Chapter Text
(1)
He thrusts his fists against the posts but they pass through, he is the ghost. The post is wet with deadwood rot, his name his parents have forgot. His brother dead, friends are the same and all know where to lay the blame.
---
Dust kicks up around his crisp new Keds and the gravel crunches underfoot as they walk home three in a row. Bill and his mother and father properly out as a family for the first time in, a while. Since the previous October really. Bill’s parents took him shopping at Freeza’s today for new clothes to greet the new school year. He’d grown a full two inches. Between school letting out in June, and all of the events of that summer, most of Bill’s old shirts are tight and straining at the seams across his impossibly broadening shoulders. Or in the case of his old jeans and sneakers, inexplicably caked in the muck of all the runoff and sewage Derry had to offer.
'You been playing down by the Barrens?' His father had asked, the very same day in August that Bill returned home. Grime streaked, tear-stained, palm-bleeding, after they fought It.
Bill had crept into the garage, sunset licking gold around the corners of the house, hoping to reach his room unnoticed as he so often did. His father had been sitting there at his workbench and for the first time ever since Georgie’s death Bill wished he would leave. His father was woodwork come to life, tired grey eyes focused on Bill like it was vital that he see him for once, now of all times.
Zack Denbrough’s presence rather than being a comfort, was a jarring adult thing that encroached and invaded, like a too big man stooped in a miniature house. Something horrible, something magical...had happened to the seven of them. Something that could only really survive in the space between the tight-woven promises of children. Bill had felt a strange kind of loss that night after they resurfaced. A piece of himself that could have been Bill’s hope for bringing Georgie home, he’d left it down there in the dark with the bolt gun. In a really messed up way it made Bill want to be with the others, down in the sewers just one more time. As horrible as it had been, for the first time that summer Bill had felt fully complete. All the way alive.
"J-jungle safari, in the b-amb-boo," He had answered his father, stutter already returning.
Zack Denbrough, like he’d been reminded of some sort of cue, blinked back into his tired vague self. His overbright and eyes shifted a little off focus to Bill’s shoulder and he once again passed from daytime father to a moontime ghost of mourning. His father had nodded absently as if he no longer really cared how Bill's shoes had been wrecked, or really even that they had been wrecked at all. Bill had hated him just a little then, as much as a child can ever really hate their parents.
Bill could have died. He’d been ready to suffer worse than that even. Only a baseball swing short of letting his mind go entirely separate from his body. He wondered if his father's expression would have changed if he'd told him that truth.
Sure dad, I was under Derry in the tunnels that swallow even adults. I was lost in mazes of decay with my friends, mentally biting the tongue of a nightmare from the void. Flying through time and past the turtle who spawns galaxies. The turtle who didn’t barely help us. Watching the strings that hold the fabric of our world twang and ricochet, and we all almost died.
Oh and dad? I saw Georgie too. Only he wasn’t my brother, or your son. I shot him dad, he’s dead for sure. No more need to worry about me stealing your maps without asking.
Would his father have woken up then? Finally alive to the risk of losing both his children?
No, probably not. Probably not.
It is the cemetery time of August, only two days to September. The old age of summer bowing out to fall slowly and gracelessly. It is a sleepy time, a lazy time for those who are not children lamenting waning freedom. Bill watches their trio of shadows walk in step before them, the sun sinking behind on the horizon. He aches to reach out to hold his parent’s hands but something in this frightens him. It's absurd Bill knows, but what if they pull their hands away. What if they tell him they don’t want to touch him. That only very little boys hold hands.
Very little boys like Georgie.
Instead Bill moves his arms just so. So that the shadow his hands cast connects with his parents'. There, a perfect trifecta. A patchwork of family that Bill can imagine hides the smaller shadow of his brother, like a baby chick under the wing of a greater bird. Not the horrible bird Mikey had seen. A nice bird, one of Stan’s birds. A Cardinal or Scarlet Tanager, or a great Golden Eagle. Something bright with the light of life in springtime.
Bill thinks on this as they continue to walk, his shadow arms held aloft and at a strange angle to secretly keep connected with that of his parents. He thinks of the Losers and is grateful. Eddie knew, they all did. But Eddie had known Bill the longest. Him and Richie, Stan too, recognized the change in his parents on a profound level Bill could only half-express to the others by way of that wretched, halting parade of aborted syllables. They had been there for the before of it, they saw distinctly the Georgie-like hole eating up the shapes of Bill’s parents as they had once been.
