#This is literally the second day she's known Tim for and she already witnessed him seconds away from killing somebody

[hyperfixatinator]

So, was anybody going to mention the time Huntress had to physically restrain Tim before he could beat a guy to death?

[sohotthateveryonedied]

In the Eye of a Hurricane

Read here on AO3!

Summary:

He can hear his mom’s voice as he reads the letter, recognizes her handwriting in all its fancy loops and swirls. She tells Jack in the letter that she has been hiding a secret from him for years and doesn’t have the guts to tell him in person. Tim skims, tries to pick apart his mom’s long-winded explanations about living in fear of being found out, of the shame that followed her every day.

Tim can’t even begin to guess what she could be talking about until finally he sees it, clear as day in black ink.

Timothy isn’t your son.

Mom is dead. Dad is in a coma. Bruce is...here.

Tim is still getting used to the idea of a parental figure sticking with him for longer than a few weeks at a time. He keeps waiting for Bruce to turn a corner and disappear without a trace like he should, but it never happens. He stays by Tim’s side, offering support that Tim wasn’t even aware could be offered. It’s different, but it’s a good different. Tim only wishes that could be enough to wash away the grief. He takes it one day at a time, bit by bit, if only to keep himself from looking too far ahead and seeing the sea of loneliness waiting for him in the case that his dad never wakes up. Today he dedicates himself to handling his parents’ finances, sifting through the mess they left in the hands of their thirteen-year-old son. It’s eerie being in his dad’s office now, like he’s entering a tomb. Tim is searching for his parents’ insurance documents so he can get that dealt with and out of the way, then move on to the next project. Whatever takes his mind off of it all. It’s hard enough seeing his dad lying in that hospital bed every day, looking dead but not quite getting there yet. Tim opens the next filing cabinet, grabbing another stack of files and opening the first folder, only for an envelope to fall out. It’s not like the others, otherwise Tim would have put it back and disregarded it altogether. But this one is not a clean white envelope you would find in any office. This one is made of thick paper, yellowing at the edges with swirl patterns on the flap. Jack, don’t open this until I’m dead, it says in Tim’s mother’s handwriting.

Dad clearly didn’t obey orders (what else is new?) because the envelope has already been torn open. It’s crumpled at the corners, creased in places it shouldn’t be, as if Dad was angry when he stuffed the contents back into the envelope and locked it away in this cabinet. Tim’s first instinct is to read it. After all, Janet Drake is dead. She’s not here to scold Tim for going through what isn’t his, but that is precisely what stops him from opening the letter. This is from his mother—his mother who is now dead. And his dad is in a coma. Poking into their business...it feels wrong. No matter how curious Tim is, he can’t desecrate this letter. So he tucks the envelope into his pocket, careful not to wrinkle it. He can’t imagine what the letter must be about, but that isn’t very surprising. Despite being their son, Tim didn’t know Janet and Jack Drake any better than he’d know a gym coach or one of the housekeepers. He knew everything about their company and their lifestyles, but he never got more than a glimpse into who they truly were. Not until it was too late. The closest Tim would ever get to bonding with his parents were the rare nights on which Mom and Dad would sit with Tim on the sofa, watching Pixar movies until he fell asleep. Those were his favorite memories of his parents: his dad calling him “champ” and talking endlessly about the movies’ animation styles, Mom with her hair down and her makeup washed off, for once not caring about her appearance. Tim doesn’t know what the letter could possibly be about, but curiosity is a persistent thing. Days click by, switching off into nights in an endless cycle. Dad doesn’t wake from the coma. Tim isn’t sure if he ever will. Dick and Bruce hover around him like house flies, waiting for some kind of ball to drop. Maybe for Tim to break down, to cry, to mourn the ending of his world. Instead, all Tim can do is wonder about the letter. If it was so important, Tim would already know whatever it was, right? Maybe it’s a copy of his mom’s will. Maybe it’s a map to a collection of buried treasure that she never told anyone about. Maybe it’s a confession that she was secretly a supervillain and all of those trips she and Dad took were actually with the intention to rob every bank across the eastern seaboard. Tim keeps the letter buried under piles of school papers in his desk drawer, but it might as well be sending out a signal to him every minute, reminding him of its presence. He falls asleep night after night in his temporary room at the manor, listening to the letter rattle around in its drawer like a tell-tale heart. What does it say? What secret was his mother hiding? Is it about Tim? Is it about her past? Will it unlock some family conspiracy? Tim makes it almost a month resisting the siren’s call before he can’t take it any longer. He climbs out of bed one night, the floor cold on his bare feet. He grabs the letter from its hiding place and jumps back into bed where the shadows’ tendrils can’t reach. He pulls his blanket over his head, a shiver running down his spine as he clicks on his flashlight and sets the beam on the letter. He can feel the walls watching him, witnessing this desecration of his dead mother’s written crypt. These are the last words he will ever get from her. Tim opens the letter. He recognizes his mother’s stationery, the flower patterns at the top. Back when he was younger, Tim used to spin around in his mom’s desk chair and ask why she had special paper with her name on it. “Because important people like to stand out in their letters,” she’d say. “Why can’t you just use regular paper?” “Because regular paper doesn’t have your name at the top. You can’t feel official if you’re not using official stationery.” Tim thought about that as he spun. “You can if you write it in yourself. All you need is some crayons.” His mom chuckled and ruffled his hair. “I suppose you could do that too.” He can hear his mom’s voice as he reads the letter, recognizes her handwriting in all its fancy loops and swirls. She tells Jack in the letter that she has been hiding a secret from him for years and doesn’t have the guts to tell him in person. Tim skims, tries to pick apart his mom’s long-winded explanations about living in fear of being found out, of the shame that followed her every day. Tim can’t even begin to guess what she could be talking about until finally he sees it, clear as day in black ink. Timothy isn’t your son. He stops. Rereads the sentence. Then again. And again, trying to tempt the words into making some sort of sense. Tim doesn’t know how long he spends staring at those four words, his eyes glazed, before he tentatively starts reading again. Janet talks about how guilty she feels for not confessing this earlier, how she doesn’t want Tim to find out, how sorry she is that Tim isn’t the son Jack wanted him to be. That she disappointed him by giving him Tim instead of the “correct” child. Tim is going to be sick. He throws off the blanket and goes to the gas fireplace across the room, turning it on. He crumples up the letter and throws it in without a second’s hesitation. He watches it catch fire, the flames blackening the corners as they eat away at the letter until it’s no more than ash. This can’t be real, he tells himself. It can’t be. His dad… He knew. Dad knew all this time. They both did. Tim has been walking around, thinking he knew exactly who he was and where he came from. Writing his dad’s name on school forms and calling himself Tim Drake when he’s not even a Drake. Not biologically. How could they hide this from him? Did it never occur to them that Tim should know this kind of vital information? That it might literally reconfigure his entire life? Tim sits there on the rug, staring at the fireplace as the walls crumble around him. He can’t believe they kept this from him. Who doesn’t tell their own son that his genetics aren’t what he thinks they are? That somewhere in the world, there is a person walking around who has no idea he’s got a son somewhere. He probably doesn’t even know that Tim exists. The more Tim thinks about it though, the more it makes an odd sort of sense. His parents have always been distant, always treated Tim like they expected something different every time they looked at him. Like he was so entirely Other that they couldn’t help but be disappointed, no matter what he did or how hard he tried to get them to love him the way other kids’ parents did. He wonders when Jack found the letter. Was it given to him with instructions, or did he stumble upon it one day in Janet’s office? Did he confront her right away, or did he wait a while? Tim thinks back to three years ago when their marriage took its first sudden dip, as if they hit a wall out of nowhere. Could this have been the cause all along? Three years since the secret came out. Three years of arguments bordered by stony silences, flipping back and forth between moods whenever they weren’t on yet another long trip, trying to salvage a failing marriage. Tim used to assume it was his fault that his parents were never home—maybe there was something wrong with him that they didn’t want to see. Now it all makes sense. Jack has never acted like much of a father to Tim in the first place, as if he’s subconsciously known all along that there was something dividing him from his son. Because there was something dividing them, something deep in their DNA. Which, of course, begs the question: If Jack isn’t Tim’s father, who is? Parts of the letter were ripped, the ink smudged in places from what must have been scars of Jack’s anger at finding out his family was built on a lie. If Janet did divulge who Tim’s biological father is, Tim couldn’t find it in the letter. There are only two people in the world who can give Tim the answers he needs, and one of them is dead. The other one is close behind. He’s stuck in limbo. The days after the revelation pass in a haze. A haze of astonishment, silent questions, answers he needs but may never get. Tim keeps waiting for the universe to shift, because he just found out information that changes everything he thought was true about himself. He should be feeling something, right? Maybe it’s because he and his dad never had a real relationship anyway, so there’s nothing to mourn. There’s no deciding moment of what does this change? because there's nothing to change. He and Jack have been living separate lives for a long time now. This revelation just cements something Tim has known for years. He never had a father before. Why should it change anything that he still doesn’t have one now?

[Read the rest on AO3 because this one got kinda long.]

[galaxy-parchment]

Nepotism at its Finest

I’m back on my bullshit, fellas! This time we’ve got something fun. A fic that I wrote based on another TMA AU, ‘Timeline of Theseus’, by @creativitycache.  All you need to know is Jon has been the Archivist since he was 8 because time-travel shenanigans and now Elias is his reluctant dad, I would highly suggest reading ToT if you enjoy this fic and even if you don’t. This also hasn’t been beta-read because this is spoiler-y and my usual beta-reader hasn’t listened to TMA and honestly this is pretty self-indulgent.

--

Jon, despite being an Archivist for as long as he could remember, only got the ‘official’ title of Head Archivist once Gertrude finally died. He knew Jonah was the one that did it, but honestly, Jon was just glad he didn’t call in someone else to do his dirty work for once. He always hated when a random avatar barged in and somehow always left some kind of damage in their wake.

Working as an archival assistant wasn’t so bad, other than that. After a while, just to justify him hanging around the Archives all day reading statements, Jonah had given him a position as Gertrude’s assistant. Not that she ever asked him to do anything. It was just a formality.

At this point he’d given up on only reading statements that included people that were already dead. He’d take one over the newer statements, certainly, but the problem was that there’s only a certain number of people that have had supernatural experiences, and if they survived the encounter, they don’t tend to die as quickly as the ones that didn’t make it.

He still occasionally got odd flashes of things he never actually did, but it wasn’t like they had a manual about how his powers worked. Jonah just half-explained that it was probably something to do with his omniscience filling his head up with blanks that didn’t exist. The fuzziness and lack of detail certainly matched up with that theory. Just one of the perks of suddenly gaining knowledge powers at the age of 8, he supposed. At least he’d finally managed to get a grip on what exactly he Knew at random intervals. The Eye still liked to give him the odd unwarranted insight or two, but he didn’t mind all that much.

Strangely, though, he did ‘remember’ all of the assistants Jonah had chosen for him on his first day as the Head Archivist. Sasha, Tim and Martin, although for some reason Sasha didn’t look like how his ‘memories’ picture her.

—

Jon was weird, to be honest. Tim knew it the moment he walked in and saw the guy. Looked like he’d been raised by wolves then taught how to act like he was a respectable academic. Sure, he looked the part, but you could tell he didn’t care about being a ‘scholar’, he only cared about the statements.

He also obviously had some weird tension with Elias. Whenever Tim mentioned him Jon would always change the topic and refuse to acknowledge the man’s existence. He’d worked here for a while, though, probably just a standard ‘gradual resent for your boss’ scenario.

At least Tim thought that was it until Monday.

They were all in the break room, Jon included, eating their lunch, when Elias wandered in and gave them all a polite smile.

“So, Jon,” He said pleasantly, “I was wondering how you were settling in as Head Archivist.”

Jon glanced back from the coffee pot, “Doing fine, thank you…” he grumbled.

“That’s great to hear,” Tim could hear the condescending tone dripping from his voice, “I know that you’re not used to such an active role in the Archives, is all,”

“What? You don’t think I’m capable of the job? You didn’t need to give me the position you know, I can do what I need to do here without it,”

“Oh, goodness, no, you were fully deserving of the promotion,” Elias said, raising his hands in defence, a knowing smile on his face.

“And as I told you when you promoted me, theres no need to worry about me,” the archival assistants stayed silent and glanced at each other awkwardly.

Elias grimaced, “Is it really so bad that I just wanted to see how you were? I have every right to worry,” Tim didn’t know what the relationship there was, but that was definitely a weird thing for your boss to say in his books.

“Elias, I am 24 and an adult who’s been working here for a while, I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” Jon said sternly, turning to face him with his arms crossed. Okay, that was definitely a weird thing to say. Sasha hid her face in her mug and Martin was fiddling with his hands and staring at them.

“Fine, but you know where to find me if you need anything,” Elias sighed. He turned and walked out the door.

Jon scowled for a moment, the tension in the air thick. He suddenly marched up to the door and yelled down the hall, “You’re not my father, you know!”

Tim was about to ask what the hell that was about before he heard Elias call back.

“I have paperwork that says otherwise!”

Well, that certainly explained a few things.

—

The ‘break room incident’ was still a talking point among the assistants, but at this point it was mostly just Tim complaining that Sasha just didn’t get the job because of nepotism. Jon didn’t even have a degree of any kind, he just got a position as an assistant and then got the Head Archivist promotion.

Martin tried to connect with Jon, though. He’d heard about how all of the old assistants just went missing over time. That must’ve been lonely for Jon. So he brought him tea every day. Sure, Jon didn’t always drink it, but hopefully it helped him feel more comfortable with them.

He did give Martin odd looks occasionally, though, as if they’d known each other and Jon was trying to place his face. He certainly would have remembered meeting someone like Jon, though.

When he wasn’t reading statements, Jon actually came out and spoke to all of the assistants directly when he needed something, which was a bit odd. Not spooky odd, but still odd.

Jon was instructing Martin on some follow-up he would need to do at his desk when Elias made his second appearance of the month. The others stayed quiet, knowing how things went last time.

“Jon, I have some good news!” Elias said, unusually chipper.

Jon seemed unimpressed, “Do tell.”

“Peter and I are getting married!” Martin was about to congratulate him when Jon beat him to it.

“I give it three months,” he deadpanned, not taking his eyes off Elias, who seemed far less offended than Martin would have been in his situation.

“Give me some credit, Jon”

“You’re right, he never even replaced the vase he broke before the last divorce did he? Make it two.” Wait, divorce? Last divorce?

“He’s changed, really, he even said he’d actually replace it once it was official,” Elias defended. Martin spotted Tim in his peripherals jamming his face into his elbow to stifle his own laughter. Sasha had a not-so-subtle smile creeping onto her face.

“Oh, and let me guess, he also promised you he’d ‘start trying to really connect with Jon’ like he does every time, as if he doesn’t literally feed off of doing the exact opposite.”

“No, but he did-“

“No, wait, I’ve got it this time, he said that this time, he’d keep his voyages short and make more time for you!” Jon guessed, intently waiting for Elias’s response

“Yes.” He said curtly. What on earth was happening? Martin wanted nothing more than to be anywhere but this exact position, right next to both of his bosses having a family squabble.

“Let me guess, you came down here to tell me right at this moment because you need me to drive you? Of course,” Jon ran his hand flat across his head to give his hair the gelled flatness Elias’s always flawlessly maintained, “I’m Elias, I’m going to ask Jon to drive me and my fiancee to the courthouse for our tenth marriage! I can’t drive myself, though, because then Peter is going to insult my driving and then I’ll tell him that he has no place to do so since he doesn’t even have a license! Then we’re going to cancel and try again the next week!” He ranted in a tone that was obviously meant to imitate Elias.

