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He tugs your greasy hair back as you shudder and heave over the toilet bowl, pulling most of it away from your face— your face, your human face, Evan’s face, at least. Something slick and black slides out of your gullet, spools of vomit staining worn porcelain. It smells like rot and dogflesh. The scent of it nearly makes you start gagging again.
“Easy does it,” Vinny says. You hear his voice tremble just a little bit. It makes you sick, even sicker than you already are, but you want him here so bad it hurts. He can’t leave you alone. God. You don’t know what you’d do with yourself if you were alone. You don’t know what IT would do–
“Breathe,” Vinny says. So you do, or you try, anyways, chest heaving, and some of the foul-tasting shit is still dripping from your mouth (your human mouth with human lips), but you think most of it’s gone from your throat and your lungs. In and out. In, one-two-three-four. Out, one-two-three-four. You feel everything— you feel the sweat sliding down the back of your neck; the warmth of Vinny’s hands as they narrowly brush your skin, hairs against hairs; Steph’s blood, still under your fingernails no matter how hard you try to scrape it out, even after weeks (or has it been longer?)—
“God,” you choke. The joints in your shoulders pop as you uncurl yourself, knees sore and weak against the tile, fingers fumbling to flush the toilet. They’re your fingers again, even with their greasy death-pallor, and so maybe you are thankful for that much, at least. “Goddammit–”
You have too many arms. Or maybe your arms aren’t bending the way they normally should. Or maybe both. You don’t know. You don’t think you’re meant to know, really.
Though you do know it hurts, that much is evident to you, in some strange sort of way you’d never thought possible; it is the feeling of your world crunching and snapping into pieces so it can rebuild itself as something else. The taste of your own blood leaves you whimpering, heaving as you gurgle through it, any last-ditch attempt at screaming effectively blocked off.
Here you are. Here you are. You rise, slowly, and catch yourself on the counter. Christ. Some superficial layer of your body that you still can’t reach is hot and so, so fucking itchy and wrong, like TV static in your skin. You need to shower. You need to get it all off of you– the smell, the grease, the grime pumping through your veins, smothered all over you, caked in your scalp. Your stomach growls with hunger, but you can’t let yourself think about that, you really can’t, because the only way you can ever eat anything ever again is by pretending it isn’t happening.
For some reason, you think of Nick, even though you haven’t really thought too much about him in a while, somehow, despite all the time you’ve spent with nothing to do but think. You think: that schmuck got the easy way out in the end, didn’t he— even for all he suffered, his mom and his dog and his mind and his body, he got you to give him what he needed most: freedom. But there’ll be no such thing for you. Not now that IT has you. Why would IT ever want to let you go? Oh, IT likes you too much for that, doesn’t IT? Or does IT hate you too much for that? You can never really tell.
You can’t stand for long; your body slips into a sitting position on the lid of the toilet. You think to yourself, very distantly: oh. There’s blood all over my mouth. Some trucker. You remember bits and pieces, but it’s more dreamlike this time around; it barely even seems to make sense to your fragmented brain. IT will pick and choose very carefully what IT wants you to bear witness to: you’ve discerned that the more important the victim, the more satisfaction your begging will bring IT. Different every time, really. Go to sleep, Evan, and sleep dreamlessly, or dream of it in fragments, or feel it then and forget it when you wake but remember in pieces later, or sleep blissfully empty but remember it afterwards, or know all of it, all of it, every sensation, every tiny little feeling, let it eat at you, make it never leave—
But this must’ve been just some nobody, ‘cause IT pushed you down into the darkness for a while there. You have to wonder which way is better, in the end.
Your face is wrong, wrong, wrong— you know now that whatever it looks like, it can’t look anything like Evan, not anymore, probably the most disgusting thing you could ever imagine seeing. A grotesque snout-thing twisted the wrong way, lodged full of too many teeth. Hands trapped in claws. How many eyes do you have now? Is it two or is it something else? Your skin is mottled pale in some places, purple in others, both of them nasty shades of rot, and you suspect that your hair has migrated to strange, bristly patches sporadic all over you.
“Come on,” Vinny says quietly. “You’ve gotta eat. It’s been— I don’t know. A while. But you look like shit.”
Yeah. Yeah, you sure do. Your muscles are still there, but the thin layers of fat meant to support them have been steadily dwindling. And you’re pale, and you’re haggard, and even though IT’s gone and receded back into your head, the stink of death is still faint. Still. Rotten ham and spoiled milk and old, old melon; it’s hard to avoid the smell of a corpse when you’re living inside one.
