Part II: Present

*

AJ woke up on the morning of the ninth and scrubbed at his eyes, which were telling him the alarm clock declared the time to be eleven twenty-four. The time had only changed by a minute when he reopened his eyes, which now felt delicate and puffy. AJ stood up and swore. "Shit." He walked to his doorway and yelled, "D!"

Howie's voice came back from a direction that sounded suspiciously like the kitchen rather than his room. "Yes?"

"Why the fuck didn’t you wake me up? We're gonna be late." AJ hurried to kitchen, intent on grabbing a glass of water before dressing. He was pushed into a chair by Howie. AJ stared at Nick, who was evidently sitting across from him. "Why are you here? Are we not going into the studio today? Did we change schedules again? Is one of the girls sick?" A few weeks into their second trimester, both women's morning sickness had slaked off and the guys had decided to start going into the studio earlier.

AJ felt someone kiss his cheek from behind and he looked up into Kristin's eyes. Behind her, Kevin wished AJ a, "Happy birthday."

"Oh." AJ stilled at that and he knew the expression on his face was comical because he heard Brian laugh. "I had forgotten."

Howie placed a large glass of something pink and frothy in front of AJ. "Good thing you have us to remind you."

AJ took a sip. It was a strawberry cherry smoothie, with just enough carrot juice to give the sweetness an edge. AJ told Howie solemnly, "I want to bear your children."

Howie answered with an equal amount of gravity. "Let's wait until we get the other expected chillun' squared away."

AJ went back to sipping his cold treat.

Nick bounced a little, "We're taking today off. We're gonna kidnap you."

"If it's ransom you're after, I warn you, my mom drives a hard bargain." AJ's lips were turning pink from the berry juice.

Nick stuck his tongue out. "We're going golfing, ungrateful bitch."

AJ spewed shards of ice with his surprised, "Really?" Brian and Kevin enjoyed golfing as much if not more than AJ, but Nick hated it, couldn't get into the stop-start rhythm, or sustain the patience it took to start at hole one and finish at hole eighteen. Howie was completely indifferent, but given the choice, AJ knew it wouldn't be the way Howie spent a day.

"Yeah," Nick responded, exasperated and wiping melted ice off his face.

AJ swiveled around and looked to Howie for confirmation. Nick threw the napkin he had been using at the back of AJ's head as punishment for doubting him. Howie leaned against the sink casually, "Unless you'd rather do something else."

AJ untwisted himself, facing where Nick was pouting dramatically and off to the side, where Brian was snickering along with Leighanne at both of them. AJ felt something tug at the back of his throat. It didn't feel like the sadness that had made its home there on a semi-permanent basis and AJ took a drink to see if he could wash it down. It didn't work. AJ had a hard time working the words, "No, that's great," past the blockade that reminded him eerily of happiness.

*

On the fifteenth of January, AJ took a ten minute drive to the nearest grocery store with the list that Howie had made up in his back pocket. He parked and nearly made it through the door when his eyes focused on the overwhelming amount of pink and red displayed in the grocery store's windows. Ice-pick sharp clarity of what those colors occasioned formed in his mind and AJ barely made it to the waste bin a few feet outside the front doors before losing what felt like everything he had eaten in a week.

An elderly lady inquired as to whether he was all right and AJ smiled weakly, accepting her offer of a handkerchief. She pulled out a cell-phone and asked if he needed her to call someone and he patted his hip where he had hooked his phone, "No, thanks."

She wandered into the supermarket. AJ looked away, out into the parking lot and counted the blue cars. Blue was a safe color. Except that his favorite of her nightgowns had been blue, and that she had painted her toenails blue for a whole summer, and she had evidently named her first car Blue. Other than that, though. It was safer than red and pink. Safer than colors that were indelibly linked with his wedding to her, even if she had refused to let either of those colors anywhere near her ceremony and reception. "Too traditional," she had smirked, and he had respected that enough not to point out that they had set their wedding date for Valentine's Day, for fuck's sake, and really, how much ability to escape from tradition was there after that?

AJ let go of the trash can he was still supporting himself on, just to see if he could. He wobbled a bit before turning resolutely around, looking nowhere but straight in front of him. He made it safely through the doors and grabbed a shopping cart. He paid only enough attention to make sure he wasn't going to plow into anyone around him. He was glad he had gotten to know this particular grocery store so well while living with Howie and was able to comfortably navigate the aisles, getting exactly the requested items in a minimum amount of time. He managed a, "Hi, how are you?" for the teenager checking him out, closed his arms tightly around the paper bag and walked with preternatural speed to his car.

AJ took a moment to appreciate the black leather interior of his car, turned the "System of a Down" CD that Howie had left in the player up to a level where he couldn't so much hear it as feel it, and peeled out of the grocery store parking lot leaving rubber in his wake.

*

Since Nick's arrest, the youngest member of Backstreet had consumed about as much alcohol as post-rehab AJ. Instead, he had devoted himself to learning how to make every single non-alcoholic party beverage that existed and being able to do so at a mere suggestion. Brian and Howie had made fun of him for about a week until they realized how much more fun it made social events for both Nick and AJ.

AJ's favorite was a frozen pineapple concoction that tasted surprisingly like a piña colada. Nick kept a rainbow assortment of tiny drink umbrellas under his sink for festive occasions.

They celebrated Nick's birthday in the evening after a full day at the studio and Nick got on AJ's back about it, "See how much more they love you," but settled down when some of the studio crew surprised him with an ice cream cake during lunch.

Kevin had rented out the pool in his apartment complex for the night so that they could be as obnoxious as they so chose without anyone's getting in their way. Nick brought his umbrella box and his blender and made himself something unnaturally blue before taking orders from the guys. Brian placed a dinner order with Nick's favorite Italian place and went to go pick up the food.

Nick goofed off in the pool with Lara while waiting for dinner. Howie and AJ set the table that Kevin had cajoled the landlord into providing for them. They had a quick and dirty fight over which side of the plate the forks went on. In the end, AJ let Howie win, because he couldn't remember if his mom had taught him table etiquette, or someone on one of their crews, and Howie was secure that his knowledge had been directly handed down through generations of his mother's family. Since they had gotten stuck with the menial labor and Brian had his hands full of steaming doggie bags, Kevin was given the honor of dragging the birthday boy out of the pool so that they could eat.

Kristin ate more than the rest of them put together, though Leighanne gave her a run for her money. AJ ate enough that Nick gave him a noogie and grinned like an idiot, shrugging when AJ fondly demanded, "What crawled into your ass?"

After dinner, Nick pushed a fully-clothed Brian into the pool. Brian's shouts about cramps were drowned by what sounded like, "Old-wives tales," from a surprisingly loud Lara. Leighanne shook her head disparagingly at both of them for good measure and helped Kevin, AJ and Howie clean up until they ordered her to go sit down with Kristin.

When they had rid themselves of the mess, Howie tugged AJ's shirt over his head, "Get in?"

AJ shucked off his shoes. "You gonna?"

Howie was already undressing. "Yeah."

AJ ran, diving low into the six foot deep-end, barely hearing the impact below water that indicated that Howie was right behind him. He came up with this eyes closed, his world consisting of Howie's wet breathing, Nick's excited yelps, Brian's exuberant shouts and Kevin's deep throated laugh in the moment before he wiped the water away and used his sense of sight once again.

*

Nobody had gotten AJ a calendar for the new year and he hadn't felt any particular drive to pick one out himself. There didn't seem to be much point to ticking off the days when he wasn't waiting for any specific point in the future. The idea depressed him, so if he needed to know the date for something, AJ used the function on his cell phone that gave him access to such information and left well enough alone.

He slapped his screaming alarm into silence on the morning of February fourteenth and knew, instinctively, exactly what day it was. Twenty minutes later, AJ felt Howie sit on the bed behind him. He mumbled, "I'm sick, go away."

Howie followed standard Backstreet operating procedures in case of emergency or otherwise bad occurrence and ignored AJ. He laid down behind AJ and threw an arm over the younger man and his pile of knitted throws. AJ ordered him to, "Get your nasty ass shoes off my clean bedspread," without much heat. Howie kicked his shoes off the edge of the bed anyway.

"You just gonna stay here all day?" AJ asked, unsure of what he wanted the answer to be.

"If I need to, yeah." Howie didn't sound as if this were much of an imposition. "I called Nick and told him to work on getting his solo in 'Delirious' laid down."

"I'm okay," AJ asserted, mostly to see if he could make the words come out right.

"Okay," Howie agreed easily.

AJ drifted in and out of sleep for most of the morning, dragging himself out of bed at half-past one only because there was no possibility of his waiting a second longer to go to the restroom. Howie caught him coming out and pulled him down the hall forcefully into the kitchen, where Howie made AJ drink a glass of cranberry juice and eat some scrambled eggs before allowing him to curl up on the couch and fall back asleep.

AJ woke up again sometime around five. It was already dark outside and AJ had to stare at the clock for several moments to register the fact that it was actually evening. He called Howie, who had left a note on the refrigerator, "I went to the studio, call if you need me."

"Hi," he croaked and then tried again, going for less of a bullfrog impression the second time around, "hi."

"Hey, you just wake up?"

"I'm an idiot, I'm gonna be up all night."

"I have a bottle of Dramamine stashed somewhere in the bathroom." Howie got bus-sickness and kept the drug on himself pretty regularly even when they weren't on tour. "I'll let you have one if you're nice to me."

Which reminded AJ, "Sorry about this morning."

"Oh hey, payback's fair game," Howie said in reference to the first year Caroline hadn't been around for her birthday and he had been mean enough to everyone to actually make Nick cry. "You really weren't that bad."

"I was gonna take her to Nick's beach house this year. I had even asked Nick about it a while back, just to make sure he wasn't letting someone else stay there around this time. I figured we'd lock ourselves in for a week, maybe venture out for some sun, sand, beachy stuff. Mostly us away from everything else was the idea. She liked that sort of thing." AJ felt himself caught up in his stunted plans, almost as though if he kept talking she would show up, flip flops and all, ready to head down the highway. Into the sunset.

Howie, who knew that there was nothing really to be said, settled for, "I'm sorry babe."

AJ accepted this. "Me too." His breath hitched in a sob.

Howie asked, "You want me to come home?"

AJ managed to get the words, "Could you?" past lips flooded with tears.

*

Howie took a little longer than he should have to get home, but AJ wasn't aware enough to notice. He figured it out when Howie held up a pizza box from the place a couple of doors down from the studio. AJ showed interest, mostly to make Howie feel better, "What did'ja get?"

Howie walked toward the kitchen. "What do you think?"

It took a couple of rotations for AJ's brain to realize that this was one of those times when Howie would get AJ's favorite. "Margharita," he said, using the fancy name the place had given a pizza consisting of real tomatoes on top of the sauce, nearly too much oregano and two types of cheese.

"Got it in one." Howie set the box on the counter and turned around to pull AJ into a hug. "I rented us a couple of Fred and Gingers too."

AJ stood back from Howie and mustered a smile. "Brainless dancing film fare. The evening might be salvageable after all."

Howie turned AJ around and smacked his ass lightly, "Go get us plates."

AJ obeyed, "We're not eating off of napkins? You have no idea how to be single, Dorough. Which, all things considered, is kind of impressive."

Howie went in the direction of his bathroom, hoping to find the pills for later. "I'm great at being single, I just suck at being a pig."

"Synonymous," AJ yelled half-heartedly after Howie.

"Oooh. Sixty-four dollar word!" Came floating back.

Sarah had improved AJ's vocabulary within their first month together. He had been forced to go online and look up a word twice. He memorized them in case she used them again. She generally did. He had told her she was overeducated. She had thought it over, "Maybe. But you're undereducated. We balance each other out."

AJ set the plates on the table and went the extra mile to put glasses out too. He laid his palms on the flat surface of the table, resting his weight against them. He felt unbalanced.

Howie returned shaking the bottle in the rhythm of the song they had been recording that day and didn't say anything about AJ's bizarre posture. "We gonna eat?"

AJ pushed off the table and stood still for a moment, finding his center of gravity. He moved to grab the box off the counter and slide it onto the table. "Until we can't eat no more."

Howie opened the box and grabbed himself a piece. "That's the spirit."

AJ tore off two pieces. He thought he might be hungrier than any of his internal conditions were indicating. That had been happening a lot. "Thanks for babysitting."

"When did I agree to that?" Howie looked genuinely surprised and confused.

"Me, D. Tonight."

Howie chewed slowly, giving himself some time. "I live with you. What was I supposed to do, not come home?"

"You didn’t have to offer up your apartment in the first place," AJ pointed out.

"This is bullshit, and you know it Aje. We're best friends. Your life is kinda fucked right now. It’s getting better, you know it and I know it, but still, fucked. So you're here with me, which makes things better, for everyone really, because you have someone and I know you're okay and I can tell the others that you're okay and they trust me not to lie. You're not a burden, you're not an imposition and you're sure as fuck not a babysitting charge. Are we clear?"

AJ played with his food. "It's funny, because I sound like Sar when I say this, and I know that every time she said this I told her she was being ridiculous, but I just can't see how you can keep doing this. Sarah was my wife, you know. And yeah, she was being ridiculous, I wasn't going to leave her over the depression, but still, it was hard, okay? All's said and done, there wasn't a day I didn't wake up and wish that she was all right, that everything was fine with her and yeah, it was a lot for her sake, but it was a lot for me too. But you just keep being patient and okay with everything and understanding and I don’t get it, D."

"I have three other guys to bitch to. Of course I want you happier, Aje, for both of our sakes, for everyone's sake. I don't really mind that it's taking you awhile though. I can't imagine how long it would take me, don't really want to. I just want you here and safe and the rest, I can wait for that, or I can do without it." Howie swigged at his drink defiantly.

"I'm tired of waiting," AJ told him.

"Yeah, I think I would be too."

AJ didn't respond. Instead he ate half the pizza before pulling three pints of Ben & Jerry's out of the freezer for a movie-viewing snack. Howie's expression indicated that he was taking the opportunity to feel encouraged.

*

AJ took Brian out to lunch the day before his birthday because Brian was having family in town, Southern belles and gents flying in from all over and AJ had warned him, "I dunno how long I'm gonna last."

Brian had understood. "Me neither. It was kinda my mom's idea." Which explained a lot, because Brian was the biggest momma's boy AJ had ever met and that included Lance Bass and Justin Timberlake, who both had the moniker tattooed across their foreheads.

AJ treated Brian to country-fried steak and mashed potatoes with gravy and kept his mouth shut about the heart-attack that Brian was clearly asking for. He gave Brian a green baby entourage with booties and all. They had recently received the news that it was to be a boy, but AJ stressed that he wasn't all about, "determining gender before they're out of the womb. That shit fucks kids up."

Brian folded the tiny outfit carefully. "I think I might be more worried about your language than blue socks."

AJ handed over his second present, choosing to ignore the censure, "This one's actually for you."

Brian opened the envelope and grinned.

"Take your gal out, I think she might be getting a bit stir crazy," AJ instructed, counting on the fact that the two tickets to the Dixie Chicks concert -- Brian's secret weakness -- would be used for just that purpose.

"I take back every harsh word I have ever said about you. This has been sold out for weeks."

"Yeah." AJ had heard Brian bitching about the fact that he'd forgotten which day he was supposed to buy tickets and by the time he had gotten around to it, they had already been sold. "I loaned out my soul, but don't worry, I'll get it back in a few weeks."

"Good to know one of us still has that on him."

AJ chuckled in acknowledgement of the sentiment. "Non-sequitur warning."

"Consider me adequately warned."

