For minniem: Lance/Justin. "Came in from a rainy Thursday on the avenue thought I heard you talking softly / I turned on the lights the TV and the radio but still I can't escape the ghost of you / What is happening to me crazy some would say / Where is the life that I recognize, gone away"

They've always talked a good game in interviews about how close they all are, throw around the word "brothers" like it's going out of style, but sometimes Lance catches Justin sitting on the stool at the end of the island counter in the kitchen, his face distant and still, and has to wonder what he's thinking. It seems uncouth to ask, because somehow along the line they had all just been supposed to grow telepathy and be able to know, but for all Lance can tell Justin's thinking about the economic policies of South Africa or the best way to get red wine stains out of white cloth or the price of fucking tea in China and all he can think of is that somewhere along the way he missed a memo, didn't get the secret document outlining what each expression mapped to.

Justin's the most mysterious out of all of them, in the way that he's not mysterious at all. Justin will talk for hours with reporters, casual quick laugh spiking and then fading, and he thinks nothing of sharing details that anyone else would never dream of telling a stranger. Sometimes Lance thinks that it's just that to Justin, nobody's a stranger, even if he hasn't met them yet. He wonders what it's like to live that way, all up in everyone's faces, and it isn't until he wakes up one morning to Justin's voice on the radio spinning another long tale that Lance barely recognizes that he realizes that what Justin is really saying is whatever everybody else wants to hear. It's not normal, Lance thinks, but nothing about them is. They'd been normal once, but that had been a long time ago, and sometimes he barely remembered it.

"They're gonna write what they want anyway, man," Justin said once, one of his shoulders rising and falling in a half-shrug. "Might as well give it to them in my own words."

"Don't you want to tell them who you are?" Lance asked him.

"Sure." Justin shrugged. "Wouldn't anybody? But it wouldn't do much good, so why bother? I figured that out a while back. It's just easier this way."

Sometimes Lance wakes up in the morning and Justin's already out of bed, standing at the window and drinking his coffee absently, as though he's forgotten that it's in his hands. Watching Justin when Justin thinks that he's alone should be enlightening, it should reveal the deepest and innermost secrets of the way that Justin's mind works, but in real life Lance always winds up squinting at the sun and making some kind of noise. By the time that Justin turns around, whatever might have been there is gone, and Justin smiles at him and climbs over him in bed, his kisses flavored with coffee and toothpaste.

Justin is the most mysterious out of all of them because you can't look at him and see anything but your own reflection. Lance sometimes wonders who it is that he wants Justin to be.

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