Chapter Text
Stanley tried to kill himself. Stanley. Stan the Man. He tried to kill himself. He tried to, he tried to—
Those are the words racing through Richie’s mind, the distant static of a feedback loop tingling inside his eardrums. Beverly had called Stanley’s wife, Patricia Uris, and through crackling tears she’d said the words: he slit his wrists in the bathtub.
He’s in a coma.
Richie wants to puke again, like he’d done before his disaster of a show. The nausea from Mike’s phone call had never truly dissipated in the first place, actually, and Richie thinks he might just shit his pants for good measure.
“Stanley,” Eddie intones, emotional yet firm. Richie tries to even out his breathing. “Pennywise knew! He knew before we did!”
“How?” Bill chokes, tears tracking down his cheeks in dual lines that shine against the restaurant’s glowing lights.
“Jesus, Bill, you want a fucking play-by-play?” Richie bites, irritated and upset and terrified as all hell. “He slit the fuck out of wrists so he wouldn’t have to come back to this shithole. Case closed.”
Just a few minutes ago they’d all been inside, scared out of their minds while nasty, gnarly creepy-crawlies attacked from every direction, and before that—before that, they’d been… happy, almost. No, they had been. Laughing and smiling, joking and poking fun, acting like dumb kids who never grew up and never forgot. Let’s take our shirts off and kiss! Yeesh. He could’ve had an aneurysm.
They can’t pretend now, after what they’d seen and remembered. Not when one of their own is hanging on by a thread, dangling so far out of their reach.
It feels like he’d seen Stanley just last week, but he couldn’t have. He didn’t even know a Stanley last week.
“N-n-no, Richie, fuck. I ju-just—”
Richie’s gaze is drawn from Bill to Beverly when a flame flicks to life beside her shaking hand. The yellow glow illuminates the tears dripping down her own cheeks, a mirror of Bill.
She’d always been a mirror of Bill, though, Richie thinks distantly. Bill in lipstick, sans the stutter and dead (missing) little brother, too alike for their own good. He swallows at the memory of Bill’s insistence, how he wouldn’t let Georgie go until he had undeniable proof, until it wasn’t giving up, only letting go.
But Richie’s not the only one with his attention on Bev. Ben’s looking at her too, as enraptured as he ever was. There’s something pinched in his gaze. Something confused. Something knowing.
“We have to stop it,” Mike declares, loud and half-desperate. Unreassuringly assured. “I have a plan—”
Richie’s brain pounds at the front of his skull.
“I got a plan! Get the fuck outta dodge before this end’s worse than one of Bill’s books! Who’s with me?”
He holds up his own hands, looks to the faces of the four surrounding him and feels an inkling of relief when Eddie raises his, expression apologetic, serious, but as dead-set as Richie feels deep in his chest.
“We—we made a promise to each other!”
Mike looks twenty-seven years younger when he says those words, voice tinged with the childlike softness he recalled, somehow, the moment he heard it on the phone. But Richie doesn’t know him anymore. He can’t, if it’s like this.
“So let’s un—let’s unmake the promise!”
“Richie, other people’re gonna die,” Ben tells him. Not quite in admonishment, merely earnest and selfless as all fuck. Richie has never particularly been either of those things, has he?
He wants to laugh. He splutters instead.
“People die every day, man! We don’t owe this town shit!” He’s waving his arms around—long to match his height, not gangly like when he was a kid, more muscled than those awkward teenage years—because he doesn’t know what to do with himself, can’t hold it all in, has to be seen and heard. “Plus, I just remembered I grew up here, like, two hours ago, so I’m fucking leaving. Fuck this!”
He turns towards his car as he says this, inching away step by step, and that relief from before blooms a little more behind his ribcage when Eddie begins to turn away with him, a half-assed wave thrown up to go along with a mumbled explanation when Mike comes at him in visible despair.
“Sorry, man, I’m with Richie.”
“Eds, please.”
“Listen. What, we stay, we die? That’s it?”
Richie’s rumbling Mustang cuts into Eddie’s voice, until, soon enough, he can’t hear it at all. The slam of the door shielding him from Derry’s eerie night air.
Richie takes a breath and begins to back up only after Eddie passes quickly behind his taillights, idles with his eyes trained on the black tarmac, peripheral still aware (always) of that small torso covered in a maroon jacket. Richie waits until Eddie’s rental backs up in front of him and drives away ahead, leading him out of the Parking Lot of Misery, where, with one glance in the rearview mirror, he spots Bev power-walking into the distance, Ben trailing her like a lost puppy. And then he sees Bill and Mike lingering near Jade of the Orient’s entrance, distant blobs in the dark, because of course. Bill could never let anything go, the fucking idiot.
Richie’s not about to play hero for a bunch of schmucks he couldn’t even remember the names of a day ago. (Welcome to the Losers Club!) And he sure as hell isn’t going to play hero for a town that did nothing but silence him in any way it could.
Stan had the right of it, he thinks. He’d always been the smartest.
* * *
“Let’s get our shit and get the fuck outta here.”
They’re booking it to the stairs when Bev swerves away, heading straight for the bar Richie glimpsed when he’d dropped his bag off before dinner. Eddie’s on his tail, asking Ben if he’d brought his stuff in like they had, nearly stepping on the heals of Richie’s sneakers when Ben says he’d left his stuff in his car.
Eddie mumbles on the ascent, words dripping constantly like a leaky faucet, all the way down the hall and to their rooms.
“What the fuck were we thinking? I knew this was a bad idea, I fucking knew it, but I still drove my ass all the way out here, and for what? Fucking Stanley, man. The fucking clown. Shit.”
Surprisingly, Richie remains silent. He lets Eddie mutter to himself because, for one thing, the little shit is saying everything that’s running also through his mind in that very moment and, for another, he ducks in and out of his room so quickly he doesn’t really have a chance to respond before his legs are carrying him back down the stairs.
There’s a vague sort of interest that piques in him when he sees Ben trying to stop Beverly from leaving the room, leaving her problems, leaving him. He’s not blocking the door, not forcing her to stay, but his presence is solid and his crackling voice is pleading, and Richie sees that the tears from earlier haven’t left Beverly’s wide green eyes.