It was as if ghosts had taken up residence in their bodies. Nothing but the pale reflection of warm people, like optical illusions of parents gliding around the house. Once brightly shining twin suns that warmed Bill’s days, now only frigid moons orbiting slowly around each other before spinning away into the black. Sitting in front of the television, glancing at him when he tried to fill up the cold spaces with words. Glancing away when Bill’s stutter made that impossible. Dinners drowned out to the scrape of tableware, knives and forks cutting into silence that seemed to bleed only in Bill’s direction.
Bill’s parents still bought him all that was necessary for a boy of fourteen to survive, but that was more often than not the extent of it. It was up to Bill if he made his school lunch or if he let the vegetables and cold cuts putrefy in the crisper, washed his clothes or not, made sure he scrubbed the dirt from his skin after returning from a particularly vigorous day outside. They had stopped asking after his day, only registered faintly if he came home after dark, no longer bothered about his grades.
And why would they with Bill giving them only A’s, though Bill doubted they would notice a dip in his academic performance of all things. Still his mother used to ask. Bill’s mother used to take an interest in his reports and essays, particularly English. She had loved to read, it was something Bill and her shared. She might leave a book on his bedside, and he would try to finish it as fast as he could. It wasn’t something that happened often but she did it enough that it held a form of regularity in Bill’s memory. He felt as if they were communicating in a secret code only the two of them understood. A code wherein you had to read the story in order to unlock some essential part of the other person.
She had also begun to teach him the piano. On rainy days when he didn’t have the flu and there wasn’t enough water for streams to form and sail paper boats on. When he got tired of Georgie hanging about his room pestering in that way only younger siblings ever can, Bill wandered downstairs to lean on the doorframe to the parlor and watch her fingers dance on ivory and jet. His mother would sit him beside her and show him the scales. Would read aloud the names of notes as she played and Bill would pick up on them. Music was another language, beautifully it was one that didn’t require a stutter-free instrument.
Then Georgie died, and with him Bill’s parent’s turned to ghosts to chase their youngest son, leaving Bill very much alive and thirsting for the feeling of knowing what that truly meant.
Bill is pulled back into the moment by a flicker of dark movement. He tenses, and for an instant a finger of uneasiness strokes up his spine.
But it is only the strange warped dark of his mother and father's shadows moving, and an instant later Bill feels the very real grip of his parent's actual hands grasping his own. He blinks wide-eyed at the trio of shadows, honestly shocked. Now they are holding hands properly, the outline of larger fingers clasped around slender boy ones, starkly visible in silhouette against the dusty road. Old leaves scatter free from the trees in a rustle of wind as they pass McCarron Park.
Bill looks to his left where his mother's fingers encircle his, warm and gentle as if she is cupping a small animal in the palm of her hand. With the way Bill's heart has started to slam inside his bones it might as well be. To his right his father clasps firmly, hand almost double the width of Bill's but with fingers that manage to be soft despite the strength. He looks up at Zack Denbrough and suddenly Bill thinks he might cry. He thinks he might sob on the spot because thank God, thank God they're finally looking at him again.
Bill tears his eyes away with some difficulty. He resolves not to make a big deal of it, and looks back at his feet. The shadows are longer, less stark against the street now that the sun is waning lazily. Fading shadows to match fading grief. Bill barely dares to hope that this excursion somehow signals the start of a vital change. That despite it soon being fall, he and his parents have stepped into some kind of overdue spring thaw.
Held bookended by his parents like this, the wanting in Bill’s heart is fulfilled. He can't help that his eyes prick, the slightest sting of tears unshed. Because Bill, with the help of his friends, destroyed the monster that killed Georgie, and now finally, his parents really are looking at him again. Just like he’d hoped. God, just like he’d prayed, to anyone who was listening. Not the fleeting overbright of his father’s eyes as he stared at Bill’s sewer-grimed clothes in uncomprehending perplexity, not the grief clouded, hair obscured haunt of his mother’s terrifying sadness filling the house like a busted water maine. Real seeing. Clear-eyed, right-to-your-heart seeing.
