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This is a good ending.
Everything is good.
It couldn't be better than this.
Beverly keeps repeating it to herself as watches her friends celebrate from the bar, untouched drink held to her chest. There had been a few halfhearted suggestions to get the hell out of town as soon as they stumbled from the sinkhole on Neibolt, but once Ben had brought up the quarry, and they were splashing and clean in the water, they had decided to stay just one night more. Something defiant had risen up in each of them, something wild and untouchable, that had them all lingering in Derry of their own free will, running off that cliff like they're thirteen again, daring that town to just try to take them down.
And now they're here: dressed in clean clothes again, tipsy and happy and together again without any kind of terror hanging over the six of them.
A victory lap. A happy ending.
The six of them. Not five, or four, or one. (But not seven either.) The same number of losers that arrived in Derry would be leaving in the morning. In the cistern there had been a moment—many moments, more than enough for them all, but one particular moment so vivid—where it nearly wasn't. She could barely see from across the cave full of jittery light, but she knew it in fine detail regardless, because it was a scene she had seen in so many nightmares without knowing. It was Richie, fallen like a doll with cut strings, and Eddie, leaning over him, and she knew what followed: the gore she couldn't see from her current angle but smelled in her memories, feeling warm blood and then the displacement of air as Eddie was lifted up, thrown up, and—
But that didn't happen; the scene didn't play out. Living three seconds in the future, she didn't see what changed, but she heard the crack of claw meeting stone, saw two little figures of scrambling into a crack in the wall. Ben had tugged on her hand and she'd followed, and she'd shouted all the words and followed all the others, into the corner where It cowered and then back, up, onto the street.
It didn't happen. It almost happened, but it didn't. Eddie is right there, new gauze on his cheek and his ankle (which he swears he sprained but defiantly refused to go to the hospital for) and intact, failing happily to beat Ben at darts. He's fine, all six of them are, but again, it's that six, that...
It could have been five, so easily, but Richie saw what was coming and got them both out of the way and never had that awful look on his face like he...
But Bev...
"Bev?"
She looks up to see that very face leaning over her shoulder, now giving her a quietly concerned look. She always forgot that about Richie: he was good at being sincere when he wanted to (and when he didn't but forgot to put on a mask). She thinks back to that night at the restaurant, the simple way he had said, "I feel very relieved to be here with you guys," the way her heart had twisted for a moment at the irony of that relief without knowing why.
Richie frowns more at whatever he sees on her face. "Hey, you okay?"
Bev remembers, suddenly, a moment from that summer. One of the rare days after they climbed back out of the sewers when they were together and happy—not serious, not burdened with the weight of deepest fears and growing up and apart and away. Just kids clambering through the woods looking for some pseudo-junkyard Bill found, full of the uncomplicated kid version of the invincibility they feel now.
She was walking alongside Eddie, their conversation having lapsed when Richie came over, hanging over Eddie's shoulders, badly singing some jokey song with Eddie's name swapped in, a parody of a parody (which was mostly all he was capable of, comedy-wise). Eddie had shoved, Richie had clung, and they'd toppled off the path and tumbled down the slope yelling at each other. Stan had sighed and Bill and Mike laughed as Ben went to pull them out of the bushes, but Bev had been frozen, quip on her lips, at the sight suddenly transposed over them.
It was the sight she'd almost seen again today and, in remembering, the memory of the future transposed on memory of the past experienced in the present where that future had nearly come flashes before her eyes again and she drops her glass.
"Whoa, okay, not okay," Richie says, bending awkwardly around to grab the whiskey before it spills everywhere.
Eddie, what can the problem be? Sweet Eddie, why won't you go out with me? Richie's little kid squawk fills her head as regular adult Richie murmurs awkward soothing things and guides her out into the front hall.
"Seriously, Bev, what's going on?"
"I..." She shakes her head, standing. "Nothing. I just zoned out."
Her feet carry her calmly to the foyer, but Richie follows with concern scribbled across his face.
"You're not dying, are you?" He asks. "This isn't like one of those zombie movies where someone gets bitten but doesn't tell the rest of the heroes so they can focus on the mission, only to get turned in the end, right? You'd tell us if you had some life threatening wound?"
The phrase twinges in the back of her mind even as she can't help laughing just a little. "No, Rich, I'm fine. Just tired."
