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Everything is white.
It’s blinding him, making his eyes ache, his head pound. It’s hot, rushing over him in a never-ending wave, flooding him from the inside out with heat. He tries to blink, tries to shake his head, but he doesn’t know if he’s successful. He can’t tell where his body ends and the white light begins, white and heat surrounding him, pressing in on him, making it hard to breathe—
“Stop,” he chokes out, pleading for respite. He reaches out blindly, fear filling him as he’s met with nothing, nothing.
And then, a hand takes hold of his.
He grabs onto it tightly, desperate not to be alone.
Someone laughs.
“Not so hard, Billy bear.”
In an instant, there is more than just white.
Colour bursts onto the scene, painting itself in a wide arc to colour the sudden sky a stunning blue, rich green grass spreading out underneath his sprawled-out form, a towering maple tree bursting to life behind…
“Mom?”
Marilyn laughs and tugs Billy up so he’s not laying stretched out on his back. She squeezes his hand and he numbly lets go, staring at her.
“I knew I’d find you sleeping out here,” she says, smiling. “You always liked your naps under the tree. Come on,” she adds, straightening, “you can help me decorate the cookies.”
Marilyn turns and Billy stands on shaky legs, turning to follow her, to ask the hundred questions on the tip of his tongue, but they all fall away when he sees the cozy yellow bungalow she’s leading him to, at the edge of a well-kept lawn, the massive maple tree at his back.
“Wait,” he calls, heart flipping funny at the sight of her retreating back. “Mom—”
He’s sitting at a kitchen table set with a patterned blue tablecloth. He looks out the window to his left, sees the same sprawling backyard he had woken up in. Beyond that, the horizon is blank, a wall of white.
Marilyn steps in front of the window, obscuring his view, and smiles at him, setting a plate of cookies on the table. “Do you have any homework?”
Billy’s head is still spinning, but this, he remembers this smile of hers, how she could encompass so much love in the simple upturn of her lips.
“No,” he says, staring hungrily at her, this perfect memory tangible once more, when there’s the sound of a door opening and closing.
“Hello!” calls a cheery male voice.
“In the kitchen,” Marilyn calls back, then turns to Billy. “Looks like your father’s home early.”
Billy’s heart stops.
“M-my who?” He barely stutters out when a man sweeps into the room, sliding a blue work jacket off his shoulders.
“I thought I smelled cookies,” the man says, ruffling Billy’s hair as he passes behind the chair to sit beside him. “What’s the occasion? So we don’t have to eat your mom’s casserole?” He winks at Billy as he says it, then squawks when Marilyn gives him a light slap on the back of his head.
“You’re awful,” she tells him, but she’s grinning as she says so. She leans down and kisses where she’d slapped him.
“See how she treats me?” C.C. asks Billy, snatching up a cookie and taking a big bite. “I’m a martyr.”
“Those are for after dinner,” Marilyn scolds, trying to slide the plate away, but C.C. grabs it and pushes it toward Billy.
“Go, son, go! Save the baked goods!” C.C. grabs Marilyn around the waist and pulls her into his lap, peppering her face with kisses. She laughs, halfheartedly trying to escape.
The cookie plate rests just against the tips of Billy’s fingers but he takes no notice, still very much trying to come to terms with whatever the hell is going on.
“What the hell is going on?” he demands, and his…parents fall quiet, looking at him with surprise and mild concern.
“What do you mean, son?” C.C. asks, and, oh, that’s weird, because that is an expression Billy has seen in the mirror before, and he’s never really thought before about it coming from somewhere, from someone.
“I mean,” Billy says with no idea what he means. He has this underlying hysteria thrumming through him, telling him something’s not right but he can’t remember anything before that white, hot light except these two people in front of him. He knows they’re his parents, like he knows his name is Billy and he didn’t grow up with his parents in a cozy yellow bungalow, he knows all this but he’s hard pressed to remember why all that is such a big deal. This is a nice present so he’s just going to live in the moment.
“Is it not what you expected?” his dad asks, settling in his seat at the stern of the rowboat, casting a fishing line out into the still lake.
Billy looks down at himself, suddenly wearing rubber boots and a plaid shirt, holding tight to a fishing rod. He reaches out to touch the boat underneath him. The wood is solid, real; he sticks a hand in the water and shakes off cold water droplets.
“What are you thinking, son?” C.C. asks.
