"Still, I Call It Magic, Such a Precious Truth"
by: singyourmelody
Disclaimer: Don't own any characters you recognize. Watched this movie for what was probably the forty-thousandth time recently and was just struck with this idea. So I wrote it down. Title is taken from Coldplay's "Magic." Heading is taken from Pilot's "Magic."
|| oh, it's magic, you know : never believe it's not so ||
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The morning after, well, everything, he walks her home. Dani is practically passed out in his arms, so it takes a little longer than usual, but he bends around his sister's tiny frame to kiss her cheek and he murmurs something about seeing her at school on Monday. She smiles.
She enters the foyer to find that everything has returned to normal. The large candy bowl has disappeared and the furniture has been returned to its rightful spots, as if there wasn't a party full of her parents' tipsy coworkers here twelve hours before. She silently muses that her mother and Candace, their housekeeper, must have been up most of the night cleaning. Her mother always refused to go to bed with a messy house.
Tiptoeing up the stairs, she makes it to her room and quietly shuts the door behind her. She steps in front of her mirror and stares at her reflection. Turns to one side and then the other. Pulls her hair back and lets it back down again.
She looks the same.
So how come she feels so different?
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Monday morning, he meets her in the hallway and she bites her lip to keep in their secret.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
He nods and she leans against her locker, as the silence encompasses them. She shakes her head.
"What?" he asks, lightly rubbing his hand over the back on his neck.
"Nothing. Still just trying to wrap my head around all of this," she says.
He steps closer to her then. "So the great Allison Reynolds doesn't believe in spells and witchcraft, after all?"
She narrows her eyes. "I don't know what I believe anymore," she says.
He nods. "I know."
She believes him. She may not be sure of what she saw or what they did or how witches from the seventeenth century could be defeated by three crazy kids and a cat, but she decides that maybe she can be sure of him.
"Walk me to class?" she asks.
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It doesn't take long for Max and Allison to become MaxandAllison and Dani constantly makes kissing noises around them, but his mom seems to like her so she starts spending more and more time at the Dennison house.
It's not like her own parents notice.
She thinks back to that night. Of falling asleep next to him and waking and realizing the time. She told him they would kill her for staying out so late. Wishful thinking, she supposes.
"You missed a spot," he says, snapping her out of her reverie.
Elbow-deep in soapy warm water, she looks at the plate he is holding with a dishtowel. It's clean.
"Oh, I missed a spot, did I?" she asks, raising her eyebrow.
He smiles triumphantly. "Yup, right there," he says, pointing to the corner of the ceramic dish.
Pulling her arms from the sink, she steps in front of him to investigate.
"Where?" she asks, grabbing the plate with her wrinkly wet fingers and examining it closely. "It's perfectly clean!"
"Nope, you missed it, right . . . there," he says, pulling her closer to him and kissing her gently.
He pulls back and his eyes are dancing as if he has just succeeded in some great crime.
"Max!" she exclaims, stepping out of his reach. She likes Mr. and Mrs. Dennison. She doesn't want them thinking badly of her, to know that she routinely kisses their son in their house when they are not home. She is a respectable girl, after all.
"Allison!" he mocks back at her.
"Oh, I think I missed another spot," she says.
"Oh yeah?" he asks, leaning forward.
"Yes," she grins and rubs her soapy wet hands through his hair.
He laughs, stepping back. "Well played," he says as he pulls bubbles off of the top of his head.
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The days fade into weeks and it almost seems like that night was a dream.
But how could she have dreamt something like that up?
How could Max have the same dream? And Dani?
She doesn't have answers.
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The week before the snow really hits, they bundle up and they borrow his parents' car.
After climbing the large hill, they lie on a too-thin blanket and look at the inky blue sky.
"This is my favorite place," she says. She is cold and he seems too far away from her, but she doesn't want to move.
"It makes me feel . . . small," he replies finally.
"Maybe that's why I like it. I see all of these stars and I think that maybe it's okay to have these crazy experiences that you can't account for. Maybe we're given nights that make no sense whatsoever because we're supposed to become different people. We're supposed to be different in the morning. . . I was different in the morning," she finishes quietly.
"You've thought a lot about this."
