Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In early November, the air in Derry is crisp with cold. The first anniversary of Georgie Denbrough's disappearance is fast approaching, and the air inside his household is thick with it. This is why their eldest, Bill, can often be seen racing down the quiet streets on his bike, his long winter jacket streaming unbuttoned behind him. He leaves early in the morning, and never comes back before sundown.

In early November, the air in Hawkins is gone.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck-”

Gloved hands in crisp white sleeves scrabble madly over smoothly sterile walls. Where the palm flattens against white, and drags, and moves on, a smear of orange-red slips along in its wake. Fingers probe, rubber squashing and rolling against painted concrete until they find the steel rim of the alarm. The arm pulls back. It swings forward, elbow acting as a fulcrum as its entire forearm carves through the air like a bat, and hits. Glass shatters. The plastic inside depresses, the air explodes in sound. The man slides to the ground, marks his motion with more scarlet tracks, and feels the floor beneath him crack.

Elsewhere in the lab, radar screens had lit up blue.

The residents, save for a few, hadn't known why they'd had to leave. Sirens had split the cool night air, and sleepy housewives had opened their doors to official-looking men and women instructing them to prepare for an emergency evacuation. Meetings were held in the school gymnasium, (the parking lot lit up with headlights, every family in Hawkins crowding themselves into a musty old hall) wherein the civic leaders had consulted a list of towns across the country who had volunteered (with more than a little arm-twisting from Uncle Sam) to take in evacuees. Smartly-dressed men had stood alert behind their bewildered mayor, surveying the crowd with impassive faces.

Karen Wheeler, looking immaculate as always but for a roller still caught in the back of her hair, had found herself facing down both her children.

“Mom, I can’t lose them again.” Mike had blinked at her, her ever earnest son, fists balled at his sides. “It’s been so terrible, without Will, and then El - I can’t move away and leave them.”

“Mom,” Nancy had butted in, arms crossed and eyes hard, “it’s okay if we need to leave.”

Mike had gasped at that, spat betrayal at her but she’d put a hand on his shoulder and continued.

“But, if we do go, wherever we go, we should go to the same place. We should all stay together.”

And she had agreed. Maybe it was the way Mike’s whole body sagged in relief when Nancy said that, or the way her own daughter - her own daughter, had looked at her as if there was to be no argument. But she’d agreed, as had Mrs. Sinclair, and Joyce Byers (who was overwhelmingly adamant), and Mrs. Henderson. There was something else in their children's eyes, and after the scare with Will not yet a year past, they were less inclined to pry the kids apart. Joyce had said something, in that wavering, fanciful way she had, about Maine. Bob had wanted to move to Maine.The mysterious Mayfields even agreed to allow Max to come visit.

“I did, yes, I did see an entry on the list of accommodating towns for Maine. Let’s see, let’s see…” The mayor was fumbling, and it had taken one of the obvious Lab representatives to step forward and slip the loose-leaf file out from the messy stack, place it in his trembling hands. “There aren’t many wanting to go to Maine, see, and the town we’re talking about is underpopulated… There shouldn’t be a problem finding you all somewhere to stay…”

So it was that in that same November, in that first week spent unpacking in the echoing, empty house they had been allocated in Derry, Ted Wheeler rocked back on his heels after setting up the television, and saw that Hawkins was gone. Mike had gaped at the screen, as it showed deserted, rotted streets thick with mould. Their old house had all but fallen in on itself. The cloudy air could be blamed on TV static, but Mike (and Nancy, and Eleven, and Will, who had all seen it firsthand) knew it for what it was. Hawkins had slipped into the Upside Down, and its occupants had only barely escaped in time.

Will Byers doesn't like Derry. This is for many reasons, he would argue: he feels eyes on him, everywhere, even in the privacy of his new home. He's used to Hawkins, and the remote but comfortable little house he lived in his whole life is so far removed from this apartment near Derry's town centre that it feels like a different life entirely. And the main reason for his current, vehement dislike of Derry, at this current moment, is that it's his first day of school here.

He pulls on his jacket, and puts his plate in the sink where tap water drips steadily onto the scrambled eggs Jonathan made him. He felt nauseous this morning. His mother's eyes flick over to the sink as she opens the door for him, worry evident in the crease of her brow. She's trying not to fuss over him this morning, he knows, and he appreciates it. They’re the last to go; Hopper took Eleven to school already, taking her to meet her new teachers and deliver them a heavily falsified sob story to help explain away any odd behaviour.

The car ride is quiet, and he looks out the window the whole time, scanning the world outside like he's assessing a threat. The kids are walking to school in little clumps, and they’re so clearly settled into their groups that he feels even worse.

"Mom?"

"Yeah, sweetie?" Joyce is watching the road nervously.

"Do you know where my friends will be when I get there?"

Joyce smiles a little, hearing the anxiety in his voice. He doesn't want to linger awkwardly by the school, wondering where his friends will be. It's just like Will to think ahead.

"Hop's taking El back out to the front gate when they're done, and you can go in together."

Will lets out a long sigh, relaxes a little into his seat. The crowds are getting thicker here, obviously much closer to the school. He's dreading this.

The first thing he notices once he's walked a few paces from his mother's car is that Mike is there, and he's yelling at some other kids. They're laughing, and though it doesn't seem malicious he starts forward nervously, worried. It's not like Mike to be so aggressive. So loud. Before he gets near, though, Mike snatches a set of thick, goofy-looking glasses from another boy's grip (he's small, with neat hair and dark eyes, and his arm is encased in a large, stiff cast) and slides them onto his nose. Will is in hearing distance of him now.

"You're such a fuckin' asshole, Eds, come on-"

"I told you, I told you, first, don't call me that, and two, I told you - if you don't stop talking about my mom like that, I told you I was gonna take your glasses -"

"Like, I know I'm so sexy in them, but truth be told I don't actually just wear these for fashion, I do need them -"

Will stumbles back, an alarm blaring in his head. That's not Mike. They look identical, perfect mirrors but for this boy's thick glasses and loud voice. Something’s wrong here. He looks back at the fake Mike, but realises one of the other kids is looking at him.

He’s tall and thin, with a worried twist to his face and floppy brown hair. ("Oh my God, shut up, " the boy in the cast is saying, voice high in frustration) He raises a hand silently to Will in greeting, or concern, or something - he supposes it must have looked weird, the way he almost fell over, but before he can respond there's a call from behind him.

"Hey, kid!"

Hopper's by the school gate, Eleven trailing thoughtfully behind him. Hop is, as always, a huge presence, made even more intimidating by the way he towers over the schoolchildren. El's watching the passing kids with a mixture of disdain and curiosity, but her eyes light up when they meet his. He glances back at pseudo-Mike one more time, shakes off the crawling feeling on his skin and runs to the gate.

Will and Eleven, since they became some approximation of step-siblings, have gotten on well. For Will, she was the voice in the dark, the person who came to him in the cold deadness and told him there was help coming. For her, he’s someone who doesn’t expect her to talk. They have a comfortable silence together, quiet and curious and introspective. Hopper puts his big hands on the top of both of their heads, ruffles their hair with a vigour that leaves Will's head spinning and El smiling softly from under her curls. He clicks his tongue, looks away when he tells them to be good and not to cause trouble. "Look out for each other," he says briskly, before he spins on his heel and leaves them by the school doors.

"What class do we have first?" Will asks, and El casts her eyes skyward in thought.

"English," she says, quiet, and starts back into the school building. Will scrambles after her.

English is usually one of Will's best subjects, and he was used to being in the advanced class back home. Here, he and the other recent transplants have all been started in the same standard classes across the timetable, and he's grateful for it. The teacher's voice is droning and strange, and he spends most of the lesson desperately trying to signal to Mike (the real Mike, who arrived a breathless two minutes late, but still earlier than many of their classmates, much to El's amusement) that he needs to talk to him after class. Mike raises his eyebrows but offers a gentle smile. Will is reminded of the other-Mike's wide, obnoxious grin, and shivers a little. Eleven is drinking in new vocabulary words with wide eyes. He forgets, sometimes, that it’s her first time as a real student. He doesn’t forget how she likes to learn.

Their first few classes are both interminably long and startlingly short; they're soon blinking in the cold, bright air in the schoolyard, huddled close in awkward solidarity. Will casts around quickly to ensure that fake-Mike isn't nearby (he hasn't been in their classes - it looks like he and his friends are in the year above) before he pulls the Party into the shade cast by the school building.

"Will, what the hell?" Lucas asks. He looks exhausted, and suddenly Will's sure that Lucas can feel it too, the malignant feeling in the air that makes him feel unsafe, and watched.

“Before you freak out,” Will says, and he can feel Mike freaking out already, “there’s a kid in this school who looks just like you.”

It’s anticlimactic. Dustin snorts. Mike just looks confused, and asks, “Is that all?”

“You don’t understand - he’s like your twin. But with glasses.”

Eleven looks curious, but everyone else has already lost interest. They think it’s just an oddity, a kid who looks a bit like Mike and Will is (uncharacteristically, sure) making a big deal out of it. They’re just gearing up to move on to something else, Dustin about to launch into a rant about how their new science teacher has nothing on Mr. Clark, it’s like she doesn’t give a shit whether they learn anything -

And then, vindication. Will freezes, Lucas shoots him a Look. He hears the doppelganger before he sees him, and they just have time to turn around before fake-Mike and all his friends come bounding around the corner, and just as quickly stop in their tracks.

“I told you,” the little one is gasping, as if he’s just run a mile, even though they were barely moving faster than a walk. “He looks just fucking like you, do you think it’s -”

“It’s dead, Eddie, don’t start, please.” The one who’s just spoken is pale with flat curls, light eyes locked on Mike with worry.

“This is so weird,” a tall, redheaded girl breathes. The boy with the floppy hair, who’d waved at Will that morning, nods mutely. It’s the boy at his side, the one with a sweet face and a Walkman slung around his neck, who actually speaks to them.

“Hey, you guys are new, right? I’m Ben.” He waves, a little redundantly. “I was the new kid last year. What’re your names?”

“Um.” Dustin says, intelligently. “Names. We have those.”

“I think they’re a bit fucking weirded out, Ben,” the little one says, “given that there are two Richies and zero explanations!”

The Mike lookalike (Richie, did the little one say?) prods his glasses up his nose and cocks his head to one side, a theatrical little gesture so unlike Mike that it’s oddly reassuring.

“I don’t see it, fellas. I’m clearly much more handsome than this bozo.”

There’s a frisson of discontent that passes over the Party then, (Frog-face, frog-face).

“Nah, he’s way better-looking,” the pale one says flatly. “He doesn’t have those coke-bottle glasses, for one, Richie.”

“P-Probably doesn’t have your p-p-personality, either, Rich.” the tall one adds. “That’s always a b-b-bonus.”

“You wound me,” Richie announces, voice so loud it makes El jolt a little by Will’s side. “I do nothing but toil and work and slave for this family, and this is how you repay me?”

He drops to the floor in a stupidly extravagant display of hurt, peeking up at them through his lashes.

Ben clears his throat, and makes another brave attempt.

“So... who are you guys?”

The little kid with the cast gives Richie a tentative prod in the ribs with the tip of his shoe, like he’s checking if he’s really dead. Mike coughs, uncertain, but when no-one else seems to want to go first, he sighs.

“Mike Wheeler. We all just moved here, so it’s our first day.”

“I’m Lucas Sinclair,” Lucas chimes in the second Mike stops talking, rushing awkwardly to get the words out.

“Dustin.” Dustin reaches a hand out, and shakes Ben’s hand briskly, like a businessman. “I’m new here. Obviously.”

“Will Byers,” Will says softly, pointing at himself.

“Eleven.” She mirrors Will.

“Eleven? Like the number?” The kid in the cast says, voice high and sharp. Richie kicks him from the ground, then goes back to his feigned death. 

“Well, we’re the Losers,” Ben says. “I’m Ben, but I guess I already told you that…”

“I’m B-B-Bill. Denbrough.”

“Stanley.” He bows his head a little when he says it, as if embarrassed, and Will realises he’s wearing a kippah.

“Beverly Marsh,” the girl says, smiling wryly at them. She slips a cigarette from a pocket on her overalls and lights it. “Bev, to friends.”

“Too bad you have no friends,” comes a voice from the ground, and Bev steps on Richie (“Hurk- ”) without a falter in her smile, grinning around the cigarette between her teeth.

“Richard Tozier, forever at your service,” he says, voice muffled where he’s speaking directly into the ground.

“Eddie Kaspbrak.” The little one fixes them with a glare so intense it almost burns. “Why the fuck do you look like Richie, Mike?”

“Are you calling him Mike like it’s a lie, like, why would he lie about his own name-” Eddie goes to kick Richie again, but Richie just grabs his ankle and yanks, pulling him down to the ground with him. Eddie yelps, something about being in the mud, and Bill smiles at the Party over the sound of their squabbling.

“So do you g-guys have any idea why M-M-Mike looks like Richie?”

Will shakes his head, but Eleven puts up two fingers and says “Twins.” with the quiet certainty she has.

“No offense, but I think I’d know if I had a twin, El.” Mike says. “We’d have had the same mother. We should have grown up together.”

“Not if you two got separated at birth.” Dustin pipes up. “We know the government does fucked up shit to babies,” here he gestures at El, who looks unimpressed - “maybe you are twins.”

“And why would the government want to separate them, for no apparent reason? Just for fun?” Lucas retorts, and Dustin looks stumped.

“Too handsome,” Richie mumbles, finally dragging himself up from where he’s been wrestling with Eddie in the dirt. “Couldn’t have two of us in the same place, the universe can’t handle it.” He swings his hand down almost absently to help Eddie to his feet, who takes it, pulls himself up and then immediately starts fussing over the dirt stains on his bare legs and arms.

“By the way,” Richie adds, looking up at them through wild black curls, “as if you’re not enough of an impostor already, Mike, you’ve only stolen Mr. Hanlon’s favourite first name.”

“Shit, yeah,” Stanley says. “Two Mikes. That’s gonna get confusing.”

“Not if we never speak to them again,” Eddie says, and then looks guilty. “No offense.”

“Some offense,” Richie adds.

“Who’s Mike?” Will asks.

“Another L-Loser, but he d-d-doesn’t go to school here. Y-You’ll probably meet him at s-some point. He’s usually busy w-w-working.”

“Ah.” Mike says, feeling strangely guilty for stealing some random kid’s name.

“Well, that solved nothing,” Stan says, dryly. “Recess is almost over, we should get ready to go.”

Ben shrugs helplessly, as if to say I wish we could hang out more, but the passage of time is beyond my otherwise-infinite control. Will can’t help but grin at the thought, and Ben’s face lights up.

“Yeah, s-see you later, guys.” Bill says, and Bev gives them a little wave, stubbing her cigarette out against the wall of the school building. Richie and Eddie stumble off, pushing and shoving at one another the whole way, Richie laughing that loud, donkey-ish cackle, miles away from Mike’s soft, wheezy laugh. Ben offers them another soft smile before he leaves. Lucas waves awkwardly.

Just as Bill is walking away, he turns back and says, voice serious, “Be careful.”

It could have been an innocuous comment, but something about the gravity in the other boy’s voice makes Will shiver.

“Mom, it was so weird, seriously -”

“You should have seen him! He looked just like Mike!”

“No.”

That’s Eleven, and cutlery stills. Even with eight at the table, (the Party, Jonathan, Hopper and Joyce) no-one speaks. She lifts her head up from her plate, meets Mike’s eyes, and says, “They're different."

“No-one’s saying they’re the same person, El, just that they look alike.” Lucas offers.

“No, I know what she means,” Will says. “It’s like, they’re such different people, it’s kind of hard to think of them as being alike, even though they have the same face. Right?”

Eleven nods, and returns to her meal.

“Well, nothing against the law about looking the same,” Hopper mumbles. “Put it out of your minds. Might be a good idea to make some… new friends around here, though.” He grits the last sentence out, like it’s physically paining him.

Eleven scowls. Joyce puts a hand on her arm.

“You don’t need to replace your old friends, sweetie, nobody’s going anywhere,” (Mike nods so vigorously he gets hair in his eyes) “It’s just nice to meet new people. They might know some fun places to go around here.”

“New friends,” Eleven whispers. Will smiles at her. Mike bumps her knee under the table.

“So!” Joyce claps her hands. “Tell me about these other kids you met. Including new Mike. Do they seem nice?”

“Nice enough,” Lucas shrugs. “They’re different.”

“They don’t seem like bullies.” Dustin adds. “They called themselves the Losers.”

“Probably the ones getting bullied, then.” Jonathan muses.

“The one with the stutter,” Mike says, thoughtful. “It might be cool to talk to him.”

“High praise, Mike. Where was this open-mindedness when we were trying to get you to let Max in the Party?”

The table devolves into playful squabbling. Joyce Byers watches it all over the rim of her glass, and whenever Will or Eleven laugh, she laughs too.

Late that night, Eleven pads softly into the hall. The new house is still strange, and despite Joyce and Hopper’s best efforts there are still boxes stacked against the skirting boards. She flicks on the fluorescent light in the kitchen, hears the low hum as it flickers to life. Normal. Normal electric behaviour, no surges or unexplained flashing. Normal. The tapwater tastes different, she thinks, and she dimly remembers Hopper telling her how to take care of dirty dishes. She leaves her empty glass on the kitchen table anyway. She’s about to return to her room, but she slips into the living room instead, runs her fingertips over the couch that came with the house. There’s a silhouette out the window. Someone’s outside.

Jonathan is leaning up against the railing on the fire escape, looking pensively out. Brooding , Eleven thinks. Word of the day. The metal creaks underfoot, so she has no chance of sneaking up on him, but he doesn’t turn when she joins him.

“Can’t sleep?” He asks instead.

“Losers.” She murmurs. “Bad.”

“You think those other kids are bad?”

She shakes her head. "It's a bad word. Mean."

“Ah.”

They stay in silence for a moment. Jonathan doesn’t smoke, but some of Hopper’s cigarette butts are already littering the fire escape. Joyce’s too, she imagines.

“Sometimes,” Jonathan starts, then falters. “Sometimes, when someone calls you mean things, it feels good to - to reclaim it, you know?”

Eleven looks puzzled. He continues.

“Like, people always called me a freak, right? And it used to get me down, until I said no, okay, I am a freak, and I’m glad, because fuck being normal, you know?”

Eleven nods slowly.

“So maybe, I don’t know, these kids you met get called Losers so much they decided to make it their own. And, you know, props to them. Screw what other people think.”

“Screw what other people think.” Eleven says, soft, and smiles. Jonathan claps a hand on her back.

“We should get back to bed, huh. School in the morning.”

He stretches, and the pop and snap of his back are loud in the night.

“I’ll make you Eggos for breakfast. Don’t tell Hopper.”

Eleven holds a finger up to her lips, and lets Jonathan bring her back inside.

Chapter Text

The Derry Library is a dusty, usually deserted building. Ben Hanscom knows most sections off by heart - he gravitates towards local history, but he’d be the first to admit he’s a romantic at heart. More often than not, he slips out between the heavy doors with a book on local folklore tucked into his schoolbag. History and mythology are closely linked; one needs to be familiar with both to really get an understanding of how people lived.

He’s sat at his usual desk on a brisk afternoon, the first weekend of November. Alone. Normally, the Losers hang out at the clubhouse after school, and as winter wears on, they trek down to the Barrens or the quarry less and less. On the weekends, those with more watchful parents lay claim to their children. Not that Ben’s mother is neglectful; she just likes for him to be out of the house, for a change.

