#beneverly

Dee Dee Blanchard was dead. She had been stabbed repeatedly by her daughter's boyfriend while she slept in her bed. Her daughter, Gypsy Rose, who was wheelchair-bound with many ailments, was believed to have been kidnapped by the killer. Later, it was found out that not only Gypse Rose been the mastermind in her mother's murder, but wasn’t sick after all.

She was a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In layman’s terms, it means the person taking care of you pretends that you’re sick to continue taking care of you. For some, like Gypsy Rose, it’s being told that you suffer from leukemia and other forms of the body affecting illnesses.

For Eddie, it was being told that the world wanted him dead.

For as long as he could remember he had been sick. His earliest memories had been visiting the hospital where his father would eventually die from lung cancer, only to wind up there himself with a case of acute bronchitis. He survived it, thanks to the help of modern medicine.

That was the last time Eddie remembered being sick.

The issue was, that wasn’t the last time he had been told he was sick. From the moment he came back from the hospital, everything just seemed to get worse. His allergies had picked up, and it seemed like almost every other weekend he was feeling off.

His mother had tried her best to help him. They made weekly trips to the doctors and had become regulars with the pharmacy. Eddie didn’t go out much, because the pollen in the air made him have a horrible reaction and on the rare chance he did go out and he scraped his knee or elbow, the bleeding never seemed to stop.

Soon enough, he just stopped going out altogether. He went to school and back, though that rarely lasted as he was homesick half the time. He would have tutors come to the house to keep his grades up, but he missed being around the other kids, missed having someone other than his mom to talk to.

Sonia had suggested homeschooling, but the doctor refused. Even with his sickness, he needed to be around other children, other people. His mother agreed, but only if he followed her rules. He couldn’t join any clubs or sports, because if something had happened if he had gotten sick or worse, they wouldn’t know what to do.

He carried his inhaler and assortment of pills around in a fanny pack because it was easier than shoving them into his backpack. He needed them on hand 24/7 after all.

By the time Eddie was 13, he was allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, and several cooking oils. He couldn’t eat any blue dyes or anything with artificial sugars. He was on a gluten-free diet and used only antibacterial soaps and lotions. Perfumes gave him rashes and direct sunlight had an almost narcoleptic effect on him. He had asthma and panic attacks.

By the age of 15, he had never eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He had never swum in gym class and never went to a friend’s birthday party or had one of his own. He never had any friends to call his own. The closest thing he had to one had been Greta Keene, as her father owned the pharmacy that he and his mother frequented.

Over time, Eddie realized that Greta was nothing but a heartless bitch who picked on others because she couldn’t deal with the fact that her father was a perv who checked out her friends when he thought she wasn’t looking. But during childhood, they had sat together as they waited for the prescriptions to be filled. Sometimes she would be looking through a magazine and she’d be nice enough to let Eddie look through it with her.

He couldn’t touch it thanks to the ever-so-worrisome possibility of a paper cut, but he would look over her shoulder and gaze at the pictures of the different celebrities and whatever products the magazine was trying to sell.

By the age of 16, Eddie knew that he liked looking at boys rather than looking at girls, though that didn’t seem to matter at the time. For a very long time, he thought he didn’t like either. He would watch people kiss on the television during a movie with his mom and he’d get uncomfortable with the idea of having someone touch him so closely and swapping spit so carelessly.

It wasn’t long before his teenage mind began to drift off. The screen time he was given was very limited, but he found his mother was something of a thick sleeper and using incognito mode was a good combination for being able to see the world for what it was outside of the bubble his mother had made for him.

He didn’t have any social media accounts, but he was able to see everybody else’s. People from school, random strangers who had interesting lives. He scrolled and scrolled, trying his best to imagine what it would be like to be an everyday kid out in the world.

Would he have been good at skateboarding? Would he have been a gamer? Would he have been invited to sweet-16’s and would he have eventually fallen in love with a girl from school? Would he have gotten excited by making out with her after the school dance? Would he have held her hand in the hallway as they walked to class?