"I can't stop thinking about it," she says honestly. She reaches for his hand, but he pulls away and sits up. Following him, she says, "Don't you think about it? Wonder how it all was possible?"
He closes his eyes and opens them again. "That was one of the worst nights of my life. And one of the best. And how can both those things be true?"
"That's what I mean. We can't explain it and maybe that's okay. Because we know now."
"Know what?" he asks, brown eyes narrowed.
"That there's magic in this world."
He shakes his head and lies back down.
"How many years?" he asks after a moments' silence.
"How many what?"
"Years. How many years do you think she took from my life?" he asks.
She moves closer to him then. "The potion didn't work because she didn't finish, she didn't get your life. . ."
"But she did get some of it. I could feel it, Allison. I could feel myself slipping away. And then the sun came up and it stopped, but it didn't reverse. I didn't feel myself returning, I just stopped slipping," he says, not looking at her.
She leans over him, her feet tangling with his and reaches out to turn his head, so that he has to look at her. "You never told me that."
"I didn't want you or Dani to worry."
She gives him a small smile. "I want to worry. Like it or not, I kind of like being around you, Dennison."
The side of his mouth twitches up at her statement.
"So how many?" he asks again.
"I- I have no idea," she says, sadly, dropping her forehead down to his chest, her hair falling to form a curtain around her face. He brushes it aside and softly says, "hey" before leaning up to kiss her. She kisses him back, but this kiss tastes different. Bittersweet maybe, because she's just beginning to realize that the witches are still changing things. One night, so many months ago, and she is still becoming a different person. He is too.
And if that's true, then how can anything feel safe?
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They defeated the witches. They won.
But then she thinks she sees a silhouette against the wide full moon, as she walks home from the movies.
And she thinks she hears Sarah's melodic voice, swirling around her, when the wind beats against her bedroom window.
And then she looks at him, biting his pencil as they work on their history assignment, and she sees them: small wrinkles around his eyes, small worry lines on his forehead. She didn't know him long before that night, but she knows he didn't have those before.
And she decides that maybe there aren't really winners.
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She knows that he doesn't like talking about it.
But Halloween approaches (has it really been a year?), and Dani cannot stop talking about tights and wings and fruitlessly tries to convince her to dress up as Tinker Bell to complete the look.
She smiles. "I think this is something you need to do with just your brother."
"But we're a team!" she insists. She plops down next to her at the Dennison kitchen table. "I don't think he wants to go anyway," Dani says.
"Why do you think that? He'd do anything for you, you know that," she replies.
"You mean, like die for me?"
She turns and looks at her sharply.
"Sometimes I wish he would tease me like he used to," Dani says, staring at her bright green nail polish. "He just acts like . . . like the witches actually got me or something. They didn't. I'm still here. And so is he."
"True."
"So maybe if you come with us, we'll go trick-or-treating, and get all this candy, and he'll start being my big brother again," Dani proposes.
She knows that logic doesn't even begin to pan out, but she nods her head anyway. "On one condition."
Dani moves her chair closer. "What's that?"
"Nobody lights any candles," she says, with a straight face, before Dani bursts out laughing.
She laughs too. It feels good.
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"Get a little closer together," his dad says, camera in hand.
She thinks she might be blind from all the camera flashes they have had to endure.
Dani is jumping around them and he is pulling at the green leggings she made him wear (because there was no way he was going to do tights, he said, no way on this planet) and his mom finally ushers them out of the house.
It's a year later.
And they knock on doors and yell "trick-or-treat" until their voices are hoarse and it all just seems . . . normal. An average night, maybe a little cold for October?
When their bags are full, they drop Dani off at home and continue on to her house.
"Well she only talked about Binx three times tonight. I think that's an improvement," he says as they wander the streets.
"She misses him," she says.
"I know." He tugs on one of her wings. "So what does Tink like to do for fun? You know, after hours?" he asks.
"Fly, of course!" she says, and she takes off running up the sidewalk to her front door.
He chases after her and spins her around, when he finally catches her.
She exhales and sees the cold mist of her breath dance around them, his arms tightly around her.
"Come inside?" she asks.
"To the party? Isn't that why we're here?" he asks. From their position on her front steps, they can hear the faint hum of music.
"I was thinking maybe we could skip the party. . . I mean it is Halloween night after all," she says, raising one eyebrow.
