Archive of Our Own

Beverly leaving town feels like a bigger deal than it should do, maybe – they hadn’t even known her all that long, just one summer really, and what’s that in the grand scheme of things? But Richie guesses that fighting a demon clown in the sewers has a way of bonding people together, because her absence feels like a knife to the gut and she’s only been gone a few days.

The cut on his palm still throbs, and he imagines he can feel his friends’ blood flowing through his veins, even though he’s old enough to know that it’s not physically possible. He feels strange in the wake of their victory; jittery and off-kilter, unable to relax. Already the memories of what happened in the sewers are starting to fade from his mind, and he doesn’t even know whether that’s a good thing or not. Even listening to his favorite music doesn’t help, like It is somehow taunting him through the lyrics. The spider man is having me for dinner tonight, Robert Smith croons, and he shudders with revulsion, barely resisting the urge to fling his cassette player across the room.

More than anything – though he’d almost rather go another round with the clown than admit it – he doesn’t want to be alone, which is probably why he finds himself knocking on Eddie’s bedroom window at approximately 1:46 am, balanced precariously in the uppermost branches of a large tree outside the Kaspbrak residence.

“What the fuck, Richie?” Eddie hisses as he opens the window, blinking the sleep from his eyes. He hauls Richie bodily into his room; he’s surprisingly strong for his size, especially considering he’s only got one good arm to work with. “Do you know how many kids die every year from falling out of trees? You could have broken your stupid neck.”

Richie grins his most obnoxious grin as he thuds onto Eddie’s bedroom floor, shoving his glasses up his nose and gathering himself into a sitting position. “Aww, Eds. I didn’t know you cared.”

"How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that?” Eddie says.“And I don’t care, I just don’t want you to wake my mother up by smashing your skull all over the driveway. I'm already on house arrest; she might actually kill me if she found out you'd gotten in here. She'd definitely kill you."

“Worry not, fair maiden, for I have slain the evil dragon and come to rescue you from your tower,” Richie announces with a dramatic flourish. Eddie looks distinctly unimpressed, so he waits a beat before elaborating: “See, the dragon is your mom –“

“Oh my God, shut up.” Eddie flops down on the bed, pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s trying to ward off a headache. “What are you even doing here?”

“What, a guy can’t just drop by to visit his buddy all of a sudden?”

“By climbing through in through their window at two in the morning? Not unless something's on fire.”

Richie shrugs, feeling unbearably self-conscious all of a sudden. “Couldn’t sleep, you know? Every time I close my eyes I start remembering all this fucked up shit, and I’m not even sure how much of it really happened.”

Eddie softens just slightly, his expression turning into something that wants to stay pissed off but can’t quite manage it. It makes Richie want to pinch his cheek, ruffle his hair.

(He always wants to do those things to Eddie, lately. He tries not to think too hard about what that says about him.)

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Eddie mutters. “What are your nightmares about?”

“Your mom’s vagina,” he says – and okay, so it isn’t his most original material, but he’s had a lot on his mind lately. Sue him. “It has teeth.”

Eddie scowls and punches his arm lightly. “I’m being serious, dick.”

“Yeah, so am I,” Richie says. “I don’t know, I don’t fucking remember, okay?”

That isn’t the whole truth, either. He remembers enough. Sometimes it’s the clown, the sewers, too many teeth gleaming in the dark. Mostly, though, he dreams about that fucking house on Neibolt Street, hearing Eddie scream in the distance and never being able to reach him.

(The ones where they do find him are the worst. The ones where he and Bill are too late and Eddie is already dead, torn apart like Betty Ripsom, like Georgie.)

Eddie doesn’t look convinced, but for once he doesn’t push it, either. He picks absently at his cast and Richie winces as he remembers the unnatural angle of his arm, the awful crunch as he’d snapped the bones back into place. Don’t fucking touch me, Eddie had practically screamed at him, but he’d clung to Richie as they guided him out of the house on unsteady legs, trusting Richie to keep him upright as they made their way to relative safety.

The LOSER with its hastily scribbled red V still stands out on his cast, stark black lines against white plaster, but there are other signatures there now, too. Richie can make out Stan’s precise lettering, a farewell from Bev written in her looping cursive. His own message is practically unreadable, scrawled messily in a corner up near the elbow, but Richie can recall what it says from memory. My dearest darling Eddie Spaghetti, best hope you’re all fixed up soon, you’re gonna need your jerking arm back. Love your best pal Rich. Then he’d started doodling little cartoon hearts in red marker pen before Eddie realized what he was doing and yanked his arm away, sending a line of ink veering wildly over the cast until it collided with Ben’s signature.

The slice in Richie’s palm starts stinging again and he rubs at it without really thinking. It only serves to irritate the barely-healed wound even further, but he finds that the pain helps to ground him, keeps him in the here and now.

We did it. We won.

“Don’t mess with that, you’ll get it infected,” Eddie snaps, and Richie blinks at him from his position on the floor. “Did you even clean it properly?”

“Yes, mom,” Richie says sarcastically. “I even used those stupid antiseptic wipes you gave me and everything.” He glances at Eddie’s own hand, which is – of course – swaddled in a pristine white bandage. “How much did your mom freak when she saw that, anyway?”

“She hasn’t said anything to me for about three days. Which is probably for the best, seeing as how she’s been lying to me my entire life, but she just keeps looking at me instead, like she’s about to start crying or something.”

“Sorry, Eds,” Richie says, and means it. Eddie hasn’t told him exactly what went down that night he defied his mom to rescue Bev from the sewers, but it’s enough that Richie is able to fill in most of the blanks. He feels a rush of honest-to-god hate, sudden and sharp, towards Mrs. Kaspbrak for what she’s done to Eddie. Richie’s own folks aren’t exactly winning any Parent of the Year awards any time soon, but at least they don’t have him convinced that he could drop down dead at any given moment if he so much as gets a cold. “That sucks.”

