Note: Ummm... hello world. It's been a while. I am very sorry for how long it has taken me to update this story! I've had this chapter partly or mostly written for a long time, but a combination of crazy work life, summer holidays and a bit of writer's block combined to result in me continuing to put off finishing it. I did in the meantime finish the book, though - success! Thank you to everyone who reviewed the last chapter, I really appreciate it and seeing your comments was a continuing reminder to me to finish the chapter! Shout-out to Guest for noting one of my typos, oops! And special thanks to those who posted months after my last update, thanks for not giving up on this fic :) I hope to be able to update much sooner with the next chapter, will do my best - lots of things to come for the gang of Losers! Hope you like this chapter, and let me know your thoughts! (and sorry again, I don't honestly know how it is October, like what even happened to the middle of the year...) :o

"There's a hole in my soul
I can't fill it, I can't fill it
There's a hole in my soul
Can you fill it? Can you fill it?"
- Flaws, Bastille

It was a sunny afternoon, the leftover from what had evidently been a day of clear and beautiful weather. He was standing on the grounds of his family farm, the green hill sloping away towards the pastures in front of him. That seemed strange to him, since he hadn't been back there for so long... but the warmth on his skin comforted him and his initial concern faded away as his eyes scanned around. They rested on his old family house, the memories of his childhood washing through his mind.

Then his stomach dropped.

He saw his beloved dog, Mr Chips, bounding across the grass from the house, towards him. Despite himself, he raised his hands in a welcoming gesture, about to call his name, but the ghost of his childhood friend ran past him, tail wagging, towards...

... towards the Bowers farm boundary.

Why did they ever let Mr Chips roam so freely, knowing they had enemies so very close?

There, of course, was the demon in a mullet Henry Bowers, just as he was back then, complete with singlet top and faded jeans, every bit the 1980s hoon, beckoning and calling to Mr Chips with all the falsified warmness of a friend. But his eyes, oh, those eyes gave it all away. They were the emptiest blue Mike had ever seen, a hollow washed out vacant kind of blue. Like the lights were on, but the boy once known as Henry wasn't home. And yet Mr Chips went, too trusting and believing to sense the truth.

A choked cry died in Mike's throat as he realised that it was futile and he was doomed to watch this play out: Henry offering the poisoned meat to Mr Chips, who immediately starting munching it with an enthusiastically wagging tail, the wag slowing as the dog tasted something off in the food, the reassurance from Henry encouraging him to keep eating, the wavering stance of the young Labrador as the poison began to kick in, as Henry tied Mr Chips to a tree to stop him running back home.

Hot tears stung Mike's eyes as a wound that he hadn't opened in years was torn apart in front of him cruelly, as Mr Chips collapsed, panting, on the grass with feeble whimpers, the tail still wagging ever so faintly at what he thought was his friend. But why wasn't the friend helping him? Why was the friend just watching?

The sky darkened, and in a matter of seconds it had changed from a sunny afternoon to the heavy weight of an impending storm, everything now in shades of muted grey. And at that moment, Mike's time as a bystander ended, and Henry looked directly at him with the same empty expression. Mike sensed the threat, and tried to back away, but his legs wouldn't cooperate with him.

Henry stood, almost as tall as him even as a teenager, and made a sharp movement with his right hand. Mike saw the switch blade glint as Henry opened it, the boy grinning vacantly as he advanced towards Mike. Lightning flashed, and Henry was suddenly unspeakably closer. Another flash, and he was right in front of Mike. The switchblade flashed, and Mike cried out as the teenage Henry embedded it in his stomach, twisting with a triumphant gleam in his empty eyes.

Mike fell to his knees, pain flooding through him mixed with the nausea and regret for not protecting Mr Chips, for not being there with him when he passed in pain and with only a heartless savage for company. His vision was blurring, as his hands grasped at the switchblade, coughing up specks of blood which landed at Henry's feet. Henry laughed, an echoing sound that was laced with not just his own laugh, but the high-pitched laughter of Pennywise and the eerie watery giggles of monstrous children, the ghosts of those lost in the depths of the sewers.

In his swimming vision, Mike glimpsed a figure near the tree, standing next to the small body of Mr Chips. A thin shape, ragged hair, and torn clothes, with a flash of green eyes as the lightning cracked around them.

