……

"One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes."

-Antoine de Saint Exupery

……

Heart in his throat, Justin leans closer to his sister and asks what she has to tell him.

“You” Alex begins, “you’re kind of…getting on my nerves.” She catches him off guard when she shoves at his shoulder, sending him sprawling onto the sand.

Spitting out the grains that ended up in his mouth, he righted himself and glared at his sister. “I’m only trying to help.”

She says nothing, which only infuriates him more. All he’s done this entire time is try to fix this for her-like he always does. But of course she doesn’t appreciate it. She never does. And now he thinks he was just crazy, thinking that he was feeling anything as a result of this whole stupid voodoo nonsense. Like it would even work on him-even if he were out of his mind enough to believe that she could possibly…

He stands, looking down at her huddled figure on the sand, and sighs. “I’m gonna go call Mom and Dad and let them know we’re not dead, and then I’m gonna grab something to eat. You want anything?”

Still, she doesn’t respond, which would worry him if it didn’t add to his aggravation. Alex is always hungry. But he’s tired of dealing with her. “Fine. I’ll be back to get you and then we’ll go home.” He reaches down and snatches her wand out of her pocket, just in case. She doesn’t even protest.

“Fine. Sit there and sulk. See if I care.”

(He does though. A lot.)

His parents are angry, duh. Angrier than usual and that’s saying a lot after some of the stunts Alex has pulled. Like when she was nine and turned Max into a beetle so she could watch some lame dance movie on TV two hours after she was supposed to be in bed. They did skip out on grounding and transport themselves to another country so he can kind of see their point.

Then he says that he couldn’t very well let Alex come down here on her own. She’s Alex. Supervision is necessary.

They agree and tell him to get her home as soon as he can.

(One skill he’s glad he picked up from his sister-a modicum of stealth. He just never knew how glad he was until he slipped the cell phone back behind the counter of the juice bar before the guy noticed it was missing.)

And even though Alex said (implied) that she doesn’t want anything to eat, Justin knows she must be as hungry as he is so he buys her an extra large Danish and a smoothie. Too much sugar for his taste, but that’s Alex for you.

“Here.” He holds them out to her, expecting a thank you. Instead she looks at the food like a snake preparing to strike. Rolling his eyes, he shakes the Danish at her. “Take it before it ends up on your head.”

She grimaces, but takes it. “Thanks I guess.”

Well…its something.

He sits beside her and takes a bite of his breakfast burrito. Justin hadn’t realized until he got to the counter of the juice bar just how hungry he actually was and he feels a little more like himself with some sustenance.

The idea of him and Alex like that….craziness.

Insanity.

And the implausibility is why he can’t really seem to stop looking at her while. Totally.

His mind wanders, just for the tiniest of nanoseconds and no more, only to be pulled back when she snaps her fingers in front of his face. He jolts and drops what’s left of his food onto the sand between them. “What?”

She looks down at the food and back up at him with a look that wouldn’t be amiss at being aimed at some hapless idiot who just put their shoes on their hands. “What’s with the spacieness?”

“Uh, nothing.” He says it too quickly and her eyes narrow, catching on. “Just thinking.”

She leans closer and, God help him that he can’t tear his eyes away from the remnants of icing and sugar at the corners of her lips, pulls his face forward by placing her fingers on either side of his chin, tugging hard.

“Ow,” he protests.

Alex searches his face. It surprises him. Usually he’s pretty much an open book-or so she often tells him.

Justin tries, and fails, to ignore that little voice that lives in the back of his head that says she’s looking for something specific. Something she shouldn’t be. Something he shouldn’t even be thinking of.

The entire bottom half of his face overcome with heat, growing heat, he jerks his head free of her hold and scrambles to his feet.

He wobbles, but doesn’t fall down. He can be mildly proud of that, right?

Alex stands in front of him. She looks all defiant and angry and this never ends well. “What do you know?”

Huh?

“I don’t know anything!” He pauses, thinks about that. “I mean I do. I actually know quite a lot-”

“Justin!”

“I don’t know anything about this.” Waving at her, some odd pantomime of greeting almost, he tries to make his point and back away at the same time. She follows him. “Just what we’ve learned-together.”

Arms crossed and eyes barely more than slits, she stares him down, confident he’ll crack.

He always does.

Alex deflates. Yes, he’s glad. His sister and her twisted mind scare him a little.

(His thoughts were not that twisted. It was just low blood sugar. Not like he meant them.)

Sinking down onto the sand, Alex falls back and stares up at the sky. “I think this thing is making me paranoid.”

Cautiously, because he does still have a sense of self preservation and all, he sits down beside her and pats her knee.

