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The first time Eddie Kaspbrak and Richie Tozier ever talked about running away together, they were six years old and it hadn’t seemed serious. Richie had just found Eddie forced into one of the intermediate lockers by Henry Bowers nasty gremlins. It had taken several minutes for any sort of authority figure to finally take Richie’s claims seriously and the two boys now sat in the waiting area of the principals office, Eddie crying and Richie feeling like he was about to.
“I hate this place,” Eddie sniffled. Not really thinking about his actions at all, Richie’s arm jumped up to drape around Eddie’s shoulders. Richie’s arms were rather too long for his body; his mother told him it was a sign that he’d grown to be very tall, but right now it was just something else for kids to tease him about.
“Then I’ll take you away,” Richie had promised, tears stinging behind his pre-glasses eyes. “I’ll take you somewhere far, far, away from here where there’s no Bowers or anybody else that could hurt you again. Maybe we can even find somewhere in the world that doesn’t have germs.”
“Everywhere in the world has germs, stupid.” Eddie rolled his eyes, but he still cracked a smile. While Richie didn’t know how he’d get Eddie out of this place, or even what that meant, the smile made him want nothing more than to try.
///
The next time it came up, they were nine and sitting in Eddie’s attic. It was one of the only places Eddie had been allowed friends growing up, because his mother couldn’t make her way up the fragile stairs. She wasn’t a fan of Eddie spending too much time up there (“there’s so much dust up there, Eddie bear! You know it’s bad for your asthma to be around that.”) but she begrudgingly allowed him to send a few hours up there on Saturday afternoons with a friend.
That friend had once been Bill Denbrough, but had become Richie Tozier more and more. Eddie told himself that it was because Richie had better comics than Bill did, that his parents bought him more of a selection, but even at nine years old Eddie had that sinking feeling in his chest that he’d learn to associate with lying to himself about Richie Tozier.
“You know what, Eds,” Richie said, tossing his copy of Captain America. Eddie sighed to himself. Inviting Richie over for comic book reading left very little time for reading comic books, he knew.
“Don’t call me that,” Eddie said automatically. The nickname had only started within the last couple of months, and Eddie hated them. He didn’t know why they’d started, Richie had always called Stanley “Stan the Man” for as long as Eddie had known them. Lately though, he’d started picking up nicknames for Bill and Eddie, too, but Eddie felt like Richie attacked him with them more than anybody else.
Richie ignored the request, as he always did. “I think we should run away.”
Eddie wheezed and reached for his inhaler. “Run away? How would we live Richie?”
Richie just shrugged and smiled. “I’ll run away with you someday, Eddie Spaghetti. Watch me.”
“Stop calling me those stupid names, Trashmouth!”
///
It was brought up again they were twelve and Eddie was throwing it back in Richie’s face. Eddie had been leaning up against the brick wall behind the pharmacy, face starch white and broken arm cradled in his lap when Richie and Bill had found him.
After rushing over, Eddie had barely been able to get out the explanation of what had happened, what Bowers had done to him, through his sobs and shuddering wheezy breaths. Richie had forced the inhaler into Eddie’s mouth, releasing it. It hadn’t done anything to help Eddie’s wheezes and that’s when Richie’s true panic set in. Eddie was going to die, he was going to die, he was going to die. As Bill ran off to find help, Eddie’s blazing eyes found Richie’s and he looked surprisingly coherent in that moment.
“You promised me,” Eddie choked out, voice shallow but angrier than Richie had ever heard. “You promised you’d take far away and they never hurt me again. You lied.”
Tears blurred past Richie’s eyes. He hadn’t lied, he hadn’t. He was going to take Eddie Kaspbrak away from Derry and the terrible people in it if it was the last thing he ever did.
“I’m going to snap it back into place.”
“DO NOT FUCKING TOUCH ME!”
The snap of Eddie’s bone and then Eddie’s blood curdling scream echoed through the empty alley.
//
Richie promised Eddie again when they were fifteen and kissing.
“No, no, no,” Eddie gasped suddenly, pulling away. He crawled silently away from Richie, not far enough to break all content, but enough to let Richie know not to lean back into his space. Eddie glanced around the area frantically. It was nearing on nine (oh god, he’d need to go home soon for curfew. Fuck, fuck, how could he look at his mother after this?) and he knew that the quarry was empty but he couldn’t control the burning anxiety in his chest. “We can’t do this.”
