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catzula · 4 years ago

Text

of red things like an earphone or a thread

Synopsis: you meet a little boy who lost his big brother's earphone, crying because he's sure his brother will get mad. You decide to look for it together, not expecting to find something- or rather someone else instead of the red earphone, although tied with a red string.

Pairing: Iwaizumi x fem!reader

Honorable mentions: soulmate au, female reader, cursing once or twice, children, 1.8k words, fluff, (K/N) stands for kid name lol

One last wave at your friend and you stepped out of the warm cafe to the cold, rainy winter afternoon.

The wet wind hit you square in the face as the glass door closed behind you, and you knew you were going to get wet. You already knew it was going to rain that morning when you left your house, but you were too lazy to take your shoes off and get your umbrella. I'm not afraid of getting a little wet." You had thought to yourself like an idiot. Though it was true. You weren't afraid of getting wet under the rain, not, however, a big fan of walking through a goddamn storm.

You sighed, knowing it was your fault, and you were glad you had at least thought of wearing your good old ski jacket. Closing the hood of your jacket over your head, you wore your earphones and started walking.

~~~

cold, cold, cold, cold

Only halfway through walking, the cold was all that was on your mind. You didn't even have money on you since you had forgotten your wallet back at the cafe (your friend had texted you they had it and would give it to you the next day), so you couldn't even ride a taxi for the rest of the long walk.

Hopping over puddles of water and mud, you were practically sprinting your way back home, not stopping for any obstacle and wanting to go home as soon as you could.

Float like a Cadillac, sting like a Beemer, you thought to yourself, laughing when the image of Lightning Mcqueen came to your mind. I won't stop until I reach home, not even if Jesus himself stood before me-

You stopped just as the thought crossed your mind, eyes focusing on the small body kneeling in front of a wall, face hidden behind short, chubby fingers, and body shaking with soft sobs.

Your brows furrowed in concern when you noticed the kid had nothing but a shirt on, the shirt already wet and sticking to his body. "H-hey," you turned to the kid, afraid of scaring him into thinking you were a murderer. You got a little closer to the boy, also kneeling when he seemed not to have heard you, still sobbing into his hands.

"Hello?" You touched his freezing arm as softly as you could, pulling it back whenthe boy flinched, abruptly springing to his feet. You watched him as he wrapped his arm around himself, lips near purple and lashes wet with tears and the pouring rain. He couldn't be more than seven, you found yourself thinking as you stared into his oddly familiar olive-green eyes. You felt your heart stopping as the wide eyes stared back at you, reminding you of someone you dearly longed for and missed. You could swear you had seen that harsh gaze and the way he tilted his chin up with pride before, so familiar, yet strange.

"Excuse me," he muttered between chattering teeth, wiping the tears off his face, even though newer ones filled their places nonstop. "Did you- did you see a red earphone coming here?"

"A red earphone?" You repeated, and he shook his head violently. "Yes! Did you see it?"

You bit your lip as you tried to remember if something like that had caught your eye, watching a new wave of sobs engrave him when you shook your head no apologetically.

"I'm sorry," you muttered. "Did you lost it? Is that why you're- well, here?" The little boy wiped his tears with the back of his hand, nodding, still looking back at you with those green eyes, now even brighter with tears.

"Okay, okay, look, first calm down a little, aren't you cold?" You asked as you started unzipping your jacket and shook it off your shoulders. You smiled at him when he didn't answer your obvious question, averting his gaze with a proud, stern look.

He took the jacket without contest, watching his hands as you dressed it over him. Wind howling in your ears, you were left only with a sweatshirt, a wave of shiver running throughyou when the wind howled even louder, the rain already wetting your heair and making it heavier. A curt nod was the boy's thanks, faintly smiling when you gave him a reassuring one.

"Let's take you home, okay? You'll catch a cold if you stay out in this cold when you're wet." Your words had seemed to take a wrong affect on him, since he quickly pulled himself away from you with a new round of tears gathering in the corners of his eyes.

"No, no- I can't!"

"It's okay, you can buy a new one and-"

"No, please- my brother will be so angry if he learns I lost it, I can't go home!" The little boy started to unzip your jacket off him with panic clouding his mind when he thought just how mad his brother was going to be. He could already vision the furious look when his brother figured it, swearing he would never lend him anything again.

"Hey- hey, stop," you caught his cold hands between yours before he could shake off the jacket. "Okay, we won't go home, but let's look for it together, all right?" You offered, trying to bargain with him and stay with him until you could convince him to go home.

"Okay." He agreed, eyeing you with soft suspicion but still walking beside you as you started to walk the way back.

After what felt like a whole day but was only an hour later, you had noticed just how many red things one could find if they looked around.

Even if you averted your eyes to your hands, there it was, a bright red thread hanging from your finger. But this was the day you had come to hate the many- many red things that littered the surface since each time you saw a glimpse, and it was never the red earphone (K/N) was looking for and made him cry even more.

You didn't have it in you to tell him even if you did find the earphone, no way it would work since it was raining nonstop for hours now, either. So you swallowed your sense of cold and went on looking with the boy, telling him funny stories, listening more from him.

You had no idea why your heart missed a beat each time he spoke of his older brother -how old are you, miss? Woah, really? Then my brother is only e year older than you!- how you found your tummy hurting with how hard you were laughing as he kept telling you a funny thing that happened to his brother and his best friend.

"He seems like a- well, nice guy." You muttered as you threw the red bottle cap you spotted on the ground to the trashcan. "He is!" The boy answered with sparkles in his green eyes, "my brother is the best!"

"That's nice." You smiled, chuckling when he went on. "He is the strongest, the coolest, smartest guy ever!"

"He does sound really cool. But also seems like he has some anger issues." You muttered as a joke, not expecting him to frown immediately. "He will be furious with me." He bit his lip, your eyes widening when you noticed the tears in the corner of his eyes.

"Hey, no- I'm sure he'll understand!" You tried to reassure him. "Your brother sounds way cooler to get angry about a red earphone." You smiled, patting his head, laughing when he sniffed. "Really? You think so?"

You thought you were reassuring him. A white lie was all it was, but then, why did it feel so real? Why did it feel like the truth, despite not even knowing who the said guy was?

You hummed. "I'm pretty sure."

"Okay then, I think we should go home." You smiled, nodding and letting him lead you as he pulled your thread-free hand.

"We're here." He sighed, meddling with his fingers as he stared at his house door. "Can yku, maybe stay with me as I tell him?"

You had opened your mouth to answer before a loud call of the little boy's name made you both jump in your places. You turned around to see where the stomping sound came from, eyes meeting the tall figure running his way to you.

"Th- that's my brother." The boy gulped, and you did the same as you watched the also wet boy coming towards you.

You quickly noticed his eyes weren't on you but the little boy standing next to you, and you bit back the urge to hide the boy behind you from his seemingly furious brother.

"Where were you?!" He shouted, his big hands running over the small face and body to check if he was injured or not, pulling the boy into a tight hug as the man took deep breathes of relief. "I was so worried- so worried, you hear me? I've been looking for you for hours!" The tall man spoke into the hug. "What were you thinking, disappearing like that?"

"I- I didn't mean to worry you." (K/N) whispered to his brother's hair, hugging him even tighter, burying his face to hide his tears. "I was- with this lady... she was helping me."

You felt your heart skipping a beat when he mentioned you, making his brother break the hug and look at you instead. "Helping you? Helping you with wha-" You watched his eyes widened as he finally got the chance to look at you, and you knew he was the owner of the green eyes your heart seemed to long for.

"Y-you-" he stammered, chest rising and falling as if he had just run a marathon, but you weren't any better. You could feel your face, your whole body heating up, the thought of hypothermia you just had in your mind a few minutes ago now turning into cursing the global warming.

You watched him as his green eyes wandered down to your hand that stood awkwardly next to you, following the red thread hanging from your pinky to his.

Never in your life had you seen the end of the string, you smiled at the thought. It would always blend in with the world, disappearing into the void, and you had tried to follow it to the end countless times, too eager to find your soulmate, to see where it tied your fate to, failing each time.

But now, you felt your hands shaking with the overwhelming sense of being able to follow it to the end, the end where it was only a few meters away from you, where it tied to the large hand that reached at yours without even thinking.

It felt warm and safe as you touched his hand, both of you smiling uncontrollably.

"You look cold." He spoke the first time to you, but it felt like you had been together forever, like you knew him as well as you did yourself, not feeling the slightest bit of awkwardness.

"I am cold." You giggled, and you could see how it only then occurred to him that your jacket was hanging on his little brother's shoulders, and you stood there wet and shaking with only but a sweatshirt. The green eyes you would find yourself admiring from then on widened with concern, quickly shrugging his jacket off and wrapping you with it.

"Here, wear this." He muttered as he zipped it as far as he could, making you both giggle.

Maybe it was an odd day to meet your soulmate, you thought, probably not the best, too, since both of you were wet from head to toe, hair sticking to your face, shivering from the cold, and probably a mess (and sick the next day). But however it was, you wouldn't change it for the world.

~~~

You got a red earphone next year in secret santa.

Hajime got a red earphone next year in secret santa, too.

A/n: if you made it this far, thank you for reading! Here's a lil ❤ for u. Funny thing, this red earphone thing is real lol, it happened to me a few days ago!! But it didn't end with me finding iwa, no no, we couldn't find neither iwa nor the boys red earphones and I dropped him back to his home.

#haikyuu x reader #haikyu x reader #haikyuu imagines #iwaizumi x you #iwaizumi drabble #iwaizumi x reader #iwaizumi imagine #iwaizumi fluff #hq iwaizumi #haikyuu headcanons #haikyuu x y/n #haikyuu x you #haikyuu x self insert #haikyuu x me

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btssunnyboy · 5 years ago

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Happy Holidays- BTS

Happy Holidays consists of too many gifts and a gift sweeter then a gingerbread house.

Word Count - 3,571

Warning - lots of fluff, worried about significant others,. A gingerbread house mishap. Can you guess who caused it?

ALSO PLEASE GIVE ME FEEDBACK IT IS REALLY APPRECIATED!

Masterlist

———————————————————————

The weather outside was definitely frightful. The blizzard was building in strength and it was making your body build up with worries. The boys had left almost two hours ago to get some last minute supplies. No matter how hard you begged and pleaded they promised they'd be more then careful and be back within the snap of a finger. Two hours ago and your lovers had yet to walk through that big wooden door.

You could feel your nails growing thin from the numerous amounts of times you've slightly bitten them. The blanket around your shoulders was providing little warmth as you stayed glued to the window sill. Just hoping and praying that the familiar black Cadillacs would pull into the driveway. You could feel the slight tears swelling up in your glossy eyes. Terrible thoughts clouded your already messy mind, just adding to the stress. Images of car wrecks and the boys heavily injured made your stomach drop.

You just wanted your boys home and you'd do anything to see them walk through that door. The time flashing on the clock was just slightly away from striking midnight. Your chest was getting tighter as the minutes passed. Even though you eyes were growing heavy, you never left that small sill. You needed to stay because you hoped they'd be home soon.

Just as your weak eyes were about to finally close for the night, blinding headlights shot through the foggy glass of the window. With a mind still in a sleepy haze the source of the lights never registered in your head until loud knocks banged against the wood. Hastily throwing the purple blanket against the floor, you ignored the sting of the cold tiles against your feet. You yanked the door open and was greeted with the sight of three red nose and puffy eyed men. Without thinking you raced through the snow and towards the trunk of the cars. A tight grip around your waist pulled you back as quickly as you stepped one foot in the snow.

"Baby, stay inside you'll get sick." Jimin spoke as he teeth chartered wildly in his mouth. His lips practically shaking as he wobbled into the house. "They're fine, just getting some bags."

You gripped tightly at the yellow bags in his hands and set them down in the kitchen floor. A small gasps left your lips the moment I've cold hands sneaked underneath your shirt.

"You're gonna freeze the poor girl!" Jin chattered as well as he blew hot air into his hands. His red nose running almost wildly as he made his way towards the fire place.

You gripped Jimin tightly as you buried your face in his shoulders. You wiped underneath your eyes as you pulled away. "I thought something horrible happened I was so worried. Now go get those snow covered clothes off and put something warm on."

He nodded his head as he passed the simple message on. The moment all the boys made their way up the stairs to their rooms you started pulling out the containment's in the bags. Wrapped a little sloppy, but nonetheless wrapped gifts stored within the bags. A small smile graced your face when a few gingerbread house kits were spotted as well.

"Those idiots risked their lives for a gingerbread house." You smiled as your fingers traced over the gumdrops decoration on the box.

"You wanted it so we went and got it!" Hoseok sniffed as he wrapped his arms around you. His icy body finding comfort in your soothing warm presences. "Yoongi was up for the idea, in fact he even suggested it."

"What about all the wrapped gifts?" You questioned while trying to fix the boys the hot chocolate. Turning the stove down to let the milk simmer.

"We...um about that, we knew you didn't want a lot of things, but we all found so many pretty things that would look absolutely amazing on you!" Hoseok rambled as he quickly dismissed himself to find the cups. An uneasy smile came over his face as he watched you. Not a single sound coming from you.

"You guys buy me enough stuff as it is, I couldn't get you all a lot this year." You sighed, and down casted your eyes. Guilt coated your body like a blanket, they spoiled you with anything and everything. You wanted new shoes, done, new clothes, done. You on the other hand worked at a small department store and it didn't pay very much. Hence the reason you could only afford two gifts for each of them.

"Princess, none of us care if you got us anything or not, all we ever want is you. Holiday or not you're always our present." An embodied voice called from the other room. Before you knew it a hand was spinning you around to face them. A gentle kiss was soon given to your waiting lips as well. It was almost deepen if a cleared throat didn't catch Namjoon's attention.

"Me and Joon got the cups go get settled in with the others. We'll try not to drop them." Hoseok nudged his head towards the living room where the rest of boys were longing to have you back in their arms. "And I'll make Jungkook put the presents under the tree."

"Already on it." Jungkook softly smiled as he placed a chaste kiss to your temple before grabbing the multiple bags. Who new the boy was strong enough to carry so many. You laughed lightly at the thought of him taking on so much exercise just to show off with some shopping bags. "Go and sit down the Christmas movies are already playing."

You gave a quick nod before making your way towards the four boys scattered about in the living room. "Who decided to go out and do some last minute shopping."

