Pairing: JC and Kevin
Words: connive; intern; mercury; hurricane


Kevin took another look.  He still couldn't read it.  That was what
he hated about mercury thermometers.

A barometer would probably be more useful about now, but even if he
could've read one of those, he wouldn't have known what it meant. 
He averted his eyes from the window.  Not that it was necessary. 
The signs of the approaching hurricane were clearly evident in the
darkening sky and the whipping of the palm trees.

Only an idiot would be at the Compound right then, rather than
headed further inland, and an idiot *was* there.

An intern had called Kevin before they abandoned the building, and
told him that the idiot, namely AJ was closeted in the recording
studio, and refusing to leave.  With Denise out-of-town, that left
Kevin as the designated parental figure.  And he wasn't too happy
about it.

He headed deeper into the building.  It felt safer away from the
windows, but it probably wasn't.

Kevin opened the door to the engineer's booth.  The idiot was
sitting in the chair, singing softly and fiddling with the knobs.

"Only love is real / Everything else illusion / Adding to the
confusion of the way we connive / At being alive."

There was just one problem.  It was the wrong idiot.

He stepped in, putting himself in JC's peripheral vision.  JC
looked up and took his headphones off.  "Kevin?"

"Where's AJ?"

"AJ?"  JC looked in the booth, then back at Kevin, forehead
wrinkling.  "There's just me here."

"AJ's not here at all, is he?"

"Um..."

Kevin stepped out into the hall, took out his cell phone, and
dialed AJ's number.  AJ told him to fuck off, that 5 a.m. was too
early to call, and hung up on him.  When he tried to call back,
there was no answer.  He called Howie instead, who told him that AJ
was in Hawaii, where indeed it was just past five.

He sighed and looked at the door.  Wrong band, same problem.  He
wondered if Lance Bass was still in Russia.