He definitely doesn't believe her. Bev doesn't blame him, but she also doesn’t want to have this conversation, and hopes that that is broadcast on her face just as clearly.
"Okay..." Richie squints. "Well, if you wanna go lie down, I can cover for you. Y'know, it's your party and you'll nap if you want to."
It's tempting, but part of her doesn't want to waste a minute they're all together, and a much larger part is afraid that, when she closes her eyes, nothing will have changed—and as soon as she lets herself think that, the dam bursts, emotion running through her fast enough to shake her limbs. She doesn't cry, not yet, but folds over into herself, hands over her eyes as she trembles with the force of every nightmare from the past twenty-seven years.
"Hey, th—" Richie's hands hover uselessly near her shoulders. "Uh. Okay, Lesley Gore, um—"
Richie is tall. Bev doesn't think she'll ever get used to Richie being so tall, but it's comforting, the way he sometimes seems like he doesn’t know what to do with all that tall. He gingerly puts his arm around her shoulder, barely having to lift it, and steers her over to the stairs.
They sit there, side by side, with Bev crying in every way but with tears and Richie mumbling, "It's okay, you're okay," for what feels like hours but has probably only been a minute, seeing as no one has come out to look for them yet. When Bev runs out of breath she looks up, up to the ceiling and the dusty chandelier hanging far overhead. It's not the sky, but it's close. It's not the nauseating swirl of the deadlights sliding off the wet walls of the cave overhead.
At some point during her dry sobbing, Richie had lopsidedly draped his hoodie over her shoulders, and she clings to it now in the same way, reveling in its dryness, in the fact that no, there is no blood here, some grime but no blood, not like that.
After another glance at the open doorway, Richie speaks. "Is it... y'know, this whole freak show, or is it something else?"
"No." She considers telling him about Tom, but it feels disingenuous to say something now, like she's trying to foist off her problems on someone else.
(Like you always do, a voice adds. Like you think if you put something off, if you don't tell anyone, it won't happen. How did that turn out, Bevvie? Why don't we ask Stan, hm?)
She doesn’t want to talk about it: doesn’t want the blame. A thread of twisted logic argues if no one thinks it was her fault, it wasn't her fault, right? And she almost believes it, until she looks over at Richie, sees the concern on his face, and the guilt punches her in the stomach again regardless.
"Rich..." Bev takes a deep breath. "When you were in the deadlights..."
He flinches like he's been slapped. It's so nowhere near the reaction Bev was expected, especially before she even got to the question, that she freezes too.
After a long quiet moment, the happy murmur of their friends in the other room rising and falling imperceptibly, Bev asks, much more softly, "You saw something, didn't you?"
Richie jerks into action without actually moving, arms crossing over his chest, then reaching up to fiddle with his glasses, ruffle his hair, all while talking a mile a minute. "No, why would you say that, I didn't— I wasn't in there that long, you were there for hours before we found you but I just— It wasn't long enough to— Why?"
"You saved Eddie," she says, like any of this is that simple.
"So?" Richie seems to realize his voice says much more than two letters as soon as he says it. "I mean, I saw the thing behind him, it's not like I had a vision of him leaning over me with this fucking clown claw sticking out of his—"
His voice breaks and Bev grabs his hand. It feels like they're having three conversations at once, all half-spoken and tripping over each other. None of this is how she thought it would go, in so many ways, and it's hard keeping all the lines of what she means to say and what she actually says and what Richie says and what his face says from tangling up in her hands, but she knows how to do this one thing at least.
"Hey, it's okay," she echoes back at him. "He's fine, we're all— Eddie is fine."
"Then why did you bring it up?" Richie asks, frantic speed blurring it almost into one word, leaning forward into it. "If we're all fine, why would you...?"
When Bev looks away, he realizes.
"We're not all fine."
"No."
He sighs, so small, so very un-Richie. "I really thought this time we..."
"No, not that," Bev hurries to interrupt. "It's really gone, I believe that, I know that. I just meant... we're still not all fine."
"Oh."
The silence stretches as Beverly waits for the hammer to fall. It doesn't. She's waiting and waiting, Richie's sad face in front of her still colored with concern for her, and it makes her feel sick the way Richie had earlier. Before the relief.
Turning back to the wall across from them, trying to make out the tiny patterns of the wallpaper, she whispers, "How did you do it."
