dual

Dual
by Molly
irreelle@mac.com
May 2001

Waking up to the sound of Britney shrieking in the bathroom was, to say the least, not precisely what Justin had had in mind for the three days they were both in New York. He bolted up in bed and blinked painfully, and his hands shook with the tremors of a hangover as he raised them to scrub the crud from his eyes.

Britney was still screaming. She sounded strange, a little hoarse, and Justin muttered about how it better not be something stupid and girly but got up anyway and stumbled to the door of the bathroom. "Brit, what the fuck are you yelling about? Do you know what time-- fuck."

"Fuck!" Britney wailed in echo, and she sank to sit on the edge of the tub, sobbing. "This is-- shit. I need to call my mom. I need, I need-- Don't look at me!" she yelled at him, all of a sudden, and Justin just blinked.

He couldn't really help it. Britney had gone and turned into a boy.

***

It was a little more familiar when she emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a white hotel robe. It was the same hair, falling around a face that was-- not quite the same, but very similar. Less gently angular and less fragile where her jaw had widened a little and gotten blunter, and where her cheekbones hadn't so much lowered as they had gotten flatter, not so sharp and obviously high. And her eyes, which were also red and swollen, just looked less girly; they were smaller, less round, shorter lashes. Britney with plastic surgery, Justin thought, but then his eyes fell to where the robe clung to a perfectly flat chest. A *lot* of plastic surgery.

He didn't let his eyes fall any further. He didn't want to think about that much surgery.

"I told you not to look at me," Britney sniffed, crossing her arms over her chest and wincing a little as they settled in more than they should have. "Where's the phone? I need the fucking ph-- Who the hell are you calling?"

"You can't just call your mom and say you, you turned into a... I'm calling Chris."

Britney launched herself at him, and hell if she wasn't packing more dense muscle mass. "You're not calling Chris!" she screamed, but Justin was stronger and rolled her under him on the bed while he dialed. "It's Chris," he said, staring down at where the robe spread open to reveal a fine dusting of light hair on his girlfriend's chest. He closed his eyes and gulped. "He's weird. He knows about weird shit."

He felt her chest -- flat, flat, FLAT against his -- jerk as the sniffling sounds of crying started again. And it was only about five in the morning, so Chris didn't answer until the fifteenth ring, and when he did he screamed, "Motherfucker, this better be good! Chris speaking," Justin coughed and scrambled off Britney and lay quietly on his back for a second. "Joey, if that's you, I'll feed you to lobsters, I really will."

"Chris," Justin said weakly. "Chris, can you come to my room real quick?"

"No way. I don't want anything to do with whatever freaky shit you and Brit find kinky --"

"Chris. Get your ass over here. I'm serious."

Justin hung up and looked at Britney again. "We can make this okay," he said, but didn't sound convincing even to himself.

***

"Wow." Chris stuck one hooked finger under the lapel of her robe and tugged slightly, craning his neck to peer at hair and pecs and small, tight nipples. "Fuck, no joke, huh?"

Britney shook her head slowly, then just stepped silently into Chris's arms, crying yet again. Making a face at Justin over her shoulder, one of confusion and just plain helplessness, Chris patted her back lightly. "Uh. Okay. Who else did you call?"

"Nobody," she mumbled, pulling back and collapsing on the edge of the bed.

"All right. Call your mom. That's first."

"Justin said-- "

"Never, ever listen to Justin. Ever. From now on. Call your mom, kiddo. We'll be right here."

Britney grabbed the phone and dialed, glaring at Justin, who glared at Chris and squeezed his eyes shut for one more brief moment. He slid off the end of the bed and sat against it, and Chris came and plopped next to him, nudging him with one elbow. "Hey, Jup. Stuff like this, I mean--"

"Stuff like my girlfriend growing a dick, you mean?"

"Yeah, like that. I mean, it-- it gets better. I think. It doesn't seem like something that would be permanent. I think."

"Thanks," Justin muttered. "I think."

