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He heaves a labored and furious breath, the false tomb made to resemble the one his parents died in— the one this man murdered his father in— crumbling down with the intent to bury them too. He’s still holding the bits and pieces of the scarab necklace he’d broken off Theo’s neck in his clenched fist, glowering down at the pleading man blubbering for mercy.
“I could leave you,” Billy states. “I could let one of these rocks crush your head into the ground.” He catches one such rock with one hand, a miniature boulder that would’ve left his head a red fleshy smear on the ground. Theo reflexively brings trembling arms to protect his face, arms Billy kicks away to hover his boot over the man’s face. “I could crush your head like a watermelon if I wanted to!” He yells at the murderer, “No no! Don't!”
He stands back on both feet, leaning down to grab the man by the collar of his shirt and yank him eye level. “I wouldn’t, because I’m not like you. I don’t kick men when they’re down,” still angry, still petty and mournful of everything he lost at this man’s hands, he drops his voice to a threatening tone. “And I don’t stab people in the back.”
It’s a mercy, one Billy can’t find much pride in giving as he flies them out to safety and calls to the heavens for the Wizards guidance on how to keep Theo from calling for his powers again. The answer, as it comes in the blazing trail of a lightning strike just in front of the man as he holds him out, is the loss of his voice with a scar trailing across the front of this throat. Muted yells lost as Billy's heart betrays his anger to feel almost sorry for the man. He’s not sorry to see him off in a police cruiser though, just upset and mournful. His parents are gone, but Theo isn’t. He’ll just spend his days behind bars for the rest of his life fed and cared for so he lives all those years surrounded by stone and iron bars with only people as vile as him for company.
He wouldn’t change his choice, he thinks at least. Theo could only stab his dad in the because he turned it to him, his dad trusted him, showed him mercy. But Billy still went back to the fight time and time again, wondering if he’d be able to live with himself if Theo was left behind like his dad. It put a tangle of cords around his heart that squeezed and made his chest ache, its twin sensation coming as knots made of his stomach out of guilt for having any desire to go back and test that other reality where he acted on that impulse of revenge.
He couldn’t make a choice like that, he decides. That isn’t a choice for him to wage lives, he could never live with himself if he left anyone to die.