#stanscom

The window out to the fire escape is a quarter of a centimeter too big for it’s frame and the lock on top is broken, partially because the landlord had painted over it entirely before they moved in, but mostly because a week after they’d settled Bev and Richie had thought it would be an excellent idea to purchase something called a fruit slingshot from a gag gift website and try it out in the middle of their kitchen. They’d sent a rock hard, incredibly unripe pear directly into the top of their window pane less than two minute into playing with it. (Stan had, in fact, been there and fully within her rights and abilities to stop it, but thats neither here nor there; it had been really stupid but also, admittedly, fucking hilarious.) That's why she’s sure Ben had heard her coming, the window panes scraped on their way up and then banged into place, as aforementioned shitty windows do, but she doesn’t turn around to look at her until Stan has carefully slotted herself across from her.

“Hey,” she says, gently, because this is uncharted territory and she isn’t quite sure how heavily to tread upon it. Ben lets out a huff of air that could have been a laugh, though it’s certainly not Ben’s laugh and Stan would love to know who she stole it from.

Ben leans her forehead against the railing, setting her water bottle down on top of an open notebook Stan hadn’t noticed was there before. It’s one of her graph paper ones, the kind that she keeps extras of in messy, forgotten piles around their apartment because she fills them up too fast with designs and ideas and assignments and then forgets she has more when she goes to the store.

It’s homework.

Ben is out pouting on the fire escape at three in the morning doing fucking homework, which is not helping the part of Stan that is desperate to gather the facts of the situation and then sort them out in her brain until she comes to a logical conclusion and, more importantly, a logical solution. It’s certainly not out of character, but it also is, because Ben usually gets her homework done well ahead of time and she doesn’t even have a ruler or one of her six compasses (she lost the first one, bought a second, found the first one again, and then found an online store that made them with fun patterns the one time they ‘accidentally’ hotboxed in Bev’s room and bought four), she’s clearly just been using the edge of her calculator to draw wonky-straight lines.

“Hey. Why are you up? S’late.” Her voice comes out rougher than normal, which Stan is certain someone like Eddie, whose isn’t the best at social cues but fucking impeccable at vocal ones (a thanks to Sonia goddamn Kaspbrak Stan would like to present like a fuck you) would have fixated on; but Stan isn’t Eddie and thats not how she does things so she bulldozes right over it.

“National Geographic is doing a bird week and, like, it’s mostly been shit like ostriches and penguins, which are great and all, but they were finally doing one about non fucking flightless ones and I—”

“Got distracted?” Ben tilts her head a little, grinning in a halfway crooked way that makes Stan’s whole face, she’s sure, go pink; not because she’s embarrassed, her Losers are notoriously bad at embarrassing her, and even then Ben has literally fucking never embaressed her once in their entire almost-decade of friendship, but because it’s so genuinely Ben.

“Exactly.”

“Mmmm. Birds,” she snorts, dropping her forehead from the railing to bury her face into her hands. Which is kind of odd. Or, at least, Stan thinks it’s kind of odd. Certainly not a very Ben like response.

“Yes. Birds.”

“Fuckin’ birds.” Mhm. Yeah. Incredibly odd.

She takes advantage of Ben’s current bent-over-her-knees, face-in-hands position to look her over for more things that don’t seem to quite line up with the reality Stan is pretty solidly sure she exists under; like one of those ‘find what's wrong with the picture’ games they have in magazines for children.

“Why are you up?” She tries, carefully, after a long considering moment of trying to sort what’s changed from Ben A to make this Ben B.

“Got back from a date, gotta finish shit for… shit,” she twists to glance at her notebook, “Environmental planning. Fucking hate that class.”

Date. Stan tries to remember if she knew that that's where Ben had been tonight, and comes to the consensus that she’d probably been informed but she had work and then, afterwards, National Geographic to watch so she hadn’t really processed it.

