“It’s perfectly natural,” Daphne tells him. In the background he can dimly hear the hum of voices, a strident clang that could possibly be a call button. He remember the sounds of the hospital well. “You’re feeling out of control, so your subconscious dredges up the those moments when you felt the least in control and harangues you with them.”

“I thought you were going into pediatrics, not psychiatry,” Justin grumbles.

“A smattering of Pysch is a prerequisite for almost every medical discipline.”

Justin sighs. “Alright, you’re the resident expert. What do I do?”

He can hear the hesitation in her voice before she answers. “I’d recommend therapy--”

“Fuck that.”

“Just talking to someone can--”

“I’m not seeing a shrink, Daph.”

“You could… you could talk to Brian.”

He hears Brian voice - I wish I could forget - and closes his eyes, can still feel the trembling of Brian’s limbs as if it was yesterday. The parking garage echoed with their footsteps as they walked back to the jeep, and Brian’s back was stiff, his hands clenched on the wheel for the entire ride home, and he’d tried to apologize for not being able to remember but Brian had silenced his voice with a look.

“No,” Justin says quietly. “I can’t do that.”

Justin throws himself into his work, labouring under the assumption that pure exhaustion will give him sleepless nights. Every new canvas is filled with darkness, and he ends with several unfinished works scattered about his space.

He still wakes up every night drenched in sweat, fingers clutching at the blankets, a wordless cry on his lips.

So he finishes the canvases and starts new ones, and his manager can’t understand where this sudden “disturbing but beautiful” inspiration has come from, especially now, but he sees dollar signs dancing in the oils and he gleefully encourages his client to continue.

Justin takes to working through the night.

He wakes up suddenly with a gasp one afternoon on the subway, flinging himself out of his seat, terror stricken eyes and shortness of breath and a high pitched gasp issuing from his throat. The other passengers shrink back from him in disgust, in horror, in shock, and he bends at the knees and takes deep breaths and tries to remember where he is. Who he is.

He gets off at the next stop, somewhere in Brooklyn, he doesn’t even know, and presses the first speed-dial number on his phone with shaking fingers.

“Brian,” he says, voice cracked and hoarse and barely recognizable. The sound of that voice scares him. “I need you to come.”

To his credit, Brian doesn’t make any of the no-doubt dozens of crude remarks he could with such an opening. He just drops everything and travels to New York.

Justin locks himself in his apartment and sits, sits, and the walls feel like they’re closing in on him. His eyes burn, he’s so goddamn tired, and he sits, he wishes he hadn’t given up smoking a fucking year ago and he sits, sits, and finally the key turns in the lock and Brian is there, and Justin launches himself into his lover’s arms and everything… everything isn’t miraculously okay, but it feels better. A little bit better.

“Shit,” he says finally, shakily, when he feels ready to extricate himself from Brian’s arms. He swipes at his eyes. “I guess I can’t really blame this on allergies, can I?”

“Justin,” Brian says.

He doesn’t really want to look Brian in the eye, he really doesn’t, but he’s come to realize over the years that when Brian says his name -- rare enough on its own -- but when he says his name that way, it’s impossible not to look.

Brian wraps a hand around Justin’s neck and bends slightly at the knees and asks, “Are you all right?”

“Oh! Oh, I’m fine, I’m not sick .. it’s not…” And Justin watches Brian’s eyes, and… “No. No, I’m not all right.”

Brian puts together a make-shift dinner that tastes better than anything Justin has had in months, and they stretch out on the sofa with something mindless prattling on the television. Brian lays still and quiescent as Justin’s hands roam over his body, as he slowly divests Brian of shirt and jeans and shoes, as he covers Brian’s body with his own and slicks on a condom and slides inside, rocks, and Brian’s arms come up to encircle his body, Brian’s breath warm on his ear, Brian’s teeth nipping lightly on his lobe, Brian everywhere.

“Brian,” he says, and he’s not sure if it‘s a moan or a cry. Or a little bit of both.

“I’m right here,” Brian whispers.

“I’ve missed you,“ Justin says later, when they’ve moved to the bedroom and are tangled in crisp cotton sheets.

“I know,” Brian says smugly, and Justin smiles. “I’ve missed you too.”

“Can you stay for the show?”

“I’ll check some shit with Cynthia tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Justin says, and then -- “I’ve been dreaming about the prom” -- and he never meant to blurt it out, never meant to tell Brian at all, and his mouth drops open and he feels his pulse race and --

“I know,” Brian says.

That night when Justin wakes up, dry-mouthed and gasping, Brian pulls him into his arms and runs soothing fingers through his hair, and tells the phantom of Chris Hobbes to go back to fucking hell where he belongs. And Justin laughs, sleepily and shakily but he laughs, and he curls into the curve of Brian’s arm and listens to the steady unworried beat of Brian’s heart.

Justin’s first solo show, held four days after his 25th birthday, is a resounding success.