The final bell of the day rang hours ago, and the dim halls of Wiz-Tech are as old and dark as any fairytale wood, and during the day they're often inhabited by the kind of creatures you'd expect find in one. But right now, they're empty.
Well, mostly empty.
In the dark of the wide, still halls, a little sister moves through them at an increasingly frantic pace, her heels clicking against the stone floor and the hollow sound echoing back to her, as she rushes to save her big brother from an evil woman, or from a cage, or maybe just from the world. Like Gretel, saving Hansel from the witch.
It's taken Alex twice as long to get to Wiz-Tech as was supposed to. Getting away from the office was a nightmare, as one pseudo-crisis after another demanded her attention. Now she's here, in Wiz-Tech, worry building in her stomach and rising in a wave up her body as she prowls the empty school looking for her brother. The sense of urgency is, frankly, really annoying. It began the while she was still face-to-face with Mason's ugly mug, and it's grown with each delay, until it's something of a monster. Nothing short of the sight and proximity of Justin is going to help, now. Alex has no idea what she hopes to do for him, once she finds him. She just knows that she needs to hurry up and find him, so she can do it.
It isn't really like her, under normal circumstances, to be so concerned about Justin's welfare; it definitely isn't like her to make such an obvious display of it. But these aren't normal circumstances, are they? This is, more or less, the end of the world.
(Alex's world, at least.)
Since the night of the Wizard Competition, Alex Russo has lived inside a secret. It's not a nice secret, and it's not a very nice place to live, but it's hers; for months she's protected it, a sort of human shield against the knowledge of Juliet's betrayal. She's lived huddled up around the sharp edges of the thing she's sure is going to cut the heart out of her brother. Carrying it with her all the time, she's become exhausted. Secrets are heavy, to carry arround.
She's tried, of course, to put it down. Frantic to drown her guilt and loneliness, to find a place to set it down, she's thrown herself into disposable relationshps with one guy after another. She knows she should feel guilty, for breaking their hearts, but it's hard to After all, she hasn't done any damage to their hearts that she didn't do to her own first... which adds up to a bizarre kind of justice, in Alex's view of the world.
And between heartaches, always, she goes back to Justin. Justin, who always tells her he's disappointed in her, but never tells her no. She shows up on his doorstep (or more likely, in his office), looking a mess, with tears in her eyes and secrets in her head, waiting for Justin to make it better. Every time, it's the night on the terrace all over again. The night in jungle they don't talk about. It's Justin and Alex against the world, and he's her safe place. Justin protects her. Alex protects him. It's maybe a little twisted what they've got... but it works.
(Or it has, anyway, up until now.)
Now it's all come crashing down. The sharp-edged thing knowledge that Alex has been hurting herself to keep from him is loose in the world, and Alex is afraid. She knows that the timing of the betrayal isn't what matters, because she knows another secret inside the first: Alex's brother Justin, Justin-the-hero, Justin-the-smartest-guy-in-the-world, Justin-who-always-shows-Alex-up... he's fragile.
Alex knows about heartbreak. She knows all too well it turns you inside out and cracks open your life. How it makes you someone other than yourself. Justin's fragile, and if she's being honest... she doesn't know what he'll do without Juliet. For a long time now, Juliet has been what made Justin feel good about himself. Like he was a grownup, a real man. Like he was someone other than the nerdy guy who couldn't get a date in high school, whose parents never came to his academic events because they weren't real sports, whose only friend was just this side of mentally deficient. Juliet made Justin feel real.
It's like she can hear it, the sounds of a falling world. She's surrounded by the crashing-in sound of dropped secrets, and she's afraid of what she might find in the wreckage. She hopes that he's only bruised and not entirely broken.
What will Justin do, without Juliet?
(And, more importantly, what will Alex do without Justin?)
