before.

It would have taken more than seven years for Lance to forget those crazy months in Germany, right before they finally hit it -- performance blending into rehearsal blending back into performance, all of them living in each others' pockets, all of them certain that any moment, if they worked hard enough at it, the sacrifices would be worth it. Years afterward, Lance would think about it, sometimes, late at night when Beth and Carrah had gone to sleep and the house was dark and silent -- how much he almost missed it, in a sick sort of way. Years later, in interviews, they credited their success to the fact that they were all such close friends, but never really mentioned that they were all such close friends because of the trial-by-fire bonding that shitty little hotel rooms, no privacy, and eighteen-hour days had forged.

At the time, though, the only thing that seventeen-year-old Lance had thought was that Chris was really, really cool, and he wanted to be just like Chris when he grew up. He went through phases of crushing on each of his bandmates. Just a little. But Chris -- Chris with his fuck-you mouth and those hard-as-nails eyes that were just a hint vulnerable when you caught them in the right light, Chris with that annoying and yet comforting older-brother habit of always being right up in everyone's business and making sure that nobody got hurt too badly and nobody got homesick too much and nobody had anything really bad happened to him --

Chris was the coolest.

Lance would watch him, when he could do so without giving himself away too much, and try to figure out what it was about Chris that made him so damn cool. He couldn't think of another 24-year-old guy who would have been able to move into the position of older-brother-de-facto of four -- well, not kids, really, not all of them, but close enough -- and still have managed to treat it like it was exactly where he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. Chris bought them cheap German beer, and held their heads when they got sick from drinking too much of it, and took them all out to play like idiots in phone booths. Chris was the one who would tell them exactly what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear -- no matter how much it hurt -- and that was a talent that Lance didn't appreciate for another few years.

Maybe it was the fact that he'd been watching Chris so closely that was what let him notice when things changed that night. He filed it away at the time. Something to think about later, something maybe to worry about Chris over instead of letting Chris worry about all of them. Chris would sneak out of one hotel or another sometimes late at night, and none of them had ever asked him where he was going. Lance thought that it was Chris's way of recharging himself. Getting away from the rest of them and remembering what it was like to be Chris Kirkpatrick, instead of "Chris from *NSYNC". He only watched, and if sometimes he caught himself thinking that he couldn't wait to be old enough to do it himself, he liked to think that he hid that feeling pretty well.

But that night, Chris came back late, later than he usually did. Lance had been lying awake in the room he shared with Justin -- telling himself that he just couldn't sleep, not that he was waiting up to make sure that Chris got home safely and okay. He'd slipped out of bed when he'd heard something or someone stumble into the wall of the hallway. When he opened the door, Chris -- soaked to the bone, shivering uncontrollably, pale as a sheet, with his wrist wrapped up in some sort of bandage -- stumbled again and turned around to face him.

"Chris," Lance had asked, thinking the worst. Bar fight. Mugging. "Are you okay?"

Chris had just looked back at him -- no, through him, like Lance wasn't even really there. "Lance," he'd said, softly. Trying to remember who Lance was.

Chris's eyes were hollow, and tiny rivulets of water were running down his cheeks from the braids. The look in his eyes had made Lance shiver, like something walked over his grave. He stepped out into the hallway a little more. "Chris," he'd said. "Chris. What happened?"

"Nothing," Chris had said, and looked down at his wrist. "And everything." And then he'd shaken himself, like a dog trying to shed water, and was Chris again. "You should be in bed. It's late."

It had stung, that Chris had thought of him as a child to send to bed. Lance had just slipped back into his room, going to curl up under his covers in the ice of the underheated room and listen to Justin snore.

That had been when Chris had changed, though. It had taken Lance a while to notice it, because on the surface, Chris was the same Chris he'd always been, loud and crazy and in-your-face and never seeming to take anything too seriously until he had to. But there was something else behind it. Once or twice, when Chris's teasing had gotten too sharp again -- when Justin had retreated to his room to pretend that he wasn't going to cry, or Joey's notoriously-hard-to-raise temper had flared and there'd been a brief but ugly argument, or JC's eyes had gone bitter and glassy and he'd turned, thin-lipped, to pick up his notebook -- Lance had watched, and made his mental notes, and carefully avoided asking.

After a while, though, he'd forgotten the way that Chris used to be.

It wasn't that different, really. Just a bit more edged, a bit more raw, a bit more loud. And there had been other changes -- Chris was suddenly harder to look away from, harder to say No to, harder to pull away from when he decided it was time to be touching you. From that point they all seemed to gravitate around Chris, like he was the source of warmth and heat and they were all freezing. Touching him felt like pressing your hand against a Van der Graf generator, or standing out in the middle of a field during an electrical storm. Nobody thought twice about it, though, and it didn't take long before that was the way it had always been. If Lance sometimes sat up at night and wondered where, precisely, the tempo had all changed, he never thought of a night in a hotel room in Germany and the water dripping from Chris's hair.

"Chris," JC had said once, when they were all sitting around half-drunk and three-quarters stoned and talking about things that they'd never say sober, "is probably the most painfully real person I've ever met." And they'd all nodded, even Chris, although Chris's nod had been tinged with a rueful little smile that Lance found he couldn't bring himself to ask about.

By the time they decided that they all needed a break from each other -- though it wasn't ever phrased like that, it was always "taking some time to relax and unwind", or "following what we've always wanted to do now that we're in a place that we can pursue it", or, in Joey's case, a blunt "They want me, man, and it's what I've always wanted" -- Lance didn't want to be Chris when he grew up. Not anymore. He'd grown up, and he was finding that he kind of liked who he'd grown up to be -- Lance Bass, and not a pale shadow of someone else. Russia was harder than hell, and when it was all over, he was a substantial sum of money poorer, a substantial bit more muscular, and a lot more confident in his own skin. He hadn't succeeded. But he'd learned a lot more about how to fail without letting it eat him away from inside.

Once they took the group off hold and started working together again, they fell back into old studio habits quickly. Justin dragged out notebooks with that little self-deprecating grin that he somehow managed even with the top-of-the-charts solo album under his belt. JC sang out a few bars. "Didn't sound right with just me," he explained, ducking his head and worrying at the floor with one toe. "I think I wrote it for you guys and didn't even realize it." Lance had a few ideas of his own, and Joey, laughing, waited until JC and Justin were pitching artistic temper fits at each other to belt out, "To sodomy, it's between God and me" (bickering over music, he had maintained for years, was Justin and JC's form of straight-boy foreplay) until everyone was laughing too and Justin dragged a sheepish hand over his head and apologized.

It was as though their time off had never happened, except for Chris.

"Is anyone else worried about Chris?" Joey asked Lance one morning over coffee. They'd been up late watching movies, and Lance had just crashed at Joey and Kelly's; Joey was closer to the studio, anyway.

Lance paused in the middle of buttering a bagel, and frowned. "What do you mean?"

Joey rescued the salt, which Briahna had been about to tip over, without even having to look. "He's been -- weird lately. Quieter. Less -- Less Chris."

Lance had noticed. He'd never really gotten out of the habit of watching Chris, not even when he'd stopped wanting to be Chris. But he hadn't thought twice about it. "Stress," he offered. "Pressure. The knowledge that we've got everyone in the world expecting us to turn out another Strings or Celebrity, except if we do, they'll slam us for being derivative." He put down the knife. "Sudden and irrational hatred of pop music after working with people who have nothing to do with pop. Messy love affair gone horribly awry. I don't know, you know he never talks about it."

"That's not it, I don't think." Joey frowned. "He's been like, seriously weird lately. I caught him on the phone with his lawyer the other day, changing his will around."

"I update my will twice a year," Lance pointed out.

"Yeah, but you're Lance. Come on, you know how much he hates paperwork." Joey shook his head. "There's something really wrong here, Lance."

Lance sighed. "Well, ask him about it. It can't hurt."

Justin, true to form, was a lot more blunt when he came to Lance later that week. "Lance, you need to talk to Chris and ask him why the fuck he seems to be getting ready to kill himself."

Lance choked on his coffee in mid-sip. "Excuse me?"

But Justin was serious. "He won't talk to me, and he won't talk to Joey, and Lord knows he's not going to talk to JC, and I'm a little tired of watching my best fucking friend seeming to put all of his affairs in order before he commits suicide or something, okay? He's been quiet as hell for the past three weeks, and he hasn't been going out or doing anything, and he's been changing all of his next-of-kin information everywhere, and every now and then when we start talking about a tour next year, he gets really quiet and thin-lipped and stops saying a word. You've got to talk to him, man."

"Why me?" Lance dragged a hand through his hair. Justin always managed to show up just when he was about to go in the shower. "We're not even really all that close anymore. Shouldn't you be the one who --"

"You're the one who's always watched him like a hawk," Justin said, and Lance groaned a little, inwardly; had all of them noticed, back then? "You can lay it out for him, all the ways that he's changed. Like an intervention, or some shit like that. If any of us can drag him out of it, it'll be you."

"Look, I've noticed it, okay? And I've been just as worried as you guys. But it's just the way he gets in the fall. Come on, Justin, you know how he gets all weird right before Halloween, the way he's just a little more jumpy than usual. He's always fine again once it's is over."

Except it hadn't always been like that, had it? Lance caught himself in mid-sentence and tried to trace through hazy half-memories to the first year that they'd all spent together. Chris had been like a little kid, insisting that they all carve pumpkins and find costumes, and there'd been none of that skittishness to him at all.

That had been before Germany.

Justin shook his head. "It's not like that. Not this time. Look, you just need to talk to him, okay? I'm really getting worried."

"I just don't know what you expect me to be able to do about it."

After all the years, Lance knew that the tilt to Justin's jaw meant that he'd made up his mind and there was no use arguing with him. "Talk to him, Lance. I mean it. Something's wrong, and this is the first time that he's ever refused to talk to me about it, and I don't know what's going on but I don't want to just let him fall without one of us trying to catch him, okay?" There was real concern in Justin's eyes, and Lance found himself agreeing, without really knowing what he was agreeing to, to find a moment and talk to Chris.

sunday.

It proved more difficult than one would expect. Chris had always had some sort of sixth sense about when someone wanted to corner him for a Serious Talk, and managed to be elsewhere with preternatural ability. He left to get lunch just when Lance was about to invite himself along. He disappeared the minute that recording was done for the day. He wasn't anywhere near his usual haunts, and none of his other friends had seen him. If it hadn't been for the tracks in the studio, Lance would begin to think that Chris didn't even exist anymore.

Lance finally resorted to borrowing the spare key to Chris's house from Justin and showing up on the Sunday before Halloween, putting on a pot of coffee and waiting for Chris to stumble, bleary-eyed, down to the kitchen.

Chris stopped in the kitchen doorway when he saw Lance reading the New York Times at his table, but after that, he didn't seem all that surprised. "Why the fuck do these conversations always happen at the kitchen table?" he grunted, and that was the last thing he said until he had two cups of coffee under his belt.

Looking at Chris -- really looking at Chris, the way he hadn't in a long time, not since before the hiatus -- Lance was startled to see that somewhere in the last year, Chris had gotten old. It was lurking around his eyes, dark and ponderous. Chris seemed to sense Lance's eyes on his face, and looked up and smiled without humor. "J and Joey sent you, didn't they."

"Yeah," Lance said, and wondered if he should refill his own cup of coffee.

"Giving you some kind of line about how they're worried that I'm gearing up to kill myself, or something."

Hearing Chris say it, it sounded ludicrous, but there was still enough of the oldness lurking around Chris's eyes that Lance wondered if maybe it wasn't what Justin and Joey thought. "Chris," he started, and then frowned. "You're not sick, are you?"

Chris's shoulders began to shake, and he dropped his head down onto folded arms. Lance reached out a hand, ready to let it fall onto Chris's shoulder, ready to say something along the lines of "we'll find you the best doctors around, we'll get through this somehow, it'll all be okay", when he realized that Chris was laughing, dark bitter laughter that rolled from him in waves thick as syrup.

"No," Chris finally said, picking his head up and wiping his eyes dry. "No, I'm not sick. And it's not drugs, and it's not booze, and it's not some sort of suicide wish."

"Then what is it?"

Chris looked away. The tension was back in his shoulders, and Lance ached to be able to reach out and smooth it away. "It's nothing, okay? Just tell everyone that I'm gonna be fine."

Anyone but the guys would have taken that as an answer. Lance knew it for a statement that Chris really did want to talk about it, whatever it was -- he just couldn't bring himself to do so without a little more prodding. "Look," he said. "I don't have anywhere to be today. If I have to sit here all day and keep asking you questions, I will. Don't think I won't."

"Oh, I know you will, you stubborn bitch." Humor flared briefly through Chris's eyes, and then was lost again. "I don't want to talk about it. You can sit here until the cows come home if you'd really like, and I still won't want to talk about it."

"Wanting to talk about it and needing to talk about it are two entirely different things. And you need to talk about it." Lance watched the slump of Chris's shoulders, the stubborn curve of his chin, and tightened his hand around his mug to keep himself from touching. "Can we just pretend that we went through the usual four-hour process of getting you to the point where you're ready to admit what's bugging you?"

Chris sighed. "You're going to think that I'm insane."

"The guys already have me none too convinced of your sanity," Lance pointed out. "Whatever you tell me, Chris, I won't judge. I, of all people, won't judge."

Chris studied Lance's face for a long moment, and then sighed again. "Okay," he said, His voice rang with an unfamiliar defeat. "You really want to know?"

That had been too easy. The only time that it was that easy was when Chris was dealing with something serious. "Chris, if you're in trouble, tell me. We'll figure out some way to fix it, somehow." Somewhere along the line, he realized, he'd become the one to make the plans. The fix-it duty had slid from Chris's shoulders onto his own. He wondered why he suddenly felt cramped and uncomfortable.

"Okay," Chris said, and was silent for a long minute.

"It was back in Germany, right before we really hit it," Chris finally started. He kept his eyes fixed on a point just over Lance's shoulder. It sounded as though he was picking through the words, looking for the right ones to let him keep some sort of control over the story. "Remember how I used to disappear, some nights? When I just couldn't take being around you guys any longer, and I had to get out?"

Of all the ways Chris could have started the story, that wasn't what Lance had expected to hear. He did remember. "Yeah," was all he said.

"Yeah," Chris echoed, and smiled. It was a washed-out and watercolor smile. "So. This one night in Berlin, I found a place that was renting bikes. Motorcycles. I didn't think the guy would rent to some crazy foreigner, but all he said was 'Be careful, it's going to be a stormy night.' I thought he was smoking something, because it was the clearest night you could imagine, all cold and brisk. But I took the bike and went off riding."

Chris rose from the table, to refill his coffee. Lance watched the curve of his shoulders and thought that the coffee was probably an excuse to avoid facing the fact that Chris always found it easier to talk when he couldn't see you. "In retrospect, it was a pretty dumb thing to do, but, you know, we were all pretty dumb back then. It was a good night for riding, and I must have been out there for about an hour, hour and a half, before the storm clouds blew in. I remember thinking that the old guy had been right, even as I got drenched. I was just about to turn around and bring the bike back when this group of riders showed up. Like, out of nowhere. Good riders, too. You could tell that they weren't just weekend warriors, they were the people who knew bikes."

That night came flooding back to Lance; he remembered the click of the hotel door behind him, the sound of Justin snoring, the electric lost look on Chris's face. He chewed on the inside of his lip, waiting for Chris to go on; Chris paused, looked out the window, and finally sighed.

"I should have left. I should have. But I didn't. There was a woman riding at the head of the pack. I couldn't see much -- she was wearing a big jacket and a helmet, and I couldn't see her eyes. But she signaled to me, invited me to ride with them for a bit. And I did. They were good, Lance. Pushed it right to the limit. And I kept up with them." Chris looked back at Lance, over his shoulder. His eyes were one-dimensional. "I did," he insisted, and it seemed to be a point of honor. Lance just nodded.

Chris looked back down at his hands. "We hit this patch of rough road, though. And it was wet and slippery, and they were pushing it hard, and I went down. Managed to keep my legs under me, for the most part, and most of me got clear, but I wrenched my wrist, and got pretty scraped up. The pack stopped, and the woman got off her bike, and took off her helmet, and that's when I saw --"

The narrative cut off, and Lance almost prompted him, until he saw the faint specks of white on the back of Chris's knuckles as he clutched the counter. "She looked human," Chris said. It was almost conversational. "She looked perfectly human. But she wasn't." He took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh, dropping his chin to lean against his shoulder and studying the ground. "There was something in her eyes -- something about the way she moved -- Lance, she wasn't human."

It should have sounded outrageous. He should have thought that Chris was mad. He should have been checking Chris's ashtrays for roaches and recycling bin for empty fifths. Instead, he felt like he'd been punched in the stomach and couldn't draw breath to recover. Chris didn't bother pausing. "Do you remember those stories your momma used to tell you when you were a kid? About the good faeries and the bad faeries, and about how if you weren't good, the bad faeries would come and snatch you away in the middle of the night?"

