AN: Okay, I'm going to take a stab at a Suspense/ Mystery fic.  I've *never* done one 
before and, well, dammit, I know I have a lot going on but I can't blow off ideas when 
they come.  I wanted to do a Chris fic and, well, someone said it would be cool if it 
wasn't all hearts and balloons and laughs so, here it is.

I would really, *really* like to get some feedback on this one; good, bad, or anything 
in between.  Thanks guys!

inspiredthoughts@hotmail.com   



****************************** Framed: Prologue ********************************



Chris cursed as he knocked on Justin’s mansion door in LA.  It was damn hot outside and 
dammit, he knew that Chris was coming over today, and why the hell wasn’t he answering his 
door?  Chris knocked again, impatient, and sweat ran down his back, leaving damp marks on 
his three hundred dollar shirt.  He mopped his forehead with the back of his hand and 
growled.  

“Prick,” he muttered as he dug for his keys and fumbled with the keychain until he found 
his copy of Justin’s key, for emergencies.  He didn’t want to just stroll in, but he sure 
as hell didn’t want to stand in the sweltering Los Angeles heat, less.  If Justin was doing 
something private that was his own damn fault.  

Chris didn’t want to be here, wouldn’t be here if Justin hadn’t called him last night, 
sounding young and afraid and breathing hard, like he did when he was trying not to cry.  
And Chris had caved, like he always did, and told his band mate that he’d drop by since he 
was in town anyway, sometime the next day.  

It never hurt to let Justin talk; he was so very good at it.  

But shit, he didn’t want to be here, in Justin’s house which he bought from selling them 
out.  He didn’t want to see the shiny cars and model friends and leather couches and flat 
screen TVs.  Chris had been to this house before but he could never look around without a 
sour taste rising like bile in the back of his throat.

Things weren’t great between Curly and the rest of the Fab Five.  They didn’t deny him 
happiness, or his music.  They tried to support him, had tried for the last two years, but 
every time Chris saw the new, grown up Justin Timberlake he didn’t recognize the boy who 
he had known and loved like a brother.

There’s was a coldness, a hardness that was new, and his smile was so distant.  Chris hated 
him sometimes, when he heard him talking about all the girls he had used and the drugs he 
had tried, when he was flaunting the producers and rappers who had taken pity on the poor 
boy band member who wanted so badly to play with the big boys.

Chris was happy to be who he was best, even if that was an aging pop star with bad knees.

“Justin?  Justin, where the hell are you?  You wanted me here and I’m here…”  He sighed and 
looked around, first in the living room which was always so spare and unlived in, then in 
the kitchen and dining room.  Justin’s dogs barked excitedly from the backdoor but Chris 
didn’t let them in.  He peered out the glass door but Justin wasn’t outside by the pool 
either.  

More annoyed now, he ran a hand through dark hair, and headed upstairs.  Chris didn’t know 
this house that well so he had to stop in each room and stick his head in.  Of course 
Justin Timberlake would live in a freaking mansion that was virtually empty.  

There were high tech gadgets and furniture but each and every room was virtually devoid of 
decoration or adornment.  The walls were white and bare.  It might have worked if he had 
been going for simplicity but bare necessity was hardly Justin’s style.  He was much more 
into gaudy and ostentatious.

The first three rooms were sterile bedrooms, the fourth was a game room, the fifth room 
was Justin’s.  Chris recognized it, mostly because it was more decorated than the rest, 
but he had only seen it once in passing.  

“Justin, come on, where the hell are you?”  Chris stepped into the bedroom fully, pissed 
off, and stopped dead in his tracks.  

Justin sat on the king sized with black silk sheets and dozens of pillows.  He was shabbily 
dressed in sweat pants and a ragged t-shirt that Chris recognized with a flash from their 
early days- it was baby blue with North Carolina’s logo sprawled across it.  He might have 
looked like the child Chris through they had lost forever if his hair hadn’t been buzzed 
closely cropped to his skull, and he hadn’t been holding a gun in trembling hands.  

“Justin?” Chris asked, suddenly hesitant.  

Justin Timberlake looked up and his face was haggard, a five o’clock shadow drawing his 
face in shadows, cheeks hollow, and eyes bloodshot.  His long fingers stroked the handgun 
he held carefully.  

