#pennywise fluff

Alertness.

It's the kind that goes under the skin, a subtle shift in the air when someone is watching you too long.

You're just walking home, shoes a little muddy from the Barrens, head full of things you shouldn't love this much.

You've been out too late again, too close to the drains. Too close to him.

The town is half-asleep, streetlights humming low and orange.

And then someone whistles.

Your stomach drops.

The sound follows... Sloppy footsteps, lewd laughter. Some guy from the pub, or maybe he just looks like someone from the pub. You don't look long enough to find out.

You walk faster.

He calls something after you.

Something that's supposed to sound flattering but drips instead, thick and mocking and objectifying.

When you don't answer, he gets bolder.

Boots scuff the pavement.

You turn a corner and that's when the air goes wrong wrong.

The wind dies entirely and the lights flicker momentarily.

And from the gutter comes a balloon.

Crimson like wine—or blood.

It bobs once, twice.

The man behind you laughs, nervous now.

"The hell is that—"

You don't have to see what happens next.

You just hear it... Garrulous laughter. Not human...

Then the man is gone. Just gone.

Running, screaming something about a clown.

And suddenly, everything's quiet again.

Not peaceful though.

You're shaking, clutching your own arms, trying to remember how breathing works.

Then a huge shadow moves in front of you.

Pennywise steps into the streetlight like a nightmare unfolding.

Ruffled collar, too many teeth hiding behind a smile that's only now turning back to gentle. His eyes are gold, fixed right on you.

"You're trouble" he says, voice low and lilting. "Little thing wandering around my streets… collecting attention that doesnct belong to you. Oho..."

You swallow hard. "He—he followed me."

His head tilts, curious.

"I noticed... *sniff* You smell like fear. Not yours anymore, though. His."

He giggles.

Your pulse stutters.

You open your mouth to thank him, to say something sane, but then he's crouching, face inches from yours.

His gloved fingers trace a smear of dirt on your cheek.

"So fragile" he murmurs, almost to himself. "Soft little thing, all cracked china and heartbeat."

You forget to breathe—again.

He sighs dramatically, theatric as ever.

"Humans, humans... Always needing rescuing."

Then he stands, looming impossibly.

"Up up up!"

"What?"

Clawed hands slide around your waist before you can argue.

Effortless.

Like you weigh nothing.

He scoops you up against him, your shoes dangling, and the air hums faintly where his skin touches yours through fabric.

You cling out of reflex.

He chuckles, deep and sharp.

"Oh relax, little magpie. I'm not hungry tonight."

That shouldn't be comforting, but somehow it is.

The world blurs.

You blink, and then you're home...

His way of moving, reality bending to suit his whim.

He sets you down on the bed, surprisingly careful. His claws catch the blanket, tucking it under your chin.

"You—you scared him off."

"I do that." He grins, the corners of his mouth twitching wider than humanly possible. "Scaring is easy. And fun! You're… harder."

He studies you for a long moment then, gaze flicking from your eyes to your trembling hands.

Then, almost absently, he sits beside you, weight making the mattress dip.

The room feels too small with him in it.

His voice softens.

"Don't go walking out there alone again. Unless you want to see good old Pennywise go all angry."

"Mhm... I like seeing you" you murmur, half-asleep already.

He laughs quietly, an eerie musical sound. "Of course you do."

One gloved finger taps your forehead, then your collarbone, then he pokes your knee just because.

"Hmm. Still in one piece. Mostly."

You blink up at him.

"What'd you mean? Mostly?"

He leans closer, eyes glinting.

Now electric blue.

"No bite marks, no missing bits… Shame. You mortals bruise so easily. It's adorable!"

Then, without warning, he pinches your cheek like a nosy grandmother.

"Soft! See? Perfectly soft. Very snuggleable."

"You're mad." You say, entirely smitten...

He looks equally delighted.

"Awee... Compliment accepted."