“Whatever you guys are talking about, let’s make it happen fast, alright? We gotta go.” Gotta go before this town sucks us back in, before that bucktoothed bitch bites onto our ankles and drags us into the sewers where we’ll float, too. “Hey, Eduardo!” he calls to the ceiling. If he’s panicking, he tries not to let it show. “Ándale! Let’s go!”
He and Eddie need to just get the fuck out of here and they’ll be fine, he knows it. It’ll be easy twenty-seven years earned, just by leaving, but then what? He’d had fun at dinner, despite his nerves and reservations, before everything devolved into a spooky-scary-Goosebumps book. Seeing Eddie again, seeing the Losers, what a trip that’d been. They look the same, but older.
(Am I still handsome as an adult?
You grow into your looks.
What the fuck does that mean? Followed by amused chuckles. A tiny grin, tiny shorts, an even tinier snicker.
What about me?
Happy smile, bandage wrapped around and between unruly, curly hair.
The same, but taller. The same, but taller. The same, but taller.)
Will he forget again? Present Richie bristles at the thought, but Future Richie reminds him that he won’t fucking remember if he fucking forgets, and maybe it’s better that way. To forget before all the memories, the ones his body knows to dread but his mind can’t yet grasp onto, swim to the forefront of his consciousness like rapids. So let’s move, dipshit—
“There’s something you’re not telling us,” Ben croaks behind him. “You knew where Stanley was. You knew what he did. You knew.”
Richie turns at that, blood freezing in his veins. He steps closer and blurts the first thing his brain so eloquently provides.
“Wait, what?”
“I can’t do this,” Bev whispers, and Richie’s never known her to run from her problems before.
(I wanna run towards something, not away.)
Molly Ringwald’s changed. Twenty-seven years.
Bev moves past Ben, past Richie, stops at the empty front desk.
“She knew Stanley was gonna try to kill himself? Is that what she just said?”
Richie’s voice pitches higher at the end, but he still doesn’t sound as distressed as Ben and he doesn’t move as quick as Bev. He watches them flit around each other, feet glued to the floor. He notices Beverly’s distress spiking while Ben begs her to just talk, the way they used to.
“How did you know?”
“Because I saw it.” She breathes the words like she stole the very air from Richie’s own lungs. “I’ve seen all of us die.”
What the everloving, motherfucking—
It’s in that moment that Richie would assume a herd of elephants are stampeding down the stairs, what with all the racket Eddie’s small body makes on its descent.
“Okay, Richie,” he grunts, almost too fast to comprehend in his current state of shock. “I just gotta grab my toiletry bag and then we can go.”
Two huge suitcases drop down on the landing like they’re full of bricks. Or a fuckton of pills. Both options are useless.
Eddie looks at the trio with big brown eyes and thick, lowered brows. His lips are a straight line almost always, narrow cheeks dimpling even when the barest of frowns begins to form. He reminds Richie of the fucking 40 Year Old Virgin, with his stupid polo shirt and carefully combed hair. He’s short like Steve Carell, too. Cuter, by far.
And yet he still looks just like the tiny spitfire he used to be, only now with added lines and wrinkles, who would talk a mile a minute and never let Richie get away with shit. That was the fun of the game, wasn’t it? Richie would’ve pulled Eddie’s pigtails, if he’d had any, but he didn’t so he settled for fucking his mom instead—
And wow, Richie hasn’t told a “your mom” joke in years. The ones in the restaurant had flown from his mouth before he knew what he was saying. A reflexive response. It’s all about “my girlfriend,” these days. Not nearly as fun or rewarding, though equally untrue.
He blinks just as Eddie says, “What’d I miss?”
Richie doesn’t know how to answer. He doesn’t know anything anymore. Fuck it all.
* * *
Richie couldn’t say where the hell Bill and Mike ran off to. He cares, in a far-off way, because something could have happened to them and that’d be worse than awful, but the room is too small for any conversation outside of the one they’re currently having so he zooms into what’s just been said. His focus mostly ends up landing on Eddie as he paces footprints into the floor, however; tense hands on slim hips, walking like he’s got a fucking stick up his ass. Oh, Richie remembers that.
“Okay, so, what d’you mean that you’ve… seen us all die?”
“Yeah,” Richie chimes in, tone far more casual than he is on the inside. He’s fucking tired, man. He’s fucking old. “’Cause I gotta be honest, that’s a fucked up thing to just drop on somebody.”
He feels a little bad for saying so when Beverly wipes at the tears that still haven’t ceased. She doesn’t look at him, just stares straight ahead, dead-eyed. He can’t even offer her an awkward smile for reassurance, but he offers one to Eddie when the shorter man peeks over. The lines on his forehead manage to grow even deeper.
“Every night since Derry, I’ve—” her voice is wispy, “—I’ve been having these nightmares.” Eddie turns away, attempts to pace again, stops before he can start. His dimples are even more prominent now with the level of grimace he’s sporting. “People in pain, p-people dying, people…”
“So you have nightmares,” Eddie interrupts, insincerely flippant, before Beverly can start crying for real. Richie doesn’t know if it’s tactful or oblivious. Probably the latter, coming from Eddie. “I have nightmares! People, they have nightmares! But that doesn’t mean that your visions are true!”
Eddie’s waving his hands around and looming over Beverly and smiling like a fucking weirdo, and Richie thinks he might be trying to stave off an asthma attack. Panic attack. He’d never had actual asthma, Richie knows that much.
It’s isn’t real. He remembers Bill telling him that inside the house on Neibolt, after he’d seen Eddie spit up oozy black sizzling blood—the same stuff that was at the restaurant. (There was a bat, not of the baseball variety, too. And why did that seem so fucking familiar?) He remembers Bill saying those words when they were trapped behind bullshit doors conjured by It, and all Richie wanted to do was run towards Eddie’s terrified screams—
It isn’t real. But this is. Here, in this moment, in the center of Derry. Stanley tried to kill himself. Beverly’s had visions of them all dying. How much worse can this get?
Bev turns to Eddie, eyes wide and scared, more scared than anyone should ever be. “I’ve watched every single one of us—” Her voice trembles so hard she can’t even finish her declaration.
“You’ve seen every single o-one of us wh-what?”