Everyone's eyes widen as they were sudden more interested in the movie then your harsh glare. No one spoke up as they forcefully laughed as the character slid through the snow on the tv. You tapped your foot impatiently as the room grew stiff with uneasiness. They said this was a last minute food run and return with hundreds of dollars worth of gifts apparently all of you. "You guys know I how I feel about this."

"We know baby, but -" Jimin tried to explain before you cut him off.

"I know you guys care, but I saw the tags! You went to a freaking Gucci store this late for a gift!" You rambled, upset simply by a Christmas gift. No ill intentions were thought when they got the gifts, they just wanted to see that gorgeous smile on your face. And they thought in order to see that smile on Christmas Day they'd get you something you wanted so dearly.

"We didn't mean to make at us." Taehyung said, his eyes clouded over in what looked like sadness. He fiddled with his fingers as he scooted further away from you on the couch. His movements stopped midway when your hand clasped over his big ones. "Baby...I."

The moment his voice crack you threw yourself in his arms. Taehyung was always a bit more sensitive when it came to you. He done everything in his power — they all did — to make you the happiest women alive. The thought of you being mad at him broke him entirely. "I just thought a smile matching gift would make you happy."

"Honey I'd be happy with a homemade card if it was from you. I don't need expensive things all I need is my precious is my boys. I cannot stress that enough." You mumbled into his neck as he held you tighter. His lips ghosting over the smooth skin in an attempted to keep him calm. "I love you."

He only wrapped his arm tighter around you as he pulled your body up to straddle his waist. The fact that this was a normal position no one batted an eye as they watched, neither did Hoseok or Namjoon when they finally entered with the warm drinks.

"So are you still mad at us?" Yoongi spoke as he reached for your hand. You rolled your eyes playfully as you let he intertwines them together. "Take that as a no."

"Of course I'm not mad, I melt the moment any of you put your hands on me. I just ask that next year you don't go so over board." You suggested as you pulled yourself off of Taehyung and settled between him and Yoongi.

"We make no promises, Love." Jin smiled as he happily slipped on his beverage. "Can't wait for tomorrow!"

"I noticed the gingerbread houses." You smiled as you tried to change the atmosphere.

"We'll work on those later today, but for now let's just watch our movie." Yoongi smiled as he rubbed his hands up and down your arms. "I love you so much, Y/n."

"I love you so much." You smiled as you pulled his head towards you. A seemingly sweet kiss soon turned heated the moment his hand slipped to your neck.

"Get a room."

"Don't mind if we do."

»»————-　✼　————-««

You didn't remember falling asleep or how you wound up in the soft confinement of your bed. With a heavy arm, more like arms, draped across your body. The heat radiating from their body with enough to almost smother you. You gave Yoongi and Jimin small pecks on their forehead before maneuvering underneath their iron grips. It was a miracle they didn't pin you down in their sleep, it's happened multiple times before.

"Geez Louise, look at the bottom of the tree." You gapped as you looked onward to see the stack of gifts practically multiple from last night. There were so many that the small space underneath the tree was so full the rest of the gifts were piled in stacks beside the tree. Stacks meaning definitely more then more.

"Come on, we're making the gingerbread houses!" Hoseok enthused when he spotted your figure at the doorway of the kitchen. His hands grasped your and pulled you swiftly towards the kitchen. "Not so fast."

"I didn't even do-" The sentence was cut short as soft lips were hastily placed against yours. You didn't protest as you wrapped your arms around his neck. His hands rubbed small circles against your clothed hips as he brought you closer. If that was even humanly possible. Sadly, you had to pull away due to the lack of oxygen. Before you could even asked Hoseok pointed a finger upwards. A small little treat was hung right in the doorway.

That little treat was something the boys loved to place around the house, in every place they possibly could. It was a tradition, they'd like to say. While you believed it was an excuse to kiss you every

Mistletoe.

Before you could even step another foot a soft hand cupped your face. Those familiar dark brown eyes that always held a mischievous glint, were staring lovely at you. "I'm next." Compared to Hoseok, Jungkook's kiss was more slow instead of a rush. A nice change, but you loved the feeling of both their kisses either way. Besides they both always left you with a longing feel for more. It was an effect all of them has over you.

"Okay time to see if we understand what we're doing!" You smiled giddily as you dragged him closer. The next hour consisted of many mishaps with icing which resulted in your hair having more then just frosted tips. "Yay! We're done!"

For once the three of you made something decent instead of a horrendous mess. A simple gingerbread house decorated with many pink and purple gumdrops, as well as the occasional candy cane. Most importantly the little iced gingerbread men. You all would've had more if a little brat would've kept his hands out of the treat bag.

"I love how this is what I wake up to." Jin said, sleep still evident in his scratchy voice. His eyes still drooping as he walked towards the fridge. Not before giving a peck to each of you. "By the way Namjoon is about to come in here, I'd clean up that icing if I were you."

"I'll go get the cleaning supplies." You stated as you rushed towards the bathroom. You quickly searched through the bottles underneath the sink and hastily grabbed your towel. You loved Namjoon, but the boy was practically a walking disaster. Having that icing on the floor would only add to the chaos that he could cause. "Oh come on!"

"I swear it was an accident!"

You softly sighed to yourself. The gumdrops were scattered about, the small little splotch of icing on the floor was accompanied by a lot more then the white icing that glued the pieces together. The gingerbread men as well as the entire house was in shambles on the floor. A whole hour and a half of work down the drain. Good thing they bought more then one kit.

"I told you to clean it up." Jin protested as he got his water and bolted out of the kitchen. He saw his chance to avoid this mess and he knew better not ignore his chance of escaping.

"Get the other one?"

"Get the other one. And make sure he stays out of the kitchen!"

»»————-　✼　————-««

"I'm still so sorry about the house." Namjoon glumly said. A sad smile plaguing his soft features. The expression alone made your heart strings pull with guilt. You know he didn't mean it and you should've been nice when you asked him to leave.

"Honey it's fine. I know you didn't do it on purpose, besides we still had at least three more kits!" You tried to cheer him up and so far it didn't seem like it was working. You laid him across your lap as your small fingers made laps through his silky hair. The contentment in his smile made it clear is enjoying this. "I'm sorry I got upset."

"I'm not that little egg killed our gingerbread men!" Jungkook stated with a scoff as he stared at the two of you. A small glare delivered by you seemed to do the job of shutting him up really quickly.

"Enough with the tension who's ready to open a gift!" Taehyung suggested as he slid his way over to the bottom of the tree. His eyes gleaming with joy when he noticed one with his name on it. With a second he grabbed random names and passed them all out. A small smile of happiness grazed everyone’s face.

“Tae, are you sure something like this is for me?” Namjoon questioned as he raised his eyes a him. At the same moment Taehyung’s eyes widen comically as he took another quick peek at the back of the tree.

“I’m sure it’s for you, Hyung.” Taehyung breathed a sigh of relief. The action making you slightly suspicious and worried. You should’ve know Namjoon wouldn’t like such a small gifts. “Well what are you waiting for open them!”

Everyone tore into the gifts without hesitation and awed at each and every single one.

“My knight and shining armor?” Namjoon laughed as he read the incrusted words on the inside of the ring. It didn’t seem like a laugh of amusement, but a laugh of mere happiness. “Princess?”

“I just thought it would be a cute gift, since your only nickname for me is princess. I’m sorry I should’ve gotten you something more flashy you probably think it’s stupid.” You stifled a heartbreaking sigh as you looked down at him in your lap. His familiar touch was felt on your face as he cupped your cheek.

“This is the most sweetest gift I have ever received. I love it.”

“You’re not just saying that so my feelings don’t get hurt are you?” You accused while smiling softly at him. He smiled that heart melting smile and suddenly you were putty in his hands.

“I can now have a piece of you whenever we’re gone.” He spoke in mellow voice sounding like heaven in your ears.

“I hope mines from you, but we all know what I really want.” Jungkook beamed as he ripped out the package. His eyebrows creased in confusion as he stared at the small, empty brown box.

“You’ll get yours after the storm settles down.” You smiled. The bunny smile he was so lucky to have shines brightly. “But no huge ones.”

“Wait you’re actually getting the tattoos with me!” Jungkook bellowed as he races towards you. His hands cupping your face as he planted multiple kisses across your forehead, cheeks, nose and finally your mouth. His teeth grazing yours slightly due to the speed at which he delivered those chaste kisses. “I thought you hated needles! Please don’t do this if you’re only doing it to make me happy.”

“Kookie, I’m doing because I want to and getting cute matching ones with you would make it even better.” You said, trying to calm his worries. “I love you, bunny.”

“I love you, baby. Now open your gift.”

Namjoon raised straight up as the other began to form a small crowd around you. A small laugh of amusement echoed sounded like music to their ears when it passed your lips.

“Diamond earrings, wow they’re gorgeous.” You stated amazed at the sight of the lights sparkling off of the surface. The small glimmer making flecks reflect on your eye. The sight alone made all of them fall deeper in love with you. You were stunning in every aspect according to them. “Who bought these.”

“I did, also comes with something that matches.” Yoongi raised his hand slightly. His gummy smile becoming wider when you placed a kiss to his cheek. The boy with a sucker for all those sweet kisses you gave him. “I hope you like them.”

“I adore them, Yoongi, now where’s the matching item.” You tried to get up only for a hand to push you back down. Many protests were sounded through the room. “Humph, why can’t I have the matching item guys!”

“Our tradition is one present before Christmas that is your one present.” Hoseok stated. “Remember you’re the one who made the rule.”

“Well I didn’t think anyone would actually follow it.” You huffed as you crossed your arms and flung yourself back on the couch.

“You always got onto us if we even looked at another gift!” Taehyung added as he rubbed small circles on your thigh. His nails giving your skin a pleasurable scratch. “Besides only a few more hours until Christmas is here!”

“We can pass the time by watching those movies finally.”

»»————-　✼　————-««

They all stared at your sleeping form with peaceful smiles across their faces.

“Should we wake her up?” Jimin asked as he ran his hands through your hair. “After we go over the plan.”

“We leave the present for last and tell her it’s from all of us.” Jin stated as he took the familiar red, velvet box and hid it in the back of the tree. They really hoped this question didn’t take you off guard, and made you say no. That small word would absolutely send all their worlds crashing down in despair.

“Princess, wake up its Christmas!”

“It’s about damn time.”

You rubbed the cold from your eyes as you pulled yourself up. Eyes almost immediately darting towards the present filled floor. They gave a knowing smile as you quickly got in front of the lit up tree. Hands just grabbing away at random presents.

“I still can’t imagine how much money you all must’ve spent on these.” You softly spoke as you pulled the paper from one of the gift bags.

“For you, we’d spent a lot more then this.” Jungkook stated without hesitation as he pulled you between his legs. You softly leaned into his touch out of habit. “You still have one more gift to open.”

“I don’t see anymore.” You strained your neck to look over the couch and noticed nothing. The sight before you when you turned your head back around made your heart drop.

“Remember how I said the earrings had a matching item, well it matches, but it had a different purpose.” Yoongi cleared his throat as they got down on the floor. You couldn’t help the tears that were starting to gather in your eyes.

“Listen I know the seven of us are a handful, you have ever right to say no. But y/n we’ve all come to the conclusion that you mean the entire world to us and we want you as something more then a girlfriend. We want to establish the fact we’re a family. Would you complete our family and become our wife.”

The sob in your throat escaped before you could retain it. You launched yourself forward into Yoongi’s arms and he wrapped you up without a second thought.

“Oh god, I hope that’s a good sob.” Jin panicked, when it suddenly got loud. Everyone took a cautious step towards you. They were worried you hated them now, they were worried you were gonna pull away from Yoongi and declare those whole thing to be madness in the making.

“Nothing would make me happier, yes absolutely.”

“We love you.”

“I love you all with everything in me and nothing is going to change that.”

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lunafeather · 6 years ago

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Brio + 11, 39, 76

11.

“I know you, and this isn’t you.”

“Oh, you know me now, huh?”

“Yeah.” She freezes, realizes what she’s said and stares at him, the gears in her head grinding. And then something clicks. “Yeah, I do know you.”

He snorts, shakes his head and turns away. Beth grabs his sleeve and spins him back, her fingers clenching forcefully against his arm, and then she’s in his space, chest to chest, her mouth a thin sharp line when she leans up into his face. She watches as fury is smothered into blankness, and her frustration only mounts. He looks down his nose at her through thick lashes, and she does know him, she does, because when his nostrils flare she knows he’s fighting not to rise to her bait. She knows that he is carefully keeping himself in check by the way his arm tenses beneath her grip, held taut like a bow, the way he looms very slightly over her despite her heels giving her some leverage.

She doesn’t back down, doesn’t flinch, holds his gaze while he glares down at her.

And she thinks that maybe she sees his eyes dart down to her mouth, and it’s too fast, she must have imagined it – but then he’s kissing her, hard, a brutal crash of his mouth against hers and she’s so startled that her mouth opens on a gasp and then his tongue is in her mouth, deepening it. She is knocked off balance by it, stumbling back, but his hands are there to catch her, rough on her hips and then her ass, yanking her against him as he walks her backwards until she’s pressed against the nearest wall. She manages to get the nails of one hand scraping against his scalp, is rewarded with a groan – her other hand scrabbles against his shoulder in a futile attempt at regaining some control.

He shoves a thigh between hers at the same moment that she bites down on his lower lip. They break apart, panting, and Rio presses his forehead against hers while they catch their breath. Her eyes flutter closed even as her hand strokes gently through the hair at the nape of his neck, urging him closer, closer still, and a bizarre image unfurls in her mind of crawling into him and just letting go – of this tension, of this fight, of this exhaustion. His hand at her lower back presses her more firmly to him, and maybe he’s having the same thought because the rigidity in his body seems to melt away.

“We can’t keep doing this.” Her voice is hoarse and small, just for him in this small space they share.

Rio shrugs, so slightly, and then leans back to look at her. He waits until she opens her eyes to say, “Then let’s stop.”

Panic surges through her and her mouth falls open to argue – and then his fingers are at her temple, stroking down her face in that familiar gesture that haunts her dreams. But he doesn’t let his hand fall away, like usual. Instead he gently cups her jaw, fingers spread against her throat, thumb tracing her kiss bruised lower lip. He watches the movement, watches as she licks at the skin there, then his gaze flicks up to hers and she understands.

39.

