Throwback Thursday #11: Top Five Favorite Fatherly Moments

THE COUNTDOWN IS ON! It’s June, and that means we’re just a month away from the release of the Millennium 2.0 album and the start of the residency! I would say I can’t wait, but I refuse to wish my summer away. Love you, Boys, but I can wait!

In the meantime, the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration continues here at Dreamer’s Sanctuary!  One of the cool parts of being a BSB fan for over twenty-five years has been watching these five “boys” grow into men. They’ve graciously shared snippets of their lives with us through photos, videos, articles, and social media, giving us a glimpse at the small moments and huge milestones they’ve experienced over the past three decades. Through these windows, we’ve watched them fall in love, get married, and start families. It’s been a joy to see all five of them become dads and celebrate the birth of each Backstreet baby. Father’s Day is this Sunday in the United States, so for my first Throwback Thursday blog this month, I’m looking back on fics that feature the Boys as fathers.

5. AJ in Secrets of the Heart

Some RPF (real person fanfic) writers have a strict “no writing about their real family members” policy. While I understand their reasons why, I usually prefer to keep my stories as close to “canon” as possible, which means including the Boys’ families when necessary. That being said, I generally don’t enjoy writing about their real wives and kids and try to avoid it as much as I can by coming up with ways to keep them out of my stories. I’ve been known to kill off wives when it serves the plot of the story to have the boy be single, but I won’t kill off their real kids. Fictional kids are fair game, though. That’s one of the things I like about writing alternate universe fics – not killing kids specifically (although, admittedly, it does seem to happen in my AUs) but having the freedom to do whatever I want… including killing kids.

Secrets of the Heart is one of those AU fics that does include a dead baby as a plot device. While it’s far from a happy story to write about for Father’s Day, it’s one of the few fics I’ve written that features AJ as a father and the only one that actually focuses on him and fatherhood. In Chapter 6, we see the moment where AJ meets his newborn baby, Lucy, for the first time. Just ten chapters later, he’s forced to tell her goodbye, but his enduring love for his daughter is what drives his actions through the rest of the story. Even back in 2008, I always knew AJ would be a great girl dad! Thankfully, fatherhood has gone a lot better for him in real life than it does in this fanfic.

4. Brian in Secrets of the Heart

Fatherhood – and, more specifically, the lengths a father will go for his child – is a major theme of Secrets of the Heart. We see this in Brian’s storyline just as much as in AJ’s. Unlike AJ, Brian was already a father in real life when I started writing Secrets. But, instead of using Baylee, I gave Brian a fictional son named Calhan as a counterpart to AJ’s fictional daughter. Like Lucy, Calhan is mostly a plot device that’s used to motivate Brian’s decision-making in the story. At the beginning, Calhan serves as Brian’s main reason to hold on as he waits for a heart transplant – and to heal after having one. Brian wants to regain his strength, so he can be a better father and take on a more active role in his son’s life. We see this in Chapter 9, in which Cal visits Brian in the hospital for the first time after his surgery. This chapter starts with one of the dreams that will haunt Brian throughout the rest of the story, eventually driving him mad. But it’s his desire to protect his son at all costs that causes Brian to do what he does at the end of the story.

Despite how depressing this story is, it’s somehow less depressing than Brian’s dad arc at the beginning of Song for the Undead, which was my only other decent Brian option to write about in this blog. You would think that, as a Brian girl who’s been writing since before Baylee was born, I would have a lot more options by now, but the truth is that Brian being the first to start a family is exactly what forced me to move away from writing about him and focus more on the other guys (mainly Nick). Like I said before, I don’t love writing about their real families, so while Baylee has been in a lot of my stories, his appearances are usually brief and inconsequential. And because I’ve branched out to write about the other guys, the scenes that do include Baylee are usually about somebody else (mainly Nick).

