Author's Note: So, this is me apologizing right up front, both for the long delay between chapters—especially after the cliffhanger that ended the last one—and for the rather blatant exposition-dump you're about to read. I've already rewritten it almost completely from scratch twice, and I honestly think this is as good as it gets. I've at least tried at least to make it an entertaining one. (And to make it up to you, I may have also included some rather blatant fanservice. Yes.) Hopefully I've done a good enough job of foreshadowing that none of it feels like it's coming out of left field.

Massive amounts of gratitude as always to the lovely and talented Not Just A Nerd, not only for her unparalleled assistance in keeping everyone in-character, but also for helping me to unravel the tangle of Justin's feelings and motivation in this chapter. And thanks to all of you for reading, reviewing, favoriting and alerting. Otherwise I'd just be talking to myself, here, and would be a very sad panda, indeed.

Please to enjoy!

xxviii.

"Alex, wait!" Justin calls after her, but Alex is already out the door and down the hall. Burning with equal parts anger and humiliation, she practically flies down the spiral staircase. Jerry and Theresa tear their attention away from the news and glance over the back of the couch at her as she continues past them, into the Sub Station below.

"Is everything all right, mija?" Theresa calls after her. "Where are you going?"

"Anywhere that Justin isn't," she growls over her shoulder without slowing down.

Justin's footsteps clank hurriedly down the staircase behind her—surprising, given how anal he usually is about safety, and how prone to turning his delicate ankles are—forcing Alex to pick up her own pace a little.

"Sooooo I'm guessing you already know that we mentioned the whole Mason thing to your sister...?" she hears Jerry say to him from the living room.

"Uh, yeah," Justin snaps, from above and behind her. "Thanks for the heads up, by the way. Really. Awesome."

Alex is already halfway across the dark and empty Sub Station by the time he comes into view, and peers over the black metal railing at her.

"Alex, c'mon...would you please stop and talk to me?"

Alex snorts loudly. Without so much as a glance over her shoulder at him, she lifts her left arm straight up into the air, her middle finger pointing towards the ceiling, letting him know in no uncertain terms what she thinks of that idea. Because, seriously.

"Oh, now that's real mature, Alex," Justin sighs. "Classy."

Ignoring him, Alex storms behind the counter without breaking stride, and shoves open the swinging door into the kitchen so hard that the hinges actually groan in protest. Crossing the kitchen in two strides, she heaves open the heavy steel door to the lair, and steps through, yanking it shut behind her. Then quickly, before he can follow, she hunches forward and hitches her right knee up to her chest to fish her wand out of her boot. Pointing the business end of it at the door, she dismisses the enchantment on it without so much as a word. It disappears with a flash, leaving only a blank brick wall in its place.

"Hey nonny-nonny, ha-cha-cha," she growls, without lowering her wand. The tip of it flares brightly again for a moment as she casts a spell-lock on the wall, sealing the lair off from the rest of the world until she deems fit to lift it. Which means that now Justin can't follow her, even if he tries magic. Nodding to herself, Alex turns and whips her wand onto the red velvet seat that Justin normally occupies during wizard lessons, then flops down into her Dad's brown, overstuffed recliner, fuming.

(Yeah, that's it: fuming. Not sulking. Not pouting. And definitely not on the verge of tears. Because, seriously, screw all that girly crap.)

She's barely had a chance to take a breath before the flashing, multicolored door that leads to the Wizard World swings open, and Justin leans in, smirking at her.

"Oh, goddamnit!" Alex groans in frustration, wincing and leaning forward to cover her face with both hands.

"Nice try," he says evenly, as she hears him step inside and shut the door behind him. "The spell lock was a nice touch, but you always forget to lock the portal."

"Ugh! Justin, go away!" Alex shouts, her voice muffled by her hands. (And not at all choked with not-tears. Nope. Not even.)

"No, not until you've given me a chance to explain," Justin says, his voice getting closer. "You ran out before I could finish. You've got entirely the wrong idea."

"Oh, really?" Alex drops her hands from her face and braces them on the armrests to shove herself to her feet. "Because the idea I've got, penis-breath, is that you wouldn't dare break your goddamned Temporal Prime Directive for me, but you sure as hell would for your precious Schnuggly Boo-Boo Kitty Fuck!"