"no, no. You don't think. Sit there and feel, and I'll figure this out." Chris sounded determined; even with dark circles under his eyes and a sleepy rasp still clinging in his voice, he seemed alert and engaged in the entire situation. Perfect, Justin thought. Nothing to get Chris going in the morning like a good old mystically spontaneous sex change. But it was a comfort, because Chris really was good at the crazy shit, at making things better.

Behind them, Britney was talking rapidly into the phone. Her voice had changed, too, gotten lower just a little bit. Feminine for a guy, but on the low end for any girl, and Justin swallowed back bile at thinking she had the perfect voice for phone sex. Luckily, she ruined that sentiment by snapping, right then, "I've got a penis, mother! How could you not tell me?"

A few more angry moments and she hung up the phone, then sat silently, staring at the wall. Chris and Justin just angled their heads back and waited. "There's this thing or something," she finally said, very softly. "In my, uh, family. Lasts around a year, usually, though, um, my cousin Jimmy, he's twenty-five now, she said he used to be Jessica. Hasn't switched back yet, but apparently that's not what normally happens, so I shouldn't worry. A year, and I'll be. me. Britney."

"So you should plan on a year. Okay, okay," Chris said, climbing to his feet and pacing. "You going home?"

"I don't want to," Britney whispered. "I don't want to see her right now. She didn't tell me to, to expect this. I-- I can't."

"Okay. So you take some time." Chris was totally in his element, rubbing his hands together. "You're going to have to talk to your management team, though, and it's probably best if you do that in person. They might think you're drunk or on something, like when Joey told them he'd knocked Kelly up and it took two fucking weeks to get Jack to just *believe* him--"

"Chris!" Justin snapped. "Tangent. You're on one."

Chris blinked. "Sorry. Sorry. Point is, Brit, you need to go in with a plan. This is gonna be hard, no lie, and it'll only get harder if you let them jerk you around with some half-assed plans." Britney nodded slowly. "Okay, your tour next summer. It's gotta be cancelled, obviously. There's plenty of time to just call it off, luckily. So the story is, uh... the story..."

"She's sick," Justin finally piped in. "Been diagnosed with something or other, and went off to get treatment in peace. And they'll look for her, yeah, and try to find out where and how she's being treated, but they won't be able to find her anywhere. And won't be able to prove it isn't true. So she's gone for a year."

"But." Britney frowned. "But what do I do for a year?"

"Be a guy," Chris said with a grin. "It's fun, I swear. And you can hang with us." Justin's eyes widened at that, but Chris prattled on about how she could stay with him and he could teach her to shave, and it was like he thought it was the coolest thing in the world, having Britney be just one of the guys, really one of the guys.

Justin was just wishing he'd never woken up that morning.

***

JC's face crumpled when they all broke the news over breakfast in Chris's room, as did Joey's. "But you were so pretty!" JC sputtered. "It's, it's-- "

"It's a crying shame," Joey said, shaking his head sadly. "You had great tits, babe."

Lance just blinked and stood up from the table and walked out of the room for a few minutes. When he came back, he sat calmly and said, "I'm not dreaming, am I?"

"Nope," Justin muttered darkly.

"Shit."

"Yeah."

***

Britney cried a lot all morning, curled up in bed and refusing to let anyone but Chris near her. She made Justin trade rooms with Chris, screaming, "I'm not a girl, and I'm not your girlfriend!" and shoving him roughly away the one time he actually tried to comfort her. She'd gotten a lot stronger overnight. Chris shook his head in exasperation, like Justin should have known better, like girls just turned into guys all the time and there might be a handbook out there.

They had to tell Lonnie, since they thought it was best to leave a bodyguard on the floor with her when they went to their photo shoot that afternoon, and when they got back that night, Britney was dressed in some of Justin's clothes, which really actually fit her besides being too long everywhere, and sitting on the floor of the hallway, talking excitedly with Lonnie.

"Uh," Justin said. "What's going on?"

"Lonnie's gonna teach me to fight!" she said happily.

