Max Russo
(m a g i c a l fire)

When you're four years old, you see Alex's first tantrum.

You can't remember what it was about, all you know is that she was angry at your parents and she really, really wanted them to know about it. You think she's like one of those storms you saw when you were watching the Discovery Channel with Justin, a tornado.

But then you notice that her eyes are flashing with indignant rage and resentful irritation, sparking with some inner fire that's so strong it glimmers at the end of her fingertips as well.

And you decide maybe she's something different than a tornado, maybe she's more of a firestorm.

It's only later, once you've grown old enough, that your father tells you about wizards and wands and magic. That night, your mind dancing with visions of fruit turned to dessert and a room you'll never have to clean again, you suddenly remember a tiny Alex Russo with rage sparkling brightly on her fingertips.

You start to play with your own magic, trying to force it to the tips of your tanned fingers. You want to see what color it is, if it will flicker between dark ruby and bright gold the way that Alex's did.

But it won't work.

You jump from your bed and shuffle down the hall to Alex's room, wondering if eight years old is too old for a manly boy to be going to his big sister for help. But whatever it's Alex and she helped you plan that prank on Justin so she can help you with this.

You creak the door open, just wide enough for your slender body to fit, and slide through the crack. You stride over to the bed and poke Alex's nose and then jump back a few steps. She jerks awake, sitting up quickly and looking around the room with bleary eyes.

"Maxie? What're you doin' here?" she murmurs, still looking slightly bewildered.

"I wanna know how to glow!" you whisper back, moving closer now that she no longer looks violent.

"Glow?" she asks, "what do you mean glow?"

"Like you do when you're yellin' at Momma and Daddy. How your hands go all shimmery and stuff. Dad told me it's magic and we're wizards and that I get a wand! And he said I couldn't do nothin' without the wand. But you did!" you're so excited you start bouncing up and down on your toes, reaching out an eager hand to grip Alex's arm.

"Oh. You mean when my fingers sparkle," she laughs, her eyes clearing with understanding. "It's easy enough, Maxie! Just stop concentrating."

"Just… stop concentrating?" you ask, not really understanding what she means, "if I don't pay attention that my fingers will get all fiery like yours do?"

"Yep," she says, popping the p. Then she burrows back into her bed, turning her back towards you.

You leave the room, still trying to puzzle out what she meant. But when you get back to your room, your bed is comfortable and warm and you fall asleep before you can make your fingers light with red and gold magical fire. And when you wake up, you smell waffles and therefore completely forget about wanting to have hands that sparkled with fire.

It's not until you're seventeen and watching Alex yell at your mother with bright yellow and dark garnet swirling around her fingers that you remember.

She's telling your mother that she doesn't care what she has to say about it, that she's going to live with Justin and they're going to do whatever the fuck they want to in their one bedroom apartment. Her hands glow with magic the color of fire and you should probably be paying attention to the fight, but whatever, you'd known for ages anyways, so instead you just sit there, still wondering how she does it.

She storms from the apartment as your mom yells in a mixture of Spanish and English and you look down at your palms, imagining orange and yellow fire leaping across the two of them.

Nothing happens.

Maybe magical fire is just an Alex thing.

Harper Finkel
(s t a r fire)

When you were little, you didn't really think about the stars too much. They were just these specks of light that shined with the moon in the night sky, pretty to look at but not all that important.

But then in sixth grade, your teacher did an astronomy unit in your science class.

She talked about how stars were so far away that sometimes, it took hundreds of years for people to stop seeing their light. She explained how there are different types of stars, like red giants, and how when their lives are over they turn into black holes.

And she says that they're made of fire.

You know that there was a more scientific explanation than that, something about various gases working together in space to create a bright and shiny star, but in your mind it was simplified down to fire.

And so, when your parents came back to visit and Alex joined their insanity and they called her a star, it kind of made a lot of sense. You started to think about Alex, what she was like and what she did and all of a sudden it's so clear. How could you not have thought of her as a star before?

She's bright, almost too bright, and the people around her tend to get burned when they stick around for too long. She's out of reach and unaffected, you can see but you can't touch. Her eyes spark when she gets new ideas and there's also that whole wizard thing, so maybe they were descended from aliens or something all other worldly like that.

