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Justin has been knocked out on the floor for the past two minutes, and Alex is starting to get scared.
She steps back, leaning into the magic textbooks lining the lair. When she bumps into Grandma Russo’s inherited pegasus wings, she doesn’t turn around to check if it’s alright, her eyes glued to his face.
He is just so pale. And his eyes aren’t even twitching. They twitch sometimes when he’s asleep. Usually right before Alex spells up a vat of glue on the side of the bed he gets up from everyday. He has a sixth sense for those sorts of things. Her trickery.
Jerry is speaking in hushed tones into his wand-phone. When he notices Alex staring at him, he gives her a firm glance. Her gaze drops to the floor. She didn’t do anything wrong, but can’t help the feeling that this is all somehow an Alex-shaped accident.
She just doesn’t know what happened. One second Justin was showing-off like usual, demonstrating this week’s spell to Dad. Then he dropped to the floor seizing. Rapid jerks that ran up and down his body. Alex almost laughed until she looked at his face, and saw that his eyes were rolled into the back of his head. His eyes were completely white, like two bloated crescent moons, his mouth hanging limp.
“Does he need to go to the hospital?” Alex asks numbly, creeping forward. He’s still twitching off-and-on, his leg spasming at the end like those floppy-tube blow ups. The ones stationed outside car dealerships. “Dad.” She repeats, voice rising anxiously at the lack of response.
Jerry frowns. “Can you check and see if your Mom and Max need anything?”
Alex gets the memo. She slips out of the lair, ignoring the urge to look back towards Justin before she closes the door. He’ll be fine. It sounded like Dad was calling a doctor from the Wizard world anyways. If it’s truly a magical problem, there’s no reason to go to a human doctor. Not like magic can show up on a X-Ray or something.
Teresa is packing a bag upstairs. Alex’s heart plunges to the bottom of her feet. So this is getting serious. “Mom.” She says, but doesn’t expand on her plea.
“It’s okay. I’m packing just in case.” Teresa wraps her into a hug. Alex hooks her arms around her, feeling numb.
She flops onto the couch, Max is flipping through the channels lazily. She can’t get rid of the gnawing feeling in her stomach. If he needs to go to the hospital, shouldn't they be going now? If they wait too long it could end up worse. “Max, aren’t you worried?” She says when Teresa goes upstairs.
“It’s fine, Alex. You know Dad’s got it.” He shrugs. “They’ll probably be upstairs soon.”
Alex turns away, crossing her arms around her middle self-consciously. Something’s not right. She can feel it in her gut.
Dad comes up an hour later, right before they would normally have dinner. They shut the substation down today for the dinner service, Alex went downstairs to flip the sign around in between all the commotion and waiting. Waiting.
Mom talks to him, out of ear-shot from where she and Max are sitting on the living room couch. This is where the ear of a bat spell could come in handy, she groans in frustration. She doesn't think she could pull it off without them noticing, unfortunately.
“So?” She asks, trying to keep the desperate tinge out of her voice. He’s probably fine, they wouldn’t be here right now if he wasn’t, but why are they keeping this a secret? Alex wrings her hands in her lap. Straightens them back out again.
“Justin will be fine,” her father reassures, sitting in the chair next to the couch with a sigh. “I don’t know exactly why, but when performing the spell his magic must have,” he pauses. “Internally combusted, of sorts.”
“That can happen?” Alex blurts out, raising a quizzical eyebrow. Like an explosion? A magic explosion? Are they all just walking grenades then? Don’t let airport security find that part out. They’ll never leave the country again. She can feel Max’s attention piqued next to her.
“I mean, no.” Jerry backtracks. “Not the way you think. You’re not just going to explode randomly.” He laughs dryly. “Justin might be sick,” He finally confesses. “And we don’t know exactly what’s wrong with him, but for now he should be okay.”
Alex nods, shrugging at the non-conclusive explanation. So he’s okay. Or not okay. But none of them are going to find that out today. Sounds about right. She looks at the stairs leading down to the substation, then back at her father.
“He’s still in the lair, we put him under glow-light to purify the stray magic out of his system.” Her father explains. “Justin should be awake by the morning. We just need to let him rest for now.”
