Summary: What happened after the BMG exec told NSYNC to change their name and lose Lance if they wanted a record deal? What if NSYNC agreed?

Family: The Extended Dance Remix, by Mercutio
(mercutio@europa.com)


Lance didn't throw up until he was already in the bathroom.  That
was the one saving grace of the day.

*Not good enough.*

*Not up to the level of the others.*

*Holding the group back.*

*If you get rid of Lance, you can get a record contract.*

He threw up in the toilet.  Didn't help any.

JC came in behind him, handed him a stack of tissues and stood
there silently while Lance flushed the toilet, then wiped off his
face.  Lance rinsed out his mouth in the sink and said steadily,
because the worst was over and he might as well get the rest over
as well, "I'm gay."

Except he was kinda mumbling and not really coherent, and what came
out was more like, "Gay."

JC flinched, then his mouth tightened.  "Well, fine then.  I came
in to see how you were doing, but if you're going to be a bigot,
then I'm glad you're going."

"A bigot?"

"Yeah.  That's what they call people who have problems with other
people's sexual preferences."

Lance shook his head.  "I don't have a problem with my sexual
preference.  I thought you guys would.  Or the public or the record
execs, but it doesn't look like it matters much anymore."

"Your sexual preference?"

"Um, yeah.  That's what I was trying to tell you.  I'm gay."

"Oh."

Lance threw the tissues away.  "So you're gay, too?"

"Yeah."

His mouth twisted.  "Just as well that I'm leaving then."

"Huh?"

"Because there's no way I'd ever get through being a part of a
group with you without wanting to do... stuff... with you.  And
contrary to popular belief, I'm not so stupid that I don't know
that'd cause trouble."

JC's brows narrowed.  "Not as much trouble as you think."

Lance smiled.  Big and happy, exactly the way he didn't feel. 
"Enough trouble."  And then, because he knew he was gone, because
he knew it was over and he was getting sent home, he stepped up to
JC, put his hands on his chest, and raised up the slight amount
needed to kiss him.

Just for a minute, because being gay didn't mean that JC wanted
him, not the way that Lance had always wanted JC, but for that
minute anyway, because he wasn't going to see JC again and he
wanted to have one good memory to take away from all of this.

JC pulled back after the minute, gave Lance a puzzled look, but
reached out for Lance's hand anyway.  "The others are waiting."

"Yeah," Lance said, threading his fingers through JC's, stealing
this last little bit of fantasy for himself.  "I suppose they are."

****

They didn't try very hard to convince him to stay.  Joey tried the
hardest, but Chris wouldn't meet his eyes for the rest of that
meeting and Justin nodded every time Lance agreed with one of
Johnny's points about how behind the rest of the group Lance was.

All of them knew as well as he did that he didn't belong there,
that they'd fly further and farther without him, and really, Lance
knew that it had always been a dream.

Now it was time to wake up.

He packed his bags while JC sat on his bed and promised that he'd
send postcards from Germany, and Chris and Justin played basketball
outside.  Joey gave him a hug when his mother drove him away, and
that was that.

The end of his brief flirtation with fame and fortune.

Back to reality.  Back to a world where fame was unknown, something
for other people, and he was a senior in high school and he was
supposed to think about college and who he was going to take to the
prom, and he could never ever be gay.

****

JC didn't send him a postcard.

Lance hadn't really expected him to.  Joey did, though.  One lone
postcard from somewhere in Germany, a deep blue lake with green
hills surrounding it, and Lance tucked it away in a box without
ever reading what it said.  He didn't want to know.  They didn't
have anything to say to him ever again.  He was no one anymore, and
they were the stars of tomorrow.

Stacy'd pointed out, exactly once, an article about them in a teeny
magazine, a small picture of the group.  They'd found another bass,
someone who was probably a much better dancer, a much better
performer, and the other bass was perfect, because his name even
ended in N.  Lance didn't remember what the guy's name was; he'd
gotten a brief impression of a smiling *wrong* face attached to an
arm draped casually around JC's shoulders before he'd taken the
magazine in unsteady hands, ripped out the page, and shredded it
methodically into little pieces.