“We’re going next Wednesday.” Elias said.

“Fine.” Jon replied without a second thought, turning back to Martin, who hadn’t realised he was holding his breath. Elias silently turned and headed out of the Archives.

The room was silent for a moment. Sasha spoke up first.

“Did you say tenth time?” She asked incredulously.

“Yes, and that’s only the legal ones. I’ve seen them ‘get married’ one night and the next they’ll swear vengeance on each other. Peter gives excellent Christmas presents, though, what with the insurmountable wealth.”

Tim barked out the laugh he was suppressing, “Jon, I just really want you to know, that is the funniest thing I’ve witnessed in my life, thank you,"

--

For the record I’ve changed a few rules of how the whole Jon situation works and I mostly just took the concept of adult Jon and Elias father-son dynamic and sprinted with it.

[mmagazinemoment]

Why my past loves make me want to look into nihilism as a lifestyle.

Good morning, midday, afternoon, or evening to you my fellow queers and allies and plain and simply gorgeous humans. You see I have already written another version of this edition but instead I have a pure heroine filled piece instead, and you may not be ready for it because it covers a few serious points but it’s also the (fuck your ex) vibe, not literally…unlesssssss * insert meme*. Thanks for joining me again my loves

 Why my past loves make me want to look into nihilism as a lifestyle

You ever just meet someone and fall completely into their arms and become almost a complete and utter 3rd leg of the other? What I mean in all seriousness is, don’t you ever feel like the love game grows on you like a drug addiction and I know some of you will see this and be thinking? What do you mean “the love game” I know it’s not a game, a figure of speech as such. Basically, what I’m trying to say is have you ever loved someone so much that you didn’t see the signs of detrimental dysfunction.

Wow that all sounds so serious, let me dial it down a little, I’m just trying this new thing called being uncensored and not caring about preconceived notions of myself from external eyes. Months ago, I was shattered into a million pieces and I won’t blame just him because it was my fault for thinking every relationship or whatever it was, was going to end up like a tv romance, no that’s a lie. I over invested and blamed him for hurting my own self, sure he had something to do with it, but he wasn’t just to blame. Can’t tell me I don’t know how to take accountability (wow I’m funny).

For instance, in a movie you meet and lock eyes with someone and the breeze grasps your hair, when I met said person, I was like ‘omg he’s tall, I’m going to fall in love with a giraffe’ and then I tried to build a home in him, without the investment and time taken to be careful with my time and words of affirmation in efforts to receive reciprocation I never got unless it was backhanded or what I wanted to hear. So how did you perceive your first love? Did he/she/they look pleasing? Or was it the scent of their perfume or cologne? Did they dress in a floral vintage outfit or was it a suit and tie? Ballet flats or sneakers? Tell me? I want to know all of the juicy details!

I know some of you probably didn’t ask or ever want to know but my first love happened in a series of me closing doors journeying through my uneasy sexuality labelling and let’s be real, fuck labels am I right? (unless you find comfortability and closure under a label and with that you’re perfectly valid), Love to me was like heroine and in some senses it still is. When I first learnt of love, it didn’t feel like love, it felt like obligation, perhaps a trend. Love felt like learning all he moves to a Tik Tok dance as fast as possible before the hype disappeared, and it became irrelevant again, questionable reference point but blame social media not me. I was never satisfied.

Keep in mind this was 15-year-old me, trying to gain some sense of validation to seem a little less repressed and not confused because before 15 year old me realised that 12 year old me wasn’t as weird as I thought.  I was under this veil of non-transparency and speaking on the subject of transparency I must tell you 12 was the year of age I realised that I wasn’t like the other boys at school, just swooning for girls and getting scared of cooties, I was just begging to be seen by whoever had eyes to care. Sounds dramatic I know.

Nobody was ever there to tell me at such a young age that there were others like me, “different”, the type of boy who watched rebel without a cause and felt weird when James Dean was looking so gorgeous and composed in that leather jacket or admiring Tim Curry when he dressed like no man I’d ever seen on a movie screen in or even real life in the Rocky Horror Show, something sparked in… me. I started on the smallest step I knew, acknowledgement, I knew I could find a home in the fact that there were more people like me, and wow I was right. I was finding comfort in what I knew, I found a few gorgeous women and obviously because of my age we thought that holding hands and a peck on the cheek was all we needed in life from the label of ‘relationship’, but it was only ever a weekly process. Anytime I found ‘love’ I wouldn’t know what to do with it without the chase, like a dog chasing a bone. Even to this day I have never had a successfully long relationship but at least these days it’s not because of my toxic traits, I like to think I’ve grown a considerate amount since I was 15. Don’t get me wrong, neither of those experiences were love? How could they be?

Ironically love happened even ‘after’ I was in a relationship. I had another relationship when I was 17, it lasted a little longer than the prior, it went for a month and a half, I was convinced I loved her, so sappy but you wanted transparency right? I have a lot of it. After that, my ex brought to attention after she cheated on me that I was using her as a sort of beard to cover up the truth about myself, I never knew how to perceive myself until then and that was only the second step, there was so much more to cover.

Skip forward past a few experiences leading up the near current, I met someone, a sort of fleeting romance, now (forewarning, this gets sappy) we talked for a few weeks if my memory isn’t hazy, and we quickly developed something no short of a connection. FaceTime after FaceTime I’d gather more and more pictures of his goofy face and at one stage, I thought I was going to be happy for the foreseeable future, then came reality. You can’t be loved by someone who doesn’t want to face themselves and you can’t help them anymore than what you’re capable of giving out. I didn’t listen to that, naturally things just got worse, and I hated everything…

He would apologise, I would validate his actions to friends who were concerned and realising that I was getting too soon attached and it wasn’t going to end well and I copped the consequences, I still have only recently not found regret in messing up this badly because if I didn’t make that mistake then I would’ve just witnessed those mistakes I made in the lap of somebody else and this is where the saying goes, better the devil you known then the devil you don’t. let me tell you it did more than a number on my mental health before I added up the reasons as tallies against us and internalised what I should’ve subtracted (hehe see what I did there). In all seriousness I wanted the thrill, I sure as hell got one.

Your mental health is amplified by your lifestyle choices and the people you choose to keep in your circle, friendship, or relationships regardless, the whole thing was out of whack and a tornado was nothing less than the accurate definition of where I was at, and it hurt a lot but sometimes it’s best to leave that situation if that person who you thought was going to be there for a while and a necessity to your life ends up being the detriment. (as Ashley Frangipane said) “its crazy when the thing you love the most is the detriment, let that sink in”.  

 If there is one piece of advice that I want whoever sees this to take with them it’s this, Keep your space sacred baby, you only have one life, but also please do not criticize yourself for getting caught in the motion sickness, sometimes you just can’t avoid it and that’s ok. Life is not a movie, life is more like the behind the scenes extra that puts everything into perspective, it’s rational and shows the hard work put in place to make the art and you should remind yourself as such. Remember also that if you cannot cope with all of the stress that presents itself in your life, that there are people that are equipped to help you hold some of the baggage for you until you are ready to take it back and analyse it. Whatever your grief is, I assure you, you’re not alone.

As always, stay healthy and strut your shit and I cannot stress this enough but keep raging against the machine and the super straights xoxo without the gossip girl, farewell until the next piece of The Mantra Magazine. *keep this in mind* next issue will be a little forward, it will include themes of segregation and war regarding the families of the Palestinians and Israeli conflicts happening right now. So, bring some tissues and an open mind. Farewell.

[amazingflyingdick]

stars gone nuclear.

WHO: Dick Grayson @amazingflyingdick & Slade Wilson @terminator-deathstroke ; mentions of Damian Wayne @sonofabct WHERE: NOVA Headquarters WHEN: September 13th, 2020 WHAT: Dick is infiltrating the secret lab at NOVA Headquarters when he realizes something is wrong.

Slade: All around them, chaos. Slade couldn't tell how many people he had cut down, but Slade didn't operate with any kind of hesitation or concern. Normally, he did show mercy and normally he did have some modicum of respect. But this was like a nest of wasps. The heroes hadn't dealt with it, so Slade was going to deal with it. NOVA had been around too long to really be allowed to continue and he wasn't going to allow them to take another shot at Dick. This was what he did. What he had trained for. Death and destruction were his calling card. And if he could use it to actually care for his own this time, he would.

Damian Wayne was every inch Talia Al Ghul's child. He saw it in the way he fought, the way he could fully disengage from human life. He had said before that he was wasted with Bruce Wayne, who suppressed his natural skills at every turn and refused to let him live as he should be permitted to live. Let him use the skills he possessed from birth. Slade could teach him everything, but he was sure that wasn't a fight he would win with Dick. If he could even win this one.

Damian had a set of detonators, and Slade had the other. They had been blown and major structural damage had been done to the building. Their security was fried, and they were methodically destroying everything on top of taking out operatives.

He could hear, however, even through the din, the moment Dick arrived. He had always said he could pick his heart out of a crowd, and now was no different. He tense, flicking blood from his katana and holstering his pistol as he turned. "Nightwing," he greeted. It would be easier for Dick, wouldn't it? If Slade kept it professional right now. It was a job, but Slade wouldn't begrudge Dick his rage.

Dick: The sound of gunfire reached him even though Dick was in the basement. The walls were thick down there, and everything was muffled, but even he knew when something was very wrong. There was nothing he could do at first. He was in the middle of helping Erik get the mutants out safely. There were still more who needed to be released.

But he had no idea what was going on or who would be shooting in a NOVA facility. The possibilities set him on edge. It was no coincidence that the league was carrying out their elaborate plan at the same time. Something must have gone wrong. The thought preoccupied him, even though he managed to focus long enough to get the last of the mutants out of the building. Only then did he finally feel as if he could leave. The commotion was only getting louder.

He'd just reached the first floor when he felt the building shake. Parts of it collapsed. Stunned, he rushed through the the hallways, dodging people who were running from something - or someone. As he passed people on the ground, Dick stopped to check their pulses just to be sure, just in case he could so something to help, and he was shocked to find not one of them alive. This almost looked professional.

When he rounded the corner and saw Deathstroke standing there, he stopped cold. The slow dread in his chest intensified to near-panic. His throat felt tight. "What are you doing?" The sound of his own voice startled him. He felt disconnected from it. He was in complete shock, even denial, and he kept telling himself that this wasn't what it looked like. It couldn't be what it looked like. Dick didn't know how to reconcile with the idea.

An agent that was trapped in the doorway close to him screamed for him to help her. Blinking, Dick held up a hand. "It's all right. You'll be all right."

Slade: "She won't be," Slade answered. "Her body is half crushed." He pulled his pistol, leveling it at the woman. "It'd be more of a mercy to get out of my way and let me finish up here." He knew he was right, and he knew that Dick would be a pain in the ass regardless. He hadn't anticipated that he would do this. That he would appear. But he had, and Slade would have to deal with that. "I hadn't thought you'd show up so quickly." He had known he'd come, but Slade had half wondered if he'd get out before anyone from the League surfaced.

Dick: Dick glared at him, but he instantly moved so that he was standing between the gun and the woman. At the same time and on instinct, he withdrew both escrima sticks. "No." He wasn't going to let him just shoot her, especially if there were still a chance that she could live. "I..." What? Slade had expected him to show up? This was some sort of plan? His mind raced back to the last time they'd seen each other. Suddenly it made more sense - or less, he wasn't sure. It was impossible to understand why this was happening. Seeing Slade as Deathstroke made it ten times worse. "I was here before you," he said woodenly, his jaw clenched. "Was this the job you told me about? Is this what you were hired to do?"

It was the only thing that made sense. Slade had lied to him... again. He'd been lying the entire time. But why? To get closer to him? To get information from Dick about the league, so he would know when to plan the attack?

Slade: Slade blinked before shaking his head. "No. It wasn't the fucking job, Dick." There was no point playing at secrecy. Dick had been outed to the whole city, and all of these fucking people knew who he was. They knew enough to nearly kill him, and Slade wasn't going to give them a second chance. Therefore, it didn't matter if they heard him or not. "I knew you'd show up because you always show up. You always appear to stop things. But I'm doing what needs to be done. What I'm surprised your people haven't done sooner."

Why hadn't Wayne taken them out? They could have easily dealt with NOVA. They had Superman on their side and Bruce Wayne was balls-deep in a woman would could literally destroy reality as they knew it with a single phrase. Slade did his research and he wasn't a moron. He hadn't come to Star City to do this, and he hadn't given a shit about NOVA until they had hurt Dick. But that had made his personal. Slade wasn't going to let Dick go without retribution, and he wasn't risking King Midas not being available to make death obsolete should they manage to actually successfully kill Dick the second time around.

Dick: "Then why are you doing this??" Dick wasn't making the connection, even though he might have been able to figure it out if he wasn't so stunned by what he'd seen. He just couldn't get his head wrapped around it. NOVA had been a thorn in everyone's side for years. Even though he was aware they had some sort of involvement in what happened to him, it didn't occur to him that it would have inspired something like this. They didn't know for sure who orchestrated the attack yet. The last he heard, Tim was still tracking down surveillance. Even when they did find out who was responsible, it wasn't as if he'd want them dead.

Shaking his head, he stepped back, but still maintained the position between Slade's gun and the agent. "You think the answer is to kill them all? Destroy the building? That isn't the answer. That isn't going to change things for us, or for mutants or metahumans. That - it isn't - why? Why would you..." The information that came over the comm made his mouth snap shut. His eyes widened. "Damian?" Suddenly he moved, his palm striking the side of the gun as he tried to disarm him. "Why is my little brother here, Slade??"

Slade: "I don't care about mutants and metahumans, Dick. I'm not a hero. I don't care about the greater cause." Slade had always been a businessman, and by virtue of being a businessman, he cared more about himself and his people than he ever would about some overarching cause. In his years as Deathstroke, he had learned that most people died the same at the end of the day, and good or evil was all fallacy. He found that his way of viewing the world was more realistic. Less doomed to fail.

As the other seemed to get some kind of comm transmission, Slade reached up to speak into his own, informing Damian that the League had arrived. The kid could choose his own adventure as to what he would do next.

"He's here for the same reason I'm here, Dick. You. We're doing what your father should have done. What his precious League should have done. These fucking people shot you in the head. You're one of their own gets fucked?" He shook his head, and very nearly reached up to pull off his mask. But he couldn't. Not if he wanted any hope of walking the streets of Star City as a free man.

Dick: Dick was seeing red. He had no idea what was going on. None of it made sense to him, partly because he wasn't allowing his brain to slow down and process the information. He was already starting to suspect what the answer was and he didn't want to hear it. The woman behind him was the only one in earshot, but even if there were other witnesses, he was too infuriated to think about protecting Slade's identity. The rage and absolute devastation was dizzying and he didn't know how to channel it.

"What?" Even though his voice was almost a whisper, it was obvious that anger simmered just below the surface. "No - don't. Don't try to tell me this has to do with me. You can't possibly think this is what I want. That I would want people dead because of me. I..." It made him sick when he thought about the bodies he'd passed on his way here. The idea that he was responsible for it was overwhelming. And Damian being part of it - Damian, who had trained with him and thrived as Robin - was too much to handle.

The woman's cries had stopped. Dick felt his back against the wall and he slid halfway down it, bent over, his grip so hard on the sticks that his knuckles were white. "I can't believe you did this. How could you? Do you know what this means? Do you even know what you've done?"

