Chapter Text
“You’re not going without me.”
Richie pauses, hand lodged in the Miscellaneous Garbage Drawer as he tries to land a grasp on their spare key. He needs to start putting it somewhere other than the same drawer they use to store broken lighters and mostly-empty boxes of matches. Somewhere easily accessible, like a key hook. Or maybe one of those little bowls old people use.
Alexandra jerks her chin at him, hands gripping her suitcase. There’s a stubborn tilt to her jaw Richie recognises from himself when he’s mid-argument with Steve about venues and optics, and Richie lets his head thunk against the countertop. His hand continues to move listlessly in their drawer of crap.
“Andra,” Richie starts, but her eyes start to narrow, and Richie knows it’s a lost cause. He only ever pulls out the Andra card when he knows shit’s dire. It’d been how she’d said her own name for the first two years of her life, and it makes him both warm inside and terrified at how much has changed since then.
The flight’s in two hours and knowing his luck he’s going to end up stuck in TSA for three fucking months, somehow found with coke lodged inside him. At this point, Andy coming could just be helpful rather than a hindrance.
(Not that Andy is ever a hindrance.)
“You’re not on the-.”
“I already changed the tickets,” Andy talks over him, and pushes her messy head of black curls out of her face. One of them gets caught in the hinge of her glasses, and she shakes it loose with a scowl. “You should change your passwords.”
Richie blinks, outraged. “I told you to stop going through my emails!”
Andy gives him a look like yeah, and? which is par for the course, for his kid. “So make better life choices than leaving your phone unlocked and crisis puking at eight in the morning, dude.”
Richie’s mouth opens, then closes. His hand clasps around the spare key in the drawer, and he slaps it onto the granite countertop like a gavel. Order in court, he thinks to himself, and wonders what the fuck he’s going to do.
“I don’t- Andy, I don’t know what’s going to happen, okay? This whole thing is fucking weird, kid, I don’t want you to get hurt or stuck somewhere three thousand miles from home, and you’ve got school.”
Andy blinks at him. She rolls her eyes. They’re brown, like her mom’s had been, but far more warm and loving than he remembers from any of those weird drug-fuelled nights at the start of the millennium.
“I can handle it,” she says, which may or may not be true, but Richie’s still her dad and she’s still only fifteen years old, Jesus Christ. “I can get Kayla or Amal to get notes if we’re away for a while, and half my teachers post their stuff online anyway.”
Richie tries to think up an argument he hasn’t already come up with, but can’t.
He steps closer to her, and Andy lets him squish her cheeks together with only a wrinkled brow and a sigh. She’s so young, still, but it makes his chest throb remembering her as a baby, all balled up fists and scrunched up alien features. Even back then she’d had bundles of personality, spitting mashed up banana at him square in the face and kicking him when he didn’t change her quick enough.
Andy comes up just below his chin, now, gangly and ungainly the way Richie always tries to ignore he ever was. She’s all limbs and knobbly knees, and she’s only going to get taller. Her mom had been tall, too, from what little Richie remembers of her.
She’s still Richie’s kid, though, will always always be his baby.
“I just want you to be okay, that’s all.” He tells her, and kisses her wrinkled up forehead.
Andy buries her face in his shoulder and grips at his side with her small left hand. She rubs her right knuckles into his chest, hard enough to make him wince. “I wouldn’t be better off here away from you than in some weird backwater town in Maine, pops.”
Richie sighs. He presses a kiss to her curls and tries to ignore the way it’d felt hearing Mike’s voice over the phone, that sudden flood of nausea and relief and a weird, gnawing ache.
It’s Mike Hanlon, from Derry. You don’t remember me.
And it was true -Richie hadn’t remembered him. And then, all of a sudden, he had. It’d felt like a fucking anvil hitting him over the head -or maybe like a nuke going off inside his skull. Something too big for him to conceptualise.
All he knows is that he made a promise to go back to Derry twenty-seven years ago, and he doesn’t know why, but he does know Mike, a void filled in the gaps in his bones -of course he knows Mike. How couldn’t he? How could he not listen to him and go back, even with so much of the context missing?
There’s other names, too, sprouting in his head, but he’s not at the point of remembering yet. It’s hazy and odd -swirling moments that are more image than words, flashes of red hair and feet on bike pedals and a shaken inhaler and a yarmulke and a house of cards and watercolor paint-. Just flashes of Things that Mean Something, but he doesn’t know what, yet.
