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"'All except you,' Bill said. 'What happened to you, Mikey?'
'Isn't it obvious?' He grinned. 'I stayed here.'
'You kept the lighthouse,' Ben said."
— IT, Stephen King, 1986
Adrian Mellon is the third person to die.
It makes Mike sick to his stomach, to remember that, how long he had waited—he had wanted to be sure. The first two deaths may have been coincidences, flukes, they were really only missing and people went missing in Derry all the time, what if they had really killed It in '89? Ever since March, before the disappearances had started, Mike had been telling himself if he made it to the end of this year without any unusual or clown-related deaths, than he'd know, and he could finally leave. He wouldn't have to drag everyone back, remind them of things they'd probably rather forget, he would be able to leave and have a life outside of this horrible town that took his family…
He had to hope that the clown wouldn't come back. He couldn't want it to come back, want people— children —to die just because he missed his middle school friends, who wouldn't even remember right away when he called, who might not remember at all. He had hoped furiously that It wouldn't come back until June, when the first person disappeared. And he'd held off on calling, because he wanted to be sure, but maybe also because he was scared. He's been scared of this for twenty-seven years.
Adrian Mellon confirms it all. The words scrawled on the underside of the bridge— COME HOME COME HOME COME HOME —seal the deal; It is calling them home. It wants Mike to bring them all home.
This is the exact scenario that Mike has been terrified of ever since they had all left. Since he'd been left behind, or chosen to stay, or any number of things. It still scares him shitless, thinking of fighting the clown again, descending into the sewers—thinking of that list he'd written last December in a paranoid frenzy, documenting where all of his old friends were now, how to find them—but a strange, horrible part of him is almost excited. Not for the fight, of course, not for the deaths that result of all this, but excited to see his friends again. For the first time in years, he won't be alone in this.
---
Most of them had stayed, after the summer of 1989, before they'd all grown up. Bev had left in the fall, gone to Portland with her aunt, and Bill had started splitting his time when his parents had divorced in their junior year. He'd spent school years with his mom in Brunswick and come back to Derry to spend two summers with his dad and the rest of the Losers. Everyone else had stayed right up until graduation.
Looking back, Mike thought that they should've realized that they were losing their memories as far back as then. They'd thought it was unusual when Bev's phone calls and letters grew less frequent and more hazy, like she only remembered the non-clown parts of that summer, and then had abruptly stopped a year and a half after moving. They'd thought it was strange when Bill came back for the summer half-confused, not knowing what they meant when they referenced fighting the clown, being unable to recall how he'd met Ben or Mike, barely able to remember Bev at all. He'd actually seemed to forget how Georgie died altogether. But they hadn't known, they really hadn't known. Richie had made incessant jokes about amnesia pills, and Eddie had suggested about ten times that Bill should go to a doctor, and Stan had given Bill looks like he'd grown a second head, and Bill would shake it off quickly and be his usual self by mid-summer. They all had just figured Bev had stopped wanting to write or something like that. People grow apart, Mikey, his grandmother told him about a thousand times. Friends fall out of touch. It'll happen when you all go off to college.
Their friendship had shifted a lot since that first summer, but it hadn't seemed to change where it mattered. Bill wasn't there during the school year, and Mike barely saw anyone during the school weeks anyway because of homeschooling, but they still spent an absurd amount of time together. They still used the clubhouse all the time, which even Ben could barely believe was still standing. They went to the quarry and out to the Barrens and—now that cars were a factor—drove over to nearby towns just to get out of Derry for a while. The guys came out to the farm a lot, too, mostly because it was far enough away from town to avoid everybody, and they could fuck around in the woods unseen. They met up at the library to work on college applications (which was very unproductive for everyone aside from Mike and Ben and sometimes Stan, but still plenty fun). There were some places they were all applying to, like NYU or Northwestern or places like that, but it was still pretty varied, and it got even more varied when they started getting in places, as it became more and more clear that they were gonna end up scattered all over the place. Richie wanted to go out west, and Stan and Eddie were both eyeing New York, and Ben was applying to the schools with the best architecture programs all over the country, and Mike had just applied all over the place, knowing only that he wanted to go as far away as possible. He picked schools randomly from a map of the United States, applying to schools in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, California with Richie, New York with Stan and Eddie. Three schools in Florida, holding onto that childhood dream of somewhere warm and different. He saved the money for application fees out of his payments for work on the farm and tips for deliveries; he couldn't go to the movies or the diner with the guys unless they spotted him (which they often did when they could) for months, but it was worth it. Anything to get out of Derry. He didn't even know what he wanted to study, only that he wanted to do something besides sit in this stupid cursed town and wait to die. (The ruins of the house on Harris Avenue still seemed to stare at him every time he rode by; he still heard people whispering about his parents whenever he was in town alone. He fucking hated it here.)
He'd gotten into most of the schools, even got a scholarship offer from a few. He got his letters around the same time as his friends had gotten his, and they'd spent hours out at the clubhouse over Easter sorting through their admissions letters. Bill was in town with his dad for Easter, which meant he was basically spending the holiday bouncing back and forth between their houses so he wouldn't have to stay at his dad's Mike had figured that most of them were waiting until they found out where Bill was going to make a definitive decision. But when Bill had arrived back in Derry, it'd been with the news of his full ride creative writing scholarship to a school in Indiana that none of them had applied to, which he'd already accepted.
That'd been like the confirmation for all of them, that they could go to different schools from each other. So they did, they all decided on different places. Ben accepted a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, and Richie went for the University of California, and Eddie and Stan ended up at different schools in New York City—Stan at NYU and Eddie went for Fordham, accepting nervously, assumedly because of his mother. And Mike eventually settled on Florida State, in Miami. It seemed like the furthest away he could get without actually leaving the East Coast, and he still had that image of Florida plastered in his mind, being on the coast, in the sun. Maybe it was silly, but it was what he'd wanted forever. The only time he'd ever left Maine was when his parents had taken him to Cape Cod when he was a toddler, and he couldn't wait to get as far away from the stupid state as possible.
He was ready to send in his deposit when his grandfather got sick. Pancreatic cancer, Stage III.
He couldn't leave. He knew as soon as he got the news that he couldn't leave, at least not yet. He was talking before his grandparents were even finished, promising that he'd take a gap year, he'd help with the farm (even though he hated it), he'd stay and help his grandfather get better, even though his grandpa shook his head solemnly when Mike said that part. His grandmother tried to talk him out of it, insisted that he had to go to college, but Mike knew he couldn't leave. As much as he might've resented his grandfather at times, he still loved them both, and was incredibly grateful for their taking him in. The least he could do was repay the favor.
It would just be a couple years, he told himself more than once, even though it made him feel sick to his stomach. He kept insisting that his grandfather would get better, but he knew it might not be the case. His grandparents were pushing eighty, and Mike was nothing if not realistic. But he hated the thought of losing anyone else. He was already so lonely at holidays, on his birthday, when he got his acceptance letters, when he flipped through photo albums and saw old, faded pictures of his dad as a child, of his parents on their wedding day, of the three of them posing together on Christmas, on Thanksgiving, at church. He was already torn up inside at the idea of losing his friends, practically an extension of his family, when they all moved away; he still missed Bev, and Bill when he wasn't in town. He didn't want to lose anyone else.
His friends were shocked when he told them he was staying, but understanding. Eddie seemed to understand the most out of everyone. "I've thought about staying for my mom, before," he told Mike privately, in a little guilty voice that made Mike feel horrible because Eddie's mom was horrible and nothing like his grandfather, as far as Mike could tell. But he still hugged Eddie and thanked him, because it was nice to have someone so completely understand why he was staying instead of leaving, like they'd all wanted to do for years.