Eddie makes a noise of agreement that turns into a yawn halfway through, and suddenly Richie’s acutely aware of the late hour, feeling that he’s overstayed his welcome. He makes as though to leave the way he’d came but Eddie grabs his wrist to stop him, looking at him like he’s lost his mind.

“You’re not climbing back down there, are you crazy? You’re staying here tonight. You can leave when it’s actually light out.”

“I don’t know,” Richie says doubtfully. “Will you still respect me in the morning?”

Eddie groans and buries his face in the covers. “Just shut the fuck up and get in bed before I change my mind.”

Richie does as he’s told, climbing gingerly onto the mattress beside Eddie, sliding under the covers and trying to ignore his flaming cheeks. It’s not like it’s the first time they’ve ever shared a bed – more often than not the whole gang ends up tangled together in one big pile whenever they have one of their sleepovers – but this seems different. He could never do this with any of their other friends. He’s known Stan the longest, and he’d follow Bill to the ends of the earth, but Eddie is in a class all of his own. Eddie gets him; not just the over-the-top, jokey façade he presents to the world, but the fragile, squishy bit underneath that he tries to keep hidden, and he’s too old to be running to Eddie like a little kid every time he has a goddamn nightmare, but he can’t quite bring himself to feel bad about it. Not when he’s positive that Eddie needs this as much as he does.

Richie takes off his glasses, setting them on the bedside table as Eddie turns out the nightlight, and it’s a little easier to be breathe when he can’t actually see anything. Eddie doesn’t talk, but he takes Richie’s hand and grips it tightly in the dark, for once not complaining about how clammy his palms are. Richie holds on tight and doesn’t think about anything save for the warmth of Eddie’s small body next to his, the reassuring asthmatic wheeze of his breath.

We won. We did it. We’re alive.

--

School starts up again, and things more or less go back to normal, at least on the surface. Beverly doesn’t call or write them like she’d promised; Ben takes it the hardest, but they all pretend not to be sore about it. Richie thinks again that a single summer isn’t really a long time to have hung out with someone, and Bev would probably just as soon forget all about Derry than relive everything they went through. If that’s the case, he can’t exactly blame her.

As it is, they all go about their business, acting like everything is fine as much as they possibly can. School, at least, is a little easier with Bowers and Hockstetter out of the picture. The remaining members of the their little gang still glare at them when they pass in the corridors, but without their leader and resident psycho they don’t seem entirely sure what to do with themselves. Cut off the head of the snake, Richie thinks, and smirks to himself.

The rest of it is more difficult to deal with, mostly because remembering exactly what happened gets harder and harder with each passing day. Richie is left with nothing more than vague, fleeting impressions: Beverly suspended in mid-air with a glazed look on her face, the thud of a baseball bat against the monster’s skull, only wait, did that really happen? Surely, surely it was just some awful, too-vivid nightmare, but then he’ll see an open storm drain, some leftover balloons from a kids’ birthday party, and panic will squeeze his chest like a vice.

He sees it in the others, too: in the way Bill’s stutter is more pronounced than ever, the way Stan stares a little too hard at his face in the mirror sometimes, at the scars that none of them can quite remember how he got. One day he catches Eddie gasping and wheezing in the bathrooms at school, and Richie doesn’t even think about it; he grabs Eddie’s face between his hands and forces the other boy to breathe in sync with him, acting on some kind of muscle memory he barely understands.

“Where’s your inhaler?” He asks, once Eddie’s breathing has slowed enough to no longer be a cause for alarm. Eddie glances away, briefly shamefaced.

“I threw it out,” he says, looking back at Richie with a defiant glint in his eye. “It’s bullshit, I probably never even had asthma in the first place.”

“You picked a hell of a time to test that theory out,” Richie mutters, because they don’t yet know about things like panic attacks and psychosomatic symptoms, but Eddie is nothing if not stubborn when he wants to be. He realizes absently that he still has his hands on Eddie’s face, thumbs stroking over his cheekbones in a soothing circular motion, and lets go of him like he’s been burned.

“What, uh – what’s got you so spooked, anyway?” He asks, ignoring the almost disappointed look that flits briefly over Eddie’s features. He’s pretty sure he imagined it, anyway.

“I couldn’t remember how I broke my arm,” Eddie admits, rubbing self-consciously at the stretch of forearm where his cast had been until a week ago, the skin there still paler than the rest of him. “I remember the pain, and being in the hospital, but whenever I try to think about how it happened, there’s just… nothing. I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind.”

Richie swallows uneasily, remembers Eddie cowering on the floor, the sick snap of bone, “it isn’t real, it can’t hurt us,” and the wrongness of it sits heavy and sour in his gut.

“What are you talking about? Henry Bowers broke your arm, remember?” That doesn’t feel right either, but it’s the only explanation he can think of.

“Henry Bowers, right,” Eddie says flatly. “And what exactly happened to him, again?”

“I don’t know. And to be honest, so long as he’s nowhere near us, I really don’t give a fuck,” Richie bursts out, unable to stop his voice from wavering. “What’s going on, Eds, really? You’re kind of scaring me here.”

“You should be scared!” Eddie practically yells, only lowering his voice to a furious hiss when Richie makes a desperate shushing motion, not wanting any of their classmates or teacher to walk in on this little scene. “Everything’s wrong, Richie, nothing makes sense. I think something happened to us this summer, something bad, and don’t you dare tell me I’m being crazy or dramatic because I know you feel it too!”

“You’re not. I mean, you’re always a little dramatic,” Richie teases, and it’s worth it for the withering glare Eddie throws his way, “but you’re not crazy. And you’re right, I do feel it. I think we all do.” They just don’t talk about it, because that’s probably the only thing keeping them from stark-raving insanity, but he doesn’t say that.

“I don’t want to remember,” Eddie says quietly, “but I’m scared of forgetting, too. What the fuck are we supposed to do, Rich?”

