For niftykitten: Chris/Lance. "Please tell me that I have grown / For I have bruises left to show"

Lance caught Chris staring at himself in the mirror, after a shower, with a damp towel wrapped around his waist and his hair spiked every-which-way and still dripping water. "Do you think that I'm getting too old for this?" Chris asked him.

Lance thought that it was too early in the morning for existential crises. "Thirty-two isn't old, Chris. It's not even middle aged yet."

"For a boyband member, it's well over the hill."

"Which is why we're not a boyband anymore, we're a male vocal harmony group." Lance cocked his head to the side and studied Chris with about the same intensity that Chris was studying himself. "This isn't going to be a repeat of the angst that we had when you turned thirty, is it?"

Chris gave him a death-glare in the mirror. "That's not it. I'm not, like, feeling old. Well, I mean, I am, but not like that. It's more like -- Eight years, you know? J's coming up on the age that I was when we started this whole thing. And I was looking at some of the old video footage last week --"

"That was your first mistake."

Chris ignored him. "--and I got to thinking, you know, we've all changed an awful lot in a lot of big and scary and important ways, but nobody ever wonders if we haven't really changed at all."

Lance sighed. "What's this really about, Chris? It's not about history. With you, it's never really about what you say that it is."

"I don't know," Chris said. His eyes were wide and Lance could see the droplets of water that lingered on his new tattoo. He wondered, again, what the phoenix meant to Chris, that he'd had it written on his skin. "I just wonder sometimes. If there's something else we're supposed to be doing instead."

"I think you're doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing," Lance said. "Come on. I have coffee."

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