"It's not like that, Alex. Really, it's not," Justin protests, his forehead creased with concern. Then, after a beat, he clears his throat and shrugs his shoulders uncomfortably, adding: "And it's Schnuggly Boo-Boo McCutiekins, actually, not—OW!"

He ducks and holds up both arms to shield his head as Alex starts furiously snatching up books, potion ingredients, spell components, and whatever other magical brickabrack she can lay her hands on, and whips them with all her might at her brother's head.

"ARE YOU SERIOUSLY CORRECTING ME RIGHT NOW, YOU STUPID! POMPOUS! DOUCHECANOE?"

"OK, OK, I'm sorry! Not in the face! Not in the face!"

"Oh SURE! You're SORRY!" Alex snaps, slowly circling about the lair to find more things to throw at him, even as Justin circles away from her. "Just like MASON! was SORRY! for proclaiming his UNDYING! FUCKING! LOVE! for her. RIGHT! IN! FRONT! OF! ME!"

"This is not the same thing, I swear!" Justin insists, dodging for dear life as potion vials, rodent skulls and enchanted crystals alike smash to pieces on the floor, walls and furniture all around him. He risks uncovering his face for a second to look at her, then holds out both hands in panic. "Waitwaitwait, not Dad's twelveball signed by the '75 Hippogriffs! He'll kill us both!"

Alex hesitates mid-wind-up, and glances at it, surprised to see it in her hand. Shrugging, she puts it back down on the shelf, and picks up a pair of petrified codfish to hurl at him instead.

"Agh!" Justin cries out, as one bounces off of his forehead. Glaring, he ducks under Volume One of the Pseudonomicon, and charges at her before she can pick up the other sixty-eight. Wrapping his arms around her in a bear hug, pinning her own arms to her sides, he holds her tightly even as she squirms and struggles and kicks to get free.

"JUSTIN! LET ME GO!"

"Dang it, Alex, knock it off!" he grunts, his surprisingly strong arms holding her tightly even as she squirms and struggles and kicks to get free. "Would you listen to me? I didn't want to change Juliet's future because I loved her!"

"BULLSHIT!"

"It's true! The whole reason I wanted to change it because I knew I didn't!" Justin says. "At least not nearly as much as I did you!"

Alex pauses in the middle of trying to bite down on Justin's bicep, and blinks. Clearing her throat, she takes a moment to compose herself, flipping her hair over her shoulder with a shake of her head.

"Go on," she says smoothly, sounding calm as can be.

Clearly, Justin isn't buying it, because he doesn't release his hold on her. He keeps his arms wrapped tightly around her, pinning hers to her sides, even as he heaves a sigh that sounds like it comes all the way from the soles of his feet.

"Things...changed between me and Juliet, after we got back from Puerto Rico," he explains. "At least, they changed for me. After everthing that happened to us out there—'us' meaning you and me—I realized that, while I still cared about her, it wasn't just the same."

Alex takes a second to absorb this, then turns her face towards him.

"How do you mean?" she asks.

(And duh, it's not like she doesn't know exactly what he means—they commuicate with each other non-verbally half the time, after all—but look, there are some things that a girl really needs to hear out loud, OK?)

"I mean that I knew that we weren't meant to be together. 'We' meaning Juliet and I," Justin says, and the guilt in his voice is palpable. "I knew beyond any shadow of doubt that shewasn't the one with whom I was meant to spend the rest of my life."

"Snkt! 'With whom'?" Alex mocks him, mostly out of reflex, even though she feels all warm and tingly inside. (And, if she's perfectly honest with herself, a little smug, too. Because as much as she'd liked Juliet, she'd kinda sorta hated her, too.)

"The problem was that Juliet didn't know that," Justin says sadly, ignoring her jab. "And apparently, neither did Future Harper."

Alex blinks at this, then grimaces in confusion.

"Huh?" she grunts. (And this time, she really doesn'tknow what he means.)

"I told you before, Alex," Justin sighs. "Book Six starts, and it's like Book Five never even happened. And OK, for all intents and purposes, the wish that Julia made with the Crystal of Desire means that it technically didn't happen...because it rewound time and set everything back to exactly how it was the day before...but Alan, Jula and Sam all pretty obviously remember it. We remember it. I mean, how could Future Harper have written about it in the first place unless one of us told her about it, right? Maybe it didn't happen for the rest of the world, but to us, it's real."

