Chapter Text
Stan was the first to leave. He always had been. Maybe because being the first to leave meant no one left him. But that wasn’t even true. Stan rubbed the scars down his jaw: white, circular bite marks starkly reminding him of how he was left alone. Stan clutched the steering wheel, refocusing on the road pulling him out of Derry.
He left before Beverly. A couple years ago, he didn’t even think that would’ve been possible. But here he was, Stan Uris, freshly eighteen, not even staying for his last summer. The rest of the Losers saw him off, trying to be happy, excited for him, but he knew they felt betrayed. No, not betrayed, they felt guilty.
And maybe, stupidly, Stan wanted that.
Stan remembered Billy pulled him aside after he helped him tie his bike to the roof rack. He looked close to tears, which made Stan want to unpack the Volkswagen and stay the summer like everyone else.
“Stan, you can’t go off alone, not now. We have to stick together,” Billy pleaded.
And suddenly Stan hated Billy, hated his sad eyes, so noble, like he bore the weight of everyone, even though no one asked him to. Even though Stan was always right behind him, slogging through sewers without so much of a complaint, not like Eddie or Richie. But no matter how close he stuck, somehow he got left behind. “You have nice words, Bill, really nice. But those exact words got me alone in a sewer with my face almost chewed off.”
His words were savage, but they felt good. Billy blinked, like he’d been slapped. And Stan knew Billy was looking at the bite marks framing his face. Billy hating himself, blaming himself, wishing he’d died in that sewer.
Stan knew he should take it back, walk over the words, but he didn’t. He did what he always did. He left.
-
“Stan! Stanley, my boy, what happened—“
Stan was thirteen, his face was covered in blood, and he was running into his Dad’s office. He didn’t break his stride as his father stood up from his desk. He went straight to the painting, that soulless, lonely woman with empty eyes and ripped it off the wall. He hardly realized he tore it apart in his hands until his father stopped him, wrenching the bits of painted canvas from his grip.
“Stanley! What is wrong with—“ then his father stopped, choking on his words. “Your face.”
And Stan was crying. He pressed his bleeding face into his father’s coat, begging for it all to go away, to forget the realization that he’d been left to deal with It, even though Billy promised he wouldn’t leave him.
He wasn’t afraid of the woman, even as her teeth sunk into his skin, his body convulsing under the pain. He was afraid of what the woman didn’t have.
The painter of the woman was Amedeo Modigliani, and he didn’t paint the eyes of his subjects unless he knew their soul. Stan had only ever saw his paintings without eyes, but in a bid to stop his fear, his father had shown him Amedeo’s paintings of his lover.
Every single portrait had warm eyes, her dark pupils glittering in the oil paint. Each portrait different as her eyes changed slightly. Her eyes completed the painting, made it human, made her human.
But that did not stop his fear. His fear was not of an eyeless figure, but of someone solely unknown, alone; that no one knew enough to paint their eyes.
Did anyone know him enough to paint his eyes? Or would they be left blank, since no one ever knew him, since he was alone, since he left.
Stan cried all the way to the hospital, mumbling about dogs or bears or whatever he decided bit him. But all he could think of was his eyes, wondering if anyone looked into them long enough to glimpse his soul.