"You should know, you and Leigh both, really, that I am glad you're having this baby. I know I haven't been the greatest about being around and helping out, when everybody else has been on top of that from day one, but honestly…the baby, babies, they're a whole part of what reminds me that the future isn't just another day to be marked off of the calendar at one point." AJ stopped and fiddled with his fork, not really sure what kind of response he was expecting, or really even wanted.

"Aje," Brian waited until AJ looked up at him to continue, "we know all that. We wouldn't send Howie back with updates if we thought you didn't care."

AJ pressed the tines of the fork against the skin of his palm. "It's just that I spent so long being there for her. I was always worried and always on top of it and I think I forgot how to take care of myself somewhere along the way. So, I have to relearn that first, before I can take care of anyone else. But it doesn't mean I don't care. You guys are my everything, your families are…an extension of that."

Brian made AJ release the fork and rubbed softly at where the indentations took a while to reform themselves to complete the unblemished landscape of AJ's palm. "Okay, then you need to take that time. We'll wait. We know you care, we've never doubted that, and that is not an easy thing to say, Aje."

"No," AJ knew that, "not easy at all."

"You know you're doing just fine, right? I mean, we're all really proud."

AJ blinked at Brian, "Nobody said anything."

"Well, somebody should have. We are. For not trying to follow her, or diving back into a bottle, for letting us help you, for pretty much everything you've done since that morning." Brian nodded his head as if to agree with himself. "You're doing…perfectly."

"Maybe not that," AJ muttered.

Brian put his palm down on the table, in lieu of a metaphorical foot. "Perfectly."

There was no arguing with a Brian who knew he was right.

*

On March 21st, AJ commandeered the table on the apartment's balcony and planted a limited garden of snap peas and tomatoes and some perennials that had looked nice on the front of the seed package. Sarah had taught him the fine art of keeping plants alive on a bus, how to understand the delicate ratio between food and water and insider's tricks like the use of spray bottles over watering cans or pitchers.

Vegetables and flowers were slightly more complicated, more needy. AJ tended to them carefully, using methods suggested by the gardening tome the employee at the bookstore had recommended, to keep bugs away without poisoning the plants. He kept charts of how much water they needed and had been given, performed experiments to figure out what place on the balcony afforded the tiny rows of seeds the most direct sunlight, and sang to them while he worked. Sarah had sworn up and down that music made plants grow faster, and, as AJ had nothing to disprove the theory, he chose to believe it.

On a morning nearly a month after AJ had begun his project, Howie woke AJ by pulling him out of bed, not even reacting to AJ's increasingly vocal protests as Howie dragged him out to the balcony where AJ swore and shut his eyes as a precaution against the early morning sun. Howie put a hand up to shield AJ's eyes, "No, no, you have to look."

Carefully, AJ peeled his eyes open and looked straight ahead at the newly arisen buds of the perennials. "D. It's working. I grew something. Something I couldn't leave without watering for four days, even." Sarah had picked relatively low-maintenance plants for AJ, not trusting him to handle anything more complex.

"I know. No more having to drive forty minutes for a fresh tomato." Howie had asked his mom for good tomato-based recipes in anticipation of this particular aspect of AJ's hard work.

AJ walked over to the stylish watering can that Howie had bought him and poured enough water for it to seep underneath the surface with no overflow. "I was supposed to do this when I got out of rehab. Sherry suggested pansies, but I think she was just digging on me."

Howie walked to the edge of the balcony and leaned out slightly over the rail. "Why didn’t you?"

AJ set the watering can down. "Most people, when they get outta rehab, they don’t have much to return to. The lucky ones have a family, but most of us have managed to destroy that, so we end up going back to a life where the big goal is for us just to make sure we get dressed in the morning, eat three times a day, sleep eight hours a night, and oh, yeah, don’t drink. Which is a huge amount of responsibility, as it turns out. So they tell you to get a plant, because if you can handle the extra dosage of responsibility, then you might have a shot of meeting other, more complicated sets of expectations. I already had four plants, though, five if you count Sarah, which I don't know if I do or not. I wanted her to stay with me, of course, but I was ten times more worried about keeping you guys okay with me, and that was way more work than having to remember to water something twice a day."

"But you did it," Howie reminded him.

"I did it. And I kept her, which ended up being more important than I thought at the time. Her being dead though, her basically saying, 'you couldn't hold up to your end of the bargain,' that throws me." AJ held up a hand, aborting Howie's squawk of protest. "I know, it's not my fault. She was depressed and stuck inside her head and she would have done it no matter what I said or did, but somewhere beneath all the logic, I wonder about the what ifs. What if I had started off with a plant? Would I have known how to keep things alive better? What if I had woken up an hour earlier? What if I had told her I loved her, like I meant to that night? And there's a million of them, each as pointless as the last, and I'm learning to answer them with a stronger, 'it wouldn't have made a difference' each day, but that doesn't mean I don’t think about it. It doesn’t mean I don’t look at those buds and wonder why the hell I can get them to peek out of the earth when I couldn't get my wife just to stay safely on it."

Howie turned to AJ's back, his hip digging into the steel rails. "Okay."

AJ faced him. "Okay?"

"Is there something else you need me to say?"

AJ pursed his lips for a second and said tightly, "I think mostly I just need you."

"Okay."

AJ shook his head slightly, "It’s not-"

"I know," Howie's words were succinct, and AJ knew he was trying to keep the hurt out of his voice.

"I'm sorry." AJ was. He remembered coming to the awareness that he had preyed upon Howie's loneliness in his days spent constantly drunk. He had woken up to the fact in the middle of withdrawals and had vomited up nothing, sheer guilt, for hours. That was before now, before he had known about the way Howie looked at him when Howie was so positive that AJ was fully asleep, before he knew that the older man would and had given up his life to a man that he never expected to love him back. "I don't have that to give anyone yet."

"It's okay, Aje." Howie stressed the word 'okay.'

"I think, that that may be the most perfect antithetical statement of the situation that I have ever heard," AJ quipped darkly.

Howie twisted his neck to look back over the city. His soft, "Ooooh, sixty-four dollar word," was lost in the early morning April wind.

*

AJ made it to the vending machine two seconds ahead of Kevin and forked up the dollar for a 20 ounce bottle of Root Beer, Kevin's favorite. He handed it to his bandmate and quickly bought a Dr. Pepper for himself before he could get over to the Dole machine and pick out the dreaded strawberry-banana.

Kevin twisted the cap open and allowed the air to release with a hiss. "Thanks."

AJ waited until the bubbles formed by falling through the machine went down a bit in his. "Welcome." He opened the bottle. "I think I should move out of Howie's place."

"It's your place too, you both pay rent," Kevin reminded him, but AJ knew he had gotten Kevin's attention.

"I don't think it's good for him." AJ took a sip too quickly and winced as the carbonation burned all the way down his trachea.

"I see. When did you figure things out?" Kevin wanted to know.

"It's been awhile. I was ignoring the situation, hoping it would go away. I thought maybe he was suffering from temporary insanity." AJ shrugged.

"If it were insanity, Aje, we'd have had no choice but to commit him about seven, eight years back now. And that's just when Brian and I managed to catch on to the whole thing."

AJ clenched his teeth before consciously making himself relax. "So, moving out," AJ said, with more confidence than he was really feeling, because he had no idea of where he would go or how he would remember to live in his own space with nobody else's leftovers to steal or footsteps waking him up in the middle of the night.

Kevin solved the problem by being very firm about the fact that, "I don’t think it's a good idea."

AJ tried to explain, using the hand that wasn't holding the soda bottle to emphasize his points. "My living with him hurts him. I can't do that to him, not after everything he's done for me in the past year alone, that being a small percentage of the things I owe him for overall."

Kevin took several large gulps of his drink in succession, draining the bottom, and pitched it smoothly into the recycling bin in the corner of the room. "Yes, to a certain extent, your being constantly in close proximity is hurtful to Howie. On the other hand, I wasn't kidding when I cited that seven years ago thing, Aje, and it's not exactly like we haven't been living inside each other's shoes for most of that time anyway. Howie's used to it, he's used to it and it makes him feel much more secure that he can take care of you and be the one in the group to know first how you're doing and I would hate to be the one to advise you to take that privilege away from him. He's your best friend, even more than someone who's in love with you, he's always known how to put that first and I don’t think that you have the right to insult him by insinuating that he's not up to the task anymore."

AJ threw his empty bottle into the recycling far more violently than Kevin. It met with the side of the bin and bounced off, rolling back to AJ. "Damned if I do, damned if I don't."

"A little bit," Kevin conceded. "But in a lesser-of-the-two-evils world, which we all know this is, you staying there, where you're comfortable, him getting to continue being lover to you in every sense except the most literal, that's the only solution that I can see making sense. If I thought that you moving out would hurt him less, I would tell you, because as much as you're going through, Howie's paid his dues time and again and we could find somewhere else to get you settled and happy. I'm not overlooking his needs here, I just honestly think that they're being met as much as is humanly possible at this point in the game."

AJ bent down to pick up the boomerang bottle and tossed it again, this time with less animosity. It hit the far side of the container and rebounded into it. "I want him to be happy."

Kevin nodded, he and AJ had known each other far too long for Kevin to recite calming platitudes. "You and me both. You and me and Brian and Nick, at that. When Howie says it about you it's me and Brian and Nick and him. The sentiment is fast becoming something of a Backstreet motto."

AJ knew that statement didn't wrap everything up as nicely as Kevin would have wished, particularly not in the case of AJ's evolving and sometimes indeterminate relationship to Howie, but he wasn't yet ready to discuss those issues. Instead, he returned the sardonic smile that had formed on Kevin's face. "Classy."

"That's us, the classy boy band." Kevin smacked AJ's ass, herding him in the direction of the studio, to prove his point.

*

"Against all odds, gentlemen," Kristin announced grandly, "that sounded like something I would actually consider buying an album for."

The Boys all considered this for a moment before Nick took off his headphones and spoke through the studio glass into the mixing booth where she was sitting and observing them. "Really?"

"Well, it needs a bit of fine tuning," she smiled in the direction of the man sitting next to her, who was already bent over the sound boards, fiddling with the controls. "But yes, really."

"A whole album, right?" Brian clarified. "Not just a single?"

"Counting your chickens?" Next to Kristin, Leighanne raised an eyebrow.

Brian made a face at his wife. "I'm gonna be the bigger man here, and not respond to that."

Howie took hold of the conversation and pulled them back to the issue at hand. "When you say you would buy an album for that song, are you saying that it's better raw than the other stuff we've been seeing and is therefore releasable, or are you saying that the song itself is actually single material?"

"The former. I think it's too slow to be released as the first single. Maybe the second. But AJ's sounding much more steady than he has been, Kevin's harmonies were really coming together there, and Brian was perfect. You're sounding a little more into it these days as well," Kristin commented lightly. She knew enough of what was going on in Howie's life to feel that a little added encouragement from any given direction might not be a bad thing.

Howie's smile was a little grateful and a little knowing all at once. "Okay, fair enough."

AJ waved at the women to get their attention. "Thanks for the input."

Kevin caught the tech's eye and gave him a hand signal to replay what had just been recorded so that the guys could listen to it themselves, try and see if they heard what Kristin and Leighanne had. The opening chords of the song filtered into the recording booth and at first, AJ thought Kristin had nailed her descriptions. Brian's opening solo was spotless, Kevin was lending a much fuller sound to the overall harmony than he had been earlier in the sessions and AJ's own voice was much stronger than he had gotten used to its sounding in the over half a year that he had been grieving. There was something Kristin hadn't mentioned though, and it was that aspect of the song that for AJ, made the album worth purchasing.

The song was a love ballad -- slow -- a little more country than pop, and leaning slightly toward the melancholy. Howie's voice, floating right above the rest of theirs, fit the mood of the song perfectly. Nick and Brian had written the song, but AJ wondered if maybe Howie had hung around, listened to their ideas, bounced his own off on them without interfering in the writing process all that much. Howie's soul was laid just the tiniest bit bare when he sang the chorus and it gave the song a haunting beauty of truth that AJ could claim to have rarely heard in music.

When the last few measures of the guitar solo that ended the song died out, AJ told the tech, "Don't fuck with Howie's end of the harmonies."

Nick had been saying something at the same time, but AJ had talked over him, so AJ turned to Nick, "Sorry."

Nick shook his head, "Nah, I was saying the same thing."

Howie, who was still bad at taking compliments and preferred to ignore them, blushed furiously as he said, "Um. I think we probably should clean up the middle, with Nick and AJ singing together. It sounds a little flat."

AJ was tempted for a moment to turn the conversation back to just how good Howie had sounded, make his friend listen, but he took pity on him, both out of the fact that Howie was so obviously uncomfortable with everyone's praise and out of the knowledge that having one's self laid out so plainly in a song took a lot out of a person. He let Howie have his way. "Yeah, sorry about that, I was concentrating a little too much on the next section while I was singing that."

Nick put his headphones back on. "All righty then. Let's start with the sixth measure, third page, that gives us four beats, you good with that?"

AJ nodded. The music played.

*

Howie took a vacation the week of Mother's Day and flew to Florida to see his mom. AJ made it all of twenty-four hours before he started walking around the apartment with the cordless, hoping that Howie would call. AJ had been out to dinner with Nick and Lara the night before when Howie had called to say that he had gotten in safely. AJ had listened to the message six times before making himself erase it.

Howie called late into the second day he had been gone. AJ took one look at the caller id on the phone, and seeing "Mom and Dad" programmed in, answered as coolly as he possibly could. "Hey."

"Hey," Howie mimicked. "What'cha up to?"

"Just reading," AJ told him. It wasn't exactly a lie. He'd had a book open and in front of his eyes for nearly an hour.

"Did you go into the studio today?"

"Nah, they were mostly working on Brian's stuff," AJ didn't add the part where he hadn't felt up to recording without Howie, or how he hadn't wanted to miss Howie's call. "How's everyone down there?"

"Everyone's fine. Denise came over for dinner tonight. I invited her to come out, told her you'd give up your bed."

"Very magnanimous of you," AJ deadpanned.

"Very honest of me."

 

"The apartment is very empty," AJ observed, trying to sound nonchalant.

"Why don't you go stay with Nick for a little bit?" Howie suggested.

"He didn't say anything, but I think Lara's been staying over a lot."

"Aje, you fuck, if you ask Nick if you can stay, he will choose you over his need to get laid for a few days. I know this comes as a shock, but-"

"Shut up. I don't wanna ask that of him, okay?"

"So go to Kev or Bri, no sacrifices being made on either of their parts and really, you've heard it all before."

"Which only means that I have even less desire to hear it all again. Howie, I can make it another four days on my own. I can."

"But you'd like to see yourself do it anyway?"

AJ closed the book lying on his chest and put it on the floor. He curled onto his side. "Basically." He pulled the throw that was folded up over the back of the couch on top of him. "Also, I just, I live with you. That's it. We live together well."

"Of course," Howie agreed. "I understand."

AJ snuggled deeper into the throw, messily unfolded around him. "Good, that makes one of us."

"I miss you, AJ. I've got my mom and my dad and Angie and Polly and John and the rest of the clan here and I miss you like hell. So it's like that, I guess."

"I've been waiting for your call," AJ said, a little caustically, mostly because sometimes Howie's understanding could be overwhelming, and AJ wasn't sure he deserved it.

Howie laughed, "I've been making myself wait to call."

"I'm used to hearing your voice all the time. To telling you every stupid thing that crosses my mind. I feel like…remember when Nick and I had to read Pygmalion in bus school, and you made us watch 'My Fair Lady', because you said it was less depressing, and I disagreed with you?"

