Billy has his legs crossed on the desk. He reads a comic book, listlessly, although he should study algebra because he has a class assignment tomorrow. He doesn't care much about it. He doesn't like school, but maybe because he has changed so many that he can't even remember them. He didn't even make a friend to pay him for gold, but since his new adoptive family took him under his wing, things have definitely changed. It is not yet simple, to be able to integrate, but he has brothers who, even if they are not really connected, make him feel part of something he has looked for too much. Difficult to admit that this is so, but after all Billy has never been good, to express the feelings and he is one hundred percent aware of it.

He looks up at Freddy at that thought. He is listening to music with headphones. He bangs a pencil against the pen holder, simulating a drum and, looking hard, shows the song that rings in his ears is a decidedly metal song. He likes that music, and Billy doesn't disdain that kind, for that he lets out a little smile and goes back to staring at his comic, losing in the most total way the interest in the plot of that particular tome.

"Drain," Freddy says, and he gasps and looks up at him again, confuse, then he understands.

"Do you need an easy mobile recharge?"

Freddy snorts and makes a strange sound with his tongue, then smiles. "Nah, I detoxify myself a little. You? You have a check tomorrow. Aren't you supposed to, I don’t know, study?” He reproaches him and Billy performs a short heartfelt laugh.

"And since when do you worry about studying?"

"Certainly not my need to study." He shrugs. He folds his mouth into a grimace that hides something that only he knows. As always. "But you should think about yours. So, just so you don't fail. It doesn't happen to me, in the end they love me. Will it be the good-natured face that I find myself? "

"Or from something that perpetually weaves something!" Billy laughs and Freddy puts on a pout, which he can't keep for too long. He laughs then, and shakes his head. He loves spending time with him, and if it hadn't been for that sorcerer who turned him into a super-cool superhero kind, they might never have tied that way. Freddy is always there. Anything can happen, and he doesn't hold back. That must be why, that day when they kissed under the door of the house - and Billy then pretended it hadn't happened, he didn't ask questions. In fact, Freddy never does. Not inappropriately. And yet, despite not seeming, from that day things between them have changed and Billy knows that, very probably, sooner or later they will have to talk about it.

"Cell phone with zero charge and you don't want to study. Can we do something?" Freddy proposes, and awakens him from the mosaic of thoughts that have been drumming his head for days. Freddy pretends that everything is okay, and he does the same, but in front of their world there is a wall of lies that they tell and tell themselves. Billy likes Freddy, and not in the way he would like a friend, but something more, which he knows to be wrong inside but which, in the tangled adolescent confusion of his head, makes him feel frighteningly well. He is afraid that it is all suggestion given by his life that he is slowly taking a right turn and that he will receive a blow between head and neck, like when he saw his mother again and she didn't want him. Again, she abandoned him, and Billy suffered less than he thought. After all, he has a family, and a new life.

"Billy?" Freddy asks. He tilts his head and looks at him curiously. It has the ability to be the most irritating human being on earth and at the same time the guy that Billy would protect under every circumstances. As he has always done. From the first moment he saw him threatened by those two little shits. Pieces of shit, he thinks.

"Over-thought," he replies. He smiles and then runs his hand through his hair. What to do? Go out? Staying there and breathe the heavy air of those lies that keep telling each other? Talk about it? Billy would like to do it, but he's afraid of too many things. Of his insecurity, his messy head and his adolescence that never gives him a single, stupid right answer. Is it possible that, even those that appear to be certainties, have to doubt that they are not?

What a mess to be kids..., he think.

"I deduce you don't want to go for a ride. Okay, no problem, bro! Maybe tomorrow. Who knows if you feel like studying. "

"Impossible," Billy snorts, amused, then points his eyes at him and Freddy looks at him questioningly, "Let's talk about it."

"About what?" He says it, but he knows very well what he wants to talk about. This can be understood from the small terror that has just vibrated on his cheeks. Maybe he hopes not to talk about it, because maybe he doesn't feel the same and doesn't want to hurt him. But Billy knows that, in fact, he cannot continue to ignore what has been.

"About that thing. That thing that happened under the porch and ch- »

"Holy god, Billy. Now?"

Billy takes his feet off the desk. He puts his elbows on his knees and folds his hands just so as not to reveal his knees and crosses his fingers between them, with the single and stupid intention not to show him that his hands are shaking. He wants to be mature, for once. He does not want to be the unfriendly boy who cares about others, even though he knows that the desire to clarify has the only purpose of removing that doubt and starting again, at least, to sleep at night.

"And when, otherwise?"

"Never?" Freddy blurts out, and raises his pitch-black eyebrows. disheveled, like always. Adorable. He snorts air and looks away, "Look, we both know it was an accident. I fell on you, it was raining, confusion ... you know how these things go, don't you? Type that seem blatant errors derived from – who knows what, and instead are only things that happen haphazardly. Adolescence, isn't it? You know".

"No, I don't know. I don't kiss everyone who falls on me by mistake. What kind of fucking speech is it?” Billy blurts out and knows he is, as always, hostile. That explanation Freddy gave him has no fucking meaning. It looks more like an excuse - the more he doesn't want to talk about it, the more he wants to do it.

