Chapter Text
Stan wakes up expecting to be dead. He should be dead – he thought he’d made sure of it.
It wasn’t as though he had been actively suicidal, not before the phone call. But beside the fear, beside the sudden awareness of IT – that stupid fucking clown reaching up from the depths of his consciousness and jingling its merry murderous way to the very forefront of his mind – there was another feeling that he had forgotten. The idle thought that it would be better if he simply didn’t exist anymore. He had thought it more than once throughout his younger years, but he had never acted upon it. Not until now.
Of course, Stan thinks as he blinks up at a cream-colored ceiling lit by rectangular fluorescent lights, that particular course of action hadn’t exactly worked .
A machine he can’t see starts beeping, and he sees a shape move in the corner of his vision. A burst of bone-deep dread socks him in the stomach – is that IT? Is IT here, in what must be a hospital room?
The feeling fades quickly, though, as Stan remembers that IT can’t be here. IT is confined to Derry. He’s safe in Georgia. For the first time, he wonders if the distance from Maine was a subconscious reason he had for coming to live here.
He tries to turn his head, but there’s an oxygen tube in his nose, a mass of bandages covering his arms, an IV and a splint and a million wires connecting him to machines he can’t see behind him and – yep, he’s not moving any time soon.
Still, his twitching and the beeping from the machine is enough to alert whoever’s in the room with him that he’s awake.
A voice says, “Oh my God,” and a face swims into Stan’s field of vision.
It’s Patty. Oh God, Patty. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days, the dark circles under her eyes almost racoon-like. Stan wouldn’t be surprised if she hadn’t. She isn’t crying, but her eyes are red-rimmed, like she has been recently.
“Stan,” she whispers, like she’s trying not to break a spell, “Are you really awake?”
Stan tries to speak and realizes that his entire mouth and throat are bone-dry and painful. “Patty,” he manages to croak, “I–”
A veritable crowd of nurses come rushing in, probably alerted by the beeping machine, and Patty’s face is replaced with serious, unfamiliar ones.
Over the next few hours, Stan gets visits from a Hematologist (apparently he had a blood transfusion while he was asleep), a pain medicine specialist, and, in the most personally embarrassing conversation of the day, a psychologist. Though it sounded like he would make a full recovery, the doctors were clearly assessing him to see if he would be a danger to himself if and when his body healed.
A part of him, the part that had stayed up reading horror comics with his friends through to his teenage years, balked at the idea of being stuck in a hospital even when the cuts in his arms closed. It was difficult to avoid picturing a place where the patients were more like inmates , neglected or even tortured by the doctors and each other. There had been at least one comic – Stan remembers now – where the ghosts of murdered patients attacked a group of college students exploring an abandoned asylum. The thought of it is enough to remind him of other memories, the corpses at the Standpipe – but he doesn’t want to think about that.
Another part, the more logical part of him, knows that he needs to do something to help himself. Stan can’t go on like this, but he can’t die, either – not after seeing the look on Patty’s face.
Besides, psychiatric wards can’t possibly be as terrible as the silly comics he read as a kid made them out to be. Not these days, anyway. Stan knows that even his concept of someone being “crazy” is outdated. He’s certainly known mentally ill people before, and he didn’t think they were crazy, so why would he apply that idea to mentally ill people he didn’t know?
He recalls how John, a coworker and friend of his, had once confided in him that he dealt with frequent auditory hallucinations. He had said it as though it was something to be ashamed of instead of a medical condition.
He recalls Angela, Patty’s sister, who had helped Stan plan his proposal to Patty all those years ago. Angela had bipolar disorder and had been to the hospital for it before. Stan had never asked her about it, thinking that she would probably prefer not to talk about it. Now he wonders if he should have.
Hell, he remembers Eddie – it still feels strange, being able to remember Eddie – who lived in a constant state of anxiety so intense that his muscles would lock up and he would think he was having an asthma attack. And, well, the whole not-asthma thing was a whole different can of worms, if Stan recalls correctly.
But the point is, while the idea of there being something wrong with his brain is hardly pleasant, it isn’t the end of the world. Stan can deal with it. It just might take a bit of…adjusting.
