Sunset is really pretty when there's nothing else around except for road and sky and the occasional billboard. Tonight it's pink, peeking in and out behind the clouds from minute to minute as the clouds blow by, and it feels like the sky is on fire. He could watch it for days, but he knows that it's not going to be there for days. It's a short and fleeting thing, twenty minutes tops. Maybe that's why he likes it so much.

He woke up at the rest stop just outside of Baton Rouge a few hours ago. He hadn't been planning on sleeping, but at around nine in the morning the world had gone all camera-click, sleep deprivation layering on top of an already bone-deep exhaustion to turn the road into single stills jerking along at an uncertain and uncomfortable slow-fast-slow-fast frame rate. The caffeine hadn't done anything but given him the shakes, and his hands had already been uncertain enough on the wheel. He'd pulled over to the rest stop, smiled at the woman who was cleaning the men's room, and then climbed into the back of his SUV and pulled the blanket over his head. The next thing he'd known, it had been two in the afternoon and there were a bunch of five and six year olds playing a game of tag on the lawn next to his car. He'd sat up, dragged a hand over his head, and watched them frolic. The inside of the car had been stuffy and the air was still, though sometime while he'd been asleep it had rained.

"You look familiar," the waitress in the Waffle House in Louisiana had said to him as she came over to refill his coffee.

"Yeah," Jay said, and picked up his book. "I get that a lot."

"Where you headed?"

"Saved up a bunch of vacation this year, had to take it before the end of the month or I'd lose it. I figured it was time to see some of this country of ours. Gonna keep driving until I fall over, then get up and drive some more."

"Good luck," she'd said, and left him in blessed peace with his coffee and his hash browns.

He's about ten miles out of Lake Charles and the refineries are smoking on the side of the highway, all lit up like Christmas. The Mississippi is sluggish this time of year, slow and ponderous. The road's wet enough to kick up a bit of spray, but only when one of the tractor-trailers goes by him. He's got the cruise control set at 78, which is probably not a good idea with out of state plates despite the 70 miles an hour speed limit, but he's been driving for so long that it's like the high speed has gotten burned in. Anything slower than that feels like he's crawling. Jay likes to drive fast, anyway, even when he hasn't gotten so used to it. He's been in the car for a very, very long time.

He'd had the CD player off for a while, reveling in the blessed silence and the hiss of the wind just outside the windows of the car, but no matter how much he craves the silence when he can't get it, too much of it and he starts to twitch a bit, so he turns the music back up as loud as it will go. Jay's got a music taste that's generally politely called "eclectic", and A Perfect Circle gives way to Patty Larkin. He sings along because he wants to, not because he has to, and he doesn't care if anyone can see him dancing in place in the car and drumming along on the steering wheel. It feels good.

His shoulders had gone from "ache" to "scream" at about three AM, halfway through what they generally called Ass End, Mississippi, and his hands had started to go numb. It didn't worry him; that always happens when he spends so much time driving. He tenses up too much, that's all. He'd slouched down in the driver's seat, thumbs the only thing on the steering wheel, knees pulled up towards the seat because the cruise was on and he was the only sign of life on the road for miles, and rocked his shoulders back and forth in rhythm to the REM on the CD player. That had stopped working quickly, and he tucked each arm back behind the seat in turn to stretch it out in the other direction, concentrating only on releasing the tension in his biceps and shoulders. The numbness in his fingers got worse and then got sharply better, that faint tinge of abused nerves giving way to the tingle of returning circulation, and slowly his hands stoped feeling like they were someone else's skin when he brushed up against them. His shrink would probably call it a metaphor or something.

The rest stops in Mississippi are all done up in fake Southern plantation architecture, and he'd realized when he got out of the car that his knees and shoulders were weak and shaking. He wasn't sure if it was from the caffeine or from the tension he stocks up when he's driving and lets go the minute that the car turns off. The guy parked in the spot next to him didn't speak much English but picked his head up from under the hood of his van anyway and asked for a wrench. Jay studied Spanish in school for a grand total of two semesters, but he spread his hands and tried to remember how to say it, lo siento, no, uh, no me tengolo, and he was sure that was wrong but the guy smiled and seemed to understand anyway.

