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Six months ago when he’d RSVPed, he’d decided that on the night of the wedding, he would tell them all the truth.
He’d wanted them to know before the general public potentially found out. A few weeks after coming home from Derry he’d awkwardly told his PR guy that he was gay and that he did, in fact, have intentions of actively being gay at some point in the distant future when he was emotionally stable enough to install an app that would help him do that with minimal effort on his part.
It was the first time he’d ever told anyone. There had been absolutely no ceremony about it and no real sense of relief, either. His PR guy had blinked at him and stumbled, “You’re - oh, okay, right. Okay, well. We should probably talk about how to handle this, when you’re feeling a little less...”
He hadn’t finished that sentence; Richie had managed to fill in the blank by himself well enough. He’d scrubbed a rough hand over where his stubble had been mutating into a beard that didn’t look good on him, that made it embarrassingly obvious that he was going through some shit - but he hadn’t cared about how awful he looked because he hadn’t cared about anything six months ago.
“Yeah, we should probably talk about how to handle this when I’m a little less depressed about my best friend dying,” he’d said.
Eddie had still been dead six months ago.
He couldn’t tell them now because it felt like a half-truth, somehow. It felt like, on the scale of shit that required attention, being followed around by someone they all saw die horribly probably blew just about everything else out of the water. Sexuality wasn’t even relevant when this Sixth Sense knock-off bullshit came into play.
“Are you a fucking idiot?” Eddie asked in the hotel room. He was bordering hysterical, as was his wont. “Why aren’t you telling them? This is the perfect time to tell them. Richie, look at me. Look at me. I’m dead. You should not be able to fucking look at me, man.”
Richie had made the mistake of having a panic attack the minute they were alone and admitting to having zero intentions of mentioning the Deddie situation to anyone - that was what he called it, gingerly in his mind, when he was trying not to lose his shit over it.
His stupid hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He fumbled trying to do his tie for the third time, said, “Oh, for fuck -” and then he whipped it off of his neck at the floor. He dropped his head in his hands.
“Richie,” Eddie said, except it wasn’t really Eddie, was it, because Eddie was dead. “Rich, seriously -”
“Can you shut up for a minute?” Richie scraped at his eyes under his glasses. “Please.”
Really, he’d known the rest of the Losers wouldn’t be able to see Eddie ever since Mike met up with him on his post-Derry imprisonment road trip. At no point during their dinner together had Mike seemed to notice that their dead best friend was sitting with them, or that their dead best friend would not shut the fuck up. No, Mike hadn’t noticed Eddie there, yelling his name and waving his hands and generally giving Richie a migraine, but he had, he said, noticed the drinking.
That’s what he called it, the drinking, like it was some off-Broadway melodrama about Richie’s alcohol-fuelled journey towards a complete mental breakdown. Mike hadn’t known that Richie had already well and truly had that breakdown after he’d woken up to find Eddie standing over his bed, dead but alive, a week before.
Richie had considered telling Mike everything then - like, everything - for all of a fraction of a second, and in the next he was already resigned to the knowledge that it wasn’t going to happen, even with Eddie next to him asking him why, why aren’t you telling him? Why the fuck aren’t you saying anything? He knew that he wasn’t going to go through with it, that whatever words he could piece together into an explanation would refuse to meet in his brain. He’d been at this crossroads before and picked the same route.
He’d swallowed it all down with another mouthful of whiskey, his jaw clicking like a lock. Jesus, Mikey, let a guy mourn, would you?
He’d known then that the rest of them wouldn’t be able to see Eddie either, but some stubborn thing inside of him had still been holding out hope on the drive up here anyway. Eddie had been in the passenger seat with the seatbelt wrapped around him - like that’d do fucking anything at this point - and he must have been thinking along the same lines because he hadn’t said a word. Neither of them wanted to admit that they still honestly believed the others might be able to see him, too, because of how much worse it would make the disappointment when they had to accept that they were alone in this. If Richie had learned literally anything from his life until this point it was that any insane, fucked-up situation was easier to handle if you had enough back-up.
It had felt somehow possible: the Losers would all meet at the hotel and before all the hugging back-patting could even start someone would look horrified, someone would say, “What the fuck, Eddie, is that you?” and then Richie would know he wasn’t totally crazy.