"Sure," Howie drew out the syllable, unsure of where this was going.

"I feel like Rex Harrison, being all accustomed to your face and that shit. But not as misogynistic," AJ added.

"I suppose that's good."

"Wow, I don’t feel like a freak or anything now," AJ joked.

"You, a freak?" Howie feigned surprise.

"I miss you, bitch." AJ told him fondly.

"Miss you more, freak," Howie responded.

"Nuh uh," AJ hung up before Howie could get the last word.

The phone rang and AJ picked it up again. It was worth Howie's having the last word to hear more of his voice.

*

AJ threw a hand out, for all intents and purposes still asleep, and managed by some miracle to find the phone. "It's fuck-all early," he growled into the receiver.

"Get Howie's and your ass outta bed and down to Mercy," Kevin instructed him, too much excitement in his voice to leave room for apology.

AJ sat up. Mercy was the hospital that the gynecologist Kristin and Leighanne were seeing worked out of. "Kris? Is it Kris? Is she all right?"

"It's not Kris, it's Leigh, which is why I'm calling, Brian's in there with her. She's fine, loud," Kevin laughed giddily, "but fine."

"Give us twenty minutes." AJ was hanging up as he heard Kevin shout, "Take thirty, drive safely!" AJ jogged down the hall to Howie's bedroom and turned on the lights, "D, get up, we gotta go, seriously, up."

Howie blinked awake painfully. He glanced over at the clock. "Three fifty six, AJ. What could possibly be that important?"

"Leigh's having the baby, Kevin just called," AJ's grin was so big he could barely force the words out. Halfway through the announcement, Howie was already on his feet, searching for a pair of jeans and some shoes. AJ left the room to do the same. They met at the door no more than a minute later. AJ asked, "You have keys?"

Howie dangled them from his pointer finger, opening the door to let them both out and locking it behind them. Howie drove, cutting the time there by ten minutes. AJ goaded him, "I coulda done better."

"In the 'we'd be dead now' sense," Howie concurred easily.

AJ hit the nursing counter at full tilt and leaned over it eagerly, "Can you tell us which room Leighanne Littrell is in?"

A nurse who could have easily been AJ's grandmother smiled and said, "You must be the last of the pep squad. She's still in labor, but you can wait in the lounge down this hall, third door on your left. That's where everybody else is."

When they got to the lounge, Nick and Lara were sipping coffee, both looking disheveled but perfectly content. Kristin was dozing on Kevin's shoulder. AJ took a seat next to Nick, "How long have they been in there?"

Nick looked up at where Howie was still standing. "Uh, well, he called Kevin on the way to the hospital, and Kevin called me and you on his way, so, I guess an hour at most."

"And the doctor says she's doing fine?" Howie's feet were jittering restlessly beneath him.

"That's what they told Kevin when he got here. Haven't heard anything since."

"Did he say how long they expected it to be?" AJ didn't mind waiting around three weeks, if that was what it took. Realistically though, Leighanne and Kristin had picked Mercy for its excellent facilities, and, almost as importantly, its promise of confidentiality. Even so, AJ wasn't going to pretend that someone wasn't going to hear about this by midday at the very latest, and then there would be camera crews everywhere trying to get a first glimpse. He hoped that by that time, Leighanne would have had the baby and Brian would be available to go out and give the reporters a few minutes of his time. A little bit of nuclear-shining-happy Brian ought to be enough to appease the press, at least until the guys could get Leighanne and the baby home.

"They settle on a name yet?" Howie wanted to know.

"You weren't in on that?" Nick frowned and beside him, Lara looked broad-sided. AJ imagined it was the first time she had ever found something in-group out before one of the other guys. "Yeah, Leigh caved last week."

"Really?" Howie and AJ practically gasped at the same time. Leighanne was very rarely the one to give in on major issues.

"Brian just kept saying that the name meant everything, where everything started, where he fell in love with her, where he became part of something… I think it was the second reason that got her to throw in, but I like it, I think it's cool sounding."

"Orlando Wallace Littrell," Howie tried it out. There had never been any question that the kid's middle name would be Leighanne's maiden name, girl or boy, that had been part of the condition for her changing her name back when her and Brian had gotten married.

"I think she was afraid it was too girly sounding," Nick opined.

AJ muttered, "Orlando Wallace Littrell, Orlando Littrell, Orlando," then shook his head, "Nope, I don’t think so."

Lara offered up, "I think it's perfect."

Nick added, giving away some of the nerves he was experiencing, "Just like the baby."

AJ hooked his hand around Nick's head and pulled it toward him, smacking a kiss on Nick's cheek, "It's gonna be fine."

Nick kissed him back, with interest in slobber, "Good to hear you say that."

*

The baby came out, as Brian described it, "A step above perfect," and all five guys spent nearly three hours staring at it through the glass of the nursery, conjecturing about the road to come. By the time they left to go shower and get some sleep before coming back to see Leighanne in a waking state and deal with any press that had shown up, Nick had already decided that Orlando was the next NBA superstar, spurred on to that fate by none other than Nick Carter's fantastic coaching. Kevin was practically signing the kid up for piano lessons right there on hospital grounds, and Brian had the kid auditioning for school choirs as soon as he had the gift of speech. AJ and Howie listened mostly, sometimes laughing, or echoing in their friends' excitement. AJ pressed his fingers to the window and watched the tiny blue blanket rise and fall steadily. That was enough for him, right then, just that rhythm, that slow steady assurance of life.

AJ and Howie were the first two Boys back at the hospital and, as a result, they spent the most time fielding questions from several of the news crews that had arrived. Brian came down to rescue them about the same time Kevin arrived, and AJ thanked Kevin with a knowing smile for having thought to call up to Brian.

Leighanne was breastfeeding when all of them got up to her room. Kristin stroked Leighanne's hair and cooed down at Orlando, who was too busy to really pay attention. Leighanne smiled up at Kristin, her eyes tearing up, "I'm a total sap right now."

Kristin nodded, "I can see why. He's beautiful."

When Orlando had finished, Leighanne allowed Brian to pick him up, Brian walked around the room, a slight bounce in his step, patting Orlando's back lightly. When he was burped, only then did Brian pass him carefully to Kevin. AJ thought it was probably among the hardest things he had ever done to wait patiently for his turn to hold the baby, but he did. Orlando was asleep by the time he got to AJ, but AJ didn't mind, trying to make his breaths quieter so as not to wake him. He felt like crying in the same way that Leighanne had been and wished he had hormones to blame it on. Next to him, Howie's breath hitched softly and AJ let go, allowing himself the release. He handed Orlando back to Leighanne and kissed her forehead, "Y'done good, babe."

She pulled him back toward her with her free hand and kissed his forehead. "You come spend time with him anytime you want, you hear? You’re his family." She looked around, "You all are."

Kristin broke the silence that followed. "Kevin and I have been waiting a lot lately, for the perfect moment to talk to you and Howie, Aje. I don’t know if this is perfect, but it feels like it, so here goes, okay?" She glanced at Kevin who came to her side.

AJ tilted his head, "What's up, babe?"

"You all know that Kevin and I are having twins," Kristin started.

Everyone in the room nodded in unison, there could be no forgetting that announcement. Kevin had actually jumped for joy while telling them. "Baby girls," he had shouted, "Girls!! With an S! Plural!" Nick had twirled to cap off the effect.

Kristin continued. "We've been thinking a lot about names, and about a week ago, we finally settled on something we're both happy with: Carolina Jaye and Sarah Monica."

It was a while before Howie breathed, "Wow." AJ followed it up closely with, "That's…"

Kevin stressed, "Only if it's okay with you. That was our deal."

"Okay?" AJ asked, like he didn't understand the word. "It's a lot of things, but I'm not sure okay really covers it."

Howie tried to explain, "More like, amazing and heart-breaking and something we would never have imagined, not even from you. I, for one, am honored."

"Definitely," AJ put in. "Definitely."

A look of relief spilled over Kristin's features shortly before it disappeared and she said, "That was the first part of what we had to ask."

AJ and Howie exchanged a look. "Shoot," they said in time with each other.

Kevin took the lead this time. "In asking this, we are not saying that we assume that y'all will be living with each other forever, although that would be fine, just don’t think that we expect it or anything. We do think, though, that if the girls ever needed you, that you would be willing to do just about anything for them, including pick up your lives and move back in together so that the girls wouldn't be taken from each other."

Howie wrinkled up his face. "What are you saying, Kev?"

Kristin put her hand on Kevin's wrist. "He's saying that we would like AJ to be Sarah's designated guardian and you to be a designated guardian to Carolina."

AJ went white and stopped breathing. He wheeled around, walking blindly toward the window, where he stopped, staring unseeingly out at the city. Kristin started to say something but was cut off, by what AJ didn't know. Howie came up behind AJ, resting his hands on AJ's shoulders. AJ started to breathe again under the weight. Howie whispered, "You kept the plants alive, Aje."

"This is so much bigger than plants, D. You held Orlando, you felt…" AJ squeezed his hands into fists tight enough that his fingernails drew blood from his palms. "I should not be entrusted with anyone's life, let alone something that small and perfect and-"

"I trusted you with my life. After Caro, when you made me keep eating and talked me into going back to sleep even after nightmares because my body needed the rest, I trusted you then and you didn't fail me. You didn't fail the plants on your bus or the ones on our balcony. And you didn't fail Sarah." AJ started to say something but Howie spoke over him, "I know you don't like hearing this and I'm sorry, but she failed you, baby. And these girls, they aren't going to fail you, y'know why? Because they're Kevin's and Kevin has never failed you."

"Maybe we both failed each other. It took two, though."

"Divorce takes two, Aje, not suicide," Howie corrected him gently. "Just tell me something. Is Kevin right? Would you do anything for these girls? Would you pick your life up, wherever it was, and uproot it to somewhere that they could be together and happy?"

AJ didn’t have to think about that. He didn't have to glance back at Orlando, sleeping safely in his mother's arms, or look at Kevin and Kristin's faces or consider a thing. "Yes. In a second."

"Then maybe you're not perfect. But I swear to you you’re the best choice they could have possibly made if they'd had the chance to consider every candidate available on the surface of this planet. And nobody is perfect, Aje."

Down below, cars passed by continuously, bright colors beaming off their hoods in the early spring heat. AJ watched them without any real concentration for another second before turning and focusing on Kristin and Kevin. Howie turned with him, standing at his side, touching AJ even without reaching out to him.

Kevin held no disappointment for AJ in his voice when he said, "I won't be mad if you say no. I would understand."

AJ hadn’t known up until that moment that an entire soul, splintered to the point of uselessness, could be rebuilt. But a tiny fragment of his slipped back into its proper place and AJ understood instinctively that the sensation, the feel of something nearly forgotten being remembered, was what healing felt like. He let himself cry this time, not even putting up the barest of fights. "I know. I know you would. But I want to be your baby girl's guardian. More than anything I can ever remember wanting."

AJ thought about how badly he had wanted Sarah back with him, alive, and knew that he was telling Kevin one of the hardest truths AJ would ever be able to admit to. Kevin's smile conveyed his acceptance of the enormity of AJ's gift.

*

Kevin got a call in the middle of a recording session that consisted of three shouted words, "Hospital. You. Fuck," and a lot of heavy breathing. Kevin ran to his car. Brian, who had been close enough to hear, said, "I think Kris is in labor."

The other four piled in Nick's SUV because it was the biggest car there and drove down the highway like madmen, trying to catch up with Kevin. It wasn't long before they found themselves in the same lounge they had been waiting in not a month before, experiencing an odd dèja-vu with Brian substituted in for his cousin and Kristin across the hall.

No doctors came out to tell them what was going on and AJ had worked himself into a decently quiet panic by the time Kevin came out wearing an expression that inevitably lead to woeful tidings in Backstreet land. Howie pulled it together enough to say, "What's the deal, Kev?"

"One of the girls isn't positioned right, they have to do a c-section." Kevin's voice was shaking along with his hands. AJ, who was much better in a crisis when he knew the exact perimeters of that crisis, took Kevin's hands and led him to a chair.

Nick asked, "Don’t they do that all the time? I mean, just, it's a pretty common procedure, right?"

"Yeah, Nick, it is," Howie told him calmly, taking a seat as well.

AJ sat down on the side of Kevin that Howie hadn't chosen to occupy. "Hey," he waited until Kevin was looking at him. "Kris is gonna be just fine. Kris and Carolina and Sarah, all your girls are gonna be just fine."

Kevin closed his eyes. "You didn’t hear her screaming."

Brian, who felt that he had adequate right to respond to that, flicked Kevin's knee and told him, "That part happens. Even when it all goes right. Women just…they survive things I don’t think we can imagine surviving."

Brian had a bit of a worship complex concerning Leighanne, it was why she won so many of their fights. Brian had been raised to respect women utterly and wholly and when he had fallen in love with one, it had just kicked that instinct into overdrive. Kevin and Kristin's relationship was wholly different, characterized by the fact that they had tried over and over again to break it off and discovered that they were both just no good without each other. AJ had seen them looking at each other when they thought the other one wasn't looking though, he knew the attachment between them wasn't co-dependence; Kevin and Kristin were both too fiercely individual to form that kind of bond. Whereas with Brian and his wife it was two parts adoration and three parts love, with Kevin and Kristin it was three parts deep and instinctual understanding and two parts love. It worked out for everyone, more so as time went on.

Kevin took a deep breath and opened his eyes, looking straight at Brian. "She was scared."

AJ understood that, understood that it was near impossible to look into the eyes of a person you considered to be an extension of yourself and see her terror and not take it on. Especially if that person didn't frighten easily. Kristin was among the most unflappable people AJ had ever met. "Of course she was, Kev. First time doing this, wouldn't you be? I would be peeing myself." AJ didn't even know if that was anatomically possible, but he figured the imagery would suffice.

"She told me I couldn't stay. Told me the first thing I saw of our babies couldn't be the doctor cutting them out of her insides. Just like that." Kevin clenched his jaw. "It wouldn't have mattered. I'm gonna love them no matter what, she's supposed to know that."

"Kev." Brian was smiling the way he did when he was sharing an inside joke. "Kris and Leigh, they always find ways to send us to the guys when they think that's what we need. She wasn't worried about you being grossed out, she wanted you out here with us, so that we could calm you down for when the babies are out and healthy and she wants her husband back at her side, calm."

Kevin opened his mouth and closed it a few times before saying, "Oh. I guess…oh."

Nick rocked back on his heels. "And really, if she's with it enough to do something like that, there's no way she's not gonna be fine." Nick's logic wasn't always phenomenally logical, but somehow it was still soothing to the other guys.

Kevin slumped in the chair. "Yeah, you've probably gotta point."

Howie tucked a lock of Kevin's hair behind his ears. Kevin needed a haircut, but it hadn't really been on his list of priorities for the past month and a half or so. "So you able to settle down and do some waiting with us now?"

Kevin leaned over and rested his head against Howie's shoulder. "Not like I have much choice, huh?"

Brian pulled up a chair across from Kevin and sat down. "Not really at all."

Kevin made a half-hearted face at his cousin. "I'm glad you guys are here."

Nobody told him there wasn't anywhere else for them to be at that moment. Nobody felt they needed to.

*

AJ felt like a tool, asking for the third time, "Yellow, Sarah, purple, Carolina."

"You’re not going to forget, Aje." Howie reassured him, sounding exhausted.

"Are they gonna look this much alike their whole lives?" AJ was fretting, he knew he was, but he couldn’t help it.

"That's generally what the term 'identical' indicates."

