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Chapter Text

Richie rubbed at his bloodshot eyes, bringing a steaming cup of coffee up to his mouth with his other hand. He didn't care that it seared his chapped lips, nor that it did absolutely nothing for the buzz of exhaustion droning behind his eyes. Eddie hadn't budged in days, and Richie hadn't gotten a wink in just as long. The hospital staff had forced him to wait with the rest of the Losers' Club when Eddie was first brought into surgery and had allowed them to visit Eddie during visiting hours afterwards, but only Richie stuck around day in and day out. It wasn't like he had anyone waiting for him outside Derry Home Hospital.

He needed to be there when Eddie woke up. If he woke up... He lost so much blood, he came so close to...

Leaning back in the unpleasantly rigid armchair he'd claimed for himself, Richie rested his head on the hard frame to stare sightlessly up at the blank, white ceiling. In an effort to clear his mind of these hypotheticals, he found himself seduced by the notion of sleep, by Eddie's deep, steady breathing on the hospital bed, peaceful almost unto the likeness of death. But try as Richie might, there was no sleep to be had.

He made a bored noise with his mouth, tapping a beat on the coffee cup so the pads of his fingers hummed with the heat. Flashes of the fight beneath the Well House burst in spectacular horror behind his blind gaze. He'd gone too long without sleep, finding himself trapped in the memory gnawing at the edges of obstinate consciousness. The Moment - capital M - had been replaying in his mind since he'd fallen to his knees outside the Neibolt house, cradling Eddie's corpse-like body to his chest and weeping into the shirt clutched in his fists, wet with Eddie's blood.

One of Its monstrous limbs, spidery and too fast to see, had waited to impale Eddie in his moment of triumph as he leaned over Richie. Fuck, Richie had never been prouder, been happier, than in that moment, hearing the victory in Eddie's voice upon saving Richie's life and seeing him there, hovering over him. He'd thrown that piece of metal like a Greek hero armed with only a javelin before the walls of Troy. Richie's heart had threatened to beat straight out of his chest, oh but there was nothing straight about it.

Neither of them realized, it had been Richie or Eddie. Now, Richie wished it had been him. Instead, he was made to watch, helpless to do anything, as Eddie collapsed in on himself around the protrusion poking out from his chest. Eddie had rasped his name on a blood-drenched breath, still echoing in the back of Richie's cluttered mind. When It flung Eddie's spasming body into the rock and he had tumbled down the narrow crevice with an echo of pained cries, Richie felt his heart stop, like he was the one who'd been impaled.

His feet were moving before he could register what had happened, the one thought in his mind: get to Eddie. It was all he could do. The whole of the Losers' Club bolted for their downed companion, but Richie could hardly make them out around the hems of his vision, centered on the body lying still at the base of the dark crevice. Eddie was still breathing, still talking, still cracking jokes - the kind Richie would have been cracking if his whole world hadn't just shattered around him.

Richie should never have left his side, hell, he should've gotten him out right then and there - the others didn't need Richie's voice to belittle It, they could have done just fine without him, and Eddie's last conscious moments wouldn't have been spent like the last few ticks on a failing clock alone, in pain and terrified in the depths of that dark pit. Richie couldn't help thinking if he'd only kept Eddie talking, kept him awake...

The nurses said things were still iffy. They said there was a chance he wouldn't wake up. If he didn't, it would be the same as dying alone. "Fuck..." Richie groaned, rolling his head on his shoulders and squeezing his temples between thumb and middle finger. When he pulled his hand away, he could see the tremors in his fingers more than he could feel them. He clenched his fist, throwing back another hot mouthful of coffee. Except, it was no longer hot. He couldn't pinpoint just how long he'd sat still in the haze of memory - an absurd amount of time, no doubt. Like he'd been dreaming with his eyes open. If not for the unpleasant room temperature of the coffee, he might not have realized.

Harrumphing to himself, he gazed into the brown ripples illustrating the quake of his hand. It could've done with a shot of whiskey. Hell, he could've done with a shot of whiskey.

"Richie...?" a scratchy voice moaned so near to him, Richie nearly jumped out of his seat. His body was too tired to fulfill the effort, and he merely spilled a sizable portion of cold coffee over his lap.

"Ah, fuck! And here I thought your mom was the only Kaspbrak who could get me wet-" Cutting himself off, Richie pushed up from the chair, setting the mug aside on a table with a vase of flowers Bev had brought by. "Eds! You're awake! What the fuck do I-? Nurse, nurse!" Leaning over the colourless hospital bed, Richie's excitement deflated just as suddenly as the light airiness of hope had filled his chest. Eddie's eyes fluttered closed and his head fell back on his pillow, his injured cheek turned up to Richie as he succumbed again to sleep. Richie was certain it had been Eddie's voice, albeit scratchy with lack of use. He assured himself it couldn't have been the clown's mind tricks. It was dead, It couldn't get inside his head anymore. But that was the extent of Eddie's waking. 

Slumping once again in his seat, Richie bit back the emotion closing up his throat. A nurse burst into the room, demanding why she'd been called, and the last of Richie's energy went to explaining what had happened as he cleaned off the coffee spill. She averted her eyes, judging him silently, but seemed to take Eddie's fleeting consciousness, just to whisper Richie's name, as a good sign. Richie just wanted his best friend back. He had to tell him the truth. The initials he'd carved into the wood railing at the kissing bridge as a boy...

Days came and went, and surely, Eddie should have woken up already. In all that time, Richie couldn't intentionally find it within himself to sleep, but in all the monotony of waiting, he could've very well been passing out with every blink of his eyes. By the appearance of little gifts, fresh flowers, and small signs of life in the way things seemed to move around in the hospital room, he assumed the others were still coming by to check in on Eddie, but he missed them while sleep assaulted his weary mind and bedraggled body. At least all this time spent in his armchair had finally developed a perfect dent to hug his ass in the once-uncomfortably stiff seat, but Richie was never one for finding the bright side of a bad situation, only for mocking in the name of unwarranted levity.

Richie sat hunched forward in this seat which had molded to his backside. He'd taken to studying Eddie's motionless shape. The contours of the white sheets over him, hiding his broken body. The slow rise and fall of his chest, still the scrawny kid Richie had worked so hard to remember through the blur of his memory haze. The occasional flutter of his eyelids, hiding eyes that would often dart around the room with a slight mania. Eddie's manic energy was concentrated there, in those expressive eyes which, admittedly, would more often than not narrow in disgust or disdain whenever Richie opened his mouth. But Eddie was always the quickest of the group to meet Richie's crude jokes with a witty comeback or to play along with his banter.

Talking to him - teasing him - had become like an addiction for Richie when he was a kid. He could never get enough of Eddie, in all his frenetic hypochondria, so easy to rile up and so keen to toy with Richie right back. As kids, Eddie would instigate these little riffs just as often as Richie did, chasing him around to sit where he sat just to stick his feet in Richie's face, or tickling him in the quarry until he could successfully dunk Richie underwater, laughing and teasing as he did. They had loved to torture each other, but this indefinite waiting... it was a far worse torture.

His tired body was too slow to react to the sight of Eddie's eyes cracking open. Not even when Eddie lifted a hand to his head, startling in alarm at the sight of the tubes poking out of him, his eyes following the tubes to the medical contraption beside the bed.

"Where...?" Eddie croaked in a voice less awake than asleep. "Where am I?" His eyes focused, taking in the machinery, and his face blanched with a look like he was about to be sick. "Oh noo," he crowed, "Why am I the one who always ends up hospitalized? This is some fucked up irony right here-"

Finally, fighting the brain-numbing agent that was his insomnia, Richie registered that Eddie had truly woken up, spouting, "Oh fuck, Eddie!" Too many words piled up at the back of his throat, clogging him up before even one more could reach his tongue, but he didn't need words.

Richie threw himself forward, out of the seat practically grafted to his ass, and gathered Eddie's smaller frame in his arms. He buried his face in the crook between Eddie's shoulder and neck, weeks' worth of stubble brushing against Eddie's skin and making a soft but scratchy sound in his ears against the silence of the room.

Feeling Eddie's warmth against his chest as Eddie's arms automatically wrapped around him in return, the floodgates burst and a deluge of words spilled out, leaving Richie rambling into Eddie's collarbone, "What kind of dipshit romantic-? You know, when I gave you that pep talk, I wasn't telling you to die for me." Yanking back from the embrace to meet Eddie's eyes, Richie sank to the edge of the bed, his legs melting under him. "I thought you were supposed to be the paranoid one, but nooo, you decided to give It the cold shoulder like a middle-aged housewife with a grudge and to, what, have a chat mid-boss battle? Who chucks a spear at a demonic spider-clown and thinks oh me oh my, looks like the job's all done here-? "

"Why don't you shut the fuck up with the British guy," Eddie cut in, brows furrowing in his trademark look of vexation reserved just for Richie. "Don't you think it's a little immature, after everything we just went through? I had to make sure you weren't-"

"You were worried about me? I thought you fucking died on me! And I mean literally, on top of me!" Before any unwelcome emotion could shake his voice, Richie tacked haphazardly on, "Do you even realize how traumatic that would've been for me? Really, it's a testament to how little you care."

Fuming, Eddie met his accusation head on, raising his right hand, straight as a salute, parallel to his face like he sometimes did when Richie managed to get under his skin. Even that small gesture, so familiar, brought a wave of relief over Richie crashing against his sleep-deprived body. But he'd riled Eddie up alright. "How little I-?! I've been awake for all of ten seconds and you're already on my ass for fucking saving your life? This is bullshit!"

Stopping himself on the verge of picking up this thread of banter, teetering on the edge of a real argument, Richie let the deafening hum of exhaustion buzz through his head and mow down his line-up of snarky comebacks. Unable to fight the small smile in the corner of his mouth, he noticed his hands were still cupped around Eddie's shoulders and let them fall, ghosting over Eddie's arms. "Yeah, I can't argue that. There's been a lot of bullshit, Eds. But, uh, the clown's dead. For good, this time. I think." This was somehow the easier topic.

The fighting spirit whooshed out of Eddie at his mention of It, the look of a deer in headlights widening Eddie's eyes. "It's dead?" he breathed, so quiet that had Richie been any further from him, he might not have heard. "How can you be sure?"

"It looked pretty dead to me after the five of us crushed Its still-beating heart in our bare hands. A little overkill if you ask me, but It died doing what It loved. Being part of a fucked up gore-fest," Richie said with a shrug. "Then the house came down and almost took us with it, so thanks a bunch for making me lug you through that."

"You carried me out?" Eddie muttered under his breath, the gears churning behind his eyes.

"Yeah, and you're heavier than you look. Lucky I've had so much practice holding your mom." At his words, Eddie kicked at him from under the blanket, screwing up his face in a frown that sent a warm feeling through Richie's gut. Ignoring both the look and the sensation, Richie continued, "You'd think with a big chunk taken out of you, that'd take off some of the weight. Nope, I was sore for a week, and not the kind of sore I'd want from a Kaspbrak."

"Are you done?" Eddie snapped, kicking him again - so reminiscent of their childish roughhousing on the hammock back in the fort, now but a distant memory clouded by years spent outside Derry.

"When am I ever?" Richie teased, absent-mindedly fiddling with the edge of the surgical tape on the back of Eddie's hands - hands that were closed on the bed to either side of him, clasped beneath Richie's. Even if he'd wanted to, he found he was unable to let him go now he finally had him back. Whether Eddie noticed or not, he let Richie linger in this contact a moment longer. But then Eddie did notice, and he pulled away from Richie's touch.

"Do not fucking touch my tape! You're not sticking these needles back in me if they fall out-" He gagged at the thought, drawing a laugh out of Richie. "It's not funny, asshole!"

"I just realized something," he chuckled, raising a hand to brush his thumb over the bandage on Eddie's cheek, his gaze sliding from Eddie's glare. He told himself it wasn't just an excuse to keep his hands on Eddie, and teasingly slapped his cheek just next to the bandage, careful not to cause him any actual pain. "You're full of holes. I think I'll dub thee Eddie Spaghetti-Strainer."

"Oh shut up!" Eddie burst, but couldn't help a laugh in mixed exasperation and amusement. "Where's everyone else?" Eddie grew suddenly somber, grabbing Richie's hand to stop him touching his face but keeping hold of his fingers. "Tell me we're not the only ones who made it out-?"

"No! No, the rest of the Losers' Club, they're all fine, or as fine as one can be after fighting a, and I repeat, demonic spider-clown. But you are the only one who came so close to dying. Second only to It, I guess."

"Great," huffed Eddie, deflating in the conflict of relief and disappointment raging behind his eyes until he lay back on his pillow. "So much for your speech. Turns out I was the weakest link after all."

"Says the man who made everyone's worst nightmare deepthroat his spear-" At the double-entendre, Eddie rolled his eyes. "-and kept It from swallowing me whole. Call yourself the weakest link one more time and I'll know how you really feel about me."

"Not everything's about you, Trashmouth."

"Oh? Well that is news to me." Although his tone held a deadpan air, easing back into his usual snark, the overwhelming relief and fondness he could feel pouring from his eyes threatened to give away what Richie had long ago bottled up inside. With his one free hand, he plucked Eddie's fingers up from grasping his own, and pushed up his glasses on his nose to rub the exhaustion from his eyes, polishing out the sincerity there. All that lovey-dovey stuff just wasn't his shtick. More than that, with Eddie gazing up at him from the plush dint of the pillow, the words he'd been building up in himself while waiting for him to wake felt just as far out of reach as when he was a kid.

"Of course it would be news to you," Eddie scoffed.

Shrugging, Richie remarked, "But you can't trust everything you hear."

Even as he spoke, his mind was elsewhere, too tired to process anything beyond the placement of his hands now Eddie's had left his grip. After Eddie's warmth, this emptiness in his palms had the same itching sensation of attending a party without a drink to occupy his hands. Would it be too telling if he went to hold his hands so soon after making a big deal about letting him go? Why did he have to make everything into a spectacle of gesticulation? He'd been rendered a kid all over again - but that was only a symptom of having Eddie around.

Richie had settled for any excuse to hold Eddie's hand when they first came back together in the Jade of the Orient, challenging him to a pitiful arm wrestling match. After all these years and all the warped memories, his was still the most familiar touch to Richie. For a moment, Richie had resented it; proof that he simply couldn't help himself. The relief that washed over him was stronger. Well, he couldn't very well challenge Eddie to a rematch here in his hospital room, although he liked to think he could easily provoke Eddie into it.

With a start, Richie realized he was still jabbering away about some crude nonsense, but Eddie's eyelids had drooped half-closed, and he was sinking deeper into the pillow. His arms lay limp to either side of him, as if too heavy to be raised. Richie's space-filling chatter died on his lips, pausing just long enough to feel his heart stutter on a beat.

"You're still tired," Richie guessed, followed by an incredulous, "You're still tired? What's the point of a coma-?" It took a genuine effort to stop himself mocking this irony, but Eddie was quick to check his ridicule.

"You know that the human body can't survive losing more than two thirds of its total blood, right? And that's being very forgiving. I'd cut off my life expectancy at half or less, but boy, I wonder what the rate of blood loss is for someone who's been impaled through the chest and then dragged through a cave system before receiving any medical attention whatsoever? Huh, guess I make a good case study!" he retorted, passive aggressive in a high-pitched voice, "Sorry if I don't bounce back to normal in, what, a couple days?"

"It's been more than a couple days," Richie chuckled humourlessly. "Try a couple weeks."

"Shit! I have to call Myra. But she'll have an aneurysm if she finds out I'm in a hospital- Shit!" Eddie turned white as a sheet, his eyes going wide, but he seemed to notice Richie's confusion. Sass in his tone to cover the panic, he elaborated, "My wife?"

"Oh - right," Richie muttered through his teeth. He'd managed to forget Eddie was married. And to a woman, no less... But who could blame him forgetting such a trivial fact when it was dwarfed by the heartache of almost losing Eddie completely. Thinking back to it now, he frowned with remembrance. "Bev got in touch with her, actually. Just after they got you all set up here. I think, at the time, I assumed she was on the phone with your mom-"

"Oh would you give it a rest, Freud-"

"I'm not totally joking!" Richie smirked, and with a gesture in the general direction of his head, explained, "I was pretty scatterbrained when we finally got out, and really, by the sound of her, your wife could win a Ms. Kaspbrak lookalike contest with your mom in the running."

Meeting Richie's wry look with a glare, Eddie grumbled, "Beep beep, Richie."

Laughing, he teased, "So this is where you draw the line? Noted." Hoisting himself up to a stand, he stretched his back with a groan, turning away from Eddie to say, "Go ahead and call her, I needed another coffee anyway." But when he closed the door behind himself, he stood out in the hall for a moment, straining to shut out the sound of Eddie's pitiful voice inside the room, stricken and small. He even spoke to Myra Kaspbrak the same way he had with his mom, making himself insignificant under her dictatorial will.

Sighing, Richie rubbed the meat of his palm to his cheek, stretching his train of thought over too many tracks until his mind was blank, and only then did he keep walking. Instead of getting himself another cup of poorly brewed bean water from the nearest coffee machine he'd been milking like a dairy farmer - a machine that had long outlived its warranty - he lugged his sore body to find and inform the nearest nurse.

Myra showed up the next morning. Richie woke up to her thunderous marching in the corridor outside the room, fading out of sleep to the whirring of machines and Eddie's low, deep breathing. As consciousness dragged its lazy feet back to him, his hand automatically squeezed that which he'd been holding in his sleep, running his thumb over dry skin - dry from over-washing. When he glanced blearily to the bed on which he'd propped his feet that night, he found Eddie asleep on his side, facing Richie with unkempt hair and peace in the softened lines of his face, and both hands cupped around Richie's right one. Eddie had drawn Richie's hand in, so near to his chin, to his lips, Richie felt the tingle of his breath ghosting over his knuckles. But the warmth and intimacy of the moment popped like a bubble lanced by something sharp, something grating - nails on chalkboard - when Myra burst through the door. The sudden racket of her entrance had both men jumping apart, fully awake.

"Eddie-bear! So this is where you ran off to," she cooed in perfect pitch with the ghost of Ms. Kaspbrak, not to mention she looked exactly how Richie remembered Eddie's mom from when they were kids. This is almost eerier than the clown, he thought.

"Myra, I didn't think you'd get here so soon-" Eddie began, but she cut him off with a curt glance in his direction. A permanent scowl screwed up her face even as he met her with a weak smile.

"Who's this?" It was a rhetorical question, unclear who she was talking about because she'd yet to even glance in Richie's direction, and was at once the only acknowledgement she made to signify she'd even noticed him in the room. "I told you these old friends-" Her lips curled in distaste around the word. "-weren't good for you, dragging you off for who knows what reason, and just look where you ended up. What did I tell you would happen, hm?"

Shoving past Richie, she bumped the very furniture out of her way to plant herself securely between both men, blocking Richie entirely from view, although she seemed to have forgotten Richie was there at all. He'd been shoved to the corner behind her rump and was now trapped there. This wasn't a very big room, even smaller with machinery taking up much of the available space. "Whoa, hey-" Richie squeaked, worried she might try to take a seat on his claimed armchair if he didn't remind her he was there.

From the other side of her girth, he heard Eddie's, "Honey, can't this wait til we're alone-"

"Alone? You want to be alone?" Leaning in close so she loomed over him, she made her voice sickly sweet on the promise, "Oh, you will be if you run out on me again. It's just one hospital to the next when it comes to these friends of yours. This is why you listen to me, sweetie. You need me."

"Mrs. Kaspbrak, is it?" Richie spoke up, anger shaking his otherwise snark-ridden voice. He noticed Eddie's fists knot in the bed sheets - he couldn't shove Richie out of the room himself - and Richie promptly ignored it. For the first time, Myra had rounded on him, shooting him a cold glare. "I was here to make sure your husband wouldn't be alone when he woke up. Where were you?" Angling himself to peer around Myra, Eddie sent Richie a silent warning with his eyes.

"You? You did this," Myra snapped at Richie, exactly the way Ms. Kaspbrak had said it all those years ago outside the Well House. Without removing her glare from Richie, she gestured out to Eddie in the hospital bed and nearly slapped him across the face in the motion, only to clasp a hand tight on his shoulder. "I've heard about you, Richie Tozier." She narrowed her eyes, a vindictive smile twisting in the corners of her mouth. "Get out of my husband's room."