His phone pings, that familiar tone he set to her number only startling him awake from a light doze. He doesn’t move for a moment, breathing sharply through his nose, and then he rakes his palm roughly over his face and scratches at his beard. When he rolls on to his side and lifts his phone, his eyebrow arches at the message staring back at him.

Can you meet me?

1:47AM hovers in the top corner of his phone’s screen. It’s not like her to be up this late let alone messaging him, and he pauses before he responds, flicking over the possible reasons she could have for wanting to meet. Their partnership is tentatively back on, though decidedly secret, which adds that much more mystery to her request.

He briefly mulls over the idea that it might be a booty call, then quickly discards the thought.

He’s not quite back in that good of graces.

Yet.

His curiosity gets the better of him, and – if he’s being honest – his concern. Though she remains tight lipped and infuriatingly vague about her home life, he gets the feeling that it’s not all sunshine and roses (and how could it be, if car man was up and swiping their kids out of her reach?). This thought spurs him up and onto his feet, tugging on a pair of jeans and shooting her a clipped response.

15.

She doesn’t reply, but he knows she’ll be there. When he rolls up to the park in his black Cadillac, her mama van is already parked at the curb. He tugs up on the zipper of his hoodie while his eyes canvas the playground, tracing over familiar twisted metal shapes, searching – there, nestled into a swing, swaying softly in the darkness. He watches her a moment, drinking her in; her copper curls are smothered by a thick black beanie much like his own, her shoulders curled inwards against the Autumn chill. She kicks idly with one boot, but otherwise seems still.

Her head doesn’t lift until he’s ten feet away, and when it does it strikes him somewhere deep, somewhere he struggles every day to smother. Tear tracks glide down her cheeks, the skin rosy with cold and shimmering in the street light that barely reaches them. She sniffles, but otherwise just watches him warily. When the silence stretches on, he shoves his hands into his pockets and leans against the swing set support bar, eyes fluttering closed, sleep hanging like a hazy weight on the edge of his vision.

They sit like that, in silence, and somehow it’s comfortable and calm. Even standing this far from her he feels that undeniable tug, that thread that binds them together, dragging him towards her, always. It’s becoming harder and harder to stay away from her, to not gravitate into her space and let their energies collide and meld into one. He had thought it was difficult not to touch her constantly after their encounter in that bar bathroom, but now? After tasting her in every sense of the word, after drinking directly from the source, swallowing her moans and her whimpers, and knowing what every delicious curve felt like, heavy in his palms…

The urge to have his hands on her, always, buzzes like lightning beneath his skin, making him jittery and tense and agitated. She often takes it the wrong way, believes its something she did – and it is, it is, but not in the way she thinks.

Even now, he wants to crowd into her space and nudge her chin up with his thumb, meet those blue, blue eyes and draw out every thought and every desire, wants to catch each one and bottle it up and hide it in that place he keeps shoving way down.

She sniffles again, and he opens his eyes to find her staring. The openness of her expression, the vulnerability, knocks him in the chest like a horse kick. He’s frozen, afraid to move and scare her off, his face a calm mask of neutrality.

“He found some of my notes.”

The corners of his mouth curl downwards, and his brows furrow just so, but he doesn’t speak. He knows her well enough to know that her words will come in time.

“He got suspicious, and we fought – it woke the kids, they were crying. They didn’t… they didn’t want me to…” She huffs, finally breaking their eye contact. She lifts a hand to rub at her nose and tilts her head back until her face welcomes the stars. When she meets his gaze again, her expression is carefully blank, though even from his position he can see the tears sparkling at the corners of her eyes.

“I need a place to stay.”

He doesn’t ask why she doesn’t call her friend or her sister, doesn’t really want to. It’s a rare gift for her to let him see this far inside her, and despite the fact that it sometimes feels like there’s a gulf they’ll never be able to cross between them, he can’t deny how warm it makes him feel.

He can do this for her.

He jerks his head in the direction of his car and starts off. He doesn’t have to look over his shoulder to know she’s following – he feels that thread taught and thrumming between them and keeps walking.

76.

Everything happened so fast. They had been on the couch, talking then touching then kissing, because when have they ever been able to keep their hands off one another? And then Dean was there, yelling, red faced and spitting, waving a gun. Rio hadn’t jumped up or shown any emotion, rising calmly and standing between Dean and Beth. And then she had been on her feet, too, and everything was tense and loaded and she didn’t think he would do it, didn’t think he had it in him – she had seen the hard line of Rio’s shoulders, ready to strike, voice laced with the threat of danger and she isn’t sure who said what that made Dean raise the gun and pull the trigger, but she is sure that her instincts took over and she shoved Rio sideways, slotting her body into the bullet’s path.

Everything thereafter was a blur – screaming, crying, hands everywhere on her body then nowhere and she was alone and then not, eyes snapping open to meet Rio’s as he gingerly shifted her and then pain, unbearable and agonizing, and it felt like her side had split open and her guts had spilled out, and maybe they had, maybe they had.

Her last snapshot of consciousness is the look on Rio’s face – guarded, cool, murmuring softly to her, but the pain at the corners of his eyes stands out the most, the tiny pull of a frown at the edge of his mouth.

She wakes to sunlight streaming through the gauzy curtains of her bedroom, bathing her bed in warmth. She’s on her back, laid carefully out and straight as board. When she tries to sit up, pain ricochets from her right side across her belly and her chest and her hip, and she yells, the sound hollow and tinny.

“Beth!” Annie surges out of the bathroom, her hands insistent on Beth’s shoulders, pushing her back down. “Jesus, I turn away for like 10 seconds and you’re trying to escape.” Her little sister tries to inject some levity in her tone, but they both know it’s a thin facade.

Beth trembles with the pain throbbing in her side, nausea washing through her. Annie keeps a hand pressed to Beth’s shoulder, the other gently brushing Beth’s sweat soaked hair from her face. She sits on the edge of the bed, and when Beth can finally manage to open her eyes, she is struck by the worry and panic hanging heavy on Annie’s face.

“Don’t move, okay? It could rip open the sutures.”

Beth nods, and they sit quietly. Then, “What happened?”

Annie’s brows pucker together. “You don’t remember?” At Beth’s small head shake, Annie sighs, glancing distractedly down to Beth’s lap. “Dean shot you.”

Beth doesn’t mean to, but the words startle her into another attempt to sit up and another shove back down to the bed and an annoyed growl from Annie. “He what?” she pants, swallowing thickly against another wave of pain and nausea.

“Well, I think he meant to shoot Rio, but…”

Beth’s eyes pop open and she moves again, panicked. “Rio! Where is he? Is he okay?”

Annie is prepared this time, holding her down with a palm on her shoulder, and watches her curiously, almost surprised. Her mouth falls open to answer–

“I’m fine.”

Both women turn to see Rio leaning against the door frame, hands buried in his pockets. His expression is closed, guarded, but rough. He and Beth lock eyes and she feels her breath leave her in a whoosh at the intensity in those black depths.

Annie looks between them, put out at being so obviously forgotten. “Yeah, he’s just fine,” she retorts. She watches them for a long moment, and when no one says anything else, she helpfully provides, “he actually refused to leave your side. Dug the bullet out himself and sewed you up. Held your hand all night. It was, like, kind of sickeningly sweet.”

Two pairs of eyes flick to her, and she knows a dismissal when it’s staring right at her. She throws her hands up and scoffs. “I’m going.” If she notices that they immediately go back to gazing at one another, she doesn’t mention it.

With Annie gone, Beth takes her time in absorbing the man before her. His face is cracked and red, dried blood crusting over a wound or two – eerily reminiscent of the last time the two of them and her husband had found themselves in a room with a gun. Blood stains his dark blue t shirt – his blood? Her blood? Dean’s? Maybe all three? There’s marks on his tanned arms, marring the smoothness there. Dark circles cushion his eyes, his skin is pallid – but god, she still finds him so devastatingly beautiful.

“You look awful,” she says, and smiles when he smirks.

“Yeah, I was about to say the same thing about you.”

He’s lying, and not even hiding it. His smirk briefly swells into a grin – a warm, affectionate, dare-she-say loving grin – and then it deflates and ebbs away, dragging her own smile with it. Suddenly he is oh so very serious, and her heart drops. They stay like that, the tension so thick that she’s afraid it may smother her and something painful and thick is rising like a tidal wave up from her toes through her belly through her chest and then there are tears in her eyes and she’s not entirely sure why.

That’s what breaks the moment, her tears. He swallows audibly, and she would swear that his breathing hitched, and then he’s ambling over and sitting next to her, hands still shoved in his pockets like he’s afraid if he has them free he’ll shake her.

He sighs, looking up at the ceiling. “You know, you done some real dumb shit during the time I’ve known you, but this is a new record.”

She shrugs. “I think that depends on who you ask.”

The memories are jagged and blurred, swirling together in a colorful mess in her mind, but she knows, without a doubt, that she saved Rio’s life. And even though barely moving any part of her body feels like someone is stabbing her in the gut with a dull knife, she doesn’t regret it. She’ll never regret it.

And she says as much.

Rio just shakes his head, but when his eyes meet hers, his expression is open and vulnerable. It takes her breath away all over again.

“Elizabeth.”

How can he fit so much into just her name? It comes out as a sigh, a plea, a prayer. She can hear the annoyance, the pride, the fear in it, the judgement and the forgiveness. He speaks her name like a caress, and she feels it as a ghost of his fingers trailing down her face, pushing her hair back.

She wants to ask about what happened after she jumped in front of him, about Dean, about where they go from here, but she knows it’s not the time. This gentleness, this softness, is too fragile and for once she allows herself the selfishness of indulging in it without guilt. She just wants to be close to him, to soak up his realness, his vitality. She wants to revel in this thing between them, and the fact that they somehow managed to cheat their way out of another bad situation.

“Rio.” It’s a murmur, and it’s laced with just as much emotion as her name on his lips.

He gets it, though, he always gets it, get her, reads her like an open book, and she’s glad for it now. He stands and sheds his sneakers, then climbs onto the bed next to her, stretching languidly along her side on his back, careful not to jostle her too much. Her eyes flutter closed, suddenly exhausted. When his fingers intertwine with hers, she smiles, warm and content. She is halfway submerged in sleep when she feels the brush of his lips against her forehead, and she knows better than to hope it’s real and not her imagination – but she lets herself believe it anyway.

(thank you to @cpt-falcon for the inspiration and idea for this one – she has this amazing theory about how the final episode is gonna go down and I love it. This may become an entire fic cause I was feeling inspired.)

Please send me prompts from this list!

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imgilmoregirl · 6 years ago

Text

Gift of Love

AO3 Link

Summary: Gideon missed the mother's day with Belle because of a really sweet - and for him, a really annoying - reason, but it doesn't mean they can't make it for the lost time and Rumplestiltskin will help with it.

Notes: Written specially for the @rumbellemdm, which finally made me write for my favourite couple after months, so YAY! I hope everyone enjoy it, this is a very sweet family fic that I loved writing.

What is a gift of love? Some people would say it is partnership and devotion, other - the most pretentious ones - would guess it was some piece of jewelry or anything made out of gold, and in some cases you could hear some saying it was the bliss found in one's arms. However, although all of these could be considered gifts, none of them is the only and one, gift of love, the present that can only come from the pure passion between two human beings. The ultimate gift of love, is a child.

Of all people in this world, Rumplestiltskin understood the importance of bringing someone entirely new to life, he had lost two children and got his heartbroken by their absence. It was all in the past now, of course, but he only got one of his sons back and his heart would lack his Baelfire until the end of his days, but it wasn't enough motive to make him bitter and dark anymore, that thanks to his wife and the best mother he knew, Belle.

Storybrooke wasn't the place he had imagined staying his whole life at, but after many trips, he and Belle had decided it was right to have a home to come back to and raise their family. The pink house had always pleased her, as it did him and most of their memories were there, so when they permanently moved back, it didn't seem strange at all, not even for Gideon who was used to struggle through his first nights in whatever hotel they stayed at. It was really like finally finding the peacefulness of constancy they needed.

Gideon had just turn four which was just another reason for them to decide to settle down, it was time for him to start school and as afraid as they were of how he might react staying away from his parents for so long, the boy was doing great. Rumple was proud of him and was more than happy to be able to pick him up that specific day. His car was full of the silliest stuff that would have only made him roll his eyes some years ago, but that now only made him imagine his wife's happiness when they arrived home. The flowers were a big part of it: a full box of red, white and yellow roses to bring some colour to their house and make everything a bit more special.

He was waiting inside the car, watching as the people slowly gathered in front of the school's gates in that cloudy Monday morning. Gideon had been a bit angry in the day prior, said Granny, who had taken care of him during the weekend for them. His poor boy had a plan for Mother's Day, but life had another, so he hadn't seen his precious mama when he was supposed to fill her with kisses and cuddles. Now, however, with the surprise he had carefully prepared, Rumple hoped everything was going to be alright and Gideon would be more than satisfied with this replacement for the weekend he had lost.

The gates opened and Rumple let most of the parents in before he left the car to follow them in search for his son's class. And there he found him, wearing his cute uniform and holding his Batman bag with pleedy eyes, probably hoping Granny wouldn't come to pick him up again, just like in the last Friday. A big smile crossed his lips when he saw Rumple and ran past his teacher, throwing himself in him papa's arms with a squeal.

"Papa, I was missing you," Gideon whined.

"We saw each other yesterday," Rumplestiltskin pointed out, carrying his son out of the school's building. "You've only slept at Granny's."

The boy with his eyes and his mother's sweetness looked down at the ground, clutching his bag closer. Rumple knew he was sad and wished everything could have turned out as Gideon expected, but it was time for him to understand that some things come for the best and that we doesn't always get exactly what we wanted.

"I want to see my mama," he sniffled. "I've made another card for her today."

"Two cards and a bracelet, huh? Your mother is certainly very lucky," the father answered, kissing his son's forehead. "But you're also lucky, but you're getting to see mama in just a bit."

"So she is home?"

"Aye, my boy," Rumple said with a smile. "Your mother is finally home."

The happiness in Gideon's face was as clear as the bluest sky during Summer break. He jumped out of his father's arms and pulled the car's door open, letting out a surprised grasp when he saw the flowers and the balloons filling the space that was usually empty in there. Gideon threw his back on the bench, sitting up on his car seat, adjusting the belt without even being asked to do it, which was a surprise for Rumple, because they always struggled with the use of that stupid thing.

