![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
info |
atenburg is a small town in southern Netherlands that received its city rights in the early 14th century, no one really knows why, Thijs would like to say, hole in the fucking ground that place, but anyway – that is where he was born and brought up by two religious nutcases for parents. Exceedingly Catholic, to the point where he was the oldest of 6 kids.
Around the age of 14, he realized he was attracted to men and as a 15-year-old, he started working for a young farmer who had taken over an old farm outside the town. The man, ten years older than him, became the object of an obsessive young love for Thijs and at some point, they initiated a secret relationship that his parents, however, were quick to discover and vehemently forbade him to see the other man again, as well as beginning to threaten the farmer with police action.
To make sure they couldn’t do something like that, Thijs ran away from home three months later, travelling to the middle of the country, to Utrecht and lived on the streets there, doing petty work for the local gangs, until one of the gang leaders got his eyes up for the fact that the one thing in the world that Thijs was extremely good at was driving cars. He became a getaway driver for the gang and was invited to live with the gang leader until he was legal and had the money to move by himself.
While he earned his own income and slowly made a life for himself in Utrecht, Thijs – several years after he actually learned to drive by his dad – finally got his driver’s license and set his sights on the racetrack near Amsterdam where he’d love to work as a driver at some point. The gang leader got him in touch with people he knew in Amsterdam and as soon as he turned 18, Thijs made the move, starting over yet again in a new city.
He couch-surfed for some months and got groundskeeping work at the racetrack (a couple of years later advancing to becoming truck driver for the resident race team), spending his money buying lessons from the infamous race car driver, Karl Bech, to try and catch the eyes of someone in the business. Through another getaway driver for one of the major gangs in Amsterdam, he heard about Marcel Verlinden, a new gang member who was in need of a roomie.
After a brief interview that Thijs understood exactly nada of, Marcel invited him to move in and it would be the beginning to a long and complicated relationship between the two men, who’d soon realize they were attracted to each other with everything that entailed of difficult circumstances, Thijs gotta add.
Some fucking Romeo and Juliet shit, that.
While simultanously working getaway and transport jobs for Marcel's fraction in Amsterdam, when Karl gets injured in a very serious accident, in lack of better options, his team put Thijs behind the wheel of their real fucking race car, making him lead a few races for them until they can find someone else. As it turns out, he's the best there is and they end up keeping him, introducing him to the vast and influential racing circles all over Europe. At this point, Thijs is 24.
He's a year away from getting ordered dead by the Big Boss, de Groot and having his murder faked by Marcel, who sends him out of the Netherlands to a new future and a new identity overseas.