Eddie didn’t think the girl part would ever come about, though he did find it rather fascinating how beautiful some boys would be. He never thought of himself much. He knew, in retrospect, he had nice cheekbones and a fit frame. He had boyish looks that remained graceful even as he went through puberty. His mother kept his hair at a nice length and he styled it well enough.

His clothing was something to be desired. Shorts that remained rough his tights and polo shirts with the collar always pressed. He wasn’t a boy scout, but he had the look of one. He tried not to think about wanting to change it up. Wearing clothing that clung to him or styling his hair differently.

He would see some boys online that just looked completely in their element and he would find himself angry that he couldn’t do the same and had very little chance to do anything about it. He would see boys kissing other boys and think about how his mother had brought home a pamphlet from the church about how same-sex relationships and ‘equality’ were wrong for the world. He didn’t understand why.

Kissing was meant to bring joy to people. Love was meant to bring happiness. How could any of that be so wrong? Sometimes he would want to argue with her, but he never allowed himself to do such a thing, not after his mother had put so much time and effort into taking care of him.

He swallowed that anger down, letting it a bubble and fester inside of him as he carried out his day to day life.

By the age of 18, he had graduated high school and that was the end of his social life. He would go out to the doctor or pharmacy, but that was that. No going out to get take out or to see a movie. His bedroom had become his sanctuary. His home had become his prison.

By the age of 21, Eddie’s life had been torn to pieces.

Good old Dr. Keene had finally snapped after years of pent up frustration. Nobody knew what caused it. Perhaps it was from the endless repetition of filling the same prescriptions for the same people every single day. Or maybe it was the guilt of being attracted to young girls that pushed him over the edge.

One second he was working on a puzzle, trying to collect all the edges and then in the next, he was watching his mother be escorted in a police car.

It seemed that Keene finally had enough with Mrs. Kapsbrak’s bullshit and let the authorities know that she and her doctor had been lying about Eddie’s illnesses.

He wasn’t allergic to any nuts, or dyes, or perfumes. His inhaler was filled with water and the pills were just placebos.

They had lied about everything.

Sonia tried to defend her actions, saying that Eddie was, in fact, sick and she just took extra precautions to keep him alive. The doctor, on the other hand, admitted that he was dirt and had been accepting payment for assigning Sonia in her beliefs. He wrote up the scripts for the sugar pills, writing off blase excuses for why Eddie felt the way he did.

The doctor was arrested for malpractice and Sonia had been taken into custody for abuse and after a bit of time, they found her guilty of being a proxy to Munchausen syndrome. She was sent to jail for ten years with the possibility of release in three years given good behavior. A restraining order had been placed to keep her away from her son. And Eddie was forced to leave the only home he had ever known and been placed into the foster system.

Though he was over the legal age and classified as an adult, the lawyer the state had given him fought that, due to his mother’s influence, he shouldn’t have been thrown out onto the street. They wanted to fight that he wasn’t fully developed, at least not mentally, and needed proper assistance.

It seemed like almost overnight Eddie’s life had changed. He packed up the few belongings that he wanted to bring with him and went off to a few towns over to where his new home waited.

It was there that he had learned about what Gypse Rose and her boyfriend had done. And that bubbling pit of anger inside him began to simmer as he thought of whether or not he would have done the same.

When he found out the truth, he didn’t know what to feel. He threw up a couple of times and begged the police to give him his medication. When they refused, sending in a doctor to explain the situation, he began to go through withdrawals.

It took a good few days for Eddie to finally begin to feel normal. For the headaches to go away. For the aches in his chest to finally settle down.

His new home was decent enough. It was a decent-sized house, filled with just a woman and her son. They hadn’t been strangers, at least not completely. It seemed Mr. Hanscom was his father’s cousin and had been best friends with him all those years ago. He also turned out to be Eddie’s Godfather and legal guardian if anything were to happen to either of his parents. After his father passed away and he had gotten sick, Sonia refused to let anybody see Eddie and all contact with the family was cut off.

