When Rebecca Kaplan had been a child, the world had once made sense. That wasn't to say it was a good place, but it was a place that made sense. Sure, her childhood had been lived under the constant threat of nuclear warfare, but she'd survived the Cold War without any nukes flying. She'd not only survived, but she'd thrived, meeting a wonderful young man in college and falling headfirst in love. So many of her friends had complaints about their marriages, but Jeff was kind and gentle, a steadying presence who could restore calm to any difficult situation. Eventually, the two of them had decided to start a family. William had been a marvel, a vision. He'd brought so much joy to Rebecca's life.
She needed to hold onto said joy, because the world ended up becoming a lot more unsteady in her adulthood. She'd heard vague rumblings of gods and monsters and superheroes, but none of it really seemed to matter. Not until Loki and his Chitauri warriors had invaded New York when William was just two. A literal alien invasion, which had killed hundreds of people and permanently altered everyone's perceptions of reality. Aliens were real. Superheroes were real, not just products of comic books or Tony Stark's narcissistic delusions. She'd seen footage of buildings collapsing, spaceships firing on the city that never sleeps. People had died, people she knew. The invasion had happened right in her backyard, less than twenty miles away from her. Hell, she could have died if she'd decided to go into the city like she'd planned!
The coming years were a never ending series of gut punches as the veil between the real and the unreal kept on getting ripped away. SHIELD, the organization which Rebecca had trusted to keep her safe, had been infiltrated by Hydra, which had come within mere minutes of raining fire down upon millions of people. Hydra, the Nazi organization, had nearly unleashed a second Holocaust. And if it hadn't been stopped by Captain America, it wouldn't have been limited to just Jews like Rebecca – people from all walks of life would have experienced it. When Rebecca had learned how deeply Hydra, how deep the goddamned Nazis had gotten their hooks into society, she lost it, had a breakdown. The world had nearly sleepwalked into the return of fascism. Thank G-d for Captain America.
The Avengers had kept on protecting the people of Earth, even apparently saving it from some apocalypse at the hands of a homicidal robot (Rebecca was not clear on the details; she tried her best to avoid the news for the sake of her sanity). But nothing lasted forever, and the Avengers broke apart, riven by politics and internal conflicts. Captain America became a fugitive and Iron Man mostly retired from superheroism. Rebecca was disgusted by the whole conflict. Where had Iron Man been when Captain America had yet again saved the world from the Nazis? And yet somehow, Captain America had been made into the bad guy. It was nauseating. Rebecca had very proudly attended pro-Captain America protests, wanting to do her part to thank the Star Spangled Man with a Plan.
But the collapse of the Avengers ended up becoming just the tip of the spear for the tragedy that was to come. In May 2018, half the universe turned to dust. It just…happened. One second, Rebecca was arguing on behalf of her client in a courtroom and the next second the judge, her client, and around half the people in the courtroom were dust. At the time, Rebecca had assumed she was having some sort of mental breakdown, at least until she saw, from the window of the courthouse, sheer and utter pandemonium. And, at the time, it really seemed like the literal, biblical usage of the world. Explosions, fire, people panicking in the streets. Millions of people died in the aftermath of the Blip indirectly and unlike those Blipped, they would never return.
One of them, Rebecca later learned, was her father, who had survived the Blip only to for the plane he was flying on to crash into the Atlantic.
It took hours and hours for Rebecca to make it back to her home. The roads were clogged with people trying to flee, and that wasn't including the damage from the accidents which had already occurred. Rebecca thanked G-d every single day that neither Jeff nor William had been Blipped. But her mother, who had been flying alongside Rebecca's father, had been. (Not that Rebecca learned this until she came back with the rest of the Blipped.) She'd lost friends, she'd lost family, she'd lost coworkers.
But in the midst of all that loss, she still had Jeff and William. She still had her home, she still had her job, she still had her life. Rebecca was definitely one of the luckier people to endure those five years of perfect agony. Yet she could not be happy when so many people were less fortunate than her. How could this have happened, Rebecca wondered over and over again? What kind of a righteous G-d could allow a monster like Thanos to decimate the universe, to bring grief and pain to so many? Was this, Rebecca wondered, what those who had survived the Shoah had been experiencing? A sense of dread, of all encompassing grief, those endless thoughts of it should be me?! I should have been the one to die!
