Chapter Text
There was a loud, sharp ringing in his ears as Billy awoke with a gasp. It was loud, and bright - the light above him piercing the back of his eyes as they slammed shut again. People were trying to talk to him - loudly. Too loudly. It was more like shouting. Everything in his body told him to get up and run.
But there were straps over his chest, his neck was pinned down to whatever bed or board he was laying on. He couldn’t move - he couldn’t escape.
He started to breathe harder. He tried looking around, trying to figure out where he was - but the lights were too bright and he couldn’t move and it was all too much -
“Billy? Billy, can you hear me?”
Too loud - it was too loud.
“I know - hey, okay - we’re taking you to the hospital. I’m gonna ask you some questions, okay?”
No. No, no, no no no.
“It’s gonna be okay - do you remember what happened?”
What happened to him? His head hurt -
The people around him continued to shout about how he was awake but not coherent. How they were almost to the hospital -
The hospital? What happened to him?
“It’s gonna be okay, Billy, we’re gonna help you.”
“It appears Billy is experiencing some form of Amnesia,” the doctor’s explained to the two people Billy had woken up to sitting at his bedside. His parents, they had told him. But Billy had never seen them before in his life.
“We don’t know if he will ever recover his full memories.”
They’d been so disappointed when Billy had asked who they were. They kept asking questions he couldn’t answer. They sat on the edge of their seats, reaching out and holding his hands, their eyes wide with expectation.
They looked so crushed whenever he spoke - clearly not saying what they wanted him to.
“What can we do to help him remember?”
There were pictures laid out on the coffee table at home. Or, at least what Rebecca and Jeff called home. Billy had had to figure out how to navigate the new place on his own. His alleged parents had hoped he would remember his way around, so they hadn’t given him a tour - and Billy hadn’t had the heart to ask for one.
“This one was from your first day of middle school,” Rebecca said, pointing to a picture of a boy - him - standing on the front steps of the house, smiling and holding onto his backpack straps. He wore bright colors - blue jeans and a graphic t-shirt with cartoon characters printed on it. His hair looked straighter than, but his face matched the one Billy had seen in the mirror.
Jeff slid over another one. “This one was just this year - over the summer. We took you to tour the Avengers campus, since you always loved superheroes so much.”
The pictures were all of him. They matched his face - but the smiles felt foreign. He felt so disconnected with the interests of his younger self - he just couldn’t imagine he had ever been that person.
“He’s changed so much.” Billy heard his mother saying across the hall a few months later, lying in bed when his parents thought he was asleep.
“He’s our son,” came his father’s voice.
“I know, and of course I love him but…” the voices trailed off.
The Kaplan’s had definitely felt more like his mom and dad now. They’d been by his side throughout his recovery, and even though Billy never recovered his memories of his life before - he never doubted that they loved him, and through the time they’d spent together, Billy could confidently say he loved them too.
But he could never quite shake the feeling that he was not the son they were looking for. And from the sounds of it - they were starting to think so too.
“... sometimes I feel like Billy really did die that day. And that the Billy we have now is this new kid, and he’s my son but… he’s not him.”
They moved to Westview before Billy started High School in the fall. He’d finished Middle School in Eastview, but it had been hard when everyone there knew Billy from before.
It had been Dad’s idea - a fresh start for Billy without uprooting their entire family.
Every day still felt like Billy was living in someone else's skin, but the new school helped. He met Eddie, who had been his best friend until their feelings had started to grow into something more. Billy felt that Eddie knew him better than anyone else.
Billy dressed the way he wanted to - in darker colors and clothes with more coverage. He talked his parents into letting him get his ears pierced, letting him buy some makeup. He felt a lot more like himself now.
But the thing that made him feel the most like himself was magic. Witchcraft.
There was an unfinished house across the road. Unfinished was generous really - it looked like after the foundation had been poured all progress has stopped entirely for years. There was graffiti sprayed over the cement, saying things like “Evil Witch” “STAY AWAY” and a crossed out symbol of a crown.
Everyone in town talked about the Scarlet Witch. How she trapped them all in her spell and forced them to play roles in her picture perfect life. It sounded horrifying, having to play a part of someone who wasn’t who you were. Taking a name that wasn't yours.
Billy found it hauntingly relatable.
But everytime someone talked about it - which was admittedly rare given how no one even dared to say her name - Billy was filled with an overwhelming sense of deja vu. There was a pull in Billy’s chest, an uncomfortable ache that wouldn’t leave him alone, until it had transcended just talking about it until that uncomfortable feeling started to itch under his skin, and the deja vu started to take over his entire life.
Westview. Scarlet Witch. Wanda.
That feeling even began to seep into his dreams. Visions of a different house, a different life. A boy his age - no, younger… who could run at superhuman speeds. A man whose skin changed from real and human to robotic and red. A woman with hair the color of scarlet. Who could fix anything.
You can fix anything mom.
Those dreams had him waking up in a cold sweat. He felt a longing he couldn’t understand, and yet at the same time a kind of suffocating claustrophobia.
It was all so confusing - but he needed answers.
And so began his foray into researching the Scarlet Witch. Which then led him down an even deeper rabbit hole.
Agnes O’Conner lived down the block from Billy’s house. He didn't know much about her, but he saw her often enough. She’d introduced herself the day they’d moved in, and was always out and about talking to the neighborhood.
So imagine Billy’s surprise when r/FamousWitches posted a picture of a woman dated to the 1890s named Agatha Harkness, who looked an awful lot like Agnes.
And that wasn’t all there was to Agatha either. There were tons of theories and rumors that linked her all the way back to the Salem Witch Trials, to various murders and freak accidents.
Billy found himself stopping by to visit Agnes every once in a while. She looked enough like Agatha - okay, she looked a lot like Agatha - but she didn’t seem quite right. Her face had a plastered-on smile that didn’t ever quite reach her eyes, and she never talked about herself. Sometimes it almost felt like she wasn’t allowed.
“She never really recovered from the, erm…” John, Agnes’s neighbor who lived across the street from her said once, clearing his throat to avoid finishing the sentence. Billy caught the meaning right away. The spell.
On r/WestviewConspiracy, some users claimed that Agnes was the one who talked Wanda, making her release the spell on Westview. Others said Wanda cursed her herself.
So besides throwing himself into learning everything he could about witchcraft, Billy had reached another dead end.
Then, the dreams started again. Dreams where he couldn’t see, couldn’t move. He could only hear soft crys calling out into oblivion - could feel from the vibrations in his vocal chords and the cool wetness on his face that it was him.
Mama!… Mama!…
Each day that passed, the question weighed more heavily on his shoulders - at first unconsciously, then gaining more intensity.
Who am I? Who am I? Who am I whoamI whoamI -
He visited Agnes’s house more. She seemed happy enough to have him, but he wasn’t quite sure if she really knew he was there. Eddie started to worry about him, trying to pry him away from his research, from his work, from Agnes, from Agatha.
He wasn’t getting answers - he needed answers -
Then -
The Witches’ Road. And the one witch who had ever survived it.