"Yeah, no duh," Alex says, if only to derail his whole geeky diatribe before it can pick up steam. "What's your point, egghead?"

"My point is that Book Six opens with Alan and Ophelia seeming even more in love than ever, while he and Julia appear to be growing farther and farther apart, which is the exact opposite of how we left them at the end of Book Five. And it was confusing to me, because...well, I didn't feel that way. About either of you."

"Oh really?" Alex snorts. "Because you could have fooled me."

With a surge of bitterness, she thinks back to those first few months following the Family Vacation From Hell (as she'd referred to it both before and, somewhat less ironically, after). As soon as they'd returned home, it was as if some invisible wall had gone up between her and Justin. The friendly sibling rivalry that was always at the center of their relationship became a lot less friendly, while the closeness between them that balanced it out all but evaporated. At the time, Alex attributed it to Justin's jealousy over her having won the Wizard Competition. And though she pretended not to care—and, in truth, gave as good as she got—it still stung. Really stung, especially in light of everything they'd been through together, and of what she'd given up for him.

(Because, let's be honest here: she gave up her full powers so that Justin could keep his. Yeah, it meant that Max got to keep his powers in the bargain, too, but that had been just a happy side effect. She loved Max and all, sure, but c'mon, it wasn't like he was doing anything particularly important with them...)

"Yeah, well...it wasn't you I was trying to fool," Justin says, bringing her back to the present, having the good grace to look a little sheepish. "Look, the books are supposed to tell the future, right? And Book Six says Alan is deeply, head-over-heels in love with Ophelia...and that Julia is just his sister, who can barely stand him most of the time. So of course I played along. What else was I going to do? Who am I to change anyone's destiny, just because it's not the one I particularly want for myself?"

Alex barely contains the urge to roll her eyes at this. Because it's just so supremely Justin, to play by the rules and throw himself on the sword for "the greater good"...only to humblebrag about it later, like he deserves some kind of goddamned medal.

"Before Puerto Rico," Justin continues, oblivious, "having the books spell out our future for us was...comforting, in a way. Reassuring. It was like having a road map, one that let me prepare for every twist, every turn that was going to come our way. But I swore to myself that I'd never use that knowledge of future events for personal gain. That I'd let destiny play out as intended. I mean, just about everything seemed to work out OK for us in the end as it was, anyway. And who knows what might happen to the space-time continuum if I dared to interfere?"

"Yeah, yeah, Edith Keeler, butterfly effect, cosmic implications, yadda yadda yadda," Alex drones. "I've read all this already, and it bored me stupid the first time. Fast-forward to the part where it affects me."

Justin scowls at her, then shakes his head ever so slightly.

"After Puerto Rico...after that night in the rainforest, and everything that happened after...knowing the future like that was like being an inmate on Death Row, with absolutely no chance for appeal," he says, his voice going all low and gravelly. "I was condemned. Not to death, but worse: to a life of living a lie, pretending to love the girl that destiny said I should, while burying my true feelings under a shroud of deception."

"A shroud of deception?" Alex scoffs. "Christ, Justin, are you for real? Have you been reading Twilight on the side, or something? Because, hi, emo much?"

Justin's eyes flare angrily, and his arms tighten around her for a split-second, but then he breathes another deep and heavy sigh. He slumps forward to rest his chin on her shoulder, and stare off into the middle distance

"You're absolutely right," he says softly.

"Wow, seriously? About you reading Twilight? Snkt, lemme guess, you're all up with Team Edward 'cause of your whole vampire fixa—"

"About me being 'emo', for lack of a better word," Justin cuts her off with a snarl. "It was pretty pathetic, honestly. There I was feeling sorry for myself over the future I'd been condemned to...when really Juliet was the one who was doomed."

And just like that, Alex's snarky little smirk slides right off her face, as her blood runs to ice water in her veins.

"Oh," she says quietly. "You mean...?"

Justin merely nods against her shoulder, apparently not feeling any more up to saying the T-word that's hanging in the air between them than she is.

