early days Fashionably late. It was the first thing June's mother uttered in a Hong Kong hospitable bed when the hour struck midnight. By the time her son was born it was well beyond the end of the party but it didn't matter to the little family huddled there. Time, like their home, was a well meshed problem anyway and 2 AM seemed as good a time as any to decide that their plans to raise their child were well worth throwing all away now. So there aren't any memories of Hong Kong as far back as June can figure but that never hindred him much. He could listen to the stories once he came of age and knew that, with the calls they'd get when he was still too young to reach the phone on the wall, he had uncles and aunties on the other side of the world always loving him.

Buffalo was something else altogether. The American dream wasn't completely American the way it should have been. They'd heard about the steel factories though and Dan found work fast. The first few years were simple. Difficult work but fair pay, and Grace was able to find some time to volunteer around the community, tugging her young son along. It wasn't until a few years into living some fake American dream that things began to change. The neighborhood had never been prosperous but it had been dutiful; but the layoffs started and the culture of it changed. Break-ins and robberies became more frequent until no one lived without a weapon in the house just to get through the night. It meant a tighter leash on little June where they could manage it together, keeping their kid at their side when he wasn't in school just to make sure he didn't happen on anything that could have been a wicked end.

Wicked ends have their ways of heading out to meet you though. It was an odd Thursday in late April, 2003. The accident was a mishap, a common enough incident that usually had a few bumps and bruises at best, some pay cuts. But June was with Dan that day at work and things went wrong. The steel came undone from its lift and June was stupid enough to be standing in the way. The pain when it smacked into his skull was a searing thing, enough to make him scream, until he heard the rest of the crew screaming in their deeper voices in turn. Dan had tried to push his son out of the way and kept him from the worst of it; he did, but the bars fell right onto Dan's spine and he was dead before anyone could even react. June freaked out, bleeding and trying to wake his father up. The guys were trying all around him and when a lineman tried to drag June off, his requite snapped out: all the machines in the factory blew out at once and the metal twisted up away from where he stood.

After that life came in slow percolation. The insurance money barely covered the funeral and it was up to a single mom in an empty neighborhood to make ends meet. She did her best, though, and even got herself a low paying government job so that they were better off than a vast majority of their neighbors. June understood the strain anyway though, from the get-go. The bus rides to training, the bags of clothes from coworkers or neighbors mom would bring home — things never went unnoticed. But the first few years were hard, harder than June likes to touch down on. Without much to work with his training became a matter of rebuilding what he was given: the process turned into odd jobs by the age of ten, being able to put back together radios, toasters, microwaves, whatever a neighbor needed and could pay a few bucks towards.

Eleven years old and the local repairman came with its own little problems, though. Word passed around about the boy genius with technology and it hit the wrong ears. June didn't have much means on avoiding the worst crowds of the neighborhood and when they finally came after him, he was too young to know how to say no. In his own rearview the fortune of life came with the crew that dragged him up into their hold being one of the less violent groups in the area; they wanted him to help make things easier. Break ins to local franchises where they wouldn't have to resort to their pieces, little jobs that'd get them by. It was wrong and June knew it but — it worked. It was easier than anything getting the cameras to do what he wanted, to get registers working so they could make their quick cash. And they actually gave the kid a cut which, in turn, wound up doing something worse than they would have otherwise.

Ordering some special metal from some of the uncles who'd reached out to June in leiu of his father's death, June began to work on something he'd been seeing in comic books. A symbiotic suit that could be used for protection. He'd be like Iron Man, then. He'd be a hero and he could stop the crew from doing whatever they wanted. But the gift went wrong; the suit came to life and became part of June, crawled into the wound and dripped over his eye. He doesn't remember screaming but he'd been home alone and by the time his mother was waking him up the next morning June wasn't really sure anything had happened at all. Until the guys came around again and tried to get him to move out on some new hit; June felt the shift as the suit grew out of his face. The bullets came next, bouncing off his chest and head before the guns malfunctioned in their grips and the guys ran cowardice, little boy draped in armor left standing before half a dozen firearms and their casings.

He didn't run into those guys one on one again and that was pretty good. The guns were melted down in his grip, in the private of his bedroom, and absorbed into the suit. His new eye made things easier, anyway, and once his training helped him sort it out June was set in ways he didn't ever imagine would lead where they did in time. golden days Other June from down the block was where it all started. He didn't just want repair on his car he wanted an upgrade. He asked June if he could manage it, half-joking, and June's head began to work. Yeah, he thought. He could handle it. And he knew exactly how to: the uncles who'd sent the metals that became his protection were the same guys who started his empire. The first part came easily and June was willing to pay a little more than a few bucks for it. He told some friends and they told some other friends and by fourteen, June was already working on upgrading one car a week. The internet helped him expand there after, renting out an empty garage in New York City and using it as some launching off point to get imports and upgrades done, June became the first and sole provider of automotive upgrade parts from overseas within the East Coast of America; by fourteen he was traveling to New York three times a week and worth a million dollars already. He bought his mother her own house and got himself a small apartment to rent on his own, finishing high school up early just to do so.

