Normally, the comings and goings of people weren't something he paid huge attention to. In this instance, Justin had never been so glad to see the back of anybody in his life.

It was oddly comforting to know that Renee's father didn't like him in any lifetime. For once he felt like there was something his alter ego was no better at than he was. Idly he wondered when the animosity had begun in this world - in his he had made the oh-so terrible mistake of picking up Renee's phone and being a little too colloquial in his greeting. He had never been able to work out why the man disliked him so; his best guess was that he was protecting his youngest in some overbearing fatherly way, but even that theory seemed to be missing something. It especially missed something when here the brunette Renee had been so much older on meeting him. It was a little more understandable that he didn't want a teenage daughter sexing it up, but the other Justin had met her when she was significantly into her twenties.

Still, he had been grateful to watch the man walk out of the door this morning. He was relieved now that he had taken so long to come back, and in fear that any second he would. Nathan Anderson had been far less understanding of the necklace story than Faith, had considered it very odd. Possibly if it had been purely Renee visiting he wouldn't have questioned it so, but she'd had to do a lot of improvisational work to cover it up. His own method of dealing with it had been to shut up and let her talk, and then to hide in the attic looking for the necklace.

Justin was incredibly frustrated by the necklace. You would think magic could actually do something useful for you, but thus far he had no answers and he was probably going to have to return immediately on getting the necklace back. He couldn't stick around with Renee not speaking to him. So, in summation, all he had earned for this trip was no answers and probably an even deeper rift in his already flailing relationship.

He was starting to agree with Claire's first thoughts - that it was the stupidest idea anybody had ever had in the history of Man.

The whole thing confused him deeply. He saw shades of himself, parts of himself he didn't even recognise, and yet he had no idea how it all fitted together or where the patterns started making sense. As far as he could gather, there was nothing discernible that ought to account for the difference between their two worlds. They both had the same talent, same commercial success, same family and almost the same people in their lives. So why was this guy being taken seriously and having somewhat successful if ultimately transitory relationships when he couldn't?

And why despite them being the same age did he somehow feel like he was a high school kid looking at a graduate - like the guy was completely untouchable, a million miles from him and all he would ever be?

"Hey."

"OWW, Jesus!"

"Sorry."

Renee's entry to the attic had been so utterly silent that it has shocked the hell out of him and the arm he'd involuntarily shot out had hit a particular solid old dresser. He supposed he should be impressed by her stealth - the stairs had been creaky as hell when he'd trundled up them.

"Any luck?" Renee picked her way over the boxes and looked critically at the mess around him. He couldn't help noticing her shorts had disappeared in favour of more attic-sensible sweats (not that he'd admit to himself the amount of attention he paid to her appearance).

"Nope."

"Oh." Her face clouded over in an expression of worry. Intriguingly, he didn't recognise it - there was something behind her eyes that he couldn't quite pin down to a specific emotion. She seemed to shake it off, slapping her thighs a couple of times as if to wake herself back up; then she did something really shocking and actually looked him in the face. "So, what's left to go through?"

He pointed to a large stack of boxes the other side of the attic. "Those. I'd have got more done already but all the shit in these dressers was so messed up together I had to separate it all before I could go through it."

"You know, in hindsight I should have been a little more careful about where I kept that thing."

"Why'd you keep it?" he asked curiously.

Renee's breath caught in her throat as his words settled. Claire's warnings still rang in her ears and she knew in her heart of hearts that her ghost was right. Denial might be easier than facing up to things but it wouldn't get her results and she had less than a week to get those. What he had asked wasn't a question that had ever occurred to her before. Suddenly it seemed a very pertinent one she ought to have considered earlier. After what he'd done it was lucky she had kept it, but that still didn't help her avoid the answer.

"I guess… I don't know. I guess I didn't want some other sucker picking it up but… I don't know. Didn't feel like I should be getting rid of it somehow."

Justin's voice rang strangely hollow as he responded. "You mean like you weren't quite done with it?

"I…" She needed a good rebuttal but was having extreme difficulty finding it.