Alex sulks at that, shoulders slumping. That doesn’t seem very fine at all, does it.
“I bet Justin’s getting the day off tomorrow,” She complains to Max once Dad gets up. She needs to say anything to clear the static noise building in her head. She doesn’t feel much like herself right now.
“Yeah! That’s unfair. Do you think I should collapse too? I got this project I’ve been working on in my bedroom upstairs. Do you want some of it? I think if I put it in the toilet it’ll pass as throw up…” Max trails off, feet kicked up on the table.
Alex gags. Is he talking about that heap of garbage he keeps sneaking upstairs? What did he put in it to make it start looking like vomit? She gets off the couch. She needs Justin to be fine again, and now.
Mom and Dad have checked on Justin for what is likely the last time of the night. Alex hung back, not electing to go downstairs when her brother or parents did. “So he’s asleep, right? What’s the big deal?” She said over her teen magazine in the later evening.
She slips her uggs on, pocketing her wand just in case. She takes note of avoiding the fifth stair down the stairwell, the one that always creaks. Learned that trick when she was sneaking out to one of Riley’s parties last year.
She hasn’t spoken to him in months, and honestly he kind of just slipped from her mind.
The wizarding doctor must of been the one to put him on something that looks like a tanning bed to Alex, just without the top-half that shuts that’s normally included. A shimmering blue glow emits from the bars that Justin lay on. It seems to sear through him, his skin an unnatural pale shade, blue shadows casted in the contours of his body. He looks dead. Kind of like how their Great-Aunt Margherita looked in the casket.
Alex sits down, feeling unmoored at seeing Justin in this state. In the dark of the lair, the fatigue on his face is further pronounced. His eyebags dark and lips pale and chapped.
Alex looks behind her, an expression of guilt on her face. She can’t let anyone catch her being a huge sap right now. At the sign of no one, she grabs his hand, her frown deepening.
Everything is red. That is all Alex sees– a specific, deep shade of red that looks almost orange. She starts to panic– why can’t she see anything else?
Alex feels the electric pinpricks travel up her limbs. Feels warmth surrounds her body like whiplash, an ebb and flow. Her nose crinkles, a strong tang coming to the forefront. Smoke, she identifies. Alex grasps Justin’s hand tighter, for all purposes unable to see. The touch grounds her, allowing her to metaphorically place her feet on the ground. It is then that Alex can see everything.
Emerald leaves, glimmering with nanobeads of rainwater. Likely from the morning’s drizzle. She concludes in a voice that is not her own. She hears the chirping of birds, so loud and high pitched it seems to ring in her skull. Green reverberates in her head, everywhere and nowhere, her vision blanks into a searing white. The chirping noises turn to static in her mind. Alex can feel the ground pull out from under her feet, and she starts to feel similar to when she was hanging off the edge in the Stones of Dreams Cave. She's about to freefall into the pit of nowhere.
I need to get out of here!
No. No. She needs to get it together. She only came down here to check up on Justin, what is wrong with her? She grasps his hand tighter, mind reeling as she feels the electricity of his skin travel up her arm again. It hurts, hurts real bad, makes her limbs heavy as her mind is assaulted with visions of green. And red, and orange, and warmth. And oh.
Alex sniffs, the smoke thick in the air, tinging the sensitive skin of her nostrils. The spell from this afternoon is recalled in her mind.
Her father turns to the chalkboard, looking at the notes he scribbled down. “This spell was discovered in the medieval century. ‘What is your greatest desire?’ Desiderium notum. It was used in witch trials, to try and find out if the woman being trialed had a certain,” Jerry scratches his head, just as perplexed as Alex is sitting at her desk, half-asleep. “Persuasion for the Devil, I guess.” He gives up trying to explain the logic of medieval Wizard society.
“Justin, want to show it off?”
And Justin had stood up with that same flourish that he had all the thousand times he had shown off a spell before, of the eldest sibling, the oh great one who actually read the chapter Dad told them to before class. But now looking back on it, Alex realizes the ever-recognizable ‘Justin anxiety’ (it’s more twitchy than normal expressions of anxiety, in Alex’s opinion) is on his face. It’s written all over him, in the way his hands go in-and-out of his jean pockets, constantly moving. She was half-asleep the first time, never noticed it.
