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."

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