"Papa," the boy called, pulling at the hem of his overcoat. "Did you buy all of this for mama?"

"I surely did. Do you thing she is going to like it?"

"Of course!"

Ruffling his hair, Rumple locked the door and set himself in front of the steering wheel, finally driving them home.

Right in front of the house, was parked a cute little blue car, Belle's most recent acquisition, although she wasn't really fond of driving and preferred to watch the road from the passenger's seat, she had insisted that it would now be needed and Rumple was more than happy to give her another thing that could make his daring wife feel free. Gideon, who was used to see her listening to some music and reading a book inside the car rather than driving, immediately rose from his own seat to peek a look through the windows, just to find out the other vehicle was empty. He made an angry noise, crossing his arms and kicking his bag in deception, a feeling that Rumplestiltskin could very well understand, as he also hated to stay away from his Belle.

"Calm down, son," he said in his wisest voice. "Your mother is just inside the house waiting for you."

Gideon nodded, still a bit torn. They parked the car and Rumple started picking up the things he had brought, but even before he could have picked up the second box of flowers, Gideon slipped out of the car and ran towards their house, entering it as if he was a hurricane.

Rolling his eyes, the pawnbroker continued his work, locking the Cadillac before he managed to enter his home with all that baggage in his arms, but once inside there, he was rewarded with the amazing sound of his wife and his son's laughs, that sound of happiness that always reminded him of how lucky he was. And, as he didn't want to bother them now, when they were just meeting after that first long - not that long - separation, Rumple prepared the living room, settling down the roses, the balloons and serving the cupcakes in their best china, just the way Belle would do had she been preparing something like this.

Then, when the laughs had become a lower conversation, he followed their sound through the house and on to the backyard where he finally found them. It was the most beautiful image he had ever seen in his whole life, like a glimpse of Heaven. A giant tea towel was stretched out on the grass, Belle laying above it under the sunset, wearing silly black leggings and a long blue blouse, her hair forming a dark pillow under her head. She was beauty and their four-year-old son wrapped around her arms was just what joy could be described as. A warm smile formed on his lips as Rumplestiltskin got closer, admiring his family and settling his curious glare on the Moses basket that laid beside them.

The pink blanket was falling out of it, just as did one little hand. He got even closer and kneeled to brush his fingers ever so softly on the baby's chubby rosy cheeks before picking her up and bringing her close to his chest where his heart beated fastly at every new breath of that new life. He run his nose along her face and kissed her eyelids, watching as she yawned and brought a fist up to her mouth so she could suck something.

"I don't think I've ever seen you so awestruck in my whole life, Rum," Belle said lazily, cuddling Gideon closer. "I'm probably the second girl in your life now."

He let out a laugh, adjusting Rosie's weight in his arms before benting down to kiss Belle's lips, which made Gideon make a disgusted noise.

"You'll always be the first, sweetheart, after all it was you who gave me her, wasn't it?"

"What about me?" asked Gideon, his head appearing between them and making them both laugh.

Belle sat up, holding him in her arms just like she did when he was a baby, wrapped in blankets just as his newborn sister was. She filled his face with butterfly kisses and tickled his belly, almost making the boy lose his air before she stopped, looking at their son with the same adoration that Rumple had probably been looking at their daughter.

"We will always love you, Giddy. Always. You're the most handsome and special boy in this world for us."

"And I will be a hero," added him.

"Well, let's see what future holds for you," Belle winked.

Just on cue, baby Rosie opened her mouth and let out the loudest wails of all, making Rumple freeze in place for a second. He had taken care of Baelfire and then Gideon when they were babies, but every time seemed to be a brand new experience and now that they had girl he was sure that it was. Rosie seemed too small and fragile and most of the times although he wanted to keep holding her and protecting her from the world forever he also felt afraid of doing the wrong thing. It had been the very first time he had watched his wife's pregnancy, that he had felt a child of his kicking from the womb and that he had been there for the scariest thirth hours of labour and then fourteen hours of NICU and now he thought Belle was definitely the greatest warrior he had ever known.

Rumplestiltskin had broken down in tears twice during this complicated progress of bringing Rosie into the world, whist Belle had stayed strong and held her tears until they were tears of happiness and relief. Maybe that was the reason he froze and needed to let Belle pick up the baby from him, giving him a reassurant smile as she shushed for their daughter until she calmed down in her mother's loving arms.

"Why is she so small?" Gideon asked.

"Well, she came for weeks earlier, darling," Belle replied, pulling herself up to her feet with such a grace that she could have been a ballet dancer for all he knew.

Rumple copied her, grabbing the basket and the towel to take them inside in case it started raining.

"But your belly is still quite big," their boy pointed out with a curious face.

Belle laughed out loud.

"Well, thank you, I know I look giant," she added in a sarcastic tone. "But yes, it will take some time for my belly to go back to normal, but there is no other baby in there, I can guarantee."

This time, Gideon shrugged, rushing back into their house to pick what Rumple knew were the presents he was waiting for forever to give his mother, but they took their time making their way back and Rumple enjoyed it, wrapping his arm around Belle's shoulders and kissing her cheek.

"Just so you know, you look wonderful for me," he reassured her.

"Thank you, Rum, but I'm not actually worried about it right now, I'm just happy Rosie and I are both alive and well."

With a quick nod, Rumplestiltskin agreed with her, because even when life was the most peaceful and calm for them the bad times still existed. No Black Fairies didn't meant no danger this time, as nature itself had its dangers and an early difficult labour was included in it. Funny it was, however, that they were so worried about Dark Magic and monsters that neither Belle nor Rumple had been prepared to the normal difficulties of life. Not that anyone could actually blame them. But in the end, however, Gideon had been the most surprised - and frustrated - by his sister's birth, because Belle had gone into labour on Friday and couldn't come home until now, which meant that for the very first time they missed a Mother's Day together.

The maddening hormones that still worked in Belle's body plus her usual tendency of being easily overwhelmed, brought clear tears to her eyes the moment they stepped a foot back inside the house and saw their little Gideon bouncing around with his gifts in hand and pointing at the living room. She looked up at her husband with a mesmerized glare and all he could do was to smile back at his beauty, taking the baby from her arms to allow her to silently follow their son on to the next room.

"God, you two did all this?" Belle questioned, as she kneeled on the floor in front of their coffee table, which had been filled with delicious red velvet cupcakes which together read best mother in the world.

"No, mama," Gideon laughed. "These are cupcakes from Granny's, don't you see? But I've made you something all by myself."

He presented her the sparkly cards, full of glitter and too much glue, but Rumple doubted that Belle had even noticed it. She opened both, sighing happily to see her name written in that four-year-old clumsy calligraphy and kissed him twice on each cheek.

"Oh, Giddy, this is lovely! Thank you! I've missed you so much these days."

"Me too," the boy replied. "I was angry Doctor Whale said I was too young to pay visits at a hospital. I have told him that when I grow up and get powerful like papa I will turn him into a toad for that."

"Gideon," Belle exclaimed in disbelief, giving Rumple the kind of glance that said how much that boy was his son through and through. "Remember what I said, magic is not for that."

Shrugging he reached for the second gift that was waiting on the table, a bracelet he had made at school with blue and yellow threads. The smile on his face when Gideon handed it to her, could have stopped the whole world. It surely made Belle's heart stop for a second, Rumple was the love of her life, but her children were her pride and soul. She let Gideon slid the bracelet around her wrist and kissed his cheek, hugging him so tightly that he made a whiny noise.

"This is perfect, darling. I can't believe you're old enough to make things like this."

"And someday I'll be big enough to have money and buy you golden, sparkly things from those nice stores," Gideon guaranteed. "I will become smart, wear suits and punch every boy that tries to marry my sissy Rosie."

There were loud laughs coming from both Rumple and Belle. It was fantastic for the beauty how much their son had taken from his father, but how now-a-days it made her just happy to realize it than it had made in the past when her Gideon had been that tortured young man they so tried to save. The darkness of their past just made her present days more beautiful.

"Poor, Rosie, then," Belle giggled. "Just make sure she chooses the right one, huh? We want her to have a good boy by her side."

"No," Gideon insisted. "No boys for my sissy."

Belle looked up at Rumple, seeing him shake his shoulders as he smiled back at her, getting comfortable by her side and placing their baby girl on his legs, carefully. He knew that eventually Gideon would change his mind, knew that they would make everything for him to grow up being the best of the both worlds and he couldn't see the future failing them in any way.

"He is a protective one, sweetheart."

"Yeah," the wife agreed. "Just like his father."

When she reached up for his lips and brushed hers against them Rumple sighed joyfully realizing that he didn't need to reach out for the darkness anymore, never again. He was now a changed man who got his second chance and Belle had done exactly what she had told him to do: she taught him how to love again and she gave him the family he had always longed for.

"Happy Mother's Day, my love, belated or not you are still the best one of them."

#rumbelle #rumbelle fic #rumbelle mother's day mania #mine #writing #Rumplestiltskin #belle french #gideon gold #rose gold #family fluff

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Oscars Telecast Sells Out Ads, Despite Expected Ratings Decline: Live Updates Here’s what you need to know: Preparations for the Academy Awards last year, when viewership was down 20 percent from 2019. It is expected to be even lower this year.Credit…Josh Haner/The New York Times ABC has sold out its advertising inventory for the pandemic-delayed Academy Awards on Sunday, with companies like Google, General Motors, Rolex and Verizon spending an estimated $2 million for each 30-second spot, according to media buyers — only a slight decline from last year’s pricing even though the television audience is expected to be sharply smaller. Rita Ferro, president of Disney Advertising Sales, which sells ads on Disney-owned ABC, announced the sellout. She declined to comment on pricing or say how much revenue Disney will generate from the telecast. Last year, the Oscars pulled in about $129 million across 56 ads, according to Kantar Media, a research firm. (A red-carpet preshow attracted $16.3 million across 42 ads.) Additional revenue comes from “integrations” and other sponsorships. For the first time, for instance, ABC will have a sponsor for closed-captioning (Google). The upshot: ABC’s revenue for the telecast is estimated to have declined only 3 to 5 percent from last year — a tiny drop compared with the expected 50 to 60 percent decline in viewing. The ceremony is “one of those big cultural moments,” Andrew McKechnie, Verizon’s chief creative officer, said of the company’s decision to buy ad space. “The broadcast this year will be a bit different,” he acknowledged, “but the event will still be an impactful one and an important one for us to show up in.” Last year, about 23.6 million people watched “Parasite” win the Academy Award for best picture, according to Nielsen data. That was a 20 percent drop from the previous year and a record low. On Sunday, nine million to 12 million people are expected to tune in. Audiences have been turning away from awards telecasts for years, but ratings have nose-dived during the pandemic. Without live audiences, the shows have been drained of their energy. Big studios have also postponed major movies, leaving this year’s awards scene to downbeat art films. ABC does not guarantee an audience size to Oscar advertisers, thus removing any potential for so-called make-goods — additional commercial time at a later date — if ratings tumble. ABC has been able to keep ad rates high in part because of the fragmentation of television viewing. Oscars night is a shadow of its former self — it attracted 57 million viewers in 1998 — but still pulls in one of the largest audiences on broadcast television, certainly for a nonsports telecast. New advertisers this year include Apartments.com and Freshpet dog and cat food. Expedia and Adidas have bought commercial time to introduce new campaigns. “We’re very pleased with where we are,” Ms. Ferro said, citing “the quantity, the caliber and the diversity of the advertisers in the show.” Volkswagen’s new electric ID.4. The company is investing $80 billion to develop E.V.s.Credit…Bryan Derballa for The New York Times As many as 100 new electric vehicle models are coming to showrooms by 2025 as automakers insist we’re “this close” to an E.V. tipping point. But outside of Tesla, the American record for sales of an electric vehicles is the mere 30,200 Leafs that Nissan sold in 2014. A single gasoline sport utility vehicle, the Toyota RAV4, finds well over 400,000 annual buyers, compared with roughly 250,000 sales last year for all E.V.s combined — 200,000 of which were Teslas, Lawrence Ulrich reports for The New York Times. Globally, Volkswagen is poised to pass Tesla as the world’s biggest electric vehicle seller as early as next year, according to Deutsche Bank, with Europe and China its key markets. In the United States, where the brand remains an underdog, VW and other legacy automakers are concentrating fire on the sales fortress of compact S.U.V.s. The latest electric-S.U.V. hopefuls to reach showrooms are the VW ID.4, Ford Mustang Mach-E and Volvo XC40 Recharge. The Nissan Ariya, BMW iX and Cadillac Lyriq are set to arrive between late 2021 and next March. Homes typically sold in 18 days in March, according to the National Association of Realtors.Credit…Ted Shaffrey/Associated Press The median sale price of an existing home in the United States was $329,100 in March, up 17.2 percent from a year earlier, when a 3 to 5 percent annual increase is considered healthy, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors, a trade group. Nationwide, housing inventory was at 1.07 million units at the end of March, just above its record low of 1.03 million the prior month and down 28.2 percent from a year earlier, according to the group. As a result, homes typically sold in 18 days, a record speed. Normally, 60 days is typical, Lawrence Yun, the group’s chief economist, told Stefanos Chen of The New York Times. When the housing market peaks will depend largely on where you live and how the pandemic continues to reorder buyer priorities, but it will hinge on two trends: rising mortgage rates and incredibly tight inventory in some markets, which will likely keep demand strong through the rest of 2021, even as price growth moderates, several analysts said. In Manhattan, where commercial real estate was battered and home buyers fanned outward to surrounding suburbs in search of affordability and more space, the sales market fell off at the beginning of the pandemic but appears to have turned the corner. “The rate at which homes are selling nationally is not sustainable, but in New York, the uptick is just getting started,” said Nancy Wu, an economist for StreetEasy, a listing website. In the week ending April 11, there were 783 new signed contracts citywide, the highest since the company began tracking weekly pending sales in 2019, when the peak was 491 contracts, she said. A bitcoin ATM in an Istanbul shopping mall. Many Turks have turned to cryptocurrencies as a hedge against inflation.Credit…Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images A cryptocurrency exchange in Turkey suspended operations this week amid accusations of fraud, freezing an estimated $2 billion in investors’ money, and authorities said they were seeking the company’s founder. Turkish authorities raided offices in Istanbul associated with Thodex, a cryptocurrency trading platform, on Friday morning and arrested more than 60 people, the private news agency Demiroren reported. Thodex’s 27-year-old founder, Faruk Fatih Ozer, left Turkey for Albania on Tuesday, Turkish authorities said, who added that they were seeking his extradition. The cryptocurrency firm has nearly 400,000 active users whose accounts were nominally worth a total of $2 billion, according to Oguz Evren Kilic, a lawyer in Ankara who is representing Thodex investors. If their money has gone missing, the losses would add another element of instability to Turkey’s already shaky economy. Living standards in Turkey suffer from double-digit inflation and a wobbly currency. Though cryptocurrencies are inherently risky, many Turks have turned to them as a way to protect their savings as the Turkish lira lost more than one-quarter of its value against the dollar in the last year. Last week, Turkey’s central bank banned the use of cryptocurrencies for purchases, citing the “significant risks” involved. Thodex had promoted itself with ads that featured female Turkish celebrities dressed in bright red outfits and draped over a highly polished black automobile. “For sure the economic situation has an affect on this,” Mr. Kilic, the lawyer, said in an interview. “In such times of crisis, people want to diminish the loss of value of the assets they have.” The sagging lira has raised the cost of imported goods and fueled inflation, leading to a steady erosion in living standards. In March, the annual rate of inflation was 16 percent, according to official figures, which many economists say understate the true rate. In a statement on Thodex’s website, Mr. Ozer, the firm’s founder, insisted he had left the country merely to consult with foreign investors and would return. He said the accusations were a “smear campaign” and blamed the shutdown of the trading platform on a cyberattack. Thodex “has not victimized anyone,” he said, adding that only about 30,000 accounts “have a suspicious situation.” Mr. Kilic noted that none of Thodex’s customers could gain access to their accounts. “If you cannot access the account, then you are a victim,” he said. On Twitter, people reacted to a statement from Thodex with crying face emojis. “There are people who trust and invest everything in you,” one user wrote. Source link Orbem News #ads #decline #expected #Live #Oscars #ratings #sells #Telecast #Updates

