"Now that the tour is over," JC announced at breakfast the next morning, "I got something to tell you all."
Apparently, nobody cared. Justin kept shovelling cereal into his mouth like a bear worried about imminent Goldilocks arrival. Lance kept peering at the newspaper, pretending to be interested in the financial section when they all knew perfectly well he only read it for the gossip. Chris's attention stayed on the muffin he was dissecting with ghoulish precision. Joey, possibly the least hung-over (because being the largest, he was best able to hold his liquor), grunted in acknowledgment but carefully did not raise his eyes, for only yesterday morning JC had been eating a tuna and jelly sandwich, and, able to hold his liquor or not, Joey did not need to see that kind of thing at this time of day.
"I'm pregnant," said JC. A moment later, he said it again, louder.
"Yeah, dude, heard you the first time," said Chris indifferently. "Didn't believe you then either."
"Don't you want to know who the father is?" JC asked, silkily.
There was a sudden... attentiveness in the atmosphere. Joey stopped chewing his mouthful of bacon. Lance's head came up, and turned slowly until he was looking at JC. Chris put down his knife. And Justin, who had apparently ingested sufficient sugar to achieve sentience, pushed away his empty cereal bowl and stared.
"You're serious," Lance stated.
"You can't be," said Justin.
"Is that why you kept throwing up when they brought coffee?" asked Joey, in the tone of one who has put the shards of evidence together and found the result unexpectedly watertight.
"You're delusional," said Chris, firmly.
"I," said JC, with dignity, "am with child. And somebody is going to have to step up and take responsibility." His gaze lingered on each dismayed face in turn. "Think about that." He rose, and swept grandly out.
* * *
So they did the Disney thing, and sat in the hospitality suite afterwards picking at unidentifiable but tasty crunchy stuff, somehow reluctant to fission apart into the great unknown that was Hiatus. Fission was, however, imminent. It was in the air.
"Dude, I'm just saying, you can't be. Guys don't get pregnant."
JC glared magnificently. "I did."
"Yeah, right. How?"
JC rolled his eyes. "You see, Chris, when two people have a really special cuddle—"
"No, but JC, seriously," said Lance. He had been visibly paler than usual ever since breakfast .
"It can't be mine," Justin said, a little bit too loudly, and was hushed by three of his bandmates—JC had already stated that he was not ashamed, he was not the one trying to weasel out of his responsibilities, but the others had an unspoken agreement to keep this quiet. The Pearlman years had left their mark. "I mean," Justin continued in a fierce whisper, "it was only the once. One night." He blushed slightly.
"Oh, Justin, Justin." Chris shook his head sadly. "Didn't they teach you this stuff in bus school? Once is all it takes. And doing it up against the wall isn't any kind of protection. Which incidentally, means it isn't mine either. Not that it exists, but, if it did, it wouldn't be mine because I know how to use condoms, if you remember. Right, 'C?"
"Hmm," said Joey. "You don't think Kelly and I were... I mean, we always, but she got pregnant anyway."
"Yeah, and you notice the key word in that sentence, Joe? She! She! Guys don't get pregnant!" Chris's voice was edging towards glass-shattering range. Joey and Justin hushed him, nervously.
"Uh, about that," Lance muttered, "I looked some stuff up because, you know, it's JC, and apparently..."
"Oh, give me strength," Chris said, shaking off the hand Justin was patting him with.
"No, it's true. There have been instances..." Lance tailed off, looking at JC in abject terror.
Joey frowned at him. "Are you saying that you and 'C—that this baby could be yours?"
"Oh, don't get all self-righteous on me! You already have a kid!" Lance flounced into the nearest seat, and sulked magnificently. "It's all right for you, I mean, at least you know this one isn't yours!"
Joey swallowed.
"Don't you, Joey?" Justin asked.
"Um," said Joey, scarlet, and subsided onto the couch next to Lance.
"Yes, indeed," said JC, with a significant little smile on his lips.
The other three sat, too.
"Okay," said Chris, after a moment. "Leaving aside the fact that this isn't possible, and I don't care what some kooks on the internet say," he hissed as Lance began to open his mouth, "it looks like it could be any one of us who fathered the Chasez miracle baby. So, give, JC. Who're you fingering?"
"Oh, please, can't we show a little sensitivity—"
"I think we've had more than enough of—"
"I don't think fingering would have gotten—"
The three of them shut up simultaneously, and looked at JC.
"I," said JC with immense dignity, "am not going to speculate. Y'all will have to wait until after the baby is born to find out."
"Do you actually know who the father is?" Lance asked.
JC did not reply.
"You don't, do you! You don't know!" Chris was jumping up and down now, whether with excitement or rage it was impossible to tell. "It could have been anyone. Hell, maybe it wasn't even one of us, maybe it was someone who's got nothing to do with *Nsync!"
"It could not," said JC, shooting a glare of lightning blue rage at Chris, "have been 'anyone'. I'm very discriminating. Which means that as of now, you are off the list. Not," he continued, venomously, "that it gets you off the hook. Just wait until the baby is born."
