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.

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