"Renee, I know I'm probably just gonna make you mad again but I might as well say it while you're not yelling at me - I am really sorry about this, you know. I didn't mean to hurt you in any way, I just… this whole thing never felt over to me somehow and I need it to be, one way or the other. I'm sick of thinking about it every damn second. And I know the way I picked to do that was real fucking dumb, but I was desperate."

Taking a second to ponder her response, Renee sat slowly down next to him, crossing her legs under her. She pulled a box out from behind Justin's back and took his silence for confirmation that it hadn't been searched through yet.

"What about, Justin?" This was a genuine question, but part of her just wanted him to be the one squirming for a change. "What made you so desperate you would do this?"

"My life is so shitty right now I wanted to see how the other side lives, and… well, you. I just… I think about you. I'm not sure what that means, but I do. We did kind of sleep together, you know."

Justin hadn't expected himself to be so candid with her. It was probably the little piece of his head which was gleefully celebrating the fact that the lines of communication appeared to be re-opening. Indulging in one of her nervous tics, his companion pulled her ponytail out and redid it once or twice (or three times, to be exact). Without knowing precisely why, she was yanking pieces out and strategically arranging them around her face.

"What makes it shitty?"

"Fighting with Ren all the God damn time. The way we can't seem to get past what happened just before you got there or what happened while we were apart. My total lack of musical credibility. You know, the same old."

"The musical credibility… well, not to be a bitch but that's your own fault. You gotta take the risks to nab that and you've been playing safe."

"Gee, thanks." Possibly she had a point there, but he couldn't vocalise that right about now. Claire's bluntness appeared to have rubbed off on her and now he was less sure that chatting was a good idea. "I just… God, why does he get to be the big man and I still feel like a little boy?"

"Well…" Renee said slowly, cogs turning creakily in her brain.

She had a feeling what she was about to say was amateur psychology at its worst, but it was all she had. Also, it was better to talk than to keep looking at her boyfriend's body in clothes which her boyfriend had long since grown out of wearing, style wise. Looking at him did weird things to her head and stirred up feelings she didn't necessarily want to have.

"Maybe because he's moved on in his life and you haven't. I mean, he was kind of forced to. His relationship with his first big love ended in a big old fireball and left a huge mess after it that he had to clean up, you're still with yours. He had his life totally shaken up and that kind of totally shook up his career too and made him start going for all this risky stuff going solo, but you're still kind of doing the one man version of *NSYNC."

"What, so you think I'm totally immature and I should ditch Renee because it'll force me to grow up?" Justin asked incredulously, unable to believe his ears.

The woman did not pull punches, he had to give her that - it was an odd sensation, feeling the mental wind so thoroughly knocked out of him. He'd become so used to his own girlfriend constantly backing down over the past couple of years that he'd forgotten how much of an impact people so close to you could have.

"I think you're in a rut," she replied. "That doesn't mean you're completely immature or that you should necessarily break up with her, it's just that I think you've grown up but you're still in the place you were seven years ago. And I think the reason you feel so bad there is precisely because you have matured and part of you knows that you shouldn't still be in that place."

"I… but…"

"Holy shit I found it!"

Renee squealed happily as she yanked her prize out of the box - that black, sparkly piece of onyx which had begun all the trouble in the first place. Justin was about to wish she wasn't smiling so hard when she granted it for him… her face fell, twitching oddly in thought.

"Umm… I'm gonna keep this with me, okay?"

"What?" As if he wasn't confused enough already, that was the one sentence in the whole conversation that he would pinpoint as the most bewildering. "I thought you'd want me to swap us back immediately."

Again Renee's face faltered, and she didn't look at him when she stood up. "It's not my decision, right? You told me that I shouldn't let you make my decision for me, and I think it's only right I do the same by you. Just… try not to draw it out, okay?"

"Ren…" he stuttered incomprehensibly, absolutely floored. It was a good job he was already sitting on said floor or falling on his ass might have been a possibility. Then, before he could even work out how to even start questioning that, something else popped into his head. "So why you keeping it?"

With that she smirked and raised a weary eyebrow. "What, after the whole sneaky swap thing? Shame on you if you fool me once, dude, but I'm the moron if I let you pull more shit."

Again it struck him how unused he was to being challenged by her - clearly the guilt trip he'd been so successfully putting on his girlfriend had made him complacent. That, however, didn't mean he was completely rusty.