Patty returns not long after the last doctor leaves. She looks a bit better than she did earlier – she’s brushed her hair and changed clothes, though her face is still haggard.
Now that Stan has had some water, his throat is relatively painless and he’s able to properly say hello.
“The doctors say you’re going to be alright,” Patty says, half a question. She’s made her way over to stand at his bedside, but she’s positioned herself to avoid touching him. She isn’t looking him in the eye, either.
“Physically, yes,” Stan replies.
One of Patty’s hands forms a fist in the loose material of her sweatpants. She usually doesn’t dress this casually outside the house, preferring to go out in public looking as put-together and professional as possible, but these are hardly normal circumstances.
“What happened, Stan?” she asks him quietly. Stan has only heard her look or sound like this once before, when her father had a stroke. She had been so afraid of losing him then. Stan hates that he made her feel something similar.
“Why did you…why?” It looks like she wants to say more, but she doesn’t.
Stan ponders how to answer her. He’s been dreading this conversation ever since he woke up, but he’s accepted it as inevitable all the same. He can’t tell her the full story – not yet, anyway. Not without a lot of proof to back it up.
Instead, he says, “I got a phone call.” When she just looks at him, he continues, “It was from an old friend. A very old friend – I’ve never told you about him. He…he reminded me of a promise I made a long time ago. I didn’t want to keep it. I felt like I couldn’t keep it, but I couldn’t ignore it either.”
She looks at him then, really looks at him for the first time since he woke up, but it only lasts a moment. When she speaks, he knows that she’s holding back tears.
“So what, you go and you – you –” She can’t get the words out, but it’s obvious what she means.
Stan sighs. “It’s a long story. Something bad happened to me, you know, when I was young. Something very bad. I didn’t want to remember.”
He still doesn’t. Mentioning it, (IT), even in the vaguest terms, is making his mind churn with unwanted memories. Stan can’t think about Derry, because if he does he’ll start thinking about the thing in Derry, and then it will all come rushing back – the woman in the painting, waterlogged corpses trudging towards him inside the Standpipe’s cold belly, a hulking mass of fur and teeth in a half-shredded letterman jacket, and a massive, ever-shifting being whose forms all coalesce into a fat spider sitting at the center of a town-shaped web…
Patty must realize that he’s drifting, because she fits her hand over his where it lays limp on the hospital bed. The warm touch is a shock to his cold skin.
“You know I love you, right?” He hates that there’s doubt in her voice as she says it, as though any of this could be her fault.
“Of course, Pat. I love you too.” Stan means it, too. He’s always meant it. God, he’ll never be able to forgive himself for what he did to her.
Patty breaks a little when he says it. Tears finally begin to spill past her eyes and down her cheeks. She leans forward all at once to embrace him. Though she’s careful not to jostle all the wires and tubes, she manages to put one arm around him and press her face into his shoulder. Stan can feel the warmth of her body heat and the cold wet of her tears and snot through the flimsy hospital gown he’s wearing.
“God, Stan, I was so scared –” he hears her mutter into his shoulder.
He can feel his cheeks growing wet too, and he replies, “I know, hon. I know.” He wishes he could put his arms around her, the way she has hers around him. As it is, he stays still to avoid ripping out his IV, and hopes that she knows why.
They stay like that for a long time. Later, when they’ve settled into a silence that feels almost companionable, a thought occurs to him – a thought that sends another spike of adrenaline straight to his heart.
“Patty, how long was I out?”
She looks up. “What? Oh, almost four days now. It –” she chokes a little. “It happened on a Thursday evening, and it’s Sunday afternoon now.”
Four days – technically three, if he wasn’t counting Thursday evening. The other Losers would be in Derry right now. Hell, they might have fought IT already.
Hell, they might have lost already. All because he wasn’t there.
Cold fear grips him again, and he takes a moment to push it down. Breathe, Stan, you imbecile, he thinks.
He needs to call Mike back. Though he’s hardly in any condition to go to Derry himself, he needs to know what’s happened. He needs to know if his friends are okay.
“Patty,” Stan says tentatively, hoping to God that he gets a good answer, “I don’t suppose you know where I left my phone?”