Title: Look After You
Fandom: Wizards of Waverly Place
Word Count: 3,603
Rating/Content: Jalex. PG this time.
Spoilers/episodes: None, really, Maybe 'Halloween, if you're really picky.
A/N: For a long time, I've wanted to do a Baby Jalex series. You won't find any overt sexuality here, no near-nudity or brushing up against one another in the dark. Just Justin and Alex, doing what they've always done: arguing, fighting, and completing one another. They can't help it: They're Justin and Alex.
Beta: I've been sitting on this story for so long that I'm embarrassed to say I'm no longer sure whose hands have been in it with mine. I'm almost entirely sure that my good friends TheWolfHourx (aka UsexSomebodyx) and mktoddsparky both reviewed it at some point, and my sincere thanks goes out to them. If someone else who helped me is reading this, please accept my sincere apology for my absence of mind, send me a PM, and I'll add you to this gratitude list.
R/R: As always, love is appreciated, critiques will be received with less joy but just as much gratitude. I write faster when I'm being told how great I am. Don't you?
Summary: Ch 1: Captain JimBob Protect Me
"Crybaby Russo? I put that kid on my resume! 'Captain JimBob protect me, Captain JimBob protect me!' "
-Mantooth in "Halloween," WOWP, S3 Epi2
Disclaimer: I don't Wizards of Waverly Place, or anything else that might look familiar.
"I'm not scared of you," whispers Justin. His eyes are fixed on his closet door.
Justin is almost sure he closed the door when he went to bed. It's cracked open now, though, just a tiny little bit. Looking into the thin gap of darkness, Justin feels gooseflesh ripple across his neck and the backs of his arms.
Be brave, Justin, he tells himself. Don't be a baby.
Shivering, he tells himself that it's okay. Doors can come open sometimes... right? Maybe he only thought he shut it all the way. Or maybe it snagged on a stray hanger. Maybe a forgotten pair of socks rolled down and kept the closet door from closing. (Both scenarios, though, seem unlikely. At seven, Justin already has the most organized closet in the household.) Maybe one of his younger siblings has been in his room, rummaging through his stuff while he slept, stealing his toys (he bets he knows which one, too).
Maybe the perpetrator is IN there, hands pressed to her mouth to stifle her wild laughter, just waiting until he lets his guard down to spring out and...
Did the closet door just move?
The boy tells himself it's his imagination. It has to be. Closet doors might be left open by accident. They might craftily fail to latch, or even contain devilish siblings, but they do not move by themselves in the middle of the night. They do not slyly creep open; not even at the witching hour, when the raucous sounds of the Sub Shop have been put to bed and there's no TV noise or comforting parent-voices, when there's no sound at all save for the dim street noises, and Justin is all alone.
Is that… a scraping sound? Like the door catching on the carpet where it doesn't hang quite straight? (Justin's Daddy hung the door himself). It sounds like the door is sliding stealthily across the carpet, rasping with malignant intent. It sounds like something's there that doesn't want to be overheard by anyone else… but wants Justin to know it's there.
Justin isn't scared. He's not a cowardly custard, no matter what Alex (and lately Max, to his chagrin), say about him. Justin is brave.
Was that a clicking, skittering sound from within the closet?
No! It can't be those things, those things cannot be. That's his imagination, playing bad tricks. Imagination is fun but it's not real, and not-real things can't hurt him. He knows that because he remembers it from TV. He knows that Captain Jim-Bob Sherwood wouldn't be scared... wait, Captain Jim-Bob!
Without taking his eyes from the untrustworthy closet, Justin reaches a hand out to feel around on top of the dresser by his bed, where his newest action figure of the Captain poses cheekily in his metal display stand. Normally Justin doesn't like to take the Captain out of his stand, but this is an emergency.
Backing up against as far as he can go until he's crammed up against the headboard of his bed, Justin clutches the hard plastic figure to his chest. He whispers, "Captain Jim-Bob wouldn't be scared. Y-you aren't scared, are you Captain?"
In a slightly louder voice, he breathes, "And I'mn-not, either." He's squeezing the action figure hard, so hard it kind of hurts his hand. That's okay, because Captain Jim-Bob is plastic, so he can't get squished.
There it is… that sound again. Justin doesn't care what TV says: that is nothis imagination.
As if it were waiting for him to come to this very conclusion, the closet's door starts to slide open, slowly but steadily, while he's looking right at it. Justin can't breathe.
"I'm not scared," he whispers. "I'm not scared…I'm not scared…I'm not scared..."