Slade: Slade sheathed his weapon. He didn't need it. He'd never use it properly on Dick anyway. He watched the other sink and shook his head. "What you want isn't necessarily what you needed, Dick," Slade said, softening for him as he always did. Beneath the mask, his face gentled, not that it would matter. "I protected you. I did all of this for you. Damian wanted to do it too. I didn't coerce him or force him. But don't you see that this pandemic from NOVA would continue to worsen? I wouldn't see you in another fucking hospital bed on their account while your so-called father sat useless even for calling in your fairy godmother to fix you." He shook his head. "I wouldn't."

He moved toward him, reaching out to catch his chin. "Don't you see? I did it because you wouldn't. I did it so you wouldn't have to, and so that even your team wouldn't have to. This method makes changes, kid. I've been using it a long time."

Dick: All Dick could do was shake his head. He could feel his hands shaking, but he managed to retain his grip on the sticks. It was the only thing that was keeping him together, grounded, and he barely heard what Slade was saying. The words twisted up in his mind. "Stop. Stop. No." He couldn't listen to it anymore. "I didn't need to see them die. I didn't need to know that I'm responsible for their deaths, or that it's because of me that my little brother went back to being something he's worked so hard not to be."

His breath caught when Slade took his chin and he lifted his gaze. "Do you think that absolves me? It doesn't. I played a part in this." Even if it were a passive role, he had been the driving force behind it. He'd failed to stop it in time, or even see it coming, despite the warning signs he'd gotten from Damian. "I didn't need this. I needed you."

Slade: He hadn’t expected Dick to understand or to be grateful. Why should he be? Still, Slade shook his head, especially tripping up as Dick mentioned Damian. “Something he worked hard not to be for you, kid. Do you really think that he’s ever going to be like Batman? It’s in his blood. Literally. He’s an Al Ghul, and all Batman ever did was tell him how wrong he was. How every belief he carried was wrong. He’s worked so hard to snuff out every hint of his mother and never paused to think the kid might be better off like Red Hood. Or like me.” Slade scoffed. “Damian’s choice was his own, and it’s probably one of the first ones he’s felt certain about. You all tried to beat it out of him, but never taught him why.”

He shook his head. “And I’ll let you in on a secret that Bruce Wayne never will: there is no why. There is no moral absolutism, Dick. Anyone who claims they know greater based on morality is selling bullshit. Look at you. You won’t even let them see who you are, what you need. All because Batman forced you into something you weren’t and then threw you out when he was fucking done with you.”

“Horseshit,” he answered fiercely. “The only part you played was showing up here and doing this. I chose to make the plans, Damian chose to work with me, I swing my own fucking weapon and so does he. And we do it for the same motivation.” Because they loved him. Slade loved so few people in this world. There were even fewer for whom he’d put down his life. Dick was in a group he could count on one hand. And it was Slade’s choice. “I did this, little bird. You did nothing.”

Dick: "That's not true!" Dick insisted, instantly agitated and angry at the thought that Damian had done anything for his sake. It had been his decision too. When he'd encouraged Damian to take up the Robin mantle, it had been with the understanding that he would follow the rules required to wear the suit. That was a choice he'd made. At some point, Dick always imagined that Damian would make his own way in the world. This wasn't the choice he expected him to make, however, especially when he was supposed to be working with Barbara. With Bruce. This wasn't supposed to happen. None of it felt right. "You don't know what I taught him," he said hoarsely. "I always told him why. He..." What had happened? How had this happened?

He shook his head, but his breath caught when Slade brought up what Batman had done. It brought another wave of anger, and he pushed his hand away from his face. "No. I chose to be Robin. I wanted it. I believed in it. I believed in what he taught me. All of it." It hurt to hear those words spoken aloud. Bruce throwing him away. That had been what it felt like, even though he'd gotten more explanation in the years that followed. What he had failed to live up to were Bruce's standards. He'd made them his own and tried diligently to stay in line and to be perfect, but he would always fall short. It was an impossible expectation he'd never be able to maintain. "I put it on myself," he said dully. The anger was still there, but there was no energy behind it. Motivation. That's what he was. "Doesn't matter. What now? We all walk away from this place. NOVA rebuilds. More agents replace these. It's pointless and it doesn't change what happened. It doesn't change what will happen. This isn't what I wanted and it's sure as hell not what I needed." Pushing away from the wall, Dick suddenly remembered the woman and bent down next to her, reaching for her wrist. He didn't feel a pulse. His shoulders crumpled and he lifted his other hand to his face, pressing it over his eyes. "You threw me away, too, you know, and for what? This?" Closing his eyes, he took a slow breath. "Just... go. Go before they get here."

Slade: “If it wasn’t true, why is he still fucking killing after all these years? Why isn’t he Robin anymore? It’s bullshit, Dick. What reason do you have to tell him that he can’t be what he is? That he can’t do what he’s good at? Not everyone in the world is destined to be a fucking superhero. He’s a person, and people make their own choices. Look at Red Hood. You love him, don’t you? In spite of the fact that he’ll never be ‘good’. You love me. And I know what I am, too. So do you. You’ve always known, Dick. And you loved me anyway.”

“And he let you. You put it on yourself and he never fucking told you that this life would kick you in the ass over and over and sometimes your fuck ups are just a part of being alive.” He shook his head, looking away. “I’m a shitty father. My kids hate me and crave me all at the same time and it’s because I fucked them up. But at least I’m not so arrogant as to think that my little girl doesn’t hurt inside every time I’m hard on her. That my sons aren’t lobotomized from the effects of his death or fucking mute from a gamble I lost. I did that. I ruined them. I don’t walk around pretending I didn’t. And I’d never let them tell me I hadn’t.” Slade loved his children. He loved them so much, and he hurt them all the time. It was why he had pushed them to the Titans. They had needed them. They didn’t need him. Slade had seen that. Bruce Wayne saw nothing but his fucking agenda, and he didn’t care who fell to it.

“It’s not pointless,” he snarled. “It escalates. Prompts action. No war ever ended because the good guys sat in their ivory towers planning and never acting. Now you’ll all have to, and now they won’t think they can get away with sending an assassin after you again. I’ll kill them over and over again, Dick. I will never let them hurt you like that again. Whether you want me anymore or not, I looked you in the eye and told you I loved you. I’ve told one other person. I’m not gonna fail you like I failed her."

He caught Dick’s face again, this time pressing his masked forehead to his. “No,” he said. “I just accepted that I’d never be a good enough man for you, Dick. That I could feel more fiercely for you than I ever did for another person, and I still wouldn’t ever be what you thought you wanted. I accepted that this would probably be it for us. I’m not going to stop loving you, little bird. I didn’t for ten years. Even if it’s fucked up, it’s what we’ve got. I’m not throwing you away. You’re just cutting me loose. I understand.”

He pushed back, giving Dick one last lingering look. “The main bombs will blow in four minutes. The larger ones. Let them know if you want. Or just get everyone the fuck out.” There was a pressure in his chest and he almost wished that his heart would explode like Grant’s had. Slade Wilson was a stranger to heartache, because he usually ran on too much quiet rage or brutal resignation to let it through. But he had known from the start of all this that they’d be doomed in spite of everything. He just fucking hated to be right.

Dick: Dick shook his head. "That's not what I told him. I... wanted to show him another way to live, a way that wasn't killing, because he didn't know any other way. He'd never had a choice before. He chose Robin. I knew it was only temporary, until he made a new name for himself, and that would also be his choice." He'd made an effort not to box Damian into one way to be. Of course, that wasn't to say what happened once Bruce took over, but there was a reason Damian hadn't given up Robin. Wincing, he lowered his head, unable to argue against the undeniable fact that he loved Jason and Slade despite what they did. He couldn't think of them as bad.

"He didn't have to tell me. I learned that on my own." None of the lessons had been easy. Dick wished Bruce could have been more of a father rather than a mentor. He knew now that Bruce hadn't wanted to act as if he were replacing his father. At the time, it had felt like a rejection. Hearing Slade talk about his children and compare what he'd done to Bruce made his heart sink. It was something he'd thought about before, but only when he'd felt embittered and frustrated at Bruce's inability to emote. The way he was had cost them all. Lives had been lost to it. Dick knew Slade saw the effects of his own upbringing and had his own thoughts about it. Slade was the one who slept next to Dick at night, who dealt with his frequent night terrors, a side effect from early exposure to fear gas and Joker venom. He found himself unable to speak up and defend Bruce this time. If anything, he didn't want to undermine what Slade said about his own kids. There was truth to it, even if Bruce had his reasons. Wincing, he shook his head again when Slade said he would kill them over and over. It made him wish, naively, that NOVA wouldn't come back to the city. He didn't think they'd give up that easily, but maybe it would slow them down long enough for the league to get the upper hand. Maybe they could end this sooner rather than later. It wasn't something he could focus on right now. Not when Slade was saying things like that to him, words that sliced right through him and tore into his heart. He could barely stand to hear them.

This time he didn't pull away from Slade's hold. His eyes stayed open, even though he couldn't see him at all behind the mask. He wanted to remove it. This wasn't what he wanted to think about when he closed his eyes. He wanted to see his face. "Don't... don't put this on me," he said, almost too quietly for the words to be understood; his voice was broken. "I wanted you. I risked everything for you, for this, because I thought..." Swallowing hard, his gaze drifted down to the woman next to him. "I thought you wanted it too. But this is the only thing you really love, isn't it? The only thing you really want."

The main bombs. There were more? Shocked, he looked up at him, suddenly realizing the high likelihood that members of the league could have been killed if he hadn't gotten here first. He quickly communicated the information to Babs, but he couldn't bring himself to move. To leave. There was no way he was going anywhere without Damian. "I'm getting everyone out."

Slade: Slade shook his head. He could see the betrayal in Dick's eyes. He could see how hurt he was. But Slade had anticipated that. It didn't mean he was sorry for what he had done. It didn't mean that he believed it to be the wrong call. He had done it for Dick and he'd do it again. A thousand times over. He would risk everything, including the security of the relationship, to keep him safe. "You know what I want, Dick. I haven't lied about that. Ever."

Still, the assassin understood a dismissal when he saw one. Falling back, he gave one last long and lingering gaze to the other before turning to get out. Radioing Damian, he told him to clear out, or to report to Dick. Whatever he was going to do. There was no time to dawdle.

When he made it into the fresh air, Slade didn't look back. He only prayed as he walked that his little bird had managed to take flight as the final explosions sounded against his retreating back. He winced with the first, but tasted bitter resolve with the second.

[toflyandfall]

YAY :D! OK, I wanted to please ask what your thoughts were on Dick and Shawn's relationship. Did you feel it was in character? Did you feel it made sense? Did you want them to last or did you feel it came out of left field and didn't make any sense? How did you feel about the pregnancy scare and how they broke up ("I know what I said/did was shitty but we can fix this. We can make this work!") - does it sound like Dick? I'm also happy ur still here. I'm so used to asking you & Shelly so thank u!

I'll be honest with you, anon--DC burnt me hard with the Spyral travesty and then putting Tom King on Batman and keeping Seeley on Nightwing, so I don't keep up with current DC comics.  I don’t enjoy them and nearly without exception I don’t find them to be written well or in character. However, you're very sweet and I want to help fill the meta void in your life, so I read through Dick and Shawn's arc together and here's my analysis.

 I’m dividing this into two parts.  The first half will be as objective as possible and analyze your questions on whether Dick seems in character, what he says during the break up, etc.  It’s roughly chronological, starting when we first meet Shawn and continuing through to the break up itself.

The second half I’ll put under a readmore, as it’ll answer your questions about my more subjective opinions about the arc.

 Let’s start by looking at Dick’s previous and most happy relationships to see what good indicators for an in-character relationship would be.

  Getting physically involved with someone -before- having a secure emotional connection with them is not in character for him.  All of Dick's major relationships have been preceded by extended periods of mutual flirtation and bonding before physical overtures.  His most significant and longest lasting romantic connections began by building emotional and romantic attachment before sexual intimacy, frequently paired with a shared history together that precedes even the flirtation.  

There’s significant canon evidence that he’s demi sexual: a comprehensive, though hardly exhaustive, collection of it can be found here and here (the latter half of the second link relates to the Grayson series specifically, but overall it offers a nice long view on his relationship history since character creation and also addresses beyond-canon factors at DC that impacted some relevant canon writings.)  Whether you use the label demi for him or not, it’s canon that he’s not comfortable jumping into bed without a secure emotional connection.

 So let’s look at Shawn’s relationship with Dick through the lens of relationships in which he was the happiest and most comfortable.  Those relationships have these things in common:  

He has a stable, safe emotional connection to the individual.

He is willing and comfortable engaging in banter and flirtation.  

Relationship is based on mutual respect and affection, often paired with shared history together.

Now, let’s look at Shawn’s relationship.

Their ‘history’ together (as Defacer and Robin) is antagonistic, and their interaction in the past leave Dick feeling uneasy. Sure, he seems to think about her situation, but as this panel reads, the kindest that can be said of any emotional connection there seems to be here is one-sided pity.

Nightwing #10 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Once they meet again, she’s his boss.  Even or perhaps especially in the world of #MeToo, it’s important to address workplace relationships, particularly boss/employee scenarios, with care and sensitivity.  Seeley sidesteps this by just…having her later quit the non-profit she founded and giving Dick her position for a while.  However, even if she’d just worked in HR at an equal level with him when they met instead of being his boss, let’s look at the amount of participation he shows in their first meeting:

Nightwing #10 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

There is a lot of her talking and almost none of him.  He’s not engaged in their interaction here.  Where he tries later as Nightwing to engage more personally, he’s immediately shut down.  The most dialogue we hear from him is in his own head—in their first meeting, the ratio of her dialogue to his is literally 22 sentences to 9.  Of those 9 sentences, one is a lie he gives to avoid establishing an emotional connection with her, another she interrupts, and three of which were less than five words long: “Sorry.” “You can call me Dick” and “Thanks, Ms Chang”.  Even taking the workplace environment into account as best we can, this is not meeting any of the three criteria for Dick to be feeling emotionally attachment or attraction.  No one would look at those 9 almost-sentences and that flashback and say, “Ah yes, this man is deeply infatuated with her.”  

This is made even more jarring by the fact that the internal narration frequently doesn’t match the actual scenes we’ve witnessed.   

Nightwing #11 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Nothing about the few sentences Dick has managed to finish around Shawn when this narration comes up has said ‘attraction’, physical or otherwise, but the dialogue here reads like Dick was laying the flirtations on thick every time he saw her.  Same with when they talk about the flashback scene later.  There’s a lot of cognitive disconnect between what Seeley wants to tell us happened and what we actually see and hear and have evidence of between the characters.

If you’re wondering why I’m examining these initial interactions with particular depth, it is because frankly, these are the most interactions the two have together for roughly the first five issues of their ‘getting to know each other’ phase...and when they reunite at the end of those issues, we are supposed to believe they are already heavily, life-changingly in love.  So, for all intents and purposes, this scattered handful of conversations is all we have to analyze to examine whether this fits the qualifications for whether Dick would feel comfortable and emotionally attached enough to approach a physical relationship.

We have three chances in their various guises for Dick and Shawn to meet and start developing that all-important rapport.  This is our first initiation to their relationship and it certainly doesn’t read as a positive one.  The next one, she yells at him and kicks him out—again, a whole page of her dialogue to a fragmented sentence of his.  The third one, the flashback panel posted above, they don’t even speak to each other. Two of them are actively red-flags of being unable to establish a closer connection with that person; the third is a neutral connection.  This is not the kind of two-way interaction we see where he’s comfortable and interested in someone, and this is not an emotionally secure connection.  

Shawn disappears for three issues or so, during which they have, obviously, no interactions.

