aruan | Day Six and there's already an emerging theme.

I'm going to have to ration my irrational affinity for Joey/Lance, I realize. Joey just brings out everything I love about Lance - the snark, the smiles, the kind of comfortable you can only be with someone who not only knows next to everything about you and loves you unconditionally, but who also makes you feel like none of it matters. Not your own insecurities, perceived shortcomings, or what the world thinks of you. I never truly understood the OTP concept until those two. Irregardless of the kind, Lance loves Joey beyond all measure, and that's not artistic license I'm claiming. As early as Orlando, Germany, all throughout the early!Sync timeline Lance can be seen in various phases of touching Joey - an arm here, a brush of knees underneath the table there, rarely ever apart in photo shoots and plenty of candid stuff to endear them to you irrevocably and forever. Today they've been known to party together, attend a No Doubt concert a thousand miles away from either of them on the single night Joey had off during the run of Rent, and talk about each other in fond tones when the interviewers ask. What they have together is uniquely beautiful.

Sometimes though, sometimes, Joey can be the foil, the weak chink within Lance simply because Lance loves him too much, and there's just no doing everything right. Double dose because the sequel brings it home.

Frisbee by Julad

"When it happens, you won't be alone," Lance told him, steady eyes looking straight into his, salty fingers brushing his lips, brimming over into the last of his empty senses. "I promise."

and its sequel, The End of the Beginning by Julad

It had been sweet once, he would tell himself, fist crammed into his mouth, trying to overcome Lance's pleas not to interfere. It had been cute, and funny, and sometimes really fucking sexy, he was sure of it. The only times he could really remember the good parts was after, if Joey was still awake, because they clung to one another and sobbed like they'd once giggled.

I love speculative fic that attempts to look at the end of the group and beyond, how that would come about and what kind of lives the boys would lead, who would be with whom. I do not subscribe to Julad's version of the future - her Lance, however, is everything he would be if such a situation did arise. Not because of the end of the group, but because of Joey, and the one he made to him is the promise he'd keep above all because he wouldn't know how to break it. Couldn't even, I imagine.