[fic] not your typical incestous teenage love story
Title: not your typical incestous teenage love story
Fandom: Wizards of Waverly Place [Justin/Alex, incest]
Length: ~1,860
Rating: PG? I think? Possibly PG-13, for references to alcohol and somesuch
Summary: Alex's life is not a romantic comedy. Or a romantic tragedy. Or really the plotline of any movie ever.
A/N: For author_abz Contents within may be further from summary than they appear. read: I fail at summarizing things that I wrote a month ago *headdesk* I really hope you like it! <3
It’s the Friday before Christmas when Alex realizes she’s in love with her brother.
It hits her when he’s helping decorate the tree, reaching up up up up with his arm to hang a paper snowflake on the highest branch (their mother has outlawed using magic to decorate for years), his shirt riding up a bit and displaying a strip of smooth, smooth skin and taut muscle, and she realizes she’s in love with him, and she thinks, how cliché.
* * *
A few days after Christmas, Alex brushes her hand against Justin’s, and she’s pleased because she feels nothing at all, no sudden jolt of electricity or warm fuzzy feeling in the pit of her stomach or flip-flopping heart (which never made sense to her anyway). Which means she hasn’t lost it completely and this isn’t just like every lame teen movie ever, she’s pretty sure. Except with incest.
So there are no flustered exchanges between them or embarrassing blushing when he’s around or constant worrying about whether or not he’s looking at her. Except that even without those things, she knows she’s in love with him as surely as she knows that the sky is blue, or that magic is real, so there’s that.
* * *
In March, she spends an entire day staring at Justin as he bakes cookies in his entirely too flattering apron, until he says What? sounding all self-conscious and she thinks Oh, god, and this whole thing is even worse than she thought.
* * *
Alex is able to continue on as normal. She ignores her brother, teases him, messes with him. She still finds him completely annoying and dorky, but it’s endearing, and she wouldn’t have him any other way, and she’s in love with him. And she’d be thinking maybe I always have been, if it wasn’t so completely sappy and stupid and cliché.
She thinks maybe this feeling is never going to go away, that maybe she’ll always feel exactly as she does now, and she wonders what that means. She thinks maybe she can live with it, maybe she can love someone else, too, and it’ll be just like those movies where the heroine falls in passionate love with that guy she can never be with, and they have a heart-wrenching fling, and then the girl settles down with a dependable man she loves but isn’t in love with with the same ardor, except Alex and Justin can never even have a what we used to be and god, is Alex really comparing her life to Titanic?
Alex shakes her head and thinks a little of passion and true love and destiny, and then she thinks much more at length about whether she can get out of writing her English essay if she compliments Mrs. Wecker on her hideous perm and smiles winningly.
* * *
In July, Justin leaves for camp. Science camp, because despite his objections to the contrary, he really couldn’t get any dorkier.
He’s about to leave, saying goodbye to their parents in the kitchen, and Alex is lounging on the couch with a bowl full of potato chips and wearing her best look of apathy. Alex, I’m leaving, he says, and she grunts and shoves another handful of chips in her mouth.
(At least this whole being in-love thing, she thinks, hasn’t made her embarrassed to eat or whatever in front of him. That would just be stupid.)
Alex, and he’s teasing now; he comes up from behind her and reaches down, over the couch, hugs her from behind. I’m not leaving til you say bye to me. It’s just to torture her, really, and he knows that, and she knows that, but he doesn’t really understand the full depths of his torture. It kind of makes her heart hurt, in a purely metaphorical sense.
Alex rolls her eyes, and turns her head, intending to kiss him on the cheek and accomplish the double victory of saying goodbye and hopefully freaking him out, but she turns just a bit too far, or maybe he does, and then she’s kissing him softly on the corner of his mouth, which is something Alex doesn’t even have words for.
She pulls back, and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and honestly, Alex doesn’t mind what just happened. Except that it kind of messes up her plan to never let the whole being-in-love-with-him thing come out, or affect her life whatsoever, and it feels completely stupid that something happened to not make that work. It kind of freaks her out a little, and that makes her feel like none of this is really in her control. That it never has been.
Belatedly, Alex realizes she should have pretended to be grossed out or something, but it doesn’t matter: Justin clears his throat and leaves, and by the time he comes back from science camp it seems he’s forgotten all about it, and Alex has reconciled herself to the idea that one accidental almost-kiss will always be the entirety of their used to be.