Mrs. Hanscom and her son Ben had been very open to why they decided to take him in. Mr. Hanscom cared deeply for his cousin and was heartbroken when he passed. They had tried to fight Sonia on letting them see Eddie, but Mr. Hanscom died before they could take it to court. Mrs. Hanscom had always attempted to make contact and repeatedly sent birthday cards and letters to him, but they were always sent back.

After he had died, Mrs. Hanscom went through some tough times and had to move in with her sister. It wasn’t ideal, especially for Ben who had been dealing with a few issues of his own like bullying, but they worked hard so they could afford a place of their own.

First was an apartment just big enough for themselves and eventually, a home that could have an extra person. At first, Mrs. Hanscom had suggested they would bring in someone who could pay rent, but they later decided to welcome in someone who needed a place to go just as they had years prior.

And then the news broke out about what Sonia had been doing to him and they jumped at the chance to help him. They didn’t want Eddie to look at it as a handout or a fostering situation. He was free to stay for as long as he liked, glad to have a little piece of his father back in their lives.

Eddie did everything he could to be anything but a challenge for them. The situation was strange on all of them and the last thing Eddie wanted was to be a bother. He tried to work around his allergies, only to be reminded that they didn’t exist.

He could eat gluten. He could have peanuts. He could eat things cooked in certain oil and have those sugary cereals.

Not that the Hanscom house was filled with any of that stuff. Ben had admitted to him that he spent a lot of his time eating his feelings when he was a kid, earning him some interesting nicknames along the way due to constantly being bullied for his weight.

He slimmed down in high school, having joined the track team in hopes of gaining some popularity and shaking off the weight. It worked and he was now out of school, feeling healthy and looking good.

He was attending the University of Maine for architecture, deciding to stay home with his mom since the school was less than twenty minutes from their town.

Eddie, upon finishing high school, decided not to go to college.

Well, his mother had chosen that. Now she was gone and he didn’t have any money to go and his grades weren’t good enough to warrant a scholarship. So he was forced to carry on like the rest of the losers in his school and remain in Maine forever.  

Ben had been nice and got him a job at the grocery store in town with him. He had never gotten a job before and he was hesitant at first. He didn’t want to be a disappointment, but Mrs. Hanscom insisted that there was no way Eddie could be a failure at stocking shelves and bagging eggs for little old ladies.

Another thing they had done for him was to help set up a support group. The caseworker had it very clear that Eddie would have some mental issues after what he had gone through. They suggested having him go to a therapist, but Ben thought it would be more helpful for him to be around other people dealing with similar situations.

It just so happened that Ben had a friend who went to a group and they were able to squeeze him into it.

That’s how he met Beverly Marsh.

She was a friendly girl who had been through hell and back and welcomed Eddie in with open arms. He hadn’t been too keen on going, simply because he didn’t want to bother anybody with his problems.

It was just as they played it out on TV. They all sat around in a circle, introducing themselves to him and talking about their issues. The man running it offered one-on-one care if needed, though Eddie promised he would try out the sitting circle before branching out for personal help.

“It’s okay to be shy,” Beverly had mentioned as they walked out of the meeting. Eddie hadn’t spoken much, only when someone asked him a question, but even then he didn’t give more than a few answers. “Nobody likes to brag about the shit they’ve been through and if they do, then they’re worse off than the rest of us.”

“I just don’t think it’s worth anybody's time.” Eddie had mentioned, shoving his hands into his pockets as they walked down the street. “My mom was crazy. I don’t know what else to say about it.”

It was clear she had her issues to deal with. Eddie didn’t want to ask her why she did what she did because he already knew. She loved him and wanted to protect him, even if it meant doing unspeakable things.

Eddie knew people had it worse off. People like Bill, who dealt with a stutter because his mom knocked him down the stairs and had become neglectful since his little brother’s death, something that Bill himself still blamed himself for. Or Henry Bowers, who suffered mental abuse from the hands of his policeman father had turned himself into an abuser himself before finally being forced to seek help.

