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Epilogue

They were all sitting in relative silence, just enjoying one another's company, when Joey's I.V. popped right out of his arm.

"Holy shit!" JC yelped, and Joey grabbed at his itching and somewhat sore arm, eyes widening as he watched the tiny hole made by the needle closing up right before his eyes.

"Guess you're back to being nigh-invulnerable, huh?" Lance deadpanned.

"Guess so," Joey answered, poking at the injection site. "That was kinda cool!"

"Nigh-invulnerable?" JC said. "What the hell?"

Justin cleared his throat, and Chris quickly picked up his pen and pad, scribbling, Sorry J. Joey's nigh-invulnerable again. Lance's words.

Justin raised an eyebrow at Lance, who said, "Okay, I've been reading 'The Tick' again. Sue me," while Chris wrote down the same for Justin to read.

They had all hoped that Justin's hearing would come back like their powers, but his eardrums had burst when Keith had blown the airhorn, and they were simply not growing back. Joey was positive that Lance's powers would soon be strong enough to do what modern medicine and Justin's own body could not. After all, he'd brought Chris back from the dead, so he could certainly regrow two tiny eardrums.

Lance had wanted to heal Joey after his severe beating, but Joey refused to let him. Lance needed to recover just as much as the rest of them, and if he insisted on healing Joey every time he started to get any energy back, it'd take him forever and a day to get back to normal. Besides, Joey had told him, with his own powers coming back, the healing was going a lot faster than it would for a normal human being anyway. That theory had definitely been validated a moment ago by the rejection of his I.V., but Lance needed something with which to occupy himself now that it was all over, so he could feel useful and not have to think about how close they had come to losing everything. The only thing he could think to do was work closely with their management to make sure no interviews, studio time, or traveling was scheduled until they were ready for it. As overprotective as he was feeling at the moment, they wouldn't be seen in public until the year 3000. He had, however, written a statement that they had all approved, and it was being repeatedly replayed all over the world, along with their aborted interview with Rosie.

JC had been unusually quiet, and as was his custom when something was bothering him, he often forgot to eat. They all made sure to keep a close eye on him, since with his high metabolism and natural energy, he lost much-needed weight all-too-easily. He also wrote a lot—mostly sappy, melancholy, and depressing poems about pain and loss. They didn't bother trying to stop him, as he really needed to get that kind of thing out of his system before he wrote anything good. If they were lucky, they'd eventually get a new single or two out of it. If not... well, JC would just need a new notebook after this one got filled up.

Justin, for his part, seemed to be taking things remarkably well. He didn't even seem to mind being deaf all that much, except when they forgot to write down what they were saying. He could read lips a little bit, but not well enough to follow a whole conversation at full speed. Nobody ever spoke about what he'd done to Keith, but it seemed like the rest of them were bothered by that a lot more than Justin was. Not that Keith didn't deserve it, but still.... Joey shuddered a bit, glad he'd been unconscious and hadn't seen anything. JC turned kinda green anytime he even asked about it.

The only outward sign of Justin's trauma was his unwillingness to leave Chris's side, even for a moment. It was almost funny, how clingy he'd become, only it wasn't, really. If Chris offered to go get food, Justin wanted to go, too. If Chris wanted to go for a walk, so did Justin. If Chris left the room to go to the bathroom, so did Justin. It was the kind of thing that Chris would normally have found extremely annoying and would have joked about semi-cruelly until Justin got the hint and quit it. But Chris didn't joke much anymore, cruelly or not, so that was the end of that.

Chris had gotten quiet. Even quieter than JC, which was weird in all kinds of ways. He didn't really ever meet their eyes if he did speak, and he only did that if someone said something to him first, or if he was making excuses to get out of the room and away from them. Lance said it was because he still felt guilty about everything, but that didn't make much sense to Joey. What in the world was there to feel guilty about? So, yeah, Chris had led them in there and it turned out badly, but he hadn't done anything stupid. In fact, if Joey himself had been in charge, he'd have done exactly the same thing. Chris didn't see it that way, though. He saw it as having led his best friends into a trap, and the guilt was eating him up. It was so bad that when Joey tried to thank him for saving his life, Chris just shrugged it off, saying he'd done what he had to do. Joey had tried to joke him out of his dark mood, saying, "Gee, Chris, way to make a guy feel appreciated!" But that had only made Chris feel worse, so he gave up.

As for Joey himself, his only problem was worrying about his friends. Yeah, so what happened really, really sucked. But they were all alive, weren't they? And little Alicia Dennis had escaped without a scratch on her, which was the whole reason for going in there in the first place, so that was a lot to be thankful for. And wasn't he the one stuck in the hospital with about a million broken bones? Yeah, so why wasn't he the one moping around and feeling sorry for himself? Because they were all pathetic, that's why.

That thought made him chuckle a bit, and Lance raised an eyebrow at him. "What's so funny, Joe?"

"Nuthin," he answered, still fighting back a smile. "Just... thinking."

"Don't hurt yourself," JC said, surprising all of them, including himself.

Joey grinned. "Nice one, Jayce. Does this mean you're out of your funk?"

JC thought about that. "No.... Getting there, though." He gave a crooked smile. "The last poem I wrote wasn't nearly as bad as the others."

The good thing about JC was that he held no illusions about how terrible his poems were when he got in these moods. It made it easy to tease him about it and not feel like you were kicking a puppy. Which, now that he was a shape-shifter and all, was actually possible to do, quite literally. That made Joey laugh again.

"Are you getting giddy?" Lance asked, glancing suspiciously at the IV, which was now dripping an unidentified clear liquid onto the floor.

"Naw," Joey answered, still chuckling. "Just thinking about puppies."

"Ooooh-kay."

Justin started to giggle, having read the whole conversation as Chris continued to transcribe for him. The sound was contagious, and soon all of them were laughing about absolutely nothing, even Chris. Joey decided that it was definitely a step in the right direction.

End

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