🖤 - The time they almost lost it completely
The sky is dark with dense clouds and the fading evening light only allows Bill to see the trees at his sides and the arching bridge ahead while he sprints down sidewalk, the rainfall beating into him like icy-hot needles. He can hardly see through the rain, squinting, gasping, panting with each hard beat of his shoes against the ground. He feels like he’s going a thousand miles per hour. He feels weightless, just like he does on his bike, the only place he ever really felt the free, euphoric feeling of the wind whipping him in the face as he flies down the street like an invincible hawk.
But Bill doesn’t have his bike now, and that euphoric feeling is absent. Instead, his body pumps white hot panic and dread through his veins and dizzying nausea twists in the pit of his stomach as his lungs burn and burn and burn, begging him to stop running, but Bill can’t stop running. He can’t stop running.
Bill reaches the bridge and suddenly his legs give out on him. He tumbles forward, somersaulting over himself once, scuffing his hands, forehead, and cheek against the ground before landing on his knees, sliding on them and tearing him across the concrete before he stops at the tall railing along the sides of the bridge. He grasps at the iron bars, his body searing with pain with blood pooling at his knees and beading on his face from the skin being torn.
He’s gasping still, squeezing his eyes shut and wringing his hands around the bars till his knuckles go white, and right there curled up on the bridge, a shrill sob jumps out of Bill’s throat after a gasp balls up and refuses to come out. His mind is spinning, body numb but screaming with pain in the same moment.
But it’s not the physical pain of the fall that makes him cry out. It’s the indescribable, crushing ache deep in his chest that makes him break apart.
‘Mister Denbrough, Missus Denbrough… I don’t know how to begin…’
The police officer stands in the front doorway, and his mother is screaming, screaming, screaming into her hands. Bill stands at the bottom of the stairs, staring. Numb. The hard rain pounds against the roof. Numb.
The numbness stuck. It stuck like glue to every limb and bone and muscle. It stuck for days until it melted away like hot tar and acid and boiling oil, and it seeped into every pore in Bill Denbrough’s body.
So he ran. He ran until he collapsed on the bridge. He ran until he sat clutching the bars and bleeding from his knees and he cries out till nothing comes out and his head his hung, face contorted and mouth wide open in silent agony as every wave of horrified grief and fear and anger pound into him with merciless grace.
Bill Denbrough mourns the life he’ll never have, an absence that will permeate within him like a hollow hole of black lead where his heart and lungs and stomach used to be. It takes from him like a sponge, every breath of optimism and every ounce of bargaining sapped away from him.
The young boy shakes on the bridge, the pain too much, making him thrash and stiffen and buckle and numbly press against the iron bars as another pathetic, shrill cry rips from his throat for the last time that night.
Derry’s great river carries on beneath him, even as the rain beats down unrelentingly.
