Chapter Text
-Richie-
Richie Tozier’s life changed because of a stupid rock.
It was fist sized. Smooth and gray; unremarkable really. A downright embarrassment to rock kind if he was being honest with himself. Not even the slosh of alcohol inside his veins could excuse the overall unimpressiveness of what was no more than an oversized pebble.
But God, did it ever fuck up the window of Kaspbrak’s Florals in the most spectacular of ways as it flew from his palm.
Richie was surprised he could even hear the shattering over the victory shrieks Henry and Patrick issued in response, but it was inexplicably loud. Deafening in the too still night of Derry, Maine, as it began to rain glitter down on all the fine petals on display. A racket for the record books, a cacophony for the ages. Even inebriated, his brain was quick and clever, eager to make it momentous in his memories.
A disbelieving laugh began to climb up Richie’s throat as he stared at the damage, only half seeing it. Ho-lee shit. He had really gone and done that, hadn’t he? Crossed some kind of rebellious threshold that you really only saw in 80s movies. Fuck. Fuck .
He opened his mouth to maybe say that, or maybe just spew his guts up, but Henry’s arm was coming up around him before he could, his breath hot against his ear as he began to shout. “ Toezy-eh-heh-heh! Lewkit you, bud! Fuckin’ look at you! ”
He was slurring his words, unsurprisingly. Doing that stupid thing where he pulled out Richie’s last name the wrong way, the way Richie hated , as his grip became unknowingly tight across his throat. Or maybe it was knowingly. Who the fuck knew when it came to Henry Bowers. Their “friendship” was a jagged one, just like the remnants of glass lining the window sill. Fueled by intoxicants, bad decisions, and a few too close encounters with the police. It was a thing of convenience over consideration, if Richie had to put some kind of label to it.
Trouble just waiting to happen.
A ticking time bomb.
Patrick replied with a baying noise of pleasure on Richie’s behalf when the silence stretched on for too long, his grip scary loose on the bottle of Jim Beam they had plucked from Keene’s drug store shelves hours beforehand. And then he started to dance the only way he knew how, wild and wheeling, twitching his limbs violently under the street lights as he mumbled excited lyrics to himself. “Idiot!” Richie barked at Patrick when he nearly hit the concrete face first before finding his footing once more. “Get off it!”
“Get off!” Patrick spluttered back with an extremely obscene gesture, getting Richie to laugh despite himself. “Good one, Toezy-eh!”
“Yeah, good one!” Henry released him with a hard push, nearly propelling Richie into the very mess he had made. He wasn’t enough drunk to let himself take the fall, but he wasn’t sober enough to school his features into something less than contempt either as he came back up again. Henry, however, was a million miles away from them, and thank God for that. Head tipped back to the stars, his mouth slack with drunken pleasure, gone gone gone. “Fuckin’ good one, Dickie.” The words all but exploded out of him as he whipped his head towards Richie. “Fuckin’ fuck yeah. Hell yeah!”
The older boy turned on Patrick and ripped the bottle from his grip, throwing it back so violently that it came as a surprise that any of it ended up in his mouth. Henry managed though, impressing Richie until he decided to dash it against the ground with a guttural howl. “Okay, we get it.” Richie rolled his eyes, irritation growing as he watched how the liquid spread across the concrete between the shards of glass. “Can we go now?”
Henry eyed him, surprisingly lucid for how drunk he ought to be. “Whuz got you’n such a rush? Ya already skipped curfew, Toezy-eh. Whuz a few more hours with yer best friends’n’such? The night’s jus gettin’ started.” He took a slumping step forward to Richie, his boots crunching over the glass. It was a horrific sound, more so than the window breaking somehow, gritting and grinding in protest before giving away under Henry’s foot.
“Henry.” Richie started, hating how his voice shook slightly, but Henry was actually pivoting away from him, aiming towards the store on drunken feet. “Fuck, Bowers, c’mon-”
He stopped at the lack of window, staring beyond the ruined flowers to the inside of the store with his head half tilted, as if studying it to find the best way to approach. But he wouldn’t, Richie tried to reassure himself. Bowers wouldn’t be that stupid. Wouldn’t be that much of a bastard man no matter how tempting it seemed.
And then he went and did it, of course, because that’s just how it worked.