You're soon drifting, warmth seeping through your limbs, safe in the strangest way possible.

Somewhere above you, the bed shifts, and you feel a heavy arm curl around your waist. Claiming.

He's really warm for something that shouldn't have warmth at all, or pulse.

Is It simulating all these things for you? Knowing humans find comfort in them.

The ruffles of his collar brush your neck.

His chest rises and falls slow and deliberate, like he's mimicking your breathing just to lull you.

Here's your answer. Even him breathing is intentional.

Long fingers trace patterns over your ribs, almost like he's mentally counting them.

You burrow closer anyway.

His laughter fades into something like a purr.

When you wake in the morning, he's gone. Only a single red thread is tied around your wrist, knotted neat.

Thank you for reading! You can support me by commenting, reblogging, and tipping!

🩷 Tipping Options

👻 October Masterlist

Divider by @saradika-graphics.

"What do you— how long?"

It stared at you, calculating, its left eye dropping to gaze at your throat. "Twenty seven years."

The thought of spending the next twenty seven years without that strange and bewitching entity was not a pleasant one. Not when you had come to feel such affection toward it. “Let me come with you–”

“No.” Its answer was firm, “Why, you would waste away to nothing but bones and dust. Pennywise must sleep alone.”

No amount of reasoning could change its mind. It couldn't wait just one more year, one more month even. It was time.

Several lonely hours had passed since it walked away.

You sat alone in your bed, accompanied only by the single red balloon Pennywise had left behind, bobbing in the breeze from your open window.

Perhaps it was meant as a souvenir, something to remember it by? Although you were never sure if a being like Pennywise could even care enough for such a gesture.

Sirens wailed in the distance and helicopters chugged through the night sky. Whatever was happening across the other side of town, it was big.

When morning came, the news would be flooded with reports of the chaos Pennywise had unleashed and the lives it had taken. It would sting. You almost felt your heart coiled a little tighter, preparing itself for that barrage of guilt. And the loneliness.

You closed your eyes and tried to push it all from your mind.

But that's when you felt it, a familiar presence beside you; dark, foreboding, unmistakable. Your heart unfurled.

“Pennywise?”

It didn't respond at first, it simply stood over you, watching, those eyes glowing in the dark of your room like little pieces of hellfire dedicated entirely to you. Your heart briefly entertained the idea that it had come back for you, that it couldn't stand to be apart for all those years either. But the cold creeping down your spine and the hairs bristling at the back of your neck warned you to run. They always did.

“I have feasted,” the entity’s voice broke the silence. It stepped out from the shadows, still wearing the guise of the clown; its favorite way to appear. “And now… I am in agony.”

“Oh, Pennywise, so am–” You paused, watching as it wrapped its arms around its middle and bent slightly at the waist. Its brow furrowed in discomfort. “Do you have a stomach ache?”

“Stomach ache,” it echoed, as if trying the words on. “Yes. I believe I do.”

It crawled onto the bed beside you, grunting, and flopped, belly-up onto the mattress. A gloved hand surrounded your own, pulling it toward its abdomen. “Soothe me.”

“You want tummy rubs?” you said, the teasing, affectionate tone of your voice causing those eyes to flicker toward you.

“Someone I ate disagreed with me.”

“You poor thing.”

“Hm.”

You couldn't help but smile as you rubbed gentle circles around its belly, watching its ghostly white face grow slack and relaxed.

Ordinarily, Pennywise's body felt soft and supple, comfortably well-fed, but that night it was over-stuffed and tighter than drum skin.

A sound which began as a groan rumbled through its chest and continued on and on, turning into a purr it would adamantly deny if pressed.

“Your hands are warm,” it murmured, ever-so-subtly tilting its head toward you until its temple rested on your shoulder. It hummed contentedly at the brush of your lips against the crown of its head, and though it may have been a trick of the light, you could have sworn you saw it open its lips to say something before snapping them back closed.