He'd been ten hours into the trip already, all the way into Georgia, when he'd decided that he was detouring, and he's still not sure where he's going. He'd clicked off the onboard navigation computer that his car comes equipped with and turned off his cell phone. The paranoid part of his brain tells him that they can track him like that, but that's not why he turned them off. He just wanted to get lost for a little while.

Jay's a little bit of a slob, so the well of the passenger's side of the car has a few empty soda bottles and a half-finished bag of chips rattling around. Jay smokes -- Marlboro Ultra-Lights 100s, the ultra-lights to keep from fucking up his voice, the hundreds so that they last longer -- and he lights one as the mile markers count down to Texas on the side of the road.

"Are you sure that you feel like driving?" his mother had asked him. She'd been sitting on the bed, watching him throw the last of his stuff into his suitcase. "There's no reason why you shouldn't fly. They can get someone to drive the car down for you later on this week or something."

"I want to drive," he'd said. "I need the time to myself."

His mother understood that part of things, she always had, so that was the end of the matter, and when he'd pulled the battered leather bomber jacket out from the closet, she'd just sighed a little. "I think we have some No-Doz in the bathroom cabinet. Be sure to call when you get home."

Jay is twenty-two years old. Jay just graduated from college and has a nice job lined up for him halfway across the country. Jay likes reading and plays video games and messes around online more than is really good for him. Jay has Martin, his boyfriend who's studying to be a massage therapist and likes stuff that's a little more kinky than Jay's used to, but Jay always likes to try. Jay's got about forty thousand dollars in student loans to pay back, and just recently got his first credit card, and sometimes winds up eating ramen at the end of the month when he doesn't budget well enough and has to take both his car insurance and his health insurance payments out of the same paycheck.

Jay doesn't exist anywhere but in a few computers and inside two people's heads. Maybe three, if you count Jay's godmother. He doesn't, though. Not really.

His mother had gone to find the box of caffeine pills that she keeps in the medicine cabinet for occasions precisely like that one and he had pulled the jacket around his shoulders and removed the pair of glasses from the pocket. Jay needs glasses, so he put them on, squinting through the clear plastic at his reflection in the mirror. One of his four best friends in the world once told them all that the way to avoid being recognized is to change your body language. He'd always thought it was insane until he'd seen it work, seen people look right by him when they'd been looking for him. He stared at his own eyes in the mirror and took a deep breath, then let it out slowly, concentrating the entire time, and when he rolled his shoulders and turned a little, there it was. Jay not only can't dance, he once broke his foot by tripping over a curb.

"Baby," his mom had said, coming back with the stuff for him. "Are you feeling okay?"

"Yeah," he'd said, and let Jay go away for a little while. His momma was smarter than she let on, sometimes. He didn't feel like trying to explain to her why Christmas in Memphis makes him want to walk out the door and keep on going.

Which is really what he wound up doing; he was supposed to be there for four or five more days, but he'd told them that he was going home early, and he really had intended to go home, he just hadn't made it far enough to get there. It's the middle of the evening and it's coming up on the third night he's spent on the road and his body aches like nobody's business and all he wants to do is keep going.

When he catches himself reaching for the cell phone, he hesitates for a minute, knowing that it's going to be a bad idea, but he thumbs it on anyway. Two days really is a little bit too long to let it go. The phone takes a minute to find its network and then lights up like a Christmas tree, pinging over and over again with his you-have-new-voice-mail tone. If he's traveling at seventy-eight miles an hour and his phone rings for three minutes straight, how many messages per mile is that? He catches himself setting up the problem in his head and laughs at himself, then flips the phone open when it seems to be done chiming.

His best friend answers after two rings. Caller ID is a curse and a blessing all at once. "You fucker," comes the voice, hard and angry, "you can't just go and disappear for two days like that without telling anyone, without calling anyone, do you have any idea how fucking worried we all were? Johnny's giving you until sunrise and then he's going to subpoena the phone company to trace your fucking cell phone, your mom's building kidnap scenarios in her head and Trace thinks you've driven into a fucking ditch somewhere. Where the fuck are you, Justin?"