Against all probability and in direct defiance of what TV has taught him, four long dusky claws round the door's edge, clattering against the wood. Justin makes a shrieking dive under the covers. He's only seven, and he's not a hero. He's not Captain Jim-Bob. Justin is a little boy and it's late at night, and he's not scared… he's terrified.
"Go away! Go away!"
On a child's bed, blue blankets are hunched and quivering. The blankets, which are dotted with Captain Jim-Bob Sherwood's ruddy likeness, are tucked in all the way around, that time-honored method of keeping monsters out.
But on the outside of the blankets, a hollow-eyed fiend advances, fingers outspread and much too long, mouth stuffed with teeth. The apparition laughs with a bit of a wheeze, exhaling a foul cloud. "Come out, come out...Justin," it snickers. "What's the matter?" You're not scared, are you?
"Captain Jim-Bob," the kid whines… and Mantooth laughs. Man, but this Russo kid is an easy mark.
Mantooth, the boogeyman assigned the Wizard kids on Waverly Place, figures Crybaby Russo here'll probably be wetting the bed well into his teens. It's almost too cruel, tormenting him like this when he's obviously a little on the nervous side already... Mantooth's nightly visits are probably leaving more that a few psychological scars. Heck, he might be giving the kid bedtime issues for life. But of course, he's a monster. That's what he does.
This is gonna be sweet.
Mantooth hovers above the bed, preparing to peel the covers back like a kid opening his Halloween candy. There's a banging sound from somewhere in the loft and he pauses… but it stops. Probably just the rats. Grinning, he reaches for the edge of the blanket... Now there's a creaking noise coming from behind him and he turns, confused.
Did someone just open the bedroom door?
"Go away! Go away!"
It's not morning yet, but Alex is awake. Four year old Alex doesn't really like getting up even when it's the right time, so it confuses her to be awake when it's still dark outside. Then she hears a bunch of yelling coming through the wall ("No...! Please... Just go away! Captain JimBob, protect me!"), and sits up, rubbing her eyes.
For a second, she's scared. Her mom and dad never yell at night (they only yell when she and her brothers are around, she thinks), and it's coming from the wrong direction to be the TV. What if there's a bad guy in the loft? What if he's there to steal their money or their sandwiches, or to kidnap little girls, like the bad guys in The Rescuers, the movie with the mice? (Alex doesn't think that little girl fought back nearly hard enough. A couple of good kicks, and she could break free, and run really fast...)
Her reverie/escape plan is interrupted as the cries from next door start up again. Now that she's kind of awake, she recognizes something very familiar about those cries for help. Alex has heard them before. Usually, she's the reason for them. That is NOT a robber-guy... she'd know that screechy voice anywheres.
Stupid Justin.
As the sounds from her big brother's room increase in both volume and intensity, a scowl forms on the little girl's face, her lower lip protruding in a monstrous pout. Why does he have to go and wake her up? He already gets to stay up way later than Alex, which no one can convince her is fair or right. Now he's playing some dumb, yell-y boy game next door and waking her up. When it's not even morning. Incensed, she pounds on the wall with her tiny fist. "JUSTIN! QUIT IT!"
Really, it's weird that their parents never wake up for stuff like this. But the Russo kids are used to it.
The noises stop. Alex listens, pressing her ear up to the drywall like she does when Justin's kicked her out of his room and she needs to know what's going on. When there's nothing more, she slumps back into her mountain of pillows and closes her eyes, beginning to drift off right away. The shouting starts up again.
Aw, no way. Alex stands up on her bed, makes fists with both tiny hands.
"JUS-TIN!" But this time the banging and the shouted orders have little effect. Instead, the sounds take on a different quality, one that makes her shove her head against the wall even harder, wrinkling up her face as she tries to understand.
Is Justin CRYING?
Normally, making Justin cry is Alex's job (although as Max gets older, she's able to enlist him more and more). Naturally, she wonders what's gotten him all worked up when she's not even in there. It makes her a little mad, along with a funny tummy-roiling feeling she can't identify... She just knows that it means if someone's making Justin miserable, it's supposed to be her. That's…well, it's the rules!
The funny feeling kind of hurts, and she definitely doesn't like it. The noise and the feeling (especially the feeling) have to stop. Alex stumbles out of bed to find out what's making all this trouble, and tell it to go away. It's early, and cold, so she pulls her pink fuzzy blanket with the stars on it from the end of her bed and wraps it around herself, dragging the rest behind her like a tail as she shuffles out the door.
Stupid Justin.