“Does this help?” you asked, still stroking its belly.

“It does,” it responded, growing heavier against your shoulder. “I think I will go for my long rest tomorrow.”

Not the normal summer lull, not the hush of heat and cicadas and lazy afternoons. This was...hollow. Like someone had taken a bite out of the town and left the air rearranging itself around the missing piece.

Bill still biked to the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He came in quieter now, shoulders hunched, hair in his eyes. You helped him find books, watched him sit alone at a back table, lips moving over words that didn't quite fill the space Georgie left.

Stan came on Saturdays. He never stayed long. He checked the bird books in the natural history section, ran his fingers along the spines like he was counting, and, sometimes, stood by the window as if he wanted to leave the town with the light.

Richie didn't come to the library at all.

You saw him at the arcade once, face washed in neon, laugh too loud as he heckled some older boys at the machines. His friends weren't with him. He pretended not to see you; you pretended not to see the tightness in his jaw.

They were all orbiting each other in sulks and bruises and unfinished arguments.

You did your job.

You walked Billy home when his father worked late. You walked Stan partway toward synagogue when his parents wouldn't let him bike alone that far anymore. You listened to Richie from a distance, tracking him by the sound of his voice on the street.

You hummed when the drains gurgled.

You tried not to think about Neibolt.

You tried not to think about the dark.

You tried not to think about him.

You failed.

It's late, the kind of late where Derry feels thin.

You're in your little apartment over the laundromat, curtains drawn half-open so you can watch the streetlights fuzz the edges of the dark. Your tea's gone cold. A book lies open on your lap, un-read.

There are no new missing posters on the boards.

No headlines about strange accidents or vanishing children.

For the first time in weeks, the town's sleeping like it believes in peaceful dreams.

It should comfort you.

Instead, it makes the quiet louder.

You know why there are no new posters.

He's resting.

Not asleep, not yet. Wounded things don't sleep deep. They keep one eye open. They mend. They sulk. They...wait.

So do you.

You're the one who goes to bed with Derry's maps still in your head. You're the one who knows which kids glow brightest when they sleep. You're the one with Mary's letters under your pillow, her careful script reminding you that "deadlights are as dead as stars: they only seem gone once you've named them."

You're the one who slips, more and more, in the edges of your own body. When you look in the bathroom mirror these days, there's a faint shimmer behind your eyes that never used to be there.

Mary called you a different kind of battery.

"He eats the current," she wrote once, ink blotted where her hand had trembled. "We stabilize it. Two poles. Same storm."

You close the book in your lap and stare at the window.

The air in the room changes.

It's subtle. A small drop in temperature, a tightening in the dim corners, the sense that the shadows have suddenly remembered what they're for.

You don't jump.

You just say, softly, "You've been good."

The corner of your ceiling...unfolds.

He doesn't bother with doors.

He pours out of the dark like smoke taking shape, coalescing in the far corner of the room. Not the full carnival clown tonight; something in between. The suit, yes, the ruff and the boots and the painted face, but softened, like someone smudged a thumb over the sharpest edges.

"Have I?" Pennywise asks, head tilting. "Been 'good'?"

He says the word like it's an insult.

"No new posters," you say.

He sways a little, considering.

"No new posters," he agrees. "Old meals last a while. I'm...pacing myself."

He looks oddly pleased, like a child who's been told he showed restraint.

You swallow down the flicker of relief that wants to bloom in your chest.

"You're healing," you say.

He grins, wide and lazy.

He's taken the lamp out of his head, but the crack remains. Fine lines across his temple, paint spiderwebbed. A faint glow pulses in the seam, like light leaking from an attic.

You find yourself staring.

He notices.

"Do you want to touch it?" he asks, sing-song, as if he's offering you a balloon.

You roll your eyes.

"You came into my apartment to show off your scar?" you say. "Vain much?"