Bill. He sounds just like he did when they were 13, an octave lower than before but still so soft, still so convicted, still so broken by uncontrollable stuttering. He’d been fine before the Pennywise talk started, before the fear gave itself a name. His voice had been the first thing that struck Richie at Jade—well, right after his shockingly short stature and those streaks of gray in his hair.
Richie remembers Bill giving a speech in front of the well-house, so cheesy and motivational and real that even Richie couldn’t make fun of it. He remembers Bill hadn’t stuttered once. He gets down to Bev’s level, looks her in the eye, and for a moment they share that same gaze again, that same thread of bravery, that same familiar wavelength.
“The place where Stanley—” She stops herself, takes a shaky breath, still can’t finish it.
“Stanley’s not d-dead yet, right? His wife s-s-said he was in a coma. He could w-wa-wake up.”
Bev nods absently, unconvinced by the correction but not refuting it.
“The place he could wind up… He will. And that’s how we end.”
End. Shit, they really are gonna fucking die, aren’t they? Big Bill Denbrough really wrote them into a corner here. Richie would rather go back to puking and getting heckled on stage. He kind of liked it, if he was being real. He’d always liked people spitting biting words his way, never really knew why until Eddie Kaspbrak popped back into his world.
Eddie. He’s starting to gasp for breath next to Ben.
“Hey, how come the rest of us aren’t seeing that shit?” (Can only virgins see this shit? Why had that fucking fortune cookie been looking at him?) “I mean, what—what makes her so different?”
“The Deadlights.”
Of course Mike knows. All that freaky-deaky research in his handy-dandy-notebook. Of course he’d get it first. But Richie’s thrown for another loop, even more so when Bill nearly chokes when realization hits him.
“The D-Deadlights.”
Bill stares straight ahead, at Richie but not at Richie, past Richie, into the literal past. Their time in the sewer, the cistern. Richie can see it in his own mind’s eye. Can recall.
They were chasing after Bill through the greywater, stopping in front of Beverly as she hovered, lifeless, in the air.
Floating.
Ben shouted tearfully. Used their help to reach up, pull her down. Cried when he hugged her and she stayed as still as a doll, like the one in the coffin in that stupid ass clown room.
And he’d kissed her, right? Ben had laid one on her and Richie thinks he might have gagged, for a moment, before he understood what was happening. He joked so much about kissing girls, fucking Eddie’s mom, but the reality of it was kind of gross, wasn’t it? He could only ever imagine it with—
“She was the only one of us that got c-caught in the Deadlights that day.”
“We were all touched by It,” Mike explains, a little too giddy for Richie’s tastes. Or maybe manic is the word he’s looking for. Still not great. “Changed, deep down. Like an infection or a virus. A virus! You understand?”
He zooms in on Eddie again as Ben gets up to stride over to Beverly, who’s pulled out another cigarette. Chain smoker. Richie wants to snatch it from between her lips to steal a puff.
And Eddie, the poor fucker, slips past Mike with his hands in the air like even just the mention of a virus is going to kill him where he stands. He turns to look at them, look at Richie, with soulful eyes that always showed so much but never enough.
“Slowly growing. That virus, it’s been growing for twenty-seven years. This whole time! Metastasizing! It just got to Stan first because—”
“He was the weakest.”
It’s Richie who says that, though it doesn’t register at first. His voice sounds deeper, even to his own ears. Detached. Does he mean it? He thinks he does, but not in a way that’s intended to be mean or bad.
Stan had always been different. Peculiar in a way that even Eddie wasn’t. Sure, the little hypochondriac loved to complain and bluster and shout until his face turned red, but he still got shit done when it came down to the wire. He was brave. Brave in a way that even the rest of them weren’t. Eddie never thought so himself, but he was; walking through greywater, jumping to the front lines to throw rocks at ugly bullies, cleaning blood from Ben’s stomach and Beverly’s bathroom despite his seismic fear of AIDS, running away from his mommy to help the friends who needed him even after said friends let him break his arm and get drooled on by some batshit alien creature dressed as a big-headed clown.
Stan, in some ways, had been more delicate than Eddie. Because no matter how much he argued, Eddie believed. In the Losers, in It, in Richie. Stan, who’d been traumatized in those sewers maybe more than any of them had—except maybe Bill and Beverly—couldn’t believe, didn’t want to. Was probably the happiest out of anyone that he’d forgotten until Mike dropped a bucket of icy truth over his head. Guess Stanley could not cut it.
And God, Richie feels like the biggest fucking asshole for even thinking that, but it’s true. Because that’s what Pennywise does. He takes your truths and he fucks you over. Makes you afraid of everything and especially yourself until you want to leave it all behind. Until you’d be forced to relive it all and come home.
“Jesus,” Bill whispers. Richie feels a prickle of shame. “Jesus Christ, Rich.”
“I’m just sayin’ what everyone else is thinking, man.”
“I mean—” Eddie shakes his head the way he always did when Richie went too far. It’s not a joke this time and it wasn’t meant to be. “Richie. Come on.”
“What Beverly sees,” Mike wastes no time launching right back into his spiel, “it’ll all come to pass. It’ll happen to all of us, eventually, unless we stop it.”
Shit, fuck, shit.
Richie needs a drink or ten, but most importantly he needs to hold onto something before his legs give out and he collapses on the floor like a jackass. He hurries to stand behind the bar, shooting Mike a look that says “when the fuck did you get so crazy” while leaning against the sticky countertop. Eddie’s lips curl so far around his teeth that they become nonexistent.
“How the hell are we supposed to do that?”
“The Ritual of Chüd.” Mike pauses long enough for Richie’s jaw to slacken because, seriously, what the fuck. “The Shokopiwah, the first ones who fought it, they have a saying. All living things must abide by the shape they inhabit.”
“A tribal ritual? Are you—are fucking kidding me, man?” Richie shouts, a huff of a laugh escaping his nostrils. He’s at the end of his rope now. So is Eddie, judging by the way his eyebrows shoot up as if to say ‘yeah, are you fucking kidding us, man?’ “Alright, there’s gotta be another way, okay? This thing comes back, what, every twenty-seven years? Let’s kick the can down the road and do it then.”