It made sense though, when she put the puzzle pieces together;

Bev’s shitty sewing machine had been rattling on, then off, than on, then off, then he did a frustrated lap around the apartment and went back to on, then off—

Bill and Eddie had been irritable enough that Bill was pouting in her room with Virgina Woolf before Stan even came home from work and Eddie was outside in their singular allotted garage spot working on something to do with her car engine.

Mike had made bread with dinner, a dense ass brick of unpleasant wheat and yeast, because she’d gotten too overzealous kneading and beat the shit out of her dough before baking it.

Richie had spent the whole night overcompensating. Without context Stan had pretty much assumed she was the impetus for Bill and Eddie’s self imposed angry exile, but now she’s pretty damn certain she was just the final push.

All of that added up to ‘Ben’s on a date with her fucking boyfriend.’

Becuase everyone hated Ben’s stupid, asshole boyfriend, Stan violently included.

His name was Jason (shitty name), and he was a kind of gross looking guy (one of those chin strap beard douchebags) from her Intro to Art History class (he didn’t even like art, though, he was a fucking business major who needed to fill his arts credit); but that wasn’t why the Losers didn’t like him. The Losers didn’t like him because he was a fucking asshole, and all around lovely, incredible individuals like Bonnie Hanscom do not deserve to be dating assholes.

(The fact that they deserve to be dating people like the Losers goes incredibly unsaid.)

(They’re all thinking it though.)

“Where’d you go?”

“What?”

“On your… date?” Ben patters her free hand on her knee; she’s wearing a pair of jeans Stan knows she doesn’t like, but she wears them when she needs to look good because they make her ass look nice. Not that Stans is paying attention to things like that or anything.

“Oh, there was a party on the other side of campus.”

“How was that?”

“Bad. I don’t know, not like bad, but I didn’t really wanna go.”

“Why’d you go then, could have watched the birds with me,” Stan asks but it's an empty question.

Ben’s always been more of a follower than anything, it’s part of her ‘immediate-die-for-you puppy loyalty’ thing and something the Losers have long since learned they need to look out for because she’ll almost never actually say if she’s uncomfortable with something. She’ll just do it.

Someone who doesn’t care enough to pay attention to things like that wouldn’t have even known she didn’t want to do it at all.

“He wanted to.”

“Mhm.”

Ben and Stan tend to work under a blanket of incredibly comfortable silence when they’re alone together; the two of them have spent their fair share of hours, well before they were roommates, sitting on one of the other’s bedroom floors doing homework or reading in peaceful, pleasant quiet. This is… not that. Something in Stan’s stomach feels too tight for comfort.

“Are you drunk?” She smells drunk, but smelling drunk and smelling like a party are very similar things.

“I mean kinda.” It had been a stupid question; it seems Ben, voluntary DD of the fucking century, doesn’t get drunk unless it’s with her boyfriend.

“Jesus.” She rubs a hand down her face, “At least you’re drinking water.”

“Oh, this is not water,” she giggles a little bit when she says it, like it’s a fucking joke, and Stan’s whole chest goes freezer-burn cold.

“Ben.”

“What.” She whines back with the same intonation.

“Ben. Are you okay?” This is so incredibly out of character, or at least it was before Jason and Stan hated inconsistency just as much as she hates things not making sense; two things that seem to be prevalent themes on the fire escape tonight.

“Ugh.” She flops backwards with enough fervour that the grating rattles around them, “‘m fine, Stanny.”

“I don’t think you are.” She takes the opportunity to wrestle the water bottle out of her hands, throwing it over the railing and watching it bounce off the brick wall of the alleyway across from them. (She figures it’s alright as long as there isn’t a fucking flash fire, which seems unlikely.)

“Hey!” Ben whines, staring forlornly at the wall from under her bottom lashes without really lifting her head, “I was drinking that.”

“Mhm. We’re gonna try this again. What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Not really. I don’t know, he wanted me to drink more so we could go back to his place and I didn’t wanna and so he got pissed and took me home. It’s not a big deal.”

“Does he only… you know, when you're drunk?” They haven’t really discussed things like that, mostly because any discussion about Ben’s boyfriend as a collective ended either desperately awkward or with yelling, but now Stan’s wondering with a certain level of abject terror whether or not they fucking should have.

