A/N: Please R&R!
Bill took his infant brother out onto the front porch as their mother and father fought tooth and nail behind them. Neither had heard the baby screaming, but it was only when Bill carefully lifted Georgie up and began walking with the baby steadily that the unbearable bedlam became manageable.
It was difficult to hold his infant brother carefully and close the door behind him at the same time. Yet, Bill fared as he walked from the living room and kept from looking back at the sorry state of his home. Instead, the child took everything in what lay outside his home, sending a wistful gaze at the wet, gray world made by the unending rain in his small town of Derry.
The rain was nice – it poured down from the gutters and dripped from the edges of the awning above them. Bill could feel flecks of water against his skin, and wondered to himself how rain could fall and still touch him.
The little boy watched the sky and the shivering trees with placid round eyes, rocking Georgie gently from left to right to soothe them both. The baby's cries had softened into uncertain whimpers that arose whenever his older brother became too distracted. Bill was in the mood to swing his body from side to side until he got dizzy, but he more often did the opposite and became greatly still. Bill was so practiced in being still, quiet, and "not annoying" that sometimes either of his and Georgie's parents found fault with that too – wondering dismally if their son was displaced by catatonia.
Bill told himself to stay still as his legs ached from standing in one place for too long and his stomach growled when he remembered not eating since earlier that morning. He obeyed the mantra until the wind became heavier and shook the trees above the awning, and harassed the sheets still left on the clothes wire next to him.
Bill's attention spurred, as he turned in a circle slowly, and came to stop in front of the forgotten sheets that had been severely dampened by the downpour. The white cloth was see-through now, after being drenched and already thin to begin with.
Bill wondered if the sopping sheets had caught fire, when he noticed a flare of stark and brilliant orange in the gloom. The child narrowed his gaze, straining to see what it was when the color didn't die down and remained alight, and soon Bill could identify a lone man standing in the rain. The man was hulking, towering above the clothes wires and so very close to touching the clouds that his red hair stuck out like devil's horns above the gloom.
The plain cloth surrounding him couldn't hide his unusual appearance, as aside from the hair, Bill noticed that the man was extremely pale and decked in silver, with more red glazed over his lips and surfing the pallid skin. The red highlighted a second smile to frame the real one that the man was sporting, and Bill connected the dots after but a moment of consideration – the man was a clown.
"Hi." The clown in Bill's backyard waved cheerily, heedless to the rain that barely touched a hair on its enlarged head.
Bill rocked from side to side, still with an armful of his petite, infant brother. Though the boy's spine tingled unpleasantly at the untold appearance of the circus worker, and right beside the Denbrough home, Bill only feared being impolite in that moment. His mother and father had, perhaps, not instilled a fear of strangers deep enough into him for Bill to recognize the gooseflesh over his arms and legs as warning signs.
The expression on the clown's face flickered from overly-joyous to a deep, histrionic frown that made the slivers of red daubed against his cheeks elongate, like paint as it absorbed a blank page.
"Aww," He cried in that high, nasally voice that distorted ever so slightly into a grumblier mockery of itself. "Aren't you gonna say 'hello'?"
"H-hi." Bill called eventually, remembering not to drop his brother as he acknowledged the strange man. Bill went silent, drawing it out to see if either his mother or father would stop shouting long enough to hear him speak.
No one came out of the house.
The clown smiled again, blue eyes shining in the dim light around him. "You look like a nice boy, but unhappy."
Bill watched as an elegant but larger, gloved hand reached out to him, and he realized for the first time that the clown man had balloons in the other. It'd been a long time since Bill had seen balloons, especially ones so vibrant and red. His birthday had been recent, but the child couldn't quite recall any balloons on that day when all the fuss had been directed upon the newborn Georgie.
"You look unhappy, Billy." The clown's voice was a whisper, pleasant and soft, perhaps even sweet. His rabbit teeth were pronounced upon his lips as he spoke, and it seemed to make the words that poured out of his mouth more cluttered and lisp-like. "I bet I could cheer you up with a balloon. You like balloons, don't you?"
Bill nodded, hair catching in the little roll of cold wind. It made the chimes hanging above him and Georgie tinkle as they were meant to.
"Come and get one." The clown said then, kindly still. "Come, come now."
