You're being followed. You tell Chris that, but he laughs at you, slapping you on the back and using your shoulder as a support when his knees buckle in his hysteria. "No shit, sherlock," he gasps, when he can finally talk again. "Of course you're being followed, dumbass, you're famous!" And then he runs off to tell the others, giggling, "Hey, guys, Joey thinks he's being followed! Quick, call the FBI!" Sometimes you think you hate Chris.

~*~

You try to put it out of your mind. Chris is probably right and it's probably nothing. It's probably just a persistent reporter or an obsessed teenage fan with a camera. It's probably nothing to be worried about, even though it makes your skin crawl and your ears burn and your stomach churn with anxious nerves. It's probably nothing.

~*~

Nothing has a face. You haven't actually seen the face, not the whole face anyway, but you saw the eyes. At least you think you did. You saw something, anyway. Somebody. A man—tall and thin, wearing a long trench coat with a hood that cast his features in shadow—but his eyes glowed out from under it like the grim reaper or the Ghost of Christmas Future.

You stopped short when you saw him, and Lance crashed into your back and Chris into his and Justin and JC behind them and you all lurched forward together like in a slapstick movie. By the time you squirmed your way out from under the pile, the trench coated man was gone.

~*~

You don't tell Chris about the man. He'll just laugh at you again, or worse, get that concerned pseudo-psychiatrist look on his face and quietly ask you if you're feeling alright and do you maybe need to take a break. You hate it when Chris suddenly decides to act his age. So you keep your mouth shut and your eyes open and you watch, waiting for him to show up again. You know he will. You can still feel him following, those glowing eyes watching all of you from the shadows, making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up at attention. You wonder if your neck hairs will ever relax again.

~*~

He catches you by surprise, when he finally appears again. You've been asleep, but you jerk awake, suddenly aware of a presence in the room with you, and he's there. He's standing above you, just a vague shape in the dark, the moonlight through the windows highlighting nothing but his eyes under the hood. You realize that that's why they glowed, before. He's just a man. A man in your locked hotel room, watching you sleep.

"What do you want," you say, your voice rough with sleep and fear.

He doesn't answer. He stares down at you and shifts slightly, his trench coat rippling with the movement. You flinch involuntarily, wondering absently if he plans to kill you and why. You haven't done anything to him, you don't think. You haven't done anything to anybody.

But he doesn't kill you. He turns to leave without saying a word, but you don't watch. You watch the piece of paper he dropped from his long, thin fingers fall slowly toward your bedcovers, twisting and fluttering in the breeze from the air conditioner. Your door clicks shut almost silently, and you lie there, holding your breath as the paper lands on your chest.

When your heartbeat slows down, you sit up, clutching the paper between your fingers. You turn on the light and look down at it and your blood runs cold.

NSYNC'S KIRKPATRICK DEAD FROM GUNSHOT WOUND

The date on the newspaper is two weeks from today.

~*~

You don't see him for a few days. You can feel him there, still, but the buzzing has faded into the background. It's been there so long, you can barely remember what it was like to feel normal.

You try to ignore the bad feeling. It was a fake newspaper, those are easy enough to get. It was a joke, you tell yourself, just a joke in very bad taste. You keep it in your wallet.

The others have noticed your distraction. They tease you about it, asking if you've been taking JC's drugs. You wonder briefly why even JC seems to find this funny, but can't bring yourself to really care.

You're not really surprised when you wake up a few days later and he's there again, glowing in the moonlight.

"I don't believe you," you say, blinking up at him. "You made it up. It's just a novelty paper."

He stares at you for a moment, and his hand comes up slowly, his fingers worrying at the hood covering his face. Then the hood is gone and you gasp, feeling your world collapse around you. "Justin?"

~*~

He kept you up all night, this other-Justin. He's older than your Justin. Much older. His skin is pale and stretched over his bones, his eyes sunken in a face highlighted by too-prominent cheekbones. It looks good on JC, but on this other-Justin it looks wrong. Scary. His lips are thin and bloodless as he speaks, and you recognize his voice even though it has roughened with age.