"Oh, let me have my little trophies," he says, padding closer, boots soundless on your floorboards. "You left your mark. I left mine. One big cosmic exchange program."

He stops by the other end of the couch, close enough now that you feel the cold rolling off him like fog.

"You haven't asked me to leave," he observes.

"I haven't asked you to stop breathing, either," you say. "Doesn't mean I don't think about it."

He laughs.

"Sharp," he says approvingly. "You're always sharper when they're not around. Less...polite."

"Less busy," you say.

He hums.

"It's quieter upstairs," he agrees, meaning the town, the kids, the lines he runs through people's heads. "Downstairs, too."

His gaze flicks to the window, to the invisible paths under the streets.

"I noticed you stopped...poking," he adds. "No more slamming my drains shut. No more storm tantrums. No more bathroom concerts."

You shift, the couch springs creaking.

"You're not hunting," you say. "I'm...not interrupting."

He smiles.

It's a slow, knowing thing.

"You miss me," he says.

"You're in my head," you remind him. "You know what I missed."

He does.

You feel his awareness move through you, lazy and unhurried, like a hand trailing through water. He's not rifling, not digging. Just...testing the field. Tasting the edges.

Your deadlights flicker in response, flaring warmer when he skims close to certain thoughts: Neibolt's kitchen, your hand on his face under the house, the way his body folded wrong out of the fridge. The way your own body responded when he caged you against the mirror.

You hate that he sees it.

You hate how seen you feel.

He crosses the last few feet between you.

"May I?" he asks, surprisingly formal.

You look up at him.

"At what point," you say dryly, "have you ever asked permission?"

He shrugs.

"At this point," he says. "Different game, favorite."

He waits.

That's the worst part.

He's patient, tonight.

He's not dragging, not grabbing, not shoving.

He's offering.

You could say no.

You could tell him to get out, to slink back to his pipes and sleep on his wounds.

Instead, you breathe in slow and say, "Yes."

His smile goes bright and feral all at once.

"Good girl," he murmurs.

Your skin prickles.

He sits.

The couch dips under his weight, closer than politeness, not as close as you remember from the mirror. One gloved hand lands on the back of the sofa behind you, not quite touching your shoulders. The other rests on his knee, fingers flexing once, twice.

"Show me," you say.

Your voice surprises you.

Low.

Steady.

"Show you?" he asks, faux-innocent.

"What you are," you say. "You keep calling me the same. Prove it."

He watches you for a long, slow moment.

Then he leans in, breath cold against your cheek.

"That's not how this usually goes," he says. "Usually... you beg me not to show you. 'Don't open your eyes like that, mister, don't—'"

You lift a hand.

Press your fingers lightly to his jaw.

He stills.

"This time," you say, "I'm changing the rules."

He laughs softly, the sound curling between you.

His hand slides from the couch to your shoulder, heavy and very cold.

He's not human; his weight lands different, like gravity bends for him a little.

You can feel your heartbeat in your throat.

"Show me," you repeat.

"All right," he says.

He shifts closer, knee touching your thigh now, body angled toward you. The bells on his chest don't ring; they only chime when he wants them to, and tonight he wants quiet.

"Look at me," he murmurs.

You do.

His eyes are bright, bright, bright, yellow and bottomless, and as you meet them he lets the masks fall away, one by one.

The room tilts.

The edges of him blur.

For an instant you see the clown and the thing wearing it, overlapping like two images out of sync.

"Don't look away," he says, voice soft and oddly gentle. "You turn your head, it hurts more."

"Because you love making this easy," you manage.

"Oh, I do," he says. "For you."

Then he opens.

It's not physical.

There's no tearing, no literal lids peeling back. It's deeper, sideways, the way he did in the house, only this time you're not a child, and you're not unprepared, and you're not alone in it.

He pulls.

You let him.

For a heartbeat, the deadlights are all you've ever known.

You've drowned in them before. This is different. This time, they don't eat you; they reach for you, and something in you. Your own pale, stubborn lights, reach back.