Billy looks up, but C.C. is looking out across the lake. Billy follows his gaze, and on a distant shore he can just make out the silhouette of a small house.
“This is weird,” Billy says. “I don’t even remember what you look like, but you’re here. My dad.”
“I’m here,” C.C. agrees, and he turns and smiles at Billy, then looks over his head and smiles bigger as he half-stands to hold a hand out to escort Marilyn to her spot on the picnic blanket spread out on top of a lush, grassy hill, helping her settle the giant picnic basket she had carried over.
“And I am, too,” Marilyn says to Billy, taking his hand and kissing the back of it, smiling that special smile at him, just for him. She puts a hand on top of the basket, holding the lid in place as something inside tries to push it open, and keeps smiling at Billy. “Hungry, Billy bear?”
“Why are we here?” Billy tries to ask, but the words are stolen along with his breath as the roller coaster crests the hill and drops like a stone on the other side.
Marilyn hears him anyway, and she frowns and leans in, body jerking about in her seat as the coaster rattles along its track. “What do you mean?”
“It’s the happiest place on Earth, son,” C.C. screams as their car is flipped upside-down and spat through a hair-raising corkscrew.
“No, I mean, what are we doing here? Why is nothing the same?” It’s hard to concentrate on the jumble already in his head when he’s trying to keep up with the jumble in front of him, with the ever-changing scenes of idyllic childhood playing out before him that he’s never actually lived.
He looks up and can see the edges of the sky, the endless white brushing against midnight blue. Even though the sky is dark, and dotted with bright stars, the day blazes around Billy like it’s noon. He can’t see the sun but he can feel its heat.
Or, he thinks, looking past the zoo’s tiger enclosure to the white bordering the world, the heat is from the white light that he first woke up in, when he first found himself living in a yellow bungalow with his mom and his dad. The warmth feels the same, only not overpowering like it was at first, more like something he could ease into, something he could live with. Something more comfortable than this façade with his parents.
“What’s that light?” he asks his mother between the banana split they’re sharing and the beach they walk on. The wall of white recedes and advances like the tide, if the beach had one; the water is still, the pulsing of the white light all the more obvious for it.
“Don’t worry, Billy bear,” Marilyn says. She hasn’t stopped smiling since Billy first woke up here. “It can’t hurt you.”
Billy shakes his head. “I’m not— I’m not scared of that. It’s weird, isn’t it? That there’s just all this white around us, like nothing exists if we’re not there for it to?”
“What else do we need besides our family, huh?” C.C. asks, throwing an arm around Billy’s shoulder.
“Our family,” Billy repeats, the words ringing a bell in his head, the bell that’s been easy to ignore in his time with his parents, but it’s loud again, that this isn’t right feeling. He looks at his parents, watching a butterfly emerge from its cocoon, and doesn’t think ‘family’. They don’t feel like family. But how would Billy know what family feels like, if all he’s ever had is his mom and dad?
But that’s not right, he remembers, because this isn’t his life. It’s hard to keep that in mind, like his brain isn’t interested in holding onto his fleeting thoughts that there had been something before the hot white light he woke up in.
Except, Billy is starting to think maybe he hadn’t woken up in the white light, but fallen asleep. Every instance since he’s been paraded around with his parents has felt dreamlike, surreal; he feels like he’s watching everything happen from a distance. And there’s no way this is real, right? Why does the world only exist in their activities? A part of him wants to shrug and say it’s always been like that, but that’s the same part eager to dismiss any unsettling thought; Billy doesn’t trust it.
He doesn’t think it’s normal for endless white to border every edge and horizon.
It would be easy to accept, he can feel that. His parents want his acceptance, they want him to stop feeling uneasy and wondering about everything, and just enjoy their time together. Ordinarily Billy would want that, too; he does, he wants a family that he can love and know they love him back no matter what. He doesn’t feel that with Marilyn and C.C. They’re never not smiling, never not happy, but when they hug him it’s like a mannequin leaning into him, hard and inflexible. They tell him they love him in the same voice they ask him if he saw that whale breach off the side of the boat.
“Billy bear?”
Billy looks at Marilyn. She’s still got the same smile plastered on, but it doesn’t look the same. His childhood nickname doesn’t fill him with the same warmth it did the first time she said it. He closes his eyes and thinks, over and over, my family. He tries to imagine his family, what they would be like. He thinks he would have a couple of brothers and sisters, with him comfortably in the middle, a few older siblings to look out for him, a few younger for him to watch over.