The others offered reassurance, too, Ben saying that they'd be able to see Mike when they came home for holidays, and Stan pointing out that New York wasn't that far, maybe Mike could drive down and Ben could take the train up and they could hang out. Richie acted horribly offended that he was left out of this plan, and Eddie called him a hypocrite and said he deserved it for moving so far away, and then Stan pointed out that Bill was going to college far away, too, and Mike was laughing and insisting that he'd come to visit all of them if he could, and that they'd have a blast over the winter holiday and in the summer. It wasn't too different from going to Florida, he told himself, because he wouldn't have seen any of them except over holidays in Florida, either. It might even be better because it would be closer.
The next few months went by too fast. Mike went to his friend's graduation and clapped and cheered and cracked up at Richie goofing off onstage and let them all pull him into the pictures after, their arms slung messily over each other's shoulders. Then the next weekend, they all jammed in Stan's car and drove down to Brunswick for Bill's graduation. Bill gave them foggy looks from the stage, like he didn't know why they were there, but was normal by the time he got down and they all dog-pile hugged him. They called home from Bill's mom's house to tell their parents they were staying in Brunswick (except for Eddie, who claimed he was staying at Ben's), and then they all drove down to the coast and spent the night goofing off down there, smoking weed Richie had bought off of some sophomore, running in and out of the freezing ocean, roasting marshmallows on a makeshift fire former Boy Scout Stan made. Ben glumly floated the idea of going down to Portland to see Bev, but it deflated quickly when Eddie pointed out that they hadn't talked to her since sophomore year and had no real idea if she still lived in Portland, or if she even wanted to see them. (Bill gave them all a weird, distant look when Ben mentioned Bev that Mike didn't understand until later.) They stayed on the beach until two in the morning and slunk home half high and very giggly, and Bill's mom didn't even notice. Mike would think later that it was one of the best nights of his life.
The summer went by too fast, short and hot and crazy quick. They all got jobs out at the farm, except for Eddie, whose mom would have freaked, and for Stan, who was helping out at the synagogue. But they still managed to bike out at the end of long, hot days to meet the rest of them at the quarry. Mike drove his grandparents to treatments in Bangor in the truck that was essentially his now, held his grandmother's hand in the waiting room and tried not to cry. He drove out to his parents' graves a couple of times with flowers, an annual ritual that he'd never quite lost track of. He helped the others pack, as they all went through shit that had belonged to all of them forever, shit they stashed in the clubhouse and passed back and forth between houses. Mike and Ben and Bill had a stash of books that they didn't want to split up, and Ben eventually talked Mike into keeping the majority of them, aside from a few he selected for himself. "You can keep our research project going," he said, referring to the absentminded collection of Derry history they'd been working on since they were fourteen. Bill selected the ragged horror and mystery novels that only he liked from the pile to take with him. Richie and Eddie and Stan split up their comics, which mostly entailed of Richie and Eddie bickering loudly while Stan silently spirited away the ones he had paid for, that only had Property of Stanley Uris written on the inside instead of This belongs to Richie and Eddie [incomprehensible scribbling] but also Stan, Mike, Ben, and Bill if they want it. Ben retrieved old toys that none of them really had a use for anymore and deemed Mike the caretaker of all that, also—"Since you're staying, you'll still have it when we come back." They all fought a little over photos, from sticky Polaroids of just Bill and Stan and Richie and Eddie from elementary school, to cut-out yearbook photos of their second and third grade classes containing a cute gap-toothed little Beverly (dug up after she moved and used primarily as objects of teasing when they called her before she stopped calling them), to rare photos of all seven of them that summer. And photos of all of them since, growing rapidly and awkwardly in the smudgy, overfolded photos: Richie in his braces phase, Ben and Mike when they outgrew Bill, photos of all of them on the last day of middle school and the first day of high school, the day Bill and his mom left, on the roof, crammed on the couches in Ben's living room or sprawled out on Stan's screened porch or in the hay loft out in the barn. They divided them up as amicably as possible, everyone with a little bit of regret. Mike himself knew he wanted to hang onto as many as possible.
Finally the day came when the group started to split up. Bill and Richie left earlier than everyone else—Richie because his parents were taking him out early to LA to get settled and sightsee, and Bill because he had to go back to his mom's and pack before flying out to Indiana. The night before they both split, everyone came out to Mike's farm to sleep out in the barn, as was their summertime custom. Everyone was quiet and even a little weepy—Stan retreated into silent solemnity that everyone recognized as his form of sadness, and Richie and Eddie were practically clinging to each other in their unspoken weirdly close friendship that no one could really analyze, and Ben fell into a sad recounting of memories, punctuated by laments of the fact that they were all leaving. "I don't know what I'm going to do at college," he said at the end. "I've never been very good at making friends… I don't know what I'll do without you guys. I've never had friends like this before."
Mike reached out to pat Ben's back reassuringly amid sympathetic sounds from Eddie and Stan. "Oh, don't worry, Haystack," said Richie, "just get yourself cut up again and some new group of kids will rescue you. You're set for life after that." But the joke fell flat, sounded flat in Richie's voice. That's how they all could tell that he was sad, too.
Bill was the one to reassure them, of course, in surprisingly good spirits compared to the rest of them. He was sad too, of course, but Mike got a sense that his excitement was level with his sadness. He'd changed a lot since he moved to Brunswick, and while he was still the same Bill they all loved most of the time, there was something different about him that Mike had never been able to put his finger on. The stutter had almost completely vanished since childhood, but it came back that night. He said it while they were all out on a blanket under the stars, lying in a row: "I-I-it's gonna be okay, guys. I p-promise. We're gonna talk on the phone, and w-w-write, and we'll all see each other on holidays." No one really responded to that, so Bill sat up a little, lifted his hand and held out his palm for all of them to see, the thin white scar slicing across it. "Remember what we swore," he added, sending them all into wild shivers even though it was still warm outside. "If I-It comes back, we have to come back. This promise connects us. W-we're not gonna lose each other."
Ben and Richie kind of nodded in agreement. Stan was sheet-white, looked halfway ready to faint, and Eddie didn't look much better; he was leaning absently into Richie's side, rubbing a hand over his face furiously. Mike, for his part, was staring at Bill in astonishment, half sitting up himself. They never talked about that summer anymore, never talked about the clown, but on the rare occasion they did bring it up, Bill always looked at them like they were nuts, like he had no idea what they were talking about. Mike honestly kind of thought he had forgotten, like he had forgotten how Georgie died. He almost couldn't believe that Bill was bringing it up.
Bill caught him looking and smiled a little, nervously. "Right, Mike?" he asked gingerly.
"R-right," Mike said, and smiled a little back. He rubbed his thumb over his own scar, which was tingling oddly, and lay back down beside Ben.
They stayed up half the night talked and were shaken awake by Richie at dawn, insisting he had to make his flight. They all piled together in a messy group hug, and they all cried, clinging hard to Bill and Richie. Mike didn't know if he'd ever seen Richie cry before but he was crying now, his glasses getting all fogged up. Bill was sniffling as he hugged them all in turn, wiping his eyes frantically. Maybe it was melodramatic, but it felt like they were never going to see each other again, never going to all be together again.
The rest of them clustered at the end of Mike's dusty dirt driveway to watch Bill and Richie drive off, Eddie and Ben and Stan and Mike pressing in and not saying a word, just watching them go with a silent sort of resignation. They'd all be gone by the end of the week: Ben piling his stuff in a car with his mom and driving off to Pennsylvania, Stan sticking his head out the back of his parents' car to wave goodbye two days later. Eddie heading off in a bus because his mom refused to drive him three days after Stan. Mike drove him to catch the bus in Bangor, and he could feel the nervous energy radiating off of Eddie. "Maybe this was a bad idea," he said. "Maybe I should've stayed closer, maybe I shouldn't have…"
"You shouldn't feel bad for leaving, Eddie," said Mike. "It's… everyone's doing it. You can't let your mom guilt you into staying."
