head back, voice turning all serious. “Babe, can I tell you something? Promise not to get mad?”

My heart dropped, sure he was going to confess to something awful like cheating on me. We’d been apart for weeks, and I knew the sexual frustration would have been getting to him as much as it did to me, and he had no shortage of opportunities. I swallowed thickly, hoping my voice wouldn’t betray my inner turmoil. “Sure.”

“See…” he started, and my heart rate increased, terrified of what was to come. “For a long time, Taehyung and I have had this kind of friends-with-benefits arrangement-” My brain short circuited, not understanding what I was hearing. I was expecting something, something like an intern he made out with, but he’s suddenly confessing to some past relationship with Taehyung? His roommate and fellow band member, Taehyung, who everyone thought I was cheating on Namjoon with? I didn’t even know he was into guys, like at all. Namjoon was still talking though, so I tried to catch back up. “-So when he offered I kinda freaked out and he didn’t mean anything by it cause he thought it’d be cool, and I swear I didn’t fuck him.”

I turned on my side so I was facing him. “Okay, slow down. You and Tae have...a past?” He nodded. “A romantic one?” He twisted his mouth and brought his hand closer to our faces and tited it back in forth, meaning kind of. “Okay, not quite romantic, but sexual?” Another nod.

This time the feeling in the pit of my stomach wasn’t dread or fear, but something molten I felt to my core. Namjoon smirked when he saw the way my pupils reacted. I tried to push aside the flash of lust that had hit me at the thought of my boyfriend and his group member together in that way. “So, sorry, what happened with Tae?”

“Whenever we’re both between relationships and feeling horny we, you know, help each other out,” Namjoon explained unnecessarily.

I shook my head. “No no, I get that part. What happened the other day that Tae didn’t mean anything by cause he thought it was cool? I kinda lost the thread of what you were saying in the middle there,” I admitted, which made him smile even wider.

“Uh huh,” he leered at me as he said it. “So Taehyung saw that I was...shall we say I was struggling with being away from you for so long, and he thought I might need some relief of a sexual nature. And he offered by, uh, kinda waking me up with his mouth. Like, on my dick.”

I listened to him struggle to give me details, and the images his words brought to mind were some of the most erotic things I’d ever imagined. I glanced around at the bed we were lying on, imagining Joon splayed out across it like he usually was when he had the bed to himself, morning wood tenting the soft grey sweatpants he used as pyjamas. Taehyung, sliding out of the bed on the other side of the room and approaching Namjoon’s bed slowly, pulling down Joon’s pants to free his erection and sliding that wicked looking tongue of his from base to tip. I knew from experience that would be enough to wake Namjoon, but in my little fantasy Tae didn’t stop, crouched over my boyfriend and taking him deep into his throat a few times before Namjoon’s hand fell to the back of his head and Joon arched up into the younger man’s mouth…

“Well now, isn’t that interesting,” real life Namjoon said quietly. I snapped my head up to meet his eyes, falling into his all too perceptive gaze. “You like that, don’t you?” He slipped his firm thigh between my knees and pressed upwards. “Here I thought you’d be pissed, or need me to convince you that I didn’t take him up on his offer, which I didn’t, and that he knew now that it wasn’t something I’d be welcoming since you and I are together, which he does. Instead, I think you want me to tell you more.”

His thigh was high enough to press against my core, and I rocked against it. Namjoon hissed. “Baby, you’re soaking again. I can feel it on my leg. We just got cleaned up for bed, but you’re such a dirty girl, aren’t you?” he said into my ear, his voice low and gravelly, which wasn’t helping my level of arousal. I moaned and twisted my head to kiss him again just as a sliver of light fell across the opposite wall and the door creaked open. Namjoon grabbed a blanket and quickly pulled it over our entwined bodies.

Taehyung walked into the room slowly, glancing around in the dark to detect any possible movement, trying not to disturb us while he thought we were sleeping. After he stumbled over something on the floor, it was too dark to see what, Namjoon took pity on him. “It’s okay, Tae, we aren’t asleep yet.”

“Oh, sorry,” Tae whispered. “I can go back, I was just getting tired and it sounded like you guys had, uh, finished…”

“We were just falling asleep, Taehyung,” I reassured him. “Go to bed if you want.”

“Mmm, are you sure, babe?” Namjoon teased me. “We were just talking about what happened with Tae and I the other morning, and you were getting all hot and bothered.”

Taehyung coughed. “I’m sorry, what? You- you told her?” I wished there had been enough light to see the expression on his face, to see the shock that as so evident in his voice.

“Yeah, don’t worry, she’s kind of really into the idea,” Namjoon laughed until I struck his arm lightly. I didn’t want Tae to know I’d been fantasizing about him fucking my boyfriend and get all awkward with me.

“No, we are just going to go to sleep, you’re safe to stay,” I assured the younger man. Namjoon rocked forward, the thigh still between my own pressing against my centre, so I shoved him back. “And if you don’t stop that, my love, I’ll go find somewhere else to sleep, and you can sleep alone.”

25 days P.I.

“Come on, babe, please?” Namjoon begged. I sighed, knowing I shouldn’t give in but wishing I could.

Things between us had been better since I’d been to visit a few days earlier, back to the nightly phone call and endless string of texts. Now he was asking if he could come by my place for a quick visit, and being whiney about it.

“I have a deadline, Joon-ah,” I reminded him for what felt like the twelfth time in the five minutes we’d been on the phone. “I need to work through the edits from my advisor before I submit my final draft, and after that I need to start preparing for my defense.”

“I promised I won’t stay too long,” he argued. “I’ll even bring some of the guys with me so we have chaperones. We’ll bring dinner and we can all eat together. I know you probably haven’t been taking time to eat properly…” I looked at my messy kitchen, counters piled with bowls of half-eaten ramyeon eaten hastily in front of my computer, knowing he was right. Namjoon’s voice dropped as he added, “I don’t want to go so long without seeing you again. I don’t want us to end up doubting each other again.”

Of course he knew exactly how to pull at my heartstrings. “Fine,” I acquiesced, as he knew I would. “But only for a little bit.”

I really should have known better. Namjoon showed up with Taehyung (“the others were all busy”), dressed so stylishly in their ripped jeans and designer shirts that I wondered if they’d just come off a photo shoot, and filled my coffee table with the boxes of food they’d brought. Once we’d eaten, he’d insisted there’d be no harm in them staying to watch a movie while I continued to work. He just wanted to hold me, he claimed, so I settled in to his lap with my computer and ignored the movie on screen. I was so engrossed in my work that I didn’t even notice when the first movie ended and they started a second, but it was one of my favourites, so eventually I closed my work and settled back into Namjoon.

After a few moments of my leaning across him, Namjoon shifted so that he was sitting sideways on the couch, his legs on either side of me so he could pull me more firmly into his lap. I wiggled back against him and he let out a low groan, slipping his hand up under my shirt to splay across my stomach.

“Uh, Joon-ah, don’t be gross in front of Tae,” I chided him, but wiggled back again, wanting to punish him a little bit for staying longer than he’d promised.

Namjoon swatted at my thigh with his free hand. “Sit still, then!” he returned. “I wouldn’t have been gross if you weren’t being dirty.”

I gasped for dramatic effect and twisted to look him in the face. “How exactly am I being dirty? I’m just getting comfortable.”

Namjoon scoffed. “Yeah, you’re comfortably grinding on my dick.” The hand on my abdomen slid up high enough slip unter the wire of my bra and graze at the underside of my breast, causing me to wiggle yet again. “You’re killing me here, babe!”

I stopped, remembering we weren’t alone, and looked over at Taehyung to make sure he wasn’t about to run away in embarrassment. To my surprise, he met my gaze and smiled. “It’s okay,” he assured me. “Nothing I haven’t heard or seen before.” I blushed, but smiled my thanks and grabbed the blanket from the back of the couch, throwing it over Namjoon and I for a little more privacy if he decided to pull my shirt up again.

By the end of the second movie, Namjoon was snoring behind me and Tae could barely keep his eyes open. “Okay, guys, you’ve been here longer than you said you would, time to head home,” I said, loud enough to startle them both. Taehyung groaned, and Namjoon hugged me tighter, pulling me back into his lap.

“Babe, it’s too late,” he complained. “Can’t we just crash here?”

I muttered, “How did I not see this coming?” but still freed myself from Namjoon’s arms and went to the closet to grab an extra pillow and some blankets. “Here, Taehyung,” I said, dropping them on the couch. “The couch is comfy enough that I fall asleep on it all the time.” I helped Namjoon to stand and pulled him behind me to my bedroom.

We had settled down, ready to fall back asleep when we heard my couch scrape against the floor as if someone was moving it around. It finally stopped, but we listened to bare feet padding down the short hall to my closed door.

“Noona?” Taehyung asked through the door. He said something else, but it was muffled.

“What?” Namjoon asked. “Open the door, we can’t hear you.” Taehyung did as ordered, but stood in the doorway, not stepping into the room.

“Do you have an air mattress, or some more blankets or something? I’m too tall to fit on the couch,” he said.

I shook my head. “Sorry, I don’t really.” Tae nodded and reached for the door to close it again.

“Just-” Namjoon said with a sigh. “Come join us,” he offered. “We should have enough room.”

My eyes widened in shock, and I turned back to look at Joon’s face. Was he serious? I knew he was used to sharing a bed with Tae, but I certainly wasn’t. Did he really want to spend the night sandwiched between his past and current lovers? I may have found the idea of the two of them together that way...intriguing, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to lay next to them while they snuggled or something. I certainly wasn’t a fan of having the situation sprung on me like this.

I couldn’t exactly deny him after the offer had been made, though, so I scooted back toward the edge of the bed to make room for Taehyung on Namjoon’s other side. Joon grabbed me, though, and started pulling the both of us the other way. “You know I’d overheat if I was between the two of you,” he explained, and I felt the bed sink behind me as Tae climbed in. “You good?” Joon asked once we were all settled in.

“Yeah, sure,” I promised bravely. Tae and I had technically fallen asleep together before, but there was a big difference between falling asleep against each other on the couch at the dorm and sleeping in bed together on purpose.

“You know,” Namjoon began with a smirk. “If you get too hot, you can always take off your pyjamas. Neither of us will mind.”

“Hyung!” This time it was Taehyung scolding him. “This is awkward enough without you making it worse.”

I kicked my way out from underneath the blankets, sitting up to crawl out of the bed. “I’ll just go sleep on the couch, I’ve done it before,” I grumbled, trying not to let emotion creep into my voice. I’d nearly made it to the end of the bed before a strong arm wrapped around my waist and pulled me back. To my surprise, it was Taehyung who held me to him, not my boyfriend.

“Ignore hyung, he’s being an asshole,” Tae said, his mouth right next to my ear. I hoped he couldn’t feel the shiver that coursed through my body; I really wasn’t exaggerating the effect his voice had on me. “It’s just like passing out on the couch together, no big deal.” He had a point, our relationship had always been heavy on skinship and it had never bothered me before.

As if to further convince me, Taehyung started humming softly, some tuneless notes that turned into the melody of the song I’d heard at the studio, the one he and Namjoon had written for me. My body was still tingling from his voice, so I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing, hoping I’d drift off.

I must have looked convincing, because once the song was over, Tae started whispering at Namjoon. “What the fuck are you trying to pull, hyung?” His voice was harsh despite his attempts to keep quiet.