He imagines his parents, and it’s not Marilyn and C.C., but two people who mean it when they smile at him, when they hug him, when they tell him they love him. His family is made up of people he can feel safe with, and he remembers that he had that. He can feel it, deep inside, that it’s not something he’s making up, but something he had.
And he wants it back.
When he looks again to the encroaching white light, he feels it, like a tug on his heart: come home. For just a moment he thinks he can smell something, clay and salt and seaweed, a semi-sweet scent that is almost familiar.
He ignores his parents’ calls, walking away from them, toward the rough edges where white meets colour. They call after him, but they don’t chase him; regardless, Billy walks faster and faster until he’s running, and the world catches up with him.
He falls into the lake and comes up gasping for air, swimming determinedly through the water, no longer still but thrashing about, great swells in the waves urging him to give up, to turn around, but he plows through and hauls himself onto a boardwalk, that rattles when the roller coaster thunders past overhead, and he runs past carnival games, onto a wide plain, clambering up the hill and jumping over the picnic basket at the top. He runs through the backyard and up the back stairs of the yellow bungalow, tears through the living room and kitchen, and when he throws the front door open, he’s met with—
“Shazam?”
The hero stands on the porch, a wide expanse of warm white light in front of him. He turns around and grins at Billy.
“Hey.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “This white light, right? It’s—”
“Weird,” they finish together.
Shazam nods, and Billy steps up to stand beside him. They both look out upon the sea of white.
“It’s warm,” Shazam says.
Billy nods. “Yeah. It used to be hot.”
“Oh my god, it was, like, uncomfortably hot,” Shazam says, nodding vigourously. He holds a hand out as if feeling the heat from a fire. “Now, it’s pretty sweet.”
Billy nods again. He makes no move to step off the porch. Now that he’s here, he doesn’t know what to do. The white light soothes his eyes, something pleasant to look at instead of overwhelming. He looks at it and feels comforted. He looks over at Shazam, finds the hero looking back at him, expression pensive.
“What happened to you?” Billy asks.
Shazam’s gaze grows distant, and he glances away.
“I got lost,” he says.
“Well,” Billy says when he sees how the hero’s hands tremble at his sides, “we’re here now.” He thinks of his family, of feeling safe with them, and he reaches out and takes one of Shazam’s hands in his own. He grins up at him when Shazam looks down. “We’ll go together?”
Shazam takes a deep breath and nods. “I mean, it feels welcoming, right? That’s not just me? Like we aren’t about to step into a bottomless pit of freaky mind trips, are we?”
Billy holds a hand out like Shazam did, gauging the feel of the white light. “No, it feels like it wants us to come back. It kind of feels familiar, don’t you think?”
Shazam holds out his hand again, nodding. “It does feel familiar. And it’s not like we can get any deader, right?”
Billy laughs, because, oh, yeah, he was dead, wasn’t he? He remembers thinking this is it and sorry and…my family.
“No,” he agrees, “we can’t get any deader.”
They step off the porch as one, and fall through blazing white light that envelopes them, wrapping around every limb like an overeager hug, filling them from the inside out, welcoming them back.
“Billy!”
He has a mouthful of dirt to spit out before he can answer, and when he turns and sees his family behind him, words falter. It doesn’t matter, though, because his family says all they need to with their joyous grins and arms wrapped around him.
When he sees Diana, he’s hit with that same feeling of familiarity from the light, and when they embrace, he smells clay and salt and seaweed, semi-sweet and familiar.
“Thank you,” he tells her. “I was lost. You helped me find my way home.”
Diana shrugs, that faintly amused expression at home on her face. “All I did was give you a nudge,” she says.
It’s Freddy who asks eventually, which surprises Billy not at all. Its been three days since Billy officially became the undead and the novelty has worn off some. Sure, Rosa still hugs him every time she sees him for at least thirty seconds, and yes, he had a sleepover with Darla last night because she wanted him to be the last thing she saw at bedtime and the first thing when she woke up, but no one is crying around him anymore, and Billy himself has moved on from grinning dopily at his sisters and brothers, starting to feel relaxed at home again. Naturally, that’s when Freddy pounces.
“What was it like being dead?”
It’s just the two of them in their room, and as much as Billy loves his family, sometimes it’s nice to be alone with Freddy. They’re not just brothers but best friends, and not for the first time Billy wonders how he could have forgotten all of this.
Billy makes a face and Freddy quickly backtracks.
