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what do you wish for? the road murmurs, deep in his mind, and he straightens his shoulders and clenches his fists and thinks, who i lost.
Tommy. The name echoes through him, the first name he ever said. Tommy. Tommy.
But that isn’t his thought, and it isn’t his wish.
who i lost, he repeats, and he feels the road’s laughter at the back of his throat.
In the corner of his vision, Agatha’s mouth is twisted in a snarl as she holds her hands out in front of her, uncaring of the tears flowing down her face. Jen’s muttering so quickly and lowly that he can’t make out the words, staring down at her own palms with a manic reverence. He can’t see Rio, knows that they’re in the one trial she can’t interfere with, but Agatha has two shadows, her shoulder tilted down as though someone is leaning on it.
His coven. His family.
who i lost, he repeats, more urgently.
one wish.
it is one wish, because he has spent days by the side of a woman so fond of loopholes that she ensnared death herself and he is nothing but a good student.
The road is amused and the road is angry and the road is so very old that it would take his breath away if he let it.
But Billy Maximoff is the son of an eldritch goddess and an infinity powered android, and William Kaplan is the son of a psychologist and a cardiologist, and he is both and more. He is apprentice to the death-loved and brother in the craft to the bound and the cursed and the time-lost. He is a witch.
who i lost who i lost who i
It’s only when Agatha’s wishing stutters to a halt and she calls out his name that he realises that there is blood on his face, dripping down from his nose, his ears, his eyes. He laughs, wiping a finger through it.
Does it really think a little blood can scare him?
He is a dead soul in a dead body, brought into the world by blood and death and chaos magic. Twice-dead and so alive that the universe shakes with his every breath, and he will not let it take anything else.
He turns to her, to death dogging her footsteps, and grins, and knows there is blood in his teeth.
“It’s okay,” he promises. “I’m gonna fix it,” and for a moment his voice is double-toned, is echoed by someone (something) just a little older and just a little angrier and with more power than she ever should’ve had, and Agatha Harkness recoils.
And he reaches deep inside him and he bares his teeth at the universe and thinks who i lost and the road rises up around them and—
—
He’s never been drunk before but he imagines that this is how a hangover feels, the ragged edges of his mind sliding against each other, the nausea licking up his throat like fire. Or maybe he’s just dead. He groans, grinding his palms into his eyes. It doesn’t help that there is so much noise. It feels like an eternity has passed by the time he finally manages to crack an eye open, and then he laughs, pushing himself to his feet.
He’s back in Agatha’s basement. No, they’re back in Agatha’s basement. His coven.
Agatha is cackling madly, purple winding around her fingertips like a cat through its owner’s legs; Rio half a step behind and curled into her, mouth flat but eyes unbearably fond. Sharon is leaning against a wall, delighted and confused in equal measure. Jen shrieks as she launches herself at Alice and Lilia in a flurry of sparks, and then immediately backs out of the hug she created, face flattening back into practised disinterest. Alice doesn’t seem to have noticed, crying even before she pulls her shirt to reveal unscarred skin. Lilia tilts her head to the side, eyes so unfathomably deep that he has to wind his mind back before he falls in, and winks at him, lips curled up with something old and infinitely knowing.
And, in the middle of the room, there is a boy.
A boy with a shock of silver-white hair and wide, clever eyes that bounce back and forth between the other basement’s occupants before they meet his own, and widen. A boy like-unlike him, different-faced, same-souled. A boy who looks at him and beams, and the universe bends around him and then he’s there, standing so close and heart so fast that it feels as if it’s beating in his own chest.
“Billy,” Tommy says, delighted and relieved and mischievous and alive.
“Tommy,” he replies, again and again, until there are arms wrapped around him so tight that he almost can’t breathe.
And then he really can’t, as thick magic curls around them both. His own flares instinctively, but whatever has them is so strong it makes his endless power feel like something small and guttering, a single candle in a bottomless abyss. It sinks inside of him, lonely and ravenous all at once, a fog of grief so heavy that he starts to choke on his own tears.
“Yes, dear,” Agatha drawls, though there is so much joy in it that she isn’t able to pull off her usual acerbic indifference, “we are all proud of your little prodigy, but if you keep smothering the twins like that then I’m gonna have to scrape them off the walls.”
Oh.
The pressure increases, building and building until it becomes tangible, narrowing to a point until it is no longer a thick blanket but a hand curled tight around the back of his neck and a voice crying in a language that he doesn’t understand but knows. In his back pocket, his phone starts to ring, the stupid ringtone he’d picked out for his mom because she finds it annoying. Outside, an unfamiliar-familiar mind approaches from above, alien and artificial and inorganic and so very alive.
Billy Maximoff Kaplan: 1, road: 0, and when he laughs the universe laughs with him.