“No-p-e, this was the first time he’s brought it up. But he was drunk too so it’s fine.”

“No it’s fucking not fine, Ben, what the fuck.” “I mean I can’t really blame him.”

“What the fuck does that mean.”

“I mean,” she huffs out a laugh, tipsy and unamused, “Look at me.”

The terror and the frustration and whatever the fuck is coursing it’s way through Stan’s circulatory system stops, abrupt and frozen stiff in her veins. Something’s shifted in the conversation, this is worse than Ben being tipsy and late on her homework, this is worse in a way Stan can’t even really name.

“What?”

Ben doesn’t even say anything, she just buries her arm over her face and sad-laughs again, like she hasn’t just dropped a whole ass bombshell on Stan’s lap.

“Ben, what the hell does that mean?”

“Can we… can we not have this conversation right now?” She groans, muffled through her sweater sleeve.

“Yeah, no, we’re not fucking dropping what you just said what does that mean?”

“I’m fat.” She drags her arms away from her face, glaring, “Happy?”

“I- no, I’m not happy, I’m confused.” She says, flat where she’s sure she should be gentle, but she’s just so genuinely baffled she can’t manage it. And maybe that’s because Ben is just drunk and not making any sense, but she’s not dropping it yet.

“Oh, come on, don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Act… act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.” Her bottom lip wobbles a little, but she jams her hand up her face roughly and once she drops it her whole expression is smoothed out and sort of angry again.

“I sincerely do not.”

“Fuck off. I’m fat and ugly and it’s fucking obvious.”

“Did he—” She has to stop and take a second to even her breathing, “Did he tell you that you were ugly?”

The thing is, Stan was aware coming into this conversation she fucking hated Ben’s boyfriend, that just the mention of him made her feel the faintest sort of warm and shaky feeling all over; like she was coming down with something. But picturing him having the audacity to look at Ben Hanscom, of all people, and call her ugly has her so fucking pissed she doesn’t even know what to do with her hands; they flex themselves in her lap for a few seconds before reaching back to grab one guardrail at the back of the fire escape, stabalizing her to the spot she’s sitting so she doesn’t hug Ben so hard they topple several hundred feet to the ground or leave Ben all alone, drunk and upset at two in the morning on the fire escape, to go murder her boyfriend.

“He didn’t need to,” Ben snaps, not answering the goddamn question. Stan’s starting to realize she’s good at that.

“You're not ugly, Ben.” It feels empty, like she should be saying more, but she doesn’t know that more, she just knows that Ben Hanscom is not fucking ugly, “And you should break up with your boyfriend.”

Because she should.

“Jesus Christ. We are super not having that conversation right now.”

And maybe she’s right, maybe drunk and upset Ben isn’t the right Ben to be discussing things this important with, but Stan, unfortunately, is secretly one of the most stubborn of her friends. The only person less likely to stop was fucking Eddie.

“If you want me to not bring shit up, stop being so concerning.”

“I’m not being concerning, you’re just not fucking getting it.”

“Then say something that makes sense!”

“I'm trying to!”

“Well try again because this isn’t it!”

“He’s the only person who's ever gonna want to ever date me. There.” She sits up abruptly, and shuffles all the way back against the wall under the window, and for a second Stan’s worried she’s just going to leave; storm through their kitchen and into her shared room with Mike (whose certainly still waiting up for her, and who will certainly try to do what Stan is doing with far more grace, but Stan’s fucked it so she’ll just be ignored), door locked in her face; but she just curls half up over her knees and buries her face in her hands.

For a startling second she looks like twelve year old new kid, Bonnie ‘Please call me Ben but if you don’t want to it’s fine I really don’t care’ Hanscom hiding in the back row of Stan’s eighth grade English class.

(When Ben had first come home from her Intro to Art History class demanding someone tell her what the fuck you wear to a date, Richie had made a shitty joke— as Richie Toziers are wont to do.

‘Who’d have guessed Haystack would be the one to score a college boyfriend first?’