He’s poring over a book on the broader mythology in New England - the creatures and superstitions are stitched together from other cultures, for the most part. The paper is yellowed and crisp, and the smell of aged, musty bookbinder’s glue wafts into the air with every turn of a page. The illustrations are pen and ink, and they look like they could have been scratched directly onto the paper. The air is heavy with silence, the kind of quiet that weighs down and strangles any defiant sound. The silence blankets the scritch-scritch of his ballpoint pen, when he takes a note in his old copybook. He’s so engrossed in his work that he doesn’t register another presence until a stack of books slams onto the desk beside him.

Ben fumbles with his Walkman, the headpiece slipping around his neck. He blinks up at the newcomer, who looks familiar, where has he seen this kid recently -

“Hey. Ben, right? It’s Dustin, you know, from Monday?”

Ben blinks. Then it hits him.

“Oh, oh, you’re friends with the Richie lookalike. Yeah. Um, sit down…”

He clumsily clears some of his notes from the desk, and Dustin lands in the chair next to him with a sigh.

“So what’s happening, man? What’re you reading?”

“Um. History, mostly.” He clears his throat. “I used to move around a lot, so I kind of got into the habit of reading up on every town I moved to.”

“Huh. That’s cool.This is the first time I’ve had to move. It’s pretty weird.”

Silence falls.

“What are you reading?” Ben asks.

“Oh. I really like science, ‘cause we used to have the best teacher back home. Being in that dumb class made me miss, like, actually learning.”

Ben smiles. “That’s really neat. You ever do anything cool in science?”

Dustin’s face lights up, his eyes crinkling with the force of his smile. “Oh, dude, you have no idea.”

“Dude, Will’s going to be so excited. Lucas and Mike have kind of lost interest in D&D lately, it’s such a bummer -” Dustin stands up on the pedals of his bike.

“Are you s-s-sure Will’s family will be okay with us just c-coming by?”

Bill still seems a little bewildered, and Ben honestly can’t blame him. Picking him up had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, once Ben had suggested that Bill might be interested. It just seemed like a logical choice, to Ben, that Bill (with his passion for storytelling, and adventure) would enjoy a roleplaying game like the one Dustin had been excitedly talking about, loudly enough to have them escorted from the library.

The Byers are situated in a little walk-up apartment that reminds Ben of Bev’s old house. It sends a reluctant shiver down his spine, remembering gloomy, filthy rooms cluttered with old tools and dusty memorabilia. He remembers seeing the deep groove on the sofa where her father slept, littered with moth-eaten blankets and empty cans. Remembers the feeling of sodden sponge in his hands, squeezing and twisting and feeling that bloody, soapy mix slip through his fingers and spatter into the tub. Though, when a small, kind-looking woman with dark eyes and wild hair answers the door, he feels his heart rate slow, the goosebumps settle on his skin. She smiles at them.

“Oh hello, Dustin, sweetie, are you here for Will? And who’s this?”

“Hi, Ms Byers.” Dustin grins. “This is Ben, and his friend Bill - I wanted to show them some of our old campaign stuff, I know Will brought it with him.”

Ms Byers looks genuinely excited that they’re interested in D&D, and she ushers them in quickly. The inside of the apartment is cluttered, littered still with half-unpacked boxes and stacks of books. It’s cozy, though, with Christmas lights strung over the dresser in the kitchen and drawings pinned along the walls.

“Mom? Who is it?” Will ambles around the corner, and if he’s surprised to find two near-strangers in his living room he doesn’t show it. His mother hurries over to the far wall, and starts peering into the cardboard boxes.

“Hey, Will. You still got those campaign notes? These guys wanna see.”

Will’s eyes widen. “For real?”

“Y-y-yeah,” Bill says. “I’ve n-never played D-D-Dungeons and Dragons, but it sounds f-fun.”

Will smiles, and when he does, Ben is put in mind of the woman now shoulder-deep in an old refrigerator box.

“Aha! Gottem!”

“...So, this is where Mike - he was our DM for this campaign, it took weeks - he pulls out the Demogorgon and just slams it on the board…”

“No way,” Ben breathes.

“W-Weren’t the Demogorgon’s stats, like, c-c-crazy high?”

Will’s about to answer (to bring up that he’s pretty sure Mike introduced the Demogorgon so suddenly because he realised the campaign was taking longer than expected, but that’s lies and slander and Mike won’t stand for it) when he notices a head of curly hair disappear around the doorframe.

“I’ll be back in a second, guys.”

Eleven is sitting on Will’s bed, feet swinging over the rug. He eases the door closed behind him, but leaves it just barely ajar. He crosses the floor in little, quiet steps, the only sound a soft flump when he sits on the bed next to her.

“Do you want to come meet them?”

El stares at him for a second, then drops her gaze to the floor.

“They’re not scary. They’re a lot like us, actually. And they’re quiet.”

“Quiet.”

Will smiles at her. She’s still unused to loud environments, too much being said too fast for her to make sense of, to pick apart the words. Will looks at the ceiling.

“I don’t really like loud places. Feels like I can’t think, you know?” Eleven nods. He looks at her again.

“You don’t even have to talk to them if you don’t want to. But I bet you’re dying to get a proper look, huh?”

El swats at him, and Will laughs.

“You are! You’re so nosy, I swear. Come on out with me, and I’ll introduce you.”

Ben’s poring over creature sheets with Dustin when the door creaks open. There’s a girl next to Will, with dark eyes and close cut curls, like Bev’s but brunette. She walks carefully, like she’s trying to move soundlessly, just socked feet on the wooden floorboards.

“Oh, hi, El.” Dustin returns his attention to the creatures almost instantly.

Her eyes are roving over them, as if she’s trying to commit every detail to memory. Bill stands, with a little clatter as some of the figurines topple over.

“H-h-h…” He swallows. “H-hi.” Ben waves lamely.

Eleven points at herself, finger pointed square at her dungarees.

“Eleven.” She points at Bill.

“Oh! B-Bill.” He sits down, awkwardly. Her finger moves to indicate the boy next to him.

“Ben.” His face is bright red.

“Well, that clears that up. Not like we've already been introduced, or anything.” Dustin mutters.

El sits in the empty chair next to Bill, staring shamelessly at both of them. Her gaze isn’t as heavy on their skin as it might be, just undiluted curiosity. Dustin has Ben engrossed in a conversation about the history and mythology of their last campaign’s setting - “lore”, Dustin calls it. Will tells them about Will the Wise, and soon he, Bill and El are making characters of their own. They both like drawing, and end up sat on either side of Eleven, sketching her character in turns while she points out mistakes with a haughty finger. Bill is just adding a pair of antlers - El snorts - when the front door opens.

El twists in her seat. There’s a frankly enormous man in the doorway, hanging a hat on the coat hooks in the hall and shrugging his jacket off.

“Hi, Hopper.” Will calls.

He comes over to the table, ruffles El’s hair.

“Who’re these?” Ben isn’t sure if he’s really glaring at them, or if it’s just his face.

“Ben and Bill. They’re some of the kids we met on Monday.” Dustin says.

Hopper is scary. Not, you know, clown-scary, but he’s intimidating. And it’s not just his presence. His focus on them is frightening - they’re all just so used to adults looking at them without seeing. It’s scary, to be seen.

“H-How about g-g-goat eyes?” Bill slides his paper over to Eleven again.

“What eyes?” Hopper squints.

Eleven inspects the paper, and nods thoughtfully. “Goat eyes.”

“Kids!” Joyce calls. “I found chips in the cupboard, you want some?”

“Yes please, Ms Byers!” Dustin hollers back.

She slips out of the kitchen a minute later with a bowl in either hand.

“Aw, hi, Hop. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Joyce.” Hopper gives her a tight smile and grabs a handful of chips.

“Hey!” She swats at his arm. “Those are for the kids.”

“Mmf.”

“T-thank you, M-M-Ms Byers.”

“It’s no problem, sweetheart. You’re both so good,  to come over like this. I was worried the kids wouldn’t make any new friends…”

“Mom.”

Ben laughs, nervous but melodic. “Believe me, I’m glad to be making friends, too.”

“Yeah, it’s all sunshine.” Hopper growls.  “Listen, kids. Anyone bother you at school?”

“W-What?”

“Bu-llies.” Hopper drawls, sarcastic. “There many? I need to know if my kids are gonna have a problem, here.”

Ben gulps.

"Hopper!" Joyce says, tone scolding but her eyes are fixed on the new boys.

“I-It’s honestly not so bad, since Bowers and Hockstetter…” Bill blinks. “W-Went away.”

Ben nods. “His gang are still jerks, but they kind of fell apart after that. I wouldn’t go anywhere alone, though.”

Hopper nods, eyes narrowed like he’s memorising every word. “They violent?”

“Oh, sure.” Ben surprises everyone with his instant response. “But like Bill said, Bowers and Hockstetter were the worst.”

“What happened to them?”

“B-B-Bowers got arrested. Hockstetter went m-m-m… m-m-missing.”

“Missing? ” Joyce says sharply. “What do you mean, missing? Has he been found?”

Ben and Bill swap a look. Dustin looks nervous, and Will is examining the grain of the table with great interest.

“When people go missing, in Derry… They don’t come back. Ever.” Ben says. Bill nods.

“Ever? ” Hopper says.

“Like G-G-G-Georgie.” Bill looks like it’s physically hurting him to get the words out, mouth twisted.

Ben looks at everyone, earnest eyes roving from face to face. “Georgie is - was - Bill’s little brother.”

Joyce gasps.  Under the table, Hopper’s fists clench and twist in the fabric of his jeans. Eleven is watching it all  with wide, wide eyes.

“H-H-He was six. W-Would have been turned seven l-last month.” Bill swallows. “L-look, we should go. It’s d-d-dinnertime-”

“You didn’t look for him?” Dustin interrupts. “When Will - I would have looked, is all.”

“Dustin!” Joyce snaps.

“Of course we l-l-looked.” Bill says softly. “L-L-Longer than the p-police did.”

 “W-When someone goes missing like that, you just don’t s-s-s-stop - you keep looking, even if you know deep down you w-won’t find them. B-Because you need some kind of answer. You need t-t-to… t-to know.”

“Did you find your answer?”  Hopper asks, quiet.

“We f-f-found… We found what was left. Of G-Georgie. And we knew. I… I knew.” 

No-one says anything.

Bill stands up, a little unsteady.

“We should go.” Ben says. “Our parents will… we should go.”

“Of course,” Joyce breathes, eyes shiny. “Of course.”

She hugs them, tightly, before they can make it to the door.

“Thanks for having us, Ms Byers. See you around, guys. Dustin.” Ben mumbles.

“A-And be c-c-careful. Not just the b-bullies.”

Ben nods, solemnly. “It’s dangerous, here. Don’t get caught alone.”

When the door closes behind the two boys, the click of the lock seems deafening.

Chapter Text

“I just don’t see why you’d need antibiotics, just ‘cause your arm is busted -”

“My system is weak, asshole -”

“And what? You fight off germs with your arms?”

“Shut up, that’s not what I meant.”

“In one corner, Eddie Kaspbrak, the Fists of Fury -”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“In another corner, a single bacteria -”

“Bacterium!”

“In what the experts are calling a cage match for the ages! Roll up, roll up, for the fight of the century, folks!”

Richie says the last part in his 1940s radio presenter voice, flinging his arms out so he takes up the whole footpath. Eddie has his hands clamped firmly over his ears.

“It’s gonna be such a good fight because you’ll probably lose. That’s, like, the funny joke here.”

“I hate you. I wish you were dead, Richie.”

Richie just laughs and wraps his arms around Eddie’s neck, lets himself be dragged along as the other boy marches onward.

The bell over the door chimes as the two boys enter the pharmacy. There’s a girl there, stocking shelves. She’s in her late teens, her dark, curly hair done up in a ponytail. The boys pay her no attention, continuing to bicker as Eddie picks boxes off the shelves and shoves them into Richie’s arms.

She pays them attention. First, she just turned when the door opened, wondering if Mr Keene’s (frankly, evil) daughter had come back from one of her criminally long breaks. Then, she’d almost dropped the box of vitamin supplements she was carrying, when she saw the boy who was the spitting image of her younger brother. Nancy had heard about this already, but seeing it in person was another thing entirely. The boys move further into the shop, up to the counter where Eddie starts methodically picking items out of Richie’s grasp and placing them in front of Mr Keene. He’s completely absorbed in his task, muttering to himself over every purchase. Richie is completely absorbed in watching Eddie.

Then, Mike Wheeler comes in. The door slams open, the bell jingling so violently it almost falls. The boys at the counter twist around in shock, but Mike is heading straight for Nancy. He’s breathing heavily.

“Hey, Mike, you okay?” She resists the urge to bend down to talk to him, knows it just frustrates him - and he looks shaken enough already.

“Uh,” he begins, and then spots the boys at the counter staring at him. “Oh, damn.”

They’re coming over, Eddie trying to awkwardly manage the pile of pharmaceuticals in his arms, until Richie realises and takes over. Eddie bops him on the head with the heavy plaster of his cast for his trouble.

“Oh. Yeah, your weird twin is here.” Nancy muses.

“Hey, Wheeler!” Richie calls. “What brings you to Eddie’s neck of the woods, huh?”

“This is not my neck of the woods, Richie, just because I don’t want to die of sepsis at fourteen.”

“Aw, man, you heard it here first, guys! Eddie’s got sepsis!”

“I do not have sepsis!”

“You literally just said you did!”

Eddie thumps him with his cast a couple more times, but by now they’ve reached the two Wheelers.

“Mike.” Nancy turns her attention back to her brother. “Is something wrong?”

He shakes his head. “It’s fine. It’s nothing.”

“Is it… Was it the lights? Something like that?”

“No, no, no.” Mike shakes his head even more violently.

“What the fuck. ” Richie stage-whispers, and Eddie just jabs him in the stomach this time.

“Something to do with Will? Or El? You can tell me, Mike. I need to know.”

“It’s really nothing like that, Nancy. It’s nothing at all, actually. Don’t worry.”

He turns, awkwardly, to look at Richie and Eddie, who are just standing there.

“Well, not that this eavesdrop session wasn’t just riveting,” Richie announces, without an ounce of shame. Eddie glares. “- But we should head out. Gotta drop these back at the love of my life’s house.”

Eddie goes briefly scarlet, before Richie adds, “Eddie’s mom.” and he goes red for an entirely different reason. They leave the pharmacy, Eddie trying his utmost to step on the backs of Richie’s heels the entire time.

Nancy watches them go. She turns back to Mike.

“Are you sure you’re okay? It’s just us, now.”

Mike nods. “I’m fine. It’s really nothing like - it’s not the Upside Down, not anything like that. It’s nothing.”

He looks tired. Nancy watches him with worried eyes.

A few hours later, the Losers are all gathered in the clubhouse. Mike and Stan are squeezed together on the workbench with Bill, and Bev is reclining in the hammock - a bold act, considering it’s usually occupied by either Richie, or Eddie, or most often both. Ben is puttering around off near the wall, setting up another table from a plank of wood he’d dragged from the dump with Mike. Richie and Eddie, having called this impromptu meeting, are standing awkwardly in the center of the floor, shifting from foot to foot. Eddie clears his throat.

“So I know no-one wants to talk about this and I get it I really do but I’ve been having this feeling and I thought it was a virus but I don’t think it was and then earlier we were at the pharmacy -”

“We’re worried It is back.” Richie interrupts.

Eddie lets out one long exhale. “Yeah.”

The clubhouse is deadly silent. Bev swings in the hammock idly, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Stan is examining his hands. Mike is the one to speak up.

“Is this something to do with the Richie clone you’ve been telling me about?”

“No.” Richie says. “Kind of.” Eddie says.

Eddie looks at him. "It’s what he said at the pharmacy - it sounds like It.”

“Eddie, it was so vague. He could have been talking about literally anything.”

“Wait, wait, hang on. So if you can’t agree on if fake-Richie was talking about It, why do you both think It’s back?”

Richie looks at the floor, toes at a crack in the planks with his sneaker.

“I’ve just been getting this feeling again. Like there’s something around the corner. I don’t know.”

Bev hums, directs her words at the low ceiling. “But It’s never been shy, before. Why would it be holding back?” Ben nods, looking a little desperate.

Eddie scratches at his cast. “We’re probably wrong, you know. I’m just worried.”

“We should keep an eye out, just in case,” Mike says. “No point getting caught out.”

Richie nods. He looks over at Bill, who’s been silent thus far.

“You okay?”

“W-We killed It. We need to b-b-believe in that.”

And that’s that.

“So, how’s the identity thief?” Stan asks, deadpan as always.

“Bill and I hung out with some of his friends a little. They were nice.” Ben says, lightly. Bill nods.

“Hm.”

“What?”

Stan squirms. “It’s nothing, I’m just - I’m not sure it’s the best idea to get too close to them.”

Eddie nods. “The other Mike - he rubs me the wrong way. I don’t know. It’s weird.”

“Probably just not used to getting rubbed up by anyone other than yourself, Eds.”

“Shut it.”

Mike looks thoughtful. “I know we’re done talking about this, but on the off chance that It is still alive, I’m worried that the new kids won’t be safe hanging out with us.”

“Right. We killed it, so we’re probably not in It’s good books.” Stan says.

“You know, Stan, that would be a great point, if it made any sense.” Richie snaps. Stan ignores him.

“Wouldn’t they be in even more danger, if they don’t know anything about It or how to protect themselves?” Bev asks, directing her question to the ceiling again.

“I feel like all of this is irrelevant, given, I don’t know, how we just decided that It is dead?” Richie’s voice has a tense quality it usually lacks.

“L-L-Let’s be practical, here. If It comes back, w-we kill it, like we p-promised. We can’t d-d-do anything if It doesn’t show up, th-th-though.”

“I think It’s dead.” Ben juts his chin out, defiant.

When they leave the clubhouse, it’s dark, and the atmosphere is tense. Richie had been oddly quiet since their almost-argument, choosing instead to lie on the floor with his legs in Eddie’s lap, reading the same page of an old comic over and over. They split up to go home in silence. Bill brings Mike home - “I-It’s no t-trouble, my p-parents won’t notice if I c-c-come home late. Or n-not at all.” 

They talk about It the whole way, until Mike finally sighs.

“What if we do some research? Maybe we can figure out if It is really dead, without just waiting for it to attack again.”

Bill smiles, sadly. “Th-That sounds good, Mike.”

Richie, Eddie and Stan cycle home together, weaving in and out of a silent convoy. They get to Eddie’s house first, taking the long way so they don’t have to pass Neibolt. The lights are on at ground level, and Eddie heaves a sigh before he dismounts.

“You better get out of here, guys, she’ll kill you if she thinks you kept me out this late.”

Stan nods, and Richie almost falls off his bike trying to ruffle Eddie’s hair as he passes.

“See you tomorrow, Eds.”

Eddie flashes him the finger as he makes his way down the path to his front door. Stan and Richie are around the corner by the time he’s opened the door, though his mother’s voice echoes down the empty street anyway.

Stan’s the next to get home, carefully lifting his bike off the ground and carrying it to the door. He turns, to see Richie already climbing back on his bike.

“You’re leaving already?”

“Dude, I can’t stick around, your dad might come out -” 

“What’s so scary about my dad?” 

“He’s not scary, fuckface, just if he sees me he’ll be all uhh, Richard, why haven’t I seen you at temple recently and shit.”