“Not that you have to talk about it if you don’t want, I mean, maybe I shouldn’t even have asked, I wasn’t really thinking about the whole trauma aspect, I’m just really curious if—”
“It was weird,” Billy says over Freddy’s rambling. “I don’t remember all of it super well, but I remember that was something that kept occurring to me, that this is weird, it’s not normal. And—” He pauses, swallowing against a sudden lump in his throat that he doesn’t expect. “I was with my parents.”
He glances over at Freddy, who is sitting beside him on the bed, eyes and mouth wide open.
“Oh my god,” Freddy says, horrified, “we Buffy Summers-d you.”
Billy frowns. “We what season now?”
Freddy groans. “You know! When Buffy’s friends bring her back from the dead but she was in heaven, literally, like freaking pa-ra-dise and they just yanked her outta there for their own selfish reasons not even thinking maybe she was happy and didn’t want to come back—"
“I wanted to come back,” Billy interrupts, and Freddy stops, chewing his lip and looking at Billy. “It wasn’t…”
It wasn’t heaven, he had been about to say, but he doesn’t really know that for a fact, does he? Billy has never been religious, never thought too much about life after death, never really set any expectations as to what the afterlife would look like, assuming there was one.
“Wasn’t what?” asks Freddy.
“Happy,” Billy says. “It all looked nice, if you didn’t look too hard, but it felt…empty. Like everything was good, all of the time, so after a while all the good things didn’t mean anything, because of course it’s all good, what else would it be?”
Freddy is silent for a moment. “What about your parents?”
Billy shakes his head. “They were the same. Everything they did was the best thing ever, and I could just feel that it wasn’t right.” He remembers Marilyn’s plastic smiles, C.C.’s commitment to calling him son at every instance. “I don’t even remember what my dad looks like, and he was just there, like, it was normal. I couldn’t remember everything before, it was like I had always been there, but I could tell.”
“So, what, if you’d never realized what was up, would you just be…there still?” Freddy asks wildly. “What if you had liked being with your parents so much you never came back to us because they were busy being the best family ever for you and…why are you laughing?”
“Because,” Billy chuckles, “you just showed more emotion in the last two minutes than they did in however long I was there. I told you, Freddy, I could feel that something wasn’t right, and that was mostly because of you.”
Freddy’s brow furrows. “Me? Why?”
“Well, you and everyone else,” Billy amends, waving vaguely at their bedroom door to encompass the rest of the family. “When I thought of my family, I felt safe, even when I couldn’t remember you guys. When I looked at my parents, I felt nothing. And I knew I had to get back to what was mine.
“And the light changed,” Billy remembers. “When I first got there, there was this blazing, blinding white light. I couldn’t see or feel anything, and it freaked me out. My mom was the one who pulled me out of it. It used to scare me, when I would look around and see white bleeding over into everything, but then it changed. I knew I had to go back to it.”
“What if it ended up being a trap?”
Billy remembers Shazam’s words and grins. “We couldn’t get any deader.”
“’We’?”
Billy nods. “I was there, but so was the captain.”
Freddy frowns. “Like, separately?”
“Yeah. I found him at the light, right before we came back. I came back,” Billy says, and shakes his head. It’s confusing at the best of times, having an alter ego he can’t refer to by name unless he wants to transform. Calling Shazam ‘the captain’ made it easy to talk about his other self’s activities without bursting into a six-foot six frame in a lightning-powered instant.
Although, he muses, now that Victor and Rosa know, he doesn’t have to worry about keeping the secret from them anymore.
“You weren’t together the whole time?” asks Freddy.
“No,” Billy says. “I was with my parents, and he was…he said he got lost.”
Billy hasn’t shifted back into his superpowered form yet, but he wonders if he’ll have Shazam’s memories of their time dead, or how much he’ll be able to remember of something he didn’t live.
“What does that mean?” Freddy asks, looking a little spooked by the idea of being lost in the afterlife.
“I don’t know,” Billy says. He shakes his head. “Let’s not talk anymore about it, okay? It’s done now. Everything can go back to normal.”
“Well, mostly,” Freddy agrees. “But imagine superheroing on a curfew?”