The very next after that, by the end of it, she lunges into him to kiss him.  

The next issue after that, they’re evidently in honeymoon heaven and already shacking up.  

Trust me, we’ll be going over that under the readmore later.

Back in the area of the objective, if you ever need to know the number of days Tim Seeley thinks is needed for two people with self-admitted enormous trust issues to form the ideal Hollywood manic pixie dream girl relationship, we were given a careful timeline.  

68 days—first date

Nightwing #15 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

62 days—first intercourse.

Nightwing #15 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Six days.  Not even a week.

They’ve met each other, then met each other’s parents and are living together and are one baby scare away from the suburbs in less time than it takes for someone to finish a semester at college.  It took literally longer for the issues of Nightwing where Shawn was an absent character in her own arc to get published in our real lives than it did for their on-panel romance to go from not even knowing each other to Nightwing (not Dick, but Nightwing) kissing Shawn (not Defacer, but Shawn) upside down in the middle of the city.

Trust issues, amirite?

Nightwing #15 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Meanwhile during that mostly off-panel ‘dating’ period we have these wildly out of character moments. In particular, there are two noteworthy things.

Shawn says she never would have pinned Dick for being a traditionalist.  

That directly contradicts…well…most of the statements people close to him have made of his dating views, and also his own self-stated views of them, whose top tracks include things like “…this might sound unhip, but I feel strange about living with someone I’m not married to”, “I gotta be honest, Roy—I couldn’t make love to someone I didn’t really love”, and “Love should be between two people”.  

We have a direct parallel of an in-character Dick moment walking someone home after an early date to use for comparison.  

Nightwing #31  

Things Dick does in this panel: reassures his date there is no pressure for sex and the night will not be ending that way, plan out just about the most traditional date experience, and engage in light-hearted mutual bantering.  

Additional relevant context around this panel: Dick and Clancy have known each other for months and have a friendly, mutually respectful connection.  Dick’s turned down a sizable number of invitations from her because despite living in the same building, the vigilante life made it difficult for him to make and keep plans.  This is their second date because Dick had to bail in the middle of their first.  It took months both in comics-time and in real-time of developing a mutual interest to lead up to that first real date.  And by then, the reader is invested in the status of that relationship, too.

To contrast the then vs now, we also have in that same moment with Shawn Dick, of all people, ignores a phone call without a second thought in favor of trying for a booty call. On the first date.  Let’s take a look at Dick and Clancy’s first date, 9 issues earlier than the one we just saw.

Nightwing #22  

Dick is a chronic workaholic, with all the associated inability to disconnect from his work while in relationships even during date night or intimate moments. It’s perfectly reasonable, considering that with his lifestyle choice, that phone call could be life or death for someone he loves, a stranger, or many, many someones, and it’s put significant strain on his past relationships when dating those not actively in the superhero lifestyle.  Clancy is, again, a great example of this--despite genuine interest on both sides, he blew her off at least half a dozen times because of vigilante emergencies before they even got��to their first date.  And then despite their great rapport and a genuine interest in being there, he still ditched her in the middle of it when his phone rang.

What we see in Seeley’s Nightwing #15 not only runs directly contrary to significant chunks of his history and personality, it also tells a deeply upsetting story of a world where exists a horndog Dick Grayson who would risk other people’s lives to get laid with a chick he’s known less than a week.

They handle vigilante interruptions more in character in later issues once the relationship is established, but...yikes. 

Not in character.

We’re going to take a little jump here to move from discussing whether their relationship is in character for Dick to whether their breakup was in character.  

In general, it actually is pretty in character for Dick to panic himself into commitment in a romantic relationship even if he’s not really sure about it.  Dick is very interesting that way: he runs away from platonic relationships under tension, either by throwing himself into casework or by literally setting up in a new location.  If his romantic relationship is undergoing trauma, however, he's very capable of reacting the opposite, like in this example with Kory.

Team Titans #2

There’s even an awkward Devin Grayson incident where he thinks a woman is serial-murdering her husbands, fake-marries her to solve the case, uncovers the real killer who wasn’t her, and feels bad enough afterward that he offers to date her for real. (An interesting side-note: this makes Devin Grayson responsible for not one but two of Dick’s emotionally compromised almost-marriages. This one, at least, came before she jumped the shark with the dreaded Catalina Flores arc.)

Nightwing Annual #1

So let’s take a look at where Shawn’s exact circumstance falls in against those.

  To me, the lines that sound the most like Dick are actually the lines he says that cause their break-up.  

Nightwing #23 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

Dick has a lot of darkness and anger in him. He’s a lot like Bruce and he’s a lot scared of how much he’s like Bruce.  We’ve seen several timelines where Dick’s had biological children and we’ve also seen how he tempered Damian’s darkness when Bruce was lost in the timestream.  Though this arc and timeline does not show it well (and that’s a whole different meta), we have the advantage of having known how Dick behaves as a father in a way this particular Dick has never had to experience.  And we know that when kids are in the picture he does work hard at repressing or concealing his anger and darkness to be a good role model, often in a way he isn’t sure he has the capacity to do when there are no children involved.  Despite some of the specific phrasings being iffy, the general sentiments here do feel like legitimate concerns Dick would have.

With this knowledge, that moment felt significantly more honest to Dick Grayson’s character than most of the rest of their relationship.  

Nightwing #25 (Nightwing: Back to Bludhaven)

The actual break-up dialogue itself is…well, it’s not out of character, exactly, because as shown, Dick has been known to clutch onto potential romances hardest when he feels they’re about to slip away. But the delivery of it isn’t in character.  Yes, in general, Dick has a temper and he lashes out. However, he’s clearly aggressive and angry in this panel, where previous experience has showed us he should be at his most emotionally vulnerable and pleading.  Dick, who is a generally emotionally closed-off person despite his extroverted demeanor, reacts to these kind of romance scares by showing emotional vulnerability in ways he frequently is unable to do during the relationship itself.  And the panel that he’s apologizing for as being a crappy thing to have said, is…as mentioned, the panel that comes closest to a consistent Dick Grayson.

And the thing they’re fighting about is that Dick missed a job interview because he was doing Nightwing things.  Shawn fell in love with Dick knowing he was Nightwing (somehow), he’s been Nightwing the whole time they dated, constant interruptions and all, but she breaks up with him because somehow 'the thing I always loved most…you.’ apparently wasn’t one that included the Nightwing schedule.  She also seems to be both blaming him for wanting the baby and also accusing him of not wanting it.  At the risk of getting off-topic and subjective, I’ll be honest and say Shawn’s dialogue here makes no sense to me at all.

Dick’s tried not being Nightwing, in both pre-52 and new-52.  Dick spends a fair amount of pre-52 time either bouncing from job to job or lacking a day job entirely.  In both pre-52 and new-52, the Dick she’s claiming is the one she’s always loved the most…doesn’t exist anywhere I can think of. Certainly not anywhere during their on-panel relationship.

Now that we’ve looked at what we see of Dick and Shawn on-panel, it’s time to talk about the impact this has off-panel.

I happen to have been re-reading a lot of Chuck Dixon’s original Nightwing’s run lately.  And here’s the thing.  Clancy’s been showing up consistently in that run as someone Dick could be attracted to for for oh, about...two full graphic novels now (that’s 17 single-issues) and they haven’t so much as gone on a date, let alone shared a smooch. It takes 20 issues before they make it to the first date we saw from Nightwing #22.  I don’t remember if she’s in every single issue of that period, so I’m going to round down by probably a lot and say that’s a minimum of a year when this was getting published for us as readers to get to know her and how she interacts with Dick, to get interested and invested in a potential relationship.  In comics-time, it’s weeks before Dick actually sees her face, not just hears her voice.  Even if you’re reading post-publication like me, that’s hours and hours where we watch she and Dick bond and banter and develop a mutual interest.

That’s build up.  That’s emotional investment developed over time.

I’m not saying every single relationship has to take more than a year’s worth of issues on-panel to develop.  However, she does summarize one of the single biggest struggles for DC’s cadre of writers over the last few years.  Basically, the problem I have with this beyond just the characterizations is the same that made me stop reading from New 52 onward: DC constantly trying to skip out on the process of creating meaningful emotional build-up or connections but still expecting to cash in on an emotional payoff.  

You can’t go from ‘kissed once’ to ‘been together for years like an old married couple couple vibes’ off-pages like Nightwing #15 tries to do.  Even if you expect the readers to believe the protagonist now feels that connection (which, frankly, I don’t), we don’t have that connection to the relationship.  It’s a cheap paper cutout with no actual emotional content behind it--why should we care if it tears under pressure?  We have no stake in it; we don’t know why the protagonist has a stake in it.  It’s meaningless.  

As a reader, my experience with Shawn and Dick’s relationship is as follows: a) they meet in a scenario where she is his boss (strong do not date vibes) b) they meet as vigilante and paroled ex-villain and she doesn’t even let him finish a sentence (would not date) c) they show a flashback where they don’t even speak to each other (Robin pities her; no ‘date/no date’ vibe data gathered), d) they share a confusingly out of nowhere ‘emotional’ moment that didn’t match up with my prior understanding of either what I extrapolated from the flashback or what I saw in their on-panel interactions (vibe check, please??) then she disappears for several issues into police custody (no ‘date/no date’ vibe data gathered)  The very next time she sees him, she betrays him  (STRONG do not/would not date).  Then all of a sudden at the end of that issue she kisses him.  

My context for their relationship is based on two ‘emotional’ conversations of dubious quality and consistency, one ‘look’ where their dialogue contradicts my own understanding of the on-panel events, a shouting match or two, and a very major betrayal that just happened to work out alright for everybody but is never actually addressed.  Most of her introductory arc where we’d be piecing out how she fits in with Dick and how they interact together, she isn’t even there for.  They’ve known each other for less than a week.  I the reader have known them for, in my case, maybe an hour of read-time. 

And the very next time I see them, I’m supposed to believe, and more importantly, feel emotionally attached to the fact that They Are The Most In Love Couple To Ever Be In Love.  

Trying to put a timeline on intimacy as a gimmick instead of establishing genuine emotional connection never works.  Yes, maybe we knew that one person in high school or know someone in college who falls hard and often and met and married someone within two months, but Dick Grayson has never been that person.  Maybe this style of flashback manic pixie romance would be more believable if they’d tried it on a different character with a different history and personality, but it especially never works on a character like Dick Grayson with a strong history of being slow to decide his feelings and even slower to jump into bed. 

In order to work, the entire arc that follows with the kidnapping by Pyg is predicated on the fact that I, the reader, am supposed to already care about Shawn’s relationship with Dick, and that I, the reader, believe in the validity of Shawn’s relationship with Dick and in Dick’s commitment to it.  But I haven’t been given time or reason to do either of those things by the time that arc starts.  

You cannot shortcut relationships and expect them to be meaningful to the reader.

So they threw in a baby.  Because even if you don’t care about a relationship, everyone cares about babies.

Throwing in a baby to up the emotional stakes is just a further step up that same problematic cheap-shortcuts ladder I was talking about: like in a stereotyped failing marriage, if you feel like you have to add a kid just to put meaning into your relationship again, maybe what you actually need to do is take time and consider what that relationship is built on.

[miss-choco-chips]

Put a ring on it

I’m not sure what this is, everyone. Had it on my docs for a while, got bored during work and thought ‘what if I just post this?’, and here we are. Basically the Core Four being loving and caring (and spiteful).

Shout out to @animemangasoul who pumped me up about this and @the-quiet-carrotcake and @iphoenixrising for letting me cry to them the Titans loving Tim.

Can be read as either ship or friendship

------.------

When shit went down, Wally and Roy made sure they were nowhere near the planet. A nice little interplanetary fuckery called for anyone free, and both of them had magically clean schedules, so off they went, praying to every god they knew about (and, with how many holy disasters they had faced between them, there were a lot) to be back after the worst of the mess had blown over.

Even if it meant missing the undoubtedly hilarious face Batman would make when he found out. Not even the chance of witnessing that was worth staying and waiting with bated breath until someone pointed out that, in the end, it was both their faults.

-So let me get this straight.

-Difficult for me, but go on.

Wally rolled his eyes, chucking a pillow at his little dude, wondering how Nightwing could do this with not one, not two, but three badly adjusted little brothers (and that without counting the girls, though, to be honest, they already had Babs). Truly, a hero of the ages. Arsenal just cackled from his place in front of the coffee table, where he was keeping them company and cleaning his equipment.

-I’m serious. I’ve never seen you this mad without a bad guy to blame for it.

-Well…

-As furious as you are at them, Bart, they are still the good guys.

-Debatable.

Wally threw another pillow, and Bart, arms crossed and all but vibrating on the couch, didn’t even bother on dodging. Just moved his particles quick enough that the thing went straight through him. 

Arsenal raised an eyebrow at them- It’s scary when you do that. Like a freaking ghost.

-It’s scary that Tim’s whole family can be this level of neglectful, but you don’t see me bitching at them.

-Only because you know they’ll give you your ass back to you in a silver platter after they are done whooping it -interjected the older speedster, snack bag on his lap, a few more by the ground at his feet, sitting as close to Bart as the whole ‘don’t touch, I bite’ aura he had around him would allow.

-Kinky.

This time, Wally’s pillow was aimed at the archer. Roy just dodged without looking, still cross legged on the other side of the little table facing the couch.

-Real talk now, it’s not like they are jerks on purpose. We all know the Bats are on a whole new level of ‘always busy’, it’s to be expected they wouldn’t have time for social niceties.

Wally winced, scooting a little further away from Bart when he looked up to glare at Roy. That wasn’t a nice look. That was a ‘I can take you to someplace no one would hear you scream in less than ten seconds’ look.

-My seventeen year old best friend managed to finish high school after having to take a year off to go look for his missing mentor, going through several different mourning processes and dodging a frankly creepy cradle robber of a ninja terrorist, all while kicking ass and taking names, taking care of a huge as hell company, and keeping up the intel guy work for the rest of his shitty family. And he still graduated early. The least they could do after the fuckery he was put through by their collective stupidity would be go as moral support, but no. No, other things are more important than such a big milestone on his life. Fuckers.

Wound down after the rant, Bart dropped back on the couch, shrinking in place, oozing contempt from every pore.

Roy raised his eyes to share a look with Wally. Even if the bro code meant they were contractually obligated to defend their respective best friends, there was undeniable truth to Bart’s statement. Jason had gone on killing sprees for far less than Tim’s situation, and God knows Dick would have showed a big  middle finger at his mentor and go off world with the Titans as a protest at the slightest fight. All in all, Red Robin was taking it like a champ.

-Jason’s busy with the Torinelli drug cartel thingie -tried Roy nonetheless, loyal as one could be. 

Wally nodded- And Dick had already promised Damian to go on a camping-training trip that weekend...

-Great. So criminals that aren’t going anywhere and the ‘favorite’ demon child are more important than my best friend’s graduation, which isn’t even a long thing, just a couple hours and a few photos. Awesome. Do you happen to know Batman’s excuse? I mean, I’m sure is equally as shitty as his sons’ excuses, but, you know. Variety and stuff.

Wally sighed, because yeah, point. Were it Bart’s graduation, nothing short of the end of the world would have kept him from going, but, again, he only had one little dude to worry about. Dick’s house was full.

-You’ll be there -tried Roy, dropping his arrow back on the table and resting his crossed arms next to it, leaning forward to look straight at Bart-, you and the rest of the brats, right? Supes and Diana’s babies. You guys may not be related like that, but that’s not necessary for you to be family.

Like the Teen Titans were, went unsaid- the older heroes exchanged a glance, reminiscent of their days fighting side by side under Dick’s unwavering leadership. No matter where they were now, that’s where they both came from.