“Don’t act all innocent, I know you still like her,” Namjoon answered, his voice almost teasing and heavy with sleep. It seems Tae’s lullaby had worked on Joon as well. “Seen the way you watch her when she isn’t looking, use every excuse to touch her and hold her close. That picture, the scandal...I don’t know how she doesn’t see how bad you want her, it’s all over your face.”

“Hyung,” Tae whined. “So you just want to torture me? Force us closer to punish me for wanting her, or is this retaliation for interrupting you the other night?”

Namjoon chuckled. “No, nothing like that.”

“Then what, hyung?”

Namjoon was silent for a few moments, long enough that I was tempted to open my eyes to check if he’d fallen asleep mid conversation. Finally he spoke, but his words gave me no comfort. “Look at her, curled up with you in an instant, when I’m right in front of her. She was looking at you the same way, Taetae, in that picture. She wants you too, I’m pretty sure.”

I felt more than heard Tae’s sharply indrawn breath; he had pulled me right up against him and his arms tightened around me even further in his moment of shock. I had to will myself to remain relaxed, knowing that if I even stiffened they would realize I was awake, and I’d lose out on hearing the rest of this conversation they were having.

“I would never, hyung! Noona wouldn’t- She’s your girl, Joon-hyung,” Taehyung stumbled through the words, clearly at a loss for what to say to Namjoon’s revelation.

I wouldn’t have known what to say, either. My mind was racing, overwhelmed with new information and things to consider. Was he right? Did I really have a crush or something on Tae? He was probably my best friend, and I adored him to pieces, but I had been into Namjoon from the moment we met, head-over-heels in love for a couple of years now. Sure, Taehyung was attractive, but so were all the other members, and no one could fault me for enjoying the view. But I couldn’t deny that my relationship with Taehyung was different from the rest of the guys, we were closer and hung out together more, and were more cuddly, but I figured Tae was just like that with everybody. Unless that touchyness was a manifestation of some kind of feelings for me…

“She is, for now. Doesn’t have to stay that way,” Namjoon said softly, and my racing mind ground to a halt.

Next (Part 2)

#bts fic #namjoon x reader #taehyung x reader #namjoon x reader x taehyung #ipurpleunet #my fic #bts smut #namjoon scenario #taehyung scenario #idol au #bangtan smut #namjoon au #taehyung au #bangtan x reader #namjoon fic #taehyung fic #bts au #bts au fanfic #fic: this looks bad

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vgperson · 5 years

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What Did I Translate in 2018?

#vgperson

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jasonfry · 7 years

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Notes: Weapon of a Jedi, Pt. 1

Welcome to another installment of author’s notes! (if you missed them for Servants of the Empire: Edge of the Galaxy, you can start here.)

WARNING: These notes will completely spoil The Weapon of a Jedi. If you haven’t read it, stop and go here.

The Weapon of a Jedi began with an email from Lucasfilm in August 2014. Did I want to tell the story of Luke Skywalker’s first lightsaber duel, and offer readers a little sneak peek at The Force Awakens?

That was an even easier “yes” than most invitations to tell a Star Wars story. The idea was that Luke and the droids would explore a ruined Jedi temple on a jungle planet, which immediately made me smile. Luke, C-3PO and R2-D2 were the first three Kenner action figures I’d bought as a nine-year-old on Long Island. How many times had I invented a similar story back in 1978, using those figures and terrain made out of couch cushions?

Still, I admit to being a bit nervous as we filled in the details for a book with the working title of Luke Skywalker and the Lost Temple. This was Luke Skywalker – one of the most iconic characters in Star Wars, and a tricky character to get right.

He also wasn’t a Star Wars character for whom I felt a natural affinity.

I’d always been a Han guy – as a kid, I thought Luke should have run off with Han and Chewie and become a space pirate, instead of worrying about a bunch of cosmic philosophy. (I would have been a terrible rebel.) It’s not that I disliked Luke – it was more that I felt I lacked a sense of the character despite decades of watching and reading his adventures. So I had to fix that, and quickly.

An amusing aside: I confessed the above at 2015’s New York Comic-Con while sharing a microphone with Greg Rucka, who wrote the Han Solo adventure Smuggler’s Run. No sooner had I said those words than Greg leaned over and admitted he’d always been a Luke guy.

(Amusing aside to the aside: Neither of us had shared this with our editor. Writers, man.)

Anyway, I enrolled myself in Luke Boot Camp. I started by watching the classic trilogy again, concentrating on Luke’s reactions – not just what he said but his body language. How did he respond when questioned by other characters? When learning from Obi-Wan and Yoda? When being pushed to do something he disagreed with?

Two things I read unlocked Luke for me. The first was in The Making of Star Wars, J.W. Rinzler’s terrific behind-the-scenes chronicle. Mark Hamill recalled shooting the scene where Luke and Threepio intercept Artoo. Hamill played the scene angrily, only to hear George Lucas call “cut.” His advice: “It’s not a big deal.” Disagreeing with his director, Hamill delivered a deliberately “small” take, figuring Lucas would see how wrong he was. The director thought it was perfect. After that, Hamill understood his character a lot better – and nearly 30 years later, so did I.

The other moment was a TheForce.net post written by a commenter named Jedi Princess: “Luke is gentle, in a way that so few action/adventure movie heroes are.” Yep – that’s it exactly. Luke destroys the Death Star by taking Obi-Wan Kenobi’s advice to “let go” and allow the Force to guide him. Two movies later, he defeats the Sith not by using his lightsaber, but by throwing it away and awakening his father’s love for him. It’s in Empire that Luke is most like a conventional action-movie hero, spurning his teachers’ advice and rushing off to confront Darth Vader. That turns out to be a disaster: he learns a terrible secret he isn’t ready for and the friends he tried to rescue must risk their lives to rescue him.

Those two lessons prepared me for the book. (Which was good, because I had about a month in which to write it.) I felt ready, but still knew Weapon would be a challenge. A big chunk of it would be introspective, with Luke limited to Force training and the droids acting as a Greek chorus. But the story’s the story. Thinking about how to approach that, I kept coming back to fairy tales.

But we’ll get to that.

Prologue

The frame story is set shortly before The Force Awakens, and features Jessika Pava, one of the pilots seen in the battle above Starkiller Base.

The basic beats of the frame story – a pilot, droid duty, Threepio as storyteller – came from Lucasfilm, including the funny bit about Threepio being persuaded not to tell a story everyone had heard before.

I started writing Weapon of a Jedi before the Easter eggs for The Force Awakens had been worked out with Story Group, so I left placeholders for them. I originally named the pilot Draupadi Pava, changing her first name when Story Group chose an on-screen character who’d already been named Jess because she was played by Game of Thrones veteran Jessica Henwick. (In the credits she’s Jess Testor, a detail that slipped through the cracks.)

A funny thing: I hadn’t read the script for The Force Awakens, so I assumed Artoo was busy elsewhere on the base, off in an X-wing, etc. After a couple of false starts I was told just to avoid our favorite astromech. As you might imagine, I wondered what that could possibly mean.

More bits from the prologue:

On D’Qar, Threepio mentions a long-ago diplomatic mission to Circarpous with Luke and Artoo. Hey, a reference to Splinter of the Mind’s Eye! Well, sort of – Alan Dean Foster’s ur-Legends 1978 novel starts off that way, but inferring that everything that happened in Splinter therefore “really happened” would be a continuity bridge too far.

I now think I overdid it with the Legends nods in Weapon of a Jedi -- they don’t demand special knowledge or distract the reader, which is good, but less would have been more. In my defense, I knew from the start that I wanted to pay homage to two Legends tales that could plausibly claim to be Luke’s “first” lightsaber duel, so I included a nod to Splinter very early. We’ll get to the other tale later.

Note that Threepio has updated his Tranlang database and is now fluent in nearly seven million forms of communication. Who says you can’t teach old droids new tricks?

Part One

The original idea for Weapon of the Jedi hewed pretty closely to the final story: while on a mission for the Alliance, Luke senses something in the Force and is called to the planet Devaron. Dodging an Imperial patrol, he reaches the planet, discovers the Temple of Eedit and trains there. He’s interrupted by the Scavenger, who’s there to loot the temple and sees Luke as easy prey. Stormtroopers arrive soon after that, beginning a three-way game of cat and mouse. With the Imperials out of the way, Luke duels the Scavenger and defeats him.

I wanted to simplify the three-way running battle, which felt a little more like Indiana Jones than Luke Skywalker to me. And I was worried about the idea of a call to a distant planet. If the summons was vague, how would Luke know where to go? Yet specificity felt like supernatural exposition, risking letting the reader hear the gears of the plot whirring. (Let’s be honest: the ghost-in-a-blizzard scene in Empire is pretty clunky storytelling.)

My solution was to have Luke on or near Devaron in the first place. A little convenient, maybe, but it eliminated the Where to Go problem – the Force’s answer would essentially be, “Right here, dummy.” And that would let me get away with a bit more supernatural aid elsewhere – a dream or a vision of what Luke was being called to do.

I also felt it was important for Luke to reject the Force’s call at first. That’s a basic element of the heroic journey, and would also show that Luke was torn between responsibilities and identities. The destroyer of the Death Star would be an Alliance hero and recruiter, encouraged to continue along that path. But Luke would also hunger to learn about the Force as his father had – a far more difficult path considering he no longer had a teacher.

That yielded my first pass at the opening of the book: While on a mission for the Alliance, Luke refuels his Y-wing at Devaron, shakes off a funny feeling in the Force and continues on to Giju, where he meets with a resistance group of Herglics. A Herglic elder remembers the Jedi, and tells Luke he should wear his lightsaber with pride but keep in mind that having one is a death sentence under the Empire. Stormtroopers break up the meeting and Luke escapes, but feels a prickle in the Force and catches sight of a mysterious figure watching him. He then delays his mission to return to Devaron, accepting that it’s where the Force wants him to go.

Not a bad start, but it would have featured a lot of standing around and unneeded exposition – neither Luke nor the reader needed a big speech about the Jedi’s value or the Empire’s drive to destroy them.

My editor, Michael Siglain, felt we needed to get Luke to Devaron a lot more quickly, and he was right -- a basic principle of storytelling is to start as late as possible. So I scrapped the meeting on Giju and replaced it with Luke and Wedge in X-wings, battling TIEs above the planet. Luke’s trip to Devaron and his rejection of the Force’s call now came after the initial mission, instead of before it.

Now we started with an action beat, one that showed Luke as a starfighter ace. That was a more exciting way of showing him caught between being a rebel hero and a Jedi apprentice. To quote George, it was faster and more intense – as well as cleaner and better.

Some notes:

A few readers told me I’d screwed up by making Wedge Red Three and not Red Two. Nope – that was a deliberate switch based on the fact that he’s Rogue Three at Hoth.

Commander Narra first appeared in The Empire Strikes Back radio dramatization penned by Brian Daley – his death at Derra led to Luke taking command of Rogue Group. That’s a Legends nod I’d keep -- from the beginning Mike and Story Group suggested using the radio dramas for background lore, which as a big Daley fan I was thrilled to do.

I introduced the idea of Alliance pilots using “scatter protocols” to avoid Imperial capture – and of Luke being assigned a more complicated pattern because of his value to the rebel cause. That was a compact, logical way to confront him with special treatment he dislikes.