"Yes," Lance said, and his voice sounded scratchy in his own ears. Chris spoke with the flat despair of someone who knows that he isn't going to be believed. "Yeah, I do."

"Well, I always thought that they were just -- heh. Pardon the expression, fairy tales -- But they were all like that. Tall and shining and beautiful and perfect. They moved like angels, and when they talked, they sounded like you could only dream of, and she -- she was their leader. Their queen." Buried underneath the dispassionate recital was a real and chilling longing, as though Chris had wanted nothing more than to crawl inside those distant and mythical figures and never let go. Lance couldn't see his face, but the sound of his voice sent shivers down Lance's spine.

"She picked me up, and looked at me, and said --" Chris paused, as though he was struggling to remember the exact words. His voice dropped, taking on what Lance imagined was a dim echo of the voice of the woman he'd encountered. "'For one who rides with us, you have done well, little human, but those who ride and fall belong to me.' And she picked me up, and when she touched me -- God, Lance, when she touched me, you can't imagine --"

He broke off again, breathing deeply, and his fingers clenched, then relaxed. When he spoke again, that naked desire was gone, shoved back behind the cool recitation. "She wrapped up my wrist. I didn't ask how she knew that I'd banged it up. She told me a bunch of things -- I don't really remember what she said, not all of it, but the basic essence was that -- she had some sort of claim on me. Some sort of mark. That she'd come back for me, at least once a year, maybe more, and that I'd ride with them for as long as she wanted me. And she drew me close to her and kissed me on the forehead and it burned like acid, and I blinked and when I opened my eyes again, they were gone. And I was wet and cold and my wrist didn't hurt at all, and I went to return the bike and go back to the hotel."

The silence after Chris finished speaking was like a dare. "I remember that night," Lance said. Chris nodded. Lance paused, struggling to count dates in his head and piece together a chronology from days that all blended into each other. Something clicked into place. "We got our first gold record just after that."

"Yeah," Chris said. He twisted his fingers together. "She, uh, said that while I was hers, good things would happen. We would have made it anyway, eventually, but. It. Uh, I think it helped."

"Okay," Lance said. He took a deep breath. The rational, practical, business side of his brain was obviously out to lunch, because he believed Chris. "So. You're basically telling me that the Queen of Faerie exists, and has laid -- what, some sort of claim on you?"

"Yeah," Chris said. "I know. It sounds like I'm ready for the funny farm. Or for rehab. I swear to you, though, I'm clean."

"I know." Lance was more than a little surprised at how well he managed to keep his voice even. "So. This has been going on for -- what?" His eyes flicked upwards as he counted. "Seven years, give or take?"

Chris's voice dropped, and he braced his hands against the counter again as he dropped his head to match it. "Seven years exactly. That's the problem."

"Chris," Lance said, and stopped, not knowing what it was he was going to say.

Chris turned around. Behind the set and distant mask he wore, his eyes burned like two coals. "You remember when we got hit with that damn counter-suit, right? Right around Halloween, back in '99." Lance nodded; those days were written heavily in his book of memories. "And you remember how I kept saying that it was going to be okay, that we'd get out of it fine, that nothing was going to be able to stop us."

Lance had walked around in a daze, reading contracts over and over again; that had been when he'd stopped being interested in business in the theoretical sense, and started being interested in business in the practical sense. Justin had started sucking his thumb again. Joey had disappeared into the clubs, coming back with girl after girl. JC had just seem to disappear inside himself completely, armed only with headphones and a notebook. Chris had fallen apart at first, blaming himself for getting the rest of the guys into it. And then he'd gotten up one day, calm and composed, to face the lawyers with a dignity and maturity that nobody had really expected out of him. Chris, they'd all agreed later, had been the one to keep them all sane through it.

"All Hallows Eve," Chris said, "is the one guaranteed night of the year when she'd come for me. No matter where we were. And when she called --"

"Chris," Lance said again. He wanted to say something brilliant, something that would reach across the space between them and take whatever burden it was off of his friend's shoulders, but it died in his throat at the look that Chris gave him. For a second, it seemed as though all of the weight Chris was carrying had burned away, leaving Chris behind, crucible-forged and shining and real, real, real in a way that nobody had ever been real before.

"Look. I can't tell you what it's like. I don't have the words. Riding with them -- It's like the best orgasm you've ever had in your entire life. Like the first time you stood on stage and had a million teenage girls screaming in your ear. Coming back afterwards, it's like being wrapped in gauze again, deaf and dumb and blind and --" Chris broke off, and swallowed heavily. "And she could fix it. Whatever it was, she could fix it. And I knew that while I was riding with her, while I was one of hers --" The words were spit out, sudden anger flaring and then fading away again. "--that nothing could touch me. Could touch us. We were flying on the top of the world.

"Except nothing lasts forever." Chris pulled up the hem of his T-shirt to rub at his eyes, and when he let it fall again, he was back to being old-looking Chris, that strange glamor gone. He leaned back against the counter. "Because every seven years, like clockwork, the Faerie Court has to sacrifice one of its riders to Hell." His lips twisted, bitterly. "Think of it like royalties."

Lance stirred. For half a second, he was back in that Mississippi Baptist church he'd grown up in, listening to the preacher thump the pulpit and shouting about the wages of sin. He remembered the Sunday-school fire and brimstone, the way he'd shivered himself to sleep at night until his mother had reassured him that God was love, too. He opened his mouth to say something -- anything, anything to let Chris know that he was still there and listening, but Chris wasn't looking at him anymore. He'd opened the floodgates, and Chris was ready to talk.

"It's why she picks up humans and takes them in. We're like -- ants to her, or insects. You have to understand, they live for thousands of years. The Lady's been alive for longer than we've had recorded history. We're dead before she can bat an eyelash. What difference does it make to her if one of us gets twenty years chopped off the end of his lifeline?"

The words were flippant. Too flippant, Lance thought, like Chris was making it all a joke. Or a fairy tale. "Don't make excuses for them, Chris," Lance said, sharply -- perhaps too sharply, because Chris looked back at him, temper flaring quickly. For half a second it was as though the old Chris was standing there in front of him before it was gone.

"I'm not making fucking excuses, okay? I'm not saying that it's right, and I'm not saying that it's good, and I'm not saying that I'm not terrified out of my fucking skull here. I was there for the last guy, dammit. I was there when --"

Chris broke off, closing his eyes and taking deep breaths. A moment later, he continued, in a more even tone, and Lance realized just how close to breaking Chris really was. "I heard the way he was screaming. I can hear it every night before I go to sleep. And all I can think of is, that's gonna be me, in another five days."

The silence nearly crackled. Lance cast about for something to say. "Are you -- Are you sure it's going to be you? Maybe it won't be, maybe it'll be someone else, maybe you'll have another seven years to figure something out --"

Chris sighed, and finally got around to actually refilling the cup of coffee he'd brought over to the counter. He dropped heavily back into the chair across from Lance. "I'm the only human she's got right now. From what I can tell, she keeps it to one or two of us at a time, the same way that you don't really want more than one or two dogs at a time. And she always, always takes the one who's been with them for the longest."

Lance cast about for something to do with his hands and finally picked up his own long-since-cool cup of coffee, staring into its depths as though there were answers there. There had to be something. "Did you ever -- I don't know. Sign anything? Agree to anything? Is there some kind of -- supernatural court that you can go to and ask for some way out of the whole deal?"

Chris shook his head. "You're always the businessman." There was almost admiration in his voice before it deepened. "It doesn't work like that. I know, in the old stories, you always have to agree to it, you always have to bring it upon yourself, but that's not how it really works. I was hers from the minute I fell off that damn bike and she picked me back up and bandaged me up and put her lips on me. She claimed me, and that's not the sort of thing that you can get out of just by saying sorry, nope, don't want to do this anymore. She'll always come for you. She'll always come back for you."

Lance set his coffee mug down with a sharp click. "Look, that can't be all of it. There's no such thing as an unbreakable contract. There's always a loophole. Are you trying to tell me that nobody, in all the history of recorded time or however long this has been going on, has ever managed to wiggle out of this before?"

"Once." Chris winced, a little. "One of the others was the one who told me about the whole thing -- he seemed to like watching me squirm, like the way you might pull wings off a moth or something. Wanted to make sure I knew what I was staring in the face. I asked the same thing, and he said that once, someone managed to duck it."

That brought an absurd rush of relief. "Okay," Lance said. "How? We'll just do that. Whatever it is."

"The only way I know of to get out of it is to have a woman who's pregnant with your child meet the riders at the crossroad and drag you -- me -- the sacrifice off his bike -- well, they used horses back then. But. Drag the sacrifice off his bike, and hold on tight to him while the Lady does everything in her power to try to get her to let go. And if the woman manages to hold on, without letting go once, at the end of it he's free." Chris wrapped his fingers around his mug of coffee and looked off into the distance. "Ever since then, she's, uh. Picked people who tend mostly to play for the other team, if you know what I mean."

They'd never talked about Chris's sexual preferences in the past, not really, but all of them knew about Chris's problems with women. Lance winced. "So that's why you and Dani --"

Chris reached across the table; his hand closed on Lance's wrist, sharp as steel. "I loved Dani," he said, and each word fell between them like spiders. "Don't you dare say anything that insinuates otherwise."

The silence spun out, until Lance freed his hand and rubbed at the side of his nose. "All right," he said, raggedly. "All right. So they're going to come for you --"

"On Halloween." Chris spread his hands out flat on the table, looking at them rather than up at Lance. "And I don't happen to have a pregnant woman at hand to save me."

"Are you sure that's the only way?" Chris's kitchen was the most normal place in the world, all full of dirty dishes and empty bags of potato chips, and the morning sunlight warmed the table. Lance couldn't believe that he was having this conversation in it.

"It's the only way that anyone's ever managed to get out of it before." Chris looked up then, giving Lance a little, sad smile. "Others have apparently tried. None of them managed it."

Lance turned possibilities over in his head. "All right," he said, slowly, feeling useless. He hated feeling useless. "Can you have someone take your place?"

"No." The word slashed the air suddenly, aching and angry. "No, you fucker, I know what you're thinking, and you are not going to give yourself up for me, okay, so you can just stop fucking thinking that right this minute. Jesus, that's why I didn't tell any of you guys. I knew that one of you would come up with some sort of crazy idea to take my place, and you're not going to do it, okay? It was my fuckup, it's my problem, and you're not going to pull some kind of half-assed self-sacrificing shit, okay?"

Lance nearly recoiled at the intensity. "I can guarantee you," he said, "anything I come up with will be fully assed."

That wrung him loose a smile, pale and thin-lipped. "Yeah, well, don't do it. I've been over it, okay? There's nothing that any of you guys can do."

"I'm not going to believe that until the very end of it, okay?" Lance snapped. "Look, you'll have to forgive me, but you're sitting here telling me that one of my four best friends in the world is about to get eaten by -- by something nasty enough to pass for Hell, and I'm supposed to just sit back and pat you on the head and say that's nice, Chris, it's been fun, I'm gonna miss you? What the fuck do you take me for?"

"I take you for someone with more sense than to meddle in shit that you shouldn't touch, dammit!" Chris slammed a hand down on the table. The sudden sound was loud and raw. Lance struggled against the conditioning; when Chris raised his voice like that, the only thing to do was to show him your throat and hope he didn't choose to bite it. "You don't understand. You've never seen her. You've never had her touch you. You don't know what it's like, when she looks you in the eye and tells you to come here and you do, dammit, it's like you're some sort of fucking lapdog, and you can't say no, you can't step back and say no, this isn't happening, not to me, not like this, because you can't get free of her. I'm not fucking putting any one of you in that situation, okay? I love you fucking idiots --" Chris was crying, his eyes bright with the tears that he wouldn't let fall, and Lance ached to reach out and touch, to comfort -- "--but this is mine, my issue, my shit to deal with."

The anger slipped away, and Chris closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "I've never kept anything from any of you before, and you know that. But let me keep this. Let me be the only one who gets dragged down this time. I couldn't -- I couldn't bear knowing that I brought one of you with me. Please, Lance. Leave me that much."

Lance did reach over the table then, his hand brushing over Chris's, but Chris yanked his fingers back as though Lance's skin burned him. "Don't touch me," Chris said, his eyes still closed, and his voice rasped. "Please. I can't -- I can't hold onto it if you touch me, I can't --"

"Chris," Lance started again, and maybe the third time was the charm, because this time he knew what he was going to say. "I'm not going to just let it drop. You know that. You know that I can't. If there's a way, and there's got to be a way, I'm going to find it."

"Yeah, fine," Chris said, lifting a hand to scrub over his eyes again, and his voice was like a grey rainy Thursday in May. Lance wondered if that had maybe been the reason Chris had picked him to tell. "You just have to promise me that you're not going to say a word of this to the rest of the guys."

"Okay," Lance said, as Justin poked his head through Chris's back door demanding that the "old man" get his ass in gear so that they could go for the promised game of basketball, and the conversation was over.

-- * --

Promises were promises. But they'd never let a promise stand in the way of the well-being of the group in the past. Lance called the Group Meeting Without Chris So That We Can Talk About Him Behind His Back at Joey's. As the resident No-Longer-Bachelor, Joey's fridge was always stocked.

Chris was right; some conversations could happen anywhere, but for some things, the kitchen table was the only possible choice. Albums had been written at kitchen tables; careers had been plotted. They'd been sitting at JC's kitchen table when they first realized how badly that Lou had been screwing them, and Lance's kitchen table when they'd decided on the hiatus. It was why all of them, no matter if they lived alone, had at least five chairs in the kitchen.

Maybe they'd only need four, soon, Lance thought, and winced. He fought off questions about whether or not Chris was okay until JC (always the last to arrive) had settled in around Joey's table with the rest of them.

"Okay," Justin said, finally, once everyone had beverages and they'd made inroads on the bag of chips. "Give."

"You're not going to believe this," Lance said, and Joey put a hand on his wrist.

"Try us."

"All right, but don't say that I didn't warn you." Lance told them the story that Chris had given him in as few words as possible. He tried, as well as he could, to match Chris's uninflected recital.

"Okay," Justin finally said when he was done, and frowned. "And you believe him? I mean, Lance, that's a bit outrageous --"

"I believe that Chris believes it." Lance knotted his hands together and looked at them. "I don't know how much of it I believe. But --"

"But what if it's true?" JC took up the thread. Of all of them, he seemed the most willing to take Chris's story at face value. Then again, JC also believed in tarot card readings and horoscopes. "If it's true, and we ignore it, we lose Chris. And if it's not true, what's the worst that can happen? We look like idiots for a while."

"Wouldn't be the first time," Justin muttered under his breath.

"Wait a second. This is sounding familiar," Joey said, suddenly, turning his mug of coffee around in his hands. "Really familiar." They swiveled to look at him, and he held up a hand for quiet while he chased it down inside his head. Joey wasn't the best out of all of them at logical deduction, but he could remember things that everyone else had long forgotten. "I think --" He got up from the table suddenly, and disappeared into the living room, where the mingled shelves of his and Kelly's books resided. A moment later, he came back, a thick and musty textbook in his hands. "Mom gave me some of her old books when she realized I wasn't going to college," he said, and let it thunk down on the table.

Lance slid it sideways so that he could see the title: it was an anthology of English literature. "Well," JC said, dubiously, "it's heavy enough that we might be able to hit someone with it..."

Joey shook his head and slid it back over in front of him, flipping pages quickly. "Here," he finally said, and slid the book over to Lance. Lance glanced down at it; Joey had opened to the ballads section, and was pointing out one called "Tam Lin".

"Yes," Lance agreed, after skimming through it. "'Ay the end of seven years, they pay a teind to Hell' -- that's it."

"Let me see that," JC said, and Lance slid the book across the table. JC frowned at the Scots dialect; his lips moved as he read.

"So let me get this straight," Justin said. There was none of the petulance or disbelief in his voice that could have been there; no, Justin honestly wanted to make sure that they had all the facts, not doubt those facts were true. Much. "Seven years ago, in Germany, Chris made some sort of bargain or something with a woman he believes is the Queen of Faerie. During those seven years, he would disappear on Halloween to go riding with these -- I don't know, spectral riders, or something. And now, seven years later, they have to make some kind of ritual sacrifice, and Chris thinks that he's going to be it. And the only way for him to get out of it is to have a woman who's pregnant with his kid yank him off the bike."

Put that way, without Chris standing in his kitchen and looking at Lance with those eyes, it sounded ludicrous. Lance sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. "That's what he said. I know, I know, it sounds insane --"

"We're popstars," Joey said, firmly. "We're the opposite of sanity." He reached out, snagged a potato chip from the bag in front of Justin, and frowned at it, thoughtfully. "Does anyone know the stories? Is there something you can use against Faerie -- weapons, I mean? If we can't weasel Chris out of it, can we just fight him free?"

