From the Archives

Belief

It was an awful, terrible, wrenching feeling in your stomach, strangely unlike the ones you would sometimes get right before he got to you, the ones that signalled his arrival that you wouldn't register until it was far too late. It ate away at you all day, this forebodingly persistent gut feeling, and a creeping prick on the back of your neck seemed to whisper dreadful things in your ear. By all accounts, surely all of this meant he was coming to you... Right? It was true you were quick to assume the worst in nearly any situation, and now was no exception. Pennywise was always delighted to exploit this paranoia in you; it made him giddy, it gave him joy, especially when your misgivings would almost inevitably turn into nothing and he could tease you to the moon and back for being so flighty and skittish, so silly and cute.

But now... Now was different. To tell the truth, the roiling in your stomach was beginning to scare you. At first you thought you might have eaten something dubious and were now experiencing the apex of the worst bout of food poisoning in recorded history, but given that you hadn't eaten much of anything in the past couple days it seemed reasonably unlikely to you. It felt like... The blood underneath your skin, flowing through your veins, was restless. It screamed out for something and it wouldn't stop. Your life force was inconsolable, wailing and shrieking for something you couldn't pinpoint, and finally you couldn't take it anymore. You went to him.

Pennywise hadn't been awake for very long, and neither had you. He'd taken you long ago, during his last cycle, 27 years previous, and made a companion out of you. He was content to claim you and leave you to continue your life in the world above, interrupting you frequently with interludes of his childish games, often salting you up with fear before he pinned you beneath him for devilishly depraved things. He loved the taste of your fear and pleasure, the delicious blend of your essence addicting to him in a way that made a rather compelling argument for your own continued survival. Once Pennywise had picked someone out, be they food or something else entirely different, they didn't tend to last long even in the best of times. His attention span was like that of a child's, it was fickle and capricious and if you stopped amusing him for even a second that was the end. But you were different. Your love and adoration for him was so earnest and unwavering, he could taste it. To be honest, Pennywise had never tasted something so pure and sweet, that rolled off his tongue the way you did, and given how rare of an occurrence this particular flavor was for him, he was hard-pressed to get rid of it. Somehow, with you around, he felt... Stronger, more enriched, more substantial and secure. He wanted you to stay, so he kept you with him while he was awake and when the time finally came for him to go back to sleep, you'd gone with him.

Waking up practically no older than you'd been when you'd gone to sleep so long ago was hard to process, as was the revelation that everyone you loved and held dear had deserted the town to grow old elsewhere following the shock of your sudden disappearance. Everyone had moved on without you and now you were quite literally an artifact of another time lost in a modern world you hadn't seen develop because it had built itself up in your slumber. It was disorienting to be sure, and you were heartbroken at the loss of your loved ones, but the one you loved most had chosen you, he wanted you, and somehow that made it all worth it in the end. When you awoke with him he had thankfully recovered from his last altercation with them, with those kids, but you remembered the dreams you shared in your sleep together. He was obsessed with finishing it once and for all, to give back to them tenfold what they had made him feel for the first time. It made you uneasy, of course, as you had all the confidence in the world for your monstrous lover, but it was clear a similar force of nature had chosen those kids to hamper him much in the way that he had chosen you, and it was not as simple as ability or who had the upper hand. It was destiny. That terrified you.

When you came upon his lair that feeling in your gut only seemed to compound inside of you, your heart pounding against your chest as you made your way down into the deepest, cavernous reaches of Derry as you'd so often done before. The way down was familiar in a way you couldn't fathom, like a memorized dance ingrained in the way you carry yourself on your feet, crawling through the intricate tunnels of the sewers below, and before you know it you're stepping back into the hollow where he made his home, where you'd slept together all those years, burrowed underneath the cistern in a place that existed to no one else in the world besides you and him. The aftermath of a no doubt brutal confrontation is evident in your surroundings and although your body is insistent that he's here, you can't feel him, you can't see him anywhere. You're hesitant, swallowing hard. Its difficult to find your voice.