Bill wanted to, surely. He wanted to forsake all else just to run and grab the whole bunch of them bobbing around as flashily as fireworks against a backdrop of drab grey.
He stilled when that niggling part of his brain and the bundle still in his grasp weighed him down. "But it's cold… and Georgie… He'd get sick."
The clown nodded at Bill's answer without hesitation, as if he'd expected it. "You do look cold, I agree. You look so unhappy and so cold."
"I have to keep Georgie from getting too cold." Bill agreed in a small voice.
It was odd, but just then it seemed like the clown was closer than before. Much closer.
"I could keep Georgie from getting too cold, too." The stranger said, still dry and without a drop of rain on his satin suit. "I could keep you both warm. It's warm underground. It's warm where it never rains, and the lights from the circus tent are always glowing. That's where I live, Billy. Do you want to live there, with me?"
Those eyes emerged like lights to Billy. As pretty and sparkling and unnatural as Christmas lights.
"There's a… a circus underground?" Bill whispered in awe. The balloons were coming closer, too.
"Yes." The clown was mere inches away, unblinking as he bent down fluidly to speak with the child at an affable angle. "It was an ordinary circus… till a storm blew the whole thing away, and me with it!"
The fiery-haired clown giggled contagiously, prompting the starry-eyed little boy to smile a shy, open-mouth smile revealing the gap where his two front teeth should've been.
As soon as it came, the happy demeanor of the clown waned and died into a more unsettling, serious trance. "It was an ordinary circus… but it was cold. We were all cold – everyone was yelling and screaming and they ignored us. Pennywise was so cold and alone…"
Those askew eyes never left Bill's, though the stranger was holding out the balloons for the boy to take. Georgie had fallen silent and sleeping between the two.
"That's me, Billy. Billy meet Pennywise. Pennywise meet Billy." Pennywise extended a hand from himself to Bill and back, before gently squeezing the child's shoulder. He'd caged the 7-year-old in, but had not yet scooped him up. So close, and yet…
The Denbrough boy had been one that the eldritch being had scouted for weeks beforehand. Pennywise was always on the hunt, to see if this child or that child was worth investing in. Initially, what had garnered Pennywise's attention was that the baby was never blamed for the neglect that Bill himself suffered. And that was even when Bill was clearly keen to an inordinate sense of self-preservation, the likes of which Pennywise could see himself coveting. The clown's shrewd, yellowing eyes studied the child and wondered once more if Bill Denbrough was too old to be his.
Pennywise lifted a single balloon between the two of them, and gestured for Bill to hold out his wrist. The clown man carefully tied the tassel of the balloon around Bill's wrist, as they, together, kept Georgie from tumbling from his brother's cradling arms.
Bill's smile was sweeter now, while his eyes followed the balloons. He was completely enamored with them as Pennywise took the bundle that was his baby brother into his longer and larger arms completely. The baby weighed nothing, and from the look of Bill's abnormally angular and thin face, neither would he.
"Are you still unhappy, Bill?"
He feigned disappointment well, but delirious sparks of triumph burst inside Pennywise the moment the voices within the house, that had died down throughout their conversation, flared up again. It made the child dwarfed in Pennywise's shadow cave in on himself. The bantam boy's eyes watered not from the wind, and he ducked his head down not from the cold.
Bill tried to speak, with a tremulous look in the clown's direction. "I d-don't mean to b-b-be."
His head canted in the direction of Pennywise's hands when the clown brushed away his tears. Those hands were visible claws, and as sure as any little boy who believed in magic and myth, Bill was certain that he would die by them. Monsters, adults… it was all the same when it came to how cruel those that were bigger than you could be.
"No, no. No one means to be." Pennywise kept kneeling, and with that impossible strength and grace, brought Bill inward and squeezed his shoulder as a comforting parent might. That aching caveat within was roaring less for Pennywise the closer it got to Bill. And like he'd imagined, all worry that the child wouldn't fit in with what the alien had in store for him and his brother fell away like ice melting beneath a sweltering sun.
Bill rested his cheek against the stranger's shoulder and closed his eyes, eyelashes wet with tears. Georgie was safely sandwiched between them. He listened when a rumbling began from some unknown source, and Bill believed it to be thunder. He could imagine that in the flash of blinding lightening to follow, the inhuman thing that had a grip on him would strike.