College, however, had to wait on a long line. Because the world moved fast; his former connections ended up creeping up in new ways when June found himself being able to get along fine with less than proper dinner guests just to help build his business. Sure, there was getting to work as the sole provider for Top Gear USA and getting to buy up factories back in Asia to keep the uncles in business but more was always the way for June. Extreme Performance Motorsports stayed relevant and ended up remaining the sole import prospect for factories across Asia while June greased hands back by launching Kanoochi — a brand that manufactured and provided automotive parts internationally for all the factories that'd helped him build a small empire in America. A trip through those factories with men who became his guidance in life was what helped told June about some garment factories that needed the same support they were getting. And a light clicked.

The return to America was greased lightning. Opting to buy out the factories he was able to launch Tykoon Enterprises and opted into becoming the sole provider of headgear for Rocawear. It was that venture that built into June's true gift: designing. He bought out a failing leg of Rocawear and rebranded it with the rapper who owned it, turning 8732 into a profitable business again and the third largest urbanwear brand in America. Life, life was good, life was great, and he was a teenage multi-millionaire, traveling America and making connections across the fields. At just fifteen years old June was splitting time between Buffalo, New York and Los Angeles, awkwardly rubbing shoulders with men and women two and three times his age just to get them better deals and, in turn, make more of a profitable name for himself. It was with those shoulder rubs that June ended up getting introduced to a music CEO's stepdaughter at an after party June was giving away some headwear in.

Jelly was solid. A girl who was finishing up school before getting into her dream goal in life, even though she'd started young. They had things to bond over back then — movies and music and fashion interests galore. It became an easy thing to imagine lifetimes together, enough so that by 17 they had their own apartment together in Los Angeles. The three years they spent together and in love were, well, impressive even by June's standards. His companies grew and he got unique ventures while his capital began to expand and June's appearances began to build. It never seemed too rough, though, or too bad; Jelly even finished school and signed up with a modelling agency and their plans to move to New York together solidified.

Something changed, though. Coming home to friends he didn't know became a frequent thing and before long, she was more socialite than person and June, well, he wasn't there for it. Fights began to break out between them — especially over June's ability to stay connected to some of the worst kinds of people while judging her for her choices — and just a few months after her move to New York they broke up. It was, in a way, devastating. June went back to Buffalo and thought about his life in a more serious way. His businesses were almost autonomous at that point and the decision came easy: Georgetown for a degree in International Business and Management. It wasn't a party school and that was a damn good thing, he and his mom figured. You couldn't really get in trouble there.

But trouble was an easy thing to stumble into. Two years of partying and somehow managing his studies because he'd lived this already, since he was a kid, came and went; June's money helped him shy by the worst of it and also made him pretty popular with the women who only cared about a good time. And as far as he was concerned at that point, a good time was the best he could hope for, with his future already broken. Early, fast graduation with testing out of some courses and taking them year round, changed things, but only barely: parties became only business dealings and June kept his own troublemaking to the privacy of his New York apartment. June was coming down from a big change — a new father, his mother having met and gotten engaged to a man not much older than June — when he was partying in Los Angeles for this music gig.

In his defense, the food really was shit. But in most circumstances being the rich careless twenty year old trying to ask someone for the actual address of the joint just to order a pizza probably wasn't the best idea. Asking the son of the industry player hosting the event, even worse. But something clicked. June saw something in those eyes that made him want to chat while waiting for the food and, before the night was through he was even offering to share the pizza with the guy. It was a fun summer fling from there on out until August when June heard word of lexi with some white girl out in public; the month of August was a work filled ignorance run trying to ignore the little let down of getting worked up over someone invested in someone else.

Then came a labor day wedding — one June almost didn't go to because Usher was really just a friend of a friend of a friend — where he got to run into lexi and his date that evening. Turned out the girl was actually his sister, though, and June had a good laugh at his own expense. Flash forward not even a year later and they were buying a place together in Hawaii to accomodate lexi's gifts and aversion to the cold, June building his own lab to get to Be There more this time, not having to rely on hearsay or casual conversations but living together day in and day out with a new idea of the future together. Young and in love but this time, more than willing to let it flow where the design is meant to.