"But they'll like, cut their hair differently, and Sarah will wanna wear different clothes than her sister, right? Because I mean, if they don’t, something could happen and we could take Sarah to piano lessons when it's really Carolina who plays the piano and Sarah's into, I dunno, extreme sports, but I hope not, because then Kevin'll have to lock her up for the rest of her natural life-"

Howie reached over and shook AJ. Hard.

"Okay. Okay." AJ got his breathing under control. "I would have sucked as a father."

"It does seem to bring out a bit of the paranoid schizo hiding inside you."

AJ snorted. "They're so…everything's in place. Five little fingers on each hand, five tiny toes on each foot, centered baby noses, even their hair, what there is of it, curlicues laying just right. I mean, we've all been worked over by makeup artists for hours on end and not looked that perfect. It seems fucked up that they have to leave this place and this time and come out here where people will lie to them and break their hearts and they'll have to shatter and reform just to survive."

Howie curled his fingers over the back of AJ's neck.

AJ reached up and pried Howie's fingers off, intertwining them in his own instead. "That's the thing, though. I don't know anyone who hasn't done that, hasn't been taken apart, inch by inch and rebuilt. And maybe I'm a little pissed off at the world for that. I'm a lot pissed off that it took Sarah apart and she couldn't put herself back together. That I couldn't make it happen any more than she could. I'm so fucking mad I want to scream and break things and be dramatic, but I can't because it goes deeper than that. So it's scary, that maybe that could happen to one of the girls, to Orlando, right? Because it could. But the day Orlando was born, when they asked us, I thought about…all these moments that I have in my head that won’t ever go away."

AJ listed, "There's the time Nick couldn't stop crying about Brian's heart, I mean, not for hours and hours and the way he stopped crying after that, didn't again until I slammed his hand into a door on purpose and the way that him crying was probably the only thing in the world that saved my life. I don't know that anything else could have found me inside the raging psychotic asshole that had taken over. Or there's the way Brian totally freaked the hell out when those girls kidnapped his dog and y'know, he's so calm all the fucking time, I mean, even when they told him they had to dig his heart out of his chest and tinker with it a bit, he was all, 'oh, well, I guess if you say so…' but then those bitches take his ugly pets and he starts throwing hotel lamps across the room, and we'd all seen Kevin be calming and careful and take care of things, but not like that, not like he was Atlas, or whoever the guy is, the one holding the world, because he just stood there, and held onto Brian until his world stood still and things were okay."

AJ paused for a moment, taking a breath, as if to let Howie in on just how important his next thought was. "There's a million of those moments that I store up, but mostly the one that came to mind was right after they called about Caro, and you knew, but none of us did and you couldn’t talk, not to save your life, you warmed up with us and you got on stage with us and you were there but you weren't, I felt like I couldn't see you, even standing right in front of me. I made you coffee that night, after the show, I can't see why you'd remember, but I was feeling helpless and it was something to do so I did it, measuring the grinds and pouring the water and putting a lump of sugar in yours because you liked it that way when you were upset, 'spoonful of sugar' was how you said it, so I remembered and dumped it on in. You took the coffee from me and our fingers touched while I was giving you the mug and you held your hand there, even though it was hot and maybe burning a little and eventually you said, 'She's dying and I feel I'm going with her and I don't know how to tell everyone that, I don’t know how I'm telling you this,' and so I told everyone and then they knew and we just did the best we could, which wasn't very much but it was something and most of the time you ended up making me feel like it was everything."

AJ pressed his lips together and then broke them apart. "That was what I thought of when they asked, that I did that once even though I couldn't do it again and again and again with Sarah, because whatever I did, it just didn't go all the way through her like it did with you. It got under her skin, I think, a little -- I hope anyway, that the things I did healed some part of her -- but with you it made things better, not perfect, but better and you got past things and became even more the man who is my best friend in the world, for lack of better words to explain who you are to me. And you were standing right behind me and you were part of the package deal and it occurred to me that this could work, that I could fix scraped knees and broken arms and even hearts that had been stamped upon if it wasn't just me. If Kevin and you and Nick and Brian were a part of it then it was going to be okay because when you're all part of the mix things work out for me. Not always in the way I think they're supposed to and usually not without vast amounts of pain involved, but I'm still here and I'm still wanting to be here and all of you are too and there's probably something to be said for that that I'm not even saying here, but I've been talking a long time and I can't remember most of what I said so I'm gonna stop now and hope it made sense."

Howie brought their hands up to his mouth and kissed one of AJ's knuckles. "I got it. I dunno if that's in truth any kind of sign of coherency, but I got it."

"Being that my point, buried deeply inside that mother of a monologue was something along the lines of 'that's really all that matters and since you do things are going to be just fine,' I'll go ahead and take your understanding over the vastly overrated concept of coherency."

"You know that…" Howie bit his lip, considering, "I mean, I think you were probably saying this too, but after the breaking, after the healing, that's always the best of a person. No matter how many times it happens, the scars, they add something. It's usually not pretty, but it's real and okay and if you love the person then all it does is give you something more to love."

"I know. I was trying… Kevin was more whole after the lawsuit. Sharper on the inside, dangerous to those who couldn't see the spikes, but put together in ways that I hadn't even imagined he could be. Brian lived more after the surgery, in everything, even tiny things, like dance steps and how many pieces of cake he would eat at a party. It's that way with all of us, even me, probably, though it's harder for me to see that, especially when I'm still pretty sure that there's no better me that was worth her death. All the same, on some level, I know it's there, waiting to be come into, when I can."

Howie inclined his head toward the glass, "I'm just trying to make you see that the perfection you're looking at in there, it's an optical illusion. To be perfect is to have no room for improvement. Watching them go through the stuff they have to go through to improve, that's gonna suck, I'm not even gonna bother lying. It'll probably involve a lot of stress and sleeplessness and yelling and other unpleasantness, but it'll be worth it, in the end. That's why I said yes. Because everything you guys have taught me that has mattered has been about the fact that living through shit pays off. I want them to know that, I want them to find that out for themselves, and I want to see it happen, the way I've seen it happen with their father and their second cousin and all the guys that they're gonna think of as uncles. I can't imagine any other possible way for this to all happen."

AJ looked at the sleeping bundles of yellow and purple and processed Howie's words. He opened his mind to the other possibilities, paths he hadn't chosen and didn't think he was going to at any time in the future. "I can," he replied honestly, flashing through a million scenarios a moment. "But none of them seem to be making any sense inside my head." His brain stopped working on alternative futures and slipped back into the past for a second, into watching Kevin take Sarah from Kristin's arms, Kevin's eyes holding an expression that AJ had never seen Kevin take on before, not even when dealing with his nieces and nephews. After several minutes, Kevin had held his arms out to AJ, baby and all, "Come hold her," with a casualness that belied the trust that was being placed in AJ's possession. A casualness that explained how deeply and without question Kevin placed his faith in AJ.

Suddenly, everything made sense.

*

Orlando was drooling contentedly, asleep on AJ's shoulder when AJ whispered to the other guys, "I've been thinking, if I was willing to front the expense, would you guys be willing to go into the studio, and, with the exception of about two songs, just start recording everything all over again?"

Kevin, sprawled on his back on the floor with Carolina asleep on her belly on top of his stomach, opened one eye. "Why, Aje?"

AJ laid his hand lightly over Orlando's back. It covered the whole space. "Because something's changed in the last few weeks. We sound different. I don’t like the thought of the album being uneven. Besides, I think we sound better, and that never really hurt anyone's sales."

Nick leaned slightly over the back of the couch, looming over AJ and Orlando. "He might have a point. I'd be willing to pitch in for the extra time."

Sarah, who was the only baby still struggling to stay awake, made cooing sounds of what AJ chose to think was agreement, wriggling slightly in Brian's arms. AJ reached over to run his hand over her soft head, "That's my girl, always backing me up."

Brian lifted Sarah up and kissed her nose. She smacked her lips at him. "Okay, I can see where this might be a good idea. I know I'm feeling much more on top of my game vocally since Leigh's been feeling better." The last few weeks of the pregnancy and a couple of weeks following it had been trying for Leighanne, but once she had started recovering she had taken over getting up in the middle of the night to feed and change Orlando, since she could sleep through the day while the baby was sleeping, whereas Brian had to go into the studio.

After Sarah and Carolina had been born they had moved studio hours back up to the afternoon and evening, where they had been when Leighanne and Kristin were still experiencing morning sickness. Kevin had been getting up with Kristin most nights and the later hours meant that he wasn't as tired when he came in.

Howie settled himself on the couch in between AJ and Brian. "I'm all for. We are sounding better. More like we remember why exactly we're doing all this."

AJ knew Howie was talking about making music and releasing it, but the words resonated on a much larger scale for him. "I'm starting to. Look, I know this is mostly about me, I should never have asked to go back into the studio so early. I wasn't ready, but at the same time, I'm not sure I could have made it to ready without going back just to not be ready for awhile. I'm sorry about the time that cost all of you, which doesn't mean that I'm not shameless enough to ask you to indulge me again."

Nick came around the couch and parked himself on one of the armrests. "I don’t think anyone's said this yet, and maybe it's a little mean. I don't want it to be that way, but I'm not sure, I think it might be. None of us has said this to you," Nick looked at AJ, "because we all thought -- think -- that you have the most right to grieve, and you do, of course, but it's not just about you, okay? Yeah, you've sounded like shit most days and we've gotten used to going in not expecting anything to come out of the session, but you quite obviously haven't noticed that none of us have exactly been performing at full capacity since last fall. I'm not gonna pretend like some of that wasn't stress from Leigh and Kris being pregnant, or from the studio being bitchy about how much time this album is taking or any of those really important things. Mostly, though, we all miss Sarah too."

Nick studied AJ's face for a second, careful of the older man's reactions. "We miss her and we think that maybe we should have been there for her, for both of you, that we should have seen things we didn't see. She was one of us, just like Leigh and Kris and can you honestly tell me that if one of them was hurt or in trouble or scared that you wouldn't feel a responsibility to help them out? Sarah was yours, but she wasn't just yours and all of us are trying to cover up the scars she left. More than that, though, she took you apart, and more than knowing what was going on with her, more than being able to stop her from self-destructing, we should have been able to stop her from harming you, and we weren't. At all." Nick was crying, something he did fairly regularly since he had started again, three days before AJ went into rehab and nearly two and a half years after he had first stopped completely.

"So let me correct your slightly selfish, if understandable, idea that this is all about you. It's a lot about you, definitely, and you have sounded like crap. But we've all been at less than our best and nothing in this group has ever been or will ever be about one of us. I don’t even think my solo albums were, as much as I wanted to think they were at the time. They were about my ability to come back to you guys, to be part of a whole again. I wasn't sure I was living up to my part of the bargain, being one of five, so I had to make sure I was one. In the end, though, it was about all of us. And this, this is also about all of us, whether you want to think that or not."

"Nicky." AJ said it because there was surprise in Kevin's eyes, both now open, and a little bit of worry that Nick shouldn’t have had to be the one to say all that. Brian was nodding slightly, though, and he didn't look taken aback at all. Brian always had known and always would know Nick the best, regardless of the things that sometimes drew them a bit further apart than they had been in the very beginning.

"You're not mad?" Nick was worried.

AJ shook his head. "No, just… I should have known that. I knew that when I came out of rehab, that it wasn't about me, not at all, really."

"You kind of overdid it then," Kevin told him, because AJ had nearly taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to the Backstreet Order in trying to make amends for his actions while drunk.

AJ smiled, a little. He leaned toward Nick, who ruffled his fingers over AJ's buzz. "I'm sorry you had to tell me all that, that I didn't notice, that I haven't been paying that much attention. I don't think you guys should have known about Sarah, or been able to help and I don't hold you responsible for not having watched out for me, because you did. You…well, I'm still here and there's really not much else to be said on that subject all things considered. I don't know if maybe you want me to blame you, because I did, for a long time, want somebody to blame me, somebody to yell at me and tell me it was my fault because then I could have agreed and everything would have been so much easier. I can't do that for you, all I can do is tell you that I'm getting better and I wouldn't have without you guys here, going into the studio with me, celebrating everyday things like birthdays and the coming of spring and just things that mark time, the passage of it, the reality of it, the fact of it. That's all I can do for you. I wish it were more. I owe you so much more."

"No," Nick disagreed. "That's more than enough. At least, for me."

Howie continued, his words flowing so quickly after Nick's that it was disorienting for them to be coming from AJ's other side, "And I think redoing everything is a great idea. I know I'm glad for the chance to clean up some of my suckage."

Orlando woke up then, screaming plaintively in AJ's ear. Brian and Kevin said at once, "Motion seconded."

Brian slid Sarah into Howie's arms and got up to take Orlando from AJ, "But yes, I'm in agreement with everyone else so far."

Carolina woke up in response to Orlando's cries and joined in with some of her own. Kevin sat up and transferred her to his shoulder. Sarah was awake as well, listening with wide-eyed wonder. "Listen, two-part harmony," was Kevin's only comment, but with four out of the five in agreement, it was understood that the decision had pretty much already been made. Only a major problem on Kevin's part would stop the proceedings at that point, and -- standing up, holding Carolina above his head and wiggling her a bit to get her to calm down -- he didn't look too upset about much of anything.

*

AJ waited until he and Howie were in the car on their way back home to half-state, half-ask, "Nick was awfully calm."

Nick and AJ tended to give each other a run for their money on the emotionally instable front. They could both be overwhelmingly loud when they were mad, dramatic when they were upset, and bouncy when they were happy. Nick's quiet, even laying out of the facts for AJ had scared AJ more than Nick yelling for a half an hour would have.

Howie knew what AJ was looking for. "The rest of it was behind the scenes, mostly for your benefit."

AJ wasn't sure if he had the right to know more, but his guilt had no interest in him staying quiet. "What was the rest, D?"

"It's been nearly ten months, Aje. There was a lot of 'the rest.'" Howie's jaw was tight.

"Is this why Brian and Nick weren't talking for most of February?"

"You know how Nick is, he had to take it out on someone," Howie didn't seem too concerned by the fact that it had been taken out on the wrong someone.

AJ knew how the group functioned, he knew that at any given point each of them was willing to stand in for another if it would minimize the hurt or the fracturing within the group. All the same, "I wish something had been said earlier than now."

"I know you do. I know. I need you to believe me when I tell you that this was really the best way for it to be handled, for everyone involved. You're doing better, Nick's doing better, Brian and Kevin and I are all doing much much better. Really, I know you're sitting over there having some kind of McLean Specialty Freak Out, but I wish you'd stop because every once in a rare while the rest of us know how to take care of ourselves and you and this just happened to be one of those times." Howie's voice was less biting than his words, but there was a definite edge of seriousness to it.

They pulled into the parking garage for their building. As the dark of the garage fell over the car inch by quick inch, AJ gave in. "Okay."

Howie peered suspiciously at AJ for a second before turning tightly into their assigned parking place. "Okay? You're not gonna play songs that are better used as background music on 'Dawson's Creek' for three days and send the rest of us large fruit baskets with stuffed giraffes in them or anything like that?"

AJ got out of the car and slammed the door cleanly shut. "A, I do not listen to teen-angst rock, except maybe when Nick writes it. B, the only reason you got a stuffed giraffe was because there was some kind of mix-up with the person who ordered their bouquets after me and were throwing a zoo-themed party. Finally, C, no, I'm not, because I'm tired of talking and feeling guilty and just the sheer and utter seriousness of everything right now. If I need to, I'll get back to feeling like a dick in a week, but for now, if you don't mind, I'm gonna go upstairs, take the meat out of the fridge and use the only kitchen implement in the entire set-up that I am able to without setting things on fire."