Raising his palms, Richie pushed up from the arms of his chair to come to a stand. "Don't get your panties in a twist, I'm leaving." Navigating around Myra was the hard part, and leaving Eddie alone with her, almost impossible. But it wasn't his place to stay.

Richie couldn't bring himself to leave Derry, even with Myra around. He couldn't leave things so open ended on his part, even if he felt he knew the outcome before even saying anything. There was no going anywhere until Eddie knew... Then, at least, he would have a reason to run away. Like he had run away from It that summer after It hurt Eddie, even going so far as to get in a fight with Bill in his cowardice.

The issue was, Myra had made a habit of shooing him out of Eddie's room before he could find the strength in himself to speak his truth. It made spending his dark, lonely nights in his room at the Derry Town House about a hundred times lonelier. Somehow, he slept even less there.

Myra stayed in the room Eddie had booked for himself just across the hall from Richie's, spending most of her time inside with only the TV for company, although Richie swore she had an eye on him at all times. The constant feeling of hair raising on the back of his neck said as much. That didn't stop him going to visit Eddie every day, even if only for a short while before Myra would walk in, just a few steps behind him, and boot him out again. This left scarce little time to just him and Eddie, alone. He didn't know how she did it.

She had insisted Eddie stay in hospital longer than anyone deemed necessary, chewing out any doctors who suggested otherwise. The way things were headed, it was starting to look like Eddie was never going to get out. Richie could only imagine a bedridden Eddie, the wires and tubes stuck in his skin becoming akin to roots which grounded him to his bed, there where he would forever lay. Richie couldn't have that. Eddie hadn't survived for that.

It was a fine, sunny day, albeit wet after a night of rain, and like every day, Eddie was stuck inside. It had been almost a week since the nurses discharged him and had to deal with Myra's wrath over it - they'd succumbed to her, of course.

Richie entered Eddie's room, peering covertly over his shoulder and ducking in through the doorway like a spy who shouldn't have quit his day job. The hallway was empty, but he somehow never managed to see Myra coming. Before she could appear out of nowhere - as far as Richie was concerned, all signs pointed to her being a second It, and Eddie's offended scoffs couldn't convince him otherwise - Richie strode into the room, taking Eddie's hands in his and pulling him up from a nap.

"Wh- what's going on?" Eddie blearily asked around a yawn, automatically squeezing Richie's hands as he floated out of sleep.

"We're gettin' you out of here. A jailbreak, if you will," explained Richie, tugging Eddie's hands until he sat up in bed without even a wince at the movement affecting his injury. Richie tried not to notice his messy hair sticking up in a truly atrocious bedhead, nor the way his eyes were half-closed and content with sleep. "Come on, come on. We don't have all day."

"Why?" Eddie protested, waking up all the way as the colour drained from his face. He didn't have to say her name for Richie to know who was on his mind.

"I feel like I'm the only one here with my fill of vitamin D. As your friend, it's my responsibility to give you your fill." Catching the unintended double-entendre in his words, Richie's face burned, and he tripped over himself adding, "Cooped up in this room, you'll go nuts without a little sunlight."

"I have pills for that-"

"Eds, come on," Richie pleaded. Steeling his nerves, he gulped back his reluctance to admit, "I have something to show you. At the... at the kissing bridge. You remember-?"

"Of course I remember. What's there?" Confusion tended to give Eddie a pair of puppydog eyes - Richie had to work on breathing evenly.

"You'll see when we get there." And he'd have to explain why he'd carved his and Eddie's initials into the kissing bridge. Then, and only then, could he leave Derry, finally leave it all behind. For what? asked a cruel voice in the back of his mind. "You coming?"

"Yeah, yeah," Eddie groaned, his eyes shifting to the door as he pushed himself out of bed. He found his feet under him, wobbling to a stand on uneasy knees. Richie caught his arm, holding it across his shoulders to steady him. His fingers intertwined with Eddie's over his shoulder - another excuse.

"If my stitches break-" Eddie was warning, riling himself up into one of his lectures, but Richie patted the back of the hand he was holding across his shoulders, smiling.

"That's not gonna happen, Eddie Spaghetti-Strainer. We'll take it easy," he promised.

As they hobbled together out of the room, Eddie bitterly muttered under his breath, "Eddie Spaghetti-Strainer just doesn't have the same ring to it."

"I don't take criticism," Richie answered, leading into a rowdy bickerfest lasting all the way to his car.

Chapter Text

Richie had brought Eddie a change of clothes - an outfit he'd chosen from his own closet for the smaller man based entirely on mocking rights - and had found his prepared roast foiled by the sight of Eddie in a pale pink Hawaiian button-up, which he buttoned all the way up over a graphic tee, and shorts. Although Eddie hated the fashion choices made this day, Richie had to hide behind teasing laughter to keep himself from ogling. Richie had cleaned up for today, having shaved his scruff and washed his hair, and yet a bedridden Eddie still wore his clothes better. Motherfucker.

Stopping for ice cream was Richie's idea - he should've known the sugar would do nothing to calm his already palpitating heart. He just thought, if he could push off reaching the Kissing Bridge a little longer, maybe speaking candidly for once wouldn't turn out as terribly as he was certain it would. It was too late to turn back now that he'd piqued Eddie's interest. So, he took his time finishing his ice cream cone as the two sat together on the bench under the looming epitome of masculinity that was Paul Bunyan, talking more than eating.

Eddie didn't seem to mind, in no rush at all even though his eyes flicked back and forth over the landscape, as if expecting Myra to pop out of nowhere at any second. Why rush when your wife was some kind of cosmic horror all her own? Richie figured. She would find them when she found them.

"It's weird, huh?" Eddie said and licked a drop of melted vanilla ice cream off his lips. He had his legs draped across Richie, taking up the entirety of the bench with his back against the arm rail, while Richie had an arm draped over the back, one leg propped up on his other knee. Eddie had always gone out of his way to clamber on top of Richie as kids, so this shouldn't have been a surprise to Richie, but he'd had too many years to become vulnerable to this again. "Being back here and knowing, or at least thinking, It's gone?"

Richie shrugged, averting his eyes from Eddie's mouth. That was a dangerous place to look. "I haven't actually thought much about the clown." Only what It had done to Eddie.

Richie doubted Eddie had heard him at all; he could practically see the gears turning in Eddie's head, moving a mile a minute with no hope of slowing down. "But does this mean we won't forget this time when we leave? Will we start to remember all the little things we've already forgotten? What happens now?" he railed off.

"How am I supposed to know?" Richie's heart sank low in his chest. Because he hadn't forgotten everything, not like how Eddie had forgotten him.

Even when the details of his memories were whisked away to time, to separation, his heart had held true to the abiding love sheathed therein - a hole he could never fill but had always brought the feeling someone was out there, entirely his. Now he knew, it was he who was Eddie's. Even when he couldn't recall Eddie's face, he could clearly remember a little blue inhaler and the way his blood would rush to his head at the sharp tone of someone beyond recollection - derisive, quippy, panicky, down to the smallest quality. The way Richie would always have a comeback ready, something witty to say in return - in all honesty, Richie had figured himself a sham of a comedian because of it, his comedy having peaked in his youth, or worse yet, a time he could hardly remember. For all the laughs his shows had received, it was never enough without Eddie's in his ears, and least of all with others' words on his tongue. Nothing had belonged to him in California, the pretense of anything in his possession simply undeserved. And he'd been content to keep it that way - ungratified and floating on the empty promise of an untempered heart - for twenty-seven years without a past to look back on with any fondness. He'd managed to forget all the bad he'd endured, and with those memories had gone Eddie, too. Now, Myra had him. Even seated side-by-side on the bench, Eddie had never felt further from him.

"Do you really want to remember?" he asked, putting on an indifferent front to hide the sincerity in his words. All there was left to remember of their bygone childhood days were the close, intimate moments the clown would have wanted them to forget - to distance the Losers from each other, make them weaker, alone. It was in those small moments that Richie imagined he'd vilified his own mind for wishing against all plausibility that he could have something so painfully close yet out of reach. Boys weren't supposed to like boys, and friends weren't supposed to look at friends that way. Eddie would have been disgusted by him - Richie knew his mother had chalked up the AIDs epidemic to the gays and, in spot-on Ms. Kaspbrak fashion, intentionally scared the shit out of him with medical horror stories. So why remember? Who in their right mind would want to dig up those old pains, just to pine over a love that was never his to begin with?

Eddie scoffed, tilting his head to meet Richie's eyes with incredulity in his own. "Does early onset Alzheimer's sound like something I would rather have than a few bad memories? If we can't remember the things that made us who we are, then who are we, really?" Shrinking in his seat, his eyes spelled his thoughts clear as day to Richie, playing a film reel of the bad memories already chock full behind his eyes. "And, well, it can't all be bad, can it? I think we deserve something good to hold onto after all the shit It put us through." Noticing a trickle of ice cream about to wet his fingers, he licked along the waffle cone as he thought on his words and frowned. "If I forget again, Myra really will put me through intensive therapy."

"Is that just something you two talk about?" Richie asked, watching Eddie's tongue traverse the cone. Catching himself, he averted his eyes, taking a bite of his ice cream only to wince against the cold on his teeth.

"Well, she was worried about me. I mean, wouldn't you be? I could barely tell her anything about myself when we first met," Eddie explained, and with a glance between the bite taken out of Richie's ice cream and the expression he made, tacked on, "You heathen."

"Lucky man, you are," Richie goaded him, donning a voice. "You caught yourself a real angel. Did she make the Grand Canyon when she fell from heaven? Or the Mariana Trench? I've been to neither." Pushing Eddie's legs off of him, Richie set his cone between his knees to clasp both hands next to his face in the image of a lovestruck romantic. "You know, Satan was a fallen angel too. I think I get it now, Eds. You're into some weird shit."

Eddie knocked Richie's knees with his own, his brows furrowed, mouth a thin line, and chin jutting out in a full-faced frown. Richie couldn't help but smile, even as his ice cream cone crunched between his knees. Eddie reacted first, having apparently failed to realize the waffle cone was there when he knocked into Richie, and now jumping at the sound of the napkin crinkling and the cone crumbling. Richie burst into laughter at the sight of Eddie diving for the cone before it could hit the ground as he squawked, "Oh shit!"

Resurfacing with the catastrophe of melting ice cream flecked with the remnants of its splintered cone in one hand, and his own in the other, Eddie snapped as if debating with himself, "No, I'm not gonna apologize, this is what you get for insulting my wife." Richie turned a knowing look on him, and Eddie cracked. "But I'll buy you another. I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to-"

"Don't worry about it. It's probably best we get going." What an awful dilemma, to be caught between resenting every second leading up to the truth and having to speak it at all.

"What's so important about the Kissing Bridge, anyway?" Eddie mused before stuffing the last bite of his cone in his mouth and chucking the pitiful remainder of Richie's in the trash. "You planning to kiss me there?" He said it teasingly - so obviously a joke - but Richie's heart leapt to his throat, and he choked on his words for what felt like an eternity.

"N-no! What? What are you, some kinda...?" Fairy. He forced himself to trail off, snapping out of his reactionary response before he could dig a grave he'd soon be jumping into. "I just noticed something there. Like a memento. From when we were kids. Thought you'd want to see..."

"And that's important enough for you to pull me out of hospital?" Eddie scoffed, raising a skeptical eyebrow. Richie helped him stand up from the bench with an arm in offering in the aspect of a prince asking for a dance at an extravagant ball. The only thing extravagant about Richie was his flair for the unnecessary.

He rolled his eyes behind his comically thick lenses. "We both know you're just taking up space there. The real tell is it's more important than ice cream."

"He says, making sure I don't use my core muscles-"

"What core muscles?"

"-so I don't reopen the life-threatening stab wound-" Eddie cut himself off with a sharp intake of breath between gritted teeth. Richie caught Eddie's hip under his hand - thumb catching in the belt loop of his shorts - to steady him before he could fall back to the bench seat and do any more damage. A flash of memory struck, painting an image of utmost agony he’d witnessed once before over Eddie’s small wince. For a moment, Richie was transported back to the bowels of the caves beneath the Well House, holding Eddie like he was his losing grip on his last lifeline.

"You okay? Eds?" Richie searched his eyes, his other hand flying up to cup the side of Eddie's face, get him to meet Richie's gaze, but he stopped himself a hair's breadth from touch. Instead, he placed the hand on Eddie's collarbone, clasping him the way Richie's father used to clap a hand on Richie's shoulder - stern, firm and distancing.

"You know, there are some things I still remember, like how I told you I don't like when you call me Eds," he huffed, clearing the pain from his expression and meeting Richie with a forced smirk. "I still stand by that."

"Hmm, doesn't ring a bell," Richie hummed as if deep in thought, letting the joke wash away the anxious buzz that had so swiftly bore down upon his mind, and, sending him a wry smile to cover the momentary panic still panging high in his chest, patted Eddie's shoulder. Only then did he realize he still had his other hand on Eddie's hip, tangled with his belt loop. Blood rushed to his head as he pulled away, making an effort to move casually so he didn't look like he'd been stung by fire, the way he felt. And truly, the lingering buzz of warmth in his palm could have sprung a pyre he'd be happy to die on. But it was shit like that what got Adrian Mellon thrown off a bridge.

Eddie started walking back to the car before Richie could register they really were on their way to the Kissing Bridge this time. If he could linger in this moment, the calm before the storm, just a little longer... But time kept up its endless trudge, dragging him along with it. He'd have to face Eddie's disgust with him sooner or later, and it was looking to be sooner rather than later. He could imagine it already, the look of a friend betrayed by hidden sentiment, the change, a minor shift but lasting, that would forever drive a wedge between them. He got Eddie back, just to lose him to the truth he’d been hiding from all his life.

"Fuck..." Richie breathed, the first winds of the coming storm, and traipsed along after Eddie, rubbing his ever-tired eyes.

Richie had pulled up to the Kissing Bridge some minutes ago but sat still in his parked car, allowing Eddie to buy him some time with his worried chatter about the itchiness around his wounds - ascribing such minor discomfort to something drastic and terrible. An infection or perhaps late symptoms of an allergy to the pain meds he'd been prescribed - Richie knew better than to believe Eddie's hypochondriac's intuition, but that didn't stop him humouring Eddie's fears with a caricature of Mr. Keene’s voice from their old haunt, the local pharmacy. The Losers all agreed, it was a weird place for kids to hangout, but Eddie had a way of detouring them through there before anyone realized, only to then decry his need for this or that medication. Using Mr. Keene’s voice only succeeded to make Eddie scoff and roll his eyes, but just like that, he dropped the thread of misplaced anxiety – this was Richie's talent, not the Voices, not the jokes; getting Eddie to forget his own mortality, even if it was just for a moment, was one of seldom few things he could pride himself on. Too bad it made for an awful party trick.

His knack for mockery had acted the antithesis to Ms. Kaspbrak’s constant, coaxing, “He’s delicate… My son is very delicate,” through their youth, his end goal seeming exclusively to be provoking Eddie into risky situations – and subsequently helping him out of them when the risks turned out to be real. Just two days ago, he’d overheard Myra’s implacable, “He’s delicate… My husband is very delicate,” as she spoke with the nurses. Her saccharine sweet tones still played in the background of his mind, gooing up his insides with a slick, tar-like substance, until he felt gross, gummy and uninhabitable. He couldn’t figure what the hell Eddie saw in this woman besides his own mother – and that was an entire airlines’ worth of baggage he’d rather not unpack.

Above all else, Richie simply hoped Eddie didn’t believe it – didn’t feel that he deserved or needed to hear this bullshit every time he faced even the slightest hazard. Because anyone who knew Eddie Kaspbrak knew he was anything but delicate. Small? Sure. Flighty? Like a bird. Needy? As hell. But delicate? Fuck off. The number of pills he took on a regular basis could’ve downed an elephant, for starters. And the fact he’d come back to Derry to keep his promise, that alone would’ve killed a lesser man. Maybe it did, Richie mused darkly to himself, faded memories of Stan flashing behind his eyes – from what few he still had banging around in his head.

If not for Ms. Kaspbrak spoon-feeding him these lies – and in a time when he was naïve enough to eat them up without question, no less - Eddie would never have come to rely on such controlling neuroses to function in daily life. Through all the alligator tears and overbearing manipulation, Ms. Kaspbrak had created a foolproof system to get Eddie ducking his head, quieting his voice, and reaffirming to his mother that he loved her. Myra only needed to open her mouth, already the mother Eddie had lost. Richie supposed he wanted to love her just as much for her concern, so he did. He loved her, and he let her control him with pills and prattle. He regressed to the scared, little kid he used to be, and Myra stepped on the throat of whatever independence he might’ve claimed for himself in the time between mothers. She put him back into his old ways, and whether by the mind-muffling effect of leaving Derry or simply years of repression, he’d forgotten that he had stood up to his mother, even ran away from her multiple times to take the secret space on Richie’s bedroom rug until guilt and pity drew him as if on a string back into her constrictive arms.

Chasing these thoughts, a snide voice in the back of Richie’s head - disturbingly similar to a young Henry Bowers - teased, And you think you’re any better for him, you fag? He’ll hate you just for looking at him!

“Richie?” Eddie’s voice snapped him out of the rattrap of his mind, and Richie found himself in the driver’s seat with a white-knuckled grip on the wheel, his eyes staring unfocused in the exact direction of the initials he’d carved into the rail. At the same time, Eddie was busy sifting through a fanny pack for his pain meds – where the hell did he find a fanny pack?

Shaking himself out of his stupor, Richie reminded himself why he was here, and it wasn’t to psychoanalyze his friend. He came here to psychologically ruin himself, thank you very much. So he got out of the car, hands shaking, and began toward his undoing. Eddie scrambled out after him, spilling a couple bottles of pills to the tarmac.

“Agh, Richie!” Eddie squawked, gathering up his meds in his arms. “Did you hear me?”

“I think you would’ve been taken off the pills if they were giving you a reaction,” he absent-mindedly answered, too busy panicking internally to spout off any jokes.

“Well, statistically, it’s the person taking the bad meds who notices first, but that’s not what we were talking about.”

“It’s not?” Richie scoffed, stuffing his hands in his pockets and slowing his antsy pace so Eddie could catch up to him. Just ten paces away…

Eddie didn’t even realize what he was about to show him, what he was inching ever closer to admitting, the friendship that was mere seconds from ending… Well shit, he’d have to drive him back after, too. How had this little inevitability managed to slip his mind? He could imagine the thickness of the air in the car already, stifling hot and pushing down his throat to clench his heart in a vise-like grip, enough to break it in half. Fuck.

Richie’s feet stumbled under him, seeming almost to turn around with a mind of their own, but he got a grip on himself. He was doing this. He had to, and then he’d drive Eddie back into Myra’s crushing arms, and he’d leave this godforsaken town, forever this time. He’d never see Eddie again, and if he was lucky, he’d forget him - and forget himself too, a squatter in the wastes of Richie Tozier without Eddie.

He felt Eddie’s hand on his shoulder before he saw Eddie move in front of him, stopping him dead in his tracks to yank him back from yet another mental digression. Richie’s gaze snapped down to Eddie’s imploring eyes, and he found that Eddie’s mouth was still moving. All at once, the world snapped back into place around him, led by Eddie’s voice in his ears, “You’re out of it, man. This is what I was saying, they’re all worried about you. I am, too.”

“What? Who are?” Richie heard himself ask. His eyes drifted past Eddie, again catching on the initials he could almost make out against the faded white of the wood rails. Almost there.

“The Losers. Who else? We’ve all noticed. You look like something the clown would think up. You haven’t been sleeping, you’re scatterbrained, and you’re… well, you’re not yourself. I thought I got the worst of it, but you… What’s going on with you?” Eddie peered into Richie’s eyes, imploring him to open up, but Richie could only wonder, How much had the others already guessed? After the mental break he’d more than exhibited when he first thought Eddie dead, he doubted the notion was far from their minds. None of them wept like he had, they hadn’t screamed and clawed at the body, vehement to wrench him back from the afterlife even if it meant chasing him there, himself. And even if his hysteria could be chalked up to the grief of losing a best friend, he didn’t put it past Bev to put two and two together. She’d always been perceptive to the point of uncanny intuition when it came to her boys. Maybe that was why he’d been avoiding them, so conveniently asleep every time they came to visit Eddie.