That gives Eddie pause, his face scrunching up in a way that’s stupid and adorable, like he’s been sucking on a lemon. He bisects his hand through the air, fingers held tight together, the middle jutting out to point at Richie accusingly. It’s so achingly familiar that Eddie’s face smooths out for a flash, baby cheeks and doe eyes and round chin transporting Richie somwehre else for half a second.
“Wait. We’ll be seventy years old, asshole!”
Richie can’t do anything but stare, honestly. Mouth wide around words he can’t so much as think, shoulders rising and falling with a breath that doesn’t help. Shit, he thinks for the millionth time. Maybe he’ll get lucky and keel over at 69, then. Heh.
“It doesn’t work that way,” Beverly manages to say, re-finding herself among the chaos. She looks like she’s going to cry again, like she might need a puff of Eddie’s inhaler instead of that cigarette. “None of us make it another twenty years and… the way it happens…”
Her breath catches. Richie downs a shot, his eyes never leaving hers. He feels like he can’t look anywhere else or he might crack at any moment.
“If we don’t beat It this cycle…” Ben trails, voice so gravelly that it takes a moment for Richie to understand what he’d said.
Bill has no such trouble.
“We die.”
“Horribly,” Eddie adds, factual beneath thin panic.
“Yeah, I don’t need the horribly part.”
“I didn’t say it,” Eddie grouses, eyes closed like he can’t bring himself to look at Richie’s face, or maybe he can’t bring himself to look at anything. It’s all too palpable. “She said it, not me.”
“Alright, guys, look.” Bill draws them all to silence, stepping back into those dusty old Leader Shoes because they need something concrete to understand. “I’ve seen w-wh-what he’s taking about and i-it’s all true. It’s the only way. If we want this ritual to work…”
He looks to Mike, who seems relieved by the support.
“We have to remember.”
Richie doesn’t like the sound of that. Not one bit.
“Remember what?”
* * *
Derry looks deserted at this hour. The Town That Dreaded Sundown. There’s no one around, literally not a soul for miles—except for the six bozos currently ambling down the street in hurried strides—and the air is too cool for August, even through Richie’s leather jacket, and when he glances at Eddie, in his thin little zip-up, he wonders if there’s ice prickling at the back of his neck, too.
Missing posters litter the streets alongside fallen leaves and crumpled trash, spread out along dry gravel and dirt, the black and white faces of unknown children staring up at him with blurry eyes frozen in their emotions. Richie knows they’ll never feel anything again.
His fingers, which are curled tight within the confines of his pockets, rub against the ridges of his car keys, against balled up gum wrappers, against a matchbook he’d snatched from Jade of the Orient, against a crinkled receipt for gas and a Coke he’d paid for not long after he’d entered the state of Maine. The Way Life Should Be, his ass. They’re well on their way to whatever destination Mike has in mind, but the blast from the past has already started, slowly trickling into Richie’s awareness with a surprising pang of nostalgia.
The trip through the main drag goes by quickly, with Richie’s gaze zeroed in on Mike as he leads the way, only flickering to Eddie every few steps because something might pop out at them any second and he needs to know how long it’ll take to drag them both away. Just in case.
Richie remembers, with startling clarity, the rock fight they’d had with Bowers and his gang once they start down over that hill, past the water below and the train-tracks above, through tall grass and taller weeds, and he remembers how Bev had nailed Henry on the head to save Mike. Homeschool. He remembers Stanley (nice throw) and shouting a war cry before his head exploded with pain that’d knocked him off his feet, thick glasses remaining thankfully unbroken. He remembers Eddie screeching, his tiny body hopping down to get closer, his throws full of rage and care, just like himself.
They traverse the hill with Richie bringing up the rear, gaze on Eddie’s back instead of his profile, and he remembers that just as well, the time the Losers Club had become officially official with its last member. Lucky number seven.
The barrens come next. Sewer water rushes out from its mouth, lapping over steady stones. Eddie’s the only one who rolls up the ankles of his pants, forever cautious and so fucking dorky. He pulls them back down over his wet, skinny ankles once they all disappear through the treeline to crowd gnarled trunks and overgrown roots, circling each other with a warm sense of awareness. Ben can’t stop smiling.
“This is where we came,” he says, soft and low and happy, “after the rock fight.”
With beams of sunlight shining through tall branches, bathing them in heat and memory, Richie’s brought back to something else. Someplace else.
“The clubhouse…”
And then they all start smiling, the way Ben had been from the start. Beverly laughs. “You built that for us!” she exclaims, motioning to Ben’s proud expression.
“Yeah!” Richie’s insides tremble with childish excitement. “Yeah, yeah, yeah! The hatch’s gotta be around here somewhere—”
“You did!” Eddie shouts, finger pointing through the air. His fist covers his thin mouth, though it does nothing to hide those deep fucking dimples or the squint of his dark eyes. “Yeah, yeah I do remember that!”
Richie does, too.
~*~
He’s thirteen, head matted to his forehead with sweat, oversized overshirt billowing in the slight breeze, clumsy fingers wiggling too-big glasses in front of too-big eyes. His head aches but he couldn’t be happier. Climbing down into a hole in the earth, fitted with beams of wood for what looks like every inch, he’s also a little amazed.
“What the dick is this?” he asks aloud. He sounds disbelieving even to his own ears, perhaps a little jealous that the New Kid might turn out cool. “How’d you build it?”
“When did you build it?” Bill counters, like his question is better. Richie doesn’t care. He’s too busy darting around all the dust and dirt, looking for worms and pebbles in the walls.
Ben sounds shy, somewhat proud, when he replies.
“Here and there, I guess. It was already dug out for something, so I just had to reinforce the walls and get some, uh, wood for the roof door, and that’s pretty much it.” He grins, chubby cheeks looking splotchy in the low-light, and leans against the nearest beam. “Pretty good for my first time, huh?”
Part of the ceiling falls to the floor with a giant thud.
It startles them all—well, except Richie. He tries hard not to laugh.
“Now that’s a cool feature! What happens when you put your hand on the other pillar, Professor?”
Eddie can’t and won’t let this slide.
“Okay, you see, this is exactly why we have safety codes!” He launches into it straight away, his skinny, bare legs carrying him towards Ben in swift, confident strides, hands slapping together for emphasis. “Why there are permits! This place is a death trap, d’you understand that?”
“Well,” Ben looks down, voice suddenly quiet, “it’s a work in progress, okay, Eddie?”