If NSYNC ever appeared in any other magazines, no one showed them
to him.

Which was just as well.  Lance didn't want to know what he was
missing.  He had a pretty good idea already.

They had the perfect bass for their perfect band, and whether they
succeeded or failed, he didn't want to know.  If they succeeded,
then Lance was Stu Sutcliffe, he was Jason, the person who dropped
out before things hit big, the idiot who didn't cash in on the big
break and earned himself a footnote in music history as a complete
loser.  And if they failed, then JC would fail as well.  Then
Lance's heart would maybe shatter, and he'd rather be able to be
glad that they failed because he wanted to hate them, but all he
could manage, the best he could do, was not to care, so he did that
instead.

Walled off his heart and tried to forget about them and about that
part of his past.

Lance spent the last half-year of high school studying and working
almost as hard as he had at the thing he didn't talk about anymore. 
He had schoolwork to catch up on, SATs to take, colleges and
financial aid to apply for, and more tests to take.  CLEP and AP
tests -- tests to prove that he really had been studying while he
was away and could thus get college credit for his knowledge and
not have to retake the basic level college courses which were
really a repeat of high school for those people who hadn't been
paying attention the first time.  He got a 5 on the English
Advanced Placement test, and a 4 on the History test, and passed
the CLEP tests for natural sciences, biology, chemistry, psychology
and every math test available except calculus.  He'd had the
feeling he'd barely squeaked by on the psychology test, but none of
the CLEP tests had been nearly as difficult as the AP exams.

He had the time, though, because he didn't get involved in any
afterschool activities.  No singing.  No show choir.  No anything. 
He had too much work to do to get involved in frivolous pursuits.

****

Two years gone by and Lance had almost forgotten.  Forgotten as
much as anyone could forget an experience that had scarred him
deeply, that pulled at him constantly, at unexpected times.

Forgot, until he came back to his college dorm room, and found the
door already standing open.

He didn't have a roommate this year.  There hadn't been anyone he'd
been interested in rooming with.  He didn't make friends easily; he
never really had, and since the Thing, he didn't make friends at
all.

So there was no one with a key except the RA, and he didn't think
the resident assistant would just barge in, much less leave the
door wide open.

Lance approached his room cautiously, peeking around the corner.

Caught the impression of someone sitting on his bed and someone
else going through his bookcases before he was enveloped in a bear
hug.

"Lance!"

He'd clenched his fists and started pushing back before he realized
who it was, and Joey let go of him with a puzzled look on his face.

"What's the matter for you?"

Lance breathed hard and looked at him, looked at all of them. 
Joey, standing there, looking at him, JC sitting on his bed, Chris
going through his bookshelf, and those had to be Justin's sneakers
sticking out from behind the end of the bed, probably going through
Lance's stash of snacks in his desk drawer.

Four of them.

"Aren't you missing someone?" he asked coldly.

Chris put his finger in the book he was reading.  One of Lance's
sociology textbooks, from the look of it.  "Yeah, Bass.  You."

He didn't look at the man on the bed or at Joey.  "No.  The other
guy.  The guy who was better than me."

Justin popped up from behind the desk, chewing on something, two
Snickers bars in his hand.  "He's gone.  Took off."

Lance raised his eyebrows.  "And now you want me?  How flattering." 
He held the door with one hand, gesturing to it with the other. 
"Get out."

Joey looked hurt.  Chris walked over, still holding the book. 
"University of Colorado, Boulder.  Pretty impressive."

"Yeah," Lance said tightly.

"Junior year, too.  Dual major, aerospace engineering and
business."

"That's right."

"Dean's list."

"Is there a point to this?" Lance asked.  "I'm doing good here. 
I'm not going to let you come in here and ruin my life again.  I
did this once and I'm not gonna be that stupid again.  If I wasn't
good enough for y'all then, I'm definitely not good enough for you
now.  I haven't gotten any better at dancing, and I haven't sung
anything since I left Orlando.  I have a future here, and maybe it
isn't the pop star future y'all are chasing, but it's a future and
it's mine and it's one I'm good enough for and I don't have to
listen to anyone tellin' me that I don't fit, that I'm the reason
all of your brilliant careers are being ruined and..."