“I…” How could he even begin to explain himself to the very substance of his misery?

They were so close, his body buzzed with an electric charge from mere proximity. An image came to mind, of one of those plasma globes they always had in little joke shops, in which electricity danced in vivid, branching bolts. The rail where their initials were carved was like the lightning kept within, and Eddie, the glass sphere keeping the lightning from escape. But the thing that really made him think of plasma globes was the tingling sensation of Eddie’s hands on Richie’s shoulders, lighting him up. This funny inversion of the way Richie remembered his hand glowing when he touched the glass seemed just the same to him as when lightning kissed his fingertips and played across his palm.

Richie’s heart hammered in his chest, a different kind of exhilaration from when he’d held the plasma globe as a kid. “I just need to show you this one thing. Then I’ll explain everything.” Everything…

Without another word, he stepped out of Eddie’s grasp and continued the final few steps to the Kissing Bridge. It was an odd place to go to kiss, that was for sure. Right on the edge of the Barrens, the smell was rank – overpowering nature infused with the stink of the sewage plant gurgling far below where too many memories had thankfully been wiped from his mind, and the wet smell of dirt caked under rain-washed gravel. The only real reason people came by here was because no one else would, and the sheltered bridge looked more romantic than the place smelled. No wonder Henry Bowers had chosen this almost-literal shithole to mark Ben up.

Eddie followed, but he was timid about it, uncertainty in the way he tiptoed after Richie, clutching his pill bottles to the lid of his fanny pack. Richie had to stare intently down at his feet, refusing himself to glance back at him, to look forward at the railing, to do anything but cross the last distance to the end. In any other circumstance, he would’ve filled the space with inane chatter and goofy jokes, but it was Eddie who filled the silence, and he did so in the most Eddie way possible. He started listing off mental disorders rooted in trauma. It was a moment before Richie realized he wasn’t self-diagnosing.

“… and Myra was telling me about this guy who got a pipe blown through his skull at work, and he survived, but his frontal lobe was all shredded so he couldn’t empathize with anyone anymore-”

“If someone gets brained by a pipe and survives, who cares if they’re a dick after? I’m an asshole when I stub my little toe,” Richie considered, fingers edging along the top of the wooden rail so his nails dug in, scratching absent-mindedly until woodchips pulled up and fluttered down into the Barrens below. Just inches under his nervous picking was the stupid equation he’d carved all those years ago.

R + E

“You’re an asshole whether you stub your toe or not, Trashmouth,” Eddie teased, entirely unaware of the turmoil bubbling up under Richie’s surface – but only until Richie didn’t grin at the playful jab. Eddie’s smile fell and Richie’s head filled with static, anticipating the words he’d soon speak – oh, how he wanted to put on a different Voice for what was coming next, but it had to be his.

“Eds?” he croaked, a sudden wave of vertigo sweeping over him, nearly enough to knock him right over the railing. He tapped the wood just next to the carved letters, drawing Eddie’s gaze, and had to grab hold of the railing - feeling the prick of a splinter sliding under his skin - to keep himself steady.

“What about it? Did you…?” Eddie mused, and understanding dawned in his eyes. He reached out a hand as if to run his fingers over the letters, but he pulled back before he could make contact. If Richie was in his right mind, he would have realized Eddie refrained because the rusty old nails holding this railing together were a deathtrap with tetanus written all over them, and splinters – think of the splinters! – but Richie was indubitably not in his right mind.

What came next, he forced out of him like he had more than once forced himself to vomit after ten too many drinks, lest he be plagued by the spins all night long. “I’m… I’m sorry, Eds. I never meant to fall in love with you-” The words grew thick in his throat, sticking to the sludge he’d felt building up inside himself all day – for a moment, he thought he really might puke - until he choked on them, and the words cut off.

For once, Richie Tozier was speechless – defenseless - unable to get a word out not because of shock or fright, but simply because there were none in his arsenal, leaving him to linger there with his confession hanging for ages and eons between them. He’d never endured a longer silence, each passing second burning hotter under his clothes; hands clammy on the wood where he instinctively moved to cover their initials. How he wished his palms, slick with sweat, could wipe away this evidence like washing a chalkboard.

Eddie made a face like he was sure he’d misheard Richie, but by the pallor of the other man’s face – an ill, almost green, complexion with blotches of red at the tops of his cheeks - he understood he’d heard him correctly. And he was quiet. Dreadfully, painfully quiet.

Richie’s mind was decidedly not; a cacophony of slurs and reproach, all self-directed and each merely a single drop of poison in an endless sea churning the same hateful ideas. Bolt, deny, or toss himself headlong over the railing – these were his only options. He couldn’t bear to watch everything they had together rot behind the love of his life’s eyes; to see Eddie, with his confusion and the slow-emerging repugnance he was certain would come after, begin to hate him. But Richie couldn’t budge, nailed to spot with his legs frozen under him and a deathly chill fingering up his spine. He was unable to communicate within his own body the grating compulsion to get in the car and leave before Eddie could say a single word.

And so, with a soft regard and the barest step closer, Eddie spoke first. “I kn-”

Against all odds, Myra’s shrill voice rang out from down the road, joined by the crunch of gravel under the rolling wheels of a slow-moving Cadillac, “Eddie-bear! There you are!” Eddie and Richie’s heads snapped in her direction, alarmed at the shrill squeal of her voice. She had her thumb-shaped head stuck out the driver’s side window of Eddie’s car, tears streaming down from red, puffy eyes to wet, mottled cheeks. Make-up gathered and wedged in the creases under her eyes like a raccoon, amplifying the effect. “What are you doing out here, you’ll catch your death!” Her concern for Eddie didn’t stop her shooting a sharp glare at Richie, a hellish regard with the state of her face.

Eddie pressed his back against the wood rail just next to Richie, covering the carved initials with his body and thereby making it impossible for her to glimpse the real reason they were out so far. The two men were shoulder to shoulder, the tangy scent of medicine which always clung to Eddie enveloping Richie - caught in the orbit of his heady atmosphere - but all this did was drop his stomach below his knees, for Richie assumed part of hiding the carving was to avoid humiliation. Because it was humiliating; why else would Richie’s heart be racing a mile a minute, his breath hitched so high he could’ve done with a huff of the placebo aspirator.

“How did you know I was here?” Eddie blurted, his voice seeming muffled in Richie’s ears past his internal deconstruction. Still, he could hear in Eddie’s voice, he was too shocked to be angry – Richie doubted Eddie could register his own anger when it came to Myra, unless under the worst of circumstances, like it had been with Ms. Kaspbrak. He had only ever stood up to her when the other Losers most needed him to, like when It had Beverly.

“I didn’t! You weren’t in your room, you didn’t leave a note, not even the nurses – the nurses, Eddie-bear! - had any idea where you went! I’ve been worried sick about you! Oh, I’ll have the doctors give you a look-see when we get back to the Derry Home Hospital, okay? Come on, sweetie, in the car.”

“No, Myra-” Eddie was sighing, almost snappish with waves of surprise to see her here still crashing over him, but she didn’t give him the chance to object. She parked Eddie’s car just behind Richie’s – making it impossible for him to slink away as the chaos of his mind so called for – and spilled out of the driver’s side in ripples and folds of her burlap sack of a dress, slamming the door behind herself with enough force, Richie was surprised she didn’t shatter the window. She was already a blubbering, teary-eyed mess as she made a beeline toward Eddie, arms out and face crumpled.

“I was so wor-hur-ried!” she wailed, swathing Eddie in her mass so tightly, she could have squeezed the life out of him. He let her test the durability of his skeleton, even leaning into the embrace. Richie’s stomach turned, his eyes slipped to the Barrens below the railing, and his itch to escape offered the handy reminder that Ben had survived throwing himself over.

The thing was, Richie would rather be anywhere but here, stuck between the man to whom he’d just confessed his lifelong love - so fresh he could still taste the words on his tongue - and that man’s wife who’d interrupted before anything good or bad could come of it. Was he grateful that Eddie hadn’t been given the chance to respond? Was it better this way? Had it been answer enough that he’d leapt in front of the proof of Richie’s sentiment to conceal it, as Richie had concealed it within himself all these years? And yet, the only question running amok to all the corners of his mind was, even if it had only been by dumb luck that Ben survived the fall, could it be reproduced?

“Will you come back with me?” Myra sniffled, half-sobbing as she pulled back just enough to ensnare Eddie in her tears. Richie watched him crumble, shoulders drooping and the breath of a sigh escaping the pouty, almost-frown of his mouth.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, turning his gaze down to his feet – even though they were blocked from view with Myra still pressed firmly to his chest. “Can I just have a moment?” He struggled to free a hand and gesture between himself and Richie. She turned a scowl on Richie, again seeming as if she’d chosen to forget he was there. He didn’t mind so much, having welded himself into the background, hoping to disappear entirely.

“But he’s had you all day, and out in this weather, no less. You know what it does to your asthma! And just look at you,” Myra whined, grabbing his other wrist in her pudgy hands, a strangle-hold showing off his grip on the pill bottles he’d dropped, now caked in dirt and grime. “You just don’t take care of yourself the way only I can. For both our sakes, it’s better if you just come with me. Don’t you think?” Her honeyed voice had returned, coaxing him back into his shell for her to carry along without issue.

Eddie sent Richie a wince in apology, whatever walls he might’ve thrown up against Myra’s wheedling already sinking on soft foundations, undermined for the better half of an entire lifetime.

“Righty-o and I guess this is goodbye?” Richie said in a caricature of a trans-Atlantic Voice, easier to hide behind than his own – he hadn’t meant to open his mouth in the first place, the words that spilled out ten steps ahead of his staggered mind, and for it, sounded terribly unsure of himself. “I’ll be hitting the road again today.” I will? a frantic voice gasped in his head, as if audience to the soap opera that had become of his life.

Eddie froze up in his wife’s enduring embrace. “You’re leaving Derry?” Richie had never heard his voice so dispirited, as if a glacial wind had swept through him, leaving only night and ice in its wake. “When did you-?”

“Well it was certainly a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Tozier,” Myra cut in, her flippant tone directly contradicting her words. Releasing Eddie from the hug that had nearly turned her lover’s face a deep plum, she linked one arm around his waist, threw out her other hand to clasp and shake Richie’s in farewell, and began away to the Cadillac with Eddie in tow. He went along with no trouble, a leaf adrift on the surface of a stream, but his eyes never once left Richie’s. “Oh! My apologies, it would seem we’re blocking you, huh? Better let you on your way.”

“Rich-” Eddie stumbled over his name, only to cut himself off when his wife’s arm tugged more insistently. He didn’t fight her, so easily led away that for a moment, Richie didn’t see Eddie as he was now, but rather, as a little boy obediently holding his mother’s hand as they crossed a street, feeling powerless to separate or go any other way but hers for fear of being struck by oncoming traffic.

Richie thought for sure this would be the last he saw of the other man until Eddie made a real effort to reach back – Richie’s heart leapt to his throat at the thought Eddie meant to catch hold of him – only to rap his knuckles on the wood plank just below the one where Richie had carved their initials. When his hand fell away, leaving Richie’s gaze to linger there where he’d tapped a short beat, he noticed for the first time a poorly drawn heart and an R carved in its center. There, faded with age and directly below Richie’s own carving, was what looked like a message scrawled by a hand hampered by a cast.

Myra had him further along now, nearly into the car, but Eddie looked back at Richie over his shoulder, calling back, “Well, come visit me one last time before you go, won’t you? Derry’s not much without you,” and went away with his wife to their car. Myra helped him into the passenger seat, coddling him terribly and even buckling his seatbelt for him while Eddie only half-heartedly complained, but Richie was entranced – his mind racing - with the mark on the banister he’d never noticed before.

R… Like for Richie? asked a stupid voice in his head, slow and stunned as he traced his fingers over the jutting edges of the heart. “What the fuck?” he heard himself spout, but the words were muffled under smaller sounds made loud with the presentness of the moment, pushing in on him from all sides. Whether it was the growl of a revving engine, the grating of tires over gravel only to brush softly onto tarmac, or some other, distant sound filling his head from another time – softer, warmer, closer. His pulse pounded under his thumb as he brushed the contours of the heart, beating so strongly, the love-note seemed to have a heartbeat of its own.

The rational part of him feared it was mere wishful thinking to suppose - against reason and everything he’d ever judged - that a young Eddie might have carved this. And to think he’d done so that same summer Richie made his mark on the Kissing Bridge – based on an assumption, no less, that the message was only so poorly drawn because of a cast. It had to be – couldn’t be anything but – self-deception. Or so disclaimed the cynical voice in the back of his mind, shouting over that dopey voice of hope pleading, why would Eddie have pointed this out otherwise? What else could be so special about it, in the context of what I confided in him?

And how ironic it would be if it was true. That Richie had spent his childhood pining over what had seemed a hopelessly unrequited love, and had returned to Derry only to find his love bolstered – unbearably so – for someone who had all along returned the sentiment...

Searching back in his mind for proof of times past, he unearthed a stockpile of memories, too casual and light-hearted to have stuck out to him before, but most painstakingly belittled by his negligent mind – shielding himself from the slow torture of hope. It had seemed impossible, and for it, became an unquestioned impossibility in his mind.

He slipped into these precious memories - few and far between like gems on the outskirts of a collapsed mine - easier than slipping into a dream; easier, even, than slipping into fantasy.

The first time he had noticed without realizing that Eddie was, or could have been, flirting with him was on the hammock in the fort Ben had built for the Losers, still that same summer. Of course, back then Richie never would have attached that word – flirting - to Eddie’s cuddling, having never entertained the thought of such things as romance between friends, and certainly not between two boys. Richie had assumed, as always, that Eddie was just a cuddly little mama’s boy who needed to sit on someone’s lap to be comfortable. He’d been annoyed, sure, and had fixed his eyes to the comic book he couldn’t hope to read with Eddie’s legs tangled with his own, Eddie’s warmth against his inner thigh, Eddie’s feet in his face – it was all he could do to keep from going up in flames right then and there. Eddie was all over him – it wasn’t fair – and Richie had only realized his own feelings, oblivious to the fact Eddie had crawled up on top of him that day. Eddie was always on top of him, finding any excuse to lean into him, sit on him, bug the shit out of him by whatever means. It was what he did, just, not with anyone else.

He doubted Eddie had realized what he was doing, either. It had come so naturally to them, to be tucked under each others’ arms, laid out across each others’ laps, hands always inches from touch if not already touching. Richie had always reached out to Eddie first, instinctively drawing the smaller boy behind himself, to take the brunt of whatever the clown had cooked up for himself before ever letting Eddie face the worst. Hell, even when the clown had prowled in closer to a downed Eddie – arm freshly broken and paralyzed with fright between Richie and Bill - with all It’s taunting cackles and gnashing rows of fangs and fingers extending into razor-sharp wolf-man claws shredding through his Mickey Mouse gloves, Richie’s first instinct amid raging terror was to knot his fists in Eddie’s shirt, pressing his knuckles to his shoulders, and scream at him, “Eddie, look at me! Look at me!” He remembered rationalizing this as the reason why, even when Richie wasn’t looking, his grasping hands never failed to find Eddie. Always right there, ready for Richie to grab hold of him and defend him, because Richie would always defend him. Thinking back to it now, Eddie had always just as quickly grabbed hold of Richie, leaping in close, trusting in him to hold him right back. He didn’t cling to Stan, not to Mike, not to Ben, not even Bill. Only Richie, and it had taken him twenty-seven years to realize it.

With a cynical sort of chagrin, the thought struck him that they had both been waiting for the other to act without ever understanding the innocent anticipation within themselves. As if summoned by this notion, one particular memory which hadn’t resurfaced in all the years since it occurred struck him with all the force of a speeding truck, sending him reeling on his heels. He hunkered down in the damp gravel and weeds lining the base of the wooden railing, one hand still clinging to the lower plank where he felt his pulse echoed in the roughly carved heart. The damp chill of the road’s shoulder seeped up through the seat of his pants but be it by exhaustion’s lazy will or the thrill of the memory, he rested there, undisturbed by anything the outside world could throw at him while his inner world expanded.

They had been fifteen years old  at the time and Richie had taken more than enough beatings for the mere suspicion – and perhaps not even that – of his interest in other boys. He was lucky, in a weird way, that all the boys in Derry seemed to get beat up for being gay, so much you’d think just one of them might’ve returned Richie’s interest, but nope. He was alone in his attractions, and so made enough womanizing jokes to cover his ass, at least among his friends. They’d been so on the nose, crude and surprisingly detailed for someone as inexperienced as he, that he was astounded no one ever called him out or caught on. Besides the kids with scabs on their knuckles and mean looks in their eyes, but he doubted they really knew.

Eddie had stayed the night at Richie’s house after Richie barely escaped a particularly cruel beating from one of said kids, although at seventeen they were practically adults and were soon to be jailbirds if they kept it up. Richie refused to talk about it with Eddie, who had been sitting on the floor but had moved to prop himself up on the armrest of Richie’s seat as they riffed off each other. This was Richie’s favourite way to take his mind off the dull pain still throbbing around his mostly closed eye where the corner of his glasses had dug in, inversed under the force of a fist but succeeding to draw a long gash across his assailant’s knuckles. Eddie had been laughing so hard at something Richie said – certainly not one of his crude jokes parading the imaginary notches on his belt, which never failed to make Eddie scrunch up his nose in that adorable way he did and chide, “Gross!” even into his late teens - that he’d doubled over, falling off the armrest to pin one of Richie’s legs under his ass and even then, leaning into Richie’s side. The flexible little guy that he was, he’d almost managed to press his forehead to Richie’s other thigh. Richie couldn’t even remember what he’d said, only that he didn’t think it was that funny.

While Eddie was pressed into his side, Richie could only see the way his back moved as he laughed, taking deep breaths which would’ve otherwise kicked off one of his infamous asthma attacks under other circumstances. Richie’s hand had moved without any signals from his brain, splaying gently on Eddie’s back to feel the way his lungs expanded, contracted and shook with laughter, and to his surprise, Eddie had leaned into his touch, so that he practically lay across Richie’s lap. All at once, Richie was terribly, dreadfully aware of Eddie’s leg pinning down his own, Eddie’s hand on his other thigh, Eddie’s elbow wedged into the muscle just inward from his hip sending shockwaves of happy tingles up his spine, Eddie’s warm, humid breath spelling the alphabet of his laughter through his jeans, and heat had shot through him to the very tips of his ears. Eddie hardly allowed him the chance to acclimatize to this closeness, turning over to lie flat across Richie’s legs, with his own head and legs propped up on the armrests to either side – because whenever Richie tried to sit in a one-person seat, this motherfucker always saw it as a two-seater.

The look Eddie met him with, in that moment, as laughter quieted on his still-grinning lips and his eyelids closed halfway, as if in mockery of Richie’s inability to fully open his right eye, bloomed fire in the pit of Richie’s stomach and seared the freckles on his cheeks. And he’d proceeded to shove Eddie off him, sending him flying to the floor. What else was he to do, with Eddie gazing up at him like that? Eddie had laughed, dousing the flame he'd started in Richie, and the moment was over, soon forgotten in the fast pace of their banter. If only Richie had gotten the hint – if it was a hint. If only he had taken his chance, leaned in until Eddie’s eyes were wide and his breath was short, rabbity, until their breath mingled mere inches from each others’ faces, and Eddie would lick his lips, almost feverishly, attracting Richie’s eyes; if only he had closed the distance-

Like a bucket of ice water dumping on his head, Richie was dragged back to the present when a remnant of the clown mocked in bouncy tones fitting that high-low pep of his voice and nestled deep in the tunnel of Richie’s ear, But that’s not how it went! Oh no no no, you kept your dirty little secret, didn’t you, Richie?