Richie almost feels bad for the guy, truly. Eddie can be stinging when he wants to, and especially when he doesn’t want to, but all that wrath coming out of such a tiny body? Richie won’t ever not find that amusing. It’s a sight to behold.
“Just so you know, if I get hurt you’re reliable, and also—” Eddie turns abruptly, hand shooting out to smack a dusty rectangle chained to a beam. “What is this? The switch from an iron maiden?”
“It’s a flashlight.”
“And what is that, a horse hitch? When do you have horses down—oh, this is cool.”
The tirade stops momentarily when Eddie sets his eyes on a paddle ball, of all things. His frown turns upward into a soft little smirk. It makes the back of Richie’s throat go dry.
“That was like three dollars, so be careful with that, please,” Ben tries, but Eddie’s isn’t listening.
“I have one of these,” he boasts, self-satisfied, like it’s the latest cassette from Sonic Youth or a fresh copy of MAD and not some shitty little children’s toy. “Hey, Stan, you see this?”
He bangs the red ball against the paddle, the string stretching out taut mere inches from Stanley’s face, making the curly-haired boy flinch.
“Yeah, okay, can—can you maybe not…?”
“Maybe not what?”
s mack smack smack smac k
Richie’s leaning against one of the beams, head tilted, Bill and Bev watching the scene unfold just as blankly beside him, but he knows with certainty that they aren’t feeling the same long-suffering fondness spreading through their chests how he is, slow and steady, like spilled glue trickling out atop those rickety wooden school desks.
“Yeah, yeah, hold on. Maybe not what? Maybe not what, be awesome and have fun and celEBRATE THE MAGIC OF THE PADDLE BAAAALL—!”
Someone’s still hyped up on adrenaline, Richie thinks amusedly. He blinks, lips pursing when the paddle flies right out of Eddie’s hand, nearly hitting Stan in the process. Ben watches forlornly as the ball snaps off the string and dribbles away to land somewhere between dirty wooden slats.
“Wow,” Eddie huffs. “Oh, good going, fucknut, you broke his thing!”
“I broke it?” Stan repeats indignantly, and yeah, Richie can see why. Because, god, Eddie is such a fucking little shithead, the most annoying person in existence, outside of Richie himself—a title he holds proudly—and—
“Yeah! You broke it with your face!”
“What?”
—and there’s a moment, briefly, where he wants to jump in and say some stupid shit just to pull Eddie’s attention off of Stan and onto himself. Because he craves it, feels itchy when it’s been too long without a snipe or a stare, but he brushes it off as quickly as the urge comes. He’s tired, not really in the mood for bickering when he can feel all his well-earned bruises begin to form and pulse.
“I’m not putting my fucking hand down there!” Eddie announces, like any of them assumed he would. It’s almost enough to draw Richie’s tongue out into a quip about Eddie putting his hand down somewhere else. Almost. Common sense stops him from going there.
~*~
Young Eddie wouldn’t risk shoving his grubby little hands into a dark slot just for some dumb, broken toy, but Older Eddie doesn’t seem to share the same qualms. He’s relaxed for the moment, Richie can tell from way over in the dark corner he’d stepped into, as he blows away the top layer of dust covering the ball that’s caked in twenty-seven years’ worth of grime. His smile isn’t a smirk, now, but something gentler, matching with everyone else. Richie still feels it in the back of his throat, stronger than ever before.
“Hey, Losers!” He aims for ‘killer clown from outer space’ but sounds more like ‘drunk hobo in the back alley.’ Still, everyone twists around, their smiles dropping, flinching and stumbling away. “Time to float!”
Ben falls into a sitting position. Mike raises a bat. Bill bangs his head on a low beam.
Richie steps forward, ducking down to fit, cackling the whole time. The wide-eyed, flat-mouthed expression on Eddie’s face makes him grin like a loon.
“Dude!”
“Remember when he used to say that shit? He’d do that little dance.”
Richie’s arms go back and forth, stilted and silly, throat clicking with a tune that vaguely reminds him of any circus ever. No one laughs. Beverly’s ignoring him, in fact, and Eddie looks like he’s testing whether or not his glare could slap Richie all the way from where he’s kneeling.
“Am I the only one who remembers this shit?”
“Are you gonna be like this the entire time we’re home?” Eddie all but shouts. He’d always been a loud little fucker.
Richie twists his mouth, feeling oddly reprimanded, not wasting any time shoving his hands back into his pockets. He feels safe that way. Bundled up. Closed off.
“Alright, just trying to add some levity to this shit. I’ll go fuck myself.”
Beverly can’t help but smile, just a tad, trying hard to hide it as she immerses herself in old trinkets. Richie catches it as he turns away with a whistle, salvaging the moment in that one small way.
“It smells so fucking terrible in here…” he whispers to no one, and then he bites his tongue when ‘it’s your breath, wafting back into your face’ nearly rolls right off it.
The clubhouse does smell rancid, though. Like something fucking crawled down here and died. Probably a racoon or a squirrel… hopefully not a human, but who the hell can be sure? It’s also dark and overgrown and more subdued than it’s ever been, as if someone slapped one of those sepia-toned filters over the whole area, leaving the Losers and their imaginations to make up for the loss of color.
Unwound cassettes, crusted comics, flattened boxes of Whoppers and crushed cans of Shasta. There’s a dirty action figure poking out from beneath a pile of books and tape covers, a faded Lost Boys poster on the wall. Someone’s old coat hangs from the plank swing. A pile of trash is piled near a crate.
They’d had some good memories in this clubhouse. Mike helping Ben reconstruct the support beams to be sturdier, Bill and Eddie dropping stacks of goodies down the ladder for everyone to share, Beverly and Richie making mixtapes on the boombox Richie always hauled back and forth from his house to the barrens, Stanley bringing blankets or flashlights or snacks that weren’t full of salt and sugar.
“Hey, you guys? It’s S-S-Stan. For the use of L-Lo-Losers only.”
Richie stops in his tracks at the sound of Bill’s voice cutting through the silence.
“Bill,” Eddie swallows, tilting his head like he’s ready to rear back.
Richie’s jaw itches. He hunches in on himself as far he can.