Or Beverly, who had been open to Eddie about why she was at the place, to begin with. During their first meeting, she said she had been abused by her father but didn’t go into detail. It wasn’t until they were alone when she confided in Eddie just how it had been.

The way he would treat her and touch her. The shit Keene used to do, leering at girls and making sly comments, couldn’t hold a candle to the horrific things Beverly had gone through at the hands of her father.

It was shit like that that made Eddie feel like he didn’t belong in the group, to begin with. All those people needed help because of the bad shit they had gone through. Eddie’s mother loved him, enough to want to protect him from the world. How could he complain about that? How could he compare himself to the likes of Beverly and Bowers?

Eddie felt more like a burden than he had before, but he swallowed down that pain and focused on the only thing he could control his job.

Mrs. Hanscom had been right when she said he wouldn’t fail. He succeeded in filling the shelves and bagging those eggs for the little old ladies.

He did that for two weeks, going to work and coming home to help with dinner, doing the dishes and washing his clothes and keeping his room spotless. A new routine for the same old guy.

Eventually, Mrs. Hanscom began to see how this was creating a rut for Eddie and thought it would be best if he joined Ben at the local gym. Eddie couldn’t think of a worse place to be, filled with sweaty men all grunting as they worked on their bodies, none of which bothered to wipe down the equipment when they were finished with it. Eddie stood off to the side for most of it, just following Ben around like a puppy with his tail between his legs.

“You know you can work out, right?” Ben asked a few minutes of Eddie just idling there. “You’re my day guest. Why don’t you grab a few weights and give it a go?”

“I’ll pass. Knowing my luck, I’ll wind up dropping it and breaking my foot.”

Ben snickered, sitting up from the lying position he had been working in. Eddie was sure it had a name, but he wasn’t aware of it. He didn’t know any workout slang or equipment names. Ben stood then, gesturing to the machine. “Lay down.”

“What?”

“Lay down. You’re gonna work those arms.”

Eddie shook his head, but Ben ignored his protest and requested to clean the seat down before forcing him to lay back. “Alright. This is a barbell bench press. We’ll start slow, okay?”

“Ben, we don’t have to do this,” Eddie swore, hugging when the other male pressed the metal beam against his chest.

“It’s twenty pounds, Eddie. You can do twenty pounds, right?” Ben asked, going to stand by Eddie’s head and spot him. He kept his hands hovering under the beam, letting him ready to catch it in case Eddie couldn’t do it.

But he did. He lifted it carefully, not with much effort. Eddie wasn’t weak, not physically at least. He should have been based on the way he had been living and the food he had been fed, but he found that some of the things his mom had been pumping into him, aside from sugar pills, had been vitamin supplements. All the vegetables that his mother had fed him were filled with enough protein to keep him moving, to keep up his strength.

So yeah, he could lift the twenty pounds. And then the thirty that Ben added. They went to forty and it got to be a bit harder, but he could still handle it. It was only when they got to the fifty pounds did he start to shake a bit, start to worry and doubt himself.

“Hey hey Haystack!” A voice shouted from across the room. Eddie lifted his head to see who was speaking but was quickly pushed back into his place by Ben as the man approached. “You throwing down tonight?”

“Nah, not tonight Rich,” Ben replied. Seeing as he answered the stranger, Eddie guessed that Haystack must have been a nickname of sorts. He didn’t get it, figuring it was some sort of inside joke.

“Awe, come on. Big Bill is gonna be dropping by and you know you can’t resist stepping in with him.”

“I have a handful of shifts this weekend. I can’t risk pulling something or messing up my hand.”

“Bah! Like you’ve ever lost.”

“I’ll stop by though. Cheer you on from the sidelines.”

“Now that’s what I call friendship Vol 12!” The stranger tapped Eddie’s knee then, prompting his attention. He craned his head up so he could gaze at him, finding a lanky man with wild hair and glasses standing at the end of the bench.

He had on gym shorts, much like everybody else and a white tank top, which was covered with an obnoxiously colored button-down shirt that was opened in the front. He had a headband around his forehead and thick glasses which made his eyes seem just a tad larger than normal.

