I woke up tasting death.
Not my death—though that would come later, in different forms, wearing different faces—but someone else's. Something old. Something patient. Something that had been waiting in the dark for a very long time, and had finally found what it was looking for.
Me.
The rain didn't fall.
Let me say that again because it's important: **the rain didn't fall.**
It hung there. Suspended. Like the universe had pressed pause mid-frame and forgotten to hit play again. Each drop caught light that had no source—no sun, no moon, no streetlamp brave enough to stay lit in this part of town—and reflected it back as something wrong. Copper. Rust. The taste of old pennies left in a dead man's pocket until the metal learned what decay smelled like.
And underneath, sweetness.
Carnival sweetness.
Cotton candy gone rancid, the kind that sticks to your teeth and your tongue and the back of your throat no matter how hard you swallow. The kind that makes you think of children laughing and children screaming and the razor-thin line between the two.
The drops struck pavement with soft, deliberate *plinks*.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
A clock counting down to something inevitable.
Something hungry.
My cheek was pressed against cracked asphalt. Still warm from the ghost of daytime—that phantom heat cities hold in their concrete bones long after the sun abandons them to whatever hunts in the dark. Water pooled beneath my tongue. Cold. Insistent. *Wrong*. Forcing itself down my throat in thick, choking gulps that made my lungs burn with the memory of drowning.
Not quite drowning.
But close enough to taste panic at the edges.
My head throbbed. The kind of ache that starts behind your eyes and spreads like ink in water, promising migraine territory soon. The kind that turns light into knives and sound into hammers against raw nerves.
For one long, disoriented heartbeat that stretched into eternity—
Everything felt like it belonged to me.
I was David Winchester.
Subject 011.
Escaped asset.
**White rooms.**
The memories came like shrapnel. Sharp. Fragmentary. Real as bone and twice as permanent.
Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. My head—younger, smaller, shaved down to skin that showed every vein and vulnerability—tilted back in a restraint chair. Hospital gown with 011 stitched in black thread over the heart. Like a target. Like a designation. Like a number was all I'd ever be.
Needles.
So many needles.
Sliding into thin arms while monitors beeped their steady, cold song of data collection. Blood running warm from my nose while objects across the room lifted, spun, shattered. Just to make the pain stop. Just to prove I could.
Just because they asked.
Doctors in white coats calling me Eleven. Calling me subject. Calling me asset—never child, never person, never *human*—just thing that did tricks when prodded hard enough.
Sensory deprivation tanks filled with black water that closed over my face like a grave. Electroshock that turned the world white and silent for seconds that felt like hours, like dying, like learning what it meant to have your soul scraped raw and put back wrong.
Isolation cells where the only sound was my own heartbeat and the hum of ventilation that never quite drowned out the screaming.
Pain conditioning.
Layer by layer.
Breaking me down until there was nothing left but obedience and power and the cold certainty that I was a weapon first and a person never.
Those memories were mine.
Burned deep.
Real as bone.
Then the smell reached me fully.
Wet earth. Rotting leaves composted down into black mulch. And threading through it all, that cloying artificial sweetness turned poison. Cotton candy left too long in a storm drain until it fermented into something that shouldn't exist.
Sugar corrupted.
Innocence weaponized.
My eyes opened.
The world swam into focus slowly, reluctantly, like it didn't want me to see what it had become.
**Derry.**
I knew the name before I lifted my head to read the street signs. Knew it in my bones. In my blood. In some deep lizard part of my brain that was already screaming *run run run you stupid fool RUN*.
But something else cracked open behind my eyes.
A second flood.
Gentler this time.
But sharper.
*David Black.*
Twenty-eight years old. Ordinary apartment with popcorn ceiling and neighbors who complained about noise. Weighted blanket. Late-night reruns of shows I'd seen a dozen times. Books on the shelf—thick paperbacks with creased spines and coffee stains on the covers.
Stephen King.
*IT.*
I had read the book. Watched the movies—both of them, old and new, Tim Curry and Bill Skarsgård, each one teaching different lessons about fear. Knew the clown. Knew the balloon. Knew the Deadlights that waited behind the greasepaint smile.