"Justin is in the bosom of his family in Memphis, Tennessee, catching up on some much-needed sleep and relaxing for a few days," he says, propping his phone up against his shoulder and throwing the cigarette butt out the window.

There's a pause, and then a nearly audible snap as Chris rearranges a few things in his head. When he speaks again, it's that calm and rational talking-the-leaper-off-the-edge-of-the-building voice, and it pisses Justin off, suddenly and inexplicably, despite the fact that he knows Chris developed it in response to years of freakouts just like this one. Chris had been the first one to realize what had been going on. "Okay," Chris says, evenly. "Where's Jay?"

"Jay's just gone over the state line between Louisiana and Texas. I'm about, oh, twenty minutes outside of Beaumont. Heading west on I-10. It's a nice night out, clear and just a little on the chilly side."

He must have caught Chris at his desk, because there's the click of keys and Chris sounds just distracted enough. "Okay. I can catch the last flight into Houston, which leaves at... come on, you fucker, load -- eleven forty-three. You wanna meet up there, or do you want to keep moving and I'll catch you in Dallas or El Paso a little later on in the day?"

"Chris," he says. "It's okay. I don't need a rescue this time. I just needed some time off, is all. I can do this one on my own."

Chris doesn't sound convinced. "Did you call Liz?"

"No," Justin says, and it's sharper than it should be. "I don't need to call my shrink every time I have a sudden impulse to take some time off. That's what Jay is fucking for."

He'd always managed to stave off the panic attacks until after the shows, he'd always managed to hold them off until after the mad dash through the crowds of fans and the touching and the people in his space, managed to hold them off until afterwards, when he could crawl into someone's bed and shake and just breathe. He still doesn't know which one of the guys had talked to their minders. He hadn't been trying to kill himself, he really hadn't, he just wanted to get some fucking sleep and how had he been supposed to know what the dosage on those things were, anyway? The guys had taken turns walking him up and down the hallways of the hotel, one at a time, rubbing his back and talking to him to keep him awake. Joey and Chris had nearly come to blows over whether or not Joey was going to call the hospital. "You wouldn't be doing him any favors," Chris had said, his voice low and barbed, where he thought that Justin couldn't hear. "The last thing that he needs is a rep for being crazy."

Transcon's people had sent him to Dr. Elizabeth Call-Me-Liz Dehner a few weeks later. No explanations, no reasoning. Justin still isn't sure which one of the guys said something to someone, or if it really even was one of them. Maybe the wrong person had stuck his head out the wrong door at the wrong time. He prefers to think that, anyway. Liz wasn't the first shrink Justin had been to, but she was the first one he stuck with, mostly because she survived the new-shrink test when five of her predecessors hadn't; their first four months had been Justin sitting in complete and total silence, and Liz doing paperwork and ignoring him. It was the first time that he'd ever cracked first, and when he'd asked later why she let him get away with it, she'd shrugged and said "I figured you were enjoying the chance to not have to pretend to be what the other person wanted to hear." Justin's in love with her, just a little bit. Has been ever since that moment.

Chris exhales. "Okay, okay, It's just -- The last time you spent any significant amount of time out and about as Jay was right after you and Brit, and I thought -- Are things okay with you and Cam?"

He's beginning to regret calling Chris. "I told you. It's not any real reason, it's not anything bad. I just. I needed to get out of there. I don't belong there anymore, and there are too many people trying to make me into the local boy done good."

"So, in other words, it's the usual." Chris still sounds sympathetic, even if the words are brisk. He always tries to keep it light at first, at least until Justin lets him know that it's serious. "Did it just all hit you at once, or did it take a while for it to build?"

Justin isn't paying as much attention to the road as he should, so he turns the cruise speed down with his fingertips. Louisiana bayou turns to Texas suburb within feet of crossing the state line, and he ponders pulling over and taking a break to pee and pick up another bottle of Coke. He's been through this section of road before, and he knows that the minute he gets through Orange and Beaumont, there won't be anything until he hits Houston. "It got kinda bad when the kid at the convenience store wanted to know if it was true that Cam and I were getting married, and his boss started arguing with him about it before I could."

