wreċċa /ˈwret.tʃa/

Old English

Definition: Outcast

[Important]

Alright, so for everyone who read the first chapter before the 27th of October, I was rewatching Wandavision and noticed several errors I made. In particular the effect of the Hex making everyone forget Westview existed and the FBI taking over from SWORD at the end of the series.

I changed the first chapter's dialogue about the anomaly is to be more in-line with what we have in canon. I also changed any mention of SWORD in the last chapter into the FBI. I added in a little detail at the end of the chapter too about the sigils.

That is all, thank you.

『O』

Fire took her mother, so Alice kept fire out of her home. She had an induction stove in her kitchen, butter and margarine to replace oil, "no smoking" signs to threaten her neighbours, and a fully functioning microwave that had never been a problem—until today.

"Ms. Alice!" Billy's scream, accompanied by a loud explosion, jolted both her and her cop instinct awake. She scrambled for the nearest weapon, a plastic stool, and rushed to the kitchen, expecting to knock the light out of their intruder and take her charge to safety. What she found instead was said charge smiling sheepishly at her. All the while, the microwave beside him buzzed lazily, its window now plastered with bits of food from the inside.

Alice lowered the stool, heaving a sigh of relief. "You tried to cook an egg, didn't you?"

"Sorry. I was hungry." Billy fiddled with his fingers and tried his best not to look her in the eyes. "You were sleeping so I didn't want to wake you up."

"Go to the table. I'll cook something up," she said in her usual authority voice out of habit. The boy squeaked a yes and dashed away to the dining table.

Opening the scene of the murder in front of her, she found that he was trying to boil an egg in the now steaming bowl filled with water. Going by the opened bread packaging on the countertop, his sandwich meal plan didn't go quite as planned.

Cleaning the microwave didn't take long, but the time she took was enough for her to decide what to cook for a hungry child.

After mixing whisked eggs with milk, she soaked several slices of bread and fried them. To complement her French toast, she half-boiled a pair of eggs to place on top of the bread.

Billy was swinging his legs guiltily under the table when she arrived. But once he noticed the food, he straightened up and licked his lips. It didn't take long for him to forget the incident earlier in his excitement, his little body somehow inhaling all the food in mere minutes. She had barely taken her second bite when he was finished with his meal.

"Sorry. Hungry." He cast his head down in embarrassment and wiped the pieces of food he dropped on the table with a tissue. He paused briefly, shyly glancing up at her, before looking down again. "And sorry for making a mess in your kitchen."

Alice nodded and continued slicing another piece of her bread to show she wasn't upset. She only hoped her resting-bitch-face wasn't scaring the boy too much. He stifled a chuckle.

She propped her elbow on the table, chin on her knuckle. "Something funny?" she asked, knowing exactly why.

"You said a bad word."

"No, I didn't," she deflected his allegation by flexing her fork at him. "I thought of it. There's a difference."

"Excuses." He turned his nose up in the most adorable posh look for her to laugh at. If his blush was from the laugh or her calling him cute, he didn't confirm. Instead, he coughed into his hand and changed the topic. "Say, Ms. Alice. About the anomaly."

"Shoot."

"You said you forgot Westview existed, right? How did it feel now that you remember everything?"

"It's weird." She tapped her fork against her bread, humming as she thought of the experience. "It's like everyone had a collective amnesia. And then the red dome appeared and my memories started trickling in, like..." she imagined running the water on her sink.

"Like someone opened the tap," he finished her words, humming as he rhythmically tapped his finger against the table. "Do you think I'll get my memory back like that?"

Hm, hard to say. She only had gaps in her memories, not missing them entirely, she absentmindedly thought as she munched on her egg...

It wasn't until she swallowed that she realized her careless thought.

"Crap." She snapped her head at the kid, already assembling words to reassure him. What she found was him chuckling like she was the weird one.

"You said a bad word," he cheekily said before softening his grin into a thin smile. "It's okay. You can't control your thoughts, you know? I tried."

She drew her lips into a thin line, unsure what to say. A notification ping from her phone saved her from making the situation worse. She leaped up for the living room, hoping for good news. As it turned out? Yes.