"I don't know, I just... did." Richie looks the same way, not seeing what she sees. "I didn't really think about it, I reacted before I even knew what I was reacting to."
She never paid attention to it before—the wallpaper—too distracted by haunted skateboards and Eddie, blood pouring from his mouth, uncanny almost-familiar that now makes her dizzy with its resonance. It's a series of oddly disjointed boxes, tiny floral pieces and birds, animals. It reminds her of this art, a painting or something, of a unicorn in a cage; the same dark green field, the same littering of flowers, the same animal shape in the center, fenced in by the border. She knows that's not really it, but still: all she sees are unicorns, caught up in their cages.
"I don't know," Richie finishes lamely, repeating himself for lack of a better explanation. "I just did."
"And I didn't."
His head jerks to look at her, but Bev gamely keeps her eye on the wallpaper.
"Yeah, but... Bev..." The wary tone of his voice makes it practically a question.
She almost turns, almost, but instead shuts her eyes. "I knew. That last day, you asked how you looked all grown up, and he—"
You look the same, but taller. She had assumed. She couldn't tell, not when he was lying slumped over like that, though yes, there were the same curls on his head, damp with steam. It scared her too much to think about then, and it scares her now in another way, mostly because at some point in the middle it stopped scaring her, becoming only a half-remembered movie tableau that stuck with her over the years for some reason. Now that she remembers what she's looking at, it takes on a new kind of sickening feeling, the guilt of not knowing and not doing suffocating her like dark sludge. It was scary. It was memorable. And now it is sickening.
When she looks at Richie now, she can't help the sad little smile that creeps up her face. "I told you you grew into your looks."
"What," Richie cuts to the chase, "and you should've told Stan, 'No, actually, you don't look any different, you look dead'? Seriously?"
Bev feels herself rising to meet Richie's energy, hands coming up to gesture jerkily, because she's never been great at resisting that, the way he drags everyone up (or down, as the case may be) to his level just by being the most: the loudest, the grossest, the farthest afield, whatever.
"I could have... told him, any of you, I—! Stan wasn't the only one, any of us could've ended up in that same place. I could have said something, that no matter what happened we would all have to see it through, to live, if I had just—" The dry sobbing feeling is rising in her chest again. "I didn't say anything, it's my fault he—"
"You weren't there, Bev, you couldn't have saved him."
"You did." His hand freezes where it was coming up to rest on her back again and a part of her feels a twinge of vindication when he stops. "You knew what was going to happen to Eddie and you stopped it."
"Because he was right there! I was already reaching." His face twists into a rueful grin. "If I hadn't physically had my hands on him, it would be a totally different story."
The phrase obviously sours in his mouth—saying out loud words even gesturing at that possibility brings it an inch closer into the real world, and that is an inch too far—but Richie doesn't back down.
This is when Bev realizes this is the first time he's gone more than a minute without touching Eddie, and the weight of that fact. All the Losers had immediately fallen back into their childhood closeness, and in the post-victory rush none of them have been willing to stray that far from the others, but Richie and Eddie have always been a different story, and one that hasn't changed. Without the fog of her guilty introspection, Bev sees now the way they've been since returning to the townhouse: the long looks speaking volumes, the hands on shoulders and arms, just checking, just making sure. She sees Richie appearing over Eddie's shoulder to add a dumb joke or hand him a drink or pull a face or pick at the new tape on his cheek until Eddie wordlessly bats him away, still mid-conversation with Bill about real estate or something, never once upset, and always, always, standing there, near each other, both of them breathing and whole.
Always within arm's reach. Just in case.
"I could've saved him," Bev says quietly. "If I had been there."
"But you weren't." Richie sighs, then, like he knows something. "None of us were."
When Bev nods, he continues more emphatically, "But that's not our fault. It's not your fault. Even if you had said something back then, it wouldn't have made a difference. We all forgot everything."
"We didn't all forget everything," Bev corrects. "This was the one thing I remembered. What I saw in the deadlights, it never left me—It got hazier, sure, I stopped recognizing your faces, but I never forgot."