Eddie is staring at him like he can make everything better, and Richie kind of fucking hates it because Eddie isn’t supposed to look at him like that, nobody is. Bill is the one with all the answers; Richie’s just the comic relief guy.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Just keep on keeping on, I guess.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Eddie actually laughs at that - a dry thing that’s utterly devoid of humor, but a laugh all the same. “Thanks, Richie, that’s very profound. You should get that put on a t-shirt or something.”

“Seriously?” Richie demands, feigning indignation because this, at least, is familiar; at least if Eddie is making fun of him, he isn’t looking at him with despair writ large all over his face. “Here I am, thinking we were having a moment, and you’re mocking me?”

“You just make it so easy,” Eddie says, and then the bell goes for last period and he seems to remember that they’re supposed to be in class, grabbing his backpack up from the floor and slinging it over his shoulders. Before he leaves, he does something completely un-Eddie-like, leaning up on his tiptoes to plant a kiss on Richie’s cheek, and Richie can only gape at him in shock. It shouldn’t be a big deal – Richie does it to Eddie all the time, and their other friends too when he can get away with it – but this is different. Eddie rarely if ever initiates physical contact first, and most of the time he seems to barely tolerate Richie’s over-the-top affection.

“Um. What was that for?”

Eddie shrugs, though Richie is pleased to note that he doesn’t seem completely unaffected, a pink flush spreading across his face and neck. “I don’t know, for taking care of me?” He cocks his head to the side, as if seeing Richie in a whole new light. “You’re surprisingly good at that, when you’re not being a dick.”

“Hey, when am I ever a dick?” Richie manages, because it’s easier than thinking about the other thing Eddie just said, and Eddie rolls his eyes around a smirk.

“Don’t ruin it, Trashmouth,” he says, and then he’s gone, the bathroom door swinging shut behind him. Richie lifts a hand to touch the spot where Eddie had kissed him in kind of a dazed wonder, until he catches sight of in the mirror of how utterly moronic he looks and drops it with a scowl, hurrying to make it to class before the second bell can ring.

--

Years pass, and the Losers grow up. They don’t get popular, not by a long shot, but with Bowers and his gang gone they’re not quite the social pariahs they once were, either. Richie takes girls to the movies and kisses them under the bleachers, even manages to go steady with Stephanie Kirsch for a few weeks, and it’s nice. Eddie doesn’t seem interested in dating anyone, so far as he can tell, and Richie tries not to be secretly a little bit pleased at that.

He still stands just an inch too far into Eddie’s personal space; still throws a companionable arm around his shoulders as they walk to class together, pinches his cheeks and calls him cute when Eddie gets shrill and angry. Richie isn’t an idiot: he’s aware on some level that the way they act around each other probably falls outside the realm of what would be considered acceptable behavior between platonic male friends. He knows what the other kids at school still say about Eddie – what they say about Eddie and him, sometimes – it’s just that, when Eddie is smiling at him, or leaning his head on Richie’s shoulder at movie night, he finds it difficult to care.

Stan moves away not long after Beverly, and Ben not long after that. Bill is the last to go, right after high school graduation, and then it’s just Richie and Eddie and Mike. For a few more months, at least – Richie has somehow managed to secure a full ride to his first choice school, and he knows he’d be a moron not to accept it even if it kills him a little when he has to tell the others.

“So I guess you’re not a total dumbass after all,” is all Eddie has to say when he breaks the news, and it’s almost normal if not for the fact that he won’t look Richie in the eye. “Seriously, Rich. Congratulations.”

Richie doesn’t bother trying to convince him that it’s not too late to start looking into colleges for himself, that Eddie is one of the smartest people he knows and his mother is a selfish piece of work for guilting him into staying with her. It’s an argument they’ve already had at least a dozen times, and Richie has no desire to fight with him, especially now that their remaining days together are numbered. He guesses that means he’s matured, or something.

Instead, he spends his last summer in Derry hanging around the arcades and their old stomping grounds in the barrens, smoking rollups with Mike while Eddie lectures them on lung cancer and emphysema, complaining about the risks of passive smoking but never actually moving too far away. When the carnival rolls around, the three of them go along for old times’ sake, making a point to avoid the performance area without actually discussing it out loud. The summer of ’89 feels like nothing more than a bad dream now, but Richie isn’t the only one who gets nervous around clowns these days.

They find a secluded corner of the park to sit in, away from the crowds and the noise. Eddie lies with his head in Richie’s lap and his eyes closed against the sun, and Richie plays absently with his hair. He wants to do something stupid, maybe, lean over Eddie and kiss him upside down like Spiderman.

At least until Eddie opens his eyes and says, “I can see all the way up your nose from here.” Richie winds a lock of hair around his finger and tugs – not hard enough to hurt, but enough to make a point, because way to kill the mood, Kaspbrak.

“Kinky, Eds. I didn’t know you were into that kind of thing.”

Eddie actually laughs at that, uncomplicated and lovely, and Richie’s chest swells with pride at the sound of it. Nine times out of ten, Eddie will either ignore his jokes or outright disapprove of them, but the one time he doesn’t always feels like a triumph.

“Nostril fucking? I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing.”

“Oh, my sweet, naïve Eddie Spaghetti. You’re so cute I could just put you in my pocket and take you home with me. Trust me on this: everything is a thing.”

“Do I even want to know?” Mike asks when he returns with the ice cream, looking back and forth between the two of them with a dubious expression on his face. Eddie collapses into helpless laughter again and this time Richie can’t help but join in, feeling a little like he did the time he smoked his first joint: punch-drunk and giddy without even knowing why, just hanging on for the ride.

They return to that same spot a few weeks later, the night before Richie is due to leave for college; just the two of them this time, sneaking out after curfew with a case of cheap lager and a pack of smokes. Eddie refuses the cigs but drinks the beer, and after an hour or so he’s leaning into Richie’s side, drowsy-warm and affectionate.