Stan doesn’t think she’s ever seen Ben get so immediately angry, face going entirely red as she snapped ‘what the fucks that supposed to mean’ and stormed into her bedroom.

Richie hadn’t meant anything by it, they all knew Richie never meant anything by it, hell, Richie had looked like someone had slapped her for the rest of the night, because no one had ever seen Ben get so tetchy about this kind of shit that it almost felt like they’d entered a parallel universe.

They’d just figured she’d had a bad day, though. Those happen and they didn’t read too much into it. Richie had apologized, Ben had, unnecessarily, apologized, and Bev had very awkwardly helped Ben pick a date outfit.

Now Stan’s starting to think they should have asked more questions.)

“That’s not true.”

Ben scoffs, like she’s joking, and she really doesn’t know how to explain how little humor she’s finding in the world of their fire escape right now.

“It’s not.”

“Sure, whatever, this fucking bit your doing where you pretend you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about isn’t goddamn funny, Stan, it’s mean.” Her word choice is angry, like she’s crafting sentences that can be best yelled to win an argument, but her voice has fallen out of her, quiet and sad and small. Twelve year old new kid in the back row of English again.

And something clicks.

It’s a something Stan could really have done without having clicked into place, and she has to wonder, just a little bit, why everything seems to go back to fucking Derry, Maine.

Fucking Jason didn’t need to tell Ben that he thought she was ugly. Of course he didn’t. Their entire graduating fucking class already had. Their entire goddamn hometown had made it clear from day one they did not think Ben Hanscom was the type of person who deserved to be in a relationship, they’d just all assumed she didn’t let it get to her, but of course it had.

Derry, Maine had mastered the art of digging its way under your skin well before any of them were born.

But... the Losers have never been a well acclimated part of Derry, that’s why they're all the way across the country right now, that's why they’d built a club-house below the town, and Stan had just assumed Ben knew that they were different.

“Ben you are one of the smartest fucking people I’ve ever met you can’t be this stupid.”

Now, in retrospect Stan really wants to make it clear she didn’t mean to kiss Ben. That wasn’t really the plan.

But when has anything involving the Losers Club ever gone to plan?

“What the fuck.”

“I- sorry. Fuck. I should have asked—”

“That's not funny, Stan. Thats- I- why are you being so fucking awful tonight?” She shoves herself upward into a wobbly standing position, actually going for the window this time but Stan had accidentally closed it behind her; it's a generally unspoken rule that you don’t because it’s almost impossible to open from the outside sober, and Ben’s fingers keep slipping. Privately Stan gives her past self a semi-guilty high five, “You can’t just do that when you don’t mean it.”

“Who says I didn’t mean it? I've wanted to kiss you like that since we were thirteen.” It’s sort of a big confession, one none of the Losers have really been ballsy enough to make even though, honestly, Stan gets the feeling they’ve all been thinking it since high school, to some extent, but it doesn’t come out the way she thinks a love confession is supposed to. Because Stan is getting pissed. Not at Ben, absolutely not at Ben, but at Derry, and at the world, and at Jason, and at the Losers for not noticing sooner that Ben was feeling like this.

“Bullshit.”

“Ben, I don’t do bullshit.” She doesn’t, unless it's for very, very special occasions like getting ten bucks out of Richie for finding her glasses when they’re just on top of her head. This is something Ben knows, and she can see how her logical little brain is trying to backflips to deny it.

“I—” And then she doubles over and vomits on her shoes.

When she un-doubles she’s crying, and there's something earth-shattering in it, because Stan knows she’s drunk, even if part of her forgot until she was stuck staring at Ben vomit dripping between the slats of their fire escape to the one below (Mr. Willis, their downstair’s neighbor and the biggest dick any of them have ever met, is gonna be pissed), but regardless, Ben doesn’t cry.