It’s a shower cap that Bill pulls out. Bill, who, in that moment, looks so much like Stanley, standing there with boyish innocence written all over his face.
And then it is Stanley, in Richie’s memory. Pulling that souvenir out of a cleaned coffee tin, the label on the front taped neatly with perfect blocky letters written across. As perfect as a teenage boy could manage, anyhow.
Richie can see Stanley, his shirt buttoned up all the way to the neck, curls tucked carefully beneath the elastic band of his own patterned cap. And Richie can hear a bumping beat nearby, some 80s track they all played too much but enjoyed every time. He can feel the hammock—the hammock—swaying beneath him, the object of Stanley’s masterful idea smooth and crinkly beneath his fingertips when he plucks it from his grasp…
~*~
“The fuck is this?”
“It’s so you don’t get spiders stuck in your hair when you’re down here.”
“Stanley, we’re not afraid of fucking spiders.”
He throws it down, causing Stan’s smile to drop into the fastest scowl Richie’s ever seen, and then the birdlike boy jerks away in a silent huff. Richie settles back into the hammock, comic held in both hands, when he senses Mike, Bill, Bev, and Eddie freezing in the corner. Glancing over, he sees that they’re in the middle of tucking their hair into Stanley’s dumbass anti-spider safety hats.
He blinks at them, not sure where exactly he went wrong in showing these losers how not to be so lame, and sighs through his nose.
“I stand corrected.”
He doesn’t expect Eddie, of all people, to rip his cap away from his head the second Richie pokes fun, flinging it to the floor like it suddenly has cooties, but it happens and Richie doesn’t know why. He doesn’t think it should matter enough to make his chest feel tight, though it does, and Eddie’s bewildered expression, fucking doe eyes looking caught and alarmed, has Richie staring at his comic with renewed interest.
Bev laughs. For a second he thinks it’s because of Eddie trying to look cool for him—yeah right, you freak—but then she says, through cigarette smoke and a grin, “That’s a first,” and the relief is immediate.
“Touche.”
Through his peripheral, marred only slightly by the huge-ass frames pressed against his face, he spots Eddie striding purposefully forward. He’s wearing those red shorts again, the ones that seem too small even for someone as short as Eddie, and a ThunderCats shirt that matches the figure propped up against the boombox. Dork.
“Hey, Rich. Your ten minutes are up.”
He sighs, rolling his head back to glance up at Eddie’s face, one of the rare times he doesn’t have to look down instead.
“What’re you talking about?”
“The hammock! Ten minutes each was the rule.”
Richie almost snorts. The rule? It’s summer. No fucking rules until they’re corralled like animals and dragged screaming through the hallways for a whole ‘nother year of tests and detention. So he looks around innocently, knowing it’ll tickle Eddie’s angry bone just right, and shrugs.
“I don’t see any sign.”
“Are you being this way right now?” Bingo. “Really? No, no, no, no. Why would there be a sign if it was a verbal agreement!?”
“I don’t think—”
“I remember you—”
“I don’t think—!”
“—agreeing on the fucking rule!”
He can’t get a word in edgewise, not with Eddie’s incessant bitching, but it wouldn’t do any good anyways because the next thing Richie knows is Eddie launching himself forward without any care towards, you know, not tipping them out onto the floor or unraveling the ropes that stretch and creak with the weight of two teenage boys.
Richie’s nose scrunches irritably, arms coming up to protect his face when Eddie’s shoe threatens to slam into his jaw. And Eddie’s shorts, which are already too short, ride up even further, making Richie’s body seize when he can’t help but glimpse up the leg holes.
He doesn’t want to think about Eddie’s underwear. Shit! That would be gross, right? Disgusting. Nothing at all like Bev in hers, nope, no way. They were blue, right? Eddie’s are white. They always are. He wears whitey-tighties, just like the rest of them, but Richie had never really looked this close and they’re just as small as those stupid fucking shorts and—
“Ugh! I can see your vagina!” he shouts because, really, what else can Richie say? He’s getting an eyeful without even asking for one. Not like he ever would ask, but— but—
“Ten! Minutes! Each!” Eddies shrieks, eyes twinkling. Richie thinks he might be enjoying this a little more than he should. Eddie, he means. Definitely not himself. He’s annoyed, nothing more.
“Go back in your dumb little stupid corner!”
They’re shouting at each other, nonsense like always, as the hammock sways dangerously, threatening to toss them if they keep it up. But Eddie won’t stop wiggling in his attempt to get his growing limbs to lay comfortably over Richie’s gangly ones.
“—I fucked your mom!” he shouts with conviction, trying to ignore the turbulent pit growing in his gut by focusing on the uncomfortable angle Eddie’s forced them into, all their bony points digging into sensitive flesh.
“No you didn’t! Take that back, dickface!”
“Fuck you!”
It’s a game, Richie knows, maybe even more than Eddie does, and it’s his favorite to play. He can’t help himself when it comes to his fanny-pack wearing friend, he just gets so riled up at even the smallest of comments to leave Richie’s perpetually chapped lips.
Eddie’s lips always look smooth because he wears chapstick like a weirdo, probably the same one his mommy uses, and hey—Richie can store that one away for a rainy day, see how long it takes to get Eddie all flailing and threatening the next time things go too quiet.
Richie doesn’t like the quiet. He doesn’t like where it could lead.
“Why do your toes smell like your mom?”
“Your ass has been there for twenty-three minutes!”
And oh, right, they’re still arguing. Richie hadn’t even realized he’d continued spewing shit at Eddie, who’d been spewing it right back with extra fervor. It’s their natural setting and there are no giggles or grins or cracks in their act, just pouted lips and high voices and eyes that shine like they weren’t truly living until they were living in these infuriating moments.
Richie doesn’t want to wonder why no one else cares that he’s been hogging the hammock for as long as he has. He doesn’t want to wonder why it’s just Eddie who wants his turn, who would rather climb in with him than grab the cloth and shake him out the way Stan would. He doesn’t want to, but it crosses his mind regardless.
It doesn’t mean anything.
They grow quiet after Eddie plucks the comic straight from Richie’s hands, allowing the hammock to settle under their shapes, allowing them to once again able to hear the low thumping of the music and Ben’s little conversation with Beverly just a foot away. He’s talking about leaving for the summer, Richie thinks. Some program to teach him about architecture.
