Note: Hello! I'm sorry! (oh wow I just realised it's one year to the day since I last updated, oops) This super mini chapter does in no way even slightly make up for my terrible track record of progressing this fic, but I have very much had this story (and its state of incompleteness) in the back of my mind at various points over the last many months. There's been a lot going on and I never really found the headspace to get into it properly, but I'm working on Chapter 14b and will try to get it to you soon (hoping this mini snippet will kick off the rest that follows and wanted to let anyone still following this story that I do aim to finish it one day!). It's a pretty crazy world we exist in right now, and hopefully those of you out there are doing okay. Anyway, will try to keep the momentum going and get proper Chapter 14 out to you all as soon as I can. Stay safe and avoid sewers!
They're coming, they're coming, they're coming.
He felt Pennywise's tormenting whispers all around him, breaking into the peaceful mirage of the Barrens, shattering the shimmering illusion into jagged pieces and leaving only the wet darkness of the sewers. The clown's voice had always been more than words alone; it ripped into him like tiny daggers running all over his skin, painfully forcing him into submission. He'd been down in this darkness so long, he couldn't really remember what it was like to not be cold, damp and hurting.
They don't care about you, they never did...
An unfamiliar yet comforting rage continued to bubble within him, dark thoughts running through his mind as he thought about the ones who had abandoned him, and worse - forgotten him. Even as a tiny part of him cried out in protest, he felt a burning desire to see them suffer as he had, to have them live a million torturous lives at Pennywise's hands and try to come out of it in one piece.
Not that he really did come out in one piece, that much he could acknowledge to the voices in his head.
Georgie betrayed you, they all betrayed you.
It wasn't as if he couldn't remember his endlessly optimistic past self, or the righteous arrogance with which he'd led the Losers into the sewers. But when he thought now about those memories, it was as if he was watching from afar the actions of a different person, someone so distant from whoever he was now.
Whatever it was he was becoming.
The darkness of the sewer used to terrify him, both before and after he'd been left with Pennywise. And now... he couldn't imagine being anywhere else.
Make them pay, Billy boy.
With every rasping whisper of the clown, he felt the darkness within him pulse in response, felt it grow as if it was fuelled by the clown's malevolence. All of the treacherous feelings he'd suppressed for so long: despair, anger, hatred, loneliness, fear... the more he felt them and gave in to them, the more he felt at home in the murky shadows of the sewer. The more he felt at home by Pennywise's side, some kind of broken apprentice to the creature that preyed on Derry. Forgotten by everyone he'd ever known or loved, destined to become his own worst nightmare.
A warm amber light suddenly, and fleetingly, embraced him.
Thanks, Billy.
Bill started, the echoed memory jolting through him like icy shards. As if he was sitting there that day in his room, finishing the boat with paraffin wax, his brother's arm draped around his shoulders. Had he really just heard Georgie's voice mixed in amongst Pennywise's imperative taunts? For a brief moment, it felt as if that bit of warmth glowed within him, and fought back the looming darkness. A semblance of his former self and his past life that he grasped at desperately, even as it felt like Pennywise was all around him, surrounding him and drowning him in the endless black.
If you come with me, you'll float too.
He shuddered, remembering Georgie's ghostly features in the flooded basement, remembered how the waterlogged flesh peeled away from his face as the clown rose up from the depths behind him. The utter hopelessness tightening his chest as his irritated father stepped in the water in the basement, water that only Bill could see, water that seemed to exist only in his mind and nowhere else. In this watery world he now inhabited, there was only Pennywise. No escape, and no salvation. The numbing feelings of wanting to have others suffer as he had returned, a cold simmering rage now more familiar to him than the flicker of lost spaces and times.
And deep within him, in the darkest part of his being, the part of him he feared the most - a growing gnawing desire... to feed.
You're everything you ever were afraid of.
The distant memory of the turtle smashing into blocks on Georgie's bedroom floor flashed meaninglessly through his clouded mind, gone as quickly as it had arrived, and it was as if the last feeble trace of light faded out, leaving only the enveloping darkness.