"You're... in a better mood," Chris said carefully.

"Yeah." She waved her hand dismissively. "Mom talked to management and they sent a rep over to see if it was true. They're working out the illness story, and getting me ID and shit for a new identity, and how did I not realize that I get to go a *year* with no attention and no cameras and no touring! It's a fucking vacation! And pissing standing up is so cool!"

Joey laughed and leaned to ruffled her hair. "You're gonna make a great guy, Brit."

"Thanks," she mumbled, blushing. "Hey, Just, can we talk?"

Justin followed her back into their -- her -- she and Chris's room, and leaned nervously against the wall. "Look, um," Britney started. "This is weird."

"Mm."

"And I, I liked Chris's idea, of hanging with you guys this year, I love you guys, but if it's too weird for-- "

"No!" Justin said quickly. "I mean, it'll be different, 'cause you're a guy, but you're you and all, and... Joey's right. You'll be a great guy. A great guy friend."

And Britney smiled happily and hugged him, and he tried to ignore how she didn't feel so nicely soft anymore.

***

She had to go back to LA to clear up final details of her disappearance from public life, and they all went back to Orlando to carry on with life in the off season and recording plans. Life felt sort of normal, for Justin, being at home with a girlfriend who was often far away, and he told himself, this is okay, she's just like, further away. For a year.

And she showed up a week later with a duffel bag full of what few clothes she could still wear and a lot less hair, and lots of credit cards and ID that said Bradley Chase and had pictures of her as a guy. She moved in with Chris until she could find an apartment, and Chris taught her to shave, and play football, and Lonnie really did teach her to fight, showing her stances in the hallways whenever she came with Chris to the studio.

The first time they all got drunk was at Joey's after a month, and Brad had the same low tolerance as Britney always had. She still got flushed after a few fast drinks, and giggled a lot; it was just at a lower pitch and not so femininely sexy to listen to, for Justin. She had gotten comfortable with the body, though, and had stopped complaining, "how do you stand walking with this, this *thing* always there?" and now she usually sprawled out in a way that would have been completely lewd if she were a girl. Lance pointed this out and she laughed and said, "There are perks to being a guy."

"Name 'em," Joey mumbled, opening another beer.

"I've gone nearly two months without a period." She smirked. "I get to walk around with no shirt. I don't have to shave anything but my face. I could fuck anything on two legs and nobody would call me a whore."

"Have you?" Justin demanded.

"Have I what? Been called a whore?"

"Fucked anyone."

Everyone got quiet and Britney turned even brighter red, and mumbled, "No," so quietly Justin barely heard it, and he knew to shut up after that, even as drunk as he was.

The next day he woke up on Joey's floor and was still half asleep when he went to the bathroom and pissed even though someone was in the shower. He turned around as she was stepping out and he blinked and swallowed hard at the eyeful he got. "Sorry!" he yelped, and she laughed, reaching for a towel.

"Christ, Justin, you didn't seem to mind looking when I was a girl."

"yeah, well. You were a girl."

"Now I'm not." She frowned. "Just, have you, um. Have you been with anyone since, you know -- "

Justin coughed. "No. I didn't think-- "

"You can," she told him, her voice neutral. "I mean, we're not, we can't... I don't expect you to just *wait* all year."

"I. I have to. shit," he said, and left the bathroom.

***

They called her just B in public and nobody ever slipped up. At first, Brad stuck with Chris, went damn near everywhere with him that wasn't directly and publicly involved with the band.

Then she started working out with JC; they had similar bodies now that Britney was male, and she spent hours with him in the gym, developing the same taut, corded muscles that JC worked so hard to maintain.

She hung out with Lance at odd times, getting coffee or watching artsy movies that the rest of them couldn't stand, and it was Joey who said, "shit, that's it."

"Huh?" Justin said.

"She reminds me of Lance. Like, from before he grew into himself."