Rebecca believed all her life. She'd been raised as such, and her faith had only intensified as extraordinary happenings kept on occurring in the world. She lived in an age of miracles or so she had thought. It turned out she also lived in an age of plagues as well. Why had G-d permitted this? Why had he allowed such slaughter? Why had Thanos been allowed to gain access to such power, power He had cursed the builders of the Tower of Babel for trying to access? Did He exist at all? Did He not care? Or was he just as powerless to stop Thanos as he had at stopping the Shoah, shackled by an inability to interfere in matters of free will? Was all this hurting Him as much as it was hurting Rebecca?
She'd asked all these questions to Rabbi Lee, desperate for answers, desperate for a way forward. Rabbi Lee was ancient, 95 years old, and probably should have retired ages ago. He'd been Rebecca's rabbi all her life; he'd been there when she'd been delivered, officiated her marriage, performed William's bris. There were few people she trusted more, not just theologically speaking but also personally speaking.
"I just don't understand, rabbi," Rebecca said, her voice cracking. "Why is this happening?" She knew she wasn't the first person to say those words to him, and there were people who had suffered worse from the Blip, but she'd had to bury her parents, and she'd thought at that time her mother was gone for good, and she just didn't understand why.
Rabbi Lee shrugged. "I dunno."
Rebecca stared at that wise, venerable man she'd idolized all her life. "What do you mean, you don't know?"
"Well, sorry, Becky, but God didn't exactly come to me in my dreams and say 'this is why I let all those people get smote.' And if he did, I'd have punched him right in the face, pow, right in the kisser!" He made his shaking, feeble hand into a fist. Rebecca couldn't help but laugh a little. This was one of the reasons she loved being Jewish. Jews weren't afraid to tell G-d when He was doing things wrong. The name Israel literally meant "one who wrestles with G-d" and that wasn't hyperbole – the original Israel had literally wrestled all night with an angel.
"But you must have some theories," Rebecca pressed him. "Why must everyone suffer so much?"
Rabbi Lee gave a kind smile to Rebecca. "I could tell you to trust this is all part of God's plan. Maybe it is and I'm just too stupid to see it. Sounds like a dick move by him, but, hey, I'm just a man. I don't see the bigger picture. What happened was so big, I can barely even understand it." Rebecca sighed. She should have known better to expect definitive answers. In a sense, it was a good thing Rabbi Lee wasn't claiming certainty – a lot of religious leaders were taking advantage of the pain to claim the Blip had been divine retribution and they could save people. But it still hurt.
Rabbi Lee squeezed Rebecca's hand. "But Becky, the thing I want you to take away is you're not alone. None of us are alone. These last few months, we've all seen that. People have come together to help the survivors. The refugees of Asgard have been given a home, and according to them, the same thing has happened across the universe. Imagine it! All over the place, aliens right out of Star Trek, lining up to help each other. Maybe this whole thing is a chance to show our best selves. I know I'm gonna do my part for as long as I've got left."
"Thank you, rabbi," Rebecca said. "You're right, I guess. It just feels so…raw."
"We're a community, Becky," Rabbi Lee said. "A family. You need any help, you just reach out to your family."
Rabbi Lee passed away seven months after the Blip. This was not a surprise. He was a very old man, he'd suffered a bout of pneumonia back in February, and his longtime wife had passed away the year before. It was a testament to his strength and commitment to help his congregation he hadn't died long before then. But the words Rabbi Lee had told to Rebecca stuck with her. She left her job at her high powered corporate law firm for one with a community-oriented law firm which specialized in helping the families of the victims of the Blip. Jeff was with her every step of the way and so was William.
G-d, she was so proud of William. He'd only been eight years old when the Blip had happened and he'd lost his grandparents, but he'd been a pillar of strength to her, Jeff, and to just about everyone. He was sweet and sensitive, focused and strong. Rebecca felt awful he'd had to shoulder so many burdens so long. He'd spent his formative years in a world riven by conflict, a world awash with blood. He'd seen the best and worst humanity had to offer, experienced a world which had more chaos than any other time in human history. Probably any other time in alien history either. And yet, he hadn't lost faith in the goodness of people, hadn't spiraled into depression and hatred like so many others. He'd kept his grades up, kept on supporting people, kept on doing the things he loved because he saw hope where others did not.