"Ouch." Chris laughs a little. "That's not the first time that something like that's happened, though, right?"

"No, it isn't." Justin's fingers itch, and he stops himself from reaching for the pack of cigarettes. Jay really does smoke too much. "It's just -- What's that definition of home you always use? The one from Frost?"

"Home is the place where, when you go, they have to take you in."

"Yeah. That. I love my momma and I love my brothers and I even love Paul, but they're -- it's not -- it's just not real, you know? None of it is. It's someone else's life and I'm not living it, I'm just borrowing it, and I'm already doing enough of that. They don't get it, they don't get all of it. I could feel that it was starting to happen again, that I was about to do something that would fuck it all up and push them away and cause nothing but problems. So I had to get out of there and get back to my life. Except even that wasn't okay, you know?" He's been doing that for years, pulling people close and then pushing them away when they get there. Liz was the one who made him realize what he was doing, and he still has to consciously stop himself sometimes.

He can hear Chris frowning. "Are you sure you're okay? I really can come out and meet up with you, you know. It's no big deal, it's no imposition."

"Chris." He makes his voice as firm as he can. He really would like to have Chris there with him, to stick his feet up on the dashboard and hang his hand out the window and listen to him tell stories, but his New Year's resolution last year was to learn to deal with things by himself, and his New Year's resolution this year is to keep going with that trend, and dammit, he's a rational and capable adult who doesn't need to lean on anyone. "I'm in a much better space than I was when all this started. Look, I know that Liz cooked this whole thing up to keep me from going bugfuck, and I know that you and she have talked about things since I dragged you in on it, but you really do need to trust that I know what I'm doing, okay?"

There's a long silence. He's used to this; sometime around the worst of Justin's headcase days, Chris had learned to stop and play everything over in his head once or twice before saying it out loud in Justin's earshot. Justin sometimes thinks, when he's being honest with himself, that he fucked Chris up pretty badly during the process of Chris trying to get Justin un-fucked. "I just worry about you sometimes," Chris finally says. "You're right, you are in a much better place than when this all started, but that doesn't mean you can't have times of not being okay, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah," Justin says. "But I want to prove that I can be not-okay on my own."

Another pause, and then Chris says, "Okay. But promise me that you'll leave your cell phone on, okay? You can put it on silent and throw it in the glove compartment, but leave it on."

Justin knows that what Chris is really asking is "don't drive cross-country while you may or may not be on the verge of another episode, with no plan and no itinerary, on Jay Randall's driver's license that I helped you to illegally obtain, with no way for us to track you down if anything happens". He also knows that what Chris is really saying is "I love you", and that's what makes it bearable. "Okay," he says. "But you have to promise me that you won't let Johnny go through with that subpoena."

"I'll just call him first thing and tell him that I talked to you last night and you're fine. If you'd just tell people when you're going to disappear like this, people wouldn't flip out, you know."

"I didn't know I was going to disappear until I did," Justin says. "I still don't know where I'm going. Santa Fe, maybe. Or maybe the Grand Canyon. Or I might take a right turn and head on up through Wyoming, visit Yellowstone or something. Head for Seattle to get a decent cup of coffee. I figure I'll figure it out when I have to."

"How long are you planning on being gone?"

"I don't know. A week or two. I've got plenty of time. You know I'm lying low for a while to give C his chance for the spotlight."

He's starting to lose the sense of Jay, so he plucks another cigarette out of the half-empty pack and lights it. He knows that Chris heard the lighter, but he also knows that Chris knows better than to say anything. They built Jay together, the two of them, painstakingly and piece by piece. Justin had gone to Chris because Chris was the closest thing to normal that he'd known and trusted enough to let in. Chris hadn't gotten on the merry-go-round until he'd been twenty-four.