Eddie twisted the string on his hoodie around one finger and said, "You're not leaving."
Mike chewed his lower lip, his hand on the clutch. "That's different," he said quietly. "I'm staying because I want to. Not because anyone's guilting me into it." Eddie didn't say anything for a moment, looking out of the window, so Mike added gently, "No offense, Eddie, but your mom kind of sucks."
Eddie laughed quietly. "That's what Richie said," he said. "A little less tactfully than that, but."
"You'll have fun in New York," Mike said. "And hey, you and Stan have each other, right? You'll hang out all the time. You'll convince everyone to come there just because it's convenient."
Eddie laughed again, although it was much more muted. "I don't know how much Stan and me are even going to see each other," he said. "I mean, Fordham and NYU aren't super close, and we'll both be so busy…"
"You'll find a way." Mike was sure of it. His scar was tingling weirdly but he ignored it. "Losers gotta stick together, right?"
"Right," Eddie said, sounding a little relieved, rubbing at his forehead like he had a headache. "Mike, you'll… you'll get out of here eventually, right?"
"Right, of course," Mike said, meaning it immensely. "As soon as my grandpa gets better. Maybe I'll take them with me. I'll bet they'd like to retire somewhere warm, right?"
"Right," Eddie said, just as they pulled up to the bus station. He leaned over the seat to hug Mike hard and thank him for driving him to the bus station. "I'll see you at Christmas, okay?" he said. "Don't let the town get to you too much."
"I won't," said Mike with a little laugh. He hugged Eddie back and then Eddie was climbing out of the car, grabbing his bags and disappearing into the bus station.
That was it, Mike thought as he pulled away. Everyone was gone but him.
---
It took Mike entirely too long to realize that everyone had forgotten.
To be fair, there was a lot going on. He had to take over most of his grandfather's duties on the farm, and it took up most of his time. He still drove them to treatments, did his best to hold them together as the news only got worse. In the empty moments—of which there weren't many—that he once would've spent with his friends, Mike spent at the library, continuing the project like Ben had suggested. It was honestly largely motivated by his dad as much as Ben; his dad had been amazing at essentially everything, managing to be an excellent farmhand as well as having an increased interest in history and volunteering at the library. He wanted to write a book. Mike could remember being a little kid curled up on his dad's lap, turning the heavy pages of the history books, pointing at the faded pictures, listening, enthralled, to his dad's stories about the early days of Derry, about his own childhood and young adulthood in Derry. It was one of the best memories he had of his dad; it made Mike feel kind of good, to be continuing his work in a way.
He did think it was odd that he didn't hear from anyone after they left, but he tried to tell himself it wasn't that odd. They were probably insanely busy, and it cost money to make calls, maybe they didn't have enough for the pay phones. Mike wrote them letters and sent postcards ( Hope you're not missing Derry too much! ), and tried not to take it personally when they didn't write back. He'd pictured them sending him postcards from everywhere they'd gone and him putting them up on his corkboard, a spread of scenes from Indiana, California, New York, Pennsylvania. But he never got anything like that.
Four months passed surprisingly fast, and then it was Thanksgiving, and Mike was frantically hoping that he would see the others. But going into town, he figured out that it probably wasn't going to work out that way. The Toziers were apparently going out to California for the holidays—Mr. Tozier claimed it was all Richie's idea, which stung a bit, and Mrs. Tozier apologized and said she would have Richie give him a call, but the call never came. Mrs. Hanscom was apparently also going out of town; she and Ben were spending Thanksgiving with her brother in Nebraska. She also promised a phone call which never came. Mike didn't go talk to Mrs. Kaspbrak, of course—it'd been clear since that first summer that she hated him, hated all of them, and Mike avoided her on principle—but he found out from the Urises that she had moved out of Derry, apparently had decided to move down to New Jersey with her sisters to be close to Eddie. The Urises, apparently, were moving by the end of the year, too, because Stan's dad had gotten a job offer from the synagogue in Bangor. "We'll still be close, though, dear, I'm sure you'll see Stanley all the time," Mrs. Uris had said, and Mike had shrugged and thanked them and left. It seemed odd that no one was coming back for Thanksgiving (he was sure that Bill had no desire to spend Thanksgiving with his dad), and it seemed even stranger that apparently neither Eddie or Stan would ever come back, but he tried not to let it bother him. He could still visit them in Bangor or New York. He had dinner with his grandparents and the farm hands that didn't have any family to go home to, and he and his grandmother looked through the photo albums after, and he let that be enough.
Christmas vacation was a little harder. Eddie and Stan didn't show up for break, of course, and Richie and Ben apparently didn't, either. Mike drove through town and looked at their houses to make sure they were dark, that the driveways were empty, and felt strange, and missed his friends too much. He could hear his grandmother's voice telling him that friends grew apart and was trying not to. He felt pathetic and angry and sad, and hated himself for it. He shouldn't let this get to him. He wouldn't have seen them much if he'd left, either.
He stopped at the diner, one of their old haunts, to use the payphone, only because he didn't want his grandparents to hear him. He called Stan first, since Mrs. Uris had mailed him their new number, but he got the machine. So he hung up and tried Bill's mom's, telling himself that Bill had to be back there. He actually got an answer and he pressed his palm to the cold metal of the pay phone in relief. "Hi, Mrs. Denbrough, is Bill there?"
"Just one second, I'll go get him," Mrs. Denbrough said in the numb sort of way she always had about her, and put the phone down. Bill's voice came through a second later, clear and steady as he said, "Hello?"
Mike was so relieved he could cry. "Bill!" he said, possibly too cheerily, but he didn't want Bill to know that he'd just been close to tears out in the truck. "Big Bill. Hey, i-it's Mike."
"Mike who?" Bill said on the other end, his voice startlingly blank. The way his voice always was when he came home at the beginning of the summer, when they mentioned Bev, mentioned Georgie's murder or the clown. Blank, like it had been before, but about Mike now, like he didn't know who Mike was.
"I-it's me," Mike said dumbly, still lost in the confusion of Bill's words. "It's Mike, you know… Mike. It's Mike."
"I d-don't know a Mike," Bill said, his voice full of confusion.
Mike's face screwed up and he slammed down the phone before Bill could say anything else. He ignored the weird looks the other diner patrons were giving him and left without ordering anything.
He managed to make it out to the truck and shut the door behind him before he started crying. Crying like he was a little kid again, curled up around the steering wheel and rubbing his face like he could make the tears go away. He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried like this; it felt like something had been etched out, like he'd lost someone all over again. It felt stupid to cry like this over Bill blowing him off, when his parents were dead and his grandfather was dying, but he couldn't shake the idea that he'd lost someone else. Five someone elses— six, counting Bev when she stopped calling. They weren't going to make an effort to keep up with him or see him, they were just gonna pretend like he didn't exist. He should have known this would happen.
It wasn't until later, at home, that he realized that maybe Bill wasn't an asshole who had blown him off. He was remembering the way Bill had seemingly forgotten things when he came back to Derry, the way his memory was foggy. He was remembering the last phone conversation with Bev, the very last and the shortest they'd ever had; it'd been awkward, like they had nothing to say to each other, all them offering information and Bev giving almost nothing. At the very beginning, though, when Bev had picked up the phone, Ben had called, Hi, Bev! and Richie had screeched, It's us, Marsh, Derry's biggest collection of Losers! And Bev had said—in that same blank voice Bill had spoken in, before things seemed to snap into place and she recognized them— Who?
And that was when Mike guessed it. He didn't know for sure until over two years later, when he ran into Stan in Bangor, home for Thanksgiving with his girlfriend, Patty—Stan was polite, but he didn't seem to recognize Mike even after Mike introduced himself, told Patty, We were friends back in Derry. The conversation was brief and awkward, with odd, nervous looks from Stan, his forehead wrinkled in confusion as he tried to remember. He was home from college, he said, and when Mike asked if he ever saw Eddie in New York, Stan said, "Who's Eddie?"