But nobody said anything when they’d met in the hotel lobby. They’d all been cracking jokes about Bill’s new bestseller, the crappy movie adaptation of his other one, about Mike’s new Floridian dress sense. Talked about the wedding tomorrow, like everything was fine. Like it was good.
Richie had been in the middle of it, trying to roll with it, ignoring the cold sweat on his palms and the nauseating pounding of his heart, then he’d looked over his shoulder at Eddie and saw him standing off to the side with a look on his face like he’d just been stabbed through the chest for a second time.
“Richie,” Eddie said, here, now.
Slowly, Richie looked up at him from where he was hunched on the bed.
The blood on the bandage on his cheek never got any older. With his hoodie zipped up you couldn’t even tell there was a hole in his chest the size of Richie’s fist unless he turned his back, and that was why Eddie always faced towards him. Richie had glimpsed it, once - a tangle of red leading somewhere dark, leading into the gruesome little cave inside his best friend’s body.
When he’d seen it, his brain had shut off. It was impossible to reconcile that gaping fucking hole with how normal Eddie looked otherwise, how normal he acted, but there it was, the raw evidence that he wasn’t alive, not really.
Richie looked down at his shoes for a long moment. He shook his head, swallowed.
“It’s their fucking wedding, Eddie,” he said.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t. They were happy, all of them, so genuinely, infuriatingly fucking happy. They’d already suffered through a lifetime’s worth of weird bullshit and now they were enjoying well-earned respite in some new, contented world with their beautiful wives and their ugly Hawaiian shirts and like hell Richie was going to be the one to say hey guys, something is wrong.
He looked back up at Eddie and Eddie was still looking down at him, still looking like himself, the only dead thing that Richie had ever wanted to reach for. He looked miserable and small, like the tiny little kid Richie had once been able to carry on his shoulders.
“It’s not like they’d be able to do anything, I guess,” Eddie said in a rush. His mouth pressed into a line. “I don’t even know what - what needs to happen. How to fix this. If it can actually be...”
Richie didn’t know either. Not a thing.
“Maybe there’s some kind of medication I can take,” he said, and Eddie rolled his eyes.
“Oh, ha ha, good one, I’m a figment of your imagination. You think it’s so hard just being able to see me,” he made a sweeping gesture over himself, “imagine what being me is like, you -”
Someone knocked on the door.
“Yeah?” Richie asked.
“We have to go in five minutes, Rich,” Mike said, muffled.
“I’m in here too, Mike,” Eddie called out. “Me. Eddie.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Richie said.
“Who’re you talking to? Is Bill in there?”
“What? No, he’s - I was on a call.” He leaned over and picked up his tie from the floor, sliding it back around his collar. “I’ll be out, I just, you know.”
Even Eddie waited until they could hear that Mike had walked far enough away before he obviously couldn’t handle watching Richie fuck up a windsor knot anymore and had to say something about it.
He sighed, reached out towards Richie, and said, “It’s just a tie, you idiot, let me -”
Richie shot away from him, breathing in sharply.
Eddie stared at him, struck. His hands were frozen in mid-air. He dropped them after a moment, eyes darting away belatedly, like he was embarrassed, like he was sorry, and he pressed his lips together, nodding.
“I’ve got it, okay?" Richie said, softly.
Eddie put his arms around himself, covering the spot that Richie had once seen all the way through, and said nothing.
Richie was half-present during the wedding, which was the best he could do these days. Even while reading the verse he’d tried to argue his way out of doing with Bev, his mind wandered back to where it always was these days.
“Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.” He cleared his throat, gruffly.
Eddie was sitting in the back row of the church and Richie couldn’t help the way his eyes were drawn towards him as he spoke. Being haunted was strangely intimate like that. Even here, surrounded by the only people he’d ever really loved and the small gathering of people who loved them too, part of him was only conscious of he and the Eddie-shaped thing across the hall. Part of him existed in a place intended for the two of them and no-one else.
“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled.” He looked at Eddie and Eddie looked back at him and somewhere in the church, in that other plane of existence, a baby was crying and wouldn’t stop, and Eddie kept looking back at him, kept looking, kept looking, and Richie broke and read down from the page. His hands were shaking.