“Aye, keep it up, small fry. You got this!” He cheered on before walking off.

Eddie faltered for a moment, letting his head fall back and then lifting it again to make his statement. “I’m not fucking small!” He shouted, causing Ben to chuckle from above.

“Ignore him. He’s not worth your effort, trust me. Had enough or do you want me to up it?”

“I think I’ve had my fill of bodybuilding for the day.”

Ben laughed and pulled the beam off him like it was nothing, carefully placing it down in the corner.

They left the gym and returned home. Eddie helped Mrs. Hanscom make dinner and set the table and then once they finished eating he helped clean up. They sat together on the couch, watching some movie on the tv. It reminded him too much of how he and his mother would spend time together.

They wouldn’t go to the park or out for walks. They stayed inside and did puzzles and watched tv. She would put on the news and show all the horrifying things going on in the world and comment on how lucky Eddie was that he could stay inside. They would watch old cartoons that were perfectly fine for a little kid well up until she was taken awake.

Mrs. Hanscom gave Eddie the choice of what to watch though he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know the television shows that were popular at this time nor did he care for anything. It was just white noise for him. He would stare blankly not even bothering to soak in what was being played out for him.

They settled on some reality show that was trashy and boring. Mrs. Hanscom would comment here and there about how ridiculous it was and how utterly staged it had to be.

After a while, Ben got up from the couch and went to change his clothes. He told his mom he was going out and kissed her cheek before walking out the door.

Eddie sat alone with Mrs. Hanscom, watching the trash television of overly wealthy people and the petty problems they lived with every day. Eventually, she turned in, wishing him a good night as she went off to her room.

She didn’t tell him to turn the tv off or to make sure he was in bed by a certain time. He was given choices for the first time in, well ever. Eddie did make his home to bed, ready to start the day all over again.

To work, then home, to make dinner and do laundry. He had a routine, just like he had before everything went to shit.

He liked it, to an extent. Liked knowing what to expect and having a routine allowed him to mostly stay sane in all of this. If he knew what tomorrow brought, then he would have something to focus on and wouldn’t get lost in the in-between.

He didn’t question where Ben had gone that night or where he had gone a few nights later. Ben had his own life and didn’t have to invite Eddie everywhere he went. He brought him to the gym for a second time, pushing him once again onto a machine so he could work on his upper arm strength.

Nobody paid much attention to him there, all speaking to Ben and offering him polite glances and nods. This time he was on something called a ‘hammer strength machine’ pumping his arms in and out. Ben once again spotted him, making sure he didn’t push it or hurt himself.

Eddie would have wondered why Ben didn’t go to school to be a personal trainer if he hadn’t seen some of his sketches and models. The guy was born to create buildings. He just happened to also have a knack for bodybuilding as well.

It wasn’t until Beverly had come around to pick Ben up to go out did she see that he was being left behind. She was pissed, more so than Eddie had been about the whole thing and threw a bit of a fit over it.

“You can’t just leave him behind, Ben!” She argued.

Eddie was just sitting on his bed, reading one of the books that Ben had lent him. He didn’t even realize that Ben was going out on this particular night until the redhead rushed into the room and told him to get dressed.

“I wasn’t leaving him behind on purpose,” Ben swore gently. “It just didn’t seem like his type of thing.”

“You said the same thing about me.”

“I’m sorry, what are you talking about?” Eddie injected, trying to piece together what exactly was going on.

“We’re going out. Put your clothes on.” Beverly said.

There was something about the way Beverly presented herself that proved to Eddie she wasn’t a force to be reckoned with. He pulled his clothes back on and got into Ben’s car where he drove them out and away from the suburbs and into the grasslands. He didn’t get a chance to ask why they were out in the middle of nowhere when they were suddenly pulling up behind an old farmhouse.

Everything seemed so sketchy and murder and when he found there were more people there than expected, Eddie didn’t know what to think. They passed all the sheep and chickens surrounded by a pen, going further down until they came upon an area that was completely lit up by torches.