He realized he was ranting, and cut himself off.  His cheeks felt
flushed with heat.  "Get out."

They were all staring at him now.  Justin had broken off his
chewing.

Joey just shook his head.  "It wasn't like that, Lance.  It isn't
like that now either."

"I don't want to hear it."

"You're *still* all kinds of fucked up about that?" Justin asked,
with what sounded to Lance like incredulousness.

"Yeah, I am."  He smiled, and it felt bitter even from the inside. 
He half-said, half-sang, "'I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill
me?'"

"Voice still sounds fine," Chris commented.

"Out."

Chris crossed over to the door, pulled it away from Lance's grip
and closed it firmly.  "We're not going anywhere.  We need you." 
He gave Lance a little grin.  "Help us, Lance.  You're our only
hope."

There were two beds in the room; an extra one for his non-existent
roommate.  Lance went and sat down on it and put his head in his
hands.  There was a point in your life when you believed that you
could personally change the world.  Do something important, make a
difference.  Most of Lance's peers still believed in that myth. 
Lance didn't.  The most he was hoping for was that, after a lot
more work, he could get a job at NASA, and even then, space was a
dead dream; the U.S. hadn't done anything serious about it in
decades.  But he thought maybe he knew something about dead dreams.

Someone settled down on the bed next to him.  Joey.

Lance looked up at him.

"You okay, man?" Joey asked.  "You know, I never wanted... *we*
never wanted to leave you behind..."

"It was the right thing to do," Lance said firmly.  "It's over and
done with now."

"Except you're still upset about it."

"Yeah, well..." Lance gestured at them, at Justin, who was sitting
on a corner of Lance's desk, at Chris, who was letting Joey handle
things for the moment, and keeping his eyes well away from JC. 
"Here you are.  It makes it hard to get over it."

"We don't want you to get over it!" Justin said, "We want you to
come back."

"If I wasn't good enough for y'all then, what makes you think I'll
be good enough now?"

"You *are* good enough," Joey said.

"Yeah, right," Lance said.  "No, thanks."

Chris cleared his throat.  "Well, see, here's the thing.  Then
isn't now.  We aren't with BMG anymore.  Or Lou.  For that matter,
we're not even NSYNC anymore."

"Excuse me?"

"There was a lawsuit," Chris said.  He shrugged.  "We lost."

"They sued you?" Lance asked.

"No, not exactly."

"Lou was screwing us over," Justin added.  "Taking all our money. 
So we sued him and the record label 'cause of the lousy contract we
signed, only they won, and now we don't even have the right to use
our name anymore.  How shitty is that?"

Lance raised his eyebrows.  "Let me get this straight?  You didn't
like your contract, so you sued the *record label*?  Didn't it
occur to you to leave BMG out of it and just sue Lou?"

There was a quick exchange of glances.  It was obvious that it had
not.

"But it was their fault," Justin said.

Lance rolled his eyes.  "You never sue the people with the money
and the power, especially not when you're gonna need something from
them later.  It's just stupid."

"This is why we need you, Bass," Chris said.  "Not just for your
voice, but for your business sense, too."

"That's just common sense."

"Yeah, well, we didn't think of it."

Lance looked around at all of them, eyes brushing across even JC
briefly.  They'd changed since the last time he'd seen them. 
Better dressed, for the most part.  They all looked older, of
course, but Justin had changed from a child into a teenager, and
Chris had stopped trying to look like a teen.  And, okay, so maybe
it was juvenile of him, but he felt more charitable toward them,
knowing that they'd failed at something.  "What happened?"

Chris shrugged.  "We went to Europe, worked our asses off, got
famous overseas, went gold, then found out that all the money was
going to Lou and not us.  That any and all money we personally got
was being listed as a loan, and the only ones getting rich from our
work were Lou and BMG.  So we sued.  And we lost, and now we're in
debt, with no right to our names or our music and having to start
over from scratch.  Without our bass, who bailed after we lost the
suit and who is now countersuing *us* for dragging him into the
whole mess.  We're up shit creek without a paddle, the canoe has
holes in it and we're bailing for our lives.  The only thing we
know for sure is we aren't giving up making music.  We aren't
giving up on each other.  And, oh yeah.  We want you with us this
time."