“I can’t eat,” you murmur. You sound like a child. “IT— IT already ate, Vinny.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know.” You run your tongue along your teeth— there are no bone fragments trapped in the thin gaps. Was it human? Maybe it was rabbit. Something else. God, you don’t know. The taste muddles together into something barely recognizable as any edible meat. “I don’t…I think I…Jesus, fuck. It couldn’t have been much.”
“And besides,” you add then, “I’m just going to throw up anything I eat, anyways.”
“Water, then?” Vinny looks a little sad, eyes murky and wet, lashes poised downwards. You almost feel bad for the guy. “Come on. Give me something to work with here.”
“Okay.” You swallow. “Okay, yeah. I can…I can work with water.”
You rise again, but this time your legs don’t crumble underneath you. Slowly, you approach Vinny— not even to touch him, you don’t think you could handle that, but just to get the vague impression of his body heat radiating through to you. Weird as that sounds. You need to know he’s here. You need to know he’s alive.
But Vinny can’t hide the way his body tenses up. And you know. Oh, God, you know. Your hands, when they weren’t your hands, only halfway, maybe even less than that—
“Vinny, I—”
“HAB—” Vinny stops himself, but it’s already too late. “Evan.”
Hunger tears at you. The thrill of the chase vibrates your bones. Someone here, someone in front of you, someone terrified, someone running away from you as a noise like what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck peels from him shrilly, and you’re gone— Evan’s gone, and IT laughs, an ugly noise in your fucked-up throat, IT likes the sensation, the smell, all of it, and you’re somewhere very, very far away, which is a mercy, really— sometimes IT likes to be as human as IT can be, and sometimes IT likes to be as monstrous as IT can be (like now), but none of those things are you. Not even the version of IT that looks just like you— it still isn’t you, not quite. It hurts. Everything hurts. And you’re still hungry.
A laugh slips out of you, wet and broken. You’re dizzied. Your head aches and spins around and around and around. But it’s funny, isn’t it, you think. It’s funny!
“So that’s what you really think of me,” you croak, and you laugh again. That one sounds worse than the first. “That’s all this,” —you gesture to your body— “is to you, huh? Not Evan anymore?” Your voice breaks. “I’m not— none of this belongs to me anymore, Vin? Is that it?”
“Ev, I didn’t say that—”
“You did, Vin, but it’s okay, ‘cause you’re right.” This isn’t your skin. This isn’t your body. This isn’t even your mind, not anymore. “You probably want IT back. Right? ‘Cause— ‘cause at least IT can do something for you. Get you something good for the cameras. At least IT isn’t as miserable as you are. Because you probably think Evan’s just a weak little bitch, he couldn’t even stop himself from fuckin’ murdering everyone—”
“That’s not true,” Vinny says. “I want you here, Evan. I do. I…I miss you.”
You whimper. “No, you don’t, Vin. You said it yourself. Remember? ‘You killed Jeff.’ I remember. I do.”
“Because I didn’t know what the fuck was going on then, Ev!”
“Uh-huh.” You snort. “Uh-huh! Fucking sure, Vinny!”
“It’s…” Vinny starts, then quickly runs out of words to say. “I’m sorry, okay? But I rarely see you. It’s just…you know, IT. And all the things IT wants me to do for IT. You’re not…you’re barely even here anymore, Evan, you’re like a ghost.”
IT lets you go, lets you be small again, lets you be Evan again. It still hurts to feel your joints pop and shift, but it’s a more welcoming ache now as the faint vestiges of you crawl back to the surface, the ache like running your tongue over an empty tooth-cavity, the ache like scratching fervently at a bug bite. You’re human again, you’re right again, except you’re not, because you’re wearing nothing but countless amounts of blood and the thin rags of what used to be your clothes. Your face cracks back into place, but maybe it isn’t your face at all anymore, not really, since the thing inside of you wears it just the same.
“Tell me something I don’t know, Vin.” It’s an ugly little whine, and then you’re collapsed in his arms, not even crying or screaming or anything at all, really. Your chest moves the minimum amount required for bloodflow. You’re somewhere else. Not here. And Vinny’s arms are warm, and too goddamn soft with all that hair, and it would be nice, but it’s only wrong.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, and you really don’t know if he means it, but it hardly matters anyways, because you’ll take what you can get, won’t you. “I wish things didn’t need to be like this.”
You don’t know if that’s a lie, either, but you decide to believe that it isn’t.
So you say: “I missed you too, Vinny,” and: “I hope you can forgive me,” even though you don’t really know what for, if there’s anything you should be sorry for at all.
“Yeah,” Vinny says, swallowing thick, arms tightening around you. It feels kind of nice. You think you’d be okay with staying here forever. “I do, Evan. I do.”