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morganbelarus · 6 years ago

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50 Photos That Show Just How Insanely Cold It Is In America Right Now

Extreme weather events are becoming more and more common, with records shattered down under during Australia’s recent heatwave, and now, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the ‘polar vortex’ bearing down on Midwestern U.S.

The polar vortex is a band of strong winds, high up in the atmosphere that keeps bitterly cold air locked around the Arctic region. Sometimes, like this year, it can drift further south than usual and envelop highly populated areas of North America. Chigaco has been particularly hard hit, with its notoriously windy location on Lake Michigan bringing wind-chill temperatures down to record-breaking lows.

With much of the Midwest on lockdown and people urged to stay indoors, some people have been braving the plunging temperatures to take incredible images of the effects that the vortex is having on their daily lives. From exploding toilets to icy hairstyles, this list compiled by Bored Panda will give you chills just from looking at it!

#1 How Cold Is It In The Midwest? Bubbles Are Freezing

#2 My Brother Was On One Of The Few Flights Into Chicago This Morning. He Took This Photo Of Frozen Lake Michigan From The Plane

#3 After Two Days Of Freezing Rain, This Mold Came Out

#4 Meanwhile In Minnesota. The Tank Exploded

#5 My Sister Opened Her Car Door In Chicago

#6 Trying To Make The Most Of This -40 F Weather

#7 Lunch In Chicago Today. I Like Mine Al Dente

#8 A Firefighter After Working In The -40° Polar Vortex

#9 My God. We’ve Reached The Day After Tomorrow

#10 “Is Iowa Really That Cold?”

#11 Current Level Of Snow In Madison: One Whole Mingo

#12 Pray For The Homeless During This Time! Give To Your Local Shelters. Most Are At Full Capacity

#13 It’s So Cold In Chicago They Set Commuter Train Tracks On Fire To Warm Them

#14 Eye Lashes On Fleek! Is That A Thing? Is This The New Winter Running Fashion Statement?

#15 It’s So Cold In Iowa That We Froze Antifreeze

#16 What Happens When You Blow Bubbles In A Freezing Weather

#17 Meanwhile In Wisconsin

#18 Freezing Our Pants Off In Minnesota

#19 When These Are The Inside Doors… You Know We Are Polar Vortexing

#20 Landlord Decided To Turn Down The Heat Today In My MN Apartment As It Reached -40°

The idiot must have forgotten he pays my electric and doesn’t realize that I value my comfort over safety or energy conservation.

#21 Going To Daycare When It’s -30 Outside

#22 Cadillac Michigan The Light Poles Are Shivering. Science Mannn

#23 Frozen Chicken Eggs

#24 You Know It’s Cold When The Toilet Paper Is Frozen In The Outhouse

#25 The Detroit River, Frozen All The Way To Canada

#26 We Had A House Fire South Of Cameron Today. Our Chief Mitch Hansen Thought It Was A Splash Park

#27 Got So Cold Last Night That Our Vodka Froze! For Reference The Freezing Point For Vodka Is -16

#28 Letting My Car Heat Up During The Polar Vortex

#29 Minnesota’s Officers

#30 House Is Freezing From The Inside During The Coldest Day In A Decade

#31 This Flash-Frozen Fire Hydrant

#32 The Beauty The Cold Brings To South Dakota

#33 This Door At Work In Minnesota

#34 A Sheet Of Ice Formed Between The Glass Panes Of This Door

#35 Polar Vortex Lesson: Don’t Try To Hang Dry Your Clothes Outside

#36 Polar Vortex (Temp. 16 F /-9 C)

#37 My Neighbor’s Furnace Exhaust Is Creating An Interesting Icicle

#38 My Parents Sent Me This Pic Of Our Peephole (From The Indoor Side)

#39 One Cold Rowdy Dog On The Bulkhead. Still Looking For Leftover Canteen Snacks

#40 I Just Wanted To See How Long It Would Take For An Egg To Freeze Outside And Also What Would Become Of My Egg

#41 Cold Spell

Yes, that is ice on the inside of our house. It’s not the first time that ice has formed around our door. We’ve talked to our landlord and hope to get a new door and door frame in spring when we don’t have to worry about getting frostbite about people outside for five minutes. It would really help with our utility bill as well.

#42 Ice Is Freezing As Soon As It Comes Out Of Our Faucet Because It’s So Cold

#43 It Was So Cold In Chicago That The Paint Came Off My Car

#44 This Is My Buddy Jesse At The Arrowhead 135 In Mn Yesterday. Day Time Temp Was -26 °F

#45 “No, Believe Me, ‘Tis Very Cold; The Wind Is Northerly”

#46 In A Matter Of 2 Minutes Walking Across Campus, My Glasses Started To Frost/Ice Over

Everyone’s been talking about how cold Chicago is right now. The upper Midwest (I’m talking Fargo area) had windchills up to -60 below zero, ten degrees colder than Chicago. In a matter of 2 minutes walking across campus, my glasses started to frost/ice over.

#47 My Wall Is Freezing In My Bedroom. There Are No Pipes Behind It. Chicago

#48 So My Soap Is Frozen In My Shower

#49 It’s So Cold Here In Iowa That There Is Now Frost On The Inside Of My Door Hinges

#50 My Beard Froze While Waiting Bus. I Wish It Would Be Summer Already

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

50 Photos That Show Just How Insanely Cold It Is In America Right Now was originally posted by MetNews

#MetNews

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lovelyfantasticfart · 5 years ago

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Xc90 T6 Overview

Dynamic mode is your go to alternative if you happen to need a sportier experience. I popped the car in guide mode and plowed proper out of 1-foot snow drifts, whereas our Camry bottomed out and obtained caught a number of instances. Certainly, the four-cylinder was "enough." But I did notice one odd side: there was a couple of occasion the place I'd set the cruise control whereas climbing a grade and the Explorer wouldn't (or could not) match my desired pace. It isn't sporty sufficient to make up for its lack of room in again, and though it's most likely one of many extra capable automobiles of the group off-street, that doesn't rely for sufficient to vault it above the others. We also characteristic these which are amongst the top mpg vehicles of their class. They're focusing on digital-savvy new automobile patrons who desire the online route to thumbing by means of automotive magazines and trawling around the internet to draw up a shortlist, visiting showrooms to kick the tyres before uncomfortably haggling over the value. Subscribers have the opportunity to improve to a new automobile as early as 12 months into this system without any negotiation. The X5 does have a three row option, but it doesn鈥檛 look as subtle and modern as the Volvo.

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micaramel · 5 years ago

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Artist: Judy Linn

Venue: Parker, Los Angeles

Exhibition Title: For Ruth Roman

Date: January 12 – February 29, 2020

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Parker, Los Angeles

Press Release:

For her exhibition with Parker Gallery, the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles, Judy Linn will exhibit a group of black-and-white and color photographs taken over the last 31 years. Linn’s pictures traverse genres, occupying an interstitial space between snapshots, the found still-life, and documentary photography. As evidenced by her images taken in everyday, often unremarkable environments, Linn’s work appears spontaneous, yet her work is not oriented towards action. Her work as a photographer takes place in the moments just before or after the action has oc- curred, during a period of reflection, but never in between. Linn refuses to cede to the seductive power of photography’s time-freezing nature, focusing instead on something that has been there and will remain.

As she has chosen to do for exhibitions in the past, the presentation will include prints pinned directly to the wall —an act that brings attention to the paper as an object, the relationships that form between image to border, and from one paper’s edge to another—together with framed prints. Deliberately pinning a print to the wall minimizes the preciousness of the illusion, while revealing its vulner- able, naked, and bare existence. Pinning also implies that the sequencing and arrangement are buoys, subject to shifting. In contrast, the framed work within the grouping are anchors along Linn’s route.

In book shelf (2007), Linn has taken a photograph of the back of an art book. It’s a reproduction of an oil painting from 1655, framed by an industrial book shelf. The white flash of the camera has blown out the female subject’s head, while the male portraitist (Gerard ter Borch) has chosen to study the back of her dress, her neck, and the vibrant red bed hangings in front of her. On the bed: a kinky brush.

In a reversal, Linn turns the camera to her TV—a piece of talking furniture in the living room—in Karlson Movie (2000). Here, a color photo of a black-and-white film depicts a cartoonishly sinister pair of “Bowery Boys” eyes that peek out from behind an upholstered chair. A bulky pillow is placed absurdly on the character’s head, while the curtained background helps to camouflage him. Who is he creeping on? What fantasy is he reenacting? There’s a dynamic comedic standoff at play here: Linn aiming her camera at her tiny television set that squats on a table inches from the floor.

Burning car (1986) is as vibrant as it is shocking. Shocking not only in its subject matter, but for its presence amongst the other works, tipping the equilibrium of the more static pictures. Passersby hardly react, except for a young girl who looks back at the chaos behind her like Lot’s wife. At the edge of the frame, the fireman has put aside his duty and seems frozen in his resignation to just let the car burn. Linn was out shooting with Helen Levitt when she came across the burning Cadillac.

-Text by Daniel Terna

Judy Linn (b. 1947 in Detroit, MI, lives and works in Stone Ridge, NY). Since graduating from Pratt Institute in 1969, Linn has photographed the art and music scene in 1970s New York City, had a stint as a newspaper photographer for the Detroit Area Weekly News (1972-73), published a book of photographs of Patti Smith, and taught at Pratt and Vassar, among other institutions. Solo exhibitions include those held at Janice Guy (in collaboration with MBnB), Harlem, New York (2019); Cue Art Foundation, New York (2018); Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin (2015); Esther Massry Gallery, College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY (2014); Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2008); Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver (2007); and White Columns, New York (2005). Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including Deana Lawson, Judy Linn, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York (2017); Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, Brooklyn Museum (2009); Strange Messenger, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2004); and the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Select public collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, TX; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Cranbrook Museum of Art, Birmingham, MI; and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkerque, France.

Link: Judy Linn at Parker

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

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talhaghafoor2019-blog · 6 years ago

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The Night the Music Died – Texas Monthly

A small memorial marks the spot in the Iowa cornfield where Holly’s plane crashed on February 3, 1959.

David Bowman

It came out of the sky about five miles north of Clear Lake, Iowa, and slammed into the frozen earth. The right wing dug a six-inch-deep furrow for 57 feet as it disintegrated into bits of fabric and metal. The fuselage bounced hard, careening and ripping apart over the next 500 feet while the nose gear, door frame, and tail cone were all smashed loose and scattered, until what was left of the red Beechcraft B35 Bonanza finally came to rest against a barbed-wire fence at one end of a long, empty cornfield. It was just past 1 a.m. Deep inside the twisted mass was the body of the pilot. Outside lay the bodies of three young men who had been thrown from the plane at more than 100 miles per hour. They had all been killed on impact, their bodies broken, their heads smashed open. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and Jiles P. Richardson, also known as the Big Bopper, were dead.

If you believe, as I do, that the modern age is defined as that period beginning sometime in the fifties when the Kids started to dictate what the Grown-ups would hear, see, wear, and think, then the plane crash killing the three teen idols (and their pilot, Roger Peterson) was the first modern tragedy. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were years down the road, as were the deaths of rock gods Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain. On February 3, 1959, Holly, the four-eyed country boy from Lubbock, became the first martyr of American pop culture. His iconic status was sealed twelve years later by “American Pie,” folk singer Don McLean’s sprawling 8-minute, 33-second tribute to “the day the music died.” The song spent four weeks as the country’s number one hit, the longest song ever to do so.

For the second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, on January 26, 1958, Holly and the Crickets performed “Oh Boy!” despite Sullivan’s objection that the song was too raucous.

Getty Images

Last June, I visited the Iowa cornfield where the music died. My guide was Jeff Nicholas, a mild-mannered farmer who owns the field. Nicholas has become the unofficial keeper of the Holly flame in Iowa. Not only does he maintain a modest monument at the crash site, but he is the president of the Surf Ballroom, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving the majestic old dance hall near downtown Clear Lake where Holly played his last show. I had come to town for a tribute concert to Holly, Valens, and the Bopper in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of the Surf (it opened in 1933, then burned down and was rebuilt in 1948), a party not unlike the one that the Surf will host this February 2, on the fiftieth anniversary of the last concert before the crash.