He was looking at Lance, and Lance held up his hands. "What are you looking at me for? I don't know any more about this than you do, and what I've already told you."

"We need to, I don't know, find books on it or something," Justin said. Bus school, Lance thought from time to time, had affected Justin in many ways, the chiefest of which was that he preferred to rely on self-teaching if he needed to know something. He often demonstrated a childlike faith in the idea that if something was known, there was a book on it somewhere, even if he didn't know where it might be. "Figure out what we can do."

They all looked at Lance as though he could pull the information out of his messenger bag. "Okay," Lance said, finally. "Look. We've got five days. C, you go and look up the song, okay? If it's old, there'll probably be five or six versions of it hanging around, and maybe one of them has more information. Joey, Justin, you guys go to the library and see what else you can find on other stories about this whole Faerie thing. Not the hearts and flowers kinds of faerie, the kind that we're talking about here in the song. The old stories."

JC nodded; Joey asked, "And what're you planning?"

"There has to be someone here in town who knows the folklore. I'll go and see if I can turn them up."

"I just thought of something," Justin said, suddenly. "Does this mean that after all these years of denying it every time the topic comes up, we can actually legitimately say that Chris Kirkpatrick is a fairy?"

Lance pinched the bridge of his nose in the hopes that the headache would go away. "Justin?"

"Yeah?"

"Shut up."

-- * --

Lance made a few calls to people who might know something, and they made a few calls to other people who might know something, and all in all it was a long afternoon and evening spent on the telephone with little to nothing to show for it except a few vague promises to call back if anyone found anything. He hoped that the other guys were finding more luck.

It was nearly ten when his cell rang again, and he half-jumped out of his skin. The caller ID wasn't helpful; it showed a local number that he didn't recognize, and he wondered if his private phone number had been leaked again. He opened the phone and said, cautiously, "Hello?"

"Please accept my apologies for calling so late, but if what I suspect is true, time is of an essence," came the light and reedy tenor from the other end of the line. Even though the crackle of cellular static, Lance could hear the faint lisp behind the Irish lilt that flavored it. Somewhere in the background, there was wild fiddle music playing. "My name is Matthew Kinrowan, and from what I hear, you've been calling all over town today looking for someone who can answer a few questions for you."

Kinrowan's name had come up a few times in Lance's research, mostly in the context of "If anyone will know, Kinrowan will." Lance swallowed heavily. "Mr. Kinrowan. I'm Lance Bass. I've had an interesting folklore problem dropped into my lap today, and I'm looking for someone who can shed some light on some of the more tricky parts of it. Would you be available to answer some questions?"

"Sure, and there's no harm in the asking, now is there?" There was a smile in Kinrowan's voice. "But you'll be calling me Matthew, and I'll be calling you Lance. Do you know Náid's, down on West Washington?"

"I'm sure I can find it."

"All right, then. I know it's coming late, but if you'd like, I'll be here for most of the evening. I'll stand a round, and we can talk. My next set is over at eleven, if you'd care to join me."

Lance found himself agreeing. When he hung up the phone, he followed impulse, and called Joey and asked him to meet there. It took them longer than it should have to find the place, and when they finally did, Lance blinked, because he'd been up and down that street a hundred times without noticing the unobtrusive sign marking the door. The door of the pub was thick and sturdy oak, with a brass knocker meant more for decoration than actual use. It was heavy as Joey pushed it open, and the same bright fiddle music washed over them as they walked in.

The thick and flowing music put a smile on Lance's face. Before he even looked around himself, he knew that this was a place where the drunks never got argumentative, and the waitresses never had to fear unwanted advances, and there was always music playing. It felt, as the door shut behind them, that the bar itself saw them and welcomed them, and that they were safe there.

Lance blinked a few times when he realized what he was thinking. His world had gotten decidedly more strange in the past twenty-four hours, but surely it wasn't enough for him to think that a bar could have a personality.

He was humming absently under his breath, harmonizing to the music, when a waitress saw them standing at the door and bustled over. "Table, gentlemen? You're new here, aren't you?"

"First time," Joey said, with a smile, and she nodded. "We're here to meet someone?"

"Matthew Kinrowan," Lance said, letting his eyes rove over the bar. It was a simple place -- some booths, some tables, and a stage across the back wall that was little more than a double handful of feet across. A man and a woman -- he carrying the fiddle, she a thin round drum that she held in one hand and struck bare-handed with the other -- were apparently in the middle of a set. They had the looks on their faces that Lance recognized from when JC was in the throes of creation. The music was just short of being too loud to talk over, and the pub's patrons, even those who didn't appear to be paying attention, were nodding in time to the music or tapping their fingers on their tables.

The waitress's smile, if anything, got wider. "Ah, so you're the ones Matthew was expecting. He's in the back; if you'll follow me?" She led them through the tangle of tables and booths to what appeared to be a small back office. Lance realized that he was humming again when Joey pitched in the harmony, a fifth up the scale, and stopped himself by force of will.

"Matt," she said, knocking at the door. "Your friends are here."

"Show them in, Sheila," came the response. When they opened the door, the man behind the office's desk was rising and holding out a hand.

From the way that everyone had been talking about this Kinrowan, Lance had been sure that he would be an older man. He had thought wrong. The man facing them looked to be barely thirty; long blond hair dusted his shoulders, and his green eyes were crinkled up in a smile, but that wasn't what stopped Lance in his tracks. No, Kinrowan had that same glow to him that Chris occasionally held, only in him it was radiant and clear. He fairly crackled with it, and Lance fought the urge to squint his eyes before he realized that Kinrowan was talking. "-- must be Lance, and your friend?"

Dumbly, Lance shook Kinrowan's hand, and tried to ignore the sensation of electricity shooting beneath his fingertips and the way that the man seemed to wear a halo of silver. "Uh. This is Joey. Joey Fatone."

Kinrowan smiled. "It's always a pleasure to meet fellow makers of music, though we certainly do move in different circles. What can I do for you gentlemen? Will you be wanting a drink?"

"I think," Lance said, and didn't know what the words were going to be before they left his mouth, "that just sitting in the same room as you is enough to get me feeling drunk."

Joey shot Lance an inquisitive look -- he doesn't feel it, then, Lance thought, how could he not feel it, not when it's just like being in the room with Chris when Chris is shining like the sun -- but Kinrowan just laughed. "I'm sorry, am I being too loud for you? You should have told me that you were sensitive to it."

Everything fell on top of Lance suddenly, all of the chaos and tumult of the past twenty-four hours, and he nearly snarled. "I don't even know what 'it' is."

"All right, then," Kinrowan said, sympathy in his voice. He closed his eyes for half a second, and when he opened them again, the radiance had dimmed to a pale echo of what it had been. "Is that better?"

Lance just nodded. His eyes felt hot and gritty; he fought the urge to lift a hand and rub them. Joey blinked again, and finally ventured, "Um, guys? I don't mean to be rude, but --"

"It's all right, Joseph," Kinrowan said. "I believe that your friend is used to seeing the touch of faerie on a man's face, but never quite so strongly, am I correct?"

Lance felt old. "Look," he said. "I'm in a boyband. I dance. I sing. I occasionally get trotted out in front of the camera for an interview. I don't know a damn thing about faeries or -- or whatever this is. I gave you a call because one of our friends is in trouble --"

Kinrowan was nodding along. "The small one, the one who has the old blood. I saw you on the television earlier this year, and I could see it on his face. I had thought he made the bargain willingly."

"He thinks he's going to die in five days," Joey said, sharply.

"Aye, and he will, unless you're strong enough to stop it." Kinrowan's eyes were suddenly serious behind his kindly smile. "Do you truly not know what your friend's stumbled on?"

"We don't know anything," Joey said, and the note in his voice was frustration. Lance was about to say something, anything, when Kinrowan sighed.

"I can't make believers out of you, not in so short a time," he said, regretfully. "And I can tell that you don't believe. But will you trust me when I say that whatever your friend has told you, he is not lying, and the danger is real and immediate. He will have told you that he has met the Queen of Faerie, and that she has laid her claim on him, and that in five days, she will use him as the tithe she needs to pay. And what he has told you is the truth."

"Is there a way for him to free himself?" Lance asked. For half a second, waiting for Kinrowan's answer, his world seemed to balance on that thread of conversation between them.

"There is," Kinrowan said, after a moment of hesitation. "But it won't be without danger."

Lance met Kinrowan's eyes. "We didn't think that it would be."

The plan that Kinrowan laid out for them was a simple one, but breathtaking in its audacity nonetheless. They went over it twice, breaking off only when Lance couldn't hide his yawns anymore; he hadn't been sleeping very well lately, and Kinrowan finally sat back in his chair and said, "I think that any further conversation would be lost on Lance. You seem as though you're about to fall asleep in your very chair."

"No," Lance said, but his eyelids were dragging anyway. "I mean -- I shouldn't be so rude. You've been so helpful --"

"It's all right," Kinrowan said, and rose from his chair again. "Go home, and sleep it off. It will all look clearer in the morning, and if you've any more questions, you've my number. I'll help you as much as I can."

Joey stood as well. He looked as though he was going to head for the door for a minute, and then turned back. "How do you know all of this?"

Kinrowan's eyes dropped. For half a second, Lance imagined that he saw the regret flaring across the other man's face. "Not all of the Court rides with the Lady," he said, simply, and Lance's breath caught in his throat as he realized what the other man was implying.

"When this is all over," Lance said, his words slurring slightly with the weariness that seemed to be imprinted bone-deep, "I'm coming back, and you're going to teach me what this is that I'm seeing in you. In Chris."

"When this is all over," Kinrowan agreed, and his face was once more only that of a man, "and if it ends well, I will even teach the five of you to harness the music that only you can hear."

monday.

He was on the back of a white horse, plunging hell-bent-for-leather down a thin dirt-track road, with the horse's mane and the reins tangled in a death's grip in his hands. Music surrounded him, and other riders, each of them easy and free with their seat and matching the pace. The song was wordless, sweet and aching, twining into his ears and wrapping around his throat, and he opened his mouth to say something and chirped like a cell phone.

Hazily, Lance reached one hand out of the nest of covers and patted around on the table, the dream still threatening to grab him and throw him back down into its grasp. "Hnff?" he said, finally, once he managed to locate his phone and flip it open one-handed.

"Lance." It was JC, sounding concerned. "Lance, it's Monday morning, and we're all waiting on you down at the studio. Are you okay?"

"Fuck," Lance said, and sat up, running his hand through his hair. He snuck a glance at the clock. 10:13. "Yeah. Fuck. Alarm must not have gone off. I was having a wicked dream, too." He could hear the Mississippi creeping back into his voice, the way it always did in the morning. "Lemme just toss myself in the shower and I'll be down as soon as possible. Y'all record without me until I get there."

He took the fastest shower he'd ever taken, trying to wash the last remnants of the dream down the drain along with the shampoo, and pulled on the first clean clothes that came to hand. By the time he got down to the studio, JC and Justin were arguing again, though this time it only looked like a mild stormfront instead of Hurricane Pop Diva. Joey tossed Lance a bottle of water and made vague "they've been at it forever" hand motions. Lance just sat down at one of the stools to watch the carnage. It was almost educational, as long as you weren't in the direct line of fire.

A pair of arms twined around his neck from behind. "Get lucky last night?" Chris whispered into Lance's ear, and Lance jumped, feeling his face flame red.

"Nah," he said quickly. "Just overslept, is all. Weird dreams." Chris's arms were warm against him, and Lance imagined that he could feel the barely-tamed life quivering just beneath Chris's skin.

"Yeah," Chris said. It was quiet and rueful. "Tell me about it."

Just then, JC lost his temper, and his voice spiked viciously. JC might have been the quiet one, but he was also the one of them with the most classically-trained voice, and when he felt like yelling, everyone in a five-mile radius could hear it. "--have to get this finished by Thursday, dammit, or we might not get another chance, so get your head out of your ass and let's just get it right this time --"

Chris's arms tightened around Lance's neck, and the comfortable warmth turned to desert sunlight at high noon. "You told them." His voice was deathly still.

Joey automatically moved to lean against the door. Chris had always had a habit of getting fed up and walking out halfway through a confrontation whenever he felt ganged up on, and they'd all learned the hard way that any Serious Conversation that was more than one-on-one should also have someone blocking the exits. Lance closed his eyes, briefly cursed JC, and tried not to move. Chris was clinging to him like poison ivy.

"Yeah," Lance said. He barely recognized his own controlled tone. "You were the one who made the rule that promises didn't have to be kept if it would mean worse problems for the group."

Chris had cashed in on that many times in the past, cheerfully breaking confidences right and left to haul shit out into the open instead of letting it fester. Somehow they had always all kept going to him anyway, because when he did it, it was always necessary, and it always worked out better in the end. Confronted by that, Chris faltered for a second before he let go of Lance and turned around blindly to head for the door; Joey moved just an inch to intercept, and Chris stopped with his fists clenching at his side.

"Dammit, you fuckers," he said, closer to tears than anger. Justin and JC had stopped arguing the minute that JC had blurted out what they all knew. There was a minute of silence, until Justin stepped across the room to first punch Chris in the shoulder and then fold him into a long-limbed and lanky embrace.

"You're the fucker." Justin sounded as though he couldn't decide between laughter and screaming. "When were you going to tell us? Didn't think we'd believe you?"

Chris's shoulders were tense as Justin hugged him. Lance could tell that he was barely resisting pulling away. "Didn't think you'd believe me," he said, roughly. "Didn't want you involved. I told Lance over there because I was under the mistaken impression that he could keep a secret."

"Yeah, like you haven't told secrets hundreds of times before," Joey said. Once Chris let you hug him, he generally wasn't going to bolt anymore, so Joey pushed himself away from the door and came over to hug Chris from the other direction. JC came over after a minute and threw his arms around all three of them, and Lance hesitated for half a second before completing the circle.

They stayed like that for a long minute, and Joey finally said, "It's okay, Chris. We've got a plan."

Chris's shoulders tensed just as they'd relaxed. He pulled back from the group hug; they all let him go, scattering across the studio like pool balls after the break but still never really out of arm's reach of at least one other. "I said I don't want you guys involved in this, dammit."

"And I said that I wasn't going to let it drop, and I'm not, dammit," Lance said, matching Chris's tone exactly. "Joey and I found out some stuff last night. We've got a plan." He looked over at JC and Justin, who hadn't heard the details yet. "I, uh. The guy I was talking to said that you're not supposed to know what's going on, in case the Lady tries to make you tell. But he says it'll work."

Chris's eyes flashed with anger. "You told someone other than the guys?" That, Lance knew, would be the ultimate betrayal to someone who guarded his privacy and his dignity so closely as Chris did, and Lance winced. Maybe Justin and JC could handle the first part of the plan, maybe Joey could, because if Chris was this pissed off at him --

Just as Lance was about to crack, Joey grabbed Chris by the shoulders. He turned Chris roughly to face him, taking the heat of that anger off of Lance. "Chris," Joey said through gritted teeth, with the first warning flare of temper, "you are one of my best friends in the world, and you are being a selfish, self-absorbed idiot. Did you even stop to think that dumping all of that crap on Lance's shoulders and then expecting him not to do something about it was the shittiest thing you could have done? Did you honestly think that he wasn't going to tell us? Did you honestly think --"

Justin didn't even bother to wait for Joey to finish; he stalked over and slammed the palm of one of his hands into Chris's shoulder to turn him even more. It was as smooth a taking over from Joey as though they'd rehearsed it. Justin had been on the receiving end of group lectures often enough, Lance supposed, to know his cue when he heard it. "Asshole," Justin said. "Lance was probably up all night looking for some way to save your sorry ass, you shut the hell up right the fuck now and apologize to him."

Chris broke off, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. "All right," he finally said. "All right." He opened his eyes again and looked at Lance. He was still angry, but it was banked. "I'm sorry I yelled at you."

"It's okay," Lance said, and took a deep breath. "It's okay."

Chris took another deep breath and then looked back at JC, who was standing mute and horrified that he had been the one to slip and say something. "Come on," Chris said, and his tone was as casual as he could make it. "We've got an album to finish up."

-- * --

They sent Chris to pick up lunch so that Lance could fill Justin and JC in on the plan. "Don't think that I don't know what you're all doing," Chris warned, but went anyway. Lance thought that maybe, just maybe, he was relieved to have someone else in on it, to have someone else around to worry about it so that he didn't have to.

"That's, um." Justin stopped himself, and then tilted his head and looked up at Lance. "That's going to work?"

"Kinrowan said it would." Lance wondered briefly when his life had become a fantasy novel. Maybe Joseph Campbell would pay for the rights. Or wasn't he dead?

"It might work," JC said. "You'll have to write it all out for us. What we're going to have to do."

Lance felt an unnatural surge of relief. "You're in?" He looked at Justin, whose eyebrows were still drawn together dubiously. "Both of you?"