* * *
In October, Alex realizes Justin hasn’t dated anyone in a while. As much as she likes to make allusions to Justin’s unattractiveness to the opposite sex, it’s never really been true-Justin kind of gets around. He actually dates more than she does, if Alex is honest (but when is she ever?). So his not dating anyone in a while-several months, actually-or even talking about a girl he likes, is a little off, but not for a moment does she consider that it might in any way be tied to her. She is not Bella Swan.
It does make her wonder, though, whether an unrequited love or a mutual love that can never be acted upon is worse. They’re both pretty crappy, she thinks. She doesn’t want crappy. She wonders if there’s a way around that.
She comes up blank.
* * *
A week later Alex realizes she hasn’t dated anyone in a while either, or really even thought about it, despite her learning-to-simultaneously-love-someone-else-who’s-actually-attainable plan still being in full force, theoretically, and she does a little more freaking out.
* * *
In December it’s nearly been a full year since her stupid, stupid epiphany hit her while Justin was hanging decorations, and it hasn’t gone away, and she’s realized that this whole thing is pretty crappy.
It’s not like being in love with Justin dominates her entire life, or anything, and it’s not like she has stopped finding other boys attractive, and it really hasn’t changed her other feelings towards him at all-familial love, sisterly protectiveness, annoyance, affection. But it’s there, and she can’t convince it to go away, and she just doesn’t like the thought of having to go on living like this for the rest of her life. She wishes she could at least have a taste of what, under very different circumstances, might have been. And Alex is accustomed to finding a way to always get what she wants.
Alex’s strategy is a far cry from “every lame teen movie ever”, in that she doesn’t accost him randomly and start making out with him, and she doesn’t drop little hints and winks and innuendos in hopes that he’ll catch on. Instead, she plans to get him drunk and then accost him and start making out with him.
Okay, so maybe Alex’s plan isn’t the best ever, and it’s a little devious, but all she wants is a taste of him, and then maybe she can finally get him out of her system, and she swears she’ll stop, and she really, really doesn’t want this messing up her relationship with him in the future. The problem with this is that Alex really doesn’t know that much about drunkenness: how much it takes to get someone to the not-remembering-anything-the-next-morning stage, and whether or not she’ll have to bypass vomit or passing out to get there. She ends up waiting till New Year’s, when her parents are out at some party and Max is at a sleepover and it’s just Alex and Justin, home alone to celebrate the changing of the year together.
Alex has already figured out where her dad stashes the liquor, and she’s able to break in with some fairly easy forbidden magic, and then it’s on to step two of her plan, which involves disguising the alcohol so her goody two-shoes brother doesn’t know what he’s drinking. She realizes the flaw in her idea when she opens a bottle of something-or-another and, well, she’s never actually tasted any alcohol, her parents won’t let her, and she takes a swig and nearly barfs.
Alex reevaluates this entire thing. And then it hits her-magic-and she feels really, really stupid for not thinking about that in the first place, given that that’s how she solves most of her problems. Granted, she doesn’t usually succeed in solving them ninety percent of the time, but she’s never not at least tried to. She blames Justin for messing up her scheming lately, but she’s just kind of secretly relieved to not have to go through with plan A. Plus, abandoning Plan Alcohol in favor of Plan Magic is definitely not a cliché, which is always good.
So it’s nearly midnight and she’s in the lair, studying, which is really not how she planned to spend her New Year’s Eve. She has at least three books open and is poring over a fourth when Justin comes in.
Alex, he says, suddenly right there, and she hadn’t noticed him sooner, too absorbed in her research, so she quickly tries to shut all the books at once, but he still gets a glimpse: pages opened to spells about love and lust and memory and midnight and what one dusty tome calls “a very different kind of magic”. Justin catches her eye, and she holds her breath, because she has no idea what he’s thinking, but then he’s just tugging her arm to Come upstairs, the ball’s about to drop, it’s almost midnight, and what are you doing studying? Are you sure you’re not sick?
Alex follows him upstairs to the living room. She can hear the annoying people on the TV loudly counting down to midnight. Justin hands her a noisemaker at ten and she blows on it half-heartedly. In a small corner of her mind, she remembers the myth about what you’re doing at midnight on New Year’s setting the tone for what you’ll be doing all year, and she’s at least glad that she’s no longer studying.
When the annoying people on TV finally count down to one, Justin turns to her, again just suddenly there, and it kind of is like every lame teen movie ever when he kisses her at midnight on New Year’s under the freaking mistletoe. It’s pretty much every stupid cliché she hates rolled into one.
But as Alex wraps her arms around Justin’s neck and pulls him closer so she can kiss him properly and thinks finally, she can’t quite bring herself to care.