I had to switch Luke from an X-wing to a Y-wing so Threepio had a ride to Devaron. The designation of the Y-wing as Y4 is a really obscure Legends reference – Y4 is the Y-wing Luke uses in the Holiday Special’s Boba Fett cartoon. Credit Pablo Hidalgo for the suggestion.

It isn’t all Legends references in this section – the prequels shape the story too. Luke’s prophetic dream about practicing in the temple was meant to echo Anakin’s dreams about Shmi and Padmé. An important part of the prequels that’s easily missed is that Anakin doesn’t have superhuman reflexes, but uses the Force to see things before they happen. That’s why his nightmares about his wife are so terrifying – he knows they’re not mere dreams but glimpses of the future.

Note also that Luke remembers advice from Obi-Wan which is word for word the counsel Qui-Gon gave Obi-Wan in The Phantom Menace. I liked the idea of Obi-Wan and Luke sitting around a campfire on the way to Mos Eisley, with the older man telling his new student not to center on his anxieties.

I also wanted dreams and visions to guide Luke – though as discussed above, I knew I had to pick my spots. I imagine the Force often manifests itself in dreams, even for non-Jedi -- people’s minds would be most open to the will of the Force while they sleep. Dreams and the tricky business of interpreting them are also common elements of fairy tales, which fit the tone I wanted during Luke’s time on Devaron.

An idea I dropped was to put Luke in a cantina on Devaron so I could show how much he’d grown since his wide-eyed trip to Mos Eisley. That was scotched to steer clear of Greg’s Han Solo book – and, I presume, the scenes in Maz’s castle. I replaced the idea with putting Luke in the depot in Tikaroo, which I depicted as more like a safari lodge than a dive bar.

Luke first used the alias “Korl Marcus” in Marvel #49, “The Last Jedi.” That’s one of my favorite tales from the old Marvel days, and was an appropriate Legends story to mine for a couple of reasons: a) it’s about Luke finding an unlikely source of Jedi wisdom and b) it also begins with a journey in a Y-wing.

Next: Visions of the Clone Wars! A mysterious guide! And a creature switcheroo! Continue the notes here....

#star wars #writing #storytelling #author's notes #weapon of a Jedi

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artificialqueens · 7 years

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Driven Away - Pharon - Part 1 - Cece

Hello my lovelies, everyones asking for Pharon including me so i figured i’d save you guys from the drought even if it doesnt help me :( becuz i’d be the happiest ever if someone did this for me!

Quick little thing though, this Pharon is not for everyone and by that i mean TW!

We have a MAJOR trigger warning on Alcoholism and Alcohol in general, a very present and main topic to the story, so be safe!

It will also involve some forms of violence, sorta kinda hit and run, cuss words, hospital, and i can’t think of anything else that would need a TW, maybe i’ll including smoking but not yet.

a few things: this AU is in a universe in which The world saw Sharon as the bad guy in the whole Phi/Sharon fight, and Phi Phi as the good part of it.

Female pronouns used but they are very much men, and things will evenutally switch up names and pronouns.

enjoy, leave feedback, and no i am not sure how many parts will be made of this <3 toodles - cece

“Call me back, please Sharon, I wanna talk.” Phi Phi begged into the phone as she made her way to her car. “actually, we need to talk."

She ducked as she got into the drivers seat of her car and plopped her cellphone down in the cup holder to her side. She slammed the car door, getting some of the frustration she had with Sharon go.

The fourth episode had just aired and not only were the editors harsh on the spooky queen, but so was all of social media. People just gagging over the fight but 99% being on the side of Phi Phi and sending Sharon a big fuck you in the form of "Go back to Party city, for real bitch”

When her and Sharon had agreed to do the tiff between them to get to the top two and become iconic, it was never done in plans that one would receive all the hate, but here she was feeling sick to her stomach over the hate she saw pouring in for Sharon.

She wasn’t truly at fault, they had made the pact together and editors just decided to side with Phi Phi for it. Why, she wondered, why could they not make it a both side thing, but then she remembered it was reality tv and instead just wished it on her.

As she drove her car aimlessly, wondering where on earth to go she had to pull over after ten minutes of driving. Her mind couldn’t let this go, as she opened up the twitter app to see thousands of more things pouring it. Ignoring all the positive and Sharon bashing tweets she personally got, she went straight to see a hashtag had been started.

#Sharonthehate had been started and holy crap did it already have a good amount of entries for being such a lame ass pun.

She looked through a few, not believing that these words could come out of people to post cowardlessly on twitter because of a show.

One tweet caught her attention however, it read: “Just saw the bitch in the flesh @ Gene’s bar, hope she drives herself home #sharonthehate”

Phi Phi not only grimaced at how awful the thought was, but then she thought of the fact she knew exactly where Genes bar was. Not only was she not gonna let that tweet come true and find Sharon dead behind the wheel of a car, alcohol still on her breathe even in death, but she would finally get to talk to her.

She started her car back up and took the familiar roads to get to the establishment, only taking a few short mineuetes to pull in the parking lot and hop out of her car. She made her way up to the front doors of the place, and swung open the door, making a bell ring.

She looked around as she placed her hands in her pockets, the cold from the metal of the door handle still stung at her skin. She finally spotted a person, sitting up at the bar, who’s back of the head resembled her fellow queen.

The place was low key empty she noticed seeing as the only other person sitting on one of the actual stools at the bar and not a booth or table was someone all the way on the other side.

“Sharon.” Phi Phi said as she walked up behind the girl, who spun around from hearing her name. The spinning of the chair was a lot looser than she thought it’d be as she spilled some of her clear drink (no doubt vodka) onto the other queen as she struggled to not fall off her seat.

She gave Phi Phi a glare who was picking up some napkins to dry at her shirt which now smelled just like the heavy substance. She spun back around catching herself by smacking her hands down on the bar, and also using it to signal the bartender.

“Double shot again, keep them coming.” She told him, watching him nod as she just let her head fall onto the cool top of the bar.

Phi Phi went to the stool next to the spooky queen and got up on it, now on the same level as her friend and able to get her attention better (especially with how short she was).

“Goooo the fuck awayyyy.” Sharon mumbled, something Phi Phi just could understand between the slur in the talk and how her mouth was covered.

“I was hoping you’d just had your phone turned off before but clearly my fear is right and you are mad at me.” She said which made Sharon come out from where she hid her face in her arms.

“Mad?” Sharon asked before bursting into hysterical laughter, no doubt the alcohol was already getting to her. “You’re the reason everyone hates me, and i’m gonna do something like thank you for it? Hell nooooo!"

The bartender walked over with the double shot about to hand it to Sharon when Phi Phi cut in "isn’t over serving something you could get a fine for, or i don’t know, your alcohol license revoked?"

She gave the man a glare until he back off and took the glorious liquid away from Sharon making her grow madder as she stared desperately at the stuff in the shot glass be taken away.

"You BITCH!” She screamed, getting the people in the joint to look, but grow disinterested shortly after. “You take away my fans and now your taking away my drink, in what hell is that something you think you can do."

"You’re drunk Sharon, you know why I told him not to serve you.” She muttered

“I can handle some drinks, you don’t own me.” Sharon screamed out as she picked her coat up from the stool on the other side of her.

“Thats not what I’ve heard,” She said before lowering her voice. “I know you’ve previously had alcohol issues, i’m being a helpful friend, whether you see it now or not.”

"You are not my friend! You are nothing to meeee, I want you out of my life you career wrecker-er!“

The illiterate words spat out at Phi Phi hurt, a lot, but she knew a mad Sharon was better than a dead one, so as her heart broke and Sharon made a bee line for the door she decided to follow.

"You don’t have to like me but let me drive you home!” She yelled out into the cold as she sprinted outside after her.

“Go to hell.” She said as she fiddled with her keys.

“Sharon you cannot drive while drunk, not only for your safety but others too!” She said as she got right up to sharon who was now in her car, closing the door on Phi Phi.

“I can drive, i’ll be fine, as fine a s i can be!” She said as she gripped the wheel of her car and closed her eyes. She was upset, frustrated and didn’t need the voice of phi phi to tell her what to do. She would never admit it but she was a little dazed like phi phi suspected.

“I’m not letting you leave here and kill yourself!” Phi Phi said as she stood arms crossed in from the the vehicle blocking the girl from going forward.

‘idiot’ Sharon thought as she looked at her and began to press her foot down on the petal. 'i can still go backwards’ .

Her foot goes down and goes back up straight away after hearing a sound that made her mouth drop. She swore- okay she SWORE, the car was in reverse but nope, she’d just managed to hit Phi Phi O'Hara with her car.

“Shit, Shit, Shit..” she repeated as she hoped out of her car to go to the girl who was laid on the pavement.

She bent down to the girl and moved her hand to push away some hair revealing blood that got onto Sharon’s fingers as well.

“Phi Phi wake up, tell me i’m a drunk or anything just wake the fuck up!” Sharon begged as she shook the girl. no response.

She quickly placed her ear down onto the chest of the fellow queen and was relieve to hear it’s still beating, faint but there.

She picked up the phone out of phi Phi’s pocket, thanking everything that it was still working as she dialed the 3 numbers of 9-1-1.

“Ambulance to Gene’s bar.” She just spat before dropping the phone and scurrying off to her car to get out of there.

She didn’t want Phi Phi dead, god no she didn’t, and she wanted to stay to make sure that she wasn’t but she knew hitting Phi Phi was the cherry on top to get her all the hate and death threats in the world.

So Sharon drove off, guilty, and red handed as she wondered if her co star was okay, another part forgetting any hate she had in her stubborn little heart for the girl who was in a puddle of blood thanks to her and her intake of alcohol.

She didn’t know what was worse, Phi phi could be dead, fans could think she did it and destory her, or the fact that she wanted another drink to soothe herself when that was the reason she was in the situation in the first place.

#pharon #phi phi o'hara #sharon needles #cece #driven away #tw alcohol #tw violence #au #rpdr fanfiction #canon compliant #submission

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itsworn · 6 years

Text

Industry Icon Ted Dzus: Made In America

Ted Dzus and I go back more than forty years. In that time, he built some pretty hairy companions and all of them exhibited craftsmanship, thought, and even a little whimsy. And this was well before the internet tangle, so we got our news pony express-like from the monthly rags and the advertising copy that accompanied them or we heard it over the land line. There was civility then. Nobody yapped immediate when there was no forum to put it in; there was no specious social media for all that gas and very little grit.

These days everybody’s been dog-trained to spit up a sound bite, no matter how inane, thoughtless, or cruel, for a few seconds of something and there’s always somebody with a phone cam on every greasy street corner in America to record their proclivities. Common sense surely seems to abandon them, or maybe they haven’t got any in the first place. Back in the day, we just kept hammering and kept our derision close to the bar…

I lived in northern New Jersey then, so it was only a short crawl over to Long Island. One powerful fall day in the mid-seventies, I was out there to shoot Ted’s Modified Production Vega wagon that had been naturally riddled with Dzus rounds. We had lunch at Herman’s, one of his favorite haunts. We ate, we drank, we ate some more. Then we burned rubber across the street to a strip-mall gin mill managed by Geraldo Rivera’s brother, who fixed us right up with a six-pack of Kamikazes. (Yo, what’s the big deal, it’s only two o’clock.) About an hour later, we set fuzzy sights on the Vega.

Suffice that I had to put my shoulder to a steady tree so I could focus (a loose term here) the Nikon. I felt woozy, delaminated. When the proof sheets came back they were awful. (Your eyes were closed when you did this, right?)Maybe it was time for a change of scenery. Shortly thereafter, I got the new-car bug at Motor Trend and left the land of hard-core modified for the bright, shiny, and mundane. Fact is, I did a dozen or so stories with Ted over the years.