"What kind of a stupid-ass question is that?" Justin said. "I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear that question, or else I might have to be offended."

"Told you they'd be in," Joey said, and nodded.

They stayed in the studio well past dinnertime, and only gave up for the night when Joey put his foot down. "Sorry, guys, but if I sing one more note, I'm going to sprain my vocal cords." He made vague gestures towards the door. "Tomorrow morning will be soon enough."

Lance caught a hold of Chris's arm as the rest of them were packing up to leave. His fingers curled around Chris's wrist, pressing into the soft skin there, and he could feel Chris's pulse running wild and steady beneath his fingertips. It felt comfortable, like holding his hands over a fire to warm them. "Come and stay with me tonight."

"Why?" Chris asked, bluntly.

What a wonderful question. "Because I don't think that you should be alone much this week," he said, meeting Chris's eyes. "You don't have to pay any attention to me if you don't want to, but I want you to come and stay at my place anyway."

After a moment of thought, Chris nodded. "All right." Lance thought that he detected a note of relief in Chris's voice. "Let me just run back to my place and pick up some clothes and stuff. I'll meet you there."

JC came up behind Lance as Chris headed out of the studio. Together, they watched the door swing shut behind him. "Will you be able to do it?"

Lance was asking himself that very question. "Your guess is as good as mine. You know how stubborn he can get."

JC rested a hand on Lance's arm, and Lance caught himself comparing JC's touch to Chris's. JC's hands were softer, more delicate; his touch contained none of Chris's tense sliding energy, only a calm and quiet pool of warmth. "You should tell him, Lance," JC said. It was one of his rare moments of total presence, and Lance always treasured those. "Ahead of time. If he finds out later --"

"Then he'll find out later," Lance said, as evenly as he could, and bit his lip. "I don't want to risk it. You know how stubborn he can get. If he decides --"

"You're going to be the one who has to live with it," JC said, after a minute, and shook his head. "I just don't want either of you to get hurt."

Lance turned away, only to see Justin watching them, concern in his own eyes. "We'll all just be happy enough to be around for the argument," Lance said, and made his own escape as quickly as possible.

He stopped on the way to pick up takeout -- no use in either of them trying to bumble around in the kitchen when Orlando sported hundreds of places willing to feed them -- but still managed to beat Chris back to his place. Setting out plates, he wondered whether or not Chris had changed his mind about staying. That fear slipped away when his front door opened; the doorbell hadn't gone off, which meant that Chris had, at some point, grabbed the spare key from Joey, or maybe from Justin. House keys were communal property when they were all in the same city.

"In the kitchen," Lance called, and a moment later, Chris wandered in. He tucked his hands into his jeans and leaned against the doorjamb, giving Lance his best impenetrable stare, and Lance just jerked a thumb at the table. "Chinese. I even remembered to order from the place that you like."

"Good," Chris said. It was the kind of cheerful nasty that only Chris could pull off so well. "Because the place you usually order from tastes like ass."

Lance hadn't expected the opening as quickly as it arose. He pondered letting it go, picking up something later on, but he went for it anyway. "Please. I don't need to know the fact that you are intimately acquainted with the taste of ass in order to make a comparison."

"Out of all of us, one would think that you would be more likely to know it than I would," Chris said. It was the old Chris again, sharp as knives and twice as deadly. He watched Lance, eyes dark, as though poised at that moment in the gulf between staying and going.

Lance only busied himself with the lo mein carton, feigning a nonchalance that he did not feel and keeping his voice as casual as possible. Chris was the only one who would tease Lance for his sexual preferences. His theory was that if Lance wasn't comfortable enough with his own sexuality to take some teasing about it, he sure as hell shouldn't be sucking cock to begin with. Then again, Chris did the same to the rest of the group, so Lance didn't feel all that special.

Lance tried to never respond. He wanted to never gave Chris the satisfaction of knowing when barbs hit home and when they were just another variation on a song he'd been hearing his entire life, but that policy was going to have to change soon and there was no reason not to start now. "Actually," he said, turning around to raise one eyebrow at Chris, "I've found that the taste varies so widely that there's no use in making comparisons. Now, are you laying claim to any of this lo mein, or is it all mine?"

Chris recoiled, just a little. "That's not how this game is supposed to work," he said, after a minute. "I'm supposed to make snide and sexually suggestive comments at you, and you're supposed to get flustered and refuse to say anything."

"Yeah, I know," Lance said, and held out the lo mein carton. "I'm kinda tired, though, so can we just pretend that we went through it?"

As though he was hypnotized, Chris plucked the white cardboard from between Lance's fingers. He looked as though he'd been cast adrift. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

Lance had been the only one to ever bother to learn to eat with chopsticks; he plucked a pair out of the paper bag the food had arrived in and tucked them under his plate. "Maybe I'm just tired of you spending so much energy mocking me for sleeping with men when you're really talking about yourself," he said, and headed for the living room without waiting to see if Chris followed. "Is there anything good on HBO tonight?"

Chris did follow. "Hey," he said, halfway between confusion and irritation. "What's with the Cool Hand Lance act?"

"News flash, Chris." Lance swallowed hard and let the words come. "You could only harass me about liking cock until I was about nineteen or so. I got a thicker skin round about then. And don't think that I don't know you only did it because a lot of other people would do the same thing if they ever figured it out, and don't think that I don't know that you wanted to make sure I could handle it when I had to, but you know what? I was the one who sang on national TV at the Grammys this year wearing a t-shirt from the most notorious gay bar in Manhattan, and the world didn't end, so I think you can lay off the smartass comments for one night."

"Oh," Chris said, and fell quiet.

Lance let the moment stretch out before he said something. "I always knew what you were doing. Well. After Joey explained it to me."

"Explained what?" Chris's eyebrows drew together.

"The way that you figure out the things that can get under our skin the worst, and then spend so much time poking us about it, so that it comes from someone who loves us instead of from someone who hates us. So we can get used to it. Because we're going to get hit with it anyway, and we have to learn how to handle it."

"Oh," Chris said again. After a minute, he made a little thoughtful noise. "Joey said that?"

Lance picked his way mechanically through the lo mein with his chopsticks, pulling out the water chestnuts and transfering them to Chris's plate. "Yeah," he said, his mouth full. "One night in Germany when you'd made me cry again, and I was swearing up and down that I was going to quit the band and go home and become an accountant. Joey dragged me out of the bathroom and told me about how you'd lit into him the previous week for being the 'slut' and he was ready to kill you, and then he got the same shit from an interviewer the next day, and finally realized what you were doing."

"Jesus," Chris said, and dropped his head into his hands. "You all really think I'm that much of a shit?"

"Actually, we all think it's really kind of sweet, in a demented Chris kind of fashion." Lance glanced up and then sighed, a bit. "Chris. It's not like we don't know where it comes from. When all of this started, you were the only one of us who was tough enough to stand it. So you set out to make all of us just as tough as you were. We all wanted to strangle you every now and then, but we got over it. You're not a shit, you're just too overprotective for your own good."

Chris looked up after a minute. "I just worry sometimes. That I fucked you guys up. That I fucked you guys up to prevent you from getting fucked up by someone else, and I didn't have to."

"We were already fucked up." Lance bestowed another water chestnut on Chris's plate. "All of us, in one way or another. You too. Maybe you the most. But you were the realist. The one who saw through all the shit and found what needed to be done and did it. The one who showed the rest of us what the hell needed to be done and how to do it. We forgave you an awful lot. We always have."

"You're the realist now," Chris said. "Mr. Hollywood. You're the one who handles shit. You gotta promise that -- that starting next week, you'll pay attention to stuff and take care of the guys. If I can't."

From Justin, or JC, or hell, even from Joey, that would have been his cue to leap in with reassurances that everything was going to be all right. Lance didn't, though. Chris would know better, and Chris deserved more. "I'm not giving up on the idea that you're getting out of this, Chris," he said, and then met Chris's eyes firmly. "But if I'm left as the only person in this band with his head screwed on straight, I'll do it right."

"Jesus," Chris repeated after a long minute. "We're writing my eulogy here."

That should have been Lance's cue as well, but it wasn't in the script. "Must be nice to be able to hear it ahead of time." He pushed the last of his lo mein around his plate with the tip of his chopsticks, and finally set his plate down on the endtable. No matter how casual he sounded, he could barely breathe through the weight of it all on his chest.

Silence again, and then Chris broke it. "You brought me here so that you could take me to bed, didn't you." It was said in the same detached, dispassionate tone that Chris had always used to hide behind when something was so enormous, so important that he didn't trust himself not to fall apart halfway through it.

It had taken Lance a long, long time to tell that tone apart from disinterest. He should have known better than to think that Chris wouldn't be able to tell what he was planning. Nobody could ever hide anything from Chris, no matter how much they thought they were being subtle. He only wished he knew if it was working or not. "Yes," he said, and then nodded at Chris's plate. "You'd better finish that. You know it never tastes right when you reheat it the next day."

Chris's plate clicked against the table as he put it down, just a shade too quickly. "I'm not hungry," he said, and stood.

Neither of them said another word as they climbed the stairs to Lance's bedroom. Chris suddenly lost his momentum the minute they stepped inside and he turned to look back at Lance. Lance shut the door behind himself and stepped right into Chris's personal space. Chris tipped his head up, obviously fighting the urge to step back and away.

"Shh," Lance said, lifting his hand to cup the side of Chris's face, and brushed his thumb along Chris's lips. Chris shifted his weight, one foot to the other, and Lance replaced his thumb with his mouth. Chris's mouth was a furnace, hot and ravenous, and it took a long sweet forever before Lance realized that his hands were cupping Chris's face and Chris's hands were twined in the hem of his shirt.

"Less with the clothes, more with the naked," Chris said, and pulled Lance's shirt off. Lance heard the desperation unfolding into those words and fumbled with the buttons of Chris's jeans as quickly as he could, before Chris could realize what he was doing.

Chris was beautiful when Lance finally got him naked, all whipcord angles blending into soft curves, and then Chris was kissing him again, suddenly the one in charge of the situation. Lance let him control the kiss for a few minutes, knowing that Chris had to think that he was at least partially in the lead. To be honest, he wouldn't have minded letting Chris tip him backwards, have his way, ravish Lance until they couldn't see straight -- but not tonight. Tonight, Lance knew, one of them had to stay in control, and so he pulled his head back just enough to meet Chris's eyes and knocked him over onto the bed.

Chris's eyes widened as Lance leaned over him. For half a moment it looked as though he was planning on objecting. Lance silenced him before he could say another word by the simple but effective method of another of those dizzying kisses. He ran his hands down Chris's sides, and just the brush of palm against curve lit the fire under Lance's skin that always seemed to burn when he touched Chris. But this time it was so, so much hotter.

He knew that he could lose himself against Chris's mouth, against Chris's skin. He knew that the thrumming beat of Chris-energy, of Chris-fire, would snake through the air between them and try to seduce Lance. Hypnotize him. Control him. He knew, logically, that it was a side-effect of the touch of Faerie on Chris's skin. Knew suddenly that Chris had never once, in all the years of flirting casually with all of them, ever seriously made overtures, for that very reason. Chris had never wanted to wonder if someone wanted him for him, instead of because of that reflected glory -- much less any of his friends. Lance could taste, in that reckless no-holds-barred kiss, just how long Chris had been wanting him, wanting them all, never once daring to reach.

But dammit, Lance wasn't without a few tricks of his own.

He nuzzled his way down Chris's chest, open-mouth kisses, wet and loose, and kept his hands on Chris's elbows, as if to say stay, stay, let me touch. Chris was hard -- hell, he was hard, harder than he'd ever been in his life and trying to ignore it and keep control when his body was crying Chris, Chris, Chris. He wrapped one hand around Chris's cock, took a deep breath, and swirled his tongue around Chris's head. Chris tasted like apples, apples of all things, and his skin was warm and soft and perfect.

"Lance," Chris hissed. Lance liked the sound of his name on Chris's lips like that, liked knowing that Chris was there and concentrating and aware. He opened his mouth and opened his throat and took Chris in, as slowly as he could. Chris's hips rocked underneath his fingers; Chris's breath was loose and ragged, full in his throat, halfway between moan and sob.

Lance ran his fingers over Chris's hipbones. Shhh, that touch said, or he tried to make it say. I know what I'm doing. You don't have to worry about it this time. Just let go. And maybe Chris heard him, maybe Chris could feel it in the press of skin against skin, because he rolled his shoulders and let his head fall back against the pillow and twined his fingers roughly in the covers to avoid pulling at Lance's hair.

They knew each other better than any first-time lovers had any right to. Lance knew that Chris liked it rough and fast, hard enough to leave him feeling well-fucked afterwards, bruised and shaken and stung and alive in his own skin. He reached blindly for Chris's face, the inside crease of his knuckles scraping across the faint prick of Chris's beard-stubble. Chris caught one of Lance's fingers between his teeth, then suckled it between his lips, nuzzling roughly. Lance could feel his toes curling.

Chris's cock was warm and solid in his mouth, and he let his throat close around the head. Who needed air to breathe? He could survive for hours on the sounds that Chris was making alone. He drew his fingers back from Chris's mouth, spit-slicked and well-tongued, and reached between Chris's legs to rub them along the crease of Chris's ass before sliding one finger inside.

"Fuck," Chris said, on a half-moan. "Fuck, Lance, I don't need -- I just want --" One hand unknotted itself from the covers and lifted as though in illustration of the sentence that Chris could not complete, but fell back to the bed loosely when Lance swallowed again. "Fuck," Chris repeated, and that time it was more of a prayer.

Lance knew what Chris was asking, and pulled his head back, swirling his tongue along the underside of Chris's cock, in order to look up and meet Chris's eyes. He made a soft inquisitive sound, and Chris gasped, then laughed, at the vibrations this sent through him. "Bedside -- table," Chris said, and laughed again. It was a good laugh, the kind that Lance remembered from long nights in Germany, high on too much candy and never having anywhere near enough freedom except the kind that they made for himself.

He pulled back entirely, rising to his knees and reaching over Chris; Chris ran his hands along Lance's chest, flexing fingers against Lance's skin like a cat kneading. One ankle hooked over Lance's calf, and Chris's hips rose, roughly, demandingly. "Just gimme a minute," Lance muttered, and fumbled to open the condom package between his teeth, fumbled one-handed to roll it onto him. The pinch of latex rocked through his own belly, and he knew that he wasn't going to last long.

He knelt between Chris's knees and ran one damp hand over his cock in preparation. Chris twined one knee around Lance's hips, pushing himself up onto his elbows and staring Lance directly in the eye. He nudged Chris's knees a little further apart, and slid two fingers inside of Chris to test the waters. Chris let out a sound that edged towards a whine and shimmied, hips going up, strong thighs closing around Lance's waist, and if that wasn't a direct order Lance had never seen one before.

When he finally slid inside, Chris was hot and slick and tight beneath him, and Lance dropped his head to Chris's shoulder, mouthing at Chris's collarbone. He could taste the salt-tang weight of Chris on his tongue. Chris's head fell backwards, just brushing the pillow, and his hips rocked again. "Lance," Chris said; "fuck, Lance, don't wait, want you hard, want you now," and Lance drew back and slid forward, and Chris moaned.

"Hold on to me," he said, setting the pace just like he knew that Chris wanted, and oh, God, it was just like coming home, even though he'd never been there before. Chris rolled his hips, and Lance thrust into him, and at some point their mouths and tongues found each other again.

Chris was whining into Lance's mouth, a rhythmic stuttering keeping the beat, and Lance couldn't breathe through the haze. Somewhere in the middle of all of it he'd slid his hand between their bodies, closed it around Chris's cock, rubbing hard and slick with sweat. Lance reined in his control as hard as he could, but Chris was so hot, so fucking hot and tight and perfect, and it was a relief when Chris came hard on a single keening high note, because it meant that he didn't have to hold back anymore. He angled his hips more sharply, and threw back his head and bit his lip. After what felt like forever of perfection, the orgasm slid up from the backs of his knees, white-blood fire, and slammed him just behind the eyes and oh, he didn't care if he was screaming.

It took him a long time to be able to breathe again. "I was a long time coming," Chris eventually said against Lance's skin, his voice thick and ruddy with sleep. "I'll be a long time gone."

Lance knew that Chris was quoting something, but couldn't drag the next lines out of his mind. He spread a hand over Chris's shoulder, and found himself listening for Chris's heartbeat.

He wondered which of them would break first, in the morning.

tuesday.

But it was all okay in the morning, or at least as close to okay as it could possibly get when one had just had mind-blowing sex with one of one's best friends, with whom one had never had mind-blowing sex before. Which was to say, it was weird, but it was an acceptable level of weird. Neither of them could look the other in the eye for the first twenty minutes after waking up, but that could have been the fact that Lance had forgotten to set the coffee-timer the night before and they had to wait for a fresh pot.

