A/N: I actually like this chapter! Yay AxI! -insert moar review whoring here-

Touch

The dreams come in fragments at first. They seep through his subconscious and appear in flashes and pulses. A picture, a phrase, a feeling, all flickering around his mind while he sleeps.

He’s had dreams like this before- dreams that leave him gasping and shuddering and tense between his hips when he wakes up, but there’s something different about these ones, something different and strange that leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

It’s hardly a gradual realization when he finally figures it out one lazy Sunday morning (well, can two A.M really count as the morning?). He peels away from yet another dream and recalls through the hazy fog of sleep that whoever he keeps dreaming about had black hair. Long, thick black hair. His first thought is Magnus, but it can’t be him because Alec remembers eyes, eyes that aren’t hazel or catlike, eyes that are wide and innocent and deliriously brown.

And then it hits him. Just like that, he knows. His hand flies to his mouth and he doubles over and, dear god, he’s going to throw up and his heart’s beating like crazy against his ribcage and his mind is racing, tripping over itself in a mad effort to sort this out and it’s a steady stream of words, pounding along- (nononothernotisabellecant’isabelle.)

It’s a mistake; it has to be a mistake. He’s jumping to conclusions too soon. The person in his dreams is not Isabelle, not his sister because he’s not like that, he’s her brother, he doesn’t think about her that way. She’s his sister, his tiny little (beautiful) waif of a sister who he loves, but not like that. That’s enough to calm himself down and it takes everything he has to keep the constant frame of mind that he’s not lying, that this is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (so help him, Angel.)

Then why can’t he get it out of his head? The dreams come back, of course, painful and vivid inside his mind, the one place he can’t escape, but he ignores them, brushes them off as nothing because that’s just what they are. Nothing. But his exchanges with Isabelle are becoming few and far between, as awkward as hell. She’ll give him a look, part her lips a certain way and everything, the dreams and the fragments and the desperate, hollow aching between his hips all come rushing back and he’s afraid it’ll show, that she’ll know about it and he’s pretty certain that if she ever does find out, she’ll never want to be within thirty feet of him again.

On the plus side, she’s stopped having those nightmares, which is a good for both of them. She doesn’t have to go through whatever hell she had been night after night, the hell he only knows bits and pieces about from her frantic mutterings when he wakes her up (.) and he doesn’t have to deal with the surge of new, unwanted feelings that would surely accompany her gripping him tight enough to choke, her hands clinging to his shoulder, her muscles jumping and shivering under her skin, her breath- loud and jagged- in his ear.

Out with nightmares for one sibling, in with ones of a completely different kind for the other.

The dreams get longer and longer, no longer fragments but full, torturous hallucinations that haunt him. More and more detailed till he can swear that someone is actually touching him, that his lips are really pressed against someone’s skin. The worst of them come when he’s really exhausted- he can never remember how they start out but they end up the same. His skin on hers, kissing her hard, her hands tangled in his hair, her hips moving skillfully against him, both of them gasping for air.

The most horrible part is right after he wakes up and he wishes he could go back.

It’s enough to make him wish he had never known her at all.