“I wish you weren’t leaving,” he mumbles. It’s the kind of thing he’d never say if he wasn’t halfway to buzzed, and Richie kind of wants to tease him mercilessly for it but he also doesn’t want to shatter this perfect, fragile moment.

“I wish I didn’t have to.”

“That’s a fucking lie,” Eddie says, “You’ve been counting down the days till you could get out of this town since you were about six.”

It’s the truth, mostly. Richie can’t honestly say he’s sad to be leaving Derry in his dust – but Eddie is part and parcel with Derry, and the thought of leaving Eddie cuts him clean in two.

“You could always come with me,” he says, only half joking. “Hang around my dorm room, be my kept boy. Hey, you could go to lectures and take notes for me while I’m out getting laid at frat parties.”

Eddie snorts. “When you put it like that, how could I refuse?” He cranes his neck, rolling his head on Richie’s shoulder so that he’s looking up at Richie with his big stupid cow eyes, and Richie feels that urge welling up inside him again, the urge to do something utterly dumb that he won’t be able to take back.

Now or never.

“Close your eyes,” he blurts out before he can stop himself. Eddie sits up with a frown, instantly suspicious.

“Why? What are you gonna do?”

“Nothing! Jesus, just – don’t you trust me?”

“Not even a little,” Eddie says without hesitation, and Richie knows he doesn’t mean it – not entirely, anyway – but it still stings. It must show on his face, because Eddie sighs long-sufferingly and makes a big show of scrunching his eyes shut, holding his hands out in the universal symbol for there, happy now?

“If you draw on me, I swear to God,” he grumbles, and Richie surges forward and kisses him before he can lose his nerve. It isn’t perfect – the angle is off and Richie’s glasses get in the way – but after a moment Eddie lets out a tiny squeak of surprise and starts to kiss him back, and Richie thinks it’s pretty damn close.

“Did you know that the average human mouth contains over five hundred different types of bacteria at any given moment?” Eddie informs him when they separate. “You taste like an ashtray, by the way.”

Richie blinks, because okay, that isn’t exactly the swooning response he’d been hoping for. “Did you… want to stop?”

Eddie furrows his brow like he’s genuinely chewing it over, and Richie spends a few seconds internally freaking out before he catches the smirk playing at the edges of Eddie’s expression and realizes he’s been had.

“I’ll deal. I’ll just have to make sure I remember to floss tonight.”

“Wow, thanks. You really know how to make a guy feel special, you know that?”

“It’s a talent,” Eddie says, smiling for real now, and then he’s sliding Richie’s glasses off his nose, cleaning them on his shirt because he’s a fucking dork and hooking them on Richie’s collar. The world goes sort of fuzzy and unfocused, and Richie can’t make out Eddie’s individual features as he leans in again, just a soft blur of eyes and hair and lips.

The second kiss is better: it’s Eddie’s hand on the side of Richie’s face, Eddie making these breathy little noises into Richie’s open mouth as the taste of warm beer and cigarettes gives way to something earthy and human. It’s hungrier, too; Richie grabs hold of Eddie’s waist and finds bare skin where his shirt has ridden up just slightly. Eddie presses closer to him until he’s practically in Richie’s lap, and there’s the faintest impression of teeth, a hint of tongue slipped between parted lips.

“I’ve thought about this,” Eddie is saying between kisses, the words spilling out of him like he’s not fully in control of them, “so many times. Never thought you’d actually –” and then Richie has to pull back and look at him because seriously, what the fuck.

“What, you never thought I’d want you? Why the hell not?”

Eddie looks at him as though he’s being deliberately obtuse. “You like girls.”

“Well, yeah, who doesn’t?” Richie says without even thinking about it, because girls are fucking awesome, they have soft skin and nice hair and they smell good when he kisses them. He’s just now realizing that all of those things could apply to Eddie, too. That the feeling he gets when he’s with Eddie is the same as the way he feels around pretty girls, only somehow more, because he’s known Eddie practically his entire life, Eddie is maybe his favorite person in the whole world. Eddie is sharp-tongued and fucking hilarious when he wants to be, and over the last five years or so he’s grown from a cute kid into somebody who’s just – really fucking beautiful, and holy shit is Richie an idiot for not figuring this out sooner.

“I don’t,” Eddie says without meeting Richie’s eyes. There’s a confession in there somewhere, one that Richie’s maybe been expecting for a while.

“Not gonna lie, Eds, I always kind of assumed you didn’t really like anyone.”

“Yeah, well,” Eddie says, picking at the grass beneath his fingers. “I like you. God help me, but I do.”

They kiss some more and it’s nice, and then it’s really nice, and then things kind of go from naught to sixty really fucking fast and Richie is bearing Eddie down onto the damp earth, sucking bruises into the hollow of his throat. Eddie whines and fumbles at Richie’s belt buckle, and Richie wants, God, he wants, but he forces himself to slam on the brakes because Eddie’s hands are shaking and maybe this is too much, too fast, too everything.

“You don’t want to?” Eddie asks when Richie stills him with a hand around his wrist. Richie doesn’t need his glasses to feel the hurt practically radiating from him, but he shoves them onto his face anyway to get back some much-needed clarity.

“I want to, okay? Jesus, you have no idea… And it has nothing to do with it being gay or whatever, I swear.”

Eddie flushes a little at that, the g-word, swats at Richie’s shoulder until Richie backs off enough to let him sit up. He has bits of grass and leaves sticking to his hair, and Richie absolutely does not find it adorable. “Then what?”

“I don’t want you to do something just ‘cause you think it’s the last chance you’re gonna get,” Richie admits. “And I’m not gonna deflower you in some filthy field, not when I know you’re just itching to tell me how unsanitary it is.”