She turns to him and sees a different Richie, one she's been trying to forget for years, tall the way he has been in Bev's memory long before he was in person, swaying gently at the side of a train platform. He's swaying and swaying, staring blankly at the tracks of the L like he often does, but between the alcohol almost always in his system those days and the weight of the years, of the memories he no longer knows but carries nevertheless, the pull is too strong. He tips over. That's it—and she knows now, looking at the Richie before her, that it would have been only months, if not weeks from now, that final tip.
And though she hasn't seen it for certain, she knows just as well that there's another Richie out there, trapped under the weight of the crumbling house on Neibolt, just as set-in-stone inevitable as the first.
"I could remember the warnings, but not who I was supposed to warn."
Richie shakes his head. "You didn't kill Stan."
"But—"
Richie sets his hands on her shoulders slowly but surely—giving her enough time to see it coming but emphatic nonetheless. "You. Didn't. Kill. Stan."
"But I didn't do enough to stop it happening." She fights the urge to go fully catatonic, the words building up inside her clogging her throat.
"You didn't—!"
"I—!"
He's just shy of actually shouting, Bev even closer, and they both immediately turn to the doorway for a tense moment.
"Look, I—" This time Richie cuts himself off, frustrated-anxious and ruffling his hair. "When we were down there, and I knew Eddie was gonna die, I felt like... like someone was pulling my hands up towards him." Bev blinks. "And I know that sounds crazy—"
"It doesn't." She remembers standing on the bank of the river, leaning down to pick up a rock that she knew would be under her hand, pulling back to throw it at Bowers and feeling something moving her hand just to the right, just a bit farther back, to throw it exactly at his head. Some kind of deep instinct, coupled with the out-of-body feeling of some thing or one guiding them all into place, the hand on her back pushing her forward to talk to Ben the first time, to turn left instead of right in the pharmacy, to throw that rock with eerie precision.
"But what I'm trying to say is even then, even with that— whatever, I still almost didn't. Save him, I guess."
The words sit awkwardly on Richie's tongue, and Bev wants to tell him of course that's what he did, that Richie is brave too, that he can be a hero.
Almost as though he could hear her anyway, Richie takes a deep breath. "Look," he says, then takes a long pause. "You said..."
He sighs again and Bev puts her hand on his arm, like as long as there's something else to focus on, she can keep it together.
"When we got separated down there and you got—"
He waves at her whole body to indicate the blood soaking the clothes she's since changed out of. Bev nods.
"All Carrie'd out," he finishes in a rush. "You said at the Quarry that It split you guys up, and you got the blood room. And he said you saved him, right?"
She shrugs uncomfortably. "Ben is always saying stuff like that."
The smile that slips across Richie's face for a second is equally sweet and disgusted. "Yeah, I know, it's super gross. But he meant literally."
A hint of childish wistfulness flickers into her mind.
"Yeah."
"Okay, well..." His hand flails around again, vague and directionless. "How?"
"We were split up," Bev starts slowly, half afraid that as soon as she starts to describe it, it will happen again—that setting the scene will bring it back to life—so she keeps her eyes trained on the weave of the rug under her feet. "I was in the fucking middle school girls bathroom, exactly the same as the last time I saw it—Greta Keene poured wet garbage all over me." She picks up speed, the memory returning as she says it. "The hairspray and cheap cleaning supply fumes, the cigarette burns, the graffiti in the stalls."
Richie nods, not quite hiding the bitter smile on his face. "The legendary first floor girls room. Many a rumor started on those walls, and many a boy given detention trying to sneak into it."
The recent memory freezes and stutters for a second, rewinding back into something older, a permanent marker scribble Bev only read because she recognized a name she didn't think to look for: that weirdly smart spaz from her science class, later one of her best friends, later someone she knows, instinctively, she should not bring this up to.
"It was so vivid," she says instead, "I couldn't do anything but sit there for a second, afraid I really was there, back in time or something. And then—" The cacophony of voices, door shaking in its frame, thick blood seeping into her shoes, her skin— "Shit happened."
In the corner of her eye Richie silently nods like a loose bobblehead, which is oddly bolstering.
"But I don't know," she continues slowly. "It's like I could hear him, even though it was so loud. I just knew there was something else behind that door, and that even though there was all this shit out there, if I wanted to not drown in there I had to get it open, and that it was okay. So I kicked in the door and there he was." She smiles faintly, closing her eyes for just a moment. "All the blood was rushing out around me, and he was almost swallowed by all that dirt, and I held out my hand and pulled him up. It shouldn't have been possible. I'm not that strong, you know? But it was like gravity pulling my arm down to him, I didn't have a choice."