"Okay. . ." he says, clearly not following her.
"It's Halloween night and on some Halloween nights, certain virgins have been known to light candles and send everything into chaos. . ."
His brown furrows so she continues.
"I was just thinking that maybe we should take some precautions. You know, so that if certain people happen to light certain candles, nothing will happen. Because they wouldn't meet the qualifications necessary to bring people back from the dead," she says, flicking her eyes up to meet his. She didn't think she'd be nervous, but standing here, talking about this, yeah, she's a little bit freaking out.
He nods and gives her a small smile, finally catching on. "So this really would be for the good of mankind. You know, to prevent anything awful from returning to the earth."
"Exactly, totally for the good of mankind," she agrees, as he leans closer to her.
He kisses her then, a light kiss that quickly deepens into something more. Just as she's starting to lose herself in it, he pulls back.
"And maybe a little bit for the good of me," he says, kissing that one spot right below her ear. "And you," he says, his lips moving down her neck.
She forces herself to pull away momentarily as she laces her fingers through his and pulls him inside.
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She gets into Brown, and she goes there because she is a Reynolds and Reynoldses go to Brown.
He gets into UCLA.
And they don't break up even though everyone is telling them that they should because they've fought supernatural forces together and you don't just throw something like that away because there are going to be thousands of miles between you. Right?
They write letters. And plan phone calls. And their colleges have pretty great computer labs and this new thing called e-mail, so they communicate that way sometimes.
It's hard.
He makes a special point to call her the third week of October because it's coming up on the first Halloween since they met that they aren't together and that just feels wrong, he tells her.
She misses him most that night. Her roommate couldn't understand why she would skip the hottest campus party since Rush Week for a phone call, and really what could she say? How could she begin to explain?
So instead she had shrugged and said, "I'm waiting for him."
"Girl, you got it bad," Rachel had said, as she shut the door behind her.
But as she listens to him talk about his classes and his roommate and the campus newspaper he's writing for, she knows she made the right choice.
They talk for hours and she almost falls asleep in the small common room where the phone is located, her head resting on a large phone book.
"Allison?"
"Yeah?" she asks, her eyes drifting shut.
"I miss you."
"I know," she says softly. "Me too."
He hangs up then and she listens to the dull hum of dial tone until it echoes in her ears as she falls asleep.
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She walks out of her Introduction to Psychology class and he's there.
Her books practically tumble out of her hands as she rushes over to him.
"You're-you're here."
He grins at her. "I'm here."
She throws her arms around his neck and buries her face into his chest, mentally noting the feeling she gets when she feels his arms wrap around her.
"I'm so glad you're here. Wait, why are you here?"
He shrugs. "Thought we needed to be together today."
"You flew across the country so that we could be together for Halloween?" she asks.
He smiles sheepishly. "Um, yeah, I guess I did."
She can't stop grinning and she doesn't know what to say, because this is probably the biggest, most important thing anyone has ever done for her.
He knows her. He could tell from their call that she needed him and he hopped on a plane and he's here and maybe that is its own kind of magic.
Some would call it love and she knows it is that. But it's more, too.
It's how she sees things now. The changing colors of the trees and the way Dani seems to be growing up so fast and how she was actually a little afraid to leave her parents' house, but she's defeated three dead witches and if she can do that, than College Calculus doesn't seem so scary. Living on her own doesn't seem so daunting. Being so far away from him, while hard, doesn't seem impossible.
Nothing does.
And maybe she has one Halloween night and the boy standing next to her to thank for that.
Maybe, maybe they hold their own kind of enchantment.
"My parents will kill me if I flew this whole way and didn't go see them," he says, pulling her out of her thoughts, "so would you be up for a road trip?" he asks, and he actually looks nervous, as if he doesn't know that she would go anywhere he asked her to.
She slips her hand into his.
"I don't know. It's supposed to be a full moon tonight. And it's Halloween. And you want to go back to Salem?" she teases.
He reaches forward and kisses her quickly, his hands lightly holding her face. She kisses him back and it's so much better than she remembered. She breathes in and she just might be entranced by every part of him.
"No, I want to go home," he says.
She smiles as she pulls him towards the parking lot. "Home."
|| End ||