STEPHEN KING'S "IT": RICHIE TOZIER

CWs: mentions of death, horror themes, internalized homophobia, repressed trauma.

this is strictly an exploration of an existing character, richie tozier / it / other characters mentioned in these samples do not belong to me etc. 

BEVERLY MARSH:  ❛ I know I don’t have a right to ask. ❜ 

Richie didn't mean to snap at her, before. The feeling was just so volcanic, so raw with nerves that he can’t say it without shaking — can’t say it without the dirt and iron and broken glass and  ' this kills monsters if you believe it does ' — 

    But it doesn’t, it didn’t. 

He wants to scream it, but it's the kind of scream that doesn’t make it out, in a yellow-violet wave. Shrill, thin, it smoulders with the death rattle of the Derry underground — the death pit and you knew it was going to be death you knew it was going to be someone why did you let it be him —

❝ …It was gonna kill me, Bev. It didn’t, because he — Because Eds. ❞  He swallows thickly, and then continues, more quietly;   ❝ — It could have, and  ❞ 

      It should have. Oh, it should have. If I didn’t talk so fucking much. If I warned him. If I moved if I—

Richie is still living in this moment; the cave of teeth, and the red-white lights and the float, float, just float away and see nothing and hear nothing and — 

Well. No one really tells you what it’s like for someone to die in front of you. 

It was like the lights going out in a house one at a time. But here was the punchline: You had only just moved in again, you had only just remembered where to hang your coat — 

There was no real rewind on this scene, no laugh track. Bev had seen him, caught him without a joke. She’s seeing him now, tear streaks and coming apart in big claw-marked chunks — that he’s been told, are him.

They both smell like quarry water, he realizes — the quarry water that hadn’t gotten all the blood off his hands. They looked like people wandering in from the woods,  after having been missing for weeks. And they sort of were. He looked like someone he didn’t recognize, the mirror returning to him a scattered suggestion of himself.

He thinks he would give anything to forget again. In only a handful of days, he had tripped down a trap door in himself — had his teeth shaken with the residual tremor of a heartache,  so deeply buried in a Derry summer he’d tasted blood. 

Eyebrows furrow down, he swallows the shame of it, the scatter of ice-chip fear. It’s Bev, It’s Bev. You could always trust Bev, remember?

And back then, when they were just two kids sitting out by the Kenduskeag River, tossing rocks and blades of grass at the slow rapids. When she’d caught him after the tail-end of a Bowers encounter, caught him before he could find a different voice — one that didn’t tremble.

     'What if the stuff they said  about me was true? ' he had asked; ' would you hate me then? '  

The words, back then, becoming synonymous with his name, scrawled hateful in bathroom stalls or whispered at his back in the hall. Sticks and stones, but he’d rather have taken the bloody nose, the smashed glasses, anything. Because there had been something locked in that film reel — 

That you thought you’d never told anyone but the Kissing Bridge, with a shitty little pen-knife and a chest-splitting guilt. But you did. You told the person who you knew would listen. He wonders if she remembered, if she was just asking to be polite.

         '  Did you love him? '

He could laugh, right now. But the sound would be dreadful. 

He feels like that kid again, wanting to crunch himself smaller in a bathroom stall, clap his hands over his ears and scream. He doesn’t have anywhere to put this — the clutter, the laundry on the floor, the muddy sneakers, the old comic books. Eddie hadn't had the fucking decency to pick any of it up before he left. The fucking proverbial house. But this time for real. This time for good.

In Methodist church, they tell you you go to heaven, after that, if you deserve to. You don’t know if you believe in any of that, from Methodist church — but God if something made you want to —

❝ Shit, Bev. ❞  The laughter wilts, caught in the tightness of his throat. Stupid, funny. All the stupid, funny words, like and how they mean nothing, now. Because finally, he could put his finger on this unknowable dread; it's grief.  For exhuming the feeling, grief in burying it, again.         

