Archive of Our Own

For some reason, it’s so much easier to fight when other people are around. Maybe that’s just because when they’re not alone, the envy of what the other has kicks in: Alex can see the way Justin doesn’t have to fight everyone and everything just to eke out a place in the world, and Justin can see how Alex dances around everyone and makes things up as she goes along and it somehow results in a working shortcut.

But when they can’t see each other’s faces, in the dark, with their backbones aligned and the blanket over them subjected to only a gentle tug-of-war, the barbs they toss back and forth can be a little more blunted than during the day. It isn’t perfect. But it’s a small truce, a place to breathe and to remember and to tell each other scary stories , if nothing else.

Tonight’s scary story , though, may have been Alex’s most frightening yet in a lifetime of hair-raisers, and as Justin lays awake and stares at the glow from his alarm clock, he wonders why he ever let her stay in bed with him in the first place. The only thing more inconceivable than allowing her to stay, however, is being without her, tonight of all nights.

~*~

When Alex was four, she came screaming down the hallway in the middle of the night and pounded on the door of Theresa and Jerry’s bedroom, demanding to be comforted after a nightmare. She launched herself onto the bed, right in the middle, when Jerry let her in, while he whispered to Theresa that sometimes this happened, when magic started to manifest itself. She nodded sleepily, tolerantly; magic was still magical to her, and not merely something to get everything breakable in the house broken in just half the time a toddler usually needed to accomplish the same amount. When Jerry returned to bed, Alex nestled into his chest without hesitation, holding her blankie close with her angular elbows digging into her father’s ribs. He didn’t mind.

“Tell us about your bad dream, honey,” he said. Theresa reached over to rub Alex’s back.

“There was a tiger, an’ it had knives for hands, an’ it wanted to chop off my toes,” Alex said, wiping her nose on Jerry’s t-shirt. “It was really big an’ had eyes that glowed green. It was walking around my bed and I heard the knives scraping on the floor.”

“That’s quite a dream, Alex,” Jerry said, as she began to slow down and start to doze off. He kissed the top of her head. “Your mommy and me are big and strong, though, so you don’t need to worry about tigers.”

“’m not,” Alex murmured. “I wanted to sleep between you so that it’d chop you up first.”

“…oh.”

“Night, Daddy. Night, Mommy.”

“Um, Jerry,” Theresa said a moment later, as Alex’s small buzz of a snore started up, “what’s that?” She motioned towards the end of the bed.

In the dark hovered the green glow of the reflection of cat eyes. They blinked, and then moved. There was a metallic noise.

“It’s not real,” Jerry whispered, “I think. Sometimes wizards with a lot of natural talent for magic have these nightmares that they can project, when their powers come on. I don’t know that it’s ever happened in my family before, though. It should pass, eventually.”

It didn’t, at least not that night. They were kept awake by a tiger with knives for paws scraping back and forth at the end of the bed, all night long.

The next night, it was a demon that could set your entrails on fire.

The night after that, it was a flood. Just a flood. Theresa woke up choking on dirty water that wasn’t there every thirty minutes. Jerry got athlete’s foot and had to throw out the t-shirt he slept in when the mildew smell wouldn’t go away.

Then the nightmares got worse, and Alex’s retelling of them (despite her parents’ requests for her not to) grew more lurid and dramatic. “Where is she getting this from?” Theresa demanded one morning, exhausted and sinking deeper into her coffee. “Have you been letting her watch horror movies? Or the news?”

“It’s a generalized psychic field,” he responded. “She could be getting it from anyone, anywhere. Or she could be making it all up herself. When she figures out how to control what she’s taking in instead of just spilling it back out again, the nightmares will stop.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not even a little bit.” He leaned over and kissed her. “But short of getting Kelbo to make her a sleeping potion, or finding someone else with an equal amount of magical affinity and strong will, I don’t know what else to do but wait.”

“No drugging our daughter with anything,” said Theresa firmly, “except maybe Benadryl. What about Justin? Could he be a psychic match or whatever it is for her?”

“In magic, probably. But he’s…” Jerry hesitated. “He’s the, well, he’s the good child. I don’t think he’s quite as strong-willed as Alex is.”