"But then I completed my three-thousandth spell, and graduated from wizard lessons without even realizing it, because I'd spent months going through life on auto-pilot," he says. "So I chose my independent study course, and became a Junior Monster Hunter, just like Alan does in Book Six. And then you began talking about this new foreign dude making eyes at you in Art class, and Max separated himself from his conscience...and it was all like a slap to the face, because I knew what that meant was coming up."

"Transylvania," Alex says, finally giving voice to what they've both been thinking.

"Exactly," Justin says.

He finally drops his arms from around her and steps away towards the workbench, looking towards the flashing door of the Wizard World portal, a haunted look coming into his eyes.

"And even though I'd vowed never to alter destiny...I just couldn't let that happen to her. It was bad enough that I'd already lied to her for months, Alex. I couldn't let her throw away her youth like that for me. Not when I didn't even...didn't really..."

He trails off, then, and starts fiddling with the shattered remains of the petrified gryphon's egg she'd hurled at him, as a battle royale between guilt and sadness plays itself out across his features.

"And that's when you put up that stupid poll on your Livejournal?" Alex prompts him. "The whole free will versus destiny thing?"

"Yep. That same day we set up Frankengirl and my robot to take the fall for Juliet, and sent her to Monster Jail." Justin sighs, then winces and reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose "I was so conflicted. I thought it might help me make up my mind about what the right thing to do was. But God forbid you have an intelligent online discourse without some moron ruining it by bringing up the freaking Nazis..."

"Well, duh," Alex says. Because, after only a few short months in online fandom, even she's seen enough to know better than that. "Why the day we sent Frankie up the river, though?"

"Because the very next chapter after that happens in Book Six sees Ophelia enslaved by the undead lich that Alan's been assigned to capture. Which is what starts the chain of events that lead to Transylvania," Justin explains. "I knew that Juliet was bound to be kidnapped by an undead monster of some kind, and that our best chance to prevent Transylvania—for everyone's sake—was to to keep it from happening. So after a lot of soul-searching—and fighting about it with idiots on the internet—I finally decided to follow my conscience, say 'damn the consequences', and try to change her future."

"But..." Alex blinks, hard, as the implications of what he's saying start to sink in. "Justin, if you'd prevented Transylvania, it wouldn't have just been her future you changed."

"I know," Justin says. "You wouldn't have lost Mason, either. Like I said, for everyone's sake, right? But as much as I like seeing you happy, Alex, you'll forgive me if keeping you together with him wasn't exactly my primary objective. "

"Yeah, OK," Alex says. "But after all that, Juliet still got kidnapped by the mummy anyway?"

"Yeah, well..I never said it worked, did I?" Justin chuckles bitterly. "See, the book said that Ophelia goes with Alan when he gets the assignment to hunt down and confront the lich, which is how they wind up getting trapped together in his lair, et cetera, etcetera...so I decided just not to tell Juliet about staking out the museum in the first place. I told her I could handle it, sent her home, and went without her. Simple, right?"

"You went after the mummy alone?" Alex snaps, staring at him as though he's grown a third eye on the tip of his nose. "Without any backup? Even though you knew you'd probably be trapped? What are you, nuts?"

"Maybe." Justin's admits with a shrug. "At least then she'd be free, and Transylvania would be averted for everyone."

"But what happened?" Alex asks. "Juliet followed you?"

"Not so much, no." Justin lets out a snort and shakes his head. "I ran into her there, if you can believe it. Completely by coincidence. Turned out she'd come to see the Egyptian exhibit on her own because she'd heard an old friend of hers was part of it."

"Oh dude, really?" Alex winces. "And then...?"

"Exactly what the book said would happen," Justin says, smiling tightly at her. "Really helped to settle that whole 'free will versus destiny' debate for me. Pretty decisively, in fact."

"Ohhhh, Justin..." Alex groans, dropping her head forward to cover her face with her palm. "You idiot, why wouldn't you tell anyone about all this? If you'd just asked Juliet to stay away from stupid the museum...or, hell, brought me and Max with you to get the drop on the Mummy in the first goddamn place..."