He takes you with him.

You see the void between stars long before there were human names for either. You feel hunger as a first language, the cold curiosity of something that fell not so much from the sky as through it, curling into itself as it struck earth so hard it carved a scar in the world.

You feel the first time he tasted fear, not as a side effect but as a delicacy. Not on this planet. Not in this form. Somewhere else, someone else, lights blinking out in vast, slow patterns.

Eater of worlds.

Not metaphor.

Memory.

Lifetimes unfold at once, stacked: forest things worshiping shapes in the dark, cities that never wrote their histories, cataclysms swallowed in the gaps between recorded years.

You see Derry's ground open, eons later. Ice melting, rock shifting, his mass uncoiling in the new space, slipping into the cracks.

You see him learn your species.

Children go first.

Soft.

Bright.

Easier to chew.

He learns the shapes that scare them most. Wolves. Bears. Witches. Ghosts. Finally, clowns. An accident, at first: a parade, a laugh. The discovery that something that should be safe is the sweetest flavor when it's wrong.

You feel his satisfaction when he realizes fear seasons the meat.

You feel his boredom between cycles, curled in his nest of bones and scraps and memories, every light outside of him dim and flavorless. Until...

You.

Not you, then.

Small, furious, armed with an umbrella and a song and a light in her skull that doesn't belong to a human anything.

He tasted her when she hit him.

Just a sip on accident, a spark that jumped from her storm to his teeth.

It burned.

It thrilled.

He wanted more.

He couldn't eat her.

Not the way he eats the others.

The current wrong-footed him, snapped between them and went running elsewhere, into the pipes, into the dreams, into whatever wove the world together.

He learned quickly.

You don't smash the battery.

You...play with it.

He stalked Mary.

Pushed at her, prodded, tasted the edges of what she was. She pushed back, burned him badly once, badly enough he slept early.

When he woke, she was gone.

But something of her wasn't.

You see it: a little spark skipping line to line, from blood to blood, generation to generation. A different expression of the same light. He followed it distantly, too lazy to surface entirely, watching it flicker in different children's eyes, never quite settling.

Until you.

You, humming over cribs.

You, floating above carpets to fix cracked ceilings.

You, calling him "poison" with your hands shaking and your deadlights flickering in sync with his.

You're not a lesser thing.

You're...adjacent.

He shows you more, without words now... Just impressions of how he sees you: a tall, bright shape made of the same cold, aching hunger, wired differently. Where his nature says take, yours says hold. Where his says consume, yours says contain.

You don't feed like he does.

You siphon.

Soothe.

Recalibrate.

You keep little suns from flaring out all at once.

You see yourself through his eyes as a walking contradiction: a Mary Poppins silhouette cut from the aurora borealis, umbrella a lance of condensed storm, carpetbag a pocket of uncollapsed space.

A caretaker made from the same raw stuff as a devourer.

A battery turned upside down.

You feel him savor that.

The way your nature irritates and intrigues him both.

The way he could, if he tried, unmake you.

The way he won't, because you're too interesting.

The visions slow.

The deadlights dim.

You find yourself back on your couch, heart racing, lungs dragging air like you haven't breathed properly in years.

You're shaking.

Your fingers dig into the upholstery.

His hand is on your throat.

You register it all at once: his thumb under your jaw, four fingers curled along the side of your neck, just enough pressure to remind you he can crush if he wants to.

He doesn't.

He uses that grip to anchor you, to hold you in place while the world settles back into four walls and one small room and one painted face inches from yours.

His forehead rests against yours.

"You see?" he whispers. "Same storm. Different use."

Your throat works against his palm.

"You're a sinkhole," you rasp. "I'm...a dam."

He laughs, low and pleased.

"Exactly," he says. "Both made to move water. One keeps. One swallows."

His thumb strokes absentmindedly along the line of your pulse.

