Chapter Text
Somehow, in all of Stanley’s meticulous research on Chicago, the rain never came up. He woke up this morning to the sun blazing as relentlessly as ever, the only clouds against the blue sky hanging still and fluffy as the illustrations in a picture book, and he thought, with a delightful thrill of optimism, today, I can leave my umbrella.
Like a fool.
Somewhere between home and campus, the clouds lose their pleasant roundness and flatten out into a dull, dangerous gray. The city gets a single rumble of thunder as a warning before the sky opens up and pours down sheets of rain. Stanley lets out a frustrated groan and runs faster for the library, as if that'll make any difference. He's soaked by the time he gets inside the little lobby that separates the outside from the library proper. Someone else walks in behind him, but he barely registers that, too focused on making sure that the rain didn't damage the notebooks in his messenger bag.
“That came out of nowhere, huh?”
“It tends to do that,” Stanley says, running a hand over the mess the rain has made of his curls, trying his best to fix them in the faint reflection on the door glass.
“It's gotta be the lake or something, right?”
“Must be,” Stanley replies absently, although he isn't sure at all. It's a question he files away for later investigation, far down the list.
“Hey, I think you dropped these,” the stranger says, and Stanley turns around to look at him for the first time. The other young man holds up Stanley's keys on their bright yellow lanyard. He's wearing a green and white striped t-shirt under a denim jacket that seems too heavy for this hot weather, especially as the rainwater keeps dripping down from his wavy dark hair and rolling down the already soaked fabric.
“Oh, yeah, thanks,” Stanley says, taking the keys and tucking them into the outside pocket of his bag. The two of them exchange polite smiles, until the stranger’s suddenly blooms into something brighter and more genuine. “Holy shit-- Stanley?”
Stanley blinks, his brow furrowing as he tries to match a name or a context to this face. He comes up with nothing-- he looks vaguely familiar, the way a lot of people do, but there's nothing for him to latch onto. The confusion must show on his face, because the other man gestures to himself with one hand, running the other through his hair. “It's me. Eddie Kaspbrak, remember? We were friends when we were kids.”
The name finds no purchase in Stanley’s memory, and he feels faintly uneasy, for no reason he can pin down. “No, sorry. Think you've got me mixed up with someone else.” With that, he ducks out of the lobby and into the library, heading towards the elevators.
His destination today is the stacks on the tenth floor, as usual. He wants to get a head start on his readings for the week, and he prefers to work at one of the little desks behind the American history stacks. The faint rattle and murmur of library sounds is easier for him to work in than the absolute silence of the quiet study floor.
The odd encounter in the lobby has already started to fade as the elevator doors slide shut behind him, sinking out of his short term memory and into oblivion.
Or it would, if someone hadn't followed him, jamming a damp, denim clad arm through the door to halt their progress. The doors slide back again, enough to allow the stranger-- Eddie, he remembers after a moment-- into the elevator. “Hey, thanks,” he says, leaning on one of the bars on the opposite side of the car.
Stanley tries to think of what he could have done that deserves a thank you, comes up with nothing, then settles for a half shrug in response. His gaze settles resolutely on the dull yellow-orange lights on the elevator buttons, as if this is any other elevator ride.
But apparently, this Eddie person doesn't seem to respect the social contract of the elevator, because he starts talking like they've been friends forever. “So, I understand that this probably sounds crazy--”
“Look, man, I don't know you.”
Something flickers across Eddie's expression, something impossibly sad. “I used to think that-- I forgot too. So did… so did Richie.”
Stanley shakes his head, and that nervous, uneasy part of him wishes he had a can of pepper spray or something on his keys. Eddie seems nice enough, but this is a small box they're in together, and he's absorbed enough Lifetime movies by osmosis to know how quickly things can turn.
The lights flicker in the elevator, and between floors seven and eight, the machinery outside the car shrieks, shudders, and comes to a stop.
Stanley's breath freezes in his chest, and he looks up at the ceiling of the car, like he can will the elevator back into motion again.
It doesn't work.
“Oh, what the fuck,” the other passenger says, going down into a half crouch, like he's bracing for impact. After a moment in limbo, Stanley goes over to the emergency call button and presses it firmly, as if he's completely confident about what he's doing. The tinny sound of the dial tone fills the car.