Mike didn't know for sure til then, but he guessed at that moment, the Christmas right after they left. He found his research notebook, the one he and Ben had started two years ago, and wrote in huge letters YOU FORGET AFTER YOU LEAVE DERRY (??) . He underlined the words three times. Two years later, he would scribble out the question marks.
---
The next few years were hard. Some of the hardest Mike had experienced since 89, or since the years following his parents' deaths, where he was in a state of shock, constantly sucking his thumb and staring off blankly, waking up screaming at night and calling for his mom and dad.
His grandfather died two years after his diagnosis, after the difficult decision to stop treatment and to sell the farm. ("You're not a farmer, Mike," he told Mike two months before the end, and surprisingly, there was no malice there. "You've tried hard and you've grown a lot, but you're just not a farmer. It's okay. I know you're strong enough to keep running it if I asked you, but I want you to do what makes you happy.") They sold the farm to a close friend who would keep on all the hands, and Mike and his grandmother got an apartment further into town. The first few weeks after moving were awful, the two of them just rattling around in a tiny two bedroom apartment, deep in their grief. The apartment was across town from Harris Avenue, but Mike could still feel its presence; he was living closer to the old house than he'd been since he was four. And he could feel the spectral presence of his grandfather hovering between them deeply, leaving a hole in the little family they'd formed. His grandmother was understandably in pieces—she'd lost her son and her daughter-in-law, and now she'd lost her husband, too. Mike was all she had now. (After the funeral, they'd been crying together in the emptying room of their old house, and she'd hugged him hard and said, "I'm so glad you stayed, Mikey. Oh, God, I'm so glad you stayed.")
Mike wouldn't have left even if he'd wanted to—partially because of his grandmother and partially because he didn't know where he'd go. Florida just seemed like a pipe dream now, a silly childhood fantasy that was horribly unrealistic. He was branching out further, sure—he'd been taking classes at the community college in Bangor for a year now, and he planned to transfer to Husson for his Bachelor's—but he couldn't imagine leaving Derry now, not when he knew so little about what waited for him out there. Not when he knew he'd forget. (Driving back and forth to Bangor was hard enough. His grandmother had pushed him to stay in Bangor, live closer, branch out, but the closest he'd come was staying a weekend at the house of a friend from his classes. He'd been horrified to realize that his memories were starting to fade after a few days—he knew he had to go back to Derry but he couldn't remember why . He couldn't recall the names of his childhood friends, no matter how hard he tried, the address where he'd grown up, the name of his childhood dog, and by the end of the weekend, he realized he couldn't remember how his parents died. He'd driven straight back to Derry at one in the morning, and since then, he refused to be away from Derry for more than a night.) So he stayed in Derry and he stayed with his grandmother, who he wouldn't have been able to bear leaving behind. Not after everything. And besides, if he had to stay in Derry, the last thing he wanted was to be alone.
It was still strange, being in Derry without his friends. He had hated the town before he made his friends, the town that seemed to do nothing but chew him up and spit him out, and he hated it now, but there were things that his friends had made better. Now he couldn't go to the Aladdin without remembering the arcade, looking at the decaying machines and remembering how Richie used to kick their asses at all the games, couldn't see the photo booth without remembering them cramming in all together and posing for those photostrip photos. He couldn't go to the diner without remembering how they'd haunted it at the end of high school, living off black coffee and hot chocolate and waffles and bacon. Every time he went to the library, he remembered all of them studying together, or browsing the New Fiction shelves with Bill, hoping for something good, or researching with Ben back in the stacks, establishing a messy timeline of Derry history in a series of tattered spiral notebooks filled with smudged ink. He drove by the quarry and remembered the summers swimming there together, went to the Barrens and thought about how they took him there after the rock fight, adopted them seamlessly into their ragtag group without question. He walked past the clubhouse, sometimes, but he never went in; he didn't want to break the spell. He didn't want to see the way it had fallen apart.
He tried not to linger over his old friends too much. It felt strange the older he got, lingering over people he hadn't talked to in three or four years (encounter with Stan wherein Stan clearly didn't remember him aside). He tried to find the bright spots in life. He enjoyed his classes in Bangor. He joined a book club that met in the library. He started spending all his spare time in the library, studying for classes and reading as much as he could, to the point that when an assistant librarian moved away, the head librarian approached him and encouraged him to apply. He got the job—part time—right away. The librarian actually remembered his father—"He was volunteering here when I first started," she told him, "with the Historical Society. He was a very nice man. You actually remind me a lot of him," which was about the best compliment Mike could've gotten. It was probably the best job he'd ever had, which wasn't saying much, considering his last job was on the farm. Those years after everyone left were hard, but they gradually began to get a little bit better. He spent nearly three years juggling college and working part time at the library before he had graduated. As soon as he returned to Derry with his diploma, he got offered a full time job, which he immediately took.
As much as he tried to forget his friends, tried to forget the promise they made and the possibility of ever seeing them again, it was impossible to ever completely forget it. The scar on his hand was a constant reminder, as was the fact that they'd forgotten. Forgotten due to some outside source, some supernatural entity, that they'd promised to come back and kill when they were all forty. It wasn't something Mike wanted to remember—he still nightmares about the clown, even now—but it was impossible to forget. When he was researching Derry, he kept coming across strange things, horrible violent events that seemed to fall under the umbrella of evil clown magic. He even caught glimpses of the clown's face, hidden in scrawly drawings and faded black-and-white pictures. It was a part of the town, ingrained in it, like Ben had said all those years ago. It may have been dormant now, but the town was still feeling its effects—when Mike was twenty-five, there were a record number of deaths all across Derry, including a total of ten murders. Four of those murders took place just in one month. It was dormant, but one day, it would return.
He kept track of his friends' families, if only because he was still holding onto the hope that they'd come back someday. The Urises and Mrs. Kaspbrak were still long gone, and Alvin Marsh was still an angry, sick drunk that everyone avoided like the plague. (Mike didn't know Bev anymore, but he knew she wouldn't come back for him, and he didn't blame her at all. They all had known her father was a jackass, and they'd all been happy for her when she left.) The Toziers were still in town, even if Richie and his sister never came home, and they still waved at Mike when they saw him in the library or the grocery store. But Arlene Hanscom moved away when Mike was twenty-four. He didn't find out until he drove by and saw her car loaded up with belongings and a For Sale sign in front of the house. (He thought, for a second, that he saw Ben lifting boxes into the back. He'd raised his hand in a tentatively eager wave, but he didn't think that Ben saw him. He came back later to see if Ben was still there—he wanted to know if you remembered when you came back, even if it was just for a little while—but he didn't want to stop in the middle of the road and run up and creep Ben out. He came back a couple hours later and found the driveway empty. As far as he could tell, they never came back.) Bill's dad was still there, too, but Bill never came back to see him. Mike didn't blame him. He knew that Bill's parents had never really been the same since Georgie, and they'd only grown more distant in the years after.
He heard about Bill in another way. In 2002, while unpacking a shipment of books for the New Fiction section, he found him. William Denbrough, the name on a glossy new hardback book with a shadowy attic on the cover. It was called The Attic Room , and it was apparently about a woman who, torn apart after the brutal murder of her young son, begins to hear strange sounds in the attic overhead and becomes convinced that her son is not dead but simply inhabiting a small attic room behind a locked door. Mike shivered all over when he read the synopsis; the plot sounded nothing like what they'd experienced with the clown, but it did sound entirely too much like what Bill had experienced with Georgie. He opened the book and found a picture of Bill on the inside flap. He looked older; that was the first thing that struck Mike, and it was an idiotic observation, but it was true. He was older. He'd grown a beard. He looked like he was trying to be distinguished, maybe just playing at it, but when Mike looked at the picture, all he could see was that thirteen-year-old kid they all would've died for.