-Yeah -accepted Bart, but the frown hadn’t left his face-. It’s just. His parents are dead, his ‘foster’ bat-family are dicks. He has us, yeah, but… I wished he could have his family there, you know. Like, if I could adopt him, I would, just so he can have that.

Wally dropped the empty snack bag onto the ground and took a new one, tipping it in Bart’s direction as a peace offering- I mean, it’s still a month away, maybe one of them would clear his schedule and go? Probably not all of them, but anything’s better than nothing, right?

Bart harrumphed, hunching even lower in the couch, pout still present.

-If anything else fails -joked Roy, going back to cleaning his stuff-, I hear Kara’s single right now, and Tim’s an emancipated minor. Get them to marry each other, and then your Super friend is technically his brother- or something like that. Political families still counts.

Bart went still for a second, and if Wally were less invested in his snack and more on the thoughtful expression on his face, he might have known ahead of time that his next words were a bad, bad idea.

-And if she’s not on board, you could always ask someone else on your team. Team as family and all that shit, Tim would literally be marrying into the fam. Want some chips?

But Bart was already gone.

-Huh? -blinked Roy- Where'd he run to?

-...

-...You don't think he…

-What? No. No, of course not, they aren't so dumb...

For a horrible second, Roy and Wally crossed eyes again, both remembering the stupid shit they got up to when they were seventeen, and replayed the conversation. Their jokes, that anyone with half a brain would take as that, as silliness. Then came the thought that being stupid was almost a requirement for being a Titan. 

With the kind of synchronicity one could only have after fighting side by side for years, they both jumped to their feet at the same time.

-I’ll hit Kori up, maybe she has some alien fuckery to deal with and we can tag along.

-Imma call Supes and let him know we’ll be off planet for a while. Shit, Dick’s gonna flip. He was the big B for a while, he knows stuff. Painful stuff.

-Dude, he at least doesn’t kill. Jay has guns, and it’s his favorite brother we’re talking about.

A shiver went through them when Batman’s reaction came to mind.

-If Kori’s not dealing with something, I’ll ask her to start shit up somewhere far, far away to give us an excuse to leave either way. She’s a goddess like that, she’ll help.

-Good thinking. I’ll start packing.

---.----

The secret meeting was held at one of Tim’s safe houses, because it had enough lead on the walls there was no risk of Superman overhearing them. Not that the owner of the place was aware of it; no one was, besides Cassie, Kon and Bart themselves. Keeping it hush hush was vital for the success of the mission.

-All on board then?

Kon’s smile could light up a town- Hell yeah dude. I’ll take care of getting Tim time off from work. Tam knows me and I’m fairly sure she doesn’t hate me as strongly as she does the bats. Fair warning though, she might ask to come with.

-She’s cool, so I’m in. We’re gonna need a witness anyway.

Cassie nodded, fierce smirk and challenge in her eyes- This is gonna piss so many people. Hey, do you think if we let Oracle in the know she’ll give us footage of the bats' faces when they find out?

Bart bit his lip- As crash as that would be, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.

Cassie deflated, but then shrugged it off- We’ll ask Tim, then. He’s as good as her with hacking, I’m sure he’ll figure something out.

-If he doesn’t kill us first, you mean.

-Don’t be a coward, Kon. I thought you were in.

-I’m not saying I’m backing down, just that we should put our business in order in case he snaps and murders us in cold blood. I know he has it in him, if pushed the right ways.

She nodded, because point. The almost feral look on her face wasn’t gone, though- Worth it. I'll be in charge of clothes. You reckon there's any chance I can get a dress on him?

-Sure, if you want him to actually break his no kill rule. 

-Fine, but he's wearing white anyway. It goes well with his skin tone.

Bart extended his first for her to bump- Now you're talking. I'll be the extraction man and take him to the place.

Kon crossed his arms, looking conflicted for the first time- We can't go the classic way about it, because a fake name would mean he won't take seriously what we're trying to do, and if we use his real one in a formal document, it'll hit the news before the ink has a chance to dry. And then he'll kill us for sure.

-You're awfully worried about him drawing blood, Blue. What gives?

-He's scared shitless of Cassie and you're too adorable to hurt, but me? I'm the one he's gonna focus his rage on, and you know how he gets when at his limit.

Cassie snorts- He can't live without you, you dork. I think we are all safe. And anyways, the plan is to make him too drunk to walk on a straight line, he wouldn't be able to hurt us.

-You say that -interjected Bart, getting up from where he was crouching above their carefully spread, color coded sheets of plans; Tim would be so proud- but I've seen the dude drop kick someone with a broken leg once. He can fuck shit up no matter the situation.

-True… still, we are doing it, right?

-Oh yeah, for sure, I just wanted everyone aware that it might be our last big bang.

-Then we better make sure it's one hell of an explosion, am I right?

-Hell yeah.

-This is gonna be so crash!

----.----

The entire thing had gone something like this.

On friday, Tam made Tim turn around and head back home the second he showed his face at the office, claiming the bags under his eyes clashed terribly with her new Prada handbag and she’d rather had it than him around. In Foxspeak, it meant ‘go the fuck to sleep or so help me God’. Tim would have fought back just on principle, but Tam had him at a standstill, because the spleen thing could very easily reach Alfred’s ears if he crosses her, and no one (him) wants that. As if to make sure he would obey, she demanded they share the car that would take her to the airport (did she have some meeting out of Gotham? He couldn’t remember) and dropped him at his Perch on her way there.

He wasn’t actually planning on sleep, maybe work some of his cases from home, start patrol early, possibly tracking Jason down to offer his help for the drug cartel thing. Confused by the unexpected way his morning had gone so far, he was woefully underprepared for a flash of red and yellow to whisk him from his living room the second he put his carrier bag on the ground. 

It was only years from using his team as glorified uber drives what kept him from nerve striking Bart on reflex. Knowing whatever he asked would be lost to the background sound of super fast travelling, he merely slumped over the thin shoulder he was thrown over and waited till they reached their destination.

Which… he wasn’t expecting Vegas.

The next few hours were a blur of his team explaining they had planned this gateaway as an early graduation party,  hugs and a few grateful tears on his part, and booze. So much booze. He was trained by Batman, he had a bigger than average resistance to… well, everything, and still, he got so, so wasted. 

Saturday’s hungover was cured with more booze. They hit casino after casino, danced over tables, payed a bar owner to close for the night and let them work their way through his entire supply, went to some neon party at someone’s exceedingly large hotel suite (the guy wasn’t getting his deposit back), his cellphone was thrown on a fountain after Cassie got sick of it going off again and again with Dick’s predetermined ringtone, drank some more, were kicked out of yet another casino... 

At some point Tam appeared (a very drunk Tim had hugged her and spun her around so fast her stilettos went flying and almost blinded someone), and they all went back to the hotel, where  Kon basically manhandled him into a white suit. More booze when Tim started asking questions, followed by a  two hour long stay at some park were Cassie, Bart and Kon took turns holding his hand, and then each others’, with Tam saying something about bonds, and family, and sickness, and health in the background, Kon muttering something in kryptonian and making Tim repeat it, Cassie dropping to one knee and sprouting some Amazonian speech, Bart jumping on his back after his own speech (futuristic laws and all) was done, then more booze, partying and….

Well, everything was a blur, before and after that.

They woke up saturday morning with the worst headache, in a undignified puppy pile back at their suit, minus Tam who apparently had her own room. Kon’s TTK took care of the blinds and Tim blinked awake at the sound (Robin instincts), looked at his sleeping friends and then went back to sleep, head pillowed by Bart’s butt, with Cassie’s knee denting his ribs and Kon’s arm thrown over his neck, completely disregarding the three rings hanging from his shiny new necklace.

That was a problem for sober Tim to solve. 

---.----

Monday morning, Tim went back to the office, Tam by his side, acting like everything was perfectly fine. 

Dick called after lunch asking about his whereabouts that past weekend, claiming he was missed during patrol, but backed down when informed he was actually relaxing with his friends. Bruce didn’t ask, probably had tracked him down the second he couldn’t find him and let him be after realizing he was at Las Vegas.

Everyone that saw them walking down WE’s hallways would have swore a trail of classic music followed them, graceful and elegant.

In Tim’s mind, however, the background sound was the kill bill sirens and blaring red lights.

Tam felt like a queen, coming back after conquering treacherous lands.

Tim felt like Jason may have been onto something when he died.

----.----

When the Big Day (capital letters included) arrived, and Tim got into the stage to accept his diploma (Honor Student, of course), his eyes automatically went to the loud, rowdy teenagers, sitting as close to the front as possible, cheering and smiling.

He was far enough that it could’ve been a trick of the light, but he thought he could see all three of them going misty-eyed. His own eyes watered when he shook the headmaster's hand and posed with his diploma for the cameras (Wayne Heir Graduating would be trending on every magazine by dinnertime), his friends never stopping yelling his name.

When the time came to throw the little hats, he catched by the corner of his eye how Bart held both Cassie’s and Kon’s hands, keeping them from flying in their emotion. If one paid close attention, their feet actually were floating juuust above the ground. They were just so genuinely excited for him, it was… it was amazing.

After as little smalltalk as possible with his classmates, he sneaked away into some hidden spot, away from prying cameras, and waited. Sure enough, his best friends were there barely ten seconds later, and using that same speed, they swept him off his feet. Bart was the first, latching to his front, Kon a close second jumping on his back and hugging his head. Cassie, ever the showoff, threw her hands around the three of them and spun them around as if they weighted nothing to her. That was probably the case.

-You did it, you did it, you did it!!!! Oh my god, this is so crash!!!

-Not that we had any doubt, with that big brain of yours. Making a girl so proud.

-Speak for yourself. Personally, I feared the worst. This is Gotham, after all.

-But nothing happened! And you GRADUATED!

Tim let out a laugh, allowing himself to just feel joy. Letting them see him like that, as payment for being the most awesome friends (family) in existence, he returned the hug, squeezing back as strongly as his non meta arms could.

Then, a voice behind them that he absolutely didn't expect- Congratulations, Master Timothy.

Without letting any of them go, Cassie turned around, so they could all see Alfred Pennyworth, in his Sunday’s best, looking proud and warm, his eyes glazed over with nostalgia when they landed on his young charge. One of the young men he had the honor to watch grow into the amazing person he was today.

Even more surprising, he held a tablet on his arms, screen facing them, with a familiar figure there, white streak and leather but no firearms, probably cautious of possible civilians around.

-Hey, baby bird. Sorry ‘couldn’t be ther’ p’rsonally. Hope ya don’t mind me an’ Alfie crashing like this.

-A-Alfred? Jason? What… I thought you were in Russia!!

The man on the screen scratched the back of his head, visibly uncomfortable but determined.

-Am, actually. But it’s yer big day, babybird. Wouldn’t missit for the world.

Tim’s already watery eyes just overflowed.

-----.----

It took a month for shit to hit the fan. Tim was honestly impressed, because things rarely went his way, and getting more than a few hours to mentally prepare for Disaster? Unheard of. What a shocker.

When it did went down, it was in large part because he was milking the ‘no metas in Gotham’ rule that kept his team at bay and allowed him to go days without sleeping. Kon would say it was karmatic retribution for ignoring their orders to relax and take it easy. He would protest, but really, how to deny the truth; if not for his sleep deprivation, his secret would have gone a lot longer without being unveiled.

 Between hacking into Lexcorp, running the dna samples he took during patrol half an hour ago on the database and finishing his report of the night, he was out of fucks to give. Damian bitching on his ear was the last drop.

-...And your mere presence here is an insult to Grayson's legacy. He founded it, Todd died for it, what did you even contribute to it?

A slow blink. Tim was aware his brain to mouth filter was as good as gone, but tired as he was, he just didn't care.

-Besides providing the brains on this whole fucking operation? Pants, I guess. Common sense. Ninja skills commended by your own grandfather, the king of ninjas. Virtue, too, since Dick is a verified hoe and Jason slept with your/

-C'mon Timmy -cut in Dick, Nightwing suit halfway down his chest, when Damian's face was turning an alarming shade of blue- aren't you a little old to be fighting a kid?

-Who are you calling kid?!

Typical, big bro to the rescue. Tim was too tired to be disappointed that once again Dick was siding with an eleven year old bully that kept harassing Tim. Never mind that he had been minding his business before Damian came to bark at him.

-Boys -chided Bruce and, huh, Tim had said that out loud. Whatever, not like it wasn't true. Fuck them.

-Fuck you -he told… Bruce? Dick? Definitely Damian, too- all.

-Tim! -gasped Dick. Still half naked. Standing right by Damian's side. 

That kid was going to have a very uncomfortable sexual awakening any day now.

-SHUT UP, DRAKE! YOU ARE DISGUSTING!

Wow he really needed to stop talking out loud.

-Tim -And now Bruce was walking towards them, frown firmly in place- you are obviously too tired, if you can't control what comes out of your mouth. Go to sleep.

Tim hissed at him. Dick looked too shocked to answer but Bruce, somewhat used to that reaction of the sleep deprived teen, loomed even more.

-I'm an emancipated adult. I control your company. I live on my own. You're not the boss of me. 

Now even Damian was looking at him open mouthed. Whatever. The computer pinged with his results, just as his phone did with his  'The hubbies and waifus' group chat.

-What's gotten into you, kiddo? -now Dick was worried, throwing an arm around his shoulders. Still half naked, that was an important detail.

Tim shrugged him away.

-Fucking demon spawn coming from nowhere to fuck with me just for the hell of it puts me in a bad mood, I'm weird like that -he deadpaned, replying to the group chat one handed- And the rest of this fucked up team siding with him just because he's a bad word away from a violent psychotic break doesn't help. Fuck off and let me do my shit, and I'll be out of your hair before you know it.

And then, with a sneer, ignoring both Bruce's and Dick's flabbergasted expressions, Damian said what would be Tim's down fall.

-Go to hell, Drake.

A ping made Tim look down at his phone and he replied without thinking, one hand tapping away at the screen- Wait, let me ask my wife.

A beat of silence. One sneer, one grunt, one surprised gasp.

Bruce made a half step towards him- Tim, what/?

A ping.

-She says no. Hang on, let me get you a second opinion, just to be safe.

-Timmy, what do you mean/?

Another one.

-Husband number one says no, too. Husband number two hasn't replied, probably asleep or traveling somewhere, but two already win by majority. It seems it's a ‘no’ on going to hell for me. Bummer, it would have been funny seeing your homeland, brat.

-...

-...

-...

-Aaaaand that’s my cue to interrupt -announced a new voice above them all. Kon, phone at hand, looked down with half amused, half guarded expression-. Someone hasn’t held their end of the deal and slept eight hours, huh, bud?

Tim, ignoring his family that hadn’t yet recovered from the bomb, shrugged- I slept eight hours. This past week. You never said they had to be consecutive hours.

The super just sighed and landed long enough to haul a too tired to resist bird in his arms- I can see you aren’t getting any sleep in Gotham. Let’s go back to the Tower, Cassie wants us to see The Princess Bride with her again.

-Don’t lie to me, you liar.

-Bart wan/

-Look at my face and tell me the truth.

-Okay, I want to see The Princess Bride again -he conceded, taking flight towards the closest exit, sleepy bird cocooned in his arms and TTK- Later, bats!

-...

-...

Finally, Dick snapped back to reality, although the background noise in his head was one would expect in suspense movies right before the assassin jumped a unsuspecting protagonist- ...did he say ‘husbands’? As in, married?

-...

-AS IN MORE THAN ONE?