“What are we doing here?” He asked Beverly, following her off to the side.

In the middle of the crowd, there was a boxing ring. It was mostly makeshift, with the ropes around it looking tethered and overused. He wondered what a thing like this was doing randomly out in the middle of nowhere.

“Tonight, just watching,” Beverly answered to him.

“Watching what?”

“All right, all right! Everybody settle down!” A voice shouted out. A man appeared in the room then, followed by a second man. The first was dark-skinned and he recalled seeing around town before. His family’s farm supplied the meat for the grocery store. His name was Mike.

The other man was a stranger to him. Tall and thin, with short, neatly styled hair. Neither men looked like they were dressed to be inside the gym, with Mike wearing a plain tee shirt and jeans and the other wearing a button-up and khakis.

“Welcome everyone. We’re gonna have some good fights tonight.” Mike said, greeting the crowd once they relaxed a bit. “So far we have six signed up, which means three tights. Stan and I have put together who goes again who, so if you’re fighting or betting, listen up.”

The second man, Stan, held up a chalkboard for the crowd to see. “We have Denbrough vs Bowers. Cross vs Huggins. And Tozier vs Hotchsetter. Now, you all know the rules, so we’re gonna make this quick. No shirt, no shoes. No weapons of any kind.”

“The only weapon allowed in the ring is your body,” Stan mentioned, smirking down at the crowd.

“If you bleed, then you bleed. If you think something is broken, then you’re out. If someone says stop and if you do not stop, then that calls for what?”

“Total elimination,” Stan answered.

“If you wanna play dirty, you gotta pay the price. Now that we’ve reminded you how it goes: let’s begin, shall we? Anybody willing to take bets, speak with Stanley. Bowers! Denbrough! You have two minutes.”

“What is this?” Eddie asked, shifting aside as people moved through the crowd to get to Stan and make their bets.

“Have you ever seen the movie Fight Club?” She asked. “It’s sort of like that.”

“Bev, the only movies I was allowed to watch were G-rated films screened by my mother. Nothing with the word ‘fight’ would have passed her.”

“They’re gonna beat the shit out of one another.” Beverly simplified.

Before he could ask another question, both Henry Bowers and Bill Denbrough, two people that Eddie knew from the group meeting, slipped into the ring. Both were shirtless. Both were shoeless. Henry had his hair pulled back with a headband and Bill had some medical wrap wrapped around his knuckles.

Eddie moved closer, peering over someone’s shoulder to get a better look. Mike stood in the middle, reminding them both to be fair and to put on a good show before tapping them in. Bill and Henry circled one another before Bowers made the first strike. Bill blocked it easily, catching Bower’s off guard a half step later. It seemed like a simple boxing match except without the protective gear.

Eddie thought back to when he was eleven and had been flipping through the channels. He stumbled upon some MMA fight that was being televised. He was able to watch it for a good forty seconds before his mom flipped out and changed the channel. She rambled on about how dangerous fighting was and how sensitive Eddie’s skin was so if he were to ever be in a fight, he would be torn to pieces.

Eddie thought about what the differences would be, between MMA and boxing and whatever this thing happening here was.

In the tiny ring, they went at it, punching, and kicking, and biting, bruising skin and spitting out blood, they fought until finally, Mike seemed Denbrough the winner. The crowd cheered around them and despite having blood on his face, Bill still offered Bowers a hand to lift him. He guested it was out of good sportsmanship or something.

They left the ring, letting a few people slip inside to clean it up before the next two came up to fight.

Eddie recognized one of them as the fella from the gym the first time he went. He had his shaggy hair pulled back out of the way of his face and his glasses had been removed for obvious reasons. He was jumping up and down, practically bouncing with excitement as he stretched on the sidelines of the ring.

When Mike called his name, he hopped inside, pacing in place and punching the air theatrically.

Beverly stood beside him then, touching his shoulder to get his attention. “Hey, you okay?”

“How long do we have to stay here?” He asked curiously.