"Help-" Mike gasped, gesturing at the figure. The face was shadowed but in the flash of the lightning he could make out details. The person was young, and familiar somehow. He reminded Mike of someone he knew, or someone that he used to know... and the expression on his face was such a strange mix of emotions... despair, anger, fear... and a glimpse of hurt...

Who was this person?

He didn't have time to dwell more, because Henry had knelt down and wrenched the switchblade from his stomach, causing him to cry in agony, and then the lightning flashed again and the blade came down towards him.

He screamed.

Mike lunged up from the chair, the remains of a cry dying on his lips as he looked around at the shocked faces of the others.

"You alright, man?" Ben asked, clapping him on the shoulder. "You screamed like you were being murdered."

"I was..." Mike mumbled, absently. Already the details were fading from his adrenaline-pumped mind, his heart rate slowing. He wasn't the slightest bit aware of Andi's speculative eyes fixed on him. He'd just seen Henry Bowers in his nightmare and it had felt so real, but there had been someone else there, hadn't there, watching... But not Pennywise...

Mike looked around the room. Everyone was milling around, looking a bit anxious. He supposed his outburst hadn't helped with that. The last thing he remembered was that they had decided to wait for George and Beverly to return, and then Andi was going to try and help them remember more about their lost childhood memories. There was still no sign of either of them, so Mike supposed it hadn't been that long since he drifted off while sitting in the rather comfortable armchair. Maybe fifteen minutes, the time during which he'd be thrown unwillingly into that awful time and place. The loss of Mr Chips still hurt deeply after all these years, and if he came face to face with Henry now, as an adult, he wasn't sure what he would do. Probably get his ass kicked, realistically.

He'd grown up to become nothing more than a taller, nerdier version of his kid self, and when he saw the kids of this era running around with their gadgets and their fashion-savvy attire, he figured he would have done just about the same in their generation. Except with more cyber bullying, maybe. That seemed to play out with surprising and unfortunate regularity in Derry, he'd observed from his post in the library, and he assumed the same for elsewhere in the world. But then, wasn't Derry always the worse example set for the rest of the world? Things just seemed to go wrong more often here. Like they lived in a naturally dark corner of the world.

"What were you dreaming about?" Andi asked finally, the only ignorant non-Loser who, unlike the others, wasn't aware that it would be something traumatising drawn from their childhood. Like all their dreams, or rather nightmares, had been lately, because living the nightmare of Pennywise being back wasn't enough apparently.

"Mr Chips," Mike replied simply, his mouth drawn. He knew she would make the connection, since she already knew about what Henry had done. And he realised the reason she knew was his fault, because despite his father's weary contradictions, he'd insisted on going to the police about Mr Chips. Without evidence, they weren't able to do anything though, and so they'd simply made a record of his accusation and said to come back if they found evidence. Of course, the police were just as scared as anyone else of the Bowers family. And after the chickens... the newest staff of the police were hardly looking for any more fights like that.

"That fucking bastard," Richie contributed sympathetically. "I can't believe he did that to your dog. That guy was messed up to the extreme."

"No kidding," Ben said, his eyes dropping to the scars hidden underneath his shirt. The scars he'd gotten from Henry weren't just physical, and the mental ones were arguably worse. But Henry had also played a key role in his utter hatred of himself as a teenager, and so, in a weird way, in his motivation to finally be more than the fat kid who was always such an easy target for bullies.

The door opened cautiously, and a familiar face with wavy red hair appeared. Ben's stomach dropped. She always had that effect on him, even after all this time. But her heart was always... someone else's... he frowned at the repeated and confusing train of thought. For a brief moment he'd felt that same lovesick feeling that burned in his chest during his time in Derry, but he'd been somehow watching her with someone else. Maybe that was important... but then his eyes were drawn to Beverly again and he lost the train of thought.

"Bev, finally!" Richie exclaimed. She entered, looking a bit sheepish, and closed the door behind her. Instantly they all realised the missing party from her return.

"Where's George?" asked Eddie, looking confused and a little panicked.

"Yeah, about that..." she began. "Look, I know it was a bad idea and I didn't want to... but we split up on the way back from the Neibolt house. He said he had something he needed to do and I couldn't stop him, and he seemed so sure that I shouldn't go with him..."