"Or you couldn't find anyone else who wanted to take a chance with
you knowing that even if you *did* manage to successfully start
over from the beginning, there isn't a record company on Earth
who'd be willing to sign you after you sued your last one."

"Yeah, well," Chris smiled self-mockingly and shrugged.  "There is
that, too."

"Thanks, but..."

"Lance," JC said, speaking for the first time.

Lance froze.  Looked toward JC very slowly.

"It was a mistake letting you go."

"It was the right thing to do," Lance said, because it had been and
because believing that was the only thing that had allowed him to
leave at all.  "You needed someone who could dance, who wouldn't
hold you back."

"No, it wasn't.  We needed someone who'd be with us all the way. 
Someone who would put the good of the group before themselves. 
That's you.  It's always been you.  You put us first when you
convinced us to replace you with someone else."

"I didn't..."

"You did," JC said, staring him down.  He was speaking quietly, but
with conviction.  "You fought harder than anyone else to get us to
let you go."

Lance stared at him, but after a minute, had to drop his eyes.  It
was true, but it was a truth he'd been doing his best to avoid. 
"It was the right thing to do.  And.  None of you tried very hard
to get me to stay."

Justin started to say something, but Chris put a hand on his leg,
quelling him.

JC nodded.  "You're right.  We didn't.  But we should have.  We
treated you like you were replaceable, when you weren't."

Lance made a scoffing sound.  "Except you did replace me."

"We didn't.  We tried, but it was wrong.  We knew it; he knew it. 
There's a reason why we're all staying together, trying again
together instead of breaking up and going our separate ways.  And
it's not because we think we'll have a better chance this way. 
Because you're right.  We're going to have a lot of trouble getting
anywhere with the lawsuit hanging over our heads.  But we're a
family.  We belong together, and we aren't going anywhere without
each other.  And we talked about it.  The first mistake we made was
in treating you like something else, something other than a family
member.  You don't send back one of your brothers because he isn't
perfect, and we did.  We're trying to change that now."

"And if I'm not what you want?  For whatever it is that you're
doing?"

"You're it," JC said, gaze level and serious.  He meant it, Lance
could tell.

He looked at the others.  Chris was still pinning Justin to the
desk, but Justin was leaning into Chris now, and they were both
watching Lance.  He glanced sideways at Joey.  Joey looked awkward,
like he didn't know what to do with his hands.  Lance remembered
that Joey had always been a touchy-feely kind of guy.  Lance knew
all he had to do was move over a little, and Joey would wrap an arm
around him, would feel more comfortable, but Lance didn't want
that.

Or maybe he wanted it too much.

There were so many good reasons to throw them out, to refuse to
hear them.  His future.  His heart.  He didn't know if he could go
through the painful cycle of hope again with them, and then there
was what he was going to do for a living.  Spend the next however
long dancing and singing, in endless days and nights of practice
for nothing?  Or finish off his degrees here and then go for a
master's and perhaps a doctorate as well, and get a job that would
pay well and where he would only have to sign 40 hours a week of
his life away, not all of his time and, worse, his hope and his
ability to believe?

"What's your plan?" Lance asked.  "What are you going to do next?"

Justin whooped.  Chris asked, "This mean you're throwing in with
us, Bass?"

"This means I want to know what you plan to do.  That's all.  I'm
not saying yes."

Justin whooped again.  Chris whapped him.  "What?" Justin asked
indignantly.  "He wouldn't want to know what we're doing if he
wasn't at least *thinking* about it.  And if he's thinking about
it, he's gonna say 'yes' eventually.  You know he will."

"What I know is that you should keep your mouth shut before he
remembers how annoying you are."

"Hey!"  Justin shoved Chris, who staggered back a step, and then
leapt on him.  The two of them started tussling on the floor.

Lance grinned despite himself, and ducked his head to hide it.