Slowly, Mantooth turns around. Sure enough, there's someone standing there, silhouetted in the thin hallway light. He squints into the light. The figure looming in the doorway should be a lot taller, if it's an adult come to put a stop to his fun. But it can't be, because if an adult comes within a 50-foot radius of Mantooth, he senses it right away. It's a natural kind of boogeyman self-preservation thing, an instinct telling him when it's time to kick rocks. If it's a kid on the other hand, which is looking altogether likely, they should be screaming and heading for the freakin' hills. Because really, if he does say so himself, Mantooth is scary and anyone who seeks him out is downright crazy.
Mantooth looks the new person up and down, but mostly down. He determines that it is definitely a kid. Maybe the kid doesn't get that the real, live boogeyman is right here in the room…
There's a nervous shuffling of blankets behind him, and he glances around. The boy's head pops up as he peers above the blankets for a quick look, but he darts under again as Mantooth bares his teeth, and the monster shuffles toward the new arrival. Wan hallway light illuminates the tiny face as he comes closer, and he gets his first peek. Aww. Now how about that, huh? It's dust a widdle goil!
Mantooth's smile widens and widens and then it widens more, reaching grotesque proportions, and spreads across half his face in a way that should be impossible, threatening to cleave it in two. Inside the smile he's got a mouthful of teeth like needles, a whole world of nightmares waiting just behind his lips. His eyes blaze a flickering and shifting red, like he's on fire inside. He advances at a dead man's shuffle, grinning.
Well, well. If she isn't just the cutest thing he's ever seen. With big liquid eyes like a character right out of Disney flick, that mess of dark curls, and, gosh, she's even wearing footie pajamas and her pink blankie…? Shoot. Just adorable.
He's going to enjoythis.
The poor little thing must be too shocked to move. She's frozen in the doorway. He comes to a halt right in front of her, raising his curved claws in an attitude of menace, and waits to hear her screams.
The little face scrunches up in irritation. "Justin, your stupid monster thing woke me up! Say a spell to make it to go away!"
Mantooth blinks in confusion. A spell to...? Then he puts it together. Wizard kids. Sure. She thinks he's as illusion, summoned by wayward magic. As if something like Mantooth could be controlled by the magic of a seven year old wizard! Such naiveté. So…touching.
"Ohh, I'm not a spell, Little Girl," he growls, enjoying the sound of his own scary voice, like razors dragging over rocks. "Your brother didn't conjure me." Then, because "conjure" is a big word, he adds, helpfully, "That means I'm real," as he looms over her just a little more.
The diminutive Wizard gives him a doubtful look, and her lower lip starts to quiver, but she holds her ground. "My mommy says monsters aren't real, and you woke me up!" she exclaims, stomping one tiny foot.
Heh. The kid's got big ones alright, he'll give her that. Apparently, the chutzpah in this family skipped the firstborn. But Mantooth isn't an amateur, and he's not imaginary. He lunges for the girl, arms elongating like snakes, and she screams, dodging him.
(She might be tough, but she's four.)
Mantooth licks his lips with a lizard tongue, and begins his "Terrify 'em" Scare Routine (patent pending). His arms snake through the air, sinuous and lithe, bending in ways that arms were never intended to bend. His hands drip razor claws. There's a fading, melting switch, and now his face has no eyes at all, just that monstrous mouth of his, and a smell like death permeates the darkness as he advances on her.
Little kids don't know about the "no-touching" clause that (legal) monsters have to live by; always believing they're a second or two away from death, the little ones give off the best kind of terror. To monsters like Mantooth, fear is bread and cheese, air and water. They need it to live. Breathing in deeply, Mantooth inhales the scent of little Alex Russo's four-year-old terror, and it's sweet. The child shrieks, a high, short yap of pure fear that ought to bring any decent parent running, no matter how late the hour. But this is apparently his lucky night, because she's on her own on this one.
"Hey! Leave her ALONE!"
Or maybe not.
The unexpected interruption is enough to make the boogeyman whip his head around, fast. The girl's brother has come out from under the covers and stands unsteadily on the edge of his bed, clutching a wand in one shaking hand and that ridiculous doll in the other.
Wizard kids… so unpredictable. Honestly, they don't pay him enough for this. Sensing that all is not well, Mantooth fades back to his least horrifying form, the one he wears when he's not working. "Look, wait, kid..."
But Crybaby Russo isn't listening, and he's not crying, either. The tears are still wet on his cheeks, but he wears a look of fierce determination.
"Kid, hang on a second..."