Stan shrugs. It’s true, and fair enough. Richie turns to wave at him as he rides, wobbling across the road. It takes another ten minutes for Richie to make it to his own house, a little terraced brick house near the river. The front garden is wildly unkempt, and he just lets his bike career wildly into the grass once he’s hopped off. The lights are all out, and he slips in the door quietly, turning the lock behind him.

Bev and Ben go home together, though Bev splits off early, so as not to worry her aunt. Sure enough, when she arrives, her aunt is still sitting up with a book in the living room, waiting for her.

“Sorry, Auntie, I didn’t think I’d be home so late.” She closes the door behind her, wincing when she hears the lock click.

“It’s fine, darling, but please, give me a call next time you’re out late, okay? I worry, otherwise.”

Bev lets out a breath she didn’t realise she was holding.

“Will do.”

On Thursday, the sing-song sound of Richie's high, plaintive voice precedes his graceless tumble into the clubhouse.

"Sleep-o-ver! Sleep-o-ver! Sleep-ohh -ver!" He grins at them, eyes bright and wild behind his glasses.

"R-R-Richie," Bill starts, bending over to help him up. "What the f-fuck are you talking about?" Richie clears his throat when he straightens up, brushes the dust from his (admittedly, already rumpled) shirt with an exaggerated flourish.

"Ladies, gentlefolk, losers," he begins, dipping his head in a bow and gesturing grandly with his hands, pauses like he's expecting applause.

"Get on with it!" Bev hoots. Mike snorts. Richie barrels on, unfazed.

"As you all may be aware, the season is upon us -" ("What season?") "- and the Tozier parental unit has fucked off for the weekend, leaving their dashing, handsome son with an empty house and a whole mess of losers to fill it!"

Stan and Eddie exchange a look, but whatever it is they're thinking is lost in the excited babble of the other kids.

"My aunt won't mind, if I tell her your parents will be there -" "The whole weekend? Will you have f-f-food?" "I've never been in your house, Richie." "I'll bring some movies, we can make popcorn..."

Richie damn near skips over to the hammock where Eddie has been watching this unfold.  His dark eyes are creased with worry, and they don't leave Richie's face for a second. Not even as the taller boy clambers into the hammock alongside him, though he yelps in discomfort, thwacks him with the heavy cast on his arm.

"Jerk. Not your turn." Richie pulls a grotesque face.

Ben and Bev are very intensely discussing possible movies to watch, drawing inspiration from the dusty VHS tapes they know are stowed away in their TV cabinets at home. Bill is chewing at his lip, listening to Mike talk about how he's going to convince his grandfather to let him come.

"Hey, Rich?" Stan's voice is clear as a bell, rises from where he's sitting by the little shelves, squeezed in next to Mike on the bench.

"Staniel?"

"What do you mean when you say your parents 'fucked off' for the weekend?"

And there it is. Eddie tenses further (if it even seems possible) and the intensity of his gaze seems to burn into Richie's skin. He watches the other boy tip his head back in a display of overplayed nonchalance, rearrange his long, gangly limbs around Eddie's in the hammock.

"Ah," Richie says. "I didn't want to boast, Stanley, because I'm not a braggart at heart, but my parents are out of town on quite important business. Monumental to society as a whole, even."

Stan quirks an eyebrow, but his face is a mask. "And what's that?"

"Finding the stick up your ass." Bev laughs despite herself, claps a hand over her mouth and signals an apology to Stanley with her eyes.

"It's like the expedition to the North Pole, Stan, you have no idea how hard it is. And the whole time they're like wow, what if we never find it? What if Stan Uris stays a stuck-up nerd the rest of his natural life? It's so hard for them to keep up morale, Stanley. They've had to put down, like, three of their horses, not for food or anything, they were just too depressing."

The problem, Richie finds, with Stan, is that he's difficult to distract. He's got his eyes on the prize, so to speak, and even when everyone else has been successfully diverted, he's still ticking away. His eyes on Richie are hard and appraising, even as he leans back and lets the conversation move on.

And if Stan wasn't enough, he has Eddie, too, similarly dogged but in a different way. Eddie's always easy to taunt, to lead off the track with a disgusting comment or insult that just makes him so angry he can't help but bite. But then he loops back, fast and sharp, when Richie isn't even expecting it, sinks his teeth in with blunt questions, like Why don't you have lunch? and Is that broken glass?

But Richie doesn't want to spend the weekend alone in his house, so he's willing to face the music. He's pretty sure he can skate through the initial confusion with a few well-placed comments, slip in that his parents are alcoholics and his house is a nightmare, push past the reactions by reminding some of the losers of their own less-than-ideal home situations (hello, hello, paging Dr. Kaspbrak) and get to watching movies.

He also knows that this plan is bullshit, and his life is going to come crashing down, and he might just lose all his friends. But lies have always been more palatable, especially in his own head.

He sticks his bare foot in Eddie's face, and relishes in the resulting yowl.

Chapter Text

Keene’s closes early enough, but it’s dark out by the time Nancy’s finished stocking shelves. The basement is dark, and crowded, and the area right at the back is littered with upturned boxes and the wreckage of what looks like an operating table. It takes her hours to clear the floor, and when she comes back up into the darkened pharmacy, the shelving units look tall and strange in the moonlight.

She winds her way through the shop, lets the jingle of the bell ring out into the night as she locks the doors behind her. Then it’s just the squeak of her rubber soles against the footpath, the rustle of her jacket as she draws it closer around her. The wind’s like ice. Her eyes flicker up when she hears a car pull in behind her, her shoulders tense into a tight line. She clenches her fist in her pocket, her keys sticking out from between her fingers.

“Hey! Nance!” 

Well, that’s not what she expected.

“Steve? ” She spins on her heel, eyes wide and white in the dark. It’s definitely him, trying with some difficulty to extricate his long legs from the footwell of his car. She runs towards him.

“What are you doing here? You weren’t going to visit until next week!”

“Well, gee, Nancy, thought you’d be more excited to see your - uhf, shit - boyfriend.”

She smiles. “You need a hand?”

“I mean, the job’s fine, it’s like anything. I still want to be a journalist, but getting a job like that when we moved here like a week ago isn’t gonna happen. The pharmacy’s creepy, and so’s the guy who runs it, but it’s not too bad.”

Steve cringes. “How do you mean, creepy?”

“Not like that, he’s harmless. I just feel like he could, like, spasm and collapse into a pile of cockroaches, or something.”

“Ew.” He drums his fingers absently against the wheel. The radio is turned down low. “I missed you, you know.”

Nancy kicks her feet against the dash of Steve’s car.

“Can you pull over up ahead? There’s a 7-Eleven open, and I need some Advil.”

“Migraines, again?” Steve’s brow furrows. “I’ll get gas while we’re there. It’s a hell of a drive, to Maine.”

Nancy’s starting to hate the sickly little chime of a shop door. The fluorescent lighting is overwhelming, a hundred tiny needles in her brain. The music is airy and warps around her ears; the shelves of brightly coloured bottles and boxes seem to multiply to swarm her periphery. Whatever the cashier says to her is lost in the slippery, ephemeral music floating and winding around them both. The cash register rings; Nancy turns away, stuffs her receipt into her bag and looks up, and she sees -

A round face, and smart eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. Naturally wavy hair in a loose perm cut to frame dimpled, freckled cheeks. She’s tall, and modestly dressed, and her eyes are fixed on Nancy’s like a whirlpool she can’t escape.

“Barb .” Nancy can only mouth the words. If she could see the cashier standing over her shoulder, she would see his smile, but she can’t, so she doesn’t. Barb is standing so close to her. Was she always so tall? It hurts her, the way she can’t quite remember.

“Why did you do that, Nancy?”

Oh, God.

“That wasn’t you.”

She wants to move, slide along the counter, put some distance between her and Barb, though it gnaws at her insides. She shouldn’t be trying to get away. This is Barb. She’s here.

“I didn’t want to go.”

Maybe that’s why she can’t move.

“You made me go.”

Is she crying? She might be crying.

“You made me come with you, and then you left me.”

Was Barb always this tall?

“All alone.” 

 Is she taller, now?

“When it took me, I was all alone.”

The rim of the counter is digging into her spine. She can’t press back any further.

“You weren’t alone when I died.”

Barb’s breath is hot on her face.

“You were busy getting -”

The door chimes.

Nancy heaves, sucks in a breath. When did she stop breathing?

“Nancy? You okay?” Steve is slipping his wallet out from his jeans. Right. The gas. He needs to pay for the gas.

She can’t move from where she’s stood, backed up against the counter.

“Nancy? Did something happen?”

Her hands are shaking.

_

The arcade across town, Will and El have found, isn’t really their place. Mike and Lucas were excited to see what machines they had, and had quickly gotten sucked in. Eleven had gotten tired of people-watching after a half-hour, and Will was feeling the prickle on his skin of being watched. They just couldn’t lose themselves like the others could. 

“I’m gonna get us some candy. I’ll be five minutes, okay?” Eleven nods, from where she’s been watching Mike play Badlands. Watching his brow pinch in concentration, his fingers hammering on the buttons.

Will sticks his hands in his pockets, feels the loose change cold against his fingertips. He hasn’t felt like playing anything here. He feels larger than life, some hulking, awkward, half-human thing slinking between the machines. Some half-human thing, and everyone knows, because they can see how wrong he is, he’s towering above them with the bright neon lights dancing through his hair and they can all see that he’s just pretending to be like them. Something false. He’s poorly constructed, nylon skin over wire frame and if they look close they can see where the joints peel away to steel. When the bright green light of the exit sign catches his face the right way.

The night air is heady and freezing, the kind of cold that chills to the bone in a second. There’s a convenience store right by the arcade, and it stays open late to cater to the stream of teenage boys who frequent the arcade. He doesn’t go in right away. The cold is bracing, which is odd, because Will honestly thought he’d never want to feel cold again. He doesn’t want to go inside, doesn’t want to be seen right now. It feels like the weight of a pair of eyes on his skin would split him right open.

Just as he has that thought, the ground lurches underfoot.

Eleven bores quickly. She can’t help it - she has stimulation, now, things that excite and engage. And it’s everywhere. There’s something everywhere, so much so that it feels like she’s drowning, sometimes. So when she’s tired of watching Mike play, and then of watching Mike watching Lucas play, she slips into the crowd. She’s not stupid. She wouldn’t wander off and get lost, when she’s supposed to be waiting for Will to come back. She’s going out front to meet him,  to get out of the fireworks show of human interaction sparking and bursting around her. That’s where she’s going, so when she pries open the heavy fire exit and slides between the doors, when she turns, it’s odd that she’s faced with a corridor, long and dark and definitely not the scuffed-up sidewalk and cool air she was expecting.

The walls are bare, and off-white in the gloom. Underfoot are grey tiles. It’s all very familiar. Sterile, echoing corridors, devoid of the little human comforts she’s grown accustomed to. The door she came through is gone when she spins back around; just another endless expanse of hallway. There’s a pull, something in her mind that says This only ends if you do as you’re meant to. It feels like a dream, the way she places one foot in front of the other, the pounding of her heart in her chest shaking her whole body so intensely it feels like her brain is thumping against her skull. There’s no space for logic here. Eleven comes to a stop when she’s faced with another door, this one heavy, steel lined with dark chestnut. It’s ajar.

She reaches towards it with fingers that seem so delicate now, so easily broken. They wrap around the door’s edge, and she almost isn’t surprised when a gloved hand closes around her wrist, easily encircling it. It’s not the slippery latex of a surgical glove, or the chilly stiffness of the heavy-duty white rubber gloves they would sometimes wear. It’s soft, cotton that’s a little worn and rough around the palm. It yanks. She pulls.

She can’t pull out of its grasp. Feet planted firmly on the floor, she just has the strength to keep it from yanking her into the darkness behind the door, but no further. This isn’t a flashback, her mind belatedly informs her. This is no nightmare.

It’s laughing at her.

The thing behind the door is giggling, and its voice is echoing off the smooth ceramic ceiling tiles, the painted concrete walls. She doesn’t want this. She wants it to go away. She wants it to let go of her. 

She screams, and feels the heat in her sinuses and the wetness running over her lips, and its grip doesn’t slacken at all.

It just comes closer to the gap in the door, so she can see just a sliver of it, a too-wide smile and flashing yellow eyes, a sliver of teeth like broken glass under red-painted lips -

And then her hand is free, and she’s gasping, and her lungs are filling with cold, cold, fresh air, not like the musty stink of wherever she just was. She slumps against the brick of the wall by the doorway, and tries to catch her breath.

And then she sees Will, and almost stops breathing all over again.

He’s standing on the footpath a few feet away, stiff with fear and staring at something she can’t herself see. She’s almost hesitant to close the distance between them, the image of the clown dancing behind her eyelids, but she does. 

“Will?”

No response. She reaches out, grabs him by the shoulder. His sweater is wool, and it’s rough under her fingers. She shakes him.

“Will!”

He gasps, but she only loosens her grip when his eyes meet hers, wide and terrified.

“El… El, I saw - I was in the Upside Down, all over again, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t really it -” He heaves, like he’s choking on air. “It wasn’t like before, and there were all these… people, people I knew, like you, and Mike, and they were all - all…” He bends double, sucks in another breath. Eleven places a hand on the small of his back, light and unsure. “Like I was when Mom found me. And one of them, when I was checking to see if they were - one of them was, but it wasn’t anyone I knew, it was - it was -”

“A clown.” Eleven says softly.

Will turns to look at her.

“How did you…”

“I saw it too.”

They stand in the dark for a moment in silence. And then they start to run.

_

“So, you saw Barb, but it wasn’t real?”

Nancy groans. The experience is slipping away from her, like a bad dream, but the feeling of being pressed up against the counter, her dead best friend penning her in, the stomach-churning dread of it, refuses to leave. She’s wrapped up in Steve’s jacket, the heating turned up high so the whine of it fills the car. It’s bordering on uncomfortably warm, but she can’t still the shivers that still wrack her body.

“I don’t know. It felt like it was real, so real, but she wasn’t. It was like, that’s the Barb I’m afraid of, the one that blames me for all of it.”

“Nance…”

“It just - it feels unfair to her. The real her. Like, she was this amazing person, this great friend, and that version of her where she’s cruel and vindictive, it just seems so wrong. It feels like she’s getting screwed over, if she’s just, embodying all my worst fears.”

Silence falls, just the whine of the heating and the radio turned almost imperceptibly low.

“But what do you think it was?”

Nancy shrugs, looks out the window. It seems like she’s done talking, up until she grabs Steve’s arm and says “ Stop the car! ” with such force he almost crashes it.

“What the fuck?”

She’s already getting out, and Steve finally sees why they stopped; Will and Eleven, standing huddled a few streets down from the arcade, red-faced and breathing heavily.

The car ride back to the Byers is easily one of the most uncomfortable rides Steve’s experienced.

Chapter Text

It’s Saturday, and the Byers household is quiet. Jonathan is at work, and the kids had rushed out to the arcade when Lucas and Mike almost broke down the door. Joyce is sitting at the table, fingers drumming incessantly against the wood. She’s supposed to be dealing with this better. She’s supposed to be able to settle down, watch TV, clear her head for an evening. She’s supposed to be moving on.

She’s not.

She stands and paces for a minute, tries to resist the urge. She’s not panicking about her kids being away from her. And she really, really shouldn’t be distracting herself with -

And the folder is out. This is not a healthy way to keep herself occupied, she reminds herself. If there’s a terrible way to keep her mind off her kid being out on his own, it’s researching missing kids.

It’s just - Ever since that boy, Bill, had talked about his little brother (Georgie , her mind supplies, and he would have turned seven in October) she hasn’t been able to shake it. The way the other one had said that children who go missing here don’t come back? She’s been running it over and over in her head a hundred times, and all she can think is, how many children have gone missing in Derry? Where did they go?

So maybe she hasn’t been able to move past it. Maybe she can’t stop drawing this connection between Will and Georgie, and maybe she’s been feeling this hot rush of shame every time she catches herself thinking at least Will came back. Maybe she’s been imagining all the parents in Derry waiting for their children to come home, evening after endless evening. Maybe she’s been wondering why there isn’t rioting in the fucking streets, because once she started looking into it she found a slew of missing kids, stacks and stacks of flyers she now recognises in faded scraps on shop windows.

So she has a folder, and it’s straining its bonds, worn elastic close to snapping. The information on each child is in itself scarce; just names and dates, addresses and ages and where they were last seen. It’s just that there are so many children. There are so many. It had made her feel physically ill when she’d put the timeline together and realised how many children were gone, and how close together it had all happened. How suddenly it had stopped.

She’s shaken from her reverie when the door opens, and she recognises the sound of heavy work boots stomping over the threshold. She toys with the lining of the folder for a second, considers shoving it back into the bookshelf before Hop comes through and sees her. She doesn’t.

“Hey, Joyce. What’s up?”

She likes that he ruffles her hair when he passes, the same little affectionate gesture he uses with the kids. His hands are cold from outside, though, so she wrestles him away, bats at his arms, and he grins. His expression changes a little when he spots the folder, but it’s interest, not concern.

“What’s all this?” Joyce turns to the kitchen counter and starts bustling about, putting the kettle on. Her back to him.

“You remember last week, those friends of Will’s came around?”

Hopper hums. “Sure.”

“They mentioned missing kids. And that one of their little brothers went missing…”

She hears Hopper flip the folder open behind her. The kettle is starting to bubble.

“Lotta kids here. Any of them ever turn up?”

Joyce sighs. “Some. But it's gruesome. They did… They found an - an arm that they traced back to one of the last kids to go missing. Ed Corcoran.”

“An arm?”

“It had been chewed off, Hop. And they weren’t animal bites.”

Hopper stops turning pages.

“Human bites?”

The kettle is screaming.

Hopper leans back. “I thought I was finding some weird shit, but this kinda takes the cake, Joyce.”

“What were you finding?”

He lights a cigarette. “You weren’t the only one thinking about what those kids said. I looked into the bullies they mentioned, the Bowers and Hockstetter kids.”

“Right.” Joyce pulls the folder towards her, and rifles through it for a second. “Patrick Hockstetter went missing in June, not long after Betty Ripsom. No trace of him was ever found.”

“Yup.” Hopper tips his chair back, props his foot against the kitchen table. Some compacted dirt caught in the heavy sole of his shoe crumbles off onto the table’s edge, but neither of them pay it any mind. “I had to ask around about the Bowers kid. Apparently his dad was a cop, made sure none of the reports on his son got filed. They were still filled out though. There’s a box in the archives dedicated to Henry Bowers, but he wasn’t in the system ‘til August.”

Joyce says nothing, just slides a steaming cup of hot chocolate in front of him, then takes the seat opposite with a cup of her own.

“So I checked out the reports, and the kid had a pattern. Escalating violence since he was little, went from skinning squirrels alive to carving up schoolkids.” He takes a long sip of his drink. “The parents would report it - the kids never wanted to, knew it’d get worse if he found out they snitched - and the good ol’ boys on the force would toss it into the Bowers box and their friend’s kid’s record would stay squeaky clean.”

“Jesus, Hop.”

“Mmm. Sadistic little shit. His dad was a piece of work too, seems like. No-one was that surprised when the law finally caught up with Henry.”

“Must have been pretty bad, if his dad couldn’t cover it up like everything else.”

“That’d be because he got nailed in August for killing the guy.”

Joyce’s mug slams against the table, hard, and hot chocolate slops over her fingers. Hopper ploughs ahead, eyes trained on the ceiling.

