A/N: BEFORE YOU COME FOR ME - I do enjoy the original Pennywise as a murderous, evil asshole and the original story is great! It's just that I personally enjoy messing with the whole 'pure evil' thing as well, and thought it was hilarious how Pennywise can't get his shit together when he's doing basic stuff (like walking to one kid or keeping his eyes in-tact). I'm not trying to romanticize or excuse this fictional character's canonical actions, I'm just doing my own weird thing with these characters.
If you don't like safe, warm stuff in a horror movie genre, I apologize, but please don't harass me about it. I'd like to keep expressing my ideas without suffering through that.
It stayed in the darkness, cooped up in a cozy, hand-chosen area beneath a long abandoned house. The well that It retired to every 27 years or so felt like a comforting entrance into its abode, stacked high with trophies and treasures that belonged to the curious and curiously small residents of Derry, Maine.
Derry had been It's home for longer than 200 years, and yet many of the lost valuables belonging to its children had crumbled without ever being returned. Instead, like It itself, tricycles, dollies, miniature umbrellas, toy trucks, sandbox and bathtub toys remained in the darkest of reaches below the ever-changing town. Many of these things had crumbled to dust and scattered within the unchecked sewer system, in fact, or stayed floating in place out of some sentimentality that It remained victim to.
For as long as the cosmic entity had hunkered down in the pipelines of Derry, Maine, It had never been encountered any child willing to retrieve its possessions within the mainline.
"Be careful."
Georgie had already raced after his water-swept boat by the time his brother's voice on the walkie-talkie registered. He was preoccupied with the fun of trying to keep up, so much so that Georgie forgot to look where he was going and soon bashed his head, first against a police roadblock just a few lawns down from the Denbrough house and then against the paved street beneath it.
Woozy and short of breath, Georgie crawled beneath the roadblock while trying to regain his sense of direction. Amid the blurred vision onset by the rain and the fall, the child saw a slice of white steadily roaming down the lush of rainwater rolling down the sidewalk and he made a run for it. Panic rose in the child's throat as he spied the dark, rectangular mouth of death that was one of several sewer grates on their suburban neighborhood streets fast approaching.
"No!" Georgie cried, just as the paper boat sailed away and away, right down into the gutter. "Bill's gonna kill me!"
The little boy knelt in the pouring rain, feeling it seep into his jeans and into the toes of his galoshes to wet his mismatched socks, and peered into the pitch blackness beneath the sidewalk. Georgie couldn't see a thing, much less the little paper boat that Bill had worked hard to make and that Georgie himself had risked life and limb in getting wax for.
"Oh… where are you?" Georgie whimpered, wishing that the boat never fled from his watchful care.
He squinted into the darkness, as if it would help him see through the perpetual night beneath the road and find the long-gone paper creation. He was so caught up in his relentless, pointless searching, that Georgie nearly leapt back ten feet when he did manage to see something. A flash of beady black surrounded by a simmering, stuttering yellow-blue met Georgie's gaze from within the grate.
The 6-year-old squeaked, just as he heard someone speak from out of the sewer.
"Hiya Georgie!" The sewer said, voice just as squeaky. "What a nice boat!"
He could still barely see a thing, but the bizarre eyes were smiling at him, one more askew than the other. It was more than a little unnerving to the child, who shook slightly at the unexpectedly conscious, person-like thing that had answered him.
Georgie clapped his hand over his mouth, feeling droplets of water splash on his cooling skin at the motion. "Um, thank you."
He wasn't supposed to talk to strangers. He knew he wasn't supposed to, even if said strangers were hard to see and sounded kind of strange and breathy as this one.
"Who're you?" Georgie couldn't help but ask, rationalizing it in his mind that if he knew the name behind the voice, that he'd be able to get past punishment from his mom, or risk disappointing Bill of all people.
The child's brow scrunched. He didn't want his bestest best friend to be mad or disappointed in him for breaking such a simple rule.
In answer, a pale as the moon hand stretched out and hovered within the boy's line of sight – it was a very human-looking hand, much to Georgie's surprise while he leapt away just that much more – but what caught Georgie's eye first and foremost was the paper boat in its grasp. The boy reached out to grab it, and was instantly rewarded.
"You don't want to lose it." The soft, pitchy voice was hard to decipher then, as if whoever stood in the sewer below was moving away with every word. "Bill's gonna kill you."
"She." Georgie said without thought, strangely dry paper secured in his hesitant fingers. "You call boats 'she'."
The eyes never blinked nor changed shape to indicate that whoever it was, was emoting at all, and yet by the tone of its voice, Georgie had seemingly stunned it.
"She." It repeated in slight awe.
It paused in silence, and the child wondered if he should go or stay to talk with whatever was talking back to him. Young or not, Georgie was lacking when it came to decision-making, and he often left what was important up to his big brother.
"You should get going, Georgie." The voice came as soft as ever from inside, so soft that it's counterpart had to lean in to hear properly. "It's getting dark, and you're already cold."
The little boy looked back, in time to see the tips of white fingers retract back into the dark beneath the walkway. Georgie stared for a beat, and another, before his attention returned to the S.S. Georgie, already wincing at the cold, mushy feeling of his socks as they squished between his toes. The boat itself looked like it hadn't sailed on water at all, for as much as it looked brand new while Georgie turned it over in the rain.
He shrugged after a time, glancing back one last time at the mouth of the grate before trudging back up the street to the Denbrough home and out of sight.