Clear Lake is a small resort town of tidy two-story wood and brick homes with nice yards; it looks and feels like Eisenhower’s America. Apart from Holly, the biggest local celebrity is Meredith Willson, the author of The Music Man, who hails from nearby Mason City. Nicholas drove me north through town, up Buddy Holly Place, and soon we were cruising on a gravel road through flat, rolling cornfields and soy fields, with old, faded barns and large gunmetal granaries. We made a right and a left and came to a stop at 315th and Gull Avenue. “This is it,” said Nicholas, who at fifty has a thin mustache and hair just turning gray. He led me into the hip-deep corn, walking in a furrow next to the fence. The wind blew hard, and the green stalks waved like kelp under the sea.

After about ten minutes we came to the monument. It was a simple stainless-steel sculpture of a guitar with the musicians’ names and the date of their deaths alongside three 45’s inscribed with the song titles “Peggy Sue,” “Donna,” and “Chantilly Lace.” Draped over the guitar’s fret board was a rosary. A pair of Holly-like glasses had been balanced on top. Fans had left various other tokens—business cards, a student ID, a debit card, coins, guitar picks, plastic flowers, and a biscuit from US Airways, still in its package.

Nicholas reached down and began pulling up weeds from around the base. The only sound was the wind rushing through the corn and the occasional bird chirping as it cruised through the cool air. We looked south and southeast at the farmhouses and coppices of trees on the horizon. Nicholas pointed out a lone windmill. “Some people believe the plane’s wing hit that,” he said. I imagined the four-seater buzzing over nearby farms in the freezing dark. Elsie Juhl, who lived on the farm with her husband, Albert, had said she heard it early that morning. Afterward the Juhls would find body parts and pieces of the plane scattered around their land.

Nicholas and I stood in the breeze, watching the skies. “We’ve thought of putting up a sign and a walkway,” he said, “but we like how simple it is.”

The stars of the Winter Dance Party—Holly, the Big Bopper, and Valens—performed their last songs at the Surf Ballroom, shown as it is today.

David Bowman

The rolling guitar riff at the beginning of “That’ll Be the Day” is, to me, one of the most exciting three seconds in all of rock and roll. That song was among the first John Lennon ever learned to play. Holly’s tunes changed the lives of many aspiring rockers, from legends like Lennon and Paul McCartney to contemporary bands like Vampire Weekend. “Everything he did you still hear on the radio today,” Keith Richards once said. “Not bad for a guy from Lubbock, right?” And it wasn’t just the music. Holly’s appearance and attitude said that it was okay to look like a geek as long as you made cool music.

But Holly had been a rock star for only eighteen months when he died, at age 22. It all happened so fast. Born Charles Hardin Holley (after the e was dropped accidentally in a contract, he decided to leave it off), he grew up playing country music. One of his first bands opened for Elvis in 1955, when Holly was just 18 years old. Hearing Elvis play live changed Holly forever. He moved toward a more rockabilly sound and started the Crickets. Stardom followed fast: “That’ll Be the Day” was his first hit, in the summer of 1957; then came “Peggy Sue,” an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and tours and shows with Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard, who described him as “a wild boy for the women” (for an entirely unwholesome and possibly apocryphal example of said wildness, consult page 84 of The Life and Times of Little Richard, or Google “Buddy Holly,” “Little Richard,” and “titty”).

In August 1958 he married María Elena Santiago, a receptionist at his publisher’s office, in New York. He moved to Greenwich Village, split with the Crickets, and hired a lawyer to help him break away from his manager and producer, Norman Petty, with whom he was fighting over royalties. Holly had all kinds of plans. He wanted to start a record label and a publishing company (which he planned to name Taupe, after the color of his Cadillac), build a studio and a pressing plant in Lubbock, and act in the movies. But he needed money. So he signed up for the Winter Dance Party, a package tour with rising and current stars that barnstormed the Midwest. After a month on the road, he’d be back in New York.

The other acts on the Winter Dance Party lineup were Ritchie Valens, a 17-year-old kid from the San Fernando Valley who had had a breakout hit with “Come On, Let’s Go”; the Big Bopper, a 28-year-old deejay from Beaumont who had made a splash that year with a novelty hit, “Chantilly Lace”; Dion and the Belmonts, a quartet of teen singers from New York with a few minor hits (“I Wonder Why” may be the most notable); and Frankie Sardo, an Italian kid from New York with another minor hit, “Fake Out.” Holly would be the top draw. At Christmas he returned to Lubbock to put a new band together. Earlier Holly had befriended and recorded a young deejay and singer named Waylon Jennings. Now he told him to learn how to play the bass; Tommy Allsup would play guitar and Carl Bunch drums.

The tour had no frills. Jennings, Allsup, and Bunch backed up all the stars, who sang through one microphone and whatever primitive public-address system the local promoter had found for the show. Sardo—whom Jennings later called “the worst singer you ever heard in your life”—was on first, then the Bopper, Valens, the Belmonts, and Holly (sometimes the Belmonts played second). There were no set changes; the show was a dance, and the stars played one after the other, the earlier acts doing a handful of songs and the later ones getting more time. Holly played 45 minutes to an hour. He began every performance with the old folk song “Gotta Travel On,” then moved through his hits, as well as “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” which had just been released, and a few covers, such as “Lucille,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and “Salty Dog Blues.” The whole concert was about two hours long.

That winter was brutally cold, and the musicians traveled in a series of cramped, drafty old charter buses that kept breaking down. The first performance was a January 23 show in front of six thousand kids in Milwaukee, where the temperature was 17 below zero. From there the tour crisscrossed between Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The bands played every night, sometimes driving three or four hundred miles to make shows in tiny towns like Kenosha, Mankato, and Montevideo. After about a week, they were miserable. Valens was sick, and the Bopper was coming down with the flu. There was never any time to do laundry, so besides being cold, the buses began to stink. “We smelled like goats,” Jennings later recalled. On January 30 Holly asked the Fort Dodge, Iowa, promoter about chartering a plane.

The next day the Winter Dance Party played a show at the Duluth National Guard Armory (Bob Dylan later claimed he was in the audience and that Holly had looked right at him). That night, the bus broke down on a lonely country road in rural Wisconsin. It was 30 below. The singers burned newspapers in the aisle and drank whiskey to keep warm as they waited to hitch rides to the nearest town. Bunch, the drummer, got so cold he had to be taken to a hospital and treated for frostbite. The afternoon show was canceled, but the band took a train to that evening’s gig, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for which Valens and one of the Belmonts subbed for Bunch on drums. A new bus was secured for the trip to Clear Lake, though Allsup says that Holly tried again to charter a plane, despite the bad weather. “He had no fear of flying in a small plane,” Allsup told me. “His theory was, you could land a small plane anywhere.” Holly loved flying—he and his brother Larry had taken a lesson, and he had dreamed of one day using a plane for touring. This night, however, he failed to locate one, so he climbed into the new bus, which had its share of problems too. Among other things, the heaters barely worked. By the time the troupe rolled into Clear Lake, Holly was determined not to get on a bus again.

Another view of the Surf Ballroom today.

David Bowman

Holly spent the last five and a half hours of his life in Clear Lake, but the way the town reveres him, it’s as if he were a native son. “Let’s face it,” one local told me, “Buddy’s death is the only thing that ever made Clear Lake what Clear Lake is. Otherwise it’d be just another little resort town.” His presence is everywhere, especially at the Surf Ballroom, where the tribute concert was held. About one thousand people showed up; the average age was maybe 65. Some wore hoopskirts and saddle shoes, others Converse sneakers. While we waited for the show to begin, I wandered around the dance hall, checking out the murals depicting seaside idylls and the ceilings painted in the wide green-and-white stripes of an old-fashioned beach tent.

Holly’s face is in every room at the Surf. Ten giant color prints hang in the main ballroom. Along the walls are photographs of Holly and the Crickets and Holly onstage at other shows on the Winter Dance Party tour (pictures have surfaced from every show on the tour except the one in Clear Lake); there are drawings of Holly, paintings of Holly, and original 78’s by Holly preserved behind glass. Valens and the Bopper each have a shrine, and there are pictures of graying Crickets and other fifties-era musicians who have played at annual reunion concerts over the years.

The June show featured a performance of John Mueller’s Winter Dance Party, a traveling re-creation of the original fronted by John Mueller, a singer and an actor who played Holly in the long-running Broadway hit musical Buddy . . . the Buddy Holly Story. Mueller’s show, which features the Bopper’s son, Jay P. Richardson, as his dad and a Las Vegas singer and guitarist named Ray Anthony as Ritchie Valens, has been touring every December, January, February, and March since 1999. Both the Valens and Holly estates have endorsed it as the official tribute show.

The Big Bopper was introduced first. Richardson bounded onstage, looking an awful lot like his father (tall, wide, and wearing a leopard-skin jacket). Backed by a drummer, bass player, guitarist, and saxophonist, he sang “White Lightning” (which the Bopper had written) and talked about his dad. When he did “Chantilly Lace”—holding an antique black telephone as a prop, just like the Bopper used to do—the whole crowd sang along: “Oh, baby, that’s-ah what I like!”

Anthony came on next as Valens. He plugged in his guitar and sang “Come On, Let’s Go.” When he did “La Bamba,” he demanded that everyone get up and dance, and all ambulatory Iowans complied, singing and waving their arms in the air. Most dancers were content to sway gently back and forth, holding hands and twirling, but some were determined to prove they could still rock. One paunchy sexagenarian twisted down to the floor and stiffly straightened up again while his wife good-naturedly looked on.

“And now, from Lubbock, Texas,” the announcer said, “Buddy Holly!” Mueller, who’s from Wichita, Kansas, ran onstage and strapped on his Stratocaster, and the band played “Maybe Baby,” with the drummer and the sax player singing the “ahhhhh-ah-ah-ah-ah” harmonies. Mueller is a skilled impersonator. He wears fake glasses and a short haircut, sets his legs like Holly did, and plays his guitar perfectly, from the intro to “That’ll Be the Day” to the rockabilly riffs in “Blue Days, Black Nights.” The drummer played the rolling tom-toms of “Peggy Sue” and slapped his thighs on “Everyday,” just like Jerry Allison, the drummer for the Crickets, did. “Buddy!” people called out. “Buddy!” The technology of rock and roll has changed since 1959—the drum kit was miked, everyone had vocal monitors—but the songs were identical, note for note, riff for riff. It was as if Holly had never died, that the years since 1960 had not passed so fast.

At some point in the evening Nicholas introduced me to Jerry Dwyer, the man who had owned the infamous plane. Dwyer is a mystery—even locals don’t know for certain what he thinks about the tragedy. He was the last man to see Holly, Valens, and the Bopper alive and the first to find their bodies. In many ways he is the haunted survivor of the crash. One Clear Lake resident told me, “Jerry and I are good friends, but I’ve never mentioned Buddy Holly to him because it has to be incredibly painful. Four human beings died in his airplane.” Dwyer was sued by Valens’s family in 1959 for $1.5 million in lost income (the case was ultimately settled). Several people told me he still gets angry calls in the middle of the night from Holly diehards screaming some version of “You killed Buddy!”

Allsup, who has stayed in touch with Dwyer, told me, “He blames himself for letting Roger go up there—that’s my opinion.” Over the years, Dwyer has turned down almost every interview request ever made to him, so I was surprised when I raised the possibility and he said, “Sure, I’ll visit with you.” I had read that he harbors an alternative theory about the crash, that perhaps it was caused by a fight onboard. I wanted to ask if it was true that he had kept some of the wreckage, and why. But I turned to watch the band for a few seconds, and when I turned back, Dwyer was gone.

A deputy sheriff from Cerro Gordo County examines the wreckage. Investigators quickly determined that Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and the pilot, Roger Peterson, had all died on impact, at about 1 a.m.

Mason City Globe-Gazette photo by Elwin Musser.

When the Winter Dance Party bus pulled into the parking lot of the Surf Ballroom around 7:30 p.m. on February 2, 1959, teenagers were lined up in the cold, waiting to get in. One of them was thirteen-year-old Michael Bainter, who was raised in Clear Lake. “Buddy was a huge star,” he told me, “bigger than Elvis as far as I was concerned. I would have crawled out my bedroom window and been grounded a month if my parents had said I couldn’t go.” Today Bainter and his wife live just down the street from the ballroom. His old friend Mike Grandon lives a block away. Grandon has been the Cerro Gordo County treasurer since 1975, but back in 1959 he was just a boy trying to meet girls. “It was a teen dance,” Grandon recalled. “I think you had to be thirteen to get in.”

Inside, the musicians rushed to set up the equipment. The Bopper sat and chatted with Bob Hale, a local deejay, and Hale’s pregnant wife. The Bopper’s wife was also pregnant, and when Kathy Hale took his hand and placed it on her belly, he said, “I can’t wait to get home to that.” Holly talked to ballroom manager Carroll Anderson about chartering a plane to fly to the next gig, in Moorhead, Minnesota, 360 miles away, so he could get some sleep and do some laundry. Anderson said he’d help him find a plane. Anderson couldn’t find Dwyer, who owned Dwyer Flying Service, but he located one of his pilots, 21-year-old Roger Peterson. It would cost $108 for the trip. Holly agreed. “He was determined to fly,” said Allsup.

A thousand teens were on hand for the show. Anderson, who died in 2006, said in a 1977 interview he did with Bill Griggs, the founder of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society, that the musicians played two sets, starting on time at eight with Sardo. Five decades have dulled the memories of the kids who were at the show, though most I talked to still recall the Bopper’s performance. “I remember what a huge presence he was,” says Grandon. “He was big, boisterous, had a big smile on his face, waved his arms a lot, was very animated.” Dave Leonard, of Mason City, Iowa, had a similar impression of the garrulous Texan. “Buddy Holly was kind of quiet, and Ritchie Valens didn’t say a whole lot either,” says Leonard, also thirteen in 1959, though he admits he wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the singers. Like a lot of boys, he was there for other purposes. “There’s a brick wall in front of the men’s room. We’d sit on that wall because sooner or later every gal in the place would walk by that spot. We’d go up and watch the band too. We enjoyed the music, but we were there girl hunting.”

Holly finished the first set at 9:30, and the musicians took an intermission. The stars signed autographs and made phone calls from the ballroom’s backstage pay phone. Everyone knew about the plane—Holly was planning on taking Jennings and Allsup with him, and at some point that evening the ill Bopper approached Jennings. “We were really good friends,” Jennings told me in 2000, two years before his death. “He said, ‘Man, I’ve been sick. I have the flu. I can’t get any rest at all. Would you mind if I take your place on the plane?’ And I said, ‘Well, if it’s okay with Buddy, it’s okay with me.’â€Š” Holly okayed the deal. When Valens heard about the plane, he asked Allsup to give up his seat, but the guitarist refused. Valens persisted throughout the rest of the night, but Allsup kept turning him down.