“Henry!” Richie hissed in disbelief. There was a difference between shoplifting cigarettes and sneaking into bars versus breaking and entering into someone’s damn shop. The closest thing to this had been when they had hotwired Adrian Mellon’s car and drove it to the Barrens in the middle of the night, where Patrick and Henry did lines of coke off the armrest while Richie watched them as he smoked a joint instead. His stomach had been in knots then and it was in even tighter ones now, making it near impossible to move, to breathe even.
He watched as Patrick launched himself into the store like some kind of crazed hurdlist seconds later, clearing the broken glass by mere inches only to crush those poor flowers under his feet, giving an uncaring laugh. Fuck. Fuck. Suddenly it wasn’t so epic anymore. This was bad. “Guys! Come on!” They had to have some kind of alarm system in there. Cameras. Something that was going to get them caught. “Get out of there!”
It could be as easy as leaving them, a selfish and cowardly part of him couldn’t help but think. Henry and Patrick weren’t his responsibilities. They were barely his fucking friends. And there was the fact that they wouldn’t do this for him if their positions were switched. They’d let Richie straight up crash and burn if it meant saving their skin.
But Richie couldn’t drag his eyes from the flowers, the glass. He had given them the means. He had thrown that damn rock. “Fuck.” He groaned under his breath, hating his conscience as it forced himself to step over the sill and into the store. He gave himself just one moment of silence and stillness after his feet touched the ground, taking it all in. It was quaint with it’s shining blond wood floors and spring green walls, a relic of a Derry you almost didn’t see anymore...
And the flowers! He never knew there could be so many different ones. Richie could name roses and daisies on a good day, sunflowers and tulips too, but there were hundreds more in here. Some of them were like fireworks mid bloom, others like watercolor brush strokes upon the world. He paused to touch one, sunshine bright, trying to figure out if it was more trumpetlike or teacup when he heard an awful, heavy sound.
“Dude.” Patrick delighted from the other room, drawing Richie to the nearest rose bouquet so he could spy on them without being seen. They were standing over the till at the counter, Patrick digging through it as Henry put down a heavy looking stone vase on the ground. “We’re gonna be rich.”
“This isn’t more than five hundred dollars, you fucking spazz.” Henry told him, his lip curling back with disgust. “What’re we gonna buy with five hundred dollars, huh?”
“Drugs.” Patrick told him simply, too pleased for his own good.
Without warning, Henry drew his arm back and cracked Patrick straight across the face, so hard Patrick’s head snapped to the side as blood sprayed out of his mouth. Richie’s stomach pitched with it but he didn’t dare move from his spot. Once. Something like this had happened one other time. Except it had been the flat of Henry’s knife against Patrick’s jaw, Henry’s hand amazingly steady on the handle despite the cocktail of drugs inside him as he threatened to carve Patrick’s eyes out for no particular reason at all.
Hocksetter, to his credit, didn’t so much whimper or even cry out. He almost seemed to smile to himself as he straightened back up. It had been like that with the knife too. There had been something in his eyes, something like silent wanting…
Bad, bad, bad .
“Go and find the safe. The rest of it has to be in there. Then we’ll have drug money, yeah?” It was all fun and games until you robbed a store, Richie told himself, trying to make light of the situation (only managing to make it worse inside his head.) He just had to get back to the window, to the outside, and he’d be gone like a thief in the night. Except he’d be the exact opposite of a thief. An anti-thief. A rock thrower, sure, but no god damn burglar.
Fuck, he hated his brain sometimes.
Apparently his body was feeling left out of the hate-fest too though because the moment he moved back a step his foot found the loudest, squeakiest floorboard in all of Kaspbrak’s Florals and pressed down, causing Henry to look up with a smile, nice and slow. “That you Toezy-eh?” He called out despite already having to know. “Why don’t you come and help us, bud?”
He opened his mouth just like before, except it wasn’t an arm that cut him off this time...
...It was sirens, red and blue and loud .
Henry moved terrifyingly fast, shoving whatever he could grab from the till down the front of his shorts, knocking quarters and pennies to the floor. “Patrick!” He roared. “Cop’s are here, let’s go!”
Patrick barreled out from the back office, whipping his head back and forth until he found Richie still crouching there. He kept telling himself to move, to speak, to do anything but just stay there, but the image of of Henry slapping Patrick wouldn’t leave him, just like the threat of the knife, or the way the bottle smashed across the ground.
“Snitch.” Patrick said in a deathly calm voice as their eyes met. He still had blood on his lip, his chin, and it made for a horrifying picture alongside his too pale skin and greasy dark hair. “You’re dead.”