Then, it’s somehow 1998 and beyond my belief I’ve been the editor of Hot Rod for two years. I’m on Power Tour, the first one to chew down the Right coast (from Ft. Devens, Massachusetts to Tampa), waiting in a ratty motel lobby in ratty Suffern, New York, for some company to arrive. Across the floor I see a tanned head and trademark white shirt, bobbing in conversation—Dzus. When he sees me, his face lights up.

We tramped around for a decade, sometimes on Long Island, always on Power Tour. There were cocktails after five. Sometimes we yelled at the crowd. Sometimes we yelled at shoddy service. Sometimes we yelled at one another. And so it was with a couple of very blessed, very fortunate miscreants (now in their mid-seventies) who never really got beyond the age of 18. Not quiche aficionados. Not cars ‘n’ coffee wanks. Not soap opera stars. Car guys.—Ro McGonegal

William Dzus (born Volodymyr Dzhus)

As a child, Ted’s grandfather had a fascination with all things mechanical and he especially loved large machines. As he grew older, his interest expanded. One day he saw a thresher and followed it to the fields. When his father John found him watching it he was enraged that William had been frittering his time. John Dzhus was not one for any resource spent that didn’t immediately add to his or the family’s wherewithal, e.g., farming. As his ancestors, he was bound to the land in the western Ukraine and fiercely pushed his son to follow the same life; he distained William’s natural curiosity and refused to indulge him in his true interests. One telling example: William had built a miniature tabernacle out of wood for his work-worn grandmother thinking that it would brighten her up a little. When his father saw it, he ripped it from his hands and crushed it under a heavy boot. William was undeterred.

Sometime later, he dreamed of having his own transportation. Because there was no metal to do it with he built a working bicycle from trees and branches as the raw materials. Pieces of rope he found along the roadside became the “tires.” William was pleased with his pure accomplishment. His parochial somewhat sadistic father was not. He found the bicycle and smashed it to pieces. Incidents as such were a large factor in William’s desire to get out of the Ukraine, away from his suffocating father and make his bones in America, in the land of the free. In 1913, he made the crossing carrying a change of clothes in a cardboard suitcase and a small fortune of $25 in his pocket, or so the story goes. He spent years in the new country becoming acclimated and making contacts.

Eventually, William managed to establish a shop in Babylon, New York, even as the Great Depression was raging full. Rather than repairing cars, if they still had them, his clientele was more concerned with putting a potato on the table and keeping the roof over their heads rather than squandering what little money they had on personal transportation. It occurred to William that this trend was a bellwether and he closed the doors to his sanctum for good in 1929.

Subsequently, he went to work as a toolmaker in the fuselage department of the Fairchild Aircraft Company in Farmingdale, New York. At the time, the switch from wood to metal aircraft construction was an epiphany, but there were teething problems. Drawing the light metal alloy through a die produced the frame components, and though it worked fine, often the dies scratched the metal deeply enough to where the intrusions became stress risers that certainly became cracks when exposed to the constant rigor of operation. William, the consummate thinker and inventor unkinked the problem by applying a coat of lacquer to the dies, thus isolating them from the surface of the extrusions.

By 1931, his lush, verdant mind and economy of design had devised a die that formed aircraft window frames rather than doing it the old way of cutting, fitting, and welding, thus saving time and money. He is also credited with developing the first automotive grille and the first radiator fan, but lack of promotional funds and patent knowledge precluded proprietary rights.

That same year, William observed a military exercise, watching planes take off and land, looking for weaknesses. He heard a lot of rattling as the aircraft touched down and he traced it to the cowlings, those removable metal sections that housed the engine. None of them were securely attached to the structure of the plane. The repertoire included fasteners in the shape of a diaper pin, a mushroom-shaped latch fastener, and a trunk latch type. William envisioned a fastener that would prevent the metal from vibrating and eventually hardening from this activity; the hardened metal became brittle and ultimately the piece would fail.

His panacea had three basic qualities; strength, safety, and simplicity. It was easy to lock and unlock in either direction and required adjustment of a scant ninety-degrees. The fastener was self-locking by virtue of a recess in the cam that allowed the drawn spring wire to fall in place behind it (see illustration). Dzus produced 26 sets of fasteners for an experimental aircraft. The set-up worked so well that Fairchild leaned heavily on William to give up the patent or get the hell out. William would not bend. He extended a figurative middle finger and told the company to rotate. He would open a machine shop after his own regard. It wasn’t long before Fairchild invited him back, sorely missing his genius. He was quick to realize that the company was flopping and was able to purchase his vital machine-shop equipment at auction. On April 26, 1932, the Dzus Fastener Company drew tentative breath in a garage on Hawley Avenue in West Islip, New York.

Original line drawing of Dzus quarter-turn done for patent purposes that ran in a sixties issue of Popular Hot Rodding.

Way before a single race car adapted the Dzus quarter-turn fastener, these buttons would become the panacea for military aircraft. That occurred only after the cam-and-spring arrangement had been deemed successful in the field of commercial aviation and that was what finally attracted the interest of the U.S. Army Air Force. The military had long been conscious of the need for a better fastener as repeated reports from pilots, crew members, and maintenance personnel indicated that many aircraft failures were attributable to a cowling that was improperly secured. Such failures were directly attributed to the intense vibrations of the machine guns, frequently causing the cowlings to break away from the superstructure. Sometimes, the defeat was in the fastener itself and sometimes it was attributed to the metal surrounding it.

William proposed to the military that the cowlings were fastened too rigidly to the fuselage and didn’t provide enough cushioning. He demonstrated how this fatigued the metal of the cowling under the fastener, weakening it to the point of breakage. Then he concluded by demonstrating the cushioning effects of his Dzus fastener. As a result, the fasteners were tested in commercial aircraft, and soon afterward, the Dzus prodigy was approved for all Air Force craft.

What’s the advantage of those magic buttons? Here are a few.

Note: Long before race cars entered the big picture and before the aircraft industry travails, one of the earliest application of Dzus fasteners on a race car was by Ed, Sr. and Zeke Justice (eventually Justice Brothers) while working at Kurtis-Kraft in Glendale, California. Ed was an A&E at Douglas Aircraft prior to WW II and had graduated from Fry Aircraft School in Kansas. The car the fasteners accommodated was the “Bullet” Kurtis-Kraft midget owned by Joe Garrison and this “upgrade” had occurred while boss Frank Kurtis was out of town. At first Kurtis wasn’t too thrilled with their alterations, but he later realized the benefits of the quarter-turn buttons.

At age 69, patriarch William passed away from complications of a stroke. He was succeeded by his son Theodore.

Ted Dzus

Before the all-American Ukrainian got into drag racing, he liked American and British two-seaters and had a Corvair-powered dune buggy. He drove upstate to Watkins Glen for the single-seat Formula 1 races. One day that all changed like Dr. Jekyll skizzing into Mr. Hyde. A friend who had a 409 took him for the thrill ride of his life. He was floored. The next day he says he ordered a 1966 GTO and checked the boxes for triple carbs, close-ratio 4-speed, Posi-traction… and also the one for undercoating delete.

“I pulled the engine out and took it across the river to Dick Simonek in Gasoline Alley in Paterson, New Jersey,” said Dzus. “He built me a legal NHRA C/Stock motor. I went to West Hampton a few times, but for me it really was more fun to drive it on the street.” More complicated projects would follow.

It was almost time for young Ted to carry the flag. He realized that he’d have to create a niche for the racing fasteners and a place of his own within the family history.

“After I graduated high school in 1961, I didn’t want to go to college full time. I wanted to work at the plant, but I took Business Management classes at night. I started at Dzus in the fall of ‘61. My grandfather made me punch the clock. He said I would learn something from that. I started right at the bottom and learned all phases of manufacturing by being hands-on. I loved this part of it anyway. I did hand-screw, automatic screw, cold-heading, packing, shipping, engineering, drafting, in-house sales, and applications; I manned the phone and did on-the road sales. What was the correct fastener for the application?” In 1964, he segued to England for about six months and learned how things were done in the Dzus plant there.

Eventually, Ted became an assistant to his father Ted. Then the pace ramped up. He was elevated and sat on the Board of Directors. He married Carol in 1980. Two years later he became president of the company. He and Carol travelled. They went to the facilities in England and Paris and by 1989 there were Dzus facilities in Britain, Scotland, France, Germany, and Japan. In 1989, the Managing Director of the English company formed a group that bought all the other companies.

It soon became apparent that the new owners paid little attention to the aftermarket, speed equipment, race car builders, etc. So, the aftermarket started to make their own fasteners (patents were exclusive for 17 years). Southco in Concordville, Pennsylvania, now owns the Dzus name and along with latches and fasteners of its own design, sells the quarter-turn product to industry.

“I always had a problem with the shrink card companies to advertise all Dzus stuff,” Ted scowled. “They said that they didn’t make enough money to produce exclusive Dzus full-page ads. Although I continually asked them to put Dzus along with other products on their page ads, they never did. They only had Dzus in their catalogs. So the others, the valve cover fastener, clutch stop, quick disconnect for radiator hose, header collector quarter-turns, air cleaner fastener, quarter-turn oil drain plug, which I had patents on, were never promoted.

“After WWII, the guys started using Dzus on their hot rods with the thinking that if they will hold fighter planes and bombers together, they sure will hold our hot rod together and they got busy changing from straps and bolts to Dzus quarter-turn fasteners. Racers got them from surplus stores. I think the first company to supply speed shops was Mr. Gasket. Joe Hrudka and I had some fun out there in Cleveland. Then other speed equipment companies followed.” But Dick Moroso had Dzus on shrink cards before Joe did. When I told Dick there were a few guys that sold the fasteners—body-builders, race car guys, small stuff out of a box, really. He said, it’s good for competition. But boy did he get pissed when Joe shrink-carded the Dzus. I said to him, what happened to ‘competition?’ He cooled down.”

Ted Dzus was a war baby born of a culture that celebrated hard work, dedication, and a strong constitution; he had his father and grandfather to remind him of that. For him it was all about the process and the excitement it generated, and the money not so much.

Dzus Use

“The Stock and Super Stock guys would unscrew the radiator hose clamps and run cold water to cool the motor down between rounds. To address this messy time-consuming job, we designed the radiator hose quick-disconnect device. It worked by releasing the pressure at the radiator cap, twisting the fastener a quarter of turn and then pulling the hose free.”

The valve cover fastener: “Garlits and I are good friends. I asked him if he would try-test them on his dragster. This was 1970-ish. He was still using steel valve covers. I went to the Indy race with fasteners to just give to him some to try later. No, he put them on there and then. Of course he had to ask if they would hold. I said yes. Don said let’s do it.”

The clutch stop was attached to the pedal arm and was adjusted so there was just enough “clutch” to power shift…and keep the foot from going too far. From there, we developed quick-release modes for the oil drain, distributor hold-down, battery cable, carburetor(s), air filter hold-down, and header dumps.” On the civilian side, Dzus fasteners were being used to hold together compound fractures in human long bones.