He checked out the book and took it home, sat up all night reading it. It was amazing, like Mike had suspected it would be—Bill had really gotten into writing in high school and had always been great it, scribbling morbid short stories at the back of his English and Science textbooks and letting Mike and Ben read them at lunch. The only problem was the ending. It set a morbid edge over the entire book and had Mike looking over his shoulder all night, scared like he was a kid watching horror movies all over again. It was very much a disappointing ending, but Mike understood where it came from. It wasn't like their actual life had many happy endings.
Seeing where Bill ended up made him think, though. It made him want to know where the others had ended up. The book jacket didn't exactly present a full picture, but it did tell him that William currently lives in St. Louis, accompanied by his cat, whose sole purpose in life is to distract him from writing. It made Mike curious about where the others had ended up.
So, even though it made him feel like a stalker, he researched his friends. He searched through newspapers, censuses, the Internet, and found a scarce amount of information, but it worked. According to the 2000 Census, Richie was still in Los Angeles, Eddie was still in New York, and Bev had ended up in Chicago. Ben was in Philadelphia, Bill was in fact in St. Louis, and Stan was in Atlanta. Stan was married, too, apparently; Mike found a wedding announcement for him and Patty Blum from 1999. The same girl he had met in Bangor. He couldn't make out the picture well, it was a little faded and tiny, but he could tell this: Stan seemed extraordinarily happy. He was grinning, in the photo, with his arm around his wife, and he was looking down at her like she hung the moon.
He printed out the research and put it in a folder, along with his scattered notes on Pennywise. He still felt a little stalker-y, collecting all this information on his former best friends, but he told himself it was necessary. If the clown ever came back, he would have to know where to find them so they could come back, too.
(And even after all of it, even after years of staying in Derry alone with his grandmother, with the knowledge that none of them even knew who he was, he still missed them all horribly. He still had everything they'd divided up before they moved away, in boxes in the storage room, the photos they'd let him keep scattered on top. He carried them along in the move, labeling them Losers Club, 89-94 affectionately.)
---
When Mike was twenty-eight, he actually saw one of his friends again. The Toziers were moving, he'd known that for a couple months, but he hadn't expected Richie to show up. But he was driving past the Toziers' house one day in October and he saw Richie Tozier lugging a chair into a U-Haul in the driveway. He'd grown since high school, grown taller, but he was still the same kid Mike remembered as a teenager. It still looked like he hadn't brushed his hair in a week and his glasses were still huge and he was still wearing those awful patterned shirts, and it was the best thing Mike had seen in a while.
He slowed his car down, barely allowing himself to hope that Richie would remember him, let down the window and called, "Trashmouth Tozier?"
Richie whirled around, and Mike saw an incredible mix of confusion and recognition flicker over his face. "Shit, shit, I know you," he said, snapping his fingers absently and drawing closer to the car. "I know you, uh, but I can't…"
"Mike Hanlon," Mike supplied, throwing the car into Park and getting out.
"Mike Hanlon!" Richie threw his arms around Mike in a brief, sloppy hug. "Jesus Christ, Mikey, it's great to see you."
"It's good to see you, too," Mike said, hugging him back. It was a stunning relief, to have one of his friends back and to have him recognize him. It was such a relief he nearly wanted to cry. "I… I wasn't sure you'd remember who I was," he added sheepishly, patting Richie on the back a couple times before letting go.
"Shit, my memory of childhood has always been foggy," said Richie, "but I definitely recognize you. We… we ran around with a lot of other kids, right? Here in Derry?"
"Yeah," said Mike, and smiled absently. "Hey, Rich, uh, do you wanna go grab a drink?"
So they went to Mike's favorite bar in Derry, where they'd never been able to go as kids, of course. ("It feels weird being able to drink with you, Hanlon, and not having to sneak around in the process," Richie said.) They got beers and sat in a back booth and swapped stories from the past ten years, hunched over the table laughing like crazy. Richie had better stories than Mike, of course—he was working at a low level job at a television station, apparently, but he still had high hopes of being a comedian. "I've been going to open mic nights when I can, y'know," he said. "They say it's all about knowing the right people, right?"
They talked about the others, as much as they could—Richie was clearly still in a foggy state of mind, but the memories seemed to come back gradually as Mike reminded him of the others. They talked about The Attic Room and the other book Bill had released since then—another horror novel about a reporter searching for missing children from his hometown and instead finding a monster living in the swamp. Richie wasn't a big reader, he said, but he'd read them both. "I guess I subconsciously knew that Big Bill was responsible," he added. "They were creepy as shit. Who knew Bill was that morbid, huh?"
Mike kind of stared at Richie after that, unbelieving, and that was when he realized that Richie still didn't remember everything. He figured he would build to everything, reminding Richie of Pennywise, telling him about the forgetting, but the time never seemed right. How do you tell somebody about that, that a demon clown has taken their childhood memories, and that someone they'll have to come back and kill it? Not to mention that they were both a little drunk by the end of the night. Richie was taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes like he was crying, saying, "Man, I missed you guys so much, I'd forgotten, I really missed you, Mikey, you and Bill and Stancakes, a-and Haystack and Bev, and Eds…" and Mike was stricken by a foolish hope that maybe it would work, that Richie wouldn't forget this time and maybe the others would remember. He probably just believed that because he was drunk. He thought maybe he could tell Richie about it tomorrow, the forgetting, but when he mentioned tomorrow, Richie apologetically said he had to drive the U-Haul to Boston.
They hugged again outside the bar. Mike said, "We gotta keep in touch, man, really, hit me up any time," and Richie said, "Yeah, yeah, I'll call, I'll write, whatever. I can't believe you're still in Derry, Mikey, you must be bored out of your time. You've gotta come out to LA sometime."
And Mike really did hope it'd be different this time, the whole walk home, lying in his bedroom in the apartment; he really thought it might go differently. That he'd hear from Richie, that they'd keep in touch, that he could tell Richie everything and he wouldn't be alone in all this. But it didn't happen—through no fault of Richie's, Mike knew, but it still stung. He woke up the next morning, and the Toziers' house was empty. The U-Haul was gone. He didn't hear from Richie again.
---
Mike moved in over the library when he was thirty-two. He'd been promoted at thirty, when his boss retired, and he was the head librarian now. The real decision to move happened, though, came when Mike's grandmother passed. She'd gotten sick a few months earlier and had no real desire to do treatment; she was ready, she told Mike. And before he knew it, she was gone.
He didn't want to stay in the apartment after that. It was too quiet, too lonely and dark. He found his grandmother around nearly every corner; every room seemed even emptier without her in it. He was haunted by too many ghosts now, the ghosts of his parents and his grandparents and Georgie Denbrough and his friends who had left, who were out there becoming successful. So he moved into the room above the library. It was where he was spending most of his time, anyway; it was probably his favorite place in town.
The town was getting lonelier now. He'd made friends—friends with his coworkers at the library, old friends from college that he'd meet in Bangor, friends from the book club he was practically running now—but no friends like his old ones. Which felt like an unfair standard but it was the one he had. He dated a little, mostly people from Bangor; he had a relationship that lasted a year and a half, but that he broke off mostly because it felt wrong to commit to anything, when he was tied to this cursed town that he couldn't leave and wouldn't bring anyone into. Nobody deserved that, not a spouse and not a family. He wasn't sure that he could have kids if he wanted them—he had a strange theory building from the apparent lack of children in all six of his friends' lives—but whether he wanted them or not, he couldn't have them here. It was too dangerous, it would be stupid, he was sure no one would raise children here if they knew the truth. But he was still so lonely, lonelier than he could stand with all of his family gone. An absent part of him was counting down the years, anxiously waiting for the point where this all might be over and the town could heal and he could leave and never look back.