The next five years were hard on everyone. After the Blipped returned, a part of Rebecca selfishly wished she'd been among them, though at the time, of course, like everyone she'd assumed they were dead and gone. Yet somehow, the massive societal collapse she'd feared never materialized. There was crime and hatred and intolerance and terrorism like always. But all in all, people seemed…burned out by those things. Everyone had suffered so much at the hands of a capricious, random disaster, and it seemed to have destroyed their appetite for more pain. The world was, in some ways, in a better place than it had been when it started. If only the cost hadn't been so damnably high!
The world spun on. William started studying for his bar mitzvah and it brought tears to Rebecca's eyes. Her little boy was going to become a man! And then it had happened. The answer to so many prayers. The greatest miracle in all of human history, a miracle which made the Burning Bush, the extension of the oil at the Temple, the survival of humanity after the flood, seem completely meaningless in comparison. The Blipped came back. It wasn't precisely divine intervention: it had happened by the Avengers somehow (it was very unclear) duplicating the artifact which Thanos had used to kill so many and bringing them back to life. But as far as Rebecca was concerned, it was as close to divine intervention as she was going to get.
Her mother was alive! She was alive and so, so many others were alive again! Of course, this didn't come without problems, societal disruptions almost as massive as the Blip itself as society adjusted to abruptly having twice as many people. But Rebecca didn't care about any of that in that moment. When she saw her mother step off the plane from Bermuda (where she'd come back to life, because the Avengers had helpfully made it so people would return at the nearest safe place), it was the best moment of Rebecca's life. A life so cruelly taken away from her was back. G-d may have been late, but He'd answered everyone's prayers finally.
And then, just weeks later, she'd gone from jubilation to horror as her family got into a car accident which had nearly claimed William's life right after William's bar mitzvah. The doctors all said he honestly should have died and they were all quite puzzled as to why he was not. William lost his memory and to this day, he'd only regained a fraction of the memories he'd once possessed. While Rebecca was terrified he would never return to the person he once was, a part of him felt he was lucky to have lost memories of the turbulent times of the Blip.
William was not the person he used to be. It wasn't that Rebecca didn't like the person he was now, but he was a fundamentally different person. The way he reacted to everything was different, not worse, but just different. Every little quirk he used to have was gone. He wanted to be called Billy. And there were moments when…weird things happened around him. Things that Rebecca struggled to refer to as anything other than magical. But they were so subtle she could very well have been imagining them, trying to construct a narrative to ascribe magical blame to a difficult mundane situation.
In any event, it wasn't as if Billy was unhappy with his life or something sinister was going on. He was still a great, sweet kid who did well in school and loved his parents. He'd even been brave enough to come out as gay, which of course Rebecca and Jeff responded to supportively. And he'd even started dating that kid from his art classes, Teddy Altman. Sorry, Eddie Altman. (Apparently, Eddie was trying out a new name cause he thought Teddy sounded "lame" or something.) This was all great news in Rebecca's opinion. Eddie was a sweet boy and his parents would eventually become good friends with her and Jeff, united by a shared love of Lorna Wu's music and barbecue.
But something was going wrong with Billy. Rebecca could sense it. He spent a great deal of time in his room, studying the paranormal online and through books. In itself, this wasn't as alarming as it once might have been. These days, the paranormal wasn't exactly as para as it used to be and it seemed only sensible to Rebecca to try to understand it better. Even if she thought witchcraft was a bunch of hogwash. Still, she knew it could lead Billy down some dark paths if he wasn't careful. Not everyone who believed in magic had good intentions, and that was setting aside the possibility dark magic really did exist and he was somehow being lured into corruption. G-d, how was this the world she lived in?
Then Billy had just gone completely missing for a full day. A day! Anything could have happened to him during that time! Rebecca had called the police; she was convinced he had gotten kidnapped by someone. Of course the police wouldn't act until he was gone for twenty-four hours. Of course. The fact Rebecca's law firm had sued the police successfully several times had nothing to do with it, obviously.
When he'd returned, he was bleeding. Bleeding! Someone had hurt Rebecca's precious little boy. Whoever did it would pay, she vowed. But Billy wouldn't answer any questions, and to make matters worse, he just disappeared the next day. When he returned back to the house, Rebecca had the terrifying thought this was the last time she'd see him again.
