And these days I feel like I'm fading away
Like sometimes when I hear myself on the radio
Have you seen me lately?
I was out on the radio starting to change
Somewhere out in America, it's raining
Could you tell me one thing you remember about me?
And have you seen me lately?
      -- Counting Crows

"You told me," Chris says, "you weren't going to do this anymore."

Justin's heard it a thousand times: different verses, same chorus, but he doesn't mind, because he always feels better when he can sing along with the refrain. "I told you I wasn't going to do a lot of things anymore. I was usually lying. What in particular do you mean?"

Chris is leaning against the back of the door of yet another hotel room in yet another city. It's like if he holds himself there, he'll be able to keep Justin from making an escape. Justin doesn't tell Chris that two weeks ago he'd closed his eyes and pulled the pillow over his head and pulled up the memory of every lecture Chris had ever delivered, every time Chris ever threw up his hands and dragged Justin somewhere by the ear and sat him down to listen. He doesn't tell Chris this because he doesn't have the words to explain how much it hurts when he stands backstage and doesn't have a hand to reach for on his left and another one on his right. He doesn't tell Chris this because he doesn't know how to say that being out there in the spotlight all by himself makes him feel even more like nobody in the world can really see him.

Maybe Chris knows anyway. Chris came to D.C. when he called, after all.

"Work yourself into the ground like this," Chris says. "This was supposed to be a vacation. When was the last time you slept?"

"It's not like that." It is, but not in the way Chris means it. Not in the way Justin can say it. "I didn't -- I don't do vacation really well. You know that."

"You never have." Chris sticks his hands in his pockets and studies Justin, like he's a road-map to some tiny town in the midwest nobody ever goes to because there's nothing there when you arrive. "Is that what this is about?"

Justin crosses the hotel room and opens a drawer. He isn't looking for anything, not in particular, but if he's looking in the drawer he's not looking at Chris. "What what is about?"

"The album. The tour. The way you're running yourself down to nothing." The going out on your own without the rest of us, Justin thinks he can hear, but maybe he just can't read Chris's mind anymore.

"I'm not running," Justin says.

Chris's eyes are hot on his neck. He can feel them, boring into his skin, flaying him loose and raw. Chris is angry about something. Chris always seems angry about something these days. "If you weren't running, you wouldn't have said it like that."

Justin takes a hoodie out of his suitcase and shakes it out, then re-folds it, edges neat and smooth, and puts it into the drawer. Looks at it, black against the eggshell-white of the empty drawer. Picks it back up and puts it back where he got it from. "I don't have anything to be running from."

Chris laughs. "You've got everything in the world to be running from. You wouldn't have called me if you didn't need me. You wouldn't need me if there wasn't something wrong."

Justin called Chris because Chris has always been the one who watches him holding his breath and reminds him when it's time to come up for air. Sometimes he wonders if he's forgotten how to breathe on his own. Sometimes he wonders why he ever thought he wanted to. "It's wrong, with just me. I wanted to -- you know. Keep it the way it was. But it's not."

"Baby," Chris says, with a flash of teeth, "if you haven't figured out yet that normal is a setting on a clothes dryer, you haven't been paying enough attention."

Justin closes the drawer with a snap. "I don't know why the hell I wanted you here in the first place."

"Yeah, you do." Chris crosses the room and rests his hand on the nape of Justin's neck. Justin hisses under his breath as his skin crawls, the way his skin always crawls when Chris touches him, like there are tiny insects trying to get out. He wonders if Chris feels it too, if the insects are reaching for him the way Justin's reaching for him, the way Justin's always been reaching for him and never managed to touch.

It should be familiar. It isn't. Chris is someone different. It's like the months they spent apart have translated them both into a different language, unfamiliar in its alien script.

Justin hates it when things change. He always has.

He pulls away and turns around. "I feel like I'm going to wake up tomorrow and find that the world's been washed away. Or that I have."

There isn't much kindness in Chris's eyes. "Put it in a song. That kind of melodrama works on records."

Justin curls his fingers around the edge of the dresser behind him. He needs to cut his fingernails, he thinks. They're ragged and biting into the pads of his fingertips again. Concentrating on that little detail keeps him from concentrating on any of the rest of it. "I don't need the snide little commentary, you know."

"No, you've always needed the snide little commentary. Because without it your head's gonna disappear so far up your own ass that you'll only see the sunlight when you open your mouth." Justin's seen Chris wear a thousand moods like they're things to be tried on and then discarded, but he's never seen this one before. "You know who you are. You always have. What you forget is what it means for the rest of us."

What it means for you and me, Chris is saying, or Chris would be saying, if Justin could still read what Chris isn't saying. A year away from each other. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, a chance to surface from the ebb and flow of it. You don't notice the water you're drowning in until it closes over your head and you go under for the third and final time.

"I didn't do it to hurt you," Justin says.

Chris nods. "I know you didn't. You never do."