"I was trying to cause the smallest disruption to the space-time continuum as possible!" Justin protests, his voice pitching two octaves higher in the process. "I figured the fewer people I involved, the more contained it would be! And by the time I realized it hadn't worked, it was too late! The wheels were already in motion! And Juliet wouldn't leave!"

"Ugh!" Alex grunts. She reaches up to grind the heels of both hands into her eyes in frustration. Because this is classic Justin, too: taking the weight of the world on his shoulders, and trying to fix all its problems himself. Usually it's a trait she admires—if only because the problems he's fixing are usually hers, and fixing it on his own generally guarantees that Mom, Dad and/or the relevant authorities don't have to get involved—but the few times it blows up in his face? It tends to blow up huge.

"So that's why you practically dropped out of school to hunt for her day and night," she sighs, dropping her hands from her face to shake her head at him. "You were still hoping to change history and find her before Transylvania could happen."

"Ummmm...not...exactly," Justin stammers, his cheeks flushing slightly. "I mean, I did at first, sure. The book said we'd eventually find her in a ruined castle in Transylvania, so of course I searched high and low through every abandoned castle in Transylvania I could find. But...well...do you have any idea how many ruined, abandoned castles they have there?"

Alex purses her lips. "I'm guessing more than just the one?"

"Dozens, Alex. Possibly hundreds. And for those first couple days after Juliet was taken, I checked out every single one I could find. And what did I find? A few abandoned vampire nests. A couple lonely poltergeists. And one incredibly despressing Undead Anonymous meeting."

Alex cocks an eyebrow at this and tilts her head back. "And exactly how long did you share your feelings with them before they threw your ass out?"

"Only six and a half minutes!" Justin exclaims. "Can you believe it? They let that whiny zombie who went before me have the floor for fifteen! Oh, woe is me, I'm sick of the taste of brains, why are there no vegan alternatives, wah wah wah!' And their free coffee? It was terrible!"

Alex tries to hide her smile at this, and is only partially successful. "OK, so...Transylvania was a wash. Then what?"

"Then I...uh..." Justin licks his lips, looks away from her towards the glowing portal door, and clears his throat. "Well, then I kind of...um...gave up."

Alex's mouth drops open, even as she stares at him so hard, she feels her eyes practically bug out of her skull. "You what?"

"I know, I know," Justin says, holding his hands up defensively. "But listen—"

"But you don't do that!" Alex protests. "I give up. Max gives up. Half the time with him, it's not even on purpose. He just gets distracted by a shiny object and forgets what he was doing. But you? You don't give up! Even when you think it's a bad idea to keep going, you keep going! It's one of the many annoying things about you that's always made me wonder if you're adopted!"

"Alex, I'd already tried to fight destiny once, and lost," Justin says. "Trying to circumvent it a second time hadn't gone any better. Even armed with all the foreknowledge that Future Harper's books had given me, I'd failed. By that point, I was convinced that our future was on rails, with no chance of changing tracks. And that future—Book Six—said that I wasn't going to find Juliet on my own, no matter how far I looked, or how hard I tried."

"But...the books say Alan searches high and low for Ophelia, don't they?" Alex asks, with a confused frown. "And mom and dad said you were falling asleep in class...and you were always wearing your Monster Hunter uniform..."

"Not at first," Justin snorts. "Think about it: what's the very next thing Alan does after Ophelia is captured? What did I do?"

Completely at a loss, Alex shrugs and shakes her head. "How the hell should I know? Hi, failing History, remember?"

"I took my Captain Jim Bob Barnyard Space Command Module playset to have it appraised," Justin says. "And then afterwards, when I fell on it? I spent days trying to restore and sell it. Remember? Right around the time when Harper moved into the basement, and you were stuck in your doll house?"

Alex's brow furrows as she thinks back, memories flashing before her mind's eye. Justin bailing her out, just like old times, before the awkwardness between them in the wake of Puerto Rico. Followed by her baiting him into both an argument and a fiercely intense hug, her nipples standing at attention beneath an all-too-thin dress...

(OK, yeah, so maybe it hadn't been just like old times...)

"And what's the next thing I did after that?" he asks, interrupting her reverie. "I trained for a freaking marathon!"