They sit in silence for a while, each trying to process what’s gone on the past few days. Justin thinks that he’s let all this voodoo stuff get to him. Like a bad ghost story that gets inside your head and makes you see boogeymen on every street corner.

That’s it. Has to be.

He’s so lost in his thoughts, his justifications, that when the sound Alex’s voice makes itself known, he doesn’t hear her for several seconds. “What?”

She sighs. “You know, don’t you?” And she looks at him with so much sadness he expects it to burn a hole right through him.

Unable to lie to her (common affliction) when she looks at him like that, Justin desperately pushes against the sudden urge to tuck tail and run before this all gets out of hand, he decides to just lay it all out.

What he likes to call The Band-Aid Method.

“So I was right.”

Alex looks at him, all wary, like she always looks at him (until she wants something), and gives him that silent plea to go on.

“All this,” he waves his hand in a circular motion in the air above where Ezrulie’s charm still lays against her skin, “its me. Isn’t it?”

She gives him a dirty look somewhere between ‘I could kill you right here’ and ‘this is too embarrassing for words’ and drops her head into her hands. “Ugh. You’d think you would get tired of always being right.”

Insult? Compliment? Doesn’t matter. He was right.

And he’s not as disturbed by it all as he should be.

It’s an odd place, this scenic paradise, to be talking about a thing like this. So taboo, such stigma, a horrible, ugly word.

He has this friend in Alien Language League, Derek, who came out last May and he remembers the day his locker got trashed and he looked at Justin and wondered ‘how can love be wrong, or ugly, how is that fair?’

Maybe…he had a point all along.

Justin had no answer then, but then is over and this is now and some tiny part of his heart is aching in a good way.

He lays his palm, tentatively, on her shoulder. “Its alright, Alex.”

Her head jerks up, fire in her eyes. “No. no, Justin, it is not alright. Its creepy and wrong and gross and just plain weird.”

Well…

He thinks about Derek. “Thanks.” It comes out drier, more sarcastic than he intended.

Her bright, expressive, angry face dissolved and she looks at him like he’s the biggest dolt she’s ever come across in her life. “You’re my brother.”

She says ‘brother’ like it’s something filthy. He flinches, taking in a harsh breath, the air between them becoming charged with tension. Exactly what kind of tension though, well, that he’d rather not think about.

“I still love you,” Justin says simply.

With watery eyes, she looks at him. His heart comes near to breaking with the hope he sees reflected back at him. Justin wondered if he had been right, but it he never thought about whether or not what this was doing to her.

Frankly, its not really like him. He’s half tempted to glare at that cursed necklace, but what good would that do? If this was already here between them it would have come out sooner or later, charm or no charm.

Justin rubs a hand through his hair, grips at it a bit, biting back the tears and the nausea rising up in his stomach.

Blinking back tears, Alex takes in a shaky breath. “You do?”

He can’t help it; he pulls her against him, tucking her head underneath his chin where she finally lets the tears come. Justin squeezes her shoulder and rubs her back and says every so called comforting platitude he can think of until and just tries to let her know that he’s here, here for her, and always will be, whenever she needs him.

When she finally pulls away and raises her head up, her cheeks are still wet. He wipes the tear tracks away. Habit, even if it has been years since she let him do this, since she used to scrape her knee and declare that her legs hurt to much to walk so he’d give her a piggyback ride home.

“Of course I do.” There’s a shift in her eyes and he wonders if it would be better to ignore it. “Family hate aside, I always will.”

Rolling her eyes, Alex knocks against him. She grins, every inch his sister again. “I hate you,” she says, with all the tenderness of a love poem read aloud.

Alex’s hand goes to her neck and they look down at the same time to see that her necklace has fallen off, landing in her lap. With a laugh of relief, she stuffs it in the pocket of her jeans.

Its been dealt with.

Justin stands up and holds a hand down to her. “Ready to go home?”

Taking and expelling a deep breath, she twines her hand around his and lets him pull her to her feet. “I guess. We’re gonna have to get busted sooner or later, right?”

“Right.”

He tells her he’ll give her back her wand once their home when he leads her over behind a particularly big palm tree and takes his own out to send them back to New York. She puts a hand on his arm, halting him. “You know, I hear beach bum is a pretty good living.”

Chuckling, Justin takes her hand again. “Puka shells aren’t really a good look for me.”

“No surprise there.” She grins at him, tongue poking through her teeth.

With a roll of his eyes, Justin waves his wand and like that, they’re home.

……

fin.

Yeah, it probably didn't help that I watched the playground fight scene in To Kill A Mockingbird when I wrote this.