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Freddy has known Billy for a long, long time. Hell, he’s known Billy before he was Billy!
He’s known him all the way back to when they were both 8. It was Freddy’s first group home. He was still clumsy and unused to the crutches he had to use to move now, and that combined with being the youngest person in the home meant he was an easy target and some of the older boys there knew it. One of them had decided that stealing his crutches and taunting him from across the room while he was stuck in his bed was his ticket to being seen as a top dog, and it almost worked, right up until Bailey B. ‘looked 50 pounds soaking wet’ Batson came racing in like the Flash and broke his nose. Being known as the guy who got his ass whooped by a little “girl” kept that guy from trying anything again, and as soon as Batson handed him back his crutch with a grin and a swelling cheek Freddy knew he was going to be this kid’s friend for life.
They had managed to keep in touch with each other after they both left the home through a precarious combination of real life visits, emails, discord messages, and honest to god paper and pen letters at some points.
Freddy was there when Billy’s voice got rougher and he started to smell of cigarettes, though he was too nice to smoke when Freddy could breathe it in. Billy said it helped with the hunger, so even though Freddy hated it he couldn’t really say anything about it.
Billy visited him every year on his birthday without fail, even if it sometimes could only be for a few minutes as Billy avoided being caught, gifting him superhero merch he probably had to five-finger discount. The cheap Superman keychain he got at 9 still sits proudly on his backpack.
Freddy accepted him when Billy quietly told him he didn’t feel like a girl. They spent the rest of the day huddled near the computers in the library looking through baby name websites to pick a boy name for Billy, and then he helped him cut his hair in the bathroom. It was a shaggy mess by the end but Freddy had never seen him smile that hard.
Billy looked out for him during the few times Freddy has had to run from a home. Sleeping back to back in subway tunnels, condemned buildings, and illegally rented apartments, showing him who in the city would pay them to do odd jobs, and which restaurants would give them leftovers versus which ones poured bleach over their dumpsters. Despite the danger and the pain he can never bring himself to hate those times, and he misses them when he outgrows his crutch or the chronic pain gets too bad and forces him to reenter the system.
Freddy hid him when Billy showed up outside his school after his last foster father put his hands on him, determined to prove to him that he was a girl.
Billy came to him first, three years ago when he became the Champion of Magic, tumbling through his window sweaty and pale and clutching at his head with branching burns underneath his shirt. Gasping out a story of flickering subway lights and looming cave walls and a circle of empty thrones and SAY MY NAME and bright, bright lightning and suddenly being so much more.
All of this is to say that Freddy knows Billy very, very well. He has the dubious honor of being the one person in the world Billy Batson trusts completely, which is how he knows Billy will run away from the Vasquezes.
And it's not like he wanted him to run! He doesn’t! Billy deserves the gentle care and ardent support that the Vasquezes will give him. He deserves to have Victor help him with his math homework at the dinner table, deserves to have Rosa defend him from stubborn adults when he inevitably gets into a fight defending someone else, and deserves the chaotic camaraderie of the rest of the Vasquez siblings. He deserves to be able to look a foster parent in the eye and tell them he’s a boy and be met with nothing but support, the way they supported Mary, to be able to start taking testosterone and make plans in the future for surgeries. To go back to school, get his high school diploma, and have a plan for the future that’s better than running himself into the ground with work both as Billy and as Cap. It would be so much fun to go to school with Billy again. There’s an empty bunk above Freddy’s bed and he knows that Billy could fit so perfectly there, the same way he knows Billy never will.
Because as incredible and freeing and powerful as the Wizard’s powers are for Billy, they also doom him. Billy will NEVER choose himself over Captain Marvel. Full stop; capitalized, bolded, and italicized. As he is now, Billy is always ready to race into action, no parents keeping an eye on him, no school fussing over his attendance, and all his other friends are street kids and adults with problems too big to be too worried if he’s not around much. Billy had already begun toying with the idea of running away from the system permanently by then.
Sometimes Freddy wonders if the Wizard chose him then for that reason.
The world would mourn Captain Marvel, but Billy Batson would slip right through the cracks.
…
He needs to stop thinking about this.
Billy is fine.
It hasn’t even been five minutes since he hugged him bye and climbed out the second-story window of his house, Freddy can still feel the cool winter air let in by him opening the window and slipping out, quiet from practice slipping out of houses and apartments and group homes and orphanages and the dozen other placements Billy has slipped away from. A small spark of Eternity’s magic was all that he needed to bust the security alarms before they even went off.
There was no reason for Freddy to feel like this, he knew as well as Billy that he couldn’t stay. His secret identity would fall apart within weeks no matter how hard they tried to hide it and Fawcett City and the Justice League would question his suddenly reduced patrol time and availability. Part of the genius of Captain Marvel’s secret identity was making people believe that there was no secret identity at all, that he was a being made by the gods entirely of magic (technically true), that had been around for over 1000 years (also technically true), and during all the time he wasn’t out patrolling and heroing he was resting and replenishing his energy at the Rock of Eternity (not true); throwing a high schooler’s schedule and a packed house like theirs into the mix would be a bigger disaster than when Twitter found out Superboy was biologically Lex Luthor and Superman’s kid.
And it wasn’t like Billy was just alone out there, he wasn’t even really unsafe. He had finally passed the legal age to work, so while he didn’t have a proper ID or anything more people were willing to hire him and let him do odd jobs for cash, he had access to the literal nexus of all magic in the universe and was slowly learning how to use it even when he wasn’t all Shazam’ed up, and he could call the literal Justice League to help him out if he got in over his head as Captain Marvel.
So yeah! Billy would be fine on his own. It's just… sometimes Freddy wishes he didn’t have to be.