"I'm trying to make sense of what happened because, you know, I don't think I got it! I'm not uncomfortable if you're asking. It went like this. Everything's over, isn't it? You didn't break my arm. so don’t panic."

Aaah, here we go again, thinks Billy and reveals that thought by raising his eyes to the sky. He picks up the comic and opens it. He does not read it, frowns and goes beyond those images. He is angry because Freddy is putting another wall in front of him, and he doesn't want to face that speech. Maybe it's really so; maybe it just really happened by mistake, and that's actually what's frighteningly bothering him. The incommunicability of feelings.

"Don't be offended now."

"I'm not offended, you said it's over. So, it’s okay” He replies lapidary and impatient. He no longer looks at him and has no intention of doing so. He wanted his answers and didn't have them. He was able to open the speech and Freddy cut him off. It will take another thousand years before he manages to open up that way.

"It doesn't seem all right to me. Indeed." He folds his arms over his chest, and Billy sees him out of the corner of his eye. He would like to shout Shazam! with so much impetus to make the walls tremble, strike him to punish him and then go back to being the usual, snout Billy Batson. "Only ... I don't know who started that thing. Me or You? I'm confused."

It is that confusion that makes him look up at him, although Freddy has pointed his eyes at the window thoughtfully. Who started it from? Ah, well, if Billy knew, he wouldn't be there asking the same thing; at least he knows that, after all, he is not sorry. What then, to call that fleeting and awkward touch of lips, makes him feel even more stupid.

"Maybe from me," he admits and when the other returns to look at him, with a raised eyebrow, he looks down at his comic strip and pretends it's more interesting than anything else in that room.

"I would have said tme. Why do you say it started from you? Do you see that it is not clear? "

"If I hadn't had the answer ready, saying that maybe coming from you, it was clear to me. Now it is no longer ", he replies, and feels an idiot. "Good job, Freddy."

"This conversation is becoming absurd. Are you stupid or what? Started from me, or from you? What if it started from both of us? Do you find the thing so impossible? "

"No, you idiot. The intent was precisely to understand if, indeed, this was precisely the reason why it happened," replies Billy, and finally has the strength to raise his eyes again to his own; they are there, bulging, confused, incredulous and disoriented. But aware. Maybe too much. It's scary, that's it. Freddy grabs the crutch. It curls its lips and then comes closer. He tells him, with a wave of his hand, to get up. He looks angry, he seems to want to face the truth. He, that little fellow who limps and who always seems so brave as to be close to be absurde. This time, however, Billy doesn't want to laugh. He looks up, still sitting, and opens his mouth slightly, unable to say half a word that is one.

"What do you want?" He asks, and Freddy rolls his eyes and snorts.

"I wanted it ... a little. A little. I don't know why, I still haven't understood what I feel, but I wanted it. You?” He opens his heart in front of him, brazen and embarrassed at the same time, as only he can be in his frail and ruffled person. It is more and more adorable, with each passing day. The more it opens up to feelings, the more vulnerable it becomes and, fuck, in need protection in some way.

Billy would like to make that possible forever. It’s a mission he particularly cares about; a thing of his own, which he will never reveal to anyone, not even Freddy; not even now, that he is getting up to kiss his lips and tell him, tacitly, all those things that he is not really able to externalize with words.

He has no idea how to give a real kiss. He never gave it to anyone, but Rocky kisses Adriana like that, like he's trying to do with Freddy. He took it by the collar of the Flash t-shirt, as red as his cheeks were, when he looked at it before closing his eyes and throwing himself into that demented attempt to show him that for him it's the same. His lips are soft, though he's messing with his teeth every time he's nervous. He caresses them with his and finds a boundless refuge. A new home, different from the one that Victor and Rosa gave him. An account is a family, an account is a heart. Billy opening his heart to Freddy and it hurts.

They separate after moments that seemed hours, perhaps centuries. Billy looks at him with the knowledge that he has made the biggest crap of his life, but he does not regret it. He wanted it. As Freddy revealed to him and now he has his eyes wide open on his, with the confused look of someone who has lost his memory and doesn't even know who he is anymore.

He would like to tell him that there is no problem, if in reality he does not feel the same. He would like to tell him that, in spite of everything, he hopes that everything can come back as before, although that gap will come back in full time. Maybe he will ask Rosa to change his room; maybe he will try to ignore it, until things come to him. He just wanted him to know, he just wanted it to be clear why it had happened under that porch, when even he wasn't so aware of his feelings.

He would like to tell him, but Freddy drops the crutch that makes a deafening mess against the floor. He puts his arms around his neck, in one of those liberating gestures that speak much more than other methods, like words spoken without meaning, because the mind is too blurred to put them together in an orderly way.

He hugs him. They never hugged each other before, but there is something that needs healing after that kiss. Teen confusion, first of all.

"I think it really started with both of us," he smiles slightly, and Freddy sighs a laugh in his shoulder.

"I told you. Stupid, fucking, idiot" he replies, with a very sweet insolence. Billy feels lighter, even if he's afraid of what's to come. He has never felt anything like this for anyone, and he is not so good at showing his feelings, but sooner or later it should have happened and he is infinitely happy that, after all, it happened with Freddy.