“Where does that go? 911?”
“I don't know. I don't think so. Building maintenance, maybe.”
“What? Building maintenance? What if I were having a fucking heart attack or something?”
Stanley glanced over his shoulder at Eddie, one eyebrow raised. There's something familiar about the too fast rattle of his words, but he can't quite place it. “Are you?”
Eddie rubs at the back of his neck, a sheepish smile tugged wanly over his anxious face. “Don't think so.”
“Then we should be fine.”
As it turns out, they're both wrong. The person on the other end is in the office for campus security, and they don't quite seem to know what to do. After collecting the address of the building and their names twice, the cheerful voice on the other end of the line advises them to “sit tight.”
“As if we have a choice,” Stanley mutters, sinking to the floor and looking up at the ceiling. Eddie follows suit, laughing to himself a little nervously. He glances at his watch. “Think they'll accept this as an excuse for missing my histology lab?”
“I would hope. It's not like you planned to get stuck in an elevator.” Stanley pulls out one of his notebooks, going to last week's lecture notes from Computational Linguistics. “Pre-med?”
“Med school. How could you tell?”
“I couldn't, actually. Lucky guess,” Stanley says, laughing a little to himself, even as. he looks at the physiology textbook poking out of the overstuffed backpack at Eddie’s side..
“So what are you studying?”
“Linguistics. I'll get my Ph.D someday, hopefully.”
“You can study that?”
“You can study anything. It's getting someone else to do it that's the real trick,” Stanley says, a wry grin playing on his lips despite the fuckery of this whole situation.
Eddie nods, but he doesn't seem to get the joke. Instead, he looks over at him, that small smile shrinking into something sadder. “You really don't remember?” he says, his voice quiet.
“I don't know you,” Stanley says, almost as a reflex.
“We were in the same kindergarten class. Back in Derry. You brought your bird book to show and tell.”
All at once, Stanley can picture it in his mind-- the enormous hawk spreading its wings across the white cover, swooping gracefully under The Sibley Guide to Birds. He can feel its comforting weight on his lap as he carefully turns the pages, trying to find the bird his friend is describing at a mile a minute, all the words jumbling together at once.
“Purple finches.”
“... what?”
“You had purple finches in your yard,” Stanley says, a note of wonder coming into his voice, as if he's rediscovering something he thought was impossible, pulled out of the inscrutable depths of his brain. He wonders if the fishermen who pulled the coelacanth out of the water eons after its supposed extinction felt the same way, wonder and fear circling each other uncertainly inside their heads. “And you got so mad--”
“Because those little bastards were definitely red,” Eddie says, grinning at Stanley now, full and bright. “I tried to tell you the book was wrong. It took the teacher and you to convince me.”
“You weren't convinced. You just said that the person who named it clearly didn't have a handle on his colors.”
They laugh together then, like friends do. “God. I haven't thought about that in years.”
“Me either,” Stanley says, as if this is mere absent-mindedness and not the sudden emergence of an oddly lively fossil. The lights flicker again, and Eddie sucks in a nervous breath as the elevator starts to move again. The both of them scramble to their feet as the elevator starts to move again, humming along as if nothing ever happened. “Shit. Guess I'm gonna make it to my lab after all.”
“Lucky you,” Stanley says, pulling his bag back onto his shoulder as he steps out onto the blessedly solid tile of the tenth floor. Eddie follows him out, holding out a hand to shake. “It was good talking to you again,” he says, a painfully earnest smile on his face. Stanley shakes his hand a little awkwardly. “Yeah. It was good talking to you too.”
“We should catch up sometime,” Eddie says, before ducking into the stairwell. Stanley watches him go, a bemused smile on his face as he wonders how they'll manage to do that. Will they end up involved in another elevator mishap? Perhaps get stranded on the train?
He shakes his head and goes to his usual table, unloading the contents of his messenger bag in neat stacks. The world is always smaller than you think. He's crossed the country twice, and he still managed to have someone wander out of the flat, static snapshots that make up what he remembers of Derry-- holding a sparkler alone on the driveway of their old house; a shot posed on the bench in front of that hideous Paul Bunyan statue; standing sullenly at eighth grade graduation.
