Work Text:
Soloman tells him things he has no right to know. Knowledge that doesn't rightfully belong to him. Answers to questions he asks on a never ending night.
These never ending nights are where he first finds knowledge that’s not Soloman’s to claim. He supposes--really, that the memories come earlier--although they come in smaller forms. A doodled prayer in sabujá--Solomon tells him what he’s unintentionally written, but there’s a warmth in his chest, and a familiarity in his heart that he knows Soloman can’t give him.
He has his knowledge. His wisdom--and as far as he’s known it, it’s a lone hiss in the back of his skull telling him what he needs to know at the moment. Answers to questions, without work shown. Definite, solid knowledge.
What’s been showing up in his head isn’t definite. It’s a curl of muscle memory in his arm as he picks up a sword, or the raging contentment when he seats himself on those stone thrones. The oily feeling of invisible blood on his hands as he goes to open the wrong door, or the sick horror in a thump reminding him of the wet sound of a head being torn from its shoulders. The loving Deja vu in playing with Darla--or really, Deja vu in places he knows he’s never experienced, even as a side view from his days on the street.
And he had wanted to claim it was just a one-off of his powers. Some kind of weird final twist of Soloman being nosey.
And then there were things that came to him in dreams. In retrospect--they likely came earlier--forcing themselves into his civilian form, and presenting themselves as anxiety rather than a memory. Faceless imaginings of his siblings dying on a battlefield he doesn’t recognize.
But that’s not when he sees it as it is--at two in the afternoon in a crowded math classroom, it’s a horrific fear for what might be, not the horrific memory it might very well be.
It’s not until a few days later, when he can’t seem to stop crying for the life of him, that he has something flow through his mind that he knows isn’t his.
Billy has Rosa now. He has Rosa now, and still at night he can’t help but feel alone. Can’t help but lay alone in his bed at night and think of her. He’s eleven. Billy knows better than to cry--you don’t cry for your mommy on the street--not if you want to stay untouched--and not-beat-up, but this isn’t the streets, and now he can’t leave after everything he’s put the other kids through.
He lives in a house, and when the house is quiet Billy cries--and sometimes he’s not even sure it’s for his mommy anymore. He can’t tell if he wants his mother or if he’s unbelievably angry at her. Mad because she left him, and thought that eleven and willingly homeless was ‘alright’. Billy hadn’t been alright since he watched her walk away from him, and now he was eleven and he had nothing that she was supposed to give him.
He lives in a house, and at night he’s as sad as he’d ever been.
Billy has Rosa, and at night when he’s alone in the dark she’s not enough. She’s his legal guardian, and the closest thing he’s had to a mother that wants him in years. She’s warm and inviting, and she ruffles his hair when she walks by, and tries to talk to him about what he likes--even though he has yet to figure it out. And somehow it’s not enough.
He wants her to be. He wants Victor, and Rosa to be more than enough. They’re more than he’s ever had, but somehow there’s something missing.
He’s greedy. Billy Batson is so greedy that he ran his own mother off, and now having more than enough leaves him sad in the dark.
But as Billy lies in bed he’s aware of the pillow under his head and the heavy comforter over him, and the tears running down his face, but he doesn’t see the cracked wall in front of him, or the metal bunk bed frame. No, in his mind's eye, whether he likes it or not, he’s not in his own bedroom.
The room he’s in isn’t what anyone would describe as modern, the walls are made out of some kind of muddy-stone, and there’s no glass in the windows presented to him, it’s warm, and sunlit and somewhere deep down there’s an ache he has no right to feel. Even more importantly, he’s sat in a strange woman's lap.
She’s younger than Rosa--if not by a lot, but she looks at not-quite-Billy with so much love in her eyes that Billy wants to know her more than anything.
Deep down he knows that the love isn’t for him. That the adoration in her voice, and the gentleness of her hands is for whoever held the memory before he did, but he wants it for himself. A greedy part of him who can still remember the snip in his mother’s voice when she told him he grew up fine--the part of him that feels the tears on his face wants all of this for himself. He wants to eat this whole, and have this woman he’s never met hold him for the rest of his life. He wants the loved feeling soaking into his bones to live with him forever.
Her hands are almost there as she brushes both his--and not his own tears from his eyes. Her hands are rough against his face, and the hold she has him in is so much warmer than everywhere he’d been in the last seven years. She kisses the top of his head, and breathes in his hair, and calls him a name that he knows is sweet, even without Soloman dissecting the language for him.
He wants to be closer to her, someone he's never met. He wants to keep the love and contentment he knows is trying to replace the aching holes in his heart. It's not for him, and it's not his but it's something he needs more than anything else he's ever stolen. The comfort she brings him with each and every look and touch is like air filling his lungs, and he never wants to live without it again. It's not for him, but it's what he wants.
For something Billy can't remember having, it feels like the most important thing in the world.
And of course it doesn't last forever. They never do, but he's content in the morning, and it's all he can ask for--especially since he hadn't asked for it in the first place. And by the time someone else's mother, and her cradling has faded from his mind, Billy is content enough to fall asleep.
And the next time Rosa runs her fingers through his hair, he’s content all over again.
He doesn't know if the warm memory of a woman he'd never met--and never will--somehow came from Soloman. If somehow he'd managed to translate the love in that woman's eyes from a still idea to a living moment, but something in Billy doubts it. It's personal, and...when he's up at night, and his brain tries to sink back into the idea of his mother--he finds that someone he'd never known at all clouds his mind once more. And...he's almost okay with that.