She stalks the halls, moving as quickly as she can: he's not in the lounge. Not in the nasty cafeteria, or any of the classrooms she passes by. His office is dark and probably locked, so she doesn't even bother with rattling the doorhandle. So that just leaves...
With a sinking heart, Alex realizes she probably does know where to find Professor Russo. She groans, then retraces her steps, takes a sharp left, and heads for the creepy scienced-up room where, less than a week ago, they'd made things explode.
Asleep across his desk, Justin is dreaming his life back into place.
In his dreams, Juliet comes back to him, repentent and loving. He transforms her back into the girl who adores him, a beautiful blonde with an appetite for mushy sentimentality (and the occasional spider), a girl who's not intimidated by his big brains, not put off by his unsexy passion for science and history. In his dreams, Justin's girlfriend isn't the coldblooded creature who's been gradualy receding from him over the past few months, sleeping somewhere other than the bed they share. In his dreams, she's waiting for him when he comes home at night. In his dreams, Justin knows something he'd never admit in the conscious hours: dreams are are better truer magic than any incantation, more powerful than any wand the Wizard World has to offer.
He dreams that Alex is a little sister, nothing more. She's the bratty but almost tolerable companion of his childhood, who usually makes his life miserable and occasionally saves it, but she's a family member and nothing more. One who sometimes drops by to inconvenience him... during normal visiting hours. In his dreams she's a perfectly ordinary sister, not an unpredictable moving earthquake. She never appears like an apparition in the small hours, demanding his time and his money and his love, challenging his patience and sanity. She's not a dark, wet-gleaming creature who shows up almost nightly his dreams, making him question the good things he believes about himself.
Justin dreams that the strange alchemy between them never happened... or if it happened it didn't change anything important, didn't do anything more lasting than make him rethink the wisdom of mixing Alex and volatile chemicals and magic and lack of sleep. He draws a veil across what happened in the lab, until he can't see it anymore. The words written on the wall disappear as if they'd never been at all. He dreams the paint back on, bright and clean, concealing scars and imperfections and truths that make Justin uncomfortable.
The problem with dreams, of course, is that you have to wake up.
In the doorway of the chemistry lab, Alex stands frozen.
It's weird, too, because couple of minutes ago, all Alex wanted to do was move. Move. It was like she couldn't stop, her restlessness prickling her from the insidelike an itch she couldn't get to, a pain she couldn't reach to soothe.
But now... now she's frozen. Standing stock-still. Alex is leaning up against the doorway again, propped there like she was the night she came crash Professor Big-head's little party and take him shopping. But now the energy has run out of her... the sight of him has done that.
At least the knot in the center of her has eased, because she's found Justin. But something about the sight of him hurts.
Maybe it's the slumped-over, sloppy look of him: that part's not right. Always, Justin is meticulous to a fault, especially about his appearance. This worn-out posture just isn't Justin. He doesn't look like 's something loose and untucked about him, his shirt wrinkled, his perfect posture long gone as he hunches to put his head in his arms, his slightly open mouth as he snores. Even his paperwork is wrong, its perfect edges knocked askew by the weight of him. More than anything, it's the unwashed, unloved weariness of Justin that knocks her back now, makes her want to stand there and not move for a while. He looks lost and uncared for, and it's the last part that hurts her the most. She hasn't seen him like this since... well, since the first time he lost Juliet. To the Mummy.
(Man, the girl's been nothing but trouble. Really, Alex should have let Harper douse her with garlic powder like she wanted to, back when she first showed up.)
Alex... well, she doesn't know what to do. He looks so tired. She can't bear to leave him like this. But she can't bear to wake him, either. Luckily, Alex Russo has never been one to let a lack of options slow her down. So... she retrieves her wand from her left boot, and does something else.
