Work Text:
Bill feels like a ghost in his home.
He knows it doesn’t make sense. He’s not the one who’s…
Dead
Missing. He’s not the one who’s missing.
But he doesn’t feel real.
He drifts from silent room to silent room like a feather caught in a breeze, his old, scuffed sneakers barely skimming the floor, fingers not daring to disturb the layer of dust beginning to settle over everything. It reminds him of the first snow that arrives with the winter chill, where Derry looks like it’s been tucked in a white cotton blanket, left to sleep until the spring melts the town awake.
Bill doesn’t think spring will arrive in the Denbrough house, not for a long while.
His parents don’t seem to notice him. They’re snared in their own thick webs of grief, they’ve both retreated back into their memories, the only grainy home videos so far from reality that it can’t sting any more. He sees an empty glass and half-empty bottle by his mother’s place on the couch more often than not, and he can’t understand the curling script on the bottle, but he knows it’s alcohol. He wonders where she retreats to, whether it’s back to before she had children, when the marriage was still young, or whether she retreats to Georgie’s babyhood, when he was no bigger than a sack of flour, when her arms were all he needed to stay safe. Both thoughts leave Bill aching. His dad comes nowhere near the bottles, he’s noticed. Instead, he shuts himself away in the garage, where he’ll sit in silence. Bill’s seen him plenty of times, hunched over his work bench, face scrunched up, tear tracks glinting on his face and a tissue crumpled in his hand. Bill always vanishes from the doorway before his dad looks up and catches him. He doesn’t know what’s scarier; his dad, his big, brave dad who would fight off all those childhood ghosts and ghouls, crying, or the fact that he’s hiding it from them. He doesn’t let himself think far enough into it to come to a conclusion.
Bill knows why they don’t notice him. They refuse to. They refuse to see their lone son, they let him shoulder his grief alone, because if they reach out to help, they’ll be drawn in and overwhelmed by it. Bill is only just managing to keep from choking on the thick, heavy fog of sadness that clings to him all the time, rarely ever abating. He’s only a boy, he’s only young, too young for the horrors facing him, the horrors that will continue to rise against him, but he cannot turn to his parents for help. They can’t look at him, because they will only see a half. They’ll only see half of what used to be, half of the ruckus being caused in an upstairs bedroom, half of the toys scattered across the floor, half of the storybooks left open and flicked through, half of BillandGeorgie, one word, a double act. They can’t look at him, because they’ll only see the shadow Georgie used to cast by his side.
Though he may know why, Bill hates being unnoticed like this. He knows he can scream, he knows he can shout, he knows he could have a zoo march through the living room, and neither of his parents will do anything to stop it. They’ll simply sit and watch blankly, unseeing, then blink and ask, “Did you say something, Bill?” He wants to sit and pour his soul out onto the rug in messy gushes of tears and snot and raw sadness, but he knows they’ll refuse to hear him. He wants them to notice how much he’s hurting, because it feels like his splitting, facturing, snapping, he’s just breaking apart right under the blind eyes of his parents and they don’t care to pull themselves free of the fog surrounding them to comfort him. It makes anger boil inside him, all sour bile and burning acid.
Just as quickly as it comes, it vanishes, leaving chillingly cold, incredibly bitter guilt and grief crawling up the back of his throat. He’s an awful son for those thoughts. He’s selfish, he knows it. His mom is only keeping herself together with booze, his dad is splitting at the seams, what right does he have to pretend he’s the only one reaching breaking point? They’re all little glass figures perched on the same teetering shelf, barely an inch away from slipping off the end and burst into a handful of chips of glass upon the floor.
“Bill, baby? It’s late. Shouldn’t you be getting to bed?”
Bill’s knocked into silence when his mom speaks up, her usual gentle voice roughened with drink and sleep, her bleary eyes slipping over him again and again as if terrified to properly land on him and properly take in what she’s seeing.
Bill can’t form words, so he simply nods. He pushes himself to his feet, gathering up his comic books. He shuffles closer to where his mom is draped across the couch, he leans down to press a kiss to her forehead.
“Goodnight, baby. Sleep well.” Sharon lays a hand on Bill’s neck, her fingers toying with the soft, downy hair at the nape of her boy’s neck, inhaling deeply before letting out a sigh and letting him go.
With the armful of comics clutched to his chest, Bill hurries upstairs, determined to make it to his bedroom before the tears start falling.
He doesn’t make it.