“You’re wrong,” she told him. “Justin wants your approval so he does what you say. But I bet that if there was something he really wanted, he’d do whatever he needed to get it, no matter who was in his way. His stubborn streak is deep down, but it’s there.”

So they sat down with Alex and Justin and explained to Justin that he had to protect his sister from the bad dreams , and to Alex that when she had a bad dream she should knock on Justin's door, because he was a wizard and Daddy was not. The two were silent for a moment at this outright admission that their parents were not actually in charge of the universe, before Justin solemnly promised he would look after his sister and Alex started protesting that she needed enough people to use as monster bait when she slept. "You only need to sleep with Justin until the nightmares go away," Jerry said, but it was unclear whether they heard him over the argument of if Justin was a big enough mouthful to be a distraction for tigers while Alex ran away.

And that night, Theresa and Jerry heard the sound of small footsteps race towards their door, then stop, then walk away. “Are we doing the right thing?” Theresa whispered. There was a distant knock.

“Do you want to spend another night listening to the Unibomber dropping bombs around the room while lecturing on anarchy?”

They heard the door to Justin’s room open and close. “It’ll be fine,” Jerry said.

Down the hallway, Alex climbed into bed with Justin and curled up with her back to him. “You’re lucky tonight. The monster I dreamed about doesn’t have a mouth. But you prob’ly don’t wanna put your feet over the edge of the bed.”

Justin rapidly pulled his feet up and put them under the blankets. “I can hear it under the bed. And I checked before you came in and there’s nothing there.”

There was a rasping noise. “Those are its scales,” Alex said, with what might have been delight. “It uses them to chop people up, like smoothies.”

“There isn’t anything there,” Justin said. He screwed his eyes shut, and then opened them again, peering into the dark.

“It looks kind of like a big lizard, just without a head,” murmured Alex, sunk deep in both of Justin’s pillows. He tried, mostly in vain, to free at least a corner of one of them for himself.

“There’s no lizard. There’s nothing there,” he said firmly, because he knew there wasn’t. He had checked.

“Are you sure?” asked Alex, nearly asleep.

“I’m sure.” He laid his head on the corner of pillow he had worked loose, his back against his sister’s, both of them watching over the edge of the bed. He was sure, and that seemed to be enough for Alex, and miraculously, the sound of sharp scales died down into nothingness.

That night, Justin let her steal all the blankets.

(Of course, he was completely wrong, and ended up nearly losing a toe but luckily only acquired a long scrape down his shin. Alex had been complaining of dangerous monsters under her bed because there damn well were dangerous monsters under her bed, just looking to snack on someone who lived half in the world of magic. But after a week of sleeping with Justin, she stopped having nightmares, and the monsters stopped crawling out of the shadows, except for the ones she had made friends with. Justin, on the other hand, was plagued by some haunt with goggles for the next decade. These were the costs of living with Alex.)

~*~

Justin can’t make himself fall asleep and ignore his sister, and a nasty, cynical part of his mind wonders if that was the entire point of Alex crawling in bed with him in the first place. But she’s not sleeping either, and he knows how the very act of planning far enough ahead to wage this much psychological warfare on him is more than she’d ever bother with.

And also, she has a good point, goddamn it.

The Wizard Competition is a flaming pile of shit, she had said. Normally he would disagree with her on both principle and the specific point, as competitions were an excellent opportunity to let people see your superiority, but she hadn’t said anything he hadn’t tried to avoid thinking about over the past few years, and possibly in more colorful terms than even she used.

It’s a way to determine who most deserves to hold onto their powers, he had argued back out of habit, and still because he held out hope that studying all his life hadn’t been for absolutely nothing.

Alex had retorted that it was a way to keep the wizarding families from ever becoming powerful enough to upset the balance of power in the wizard world by dividing them against each other. He hadn’t realized she was capable of that much political awareness, but when she pointed out that she had been getting her own way since pretty much the day she was born by distracting people with their need to bicker or prove themselves, he didn’t question her expertise.

“They want to divide us up, and it’s going to work,” she says, and Justin gives up on sleep, officially. “Because if you win, you’ll tell everyone how hard you worked at it and it’ll make you even more of an obnoxious ass than you already are. And you’ll be doing stuff I can’t do. Which isn’t fair.”