“Why not?” Richie’s face curled up into confusion. A deep frown burned across his lips, lips that were still tingling. “I don’t…”
“It’s wrong!” Eddie whined. “We can’t, okay? What would people think? My mother, your parents, everybody in this stupid ass town?”
“I don’t care what they think,” Richie said, almost harshly. “I don’t. Eddie, I love you. I have loved you since I was like, eight.”
Tears burned Eddie’s eyes and he kept his gaze stubborningly on Richie’s dirty blue vans. “Richie, it’s not that simple, you know that. Maybe… maybe if we lived somewhere else? I know there are places that are better but, Rich, we don’t.”
“Then we’ll go there.” Richie promised, his voice softer and more genuine than Eddie thought he’d ever heard the Trashmouth sound. “I swear to God, Eddie, we’ll go. We’ll go, okay? We will.”
“That would be years from now,” Eddie said quietly. “I can’t ask to you wait until we live somewhere else to be with me, Richie. And I just… we couldn’t be together like real couples here. That’s not fair to you.”
“How come you get to decide what’s fair to me?” Richie laughed softly. “Didn’t I just say I’ve loved you since I was eight? I’d take being with you anyway we can be, Eds. It doesn’t matter if people know or not. We know.”
“Who are you and what have you done with Trashmouth Tozier?” Eddie scoffed teasingly, his voice thick with his tears. Richie let out a similar laugh.
“Get the fuck back over here,” Richie gestured towards his lap. “I wasn’t done making out with you, Kaspbrak.”
“aaaaaand there he is,” Eddie giggled, already quickly crawling over.
///
When a sixteen year old Richie brought it up next, he wasn’t even talking to Eddie. Stan had always known about him and Eddie, even if nobody else did. Stan had been aware of Richie’s aggressively painful crush on Eddie Kaspbrak since before Richie even had been. It had only been logical that he’d told Stan when they finally gotten together.
“I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him,” Richie said wistfully, staring up at the ceiling in Stan’s bedroom. Stan had been sitting cross legged on his floor, flipping through a comic book. He turned his head over his shoulder to look at his best friend.
“Eddie?” Stan asked, as if he didn’t already know. Richie turned to give a disbelieving look.
“No, Ben,” Richie snarked. “I’ve secretly been cheating on Eddie, the Love of My Life, with him this whole entire time. Surprise.”
Stan let out scoff. “Go back to being a sappy in love idiot, please.”
“Happily,” Richie said. “I was saying that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with Eddie. I am going to marry him.”
Stan frowned slightly, biting back the response that gay people couldn’t get married. He knew this and he knew that Richie knew it, too. There wasn’t any harm in letting him ignore it, even if it was just for one afternoon in the safety of his best friend’s bedroom.
“Not here,” Richie continued. “We couldn’t… not here. We’re gonna run away. Maybe after graduation or something. I don’t know how, but we will.
“I’d help you,” Stan said, turning back to his comic book. He turned the distinct ruffling on Richie sitting up on the bed.
“Wait, what?” Richie squeaked. “Really?”
“Sure. We could consider it my teenage rebellion.”
///
When Richie dropped the bomb on Eddie, he was seventeen, a few months shy of being eighteen. It was Eddie’s birthday, and everybody had already gone home from his gathering. Stan had given Richie a knowing look when Richie had said he was spending the night, but nobody else had questioned it. They never had. It was routine at this point. They’d all come to expect it.
“Hey, Eds,” Richie said mildly. “Remember when I told you that I’d take you away from here?”
“Uh, yeah, Rich,” Eddie laughed, tossing his boyfriend a pair of sweats he kept there for sleeping. “You say it at least once a week, how could I forget?”
“I know, I know, it’s just,” Richie fiddled with the pants. “It’s your birthday. You’re eighteen now, and I… I’ll be eighteen in a few months.”
Eddie raised his brow, watching his boyfriends’ nervous, jerking hands and the way he nibbled on his bottom lip. Eddie’s heart began to race, Richie couldn’t really be talking about what Eddie thought he was talking about… could he?
“We’ll both be adults,” Richie continued, his speaking voice slowly getting faster. “They couldn’t, they couldn’t… control us anymore, you know? They couldn’t..”