----.----

[girlobsessed21]

The 100 - 6x04: The face behind the glass review and predictions.

Before we get into the specifics, I’m a little scared of the rehashing of old narratives that comes to surface in this episode especially. Not sure how I feel about all the parallels. In my trailer analysis, I did point out the fact that it does not seem that much different than previous seasons: There are no good guys, we kill them so that we can live and blah, blah, blah. Even so, I’m interested and invested to see what types of unique twists and turns this story will throw at us. Jason Rothenberg, you better not disappoint.

The face behind the glass written by Charmaine DeGrate and directed by Tim Scanlan, who is known for directing the sex scenes on the show. Dead giveaway. Not my favorite so far, but a lot of things happened that has me excited for the rest of the season.

Is there a better way to open an episode than Diyoza joking with her unborn child? It’s no secret she’s in my top 5 favorite characters and keeps climbing the charts. So, the Sanctumites offer her a deal: Save Rose and we’ll take care of your baby, which she takes, to offer her child a life and it’s something to do other than trying to survive. But in known Diyoza fashion on condition of a gun and a bike. 

Then, Simone begs Russel to cancel naming day on account of spies inside the compund. They’ve already been deprived of three primes (Kaylee’s family) and Rose. Pushing them towards extinction at an alarming rate and it once again becomes obvious that Clarke will become Josephine, yet I’m now intrigued by Madi. The cultish way in which these people worship the primes are uncanny and wayward. But then again all cults are weird. I don’t believe in the divinity of the primes either.

Russel disagrees by saying: “If we cancel, Gabriel wins.” Last week I thought that Gabriel will be brought back to life in one of the hosts, but I think there’s something else going on there. It’s clear now that Gabriel and his children are against the revival of the primes, bringing about the question: How has he survived all these years?

Priya and Jordan share some sweet intimate moments where he tells her he feels guilty for becoming another taunting face behind the glass. Which was necessary to show he’s still grieving his parents even while having fun. Her referral to this line later before she becomes a prime is crucial though, meaning there might be a possibility for her to come back.

The four pillars of Sanctum: Repent, Renew, Rejoice, Rebirth. Accentuating rebirth very literally. We know from episode two that Russel Lightbourne does not believe in God, but by killing a person for no reason other than so that someone you love can live is playing god in the cruelest way imaginable.

Embracing their traditions, Clarke decides to repent for her sins. She tries to apologize to Raven who won’t have any of it and compares her to Octavia. For me, the biggest difference between Clarke and Octavia is the remorse she feels. She knows what she did was wrong and she’s trying to make up for it. Therefore she deserves forgiveness. I wonder how Raven will react to Clarke’s death? 

Gabriel? Who the f#@k are Gabriel and his children?

As I said earlier, the old man is definitely Gabriel. We don’t know if he’s dead or alive. It can’t be that he lives within a computer because then his existence would be known. 

My guess is the split within Sanctum came recently (using the term loosely). Gabriel had to be one of the 12 primes since he came with them and his blood was also altered. Meaning his conscience was also transferred into a host. He was against the hostile takeover of innocent bodies and decided to rebel by saving the hosts. 

If this happened sixty odd years ago, Gabriel could still be alive somewhere (perhaps in hiding due to a failed conviction) and old. Very, very old. I’m not sure whether his followers are literally his children or just those that have sided with him, but either way, they want to continue his cause. Which they’ve clearly lost sight of. Save the hosts, don’t kill them.

Or this anomaly they mentioned somehow extends life, only it’s dangerous. Who knows, I’m a bit boggled here.

Xavier purposefully left his bag out to save Octavia and Rose. I’m sure I’ve seen this before. Right, Lincoln kidnapped her and saved her simultaneously. I know this is such a retelling of their story, but I loved Linctavia and thus cannot help boarding this ship.

Another season one throwback to Bellamy and Charlotte. But I think I’ve voiced my concerns about these. Poor, poor Rose. That scene was heartbreaking. 

Boy oh boy Bellarke and their romances

Clarke apologizes to Bellamy and states her reasons even though Bellamy has already forgiven her because he would be a hypocrite not to. And they share what has now become known as a Bellarke hug since it’s all these idiots can ever do.

Clarke hooks up with Cillian (who turns out to be the spy) within two seconds, now I’m not sure about you, but I rolled my eyes. Oh, cute, Clarke has yet another lover added to her long list of previous ones. Finn, Niyalah, Lexa, and Bellamy always on the side. I’m glad it’s a guy though to showcase that she is indeed bisexual and not gay. Bisexuality really needs some appreciation.

No one can tell if Bellamy was only upset with the party as he stated or Clarke having fun with some random dude. Most will say it’s the former and it probably is, yet it’s filmed in a different way. Why did they put him in this scene in the first place? 

When he sees her having fun, he smiles, he’s happy for her. Then the doctor’s all over her and all of a sudden his attitude changes. I don’t want to read too much into it since I had to watch it like six times to draw this conclusion.

He’s hurt and grieving over a lot of things, especially his sister and then he witnesses his “platonic soulmate” in the arms of another man. She’s always known exactly how to get him to open up, what to say to make him feel better and even though he knows he’s not allowed to feel that way, he’s jealous, he realizes he still needs her. 

And that spurs the single tear and his fight with Echo. He even spares another glance over his shoulder when she asks what’s wrong. Or was that just random? Because once he’s calmed down he apologizes to his girlfriend and comforts her when she tells him her backstory after six years of being lied to.

I felt for Echo, her life wasn’t easy, but none of their lives were. Honestly, I just can’t find Becho’s connection. Even though I try, because at some point we have to accept the fact that this is possibly a long term pairing. I’ve made my peace, I’ll ignore them. Give Echo an individual storyline and I might just start liking her more. 

A Red Queen and a terrorist walk into a bar

First of all, I have to show my gratitude for the glimpses of Octavia’s humanity. She’s in there and she’s slowly swimming to the top. That thorned rose is blossoming once again, thank you, Bellamy, for your part in this.

This is a weapon of mass destruction if I’ve ever seen one. A pregnant terrorist and a former evil queen. Yes, this is what I’m talking about. I might just write fanfiction about it.

“The devils of earth become the heroes of Sanctum.” They’re set out to kill Gabriel, but I doubt that will occur. From all I’ve heard, he’s good. Enhanced by Cillian’s words: “There are two sides to every story.” So, they will most likely join forces against Sanctum in some way. Hopefully not blowing up another planet. Please do something interesting here.

Josephine!Clarke

Okay, my first take on Josephine Ada Lightbourne was very wrong. To me, she seemed smart, funny and confident. Now she looks like the devil in disguise (No pun intended.) 

Reverting back to my earlier assumption about Delilah/Priya. It’s evident that Delilah no longer exists within her body which sets Jordan on edge. But that small statement along with knowing the mind of the host is erased but the brain is unharmed propels me to believe they can come back. Somehow. Hopefully.

Simone says, “I’ll prep for insertion, you clear the host.” Did that mean Clarke’s mind might be stored in some device too? They must have a way of extracting consciousness to transfer it to a host. Thus Clarke Griffin’s mind will be backed up somewhere as well. Not for too long before it’s disposed of, I’m sure.

Come on Madi (Lexa and Becca), Bellamy, Abby, Jordan, Raven, Murphy. You have to figure this out and bring her back before its too late. I refuse to believe Princess Clarke is dead. If she is, my mind is blown in a bullet to the brain kind of way. 

One scenario is that Josephine will have to give forth a ruse of being Clarke and willingly accept the “honor” of becoming a prime. She’s been indulging in all their other conventions, why not this one, right? But Jordan now knows what happened to Delilah, so they will try to stop her. Most likely Madi or Bellamy will notice a difference within her.

The dangerous alternative will be for Josephine to simply embrace her new host by saying they brought her to life after Cillian murdered her. Sanctumites, you have no idea how much Clarke’s people care about her. This might even sway those currently mad at her for an investigation.

A few last things

Russel does feel bad about what he’s doing, but so did Dante Wallace.

Raven and Wick (Sorry the other mechanic) what is that? Five minutes after Shaw’s death. Or was it only the motorcycle. Why does this show give us seedlings of relationships that will have no chance of growing?

Is Shadeheda Cadogen and what will he bring to the table?

Madi tasting her first cookie was awesome!

I missed Murphy this episode. His presence is required at all times.

What will happen to Niylah on the ship? And when will Indra make her appearance?

Will Russel and Simone find out that Abby knows how to create nightblood? 

Let me know what you think.

[giftofshewbread]

The Purpose for the Tribulation

By Alice Childs   Published on:October 25, 2017

The notion of a coming Tribulation is a well-known concept, thanks in great part to the late Dr. Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind book series. Even those who aren’t familiar with the Bible or biblical prophecy know something about the coming Tribulation, even if all they know of it is the infamous Battle of Armageddon.  However, what is much less well known even among believers is the reason for the Tribulation. Yet there is a reason for the Tribulation, and we as believers need to be able to answer and clarify the why of the coming time of God’s wrath. God is a God of order, reason, and design. He does nothing capriciously or without a plan and purpose. He is indeed working out His “Plan for the Ages,” and He is doing so with a definitive purpose and end goal in mind.

God, being omnipresent and omniscient, is not bound in TIME as we humans are; He is outside of the created construct of Time. God dwells in eternity; therefore, it is He who slices Time into infinitesimally small fragments of nanoseconds or stretches it out into millennia. The very construct of Time is the canvas on which God weaves the history of the world, from the very moment when Time began with God’s words, “Let there be…,” right up until the point when Time dissolves into what will become the “eternal now.” God is the author and finisher of it all. It is He who writes history past, history now, and history yet to come; therefore, all that He does is done with His plan and purpose in mind.

The entire Bible, both Old Testament and New, comprises the “whole counsel of God,” and the two testaments dovetail seamlessly together into a unified and complete whole with no contradictions or flaws — inerrant and infallible — when studied literally, historically, grammatically, and in proper context. This is important to keep in mind, because “rightly dividing” the Word of God is essential if we are to understand God’s “Plan for the Ages.” After all, we want to understand His agenda and not form our own by misapplying Scripture or taking His Word out of proper context.

If we are to understand what God is doing throughout history (which is really HIS STORY), then we need to move through Time to follow God’s ever progressing and ever more revealing plan throughout the ages. And what is the purpose of God’s overarching plan? Why, it is nothing less than the eternal redemption of fallen man through the sacrificial death, burial and victorious resurrection of God the Son, who paid the penalty of Sin that sin-cursed man could never pay. God revealed Himself and His plan through a race of people whom God Himself chose to work through — the nation of Israel. In fact, the entire Old Testament and part of the New (up until the birth of the Church at Pentecost after the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus in Acts chapter 2), is the telling and revealing God’s plan for the ages.

What we want to examine in this article is the purpose behind the Tribulation. Many people know what the Tribulation is, but very few believers can explain why the Tribulation is necessary to God’s plan.

Let’s begin in the book of Daniel, focusing this study on chapter 9, where we get a glimpse of God’s purpose, order, and design. Although there is much information that still remains a mystery to us, God in His sovereign love has given to us in His Word a precise and astonishingly detailed outline of history, written in advance.

Daniel is one such book where history past, history now, and history future is converging headlong, fulfilling prophecies made and given to Daniel, a Jewish exile in Babylon nearly three millennia ago. This is why the study and understanding of biblical prophecy from both Testaments (the whole counsel of God) is so crucial to our being able to understand God’s Word.

Biblical prophecy not only validates Scripture as authentic and “God-breathed,” but it also helps us keep firmly in mind exactly when and to whom certain passages belong. This illumines for us God’s differing plans for the different divisions of people groups within the timeline of the Bible.

For example, right after creation, humanity was all one vast people group. Later on, after the call of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Jacob’s name was changed to ISRAEL. Thus God had chosen to separate for Himself one particular ethnic people through whom He would reveal Himself to all of humanity. It would be through the Jewish race (through the nation of Israel) that God would send His Son Jesus (God in human flesh) to be the Redeemer of all mankind.

Thus, with the calling and separating out from humanity as a whole — Abraham and his physical descendants — humanity was afterwards separated into two people groups: Jews (the physical descendants of Abraham) and Gentiles (all those who were non-Jews by birth). Both people groups God loves and died to save, but it was His chosen people, the Jews (Israel), through whom God chose to fulfill His redemptive plan.

This division continued until after the nation of Israel rejected Jesus as her Messiah by having Him crucified and rejecting the earthly kingdom He offered to them. Scripture is replete with God’s dealings with national Israel through both conditional promises (the – if Israel will, then God would offer conditional promises specific to Israel) as well as certain unconditional covenants made between God and Abraham, along with Abraham’s posterity — covenants that cannot be broken by God and which will be fulfilled down to the smallest detail in God’s perfect timing and plan.

Even though Israel turned her back on Jesus as her Messiah, God has never turned His back on Israel. He has, for a time, put national Israel on the back burner, so to speak. Israel, as a nation, was scattered throughout the earth in the diaspora for almost 2,000 years (read in Matthew 24-25 of Jesus’ prediction of the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. and of the subsequent scattering of the Jews worldwide). Nonetheless, God has never cut all ties with Israel (read the entire book of Romans, in particular chapter 11).

When God temporarily set aside national Israel (after Calvary, His resurrection, and His ascension back to Heaven), He then made a third division into the great sea of humanity; He called forth a people out of both Jews and Gentiles into one new body — a body of believers in Christ alone as their Savior (1 Corinthians 14:1-4) in whom the Holy Spirit of God actually indwells and is eternally sealed (Ephesians 1:13; Ephesians 4:30; 2 Corinthians 1:22).

This new entity is, of course, the Church. Her function is to be God’s witness on Earth as a body “called out” of the world. The Church’s role in this dispensation (The Age of Grace) began with her birth at Pentecost (Acts chapter 2); it will end with her removal from the earth at the resurrection/rapture, when Jesus comes to receive His Church (also called the body/bride of Christ) into the air just before the final seven years of fallen Earth’s history (1 Thessalonians 4: 16-17; Romans 8:18-19; Philippians 3:20-21; John 14:3; Revelation 3:10; Revelation 4:1; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-17; 1 Corinthians 15:50-54). This seven-year period of God’s wrath is the same seven years recorded in Daniel chapter 9.

Once the Church is removed in the rapture, God’s focus returns to national Israel in order to preserve from her a one-third remnant (Zechariah 13:8-9) to be brought through the coming Tribulation (more correctly known as “The Time of Jacob’s Trouble” in Jeremiah 30:7) as through a “refining fire” in order to prepare Israel for the fulfillment of all of God’s promises for her during the literal millennial reign of King Jesus on Earth.

This is the reason that the Church and Israel cannot be the same entity. The Church is not Israel, neither has the Church replaced Israel. Both are separate entities. Ever since the birth of the Church, there have been three divisions of humanity:

(1) unbelieving JEWS (2) unbelieving GENTILES (3) the CHURCH (made up of both believing Jews and Gentiles — a new body “in Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:32).

The Church (made up of both believing Jews and Gentiles), will be  removed before the beginning of the Tribulation because, during the Age (dispensation) of Grace, all who are willing to come to salvation have their sins judged at the cross, and the righteousness of Christ is imputed to each believer in Christ (Romans 4:22-25).

One purpose for the Tribulation is to judge and prepare a remnant of national Israel. After this time of testing, she will at last recognize, mourn, and believe in her true Messiah Jesus Christ, thus preparing her for the coming kingdom of Christ on Earth.

The second purpose for the Tribulation will be to destroy the rebellious unbelievers (both Jews and Gentiles) — those who have rejected Christ and who have “destroyed the earth” (Joel 3:2; Revelation 11:18).