It's strange to feel the memory of that long ago afternoon slide into place among these pictures, a living, vivid creature among dry and dead bones. He wonders briefly what else might be hidden there, just beyond his reach.
But he has too many chapters to read to worry about that at present.
⚫️
Stanley rarely dreams. At least, that's what he thinks. He doesn't remember them upon waking, and he doesn't think he's missing anything. Just random input and output, only as much meaning as you can make.
But that night, he dreams of sitting alone on the riverbank, the tall golden grass whispering all around him in the September wind. He closes his eyes and breathes this still moment in deep, like this is the first chance he's had to breathe in ages.
Swear you'll come back.
He opens his eyes and looks down to see a silvery pink scar across his palm. He traces his fingers along it like he's reading his own palm, like he'll find the answers there.
In the whisper of the grass, he can hear his friends laughing and calling to him.
The next morning, he stares for a moment at his unscarred palm, feeling crushed under the weight of a forgotten promise until he fully awakens.
⚫️
Weeks later, fall has finally swept in, a biting edge in the October wind. Stanley has settled well into the rhythm of grad school by now, and the future seems so… possible. Most nights, when he's elbow deep in yet another paper on semantics or morphology, he can practically see the diploma in the wall of his future office, gleaming like a beacon of all he's ever wanted to be.
Tonight, he's earned some kind of small celebration.
He goes to the pizza place down the block from his apartment. It's not spectacular pizza or anything, but it's nearby, and it’s never empty, for something this close to campus. He likes to settle in with a book that has nothing to do with linguistics and linger for hours, losing himself in the world on the page.
He's walking back to his usual table in the furthest corner when someone calls his name. “Stanley!”
He whips around, nearly dropping his tray as he stares around the crowded restaurant, trying to trace the voice to its source. Finally, he spots someone waving at him from one of the booths up by the front window. It takes him a few moments to connect a name to the face-- elevator; purple finches; Eddie. He nods and smiles, preparing to duck back to his usual place, but there's a group of college freshmen sliding into place there already, and Eddie waves him over.
Stanley swallows and heads over. At least only one of the people in that booth is a stranger.
And the second person is only a stranger for so long. He adjusts his glasses and swallows his drink, thumping on his chest a little theatrically, like he’s just had a near miss with choking on it. “Stan the man, as I live and breathe. I really thought Eddie was fuckin’ with me,” he says, holding out a hand in greeting once Stanley has set his tray down. “It’s good to see you, man.”
Stanley nods, staring at this man and trying to make him fit somewhere in his limited memory. He’s about to give up when it rises out of the depths all at once, like a sea monster in a bad movie.
He and Eddie are standing in one of the aisles of the Derry Video Palace, trying to find something to watch for that night’s sleepover. The third boy is supposed to be helping, but they lost him a couple minutes ago, when they dared browse outside the horror section. He’ll be back any minute now, Stanley knows, as soon as he spots a slipcover weird enough to catch his eye.
And the other boy does come back. But he’s accompanied by a cardboard stand up taller than he is, one he definitely isn’t supposed to have. “May I have this dance?” he says, dark hair falling into his eyes as he drops into a low bow.
“Put that back,” Stanley says, before going back to the movie he was examining. He hopes that’ll be the end of it. But it never is.
Instead, Stanley and Eddie watch as their friend waltzes the cardboard standup towards them, humming something that sounds like someone put “The Blue Danube” in a blender and added a hefty shot of what their dads call rock’n’roll. Eddie lets out a laugh before he can stop himself, and Stan is biting back a smile even as he tells Richie one more time to put the standup back.
Then Richie makes to twirl his cardboard partner, and in the process, sends dozens of the slipcovers to the floor in a clatter of cardboard and plastic. The three of them stare at each other in an ankle deep mess, at a loss for what to do. They’re frozen in place until the guy behind the counter comes back from his smoke break and yells for them to get the fuck out of his store.
“Richie Tozier,” he says, more to himself than either of them, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
The other man nods and bows his head, dropping into a competent British accent. “At your service, sire.”
“You got us banned from the video store for life.”