They continue along Up Mile Hill, passing right through the intersection at Jackson. Faint sounds of a pickup ball game float up from behind the Tracker Brother’s depot. Bill is glad they’re going the long way. They’ll hook left at West Broadway and then back down Witcham Street. This way they won’t pass the storm drain that took Georgie and risk breaking the strange spell of peace that has settled over them. Bill wonders how long it will last. If it will last, or if the grief will leave only to return like waves lapping on the shore. Still, this is a breakthrough and Bill thinks about who he’ll call up to tell first. He’ll tell them all of course, they tell each other everything now, eventually. He thinks he’ll tell Eddie because it will help him worry less, and then Richie because Richie won’t forgive Bill if he loses out to anyone except Eddie. Stan is next but Stan, Bill will tell in person, so he can see a smile break over the almost-adult stillness of his face.
Sharon Denbrough interrupts the companionable silence. His mother’s face is serene, calm and with the barest promise of future wrinkles in all the places her skin has been folded over the course of years, like the crease of a waxed paper boat. Her hair, so much like Bill’s hair, shifts with the light wind. Her blue-green eyes twinkle sleepily and as hazy as the last shimmers of dusk burning away into true night.
“You have another set of speech classes up in Bangor next week,” she informs him, smoothing auburn flyaways from her face with her free hand. Bill’s palms feel sweaty but he doesn’t dare adjust his fingers, for fear that his parents might mistake it as a desire to let go.
“O-o-okay,” He winces a bit, wishing he could get out even one simple word without the echo of it overflowing. His parents don’t say as much but it is clear to Bill that they measure his speech against him by way of determining his well being in other things. His speech classes mean so much to his mother, it’s the only time she ever focuses, ever comes even partially alive.
“What ab-about school? It’s the start of a n-nuh-new term,” Bill doesn't like the idea of not joining his friends on the first day. It throws off their precarious balance of unity if they are separate for too long, with Beverly in Portland it’s more important than ever that they keep the circle. Leaving Derry scares him too, even for one or two days, because Bill starts to Forget.
“We’ll write you a note, it’s not a big deal,” His father says, nonchalant.
“You want your stutter to get better don’t you?” His mother asks, and it’s almost too much for Bill. The way her eyes meet his straight on. He can’t keep the gaze and looks back at the shadow of his family.
“C-course I do,” Of course he does. It only hurts a little when it feels like they are trying to smooth over the flaws in him, rather than to accept that his stutter is a part of him. He’s had it since he was three, that’s eleven years to get used to it.
Sure Bill wants it gone, but he doesn’t exactly hold out hope. Lately the severity of it doesn’t seem to be dependent on how many speech therapy classes he takes. Instead his stutter seems wrapped up in something larger than Bill, an encompassing other force.
Sometimes it’s a prominent part, sometimes faint, but still his stutter is just a part of Bill to be accepted, the way the Losers do. They each have their standout ‘thing’. Eddie’s asthma, Richie’s glasses and trashmouth, Stan’s Jewishness and cleanliness rituals, Ben’s weight, Bev being a girl, Mike’s race. The differences, what the world calls ‘disadvantages’, that set them apart alone are little more than mundane facts when they come together. Sometimes Bill even feels an odd possessiveness over his stutter and a formless resentment that his parents keep insisting it must go away. It feels like they are scrubbing over him, hard and abrasive, trying to erase. Trying desperately to erase.
“I thought we were going to lose you, when that car...” His mother starts, and Bill feels his father’s hand clench momentarily around his. They never talk about the accident when he was three or the head trauma his mother is sure caused Bill’s stutter.
“You were so small and limp in my arms, I thought I’d give anything in the world to make you be okay again,”
Bill keeps his eyes fixedly on his shoes, matches his strides in time to his parent’s longer ones so that now he is doing some awkward loping thing of a step. They walk a little faster and in silence for a while, something tense about it this time.
They keep the Barrens to their right and Bill tells their orientation by feeling. They’re passing the spot, roughly, where the clubhouse sits dug in the ground. A part of Bill whispers wait.
“I didn’t know It was listening. I didn’t know I’d have to give up Georgie,”
Bill runs the words over in his head. What. That part again, more urgently. Wait. We’ve passed it. Our street, we’ve passed by it.
“Well, we’re almost here anyhow,”
Bill lifts his head up and looks around. Suddenly as if the three of them have clipped through spacetime, they are much further along than could ever be realistically possible. They were just passing Jackson, now they are striding down Up Mile Hill at a dead shot for the trainyard.