"Hey," Chris finally said, once the coffee had yanked him up the evolutionary ladder, and Lance looked up.

"Yeah?" he asked, fearing that Chris was gearing up for a classic and world-famous Kirkpatrick Freakout, but all Chris did was reach across the table and rest his hand over Lance's. The familiar thrumming intensity quickened through that contact. Lance welcomed it.

Chris smiled, just a quick flash of off-kilter humor, and ducked his head. "Thanks," he said, and Lance knew that it was all going to be okay.

The only thing that JC was ever on time for was studio time; Chris and Lance were the last to arrive. Joey's eyes asked Lance a question the minute they walked in, and Lance tried to answer it as well as he could. It became a moot point when Chris trailed in behind him, pointed one finger at Lance, and loudly announced, "If any of you have issues with the fact that Lance and I are fucking, get over them now so that we don't accidentally freak you out when you walk in on us necking in the broom closet on break."

The guys just looked on, surprise bringing on disbelief. Lance held his breath to see what the reaction would be; they'd talked about it, but nobody could ever tell how someone would react until something happened. But then Justin just rolled his eyes and said, "As if Lance would ever stoop so low as to make out in a broom closet, how tacky can you get," and Joey let out a big relieved belly-whoop of laughter, and JC's ears were bright red.

"Guys," JC tried, after a minute of Chris attempting to stick a wet finger in Justin's ear and Joey leaning against the wall still laughing, "guys? Album? Studio? Singing? You know, that thing where you open your mouth and music comes out?"

"Shut up, C," Joey managed through his laughter, "I want to hear about Lance and Chris getting it on." Lance imagined that his face was probably bright red.

"Well, I don't!" JC held up his hands, and his own laughter was bubbling up from the base of his stomach with the tinge of incipient hysteria. "I don't need that mental image, man, I really don't --"

And that was when Lance knew that it really was going to be all right, at least for a little while, and tried not to think about the rest of the week.

"Johnny called," Justin said casually on one of their afternoon breaks. "He's making noises about setting up the tour again. You guys want to do stadium, or smaller?"

Lance held his breath and glanced at Chris, but Chris was looking away, his face unreadable. "Stadium, I think," Joey said, after an uncomfortable silence. "Lance, you mind if I bring Bri and Kel along on the bus for a while?"

"Guys," JC said, softly, and reached over to wrap his hand around Chris's wrist. Lance winced as Chris jerked his hand back again. "I think that maybe we should talk about this next week."

"Fuck that," Chris said, his voice angry and jagged. "I'm not made out of glass, guys. You don't need to tiptoe around me like I'm going to break or something."

JC drew back, and sighed. "Chris, I'm just trying to --"

"Well, you can stop fucking trying," Chris barked, and turned around. "I'm going for something to drink. I'll be back. Or not."

"Nice going, C," Justin muttered under his breath, dragging a hand over his face, once Chris was gone.

"I didn't -- I wasn't -- I was just saying. You know. We can figure all of that out next week. You know. When we -- when we know. For sure." JC's eyes were wide.

"Nice going, C," Justin repeated. "You don't think -- Look, he's scared as hell, okay? You can tell. And he's looking at us to see if we really believe that things are going to be okay, and when you pull shit like that --"

"Guys," Lance said. It came out sharper than he intended, and he winced and modulated his tone. "Can we not argue about this? Please? JC, I know, you're just trying to make sure nobody's feelings are hurt, and Justin, yeah, you're just trying to make sure that Chris gets some reassurance, but I really think that the best thing to do is for everyone to just act normal, because even if this isn't freaking him out, it's really starting to give me a headache. Okay?"

JC had the good graces to look ashamed. "Lance, I'm sorry, I didn't think --"

"It's okay," Lance said, and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm gonna. Go find him. And then I'm going to see if I can drag him back here to get stuff done, and if I can't I'm just going to take him home, and I think that maybe somewhere in there I might pick up a couple of Advil."

"Here," Joey said from behind Lance. Lance turned around just in time to catch the little white bottle that Joey underhanded at him. "Take a few of those. Then go after him. I'll hold down the fort."

Lance found Chris standing in the hallway next to the vending machines. One of his hands was propped against the wall, and his face was buried against his arm while he breathed deeply. "Hey," Lance said, as he approached, and Chris jerked upright as though he'd been burned. "JC says to tell you sorry."

"It's okay," Chris said, but it was an automatic response; his shoulders were tense, and Lance could practically smell the rage and fear sheeting off of him.

"No," Lance said, and leaned against the wall himself. "What's bugging you?"

"It's just," Chris started, and then stopped himself. He raised his eyes, bubbling with anger, to Lance's. "You don't need to come following after me just because we were fucking last night."

Lance was glad for all of his pop-star experience in keeping his face neutral and not showing what he was really thinking. "You're right," he agreed, as casually as possible. "I do, however, have to come following after you because I give a flying fuck about whether or not you're okay, which you're not. So I repeat: what's bugging you?"

Chris closed his eyes and muttered something that sounded like "such an asshole." Lance couldn't tell if he was talking about Lance or himself, and he didn't ask. "Yeah," Chris said, a little louder. Lance didn't bother pointing out that it hadn't been a yes-or-no question. "It's just. They don't need to try and pretend for my sake. I know that none of the guys actually believes a single word I've said so far. They're -- like trying to wrap me in padding. It's like they're smothering me."

'They', and not 'you'. Lance filed that away for future consideration. "We're just trying to help," he said, softly.

Chris threw him a look. Lance felt for half a minute as though that look might ignite his skin, reach through the air between the two of them and set him to burning. He didn't flinch. "Yeah, well," Chris said, sharply. "I don't need help."

"No," Lance corrected as pleasantly as he could. He was astonished to find just how pleasant that was; for once, for once in a very long time, Chris's pointed nastiness didn't disturb him. If nothing else, he thought wryly, the whole fucked-up situation at least gave him more of an insight into Chris's head. "You need help pretty desperately, and you refuse to admit that you do, and we're all conditioned to believe what you say and leave you alone. Not going to work this time. Are you coming back to record, or shall we just go back to my place?"

Chris just looked at him again, and then closed his eyes and sighed. "I don't know if I like Lance version two-point-oh," he muttered, but it was under his breath enough that Lance could pretend to ignore it. "No, I'll come back. C's right. We don't have a hell of a lot of time to finish this stuff, not if --" He broke off, and sighed. "Yeah. Let's just all go and pretend that I'm not an asshole, okay?"

"Sure thing," Lance said, and curled his hand into a fist to prevent himself from resting it on the base of Chris's spine as they walked back down the hallway.

Tuesday night they did it all over again, and then they did it in the shower. Afterwards, Chris rolled over and nestled his back up against Lance. Lance splayed his fingers out on Chris's hip and tried to remember how to keep breathing enough for them both.

wednesday.

They didn't have sex at all on Wednesday, just spent the night sprawled out on the couch with Lance nestled sideways against the arm and Chris tucked in between Lance's legs and the overstuffed couch cushions. Two hours of silence punctuated only by the sound of the television later, Chris said, abruptly, "Tell me a story."

Lance realized that if you tilted your head just right, listened with just the right intensity, you could hear what Chris was really saying -- the tell me that it's all going to be all right even if you have to lie wrapped up with you're the only one who's never lied to me and I don't think I could bear it if you started now. It took him a long moment of thought before he opened his mouth, and even he didn't really know what he was going to say until he heard himself speak.

"There's a story I learned when I was in training in Russia, even though it isn't Russian." He bit his lip, and shifted his hips to get more comfortable. Chris didn't look up at him. "There was a god. Baldur. He was the god of beauty, and innocence, and purity, and peace. Every creature in the world loved him for his perfection, but Baldur began to dream about his own death, and told his mother of his fears. His mother Frigg traveled the world, and made every creature, every item in the world swear that never, never would they harm Baldur."

It was slow going; he had to translate in his head before he spoke, and he knew that his speech was coming out stilted. There were still, even after all these months, some things that only graced his thoughts in Russian. "All things except one; his mother didn't ask a single plant, the mistletoe. It was a young plant, and wouldn't know what she asked it. And when Loki, the god of mischief, heard about this, he made a spear out of the mistletoe bush.

"The Norse gods were direct creatures, and not subtle at all. When they heard of Baldur's invulnerability, they designed a new game. They would all gather in their hall and hurl things at Baldur, for the fun of watching their missles bounce harmlessly off of their brother. And Baldur smiled his beautiful smile, and spread his hands, and let them have their fun, no matter how much he wished only to be left alone in peace, because he knew that to them, the game was a way of paying him respect.

"And yet, Baldur's brother, the blind Hod, god of darkness and winter, stood alone in the corners of the hall, weeping, because he could not see to join in the game. Loki came up behind Baldur's elbow and asked, 'Brother, why do you weep?' 'For I cannot see to honor my brother in this game,' Hod replied. 'Weep not,' said Loki, 'for my aim is true, and I will guide your arm.' And Hod took to his feet, and took the spear that Loki pressed into his hands, and with Loki's guidance, loosed the spear that killed the god of beauty."

Chris had his eyes closed; the shift and play of light and shadow from the television set his features into sharp relief. Lance thought that Chris was, perhaps, the most perfect thing that he had ever seen. "And the gods placed Baldur on his ship, and set it on fire, and thus sent him on to the underworld, but beauty had gone from the world, and the gods found it barren and bare without Baldur's presence indeed. His mother went to the goddess Hel, overseer of the underworld, and asked for her son to be released. And Hel said, 'If it is true that all the world mourns the death of beauty, let all the world weep for Baldur, and I shall let him free.'"

Lance closed his eyes so that he didn't have to look at Chris's face, and tried to give the story the same sad hope that the old man in Moscow had managed to convey. "And so, as Frigg had once traveled the world to gain a promise, she traveled again to gather tears, and as everything had sworn, so did everything mourn. Until Frigg came to a giantess sitting on a rock, and said to her, 'Weep, weep, for Baldur is slain, and beauty shall not return to this world unless all the world mourns it.' The giantess looked at Frigg, and said to her, 'I weep no tears for Odin's son; let Hel keep what Hel has claimed.'

"And later, the gods discovered that the giantess had been none other than Loki in disguise, and so they bound him with chains and imprisoned him in a cave, where a serpent's venom drips endlessly into his eyes and he quakes the earth every time he trembles; but Baldur still dwells in Hel, where the honored dead may look upon his beauty, until the day of Ragnarok, when he shall rise again and rule the world hand in hand with Hod."

Chris was quiet for a long, long time. Lance was just beginning to wonder if Chris hadn't understood, if Chris mistakenly thought that Lance was telling the story as a way of saying that there was no way to win, when Chris let out his breath all at once, shivered, and relaxed. "Yeah," he said, nothing more. Lance closed a hand over the back of Chris's neck and held on until the network faded to endless infomercials.

thursday.

By unspoken agreement, they didn't mention Chris's deadline all day on Thursday. JC slid his headphones off of his ears just after lunch, hanging them around his neck. "I think that's it," he said. "Or at least it's the vocals. Everything from here on out is knobs and buttons."

Justin whooped, pulling off his own headphones and slinging them halfway across the studio, as usual aiming for the table and as usual missing horribly. "Hell yeah," he said. "You know what this means."

"Yeah," Joey said, pitching his headphones after Justin's. "It means that we can finally stop hearing you and C bitch at each other."

"They'll keep bitching for the next three weeks of production," Lance said. He hung his headphones up neatly on the wall, and then crossed the room to retrieve Joey's and Justin's as well.

"Yeah," Joey said, bouncing on the balls of his feet, "but we won't have to hear it. That's my point."

"Beer," Chris said, firmly. "That's my point. As in, we are going to obtain some. Right now. And take it back to someone's house, and get stinking drunk, and not sing a note."

That was the traditional post-album activity, but Chris seemed to be the only one who was really in the mood for it. They wound up back at Justin's, because Justin had been spending the day shooting Chris glances out of the corner of his eye when he thought that nobody was looking, and jumped at the chance to do something that might possibly have a chance of cheering Chris up, or taking his mind off of things, or something. But it was the kind of party that never really got off the ground, and after a few hours, everyone still had his original can of beer sitting half-touched and mostly-forgotten.

Joey, bless him, could always be counted to fill the conversational gaps when no one else was around, even when it was a story that everyone had heard a hundred times already and nobody was really paying attention to him. Lance was sitting in his usual spot in the corner of the couch, but this time Chris wasn't sprawled out on the floor with Justin arguing over which one of them was the World Halo Champion. Instead, he had draped himself across the couch, his head in Lance's lap, after having given the others a look that fairly dared them to say something about his choice of pillow.

None of the other three had so much as batted an eyelash. Lance wondered whether they would have gotten the same reaction if Chris had just walked into the studio one morning and announced that they were involved without any of the leadup, and then dismissed the thought as unworthy. He smoothed his fingertips over Chris's eyebrows and eyelids, idly, and could feel his skin tingling with the contact.

"--so I went back across Grand Central again," Joey was saying, with more subdued hand motions than the frenetic gesturing that usually accompanied that particular story. "And she was still sitting on her suitcase, except she'd picked up this puppy from God only knows where and was looking at me like --"

"Joey," Chris said, without opening his eyes. "We've heard this one before. We've heard this one before this month, even. We know how it ends."

"Aw, come on," Lance said. "I wanna hear if he manages to talk her out of her clothes this time."

Usually that would have resulted in a food fight, or at least a few disparaging comments, but Joey just looked down at his hands, picked up his can of beer, lifted it halfway to his lips, and then put it back down untasted. "I'll just," he said, and stood up, grabbing the bowl of tortilla chips and heading for Justin's kitchen to refill it. The bowl had barely been touched, but when Joey got uncomfortable, he reacted by feeding people. Always had.

"Chris," Justin said abruptly, into the sudden silence. Chris turned his head on Lance's leg and looked back at Justin, unspoken acknowledgement to continue. Lance thought that Justin sounded nervous, and that nearly made him speak up and stop Justin from whatever he was going to say, because anything that could make Justin nervous was probably a bad thing.

"I just wanted to say," Justin started, and then stopped again, bit his lip, and kept going. "I mean. It's not like I think that we're sitting here, like, waiting for the boogeyman to come and get you. Because we're going to win. But. Just in case. I wanted to say -- thank you." He looked down at his linked hands in his lap, and then looked back up. "Because I don't want you to think that I don't know that you did a lot of growing me up. I hear people talking when they think that I'm not listening, about how I could have turned out to be such a spoiled brat, growing up in the business, and I didn't, I turned out to be kind of an okay guy. And they're right sometimes and they're wrong sometimes but on the whole I know who kept me from turning into that asshole and it was you. Mom did a lot of it but you did a lot more, and I wanted you to know. That I noticed it. That I appreciate it. Just -- Just in case."

Chris shifted against Lance's thigh to push himself up onto one elbow, looking directly at Justin. His voice was low and even. "It was my pleasure."

"J," JC said, and his voice was sharp. "That's not right, you can't be talking like that --"

"Shut up, JC," Justin said, and his voice was even sharper. "I know you want to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend like none of this is happening but it is and it's something I needed to say, because I don't want anything to happen and leave that unsaid, all right?"

"Guys," Joey said, one word cutting the room from the doorway, and crossed the room. "Stop it. Just stop it. None of us know what to say and none of us have any idea how to handle waiting for things and that's no reason for us to snipe at each other, okay? All of you, just shut up."

"No," Chris said, to Joey. "It's okay. Let them -- just let them."

"I don't know what I'd do without you," Justin said after another minute. Lance wondered how close he was to tears. "I don't. It feels like you've always been here."

"I'm going to be here," Chris said. Lance couldn't see his face, but his voice was soft and vicious. His shoulderblades pressed back down against Lance's thighs, all sharp edges and tense lines. "J, I'm gonna beat this shit. I didn't -- I didn't think so, at first. But now I do. It's gonna be okay."

They were all so used to Chris's pronouncements, like some sort of divine word of God or something, that nobody thought to question it. Chris said it was going to be okay, so it was going to be okay. Even Lance, who knew what was going on and knew how it had all happened and knew that Chris could do that thing where he reached out and drew on some bizarre glamorie that wasn't him, wasn't really his -- even Lance didn't notice, didn't realize, until it was just him and Chris in the dark and silent car on the drive back over to his house.

"What are you doing here, Lance?" Chris asked, tight and small with traps lurking behind every word. "What's your story?"

Lance wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel and tried to work past the urge to roll down the window. Chris in such a confined space was dangerous. "I'm driving you back to my place so we can get some sleep before tomorrow."

"That's not what I meant, and you know it." If they had been in a lit room, if Lance could see Chris's face, Lance knew that it would be that sort of crazy beautiful that he'd never seen anyone else ever pull off with the same sort of punctuation that Chris could do it. But if they had been in a lit room, Lance knew that Chris never would have said it. "What are you doing here, babysitting me this week? Don't think I don't know that you have better things to do."