Richie just knows, suddenly and viscerally, that he needs to be in Maine, he needs to see Mike. He needs to know what all these feelings rising in his chest are, what the little skipping movie reels inside his head mean.
“Okay,” Richie agrees, finally. “But if shit gets weird we’re hightailing it out of there.”
Andy nods against him and holds out her pinky. Richie links his own with hers and presses another kiss to the top of her head, breathing in the scent of her strawberry detangler.
“Did you put food in the auto-feeder for Turnip?” He asks, suddenly remembering their half-feral cat, and Andy rolls her eyes and punches him.
Yeah. Fair enough.
As if Andy would ever forget Turnip.
+++
The airport isn’t a terrible experience, with Andy next to him. It’s still not great (it’s an airport, they are inherently a fucking terrible experience), but it’s better knowing his kid’s next to him and safe.
It’s made exponentially easier by the fact Andy is an immeasurably better planner than he is, nor does she take shit from the TSA guys. They try to pat her down when the metal detector goes off but she just yells “that’s my fucking bra, shitbrain!” and they’re so startled that they let them both through.
If Richie’s daughter was any more prone to domestic terrorism, this would be worrying, but as it is it just makes their lives easier.
They settle into their seats (business class, because Andy is nothing if not opportunistic, and fully willing to spend Richie’s money), and Richie takes her hand. Andy grips him back tight, her smaller fingers not even reaching around his over-large paws.
“How can you still be scared of flying? You fly all the time!” She hisses at him, and Richie pouts at her.
“I contain multitudes, little dude,” he tells her.
Andy rolls her eyes and clicks her phone on to start texting one of her various group chats. Richie leans his head back into the seat to give her as much privacy as he’s able, and tries to sort through the mess in his head.
There’s eight hours between L.A. and Bangor, Maine, and another hour after that to Derry. They’ll have to rent a car on another side. And find somewhere to stay in Derry, too.
Maybe by the time he gets to the address Mike texted through he’ll remember more about his childhood, know what all those weird flickers in his head are.
An ache presses behind his eyes.
Or maybe he’ll just fall asleep and ignore being a mile over steady ground, instead.
+++
Finding a car takes longer than it should, if only because Andy starts doing her Big Eyed Depressed Teen face and ropes him into renting a Mustang convertible.
It’s shiny, new and red and the moment they climb in Andy presses the button to lower the roof, a grin stretched wide across her face and her glasses sliding down her nose. Her hair’s a rat’s nest of curls and tangles, and her mascara’s smudged under her eyes. She looks beautiful, glowing with a fervent joy that Richie’s just glad to be a part of.
Richie sighs to cover up the burst of fondness, knowing Andy’d just bitch at him for being a sap. “You’re going to end up swallowing bugs, kid.”
Andy shrugs. “Small price to pay for such wonderful protein.”
The anxiety swirling in Richie’s gut lessens a little when he cackles. His kid’s funny, and doing okay, and so he can’t really be doing such an astoundingly shitty job. He worries, sometimes (most of the time), that she might be better off with Mags and Went, but then there’s moments like this, when she’s so obviously his kid and still happy, and he realises the best place for both of them is together.
Thank G-d she’d manipulated him into her coming along. He’d probably be vomiting along the highway towards Derry, otherwise.
“So, like,” Andy says, when they’re maybe fifteen miles out of Derry city limits. “You lived here? Your entire childhood? And you just… didn’t remember this Mike guy, or like. Any of your past? And you didn’t think that was weird?”
Richie shrugs. Admittedly, faced with these questions, he realises it’s fucking bizarre that he previously had no memory of anything before he was seventeen, but he doesn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t so much forgotten so much as a void, somewhere inside him. Without being roasted by a fifteen year old, anyway.
“No. I don’t know why. Maybe Mike can explain, some. There’s others coming, too, but I can’t.” He taps on the steering wheel, trying to dredge up memories from somewhere deep inside him.
The flashing images are clearer, now; less like they’re being viewed through film grain and more like seeing them through slightly warped plexiglass. There’s more of them, too, sprouting into being the closer they get to Derry.
It’s making his head hurt, like all the memories are clamoring around in there yelling look at me! but none of them can decide what it is, exactly, that he should be looking at.
“I can’t remember their names. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like trying to think through quicksand, or something.”
Andy blinks. “Well, hopefully they aren’t freaks, then.”