“Rich,” Eddie cut him off, heart practically in his throat. “I love you but please, for the love of God, get to the point.”
“We could go,” Richie cried out suddenly. “We could leave and nobody could stop us or make us come back here ever. Just like I promised, Eds, I’d never break that. I’d never-“
“I know,” Eddie said softly. He sat on the bed beside Richie, grabbing his fidgeting hands and pulling them close to him. “I know I wouldn’t. Hell, Richie, you made that promise when we were like… seven-“
“Six,” Richie corrected quietly.
Eddie’s eyes widened slightly and he sucked in a deep breath. “I just, I know you mean it. I mean it, too, I always have, okay? But a few months from now, are you sure you’re ready to do this now?”
“I’ve been ready for years,” Richie said, voice so full of truth and vulnerability that Eddie wanted to cry. “I’m ready whenever you’re ready.
Eddie looked his boyfriend up and down slowly, from his messy halo of brown curls and glasses crooked from being broken so many times. To his chapped lips and stained Hawaiian print T-shirt that even at seventeen years old Richie didn’t feel embarrassed to be seen wearing. His jeans were ripped, not from style but from ridiculous amounts of accidents caused by limb he hadn’t quite gotten used to yet, and the mismatched socks on his feet. Eddie swallowed hard.
“I think I-“ Eddie nodded, a slow smile growing across his face. “I think I’m ready.”
Richie’s face broke into the widest grin Eddie though he’d ever seen and he kissed Eddie, hard. There was no thought, no rhythm, just a complete mess of overwhelming emotions that neither knew how to describe. Once they pulled apart, both still grinning messes, Richie reached back for the sweats.
Eddie grabbed them from him and chunked them across the room. Richie started at him, brow crinkled. Eddie launched himself into Richie’s lap, clasping his hands behind Richie’s neck and stared deep into his eyes.
“You don’t need them,” Eddie said firmly. Richie blinked for a moment before his face blazed with understanding.
“Eddie, Eds, are you…” Richie cleaned his throat, hoping it would clear the hoarse sound. “You…?
“I’m ready,” Eddie whispered as he sealed their lips together again.
///
Richie was the one to step out of the truck first, walking towards where Stan stood at the end of the driveway. His best friend gave him a sad smile and Richie felt a terrible burning in his chest and stomach. Wordlessly, Richie launched himself forward and yanked Stan into his arms. Even though it was Beverly he always had height wars with, it was Stan whom he’d always been bouncing back and forth between with. Richie now had just enough inches on Stan that he had to tilt his head to bury it into his neck.
“Oh, fuck, man,” Richie said, voice gruff and quiet. “I fucking love you.”
“I love you too, brother,” Stan whispered back.
Richie kept a hand clasped to the side of Stan’s neck as he pulled away, and nearly lost it himself when he saw the misty look in Stan’s eyes. “Alright,” Richie cleared his throat. “No fucking crying, you hear me? Jesus Christ.”
Stan swallowed visibly and pursed his lips. “Rich-“ He cut himself off as he caught sight of Eddie approaching. He pulled the smaller into a hug, too; a softer hug, a shorter one. Richie could’ve burst into tears in that moment, could’ve turned around and gone back home just watching his best friend and the love of my life hugging. Thoughts of potentially never getting to see that again ate at Richie’s mind.
He forced the thoughts away, there wasn’t a choice. Not really.
“Thank you so much, Stan,” Eddie whispered as he pulled away. If Eddie was wiping at his eyes, nobody chose to acknowledge it.
“Yeah,” Stan replied, voice cracking like it always had during puberty. Stan had had worse than anybody aside from Richie. Richie had promptly called them The Crack Brothers for a week until Stan told him that if he didn’t stop, he was going to shove a clarinet so far up his ass that it would come out of his mouth. “It’s no problem- really.”
“Teenage rebellion,” Richie said simply. Eddie crinkled his brow in confusion but Stan shot Richie a smirk, and really, that had been the reaction he’d been looking for. “Come on, good chaps,” Richie said, letting an arm drape around Eddie’s shoulders. “We have tones of work ahead of us, on this lovely fortnight!”
“Oh my God,” Eddie complained with a grin. “Do not do the British guy right now, I beg you.”
“Especially since you don’t know anything about British slang, clearly.” Stan added, knocking his elbow against Richie’s.
“And here I thought you loved me.”
“How disappointing for you.”