Eddie doesn’t even take the bait, just kind of deflates like a sad balloon. “Oh my god, you’re actually serious, aren’t you?” He says, staring at Richie like he’s suddenly grown another head or something. “Since when are you the responsible one?”

“Hey, I can be responsible on occasion.”

“I hate you so much.” Eddie looks mortified now, hugging his knees to his chest, and Richie wants more than anything to wipe that expression of his face, so he does what he does best: he turns it into a joke.

“No you don’t,” he crows, “you like me, you literally just said it.” He launches into his best Eddie Kaspbrak impression, which is mostly just a higher pitched version of his normal speaking voice. “‘Ooh, Richie, please don’t leave me, I don’t know how I’ll survive without your big, manly arms -’”

“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie says without heat. “I take it all back, I can’t fucking wait for you to leave.”

“Nope, no takebacks. You’ve said it now, that means it’s true forever.”

Eddie shakes his head but doesn’t deny it, and they just look at each other for a moment, warm and fond and probably kind of dopey, until Richie feels compelled to break the silence again.

“You will come visit me, won’t you?” It sounds horribly needy even to his own ears, but he can’t help thinking of Beverly and Stan and Ben and Bill, all of whom promised to keep in touch and all of whom seemed to forget the rest of the Losers Club even existed the second they crossed the town limits.

“Of course,” Eddie says easily, like it’s not even a question. “Do you even know how to iron a shirt? Face it, Tozier, you’d fall apart without me.”

“In your dreams,” Richie says. Then Eddie kisses him again, and Richie thinks you have no idea how right you are.

--

Eddie keeps his word, at least to begin with. The first time he comes to visit, he gapes in abject horror at the state of Richie’s dorm, lecturing him a mile a minute on how easily germs can spread among freshman populations and commenting on the amount of bodily fluids that have probably seeped into the mattress over the years.

(“Want to add to the collection?” Richie asks with his most lecherous grin, and Eddie blushes and wrinkles his nose and calls him an idiot and doesn’t, Richie notes, actually say no.)

Towards the end of his first year at college, Eddie calls him to announce that he’s finally getting out of Derry; his mom’s health has taken a turn for the worse, so they’re moving in with some relative in New York, of all places. Eddie has a place at one of the community colleges, studying pharmacy with his mother’s blessing because he’s apparently some kind of fucking masochist.

Richie is happy for him, escaping the shithole that birthed their childhood nightmares, but he’s also – selfishly – kind of terrified. His own memories of the summer they were thirteen are hazy at best these days; he’s had to phone Eddie on the verge of a breakdown more than once because he couldn’t for the life of him remember Bill’s last name or the color of Beverly’s hair, and he’s scared that if Eddie leaves too, then his last link to those days will be severed for good.

(What if Eddie forgets, too? What if Eddie forgets him?)

“Mike will still be there,” Eddie points out reasonably. “And I’ll still visit. You can even come visit me in New York, if you like; my mom’s pretty much permanently stoned on prescription meds these days, so she’s a lot more chilled out.”

“You promise?” Richie says, and he hates how pathetic he sounds but he needs to hear Eddie say it. “Promise you won’t forget about me.”

“As if you’d let me,” Eddie says, and his voice is warm and fond coming down the phone line.

Time passes. The spaces between their visits grow wider and wider until they stop altogether, and eventually the phone calls do too. Richie doesn’t really have time to be sad about it; he’s too busy graduating with honors and landing an internship with a radio station in L.A. Within ten years, he’s got his own show. He dates – mostly women but a few men too, never anything serious but all of them fun while they last. He’s content and successful and all things considered, life is pretty damn good. Even if he still sometimes has vague, terrifying nightmares and finds himself overcome with a creeping sense of dread when he tries to fill in the blanks from his half-forgotten youth.

He doesn’t forget about Eddie, exactly, but some of the details start to blur after a while, like a watercolor left out in the rain. He can’t quite remember what Eddie looked like (small, cute, permanently irritated), or his favorite movie (The Breakfast Club) or how he ate his eggs (he didn’t); just that the name belonged to someone he thought of with affection, once upon a time. He figures it’s all just a part of getting older, that you outgrow your childhood friends and fill the gaps in your life with shiny new people. He doesn’t think about it. It’s fine.

And then, one day, Mike Hanlon calls him out of the blue.

--

Richie is the last one to arrive in Derry, which just fucking figures. His mother always said he’d be late to his own funeral, and he thinks that in this particular instance the sentiment is depressingly apt. Especially after he hears what happened to Stan. (God, Stan.)

Walking into a room filled with grown-up versions of his childhood friends isn’t something he thinks he’d be prepared for at the best of times, but there they all are, and with each reintroduction comes a fresh wave of memories. Mike is the first to greet him, and it’s a shock. Even accounting for Richie’s outdated recollection he looks older than he should – deep lines in his forehead and his hair closer to white than grey, like staying in Derry has been slowly draining the life out of him all these years – but his eyes are still warm and kind, and his grip when he shakes Richie’s hand is firm. Then there’s Bev, still as beautiful as ever, her red hair long again and tied in a neat ponytail; Ben, smiling bashfully, slimmer now but as solid as Richie remembers; Bill, unexpectedly bald and grinning despite the circumstances as he slaps Richie on the back.

And then, hovering at the edge of the melee like he’s waiting for Richie to notice him, there’s Eddie. He’s still small, fine-boned and barely clearing five-six, still babyfaced and almost sickly-looking in his pallor. His hair is starting to curl away from its neat side-parting like he’s been running his fingers through it in agitation, and he’s wearing a dorky sweater vest that makes him look downright professorial, and Richie thinks, oh. This one, this one is special.

He wonders what Eddie sees looking back at him, what he makes of the facial hair and the contacts and the slight softness starting to show around his belly, a symptom of the comfortable life he’s carved out for himself. Then he wonders why the hell it should matter to him what Eddie thinks of the new and improved Richie Tozier, when he’s never cared for anybody else’s opinion before.