Ironically, said kitchen implement was the indoor grill, which Howie was unsure of and preferred to stay as far away from as humanly possible. "Zoo-themed party my ass. Sounds good to me."

"Even the feeling like a dick in week thing?" AJ inquired mildly, because they both knew who would be dealing with mopey-AJ when and if that happened.

"I've been trying to take things as they come for awhile now." Howie stepped into the elevator on the side of the garage, AJ right behind him. He put his arm around AJ's waist and squeezed.

AJ made a small squeaking noise when he couldn't hold it in any longer. Howie didn't even laugh at him.

*

The first thing AJ said to Howie the morning of Friday, October 5th was, "Last year, today was a Thursday."

The guys had scheduled off the date of Sarah's death because Kevin had said it was what he wanted for his birthday. He was vehemently opposed to, "Acting like nothing happened. I don’t doubt that AJ can get himself up and make himself coffee and sing for us, I just don't think he should have to."

AJ had looked around the room, "I don’t think any of us should have to." He had purchased Kevin a year's subscription to National Geographic on the off chance that everyone else took Kevin seriously and decided that was his only present.

In response to AJ's seemingly meaningless opening announcement, Howie walked over to the coffee machine. He thought better of it when he got there. "Fuck it, you feel up to going out?"

"Depends," AJ told him truthfully, "where're we going?"

"Jellies. I want me some hot cocoa with real whipped cream."

Even though it was warm outside, AJ felt just cold enough to smile, "Sounds like a plan." He went to go get his shoes on, grateful for the apartment's carpeting, not wanting to feel the uneasy slide of his feet against wood, to remember running frantically, feeling lost in a house that he had known so well.

Jellies was busy and loud and it was starting to give AJ a headache when Mama J magically appeared and bustled them into the tiny room in back where the employees sometimes lounged on their break. Her smile was as kind as her words, "Nice to see you boys here."

AJ bit his lip and reminded himself that he knew how to go on, how to keep living, had been doing it for a year now. A year and twenty-three minutes. Howie kissed Mama J's cheek, laughed at something she said and ordered their hot cocoas. Mama J ruffled AJ's hair and the rush of sensation was almost too much. AJ fought to keep his tears safe where they could only burn him. Howie stared hard at him after Mama J left, "Maybe we should have stayed home."

AJ shook his head. It took a few deep breaths before he could safely speak, "I was gonna leave anyway. I needed to pick up the flowers for the grave."

"Do you want me to go with you?" The first few times AJ had visited the grave Howie had driven him. AJ had asked him to, afraid of taking the wrong turn on purpose or finding some other direction to drive in on a whim. Howie had always gotten AJ there safely, though, and returned him whole. AJ had been going by himself for nearly eight months by this point, generally once a month, more if he needed to, but Howie thought it couldn't hurt to ask.

Mama J brought their hot cocoas along with everything they usually ordered and a few poppy seed muffins, because she knew they were AJ's weakness. "My treat, boys."

Howie protested ardently but she glared him down, "Just doing my part to make that one smile," she gestured at AJ. AJ looked up and gave her his best imitation smile, the one that had made all the cameras think he was fine for over a year when he was anything but. Mama J wasn't fooled. "A real smile. Eat up."

AJ slowly nibbled at one of the muffins. "I think I'd like you to be there. I want you to come to the grave with me, though."

Howie was used to waiting down by the car. "You sure about that?"

AJ stopped eating for a second. "Do you miss her, D?"

Howie took a sip, respecting the question enough to think about it. "Yes. I miss her, I miss a million things about her. But more than anything, I miss the way you were when the two of you were together. It…those moments overcame everything that should have been hard for me about them, you were just so happy."

"Then why wouldn't I want you to come up to the grave with me?"

"I guess I don’t really think of her as sitting up there watching over me, knowing what I'm doing. Sarah was a good person on the inside, and I think, given the chance, that she would have taken the chance to be guardian angel to a lot of people, would have liked that kind of purpose, but if she was given one choice, out of the millions and millions of people on this earth, the hundreds she knew in her life time, even Liz and Tessa and her mom, she would have chosen you. I feel like your visits to the grave are the times when the bond that still exists between the two of you is at its most tangible and I don’t have much right to interfere with that."

"If she really is sitting up there guarding over me," AJ pulled the words out of himself slowly, he'd had a year to think about the after-life in regards to his wife and for the most part he had strenuously avoided doing so, afraid of what he might discover in respect to his beliefs, "then she sent you to me, because you've been the tangible part of a guardian angel relationship this last year. And like Brian said, the wives, they always find ways to send us back to you guys when they think we can't handle something. I think Sar deserves to see what her work has wrought, don’t you?"

Howie spooned what was left of the whipped cream off the top of his drink. "Not arguing there. Just…thank you for letting me in this far."

AJ concentrated on the task of finishing one of the muffins.

*

There were already flowers on the grave by the time AJ and Howie got there. AJ had ordered a special bouquet ahead of time, one that mixed yellow roses and every color of tulip known to mankind. AJ suspected that a few of the colors in the bouquet had been cooked up in a lab somewhere, but Sarah had liked odd colored things, and tulips had been her favorite flowers, so he didn't take them out. Yellow roses were his favorite flower. Brian, who had been raised by a Southern Belle and took etiquette of all kinds very seriously, continuously reminded AJ that a yellow rose meant friendship, but AJ thought the memory of tucking one in Sarah's hair the night he had asked her to marry him, telling her, "This is friendship, just more," overrode the technical significance behind the flower. He was pretty sure Sarah had agreed, she had gotten the flower pressed between two sheets of silk and had it sewn into her wedding dress.

AJ got down on his knees and put the flowers at the base of the gravestone, next to someone else's mix of daisies. AJ thought they were probably from Liz. Liz was from Louisiana and had the accent to match and Sarah had always called her 'Daisy Mae' with a gentle lilt in her voice. Howie stood at AJ's side until AJ tugged at his hand. Howie came down, his hand staying in AJ's.

AJ traced his fingers over the words 'beloved wife.' He laughed painfully. "I think that if I'd been more able to deal with things when you were doing this, making plans for the funeral and the coffin and the headstone, that I would have chosen something more biting, something she would have grinned at and said, 'yup, that's what I'm saying.'"

"Like what, Aje?" Howie and Kevin had dealt with all the arrangements since both of them had done it before, or at least helped do it, and they didn't want Sarah's mom or AJ to end up having to be in charge. The gravestone was simple and tasteful and Howie knew that AJ appreciated both of those qualities. The saying on it was also one of the ones that the cemetery offered, prefabricated except for the name of the person and the years. Howie and Kevin had both wanted something different, but had felt too uneasy to ask for information from anyone who would know better.

AJ tilted his head. "She would have picked something that made her seem harder than she was. Dorothy Parker, maybe."

"What would you have picked?"

AJ closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the way she could find the cadence of any poem, late at night when she would read to him, her words linking together in an unsung melody. "She loved Frost. She must have written at least a dozen papers on him in college, because she was always talking about something she had learned while writing a paper on him. Or maybe it was just a really long paper. She had her favorites though. 'After Apple Picking,' maybe something from that. Or…no, this: 'They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/Between stars -- on stars where no human race is./I have it in me so much nearer to home/To scare myself with my own desert places.'"

"That's…"

"Honest," AJ finished for him. "She was scared. A million other things too, but scared. She wouldn't mind my being honest. She thought honesty to the people who were worthwhile enough to be honest to was the only way to go in life."

Howie peered over at AJ, his expression curious.

AJ turned his face to look at Howie, "I've been pissed off at her a lot lately. It's not fun, or a release, I just feel guilty about it, mostly, but Sherry says it probably had to happen, so I'm trying to let it without being destructive."

"This what the three hour run last week was about?"

AJ had scared Howie, going out for a run and not coming back. Howie had gone out to look for him in the car, found AJ miles away from the house, still running, seemingly unaware that it had grown dark outside. "Yeah. I didn't wanna break anything, or yell at you, so I just…left. I should have left a note," he admitted, apologetically.

Howie hadn't been mad since the first moment after AJ had seen Howie's stricken expression and had hastily murmured, "Shit, sorry, didn't realize how long it'd been."

"It's selfish, I know, but she didn't think about me in this, at all," AJ told Howie. "I mean, the note, it said she loved me, but how could she have if she could still leave me? And when I'm rational, I know, I know she left me because she thought that was better for me, but what kind of fucked up logic is that? I saw that note and I ran through my house unable to breathe, I couldn't draw oxygen into my lungs and I was still running, trying to get to her. She shouldn’t have done that. She should have stayed with me and tried to make things work and yeah, I'm mad that she didn't. Really fucking mad."

"That's okay," Howie wanted AJ to know.

"I left her once, I never told you guys, I went to go visit her and we got in a fight and I turned right back around and came back. But I called her from the fucking plane I felt so bad, and I told her I would never leave her. I promised her that. It was supposed to work both ways, D. We both took those vows. We both promised each other as much of forever as we had. She didn't have the right to renege." AJ was sobbing, hunched over on the ground, his shoulders shaking.

Howie placed his hand in between AJ's shoulder blades, his middle finger aligning perfectly with AJ's spine. "I know baby. I know."

"I hate her for hurting me like this," AJ's words were venomous, dripping into the ground with his tears. "I hate her."

Howie tipped up AJ's chin and looked into his friend's eyes. AJ let go of another broken sob, "I still miss her. Every day. Every second. Nobody tells you that love buries itself inside of you where it can cause internal bleeding if anything goes wrong."

Howie nodded slightly at that, not looking away. "I've heard it's worth the risk."

AJ struggled to take a few deep breaths. "With her it was."

*

Denise finally took Howie up on his offer to visit over Thanksgiving weekend. AJ picked her up at the airport and carried her bags for her, and once they were by the car, where he could stop and put down the bags, he hugged her to himself tightly whispering about how much he had missed her. She let herself be held, grasping on equally tight, not saying anything but making little noises of agreement at everything being said. When he finally let go of her, she looked him straight in the eye and told him, "Well, it wouldn't kill you to hop a plane and visit more often, mister."

Only slightly chagrined, he responded, "Works both ways, missy."

She ruffled his hair and climbed in the car. "Take me to go see Howie, I miss him too."

"Way to make me feel special, mom."

AJ and Howie had scoured the apartment before her visit. It wasn't that either of them were slobs or that Denise was a neat freak, but both of them had an inborn sense of what was appropriate for a parental visitation, nurtured by Jane and Denise's trips over to Europe during the years that they had all been there.

She cooked Thanksgiving dinner for them, making enough that there would be leftovers for weeks. After the dishes had been done, all three of them settled on the couch, Denise and Howie on either end with AJ's head in Denise's lap and his feet in Howie's. He fell asleep like that, the words of the conversation making less and less sense as his mind detached from his surroundings.

He woke up in the morning with his favorite throw wrapped securely around him and the smell of eggs and butter wafting in from the kitchen. He got up, throw and all, and walked over to see what was being made for breakfast. Denise turned around and smiled fondly, "Morning, sleepyhead. Cheesy eggs and toast okay?"

AJ grinned goofily. "You know it is." When he had been young, AJ had tried to get his mom to make that for breakfast every day of the week.

"Sit down, kid."

AJ obeyed his mom and she made up two plates, bringing one to him and sitting down with hers next to him at the table. AJ took a bite then leaned over and kissed Denise, "Thanks." He sat back down. "Sorry I wiped out on you guys last night. I guess I was exhausted."

"It was okay. Gave Howie and me a chance to talk."

AJ finished chewing. "Oh?"

"Don't look at me like that," Denise told him defensively. "You never tell me anything, I've gotta get my info from somewhere. I would suck as a mom if I just ignored you."

"I tell you things," AJ argued.

"You tell me the good things. You never tell me the bad things."

"I don’t want to worry you," AJ protested.

"I'm your mother, dip. I worry whether or not you tell me. And it's worse to worry over the unknown than over the known."

AJ flinched at that, thinking of how many times he had wished there was something they could pin down as the cause of Sarah's depression. "I'm sorry."

"Baby, what-"

"Just something you said made me think of something, mom. I'm okay." He added at her look of doubt, "Really, I'm fine. What did Howie tell you?"

"That you still miss her and sometimes you and Kevin and Nick fight because you feel guilty but you don’t know how to express that without getting pissy and Kevin and Nick don't always get it but things work out in the end. That you spend a lot of time with little Sarah and Howie gets to thinking that you're moving on and handling things but then something will get said and he senses this invisible thread that's holding you back from taking the next step, whatever the next step is."

AJ got up and took the milk out of the refrigerator. He reached up into the cabinet for a glass. "You want some?" Denise nodded. He got out a second glass. "I think…this is gonna sound stupid."

He handed the second glass to Denise and put the milk back where he had taken it from. She stayed silent, waiting. He sat back down. "I'm afraid that if I move on past where I am now, that if I take that last step toward feeling okay most days, thinking of her a lot, but not constantly, not with every breath, considering that she won't be the last person I love in my life, if I do all those things, take those tiny leaps from the way I function right now, that I'm letting her down. It's only really been a year, y'know? I mean, a year, a month, fifteen days," AJ glanced at the clock, "an hour and six minutes since she was pronounced dead. Estimated, a year. And it's funny, because I read a whole bunch of pamphlets over at Sherry's on mourning and how it shouldn't be given a time period and the worst thing a person can do as a mourner is listen to people tell them that it's been 'so many months' or 'so many years' and that they should be over it. The guys didn't do that though, ever, and I never had to feel guilty about how long it was taking me to deal with it. Not until I started feeling like I had dealt with it, until the babies were born and life started taking on this wholly different feeling from everything that had come before it. Then I started thinking that it hadn't been long enough. That maybe if the healing is happening this quickly for me that I didn't love her enough in the first place and that's why all this happened. I'm just scared, trying to understand how I really could love her as much as I know I loved her and yet be able and almost willing to move past her in such a relatively short amount of time."

Denise scooted her chair closer to AJ's and cupped his face with her palm. "You have lived a life since you were very young in which there was not a lot of time for anything: grief, happiness, terror, anything. Everything in your world has been compressed in some ways, all your possessions had to fit on a bus for so long, all your relationships had to either span long distances or last a night. What is normal for other people is not normal for you and the four other guys. You can’t go through your life expecting your reactions to things to mirror people who live outside the bubble that your occupation has created for you." She leaned in and kissed his cheek, holding his face to hers for a few moments before straightening up. "I have never known anyone to love the way you do. Not me, or my mother, or any of my friends, or even the other guys. Their love is strong, and unwavering, but yours has a passion added to it that I have never seen duplicated in anyone. Sarah was at the pinnacle of that love for a little over four years. I know I'm your mom and I see things that other people, least of all you, get to see. But how you can doubt that your love was enough is beyond me. I can't understand it and I never will, not even if you spend years trying to explain it. What I do understand is that you are worried about disappointing her, even now. I know because you've always worried about disappointing others. So much so that sometimes you end up doing things that drive you into doing just that. But baby, and I don't say this to be mean, just because it needs to be said. Sarah is dead. You're still alive. And you have got to let that be, let yourself live. If she would want anything different then she didn't love you enough, not the other way around. Am I…is that clear?"

AJ got up and nudged his mom over so that he could sit on the edge of her chair and curl up into her arms. He was hanging off the end of the chair, uncomfortable, but safe in his mom's hold when he nodded, his head moving against her shoulder. "But knowing something and being able to act on it are such completely different things, y'know?"

She kissed the top of his head. "Yeah, baby, I know, but I've yet to see you not do something you set your mind to."

It surprised AJ that, at nearly thirty years of age, his mom's confidence in him could still make him feel like everything was going to be all right.

