Sweet Nothing
by northern

For Maggie. Thank you to pierson, Kim and charlidos.

insidious; melon; supreme being

Justin lives his dream, to the fullest, over the brim. On starlit, quiet nights he can picture the chalice overflowing. Or leaking, the heavy syrup plunging in taffy-like drops into the endless black of the sky. Justin's dream is huge, and so is the abyss of failing.

He is getting more and more transparent. The people around him have started to look twice, three times, as if they're not quite sure what's different. Nothing is different. Justin can see it himself in the mirror. It's just becoming visible. He's hollowed out like blown glass and filled with sugary dreams, a golden concentrated liquid. Moving back and forth in front of the mirror, Justin can see it swirling sluggishly in reluctant, thick currents.

It's difficult to contain. Cameron tells him how sweet he tastes, like honey-dew melon. No wonder, Justin thinks and keeps his smile pasted on.

Sometimes when he passes his hand in front of his face something glitters, just for a moment, reminding him that he doesn't know what's happening. Maybe he'll turn into gold. That would be almost fitting, but Justin doubts it will be that simple. The glints are like pinholes, sharp and bright. Gold has never been that colour.

Life goes on — promotions, talk shows, performing — and Justin doesn't mention to anyone the shadows of a voice becoming clearer, rising from the depths. It seems like it's barely stirring, but maybe that's because it's so immeasurably far away. The voice reaches him in fragments, pulses, almost.

"...you... higher... dissolve... multitudes... deeper... infinite..."

That night she asks if he's put anything in his bath water.

Chris comes on a visit and stares and stares.

"What have you done to yourself?" he finally asks.

Justin darts a quick look down at his palm, trying to catch a longer glimpse of the bright pinprick teasing the corner of his eye, but it winks out and he's left with the dull dark brown of Chris's heavy gaze, unblinking.

"What? Nothing!" Justin says, and the voice from far away echoes "...everything..."

Chris steps closer, gingerly, which is so completely out of character that Justin raises his eyebrows. Chris's nostrils flare and he leans in slowly, sniffing at Justin's shoulder. When he leans back out again his face is a mask of distaste.

"That's some fucked-up shit, Justin," he says. "You reek."

"...in the palm of your hand..." the voice offers more clearly than usual, and Justin reflexively looks. Nothing is there. It's just his skin, a bit more translucent than yesterday, and the hint of something golden swirling below if he doesn't look too closely.

"It's nothing new," Justin tells Chris and his suspicions. "It's just... me." That's not enough of an explanation, he knows, but it's not as if he knows that much about himself. It could be just him, just time for this.

"Like hell it is!" Chris is not a man who gives up easily when he wants to know something.

"I'll go do the sound check now," Justin says and walks out of the room, listening absentmindedly to the droning baseline of the voice and behind that the higher buzz of Chris talking.

The music is so clear. It's like he's actually turning into glass, a glass instrument resonating perfectly, vibrating with the notes as they flow so easily out of him. Half the time, he can't even see the audience anymore. If he really concentrates they're there, a vague mass of want and joy, but otherwise it's just him and the light and the golden haze extending forever into black.

After the show, and the aftershow, he undresses and stands in front of the mirror. It's neither cold nor warm in the room, and the sweat has already dried. Looking at himself, he suddenly switches perspective and sees himself as if he were standing to one side. It's a shell he's seeing, so thin the skin is blurring in places. There's light shining from it in tiny specks of cold glitter and the hazy dark gold mist still moving, moving, but he also gets the impression of endless darkness underneath. As if the shell strives to contain the night sky.

The shell. His body.

He abruptly switches back to staring at himself in the mirror. Something floats across his line of vision, darkening it for a moment, and he sways and blinks furiously to see. It sails past in its own time, and when his vision is clear again, Justin is trembling.

The voice is clearer than ever, telling him deep things about dissolving, about expanding and about countless shining lights. Justin considers not listening to it, but it's like trying to ignore his own heartbeat. That scares him, that it's not something he can choose after all. That it might be something... not-good.

Cameron is asleep under the covers. She looks like she always does, sleeping — peaceful. She always sleeps with earplugs.

Justin pulls on sweat pants and a t-shirt quickly and hurries out of the room. Opening the door he is almost afraid of grasping the handle too hard so his skin will give and the... whatever it is... will flow out of him, and there will be nothing left. Nothing at all. He stares at his hand, closing the door behind him, very much aware of the way his breathing expands and contracts his lungs. He read somewhere that the lungs are very fragile, very thin barriers between blood and air.

Chris opens the door without delay, almost as soon as Justin's finished knocking. He's still dressed and looks Chris-tired, with shadows under his eyes and narrowed mouth.

"When you said... You said it was fucked-up." Justin shifts his weight and looks down into Chris's eyes. He remembers when they were the same height. "...Giant cloud of gas..." the voice offers, but Justin tries not to notice.

Chris runs a hand through his hair, looking him up and down an extra few seconds. "Yeah. Didn't think you listened."

He steps aside, lets Justin inside, and Justin walks into the room leaving the door for Chris to shut. There's a mirror in here, too, right there on the wall, and he checks his reflection one more time to be sure. He doesn't want to look too closely anymore.

Chris shuts the door and walks past him to stand next to him in front of the mirror. Justin's eyes seek him out instead. Chris's realness may have seemed dull earlier, but it's a lot safer than the radiant, flimsy-looking being in the mirror.

"Really, Justin," Chris says after they've stood there looking at each other for several moments, "what did you do?"