"You're not human," you say.

"You're not either," he says gently.

The words land and sink.

You've suspected.

Mary's letters danced around it.

You've felt it, in the age in your bones that doesn't match the calendar, in the way people forget your face if you stay away too long, in the fact that you've been doing this for more than one twenty-seven-year cycle and still look like someone's young aunt instead of a great-grandmother.

"Why don't you eat me?" you ask, blunt, because you're too rattled not to.

His grip on your throat tightens, not choking, just firm.

"Because you're not food," he says. "You're...flavor. You're decoration. You're a toy. You're..." His lips curl. "...mine."

Heat flares in you, confusingly layered, anger and arousal and something else you don't want to name.

"You don't own me," you say.

"I don't?" he asks.

His other hand finds your waist, fingers spanning the curve easily, holding you in place.

Your hips roll, just a little.

You don't mean to.

You do.

His smile sharpens.

"There it is," he croons. "You feel it too."

The pull.

The way his presence makes your magic buzz, your skin electric, your thoughts run too bright. The way nothing in your long, strange life has ever matched this intensity. Not people, not places, not other shining ones like Dick.

Only him.

"You're poison," you say again, but there's no real conviction in it now.

His mouth curves.

"You're immune," he says. "Or just...addicted."

His nose bumps yours.

Your hands, which had been clenched on the couch cushions, find his shirt, fisting in the rough fabric of his ruff.

"Maybe both," you say.

His laughter sinks into your mouth as he kisses you.

It's not human, the way he moves.

Too still at first, like he's mimicking something he's watched others do. Then suddenly present, all weight and cold and deliberate pressure. His lips are...wrongly soft, for a clown mask. The paint tastes bitter, like copper and chalk.

You open for him anyway.

He deepens it like he does everything, unhurried but unstoppable, carving out space, taking inventory. His thumb presses into the hollow at the base of your throat, feeling the hammer of your pulse as his tongue slides against yours, cool and searching.

Your deadlights flare hard, answering his like they're echoing.

He's showing you himself.

You're showing him you won't break.

His hand leaves your waist to map other lines, ribs, hip, the slow drag down your thigh that makes your muscles jump. There's nothing timid in it. He's not exploring to ask; he's exploring to learn, to catalog responses, to see where you spark brightest.

You let him.

You take, too.

Your fingers trace the crack in his temple, the faint raised edges where Bev's blow kissed bone. He shivers at your touch, the deadlight pulse under your fingertips jumping in rhythm with something that isn't a heart.

Your hand slips down, over his jaw, along the line of his neck, down to the place where his ruff meets the plates of his chest.

Beneath it, his body feels...solid.

Not empty costume.

Not all light.

Something in between.

"You like this," he murmurs against your mouth, sounding almost surprised. "My favorite likes being swallowed by the thing she hates."

"You're the only thing that makes me feel like this," you whisper back, honest despite yourself.

His laugh is a shudder between you.

"Good," he says.

His mouth leaves yours to wander, a cold drag along your jaw, the sharp nip at your ear that makes you gasp, the press of teeth at the side of your neck, testing, teasing. His hand on your throat tips your head back, baring more skin; his other hand anchors you, thumb drawing circles that make your breath hitch.

"You let me in," he murmurs, voice low and close. "You want this. Say it."

You could pretend you don't know what he means.

You don't.

"Yes," you say.

You feel his smile against your skin.

The lights behind your eyes swell and crest as he feeds you more of himself. Not devouring, not destroying, but saturating you with his presence. The physical and the not-physical blur together: his hands, his mouth, his mass around you on the couch; his history, his hunger, his cosmic loneliness threading into your own strange isolation.

You're not human.

You're not him.

You exist in the narrow, terrible space between.

Tonight, you stop pretending that space isn't where you want to be.

His hands roam, your body arches, the room narrows to cold and heat and the pull-pulse of shared deadlights. You let yourself fall into it, into him, into the way your nature and his snarl together like two currents meeting.