“That motherfucker,” Richie whispered to himself on a hitched breath, finding himself again on the edge of the Kissing Bridge where he sat alone, old and tired on the ground with the cold wet of the earth soaking into the seat of his pants. “I wasn’t the only one…” with a dirty little secret.

The corners of his mouth picked up - like stage curtains drawn by a string - into a too-wide grin, beneath which bubbled laughter. It was the kind of laughter that caused small children to cry, a manic delight – a masochist’s delight – in the too-loud, too-high giggles and cackles bridged by wheezing, coughing, rasping breaths. The skin-prickling sound echoed back to him – mocked him - off the trees of the Barrens, uncanny against the almost palpable silence which sheathed it. The sound of loneliness. His lungs ached almost immediately, unaccustomed to laughter of any sort, least of all this which, when tears sprung to his eyes, felt more like weeping. That was at least more familiar territory, albeit no less gruelling on the heart with the echo of lamenting Eddie’s cold, dying body singing in the back of his mind. All this time, and he could have loved him. Properly. Truly. Fully. Now, these long years seemed but time wasted apart, and his opportunity, missed.

But he hadn’t left Derry just yet, and he wouldn’t. Not until he knew for sure, although it was torment just to think it… had Eddie loved me back?

Chapter Text

Happening simultaneously with Richie’s moment on the Kissing Bridge, Eddie found himself anchored in his own mind in the passenger seat of the Cadillac. Myra was off on a rant beside him, but he couldn’t for the life of him pay her any mind, finding her voice barely audible over the buzz of thoughts stampeding through his head.

Until Richie pointed out the letters carved in the wood, Eddie had completely forgotten he’d already discovered them long ago. Richie hadn’t shown it to him back in the summer of ‘89 – Eddie remembered thinking if Richie had been the one to carve it, he would never have wanted Eddie to see it – but he’d found it all the same and felt his heart soar high enough to dye his hair in the sun’s gold nectar at the idea. That was why he’d been compelled, upon finding R + E engraved on the Kissing Bridge – the Kissing Bridge! - to leave a piece of his heart there, too, with a scandalized, fizzy sensation sparkling low in his stomach. It had been difficult enough with his cast on, hampering his penmanship, but he kind of liked that he was doing this with “LOVER” plastered over his arm.

He couldn’t believe just how much he’d forgotten, a new wave of memories washing over him with the revival of this moment in his mind – the catalyst ushering in this storm of long-elapsed love. The thought surprised him. Love… Had he loved Richie?

Eddie’s breath caught high in his throat, hitching on something between a cough and a gasp. Myra’s ears were tuned into him - his every sputter, every wheeze – and her rant cut off mid-sentence, instead insisting something about his aspirator. He didn’t need to listen to her to know what she was saying. It was what his mother would have said, what the ghost of his mother still whispered in his ear every now and then.

“No, no. I don’t need it,” Eddie automatically said, waving his hands to spell his objection, but she shoved the little blue safety net into his hands anyway. Just to appease her, he sucked back a huff of the cold mist, feeling his insides settle with the habitual comfort.

He glanced at the rear-view mirror, hoping to find Richie’s car tailing them, but the roads were empty save the lonely Cadillac rolling back to Derry Home Hospital. A sinking feeling lowered him in his seat, squeezing a disappointed sigh up from his lungs which surprised even him.

“Sweetie? Do you have a fever? Let me feel your forehead,” Myra insisted, worry shaking her voice. Before he could answer, her clammy palm pressed his forehead. Her skin was ice-cold to the touch, but she was the one who gasped and cried out, “You’re burning up! Do you see? What did I say? You must have come down with something, hobbling around outside in this state. Oh, we’ll have to make sure your wounds weren’t contaminated-”

“Myra, honey,” Eddie soothed her, a mechanical response, “I’m sure I’m fine.”

“But you don’t know that!” she shrilly retorted. “This is why you shouldn’t have left. It’s that Richie Tozier.” Her lips curled as she spoke his name, a sneer scrunching her face. “He doesn’t care if you get hurt. I’m sure he’d just love to see how far he can push you. Just look at you! You’ve been hurting since you left me, since you came here, and he’s only stuck around to make it worse. To laugh at you.”

“He wouldn’t,” Eddie snapped, deathly calm. Myra glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, a momentary hush falling still as a first snowfall in the car. “Richie’s not like that. None of them are.”

“Then why did they let you get hurt?” she asked, heaping innocent confusion into her tone, but he recognized a leading question when he heard one. Before he could speak, she was rushing to continue, “I don’t think Derry’s been very good to you, sweetie. You’ll only end up hurting yourself again if you go crawling back to those friends. And it’s just what they want! To see how much you’ll put yourself through pretending that you’re part of their little group-”

“That’s enough-”

"You need to hear the truth, Eddie-bear! I’m the only one who’ll tell it to you straight! Can’t you see? I’m the only one who understands what you need, not them.” A slight hysteria entered her tone again, wobbly and on the verge of tears. “You don’t know what’s good for you, and they’ll use that! They’ll take you away from me!”

Frowning down at his legs, he shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re talking about-”

“Why are you being so defensive?” she squeaked in a high pitch, and for a moment, he actually felt bad. Until she started up again. “They want to single you out and leave you when you’ve got nothing left at all. They think you’re a joke. That you’re pathetic. They just want to see how far you’ll fall-”

“That’s enough!” he burst, seeing red. He hadn’t noticed his fists knot in the hems of his – Richie’s - shorts, white-knuckled and pressing what would become bruises into his thighs. “I don’t ever want to hear you talk about them like that again! I wouldn’t be here if not for them, every single one of them!”

She paused, breathing rapidly as she pulled up to a red light. Turning her face to meet Eddie head-on, she tearfully said, “It’s an evil world out there for people like you. The prettiest flowers are picked from the flower patch on a whim, not strong trees in big forests, and it’s these flowers who die alone in a vase. But I put up a fence around my flower patch. I’m yours. I’m the only one, Eddie-bear, the only one who bothers with you. Can’t you see that?”

What are you looking for? a distant, grating voice at once raspy with dry lungs and choking on mucus ricocheted in his head from a very long time ago.

“Myra…” I don’t love you.

The words on the tip of his tongue scared him, so much that he shrank deeper in his seat. In comparison with the recently returned memories of love now alive in his heart, the match of an idea had struck within him that he never loved her the way she thought. It wasn’t that he never loved her at all, just not the way a husband should have loved his wife – whether it was out of habit or decency, he couldn’t tell. The feeling had always been confused by the foundation buried in his head of dependence on his mother, and Myra had become her stand-in – always more like a mother to him than a lover. Everything he had ever felt for her now paled in comparison to what he recalled from his youth with Richie.

Eddie fell quiet, unable to spin these thoughts into words. The light turned green, and Myra pressed the gas, riding in silence for a couple blocks before she picked up the loose thread of her concerns regarding a head cold. Like this, all talk of Eddie’s friends passed from the one-sided conversation.

Instead, his memories swallowed him up again, taking him back to a time in the summer of ’89, not long after they fought It but before he first noticed the mark at the Kissing Bridge. He had spent the day with the Losers, late into the evening until it had begun to drizzle, verging on a rainstorm, and returned home just after the 7 o’clock curfew.

Knowing there was no longer any reason for the curfew, he had slipped up a couple times near the end of that summer. It had been a few weeks since the last kid went missing, and with so many bodies – or more accurately, body parts - found at the sewers’ gaping mouth in the Barrens, most parents had begun writing off the carnage as an ordeal of the past. Not Eddie’s mother. She was livid when he arrived home just a few minutes after 7, her hand already gripped around the phone just a moment from dialing the police.

“Eddie!” she had screeched, barreling down the hall to check him over, but she stopped herself on the verge of a full-fledged inspection. She took his chin between thumb and forefinger, slanting his face up to hers to get a better look at the expression settled there – he couldn’t stop himself beaming, even with the first spray of rain making his clothes cling to his skin. He’d been reliving his day as he wandered home through the light drizzle but had come in chuckling over his fondest memory of the lot. “Were you with a girl?” A hard tone was in her voice, meaning she had a lecture filling her lungs.

“Well, no, Bev’s gone to stay with her aunt-”

“And good riddance. What did I tell you about that filthy girl? Who was it, then, hmm?” she mused and pulled out a wet wipe from a kit stashed in the end table near the door, with which she immediately began rubbing at Eddie’s mouth. She wiped the smile right off his face in this meticulous business until his skin was red and sore, all the while muttering something about a kissing disease. Eddie’s cheeks flushed hot, searing his face so bad, he thought for a moment the dampness on his skin might evaporate off him.

“It’s not like that. She’s just a friend-” Eddie tried to explain around the insistent fabric dragging his lips this way and that.

“Who had you looking so giddy, then?” she persisted, almost triumphant sounding, as if she’d caught him in a lie.

“No one! Richie was being a moron-”

Her hand froze, the cloth draping lazily from her tight, flexed fist. “That Tozier boy?” she breathed, a menacing hiss of hot air. Seeming to come to some conclusion, she started up again, scrubbing harder, much to Eddie’s complaints, but he knew better than to try to escape her firm grip. “I thought I told you to stay away from him?” Though shaky with poorly concealed anger, her voice was soft.

“He’s my friend!”

“Your friend?” she entreated with a simpering, high-pitched inflection, and threw out the rag. Clasping her hands over her belly and leaning in to meet Eddie’s eyes, she asked in just as strange a voice, “Is he… your special friend?” She wore an odd expression, akin to a hidden fear screaming at him from her eyes.

His mind blanked. Thinking she meant best friend, he shrugged his shoulders and nodded. He should’ve grasped her meaning – Richie made enough jokes about special friends - but he hadn’t expected her to bear down on him like this, caught entirely off-guard. At the conceding dip of his chin, she looked like she could have swooned, staggering back a step.

“That’s enough of him. You won’t be seeing him again. Do you hear me?”

“You can’t stop me,” Eddie snapped back before he could stop himself. His words were punctuated by the kind of silence that stuffed a person’s ears, plugging them up until there was only a shrill ringing to fill the emptiness. Eddie raked in a wheezing breath, grasping for his aspirator tucked away in his fanny pack.

“What did you just say to me?” his mother rumbled as Eddie pulled the trigger of his aspirator, sucking down the mist. “You will not see that boy again, Eddie-bear. This isn’t a request.”

He bit his lower lip, fending off another outburst, but he could feel his face getting hotter by the second, his fists balling at his sides. The cast on his arm and aspirator in his palm were just things to squeeze, his grip testing the durability of the plastic.

Brushing a damp tangle of hair off his forehead, she asked, “How do you feel around him, hm? When you’re with him?”

He glanced up at her in confusion. “I don’t know. Why does that matter?”

“Those feelings, they’re a sickness, Eddie. Dirty boys like him will try to spread it to you…” She scowled, shaking her head, and shuddered – actually shuddered. “They’ll make your soul dirty, too, and no number of antiseptic washes will be able to clean it. There’s nothing I can do to protect you when that happens.” She sounded so sad, so infinitely powerless against whatever the hell she was talking about, that the frown dropped from his face and the tight balls of his fists loosened.

Eddie didn’t get what the problem was – he hadn’t expected his mother to take up the same homophobic stance against him that many bullies chose off the wheel of excuses to punch his teeth in. The only solid notion in his mind was that she didn’t like Richie, but that wasn’t surprising. The aptly nicknamed Trashmouth was always saying inappropriate things within earshot, but Eddie didn’t think that was enough to condemn him. There was no way Eddie could just drop him, either – they had been through far too much together. Even if it made his soul dirty, or whatever she was trying to scare him with this time. The pills had been gazebos – placebos, he corrected himself – so why should he believe this bullshit?

A self-satisfied smile had pulled up the corners of her toad-like mouth in Eddie’s silence, assuming she’d broken him like a rancher breaks a horse, and she waddled over to her armchair. The billows of her floral pillow-case dress rippled out behind her, seeming almost smug to Eddie. Planting herself down for the evening, she patted her thigh, calling, “Come sit with me, Eddie-bear, and I’ll warm you up from the cold. I can’t believe you were out in the rain-”

“Mom…” he gulped, standing rigid in the front hall where he hadn’t yet budged from the door. “I’m not gonna stop hanging out with him. I… I just thought you should know.” Even seated in her chair across the TV room, still as a statue with a stare just as stony, her simmering presence dwarfed him in the space after his words – Eddie was already so small, making him feel it wasn’t difficult.

“I told you, sweetie. This is non-negotiable,” she said, measured and precise. A viper striking its prey. Blood swam in Eddie’s ears, a buzzing sensation taking root in his head until his whole body felt like TV static.

“You’re right, it is non-negotiable.” His throat felt like it was closing up, instinct moving his hand to his face so he could take another huff of his inhaler. When he spoke again, his words came out like knives, but his voice continued to shake as he threw his numbed hands around wildly. “I can’t just give him up! He’s an obnoxious idiot, and a loud one at that, but Richie and the others are the only good ones out there, no matter what you say! Everyone else jumps on the chance to beat the snot out of me! Or would you rather I sit at home all day with you and do nothing for the rest of my life? My- my muscles will atrophy!” As he raved, a very clear image came to mind of what his life was meant to be, which necessarily included Richie in the picture.

Before his mother could respond, he ran up the stairs and closed himself in his room, careful not to slam the door. There, he took another gulp of his aspirator, hands shaking almost too much to get it to his mouth. He knew he didn’t need it, but the panic constricting his chest felt a lot like what he’d come to associate with an asthma attack.

He paced his room, eyes flicking to the window by his bed – his mother always kept it closed and locked, afraid of pollen and a brisk breeze. Eddie didn’t even have any allergies, but she’d hammered in the idea that exposure was what started them. It’s a miracle she ever lets me out of the house, he figured, and with a groan, fell back on his bed – arms splayed out to either side of him, feet dangling off the edge.

Of course she would rather he stay at home doing nothing but existing! She’d delighted to have him all to herself after he first broke his arm. The Losers had fallen apart, broken up like a boy band, and he’d had no reason to go out except to pick up his meds from Mr. Keene at the pharmacy. The boredom alone had almost driven him bonkers.

What if she grounds me? he worried. What if she makes sure I don’t see him? I shouldn’t have snapped at her. She’ll keep me here until school starts up again!

He didn’t know what came over him, but within half an hour of pacing his room and psyching himself out, Eddie had thrown open his bedroom window and climbed out into the rain. This was the first of many times he would sneak out, but he scaled the latticework on the side of the house like a pro even with his cast and bolted off in a familiar direction the moment his feet hit the grass. He’d always been a fast runner, maybe the fastest of the Losers, but as he splashed through the streets, he’d never felt slower, like he was fighting a bungie cord tied at the other end to his mother.

By the time he showed up on Richie’s doorstep, sopping wet and shaking like a leaf in the wind from the bone-deep chill of the rain, he’d already begun second-guessing himself. He was only lucky Richie was the one to open the door, positive if it had been his parents, they would’ve called up Eddie’s mom right then and there.

Richie was talking over his shoulder as he wrenched open the door, but his words died on his lips the moment he caught sight of Eddie with his arms clasped tightly over his chest, looking like the pelting rain could blow him over any second. His shoulders shook and teeth clacked loudly, t-shirt and small red shorts absolutely drenched. Without hesitation, Richie pulled him inside, only to then pinch his cheeks and exclaim, “Cute, cute, cute!”

“Stop it, Richie, I hate that!” Eddie stammered past chattering teeth, swatting away Richie’s hands, and bitterly asked, “Can I sleep here tonight?” Showing his palms in surrender, Richie took him under his arm and directed him right upstairs so as to hide him from view of his family.

“Yeah, yeah. You want a towel? You’re about as wet as your mom was last night-” Richie teased, but Eddie cut him off with an elbow to his side. Richie laughed like Eddie had pushed just the right button and tossed him a towel pilfered from the upstairs bathroom.

Catching it, Eddie followed Richie down the hall as he toweled off his hair. Shaking out the droplets, he melodramatically sighed, “Why did I come here.”

“Why did you come here? Had a few too many good chucks lately? Got yerself an addiction, ‘ere?” Richie held his bedroom door open, exaggeratedly ushering him into what could only be considered a pigsty. Comics, magazines, and dirty clothes littered the rug in the middle of the room, posters for bands and movies covered his walls, and his bedsheets pooled around the end of the bed, rippling plush across the floor. The Losers didn’t spend much time in Richie’s house, least of all in his bedroom. Eddie couldn’t remember the last time he’d been here, least of all alone with him in his room. Richie closed the door behind him, not without first peering down the hall to be sure his parents hadn’t seen anything.

“Just my mom…” Eddie said, letting his words trail off. He didn’t want to talk about it – how could he? Richie was at the heart of the whole issue and was the first person Eddie came running to.

“Say no more, my good fellow!” Richie announced in one of his facetious accents and clapped a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. Snickering, he promised, “I’ll show you a good time.”

With a slight blush warming his face, searing hot after the chill of the outdoors, Eddie rolled his eyes and wrapped the towel tighter around himself. He made a futile effort to supress his shivers, entirely too aware of Richie feeling how they wracked his whole body – how Richie would think him pathetic and frail - but without missing a beat, Richie’s hands found Eddie’s bare arms – a t-shirt in this weather? screamed his mother’s voice - and polished warmth back into him. Eddie couldn’t help himself leaning into it, as reflex as a sunflower turning to face the sun, and all the while let his mouth run parallel to his mother’s in his head which had been wheedling non-stop since he left home.

Richie guided Eddie into the room and sat him down on the bed where Eddie vibrated uncontrollably, rambling about the horrors of pneumonia. Letting him go off, Richie kicked his things aside on the floor, making room for a nest of blankets. Even as Eddie described in morbid detail the thought of dying a nasty, choking death by fluid-filled lungs, he found himself relaxing in Richie’s company.

It wasn’t long before Richie draped the last blanket over Eddie, his hand briefly lingering on Eddie’s back before plucking up the wet towel and tossing it in the corner of the room – “Ah- hey! You shouldn’t do that, you’ll get mildew!” - and with that, plopped himself down on the mound he’d thrown together on the floor.

With elbows resting atop bent knees, Richie’s eyes found Eddie’s, but not first without passing a glance over him, so quick Eddie almost missed it. Bundled up in Richie’s bedsheets, Eddie was no more than knocking knees and a face, and a smirk lifted the corner of Richie’s mouth. With the blanket covering his short red shorts, Eddie could only imagine what he looked like. And so, scowling back at him, Eddie swooped down from the bed like a bat and wrapped his arms around Richie to enfold him in the fabric, stealing his heat. Richie was so much warmer than any blanket or towel.

They had huddled together on the bed of blankets late into the night, reading comics shoulder-to-shoulder, teasing each other mercilessly, talking nonsense, and laughing away the dark cloud hanging over Eddie’s head. Richie left the room a couple times to ensure his parents wouldn’t come up looking for him, but that was rarely a problem. He could’ve been spending the night at the Arcade or lost in the Barrens for all they knew.

The last time he came back from his little scouting mission, he leapt over Eddie in the middle of the floor and landed gracelessly on his bed, half-colliding with the wall and plucking up a horror comic book from his side table in the same action. A grotesque-looking spider creature was on the cover, the almost illegible title font looking more like a splatter of green goop than words. Eddie snapped at his audacity to use him as a hurdle, but Richie merely stuck his tongue out and continued reading.

That familiar tug to be close to Richie started up deep in his gut, urging Eddie to clamber up on the bed and nuzzle in next to him – under the guise of revenge for vaulting the blanket pile - but he simply sat there, cocooned in blankets as he watched Richie’s magnified eyes rove over each page with an odd fascination. Observing him like this, the scent of mint following in his wake after he’d only just brushed his teeth, invited a soft tranquility to settle over the room in all things but the beating of Eddie’s heart, threatening to hammer out of his chest.

There was nothing discernibly special about it – they’d had sleepovers before - but everything shifted just slightly from the norm in that moment. Maybe it was the big deal his mother had made over his smiling about Richie or the fact he’d stood up to her in defense of his friendship or the way Richie’s mere presence had summoned the sun through the rainfall, but Eddie twiddled his thumbs in the blankets and grinned like a doofus, so quietly euphoric. If Richie had glanced his way, he might’ve noticed how Eddie’s whole body jolted at each thunderous thrum against his ribcage, or the stupid expression on his face, or the heat spreading to the tips of his ears in a deep, red blush. That night in the summer of ’89, as he gazed up at Richie reading a comic book on his mattress from the bed of blankets on his floor, Eddie was certain he would spend the rest of his life with Richie Tozier.