After the intermission, the musicians returned and played a second set. When it came time for Holly’s last song, Sardo, the Bopper, Valens, and the Belmonts all joined him. Hale says Holly announced, “Hey, we’d love to do more, but we have a plane to catch. We’ll be back in the spring for the Spring Dance Party!” For their final tune the band launched into one of Chuck Berry’s songs, by some accounts “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” (an anagram of which—as a die-hard Holly fan once discovered—is “rhyme man be dead on snow”).

Backstage, Holly and Jennings ate hot dogs, and Holly mocked his friend for not going with him on the plane. “I hope your damned bus freezes up again,” Holly said, laughing. Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” It was two friends having fun with each other but, as Jennings wrote later, “That took me a lot of years to get over.”

The musicians signed autographs, and Holly, the Bopper, and Allsup got in Anderson’s station wagon for the trip to the airport. This was the first time the musicians had broken their usual load-out protocol, and Holly asked Allsup to go back in and check to make sure they hadn’t left anything. While he was looking, Allsup bumped into Valens, who was signing a final autograph at the backstage door. Allsup remembers, “He asked me, ‘You gonna let me fly?’ For some reason I pulled out a fifty-cent piece, flipped it, said, ‘Call it.’ He called heads.” Valens won.

Anderson drove him, Holly, and the Bopper to the local airport, where they arrived at about 12:40 and met Dwyer and Peterson. The three musicians each paid $36 and got in the Beechcraft Bonanza—Holly in front. The plane taxied, sat on the runway for a few minutes, and took off at about 12:55 a.m., heading north. Dwyer later told investigators that from his point of view, in the airport tower, he thought he’d detected the plane “going down at a very slow rate of descent as it went farther away from us. I would guess that it was approximately four miles north of us. I thought at the time that probably it was an optical illusion.”

Peterson hadn’t filed a flight plan but told the airport controller that he would as soon as he was aloft. He never did, and Dwyer spent the next several hours trying to contact the plane, then calling airports along the northern path—where nobody had seen or heard anything. The controller in Fargo, North Dakota, told him the airport was closed due to a blizzard. Frustrated and worried, Dwyer took another of his planes up a little after nine that morning and half an hour later spotted the wreckage five miles from the airport. He called Anderson, who notified Hale, who was on the air at KRIB. Hale interrupted the record he was playing and broke the news to the world that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were dead. “Then I reached over for a Holly album and put it on and just dropped the needle,” he told me. He couldn’t remember the song.

Federal investigators from the Civil Aeronautics Board spent three days poring over the crash site, and since there was no evidence of fire or equipment failure, they turned to the pilot. Peterson, they were told by flight instructors, sometimes suffered in-flight vertigo and disorientation. One instructor noted that during a March 1958 training flight, Peterson had been “very susceptible to distractions.” The CAB report, released in September 1959, concluded: “It is believed that shortly after takeoff pilot Roger Peterson entered an area of complete darkness and one in which there was no definite horizon; that the snow conditions and the lack of horizon required him to rely solely on flight instruments . . . ” Peterson was licensed, but he was not certified to fly by instruments alone. In the pitch-dark northern plains, with an overcast sky hiding the stars above and no city lights below, he couldn’t tell which way was up.

Iowans didn’t take kindly to the idea that one of their own had caused the crash, and over the years other theories were advanced. The most controversial one came after Holly’s pistol, which he carried in the bottom of his shaving kit, was found by Albert Juhl in the cornfield two months after the crash. Holly had the gun because of the large amounts of cash he carried after the shows. One empty shell was in the pistol, meaning it had been fired, but Juhl told the sheriff that was because he had shot it himself to see if it still worked. Nonetheless, a story took shape that perhaps there had been a struggle. Perhaps drugs and alcohol were involved (these were, after all, rock stars). One rumor has it that during one of Holly’s last phone calls with his young wife, María Elena, the couple had argued; perhaps he was so distraught that he started shooting.

Examiners never found any signs of gunplay (shells in the wreckage, bullet holes in the fuselage, or gunshot wounds to the bodies), but many locals remain convinced that some kind of onboard violence contributed to the crash. The theory gained enough momentum that in 2007 Jay Richardson paid to have his father’s body exhumed and examined by a forensic anthropologist. (It wasn’t just because of the gun; the Bopper’s body had been found farther from the plane than the others, on the other side of the fence, leading some to wonder if he had survived the impact and crawled away.) The expert concluded that the Bopper had died on impact. “There was no foul play,” he stated. After Griggs, the Holly expert, had a chance to look over the Bopper’s X-rays, he reported on his Web site, “It seemed that every bone had been fractured at least once.”

Griggs has his own theory. “I think the wings iced,” he told me. “Dwyer kept calling Peterson on the radio, and he never responded. I think he was too busy trying to keep the plane in the air.”

One person who remains a skeptic is Jerry Dwyer. I called him a few months after my visit, hoping he would remember his tentative okay to sit for an interview. I was in luck. Dwyer still flies, still has a hangar at the Mason City airport, and confirmed that he still gets nasty calls in the middle of the night, though not as often as he used to. “Yeah, I’ve had death threats and everything else,” he said. “Nobody has shot at me as far as I know.” I’d heard he was writing a book about the crash and his experience. “I’m working on it,” he confirmed, adding that he hopes to have it out within a year. “I’m gonna stir things up, and some folks are not gonna like it. But you have to remember: I was the only guy there.” He wouldn’t elaborate, but he did acknowledge that he had kept some of the wreckage. “There’s a reason I still have it.”

“Because it backs up your theory of what caused the crash?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied darkly, “I would think so.”

All manner of tokens have been left at the memorial. Note the Holly-style glass perched atop the stainless-steel guitar and the students IDs and driver’s licenses scattered around the base.

Michael Hall

The survivors of the Winter Dance Party tour went on to enjoy various careers in show business. Dion left the Belmonts and had a series of huge hits in the sixties, including “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer.” Jennings became one of the biggest country stars of the seventies. Allsup turned himself into one of the greatest session guitarists ever, backing up everyone from Bob Wills to Willie Nelson and playing on some 6,500 recording sessions with three hundred artists (in 1987 he opened a club in Dallas’s Deep Ellum called Tommy’s Heads-Up Club; he still has the coin that saved his life). Allsup’s rhythm section partner, Carl Bunch, became a minister, singing Holly’s songs but with new, Christian lyrics. Sardo moved into film, acting in and producing B movies, like The Human Factor.

Holly wasn’t the only one of the three teen idols to become larger-than-life in death. Valens, the first great Mexican American rock star, influenced several generations of bands, including Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys, and his life was the basis of the popular 1987 film La Bamba. A biopic of the Bopper is under way now too. Its working title is “The Day the Music Died.”

Of course, the music didn’t really die. Before leaving Iowa, I went back out to the cornfield and stood alone at the crash site. It was sad and eerie yet also strangely unsatisfying. The world long ago moved on from this place. The corn grew again and died again and grew again. Kids thousands of miles away and dozens of years in the future heard the music made by the guys who died here, and it moved them so much that they started making music too. As I walked back through the corn to my car, a song played over and over in my head. It was “That’ll Be the Day,” and it made me glad to be alive.

This content was originally published here.

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jonathanbelloblog · 6 years ago

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2019 Detroit Auto Show Preview: The New Cars, Trucks, EVs, and Concepts to Expect

It’s all about Motor City and the 2019 Detroit auto show this week, where automakers are preparing to debut tons of new cars, concepts, and trucks that we can’t wait to see in the metal. Plan on seeing new concepts from Nissan, Infiniti, and China’s GAC, plus plenty of American iron at the final North American International Auto Show that will be held in the month of January. The show officially moves to June in 2020, which will make a nice change of pace from the freezing weather that typically greets our trips to Cobo Center. Read on for a preview of all the 2019 debuts we know about—there’s always a surprise or two, too!—and be sure to follow our live coverage from the D on our show landing page and on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

2020 Cadillac XT6

Think of this large midsize three-row sport utility as Cadillac’s answer to the rear-drive-based Lincoln Aviator. Power for the XT6 should come from a 310-hp 3.6-liter V-6 with stop-start technology, mated to a nine-speed automatic transmission and the option of either front- or all-wheel drive. Speaking of options, we can wait to see all of its new interior upgrades and add-ons. Based on the teaser image Cadillac tweeted today, we know that it will have a front end.

2020 Ford Explorer

The all-new rear- and all-wheel-drive Explorer has already been unveiled, and its base engine remains a turbocharged 2.3-liter EcoBoost four-cylinder, albeit with a 20-hp increase to 300 horses. Torque remains unchanged at 310 lb-ft. There’s also a 365-hp, 385-lb-ft 3.0-liter EcoBoost V-6 in the top-trim Explorer Platinum, and both engines mate exclusively to a 10-speed automatic transmission. Sporty Explorer ST and efficient hybrid models have been confirmed—we can tell you more about them soon. [Read More]

2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500

Last year brought the scintillating Mustang Bullitt, while this year FoMoCo turns it up a few notches more with the highly anticipated 2020 Mustang Shelby GT500. Expect it to feature a supercharged version of the 5.2-liter V-8 found in the GT350 and GT350R. Power output remains unknown, but there’s little doubt that it will have more muscle than the previous-generation GT500, which checked in at 662 horsepower.

2020 Ford Police Interceptor Utility

The latest Ford cop SUV has also broken cover, and it goes green with a standard 3.3-liter V-6 with hybrid assistance. There’s an optional 3.0-liter turbocharged EcoBoost V-6, as well as a 3.3-liter naturally aspirated V-6. The engines are all mated to a 10-speed automatic transmission with all-wheel drive. [Read More]

GAC

China’s Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC) has staked out show floor turf since the 2017 Detroit Auto Show—its 2018 stand is pictured above—and is poised to enter the U.S. market this year unless someone whose name resembles Trumpchi tweets otherwise. (Trumpchi is a brand owned by GAC.) Expect to see a cool concept from GAC and maybe some fireworks online, too.

Hyundai

Last year’s Detroit show hosted the premiere of the Veloster N, but what will Hyundai bring to Motown this year? Perhaps something even racier? Stay tuned.

Infiniti QX Inspiration Concept

A new fully electric crossover concept will usher in a new look for the brand’s people haulers, while also celebrating the 30th anniversary of the brand’s launch at the same show in 1989. Expect a lounge-like cabin with plenty of new bells and whistles.

2020 Kia Telluride

The Kia Telluride crossover can accommodate up to eight passengers and will be built at the brand’s U.S. plant in West Point, Georgia. A V-6 engine will provide power and it will slot above the Sorento, which offers four-cylinder power and seating that stops at seven.

2020 Lexus RC F Track Edition

Despite what the name suggests, the RC F Track Edition is a purpose-built vehicle, not a special-edition package. It will join the lineup in limited production and is promised to be the most powerful non-LFA car ever from the brand.

Nissan Concept

Nissan is planning to unveil an EV concept car or crossover of some kind. There is a new Star Wars movie on the horizon, so it could also be another movie tie-in but we expect it’s something more significant.

2019 Nissan Leaf Plus

Nissan used the 2019 CES event to launch its new long-range version of the Leaf EV. We know its new, 62-kWh battery pack increases its range to 226 miles, 75 more than the current non-Plus car. Will we see a variant in Detroit? Perhaps.

2019 Ram Heavy Duty

Last year, Ram introduced its new 1500 (pictured above), which we love, and now comes the burlier 2500 and 3500 Heavy Duty versions. Is there more to love? You bet. Expect more horsepower, more torque, more luxury, and more, well, everything else.

2020 Subaru WRX STI S209

Subaru has confirmed the S209 will debut at the Detroit auto show. All we know so from teaser images is that the latest Subie sports a black grille, special badging, and a red accent line that denotes its sportier stature. We expect a decent power boost, and certainly can’t wait to drive it. [Read More]

2020 Toyota Supra

Hello? If you’re not excited for the arrival of the all-new fifth-generation Toyota Supra, you might want to check your pulse. The Supra is back and we can’t wait to see the official reveal after seeing it leaked and teased over and over the past few months. We’ve already driven the prototype and can tell you Toyota is on the right track. [Read More]

2020 Volkswagen Passat

The new Passat gets almost completely new sheetmetal, while the lineup will simplify to only SE, SEL, and R-Line trims. All will be powered by a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder making the same 174 horsepower as before, but the good news is that torque gets bumped to 207 lb-ft, an increase of 23. The sole transmission is a six-speed torque-converter automatic, while advance sketches of the sedan actually provide a good idea of what it’ll look like (we’ve already seen it). [Read More]

The post 2019 Detroit Auto Show Preview: The New Cars, Trucks, EVs, and Concepts to Expect appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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eddiejpoplar · 6 years ago

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2019 Detroit Auto Show Preview: The New Cars, Trucks, EVs, and Concepts to Expect

2020 Cadillac XT6

2020 Ford Explorer

2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500

2020 Ford Police Interceptor Utility

GAC

Hyundai

Last year’s Detroit show hosted the premiere of the Veloster N, but what will Hyundai bring to Motown this year? Perhaps something even racier? Stay tuned.

Infiniti QX Inspiration Concept

2020 Kia Telluride

2020 Lexus RC F Track Edition

Nissan Concept

2019 Nissan Leaf Plus

2019 Ram Heavy Duty

2020 Subaru WRX STI S209

2020 Toyota Supra

2020 Volkswagen Passat

The post 2019 Detroit Auto Show Preview: The New Cars, Trucks, EVs, and Concepts to Expect appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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jesusvasser · 6 years ago

Text

2019 Detroit Auto Show Preview: The New Cars, Trucks, EVs, and Concepts to Expect

2020 Cadillac XT6

2020 Ford Explorer

2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500

2020 Ford Police Interceptor Utility

GAC

Hyundai

Last year’s Detroit show hosted the premiere of the Veloster N, but what will Hyundai bring to Motown this year? Perhaps something even racier? Stay tuned.