“In the early shot, around 1968, Big and I both looked good. I’d made a placard for Don saying thanks for testing our stuff, well appreciated, etc. We were great friends. At the Indy Nationals, I brought him a box of the ¼-turn fasteners that I’d patented for rocker covers. I told him to take them home and try them out. He asked if they would hold. I said ‘yaaaah!’ He put ‘em on right there. The ’98 Power Tour stopped by his place and I wanted a sequel image to go with the original.”—Ted Dzus

45 Years Of Animals

Ted’s cars naturally became test beds for various products and not coincidentally were tax-deductable expenses. Exposure to the racing arena exhibited the diversity of application.

1973 Vega

More than forty years ago, Ted dragged the tiny station wagon into the Dzus plant so he could fix it with rails of his own design. Not that the chassis was something special because it wasn’t. He could have farmed this chore out, but he didn’t and that’s what made it special. He built the chassis and the rollcage from 1 5/8-inch mild steel. Don Hardy supplied the engine swap stuff and the V8 coil springs. Ted pushed the engine as far back as he could without the need of a new firewall.

Speed Research and Development in Malvern, Pennsylvania, sussed out the rear suspension design that included a Don Hardy 12-bolt housing supported by 22-inch upper and 25-inch lower links in conjunction with a Watts link. Hardy’s narrowed axle was damped by Armstrong coilover shocks. This car had two distinct incarnations: the first was representative of a street/strip driver. Later, the shenanigans segued to race-only reptilian.

The LT-1 engine was a hot item in 1970. Richie Zul was booming at S&K Speed when he did the machine work and balanced the assembly, but the engine builder was local Richie Solano. He retained the forged crank and connecting rods and included Manley pistons that contributed a 12.0:1 compression ratio when combined with matched and polished ports of the zippy LT-1 heads. Solano dressed it out with a Racer Brown 66R roller and kit along with Mr. Gasket rocker arms. The Edelbrock tunnel-ram raised 660cfm Holleys. Dzus communed with Jere Stahl, who in a fit of controlled madness squeezed in exhaust with 1 7/8-inch primary pipes. Yeah, and those sixties-style Cyclone side pipes were so stupid loud that the cops over in Queens could hear them.

As a street rat, Ted banged on a T-10 that Zul had built and then followed with a hopeful Hone overdrive unit that offered 30 percent gear reduction and yielded 13 mpg on the open road. But all that needed to change. Dzus reminded me of something that happened when we took the Vega out one day. “I floored it and power-shifted Second gear and it drifted 50-60 feet down the street. We both thought it was cool. You said ‘Eff.’ I was saying ‘straighten out mo-fo.’ Any way, it did that most of the time.” So in the interest of consistent 10.60 times, Dzus installed a Fairbanks Turbo 400 and never looked sideways again.

Dzus: “I drove the Plain Brown Wrapper mostly on the street. Joe Conway painted it Cinnamon Mist and overlaid that with gold pearl. Then I lightened it up and bracket-raced the tri-state area. One of my sponsors, Harwood Fiberglass Front Ends, gave me a slicker ‘74 nose and Moroso followed up with a revised hood/scoop arrangement. Joe painted it again, School Bus Yellow, and the Plain Brown Wrapper became Quarter Turn Fastener Man. Then I sold it to my friend Fred Kobasiuk—who still has it.”

1980 Chevette

“I wanted to build a real race car,” said Ted, “and travel the East Coast. I had a good friend in town who owned Top Speed speed shop. I asked him if he knew anyone who had the time to travel. ‘I have your guy,’ he said. ‘He’s a motor head, sleeps and breathes cars. Well, step in Fred ‘The Kabas’ Kobasiuk. If something broke, I’d say screw it, let’s party. No-no. Fred wanted to dive under the car and fix it right then. We raced from Canada to Florida. We’ve been together through the Chevette, the ’55, the ’51 Merc, and the Henry J.”

If this cartoonish crate comes off a little weird, that’s because it is—a toady, truncated body bracketed by gigantic tires. Throughout, the objectives were easy accessibility and ease of maintenance. To reduce mass, builder Richie Sullivan (Richie Sullivan Race Cars, Huntington Station, New York) envisioned the foundation as a short and narrow 2x3x1/8-inch chromemoly chassis. Richie built a tube axle, custom kingpins, and used coilover shocks for the front (complete with a Pinto steering rack) and leveled a Strange Engineering Dana 60 (5.12:1 gearing) in the back. He ran it with ladder bars welded directly to the axle housing.

To that end, Sullivan prevailed not on a complete body but on a puzzle of panels instead (roof, doors, hood, hood scoop, deck lid, and interior and engine tinwork), all of them cinched by 171 quick-release buttons. The windows were Lexan. Lightweight brackets accommodated the Don Hardy radiator core and connected the fiberglass nose to the frame. Stripping all the pieces down to the naked chassis took about 15 minutes.

Its braking system was unorthodox. The Strange Engineering discs were controlled by dual master cylinders. One attached to a pedal on the floor and was for the front brakes; the other controlled the rear brakes. Ted locked the front brakes for the burnout and to stage the car. On the top end, the rear binders, along with the influence of a drag chute, alleviated the stress on the front ones and helped the car keep composure when slowing abruptly from high speed.

When Sullivan had finished with the body prep, the car went to Burd Turd Auto Body (Deer Park) and Chris sprayed the Chrome Yellow. Bayview Chevrolet (Bay Shore) supplied many of the engine performance parts and all the metal exterior components.

Gasser guru Jack Merkel did the trick oiling modifications and built the 0.006-inch clean-up bore 350 motor on a forged arm, Superod aluminum connecting rods, and Manley 13.5:1 pistons with VHT baked into the gas-ported domes. Jack liked a Comp roller (0.368/0.368-inch lift at 0.050; 312/312-deg. duration) and put it in with Racer Brown’s lifters and roller rockers, Comp valve springs, and Ridgeway girdles. Racing Head Service prepped the Turbo cylinder head castings to the limit of Super Modified rules. The fuel system featured a Holley 850cfm carburetor and an Edelbrock Victor manifold. Somehow, Hooker built the snaky long-tube headers for it.

The viable powertrain included a Fairbanks Powerglide driven by an 8-inch converter and monitored by a Hurst Auto/Stick. Friction or lack of it depended on 15×4 and 15×12 Centerline wheels with 26×4.5 Goodyear fronts and D8 compound 31.5×15 slicks. In Super Gas, the littlest Chevy ran a best of 9.69 seconds at 139 mile per hour. The car met a violent, ignominious end.

Ted: “I was sponsored by ATI. There was a Points meet that weekend at Maryland International Raceway and ATI’s Jim Beattie had secured the track for test and tune on Thursday for his sponsored cars, so I had to be there. I wanted to go anyway. We were running S/G. But before we hit those timers, we’d added weight to slow the car down. It went 9.60s all day long, anywhere.

“Jim wanted to freshen the ‘Glide,” he said. “I went down to his place, picked it up, and put back in Chevette and put oil in it. I made a pass. At the traps, smoke started coming through the transmission tunnel. I pulled the chute and at the same time the car made a hard left turn into the dirt. As it rolled, I let go of the wheel and closed my eyes–that pissed me off because I didn’t see anything but I wasn’t knocked out. There were no photos, no photographic evidence of what had happened because shooters wouldn’t be there until the following day. I’d made a big mistake in haste. No one had checked the drain plug, which was in hand-tight, not wrench tight. It vibrated loose, fell out just before traps and oiled down the right slick.”

1955 Chevy 210

“During a test session at MIR, Ted rolled the Chevette in the lights. When I saw my friend disappear at the top end that was a scary time. But Richie Sullivan had built a superior car. Ted was unscratched after that final 9.90 pass and said that he was alright and just needed a cocktail and he would be better again! We undid the Dzus fasteners and took off the body and interior panels and left them in the dirt, all except for a door and the deck lid which we saved as mementos. We brought the chassis and drivetrain home. The chassis got some minor repair and was sold.

“The Chevette engine was disassembled, basically because it needed a rebuild. Of course, Ted wanted to get back into the game. He had the engine and transmission and I had this ‘55 sitting in a chicken coup. I asked Ted if he was interested since I did race it when I was a kid and had owned it since I was 15. We rebuilt that car from the ground up.

“We did a lot of brainstorming. We did a back-half with ladder bars and coilovers. Removed the old stock front end and replaced it with a Pinto rack steering setup. We lightened it wherever we could. Used a fiberglass front end, doors, trunk lid, and bumpers. I fabricated the headlights out of fiberglass, from mold to finished product. All the glass was replaced with Lexan and we used aluminum wherever possible—interior and brackets and we fabricated hinges for the doors. We made the new grille out of aluminum square and round stock to the dimensions of the factory one. “The car sat very low. To access anything in the back and to remove the slicks meant dropping the rear suspension. We came up with a better plan. We cut large circular wheel openings and we reproduced the cut-out with aluminum and used Dzus fasteners to attach them to the body.

“For consistency, Ted wanted the 2-speed to shift automatically. We started out with an Auto Meter tach equipped with a shift light. I had a friend who was an electronic tech who built a board with relays to pick up the shift-light signal at the pre-selected rpm and send that signal to a solenoid. After some research, we decided to use air as the medium. Parts were readily available. We put an air cylinder and a solenoid in trunk. It worked like a dream.

“We wanted to run that car in Super Gas, but couldn’t get it to go that 9.90; it ran a best of 10.07. Not bad for a shoebox with a 355 small-block, Predator carb (how many remember them?), a Powerglide, and an early Oldsmobile rear. We decided to run in 10.90 Super Street. Ted came up with this idea for a throttle stop: We had the air and the electronics and just needed to add another circuit with a time delay. It worked great, but Ted was uncomfortable with the gas pedal pulling his foot up so he developed a spring setup that when the stop was applied he would not feel it in the linkage. Again, it worked great. We looked at the water pump and electric drive as another place to reduce weight. Ted called Jabsco. We ended up with a marine bait-well pump. We fabricated an aluminum manifold for the block, installed the pump, and we were off to the races.”—Fred Kobasiuk

“I always said ‘Fred’ but no one knew him. This is what I sent to sponsors…and possibly Facebook. Here’s Fred ’The Kabas’ Kobasiuk with the J.”—Ted Dzus

1951 Mercury

By this time, the race-car tramping was well over, but Ted couldn’t sit still. He’d been captured by another idea: long-haul cruising on the Hot Rod Power Tour. On his first one, he drove his triple-black late-model Trans-Am. But after he’d gotten his beak wet, he had a talk or two with Hot Rod’s Gray Baskerville, who steered him to the fiberglass-bodied Mercury, a car that was a hot rod icon and irrefutable in Old Dad’s mind. This one would be a bona-fide street car outfitted like Ted’s Lincoln Town Car and encompassing, among other civilities, air spring suspension, air conditioning, electric window lifts, LED lighting, and an electronically coded entry system.

Then the trouble started. He’d sourced a fiberglass body from a fly-by-nighter in Virginia. The shell he got came off the mold with a three-inch chop and was ready to be channeled but was otherwise rudely unfinished. Joe Rupert at Higbie Collision (West Islip) devoted insane hours to straightening and mending the material and installing the high-mount brake light, directional signals, marker lights, and LED insertions. Rupert says he applied the PPG Ford School Bus Yellow straight from the can.

Torsional rigidity would be the key to a tight, rattle-free coffin. Scott Weney of S&W Race Cars in Spring City, Pennsylvania, created stiffness with a 2×3 chassis on a cushy 118-inch wheelbase. S&W fabricated a 9-inch type axle housing that carries a Strange Engineering third member, Detroit Locker differential, Strange 35-spline axles, and 4.10:1 gears. Weney positioned the assembly with ladder bars, a diagonal link, and Air Ride springs. At the front, he was bound to Air Ride upper and lower control arms to accommodate the air springs.