Alex blinks at this, and purses her lips as she considers it. It was true: he had kind of dropped everything to enter the same race that Harper was running. For reasons she never quite got a handle on. Despite the vow to search for his captive vampire girlfriend non-stop, and never having shown any interest in running before. At the time, it had struck her as a little odd, even for Justin. But she hadn't given it much thought, preoccupied as she was with the whole 'making Harper win by magic again' thing.

"It never made sense to me why Alan swears to save Ophelia, then spends the next two chapters doing absolutely nothing about it," Justin grunts. "But once we got there, I understood: what was the point in even trying? I wasn't going to find her, not until you started dating your werewolf boyfriend, and he helped us track her...which only locked us into Transylvania, anyway. It was completely hopeless. No matter what I did, Juliet was doomed."

Alex's frown deepens. "So what did you do?"

"Pretended, just like I'd already been doing, ever since Puerto Rico," Justin replies. "Book Six is really sketchy about Alan's whole search for Ophelia. There's a lot of 'tell-don't-show' going on in those chapters. You see him coming and going in his Monster Hunting gear, or he'll talk about looking for her, but there aren't any scenes of him actually doing it. So...that's kind of what I did. From Harper's perspective, it probably did seem like I was really looking for her."

"But then why were you falling asleep in class? What were you doing instead?"

Justin shrugs. "Writing angsty fic. Reading some. Alternating between beating myself up for not being able to change history for everyone, and feeling sorry for myself for being put in the position of having to try in the first place. Taking Max out on a few wild goose chases that I knew wouldn't pan out, to assuage his guilt over having set the mummy loose in the first place. But mostly...mostly I was avoiding you."

Alex jerks in surprise, as if he's thrown something at her, for a change. "Avoiding me? Why?"

"Why do you think?" Justin asks, his eyes cast downwards towards the floor. "You were busy falling in love with Mason at the time. And as much as I knew it was only temporary, it still kind of...well...really, really sucked."

Alex frowns at him. "I'm sorry."

Justin looks up at her in surprise, one corner of his lips quirked upwards in a little half-smile. "Don't you mean you're 'rhymes with Laurie'?"

Alex lets out a breath and tilts her head to one side. "No, Justin, I really mean it. I'm—"

"Alex, it's OK. Really. You couldn't have known. Heck, I didn't want you to know. And besides, even if you had known back then, it wouldn't have...I mean you wouldn't have..."

Justin trails off, his eyes focussing inwards for a moment, the way they do when he's searching for just the right words to describe what he's thinking.

"I've always known that this was something you really had to come to on your ownterms, if you were ever going to come around at all," he says finally. "I don't think it could have worked any other way."

"Well, yeah," Alex replies, as though this is the most plainly obvious observation that anybody's ever made in the history of time. "It's like the old saying goes, egghead: you can lead a horse to sibcest, but you can't make it—"

"Stop. Right. There," Justin cuts her off, grimacing as though he's going to be sick. "Look, can the two of us, right now, please agree to a permanent embargo on the use of the 'i' word, and all its equally unpalatable fandom permutations? It really makes me uncomfortable."

"Stop using words like 'embargo', 'unpalatable' and 'permutation', and maybe I'll think about it, dork," Alex shoots back, her snarky grin having returned. She flops back down onto the brown recliner, coughing a little at the cloud of dust it throws up into the air, and proceeds to examine her nails on her right hand.

"So I guess it's not like Back to the Future after all, then, huh?" she says. "Knowing what's coming...all that reading and studying and analyzing the books like you did...it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. It all just happens anyway, whether we want it to or not."

"That's certainly how it looked, anyway," Justin says, lowering himself down onto the red vinyl bench across from her. "I know I'd given up hope of trying."

"Boy, don't you feel stupid then," Alex snorts. "I told you we might as well just wait for the movie."

"Alex, pay attention: I said that's how it looked." Justin sits forward to rest his elbows on his knees, and steeples the tips of his fingers together. "Because here's the thing: ever since Transylvania? There's been this...this weird gap...where nothing strange has happened to us that corresponds to the books."

Alex tears her attention away from her manicure to blink at him. "Nothing strange? Really? Are you kidding me?" She gestures back and forth from him, to herself, and back again. "What do you call this, then? Normal?"

