Notes: Because the trailers for Venom have my beta, Sky, and I drawing IT comparisons. Not all of them good.
Post ITerations - It didn't go quietly. ...Still hasn't.
Recommended OST: "Point Of No Return" by Starset.
Part 1 of 3.
"Inversion"
T (for language)
This wasn't nausea, per se. He felt no true need to expel whatever was left of his last meal, as if his guts had spontaneously decided they could no longer handle its presence. Where once they undoubtedly would not tolerate the invasion of so much unconventional... food, he suspected the only discomfort he now felt at the queasy notion was purely mental. His body was no longer complaining the way it rightfully should be at the thought of what it was missing.
Still, he would have endured the world's worst case of food poisoning in recorded history if it meant somehow availing him of this morally-repulsive craving.
His head hurt, too. Mostly, it manifested as a peculiar tightness festering between his ears. It pulsed worst around his optic nerves, but the applied pressure was not enough to blot out his awareness to a somehow-comfortable degree. His senses were dulled, halved, but not dead enough they spared him their full opinion on the discomfort.
The pain wasn't a full-on debilitating migraine, whose agonizing effects could easily be allayed by the right regimen of ibuprofen and bedrest. A rather sedate headache, he didn't want to remember when it had began. It simply showed no signs of diminishing anytime soon.
Eddie supposed, among other factors, his building frustration wasn't helping soothe either ailment.
Lord knew the wan-faced sophomore had an indefinite number of medical excuses to pull from his pocket, he could effectively cut class and suffer no official repercussions. Only in this sense was he even remotely grateful being genetically-predisposed to so many conditions. It meant he could partake in as many visits to the school restroom as he had in the past few days, and no one batted an eye.
But then, this wasn't the only reason no heads turned his way as he left science class for the fourth day in a row.
Today, all it had taken one glance at the contents of his biology book to send his mind careening back around the proverbial basin, his very sanity spiraling down in a swirling mess, with no way to drop a stopper in the drain to slow the flow. After lunch, he had been feeling a trifle better - just a bit, as some blessedly-normal cuisine did surprising wonders to refresh his waning energy reserves - and despite his ever-paranoid, hypochondria-prone nature, Eddie had tried to hope for the best thereafter. He might be able to make it home without losing his shit for the millionth time or so in the past two weeks.
How foolishly optimistic of him.
School was back on. To most kids, it was the ultimate evil.
Easy for them to say.
This was something worse.
ToLd you we were tireD.
Arms positioned around the perimeter of the sink, Eddie Kaspbrak exhaled and rested his clammy forehead against his overlapped wrists. The mounting vertigo reached its peak just as he had stumbled through the door. With every step down the hall he felt the bizarre, ever-increasing sensation of taking longer and longer strides, feeling his vantage point shift from normal to somehow-higher up, as though he were ascending invisible stairs.
It left him feeling unbearably dizzy. Catching himself on the counter, the shivering teenager tried to breathe deep and easy, to ignore the new sheen of sweat he felt emanating from under his arms and running down his back. He had walked at a brisk pace, but nothing that should warrant sweating so much all of a sudden.
Thankfully, he had dressed accordingly. In recent days he had taken to wearing dark clothes, sometimes a jacket. Using the guise of color and layers to mask what outward symptoms there were, the signs no one had yet called him out on were peculiar and troublesome.
As yet, increased perspiration (cool to the touch, like he had taken a very-impulsive ice shower), frequent moments of full-body weakness (a day hence Bill and Richie saved his suddenly-weak-kneed bacon from tumbling down a flight of stairs), and an abnormally-elevated heartbeat (which stayed elevated long after supposedly calming down) were the three most prevalant clues as to his reconfiguring state.
Over the last week, for whatever reason not yet divulged, It's presence became more and more apparent.
In far more direct a fashion than ever before.
For the moment, Eddie tried to pretend he was hearing the familiar raspy, pitchy voice echo up from the dark, metallic circle he was presently staring into. He scowled at it. There. There was where the words were coming from. He could handle that being true.
His new reality was too daunting, too overwhelming to face. Still.
The others knew what was wrong, sort of. Once he bothered returning their phone calls, shakily sharing his theory, it turned out they had no better explanation than he himself had come up with ("Possession? ...Fuck me. Can you find a word that's a little less cliché, Ben?" "...None that'll fit what you've described any better, Eddie. I'm sorry."). They had tried, tried to console him with words of support, promises of a fix, and kind actions to match. But like so many times before, there was only so much they could do, and they knew this. They couldn't very well live his life for him, in the here and now.