"I didn't do anything," Justin says, suddenly miserable. "I don't know. I don't even know when it started. It felt so... natural." He looks at Chris, hoping against hope that Chris might know anyway. This whole thing is getting out of hand.

Chris reaches out and touches him then, runs a finger down his bare arm, and Justin watches in horror as it half-sinks into his flesh. He can't even feel it, and Chris's finger is drawing an invisible line under his skin.

"It's time... it's time... it's time..." the voice tells him, rhythmically, the sound of it growing deeper and more hollow like opening jaws of nothing threatening to fall off their hinges and float away forever.

"Chris?" Justin says, and his voice sounds tinny in his own ears. He looks into Chris's eyes because he doesn't want the mirror anymore, and sees his own rising panic staring back at him.

"What," Chris starts, his eyes widening. "What is this?" He's cradling his hand against his chest, staring at Justin's arm.

"I don't know!" Justin reaches for Chris, but stops himself from touching at the last moment.

"You will be one," the voice proclaims. "One with all."

"Help me," Justin begs of Chris. There is no one else to ask, and maybe it's too late, but he doesn't want to go. He wants to stay the way he is, calluses on his feet, the imperfections of his voice at times, touching people.

Touching.

He lays his palm lightly on Chris's shoulder. He can't really feel it — just a hint of pressure.

"Justin..." Chris says and puts his own hand over, through, Justin's.

"Please, keep me here."

Justin's voice feels insubstantial, and strangely enough that's what it takes for him to start crying. He can see Chris standing there, afraid, so afraid, but there's something stronger than the fear, maybe warmer than the voice that pulls at him, that is becoming clearer in his dark eyes. Justin thinks it's courage and love, bright and shining like a star.

Chris slides his hands up along Justin's arms. They're more under his skin than caressing him, and there is a sensation after all. He thinks that if he were water, he'd feel like this, slow resistance but not warm, not cold. Chris steps closer and his arms are resting through Justin's shoulders, hands along his shoulder blades.

"Now. Let go," and he feels himself losing more still of the present, the here and now that he always took for granted.

Chris's arms are falling slowly inwards, parting him, while Justin looks up at the dark, feeling much too small and much too large. The stars are many many more than he's ever seen before, and their light is cold and searing. There is a road paved for him, a stream of dark air that seeks to pull him up and away into the huge nothingness. He feels himself relentlessly drawn out, stretched thinner than the most fragile blown glass and slipping, slipping onto the road that will take him away.

Something hurts. Something is stuck, and Justin turns his awareness back down into the tiny little room in the insignificant house on the surface of the dark orb spinning slowly.

Someone is holding him, holding his heart trapped between his fingers, tighttight between the palms of his hands.

It hurts, and nothing is meant to be hurting him anymore. There is supposed to be nothing left. Still, someone is holding his heart, and from there, on a line of tension, his entire self. The voice is calling for him, and he is balancing on the edge of so many things that he can't think, doesn't know what to do. It feels a little like dying, and he cries.

No he doesn't. Someone is crying, but it's not him.

More of his consciousness slips back into the unimportant room where the line of tension originates. The hands holding his heart are connected to a being. He turns away from the voice in the sky and listens.

Chris is crying. Chris.

His heart hurts, pushing against Chris's hands in a slow pulse. He can feel it intimately, the way it expands and contracts and the way Chris's fingers aren't all that warm. There are even shadows of a body he thinks is his at the edge of his vision.

Justin sees Chris at the same moment Chris looks up from his hands and into his eyes. Chris moves his lips, but Justin can't hear what he's saying. A little bit more of him is poured back down into his body, and he hears him, finally.

"Stay. Stay here, Justin," Chris is repeating, half-whispered and with his face wet.

Justin tries to answer him, but only a faint gust of wind forms and flows over Chris's face. He is hurting more now. Chris's hands are grasping so tight, it feels like he can't breathe. And in that same moment, he remembers what it felt like, to breathe, to have lungs, and more of Justin falls down in a rushing wave into him.

Chris makes a distressed sound as his hands are pushed apart by solidifying flesh, separating them from Justin's heart, and Justin tries to touch him, to tell him it's alright. He's not going away. He's coming back. He can see his hand as it rises to touch Chris's face, a flesh-coloured shadow, becoming more visible by the moment. There are no stars shining through him, and when he puts his hand on the side of Chris's face, he can feel the warmth of living human skin.

"Stay," Chris says.

"I'm here," Justin says, with the air he just inhaled into his lungs, through his vocal cords, with his tongue and teeth and lips. The final flood of him is sucked down, almost inhaled into him as Chris's hands push tightly against his shoulders, on the outside of his skin, his t-shirt.

Justin looks at him, listening intently for the voice that isn't there. Chris is there, though.

"I'm here," he says again, and Chris is shaking, or maybe it's him. All he knows is that it's night, he's here, and Chris is real and pulling him into a hug so tight that he feels undeniably real himself. They stand there, and Justin rediscovers the way Chris smells, what it feels like to curl his fingers in his shirt.

He chances a glance in the mirror, and all he can see is two men, two real men, fully there with no golden light threatening to pour out of them. He's so relieved he almost laughs.

As they separate, Justin wipes at his face and blinks. He feels really tired. Cameron is probably still sleeping in the room across the hall. But Chris is here.

"What do I taste like?" Justin asks him.

Chris looks at him for a moment, then carefully leans forward and presses a kiss to his lips. Just a kiss, and it feels intimate and soothing, intensely right.

"You taste like crap," Chris says, and Justin feels the corners of his mouth turn upward into a smile.