It still doesn't quite get the feeling right, until Richie says quietly, "Instinct."
She looks up at him, staring at the floor as she had only a minute ago.
"Yes."
"Okay, well. Same."
Richie pulls off his glasses and wipes them on the corner of his clean(er) t-shirt. This is the second time Bev's seen him do that today, and also maybe ever, and she clocks the nervous tic as he keeps talking. (God, he just always keeps talking—but it's better than the alternative, she supposes.)
"It— I don't know." He shrugs. "Like... all I could see was the look on his face, and I'd do whatever to stop that from happening, but even then I couldn't do it on my own or... without whatever that was. And I mean, isn't the whole point that we're stronger together? Didn't we just prove that?"
"But we were together then," Bev starts, "when I first knew."
"But we weren't there, Bev," Richie interrupts. "Were you in Stan's bathroom? Did you hand him the fucking, the razor or whatever?" His voice breaks on the noun, but his face doesn't. "He was alone, and you were alone, and we all—"
He rubs his eyes under his glasses. Bev is suddenly struck by the weight of how old he looks, how old she feels. There are so many years and miles and just things separating this Richie from the one she still knows, and yet that distance doesn't seem so far right now, because for all that could change, they are all still the same. Maybe it's not a good thing; she thinks about Eddie's wife, just like his mother, and Bill's books, writing around and around that horror. For all they've aged, how much has any of them grown? They changed over that summer, but they were torn apart, shoved back in their boxes until they fit again, severed links in a chain that couldn't hold anything by themselves. But maybe they only fit back together because they never changed. Maybe, if they couldn't keep each other, they could at least stay close enough to who they were then that they might stand a chance at coming back together now.
Bev looks at Richie, and all these thoughts pass between them in a moment.
"You were just a kid," he says. "You couldn't have saved him. Not even the fucking turtle could."
When he says it, he gives her an odd look that Bev immediately recognizes as the same feeling she has when she hears it; she isn't sure what it means, but she knows it to be true. It is a feeling of weightlessness and heaviness all at once, thrown through space, and something very old. She can't look at it head-on, something stops her from looking at the details of the thought, but she can feel the shape of it in her head and it is unsettling and comforting all at once.
After a long moment, Bev feels herself smile a smile she had forgotten she had: one of calm safety, that only ever came out among these losers, she now knows, and their unconditional love but more importantly acceptance.
This is the smile she answers Richie's worried look with as she tweaks his glasses straight again.
"When did you get so smart?"
"What, you've never heard of the wise fool?" Even with her teasing tone, Richie's smile is just as sedate.
She musses his hair and quickly kisses his cheek. He wiggles faux-bashfully and tips his head onto hers. Bev, Richie, Bev, Richie; back and forth, a steady pendulum swing. God, she's missed this.
As though instinctively drawn to the smell of bonding, Bill's head peeks into the hall. He looks concerned but instinctively mirrors their quiet and only raises an eyebrow. Richie gives the tired version of his usual dopey "third grader on his first day of school" wave, Bev looks into Bill's eyes and simply nods.
He only stays for a moment, but it's a long one, heavy with the presence of together that grows more palpable with each body in the room. Then someone joyfully shouts his name from within and Bill turns back, always gravitating toward the greatest denominator, the greatest whole, and Bev and Richie slip back into the silence of coming down.
"So," Bev says eventually, "you saved Eddie like how I saved Ben?"
Richie immediately clocks the hint of an upcoming tease in her tone. "Nope, nuh-uh, I am not having that conversation."
"Oh, so you're happy to talk me through some lifelong traumatic guilt, but we can't talk about how you have a huge cr—?"
Bev smiles under the hand he covers her mouth with before licking his palm, which immediately retracts.
"Ugh, dude."
"Calm down, you big baby, it's just a little spit," Bev says, rolling her eyes briefly before a grin spreads to every inch of her face. "You know, I bet if I was Eddie—"
"I swear to god—"
"If Bev was me?"
The look on Richie's face when he sees Eddie in the doorway (all at once horrified, guilty, besotted, and genuinely surprised) is enough to fuel Bev for another twenty-seven years; the way Eddie immediately drops into preemptive disappointment at the look is just icing on the cake.