"Maybe I wanted to give a friend a hand," Lance said. He kept his eyes steady and unblinking on the endless parade of white stripes stretching out before him.

"Don't give me that shit," Chris said. Something in the sound of his voice reminded Lance of the noises he made while Lance was tasting his skin. "That's part of it, but that's not all of it. I'm not stupid."

"Maybe I wanted to be the one to be the one to take care of you for a while," Lance said, and there was apparently enough of the truth in that to shut Chris up, because the rest of the drive was accompanied by nothing more than the sound of the tires on the road and the sharp silent needles of Chris's thoughts striking him from the passenger seat.

"Upstairs," Chris said, the minute they got inside the house. It was a different tone than the ones Lance had heard before. Calm, forceful.

Lance blinked. "Yeah, let me just --"

"No." In the dim light of the hallway, Lance could barely see Chris's outline, glowing the way he'd been glowing all fucking week. The way that Lance was sure wasn't actually visible at all. Chris's eyes were dark in his face, unreadable. "I said upstairs."

Lance stopped and turned around. "Chris, I --" He broke off as Chris pushed him against the wall, and on one primitive mammalian level of his brain, noted that Chris's skin was hot enough to make him suspect fever as teeth closed on his neck.

"Fuck you, Bass," Chris growled. "You take me in, pick me up, shake me out, distract me all fucking week, and all you'll give me when I ask you why is that you feel sorry for the guy who's all ready to get his shit in order and walk out the door. I'm not taking it. You're going to fucking walk upstairs, and you're going to take off your clothes, and I'm going to push you backwards onto that bed and fuck you until you can't see straight, because there is nothing in this whole situation that involves pity. I won't let there be." Chris's teeth scraped against his throat, and all Lance could think was that Chris's hair smelled like his own shampoo before Chris's palm closed over his erection through the denim. "If you're going to take me, you're going to take the whole deal. I'm not some fucking charity case for you to pick up out of the gutter and make better again, and I'm not going to let you get away with treating this like one of your special projects that you drop once it's done. In or out, Bass. You make the decision now. You either take me, or you tell me to turn around and walk out, but I have had enough of this nonchalant bullshit."

Lance was finding it difficult to think through the ocean ringing in his ears, but he managed to get his hands up and between them anyway. His fingers closed around Chris's biceps, holding tightly -- I'm stronger than I used to be, but he's strong in ways that can't be measured by what you can bench press, and I always fucking forget that -- and buying him a little bit of breathing room. Chris tilted his head back enough for a bit of light to reflect into his eyes. Oddly enough, all Lance could think of was an old interview, years back, when the reporter had called Chris a caged animal. That was nothing compared to this look. This was the animal free and loose, and yet still just a little worried that the next words from Lance would have him walking out the door.

"I'm not telling you to go, Chris," Lance said, and it was more of a struggle than it should have been to keep his voice even. "But I'm not going to let you fuck me right here on the stairs, either. You'd be bitching about your knees for days."

Some of the fear drained out of the fear-anger-arousal in Chris's eyes. He leaned back a little more, and Lance managed to slide from between Chris's body and the wall to cross the last few steps of the vestibule. "I want to reach inside of you and find that composure and break it into a thousand little pieces," Chris said into the darkness behind him. It was perhaps the most honest thing Lance had heard from Chris in days, and it scared him more than he would ever admit. "I want to reach my hand inside of your mouth and pull you out."

Lance lifted a hand to his shirt to undo each tiny button as he climbed the stairs. "I'll let you do whatever you want with me," he said. It was easier to say it when Chris wasn't looking at him. When Chris was behind him on the stairs, when he was out of the reflected sunlight of those eyes and that presence. "And I'm not planning on tabling this project anytime in the near future."

"As long as we understand each other," came the voice from behind him as he shrugged his shoulders out of his shirt and let it fall to the ground.

Much later, when the sky's first dark violet betrayed the fact that "Thursday night" was becoming "Friday morning" even to those who have been up all night, Lance laid in the darkness. He was sticky and sore, grateful for the light breeze of the air conditioning. Chris was draped bonelessly over his chest, and he was positive that the other man was asleep until he stirred.

So quietly that Lance could barely hear him, Chris said, "Lance. I'm scared."

"I know," Lance said, and rested his palm on the small of Chris's back. His hand felt huge and clumsy against Chris's skin. "I know."

friday.

Lance came awake like a gunshot and sat up with his heart racing. "Fuck," he said, Mississippi thick as always in his first words of the day, and ran a hand through his hair. The bed was empty, and there wasn't even an indentation on the pillow to show where Chris's head had been. "All right. If that's the way we're going to play it, I can do that too."

The clock was blinking 12:48 as he made his way down the stairs and into the empty kitchen. He wondered when Chris had left. The note was in the first place that he looked for it, and he sighed.

"Lance: Gone back to my place to do the things that need doing and call my mother. Call me later. I'll see you tomorrow. Chris."

For about five minutes, he stood in the kitchen and looked at the note, lying in a puddle of warm sunlight, before sighing again and getting breakfast. His cellphone rang when he was finishing his coffee; the caller ID read "Superman". He smiled a little and flipped it open. "Cowboy Feng's Bar and Grill, how may I direct your call?"

Joey's warm laughter went a long way to freezing the chilly block of nervousness in his stomach that the coffee hadn't managed to touch. "What happened to Myrna's House of Ill Repute?"

"Closed down last week due to health code violations. What's up, man?"

"Looking for Chris. He awake yet?"

Lance sighed a little. "Long since awake, and left Dodge on the first stagecoach out. He was gone when I woke up. Left a note saying that he was going to head back to his place, do some stuff, call his mom. You try his cell?"

Lance could hear Briahna in the background doing something that seemed to involve pots as drums and a wooden spoon. Joey covered the phone for a minute and said something to her, love wrapped up even in the sternness, before coming back. "Yeah, tried that first. No answer; it went to voicemail. Oh, well, it's not important. What time are we meeting up over there?"

He found himself wishing for a minute that he smoked, just to have something to do with his hands. "Chris said that he wasn't coming back tonight. Well, he didn't say, but he strongly implied. I guess -- can you call the guys and have them meet up over here at around eight? We've got until midnight."

"No problem," Joey said, and then covered the phone again. Lance smiled; talking to Joey was always full of interruptions, but he didn't begrudge them for a minute. Joey came back after a few seconds, his voice dropped as though he was trying to be inconspicuous. "Hey, are things okay between the two of you? You and Chris? I mean, you haven't said how things were going."

"They're ... going." Lance got up from the counter and went to refill his mug of coffee. "He hasn't killed me. I haven't killed him. We're cool."

"That's not what I meant." Lance could picture Joey shaking his head. "Dude, you didn't tell him, did you. That you're in love with him. You idiot."

He nearly dropped the coffee mug. Did drop the phone; picking it back up and rearranging himself took a few seconds, and he could hear Joey laughing quietly. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about," he said, when he got himself settled again. "Share the crack you're smoking, 'cause I'm all out."

"Look," Joey said, "if you want to pretend that's not what this is all about, you go ahead, but I think you're setting yourself up for one hell of a fall when this is all over. He doesn't think you're doing this for anything but friendship, does he."

"Joey," Lance started, and then abandoned whatever the hell he was trying to say. "Look. I've got a lot of shit to do. I'll see you when you come over later, okay?"

"Sure thing, man. But if you ask me, you're being stupid about it. Catch you later."

They never bothered with goodbyes when it was just them on the phone. That had been a Justin thing, originally -- the idea that if they didn't say "goodbye", it wasn't an end to the conversation, just a postponement -- but it had quickly spread. Lance hung up the phone, closed his eyes, and then opened them again and dialed memory two.

As Joey had said, it rang through to voicemail, JC's voice proclaiming that Estelle couldn't come to the phone. They changed their voicemail greetings like some people changed socks, and nobody ever recorded his own. "Chris," he said, once the recording had beeped at him. "It's me. I figure that note you left me means that you don't feel like company today, and that's cool. Don't worry, okay? You go do what you need to do, and when they come for -- when all the shit starts to go down, don't worry. We're gonna be there. You're gonna think that it's the last minute and we're not there yet, but we will be. We know where to find you, and we know what to do. Be strong. Call me if you need me, I'll have my phone on all day."

With that done, he finished his coffee and folded the paper neatly before stacking it with the previous days' in his recycling area in the laundry room. He rinsed out the mug and set it in the sink, then turned around. He indulged himeself in a minute of mental freakout time before opening random cabinets until he found the small pottery bowl that Carrah had given him for last Christmas. He toted it upstairs with him; he'd just left it on the dresser when he heard the door open and Justin's unrestrained "hallooo" echoed up the stairs.

"Bedroom," he called back, and a minute later, Justin's head poked in.

"Oh, man," Justin said, as they went through the greeting ritual of slapping hands. "Scene of the crime. I didn't need to picture this."

"You were the one who came over here. What's up?"

Justin shrugged nonchalantly and toed the floor. "Nothing, really. Joey called and gave me the 411 about what's going on tonight, and I figured that you might want some company, since Chris pulled one of his usual disappearing acts. How're you taking it?"

"I'd like to know why everyone thinks that I'm the one in need of serious help here. I'm fine." Lance pulled a cloth-wrapped bundle out of his underwear drawer and unfolded it on top of his dresser. "Just getting a few things ready for tonight."

Justin watched with bright and interested eyes. "That's the stuff that the guy gave you, right? What's his name?"

"Kinrowan. Matthew Kinrowan, and yes, it is." Inside the cloth was another cloth pouch tied with a drawstring, a piece of paper with quickly sketched symbols, a tiny knife sheathed in leather, and a linen cloth stained ruddy brown; Lance tucked the paper into the back pocket of his jeans and started picking the knot out of the pouch with his fingernails. "You remember what you're supposed to do?"

"Yeah." Justin sat down on the bed. "You're going to go over it again for everyone, right?"

"Yeah." The pouch was filled with blue powder, and Lance emptied it into the bowl. He picked up the pair of scissors sitting on the dresser, leaned over to look in the mirror, and carefully clipped a lock of his own hair, adding that to the bowl. His stylist would just have to cope with the bare patch. "Do me a favor, will you? Head on down to the kitchen and pick up one of the chopsticks out of the drawer and a bottle of Evian out of the fridge."

"Sure thing." Justin eyed the bowl curiously, but headed on down the stairs anyway. Alone in the room -- he didn't really want to try to explain what he was doing -- Lance picked up last night's condoms from the dresser and carefully emptied their contents into the bowl as well. He'd just finished tossing them into the garbage in the bathroom and washing his hands when Justin returned.

"Aren't you supposed to be chanting something obscure when you're doing this sort of shit? Double, double, toil and trouble --"

"Don't say that." Lance turned around to face Justin, and took the bottle of water and the lacquered chopsticks from his hands. "Bad luck to quote that play."

"Right, sorry, I forgot." Justin ducked his head and sat down on the bed. "This is all just sort of weird. I mean, it's like you're mixing up some sort of crazy spell or shit."

Lance sighed, just a little. It was precisely what he'd been thinking. "Trust me, J, I know. I am just as weirded out by all of this as the rest of you guys. I'm just hiding all of it a little better, is all."

"JC wants to talk to your guy when this is all over and, like, ask him for creativity spells or something." Justin's eyes flicked over to the window, and then back to Lance. "I don't know. I still don't really believe in any of this, you know?"

"I don't know if I do either." Lance spit into the bowl, then picked up the knife from the dresser, unsheathed it -- it was made of obsidian, not metal -- and resolutely thought about something else. The skin of his palm parted beneath the blade, and he let a few drops of blood spot against the damp blue powder before picking up the linen cloth and pressing it against the wound to staunch the bleeding. He looked over at his shoulder at Justin, who was watching the whole process with a sort of sick fascination. "I'm glad that you said that to him last night, though. What you did. Even if this is all one huge acid trip and it all turns out to be nothing, I'm glad that you finally said it."

"I am too," Justin said. "I've been meaning to say it for forever. Years, even. But the time never quite seemed right, you know? I mean, it took me a while to see it, but once I did, there really isn't much of a way to bring that shit up. I mean, we all call each other brothers, and we are, but that's above and beyond the call of duty. I was a shit back then."

Lance laughed. "We both were." He opened the bottle of water and poured a little bit of it over the mess in the bottom of the bowl, stirring it with the chopstick. (Don't let metal touch it, he could hear Kinrowan's voice echoing in his memory. It won't ruin what you're building, but it will disturb its efficacy, and you'll be wanting every bit of help that you can get.) "Someday we'll both have children, and when they go through adolescence, we'll think back on what we put Chris through and finally understand." The woad was turning to paste; he added a little more water. "Seriously, though, J. I should have let you take my part in all of this. You're so much closer to him."

"It wouldn't have worked," Justin said. The set tone to his voice made Lance turn around. Justin was watching him, with that firm and serious expression that graced his face when he was saying something that really mattered. "You said that it had to be someone who loves him."

"We all love him," Lance said.

"No, man. We all love him. You love him. We talked it over when neither of you were around. Nobody's in love with him like you are. I love him, and sure I'd jump his bones if I got the chance, and he's the older brother I always wanted and the best friend I've ever had, but if there's going to be someone who needs to stand for him, it's going to be you. It's gotta be you."

Lance closed his eyes and tried to pretend that it didn't matter. "It's so nice to know," he said, "that you've been discussing my emotional life when I wasn't privy to the discussion."

Justin made a quick and impatient gesture. "Oh, lay off it. You know that we all talk about each other when we're not around all the time. Hell, you've done it. Seriously. You've been watching him since you were eighteen and wondering if you'd ever be cool enough for him, and I've got news for you: you're the only person who could handle him. And if you don't go for it when all of this is over, if you treat this like it was a few days fucking in the middle of extreme duress, I'm going to -- I don't know, hunt you down and kick your ass, or something."

Lance let the conversation slide away. The paste was reaching the consistency of paint, and he tipped in just a bit more water to get it the rest of the way there. "You could try," he said.

Justin snorted. "Try and succeed. Seriously, man. Don't let a good thing slip away just because you're too chickenshit to go for it, all right? I know where you live."

"You have a key to where I live. Come on, I have to go put this outside in the sunlight for a few hours."

Justin nodded, apparently content to let the conversational topic go. "Yeah, sure. You eaten yet? I missed lunch and you could probably stand to get the hell out of this house."

"Translation: You got Lance-sitting duty and you're hungry, so you're going to try to feed me even though I'm supposed to be fasting all day."

Justin just grinned. "All right, then, you can watch me eat. Come on."

-- * --

Chris didn't call. Lance hadn't really been expecting it -- Chris's standard mode of operation when something big was looming over him was to hide away in his house, getting ready to face it -- but he couldn't help feeling just a little worried about matters.

His standard mode of operation when something big was looming over him was to try to act as normally as possible, but he had to re-sort the laundry three times before he was sure that he hadn't left the red socks in with the white underwear.

"I brought the paintbrush without the metal tips," JC said when he showed up, and pressed it into Lance's hand. "Give me the paper to look over before I start."

Lance nodded and pulled the paper from his back pocket. "Sure. They're pretty simple."

JC nodded. "Yeah, I can do these." He looked down at the paper again, then back up at Lance, and his eyes crinkled in a smile that Lance thought was trying to be reassuring. "You like any of them? We could always head over to the tattoo place later. They'll have something to work from."

"You're supposed to be the one who talks us all out of getting more tattoos," Joey said, coming out of the kitchen with a glass of water. "I distinctly remember the responsible-adult lecture after Lance got his last one."

JC shrugged. "You know my motto, man. Do one thing out of character every day, so people don't start thinking you're predictable. Who's going to do mine?"

"I will," Lance said, and stripped off his shirt to present his skin as a canvas. "They're simple enough."

"Hold still," JC said, a minute later, as the paintbrush dipped in the woad traced the first glyphs down the side of Lance's face.

Lance started to scowl, and then stopped himself, not wanting to have to wash off the design and start again. "It tickles," he said, trying to move his mouth as little as possible.

"It's a paintbrush going over your skin, of course it's going to tickle. I said hold still."

Justin was leaning over the back of the couch and watching the whole process with interest. "That stuff is so gross," he said. "Why'd you have to put all that stuff in there?"

"It's an old idea," JC said, before Lance could answer. "That parts of you have power. There's probably spit in there, right, Lance? And blood, and hair. And something from Chris, too."

Lance made a noncommital noise. Justin screwed up his face, realizing what of Chris's must have made its way into the ingredients list, and Joey handed Justin the glass of water before he could make a comment. "How do you know that shit, C?" he asked, instead, after taking a drink.