You know the limits. You have learned them the hard way before. There's a point past which his light will start to strip you, to peel you down layer by layer until there's nothing left but the part of you that matches him.

You go right up to that edge.

He takes you right up to it.

And, for now, he doesn't push you over.

Not yet.

At some point, the lights in your apartment have gone out.

You don't remember when.

You come back to yourself in the dark, hair mussed, clothes askew, breath slowing. Your throat is pleasantly sore where his hand had lain. Your magic hums under your skin, overstimulated and oddly sated.

He's half-reclined against the arm of the couch, one leg stretched out, the other bent, body draped in a boneless sprawl that shouldn't look comfortable and somehow does. His eyes are bright and lazy.

"Tasty," he says, sounding like he's had a very good meal without having swallowed a single scrap of you.

"You didn't eat anyone," you say, because you have to.

"Tonight?" he agrees. "No." His gaze flickers to the window, to the sleeping town. "I told you. I'm pacing myself."

You search his face.

"You showed me everything," you say. "Or...enough. Why?"

He shrugs one shoulder.

"You asked," he says simply. "And I wanted you to stop pretending you're not what you are." His grin returns, slow and satisfied. "You're mine, whether you admit it or not. But now you know you're also yours. That matters."

You frown.

"That doesn't make sense," you say.

"It will. Next time," he says.

You think of Bill's stubborn faith, Bev's defiance, Richie's anger, Stan's order, Ben's longing, Mike's patience.

You think of them grown.

You think of another cycle.

"When you sleep," you say slowly, "I'll still be here."

"Mm," he hums. "Standing guard? How noble."

"Standing between," you correct. "Between you and them. Between what you are and what they could become."

He considers that.

"They'll come back," he says. "One way or another. Light like that doesn't just go out. It...reincarnates. Regroups. Rewrites itself. Little losers, big losers, floating through time."

"I know," you say.

His eyes gleam.

"Good," he says. "I'd hate to get bored."

He pushes himself up, suit rustling.

At the window, he pauses.

Looks back at you.

"You're going to try to use what you saw against me," he says. It's not a question.

"Yes," you say.

"I'm going to use what I saw against you," he replies.

"I know," you say.

For a second, you just look at each other.

Eater of worlds.

Keeper of lights.

Not friends.

Not enemies in any simple way, either.

Something worse.

Something more.

"Sleep well, nanny bird," he says at last, voice soft as dust.

He steps into the corner shadow.

By the time you blink, he's gone.

The room is just your room again: small, cluttered, smelling faintly of tea and laundry soap and the ozone tang of your own magic.

You sit there on the couch in the dark, pulse still not entirely steady, deadlights thrumming low and warm behind your eyes.

Up the hill, in a house with too many books, Bill Denbrough stares at the ceiling, thinking of a well.

Across town, Richie Tozier dreams in neon and static, laughing too loud in his sleep.

Stanley Uris wakes once, heart pounding, convinced he hears a circus faint and far away.

Mike Hanlon rolls over and mumbles something about smoke and birds.

Beverly Marsh lies awake in a quiet apartment, bruised knuckles resting over the spot where she drove steel through a monster's skull.

None of them know that under their town, the thing in the drains is curled around its wounds, smiling.

None of them know that in a small apartment over a laundromat, the nanny who tucks them in and hums them toward sleep is sitting in the dark, lit from within by something that is not entirely her own.

You do.

For the first time in a very long time, you don't flinch from that knowledge.

You breathe in.

You breathe out.

You hum a tune Mary taught you a lifetime ago, feeling the storm answer, feeling the deadlights flare and settle.

You're not him.

You're not theirs.

You're something in between.

And the next time the cycle turns, you'll use both.

🎈🩸🤡🎈🩸🤡🎈🩸🤡🎈🩸🤡🎈🩸🤡