The standpipe looms stark white, memorial fountain sat in the distance behind. Bill looks forward and back again. Now he sees the street sign for Old Lyme stood perpendicular at his back. When he turns his head for the third time they are rushing to meet the intersection of Neibolt and Route 2.
Neibolt Street Church rises up beside him, spiral casting a shadow like a pike. His ears prick and even though Bill knows, he knows in his bones that it’s not a Sunday, he can hear the harmony of voices through the walls of the building. It’s not a hymn or a holy hallelujah, it’s a funeral march.
---
Bill digs in his heels, scrabbling through dirt and gravel, through small sprouts of witchgrass that lengthen the closer they get. The beginning of the trainyard lot stretches like a ghost to his right, the dead end of the tracks clogged up with piles of lumber, with crooked, ripped up rails and rusted barrels of supplies long since meant for shipping. Things that had surely, by now gone rancid inside. Like the day so fresh just moments ago with the golden sun ripening the horizon, now the blue black bruise of night and encroaching rot of darkness rushing up at Bill.
His mother and father keep the same pace and same route down the street. Bill’s feet drag and trip over each other as he scrabbles to get out of their grip. It’s a futile effort.
“You-your’e h-hu-hurting me,” His voice comes out thin and whining and scared to his own ears. Bill hates it. A hateful, weak, little boy voice and Bill wonders where that booming stutter-free surety he used against Pennywise went. His parents keep advancing. He wriggles and twists his wrists, palms locked up and squeezed so tight between their grown up hands.
“S-s-st-st-hop, s-s-stop yo-your’e h-hu-hurting-”
"It should have been you, William,"
Whatever words Bill means to say shrivel up and get lost over each other, tripping in the echoing void of his brain.
"Instead of George, it should have been you. You do know that, don’t you?"
Oh.
Oh he knows it. He knows but hearing them finally say it out loud is another animal all together. It makes Bill go weak, dizzy in the head. His strength flows out of him.
Bill stops trying to walk at all. His limp feet drag steadily against the dirt street while his parents march along like some military company. Long adult legs striding in perfect time. Bill almost suspended, rather than a child, but like a shared burden between them.
He stares at his mother’s hand, tense, veins prominent through freckled skin from holding the weight of his body aloft. Then to his father who is looking at him as if Bill is not quite right in the head. As if Bill has missed the punchline of a very easy joke.
"You didn't think we were walking past home all this way for nothing did you?" Zack Denbrough admonishes with that overbright blindness in his eyes, the one Bill hates, now an overbright note to his voice.
"We'll give you to our good neighbor Mr. Bob Grey. He'll return Georgie to us," His mother’s determination sends pins and needles of fear into Bill’s blood. He suddenly wants to puke, maybe scream, maybe both.
“He-he-he’s nuh-not th-th-there a-any-any mo-more!” Bill doesn’t know if he means Georgie or Pennywise, both probably. It’s incoherent, panicky. Desperation mounting as every second he fails to get out from his parent’s grip, every inch they come closer to the Neibolt house, Bill can feel his ability to speak in coherent strings of words eroding like unstable sand under the posts of homes on a hill.
It shouldn't scare him but It does. They killed It, he saw It break apart, disintegrate. It’s dead, it’s dead! Why is Bill so scared?
“You’ve had a year to stop stuttering, a year to find him,” His mother again, harsh and cold. Ice and needles in Bill’s bones. Ghosts and haunting, empty, loveless mothers.
“I t-t-tri-trie-,” He fumbles, weakly choking on syllables.
"A trade’s a trade Bill, it's only fair," His dad interrupts, so ambivalent Bill can feel the shrug in his words.
"P-p-p-p-p-puh-p-,"
Please no.
He whips his head around desperately searching for the others, sure they'll magically appear in his time of need. Searching for his ever-present trail of friends. Loyal loving Losers. Always at his back, always with him when he asks them, when he needs them! And by shit Bill needs them now, now, now!
The sunflowers in the overgrown yard stare at Bill’s struggle with clusters of dried black eyes. The path that flanks the three of them chokes and narrows on witchgrass, the eaves of the sagging roof drown, buckled with the weight of soggy leaves. The broken cellar window and the rotted black patch branded into the roses are all still there. The house has taken his parents eyes, it sees Bill in their place. It wants Bill in their place. Wants to eat him, twist him, crush him. Love him, in its own horrible way.