“It’s completely fair. It’s like the definition of fair.”

“Maybe you should get a dictionary that doesn’t suck, then. Because you being in the wizard world and me not means you’re leaving me behind and—“ her voice turns sullen after a pause “—and I know that promise doesn’t matter because it never actually happened but—“

“It matters,” he interrupts. “It matters more. Because it never happened, and I still mean it.”

He imagines he can hear her smiling in the dark. “But if I win, you seeing me beat you for the second time will make you actually hate me, if it doesn’t give you a
nervous breakdown
, and that’s gonna be a problem when I need you to provide me an alibi for last Thursday.”

“What happened last—“

“Don’t ruin it, Justin, we’re having a moment here. Just like we were last Thursday, when I was with you all day and nowhere near the MoMA.”

“…Uh-huh. And what happens if Max wins?”

“Repeat that last part to yourself.”

“And what happens if—oh. He technically could, you know, he’s ahead of us still.”

“I know. Even if he does win, though, what’s the worst that would happen? We all get lifetime supplies of cupcakes? He turns himself into a giant banana and lives out his days on a farm in Bolivia?”

“Do you even know where Bolivia is?”

“Shyeah, I’m not as dumb as you think, dumbass. It’s right next to… Bo… Borneo.” She elbows him. “That was a joke.”

He’s still pretty sure she has no idea where Bolivia is, but he doesn’t push it.

“But see, you and me’ll be okay with or without magic. We’ve got our band,” she continues. “And even if that fails, you’re twenty and people will be paying you a lot of money and calling you Dr. Justin in a year or two even though you have no idea how to fix a broken collarbone without magic.”

“I’m not in grad school to become that kind of doctor.”

“No, just the useless kind. And I can live off my art. Or on your couch, whatever.”

“Or in jail, if they catch you for—“

“I thought we weren’t talking about that,” Alex says sharply.

“I’m not talking about the time with the phone calls and the Justice Department,” Justin replies, smug. “I’m talking about—“

“And now we’re not talking about that, either. But the point is, we’ll be okay.”

“You sure you want to keep quiet about it? The square footage is probably better for the price in a jail cell than anywhere in Manhattan.”

She tries to smother him with a pillow. After flailing wildly for a second, he grabs her around the waist and pushes her back out of reach of his face, pulling the pillow from her hands. He’s had upper body strength for a while, he thinks; she should really stop being surprised that he can lift her so easily. For gods’ sake, he used to be —still sort of is— a monster hunter; a teenage girl isn’t exactly a problem. Most of the time. Well, very occasionally.

“You say a word to anyone about that and you’ll go down with me,” she huffs, once it’s clear that murdering him in his sleep is not presently an option.

He smacks the pillow down on her side of the bed harder than is strictly necessary, and she curses at him and tucks it back under her head. “That’s totally something I’ve never heard before,” Justin says. “Nor did it occur to me whenever we’ve given fake IDs to the police, or when getting you out of that rave meant destroying several thousand dollars’ worth of sound equipment, or when I built the hydroponics setup for your medical marijuana farm because I thought you were growing tomatoes.”

“Shut up,” she says. “Really, Justin? Tomatoes?”

“I have a pure and unsuspicious mind.”

Her disbelieving snort is expressive. “Try that with someone who hasn’t poked around inside your head.”

“Which reminds me, if I ever find out that you were the one who planted those pictures in my mind, I will actually turn you into a tomato.”

“Why would I ever tell you the answer to that? It’s so much more fun watching you worry that you might have imagined them yourself.”

Cue the inarticulate noises. He can feel a
hot flush
rising up his chest and to his neck. But really: even though he’s a twenty-year-old guy with everything that comes along with that, he’s still the good kid. There are still some lines that don’t get crossed. So he can’t have thought that up all on his own. It just made sense, right? (Right?)

Alex is chortling, so he puts it out of his mind before she starts digging.

“I thought you wanted to talk about the Wizard Competition,” he says, “and what we’re going to do about it.”

“We?”

“Duh. You’re only going to drag me into whatever you end up doing anyway, so I might as well be in on it.
 