Speaking of Nick…

3. Nick in A Heart That Isn’t Mine

In real life, it’s been so rewarding to see Nick settle down and start a family. How ironic is it that the guy who used to say he never wanted to get married or have kids now has the most kids of anyone in the group? As Nick’s been singing since long before Lauren, Odin, Saoirse, and Pearl came into his life, “It’s funny how life can take new meaning. You came and changed what I believed in.” It’s funny how lyrics can take new meaning, too.

Since Nick is the newest Backstreet Dad, I haven’t written many fanfics that feature him as a father. Some of my stories include cute scenes of him interacting with and caring for other people’s kids – Baylee in Broken, Claire’s babies in By My Side, Howie’s boys in Sick as My Secrets, and Mason in My Brother’s Keeper – but very few of them include Nick having kids of his own, fictional or otherwise. The only real choice to write about for the Nick segment of this blog is another depressing, dead baby story: A Heart That Isn’t Mine!

AHTIM includes a combination of real and fictional kids. Odin exists in it and makes a brief appearance toward the end, as does Saoirse (more on her later), but the one who gets the most focus is a fictional daughter named Arya, who was stillborn before the start of the story. The Arya storyline is one of many reasons I go on a guilt trip every time I revisit AHTIM (even though it’s admittedly still one of my favorites). When I was planning this story, I realized I needed Lauren to be out of the picture for the premise to work. Nick had to be able to disappear for a while without anyone noticing right away, and there had to be a plausible reason why no one came to visit him in the “hospital.” I have a lot of respect for Lauren for the role she played in helping Nick turn his life around and find happiness, so rather than resorting to something like infidelity as the reason for her to be temporarily estranged from Nick, I went with a pregnancy loss scenario instead. Losing a child can put a strain on a marriage, especially when the parents grieve in different ways, as Nick and Lauren did in this novel’s backstory. Killing off Odin would have been crossing the line for me, so I created a fictional baby girl instead. What I couldn’t have known when I was planning the story was that Lauren would conceive and miscarry a baby girl while I was writing it, which is where most of my guilt comes from. Sometimes I hate when life imitates art.

Baby Arya may have been conceived as a plot device, but she became a big part of the story. Her presence in Nick’s unconscious recurring dreams influenced his waking thoughts and decision-making, leading up to a pivotal (and admittedly cheesy) near-death experience that forces him to choose whether to stay with her in the afterlife or go back to Odin and Lauren in the real world. Of course, he chooses to live, miraculously defying all medical odds because this story really needed a happy ending.

For that ending, I always knew that Nick and Lauren would get back together and try for another baby. I originally planned to show Lauren pregnant as she sat by Nick’s side at the villains’ sentencing hearing, but that changed when Saoirse was born a month before I started writing the last chapter. After seeing Nick’s post about knowing she was “coming back” to them and the beautiful video he made after her birth, I decided to use that idea instead. The first scene of Chapter 50 is drawn directly from that video and is my favorite fatherly moment for Nick. I tried to capture the joy and relief he feels upon welcoming his baby girl (back) into the world, alive and well. In the context of the story, this means even more for his character after losing his last baby and almost losing his own life. Life can be cruel and painful, but it’s a precious gift that he’ll never take for granted again.

2. Howie in Sick as My Secrets

Not every story has a happy ending, and there are some truly heartbreaking scenes involving Howie and his kids in Sick as My Secrets. As my only Howie novel, this was the natural choice to write about for his part of this blog, but I had a harder time narrowing it down to one fatherly moment to focus on. Like AHTIM, I love SAMS but also have a lot of writer’s remorse about certain aspects of it, such as Howie’s last scene and his baby being used as a plot device. This is the closest I’ve ever come to crossing that line I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. I don’t kill real BSB kids, but apparently I’m okay with giving them chronic illnesses when it serves the plot. 😬 But, hey! This is the first story I’ve written about in this blog that does not include any dead babies, so I’ll consider that a win.