Dzus was used to having a cannon on the other end of the throttle. He didn’t back down just because the Merc was headed for the highway. He called on contemporary Scott Shafiroff to build the bomb the in Bohemia. It has a 540-inch displacement, an 8.5:1 compression ratio, a whopping fat Vortech V-7 (Race M) supercharger and a liquid-to-air aftercooler system. Mike Ingrossio at MI Performance in West Babylon tackled a pile of 2 1/8-inch Hedman tubing and tucked it all above the bottom of the frame. As a complement, Mike adapted space-saving oval-shaped Spin Tech 3-inch exhaust pipes and mufflers.

The Rat exhales an easy 800 horsepower and to soak up the grief, Ted stuck an ATI Turbo 400 behind it and stacked the sandwich with a Gear Vendors overdrive that effectively turns the three-speed into a six-speed transmission. The Merc motor literally whistles down the freeway laid back and relaxed with an overall final drive of 3.20:1; at 70mph it’s turning 2,200rpm. On the visceral side, the 540 can light up those elephantine 31.0×18.50 Hoosiers at will, though Ted rarely succumbs to ego. Since the Long Island where he is isn’t exactly the land of wide-open spaces, mostly he putts around town getting lots of thumbs up and doesn’t seek any high-school challenges.

One day, though, I witnessed the full-bore Merc. Out East somewhere beyond Patchogue he did something unusual. He stood on the gas! I was about an eighth-mile down the road. Ted locked the front wheels and matted the throttle and the Merc was instantly ringed in a roiling cloud of carbon black that must have been hiding in there since the last Power Tour. Then the tires went up in a white mass. I smiled and uttered something profane as he ripped past me wide open. My ears rang in the silence.

In the practical sense, the car is very accommodating over tens of thousands of miles, but it’s got a sharp edge to it. Though road noise is minimal the exhaust intrudes and so you have to talk above it. Ted has a larger frame than I and the position of the low Wise Guy bucket seats reflects that. While they fit him perfectly, my legs stick straight out and don’t reach the firewall. I’m amazed that such a conglomeration fits so tightly together. The doors latch easily the first time. When the side glass is down, it tends to rattle when you pull the door shut, but thereafter stays eerily silent on the road. More than 15 years since it was finished, the Merc has proven itself time and again, devouring tens of thousands of miles in the process.

When Ted had spoken with Gray Baskerville all those years ago about what he could to do next, Ol’ Dad had also suggested a Henry J.

1951 Henry J

Ted was in a bidding war for this pristine, unmolested roller and he was kind of emotional about it simply because his uncle had one back in the fifties. Daily he would give me updates on his eBay betting progress. He worried that he wouldn’t get the count right and lose out. In the end, his bid was better than the rest and very soon the west Texas J was headed for West Islip.

While he wasn’t fretting, he was planning. When he wanted to know what I thought the engine and drivetrain should be I said that he wouldn’t like my answer. He didn’t. To champion the lightweight vibe, I said I’d go with an all-alloy LS and a six-speed manual. His eyelids fluttered. His eyeballs glazed. He saw no blood in the wimpy Chevy wedge. He wanted old-school terror screaming from hemispherical combustion chambers.

He called old friend Bill Mitchell and they talked about a late-model aluminum 528 that engine veteran Paul Kaufman would massage with a recipe of his own. Paul set the aluminum cylinder block with a K1 Technologies crankshaft and matching connecting rods pushing Wiseco pistons. He stuck the elephant with a hydraulic roller and capped the bores with Mopar Marsh Performance cylinder heads (PN P5153875) fitted with 2.25/1.94 valves, 170cc combustion chambers, valve seats and guide inserts. A hydraulic camshaft went home with corresponding valves springs, retainers, and keepers. But by far, it was the induction system that caused the most consternation.

The issue with the Hemi and twists and turns of manifolding was a minimum of properly vented space to package them in. Ted and Fred had to re-orient the Vortech V4 compressor, and that meant pushing it halfway through a hole in the inner fender. Hogan’s Racing Manifolds fabbed the primary system that features twin throttle bodies, FAST fuel injection, and intake tube plumbing created by Vibrant Performance. A FAST Dual-Synch distributor and an MSD Blaster coil and Moroso primary wires manage the flame front. Once again, Mike Ingrossio turned a pile of Kook’s tubing into 2¼-inch primary pipes followed by a 3½-inch system. Alpha at Induction Performance and Mike at M&S Performance did the initial, get-it-running tune-up with a keyboard.

Torque transfer is handled by a TCI 4L80-E with a manual valve body and a 2,400-rpm stall speed converter. The terminus is an S&W three-link supporting a 9-inch axle. Ted remembers that (the late) Scott Weney began with an engine on the floor and that he literally built the car around it. Weney fabricated upper and lower control arms for the Air Ride suspension and propped the Unisteer electric power steering directed by an Ididit column and a Flaming River rack. There are lots of brakes here, too. A master cylinder hidden beneath the dashboard activates the collection of Baer 14-inch rotors stymied by 6-piston calipers. The Weld S71 three-piece wheels are wrapped with M/T S/S skins and are down for the stance: 17×8 with 245/45 and 18×12 with 345/35.

Ted has affection for wood trim and leather upholstery and the interior in the Henry has lots of both. To set the stage, the dashboard was moved rearward to accommodate the position of the seats and Ted’s long legs. A swatch of Auto Meter dials dominate. The real goof is that Dzus didn’t trash the bus-size steering wheel with the big “K” (stands for Kaiser-Fraser who built the Henry J from 1951-54) in the center of the horn ring. Phoenix Upholstery in Franklin Square covered the seats and door panels as well as the custom-crafted center console.

Dzus is hooked on that PPG School Bus Yellow. Maybe Joe Rupert at Higbie Collision isn’t but he put it on after a minimal body prep. To make it pop a little, he powdered the paint with a pinch of red pearl. He excised the bumper and rolled the rear pan. He removed the front cattle prod and made a low valance panel/air dam in its stead and had the grille/nose re-plated. On the hood, the Henry J script is original.

He established credibility in a world he did not make and ran the business accordingly. He turned 75 in March. He’ll never quit. The Henry still has some problems with its teeth. The intake system has been redone and the final tune-up is still elusive. By the time you read this it will be a lap-top tweaked, chassis-dyno graduate.

During Indy 500 qualifying, a side pod on one of the cars flew off. I didn’t see it but got plenty of phone calls telling me that Chris Economaki said that Dzus fasteners had failed. The incident aired more than once that day as they were filling time due to rain. Spoke to those race car guys to see what happened and they said that it wasn’t the fault of the fastener. I found CBS or NBC, can’t remember now, and asked them to retract what Economaki had said. I dropped a catalog for them and I left. But I’d forgotten something and went right back in…and there’s my catalog in the waste basket! Now I’m pissed. ‘Have Jackie Stewart retract it or I’m suing!’ I later saw him in the pits. We talked. A paper wanted a picture and Jackie quarter-turned my chest.”—Ted Dzus

Car Craft Hi-Risers was a spiff for those up-and-comers we thought most deserved the exposure. The unwritten rule (known only to us) was that if someone had the cheek to ask to be named a Hi-Riser they would never be one. We got a lot of crap for that, especially from the ad strokes. We laughed at them.

Match-head trio at the end of the East Coast Power Tour in the hotel bar in Tampa.

“Don’t know the date but I went to Cleveland to see Joe Hrudka at Mr. Gasket. We partied in his Rolls and that’s when he decided to take the Dzus Fasteners and put them on a shrink-card. When I came home, I put together the “Cheek to Cheek” flier as a mailer-hand out. Dick Moroso actually had the shrink-cards, before Joe. When I told Dick there were a few guys that sold the fasteners, were body builders, race car guys that sold parts from a box. He said ‘It’s good for competition.’ But boy did he get pissed when Joe put the Dzus on shrink-cards. I asked him what happened to ‘competition.’ He cooled down.”

On the civilian side, Dzus fasteners proved invaluable to healing compound fractures like this imperfect shin bone.

The post Industry Icon Ted Dzus: Made In America appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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literateape · 6 years

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Life is a Highway...

By Don Hall

With the gig at Millennium Park this summer, I’ve found myself less in my car and more on mass transit. I’m on the train so often these days that getting into my car and driving, say, to the Home Depot or a meeting in DesPlaines, is strange and new. I mean, not completely new. I remember how to drive, fer crissakes. Just new-ish.

I like to drive. I like the freedom that hopping in the car and just heading out somewhere allows. My parents are currently on a random road trip through the western United States and the trip is classic in that they have no clue where they’re headed until the date before. Driving for hours to land at a hastily booked motel and seeing America. I love that.

Dana and I frequently take weekend sojourns in the Prius. To Ann Arbor, to Green Bay, to anywhere around a five-hour drive from Chicago. When we became engaged, our first trip was to Kansas then to Red Rive, New Mexico with my family. Thirty-six hours in the car. Roadside gas stations and crappy snacks along the way. Random picnics inside the vehicle on a stretch of highway that goes forever. Bliss.

My first car was a Canary Yellow 1951 Chevy Deluxe. I was 14 years old and my mom cosigned so I could own it. This was in the early 1980s when all my friends (the ones who had graduated from the rural school bus in Out in the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, KS) had Camero's and Trans Am's, so my choice of chariot fit with my decidedly nonconformist stance as a kid. It was also a ride I could afford to buy. I painted it Candy Apple Red and my mom arranged a vanity license plate — "BOPPER" — and I drove the shit out of that tank.

It really was a tank. Automobiles built in the '50s were all metal and chrome and monstrous. I drove it in Homecoming Parades and loved that car like I cherished my testicles.

My senior year, while I was in the South Pacific for an orchestra gig with a Christian Missionary Performance Troupe, my mother took the opportunity to sell the BOPPER and "gift" me her used AMC Concord so she could get a Ford Bronco. It was not my choice of switches but the Concord got me through my first coupla years in college and was the site of an awful lot of sweaty, clumsy sex, and lots of miles on road trips from Arkansas to Kansas and back again. At one point, the passenger seat broke and I had to prop it up with a sawed off pool cue (... yeah... classy...) and I was sad to see it bite the dust when I was hit in an intersection in Fayetteville just after seeing Star Trek V.

Mom decided to help her vehicle-challenged, dirt poor college student son, and sprang $600 for a white 1972 Mercury Grand Marquis — a car so fucking big it was dubbed the Road Hog. Blue leather seats, electric windows, and a front hood so vast three people could lay fully reclined on it and smoke weed. Like a king-sized bed with shells. A Hummer but squashed flat.

It lasted a year and died a depressing, abandoned death after driving through one of the biggest blizzards in Arkansas history, to be parked in front of a dorm and eventually towed away for scrap.

Mom had grown tired of the Bronco and so it was bequeathed to me the following spring just as I graduated college and, in an impulsive and poorly planned decision, became my home for the first four months of my living in Chicago. Everything I owned fit in that truck and I slept there every night, occasionally watching a 2-inch screen television powered by the cigarette lighter as I got to know my new city.