“Sounds like the kinda shit I’d get up to.”
Eddie laughs, bumping his shoulder against Richie’s. “I actually found out later it was just Richie banned. You and me were fine.”
Stanley looks over at Eddie, mouth open in disbelief for a moment. “Seriously? I used to make my mom go in whenever I wanted something from there!” he says, shaking his head as another memory surfaces, just behind the other-- waiting in the car and slumping as far down in the seat as he'll go, trying to make himself invisible.
“What can I say, I live to cause trouble wherever I go,” Richie says with a lopsided from. Then he looks over at Eddie, shaking his head. “Hey, no, c'mon, Eds. Put that away.”
Eddie lets the notecards fall back into his backpack and scowls at Richie, but there's no real heat in the expression. “I was just gonna do a little review while I waited for our food--”
“No, you're taking a break, remember? No more doctor stuff until we get home.”
“Richie--”
“No, sorry, the sacred rite of Thursday night pizza is binding, Eddie. The only doctor shit allowed is ER rerun discussion--”
“I fucking hate that show.”
“I know. So you take a break, marinate in pizza fumes, and return to Chez Kaspbrak refreshed and ready to study shit that would make my brain run out my ears.”
“Are you in school too?”
Richie shakes his head. “Nah. I work at a call center and wait tables. And I go to open mics when I can, anything to get eyeballs on me, you know?”
Stanley nods as if he understands, but Eddie seems to catch on. “Richie's a comedian.”
“I'm trying to be, anyway--”
“You are,” Eddie says firmly, before taking a slice of the pizza that the waitress sets in the middle of the table. “God knows we haven't been able to get you to stop since you were twelve.”
“Earlier than that,” Stanley says, smiling himself.
Richie snorts and goes to tousle Eddie’s hair. He lingers there for just a moment too long, and all of this feels strangely familiar to Stanley. “So, Stan. Eddie said you were studying linguistics.”
“Yeah.”
“What is that? I tried asking Eddie, but he just mumbled something about ‘I dunno, languages, I guess,’ and went back to studying.”
“I did not.”
Stanley laughs. “I mean, he's not wrong. It is about language. About its form, its sound, its structure, the way we speak it, the way we write it, the way we understand it. Or… don't, sometimes.”
Richie nods, but he's looking at Stanley with genuine interest, following the words carefully. That feels familiar too-- the bright, restless mind behind the crooked grin and thick glasses. When Richie really paid attention to you, it felt like having a hummingbird perch on you. There was always something just this side of magic in those moments.
“So which part are you studying?”
“Psycholinguistics,” Stanley says without hesitation. Part of him is distantly worried that he's going to dump too much on him all at once and suffocate that spark of interest in Richie's eyes. But he's already here, and anyway, Richie's the one who asked. “I want to know what lets us process language up here,” he says, tapping at his temple. “How we produce it, how we process it… all of that.”
“Holy shit. What were you guys doing hanging out with a dumbass like me?”
“I think I was using you to reach high shelves, mostly,” Eddie says, before sticking his tongue out at him. Richie returns the gesture, flipping him off for good measure.
“You had your moments, I'm sure,” Stanley says airily, before taking a sip of his drink. Eddie and Richie's pizza is nearly gone, and Eddie looks down at his watch. Richie seems to know right away what that means, and he goes to fumble through Eddie’s bag, pulling out a pen. He writes a phone number down on one of the napkins left on the table before sliding it over to Stanley.
“That's the number for our place. If you wanna hang out sometime, you know?”
Stanley folds the napkin and slides it into his pocket. “Sure,” he says, smiling at the two of them. “Sometime.”
Richie slides out of the booth, then helps Eddie out. “All right, man. See you later.”
“Bye, Stan,” Eddie says. The two of them head off into the darkening street, Richie sliding an arm around Eddie's shoulders in a fond, protective gesture. Stanley feels like he should be surprised, but he isn't. Another memory bubbles up, just a fragment this time-- watching Eddie hold out an ice cream cone for Richie, the two of them standing so close their hands nearly touched even in the baking heat of July.
He waits for another memory, some other scrap of who he used to be returned from the darkest, quietest parts of himself, but there's nothing more that night.