When I posted the beginning of SAMS, I claimed, “It’s a story so angsty, it’s going to make Curtain Call read like a romantic comedy.” Curtain Call remains one of the saddest stories I’ve ever written, and SAMS is right up there, too, but amid all the heavy drama, they both contain some light, fluffy moments of comic relief. Chapter 62 is a great example of that. It takes place during my favorite arc of SAMS, when Nick stays with Howie in Florida and discovers that he does, in fact, want to be more than friends. While this chapter is written from Nick’s point of view, the first scene is my favorite fatherly moment featuring Howie. Left in charge of his kids for the first time since Leigh filed for divorce from him, Howie struggles to get Holden to take his medicine until Nick helps him come up with a solution. I love this little scene because it’s lighthearted. It contains some cute interactions between Howie and both of his kids, as well as some funny banter between him and Nick, the “Uncle Jesse” to Howie’s “Danny Tanner.” I obviously enjoyed having some of the Backstreet Boys play Full House and take care of kids together because I used that type of storyline again with Nick, AJ, and Kevin playing Three Men and a Baby in My Brother’s Keeper.

1. Kevin in The World Will Be Waiting

The sequel to My Brother’s Keeper (which is also dead baby-free but does include a dead wife), The World Will Be Waiting is about Kevin navigating a new relationship while returning to his old career after a life-altering accident that left him widowed and disabled. But, just like the first story, it also focuses on his role as a father.

As I mentioned toward the beginning of this blog, I don’t usually enjoy writing about the real Backstreet kids, but I’ve actually found myself enjoying writing Mason in this one. In MBK, Mason was just a baby, but in TWWBW, he’s a few years older and becomes a full-fledged character with more of a personality than he had in the first story. Out of all the guys, Kevin has kept his kids the most private – aside from a few family photos, neither he nor Kristin post much about them on social media – so I don’t feel like I know much about the real Mason, who’s almost grown up now. In a way, that’s been freeing for me because it makes him more of a blank canvas that I can use to create my own semi-fictional character. I’ve had fun writing him as a five-year-old boy who loves dinosaurs, learns how to ride a bike without training wheels, and starts kindergarten. I’ve also found it interesting to explore the challenges of raising a child as a single, disabled dad, as Kevin does in the story. Of course, he has help in the form of Dawn, his live-in nanny/caregiver, who plays a maternal role to Mason and acts as a platonic life partner to Kevin as they raise him together. As I wrote in a previous blog, I really love the unique relationship and slightly unconventional family dynamic between Kevin, Mason, and Dawn. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s one of my favorite parts of this story. I enjoy the scenes with the three of them together, so I had lots of chapters to choose from for this blog. But, for my favorite fatherly moment, I went with one that just features Kevin and Mason having a father-son day.

In Chapter 15, Kevin takes Mason to see Cathedral Domain, the camp where he grew up and got married. I visited Cathedral Domain myself in 2015 while I was in the area to watch Kevin and Brian’s induction into the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame, so I drew on my own experience, as well as the documentary, when writing this chapter. It was poignant to imagine Kevin introducing his son to such an important place in his personal history, especially in light of all that he previously lost in the story: his dad, who worked there, his wife, who married him there, and a part of himself, who lived there long before he became paralyzed. It’s fitting – and absolutely planned – that this chapter takes place on Father’s Day, which happened to fall on Kevin’s wedding anniversary in 2012. It’s an extra hard day for Kevin in the story, which is why it’s important for him to spend it making new memories with his son instead of wallowing in grief. I love the little moments in this chapter, like when he drives past his old high school and points out the football field, telling Mason about how he used to play, and when he belts part of “Don’t Stop Believing,” the first song he learned to play on the piano in the cathedral. While Mason understands that Kevin wasn’t always disabled, he doesn’t have any memory of his dad being able-bodied and doesn’t pity him the way other characters sometimes do. But the care and compassion he has for Kevin shows in the way he notices the tears in his dad’s eyes when they visit the spot where his parents got married and the way he looks back to make sure Kevin hasn’t fallen too far behind when they race back to the truck. I love the sweet father-son relationship they have. When I decided to make fatherhood the theme of this week’s blog, this was the first chapter I thought to include.

Do you prefer to read fanfics that include the guys’ real kids, fictional kids, or no kids at all? Leave a comment below and let me know!