“So he’s messing around with his gang, some other low-lives, and he gets in a fight with his old man. According to his friends, Bowers fires his gun at him, gives him a scare, and goes inside. Henry goes down to the mailbox and comes back holding a knife that his friend Vic says he lost months before. He goes into the house - he’s in there about five minutes - comes back out covered in blood, hops in his car and drives off. He wanders back the next day, right into the waiting arms of the local cops.”

Hopper takes another sip of his drink. “Stabbed him while he slept, they said.”

“I can’t believe those kids were dealing with this - with this murderer, for so long. That could have been them!” Joyce is twisting her fingers together, skin going white where they press together.

“It almost was, a couple times. By the looks of those reports, Henry Bowers was on the edge of homicide for a long time before he killed his father.” Hopper straightens up, drops his mug in the sink. He doesn’t turn around right away, just braces his large hands against the counter’s edge, tension lining his frame. “Something fucked up’s going on here, Joyce.”

Joyce chews her lip, taps the folder with a finger. “If that’s the case, it’s been going on a long time.”

-

“Ah, bienvenido al château de Tozier.” Richie says grandly, pulling his front door wide and gesturing for Stan and Bill to come in.

“I’m not even going to start with how wrong that was, Rich.” Stan mutters, eyes darting around the entryway. “I think the language center of your brain might have been burned out with a hot wire.”

“S-So specific, S-Stanley. Have you been f-f-fantasising?” Bill wanders into the living room, drops his bag by the sofa.

“Maybe it’s too many English classes sat next to him. I’m near my fucking limit and it’s only November, Bill.”

“He’s standing right he~re!” Richie singsongs. He’s shifting from foot to foot.

“I brought soda,” Stan says, brandishing it. “Can I stick it in the fridge?”

“I’m a gracious host, Staniel.” Richie says, but rather than lead him to the kitchen he just snatches the bottle out of Stan’s hands and strolls off with it. Stan’s about to follow him, when Bill sticks his head out the door and asks for a hand setting up the sleeping bags. He sighs.

Stan is methodical, the way he always is. He likes thinking of things as having structure; he thinks that might be why he gets on well with Ben - he likes the way the other boy is always setting solid foundations, something safe and sturdy to hold them all up. He doesn’t like Richie’s house. He doesn’t like Richie’s parents. They’re unstructured, and volatile, and every time he sees Richie’s mother’s car wobble across the median when she drops him off, he feels like another brick’s been pulled out of the Jenga tower that is Richie’s life.

He could document all the things he dislikes about this room: he doesn’t like the way the dusty, stained carpet betrays how the living room has obviously been hastily tidied. He doesn’t like the way there’s a sharp, sickly smell under everything, and he doesn’t like the chill in the air that indicates the windows were open on a cold November morning to chase that smell away. He doesn’t like the deep impression on the couch in the shape of an adult; he doesn’t like the hairline crack running the length of the TV screen. He doesn’t like how bare it is, how the bookshelves are smeared with dust and probably full of spiders.

The thing is, he’s never liked Richie’s house. He’s never liked stepping foot in the hallway while Richie hops down the stairs, pulling his socks on as he goes. He’s never liked being reminded that this is what Richie comes home to, when he looks down the hall and sees another microwave dinner thawing on the counter, dripping all over the floor because there’s not even a tea-towel underneath. He’s never liked the way Richie’s clothes smell after the long weekend, or the way he stays out as long as he can every night, almost begging the others to keep him company.

He’s never liked Richie’s parents, and that’s about the nub of it.

He ruminates on this as he lays out the sleeping bags, parallel and flat. He thinks about how his own bag is stuffed with food, because he has a sinking suspicion that there isn’t much to eat in the house, certainly not for a weekend. He absently smooths out the dent in the shade of the table lamp as he carries it closer to the center of the room. He leans down and, with Bill, pulls the rug to one side so that it covers a large, scorched circle of carpet. Richie watches from the doorway, and says nothing. He  only leaves the doorway when there’s an enthusiastic hammering on the front door, followed by an almost timid ring of the doorbell.

Bev tumbles in, Ben trailing after her sheepishly. To her credit (though, Stan supposes, if anyone’s to get points for being nonchalant in this environment, Bev’s got the experience) she barely falters when she enters the living room. Instead she says, brightly,

“How about we unzip the sleeping bags, so they’re like blankets?”

And that’s that.

By the time Eddie and Mike arrive, (and they’ve both got a lot to say about how hard it was to get permission for this, Eddie in particular looks wrung out) the rest of the Losers have settled in somewhat. Ben and Richie had raided the airing cupboard and the bedrooms for blankets, pillows and sheets, and on their return Ben had thrown himself into setting up a blanket fort with a little more gusto than was strictly necessary, in Stan’s opinion. Bev had appointed herself Candy Czar, as she put it, rationing out the treats with all the compassion and humanity of a ruthless despot. She’d balanced the formerly-dented lampshade on her curls, to really sell the character. Bill and Stan have been moving furniture - the Toziers have two sofas (a three-seater with a splintering frame, and a sturdier loveseat that had been covered in junk when they’d arrived) and two armchairs, which had both been pushed into the far corners of the room. Between them, they’ve arranged it all into a rough circle, and Richie had set to evenly distributing pillows and blankets. No-one has mentioned the brief aside when Richie had made to throw a pillow onto the loveseat, only to spot a huge, damp spot smelling strongly of whiskey covering most of it. He’d just said “Must have been my dad’s,” in a forced-sounding airy tone, and tossed it into the hall.

Obviously, when Eddie comes in, he takes one furious look around and announces, “Richie, your house is fucking filthy.” Mike slips past him, like he’s trying to get out of range of whatever bust-up might be incoming.

“Aw, but I thought you liked it filthy, baby!” Richie coos, and Stan can’t help but notice the toe of his sneaker digging into the carpet as he talks. Eddie just rolls his eyes and pushes past Richie to sit. He looks a little solemn when he does, scanning the room like Stan had when he’d come in.

The thing is - and it’s why Mike, and Ben, and Bev all look varying degrees of surprised by the situation in Richie’s house - the members of the original Loser’s Club have always kind of known what was going on. The same way that they all knew that whatever was happening to Eddie at home went further than sugar pills and a fake inhaler, and the same way that they all knew that after Georgie died something happened with Bill’s parents, they’ve all known that Richie’s parents probably wouldn’t notice if he went missing.

(Bill had said that, to Stan, on a rainy day after Neibolt. He’d told him about the missing poster, and they’d both looked at their shoes and at their hands and after Bill had said it, Stan had looked in his eyes for a fraction of a second and looked away.)

But they don’t talk about it, not openly, and with Richie especially it’s like pulling teeth - he’s gotten too good at filling the expectant silences with noise, everything completely inconsequential, daring them to shut him up with a straightforward question. They never do. He’d deflect, anyway, if they did, but there’s a childish logic there, an if I say it out loud it becomes real, and they don’t want to do that to him.

So they say nothing, and let him chatter away, even when Bowers breaks his glasses and they’re a twisted mess of cracked glass and Sellotape for weeks, even when he’s stealing scraps of Stan’s lunch again.

So now Eddie is sitting next to him on the sofa, and he returns his worried look with a raised eyebrow as if to say what can we do? And Mike presents to them a stack of board games with a flourish, and Richie’s motormouth is running again as he roots through the boxes. Ben is examining the creased instructions, like a dear, and Bev is yanking open a bag of chips and shaking it in Bill’s face. So Stan and Eddie slip off the sofa and onto the floor with the rest of them.

Saturday night starts to creep towards Sunday morning, the clouded atmosphere slowly clearing as the hours slip by. It turns out that Richie’s got a stack of absolutely dogshit B-movies stashed in his room, so he and Eddie pound up the stairs to get them while Ben tries to get the VHS player connected. The cracked TV screen is all static when they come back downstairs and spill an armful of tapes onto the mess of sleeping bags.

“Why’d Eddie go with? He can’t carry anything with that arm.” Bev observes wryly, propped back on her elbows. Mike’s inherited her lampshade hat.

“To insult me, apparently.”

“Richie needs a chaperone at all times.” Eddie sighs, flings himself backwards onto the loveseat with a kind of defiant recklessness that makes Stan wonder how anyone could think him delicate . Richie crawls up next to him, clambering directly over Bill as he goes.

Bill makes a little ugh sound and reluctantly vacates the loveseat, making sure to get a couple elbows in Richie as he goes. He drops to his knees on the blankets and starts to help Mike and Bev in sorting through the tapes.

“Only, like, half of these are labeled, Rich, you’re a disaster -”

“Hamburger, the Motion Picture ? No, thank you.” Bev laughs.

“W-W-What’s D-Demonoid ?” Bill asks.

Richie glances at Mike. “It’s, like, a horror. There’s a pretty gnarly scene in it where the guy burns himself alive, though, so…”

Mike swallows. “We can watch it. I’m okay.”

“I change my mind,” Bev announces, casually. “I wanna watch Hamburger.”

“Demented Death Farm Massacre: The Movie.” Eddie reads, slowly, peering at a tape from the little pile that Richie’s been depositing into his lap.

“Oh, guys, please. Can we please, please watch One Million Years B.C?” Ben asks, eyes wide. Stan picks up the tape in question, one of the few with an intact case. “It looks terrible.” He muses, peering at the box art. “We should watch it.”

Bev leans over his shoulder, and raises her eyebrows. “Aw, Ben, do you have a crush on the cavewoman in full makeup and a fur bikini?” She coos, to Ben’s utter horror.

“N-No!” He’s flushed completely scarlet, head buried in his hands.

“What’s the point of a fur bikini,” Eddie mutters furiously, poking through the tapes in his lap. “Do you want to be hot or cold, make up your mind.” He looks up at to meet the largely incredulous stares of the other Losers. “What?”

“I think if you’re in a fur bikini, you’re hot either way,” Mike offers. Bill laughs.

Richie toots an invisible trumpet. “Mike Hanlon Gets Off A Good One!”

Stan starts inching towards the VHS player, terrible-looking caveman movie in hand. By the time Ben sees him, it’s already far too late.

This is a story of long, long ago, when the world was just beginning... A young world, a world early in the morning of time. A hard, unfriendly world. Creatures who sit and wait. Creatures who must kill to live…

-

In what could be generously described as the ungodly hours of the morning, Steve Harrington’s car pulls up in front of an ugly little terraced house with a wildly unkempt garden. He reaches down and turns off the engine, but doesn’t get out right away.

“I don’t feel good about this.”

“Being fair, Steve, you don’t feel good about anything.” Nancy says.

“You’re seriously telling me Ms. Byers won’t flip her shit that her kids aren’t home? When they’ve literally just moved to a new and dangerous and incredibly haunted town?”

“I asked Mom and Hop if we could go out when we stopped by the house after the arcade,” Will says, peaceably. “It’s not our fault they said no.”

“It’s late. They’re sleeping now.” Eleven says, in her very decisive way.

“Yeah, and no sleeping person has ever woken up before.” Steve snaps. “I just don’t wanna be the poor schmuck who gets railroaded by the Parents From Hell for stealing their children away. In the literal middle of the night, mind you.”

“Not from Hell.”

“He doesn’t mean they’re bad, just protective,” Nancy says, twisting around in her seat to meet El’s glare.

Will hums. “Can we go in now? I feel stupid just sitting out in the car.”

“I’m sorry, Will, what part of it being almost 4am did you not grasp? We. Will. Be. Arrested.”

At that point, Nancy opens her door and climbs out, Steve’s desperate protests growing fainter as she stalks down the overgrown path, kids in tow. Of course, because it’s Steve, she hears him opening the door and hurrying after them after only a moment. She has to stick her thumb all the way into the doorbell button before she hears the ringing from inside the house. When she yanks it back out, the depressed button follows sluggishly, and it hasn’t quite returned to its original position by the time the door opens.

“W-W-Who are y-y-y… y-y-you?”

There’s a boy, only about thirteen, scrawny in too-short pyjama pants, pale with coppery hair that flops over his eyes. He looks worried, and embarrassed, his mouth twisted tight as if he’s trying to keep in the shuddering, stuttering words that are threatening to slip out.

“Bill, who the fuck is it at 4 in the goddamn morning? Is it Mormons? Are they coming at night now?” The voice from further in the house is thick with sleep but as he continues his words mount in volume, clearly enjoying himself. “Is it nocturnal Mormons?”

“We’re not Mormons,” Will says, as if that’s sufficient explanation.

“I don’t know what a Mormon is,” Eleven says softly.

“We need to talk to you and your friends.” Nancy says definitively. “They’re all inside?”

“Y-Y-Y-” Nancy pushes past Bill before he can get through his first word, dragging Will and El along behind her. Steve rocks up, looking sheepish.

“Yeah, but they’ll p-p-probably be a-asleep,” Bill finishes rather lamely. “O-on account of it b-b-being a s-sleepover, and all.” Steve claps a hand on his shoulder, and continues into the house. Bill sighs into the night air, then turns to follow.

The scene inside is actually rather sweet, when Nancy stops in the living room, where everyone is gathered. The room itself is horrible, messy and banged up and with an underlying smell that she recognises from frat parties - stale vomit and hard liquor. It’s dark but early morning light is seeping through the thin curtains, leaving the room washed-out and cold-looking. The kids in it are a stark contrast to their environment - cocooned in blankets and sleeping bags, pressed against each other and sound asleep. Will’s good with names - he feels a little thrill of pride at being able to identify everyone in the room. There’s a three-seater that looks like it’s poorly built enough to bend under the weight of the two slightly-built children sleeping on it. One is Beverly Marsh, lying on her back with her head on the armrest, right by a table lamp that’s been stripped of its shade. Her face is pressed into the cushions, eyes screwed shut, as if she was hiding from the now-extinguished light when she fell asleep. She’s tall, and she shares the couch with another fairly tall boy, who Will recognises as Stanley Uris, curled up neatly on his side, feet tangled with Bev’s. There’s two armchairs, but only one is occupied - a boy Will doesn’t recognise, but thinks must be the “other Mike” he’s heard of, sprawled almost upside down in the chair, knees crooked over the armrests, close-cut hair brushing the carpet. The other one, inexplicably, has the VHS case for a movie Will doesn’t recognise propped up in it, a busty cavewoman posing seductively from atop the worn cushion.

He can see clearly enough where Bill was sleeping before they came to the door, a hollow in a mound of blankets on the floor. It’s right beside another boy, sleeping with his head pillowed on his arm, a poorly-made paper crown slipping low over his eyes. That’s Ben Hanscom. Finally, there’s two more boys on the loveseat, and one of them is blinking owlishly at them. Will had known it was Richie yelling from down the hall when Bill answered the door, but he’d clearly underestimated how capable his friends were of ignoring loud noise. They’re all still sound asleep, even Eddie, lying literally on top of Richie, pinning him to the cushions, his breathing even, and slow, but scratchy.

“They were f-f-fighting, and it went on for so long they just k-kind of f-f-fell asleep like that.” Bill sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I b-b-better wake everyone up.”

“I’d volunteer, but I’m kind of tied up right now,” Richie grins, head squished awkwardly between Eddie’s back and the sofa. He looks even more like Mike without his glasses. Nancy can’t really look at him for too long without feeling her stomach twist.

Bill goes around the group in a circle. He wakes Eddie by placing a hand on his chest and shaking gently, and the boy gasps awake, spots their visitors and flails himself right off the couch. Bill just steps past, leans down to shake Ben awake with a soft word. He pauses at Bev, then settles for turning the lamp on, casting the room in a warmer, brighter glow. She squirms and blinks awake blearily, smiles when Bill raises his hand in an awkward little wave and hears Eddie’s muffled curses from the floor. He leans over Stan and tugs on his earlobe, sniggering a little when Stan immediately swings an arm out at him in retaliation.

“Aw, Eddie.” Richie is saying, hanging his head off the edge of the sofa. “You’d rather be on the floor than sleep with me?”

Bill moves on to Mike, sticks a finger right behind his exposed knee, and Mike yelps and slides off the chair.

“Richie, what the fuck, there are strangers here, it’s like the middle of the night, what the hell is going on -” That gets the attention of everyone who’s just woken up. Bev’s eyes go wide and she draws her knees a little closer to her chest, Ben sits up and squints sleepily at the newcomers. Mike just whispers “Whoa.”

“Ooh, good point.” Richie chirps. He swings himself upright, clambers up to perch on the back of the loveseat. “What are you people doing in my house?”

-

“...So, we had these, I don’t know, encounters, and we decided -”

“I didn’t have an encounter.”

“ - shut up, Steve - Will and El told us about your visit to the Byers,” Here Nancy nods at Bill and Ben. “And they thought you might know something about this. So we decided to come and ask you about it.”

“And you decided that four in the morning was an appropriate time for this?” Stan asks, dryly. Steve flings an arm in his direction, nods wildly.

“How did you find us?” Bev looks distinctly freaked, and it’s an expression that makes the boys all think of standing in a bloodstained bathroom, pausing every few moments to listen for someone coming. Just in case.

Nancy shrugs. “I got Bill’s parents’ number from the phonebook, and asked where he was. Your mom told us all you guys would be at the Tozier house for the night.”

“Wow,” Richie says. “It would be so easy to murder a whole bunch of children this way.” Stan throws a pillow at his head.

“You said you had ‘encounters’,” Mike says, slowly. “What was it you encountered?”

Nancy swallows. She glances around, then says in a low voice, “I’ll sound crazy.”

No-one dignifies that with a response, so she grits her teeth and continues. “I saw my best friend. She died last year. She was saying… things, to me. Horrible things.”

“Nance -” Steve starts, but Ben cuts him off. “Did you see anyone else?”

Nancy looks puzzled. “No.”

“I saw someone.” El says quietly. She reminds the Losers a little of Bill, the way they both command everyone’s attention when they speak. “Someone bad. He had paint on his face.”

Eddie lets out a kind of high-pitched laugh. “Like a clown? Like clown makeup?” El nods.

“Eddie, c-c-come on. It m-might not be It…” 

“Are you kidding me?” Eddie’s standing now, and he’s still speaking in this desperate kind of half-laugh. “For real, Bill? You’re gonna stand here and tell me, tell all of us, that It isn’t back, it’s - what, it’s a different evil clown eating kids this time? Oh, don’t worry, we did kill it the first time, but now there’s another one?” Eddie sinks to the ground, and then hiccups. “That’s worse than us just failing.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Steve shouts. “Did you say an evil clown is eating kids -”

“Hey, shut up a second, handsome.” Richie says absently, scrambling off the back of the sofa and down to where Eddie is crouched, one hand pressing between his shoulderblades. He curses. Looks up to the others, mouths help. 

“Oh, shit.” Stan says. He stands up and roots around in the blankets on the ground, pulling out a pair of huge, thick glasses. “Catch, Rich.”

“It’s okay, Eddie.” Bev says, voice wavering just a little. “We’re gonna be okay.”

Richie slides his glasses up his nose, then he and Bill start to coax Eddie up off the ground. As they straighten up, Will can distinctly hear a kind of gasping wheeze coming from the boy now supported by the two others.

“Jesus, is he okay?” Steve asks, but Richie just says “Give us a minute, will ya?” and they shuffle off through the doorway.

There’s a moment of silence, and then Ben tentatively says, “Eddie has asthma.”

Mike hums, rubbing at his face tiredly. “The last thing any of us wanted to hear was that - that thing being back. I don’t blame him for panicking.”