What a pity that he hadn’t. Escaping this blissful memory, Eddie found himself twenty-seven years in the future, most of which he’d spent entirely unaware of the other man’s existence.

He came out of his reverie in the Cadillac which Myra had parked just outside the hospital, seated next to an empty driver’s seat. He vaguely recalled her asking him to wait in the car. Now, she was already coming back, shifty eyed with determination in the set of her jaw. She had paperwork in her hands when she dropped back into the driver’s seat. A quick glance told him it was a long list of meds to sate his pains.

“I’ve signed you out, sweetie, isn’t that great?” she chirped, although judging by the distance behind her eyes, her mind was elsewhere.

“What? But I thought you-”

“No, no, you were right,” she cut in, speaking hastily as she kicked the car into gear, skittering out of the parking lot. “You’ve spent enough time there. And really, what can they do for you that I can’t?”

Frowning, he opened his mouth to speak but she rounded a turn and he had to throw out a hand, catching himself on the dashboard to keep from imprinting the shape of the door across his right side. “Slow down, Myra! What’s the rush?” A growing sense of unease turned over in his stomach.

“No rush,” she parroted without any attachment to what she was saying. Her perky tone only amplified the bad feeling burgeoning high in the back of his throat. Leaning back in his seat, he clenched his knuckles on the door handle and watched her out of the corner of his eye. The make-up smudged beneath her own – so wide, he could only see the whites - gave her a wild look. Unpredictable.

She brought him back to their room at the Derry Town House where she immediately rushed to the closets and pulled forth their suitcases, packing up with all the uprooting force of a hurricane. Eddie trailed in unsurely behind her, hesitant to step into the room. He glanced over his shoulder toward the door just across the hall – Richie’s room. Is he there? he wondered, wistful, but a hand caught his wrist and Myra jerked him inside, shutting the door behind him.

“Get your things, sweetheart,” she sweetly said, but he shook his head.

“You go on ahead. I’ll catch a flight out of Derry and meet you back home soon enough.” It was a strange feeling, tasting too close to a lie, to call their house his home after all that he’d rediscovered in Derry. Strangely, now that he remembered his childhood, the years outside his hometown seemed the amnesiac’s dream, albeit not to such an extent as when it was the other way around.

“Nonsense, I’m staying with you!” She tossed a few coat hangers’ worth of jackets onto the open suitcase on the bed. The other suitcase was for the stockpile in the medicine cabinet. She added over her shoulder, “And you’re coming with me.”

“I don’t get a say?” he sarcastically mocked, but by the shrug of her shoulders, he knew it was true. Furrowing his brows, he stepped up closer to Myra, avoiding the whirlwind of her efforts – she fluttered around the room like a bee to many flowers, gathering up all their things – and finally stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. She gazed up at him with big, watery eyes, but he kept his regard firm. “No, this can’t go any further. Myra, you’re freaking me out.”

“Oh, I’m freaking you out, am I?” she cried, and with wide eyes, threw both hands up to cover her mouth. “I didn’t mean to snap at you, sweetie, I’m so sorry. It’s just, these past few days, they’ve been so hard. On you, on me. It’s this place! It’s those friends! They’re ripping you away from me! Can’t you see?”

“I can see that you’re being obsessive,” Eddie noted, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Of course you would think that. For the first time in your life, you’re realizing what it feels like to have someone who cares about you and it’s scary.” Well, Eddie mused, she’s right, but not in the way she means. “But you’re obsessed with a past that never mattered a month ago! You’re all over the place, you’re- you’re not my Eddie when you’re in this town! So yes, we are leaving!”

“No, just me,” Eddie muttered, snatching a hoodie off the pile she’d stacked atop his suitcase and heading toward the door. If he was lucky, Richie would be right where he left him, or just getting back to the Town House. But he wasn’t lucky. Not hardly.

Myra grabbed his wrist before he could reach the door, scuttling around him to get in his way. Her other hand clutched the doorknob with the click of a lock. Tears were already flowing once again, like a faucet she could turn on and off. It was his momentary shock at her crying that gave her the opening to nudge him back into the room a few steps, shaking her head and sniffling pitiably.

“Myra-” he objected, finding his voice again, but she pressed her other hand to his chest, directly over the stitches still itchy and uncomfortable from his injury. A sharp spike of pain coursed through him. “Ow, Myra-!” he gasped around a wince, meeting her eyes with hurt and surprise in his own, but her blubbering only continued. Shoving into his wound – he swore he heard the snap of a stitch coming undone – she gave one final push and he found himself wheezing and clutching his chest as he staggered backwards into the bathroom of their suite.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry but you’re just not thinking clearly anymore!” she sobbed, grabbing for the door. “I’ll do the packing-”

“Myra!” Eddie rasped, but she squealed in alarm and slammed the door in his face, followed by the sound of chair legs scraping across the floor. By the time he’d thrown himself against the door, jiggling the handle, she had a chair propped behind it, trapping him in the small space of the bathroom. The muffled sound of her apologies filtered into his ears, but the drumming of his heart pounded louder. She’s lost her goddamn mind, he despaired.

The ice cream Richie had earlier might as well have been a rum raisin for how drunk he felt – high on the clouds of his fresh understanding. Richie was still reeling with the revelation of Eddie’s boyhood crush as he staggered back to his car, elated and nervous to the point he could’ve been standing atop a mountain breathing in the lightest of air with the wind threatening to blow him into the deep abyss below.

Every passing second seemed an eternity to wait for the answer he so desperately craved – the oxygen to fuel the flame of his heart. I’m gonna ask him, Richie told himself, and whatever his answer, it’ll be worth it just to know… If I wasted these years agonizing over him, without even remembering him…

He drove like a madman back to the hospital, actually bouncing in his seat as his mind raced with ideas of how to ask Eddie the burning question buying up the plot in his head. Little did he realize; Myra had already signed Eddie out and tucked him away in her little corner of Derry.

It was a high place from which to fall, once he’d half-run into the hospital, failing to slow his excited speed through the halls no matter the nurses’ complaints, only to burst into Eddie’s room and find it vacated, bereft of any sign of him.

In an instant, Richie fell into the abyss at the base of the mountain. His heart plummeted through the floor, ice spearing up his arms as sandbag weights shackled his legs. His first thought - as irrational as it was and informed by all the topsy-turvy memory hijinks the clown had made so commonplace in his life – was that Eddie had never been here to begin with; it was all too good to be true. That he had survived impalement through the chest. That he had carved something at the Kissing Bridge. That he might’ve loved Richie in return. For a moment, Richie considered that this could be the clown’s most elaborate trick yet, but he got a hold of himself and shoved the notion aside. Even so, that left him nowhere closer to figuring out where Eddie had disappeared to. An uneasy feeling like knives rolling over in his insides spoke to something sinister.

He tried Eddie’s phone, but the call went straight to voicemail. When he started dialling the next number, his hands were shaking.

She picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Bev-” A flurry of things to say clustered between his ears. All the things left unsaid while he’d avoided the other Losers, afraid to meet their eyes after baring too much of his heart that day at the Well House, suddenly clogged his throat on the way to words. With a pang in his chest, he wondered again if Bev had guessed the truth about him.

“Richie! I’m so glad to hear from you. Is everything okay?” Although her tone wasn’t urgent, he could tell she was concerned. It just went to show how little he’d spoken to her these past few weeks, to anyone really. A twinge of something like remorse plucked at his heartstrings.

“That’s what I’d like to think. Do you know if Eddie checked out of the hospital?” Richie hadn’t left that long after the Cadillac. Eddie couldn’t have been back more than a few minutes before quitting the hospital again, although Richie found it hard to believe Myra would have been happy about this. At the thought of her, he stifled a shudder.

“No, why? He’s not with you?” A sinking disquietude crept into her tone.

“I don’t know where he is. I was hoping you would.”

“We haven’t heard from him,” she was saying, and it was a moment before Richie realized she meant herself and Ben. They’d been inseparable since the Well House.

He paced the small room which had become like a second home to him – now, more akin to a house that had been removed of all things familiar, boxed up, replaced and infested with strangers instead of family – and crossed one arm over his chest, thumb rubbing the inside of his other bicep as he pressed the phone closer to his ear. “I have a bad feeling about this, Bev. I can’t explain it-”

“So do I,” her voice breathed through the earpiece. “I don’t know why, but I felt scared when the phone rang. Like when Mike called… I stared at it in my hand, afraid to answer…” Snapping herself out of it, she continued in a steadier voice, “But the clown’s dead, Richie. Wherever Eddie is, he’s safe. Just try to think, where would he go?”

In the background of the call, distant and nearly inaudible, Richie caught Ben’s voice asking, “Why would Eddie leave without telling anyone?”

When scared, Richie had a tendency to smile – kids like Henry Bowers who got a kick out of scaring him had always found it infuriating - and Ben’s question had him baring his teeth, feeling the corners of his mouth stretch high on his cheeks – a mirthless expression. His mouth was always getting away from him in that way, sometimes with poorly timed jokes which had more than once led Henry Bowers to wallop him something fierce - his mouth was the only fast thing about him.

Bev must have said something to Ben – maybe she’d covered the phone so Richie couldn’t hear – but she spoke clearly again before Richie could let rip one of said inopportune jokes. “I have Myra’s number, if you want to give her a call. I’m sure she won’t mind.”

“I’m trying to find Eddie, not cuck him,” Richie joked, but Eddie was the only one who would’ve had a gratifying reaction. Bev merely sighed into the phone – Richie could practically see her disapproving expression, threatening an unamused roll of her eyes but betraying a hint of a smile.

“I’ll call her, then. If she doesn’t know where he is, she’ll be just as worried as the rest of us,” Bev decided, but Richie’s smile morphed into a wince as he stepped up closer to the bed that had once been Eddie’s, waving a hand around as if he wasn’t talking to her on the phone, but in person.

“Wait, wait, Bev, before you do-” Putting on a voice with a playful lilt in his tone, he advised, “She’s a bit of a nut, that one, but what can any of us say about nuts. I, myself, am a simple cashew who strayed into the peanut gallery.” If Bev could only see the urgency on his face, veiled behind his jokey tone of voice, she would know he meant his warning.

“Rich…” she sighed, sounding a moment from hanging up on him.

Shoving aside the act, so easy to hide behind, he added in his normal voice, “Just, be careful what you say to her. She’s a jealous one, among other things.”

“I will,” she said with the air of someone who’d already dealt with the likes of one Mrs. Myra Kaspbrak over the phone. “And I’ll get the others out looking for him, too, Richie.” He was almost surprised none of them had left Derry yet, as if they were all waiting around for something none of them could put a finger on. “Just remember, wherever he is, he’s okay.” At her words, so soft yet firm, the airtight panic pushing against his temples decompressed some.

“Yeah… Thanks Bev.” But when he ended the call, the unease came rushing back. Not a minute passed before it stretched its callous hands from a vise-like grip on his brain to a boa constrictor’s squeeze around his heart; he had received a text from Bev:

Straight to voicemail. Her phone must be dead.

The Losers came together as an impromptu search party. They checked the lonely roads stretching all the way out to the farmlands where Mike had grown up. They searched ditches, keeping an eye on the low shoulders of the country roads. They parked near where they used to hide Silver when they would play in the Barrens, now combing the edge of the green for any sign of the Cadillac, thinking it might have gone off the roads. And when all of that turned out to be a waste of time, they checked the park, the town, everywhere in Derry they could think of. Nada.

As they turned over every rock and stone in Derry, Richie found it was easier to stomach the others’ judgement – assumed, but still looming like a dark cloud in the back of his mind - now that they had a goal, one which engrossed Richie’s full attention and kept him blissfully side-tracked from the state of things as he’d left them. He could feel their eyes on him, passing him sideways glances, trying to prompt him to speak honestly, but he poured himself into the town-wide search, spending the rest of the day in this fruitless effort – seeming the only one who truly cared, as far as he could tell.

As evening turned to dusk, the Losers had to drag Richie off the streets and convince him to return to their rooms at the Derry Town House, insisting they would never be able to find anyone in the pitch-black night. They got him back to his car and begrudgingly, he kicked it into gear, but when he parked outside the Town House, he stayed where he sat, lighting up a cigarette. The other Losers were already headed in, but Bev looked like she wanted to sit with him, maybe have a smoke as well. Too bad she’d already decided to quit the damned things. So instead, she patted Richie’s shoulder and promised, “He’ll turn up, Rich. I know he will.”

“Yeah…” he muttered, his long legs sticking out of the open door as he made no effort to get up. He’d long since passed beyond the threshold of concern into flat dread, whereas the others only seemed mildly troubled. For all his joking and teasing, he could feel it getting under his skin.

It wasn’t that he thought Eddie was in trouble – the clown was dead, and Myra hadn’t been in such a bad state as to go crashing Eddie’s Cadillac in any ditches. Rather, he was almost positive - and really only teetering on the line of almost at this point - that Eddie and Myra had taken off the moment he was off the bridge. Myra, Eddie’s wife – what the fuck had Richie been thinking. He couldn’t blame Eddie for running, either. It was no one’s fault but Richie’s own heart for loving him, and his mouth for doing what it always did: talk.

Richie had known he was being selfish – god he knew – for whether he told Eddie or not, it was all selfish. Dragging Eddie in too close to what he really was, whether he was a liar or a creep, that was selfish. He only wished he could have whisked himself away, out of the picture, without a trace once it was all over. That the creeping amnesia could have come back like a wrecking ball, tearing them all apart without ever letting them realize what they’d lost and setting them once again on separate paths, all so he would never have had to make the choice to open his damn mouth – this, perhaps, was most selfish of all.

Whatever the deal with the heart carved around an R was, he no longer wanted any part of it. He just wanted to be gone.

And go where? a snide voice mocked in his head. Wherever you go, your poison heart will go with you.

He wanted to tell that voice to fuck right off, but his shoulders merely slumped, and he took a long drag on his cigarette. After all, the voice in his head was right, like the clown had been right about him all those years ago. It really was his dirty little secret, and no one else’s. No one that mattered to him, anyway.

“Richie?” Bev’s voice called him back out of his head. “Will you be alright?”

The other Losers had stopped by the door into the Town House, looking back over their shoulders at him. Even from his car, he could see the concern written into the lines of their faces; not for Eddie, but for him. Bill wore that strong, silent look of a leader, like he was ready to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders for his friends. Richie almost felt touched, until he thought of the look he would have seen on Bill’s face if he knew why Eddie was missing, the same way Richie had convinced himself he knew it. If he told the rest of the Losers what he’d told Eddie, would they have run away from him, too?

Well I’ll be damned if I’m the last one in Derry, he obstinately thought.

Putting on a smile, he waved a flippant hand and tossed the stub of his cigarette, stifling the stream of smoke under his shoe. “As right as rain, sweetheart,” he assured her in a New Yorker accent, punctuated with a wink, a finger gun, and a click of his tongue, but his mouth was too dry to make the noise.

She gave him a wary look as if to say, “If you say so,” but let the subject drop.

Richie trailed into the building behind the rest of them, dragging his feet. Ben, Mike, and Bill invited him for drinks to wind down after the long day they’d had, but Richie wanted nothing less than to throw back a few too many and slap his heart onto his sleeve for the whole world to see. They stayed down at the quaint little bar area, but Bev walked him up to his room.

She didn’t have to – the sulking part of him would have rather been alone - but he was grateful to her for her company - not that he said anything worthwhile. Even so, he didn’t shut his mouth the whole way up. He didn’t say that he was considering leaving Derry; nor that he’d already made plans in his mind to take off early in the morning, or late this night if he couldn’t manage to get himself to sleep; nor that he would probably never see any of them again; and he certainly bit his tongue over the fact that he could already feel his heart peeling into thin slices at the mere notion of kicking himself out of the Losers' Club. She left him at the door to his room, laughing at whatever he’d said as she went. Her laughter bounced off the walls all the way back to him as she walked the halls and descended the stairs, reminiscent of their youth – amid all the fear, they never forgot how to laugh - and he was alone.

The fake smile slid off his face – it had felt real when she was there. He fumbled for the key to his room, fingers slow and numb like the rest of him. Maybe it was exhaustion – he knew it wasn’t.

As he heaved a deep sigh, his breath shook, the only warning before the prick of tears stung behind his eyes. “What the fuck?” he whispered harshly under his breath, salty tears burning hot against the back of his throat, and shoved the key into the lock, turning quickly. He escaped into the room, flinging the door shut behind him, and the tears fell hotly down to his chin. He wiped fervently at his face, trying and failing to stymie the sudden downpour.

It didn’t take much digging to tap into the root of the stream. He’d made up his mind the moment he realized the reason they couldn’t find Eddie, but the feelings that came with it were barred from him, the depth of his decision made shallow, until he was alone – alone, I’ll always be alone – without anyone he cared about upsetting around to witness his weakness. There was nothing in Derry for him, not because the clown was dead and the deed was done, but because the Losers had had twenty-seven years to forget each other, and Richie had grown used to loneliness. That fleeting moment of community, of coming back to each other, had been a fever dream. The very idea that he and Eddie could have… No, he couldn’t even bring himself to light that tiny hope again, resenting the vast darkness it would spawn the moment it blew out. It was time to get back to reality.

He sniffled, face wet with ugly tears, and wiped angrily at the mess he’d become. The mess he always was, hidden behind closed doors. The jokes, the smiles, the big talk, it had all been a façade, hadn’t it?

Stop it! he lectured himself. You think this self-pity will do you any good? Beep beep, Richie!

A sadistic smile curled in the corner of his mouth, tasting his salty tears between his lips. He always knew it would come to this. He’d seen the other boys in their tighty-whities, he’d slept in their beds, he’d wrestled them in both – now that Eddie knew the truth, he probably thought he was a pervert. That he’d gained a sick pleasure from their boyhood adventures which had seemed so harmless at the time, now thrown under a new, perturbing light.

I didn’t know! shouted the rebellion in his head. Shaking it out of his mind, he pounded the meat of his palm to his temple, as if to knock the thoughts out his other ear. They stayed anchored where they were, growing like a fungus.

He thought all the crying was supposed to be over now that they’d killed It. All the tears and the fears should have been done with, and they were, for everyone else. Not Richie – Bev and Ben had come together, Bill had finally found the resolution his horror stories had been lacking, and Mike was finally free to leave Derry. They had found their happy endings… Richie was left with nothing but a footprint on his heart.

It’s no less than you deserve, that snide voice came back. It spoke as if with hiccups, taking on a bouncy, gleefully malicious inflection – a warped imitation of the clown in Richie’s own voice.

Pressing both hands to his eyes, shut tight, he leaned his head back against the door. “I guess that answers the question of how fucked up I can get,” he muttered under his breath, and exhaled, “Fuuuck…” Focusing on simply breathing this word into the room, saturating his space with the general state of his mind, he at least managed not to sob. But his breath hitched, and his chin trembled, and he rubbed out the tears still adamant to escape him.

There was no getting around it. He had to leave this place. Derry, where he fell in love over and over, where he’d given his heart away without even realizing, where he’d had it handed back to him, not once but constantly… Eddie had run away from him, just like Richie always knew he would.

Biting his lip to stop it trembling, he tossed his head back against the door and shook out the darkness gathering behind his eyes. “Yeah… yep!” he gasped against the pain unfolding within his ribcage and leapt across the room to the luggage he never unpacked. All he had to do was zip it up, grab the handles, and turn on his heel to the door. He was back in the hall, duffel bag in hand, before he fully registered that he’d moved.

He almost didn’t catch the small rumble from the room across from his, but his feet stopped of their own accord. A sound of rummaging – quiet and muffled by the door – found his ears and a light went off above his head. Eddie’s room! They’d checked every inch of Derry before even considering the one place he would have to come back to, if only for his pharmacy’s worth of medication stashed there.