*

Lara called AJ and Howie's place on a Monday night. AJ was the first one to the phone. He didn't recognize the number on the caller ID, so there was a healthy dose of wariness in his tone, "Hello?"

"AJ or Howie?"

AJ wasn't telling a female with a voice he didn't recognize who he was, so instead he asked, every bit as abruptly, "Who is this?"

The voice laughed and suddenly he recognized it, "Lara," he chimed at the same time she did, "Sorry," they both said together again, and both of them laughed some more. He finally explained, "You sound different on the phone, and I didn't recognize the number."

"Better safe than sorry," she told him, plainly not upset.

"What's up?" AJ looked over at Howie who had been listening from the "who is this" on.

"I'm gonna just say, before I go into it, that I really debated about whether to call, and I still don’t know if I'm doing the right thing, but I had to do something, so here goes."

AJ frowned slightly, "Is everything okay?" Howie tensed up slightly. AJ walked over and sat on top of him to make him relax a little. He did, with an "oof."

"Mostly. There's really no polite way to say this, so I'm just gonna come out and tell you, you may have noticed that Nick only talks about what's eating at him after being a complete dick for several weeks about it."

This was one of Nick's larger personality flaws. However, given that it was one AJ had shared for quite some time, he felt it necessary to say, "But when he gets around to telling you, it's always really well thought out."

"True. Right now, though, Nick is feeling neglected by you and Howie. He feels like he's being left out by his two best friends in the world, and really -- this is the selfish part of my motivation for calling -- it's fucking with our relationship. Talk to him, or include him more, or something, but I'm begging, get him to stop freaking out, okay? I hate fighting with him over things that have nothing to do with us. I don't even like fighting with him over the shit that does have to do with us."

AJ thought that was a pleasant switch from most of Nick's past girlfriends, but he didn't say anything. "We can do that, hon. No problem. Sorry you had to be the one to intervene."

Lara's, "it's okay," was shaky, but audible. "Thanks."

"You're welcome. We gonna see you around sometime soon?"

"I'm sure," she said, sounding honest.

"Okay, see ya then." AJ hung up.

Howie gasped, "You have to get off me and tell me what just happened, in that order."

AJ tumbled off onto his side before righting himself. "We're gonna call Nick now, and pretend like his girlfriend didn't just call us and tell us that we haven't been paying enough attention to him and he feels left out."

Howie sighed. "Kid is high maintenance." It was a fond complaint.

AJ tucked his feet underneath his body. "If you and Nick moved in together, I'd probably start feeling left out way before a year had passed."

"The possibility of you having a point exists," Howie conceded.

"Sweet of you to say," AJ deadpanned as he hit the button for speakerphone and dialed Nick's number.

Nick picked up before the second ring sounded. "Hey!"

Howie and AJ shared identical winces at the unadulterated excitement in Nick's voice.

*

A month before he actually went, AJ started planning a field trip to the storage units where the guys had put everything he hadn’t wanted to deal with from the house. It was a good three weeks after he had begun planning that he deigned to mention it to anybody else.

He told Howie, because Howie seemed the most likely to go along with him, "I've been, like, girding my loins or something, for three weeks now. I wanted to get it done before the New Year, be all symbolic and shit. Yeah, that didn't happen."

Howie seemed unsurprised by all of this. "How's that going for you now?"

"I think I might be sufficiently girded. Or whatever. Which, uh, doesn't mean that I wouldn't love for you to come with," AJ made a conscious effort to exude his best puppy-dog-at-the-Christmas-dinner-table aura.

The effort was evidently wasted, because Howie didn’t even glance over at him. "I was planning on it, just waiting for you to be the one to say something. Nick might come too, depending on when it is and if he already has plans or not."

AJ wasn't going to fight. Howie might have been his favorite, maybe even more than that, something that couldn't be explained by a simple word like 'favorite,' but Nick was still one of his best friends. "Extra set of hands couldn't hurt."

"That's okay, right?" Now Howie looked over, anxious. "He said we should ask and I said 'why start now' but he could have been right on this one."

"No. You were right." AJ knew that the past year and three months had changed everything but he didn't want it to have changed the freedom the guys had to walk in on his life without asking permission.

Howie changed the train of the conversation. "Do you know what you're going in for? I mean, is there a plan, or is this just something Sherry suggested, or what?"

"I brought it up, actually. Sherry thought it was a good idea so long as I was ready. I think I am. As much as I'm gonna be without waiting ten years, and I don’t really have any guarantees that that'll help, either." AJ spread his hands in the visual equivalent of 'just-doing-my-best-here.'

"Are you taking all the stuff out of storage?"

"Oh hell no," AJ laughed. "Where would we put it? Nah, I want some pictures, stuff that will remind me of her without making me crazy, knickknacks and all. I wanna find the boxes with her clothes and go through them. Anything that didn't have some kind of significance is going to the battered women's shelter that she used to donate to every six months or so. The rest I'm giving to Tessa, because her and Sar were the same size and she'll wear the stuff. There might be some stuff I wanna send to her mom too. I can’t really remember what all's in there. I'm gonna donate a lot of the art to JWR, because Kevin's doing that auction thingie to raise money and I'm relatively positive I just want to start all over again as far as décor goes whenever I decide to do the whole permanently settling down thing again. The rest of the plan sounds a lot like that, donate what I don't want, find good homes for the things that mean something that I have no use for, try and find somewhere to put the stuff I do want or just pack it back up and leave it there until I'm somewhere where I have room for it."

Howie approved. "Sounds like a solid plan."

"Really? Because sometimes things sound good in my head but are actually completely screwy when put into action."

"You probably shouldn't go into it thinking it's going to be as simple as it sounds in your head."

AJ shook his head, "No, I know that. Which is kind of scary, because it sounds anything but simple when I think about it."

"Polly and Angie did it with Caro. I would've helped, but I wasn't there and they didn't want mom and dad doing it. I felt bad about that. Angie called me a lot, it tore her apart."

"She must've been glad you were there to listen," AJ reassured Howie. Howie wasn't one to let guilt eat at him, but Caro's death was a part of Howie outside of his normal self and AJ knew Howie had feelings about his actions while she was dying and for months afterward that would probably never be resolved.

Howie smiled knowingly at AJ. "I'm glad I'm actually here this time."

AJ was forced to admit, "Yeah, me too."

*

Nick ended up coming along and being the one to invent a system wherein there were three empty boxes being filled up at any time. One for stuff that AJ wanted to keep and take out of storage, one for the stuff that AJ wanted to give to friends and family, and one for stuff that AJ wanted to donate. Anything that was being kept in storage was put back in the box being unloaded after the other stuff had been sorted through. It wasn't a foolproof system, but it was the best any of them had come up with and Nick was surprisingly good at getting about three to five more items than should logically fit in any box in one. Then again, he'd been packing and unpacking on a regular basis for nearly two decades.

AJ was moving a lot slower than he'd expected himself to. Howie just clasped AJ's shoulders tight enough to hurt before releasing them, AJ's muscles loosening at the same time. "Take your time. We don't have to finish today."

AJ didn't like to think of himself as someone who needed to wait for permission to do things, but somehow knowing Howie was okay with his actions always made them sit better inside AJ's head.

Kevin and Leighanne had been in charge of labeling the boxes and both of them had done an admirable job. AJ started with most of his stuff, since he felt that it would be the easiest to make decisions on and because there seemed to be a lot more of it. Sarah hadn't been much of a packrat; AJ, when he had finally settled down and gotten the chance to, had taken to the habit of keeping everything so quickly he wondered how he'd managed to keep his life relatively uncluttered until that point.

Howie was good about letting AJ make the decisions for the most part, gently prodding him with a, "You really need that?" or "You have a plan for where to put that?" when AJ was tempted to give into the habit of keeping something for the sake of keeping it.

Nick took them out to lunch at noon, because, "We need to breathe some air that actually carries oxygen in it."

When they got back, it took another hour or so to finish up AJ's boxes. AJ pressed his lips together and pressed the tip of the Exacto into the tape on a box that purported to carry, "Sarah's clothes." He flipped the cardboard flaps over to the side and was hit by the lingering smell of liquid Downy. Howie, who was standing right next to him, commented, "That's some long-lasting detergent."

AJ smiled. "Liquid softener. She loved that shit. It had that little ball that you pour the liquid into. Even after Nicola started doing Sar's laundry, Sar wouldn't let Nic do it if Nic didn't use the liquid Downy. Sar said it made her feel clean in her clothes even when she was filthy." The smell, light as it was, was making AJ dizzy. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them back up, Nick was standing next to him. Howie asked him quietly, "You ready?"

AJ passed his fingers over the top layer of clothing packed, cotton swishing beneath his fingers. There was a blue shirt on top, a shirt he had gotten Sarah one day because he had seen it and liked it and thought she would too. He had made love to her while she was modeling it for him, over the side of the couch, the shirt still on. AJ wondered if that counted as a sentimental enough reason to keep the shirt. He knew that if it did, he would be keeping every shirt, skirt, pair of pants, pair of socks, pair of earrings, anything that Sarah had worn on her body. He had thought, or maybe just hoped, that the sensory memory of his fingertips tracing her jaw, his hands firmly clasping her feet in a massage, his tongue licking where her shoulder bones rose up in a sharp point would fade, become an imprint of pleasure rather than a constant reminder of what was no longer there. If they ever would, though, they hadn't yet, and AJ pulled the blue shirt from the pile, remembering how loud the sound of her giggling had been as he'd tickled her nipples with his breath.

He folded the shirt up carefully, placed it in Nick's hands and said, pretending like he wasn't crying. "We can give this away."

The memory still lingered, even when Nick was out of sight, putting the shirt into another box. Howie hugged him, "We don't have to do this now."

"I'll remember her without reminders," AJ told him, choking on the word 'remember.'

"Oh." Howie reached up to wipe at AJ's eyes for him. "Babe, of course you will."

"This isn't me getting rid of her." AJ was glad he sounded more sure of himself than the moment before and took it as a sign that he should speak some more. "I can't do that."

"No, that isn’t what this is about," Howie reassured him.

"Okay." AJ took a deep breath, coughed on some tears and grabbed another shirt. Sarah had worn it during one of her sets on her last tour. AJ remembered her hesitantly working out the song that had started that set: in the shower, during commercial breaks, while hiking. It had come together one morning when she was working on her email, snapped into place and she hadn't stopped singing for the rest of the day. AJ hadn't gotten tired of hearing the song, not once. "This can be given away as well."

*

Getting everything reorganized and out of storage took a little over two days all told, with plenty of breaks for food, fresh air, and the sake of sanity on all their parts. AJ called the women at the shelter immediately and asked, "If it's at all possible, could you maybe pick this stuff up soon?" not wanting to change his mind about anything.

A woman who looked much too tiny to move kitchen utensils let alone large boxes showed up and carried more down to the car from their apartment than AJ and Howie put together. She thanked them profusely for the donation, reminded them that the shelter did a yearly drive if they found anything else they wanted to give and drove off in a truck so big she had to sit on a phone book to see over the dash.

AJ invited Tessa over for dinner and was glad when she accepted even though they hadn't talked all that much since Sarah's death. Howie made the chile rellenos casserole, as it was the dish he was most confident of his ability to make well. Tessa ate three servings while convincing AJ that she really was doing fine. "How are you?" She finally asked, when Howie was dishing out equal servings of cinnamon ice cream into three bowls.

"I am..." AJ gave the question some thought, "moving on. Some days that feels good and some days it feels awful, but I'm told that it's for the best when all's said and done."

"So I hear," Tessa's expression was enigmatic, her smile conveying more than mere understanding. "I'm sorry, by the way. I've meant to call and say that for awhile now, just haven’t gotten around to it. She would've wanted me to make sure that you were okay, to make sure that Liz was okay, for that matter, and we just started really hanging out again three or so months ago. I just kind of…went a little bit crazy after. Didn't even talk to my family for months and months until my older brother flew down scared witless to make sure I was really still alive. That woke me up." Her eyes shadowed over a bit and she explained, "It was easier to call Liz than it was to call you. I was relatively sure I knew what she was going through. We were both terrified that you hated us, thought we should've seen something that would have saved her or been better friends or something. We couldn't even begin to imagine how we would feel about us if we were in your place."

"Thinking the same thing, only with you guys hating me. After all, I was co-joined in marital agreement with her, if anyone was going to be pinned with the blame, I would have to assume it was me." AJ put a hand on Tessa's knee. "I'm sorry, too. As much as she would've wanted you here, that responsibility was laid at both our feet, and neither of us really did a sterling job responding to it. I'm glad you're here now though. I already said that, so, there's me saying it again."

Tessa took all four boxes out to her car with AJ and Howie's help at the end of the evening, promising to either wear them or give them to her younger sister, who would also fit in them. AJ, on his part, promised to call both her and Liz sometime in the next week just to check up on them and chat. She kissed his cheek before driving off, "She always loved you best when you were happy. I don't think her being dead changes that."

AJ had been too emotionally exhausted by the entire evening to think about what she might be telling him beyond the basic, general, 'go forth and find your happiness, young man,' theme. Instead, AJ stumbled back upstairs and looked at the boxes left. AJ and Howie had left anything of Sarah's that AJ hadn't been sure what to do with in storage, along with the stuff of AJ's that he didn't immediately care to have. By this point, all the boxes that were to be given away had been, leaving only the stuff that AJ had decided to add to the belongings he already had in the apartment.

Howie herded AJ out of the hallway and into bed. "Problem for tomorrow," he insisted.

AJ didn't resist, entirely sure that when he woke up in the morning, Howie would still be there to help him figure it out.

*

Howie was still there in the morning, crunching on Grape Nuts without milk, a personal favorite of Howie's that AJ had tried to understand time and again despite repeated failures. This particular morning he chose to bypass his habit of trying the first bite without milk and just poured part of the freshly opened jug of milk in along with the Grape Nuts, which were still sitting out for his convenience.

AJ put the milk away. "I think we can get one of these boxes at least started on before we have to be at the studio. We're booked at one today, right?"

Howie stood up to wash his empty bowl out. "Yup. Do you have any idea of where you want any of this stuff to go?"

"I didn't even want to think about it without consulting you. I mean, I know some of it's gonna go in my room, but the rest I need your input on, seeing as how you were still paying half the rent here, last time I checked."

Howie turned the water off. "I don’t mind your sprawl, I wouldn't have invited you in if I did."

The crunch of AJ's cereal was loud in his ears and he barely heard Howie's words. He heard enough to recognize the sound of exhaustion. AJ glanced at Howie's back. Howie was leaning up against the counter, his shoulders forced high and the muscles surrounding them strung tight. AJ set his cereal bowl down and walked to Howie, wrapping his arms around Howie's midriff and pulling him back, into AJ's chest. "Hey."

"I've been having dreams, they wake me up, I can't go back to sleep." Howie said by way of answer to AJ's unasked question.

"What kind of dreams?" AJ inquired.

"I don't remember them."

AJ had known Howie long enough to snap back, without thinking for a second that he was reading the situation wrong, "Don't lie to me."

Howie started to laugh, but not like he actually found the situation funny. "Okay, y'know what, Aje? I won't. They're wet dreams, like a thirteen year old boy. Remember when Nick had his first one and he was freaked out because they didn't have sex ed in his school district yet, at least not sex ed that was in any way educational? And he didn't know who to go to about it? Like that."

AJ felt sick to his stomach. He remembered. Nick had been scared out of his mind thinking that something was wrong with him, that he was a freak. It had taken both of them nearly an hour to get him to calm down and breathe normally again. "D. That's…wet dreams are-"

"Normal, I know. The analogy wasn't perfect." Howie's voice was thick, frustrated.