JC answered him.  "We're going to play clubs here in the U.S. 
Smaller places.  We're not going to be about the dancing as much
anymore.  We're going for a different audience.  More rock, less
pop.  Edgier stuff.  We're starting all over, we might as well do
it for real with something we want to do rather than what someone
else thinks will sell for the most money."

"You aren't going to do well if you ignore what the public wants."

JC shrugged.  "There's a market for everything.  It's just a matter
of finding it.  The important part is that we're staying together. 
We're done this before.  We can do it again.  We know we can make
good music and get people to listen to it.  Our ability to sing --
*your* ability to sing -- has never been in question.  What's
important is that we have control of what we're doing and that we
don't let ourselves get lured into any too-good-to-be-true deals
because we want to be famous.  We want to be together and making
music.  We know that now, and we aren't gonna do anything else."

Lance gave him a skeptical look.  "Right.  Do you even have any
music to sing?  Because I doubt you have rights to your music if
you didn't manage to hold onto rights to your name.  Club owners
aren't going to want to take on an unknown act with no drawing
power, and without a manager who knows his stuff and has some
influence in the business, you aren't going to get anywhere.  It's
a nice idea, but I don't see how you're going to pull it off."

Chris looked up from pummeling Justin.  "See?  We need you.  You
understand this stuff.  You can help us."

"I've got a year left on my degree."

"And what are you going to do when you get done with that?  Get
another one?"

"Probably.  That's the usual way this is done."

Chris pushed Justin down and sat on him.  "So you've got your
future all planned out then?"

"Yeah.  What's so wrong with that?"

"Nothing, I guess.  If you don't mind being bored."

"It's not boring to me.  It's better than being miserable.  Better
than working 12 or 16 hours a day practicing and hoping and
dreaming and knowing you'll never be good enough to get anywhere
and always being on the outside of everything, and then you find
out that you really *aren't* good enough and that you're the one
holding everyone else back and if only you weren't there, they
could be happy."

"Except we weren't," JC said.

"You were.  You would have been perfectly happy if you'd won your
lawsuit.  You wouldn't have ever thought about me again."  He
looked at JC, who had promised to write him and never had.  "I'm
y'all's last choice.  You'd be better off without a fifth member at
all.  You never really needed a bass anyway.  You got three high
voices and a medium one; a lower one is just extra.  And with you
playing smaller places and in debt anyway, the fewer people you
have to split whatever you make between the better."

"A fifth of nothing is still nothing, Bass."

"You make it sound so appealing," Lance murmured.

"We need you," Chris said.  Justin shoved him off and Chris stood
up.  "We need you, Lance," he repeated, then started chanting,
"Lance, Lance, Lance."

The others joined in, chanting his name and pressing close around
him.  Joey slung an arm around his shoulders.  Justin pulled JC
over to the bed so that JC was sitting on Lance's other side, and
then climbed up behind them on the bed and started jumping up and
down, still chanting, "Lance, Lance, Lance."

Chris grabbed Lance's shoulders as Lance flushed.  "Look, Bass, we
really do need you for real.  And besides?  You have no friends
here.  You're living on your own and no one here gives a shit about
you.  We got your RA to let us in without any trouble -- without
even having to bribe him with Justin's sweet ass--"

"Hey!"

"--and the whole time we were in here, tossing your room and
waiting for you, no one stopped in and asked us what the hell we
were doing.  We coulda been planting drugs or stealing everything
you owned and no one in this whole place would have given a damn. 
That sucks, man.  You really want to live like this?"

"Better than believing in something and then being told you're the
reason it's not gonna happen."

"Except it happened anyway.  We still crashed and burned and maybe
we wouldn't have if you'd been there and you hadn't chickened out
and gone all noble when things got tough."

The flush on Lance's cheeks turned to a burn.  "You wanted me gone. 
You didn't miss me at all."  He felt JC's silent presence at his
side like a cold front.  "Joey was the only one who even sent a
postcard.  Y'all forgot me as soon as I was gone."

Lance half-expected them to shrink away, especially JC, who'd
*promised*, but Chris scoffed.  "What?  We should have sent you
something that said, 'Having a miserable time, wish you were
here'?"

"Miserable?"

"For the most part, yeah," Chris answered.  "What, you thought we
were having a grand old time?"