"Where did he go?" Stan looked maybe the most worried of all of them, and was rubbing absently on his wrist through the cuffs of his sweater.

"He wouldn't say," Bev said glumly. "I thought about following him, even started to... but then I felt guilty and so I came back here instead."

Her gaze fell for the first time on Andi, and her eyebrows raised. If she hadn't been so distracted by the absence of George, and her decision to let him go, she would have noticed the vibe in the room was different right away. It was the same sense of Otherness that they'd once felt as children, the unspoken sense that allowed them to immediately distinguish one of Them from someone who was not part of their circle, who couldn't be because of some unseen force they could only play along to the tune of. The sense that allowed them to welcome Mike without question, to make it Lucky Seven.

Seven? Bev internally questioned herself. No, George hadn't been with them then, he was missing for most of the summer until their showdown with Pennywise. They were six. But Lucky Six didn't quite have the same ring to it, did it...?

"Hi, I'm Andi," the dark-haired girl said, offering her hand to Bev. Her expression faltered a little when Bev just stared at her wordlessly, and she threw a look sideways to Mike for help with Beverly.

"She knows about Pennywise," he said by way of explanation. Bev looked even more confused. But she seemed to snap out of her daze and tentatively shook Andi's hand.

"Beverly Marsh," she said simply, not even bothering to state her legal name. She didn't feel like that person anymore, anyway. Mike half-expected Andi to quip something she mysteriously knew about Bev, but she was silent. Maybe she sensed her knowledge would be treated with suspicion in the case of Beverly, who had generally been slow to trust people.

"What's your connection to all this?" Bev asked, sounding a little wary in any case. "It's a bit convenient of you to show up here the same time as us."

"It's not a coincidence," Andi admitted. "I realised you were all gathering, thanks to a few calls I made or vacation replies to emails I'd sent, and I had already realised for some months that Pennywise was back. You all left quite an electronic trail leading to the Derry Inn... so here I am. I want to help."

"And you know about the clown... how exactly?" Bev's eyes were still a little narrowed, but she seemed less hostile towards Andi than when she'd entered.

"My uncle faced off against him as a kid and warned me," she echoed her story from earlier, and still Mike had the same feeling that there was more to it than that. But with time, maybe she would be more open about that part. He wondered if the others had the same sense of obscuration when it came to Andi's reason for being there, but then they hadn't spent years like he had talking to the residents of Derry trying to separate truth from reality. And in the end what he'd come to realise from all that was that there was no truth at the best of times, just fragments of evidence scraped from the memories of people who didn't always remember what had happened so clearly to begin with. Or didn't want to remember.

But wherever there was tragedy in Derry, the bloody handprint of Pennywise was never too far to be found.

"Why wait till now to approach us? You knew about this all along?" Bev didn't seem entirely convinced by Andi's answer, unsurprisingly. She did have a good instinct for people, Mike had always known this. It seemed Beverly also sensed there was more to Andi than she was letting on.

"I'm not an idiot," Andi said simply. "I wasn't about to try and take on Pennywise by myself. It's not just kids that get taken by the clown, and going in by yourself is about the dumbest thing you can do."

"Speaking of that, should we be worried about George?" Stan prompted. "Was he..."

"No, this wasn't a vengeance mission or anything like that," Bev said quickly. "It was more like he had thought of something that might trigger some memories about what we've forgotten. We did see Pennywise in the Neibolt house, though."

"What?!" Ben exclaimed, jumping to his feet.

"Don't you think you should have led with that maybe?" Richie made a face.

"What happened?" Mike asked urgently, suddenly tense again.

"Well... the ghost of Henry Bowers made an appearance," Bev said, shuddering a little at the memory of the swampy corpse lurching towards them. "Then the clown..."

"The clown?" Eddie half-squeaked.

"Yeah... but something weird happened," she recalled, her face confused. "It was like someone, or something, else was there, Pennywise was talking to it but we couldn't see anything. He got really angry about it... and then he was gone. But something was left behind, by the clown or not I don't know. It was Georgie's boat."

There was a short silence as they all reflected on what that meant, for the boat which led George into the sewers all those years ago to resurface now. Like the never-ending cycle was looping back on itself, and they were being drawn into something they maybe had no chance of winning to begin with. For all the infinite possibilities of ways it could play out, maybe it was the cycle that would win in the end, and they were just pawns from the start.