The Bronco was carted away to the scrap yard after I slid into a viaduct at 35 miles an hour a few years later — fog, slippery corners, an access road from I-94 to I-55, and thank god I was wearing my seat belt because my glasses bounced off the windshield and back onto my face upon impact.

Once I was a married guy, I finally bought a car of my own — a 1991 Aqua Geo Metro. I bought it new and got a standard transmission (I had only driven tractors with standard transmission up to that point) and learned to drive it by pulling it out of the dealership and onto the street. It was a pretty good little car for the city and I put thousands of miles on that little shitbox. Small enough to park anywhere but hearty enough to drive Bill Leff, Joe Janes, my (first) wife and me through a terrible snowstorm to a tiny comedy club in Wisconsin to watch Joe and Bill do stand up for a bunch of guys in trucker caps and red flannel shirts.

When we bought the Metro, my new wife at the time had no credit to speak of so we put the car and title in her name. That way she got the credit for the monthly payments. When we got divorced in 1998, she agreed to sell it back to me for one dollar and I felt I had gotten off cheap to keep it.

Shortly thereafter, the Geo got booted for what turned out to be about $1,500 in my ex-wife's parking tickets. By that time, it wasn't worth a quarter of that so I let the city impound it and suspend my driver's license. And I was without a ride for the first time since I was 14 years old.

The part of myself that justifies my bad luck as actually good luck (which inadvertently exposes me to be a bit of an optimist or a Disney character) painted a portrait of a man released from the responsibility entailed with automobile ownership. I lived in a city with excellent mass transit and would be minimizing my carbon footprint by burning considerably fewer fossil fuels! And so I adapted. I learned the bus routes and took the El. I walked a lot more and eventually became an urban pedestrian. I even bought a bike (although riding far distances was simply not an option — I was a fat smoker, OK?)

I lived this non-automotive life for 12 years. Yes, it was inconvenient not having a driver's license but it was the principle of the thing, you see? Sure, when we needed a rental car we had to use Jen's (my second wife) license and she had to drive. I always felt like I was going to be stopped at airports because my Illinois State ID was not, after all, a license. But I got used to it; even proud of it.

A second divorce came and went and once I moved in with Alice, one of her methods of control was that I had no license nor a vehicle but she had both. We lived out in Portage Park, in her home, and the transit to get to Navy Pier (home of $9.00 churros, fat Iowan tourists, and WBEZ) was arduous.

I broke down and paid nearly $3,000 to get my license back. I was so disgusted with the process I didn't even have them change my address or my weight on the new license. I got it because I decided, in my mid-life crisis mentality, that I wanted to get a motorcycle. And to get an M class license, you first have to have a license to drive a car.

I received my M class and promptly bought a used 2008 Honda Rebel from a friend. The bike was fun but impractical given that often I had to figure out how to transport sound systems from the Pier to events and back. Your WBEZ dollars paid for a lot of van rentals during that time all to support a habit of the Events Guy tooling around on a street bike feeling like a badass.

Alice had a second car (a Toyota) and reluctantly let me drive that when I needed four wheels and a trunk but she wielded that car like a punishment each and every time.

So, in the summer of 2012, I sold the motorcycle to a guy who ended up pulling the same thing my first ex-wife did, leaving me years later with tickets on the license I let him use to get it home to Barrington, which he never removed or replaced and stuck me with a mass of “abandoned vehicle” charges that I’m still trying to get dismissed. I then bought a 2008 Silver Prius.

The Prius fit the public radio image, gets amazing gas mileage, which allows me to drive to my folks’ place in Kansas and back for less than $100 as well as traveling to and back visiting my third wife’s family in Pennsyltucky.

And, to be frank, I love it. I love driving. As long as I don't become the Road Rage Dick Asshole I became in the '90s, I'm a rambling guy, baby. I love hanging my arm out the window and listening to the Rolling Stones. I love cruising from place to place with at least a modicum of control (or at least the illusion of control). I still take transit — just to keep me appreciating the road and because parking anywhere remotely near Millennium Park requires a mortgage and a few black market baby sales (I’m trying to get Himmel to let me sell Prince Harry but I think he’s saving him for child labor...)

Editor's Note: I am. — DH

As I look over this list of completely functional but unremarkable vehicles I have owned (the sole exception being the BOPPER, which was as cool and hip as I thought I was in high school) the understanding that I am not necessarily a fan of car culture but I am a fan of what a car can do for me sinks in. Not so much into the design or form factor, I’ll likely never own a Tesla or a high-end ride but I’ll always own a car.

There is a romanticism, separate from the many downsides to American culture, to the idea of driving across this country. It may seem like a collision of paradigms to recognize that this country was built in many ways on the backs of people not benefitting from white supremacy or the patriarchal model yet still see a certain nobility in the trek across such a beautiful land and witnessing such interesting pockets of humanity you find along the highway. Yes, America needs to be a better place but the only way you can understand how it can be better is to recognize why it is worth saving.

A Great American Road Trip in a car of your own is a grand reminder that this country is a remarkable place to live.

#American Road Trip #cars #freedom

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silviajburke · 7 years

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Is Trump Going After Your 401(k)?

This post Is Trump Going After Your 401(k)? appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

Heh… And all along you thought it was Obama who’d confiscate your 401(k). What if it turns out to be Trump?

Tomorrow the president will lay out broad guidelines for what he wants in a “tax reform” package. A few details are already dribbling out. Supposedly he wants to cut the top corporate income tax rate from 35% to 15%, and supposedly he doesn’t care whether that swells the budget deficit.

But that’s today. Less than two weeks ago, he said he wouldn’t lay out any tax ideas at all until Obamacare reform got done first — and it’s not done.

So… with the proviso that we don’t know what the president’s priorities really are from one week to the next… let’s dive into what could be a very real threat facing your 401(k).

To be sure, the term “401(k) confiscation” is an exaggeration. No one, to our knowledge, has proposed the feds outright seize the money in your account. That would be too obvious.

Instead, most of the proposals that have been floated over the years are more stealthy and devious. Your editor has been on top of them ever since the topic first came to light nearly a decade ago, when I wrote about it on The Daily Reckoning a year ago.

It was October 2008. Lehman Bros. had already gone under. The Panic of ’08 was in full swing. The crash had already vaporized $2 trillion from Americans’ 401(k) and pension plans. And the House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing looking into this question: Should “high-income” earners be excluded from making tax-deferred 401(k) contributions?

“With respect to the 401(k), it appears to be a plan that is not really well devised for the changes in the market,” said committee chairman Rep. George Miller (D-California).

Then he revealed what the idea was really about: “We’ve invested $80 billion into subsidizing this activity” — meaning to his mind the government had “lost” $80 billion in revenue it would have collected were it not for this high-income giveaway.

The notion never got out of committee. Congress was too busy at the time passing other awful ideas like the bank bailouts.

But the idea never went away. Similar proposals were kicked around in Washington shortly after Obama’s re-election in 2012.

Last year, The 5 told you how economist Teresa Ghilarducci from The New School university in New York — the star witness at that 2008 hearing — teamed up with Wall Street bigwig Hamilton “Tony” James, president of Blackstone Group. They issued a paper proposing that the tax breaks of a 401(k) be phased out for everyone, no matter their income.

The proposal made a momentary splash… and was quickly forgotten.

But fast-forward a year and there’s serious scuttlebutt in Washington about abolishing the 401(k)’s tax advantages as part of a Trump tax-reform package.

On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal had a heck of a scoop… and it got buried midway through Jason Zweig’s weekly personal finance column. It belonged on the front page, above the fold, in screaming-big font.

“At a meeting with members of the Senate Banking Committee earlier this month, Gary Cohn, the director of the White House National Economic Council, discussed ideas that would remove pretax benefits from retirement accounts including 401(k)s and shift them to after-tax benefits, according to people familiar with the discussions.”

Good ol’ Gary Cohn. “Goldman Gary.” He was president of Goldman Sachs before joining the administration.

Wonder if he’s had any phone conversations about the idea with Tony James…

Zweig was careful to point out no decisions had been made. But he seems to know which way the political winds are blowing. He quoted a Washington lawyer named Bradford Campbell, who was assistant secretary of labor under Bush the Younger.

When it comes to Trump’s tax reform, “it’s not really a question of whether retirement plans will get a haircut, but of how much,” said Campbell. Tax reform is always “a game of winners and losers, and the retirement system is poised to be one of the losers.”

And by wiping out the tax-deferral benefit of a 401(k) — effectively switching future contributions to a Roth-style plan without your consent — Uncle Sam would collect a $1.5 trillion windfall over the next decade.

But wait — even worse ideas are afoot.

Last year, an outfit called the Tax Policy Center issued its own paper. This group is backed by the center-left Brookings Institution, and one of the paper’s authors hails from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. So beware — it’s got bipartisan support.

Under this proposal, existing 401(k)s would still be available. But — and this is a huge but — the annual gains in your account would be taxed at a 15% rate. That would raise $48 billion in new revenue starting next year — enough, the report’s authors said, to offset at least some of the revenue lost by cutting the corporate income tax to 15%.

Think about this for a minute: Under this proposal, your retirement money might be better off in a taxable account. At least there you don’t pay capital gains tax until you sell!

The authors justify the tax by saying the corporate income tax cut will juice corporate earnings and thus share prices, so a bigger retirement account will offset any piddling tax you’d have to pay.

Yeah, pull the other one…

Bottom line: If Washington really is about to undertake the biggest tax reform since 1986, everything is on the table — including your 401(k).

Retirement pros were sensing this only weeks after Trump’s election. “It is incomprehensible to me that Congress will not go after retirement plans in some way in tax reform,” said Randy Hardock, a partner at the high-powered D.C. law firm Davis & Harman, and a former staffer on the Senate Finance Committee.

Who knows how it might all end? These are just broad-stroke ideas. The details could be even more horrifying: Maybe your existing 401(k) funds would be converted to a Roth and your entire account would become taxable income in a single year. (Now there’d be an instant windfall for Uncle Sam, even if it would be a financial-planning nightmare for you.)

It’s still early days. But we’ll be keeping a wary eye… and anticipating defensive strategies you might want to adopt, depending on what Goldman Gary and his friends are cooking up.

Regards,

Dave Gonigam for The Daily Reckoning

The post Is Trump Going After Your 401(k)? appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

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itsworn · 7 years

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This Tub, a 1923 Ford Model T Touring, Has Been in the Hynes Family Since Tom Hynes Built it After WWII

Brother.

When Tom “Red” Hynes went into the Navy in 1943, he was tooling around Los Angeles in what his son Rod calls a “bitchin’” ’29 Model A roadster. He served his country as a machinist’s mate on a destroyer escort; and when he mustered out, “the hot rod thing was hitting big-time,” Rod recounts. In that postwar hop-up frenzy, someone offered Tom $40 for his Ford’s body alone. “In those days, $50 could get you a complete, running A-bone out of a junkyard,” Rod says. Of course, Tom took the money, but then he found himself in need of new wheels—or, more specifically, a new body for the wheels he was left with.

Rather than build another roadster, though, Tom went in a very different direction, spending $15 on a ’23 Model T Touring body he found at a junkyard.

The first definition for the word value in our Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary refers to “a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged.” The fact that Rod Hynes is still bombing around in that same Tub—a term Rod spells in all uppercase letters as if shouting its name with pride—70-some years later tells us Tom got a helluva lot of value for his 15 bucks.