That’s stupid though, a stupid, silly, idealistic-but-not-really, idea; everyone fucking cries. Stan cries more than she’d like to, and Richie, who bottles all her shit up, always ends up sobbing into Stan’s shoulder eventually. Everyone cries, and now Stan’s stuck wondering where Ben has been going to do it where none of them could see, because she was too stupid to realize.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay—” This is something she generally knows how to do, this is something not Ben-distress specific, this is rubbing the back of someone who just puked and forcing their fucked up window open and grabbing ibuprofen from where they, inexplicably, keep it in the breadbox.

Ben curls herself around the glass over water Stan hands her, rubbing a hand rough enough over her eyes Stan feels the need to catch her wrist and hold it.

“You should get some sleep, we can talk tomorrow when you're less fucked up.” The ‘with everyone’ goes unsaid, because this is the kind of thing that they both know requires a ‘with everyone’ kind of conversation.

“I don’t wanna ever talk about it. It’s embarrassing.”

Stan squeezes her wrist, careful, gentle, and let's go.

“It’s not embarrassing.”

Ben just hums and slams her forehead against the kitchen counter.

“Why’d you kiss me,” She whispers, against the fake-marble, and Stan is secretly grateful they’re not looking at each other. She presses her fingertips into the ridges on the cap of the ibuprofen bottle just hard enough that it stings and tries to think of how to simplify ‘I’m desperately and entirely gone for each and every one of our friends in a way that both defies logic and makes the most sense in the world and you are included in that group of friend’s I’m in love with and hearing you be so mean about yourself genuinely made me want to break something because I think you are incredible and brilliant and sweet and beautiful and the only thing I could think to do was kiss you.’

She settles for: “I don’t know. I wanted to.”

“I think you felt bad for me.”

“Once again, you’re too goddamn smart to be this dumb.”

“I’m drunk,” She states, like an out of place reminder and Stan makes a point to set the painkillers back in the bread box quietly.

“Let's get you in bed, then. We can talk tomorrow.”

She kicks Richie out of their room to share with Mike, she doesn’t totally need to, she trusts Mike to make sure Ben doesn’t choke on her own puke or something, but this is Stan’s problem she’s inserted herself into, she’s going to carry it out.

And, anyway, it’s much more complicated to have to kickstart an awkward conversation about Ben’s deep rooted insecurities out of nowhere than to shoot Richie a look over Ben’s head, and know that she’s going to carry it over to Mike, which will, by tomorrow morning, result in it being carried over to the rest of the Losers, who will be clamoring to have a ‘oh my god, is Ben alright’ conversation because they always are when something is wrong with one of their seven. That's part of why Stan loves them so desperately.

Richie comes back for a second with a balled up armful of Ben’s pajamas, because she’s the kind of perceptive bastard who thinks about things like that, and Stan busies herself changing the sheets on Richie’s crapped out twin while Ben tugs off her party jeans.

She’s gentle guiding Ben under the sheets of her own, only slightly better, twin, folding half the blankets off of her because Ben always gets hot in the middle of the night, but keeping them at the foot of the bed just in case she gets cold tonight.

She’s less gentle maneuvering herself under Richie’s blankets, slamming punches into Richie’s flat-ass pillow to force it into any semblance of a shape with fists she wants to slam into Jason’s dumb ass chin strap for being such a garbage boyfriend and into herself for not noticing what was wrong and into the Welcome To Derry sign on the town line of their hometown they’d driven away from a year and a half ago and never drove towards ever again for being the worst place to grow up ever.

And Stan is angry.

And Stan’s lips still feel kind of buzzy, in a guilty, incredible way, from her frat-party-beer-soured, ill-advised Ben kiss.

She can’t, totally, bring herself to regret it, though.

But that’s all shit to unpack tomorrow, sat in their designated seats in the living room (she’s pinned between Richie and Bill on the couch, Eddie’s got the beanbag, Bev, by choice, is on the floor against the wall, Mike gets the recliner, Ben sits where there is a seat available. Tomorrow, Stan gets a feeling that should be her couch cushion, in the center of everything, she can share the beanbag with Eddie), probably with coffee from a can poured into the same mug as something stupid like red bull because all seven of them make absolutely garbage decisions when they need to have serious conversations.