In pieces, Justin's life falls back into place. It's safe, sane, and normal. Finally, he dreams himself back into his own bed. He dreams he's comfortable and warm, tucked-in with a real pillow and a soft blanket, instead of a hard chair for a bed and a stack of books for a pillow. He's... he's being tucked in for real, the blankets wrapped close around him, as if he was a child. It's remarkably comforting, and Justin is glad it's not real, because it might be embarrassing. "There, you big wuss," says his angel, his Juliet, in his dreams, "...all better now?"
But it is better. Justin is asleep.
The trouble with dreams is that you have to wake up, and Justin wakes up alone. He's stiff and sore from sleeping with his head on his desk all night, a blanket around his shoulders and his hand clutching a bundle of cloth. Wait, what?
Head aching, Justin wakes to the sound of his blaring alarm clock. But the sound isn't right. For some reason, he isn't hearing the familiar, rattling and siren-like shock of his regular alarm, but instead a blaring music. Struggling toward the surface of consciousness, he recognizes the jarring notes of a pop tune he's heard before... something about breaking up in a text message? Groaning, he reaches out to quiet it.
He can't even remember how he got home.
Justin's never been a big believer in hitting the "snooze" button (why set the alarm if you're just going to keep sleeping? It's like cheating, somehow), but right now he's seriously tempted. He doesn't. Instead he pulls himself into a sitting posiiton, yawning hugely, lifting his hands to his grimy face to rub the sleep out. Beneath him, the bed jiggles gently but insistently in response to his movements. He must be really disoriented, because for a moment, the walls themselves seem to sway, as he opens his eyes lazily on soft caramel-colored light.
Wait.
Where am I?
Groggy but with increasing alarm, he smears the last of the sleep from his eyes, wincing as real life rushing back in to make his brain hurt. Blinking at himself and his surroundings, he sees that what he'd been sleeping under, and had taken for a blanket is actually a rather heavy satin cape that's been wrapped around neatly him, keeping him warm. The "pillow" under his head is a roll of plastic or rubber that the floor appears to be made of. And the bundle clutched in his hand is a ragged bit of cloth which, when carefully released... turns out to be a soft mask, just a scrap of cloth with eyes cut out of it really, that will tie behind his head like a blindfold.
When he unfolds the eye mask, a small white object falls out. Justin's face scrunches in curiosity, but as his brain clicks into gear and his surroundings sink in, he realizes he has more important things to worry about.
Shivering walls and bed... candy-colored light filtering in through thick latices made of rubber... a bed that bounces...
Argh..! wha...? Pop music...caramel light... Bouncy house...?!
"...ALEX!"
Hardly realizing he's just shrieked out loud, Justin comes to his senses all at once, like a drunk confronted with flashing lights and a siren. He's up and moving, stuffing the note and the eye-mask into his pocket for later. Looking around with wide eyes, he jolts to his feet... and promptly falls back down on his ass, betrayed by his own momentum. Luckily, the floor is springy and giving, round rolls of plastic breaking his fall and pushing him back up toward the ceiling. Muttering near-audible obscenities beneath his breath - the majority of them directed toward his darling little sister - he lurches upright again.
This time forewarned, and taking a wide stance, he manages to keep his feet... but it's a near thing, all the same. It's a little like balancing in a rocking canoe, and Justin, who has been blessed with none of the grace his younger siblings seem to posses, doesn't like it. Not even a little. Still absently clutching his blanket... er, his cape... in one hand, he staggers across the fat rolls of wobbling plastic and out the bouncing, swaying "door". It's been edged in imitation sugar icing that sparkles in the light, and the swirly-pop handle is cold and hard in his hand. Still clutching his blanket in one hand, he stumbles out the door and lurches into the light...
He's greeted by a chorus of giggles. The students surrounding him hold lunch trays or shoulder heavy backpacks... and they're everywhere. It's like one of those dreams, he thinks, the kind where your worst fears come true. This is just like that, except not a dream. Justin feels himself flushing red as he takes in his painfully familiar surroundings. He hasn't woken up at the costume shop, as he'd assumed he would, when he found himself in the bouncy house. Instead he's...