Justin thought about that. He remembered his impression of Lance when they were in Germany, when the girls had seemed daunting and Lance's skin had always looked too soft and silky for a guy in dressing rooms, in the mornings in the room they'd shared, how he'd avoided Lance and hung out with Chris, who was older and smarter and liked to have fun with their growing fame. Who had jagged edges and wasn't ethereally beautiful, who was absolute and without the ambiguity that made him shy away from Lance.

He remembered how Lance had made him a little bit nervous, by being so approachable and nice, and he didn't want to think of her like that. "No fucking way," he told Joey. "B's totally different."

But she wasn't so different. She was still a girl, in the sort of ways that had caused management a huge problem over Lance's femininity. She rooted for the underdog when they watched wrestling. She still liked to wear a lot of pink, and she griped at Joey for not planning well enough for the baby and dragged him out to shop for clothes when Kelly got huge and didn't feel like going out all that much. She crossed her legs a lot in public, muscle memory, and she always just shrugged when Justin pointed out that it was kind of weird. For a guy.

***

But there were times when it all seemed okay. She was just enough of Britney to remember and love, and just enough... not, to not feel too weird about having his girlfriend there when they were at a club and girls hit on him and he felt comfortable enough to hit on them right back.

Once he disappeared and let a girl blow him in the bathroom, and when he came back to the table, Britney raised an eyebrow and said, "I know that look."

"What?" he asked, flushed and guilty.

"The "Justin just got some" look." She looked a little sad, or something close to it, but elbowed him fondly. "Written all over your face, honey. Congratulations."

***

The day after she finally moved into her own apartment, Justin went to Chris's and sat at the table while Chris ate breakfast. "Thanks," he said softly.

"Huh? What'd I do?"

"I-- I wasn't dealing well. Thanks for helping her so much. I... couldn't, I don't think."

Chris looked at him, a peculiar understanding in his eyes. Justin recognized that look, from Germany, from a night of confessing how he wasn't quite sure what to make of Lance. "Yeah, well, we've all got our issues, Jup. You need things to be pretty clear-cut, don't you?"

"I don't--"

"She isn't what you remember anymore."

"I'm not sure what she is, anymore." Justin stared at the table and shrugged. "So much for that one bit of stability in life, huh?"

Chris patted his shoulder on the way to the sink. "Some things don't change, J. Some people don't, either. Not in ways that matter."

***

He thought Chris was right. Some people didnšt change.

He started hanging out with Chris a lot, now that Britney wasn't always there.

***

When rehearsals started, she usually came and sat around and watched, which was nice because if one of them got a cramp or just needed a break, she knew the dances well enough to stand in for a few minutes. Wade found out pretty fast who Brad really was, and he nodded and gave her a once over, and didn't say much about it. But he looked at her a lot, appreciative looks, and the looks he gave Justin were strangely inquisitive and curious. But he didn't say anything.

***

She had mood swings. Every couple of weeks, it would get to be too much, and those were the times she came to Justin, the times he could put his arms around her solid frame and rock her as she cried. Those were the times he could almost want to pretend that things were the same.

***

"Look at this!" Brad squealed, falling next to Justin on the sofa of the three-man bus. Two weeks into the tour she'd called, lonely, and they'd managed to get it okayed for her to come along as Wade's assistant, and she traveled with them. "Feel! I've never been able to get this kind of definition."

She flexed one arm and Chris and Joey whistled, reaching to test the resistance of her muscle. "JC really fucking pumped you up, dude," Joey said, marvelling. "Wonder what it'll look like when you're you again."

"I'll be one buff chick," she laughed. "Stronger than Justin."

"Fuck you. As if."

"I could take you anytime, Timberlake." She smirked. "Put your money where your mouth is, huh?"

And they did pushups on the floor of the bus until they lost count and collapsed in exhaustion, laughing, and it was the first time he'd fallen asleep curled up with her since the change.