"We can go to Westview now?" Billy shouted from the table, already reading her mind going by his beaming face.

『O』

The return of Westview to public consciousness left, in its wake, a chaos that the department thought fit for Alice to handle, the reason being she already had a Westview resident she was in charge of.

While most parties who had families and friends stuck in Westview already got their updates, thanks to mobile phones and the Westview Police Department's announcement every few hours, some had lost contact and requested her department for help.

Since the FBI had granted her permission to bring in Billy, the job naturally fell on to her.

"Who else are we looking for?" the boy asked from the passenger seat as they drove around a corner.

"Someone called Ralph Bohner," she recalled the only name she remembered from the list her department gave. How she said that with a straight face was a wonder.

Billy pursed his lips, leaning forward on his seat. In the most innocent way possible, he asked, "Is Bohner a bad word?"

Alice thanked her ancestors for giving her the thickest poker face known to mankind.

After somehow managing to keep her thoughts pure for a child to prod into, they soon passed by the accident site from yesterday. Even the ruined car was still there.

"You found me here." Billy craned his neck around to watch the car gradually disappear from their view. "I hope that person's fine."

Alice remembered helping William Kaplan into the ambulance. His parents had huddled over the boy while he casually waved goodbye at her and Billy.

She smiled. "He's alright thanks to you. I'm sure he's doing great right now."

"I hope so." He gave one last glance at the side window before looking ahead.

The rest of their journey was accompanied by the radio blaring songs that Alice had to change ever so often. So many inappropriate songs these days, what were kids supposed to listen to? Billy looked amused by her frustration whenever she had to switch channels.

Thankfully it wasn't very long until they reached the signboard for Westview. There were guards stationed at the entrance. A simple showing of her identification, along with a letter from the department, allowed them through without much trouble. Ignoring the abundance of the FBI agents littering through the place, it was quite the quaint and nice town.

Billy studied the town in fascination, no doubt already thinking where his family was. He eyed every house they passed by with a curiosity only a small child could exhibit. They arrived at the Westview police station shortly, where Billy showed an interest in a nearby bookstore.

Alice supposed he could wander around while she reported to the WPD.

"Really?" He turned to her at hearing her thoughts, his buck teeth out and front for all to see.

"Just be careful." She handed him some coins in case he found a drink he wanted. "And don't go far. We still don't know how you ended up outside the town. A witch hunter could be out looking for you," she joked, but she made sure to show that she was being serious about his safety.

It didn't seem like her sentiment got through to him. He was too excited to look around the neighborhood. She watched him dash away without so much a goodbye when they exited the car.

"Bye!"

Good kid.

『O』

The WPD was keeping too many details out that it was obvious something else had happened here than just "an Avengers experiment gone haywire". While her counterpart printed out a letter for the local administration office, she managed to dig out some less confidential stuff. Like how the FBI had actually assumed authority from another organization just yesterday.

SWORD. Apparently, they endangered the residents during their stay here so now the organization answered to the FBI while their leader got sacked. Quite the drama and gossip she'd be bringing back to Eastview, it seemed.

She'd asked if there were reports of missing children. Dropping Billy's name awarded her a strangely curious look, but they insisted everyone in the town was accounted for after the anomaly subsided.

Once she got the letter stamped, she thanked her counterpart and made her way outside. She'd have to stop by the administration office to confirm the addresses of the people on the list, but first, she needed to figure out where her charge had gone to.

A visit to the bookstore left her stumped when she saw the "Closed" sign. It was barely noon. A look around nearby stores revealed the same situation. The earlier lively street had fizzled out with only a few people walking by.

"Hey, do you hear a kid crying?" A passer-by asked his companion. Alice listened carefully and found the source to be from a nearby alley.

"Billy?" She rushed to the alley and tentatively peeked behind a trashcan to find the boy crying into his sleeves. Her tense shoulders relaxed now that she found him safe. "What happened?"

She kneeled to grab his hand. He briefly paused his crying to take a deep breath, his bloodshot eyes looking up at her in recognition. He started sobbing again almost immediately.