"I'm going to have to be going," Billy said apologetically. "I'm not supposed to have been here at all, but…uh, I can't really regret all the time we spent together."
Rebecca's heart practically stopped. "You mean…you can't mean…"
"Uh, no!" Billy said quickly. "Yeah, just realized how that sounded. No, I'm just going to have to literally be leaving, not, you know, shuffling off this mortal coil. A lot of time left until I become an ex-Billy."
Jeff leaned forward and plastered a stern expression on his face. He didn't often pull authority, but it just made the times when he did more effective. "You're not going anywhere and you're going to tell your mother and I what's going on."
"I…I can't," Billy said, his expression and voice anguished. "You won't believe me and if…even if you do…I can't bear to hurt you."
"That's not your decision to make," Rebecca said gently but firmly.
Billy's head suddenly turned to the right, but whatever he was seeing there, Rebecca had no idea what it was. "I'm not going to erase their memories," Billy said chidingly and Rebecca's heart sped up. Erase her memories?! Were her worst fears reality? Had Billy somehow…gotten into dark magic, like it was some sort of street drug? "They're my parents."
And then Billy's hand glowed blue for a few seconds and Rebecca felt a gust of wind, yet the undisturbed nature of her possessions indicated no such gust had happened. "Sorry, Agatha's kind of mouthy and her grasp on ethics is…questionable."
"Please, Billy," Rebecca begged him. "I don't understand. Please help me understand. We'll believe you, I swear to God, we'll believe you."
The three of them sat down on couches in the living room. Billy took a deep breath and started talking. Before Billy was born, Rebecca wouldn't have believed a single, solitary word of it. But now…now what he was saying seemed bizarre and improbable, but she knew in her heart it was all true. The Westview anomaly hadn't been a training exercise at all. Wanda Maximoff had suffered a breakdown and turned the whole city into her puppets. She'd created Billy and his brother Tommy ex-nihilo. Then when her dream had collapsed, Billy's soul had left her body and then inhabited William at the exact moment he died.
And her darkest suspicions in that moment were confirmed, those thoughts she'd thought she'd rightly dismissed every single time they'd reared their way into her head. William really had died. The child before her, the child she'd come to love and care for, wasn't the child she'd given birth to.
But that didn't mean he wasn't her son.
Billy wasn't a bad person. He had never asked to be created. He hadn't killed William. It had just been awful coincidence he'd died at the exact same time as Billy had lost his mortal shell. Billy had made the best of an awful situation and spared Rebecca years of horrendous pain. In return, Rebecca had given him the love and support he'd deserved. The two of them had shared each other's pain, each other's fears, each other's grief. Billy Maximoff was just as much of her son as William Kaplan. She just wished he'd had the courage to tell her before this. Though she supposed he thought she wouldn't have believed her. Even now, she wasn't sure why she did. There was no proof. But she knew it. Mothers just knew these things.
"I swear, I didn't kill William!" Billy stammered. "I didn't mean any of it! I didn't mean to kill them!" Them? That didn't sound good. "I know I should have left, should have told you sooner, but I just figured it all out myself and…I knew how much it would have hurt you. I saw it in your minds."
Jeff looked startled. "You're saying you could read our minds?"
"Oh, of course," Rebecca said. "Your memories never came back at all because you never had them in the first place – you were just reading our minds and using that knowledge to make it look like they could."
"Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan –"
"That's Mom and Dad to you, young man," Jeff said quietly. Rebecca nodded in agreement. "I'm not going to pretend to understand all this magic and witchcraft stuff. What I do understand is family. William is gone, but you're still here. And you're as much my son as he was."
Billy looked dumbstruck. It was similar to the look on his face after he'd come out as gay, but much, much more pronounced. Rebecca could understand why. She didn't know a lot of people who would react so well to the knowledge her son hadn't been the person she thought he was. Maybe the Rebecca of years ago would have done the same. But she'd lived three years with Billy and she knew, knew in her bones, he was a good person.
"Billy, whatever happens, we're still with you," Rebecca said earnestly. "And William, he would want you to be here with us too. He'd, well, of course he'd still prefer to be alive, but I know he'd be very happy to know his body wasn't going to waste now that the rest of him is gone."