Richie snorts. “Kid, they were my friends. They were definitely freaks.”
But something about the words feel -wrong. Not freaks? Losers, he thinks, as the sign to welcome them into Derry approaches fast.
The second they enter the town’s limits, the car swerves. Andy yelps and grabs at the steering wheel to pull it even while Richie slams on the brakes.
He barely gets the door open before he’s vomiting all over the cracked-up concrete, Andy yelling at him through the throbbing of the migraine from hell.
Christ. It feels like his fucking brain’s swollen, trying to sink through the ridges in his skull.
So much is coming back, not just flashes but reels of memories, of sharp tinkling laughter and angry yelling and the sound of an inhaler rattling and scissors cutting through fabric and the smell of books and New Kids On The Block and-.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck, how could he forget, how could he ever-? They were his everything they were his home for so much of his childhood and adolescence, they made him a person, they-.
“Eddie,” he whispers, and vomits again.
Fuck.
+++
It’s ten minutes of driving around the outskirts of Derry to get to the Jade of the Orient, and Andy spends the whole time grilling Richie and shoving tiny mints into his hands.
“So, like, what the fuck was that!” She yells at him, and Richie squints an eye closed at the way it makes his head throb. Her voice quiets a little, then, and the smile he gives her is probably more than halfway to a grimace.
“Sorry. I get the feeling something about this town ain’t right,” he tells her, in a southern belle Voice, and she nods vigorously and says you fucking think so, sherlock! in a pitch previously only known by canines.
“Do you re-. I mean, do you remember anything? You said Eddie, right? Is that one of your friends, or something?”
Or something, Richie thinks, remembering a bright sharp ache in his chest and too-small red shorts and a haze of memories that don’t make sense, even with some new -if fuzzy- context.
“Yeah,” he tells her, staring around at the dark roads that feel so achingly familiar to him, suddenly, when before he couldn’t ever remember being in Maine at all. “There was Eddie, and… Sam? No, Stan. Uh… Beverly? Haystack -no, that’s a nickname - Ben! Yeah, Ben, and Bill, I think. Mike, Eddie, Stan, Beverly, Ben, and Bill. I think that’s- I’m pretty sure I’m right.”
It feels right, too, the names sitting easy on his tongue. Like he’s been holding them in his throat for nearly three decades and it’s a relief to finally let them out.
Andy nods in the passenger seat, crunching on a handful of mints of her own. Richie wrinkles his nose. Went would complain about her teeth if he saw her, but Richie doesn’t have half of the authority of Wentworth Tozier, and Andy would just crunch her teeth at him harder in rebellion.
“So when you say this town is messed up, is it like… Normal small-town bullshit, or something else?”
Something else, a voice in his head tells him, but the memory and context to go with it don’t come, so he just says, “small-town bullshit. I’m pretty sure I got hate crimed like, twice a week.”
There’s a phantom feeling of a hand at his throat, of a rock in his hand, of blood in his teeth. Some kid with a mullet, he thinks, some other guy with long black hair and cold eyes. Names don’t come back to him, though, just the memory of fear-sweat dripping down his back.
He wonders why no one ever did anything, when the idea of someone hurting Andy like that makes him want to set something on fire.
Andy grits her teeth in her seat. Her knuckles flex on her knees, and Richie is abruptly reminded of her as a sixth grader, blood down her face and fury in her eyes, telling Richie he deserved it! when some little snotnosed shitstain of a kid called her a dyke and she headbutted him.
Christ, this kid. She owns so much of who he is as a person, makes his chest feel too fucking full sometimes with all the love he holds for her. She’s so unapologetically herself, all the time, and Richie knows only part of that can be attributed to his parenting -the rest is just her, all fire and brimstone and undying loyalty for her friends.
With his memories trudging back into his skull, he’s reminded of a mix of his friends, all the Losers. All of that fire under all that hurt. She’s a mix of all of them, he thinks, even if he can’t remember them properly just yet.
He thinks: those are the people that made him, and in return (as an act of love) he helped make her, in their names.
Richie reaches out to hold her hand in his when he pulls into the Jade’s lot. He presses the button to put the hood back up and they’re shrouded in the dark, streetlights coming in hazy through the front, the green neon lighting up Andy’s face like she’s sick. He pulls her hand toward him and kisses her knuckles.
“If anything happens,” Richie tells her, making sure she’s looking him in the eye, “if anything happens, you tell me, and we leave, okay? There’s not going to be any point where any of this matters to me more than you.”