"So," he began as she went to leave him on clean up duty. "For somebody who's been refusing to talk to me for so long, you sure seem to have me all figured out."

"Well…" She let out a tiny sigh before giving him an odd look: sadness and trepidation. "I thought about you too."

There was silence for a moment between them; before he could answer her she was jogging down the stairs, yelling up to him that she would pack their suitcases since she couldn't stand another moment in a house with 'that man.'

***

At the same moment as that Justin Timberlake was wearily dumping junk back into boxes and trying to put them back in some semblance of order, the other was sitting out by the pool. Shell shock was not an unfair diagnosis. His skin had taken on a paler pallor than usual, and his eyes were still that little bit too wide. His stance was not overly rigid and his basketball shorts and t-shirt were perfectly normal attire, a detached observer might not have noticed the difference. What gave him away was that he was nervy, and every sound coming from behind the neighbours' fences was setting his teeth on edge.

He had now come to the conclusion that the inhabitants in this world were both fucked in the head. Previously this impression had been reserved for his doppelganger, but it was now extending to Version Blonde too.

Version Blonde Renee had begun a very disturbing discussion with him that morning. She had started talking about the nature of destiny and how your life could go to places you had not expected. Justin was sick to death of such topics, but they were pretty relevant and unavoidable at the present time. She had cited Claire's death, the level of fame she had been unprepared for, her first life swap… but then she had started twittering on about this one. That in itself would have been fine, but she'd taken on a somewhat fatalistic tone which hadn't been there in their previous discussions. She seemed convinced that this was their fate and that they should accept it sooner than later. The disturbing portion of the conversation had been her monologue on why it was a good thing.

The kiss has been far more disturbing, but then that didn't have much to do with discussion.

Renee, at some undeterminable point, had come to the conclusion that he was a far better man than his alter ego - ironically, much like said alter ego had. This worried Justin to no end; people around here needed to stop thinking he was perfect or so different, because he was steadily coming to the conclusion that he wasn't.

He'd already compared the passive aggressiveness of his other self's coping mechanism and found it horribly akin to his own. He had thought of all the times he had bowed down to the record company or the input of one of the other *NSYNC guys back in the day instead of pressing his own point (sometimes rightly, sometimes not), and he had considered how easy it would have been for him to have stayed in that spot. He'd pretty much only pushed it on a whim and kept pushing purely because he saw the result.

There was also a pretty startling but unavoidably likely indication of where he and Britney might have been in their relationship by now if they hadn't split up. He remembered the amount of time it had taken for him to work out how to be in a more adult, considered relationship rather than throwing yourself into the all consuming expectation of first love. Every once in a while he wondered if - had they not split up - as they got older they would have managed to make the transition into that more adult and sustainable state of affairs. Now, as he looked at Renee, he saw what he thought was the result of a failure to do that.

She refused to see the same, on either count. She saw a reflection of her boyfriend (and also of herself by proxy), a better reflection - she had just forgotten that the image you saw in a mirror was a reversal, not true reality. He, in contrast, had finally come to understand what Claire had been banging on about all this time. He saw the identical cores; he saw that the differences were only in choice and consequence. Justin now understood just how easily they could be in each other's respective positions instead of the ones they were currently in now. Renee saw none of this, which was why he had a sickening feeling she had been kissing a fantasy of fixing her relationship rather than him.

The fact that this feeling sickened him was troublesome in his view. As was his growing and somewhat contradictory feeling that being subjected to her boyfriend again would only continue to damage her (contradictory in view of his 'we are the same' revelation and that he didn't consider himself harmful to her). It was always frustrating to be torn between what was best for you and what was best for someone else - particularly when you were so unsure about what was best to begin with.

What really bothered him was his own failure. Renee had earnestly told him how at ease she felt with him and how for the first time in two years she felt like she had somebody to talk to. With wide eyes she had looked at him in wonder, like he was an answer to her prayers and that he would fix her. He had failed to make her understand. Despite his best efforts, he had failed to talk her down or to dispel her illusions.

He had also completely failed to keep himself from kissing her back. More to the point, he was wondering if he'd failed to make his best efforts trying.