Work Text:
Afterwards, Richie retreats to his room at the Inn and Beverly and Ben follow him there, closing the door shut.
Bill thinks he should follow them—the loss of Eddie cuts a hole in all of them, Richie most of all—but Mike grabs his hand, fingers warm and says , we shouldn't overwhelm him.
Bill arches an eyebrow. “We all lost Eddie,” he manages to say.
Mike nods. “But you know Richie,” he says and Bill isn't sure how that can be true, with all the years between them. “You know he'll clam up and sink back inside himself if he feels overwhelmed.”
Mike remembers everything, Bill reminds himself, and he still can't fathom that, living with that knowledge. His mind just won't process it, as if protecting itself from the full weight of it.
“Fine,” he grumbles, swallowing down what he wants to say, the jumble of emotions hitting him hard in the stomach.
Mike follows him back to his room, a quiet but constant presence at his side; Bill doesn't question it. He doesn't wanna push Mike away.
(he tends to do that, push others away, avoid the cast and crew and his own wife—a bad habit he developed in the absence of his memories, his friends, believing he was a loner his whole life)
“I need a shower,” Bill says. Mike sits on his bed, trying to relax. His clothes are still a little damp and he leaves wet spots on the bedspread, but Bill finds he doesn't care.
“Are you going to...” he can't finish what he wants to say. Going back to the library? But Bill doesn't want to remind Mike of it, make him go home.
“I don't think any of us should be alone,” Mike says. Bill stares at the way his throat moves, Adam's apple bobbing. It's strangely quiet at the inn, feels empty in his room, and it makes Mike stand out all the more.
Bill hears, I don't want to be alone anymore.
And maybe that's fair. They all left Mike alone for decades and he can imagine so it must feel, to have all of them back for such a short time
He doesn't want Mike go either.
In the bathroom, he angrily removes his clothes, stripping them off his body like he peeling glue off his skin. He thinks of what Eddie would say, suddenly, his face in his mind’s eyes, glaring, telling him he may as well burn the clothes now, they were as good as toxic waste.
Bill laughs, a sound that he clamps down on, threatening to turn into something worse.
We won, right? Bill thinks, the evil is defeated . But Bill’s written this story before—the ending everyone hates, no closure. Stan’s suicide, Eddie’s body, lost under ground, no chance of recovery.
Bittersweet.
Strange how when they were kids and so vulnerable, they all managed to get out alive. Like growing up robbed them of their ability to fight monsters.
Bill’s eyes burn with tears and he jumps in the shower to get away from himself, letting the dark space and hot water burn out any thoughts. It's a small shower, homely, should be nice, but it just reminded him of Derry and how claustrophobic it felt, to be back home.
The door opens with a loud crack, soft footsteps trending in and Bill doesn't have to look to know who it is.
“Mike?” he calls out.
The footsteps stall. “I heard something,” comes his deep voice.
Heard me crying, Bill thinks. He wipes away the tears on his face and feels stupidly young again, in all the worst ways.
He doesn't respond, too consumed in his own thoughts and Mike, softly, tentatively says, “I can leave you alone.”
Neither of them say anything for a moment, a long, silent moment with nothing but the running water pattering on the tub, and the sound of Mike’s breathing filling the space. Mike lets out a breath and it suddenly becomes imperative, crucial, that Mike not leave.
“M-m-mikey,” Bill manages to shudder out. “Stay. You can s-s-stay.”
He curses his own mouth. He hasn't stuttered in ages and now, every childhood and fear and insecurity has roared to the surface, spilling out all over, things he thought would go away with It. He had honestly forgotten he had it, though he would sometimes write a character who stuttered in his books—something compelling about a character almost violently unable to get out words, of the words stuck so heavy in his body, letters haphazard and scattershot.
He hadn't realized he putting himself in his books.
Mike doesn't comment on it. His footsteps are heavy in the bathroom tile, echoing in Bill’s ears.
