Justin smiled as he watched Alex run up the stairs. For a few moments after she disappeared from sight, he kept his eyes on the top of the stairs - and then grinned when he heard a faint cry of glee.

Still smiling, he did a slow turn, looking around the room - then saw Alex's purse, sitting on the floor by the door. With his usual compulsion to keep things neat, Justin walked to it, picked it up (dangling it by the strap in the approved manner of men everywhere who wish to make it clear that the purse they are holding is not their purse)... and then frowned as he saw the pair of bookends that had been sitting behind it.

Bookends? What would Alex be doing with - oh. Quickly, Justin put Alex's purse back where it had been, once again concealing the bookends, then moved over to the kitchen stools to wait for her to come back down.

When Alex threw open the door to her room and stepped in, she immediately stopped and blinked in shock. Sitting on her desk was an ornate vase with what must have been two dozen roses, in a mix of white, pink, and red; a heart-shaped candy box a full foot across; a new teddy bear (white with a red bow tie); a half-dozen or so balloons, tied to a heart-shaped weight that was keeping them down... and, in front of all that, an envelope with Alex written on it in Justin's careful cursive.

She let out a noise and ran to her desk, picked up the envelope and ripped it open. She was a bit surprised to find in it, not the expected card, but a letter.

Alex,

I know the last couple of years I've just gotten you a card, so this may be a bit unexpected, but I was thinking about things, and realized that next year, I'll be off at college, and Valentine's will be on a Monday, so I might not be able to come home and keep up the tradition. In fact, it'll be on a weekday every time for my first four years of college, so... I kind of thought I'd do something big this time.

Alex swallowed and blinked at that. She didn't like to think about Justin being gone next year, and the implication that he might not come home much... Well, if he doesn't, I'll just have to go visit him. He may not be willing to teleport around without permission, but I am. And besides, I'm sure Mom and Dad'll give him permission to do that whenever he wants, to come home to visit. They'd better.

Since Dean's going to be out of town on Valentine's Day itself, I'm hoping you'd be willing to spend the day with me. There's a few things taped inside the envelope you might find interesting in that regard.

She shook her head at that. 'In that regard?' Really? Who talks like that? As she did so, though, she was already picking up the envelope again and looking inside it, then smiling as she saw that he'd taped other things inside. Clever. He knew if they came out with the letter, I'd look at them first.

Pulling them out, she found several tickets, and looked them over for a minute before going back to the letter. Roller coasters? But Justin hates -

Alex picked the letter back up, looked at it, made a face as she realized she hadn't read even half of it yet. Okay, too much reading. Setting the letter back down, she opened the candy box, looked at the map of what was what inside the lid until she found a caramel-filled one, popped it into her mouth, then closed the box again and left the room.

Down below, Justin was fidgeting. Her first noise had sounded happy, but he hadn't heard anything else, and it had been a few minutes now... was she hiding up there because she didn't want to have to tell him no? He'd thought that Alex would want to go, but he might have misjudged... Maybe it's all just wishful thinking. Yeah. She's getting too old to care about her brother liking her, he thought bitterly.

Things had been seeming tense between them for about half a year now, and Justin wasn't sure why. He knew that coming out and asking Alex about it wouldn't help anything - if she wanted someone to know something, she told them, and if she didn't want them to know, dragging anything out of her was next to impossible.

Last Valentine's Day, when she'd told him about what Millie was really like, it had seemed like Alex really wanted him to be happy. And she'd been helpful before that too, with Miranda... but since then, it seemed like she was taking a positive joy in sabotaging any relationship he tried to have.

Okay, the thing with the werewolf girl, Isabella, hadn't really been her fault... but she hadn't like Isabella from the start, even before she'd wound up turning him into a werewolf. (And he still wasn't sure if their dad either had never really studied monsters, or if he was just helping Justin to cover. Either way, he hadn't told anyone that the whole thing about a werewolf's kiss being able to turn someone into a werewolf was a lie, and Justin was glad of that.) After he'd wound up as a werewolf, Alex had been outright delighted about it.

The centaur... okay, even Justin had to admit that if the shoe had been on the other foot, he would have been laughing about that one. But Alex had been all over that girl Rachel from their school, picking on her as badly as she did Justin, and he was pretty sure that was a big part of why Rachel had broken up with him after just a few weeks.

Not last, and hardly least, when Justin and Harper had discovered their mutual love of silent movies, Alex had to go and get in the way of that, even though they weren't really dating. Okay, maybe Harper was starting to think they were, but he was pretty sure that was Alex's fault - she'd actually seemed to be getting over her crush before that, but it was back as bad as ever now.

At times, it seemed like he was dealing with two different Alexes - one who delighted in torturing him, and another who... well, he really wasn't sure what to make of the other one. She'd hug him, cry on his shoulder, lean on him on the couch - sometimes it seemed like she was treating him like a boyfriend, but...

Justin shook his head a little and smiled lopsidedly. She deserves better than Dean. He's not thoughtful enough, not smart enough. And I don't like his reputation. He -

"Roller coasters?" Alex asked then, and Justin blinked. She was almost all the way down the stairs, and he'd been so lost in thought he hadn't even noticed her coming down. Which is really lost in though, because - wow. Alex had dressed up for her date with Dean, and while Justin hadn't really noticed it while they were wrestling, he was definitely noticing now. She's beautiful in that. Part of his mind immediately answered, Or out of it, and it took an effort to push the thought away.

"Yeah," he said out loud, shrugging and giving Alex a little smile. "I know you love them. And I know you love seeing me scared, so, it seemed like a natural fit."

She stopped on the step just above the floor, her eyes on a level with Justin's there. He slipped from the stool, walked to her, placed his hand on top of hers, which was on the railing. Justin's hand was warm and strong, and bigger than Alex's, covering hers completely, and suddenly she started to feel a little blushy.

Then Justin made a slight bow, and the urge to blush grew stronger as he said, "So... would you do me the honor of accompanying me tomorrow?"

Alex took her hand out from under his, waved it off-handedly. "Oh... sure. It's not like I was doing anything anyway."

Author's Note: The AGP-verse is, of course, an AU of the show's universe... mainly because I started writing these stories about halfway through Season 2, and had no way of knowing what was going to happen in the rest of that season and in 3 and 4.

I try to keep it as compatible with the show's universe as much as I can, but there are some things I've established that contradict the show - for example, that Dean and Alex were still dating in Justin's senior year. I also feel free to contradict things that I just plain don't like, and have indulged that here with the bit about Justin lying about being turned into a werewolf by a kiss.

How did Justin really wind up being a werewolf in the AGP-verse? Well, maybe I'll get around to telling that story someday...