JC was dividing his attention between the paper in Lance's lap and Lance's face, where he was drawing the symbols at the edge of Lance's hairline. "Did some reading this week," he said, then frowned and smudged lightly at a spot with his thumb before going over it again. Lance wondered how ridiculous he looked, and had to stop himself from laughing at the thought that he could put on a kilt and play William Wallace for the trick-or-treaters. "Knew some stuff about weird stuff already. But there's, like, a lot of good music from back then. Simple stuff, but universal. When all of this is over, I may keep listening to it. There's some stuff I wouldn't mind borrowing from."

"We could put out an album of traditional music," Joey suggested, only half-seriously, sitting on the back of the couch next to Justin. "Pop folk music. I bet we'd sell millions of copies."

"I bet we'd be laughed off the charts," Justin said resting his head on Joey's leg. Joey automatically started kneading the back of Justin's neck. Lance smiled to see it.

"Okay, I think that's the best I can do," JC said after another few minutes, and stepped back to study Lance's face, then nodded. "Where's the book with the other symbols?"

"Over on the table," Lance said, and nodded towards it. "There's a Post-it note on the pages you want."

JC picked up the book and flipped through it until he found the note with Lance's name, then looked back at Lance, apologetically. "This is really going to tickle like a son of a bitch." He bent down and began painting the glyph labeled as "love" over Lance's heart. It did tickle; Lance gritted his teeth.

As JC painted, Lance closed his eyes. He felt as though the room was getting sharper, more defined; each stroke of the paintbrush seemed to bring everything further into focus. "I think we should all make a resolution right now that we're not going to look in the mirror, and we're not going to tell each other how insanely stupid we look," he said as JC finished, and bent his neck to blow lightly on the woad against his skin. The moisture was cool in the air-conditioned living room.

"I kind of like it," JC said. "Old. Interesting. We should put it in our next stage show."

"Or we could just scrub it off the minute we get home, pray that the stains aren't too bad, and never speak of this again. C'mon, Justin, you're next." Lance gestured to the stool he'd been sitting on.

Justin made a face. "You didn't mention that it was going to stain. How long are we going to be wearing this shit?"

"We can wash it off when we get home," Lance said. He leaned back against the couch and watched JC tip Justin's face to one side with a hand on Justin's chin, studying and frowning, before starting in on the runes across Justin's skin. Lance blinked; as JC painted, Justin's face seemed to age, as though Lance was looking at a photograph of him taken ten years in the future.

"You okay?" Joey asked, and bumped a fist against Lance's bicep. "You're looking sort of startled."

Lance rubbed a hand over his eyes. "I'm okay," he said. "Just -- kinda seeing things, is all."

"It's that freaky shit again," Joey said, helpfully. "Matt said you were gonna see weird stuff until you came back to him and he told you how to block it out. Guess Chris isn't the only one who's a freak, huh?"

Lance tore his eyes from Justin's face and leaned over to cuff Joey upside the head. "Fucker," he said, affectionately. "You're not helping." But he was; Joey's kind and unrelenting normality made it all seem better for a minute, and when he looked back at Justin, all Lance saw was the familiar face, watching JC with an easy patience honed by years of waiting for make-up and wardrobe.

"Wait," Lance said, suddenly. JC turned, just before making the first stroke over Justin's heart.

"What?"

"Not that one." Lance's eyebrows drew together; he wasn't sure why it was wrong, but it was wrong. "Here." He slid the book over to him, and flipped the pages until he found the one that felt right. "This one."

JC looked at it, and then nodded. Rather than marking Justin with "brother", he limned the rune for "son". Justin's head and shoulders were clouded with a halo of milky brilliance that Lance knew only he could see as he tilted his head down to see what JC had drawn on him.

"How did you decide?" Justin seemed interested as he lifted his fingertips to his chest, stopping just short of touching the damp woad. Lance wondered if he felt it, whatever "it" was, if he could feel the power of the symbols on his skin the way that Lance could. "Who got which symbol, I mean."

"I ... I don't really know. Kinrowan told me to pick the one that summed up each of us. Well, each of us the way we relate to Chris. Or the way he sees us. It's -- I don't really know how to describe it. It's just what feels right." Lance shook his head. "I couldn't tell you. It just is."

"Going all mystic on us," Justin said, but there was a smile on his lips as he said it. For the first time, he seemed as though he'd lost his skepticism. "You going to start doing voodoo spells on the bus, or something?"

"Maybe he can find a spell to make your socks stop stinking," Joey said, and pulled off his shirt. "Outta the chair. My turn." Joey's rune was "protector". As JC finished drawing it, Lance could see a featureless form, made of light like the opposite of shadow, standing behind him with its hands on Joey's shoulders.

Closing his eyes didn't seem to help anymore. He did it anyway; the room was replaced by darkness, but against the velvet insides of his eyelids, he could see the outlines of each of the others anyway, like a stronger version of afterimages. It would have made his head hurt, if his head hadn't been hurting all week, and he drifted inside his own mind and his own pain for a few minutes.

"Lance," JC said, from just next to his ear, and closed a warm hand over Lance's wrist. Lance jerked slightly and opened his eyes. "It's my turn. Do you want me to get someone else to do it?"

"No. I'm okay, it's just --" Lance blinked again a few times, because JC was a riot of colors, all swirled and bright and rainbow. It flared for half a second, and then clicked off, and then back again.

"Yeah," JC said, and nodded, as though he knew precisely what Lance was talking about. He turned around and looked at Joey and Justin. "Hey, guys, can one of you pretend that you've forgotten something vital and important in the kitchen, and drag the other one out to go and get it with him? And it'll take you like five minutes to find it?"

"Gotta go, baby's on fire," Joey said, automatically, and grabbed Justin by the waistband of his jeans. When they were safely out of earshot, JC turned back to Lance. Lance winced slightly as the rainbows came back.

"Yeah," JC said again, and smiled. "First time it happened to me I thought I was going bugfuck. Here. Close your eyes again."

Lance opened his mouth as though to say something -- the universe had just gotten eminently more strange, as though the universe needed any more strangeness on top of an already fucking unbelievable week -- but JC put a finger on his lips. "Just do it, Lance," he said. There was warmth and love in that tone. "If I'd known, I would have shown you earlier, but you didn't mention that you were seeing stuff. Come on, just close your eyes."

Lance shut his mouth and closed his eyes. A second later, JC's fingertips settled at the outer edge of his eyelids, and the odd sense of unreality vanished like a burst balloon. It took the lights and colors with it, leaving him feeling drifting and disoriented. JC's voice was low and soothing as he said, "The guy who taught me this couldn't see stuff, but he had other things to block. Take a deep breath." Lance did. "And another. Find where you're breathing from. It's easy, we're singers, we know how to breathe from the center."

After a few more breaths, Lance could feel it, like a warm and sleepy pool of radiant energy curled in his belly. JC's voice stayed soft. "Once you've got it, find the spot around you that feels just like it. Not me. There'll be another one."

With his eyes closed, and the light gone, Lance could sense the things around him, the way that one only notices a soft noise when the loud noise is gone. JC felt like a nap in sunlight coming through the window in winter. For half a minute, he just wanted to lean against JC and hold on, let JC soothe away his worries. But he pulled his attention away from that warmth and comfort, and realized that JC was right; somewhere in among the disorientation there was a distinct sense of "down", and somewhere in among the sense of "down" there was a sense of "stable-bedrock-home-safe". "Yeah," he said, and his voice sounded odd in his own ears.

"Just sort of, like, reach for it. Not with your real hands, but with your mental hands. And sort of -- pick up energy from it, and bring it up to that spot in your center."

It was harder than JC made it sound; the spot kept moving, just as Lance thought he'd found it. "Yeah," he said, again.

"This is really just the quick and dirty hack," JC said. "You're going to have to learn the real way to do this really soon, because you can't leave it like this for long. But take that spot, and that energy, and push it around you like a force-field. Imagine, like, a big brick wall surrounding you. All around, not just in front. Top and bottom, too, like a bubble, to put up a block."

JC was incapable of sticking to one metaphor. The sense of disorientation was slowly ebbing, though, and Lance tried to put up the blocks the way that JC had described. After a second, he realized that his mind was taking the word "block" literally; he was imagining building blocks, like the kind that he'd played with as a child, forming a reassuring wall between him and the rest of the world.

"Yeah," JC said, after a second, and Lance would be damned if he didn't sound like a proud parent. "You've got it. Now just tell it to stay when you take your attention off of it, and open your eyes."

Lance opened his eyes after another moment, to see JC smiling at him with that crinkly-eyed smile that was known to melt hearts. And nothing more than that. "Woah," he said. And then felt stupid.

"'No one can be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it for yourself,'" JC quoted, and then grinned a little more. "Better?"

Lance blinked a few more times. "How the fuck do you know how to do that?"

JC shrugged. "Used to think I was going nuts until Tony noticed that I was flinching at something that wasn't there. He taught me. I don't know where he picked it up. More things under heaven and earth, Horatio, and so forth. If I'd been paying more attention to you this week -- well. I just thought that you were, like, having Chris rub off on you or something."

"You saw Chris? I mean, you saw the way he glows?" Lance frowned.

"Yeah. Didn't know what it meant, but some people just do that. You'll figure it out eventually." JC shook his head. "I didn't know anything about the faerie stuff or anything. All I know is that sometimes I see things that aren't really there, or something. It's, like, another set of senses. You can tell who's really spiritually connected, who's got a strong heart. Look at the other guys sometimes, when we're all together. It's pretty."

"Gosh," came Joey's voice, loudly, from the hall. "Justin, I'm really glad that you came into the kitchen with me to help me find a bottle of water, despite the fact that I've been in Lance's kitchen about as much as I've been in my own! I really hope that the guys don't mind that we were both gone when we come back into the living room in another thirty seconds!"

JC smiled a little more and dropped his hands from Lance's face. "We'll talk about it later. I want to talk to that guy you met. He can probably teach us both an awful lot."

Lance just had time to nod before Joey and Justin came back into the room, Joey whistling loudly as he walked. Lance looked at them both, and all they looked like was themselves.

"Come on," Lance said, and picked up the paintbrush that JC had left in the bowl of woad. "Let's finish this."

JC's rune was "soul". Lance had picked it earlier, but hadn't realized how right he was.

-- * --

"Are you sure we've got the right spot?" Justin asked for the hundredth time, stuffing his fists into his jeans pockets. It had been warm enough that none of them had thought to bring a jacket, but the breeze was cool and standing still left them all chilly.

"This is where Kinrowan said," Joey said. He and Lance were standing next to the scraggle of bushes on either side of the pathway that ran through the park. JC and Justin were in the middle of the pathway, waiting. "We're right by one of their places of power. Lance said he could feel it. They'll be by, at midnight."

"Yeah," Lance said, distracted. He could feel what Kinrowan had been talking about; there was something flowing underneath the ground, something running fast and loose and free and waiting to be tapped. He stuffed his hands into his pockets as well, to avoid reaching for it. He didn't want to know what would happen if he did. "This is it. This is the place. I just --"

"Lance." Lance looked up to see Justin looking back at him, composed and serene and mature in a way that he'd been once, and then lost for a while and found again. "Dude. It's cool. Remember, you're the scary competent one. Be scary and competent. I know you can."

"I hear them," Joey said, his head picking up and tilting so that he could hear better. "There's bikes coming. I can hear them. Far off, but getting here fast."

"Showtime," JC said, and held out a hand. There was a brief pause, and then they all reached out at the same time, grasping each other at random, the way they always did. "Let's rock."

"Let's do it," Lance said, and took one last look at the other three before nodding and melting back into the bushes. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, running through every single stage-fright exercise Justin had ever taught him, back in the days when he'd been a scared young kid and Justin, even two years younger than he was, had been so far more ready for fame and fortune than Lance was still.

JC and Justin never let go of each other's hands, just stood in the center of the path waiting. In the half-moonlight, Lance could see Justin's knuckles, white against his skin as he held on. Justin was the one who was in the most immediate danger. Lance had offered, but Justin wouldn't hear of it.

A minute later, the riders came into view, and Lance's world exploded.

He noticed the bikes first; top-of-the-line, he thought, with the limited knowledge of motorcycles he'd picked up from hanging around Justin and Chris. Black leather, brown leather, chrome and metal. The riders were in double file, with one figure on a black motorcycle in front. They looked like any group of riders Lance had ever seen, anonymous and pale in their riding leathers.

And then his wall of blocks cracked and crumbled, and the landscape around him blazed forth with light.

If he squinted, just a little, just enough to stave off what felt like incipient blindness, he could see what he had seen a minute before; a group of bikers, perhaps in a tighter formation than was usual, riding incongruously down a park's paved pathway in double-file. And then he tilted his head just a little more, turned his eyes just right, and the bikes were horses, tall and shining and standing proud and true, and the people on the horses were just as tall and shining -- pale, ethereal, armored and blank-faced and the most beautiful things he'd ever seen. For half a second, he wondered what it would be like to ride with them.

At the front of the column were the horses of black; behind them were the horses of brown. And behind them, dressed in a robe of white and riding on a white horse, was Chris, with his face turned down and his expression blank. His hands rested on the pommel of his horse's saddle, as though they had been placed there by someone other than himself and he hadn't thought to move them.

The single rider at the front of the column was a woman, curved and shapely with a mass of black hair and cruel, dead eyes. Lance could only look at her for a moment before he had to squint again and turn his eyes away, and when he looked back, that strange sight had clicked off and he saw only the motorcyclist again. She stopped her bike (her horse?) inches away from Justin, and looked down her elegant and aristocratic nose to stare him directly in the eye.

Justin took a deep breath, dropped JC's hand, and opened his mouth to speak. Justin had always been the one of them to learn his lines the quickest, and he'd been given the script ahead of time. His voice was calm and sure as he recited the words: "You have something that belongs to us, and we have come by the old laws to let you know that we will not let you have it."

"The old laws no longer hold true," she said, and Lance nearly wept at her voice. There was a running river in it, and the bays of a wolf-pack scenting its prey, and the heavy and ponderous scent of roses on a cloying and pellucid summer night. Every voice he'd ever heard was a dim and distant shadow of this one.

Justin swallowed heavily, and behind his back, his hand crept back into JC's for strength. Lance thought that he could almost smell Justin's fear. His tone didn't waver, though. "The old laws cannot be denied. We stand before you bearing the marks of air and fire, water and earth, and the One Who stands above them all, and we say to you, he shall not be yours."

Venom crept into Justin's last five words; Chris looked up at the sound of it, as though it had taken a moment for the knowledge that he was not alone to seep through the haze. I am about to do the most stupid thing I have ever done in my entire life, Lance thought, with extreme clarity, and then made himself stop thinking at all.

"Chris," he said, and stepped from the bushes to stand at Chris's side. The sight chose that moment to return in full force, and Chris blazed with light and power.

His voice seemed to take a minute for Chris to process, too, and it was a long few seconds before Chris turned his head and looked down at Lance. The first signs of hope flared in his eyes, and then died again. Lance shook his head and held up a hand, reaching for the Chris he saw on top of the horse, and not the Chris he saw on the motorcycle. "Chris," he said again, loading it with as much command as he could manage, and as the Queen turned her head to see what was going on behind her, Chris reached down and took Lance's hand tightly.

For half a second, the earth seemed to heave under Lance's feet, and the stars seemed to stop in the sky. "I love you," he said, as plainly as he could, and then leaned backwards hard.

They landed on the ground together in a tangle of arms and legs. There was a heartbeat where they might have gotten up together, dusted themselves off and sorted out which limbs belonged to whom, and it felt like the indrawn breath before a scream. Lance rolled over smoothly and wrapped his arms around Chris's body, as tightly as he could, and Chris's arms came up automatically to wind around Lance's neck.

And then the universe exploded.

One minute, Lance could feel Chris's vertebrae underneath his fingertips. The next, something slid smoothly between his fingers, dry and scaly. He clutched at the snake automatically, pinning the back of its head between his thumb and forefinger just as it was rearing back to strike. Chris, he thought, clear and shocking in the sort of Zen no-mind of absolute terror and absolute determination, this is Chris, I can't hurt him, this is Chris. He rolled to his side automatically, to avoid crushing the serpent.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Joey slip from the bushes, place a hand on the tassles of the leather hanging from the handlebars of the bike that Chris had been riding (around the mane of the horse that had borne Chris) and slice through them with the obsidian knife. He moved quickly and with purpose, and slipped the strands of leather (hair) into his pocket before crossing the path to stand at Lance's side.

"He is mine," the Queen said, as Lance clutched the tail of the snake in his other hand. "And you will not have him."

One minute, Lance was holding scales and sinew. The next, rough skin turned to fur underneath his fingers, and something slammed into the side of his head with the force of an anvil. Can't let go, can't let go, ran through his head like a mantra, and he rolled over again, trying to cover the bear's body with his own and pin down those deadly paws. Another weight hit the backs of his knees, and dimly he realized that Joey had flung himself over the bear's lower half to lend his weight to Lance's own.

