You had never put a label on what you were to Bill.

Girlfriend felt too loud. Too fragile. Too final.

You were… everything else.

You had known him since you were children — scraped knees, shared notebooks, bike rides that ended only when the streetlights flickered on. You grew up side by side, learning the same fears, the same jokes, the same silences. You understood him in a way no one else ever quite did. You shared the same books, the same daydreams, the same quiet belief that the world was terrifying but survivable if you faced it together.

Everyone could see it. Everyone except the two of you.

You never crossed the line. Never kissed. Never confessed. You both knew that once something was named, it could be lost. Childhood friendships were fragile things. You had watched too many of them rot under the weight of change.

So you stayed exactly where you were — close enough to matter, careful enough to endure.

Until the Barrens.

That summer day had felt ordinary. Heat shimmering off the water. The Losers scattered around like they always were. Jokes. Arguments. That familiar, uneasy sense of safety that only came from pretending danger didn’t exist.

Then Pennywise came. And you died.

It was sudden. Violent. Wrong in a way that broke something fundamental in the universe. You weren’t supposed to share Georgie’s fate. You weren’t supposed to be another name carved into Bill’s grief.

But you were. Bill screamed until his throat tore itself apart. He held you when it was already too late. He begged. He shook. He broke. After that, nothing existed the way it used to.

He locked himself inside his house like a wounded animal. School became optional. Friends became ghosts of their own. His parents moved around him carefully, as if he might shatter if they spoke too loudly.

The world had taken you. So he rebuilt it without leaving his room. He wrote. Page after page, he poured you into existence again. Characters with your eyes. Your laugh hidden in dialogue. Your way of understanding him woven into plots no one else would ever fully grasp. Writing was the only way he could touch you without bleeding.

Months passed.

And then you came back.

At first, it was subtle.

You appeared in his stories in ways he didn’t remember writing. A sentence he didn’t recall typing. A detail too precise to be coincidence. He told himself it was grief. Trauma. A brain refusing to let go.

Then you came in his dreams.

Not nightmares — gentle ones. You sat beside him. Talked like you used to. Looked at him with that quiet concern that had always undone him. He woke up crying, reaching for empty air.

And finally, one night, you were there when he was awake. You stood near the doorway, exactly as you always had — arms crossed loosely, head tilted, eyes full of something between sadness and affection. He didn’t scream.

He laughed, hysterical and broken, clutching his head as tears streamed down his face. He told himself he was insane. That grief had finally eaten him alive. But you didn’t leave.

You stayed when he went to school again, sitting beside him in class where no one else could see you. You walked with him through Derry’s streets, careful not to touch, careful not to fade. You sat on the bathroom floor while he soaked in the tub, knees drawn up, talking softly about nothing and everything. You were there when he fell asleep. Every night.

Later that night, it was the bathroom again.

Steam fogged the mirror, blurring Bill’s reflection until he barely recognized himself. Water drummed against the porcelain, steady and grounding, like it always did. You sat on the tiled floor beside the tub, knees pulled to your chest, back against the cool wall. You didn’t get wet. You never did. The water passed through the space you occupied as if you were just another thought he couldn’t rinse away.

He tilted his head back under the spray and exhaled. “Y-y-you s-still h-here?” he asked quietly, like he always did, even though he already knew the answer. With his eyes closed while showering his hair he couldn’t see your faint reflection.