What is your greatest desire? Alex recalls. And he thought of this. He thought of her.
Maybe not necessarily her. But what else is there? Besides the tropical leaves, and the smoky campfire, and the fact that their parents were set to disappear in about twelve hours tops? Maybe it’s just Alex's overinflated ego getting the best of her, but there weren't a lot of good things going on back then. So don’t call a girl conceited before maybe considering that Justin was thinking about her.
He was thinking about her. The fire that lapses lazily behind her eyes seems to grow greater, tendrils touching the starry sky. She needs him to wake up now. If only just to explain. Alex steps in closer.
It’s like a coal walk, dark and intimidating, when she enters the heat residing within him without any idea of what lies ahead. His mind is blank, overwhelmed by the sensory input being processed from every which direction, and she is quickly overwhelmed too. Her mind is screaming not to before she even actually commits to seeing this through.
It burns. She is not her own by the time she sinks to the bottom of the lava. She feels pain, then the acute pricks of what must be the sparks of heat from the campfire. She tastes the wood of the fire like a nauseating root canal, and looks into what she realizes are her own eyes for what feels like an eternity and a half.
She didn’t know that she was crying at the campfire that night. She looks different than what she imagines herself to look like, and she feels a bit strange looking at herself in somebody else’s point of view. In Justin’s eyes, she looks sort of pretty.
In Justin’s eyes, Alex realizes, she is considerably beautiful.
She is bright– the brightest thing in the forest, and she’s next to a fire for God’s sake– with the red T-shirt she had thrown on catching Justin's attention like a red flag would a bull. Every wrinkle on the shirt, the laundry detergent, the sand speckled from their day prior, all magnified in his grey eyes. What could he ever see in me? Alex wonders as she watches the event replay, why does he put so much attention towards me? Towards this night?
What doesn’t Justin notice about her? Alex feels completely consumed, carved and splayed open on his magnifying glass. Not a single detail is amiss in his focused line of sight. It’s like she was an art piece, and he was the painter, painstakingly committing himself to every flaw and crevice of her. Memorizing her, getting to know her better, devoted to getting the perfect picture.
He’s certainly perceptive, even catching when she self-deprecatingly looks down part way through her campfire monologue for a split second. His vision is perfect, better than 20/20 sight, better than any eidetic memory. Alex feels like self-combusting.
It’s too much– the sensory output, the colors, all the minimal details floating in and out of her focus.
She's sad. She's scared. I want to hold her.
She’s completely nauseated. But she needs to get out of this memory. She needs to get out of this, with Justin in tow. Even if he’s receiving quote-on-quote ‘magical light box treatment’ right now, Alex knows that Justin is actually walking around in his mind, painfully relieving every millisecond of this night.
It was the worst night of their lives, and Alex can't let him get trapped within it.
Alex scowls. Of course you decided to be a show-off to Dad. See how that turned out? She thinks, with a twinge of affection she has only just began to notice has always permeated her thoughts when it comes to Justin being Justin. She's also irritated, as now he’s stuck himself in his own head, and Alex has to fix it. It's not a matter of doing the work to fix it, suprisingly-- but Justin knows though that Alex doesn’t clean up his messes, he cleans up hers. It’s just not in their symbiotic nature for her to be the fixer.
But Alex can admit, who else is better to get him out than the girl that walked through that exact Hell with him last summer?
Because everything that happened was my fault. The words clench around her throat, unable to be spoken out into the world, especially in front of Justin, his unconscious face vulnerable in the bright light. I’m sorry.
She’ll say it in her head. She won’t do much else besides that.
When she reclasps his hand and steps towards the fire, she thinks it burns less the second time around.
So it’s not just one memory after all. It’s everything.
There are things that Alex didn’t even think Justin would remember. Ones that she sure doesn’t recall.
She looks to be around fourteen years old. In Justin’s similarly younger eyes, she looks less dorkier than she sure felt back then. Her hair is wet and straight, right out of the shower. Dark tendrils in contrast to her pale skin that’s exposed at the shoulders, her strawberry-printed towel wrapped around her. Justin’s pinpointed on the way her face twists up into a scowl, her thin eyebrows pulling together, yelling that he used the last of the body wash. Her voice reverberates around in his skull like two clanging pans.