...Why couldn't they, though? Help- help somehow, in such a fashion? If something as fundamentally fucked up as this could even be possible-
Aw, come on, Eds. You know I'm not thaT ba-
"Don't even go there, asshole," Eddie breathed out, barely a whisper of a wheeze, teeth gritting together. Besides the chill of his skin and the mental fatigue, he felt a flare of his old temper, trying in vain to ignite against the blizzard spooling up inside. "Don't you... even."
Guiltily, almost, It went silent.
Eddie fumed while he could. Given the privacy found upon shoving one's head in the sink, his ear caught the telltale bang of a stall door, opening somewhere on the other side of the bathroom. He flinched despite the relative softness of the noise. Given the headrush he was currently caught in the grips of, it sounded like a bomb detonating on the other end of the state.
But he somehow heard it - close, yet distant - in the same room.
No, the human brain wasn't at all wired for coping with something like this.
"Jeez. You okay, Kaspbrak?"
The pitchy, squeaking voice took on a growl. For Gan's sake. Go - awAy.
Feigning a queasy-sounding groan, the germaphobe unwound an arm, waving a dismissive hand in the stranger's vague direction. It didn't matter who the other voice was, or what their business was in the restroom. Right now, they were just an unwanted presence, with their own class to get back to, surely.
Obediently, doing as they were bid by some indescribable feeling of "better left alone", the aforementioned student drifted out the door without a backwards glance.
The second after it forebodingly swung shut, Eddie snapped back to life, or whatever paper-thin sense of it he still had possession of. He wrenched his head up and tried to call after the departing boy: "N-no, wuh-wait, ple- "
No. Leave it alone, Eds. We're asking for more trouble tHan it's worth, getting him involved.
Slumping over, Eddie forced a scoff, brushing angrily at the disheveled bangs, hanging over his eyes. His chest still felt tight, as though a corset had been fastened around his lungs. "We aren't asking anything, I- I was."
...We.
"Shut- Shut up."
Why? Aren't... aren't you even a litTle-
"Not anymore, you bastard, not one fucking iota," Eddie seethed, arms braced on the counter once more. Staring his pale, slit-eyed reflection down in the mirror - his reflection, his, no one else's - the dark-haired fourteen-year-old was vaguely surprised only to not see clouds of steam puffing out of his ears.
Then, as if It were catering to the idea-
"Knock that off!" Watching it happen, as against his will as almost everything else had been as of late, Eddie clapped his hands against the sides of his head. "Quit!" Wisps of white vapor billowed from under his fingers.
A quite-literal sign of his boiling temper.
Or theirs.
The voice between his ears only answered with a muted, devilish chuckle.
At least It was trying to see the dark humor in the arrangement.
Eddie harbored no such illusions, trying to get in on the joke. To him, this was no punchline in any way worthy of the pain he and his friends had been through. After everything which had transpired in the last few months, the steady decline of their very-questionable-to-begin-with friendship, he no longer knew what to think of the presence which had supposedly found a new home within his very skull.
Hell, he still couldn't put his finger on what had made him such a prime candidate to house It in the first place.
Physical build? Personality? His living situation? His place among his circle of friends?
Never Eddie would have wished any harm on the other Losers, never in his wildest dreams, but weren't they inherently better... choices for harboring a once-friend-turned-fugitive? Given the opportunity, were any of them downright asked, he had no doubt they would have stepped up and volunteered. Some moreso than others.
Instead, It hadn't proven half as considerate, in keeping with the spirit of the occasion. Recent heroics notwithstanding, Beverly was lucky to have survived her last run-in with the creature, before Bill Denbrough decided enough was enough. Time to put down the dog, gang. The being's base, animalistic side had won control, forcing them to subdue him under a flurry of blows and bashes. It went through form after form, word after spiteful word, as the rain kept up. Things had continued in such a chaotic fashion until seven-year-old Georgie Denbrough finally breached onto the scene and declared "Stop!"
Near the shattering point, It had wheeled around, stared balefully at him in bald-faced unrecognition, and immediately lunged for the kid, claws outstretched like a pouncing tiger about to take a deer. Through his tears, Mike Hanlon aimed with his coveted air rifle and pulled the trigger. The beast's corporeal body, taxed to its limits, promptly broke apart.
Georgie was left unharmed - physically, anyway.
It scattered, or so they thought. Whatever vestige of energy was left behind had, apparently, singled a thoroughly-winded Eddie out and latched onto him like an invisible tick. At the time, all he remembered feeling, besides a raging sorrow, was a vaguely ticklish sensation, creeping up the back of his neck. He flinched and pawed at the lower back of his skull - also known as the occipital bone, his biology textbook later revealed - before the sensation faded away.
Now he knew. The eldritch entity tied itself to him as steadfastly as Kaspbrak's own shadow - and was proving just as impossible to shake.