Knew how it ended.
The realization hit like ice water injected straight into my veins.
I had gone to sleep as David Black. Safe. Ordinary. A man with a boring job and a quiet life and no reason to believe anything would change.
Now I was here.
In the story.
In the fucking *story*.
The interface appeared then.
Clean blue text overlaying the gray world like it had always been waiting for me to wake up and notice. Like it had been patient. Like it had all the time in the world because time was what it made, what it controlled, what it bent until fiction became flesh and flesh became fiction and the line between them blurred into something neither.
**[SYSTEM BOOT SEQUENCE INITIATED]**
**[TRANSMIGRATION CONFIRMED]**
**[Welcome to the story.]**
David Winchester.
The name settled heavy, like a stone dropped into still water. Sending ripples through everything I thought I knew about myself.
Subject 011's memories were still there—real, burned in, mine in ways that made my hands shake and my throat tight.
But beneath them, David Black screamed silent.
I was both.
Both and neither.
Something new wearing two old skins like ill-fitting coats.
-----
The houses stared back with the patient malevolence of things that had been waiting a very long time.
Gray clapboard siding peeling in long, tired strips. Porches sagging under the weight of too many years, too many secrets, too many children who'd gone missing and were never found. Windows dark and blank like closed eyes pretending to sleep.
But you could feel them watching anyway.
The whole street had that quality. That sense of held breath. Of waiting. Of something coiled tight beneath the surface, ready to spring when you finally let your guard down.
No lights anywhere.
No cars parked in driveways.
No voices carrying on the wind, no dogs barking, no televisions flickering blue behind curtains.
Just the rain, steady and patient, washing the color out of everything until the world looked like an old photograph left in the sun too long.
Sepia tones and shadows.
A memory of a place that might have been alive once.
I pushed myself up slowly. Arms shaking with more than cold. My hands were scarred in ways that felt both familiar and wrong—patterns of old wounds that Subject 011 had earned, that David Black had never had, that David Winchester now carried like inheritance.
My jacket—black leather, expensive, broken in but not worn out—clung cold to my skin.
My heart began to hammer before my mind fully caught up.
Something was wrong here.
Fundamentally wrong.
Not just supernatural wrong—I'd learned to recognize that in the white rooms, in the experiments, in the way reality bent around me when I was angry or scared enough. This was different. This was *story* wrong. The kind of wrong that came from being a character instead of a reader. From being inside the narrative instead of safely outside it.
From being the one who could die.
Then, at the end of the street, something moved.
A single red balloon.
Bright as fresh blood against the gray world. Perfect and round and utterly impossible.
No string trailing from it. No child's hand clutching it. No natural explanation for how it floated there, bobbing gently against a wind that wasn't blowing in that direction.
Just floating.
Waiting.
Watching.
Testing the air with the patient curiosity of a predator that had all the time in the world.
My stomach dropped straight through the pavement and kept falling.
Because I knew that balloon.
I knew what came after it.
I had read the book. Watched the movies. Knew the script, knew the beats, knew exactly what lived in the sewers under Derry and what it did to the people who got too close.
And I knew—with the absolute certainty of someone who'd consumed too much horror fiction—that knowing didn't help.
That knowing sometimes made it worse.
That IT fed on fear, and right now my fear was a beacon bright enough to see from space.
The interface shifted.
**[Template Assignment Protocol: INITIATED]**
**[Available Templates: 10,247]**
**[Selection Method: RANDOMIZED]**
**[Rolling…]**
Names blurred past too fast to read. Jane Ives. Carrie White. Tetsuo Shima. Jean Grey. Eleven.
Numbers and codenames and powers that could reshape reality or end it.
**[Selected: Jane Ives // Subject 011 // "Eleven"]**
**[Psychokinesis – Lvl 0 (LOCKED)]**
**[Biokinesis – Lvl 0 (LOCKED)]**
**[Sensory Projection – Lvl 0 (LOCKED)]**
**[Dimensional Awareness – Lvl 0 (LOCKED)]**
**[Unlock Progress: 0/100 EXP]**
I stared at the text floating in my vision.