Come home Bill.
A snare to the heart, to the bloody wound in his chest formed the day Bill lost his little brother. A fisherman’s reel cast deep in the ever widening lake of sadness and guilt inside him. Each moment of rejection from his parents a drip to overflow the banks.
His sneakers scuff up the paint chipped stairs and his mind screams.
PLEASE NO. PLEASE NO. NOT ALONE. NO, NO, NO!
Zack and Sharon Denbrough swing Bill up, writhing and screaming incoherencies because it is the only sound he can get out without stuttering, over the rotten threshold of the Neibolt house.
Swing him up holding his hands. Holding his hands! Not because they love him or want him with them, but to keep him from running away.
The door groans open and they lift him over slumped foundations into the awaiting arms of Bob Grey.
---
“Come home Billy,”
Bill finds his words again, a crazed kind of fear tinged with outrage at the unfairness of it all pulls them from his throat.
“N-NO! W-W-WE KUH-KI-KILLED-”
The clown catches him by the face and Bill’s screams are muffled against silk gloves that slide then stick against his sweat matted brow. Bill kicks out with his feet, Keds slapping against the silver clown suit. He also clutches vice-like at his parent’s hands, loath to let go even as they try to pry his fingers from thiers. His efforts are only half effective in both directions.
It grips down on him, painful and crushing and Bill screams again. Bill can feel Its fingers digging into the space between his ribs, not breaking the skin, but hard enough to mottle and mark its future an ugly blue.
He twists despite the pain, he fights as hard as he's ever fought. There's no way, no fucking way he's getting dragged into 29 Neibolt street alone. No way Bill will let his parents give him over. He's going to have a Talking To with them. A sit down fucking dinner, you bet your fur! He's going to get out of this and make them wake up to the fact that Georgie is well and truly dead and that they aren't allowed to keep using it as an excuse to ignore-
Oh but then. Bill sees him. Catches sight of a yellow rain slicker darting out the door right next to him. A tiny ship’s captain, close enough to touch, and Bill’s fingers go slack with the shock and heartbreak of it. His mother and father pluck their hands from his with an almost businesslike neatness.
Just like that, so easily, It has him again. It always gets Bill in the end doesn't It. It tucks Bill under Its arm like a parcel of flesh from the butchers and moves his head so he has a clear view. It wants him to see.
He watches the small shape of Georgie-not Georgie!-Bill reminds himself, reunite with his parents. Watches his mother crouch down smiling, watches his father bracket the two of them in a hug, laughing with joyful tears in his eyes. He watches them come all the way alive and feels it like something-a dam-breaking apart and internally flooding him. The clown releases his face, now It wants him to talk. He hates how seamlessly he plays his part but Bill can’t help it.
“M-mo-om,” Bill’s voice breaks, cracks on the uptake. Imploringly, and impossibly high. It’s a question, it’s a plea. It’s disbelief and despair. Bill’s cheeks feel hot, his eyes sting and there’s that hateful crying iron taste in his throat. He won’t cry, he won’t cry! He’s not a baby and he won’t cry.
“M-m-mom, dad! M-mmm-mom that's nuh-no-ht G-Gu-Georgie!”
It's not. It's not! Oh please God, please God! Why can't they see?
Why can't they see the fibrous rot, the blue green sheen of that thing’s skin, the waterlogged flesh, the mouth leaking leaves and raw sewage, greywater from every pore. All it is is a corpse in a yellow rain slicker and green galoshes.
They don't see. They never see. They’d rather Bill die than have to see him. They’d rather leave him. Leave him with the clown.
Bill feels too much, he can’t form words to talk so instead he screams. Screams after them high and furious. It’s a wounded, howling, insensate sound. Anger. It’s an anger sound. But not the anger of self-righteousness no, Bill’s scream is an anger of deep hurt and it tapers off into bitter, breathless gasping. His ribs ache, his heart hurts , Bill feels so much, always so much feeling and never anywhere for it to go.
“Bye now! Bye! Visit again soon!” It jostles Bill as It waves exaggeratedly from the derelict porch. Its voice is chipper, artificial helium high and bright.
