A/N: Thank you for all the feedback and the follows! I really do appreciate it so much.
Before Bill knew it, the rest of the week proved to be as insufferable as he had hoped against. Although he felt perfectly fine by Tuesday, Bill found himself stuck at the bedside of his little brother, trying to keep him company. What was worse was by that time, Georgie was barely able to communicate outside of grunting, whimpering, or shrieking while tears cascaded down his round cheeks.
Bill spent most of his time sitting next to Georgie, despite the stale air around them and the pain that lingered on his brother's face. Mom had taken to staying home more often while Bill was at school, at least, but whenever Bill walked through the front door he found his mother sat on the couch with the phone to her ear.
It didn't even help to be outside with his friends, not when staying too long in the Barrens or after school to walk to the alley behind the drugstore made Bill feel overwhelmingly guilty. The fact that Georgie was sick and alone in bed was always in the back of his mind as of late.
Soon, a full week since Georgie had gone out to play in the rain overlapped into two weeks. Three weeks. A month.
It felt to Bill like every week came with some new excuse as to why their parents could put off taking Georgie to the hospital. First it was just a cold, then Mom had declared that it was the flu, and after that it was pneumonia – but none of those probabilities were enough to get them up and out the door.
And, despite himself, Bill was getting angry. It was the worst kind of angry as well, the kind that turned into a broiling stomach ache and that forced hot tears from his eyes that he had to hastily wipe away while at his desk. He stewed inside, imagining a hundred different ways in which he could persuade his mother to stop denying that there was something seriously wrong with Georgie. It wasn't like she really knew how difficult it was for Georgie to breathe all the time, or how the power of his headache could go from a two to an eleven in one whole hour. Mom didn't hang around long enough to find out how bad it'd gotten.
Bill could see it in his head so clearly – he pictured himself stomping over to his stiff, silent parents while they read the paper and toiled at the dishes mechanically. He could see himself, hear himself opening his mouth to shout at them and take his brother to a doctor, vividly. He just wanted… he just wanted –!
Bill couldn't put it into words, but knew that even if he could, he'd screw it up one stutter or another.
How did you articulate that you wanted better parents, right to your parents' faces? That you wanted them to actually take care of Georgie for once instead of leaving the difficult parts to you? Especially when you'd practically been both Mom and Dad to Georgie since before he left Elementary school?
Bill saw his Moment so clearly, and saw the ideal versions of his parents responding in a variety of ways – being proactive, immediately whisking Georgie away to the hospital, tearfully apologizing for their behavior, among other things.
But these were daydreams that, at best, left him empty and tired. The most that Bill could accomplish, being young and impeded by his goddamn stutter, was getting worked up over an unsolvable issue.
"Bill Denbrough."
Bill sat up in his seat, flexing his already shaking hands that had gone sticky with sweat. He found that although he could ignore a lot of classes without failing any tests, Bill couldn't tune public speaking class out. He couldn't have lost focus over it, even if Richie were sharing the same class schedule and talked through every lecture.
It didn't help that most lessons required student participation, and that many projects required groups of three and four to stand up in front of everyone and speak. Nothing could've been more jarring, or as comparable as getting wailed on by Henry Bowers and his toadies.
Bill felt his stomach plummet to some lower, nebulous region in his body as he stayed put, feeling the pressure with all eyes on him.
Mr. Martin stood at one end of his desk, spectacles perched over his hawkish nose. "Come up and recite what you choose for your weekly project, please."
To stand up from his seat and trudge the distance long distance from the back of the class to the front, and posture himself in front of the blackboard, was like taking your final walk before you landed on death row. Denbrough teetered between the desire to be as fast as possible in getting his speech over with and adhering to the code of how one should speak after they'd been practicing it for so long. For Bill, speech therapy was relatively new, but not as new as it was for Mr. Martin's current class that comprised of either the shiest of kids or those that had no other options.
He'd had a fair few lessons on what to do in this kind of situation, when you were all alone and reading from a shakily held notecards in your hands; but every time he had to genuinely face it, Bill forget everything he'd been taught.
Calm down.
Bill's breath hitched. He looked up from the cards in that he was crumpling, but the sea of faces in front of him looked no less apathetic. Patrick 'Pockmarked' Hockstetter sat in the far corner of the class, grinning like a feral animal.
Don't look at them. Look at your notes.
"A-ah… Ah…" Bill refrained from squeezing his eyes shut. Terror descended on him like an icy wave, and he couldn't get it out of his mind that this was stupid. This was so stupid. Why did he have to be so bad at this?
It's not you. It's not your fault.
Bill had no other choice but to close his eyes when he felt the prickle of tears. He was being such a baby.
It's alright. It'll be alright. Look at your notes, and I'll help you.
We'll do it together.
"Mr. Hockstetter, not one word!" Bill opened his eyes, letting his gaze pass between Mr. Martin's stern glare and Patrick, whose snaggle teeth cut across his lower lip as he prepared to jeer.
Amidst the mists and coldest frosts…
Bill took a breath. "A-a-amidst the mists-s and coldest frosts-s-s…"
He thrusts his fists against…
"He thrus-sts his f-f-fists-s against-st," Bill repeated.
The soft, reassuring voice in Bill's head was unrecognizable while it continued, until both it and Bill were speaking in tandem. He spoke aloud, and yet he could hear his words and those coming from an unidentifiable place outside of all other awareness bleeding together and forming a harmony.
Before he knew it, Bill had reached the end and was greeted by a ring of mundane, unenthused applaused (as was required after every speech).