Are you going to lead a revolt? That seems to be more work than you generally like to do,” he asks her.

“Probably not,” she answers. He can feel her shrugging as her shoulder blades move against his back. “I mean, it wouldn’t really have gotten Stevie anywhere even if I hadn’t—but tomorrow, no. That’s not what I’m going to do tomorrow.”

“Then what are you doing tomorrow?”

She’s silent for so long that he wonders if, somehow, she’s managed to fall asleep. “It’s like they’ve been making me do what they want my whole life. I get powers, they take them away when I don’t do what they want. They make me stay in the competition so I can keep the people I care about, when staying in the competition means I’ll just lose them all. Now they’re going to make us compete. I don’t like it when people make decisions for me.”

Justin mulls it over. “I never thought about it that way. I don’t like it either.”

“Whatever. Why do you think we get along so well? You love doing what people tell you to.”

“I can’t believe you never figured out that if you do what you’re supposed to, you can do whatever you want the rest of the time.”

“Seriously? Oh my god, Justin, I never realized.”

 She doesn’t sound sarcastic. Pride and self-satisfaction wells up in him, much the same way embarrassment did a second ago. “I’m just glad I can pass along to you the secrets of life—“

“No, what I never realized is that you actually choose to be this lame. I thought it was something you couldn’t help.”

“Didn’t  you want my help for something?” he asks testily. That bedtime he used to set for himself might be a thing of the past –he is a grad student after all, and predicts he’ll get his next full night of sleep sometime after he defends his dissertation in a few years—but it is way too late to stay up and be exhausted for the biggest test in his life. “Or would you rather go plan a revolution by yourself and then be tired enough for me to beat you in two seconds tomorrow?”

“I don’t want you to beat me. I don’t want to beat you. I think we should both lose.”

He had known this was coming, known she was leading up to this. Still, the words come as a shock, as an almost-tangible kick in the chest, very similar to the feeling he had that time Alex used her fake ID to buy him a drink called a purple motherfucker. He can feel his heart squeezing painfully, his breath not coming like it should. All he can think about are the last two times he lost his magic—when he lost that other Wizard Competition, when the Wizard Court sent him back to level-one powers and took him out of the Competition entirely—and how it felt then like was losing consciousness and falling into some blind, deaf hole, except none of those feelings were physical, not in the ordinary sense. Then, he had thought he was losing everything. Was losing himself.

“How can you even think about losing?” Justin says, his voice coming out high and strangled. He takes a deep breath, trying to force his words to come out normally. He manages about half an octave lower, which is still even more girly than Alex would sound if he spelled her into believing she was Paris Hilton. “How can you think about giving all this up?”

“Because there’s something else that I definitely can’t think of giving up. And you know what? If you don’t feel the same, you’re just as shortsighted and self-centered as everyone thinks I am.” Her voice is quiet, but cutting. He can feel that she has tensed behind him, probably ready to spring from his bed and vanish. Maybe it’s magical prescience, and maybe he just knows Alex better than he’s ever known anyone, but suddenly he knows: if he gives her the wrong reply, right now, if one badly chosen word comes out of his mouth, then everything changes. There is no Undo Dust.

Spells for Destroying the Girl You Would Do Anything For And Probably Already Have : if it had been the title of a book in the lair, Justin would have read it from cover to cover and would thus know what to avoid saying and this conversation wouldn’t be happening.

He wants to take issue with Alex accusing him of shortsighted self-centeredness, but she won’t believe him even if he does: half the good things he’s ever done have been badly disguised performances to avoid looking like the member of the family who would throw his siblings under the bus in the name of ambition (i.e., everything a future Wizard Competition contender has been raised to be). He wants to say that he isn’t going to take what they all desperately want and run with it, he’s not that person.

Except he totally knows he is.

And if he’s not, then he doesn’t know what he is.

If he gives up magic, he’s not the person who stands in between science and magic, seeing both sets of natural laws and the way they bend and dance around each other. He’s not going to be the one person in the house using magic responsibly. He’s not going to be the one people point to when they talk about hard work and ambition paying off. He’s not going to be the son that makes his family proud.