Especially since he was able to use much of his Model A in the T’s build. Tom narrowed the A framerails to accommodate the T body, and the Tub has “always had” the ’29’s rearend and a ’38 Ford industrial three-speed Top Loader transmission, says Rod. Up front Tom hung a filled and dropped axle in the stock location; it would later move out, suicide-style, after Tom started running the Tub at the lakes.

Tom’s initial plan was to build the car to compete with the “Roaring Roadsters” in the dirt bullrings of the California Roadster Association. He welded the Tub’s doors shut and stripped it for competition but soon realized the Tub would need to serve as daily transportation, “and he couldn’t have it both ways,” Rod says. So he put his CRA plans on the back burner and instead got his speed fix at the dry lakes on weekends, running with the Mojave Timing Association, SCTA, and Russetta as a member of the Road Dusters club.

Single-Stick Miller

The Tub has had a number of four- and eight-cylinder engines under its yellow hood. (And, yes, it’s always been yellow, or some shade of yellow, through three repaints over the years, Rod says.) Tom’s first engine was a Model B block stroked with a Model C crank and fitted with a single-cam Miller overhead conversion and two Winfield side-draft carburetors. It was with this motor that Tom hit 101 mph, his fastest speed on the lakes.

This is also the engine that was in the car when Tom Medley photographed the Tub for its July 1950 HOT ROD feature story, despite the March 1950 cover blurb calling out its “V-8 power plant.” Yes, you read that right. “Wally goofed,” Rod says. HRM Editor Parks meant to run the cover and feature story together, even commissioning a Rex Burnett cutaway illustration of the T, but they wound up separated with an issue in between.

And while the Tub was banger powered in Medley’s film, by the time the magazines came out, the blurb was true. In late 1949, the Tub received its first flathead, a V8/60 “that was one of Louie Senter’s Midget engines,” Rod says. At the time, Louie, co-founder of Ansen Automotive, was switching his Midgets to Offenhauser engines. His shop foreman, Bob Morton, tipped off Tom as to the engine’s availability. (In the small world of post-war hot rodding, Bob was a partner with George Rubio, whose ’29 roadster was the first highboy to break the 150-mph mark at the lakes. George, it turns out, was a cousin of Tom’s.)

The V8/60 was followed by a 296-inch Merc flathead that met its demise at the hands of one of Tom’s neighbors. “Dad didn’t mind letting people borrow it to have an evening of fun,” Rod remembers. “The neighbor brought it back with the rods hanging out of the motor. I guess he just decided it was ‘race time.’”

Tom’s reaction? “My dad was one of the coolest people I’ve ever known,” Rod says. “He had no enemies. Never heard anybody talk bad about him. Just too nice a guy, for the most part. So he didn’t react, didn’t come unhinged. He just got it home, started pulling it apart, and then figured out what motor’s going in it next. He was a racer. Shit happens. You do what you gotta do.”

Tom had a bone-stock, 265-inch Chevy small-block in the garage, though Rod doesn’t know why. “My dad was a four-banger and flathead man.” The SBC was just a short-timer, quickly replaced by a Pontiac Tempest four-cylinder.

The ex-Senter V8/60 has been in the Tub three times, Rod says, and that’s what’s in the car now. Rod’s younger brother Martin restored the Tub 25 years ago and rebuilt the 60 at that time. Rod figures the motor is due for another rebuild, having seen some 60,000 miles since the resto. “I need to put a new rope main seal in it. At 3,000 rpm on the freeway, I can’t keep oil in it. It goes through a quart every 300 miles.”

Passing of the Tub

An electrician by trade, Tom Hynes used the Tub as his daily transportation—unless it was garaged for an engine swap—between 1947 and 1965. “We lived in San Fernando, and he drove it to work every day to the Boylston Street Water and Power plant,” Rod says. “The only reason my brother and I wound up with it is because Dad couldn’t drive it anymore.” The cancer that would eventually claim Tom in 1987 made it increasingly difficult for him to drive the Tub, so he passed it to his sons in 1970, the year Rod graduated from high school.

As you would imagine, Rod’s memories of the Tub go back as far as he can recall. It was such an important part of his life, in fact, that he considers the Tub his “older brother.” He remembers bundling up for freezing-cold drives over The Grapevine on the way to the March Meet and dusty trips to El Mirage. For a time when he was getting his own Fuel Altered drag racing career off the ground (Rod’s well-known rides included the Coors Light Altered and its Quadzilla incarnation), he lived in a shop—with the Tub. “I had pulled it down to rebuild the Tempest engine, and not much happened with it for about three and a half years. I got the Tempest going, and then it became a thing for me to find dirt tracks to fool around in.”

Like his dad before him, Rod has long wanted to race a Sprint Car. And now, at 65, he’s hoping to put together a car to race in the dirt. “It’s an addiction/affliction, the racing, the four-wheeled monsters out there,” he admits. “Some people can just walk away, but I can’t do that. Been at it since I was born.”

He talks about his latest project, a ’27 roadster body he wants to put on a four-bar Sprint Car chassis and power with two Tempest bangers mounted in line. “It’ll be a 389, but as a straight-eight. I have three Tempest motors, the one from the Tub and two more. I just wanted to do something different.”

But the Tub will always be there, too. Its roots are deep. Rod clearly remembers a night back in 1960 when he realized even at a very young age how close the bonds were between him and this T: “My dad used to take the Tub over to Don Brown’s to let him make some laps in the dirt field near his house in Chatsworth. Don was a Sprint Car racer, an Indy racer, was an incredible sheetmetal man. He worked for A.J. Watson building Indy roadsters. I guess taking laps in the dirt in the Tub was a way he relieved stress.

“Anyway, in 1960 the Tub still had the big Merc in it. I was riding with Dad to Don’s house and we got pulled over by a cop at Laurel Canyon and San Fernando Mission Road. Dad was thinking he was going to get a ticket, but the cop said, ‘No, no, don’t worry about it. I just want to check out your car.’

“Dad opened the hood and the cop asked, ‘How much do you want for it?’ And my dad points to me and says, ‘It’s not mine, it’s his.’ It was at that moment that I realized this car would be mine someday.

“So the cop says to me, ‘How much?’ And I said, ‘$10,000.’ Well, the cop laughed and said, ‘That’s almost as much as we paid for our house. That’s obviously out of the question.’ And that’s when I knew how much the car meant to me.”

This ’23 T Tub has been in the Hynes family since Tom Hynes built it in 1946-1947. It’s still on the road and still being driven, now by Tom’s son, Rod.

Shortly after Tom Hynes came home from the Navy, he was offered $40 for the body on his hot rod Model A roadster—a lot of money for Henry’s tin in those days. In this photo from late 1946, he’s taking apart the car prior to delivering the body.

Tom built the first motor for the Tub using a Model B block that was bored, stroked, and fitted with a single-cam Miller OHV conversion and Winfield carbs.

In this 1947 photo, the chassis for the Tub is almost finished. Tom narrowed his Model A’s frame to fit the Model T body. The ’38 Ford Top Loader transmission and ’29 Model A rearend “have always been there,” Rod says.

Tom runs through the lights at El Mirage during a Mojave Timing Association meet on September 19, 1948. His best speed that day was 98 mph.

Here’s “Tommy” tuning the Miller banger at El Mirage, April 30, 1950. The car was good for 95 mph that day. His best speed with the Miller was 101.

George Essig’s photo of Tom (in the hat) and the Tub made the March 1950 HOT ROD cover, though the Tom-Medley-photographed feature wouldn’t run until the July 1950 issue. “Wally goofed,” Rod says. Whoever wrote the cover blurb also goofed, as the car was still banger powered when the picture was taken.

When the story “T Touring Transformed” finally ran, Medley’s photos were accompanied by this Rex Burnett cutaway illustration. It was reproduced again with “Heir-Vroom,” Gray Baskerville’s story on the Tub in the March 2000 HRM.

Gray also ran this photo of the finished Miller overhead in his March 2000 story. The “single-stick Miller” utilized an “SOHC/F-head conversion…a 4-inch bore, Robbins pistons, stroked Model C (4-5/8-inch) crank and two Winfield Model S sidedraft carbs,” he wrote.

In 1951, Tom and his wife, Margaret Louise (“Terry”), posed in the Tub on Bellevue Street in Los Angeles, near the family’s first home.

The first flathead to go into the Tub was the V8/60 Tom got from Louie Senter. It was replaced by this one, a 296-inch Merc that a neighbor blew up a couple years later.

There are no photos of the small-block Chevy that replaced the blown-up Merc, says Rod, partly because it wasn’t in the Tub for very long, and partly because his dad was a “four-banger and flathead man.” The SBC was soon swapped for this four-cylinder Tempest motor. (Photo: Steve Straw)

At the HRM 65th Anniversary show in Pomona, Tom Medley bumped into Rod and his brother Martin and told them this story about the Tub: “Tom, Wally [Parks], and my dad were all friends. Dad was good about ‘sharing’ the Tub with his friends, and on one particular evening he let Tom drive the Tub to an SCTA club meeting. One of the passengers was Wally, who was seated in the back passenger area. It was not really a soft ride back there, as there has always been only a piece of plywood over the rear spring perch. Tom was driving down one of the streets in the Silver Lake/Glendale/Los Angeles area and they hit a bump in the road. Said ‘bump’ was big enough that Wally was pitched out of the car onto the street, suffering a little road rash. This photo from Bonneville in 1955, with Wally leaning on the car talking with my dad, and whoever else is in the car with him, made me think of this story. Wally was probably reminiscing about the road rash incident he suffered while a passenger with Tom Medley.”

Tom shot this photo of Rod driving the Tub in 1981 on a 3/8-mile dirt oval at a Western Racing Association event at Indian Dunes. “I ran with vintage Sprint Cars and Midgets,” Rod says. “Dad kept waiting for me to tip it over as he thought the wire wheels would give up as hard as I was pitching it into a corner.”

Rod still likes sliding the Tub through the dirt, more than 35 years later. “I was in the dirt with it every chance I got,” he says. “That’s the most fun I can have.”

The Tub still wears the yellow Imron paint sprayed by Martin when he and Rod restored the hot rod 25 years ago. “It was the closest we could come to the shade Dad painted it,” Rod says.

It’s been rebuilt and massaged over the years, but this is the same ex-Louie Senter V8/60 Tom Hynes put in the Tub decades ago. It now wears Edmunds racing heads and a three-pot Electric & Carburetor Engineering intake mounting Stromberg 81s.

Tom originally mounted the dropped and filled front axle in the standard location but moved it out in front of the crossmember, suicide style, after running the Tub at the lakes.

Juice brakes have always been on the Tub. Tom installed hydraulic binders from a Studebaker; Rod swapped them “quite a long time ago” for ’40 Ford components, he says. “They’re easier to get.”

While the shift lever and handbrake are leftover items from Tom’s Model A, he replaced the Ford steering with an assembly from a ’40 Willys.

The dash is home to a motley assortment of meters, including a Kong gas pressure gauge and a Ford amp gauge.

Rod ran into Gray Baskerville at the Goodguys drag race in Pomona in 1999, and the two got to talking about the Tub and how it had been in the Hynes family since 1947. That was the impetus for Gray’s March 2000 piece about the car, 50 years after it appeared on HRM’s cover. Fathers figure so prominently in this story that the button on Rod’s hat, a tribute to our ol’ dad, is truly fitting.

The post This Tub, a 1923 Ford Model T Touring, Has Been in the Hynes Family Since Tom Hynes Built it After WWII appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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