"Oh!" Richie exclaimed suddenly, nudging Eddie who was standing next to him. "We found something too. Mike here wouldn't let me show it and I forgot about it until now."

He got his phone out and tapped his fingers against the screen, calling up the last photo he'd taken of the carving in the tree. The others clustered around the screen, and Richie found himself randomly thinking it was good he upgraded to the largest screen real estate available, even if it felt sometimes like he was carrying a tablet in his pocket.

"We carved that?" Mike immediately asked, seeming a bit dazed. "Why don't I remember it?"

"It's foggy for us too," Eddie said. "But look at this: who is WD?"

His finger pointed at the initials, and glanced at the faces of the other Losers. It wasn't ringing a bell with any of them, that much was clear. Bev reached towards the screen and made an odd gesture, as if imagining the wood underneath her fingers. There was a bit of a forlorn look in her eyes, but no sign of recognition.

"You're saying there was one of your group with the initials WD, and none of you can remember who?" Andi asked, arms crossed. "Why would the clown keep that from you? Where did the person go?"

She looked around only to see many blank faces staring back at her. She sighed, realising her work was pretty cut out for her with all of them still well under the shroud of Pennywise's magic. It reminded her of what her uncle used to say about the town of Derry: sometimes the clown's magic changed people, so that when something bad happened they were completely oblivious. It was a dark magic, that was for sure, to make people look the other way or even participate in the worst acts but then act as if they never happened. That dazed part of Derry - she saw it looking back at her from the eyes of the Losers. Whatever they had forgotten, the clown was using a ton of magic to keep it that way. She only hoped it would make Pennywise weaker somehow in the long run.

"Okay," Andi said finally. "We might as well try some memory recollection techniques then, since clearly you guys are all missing something."

"No kidding," Eddie said glumly. "Whatever it is, I know I feel crappy about it. Almost like I did something wrong, but that's just weird isn't it?"

Richie shrugged helplessly back at him.

They followed her directions to find a seat or comfortable position around the room. Mike chose to shift to the floor, perhaps in a not-so-shielded attempt to avoid falling asleep again. He was still a bit pale, sitting cross-legged against the wooden panelling near the door. Bev chose to sit on the bay window seat, her gaze somewhat worried as it flicked out the window. Ben, to no one's surprise, sat on the chair near her almost protectively. Richie smugly took Mike's vacated chair, while Eddie took the other. Stan sat on a rickety stool near the bookshelf, but seemed fairly comfortable despite it. His eyes were a bit distracted though, looking at the door expectantly.

Mike watched Andi's eyes flick over them all, feeling like he could see the wheels turning in her head. It seemed like she was deciding what the best approach was for them, drawing from probably several techniques for jogging memory. But how often had she dealt with suppressed childhood memories of facing off against a demonic clown? He knew the answer to that question. Decidedly, she walked over to the light switch and turned it off, and gestured for Ben and Bev to draw the curtains. The room settled into an uneasy darkness, though still semi-lit from the gaps between the curtains and the windows. It was an odd light, the light of a late afternoon hidden from view, like the kind of light that seeped warily into an attic or under the stairs.

"Okay," she began calmly, her voice somehow taking on a different tone. "When was the last time you saw Pennywise as kids?"

"The day in the sewers," Eddie said a bit fearfully. They all nodded their agreement.

"Then that's where we start," she said. "I want you all to remember that morning, if you can. Where were you? What was the weather? Was it cold? Warm? What time did you first see each other? It's the details that matter here, these are the things that will trigger your lost memories. Sometimes it helps if you close your eyes and picture yourself back there."

Obligingly, they all shut their eyes.

"I was at the arcade," Richie mused. "Finally getting the high score I was missing all summer."

"Why didn't you get a high score sooner?" Andi prompted immediately. He hesitated.

"We were searching... for George and the others," he said. "But we'd stopped. I was happy about that... I think. Or angry at someone."

"I was angry too," Stan said distantly, leaning his head back against the bookshelf. "I remember feeling angry and hurt."

"I was in the bathroom," Bev said, eyes closed, her voice hitching a bit. "I turned... and the clown was there. Right there, in my home... he grabbed me and I blacked out."

"I got a phone call," Eddie recalled. "The phone rang, and my mum wanted to know who it was... I found out Bev was missing and we had to go find her. We knew exactly where she'd gone and what had taken her."

