𝐆𝐀𝐑𝐃𝐄𝐍 𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐃

𝕚𝕚𝕚. 𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕥𝕝𝕖 𝕘𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕥, 𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕝𝕚𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘

he's underneath my skin/
i realize i'm just like him
- the mowgli's, "monster"

/

Richie isn't sure what time he actually winds up finally falling asleep - only that when he peels his eyes open again, it's a quarter to noon and he's officially way too fucking late to school to even bother showing up at all. There's a crick in his neck from being curled up on the floor and his bones all ache. His glasses lie unfolded next to his head, clearly having fallen off at some point while he was asleep. Why had he slept on the floor, again?

Oh. Right.

Rubbing sleep from his eyes, Richie forces himself to sit, scared of what he might find in his bed. Scared of what he might not.

But there's no Eddie, just a mess of rumpled bedsheets, and Richie knows logically he shouldn't feel disappointed but there's something wistful about waking up all alone that tugs the corners of his mouth down. He gets up carefully, trying to pinch feeling back into his numb fingers as he pads downstairs. He can hear his mother snoring faintly from beyond her bedroom door, so Eddie definitely didn't drain her blood while she slept. No Eddie in the kitchen, either, or on the couch or in the bathroom. He's not hiding in the pantry, though Richie observes that the box of Froot Loops has gone missing, the only indicator that last night even happened at all aside from the two empty cereal bowls in the sink and the stinging wound on his shoulder. He reaches back to touch it, instinctively.

And just like that, Richie is alone again. He turns on the kitchen sink to rinse out the bowls, and the noise echoes through the quiet.

It's not a nice quiet, the comfortable kind the Losers fall into sometimes that Richie likes to sink his teeth into to their dismay. It's an ugly quiet, makes him feel like a rotting boy trapped in a rotting house - he can leave for days on end but he always comes back, tied to the end of a string. He hates it here more than he's hated anything; more than school, more than running laps in gym class, more than the aftermath in the boys' locker room where he and Stan are always in a race to see who can change the fastest.

What would a rotting boy in a rotting house with a scar on his shoulder and no glasses do? Breakfast seems like a good option. Brunch by now, really, and Richie likes that better because it sounds fancier, makes it sound like he didn't just sleep half the day away. Oh, me? Nothing much. Just headed out to brunch with the folks.

But the Froot Loops are gone and the bread bin is empty. There's an unopened but expired jar of strawberry preserves in the pantry. Richie sighs, downs the rest of the carton of milk from the fridge and makes a mental note to ask Bill if he can stay over for dinner tonight.

He's contemplating the benefits of just going back to sleep when something scratches, soft but insistent, at the back of his mind, a thought trapped inside a locked room. He closes his eyes and he can see Patrick Hockstetter writhing on the ground, clutching his punctured throat, and then wonders if it had happened at all. He thinks of the deer, its eyes wide in a silent, permanent plea. He thinks of Eddie and his too-sharp teeth and soft voice and the way he had seemed to exist just outside of the fabric of reality, something half-formed and wispy, and before he can think it through any more he's tugging on a mostly clean pair of shorts and a worn-in red sweatshirt, already out the front door with his shoes untied.

It's a cloudy grey day, eerily still, and the deeper in the woods he goes, the more Richie feels as if he's toeing the edge of the River Styx. Something in his mind is screaming at him GO BACK GO BACK GO BACK but Richie can't, not until he checks. He has to check.

The smell gets him first, and it's enough to stop him if only for a second or two. But Richie is stubborn.

He steps into the clearing, which in the daylight is only identifiable due to the lone deer lying in its center like a sacrifice (Richie's heard about those, too, kids who go into the woods and skin rabbits and squirrels and paint their faces with the blood), and nighttime is supposed to make things worse but the corpse doesn't really look that much better right now, either. Its flesh is starting to wear thin, stretched tight over its broken rib cage, the sound of maggots squirming where its lungs should be.