Justin felt incredibly light headed and woozy. It vaguely reminded him of how he used to get travel sick, before years of travelling on the tour bus had acclimatised him.

The whole thing was a freaky experience; that was for sure. One moment he had been standing in his own bedroom, the next he had felt an iron grip settle somewhere around his stomach, like a hand had somehow managed to reach into his insides. Without mercy it had then yanked him forward and in a split second he was now standing outside a recording studio. It wasn't a studio he had seen before but he'd been in enough of the places to be able to recognise the general set up, even just from the corridor outside.

"Well that was about the dumbest thing you've ever done."

"How would you know?" He asked Claire as he tried to gauge his surroundings. "You were Renee's best friend, not mine."

"Process of elimination. There's nothing in the world you could have possibly done that was stupider than this."

"Whatever…" He looked down, trying to see if his other self's body was the same as his. It looked identical, right down to the… "Hey, what are the odds that my alternate reality self would be wearing exactly the same clothes as me?"

They were the exact same clothes. His feet were still bare, his jeans still had the same fading and threadbare patches, and he was still wearing a vintage Rolling Stones t-shirt. Hell, he could even see the small grease stain from the grilled cheese sandwich he'd made himself earlier. However, if the clothes hadn't tipped him off then the slightly smug look on Claire's face would have done it - she looked far too evil.

"Okay, what did you do?"

"I did nothing." She snorted. "You made the dumb wish all by yourself. But since you have, I will be your tour guide."

"So it's the same deal as what Renee did… I get three weeks or it's permanent?"

The entire reason for the little wish he had just made was Renee. Until a couple of years ago, Justin had been happily dating Renee Anderson, who like himself was a pretty famous pop star. Well, maybe happily wasn't the word, but they had been struggling along and life had been fairly normal. Then, one day, she had begun acting strangely. He'd been ready to have her committed, but it had turned out that body snatching was actually possible and inhabiting the body of his girlfriend was a different version of her from another dimension, one who had never become famous and thus never met him.

That had caused a few issues - not to mention a few headaches while he tried to understand the metaphysics of it. That was before he even started on the fact that he now knew magic was real and there was some form of life after death.

It had turned out that Renee had wished on the necklace entirely accidentally, even idly, unaware of what it could do. Some strange cosmic rule had said she had precisely three weeks in which to wish herself home, or she would be stuck in his reality permanently. It had taken them a while to hunt down the necklace on his side of the dimensional pond and she had wished herself home with only moments to spare, leaving some serious emotional debris behind her.

"Justin?" She tapped on his head, and surprisingly enough she actually hit it. He let out a yelp of surprise - last time they had met, she had been incorporeal and he had watched Renee pass right through her. "You didn't make the same wish as Renee."

"What? Yes I did!"

"No…" she mocked, "you didn't. She wished to be famous. You wished to see this reality, her reality. The one where she didn't become famous at the age of eighteen and then meet you: that's what you wished. And since you were wishing on that cursed piece of crap… boom!" Claire clapped her hands in front of his face. "You're going to see it. It, however, is not going see, hear or even feel you. I think you'll find you can't touch anything."

"What?" He panicked, desperately snatching at the door handle. When it sailed right through it, his blue eyes widened impossibly and his jaw dropped open. "Holy shit! Fucking hell, woman, you knew what I meant!"

"Technicalities are a bitch, huh?" Claire said, leaning casually against the wall. She might have looked relaxed, but she had a rising feeling in her gut that this entire trip was going to be unpleasant and cause more problems for him than it solved. "Lucky for the rest of us, you were sloppy with the wording - hence why they tell you to be careful what you wish for. You said you wanted to see it - you can see it without being part of it."

"Well…" He said, beginning to rub the pendant in his hand again - surprisingly enough, it was still along for the ride. "Maybe I'll just have to do some more wishing."

"Don't!"

Claire's arm shot out with superhuman speed, clutching his wrist. Justin was thoroughly annoyed with her, with her whole attitude and lack of co-operation, but suddenly there was a pleading in her eyes that he couldn't help being affected by. Clasping the necklace around his neck, ignoring the fact it was not a particularly male accessory, he folded his arms over his chest and looked expectantly at her.

"Look…" Claire said slowly once she realised he was prepared to listen. "Maybe this is the compromise. You get to see it but you don't get into the mix and start confusing things, and you can observe objectively. So… how about we just go on this little tour, when you've seen enough I'll take you home and we can lay off the wishing for a while. How's that?"

"Okay."

Justin nodded a little too quickly and she was still stuffed full of misgivings, but she nodded back.

"Okay? Well, if you're ready to meet yourself, you can just walk straight through that door. Literally, no need to open it."

"Wait a second… explain to me where exactly we are and why I got turned into Casper."