At Wiz-Tech?
In his pajamas. Holding his blankie.
Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.
He's going to kill Alex, when he sees her.
Discarding what's left of his pride, Justin balls up the the thing he's holding and flees.
Alex can't... stop... laughing.
She's standing in the Wiz-Tech commons with an extremely irate big brother, and it's just too good. The fact that they're standing in front of the bounce-house where Justin spent the night... two nights now, she'll have to work that into a clever remark later... only makes it better. The bouncing monstrosity has been hauled - well, flashed - into the commons in preparation for the Masquerade the following night, and in order to facilitate dress rehearsal for the performance she's planning.
Justin's glowering, looking a thousand painful deaths at her with his eyes, arms folded across his chest his posture tight, wearing a look of pissed-offedness she hasn't seen since the time she hid his light-saber. And Alex tries to stop laughing. to compose herself. Really, she tries. But he just looks so... so funny, when he's all mad and serious about it.
Also, he's glaring at her but he's pretty clearly not thinking about Juliet... and Alex is so, so glad. She can't say that to her brother, of course; she can't comfort him or commiserate with him, or tell him he's a sweet guy and he deserves so, so much better than fangy-face has to offer. It's just not the way the do things. There are rules. Lines. So no, she can't tell him that, but she can flash him out of his fever-dreams and misery, and into a fairytale house anytime she wants. Right now, she knows for a fact that he's too busy planning her eventual homicide to think about his vampire girlfriend, and she's glad.
Besides, he'll have to outsmart her if he wants to murder her. And, well, that's just not gonna happen. Sure, Justin has book smarts in that big head of his, but Alex, well, Alex has "stage-your-murder-and-make-it-look-like-an-accident" smarts, and honestly... which skill-set is more useful, in the long run?
Several minutes later, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes and holding in her aching sides, she gasps, "Justin... so nice to see you... with your big-boy clothes on!" trying to keep a straight face.
"Alex, that... what you did,it wasn't funny!" he whisper-shouts, stammering, as if he's still traumatized by the memory of it. The little vein in his temple throbs. "Do you have any idea how foolish you've just made me look in the eyes of the entire faculty?"
"Yeah," she snorts, "That's kind of the funny part."
He glowers at her, but his ire is wasted. "Come on, Justin, you have to admit it was funny."
"I woke up in a children's playhouse...
"Bounce-house," she corrects, but he ignores her.
"...in the middle of the afternoon!"
That sets off a fresh round of convulsions from Alex. "What, so now it's my fault you overslept?" she gasps, choking on her laughter, not even trying to keep a straight face.
"Yes!"
She holds her hands up in a warding-off gesture, her expression struggling, and failing to be innocent. "I set an alarm..."
He cries, "For lunchtime!"
She puts her face in her hands, shaking with laughter. If Justin doesn't want to be pranked, why does it make it so rewarding? Meanwhile, he's still talking, apparently.
"...do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to suddenly be standing in the middle of the school, barely conscious, in my jammies?"
"No," she giggles, "...but I'm guessing you do!" Alex sputters, unable to maintain the weak facade of innocence. She cackles."Hey, at least I gave you jammies! Would you rather go au naturale?"
"They were Mister Nimbus Pajamas!" he explodes, and Alex collapses, shrieking with laughter. Oh god, her sides are going to hurt for this later on.
(It's so worth it.)
It takes a long time for Alex to wind down. Time in which Justin has time to imagine her death, several times over. "So, if you're completely finished making fun of me..."
She holds out a hand, pretending to stifle more laughter, eyes bright. "Hold up. Wait... wait... Okay. Now I'm done."
"...want to tell me what the big secret is?"
"Big secret?" She looks blank, more so than usual. "What are you talking about?"