“Now don’t get ahead of yourself, Patrick.” Henry was still wearing his predator’s grin, making his way near. The police were close enough now where their sirens were deafening, their lights flashing sporadically off the walls. “I think Toezy-eh here is gonna do us one more solid. Take one for the team, if you will.”
“Henry.” Richie rasped, almost out of breath. The knife, oh God, please not the knife. Anything but that. He’d take Henry’s fist in his face, his gut, his balls over that rusting knife coming anywhere near him.
Henry leaned down and picked something up off the floor, surprising Richie for the second time that night. The rock, Richie realized as the light painted him blood red. He had the damn rock. The same rock that had broken the window by his hand, that had no right looking as threatening as it did now.
Fist sized.
Smooth and gray.
Unremarkable.
An embarrassment to all rock kind.
“I owe ya one.” Henry told him sweetly before he brought it down.
*
The world swam in and out of focus, impossible to latch on to. Richie saw fluorescents, pock marked ceilings, his mother and father’s faces staring down at him with worry and grief.
Sometimes, he saw flowers.
Sometimes, he saw a boy he had never met before.
But mostly it was darkness.
Again and again.
*
He had a borderline depressed skull fracture and they had shaved half of his head to put seven staples in.
It was hard for Richie not to touch his scalp reflexively, his fingers going to the near bare skin, absently touching what stubble was there. A few times, his mother slapped his hand away, other times, she’d touch it too.
His dad kept joking about it, of course.
“This is what all the kids are doing now, Maggie. Side cuts, undercuts, high cuts and low cuts.” Wentworth gave her a winning smile. “It’s hip, it’s in!”
“Yeah, what dad said.” When they had found them there had been blood, and lots of it. A fact that a training nurse had let slip to his poor mother during his first check up. “I’m hip now.”
Maggie blew out a teary, exasperated breath and waved them off, focusing her stare to the window beyond. They hadn’t really talked about it yet. Why he had been there, what had happened.
Why five hundred dollars was missing from the Kaspbrak’s register and nowhere to be found.
Richie sighed and settled back into the hospital bed. They’d be releasing him soon, and then it would be right to the police station before he even found his way back home. They had questions for him. Questions he still didn’t know how to answer despite thinking about them every hour on the hour in this too small room.
It was clear Henry wanted him to take the fall.
It was clear he was going to end up the loser in this situation unless he told the truth.
It was clear he’d die if he did. The staples in his skin were proof of that fact.
Therefore, nothing was actually, really clear.
“I’m sorry.” He said, because at this point it was really the only other thing he could say. His parents shouldn’t have ever gotten this call at 2 AM. Shouldn’t have had to hear the doctor discuss the side effects and symptoms he’d be experiencing over the next few weeks, months even. Slurred speech, random bleeding from his eyes and nose, even more random bouts of unconsciousness.
He almost asked if hallucinations were part of that too, remembering the solemn looking boy above his bed between the flowers and the dark, but he kept that thought to himself.
“We know you are, Richie.” His mother told him as her hand found his scalp again, her fingers cool against his temple as she stroked the skin there. “We know.”
*
The Derry Police station was yet another remnant of another time. It was a thing made for the quiet rustling of paperwork and the deep sighs of those who had to pour over it. They didn’t even cuff him to the chair when they set him up with the interrogation. Just let him lounge there awkwardly next to his family's attorney until the second officer came in and took the chair to his left.
“Richard Toezey-ehr.” The first officer started casually after reading him his rights, something Richie never thought he’d hear outside of a movie or TV show, paging through a folder that probably had all sorts of awful stuff waiting inside about him.
“Haven’t heard that one before.” Richie cut in before he could help himself, the jackass in him eager to make itself known. His attorney’s head whipped to him and he blanched as he curled his toes inside his tennis shoes, dipping his head towards his lap as a meek “it’s Toes-er, sir.” came out right after.
Richie glanced up just in time to see the officer give him a sideways smirk. “Richard Toes-er then. My apologies.” He didn’t really sound all that sorry... “How’re you feeling?”
As good as I can with seven staples in my head, bub. God, was he ever tempted to just lay that one out, but this is how this whole song and dance worked. They were looking for an excuse, to pin him so something could come out that shouldn’t. So Richie simply touched his head instead and waggled his hand in front of him in a ‘so-so’ kind of motion. “I think I finally know what my mom’s migraines must feel like, if we’re being honest here.”