Bev buries her face in her knees, where she’s now huddled up on the couch. Stan has his elbows propped on his legs, hands running through his hair. Mike picks his way across the blankets to where Ben is sitting, and settles down next to him in an expression of quiet companionship.

“I have to say,” Nancy says, “When we came in here with a weird story, I did not expect this reaction.”

“You guys were all alone when It got to you?” Nancy can hear the way Mike capitalises It in his own head. She nods. “I guess. There was a cashier there, but Barb went away when Steve turned up.”

“Mine stopped when El came out.” Will nods.

“Sometimes other people are a part of it. People you don’t know, usually, but sometimes…” Ben trails off, then seems to mentally shake himself. “It’s not really them. It tries to trick you, show you people you know, but sometimes they’re just… bystanders.”

Bill comes in then. “R-R-Richie’s taking care of Eddie. He’ll be f-fine, just, you know…”

Everyone in their pyjamas seems satisfied with this. Everyone who just came in off the street after a sleepless night of driving the streets, not so much.

“I really get that there’s something big going on here,” Steve says, and that’s definitely a note of hysteria in his voice. “But you guys have got to start explaining some stuff, fast.”

“You guys should sit down,” Ben says softly. “I guess we can unseat Loana, the Fair One.”

Nancy dutifully removes the VHS from the armchair, and after a moment of casting around she places it carefully on the ground next to the chair, as if unsure of its value, and sits there herself.

Bev and Stan squish up on the three-seater to fit Will and El, who are as scrawny as they are, and that leaves Steve to take up Mike’s vacated chair. Bill sits alone on the loveseat, wringing his hands. There’s an obvious empty space, but no-one moves to fill it. It feels wrong.

“Some of you guys know about Bill’s brother disappearing,” Stan starts, when it becomes clear no-one else will. “That’s really how it started, for us.”

“Georgie wasn’t the first to disappear, though. That whole year I was researching, there’s hundreds of kids that went missing. Over decades and decades.” Ben states, like he’s trying to impress how serious this is on the newcomers.

“It’s old. Older than anything else.” Mike says gravely.

“Georgie was one of the first in this cycle, though.” Stan says. ”And none of us wanted him to be gone, so we kept looking for him, and that’s how we found - you know…”

“E-Everything.” Bill says quietly. “We found everything.”

There’s a point at which the story the kids are telling gets too much for Steve. They’ve all dealt with scary shit, but this is sadistic , it’s pure malice and hatred in a way that’s so unlike the Upside-Down’s animalistic survival instinct. It turns out his tolerance for hearing about kids getting eaten, like for real eaten, is actually pretty low, he thinks somewhat madly. So he mumbles something about the bathroom, and stumbles out.

Eddie’s sitting in the tub, hands closed tight around the little handles on the sides. He’s breathing easier now, but Richie’s still rubbing insistently at his back, mumbling something completely incomprehensible and, knowing Richie, probably very irrelevant.

“I don’t want it to be back, Richie, I can’t do this again, what if I get us all killed - what if it hurts me again and - and I can’t fight, Richie -”

“It’s okay, it’s all gonna be okay,” Richie knows he’s speaking kind of blankly, but the mental strain of It being back, really back, is kind of getting to him. “We’ll all figure something out, it’ll be different this time. I - We won’t let you get hurt like that again. You’ll be sanitizing your undies again in no time.”

Eddie doesn’t snap back at him, just ducks his head and hauls in another breath like it’s physically paining him to do it. There’s a knock at the door.

“Ocupado.”

“It’s Steve?” 

“Who the fuck is Steve, Steve?” Eddie does snort a little at that, which Richie will take as a victory.

“Steve Harrington, and I’m realising now that that name means nothing to you, so, uh, I’m the guy with the hair.”

“It’s the guy with the hair,” Richie whisper-shouts to Eddie. “Should we let him in?”

“With qualifications like that? Why wouldn’t you want him in your home?”

“God, it is super weird that I’m in your house, huh. You are totally a bunch of children.”

“Extremely, yes.”

“Shit.” His voice sounds muffled from behind the door. “This whole thing is just freaking me the fuck out, man. I kinda thought all the monster shit would be over, but it turns out you guys just have a totally different kind of monster and -”

The door opens, and Steve sees, from where he’s slumped against the wall in a kind of desperate heap, the tall Mike-looking kid holding the door handle, and a terrified looking boy sitting in the bathtub like it’s a sailboat.

“- And now my kids are in danger again.” He finishes.

“Damn, you’re pregnant?”

“He wouldn’t have kids if he was pregnant, dickwad, he’d have to have already been pregnant and then given birth - ”

“Ooh, did you have them all at once? Your hips have gotta be like goalposts, my dude.”

“That’s disgusting, you’re so disgusting, I can’t believe I let you anywhere near me.”

Steve’s head is in his hands, his perfect hair shaking.

“Oh man, did I make you cry? Was it the pregnancy thing because I didn’t know that was a sensitive subject for you, you just have this hardworking single mom vibe going and you’re honestly kind of rocking it so it’s not the end of the world if your figure is ruined -”

Eddie whacks him, but he’s also looking anxiously at Steve. Who just raises his hands and they see his face is red from laughing.

“I just - Jesus Christ, I wanted to see if you were alright, kid, I didn’t expect - to be losing my goddamn mind on some twelve-year-old’s bathroom floor.”

“We’re not super pleased with our lives’ directions either, Steve Hairington.” Richie says, turning back to Eddie in the tub. “We should head back to the others, though, they’re probably butchering the story without us.”

Eddie takes the arm offered him and straightens up. “By ‘butchering’, I assume you mean that they’re telling them all the stupid shit you did instead of just lying about it -”

“Name one stupid thing I have done ever, in my life -”

“Oh, I don’t know, Richie, that’s a really hard one, hmm…” Eddie steps out of the bathtub carefully, leaning heavily on Richie’s arm and batting away Steve’s tentative offer of help. “How about when you snapped my arm back into place, fucking it up way more than if you’d just left it alone, which is, you know, why I’m still stuck in a goddamn cast -”

“You call it stupid, but I’d call it the brave action of a handsome man who was simply trying to help -”

Steve tries not to wince at the conversation matter, although despite their words the two boys don’t seem genuinely upset with one another. Eddie’s still leaning on Richie as they step over Steve sprawled out in the hallway, and Richie turns as they pass.

“You coming, Stevie? The end of the story’s the best bit.”

“Not anymore,” Eddie says, darkly. “ ‘Snot the end anymore.”

Steve groans, and hauls himself to his feet.

They come back just as Bill is awkwardly dancing around what exactly he’d walked in on when he’d gone to find Bev and found the message in blood, instead. Bev just interrupts before he mentions the body, and says “It took me.”

Bill slips off the loveseat and onto the floor with Mike and Ben when Richie and Eddie come back, and they settle onto the couch gladly. Steve picks his way across the floor back to his armchair, and almost doesn’t catch the questioning look Mike sends the two boys, his head tilting unsubtly in Steve’s direction. The Losers have been telling the story in turns, like they’re passing a baton that will hurt them if they hold it too long. The visitors just listen quietly, and if Will and Eleven’s hands are clasped tight together, no-one mentions it.

All in all, it’s almost six in the morning when the story has reached the gentle, sunlit grass patch in the Barrens, when they’d made a blood oath to come back. The sunrise is slowly brightening the room, and it just throws the kids’ pale faces and tired eyes into sharper relief. The Losers are pressed close together, much like they were in sleep when Nancy and the others first arrived, but now there’s an underlying fear there, driving them to keep close.

Nancy rubs at her forehead. “So, to summarise, there’s a monster in the sewers that eats children. It appears as your worst fear because it feeds off that fear. You usually call it Pennywise or just It. You hurt it so badly in August that you thought it was dead, but now it’s back, because it’s attacked us.”

Mike nods. “Yeah. According to Ben’s research, the cycle should have ended by now, but us hurting it might have messed it up. It’s like it’s taken the last few months to heal, and now it’s back to finish the job.”

“Fuck.” Stan sighs, and he slumps back onto the couch.

Nancy visibly steels herself. “So how do we fight it?”

“That’s the problem,” Ben says, miserably. “We were only able to hurt it that badly by chance.”

Bev hums. “We took it by surprise last time, because It was arrogant, and underestimated us. It won’t make that mistake again. But that doesn’t mean we can’t defeat it. We just need to figure out how.”

Bev’s eyes are glinting in the early morning light.

Chapter Text

Max is bored. She’s bored out of her goddamn mind. She can let her head loll and rest against the car window, and feel the vibrations rattle her skull, but it’s starting to give her a headache. She shifts in her seat instead, fidgets with her feet in the footwell. Her legs are tingling. She thinks, longingly, of her skateboard slotted awkwardly on top of her bags in the boot. Her mother is humming a song that seems to loop over and over, meandering along, running circles around her brain. She sits up a little when the WELCOME TO DERRY sign comes into view over the horizon, and soon enough it’s left behind. She’s been jumpy. The letters Lucas has sent so far haven’t done much to ease her mind - they started off normal, but quickly became muddled, as if he was losing focus mid-sentence, jumping from topic to topic frenetically. The visit was arranged before the move, though, and they’d spoken on the phone the night before she’d left. It was reassuring, hearing his voice, calm and assured.

They’re staying in the Derry Townhouse - it’s homely, understaffed, and just standing in the threshold, it feels like a building destined to be lonely. She races upstairs, throws her bags on the bed, tucks her skateboard under her arm. She almost trips on the way back down, scrambling frantically down slippery, polished hardwood steps. There’s a telephone in the lobby. She dials Lucas’ new number from memory. Counts the rings before he picks up. It’s only a moment later that she’s running out the heavy door, cold air whipping at her fingers as she throws down her skateboard and jumps on.

Her destination is a little café in the town centre, a long-time fixture of Derry that Max is absolutely certain Lucas didn’t pick himself. The Townhouse is also central, so she’s there in under five minutes - going fast, of course. Cracked pathways rumble under the hard plastic wheels of her skateboard, their surfaces crumbling and ricocheting off the varnished wood in a sporadic, hollow rattle. Max can't help but delight in the way the wind prickles at her cheeks. Speed stings.

The first thing she notices is that Derry is low and open, wide and open parks fenced in by low, elderly shopfronts. The library is across the way - it’s an impressive building, old-fashioned and intimidating, squat and crouched close to the ground. In contrast, the café before her is pleasant, its facade painted a long-faded teal, trim picked out in what-was-once-white. The windows are so plastered in notices and posters (almost none of which are current - she spots a flyer for a Hallowe’en festival years past, tucked under a torn MISSING poster that must have been marked FOUND by now, she’s sure) that it’s hard to see inside. Curiosity gets the better of her; she slips through the door to wait inside.

It’s pleasantly warm within, despite the draft that whisks in alongside her as she enters. The occluded windows let in very little of the dwindling afternoon light, so the café is lit with orange lamps that turn the ocean walls green. The ceiling is strung with lights and what looks like rigging - it’s nautically themed, she belatedly realises, taking in a large brass anchor affixed to the wall over the counter. She picks her way through the close groupings of tables and chairs to a little table-for-two by the window in the far corner. Max leans her skateboard up against the wall gingerly, slides into a little wicker chair directly opposite a large painting, all crashing waves and desperate faces, pulling sodden, ripped sails onto the deck of a beleaguered galleon.  Her chest feels hollow when she looks at it. One sailor looks out at her, the whites of his eyes stark against the seafoam, the crease of his smile captured in a single brushstroke. She focuses instead on the door, and waits for a familiar silhouette to appear on the other side.

Lucas arrives after only a few more minutes; awkward, nervous excitement gives way soon to the familiar, comfortable but heart-fluttering company she’s dearly missed since they were forced to say goodbye. It’s been a little under three weeks since Lucas and the others arrived in Derry, and since her own family moved to Chicago from Indiana - a far cry from California. He keeps looking over his shoulders, even though they’re tucked far into the corner of a relatively empty café on a Monday afternoon. He’s not long home from school, so she supposes he might be tired already. She’s already kicking at his shins under the table, prodding at his cheeks when he’s not paying attention, relishing every laugh and half-hearted glare. He makes fun of her, underdressed for the weather, and isn’t winter in Chicago even worse? And she sticks her nose high and tells him that she’s not so delicate as he is, hopes he doesn’t mention the way her cheeks are flushed with cold. He doesn’t. They swat at each other, verbally and physically, and Lucas buys her hot chocolate with all the change he can dig out of his jeans pocket. She’s sipping at it, letting the steam shroud her face when he very loudly announces his intention to piss, and some of it goes up her nose when she snorts.

Lucas pries the heavy door open. It’s a small café, and the facilities are scaled appropriately, so it’s just a small room with a toilet and a sink with a mirror over it, a deadbolt on the door and a threadbare handtowel mounted on the wall. He’s checking himself out in the mirror - he looks fantastic, obviously, very cool in his warm camo fleece and heavy jeans - when he’s startled so much he almost cracks his skull off the mirror.

“Hey.” It’s Billy. Hair wild and coarse, eyes wide. Fuck. He should have known - if Max is here, it makes sense that her dipshit brother would be too. Shit. Shit.

His face is in the mirror. Snarled, dripping with aggression. Marred with an ugly, purple-black bruise that drips from his brow to his cheekbone. Of course Billy Hargrove is here.

Is that why he’s been so jumpy, when he should just be glad that his girlfriend is here, and that she hasn’t moved on in his absence? When he should be relieved, to be far, far away from the Upside Down and all the horrors it brings?  

Oh shit, Billy’s advancing. Coming closer. Growing ever larger in the mirror, dwarfing him in comparison. Stained denim, stinking of tar. It calls to mind cigarette smoke and for a moment the phantom feels so real that Lucas's eyes sting.

Is that why he’s been feeling this undercurrent of malice, seeping up through the soles of his shoes? Oh my God, he’s going to die in a tiny café bathroom. He’s going to die on the toilet like fucking Elvis.

When he feels the steel grip on his shoulder, fingers digging so deep it feels like fingernails are going to pierce his skin, he tears his eyes from Billy’s in the mirror. He turns, hard, trying to shake his grip and whacks a shoulder into the mirror as he does. It clunks against the wall with a dead, hollow sound.

But Billy’s gone. There’s no-one here. The deadbolt is still in place on the door. Just a boy, standing in a tiny, locked room, shaking. 

Lucas scrambles for it, hot with shame - why is he so scared? There’s nothing here. He slides the bolt, but he can’t tug it across, it’s sticking, and trying to force it is bruising his fingers, and he glances over his shoulder desperately. 

There’s a face in the mirror again, hanging crooked, but it’s not Billy. It’s a - it’s a fucking clown , of all things, grinning toothily back at him from behind the glass. His stomach churns, and he pulls at the bolt again and finally feels it give and slide smoothly like it was never stuck at all. It slams into place, and Lucas is throwing himself at the door, shoulder-first like in the movies. It swings open and he flies out, spins on his heel and grasps at the door again, pushing it back and firm into the frame, pressing his back up against it to keep whatever the fuck was in there from getting out.

And then his heartrate slows, and his head stops spinning, and he starts walking back along the corridor, and he thinks.

Billy was never really there, that much is obvious - the door had been bolted the whole time. He’d been seeing things, and he’d fumbled with the lock in his panic to get out, because he’s an idiot, and he’d been so scared of this imaginary scenario that he’d convinced himself he was being - being attacked, or something. It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing.

But when he sits back opposite Max at the table, his shoulder throbs.

-

 So maybe Lucas isn’t as over it as he thought he was. And maybe he’s not playing it as cool as he thought.

“Seriously, what the hell happened?” Max asks, for maybe the fourth time since they left the café.

Lucas groans. “I just - nothing happened, okay? I was imagining things, it’s nothing…”

“It’s obviously something,” Max scoffs. “You’re freaked out.”

“Shut up, am not.” Lucas bites back. “I thought I saw something in the café. That’s all.”

“What did you see?”  Max’s voice is alight with curiosity.

“Nothing, Jesus,”

Max drops it. She pushes herself ahead on her skateboard, weaving back and forth ahead of him on the footpath. Lucas is kicking moodily at the ground as he walks, head down.

“Did your brother come with you?”

Max almost topples off her skateboard as she twists to look at him. “What?”

“To Derry. Did Billy come with?” Lucas’ gaze is still trained on the ground as he walks, but she can see the furrow in his brow.

“No,” she says, lightly. “He’s still in Chicago.” She swallows the why, and picks her skateboard up again. Stows it under her arm. It’s a comforting weight. They walk in silence a little longer, until they’re outside the Townhouse again.

“Mom’s taking me for dinner, so I should go in,” she starts. “Hey, chin up, loser.”

She taps him under the chin and he snorts, finally meets her eyes.

“Listen, maybe we should talk to the others about this. They might be able to help.”

“Help with what?” Lucas snaps. “Nothing happened.”

“I don’t know. Fuck me for trying to help, I guess.” Max glares, eyes narrowed.

“Max -”

“No, I get it, you want to be a bitch about this. God forbid you try and do something about it, huh? God forbid you break the long-standing tradition of not telling Max shit?”

“Max.”

The door slams behind her. Lucas sighs. Fuck.

-

The science lab in the school is kind of depressing, really. The equipment is all tucked away in a way that makes it seem like no-one’s ever actually used it, which is patently impossible. There’s this veil of apathy that hangs over much of Derry, though - Dustin’s science teacher had just shrugged when he’d asked to stay in the lab after school, working on a project. She hadn’t even pointed out that there was no project assigned for him to be working on.

Dustin’s been itchy, just under his skin, all week. Lucas is jumpy, Mike’s been acting distant, and after the arcade last weekend Will and El have been sequestering themselves away far too often.  Mike hasn’t even been visiting El, which is completely bizarre, and Dustin knows it must upset her. 

So, sick of dragging Mike over to his or Lucas’ new place only to sit in distracted silence while they pretend to work on the new campaign, Dustin’s trying to go back to his roots. Building a radio from the clear plastic tubs of junk stacked in the storeroom of the Physics lab. He can’t help but marvel at how unordered it all is - the storeroom looks like it was filled by someone with only a vague idea of how a science lab operates, and then never touched again. There are corroded batteries leaking alkaline into the grooves at the bottom of the tubs, in amongst neat coils of copper wire and a box of perfectly good dials.

Dustin shakes his head. He’s trying to be firm, cheerful, strong in the face of the move. He knows it’s been difficult, on everyone, particularly Mike - so he’s taken it as his own sworn duty to put on a good front for the rest of them. But he needs his alone time. He needs to be somewhere just for him, and do something he’s good at.

He picks out a length of magnet wire that’s only a little mangled at the end, a tangle of alligator leads and a squashed cardboard box of germanium diodes. Thankfully, there’s also an opaque plastic bin of broken electronics that he raids for a couple of telephone handsets that should have enough working bits between them to do the job. It’s fine, perfectly usable, it’s all just very unlike the neatly labelled trays of wires and components and electrical contacts in the AV lab at home, lovingly reorganised by Mr. Clarke every Friday afternoon.

As he’s fixing down the coil, he hears something thunk and clatter, heavy, from behind the closed storeroom door. It makes him jump, nick his finger on the blade of his pliers. 

“Shit, ” he hisses. Sucks absently on his finger and looks apprehensively at the door. He does remember replacing the stack of plastic tubs a little haphazardly when he’d been rooting around for a flat board. They’d probably just succumbed to gravity, at long last. He still doesn’t return to his work. The door is tightly shut.