The only way to get away from JC was to edge further into Joey's
half-embrace.  Lance was stuck.  And this was more close
interpersonal contact than he'd had since his last visit home. 
"You had gold records and your pictures in magazines."

"And we have nothing to show for it except outstanding debts, not
even our own name."

"Or our music," JC said.  "We can't use any of the music we were
developing for the next album.  It's not ours anymore.  They took
it all."

"Oh," Lance said.  "You really shouldn't have sued.  Not the record
label."

"Yeah, well," Chris drawled sarcastically, "that's really helpful
*now*."

Justin had stopped bouncing.  He folded himself down on the bed
behind Lance, looping his arms around Lance's neck, over Joey's
arm.  "Say you'll help me.  That you'll help us.  You know you want
to."

They were all pressing at him, making it really difficult to think. 
All except JC, who was just sitting there.

Lance darted a sideways glance at JC.

"You don't have to if you don't want to," JC offered in a neutral
voice.

"What?" Justin said.  "But he has to!"

Joey's arm tightened, but he didn't say anything.

Chris' eyes were dark.  "Well, Bass, what's it gonna be?  You going
to help us find fame, fortune and a plate of the world's best
cheese fries while playing the clubs of this fine country, or are
you going to abandon us again?"

Chris, Lance, noted, didn't play fair.  Lance couldn't very well
argue that he had been the one who was abandoned, not when they'd
already brought up that Lance had had as much to do with it as they
had.  And he knew that was true, deep down, no matter how much he'd
been suppressing it for the sake of his own sanity.  And there
*was* something very seductive about them having come here to beg
him to come back.  Balm for his wounded soul, and the only one who
could heal you from the wounds you'd been given was the one who'd
dealt them in the first place.

Lance looked at JC.  "I want to finish school," he said in a steady
voice.  "I'm not going to make the same mistake again.  And if I
quit now, I probably wouldn't be able to get back in.  Not with the
same scholarships and stuff.  You.  Maybe you guys believe in this. 
Maybe you have nothing to lose.  But I won't be left again without
something to fall back on when you leave."  Because they would.  Or
it'd disintegrate.  Lance was sure that.  The only thing he had
faith in anymore was the sure and certain destruction of hope.  His
lips twisted.  He felt a little like Scarlett O'Hara, everything
ashes around her, swearing to God that she'll never go hungry
again.

JC looked at Chris, who glanced at the others, and then seemed to
come to a decision.  "Fine," Chris said.  "We need a break anyway
to come up with some new music and find a way to mock up something
to hock to our screaming fans, all six or seven of them.  But come
summer, you're ours.  And," he rubbed his hands together.  "We can
still do some practicing in the meantime.  And the college crowd
around this area is about the right target audience.  We can start
building our fanbase here while you do that senior year stuff. 
You're a bright boy.  You don't need *all* weekend to study, do
you?"

"You're okay with that?" Lance asked incredulously.  "With me
finishing school?"

Chris shrugged.  "Not like we have a lot to lose now."

"Chris!" Joey glared at him.

"What?" Chris grinned.  "Hey, I didn't say that was a *bad* thing. 
Nowhere to go from here but up, and we can do it how we want to
this time.  People love us and we really can sing.  It'll work.  It
has to."

School and rehearsal and trying to do everything at once sounded
like a lot of work.  And Lance didn't think it would be nearly as
easy as Chris was predicting.  A musical group wasn't just the five
of them.  It was a business, and there were other people to pay,
employees, supply issues... it was more like a trucking company
crossed with an advertising firm than anything else.  Issues that
Chris was blithely dismissing, and maybe they really did need him,
but did he want to need them again after what it'd done to him the
last time?

"There's something y'all should know."

"What?"

"I'm gay."

Joey stiffened for a second, then squeezed harder.  Justin thumped
him on the back and then crowed in his ear.  Lance winced, but
didn't push him away.

Chris rocked back on his heels.  "Huh.  Well, that's cool.  You and
C, huh?"

Lance flushed again.  "Not really.  Just that once."