The signs were few and far between at first. Caught in the grips of his own emotional turmoil, nevermind what his friends were coping with, Eddie had written his initial few instances of weirdness off as byproducts of stress.
He supposed they would all be feeling somewhat apathetic, after being through what they had. Drained was the right word to describe how they had behaved. Together, the eight of them somehow found the strength to climb back up the well, and formulated a plan to notify the necessary authorities. They soon parted on very uncertain terms. Brushing off his mother's initial fretting and fawning as par for the course, Eddie remembered confining himself to his room.
Even as the phone rang not twelve hours later, he didn't think to answer it. Or in the days to come. Isolation, his once worst enemy when subjected to it for long periods of time, had suddenly seemed more appealing than any need to converse with Stan or bicker with Richie.
Barely a day later, Eddie lost his will to eat. ...Somewhat. He was never a big eater to begin with (much to his mother's chagrin), but suddenly the amply-stocked pantry wasn't looking all that full anymore. Or, it was, and he just didn't think so. His appetite slackened as much as it seemed to increase.
But for what, he dreaded to think. This was before he caught himself gazing almost lustily at his human anatomy textbook one day, eyes dreamily coasting over some illustration of the human circulatory and muscular systems. Pinning a word to the feeling he was experiencing, Eddie closed the tome with an impossibly-sharp snap. His science teacher, dutifully scrawling lesson notes across the blackboard at the front of the room, paid the noise no mind.
He slept more and more uneasily, turning unreasonably snippy and hotheaded within a record seventy-two hours - or "moreso than usual," as Richie pointed out. Once school was underway, Eddie tried to overcome the newfound insomnia to his advantage. He should have tired out to a sufficient degree, pouring over his mathematics homework with vicious, suicide-inducing determination. What was more dull than repetitive calculus problems?
Each time it only resulted in an anticlimactic slump over the kitchen table, pencil still in hand, no closer to answers on the page, or with regard to his turn in life, than when he began.
By the middle of September, he was scarcely sleeping at all.
Wide-eyed, Eddie did the unspoken math there in no time flat. He had been en route to said class and passed a recently-waxed trophy case in the school hallway. Glimpsing a refracted image of his thin face, he balked to a terrified stop. The throngs of students trailing away to either side of him kept on going, without one dirty look or angry comment of "watch it, twerp" to spare.
As if he were no longer being noticed, they strode on.
Placing a trembling hand on the glass, Eddie leaned in for a closer look. He turned his face one way, then the other, accounting for the glare cast by fluorescent lights. No. He couldn't quantify what he was looking at being true. His breath stalled, his shoulders and chest tightening ominously. His heart rate spiked. But he didn't think to reach for his inhaler.
He scant remembered to breathe in, with no consequence.
His image held all his attention in that moment. How was it, for as tired and hollowed-out as he currently felt, there were no bags under his eyes? They should be standing out as sure as if someone had smeared charcoal into the sockets.
And he had always been one given to having light skin. But looking at himself now, white as a freshly-washed bedsheet, except for the feverish tinge of his cheeks-
Hmm. Not looking so... hot therE, are we, Eds?
Like Fate had broken out an invisible hammer, the glass cracked under his feather-light touch, splitting laterally from one side of the case to the other. Eddie yelped and lept backwards, holding his undamaged hand as though the limb had suddenly broke itself upon hearing the almost-cheery sneer.
"Fuck. Fuck."
He jigged aside, backing up flush against the wall, hands fisting knuckle-deep in his brown hair. He closed his eyes, and the dreaded ache set in. People kept passing him by, as unheard as he was his newfound misery was - evidently - unseen.
Recognition dawned, and with it, an avalanche of disbelief buried his mind, and insurmountable anger melted away the snow, before seizing him in her taloned clutches.
Everything abruptly added up. Then the pronoun-sharing game began.
Approaching the end of September, the banter with his onboard company still had yet to conclude.
Nor would it.
It hadn't gone to sleep.
Not for the first time, Eddie tried - for purely old time's sake - to reason with his 'guest' later the same afternoon. Out in the sunlight, he felt less confined, his wits a little sharper and not bent out of shape at the thought of being pent up inside with all his like-aged peers. There were fewer distractions to fall prey to out here.
...Prey.
It was starting to fixate on It's needs, regardless. More and more, Eddie caught himself (not themselves, no) taking abnormally-long glances at his fellow students. And before things got out of hand, Eddie knew they had to reach some kind of compromise, an understanding. He couldn't last forever, not like this.
Physically or mentally.
Maybe... mayBe you can, Eds?