   ' Hey Bev, please don’t fucking laugh. I don’t know if i could take it. This one's not a joke.  '

Richie  flicks his cigarette over the side of the bridge, watches it disappear in the green water. Bev would get it, maybe. if anyone would get it, and maybe not laugh — These are the childish thought spirals that come up, now, bubble to the surface to grapple with the senselessness of this — all of this.

A sharp inhale; palm presses up against the prickling in his eyes. He laughs, full of splinters, looks up at her quietly.

❝ Yeah, I. Jesus. I always did, I think. ❞

ft. EDDIE KASPBRAK: 



❝ … Would you have done anything different, Eds? ❞  Richie asks, like this isn't the most fucked up thing he could ask, after all this shit.

Eddie laughs in his strained, choked sort of way;

❝ … I'd get a divorce. Shit. I'm getting  a divorce. Oh my God. ❞

And Richie does smile at that, crooked, a little amused. 

❝ Good man, Eddie-spaghetti.  ❞ Richie claps him on the shoulder, good-natured, and finds the right voice for "I'm being so normal about that information right now."  

❝ Honestly dude, i thought you were maybe just finally having a fucking mental break, when you tossed that thing in the sewer.  ❞  He sighs loudly, immersed in the bit;  ❝ I was soooo looking forward to meeting Mrs. Kaspbrak at our inevitable group potlucks to come. ❞

The stones in his ribcage are shifting again. ‘Got married,’ Eddie had said, at the Jade, like three days ago. What about you, Rich? 

You could hardly answer him sincerely.

                  For starters, you drank. You got wasted and put on the face of someone who didn’t still feel that one feeling. And you talked like it didn’t matter. Because it didn’t. How could it matter when you only just remembered? 

  Okay. sure.  You could forget everything, but the second you’d looked at him straight-on, everything had come back and run you down and released all the bats out of the damn crypt door. 

… The bats being the guilt. The bats being the thoughts bad and selfish to have. The crypt door, you couldn’t remember if it had been you or Derry who slammed it. 

These memories were full of things like broken glasses frames and muddy quarry water. Sticky summer days, and melted ice cream and the stupid Kissing Bridge. the stupid Kissing Bridge where you carved the

Nothing. Shut up, just shut up, Rich. 

                                             ❝ … Would you have done anything different, Richie? ❞                 

A question he had asked  first. A question that was now loaded and pointed back. 

He stares over the edge of the bridge with the crazy inclination to leap. because he remembers the leaving, now. If there had been a chance to say something, he had let it go the day his parents packed up all those boxes when they were both fourteen. 

You could leave yourself here, too, he remembered thinking. In another town, you could pick someone new to be. And that was easier. He’d gotten that same compulsion every time something held a mirror to him. They lived through this insane shit, alright. They survived Hellhole Clowntown, Maine. But Richie — or the character that was almost Richie — was still braced for the misfire.

❝ Yeah, ❞ Rich says absently, yet loudly over his own thoughts. He's blatantly aware of where he's standing, where Eddie is standing. 

 …Where you carved the E and the R like a grave marker, and decided to forget.

❝ — Contact lenses, dude, ❞  Richie answers suddenly, a comedian trying to pick up after a flat joke. He adjusts his blocky  glasses, Still splintered in the lenses. And he grins at Eddie, though it doesn’t remain for long; Eddie’s look is too sobering. 

❝ …Fuck, I don’t know. Maybe if we called, or wrote or some shit — we wouldn’t be sitting here taking the worlds biggest anvil to the brain. ❞  He’s just letting his mouth go, as it often does, in a nervy sort of ramble. But Eddie doesn't seem to see through him just yet.

❝ It’s all... whatever, right?  ❞ He gestures loosely. ❝ There's no going back, Eds. Shit, with our childhoods, who would want to? ❞

He avoids Eddie's gaze, stares down the river rapids like he expected them to do something interesting. No going back to the guy who forgot he had clown-related traumas, or the kid who got his nose smashed into the asphalt after school. Before Mike called — shit, he doesn’t even know how to go back to whoever that person was. The guy that picked up.  Now he's stuck with this guy. 

He still can't tell Eddie what he means.

It's okay, Eddie doesn't see through him. Not yet.