"You get points, Mr. Denbrough, for trying your hand at a tongue-twister." Mr. Martin smiled. "Please return to your seat now."
The smile vanished the instant Bill was safe and hunched behind his desk again.
"Hockstetter. You're next."
"Watch where you're goin', Tits!" Patrick laughed, mouth wide open to display his jagged overbite.
He'd gotten enough of a thrill just pushing the new kid down 'accidentally' that there was a spring in his step as he sauntered away, and Bill supposed he could see why. Bowers' gang had laid off sticking it to one of their favorite targets: Bill – since everyone seemingly knew about Georgie's situation, yet he'd just managed to score a knock-down by kicking the new kid, whose gut was generously wide, into Bill as they were leaving Mr. Martin's class.
Patrick got a two-for, as it were.
Bill didn't pout or mope over it. He quietly and quickly scooped up the scattered speech cards that he'd idiotically decided not to pack up before he left, until a pudgy hand and the clatter of bulky headphones against the solid floor caught his attention.
"I'm really sorry." Ben said as Bill accepted the assignment back with a polite, nervous smile of gratitude.
"It's o-okay." Bill replied. "It was Patrick-k-k Ho-ockstetter's fault, n-not yours."
Ben shifted uneasily in place, fingering the headphones held between his hands. For being a new kid, he sure didn't understand the clear rule that you shouldn't be caught dead interacting with a Loser for longer than you had to.
"Yeah, but I mean I'm sorry… about your brother." Ben was earnest. "I heard… I mean I wasn't trying to eavesdrop or anything, but I heard he might have to go to the hospital. That's awful."
"Y-yeah." Bill swallowed. "My m-mom thinks it's just the fl-l-u but…"
Ben nodded when the other boy couldn't finish the thought. It didn't need to be finished with words, as Ben could practically feeling the shared discomfort between himself and Bill while the other boy shuffled his index cards and tucked them in the drink pocket of his backpack.
"Well-l, I have to go s-so I don't mis-miss the bus."
"Okay, um, see you later then, I guess." Ben waved a little before subsequently wishing he could smack himself upside the head for being so awkward. Bill didn't taunt him however – he simply mumbled and plodded off, already slipping back into the inattentive state that had plagued him over the past couple of months.
It was getting easier to return to that phase, so much so that Bill preferred it to being aware and chained at the present.
"Oh!" Ben turned around. "I thought your rhyme was good, by the way…"
He watched Bill Denbrough leave the hallway, completely deaf to his words, and only just realized that he hadn't introduced himself at all.
The bus ride into his neighborhood had left Bill with a massive headache. He had to stand still and wait for the worst of the carsickness to ebb, enduring the chill wind of on-coming winter as it traveled into whatever opening in his clothes that it could find. Richie hadn't ridden the bus home that day, leaving the Head of the Losers without a buddy system or a repertoire consisting of one-sided jokes. It was lucky, really, since Bill didn't think he could handle another 'Greta's on her period' joke while he was feeling this nauseous. Bill didn't want to put up a front either, not when that too required copious amounts of energy.
What about Richie didn't require copious amounts of energy?
Bill cursed internally when the slimy taste of copper flooded his mouth and alarm bells went off in his head over the possibility of him throwing up. He bent over and counted to sixty before hobbling forward so that he could cross the street. It took some time to brace himself, but Bill made a break for it and sped over the street without looking both ways, just to repeat the whole routine again.
It continued until Bill was adjusting on Hemlock Street, where a swirl of color bobbing in the afternoon breeze made the boy do a double-take and turned the residual nausea into a backburner haze.
Balloons hovered from above the grate across the street – from one of the side sewers just a block away from the Denbrough house. The sight of them, red, blue, and yellow, drew Bill like a magnet from one side of Hemlock to the other.
Bill was silent as he stood in front of the grate, blinking in confusion as the triad of balloons… hovered from out of the mouth of the sewer entrance. Denbrough bent down before the sidewalk, edging at dark, rectangular gap next to the road with the memory of Georgie's rainy Sunday at the forefront of his mind.
Bill spoke before he could second-guess himself. "Hell-lo?"
Aside from the echo of his own voice, Bill was treated to silence and little else apart from the faint rush of water from the mild rainy weather some days ago.
He waited for an answer nevertheless, but a minute had gone by and when nothing else happened, Bill pulled the tassel from out of the grate easily. His confusion increased as a notecard dangled from the ends, having been tied with the random offering. Perhaps it was a strange thing to notice, but the notecard looked the same as those that Bill had dropped in the school hallway earlier.
The card rotated in the wind like a windmill's turbine, from an uneven puncture in one of its corners. Bill stared before reaching for it and held it up to his face. He saw chicken scratch handwriting, marginally smudged, all over it.
BiLl,
I hoPe this chEers you UP a littLe.
From,
WheRe the waTer goes wHEn it's runnING dOwn the DrivewAy
"Bill, get your coat." Dad was searching around the coffee table and the sofa when Bill had managed to get all three balloons in through the front door. His father didn't even look up, sparing his son from an interrogation about his unusual find.
"Wh-what's going on?" Bill asked tentatively, just as Dad snatched the keys up from beneath a Cosmopolitan magazine. Bill could hear the faint sound of sobbing from around the hall, from somewhere near the kitchen.
He let go of the balloons, and they floated through the air just to bob and bounce against the ceiling that kept them from soaring into the sky.
"Georgie won't wake up."