Bill buried his nose in Pennywise's shoulder. "Am I g-gonna die?"
Unbeknownst to the child, Pennywise grinned and huffed quietly against his temple. The rumbling from within became denser, richer, as the horror preserved a constricting grip around the drowsy boy.
"Oh no…" Pennywise murmured, as he lifted Bill up from the deck of his home. "Why would I destroy what was MiNe?"
Little, sparky Michael Hanlon – Mikey – had been the first that Pennywise had stolen and willingly kept beneath the hushed town of Derry.
Humans were inherently petty creatures, and while Pennywise himself was the pettiest being to exist in their plane, he couldn't quite fathom why they practiced isolation by the most innocuous of unshared attributes.
The entity had understood it over time, when he'd thought to give humanity a fair stretch in (unconsciously) teaching him how they existed from day to day. Pennywise, even before he'd claimed the name and the form, had had time to kill in-between meals. He also stuck to a rigid form of predatory advancement, testing the waters of what lay beyond his Well House. And with that came some concessions, including observing the generations of people that lived in his domain in everything they did. Pennywise had learned much and taken root deep within the lives of the people that were his own, feasting on the fruits of every little frightening thing that came into the Derry folks' path.
They feared strangeness, yes. Yet, these people feared those whom were different even more.
At first, Pennywise had been unable to tell the difference. That had not been a mistake built to last, however, when the Hanlon family began to stock in a farmhouse that may or may not have been built by slave hands. Times changed radically, and still the It that was not quite a clown saw no change in the behavior between those who were paler in complexion and those who were dark.
The Hanlons were forever at a disadvantage through no fault of their own – not that Pennywise was going to interfere. Whatever evoked terror into the heart was more than welcome from It's perspective; even if the crimes committed against that island of a family were always curious. As a matter of fact, there had been many disappearances and brutal deaths that Pennywise had had no hand in.
Case in point, when Mikey's home in the suburbs – tentatively erected into a neighborhood of white people when Mike's parents wanted to branch out from the farm – was burned to the ground.
The blaze was glorious, though it had begun from a speck of human slime: three Derry police officers on their last rounds for the night. The men had drunken cheap beer and littered the ground with empty bottles and cigarette butts before one of them had come swaggering close to the unassuming Hanlon house with a soaking rag sticking from a bottle.
Officer Bowers had pulled out his lighter and from the shadows, Pennywise watched the young man showcase a feral grin as he plunged a bottle through the kitchen window. The men laughed uproariously and loitered in time to catch a few fireworks. Smoke plumed from the shattered window and sparks of angry red and yellow built up behind the remaining shards of glass hooked into the window sills.
The officers left, wobbling and hooting into their car and never to return or to repent for their actions. Already the fire grew, its smoke consuming the entire downstairs of the home and rising upward, even as it billowed from every possible outlet into the open night air. Pennywise watched in silence, trying not to get too hopeful that the Hanlons would wake up and panic in alarm. You could never rely on humans to suit your needs when the opportunity for it to happen was perfect, as Pennywise had learned. Mr. and Mrs. Hanlon could die sleeping in their beds, for all the clown knew, and there was no point in pouting over it if that was the case.
The clown could not bring himself to step away from the house that was quickly going up in flames. Pennywise waited, teeth hedging from their gums and tongue lathering his lower lip, just in case that delectable taste could be detected in the air. The true predator in the cosmic horror could bide its time, for it knew that all good things come to those who wait.
His uncharacteristic patience in the moment paid off, when Pennywise perked up at the stench of cold, calamitous fear and the more telling sound of screaming from above his hiding place.
It was intoxicating – an atmosphere of chaotic fear, the kind that writhed in a stranglehold. The Hanlon family was doomed. Doomed from treading outside their social norms, doomed from being locked within a hothouse, doomed from being born with what had been deemed inferior features. Pennywise was driven by salivating desire to spindle his way into the home, brushing off the mad heat that turned what little air could not escape the building into visible waves.
The shrieks he followed got louder near the tippy-top of the house, where Pennywise watched a man and a woman trying to beat down the door of one of the rooms down the hall. They were trapped in a literal ring of fire, climbing to lick the ceiling as well as suffocate the couple.