Alex pulls back, wincing. Is her voice that high-pitched in real life? She starts to lose her hold on the vision and pulls herself back in unwillingly.
“Does that mean you didn’t use any? That must be why you smell, then.” Justin snarks back at her fourteen-year old self. She watches herself turn bright red, and her eyes burn at the edges when Justin takes catalogue of the bright shade her fourteen year old self flushes.
He’s storing it in his memory, to be kept forever.
That was the other shade of red I first saw. Alex realizes. So maybe all of these memories have colors attached to them? Make a rainbow, you’ll be able to walk across it?
What is this, Alex humorlessly snorts. St. Paddy’s day?
St. Paddy’s Day– and now she’s at the Leprechaun Grill. The sleeves of Justin’s horrendous, try-hard green tuxedo are in her periphery. He’s focusing on that blonde girl— her name was Tutor, Alex recalls. They never did keep in touch like Alex hoped they would. She’s as beautiful as Alex remembers though, pale blonde hair flowing down her shoulders. The half-elf smiles brightly after taking a bite of her mint ice cream.
Alex is a bit dumbfounded. Why is Tutor here? Maybe this whole thing isn’t what Alex is thinking after all.
A sharp noise grows louder in Justin’s periphery, slowly taking over his senses until suddenly Alex can’t notice the edges of Tutor at all. Her face becomes indistinct, muddled. It’s sort of disturbing, as even when she tries, Justin’s own memory of the events doesn’t allow for her to recognize Tutor’s face.
He’s turning his head now, and Alex can now see from his perspective when the leprechaun breaks Justin’s cane, splinters flying everywhere. His sharp eyes are able to track the trajectory of the cracked wood, the way they litter the ground of the Leprechaun’s enclosure.
Then she sees her own face again, twisted into an amused, sarcastic look. “Such anger for such a tiny body,” She says about the leprechaun, leaning back into the diner booth. The Alex in this vision turns forward to face Justin and Tutor, and this Justin laser-focuses on the hand she reaches up to brush her hair out of her face, a curled lock falling in front of her eyes. Her nails are dark blue, just barely chipped on the edges.
She’s not just somewhat green ice cream and blonde hair. Her face in this memory is so clear that Alex realizes in comparison how blatantly unclear Justin’s view of Tutor was, even in the beginning without the loss of focus from the added auditory component being added in. Alex swears she’s looking into her reflection now, as that-Alex carelessly makes excuses at feeding Justin’s stick to a blood-hungry leprechaun. (His fault for letting that stupid thing be in her line of sight, anyways. He knows stick-poking is her absolute favorite activity.)
He watched me. Alex thinks, realization starting to creep up her throat. He noticed me. Saw me. For all these years, he never said a thing.
They’re in a different story now, some unremarkable day where this-Alex flops on their orange couch with a bagel hanging out of her mouth. Her purple henley long sleeve just barely rides up, a sliver of skin exposed from Justin’s point of view. The fabric of the shirt looks soft, his eyes catching on the woven texture that stretches and accommodates.
It’s not the only thing Justin notices, his eyes slowly dragging guiltily across her exposed skin. Alex flushes along with him, feeling his guilt invade every pore. Then he catalogues her birthmark– the one she has on the middle of her abdomen on the left, a small brown blotch that looks akin to a cockroach. Or New Jersey. Her neck tingles when she feels him store the view away for later. Alex burns.
She closes her eyes. The sensory overload that she, and therefore Justin, is experiencing has lessened. That’s likely a good thing, but Alex is certainly no expert on whatever the Hell is going on. She runs through the colors that have stood out to him, cataloging them in his mind for him– but it’s put away in her style, memories being jammed into a dresser so tightly it barely closes. She feels the drawers of his mind shut though, and while Justin may resent her for her sloppy technique, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. At least she’s getting the job done.
She catalogues all the memories– a process that feels like hours as they flash uncontrollably through his mind. Days and small moments and glances that span across years. Years.
He’s wanted her for so long. Alex, who prides herself on reading Justin so easily, feels kind of embarrassed. If anyone was going to find out about this, wasn’t it going to be her? It shouldn’t have taken him fainting due to some weird magic sickness for Alex to finally be able to figure it out.