“Lookin’ good, Eds,” he says, before his brain has given his mouth permission to do so. “Aside from the fact you clearly haven’t grown an inch since 1992, I mean.”

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie volleys back automatically. His eyes are alight with humor, and suddenly Richie sees him again as the boy he once was, throwing rocks in the barrens, sitting cross-legged on Richie’s dorm room bed. “I listened to your show on the drive down, by the way. I always thought you had a face for radio.”

The insult surprises a bark of laughter out of Richie – because along with everything else, he’d forgotten that Eddie never took his shit lying down, that Eddie gave as good as he got. Then he’s grabbing Eddie in an affectionate headlock, ruffling his hair as Eddie shrieks and shoves at him ineffectually without actually trying to get away, and the others are all laughing at their antics, and even though Richie is sure that in returning to Derry he’s walking straight to his grave, he also can’t shake the feeling that he’s right where he’s supposed to be.

--

They sit down to eat together, and as the wine flows their stories come out one by one. Bill doesn’t stutter once, and Mike somehow survived the last twenty years in Derry without losing his fucking mind like everybody else in this godforsaken town, and Richie is almost overwhelmed with pride at the people his friends have grown into.

(He tries to avoid looking at the empty chair at the head of the table, the reservation Mike had made for seven instead of six. Stan’s fate weighs heavily on them all, conspicuous in his absence.)

The topic of conversation turns to their love lives, and Richie studies Beverly’s face for any hint of jealousy when Bill waxes poetic about his wife. He doesn’t find any; Bev isn’t even looking at Bill, she’s watching Ben with a soft, almost wistful look on her face that has Richie cringing in empathy with her. He’s pretty sure he can relate to what she’s feeling, even if he’s a little hazy on the why.

“What about you, Eds?” He asks eventually – going for casual, like the answer doesn’t matter to him one way or the other. “You got a woman waiting for you back home? Or a fella, maybe, I don’t judge,” he adds, because he can’t help himself, and Eddie goes pink around the ears and Beverly kicks him under the table and Richie feels like the world’s biggest tool because he remembers now the main reason why Bowers and his thugs saw Eddie as a target, more than his inhaler or his overbearing mother. Girly boy, that’s what they called him, among other, less savory names, and the late 80s were a different time but even now there are still plenty who’d take exception to two men together, especially in a town like Derry. Richie knows that more than most.

“Divorced,” Eddie says flatly, draining the last of his wine in one long swallow. “Turns out I pretty much married my mother.”

He glares at Richie across the table as if just daring him to make a comment about it. For his part, Richie has at least a dozen potential quips perched on the tip of his tongue – ‘course you did, Eds, who wouldn’t marry your mom? – but for once, he forces himself to stay silent.

After a short, slightly stilted pause, the conversation resumes, Bill steering them back onto somewhat safer ground with a question about the opening of Ben’s latest building. Richie pours out more wine and laughs in the right places doesn’t think about Eddie marrying a carbon copy of the woman who spent his formative years psychologically torturing him or his own string of failed relationships and one night stands, how the pieces might all fit together.

--

After the meal is done they say their goodnights and drift off to bed one by one, with plans to regroup in the library the following day. Richie makes a show of scrubbing Bill’s shiny bald head and planting a wet, obnoxious kiss on Beverly’s cheek before he makes his exit, still feeling pleasantly warm and fuzzy from the alcohol and the company despite the situation that's brought them all back home.

The hotel room isn’t exactly as luxurious as he’s gotten used to – and he suspects the same holds true for the others, given the success stories he’s just heard – but it has a certain charm to it nonetheless. He sets about starting his bedtime routine, but he’s barely toed out of his shoes when he hears a soft knock at the door.

It’s only when he sees Eddie standing out in the hallway, wringing his hands and radiating nervous energy, that he realizes he was expecting this on some level.

“Eddie, my good man!” He exclaims as he ushers Eddie inside, still playing the fool because it’s always been easier than anything real. Every time he slips into one of his characters, it gets a little harder to take off the mask again. “To what do I owe this pleasure? Just can’t get enough of me, huh?”

Eddie doesn’t say anything, just watches him with an odd, contemplative look on his face, and Richie shifts uncomfortably under the scrutiny. “What? Do I have something on my face?”

“Did you get LASIK?” Eddie asks, apropos of nothing, and Richie blinks, because whatever he’d been expecting he’s pretty sure that wasn’t it.

“Are you kidding me?” he says after a beat. “You really think I’d let some asshole burn my retinas off with a fucking laser beam? Contacts, baby.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works, dipshit,” Eddie says fondly. He lifts a hand in some strange, abortive gesture, like he was going to touch Richie’s face before thinking better of it. “I miss your glasses. I like the beard, though.”

“Oh, uh… thanks?” Richie says dumbly, for once at a loss for words. He wonders if Eddie is hitting on him; and if he is, why that makes him feel as though his heart is swelling like a balloon, fit to burst. Eddie is blushing furiously, and he’s standing so close, close enough for Richie to see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and the flecks of grey at his temples, the incongruously youthful freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose. He’s still beautiful – albeit in a nerdy, slightly unhealthy way, like some tragic Victorian waif laid up with consumption but soldiering heroically on.

“How did you know, about me?” Eddie asks, interrupting his slightly morbid train of thought. “That I’m, you know…?”

He trails off awkwardly, and it takes Richie a couple of seconds to realize what he’s talking about. “What, that you’re gay?” In truth, he’s not really sure of the answer; just that he knew, the same way he knew that Ben was still carrying the same old torch for Bev as when they were kids, that any one of them would take a swan dive off a cliff if Bill Denbrough asked them to. The sky is blue, water is wet, Eddie Kaspbrak is gayer than a rainbow at Pride. “Takes one to know one, buddy.”

Eddie’s eyes widen slightly. “You mean you…?”