"This." Justin holds up a note... tweezed between his second and third fingers. Neat and triangular, it looks a lot like the kind of thing they'd used to make as kids passing notes in class. Well, not that Justin spent a lot of time passing notes in school. But he'd seen it done. The blue-lined notebook paper has been re-folded back into its original neat triangle, creases crisp, with "Justin" scrawled on the front in familiar handwriting. As if he wouldn't have known who it was for, when it fell out of the folds of his cape. Which in itself is a surreal sentence.
Meet me in the Commons afterschool, Professor. I have something to show you. She hadn't bothered with a signature, only a postscript: PS: Bring your costume.
The costume, presumably, had been the cape she'd wrapped him in and the mask he'd still been holding when he woke up. Still sulking, he'd left them behind in his office- stuffed into a deep file drawer. He didn't want to explain his "costume" to anyone who happened to wander into his office.
Alex brightens in recognition. "Oh, hey, that's mine!" She stretches to take it from him, but he pulls back his hand, holding it out of her reach. "Look, Justin, at least this one didn't explode!" she offers. Justin grimaces, obviously remember the one that did.
"How thoughtful of you not to make me explain my exploding correspondence to yet another classroom," he drawls. "And while we're on the subject... Really, Alex?" He wiggles the folded-up note at her. "I mean, a post-it wouldn't have worked? Or a Wiz-mail? What are we, thirteen?"
Without missing a beat, his sister bats her eyelashes at him, purses her lips, and pipes in a schoolgirl falsetto, "I like you, do you like me? Check yes or no!"
Justin rolls his eyes, suppressing a grin. She's ridiculous. But he finds himself laughing anyway, infected by her mirth; Alex just has that effect on people. Especially Justin. She giggles, and there's all at once a lightness between them. A weight, lifting.
Then the bounce-house jiggles, murmuring, and the moment is forgotten as Justin becomes aware of an audience. "Uh, Alex?"
She follows his gaze, but seems unsurprised by the jostling crowd at the windows of the gingerbread house. "That's what I wanted to show you," she says, folding her arms across her chest. " I thought you should know why you're throwing this party. Professor Russo, meet the some of the street people the benefit is for." She gives the moniker a hard emphasis, as if keen to remind him of his bad manners on the night she dropped by to drag him into all this. "Come on," she says more gently, to the bounce-house, "It's alright. He's pretty nice, really. And if he gets out of line, I can totally take him."
Slowly, shyly, the players emerge from the gingerbread house.
It's a small cast, apparently. Very small: all of them under ten, at a guess. A boy of about nine, with the exaggerated facial features of a young ogre and dressed in a costume of worn-looking clothes with oversize patches and ragged sleeves carries an axe that's very obviously a prop ("Woodcutter," Alex tells him in a stage whisper, shielding her mouth with her hand), a girl of roughly the same age, wearing a pointed hat and carrying a broomstick almost as big as she is, ("She's the witch," Alex tells him in the same loud whisper, "but she's also the woodcutter's wife in the first scene.") and finally, a boy a girl who can't be more than six years old, looking worried about the newcomer and the extra attention, emerge from the candy-coated door, holding hands. They look alike enough to be twins, with their dark hair and deep brown eyes. The girl's long curls and the sulky cast of her expression both remind him of Alex at that age, and Justin has to stifle a smile.
"May I present," Alex says in a louder voice, and for the apparent benefit of the twins, rather than her brother, "...Hansel and Gretel."
The players all bow ("Gretel" executing a rather clumsy and extremely adorable "curtsy" in her patchwork skirt), and Justin claps, loudly. His sister smiles at him.
After a little more confusion, Alex hustles all the kids into the padlocked cardboard box that Justin also remembers from the costume shop (with a creepy and cheery call of, "come on kids, into the cage!") to change out of their costumes and back into streetclothes. Justin isn't sure how she's going to fit them all in there, but he doesn't dwell on it.