He was absently preparing for the return of the Loser's Club, trying to keep an idea of where everyone was and prepare so that they have a fighting chance. Last time, they'd beaten the shit out of it and it had likely done nothing. The more Mike thought about it, the more he began to believe that the clown had faked its death, done that stupid disintegrating thing because it wanted them to believe it was dead. So they couldn't kill it physically. Which meant they would have to do something different. The history project he and Ben had started all those years ago was proving to be useful in that regard; it was clear that It had been there since the town was founded, and likely before. He was trying to figure out where it had come from, how far back it all went.
In the meantime, he was still trying to keep a good idea of where his friends were, to make it easier to contact them when the time came. It never stopped feeling weird, doing that, but at the very least, some of them were making it easier. Bill was gaining more and more success as a horror novelist, praised for his terrifying plots, even as everyone criticized his endings. (His most popular novel was The Black Rapids, Mike's personal favorite, about a group of kids who believed that the river that ran through their town was cursed and tried to prove it was responsible for a series of kayaking accidents. The ending was horrible, sure, but it reminded Mike too much of their childhoods, of what they'd all done and what they promised to do next.) But the others were growing surprisingly successful, too. Richie's dreams of being a comedian were actually going somewhere, culminating in shaky videos of stand-up in bars uploaded on the Internet, requests from bigger comedians to have Richie as an opening act. Bev was making success in Chicago, as the founder of a rapidly growing fashion company with husband Tom Rogan. And Ben, although more obscure, was making headlines as an up-and-coming architect, designing buildings for Philadelphia, Kansas City, St. Louis, New York. It was, at the very least, easy to catch up with the four of them through Google searches, but it was clear that Eddie and Stan were both very successful in their own fields as well. Eddie was apparently in a high-paying position for an insurance firm, and Stan was one of the most successful accountants in the Southeastern United States. It was so uncanny that Mike suspected their success was a result of the clown as well. Some kind of supernatural magic affecting their lives even long after leaving Derry. It was insane, but Mike could believe it was real, along with any other number of crazy things he believed about this town.
Any remnants of the Loser's Club in Derry were starting to fade. Alvin Marsh died in 2009, and Mr. Denbrough moved out two years later. The Toziers were long gone and hadn't come back. Mrs. Kaspbrak hadn't come back, either, but in 2010, Mike found her grave in the cemetery where his parents and grandparents were buried in Bangor, next to Eddie's father's grave, who had died when Eddie was five. It didn't seem like the Urises were still in Bangor, either; Mike looked them up once, out of curiosity (or some odd hope that Stan would come back for some holiday), but they weren't in the most recent version of the phone book. It seemed like any part of them that had been linked to this town was fading, crumbling away; it almost made sense, along with everything else, like the clown had severed the connections to Derry so that none of them would come back. It made as much sense as the random success from all of them. What were the odds that out of the seven of them, none of them would come back to Derry for more than a couple days since they left for college? (Except for Mike, of course.) It seemed unreal, the coincidences that managed to keep everyone out other than Ben and Richie to move out their parents. Maybe the town was trying to drive Mike out, too—it took his parents, and then his grandfather, and then his grandmother, and all of his friends. He wouldn't go, though. He told himself a million times that he wouldn't go.
Mike buried himself in his research, looking further and further into Derry history for any sign of Its origin. He was getting hints of Its activities before the European settlers arrived, encounters it might've had with the local Native Americans. By the time he was thirty-seven, he finally found what seemed to be their salvation, something they could use to defeat the clown. Something called the Ritual of Chud.
---
The years kept coming, and Mike kept searching for answers. He had a bulky file of Derry history, another devoted just to Pennywise; he'd been writing down information in an effort just to make things coherent. It was the draft of a book he'd never publish, the book his father never got to write. People had written books about Derry before—there was a thin, sensationalized book about Henry Bowers and his supposed serial killings that Mike refused to display in the library—but he knew what he was writing was the truth, or as close as anyone would get to it. It was why he could never publish it.
He knew the town forwards and backwards now, better than he ever had as a kid. He walked the streets too often, looking for something he didn't understand. Walked past the diner, the theater, the park, the Standpipe, the Barrens, the quarry, the house where his parents had died, which had long since been knocked down and built over. They all seemed a little haunted, even more so than before. There were new kids in town now, playing in the spots where he and his friends had once played, and Mike didn't know anything about them, of course, but he knew he wanted to protect them. Wanted to make sure that none of them ever went through what he and his friends went through. That they could grow up and have happy lives, lives unencumbered by death or monsters or the horrible things that happened in Derry.
(A part of him still hoped that none of it would happen. That the clown wouldn't come back, that they'd been successful at killing the clown, and he wouldn't have to call his friends back, and after twenty-seven years, he could just leave. But he didn't think that was the case. The town still felt wrong , he could feel the fog of It hanging over everything. He knew the day would come, and maybe even soon, and it still terrified him because he didn't know if he was ready.)
Mike still kept track of his friends, although in more of an idle way than anything else. Eddie and Stan were off the radar, but Bill and Ben and Bev and Richie were still circulating in news cycles. He watched Richie's shows on Comedy Central, and he watched interviews with Bill, who was making headlines now for his marriage to actress Audra Phillips a couple years ago, and he read all of Bill's books, and he read the articles on Ben and Bev's accomplishments in their own worlds. They seemed different, different than he remembered them—which was probably because they were adults now, he kept telling himself, and not a bunch of teenagers, but sometimes he suspected that part of it was the Derry Effect. Because they'd forgotten.
Whatever the case was, though, it was impossible to be sure because he didn't know them anymore. He missed them, though, missed them to this day. He'd look, in the interviews or the books or the specials, and try to find any hint of the kids he used to know, used to run around with and joke with and get into trouble with and loved like family because they were. Even now, they felt like family, which was probably silly—he was a man in his thirties who didn't even know these people anymore—but it was all he had.
Mike worried over the idea, sometimes, that they'd lost whatever they'd had permanently when everyone left. Maybe they wouldn't remember when they called, or they would but it wouldn't be the same, they'd hate him or be numb to him or not care and refuse to come. They'd all changed so much since they'd left—Mike himself had changed, he didn't feel like that scared thirteen-year-old, or even that stupidly hopeful eighteen-year-old anymore. Sometimes he looked at the scar crossing his hand and wondered if they were really even connected anymore. If things would ever be the same.
He tried to be hopeful. He passed their old haunts and tried not to look back, tried to remember it as it was instead of lingering over what it currently wasn't. He prepared and he read and he researched and he told himself that would be good enough, until the time came.
In the summer of 2015, Mike drove down to the coast for two weeks. It had started in the fall of 1988, before, so he figured he at least had until the fall, but he wanted to do one last thing for himself before it all started. In case he made a mistake or it didn't work or he died fighting this stupid clown, and never got out of Derry after all. He set a reminder on his phone at the end of the two weeks, because he knew he would forget and never want to go home, and then he drove out of Derry one more time, all the way to the ocean. He got a little house on a cliff overlooking the ocean, overstocked with books and DVDs and beer. He spent the weeks reading half the night, watching every movie he'd forgotten to watch, swimming half the day in the shivery ocean and running up the beach at dusk. It was two of the best weeks of his life, although he couldn't remember why until his phone began beeping on the last day of his stay. GO BACK, it said. DON'T FORGET DON'T FORGET DON'T FORGET. YOU HAVE TO GO BACK.
Mike hated himself a little for it, but he went back, and the closer he got to the town, the clearer his head got. He stopped in Bangor on the way because he wanted to see his family again, bought flowers and went to the graves of his parents and grandparents. As soon as he read his parents' names on the stone— Will Hanlon, Jessica Hanlon —he remembered everything about them and their deaths and it was horrible. He knelt in the grass and cried, his hand there on his father's grave, and thought, I'm going to do it, Dad, I'm going to end it. It may have taken you and Mom, but I'm not going to let it take me. Not me.