And although you thought the analogy was perfect, as you continue to notice all the relations that there are between Alex and the stars that you barely knew anything about, you began to hate it.

Alex was like a star, her ideas shined too intensely for other people to understand and she burned through life more fiercely than anyone else you knew.

But there was a problem with stars, a drawback to this flawless analogy that you had come up with.

The ones that burn the hottest, that shine the brightest, are also the ones that explode the fastest.

Dean Moriati
(fire e m b e r s)

Alex Russo isn't really your type of girl.

Sure, she's got that whole breaking the rules and ditching class thing down, but when it comes down to it, she's a good person. She cares about her brothers and helps her parents when they ask and actually seems to be friends with Laritate.

And normally, you don't date those girls because they expect something more from you, something more than you can give.

But then you met Russo.

She didn't care about the rumors that had spread around school about your womanizing ways, she didn't pay any attention to them or back down from your less that chivalrous actions.

And you were hooked.

You began to hang around her, asked her out and took her on dates and treated her better than all the other girls.

You wanted to know what it was about her, what quality she had that made her able to accept you like other girls didn't. She made you curious, made you wonder about things that you had previously taken for granted, things about yourself and others.

And at first, there wasn't anything spectacular.

Sure, she was cute and tough and sarcastic. You loved her hair and liked her eyes and her laugh made you smile. But there wasn't anything that you noticed to explain her odd acceptance of everything that came her way, including your less than stellar reputation.

And then you saw her fight with her nerdy older brother, Justin Russo.

Her eyes flashed and her lips curled and she was this perfect image of defiance and victory and outrage. Then he argued back and the smile on her face widened as she spit out a retort before he even finished his insult.

And oh, that's what it was.

It took you a few days to come up with a way to describe it, because you aren't really a poetic guy. But finally, you decided that Russo was like the embers of a fire. They burned the hottest and stayed the longest, they were what you used to spark a new fire once the old one ran out of stuff to burn.

That was what Alex did.

She sparked things in other people, like your long forgotten respectable side, Finkel's almost sane side, and Justin's argumentative side.

She made other people react, pushed them until she got what she wanted, until they responded to her barbs and teasing remarks and sarcastic observations. She was always herself, always bright and warm and in the middle of a fire.

Alex Russo was like an ember, glimmering and glinting in the center of all the fire that surrounded her, causing people to become the best they can be and the worst they can be. And she accepted you because of that, despite barely exaggerated rumors, she gave you a chance because she saw something in you that no one else did, sparked something in you that you thought was forever lost.

She changed your life.

And you'll love her forever for that, for causing you to change and helping you build a new life the same way you used still warm embers to create new campfires in the mornings you go fishing with your uncle.

Russo's got something that smolders, that burns and glows and causes change and sparks reactions.

Embers burn in her soul.

Mason Greyback
(fire's s c e n t)

The first few years after you've been turned into a werewolf are overpowering.

There's just so much. All of a sudden everything's better, you can smells things more easily and see things more clearly and taste things in a way you never have before. It's almost too much for you to handle for a while, too much for your brain to easily comprehend.

But, after a long while and some oddly effective mediation, you learn to deal with your newfound super senses.

After that, you begin to notice that everything has a specific smell, especially people. Juliet smelled like an odd mixture of old English roses and stale vanilla, the slightest hint of dead things underneath. Justin smelled of ink and ripe oranges as well as the clean, pure smell that you had come to associate with fresh air. Mr. Russo smelled like cheese enchiladas and ham, Mrs. Russo like clean laundry and gardenias. Max was the oddest, a combination of too-sweet rotting apples, bright sunshine, and unwashed socks.

But Alex, Alex smelled overwhelmingly of fire.

You know that saying someone smells like fire can be slightly confusing. People don't often think that fire itself has a smell, instead relating the scents of burning wood or coal and smoke to fire and claiming that that is how it smells.

But that isn't how you think of fire.

Fire smells like power. Like impulsiveness and destruction and barely there control.

And that's really how you come to think of Alex, her crazy schemes and split second decisions. She blazes through life the same way a fire does through a city, taking down any buildings and homes that are in her way without a glance back.

You're one of the buildings that she burns down and blazes past.