Now it’s Richie’s turn to be uncomfortable. “No, I mean, maybe. I don’t know. I like women, and sometimes I like guys too. It’s not a big deal.” Bisexual, he supposes, would be the word for it, if he was one for labels. He doesn’t have Eddie’s hang-ups, and he’s not ashamed of who he is, but it isn’t exactly something he goes around advertising, either. He’s in the public eye after all, even if only slightly, and he’s acutely aware that the world is still full of assholes.

“Oh.” Eddie shakes his head and laughs without humor. “You know, I could never even bring myself to say it out loud before? Even though I knew, I’ve always known. God, I’m pathetic.”

“Come on, that’s not –"

“No, I am,” Eddie interrupts. Matter of fact, like he isn’t even upset about it – like it’s something that just is, a necessary truth. “I mean, look at me. I married a woman I didn’t even love just because I’m scared of who I am. I feel like I’ve spent my whole life being scared. I wasn’t going to come back, you know. I wanted to hang up the phone and pretend Mike never called, just go back to my life in New York.”

Richie gets that. He’s still not entirely sure what he’s doing back here himself. “So why did you? Come back, I mean.”

Eddie shrugs miserably. “Hell if I know – honestly, part of me still thinks Stan had the right idea. I guess I’m just sick of being the weak one.”

“Don’t say that,” Richie snaps, suddenly angry. It’s bad enough that they lost Stan – that Stan would rather do that than come back home and face the thing they only half remember – but Eddie mentioning so flippantly that he’s put thought into doing the same makes him feel faintly nauseous. “You’re not weak, Eddie. You’re one of the strongest people I know. You kicked that motherfucking clown in the face, remember?”

He doesn’t know where it comes from, but as soon as the words leave his mouth, he knows it to be true. He can visualize it perfectly: Eddie, covered from head to toe in sewer filth and God only knew what else, more furious than Richie had ever seen him and vowing to kill the creature that had been terrorizing them all summer.

“I did do that, didn’t I?” Eddie says slowly, like he’s coming out of a dream, like it’s only just coming back to him now. “Guess I’ll just have to remember, then.”

“Remember what?”

“How to be brave,” Eddie says, and this time he does touch, one hand framing the side of Richie’s face. He presses impossibly closer, fingers tracing the arch of Richie’s brow, the shape of his lips, like he’s trying to re-learn every tiny detail and commit them to memory. “I think I loved you once. Maybe I never stopped.”

“Well, sure you did,” Richie says faintly. “I mean, why wouldn’t you? I’m extremely lovable.”

Eddie rolls his eyes even as his lips quirk upwards with the barest hint of a smile, and Richie’s heart flip-flops in his chest the way it always did at seeing that expression on his face. “For once in your life, Trashmouth, just. Stop talking.”

“Maybe you should make me.”

And then, the unthinkable: Eddie leans up and kisses him square on the mouth, halting and tremulous and realer than anything Richie’s felt in years, and he remembers. Remembers clinging to Eddie in the dark of Bill’s garage as the clown lunged at them out of the projector; remembers climbing up to Eddie’s bedroom window in the middle of the night because it was the only place he felt safe; remembers kissing him under the stars for the first and last time before he left for college, what feels like a lifetime ago now. God, how could he ever forget?

As quickly as it began, it’s over, Eddie pulling back with a slightly panicked expression on his face like he used to get right before he started reaching for his inhaler.

“Did you know the average human mouth contains over five hundred different types of bacteria at any given moment?” Richie says dumbly, the only thing he can think of to break the tension, and Eddie looks blank for a second before his face breaks open on a look of sheer delight.

“You do remember.”

“With lines like that, how could I not? You smooth-talker, you.”

Eddie grins and shoves him playfully back against the closed door, and Richie remembers this, too: Eddie’s inner fire, the pride he always took in being the one to bring it out of him. His own secret thrill at being manhandled and pushed around, especially by someone so outwardly unassuming.

“Ooh, Eds, you know how it turns my crank when you take control like that.” Joking, always joking, honest in the only way he knows how to be.

Eddie huffs out a noise that’s equal parts fondness and exasperation. “You’re just full of colorful euphemisms, aren’t you? You always did have a way with words.”

Richie waggles his eyebrows in the most ludicrously exaggerated way he can manage. “I could be full of something else if you prefer –“

That’s as far as he gets before Eddie is kissing him again, effectively shutting him up. It’s not the same as it was when they were eighteen – they’re better at it now, for one thing – but the feelings, the affection that Richie feels when Eddie sighs into his mouth, those haven’t changed a bit. He deepens the kiss, tangling his fingers in Eddie’s hair, enjoying the catch and drag of his beard against Eddie’s five o’clock shadow, and thinks that it was worth coming back to this shithole of a town just so that he could have this again.

“It’s getting late,” Eddie says, once they reluctantly part to breathe. “We should probably turn in for the night.”

“If I didn’t know any better I’d say you were trying seduce me,” Richie says, because he doesn’t know when to stop. “I gotta say, I never took you for a first date kind of guy. More promise rings and taking it slow, if anything.”

He expects a punch on the arm, a snarky comment; at the very least, an exasperated sigh. Instead, Eddie just raises his eyebrows and says mildly, “If this is our first date, it’s one that’s been twenty-seven years in the making. I don’t think we could take it much slower if we tried.”

Well, then.

Eddie ends up staying the night, but they don’t actually do anything besides hold each other on the plush hotel mattress, trading the occasional kiss every now and then. It’s a definite upgrade from when Richie would sneak in through Eddie’s bedroom window to seek refuge from his nightmares and his shitty parents, but the basic feeling of comfort, of security, of nothing bad can happen so long as we never leave this bed again, is the same.

“When all this is over,” Richie says, his brain skirting around the edges of what all this really means, “we should just, like, take a roadtrip or something. Just get in my car and fuckin’ drive.”