"Who called you?" Andi asked.

"I... uh... I don't remember. I guess it was probably Richie."

"How did Richie know Bev was gone?" Andi had already noticed the fogginess about their memories, even in the lead-up to the sewers. The amount of magic ensuring this fog on their brains was so strong, it was almost tangible. Andi found herself wondering if the memory loss applied also to herself. If they were missing someone in their memories, then the logic followed that probably she was also affected by this lost past. That thought made her a bit uncomfortable, since in her previous experience with witnesses she'd always been a neutral unconnected third party to whatever they were trying to remember.

"Someone found me at the arcade... Ben?" Richie guessed.

"Yeah I suppose it was me," Ben agreed though he didn't sound entirely convinced. "I remember that day, it was really hot. Stifling, I was so sweaty, and it was heavy with the threat of a thunderstorm all day. The skies were so dark... it felt apocalyptic."

"For us, it did seem like the end of the world," Stan said softly. "And it was the end of our world, of being kids that summer. Everything changed after that day."

"What time did you go into the sewers?" Andi asked.

"Midday, or very early afternoon," Mike said, sounding quite sure of himself. "I'd just had an early lunch after working on the farm."

"I didn't want to go," Stan said faintly. "I was done with all of that, I just wanted life to go back to normal. But we couldn't leave Bev down there, and Pennywise knew it."

"We were basically chased by the Bowers gang into the sewers," Ben added. "The look in his eyes that day... he really would have killed Mike. It was like there was nothing human left in him."

"I was the sheep," Mike said cryptically, his forehead furrowed while his eyes stayed closed. "I never wanted to be that way again."

"We went in through the Neibolt house, in the basement," Eddie said. "I thought I was going to fall and die, with my broken arm. Somehow we all managed to get down, even Mike, after Henry…"

"After he fell," Ben filled in, emotionlessly. Anything he might have felt about the death of Bowers that day, plummeting down to the depths of the well, was not revealed in the slightest. Andi found this curious, but what she didn't realise was that this was purposely done to hide some of the guilt Ben felt about Bowers' death, not because he felt responsible (he hadn't been, obviously) but because he had actually felt relieved that day when Henry fell, as if a giant knife-wielding weight had been lifted off of his shoulders for good. Which it had... but that didn't stop him from feeling bad for acknowledging it.

"Okay," Andi said. "So you're all in the sewers, after coming down the well… then what?"

There was a silence, and a slight sniffle from the direction of Stan.

"I got separated," he said at last, shortly.

"The not-hot lady found him," Richie said, without his usual mirth. "We were almost too late."

Andi watched Stan carefully during Richie's words, noticing for the first time how pale he was. His eyes were shut to play along with the memory recollection, but he looked quite distressed at the mention of the attack of Pennywise. She noticed he was also scratching a bit at the cuff of his right sleeve, which seemed an odd quirk to have. She made a note to herself to investigate that further later, but the simple conclusion for now was that whatever had happened that day had had a lasting impression on Stan, and still clearly affected him badly now.

"I woke up by myself down there...I tried to escape Pennywise's lair, but there was never a chance of that," Bev said softly. "God, that creature is the stuff of nightmares. And yet... I wasn't really scared, you know."

"Yeah I never understood that, Bev the Brave," Richie said, shifting his position with his eyes still closed and his arms crossed. "How were you not scared of the clown?"

There was a pause, but only Andi saw the small smile creep across Bev's face as she remembered that day.

"Isn't it obvious, doofus?" Bev said. "Because I knew you guys were coming. I felt it, somehow, down there. I knew you were coming and I knew that the most scared of all that day was Pennywise. He was terrified of us."

Andi cocked her head at Bev's words. It was not the first time that there was the hinting amongst them of something almost… supernatural… about the relationship between the so-called Losers. She knew she'd be lying to herself if she said she didn't detect something strange about them, almost as if having them all together like this generated some kind of electricity in the air, a weird unseen force that she knew she wasn't a part of but could vaguely sense all the same. The existence of Pennywise challenged her agnostic view of the world: above all, she believed in evidence, and there was no convincing evidence of gods or angels or demons or ghosts despite what people held on to so dearly. But if there was some kind of supernatural entity like the clown, who could bend reality and make you see things that weren't there and sense your fears and thoughts, then who was to say there weren't other entities? That there wasn't a lot more to the world than what could be explained by science alone?