"What did you do."
"Nothing!"
Richie (literally) leaps into action, bounding over to give Eddie a noogie like the kid he both still is and hasn't been for longer than he should.
"Sweet Beverly was just saying that if she had been in your shoes, she would've started climbing Ben like the beautiful redwood he is way earlier," he continues.
"What the fuck does that even mean?" Eddie complains, fruitlessly batting away Richie's attempts to hang over his shoulders. "He's in love with her, what are you—"
"Come on, he's been all over you! Your knight in shining armor! Saving you from that fortune cookie monster, carrying you out of the sewers cuz you thought you twisted your ankle..."
"There's nothing romantic about a piggyback," Eddie counters with another shove, "and also fuck you, I absolutely could have. God, can't you ever shut up? I mean seriously, can you? Are you physically capable of not talking?"
"Not unless someone makes me. Why, you offering?"
Eddie makes his can't believe I put up with this face where he zips his mouth shut to hide any hint of a smile but, as per usual, makes no move to not put up with it, even as Richie very obviously leans his whole weight (and then some, with effort) on him. Where Bev would normally roll her eyes fondly at this display, she instead gets caught up again in the contrast with the Richie of five minutes ago, of five hours ago, of thirty years ago and yet the future, swaying, terrified and panicked and so blank-faced and alone. None of that is present as he pushes down on Eddie's shoulders, his face alternating between vibrant fondness when Eddie isn't looking and comical exertion when he is, in a way that makes it very hard to hold onto the feeling those fading faces brought up.
"Dude, why are you fucking strong?"
"Because I go to the gym, asshole, I don't wanna die of heart failure in five years like you obviously will. Also you're pushing down, there's nowhere for me to go. That's just fucking physics."
"Not my fault you're fun sized. Y'know, I haven't even seen your face this whole time, although the top of your head is now as intimately familiar to me as your m—"
Eddie shoves him from the side before Bev can flash back to the seasick guilt she felt at Richie's words earlier (the look on his face) and instead she hears that song, that stupid song, Richie's squeaky little voice and the shrieking and the sound of sunlight in the trees.
-I'm certain that our love would last forever and ever, or are you too dumb to realize that?
-If you don't shut the fuck up I'm gonna actually push you out a window.
-So you have been listening! Aw, Eds, I knew you cared.
-I will defenestrate your ass, Richie, I swear to god—
-Ooh, ten dollar word! What else've you got in the ol' cranium—
The crashing of bodies through underbrush and the laughter of others.
(Sunlight makes sound—she remembers hearing that once, though she doesn't know where, but the lack of knowing is not suspicious, just the hazy way she assumes most people forget with time. It is strangely, powerfully comforting.)
Just like that day all those years ago, Eddie giggles and shoves and Richie stumbles and laughs, and they grapple as they try to somehow both keep their tangle of EddieandRichie upright and still knock the other over. Bill's head appears at the doorway again, vaguely concerned until he sees what's happening, and Mike close on his heels with a grin, so fucking happy to have his friends back. Behind them, Bev catches Ben's eye, and such a heavylight feeling of warmth and safety covers her shoulders, making her feel like she's not floating, never that word again, but hovering, drifting just a few inches off the ground, toes touching the carpet with a hand in hers to keep her grounded.
When Bill yells at them to get a room, Richie gives up the ghost just long enough for Eddie to get the upper hand and knock him down (somehow catching him at the same time so he doesn't hit the ground too hard).
Mike laughs, really laughs, his whole body unwound of tension, and Richie makes a stupid joke about how this is a hotel, after all, and Ben is coming up to her side with a hand in hers—and where the sight of Eddie crouched over Richie should again set off guilty warning bells, all Bev feels is calm.
Yes, there is a hole where Stan should be, staring at the pile of forty year old children on the floor with vague disappointment but still unable to hold in a laugh when Eddie pushes Richie's face into the rug as he levers himself up. There should be Stan, hair neat despite still being covered in sewer slime, cracking jokes they can't help laughing at even as they don't know why, keeping them in order, keeping them whole, always the best. There should be Stan among them, and for a moment there is, a warm feeling lapping at her consciousness that feels like forgiveness and a calming hand and the smell of quarry water in the warm summer sun. For a moment there is seven.