"Umm… shit, I hate explaining this stuff to civilians. It's confusing enough to me. Umm…"

She patted her hands against her thighs, trying to think of a good euphemistic way to explain everything to him. Justin tapped his foot against the ground impatiently, marvelling at the way it didn't make any noise.

"Think of this space we're in as kind of an observation deck, dimensionally speaking. We can see and hear everything but we can't affect it, which is why you seem to be passing through things. You haven't actually become a ghost like me or anything; it's just that technically you don't exist in their time and place so you can't touch anything in it. It's just that in the dimensional space you ARE in there's nothing to touch."

"So why do I have ground beneath me?"

She gave him an evil glare. "Don't make me hit you. If you haven't noticed, I can do that now."

"Yeah, how come?"

"Call it a promotion."

Justin sighed, scratching his beard. He could still feel that, at least. "Makes sense, I guess… where are we? Oh, and how come I didn't get separated from the necklace like Renee did?"

"Umm… not sure, somewhere in Southern California." She told him. "Same day as where you were… although interestingly enough we seem to have skipped a few hours. You might find you've lost some time once you get back home, I'm not sure. As for the necklace - Renee wished herself into an entirely different body, one which was nowhere near it. You just wished yourself here, and you were holding the necklace so it came for the ride. That's all."

Filled with trepidation, Justin took a deep breath and started walking for the door, Claire automatically following behind. Possibly he was doing something stupid, but something within him just had to know. She obviously thought he was being an idiot, but she had failed to appreciate how desperate he had to have been to even consider touching the necklace again. Every instinct in him said he was about to smack his nose against the door and get pushed back, but instead he stepped straight through it as though it were nothing.

It was the most singularly head spinning experience he had ever had in his life.

Most people never had an opportunity to see themselves as other people saw them - mirror reflections were reversed images, after all, and TV screens were not the same as live action - but here he was watching himself crouched over the mixing desk. A huge grin was stretched across his other self's face and his whole torso was bobbing in time to the frenetic beat pounding through the speakers.

It was a little deflating for his ego. Where he was dressed sloppily, this other Justin was looking smart and preppy in jeans, a long sleeved shirt and a woollen sweater vest. His blue sleeves were rolled up and pushed to his elbows, a ridiculously expensive watch gracing his left wrist. His head was neatly shaven, with a well cultivated shadow of stubble keeping his face from looking too young. He looked clean and well rested; in contrast, the other self he didn't know was observing him had a messy head of curls that needed cutting, and a long beard which grew untidily down his neck.

Great, so not only did this guy have Grammys where he didn't, he looked a heck of a lot better too. Maybe Claire had been right - this trip was going to be a real bitch.

It was when he finally dragged his eyes away from his other self that his heart truly leapt into his throat. There, sat next to the other Justin, their two heads bobbing in perfect synchronicity, was one JC Chasez. That would be the JC Chasez, who in his reality he had been estranged from for years. It was yet another piece of fallout from his relationship; the other *NSYNC guys had always disliked Renee and considered her about as good for their group as Yoko Ono had been for The Beatles.

"JC?" He stuttered. He recalled this reality's Renee telling him during her short visit that in her world *NSYNC had never fallen out with each other, but seeing it first hand made his own loss hit home. "Are the other guys here?"

"Not here, but around," Claire responded. "You guys have never really worked as a group again here, but you're all still friends. They're working on JC's solo album."

"He has a solo album here?"

"This'll be his second."

"God…" Justin blinked. In his reality JC had disappeared from the limelight, choosing to eschew all remnants of his former life.

His ears finally registered the backing track that was playing. It was like nothing he'd heard. He thought it was what you'd get if David Bowie and Prince had mated, but with more of a guitar sound. The music he made back home was more like an RnB version of *NSYNC, nothing like this. He could hear an element of the electronic sound JC had always liked, but other than that he was struggling to get a grip on it. Was this coming from the other Justin or JC? Was this the kind of stuff he generally came out with in this dimension? And since when had he become so handy with a mixing desk?

"Ahh this shit is good!" The other Justin exclaimed as he finally switched off the track. "What do you think lyrically? Like, I think it's gotta be something you can do staccato, but that beat's pretty crazy right?"

"Man, crazy is the word…" JC chuckled, leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head. "I'm thinking I wanna do something a little off the wall, lyrically. I think this is too good to waste on 'boy meets girl', or 'I like clubs.' You were so right about that bass line though."

"Can you not just see them bouncing off the walls to this shit?"

"Let's not get ahead of me." JC smacked him gently upside his head before pushing his chair back and stretching. "I'm bathroom bound, back in a second."

His other self just nodded and began drumming his hands against the desk, knocking out the beat which had just been playing and beat boxing a little to himself. For his part he was staring after JC, a look of longing passing over his face. It was safe to say he'd kill to be like this with JC again - he sorely missed the times when they would sit just collaborating in the studio, usually cracking up every five minutes and constantly ribbing each other, back and forth like brothers. They had been as good as brothers, once. Now he'd probably be the last person anybody would think to tell if JC got found dead in a ditch somewhere.