Bill gets a handle on his breathing again because he can’t afford to waste time even if by God his heart feels stabbed, punctured raw by blunt needles. He looks around, for something he can use as a weapon, for someone to call out to. For a familiar face. Come on guys please .
“Waiting for your friends?” It sounds pitying, almost genuinely so, and the false concern wracks Bill’s body with shudders.
“They won’t come, Billy boy. It’s just you and me now, and you’re not enough. You’ve never been enough by your lonesome,”
It carries him over the threshold and just like that he’s back inside the Neibolt house. The front door creaks like the squeal of a stuck pig and slams closed against Bill’s back, knocking his head forward, pulling a dull throbbing pain from the back of his skull. Pennywise cocks Its head and almost casually, like they’re old friends catching up after time apart, asks;
“How’s Stan The Man holding up?”
Bill narrows his puffy eyes and chokes out as vicious a ‘Fuck you’ as his stutter will allow. Which is, not very vicious. Bill doesn’t feel very vicious right now, he feels hurt and alone. Bill feels sadness climbing up the walls of his insides and he fights hard against hopelessness.
“Does he still dream about my lights? Still long to be in them?”
Bill struggles angrily. He does not want to dwell on the increasing absence of his friend at their group gatherings.
“Does reality still grate his nerves raw? Does he still bite his little sissy nails all bloody and shaking between teeth?”
Bill does not think about the bulk of bandaids on Stan’s fingers, the length of his hair, longer and more unruly than Bill knows Stan likes it. To hide the circlet bite marks.
“Doesn’t matter,” It says, chipper as a peach.
“I watch over all of you in my own way. I know how Stanley’s doing, how you’re all floating along,”
He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
"He hates you,"
‘I hate you,’ then a smile, eyes averted to conceal the truth of the statement in a joke.
"You left him, your little lovebird so red and dead in my lights,"
Bill does not think about the silences, the blankness. The deadlight vacancy polluting Stan’s once clear eyes. He doesn’t think about how Stan is shorter tempered with Bill than with the other Losers. How Stan gravitates now closer to Richie, Richie who Stan sided with, Richie who went to Stan’s Bat Mitzvah and had warned Bill that one of them would get caught.
"They won't come for you. They all hate you, and why shouldn't they! You dragged them into this mess. You made them follow you through rivers of shit and piss to fight a monster,"
No, no. They were alright, Richie forgave him. Richie followed him and picked up that baseball bat and beat the shit out of It. Richie saved him, when Bill told him to leave. He didn’t listen, he pressed on and ignored Bill and saved him. Come on Richie. Come on, where are you?
“Stan-o got dirty for you and you leeeeeft him, left him with me!"
I can deal with being scared. It’s being dirty I can’t stand.
“S-s-stan is bu-buh-better than you!” Bill finally forces out. He has to deny It, he has to.
“Ooh! Is he? Let me tell you a secret. He’s not gonna make it B-B-Big Bill, I saw it in him, why he’s practically a grown up! All that reason stuffed so tight inside his little bones. One day he’s just gonna POP off at the wrists!”
I'd rather die than be dirty. Rather die than be dirty, rather die than be-
Shut up, Bill thinks. You shut up you stupid, fucking clown. You don’t know anything about Stan or his strength. You don’t know a thing about any of us half as well as you wish you did. If you did you wouldn’t be scared of us. Scared of me. You wouldn’t be picking us off one by one.
He thrusts his fists...against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
Say it. You know you have to say it. SAY IT.
“He th-th-thrus-ts-”
“Not today Billy Boy. Not today!” Big and jovial, horrible. Horribly joyful. Bill doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to listen to another faux-happy voice in all his life, not even in the movies.
And the clown. Mr. Bob Grey, Pennywise. Whatever It is. IT. The essential THING. Closes a heavy hand around the back of Bill’s head and, quick as a trapdoor spider, the other hand shoots forward and snatches his tongue mid-sentence. Now Bill couldn’t stutter if he wanted to.
Then, tauntingly. It lets his tongue go. Bill being the stubborn boy that he is, tries again immediately.
“He Th-THRUSTS-”
Bill clamps shut his teeth as It shoots out Its hand again. An expression of mild surprise on Its cake-peeling, sallow, icing-gone-rancid-face. Bill very nearly bites Its hand. He will, he resolves. He will bite Its fucking fingers right off the next time. Better than that. He will say his phrase, his rhyme without even opening his mouth. Bill doesn't know if the rhyme will have the same effectiveness or power, but he’ll still try. By damn he’ll try.
