Chapter Text
Richie Tozier knew that he was fucked. In fact, he was completely, irrevocably fucked.
He wasn't stupid, despite what popular opinion may say. He knew this wasn't exactly a normal 'vacation'. His mom and him certainly hadn't been doing well after his father passed. His mother had extreme mood swings and while he knew she was grieving, being forgotten by her still hurt. He knew to steer clear from her more extreme moods, as he always did, but he certainly wasn't expecting the last time he'd see her to be during one.
"I'll be good for you to get away," his mother had said through red-rimmed eyes, "It's always better to get away."
A bump in the road roused him from his slumber, shaking the cobwebs of memories best left unsaid aside. As he glanced out the window, rows and rows of houses passed by.
"Wow, Suburbia USA here," he mumbled.
"Oh hey, you awake back there, kiddo?" Came from the front seat.
Richie glanced over, taking in his Uncle Ted. The man was awkward, somehow more so than his own father. There had to be some kind of humor or fun or something under his skin though. It seemed to him like the same taste in men ran between his mother and his aunt.
'Eh, kinks supposedly run down bloodlines,' he thought.
He had been trying to crack jokes with him but Uncle Ted either just didn't get them or said 'that's funny' in the most bland way possible. Eventually, Richie had just given up and fell asleep as seeing that there really was someone who was unaffected by his trash mouth.
"Not to be that guy, well, totally that guy, but are we there yet?" He asked, adjusting his glasses.
"Actually, we're almost there," Uncle Ted said, "you see the house right over there?"
Richie glanced to where Uncle Ted had gestured to as the station wagon pulled up. The house sat there, quiet under the oppressive summer sun.
It wasn't a scary house, not really. Not in a haunted mansion way. It was… familiar. A deep, tugging familiarity, like a song you know the tune of but can’t remember the words. The pale yellow siding, the dark brown shingles on the steep roof, it really was a picture from a faded family album come to life.
A specific memory flickered in Richie's mind: the feeling of cool, polished wood under bare feet, and the sharp, citrusy smell of lemon Pledge. Squeals of laughter, running, yelled warnings from the adults. It was somehow both invigorating and comforting.
But the house itself looked tired. The paint was blistered in places, and the once-black shutters framing the upstairs windows were now a weathered grey. One of the gutter spouts near the carport had come loose, dangling like a broken arm. The carport itself was empty, a gaping mouth waiting for the station wagon to pull fully into.
Richie's eyes were drawn to the front door. Red. A bold, cheerful red that seemed defiant against the general weariness. That door sparked another vague impression—something almost primal, in the 'hairs on the back of your neck standing up' kind of way. It was odd, as he had no reason at all to fear this place.
Uncle Ted was saying something, but Richie wasn't listening. He stepped out of the station wagon after they had finally pulled in. He didn't bring a lot with him. Hell, there was barely enough to justify just the one bag, but he slung it over his shoulder as he stepped around and looked at the yard.
The lawn was neat but ordinary. A single, gnarled oak in the front yard cast a patch of shadow over the grass. His gaze traveled up to the window on the far left of the second floor. The curtains were drawn, but the window was propped open with what looked like a battered textbook. A strange antenna, cobbled together from old radio parts and wire, was fixed clumsily to the eaves just above it, pointing toward the woods behind the house. It was an odd scar on the otherwise timeless piece of his memory.
'Mike must be into some weird shit,' he thought.
He huffed and turned, following Uncle Ted inside the house.
“Here they are,” came the voice of Karen Wheeler, her voice straining for a brightness that hadn’t existed in Richie’s world for months. “Welcome home, you two."
Home. More like a three-bedroom, split-level tomb. His mom was ashes in the wind in Maine. His dad had gone years before finally checking out for good, withering away under his mother's enduring yet failing care. And now he was here, cousin to a kid he hadn’t seen since they were both in single digits, a charity case in pleated khakis, a dumb graphic shirt, and a red leather jacket. To say he looked out of place here was an understatement.
The welcome was a masterclass in awkwardness. Karen gave him an oddly warm hug, apologizing for not being able to help her sister but promising she would do her best to care for him. His cousin Nancy, pretty and sharp-eyed, gave him a look from the kitchen table that felt like an X-ray, like she was trying to read the fine print on his soul. Little Holly was the only one who seemed genuinely interested, grinning and waving at him.
'Tough crowd, but I've had worse to impress,' he said as he walked up to Holly.
She shrunk back a little but her eyes lit up once he performed a Mickey Mouse impression. He heard Karen call Mike up, announcing his presence. Nancy gave a small nod as Holly giggled away.
"Wow, someone has a way with words," she said.
"More like I have a way with the ladies," he said, winking at her.
Nancy scoffed and shook her head, but the corner of her lips upturned just a smidge.
'Maybe it won't be so hard to crack their shell after all,' he thought, seemingly at ease as he turned his attention back to Holly, who went into another fit of giggles when he crossed his eyes at her.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught him. Mike. Richie paused. It was almost like looking into a mirror. Despite the fact that they were cousins, they always could have been mistaken as twins. Richie's hair was darker and he had his mother's eyes as opposed to Mike looking like a younger version of Ted.
He stood in the doorway to the living room, a tall, lanky shadow. He looked older than fifteen. Tired. His eyes weren’t unfriendly, just… distant, like he was watching Richie from the far end of a long tunnel.
“Hey,” Mike said. It was a flat, exhausted syllable.
“Hey yourself, Wheeler,” Richie said, the old motor of his mouth kicking on by instinct. “You grow or do they just pump ennui into the water here? You’re like a moody, preppy lighthouse.”