But when he thinks about those other times when his magic has been taken away from him, Alex has always been right by his side, needing him to make everything right. And maybe, just maybe, she doesn’t come to him to fix everything because she can’t help fucking things up. Maybe she needs him to be her rock just as much as he needs to be the one who holds her up.

He hasn’t said a word yet, and he can hear Alex getting restless behind him. He rolls over, his face ending up in her great masses of hair. Clearing it away, Justin says, with his eyes closed, “I know everyone thinks I’m the capable one who has all my shit together. But… I’m not, really, I’ve just always tried really hard to make everything perfect because I’m scared that if I don’t, then I’ll lose what I want the most. And tomorrow, if I try that hard, I’ll lose something, if not everything. If I don’t try, then… then I’m not me, Alex. I’m no one.” He pauses, hoping that what he suggests next isn’t one of the dark pits of fucking-up he’s been trying to avoid. “And if—when—we lose everything but each other, you’re going to need me to be exactly who I’ve always been as much as I need you. It’s just how we work. I just don’t know if I’ll be who you need me to be, when you need me most.”

The only response to him casting aspersions upon her invulnerability is silence, and Justin finds that he is suddenly a fervent believer in a higher power, all the higher powers, any higher power that will listen to him right now and please make her say something, ohgodohgodplease.

“That’s what you’re most worried about,” she says flatly, after approximately sixteen centuries of subjective time. Justin can’t decipher her tone. He starts quietly gulping air, inhaling some hair while he’s at it, in preparation for fending off the oncoming panic attack. “When they drain your powers and you’re just a normal person. You’re afraid of not being… there for me?”

“It’s as much of a surprise to me as anyone else,” he assures her. It’s a smartass response that doesn’t really have a place in this conversation, but there’s only so much sentiment that either one of them can tolerate; even if them sleeping back-to-back is hardly a rare occurrence –Alex can be counted on to be stealing his blankets anytime she’s scared of something and wants him to be more scared so she’ll feel better− the last time they talked like this, they were surrounded by jungle.

Or maybe they can tolerate a little more sentiment, after all, because she swiftly rolls over and clings to him, burying her face in his shoulder, wrapping her arms around him, and holding so tightly that he doesn’t think he could dislodge her if he wanted to. And apparently he doesn’t: without even thinking, he’s clinging right back. “You’re my sister,” he finds himself saying. “We can stop being wizards and everything else. But you’ll still be my sister and I have to still be your brother.”

She smacks him lightly on the back of his head. “You’re supposed to get all your existential crises out when you’re a depressed teenager and then when you’re having a quarter-life crisis, not now,” she says, and he is shocked that she knows the word ‘existential’. “You’re worried about who you’ll be? You’re my brother. You’re the scientist, and I’m the artist. I’m the one always getting into trouble and you’re the one always getting me out. You’re always trying to figure everything about yourself out and I’m always telling you what you are, dork. We don’t need magic for that. We never did.”  

Good god, thinks Justin. She’s right, mostly. Terrifying. “In that case,” he answers slowly, “it just wouldn’t be us if you didn’t come up with some terrible plan and I didn’t follow you right into it.”

She does a little wiggle-dance of satisfaction in his arms. “See how much easier life is when you just go along with me?”

“That’s extremely debatable,” he says, but he kisses her on top of the head. “However, I think that they reschedule the Competition if we don’t compete. We still have to at least put on a show of trying to win, while Max goes for it. So, basically, I’m still going to take you down tomorrow.” Which, despite everything, is still going to be pretty satisfying.

“God, seriously? I was hoping to get to sleep in,” Alex grumbles. “Still, I guess setting you on fire makes up for it. Or causing your underpants to grow eels.”

“Don’t do that again, Alex. I just got over the last time, and now we’re not allowed back in that pool. You just don’t know what it does to a guy to look down and see that when his sister walks by.”

Her laughter shakes the bed. “Alright. Fine. No eels. I’ll just find something more surprising.”

Justin turns his head to bury his face briefly in the pillow. He removes it to say, “Our last time using magic gets to be fighting each other. Want to do something else for our second-to-last time?”

“Yeah,” she says, and smiles up at him. “Let’s go to the moon.”