“Your friends, are they-.” Andy takes a shuddering breath, nose scrunched under the rim of her glasses, “are they, like -. Were they…”
Richie shakes his head, fierce. His brave baby girl, his sweet kid. “No. They weren’t. You think little baby gay me wanted to hang around bigots? No way. The people who treated me like shit treated the rest of them like shit, too. It’s why we became friends. I promise, they’re gonna love you, kid. How couldn’t they?”
Andy’s lip quivers a little, but then her face smooths out. She nods, firm. “Okay. Okay, cool.”
They get out of the car together, and he tucks her into his side. She’s a warm line against him, and she wraps an arm around his waist and matches their steps together easily.
They both glance up at the sound of voices, and Andy freezes against him, mouth popping open.
She punches him right in the gut, and he bends over double to get his breath back.
“Hey!” He hisses at her, but she’s too busy staring. “What’re you-?”
A flash of red hair and white teeth and then Richie’s getting tackled, skinny little arms wrapping around his waist and yanking him upright.
“Oof!” He manages to wheeze out, and Bev cackles in his ear and swings him side to side a little.
Bev lets him go after a second, and it’s sort of ridiculous how gorgeous she is, hair cut just below her jaw and eyes wide and sparkling, mouth painted a deep pink.
“Richie!” She turns quickly to the side, then, to look at Andy.
Andy’s staring, still, eyes wide and cheeks flushed pink, and Richie remembers all of a sudden the moodboard she’s got in her bedroom of fashion pieces and pictures of someone who always felt familiar in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.
Oh, he thinks, and then oh.
“Andy,” Richie says, drawing her to him again, rubbing a hand over his aching sternum. He’s both glad and horrified his kid has such a strong punch. “This is Bev Marsh. We were friends as kids.”
Andy stares. “I fucking hate you,” she tells Richie, adamant, and then turns a blinding grin on Bev. “Hey. You’re really cool. Why were you friends with my dad?”
Ten fucking seconds in and Richie gets roasted alive by his own flesh and blood.
Seems par for the fucking course, honestly.
Behind Bev, someone laughs, and it’s familiar and warm.
“Benjamin!” He crows, and leaves Bev and Andy to their chatter. (Andy looks starstruck and awed, in his peripheral vision, and Bev has her forearms in her hands and is grinning and talking to her, and it just -G-d. Fuck. This is so much.)
Ben Hanscom is built like a fucking brickhouse. He’d been cute as a kid, and the last time Richie’d seen him he’d been starting a growth spurt, but they’re nearly of a head now and Ben is, like, model-hot. It’s fucking infuriating.
Richie’s forty years old with a receding hairline and a kid and Ben Hanscom looks like he does underwear ads for Calvin Klein and digs wells for poor children in disadvantaged countries.
He hugs exactly the same, though, all warmth and laughter and sweetness, like coming home.
“Richie!” Ben tells him, and Richie kisses him on the cheek with a smacking mwah! That makes Ben giggle like a little kid.
How can you miss something you don’t remember? How is it possible that Richie’s existed without these people in his life?
“You grew up hot, man, what the fuck?” Richie asks, groping one of his obscene biceps, and Ben blushes across his nose like a little Victorian dame.
“Shut up, Rich,” he snorts, and nods over to Andy. “Is she… yours?”
Richie grins. “Yeah, Haystack. That’s my kid.”
Behind him, Bev falls into maniacal giggles and Andy snorts out a laugh.
Yeah. That’s his fucking kid, baby.
________
Andy figured from the moment her dad started puking that shit was gonna get fucking weird, but being in Derry, Maine and staring across the table at Beverly Marsh makes it feel even more fucking surreal.
The whole situation is bizarre. Like, eighteen hours ago Andy was just chilling with Kayla and Amal in the cafeteria eating tater tots, and now she’s plain across the country at a table with her dad’s school friends he (for some reason) didn’t remember until like ten hours ago.
Shit is bonkers in fucking yonkers.
“I can’t believe you have a kid,” Stanley Uris, accountant, had said.
“You have a kid?” Benjamin Hanscom, big-time architect, had queried.
“Holy fucking shit, you have a fucking kid?” Beverly Marsh, the love of Andy’s life, had blurted.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had a kid on the phone?” Mike Hanlon, extremely beautiful librarian, had asked.