"I meant that in the magical sense," Justin says, his face flushing a little. "But you do make a good point. Up until now, the books have been an almost day-to-day retelling of our lives since Max's powers came in. But ever since the big Homecoming game, where I scored three three-pointers in one quarter? Nada."

"Ugh. You're just gonna keep on mentioning that game every five seconds for the rest of our lives, aren't you?"

Justin flushes even darker, and presses his lips together in a tight, thin line.

"The point, Alex," he says, in his overly-patient, 'my sister is an idiot' voice, "is that this whole...online thing between us...never gets mentioned in the books. Doesn't even get hinted at, between the lines, like...like some of the other stuff was. Nothing that's happened to us over the past couple months does. And when the very next chapter picks up? Alan and Zack are running against each other to be elected student body president, which can't possibly even happen midway through senior year!"

"Um, sure," Alex says, having paid about as much attention to the timing of student council elections as she did to ...well, pretty much anything else involving school. "If you say so."

"There's been other little telltale signs, too," Justin said, talking faster by the second, his eyes gleaming with excitement, now. "For instance, have you noticed how close Zeke and Harper have been getting lately?"

"Well, yeah..." Alex lazily shrugs one shoulder. "But they get together in the books anyway, don't they? Zayley Forever, right?"

"Yes, but not until much later!" Justin exclaims. "Julia plays matchmaker and gets Zack and Hayley to work together during the annual science fair, then casts a spell on them so that sparks fly between them. But the science fair isn't for months! And judging by the fact that nothing horrible has happened to either of them, I'm guessing you haven't used magic."

"Hey! It's not like something horrible happens every single time I use—" Alex breaks off as Justin cocks his head to one side and glares at her, then huffs and crosses her arms under her breasts. "Yeah, yeah, so clearly I haven't used magic on them."

"Exactly!" Justin grins, pointing at her excitedly. "They're falling for each other of their own free will, way ahead of schedule, and without any of your meddling!"

"Well, I did trick them into doing work for me, together. So I'd like to think I'm still partlyresponsible for them being together forever, thank you very much!" Alex pouts. "I still think Sayley would be cuter, though."

Justin's brow furrows in confusion. "Wait, what?"

"Never mind," Alex sighs, dismissing the notion with a wave of her hand. "OK, I get it, things in our lives have stopped lining up exactly with what happens in the books. So what, egghead?"

"So it occurred to me that maybe we've managed to jump off the track, somehow," Justin says. "That by starting this whole...online thing...that maybe we knocked ourselves into an AU...er, that is, an alternate uni—"

"I know what an AU is!" Alex snaps. "God, why does everyone insist on dumbing things down for me? Who am I, Max?"

"Woah-kay then!" Justin says, holding his hands up defensively, before she can reach for something heavy. "OK, so I had a hypothesis..."

"Ugh, I said 'stop dumbing things down', Justin, not 'start speaking Nerd.'"

"...and the next step in the scientific method is to subject it to a test, right? Right. So, to test it, I decided to—"

"—to tell mom and dad that I was planning to do something stupid to try and get Mason back," Alex cuts him off, her eyes going wide as she finally gets where he's been going with all this. "So they'd call me on it and try to stop me."

Justin grins at her sheepishly, and winces a little, his own eyes crinkling a little at the corners. "Um, more or less?"

"Seriously, Justin?" Alex growls as she stands up out of the chair, her small hands gathering themselves into fists at her sides. "You threw me under the bus to test a theory?"

"It had to be something significant!" Justin says, his voice cracking as it rises an octave. "Something that would decisively alter the course of future events! And this struck me as being an obvious turning point!"

"Oh. A turning point. I see," Alex repeats in a low voice. She cocks one eyebrow at him, and walks slowly towards him, fists still clenched. "Look, I'll admit that I just skimmed the books before, and that I kind of lost interest and stopped paying attention after...well, let's be honest, Book One...but isn't there also something in there about Julia pretending to join some kind of rebellion against the Wizard World, so she can single-handedly take it down?"

"Uh..." Justin gapes at her, clearly not having anticipated the question. "Yes, but..."

"So wouldn't tipping Mom and Dad off to that be even more significant?" Alex asks.

"Er, maybe," Justin stammers, "but I...didn't know what...greater...repercussions...interfering with that...might have on the...Wizard World as a whole...so..."