"Why out there in the middle of nowhere? I mean, Jesus, west Texas, east New Mexico, it's the most inhospitable countryside in the entire damn country. You think maybe you should take your right turn a little earlier, pick up I-80? You'd at least be driving along civilization that way."

"I don't really want to be anywhere near civilization," he says, finally. "I like it out in the middle of nowhere. There are eight thousand stars out here. And none of them have my name on them."

Chris is silent for another long minute. "Yeah, okay," he says, even though it hadn't been a question. "Remember that you don't deal with altitude all that wonderfully. Don't forget to eat. I'll call Johnny and your mother. You call your girlfriend. Justin's girlfriend. Leave her a message, at least. And call me when you get home, all right?"

"Always."

"Love you," Chris says, and hangs up before Justin can say another word.

He can see Beaumont in his rear-view mirror and the signs are telling him that it's eighty-seven miles to Houston and over eight hundred to El Paso. He thinks that Jay likes Texas, except for feeling uncomfortable about the looks he gets about his earrings sometimes. Jay and Martin came through Texas once on their way to Mexico and spent two days holed up in a hotel room in Corpus Christi fucking so intensely that getting back in the car afterwards had been a torment. Justin alternates between wishing that Martin were real and being glad that he isn't.

"There's nothing wrong with you," Liz had finally told him, after they'd gone through their four months of silence and then another six of Justin pouring out everything that had been building up since the first time someone had lifted a camera and pointed it in his direction, "that some time away from being Justin Timberlake wouldn't cure."

"I love my life," he'd said. "I do. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world."

"I know," Liz had said. "But your management dragged you over here and dropped you in my office because they think that you're exhibiting some bad signs, and you're at precisely the younger end of the age range when borderline personality disorder starts to manifest, and they want their dancing boys to be sane, or at least able to fake it for the cameras." Justin loves Liz because she'll say things like that. There's no sugar coating with her. "And it's my official and professional diagnosis that you're sane. You're fucked up, but you're sane."

It had been like a weight had been lifted from his chest to hear it. "Tell me that again," he'd said.

"Justin, anyone who's been through what you've been through at your age is going to be fucked up. You're socialized completely differently than anyone who grew up in 'normal' conditions would be. It's not wrong or right, it's just different. And you're under a great deal of stress, and your coping mechanisms are probably woefully inadequate, and from what you tell me you've been extremely volatile and hostile to the people that love you lately. You exhibit a number of the classic warning signs of the disorder, but I'm confident that it's situational rather than symptomatic. I could treat the associated depression, but again, I think it's situational rather than symptomatic and I would rather not medicate you if I don't have to."

"Good," Justin had said. "I wouldn't have taken them anyway." He'd been terrified that they'd try to drug him stupid and take away whatever it was that fueled his creativity, his drive, his music. He'd been more terrified that whatever was wrong with him was something that they couldn't medicate for.

"I know." Liz had smiled. "I want to try something with you. I normally wouldn't dream of trying anything like this, particularly not with a patient who's in such unstable condition as you are right now. But you've got a number of unusual circumstances that call for unusual solutions, and you've got such a strongly-developed sense of self-identity to begin with, and you're already doing this to some extent, even if you aren't aware of doing it."

"Doing what?"

"Being someone else." Liz had wrapped her hands around her mug of peppermint tea and watched him steadily. "You do it now; from everything you've told me, you're one person for everyone else in the world, and another person for the other four in your group. Everyone does that, to some extent or another. Situational behaviour. When you were a little kid, did you ever play make-believe?"

Justin had frowned. "I used to dream about how I was going to be famous when I grew up, if that's what you mean."

"No." Liz had shaken her head. "I mean make-believe. I want you to try and create someone. Make him partially who you are when you're not in front of the cameras, and partially who you've always wanted to be and never gotten the chance to be, and partially who you'd never be, not in a million years. Make him a little bit of what scares you and a little bit of what fascinates you and a little bit of what intrigues you and a little bit of what you've always wanted to be, but above all else, make him completely different than what you are now, and make him completely detached from the business. Build him up in your head. Give him a history, and a family, and a bunch of hobbies, and some friends, and let him be anything that you've always wanted to be but can't because of management or your fans or your lifestyle or what have you. And then, when everything that you're dealing with gets to be too much, go somewhere quiet, and close your eyes, and put yourself into his life for a little while."