In the book of Daniel in chapters 2, 7, and 9, we see how God revealed to Daniel incredibly precise and detailed prophecies concerning the times that He has appointed for the Jewish people. We learn that God has specific plans for the Hebrew people, and that His plans have spanned not just centuries, but millennia. We learn that God has appointed 490 years or 70 “weeks” of seven-year periods to accomplish His plans and purpose for the land of Israel and the Jewish people. We also learn that 483 of those 490 prophesied years have passed and have already been fulfilled — down to the very day that Jesus presented Himself to Israel as her Messiah whom she rejected. (69 “weeks” of 360-day lunar years constitutes 483 years).

As predicted in Daniel 9:26, the Messiah was indeed “cut off” — killed. This rejection of their Messiah by Israel stopped the further progression of the 70 “weeks” at 69 “weeks” (483 years), one “week” (seven years) short of the 70 “weeks” appointed to Israel.

After the removal of the Church in the rapture, God’s focus will again return to Israel to finish the final “week” in order to:

(1) judge the nation of Israel (2) finish their (Israel’s) transgressions (3) make an end to their sins (4) rescue the remaining Jews from certain annihilation from the Antichrist (one third of whom God will bring through The Tribulation) (5) save the city of Jerusalem (6) bring all remaining Jews (the one third who become saved and who are preserved through the Tribulation) to believe in their true Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ (Daniel 9).

This last or 70th “week” will truly be “The Time of Jacob’s Trouble.” In the context of Daniel 9, the Jews are the focus of this prophecy. As we will see, the Church is always to be distinguished from Israel. Once the Church is removed, God’s focus will return to Israel. However, He is going to deal with all of sinful humanity as well. As great as God’s judgment will be (and the coming judgment will be beyond our ability to grasp), even in the midst of judgment God will still extend His great mercy. There will still be opportunities for the lost to come to Christ during the Tribulation, even after the rapture of the Church.

Those who come to Christ during this time will be a great number from every kindred, nation, tribe and tongue. There will be a great ingathering of souls into Heaven during this last seven years, yet sadly the vast majority of those who are saved during this time will be martyred for their faith. These future believers are not, however, part of the Church (the body/bride of Christ), because the Church will have already been in Heaven before these last seven years begin (Revelation chapters 4-5).

The ones who are saved during the Tribulation are known as Tribulation Saints, and as stated earlier, only a very few, relatively speaking, will make it through the entire seven years alive. The majority of them will die or be martyred during this time (Revelation 6:9-11 & 7:13-17).

This is why it is vital that all who are willing (both Jews and Gentiles) should come to Christ now, while there is yet time, to become a part of the body of Christ during this current Age of Grace; for the Church is not appointed to endure the coming wrath of God (1 Thessalonians 5:9; Revelation 3:10).

In summary of this most amazing chapter in one of the most amazing books of the entire Bible, I’d like to conclude by jumping ahead for just a bit to the New Testament book of Matthew, chapters 24-25. In this book, Jesus is addressing the very events that will take place during this 70th week.

In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus was speaking to His disciples and was addressing Israel specifically. He was not addressing the Church at all in Matthew 24-25 or in the parallel passages in Mark 13:1-27 and Luke 21:5-28, which also record Jesus’ Olivet Discourse.

The Olivet Discourse given by Jesus to His disciples is recorded in Matthew 24-25. In this passage, Jesus gives a summation of events that lead up to, along with events that will occur during this final 70th “week.” Since the Olivet Discourse was written to the Jews, there are clear dispensational distinctives that must be kept in mind.

Although all Scripture is written for our edification in this Church Age, not all passages are written to the Church. We must keep in mind the three classes of people to whom the Word of God speaks:

(1) The Jews (2) The Gentiles (3) the Church of Jesus Christ

“Give none offense neither to (1) the Jews (2) nor to the Gentiles (3) nor to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10 :32).

In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus is addressing the Jews, first with regards to the destruction of the Temple, which occurred in 70 AD, and then later on in these passages to the Jews who will be living in “that day” — which is the entire seven-year period of the Time of Jacob’s Trouble (reference back to Daniel in chapter 9 where God, through the angel Gabriel, gave Daniel the prophecy of the 490 “weeks” of years that are to be appointed to “thy people” — “thy people” being Daniel’s people, the Jews).

There was no church in existence when this prophecy was given to Daniel, and would not be for several centuries. At the time that Daniel lived, there were only two classes of people: Jews and Gentiles. God gave Daniel specific and detailed prophecies regarding His plan for the ages for both the Jews, and in chapters 2 & 7 of the book of Daniel, for the Gentile world empires that had affected and would directly affect the nation of Israel.

The book of Daniel, specifically chapters 2 & 7, give God’s plans for the great Gentile empires from Daniel’s time onward, through to what is right now becoming the New World Order. These prophecies were given in astonishing detail and precision.

How do we know that Jesus was speaking to a still future Jewish audience in Matthew and in the parallel passages in Mark and Luke? For one thing, the Church was not even in existence until her birth at Pentecost (recorded in Acts chapter 2) after Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and ascension back to the Father. For another thing, Jesus’ message was to a Jewish audience concerning the time of the Tribulation – to prepare the yet to be believing remnant of ISRAEL for the Kingdom, which cannot occur on Earth until after the Time of Jacob’s Trouble has ended, when Jesus returns to earth to set up His literal Millennial kingdom in Jerusalem.

We must remember when studying the Bible to keep clear the distinctions between national Israel (the Jews), the Church, and the Gentiles (non-believing, non-Jewish peoples). Unbelieving Jews are just that — unbelieving Jews.

The New Testament books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were addressing Jews still living under the Dispensation of Law, since the new Dispensation of Grace under which we, the Church, are living right now had not yet begun.

This present Dispensation of Grace (in which the Church is made up of both believing Jews and Gentiles, now made one in Christ upon salvation) becomes the “body” of which Christ is the Head. The Church is also called the bride, of whom Jesus Christ is the Bridegroom.

This Dispensation of Grace will end at the resurrection of the “dead in Christ,” which occurs simultaneously with the rapture of all living saints. Those who are the Church both dead and alive, will be caught up to meet Jesus Christ in the air (1 Thessalonians 4:16-7). After this, God’s focus once again returns to national Israel to finish and fulfill all that is due Israel under those last seven years of the old Dispensation of Law.

The Jews will then have seven years (the last “week” of Daniel’s prophesied 70 weeks of years under the Dispensation of Law) to both finish and fulfill the entire 490 “weeks” of years the Lord purposed expressly for the Jews, according to Daniel in chapter 9.

This last period of seven years, The Time of Jacob’s (Israel’s) Trouble (Jeremiah 30:7) is also called THE Tribulation (to be distinguished from general tribulation which we all endure).

For insight into what events will be like and what things will occur to the Jews during this last seven years, read the 24th-25th chapters of Matthew, verses 9-51 of chapter 24 in particular. The Olivet Discourse recounts the same events as Daniel chapter 9 and is recounting events during that same last seven years, and thus is specific to Israel and the Jews.

In contrast, the Church–Christ’s Bride is “not appointed” to God’s wrath. See in the verse below where the Apostle Paul is explicitly addressing the CHURCH.

“For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:9).

We, the Church, are to always be looking forward to our “blessed hope” which is the Pre-Tribulation rapture spoken of in the books of 1 and 2 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians.

After the rapture of the Church, and throughout the final seven years of “The Time of Jacob’s Trouble,” God will preserve a remnant of national Israel. He will bring this Jewish remnant through the Tribulation (one third of them) so that by the end of that last seven years, “all of Israel” will be saved. That one-third remnant will have recognized Jesus as having always been their true Messiah; they will have acknowledged Him, accepted Him, and will have called out to their Messiah Jesus to rescue them.

This remnant of rescued and reborn Jews will follow their King into the kingdom in their mortal bodies (along with all surviving Gentile believers who will have come to salvation during the Tribulation, but after the rapture of the Church).

The remnant of Israel will at last receive all of the covenant blessings regarding the full land grant that the Lord made with their ancestor Abraham millennia ago. Thus, the purpose of God’s Plan for the Ages will have been accomplished when He returns at His Second Coming to set up His earthly Kingdom.

So, what are God’s ultimate goals for all of mankind, and what is the purpose for the Tribulation? In short they are these:

1) to bring an end to all sin and rebellion 2) to bring about the fulfillment of all of the covenant promises made by God to the Jewish people with regards to the land of Israel that God Himself covenanted to Abraham and his physical descendants 3) to eventually (at the end of the Millennium) deliver all of the redeemed of all the ages, along with everything else — accomplished and completed —  to the Father for all eternity. At the end of the 1,000-year kingdom on this earth, eternity will then merge with Time; and the redeemed of all ages will live with God in His midst in an “eternal now.”

The Church will have already been in Heaven in our redeemed and glorified bodies before the beginning of The Tribulation, thus the focus of God returns to Israel during these last seven years. Israel is the key to everything (Revelation 4:1).

The Church is “not appointed to wrath” (of God); however, that does not mean that the Church is now, or ever has been, spared persecution. The Church has always — since her beginning at Pentecost — suffered persecution in this world. She, as a whole, will continue to suffer persecution up until the instant the rapture occurs. However, persecution is not the same thing as the “wrath of God.”

A clear distinction between Israel and the Church will clear up the confusion. “Rightly dividing” the Word of God also demonstrates the incredible precision dovetailing together both the Old and New Testaments.

Both Israel and the Church are precious to God, and both have equally important but differing roles to play in the outworking of God’s great plan and purpose. We must learn to discern whose role is whose in studying God’s Word. In this manner, we are rightly dividing His Word. When we learn to do this, the meaning and context of the entirety of Scripture becomes clearer to us.

God bless you all, and let’s keep studying the Word until Jesus calls us Home! Maranatha!

[itsworn]

Homemade, 50-Year-Old Fuel Motor Roars Back To Life

The Big Banger Theory

Fueler.

Improbable survival stories are standard equipment around here. HOT ROD Deluxe is known for telling resurrection tales that defy all odds and logic. Some of those story ideas surely would’ve been rejected outright by skeptical editors as borderline unbelievable, had photographic evidence not undeniably documented a journey from distant past to survivor. Forget “borderline”; this is one backyard project that’s been unreal from the very start, when a retired machinist began building his racing engine, literally—a gigantic four-banger that once again cackles with nitromethane—a half-century later.

If that already sounds unbelievable, prepare to suspend disbelief long enough to hear the rest of the story. The happy ending depicted by these current photos followed decades of neglect, disassembly, and even theft that could’ve, would’ve, and certainly should’ve written a far sadder story. The magical intervention of a young Springfield, Oregon, engine builder was the last link in a long chain of unlikely coincidences—or was it something else?

“I feel like Grandpa led me to him,” says Carol Stange, a since-retired meter reader for the Springfield Utility Board in Oregon whose monthly route included a joint named Tim’s Muscle Cars. She’d never met or even seen anyone on the grounds until the day she spied an old Lyndwood dragster chassis out front. As a lifelong gearhead from Long Beach, California, whose grandfather had exposed the whole family to nearby Lions Drag Strip, Carol couldn’t resist knocking on the office door. When nobody answered, she walked inside and to the back of the building, following male voices.

“A buddy and I were painting his GTO in my spray booth,” Tim Riel recalls. “We both had respirators on. I thought, ‘Wow, this lady has a lot of nerve, walking up to a couple of strangers wearing masks!’” Tim and Carol agree that their introductory conversation began something like this:

“Hi, I saw your dragster out front. My grandfather had one of those.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, in the mid-1960s. He built his own engine. Car Craft wrote about it.”

“Is your grandpa Byron Barnes?”

Imagine Carol’s shock, hearing a total stranger utter the name of her late grandfather. “I followed him up to the front office, where Tim had a big stack of magazines. He went right to the issue and pulled it out. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the article.’ I couldn’t believe this was happening! Tim seemed intrigued that the chassis survived, was still in the family, and was here in Oregon.”

A magazine published seven years before Tim Riel was born just happened to be among several milk crates of “moldy, smelly, old paper” that he’d recently purchased from a swap-meet vendor. Tim and his machinist father, Rod Riel, had been going through the pile that very week. “We kept coming back to that Car Craft and that one article. We couldn’t get over how much work went into the engine. It still amazes me. This guy not only made his own engine parts; first, he had to design and build the tooling to make them. Everything had to be perfectly aligned for those pistons to go up and down. Even with today’s technology, not many people would—or even could—do what her grandpa did 50 years ago.”

So, as an engineering exercise, this project was pretty hard to beat; as a race car, not so much. In fact, it never got past the testing stage. When the late, great writer A.B. Shuman submitted his tech story around March 1967, Byron had run the rail twice. First time out, injected on nitro, netted “a quite respectable 120 mph in eleven seconds, shutting off at the halfway mark and coasting through the traps,” CC reported. Switching to dual Weber carbs and, presumably, gasoline for a second try, there was another half-pass of 129 mph but no e.t reported by Shuman. Gifford Barnes counts three trips to Lions Drag Strip with his dad, all plagued by bogging off the line: “He couldn’t get the fuel system right,” he explains. “After the car stumbled, it really charged, but Mickey [Okahara, the driver] couldn’t get away clean.” The wide variety of used parts visible in photos and recovered by Tim Riel point to additional experimentation, as does the only time slip left behind. On the back is scrawled, “50% nitro.” If, in fact, the indicated 8.74 and 164 were recorded by this car, it would’ve been one of the swiftest four-bangers of the era—but not competitive for the type of racing Byron initially envisioned.

Considering how many years one old guy, working alone, needed to bring this engine, particularly, plus a homebuilt chassis all the way from conception to completion—the crankshaft alone required 30 days, according to CC—it’s hardly surprising that classification rules would evolve. The article cites so-called “junior fuelers” for Byron’s inspiration. After Lions bowed out of the fuel ban in 1962, that unofficial term came to be loosely applied to single-engined, normally aspirated dragsters burning nitromethane and/or methanol, regardless of engine type or size. Those not quick enough to qualify for Top Fuel Eliminator might’ve run Top Gas or amongst themselves. Byron’s decision to make his sheetmetal cylinder block tall enough to displace either 353 or 392 ci hardly seems coincidental at a time when 354 and 392 Chryslers were fashionable. Some injected Chevys were poked ’n’ stroked to 358 and even 389 cubes.

By the time Byron was ready to go, Lions had banished fuel burners from Top Gas and created an official Junior Fuel category for unblown engines no larger than 310 cubes. Bigger motors moved into either C/Fuel Dragster (up to 350 ci) or B/FD (to 400 ci), both of which were dominated by small-inch, blown Hemis and Chevys. No wonder Byron lost interest in 1968 or ’69 and parked this car. Indeed, but for one old magazine article and however few firsthand witnesses remain, nearly nobody would know it ever existed.

Getting back to Tim’s Muscle Cars, the Springfield meter reader regularly returned to share leisurely lunch breaks and talk shop. “All I knew was that the bare chassis was hanging in her uncle’s barn,” Tim says. “Carol never got over there to take pictures. I told her that I’d be interested in buying whatever was left.”

“Oh, yeah, he bugged me for over a year,” Carol confirms, laughing. “He’d say, ‘Can I just go see it, please?’ I didn’t want to bug my uncle Giff just so someone could look up in his rafters. But my family always hoped to get Grandpa’s dragster running. My cousin Frank, Giff’s son, started on that about 20 years ago. He took the car apart, spread the parts out on the bench, but it never went back together. When I finally called to tell my uncle I’d met a young guy with his own engine shop who might want to buy the car, Giff said, ‘Nope, he can’t buy it. If you really think he’ll do something with it, tell him to come get it.'”