Richie spun around, staring down the wood door with his heart in his throat, two hot orbs burning behind his eyes. Rubbing a hand under them, he sniffled back the wetness stuffing up his face. There was certainly someone in the room, but by the sound of it, whether it was Myra or Eddie, they were packing up.

He really is skipping town…

“Well so am I,” Richie rasped, white-knuckling the handle of his luggage. But his feet wouldn’t budge. A masochist one way or the other, he hesitated between a heart crushed by the man he loved, and a heart shattered by a world made empty without him. He was desperate to know; why point out the second carving at the Kissing Bridge only to turn tail and run? Heaving a shuddering sigh, Richie balled his fists so tight, his nails dug into the meat of his palms.

Fuck it, he decided. What’s one more knife to the heart? This one’s for the road.

Dropping his bag by his own room, he stomped up to Eddie’s door and raised a hand to knock.

Chapter Text

Richie stopped himself a moment from knocking, but not out of uncertainty over whether he wanted to – he’d decided to see how far he could push his broken heart. He stopped because something wasn’t right. He didn’t know how he knew, but the hair on his arms stood on end and his gut turned over. Enough time in Derry had taught him to trust these subtle signs of danger – fear - even when danger wasn’t immediately apparent. Here, where it lurked heavy like mist in the air, invisible until put under a light.

So instead, Richie swallowed his pride should anyone mount the stairs to see what he was about to do and leaned in close to the door until his ear was pressed to the wood. He closed his eyes, straining to hear the faint rummaging within. One set of footsteps bustled around the room – heavier than Eddie’s. No, not bustling, but rather pacing back and forth. He could just about make out Myra’s high-strung voice muttering quietly but frantically to herself – that didn’t exactly seem strange of her to Richie. What was strange was the apparent lack of Eddie in Eddie’s room – but he summed the oddity of that up to his own bias.

Maybe Eddie was just washing up while Myra packed. That was innocent enough, and no cause for concern, either, but Richie couldn’t imagine she would let him in just to speak with Eddie through the bathroom door. And if she did, he certainly didn’t want the worst possible audience present for the apologies building up behind the dam of his heart, desperate to escape his lips and flood Eddie’s ears.

Unless…

Jumping back on his tiptoes and feeling entirely too clandestine for what he meant to do, Richie jogged back down the hall, soft-footed, and descended the stairs, bolting straight out the front door. He could hear the others laughing in the parlour but didn’t stop for them, unsure how long Eddie would remain in the bathroom – if indeed he was there.

Rounding the building - feeling increasingly stupid as he went - Richie found just the right bathroom window, high over his head on the second floor, and released a sigh of relief to find the light within shining through. At least he hadn’t acted on his assumption in vain, and if that was to be the only positive outcome of this little excursion, well, who was he to complain? Sniffling back the last evidence of his tears, he wiped the back of his hand across his face and hoped to god he didn’t look as much the mess he felt.

He cupped his hands around his mouth, standing on the tips of his toes under the window. “Eddie!” It came out a whispered shout, earning no reaction from the bathroom. The sensation of time running out restrained his lungs as he imagined Eddie finishing up, leaving the bathroom, and slipping out of his reach once again. He called, just slightly louder, “Eds!”

Still nothing.

He turned his gaze downward, eyes combing the ground through the dark of evening until he found a decent-sized stone, toeing the line between pebble and rock. Plucking it up, he weighed it for a moment in his hand before lobbing it up at the glass. The arc was too narrow, missing the window – the building - entirely. Grunting under his breath, he picked up another and gave it a throw. It clunked off the siding, far from his target.

Rolling his eyes, he muttered to himself, “Great. So this is my Olympian moment?” He searched the ground again, gathering up a handful of gravel along the sides of the parking lot. Figuring he couldn’t miss with this many, he drew his arm back in a pitcher’s swing and chucked the whole handful up at the side of the building. A spattering of pebbles plinked off not only the glass, but also the siding and even the shingles of the roof. Not a moment later, Eddie’s face appeared in the window, and Richie felt his own light up with a smile. The last traces of his tears only disappeared then.

Motioning to the tarmac and exaggerating the shape of each word, he half-shouted, “Meet me in the parking lot!”

Eddie waved his arms as his mouth shaped a series of words strung together far too fast for Richie to interpret, then pointed back toward his room, then in toward his own chest, and finally shot two fingers down at Richie.

Brows furrowing, Richie shook his head and made an obvious expression of confusion, arms out to either side of him. “What?”

Eddie repeated the exact same actions but this time faster, and certainly no clearer the second time than the first.

Gesturing with his hands, Richie slowly mouthed, “I can’t understand you!”

Eddie’s movements were somehow faster this time, a frantic energy in each action.

Hold on, is he telling me off? Richie thought, but quickly disregarded the notion, finding panic in Eddie’s expressive eyes rather than anger. What the hell is he on about? Heaving a sigh, Richie mimed opening the window. Behind the glass, Eddie slapped a palm to his forehead and unlatched the window, throwing it open.

“Myra locked me in the bathroom!” he called in a similar half-shout to Richie’s, barely lower than his normal talking voice.

“She-?” Richie choked on his surprise, head spinning. Now he’s making up lame excuses? Is that really the best he can come up with? He nearly laughed, jaundiced and painful, but a laugh nonetheless. He stifled it in his chest. “Does she wipe your ass for you, too?"

"Beep beep, Richie! She's out of her mind!" he harshly whispered.

"Well then jump down, dickwad!” Richie satirically proposed, extending his arms out to either side of him with one leg forward and his hips leaned back in the image of an eccentric salesman giving his golden pitch.

 “Easy for you to say from the ground! Do you know how high up this is? Last time I fell from this height, I broke my fucking arm!” Eddie snapped back at him, obviously trying to keep his voice down but failing, nonetheless.

Richie hesitated, cocking his head to one side. “You’re being serious?”

“What do you think?” Eddie hissed furiously.

From where he stood in the parking lot, Richie caught the faint sound of Myra’s voice through the bathroom door, asking, “Eddie-bear? Who are you talking to in there?”

In a more urgent tone, Richie called up to him, “Just hang down! I’ll catch you!” And with that, waved a hand in a circular motion to urge Eddie forward.

“No fucking way!”

“What, you don’t think I will? Do I have to remind you who fireman-carried you out of the Well House?”

Inhaling deeply, Eddie threw a hand up next to his face as if to get a handle on his vexation. “You fireman-carried me? You don’t fireman-carry someone with internal bleeding, asshole!” he snapped – Richie felt the corners of his mouth tug higher on his cheeks, his smile ranging all the way up to his eyes.

“If memory serves, it was mostly external bleeding, so…” Richie teased, putting on a mock matter-of-fact tone which called a world-weary sigh out of Eddie. Even so, he glanced uncertainly over his shoulder, worrying at his bottom lip, and turned again to Richie with forced determination in the darkness of his eyes.

“You better not drop me,” he warned as the scraping of chair legs on wood sounded from behind him followed by Myra’s curious, “Sweetie?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Richie assured him around a grin, throwing out his arms like he meant to catch him bridal style.

“This is such a bad idea,” Eddie grumbled even as he clambered out onto the windowsill, a pitiful reversal of Henry Bowers’ much stealthier entrance through that very aperture. Eddie must have been thinking along the same lines, a hand twitching up to the bandage on his cheek, but he closed his fist and brought it back to the edge of the window where he made certain he would have a good grip.

Carefully and after much fussing, he lowered himself down from the edge of the window, shoes skidding on the siding and drawing tracks of dirt down the wall of the old building. He gripped the creaking frame in his hands, his feet dangling just a foot or so above Richie’s head as he rambled at length about the absurdity of this whole situation – he talked so fast, the individual words blurred together indistinguishably.

From below, Richie tried to guide his footing, but Eddie only kicked and flailed uselessly. Groaning, Richie reached up to catch his ankles, to bring him down slowly, maybe even set Eddie’s feet on his shoulders so he could use him like a human stepladder, but Eddie let out a small scream.

“Don’t do that! Don’t pull my fucking feet! Are you trying to make me fall out the window?” he cried, forgetting to measure the volume of his voice.

“THE WINDOW?!” Myra exploded, so loud her voice bounced off the neighbouring buildings.

The slam of the bathroom door being thrown open nearly startled Eddie out of his grip, and just like that, Myra’s head stuck out over him, a shrill shriek escaping her slack-jawed mouth. She was like a live-performance rendition of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Honestly, Richie couldn’t help but be impressed at the uncanny stretch of her mouth, if only just for an instant. Then she was grasping feverishly at Eddie’s hands, trying to drag him back in with all the strength she could muster – not nearly enough to carry his weight, even if he helped her. All she accomplished was to pry Eddie’s fingers from the windowsill, inadvertently forcing him to let go.

“Eddie!” she screeched in time with Richie’s, “Oh shit!” and Eddie’s garbled yell in terror and alarm. The world seemed to move in slow motion as she lunged halfway through the window before getting stuck, her slick hands grabbing fruitlessly after him, while below, Richie fumbled with Eddie’s legs - catching a foot in the face - and just barely managed to grab hold of him before he could hit the ground.

Richie’s arms automatically fastened around Eddie’s chest, and in the same motion, his legs sprang out beneath him, throwing them both away from the building only for Richie to land unceremoniously on his back in the gravel, the cushion to Eddie’s own landing. Richie raked in breath with hacking coughs, the wind knocked from his lungs, and shoved Eddie off himself with a groan. Rubbing a hand behind his back where a rock had dug in, he rasped, “See? Told you I’d catch you.”

To his amazement, Eddie started laughing – for an instant, Richie nearly mistook the hysterical sound for sobbing - with an elbow bent over his face and his knees pulled up to his chest like this was the most uproarious thing to have ever occurred. It didn’t help that Myra squawked her discomfort overhead, straining against the window biting down on her wide middle.

“We gotta– We gotta go,” Eddie wheezed between bouts of laughter. Even so, it took him a moment to scramble dizzily to his feet, kicking up gravel which sprayed over Richie’s head – Richie recoiled behind his forearms, spluttering and bemoaning the little pellets to the face. Hurriedly, Eddie gathered him up, helping him get his legs – reduced to Jell-O - under him.

By the time both men had come to a stand, they were each infected with the laughing fit, holding onto each other as they bustled away to Richie’s car. Finding the key in his pocket, he realized he hadn't even locked the doors. Myra shouted down at them, struggling to free herself of the window’s tight squeeze, but they could hardly hear her over the heartbeats pounding in their ears and the full, panting laughter shaking their lungs.

Richie called Bev over Bluetooth once they were on the road - "That's how I got in an accident," Eddie pointed out while it rang but Richie waved him off - if only to loosen the others' worries. When she picked up, the familiar voices in the background of the call illustrated the impression they hadn't yet left the parlour, becoming silent when she burst, "Oh, Richie! Myra just burst out of her room looking for Eddie-"

"It's fine. I found him-" Richie was saying when Eddie interrupted with, "We're laying low." Rolling his eyes, Richie went on to explain all that had happened but held his tongue on the manner by which Eddie had been locked in the bathroom. Eddie leapt in to denounce Richie's idea of valid escape routes, meeting Richie's eyes with a smile in his as he did.

When Bev spoke again, her voice carried a breathy quality with relief, but Richie knew it wasn't for Eddie. She must have heard the difference in Richie's voice – like he could - telling of his polar mood swing from just half an hour earlier. He tried not to react to that quiet inflection in her tone, glancing sidelong at Eddie to make sure he hadn’t noticed, and was silently thankful she didn't mention it. Instead, she told Eddie how the Losers were up in arms over his disappearance not an hour into his discharge from the hospital.

Mike must have stolen the phone out of her hand then, his voice filling the car as he laughed about their long search through Derry's ditches for the better half of the day. Ben and Bill wrestled him for it afterwards, mocking their own short-sightedness now that they knew where he'd been hiding all along, followed by a ring of laughter from all three funneling into the mouthpiece as Bev's higher notes faintly joined in from the background. Richie had to pry his eyes from Eddie's smile, warm and affectionate, to keep from driving off the road.

Shit, Eds, he mused internally, You're a rollercoaster I never want to get off of.

Oh, he's well aware of that, that snide, cruel voice distantly returned, muted in the jovial atmosphere of the car but nevertheless present. None of this changed the fact that Eddie was aware of Richie's feelings for him. Aware but passively silent, like he would be content to sweep the moment under the rug and promptly forget its existence the way they'd forgotten their pasts, their childhoods, each other. Blissful ignorance.

"You'll have Myra on your case now," Bill considered, not unkindly but rather like he was musing aloud. Eddie breathed sharply from his nose and waved his hand – Richie had only to glance at him to understand he would rather be talking about anything else, even the clown who almost killed him, than his own wife. Bill continued, as if privy to Eddie’s unspoken response, "Do you know where you'll go?"

“She’ll look everywhere,” Eddie muttered, disheartened, “I really should call her-”

"There's one place she won’t be able to dig up," Ben pitched before Eddie could succumb to his guilty feelings, "The old fort."

Both Richie and Eddie’s expressions softened into contentment, feeling foreign against the haggard lines of exhaustion carved into their faces after the day they'd both had. The brief silence on the other end of the line implied a similar moment of fond recognition between the rest of the Losers.

“To the fort?” Richie offered.

“To the fort,” Eddie said, smiling.

Richie offered up a helping hand once he’d descended the creaking steps into the small, dark space of the fort. Anywhere else, the claustrophobia of this blindingly dark, underground room would’ve seeded unease reminiscent of the sewers where It had hunted them, but when Richie was with Eddie here in this bubble of childhood memory, there was only comfort. Eddie took Richie’s hand, putting two feet on each step as he descended.

“I won’t let you fall,” Richie snorted, feeling like an escort at Cinderella’s ball while Eddie made a pain-staking spectacle of his entrance with Richie’s hand clasped in his.

“Says the man who had me jump out a second-story window.”

He showed his teeth with a proud smile. “That’s anything but a diss. Best idea I’ve ever had.”

“It’s not supposed to be a diss, it’s an example,” Eddie shot back, heaping buckets of sass into his tone. Richie’s theatrical smile morphed into a grin teeming with fond amusement. Either man had yet to realize the stairs had left the equation, leaving Eddie standing nearly chest to chest with Richie as they held hands at its base.

Richie felt as though he was floating as he drifted backwards over the creaking floorboards, pulling Eddie along with him. As they went, Eddie flicked on a small flashlight which doubled as a lantern lamp he’d pulled from his fanny pack, setting it on the nearest surface along their path. It washed the room in a warm, dim light to counteract the cold dark of the night, slithering away to deep corners and under furniture. The light glinted off Richie’s glasses to match the radiant smile in his eyes.

Richie’s mouth was on a roll, spouting off everything that entered his head the moment it entered, and Eddie laughed. He was laughing as Richie claimed the hammock and laughing still as he bumbled onto the unsteady cloth sling after him.

“Think she’ll find us here?” Eddie asked, lying side-by-side on the too-small hammock – so close, Eddie was practically on top of him – with Richie’s bicep as a pillow.

“She really would have to be some kind of demonic entity to manage that,” considered Richie. For once, Eddie could only laugh in mild agreement, and felt Richie’s hand in his upon squeezing his grip.

Only then did reality hit, and differently so for each man. Richie’s heart thumped in his chest with internal delight – that this was allowed, no pining monologues or hesitation, just simple touch – and felt his heart squeeze merrily tight just like his hand in Eddie’s, but Eddie’s breath caught high in his throat at the thought of Myra, burned into his mind’s eye. The image of her throwing herself out the window after him. The picture of horror, of hurt, of betrayal.

“Can we… talk?” Eddie began, sitting up in the hammock so his legs hung over the side. He wobbled and struggled against the destabilizing effects of the sling as it swung against his movements, but Richie provided the necessary counterbalance when he sat up as well, throwing his legs over the other side. Like this, they sat hip to hip and hand in hand.

“Hmm, I think that begs the question of what we were doing before,” Richie teased. Eddie bumped his shoulder, shooting him a look, and Richie raised his one free hand in surrender. His other hand pressed Eddie’s, shooting fireworks off in his stomach. “You’re telling me you have a shred of a doubt in your mind that talking to you might not be my favourite pastime?”

An adorable crease furrowed Eddie’s brow in his attempt to decipher Richie’s sarcastic double negative. Giving up, he scoffed, “Certainly not after that mouth garbage. Ever heard of a yes or no answer?”

“Mouth garbage? I think the word you’re looking for is Trashmouth,” Richie noted around a grin.

Giving a roll of his eyes, Eddie set his chin in his free palm, his elbow propped up on one knee. Better not to meet Richie’s eyes for this, he thought. “The initials at the Kissing Bridge…”

Richie gulped, mouth drying up in a flash of heat across his face. He fought his instinct to release Eddie’s hand, wanting rather to remain in this casual contact as long as Eddie wasn’t pulling away.

“You said you loved me?” Eddie said it like it was question, but he remembered Richie’s words from earlier, crystal clear between his ears. He could still hear Richie’s voice ringing faintly in the back of his mind, repeating his love confession on a loop. I never meant to fall in love with you…

“Yeah, about that? I didn’t do it right. I’d like a redo.”

“A redo?” Eddie mused, “What, were you practicing a speech while I was locked up?”

“Heh, I wish,” Richie huffed under his breath. “Actually, I was mentally preparing myself to leave Derry…”

“You… What?” Eddie breathed, snapping his head to meet Richie’s eyes.

“I’ll get to that in a moment,” Richie said with an overcompensating smirk and had to squeeze Eddie’s hand just to calm his nerves.

Running his fingers through his hair, he was glad to turn away from Eddie for this. A million moments from their past flashed before his eyes, not just here in the Losers’ clubhouse, but everywhere they had been together. Derry. It was theirs. And for once amid the sea of feelings he had never been able to accurately tap, the right words became clear to him. Genuine and vulnerable.

“You know, when Henry Bowers used to beat the shit out of me for being a fag, I was convinced I deserved it?” Well if that isn’t a strong start, I don’t know what is, Richie internally groaned. Quick, keep talking. “Not right away. He called me all sorts of things before I ever even knew what they meant. No, it wasn’t until I started seeing it in myself, feeling it for myself, that’s when I started thinking… thinking the hurt just came with it. I guess that stuck with me, huh? I like men-” The words sounded alien in his ears, spoken in a foreign language of truths. “-and I hate that Henry fucking Bowers figured it out first.”

“He didn’t know shit about you, Richie. Throw enough stones and you’re bound to hit a target,” Eddie fiercely shot back.

“Yeah.” Rubbing the nape of his neck, Richie slouched deep in his seat. “But I figured I deserved it more than the rest of the Losers. For me, it was true. Is true.”

“Rich…” Eddie murmured, but Richie shook his head.

“I’m not looking for pity. I just want you to know why I never told you. Told anyone. Why I never, I don’t know, came out? It was a different world back then. Derry is a world all its own, full of hate and pain and… Maybe I accepted the hurt because nothing Henry Bowers did to me could ever hurt more than the fact that I fell for my best friend and everything in me was pushing me to ruin the only good thing I ever had.”

Richie felt Eddie tense up beside him, lashing a whip across his heart. Still, he pushed himself to continue.

“Even when I had no idea you existed; I kept an after image of you in my heart. And then we were back in Derry and it hit me worse than Henry Bowers ever did. I took one look at you, and everything flooded back. And you? You were married – are married. To a psychopath, apparently-”

“Careful,” Eddie warned, but there was only habit behind it.

Richie turned to face Eddie, raising his free hand, palm out, in peace. “Look, Eds, the long and short of it is, I’m into men, and I’m in love with you.” His lungs clenched painfully in his chest, chasing out these honest words. “Losing you would’ve killed me. And waiting for you to wake up in that hospital room? It made me realize what’s important. I had to show you the carving at the Kissing Bridge so I could leave Derry behind with nothing left to say.”

Eddie’s hand tightened around Richie’s, squeezing his fingers as if he never meant to let go. “Why are you leaving?”

“Oh, come on, Eds, are you saying you’re gonna set up shop with the missus here in PTSD-inducing Derry? There’s nothing left for us here.”

“I’m still here,” he obstinately retorted. The true message of his words hung in the air between them: Stay for me.