“HE THRUSTS HIS FIST AGAI-ARGHHH!”
It was working, he hadn’t stuttered. Somehow talking through clenched teeth smoothed his stutter away. That is, until It grows one long and pike-like claw of a finger through the silk glove and plunges it into the meat of Bill’s shoulder. It wiggles the finger deeper and deeper into the wound until it hits bone and Bill screams through his teeth, clenching his jaw so tightly he is sure his mouth will shatter. His world goes a blinding white around the edges, then grey and granular, the particles of reality seem to come apart like sand. Like everything is made of heavy sand and interwoven static.
Bill slumps in Its grip, pain and that grey unreality washing over him in waves radiating from the puncture wound in his arm. He is cold, and this time it isn’t merely the negligence of love. This cold is the shock of a wounded prey animal, a paralytic self-protection taken up in the body of a young boy.
Now Bill does cry, big slow drops from stinging eyes that wet his face like hot summer rain. It hurts so bad. He's afraid. He’s afraid, he's afraid! No Richie to pull him out again with his booming Irish Cop voice, no Eddie to tell him that ‘It's just a fucking clown!’ and spray It with battery acid. No Beverley to cave Its head in with a deadshot arm and a silver slug. No Mike, bolt gun holstered at his side like the hero of a great Western picture. No Ben, taking the brunt of claws and knives and rocks, of Henry Bower’s fists and getting up stronger. Every. Single. Time. No Stan. Stan with his beautiful bird book. Stan contorting himself against his naturally straight edges, bending so very far to accommodate the unreality Bill asked him to fight.
Bill only has himself and his speech impediment, only has that tongue twister now with his tongue so twisted he can’t get it out.
He pants with the exertion of staying awake. He knows if he drifts off now he’s as good as dead. It will peel his eyes open and cast him into the deadlights. It will smash his mind to pieces against the barrier of that ‘other’ place. Bill can’t beat It, not like this. Alone and really, truly afraid for the first time since the night Georgie went missing. But maybe Bill can stay coherent long enough to lurch out of Its grip and run. If he can get to the basement and jam up the door maybe he can buy himself enough time to claw up the coal heap and squeeze out the window again, just like last time.
Then he’ll run. Run all the way to the clubhouse, all the way to the others where Bill will be able to become something again. Backed by the others with younger children to protect, he’ll remember how to be something with value and a proper reason to keep fighting.
Suddenly, as if sensing his intent to struggle, to fight for escape, It moves in close, so close. Enough that Bill can see the waterline of Its eyes and the border of pale white lashes glopped together with some kind of putrid mucus that overruns onto the caked on grease paint.
“You're all alone Billy,” It gurgles, sounding a low growl in a throat full of spit, or worse.
“Billyyy,”
“Biiiiilllyyyy,”
It wrenches Its finger from Bill’s arm and he gasps stupidly, the pain making him blind. He feels warm blood, hot and sticky, seep out from the wound and slide heavy and lazily down his arm. That greyness threatens to overtake him once more.
“BiiiiilleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEE,”
The sound crescendos to a screeching chirruping racket the likes of which a human throat could never make and which when heard with human ears causes Bill to scream outright. He can no more stop his mouth screaming than he can willingly stop his heart beating, or the synapses in his brain firing.
It opens Its mouth to match his scream, and Bill expects It to cast him into the deadlights. Too late Bill realizes that It is closing the distance between them, that Its face is mashing up and splitting apart, that Its teeth have now become hundreds of yellow, gore-caked scythes erupting from Its gums. Too late for Bill to close his mouth and retreat his exposed tongue behind the safe barrier of scattered baby teeth among the adult ivories.
It takes a hold of him, not by Bill’s mental tongue but his physical one. Still making that insane noise, that skull-splitting, resounding deadlight sound, the sound of the void. It takes Bill’s tongue between those yellow scythe teeth, sinks them through as easy as butter, and bites it off.
There's a sickening pull and a pressure before the pain. Blood gouts out over Bill’s chin and down his front. Warm and sticky and bubbling up with his increasingly frantic screams. Bill Denbrough looks with disbelieving insanity into Its yellow-silver horrible eyes and watches as It chews and swallows with a smile to shut Bill up for good.