He kind of wants to walk over there, past the stools stacked upside down on the neat laboratory units, to open the door to the storeroom and take a look inside and even just check out the mess. He’ll definitely clean up before he leaves, anyway, so he should probably know how bad the spill is. But now it’s like gravity is pulling him down - he wants to go and put it right, but his soles are stuck tightly to the lino and his legs are weighted heavily, and it’s much easier to turn back and return his attention to his little radio-in-progress. 

So Dustin goes back to work. He can’t quite settle the prickling feeling across his skin, across the back of his neck. 

Building a simple AM radio is hilariously easy, though, and he’s got it done in a few minutes. The handset he’s using is held in place between his jaw and his shoulder in a move he learned from his mother, and he feels the cracked plastic casing dig into his cheek. He’s listening for the clicks, but his mind is elsewhere. He wants to make a proper FM radio, and he can - on the workspace he’s got a solder gun and a Tupperware container of capacitors, transistors, even a potentiometer he’d scraped some gunk off. Dustin huffs out a sigh. He’d started off excited for this, but now he kind of wants to leave once he’s gotten a signal. The air smells foul. Click, click, click.

He packs up. Pokes diodes back into their box, rolls up the leftover magnet wire as neatly as he can and stacks it all up in his arms. He eases the handle of the storeroom door down with his elbow and bumps it open with a hip. It’s the work of a moment to deposit his armful of junk on the nearest shelf, and he’s concentrating so intensely on keeping the pliers from slipping off the pile and onto the floor that he almost doesn’t notice it. He almost doesn’t notice that the stack of tubs is perfectly in place.

“What the fuck?” Dustin mutters. 

He tries to figure out what fell over while he puts everything back, but everything's as it should be, it seems. Until, that is, there’s a distinctly meaty gurgle in the darkness.

Now, Dustin’s a curious kid. He has a bright, inquisitive mind, and a thirst for knowledge, as his old teachers would say. That said, there is nothing he wants to investigate less, at this moment, than the wet, phlegm-choked grunting coming from the far corner of the storeroom.

He backs up, just a step. The thin metal frame of the shelving unit shudders violently. Sends all the plastic trays rattling in place. There’s another gross, fleshy thunk and the shelves jolt forward, scrape against the floor. A can of WD-40 topples off the highest shelf and hits the ground with a deafening clang, the kind of sound that reaches in through Dustin’s ears and grips the mush in his head in tiny, strong fists. His gaze flickers down to where the can is rolling along in a lazy half-circle. There’s a shadow under the lowest shelf, bloated and swelling out from the rest. Just as the can comes close to it, there’s a blur and a crack and the can shoots across the floor and ricochets painfully off Dustin’s shin.

“Jesus,” he breathes, eyes fixed on the growing shadow. It’s sick-looking, bulbous, an adjective his mind supplies without prompting. A pair of little, barely-formed hands grip the floor and crawl forwards, hauling behind them - Dart.

He - it looks wrong, and misshapen, and as it pulls itself out from the dark he sees that its hind legs have been ripped clean off, leaving a ragged gristly mess trailing after it. Dustin feels sick. He doesn’t know whether to step forward, because it was his pet, his friend, or run for it, because it’s a baby demodog or whatever and if it’s here it means that the Upside Down is here and that sucks, sucks beyond belief, because that’s just not fair. Dart trills pathetically at him, whines and cries out for him, and he stiffens and tries to move forward but before he can close the distance another shape comes out from another stack of tubs and crashes headlong into Dart, sends them both tumbling. It’s another Dart, looks like, with its legs intact but missing a chunk of its arm and chest, and as he watches its mouth splits open wide and there’s a soggy kind of crack and Dart is twitching but the whine is stuttering and failing and the other Dart is shaking Dart in its jaws.

Dustin takes a shaky step backwards, and his face scrunches up without his permission when the heel of his trainer crunches down into something wet, something that slips oily under the sole of his shoe and almost makes him fall. He doesn’t really have to look down to see that it’s another, third Dart, but he does anyway, to find he’s crushed its little skull, and he bites down on the bile rising in his throat.

Dustin stumbles back, out of the storeroom finally and the gunk on the underside of his shoe crunches and crackles against the lino as he staggers into the lab and back to the radio. Dart’s whining is still going, wheedling cries and muffled thumps as the little monsters flail their way half-formed and maimed across the floor. His cheeks are burning and hot with tears and he fumbles with the zips on his bag. Yanks them down roughly and roots through it desperately for what he needs, finally pulls it free and lets warm, fuzzy static fill his ears while he tries to find the right frequency. The walkie buzzes against his ear like it’s crammed tight with bumblebees, and his head hurts, and when he calls out for help he gets a response, but it’s not the one he needs.

“Whatcha doin’, Dusty? Shouldn’t you be taking care of your friends back there?”

The voice on the other end is high and mocking, and even through the speaker it’s oddly synthetic. The crying from the storeroom mounts, and Dustin feels rather than knows that the amount of Darts in there has multiplied again.

“You’re a good kid, right? You’ll take care of ‘em, right?” the walkie cackles.

Dustin shakes his head mutely. The walkie slips through numb fingers and clatters to the floor, but the voice stays just as loud and close, like someone speaking in his ear, muffled and bristling with electricity.

“They need ya in there, Dusty! They’re hurtin’ somethin’ fierce!” It’s howling with laughter, and its words are punctuated by distant pained yelps and thumps. Dustin’s licking his lips nervously and he’s pretty sure he’s shaking. The rudimentary AM radio he’s built starts screeching, so loud the handset is trembling and rattling, and it doesn’t make sense because he hasn’t hooked up the ground wire or anything, it shouldn’t be working at all yet, but the frequency is so high it feels like his brain is bleeding. He drops to his knees, painfully, picks his walkie back up with cold mannequin hands and stumbles forward so fast and hard he clips his side off the lab counter as he goes and half-spins out the door.

The walkie mocks him all the way out of the school, until he’s standing in the road on a winter evening with his chest heaving and his hands shaking, and it finally quiets with a hoarse laugh.

“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck? ” he mutters, madly, gripping his curls in tight fists. “What am I supposed to do?”

Oh shit. He does have an idea what to do - at least, he has a memory, and that’s about the best his weeping brain can do at the moment. It’s Steve, outside the cellar door with a heavy bat, pushing him back with one big hand on his shoulder. Steve’s in town, right? Mike said so; if he can find him he might be able to help. Dustin knows Steve sure as hell wouldn’t have answers, but he also knows for a fact that he doesn’t go anywhere without the nail bat and that would have been very comforting back there.

So he starts moving. He’s just running, kind of, in the general direction of Mike’s new place, because he figures maybe Nancy’s there and if she is, so is Steve. And the bat. So he’s running, and he still hears the wet crunch of the gristle on his shoe against the tarmac, and the winter sky is grey overhead. 

He still hasn’t calmed down when he runs into Lucas.

Ten minutes later, they’re sitting on the footpath a few streets from the Townhouse, knees knocking on the curb. Lucas has his head in his hands. Dustin’s heartrate has slowed a little since he’d spilled to Lucas; he doesn’t quite feel like he’s one strong breeze from keeling over anymore. He still takes a deep, calming breath before he speaks.

“We need to tell Max.”

Lucas whips his head up. “What? ”

“Well,” Dustin says. “We need to tell everyone, obviously, but I can already see you or Mike deciding not to, and I think we should tell Max, too.”

Lucas drops his head again. “I guess…”

Duncan continues, “I mean, we’re all terrible at keeping secrets, so whichever way it goes there’s gonna be a fight, and I think we should just skip the bullshit and get it over with.” 

Lucas groans. “We should get her before she goes for dinner. Her mom’ll be pissed.”

They straighten up, brush the dust off their trousers and start off down the road.

“So, the Upside Down’s followed us here? To Derry?” Lucas asks.

“I saw baby demodogs, like Dart was, so I think so.” Dustin hums. “I - for some reason, I really did think it was Dart. It seems weird, now, because he - he died when the portal closed, and the ones I saw were juveniles, but it just… felt like him.”

Lucas nods. He doesn’t bring up Billy - he was seeing things. Surely. And if what Dustin’s saying is true, then the Upside Down is probably what’s been - what’s been watching him this whole time, freaking him out so much. He doesn’t want to consider the alternative. He straightens up, yanks Dustin up by the hand.

They catch Max just outside the Townhouse; her mother is unlocking the car when Lucas and Dustin barrel down the footpath and sweep Max along in their wake. She can only yell out a “Sorry about dinner, Mom!” before they’ve rounded the corner and disappeared from sight entirely.

-

Kick, thunk, clunk. Richie’s been aiming at the sewer grate (isn’t he always) but any facet of athleticism eludes him. Even just a well-aimed kick at some rocks is beyond him, it seems. The hunk of concrete goes entirely wide and glances off the curb so spectacularly that Richie can picture it rocketing right back at him and nailing him in the eye; cue pratfall, reel off a laugh track that loops oddly.

“You really do suck at sports,” Eddie says conversationally, rolling a pebble under the toe of his sneaker. Eddie’s much better than he is, which isn’t fair, though much less fair is that no-one would know - only someone who’s seen them all tearing down the embankment would have opportunity to notice how Eddie’s always been fastest, because he’s light and his legs are strong and he only remembers he has asthma once he’s stopped.

See, no-one else would know ‘cause Eddie’s ma had him pulled out of Phys Ed years ago, and most have forgotten the way their gym teacher had said, bewildered, But Edward’s a very fast runner, and he’s never had any trouble and instead remembered the way he sits on the bleachers and picks at the pristine soles of his sneakers.

The Losers themselves forget, sometimes, but Richie can’t because right now Eddie is whisking rocks into the open grate like he’s cleaning house.

“Not a sport, Eds.” Richie says snootily, “Just a dirty game for gutter children. Street urchins.”

Eddie laughs lightly at that, gives up at kicking Richie’s ass at urchin games and fishes his chunky plastic watch from his fanny-pack. He can’t hear the trilling little alarm so clearly when it’s in there. He can only bear to take it off his wrist some days.

“We should get going. Mike said he was leaving at half past, so we can meet him on the way.”

Richie sounds off an imaginary trumpet in response to that.

Richie starts up the Mike-chant as soon as they crest the hill and see him. It starts low, just for him, and by the time they’ve closed the distance and Mike is trying to say hi, he’s fully hollering MIKE! MIKE! MIKE! and Mike kicks him in the ankle amiably, so he stops.

“So, do you two have any idea why we’re wanted for dinner?”

“We are the dinner.” Richie says, like it’s not a joke.

“I dunno.” Eddie says. Mike hums.

“D’you think,” Mike starts. “You think it’s about It?” Richie tips his head back and groans. Eddie gives Mike one of his Looks, brow creased in worry.

“I mean, Ben and Bill spilled some stuff about It last time they were there, so I was just thinking…” Mike shrugs. “No harm to be prepared.”

“Wow,” Richie says. “Is it too early to turn right back around?”

Eddie realises how apparent it is that he and Richie have been kicking rocks around on the side of the road for the past few hours when they’re stood in front of the Byers’ apartment door. Belated as the worry is, his adrenaline still spikes as he becomes acutely aware of how they’re both dusty and scuffed, and Mike looks much neater than they do because he probably changed before he left the house to come here, because this is a weird group dinner with a bunch of people they don’t know and they shouldn’t show up looking like actual gutter children. So he’s kind of freaking out when Richie pounds shave-and-a-haircut on the door. The door swings open and his anxiety is entirely unabated, because the man behind the door is, um, eight feet tall, and looks like he’s already at the end of his rope with them and Richie hasn’t even started on his party routine.

He wheezes, before the giant has even said a word.

“Hello,” Mike says politely. “Is this the Byers’?”

“Mhm,” says the man.

“Ms Byers asked us over for dinner.” Mike offers. The man snorts. Eddie wills his lungs to work. He can feel Richie revving up next to him, and he grabs his arm, hard, hoping to instil, who knows, a fear of God or something?

The man steps aside and waves them in, and the tight constricting feeling around Eddie’s lungs gives a little when Bill smiles at him from the table. Bev is beside him, and her grin is not as gentle or sympathetic as Bill’s but it fills him with the same warmth and security, like a sunbeam. He doesn’t loosen his grip on Richie’s arm, though, because he’s not as afraid as he was but he still has his sense, and he leads the way over to them.

“Hi guys!” Bev says brightly. “Have you met El?”

“Sure, probably.” Richie waves them off. “What’s with the mountain man?”

Bev looks a little uneasy, but Bill smiles and says, “Hopper? I th-th-think he’s nice e-enough. Scary, b-b-but nice.” So Richie shrugs, and Eddie and Mike exchange a look, and they take their seats at the dinner table. And the doorbell rings. Eddie checks his watch again.

“Seven on the dot. Must be Stan.”

“He’d be all twitchy otherwise,” Richie pulls a face, puts his hands up like claws. “Like this!”

“Oh, I’ll g-g-get it, Ms Byers,” Bill says, already standing from his chair and starting across the floor.

When all’s said and done, there are eleven seated at the table - the Losers, Will and Eleven, Mike Wheeler (“other-Mike”) and Joyce Byers. Hopper’s in an armchair off to the side with his plate balanced on his knees. The food isn’t amazing, in Joyce’s opinion, but the kids are eating it like they’ve been starving in the desert. Stan is giving his full attention to dissecting his food. In stark contrast, Richie is smearing his all over his face, because he keeps turning to talk to people and missing his mouth with the fork. Eleven wolfed down her own dinner as fast as she could, and had then settled back in her chair to watch the crowd at the table with wide, curious eyes. Right now her eyes are on Beverly, laughing through a mouthful of mashed potato at something their Mike said. Her eyes are sharp and bright, and her smile creases her cheeks when she turns, catches El’s gaze. El flushes and looks away, towards the other end of the table where Richie is questioning her Mike rapidfire, leaning so far over the table that he’s getting gravy on his shirt. Mike looks deeply uncomfortable, and El can tell that his responses are terse and harsh, but the slew of questions doesn’t once falter.

“This is fun, right?” Will murmurs, sounding unsure himself. “Lively.”

“There’s so many of them,” Eleven whispers back. Will grimaces.

“Oh!” Ben says, turning from their Mike to address the table at large. He clears his throat, uncertain, before Bev thwacks the glass in front of him with her dirty fork and the table quiets. “We were gonna have a bonfire. Next weekend. You guys can come if you want.” His voice is high and nervous, wavering just over the lingering ring of the glass.

The table shakes as Richie collapses back into his seat, fully distracted. Her Mike sighs in relief. “We’re setting the Barrens on fire, yeah.” Hopper glares at the back of Richie’s head with such intensity Eleven thinks his hair might catch fire.

Eddie scoffs. “Just don’t come crying to me when you’re dying of smoke inhalation.”

“I-I-It’s a small b-bonfire,” Bill says, and suddenly no-one doubts them. “I-It’s the o-o-only thing we c-c-can do outside in w-w-winter. Without freezing t-t-to d-death.”

Joyce swallows. A grainy police photo of Cheryl Lamonica flashes through her mind briefly, alone and so small in the cold, but then she looks down the table and sees Will’s eyes alight, and says nothing.

At the other end of the table, Richie grins at Mike through a mouthful of chewy beef, the handle of his fork hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette. He’s barely even started to speak when Mike snaps.

“Just leave me alone,  alright?” Mike slams his hands on the table. “Stop rubbing it in!”

Richie looks genuinely surprised. “Rubbing what in?” His fork clacks against his teeth as he talks. Mike slumps back in his chair, arms crossed tight and glowering. The table’s gone quiet.

“You’re just - you’re trying to make me feel bad, I get it. You can stop now.”

“Dude, bad about what?” Richie hauls his grin back up, tries to appeal to the group at large. “I’m just askin’ questions. Can’t blame a guy for tryin’ to get to know his long-lost clone!”

“Richie,” Stan murmurs, setting his cutlery down carefully. He’s watching Mike. “Stop.”

“I’m not your long-lost clone, dumbass.” Mike spits. “I’m your cousin.”

“I don’t have a cousin.” Richie says, stupidly.

“W-w-with all due respect, Rich, l-l-looks like you d-do,” Bill tries.

“Boys,” Joyce starts, but Mike cuts her off.

“I’m just sick of you trying to make me feel bad for something my mom did! I didn’t know about you either but I’m not going around bringing it up all the time, always talking about how weird it is that we look alike and how crazy it is we’re only meeting now, like it was my decision in the first place! It fucking sucks, and I’m sick of it, so just stop! ”

Mike’s on his feet, breathing heavily and red-faced. Opposite him, Richie looks pale and small.

Hopper whistles. “Alright kids, time to get the hell out.”

“Hey!” Mike snaps at Hopper, tries to shake the hand off his shoulder. “Let go!”

Richie just goes quietly, for once, his brow furrowed like he’s trying to work out a difficult equation. Hopper herds the two into Will’s bedroom, and the door closes on Mike’s tantrum with a disappointing little click.

Chapter Text

“So,” Max says. “The Upside Down followed us here.”

“Or there’s another Gate,” Dustin says. “That would just be stellar.”

Lucas kicks his heels. They’re sitting on the Kissing Bridge, looking out over the Barrens. The wood of the bridge is damp and icy, but it’s not just the cold that sends a chill up their spines.

“We need to talk to El,” he says. “How would we fight it without her?”

Max swings on the railing. It shakes a little under her weight, weakened by years of carvings. The toe of her sneaker cracks against a relatively freshly-carved R near the ground.

“She just got out of all this,” Max sighs. “Do we really have to drag her and Will back in right away?”

“Get real,” Lucas snaps. “She has superpowers, and we don’t.”

“Someone’s sounding an awful lot like those Lab freaks,” Max snorts. “It might not even be a Gate - it could just be some loose monsters, and we could totally take those.”

Dustin clears his throat. “I think the course of action here is obvious - we have to investigate. Even if we did go to Eleven now, we don’t have anything she could go on.”

“But,” Lucas interjects, triumphant, “Friends don’t lie - won’t she be super mad at us if we don’t tell her? And what about Will, are we just leaving him out for no reason? And Mike?”

Max shakes her head at him, but Dustin looks thoughtful.

“Yeah, shit. Maybe we should tell Mike, he might know what to do about Will and El. He’s closest to both of them.”

“Yeah, why didn’t you guys think of Mike sooner?” Max asks. She looks worried. “You’ve barely mentioned him since I arrived.”

“You arrived three hours ago, Max, it’s not a huge deal.” Lucas mumbles, picking at a board with his thumbnail. Dustin’s pacing.

“He’s been…” Dustin sighs, searching for the words. “I don’t know. Weird? Let’s just try and figure out what it is we’re dealing with, first.”

Max rolls her eyes. Lucas snorts.

 “Fine.”

-

Bill, Bev, Eddie, Stan and Richie are standing in the half-light of the barn door. December’s almost upon them, and the wintry light is dwindling earlier and earlier in the day.

“Maybe we should start with what we know about It,” Mike says, standing beside the Board. The Board is a half-shattered pallet Mike and Ben had carted from the dump to the farm a few days prior. The surface of the pallet is intact, so though it can’t take any weight, Ben’s propped it up on some milk cartons against the wall and they’d fixed a stretch of old canvas over it. It gives them a flat, clear surface to pin up their pieces of paper and card. Up to this point, it’s been their personal project - Mike puts together what they know, and Ben finds the structure in it.

“Right,” Ben says, and pulls the box of evidence across the barn floor towards him, to where he’s sitting on the straw-scattered floor. The others all take their seats on the ground behind him.