AJ had heard that tone of voice before. "Oh. The dreams. They're about me." It wasn't a moment of conceit, just one of realization.

"Yes," Howie bit out harshly, "and if you wouldn't mind, could you let go of me?"

AJ considered the question carefully. He thought about whether it was physically possible for him to unlatch his hands and allow Howie to step out of his arms. He was pretty sure it was if he could get his mind around the idea that doing that might be letting go of something much larger, of the surety that Howie would be somewhere near every morning for the rest of AJ's life if AJ needed that. AJ knew he would never leave, not unless Howie asked him. Which, he supposed, Howie was doing. AJ unlocked his fingers and was about to let them slip away from each other when he stopped, "What if I did mind?"

Howie's voice broke as he answered, "Then I would let you hold on."

"I-" AJ pulled his fingers back tightly together in an effort to hold his own hand, "If I told you that I wanted to hold on, wanted to give you what you want and what I think I want, I'm almost positive I want but I'm terrified of wanting, would you mind so very much if I held on?"

Howie's breath shook. "I don’t understand, AJ."

"Everybody's been telling me that she would want me to be happy, she'd want me to live, to move on, to breathe. I've been scared to for so long, and I still am. Shaking in my boots, Kevin would say. But you're standing here, in my arms, and I want you to turn around and kiss me, want it more than I ever wanted it way back when we were kids and I was jailbait and you were beautiful. I was stupid and impatient then and I didn't wait long enough. If I had we'd have been together and all this would have never happened, but I can't regret her. I don't want to regret her. We're going to be better for all of that, I know we are, even if I freak out a lot and you have to stay still and wait for me to come back, or sometimes even chase after me. I apologize in advance for the fact that maybe I'm not quite ready for this yet, but it has to start now. Everything has been about me for so long and now I need it to be about you. You need it to be about you."

"You think this because you've grown into the comfort of living with me. You need to go stay with Nick for a bit, regain your bearings, rethink this." Howie gently struggled to get past the barrier of AJ's arms.

"I think this because I've discussed it with Sherry and my mom and Kevin and Nick and Brian, all of whom asked different questions about co-dependence and fear of being alone and post-suicide trauma and a million other things. And whatever my answers were to them, they must have been right, because they all agreed, that now it was just time to wait for the right moment, the moment when I knew I could take that next step and say, 'okay, let's do this' -- not try this, do this. That's now. Even with all the uncertainties, that's now."

Howie, who was still being held hostage, turned around, leaning back to look up at AJ. "I can wait, Aje. I can wait for this. I never thought I would get it. I waited for years and years thinking I was waiting for nothing. I can wait for what I know is really something."

AJ released his arms, but only to anchor them on the counter, directly next to Howie's hips, trapping the smaller man between them. "Good. Because in a way you're going to have to. There's a million things that I remember as being part of a relationship that I can't do just yet. I'm giving into this now because I'm tired of fighting against telling you I love you and having you know that I don’t mean it the way I mean it with the other guys, because I want to sleep in your bed and invite you into mine sometimes. I'm tired of pretending that the feel of you -- your fingertips, your hair, your breath, you -- isn't everything to me, as much as it is to you. I'm tired of pretending like the scales of this relationship are uneven when they aren't. I can stop lying to myself and to you and even to Sarah now and start rebuilding what I used to think of as life. Let me do that. Don't make me wait."

Howie reached up, putting a palm to AJ's cheek. He didn't hold back the soft sigh of happiness as AJ turned his head just enough to kiss the inside of Howie's palm. "You have to tell me if you ever want to stop, because I won't. And I don't want that to keep you from living. My presence shouldn't do that anymore than her absence."

"You're not taking advantage of me in my weakness, Dorough. If anything I'm doing that to you, asking you for patience beyond what any man should rightfully have to exercise," AJ pointed out, slightly exasperated. Howie had a tendency toward the overly noble.

Howie ducked his head, smiling. "Thirty seconds into being us and I'm already pissing you off."

AJ peeled one hand off the counter and brought Howie's chin up with it. He pressed his lips to Howie's in a chaste, and yet somehow intense, kiss. "I find it cute, which is how I know this is okay. I wouldn't make a mistake on this, D. Not with you. Maybe with anyone else in the world, but you matter too much for that, please, believe me."

Howie let the word, "Always," fall from his lips and allowed both of them to feel the tiniest flash of hope that it pertained to the entire situation.

*

"Ugh!" Nick threw his hands up after they stopped taping. They were on their eighth take of one particular line of harmony and no closer to the way they wanted it to sound than when they had started. "The fuck, guys?" Nick glared at AJ and Howie.

"Sorry, sorry," AJ tried to placate the guys with apologies, which wasn't working, because over to his side Howie was grinning and AJ didn't feel all that sorry for causing that.

Howie attempted a straight face, "We'll get it right this time."

"Perhaps," Kevin suggested helpfully, "you could put off acting like lovesick monkeys until we finish this song."

Howie stiffened a bit. AJ glanced over at him, but Howie was refusing to meet his gaze. "Not acting, Kev. Being."

Brian slipped off the edge of his stool and it took him a few steps to regain his balance. "Okay. You know what? I think we're gonna have this conversation before we start taping again, so that we might actually get something done today." Brian waved at the techs in the booth who were pretending that they weren't paying attention, "Go take...thirty." He turned back to AJ, "If someone has to pay them off, take three guesses who it's gonna be."

"Rok," Howie looked straight at Brian. "Calmate." Howie sometimes spoke basic Spanish when he was close to freaking out. According to him, it made him concentrate more on what he was saying. AJ had never really thought about it before, but now it was kind of sexy. In the absence of anything to bang his head on, AJ bit the inside of his lip.

When Brian had seated himself on the stool again, Kevin took charge of the conversation. "How long, uh, have we been missing out?"

AJ brought his wrist up so that he could see his watch. "About six hours. Which is probably why I'm still leaning toward the overwhelmingly obvious with everything. That could take a while to slack off."

The other guys nodded in unison at this. They had always been able to tell who AJ was crushing on, from JC Chasez when he was sixteen all the way up through Sarah, because he held very little back on the emotional front. AJ had been amazed that they hadn't noticed him crushing on Howie until he'd talked with each of them about it, it was a testament to just how unsure of everything he was inside himself that there had been no outward indications. He was glad they had caught on so quickly to the fact that things had changed, it made him feel more normal, like his world had been broken, but someone was deftly pulling it back together, making the pieces come together like a particularly complicated puzzle being solved. He suspected Howie of being the someone.

Nick asked quietly, "You were gonna tell us, right?"

Howie rolled his eyes, "Well, yeah. Like you're one to talk, how long did you like Lara before we got to hear about her, huh?"

Nick pleaded the fifth.

"That's what I thought," Howie rubbed his victory in.

Kevin shook his head fondly. "Now that you've got that out of your system, do you think the two of you could record for a few hours without getting distracted by each other's mere presence?"

AJ took one look at Howie and decided he was making no promises. "Probably."

Kevin took what he could get and focused his gaze on Howie. "D?"

"Uh. Most likely?" Howie sounded less sure of himself than AJ.

Brian laughed. "It's a good thing I've been praying for you guys since the dawn of time, because I think I'd want to kill you otherwise."

Nick sympathized with Brian. "Disgustingly. Cute." Later, when Nick thought AJ was actually paying attention to AJ's upcoming solo, Nick gave Howie a thumbs up. Howie glowed a little brighter even than before, and AJ basked without letting on that he had been privy to the moment.

*

AJ refused to let being Howie's boyfriend be any different from being his friend in the way that they operated around the apartment. He wasn't ready to alter the ease with which their communication took place or the way that they had of not stepping on each other's toes. Their system for being in the same space was a working one, and AJ didn't need to try to improve upon that, even in the face of the massively changing surface description of their relationship to each other. If they had been normal, AJ thought, things might have been different, but normal didn't usually include two people already living together by the time they decided things might work out for them, or knowing each other for nearly two decades before the simple fact that they could be good together was brought to their attention. As it was, AJ wasn't going to worry about normal, there were enough things to worry about without adding that to the list.

AJ made linguini noodles with Alfredo sauce from a can. Howie washed the dishes. AJ settled on the sofa and turned on the History channel before deciding that he couldn't handle learning any more about Hitler than he already knew and switching to TBS, which was airing "Dirty Dancing." Howie liked that movie and all AJ wanted was not to have to think, so he threw the remote aside and waited for Howie to join him.

Howie came in a few minutes later, hands still smelling like anti-bacterial potpourri. He grabbed a throw from one end of the couch and maneuvered AJ just enough to wrap both of them in it. Howie watched the movie distractedly, his hands petting different areas of AJ's skin slowly, waiting for AJ's implicit consent that Howie's touch wasn't too much, too soon, too unwanted. AJ stayed still, allowing the exploration, taking pleasure in Howie's tiny noises of happiness from just touching AJ, just being given permission to dip his fingers below AJ's waistband and over the smooth curve of his hipbone. Somewhere inside AJ's head it occurred to him that it was dangerous for Howie to have this kind of love, when AJ had no idea what his love looked like or felt like or anything beyond the fact that it was there. He wanted to touch Howie as well, but Howie had waited longer, been more patient, deserved this more.

Howie touched his lips to AJ's jaw going still, not breathing until AJ bent his head and breathed into Howie's mouth for him. AJ hooked one hand around Howie's back, anchoring the smaller man to himself and kissed him. Howie's mouth was warm and soft and barely mobile against AJ's, letting AJ take the lead. AJ pulled back and waited for Howie to come after him, and when Howie did, he opened AJ up with his tongue, tickling against the roof of AJ's mouth, swiping and coming up hard against AJ's tongue. He pressed AJ into the couch, not bothering to come up for air as he straddled AJ, placing their cocks in direct contact with each other, barring a few layers of clothing. AJ moaned into Howie's mouth and Howie laughed, the two sounds meeting inside of them.

Howie hooked one hand firmly around the back of AJ's neck and drew back just the tiniest bit to suck on AJ's lower lip until AJ used his free hand to force Howie's mouth back into direct contact with his. AJ's lip felt about three times its normal size and when Howie scraped his teeth against it as a parting gesture, AJ nearly came right then. Instead he groaned into Howie's mouth and attacked, grinding himself up against Howie, sucking fiercely against Howie's tongue, pulling Howie so close into himself it was a miracle Howie could still work oxygen through his lungs.

They came that way, plastered together, fully clothed, making out like fifteen year olds. AJ was last, Howie already slumping over on AJ's chest, his breathing loud and wet. When AJ felt safe speaking again he croaked, "I need a shower."

Howie made him a deal. "I'll let you up if you come to my bed afterward."

The hand that had been stroking Howie's back stilled.

"Just to sleep, Aje. This was as much as either one of us could take for one night," Howie reminded him. "I just don’t want you alone after this, that's all. I wouldn’t want you alone even if I wasn't the person you had done it with."

AJ resumed stroking. "Okay, you have yourself a deal."

Howie tumbled rather ungraciously to the floor. It took AJ several minutes to do anything that required more coordination than that.

*

Howie wasn't in bed yet by the time AJ came. The shower wasn't running, so AJ crawled in under the covers and made himself wait patiently. Howie emerged seconds later, bringing the smell of ginger shampoo and baking soda toothpaste with him into the bed. AJ didn't move, so Howie went to him, lying close enough to almost be touching AJ. "You okay?"

"It was perfect, D," AJ told him, in the lightest voice he could manage.

"Yeah, but that's not what I asked."

"Trust you to choose this moment to become a stickler for meaning," AJ twisted away from Howie. Howie didn’t follow. He didn't have to, AJ could still feel him, not even inches away.

"She had to have been the last person who touched you like that," Howie said, sounding surprised at his own words.

"Right before," AJ admitted through a jaw so clenched he could barely understand himself. "Right before she said she loved me and then left me a note telling me it wasn't enough. Right before that."

"This doesn't change…" Howie considered what AJ might need to hear and settled on, "what that meant. It doesn't change what the two of you were, or how much you miss her or even who you are now."

"I want it to change who I am now," AJ responded fiercely. "I want it to mean there's improvement in me, that I'm becoming someone who deserves something like this."

"You were always someone who deserved something like this," Howie told him softly. "If this changes anything, then maybe it's your ability to understand that. If that's true, I hope you’re right, I hope it does change things."

"It didn’t feel dirty." AJ turned back to Howie, his eyes large and pleading even in the dark. "I thought…not that you were dirty, not at all, but that maybe I was, that maybe that 'death do us part' thing only counted if the death wasn't a chosen act on one of the partner's sides, and that I was breaking my vows, that maybe she was supposed to be the last person to touch me like that, to feel me all the way through. But I think I was confused, or just plain out wrong. Those vows are only good when they are kept as a two part deal and there is no other part anymore. I'm free. And it wasn't dirty, it isn't dirty, or a betrayal, and I just have to find the space in my head where I believe everything I'm saying, everything I keep telling myself."

"Do you need us not to be together until then?" Howie asked, without a hint in his voice that he was less than confident of AJ's abilities to do all these things.

AJ moved the inch or so that it took to press his body up against Howie's and spoke his next words against the tiny tip of cartilage around Howie's ear, "No. I don’t think that's necessary at all. Avoiding it isn’t going to make it seem any less scary. If anything, I think it will make the situation worse."

Howie kissed the cheek AJ had made readily available and threw an arm over his body, snuggling in to fall asleep for the night.

*

AJ woke up before Howie, left a note on the bathroom sink, and drove over to Kevin's. He let himself in and stole through the apartment to the nursery. AJ settled himself in the rocking chair, waiting for the first sounds of an indignant waking baby. Sarah woke first, which AJ had been expecting. Sarah was the more feisty of the two and spent more of her time awake. AJ picked her up before she could scream and wake her parents up. She squealed at him loudly anyway and he shushed her as he made his way to the changing table.

The changing took awhile, Sarah unwilling to stay still even for a second. AJ tickled her and blew raspberries on her feet and she made as much noise as she possibly could. AJ had given up on Kristin's and Kevin's sleeping through this, he just hoped they would recognize happy sounds for what they were and not get out of bed.

AJ picked Sarah up and the two of them made their way to the kitchen. Kristin had tried breast-feeding both of the twins for the first couple of weeks, but the dual need was creating undue stress on her body and she had gone to a split feeding system that the doctors had recommended, still breast-feeding for some of the meals and using formula for others, so as not to harm herself.

AJ took one of the formula bottles from the refrigerator and heated it up, testing the milk on his skin before letting it go anywhere near Sarah's mouth. Sarah latched onto the nipple of the bottle when it was offered, and AJ wouldn't have been willing to bet on his ability to disengage it from her mouth if need be. Her tiny hands came up and tried to latch on to the hand he was holding the bottle with. Her motor skills not being fully developed, her hands slid along his more often than actually grappling it. AJ felt like he was being petted.

When she had finished, AJ rinsed the bottle out and stuck it on the drying rack. He looked down to see her peering up at him expectantly. "What, miss? What do you want?"

He brought her up to his shoulder to be burped. She gave in easily and loudly, and AJ grinned at her, "You sound just like your Uncle Nick."

She gurgled at him, obviously still wanting something. AJ walked into the living room and found the nearest toy. It was on the floor so he went back into the kitchen to rinse it with hot water and dry it off. When it had cooled back down to room temperature he handed it to her. She threw it across the room with a squawk. "That's not what you wanted, huh?"