Infiniti QX Inspiration Concept

2020 Kia Telluride

2020 Lexus RC F Track Edition

Nissan Concept

2019 Nissan Leaf Plus

2019 Ram Heavy Duty

2020 Subaru WRX STI S209

2020 Toyota Supra

2020 Volkswagen Passat

The post 2019 Detroit Auto Show Preview: The New Cars, Trucks, EVs, and Concepts to Expect appeared first on Automobile Magazine.

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alamante · 6 years ago

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The White House proposed dramatically weakening fuel economy standards on Thursday, reversing the only major federal policy to reduce planet-warming emissions from the nation’s top source of greenhouse gas pollution.

The move would clear the way for vehicles to, by 2030, spew an addition 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ― equivalent to the entire annual emissions of Canada.

The widely anticipated proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation outlines what environmentalists see as a worst-case scenario for vehicle emissions. In April, then–EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt declared a landmark Obama-era regulation bringing U.S. fuel economy rules in line with the rest of the developed world “wrong,” calling the standards “too high.”

The regulation, which automakers agreed to in 2012, required passenger vehicles to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 — nearly double today’s standard. If fully implemented, over the course of the program, that rule would have reduced oil consumption by 12 billion barrels, halved tailpipe emissions and doubled fuel efficiency, saving consumers $3,200 to $5,700 in gasoline costs over a vehicle’s lifetime.

Instead, the new Trump administration standard aims to freeze 2020 standards through model year 2026. And in a break with the Republicans’ rhetorical reverence for states’ rights, the proposal would revoke a waiver allowing California to set its own vehicle standards, a longstanding provision in the Clean Air Act that grants special status to the Golden State, which is particularly prone to air quality problems.

The proposal marks a major victory for automakers, which profit handsomely from gas-guzzling vehicles, and oil producers, which risked losing trillions of dollars in revenue to the burgeoning electric car industry.

Automakers had scrambled to distance themselves from the scandal-struck EPA’s decision to reopen the emissions rules, insisting they supported stronger standards. Ford Motor Co.’s top executives had even called for “increasing clean car standards” in a blog post titled “A Measure of Progress.”

But executives from the auto industry’s top three trade associations flanked Pruitt at a press conference in April, praising the decision. For them, the announcement capped more than a year of lobbying.

Carlos Barria / Reuters

President Donald Trump outside the White House in March 2017. Automakers heavily lobbied his administration to roll back passenger vehicle fuel economy standards.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers began preparing to demand a break on fuel efficiency standards in the midst of the 2016 presidential election. Last year the group, commonly known as the Auto Alliance, spent $8.1 million on lobbying, a nearly 9 percent increase from the previous year, according to data collated by the Center for Responsive Politics. The other two trade groups that joined Pruitt in April similarly ramped up spending. The National Automobile Dealers Association shelled out a record $4.8 million on lobbying last year, and the Association of Global Automakers increased its lobbying expenditures by nearly 50 percent, to $3.5 million.

The demands showed a marked shift from 2012, when automakers, two of which had just received massive taxpayer-funded federal bailouts, agreed to increase standards after months of negotiations with federal and California regulators. But by 2016, fuel prices had fallen from a record high national average of $3.60 per gallon four years earlier, and Americans were once again buying gas guzzlers. Automakers insisted the landscape had changed. In April the EPA agreed. In a 38-page finding, the agency repudiated the Obama administration’s consideration of the social cost of carbon ― the health and environmental damage caused by emissions ― and energy security valuation.

Trucks and SUVs are more profitable for automakers. General Motors earns $35,000 in profit for each $73,000 Cadillac Escalade it sells, according to The Detroit News. By contrast, electric vehicles are generally half as profitable as cars with combustion engines, a Daimler executive admitted last year.

The auto companies are whistling past the graveyard that is the Chinese auto industry when they cease making efficient cars and switch over to mostly gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks. Daniel Becker, director of the Center for Auto Safety

Three weeks after the EPA said it would revise fuel economy standards, Ford, reporting a $1.7 billion quarterly profit, announced plans to discontinue all but two car models in favor of SUVs and trucks.

The intense focus on large, fuel-hungry vehicles comes amid a rapid shift toward electric and fuel-efficient cars in Japan, the European Union and China, the world’s largest auto market. China’s electric vehicle market is growing twice as fast as the United States’, and regulators in Beijing are considering banning combustion engines.

“The auto companies are whistling past the graveyard that is the Chinese auto industry when they cease making efficient cars and switch over to mostly gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks,” said Daniel Becker, the director of the Washington-based Safe Climate Campaign’s Center for Auto Safety. “It will pose problems for them even in the United States when gas prices do eventually rise.”

He blamed low demand for electric vehicles (EVs) on the auto industry, which spends roughly $15 billion a year on marketing that promotes pickup trucks and SUVs, including coveted and costly Super Bowl time slots. A study published in December in the journal Nature Energy found dealerships “were dismissive of EVs, misinformed shoppers on vehicle specifications, omitted EVs from the sales conversation and strongly oriented customers toward petrol and diesel vehicle options.”

But it’s the oil industry that may stand to gain most from the Trump administration’s new fuel economy rules. Adding 540 million electric vehicles by 2040 would cause oil demand to peak in the mid-2020s, wiping out $19 trillion in possible revenue for oil producers, according to a report released in May by Aurora Energy Research, based in Oxford, England.

“This is one of the most destructive policies in terms of increasing emissions,” said Luke Tonachel, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s director of clean vehicles and fuels. “Rolling back the standards is a giant giveaway to the oil industry at the expense of public health.”

This story is developing…

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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Star Sightings: Yara Shahidi Gets in Festival Mode, Kelly Clarkson Fangirls Over Justin Timberlake & More!

Happy festival season! Tons of celebs flocked to Indio, California, for week one of the 2018 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, rocking their best desert queen gear to celebrate the beloved two-weekend event. Though Yara Shahidi couldn't make it this year -- "I'm a little too short to see everything, which I realized there last year, so I'm just living vicariously through all my friends that went." she told ET -- the Grown-ish star did chat about her fave looks at the Teva Festival Season Styling Suite at Mama Shelter in Los Angeles on April 18, and she admitted that it was always tough to figure out what to wear throughout the festival. "I think a lot of it is about function," she mused to ET. "Sure, look cute -- pastel and glitter and all of it -- but I feel like when I was there, you’re out in the sun for hours at a time, so I ran into the problem of not being able to find the perfect outfit because it’s like, 'Am I cold right now? Do I want to carry a jacket with me? Do I want to wear heels in the grass? You can’t do that! It’s a special kind of talent... I literally live in sandals." And though they're still finding out what will happen to her character, Zoey, on the second season of Grown-ish, Shahidi is counting down the days till production starts up again. "We start shooting in the fall. I'm just really pumped because who knows where Zoey starts? I'm really excited to watch her go to class. I think she'll maybe have more than one this year!" she said. "The way season one ended, she's in a relationship now and she has other things to explore, which I'm really excited for."

Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Teva

Plenty of stars were out partying in Coachella Valley, however.

Shay Mitchell stopped by the #REVOLVEfestival Day 1 during Coachella weekend, where she enjoyed a delivery by Postmates.

Jason Camera/Postmates

Erika Jayne was one with the animals at the Galore x Her Campus party, sponsored by Bedhead by Tigi, in Palm Springs on April 14.

Galore

Paris Hilton met Sushi by Bou chef David Bouhadana, who was flown to Palm Springs from New York City to serve up an omakase to VIPs at 1 Oak's party at the Gravity SUV Mansion, where French Montana and Leonardo DiCaprio were also in attendance.

Justine Skye was excited to rosé all day at Three Olives’ Rosé Vodka party at the Hilton Palm Springs Day Club on April 13.

Eric Reed

Alessandra Ambrosio looked like there was nowhere else she’d rather be in the world while lounging on a huge pool float in an orange Peixoto swimsuit. “Coachillin in My Pink Cadillac ... 💓☀️💦 #foreveronvacation @ingefonteyne,” she wrote on Instagram.

Coachillin in My Pink Cadillac ... 💓☀️💦 #foreveronvacation 📸 @ingefonteyne

A post shared by Alessandra Ambrosio (@alessandraambrosio) on Apr 17, 2018 at 1:22pm PDT

And Amber Rose took a break from a pool party at Coachella to chat with EverlyWell founder and CEO Julia Cheek to learn about the brand's at-home health testing kits.

Ian Bailey/Jupiter Media Group

She may have been in Los Angeles, but Paris Jackson gave off major Coachella vibes in a tie-up striped shirt, navy blue patterned H&M Conscious skirt, strappy heeled sandals and a boho bandana on April 17.

H&M

Also looking pretty was Jessica Biel, who rocked a black jumpsuit with butterfly sleeves for an American Express Experience event that celebrated the launch of the brand’s new “Live Life” global campaign in New York City on April 9.

Michael Simon

Ava DuVernay also looked lovely at the Independent School Alliance for Minority Affairs’ annual Impact Awards Gala at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica, California, on April 17.

Independent School Alliance

Southern Calfornia wasn't the only place to here good music last weekend. Kelly Clarkson and her husband, Brandon Blackstock, took in the Las Vegas stop of Justin Timberlake' Man of the Woods Tour, watching the show from the Grey Goose Nest at Hyde Lounge in the T-Mobile Arena.

Loved @jtimberlake show tonight in Vegas! His band\crew is sick and Justin is a beast on stage! A true entertainer that sings, dances, and plays! BUT obviously @_NicoleHurst was my favorite part! #yeswiththatlaurynhill yes ma’am 🙌👏❤️ #Manofthewoodstour#Vegas

— Kelly Clarkson (@kelly_clarkson) April 15, 2018

Famous fans can’t get enough of JT, as evidenced by Mitchell, Leven Rambin and Lily Collins all recently rocking “Tennessee” tees from the singer’s tour merch.

Jake Owen serenaded residents of Sublette County, Wyoming, which won the title of "“RANGER Country USA," putting on an intimate show in the town of Pinedale for a RANGER Country USA Celebration. “I’ve been fortunate enough to tour the nation, meeting the hard-working Americans that make up these small towns,” the “Barefoot Blue Jean Night” singer said. “Coming from a small-town myself, these are my people, and to be a part of an initiative recognizing them is incredible.”

Polaris

Jenni Farley took to a different kind of sandy climate with her family. After some very hectic press days for Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, "JWoww" and her family -- husband Roger Mathews, daughter Meilani and son Greyson -- took a trip to the Four Diamond Moon Palace in Jamaica, where they swam with dolphins, strolled along a private beach and rode waves on the FlowRider Double Wave Simulator.

Anthony Serrantonio

Also soaking up the sun? Olivia Munn, who rocked her Etnia Barcelona sunnies while hitting up sandy shores with pal Victoria Potvin. “Beach moment: ✔️ (That look on my face is because it’s actually freezing. I had a great time anyway.),” Potvin wrote on Instagram on April 8.

It was wheel's up for Sienna Miller, who raced to the finish line at E-Prix’s debut in Rome, Italy, in mid-April. She took a spin around the race track in the BMW i8 Qualcomm safety car by Formula E founder and CEO Alejandro Agag and also met with Venturi drivers Edoardo Mortara and Maro Engel alongside Prince Albert of Monaco.

Getty Images

Vroom vroom! Milo Ventimiglia took over the Harley-Davidson social media channels on April 16 to celebrate the motor company’s 115th anniversary.

Michael Simon

Jason Mraz was mobile as well, joking he was “well trained” when he hopped on an Amtrak Pacific Surfliner train to travel throughout Los Angeles.

Jason Mraz

With hard work and lots of play also comes the need to eat! Allison Janney and NicoleKidman bonded at a dinner at Los Angeles’ Sunset Tower honoring influential women who are making a difference in the world and InStyle's Badass Women column, with guests gifted Brahmin handbags.

Getty Images

On April 16, Johnny Galecki was joined by Billy Dec, the founder and CEO of Chicago-based Rockit Ranch Productions hospitality and entertainment company, for the opening of the second location of Asian-fusion restaurant SUNDA in Nashville, Tennessee.

And Brooklyn Decker hit up a Whole Foods on April 9 for fresh fruits, veggies and Michelob ULTRA Pure Gold.

Jesse Bauer

From coast to coast, celebs were also doing plenty of non-Coachella partying. “Real Housewives of Miami” star Joanna Krupa took over Hyde Bellagio in Las Vegas on April 3 for a massive birthday bash that included a gifting suite with goodies from her friend, Monica Hansen’s, swimwear line, Ciroc Vodka and Ciroc Apple drinks, and a gorgeous pink-and-gold cake topped with red roses.

Hyde Bellagio

Golfer Michelle Wie was also partying with friends at Hyde Bellagio that night.

Ty Dolla $ign went bowling at Lucky Strike in Houston, Texas, on April 1 with a few friends. The group munched on corn dogs, BBQ wings and Caesar salad with shrimp before heading over to the House of Blues for the “Paranoid” rapper’s show that night. Jason Momoa and artist Blaine Halvorson channeled the band Kiss at Mastercard and Fred Segal Present Rock n Roll Holy Land: An Exclusive and Interactive Experience by MadeWorn exhibit in West Hollywood on April 10. The duo and guests like Gene and Nick Simmons and DJ Cassidy enjoyed a DJ set by Classixx and Moscow mules made with Absolut Elyx.

Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Mastercard

It's almost Earth Day, and January Jones was feeling the puppy love just in time to celebrate. “Uh..I have a puppy in my bike basket. It’s too much cuteness, the cynic in me is close to vomiting a little 🤦‍♀️ @criticalcycles planted a tree for my family and will plant a tree for every order placed on 4/22 #earthday through plantabillion.org #plantrootsfortomorrow🌱,” she wrote on Instagram on April 17.

Also warming hearts, Gretchen Rossi helped style the girls at the Pick Your Prom Dress event, a workshop hosted by Speechless and Girls Inc. of Orange County, where attendees discussed positive body image, self-esteem and making smart choices on prom night.

Aelorae Qahlwyn

Todrick star Chester Lockhart and Vanderpump Rules’ Scheana Shay took part in Aid for AIDS of Nevada's 28th Annual AIDS Walk Las Vegas on April 15.

Madison Freedle/one7communications.com

And activist Emma Gonzalez met Anna Wintour at the Center Dinner 2018 at New York City’s Cipriani Wall Street on April 19.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Meanwhile, Julie Bowen teamed up with Hallmark for a special Mother’s Day surprise, which launches April 30.

Hallmark

For even more must-see star sightings, click through the gallery below.