“Y-you have a d-daughter, T-trashmouth!” Bill Denbrough, of Bad Endings fame, had exclaimed, as if Andy was not present and not aware of who her father was.
Eddie Kaspbrak, risk analyst and thoroughly pent-up dude, had just stared at her with wide as shit Bambi eyes and shaken her hand with a “hey, kid, good to meet you. Sorry about your dad.”
Andy is fucking obsessed with him. Eddie Kaspbrak looks like he pops Xanax like fucking tums. The man looks like he’s ten seconds away from going utterly unhinged and just stabbing shit or doing shrooms and talking to a cactus for ten hours.
Andy’s looking between all of these people (all of them stupidly beautiful, and like, maybe Andy’s a lesbian but this is sort of ridiculous?) and just thinking oh this is fucking incredible, you are all gonna have so much dirt on my dad. There’s also another part of her brain noting that Mike The Librarian is definitely hiding some shit, judging by the twitchiness of his smile and the way he’s downing sake like he wishes it were vodka spiked with speed.
Hm. An interesting day, if nothing else.
Andy asks for her usual order every time they get Chinese back home (beef lo mein, orange chicken, and fried rice), and then settles in for some prime people-watching.
It’s like watching a sport she’s never learned the rules of. It’s insane. They’re all definitely adults, but there’s something about them that reminds Andy of being surrounded by her own friends, like just being together makes them kids again.
Beverly-call-me-Bev keeps stealing food off of Stan-the-Man’s plate and Benjamin-call-me-Ben keeps giving Bev looks like she holds his every brain cell. Mike-handsome-librarian keeps getting distracted from eating by weird tangents Eddie-the-analyst goes on, all karate chops and sheer unbridled rage, and the whole time Andy’s dad is cackling along and shit-stirring and looking at peace in a way he never usually does unless they’re home alone and binge watching Gossip Girl.
It’s making Andy feel all warm inside, like some kind of fucking loser.
“So,” Bev says, suddenly, and Andy locks her eyes on her and grins around a mouthful of sesame chicken (stolen from her dad’s plate), “what’s it like having Trashmouth as a dad?”
Her dad tries desperately to cover her mouth with one of his yeti-hands, shaking his head at Bev, but Andy shakes him loose easy and just ducks closer to short weird Bill, who the group apparently all have boners for but who Andy finds fascinating the way you find a rat in a kitchen sort of cool.
Like, yeah, sick, it’s a rat! Maybe this is the chance to live my best Ratatouille fantasies! But also, it’s a fucking rat in a kitchen, and I eat here.
Not in, like, a bad way -Bill seems like a cool guy for a short king-, but like there’s something sort of insane going on between his ears that might require psychological help and/or a Hannibal Lecter mask. He just has the energy of a guy who will bite you if provoked, and maybe before that.
“It’s cool,” Andy tells Bev, because it is. Having Richie as a dad is the best she could ask for, honestly. He’s like a cool pet with the personality of a rabbit doing a line of coke. “One time when I was eight he showed me how to poke someone’s eyes out if they ever tried anything on me.”
Dad covers his face with his hands while the table erupts, and Andy grins.
Eddie’s the one who manages to get into a conversation first, by virtue of being the loudest motherfucker here. “You were eight?”
Andy nods. She drops some of her food onto her pops’ plate to make up for the humiliation she’s about to put him through. “Some dude at school was trying to pick on me, and he was two years older and I told dad and he was like well if anyone else tries something like that you just need to hook your thumbs into his eyes and pop ‘em like grapes! And I didn’t, because I’m not clinically insane, but now I know how to pop an eyeball out!”
The entire table stares first at Andy, then at her dad, and then back.
Andy pops some more rice into her mouth.
“Rich,” Bev says, and her eyes are wide and her arms fly out and nearly hit Stan and Ben in their respective faces. They duck around her easily, like they’re used to it, even after two decades apart. “Richie, what the hell. Why is your daughter cooler than us?”
“It’s because of Mags and Went,” pops says, grinning, and Andy flushes at the gross pride and happiness on his face. Eugh. “She’d still be running into walls to take corners if it weren’t for them.”
Andy rolls her eyes. “You’re not that bad. Sometimes you didn’t hit my head off the car door when you put me in my seat when I was little.”
Eddie lets out a noise like a duck being put in a cement mixer.
Andy sits back to watch the chaos, and wonders if she can stay here forever, just stirring the pot and watching it all unfold.
Which is right when things really start going to absolute shit.