He stopped by Georgie Denbrough's grave, in the Derry cemetery, on the way back into town. He felt he owed him that. The grave looked chipped and overgrown, like no one had taken care of it in years, but Mike bought flowers and he pulled the weeds away. That was when he knew that Bill really must not remember, or must have something keeping him away, because he didn't believe that Bill Denbrough ever would've let the grave get like this. Would ever let so much time go by without seeing his brother, even if he really wasn't buried there.
Mike had never met Georgie, but he still patted the grave and made a similar promise that he'd made to his father. He was going to end it, one way or another. He was going to end it soon; they all would.
Three months later, on the anniversary of Georgie's death, it rained. It poured, water streaming through the streets and pouring through the sewers.
Mike avoided Bill's old street out of a sense of necessity—a new family lived there now, and if they were going to be affected by it, he didn't want to see it. But he did notice something when he was walking inside from his car after a grocery run. Something that he couldn't tell whether or not he'd imagined it.
Deep in the sewers, it seemed, something was giggling.
---
Two disappearances, in the middle of 2016. Spaced far enough apart that Mike let himself hope it was unrelated. Someone organized a vigil and he went and prayed along with the rest of the town, hoping that the kids would return unharmed, hoping that it was all just a coincidence and the clown wasn't back. Kids disappeared or died in Derry all the time, to the point where it wasn't really unusual. If they came back and were okay, it meant nothing was wrong, it meant the clown might not be back killing children again, he might not have to call and people wouldn't have to die.
He prayed and he prays, and he walks the town at night sometimes, hoping he'll be able to actually save someone, but he never sees the clown and the kids never come back. And then Adrian Mellon dies, and Mike knows. Even without the message under the bridge, he knows.
He walks home and he cries, hating himself for waiting this long, and he lets himself into the library, and he checks all the corners because it only seems wise. The town is haunted and It is back, and he's known this was coming for twenty-seven years, and he still isn't ready. He climbs the stairs up to his apartment and he digs through his pile of research until he finds it. The list of his friends' names and phone numbers.
---
He calls Bill first, because that seems like the obvious first choice—he's Big Bill, their leader, the reason that they all started chasing the clown in the first place. Then he calls the others based on the list he's made, his hands shaking a little the whole time: Eddie, then Richie, then Ben, then Stan, then Bev. The calls go slowly, and probably a little awkwardly, because Mike is nervous as shit the whole time, and also coming off of a shitty mood and crying jag. If what the others are feeling is anything like he suspects—the nauseating onslaught of memories that hits him every time he leaves Derry for longer than a day—now isn't the time for a long catch-up session. He tries to keep it short, remind them of the promise they made and the importance of coming back. He has to explain the memory lapse to some of them, has to really convince some of them, but they all agree to come back. They actually agree to come back.
Mike's crying a little by the end of it and he has to put the phone down and wipe his eyes. The sound of their voices on the other end is such a relief, even if they all sounded terrified out of their minds (Eddie crashed his car , apparently) and didn't know who he was. They agreed to come back. They agreed to come back, and that seems to be what matters. Even if he's scared shitless beyond belief, with no real idea of what to do next. His hand is stinging like crazy, the one that Bill cut twenty-seven years ago.
He can't sleep after that, shot through with nervous energy, so he stays up. He makes a reservation at Jade of the Orient—basically the town's best offering—for six o'clock the next night and texts everyone the information, as well as the number of the Derry Town House, which is really the town's only hotel. He pages through his research, trying to commit as much of it to memory as he can, setting out the important shit. He digs out his old boxes of stuff from the clubhouse and lets himself, for the first time since he packed it all up, sift through it. The books he and Ben had bought, with Mike Hanlon and Ben Hanscom written on the inside. The games of tic-tac-toe they'd saved for no apparent reason. The yearbook page Stan had torn out and made everyone sign for him, because he never got yearbooks with everyone else. The drawings Bill had idly done in freshman year that Ben had tacked up, wrinkled with water damage and smudged with old dirt. The pictures of all of them that he'd kept, the six of them sunburned down by the quarry in high school, or dusty and dirty out at the farm, or crammed in the back of Mike's grandpa's truck, or posing in front of the ocean the night they'd driven down for Bill's graduation. The six of them crowded around Bill the day he'd left with his mom. The seven of them crowded around Bev, taken by her aunt, their arms looped around her, Richie telling shitty jokes in an attempt to make them laugh instead of cry. The seven of them posing by the messy dam they'd tried to build with Ben's assistance. The seven of them down in the Barrens, in a clumsy, blurry imitation of a selfie before its time. The seven of them crammed in a photo booth, making goofy faces. Mike remembers that day and he smiles and he pulls the photo strip out of the box, away from the others, because it feels like a good one to show them. He's scared shitless—of the clown, of dying, of failing, of the others who might die, of seeing his middle school best friends again—but a little part of him is excited. How can he not be?
He gets a call at five a.m., unusual mostly because he doesn't get calls at five a.m. More unusual, probably, because he didn't expect any of the Losers to call back so soon. It's Stan, he sees when he picks up the phone—he'd saved all of the numbers in his phone as soon as he found them, because he wanted to remember, and there's no contact photo, but the screen is flashing Stanley Uris across it.
Mike grabs the phone and answers in a flash. "Hello?"
"Mike?" Stan's voice is muffled on the other end, different, but Mike can tell he's been crying. "Mike Hanlon?"
"Yeah, it's me, Stan. Is everything okay?" Mike's blood is running cold at the sound of Stan's voice, frightened stiff at the idea that something could've gone wrong already.
"I just wanted to let you know that I might be running a little late tomorrow," says Stan, remarkably calm if not for the tearful quiver in his voice. "But I'll be there. I promise."
"Stan, what happened?" Mike asks tightly. "A-are you all right?"
Stan takes a shaky breath and answers in a small voice. "It almost got me, Mikey," he says, and Mike feels ready to throw up. "It almost got to me. But I didn't let it."
"Stan, what are you talking about?" Mike blurts, his hand tight around the phone, sweat cold on his forehead. "Wh-what are you talking about, are you okay? What happened?"
Stan doesn't speak for a moment, but when he does, his voice is steadier, just a little. "I'm okay, Mikey. I am. I just…" He takes a deep breath. "It wanted me off the board. It tried to take me off, to get me to take myself off."
"Jesus Christ," Mike gasps out, his head falling limply against the wall. How had he not accounted for this, the idea that It might fight back, prey on their vulnerabilities? Stan was always the most reluctant, he never wanted to go into the house. He should've known, he should have kept talking to Stanley instead of hanging up, he should have made sure that he was okay.
"I'm okay," Stan says again. "I-I'm…"
"Stan, listen, if it's too difficult, you don't need to…"
"No, Mike, no, you were right," says Stan shakily on the other end. "We promised to come back. And it's like Bill said… we have to do it together."
Mike laughs a little, rubbing a hand over his face, his eyes screwed shut. "He did say that," he says softly.
"Just… just promise… if we make it through this alive that we'll kill it this time." Stan sounds like he's joking, but there's a hint of pleading in his voice. "I don't think I have the strength to do this again."
"I don't either, Stan, believe me," says Mike. He presses a hand over his mouth, blinks back tears. "Stan… Stan, I'm so sorry."
"It's not your fault, Mike," Stan says muffedly. "It's not. I… I just wanted to let you know I was coming." He makes a choked sound on the other end and says, "I… I didn't remember it until tonight, but I've really missed you guys."
Mike presses his face into the crook of his elbow and laughs a little again, trembling and grateful that Stan's okay, and filled even more with an extraordinary need to kill this clown immediately. He wants to make sure It won't touch any of them ever again. "I've missed you guys, too. You have no idea, man."