“Where there is knowledge, it will pass away,” he read.
He glanced up one more time and then went to sit down. Bill touched his back and whispered something to him, but Richie was still in that other place, could still feel the weight of Eddie’s eyes boring into the back of his head, imploring him to turn around, wordlessly asking to be seen in return, neurotic as fucking ever.
It was like a compulsion he had to bite back. This was the widest distance that had been between them since Eddie had shown up over a month ago and Richie felt it, somehow physically felt it like a dull ache in the back of his brain trying to spin him around like he was being magnetically attracted across the room.
He followed the whites of the priest’s teeth as he spoke and suddenly thought, what if he looked and Eddie wasn’t there?
It should have been a relief, it should have sounded like a good thing. It shouldn’t have made him stand up from the first pew while Beverley was in the middle of reciting her vows and turn to look in the opposite direction, to make sure that Eddie was still there - to whatever degree there was.
“What the hell are you doing?” Eddie shouted, looking panicked. He gestured emphatically. “Turn around!”
Richie turned back, mouth hanging open, struck dumb.
Beverley had stopped talking. She and Ben and the priest were staring at him. Everyone in the church was staring at him, he realised, and it took Bill’s hand curling tightly around his wrist for him to get what a fucking idiot he must have looked like and hastily sit back down.
Beverley hadn’t moved and was still looking at him, concerned - in her white dress, on the altar, on her goddamn fucking wedding day. Christ.
“Sorry,” he said, meaning it. He waved a hand. “Sorry.”
The ceremony resumed, uncertainly. Bill was still holding his wrist and waited until the vows were finished to lean over, rubbing the back of Richie’s hand with his thumb.
“Hey,” he whispered. “You doing okay, buddy?”
Richie heard footsteps clicking across the church floor, and then he watched in the corner of his eye as Eddie shuffled into their pew and sat down on the far end of it.
“Yep.” He patted Bill’s hand. “Just stretching my legs. All good.”
Bill looked at him for a long moment before letting go. In the corner of his eye, he saw Eddie shaking his head.
“I cannot believe you just did that,” he said in an undertone, sounding like he was embarrassed to have come with him.
Later, at the reception, he pulled Bev onto the dance floor to apologize.
“I’ve been taking Ambien,” he explained. “It makes me do weird shit like cause a scene in the middle of my friends’ weddings and dance really terribly.”
Beverley squeezed his hand and said, without giving him any time to prepare for it, “Mike told me you were drinking a lot when he saw you in Chicago.”
Richie couldn’t even be rightfully mad about that because if he’d been the one to witness Mike drink as much as he did that night, he’d have immediately told all of their friends and worried about it on a nightly basis.
“And you cancelled your tour,” Bev said quietly.
Richie blinked at her. His face burned and he looked away, over her shoulder. Bill was dancing with his wife and murmuring something into her ear. Mike and Ben were sitting at the top table, well on their way to being drunk and laughing hard about something. Eddie was sitting nearby them, underdressed and sullen, a thing that could not be made to belong here.
“I really miss him, Bev,” he told her, watching him.
She wound her arms around his neck and pulled him close, and he let her. They were still dancing, swaying a bit.
“This is so fucking morbid, I’m sorry.” He swallowed. “I thought it would be easier by now.”
“Don’t apologise.” She held him tightly enough to hurt, in a good way. “I love you, Rich. It’s okay. I know.”
Maybe she did know. Not about what was happening now, but about what had been happening when they were growing up and Richie couldn’t stop pulling Eddie’s metaphorical pigtails at every opportunity. If anyone would have known it was Bev, who had always understood him on a level the others hadn’t known to look for. If he was alone with her for too long there was a real possibility that the thing he was trying to keep pressed under his tongue would worm its way out from underneath.
He pulled away. Bev looked up at him with a sad smile.
He took her hand and kissed the back of it. “I think I need some air.”
Eddie followed him out of the hall, oddly quiet. Instead of going outside Richie went into the hotel lobby and pressed the button for the elevator. As they waited he felt burnt out, felt like something inside him was close to giving way and collapsing.