Pennywise didn't think much of whatever it was beyond that door, until the relentless pounding of hands and the horrendous wailing from Mr. and Mrs. Hanlon slowly withered and died. Their bodies curled like burning paper, fragile and now wafer-thin to the all-consuming flames. At that time, the clown had thought that all the fun was over, while he walked through flame and acid-smelling shambles of wood to survey the corpses. There was nothing left – their prying hands had only just scraped through the doorframe before melting down with the rest of them.
The jingling of Pennywise's bells, as he stepped over their bodies in the eerie dead air, was interrupted by that human-screaming starting up again. The muffled vocalization came from the room that the Hanlons had tried with all their might to reach into, desperate and pitched to a hypnotic whine. And that was when the entity sought what lie behind that door.
Ah – Aha!
The creature raised one hand with a flourish, as he startled the only other living thing in the house.
The Hanlons had a child, barely more than a babe. Pennywise knew the boy the moment he saw him: Michael Hanlon wrung the bars of his drab crib and protested the unknown danger with shrill cries. He screamed his little head off, having just awoken to hear the flames crackling against his nursery door and the dying of his parents. All that was before Pennywise had stepped out into the center of the room like a ringmaster to introduce an all-new circus act.
Drool was already building at the corner of the clown's ruby lips – waiting for the fear of Mr. and Mrs. Hanlon hadn't been such a waste of time after all. Pennywise's massive shoulders shook while he giggled in the middle of the room, which he realized with just a quick glance, was a soft and too-sweet room meant for a toddler.
The clown wasn't too hungry, but then frightening such a tiny, disgruntled welp of a human wasn't going to require that much work nor preparation on his part. It was even better when Pennywise considered how long the child had had to be terrified at this point, as Mikey had been screaming for quite a while now.
It was perfect, before Pennywise sniffed the air and shook with disgust.
Disgust which only, really, lasted for a minute at most before the entity froze in his fashioned cocoon of a body. Amid the fresh ash and the scent of burning carcass aiding in the dispiriting of pure terror and agony, was an electric sensation of a different sort. Mikey was fearless in his pursuit of safety and warmth.
The tiny boy needed no words to express himself, as Mike's arms came up and were held out to Pennywise beseechingly. His big, warm brown eyes stared without an ounce of anxiety or wariness, for this child was too young to know what a villain was like. Mike only wished for a protector, and it so happened that Pennywise was the only being present.
In the end, it was surprisingly easy for Pennywise to wind his hands over the child's ears and smooth down his curly wisps of hair with delicate precision. It was surprising, for the clown didn't rip the child's head off in that moment, nor did he open his unearthly jaws wide and dig into Mike's soft skin with his daggers for teeth.
The amount of trust and devotion, and the feeling of safety like a blanket made of the softest, freshest fleece and warmest wool worked like a stake to a vampire's heart. The alien's fate was sealed when Mikey touched Pennywise's porcelain skin and clung to his wrist with tiny hands that could barely fit around them.
The monstrosity wondered – when the rattling that had begun inside of himself came to coil and lock within his impossible body, seizing like several hearts that, all at once, could take no more, and when the scent of Mike and his adoration for himself that Pennywise committed to memory – if, had he ever taken the time to hold a human child for as long as he'd held Mike Hanlon, if he would have been a different thing of his kind altogether.
The baby boy babbled, begging to be picked up and Pennywise did just that. He let the dark-skinned boy nestle into his ruffled chest, grabbing at the clown costume with uncoordinated little fingers that crashed against the bells that hung from Pennywise. He lay, curled and content in the creature's arms, needing protection as much as he needed air. It was strange to the stranger, who'd never experienced the weight nor starlight-like warmth of offspring in its claws seeking protection, how much it mattered that Mike got what he wanted.
Mikey, within an instant, was claimed and converted, in Pennywise's mind, into a necessity to be protected. His small, still-growing being was mapped out for the eldritch figure, and Pennywise breathed in deeply the scent of trust and contentment.
Mine.
They traveled away from the debris of the former Hanlon home, and into the dark, damp night as quickly as smoke traveled through bare hands.