serendipity {sequel to pop} || reddie

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Notes: if you haven't watched the IT Musical yet, it is absolutely incredible and you must go watch all of it right now on youtube. That is all.

It was a prickling, sort of.

A tingling tugging at the hairs on your neck. A little twinge in your mind, a little poke deep in your stomach. Something whispering that there was more. There was something missing. But the puzzle pieces were scattered far apart.

The summer of 1989 had been a good one. The summer of 1990 had been a bad one.

In 1989, not a lot had happened over the summer. The Losers had defeated It in spring, and then had kept on living their lives. Beverly had moved away just after to live with her aunt. Eddie had lost his virginity to one Richie Tozier. And then the summer came.

Eddie was pretty sure Stan had dated both Bill and Mike at different points that summer, but he couldn't be sure, because they had never announced it; it was the same with Mike and Bill, and Eddie suspected some kind of love triangle there. Beverly visited a few times, and she and Ben remained in contact. Richie and Eddie's relationship remained strong as ever, and they spent plenty of time around one another (probably too much time).

Fall and winter and spring had come and gone. Bill moved to Washington in February. Ben won a scholarship to some college for architecture, and he would be moving that summer. Stan was ready to leave Derry as soon as possible. He'd had college planned out since middle school.

It was Bill, then Ben. Then Richie.

In June of 1990, Richie Tozier left Derry with his family, planning on going to college in the fall. Eddie was miserable the entire summer. He was left in Derry with Mike and Stan. Without Ben there, Beverly's visits became few and far between. Richie was swamped with work and college issues that summer, and he never visited.

The worst part was the phone calls, or the lack thereof. Eddie had moved to New York to follow through with his psychology career path, leaving his mother and Mike in Derry- Stan had moved later in the summer, a while after Richie had. Richie and Eddie had started out calling every day, then every few days, and then work was so busy and I had an essay to write, and it was downgraded to once a week. Twice a month, once a month. Once every three months.

Then the calls stopped completely. They would enter their dorms and look at the phone, and they'd think, not now; after I finish my paper. Eventually, they looked at the phone and wondered why; they needed to call someone, but who? Maybe tomorrow. And it didn't take long at all for them to stop looking at the phone entirely. They no longer wondered. They didn't think about their childhoods. It was a blur in their minds, Derry, The Losers Club; it faded until it was gone.

That was the Derry Disease. They moved away, and they forgot about the town. About It. About everything.

Eddie did a better job of ignoring it than Richie did. Often, Richie would go to sleep crying, not knowing why; he just felt such a gaping hole in his life, and he had no clue how to fix it. He tried everything; drinking, drugs, sex, even church, but nothing worked. Richie could never form meaningful relationships. He would push all of his partners away, feeling guilty, feeling wrong. Feeling hopeless.

He dropped out of college at 20 (what was a drama degree going to get him, anyway?) and had moved to Chicago. Richie liked the big, bustling city. For a while he wrote on a sketch show with a couple of his friends, but they gave up on it. Richie started writing comedy routines and performing them at little clubs. He got bigger and bigger until he was a household name in Chicago, and then he was offered his own show. Not a sketch show, just him; Richie agreed, and the show was a hit. He was successful, now a household name across the nation, and he tried not to think about the moments he'd have; seeing Bill Denbrough's new novel, reading an article about esteemed architect Ben Hanscom. He went on his first national tour in the summer of 1994. That's when things changed.