He tells you his story haltingly, his fingers twisting in the folds of his coat. "It was meant for me," he whispers, and you see something sparkle on his cheek. It takes you a moment to realize it's a tear.

You think about it in the silence after he finishes, and you realize you could imagine it happening just like that. You've always known that you would happily die for any of them, if you had to, so it's not surprising that Chris feels the same way. Felt.

You look at him, at his tortured, shadowed face, and you make a decision. "I want to help," you say.

~*~

He turns you down. You figured he would. This is his fight, really, and you don't think you could do much good, anyway. Even if you knew exactly where and when, what could you do but take Chris' place? Or, God forbid, keep Chris out of the way so it was Justin who was hit; who died in a puddle of his own blood while his four brothers stood weeping over him. So you agree to stay out of the way.

But you help, anyway. When he lurks too close you distract everyone so he can go about his business. You let him come into your room at night and just sit, without speaking. Sometimes he sleeps, restlessly, for a few minutes, and you let him, almost holding your breath for fear of disturbing him.

You wake up the night before it's all going to go down and realize he's not there. You get up and go down the hall and push quietly into the room where you know he's gone, and stand just inside the doorway, guarding against intruders. He's watching Chris sleep, just as he watched you that one night, only for different reasons. When Chris snorts in his sleep and starts to stir, you rush over and pull him away from the bed, touching him for the very first time since he came. Chris blinks sleepily up at you and knuckles his eyes like a little boy.

"Joey? Wha're you doin'?"

"You got my Discman?" you ask in a whisper.

"Uh? No, you... you puttitinyer bag."

Oh." You pretend to think about that. "Okay, thanks, Chris."

He mutters something unintelligible and rolls over, asleep again almost immediately. You wait until he's still before you take Other-Justin by the arm and lead him back to your room, all too aware of the tremor you can feel in his bony limbs. He sinks down onto your bed and buries his face in his hands. "What if I fail, Joey?" he moans, "I can't fail in this...."

"You won't," you tell him. "You've came too far."

~*~

You're perfectly calm and you don't know why. It's going to happen, and you can't do anything to stop it, but you're perfectly calm. You think this must be what faith is.

~*~

It happens fast. He told you it would be fast but you didn't quite grasp it. It's really, really fast. You wonder how in the world Chris did it, that first time.

There's a shout. "Hey! Justin Fucking Timberlake!" And then the shot. You see a blur next to you, and someone grabs your arm and pulls and you're on the ground. People are screaming and you see blood. Oh God, what...? You look down. Into his glittering eyes.

"Oh," you say.

"Oh God oh God oh God oh God," Your-Justin is saying, and Chris is holding him tight, both of them staring white-faced at the stranger clutching your arm, red spreading across his chest much too quickly.

"I did it," he says, blood bubbling out from between his lips, and you nod solemnly, wondering how in the world he managed to keep that hood on through the whole thing. "I did it." He coughs, and the blood splatters out, some of it landing on your hand.

"Don't speak," you say, and you wonder if that sounded dumb, but does it really matter? You figure it doesn't.

You reach up with a shaking hand and push back his hood, smoothing his sweaty curls away from his forehead. You hear Lance gasp and JC asking frantic questions, but you don't pay attention. You lean over him as he struggles to speak, still stroking his forehead, soothingly.

"It's okay, Joey," he says. "I don't really exist now, anyway.... Not as I am...."

You nod again. It's a paradox, you remember. Something you learned about in high school physics but didn't really understand. You think you might, now.

He closes his eyes and sighs once, deeply, before his chest stops moving. There's a tiny smile on his lips.

The world is still moving around you, people running and screaming and barking orders, but you don't really hear any of it. You just hear his voice, echoing in your head. "It was meant for me," he'd said, and you think now you know what he truly meant.

You're not really surprised when his body starts to shimmer beneath you and then disappears completely.

Your-Justin looks across at you, his eyes stricken.

You nod, once, rubbing at the spot on your hand where his blood should have been, but isn't.

End

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