It was a heavy thought, and one she did not like to dwell on too much.

"Why was Pennywise scared of you?" Andi prompted.

"All of us, together… we had some kind of power," Stan said, rubbing against his eyelids. "It was a power we never really understood, something to do with us being kids and knowing that Pennywise wasn't make-believe…"

"And there was something else, behind it all," Mike added. "Something… someone… a vague sense that together we became much bigger than ourselves alone... whatever it was, some power was on our side back then. Maybe it was just luck in the end but it felt like we were more lucky than we deserved to be sometimes. I hope we're still that lucky somehow."

"Okay..." Andi continued, a bit uneasily despite herself. "You rescued Stan. And then... you found Bev?"

"We..." Eddie frowned. "We found the cavern..."

"Cavern?" Andi prompted.

"Yeah, a big open cavern thing, that stretched all the way to the ceiling," Richie filled in. "It was the clown's lair. And all above us... floating..."

"... were the corpses of the missing children," Bev finished dully. "Or what was left of them."

Andi tried not to picture that particular image too clearly.

"Then what?"

There was a silence, which none of the Losers could fill, because at this point they just didn't have the answers.

"We fought the clown," Richie said simply. "And we got Georgie back."

"I'm guessing there was a bit more to it than that," Andi said wryly. "You really don't remember anything else? Even the smallest details will help here, you know."

"Oh! Ben kissed Bev," Eddie said suddenly, a little too gleefully for Ben's liking. A red flush spread across his cheeks, discrediting his otherwise-calm facade immensely. Andi noticed that Beverly's cheeks tinged pink as well.

"It wasn't like that," Ben said defensively, eyes still closed. "I thought it might wake her up."

"It seemed to work," Stan added. But the momentary joy in Eddie's bringing up of Ben's kiss rapidly settled again into the blankness of their memories. Andi looked around the room, scanning the faces of the five people trying so hard to remember what the clown had taken from them. They'd still kept their eyes shut, as she'd asked, but she saw the anxiety and worry etched in their faces. She supposed she'd been a little over-ambitious to assume that the techniques that worked on other people could combat an evil clown's magic... but it had been worth a shot.

She spotted Richie's phone on the small table next to him, still open on the photo of the carving on the tree. And then it occurred to her: she couldn't hope to get the information they needed by asking them to remember it, but if she instead assumed what the information was... maybe they had a chance.

"You left someone down there," she said, causing the others to start abruptly. "It's obvious, isn't it? Whoever WD is or was, they must have been there with you that day. They found Richie at the arcade. They called Eddie."

From the scrunched-up frowns on the Losers' faces, she thought perhaps for the first time she was making progress with them.

"Can you remember anything about WD?" she pressed. "Were they male, or female? The same age as you, older? There must be something you remember. What else weird has turned up recently where you have the same feeling of fogginess in your brain, because that's the key to undoing the magic preventing you from remembering. What about your dreams..." She trailed off, a little uncertain about bringing up Mike's nightmare. "... or your nightmares?"

She watched Mike carefully, noticing how he was still quite pale.

"There was someone else there," Mike admitted. "In my dream just now, maybe it was my subconscious trying to help me remember. I don't remember much though, just that someone was there behind Bowers."

"In mine too," Stan said quietly. He didn't seem willing to share any more details than that, and Andi didn't particularly feel like pressing on him about it. She'd interviewed enough witnesses in the past to know when they felt like talking, and when they didn't.

"Why would we leave someone down there?" asked Eddie shakily. "Do you think WD died? Why would Pennywise hide that from us?"

"Let's review," Andi said. "You all, plus WD, go into the sewers to face the clown. You all come back, along with George Denbrough. WD doesn't return, and is instead wiped from your memories. That means WD, or whatever happened to them, must be damn important."

"It's so close, I'm so close to remembering," Bev said, her eyes still shut and her face pained. "There's an emptiness in my chest that I've never known the cause of, and I'm so sure now that it is this missing person, WD... I feel like I can almost see them, in my mind... almost remember what they looked like..."

The almost-lifting of the fog was right there in the room with them, and no one else dared speak.

"He-"

And at that moment, the door opened.