“And how much longer do you plan on staying?”

“As long as you’re here!” Eddie burst, sufficing to shut him up. In the ensuing silence, he squeezed Richie’s hand somehow tighter. Richie might’ve complained if his heart wasn’t beating a mile a minute. “How can you think nothing’s changed for me? After everything? Myra locked me in a bathroom! And… and you finally admitted you love me!”

“Whoa, hold up. Finally?” Richie sputtered, pulling his knee up on the hammock to turn his whole body toward Eddie, a sunflower to the sun. “You knew?”

Shrinking, Eddie ducked his head in a timid shrug. “I assumed… or maybe it was just a hope when I saw the R plus E when I was a kid. Why do you think I left that heart-encased R?”

“Oh you motherfucker,” Richie gasped. “Are you kidding me? All this time?”

“Don’t call me the motherfucker, dickwad! You never told me!”

Holy shit, Richie thought. His entire body vibrated with the growing jubilation of Eddie’s words. “You really had a crush on me?” he guffawed, failing to hide his cynical amusement. “That’s adorable.”

Eddie slapped a palm to his face. “You don’t get to talk!” he growled against his hand. Richie could only beam his smile, brighter even than the dim glow of the upward-facing flashlight. Running his thumb over the heel of Eddie’s hand, Richie reached out with his other hand to pry Eddie’s fingers from his face, revealing his glaring eyes.

“Hey… Eds?” Richie tested, coaxing Eddie slowly out of his glare. A mischievous grin took up Richie’s features. “Mack on me like we’re in tenth grade.”

Grumbling something about Richie being immature enough to still be in tenth grade, Eddie shoved him playfully, trying and failing to hold onto the façade of annoyance in the crease between his eyebrows. Judging by the blush climbing up his neck to colour the tops of his cheeks, and the smile that rounded them, Richie knew he had him.

“I can’t believe you had a crush on me,” Richie teased, repeating the words in his head, and took Eddie’s other hand in his so he had claim over both. Eddie groaned up at the ceiling, but let Richie hold his hands, intertwining their fingers.

“You know what? Neither can I,” Eddie grumbled, but a ghost of sadness crossed his features with the sense this conversation was taking place twenty-seven years too late. Richie felt it, too, dousing the light that had shone brilliantly within him. They held each other in this moment against the hands of time which had for so long torn them apart, but it didn’t change the fact they’d missed more than half of each others’ lives.

Both men fell silent, these many lost years opening a chasm between them to steal the smile from Richie’s face and depress the flight of Eddie’s heart. “I’m sorry I never told you,” Richie finally murmured through the heavy nothing worth too many years to contemplate. “If I’d just said something, given you the hint you needed, the clown wouldn’t have had any power over me. There’s nothing I’ve ever feared more, but without it… maybe It wouldn’t have hurt you like It did-”

“No, don’t do that. I should know better than anyone not to propose hypotheticals about things that can’t be changed,” Eddie snapped, shaking his head vehemently. He twisted on the hammock, pulling his legs up to intermingle with Richie’s, but Richie turned his head away.

“The clown was counting on me to keep my secret.” Now that’s some cruel irony. I gave It all the power It needed over me, and Eddie nearly died because of it. Because of me. Giving a quaky laugh, Richie fixed his eyes on their entwined hands. “That damn clown loved to look like you, Eds. In the Well House, both times. It made me look at a version of you that was dying, blood everywhere. I guess it was just playing with my fear of losing you, huh? Then It tried to kill you, the real you, right in front of me. To make me look you dead in the eyes as you di…” He choked up on the word, unable to get it out. “But that summer, when we were kids, It showed up at my house – my house – looking just like you. No blood, no horror. I thought It was you…”

“Me?” Eddie breathed, confusion in his tone. “Since when were you scared of me?”

“I wasn’t. That’s the issue. It showed up at my house, seventy pounds soaking wet, just like the night you ran away. It was your spitting image, and It sure played the long con. Shit, I thought you and me…” His breath caught in his throat, his face blooming red. The memory rushed back to him from the depths of his mind, hazy as if from a dream. The clown had dug into his greatest desire and simultaneous greatest fear. It was the only time Richie had ever kissed a boy, and it had been that fucking cosmic horror. The memory of It’s jagged teeth still seemed to brush the contours of his neck, the clown paint which had rubbed off still clumpy on his skin – he thought he would never get it out.

“Oh…” Eddie breathed, feeling the blush warm his face as well. Suddenly, he was very aware of his hands enmeshed with Richie’s. As much as Richie felt that itch to pull away – to hide not just his hands, but all of him, beginning with the shit stirred up in his head – he held on for dear life.

Shakily, Richie huffed, “I thought I was living out one of my top ten fantasies. It was fucked up is what it was.”

“The clown tried to seduce you?” Although Richie would have expected a teasing tone for such a question, there was only seriousness to be found in Eddie’s voice.

“You can imagine my shock and horror when I figured it out.” Pausing for a moment, he wiped his arm across his face without letting go of Eddie’s hands. “It knew me better than I knew myself. It came to me as you and I almost let It get me. It would’ve been so easy for It to… But It decided to tease the terror out of me and let me stew in it.”

“I had something… similar happen to me.” Reluctance to speak had entered his tone, catching Richie’s ear. “But It wasn’t you. The leper-”

Richie scoffed in mock offense, but Eddie shushed him.

“It had nothing to do with you.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

Rolling his eyes, Eddie continued, “I didn’t tell anyone, because this time the leper spoke and I thought… I thought you would laugh.”

Richie started in surprise at that. “Since when has the clown been funny?”

“I’m asking you not to laugh now, Richie.”

In a rare serious voice, he swore, “I’m not laughing.”

Eyeing him, Eddie seemed to see something he trusted in Richie’s eyes, and muttered, “The leper chased me, and in an awful voice that sounded like it was right behind me, offered me a…” He glanced ashamedly down, unable to meet Richie’s eyes. “A blow job. First for a quarter, then a dime, then for nothing. I could feel its breath on the back of my ear. I heard its fly unzip. It almost caught me, raking its nails across my back, but all I cared about was staying out of its grasp. If it got a hold of me… I didn’t even feel the pain, I was so terrified. I thought, once it caught me…” He shuddered and closed his mouth. He didn’t need to elaborate, and felt in a way that if he did, it would become real again.

Never in his life had Richie wanted so much to face the clown and beat it to a pulp as in that moment. For a split second, he wished It alive again just to kill It, slower, more hideous, more excruciating. To make It feel what It had made them feel tenfold. Instead, he pulled Eddie to his chest and let the red seep out from his vision. “That fucking clown. It deserved worse than we gave It.”

“No argument here,” Eddie breathed into Richie’s shoulder. “I thought I was the only one the clown propositioned like that. I thought, like you said, the clown knew me better than I knew myself.”

“None of this changes the fact that I should’ve told you how I felt a long time ago.” Richie squeezed tighter against the shudder which coursed through Eddie’s body, wanting – needing – to protect him. Wrapped up in each other, in the hammock, in the fort, Eddie felt truly safe for the first time since their ultimate fight against the clown, unearthing the soothing sense that it was finally over. Not Richie, whose mind held firmly in memory and error. “If anything, this only makes it clearer to me.”

“We don’t know what would’ve happened if we did things differently.” Eddie pulled back from the embrace, forcing him to make eye contact. It wasn’t difficult - Richie was ensnared in the ferocity of Eddie’s eyes. “All I know is I don’t love you any less even twenty-seven years later.”

Fire scorched Richie’s insides, soft boiling him under Eddie’s intense gaze as these words assaulted his heart. Working to get a handle on himself, he spluttered, “Fuck, Eds. Were you practicing what to say while locked up?”

“Only a little,” Eddie admitted around a smirk which soon slid from his face. “But Myra…” A twinge of phantom pain stirred in his wound, reminiscent of her thumb pressed there. Wincing against this trivial sting, he pulled yet further away.

“You love her.” Richie said it with a nod, and to Eddie’s surprise, he took offense at this seeming accusation. Still, Richie mused on, “Of course you do, you married her.”

“Have you ever been married?”

Richie gave him a look.

“Right,” Eddie said with a small, mirthless chuckle. “I don’t think my marriage is what anyone would call normal.” He drew air quotes around the word and unconsciously rejoined his hands with Richie’s immediately after. “I don’t think most men marry a carbon copy of their mothers. I don’t think… I don’t think I do love her. Not as my wife.” The words echoed between them, bouncing off the walls Eddie had built around his heart, not as a defense but a prison harbouring the love he’d reserved for Sonia Kaspbrak and passed on, mutated and mangled, to Myra Kaspbrak. Only, the walls were breaking down, shining a light of truth in where he had coveted unreal love for so very long.

Richie met him with a soft regard. “That sounds like a tomorrow worry. For now, we’re here, we’re queer, and we have nothing to fear.” He smiled, proud of himself for the rhyme, but more so for the words themselves. This evening was turning out to be chock-full of self-acceptance, and he was starting to understand why people so vehemently advocated it.

“You’re a grade A dork, you know that?” Eddie pointed out. Richie threw a hand up to his forehead as if flabbergasted at the claim, and grinning, made a move as if to release his other hand’s hold on Eddie’s, but Eddie held onto him insistently. “Are you still planning on leaving Derry?”

“Eventually,” Richie muttered with an aimless shrug, and met Eddie with a smirk. “But that’s a tomorrow worry.”

“We have a lot of those, don’t we?” huffed Eddie, but a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He caught the flick of Richie’s eyes in this direction, rapt with the curve of his lips drawn up on one side. Something warm and light burrowed high in Eddie’s chest at Richie’s inadvertently soft gaze, his mouth parted ever so slightly. Eddie felt his Adam’s apple rise and fall with a dry gulp. “I think we can handle one more.”

“Hm?” Richie hummed, but found the noise stuck in his throat as Eddie leaned in toward him across the hammock, drawing Richie in closer by his hands. In that moment, as understanding dawned on him, Richie thought his heart would beat right out of his chest.

Stopping himself just a breath from Richie’s lips, Eddie haggardly pleaded, “Is it okay if I-?”

“Just kiss me, you coward,” Richie breathed, attempting a suave smile but failing in dumbfounded bliss. With his hands pinned to either side of him under Eddie’s warm palms, he felt Eddie’s smile against his before he realized Eddie had taken the plunge.

The hammock rocked, knocking them off balance, and suddenly, Richie was lit aflame, scorching hot under Eddie’s lips as he fell speedily backwards.

Now that’s some applaudable enthusiasm, Richie deliriously thought as his head met the comfortable support of the hammock. It swung, ropes creaking, under them, but that only added to the ride. Still, he strained his neck, chasing Eddie’s mouth, only to find Eddie had fallen forward after him, propped up on his hands – pinning Richie’s by his head - and knees – bookending Richie’s waist. Richie’s own legs were drawn up, his knees acting a seat for Eddie.

The look on Eddie’s face was priceless, a fleeting thing before Richie planted a kiss on his lips.

A haze of stupid ecstasy swept over Richie – washing away all doubts in his mind - at the loud, smooching peck he placed on Eddie’s lips, with heart fluttering high in his throat. Richie couldn’t help his gleeful laughter as he let his head fall back to the hammock, taken up with a self-satisfied smirk. Eddie wiped his mouth on his shoulder and shot him a sour look for the overexaggerated smooch – in such typical Richie Tozier fashion – but there was something more to that look.

Gazing up at him, Richie found a bold glint in the dark pools of his eyes. Eddie swooped in, slower this time, steadier, and met Richie’s lips with a gentle fervour. Richie’s own euphoric laughter funneled into his ears, muffled against Eddie’s mouth, but that was hardly where he kept his focus.

Mere minutes ago, he’d relished the shift in their dynamic that had simply allowed him to hold Eddie’s hands just for the sake of holding hands. He hadn’t imagined he would ever get that far, let alone get to kiss him. Now, he had Eddie all to himself, feeling the curve of his expressive mouth which had for so long teased him, mocked him, eluded him, tasting the intensity that was Eddie Kaspbrak for the first time, as he had long dreamed he would. The faceless fantasies of those twenty-seven years resurfaced now, given the only visage they had all along lacked.

Richie escaped Eddie’s hands to cup the nape of his neck and entangle his fingers in his hair, deepening the kiss as he slid his other hand up Eddie’s arm. He felt Eddie’s muscles twitch under his caressing touch, sending a tremble up to his shoulder and down his spine, a path Richie’s hand merrily traced to the small of Eddie’s back.

Eddie’s heavy breath warmed Richie’s face, fogging his glasses. Without a thought, Richie’s fingers fumbled to get them off, setting them on the little stand where Eddie had placed the flashlight. His knuckles knocked the little cylinder of light, sending it wobbling off the stand. The dim beam of light careened off to the side, flickered and went out, but neither Richie nor Eddie cared that they’d been pitched into all-consuming darkness. There was light enough in their heaving chests to make up for it with hands sculpting a blind imitation of sight in their happy wandering.

“Holy shit,” Richie huffed when Eddie pulled away to pepper his stubbly neck with kisses. “Maybe I died.”

“I don’t know about you, but I find death talk a real mood killer,” Eddie mocked against his Adam’s apple, shooting a bolt of electricity deep down into Richie’s gut.

“Mhm,” he moaned, nodding stiffly without impeding the good work Eddie was doing with his mouth. “Oh fuck, are you giving me a hickey?” A bubble of laughter escaped him, drunk with giddiness.

“Trying,” Eddie murmured against his throat, a wonderful vibration. Richie couldn’t help his hands tightening on Eddie’s waist, drawing him in closer. Eddie was just about straddling him, bent over him and latched onto his neck like a vampire.

Perhaps it was this line of thinking that led Richie to recognize the tangy, metallic smell of blood in the stale air of the fort, or maybe it was because Eddie’s minty breath was no longer directly in his face. Either way, the sharp scent found his nostrils, and Richie’s hands slackened.

“Eds? Are you bleeding?” He sat up straight, feeling Eddie wriggle upright in his lap, hands on his shoulders. They were practically chest-to-chest, Eddie’s thighs brushing either side of Richie’s waist, but neither man could see squat in this utter darkness.

“Shit, I am? Shit – where’d the flashlight roll?”

“What, so you don’t have a second one tucked neatly away in your fanny pack?”

Eddie pinched him in annoyance, not too hard but just enough for Richie to squirm and swat his hand away. “At least I thought to bring one.”

“Truly, the hero I deserve,” Richie sweetly chuckled and put on a mockingly suggestive voice. “I guess we’ll be playing doctor this evening?”

Eddie groaned, but moved in such a way, Richie could easily visualize his assenting shrug.

Grinning, Richie began, “Welcome to my office, Mister Kaspbrak. I take it you’ve come for your regular health check-up. Hey, Eds, could you do me a favour and make a glove-snapping noise? I assume you keep a box of them in your fanny pack-”

“Okay, that’s enough outta you,” Eddie interrupted, but Richie could hear the poorly concealed laughter in his voice. “Just do what you’re gonna do, dickwad.”

“You talk to your doctor that way?” Richie gasped in mock offense but before Eddie could come down on him, he patted Eddie’s thighs to indicate he would give up the act. With that, he found his way under Eddie’s shirt, moving slow enough for Eddie to stop him if he wished with his hands roving up to the bandage he knew he would find on his chest. Eddie inhaled sharply, halting Richie’s fingertips a moment from tracing the bandage’s hem.

“Oh,” Eddie whispered, a hint of sullen realization in his tone. “Myra might have… broken the stitches.”

“She what?” Richie breathed, although he heard him perfectly fine. No matter that the room was pitch black, a tinge of red from earlier trickled back into his empty vision. “On purpose?”

Eddie’s whole body moved – he slid slightly down Richie’s thighs – with his head nod.

Astounded, Richie spouted, “And you let me convince you to jump out a second-story window?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying!”

“Shit, man, I didn’t think she’d hurt you.”

“So you just assumed she asked me nicely and I, what, walked myself into the bathroom?”

“Yeah, kinda.” He could just about feel the daggers Eddie glared at him, but that was the least of his concerns. His fingers splayed gently on Eddie’s chest, itching to wipe the blood – the hurt – away. “So, what do we do about this? Do we consult the fanny pack of convenience?”

“I guess we can,” Eddie mused, shifting in Richie’s lap in such a way, an electric sensation rolled low in Richie’s gut. “I should have something for this.”

First to drift off was Eddie, lying with his head on Richie’s chest and Richie’s arms wrapped around him. After incalculable minutes simply taking in the bliss of the moment, Richie pressed a kiss to Eddie’s forehead – in his sleep, Eddie snuggled blearily closer - and followed him to the land of dreams. He couldn’t help thinking his had already come true and was furthermore astounded when such a cheesy line didn’t even make him cringe internally.

Morning arrived in the blink of an eye and with it came trickling streams of sunlight piercing through the ceiling to illuminate the fort.

Eddie woke softly to this haze of filtered sunlight, and to a wonderful cologne mixed with the earthy scent of the underground fort. He was still half-asleep as he pursed his lips and pressed a kiss to the smell of Richie. Slowly, his head cleared of the blissful remnants of sleep and the euphoria of the night before, becoming crisp and sharp with tomorrow’s worries. He found his face nuzzled in the crook between Richie's neck and shoulder, his morning stubble scratchy against Eddie's lips. Under him, Richie sighed in his sleep, holding him tighter, and Eddie's eyes snapped open.

Eddie's arms were folded between himself and Richie’s chest, whose sleeping grip clutched him like a teddy bear to his body, both hands splayed over Eddie's back. Eddie's first reaction was hardly his own, the ghost of his mother's voice shouting in his head, Get off that Tozier boy! Without even thinking about it, he obeyed.

Careful not wake him, Eddie moved his hands slowly out from under him and bunched either edge of the hammock in his grips, feeling Richie's slow, deep breaths of sleep - the gentle thrumming of his heart at peace - against the soft line of clothing separating them. The hammock wobbled slightly in his unsteady push-up from Richie's chest, letting Richie's loose embrace slip down his back. An electric shiver traced down in the wake of Richie's hands.

Steadying himself, Eddie pulled a leg up on the hammock, planting his knee in the middle of the unsteady bed with his thigh pressing up between Richie's. The other man made a sound deep in his throat, eyes fluttering in sleep. Oh shit, Eddie mused, but he held still for a moment, watching Richie's eyelids flicker with quiet fascination. His heart banged in his chest, gazing down at Richie like this - his lips were slightly parted, soft and still a little bruised-looking from last night. Eddie's arms trembled, and not from the plank he held over Richie's slumbering body. There would be no getting out of the hammock without waking him.

He stopped himself. But I don’t ever want to leave this hammock, he realized, this time in his own voice. To see the rare softness of tranquility leave Richie's face, becoming worn and rough again with consciousness. To stop feeling the warmth beneath him, the heady tingle roving up and down his spine at the smallest movement, the chiming, almost painful, delight burgeoning in his chest. He would be content to sleep a little longer like this, or simply lie here for just as long, savouring Richie's embrace.

His mother's emphatic No! resounded in his head, fading out to nothing. Soon, he couldn't hear her at all. Then it was just him. His wants, his desires, his agency. Eddie’s heart raced against his ribs as he hovered over Richie much in the same way he had last night, unsure which way to go.

Finally, he made up his mind, and so came the small matter of figuring out how to settle back down on the hammock. Neither his mother nor Myra had earned the place to command him against his own heart.

Eddie's face was getting warmer now as he tried to work out in his head how he could have possibly fallen asleep in the same hammock as the man he'd kissed, in the arms of the man he loved, and not combusted into flames. It was probably only possible in the dark, but seeing him now with flecks of morning sunlight dancing across his face from the ceiling - the peace captured there without his glasses’ thick rims to block the view - and slices of it catching on his waves of dark, messy hair... He was mesmerizing.

Lowering himself again to Richie's chest, he felt Richie's warm breath tousling the top of his hair. Belly-to-belly, Eddie's knee slid down in the fabric of the hammock before he could stop it, the top of his thigh pressing against Richie's groin - an electric shock trembled low in Eddie's abdomen.