The attorney cleared her throat, but he didn’t feel as guilty about that one.
“Well. That’s good.” He was laying paper by paper out across the table and Richie couldn’t help but peek at them. There were a few write ups from his school, a few speeding tickets too. Nothing god awful. Not yet, at least. “So you’re eighteen years old, turning nineteen in a few months. Average grades. What’s the plan for after the summer’s done?”
“Bangor Community College for my Liberal Arts. A job if I can find one.”
“Your parents paying for it?”
“Yup.”
“That’s nice of them.”
“Better that than some psuedo-Ivy League that’s gonna land me behind the counter at Mickey Dee’s with hundred of thousands of dollars in debt given the current state of the economy, sir.”
The second officer made an amused sound under his breath at that, brown eyes squinching shut. Small victories. He’d take them where he could. It’d take more to get this first one to crack though. And that was fine. Richie liked a challenge. “That’s fair, that’s fair. Smart too. You seem like you’re a decent kid, Richard.” The officer told him. “That’s why this is coming as such a surprise to everyone here, if we’re being completely honest.”
But he wasn’t a decent kid. Not with his banged up converses and ripped jean jacket that definitely had a few spliffs sewn into a secret pocket on the inside of it, not with Patrick and Henry’s tied into him. He drew in a slow breath and touched his scalp again, tempted to let the metal bite into his fingertips, realizing belatedly that the action had already become a habit. “So how’d you end up in Kaspbrak’s Florals with your head busted in, Rich?”
“Excuse me, officer. That’s an inappropriate question.” The attorney hissed. He didn’t even know this poor woman’s name. She was dressed to the nines, the complete opposite to him, the golden buttons on her navy blazer winking under the harsh light. “He doesn’t have to answer that right now.”
“It’s obvious this wasn’t a one person act.” The younger officer said in a gentle voice, apparently the good cop of this situtation. “If Richard was some kind of Good Samaritan, we can convey that to the judge appropriately.”
She bent over the table, putting Richie behind her. “Oh, I’m real sure that’s what you want to do, gentlemen. Listen. We, meaning Richie’s doctors, the judge that will be presiding over this, and your supervisors all agreed that this ‘interrogation’ isn’t going to go a second over an hour for his health and safety. You’ve got forty five minutes left. I say we do ourselves all a favor and cut this short before he starts bleeding out of his mouth, alright?”
Holy.
Shit.
She wasn’t done, apparently.
She straightened her papers on the table loudly, her brows pulling down. “This is a non-custodial interview. Not an interrogation, may I remind you. We can go whenever we so please. So unless you have something of interest, we will kindly take our leave and see you at the hearing.”
The older officer flapped his mouth like a fish. “Miss…”
“Marsh. Beverly Marsh.” Oh, so Miss Red got to be all kinds of sassy and smart, did she? Richie saw how this game was being played now. He kept his head bent though, doing his best to hide his shit eating grin. “How can I help you?”
“Someone… wanted to speak to Richard… before he left.” The younger one piped up abruptly, causing Beverly to raise a slim eyebrow.
“Who?” She drawled, not having it.
He swallowed and opened his mouth, unable to hide the amazed expression on his face as he faced her. “The owner’s son… Eddie Kaspbrak.”
“Oh.”
Beverly looked at him and he looked at her, both of them seeming to realize they had both uttered that soft exclamation of disbelief into the air. “That isn’t… I don’t think…” She started, biting down her lip. “I don’t think that’s necessarily allowed.”
“Well, you said it yourself. This is a non-custodial interview. The usual rules don’t really apply here.” The older officer informed her with a smirk, presumably pleased with how the tables had turned. Poor lady, Richie thought as she stiffened up. She didn’t look too much older than him either. This had to be hard. “Eddie was just hoping to see who got knocked out in his father’s store is all.”
“He can use the internet, like everyone else.” Beverly snapped as she stood up, dragging Richie up by the back of his jacket without even warning him, surprisingly strong. “We’re done. We’ll be in touch about Richie’s hearing.” She informed them briskly, looking very much done.
“But if there didn’t have to be a hearing?” A soft voice called from the doorway, grabbing his attention. “What if we can just settle this right here, right now?”
Richie turned and saw him.
Eddie Kaspbrak.
The boy from his dreams in his hospital bed.