When they were in the elevator he looked at their reflection in the mirrored doors, him in his suit and Eddie in the dirty clothes he’d died in, the ones that couldn't come off, looked at the line of Eddie’s mouth as he examined himself, too.
“I just don’t get why it’s only me,” Richie said.
Eddie’s eyes met his in the mirror for a second and flicked away again. He opened his mouth, eyebrows pressing together, and it didn’t matter whatever he was going to say or not-say because the elevator interrupted them by dinging, its doors opening wide. He waited for Richie to step out first.
Back in the room, Richie poured himself a glass of the whiskey he’d stuffed into his bag last minute before leaving his apartment. He’d thought he might need it more than he actually had. It had been touch and go there for a while, not knowing what exactly he was feeling or how it might find its way out of him, but now it was late and he was just tired. He’d been drinking nothing but Coke downstairs all night - he deserved one drink, right?
No ice, though. He took a sip and grimaced, climbing to sit on the mattress. Eddie stood at the opposite side of the room, hideous floral curtains drawn shut behind him that looked jarringly like something out of his mom’s house.
At his sides his hands curled and uncurled, curled and uncurled, and Richie couldn’t take looking at him like that, not for a minute longer.
“I’m starting to think it really is you and not some weird demonic thing pretending to be you,” he said, wiping a line of whiskey from his chin.
Eddie’s mouth fell open. “You’re starting to think that?”
“Oh, fuck you, like you wouldn’t be suspicious in my position,” Richie mumbled into his glass. It burned, not in the nice way, but in the shitty cheap way. “I guess I only have the clown as a source of comparison, but he wasn’t actually any good at doing impressions of people. He just looked like them.”
Richie had been waiting for the other shoe to drop since Eddie had arrived, but nothing had ever happened. There had never been a mask in danger of slipping, no insidious plan afoot. Just he and Eddie having alternating bouts of anxiety.
“It’s kind of worse,” Richie said, tracing the rim of his glass. “That it’s really you.”
Eddie continued to take offence. “What, you want me to be Pennywise? You want me to be, I don’t know, a fucking - giant bug monster?”
At least then I’d want to get rid of you, Richie thought.
“Is that why you -” Eddie started, and then he raised his hand like he was silencing himself with it, squeezing his eyes closed.
“Is that why I what?”
“Nothing,” Eddie said, as convincingly as he always had, looking like whatever he’d wanted to say was this close to bursting out of him against his will. He crossed his arms. “It’s nothing.”
Richie raised his eyebrows and deliberately said nothing and then, on cue, Eddie let out a frustrated noise.
“Is that why you look like you’re going to shit yourself whenever I get close to you?” His face scrunched up. “Do you think I’m going to hurt you?”
“This does hurt, Eddie,” Richie said.
It came out before he could swallow it down.
“Just - this,” he added. “Talking.”
It sat between them for a moment. He knocked back what was left of his drink and then he stood up and went to pour another, because fuck it, fuck everything.
Eddie stared at him as he uncapped the bottle, only a few feet away, and they were back in that place now, back in their weird little insulated, undead world. The wedding was still happening four floors below them but somehow it felt less real than this was.
“I know it does,” Eddie admitted.
Richie shook his head, his mouth twisted. “I wish you just hadn’t fucking -”
His voice stopped working and the backs of his eyes started to burn and the whiskey bottle dropped on to the dresser with a clattering sound. He couldn’t look at Eddie then, couldn’t bear to see the open wound of his body, couldn’t fucking breathe. He had to turn to look over his shoulder so that Eddie couldn’t see him acting like this, his breath coming out of him in shreds.
“Richie,” Eddie said, gently. He’d come closer. “Rich.”
Richie swiped at his eyes and turned back to him, exhaling unsteadily. Eddie’s hands were in white-knuckled fists at his sides, because he could never stand to see his friends upset but he wouldn’t touch Richie if he thought Richie didn’t want him to. It was so far from the truth it was laughable, it was ridiculous. It was -
He didn’t even think about it. He reached for Eddie’s hand, a warm, solid weight, and lifted it up to his own cheek.
“Richie,” Eddie said again, a breath. Richie could barely hear him over the thrum of his pulse.