Billy frowns. “What do you—”
“Our parents know, buddy boy,” Freddy says. “You can kiss midnight world-saving goodbye. And don’t even think about sneaking out, because everyone films you and puts it all over the internet, and you know I cannot lie to save my life or your butt, so don’t—”
Billy hugs Freddy tight, and to his brother’s credit Freddy doesn’t even hesitate to hug him back. Billy knows, while he was dead, he couldn’t remember Freddy Freeman, couldn’t put a name or face into focus, but all the same, it’s the truth when he says, “I missed you, Freddy.”
Freddy huffs a shaky laugh. “Me, too, man,” he says, arms tightening around Billy for a minute. “So, like, don’t ever do that to me again, okay? Cause I really don’t think I could survive it again.”
His voice breaks at the end and Billy nods, holding back just as tight.
“Me neither.”
He can’t see it anymore, but he can still feel the heat from the white light, except it lives inside of him now. Sometimes it feels so full to bursting he thinks if he opens his mouth it will flood the room, the city, the world. He keeps it to himself and revels in how alive it makes him feel, especially now, sitting with Freddy, something he could have lost without realizing it, been stuck in a joyless eternity with a family that said a lot of things that never amounted to anything. Billy’s not afraid of the white light anymore. He's not afraid to live.
Billy waits until one morning after breakfast, when it’s his and Eugene’s turn to clean the kitchen, and everyone else has scattered to get on with their day.
“Hey, you think you could find a picture of someone for me?” Billy asks as he loads the dishwasher.
“Do you mean in the photo albums in the living room or online?” Eugene brings a handful of cutlery to the sink, glancing at Billy.
“Online,” Billy says. “It’s, uh, my dad. C.C. Batson.” He doesn’t know if Eugene remembers his dad’s name, assumes he doesn’t, and Eugene doesn’t give anything away, simply nodding.
“Sure, I can do that. Right after we’re done the kitchen?”
Billy nods, ignoring his suddenly sweaty palms. “Sounds good.”
Eugene comes back into the kitchen with his laptop open and stops in the doorway. Billy looks up from where he’s been fidgeting in his chair for five minutes.
“You found him already?” Billy asks, heart pounding.
Eugene nods. “I already knew where to look,” he says. “You wanna see him?”
Billy takes a deep breath and nods, and Eugene rounds the table and sets the laptop in front of Billy. There’s a newspaper article with a picture, and a headline that reads Local Garage Raises $100,000 for Children’s Charity. The picture is a man and a woman holding a giant check. The man is smiling, a small smile, just the slightest upturn of his lips, and Billy sees himself in that face.
“This was just before he was arrested,” Eugene explains. “He’s twenty years old here.”
Billy is glad Eugene doesn’t say anything like you look like him.
“If you want, I can print that,” Eugene says.
Billy shakes his head. He doesn’t read the article with the picture, and after looking at it for a few more seconds, pushes the laptop away and stands.
“Thanks,” he says to Eugene, and he doesn’t just mean for the favour but for not just pulling up a mugshot which, Billy guesses, would be a lot easier to find. He goes and sits in the living room with the proof that the man in the afterlife had, indeed, been C.C. Batson, at least in looks.
He wonders if that C.C. was anything personality-wise like the real one, but stops that trail of thought before he can compare fake Marilyn to the real one as well, and realize which one of them at least cared enough to fake wanting him.
C.C. was twenty years old in the picture Eugene showed him. Just three years older than Billy is now. Did he have any idea, that he would end up in jail? What was he arrested for? Billy tries to look ahead to his own life three years from now and can’t imagine it, but he doesn’t think jail is on the horizon. Not now, not with the family he has. He can count on them all, he knows that.
“Think fast!”
A frisbee bounces off of Billy’s head. He looks up and glares at Freddy, standing in the doorway and glaring back.
“Why’d you do that?”
“I said think fast,” Freddy says. “Now get up, we’re going to chuck pinecones at a bird’s nest.”
“We are not!” Darla cries. “We’re going to look at the baby birds behind Mr. Wentworth’s house.”
“Why look when we can—” Freddy cuts off with a squawk when the frisbee hits him in the face.
“Think fast,” Billy mocks, then takes Darla’s hand and they march past Freddy. “Come on, Darla, I’ll keep the birds safe from Freddy.”
“I really shouldn’t be worried,” Darla says as they step outside, “even if he threw something he wouldn’t hit them. He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.”
Billy laughs and Freddy sputters indignantly.
“I could so! What’d you say, a broad barn? I’d hit a barn, I could so hit a barn.”
Darla and Freddy bicker and Billy laughs. It sounds more like love than anything Billy heard while he was dead.