“I’ll do that,” Richie interrupts. One of his hands rests unthinkingly upon Eddie’s smooth calf, above the tight cuff of a sock, trying to make the little gremlin sit still. His arm tingles a little, probably from loss of circulation. And the heat on the back of his neck is because it’s as hot as the Satan’s balls today. “I’ll do anything to get the hell out of Derry.”
Richie reclaims his stolen comic by yanking it out of Eddie’s loose grasp. He hadn’t been reading it, had barely been rifling through the pages, but now he has nothing to focus on so his gaze stops on Richie’s face and doesn’t leave. The leg on Richie’s right has stilled, thanks to his grounding touch, but the one on his left has a mind of its own, kicking up to rest near Richie’s shoulder. Eddie stares at him with raised brows as he purposefully pesters Richie after his rushed admission, rubbing his socked foot against his cheek in a taunting caress.
Richie shoves that foot away with a scowl. He’s irrationally angry by the fact that the little shit’s feet don’t even stink.
“Man, when I graduate, I’m going to Florida.”
Mike had propped himself atop the swing at some point during The Richie and Eddie Comedy Hour. He looks at them with a smile that conveys all the happiness he feels for just being with the Losers and thinking about a future away from this shitshow.
“What’s in Florida, Mike?” Ben asks, curious and interested in a way that Richie thinks only Ben could be.
“I dunno,” he says, unable to stop himself from grinning at the idea. “You know, I guess it’s just a place I always wanted to go.”
“Stan, you should go with Mike to Florida.”
Richie’s focus is on the curly-haired boy who’d just sat down, back stiff and straight as a board, but he thinks Eddie’s biting back a grin, eyes screwed shut tight as he holds back laughter. Richie is hyper aware of sharp knuckles drag against the seam of his jeans, near the inside of his bent knee.
His comment does its job of catching Stan’s attention. When he looks over, Richie continues.
“You already act eighty! You’d clean up with all the grandmas.”
The kissy noises he makes gets some giggling—from Eddie, mostly, which puffs him up with pride—and crooked smiles. But not from Stan. He’s as serious as he’s ever been.
“Do… do you guys think we’ll still be friends?”
There’s a shift in the air that even Richie notices, mostly through the trepidation in Stan’s voice, and the question itself? Richie would never admit to thinking the same thing every now and then, when he says something a little too stupid or mean, takes a joke a little too far, pisses Eddie off in a way that’s terrifying instead of exhilarating.
But he and Stan have always been different, in some way. Stan being an uptight Jew and Richie being a trashmouthed f—
“When we’re older?” Stan prompts, eyes darting around the room when the silence stews for too long.
“What?” Ben shakes with kind laughter, like he can’t believe the question because he’s never entertained the idea. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“Do—do any of your parents still hang out with their friends from middle school?”
No, Richie thinks. The Toziers hang out with a bunch of nosy assholes who smoke cigars and talk about politics and all the ways the youth these days are ruining the good of America.
They’re so boring that Richie wants to cry, or maybe that part’s because his parents are always fixated on their friends and jobs and don’t have time to sit down for dinner most nights. Don’t have time time to ask how their son is doing outside of his surprisingly solid grades, don’t have time to ask about his best friends or if he’s made any new ones, don’t have time to ask why he acts up in class or why he’s been having trouble sleeping lately.
He watches Stan with a frown, not wanting to say he’s right, not wanting to even think it. He hates when Stan knows.
Richie feels himself frowning just before his eyes narrow on instinct; because of Eddie’s foot, which has found its way to his face again, and because of the fucking caressing. When Richie doesn’t look his way the little fucknut just… just uses his toes to lift Richie’s glasses off of their perch on his nose, kicking them away to land on the floor with a clatter.
Stanley starts speaking again, but all Richie can do is roll his eyes at the jackass he calls his best friend and grit his teeth as Eddie slaps him on the cheek and temple with the flat of his foot.
Eddie doesn’t touch anyone the way he touches Richie. Never has and hopefully never will. It’s a simple fact of life. Eddie rarely touches anyone, too afraid he’ll catch their germs, but there are exceptions he makes on occasion—more and more these days, with all the Losers—and with Richie especially. Like now, here in the hammock, glued together by the sticky heat of their bodies. Like a few days prior when he’d ridden with Eddie all the way home after a handful of hours at the clubhouse, where he’d stayed up in Eddie’s Leave It to Beaver bedroom for a handful more. Like then, at the quarry, when they’d swam close in cloudy water and Eddie had grabbed onto his head and shoulders, bony knees dug into Richie’s pale back, pretending to drown him in retaliation for whatever stupid comment he’d flung out into the air.
Stan’s question hits Richie harder, once he breaks it down. Judging by the way Bev starts puffing on her cigarette again, it hits her the same way. Richie Tozier can’t imagine ever not being friends with Eddie Kaspbrak.
“—We all might be different.”
“We’ll always s-stay friends,” Bill says gently, believing each word. “I don’t think that just g-g-goes away because we get older.”
“Yeah, Stan, come on.” Bev’s smiling, though Richie doesn’t think it reaches her eyes quite right. “You don’t have to be so—”
~*~
“Sad.”
Richie’s back in the present, brought forth by Bev’s quiet utterance, breaking the memory they all seemed to have collectively shared. His vision is blurry behind his lenses.
Stanley… he had been right. They stopped being friends when they left Derry, one by one. It’d been a forced separation caused by the town’s weird alien magic, but it’d been a separation nonetheless. They’d lost each other for over two decades and now, together again, even under extremely fucked up circumstances, Stan isn’t around to see it. To revel in all the memories that wouldn’t stop kicking them in the gut.
Richie’s tempted to ask Eddie what percentage of coma victims actually wake up, but he’s pretty sure no statistic in the world has ever taken into account unpredictable powers that can’t be explained. Not like Pennywise would somehow save their friend or anything, Richie’s an idiot but not a delusional one, it’s just… they can’t know for sure. Stanley isn’t dead yet.
But he’d been right about them. Richie still hates that.
“He was old before his time,” Ben’s gravelly voice murmurs.
“Yeah.” Eddie won’t look up from the floor. Richie wonders if his eyes are blurry, too. “Wonder what he—what he’s like, all grown up.”