Eddie hums contentedly, pressing back against Richie’s chest because they’re actually honest-to-god spooning, what the fuck. His head fits perfectly under Richie’s chin, and Richie can’t help but breathe him in, here in the dark of his hotel room where nobody can see.

“Only if I can pick the music. I’ve listened to your show; I don’t really want to experience the live version.”

“You wound me, Eds,” Richie murmurs, hiding a grin in Eddie’s soft hair.

“You can’t call me Eds, either.”

“Sorry, no can do. You love it when I call you that, don’t even lie.”

Eddie doesn’t deny it, which is really all the answer he needs.

--

Eddie is dead, and a light has gone out in the world.

Tiny, fierce, nervous Eddie, who rolled his eyes at Richie’s jokes and lectured him on pathogens and held his hand in the dark, is gone, and a part of Richie goes with him.

He grips Eddie’s face and forces him to meet his eyes just like he had in the Neibolt house all those years ago, look at me, look at me, Eds, it’s not even that bad, like the monster hasn’t ripped Eddie’s arm clean off at the shoulder, like his hands aren’t slick with Eddie’s blood.

“What, no jokes?” Eddie slurs, half-delirious from pain and blood loss. “Come on, Richie, I’m ‘armless.”

Richie has never felt less like laughing in his life, but for Eddie he musters up a grin from somewhere, a horrible, broken thing forcing its way onto his face. “See, this is why I’m the funny one.”

“Beep beep, Richie.” Eddie reaches up and grabs his collar in a viselike grip, still deceptively strong even with only one good arm. “Don’t – don’t forget this time. Promise me you won’t.”

“We need to go,” Bill says, and somehow Richie had forgotten that he was even still there, that the world outside of himself and Eddie still existed. “We’ve got to make sure it’s really d-dead this time, otherwise all this will be for nothing.”

“Fuck you,” Richie spits, and he’s all of thirteen years old again, standing outside the house on Neibolt Street and wanting to break Bill’s face for dragging them into this, for getting Eddie hurt, for getting Eddie killed. But then he looks at Beverly, her jaw set in a hard line and tears drying on her face, and Bill looking equal parts helpless and determined, a shadow of the superhero Richie once idolized, and thinks that this is so much bigger than any of them. Stan is dead, and Mike is in the hospital, and Eddie is staring at nothing now, his eyes fixed blankly on the grimy ceiling. His lips are cold already when Richie kisses them one last time.

“Fine,” he says, scrubbing at the tears on his face as he stands to follow Bill into the dark once more. “Let’s go kill this fucking clown.”

--

After it’s done, they stumble out into the open air, blinking like newborns against the light, and Richie sets Eddie down on the ground as gently as he can. He’d insisted on dragging him out even as the tunnels collapsed around them, couldn’t bear to leave him down there in the sewers with the stench of greywater and the ghosts of Derry’s lost children. Now, he sinks to his knees in the soft grass and just. Stops.

He’s dimly aware of the others closing ranks around him, their voices hushed and agitated as they whisper back and forth, but he shuts them out. He doesn’t think any of them expected to make it out when they gave chase to the clown – spider – whatever it was, and he’d made his peace with that, but now here they are, alive by some miracle or another. Bill’s wife is catatonic but still breathing, and Ben and Beverly have found each other again, hands clasped tightly between them, and Richie is alone save for Eddie’s mangled corpse. Part of him wishes he’d never gotten out of the sewers at all.

He puts Derry in his rearview mirror the next day, as soon as Eddie is in the ground – they bury him in their own private ceremony that’s probably twenty different kinds of illegal, but it’s not like this town, in its perpetual state of suspended animation, is ever going to notice or care. He spares a thought for Eddie’s ex-wife, his mother if she’s still alive, but he knows it’s pointless. There’s no way to get hold of them, and even if there was, there’s no way he’d ever be able to explain any of this in a way that makes sense.

Bill tears himself away from Audra’s bedside long enough to give Richie a tight, brotherly hug before he leaves; Beverly kisses his cheek and Ben clasps his shoulder and Mike promises to keep him updated, and Richie knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s never going to see any of them again.

Maybe things would have been different, if Eddie had lived. Maybe they’d have taken that road trip, Eddie sitting in the passenger seat of Richie’s car with that prissy look on his face, bitching about Richie’s bad driving as they crossed state lines and got to know each other all over again. Maybe they would have danced at Bev and Ben’s wedding, gone to Bill’s latest book signing and visited Stan’s grave together. Or maybe not; maybe it was always supposed to be this way, the seven – six – five of them brought together by some higher power to defeat the evil that possessed their hometown, only to drift away from each other again once they’d served their purpose.

Either way, it doesn’t matter now. He’ll never get a chance to find out, and that’s maybe the worst of it.

The last few days are already starting to feel like a half-forgotten dream by the time he drives past the town limits; the memories slipping from his grasp like runoff down a storm drain, leaving him with nothing but blurred impressions. He remembers a pristine white cast and a bright red letter V; a small, pale man in a blood-drenched sweater vest; serious brown eyes that tug at something soft and warm in his chest when they light up with humor. He knows that they’re important, these scattered bits of memory, but he can’t for the life of him remember why.

This one, this one is special, he remembers thinking, and it panics him for a moment because he isn’t supposed to forget this time, he promised – but it isn’t long before Eddie Kaspbrak is just another faceless name from a hazy childhood, fading back into the recesses of his mind where he keeps all the things that can’t hurt him so long as he avoids looking directly at them.

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel as he muses what to play on his show next week. For some reason, The Cure pops into his head: Lullaby, of all things. He hasn’t heard the song in over twenty years, and it’s definitely not his usual fare. It might throw his listeners for a loop, but he thinks he could make it work. Spin it as a new feature – genre throwback, teenage nostalgia – and they’ll probably eat it right up.

He hums the first few bars, smiling to himself as he crosses over the border into New Hampshire and heads towards home.