"They hate me," he choked out, his breath ragged as he tried to speak. "They chased me away... said I'm a witch's child... said I shouldn't have come back. One of them threw a book at me that I was looking at and told me to die."

He sniffled, continuing even as his shoulders and chest rose and fell in spasms. His pitiful eyes looked at her in begging. "Ms. Alice? Am I a bad person? Is that why I lost my memories?"

Alice's hands shook when she reached for his shoulders. He was small, she realized yet again. Fragile and powerless against the cruel world he was dropped into. For all that Lorna Wu boasted about preparing her for that world, she didn't prepare her for this.

"Billy, look at me." She leaned in and forced a smile they both knew wasn't fooling anyone. "You're not a bad person. Those people you met, they weren't nice people."

He shook his head at her no matter how much she tried to assure him. "They were afraid of me. They said I'll become a monster just like my mom."

"Billy, they were lying—"

"I saw their memories!" He gripped her arms, tears flowing down his cheeks. "I brushed against someone when I was running away. I saw her, that scary woman they called my mom, hurting people. What does that make me, then?"

Alice's words died on her tongue, mouth opening and closing as she failed to find a way to comfort him. When she still couldn't, he shook his head and buried his face in his palm.

"I want to go back to Eastview." He sniffled. "I don't want to stay here."

Alice hated seeing children cry. Crying meant they were scared. Unsafe. All those years ago when her mother passed, she was but a girl hardly on the cusp of adulthood. She cursed the world, threw tantrums like a child whose toy was taken. For all that she hated Lorna Wu as a person, she loved her as a mother.

Alice became a cop hoping for no more children to go through that same pain. And yet here she was, failing.

"Billy..."

Was it her mother's spirit, that guided her to wrap her arms around the small boy? To pull him into an embrace where he continued to weep on her chest? Was it her own voice, that hummed a tune she'd once thrown away in an effort to spite a dead woman? Was it Alice Wu-Gulliver, that caressed the soft, blond locks pressed against her neck?

She wasn't her mother. She wasn't his mother. Her repeat of "everything will be alright" to the distraught children she met was to placate herself as much as to comfort them. For the first time in her line of work, she knew by heart that nothing was alright, and that she was running out of excuses to give.

"Ms. Alice?" he spoke, his croaked voice muffled against her chest as he no doubt was reading her mind. She smiled ruefully.

"I can't promise you everything will be okay," she whispered. "I don't have the power to fix this with a snap of my finger. I'm just as lost as you are. But there's one thing I can promise."

She pulled out of the embrace and looked down at him, studying the dried tears on his face as her hands held his shoulders in place.

Her smile this time was genuine, and so was the one he replied in kind before she even opened her mouth.

"I protect you. I'll shield you from all the bad things in the world. When you are scared, your place is right beside me," she finished.

"Thank you, Ms. Alice."

She wanted to make a joke about how his mind-reading made her speech less cool than she imagined it to be, but even that satisfaction was taken from her.

"It's okay. I prefer when you say it out loud." He chuckled, lifting himself just a little to land a peck on her cheek. "Thank you, even if you're not my mom."

When she blinked at him, his face gradually shifted into horror. "A-am I not supposed to do that? I saw it in on TV. The girl kissed her dad! I thought—"

"You thought right, kid." She stifled a chuckle after regaining her bearing at the surprise kiss. "I just didn't expect that. Never kissed my mom like you did."

Billy blushed and looked away awkwardly. "Sorry."

"Don't be." She pulled them both up and guided him out of the alley, his small hands in her. "I still need to check on the people on the list. Think you can be a good boy and stay in the car? You'll be safe inside, I promise."

He considered it before nodding, if hesitant. She didn't miss the way he looked out for passers-by and hurried to get to his seat in the car.

When she started the engine, he kept his head low and never looked out the window even as they moved.

When the local administration building came into view, Alice made a vow to get to the bottom of this. Among the people on the list, one of them surely had the answer to Billy's origin. His mother could indeed be a horrible witch, or it could be just another witch prosecution in modern times. Whichever it was, she was going to protect him.

Billy smiled with his head pressed against the headboard, silently listening to her thoughts.