"Just that...?"  Chris stopped rocking and stared at him.  "You and
JC?  Dude, all I was saying that you and JC are both gay.  But,
wow.  So this was before you left?  And you *still left*?  What the
hell?"

"Oh."  His flush got darker.  "Well, um..."

"Bass, you dog."

JC cleared his throat.

Lance dropped his eyes.  It was nothing.  The kiss.  He'd taken it,
stolen it and it hadn't been significant, except to him.  It hadn't
even been a very good kiss.  But if JC said it was nothing, Lance
thought he might very well throw them all out and then go find a
way to bury his heart in the deepest snowdrift Colorado had to
offer because he couldn't take this again.  Because he couldn't
take this again.

"Yes, that's right," JC said.  "And Lance?"

"Yeah?"  He looked up, treacherous heart fluttering.

Luminous blue eyes.  "I'm sorry.  That I left you.  That I let you
leave.  That I let that be the end of it.  I thought it was the
right thing to do, but I was wrong, and I'm sorry."

More balm.  Windburn of the soul.  The kiss hadn't been long enough
to chap his lips.

"You don't have to be sorry," Lance said, because it was JC and the
one thing he'd never been able to accomplish was to stop wanting
JC.  Forget, a little.  Wall away the memories and emotions so he
could go on, move on, with his life.  But stop?  No.

"I am though," and JC reached out, putting a tentative hand on
Lance's wrist.  He was the only one of them who hadn't yet tried to
bind Lance with touch.

The others were still watching them, Justin and Joey, still hanging
off him, but Lance hardly noticed them.

"I am," JC repeated.

Lance looked down at JC's hand on his wrist.  Turned his wrist in
the circle of JC's fingers until it was palm up and curled his
hand, clasping the tips of JC's fingers.  JC immediately slid his
hand up, into Lance's, without any hesitation.

He looked up from their joined hands to JC.

"Will you ever be able to forgive me?" JC asked.

Lance glanced at their hands again.  "The only person I can't
forgive is myself."

JC leaned in, catching Lance by surprise.  Lance jerked his head
up, and JC whispered against his mouth, "Welcome back," and kissed
him.

Chris whooped and launched himself at Lance, who was already
off-balance, leaning sideways into JC and half-covered by Justin
and Joey.  They all went down in a heap of protesting, squirming,
noisy bodies.  Lance landed half on top of JC, who giggled and
kissed him again.

Somewhere above them, Chris was bouncing, seated atop the pile and
declaring that he was king of the world.

Lance didn't really care.  He shifted to keep as much of their
combined weight off JC as possible and kissed him back.

Joey tried to move Chris off, which only caused Chris to cling to
him like an extremely affectionate drunk person.  "What are we
gonna call ourselves?" Chris asked.  "Now that we're out of the
boyband pop-lite phenomenon and into serious rock he-man
territory?"

"Turtle Food!" Justin suggested.

JC snorted, pulling his mouth away from Lance's.  "I'm not going to
be part of a band that calls itself Turtle Food."

"What?" Chris asked.  "Not gay enough for you?  Would Rainbow Brite
Sparkly Sprite suit your Flaming Majesty better?"

"Hey!" Justin said, suddenly struck by an idea.  "We're a real band
now!  Does that mean we're gonna have to learn how to play
instruments?"

"I call drums," Chris said instantly.

"No way.  You have no rhythm.  *I'm* drumming," Joey said.

"Fine.  I'll be the sexy lead singer then.  The leads always get
all the hot booty."

Justin grabbed onto Chris.  "No way.  I got dibs on being the lead
singer."

"Damn.  Guess I'm gonna have to learn guitar if I want any action."

Joey snickered.  "Or start boinking your gay bandmates."

Chris pulled away from Joey and Justin and pounced on JC.  Lance
tried to shield JC from having about 160 pounds of countertenor
landing on him, but Chris was determined and JC was laughing.

"Sorry, Chris.  I'm already taken."

Already taken, and Lance grinned involuntarily, happy despite the
weight of Chris on his back.

"Bass!  Leave the spazzy freak and come live with me and be my
love.  I'll even let you play the tambourine."

"Nah," Lance said.  "I think I'm happy right where I am."