Kaspbrak paused midway through the ridiculously-arduous task of unlocking his bike. His vision was wavering worse than he could yet remember. The key was in the padlock, but he stopped before it could be turned.
Against his better judgment, he asked, in a near-whisper, "What... what're you talking about?"
Lasting.
"Lasting...? You mean, like, surviving? Pfft, I'm- don't tell me that. I'm doing just- fine."
Hmph. As RiChie would say, "Like hell you are."
"Well, I'd be doing much better if you'd have just taken that semi-permanent nap you're so overdue for."
...I tried to.
"What do you mean, tried? Dude, you were completely spent. After all that, all this, you can't just fall asleep now?"
Would that we could, Eds.
"Stop it with the 'we' bullshit!"
Shhh!
"Don't try that crap with me, either. I know no one's listening except you right now."
...Hmph.
"Yeah, I thought so. Locked up in each other's heads, are we? That's a two-way street, buster. Makes my head spin to listen to you, this close, but no more than it did before. There's some aspects of you my mind can figure out, after all."
...I can help make it spin leSs.
"...Yeah? What d'you suggest?"
A deal. Whether you... you beliEve me or not, I don't want you to keep hurting. I just- we need to arrange- something. An understanding.
Somehow, in the deepest, darkest pits known as doubt, a encouraging spark of hope spluttered on. Eddie frowned and finally remembered to turn the key. The lock unhitched with a click. He stood up slowly, taking time to lean on the handlebars and get his bearings back.
Inside and out.
"I believe you."
...You do?
"Yeah... because I could always tell when you were lying - and I can better than ever, now."
Eddie cringed at the high, exasperated sound that abruptly filled his head. It whined like a rusty-hinged door, opening against its will, casting light on something better left in the dark.
But leaving the topic unspoken of didn't change the fact it was still there. It's stammering spoke volumes about the discomfort the mere notion caused.
Oh-kay, but- this wiLl only hurt as long as w- you keep letting it, Eds. It doesn't haVe to. You won't liKe- what needs to be doNe. I don't, either. I don't like thiS outcome any mOre than you. And you're- look, you'Re barely sleeping, you're not eating righ-
Eddie wrenched his bike out of the rack, headed for the sidewalk. He scant noticed the nearby students loitering nearby who paid his acridness a curious glance. "Don't go there."
It has to be sAid, Eddie. At some poiNt, I- w-we'll have to-
Kicking up the stand, Eddie threw a leg over the frame and started to pedal. He picked up speed fast, lest anyone try and stop him before he found the momentum. "You'll have to eat. I'm no fucking cannibal."
Y... you're not, no. But I'm-
"You're impossible is what you are. You gotta eat, I get that. But you know what that means for me? What am I supposed to do? Just look the other way?" Eddie paused, letting the weight of his oft-interrupting words sink in. The flawed human being though he was, he had his own kind of teeth to bite with. They may not rend flesh, but in It's case, they could dice the entity's arguments to pieces in a few choice bites. "The same advice didn't work out so good for you when it came to consoling Georgie, remember?"
Low blow.
Again, It went quiet for a while.
Struggling to ignore the alien presence's very palpable wash of regret and sadness (as best he could en route; his traitorous eyes welled up in very direct sympathy, not just because of the chilly autumn wind), Eddie managed to ride his bike home without wobbling headfirst into a crash. He focused on the clicking of his spokes, trying to somehow get lost in the noise. The headache abated, and the tears dried. And he didn't hear so much as a discontent hum of his passenger's churning thoughts as he pedaled down the length of Neibolt Street.
It was like the opened door in his head had been eased shut again, leaving them both to the relative privacy of separate rooms.
Eyes forward, Eddie didn't slow. He passed the broken-down house at a fair clip. 29 Neibolt sat where it always had, an old, slouching eyesore. Kaspbrak had - in what now felt like a past life - once stolen away to it in the dead of night, to somehow keep tabs on the same bodyless creature now festering away within his own psyche.
Because he was such a nice guy, and part of this distinction came with being there for your friends when they were hurting.
He had counted It as a friend.
Foolishly, Eddie had disregarded the risks. Perhaps there was when he had went wrong. He had given their erstwhile mascot too much benefit of the doubt, and therefore the exact wrong idea. It latched onto him, because nothing in this town happened without It knowing, and It could see where the best hiding places were. If the framework of Derry itself was no longer a fit, someone living within her borders was.
And, intentionally or not, this was where they had ended up.
Who would've made a better host than the boy who, preemptive to most of his social club, taken It upon himself, in terms of trying to understand?
The bridges are burning, the heat's on my face
Making the past an unreachable place
Pouring the fuel, fanning the flames
I know, this is the point of no return