***

Mornings in the hotels were for breakfast and cartoons, for as long as they could get away with it until they had to pack up and go, and it got to be routine to see Britney in boxers and nothing else, slouched on a sofa with a bowl of cereal perched on her bare stomach. It got to be less weird to know that now everyone knew about the mole she had under one nipple. Justin inevitably watched her, followed the lines of muscles and smattering of hair and catalogued the differences between Britney and Brad, and it was usually in the mornings that he remembered Germany, and long nights spent in bars with Chris.

***

He went in without knocking because that's what he always did the few times they had a night in a city, with no concert, to just go out. They would get ready and wander in and out as they did, and so he swiped the keycard and walked into Chris's room, and the last thing he expected was to see Brad, against the wall, with Chris right up against him.

He stopped and blinked once, twice, then took three steps across the room and jerked Chris back to hit with a resonating crack across the jaw. "Justin!" Britney yelled and she pulled her arm back and hit him with all the force of JC's workouts and Lonnie's lessons.

Justin hit the floor hard. "Fucking Lonnie," he muttered, shaking his head and tasting blood. He crawled slowly to his feet and glared at Chris. "He's my girlfriend, you asshole!"

"She's not your girlfriend," Chris muttered, holding his jaw, and Britney looked like she was about to hit Justin again and said, "I'm not your girlfriend. I'm not your *boy*friend."

"And you're not gay!" Justin yelled.

"I know!" She frowned and did hit him again, a too-strong blow to the shoulder. "I'm not. Which means Brad sorta... is."

"So. what? You're hot for Chris now? Were you always?"

"Don't be disgusting, Justin," Britney snapped, and Chris collapsed on his bed with a groan. "Chris was just-- "

"Brit, could you explain this- somewhere else? My head suddenly hurts."

"Fuck," she breathed, and sat next to him, running her fingers across his jaw. "Later? I'll work this out. I'd still like to, um."

"Yeah, whatever. If Jup's okay with it. I'm not getting between you two." Chris winced and lightly pushed her away. "Go get him to be okay with it, already."

***

"What. what did you say?"

"I'm horny, dumbass. I haven't had sex with anything other than my hand in six months."

"But-- with Chris? Chris!"

"I need someone to show me how, Justin. I don't know what to do when two dicks are involved. Chris said he'd teach me-- "

"Chris said he'd teach you to shave."

"Yeah, well. I'm a hell of a student."

"Why Chris? Why not me?"

"... because you're you, honey. You're you, and this isn't me."

***

He couldn't sleep that night, certain he could hears moans and thuds and the soft slaps of sweaty flesh moving together.

Chris's room was two doors down. But he was still sure he could hear it.

And in the morning he could swear Britney looked different. Justin couldn't see much of her from back then, anymore; now he just saw Brad, a guy, a guy who used to be Britney. She looked grown into herself. Into himself. She looked like a guy who'd just been laid. Chris at least had the decency to stay out of Justin's way with his small smile of sated satisfaction.

Nobody acted any different, so Justin thought this could work out. It wasn't like he hadn't known Chris was into guys, and it wasn't like Britney hadn't always been, anyway. He sometimes walked into rooms where Britney would be sitting very close to Chris, and once he saw Chris's hand, rubbing slow circles on her inner thigh while they watched TV. But they kept it away from him, so he tried to just keep his mind off it, off his best friend and his girlfriend having a lot of sex.

He tried, but every so often he remembered the flashing sight of Chris's tongue across Britney's mouth, of Chris's hand sliding across the waist that wasn't so narrow anymore, then blended smoothly into hip without the curves he remembered. Chris's knee, nudging Brad's legs apart, and Chris's skin, seen countless times, neither flawlessly smooth nor stretched taut over muscle and bone. It never had been; that wasn't anything new.

He started counting the weeks until Brad became Britney again and things would go back to normal, hopefully. In the meantime, he fucked a lot of women.

***

"I think," Britney said one morning, "that I'm going back to Orlando."

Justin stared at her. "what? Why?"

She shrugged. "Summer's gonna be over soon. I want to go to the beach. Relax. Use my anonymity to get *away* from this scene for awhile."

That was it. She left two days later and everything was finally exactly, *exactly* as it had always been before.