There’s an oblong of cold light that slashes across the interior of the building, and it cuts right across Mike where he stands. He’s straight-backed and calm, jeans cuffed up around his work boots and sweater-sleeves rolled up to his elbows. In this moment, the Losers look at him and see a teacher, a scholar - they see the keeper of knowledge, patient and waiting. 

“I know no-one wants to remember what happened in the cistern,” he begins, and his voice hangs clear and sharp in the cold air. “I don’t want to either. But we learned so much about what It is, when we were down there, and - and if we want to make that experience count for something, we need to use what we learned.”

Bev nods. Ben pulls a small sheaf of flashcards out of the box and hands it to Mike, and the only sound for a moment is the snap of the bullclip as he undoes it. He picks a tack from the paint tin atop the pallet and pins the first card to the Board. It reads ANIMAL.

“If you think back to what Pennywise said to us when it had Bill, you’ll remember it spoke of two things - feeding and resting. It hibernates, like - like a bear. Or cicadas.”

Mike gestures to Stan, who gives him a strained half-smile, looking pale and washed-out. Mike clears his throat.

“It needs to feed, so we can assume that if it doesn’t feed, it dies. It can die. It can hurt, and we know that.”

“What if it was lying?” Eddie asks, voice high and wavering.

“What?”

“It could have been lying. Monsters lie to get what they want. What if it was pretending to be hurt to get us to go away? So we’d do what it wanted?”

Mike looks at him for a long moment, little Eddie, clutching at his knees on the straw.

“It’s a good question,” he hums. “But I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” Richie asks. He’s subdued, unnaturally so. He’s been like that since the dinner party. Leaning back on his elbows. Mike pins up another card. The word CYCLE stands out in the dim light, carefully inked.

“Because the kids came down.” Mike says simply. “You heard what It said - it feeds on their flesh while it feasts on their fears - it needs both. There were, what, twenty or thirty kids floating?”

Eddie nods.

“But It’s killed hundreds, so - well - I think it spends the time between cycles eating the bodies.” Mike rolls his shoulders, trying to shrug off the shudder. “We hurt it so bad it couldn’t keep them floating up there anymore, but it needs to eat. If it was pretending, it never would have given up the kids.”

“Well,” Richie says, “That doesn’t make me feel any better, but it sounds right.”

“Right?” Mike looks excited for a moment, then shakes it off and looks back to the cards.

“Unfortunately, there’s another side to this.”

Stan gulps. “If it lost the bodies, it needs new victims.” The air in the barn drops another few degrees, a pressing chill that makes the kids on the floor shuffle a little closer together.

“The cycle’s going to start from scratch,” Bev whispers.

“I think so.” Mike says quietly. “Because Bowers killed his dad around the same time the old bodies surfaced in the Barrens, everyone thinks it was him, even if he wasn’t charged. No one knows the real killer was never caught. They think it’s all over.”

“N-n-no curfew,” Bill says. “No p-p-police stationed around t-t-town, like there w-was before.”

“Oh God,” Eddie groans. “It’s all gonna start again.”

There’s a moment of relative silence, where the only sounds are the wind whistling through the barn door and Ben shuffling the contents of the box. He swallows thickly, and trains his eyes on the ground when he speaks.

“I think we have to accept that It is back. We can’t keep pretending it’s not.”

“I-I-In that c-case,” Bill says, face deathly pale but eyes firm, “We’re going to have to m-m-make a p-plan.”

Eddie is pacing, so in the quiet there’s only the shf shf shf of straw underfoot. Mike coughs lightly, and taps the cards.

“So, if we figure out what It needs to survive, we can figure out what we need to do to kill it. We know we can hurt it, badly, if we’re not afraid while we attack it.”

“B-B-But that’s n-not enough,” Bill points out. “We didn’t k-k-kill it last time, j-just weakened it.”

“Exactly.” Mike says. “But It has been around a long, long time. I can’t imagine we’re the only people to have fought it. There has to be some record, somewhere.”

“I hate to bring this up,” Stan says, mindlessly buttoning and unbuttoning the cuff of his shirt. “But It is still alive. If anyone did fight it before, they failed.”

“You think we can learn from them,” Bev says, thoughtfully, looking at Mike with her sharp eyes. “We figure out why it didn’t work, and we do it right.”

Mike grins.

-

“There’s his car!” Dustin’s leaning half out of the window in Max’s room. “Come on!"

Steve’s car rolls to a stop outside the Townhouse. Nancy’s nails, bit to the quick, drum out a staccato rhythm against the dashboard.

“Should we tell them?” Nancy asks. “About It?”

Steve chews on his lip. “Maybe they’ve been through enough, Nance. We can keep them safe.”

“If the kids don’t know they’re in danger, they’ll take stupid risks, you know that, Steve.”

“What I know is that if they know what’s under this town, they’ll go after it themselves! They’ll get themselves killed!”

“I can’t believe you.” Nancy sighs.

“What?” Nancy’s stopped drumming. Steve looks straight ahead, out at the quiet street. “You think your idiot brother’s not gonna run straight into trouble like he always does?”

“Fuck off, Steve.” Nancy snaps, and fumbles with the door.

Steve doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring ahead. His mouth is set in a firm line. When the car door slams behind Nancy, he just sighs, and sinks a little lower in his seat. He only gets a second to himself before the kids are pouring in.

“Hi, Steve!”

“Where’d Nancy go?”

“Can you take us to mine?”

Steve groans. “Yeah, yeah, you little monsters. Where d’you live, Lucas?”

“I love Harrington Taxis,” Max grins. Steve glares at her in the rear view mirror.

“Uh, drive that way, towards the park. I’ll point it out.”

“I can’t believe this,” Steve grumbles. “I don’t even live here, you know, I’m just visiting my girlfriend,” he wrenches the wheel, “and instead I get roped into ferrying a crowd of toddlers from place to place, ‘cause they can’t be trusted on their own and I’m just a chump with a car -”

“Dude,” Dustin whistles. “Calm down.”

Lucas runs a hand through imaginary, long hair and rolls his eyes exaggeratedly, mouthing blah-blah-blah sounds. Max snorts.

Lucas’ new home is smaller than his old one. He’s not especially pleased himself, but he knows Erica is furious at having been shuffled from a spacious suburban house to an elderly semi-detached a little outside the town center. The three of them scramble out of Steve’s car and race across the lawn, calling out their thanks without looking back. Steve honks his horn at them before pulling away.

“First things first,” Dustin pants, dragging a heavy box down the steps to the Sinclairs’ cellar. “We go back to old tactics.”

Max tears open the box and Lucas pulls out a slim radio set and a lamp.

“This stuff is all for my dad’s office, but it’ll be weeks before he gets around to setting it up. He won’t miss any of it.” He roots around some more and comes out with a disassembled floor lamp. “Can you two go upstairs and get the box of Erica’s old stuff?”

“Will she hurt us?” Dustin asks.

“Probably not, it’s from when she was way younger,” Lucas says with distaste, screwing a bulb into the lamp. “Go on, cowards.”

They end up with four radio and stereo sets, and a dozen lights of various sizes, including a few nightlights Max had dug out from Erica’s baby stuff. Dustin had his pocket compass laid carefully out on the floor in the center of the electronics.

“What now?” Max asks, rocking back on her heels.

Lucas clears his throat. “Last time, the Gate messed with the magnetic field, so our compasses didn’t point north. You remember how the lights and radios always freaked out when the Upside Down was near, too.”

“Shouldn’t we go to the school, then? If that’s where Dustin saw it?”

Dustin groans. “I’m all for finding answers, guys, but if we try and lug all this to the school, I’m gonna lose my taxi privileges with Steve for good.”

Lucas starts to say something, but stops halfway. His mouth open, he’s just looking at the My Little Pony nightlight, blinking on, off, on, off, on, off.

“It’s not supposed to do that,” he says softly. “It’s supposed to surge.”

The stereo sets all scream to life, keening wildly, the lights blare and then there’s a pop and the overhead light goes out and the darkness is so heavy it smothers every point of light in the room.

And then the laughter starts. Lucas reaches out and grabs Max’s hand, hard, and she squeezes back. It’s manic and gleeful, and doesn’t stop to draw breath. In the flat black the only thing any of them can see are two little pinpricks of light in the space between Max and Dustin. The lights swivel in place, a comically exaggerated double-take between the two children. They’re eyes, Lucas realises, from opposite them. There is something in here with us.  

“Stop laughing!” Max shouts, “Shut up!”

The lights go back up, but the overhead light is still blown, so the room is dim. The space next to Max, where the eyes were, is as empty as it ever was. The dial on the radio lights up too, and the needle dances as a voice slips oily out from the speaker.

“Aw…”

Dustin shudders, grips at his hair with both hands.

“You don’t wanna play with me, Maxine?”

Lucas’ grip on her hand tightens so much it hurts.

“That hurts, ya know. In here. Boo hoo hoo.”

It’s enunciating its words clearly, a horrible mix of exaggerated sadness and malice.

“Shut up!” Lucas yells. “Go away!”

“I’ll remember this, y’know,” the voice says slyly, “I always remember naughty children who hurt my feelings…”

Dustin scrambles over to where Max and Lucas are and they clutch at each other. The radio shrieks again, and it sounds just like the dying animal scream of the Gate closing. Lucas stumbles back, just as black bile pours from behind the speaker mesh, sulfurous and sparking and turning the air rancid.

“Jesus, get away, get away!” Dustin barks. The bile nips at their shoes as they stumble across the cluttered cellar, and when they reach the staircase Lucas trips and ends up half-crawling up to the door.

When they’re outside at last, backs pressed firm against the door and chests heaving, Max gulps in a deep breath.

“What the fuck was that?”

-

“Nancy Wheeler came by,” Joyce says, poking through the sink for a clean cup. “Looking for Jonathan. I told her he’s out with the kids.”

Hopper grunts. He’s lifting a box up onto the kitchen table - they’re pretty sure the whisk is in this one, somewhere. For a moment the only sound in the kitchen is the clink and clatter of tableware and cutlery.

“I wonder do they know the new kids much,” Joyce muses.

“Shame about the dinner.” Hopper says. Joyce sighs.

“I know. I know it was - it felt kind of underhanded, you know? But it’s kids, Hop.”

“Hey, I don’t disagree.”  He stretches. “Just sucks that Wheeler and his idiot cousin ruined it.”

Joyce nods, and then catches herself. 

“Hey!” She rubs at her eyes, suddenly exhausted. “This is terrible, Hop. How bad is it that we’re looking to children for answers? Nobody will tell me anything. All those dead kids, and no-one in this fucking town cares. They’re blaming it on that - on Henry Bowers!”

“It doesn’t feel right,” he agrees. “Doesn’t track for Bowers to have been killing for a year before he was caught. And the kids here obviously don’t feel like the danger’s passed.”

There’s a loud clink, and Joyce braces her hands on either side of the sink, cup forgotten.

“Jesus. I don’t know what to do. And I don’t even know if asking the new kids is the right thing, especially Bill, he’s been through enough -”

“Hey, hey, hey.” There’s a warm, solid hand on the small of her back, and she leans into the touch gratefully. 

“Why did we have to come here,” Joyce says into her hands.

If Hopper was about to respond, he’s interrupted by a rat-tat-tat at the door. Joyce sighs.

“I’ll get it,” he says, brushes a clumsy kiss to the back of her head. The knocking continues up until he yanks the door open. "Christ, speak of the devil."

"I b-b-b…" Bill swallows, "...b-b-brought this." He holds up a videotape. The label is neatly lettered but peeling. It reads GEORGIE'S 5TH . There's a sharp little intake of air from Joyce. She comes up to join them at the door, eyes wide.

Bill looks very young, suddenly, for all his self-possession only a child. A little boy in a long winter coat that slips just slightly too far down over his wrists to be a good fit; his hands thin and red-tinged from the cold, framing the tape like a work of art, something very precious.

"Why -" Hopper's voice comes out hoarse, Joyce's fingers tighten around his wrist.

"I j-j-j…" Bill gulps, "... j-j-ju- fuck - just wanted t-to -"

"It's alright, sweetie," Joyce says and her voice wavers as she does, "Tell us in your own time. Let's put it on. Hop?"

Hopper starts towards Bill but the boy sweeps past him with the tape clutched tight. He's left to close the door, still wide open. Behind him, Bill fumbles with the VCR.

Joyce settles Bill into a chair with two firm hands on his shoulders - he's tense, eyes fixed on the television as the video begins. She herself sits in the other armchair, though she finds herself unable or unwilling to do much more than perch on the edge of the seat.

The tape starts off typically enough, a handheld video camera shakily recording a child's party. 

Poorly lit, a little boy with a blondish mop of hair prepares to blow out his candles - when he only gets around half, a younger Bill leans in from out of frame and extinguishes the rest, unseen by his brother. Georgie beams at the videographer, eyes fixed just above the camera. He's all gapped teeth, and utterly delighted with himself. As he opens his presents, Bill and his father move in and out of frame behind him, clearing the table. A woman's voice from behind the camera narrates each gift, until they're interrupted by an insistent ringing of the doorbell.

"It's Stan and them," Bill explains, bundling up some wrapping paper. "They w-wanted to wish him a happy b-birthday."

Georgie bounces up and down with excitement at this, and the camera is set down on the table as his mother goes to calm him. She's a trim shape in dotted blue, pushing Georgie down onto the seat with a hand on each shoulder.

“I j-just needed someone t-t-to… t-to see him. To c-care about him. The way he w-w-was.”

Bill’s voice is barely above a whisper.

Joyce feels a weight on her chair as Hopper settles on the armrest. 

"Where's he gone?" Richie's high voice rings out through the house and Georgie almost topples off his chair. His mother catches him deftly about the waist. There's pounding footsteps, and the unmistakable sound of cheap rubber squeaking against the floorboards. The camera is obscured as the boys pass it, though Richie can distinctly be seen whisking Georgie off the chair and up into his arms, hooting with delight and little legs kicking. The woman tsks, swatting Bill on the shoulder as he goes.

"Really, Bill, I wish you wouldn't have your friends over on such short notice, and on George's birthday -"

"Mom, he's b-been asking for them to come over all w-week -"

"We wanted to see him on his birthday, Mrs Denbrough," Stan says earnestly. He's stood half blocking the camera, the diamond print of his shirt out of focus. "Georgie's great."

"You're our best friend, huh?" Richie laughs from off screen, and Georgie cheers. "You love hanging out with Big Bill and his boys!"

"We are not his boys," Eddie giggles, faint like he's further away than Richie. There's a creak and a thunk, and Georgie's indistinct chatter fades further out, becoming low and pleasant. Stan moves to follow, and then it's just Bill and his mother standing by the dinner table, looking at each other. She doesn't once turn her face towards the camera.

Survey says - 

Richard Dawson beams at them in black and white, turning to flourish at the screen behind. It's an old episode - the show stopped airing in '85, and didn't run again until July of '88. Bill's mother, fond of Dawson, had been overjoyed for those few months, until November came. Joyce starts to stand, but Bill makes a sharp, jerky movement in her periphery and she sits back. The tape cuts again.

"Now how do I - oh, I see…"

The man at the sink turns, though his face is cut off by the top of the frame. 

"You should be filming the kids, you know. Not me doing the dishes."

She just hums, and for the moment the screen is all flannel and rustling as he draws her close.

"Now go on," his chin says.

The camera spins and tracks across the lino, where a blur of discarded party hats betray that the little ones, the children of Georgie's own age had been over earlier. The back door creaks a little as she makes her way onto the patio.

The new refrigerator had been long coming, and Bill had gone to great lengths to convince his father not to throw the old one out right away. Lying on its back in the grainy footage of his back garden, gutted and bloated, it's a dead animal with its door hanging off the hinges.

"Land ho!"

Richie's backpack is open in the grass, and he's pulling out a length of visual noise and draping it around Stan's shoulders. Stan has a pirate hat sitting over his curls and he's watching Richie's hands move with the same calm eyes he always has; his smile is crooked and lopsided in a way that's so at odds with his clean, pressed shirt that seeing it always makes Bill smile, too.

None of this is in the video, because the camera is moving and the two are in the background, and Stan is turned away and Richie's face is an indistinct fuzz.

Standing in the fridge is Bill himself, Georgie on his shoulders pulling at his hair with strong little hands and laughing into his ear, because the sun is shining even though it's October and Georgie associates the sun with playtime - it'll be March of next year before he learns you can have just as much fun in the rain.

Eddie's in the bow of the fridge, where the vegetable drawer had been, with the cardboard tube of a roll of kitchen paper held up to one eye and a patch over the other. He'd kept holding the tube up to the wrong eye to make Georgie laugh. Stan picks his way through the grass and clambers into the fridge too, though it's so crowded he just sits on the closed freezer compartment. Richie makes a joke about Stan wanting a crow's nest that comes through the TV as a staticky mess, and Georgie giggles although he doesn't understand, and Richie's wrapping himself in his mother's green shawl to play his part.

Bill's cheeks are hot and wet. His hands had been so tight around Georgie's ankles, his footing careful in the narrow fridge compartment. He watches himself, small and fuzzy on the screen and wonders why he let go.

Georgie's screaming and Eddie's yelling, Stan's hand is twisted in the hem of Bill's shirt. Their sea monster is launching itself at their ship, attacks rattling the hull, sending it recoiling and circling and darting back. Bill is barking orders, clear and sharp and flowing smooth, Stan is hoisting the mainsail and Eddie's casting wildly over the green sea with the telescope, leaning half out. The creature shrieks and bubbles, and Bill sees what's about to happen too late but he can't move fast enough and the thing leaps clear over the ship and takes Eddie with it.

Bill's scalp tingles with the memory, remembering how Stan had stood close to unwind Georgie's fingers from his hair. He'd said that if Bill grows up bald he could blame Georgie for it.

"Boys, play nice!"

Richie's rolling around in the grass, tangled in his shawl and slavering in Eddie's ear. Eddie's laughing and shrieking and struggling loose, and Stan's yelling "man overboard, man overboard!" until Georgie picks up the chant and starts up too, and Bill yells for Stan to change course and head straight for the monster, because they don't ever leave a man behind.

Bill presses his plastic sabre into Georgie's hand and murmurs in his ear, and Georgie's eyes are bright and he's swallowing down his excitement to look brave and serious, and Stan claps him on the shoulder before they hoist him over the side of the fridge and into the grass. He runs right through the ocean to where Eddie is, and together they plunge the blade through the monster's heart, and Richie groans and blubbers and flops around in the grass , the creature’s death throes protracted and grotesque.

Here the tape cuts out once and for all; Bill shakes his head and tries to pull apart the memory and the video. It's so hard to do when he can still feel his little brother's weight on his shoulders. He doesn't move to stand right away, and indeed it's not until Joyce is looking at him, her eyes wet and her mouth moving that he realises he needs to get up.

Chapter Text

“I thought I might find you here.”

Jonathan turns. Nancy’s a neat outline in her long, dark coat, buckled tight about her waist, hands buried in her pockets, shoulders hiked up around her ears. She looks more like a journalist than she ever has, just then, only missing a notebook or a microphone. She’s flushed with the cold, but smiling.

“Hey, Nancy,” he says softly. “What’s the occasion?”

“I stopped by the apartment, but your mom said you were out with the kids.”

Jonathan spreads his arms wide, indicating Will and Eleven.

“Your information was correct, Miss Wheeler.” He lets his heavily gloved hands drop to his sides with a flump. “But my question still stands.”