Jeff laughed. "I can't believe this. I mean…witchcraft, spontaneous generation, body swapping, souls…it's amazing. Just astonishing." He burst into tears with alarming suddenness. "I know…I know William is gone. I thought…I think I've somehow known all along. I just didn't want to admit it until now."
"Maybe this was too much for you," Billy worried. "Maybe I should have gone slower or just…"
"Kept it from us?" Rebecca said, a touch angrily. "Erased our minds? No. We're a family. A community. We support each other. That's our way. For so many years, it's been…the only way we survived."
"'If one be gone,'" Billy said, almost meditatively, "'we carry on."
Rebecca nodded. "Now I know this isn't the full story. And this has been a lot, so if you promise to not leave for…wherever you were going, and you're in no danger, we can save the rest for another time."
"No!" Billy shouted. "No, you have to know…I have to get all this off my chest."
Billy's power turned out to be much more potent than anyone, including him, knew. He'd followed a legend of the Witches' Road to the dark sorceress Agatha Harkness, breaking her from a spell. The two of them assembled a coven and Billy had, unbeknownst to everyone including himself, made the Road, just as his own mother before him had made him. He wanted to bring back his brother Tommy and apparently succeeded, though Billy didn't know where he was. But people had died following the road. An old woman, just a normal person in the wrong place at the wrong time, brought in by Agatha, died in one of the trials. Agatha had killed one of her coven members and another had died fighting people trying to kill Agatha. And then Agatha herself had sacrificed herself to save Billy from her crazy ex who was also the personification of death, who had also given Billy those injuries during their fight.
Yeah…it was definitely a lot. Rebecca could understand why Billy was freaking out so much about all this. But while Billy blamed himself for all those deaths, none of them, by Rebecca's estimation, would have happened if it hadn't been for Agatha. Sharon had died at the hand of Billy's subconsciously conjured trial, sure. But she hadn't had the training the witches had. It was like if a bunch of firefighters had taken a random person off the street and made her fight a fire which killed her and Billy had accidentally started the fire in question. It was a tragic situation, no doubt, but ultimately, Agatha bore the blame for putting a civilian in that situation. And Lilia wouldn't have died if it hadn't been for people trying to kill Agatha due to Agatha's sins.
Jeff reacted first. He stood up and sat down next to Billy, hugging him tightly. Rebecca did the same. Billy looked lost. "Hey, this isn't your fault. I know this is scary. But you're doing the best you can. What happened on the Road, I don't blame you for it."
"Yeah, Agatha doesn't blame me either," Billy admitted. "But she's not the most reliable source, ethics wise."
Rebecca was of two minds about Agatha. On the one hand, she was a horrific influence on Billy, an unrepentant serial killer who manipulated Billy throughout their time on the road and had just recently suggested erasing their memories. But on the other hand, she had literally sacrificed her life, the thing she'd killed hundreds to extent, for her son. How could Rebecca ever repay such a debt?
But Agatha was a later problem, Rebecca decided. For now, she just needed to be there for Billy. And frankly, she needed time to adjust to the news her son was an entirely different person with godlike powers, because right now, she was pretty sure she was still in shock about the whole thing.
"Okay," Jeff said. "Okay. I don't think we can do all this alone. There are experts out there who can help us." Billy flinched, probably thinking Jeff thought he was crazy. "I mean, help you control your power," he quickly clarified. "Uh, there's that guy in the wheelchair; I read a newspaper article about him the other day. He runs a school for people with powers. And those sorcerers, right? Dr. Strange? He might be able to help." He turned to face Rebecca. "And we're going to have to move my office into the garage, of course."
"Uh, why?" Billy asked.
"Cause we need to make a bedroom for your brother?" Jeff said like Billy was an idiot for not grasping the idea.
Rebecca looked at him sternly. "Remember, Jeff, Tommy might have a family of his own."
"Oh, yeah. Didn't think about that."
"I don't think they're very good to him," Billy admitted. "That's just the feeling I got."
Anger coursed through Rebecca. Children were so precious. Billy and William both had proven it. How could any parent not value their child, after everything the world had gone through? "We'll do whatever we can to help. In the meantime, you're going to clean yourself up and you're not going to be going after your brother. Not without us."
Billy grinned. "You two are just the best parents ever."
"Well, it helps you're such a good son," Rebecca said, as she ruffled Billy's hair.