“Justin, come on, what are you doing?”  

Justin ignored the question and Chris tried to edge forward but stopped abruptly as his 
younger band mate flinched and tensed violently.  “You shouldn’t be here Chris.”  

“Bull shit!” Chris spat, anger born from sharp fear that made his breath short.  “I should 
be here.  How could I NOT be here?  What the fuck are you doing?”

Justin stared with mute fascination at the weapon in his hands, blue gaze empty and 
unseeing.  “I’m making things better.”  

Chris swallowed and wanted to cry.  “Justin, you can’t make things better this way.  
NOTHING will be better this way.”  

Justin shook his head mutely as he swallowed thickly.  “I… I just want everything to go 
away…” he trailed off helplessly, voice raw and half broken.  “I, I can make things right 
Chris, I just have to be brave enough.”  His laughter was fleeting with an edge of 
hysteria.  

He looked up and met Chris’s frantic brown eyes and smiled softly, an old smile from years 
ago, before the lies and the fighting and words that couldn’t be taken back.  “You all 
know how hard it is for me to be brave.  But I’m ready now Chris, ready to fix everything.  
They… they say that it won’t hurt much.”  

“Justin, what are you doing?” Chris demanded, rooted to the spot, adrenaline racing through 
his veins.  Justin stood abruptly, the motion fluid and liquid with a thousand practices 
spent sweating in warehouses trying to make it big.  He held the gleaming gray gun to his 
temple and his sapphire gaze pierced Chris’s own.  

“I want you to leave now Chris, you… you shouldn’t have to see this.  I shouldn’t have 
called you I just, it was a moment of weakness, but its time for me to be brave now.  I 
want to be brave now.”  The gun wavered once as a tremor shook Justin’s slender, muscular 
frame like a wave.  

Chris took a shaky step forward. 

“Don’t!” Justin cried, face white.  

“Justin,” he begged, “you don’t have to do this.  There’s always options, always chances.  
Bravery isn’t dying, its living.”  

Justin’s smile faded like the sun and was replaced by a bleakness that made Chris cold.  
“Then maybe I am the coward I always thought I was.”  

Chris saw Justin’s finger begin to move and didn’t have time to think.  He dove for his 
band mate, terrified and wondering if he would ever wake up from this nightmare.  Maybe 
fear made his quicker, but he reached Justin in time to grab the gun.  He was strong enough 
to yank the gun from Justin’s temple, not strong enough to take it away.  

They wrestled together, strangely enough in silence, their harsh pants filling the silence 
of the too warm room as they grappled, their hands wrapped around the gun, their faces 
pressed against each others.  Justin’s eyes were wild and blue as the sky, even ringed in 
red from exhaustion and stress.  Chris felt more sweat roll in sheets down his face but 
didn’t care.  

He wished, desperately, that he was as strong, as big as he had been against Justin until 
growing spurts made the child tower over the man.  Age stole his strength and tears fell 
to join the sweat and he hoped that his faded prime would be enough.  

“I’m sorry,” Justin whispered in a small, lost voice as his finger found the trigger of 
the contested weapon and pulled.  

Chris and him were knocked apart with the shot that echoed through the empty room and they 
fell to the floor.  Chris lay stunned for a moment before cursing and rolling over to the 
side where Justin lay crumpled.  

The gun lay on the floor between them but Chris ignored it as he stared in shock.  Justin 
was unconscious and blood bloomed like a scarlet bloom from his side.  Fumbling hands 
reached and found a pulse, weak and erratic beneath his shaking fingertips.  

Blood stained his hands like sin.  

Chris wrenched himself away and reached for the cell phone in his back pockets.  His 
fingers felt full and clumsy as he dialed the only three numbers that could save Justin’s 
life.  His brain didn’t register the frantic words that poured from his lips between 
Chris’s sobs and he clicked off the phone, despite the operator’s cries.  

Paramedics found them an eternity later, Justin lying on the floor as his life ebbed away, 
and Chris rocking in the corner with his knees drawn to his chin, brown eyes glassy with 
the pain of Justin’s attempted suicide which played on repeat like a broken record in his 
head.