She figured if Justin was ever hiding something, that she would be able to look at him and just know. Maybe he would scratch his nose a little too often, he does that when he tries to keep a secret from her. Lying makes him congested or whatever. How would Alex not know? That goes against the entire structure of her and Justin being her and Justin– she knows everything about him, and uses it to her advantage, while he gets wrapped up in her schemes.
Maybe Alex didn’t know him as well as she thought she did. Alex shakes the thought off, picking up the next memory. It’s heavy, too heavy, and Alex realizes upon gazing down at it that it’s Transylvania. Alex feels her throat close up. Oh no.
She needs to find the nearest place to sit down. She steps back, her calves stumbling with a familiar brown bench. It’s the same one they used to sit on in Central Park, right next to the rock wall Alex loved to climb up on.
They stopped going there once Justin got into middle school. He joined the student council and started to willingly stay back after school, like a loser.
She gratefully sinks down, arms sore from gripping tightly onto the piece of glass in her hands. She can see her and Justin reflected in the piece of glass, sitting forlornly on the staircase.
Now where do I put you? Alex thinks. She knows she won’t find out until she actually walks inside the memory, so she closes her eyes tight and feels the cool Autumn air surround her.
In this memory she’s not as clear, Justin’s focus is not as pinpointed on her as the other memories that were scattered on the floor of his mind. She can feel Justin’s sadness, her body heavy and sore along with him. She feels the pain radiating down his back from being pushed across the tiles by Mason. A headache breaks across his temples.
His sadness deepens once his view catches her red-rimmed eyes, and Alex can’t help but selfishly feel loved in how her sadness causes pain in him. That increasingly too-familiar guilt is also within him, low in his belly, and Alex closes her eyes and lets the shame wash over her. It feels a little bit like she’s carrying it for him, and she imagines the ache will feel lighter if she can continue to burden it also. His guilt settles deep into her bones as he watches that-Alex’s eyes shine with tears.
Alex can’t bear another second. It was one thing living it the first time, but seeing it again from Justin’s perspective is just so much worse. He’s a feeler– a Mama’s boy with a soft heart. Every emotion that he felt during that night was like a raging forest fire. In comparison, Alex’s heartbreak back then now feels more comparable to their campfire. Alex can’t handle another second of this.
The way her eyes shimmered in the dark with tears stood out to her the most from his perspective. Brown. She drops the glass memory numbly into the drawer. She hopes it shatters and disappears for good, for all she cares.
There’s a blank canvas of white now, where all of his disorganized memories used to lay. Alex wonders what they’ll be able to paint up inside Justin’s head now with all the empty space. Empty indeed. Who’s empty headed now, Justin? She snorts, surveying his mind for any stray memories. They should be all good for now, Alex hopes.
I’m ready to go home now.
So then she’s home, clutching home’s hand with a death-grip. Alex jolts up, like she was asleep and the past events were all just a dream. Maybe it was, and she’s just in the phase where everything from her dream still feels real.
Justin’s face is not pale anymore. His skin is no longer translucent in the still-glowing light of the booth, and his eyes are beginning to open.
She doesn’t make a move to let go of his hand, swallowing down her nervousness. She knows that Justin was there for all of that, that he knows that she knows, even though he wasn't able to speak while she was in his head. She felt his presence the entire time they walked through his mind.
“Hi.” She says, feeling entirely too shy around him, like she didn’t just re-experience every one of their memories together from his own perspective.
“Hey.” Justin says, a tired smile drawing up on the edge of his lips. It looks good on him, this look of natural relaxation he almost never has on his face. He squeezes her hand tighter, as if reaffirming that she’s really there. Then his eyes drop down to where their hands are interlinked, and Alex can see the anxiety in Justin’s head start to fester and tangle together.
Hey now. Alex thinks, I just spent an eternity trying to fix that.
“Just kiss me.” Alex says, and while she meant it to sound cool and effortless, it falls out of her mouth like a breathless plea.
She feels less embarrassed when Justin finally leans forward and places his lips on her own.
Alex knows that she’d spend another millennia fixing his messes if it means they could be together like this.