In his sleep, Richie squeezed both legs tighter around Eddie's thigh, an automatic reaction stopping Eddie rubbing up against him but simultaneously drawing him in closer, and only seemed to loosen up when Eddie was all hot and cold, his hands clammy and his breath short. This was not at all what he’d meant to do.

Eddie hesitated to rest his head on Richie's chest like before, wondering if his furious blushing would burn Richie as much as it burned his face. On that note, he wondered if the pounding of his heart rattling his ribcage would wake Richie – or wake all of Derry, for that matter - but his calm, slow breathing continued, chest rising and falling cathartically. Even this managed to send small charges through Eddie while they were chest to chest.

He wasn't sure what to do with his hands now that he had moved them, wary to put them just anywhere on Richie. He crossed his arms under his head, chin resting on his forearms, and smiled, feeling the absurdity of gazing so fondly up at Richie like the lovestruck teenager he never got to be.

Lying flat on top of him with his right thigh caught between Richie's – he was extremely conscious of how this would look when Richie did wake up - he couldn't get it out of his head that he had to change positions. Except, in a perfect catch-22, to do so would risk waking him. It’s only fair, he reasoned with himself, considering the effect Richie's heady cologne had on him, refusing Eddie to sleep and filling his head with ideas he couldn't allow himself to indulge, all the harder not to with Richie straddling his leg.

Thinking slow movement his best option, Eddie painstakingly squirmed and wiggled on top of Richie until he'd managed to turn over - careful so as not to jostle the hammock too much - and finally lay on his back atop Richie's chest, his leg free at last.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when he felt Richie's hands on his hips, moving him just slightly down until his ass was on the hammock between Richie's legs as opposed to - Fuck, I'm an idiot! - what was essentially a free lap dance. Richie's breath tingled on the back of his neck with his sleepily moaned, "Eds... Do you have any idea what you're doing to me?"

Fire burst under Eddie's skin, burning yet hotter as Richie's palms traced up from his hips, following the V of his quivering abdomen to meet over his navel, and clasped over his chest where he could surely feel the flight of Eddie's heart. He drummed his fingers on Eddie's chest, matching the rhythm, and Richie's chest bucked under Eddie's head with a husky chuckle, barely awake. He pressed a sleepy kiss to the top of Eddie's head.

"Mornin' sunshine," he said in one of his overexaggerated Voices.

"Can I veto that before I have to wake up to it every morning?" Eddie was teasing before he'd even realized the implication. Richie was quick to catch it.

"Every morning, huh?" he mocked, except there was a slight breathiness in his tone, like wonder. "I'll be sure to spruce it up, then. Keep it interesting. Some nights, maybe I’ll do the risk analysis and you’ll be under the desk.”

Blushing furiously, Eddie gave a feeble, “Shut up, Richie.”

But he was on a roll, and proudly proclaimed, “You won't ever say Richie Tozier was predictable!” with a fist thrown to the heavens. Laughing, Eddie grabbed for his arm, wrestling him out of his pretentiously heroic pose and restraining his arm tight against his chest.

“Beep beep, Richie!” Eddie managed through his laughter, and Richie acquiesced, happy enough just to wrap his arms around him. Eddie crossed his own over Richie’s, tracing absent-minded patterns over the backs of his hands.

Smiling into the top of his hair, Richie noted, “You know, this is the most well-rested I’ve felt in weeks.”

“Really? In a place like this?” Eddie tsked, shaking his head in mock scorn, only to notice the state of the bug-infested hole in the ground in which they’d spent the night and see for himself the truth in his words. His eyes flashed wide open, his mouth hanging agape, and he pointed a finger in horror at all the signs of creepy crawlies and rotten wood permeating the fort. “There could be fungus spores just hanging in the musty air down here! Mold! And the bugs! They could’ve crawled in our ears, or – or lice in our hair, or ticks under our clothes! Oh fuck, Rich, grey water from the sewers could’ve dripped through the ceiling on us! Shit, I think I felt a bug on me! Why did we sleep here?”

“I don’t know about you, but there’s a bug on me,” Richie chuckled, and poked Eddie’s sides. “You wanna know what kind?”

Guessing where he was going with this, Eddie moaned, “Don’t you dare-”

“A lovebug,” Richie ironically sang, and squeezed him close, rubbing his face in Eddie’s hair like a child with his favourite teddy bear.

As much as Eddie wanted to be annoyed, he could only laugh as he battled Richie’s snuggling embrace, cackling, “Dork!”

In all their playful tussling, the hammock ropes gave one final, desperate creak and snapped first at the end by their feet, followed swiftly by the ropes above their heads. Richie’s ass hit the floor to the detriment of yesterday’s bruising, stirring up a mushroom cloud of dust around him as he let out an unceremonious, “Oof!” Then came Eddie’s weight crashing down atop him, his head pummelling Richie with a double bounce, right in the diaphragm. All the breath rushed out from his lungs, staggered with hiccupping laughter, and he shoved Eddie off himself. “That’s-” Wheeze. “-twice now!”

“Sorry,” Eddie snickered, pushing up to a sit as his shoulders shook with laughter. “But you make a great landing cushion.”

“Uh-huh. Are you calling me a bottom-?” Richie’s phone buzzed in his pocket, catching his attention. With a lethargic groan, he pulled it out to find a series of texts filling up the screen. This, the first of a series of reality checks. “What the hell?” he muttered, sitting up to grab his glasses and peer down at his phone.

“Who is it?”

“Bev,” he murmured, skimming her messages. He winced, glancing up under his eyelashes to meet Eddie’s curious glance. “So, uh, looks like Myra’s got a search party out for you. They’re combing the Barrens.”

“Fuck,” Eddie groaned, kneading his palms over his eyes.

Averting his gaze, Richie resorted instead to reading off his texts, “She apparently called all the Losers early this morning when you hadn’t come back.” Shooting him a fleeting grin, he added, “Personally, I’m offended she didn’t try me,” before getting back to the topic at hand, “Says she sounded hysterical, raving that she thought you might’ve gone back to the Kissing Bridge and fallen over the railing-” He choked on his words, eyes catching on the last of Bev’s texts. The first read,

Hold onto him and don’t let go, Richie. You deserve to be happy together. We’ve known how you feel, at least since the Well House, and you should know that it doesn’t change anything. The rest of the Losers’ Club has your backs. Now and forever.

And the final, sent two minutes later and the responsible party for catching his attention in the first place, read,

We love your love.

It was such a simple message, but tears sprung to Richie’s eyes. In the sort of hindsight brought on by happiness, one’s former doubts seemed a fever dream of dark thoughts and weakness. Now at least, he had something tangible to fight back against the ambush of darkness when it crowded in around him on all sides. Clicking the lock and home buttons simultaneously, Richie screenshotted her messages. Hell, he would’ve printed them and taped them to the inside of his wallet right then and there if he could.

Unsure how to respond, the best he could think to send back without letting his instinct to mask all sincerity with jokes was,

Thanks that means a lot

He wavered over the send button, but pressed, and immediately followed up with,

<3

Second guessing himself, he was about to send a graphic novel of emojis to help illustrate the cacophony of radiant feelings currently raving in his heart, but Eddie asked, “Richie?” and he was drawn back to the present moment.

“Oh, right. We should head back to the others.” He yawned like a cat, using this as an excuse to raise his hands and wipe the moisture from his eyes. “Regroup with Luke, Han, Leia and Chewie before Myra’s stormtroopers get the drop on us, ya know?”

“Shut up,” Eddie chuckled, coming to a stand. He stretched his arms high over his head, yawning as well. His shirt rode up to reveal a sliver of skin over his abdomen Richie would have delighted to kiss. Instead, Richie sat up with his elbows propped over his knees and a dopey in love expression on his face. Eddie dropped the stretch, musing, “Does that make you and me C3PO and R2-D2?”

“There’s no question you’re C3PO. The resemblance is uncanny.”

They wandered the Barrens in jovial company, hushing each other’s laughter and shushing the other’s jokes whenever one heard a branch snap in the woods. Even with Bev’s warning weighing on their minds, conveying the threat of being found by all those Myra had decided to involve in her hunt for Eddie, the two men had all too easy a time becoming enwreathed in each others’ affections. Or so it was, only until they noticed the familiar sewers by which they passed. Not by threat of a stubborn gale shoving against the mountain they’d already climbed in the rediscovery of their love, but by the memory of what had once lived therein, deep in the grey waters and tittering darkness, only this haunting memory was enough to shut them up.

Richie’s skin crawled as he averted his gaze from the sewer’s dark maw, loitering just along the edge of his vision, beckoning him to give into the paranoia nestled so deep in his being as never to be removed. The instinct to look over his shoulder at every opportunity, if only to catch a fleeting glimpse of the thing that would devour him no matter his efforts, no matter his precautions. He felt It like a tangible thing, alive in his memory and perched just outside his field of view. Awaiting him in the dark.

“Richie…” Eddie croaked. His own gaze was fixed forward like Richie’s, refusing to acknowledge the demise he so narrowly averted in the depths of this sewer system. “It can’t come after us anymore.”

“I know, Eds.”

But the foliage overhead veiled all sunlight, casting them in the kind of shadow that made tree branches into fingers reaching out to them, the papery bark white too similar to the clown’s gloves. Even the babbling brook echoed with the clown’s laughter.

“We’re gonna be fucked up forever, huh?” Richie muttered as they hastened up the hill together, helping each other along. They didn’t care that their shoes were caked in mud, the knees of their pants sopping wet and their hands slimy with mire by the time they reached the fence of the Kissing Bridge off which Richie had parked his car last night. Anything to escape all the faster the Hell that lay beneath.

“Better than dead?” Eddie uneasily answered, and Richie couldn’t help but give a small laugh. Memory of waiting in his hospital room coloured the laugh an uneasy hue, but he bumped Eddie’s shoulder and clasped his hand, hearing the muck squelch between their palms. At the sound and slick feeling, Eddie screwed up his face in a frown, loudly complaining, “Ugh, gross-!” but Richie leaned in close with a grin.

“So, you’re telling me kicking the bucket’s a hypochondriac’s worst nightmare, even over filling that bucket with, say-”

“Don’t-! Richie, don’t even start. I don’t wanna hear it.”

Richie cackled, squeezing his hand again, but Eddie stopped dead in his tracks at the end of the road near the shoulder where Richie had parked. At first, Richie figured this must have been his protest against the muddy adhesive suctioning their palms together, but then he saw what Eddie had. A second vehicle, recognizably Eddie’s, and a certain familiar silhouette loitering by Richie’s car. For a moment, she brought Eddie’s mother to mind, only for Richie to realize with a start, Myra Kaspbrak had found them. Or, more accurately, ambushed them.

She waited at the car with the patience of an animal trapper, letting her prey come to her, but she had her back to Eddie and Richie and didn’t seem to have noticed their approach.

“Fuck,” Eddie whispered under his breath, pulling his hand out of Richie’s and wiping the mud off on his jeans. Even after everything, Richie felt his heart plummet.

He measured his voice so as not to let his overthinking leak into speech. “You knew you’d have to talk to her sooner or later.”

“Yeah, later! I was hoping it’d be a phone call, or maybe over e-mail-”

“E-mail? I almost pity the lady-”

“Not helping.”

As if sensing her husband nearby, Myra spun on her kitten heels to face the two men across the width of Richie’s car. She blanched at the sight of Eddie and flicked her eyes toward Richie. The momentary concern that had furrowed her brows and pouted her lips warped grotesquely into anger, filling in double the colour until she was tomato red in the face.

“I knew it, I just knew it!” she began in that shrill voice of hers. Richie wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard her calm, or if she simply reserved her eruptions for him. But Richie held his tongue for once in his life, giving Eddie room to speak for himself. “What were you doing out here with him, Eddie-bear? Don’t you know how worried you made me-?”

“Stop it, Myra,” Eddie interrupted, anger glinting in his doe-brown eyes. “You locked me in the bathroom. You hurt me. Stop pretending you were ever worried about me when-” He audibly gulped. “-when you’ve only ever been worried about yourself!”

She raked in a gasp like he’d struck her, and Richie had to stifle the urge to give a play-by-play commentary.

Eyes round and watery, her pleading gaze flitted between the both of them as if expecting one to step up in her defense, as if the anguish she painted on her face was enough to overwrite all that had happened. “You- you can’t talk to me like that! I’m your wife! Your wife, and what is he? Your little fairy fantasy? Nothing but a backwoods fa-”

“Shut up!” Eddie shouted like a clap of thunder. She fell back a step in the wake of his voice, silence gathering in its absence.

For a long moment, like a painful eternity, only the rustling of leaves from the surrounding trees funnelled into Richie’s ears. He wanted to reach for Eddie’s hand again, to quell the tremor he could see in his fingertips, but Richie refrained. He could feel something bigger boiling to Eddie’s surface, and wouldn’t dare stifle him.

“I’ve spent my whole life saying nothing, letting people like you and my mother do all the talking— all the thinking for me. Well I’m done!” The boughs looming overhead quivered with the incredible force of his words, as if struck by the tidal wave of everything Eddie had bottled up throughout his life, now finally set free. “I don’t need you talking for me, I don’t need you shoving prescriptions in my face, I don’t need you deciding what’s best for me! I don’t need-! I… I don’t need you.”

When Eddie’s voice quavered, Richie couldn’t refrain any longer. He slid his hand down Eddie’s palm to find the spaces between Eddie’s fingers and squeezed quiet affirmation into the shaking man. Eddie squeezed back, an automatic response, and his panicky breathing calmed some.

The blood rushed to Myra’s face at this display, red, blotchy, and ugly. She could have huffed and puffed the whole forest down for all her indignant wheezing, a blind rage sending her forward, kicking up autumn leaves with an index finger jabbed out toward her husband. “I knew…” she snarled, throat catching on fury, “I knew this would happen if you came back here!”

Eddie glanced sidelong toward Richie, confusion knotting his brow as the two stepped swiftly back from the raving madwoman in front of them. “How could you know? I could barely remember Derry-”

“Like you forget all your night terrors? Who do you think took care of you, Eddie-bear? Who held you as you screamed and begged It to stop? To leave you alone? While you cried out for that—that Richie Tozier?” She sneered his name as if it were a curse, sour on her tongue and thrown from her lungs. “It was me who took care of you! Not him!”

“I…?” Eddie faltered for words, his hand tightening around Richie’s. He couldn’t remember anything of which she spoke.

“I knew what was on the Kissing Bridge,” she trilled, a lunatic note playing on her voice, pitched just slightly too high, too off. An unnerving glint had entered her eyes, all too reminiscent of Henry Bowers. “Of course, you only ever whimpered about it. The carving you left for him. How can’t you see, I was worried for you, Eddie-bear! You would rave about these impossible things like you were retelling a story! The same story, night after night! Like you’d rehearsed it! I had no other choice!”

“No choice…?” He struggled to form words against the dryness in his mouth. “What did you do?”

“Nothing bad!” she insisted, a sing-song intonation pleading his understanding as she edged ever closer, hands reaching out to him, “You remember the sleep study, don’t you?”

“For my sleep apnea-”

“Oh darling, I didn’t want to scare you.” She spoke over him, a twinge of guilt flickering over her expression with a fleeting wince. “But you would have developed sleep apnea eventually. It was only a matter of time with your asthma-”

“The asthma was a lie!” Another thunderous clap, halting Myra in her frantic approach. He shook his head, bringing his other hand to his brow for the bewilderment behind his eyes. “What did you do?!”

“Don’t you dare raise your voice at me!” she cried, shaking her head so her wispy hair flung side to side. “Don’t, Eddie-bear. You’re hurting me-”

“Myra,” he warned, voice low. “Tell me.”

She slipped back a step, pulling her hands in against her chest with thumbs rubbing her knuckles. “Well, darling, don’t get mad at me. During the sleep study, I called my cousin. She’s a hypnotist-”

“You didn’t,” he practically begged, fresh exhaustion carving lines beneath his eyes.

“What was I supposed to do, my sweet? You don’t know what you put me through! Every night-!” She caught herself on a hiccupping sob, casting an unsettled itch under Richie’s skin for the obvious performance of it all. “All she did was put you in a trance – oh, darling, you were so peaceful – and we finally got you talking about your childhood. You know how much you worried me, that you could never remember anything-”

Eddie released Richie’s hand to pace the empty road, throwing both hands to his face with the meat of his palms pressing his eyes. “No, no, no, no- You never told me any of this!”

“I couldn’t!” she wailed, “She dug up such awful nightmares. They couldn’t have been true. It would have only upset you to hear how sick your mind had become-”

He shot her a scathing glare, stifling her words in her toad-like throat. “You hid it from me. If you’d told me— if I knew about Derry sooner— Stan might not have-” He choked on his words, and threw his hands up again, as if trying to squeeze out the ball of confusion unraveling in his head.

“You said so many things about your friends, I didn’t know what to believe. But there was one in particular, one who seemed-” She slid a deadly glare toward Richie, meeting his eyes for the first time with daggers in her own, only to blanch upon catching sight of the shapely bruise on his neck, which he was quick to cover under his free hand, raking breath back between gritted teeth. “-like more than a friend. Can’t you see that you were sick, Eddie-bear? That you still are? Just… just sit in the car with me. I’ve packed everything up, it’s all in the trunk, I’ve done everything for you, so you don’t have to. I’ll take you home.” Her voice wobbled. “It’ll all be better once we’re back home-”

“That’s enough, Myra,” he snapped, voice like the crack of a whip, but she flew into hysterics, stumbling forward with big, alligator tears in her eyes.

"No, Eddie, no. You're going to get in the car! You're going to get in, because you do need me. You'll always need me, Eddie-bear, you don't know how much I do for you! How much you need done for you! Do you really think this fruit will do even half of what I do for you? I'm all you have-!"

“That's just not true. None of it. You've never done a single thing for me that wasn't really just for you."

"How can you say that?" she whined, but Eddie turned away from her.

"Richie?” He extended his hand once again, beckoning Richie to his side. There was no hesitation, Richie’s fingers interlocked with Eddie’s as naturally as a key fit its lock.

“No,” Myra moaned, trudging through the fallen leaves on the asphalt, “No- no- no! I won’t ask you again! Get in the car!”

“I’m getting in a car,” he snapped in return, striding blatantly past his own with Richie in tow. They were headed for Richie’s car, and no matter the tension in the air, a wave of relief knocked into Richie yet again for the confirmation he found in this. Time and again, it was so natural for him not to expect it. That Eddie would choose him. That Eddie had chosen him and would continue choosing him.

“Eddie!” Myra shrieked, voice so shrill, it left Richie’s ears ringing. “I said, I won’t ask again! If you get in that car-” The ghost of a threat haunted her tone, but she floundered for words. She had nothing left to hold over him.

“Rich?” Eddie puffed, his voice tight, and Richie immediately understood his meaning. He busied himself with the fob in his pocket, fumbling to unlock his car for a speedy getaway. Myra had everything of Eddie’s locked up in the trunk of Eddie’s own car, but none of that mattered. Richie would get Eddie away from here, away from the very things that had tightened his lungs, closed up his throat, and feigned the life-threatening asthma so often used against him.

All that mattered now was that Richie took him away to the life they had almost missed out on, entirely.

Briefly, his eyes caught on the carvings at the Kissing Bridge, but then Myra was wailing slurs, slamming the sides of her fists down on the hood of the car and crowding the window after Eddie, but Eddie refused to look at her, to see the desperation she painted upon her face for him.

“All aboard the express trip out of Derry,” Richie said as he landed in the driver’s seat and turned the keys in the ignition. 

Eddie slid into the passenger, shrinking from the scene Myra threw out his window, and met Richie’s eyes across the center console. Against all odds, he smiled, no matter the ringing in his ears nor the pounding of his heart. “Looks like we really are getting out of here."

"Together.”

Richie figured he should have pitied the woman bawling like a dying cat as her flailing feet banged dents into the side of his car and wild hands yanked incessantly on the passenger side handle, but he couldn't stifle his small, triumphant smile as he pulled onto the road. He pressed a hand to the middle of the wheel, sounding off a staccato beep beep.

"Richie..." Eddie sighed, but he punctuated this amused exasperation with a hiccup of laughter. The road beckoned them, and with Derry in the rearview mirror, they had not only survived but escaped the evils which had long lain there. Together.