It takes you a while to notice it, takes a while before you fully understand that your time as a wolf irrevocably changed things between the two of you. She said things were fine, that she loved you, that she never loved anyone but you.

But sometimes when she hugged you, she smelled like burnt oranges.

Things aren't the same and you know it, but you don't leave her. You've always been kind of a selfish person, and you won't leave someone you love, especially so that she can be with her brother.

But when you're being told that you must break up right away because werewolves are dangerous and Alex won't be using her powers anymore and she fights to keep you, you almost tell her no. You consider just telling her that you know and that, sometimes, she smells too much like the wind and not enough like a fire.

But you don't.

You chicken out and act more like a puppy than a wolf; going along with the half-planned scheme Alex came up with at a moment's notice. You go to the yacht party with her and help her convince the wizard that you aren't dangerous.

But then she's up on a chair telling all your secrets to people who are never met to hear them.

She claims that it was just jealousy, that she really didn't like the way that girl was looking at you, that she's sorry it went so wrong.

But that's not what you think.

You think that she sabotaged the chance that the two of you had to be together because she wanted to be with someone else, because she knew it was unfair to fight for you when she didn't really want to keep you.

You know that she won't ever admit it, the same way that you won't talk about how the scent of summer air and sweet oranges that has slowly melded with her own fire.

Because you knew this was coming.

Alex Russo burns down the people around her, the buildings and mountains and lives that dare to stand in the way of what she wants.

Justin is what she wants.

And she'll burn you in order to have him.

Justin
(w i l d fire)

You have only known one truth your entire life.

You thought you knew things, like you thought there was only science until there was magic too. You thought that you were going to win the Competition until you were knocked back down to level one. You thought Harper was never going to stop stalking you until she started dating Zeke. You thought you and Juliet would be together forever until she got really, really old.

You've thought a lot of things in your life.

But things are always changing, ideas always altering and bending and fluctuating.

There is only one thing that you know to be true, that has never changed and will never change.

Alex is yours.

Yours to take care of, yours to watch out for, yours to clean up after.

Never yours to control though.

Because Alex isn't someone that is controlled, not even by her big brother or her boyfriend, not even when their the same person.

See, the thing about Alex that not many people but you understand is that if she was ever controlled in some way, she'd lose everything that made her Alex. She'd become predictable and uninteresting and she'd lose all her fire.

You sometimes think of Alex as if she were fire, a continuously burning, constantly bright, and always warm bundle of wildfire all wrapped up in human form. She dresses with bold colors and her eyes glow whenever she experiences a strong emotion. She doesn't ever stop until she gets what she wants and she can change from plan to plan quickly, easily moving on from something that doesn't work until she finds something that does.

Even her magic looks like fire, dancing around her fingers and palms in swirls of bright gold and brilliant ruby when she's angry.

And sometimes when you randomly pull her into your room and press your lips hard against hers, you can feel her magic tickling your shoulders. When you look at it afterwards, it's always a twirling blend of rusty orange and soft yellow and warm red that molds seamlessly to your skin. The brand of Alex's magic normally stays on your shoulders for hours after, bright, uncontrollable fire shimmering against your skin.

Although you don't think that anyone should control Alex, or that anyone would risk trying, you think that maybe she would listen to you. It's just a hunch though, and you aren't ever going to tell anyone about it because the reasoning is fairly ridiculous.

One time, while you were still dating Juliet, she told you that she loved how you smelled. And when you asked her what she meant, she said that you smelled like a summer breeze with the slightest hint of citrus and ink. She also said that she preferred you to Max, who she said smelled like dirty laundry, and Alex. She said that Alex smelled like fire and that it scared her sometimes because there was so much power behind it.

You didn't bother telling her that a breeze can become just as destructive as fire.

But see, the point is, the only thing that ever affects wildfires in nature, that firefighters aren't aware of, is the wind.

The wind, oxygen, it's what sustains fire. Without it, not only does the fire burn out, but it also never grows, never spreads from tree to tree in order to take down a whole forest.

But you won't abuse that power.

Because the thing is, wind can blow out candles just as easily as it can power wildfires.

All righty then. Harper's sucks, I know. Sorry. I tried. I also know that technically, the smell of fire is not a type of fire, but I couldn't think of anything else to say other than that.

I own nothing.

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