---
Everyone arrives without any difficulties, as well as Mike can tell. Bill shows up at the restaurant first and Mike embraces him immediately, maybe a little overeager but definitely relieved beyond belief to see him. He hugs the rest of them when they show up, all of them somehow looking incredibly different and exactly the same all at once.
It's just Bill and Ben and Bev and Richie and Eddie for now, Stan hasn't showed up yet, but Mike tells them to go on ahead, sure Stan will show up later. They all seem as nervous and uncertain and awkward as he does, but it starts to melt away after a while, and before Mike knows it, they're all laughing around the table like absolutely no time has passed. Catching up on the missing years. There's an expected layer of awkwardness and distance under it all, and Mike can feel the specter of the truth he had to tell them hanging over them, but it's not enough to ruin the moment, not yet. He's unspeakably happy that they're all here—minus Stan, who will be there soon enough. He's missed them all so much.
Stan shows up at the tail end of the disaster in the restaurant—the breakdown after Mike has to remind them of everything, the fortune cookies exploding, Richie shouting at a child he mistook for the clown. He climbs out of the car just as the group's started to split, one wrist tightly bandaged, fear in his eyes but slow familiarity on his face.
Mike half expected the group to completely splinter here, but they don't. The sight of Stan seems to pull them together, even if most of them are remaining reluctant about the idea of staying. They congregate on the other end of the parking lot to hug him, and relief settles into Mike's shoulders. Finally, the seven of them are all together again.
---
The day and a half are a little hellish—Mike wouldn't have expected anything else, honestly, but it doesn't make it any easier. They all have to split and find artifacts for a ritual that doesn't even work, to Mike's extraordinary devastation, but they manage to kill the clown anyway. This is punctuated by constant terror, two bloody encounters with fucking Henry Bowers, of all people, and all of them almost dying about a dozen times—a stand-out being Eddie, who is very nearly impaled after getting Richie out of the Deadlights before Richie rolls them both out of the way. But they figure it out and they make it small and they all make it out , all seven of them pushing their way out of the crumbling structure of Neibolt just in time. They all live. It's the only way Mike ever would've wanted it to end.
Bev suggests they go to the quarry to clean up, but Eddie almost immediately vetoes that. Instead, they go back to the Town House to shower and then immediately check out, piling into a car and driving out of town. Mike goes with them because he's obviously going to go with them; he can come back later for his things, but right now, he just needs to get out . They drive three towns over, because that's the only thing that seems far enough, and they book a couple of hotel rooms and that's the end of it.
Mike's exhausted, but he doesn't think he could sleep if he wanted to. He sits around one of the rooms with his friends, raiding the minibar (which Eddie has quietly reassured him will be paid for by one or more of the richer Losers) and talking and laughing. Laughing in a way that they couldn't laugh at the restaurant, a little unhinged maybe, but mostly laughter of freedom. He himself can't remember the last time he was this happy, that he laughed this easy, that he felt this at ease. It's everything he's looked forward to for the past twenty-two years, and he's overwhelmed by the fact that it's happening. That they're all here together.
Stan's on the phone with his wife, as he has been for the last hour, talking in a soft, affectionate, relieved voice, like he hadn't quite expected to last this long. He does pause, occasionally, to chime into the conversation—namely to inform the others, as they swap memories, that they're remembering everything all wrong. They're mostly remembering things from the summer that all of them were together, but there's also offerings of their best stories from the years between eighth grade and graduation, none of which Bev knows. She's laughing like crazy at every one of them, sprawled out half on Ben's lap and eating all the macadamia nuts. Eddie and Richie have commandeered one of the beds and are making their way through a bottle of tequila, bickering over details to stories in that comfortable way they've always had. Eddie called his wife on the way over to ask for a divorce, apparently, partaking in a hushed conversation in the backseat, and while Mike mostly suspects that conversation didn't go very well, Eddie seems a hell of a lot happier now. Richie keeps going quiet and staring at Eddie with huge eyes, the way he had in the cistern after Eddie saved his life and he saved Eddie's right back, with the strange premonition of Eddie being in the way of the claw. Bill has kind of been migrating around the room, calling his own wife, arguing loudly with Richie and Eddie over something that apparently happened in the third grade, but he sits next to Mike now and offers him a little plastic cup. "Champagne? S-seems like we have cause to celebrate."
"As long as someone else is buying," Mike jokes, and takes it. It feels bizarre to celebrate after all this—after all the deaths, after all the destruction, after they themselves all almost died—but maybe that's the point of it all. That it's over, that Derry will never have to go through this again. That the town can heal and they can, too.
"Mike, I can't believe you stayed in Derry all this time," says Bill, sympathy in his voice.
"That's fucking nuts, man, this place sucks. You should've—hey, do you remember when I came back to the town, like, ten years ago and we got a drink?" Richie says, as if he's just remembered.
"Yeah," Mike says, "I remember. I thought about telling you then, but I wasn't sure you'd believe me. And you would've forgotten as soon as you'd left, anyways."
"What if I hadn't left? I coulda stayed, Mikey, kept you company. We could've been a couple of sexy-ass clown-fighting roommates."
Mike laughs. "But then the world would've been denied the comedic talents of Trashmouth Tozier."
"And the world would've been better off," Eddie says in a deadpan they all know he doesn't mean, swatting Richie's hand away when he tries to tousle his hair and grabbing for the bottle.
"Seriously, Mike, thank you for staying all this time," says Ben. "I know that couldn't have been easy."
"This place eats you alive," Bev adds solemnly.
Mike shrugs. "Someone had to do it," he says. "I was really just staying for my grandparents in the beginning… but it helped knowing that I'd hopefully be able to leave someday."
"Like tomorrow, right?" Richie asks, trying to wrestle the bottle back away from Eddie.
Stan's hung up the phone and come over to join the rest of them, accepting the champagne Bill offers. "Do you have any idea where you'll go?" he asks Mike.
Mike shakes his head. "Haven't thought about that one in a while," he says, and he hasn't—not since he figured out he would have to stay. He thinks about watching all of them leaving—Bill and Richie driving away, Stan waving out the window of his car, Eddie climbing on a bus to New York—and how badly he'd wanted to go, too. He thinks about driving to the ocean last summer, leaving footprints in the sand, diving under the waves. He thinks about his childhood pipe dream of Florida, the pictures he'd pin to his corkboard, the daydreams of spending all day in the sun. "Maybe somewhere warm," he offers. "Anywhere would be nice, really, anywhere but here. I think it's time I saw the sky for a change."
"I'll second that," says Ben, and Bev and Stan are both nodding, and Bill reaches out to pat his shoulder and says, "J-just make sure you keep in touch, Mikey. Assuming we don't forget again," and Richie makes a scoff-y choking sound on the bed and says, "We had better not fucking forget again."
And Mike smiles at that, thinking of Bill showing his scar on that last night and saying, This promise connects us. We're not gonna lose each other. For years, Mike's thought that Bill was wrong that night, but now he doesn't think he was. They didn't lose each other, and they all came back, and things are different, yes, but at the heart of it, it's like nothing's ever really changed. He's been waiting over twenty years for this, for everyone to come back so he wouldn't be alone, and it's finally happened. And call him crazy—although he thinks it's pretty telling that they've been out of Derry for hours and their memories haven't gone foggy yet—but he doesn't think they're going to lose that. Twenty-seven years apart, forty years spent trapped in Derry, but he's finally gotten here, and he's not alone anymore, and he hopes he'll never be alone again.
"Call me crazy, but I don't think we're going to forget this time," Mike says, looking out at his friends, who grew up without him and who grew apart and then knitted back together, who came back when he needed them. He smiles. "And I'll definitely keep in touch. Losers have to stick together."