"You're going to talk to Justin."

Groggy and "Lance? The fuck?"

"You are going to talk to Justin, Chris."

And he's more awake now, though no less confused. But angry, that he knows, because he doesn't do what he doesn't want to do and he had no plans to face the kid because—

"Fuck off."

—and the phone is back in its cradle and his pillow's soft under his ear and— Fuck! That's the phone again and this is the last thing he wants to think about.

"You can do it at graduation."

Lance decided, after some careful thought that graduation would be the best time to get them together, to let Justin have his closure because, well, for lots of reasons. Endings and beginnings and clean slates. Plus, JC was coming and he'd help. So, yeah. Now he just had to get Chris there.

Chris is, unsurprisingly, putting up a fight.

It's easy, Lance finds, to cut off the ranting, to call back persistently, patiently, after the hang-ups. He'll hunt Chris down if he has to, and drag him there by the scruff of his neck. He tells him this after the third hang-up.

Chris fires back with, "I don't want to see him and I don't imagine he wants to see me."

And Lance damns patient, tells him, "I don't give a damn what you want, Chris. Justin needs to talk to you. He needs to see what he did to your face. And you need to see what you did."

"I know what I did." Chris is still angry, but those words are raw underneath.

"No, Chris. You don't." And then, final. "You are going. I'll get you the ticket. If you don't show up..."

The rest of the threat is unspoken and Chris can posture back all he wants but he hears steel in Lance's voice. And it seems that he underestimated Lance, who's not so much the goody-two-shoes he thought. There's something very real in that threat, unfinished though it may be.

Everything in him, though, wants to keep hiding from Justin. Or, from what he did to a messed up kid with nowhere to go. He knows that everything he did was wrong, was a spiral of his past and if he changed the words, the tune was still the same. He was a coward, failed to keep Justin safe from himself. And though before he could see right from wrong, now he wonders why he didn't...

It's no use and he could hang up on Lance fifty times and the result would be the same, so despite the temptation to run up Lance's phone bill or irritate the shit out of him, he gives in, says yes, gets date and time and hey—it's after his last final is over, so maybe he'll be flunked out by then. He'll be the life of the party.

It's bare satisfaction when Chris agrees because he could have done with more of a fight. But he won and now he dials the familiar number and gets JC, starts to plot. They agree on timing and telling (not to, not even Lauren) and plan when and if.

This is, somehow, Lance's element and he's surprised as anyone. And JC, he's good too, not vague, wide-awake because he wants Justin better, back, as much as Lance. It makes Lance, when he's finally off the phone, sigh and then blush and he's nostalgic for nights in Thayer Street bars for more than Justin being whole. And though this seems to be pulling the two of them together it's not getting them together and he wishes it would and thinks it won't and his head is too full. He stops, blinks, breathes, and yeah. Chris. Justin. Tickets.


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