“You just want me to wait here?” He asks.
Bill knows he would. Just wait while Bill showers. He wouldn't even ask him why.
“You...you can come in if you want,” he says, chokes out, gets the words out all at once.
Mike pulls the curtain back, letting out some of the hot air, and steps in, can hear him step in behind him. Bill somewhat processes the fact they aren't children anymore and looking at each fully naked isn't the same as mostly naked. That maybe he should be more uncomfortable here.
Bill finds himself turning around and finds that Mike kept all his clothes on, his shirt and jeans getting soaked, again. Shoes off though. A warm curl of embarrassment hits his cheeks, but it's just a momentary surge—if it bothers him to be naked and bathing in front of Mike, he's too exhausted, too raw, inside and out for it.
“You're gonna get your clothes wet,” Bill says. It feels like a dumb to say, they already have. Mike knows that. Of course he knows that. His brown button up clings to him, sticking to his skin. His dark hair shiny with water drops. He smelled faintly of groundwater, earth, and ozone.
Mike shakes his head, eyes lowered. “It's not a big deal,” he says. He looked great for forty, yet somehow the oldest of them all and a pang of guilt hits in Bill’s belly.
“I'm s-s-s,” Bill starts but sorry lodged in his chest. The word is inadequate and hollow inside him.
Mike steps forward with a gentle shush, grabbing his soapy hands. He's warm, and slick from the water, the hot steam wafting off them both.
“It's fine,” he says. He lets go, reaching for the shampoo bottle. Squirts some of it in his hand and before Bill can say anything, Mike brings his hands to Bill’s hair and gently runs his fingers through the wet locks, working and lathering shampoo in.
Bill shudders, but he can feel himself relaxing, letting go under the water, stepping closer to Mike, face to face with his throat. It's almost too close, can smell him even under the water and he looks down instead, ignoring his own naked body and staring past it, to the water beneath them, a grey brown color from the dirt falling off them. Bill shuts his eyes as Mike washes his hair.
“What are you—” he finally starts to say, a little too late.
“I wouldn't have asked you to stay,” Mike says. “I wouldn't have asked any of you to stay.”
Sorry doesn't break out of his chest, but he makes a choked sound and reaches out, suddenly, an almost violent lunge, grabbing on to Mike’s shoulders, needing to be closer, for Mike to understand all those lost years between them all, and still he cannot push out what he wants to say.
He beats his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
Since he got back to Derry, it felt a little bit, like being slowly flayed alive, bit by bit. Here is all your childhood friends. Here is the brother you forgot died. Here is Georgie, dying over and over again. Everything that was crossed out in his mind, buried and stolen, rushing to the surface again.
Here is your friend Mikey Hanlon, all grown up, and the last time you saw him, it was the end of the summer of ‘93, and Bill was heading to college and Mike was staying behind and even though Bev and Ben never wrote back, he convinced himself he, of course, would and of course, he didn't. He didn't even remember when he forgot Mike, the actual moment he forgot them all gone.
Mike gasps as Bill reaches for him. “Bill,” he says, exhaling deeply. Their eyes meet. The shower pounds loud and hot against his back. Bill, strangely, feels like he may fall over, dizzy with it, and Mike moves his hands to his face. Clean hands now, despite the sewer and the quarry water, the shampoo almost washed off his hands. Clean and warm.
For a moment, Bill doesn't see a grown man. He looks at Mikey and doesn't see a tall, strapping man, who would have looked ten years younger than all of them, if it weren't for his haunted eyes.
No, he sees a young boy—guileless eyes and scarcely believing anyone would come rescue him in this godforsaken town. He sees Eddie—small and skinny and so fierce—grab Mike’s hand, remembers Eddie being the first to chase after him at the sight of his fallen bicycle, it's Mike, the homeschool kid. Bill feels it too, like he's somehow gone back in time, all his memories swirled together. Sees himself, hair more auburn than grey, a pile of limbs, skinny like a weed. Welcome to the Losers Club, Mike.