Lance was the one who needed to hold on, though, and he dug his fingers into the bear's fur, trying to keep his head up and back and away from the teeth. He lost his balance, had no leverage to hold himself up, and slammed his jaw down hard against the creature's breast. Just as he was about to close his eyes and wait for those teeth to close on his throat, someone skidded past him on the path, going down hard in the dirt. A touch ghosted past his hair, and he looked up just in time to see Justin's fingers lock beneath the bear's chin and yank it up and backwards, hard.

One of the pale and distant people cried out three notes, like a hunting call.

One minute, Lance had his fingers twined in rough fur. The next, his grip closed hard on a wild and flowing mane. A dull roaring sounded in his ears, and he realized that it was the noise that the lion was making -- that Chris was making, howling like a beast that had scented its prey. One paw flailed as the lion tried to shake Lance free, and three drops of Justin's blood fell on Lance's cheek as Justin flew backwards to land, crumpled, on the ground next to them.

Lance rolled with the lion's movements as well as he could, and scissored his legs frantically to try and struggle them loose from where they had been pinned beneath the lion's body. A hand closed around his one free ankle and pulled, rougly. Lance knew that JC would apologize for it in the morning, but it got him free, and grimly he pushed as hard as he could to knock the jungle cat off its paws and get one leg over it to once more cover it with his body.

He could hear his own ragged gasps in his ears, over the lion's wild roar. Hold on, he thought, and for an endless wrestling struggle, thought that he couldn't possibly be strong enough.

"What we claim," said the Queen, distant and majestic, "is ours. You shall not prevail."

One minute Lance's arms were full of a spitting, roaring cat. The next, the pain receptors in his skin flared to full and agonizing life, and he had to override the instinct to jerk his hands back. The lion had turned to blazing, white-hot steel beneath his touch. The sweet and sickly smell of scorching flesh filled his nostrils. He was crying as his hands cracked and burned, and it was the worst pain he'd ever felt, raw and agonizing and oh, God, he wanted to let go, he wanted to let go more than anything he'd ever wanted in the world, and he knew that he couldn't. Joey's voice was screaming in his ears, and he might be screaming along with it, but he couldn't tell.

Chris, he thought desperately, Chris, dear sweet suffering Christ in Heaven, ChrisChrisChrisChris, he'd known it was going to be bad but not this bad, not like this, and the blisters on the palms of his hands were splitting and weeping and he would. not. let. go. With the last little scrap of consciousness he could summon over the pain, he clung to the memories. Chris opening up beneath him like a hothouse flower, Chris looking at him over his kitchen table, Chris tilting his head back for Lance's kiss, Chris reaching for him Chris's arms around his neck Chris's skin under his lips Chris in a hotel hallway in Germany lost and alone and terrified and someone was saying something but he couldn't hear it through the rush and roar of pain that sounded like the ocean and

one minute Lance's hands were on fire. The next, his hands closed on nothing, and he was sobbing at the thought that he had failed, he had let go, before he inhaled sharply and his lungs and throat seared and scorched, because he was holding onto nothing but a blazing brand of fire. He could feel the rest of his skin bubbling, and through that hurtcharringsearingagony was the sharp sensation of someone slapping at his face, and then something heavy and rough slammed into him and they were rolling off the path and down the hill and through the bushes which flared into flame behind them and into the blessed and icy water of the filthy and stagnant pond at the side of the pathway and

When he could think again, he was holding Chris's naked body against his chest, and JC was holding both their heads out of the water, and dear God his skin was screaming so loudly that it was the greatest shock of his life to look down and see his palms unmarred by blister or blood. He realized after a second that he was naked too, his clothes having burned off of him in those last few pain-soaked minutes. Chris was unearthly still for one minute, and then he shivered, like a full-body contraction, and reared back and out of Lance's arms before Lance could stop him. God, no, was all that Lance could think, but even as his hands closed on empty air, he could hear Justin's shaky voice behind them, clogged with pain and tears, reciting as though by rote.

"We have said you will not have him. And we have held what is ours. By air and fire, by water and earth, and by the One Who stands above them all, you have lost and you will not take him."

We won, Lance thought, into the sudden silence as the pain began to ebb. He turned his head to see the Queen, tall and pale and angry, standing at the edge of the pathway and looking down the hill to where the three of them sat in the muck.

"Had I known," said the Queen, looking directly at Chris. She spoke as though she had all the time in the world. "Had I known that thy love would steal thee away. Had I known. I would have taken out your heart, and put in a heart of stone."

There was threat in that voice, the calm creeping promise of someone in whose power it is to carry out the threat that is being made, and Lance closed his hand around Chris's wrist. Chris shuddered at the touch, but didn't pull away; ripples pooled and shimmered around him as he half-fell sideways to land against Lance's chest. Like a dead weight, Lance thought, and then shivered himself, and brought his other arm around Chris's shoulders. JC wrapped his arms around them both, as though he could be their shield.

Above them and to the side of the woman, Justin coughed, sharply, and took a step forward. He nearly went down under his own weight, and Joey lept to his side, leaning against him even as Justin leaned against Joey. The blood from the swipe of the lion's claws trickled down Justin's cheek, and his clothes were covered in dirt from when he had flung himself down next to Lance and bear-Chris. Justin lifted the back of his hand to press against the wound and brought his skin away stained with red. "Look, bitch," he said, and there was nothing of recitation in his tone anymore, just raw white anger. "You missed the fucking memo. Get out of here. You lost. Game fucking over."

"That is two." The woman ignored Justin; her words fell, neatly and well-patterned, against the night sky. Her voice was calm and uninflected, but her eyes spoke of rage banked deep. "Two who have slipped through our grasp. There will not be another." Her gaze landed on Lance's, and that strange sight shifted behind his eyelids again. He saw the fury wrapped around her shoulders like a halo, and he saw the threat in her eyes, and he saw his own death in her words.

"Damn right there won't be, lady," Joey rasped. Somehow, despite the difference in height, Justin had managed to bury his face in Joey's chest, holding on and just shaking. Joey glared at her over Justin's head, and Lance thought, distantly, that he would be able to see the hatred in Joey's own eyes even without that curse of vision. "He's ours, and you're not going to get your hands on him again."

"Love can not sustain you forever," the woman said, dispassionately. She was speaking to Chris, and Lance turned slightly, as though he could save Chris by putting his own body between Chris and her venom. "Should it fail, you will fall."

Joey shook his head. "By the old laws," he said, so quietly that Lance could barely hear him. It should have been Justin's line, but they all knew it. Just in case one of them hadn't made it through. "By the old laws. Twice we have bound you by air and fire, by water and earth, and by the One Who stands above them all whose command even you may not deny. And thrice we abjure you, by that name which may not be spoken. Be gone from here, and leave us what we have won."

JC, silent until then, stood up in the pond. His own clothes were rags as well, damp rags that clung to his skin. "Go home," he said, and there was so much kindness in his voice that Lance had to choke back tears. "There's nothing left for you here. Go home."

"Guard well your heart," the Queen replied, and drew a cloak out of nowhere to wrap it around her shoulders. Lance shivered. Her eyes were resting directly on his. "You think him yours, but what Faerie takes, Faerie does not let go of lightly."

And with that, they were gone, between one blink and the next.

Joey, ever practical, was the first one to break the dazed silence. "I've got some spare clothes in my trunk," he said, as Justin coughed sharply again. "Come on. You guys are soaked. Let's get you out of that disgusting water and into some clean and dry clothes." Gently, he eased Justin away from clinging to him. "Do you guys need a hand getting out of there?"

Chris unfolded himself from Lance, slowly, and Lance's heart caught in his throat, because he'd never wanted to see Chris, not like this -- not wet and naked and helpless, with fear in his eyes. Chris was the strong one, Chris was the one who always knew what to do, and now he looked back at Lance small and thin and bedraggled. "Is it over?" he asked, the first words he'd spoken, and his voice was so rough from what must have been screaming that Lance wondered if there might be permanent damage, when all was said and done.

"It's done," JC said, and leaned down to give Chris a hand in standing up. "Come on. We'll need to be out of here before the cops show up."

"It might be fun to try to explain," Justin said, trying to make a joke, and pressed the back of his hand against his cheek again. "The tabloids would get a kick out of it."

Lance pushed himself to his feet and shivered as the cool air brushed over his wet skin; it felt almost as though the breeze were tugging at him, trying to pull him away. Automatically, his hand sought Chris's, twining their fingers together. The thought of not holding on to Chris felt foreign and uncomfortable.

Chris looked down at their joined hands, and then looked back up at Lance. "She said I still belong to her," he said, and his tone was bleak.

"You belong to you," Lance said, softly, and resisted the urge to add "but you're going to have to learn to share with me".

-- * --

Kelly, thank God, had years of experience in dealing with boyband antics with equanimity. When five men -- three damp, one bloody and filthy, and one just plain exhausted -- showed up in her kitchen on Halloween night, painted with woad and wearing each other's clothes, all she did was pass out towels and mugs of tea, send them to the living room, caution them strongly against waking up the baby, and kiss Joey on the forehead before retiring to bed.

Joey straddled Justin's knees, with the first-aid kit spread out over the coffee-table, and scrubbed at the woad markings with a washcloth before tending to the wound on his cheek. Justin winced with each touch, pulling away instinctively, until Joey cuffed him upside the head. "Quit squirming, you fucker, it's not that bad, it can't hurt that much. For the love of God, Lance's hands were on fire, all this is is a little cut."

Justin stilled immediately, his gaze snapping over to Lance, who was slumped on the couch with Chris, boneless and needy, draped over him and nestled in the curve of his arm. "Jesus, Lance, I didn't even think --"

"It's okay," Lance said, and uncurled slightly, just enough to shift Chris's weight. He could tell that Chris was wide awake, but his eyes were closed. "It's not. It wasn't that bad." He was lying, but he'd made the resolution in the car, when Chris hadn't seemed to remember anything that had happened, that he would never speak a word of it to Chris. He wouldn't trap Chris with obligations, or with gratitude. He held up his hands, smooth and unmarked, to show Justin. "It wasn't. It wasn't real. Or it was, but it didn't scar. It doesn't even hurt anymore."

"Drink your tea, Lance," JC said quietly. He was tucked up on the other side of the couch, his knees pulled tightly up to his chest, and his toes just barely touched Chris's, as though he wanted to hold on but knew that Chris would want his space. "And then I'll drive you both home, and you can take a shower, and we'll all sleep until sunset tomorrow."

"JC," Lance said, and then stopped. He searched for a way to say to JC that he knew that JC had been the one to grab onto them both, onto Lance and the blaze of flame that Chris had been, and roll them into the water. He couldn't. Couldn't think of a way to say "thank you", any more than he could thank Justin for nearly dislocating his knee to get to Lance's side in time to protect him from the bear's jaws, any more than he could thank Joey for being the one to keep his head through the whole thing and end it all when it was over.

"It's okay," JC said, and smiled. "I know. I love you too. I love all of you."

That hadn't been what Lance was trying to say, but it was what he meant, and it was enough.

-- * --

The shower in Lance's bathroom clicked off, and Chris appeared a minute later, clothed in a pair of Lance's sweatpants that were absurdly too long for him and a towel around his shoulders. The water had done him good; he was beginning to look like himself again. "You said that you loved me," Chris said, abruptly, without preamble. His voice was still scratchy, but Lance could hear that it was already starting to heal. "Before it all went down."

Lance closed his eyes for a minute, wishing more than anything that Chris had forgotten that part of things as well, and then opened them again to meet Chris's. "Yeah," he said. It had been a long fucking night, and he couldn't keep the detached tone he'd been deliberately using all week, and it was all right there for Chris to hear.

They stood there for a long moment, Lance already in the bed, Chris in the doorframe of the bathroom, just looking at each other, until Chris smiled like sunrise. "Good," he said, and dropped the towel on the floor. "Because I'd hate to think this shit was unrequited." He climbed over Lance in the bed, all elbows and knees and bones and warmth and skin, and once again it was just like coming home.

saturday.

"A toast," said Matthew Kinrowan, and raised his glass. "To those with wit and courage, who were able to win through adversity and walk away unscathed." Six pints of Harp clicked against each other, and they all drank.

"The one thing I don't get," Chris said, after putting his glass back down and slipping his hand back over Lance's, "is what she meant. About the heart of stone. Well, that's not the only thing I don't get, I don't get a lot of this, but that's the big thing."

A good night's sleep, once they'd finally settled down to it, had done Chris a world of good. He was looking like himself again, but like a version of himself that no one had seen in years, dark and lithe and unwound like a man whose burdens had been lifted from him. Lance thought, though, that there would always be that hint of shadow in the back of Chris's eyes.

Kinrowan smiled. "The Faerie Court is many things, Christopher. It is eternal and undying. It breathes magic like air, drinks magic like water. Those of the Court command powers that are a mystery to the human world, and can harness secrets long since lost to the world of man." He looked down at his hands, and smiled a little, ruefully. "But the one thing that the Court cannot understand, is powerless against, is love."

"I feel sorry for them," JC said, softly. "Not for what they keep doing to us. What they were going to do to Chris. That's monstrous. But I just can't imagine living without love."

"Neither could I," Kinrowan said. "There are others of us. Not many. But we have traded that power in for just a little more humanity than we might otherwise have had, and I consider it a bargain well-made."

"What do we still need to do?" Lance asked. Chris's fingers tightened on his own, then relaxed. "To keep him safe. To keep us all safe." He remembered the resolve in the Queen's voice, and only the warmth of Chris's hand kept him from shivering.

"You'll have gotten the hairs from the horse's mane," Kinrowan said to Joey. Joey nodded, and reached into his pocket, bringing them out and handing them over. Kinrowan nodded as well and looked back at Chris. "I'll take these and have them forged into a ward for you." He held up his right wrist, which glinted with a silver circlet that had no clasp or catch. "Yours can be Cold Iron, of course, since you've no need to worry about the poison of its touch, and that will provide even more protection. And I'll teach you what spells I can of protection and of warding, which will give you even more. You'll need to be vigilant, but you'll no longer need to walk in fear. It's over."

"I'm not scared anymore." Chris's voice was quiet, but heartfelt. "Not anymore. I owe you so much." His hand clasped Lance's again, for just a brief instant. "You've give me so much."

Kinrowan shook his head. "You have others to thank more than I. I only provided the answer. They found the strength to walk it."

"I know," Chris said, and reached on the other side of him with the hand that wasn't holding Lance's to enfold Justin's. Justin slid his other hand into JC's; JC took Joey's, and Joey reached past Kinrowan to clasp Lance's. The process only took seconds to complete, and when Joey's hand touched Lance's to close the circle, it felt like a bolt of lightning ran through them. Lance could see JC smile and knew that he too was seeing the warm golden glow that enveloped them all.

"You know," Justin said, after a moment. "We've got an album that we just finished." He paused, and then couldn't keep the grin off his face any longer. "Think anyone at the label would object if we put that ballad on it?"

- 30 -

[I don't know where this story came from, I really don't. I was in bed one night, and I had the song stuck in my head, and I'd been watching some video footage, and I thought -- well, what if? How did these five misfits -- despite their strong talent and hard work -- seem to grow so successful so quickly, and why could they command such an audience and such devotion from their fans?

Marketing, of course. But it was starting to happen in Germany, even before the marketing machine was stepped up and put into movement. What was it that was making these girls scream and faint?

This isn't the answer, of course, but I like to think that it's a good read anyway.

"Tam Lin", first written down by Francis Child in his "English and Scottish Popular Ballads" as Child 39A, can be dated back to the 16th century. Perhaps the best-known recordings that are easily available are by Steeleye Span, on their album "Tonight's the Night", and Fairport Convention, on their album "Liege and Lief". While the Steeleye Span version is more comprehensive, the Fairport Convention version is more true to the original tune. I learned it from a friend who learned it in Ireland, where they still remember the old stories. (If said friend happens to bear a resemblance to a certain Bard in this story, I'm sure he'll forgive me.) There are also many books that use the story as a base, including Pamela Dean's excellent Tam Lin, which is one of my most favorite books ever.

Náid's has been renamed from my favorite pub, but the trip from New Brunswick to Orlando doesn't seem to have done it much harm; I rather suspect that it exists in a lot of places already.

Chris quotes Ani DiFranco on Monday night (full quote: "I was a long time coming / I'll be a long time gone / You got your whole life to do something / And that's not that long / So why don't you give me a call / When you're willing to fight / For what you think is real / For what you think is right"), and Lance's story on Wednesday night is, in fact, a Norse myth, though the wording of it is my own.

This story was written to "Teardrop", by Massive Attack, on endless repeat. The song's music sounds a lot like the way the story's language turned out, in my head, and I couldn't have finished this without it.

I also could not have finished it without the wonderful and amazing SarahQ, who was there to provide beta advice, voice checking, plot suggestions, and encouragement when I was ready to throw the story in the trash. This story is as much hers as mine in a lot of places, and I cannot thank her enough. Go raibh maith agat, mo mhúirnín; tá tú go h-álainn.]

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