"God, you are such a terrible liar," Alex sneers, shaking her head sharply. She continues to advance on him, as Justin—clearly fearing for his safety—rears away from her, all but crawling up onto the workbench behind him. "Why don't you just admit that you saw your one shot at keeping me from getting back together with Mason, and you took it?"

"What? No!" Justin says, in that breathy, scandalized voice that—look, let's just call a spade a spade, here—always turns her on. "This was a wholly objective, entirely scientific approach to—"

"Tell me what is it I'm supposed to do, exactly," Alex growls, cutting him off again in mid-nerd rant. "Now."

Justin cringes, and leans as far away from her as humanly possible, as though afraid she might hit him again. "Offer to trade our portal to hillbilly wizards in exchange for the secret to turning Mason human again," he replies automatically.

"Wow, really?" Alex says, stopping short barely a foot away from him. "And does it work?"

Justin's face falls, and his entire body uncoiling itself as he faces her, a portrait of stunned disbelief. "Alex, you wouldn't...!"

"Gotcha!" Alex grins, then hurls herself bodily at him, enveloping him in a bear hug, even as he tries to flinch away from her. Impulsively, she stands up on tiptoe and kisses him lightly on the cheek, then lowers herself back down onto her heels and pillows her head against his chest. And as he realizes she doesn't mean to pulverize him, she feels him start to relax in her arms, and hears his heartbeat gradually begin to slow. After a second, he even wraps his arms around her again, in a tentative-if-awkward embrace of his own, as though he's not quite sure how to do this now that things between them are...changing.

"What was that for?" he asks, his voice a little shaky.

"For caring enough to try and change my future without my say-so after all, you self-serving, know-it-all dork." Alex says, her voice muffled a little by his shirt. "Duh."

"Um...OK," Justin says, clearly confused. "You're...welcome, then, I guess?"

"I knew it," Alex giggles. "I knew you were jealous."

"I wasn't jealous," Justin insists, as his arms tighten around her a little. "Jealousy equals possessiveness. Mason was jealous. I was merely...concerned."

"Oh, whatever. You were so jealous."

They stand like there for a long, quiet moment, just the two of them, with only the faint magical hum of the portal and their own breathing to break the silence between them.

"So you really think we've jumped the track, or whatever?" Alex asks then, because she's never been particularly good with long, quiet moments. "That things might turn out differently for us than they do for Julia and Alan in the books?"

"Well, we still don't have enough evidence to say for certain...but I really hope so."

"Good," Alex nods against his chest. "Because I don't want to trade the portal to get Mason back, or take on a Wizard revolution, or any of that other stuff. I just...I just want this. Whatever the hell this is."

"Me too, Alex," Justin says, as he rests his chin on the top of her head, and lets out a sigh of his own. "I guess only time will tell."

And OK, so maybe that isn't the conviction she's looking for, and maybe his sigh sounds a little more 'concerned' than 'contented', but that's just Justin being the big, over-thinking dork that he is, right? Because as far as Alex is concerned, right now everything is right with the world. Well, aside from the whole 'grounded for life' thing, but there's always ways around that. What else is magic for, after all?

Alex squeezes him so tightly that he grunts in pain, then lets out a contented little sigh of her own. Yeah, everything's gonna be just fine.

Author's Note, the second: And that's how you make plot holes, wild shifts in characterization, and poorly-structured story arcs in canon work for you, kids. (Why yes, I do have issues with the writing in the third season! Why do you ask?) Seriously, though, those two episodes they aired out of order right after Juliet disappears? They have always bugged me.

This isn't the first time I've taken a run at trying to explain away the (many glaring) inconsistencies that abound in the Season 3, by the way. Though it's not related to OTP at all, my other multi-chapter Jalex story Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is an alternate look at the Monster Hunter/Werewolf arc that mostly takes place 'between the scenes', and I'm quite proud of how it turned out. If this chapter piqued your interest at all, you may want to check it out. (Word of warning: although the majority of the story is a strong T-rating at best, it earns its M-rating in the second-to-last chapter in a big bad way. If you're more of a 'fade to black' mindset when it comes to love scenes, you may want to just skim that one to get the gist.)

Thanks again, everybody. Hope this chapter was worth the wait!