Eleven whispers in Will’s ear, and he bites back a laugh. They’re sitting at a picnic area, near the standpipe. There’s an aged, sputtering fountain nearby, and the water tower itself is an intimidating presence, but the clearing is still beautiful, and utterly quiet.

There’s a heavy camera slung around Jonathan’s neck, and the kids have their schoolbags spread out on the picnic table behind them. It looks like they were doing homework, but the textbooks have been pushed away and in their place is a copybook turned to its back pages, covered in drawings and notes.

“Whatcha workin’ on?” She asks, casually, strolling towards the kids.

“I’m starting to think you’re allergic to answering questions,” Jonathan remarks.

“Studying,” Eleven says dryly, pulling a textbook towards her. It’s upside down. Nancy raises an eyebrow. Eleven grins. There’s a muted snap of a shutter behind them.

“How’s Steve?” Jonathan tries a new tack, lowering his camera. Nancy turns to him, eyes appraising.

“He’s staying in town a while longer. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.”

Jonathan swallows. He gestures wordlessly off towards the fountain. Nancy gives the kids a wave before going to follow him.

The fountain is shaped like a swan, clear water jumbling out of its chipped, greying beak. There’s no glimmer of coins through the water, only a dark mass of dead leaves and dirt lining the stone basin. Nancy gets there first, because she’s always walked briskly, and she puts two cold, bare hands against the rim of the basin and hoists herself up onto the edge, her heels brushing in the gravel. Jonathan plods along quite deliberately, a steadily paced crunch-crunch-crunching as he comes close.

“Trouble in paradise, then?” Jonathan asks, wryly. Nancy pulls a pack from inside her coat and shakes out a cigarette.

“Don’t start, Jonathan.” She lights it and takes a drag, crossing her arms close about her. He puts his hands up in supplication, settles next to her. He’s taller than her by enough to just sit on the edge.

“Sorry. Bad joke.”

“Too fucking right.” She looks across to the kids, heads bent over their work in the distance. “I need to ask you to do something important.”

“It’s been a while since we’ve talked.”

Nancy sighs. “Yeah. I didn’t fall off the face of the earth, though. You could have called.”

“I kind of figured I’d see you, you know, ferrying the kids between the houses. If anyone’s fallen off the face of the earth, though, it’s your brother.” Jonathan toys with the strap of his camera. “I expected to be taking Will and El over to yours all the time, but they haven’t wanted to go, and he hasn’t been to visit once.”

Nancy groans. “Mike? He’s been a nightmare since we moved. Like a really bratty ghost. He won’t tell us what’s wrong. Dustin and Lucas have been over once or twice, though. It’s weird.”

Jonathan whistles. “So… this favour.”

“Right.”

“Is it big? Like, ‘let’s go into the woods with an armful of weaponry and hunt a monster’, big?”

“No, not really,” Nancy says, a touch thoughtful. “Just some taxi work.”

Jonathan’s looking through the viewfinder on his camera, lens trained on the treeline.

“Taxi work?” He says, absently.

“I can’t go into it too much right now, but, I think - and it’s why I’m asking Steve to stay longer - that it’s best if we make sure the kids aren’t going places on their own.”

Jonathan drops the camera so suddenly it bounces merrily around his neck. He doesn’t seem to notice, just dropping his hands slowly and turning to her.

“Are the kids in danger? Is Will - are Will and El in danger?”

Nancy kicks up a spray of gravel with the toe of her boot. “I hope not. But we can’t be too careful.”

Jonathan turns to face her fully now, eyes dark. “Nancy, what the hell is going on?”

-

The door to the Wheeler’s new home opens just a crack, a few minutes after Max’s knock. 

“Mike, hey!” She says brightly. “Can we come in?”

“Uh.” He’s framed in the sliver of the doorway, pale and strange.

Lucas and Dustin crowd Max on the doorstep, peering in.

“Mike, let us in! This is important.”

“It’s cold as hell out here, man.”

“I don’t want you to come in,” he says, half cast in the dark hall. “You shouldn’t come in.”

“Jesus, dude.” Lucas looks warily at the others. “Mike, this is a code red.”

“I don’t want you to come in!”

“There’s a monster in Derry!” Max blurts. “A monster , and it attacked us, or something, and we need to figure out what to do about it!”

Mike looks at them blankly.

“Did you hear any of that?” Dustin asks, incredulous.

“If I say no, will you go away?” Mike asks, desperately.

“Mike, what the fuck -”

The door closes. No matter how much they pound and yell, it doesn’t open again that afternoon.

-

“How’s this?” Richie asks, clutching an armful of dry twigs and slim branches.

“Looks perfect,” Ben says, turning his attention back to building the fire. “Toss it on the kindling pile.”

“Righto, Sir Haystack.”

“H-h-how’s it g-going, guys?” Bill asks, casting around the clearing. “Where’s M-Mike?”

“Gone to pick up the new kids, I think.” Eddie says, from where he’s sorting through his backpack. “Where the fuck is my aloe vera?”

“Oh man, sorry Eds, think I used it last night.” Richie grins.

“Before you finish that, I know where it’s going and I don’t want to hear it,” Eddie snaps. “Wait til one of us gets third-degree burns from this garbagefire, then you’ll be wondering why you didn’t help me find the fucking aloe vera.”

“Don’t be mean to the fire, Eddie, the fire didn’t do anything to you,” Ben says absently.

“Yet.” Eddie says darkly, zipping his bag back up jerkily.

Beverly and Stan come through the trees, carrying more firewood between them. Once they’ve dropped it on the pile by Ben’s side. Beverly raises both hands to her mouth and whistles, fluttering her fingers.

“Almost,” Stan says. “It’s like a dove’s call.”

“Ooh,” Eddie starts, and mimics her. “Stan taught me that last year.”

“Sounds pretty,” Ben murmurs, sorting through the wood they’ve brought him.

“Y-You can d-d-do an owl, too, c-can’t you Stan?” Bill says, a tinge of admiration creeping into his voice.

“You have to understand, if you’re in Stan’s position, that’s the only kind of mating call he’s ever going to use.” Richie snorts.

“L-leave it, Rich.”

There’s a blaring horn, and Mike’s rusty old truck pulls up close by the clearing.

“Jesus, he drove ‘em?” Richie straightens up, quite distracted. “What if someone saw?”

“No-one pays attention in this town, Richie, you know that.” Stan remarks, though he’s watching the approaching car like a hawk.

“Yeah, but I think they’d make an exception if they noticed Mike can’t reach the pedals -”

“Probably why he wanted those encyclopedias,” Ben muses, dusting ash off his hands.

“You helped? ” Eddie yelps. “What’s wrong with you!?”

“We have a bond, Eddie, we help each other out -”

“Help each other get arrested, maybe.”

“I have plausible deniability, I didn’t know what he was doing, maybe he just wanted to learn!”

“Fuckin’ Wright brothers over here, we’re gonna come down the Barrens one day and find them preparing for takeoff -” Richie mutters.

“This is hilarious,” Stan says flatly. “I’m loving this.” 

Bev breaks down laughing, slumping sideways into Bill, whose own shoulders are shaking silently.

“Hey guys!” Mike calls from the other side of the clearing. “I got five!”

“I thought her name was Eleven,” Bev whispers, and they all burst out laughing.

The new kids are just getting out of Mike’s grandfather’s truck when another car pulls up behind them and Nancy climbs out.

“What the hell, guys!” she calls. “I thought you got abducted, we couldn’t see a driver!”

“Like Christine, ” Steve yells from inside the car. “You know, that really mean Plymouth Fury?”

“Oh my God,” Bev says, hands over her mouth. “He was too short!”

Ben shakes his head sadly. Mike is doubled over in the frosty grass, shaking with laughter.

“Oh, Christ,” he sighs, wiping at his face. “You guys forgot about the bonfire, huh?”

Steve, Nancy, and even Jonathan in the back seat look intensely embarrassed. Bill jogs over to them, and Bev follows.

“You’re w-w-welcome to stay, if you w-want,” Bill says to the older kids.

Nancy smiles. “You’ll need a lift home after. We’ll stay out of your way.” Bill nods appreciatively.

“Thanks for coming!” Bev grins at the kids Mike’s brought. There are indeed five: Will, Eleven, Dustin, Lucas and Max. “It’s good to meet you guys.”

Max squints at her. “Thanks for inviting us,” Will says politely.

“Dustin and Lucas brought snacks!” Mike says brightly.

“Oh, fuck yes!” Bev hisses, grabbing a bag of chips from Dustin. “Ben and Eddie were the only ones who brought stuff on our end. We’re all broke, and candy’s a bit too bulky to, uh, liberate.”

“You villain,” Mike says fondly.

“Maybe if cigs weren’t pocket-sized, I wouldn’t be such a frightful rogue.” Bev says haughtily, sticking her nose in the air. She spins on her heel and waves for the kids to follow.

“Don’t let Richie hear that killer accent, you’ll ruin him,” Mike whispers, as they cross the field. Bev snorts.

“You ever been to a bonfire before?” Max asks Eleven. She shakes her head.

“Jonathan and I used to make s’mores when we had bonfires,” Will says. “We’ll have fun. Take our minds off...everything.”

“Richie tried to make s’mores on a lighter flame once,” Bev offers, over her shoulder. “Stan’s mom’s sofa was never the same.”

That startles a laugh out of Max, and the sound lights up the darkening sky. Lucas grins, ruefully.

“So I still haven’t met my fellow Michael,” Mike says lightly. “Couldn’t make it?”

Eleven’s expression darkens. “He didn’t want to come.” Dustin and Will share a worried look.

Mike says, levity now sounding a little forced, “Maybe next time.”

Max cracks her knuckles. “Or else.”

Eleven laughs. They reach the pyre, where Ben is observing the fledgling fire closely to see it’ll light, and Richie is commentating on the contents of Eddie’s first-aid bag. Stan’s picked a blade of grass and is imitating bird calls more complex than the simple ones he’s taught Bev and Eddie.

“Fellas,” Mike says, casually, taking a seat on one of the old workbenches placed by the fire.

“Mr. McQueen,” Richie retorts. “You do all your own stunts, or just the driving?”

“Richie and Eddie have possibly been traumatised by your adventures in trucking,” Stan explains mildly.

“I’m not as upset at this as you might think,” Eddie offers, and Richie gasps in mock betrayal. “And I’m pretty sure Richie’s just mad because he wasn’t involved.” Bev rounds the fire to sit by Ben, knocking shoulders with Stan companionably.

“I’m actually a very sensible person, Edward, an incredibly alluring quality I thought you would have picked up on by now.”

Will and Dustin take seats, somewhat cautiously, on the bench next to Mike. Eleven sits in a camping chair with an undeniably regal air, and Max and Lucas settle next to her.

“It’s not such a big deal,” Mike shrugs. “How do you think Ben and I got the benches and chairs out here?”

Richie’s head spins around so fast his glasses slide down his nose. “Traitor! ”

Ben laughs so hard he almost sets his sleeve on fire.

As the evening further darkens, the fire catches and begins to roar - the kids lean in close and talk quietly to one another, with the exception of Richie, who’s as indiscriminately loud as always. Nancy, Steve and Jonathan stay by the car, smoking and talking, and after a while Ben and Mike traipse over to the truck to get more soda and chips. Bev is showing Max and Lucas yo-yo tricks when they come back, and she lets the string slip off her finger when she sees what they’re carrying.

It’s a boombox. Will raises his eyebrows from where he’s sitting with Bill and Stan.

“Oh, new kid.” Bev says, horrified. “You didn’t.”

“I did.” Ben grins. “Care for a dance?”

“I’d like to say at this point that I’ve provided some actual music, just before anyone panics,” Mike says, holding up a backpack stuffed with cassettes and shiny new CDs, and there’s a definite ripple of relief throughout the Losers. And then the opening notes of Please Don’t Go Girl float out, and all hell breaks loose.

We've been together for a long time, baby

Mike dumps his bag on the ground. Bev’s on her feet, yo-yo forgotten, and she’s stumbling into the open grass to dance. Richie jumps up and starts clicking his fingers to the beat,  head bobbing low like a jazz-loving father, though the impression is ruined by the way he keeps laughing at himself. Ben’s embarrassed but still grinning, and Bill straightens up with a laugh and joins in.

I love you (I love you)

Everyone’s getting up, not without the occasional eye-roll or awkward flush, being dragged into the grass by the fire and singing along. Eleven looks a little lost, and when she glances around she sees that Mike, Ben, and Dustin are trying to out-do one another in outdated dance moves, and Will is half-singing, because he doesn’t know the words, and Stan is giving him wry advice like there’s only, like, three lyrics and just keep saying oh, baby and Will is laughing and can’t seem to stop, and Max and Lucas are waltzing ridiculously, and she feels very alone and unsure of herself. Then Bev is in front of her, taller than her and glowing in the firelight, and she takes her hands and moves with her, singing along just under her breath and Eleven starts singing too, and when Bev lets go of her hands she’s moving on her own, and it’s fun and free and the music is shallow and catchy and she loves it.

Girl, you're my best friend

Girl, you're my love within

“Is this New Kids on the Block?” Steve laughs, incredulous, strolling up to the kids. Eddie sticks his tongue out at him from where he’s been dancing with Bill, their hands joined like preschoolers.

“Dance with me, Mother?” Richie trills in a little-Victorian-boy voice, gesturing at Steve with a prim little flourish. “I do so hate to groove alone.”

Steve snorts and bats his hand away, just as Nancy runs up. “I think I’m getting a better offer.”

“Fine!” Richie says, and spins Eddie right out of Bill’s grasp. “You’re not the only one with arm candy, Harrington.” If he had anything to say after this, it’s muffled by Eddie sticking his hand in Richie’s face, trying to smear his nose back into his brain. Bill laughs, and it’s loud and clear.

I just want you to know

That I will always love you

The fire is a flare of amber and orange through the viewfinder of Jonathan’s camera, and the kids are just silhouettes, dancing and laughing and play-fighting in its warmth. He snaps picture after picture, capturing held hands and secret smiles that last only seconds.

Ooh, baby...

-

Later that night, after Steve had brought the Party members home and everyone else had set off for home, there’s a quiet click click click as two boys wheel their bicycles down an empty street.

“You okay?” Ben asks, looking sideways at the boy silhouetted next to him.

“I’m fine,” Eddie says, a curious note in his voice. “Are you okay?”

Ben hums. “I guess.” They walk in silence another minute or so before Eddie speaks again.

“You’re not, though. What’s wrong?”

Ben groans a little.

“Was it Bev and Bill?” Eddie asks, slyly. “They were dancing together a lot.”

Ben groans a lot.

They pass under a streetlight, and suddenly when Ben looks at Eddie he’s lit up orange and yellow, and his eyes are soft and his smile is shockingly gentle. Ben swallows.

“It’s just… I can see how much he loves her. And how much she loves him. And I get it, because I love them too, but it’s… hard.” He shifts awkwardly from foot to foot. “It’s hard ‘cause I know I’m not supposed to end up like that. It’s nice to think about… having something. Having someone. But I know I’m not meant to, and it’s fine, and I can deal with it just being a fantasy most of the time, but, you know, it just gets to me sometimes.”

Eddie looks at him for a long time. Ben swallows, but now that he’s started it’s hard to keep it all down.

“I think loving is, like, some central part of who I am. I don’t know if it’s the same for you, because - but my mom was all alone, and there was lots of things she couldn’t do. She couldn’t get my dad to come back, or keep us in one place for long, but she could love me. And she wasn’t always around, so when she was, it was just the two of us and she loved me so strongly to make up for everything else.”
Eddie nods. “There’s no-one else, so her attention is, like, all on you.”
“Right. And I feel like I need to soak all that up while I can, because some day she’ll be gone and I’ll be alone. It’s - I’ve always known it’s going to happen, and it’s fine, it really is, because I also know I’m meant to love. And I love Bev, and all of you, and it’s… it’s okay if I’m not supposed to get that back.”

Eddie says, softly, “I know how you feel. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to love me the way my mom does. I don’t even know if my mom knows how to love the right way, sometimes, or I don’t know if I…” He shakes his head. “It’s stupid, nevermind. But you’re just saying that you’re never going to be loved like it’s a fact and - and I don’t know why?”

“Because.” Ben says. “Because it’s not who I am.”

“Why not?” Eddie’s getting angry now, but not at Ben, not really. “Says who?”

“Says everyone!” Ben snaps. He gestures wide at empty air with one arm as they walk. Eddie nods. “And anyway, if it’s not meant to be like that, then it’s even worse when it turns out that way anyway. When I end up lonely again. Then it’s no-one’s fault but my own.”

Ben rubs at his eyes. “I’m sorry, Eddie, I didn’t mean to do this. This is so embarrassing.”

Eddie snorts. “No offense, Ben, but that’s not what’s embarrassing.”

Ben’s breathing quickens. “I-Is it Bev, because I know, she’s way out of my league -”

“No!” Eddie’s laughing despite himself. “No, no, she’s not, that’s not what I meant.”

“Then what?” Ben says, defensively. 

“Ugh, I suck at explaining things.” Eddie taps his thumbs against the handlebars of his bike, thoughtful. “Just, put it like this. Why do you love Mike?”

Ben grins. “That’s easy. He’s sweet, and smart, and it always feels like I’m doing the right thing when I’m with him. He makes everything seem right.”

“And why does Mike love Bill?”

“Because Bill makes things move,” Ben hums. “He’s funny, and he cares. And when Bill looks at you, you feel like you belong somewhere, like you’re worth something, and Mike’s always wanted that. Everyone has.”

“Right.” They pause a moment to cross the street, both careful even though there are no cars in sight.

“I still don’t get what you mean, Eddie.” Ben mumbles. “I love Mike, and I love Bill, and I love all of you, but it doesn’t disprove my point.”

“Do you know why I love you, Ben?”

Ben stops walking. “No,” he whispers.

Eddie continues on ahead, his front wheel click-click-clicking. He balances his broken arm against the handlebars, keeping his bike upright, and sticks his other arm out. 

“I love you because you’re strong, and you’re brave, and you love us more than anything, and I love you because you always try to keep us together.” With every point, he sticks out another finger, keeping count. “I love you because you brought me Agatha Christie books the last time my mom locked me in the house.” He laughs, “I love you because you’re the only one Stan will let come with when he’s birdwatching.”

Ben stands and stares after Eddie, who realises that Ben isn’t following and turns to look, framed again in the streetlight. The light glows golden on his cast.

“None of that really even matters, you know, because I love you. You could turn around and be weak, and - and cowardly like me, and you could not do any of the things you’re always doing, and I’d still love you. And it’s not only me. Isn’t that how you feel about Bev?”

Ben hurries forward to join Eddie and they start walking again. “Yeah,” he says, softly.

“Right then.” Eddie says decisively. “You have someone who loves you like you love Bev. That destiny stuff’s bullshit. Sorted.”

They walk side-by-side in companionable silence until they reach Ben’s porch. The light in the window is warm. Eddie waits as Ben takes his bike around the side of the house. When he comes back, Eddie grabs his hand and squeezes, briefly. Ben squeezes back before he lets go and mounts the steps to his front door, and Eddie clambers up onto his bike.

“Hey, Eddie?” Ben calls, hand on the doorknob.

“Yeah?” He responds, absently, propelling himself down the garden path with one foot on the ground, his bad arm braced against the handlebars.

“I love you.”

Eddie laughs again, and starts down the road, the sound of his wheel fading into the dark.