Psychokinesis.
The power to move things with my mind.
The power Subject 011 had wielded in the white rooms—lifting objects, crushing throats, bending metal like tinfoil when the guards got too close.
Locked.
**Locked.**
Of course it was locked.
Because the universe had a sense of humor. Because being dropped into a horror story with a cosmic entity that ate fear wasn't enough—I also had to earn my powers like this was some kind of RPG grinding simulator.
**[EXP ACQUISITION METHODS]**
**• Survive supernatural encounters → 1-50 EXP**
**• Defeat hostile entities → 10-500 EXP**
**• Absorb metaphysical residue → Variable**
**[Death is permanent.]**
**[No respawns. No saves. No second chances.]**
The HUD minimized to a thin status bar in the upper right corner of my vision.
**HP: 100/100**
**Stamina: 100/100**
**Power Pool: 100%**
**EXP: 0/100**
No tutorial.
No helpful guide character.
No starting equipment beyond the clothes on my back and the memories of two men who'd never existed in this timeline.
Just cold rules and colder silence.
The balloon paused directly above the storm drain.
Bobbed once, gently, like it was listening to something deep below.
Then a voice floated up from the dark.
Bright. Lilting. The kind of voice that promised fun and prizes and delivered teeth and terror.
"Hiya, kiddo! Want a balloon?"
Every hair on my body stood straight up.
My lizard brain—the part that remembered being prey, that had learned in the white rooms what it meant to be hunted by things wearing human faces—screamed at me to run.
But the transmigrator part held me steady.
Because I knew the script.
And the System was already protecting me.
A pale hand emerged from the drain.
Too long. Fingers extending in segments like they had extra joints. Knuckles knotted wrong. Nails painted garish orange and blue, chipped and peeling.
It gripped the storm drain grate.
Another hand joined it.
Then the face.
White greasepaint cracked like old porcelain. Red smile stretched ear to ear—too wide, physically impossible, extending past where lips should end. Eyes swirling with orange light that pulled, that *dragged*, that tried to show me everything I'd ever feared and make me live it forever.
The Deadlights.
Ancient. Hungry. Endless.
I felt myself starting to slip—
Reality beginning to fray—
Then something cold and mechanical snapped awake inside me.
**[DEADLIGHT EXPOSURE DETECTED]**
**[MEMETIC ATTACK IN PROGRESS]**
**[IDENTITY VEIL: ENGAGING COUNTERMEASURES]**
The pull weakened.
The wall between my consciousness and those hungry lights held.
Translucent but solid. Bulletproof glass between me and oblivion.
**[DEADLIGHT EXPOSURE: RESISTED]**
**[EXP Gained: +500 // Resistance to Cosmic Memetic Assault]**
**[Current Progress: 500/100]**
Pennywise's grin faltered.
Just for a moment.
Confusion flickered across that painted face.
"What…" The carnival barker voice cracked, split like cheap paint. Something deeper bled through—older, vast, hungry in ways that transcended physical need. "What *are* you?"
I stopped three feet from the drain.
Close enough to smell the sewer rot. Close enough to see the shapes writhing behind its eyes when the orange light pulsed. Close enough to die.
But also close enough to see.
To understand, in some fundamental way, that IT was confused.
Couldn't read me properly.
Couldn't taste my deepest fears because the System was hiding them behind a wall of false memories and transmigrator truth buried deeper.
IT saw trauma and fear—plenty of that.
But IT didn't see the knowledge.
Didn't see the reader.
Didn't see the one who knew its ending.
I raised my hand slowly.
Not to strike. Not to defend.
Just to feel the pressure against my mind.
To test if the door would hold.
It did.
I smiled.
Small. Trembling.
But mine.
"Someone who knows how you die."
The words landed like stones in still water.
Pennywise's entire body went rigid.
The smile vanished.
For just a moment, I saw something behind the clown mask.
Something ancient and vast and *afraid*.
Then the fear transformed into rage.
Pure, cosmic rage.
The clown face twisted and IT lunged—
And the real fight began.