It's almost a kindness. He steps back, finally, giving Justin the inch necessary to draw a breath free and clear. The lights outside have gone out, one by one. Had gone out long before they stumbled back to the hotel. If New York is the city that never sleeps, D.C. is the city that goes to bed before the nightly news is off the air. Chris opens the curtains and stands at the window, looking out without seeing.

Silence for a minute, while Justin tries to figure out if this really is the conversation they haven't been having for what feels like the last ten years. He'd imagined it would be -- gentler, and then he laughs to himself, because really, since when has anything about him and Chris been gentle?

"I missed you when you were gone," he finally says, because it's safest to stick with the truth.

"I know," Chris says. Tired, faded, like Chris has been awake for days. Justin can hear the resignation, the way Chris has given up on ever understanding or even predicting it. "I missed you too, J. I always do."

"I turned on the radio the other day and I heard my own voice singing back at me about the last time I was in love with someone and I didn't recognize myself until it was almost over and all I could think about was how it should have been you." It's not the way Justin ever pictured saying it. In his head, he's been having this conversation since he was sixteen. "Because it always should have. Been you."

Chris's lips curve, faintly. "It always has been. Just not the way you or I might want it to be."

"Do you ever wish it could be? Like we could both just -- wake up one morning and decide --"

"Yeah. Yeah, I have. But it's not a choice. If it were, things might be different." Chris rests his cheek against the glass. It's not all that cold outside, but the glass fogs anyway, like it's leeching away all of Chris's heat. "If I could choose, if you could choose -- but we can't."

"I think it sucks," Justin says, finally. He can hear it in his own voice, the whine he hates and can't get rid of. "It's not fair. It's not right, and it's not fair. Why can't we just say the hell with it and --"

"Because life isn't fair, J." Chris sounds the same way he's always sounded. Tired, and a little bitter. Not at Justin. At the world, maybe. Justin wants to pick something up and throw it. Not at Chris, never at Chris, but there's something underneath his skin and the only way he can get it out is to break something small and valuable. "Because it's not a choice. Because we're born to be the people we are, and there are some things you just can't change."

And really, if it were just a matter of wanting, they both would have fixed it a long time ago. But it's not. Justin's drowning and Chris has always been his buoy. The thought's preserved him over more sleepless nights than he can count.

"If things were different," Justin finally says, and then runs out of words, because he knows precisely what would have to be different, and he's tried. Chris has tried. Chris is right, some things don't -- can't -- change. Little things might change, but the big things, they stay the same. It's always been a comfort, except for this one thing.

Chris finally turns around. His eyes are deep and dark, twin black pools of regret. The anger's all bled away. Justin doesn't know what he's looking for when it isn't there.

"If things were different," Chris repeats. Justin thinks Chris might mean something else by it, something different, but there's so much they're both not saying, Justin simply can't tell. "I won't say maybe. It's not fair to either of us. But I will say that you're not disappearing into nothing, no matter how much you think you are. I still see you."

Half of Justin wants to cross the room and drop to his knees at Chris's feet, rest his head against Chris's hip and feel Chris's hand running over his head in comfort. Half of him wants to turn around and walk out the door. He settles for staying where he is. He doesn't even bother asking how Chris knows. Chris always knows.

"I know you do," Justin says. "You're the only one who ever has."

This is a conversation defined by the spaces, not by the words they're both surrounding those spaces with. But maybe if Justin watches the spaces, he can see what surrounds them. "You should sleep," Chris finally says. "Long day tomorrow."

"Yeah," Justin says, and then, because Chris really is the only one who'd go looking for him if he faded away to nothing, he asks, "Will you stay?"

It takes a minute before Chris responds, and for a minute Justin's scared he might say no. Scared that talking about it, finally talking about it, means they can't keep going the way they were. The thought threatens to choke him for a minute. The one thing that will never change is the way Justin hates change. Then Chris nods, and pushes himself away from the wall. "Yeah. If you promise you're going to sleep. Because I mean it. You can't keep doing this to yourself."

"I will," Justin says. He isn't sure which half of the statement he's agreeing to. And then, because he's been writing this scene in his head for years, because he doesn't know if he's ever going to get a chance to say it again, not like this, he adds, "I love you."

It isn't what he usually means by it, and he knows Chris can hear the difference. They've said it countless times, but never like this. There are seven thousand different kinds of love, and some of them hurt so badly you can't breathe through them. Justin isn't even sure which love he means anymore; it's all been flowing into each other for so long he doesn't even remember where it all started.

Chris looks like he's been punched in the gut, but it doesn't stop him from nodding. "I love you too," he says. Small and pinched, but it rings true.

Justin always thought hearing it, hearing it like that, would make him feel a little better, but it doesn't do anything to ease the knot in his stomach. Maybe words can't really fix anything after all.

Later on, Justin's staring through the darkness, his eyes fixed on the ceiling he can't really see, with Chris's even breathing next to him just starting to shade into a snore. One of his hands is splayed across Chris's back, Chris's weight a solid presence pressed up against his side. And he thinks, clear and perfect into the silence: he hates change. But there isn't anything he can think of he wouldn't give to change the one thing he knows he never can.

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