Work Text:
The light from the recording booth doorway startled Chris; he hadn't known anyone else was still at the studio. The soundproofed room muffled most of the sound from within, but the door was cracked enough that he could hear a guitar inside the room. He couldn't resist; he crept closer to eavesdrop.
He saw Billy's bent head before he could distinguish the music; Billy had a tilt to his head when he was playing that Chris wouldn't have thought he could recognize like that, but he immediately knew who it was. When he could finally make out what Billy was playing idly, he nearly swallowed his tongue.
In six months of playing together and three weeks of sleeping together - Chris still wasn't sure which was more intimate - he had never heard Billy mention Hard Core Logo, or Joe Dick, or pretty much anything pre-1995, even once. He never played anything from then, not even any of the covers they used to do, not even late at night, at the end of painfully endless day of recording, when everybody was punchy and maybe a little high, and people were tossing out song titles or snatches of lyrics, with 'studio points' going to the first person to pick it up and play it, with the person with the fewest points buying the first round. Not even when Georgie the studio tech warbled out, "Sonic reducer! Ain't no loooooooser!" had Billy even twitched. He'd just shifted his ever-present toothpick to the other side of his mouth and waited for someone else to pick it up. Chris was lying on the floor at that point, maybe a little giddy with pleasant exhaustion - he'd given up the pot when he started singing regularly again - but he went still at that and watched Billy from under his lashes. He'd hoped Billy hadn't noticed, since that was before he'd shown Billy his extensive bootleg collection, but he knew better now. At the time, the lyrics had burned his tongue, making him feel fourteen all over again. He'd swallowed them down, keeping the words inside as Katy shouted them out, crowing about how much she loved Pearl Jam, only to be mocked soundly. Billy had smiled a little at that.
I got my time machine, got my 'lectronic dream.
So Billy acted as if Hard Core Logo had never happened. No problem. Chris had gone through a long stretch where he did his damnedest to act as if nsync had only been a dream. A good one or bad, he still wasn't sure. At least they were all still alive. Chris shivered at that and repressed the urge to grab his phone and call them all, to hear Joey's quiet, Briahna's-already-asleep voice, to hear JC sing him a snippet of whatever he was working on or whatever he last heard on the radio, to hear Lance's low rumble flood shared happiness over him, to hear Justin's whispered, "Love you, man," as he hung up. Chris had been where Billy was before, at least in some small way, and it just made him even gladder that he wasn't there anymore.
So Chris understood Billy's blind eye to the past, which is why hearing Billy picking out the opening notes to China White shocked him so badly.
It had been late at night - again - and there was pot involved - again - and it was one of his happier times - again. He and Dani had been lying in the grass in his backyard (his first backyard ever, at least the first he didn't have to share with anybody he didn't invite in), shotgunning a joint back and forth, staring at the stars and listening to music. They'd been laughing, heads nestled together, leaping from pop to punk to soul to seventies rock and back around all over again. At one point she had declared her undying love for The Dead Boys, which had made him squeak with glee, run inside, and haul out his old shoeboxes of tapes, bringing his boombox the size of a suitcase out with him.
The tapes were already falling apart a little, and he'd never shared his HCL bootlegs with anyone else. Still, he had figured, she was worth it.
Her eyes had gone soft, watching him gesticulate wildly as he sang along and provided running commentary. They'd both gone quiet at China White. Then she plucked the joint out of his still waving fingers and dragged it to the very end. He'd covered her mouth with his, lips soft, breathing her in, tasting her and summer and the night air beneath the pot. It wasn't the weirdest song he'd ever made out to, but it was pretty close. Still, he had figured it was pretty perfect for the two of them, as pretty perfect as they were together.
When they had come together later with bright eyes and big plans for the future, he had remembered that night and that song. He never told anyone, not even Dani and especially not Billy, but FuMan had been born from China White.
And now Billy was playing it. The original guitarist playing the original song. Chris's inner fourteen year old nearly wet himself in glee, but his thirty-two-year old self clutched the edge of the door with white knuckles. Part of his mind nattered on, "Why was he playing it? Was it Joe's birthday? Or deathday? Or did he always come in and play after everyone else was gone? Would he notice if the recording button got flipped?", part of him flinched away from watching a man bleed his pain out through his music, and part of him responsed to ingrained habit: he sang along. Quietly, oh so quietly, but his lips shaped the words, and he gave them voice.
It wasn't his voice that gave him away; it was the door. He leaned on it a little too hard, and it swung open slightly further. Billy had his back to the door, but it squeaked. He whirled as if he had heard a gunshot. Chris spread his hands helplessly. "The light was on, and I heard you, and I-"
Billy cut him off. "You know it?" His voice was gravelly with the cigarettes he wasn't allowed to smoke inside the studio. Chris knew then that he had left and come back, come back with a purpose. Chris wondered if he had been waiting for him.
He nodded. "Yeah, I know it."
"Sing it." It wasn't a request.
Chris opened his mouth once, then closed it. "Where do you want me?"
Billy shrugged, picking at the callouses on his fingertips. They were threatening to break and bleed again. "Wherever."
Chris felt naked without a microphone to sing into, or maybe it was just Billy's eyes that left him exposed. Billy looked back down at the strings and fingered out the opening bars. Chris breathed, and he started to sing.