What Carol didn’t know at the time was that thieves had recently removed critical components from Giff’s unlocked boat barn and sold them for scrap. Luckily, her uncle and cousin noticed parts missing in time to track down the metals dealer before he got around to melting or reselling most, though the rare quick-change rearend was already gone. They went to court to recover what remained and prevailed, eventually.

“All I expected to get was a chassis, or part of one,” Tim says. “I planned to look for dragster parts at swap meets, maybe put in an early Hemi or small-block. Carol’s mom, uncle, aunt, cousin, brother, and sister were all there to say goodbye to Grandpa’s dragster. I walked into this big metal shed with a huge fishing boat on one side. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Byron’s short-block was sitting on a crate. Piles of parts were on the floor. Both M&H slicks were still mounted on Halibrands. The original parachute was hanging from the rafters. We found the complete clutch assembly and can, all the mag body panels, even a firesuit. After everything was laid out at home the next day, I was amazed by how complete the car was. I saw it as a giant erector set, minus the rearend and some small pieces that my dad and I could probably make. We were lucky to have the Car Craft for reference.

“I was worried that Byron’s two children wouldn’t be around long enough to see it get done,” he adds. “I’d made them a promise to try, but Giff’s health was not good. He and his sister, Carol’s mom, were in their eighties. This was important. I wanted that engine to run again, on nitro. I really got into it.”

He sure did, gradually assembling the erector set most nights and weekends for eight months, in between engine work for patient patrons of Tim’s Muscle Cars. When he proudly unveiled the sum of those parts, Byron’s descendants were there to witness the resurrection of a father and grandfather, along with an old dragster. “We were all in tears,” Tim admits.

“To me, it’s just amazing how things worked out,” says Carol Stange, the fearless meter reader whose knock on one door opened so many more. “It was fun, and I just felt like it was meant to be.”

The all-homemade engine was designed to displace either 353 or 392 ci, depending on crankshaft selection. To minimize weight, designer-builder Byron Barnes settled on four cylinders (versus eight), a sheetmetal crankcase (versus cast iron), and valves in the block (versus overhead). Note the 3-inch offset, to counteract torque.

Both the dragster and the former Romania Chevrolet store were operational in the 1960s. Despite its lengthy wheelbase of 152 inches and maze of suspension tubing, the car weighed just 710 pounds, wet.

Everything orange was powdercoated by McKenzie Chrome Plating (Springfield, Oregon). All four wheels and tires are original. After the original mag body was ruined by a careless sandblaster—and Tim Riel was quoted a price of $3,500 per magnesium sheet—buddy Les Schoonover (Springfield) replicated the cowl and side panels in aluminum.

Restorer-caretaker Tim Riel estimates that no fewer than 100 pieces of sheet steel were welded together to create the 116-pound bare block.

Byron Barnes obviously had his own ideas about weight transfer, probably influenced by his oval-track history. He formed the fuel tank by cutting and merging two military-surplus water kettles engraved with the words “U.S. Army.”

The aluminum cover contains the coolant sitting on top of four individual cylinder heads. Water enters through the open hole (which still lacks a pressure cap to replace the tiny original). Boiling water exits through the overflow tube. Mike Maher did the pinstriping and lettering. The rear-main seal is a small-block Chevy item.

The parachute, M&H 8.20-15 Racemasters, and magnesium Halibrand wheels are original. The Portland Swap Meet produced a virtual duplicate of the stolen rearend assembly, including Halibrand champ-car quick-change, that fit perfectly.

Rod Riel, Tim’s machinist dad, reproduced one of the Anglia-style spindles and some missing suspension pieces on his CNC machines. The shocks are Volkswagen. The aluminum fuel line is original.

The custom tri-drive system is a work of art. A spur gear on the crank runs the cam, which drives the Bendix Mini-Mag, Hilborn fuel pump, and a Ford six-cylinder oil pump at the bottom that fills a custom dry-sump pan. A piece of leather that seals the timing cover to the crankcase is the closet thing to a gasket in the entire engine. Byron even built his own injectors. The original velocity stacks and Hilborn barrel valve survived, but not the exhaust flange and headers, which Rod Riel replicated. Since our photo session, Tim has completed the complicated linkage and added a mini-starter to the front of the crank. Previously, he hand-operated the throttle with a long rod connecting the individual injectors and fired the engine on a stand, since none of the Riels can squeeze into the cockpit for push starting.

Since stumbling onto this photography location in Eugene, Oregon, we’ve learned that the former home of Lew Williams and, later, Joe Romania Chevrolet is infamous for 2000 and 2001 arson attacks by local “ecoterrorists” targeting gas guzzlers. In the first incident, three light trucks collectively valued at $28,000 were torched by activists who happened to be under surveillance by a terrorism task force that night. Nine months later, a different gang set fire to 35 new Suburbans and Tahoes worth $959,000. The Chevy store was sold shortly thereafter and ultimately closed in 2005 when the University of Oregon purchased the prime, four-and-a-half-acre property adjoining the campus for storage. The wooden panels were installed after rock-throwing vandals found the original glass irresistible.

Machinists’ Union

It took a father-son team of master machinists in Long Beach, California, to create this engine, and it took another to restore it to running condition, a half-century later and 900 miles north. The shared experience has tightly bonded the Barnes-Garwood and Riel families to this day.

Gifford Barnes, 86, machined the individual cylinder heads for his late dad’s engine. He inherited Byron’s last race car in 1981 and stored it for 34 years. The Barnes-Garwood family photo album produced a rare 1930s snapshot of father and son together.

Kay Barnes Garwood, 84, is Byron’s daughter. Nearly eight decades after posing with the family dog and midget at home in Long Beach, she lives with daughter Linda Garwood (left) in Port Orford, Oregon.

Tim and Jan Riel rescued and revived their rail with invaluable assistance from Rod Riel (left), a semiretired CNC machinist. Its new home is Tim’s Muscle Cars, a restoration and engine shop in Springfield, Oregon.

Social Media, Old School

For 400 years before digital devices connected us senders and receivers, magazines did that job. This one still does, albeit with a time delay measured in months or years, not nanoseconds. You know the drill: HOT ROD Deluxe publishes an article or column or photo caption that thrills/irritates you into sending love letters/hate mail. Correspondence deemed worthy of print shows up in stores and mailboxes two or three issues later to thrill/irritate fellow readers. See, just like Facebook posts, minus fake news.

Despite modern production technology, “slick” magazines still take forfriggin’ever to print, bind, and transport, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed. Our bimonthly infrequency automatically puts HRD another month behind the monthlies. If you’re reading this on the West Coast, add another week for trains and trucks to move the bundles all the way from the Midwest, where most of America’s ink gets spilled. Finally, your copy shows up in, say, Springfield, Oregon. Reading from front to back (as editors and the good Lord intended), you eventually get to a couple of 50-year-old, unpublished outtakes from a 1968 Car Craft story. The caption asks if any reader knows what happened to an obscure race car that vanished 15 years before you were born, a car that happens to be parked in your shop.

Reader Tim Riel responded almost as soon as his heart settled back into his chest. Editor Hardin couldn’t wait to print the letter and photos Tim sent of the restored rail. Meanwhile, though, another issue’s bimonthly production cycle came and went, delaying publication by one more edition. When the car reappeared in color in January 2016’s Scrapbook section, Mr. Ed. promised in print to send contributor Dave Wallace—who claimed a personal connection to its builder—to shoot a proper feature. In consideration of the Northwest’s notorious rainy season, we postponed that photo session until the late spring. Finally, the Byron Barnes rail returns to these pages, completing a print conversation started nearly two years ago—if not 50 years ago this December, when Petersen Publishing Company staffers Bob Swaim and A.B. Shuman visited the car both at home and at Lions Drag Strip.

Original Car Craft article, June 1968

From HRD’s “The Golden Age Of Drag Racing,” September 2015

From HRD’s letters section, January 2016

Shortly after Tim Riel’s letter and photos appeared in HRD, another stranger showed up at Tim’s Muscle Cars. He told Tim that, as a kid, he lived in Byron’s neighborhood and helped clean out the home shop after Mr. and Mrs. Barnes died weeks apart in 1981. He was given the blueprint as a souvenir. He thought it belonged with the race car. Sure enough, these cockpit measurements match. Byron evidently purchased a partial kit from little-known H&L Metals. Tim was so stunned by the gift that he never got a name. He’s hopeful that the generous mystery man will see this and identify himself to HRD—extending the series of old-school, ink-on-paper “posts” described above.

Lost And Found

On the snowy morning in January 2014 that Tim and Rod Riel dragged a trailer to the Oregon coast, a bare chassis was all they expected to find. Imagine their surprise!

For the first time, Tim Riel laid his hands—and eyes—on the remnants of a chassis he’d seen only in a Car Craft issue printed four years before he was born.

Carol Garwood Stange (right) is the retired Oregon meter reader who put Tim Riel (left) together with Grandpa’s slingshot. Her big sister, Linda Garwood, held up the nose while their uncle Giff supervised.

The rotating assembly stayed inside of Byron’s sheetmetal block since he last ran the car, circa 1968-69. Three types of steel were pressed together, then arc-welded with titanium-nickel rod, to form a hollow crankshaft with a 4.5-inch stroke.

Gifford Barnes machined the individual cylinder heads so precisely that they seal to the sheet-steel crankcase without gaskets. His dad used 40 capscrews made of aircraft-grade titanium, likely left over from one of Byron’s aerospace projects. All but a few of the original fasteners were located, cleaned up, and reinstalled by Tim Riel. Threaded tubes around the spark plugs prevent coolant from grounding out the plugs.

The camshaft is hollow. Byron fused individual lobes onto the tube, then had Iskenderian grind them to deliver 230 degrees of duration with 0.400-inch lift. “The cam wasn’t even in the engine, so I had no idea about where to degree it or set the lash,” Tim says. “The drive gear is slotted about 70 degrees where the bolt goes, for advance and retard. So I called and talked to Isky’s son, who remembered Ed playing cards with Byron. He said his dad would call after he got back from lunch. I thought, ‘Oh, sure, like Ed Iskenderian is gonna personally call some little engine builder in the middle of nowhere.’ That same afternoon, I answer the phone, and Mr. Isky says, ‘Old man Barnes still owes me 40 bucks from our weekly card game!’ He said he’d look around and let me know if he found anything. About two weeks later, I get a box with the original cam card with all of the specs, a new set of valvesprings, and a handwritten note: ‘Best wishes, Ed Iskenderian.'”

Jahns Pistons cast five of these aluminum, 5-inch-diameter monsters in the wooden mold. Byron finish-machined four to arrive at 10:1 compression. He also made five 4130 chrome-moly connecting rods, welding the ends to the tubular beams. This spare was never run.

The worn main bearings proved to be the most difficult replacement parts to find, plus the most expensive. Because all crank journals are identical, Tim had to spend $1,200 on five complete sets of obsolete aircraft bearings to get the five pieces. An old-timer at Federal-Mogul successfully cross-referenced the original part numbers by searching old paper catalogs. The valvetrain combines original, slipper-style lifters with Chrysler Hemi springs, retainers, and locks.

Everything here was formed from steel. First, though, Byron had to make wooden or cardboard templates for each piece, then construct a flame-cutting rig with a tracing stylus at one end and an oxy-acetylene cutting torch at the other. The intake and exhaust ports are two pieces of steel stampings, welded together. Also note the six water jackets per cylinder.

The original, giant 2-5/8-inch intake and exhaust valves are stainless heads on chrome-moly stems.

Half a century after this big banger first went together, it’s as good as new, plus much prettier. Of many missing parts reproduced by the Riels, the most difficult to design were the spur gears and shaft driving the magneto and fuel and oil pumps. In some old photos of the engine wearing Weber carbs, the two-hole bracket contained a different mag and a coil.

Who Was Byron Barnes?

This writer should know, having met him a few times in the mid-1970s. We even lived on the same Huntington Beach street for a while, yet I never really knew the man. Among my regrets is not spending more time in the large shop behind his house on Old Pirates Lane that held both the Hudson he’d customized and his fully assembled slingshot, covered in dusty plastic. I was introduced by my then-girlfriend as the editor of Drag News, but to him I was the longhair sleeping with his beloved granddaughter, Carol Garwood—now Carol Stange, the retired Oregon meter reader responsible for connecting his last race car to the young guy destined to rescue and restore it.

Byron’s family revealed that he was born in 1907 in Nebraska. In 1911, his parents moved to Long Beach. At age 16, Byron’s first homebuilt hot rod got him arrested and jailed. Since his dad was then running for city council, the folks shipped him offshore to herd goats on San Clemente Island until the election was over. He and a buddy later assembled an airplane that Byron flew before building and driving his first midget. When World War II halted auto racing, he worked for Douglas Aircraft Company as a mechanics’ instructor and design engineer developing tooling for the B-17 bomber. In the mid-1950s, Byron designed, built, and patented oil field equipment that enabled an early retirement. For the next 25 years, he indulged automotive passions ranging from the dragster and Hudson custom to off-road racing with local pals Bill Stroppe and Parnelli Jones.

Though Byron could likely afford any new car, I saw him driving Ford Pintos exclusively. Rather than bother changing fluids, he’d torture an engine until it rattled or smoked, swap motors in an afternoon, then perform an autopsy on the dead player. (The same boat shed that stored the dragster’s engine held another big surprise for Tim Riel: “There must’ve been 70 Pinto 2000- and 2300cc motors stacked up in there!”) Byron’s last daily driver was reportedly returning nearly 50 mpg when emphysema ended an incredible journey in April 1981, just shy of his 74th birthday.

Byron (right) was also a pilot. During the Depression, he earned money repairing and reselling crashed planes. Neither his son nor daughter recognized the other dapper dude.

The crowd at San Diego’s Balboa Stadium illustrates the huge popularity of midget racing before WWII and immediately after, until free competition from television kept people home on weekends. The fourth car back appears to be Byron’s.

This flathead is thought to be the first that Byron built from scratch, during the 1930s. It disappeared with a fast-talking salesman who promised to take it from track to track, nationwide, and write orders for production copies. Byron also constructed a DOHC prototype that might be the motor pictured in his wrecked racer. Historian Greg Sharp tells us that more than 100 different engine types powered midgets, all limited to 105 ci.

A page from Byron’s logbook documents eight events in five weeks at L.A.’s Gilmore and Atlantic Boulevard Stadium tracks during the summer of 1939.

Unlike most midgets of the era, Byron’s looked as good as they ran.

Gifford Barnes doesn’t know whether this could be his dad’s overhead cammer, but it’s the only DOHC engine shot in the family scrapbook.

Evidence that Byron’s hot rods attracted hot drivers includes this steamy shot of a guy recognized by historian Greg as Mel Hansen, “a big-name midget driver who qualified six times for the Indy 500, with a best finish of eighth.”

The forward-leaning positions of both drivers suggest this to be the moment of impact after Byron’s unknown shoe spun. We’re guessing that the background cars belonged to the two workers behind the wall.

The dragster’s finished block and crank are shown in the Long Beach shop where Byron handbuilt his last racing engine. The Barnes-Garwood family still owns the building on Signal Hill. Appropriately, it’s currently leased to a company making parts for Smart cars.

In the early 1970s, granddaughter Carol paid $100 for this Northern California barn find. It was original and complete except for a front seat. Once Carol got the engine running, her mom drove the 400-plus miles home to Long Beach sitting on a crate. Never content to follow a crowd, Grandpa Barnes hopped up the straight eight and built himself the only Hudson custom we’ve ever seen.

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