Mike didn’t smile. Karen, flustered, jumped in. “Mike, why don’t you show Richie the basement? You’ll be sharing the space. Get him settled. Introduce him to your friends."
Mike just nodded and turned, expecting Richie to follow. Which he did, hefting his bag and quickly following him down.
The basement stairs creaked a protest. The air grew cooler, damper. It smelled of old carpet, model glue, and something else… a faint, metallic tension, like the air after a lightning strike.
Richie could tell immediately that the basement was a monument to nerdy boyhood, but one that had been repurposed for a war room. There were the expected things: the sagging sofa, the shelf of sci-fi paperbacks, a complicated stereo. But layered over it was something else. A detailed map of Hawkins and its surrounding woods was tacked to a bulletin board, dotted with colored pins and notes in Mike’s tight handwriting. Words like “Gate Aftermath” and “Surveillance Radius” were circled. The old D&D board was on the coffee table, but the figures weren’t arranged for a campaign; they were clustered in defensive positions around a hand-drawn sketch of a mall.
Two other boys were there. A kid with a serious, wary expression stood by the map, arms crossed. The other, a kid with a curly mop of hair and a missing front tooth, was sitting on the floor, fiddling with a bulky walkie-talkie. They both froze as Richie entered, their conversation dying mid-sentence. The silence was immediate and total, thick enough to chew on.
“Alright,” Mike said, his voice hollow. “These are my friends, Lucas and Dustin. Guys, this is my cousin, Richie. He's... staying here."
Richie let out a low whistle, setting his bag down. “Well, well. The war council is in session. What’s the vibe, gentlemen? Planning a bank heist or just a real intense game of Candy Land? Is that where you keep the contraband? The weed? The... dungeons?"
The curly-haired one—Dustin, Richie realized—forced a small, tight smile. “Hey.”
The other one, Lucas, just stared. His eyes flicked from Richie to the classified-looking maps and back. The message was clear: You shouldn’t be seeing this.
The vibe was so far from the chaotic hangouts from his time in Derry. This was grief. This was paranoia. This was the heavy, shared silence of people who had seen something that had turned their world inside out. Richie knew that silence. He’d lived in it. He’d just always filled it with noise.
'Beep beep, Richie,' came from his mind, but whoever had once said that to him was long gone now. There was no one to warn him to stop.
He ramped up the act, desperate to shatter the tension. “Seriously, what’s the deal? You guys look like you just found out your favorite comic book got canceled. Or like you’ve seen a ghost.” He adopted a hammy, theatrical voice, a poor imitation of Ted. “I say, I say, the spectral presence is most troubling to my after-dinner constitution!”
Nothing. Not even a flicker.
Mike rubbed his forehead. “It’s nothing. We just… hang out here.”
The lie was so palpable Richie could taste it. It tasted like home. Like death and blood and fear so deep it became a part of your bones. He looked at their faces—Mike’s exhausted defiance, Lucas’s guarded suspicion, Dustin’s polite but firm wall—and he saw not just teenagers keeping a secret, but soldiers protecting a perimeter. He saw himself. He could almost see his friends. Though by now they were probably better off without him.
The memory hit him like a stomach punch. The grief for his mother, ever-present, suddenly fused with the deeper, weirder grief for his friends, for his lost other life. The noise in his head sputtered and died.
His own voice, when it came out, was startlingly quiet. All the performative bravado was gone, sandblasted away by a sudden, profound recognition.
“No, seriously,” Richie said, his eyes scanning the map, the notes, the tactical D&D board. “What happened here?”
The change in him was so abrupt it threw them. They had already pegged him as a loudmouth, an intruder. They hadn’t expected the sharp, haunted intelligence now gleaming behind his glasses. The kids exchanged another one of those rapid, silent glances—a whole conversation in a millisecond, a language forged in fire and darkness.
Mike was the one who shut it down. He straightened up, his jaw setting. “Nothing,” he repeated, colder now. “It’s nothing. You can have that cot over there. Just… don’t touch the stuff on the board.”
The dismissal was a physical thing. The moment was over. The secret remained, a locked vault between them. It was hard to swallow the rage that bubbled up from that but whatever this was, it was their fight. One he was obviously not permitted to join.
Richie blinked, and the mask snapped back into place, but it felt brittle now. “Right, right. Touch nothing. Got it. The sacred scrolls of dorkdom are safe with me. My lips are sealed.”
He went over and flopped onto the musty sofa, the springs groaning in complaint. “But if you are plotting to fight, like, a demon or something? I do a killer John McClane. ‘Yippee-ki-yay, mother—’”
“BOYS!”
Karen’s call from the top of the stairs was a lifeline and a termination.
“Dinner!” she sang out.
The spell broke. Lucas began carefully taking notes off the map. Dustin clicked off his walkie-talkie. Mike just looked at Richie, that same assessing, exhausted look.
“Come on,” Mike said, not unkindly, just drained.
As they filed up the stairs, the weight of the basement with its maps and its secrets and its thick, terrible silence clung to Richie’s clothes. He looked at the back of Mike’s head, at the determined set of Lucas’s shoulders, at Dustin’s quick, intelligent eyes.
He was an orphan. He was alone. And he had just walked into another goddamn haunted house. But this time, he recognized the haunting. It wasn’t in the flickering lights or the creepy voices. It was in the eyes of the kids who lived there. It was the same ghost that lived in him.
He huffed and pushed himself back up, following them up to the bright, false normalcy of the Wheeler kitchen, the echo of his own unanswered question ringing in his ears: What happened here?
And a more terrifying, familiar one, whispered from the deepest part of his memory: What’s going to happen next?