Mantooth starts to lift a hand, but before he can do anything about it, the wand flares with a ferocious yellow light, and the kid mutters something beneath his breath in garbled Latin, stumbling on the words but getting them out all the same. Instinctively, Mantooth turns away from the light. What happens next happens very fast.
Facing the little girl again, he's already begun to back her toward the wall, a half–baked plan of escape forming in his mind (put the wand down and nobody gets hurt!). But that's when the truly ridiculous happens: the girl puts out her little hand too, in a babyish warding-off gesture. Even without the benefit of a wand, her fingertips glow faintly. They continue to brighten until they seem to bleed an incandescent blue light threaded with faint sparks. It's not as powerful a blast as the one from the boy's wand, but still shocking, coming from the four year old, practically an infant, a little girl who shouldn't be able to call on her magic at all.
The light leaking from her fingertips is strangely mesmerizing. He watches, helpless to look away, as it seeps into the air. Blue light threaded with sparks. So pretty. So unlikely. Premature. Unnatural. Breathtaking. It's also the last thing he sees before the girl's magic collides with her brother's.
Mantooth's no expert, but he's pretty sure the spells are supposed to cancel each other out. Of course, everyone knows that magic does what it wants. As her faint, sparkling blue crashes into his clean fierce gold, the disparate strands of magic shiver with the impact, seem to hang in the air… then gracefully begin to weave themselves together into one spell far more powerful than either one alone. Abruptly he's enclosed in a broad netlike thing the color of emeralds, immobilized, and unceremoniously transported back into the Wizard world. He'll wake there the next morning with a headache like a three day bender, a stiff neck, and a deep sympathy for the next poor jerk who decides to take those two on.
Yowza!
After they make the monster disappear, Justin clambers off the bed to gather his baby sister in his arms. "Alex! Did he hurt you, are you okay?" There's still a faint gunpowder smell of magic in the air, but neither of the children seem to notice.
Safe (and sensing an advantage), she begin to sniffle. She's too little to name the guilt and protectiveness on her brother's face, but not too little to feel a near-overwhelming sense of satisfaction in seeing it. And the hurting feeling in her tummy is all gone. Maybe the monster guy took it with him.
"What were you do-ing," she whines, rubbing the back of her nose with one hand. "You and your bad man woke me up." She looks up at him, scowling.
"Don't wipe your nose on your sleeve, Alex," he tells her. "And Mantooth's a real monster. He's not mine."
The little girl's eyes widen. "You didn't make him come here?"
Justin shakes his head. He's still jumpy, but distracts himself by patting her wet eyes with a corner of her blankie. "Nope."
"Weren't you scared to magic him?" she asks, with admiration in her voice.
"Yeah," he says with a small, proud smile, puffing up a bit, "Sure." He hoists her onto his bed with a grunt, although he's not really all that much bigger than his sister. "But I couldn't let him... UGH! you're heavy... get you, could I? Are you sure you're okay?"
Alex swings her legs rhythmically against the side of the mattress. Under normal circumstances, she'd kick him for calling her heavy. Instead, she says, "Uh-huh. Can I sleep in here with you?"
Justin tries to look grumpy about that, like a grownup would, but she knows better. Alex can get Justin to do anything.
"I guess so," he says, caving even quicker than usual. "But," he warns, "you'd better not hog the covers like last time!"
"I won't," says Alex, crossing two fingers behind her back. (Crossed-fingers promises don't count).
She makes him sleep on the closet side.
They're snuggled down into his sheets in no time, and Alex steals most of the blankets right off the bat. Justin insists they keep his wand at the ready and leave the lamp on, but having him sleep wrapped around her, human-shield style, is Alex's idea. It does seem to calm down his racing heart, because she can feel as the too-rapid thump-thump-thump against her back start to slow.
After they're settled she asks, "Why didn't you make him go away before? I heard you, through the wall."
Justin yawns. "Dunno. Guess I was more scared of you getting hurt than I was of the bogeyman," he mumbles thickly. Then he's asleep, still holding her hand.
Alex stays awake for a while, keeping an ear out for suspicious activity from the closet, even though they've barricaded the closet door with a dresser, a lamp, and TWO beanbag chairs. She thinks about what Justin said, about being scared. She knows better, though. Her big brother Justin isn't scared of anything... not really. Not when it matters really, really big.
Justin is brave.
It's always have and never hold
You've begun to feel like home
What's mine is yours to leave or take
What's mine is yours to make your own
I'll look after you
-The Fray "Look After You"