“I missed you,” Bill says; it's wrecked now, his voice, punched out of his chest. His shoulders are shaking. At the quarry, Richie burst into sobs, and he feels a little like that now, adrenaline left his body and leaving behind just grief and a terrible fear choking him from the inside out. “I don't want to forget you again, I don't want to forget any of you.”
Mike nods, too rapidly, his eyes shining. “I'm not ready to lose you all again,” he says.
Mike holds his face in his hands and slowly, so slowly it hurts, if gentleness could hurt, could make him ache deep inside with something different than pain—he brings their faces forward, until Mike’s lips are on his.
Bill lets out a small noise, mouth dropping open. Like a gasp. Or a sigh, or a sob, maybe all three. He grabs hold of Mike, tugging him closer, twisting his fingers in his ruined clothes. The water is steaming around them, cloistering them together, hiding them away from everyone else.
It's a soft, gentle kiss, that breaks his heart and throws everything out of his mind in equal measure. Neither of them are kissing with any great skill, just trying to find each other out with hands and lips. He doesn't want to pull away.
Mike tastes like blood on his tongue, something raw and painful. Blood and tears. Bill likes it.
*
(Bill waits to forget about Mike, to forget them all, but he gets on flight back to L.A. and sobs in the bathroom for fifteen minutes thinking of Eddie and Stan, and for once, he's never welcomed the pain of grief more)
*
After, he divorces his wife.
It's a clean divorce. They both have two houses and make their own income and neither of them have pets or children to fight over. Bill wants to give Audra whatever she wants, as some sort of shameful, tacit apology, for never being satisfied, but Audra has no ill will towards him.
I just can't do this anymore.
They've spent so long fighting, snapping at each, being passive aggressive, avoiding each other, that when the time the rope finally snapped, neither of them had energy to fight. Like prolonging the marriage was just rubbing salt in the wound and now that Bill had admitted defeat, he can finally relent, relax into this.
Audra tells him, this is the most.peaceful I've seen you, at the divorce lawyer meeting.
Bill thinks he should mourn this, this last eight years of his life. Four of dating and a one year engagement and three years of marriage—that there should be a grieving period for losing this.
Instead, he packs his stuff, freshly fired off the set of his own movie, and heads to his writing cabin in Tahoe.
A cabin in the woods, Audra teased him once, I thought you were a horror writer, shouldn't you avoid them, a nd Bill knew down to his bones that there were far scarier things out there than horror cliches.
Instead, he calls Richie, then Ben and Bev, then Mike. Just to hear their voices.
It's been two weeks and he hasn't forgotten any of them.
His writing cabin is unbearably lonely—Bill was used to being lonely. He made it an art. No one can do willing seclusion (exclusion) better than Bill Denbrough. He wrote so much and poured his insides out onto a page and made his imaginary friends the realest thing to him.
That was the way of things. Bill thought he'd been lonely his whole life.
And now he can remember Mike and Ben and Stan and Eddie and Richie and Beverly, and it's like he had suddenly forgotten how to stand the silence, how to live with the sound of his own beating heart.
*
Mike calls every day; sometimes short little phone calls, five minutes at a time at a rest stop, muted conversations at diners, the whir of passing cars pumping in his ears if he listens hard enough. Be careful, Bill, don't get too in your head. Come back to the land of the living. A smile, bright and loud on the other end.
The beach here is awful nice, Billy. Not that I have much to compare to. A soft rolling chuckle.
I love you.
Sometimes longer phone calls; Bill can just picture Mike on the other end, though what he's picturing changes by the day. Pulled over at a rest stop, long legs resting in the dash, summer sunshine blinding Mike’s vision a bit, visor pulled down in defense. Leaning over a pier, watching the sun set, sunglasses on his face as he talks to Bill. Stretched out on a motel bed, relaxed, sinking into the blankets, muffled and half asleep but needing to reach out regardless, just for one more minute.