“Probably what he was like as a kid,” Richie breathes. The weight of his words from earlier—he’s a fucking pussy, he won’t show; he was the weakest—crash into him like a stampede. He meets Bill’s eye and manages to quirk his lips enough to convey a smile that hurts all the same. “The best.”
It soothes Bill as much as the other words had upset him. He tosses one of the shower caps to Richie, who doesn’t throw it down this time.
“Alright, Mike…”
The clubhouse suddenly feels stifling in a way it never used, especially when he catches sight of a heap that looks suspiciously like their old hammock. He and Eddie had shared it again, a couple times after the first. He’d climbed in with Richie, with his pointy elbows and yappy voice, after, what? A half an hour of Richie pushing his luck? He remembers feeling like his ass had fallen asleep and he’d curse himself for being stupid enough to test whether or not Eddie’s resolve would crumble to the point of deciding to share again, if he just waited long enough, and then he’d choke on his saliva because that scrappy little punk would practically straddle his stomach for lack of a better way of climbing in. His socks were always clean, a strange floral scent almost making him sneeze anytime those toes nearly went up Richie’s nostrils. He’d tickled the back of Eddie’s knees, sometimes, and laze in the braying laughter that followed.
“...What’re we doing here?”
“The ritual. To perform it, it requires a sacrifice.”
Oh, of course. What else? Richie would think Mike was pulling their leg if he didn’t look so grim.
“Sacrifice? I nominate Eddie!”
“Wait—” He sounds so much like he used to, betrayed by Richie’s words, that it takes everything in him not to laugh. “What?”
“Because you’re little. You’ll fit on a barbecue.”
Eddie’s face manages to do two things at once: flood with relief at the realization that it was just a joke, like everything with Richie is, and then scrunch with indignation at being the butt of said joke, yet another to come out of Richie’s trashy mouth. Eddie had always been Richie’s favorite subject, after all. Years apart hadn’t changed that.
“I’m 5’9! That’s, like, average height in most of the world,” he grumbles, nodding along to his own words like that could make them any more truthful.
“It’s not that kind of s-ss-sacrifice, guys.” Bill, ever the party-pooper, interrupts. “Mike?”
“The past is buried, but you’re gonna have to dig it up. Piece by piece. And these pieces, these artifacts? That’s why we’re here. They are what you’ll sacrifice. And since Stan isn’t here to find his… I figured we should all be there together to find his artifact.”
Eddie slides one of the caps he’d gotten from Bill onto his head. He keeps it on, unlike before, probably because Richie doesn’t say anything against it. He can’t. If he did it’d be some stupid flowery shit about how adorable he looks because fuck, he does. Eddie is a forty year old man but still manages to be cute, with his big eyes and bigger dimples.
“I think Bill just did that,” Eddie tells them factually.
A cute dumb idiot who’s definitely right.
They climb out of the clubhouse one by one, needing a little bit of help on the way up, unlike when they were spry and thirteen. Bev and Bill sit almost back to back on a rock near where Richie stands, scratching a hand through his hair like a madman. Now that he’s remembered Stan’s words about spiders, he thinks his younger self was a dumbfuck. He doesn’t want to get bitten by a widow or a recluse and kick it before all’s said and done. Dying by sewer clown is only marginally better, but oh well, they’re knee-deep in it now.
Once Mike’s done helping Ben get back out into the open air, Eddie ambles over to stand by Richie.
“Okay, so, where do we find our tokens?”
“Yeah, I gotta be honest, man! All due respect. This is fucking stupid, alright?” Richie glances around at the others to gauge how they’re feeling. It’s hard to tell. “Why do we need tokens, alright? We already remember everything, uh… saving Bev, defeating It. I mean, we’re caught up!”
“Not everything,” Mike tells him, calm and collected and pissing Richie off. “We fought, but what happened after that? Before the house on Neibolt. Think.”
Richie’s lips part, but there’s a disconnect between his voice and his brain. Or, more accurately, his brain can’t remember shit but his voice wants to be heard regardless. Bill speaks before he does.
“We c-ca-can’t remember, can we?”
“See, there’s more to our story. What happened that summer. And those blank spaces, like pages torn out of a book? That’s what you need to find. We need to split up.” Oh, hell no. “You each need to find your artifact. Alone.” Eddie’s mouth stretches into an incredulous smile that says ‘get a load of this,’ the lines on his forehead scrunching like he’s part bulldog. Richie feels those eyes on him while he squeezes his own shut and shakes his head, trying to keep all the bullshit at bay with a single motion. “That’s important. When you do, meet me at the library tonight.”
“Yeah, I gotta—I gotta say, statistically speaking? You look at survival scenarios, we’re gonna do much better as a group.”
He looks to Richie once more, silently waiting for the backup he’d sometimes receive when it was him against everyone else. This time is no different.
“Yeah, splitting up would be, dumb, man.” Eddie points to Richie like he’s never been more right in his life and it bolsters him. “Okay, we gotta go together, alright? We were together that summer, right?”.
“No. Not that wh-whole s-summer.”
(No! No next time, Bill!
Eddie was nearly killed! And look at this motherfucker! He’s leaking hamburger helper!
Fine! I’ll be forty and far away from here!
Georgie is dead! Stop trying to get us killed, too.
Take it back!
A sting to Richie’s face, blood on his lip.
You’re just a bunch of losers! Fuck off!
This is what it wants! It wants to divide us! We were all together when we hurt It, that’s why we’re still alive!)
Richie hadn’t remembered that until this very second. Despite all the fear and death and stress he’d felt during the summer of 1989, the worst part by far had been when they weren’t together. When they were scared and alone. Isolated. Hell, Richie’s felt some form of those three things for the past twenty-seven years, but now, knowing what it was he’d been missing the entire time? Now it’s worse.
Mike and Bill won’t budge. They can’t afford to screw up their chances of success by being gargantuan pussies, so they reluctantly begin parting ways, sharing anxious glances all the while.
The dread that’d been stagnant in Richie’s body steadily grows and grows and grows with each step he takes back into town, already in his own little bubble despite all of them heading in the same general direction. He doesn’t want to dig through the battered box he knows he’ll be uncovering, but what he wants doesn’t much matter in Derry. It never did.