Claire remained helpfully quiet, but every so often he would hear a little cough from her or get a flash of her in his peripheral vision. Justin wasn't too concerned with her. He was too busy staring at the man he could have been. Maybe he was being presumptuous, he'd seen them for three minutes together and had been standing here since JC left the room another five ago, but this man he was gawking at appeared happy. There was a contented vibe emanating from him, and he was more than a little green about it.

That envy magnified about four hundred percent when the door re-opened.

"Renee…" he breathed out, shocked by her presence. He thought she had said she didn't know him in this reality, except through the magazines?

She looked completely different. He'd always known she wouldn't look exactly like his Renee, she had told him as much, but it was still a shock to see it. Her breasts were smaller, for one thing; clearly she had kept to her word and not succumbed to the lure of the boob job as his girlfriend had. She was a little curvier as well, less skinny, but it looked good on her. Her hair was a dark chocolate, obviously dyed, but she was practically glowing. Her skin bore a healthy tan, showed off by the cute little white sundress she wore and its delicate straps. She looked practically edible.

"Hey baby!" The other Justin had turned around in his chair and burst out into a big smile.

"BABY?!" His cry went unheard by any but Claire; his eyes were virtually about to fall out of their sockets.

Renee smiled, trotting over on her impractical wedged sandals and setting down a Starbucks carrier of two coffees and a frappuccino on the counter before sliding onto her boyfriend's lap, wrapping her arms around his neck. Justin watched incredulously as his alter ego immediately put his arms around her waist and pulled her closer, dropping a luxuriously languorous kiss on her lips.

"Hey yourself. Where's JC?"

"Bathroom."

"How you guys getting on?" She dropped another peck on his lips, and Justin couldn't help remembering how nervous and uptight she had always been with him when visiting his reality. She seemed over that now. "Secured your next number one yet?"

"Listen to this…"

The other Justin replayed the track he and JC had been working on. Immediately Renee's mouth dropped open a little, her expression making a silent exclamation that elicited a chuckle from him before she too began to giggle. Their observer couldn't help it as his eyes darted between the guy's hand stroking her bare knee and her fingers massaging the back of his head. They would have been buried in his hair, if he'd had any. The actions were full of familiarity, such an affectionate thing - one he dimly recalled experiencing once upon a time with his own Renee.

"It's hot, right?" He finally asked Renee after switching it off.

"What the hell was that?"

"You don't like it?"

"I frickin' love it, I just have no idea what the heck it was."

"That's exactly what we were going for." He grinned. "So how was your day babe, interview go okay?"

"Yeah, it was alright… I just hate doing these teeny pop magazines. I think their audience and my music don't quite mesh, they always end up asking me kinda weird questions."

"Weird questions?"

"Well, not weird, just kinda pointless and entirely unrelated to anything. I think they only put me in there because I'm the great Justin Timberlake's girlfriend."

"And they seem to like your clothes. As do I…" He grinned, cheekily starting to slide his hand beneath her skirt until she batted it away playfully, pinching his arm as punishment.

"Great. I parade around in some pretty clothes and they all wanna put me in their pages. I'm Paris Hilton."

"Except that you can sing."

"Ooh, I'm telling the tabloids you said that."

"And then I'll tell 'em that this whole thing where they think it's strange such a nice girl is dating a horny bastard like me is a complete misconception and that you're the inspiration for that whole shackles/whip me thing in SexyBack."

Renee couldn't help bursting into giggles, hiding her face in her boyfriend's neck as their laughs mingled together in the air, his hands stroking her back affectionately.

"She's famous now?!" Justin hissed at Claire, unable to believe what he was hearing, especially given how badly Renee had taken to her alter ego's popularity and the attention on her.

Claire waggled her hand in the air, twisting her wrist from side to side in a 'sort of' gesture. "Not as famous as yours. She started out doing RnB but she wound up going in a very guitar, almost folk music kind of direction. Think Norah Jones but less boring. She's popular enough, but because she didn't go so mainstream she sacrificed a little fame for that - not that she minds. As you can see, she's pretty happy with herself these days."

"So I see," he muttered darkly as he watched them begin kissing yet again.

His favourite part of the whole little show was when JC walked back in and it turned out that he seemed friendly with Renee. He greeted her with a hug and a kiss on the cheek, and Justin still knew JC well enough to know he didn't pretend to get along with people if he didn't. He was a polite guy, but he wasn't going to fake it either. She then distributed the coffees - apparently she'd hung out with JC long enough to know what to order for him - and they proceeded to sit and chat and laugh together, all things he had never been able to do with the Renee and JC of his own reality. Well, at least not at the same time.

This bastard really did have everything. Justin idly wondered if hating the alternate reality version of you amounted to hating yourself.