"Like I wanna fuck a pregnant dude anyway," Chris muttered, but he looked shaken. Being crossed off JC's list was a Bad Thing, because of JC's hips, and JC's legs, and JC's tongue. And JC's astonishing ability to carry a grudge.
"So, JC," Justin began, and hesitated. "How, um, when it, um, when you say, 'born', how exactly is that gonna happen?"
Lance blenched. Joey, who had witnessed one birth already and tried hard to scrub his brain clean of every particle of that memory, did not wish to know either, but Justin was, as usual, distressingly persistent.
"I mean, does it... does it come out your ass, or what?"
"Won't care about being off the list if it does," came a surly voice from the corner of the room.
"No, Justin, no Chris, and thank you for your support by the way, the baby is not going to come out of my ass. A nice man in clean green scrubs is going to pick up a very large, sharp, shiny knife, and cut me open right across here," JC gestured (to the wrong place, but Lance and Justin were not to know that), "and slice me right open, and then pull the bleeding flesh apart until there's a great big gaping hole, then he's going to reach both hands right inside there and pull out the baby, and then the cord and the afterbirth and all the bloody bits—"
The room was empty.
"Pussies," said JC, with satisfaction.
* * *
They encouraged the rumors. JC holed up in a studio, working on his new album. Jive concentrating on Justin, poor JC being shafted by the label. Justin and JC not speaking. (Actually, that was true—by the end of the summer JC was flatly refusing to allow any of them near. Possibly his skinny form had finally blown up so large that the impending Event would have been impossible to hide. Maybe he looked like a walking Zeppelin now. Nobody knew.)
Nobody really knew when The Birth was supposed to happen, either. There were a lot of extremely skittish phone calls between the four of them, speculating nervously on when it would be, suggesting helpfully that such-and-such a date would definitely let so-and-so off the hook, and, eventually, inevitably, betting on which of them would turn out to be the father. Chris put his money on Joey, who had form, he said; Joey laid his down on Justin, on the grounds that a man who had against all reason entered and won a beauty pageant when he was twelve had obviously always been stranger than fiction and was therefore the most likely to have fathered JC's child. Indignantly, Justin countered with Chris, who generated his own insanity field and was the only one of them whose genes could possibly be as weird as JC's. Lance, moodily pessimistic, bet on himself, saying that the way his luck was going right now the brat was certain to be his, and he might as well make a few bucks towards child support.
* * *
JC turned up at the Madame Tussaud's thing after all. They hadn't been expecting him to show, but there he was, skinny as ever and unrepentantly mysterious about the outcome of his Happy Event.
They went back to Justin's hotel room afterwards. Once everyone was fortified with enough strong liquor to numb the shock, the four of them turned to JC with determined expectation.
"So?"
"Did you have the kid?"
"Do you know who the father is?"
"Dude, boy or girl?"
"Thank you, Joey. It's a girl. Her name is Tallulah."
Lance and Chris rolled their eyes almost audibly.
"And you're, like, okay?" said Justin, nervously. "I mean, with the opening up, an' all?"
JC beamed at Justin in a most sinister way. "Would you like to see my scar?"
"Uh, no thanks!" Justin squeaked, and gulped at his drink.
"Come on, JC, spill," said Chris. "Whose kid is she?"
JC looked at them in turn, his head swivelling slowly from Justin, to Lance, to Chris, to Joey. Justin, whose shaven head could do nothing to remove the memories of springy, irrepressible curls. Lance, staring at him with those wide, enormous green eyes. Chris, with his funny little nose and sweet, pouty lips. Joey, whose daughter Briahna already shared his distinctively Italian features.
"I suppose," said JC, haughtily, "you've got money riding on this."
They had the grace to look shamefaced. Except Chris, of course.
"Just tell us, JC."
He milked it for another minute, then got up, and loped towards the door. "Don't worry, guys, you're all off the hook."
"What?"
"What?"
"What?"
"What?"
"I said, you're all off the hook. It wasn't any of you." JC stuck his head round the door, and informed the waiting guardian that he was ready to leave.
"Fuck," said Chris. "Nobody gets the pot."
"But you said it was one of us!" Justin protested, sounding almost as though he was sorry not to have been blamed. Selected. The lucky father.
Joey, eager to head off the scene which he saw brewing in JC's stormy blue eyes, interjected at this point: "No, dude, he said it wasn't just 'anyone'. It's gotta be someone connected with us, though, right?"
"If the father isn't any of us, then who is it?" demanded Lance, in a voice of profound relief.
"Since it isn't one of you, it isn't really any of your business, is it?"
"I bet it was Tony. Was it Tony? You always had a thing for Tony," Justin said, sounding very much aggrieved.
"In the name of all that's sacred," said Chris, "please tell me it wasn't Nick Carter."
"Like I said, none of your business," pronounced JC.
There was a knock on the door, and the growl of a bodyguard asking if JC was ready to go.
"Bye, guys," said JC, opening the door. "Hi, Lonnie! I'm glad you're here tonight, man. There's something I've been meaning to tell you..."