His writers’ mind, running away with itself, as always.
(a sudden sharp memory hits him again, not of childhood or a teenage Mike but Mike, fully clothed, in the shower with him, hands in his hair, heavy and solid)
“My divorce finally went through,” Bill mentions.
It's official. It's all over twitter, not that Mike uses twitter.
There's a beat. Bill can hear Mike breathing on the other end of the line. Soft gentle noises that could lure him to sleep.
“I'm sorry, Bill,” he says, not unkindly, his voice dipping lower in shared mourning. He sounds sadder about it than Bill.
“Yeah, I'm not,” Bill says, still feeling somewhat horrifyingly casual about it. “It was...a long time coming I suppose.”
It wasn't a bad marriage the whole time. Post-divorce, he has nothing bad to say about Audra.
It just ran its course.
“Well,” he says, trailing off. Good natured laugh. Bill’s heart swells with emotion he hasn't felt in so long. “Don't stay in the mountains all by yourself for too long. You'll start seeing stuff.”
Bill smothers a dry laugh. Mike would know all about that, wouldn't he.
I love you too, Mikey.
*
Outside of Newport, Mike says, sure is lonely out here. There's a big city just an hour away, but Bill knows what he means.
He gets pictures sometimes, slowly loading ones from Mike’s old phone. A view from the Boston Marina. A sunset at a roadside rest stop. A beach with gently rolling waves, the last of the summer lighting it aglow.
You should get an instagram, Bill says. Let everyone else see these.
An insta what? Mike types back with a winking emoji.
My god, man, you're a grandpa.
Bill sends back photos of Tahoe, the lake filled with splashing tourists and locals alike and Bill can hear the warmth in the smile emoji Mike sends back, yeah, I know. I looked you up.
In Virginia Beach, Mike says, I read all your books. Every one. Bill tries not to cry, that plunging sense of shame and guilt rearing up again.
He forwards the pictures to everyone, Richie and Ben and Bev. They've already seen them; Mike, excitedly texting everyone, daily.
It makes Bill smile; all of them still connected and he can't bear to lose that anymore.
( they were lucky seven but not anymore. Five feels like too small a number. What's lucky about five?)
Beverly texts back pictures too—her and Ben, on a bright seaside yacht. Richie’s with them, sprawled out on a white beach chair, glum and dark and somehow wearing a stupid Hawaiian shirt, drink in hand, raised up to the camera where Bev forced him to take a picture. Officially, Richie Tozier was on sabbatical; same as Bill, really.
Seems like he and Mike are the only ones scattered by their lonesome across the country. East coast Mikey and West coast Billy, a traitor to his New England roots.
In Tallahassee, Mike just says, I miss you, buddy.
Bill is about to type I miss you, too, as he looks around his desolate cabin, which never really bothered him before until now, the sound of silence excruciating.
( remembers the feel of Mike’s lips on him, blood and skin and warmth, sparking into him)
He sends Mike another message instead.
*
Bill meets Mike in St. Augustine, Florida, sitting at a little bright sunny cafe, eating a Cuban sandwich. It's a late August morning and the sun is shining hard and impossibly, swelteringly humid, reminding Bill why Florida was the setting of one of his novels, but even from a distance, Mike didn't seem bothered. He had a local newspaper in hand, head bent seriously towards it, absorbed in the material. Mike is sitting under one out of those outdoor seating areas, a dark umbrella casting a shadow on him, wearing a colorful bright button up shirt that seemed more fitting for Richie than anything he's ever seen Mike wear, but screams tourist on vacation and it makes absolutely everything in Bill light up, to see him against after being terrified of forgetting.