Except for not being able to stop thinking about Chris, and about Chris's hands and mouth, and about how Chris always had been and always would be just-- Chris. He prayed the dreams would end soon.

Because it was the dreams that made it worse. Chris would still fling fond arms around him during the day, and he would go to sleep with that on his mind and it would mutate, become more about hands than arms, more about breathy, silent kisses than the teasing words of a friend. It was about Chris, shoving him roughly to his back on a bed and being very, very male above him. He had to start avoiding Chris, in order to avoid getting hard in public.

***

"Can I kiss you?" he asked Brad when they finished the tour and went back to Orlando. They were in her apartment, watching TV and she had his head in her lap, nestled against strong thighs, soft groin, the rough swath of a denim waistband that became a bare trail of thick pubic hair two inches from his peripheral vision.

Her face clouded and she bit her lip. "Justin, I miss you, too, but I mean, we've talked about--"

"No, Brit, I want." He stopped short, reached up to touch cautious fingers to the hair she was letting grow in anticipation of changing back. "It's, I want to kiss you like this, wanna see if... never mind."

Her eyes widened with sudden understanding, but she didn't say anything for a long time, just scraped thick fingers through his freshly buzzed hair. Finally she sighed. "Not me," she told him. "It can't be me."

"But you're my--"

"Exactly. Come on, honey, you've got stuff to figure out. You won't know for sure if you're telling yourself, even one little bit, that I'm still Britney and this is just circumstance."

"I love you," he said. "You've always been Britney."

"Yeah. That's the problem. Talk to Chris, okay? I think-- I think that's what you want to do."

He didn't know if she suggested Chris as the resident experimental tutor, or because she knew, somehow, that it was really about Chris in the end. It didn't wind up mattering, not when he knocked on Chris's door for the first time ever without just walking into the apartment, and when Chris answered, stepped inside and pressed flattened palms to his cheeks and just kissed him, without a word.

It didn't matter, because Chris looked at him sadly, carefully, and just asked, "why?"

"I think maybe Brit won't ever be my girlfriend again," Justin said softly.

***

Chris circled lazy fingers over Justin's nipple, licked slowly at the other. "Okay?" he mumbled.

"Yeah," Justin breathed. "fuck. Yeah."

Afternoon turned to evening turned to the dregs of swampy late summer nighttime heat spent kissing and touching and doing not much of anything else, and it was midnight when Justin rested his cheek on Chris's thigh and just looked, looked for a long time, at his dick.

He ran his thumb over the head, breathed against it. "What feels good?"

Chris twitched and gasped. "You're a guy, you fucking dork. Figure it out."

So he thought about Britney and her old tricks, and he tried them all, and when Chris came he knew they were going to be his tricks in no time at all. He pressed his face into Chris's soft stomach and slept without dreaming for the first time in months.

***

"So, Joey," Britney said, when she came over before her flight to LA. "Good as new?" She ran her hands over her brand new halter top, twirled to let him see at angles.

Joey whistled from the edge of the pool. "Best tits in Florida, babe."

"Half the tits in Florida are over sixty," Lance said. "What a compliment."

"Fuck off," and they started splashing and dunking each other, and JC yelled at them when the sheet music he was working on got wet.

Justin levered himself up from his perch at the water's edge, rubbing a hand through Chris's hair as he went to hug Britney tightly. "You gonna be okay?"

"I don't know," she said, frowning. "Having to sit down to piss is a real tragedy in a girl's life."

He laughed and tugged on her still short hair. "Freud would have a field day with you and your penis envy."

"I'm about to throw you into that pool."

"I'll take care of that for you," Chris called. "When I feel like moving."

"I'll hold you to that." She smiled suddenly and lowered her voice. "So."

"So." Justin stared at his feet and shuffled a bit. "We're gonna be okay?"

"Of course. I may have turned you gay, but hey." She cuffed him on the shoulder, still way stronger than she'd been before any of it. "You're a great guy friend."

**end**