Eddie's thumb moved across his cheek and he said, “Oh, god,” because he couldn’t help himself.
“You know, I,” Eddie’s throat worked, somehow, “I always, kind of - you - I don’t even know why I did, but.”
“Okay,” Richie said.
Eddie’s eyebrows arched. “Do you get what I’m saying?”
“Do I - no.” Richie was gripping Eddie’s wrist too hard but he couldn’t make himself stop. “I don’t know. Maybe. You’re not giving me a lot of fully articulated thoughts here, man.”
“When you were caught in the deadlights, and I -”
Eddie closed his eyes for a second, shaking his head. He reopened them and they were clear, like still black water.
“I was okay with it,” he said, hoarsely. “I am okay with it. Dying. If it was for you.”
Richie couldn’t do this.
“You can’t just say that, Eds. It’s pretty fucked up of you to say that.”
“Well, this is a pretty fucked up situation,” Eddie said, high-pitched.
“I’m not okay with it,” Richie said. “In fact, I think I might be kinda fucking mad at you for doing it, you selfless prick.”
It would have landed better if he wasn’t crying, probably. Eddie wiped under his eye with his thumb, clumsily knocking his glasses in the process, and that just made matters worse.
“I can’t help it,” Richie said, unsure why.
In careful, slow motions, Eddie readjusted his glasses back into place and combed the hair back from his forehead. Richie couldn’t take his eyes off him. The strange place they occupied was narrowing in around them.
Eddie said, “Yeah. I know.”
“Do you?” Richie asked.
Eddie frowned at him. He held Richie’s face in both his hands and considered it anxiously from arm’s length. It should have been funny that he could still find cause to be nervous, even dead, but it wasn’t: Richie had always liked that about him best, that he could be so afraid and still power through.
“You know why it’s only you, right?” Eddie asked, quietly.
“Probably because I’ve been in love with you for like thirty years,” Richie said, and then that was it - it was out there.
Eddie stared. His fingertips curled into the hair behind Richie’s ear.
“Yeah,” he said. “Probably that, and - you know.”
Richie grabbed his shoulders. “Just fucking say it.”
“Okay. Okay.” Eddie pressed his lips together, nodding. “Okay.”
He took a moment.
“Rich, I mean it when I say this.” He breathed in, or did a good imitation of it, at least, and then he said, “I fucked your mother.”
Then he pulled Richie stumbling forward and kissed him.
Richie’s chest felt like it was being filled past capacity. He felt fourteen again, scared shitless, upsettingly in love, bad with his hands. Eddie made a sound against his mouth, a low hum, and then Richie needed him closer, as close as he could physically get, his hands scrambling to cup the back of Eddie’s neck and catch in his bad haircut.
“What the fuck,” Richie said into his mouth, “You’re good at this.”
Eddie said something that sounded like a muffled fuck you.
Richie wanted more than this. He wanted to push Eddie down on the lumpy mattress, to slide his hand up the back of his shirt and feel nothing but warm skin and the outline of his best friend’s knobby spine and the faint impression of his heartbeat. He would always want these things; but Eddie stroked his cheek with the back of his fingers - lame beyond belief and enough to make Richie actually shudder - and he would always have that, if nothing else, and it wasn’t enough, but if it had to be then Richie would happily fucking take it.
They stayed in that place for a while, and the first time Eddie pulled away Richie couldn’t help chasing after him, their teeth knocking, but the second time he thought, what a clingy fucking bastard, and he let it happen.
He pressed his forehead against Eddie’s and tried to catch his breath. Eddie wasn’t doing his imitation breathing anymore. He just looked at Richie, and Richie looked back at him, and then Richie closed his eyes, and breathed.
When he opened them again, Eddie was gone.
“Yeah,” he said, looking around. The room had reappeared around him. The wedding was still happening downstairs. His lips hurt from Eddie’s crooked teeth. “Yeah, okay.”
He went back to the dresser with the whiskey on it and poured himself another glass that he drained in one efficient mouthful. That was it, he thought firmly, and he cut himself off for the night.
On his way out he checked his reflection in the dresser mirror and adjusted his tie. He stood there until he felt ready to leave. Then he sighed, opened the door, and walked out.