The moment Mike sees him, he stands up immediately and wraps him in a tight bear hug. Bill thinks he's gotta stop being surprised by this, the way his breath gets knocked out of him by the sheer force of love that Mike seems to push into him with his touch, but he feels it like the first time, a reminder of what he was missing and clings back, just as hard. Lets himself bury his face in Mike’s shoulder and breathe in deep, the sweat of him, the fresh soap scent under the that, faint hint of sea breeze, finding the scent of him comforting.
Lets everything just slot into place, like Mike is a missing piece.
(in the back of his mind, he thinks of Stanley, and Richie, too— you'd clean up with all the grandmas, Stan the man— it's been a month and he tries to shake it loose, the curl of grief in his bones but maybe he shouldn't)
“I thought you would have gone to Disneyworld or something,” Bill says, laughing, when they finally pull apart, sitting with him at the cafe.
Mike grins, the edges of his eyes crinkling. “You'd think I'd look good in Mickey Mouse ears?”
Mike is tall and handsome and would look good in anything, Bill thinks, something warm fluttering in his belly at the thought.
“I don't know, Mikey, maybe we should find out,” he teases. Bill’s voice is full of a lightness he didn't know he was capable of, like he's a small kid again, riding Silver with Mike.
“ Has it been hard?” Bill asks later, getting into Mike’s truck with him. “Being on the road by yourself?”
Mike’s brow furrows. “Alone is a relative term,” he says, hands drumming on the wheel but not starting the car yet. “I've been alone for so long, being able to call all of you...it's a miracle.”
He reaches for his visor and pulls out something Bill had completely forgotten about: that old photo booth picture all seven of them have taken. Black and white, perfectly preserved. Eddie pulling a face, Stan squeezing himself in the middle, Richie grinning like an idiot, Bev behind him and Ben next to here, Mike laughing. All of them.
Bill tries to speak but he can't even stutter. What comes out a ragged choking noise.
“I'm alone in my car, but I have all of you.”
Bill for a moment, tries not to cry, and then realizes it's alright if he does here, that he can just let go.
Mike doesn't say anything but he puts an arm around him, and presses them together, temples against each other, Bill instinctively leaning in.
*
Bill told Mike he'd stay with him Florida, see the sights with him, but already, in his head, he is imagining the rest of the states—Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, or further north, if Mike wants to go, or all the way back to California the long way, or Canada or Mexico if he wanted.
He didn't want to separate or pull apart any time soon.
Bill pays for a hotel, two queen beds. “No more sleeping at rest stops, Mikey,” he says, and Mike scoffs.
“Hey, I stayed in motels, too,” he says, but he didn't protest the upgrade, bounce in his step, dragging his bags in.
In the hotel, there are two beds, but when it's time to sleep for the night, Bill glances at Mike, their eyes meeting, trying to read him, then glances back at the bed. Neither of them say anything but Bill ignores the other bed, sliding under the covers, waiting.
Mike slips in next to him, shirtless, too hot and humid for too much clothing between them, even in the air conditioned room. Bill catches a glimpse of chest hair and muscles as Mike pulls his shirt off, and feels a little he should avert his gaze—it's not like he's never seen Mike shirtless before of course, not like Mike hasn't seen him naked—but it feels different right now, with the heat in the air.
He means only to sleep next to Mike, to wrap his arm around him and pull him close to sleep, chest to back, like two little kids at a sleepover, trying to ward against monsters.
But Mike turns around to face him, eyes bright even in the darkness and Bill leans in and presses a soft kiss to Mike’s mouth.
For a moment, Mike goes still—chest rising and falling, but not moving or saying anything, eyes shut—and Bill wonders if he's been reading everything all wrong. If the kiss back in Derry was just once, and once only, if that was something done in the heat of desperation, terrified of forgetting, of losing each other again.
But Mike turns, shifts closer and cups his jaw with one large, warm hand, and kisses Bill wetly, surging forward against the bed, against him, bodies pressed together until the only thing Bill is aware of is Mike against him, their hearts beating loud in their chests.