It had sounded nuts for about two seconds, and then it had sounded like the best idea that anyone had ever had. "Jay," Justin had said, and Liz had smiled at him. "His name is Jay."

When Justin had told him, Chris had mumbled dark things about Lou-hired witch doctors, post-traumatic stress syndrome, deliberately induced dissociative disorders, and cargo cult psychiatry. Justin shrank away, because when Liz had been talking it had all made sense and then Chris got so angry, and Chris had stopped and looked at Justin and then sighed. He'd picked up the phone and called Liz, without letting Justin hear, and when he'd come back into the room he'd sat back down, clapped his hands together, and said, "So, tell me what you know about Jay so far."

They'd built him together, the rest of the way, piece by piece and trait by trait. Chris always listens to Justin's stories of Jay, and hadn't even batted an eyelash when Justin had first mentioned Martin, and never says a word in front of anyone else. Chris is Jay's best friend, too, the one bit of overlap from life to life.

It's fucked up. Justin knows that it's fucked up, and Liz knows that it's fucked up, and Chris knows that it's fucked up, and sometimes Justin thinks that Jay is the only thing that's keeping him out of the loony bin. He'd looked up the definition of borderline personality disorder in the DSM-IV one afternoon, and then given JC his laptop back and gone to lie down in his bunk and finish reading the book that Jay was doing his freshman lit thesis on. Liz says that you either have it or you don't, and if you have it, you know it and so does everyone else around you; there's no such thing as a mild case. Justin clings to that and ignores the way that the symptoms sound so familiar to him, ignores the extra reading he's done that tells him that the disorder can manifest in a patient anytime in his or her early twenties. Liz says that he is at risk for it, but she's keeping an eye on him and so is Chris and so's his mother, even if she doesn't know what she's looking for, and so are the rest of the guys, even if they're doing it because they all look out for each other and not because of any fear that Justin's going crazy. He kind of likes that way better, anyway.

Jay doesn't have to worry about any of that. Jay's cure for feeling down is to eat some chocolate and sprawl out with the episodes of West Wing and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy that his TiVo recorded for him. Justin hates Queer Eye, he thinks it's nothing but pandering to stereotypes. Jay agrees, but he thinks that Kian is cute, so he watches it anyway. Justin's been living with Jay so long, this character in his head that he's pieced together from so many odds and ends, that he can tell without having to even think about it what Jay likes and doesn't like. It's odd sometimes to have that duality going on in his head, Justin and Jay both wrapped up in one person. He'd decided that he wasn't going to tell anyone else about what Liz had come up with, because it really does sound too much like he's trying to stave off one form of crazy with another. He doesn't feel crazy, though. He just feels fucked up, and Jay's one of the least fucked up things about him. It's all relative.

Jay and Justin both like driving, but Jay's the only one of the two of them who gets to do it with any regularity. Justin mostly gets driven places.

It's ten o'clock at night and he's just outside of Houston, Texas, and he's hungry and he has to pee and he needs to fill the gas tank and he's happier than he's been in days. Sometimes he thinks that the music is the only thing that's keeping him from letting Justin disappear entirely: renting Jay's tiny apartment and furnishing it with Jay's techno-Zen decorating preferences, letting Jay go to find Martin in real life.

His cell phone is on silent, but he brings it inside the Whataburger with him anyway, thumbing the keys with one hand, texting Cameron to let her know that he's falling off the face of the earth for a while and will call her when he's back. He'd warned her in the very beginning that he sometimes needed to disappear for a while, and she'd wondered how he manages to do it without being recognized and mobbed. "I've got a good disguise," he'd said, after a few minutes of wondering what he could say in response. It was the easiest possible reply that held enough of the truth.

"You look like that singer guy," the teenager behind the counter says to him as he orders his dinner. Lunch. Whatever the hell meal it is.

"Nah," Justin says. Or maybe Jay does. "He looks kinda like me, though."

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