One of Alex's confederates, a co-worker with pointy ears he doesn't recognize, re-emerges with them a few minutes later, and begins organizing them into a line, lecturing. Something about holding hands and crossing streets and no flashing straight back like you did last time. This seems to be directed at the miniature Gretel, who scowls. "I was just trying not to be late like you said," she protests, but the elf who's in charge of the kids is not impressed.
"This time, we're all going together," she says firmly.
"Hansel" elbows his sister in the ribs, as if to drive home the point. She promptly kicks him, hard. The boy yelps, attracting the attention of their keeper.
"What did we say about being quiet while we're in the big-kid school?" she scolds, and the boy hangs his head. Gretel smirks, and Hansel gives her the back of her head a dirty look.
Justin doesn't ask how they got all those kids and at least one adult into the narrow cardboard box build to house no more than one or two plastic skeletons... but Alex tells him anyway: "It's charmed," she says with more than a touch of pride, as if she'd invented the concept. "It's huge in there."
(Justin rolls his eyes.)
Soon enough, all the tiny players and their minder have left the room- walking, in a line, and talking in their inside voices, because they're in the big-kid school. Nobody kicks anybody else. Nobody flashes out, not even so they can be on time.
The kids are adorable. But Justin is still confused. "So..." he tries, "...you're gonna have the kids perform at the Masquerade?"
Alex nods, unusually taciturn.
"So how, exactly... is that going to help your..." he searches for a word that won't make Alex hit him, "...your clients, the homeless Wizard World people?"
Alex sighs heavily, favoring him with a look that asks, without a word, if it's really possible that they're related. "Those are our Wizard World homeless people, Professor."
Justin is taken aback. "You?" he says, "working with kids? Really? Without, you know, some kind of court-ordered public service involved?"
"That only happened the one time," Alex mutters.
"So, what, you've switched teams now? Weird... I always pictured you working against the poor and downtrodden."
She folds her arms and gives him a sour look, pursing her lips. "I'm just full," she says, "of surprises."
And, honestly, Justin really is surprised. Always, when he pictures the "less fortunate" of the Wizard World, (whom, incidentally, he imagines Alex both fitting in very well with and not really helping all that much), they're, well, adults. And, in Justin's mind, they're adults who have more or less failed at being adults... people who can't get a job, can't hold down a job... who don't have what it takes. That doesn't fit, at all, with the sweet little kids who just trounced out of the room. Justin shakes his head, trying to realign his interior vision with what she's just said, while Alex watches him do it. He isn't having much luck.
"Those kids are homeless? Wizard-World homeless?" He asks, still trying to work it out in a way that makes sense in his head. Kids aren't homeless. Are they? Homeless people are shiftless... and lazy.. and, well, adult.
Aren't they?
"Alex," he says, "Where are their parents?"
Alex gives him the look again. The one that says, seriously, are you this stupid? Justin recognizes it, of course. He wears it himself, more or less constantly, when Alex is talking. He's practically got a copyright on it.
"If they had parents," she says, speaking slowly, as if that might help, "they wouldn't be orphans, would they? They probably wouldn't even be homeless. And they definitely wouldn't be in the HH placement program."
"Placement program?"
But her lips clamp shut and a shadow passes across her face. "We're... hoping to facilitate some adoptions," she murmurs, not looking at him anymore.
"Really? Alex, you know how hopeless adoptions in the Wizard world can be. … how is that going to be possible? You know as well as I do how rare Wizard World adoptions are - I mean, Hugh was the only adopted Wizard kid I ever met, and he was adopted by giants. When the kid is magical really plays hell with the family Wizard competitions for one thing, not to mention all the taboo about mixing certain bloodlines… all in all, it's almost impossible. You know that. Everyone does."
Alex nods. She's looking at the toes of her boots, which have apparently become extremely fascinating since the last time Justin had a good look at them. They spend a little time like that, awkward and still- then Alex straightens up, beaming, and asks in what has to be the least-subtle change-of-subject ever: "So! Where's the costume I told you to bring?"
Justin groans.