Sarah screwed her face up and AJ could tell she was fixing to cry. Before he had even really thought about what he was doing, AJ started singing. He sang the Janet Jackson song that had been stuck in his head all morning, and "I'll Never Break Your Heart," and Billy Joel's "My Life," because Howie always sang that one when he was stressed out. She was asleep half-way through the song, but AJ didn't stop, finishing that one and going on, making his way through some Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Ma Rainey and, finally, one of Sarah's songs, the one she had written for them and almost not released, saying it was too private, too much a part of herself. AJ had talked her into releasing it, explaining, "The rest of the world deserves to have that kind of talent shared with them. I get it every day, give them a few minutes."

A cry from down the hall coincided with his last few notes and AJ listened to the sound of feet shuffling across the carpet, the abrupt, surprised stop to the cries. The low murmur of Kevin's speaking voice traveled to where AJ was sitting. AJ had always thought that Kevin's daddy tone of voice would sound identical to the way Kevin sounded when he was reprimanding one of the guys, or telling them something they needed to know for their own good. It didn't though, not even remotely. AJ wondered how special someone had to be in someone else's life to command a part of his heart completely separate from that of his children.

Kevin shuffled in, Carolina held protectively in his arms. He saw AJ on the couch and smiled. "I was wondering where she had got to."

"Hope it didn't worry you." AJ got up carefully, so as not to wake Sarah, and followed Kevin into the kitchen.

Kevin set to getting Carolina some breakfast. "What are you doing here? I mean, not that I don't appreciate the call of my own flawless offspring, but I figured you would still be cuddling up with someone we may or may not both know."

Carolina made a sound oddly similar to a pissed off bumblebee. Kevin tested the milk before sticking the bottle in her open and waiting mouth. "All right, all right. Pushy this morning, are we?"

"She knows her sister already got served." AJ cupped his hand over Sarah's head protectively. "I just wanted to remind myself that I'm making the right choices. I always remember that when I'm near these two and Orlando."

"So things between you and D haven’t taken a sudden turn for the dramatic?" Kevin wanted to be reassured.

"No," AJ stated. "We talked about stuff last night. Well, first we made out, and then we talked, mostly because we made out. But we're okay. He's a good listener, and I've developed my skills at talking about things that actually matter."

Kevin stuck Carolina's bottle in the sink and shifted her to bounce her up and down on his shoulder. She made him wait for a series of dainty burps. He left her on his shoulder, as she didn’t seem to be all that unhappy with the position. "It's a big step. For both of you," Kevin commented. "I don't know if I was expecting it or not. Hoping, but not expecting."

"Hoping?" AJ kissed the top of Sarah's head because it was there and soft and perfect.

"For you to heal. For him to get what he wanted. For it to work out in a way that didn't make the rest of us feel left out."

"This is just beginning, you don't know that any of that is going to happen."

Kevin nodded, laughing as Carolina shifted her head and blew warm breaths over his neck. "No, but I know it could happen. I know you want it to and Howie wants it to and all three of us surely want it to. That's a lot of determination to be flying in the face of."

AJ had heard that before, so many times, from studio execs who didn't think they had a shot on the charts and lawyers who thought they were doomed to play out their careers under the thumb of people who would let them die to make a few dollars, to critics who talked about shifting markets and management companies who listened. "We’re good at that."

"Only when we're trying. We're good at what we put ourselves into. In this case, that's gonna be making things work. They will, you'll see."

It was hard not to believe Kevin when he was calmly holding a life that he created on just one of his shoulders, smiling and looking completely sure of the fact that he was right.

*

"Do you ever think about what they're saying about the album?" Howie had insisted on taking AJ out on a date, an evening with classy-but-discreet written all over it.

AJ hadn't protested much but when they'd gotten to the restaurant, both of them had a hard time figuring out what to say. AJ was mildly surprised by Howie's eventual choice of a conversation path. "They who?"

"They-the-media. They-the-people-at-Jive. General The Man type theys."

"Oh, Them." AJ wrinkled his nose, thinking. "At first, I just wanted to know that bad things weren't being said about Sarah or that her death wasn't being exploited. You guys took care of that as much as you could so that I wouldn't have to worry, which I probably never said thank you for, but it was appreciated. Then I was too busy paying attention to me and you and Nick and the babies and everything I thought -- still think -- was more important than what was being said about us. It's only recently that I've even started noticing what the buzz is."

"The buzz is that we're washed up and we've just never stopped to take notice," Howie laid it out on the table, wanting an answer to his original question.

AJ watched intently as their waitress approached and set down their dinner salads. She cracked some pepper over each plate and vanished again. "I love performing, D. I love the rush of it, the attention from so many people that I can barely see but I can feel more deeply than almost anything. I like stadiums, the noise of them, the heat of arenas even in the winter. I like clubs, though, too. I like looking at the faces of people who are singing along, dancing a little, paying attention to nothing else but us. Big performance or small, I enjoy being up there. Do I think this album is gonna sell the way the last four did? No. In and of itself, I think that signifies that I'm not completely unaware of our status in music at this moment. Do I think the album won't sell at all? That we won't be able to mount a tour, even a small one? I'm gonna have to go with no again here, because I have a hard time believing that nobody in the world will want to hear what we have to say on this album."

AJ picked up his fork and stabbed indiscriminately at a couple of pieces of lettuce. "Every time we go into the studio I'm glad that we started over again when I asked us to, glad we took time to get in the song that you and Nick wrote about Sarah, the one that Brian and Kevin wrote about the babies. I'm even glad, conflicted as I feel about it, that we're doing Sarah's song." Howie and AJ had reworked a song that Sarah had just finished writing before her death and never gotten to sing, expanding it to have five part harmony.

"Somebody's got to want to hear all that. Hear how good we sound singing it, because we do. I've never heard us like this before and it's a little disconcerting and neat all at once. I don’t care if the people who want to hear us are the critics and the reporters or not, those people suck at concerts anyway. I want it to be children of the people who were kids themselves when 'Quit Playing Games' hit the charts, and fans who have been with us for fifteen years, and new people, who are listening to the radio one day and go, 'wow, that's a neat sound.' That's what I want. Maybe I worry that the media is right and that I won't get that, but I don't listen to them, I don't believe them because they don't understand about us and our lives and what this is all about."

AJ pointed at Howie with his fork, salad and all. "They don’t know that I love you because of the little things like your absolute and complete loyalty to Aveda hair products and the big things like the way you kiss me before we go to sleep and say, 'tomorrow's gonna be even better,' regardless of how the day went. They don’t know that Kevin let Nick pick out the girls' entire wardrobe because he felt left out of the whole baby thing, or that Brian brings Orlando to the studio nearly every day because he wants his son to grow up with the sound of all five of us in his ears."

AJ brought his fork to his mouth and ate the lettuce. "That what you were looking for?"

"I'm not exactly sure what I was looking for, I just wanted you to tell me the truth." Howie said slowly, still processing. "I'm not sure I was expecting that much… optimism."

"I don’t know if it's optimism. I just know that we always come back to each other after we're done leaving for one reason or another. None of us has ever stayed away for longer than the rest of us could handle. I don’t think what They're saying has anything to do with us. I think we have everything to with us. As long as we're fine, the two of us, the five of us, things'll work themselves out. You lost a sister and made it through, I lost a wife, we almost lost Brian, we nearly lost the core of ourselves after Black & Blue when we were all tired and dispirited and disconnected. We came back together, though. This album is a testament to that, maybe a little bit late but every bit as valid as it would have been the day after we realized it was time to stop fooling around and do what we do best again. The majority opinion doesn’t change any of that."

Howie reached across the table and grabbed the hand that AJ wasn't using to hold his fork. "You make it easy to love you no matter how much you change."

AJ squeezed Howie's hand. "I think you're just more flexible than most."

*

It took them twice as long as usual to get the tracks for Sarah's song laid down. The final tracks weren't perfect. Nick sounded wobbly on a few of his solos, AJ's harmony line was just a little too husky and Howie, Brian and Kevin all came off to be working too hard at getting their notes out. When the techs played it back for the gazillionth time, though, AJ observed, "It sounds honest," so they kept it.

They had waited until last to do Sarah's song, waiting until they were all hopefully ready to handle it, knowing in reality that moment had a possibility of never really arriving. When they walked out of the studio at nearly three in the morning after having finished the song, all that was left to do with the album was accomplished with machines. Nick was producing a lot on the album, so he would probably be intimately involved in the last stage, but the rest of them would leave it in his hands and those of the technicians that had actually stayed with them throughout the nearly two years it had taken to create the album.

Howie drove AJ and himself home and the two of them stumbled all the way to AJ's room, which was closer to the front door, before falling asleep, shoes still on.

Howie was the first one to wake up at nearly one o'clock the next day. He pulled AJ's shoes off his feet, tucked him under the covers and went to go run himself a bath. Unless Nick or one of the other guys at the studio called to say they were needed, they had at least the next week off. After that they would need to begin scheduling publicity events, thinking about a tour, penciling in casual face time, but this week was theirs.

AJ padded into the steam-filled bathroom fifteen minutes later, when Howie had just thrown his clothes into the hamper and was stepping into the bath. Howie twisted his neck around. "Wanna join me?"

AJ nodded, then took his time undressing. He grabbed his toothbrush and scrubbed for the requisite minute before rinsing out his mouth and only then climbing in the tub and settling in the V of Howie's legs. The tub wasn't overly large, but neither were AJ and Howie, and the two of them fit comfortably inside it pressed up against each other, water lapping over their hipbones.

"I've always liked this part," Howie mumbled, "in between being finished and just beginning."

AJ cupped his hands and sprinkled some water over his chest. "It used to make me nervous. Right now it's feeling kinda par for the course."

Howie kissed AJ's shoulder. He grabbed the soap from the dish on the side of the tub and lathered his hands well. He replaced the soap and then kneaded it into AJ's skin, starting with the shoulders, which Howie massaged for a long while, moving his hands down so that his fingers were pushing and working at the muscles around and underneath the shoulder blades and lining the spine. Occasionally, Howie reached for more soap, pushing AJ farther forward until he was on his stomach in the tub, propping his front end up on his elbows, his legs splayed wide around where Howie knelt, still working steadily downward over the ass and thighs and calves until he reached AJ's feet. Howie spent several minutes on AJ's feet, grinning at the mix of groans and giggles massaging that part of AJ's anatomy caused the other man to release. Howie reached up to AJ's hips and firmly guided him to his other side, so that AJ was facing up, and went back to his task, working upwards this time until he reached AJ's neck.

When Howie had finished, he made sure the soap was washed away, soothing his hands over AJ's skin everywhere. Howie stood up and got out of the tub before bending down to pull AJ up and out gently by his arms. AJ blinked at him, "You aren't gonna wash yourself?"

"I did it while you were being anal-retentive about dental hygiene."

"Hi, pot. I'm kettle. Nice to meet you." AJ kissed Howie lightly, pleased to note that Howie's breath did indeed smell of baking soda and mint. Howie was a survivor of years of orthodontic work and felt that to not brush his teeth after every meal and floss at least once a day was an extreme betrayal of his parents financial sacrifice on his behalf.

"I brushed while the water was running. It was an effective use of time that would have otherwise been wasted." Howie's face blossomed into a shit-eating grin and he wrapped the both of them up in the single towel he'd been using to dry both of them.

AJ tried to snuggle in closer. He licked at the still damp patch of skin in the hollow of Howie's neck. Howie tossed the towel aside and took AJ's hand. They walked back to Howie's room silently. Howie stopped on the threshold and turned back to AJ, eyes inscrutable. "You sure you want to do this? Now? Here? With me?"

AJ took two steps forward, over the threshold, pushing Howie backwards into the room. AJ shut the door behind him, even though they were alone and it was doubtful that anyone would come to bother them. "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes."

*

Howie took his time with things he enjoyed: books, good food, walks in nice places, pretty much anything. He took his time with AJ, pinning AJ's wrists on either side of him while they kissed, Howie lying on top of AJ, sprawled over the bed. Howie waited until he was good and ready to slide down just enough to pop the head of AJ's cock in his mouth and give it one hard suck before sliding his mouth down further, pushing his tongue hard against it. Howie didn’t go down all the way, didn’t even try, letting go of one of AJ's wrists to wrap his hand almost too tightly around the base of AJ's cock. AJ groaned and twisted his fingers in the covers, squirming.

Howie came up after few minutes, leaning back to watch AJ pant. Howie's eyes were filled with awe and just a tiny bit of disbelief and AJ came back to himself enough to say, "I love you," glad that his voice sounded a lot like Howie's expression looked.

Howie whispered, "Can I…?"

They hadn’t discussed sex or making love or any of the details of anything, waiting for the right moment, for both of them to feel ready, but this was the moment and talking wasn't what either of them had in mind. AJ told him what he had never been able to tell Sarah when they had first gotten together, with her needing him to control things if things were to be done without haste and without violence. "Whatever you want, baby." It felt like a beginning.

Howie got up and walked over to his closet, opening the door and poking his head and one hand in. He sauntered back to the bed with a condom and a tube of KY. He settled back on the bed next to AJ, lining their bodies up against each other. Howie kissed AJ again with long, slow swipes of his tongue. AJ allowed his mouth to be taken over, responding passively, letting Howie do as he would. Howie's thumb pressed gently against the tip of AJ's cock and AJ moaned, "D."

Howie played with AJ's cock a little before withdrawing, fooling around with AJ's nipples for a long time while he bit and sucked at AJ's lips, nibbled at AJ's earlobes, scraped his teeth along the unshaven line of AJ's jaw.

When AJ was panting and biting back, Howie asked, "How long's it been since you've done this?"

AJ took a while to find coherency. "A while. After 'Manda and I broke up."

Howie nodded. "Is this okay? You wanna be on your stomach?"

AJ shook his head, "This is okay. You're right here."

Howie opened the condom package and rolled the condom onto his cock. He poured twice as much lube as was probably needed over his fingers and slicked the condom up. "I'm right here." He poured a little more over his still wet fingers and drove one carefully inside AJ, who gasped.

AJ curled the fingers of one hand into Howie's shoulder.

"Talk to me," Howie ordered him gently.

"It's good, I missed this," AJ reassured him.

"Okay," Howie drove a second finger in. AJ bit his lower lip and looked straight at Howie with the widest eyes imaginable. Howie scissored his fingers a bit before crooking them to drive in at an angle. It took a couple of tries before he found AJ's prostate and AJ forced out, "Shit, yeah D."

Howie added a third finger and made AJ scream a few times before taking his fingers out and not giving AJ time to think before he was sliding inside of AJ, steadily and at a moderate pace. AJ moaned and dug his fingernails deeper into Howie's shoulder. Howie wrapped his arm around AJ's waist and pulled AJ closer and closer the deeper he went. He settled completely inside AJ and didn’t wait before pulling half-way out again, angling for the prostate as he went back in. AJ managed to release his death-hold on Howie, only to wrap his entire arm around Howie's shoulders, his leg curving over Howie's thighs.

Howie set a rhythm and didn’t deviate from it, driving in and out of AJ, AJ's sounds perfectly timed to the rhythm. Howie panted against the crook of AJ's neck, muting his own sounds into the damp skin. After a while, he drove harder and deeper into AJ than he had even when first going in, his body stiffening up against AJ, his arm holding on the slightest bit tighter as he orgasmed. AJ wasn't far behind, his cock caught too tightly in between their bodies to need the extra friction of a hand on it.

AJ rolled over onto Howie, his extra weight gaining the favor of gravity in the bonelessness that followed their release. AJ was hyper aware of Howie's breath -- short, but strong and regular -- moving him up and down, just slightly. AJ repeated, knowing Howie would understand that what he was saying went beyond the words involved, "You're right here."

*